Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the coup attempt in Brazil, where thousands of protesters attacked major government buildings. They then move to Ron DeSantis's attempts to control the curriculum of colleges in the state of Florida, before finishing with the many concessions that Kevin McCarthy was forced to give up including the right of any congressperson to move to have McCarthy withdrawn as a speaker.
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Hey everybody, it's Jared Yates Sexton of the McCraig Podcast.
I just wanted to record this quick message reminding everybody that my book, The Midnight Kingdom, A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis, comes out next week, Tuesday, January 17th.
It's a long time coming, and I've got to tell you, I've been excited for a very, very long time for people to get their hands on this book.
It is by far the hardest thing and also the most rewarding thing that I've done in my career.
This tells the story of how the modern world was created using white supremacist lies, evangelical mythologies, and capitalist conspiracy theories.
It is both a guide to how we've arrived at this moment, how we are approaching an authoritarian future, but also how we might save ourselves, how we might actually push back and make a better world.
Again, that's The Midnight Kingdom, A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis.
If you haven't already, get your pre-order in from your local independent bookstore.
Let them know you want me to come out, hang out with you, talk to you, sign a couple books, do those types of things, and I would be more than happy to do that.
Again, Midnight Kingdom, A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis comes out next week.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
I'm Jerry J. Sexton.
Nick, how we doing, bud?
We're doing.
It's cold.
It's rainy.
I'm happy to be inside with you.
Wait, time out.
What's cold for Los Angeles, California?
We got to get some specifics here.
It is currently, I want to say 54 degrees and raining.
That's not good.
Why, that really, is that funny?
54s, come on!
54, are you putting on earmuffs?
What are we doing?
I got a hoodie.
I got a really nice, it's warm sweatshirt thing that I zip up.
You know, it's, it's something.
Okay.
All right.
Well, we'll send our hopes and prayers to you and maybe you'll make it through this hard time.
I appreciate that.
Let them, let them rain down upon me.
Well, we've got a lot to talk about today.
We've got, man, Florida's an absolute disaster.
We've got to talk about the actual deal that ended with Kevin McCarthy becoming the Speaker of the House.
My God, what a mess that is.
But Nick, first things first, we've got to go south.
We've got to go to Brazil, my friend, because this nation that we've been keeping an eye on for a while now, it brewed over, Nick.
We knew there was an opportunity for some of these things to happen.
There was a troubling scene that took place on Sunday, January 8th.
Thousands of Jair Bolsonaro supporters stormed the Presidential Palace, the National Congress, the Supreme Court.
They made an absolute mess of everything.
They were intimidating public officials.
They were carrying out violence.
Meanwhile, Nick, it seemed, in certain cases at least, that they were aided and consoled by police forces, which we knew was a real possibility.
It is drawing a lot of comparisons to January 6th.
There are a lot of reasons for that, which we'll get into more specifically here in a minute, but what were your initial reactions of seeing the January 8th incident in Brazil?
I mean, certainly how much how closely it related to our January 6th.
It looked a lot like that with all the footage, similar ideas of overwhelmed police who were not prepared on a weekend to do this thing.
What was interesting, though, there seems to be a little bit of a tactical difference where they sort of attacked, you know, Three different places all at once.
And I think that that might have been a calculation to like overwhelm the government more.
And the only question, it's harder to tell exactly from all the reporting, like what the numbers were, especially compared to January 6th.
And I'm not even sure we've ever gotten, like, a great number, have we, for January 6th?
Like, how many people were really out there?
Because you do see, you know, a pullback, and you can see there's, I mean, we know there's, like, probably a thousand, at least, and I wonder if it was that many here.
It kind of felt like it might have been less, but certainly no less, destructive than what they were able to do once they got inside.
Yeah, you brought up an interesting point, which is we still don't know the specifics of exactly how January 6th took place in that regard.
This is another one of those instances where, you know, it's really strange, man, with all of the surveillance, with all of the information, with all the reporting, all of it, you would think that some of the details would be a little bit clearer.
I've even been reaching out to journalists based in Brazil who feel like they can't really get a grasp on this thing.
And what you just brought up, the idea that this took place not just in one moment, right, in which like overrunning Congress, but like three major points feels like an escalation.
And it has already, I think for good reason, it has drawn back to the fact that Bolsonaro, who for anybody keeping track, is currently holidaying in Florida.
He just got rushed to the hospital again after this.
He's always in the hospital.
He's in the hospital more times than he's not.
Bolsonaro, of course, is in Florida hanging out with a MMA fighter.
But he has been in consultation with, tell me if these names ring a bell, Steve Bannon, Jason Miller, the entirety of the right wing apparatus, CPAC was just held in Brazil.
It's weird, Nick.
It almost feels like there's some sort of a situation brewing there, some sort of an understanding that's taking place.
But the way that this was undertaken, It not only looks like January 6th, but it looks like the people behind January 6th have learned from January 6th.
They've learned the ability to sort of scatter things out.
They've also learned how to use social media in a way to sort of stay underneath the radar and not be censored and not be squashed, which we'll talk about in just a minute.
It is a very worrying thing, in part also because law enforcement played a role in it.
And there's even the possibility now that the military could, you know, be part of this escalation.
We're not entirely sure where this is going, but it does look like another iteration of what took place on January 6th.
And that tells us there's probably going to be more of these, not just in America, not just in Brazil, but probably in the Western democracies.
I think at this point, that's a foregone conclusion.
Yeah.
Well, anytime a major country of the United States displays, gives you a demonstration of something that, hey, that might, that might work somewhere else in a smaller setting.
Yeah.
There's going to be a lot of people who are going to try to write that stuff down and take, take that, take note of it.
I do think that I like what you mentioned that the law enforcement might've been involved.
Cause they, there were some images perhaps where they were taking pictures or helping or whatever, but they, you know, We might have forgotten in the United States, though, that if you storm the Capitol, in theory, you could be arrested on that day.
And guess what?
In Brazil, they were.
They actually, en masse, had busloads of people.
They freaking arrested right away, had them processed.
There was no three-hour delay where there was a president of the country who was egging everybody on and not saying anything to calm tensions.
That wasn't happening.
Because Bolsonaro, maybe before he went to the hospital, he was walking around Publix Still shopping for gum.
And so, you know, that was a big difference.
And that was kind of interesting to me.
Maybe the governments themselves are learning to get these things prosecuted a lot quicker, get these people arrested and processed through the system to quash anything going forward.
By the way, it's not a coincidence that new president Lula was not in the capital city.
He was in Sao Paulo.
They're taking care of some rain disaster that had taken place.
And by the way, Lula did not equivocate in any of this, came out and called them fanatical fascists, said that he was going to round up anybody who did this, and on top of that, And here is the difference between what Lula is doing and what Biden and a lot of the Democrats have done.
He said he's specifically going to go after the organizers and the funders.
That was a very, very specific focus on this.
They didn't just go ahead and pin it on Bolsonaro, even though Bolsonaro played his role in it.
He was sort of the rallying cry.
He was the one that spread the conspiracy theories and created the coalition that played out here.
But Lula did what he had to do.
And I want to point out for people something that history has shown us, which is any time a leftist gains power, specifically through democratic processes, right?
Anytime they win an election, the moment before that they gain power and the moment after they gain power, it's really a fraught period of time, right?
Because not only is it their political enemies that are going to try and undermine them, but the institutions, the status quo, the system, so to speak.
They do not want leftists in power.
Right.
So one of the things that happens is oftentimes you'll have like the World Bank or the Economic Forum will go ahead and throw some like impediments their way.
They'll kind of start, you'll see places like the United States or Great Britain start to kind of mess around with their trade, their economics, all of that.
This moment right now with him out of the Capitol as this took place, this feels a little bit like a precursor action, right?
A little bit of a warning that at any moment we can get God knows how many people there that are more than willing to carry out violence.
We can infiltrate these systems.
We can get into these buildings.
It doesn't really matter what law enforcement you have there because God knows what side they're on.
This felt like a warning shot.
Is what it felt like.
And it felt very specifically that it needed to happen while Lula was out of the Capitol.
But also, I gotta tell you, high marks to Lula!
This is how you handle it.
You round the people up immediately and you say, guess what?
If you're throwing money at this, you're on my radar now.
And that's how this is gonna happen.
Well, here's what's interesting about that, because, you know, we had just seen the January 6th Commission ignore the money, right?
They really didn't want to trace it and figure out what that is.
But I think what's clear, what we saw here, was that this was a group of people that were brought together by Trump to then go and basically attack the Capitol.
That was his words, that was his encouragement.
And it was on a weekday in a way that like, this was something different.
And I'm wondering if by Lula coming out and saying that he wants to attack the funding, I'm wondering if he feels or has information or has evidence that a lot of these people were paid.
Like, was this some sort of a, you know, and we hear the right always do that, right?
And we haven't heard for a little while though, but remember that was a big rallying cry for a long time.
Whenever we'd see some sort of protest, the right would say, oh, they're just being, they're just paid by Soros people.
And it really wasn't.
It was an organic, you know, protest and demonstration.
And I don't know.
I just wonder if that is part of this, where perhaps, you know, Bannon and those guys sat down and said, listen, we got to make sure we have enough people.
How do we do that?
They have to look the right way.
They have to dress the right way.
Let's enlist some money here and get people to show up.
I don't know.
But that could very well be something that happened there.
I think that is very, very possible.
I mean, the way that this was organized was very, very specific.
It was actually really intricate.
I spent a lot of time yesterday looking through the appeals, looking through the social media work, the way that they roused this thing.
This was done as a concentrated effort.
This was not a spontaneous eruption of violence or protest.
It was very, very specific, and it looks very much like it was by people who were involved in not just January 6th, but also who studied it to understand how to use the appeals, but also how to get around social media filters, plus also the country's filters.
I'll just say this, Nick.
I want to put this on the record.
The United States and Brazil signed an extradition agreement in 1961.
I want to say that it came online a couple years after that.
Anybody listening right now from the Biden administration?
I know you all do.
Do you want to score some easy points?
Do you want to take care of a couple of your problems all at once?
Why don't you get Jair Bolsonaro?
Why don't you get Steve Bannon?
And why don't you get Jason Miller on the next flight down to Brazil?
And extradite them down there.
We already know that Bannon and Miller are on their radar.
And Bolsonaro, by the way, came to the United States of America probably to give himself an alibi.
Probably to get out of there and be the leader in, you know, in waiting.
That's how these things work.
They always follow these trajectories.
Why don't we get him on a flight, get him down in Brazil?
Maybe we'll get this whole thing figured out.
Maybe that would clear a couple things up.
I don't know.
Are there Publix down in Brazil?
I don't think so.
Hey, the way that Bolsonaro was walking around in that Publix, it looked like he was being touched by something special.
Yeah, absolutely.
They have really good rotisserie chicken, so we'll see.
Yeah, listen, things that won't happen for 100, Jared, but it sounds good.
I mean, but isn't that the right move?
I mean, if you're serious about taking this thing on, because I have to tell you, Bannon and Miller and everybody else that they're associated with, and by the way, CPAC went down there not only to, like, bolster their arrangement, also we gotta talk about Matt Schlapp here in a second too, Uh, but they went down to Brazil to not just bolster their arrangement, probably to go ahead and help plan this thing.
I mean, that's how this stuff works.
So if you, I mean, if you really want to get serious about making sure this type of shit doesn't happen, this is a ready made way to do it.
And by the way, it doesn't really cost you much.
Like, does it look bad to the conservative media?
Will Fox complain about it?
Absolutely they will.
But my God, people, look what just happened in Brazil.
They're requesting Bannon, Miller, and Bolsonaro.
Maybe we should send them down there.
Maybe it'll all get worked out.
Now, but we know that most of those people that stormed the Capitol are being prosecuted.
The FBI is hunting them down with facial recognition and all that stuff.
So why wouldn't that have been something that dissuaded the people in Brazil from doing this?
Thinking that, well, you know what?
They did prosecute them, but they didn't get away with it.
You know what I mean?
What changed in their minds?
Now, that said, when you are as upset as certain people are in whatever country you might be in, you might not have rational thought, right?
And it might take over, you know, so that you can look at it in that respect, too, where it got out of hand and they lost their minds for a while and they completely went H-shit crazy.
But at the very least, we know that it's because Bolsonaro, he hasn't conceded.
He still has not conceded the race anyway.
And all of that animus and what he just, you know, The conspiracy theories about voting machines that he did were made Mike Lindell look like, you know, oh my goodness.
Like a level-headed dude, yeah.
No, I agree.
I think in part, and it's the same sort of configuration that happened on January 6th.
You have a lot of people, I'm sorry, but these people got dressed up in like Brazilian soccer kits and carrying flags, you know, and they end up there.
But it was a concentrated effort.
And I want to point out, by the way, That Bolsonaro never would have been president of Brazil if it wasn't for social media, if it wasn't for Facebook, if it wasn't for just the fear-mongering and conspiracy theory peddling that Facebook carried out and YouTube carried out.
They didn't care about it.
Then, after years and years and years of crackdowns because of public pressure, We've now reached a point where this entire situation was built up in the exact same way.
There's already proof, there's already substantive proof that this was aided by the fact that Elon Musk not only bought Twitter, but basically got rid of all content moderation and basically anybody who had their fingers on the control.
This is a side effect of Twitter, of Facebook, of YouTube, all of these things continuing to cause the same problems.
Which brings me to this final word on it.
This is not going to be the last time.
Brazil is going to have more of these uprisings because until you find the people who did it, until you find the people who paid for it, until you find the people who backed it.
And by the way, I'm going to guess Nick and call me crazy.
I'm going to say some of the people who funded this, they might have zip codes that aren't too far away from ours.
You know, there's some American forces in this.
There's going to be Brazilian as well, but this is an international authoritarian movement.
Until you find those people, until you actually handle this situation, it's going to happen more in Brazil.
It's going to happen in the United States of America at some other point, because the January 6th Commission kind of dropped the ball on that.
It's going to happen in places like France.
It's going to happen in places like Great Britain because they have exposed a weakness within these institutions and an inability or an unwillingness to defend themselves.
And the whole part about Musk and Brazilian misinformation was that he fired the entire team that was in charge of that for Brazil.
So it's like, why did he do that?
What did he know?
I mean, we know why he did it because he wants to make every bit of misinformation protected under some misguided notion of First Amendment or something.
But yeah, there is unequivocal evidence here because I was going to almost say, well, what could Musk really do?
What was he part of there?
But when you look at the headlines and then you realize that, yes, they had a whole team that was supposed to help people in Brazil understand what the truth is, what isn't.
That was gone.
He obliterated that.
And so then it proliferated.
And so that's a that's a big problem.
And again, in an open society and democratic societies, you know, you're supposed to be allowed to say whatever you want to say, whether it's true or not.
Right.
There is that notion.
And so, you know, how are you supposed to then officiate that when you are a major platform like Twitter?
I like what they were doing, by the way.
Didn't you when you had a little disclaimers back?
It helped.
No, it helps, but also I want to point out, Musk, because he is becoming more and more radicalized to the right wing, even he was like, oh, I think there's reasons to doubt the results in Brazil.
You know?
And then immediately it's like, oh, you're kidding me, this entire thing got out of hand because he wasn't paying attention to right wing misinformation?
And by the way, somehow or another, shocker of shockers, this stuff became amplified and gained a lot of traction.
That's really strange, Nick.
It's almost like he's carrying out the operation of Twitter using his ideological preferences.
And we're watching that play out.
And these things, when you do that, These things are going to become more and more common, specifically because these organs of communication and miscommunication are going to continue to facilitate them.
As long as we allow wealthy barons like Elon Musk, who have inherent anti-democratic tendencies, to control the panels, this is going to keep happening.
Period.
And it's interesting to figure out what is the advantage of them from a U.S.
standpoint, from a citizen here, to seeing Brazil have a coup like this successful.
You know, I mean, it's not like, oh, well, look, we can then do, hey, guys, we can get it done here because Brazil did it.
Like, I don't know if it works back that way.
Obviously, you look at the money, right?
There's got to be monetary benefits for people here for that as well.
A little bit unclear, but certainly that tends to be what's motivating for a lot of this shit, right?
It's never about, oh, I'm a patriot.
At least the people who are in charge.
It's always about how much more money can I make off of this.
Yeah, and it's infectious.
You know, it really is.
Like whenever you see this stuff start to take off and go in different places, like Bannon and Miller made a ton of money, I'm sure, off of Bolsonaro.
And also, by the way, it's funded by the same people who funded this thing.
It's the same dark money that's continually circulating the same ponds.
But also it helps your cause, right?
It goes ahead and emboldens people.
If you're able to take down a left wing president, a left wing democratically elected president, if they manage to carry out a coup over the next few months, I mean, that kind of gives you momentum.
It kind of makes it more possible that it's going to happen here.
By the way, real fast, I already talked about this, but I don't have much to say about this, but the chair of CPAC, Matt Schlapp, One of the biggest assholes in the right-wing circles.
Accused of sexually assaulting a male staffer for the Hershel Walker campaign.
Yeah, okay.
There'll be more.
I suspect there'll be more people coming out at some point after this.
It's so weird, isn't it?
I mean, how, like, this happens with the head of CPAC?
I don't know.
It's very, very strange.
So, moving on!
Yeah, it didn't bother him.
He introduced Trump the other day at Mar-a-Lago for that other thing, so he's not worried.
What a putrid movement this is.
All the way around, top to bottom.
Well, we're going to move a little bit north, but we're still going to stay south, Nick.
We've got to go to the state of Florida.
And I want to go ahead and give a hat to McCraig's supporter, listener, wonderful person, Annie, sent this along.
This was not on my radar, but this is shocking as shit.
In Florida, where Ron DeSantis, of course, is the governor, and we got to talk about the system of how this even happens in the first place.
He has the power to appoint board of trustees to put people on these educational institutions.
He just appointed Christopher Ruffo.
That name perks up a couple of ears.
Rufo is the aggressive, right-wing, racist, denying provocateur who more or less created the CRT panic, the groomer slur to go after public education in order to hand over public education to the wealthiest funders who want to privatize it for trillions of dollars.
He appointed Rufo to the Board of Trustees for this college called the New College of Florida, which is in Sarasota.
It is one of the best public higher education institutions in the country, unabashedly by the way.
progressive in its ideology, the way that it carries itself.
He has appointed Rufo.
He has also appointed Charles Kessler of the Claremont Institute, which we'll talk more about in a second, to this board of trustees, Nick, to intentionally change the entire direction of the college.
There's a lot to talk about here, but this is pretty weird, disturbing stuff.
I think we'd be better off if we just let him speak for himself, wouldn't you?
Even red states, I talk to people in red states.
How do we deal with this horrible problem of our public university system?
I don't know.
You're the state legislature.
You pay for it.
You pass appropriations bills for it.
It's under your jurisdiction.
And every year, you just write a blank check to the public university system.
These are public universities that should reflect and transmit the values of the public.
And the representatives of the public, i.e.
state legislators, have ultimate power to shape or reshape those institutions.
And so we have to get out of this idea that somehow public university system is a totally independent entity that practices academic freedom.
A total fraud.
That's just a false statement.
First of all, Nick, I gotta tell you, he has no understanding of how public education works whatsoever.
That's one of the dumbest-ass statements I've ever heard, trying to encompass it.
But also, his contempt is incredible, isn't it?
Well, don't you get the same kind of visceral reaction to when people like that use the word values?
Because you know what they really mean.
Let's ask Matt Schlapp about values, shall we?
No, we can't.
But nonetheless, that is what makes me so frustrated because they're upset about whatever is being taught as being obviously too liberal.
And so in response, they are going to create some other entity that's going to mandate what their values are to everybody else.
And that's more problematic Then what we're learning is what I would call a history, what he wants to call CRT.
So there's no question that, yes, he's got a magnetic personality.
Something about him is magnetic, right?
People are drawn to him.
They want to hear him speak and they want to accept that ideology.
It's really frustrating.
Well, the Rufus thing, he's really kind of a powerful figure on the right wing.
I think on one hand it's because he's a very aggressive, but also very clever guy, right?
Like he understands how to appeal to people.
He understands how to sort of like, you know, uh, touch on, on, on like live wires and use them to their advantage.
I mean, when he came up with this CRT thing, basically, he woke up one morning with a really good idea, he got on the radar of every right-wing donor institute and think tank foundation in the country, and they were like, how much money can we give you?
You know, like, literally, how many zeros is it gonna take in order to, like, weaponize this and roll it out?
It was...
It was a really kind of incredible mobilization.
I still think about that.
Nick, that was like, not last summer, but the summer before.
And it came completely out of nowhere.
And then CRT was everything, right?
And it had like infected just one school board and town after another.
He also, I think, one of the reasons that he's so dangerous and they love him so much, is he's actually able to go into these situations, such as the funding of public universities, and he's able to say, hey, here's the system as it has worked, which means that, you know, the legislatures have control over the purses of public universities.
Let's take advantage of that.
Right?
Which is a new, innovative idea.
Like, they've used their purse strings to cut back on money.
And I can tell you as a former academic, like, it was brutal.
I mean, the austerity that took place at a public university in a red state was incredible.
But now, it's going to be about effectively, basically terraforming them.
Completely mutating these universities, cutting out all of their faculty or terrifying them to the point nobody would ever, you know, raise a concern, and then going in and effectively doing in reverse what they have always accused the professors and faculty and people of doing, which is indoctrinating.
This is bold-faced indoctrination.
I mean, I was reading one of these articles describing what they want to do with this board that will control universities.
And here's what it says.
I'll just read it right out of the office verbatim.
With the six new members of the school's board of trustees, the DeSantis administration plans to weed out concepts like diversity, equity, and inclusion.
And CRT.
Proportionally, if I was going to try that, I might leave with CRT and then try and bury all those other words because it's hard to imagine when you're thinking about like an institution of higher learning and kids coming out of high school and for the first time living on their own, like how you could imagine that words like diversity and equity and inclusion would be, you know, four letter words that you must eradicate from any notion of the curriculum.
That's insane to me.
But yes, people like this, or certain people like this, right?
What are the things they're hearing, Jared, when they hear those three words?
Well, okay, so those three words, and basically, I want to go ahead and talk about the larger block of text.
So, one of the problems in all of this is that every university in the country that isn't, like, avowedly right-wing, they all adopt these words, right?
They all adopt these values.
If you read any mission statement for a public university in this country, they read the exact same.
And the reason that they read the exact same, which, by the way, you want to talk about an industry that has made millions for people for nothing?
They bring in so many consultants.
They bring in so many groups to come in and write the same bullshit.
And it's supposed to sound good, right?
And the reason it's supposed to talk about, you know, any of this is basically to shield the university from being sued.
Right?
It's basically to ensure that faculty don't sue, that students don't sue, that people don't come in and use the legal protections that are rightfully theirs, by the way, in order to come into the university and say, guess what?
This institution is not fair.
It's not equitable.
It's a really, really problematic institution.
They use this as cover.
They don't mean this.
They've never meant it.
Administrators in these situations are never leftists.
They're never progressives.
They don't really care about this stuff.
And what Rufo has done, by the way, and what these people are doing now, is they're attacking the hollowness of these institutions.
They don't want to do this stuff.
They're more than happy to have someone like a Rufo come in and do this stuff.
And what they're actually doing is they're taking the semantics of this and they're saying, you know what, these ideas are actually racist.
They are actually sexist.
It just so happens that they're racist against white people and they're sexist against men or straight people or whatever.
And all along, what they're actually doing is they're using the language and the spirit of progressivism, of trying to create a fairer country, They're using those concepts against the very idea of it in itself.
I mean, like what you're seeing here, I'm going to read this from Rufo.
He reacted to this by saying, quote, we're recapturing higher education.
And the agenda he wrote down is this, shift the university to a classical liberal arts model, which by the way, Nick, that means white canon, right?
That means basically going back to the old Western civilization canon, which teaches you that Western civilization is better than everything else.
Restructure the administration admission statement, which basically means a purging of leadership.
Create a new core curriculum and academic master plan, which is about ensuring that every student is going to be receiving the same conservative education.
Abolish diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Replace it with equality, merit, and colorblindness.
By the way, how's colorblindness worked out in the United States of America, Nick?
Not great, Bob.
Not great.
They're going to restructure the academic departments to reflect the new pedagogical approach, which basically means they're going to come in and fire a hell of a lot of people.
And if they don't fire you, they're going to make sure you're terrified.
They're going to hire new faculty with expertise in — this is great, everybody — constitutionalism, free enterprise, civic virtue, family life, religious freedom, and American principles.
Credible.
And they're going to establish a graduate school for training teachers in classical education.
This is literally Ron DeSantis using his power to enable a bunch of ideas from the Claremont Institute and a lot of these right-wing think tanks to create a new publicly funded right-wing indoctrination academy.
I mean, it is, if it weren't so evil, you would almost have to tip your hat to them.
I mean, it is like one of the most twisted things you can imagine.
Oh, I mean, it makes you not be surprised if, I mean, they obviously want to reverse the progress, right?
Because clearly what we've had in this country for a long time was not good, was not equitable, was not fair.
And so in order to progress, you have to have these concepts embedded into your university so you can move forward.
So if they're going to turn this thing around and back it up, Well then, of course, creationism is going to be something that's going to be on the table pretty soon.
And then if you continue that thing, then you have to imagine that some version of segregation will probably come back into schools.
And it might not be called that, and they might be smarter about how they kind of frame it, but that's all I hear about.
And it's not only segregation of races, but like probably sexual identity as well.
Yes.
Well, oh, I gotta tell you, by the way, you don't bring people in who they get trained for family values if you're not talking about making sure that it's going to be like this cis, heteronormative institution.
On top of that, Nick, I'm sorry, but my antenna always go up a little bit whenever I hear that they're going to be focusing on merit.
And colorblindness, right?
Which is all about the idea that you live or fail based on that.
And if you're talking about colorblindness, you're basically saying, I don't know, maybe some of our science, with quotes around it, is going to show that sometimes people perform at lower levels, right?
We're literally talking at that point about racial identity.
We're talking about racial merit.
We're talking about racial talent or racial deficiencies.
This thing's going to be bad.
This thing is going to be really, really bad.
And I want to point something out real fast.
The Washington Post covered this in an article by Valerie Strauss.
The title was, DeSantis Moves to Turn a Progressive Florida College into a Conservative One.
And Nick, I just want to read, we've never read a correction.
On this podcast?
I want to break ground on that because this correction, Nick, it explains exactly why liberal institutions are not up to the task of fighting this.
Here's the correction in the Washington Post.
Correction.
A previous version of this story called Christopher Rufo, a Republican activist who denies the existence of systemic racism.
He is a conservative activist who has said American law is not currently discriminating against racial minorities.
The story also clarifies language about diversity trainings used by the federal government and businesses in Florida, which were not technically forbidden but were broadly restricted in what they could say about systemic racism.
Rufo rolls these people.
Rolls them.
He made sure that the Washington Post had to come out and say, Christopher Rufo is not a racist.
He simply has questions about the current moment.
They are so ill-equipped to fight people like this, which is not only what makes him powerful, it's what makes him very dangerous.
Jared, have you ever done any diversity training?
Yes, yes I am.
Probably a dumb question since you were a professor and like obviously you probably do it every year you have something right like built into the thing.
I gotta tell you, for anybody who has never done diversity training, these things are so often just covering the ass of employers.
That's all they are.
It's basically telling you, you can't go out and discriminate.
And most of the time, unless they have an actual person within the administration who cares about it, these things are, they're almost offensive in what they do.
Well, well, hang on.
Let me, let me, I'll be the advocate.
Cause as a, as a basketball coach in high school, we had to do that a little bit.
And everyone there is a piss that they're there.
It's like taking time out of their day.
It's just a nuisance.
It's a whatever.
I know all this stuff.
I gotta tell you, when you sit down and actually pay attention and listen to what they're saying, a lot of it is very valuable, and a lot of it is probably stuff that they don't even realize that they're doing poorly in terms of communication.
So a lot of this is sort of all related, like, even like the mask-wearing stuff, which we can get to in the next segment about, you know, we have to end these mandates, we can't, I don't wear a mask.
It's just the inconvenience of things that actually might benefit you if you could just take a second with some critical thinking of your own to take, you know, Take the benefits out of it.
There are times in all of our lives, there might be things we hadn't wanted to do and then you realize later, years later, oh my God, that was actually really helpful.
And so I feel like a lot of this is what rooted them in the anger and the how dare you make me take any other time out of my day to learn something else that I might not necessarily believe in or have to self-reflect and realize maybe I have been a dick for a long time.
That is the root of a lot of this stuff, I feel like, especially when you watch DeSantis talk about it.
And it's just like that's not how leaders should behave.
No.
And by the way, I've seen this type of training have a massive positive effect when people take it seriously.
And I think that you have to make sort of like the you have to tell the difference between what Rufo is doing.
Rufo is taking advantage of just absolute, again, hollowed attempts, right?
And by the way, this would not be happening if a lot of these people cared.
You would see mass walkouts, you know, if a lot of these people cared.
You would see a lot of pressure being applied as opposed to this.
The most that I've heard on this story, Nick, are from alum.
That's it.
People who are like, oh my god, I love the new College of Florida.
I can't believe this is happening.
I've been reaching out to people over the last few hours and the amount of frustration with it is incredible.
But when it does happen, when that actual training is carried out thoughtfully and with the best intentions, I've seen not just workplaces improve, I've seen people improve.
And the answer to all of this is very simple, which is We can all improve.
We can all treat each other better.
We can make a better society.
But Republican aggrievement, and by the way this goes back to what's happening in Brazil too, it's all of these conservative movements, they are based in the idea that I am the most important person in the universe.
No one should ever question me.
Nobody should ever make me feel bad about anything.
I should get whatever I want whenever I want it.
And anybody who wants to talk to me about other people's struggles or other people's experiences are trying to screw me over and take what is mine or what is rightfully mine.
And in all of this, you're exactly right.
Like this is what's being taken advantage of is that annoyance almost, right?
Like the idea that like you should learn anything, that you should experience actual education or that you should gain actual information that troubles like your perspectives that you've been born into.
It is, I don't know, man.
I look at this.
This isn't a sexy story.
Do you know what I mean?
Like it's not like, like the board of trustees at a college in Florida, I feel like DeSantis and Rufo and the people who back them, they are so good at doing this type of stuff that flies just a little bit under the radar.
Do you know what I mean?
Like just, just, it does fundamental change.
It actually has effects.
It actually changes the way the world works and power works.
They're so good at keeping it just underneath and keeping it just acceptable enough.
It is.
I'm glad we could talk about it, but also it just it feels very large and insidious.
Yeah, I hear you.
And, you know, it's funny because they also love to use, like, Martin Luther King.
They had the one quote about Martin Luther King and the judgment, you know, the judge's person on their character, not the color of their skin.
And yet, like, they don't have any other sense of any other nuance of what he stood for, what he wanted to have happen.
And I think it's, like, you know, nobody wants to have any self-reflection and realize, oh, that's a bad part of my life.
But I get it, right?
But, like, we can't progress.
You can't get better.
If you don't do that and have any kind of sense that maybe you are part of the problem.
I will say this.
There was a poll that came out that I saw on Twitter the other day, which was encouraging because remember why he's doing this.
Like everything that Santa does now is in service of running for president in 2024, right?
I don't think I'm making that up, but you said it's true.
This kind of stuff though isn't really going to fly necessarily in a national election when he finally has to be more appealing to everybody.
And I do think that what I noticed is that there are more Republicans now who are in favor of compromise with the Democrats than ever before.
In 2014 and 2019, they had the same poll.
Are you in favor of prioritizing opposing the Democrats' agenda or working with them?
48% of Republicans said they were in favor.
So I sense that, like, even though there might be some, you know, grist here and he can get some momentum in some respects, I ultimately feel like this is going to end up, especially in the way the speaker thing went and everything like that, and the way that they're going to govern in the House, These, all these things are going to mix together and end up being a bit toxic for them, you know, in the bigger picture when they try and go bigger.
I think DeSantis's ability to sort of fly under that radar and wield state power.
What I am afraid of is that the Democratic Party is being pulled so far right by Never Trumpers, by your, you know, your Bill Kristols, you know, I feel like the idea of compromise isn't even compromise anymore.
I kind of feel like the middle ground that they might inhabit is just strictly Republican, you know, ideas.
With a Democratic sort of smile, you know?
I gotta tell you.
I've been reporting on this podcast for a while, but I'm having a lot of conversations with liberals who are starting to talk themselves into Ron DeSantis.
It just keeps happening, man.
It just keeps happening.
And I think somehow or another, he's going to bridge that gap between what we see as sort of toxic Trumpism and some sort of an approach that is going to be acceptable for a lot of these people.
And I got to tell you, This stuff with going after like new college, I gotta tell you, there are some colleges, Nick, and you live out in California, right?
Like you live out in like a liberal country.
Like out in the rest of the country, there are like sort of these oases that are like Institutions, schools, cities, you name it.
And like, even sometimes liberals outside of those institutions and areas, they look at those liberal sort of oases, and they're just like, they hate them.
Do you know what I mean?
They resent them for like, they think they have dopey language, or that they go too far, or they're experimenting with too many genders, or all of that.
And there feels like there is a growing backlash to all of that that is going to lead to that compromise that you're talking about.
And I personally, and I would love to hear what you have to say, I'm always wary of the idea of compromising with this Republican Party.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, I mean, listen, some of those compromises are what cost Kevin McCarthy's position as speaker because, you know, they want to keep the government funded and functioning a little bit, right?
So I go both ways, but I definitely hear you that if you walk in shit long enough, you'll smell like it.
And there's no question that sometimes, yes, that kind of compromise is not compromise.
It's capitulation.
And then we move the other way, even though we would like to think we can have a nice linear progression forward.
It lurches, it goes back and forth.
We've seen this time and again.
The problem is when you get into some of the fundamental stuff like abortion or gay marriage, those are the things that we should never have to relitigate anyway.
And here we are, and it's all, let's not ignore what this really is.
The CRT stuff is really moving into that realm of gay marriage and equal rights for everybody on a lot of different laws.
So that's really where they're going here in a long game.
And you're right, it's very frustrating.
And I just want to, I have a little hope.
It looks to be a little bit of a notion that there's enough people out there on both sides that understand what the nefariousness and we'll vote against him.
But the thing about what he's doing though is it is democratic.
It's little d democratic.
He is the governor.
He is allowed to do this.
They're going to probably challenge some of this stuff in court, but like that's the problem is democratically like, yeah, you were allowed.
He's allowed to do this bullshit.
Well, which by the way, I want to point out, I'm glad you brought this up.
Having worked in the public university system in Georgia, I have to tell you, it is not functional for the governor of a state to be the person appointing trustees, whether it's at a university or whether it's like the total system trustees.
It does not work.
It becomes a real, real problem.
It never should have happened in the first place.
I gotta tell you, I think a lot of this should be federalized.
I think that you should get to the point where, like, these types of things are not possible.
I think he's taking advantage of a really broken, corrupt system.
Fair enough.
At the very least, I wish we could all agree that the professionals in the educational sphere should be the ones designing the curriculum.
People who have spent their entire lives dedicated to this should be the ones who are in charge, right, of how the curriculum is shaped, what they're teaching, all those different things.
That's the biggest key, I think, of them all.
I am.
By the way, this is the part of the program where I say that my brothers, my sisters in the academic world, walk off your jobs.
Like, now is the time!
I'm sorry, but now is the time for a mass walkout.
By the way, speaking of Kevin McCarthy and the speakership...
I thought this would be a decent time to dip our toes in the right-wing world.
Nick and I read this article that showed up on The Federalist, which, saying that out loud, makes my skin crawl a little bit.
This is by Emily Jaschinski.
It's titled, In McCarthy Negotiations, GOP Landed on Most Significant Win for Conservatives in a Decade.
I want to read a little bit just to give people an idea of what's happening on the right, because you gotta know where these people are coming from.
Emily says, quote, life expectancy in the United States is at its lowest level since 1996.
Teen suicide rates spiked nearly 30% in the last decade.
Through drug overdose, deaths declined from a record high in 2021.
They remain 50% higher than just five years ago.
Over the last year, the median worker lost 8.5% in real wages, a 25-year high, Marriage and fertility rates are falling.
A heightened nuclear threat looms amidst the invasion of Ukraine.
In the last fiscal year, the government recorded 2.76 million illegals crossing our southern border as tens of thousands of desperate people stream into the country every month, trafficked by cartels.
American happiness is at a record low, so is institutional trust.
It's in this dismal context that Kevin McCarthy's bid for the House Speakership faltered over the course of four frenzied days last week.
Nick, that's terrible writing, first of all.
Is that not awful?
I am really glad that you brought that up, because I wasn't sure I was going to say anything, because, you know, here's what's weird about this.
So my mom was a writer, a creative writing editor of a magazine, just an absolute terrific writer.
So part of me feels like, maybe it's just like, every woman is a terrific writer.
Like, I think that was sort of ingrained in me.
And I'm reading this and I'm thinking, well, no, it can't be that bad, can it?
And then it's worse.
When you read this whole thing, it's just even the syntax and the right, the way they're writing quality, it's terrible.
But I gotta tell you, I wish I had gotten the music going a little bit earlier because clearly it's so ridiculous how manipulative they're trying to be with this and how they're trying to make it out to be like, we're living in end times right now.
Literally, this person is saying that the Freedom Caucus is trying to save the world.
That's the context of this article.
And by the way, she goes on to say, From John Boehner to Paul Ryan to McCarthy, House conservatives are gradually shocking Republican leadership into representing their own voters.
When the GOP failed to win back a major margin in the House, members of the Freedom Caucus did the math and realized they could flex some muscle.
Even before Election Day, McCarthy had courted the HFC.
As we reported in October, he made friends with Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
He talked about reversing certain Pelosi-era power grabs.
Indeed, this is exactly what frustrated members such as Dan Crenshaw.
From their perspective, the Freedom Caucus went into the Speaker vote having already won.
That's actually true.
But it's also true they won even bigger as the week wore on.
Those two points are not mutually exclusive, though it seemed like the baby might get thrown out with the bathwater more than once.
And Nick, let's get into the concessions.
That was the one.
When she uses the phrase, baby with the bathwater, I don't know, if you were, you would strike that out if you were grading this as a paper.
No, this is not just meandering, but this has like, This has like notions of grandeur to just like an absolute shit show that we all witnessed.
This is really, really bad stuff.
So here's the list of concessions that we know of.
And I'm sure, Nick, you've seen some of this.
There are rumored concessions.
We talked on the last podcast, by the way, that McCarthy was undoubtedly handing over committee seats.
We have seen that to probably be true at this point.
Like, the amount of people that he horse traded with is incredible.
But here are the public concessions.
One, as has been reported, it will only take a single congressperson acting in what is known as a Jeffersonian motion to move to remove the speaker if he or she goes back on their word or policy agenda.
Nick, how do you think that's going to work out?
Well, you ever go to a neighborhood meeting with the local precinct captain, the cop of your local area, and they talk about crime in the area or whatever, and you know at the end of those meetings where they will say, does anybody have any questions?
And this is the point in the meeting where you're just praying that no one does because it'll become hijacked for the next like 45 minutes to an hour over the most minute details of someone else's issue that should not be part of in front of everybody, right?
So that's what's going to happen here, or at least the threat will be, because yes, anybody can now make a motion.
One person, because it used to be the majority of that party had to get that many people before you could get this motion to be even considered.
Now you can just, every day if you want to, every other hour, just bring this motion up and then they have to go through the whole process.
So it is ridiculous that that is what they've been able to get going.
By the way, Democrats could do it too.
It's not just the party in power.
So it's clear that we had certain rules in place for a good reason.
This one was a good reason to not be allowed to have this happen.
I mean, listen, again, I know there are members of the Democratic House that listen to this podcast.
I mean, I'm sorry, but if you want to jam up the works, call a vote every single day.
My God.
Jeffries will never allow it, right?
No, he would never allow it because they're not playing hardball.
Second concession.
A church-style committee will be convened to look into the weaponization of the FBI and other government organizations, presumably the CIA, the subject of the original church committee against the American people.
Nick, a couple things here.
One, for people who don't know this, the church committee was the 1975 committee that got into things like COINTELPRO, MKULTRA, which was basically the FBI going after leftists in the country, breaking constitutional rules, surveilling them, possibly assassinating them.
MKULTRA, of course, was the CIA literally dosing people with drugs to try and mentally control them.
That's what the church committee was, which actually was like a really undersold moment in American history.
The idea that the government has been weaponized against conservatives is just absolutely just fodder for Fox News online circles.
Nick, I personally, I think it should be titled Radicalizing Grandma and Grandpa Special Committee.
This is going to be a non-stop shit show, period.
But remember, there's always something underneath the surface here that they're trying to do, right?
That we're not quite clear.
And I have a feeling they're going to use this to quash investigations of themselves, right?
Or to get the intel like they were doing during the impeachment process, leaking to the Trump lawyers what they had, what they knew was going on.
So, in my mind, that's the only reason why they really want to do this, because look at the people who are, you know, negotiating the hardest.
Guys like Matt Gaetz, who are under, I suspect, are still under some hot water for, you know, what they were doing.
We all know without having to talk about it.
You know, would love for these investigations to get, all of a sudden the money just dries up, because there's a big outpouring of emotion on the right that, you know, look at how, look what they did to me, they lied about this, whatever.
So I think I honestly think that is the main motivation for that is that they're trying to they're going to try and get rid of these investigations for a lot of different things, January 6 being one of them.
I completely agree.
And there's a lot else there with COVID in terms of limits and term limits, which is never going to get passed, although it needs to.
I wanted, though, to point out something here, Nick, and I want to hear your opinion on this.
I actually thought this article made a good point somewhere.
Another is by taking a look at the left.
The Freedom Caucus' stand against McCarthy reignited a bitter debate over Force the Vote, a movement that sought to pressure the Squad, or the progressive caucus in Congress, into withholding support from Nancy Pelosi's Speaker bid until she agreed to bring Medicare for All up for a vote.
Pelosi's margin was a bit more comfortable than McCarthy's, but the left is right that our healthcare system is a disaster the public won't tolerate any longer.
Perhaps the plan's detractors were correct that pushing Pelosi on a symbolic vote was an unwise use of political capital.
That may well be true, but in the Freedom Caucus's case, they gambled and won.
I think this is actually a really good point.
I mean, listen, I don't know that it necessarily would have won, but the idea that like a caucus within a party at this point can use these types of votes to gain some concessions, I gotta tell you what, the Freedom Caucus, as annoying as they are, as dangerous as they are, they did win this standoff.
They did.
They won what they wanted.
They have control over some of these committees.
They have gained power.
They're hated.
And by the way, Fox News is continually going to capitulate when these people flex a little bit of muscle.
But there might be a point here.
There might actually be a point that this is one of the ways that maybe the left should have done something.
In a vacuum, I'm actually very sympathetic to the Freedom Caucus in a lot of ways.
Do you ever see the movie Office Space, and they're handing out cake to everybody for saying happy birthday to the boss, and they keep passing over Gilbert, whatever his name is.
I was told I would have some stapler.
That guy, he never gets the cake.
So these are the same people who, they do all these committees, they bring all these things to a vote, and these guys are always stuck not getting any cake.
They never get a chance, they have hardly any influence.
So I totally get it.
After enough years, it's been 12, I guess, since they kind of came into power.
They're mad and they want to have some influence.
And so, yes, they did do that.
And by the way, if part of this influence means that McCarthy is going to cut $75 billion from the defense budget, like, hallelujah, I will crack one open with Mark Meadows.
One right now, if we're going to celebrate over cutting that much money for the defense budget.
Fantastic.
Love it.
There's a couple other things in there that I love if that was the case.
But here's the problem.
We know that this group and the whole Republican as a whole, they've never had any fiscal responsibility.
They've never had any ability to show that they care about balancing the budget.
And so that's what's going to end up holding hostage for everything here is because they're going to pretend like, oh, we're going to die on this hill of making sure we don't increase the budget anymore.
And we're going to have a government shutdown off of it, which is bad.
You're never going to make profit off of betting on Republicans to go small in terms of defense spending.
I mean, that's not going to happen.
Let's not forget, they came together.
We had a nice moment of democracy here with Mitch McConnell, and they get this big bill.
And what did they get out of it?
We said, okay, we'll spend more money on defense.
The Democrats said that.
Okay, fine.
That's what governing is.
Man, I hope you're right.
They're going to try and undo a lot of that stuff.
And it's going to make it again.
It's we're going to watch the demise of if not the Freedom Caucus, the Republican Party as a whole in the next two years.
Man, I hope you're right.
I think that some really gnarly things are coming down.
But yeah, this was man.
That was a trip.
Watching the tug of war over the speakership be compared to just, like, the end times.
Like, can you imagine?
Like, that must be enjoyable to watch politics like that, you know?
It's just like, as Duel of the Fates plays and atomic bombs are going off in your imagination, they're going to the 14th floor vote.
I mean, that has to at least be entertaining.
Oh, I mean, it's like describing the Titanic as a comedy, you know, or something like, oh, it was amazing.
The ship went down, but they were hugging each other in the lifeboats and we came together and sang it.
Like, I don't know.
But by the way, like even more term limits.
Great.
I like term limits.
I'll support that.
I would love to have a 72 hour period where they have to read the damn bill.
That's awesome.
Like, you know, great.
They actually, these are good ideas, unfortunately.
If they were serious about them, then Great.
You know, the only thing that it's silly that we've had, how many years have we been in this business of the great experiment?
It's been 200 and something, right?
We have a pretty good data here, right?
We have some good idea of how these things work, what works, what doesn't work.
And if you're going to try and do single bill governance, I mean, there's no way you're going to get anything done.
It'll be just like that, that neighborhood meeting where everyone's asking questions about their backyard cat.
The purpose is to disable the government and keep it from doing anything, and particularly to shrink it down as the people who fund them, who are the same people who fund DeSantis, who are the same people who fund the coup attempt in America and also in Brazil, just to make sure that the government is no longer an impediment for them.
It's just been bought and sold to them.
All right, everybody, that's going to do it for this episode.
We're going to be back on Friday.
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