Israel & France Struggle With Democracy While Trump Attacks DeSantis
Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman break down the latest protests in both Israel and France as their leaders wrestle with democratic norms related to retirement age in France and the power of the Supreme Court in Israel. They then discuss Trump's obvious signaling by holding a rally of grievance in Waco, Texas on the anniversary of the Branch Davidian siege. In a special segment, Nick's son Moses joins the show to discuss how the Right's use of Cultural Marxism dates back decades to a more nefarious group and how it affects us now.
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We're getting a little 70 degree weather, and it's a great time.
Actually, it's remarkable how, and we're all going to go through this, right?
Pretty soon, the whole country is going to have an awakening in the spring.
And it really does lighten the load a little bit.
I gotta say, in the age of QAnon, don't talk about that we're all going to go through an awakening.
That makes the hackles raise a little bit.
Forgive me, forgive me.
Well, we have a jam-packed show.
Listen, we gotta talk about happenings out in the corporate world.
We have to talk about Ron DeSantis eating pudding with his bare hands.
It's upsetting.
We gotta talk about, speaking of upsetting, one of the worst Trump rallies that I have ever seen.
We're gonna go abroad and talk about popular movements.
And as a special surprise, Nick, we have a guest coming on later.
You want to fill the people in on this world-debuting guest that we've got?
Absolutely.
Well, my son Moses is in town for a spring break.
He's actually in high school, so he's coming in town from boarding school, and this guy's got some takes.
He's got some spicy takes that he wants to discuss, and I thought of no better outlet than to have him come on the podcast and talk a little bit about Cultural Marxism from a 15-year-old's perspective.
I think it'll be really interesting.
We are excited about this.
I cannot wait to get to that.
But before we get to Moses and cultural Marxism, and by the way, smart, smart kid, exactly on the target with this thing, we have to go to Israel.
And Nick, in Israel, over the past couple of days, we have seen some really, really amazing things happening.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who by the way, I don't know if people know this, is still under indictment for two separate crimes, and could possibly be pleading guilty to fraud.
has created a far-right government, and in creating that far-right coalition government, they are now attempting to run roughshod over the judicial system.
This, by the way, would be terrible for minorities.
This was going to cause an incredible amount of problems and possibly even give Netanyahu and his allies more power.
This has not been met well.
He fired the Defense Minister, Yoav Galant, who said that this was a terrible idea, joined a lot of other people.
Nick, the Israeli people did not take kindly to this situation.
Hundreds of thousands of people went out into the streets.
They have threatened a national strike.
We've seen universities and schools shut down.
We've seen people engaging in solidarity.
And, by the way, Netanyahu today has announced, and we're recording this on Monday, March 27th, that he is going to go ahead.
He's not going to go forward with the judicial reforms, and they're going to revisit the issue later.
Nick, what are your reactions to this?
Some pretty amazing scenes out of Israel.
Yeah, I mean, we don't often see such huge protests there.
And part of the reason is because the government has been pretty liberal this entire time and has been a communist based government where they want to, you know, they walk the walk generally, at least if you're an Israeli.
And what's interesting about this, what's making the headlines I think most of all would be what Netanyahu is trying to do to castrate the Supreme Court and allow the Knesset to override any of their decisions and not make them binding.
You know, that is part of it, but this is the most conservative, I suppose is the word, government they've ever had.
And it's filled with all sorts of religious zealots here that never would have gotten any kind of power and position in this government.
And that is really concerning.
So it is great to see that the general population is really not with this and does not want to support what they're trying to do.
And that, at the very least, it kind of sounds to me like Netanyahu's just kicking the can down the road at the moment and not necessarily backing down from anybody.
But, you know, by the way, as dictators will do, right?
They'll make it seem like, oh, yeah, I hear you.
I won't do that, you know, today.
And then, you know, our focus goes on elsewhere.
A few months later, we're not paying attention as much.
And the next thing you know, they're able to push these things through.
So it's extremely concerning.
And if you're an Israeli, it's got to be, you know, there is this notion that they're on the brink of a civil war, and maybe even more so than how we feel in America.
Yeah, this was one of those things where I think people who have paid attention to Israel, they were sort of shocked a little bit by how quickly this happened, right?
Like people getting out into the streets, blockading major highways, setting fires.
And by the way, like to be quite frank, this was a revolutionary situation.
You know, we talk sometimes about what makes a revolution versus an insurrection, what is a failed revolution, all these things.
The military, which by the way, you know, so many of these military reservists who, you know, form the background, backbone of the Israeli army, they said, we're not going out there.
We're not going to deal with this thing.
We're not going to enforce this stuff.
That is when the scales start to tip.
What happened over the past couple of days has been absolutely revolutionary in nature, and we saw such a massive pushback against this.
I mean, we looked at the possibility of a national strike.
We saw teachers, students, citizens, businesses that just simply said, no, we're not going to deal with this.
And you're exactly right.
I think what is happening in Israel is very reflective.
And of course, it has its own local and cultural demarcations, right?
Like there's stuff that's happening in Israel that can't happen anywhere else.
But it also reflects what's happening here and what's happening in a lot of other countries, you know, the supposed Western democracies.
And what's going on here is this is a divide between people who want a secular government and a secular society, obviously allowing people to have their religions, right?
Not wanting to stamp it out, but wanting to have a secular government and a secular society, and people who see the opportunity to use religion for their own purposes.
Netanyahu is a crook, an absolute crook and an authoritarian strongman, and always has been.
I mean, listen, we could talk all day about the fact that this overriding of the court could have possibly played into him trying to avoid his own legal repercussions.
You know, there's a lot of Trump in this situation, and it's not a coincidence that these people, they always talk alike, they always look alike, they always have the same crimes, the same actions, the same tactics.
What is happening here is that the people of Israel have recognized that they are in a moment of crisis.
In America, this is the type of stuff that already should have happened.
I mean, of course, we had the Black Lives Matter protest, one of the biggest protests of all time.
But we need something like this here if we're going to avoid larger consequences.
And there are a ton of problems in Israel that you can only find in Israel.
I mean, listen, you can't deny that.
But this thing looks a lot like what we're dealing with here and what a lot of these Western democracies are dealing with.
No question that Trump is looking at this as a blueprint for what he could do if he gets back into power and to neuter the Supreme Court.
Now the thing that's different here though is that the president appoints the Supreme Court here and it's a little bit more of a process in Israel He's already kind of gotten control of the Supreme Court, if you will, right?
He's sort of kind of circumvented that without having to, you know, to neuter them at all because now they're going to vote in lockstep with him anyway, at least the majority will.
So that's not, there's no question that that's a big part of it.
But what's even more concerning for me, Is that the settlements has always been a thing where, and if you don't know, Israelis will just sort of steal land from Palestinians and build, you know, neighborhoods there.
And, you know, these are generally like, sometimes they're nicer upper scale areas where they just literally level the place that was there, take away land under the kind of almost like eminent domain.
And it's really the chief cause of inflammation, if that's the right word, between Palestinians and Israelis.
And the more you do it, the more strife, the more potential for violence you're going to have between these two groups.
And so when you hear racism thrown about in Israel, it's not necessarily like it is here.
It's about racism against Palestinians.
And what a lot of these people in this new government want to do, and it's sort of their religious fervor as well as ultra-Orthodox people, they want to bring about this.
They hope that the more settlements they build, The more strife that will ramp up between the two groups, and that maybe eventually the army of the Israelis will be like forced to just wipe them out, right?
That's sort of, I think, what their goal is.
They might not do it sort of unimpeded and do it without, you know, being goaded into it first, but they're trying to almost lure that conflict so that they have to say, well, we have no choice.
We need to now just, you know, go in there and take it out completely.
and take over the entire, all the land between the Mediterranean and the West Bank.
And that would be, you know, a humanitarian disaster to say the least.
Oh, and it already is.
And that's one of the things here, right, is that Netanyahu, who again is an absolute criminal and authoritarian, him and a lot of the people around him have used these things in order to gain power and in order to push their agendas, which gives them not just more power, but more wealth and more affluence. which gives them not just more power, but more wealth That has always been what's at the heart of this, and it's like what's happening in the United States, where it's inflaming through fear-mongering, conspiracy theories, religious ideology.
It's using all of those things to create a tinderbox that at any moment is leading to incredible deaths.
And incredible suffering, and again, the humanitarian crisis that you're talking about.
The whole point here, by the way, I agree with you that I think that this is going to kick the can down the road.
I think Netanyahu, and we've seen him now for years, I mean, he has used this fear-mongering for years to keep himself in power.
He maybe blinked today because he recognized that the coalition was starting to fall apart, and this is a tenuous coalition, right?
That's the only way that he's in power, and it was starting to erode.
Like, we were looking at a governmental crisis, a leadership crisis in Israel, and it could have left him out of power again, and vulnerable, by the way, right?
In this situation, maybe it is a kicking in the can down the road.
We've seen him do, you know, basically never ever budge on things.
It feels like he'll probably revisit this.
But this is a win for the people of Israel.
This is a win for the people who got out in the streets and they recognized that solidarity and mass action.
It actually gets stuff done.
And I gotta tell you, and we gotta go over to France as well, and we've been covering this story where Emmanuel Macron used his powers as president in France to unilaterally raise the retirement age.
Guess what?
People ain't thrilled.
Macron right now has a 23% approval rating.
Nick, can you check, is that good?
That's not great, Bob.
And basically, the protests have continued.
We've all seen, you know, these pictures and videos out of Paris of people dining while fires rage and people are getting in these back and forths with the police.
The police are getting more and more brutal.
We're looking at trash strikes.
We're looking at people going on national strikes.
I mean, we're seeing things left and right that are getting ugly.
Macron's cabinet has been meeting, talking about possibly trying to get this thing back on track.
It doesn't feel like it's going to happen, but it does feel, again, like a people's movement is it's obvious that this thing is unpopular.
It's obvious that people are starting to push back.
And this situation feels like it's getting worse in France.
And it also goes ahead and echoes what's happening in Israel, what's happening in Iran.
It feels like we're entering into an era of popular uprisings, does it not?
Yeah.
Well, I think that Macron was probably relying on the fact that people would just sort of get distracted.
And, you know, they had their say.
They got upset for a couple of days and then it kind of, you know, dissipates.
And what he did is still there.
Perhaps this is the new normal where these things will sustain and will cause repercussions to these guys and their power, where they will have to listen and adjust this thing.
And again, you know, the French, culturally, they get it.
They get about how hard you should work and how hard you should be, you know, not working.
And those things are really important to them.
Again, I had expressed a little sympathy towards the numbers, right?
Like, I get it.
In terms of the math, there are some concerns, especially even here with Social Security here.
Like, at some point, we're going to have a problem covering those costs.
And it felt like if you go far enough out, if you're 25 years old, you know, in 40 years from now, you know, when you're 64, it's going to kick in, you probably might be okay with that.
But clearly, that isn't okay.
Right?
They're still not okay with that.
And so you're going to have to do what politicians need to do is listen to the freaking people and then adjust your policies accordingly.
Yeah, and this is one of those situations, like, as we reach this sort of late-stage, God help us, late-stage neoliberalism, there's no way to go ahead and square the circle unless you start spreading the pain around more, right?
And there are conversations to have about retirement ages, there are conversations to have about all of this stuff, but you can't do it in a way where a technocrat, like Emmanuel Macron, is like, it is done, right?
It doesn't work that way.
The problem is that a technocracy says that that is how it has to work.
You have to have people who are specialists, many of them that you will never know, you'll never have any sort of democratic accountability for.
They're the ones who are going to decide these things and you probably just need to stay at home and shut up.
I will tell you, and this was another thing that we have to add to this conversation, the National Assembly in France is currently pushing, because the Olympics are coming to France in 2024 by the way, They are pushing a huge amount of money into investing for artificial intelligence health security measures, including surveillance.
And by the way, if anybody is wondering, where do those things come from?
Like, are they just being developed in country?
No, they are not.
They are being developed in China in handling the Uyghurs, right?
This is the stuff that we're seeing in England, we're seeing in America, we're seeing in France.
I gotta tell you, if we're seeing an age of popular uprisings, Nick, there's a real possibility that these nation states who are carrying out the agendas of neoliberalism, which is going to spread that unpopular pain around, we're probably looking at more surveillance like this.
And we're probably going to be seeing a lot of things that have been used around the world, including in China, including in the war on terror, whether or not that's AI surveillance, surveillance in general, Digital surveillance or drones or, I don't know, police robot dogs.
Like, we're looking at how that circle is going to get squared.
Am I wrong?
Well, Jerry, just behave and you have nothing to worry about.
Yes, that's right.
That would be the thing that they're going to say.
Now, here's the thing.
I don't have a lot of things in common with people who are Second Amendment zealots, I suppose we'll call them, right?
I don't have anything in common with them.
But I think I do now.
Because when you hear them talk about curtailing any kind of gun, you know, access, they're always thinking, well, that's just the first step.
And then next thing you know, we don't have any guns.
Well, this is the other idea, right?
Once we begin the process of putting AI into these cameras, now that's the beginning of a whole other mess of civil rights violations.
Now, let's not forget, we have closed circuit TV all across America now.
Certainly in London and England, they've had this for a while too.
You could track somebody all the way across a town with no problem, right?
All the cameras can connect together.
So obviously though, the concern with them is you have a minority report feeling here, right?
Where as soon as you walk into a store and it scans your eyeballs and it knows who you are and knows where you're going.
That obviously is a problem because I certainly don't want people to know, you know, where I buy my clothes.
That's an important thing that I like to guard.
And so at the very least, how do we, how will we ever You know, keep that under control.
And who are you going to trust to make sure that it's not being abused, right?
It's not going to be Facebook and those people.
It's not going to be TikTok and those people.
And meanwhile, yeah, if China is behind this whole thing and we've seen their violations, I suppose the answer would have to be just we can't do it.
It's bad.
It's really, really bad and unsettling.
And by the way, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out another mass shooting today.
Recording this Monday, March 27th.
Mass shooting at a school in Tennessee.
Awful!
But we're not going to get the guns.
We're not going to get that figured out.
We're not going to pass laws.
But what can we do?
We'll go ahead and say, ah, we can't do anything about it.
Let's get these surveillance systems in.
Let's get these AI systems in.
That's how we'll go ahead and do it.
It is the argument to go ahead and allow these things to start coming in, including making our schools prisons and making every public place basically a prison where people can be surveilled.
The problem is that when you start giving those things, when you start giving them room, they grow.
Because that's what the nation-state does.
The nation-state at some point or another looks at the people and a democratic mass as a danger.
And we're starting to see that sort of grow.
And on that note, we have to talk, Nick, about one of the most disturbing and listen, I've seen my fair share of Trump rallies.
I've been to quite a few of them over the years.
This rally this weekend, one of the most disturbing things that I have ever seen.
The 45th president, Donald Trump, fresh off of... By the way, have you heard how much money he's raised off of saying that he was going to get arrested?
Have you heard this?
You know, I heard early on that it was millions, but what's the final number?
Millions!
We're millions into this thing.
Still not indicted, still not arrested.
He goes and he holds a rally in Waco, Texas.
And I say the word Waco, and obviously everybody thinks about the Branch Davidian compound, the massacre there.
Wouldn't you know it?
This was during the 30-year anniversary of the siege in Waco, of course, which would lead to 86 people dying in a fire in the standoff with the ATF and FBI, which I have something to say about that in a second.
He gets up in front of this crowd, And I gotta tell you, this campaign has changed.
I want to go ahead and have Nick play a little clip from this rally so we can start talking about how this thing is starting to shift in tone and tenor.
And 2024 is the final battle.
That's gonna be the big one.
If you put me back in the White House, their reign will be over and America will be a free nation once again.
How do you feel about that, Nick?
How does it feel listening to a cult leader former president refer to the final battle?
Well, you know, I haven't spent a lot of time in Texas, but I am familiar, I do reading, I read a lot about it, and I see the interviews, and there is this, we can establish there's an independent streak amongst Texans.
Is that safe to say?
I think that's safe to say.
And there are probably a lot of Texans who really look at Waco in a different way than a lot of the other parts of the country, right?
And maybe even as a badge of honor, like that was a stand that people made because we're independent and we don't want to have the government taking away anything, right?
So, you know, it is, again, he keeps wanting to say, I don't like violence.
They asked him about this and he was quoted saying, I don't like violence, but we really need it because the election was stolen.
Like, that's what he keeps saying.
And there is only one path this goes towards.
Now, what scale of violence we're talking about, I can't quite predict.
But it doesn't seem like there's any other way to avoid it because of what they're saying, what the rhetoric is, and it's just as frustrating.
You heard the crowd respond, and that's really what's, and that wasn't, it could have just been a little bit more muted, but it's like, this is full-throated, you know, cheering on of what would ultimately be a civil war.
Yeah, a few things on this.
First off, Trump has escalated his rhetoric.
At one point he reposted Retruth, whatever you want to call it, a picture of himself holding a bat next to Alvin Bragg, the African-American DA, who, by the way, he's referred to as an animal and saying that he is carrying out the work of the devil.
These are not accidental triggers.
You know what I mean?
Like, this isn't just him just having fun and being wild.
Trump is a cornered rat.
And cornered rats are desperate.
And he is getting more and more desperate.
It is not a coincidence that he went to Waco during the 30th anniversary of the siege in Waco.
Quite frankly, Waco has become a place to take a pilgrimage for white supremacists, nationalists, domestic terrorists, militia members, you name it, right?
Now, did Trump think of that?
No.
That's not how any of this works.
There are people on his staff who are there to figure out what QAnon wants, what these separatists want, what Proud Boys, what white supremacists want.
They absolutely made sure that he was going to make an appearance in Waco.
It just so happens that the apocalyptic nature of what Trump is talking about, it corresponds with his level of desperation.
I'm sorry, we've said it before.
Is there a possibility that his popularity will decline?
Maybe.
But guess what happens whenever a cult reaches its pinnacle?
What happens is it starts off as a larger movement.
All of a sudden, people say, oh, I don't care for this.
This is weird.
Suddenly, you get a real concentrated group of true believers who get together, and what happens?
Terrible shit.
By the way, Nick, can you play this?
I don't know if people saw this.
There's a song that has been put out by Trump, and they call themselves the Jan 6 Choir.
It's called Justice for All.
And I just want people to remember that this is at a rally, a numbers estimate of 18,000 people in Waco, Texas.
Where a cult who followed a self-defined messiah went ahead and went down in flames with that self-defined messiah.
I just want people to hear this and we're going to talk about this brand new tone and tenor that's being rolled out.
USA! USA! USA! USA! USA!
I cannot believe you're actually sharing your phone. - Oh.
Ladies and gentlemen, please rise and place your hand over your heart for the number one song on iTunes, Amazon, and the Billboard charts, Justice for All, featuring President Donald J. Trump and the J6 Choir.
Oh, say can you see, by the dawn turning light, what so proudly we hailed at the twilight's what so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming.
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.
Whose broad stripes and bright stars...
All right.
I mean, it goes on.
So, for anybody out there listening who's like, oh, am I going crazy here?
Let me go ahead and make sure that you know what just happened.
The former president of the United States, Donald Trump, released a song with a group of men who tried to overthrow the election of 2020 and tried to carry out an insurrection at the Capitol.
They released a song called Justice for All, in reference, by the way, to their actions at the Capitol.
And that song is that choir of insurrectionists singing the National Anthem mixed with Donald Trump saying the Pledge of Allegiance, and they asked the people of the crowd to stand up and put their hands over their hearts as if this was the National Anthem itself.
There's a lot to break down here, but is this not one of the most disturbing things you've seen in a while?
Really?
I mean it's nothing sacred you know this is this is like you know I don't like covers sometimes a band will do a cover of a song and you're like this is not should not have been out you know they you know did uh do we really need to have um you know uh I don't know anyway the point being that uh I'm trying to picture myself in that pitch meeting They're like, you know, let's come up with a good, let's take the national anthem.
How can we, what can we do with that?
Oh yeah, let's cross cut in between that with Trump saying the Pledge of Allegiance, but then let's have these weird long pauses in between because we don't know how to edit.
Like, I don't understand.
This is edited.
It's not him live doing it, right?
They're playing an edited thing.
But did you notice that?
How awkward is that?
That there's these big gaps in between where he, if I were doing that in the movie, like you would have him overlap a little bit of of his part of the Pledge of Allegiance with the National Anthem.
Listen, am I actually giving them help here?
Am I trying to help them?
I think you're editing them.
And I think that's probably for the better.
I think they're trying to make it dramatic.
Nick, this is weird.
This is weird and really disturbing.
This rally, by the way, has moved, and I want to make this clear, it has moved from elect me and I'll make America great again and your jobs will come back.
It has gone from that to we are ready to enter the final battle against the deep state.
And, by the way, we're going to have our own anthem.
You're going to see so much of this and so much of these crowds doing this.
It is going to become a new Christian nationalist idea.
It is really, really becoming more and more warped by the day.
And here's the thing.
I've followed this for years.
I, myself, am shocked.
And I don't get shocked very much anymore.
This is shocking.
This is actually really surprising and disturbing.
Um, I guess, so you hold the national anthem as a sacred thing, it sounds like, that you shouldn't be screwing around.
No, I don't!
Listen, I do, I find the national anthem to be sacred, but I gotta tell you that they have blended this thing, it's one of the dumbest things I've seen.
Also, real fast, I would be remiss if I didn't point out, I love that these people who hate culture have to point out it's the number one song on iTunes, it's the number one song on Amazon, it's the number one song on the Billboard charts.
No, it's not!
Shut up!
And on top of that, that's so stupid and craven, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
But everyone's gonna believe it.
That's the whole thing about this, is that they understand that they can say anything Right?
Anything that pumps them up and makes them look good, and they're going to believe it.
And they're going to go back and tell their friends about it, and it's going to spread.
And that has always been the danger.
It's not that these people like DeSantis and Ted Cruz, that they're idiots, and that they're believing this stuff.
No.
It's that they are doing it to get votes, but the danger is that the people will assimilate this information and take it as fact.
And we're so far gone.
Right.
I don't know how you'd ever get these people back to believe in any kind of normal democracy after this.
I don't either.
And he is just priming them for some incredibly tragic and awful things.
At this rally, by the way, he mimicked Ron DeSantis crying.
And Nick, we talked about this.
Pete Dominick and I did a little bit on the The Weekender episode last week.
By the way, go to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
Go and support the show.
By the way, people who keep... We're starting to see a bunch of people who are starting to subscribe.
They're pumped!
They're like, I can't believe I haven't done this before!
They're reaching out!
They're like, my god, what have I been doing?
Those are my Fridays!
Why aren't you doing this on Friday?
It's a great time.
Anyway...
He makes fun of DeSantis, and I wanted to talk to you about this because things have shifted a little bit in the past couple of weeks.
DeSantis has been absolutely sucking, and it's been this really strange thing that has taken place.
He's been out hawking his book, which has been sort of a shadow campaign.
Already, the reports from everywhere he goes are that his operation is a complete and utter shitshow.
He's turning people off left and right.
He's a disturbing person.
Strategists who are around this campaign are already leaking stories to the press that he is, quote, out over his skis.
Real fast, Nick, can you play this from the Piers Morgan interview?
This rumored story, by the way, I don't know if you've heard it, That people are now reporting that Ron DeSantis on a plane, I believe going to Washington DC, ate pudding with his fingers.
Have you ever eaten a chocolate pudding with three fingers?
I don't remember ever doing that.
I'm telling you, maybe when I was a kid, but it's interesting.
You know, there's a lot of people when they go at you, sometimes they have, like, really good ammunition.
Like, you're a crook, you did this, you did that.
For me, they're talking about pudding.
Like, is that really the best you got?
Okay, bring it on.
But now you're not having puddings.
No, no, no pudding.
They're done.
No way.
It's sugar, man.
Nick, can you answer right now, have you ever eaten pudding with your three fingers?
I do not like pudding, and no, I did not.
But it does bring to mind a... Did you know that I had a local access TV show in college with a buddy of mine?
I did not!
How is this going to get wrapped up into pudding?
Well, let's just say there's a funny old joke that we filmed about pudding and having a dream about eating pudding and waking up.
That's all I'm going to tell you.
But nonetheless, so I've been on camera eating pudding, but not with my fingers.
And I got to tell you, that was not a denial either, was it, Jerry?
No, it wasn't!
That's the thing!
Like, you have to come out and say, no, I've never eaten pudding with my fingers.
I got to tell you, by the way, I think some of what's happening here, and I want to throw two things out.
I want to hear your opinion.
One, sometimes you kind of are the it thing in politics and people are like, this guy's the next president of the United States of America, and they start giving you a ton of money.
And what do you do with that money?
You start high.
And by the way, it's before you can put out ads.
Right?
Because you're not going to put out an ad that's like DeSantis 24 you haven't even declared.
You use that money on staffers and strategists and communications experts and sometimes that team gets so huge and they just start tripping over themselves left and right and you don't you don't have anything even approaching a direction.
The second thing is And I want to hear your opinion.
This might be the reason why he can't beat Trump.
They're already talking about recalibrating his campaign.
Trump's never recalibrated!
My god, can you imagine a meeting where Trump talks about recalibrating anything?
This feels weird.
This stumbling block feels kind of big.
How do you feel about this?
I mean, there was some, you know, when Bannon comes in, there's some recalibrating and they got rid of, you know, what's-his-face.
So, like, we've seen a little bit, but he never changed.
But it's ridiculously early for all of this that I don't even know what to make of it because, yeah, Two weeks ago he was up 41, 27.
Now he's down 41, 27.
It'll go back.
I'm sure he'll get more popular.
But that said, the reason why he's gone down is because finally Trump started to actually run a campaign and have these rallies.
And unless Trump's going to stop doing the rallies for like six straight months and then give him another opportunity, then I don't know if he recovers from this.
It is early.
And let's not forget, obviously, he's waiting for Trump to get arrested and that he thinks that that's going to help him.
And I don't know if it will or not in a primary.
If only there was a room with iron bars that Trump could go to for six months to stop the rallies and keep him out of debates.
I mean, I gotta tell you, I agree.
I, you know, when I was talking with Pete Dominic, Dominic is just absolutely, he's decided there's no way whatsoever that DeSantis could win the nomination.
In fact, by the way, he threw out Pompeo, which I think is just in left field.
Yeah, I know.
It made me feel cold, too.
It made my skin crawl a little bit.
But I gotta tell you, I think DeSantis will come back from this thing, but I also think that it's not the slam dunk that I think a lot of the people around him believed that it was going to be.
That Trump was just going to fall by the wayside and he could just sort of normalize, you know, sweep his way into the nomination.
I don't think that's going to work.
But there are some cracks in that armor.
And I got to tell you, part of it is the fact that he is definitively a weird person.
He's a very, very strange person.
And we've talked about it before.
Not likable.
There's not a lot to him that really endears him to people outside of the fact that, as governor, he's passed a bunch of policies that people wanted him to pass.
Other than that, there's no charisma.
There's no charm.
I mean, I would rather get kicked in the face than spend five minutes with this person.
But I think what is being revealed is that when he gets outside of Florida and he gets outside of that Republican bubble in Florida, that there are some kinks to work out if this guy wants to have any chance whatsoever at national prominence.
Well, and you've been on this the entire time.
You've made that clear exactly what the issue is that we're now all seeing, but you're also almost to the letter describing Donald Trump.
You know, unlikeable, no charisma, no charm.
I mean, maybe he does have charm, I guess.
We're so far down, I can't remember that.
But, you know... But I will say, real fast, real fast, Nick, on that point, because you brought up something good here.
I actually think that what happened with Trump, it wasn't just his ability to say shit that, you know, like, shocked people, right?
Which DeSantis isn't necessarily going to do.
He's going to be very buttoned down.
Trump also is weird in a way that like is disturbing to the point of laughing at it.
Do you know what I mean?
Like the things that he would say like, this is the wettest hurricane we've ever seen from a standpoint of water.
Or, you know, him the other day, I don't know if you saw this, going after the inheritance tax and being like, you can leave it to your children, or maybe you don't if you don't love them.
Maybe that won't even be a problem.
Like, that sort of weird cadence and things that he would say, I think people enjoy that, and I don't think DeSantis has a lot of it.
Does that make sense?
OK, I can see that distinction.
I mean, it's there.
It's so detestable either way on both sides for both these people.
But but there is a distinction.
I can see that.
And yeah, and even in the voice and even the whole presentation is not going to capture, you know, even the flamboyance of Trump's hair.
Right?
Sort of softens that a little bit, right?
Because, and DeSantis, I'd love to see DeSantis try that.
By the way, let's not, let's not put it past him.
He might end up like changing his hairstyle because he's so desperate to do something to get back in the race.
Listen, here's the thing that I'm learning in the years that we are covering American politics and the decline of the American empire.
If something is weird, there's a chance of it happening.
I mean, you know what I mean?
Like, he could come out like a tie that comes down to, like, his knees.
You know?
And he's just like, man, I love hamburgers.
Love them.
Can't get enough of hamburgers.
Well, it won't be.
I would pay a lot of money if he dyed his hair blonde.
That would be the ultimate, right?
Like, I gotta do something.
I gotta do my hair the same color.
That would be hilarious.
And we'll probably, in our lifetime, see that in some sort of a political race.
I really do.
Someone will just radically change their hair to try and match the opponent who's winning.
Like a real single white female type situation.
Yeah.
Right.
Well, listen, the award winning corporate executive officer coverage that the Muckrake podcast brings you, that is something that we have to get into.
Nick, we got to go.
Speaking of the People's Republic of China, We gotta head over there where the development conference has been hanging out.
Not a lot of American CEOs have been going over there because, by the way, I don't know if you're keeping track, there's a burgeoning new Cold War that is starting to grow by the day.
But one of the people who went over there, it's important to point out, Tim Cook of Apple.
And Timmy Boy not only went over to China to participate in this forum, but has nothing but good things to say about China.
Went over there and just absolutely kissed their asses.
There's a lot to unpack here, but Nick, what do you make of the CEO of Apple going to China and kissing their ass when most every other CEO is absolutely staying away?
Oh, I mean, this is a business decision.
They were reeling over the inability to produce enough iPhones during COVID, and now that they're finally loosening it up, you have to do it.
This is what you do.
You pay your respects to this country so that they'll let you mine what you need from them and exploit their citizens for cheap labor.
I mean, that's what you have to do.
I mean, as far as his fiduciary duty to this stockholders, like this is what you kind of have to do.
And it's disgusting.
And it is remarkable.
We don't have a lot more of a parade of CEOs doing this because they all rely on China like they do.
But yeah, you will not hear one thing from him about any kind of human rights violations or any other issues that that they should be handling and that Apple should be punishing China for.
Yeah, that's absolutely right.
And I want to go ahead and set the table here.
In the age of neoliberal globalism, nation-states pale in comparison to corporations.
I've talked about this.
You know, corporations like to hang out and sort of let the nation-states do their thing, while meanwhile they sort of eclipse them in terms of power and scope.
These corporations don't care about nations.
They don't care about, you know, patriotism and loyalty.
There's a reason they don't pay taxes.
They're not interested in participating in the nation-state game.
So as a result, each of these corporations and CEOs are going to have to make a choice in a burgeoning Cold War.
And Tim Cook is already signaling something.
And they have incredible ties to China.
Cook and the other people at Apple have just, anytime China said jump, they've said how high.
They've gone, they've censored the internet, they've censored the phones, they've created these firewalls for them.
Right now, Cook is in the middle of a six-year, $275 billion, that's more than a quarter of a trillion dollar deal, with the People's Republic of China.
That, by the way, goes until 2026.
Hopefully we can stave off World War III until then.
You are going to see, going forward, these corporations making a choice.
Because as globalism starts to wind down and as this Cold War gets pretty bad, you're going to see more and more of these people having to pick sides.
And Tim Cook is getting out ahead of a lot of the other CEOs and a lot of the other corporations who are going to pick their teams at some point.
And this is nothing new.
I mean, we're all about efficiency, right?
We're all about studying methods and improving them.
Well, is it safe to say that the United States itself is the most powerful country on the planet and probably ever because it was founded on slavery?
Is that a fair enough assessment?
Did that boost the economy?
I would go so far as to say that that is one of the principal foundations of why America not only got off to its financial start, but its political start in terms of its power.
And by the way, that we are still circulating money and power that was started within the age of slavery.
Yes, absolutely.
Right.
And so what happens is as you're looking at the model, the economic model of slavery, you realize, you know, we're spending an awful lot of money bringing slaves over here to do all this free work.
And wouldn't it be a lot better if we kept them where they started and just have them work there and then ship the goods over?
That would probably make a lot more money, wouldn't it?
And that's what we did.
That's all we did.
We didn't really necessarily abolish slavery, necessarily, because you don't see it here.
We just sort of made it where, you know, in other countries of origin.
So China now becomes the place where they basically have slaves and they basically work for almost nothing.
And they're forced to do that.
And we reap the benefits financially, you know, where in a way that we would never be able to do it in any other way.
And that's that's where we are without any care of what human rights are.
And it's not surprising that then it bleeds back over here with the way we treat our workers in the similar hierarchy of our economy.
So it's disgusting, is really what it is.
But hold on, my iPhone's ringing, Jared.
Can you give me a second to take that?
Wait, I've got mine too.
I gotta do that, you know?
And by the way, you absolutely nailed it.
You could not express neoliberal globalism better than that.
Except for I want to add one thing, Nick, which is now, because it's not abject slavery, what you can do is get together with your wealthy pals and say, we're giving them so many opportunities to lift themselves up out of poverty.
And listen, I know we're not paying them very much, but it's better than what they would get otherwise.
And part of the problem in all of this, and why we have reached the moment that we have, is that China made it a political strategy to use this against us.
They said, we have a lot of people that we're willing to make work like that.
And by the way, we're willing to make ourselves an integral part of that global system.
And guess what happened?
They went ahead and they became the first competitor since the Soviet Union.
Like, that system that you're talking about, which is as morally and ethically bankrupt, and by the way, is just one of the worst, brutal systems that has ever been devised, it is the thing that these people want to pat themselves on the back for.
But a time of choosing is coming, and Tim Cook and Apple are making their choices out in the open.
Speaking of... Oh, I have one more point.
You know, the original company that was, you know, dragged over the coals for this would be Nike, because they were having their shoes made by basically slaves in China.
And you won't hear Nike ever, you're not going to see Phil Knight or whoever the CEO now is, you know, go there and do what Tim Cook just did.
They're smart enough to know that they don't want to bring any extra attention to that.
When it comes up, they kind of just sort of ignore it.
Have you been to a local multiplex recently to see a movie?
Because you'll see a preview of a new movie coming out starring Ben Affleck and Matt Damon about Nike, about the origins, the propaganda of how they found Michael Jordan and how they built this empire and you know they're not going to have one Iota of a mention of anything about how they were able to really build this company into what it is now.
And I'm going to probably go see it and maybe even enjoy it.
Well, first of all, that movie looks terrible.
I'm sorry, but that is one of the worst trailers I've seen in a very, very long time.
But second of all, Nick, how could you say that about Nike?
They signed Colin Kaepernick as a spokesperson for the company.
I thought they were woke.
Oh, wait, that's right, because they do all that to camouflage themselves in order to make people not think about how they actually make money.
By the way, speaking of that, we have to talk about Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, one of the biggest rat bastards in corporate America, by the way.
I don't know if people have been following this.
He got called to Congress to testify in front of a labor board.
By the way, Bernie Sanders made sure that that was going to happen.
Weirdly enough, Howard Schultz has resigned earlier than his target date.
We're not sure if he's going to go up in front of this labor board, but I also want to go ahead and say, man, I hope your retirement sucks, man.
One of the most anti-labor people, and he just By the way, I made money completely off of just burning coffee beans.
That's not the former barista in me talking about it.
But just an absolute fast foodification of a certain sector of the country.
He has been lauded to the moon.
People wanted him to be the president of the United States for forever.
He is engaged in one anti-labor action after another.
I hope your retirement sucks, you rat bastard coward.
I mean, I'm sure in his mind he's just making sure that the workers don't, you know, talk too much amongst themselves while they're working and waste time.
But yeah, it's been pretty remarkable how consistent this guy has been at union busting an industry that So desperately needs it for any kind of representation for the workers.
And you know that, you know, Amazon's looking at this and there are all these other big companies have a lot of workers are petrified that the workers might actually have some power and some collective bargaining.
So it is disgusting.
And then it's so blatant.
It's almost like when Bill Barr quit a couple of weeks before January 6th, you know, as if he just wanted to spend some more time with his kids.
Right.
We know what that was about now.
And this is the same thing here.
He doesn't want to have to testify.
It's ridiculous and look like a bad guy, but he is.
I hope he burns his tongue on a shitty cup of coffee is what I hope.
Let's go talk to Moses.
What do you say?
All right, let's bring him in.
OK, everybody, we now have my son Moses Hauselmann in the studio to discuss a little bit about cultural Marxism.
I kind of challenged him to see how we can maybe connect that to what the GOP is doing now.
But Moses, thanks for coming on the show.
Yeah, so I've come here because cultural Marxism has become a really big talking point for the for the GOP and the Republican Party and conservatism in America in general.
So I thought, like, why don't we really look like they're just going to say it without explaining it?
What is cultural Marxism?
Um, so just to give a bit of like a preview, cultural Marxism, talking point made by the GOP, is the general belief that some people of Marxist belief are trying to subvert Western culture.
Uh, by controlling, like, big business, Hollywood, it's actually very similar to many antisemitic tropes that you might hear, and that is because it is kind of an evolution of a Nazi A Nazi... Ideology?
A Nazi, like, philosophy known as cultural Bolshevism, which is the idea that the German society was being, you know, threatened by the Jews, these, you know, communist Soviet Russian Jews and all these other undesirable people.
And then that was kind of adapted to the modern day by.
Well, so but now you're so you're seeing that the GOP, the Republicans kind of use some of these sort of tropes or some of these methods to try and keep their people in line.
Is that what you feel like?
I don't know if it's to keep them in line, but it's definitely to appeal to fear, right?
Like, a quick excerpt of Ted Cruz, a prominent Republican, he talks about how in his book he's like, oh, these woke people have taken over our society, you know, they are like, you know, a takeover of our education, of big business, media, Hollywood, in a book that he made.
And I mean, then I was like, this sounds really familiar.
I looked it up and it's like the exact same thing.
If you just look up generic antisemitic tropes, it'll be like, controls the media, controls big business, controls like, you know, all of these different stuff.
And I'm like, you can, it's so obvious the parallel between this and just so basic antisemitic things.
Yeah, I mean, that's actually what I found in my research, too, which is, it's kind of shocking, because they sort of have done this thing over and over and over again, but they keep rebranding it, right?
Because, you know, it's like, after, of course, we move past Nazism, you can't just openly say, you know, the Jews are controlling us, except for, unless you're Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, right?
But they just keep sort of putting out this, like, generic other.
And sometimes it's George Soros, who is, of course, a Hungarian Jew.
Or, you know, it's the elites in Hollywood, which has always been a code word for it.
And it's happened in America, too.
It's funny enough, Moses, they used to say that it was like they're controlling baseball.
And jazz is meant to, like, overthrow, like, cultural ideas.
And they're going after the genders and they're going after women and all this.
But it absolutely is.
You couldn't be more right.
It is a continual redressing of the same story over and over again.
And they have created this idea that wokeism is just another easy way of not saying Jews, right?
Jews and people of color who are working together.
And they have just, like, basically workshopped that until they can do exactly what you're talking about.
You couldn't be more right.
Yeah.
I mean, even, it's in so many facets of reality.
Soviet Union and Communist Russia, you see rootless, like, cosmopolitanite, just like this thing.
We are just saying the Jews who control things, but you can't openly say that.
How did you get turned on to this ideology and made aware of it?
I mean, like, it's hard to escape.
You look at anything where Republicans are talking, any kind of, you know, extreme, non-extreme, they're always just harping on this thing, like, they're cultural Marxists, because it's evoking this thing, communists are taking things over, kind of like this Cold War scare.
And I was like, well, what is this actually?
And I, you know, I watched a couple of like video documentaries, which kind of mentioned the subject.
And I was like, okay, like, let's go in depth.
What is this?
Cause this seems like a big deal to a lot of people.
So it's good to know what it is.
And then I just stumbled upon just such a large, just like for, I'd say I wanted to mention, like, for example, A terrorist attack in Norway by this guy who was like, I'm defending against cultural Marxism killed 77 people.
And it's like this type of ideology is being used for terrorist attacks, as well as just trying to discriminate against people or not needing to talk about who you're discriminating against.
Yeah, and the idea behind, like, white replacement theory, which is what happened there, the idea that there is an amazing turn of events, is the anti-Semitic trope is now being used to claim that there's a genocide against white people.
But it's, of course, like an anti-Semitic trope, right, that goes ahead and usually discounts the idea of the Holocaust anyway.
But that idea of white replacement, if you, and Tucker Carlson, Nick, we covered this before.
When Tucker Carlson talks about it, he says it explicitly that it's a plan.
Right?
That it's not demographic shifting, that there's a plan that's happening.
And what is always pointed to is that.
And it's the idea that this genocide is going to happen unless somebody does something about it.
And if you say there's a plan, if you say that there's this conspiracy, then that legitimizes violence, it legitimizes oppression, it does everything, right?
It's just a story that goes ahead and pushes this stuff forward.
But that's exactly how it's done.
From your perspective, Moses, what do you think is so alluring about this ideology that makes people want to, you know, go to rallies and scream and yell and glee about it?
I mean, each emotion is either a motivator or a demotivator, right?
You know, you're sad, I don't want to do anything, I want to sit back, I just don't want to do anything but anger and fear, I'm scared, I gotta do something, I'm angry, I want to do something, like, if you're angry at someone you're not like, well, whatever, you're like, I want to punch this guy in the face.
It's the same type of thing.
They're scared because all these people are saying they're evoking this stuff because they were being scared from their childhood With the Cold War and, like, the Red Scare, they're saying, oh, you know, communists are trying to take over.
Now they're like, it's back.
Everybody, like, hunger down.
Like, all these people are communists and they're trying to take over everything and now they're like, well, I have to do something.
Like, I can't just sit here.
I'm scared.
I'm angry.
I want to get this out some way.
So they'll go to rallies, they'll scream in people's faces because, like, even if it's not good, it's what I have to do.
Have you been face-to-face with people of that ilk in your young years?
A little bit.
I usually don't want to go there with people if they are very much disagreeing because sometimes they will start yelling and it's just a whole thing.
I mean I've seen plenty of people online who are very open about the fact that like yeah no Holocaust didn't happen or like yeah you know all this this and that and it's just like I it's crazy but it's also it's so easy to for anybody no matter even if it's the correct To be sucked into this idea that I've been told this, there's literally nothing that can change my mind on this.
And that goes for everybody.
Everybody has something that might be wrong, but they just don't want to admit.
Moses, real fast, before we get out of here, from your perspective, and you're still a couple years away from voting yourself, what do you see happening as these things keep playing out?
What's your viewpoint on where America is and where it's headed?
I mean, America is very obviously becoming more polarized, more radical.
Um, you know, we saw with the recent 2020 election how, like, the Democrats are, like, the, this, are, you know, the dominant force, and it's, like, this whole two-party thing.
I mean, I can't see it going anywhere else besides a eventual big shift in politics as we know it between, instead of, like, conservatives and liberals, it's, like, socialists with, like, Bernie Sanders, or in, like, nationalists with Trump, and it's, like, just more and more and more.
Or just a complete rework of how we model our democracy.
Because I don't see it just kind of going in the same way where we either are going to have two parties that are close enough together, liberals and conservatives, or just that same system continuing with how things are going.
It's just not built.
to last.
One of the founding fathers even said that he advocated for, I think it was every 14 years, we should rewrite the entire constitution because it's not going to work forever.
Wow.
I love it whenever Jefferson gets brought up at the end of a podcast, I'll say that.
And then do you feel like there are, it's more, for people your age, do you feel like they're more engaged with this kind of subject matter?
Yes.
I mean, some people don't really care, but it's hard to find anybody who's in their mid-teens who doesn't have some sort of political opinion.
And if you, you know, you usually find it to be quite extreme.
Uh, you know, you can, you'll see a lot of like super far left, super far right.
And because they'll just see something, they'll be like, okay, this is fine.
And they might not do any more investigation.
They might just say, this is all that I need for me.
And I think that's just a general problem.
But yeah, it's definitely a very, my generation is very politically charged.
Awesome.
Well, thank you, Moses.
I gotta tell you, this was a real treat.
I've been, I've been wanting to hear your opinions for a while now.
That was awesome.
Good, good kid you got there, Nick.
I do.
Why, thank you.
You got good friends.
That's right.
We're all, yeah, everyone's great.
Everyone's, what a nice confluence of connections and relationships.
It all works out very well.
We'll have to do this again.
Thank you so much.
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