Immigrants To VP's House, NY Mayor's Tech Fetish, and The Twitter Files!
Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauseman cannot believe they have to discuss another busload of immigrants being shipped off to D.C. under inhumane conditions, but here we are. The Democrats dip their toes in shoring up voting rights, while New York mayor Eric Adams clearly hasn't watched Minority Report, as he advocates for a sci-fi security state to somehow stop a crime wave that isn't really waving. They wrap up discussing the main take aways from the breathless threading of the Twitter Files.
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It's kind of like Grady Season's playing Tom Cruise in The Color of Money.
It's a nightmare.
You never wake up.
But you will wake up.
You will get better day after day.
I got it twice in the last four months and it will get better.
I appreciate the pep talk.
I gotta tell everybody, I feel like straight garbage.
It is hitting me so hard.
I heard all this talk.
Nick was even telling me before we started recording that it wasn't that bad for him when he got it.
I got all the vaccines, I got the boosters, I got all the jabs, Nick, and it's still coming down on me like the judgment of God.
Well, have you repented?
I suppose.
Is this what we're gonna get to?
Well, to be clear, a winter hurricane type situation descended on my town.
It was everything that we talked about.
It was so bad.
There was so much snow.
It was the coldest I've ever felt.
I had to go shovel my aunt's driveway because why?
Why wouldn't I?
And then this happens.
It feels like I've got some repenting to do.
I've got some humiliation to go after.
Well, I definitely want to wish, send some good wishes over to people like in Buffalo who are really struggling there.
It sounds like it's all in the news here, how bad it is.
And, you know, it's funny.
I saw some outrage of people who are like, why do you have to go visit relatives like on this one random day in December?
Everyone wants to do it on.
But I think that's the point.
And I feel like people should be a little bit more sympathetic.
Because certainly school schedules allow only for like the moments where you can visit your family on December 25th.
So it sucks that it has to be that way and the entire country has to get stuck because now you're looking at lines and all these canceled planes and everything.
But I just hope I'm glad I guess for me that I didn't have to go anywhere or you know to travel.
I know.
What did it get to in LA?
I'm guessing 70?
Maybe 69?
Cold start?
Oh, it's hot out here today, Jared.
I'm not going to lie to you right now.
You're the absolute worst.
But yeah, our best wishes to the people who are stuck.
Also the people who are dealing with, I don't know, power grids that have been attacked by Quote-unquote, mysterious groups out there in the wilderness, which we'll cover later when more information comes to bear.
Meanwhile, Nick, let's get into the old Christmas spirit.
It's the day after Christmas, December 26th, here on the Mutt Creek Podcast.
We're recording this.
Also known as one of the weirdest days of the year.
But a couple of days ago, speaking of weird, three buses full of migrants were sent from Texas.
Listen, depending on who you talk to, they were either heading to New York City and they were rerouted because of snow.
Somehow or another, they ended up at the Naval Observatory, which is the home for the Vice President of the United States of America, Kamala Harris.
It looks, by all evidence, that Greg Abbott, asshole, sent these people there in the middle of the night, freezing cold, some of them with nothing, even approaching a coat or a jacket.
Nick, we've covered this before.
It's disgusting, and to do this, particularly during the holiday season, during this cold snap, is even worse.
I mean, and again, it's the point.
I'm kind of almost frustrated we're continuing to talk about this because I'm sure they planned this for the first time.
When we were talking about DeSantis going to Texas and grabbing people and sending them to Martha's Vineyard, I know they already had a big X on December 24th ready to go because it was like, oh perfect, we'll make it a holiday thing.
But the real cruelty here is that, I mean, it's bad about that they're going to just try to grab random people and ship them to another place.
But they don't tell anybody about it.
And that's the issue is if they're going to show up outside on a street corner where there are, there's no services for them.
And they're freezing.
They don't have the jackets.
They don't have, they're not protected from the weather like this.
You should be prosecuted for that.
That is negligence.
That is kidnapping.
It's a lot of different things in my mind.
And the fact that they wouldn't even bother calling someone to give them a heads up.
And you had to have, you know, in the article we were reading at, there is this Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network.
Somehow kind of got them there, got them to a church.
Sure, they could at least be warm.
But it's like, you're playing with fire.
Someone's going to die doing this kind of stuff.
And it's going to be on someone like Governor Abbott's hands.
Yeah, it's weird that an aid group, a communal aid group was there, but the only other people there were reporters there to capture the whole thing on video and to snap pictures at it.
You know, a couple things.
One, I think it is utterly ironic, sadly, sadly ironic, that Greg Abbott and all these other assholes who are pulling this off, they do it on December 24th, which, if you were a believer in the Christian mythology, was the night that Christ's parents were turned away from inns, one place after another, couldn't find anywhere to stay.
It's almost like they don't actually care about their own religion, but that's neither here nor there.
Greg Abbott, the fact that this man remains in public politics is an absolute blight on the system.
Not only that he got reelected, but that he hasn't been held accountable for any number of things he's done, including human trafficking, which we talked about with the original stunt.
But also everything that he has stood up and lied about, you know, children being massacred.
This is a repugnant person.
There are no redeeming qualities in terms of Abbott as a public person.
And I'm with you.
I look at this As a publicity stunt, but I also want to talk about Nick, I got a couple numbers here.
In Texas, by the way, and of course, Abbott is doing all this grandstanding up against President Joe Biden in terms of, you know, the quote unquote crisis on the border.
Down in Texas, they have spent more than $4 billion on a program called Operation Lone Star, including over 10,000 troops on the border, which is enough to field an army, by the way, 10,000 people.
Apparently, they're not getting the job done.
But let's also point out a couple things, which is Joe Biden hasn't done anything really to repeal anything that Donald Trump did when it came to immigration.
There's been some cruelty that has been knocked back a little bit in terms of like dividing families when they get detained.
The money there, I mean, the only reason they're able to do this is because of federal funds.
That's it.
They are relying on federal aid to carry out their border security.
Most of the Trump programs are still going.
There's nothing that Biden is doing that is necessarily, like, against the whole Trump immigration plan outside of, like, the open displays of cruelty.
This is nothing but political posturing.
And I want to point out, we don't see this in any of the coverage.
Nobody talks about the fact that the Biden administration is still carrying out anti-immigration policies.
They're still funding all of this stuff.
It's just, oh, these people are getting dropped off outside of Harris's house.
It's almost like the media is doing the work that Abbott and DeSantis want them to do.
And by not going further, by not talking about this, by not putting it into context and not having a discussion about it, they're only making sure that this stuff works because Abbott and DeSantis know that these are ready-made PR situations.
Right.
And also, it's actually misleading when we talk about this as an immigration problem, because part of it is an asylum-seeking problem.
And that is the issue.
And I know that Biden's trying to reverse one of the policies that Trump had in terms of, in COVID, of refusing people to come into the country now.
But the problem is, is that a significant percentage of people and we don't want to have a situation like we had in during World War Two where they sent a ship of Jews back to Europe to be slaughtered.
So we want to be able to have an opportunity for people to declare asylum because they're under a threat of bodily harm if they go back to the countries they come from.
So we have to have that open.
But the real problem here is, again, is the normal process for immigration, of which has been set up this way for decades and decades, unless you have to be rich and well-educated and from generally white countries, for you to be able to get any headway into that line in the regular immigration.
And that's what probably needs to be fixed the most.
So if you're looking for blame, yeah, you can definitely point to Biden.
It's a long list going all the way back to Reagan, people who don't want to try and do anything to fix that issue, which would probably be related to just getting a shit ton more people on the ground who can be part of the bureaucracy to help process these claims.
And then also they don't even be at the border because all these a lot of the the sorry, a lot of the the immigration requests come just from everywhere.
And you could be in the office, whatever, and decide and process those.
I think we need to look it up.
I know it takes forever to go through the normal channels of immigration and try and get into this country legally that way.
And that's got to be fixed.
Yeah, and you know, it obviously is a problem that's been going on for a very long time.
The Republican Party has no interest in dealing with it.
There was talk of possibly changing the course of things after the 2012 drubbing of Mitt Romney.
We all know that.
Like, after that post-loss, they had a conversation about opening up a dialogue about amnesty or reforming our ideas of who should be allowed here and how many people should be allowed here.
That got thrown into the woodchipper when Donald Trump took over the party because he saw an opportunity for it and he used it, which was blatant white supremacy and xenophobia.
The Democratic Party has no interest in touching this issue because they don't see any upside of doing it.
There's absolutely nothing there for them to actually get into it because they will be painted as pro-immigration, anti-white, white replacement theory, all of that.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party has no actual incentive to solve the situation and to keep fundraising off of it and using it basically as a stick during elections.
I sit here, Nick, And I look at this administration, I don't know how you can't push back on this.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, you can't just keep letting hundreds of people get dropped off here.
And you're right, somebody's going to die.
Somebody, who even knows if anybody's disappeared or been abused in some way, shape, or form.
Eventually you have to say enough is enough.
Like, even from a political standpoint, quit letting these people get open goals on you.
You know what I mean?
At least stand up and say, this is what's going on.
Even if it's just giving a major policy speech and saying, here's what's happening with immigration.
Here's what we need to do.
Let's start working on it.
They are unwilling to do that.
It's like a situation in a boxing match.
You have to at least put up your gloves to defend yourself or else the match gets stopped.
It's one punch after another that these assholes like Abbott and DeSantis keep being allowed to hit and you have to stand up eventually for what's right and say, you know what?
The problem here is not that we're not being giving enough.
It's a problem that this has been politicized and we can't even look at this from a human rights perspective.
Oh, I mean, here's the newsflash.
If you're a Democrat and you're worried about being labeled something so you won't do that something, you're going to be labeled that anyway.
So you might as well do something about it because they're going to paint you as whatever they're going to want to paint you no matter what.
I don't know if it's necessarily that's the root of the reason why we think Democrats can't get anything going on that issue either.
I don't, but it's hard to understand exactly what it is because you would think that they could roll up their sleeves once and for all, have a big symposium, bring a lot of experts together and just discuss what they could do to facilitate this better and stop having, you know, just massive amounts of people, you know, gathering on the border and figure out a way that makes it better, smoother.
The answer very well, maybe there isn't an answer.
Like, that's what's kind of scary about it, right?
Because again, you know, there is this notion of having borders and having a country that, you know, you need to process people coming in, in a, you know, organized manner.
And so maybe that's what worries me.
It's at some point, maybe they have been looking into this thing and they're figuring out like, you know what, we don't know what to do.
Let's just keep it where it's going now.
We'll have a lot of migrant workers come in, do all the jobs and no one else wants to do in this country.
And hope that the Republicans don't hammer us for a random crime that might happen from someone else who happens to come that same way.
But again, I'm worried that the answer isn't necessarily an answer at all.
Yeah, it's a problem that nobody wants to solve.
And part of the reason is the exploitation that happens, not just at the border, but around the country.
I mean, a lot of our economy, of course, depends on exploiting people and paying them less than a minimum wage and making sure that they don't have to get benefits or taken care of.
You know, it's one of many problems and issues that this party just continually punts on.
I sent you this link, Nick.
There's this New York Times article, and again, it's a signal, right?
It's, don't worry, everybody, we're going into the new year.
We got ideas here.
And what we're seeing is the Democratic Party saying they're now going to, you know, have a big push for voting rights.
And I saw this, and I was like, oh, I hadn't heard Biden saying anything about this.
And oh, I must have missed a speech while I was, you know, traveling.
But no, it's not, right?
Even though voting rights are Being attacked all over the country, even though the Supreme Court is considering a case that could potentially basically hand over Republican-led states to legislatures to run their elections however they want without any sort of overview, this isn't federal.
There's no move whatsoever to even start talking about voting rights, which by the way, what did the Democratic Party say?
You gotta vote in November.
Right?
That's what we kept hearing.
That's the way that you ensure the voting rights are going to do.
Guess what?
People went out and they did it.
They went ahead and they gave them at least control in the Senate and, you know, kept the margins close.
And now it's nothing.
All we're hearing, two states.
One, well, there's Minnesota and Michigan, which are, you know, the old Democratic firewall, of course, that Donald Trump cracked in 2016.
You're also seeing a little bit out of Illinois.
None of this is particularly progressive.
None of this is particularly taking on problems as they sit.
You're even hearing out of Pennsylvania, where Josh Shapiro was given a hell of a mandate against Mastriano, that he's not really worried about it all that much.
He'll sort of tinker around with it.
This is a party, Nick, that I think still fails to see where the game is, where it needs to go, and what you need to stand up to in all this.
And the governor of Illinois, Pritzker, even came out and said, I can't believe the Democratic Party does this.
They're taking their foot off the gas.
They have no idea what they're doing.
They're not going to fight for this thing.
It's disappointing, but it's the same thing that we're seeing with the immigration thing.
There's no offense.
There's no aggressiveness whatsoever.
It's sort of sitting back and being terrified of being called radical.
Well, I wonder if you think or if we think that this is because they snuck in a little bit of part of the bill, the funding bill that cleans up at least the role of the vice president.
Perhaps they're thinking, well, you know what?
We got that going.
That was good.
And we're going to like, you know, take a break for a few weeks or a month or whatever, not deal with that.
So by the way, which is completely utter, utter bullshit.
That's really what they're thinking.
But, um, you know, if I'm going to be an apologist here, I guess I'm going to say, well, look, they, they snuck that in there, uh, underneath all that fucking defense spending that made the Republicans must have, they must've been running like, you know, what, like, um, like puppies are, are, and they run to the mother, you know, and they, and the mother lies down that that's sort of what I picture the Republicans when they saw that, that how much more money that Yeah, absolutely.
And it's just as obvious as can be.
on defense spending.
So at any rate, yes, it's mind-boggling because then they're going to wake up a day after the next election, which has been problematic again and disenfranchising, and they're going to be like, wait, wait, what happened?
How did that happen?
We need to stop this.
Yeah, absolutely.
And it's just as obvious as can be.
I mean, none of this is particularly hard to predict.
The Republican Party is going to continue to whittle away, particularly at the voting rights of African-Americans, particularly people of color in urban areas.
You know, You know, you have a lot of these states where you basically have large rural conglomerations, and then you have maybe one or two cities.
We're talking, of course, about the southern states.
Where they're going to do everything that they possibly can to, you know, just completely negate any of the voting power of the people there.
Including, by the way, throwing them off voting rolls.
And making sure eventually somewhere down the line when, you know, eventually when they get this independent legislature theory and you basically have an entire nation of Claremont Institute trained sheriffs, you know, that are going into like these polling places and basically stealing Dominion voting machines and the numbers that they have.
You know, you're going to have a moment where people are going to look around and say, why didn't anybody do anything about this?
The time to fix this is now.
The time to have a conversation about this is now.
And everything that we're talking about in this story, the Democrats only doing this in states where they have won a large majority.
And by the way, we're not even talking About, like, passing a lot of laws to ensure voting rights, Nick.
We're talking about automatic registration when you get an ID.
We're talking about mail-in ballots.
We're not talking about anything radical.
We're not getting into a real conversation.
I mean, like, every now and then they'll flirt with the idea of giving felons the right to vote, which it's still insane that, you know, felons who aren't in jail can't vote.
I mean, that's nuts, really.
But it's nothing radical.
It's nothing pushing the envelope.
It's not getting into this situation.
And it feels to me, and I'd be interested what you have to say.
It feels to me like the time is nigh for some adversarial action.
You know what I mean?
If you're going to sit around and talk about semi-fascism, if you're going to have these big dark Brandon speeches and talking about threats on democracy, particularly, and by the way, we got to talk about this hoot of a Donald Trump article later, with Donald Trump on the ropes and basically them trying to take the brain, well not the brain because there ain't much of a brain out of it, but You know, the central nervous system of MAGA and putting it into the Desantis machine.
It is time!
If you really want to do something about this, and that is the question, is how many of these people actually want to do something about this?
How many of them want to take the thing on?
Right now is the moment, and they're letting the moment pass.
Well, you know, you're in trouble when the radical suggestion out of this is letting, you know, college students vote in the in the city that they're going to college in.
You know, that's another one of those ones.
And obviously they skew Democrats.
So the Republicans are freaking out about that.
Yes.
The time wasn't now.
It was when they had control of Congress and the Senate.
Like that's this is we've already blown it here at this point.
But here's what's interesting to me, is that if this continues to go the way it looks like it will, and that includes if the sovereign states or whatever that law that the Supreme Court rules on, if the states are allowed to control it like they do, then you're going to have a very similar situation to what abortion is like in this country.
And it just doesn't make sense that you would be in a certain state of the union, not be able to get an abortion, or not be able to vote for a random reason, that if you would just take five steps to your left across some arbitrary border, you know, between two states, you could then vote.
You could then get an abortion legally, and that's not a problem at all.
This is the whole reason why they protected Roe v. Wade from the beginning.
It's because it made no sense to do that.
And it's the same thing now.
Why these states would be allowed to have completely different rules for how you're eligible to vote is completely antithetical to what a democracy should be.
And that is what's going on here.
And that's why it's like, when you think about how we ended the Civil War, at some point it never really ended.
And a lot of these states want to go back to having a separate country.
You know, I'll go ahead and I'll take the blame for this back even further.
I actually think you go back to the supermajority under the Obama administration and one of the things that the Democratic Party and again, this is unfortunately very true of the modern Democratic Party when they win.
There's like Oh destiny is on our side.
You know, there's like, oh, demographics are destiny and we're going to win every election from now on and we just need to proceed with caution and then eventually we'll get to where we're going.
They thought for sure that with the change in demographics in this country that, you know, time was on their side.
They never once sort of war-gamed the idea that the Republicans, backed by libertarian billionaires, were going to attack democracy as democracy didn't favor them.
You know, they simply were not able to sort of play, not just 3D chess, but like 18 degree chess.
And as that took place, like, you can see all of these moments where these things should have been taken care of.
And on top of that, you simply could have, like, I don't know, you could have inoculated large parts of the population against the radicalism we're seeing take place right now.
You could have moved things in a different direction.
You could have even started taking on climate change.
You could have gone towards more of a domestic production thing.
That was on the table back then.
And instead, we lost years.
And by the way, the Trump years, those four years, weren't just four years.
They packed a hell of a lot of destruction in those four years.
So, you lost a lot of time And now we're just sitting there sort of like it's almost like in a cartoon where you see a little character like up in the air moving their legs and nothing's happening.
Like we're losing fundamental important time here.
Yeah, I think the other thing they didn't really count on was how many people who are not white would kind of be attracted to this white patriarchal concept of how the government should be run.
Whiteness is a hell of a drug, Nick.
Yeah, right?
It's weird.
And I maybe want to give them a pass for that, but we were starting to see that where this is more of a... It's rooted more in personality traits of how you are versus You know, voting in your best interest, which we which, by the way, we should have seen then, because how many times have we seen it in the last 30 years where people would vote like, you know, the tax code they would want as if they were millionaires who want to protect all this wealth of which they had none.
But maybe they thought eventually I will be really rich.
And so I want to make sure that when I get taxed, I will not have to pay all that money versus, you know, let's make a lot.
Those people pay their fair share and everybody else will have a better life because of that.
Uh, I guess there is a similarity to that, but as a result, you know, here we are and it's teetering.
It still probably leans more towards what the Democrats feel, where they're, you know, their platform appeals to more people.
It's much more popular generally, but it's teetering and, uh, and they don't understand that.
And that's why, you know, it's, it's about to be like the Titanic is almost going vertical right here.
If I had to diagnose the Democratic Party, I would diagnose them with a bad case of manic tepidness, which is, you know, when things feel good, man, it's just the good times are going to roll again.
Hey, but you know, we've already won.
So let's just, I don't know, maybe we'll means test, you know, like half paying for lunches in Cleveland, Ohio's like third or fourth district, you know, and we'll get wild with it.
We'll, we'll, we'll even throw in a free milk when we're at it, you know, only for the people who qualify.
And in all of this, it's been so obvious.
Look at what happened in November.
We talked about this.
The results showed us that people were ready to get on board with something besides the Republican Party.
They were out there saying the children were using litter boxes in elementary schools.
That's the time to go after this stuff.
The only thing, I got to be honest with you, and this bleeds into this next story that we're getting ready to talk about, the only thing that I can infer from it, Is that this party or large portions of it do not want what they say that they want?
You know, a lot of this stuff sounds good, or at least it makes for good stump speeches.
And I had to talk to you about this New York Mayor, Eric Adams, who is just an abysmal, abysmal politician.
Can you share one of my favorite clips?
By the way, this is the This is from the press conference before the winter storm where Eric Adams was conspicuously missing.
There are rumors that he was in Jamaica, but here is the beginning of this press conference.
So I've been in touch with the mayor.
We've all been in touch with the mayor throughout the day.
And he has asked that we provide all of you with an update on the city's full response to today's weather event, which I've just learned is named Winter Storm Elliot.
I love that stuff, Nick.
I love that he's not there.
It reminds me of a while back when that governor was just—nobody could find him, and he was out hiking a bunch of trails, you know, with his lover.
I love that when a major event catches these people with their pants down, which is, by the way, how you most often find Eric Adams.
Right.
I mean, you're supposed to have those photo ops of you out there with the shovels and the snow trucks, you know, delegating whatever you're supposed to be doing.
See Giuliani, Rudy, you know, after 9-11, like that was all he did was make sure the camera saw him furiously moving around the different blocks.
So yes, that's almost like the cynical version of it is you have to be there.
You just have to be there to get those photo ops.
And I don't know, this guy seems like he's not, he doesn't really understand the job.
I'm glad you brought up Giuliani because we got to talk about him a little bit.
I stayed with my mom over Christmas when I got COVID.
And I gotta tell you, she watches CNN all day, and there's this ad for this new CNN special, which is, what happened to Rudy?
And it's like, oh, how could America's mayor?
And it's like, no, Rudy was always an asshole.
Rudy was always corrupt, and Rudy was always incredibly problematic.
But there is this perception because, of course, of September 11th, but also because a lot of the PR that Rudy did, that he did more than he actually did.
And in this case, Adams He did this interview with Politico.
It was supposed to, I think, sort of clean some of this stuff up, particularly the timing, but also to go ahead and start cracking into this perception that crime is on the rise.
Which, by the way, Nick, quick pop quiz.
Are you ready?
Is crime up or down in New York City in the last 20 years?
So, okay, I'm so glad you asked this because I did a little bit of a deep dive.
You must have known I did this, right?
Because I'm reading all these things and all these people are wringing their hands about crime.
So, yeah, the newsflash was crime up, you know, let's see, felonies, misdemeanors are up 23.5% from last year.
But if you want to compare to like 1990, it's like not even close.
It's like you're going to Disneyland every day in New York City based on what it was like in 1990.
1990 was like Joker, the movie Joker, you know, now it's like, you know, whatever.
So, so it's not even close and it's so crazy that they're going to want to use, you know, an increase in crime based on the really low numbers we saw during COVID when people were not going out as much to somehow indicate that, oh yes, there's a whole crime wave going on and everyone's scared about it.
Yeah, the biggest problems are things like mass shootings and gun violence, right?
These random acts of violence.
Crime in New York City has decreased in the last 20 years, which, by the way, Rudy Giuliani gained so much credit for eliminating crime and cleaning up New York City.
That's not what he did.
Instead, he harassed certain populations.
He made a big show out of corporatizing New York City and putting a veneer on it, but he didn't do much in the way of crime.
And now you have this.
And by the way, crime in the United States is basically down with the exception again of like gun deaths and shootings.
But Eric Adams, part of the reason that he was able to become mayor as a former member of the police department, was to talk about how out of control everything is and then blow up every piece of crime and violence that there was just to the point where it seemed like it wasn't safe to walk around New York City.
Actually, Eric Adams probably cost his own city not millions, but tens of millions of dollars by basing his entire public perception and campaign and administration around the idea that, you know, New York City has become a crime-ridden hellhole.
But what is he doing now?
I'm going to read you a quote, Nick, and I don't know if you're rusty on your George Orwell, but I'm going to see how this sort of hits your ears a little bit.
This is from Eric Adams's interview on Politico.
Quote, It blows my mind how much we have not embraced technology.
And part of that is because many of our electeds are afraid.
Anything technology, they think, oh, it's a boogeyman.
It's Big Brother watching you.
No, Big Brother is protecting you.
How's that feel?
How's that feel in them ears?
Spoken like a real New York Police Department captain for 20 years.
Yes.
It does, doesn't it?
And so what is the answer, Nick?
The answer is to divert just millions upon millions of dollars of New York funds, which, by the way, taking them from a lot of the social services that they're talking about and handing them over to some really cool and neat technology companies.
And guess what?
These things, Nick, they totally work.
One of them is this group called ShotSpotter, which is supposed to hear random shootings here and there.
Nick, what would you say is worth millions of dollars in terms of effective rates?
What percentage do you think you need to be above before you deserve millions of dollars?
Oh, I would say you got to get close to like 85, 90% accuracy.
It's really funny you say that because in other cities where this has been deployed in other areas, it's going at about 10%, 12% effectiveness, about 80% of the time, like it doesn't actually show a crime.
But the good news, Nick, is that you put these cameras and these recorders and mics up in neighborhoods of color.
And that means that the police can go there and they can find other crimes.
Isn't that great?
Jared, didn't we all see Minority Report?
I've seen how that happens, and we know it doesn't work that way, and it's like, you're still trying to make this thing happen in some fever technology pitch.
It's like, but by the way, like, listen, is there a way?
Can we ultimately leverage technology to help fight crime?
I have to assume that we could in some way, but there are ways that we shouldn't.
Okay yeah so I don't want to just completely poo-poo the whole notion and whole like concepts but yes uh you know unless you're gonna use something you know what I gotta break into this because it's like they're using newbie technology and rookie stuff here on a major you know the biggest metropolis in the United States it's kind of like you know somebody in my family making brisket for 15 people the other night
For the first time ever and subjecting us to some of the worst need I've ever had and I'm still traumatized by it and it's like you should know better you can't just throw stuff out there that isn't tested isn't proven to work in such an important environment like either a big family Hanukkah dinner or you know trying to combat crime in New York.
I gotta tell you, when Eric Adams got in office, the dollar signs in these corporations' eyes went off.
And by the way, it's New York City, which is where they're going to basically cut their teeth on these things.
It's wonderful to have a stupid mayor.
It's fantastic, particularly a stupid mayor who got elected by creating a pretend crime wave, and his entire political career now depends on him solving the problem that he has created.
Meanwhile, I gotta tell you where all the technology that we're about to see in New York City, where it's coming from.
It's coming from China, particularly these methods that have been created, not just to surveil the public, but to carry out an active genocide of the Uyghur population.
And to go ahead and take those people and not only carry out a genocide, but to sterilize them, to use them for slave labor.
That type of stuff has been percolating in the United States and in Great Britain.
This is where it's going to start really finding purchase.
It's going to be in places like New York City with idiots like Eric Adams.
And I guarantee you that's where this entire thing is going.
Well, especially because, you know, we talked about the mindset or the personality traits of certain, you know, like the ultra white wing people.
And part of that is, is that like anything more than 0% crime is crime running rampant.
And I kind of was thinking about this.
I have to think that in an open society, in a democratic society like we have here, you are simply going to have crime.
It will exist forever.
If you wear a mask, you might actually get COVID sometimes.
These things are not 100% completely effective things that you can never reduce to zero.
And yet I feel like, at least when it's a chance to dunk on the other side, that is their mindset that gives them the incentive or the energy to completely rail and base their entire life vision off of this.
And it's like, there's nothing that's going to ever solve Crime, it's not ever going to be zero.
And so it's like, but but to hear them talk about it, that's what their goal is.
If there wasn't crime, people would make it up in their own minds.
The problem is the perception of other people.
I mean, this is why, of course, you get, like, you know, Salem.
This is why, like, even in the most oppressive societies, they're still scared that evil spirits are lurking in the dark.
In this case, there's not even an uptick in crime.
There's not!
And around the country now, it's like, oh, I wouldn't live in a city for whatever.
It's about stoking the fears of people to profit off of them.
It's not even about actually solving crime.
Again, this ShotSpotter group, they have an effective rate of about 12%.
It's not about actually taking care of anything.
It's about making sure that those cameras and those mics are put up in these neighborhoods.
The side effects?
Doesn't matter.
If a bunch of innocent people are going to go to jail, if it's going to lead to racial profiling, if it's going to basically lead to another broken windows policy, that's what it's going to do.
And Eric Adams is the perfect Carrier for that, to put that into action.
Yes.
I have nothing more to add.
I'm too upset about it.
All right.
Speaking of upset, I know you wanted to talk about this, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna hand this over to you here in just a second.
We gotta talk about the Twitter files.
It's setting everything on fire, Nick.
It's just, it's just burning up the cables.
The internet is barely working because everyone's talking about the Twitter files.
I hope it's finally come to an end.
There have been some interesting revelations.
I've got an overall thought about it, but of course it divvies up from the main conversation.
But I want to hear where you are, what you're thinking about it, where your notes are taking you.
Where does Nick Halseman land on the Twitter files?
It's such a perfect encapsulation of everything that we've seen since Trump came on the scene, where you have to be in a certain fundamental ideology.
To then look at how this is being reported and then accept it at face value the way Taibbi and this guy David Zweig and Barry Weiss are reporting it.
Because a lot of it is, they'll say, okay, the FBI connected with Twitter to let them know about certain things that are going on misinformation wise from other countries.
Well, that sounds reasonable.
It sounds like what they should be doing.
And yet, if you reside in a different area code of I don't know what we'll call it.
That is a five alarm fire.
And this is the country completely, not really influencing the election completely.
I think Trump just said it.
He's like, the election should be redone because Twitter corrupted the election itself, as if Twitter had anything to do with counting ballots.
So that is really the overarching thing that you're going to get from this is this breathless reporting about these things, which are just a bunch of nothing.
It's a bunch of reasonable people having a conversation that necessary conversation about what should be allowed and what should not be on a private platform.
That's all it is.
So, here's where I come in and I say, it's unfortunately a representation of exactly what is happening in every one of these major companies.
Period.
These companies have gotten too large, they've gotten too powerful.
Of course, the big question is, they tamp down the Hunter Biden laptop story, which I've said multiple times on this podcast.
If Hunter Biden committed crimes, I hope he gets prosecuted.
I'm not going to sit here and say, if Joe Biden was involved in anything, in corrupt activities, I hope he gets investigated.
And I truly believe that.
I'm not going to sit here and be a partisan hack carrying water for people saying, oh, I hope nothing happens.
On top of that, major conversations about who should be able to say what and who should be able to do this.
Like, I don't think these companies should have that power.
I think it's a problem that Twitter as a corporation has the power to take those things over, which is exactly what Elon Musk is doing as head of Twitter now.
Because what did the right wing want?
Did they really want to get rid of corruption?
Did they really want to go get after control of information?
No, that was never the point of that.
This whole Twitter file thing was not about actually like bringing into the sunlight something that was done wrong by this corporation.
It was about creating the opening for going in and messing around with these algorithms and going ahead and giving them a right wing bit.
If somebody went into Facebook, Whatever the hell they're calling it this week.
And you revealed conversations about content moderation?
It would be the exact same thing!
Only what would it show that there was a right-wing bias in terms of like, you know, spreading conspiracy theories and right-wing extremists?
Like, this is par for the course.
This is the branding of these corporations, and I just find the whole thing disgusting.
All the way around, I can't even believe that this is a thing that we're still talking about.
I actually disagree, I think, at least in the COVID stuff, because the COVID files dropped today.
You know, when they were allowing, and by the way, what were they really doing?
They were putting a little bit of a disclaimer that had linked to more information from like the CDC, for instance, experts who have been studying this stuff.
And they're outraged that certain quacks Would, you know, try and cast doubt on how severe COVID was and how horrible these vaccines were in their minds when they weren't.
And that is important, I feel like.
And we realize how important it is when you have a fucking President of the United States who led the charge and the leadership of dispelling, you know, or casting doubt on these institutions that are simply there to serve the people and try and keep them healthy.
So I, and someone had to do it, right?
Yeah, I agree with that.
Someone had to do this and look at this.
It wasn't going to be AI.
They haven't figured that out yet.
And so, you know, at least if you want to limit it to that, if you want to talk about the other things they were uncovering, again, it's a lot of, you know, shrugs for me, but on this one, you know, and it's like this, this breathless reporting about how they were like suppressing people's point of views.
It definitely crossed the line for me when you're talking about a pandemic, like we just went through.
Well, and I gotta tell you, the people who carried the water for Musk, they did it because they wanted it to be breaking news.
I mean, it was handed over to them, this quote-unquote treasure trove of information.
It was handed over by Elon Musk, and it was going to be... And by the way, you want to talk about understanding things?
I would love to see how hard Musk turned up the algorithm to amplify these posts.
Do you know what I mean?
Like how, like how much was that amplified by his own hand to make these things come out?
When it comes to COVID and all of this, Nick, I think what you're actually seeing in these communications is that everybody who was involved with things like Facebook and Twitter, they kind of had no idea what they were doing.
They caught the tiger by the tail.
They created these things that, you know, they sort of thought, oh, it might be a website.
It'll do this.
And the next thing you know, it's like, oh, we have completely radicalized the public sphere.
We've commercialized it, corporatized it.
We now have control over discussion.
When Trump gets thrown off of the social media platforms in 2020, a couple of things happen, right?
On one hand, you start to see, I guess it was 2021, wasn't it?
I guess it was after January 6th is when they started kicking him off.
They had juiced him for as much profit, as much engagement, as much as they possibly could.
They got rid of him.
But with that, and with COVID, they looked around and they thought, oh, this isn't just a place to share pictures from your family's picnic.
This all of a sudden is like one of the main drivers of discourse, which they also did in 2016.
These aren't serious places.
And they've never been serious places.
They've been businesses that have been masquerading as like revolutionary forces.
But all along, I don't think that people understood what they were doing.
And as they did it, they had to make these judgment calls that were, at different times, not disturbing, but just maybe surprising to people who've never considered how it would work.
You know?
Yes, and at some point you gotta put your finger in the dike, right?
And that's what they had to do, and I get it, because there wasn't precedent for it, and they were having to do it on the fly, clearly.
And it was kind of crazy when you do see these interactions, but at the very least it was reasoned, and they wrung their hands about it.
They've thought about it.
They had lawyers.
They looked at it.
They tried to figure it out.
I want to give you an example, though, because this thing that came out today, one of them, number 23 of the Twitter files from today, was about this guy, Martin Kulldorf, who had a tweet that was, they turned off likes and shares, or let's see, replies and likes are shut off, and they labeled it misleading.
Now, they didn't even label it a lie.
They labeled it misleading with a little bit more information that you can click onto.
But here's what he said.
He's replying to the first question to him is, Dr. Kulldorff, do you think younger age groups and or people who already had the virus need to be vaccinated?
I am not an anti-vaxxer, but I am vaccine hesitant about this one.
It seems to be a religious mantra now that everyone must be vaccinated.
So there's already a framework here for this question that's not really coming from a A neutral point of view.
But his quote response is, to the question is, do you think that people, you know, should be getting vaccinated?
Everybody, younger people.
He goes, no.
Thinking that everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as thinking that nobody should.
COVID vaccines are important for older, high-risk people.
Complete fact.
And their caretakers.
Fact.
But those with prior natural infection do not need it.
How are you feeling today, Jared?
I feel like straight garbage.
Okay.
So I have a feeling, and by the way, how was I feeling when I got it the first time four months ago?
Not great.
I got the vaccine.
Guess what?
I got it again.
And now he also says, nor children at the end of those, he said, children do not need the vaccine.
I'm not going to go over the numbers, but they're awful as far as how many children have died from COVID.
Okay.
And also how many other people have been killed or have died from COVID who've gotten it from children who might not have suffered as greatly from it.
So what are we talking about here?
That is completely misleading information that should be labeled that way.
And yet here these people are saying, oh, they didn't let us share other points of view when it was wrong.
So like this is the bombshell they're trying to drop.
And in fact, they're just proving their point.
I want you to imagine, by the way, that you're a tech person who lands a really, really big, high-paying job at Twitter or Facebook, right?
You're so happy that you have it.
You tell everybody that you know.
Everybody's so proud of you because you've reached the top of the food chain.
Then all of a sudden you start going to work and you're helping to kill a million people in America alone.
You're putting children and grandmas and grandpas in danger.
All of a sudden the thing that you work so hard for is the thing that is actually making all of this so much worse in America and around the world.
Of course you're going to start talking about what you do.
This is such horseshit the idea that they wouldn't do it.
I take it to the next step, Nick, which is I want to break these companies up.
I just do.
Twitter has been very good to me.
I'm not going to sit here and lie and tell you it hasn't.
I want it broken up.
I think Facebook needs broken up.
I think most of these major monopolies need to be broken up.
Take them over your knee and shatter them into a thousand pieces.
The world would be better for it.
And you know what?
If any of these people cared about anything that was in the Twitter files, they would be up for that too.
But that's not what they care about.
What they care about is seizing control of the thing and then using it for their own purposes, which is what the Twitter files are about.
It's about creating the situation in which they can take it over and they can go ahead and push it in the other direction.
Okay, I'm not sure I could picture what breaking it up means, really.
um because you know okay i'll go real fast i would go ahead and say something along the lines of declare them utilities right and go ahead and start scrutinizing them because basically the government has no idea what the internet is i mean we are three decades into this thing and they still don't have an idea they're still basically on a series of tubes go ahead and turn them into utilities scrutinize them
do everything from like making sure that facebook or meta or whatever can't own Instagram, you know, go in with something like Twitter.
I have to assume how many things have been gobbled up and slapped in there and moved around.
Like, go in and start making sure that these things would be turned into either multiple companies or that there is something even approaching regulation.
There should be, like, you should be able to go after these people and make sure they're playing by some type of rule.
I mean, I guess I can see like an FCC kind of oversight to this thing, which is interesting.
Obviously, there's going to be pro-business people who are going to be like turning this off right now based on that.
If you think that the pro-business people have made it this far into this show, I don't know what to tell you, man.
I don't know.
But yeah, because obviously, you know, you got to be able to have free enterprise and capitalism and all that stuff.
And so that would be, you know, China getting in the way of free speech.
Listen, I'm not going to argue that it's an easy solution, but if you're going to do armchair quarterbacking months and years later from what you see and how they adjudicated this, this is not a four alarm fire to me as far as what they're trying to expose.
But you can see what the writing on the wall is here.
This is Musk's attempt to, first of all, probably change the narrative away from him and how ridiculous he's being right now running this company.
And then also a setup to eventually have kind of stifling oversight and control of what they would consider, you know, free speech.
It would not be free speech anymore.
I gotta tell you, it's already happening.
I'm experiencing it pretty hardcore.
I mean, the dials have already been turned.
By the way, speaking of pathetic, Nick, we have to talk before we get off here about this absolutely pathetic New York Magazine profile of Donald Trump done by Olivia Nuzzi, who basically has sort of tiptoed a line in reporting and friendly reporting with Trump and going after, quote unquote, the left.
That she was given like unparalleled access to Donald Trump and Mar-a-Lago.
Nick, the quotes and the scenes here are pretty rough.
It paints a tough, tough picture of Donald Trump, exactly what's going on, how his world is starting to fall apart and he is becoming increasingly isolated.
We have reports of a person who is delusional, who is locked in their own reality.
Shocking, I know.
And we basically have a VIP section that consists of MAGA retreads and people who never were.
Like one guy who just wore a brick suit to all these rallies.
He is now in the VIP class.
And everyone around Donald Trump at this point is saying, why in the hell are you running?
And the answer that seems to be coming up the most is, there's nothing else for him to do, which is exactly what we were thinking.
Um, yes.
Well, remember, he was thinking that he was going to run to try and maybe tamp down all these investigations, which I mean, I still don't believe that he really believed that was going to do it.
Right.
But perhaps it just gives him some more cover.
So eventually when these things come to a head, he can just keep yelling about, you know, political persecution, yada, yada, yada, which actually might be in his adult brain, somewhat reasonable.
Um, but it is, what was interesting to me is, you know, normally people don't announce a presidential run.
In, you know, a year and a half before... I'm sorry, it's not a year and a half, it's almost two years before.
Am I correct in saying that?
Uh, yeah, this ain't normal.
Right.
So as a result, it's like, if you announce that early, like, what is there to do, right?
Because part of it is saying, like, well, he's just not doing anything, and how sad is that?
But it's like, you know, he just shouldn't have announced so early because, again, there's just nothing... It is too early to be doing anything active about that.
Now, aside from that, yes, to have this slob, you know, Party crash, everything that happens in Mar-a-Lago, and getting the standing ovation.
They give him the standing ovation when he comes into the dining hall, and after he shovels the food in his mouth, they give him the standing ovation after that.
It is sad.
It is awful.
It is disgusting.
And it's like, this guy, you know, what else would he be doing besides that, you know, besides this?
Well, and that's exactly what he should be doing.
We talked about it earlier.
It's like a zoo animal.
Yeah, I want to point out, there's a really interesting anecdote in here.
Apparently, Trump is obsessed with this movie from 1950.
A really good movie, by the way, Sunset Boulevard.
I'm going to read from this, and then we're going to listen to a little clip of it.
This is from the article.
Quote, he'd wanted to be in the movie business.
It's important to never forget this about him.
He watches Sunset Boulevard, quote, one of the greatest of all time, again and again and again.
A silent picture star, sidelined by the talkies, driven to madness and denial over her fated celebrity.
When he was a businessman, he showed it to his guests aboard his 727.
When he was president, he held screenings of it for White House staff at Camp David.
He once showed it to his press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, who later described how Quote, the president, who could never sit still for anything without talking on the phone, sending a tweet, or flipping through TV channels, sat enthralled.
And he once showed it to Tim O'Brien, the biographer, who wrote that when Norma Desmond cried, those idiot producers, those imbeciles, haven't they got any eyes?
Have they forgotten what a star looks like?
I'll show them.
I'll be up there again, so help me.
Trump leaned over O'Brien's shoulder and whispered, is this an incredible scene or what?
Just incredible.
Now, let's hear from the climax of this movie.
Mr. DeMille, do you mind if I say a few words?
Thank you.
I just want to tell you all how happy I am to be back in the studio making a picture again.
You don't know how much I've missed all of you.
And I promise you I'll never desert you again.
Because after Salome, we'll make another picture and another picture.
You see, this is my life.
It always will be.
There's nothing else.
Just us.
and the cameras and those wonderful people out there in the dark.
All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up.
Man, that is a chilling scene.
And Nick, you and I were talking before we started recording.
We've both seen this movie.
We've both studied it a little bit in our time in academia.
This is, and correct me if I'm wrong, this is the story of how not just American capitalism, but American show business, the pop culture, call to personality, how it isn't just destructive, but it destroys individuals almost without caution.
And the idea that Donald Trump is sitting around watching this and contemplating his fate, I got to tell you, it's pretty chilling, honestly.
Oh, absolutely.
I would be in that room with Trump, side-eyeing him the whole time, going, like, you're watching your own life.
Is that what's so connected to you?
Is that what resonates so much with you?
This is Billy Wilder's finest movie, I would argue.
And to see her be able to morph into... Because remember, she had just shot somebody, and they're asking her questions, and she's not responding.
She's completely, like, in a...
Catatonic state.
Catatonic, thank you.
But what gets her out of it is, oh yes, the AA, the cameras are ready for her, and that sort of gets her into some other alternate reality where she thinks she's about to film Salome again without, you know, in the silent pictures from years before.
This is what Trump is doing.
It really is.
He lives for the cameras.
He lives for this kind of strange, you know, and he has these sycophants and lackeys that are all around him having to continue the charade and create this fake reality around him.
And it is, it's very arresting to see, you know, to hear that somebody almost understands it, right?
He probably, in some degree, understands what his plight is and then needs to have it verified on the screen.
Well, and if you follow this movie, and by the way, people could do a lot worse than to watch Sunset Boulevard.
You know, over the holiday break, it's pretty good.
I will say it's a fundamental misunderstanding of the movie.
I mean, I think Trump watches it and is able to project his own cause on it.
Because this is a silent film star who has been done wrong by the system, right?
It wasn't her fault.
She didn't do anything.
The times didn't pass her by.
She was done wrong by a group of people who simply don't understand anymore.
And if you look at this, I've long held that I think Donald Trump is one of the most tragic American figures of the modern moment.
This is somebody who obviously gained their wealth and their affluence from their father, from hereditary wealth, and took advantage of American popular culture and celebrity more than almost anybody of an era, took advantage of sort of the zeitgeist of the era, And rode those waves because Americans desperately wanted wealthy men who were going to, like, flaunt their wealth.
He took care of that.
Of course, fell on hard times because he sucks as a business person.
Saw himself as being excluded from the clique of the elites, even though he was one of them, obviously.
And then used that resentment in order to become the 45th President of the United States of America, even though he didn't particularly want to do it.
Now he's sitting around Mar-a-Lago, which sounds so sad, Nick, and he's had so many hangers-ons for years now who took advantage of him, who used him to basically prop themselves up, create their own grifts, create their own cults of personality, and now people are leaving him!
And now people really want nothing to do with him because he's a pariah, as he should be, and you have a person who is just sitting there basically stewing in their own resentment and their own perceived agreement, like, like, Like, nobody's business, and he's sitting around watching this thing.
It is such poetic justice to an extent, except for that he should probably be doing it from a prison cell.
Oh, yeah.
By the way, whoever's been able to have a class with you where you analyze film is very lucky, because that's so good.
And I love the notion that you can watch a movie like that and just completely take away the absolute wrong thing from that.
It reminds me, I think I talked about this before, but You know, Whit Stillman did a movie called Barcelona where a guy has amnesia and he's trying to get his memories back.
And he describes watching this movie about a guy who interrupts this perfectly nice looking wedding by banging on the glass and saying, Elaine, Elaine.
He's like, this is, he should have been allowed to get married.
And I always found that hilarious, but in a way it makes perfect sense.
Like you could, you know, he completely misunderstood the graduate in that way.
Although maybe he didn't.
And here is Trump seeing it the same way.
As somebody who was wronged versus someone who has done so much wrong, he is getting what he deserves, and he's not talented.
And he shouldn't be, you know, just by the notion of him being a rich white guy, allowed to just continue succeeding like he thinks he deserves.
So, really, there is no more perfect encapsulation.
This will probably be the scene in the movie that we do on his life, eventually, that becomes, you know, probably an Academy Award winner.
Well, and the thing is, Trump is so on the nose with this stuff that it's almost too much.
Do you know what I mean?
Like he is such like a wounded, hollow person that it almost defies any ability whatsoever to sort of turn it into abstract, you know, scrutinizing art.
I mean, that's the thing.
You know, it's actually good art, something like Sunset Boulevard, right?
The point is very clear, but the idea that someone can read it and get the wrong point from it means that there's an open-endedness to it.
It's the same thing with something like, you know, of course, Catcher in the Rye, which some people read and they were like, this is obviously about destroying fake people and, you know, bringing a society down to its knees or whatever.
It's the same thing we talked about when we did our podcast on Fight Club.
Like people watch that movie for exactly the wrong reasons, you know.
Because they felt like it sort of lined up with their own ideology, even though it actually excoriated it.
Oh, wait a minute, time out.
What is Catcher in the Rye about?
Well, Catcher in the Rye is about being lost within the wilderness of that phoniness, and whether or not you can actually do anything about it.
I don't know how to say this, but it's not about shooting John Lennon.
I'll just say that.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, no.
I mean, I read this to my son, who was probably like 10, or maybe 8 at the time, or 9 at the time.
I was reading it.
I don't know why.
I just picked it up and started reading it.
I had forgotten, though.
We all remember how it ends, right?
Maybe I don't want to ruin it now.
I was practically in tears by the end of this, because I get it in a totally different setting now, where it's much more of a statement on sort of mental health.
And by the way, youthful, youth mental health, which is a lot of what Salinger is about, right?
And those sort of ideas of like, who can change the world, who should change the world.
I got to tell you, like we have now thought about Sunset Boulevard in terms of political and socio socioeconomic ideas more than Donald Trump has.
Like Donald Trump literally loves it because it's up on a screen.
It's the same thing as him watching himself and people talking about him on TV.
But I again, I know that everybody wants to turn the page from this guy.
And listen, I'm as happy to do that in 2023 as anybody else, because this campaign is going nowhere.
If you ever read this article, you absolutely should.
Like this is this is a dispatch from the decline of Trumpism and its transference over somewhere else.
At one point, she brings up the idea, Olivia Nuzzi does, of Ron DeSantis governing Donald Trump.
And it's just like, no, I don't, he's not a governor.
I'm not under him or whatever.
Like, it's very obvious that this is a plane that is going down, or this is a sinkhole that is growing.
But I have to tell you, that desire to look away from him and not really scrutinize who he is, it's a mistake.
Like, this honestly was a reflection of the American soul.
This was a reflection of who we have become.
And this guy, I think he embodied it more than almost anybody else.
And that's how he snuck into the consciousness.
And so he's able to do it because everyone said in 2015, oh, just ignore him.
Ignore it.
That's what the guy wants.
He wants attention.
We just have to ignore it.
And that was a fatal flaw that led, you know, to 2016.
There is nothing more American than white men who have been given everything, sitting around and being pissed off that they don't have more.
And Donald Trump probably lived that reality more than anybody else ever.
Jared, why do you hate America?
All right, everyone, that's going to do it for I'm going to go take some Sudafed or NyQuil.
I don't know what I've got.
I got something, but I'm going to I'm going to go rest up.
But I will be back if everything works out for the last Muckrake episode of 2022.
They'll be coming out Friday for the weekender episode.
And all you got to do to get that is go over to Patreon.com slash Muckrake podcast.
That keeps us editorially independent, ad-free, it keeps the show going.
So again, patreon.com slash Montgomery Podcast.
We hope you all have a good holiday.
We hope you're staying safe, you're staying warm.
If you need us before then, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?
