Trump vs DeSantis: The US Is In Real Danger With Either
Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the latest polling indicating Ron DeSantis is a serious challenger to Donald Trump in the 2024 Republican Primary, and yet an op-ed in the New York Times wants liberals to be less concerned with one of them. They then discuss the ridiculous law in Tennessee that will ban drag shows on public property and finish with the dubious findings by the Dept. of Energy (?) regarding the origin of the covid virus.
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Just a reminder that my book, The Midnight Kingdom, A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis is out in the world.
If you haven't picked up your copy yet, you should do that.
I've been really, really happy with the reviews and really happy with the feedback I've gotten from people who feel like this has shined a light and illuminated a little bit of how we've arrived at this point.
This is the story of our modern crisis, but more especially how we get out of it.
Again, the book is The Midnight Kingdom, A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis.
Pick up your copy as soon as possible.
Hey everybody, welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates.
Next, my co-host Nick Halseman is living and surviving in the Republic of California in sunny Los Angeles, warm Los Angeles.
Tell us about how nice it is out there, Nick.
Well it's weird because everyone wants to text me and call me and say like oh my god what's happening out there and it's not like that big of a deal but it is freaking freezing it's like 52 and it's just a deluge of rain and like uh that horrible noise you know in 2023 they still have these um they interrupt your show with the And then he gives you a flash flood warning.
You don't get those, you know?
Well, they're interrupting your stories?
Is that what you're telling me?
Like, like Young and the Restless?
You know, I mean, you know, whatever, we're happy to be watching anywhere on TV, you know?
And it's, it's just amazing that in 2023 they still have literally the 1970 air raid warning style stuff.
What are they warning you of, Rain?
Flash floods!
Flash floods!
Pestilence.
Frogs.
I don't know.
It's horrible.
It's a biblical proportions going on here and it's gotta stop.
I didn't move out here for this.
What's it like in Los Angeles when you have rain and cold?
Like, I just imagine cars piling up on the side of the road, mass hysteria, cats, dogs.
What are we talking about?
I mean, you get the interesting phenomenon probably across the whole country, though, is the people who want to drive as if it's not raining.
That's really fascinating and fun for everybody.
But other than that, things, you know, tend to go fine.
I think what you might see socially is that people just cancel plans.
They don't want to go out.
I'm not going to meet you for dinner tonight because it's so rainy.
It's the great Los Angeles plan cancellation of 2023 is what you're telling us.
I'm actually going to travel to Florida on Sunday and I'm so looking forward to it because the weather there is so much better and it will not get better between now and a week from now.
By the way, we did not plan this.
What an incredible segue.
One of the best in the business, Nick, traveling to Florida, as we so often have to do on this show.
We have to talk about the upcoming presidential election.
We're going to talk about the moving and the shaking within the primaries of the Republican We're going to talk about some absolute madness and bullshit in the state of Tennessee, and also the lab leak hypothesis goes mainstream when it comes to COVID.
We'll get to all that, but before we do, Nick, you know, it wouldn't be this show If we didn't talk about both the dangers of the authoritarian Ron DeSantis and also our media's absolute incapability of being able to wrap their head around these dangers and to continue to normalize him, we've got a spicy meatball today.
So it does boggle the mind that, like, you know, media or whoever's covering this can't sort of handle a couple things at the same time, or things can't be true, two things can't be true at the same time, because obviously the warning about Trump being really dangerous in 2024 as a nominee, and certainly DeSantis being very dangerous as a 2024 nominee, they're both true.
Like, I don't see why we have to pick one or the other.
They're both really dangerous.
It's a real problem.
I don't necessarily see why you have to waste a lot of time reading an op-ed in the New York Times about it.
Well, and so before we get into this opinion column that was pinned by Damon Lincoln, we've got to talk about the guy who wrote this, why the New York Times ran this thing.
We're going to actually read the article and talk about what's happening here.
We need to go ahead and make it very clear why these things are run.
On one hand, yes, this is pushing an agenda.
And the basic idea that we've been told consistently by our national media is, you know, Ron DeSantis has some problems, but listen, Donald Trump is way, way worse.
And, you know, at least his company is not going to bring shame to us all of this.
That's one reason.
Another is to push traffic on sites like Facebook and Twitter from people who read this and get pissed off about it.
Right.
Because on one hand, you have a bunch of sort of centrist and moderates and never Trump Republicans who actually agree that DeSantis is better than Trump.
So they're going to get all of their retweets, all of their likes, all of their shares.
But they're also going to hear from the people who get pissed off about this thing.
The problem is that there is a twin consequence of this as you start to normalize someone like a DeSantis.
The article is, again, in the New York Times, by a guy named Damon Linker, who we'll talk about in just a second.
The title is, My Fellow Liberals Are Exaggerating the Dangers of Ron DeSantis.
Now, when I read that headline to you, Nick, and you hear, my fellow liberals, do you know who Damon Linker is?
Are you familiar with this guy?
I can't say that I am.
Okay, so if I read the headline again, quote, my fellow liberals are exaggerating the dangers of Ron DeSantis.
What immediately comes to mind?
Tell me who you think this Damon Linker fellow might be.
Oh, I just pictured Steve Buscemi walking in on, I think it was Saved by the Bell, saying, hello fellow kids!
Like, that's what I'm thinking of, but I think he's trying to signal that he's gonna probably say something that sounds really, really conservative, but because I'm gonna say that, oh, I'm a fellow liberal like you, it's gonna be okay, don't worry, I'm not really, you know, saying those things, they're not really as inflammatory as you might think that they are.
So would it surprise you to hear that Damon Linker is basically like a controversial figure in the way that he uses the word liberal?
And what he says it meaning is that he believes in liberalism writ large, which we've talked about before.
There's a difference between what many people now hear liberal and they think someone who is either on the left or voting democratic or are into pluralism and tolerance and all of that.
Multiculturalism.
When he says liberal, he means in the classical sense.
He means in terms of, oh, I don't know, the founding fathers got together and decided that white men with property are the ones who should probably run things.
It's almost like the New York Times was really, really thirsty to have a liberal defense of Ron DeSantis.
Nick, first of all, I'm going to go ahead and give you a little bit of background on this guy.
He works at a place called the Niskenen Center, which is known as being a quote-unquote moderate think tank.
We love moderates, Nick!
We love them.
And we love think tanks.
And we love think tanks that have millions of dollars, and God knows where they get those millions of dollars from.
I'm going to read you a couple quotes.
This is from Linker's other just incredible writing.
This is from a section of an article called, Making Sense of Orban's Anti-Liberalism.
By the way, Nick, if you were supposedly a liberal and all of a sudden you were going to comment on something that is explicitly called illiberalism or anti-liberalism, where would you stand on that, do you think?
You're probably supposed to be against that.
You're probably supposed to be against that.
that quote this is from Damon Linker my own position on Orban is somewhat different than the standard liberal progressive line which portrays him as having directly targeted and largely succeeded in destroying Hungarian democracy I'm more inclined to see him as what he claims to be a scourge of liberalism in the name of majoritarian democracy yes he's been pretty heavy-handed with the media giving his party somewhat of an edge in elections but But his constitutional adjustments and other reforms haven't imposed electoral changes out of line with other democracies.
And his party today wins roughly the same portion of the vote from the same largely rural constituency as it did when it first gained power.
Uh, even there, I think Orban's actions are a mixed bag.
If Hungary's ruling party wants to address the country's very serious problem of declining population by pursuing an aggressive natalist policy instead of by encouraging immigration, that's their right!
Though it isn't something I would vote for.
More troubling has been Orban's ongoing demonization of the Hungarian Jewish philanthropist, and that's a hard word to say, George Soros, whom Orban blames for every example of social liberalism that crops up in Hungary or Europe.
Orban also played a leading role kicking the Central European University out of the country, banning the teaching of gender studies in Hungarian universities.
Nick, real fast, who do you think he compares him to?
Oh my goodness.
Somebody over here?
Quote, these last two initiatives may have inspired Governor Ron DeSantis' similar moves in Florida.
There you have it folks, your fellow liberal who is standing up for Victor Orban and comparing him to Ron DeSantis who he says in the New York Times, the dangers are being exaggerated.
How do you feel about that?
How's that feel?
I never knew how fine a line it was between being a very progressive person and being Tucker Carlson.
It's really amazing.
It's really odd, isn't it?
Yeah, because, you know, he's just asking questions, you know, and that's the same kind of thing.
He's just asking questions.
He wants to get down to the bottom of it.
It's not going to shock people to hear that Damon Linker has said that transgender and gay people have gone too far in this country and they're demanding too many rights.
And so as a result, we go to, quote, Damon Linker in the New York Times.
To judge by several early polls, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida has a decent shot of beating former President Donald Trump in the race to win the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.
Some liberals have pronounced this terrible news because they say a DeSantis presidency would be just as awful as and perhaps even worse than a second Trump term.
This is wrong.
A DeSantis presidency would be bad in many ways, and my fellow liberals should fight with all they have to prevent it.
But Mr. DeSantis almost certainly would not be worse than Mr. Trump.
Exaggerating the threat posed by the Florida governor could inadvertently increase Mr. Trump's prospects in the Republican primaries.
And if Mr. DeSantis does get the nomination, progressive overreaction toward him in the primary contest could ultimately undermine the case against him in the general election.
First of all, Nick, before we even get into the ideology behind this, what does any of this mean?
What, so liberals saying that both of these people are dangerous is somehow or another going to give Trump an advantage?
What the hell is he talking about?
Oh, and that somehow saying that DeSantis is really, really bad actually benefits him in a general election after that.
That I don't understand either.
And I'm not even sure I followed the exaggeration, the whole point of that.
I suppose his exaggeration is that he's The simple notion that he could be worse than Trump is some sort of exaggeration, but it's like, look at the list of things that he's doing, and the fact that then he's referencing another article that was written about, you know, liberals saying this.
That article I liked much more, because it does lay it out very clearly how, you know, what we've talked about for years now is that DeSantis is more disciplined.
And he'll have a much better game plan around him to do these things.
So the ineptitude that we saw from the Trump administration would not get in the way.
So I just don't understand why we have to have a pissing contest on this and then why it would end up being anywhere near bad that you actually call out the reality.
I think there's a secret hiding at the heart of this op-ed that I'm going to reveal in just a second.
I'm going to read a couple more graphs here.
The case against Mr. DeSantis is rooted in his policy commitments.
No shit.
During his time as Florida's chief executive, he has governed from the hard right, taking aggressive aim at voting rights, pursuing politicized prosecutions, restricting what can be taught in public schools and universities, strong-arming private businesses, using refugees as human props to score political points, and engaging in flagrant demagoguery about vaccines.
Yeah, no shit!
What else is left there after that?
he supported cuts to social security and medicare and voted for a bill that would have severely weakened obamacare all that provides ample reason to rally against him should he end up the republican nominee in 2024 yeah no shit what else is left there after that like what a paragraph right i mean trump must look at that and be like shit i didn't do a lot when i was president because that's a murderer's robe of terrifically uh not outrageous um what's the word i'm looking for where they uh in
Issues that will just make people so intensely angry and probably support him because they live in Florida.
No offense to the other people in Florida.
Quote, but none of it makes Mr. DeSantis worse than Mr. Trump, who also did and sought to do bad things in office.
The Muslim travel ban forcibly separating migrants from their children and much else.
Could the Trump era have been worse?
Absolutely.
And here liberals have a point when they suggest Mr. Trump's ability to wreak havoc was limited by his ineptness.
Based on what we've seen of Mr. DeSantis' performance as governor of Florida, a DeSantis administration would likely display much greater discipline and competence than what the country endured under Mr. Trump.
Again!
Cool!
Great!
Let me ask you this though.
You're a writer.
Do you ever just sort of have just put words down in random orders when you're writing something?
No!
Okay.
No!
He has a paragraph when he's going to list the things that Mr. President Trump did that could be considered worse than DeSantis, let's just say, right?
Yes.
So you have a choice.
It's a poo-poo platter of lots of things.
And what he comes up with is the Muslim travel man and then separating migrants from their children.
I just find it very interesting that those are the two things he lists and nothing else besides the word much else.
So this is also revealing in a way because it seems like he is minimizing what Trump did.
That's exactly right.
So then he says, Yet it's also the case that people in the Trump orbit recognize this problem and plan to ensure things work out differently next time.
That includes ideas for bolder action on policy and much tighter and more focused management of the president with an eye toward running an administration capable of acting much more shrewdly and ruthlessly than last time.
First of all, he's not wrong in that, but you know what he's not talking about and other analysts aren't talking about except for on this show?
It doesn't matter who it is that is the president, they are carrying out the agenda of a very specific group of people.
Alright?
Trump, DeSantis, I mean, you name it, any of these contenders, they get in.
They're still pushing all this stuff from the Heritage Foundation and all these other think tanks and institutes.
Like, it's not that all of a sudden Trump's gonna get in there because he has a personal defect and make these things actually worse.
He goes, quote, quote, The way to summarize these various personal defects is to say that Mr. Trump is temperamentally unfit to be president.
And again, that brings us to the crux of the matter, Nick.
They have a problem with Trump because he's Trump.
They don't have a problem with what he does.
In fact, if you go back to what Linker said about Orban and with DeSantis, he keeps saying, ah, that's what people voted for, that's what democracy is about.
They do not have an issue with this.
As a matter of fact, he's basically sitting here telling you, I would much rather have DeSantis as President of the United States of America because he'll actually do these things.
At the hidden core of this is the fact that Linker, the only problem he has with Trump is that Trump is Trump.
And what is the New York Times doing?
It is so thirsty for someone to call themselves a liberal and to go ahead and normalize Ron DeSantis that they went ahead and presented this guy as if he's like a Democrat or a leftist or something.
And basically it's a clandestine ad for Ron DeSantis.
That's all it is.
Yeah, although, you know, maybe he thinks he's doing the liberals a favor by like saying, you know, we gotta have, you gotta make sure that Trump is the guy because he's the one that's going to get beat in the general, right?
And DeSantis won't.
So, that's another one of those really interesting child psychology approaches here to this, I suppose, where he's trying to get that.
But like, honestly, all I can see is that the argument he has is that the one thing that DeSantis wouldn't do that Trump would is foment an insurrection.
That's like, that's the standard for him right now.
And by the way, I don't even know if DeSantis would even, maybe he would do that as well.
Can I be frank about something?
I don't think he would have to.
I think that's the difference, is I think DeSantis would be able to win and win on his own.
And by the way, on top of that, we have these states, much like Florida, that are going ahead and rigging their elections.
So like, you know, you basically have an entire rigged system here.
I'm just going to read two more things here real fast.
This is a single graph.
Quote, policies can be reversed.
Talking about DeSantis, a shredded civic fabric is much more difficult to mend.
Nick, how long have you lived in the United States?
Oh, you have to ask my age now?
You're supposed to ask a lady her age.
It's been a while.
It's been many decades.
How many policies get reversed?
Like, seriously, if DeSantis gets in and pushes his entire agenda, it's not going away.
That's not the way this country works.
It's only the Democrats and moderate ideas that ever get reversed.
The Republican stuff is forever.
He then says, quote, Liberals have a long, and by the way he says liberals, like he's going ahead and saying it from the outside, liberals have a long history of hyping fears for Republican presidential candidates from Lyndon Johnson's daisy ad about Barry Goldwater.
And by the way, Goldwater was nuts!
Goldwater was dangerous!
Goldwater was an extremist!
And by the way, why do we still even know about the daisy ad?
Because it was a really good ad!
Very accurate!
It was a really good ad.
He then says, to sometimes hysterical warnings about various dire threats posed by John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012.
None of us had dire threats about John McCain!
None of us had dire threats about Mitt Romney!
We had problems with them, basically because John McCain was a war hawk and wasn't able to be president, and because Mitt Romney was basically neoliberalism in a suit and tie.
Nobody had dire threats about either of those milquetoast assholes.
That's a very good point.
I agree.
Again, it's a normalization.
It's a whataboutism.
It's strange.
I like that you pointed out that he uses the term liberals because he clearly doesn't see himself in that same group, even though he tries to say that so in the headline.
This is what happens, by the way, whenever Never Trumpers are welcomed on the raft after they leave the Republican Party.
This is one of the guys, I mean, he hangs out with Rod Gerrera.
He talks constantly about the need for a theological foundation in the United States of America.
This is not the person who should be writing this article, and quite frankly, it's disgusting that this is what happened.
It's a real mess, and we're going to see so many of these things leading into 2024.
They have to launder Ron DeSantis and normalize him.
It's simply what they're going to do.
I, yeah, I agree.
And it's funny because, you know, we're looking at these polls and figuring out, okay, well, remember DeSantis for a little while there really didn't look like he was, you know, getting any kind of momentum, right?
He was probably pretty low, but all of a sudden, right, it's jumped up there and we know why.
It's like, it almost is like a name recognition poll in some respects, right?
Because they've heard of it, okay, and I don't really like Trump, but I heard about this guy DeSantis, and they don't necessarily know why.
And obviously, DeSantis is artificially pumping up a name recognition because of all this bullshit he's doing that's somehow getting some traction across the national stage with what he's doing with universities.
I would suspect a lot of people would have a lot of problems with these policies he's trying to institute.
But, if they're going to tell the conservative line it's now, you know, a year and a half before we actually have to deal with an election, then yes, all of a sudden that polling makes it look like, at least, that DeSantis is, you know, neck and neck with Trump.
Yeah, traditionally, we would be a few months out from, like, the big start of the 2024 race.
And by the way, for those who are looking for it, you know, I'm a big fan of, like, March Madness.
I love the tournament when it comes around in March.
Like, I can feel it.
You know what I mean?
Like, we're about a week out from it, like, really starting to, like, pick up speed.
We're not far out from the 2024 race beginning.
And by the way, I said this the other night on our live show for our Patreon subscribers.
Nobody covers this stuff like us.
In a way, I'm excited to get into the thrust of this thing, but also, I have a dread in me, the likes of which that I can't even properly communicate because of the way it's shaping up.
Well, another reason why people need to go to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast and join our Patreon, because we have a lot of extra bonus stuff there, especially around the election stuff.
Oh my god, it's non-stop, quite frankly.
And so we're going to have a little bit of the way-too-early power rankings here.
Fox News released their poll, which I thought was pretty telling.
Donald Trump right now is at the top of that poll at 43%.
Ron DeSantis is at 28, which is what we call striking distance in the industry.
Then we've got a few also-rans.
Nikki Haley is at 7%.
Mike Pence at 7%.
Greg Abbott at 2%.
Liz Cheney at 2%.
And Nick, I wanted to talk a little bit just to wrap our heads around this situation.
I thought we could start at the bottom.
Who do you see?
And not just from this poll, but the people who are sort of floating around in the miasma of this stuff.
Who do you see as the people who are going to be probably in the race and out of the race pretty quickly?
Who are the people who are not going to gain any sort of Any traction in this?
Well, one thing it seems clear.
I was looking at some reporting the other day where it sounds like we're not going to have a lot of senators who want to jump in this race for 2024, which thank God we don't have to hear like Ted Cruz do this again.
And maybe he'll finally... Oh, you don't think Ted Cruz is itching to get to another run?
I think, well, what it does see before the Santa stuff started to really bubble up, it kind of felt like no one was going to be willing to challenge Trump no matter what.
It just didn't seem like it just seemed like they they all know that he is going to be so far ahead.
They can't handle another loss, even though don't forget a lot of times when you begin this process to run for president, it's like a three or four election cycle process here where you're just getting everything going.
So I don't know.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's a smaller field this year because of that.
I think that there's there's going to be momentum at some point that just says Trump is too much of a juggernaut.
We can't go against him.
Well, real fast on the Ted Cruz front, never underestimate Ted Cruz's desire to be publicly humiliated.
And on top of that, he's always one church service away from people laying hands on him and saying that God said that he should run for president.
I mean, that's literally who he is, and that's how he ends up making these decisions.
He truly believes that he has been sent by the Almighty to become president.
We need a ban on speaking about him and on this podcast.
I don't know.
I think that's totally fair.
People, for me, and I would be interested to hear what you have to say, Scott Walker, former governor of Wisconsin, is flirting with a run, which is hilarious.
We always talk about how these consultants and strategists, like, they get money signs in their eyes when they look at someone like Scott Walker, and they're like, Scott, I think you are I think you are just the guy to bring sanity back to the Republican Party.
And, you know, there's all kinds of these people.
If Scott Walker were to run, I mean, he would probably get 1% of a vote.
Huckabee always sort of gets excited about this, although I think his daughter is now sort of getting the edge for it.
She has no possibility.
Greg Abbott, I don't see him running at all.
I think Liz Cheney being included in these polls is quote-unquote hilarious.
I think it's absolutely hilarious the idea that Liz Cheney has any chance of being like the unifier of the Republican Party.
You agree, right?
Yeah, just to put the button on Scott Walker, I mean he's not even popular in Wisconsin.
That's right.
So I don't see how he suddenly finds popularity.
We said this, Liz Cheney in the beginning of the, when she was leading up the January 6th committee, it felt like this was going to be the position for her to like maybe make a run for presidency, right?
It really did feel that way.
Maybe it's just residual connections to that because we haven't seen any indication that she intends to do that.
She's been pretty quiet on the scene for a while.
But I don't know.
Sometimes people may want to run because they want to make a point.
They want to push the other candidates to have to address certain things that no one else would if they weren't running.
You know, so Liz Cheney is an interesting thing.
I doubt it.
I just don't think she would.
I think she realizes how horribly unpopular she became, unfortunately, from her participation.
But yeah, I would say it's less than, you know, 50% that she's going to do it.
I gotta tell you, that Cheney blood, it runs deep, man.
I think she's the type that wants people to come and just absolutely beg her to run.
You know what I mean?
Like, the reluctant savior, almost the way, you know.
I don't know if people know this story, it's one of my favorites, which is that Dick Cheney was responsible for picking George W. Bush's running mate in 2000, and he picked himself.
Like, he totally rigged the thing in order to become the candidate himself, which is great.
Same thing, by the way.
Mike Pence.
It's absolutely incredible to have Mike Pence and to have Liz Cheney, two people who are absolutely hated by their parties.
Despised.
Again, Mike Pence to the point where they literally wanted to murder him in a political assassination, and that these two people have been convinced by a big group of completely marooned political exiles who have no home in the Republican Party, who are trying to take over the Democratic Party, And they have been told basically if they spend enough money that they will be the savior of the Republican Party in the United States of America.
Absolutely no chance of Mike Pence or Liz Cheney gaining any sort of traction in these primaries whatsoever.
Okay, so let me posit something here.
The reason why Pence is hated by the Republican Party is because Trump told everybody to hate him, right?
And the reason why Cheney is also hated is because Trump told everybody that they should hate.
So, by transitive property, you'd almost assume that anybody he turns his vitriol on in that way he does, and when he gets back on Twitter, because that's probably going to happen too, he will be able to then severely wound in that same way, right?
And he's tried it with DeSantis.
I guess that's the argument, right?
He's already stepped his toe in the water of trying to, you know, paint him as a Whatever, we won't even get into the innuendo, but he's trying to do it.
Probably hasn't worked so well.
No, no, no, no.
Let's be very clear.
He has already insinuated that Ron DeSantis is a pedophile.
You know what?
That's how bad it is.
I didn't even want to say that.
It's February of 2023 and he's already tried out Meatball Ron and insinuating that he's a pedophile.
I mean, that's where we are in the presidential race at this point.
And that'll be interesting to see, because if it doesn't work, then obviously the only choice Trump will have is to go worse and worse and worse.
Like, he'll just keep getting, you know, pedophile.
I mean, how do you get lower than pedophile?
But he'll find it, I'm sure.
And that's the question.
Is this guy, Sanders, the one guy that is not going to be affected by it?
I would be surprised.
I would think that Trump could still figure out how to sink him with just, you know, his vitriol.
Now to go ahead and we'll get to the two big dogs in the race right now.
I think Nikki Haley sort of exists to sort of be an also ran sort of the the person who you know ends up in third or fourth and almost all of these primaries before dropping out and as you have said maybe becoming the VP of someone like a DeSantis.
I don't see her gaining any sort of traction.
I don't see her being a dark horse candidate.
And so then that brings us, of course, to Trump and DeSantis.
So I guess this is the question right now, Nick.
If you had to put it down, we're recording this on February 27th of 2023.
There's a long, long way before we pick our candidates here.
Who do you think has the edge between Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis right now?
Man, I mean, the way I've been talking about this whole thing, you have to say it's Trump, you know, even still.
But I would fully recognize or have to acknowledge that, like, Fox News, for instance, is completely against Trump at this point, right?
And they're trying to undermine that.
And it's hard to quantify just how powerful that could be if it works.
But you have to say Trump either, no matter how you slice it at this point, wouldn't you say?
I've said this before.
I just cannot see a situation in which Trump is on the board here.
I really can't.
You know, when it comes to Ron DeSantis, there's a couple of little things there that give me pause.
First of all, we've talked about it before, his voice is awful.
It's just absolutely awful.
His instincts sometimes in the way that things are presented, whether it's optics or the way that he sort of brings them about, aren't necessarily great.
We also have not seen him go toe-to-toe.
And I'll tell you what, in the re-election campaign, when he was on the debate stage and he was asked point-blank if he was going to serve his entire term, he had no idea what to say.
None.
And you know, one of the things that politicians have to do is they have to roll with punches and redirect and move it elsewhere.
He couldn't do it.
He sucked.
It really was kind of amazing that if he was in a regular GOP primary race, particularly, you know, if you think about I don't know.
2012, right?
Like when you have like an entire stage of these people and you have Ben Carson who's saying some stuff and Newt Gingrich like sniping at you.
Like, I think he would be fine in that instance.
I think he has a lot of Mitt Romney potential in those situations.
But also, like, there's still the potential for him to wrangle together all of this stuff.
I think the message is sort of coming together, the culture war stuff is coming together.
But again, I think Trump, I think Trump could box him around the ring.
And I don't know how that plays, you know what I mean?
But And the only thing we've seen from Trump in the primary is him going to East Palestine.
That's it!
That's literally the only thing that we've really seen him do other than throwing out some true socials and I think having like one or two rallies.
So right now I guess you you got to put Trump at one but man it just it just doesn't feel like that's what's going to happen.
Uh, okay.
I mean, you know, what's funny is that Trump in 2015 had the reputation of being a great businessman, right?
I even believe that.
So everyone, so that was the reputation.
Didn't, wasn't deserved at all.
And we've now found out how horrible he is.
What if it's possible that, you know, DeSantis is also the same way.
This reputation he has for being disciplined and organized and all those things, maybe it's not true.
Maybe like, you know, for instance, even he wasn't prepared to answer the question about what he intended to serve his full term.
Which is, you know, is that an indication that he isn't as prepared as everyone thinks he is?
He wears a suit and his hair is nice and he speaks forcefully, but it's possible that that is also exposed as well.
And, you know, let's face it, you could talk about the optics and specifics like the Dallas Cowboy cheerleader boots he was wearing at that, you know, the big reigns, whatever.
I still never understood that, why he was doing that, but he does not have an optics and a good eye for that stuff either.
No, he doesn't.
Including, like, these ads where he's, like, you know, pretending to be, like, a, you know, a Top Gun, you know, aerial dogfighter.
You know, but that's the thing.
It's like, there is so much money that's going to get behind this guy.
And there already is.
I mean, you know, the majority of Trump's backers have already started to move their money that way.
And you've got to think about the material sort of resources under there.
You know, I still think DeSantis is probably the guy.
It is literally a matter of how you get Trump out of the way.
And I will go ahead and say, and we're going to move to this next segment, but I will go ahead and say that Trump doesn't show much of an interest in really anything.
Really, truly.
I mean, to borrow a phrase, he's low energy.
He doesn't really engage with a lot of breaking issues.
Even the culture war stuff, he's a little silent on.
Like, it doesn't even show like an actual sort of a fire to get into this stuff.
That's where DeSantis, I think, shines.
And one of the things that we're seeing on the state level, as we've been covering on this show, has been this push within the Republican Party To get more and more aggressive in these cultural issues.
And so in that vein, we're going to turn to the state of Tennessee, which I gotta tell you, you spend any time in Tennessee, Nick?
I've been to Graceland twice.
Oh, really?
I love it.
Big, big fan.
Big fan of the 70s Elvis, yeah.
Wow, I've never been to Graceland.
Oh, you gotta go.
It's a great trip and then you get to go to Sun Records and then Beale Street.
Memphis is an awesome place.
I don't know about the rest of Tennessee.
I was in Dyersville, Tennessee staying in a motel on the way back and got yelled at by the motel owner as a 17-year-old to make sure I didn't have any parties while I was staying there, which I was pretty sure I wasn't gonna have any party, me and my friends.
But I'll never forget that.
Dyersburg, Tennessee.
You have the look of a guy who's gonna rip a motel room.
They took one look at me and my buddy, and I definitely figured these guys are here to party.
I gotta tell you, I like Tennessee.
Tennessee is a beautiful, beautiful state.
I've met a lot of good people in Tennessee, which I always have to go ahead and emphasize whenever we talk about this Republican agenda that takes place in places like Indiana, of course, where I'm from.
We have to remember there's no actual things as red states and blue states, and some of these people are decent.
But Tennessee, man, some real stupid shit.
This guy, the state rep, Chris Todd, is pushing what he is calling a child safety bill.
In the past, he's referred to drag shows as, quote, child abuse.
he's pushing House Bill 9, which would ban drag from public property and contain it to age-restricted locations.
This would be an outright assault on the art form of drag.
But also, let's go ahead and call this what it is, it is also a backdoor way to go after transgender people.
And, and to go after gay people in the LGBTQ communities in Tennessee.
This is some incredible, incredible overreach by the Republican Party.
It appears that this is going to get signed into law.
Really, really disturbing stuff that I don't even know if we can wrap our head around the actual ramifications of it at this point.
Do you get the impression that these people assume that there's eight-year-olds smoking cigarettes, walking down the street, going to the bars themselves, and just kind of having control of their entire lives.
Is that what you get the impression of?
I gotta tell you, and here's the thing, man.
Like, you know, I want people to be involved in the civic process.
I absolutely do.
But when you hear These, like, state senators and state reps, when you hear them talk, like, about the bills they're introducing, which have all been written, by the way, by those same think tanks and institutes that we were talking about earlier, they have no idea what they're talking about.
The world that they experience is just the absolute, it's like a post-apocalyptic movie in which all morals and ethics have been thrown out.
It's basically Mad Max, you know, outside of Memphis, is what they're describing.
I was just thinking about Mad Max, actually.
What a great movie that is.
Maybe we should do that as a Patreon movie at some point.
My favorite thing, though, is at the end of this article that they're describing, it says, in January, masked protesters brandished Nazi slogans and chanted anti-LGBTQ slurs outside of an event.
It doesn't mean anything like I would think it'd be compelling if you're like okay you're against this but look who else is against it look who are you what lot you are casting with people who want to yell Nazi slogans like that's okay that's no one's banning that you know what I mean like that is what's so insane about this whole thing and and just the notion that you could go to a place and we talked about this before in the hit Empathize?
of the country, these drag shows used to be just really fun where people would dress up and they would just, you know, kids could see different ways that people could act and behave in a fun way or in a realistic ways that would maybe have a little impact on their ability to, you know, accept kids could see different ways that people could act and behave in Like that's the thing.
And empathize.
Thank you.
Well, and what they've done is, and this is the really gross part about it.
They've sexualized this thing.
You know what I mean?
They've literally gone ahead and taken this art form.
And it is an art form.
I mean, and it's been around for a long, long time.
They've taken this art form, which by the way, if you actually... Oh, it's incredible to think about.
They've taken this art form, and they've just absolutely projected their own sexual hang-ups on this thing, and made it into like a complete... They're seducing the kids, they're abusing the kids, all of that.
And also, that's what they're doing with transgenderism.
They are looking at people who are simply trying to live their lives, who are trying to be themselves, and best of luck to them, and they're looking at them and basically thinking that they're perverts.
That's what this is about!
It's about, oh, these people who are all messed up and weird sexually, they're going to, like, you know, attack us in bathrooms, or they're gonna confront us and do this, or they're gonna try and recruit kids or whatever.
And it's absolute horseshit.
And what it's going to do is it is going to basically be an oppressive apartheid state in which people aren't going to be able to be themselves.
They're going to face, you know, one legal action after another.
I mean, it is an absolute rolling back of the civil liberties of the people of Tennessee.
You know, I think that if it was just the argument that they're trying to, you know, recruit kids, I don't think that that would hold as much sway as the secondary argument, which is when kids see this, they are going to become that.
And then if they see a gay couple, they're going to become gay.
Like that is sort of what I think is even more nefarious about what their line of thinking is.
And that also addresses the hangups that you mentioned earlier with them and how they're not settled in their own situation.
So I think that that is the much more frustrating thing to have to try and explain away because that seems more alluring.
Because for some reason, there's a specific section of this country that is convinced that if kids are exposed and then exposed is not the right word, but exposed to different kinds of people, they will like become those people.
And that's not how, certainly if you're talking about sexuality at the very least, that's not how this works.
And everybody should know that, and they don't.
And that's so frustrating to me.
It pisses me off, man.
I've, you know, I've worked the past few years as a professor and as a mentor.
I've worked with so many transgender students and they work so hard and they, you know, are exactly the opposite of what assholes like this portray them as.
They are really, really good people.
And again, by the way, these assholes can't even be bothered to understand the difference between drag and transgenderism.
Right, because it's all the same.
All of it is, all of it is satanic perversion.
That's, that's the only thing that they can see.
They can't even like bring these things together.
Well, but it didn't used to be that way though.
It was Uncle Milty would put on a dress and perform and everyone thought that was hilarious.
It's incredible, too.
You know, it's there's all this background to this stuff.
And by the way, man, Milton.
Oh, man, there's some problems there.
I just I look at all of it.
It's like these people are just trying to live their lives.
And every day they have to deal with some asshole calling them names or intimidating them or maybe assaulting them or, you know, just making their lives hell.
And they just keep trying and trying and trying.
And they're not doing it to, like, get their kicks off.
They're doing it because it's who they are.
You know what I mean?
It's just people trying to live, and these people have to continue pushing the power of the state on them.
It is one of the most repulsive things I've ever seen.
By the way, we gotta finish this show off by talking very briefly about something that is interesting and weird, and I think that we can give a little bit of context behind it.
Nick, turns out, lab leak.
That's how we got COVID.
And we know that because the Department of Energy For those who are watching on YouTube, you can see Nick just throwing his hands up and scratching his head in disbelief.
The Department of Energy released a quote, low confidence report that COVID-19 originated from a lab leak in China.
Now, There have been a couple of reports out there, and most of them have been low confidence.
The intelligence agencies, who I don't know about you, Nick, most of the time I'm going to throw my dice in with them, whether I think that they're lying to us or otherwise.
But that is what the Department of Energy has put out there.
This was immediately seized upon.
And in the chambers of social media, it was announced everywhere that it had been decided, that we'd been misled, that Trump was right all along, that this came from a lab leak.
All context fell to the side.
Basically, everybody said either, I knew that's what it was, or I can't believe they lied to us.
This issue is still up in the air.
It has not been decided one way or another in any way, shape, or form.
But the way that our social media, the way their internet works, the way that our media works, it has just lost all meaning whatsoever and it's just been thrown out there for people to take whatever they want from it.
And I'm just, it's still not clear to me.
I was trying to look this up to find out why the Department of Energy has any bearing on this at all.
What are they, this is not their purview.
They're not, they shouldn't be, you know, anyway doing this.
I want to know what HUD has to say about it.
Yeah, I know.
It's like maybe Buttigieg can weigh in because they've been doing some research.
I don't understand at all why.
Now, Is it possible that, yeah, somebody in a lab, like, didn't quite rinse their gloves off right, and it was on their clothes, and they walked out, and whatever.
Like, okay, that's probably what happened, then fine.
How does that change anything at this point?
Or are they just looking for ways to prosecute Fauci?
Because this is what's going to become the gain-of-function research stuff, and they're going to try and, you know, put him in jail for this.
Well, here's the thing, to go ahead and give a real brief timeline, you know, one of the reasons why the lab leak hypothesis, and by the way, it's totally a possibility, like, you know, again, there are several people out there who say different things.
The experts, you know, some say that, of course, it comes from, you know, the web markets and such.
And some say it comes from, you know, this lab leak.
I happen to believe that those are the two more likely culprits as opposed to bioweapons.
Right.
But what we're watching here is we couldn't have a conversation about that because it was being used by Donald Trump and the Republicans as a political escape theory.
So you weren't talking about how Donald Trump has screwed this whole thing up, how Jared Kushner had basically turned neoliberal extremism around on us and made sure that everybody was getting that, and Republicans were pushing us into the maw of a generational pandemic.
We couldn't have a discussion about that.
Now we've reached the point where the Cold War with China is starting to grow and grow and grow.
Maybe we can start talking about where it originated from and who caused it or whatever.
God knows that Republicans are probably going to push for some sort of a retaliation or maybe some sort of a financial settlement that would never get paid, of course.
But it's all about the changing landscape and what's happening with the sort of geopolitical tensions that we have.
And how are we ever going to actually know?
You know what I mean?
It's just sort of up in the air.
And like you said, truly, honestly, outside of making sure that something like this doesn't happen again, Like, that doesn't matter otherwise, you know what I mean?
That's really what it comes down to, and we have stopped playing national games with this, statecraft with it, all of it.
We need to learn from it and figure out how to keep it from happening again.
That's the most important thing in all of this.
Well, did we mention, you know, the threat that Chinese Americans are under when these things happen?
I mean, that's another thing.
They've already been targeted by everybody, you know, these extremists and white supremacists after Donald Trump pushed this stuff for forever.
You're absolutely right.
So and then but could we maybe out of all this get more people to just take it seriously that it really is a virus that really came from there because you know there's still a big part of the country doesn't think it's anything I think it's worth less than the flu which by the way like maybe we're getting there too at this point it's possible that eventually but I did death rates are still you know happening.
Across the country.
It's really sad in that respect because we know now that you don't, you know, most people don't have to die from getting COVID without, you know, a lot of comorbidities.
So, you know, the fact that we've kind of transitioned, we haven't talked about COVID for a year, right?
I don't know.
It's been a long time.
No one's talking about it.
Everyone's gone back to normal.
It's still spreading around all those different places.
So maybe this would get people to like, you know, finally maybe take it a little bit more seriously or at least take it like in a realistic way.
I'll say one more thing that we can learn from this.
I know there are people who listen to this podcast who are in the Biden administration.
I know there are people who listen to this podcast who are in the government.
You have to do a better job of presenting your reports.
You have to do such a better job of communicating this stuff.
The moment that this dropped, it was conspiracy theory manna from heaven.
These things are cherry-picked constantly by everybody from Alex Jones, who barely reads this stuff, to our conspiracies on Reddit, you know, up and down, YouTube, you name it.
You have to communicate these things better, because the moment that I came across low confidence, Nick, I was like, great!
That's awesome!
Thank you for giving me this.
That's awesome.
No, I don't know.
When I came across energy department, I was like, what the fuck is that?
Like, what is that?
Doesn't make any sense either.
So you can put those two together and it's ridiculous.
But again, you know, so what?
Like at this point, so what?
There's millions of people who have died from this.
But I understand the necessity.
We can't let it happen again.
And besides, you know, if the Chinese government wanted to do this on purpose, Why would they have killed so many of their own people in such a haphazard way?
This isn't Info Wars.
We can't even go down that road.
It is such an absurdity and it only adds to this growing environment.
Like you said, that number one is dangerous for Asian Americans, which it's already dangerous for Asian Americans here and Asian immigrants here.
Like, it is incredibly dangerous for them right now, but also it adds to this Cold War environment that we're talking about, which, you know, stands to take money away from programs that could make people's lives better and could lead to saber-rattling, and God knows what type of things, you know, that could come from that.
So again, I'll tell you what, Nick, are you ready for this?
I have low confidence in the low confidence report.
How do you feel about that?
I'm confident in your low confidence.
I am.
I have low confidence in the low confidence report.
Put that on your bumper sticker.
All right, everybody, that's going to be it for this episode of the McCraig Podcast.
We will be back on Friday for The Weekender.
If you haven't already, go to patreon.com slash McCraig Podcast.
I mean, seriously, what's what's what's the holdup here?
It's it gives you an extra episode every week.
It gets you live hangouts with us, which, by the way, Nick, I don't want to mean to toot our own horn.
I thought the live episode last week was really good.
Oh, it was great.
And I think everyone really just enjoyed, you know, being together in real time and chatting and talking.
It was great.
We have a good community with good people.
You want to be a part of it.
Patreon.com slash Mike Craig Podcast.
We need it to keep growing.
We need it to remain editorially independent, ad free, and all that other good stuff.
Patreon.com slash Mike Craig Podcast.
If you need us before the next episode, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?
