How Cutting Train Costs Led To Disaster In A Small Midwest Town
Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the utter failure by Norfolk Southern in keeping safety measures in place with their trains led to a huge explosion and contaminating the air and soil for miles. Then it gets weird as the United States has been shooting down UFO's left and right and how that coud lead to a huge spending spree by the Pentagon. With the way capitalism works, Jared predicted factories would eventually come for the children as Minnesota and Iowa relax child labor laws, and they finish off with the Trump vs DeSantis Name Calling Wars.
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Hey everybody, it's Jared Yates-Sexton, just reminding you that my book, The Midnight Kingdom, A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis, is available right now.
I've been getting a lot of great feedback from people.
I cannot tell you what that means to me.
Also hearing from people that they're handing it out to their relatives in order to start making sense of conspiracy theories and all of these white supremacist lies.
That is awesome, and I hope it's helping people out there.
If you haven't already, it's The Midnight Kingdom, A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis.
Go out and get your copy, and yeah, maybe give it to your dad who believes some kooky things off the internet.
All right, now to the show.
Hey everybody, welcome to the Muck Creek Podcast.
I'm JJ Sexton.
Nick Halseman, you and I are in our respective studios.
How you doing, buddy?
Never thought I felt this comfortable just sitting in my chair and being back at home.
It's really nice, but you know, it's always nice to go on the road and remind yourself how much nicer it is at home.
It's very nice to go out on the road, do your thing, take care of business, and then you come home and you appreciate it.
Also, I just want to pull back the curtain real fast, Nick.
I got a new desk that I'm recording from.
Are you ready for this?
Are you and the Muckrate community ready for this?
Yeah.
That right there was a drawer, which is where I now keep my notes.
I keep a pen.
I'm ready to go, man.
Wow, this is like national treasure.
I'm not going to hide anything at my desk today for an occasional snack.
I'll just say that.
Fair enough.
I'm very excited to talk all about what we have to talk about today and in this comfortable environment.
Can we say, Nick, what a zany show we've got ahead of ourselves?
We've got UFOs over Lake Huron.
UFOs over Canada.
We've got child labor.
That's not as exciting.
Super Bowl ads.
We've got nifty new nicknames that we got to get over.
But first, Nick, we have to talk about a very serious story that we got to get on the record.
We got to get into the nuts and bolts of.
But I think you and I both know this and our listeners.
Maybe you found it because obviously you're paying attention to the news.
Maybe you haven't.
Our media has paid no attention to it, basically.
On February 3rd in East Palestine, Ohio, which Nick had to coach me on because my natural instinct is to go Palestine, but that's neither here nor there.
February 3rd, there was a 50-car derail of a Norfolk Southern train.
It included hydrogen chloroquine and phosgene, among other chemicals.
It has already represented one of the worst ecological disasters in American history, and it's just sitting there burning, spewing incredible amounts of toxic chemicals, killing wildlife, poisoning people, and can barely get any notice in the news whatsoever.
Shocking.
It is weird.
I asked my wife, have you heard about this?
And she hadn't heard nothing.
And she spends a lot of time being connected to the news.
I had been a little bit aware, but only because we talked about something related to this, I think maybe a month ago when we had this railroad strike, rail worker strike, because I think we both had sort of said, this is going to be inevitable.
There's going to be a terrible calamity because they're constantly cutting back costs and making it a lot harder on workers.
Yeah, and by the way, to go ahead and put it in context, while I was out and about doing my book tour, I was out east.
I drove just a few miles away from the scene of this accident.
After it had happened, I had no clue.
No clue whatsoever.
And I was like, around where this took place, had absolutely no idea.
I pay attention to news, I think, closer than most.
This has just been like one of those weird sort of blips on the radar that nobody has mentioned.
As you were saying, Nick, this is exactly the type of thing that happens when you have somewhere like Norfolk Southern.
I mean, it's a textbook case of how this stuff happens.
Norfolk Southern, of course, has been engaging in massive stock buybacks instead of Updating their materials and their systems.
They're supposed to have, or should have, electronic pneumatic brake systems, which are the types of things that are supposed to make incidents like this a thing of the past.
But, by the way, they ended up lobbying, spending over $6 million to convince the GOP to roll back any requirements or to push back any additional requirements to make these things happen.
They're using skeleton crews left and right, busting unions, This type of thing shouldn't have happened, but was inevitable under the circumstances.
Right, and they have oversight with their crews.
They're supposed to take like three minutes per car was the standard, and they cut that in half because they probably were sitting in the boardroom saying, hmm, where can we find some other costs?
Let's just make it 90 seconds instead.
And those are the times when you see these mistakes get made.
And the worst part about it was the strike that was related to this was because they didn't have time to have safety, just normal safety measures in place.
And this was Congress.
Forcing them to come back to the table and not strike.
And so now you're going to have people who maybe 15, 20, 30 years from now are going to suffer from the repercussions of what happened in this accident.
And we don't know exactly how bad it's going to be, but these chemicals are nasty and they're terrible stuff that everyone's been breathing in since then.
And, you know, I don't know if we're gonna get any oversight on this.
Well, no, and that's the thing.
This is one of the reasons why this story isn't being talked about.
It's an indictment of an entire system.
When we talk about what was happening with these railroad companies, and again, just for the record, all of them have record profits.
They always, every time you hear one of these stories or read one of these stories, it's always record profits.
And the reason is because the smartest business practice, and let's go ahead and say in this environment, the smartest business practice is to say, you know what?
Chances are, our actuaries have told us that it's statistically unlikely that something like this would happen.
And you have all these actuaries who are like, well, chances are it's a game of hot potato.
And nobody wants to be the person who's left holding the bag.
And eventually, somewhere down the line, you realize, oh, this is going to happen at some point.
Chances are it'll happen to somebody else.
And chances are it won't be this bad.
I mean, Nick, this literally is a hundred thousand gallons.
of vinyl chloride that is just being expunged into the environment just absolutely a poison cloud that has been created its own little poison ecosystem acid rain you name it just killing animals poisoning people left and right and like you you hope it's not this bad Your actuaries tell you it could be this bad, probably wouldn't be this bad, and chances are it's going to happen to somebody else.
Meanwhile, you're cutting back on your crews, you're cutting back on your systems, all that stuff.
That is a perfect recipe and a logical recipe in this environment.
You cannot trust these corporations and you cannot trust these businesses to police themselves.
That's what happens when you go down that route.
Absolutely.
And we talked about this when we we did our Patreon episode on Fight Club, because in that movie, he talks about how what his job was was to rate whether or not it was worth doing any of these safety measures versus what the cost could be if they fail.
And I have a feeling that's the same thing here.
They figure, well, you know, this this is not going to be a big problem for us.
It's worth it to save the extra money we are.
And as a result, this small town in the middle of the country People who probably don't have enough money to be able to leave or even temporarily to avoid breathing in this air, you know, are now going to suffer.
And it's, you know, I mean, the list is long.
I mean, we saw this in Michigan with lead in the water.
You know, I'm actually really worried.
I think I mentioned this before a couple weeks ago.
The entire infrastructure of this country is held together by threads.
And I think if we really got a handle on how all these things work, even I'm talking about like garbage pickup to the water systems to the food and everything else.
I think we'd all be a little bit more concerned if you realize how the cost-cutting measures have affected the quality of work.
Yeah, and the problem is that this is one of the most essential and pressing things.
You're exactly right.
And by the way, some of our infrastructure, if it's held together by threads, my God, that might be some of our strongest pieces.
There are threads there.
That's fantastic.
Let's double down on those threads.
But this isn't a sexy topic.
That's the problem, is there's no ability whatsoever.
No one comes out of this looking good.
Like, everything in this situation, the fact that we transport chemicals like this, the fact that our lives revolve around chemicals like this, the fact that how many administrations should have required all of this to be done, right?
The fact that, like, lobbyists have so much power.
On top of that, you don't, like, Nobody wants to tune in to cable news for discussions about bridges and about breakers and all of this.
None of it is interesting.
It doesn't move the needle.
And on top of that, there's no ability for anybody in the current infrastructure to look good from this.
And as a result, they don't really want to talk about it.
They don't really want to scare people left and right.
They don't want to talk about industrial disasters.
They don't want to talk about infrastructure failures.
I mean, look at what happened in Texas.
Basically, if there's a cold breeze in the Lone Star State, basically everyone dies because the infrastructure just completely collapses.
There's no desire or appetite whatsoever to get into this.
And the problem with this, Nick, is that when you don't discuss it, And this is a major problem.
This is a major disaster that should have around-the-clock coverage.
It should be the type of thing that we talk about.
When you don't, it looks like there's something to hide, which is the financial interest, by the way, of the infrastructure and the status quo.
When you don't pay attention to it, who fills the vacuum?
Conspiracy theorists.
And this one, by the way, this is spicy.
This is a really, really good conspiracy theory, ready-to-go type thing.
And the reason, Nick, is because the movie White Noise, which for those who haven't read the book, those who haven't seen the movie, a big chunk of it involves a rail car disaster in which there is what was called an airborne toxic event, is loosed and a giant plume that chases people around.
Parts of that film were filmed in this area.
There were people who have been involved in this spill who were extras in the movie.
It is a coincidence.
There's no New World Order Illuminati signaling or preparing here.
But if you're not talking about this, and if it isn't that big of a deal, people ask why it's not a big deal.
And when they ask why it's not a big deal, they make up their own stories and they create their own conspiracy theories.
For sure.
And that void is not being filled by like, for instance, Three Mile Island was in 79.
If you don't remember that, I remember growing up, that caused nuclear power to be set back decades, right?
Because everyone was so afraid, even though in theory, it isn't, there's no need to be that scared of nuclear power plants.
So what happened?
What's the difference between 79 and the outcry against that, that actually gripped the nation versus now where there's hardly anybody who's gonna do anything about it?
What's the difference?
Well, nuclear power was like, it's sexy.
There's no other way to put it, right?
I mean, it's the power of the sun.
It's the atomic bomb.
It's the wave of the future.
Do you know what hydrogen chloride does?
No, tell me.
I don't know.
What are you looking at me for?
I don't have a clue.
I'm probably digesting it every day in food stuffs or, you know, when I turn on light.
I have no idea.
Like that's part of it is that the building blocks of our society are just completely hidden from us.
And meanwhile, like nuclear power, I'm sorry, but like that, that makes for good movies.
A nuclear meltdown?
I mean, my god, that makes for a wonderful movie.
But in this case, this is just so far away.
And by the way, it doesn't hurt that it's in middle America, which is where most of these disasters take place because middle America has basically just been turned into a transport system and basically nothing else.
But like, it just, it doesn't engender any sort of interest at all.
Well, I think that also, that's the answer is there is that we've had enough of them.
And so people just kind of shrug at this point.
It's not a novelty.
It's not a new thing.
It's not, I mean, maybe it's not even scary per se, which when it really should be, because well, like Three Mile Island, nothing happened there or whatever.
But meanwhile, yes, People really got sick and we've seen this happen time and again.
And we should be demanding a lot more from its local government, right?
I mean, are we going to throw Pete Buttigieg under the bus for this bus or under the train for this one?
I would love to throw Pete Buttigieg under this train and have an understanding because everybody who has even a hand in this, like, you know, deserves to walk away smelling like shit.
I mean, let's be clear about what trains are.
And by the way, I like a train.
How do you feel about trains?
You know, it's funny.
One of my best friends is going to come out here and visit me.
He loves trains.
He goes from Chicago to L.A.
He's done it a couple times.
I don't get it, but I don't know.
I mean, is it the quaintness?
Is it the throwback?
What is it?
I don't know.
I love a train.
I like to sit in a train.
I'll go up into the cafe car, grab myself a beer, sit and watch the scenery go by.
But if anybody who's listening to this has been on like an Amtrak car recently, unless you're on like one of the nicer ones, I mean, most of them are just derelict.
I mean, we don't take care of our infrastructure in this country.
This is Civil War era technology that we haven't moved beyond because, much like, you know, in this neoliberal era, if you have it, it's fine.
Don't worry about it.
You don't need to invest in it.
You don't need to spend any more money in it.
Just, you know, work and work and work until it falls apart.
This type of stuff becomes inevitable after a point.
Like, if you say, if you have an actuary in your office, and it's like, oh, don't worry, you have a one-in-a-million chance, guess what?
Eventually, one-in-a-million pops up.
And you want to hope like hell that it's not going to lead to acid rain and, like, a Three Mile Island situation like you were talking about.
But in this case, you know, the dice got rolled exactly the wrong way.
And now nobody wants to talk about it.
Nobody wants to hold on to this.
Nobody wants to even deal with it.
They would much rather that this cloud just dissipated.
You had an entire town basically die of cancer.
You have like weird cancer strains that take place wherever the wind blows that we're just not going to pay attention to.
We won't listen to the experts and we won't learn anything from.
That right now is the American way.
Yeah, well said.
And also, you know, we would have been paying attention to this for five days.
And then completely forgot about it.
I mean, has anyone talked about Ukraine in a little bit?
We haven't talked about Ukraine in a long time now.
You know what I mean?
It just fades.
Things fade.
Other things distract us and we don't pay attention and then nothing gets done either.
By the way, it's kind of a bigger picture of the progression of this country.
We need to learn what's happening now so we can improve in the future, which is sort of like, you know, looking at how slavery affected this country and how we can continue to improve.
Things like that, which, you know, there's a huge group of No, we have everything to learn from this.
that don't want to ever do that anyway don't want to reflect and look back on what we could do better and this is sort of another example of that yeah no we we have everything to learn from this but nick i gotta tell you uh i kind of spaced out there for a second because i thought i saw something fly by in the sky um we we gotta talk about the story that is taking up all of the oxygen in the room that doesn't allow us to have conversations about industrial and transportation disasters uh Folks, UFOs are out there.
We got problems.
We got real, real problems.
To go ahead and reset this for everybody, and obviously you know about this, I promise you, we're gonna talk about aliens, and also we're gonna talk about, like, why this is actually occurring.
To go ahead and reset this thing.
After the Chinese spy balloon, which, Nick, I'm still upset that we were not talking about this as it happened.
I feel like that's a lost classic episode of the Montclair podcast.
After the Chinese spy balloon was shot down over the South Carolina coast, We had a second one over Alaska that ends up getting shot down.
Not a balloon, but an object, which we'll get to that in a second.
We have a third object that is shot down in a joint operation between Canada and the United States over the Yukon.
We then have a radar anonymously over most of the entirety of the state of Montana.
They couldn't end up finding it, but they said something weird was happening there.
Then, on Super Bowl Sunday of all days, the day of the big game, They shoot down another object over Lake Huron in Northern America.
Objects everywhere, Nick.
Can you play a little bit from the Pentagon's briefings and get people up to date on this?
Let the experts fill in the holes.
Hey, thanks, Pat.
This is Liz.
I'll be asking for Jen today.
Are these balloons that have been shot down since Friday, or are they weather balloons? - You want me to take that? - Thanks very much for the question.
Yep, go ahead, Glenn. - Yeah, so I'm not gonna categorize them as balloons.
We're calling them objects for a reason.
Certainly the event off the South Carolina coast for the Chinese spy balloon, that was clearly a balloon.
These are objects.
I'm not able to categorize how they stay aloft.
It could be a gaseous type of Balloon inside a structure or it could be some type of a propulsion system.
But clearly, they're able to stay aloft.
I would be hesitant and urge you not to attribute it to any specific country.
We don't know.
That's why it's so critical to get our hands on these so that we can further assess and analyze what they are.
Thank you, sir.
Oh, cool.
Cool, Nick.
That's great.
That just clears it all up.
Okay, so I have a lot of thoughts.
I'm trying, let me get this organized though.
So the first thing is, a PR standpoint, right?
Before they get this call, or they take this call, they must sit in their room and discuss, how should we talk about this?
There is nobody who has any sense of how this works, who would have approved those talking points in reaction to what that question was, which was the easiest softball question they're gonna get.
It wasn't the gotcha, it wasn't the, oh my God, I wasn't prepared.
There's something wrong in the Pentagon that they don't know how to answer it better than that.
Can we, real fast, I study conspiracy theories for a living.
If anyone, and listen, there are conspiracies out there.
They're not even theories, like there are conspiracies out there.
For anybody who thinks that the government in some way, shape, or form carries out big, sophisticated conspiracies all the time, like they're so good at it, They are so bad at this.
They are so awful at trying to talk about this stuff.
And I'm sure you were the same way I was.
The moment that every article kept calling them objects, and the word balloon would never show up, I was like, oh my god, this is incredible, this is gonna take off in so many incredible ways.
They have no ability whatsoever to, like, really come up with anything that sounds coherent.
They have no ability to communicate this thing.
God knows that our Labyrinthian government is so large that none of these people actually really communicate with each other.
They're all professional rivals.
They all hate one another.
And by the way, Nick, I know you and I are on the same page here.
I assume that they can go ahead and rule out that these objects are of extraterrestrial origin.
Well, okay, they did.
The White House did, finally, after days.
Look at this clip!
I demand it!
I demand that this clip go on the podcast.
Hi, thanks Pat, and thanks for doing this.
This is for General Van Hurk.
Because you still haven't been able to tell us what these things are that we are shooting out of the sky, that raises the question, have you ruled out aliens or extraterrestrials?
And if so, why?
Because that is what everyone is asking us right now.
Thanks for the question.
I'll let the intel community and the counterintelligence community figure that out.
I haven't ruled out anything at this point.
We continue to assess every threat, potential threat, unknown that approaches North America with an attempt to identify it.
Nick, that's the thing.
He didn't think it was an A-League crowd, but he's such a terrible communicator that he had to say, I'm not ruling out anything.
And by the way, has there ever been a better time for a UFO enthusiast than right now?
This terrible communication is perfect for this.
I mean, it's really big.
I remember war games, the original war games, when the general says, I'll piss on a spark plug if that will help anything.
Like, that's the kind of energy we're getting from this guy.
And by the way, it's interesting because perhaps the information he's gotten from the pilots is that Maybe that like there's no wings or whatever, like there's something different about like what's going on here because there's a propulsion system that perhaps is not readily identifiable.
So it is interesting.
My take would like to be, because I believe that we're not alone, I believe that there's got to be people out there or other aliens out there, whatever they are.
But I don't think it would be possible to shoot down anything with our technology, considering what they would have to have now.
But think about this, Jared.
You know how, like, our technology is getting better and better, right, year over year?
But think how much dumber we're all getting.
So imagine if they were on that same trajectory, right?
And, like, the technology did get better, they can do interstellar travel, but they kept getting dumber and dumber, so they get here, and they're getting shot down in the sky, and they're, like, mollified by, hey, pizza!
Like, maybe that's how they are now.
They're so dumb because they're so far ahead of us, and they can get shot down.
That's the only explanation.
I will watch that movie if you make that movie.
That's a great movie that aliens got to us, but the people, the aliens who got here were so dumb.
That's fantastic.
And by the way, what you just said is both true, but not true.
Our technology is not getting that much better.
Actually, what's happened within our military industrial complex is it's been such a grift And it's been so corrupt that these people get money even if they don't produce results.
Like the United States, and think about what happened with Russia, right?
Russia has one of the greatest armies in the world.
They'll roll over Ukraine in a matter of days.
No!
Everybody was on the take and nobody was actually filling out their orders and their stuff, like, was awful.
The United States is great when it's going and bombing, you know, like second and third world countries and destroying their water plants and hospitals.
Do you think for a second that one of these giant billion dollar boondoggles like the F-22 is going to take out a UFO?
You must be crazy.
These aren't UFOs.
The reason why all of this stuff keeps popping up and why we're having a rash of them is because a balloon got sent over the United States, which, by the way, Plenty of balloons go over the United States of America.
Plenty of Chinese spy balloons go over the United States of America.
This turned into a media sensation.
It ended up being a big giant story because we're all a bunch of primates looking up in the sky trying to figure out what's going on.
And they tuned their radars to it.
There's a reason why they sent balloons here in the first place is so they wouldn't trip up a lot of this stuff.
So now all of a sudden, China probably is sending over some of their advanced balloons.
I have to tell you, this is a great strategy.
You have a paranoid, declining country full of just absolute conspiracy theory maniacs, Send over balloons!
Don't even have instruments on them.
Just here.
Here's a bunch of them.
Shoot them down.
By the way, how much does a balloon cost?
What, 55 cents?
And they're gonna shoot like a two million dollar missile at them?
My god, this is a perfect strategy.
It works.
It just works.
Wow, now I'm getting the whole Greg Brady vibe when he faked the UFO, which you probably are too young to even remember what that was like, but that caused a stir, man.
Like, you know, even watching that show, I was like, whoa, because he was so convincing with the way he created those UFOs.
Yeah, I mean, we all want to believe.
It would make sense that there would be something out there.
But again, what you're saying is absolutely right.
I refuse to believe that anybody who could get as far as here from some other galaxy would so easily be shot down.
Like, that just seems ridiculous.
No, they're not gonna get shot down.
And by the way, like, this puts everything in a new light.
Probably all of these UFOs that we've been seeing, they probably are advanced technology that China has worked on.
It's probably some sort of a drone program that they're like a little bit ahead of us, you know?
They've had this controlled economy, dictatorial power.
You know, they got to the hypersonic missile before we did.
They probably have some drone technology we don't recognize.
So what you're talking about, like what they released a couple of years ago from fighter jets that are moving way too fast?
Yeah, and I have to tell you I wrote about this on my subsect.
This is mutually beneficial for the United States and China.
That balloon incident provided a baseline, which is, what happens if a Chinese balloon or spy instrument goes over the United States?
Well, the United States will get really weirded out by it.
They'll wring their hands a little bit, and maybe they'll shoot it out.
Well, that allows both of them to have a baseline.
You have Biden and the Biden administration says, we're not going to allow these objects in our airspace.
Look, look at us take care of it.
China just keeps doing it.
And it allows this new Cold War to sort of like burn a little bit.
The United States and Russia had these baselines too, which is what is the line that we will go up to where it's not going to lead to nuclear war, World War III.
And so you're going to see a ton of these things.
You're going to see a ton of these incursions are going to go back and forth.
And on top of that, like they're relatively inexpensive.
Well, also then you have those Pentagon meetings where they say, listen, we got to be prepared for these UFOs.
We got to spend a whole lot more money so we can have, you know, we can fight them on their terms or whatever.
I mean, you know, this is, that's another thing that I can easily see them trying to maximize profit or not profits, but spending on, uh, and, and how are you going to, you know, will it be a public backlash when everyone's like, Oh, we, we need this defense.
We need to have this special SDI, you know, Dome across our, you know, our hemisphere to stop them from coming in.
Again, it doesn't matter.
I think it would be like, well, we saw this movie.
What was the movie?
Uh, they blow up the White House.
Uh, you know, the one Independence Day, you know, nothing was stopping them except for what?
I, okay, forgive me a virus, right?
Isn't that what they did it?
Oh, that movie, that movie still slaps.
It's still a really enjoyable movie, but them putting a virus on like a flippy floppy disk and putting it in like a computer is terrible.
Terrible, terrible, terrible solution.
Well yeah, but also they ripped off Star Wars.
You know, let's use one of their old ships and we're gonna use a code and whatever and get in.
So you know, but hey.
You're right, it was good.
I remember I moved to LA and that was like the first thing I saw when I moved to LA, it was that movie.
And then driving down the 405 later at night with all these lights and it felt like I was, you know, in space.
It was kind of neat.
Well, Nick, get ready because I have to tell you that the future at this point, and it's not a coincidence that the first Cold War involved the growth of the UFO world.
Sputnik goes over America, and it's beeping as it goes, and all of a sudden it's like, oh my god, terror from above.
Like, we're going to have a spate of alien movies.
And by the way, real fast, to go ahead, Midnight Kingdom, one weird thing that I found, War of the Worlds, the original book, was about fears that Germany, leading up to World War I, was going to have Like, better technology and better machines of war than Great Britain.
And that because they were more technological savvy, that they were going to run roughshod almost like an alien species coming here.
It is a primal, inherent fear.
That's why we have these Cold Wars.
That's why we have these saber-rattling loops.
This Cold War that is developing right now is avoidable, but it's already going along the same paths.
It's the exact same thing, and what you said is correct.
There is an incentive for our military-industrial complex to go with this!
This is the best thing!
Do you want new fighter jets?
Do you want more drones?
Do you want to be safe?
Oh, we've already reached the ceiling of spending?
Give me more!
This is the best thing that could happen to them and also the best thing that could happen to Xi Jinping in order to hold on to power in China.
This is a perfect thing for nation-states.
And it might sound familiar for a large body of people using anger and distrust of somebody else to maximize their plan, right?
Because every one of those movies in the 50s was all about communism, right?
It wasn't about aliens coming to this place, it was about communism.
Invasion of the body snatchers.
Don't fall asleep, you're gonna wake up a communist.
And so we're still here, right?
And we're still doing the same thing.
And we still see on the right, like, you know, Fox News still, still stirring the same kind of, I guess it's built into our DNA or to some people's DNA.
And it really is frustrating only because, you know, I would like to, I kind of want the UFOs to be real.
You know, it would be nice.
And it'd be nice if they're nice and they're friendly because otherwise we're, we won't wake up the next day.
No one's gonna stop him.
It's like a big can of Raid descends from the sky, you know what I mean?
And I had to watch The Rest of Us.
The Rest of Us?
The Last of Us?
I watched another episode, man.
I think I did have a nightmare again last night.
I said I wasn't gonna watch it, but anyway.
Another one of those.
Well, speaking of things that we watched, we watched Super Bowl.
Good game.
Really good game.
We don't need to talk about sports on this podcast unless it has a very, very specific political bent.
The commercials, I have to tell you, Nick, I was disappointed by the commercials.
Nothing says late-stage capitalism in America in decline other than every single commercial being, hey, do you remember this?
Do you remember this?
You and I have talked in the past about marketing.
The marketing industry in this country is bankrupt.
They have no ideas whatsoever.
The only thing they can do is shovel forward nostalgia.
Before we get to this segment, you agree that the commercials were awful.
Well, Tubi, I think, had the most successful one.
I don't know if you saw it, but it comes up and at first it starts like it's the announcers for the Super Bowl and then the bottom of the screen comes up like you're on Tubi.
And it seems like America was gripped with screaming at each other in the room thinking that someone sat on the remote.
So I gotta tell you, when you screw with that and you make people really feel like the TV has gotten screwy or whatever, that's actually pretty successful.
So I want to give them a shout out there and having... I mean, I saw a hilarious tweet that said, I now need to apologize for calling my mother-in-law like a bitch or something like that because I thought she changed the channel.
And so that kind of stuff is good.
Who tweets that?
I know.
Why would you tweet that?
You know, I think he must have thought it was really funny, and it did catch on.
I saw it somehow in my timeline, but... I can't imagine, like, looking at the tweet button and going ahead and hitting it.
That's fascinating.
Well, Nick, I gotta tell you, I wanna talk about this commercial.
I want this to be transparent, because we're a community.
I'm getting ready to do a little bit of patting myself on the back, a little bit of a victory lap, but can you play this commercial that caught my attention?
You want a loan to build a factory in America?
You can't do that.
This is what we were up against.
Nobody builds factories in the U.S.
anymore.
You can't do that.
Experts claim you couldn't do what we did.
You want to hire workers here in the States?
You can't do that.
WeatherTech has been proving them wrong for over 33 years.
Nick, it's almost like America is re-industrializing and globalism is rolling back.
It's almost like what I've been talking about for the past, I don't know, two years.
Almost.
You want to hear the rest of it?
No, I don't.
It makes me too mad.
But it is!
That's what's happening at this point.
We are literally re-industrializing.
And I know commercials are so dumb.
They are just completely and utterly dumb.
But they are a really good snapshot at the zeitgeist of things.
They give us an idea of what message is being conveyed in our culture by all the decision makers.
That's a pretty straightforward idea, is it not?
Oh, absolutely.
You know, I feel bad because remember, I used to say this before, any politician that was going to go to the Rust Belt and promise that they're going to open up these factories, they should just be disqualified the second they say that because that's never going to happen.
And you know what?
Like, it kind of sounds like this is sort of the new thing.
Yeah.
And they're going to somehow get these these sweatshops back open again and have these people, you know, living in, you know, basically So that's the thing that I've been screaming about forever is that this was going to end up happening one way or another.
and really difficult, dangerous jobs.
So maybe that's, we're going backwards.
It doesn't make sense to me, but it sounds like that's possible. - So that's the thing that I've been screaming about forever is that this was going to end up happening one way or another.
There was no possibility whatsoever that as America went in decline, that it was gonna continue atop sort of the global chain that it had created.
I've always said, and here's the thing, I've actually, I took a lot of bullshit for this, Nick.
I always said, look at what's happening.
We're going to see a rollback of all these individual liberties, and then eventually, who's going to end up working in these factories, Nick?
What did I say?
I told everybody who would listen, and they're like, oh, that's extreme.
You had me.
You had good analysis until you started talking about child labor.
Everybody, I want to talk about a little article that showed up.
This is incredible.
This is in the Washington Post.
A little local paper called the Washington Post.
And again, we keep talking about on this podcast, when you read these articles, they are for you.
But these articles particularly are framed toward a certain class of individual.
This is where they talk to one another.
They talk about trends.
They develop ideas.
I want to read a couple of paragraphs from this article.
And Nick, I just want you to imagine writing this, putting this out in the world.
This is by Jacob Bagaj.
Washington Post.
In a tight labor market, some states look to another type of worker.
Colon.
Children.
What a headline, by the way.
How's that strike you?
How's that hit you?
Oh, it's a good one.
It's a really good one.
It'll get some clicks.
It'll get some clicks.
I'm going to read from this article by Jacob here.
As local economies grapple with the tightening labor market, I love it when they say that, some state legislatures are looking to relax child labor protections to help employers meet hiring needs.
It's part of a persistent trend in labor economics, experts say.
What a sentence!
I love it!
They don't have to name them!
They don't have to put a name on it!
They just say it's part of a prevailing trend.
And by the way, think about if you're an economist.
You have an interview with the Washington Post, you're like, oh yeah, we're going to make children work.
And that's your day?
Sounds reasonable.
It sounds so reasonable.
When employers struggle to find talent, oh my god, many prefer to hire younger, cheaper workers rather than increase pay and benefits to attract adults.
Who writes that sentence?
Somebody who's a capitalist, I guess.
Quote, because of the high demand for workers where there are holes in the system, unfortunately, child laborers can get caught up.
Not great wording.
Get caught up in staffing some of these holes, says David Weil, a professor of social policy and management at Brandeis University.
Legislators in Iowa and Minnesota introduced bills in January to loosen child labor law regulations around age and workplace safety protections in some of the country's most dangerous workplaces.
Minnesota's bill would permit 16 and 17 year olds to work construction jobs.
Oh, keep going.
The Iowa measure would allow 14 and 15 year olds to work certain jobs in meat packing plants.
The Iowa bill introduced by state Senator Jason Schultz, Republican.
Are you shocked by the way?
Oh, keep going.
Would permit children as young as 14 to work in industrial freezers and meat coolers, provided they are separate from where meat is prepared and work in industrial laundry.
Oh, wow.
By the way, why is that happening in Iowa?
Was there like a pandemic recently where they were basically forcing people to go into work and die by the dozens of COVID?
Well, it's also interesting because so many migrants from Mexico or from the south of the border are coming up to do all these kind of jobs no one wants to do.
So in some maybe twisted way they're like well we can't have them come in because we need our border yada yada well so but the children they're gonna do it instead like I I can't think of any other rationalization although maybe they were watching Footloose a lot because in Footloose they're all teenagers and they're working on the construction stuff and driving the tractor so so maybe they're just a big Kevin Bacon fans.
Yeah, that's probably right.
They're probably big fans of him, that body double doing the gymnastics in the barn.
That's probably what this is about.
Wait, it wasn't him?
Oh, no.
Oh, Santa Claus all over again, right?
Kevin Bacon had the moves.
But yeah, like, this is just, this is just, you know, people bandying about ideas, Nick.
Like, seriously, it's a tightening labor market.
You gotta find somebody.
And the whole point here, Is that they're putting pressure on low income families who are experiencing severe precarity to go ahead and look at this and say, hey, do you want to stay above the poverty line?
Do you want to be able to afford your rent?
Which, by the way, is going up constantly.
Do you want to pay for health care or, you know, even to be able to buy pills out of pocket?
Well, guess what?
You're going to need to take your 14 or 15 year old and put them into hard labor.
Like, this is just the beginning.
That's the opening crescendo of this thing.
And the writing has been on the wall forever, and this is the consequence of reindustrialization.
This is what you have to fight against.
This.
This is where it's going.
So, you know, growing up in Chicago, we were, you know, weaned on Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, and the story of how children were being exploited in the turn of the century in stockyards.
and meatpacking plants and how dangerous that was.
So there's a reason why we have these laws of which they now want to repeal.
That's what's so interesting about this whole thing.
It's almost like the mindset is government's too big.
We have to cut everything back.
It doesn't really matter what it is or why we put those things into the first place.
And that's what's really troubling because you might think that there's bureaucracy and things get in the way and it's too hard to do business.
But a lot of times, I got to tell you, there's a good reason why they enacted those laws.
It's a good reason why they enacted those laws.
It wasn't easy to get them enacted, and they had the right reasons behind them, and by, you know, taking them, dismantling them, it causes the same problems they had before they were enacted.
Well, one of the things that's happening in a lot of this is it's these cycles where we say, OK, now that we have a little bit of wealth and stability, you know what?
It's really important for children to have their childhood, right?
We really want them to be able to have play and whimsy and to spend their time getting educated.
But when times are tough, or when you have an ascendance, actually, you even have moments where you say, no, this is about virtue.
You know, like, the educating of a certain class is important, and one of the things that we're going to start to see in terms of how this is talked about is, you're basically going to have a lot of people, in articles like this, in Washington Post, New York Times, you name it, who are going to start saying, hey, these kids today, they're pretty soft.
Aren't you tired of hearing about pronouns?
Aren't you tired of video games and screens and all of that?
Like, we've made this new generation so soft, and the generational type of aggrievement, like, how dare these kids have better lives?
How dare they, you know, have more dignity than I did?
It will lead to the cycling of bootstraps mentality.
It'll be a cycle of abuse that goes forward and forward.
And you're basically going to have a lot of people who at some point or another, probably on the Republican ticket, maybe even a couple of Democrats before it's all said and done, saying that this will be good for them.
Which is exactly what happened with industrialization.
The idea was, it wasn't, oh my god, some of these kids are dispensable, I don't care about them.
It was that it would do them well.
You know?
That it would be good for them to instill in them a spirit.
Which, by the way, I assume that's what, and this is a great little moment from this article, I assume that's what happened in Alabama where a Hyundai factory was employing workers as young as 12 years old.
I have to assume that they were like, man, this is really good for them.
It's going to teach them how to do hard work and all that.
This is the appeal.
This is where it's going to go, particularly as that labor market keeps getting tighter and tighter and people keep saying, no, I'm not going to do this job.
I'm not going to hand over my life.
I'm not going to do this for cents on the dollar.
It is always, always, always going to head in this direction until we finally stamp our foot down and say, no, this can't happen again.
Were you on Matt Walsh's Twitter feed all weekend?
Because... That's all I do.
I sit there and hit refresh, refresh, refresh.
You know, if you don't know who Matt Walsh is, he is, you know, if you look at his bio, he's like, you know, he's a pundit, whatever he talks about shit.
He loves to talk about how women are supposed to just cook meals and welcome the man home from a hard day's work.
A theocratic fascist, comma, is in his bio.
Best-selling children's author, which is such a It's incredible.
Yeah.
And then Transphobe of the Year.
He actually likes to wear that on his sleeve.
But he had a tweet where he shows a picture of what his son is playing with outside because he's so happy he's not on screens.
And if you look at it carefully, it's bows and arrows and, you know, all sorts of stuff like that.
I'm sure there's probably a gun somewhere out there that he's going to be loading and shooting at some point.
And it just also reminded me that, like, it's You know, they know, the right knows better how your kids are supposed to be raised, right?
In some respects.
And so, you know, that's where they want to go back to, like, Jimmy, Jimmy Crockett, Davy Crockett, and that whole era, you know, where the kids should be playing that way.
But then also, if you're not rich enough for that, or you're not white enough for that, then yeah, you're gonna be, you have to go work in the factories, because that's just how it is.
And if you're lucky, you know, you'll find a quarter on the floor and then you'll rub another one together and next thing you know you might be rich, you know, in some weird story.
It's awful.
And yeah, go ahead.
Well, no, what you just said is absolutely key.
They want to tell other people how to take care of their kids, because that's the whole point.
It's a natural hierarchy.
Their kids are going to be in the best schools, they're going to be vaccinated, they're going to be taken well care of, they're going to be on the fast track to financial success, right?
Their kids are going to eat the best, they're going to live the best, they're going to have the best experiences.
It's your kids.
And the entire idea there is that people of color and poor people, they don't know better, Nick!
They don't know better!
They need somebody else to look out for them.
Which, to go back into what I keep saying and put this on everybody's radar, this is one of the reasons why they got rid of abortion.
It's to go ahead and create a new underclass that can go ahead and staff these new factories and this new era of industrialization and enjoy this precarity.
The writing's on the wall!
There's so much money to be made and so much power to be had.
And you're exactly right.
It's not their kids, it's other people's kids.
I mean, I don't know if I can get all the way there because it does feel like such a religious fervence about life.
Oh, yeah.
But yes, there is definitely... By the way, we can also, yes, get a whole lot of an economic boost off of this as well.
And just to pull us over on Matt Walsh again, because we talked about the Super Bowl for a second.
Before they did the Super Bowl, they actually had a performance of a song, of a hymn.
Um, that, you know, I guess could be categorized as, like, the Black National Anthem.
It's a 123-year-old song that everybody, kids know from school, you know.
But Matt Walsh has a tweet that got 5.2 million views, and we know this because, you know, Elon Musk decided to put views in the tweets.
Now we know how much... Yeah, they're very real, by the way.
Those views are very, very accurate.
I'll just say that.
Yeah, well, anyway, whatever he got, he wrote, quote, No other country on earth is ridiculous enough to permit different racial groups to perform their own national anthems before major events.
What?
And why?
Now, you asked me why would anybody tweet the thing about the 2B commercial, right?
Why would you yell at your mother-in-law?
Why would anybody out themselves like this?
Because I think he must have been at a party, they're having some drinks, mimosas, whatever they're doing, and then decide, I want the game to start, goddammit!
I don't want to hear this, by the way, a beautiful hymn with really terrific lyrics about loving everybody and everybody being equal.
What do you make of that reaction and everyone else piling on?
The reason why Matt Walsh is popular is the exact same reason why we talked about Nick Fuentes was popular, which is he's the one who, like, skirts the razor's edge.
He's like, I will go ahead and tell you almost outright that I want women to be in the kitchen, that they shouldn't have lives, that they should be completely tethered to their husbands.
I mean, like, if you were to get Matt Walsh on a podcast and pump him up, you know, with truth serum, he'd probably tell you he wants to get rid of divorce laws and, you know, rights and all of that stuff, right?
It's that.
It's his ability to go ahead and say, I'm willing to risk being labeled like a complete and utter misogynist and white supremacist.
He's smart.
He is a smart guy in that he sort of like skirts it a little bit enough in order to protect himself, unlike Nick Fuentes, who is just evil smart and doesn't care, right?
That's his brand.
But yeah, he is.
He's repulsive.
He really, truly is.
Yeah, and so and then everyone started piling on the replies.
I don't know if you do this, but I like to look at the replies of these kind of things.
Let's just get in there and find out what everyone else is saying.
And it's related to what the CRT movement is as well, in the sense that like, you know, there is no other culture besides the American culture that they want to have.
So you can't have any other languages spoken and you can't have any other I mean listen it was a song what's like let's why not you know there's performances all over the place in this game like what's the difference at that point by the way the Rihanna stuff it was really brutal uh you know in this too but like that that is and so by the way it's not even just that though it is by cherishing some part of a culture it's not a white culture That is racist, you know?
That is throwing it in our faces.
That is making us feel uncomfortable, you know?
And just like our kids, who don't, but would feel uncomfortable learning that white people 200 years ago had slaves, and that's clearly going to make them uncomfortable, when it doesn't.
So it's, you know, it's actually, I guess, good in a way to have these big Super Bowl events and these big things where we can just be reminded, I suppose, of where we're at and why this is a thing.
And maybe we can dissect it a little better and figure out how to peel a few people off of that.
But that's where we're standing and it's really, really frustrating.
And then on top of the fact that people were kneeling, you know, NFL players were kneeling and you had heard all these people saying, that's it, I'm never going to watch an NFL game again.
And that lasted probably, what, like two weeks until they played the big game?
It didn't last long, and part of the reason was because it got fitted into the culture war, right?
All of a sudden you could say they're the good players and the bad players.
And by the way, I would be remiss if we didn't finish the show with this, Nick.
We gotta bring up Donald Trump, who of course was instrumental in this, had incredible instincts when it came to using culture war ideas to his advantage and understanding which side of an issue to be on.
There is a report that came out In the New York Times.
And I gotta tell you, Nick, I got a little bit of good news.
I know this is gonna land.
Friend of the pod Maggie Haberman is updating her bona fides.
Of course, Maggie Haberman was made indispensable to the New York Times and the media apparatus because she was a Trump whisperer.
He loved talking to her.
She got a bunch of quotes from him, a bunch of background quotes from him.
She's been showing up on some DeSantis things lately, if you want an idea of where things are going.
Like her and Ronnie Donnie DeSantis are apparently having conversations.
So this report in the New York Times, DeSantis' challenge, when and how to counteract Trump.
This is just incredible beltway brain type stuff, which is just reporting on strategic maneuvers, never ever using a critical eye, talking about the fact that DeSantis and Trump are both authoritarian assholes.
But Nick, we got to have a conversation.
Which I think that we are uniquely suited for, which is that Donald Trump is rolling out a new attack nickname on Ron DeSantis.
And a great little piece of writing, because every now and then these bullshit reports, they just have wonderful, wonderful pieces.
Before we unveil it, Nick, this is a great sentence, or a great paragraph.
It was a signal that Republicans might rally behind a single primary opponent to Mr. Trump in a way they did not in 2015 and 2016 when Mr. Trump called Ben Carson, quote, pathological, comparing him to a child molester, and insinuated that Senator Ted Cruz's father had been linked to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
What a time!
Oh yeah, the Halcyon days.
You forget how wild that was, right?
You would leave a debate and you'd be like, I wonder if that's going to play Donald Trump accusing Ted Cruz's dad of killing JFK.
What strategy, right?
I'm not, all right, we talked about that.
I'm not so, you know, you're keeping your options open.
Okay, here, here we get to it.
Quote, since November, despite this, despite the criticism he faced at the time, Mr. Trump has periodically hit out at his potential rival.
And by the way, we know this, Nick, what he's, he's been like, he's called him disloyal, Ron DeSantis.
He's called him dissanctimonious.
But this one, this one, He posted his most recent innuendo about the governor on Truth Social, where he has just under 5 million followers, and he has insulted Mr. DeSantis in casual conversations, describing him as, are you ready everybody, quote, meatball Ron.
An apparent dig at his appearance.
Nick, Meatball Ron is so quintessential Donald Trump.
It's not going to work.
It's not a good takedown from modern politics.
But doesn't it make you chuckle a little bit?
Don't you think it's pretty good just for enjoyment purposes?
Oh, absolutely.
I kind of want to get the song from Meatballs playing, but I'm worried that it's going to play the wrong song if I do it.
So we'll just, you know, have that in our head.
Meatball Ron.
Now, it's because, by the way, there's going to be... Listen, we both have talked about how excited we are for this, right?
This is going to be two guys going at each other, and they're going to lower the standard of political discourse lower than we've ever seen it, right?
Like, it's going to be... Underground.
Yeah, it's going to be underground.
It's going to be in the upside down area of that show we talk about.
What was the show?
Stranger Things.
Thank you.
And then it will be strange.
By the way, Trump is not going to let it go, the whole, you know, as a teacher, as a young teacher at this private school.
You know, there are some pictures that are not incriminating necessarily, but they're they're they're creepy.
Right.
This is great.
Ron Sanders is creepy.
And so meatball.
So meatball, I guess, because he's a little bit heavy.
Right.
Is that what it is?
He's not Italian.
It's coming from Donald Trump.
I mean, you know what I mean?
Like, we're not laughing because it's, like, disparaging the way someone looks.
It's because it's dumb.
Like, who's... and I don't know if you followed this, Nick.
Donald Trump spent the entire Super Bowl, like, criticizing outfits and stylists and stuff.
He is wild.
Yeah.
He's incredible, this paragon of masculinity that the GOP has picked.
Like, meatball is such an old, old insult.
Can you imagine a grown-ass man calling you a meatball?
No, you're right.
It's almost, yeah, like somebody, you just laugh at him because he's so lame is not even the right word.
It's sad.
He's just like, you know, but people are going to rally to this, man.
They're going to love, they're going to cheer him on to be like, yeah!
put them in a body bag like you know whatever like it is horrible uh it is every bully you know tactic thing you can imagine which you know we were hoping to transcend right that's sort of what uh you know what they get so frustrated about the teaching stuff is we're talking about inclusion and um you know uh the training of uh for workers to understand better how to speak to people it's to avoid bullying right it's to get away from that and that's what's so triggering to a guy like and then to the legions of people in america
it really is if like that rite of passage is something everybody needs to have you should be bullied i was bullied you better be bullied and you better have those terrible feelings growing up like i did that's exactly right and And, you know, like, I'm sure it's got a little bit of oomph behind it, but, you know, a little bit of free advice for Donald Trump.
Like, stop trying to do the alliteration.
Just quit, you know?
Like, just stop trying to make these little things work.
Meatball Ron is an interesting try.
Like, just go for the straight out pedophile accusation.
Like, just go with it, right?
If you're gonna do it, just do it.
Do, like, Teenage Party Ron, Pedophile Ron, you know, like, Statutory Ron.
Like, just go for the throat.
Right, well, you know, Runway Ron.
You gotta get, you know, if you want the alliteration.
I don't know what that means, but, you know, something like that, yeah.
No, it's so... Let's be honest, Donald Trump doesn't have the juice that he used to have.
You know what I mean?
Like, he's lost a little something.
His fastball's lost a couple of MPHs there.
Meatball Ron is not great.
Meatball Ron is not good.
It's fun for us.
That's an enjoyable thing to talk about on a podcast and in your last segment.
But Meatball Ron doesn't have legs, I don't think.
We'll see.
I won't put it past him, but I don't think that's going to stick.
He's going to have to come up with something better.
Like low energy Jeb.
He's going to need something better.
By the way, he'll probably release Iran's cell phone number too, like he did for Lindsey Graham.
Which I think I really liked at the time he did that, and now I realize my...
The errors of my ways, forgive me.
It's so terrible.
All right, everybody, we are going to be back on Friday with the Weekender Edition.
A reminder, if you want to listen to the whole episode, and why wouldn't you?
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If you need us before then, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?
