Nick is down in DeSantis's Florida, soaking up the sunshine and attempting not to get conservative canceled. Jared Yates Sexton is holding down the fort, going over the bizarre but important happenings from this year's CPAC Conference, including Donald Trump debuting a troubling new appeal and Michael Knowles calling for the eradication of transgenderism. Then, a look at Florida, where past CPAC and Hungarian illiberal notions are shaping the agenda.
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Down in Florida, DeSantis land, as we are going to discuss later on in this solo episode of the Montgregg Podcast.
We miss him dearly, but this week I am at the controls, which means you're going to spend a little quality time with yours truly.
We got to talk about some escalation today.
We got to talk about how the process of right-wing radicalization takes place.
We have some incredible examples of exactly how that takes place, how it works, how these pipelines of ideas come into law.
We will go ahead and start with the CPAC convention in Washington DC.
As we've discussed in the past on this show, CPAC is sort of ground zero for right-wing extremist ideology and legislation.
This is the preeminent extremist conservative conference.
It was where Trumpism was more or less born, but it has been churning.
For decades now.
It is legendary for being one of the launching pads for Ronald Reagan's eventual ascent to the presidency.
It is a bunch of panels and speeches and meetings and get-togethers where everybody from the billionaire donor class down to the diehard Republican voters meet, press the flesh, figure out where things are going and what they're going to do.
This has...
You know, we've seen it take so many different shapes.
You know, from Viktor Orban of Hungary, who we'll have to talk about in a little bit, came in and gave some incredible tips to the Republicans on how to recreate the illiberal state that he has created in Hungary, which they have taken to heart and have carried out.
This year was noticeably a little bit different.
And there are a lot of reasons for this.
You have to begin with head of CPAC or one of the most influential leaders of CPAC, Matt Schlapp, who recently was accused of sexual assault by a Herschel Walker staffer.
That entire scandal, developing scandal, probably gave CPAC a little bit of an ugliness, cast a little bit of a pall over the entire thing that kept people from showing up.
But also because CPAC has been blamed for being the crib from which Trumpism has emerged.
You know, a lot of conservatives used to see CPAC as sort of their annual conference.
They have felt as if it has been wrested from them.
Again, this is the divide between the country club Republican, the neoliberal Republican who is only interested in cutting taxes, deregulating, pushing the interest of the market, and the wealthy.
They have come to see this again as Trumpism the conference.
So a lot of people stayed away from it.
I think it's very, very telling that somebody like a Ron DeSantis chose to skip this thing as he is trying to walk this tightrope between the MAGA world and that country club Republicans set, which is probably the best strategy that he could have, at least for the moment.
But to look at what happened at this year's CPAC and then to start tracing the lines of these things, seeing how this is where a lot of the rhetoric and a lot of the ideas are presented almost like a trade show.
This is where politicians come to sort of get a read on how their campaigns are taking off.
They can go ahead and put some slogans out there, some strategies out there and see how they work, as well as these pieces of rhetoric that are meant to change the conversation and eventually lead to legislation.
It's really telling to see that Nikki Haley, who of course has announced her candidacy for the GOP nomination, and who has been hailed, by the way, by one person after another in that jet-setting country club Republican group as a possible sane candidate, right?
Maybe somebody who could restore a little order to the Republican Party.
Haley has come in hot.
There's no other way to put it.
Haley has talked consistently about the deep state, has talked consistently about the threat of Marxism and transgenderism.
Whoever is advising Haley has more or less given her the advice that the lane that she should take is to go ahead and take Donald Trump's position.
To go ahead, you know, stemming from her prior relationship with Trump, you know, they have been allies since he has come along, which is one of the reasons why, you know, whenever people would talk about the potential of her, you know, being the sane candidate, I always sort of shook my head because she was more than happy to carry Trump's water.
But despite this, you know, she has already tried and now has tried at CPAC to go ahead and start putting forward this agenda saying that the Republican Party needs new leadership.
Of course, Nick and I had covered this in the past where she said that the older members of the political class needed to have competency tests.
This is a feint that is meant to start talking about moving towards a new generation within the Republican Party.
This can be used, by the way, against everybody, basically, within the Republican leadership, but also including Donald Trump.
Because Trump has announced his candidacy, and because Nikki Haley has since announced her candidacy, she has already been seen, more or less, as a traitor to the MAGA world.
And what we saw at CPAC was only more evidence of that.
During her speech, which was pure, uncut, MAGA material, she was interrupted by Trump supporters chanting, we love Trump, we love Trump.
A noticeable interruption that then spilled into a later incident in which Nikki Haley was confronted by multiple Trump supporters, a group of them, a crowd of them, that were so aggressive with her that she literally fled them And ran towards an elevator to get away from them.
Make no mistake, this was Trump's CPAC.
The former president made an appearance and there's really no other way to put this.
added a new level of grievance, a new level of anger, and basically rebooted his campaign in one of the few ways that is available to him any longer, as a lot of his paths have already been taken from him.
Here's a little sample.
And if you put me back in the White House, their reign is over.
Their reign will be over.
And they know it.
And America will be a free nation once again.
We're not a free nation right now.
We don't have free press.
We don't have free anything.
In 2016, I declared, I am your voice.
Today, I add, I am your warrior.
I am your justice.
And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.
I am your retribution.
Not gonna let this happen.
I'm not gonna let it happen.
I will totally obliterate the Deep State.
I will fire... If that doesn't chill your bones, I don't know what to tell you.
Because this is a switching of rhetoric.
Originally, the MAGA movement, based on the promise to make America great again, at least offered the illusion of something constructive.
Of course, it was always a white supremacist evangelical dog whistle.
That he was going to aggressively roll back progress and march America back into pre-civil rights, pre-feminist rights, you name it.
What Trump has found is obviously a very, very concentrated appeal.
And what is happening there?
It's important to point out that for years now, since the 2020 election, which by the way, of course, he went ahead and said that he won the 2020 election.
But, you know, Nick and I had talked about this a little bit, that part of Trump's problem in all of this was that by constantly complaining about the 2020 election, that he was being cast as a loser.
That there was nothing moving forward, there was nothing being offered besides the re-litigation of the past.
What you just heard, and I would be more than willing to bet dollars to donuts, that that speech, and particularly those lines that I just focused on, are the handiwork of Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller.
With an emphasis on Bannon.
This is a really, really dangerous escalation.
Trump now has an offer.
And the offer is that I will seek out revenge.
I will punish your enemies.
That was always in the background.
In 2016, there was always sort of the promise that he was going to go after the deep state or drain the swamp or, you know, that he was going to lock Hillary Clinton up.
Those were applause lines that were hidden deep within the Make America Great Again promise.
The idea was that America had seen better days, but it would see better days again.
This, of course, is the American Carnage idea, which was repeated again in this speech, which is one of the reasons why I'm fairly certain that Bannon played a role in preparing this.
This speech was about crime and disorder, the idea that America was being led astray by a deep state that had taken control of everything, which was always in the background of those speeches.
But here it was front and center.
Trump has found something here, which is the question of why would you vote for him?
What is it that you get out of it?
And the main driver in the MAGA world at this point is not anything constructive.
In fact, this speech went ahead and said that the wall had been built.
You take away the wall and what's left?
It's the promise to go after your enemies.
It's the promise of retribution.
Now, just as Haley followed Trump's lead, and has continually followed Trump's lead, these notes of retribution are going to affect the GOP primary in 2024.
Everybody's going to have to follow Trump.
They're at least going to have to offer a semblance of what Trump is giving them.
And we have moved into a new frontier in the culture war.
Now it's not just about presenting a different option of what you could buy or which corporation you should spend your time with or what TV show you should watch.
Now it is about crushing somebody else.
Taking away their rights.
Taking away their livelihood and crushing them.
That promise is absolutely nothing less than kerosene to throw onto the fire.
Ron DeSantis, who we'll discuss in just a minute, obviously, promises to get things done.
Where Trump differs is a much more gleeful attack of enemies.
That means that DeSantis is either going to have to match him or fall by the wayside.
My bet is the latter.
And my bet is that a lot of these people, these institutes, these think tanks, these donors, a lot of these consultants and strategists and these groups that have been trying to reverse engineer MAGA for all these years are going to follow suit.
This is A call for violence.
A call for state violence.
A call for state oppression.
And that's the way that that is going to play out.
I have almost no doubt whatsoever.
Now, one of the other notable speeches at CPAC came from Michael Knowles, who is one of these right-wing personalities.
He, of course, comes from the Daily Wire.
You know, he has these conservative bona fides.
And Knowles is at the forefront of the attack on transgender Americans.
And this is an excerpt from the speech that, of course, captured a lot of the headlines.
There can be no middle way in dealing with transgenderism.
It is all or nothing.
If transgenderism is true, if men really can become women, then it's true for everybody of all ages.
If transgenderism is false, as it is, if men really can't become women, as they cannot, then it's false for everybody too.
And if it's false, then we should not indulge it.
Especially since that indulgence requires taking away the rights and customs of so many people.
If it is false, then for the good of society, and especially for the good of the poor people who have fallen prey to this confusion, transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.
The whole preposterous ideology at every level.
Michael Knowles sucks and is a joyfully oppressive figure.
This attack on transgender people, punching down at a vulnerable community, a group of people who are simply trying to live their lives, talking about eradicating transgenderism.
And this is, by the way, you know, part of the huge and intentional disconnect that comes from the right and the rights of transgender Americans.
The idea of eradicating transgenderism is literally the idea of eradicating transgender people.
By taking away their rights to live their lives the way that they would like to, the way that they should be able to, is literally, literally taking away their rights and taking away their lives.
Of course, Knowles has spent the past few days winking and nodding as he's, you know, possibly threatening to sue some of the people writing headlines about this, saying he never said that he wanted to eradicate the people, just transgenderism.
What he did at CPAC was introduce a new rhetorical framework in all of this.
And it's not something that he has come up with because all of these people have deep, deep ties with a lot of these institutes and a lot of these think tanks that are going through and parsing language and rhetorical and linguistical Attacked.
Now, I'm going to play this thing.
This was from an interview between Charlie Kirk, who's another one of these figures who does the exact same thing.
And what he says to Michael Knowles in the wake of this speech at CPAC is incredibly telling.
And, you know, what's sort of gaining the headlines here is this really disgusting thing that he does at the end where he makes light of people saying that what Knowles is pushing is genocidal.
Because, obviously, these people have to have a hell of a good time laughing about this and chuckling about it, you know, the concerns of the libs, the triggered libs, and all of this.
Because people are, understandably, Upset and terrified that people like Michael Knowles are out there saying this shit.
So the headlines from this interaction between Kirk and Knowles, the headlines are going to talk about him making light of those concerns.
But I want to point out that what Kirk is getting ready to express in this clip that you're about to hear This is a distillation, an expression, of exactly how these things work.
People say, how do we get our country back in all this?
You need young, articulate, entrepreneurial truth-tellers that are empowered to push the status quo, to push tired old dogma, and you're going to start to see legislative wins and courage happen because of it.
I've said this before, the media hates when I say this.
Politicians are only reading off the script that we give them, and the script is largely made sense of by articulate You know, podcasters or radio show hosts, Tucker Carlson, Michael Knowles, Candace Owens, Shapiro, Walsh, and all of a sudden now Tennessee has accomplished something that would have been a pipe dream a couple years ago.
We went from a conservative movement that was afraid to do bathroom bills in Indiana and North Carolina, to now banning the metacommutilation of children.
What changed?
What changed is now the people who are processing, that are communicating the truth, Kirk is, uh, repulsive.
- No longer just the talking heads on TV.
There's a new generation of truth tellers and it has liberated the conservative movement.
Michael, we're out of time.
Best of luck on your genocidal campaign. - I'm kidding, Charlie.
- And media matters.
I'm kidding.
- Kirk is repulsive, but he's not lying.
What has happened in terms of how this country has moved so far right And I wrote about this in my sub stack briefly and how these messages get communicated and how they take shape and how we move the Overton window and how things are experienced and processed as he puts before he corrects himself.
What happens is that those donors who take care of all these institutes, all these think tanks, and are paying off Republicans in order to be their PR fronts, they are also the ones subsidizing the shows that people like Michael Knowles and Charlie Kirk appear on.
They're not that popular.
They're not making all that much money.
Which is something that we saw recently with all these schisms in right-wing media.
The entire point is that they are being paid for by billionaires who need people out there promoting these ideas and tinkering around at the edges with messaging.
It is always coming from this weaponization of culture war fears, which is what the conservatives and the GOP prey upon.
In order to go ahead and clear the way for conservative state domination, including everything from deregulation, the absolute destruction of any impediment to profit and power, But also to go ahead and take over these industries and places including public education and, you know, to go after things like Social Security, you name it.
They need people like Kirk and Knowles to be out in front of people trying to find the perfect way to present the tested and focused attacks that they have gone ahead and created in these laboratories of the think tanks and the institutes, if they are successful.
Which they have been, particularly in this new era of social media, including everything from YouTube and podcasts, which they can go ahead and tinker around the edges with.
They can pay to promote these things.
They can get them fake followers.
They can get them fake impressions.
They can continue to grow this thing as they create and foment these fake faux populist movements.
Kirk gives it away.
Knowles was at CPAC pitching to the crowd a new way to talk about the war on transgender people in order to go ahead and promote the conservative and the wealthy's agenda.
You can go ahead and say that transgenderism must be eradicated, which sounds a lot like what the fascists said about Jews because it's intended to.
The conservative playbook has always worked like this.
You find a small, vulnerable group.
That has issues with the larger group because the larger group doesn't understand them, doesn't trust them.
There is an easily accessible amount of outrage that you can go ahead and stoke and use for your own purposes.
In this case, in America, we are dealing with a generational and a societal and political issue when it comes to a generation that is getting older, including the boomers and the generations underneath them, many of whom do not understand What transgenderism is, it frightens them.
It triggers their aggrievement.
They want other people to suffer like they have.
They're also not comfortable with themselves.
And as a result, people who are living openly, in an authentic way, frighten them.
Because the patriarchy is the underpinning of the entire apparatus that has created their power and their wealth.
He's making a pitch as if he was at a trade show.
So what we have now seen from CPAC, it's almost like going to an automobile expo and finding out, oh this year electric vehicles are in.
Oh, this year, SiriusXM components inside the car, everybody's got to have them.
You have to have a digital touchscreen in every car.
Now, it's the retribution idea that you need somebody to go in there and punish your enemies as the number one focus.
That spotlighting and eradicating and using words like eradication and going ahead and using the ideas of what eradication means.
You can say, we'll eradicate transgenderism in the public space.
And you can say, well, I didn't mean eradicate transgender people.
I mean, that's a whole different ballgame.
This was the presentation of where the right is going to go, which is why we have to keep paying attention to CPAC.
Because the modern Republican Party is absolutely held captive by its far right.
And by how the far right is using these fascistic ideas to push the agendas of the wealth class that goes ahead and bankrolls them and directs them.
So what have we learned here?
2023 and 2024 are going to be tough.
And you'd better recognize real fast That the transgender question that these people are posing is a serious, serious threat.
And they're not going to back away from it.
They're going to double down, they're going to triple down, and all of this wink-wink, nod-nod, nudge-nudge bullshit is just hiding a simple fact, which is they believe that they have found a winner.
It's the exact same thing that happened with critical race theory, the grooming slur, which we're going to hear more of both.
But now it is about that culture war that has been fought for years.
And as we keep telling people, you have to pay attention to what the culture war is doing because it may be cold, but it sure as hell can get hot in a hurry.
And that's what we're looking at now.
It is an escalation.
And you have to understand where the Republican Party is going to go with this thing.
Meanwhile, down in the state of Florida, where I hope Nick is enjoying himself.
I hope they didn't get wind of the fact that one half of the Muckrake podcast was entering the state.
I wish you well, Nick, if you're listening.
In Florida, we can see the result of all of this.
While people like Kirk and Knowles and other right-wing ideologues continue to shift the Overton window, what it does over time is it creates fertile ground to go ahead and make good on all of these appeals.
If you go ahead and create a state of panic using these carefully chosen and crafted words and appeals that go ahead and play on fears and insecurities, you can create a situation in which you can achieve whatever you want.
You know, in the past, it was a thing like in North Carolina or Indiana, you know, that Kirk had mentioned, where you talk about, oh, let's go ahead and go after transgender people in bathrooms.
And then, you know, that would be controversial enough.
But now, because the Overton window has been moved so successfully, and because in the United States the mood and the political discourse has been shoved so far to the right that we are currently looking at the possibility of a conservative movement the likes of which we have been warning about for years is made possible, you can see what the results are.
I've been doing this now for going on seven years.
I, uh...
What I worried about was reaching this point.
And this is why I did this podcast.
This is why I wrote the books.
I wrote the articles.
This is why I tweeted.
I've done everything that I possibly could to try and head this stuff off.
And why?
Because it was very obvious where it was going to go.
Down in Florida, where Ron DeSantis is just absolutely presiding over an authoritarian state, What we're watching develop in these places and in the legislature are unreal.
Here's two examples of just a couple things that popped up onto the radar.
And I want to point out that when you do this, When you start using these attacks and when they gain momentum, you start seeing a lot of these state senators and legislatures, they'll get fed a lot of legislation that is written and carefully crafted basically to go ahead and in basketball it's called a heat check.
It's when you hit a couple shots so you shoot a shot from like almost half court just to see how hot you are.
So here we have, from the think tanks and the institutes, we have a couple of bills that have now been proposed.
One is Bill 1316, and this originated from State Senator Jason Brodeur.
This, I think, has a real opportunity to pass.
This is the idea that anybody who writes about politics in the state of Florida and particularly covers the governor, the assistant governor, cabinet members, or members of the legislature, they would be forced by Florida law to register with the state.
There's a ton of penalties here that if you do not register in a timely fashion you get a ton of penalties put upon you, a ton of fines.
The idea here Is that if you write about politics in the state of Florida, they will track you.
They will see what you are writing about.
And the purpose behind this, first of all, is to police how things are covered in the state of Florida.
Because as DeSantis attempts to go ahead and loosen libel laws, including taking away everything from anonymous sources to protections, They want to make sure that everybody in the state who talks about this, every journalist, every blogger, every individual, that they have an understanding of who they are, where they are, and what they are publishing.
This is aggressive censoring, censorship, and domination of communication.
But it's also to go ahead and create an intimidation factor that would go ahead and ensure that people would go ahead and be just a little bit more careful to go ahead and avoid any consequences from this, including the fines or the harassment from the government.
Now as I talked about again on Substack, one of the things that happens here is as you create these oppressive systems, people are going to go above and beyond what the law requires to stay away from the consequences.
You would see in the state of Florida almost a complete capturing of the journalist and the communication and political coverage within the state.
Now that's just in Florida.
Now, where did this idea come from?
Funny you ask.
Because it mirrors what took place in Hungary under Viktor Orban.
There have been a lot of reports from celebrating Republicans that this actually was patterned explicitly on what Viktor Orban was able to accomplish in Hungary.
These think tanks and these institutes listen to Orban and members of his Fidesz political party, but they listen to Orban specifically when he came to CPAC or when he has welcomed multiple members of the Republican Party and their groups into Hungary so that he could go ahead and tutor them.
This is part of the international authoritarian movement that is growing.
This is patterned after Orbanism.
To go ahead and take over communications and journalistic coverage.
If you think that this is going to be limited to Florida, if you want to say, yeah, go ahead, screw Florida, awful place, I'm telling you, that's not the end of this.
Florida has become the main and most aggressive laboratory of these ideas.
And I can tell you right now, As someone who covers this stuff, as someone who blogs about this stuff, as someone who publishes this stuff, as someone who engages in journalism around this stuff, this has me worried.
Not gonna lie.
I know a lot of journalists.
I know a lot of political figures.
I know a lot of people who make their living doing this, who do it out of a sense of duty and out of a sense of honor and obligation.
And a lot of them have told me in no uncertain terms that they have gone ahead and censored themselves under less pressure than this.
Because they know that the news media won't reward them if they talk about what's actually going on or say what they actually think.
This is a massive problem.
And if you start looking at the power of the state being focused on journalists and bloggers and opinion writers I, the consequences of that are, it's almost too much to even really begin to fathom.
Because what you're seeing again is the push of illiberal ideas.
It's the leveraging of the power of the state in order to intimidate and in order to control.
I expect this will probably gain traction in some way, shape, or form, whether it's in Florida or elsewhere.
I have to imagine at some point or another this rigged Supreme Court will hear a case that will go ahead and try and enshrine this into law.
But it is part of this entire plan to go ahead and backstop things through the Supreme Court and to feed cases up the chain in order to go ahead and backdoor a lot of this stuff using the state of Florida and other vulnerable Republican-controlled legislatures to push this at a national level.
We've already seen this with abortion bans and the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Also on the docket, called the Ultimate Cancel Act.
This has been pushed by Florida State Senator Blase Ingalia.
This is a bill that is worded specifically to ban any party that has upheld the forced servitude or enslavement of humans.
For those who are looking for the angle here, it's an attack on the Democratic Party.
Now, personally, as I've said in the past, I'm not a member of the Democratic Party, in part because of its history with both slavery and also the white supremacy of the Dixiecrats, but also Woodrow Wilson's creation of the administrative state and you name it, and the modern problems of the Democratic Party.
I happen to think that maybe the Democratic Party should have gone away and been replaced by something else after the Civil War.
But this is, it's one of those long shots.
It's an attempt to go ahead and ban the Democratic Party in the state of Florida, which would not only get rid of political opposition, but possibly disenfranchise a ton of people.
The long shot is that it probably will not happen, but my God if it did.
I mean, we should understand what they are actually trying to do, which is, over time, And we keep hearing everything about child abuse when it comes to gender care.
We keep hearing the idea of the woke mind virus.
You know, Huckabee Sanders giving the State of the Union rebuttal saying this is a fight between the insane and the sane.
One of the things that we have seen in right-wing reactionary movements This is an attempt to go ahead and define what sanity is and what mental illness is.
Liberalism, socialism, leftism, multiculturalism, they have continually been called insane in order to go ahead and police against opposing ideas.
This isn't an accident.
This has been part of the larger push within the conservative groups for centuries.
Whether it was the rise of liberalism in the 18th century or the push for workers' rights in the industrial age and even civil rights.
I mean even the treatment of slaves within the United States and abolitionists.
Or if you want to go ahead and turn to the Spanish Civil War.
Which included a lot of children being taken from their families, which, I mean, is something that's being tinkered with now.
It's the idea of taking kids away from parents who would go ahead and affirm their gender care.
The idea is to go ahead and outlaw opposition by treating it as a mental illness that needs to be handled by the power of the state.
It is a slippery-ass slope.
If that's allowed to happen, well, I mean, down the line a ways, that's case closed.
End of the ballgame.
When you start talking about what reality is and what mental illness is or insanity is.
These things that are taking place in Florida were only made possible by the popularization of these ideas and the moving over the Overton window.
I want you to think in your mind back to 2014, 2015.
Think about what has been normalized since then.
How far we have moved in eight to nine years.
In a decade, less than a decade, we have seen so many unthinkable things become the norm.
Neo-Nazism welcomed in public, white supremacy part of an everyday conversation, targeted harassment of vulnerable communities and minorities, the active rollback of the progress of the 20th century, the taking of rights, an attempted coup, all of it.
It made this moment possible.
And it happened for the exact same reasons that we've been covering now for years.
Which is a lack of pushback.
And not even lack of pushback.
You pick up the New York Times.
I just read an article this weekend that was talking about Ron DeSantis and talking about how he was going to give tax credits when it came to dog supplies.
And they talked about how much the crowd oohed and awed and just felt all good about it.
He's being laundered.
He's being normalized.
Because the liberal institutions, the supposed liberal institutions that everybody has come to believe opposes all of this stuff, they're accepting it.
Because of the crisis of neoliberal capitalism.
Things are changing in a hurry.
But that's the endgame.
The difference between reality and madness, as defined by the state.
That's how you get rid of opposition.
That's how you get rid of opposing political viewpoints.
Very, very obvious stuff.
And walking away from CPAC with dwindling crowds, it's pretty easy to see what's next.
Before I end, I want to say this, in case anybody needs to be reminded.
It's not just the gay and the transgendered communities that are being targeted.
It's not just their lives and livelihoods that are at stake.
It's not even the people of color who are being marginalized and focused on.
It's not even women in red states or red state citizens in general.
I know that's a fiction we like to tell ourselves.
That maybe in these so-called red states or these places dominated by these Republican legislatures, you know, that maybe they can be contained and maybe even if they left the Union and formed their own country, everything will be okay.
It's not going to happen.
You're on the line too.
The people you love, the communities you care about, the things that matter to you, they are on the line as well.
It's really harrowing to take a look at this.
I know that.
I've said that multiple times.
And listen, most of the time I would go ahead and follow that up with a note of hope.
And I think that there's still hope.
And I think this thing is still going to work out.
But I got to tell you, just between me and you, things are escalating in a hurry.
I knew that it was possible.
I knew this was the direction it was going in.
But to watch it, it breaks my heart.
I hate it.
I absolutely hate it.
As always, these are serious times.
It's time to take it seriously.
There's no time to look away.
There's no time to just simply hope that it's going to stop.
It is pushing and pushing and pushing because there is no other way for authoritarianism or neo-fascism to move.
There's no other direction.
They don't pause.
They don't hit the brakes.
They don't seek something more sensible or kinder.
Once these things start moving, they gain momentum and they pick up speed.
These are serious times for serious people.
It's time to get serious.
Alright, I'll be back on Thursday for the Weekender episode for Patreon subscribers.
Go to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
We depend on your support.
It's one of the few shows that actually talks about this stuff, that has actually consistently called it out, analyzed it, and told you where this stuff was going.
We need your help.
It's patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
We need to keep this thing rolling.
If you need us before the weekender, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?
