Nick Hauselman is somewhere in a boat, heading toward Alaska, so Jared Yates Sexton is left to pilot this ship. Luckily, he's got Sarah Kendzior along for the ride. The author of THEY KNEW: HOW A CULTURE OF CONSPIRACY KEEPS AMERICA COMPLACENT and co-host of GASLIT NATION talks with Jared about the recent indictment of Donald Trump, the system of corruption that continues to grow, and what the next few months and years might bring.
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My buddy Nick Hausman, he's on a boat heading for Alaska.
I don't know.
I kind of want to go to Alaska.
I don't know if I want to do it on a boat.
I don't know if I want to fly around.
Either way, we wish him well.
Safe voyages, Nick Hausman.
With that being said, I have a special guest today.
Sarah Kinzier, everybody.
Sarah Kinzier is the co-host of Gaslit Nation, author of The View from Flyover Country, Hiding in Plain Sight, and most recently, They Knew, How Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent.
Sarah and I had a great conversation, as we always do.
She is a favorite of the show and one of the few people out there actually getting into what's going on.
So I'm looking forward to bringing that to you.
Before we do, a reminder, if you want access to our regular Friday Weekender Show, you need to go over to patreon.com slash schmuckrakepodcast.
We talked about it last week.
We did our first Weekender Friday Show with questions from the audience, from you.
With voice messages from the listeners, including also questions being sent to us, it was great.
I really enjoyed it.
We're going to keep doing it.
And Nick is going to be on a boat for the rest of this week.
I'm going to host The Weekender this Thursday.
It will come out on Friday.
I need your questions!
So, go over to patreon.com slash muckraigpodcast, become a patron, record your voice message, and if you're already a patron, send me a voice message, and I'll do my best to answer as many questions as I get.
That's patreon.com slash muckraigpodcast.
The Weekender Edition comes out on Friday.
You're going to want to listen to that.
Again, very excited about that.
Very excited about answering your questions.
Always a good time.
That being said, what do you say we go talk to Sarah Kinzier, yeah?
All right, everybody.
Listen, I promised a surprise.
I delivered a surprise.
I'm here with my good friend Sarah Kinzier.
You know her as the co-host of Gaslit Nation, the author of brilliant books like The View from Flyover Country, Hiding in Plain Sight, and most recently, They Knew How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent.
Sarah, I got good news for you.
Our time for rest is at hand.
Our watch is done.
We got Donald Trump.
We got him.
And it's smooth sailing from here.
I think you and I have reached the point that we've been dreaming of.
I think it's time for us to just sort of power down and things are good.
Oh yes, yes, absolutely, because that's how dictatorships and aspiring fascist empires and mafia states work, is that, you know, one guy is indicted and allowed to have rallies and run his campaign and his entire network remains untouched and all the systemic problems that led to the success of this individual remain unexamined and, you know, that clearly indicates that everything is just fine, that we should all just Turn the other way.
Ignore everything in front of our eyes and in our bank accounts and get on with the beauty of life under the Biden administration.
Well, it's great.
I'm glad we talked.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I want to get into the specifics of some of this stuff, because, you know, as well as our listeners know that this is all being criminally unexamined.
And that's not a pun.
I want to point out that even in the conversation about this, in which our media and political leaders are trying to sort of center this, there was one bad apple, Sarah.
There was one guy.
He got in.
God knows how it happened.
He's out.
You know, if we can just take care of him, everything will be fine.
Meanwhile, all of the coverage of this is not about, hey, should this guy be ruled out running for president of the United States of America?
The question is, when he wins, will he pardon himself?
And can that happen?
It's amazing how we are already imagining ourselves moving further and further into this absolute disastrous mess.
Yeah, it's disgusting.
And what people really need to look at are the last three years and the role of the media, the role of politicians, the role of courts, and the fact that this is obviously pre-planned.
Trump could have been invited For a number of, you know, criminal offenses for the last three years, including the Mueller Report, which was handed to Garland on a silver platter, including January 6th.
And, you know, in the summer of 2022, for the classified documents, there's no need to hire a special counsel.
This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of crimes that he's committed.
The same is true of his elite backers, none of whom are being challenged.
People like Robert Stone, Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, People who hold real power, people like Jared Kushner, who was involved in that classified document travesty.
And yeah, this was a deliberate means to make him mafia Grover Cleveland, to put us in this position in which there's a term for Biden, and Biden's role was to run out the clock.
Biden was a placeholder president.
I remember in 2021 writing on Twitter my fear that Biden was the placeholder president, that this was actually planned, because it drained the urgency of the moment.
It really, you know, ruined and disorganized a lot of organizational efforts that did not have to do with Trump as an individual, but with the broader rise of fascism, with systemic racism, you know, with women's rights, Me Too.
Etc.
A lot of people were challenging conventional ideas of American history.
They were challenging the legitimacy of failed institutions like our court systems and the powers that be did not like that.
And, you know, all those movements gained more power under Trump because Trump, I think, allowed them to see clearly, you know, many flaws that had been there all along.
And what Biden did was put people in this position where we were supposed to pretend Everything's fine.
Everything was solved.
It was all, you know, a, you know, aberrant sort of failure of the system for four years that we were supposed to decontextualize from the broader history of America and to say, well, now Trump's gone.
So everything's fine.
And no, nothing needs to be done about it.
And, you know, what's frightening to me now And from the minute that he launched his campaign, is to watch the exact same people who were rightfully so up in arms about him from 2016 to 2020, just, you know, shrug their shoulders like they're watching WWE, not talk about the abnormality of the situation and the lack of accountability of the situation, and just say, oh, we've got to vote him out.
Now we've got to beat him.
Now we've got to donate.
We've got to canvass.
As if you can vote out the mafia because, you know, that's what this is.
And it's also been incredibly disappointing to see scholars of American history, scholars of fascist regimes abroad, not comment on the fact that there is no corollary to this.
There is no corollary to a president attempting to enact a violent coup Against his own country, confess to it, and then be allowed to run again while his fellow coup plotters remain in office, and the ones who aren't in office are just allowed to run free.
That is clearly a collaborative effort.
It took Biden and his backers to make this possible, and that's the thing that no one wants to admit, so they all just shut up about it.
I, you know, cannot find a similar situation in world history.
The closest I can get is the recent situation with Netanyahu being indicted and then being able to become president again, which I do think is something that the Trump camp is trying to model themselves on.
Oh yeah, I mean, they're very fond of looking at what's been blazed ahead, whether it's Orban or now Netanyahu.
And I gotta tell you, I love that you went there with this.
I want to point out where we are right now, because I know that we're already in the thick of the 2024 race.
We're being absolutely bludgeoned over the head with the idea that you cannot question the Biden administration.
If you say that the economy is not great or if you don't sit around like singing its praises, which by the way, any normal person right now is feeling more and more squeezed and precarious and terrified.
And that's not a winner.
That's no way to say, hey, listen, everything's actually fine.
We don't actually need a change.
Look at where we are now in 2023.
We've had a systemic loss of rights.
We've lost liberties.
We've lost protections.
That's all normal now.
Now we also have a public education system that in not just red states but in so-called purple states has already been absolutely decimated.
We have corporate curriculum being rolled in by the wealthiest people who, just a reminder for everybody, funded the January 6 coup.
None of those people are ever mentioned in any of these reports, whenever January 6th or the charges against Donald Trump are brought up.
By the way, we're always very careful.
We don't call it a coup.
We don't try and talk about treason because that's too serious.
We have to get into some minutiae.
We have to be able to give a little bit of wiggle room in all of this.
By the way, we have children who are being forced into factories, slaughterhouses.
They're being used now without work permits, handling dangerous chemicals and dangerous machinery.
And what we're supposed to do at this point is to say, listen, we'll take that.
That's fine.
Like, it's not great, right?
Nobody's really thrilled about it, although many people are incredibly thrilled.
They're making billions of dollars.
And we're supposed to defend that.
And meanwhile, we have this criminal coup insurrectionist figurehead who he's the only person who's actually suffered from this.
I'm glad you brought up Bannon.
You brought up Stone.
You brought up Flynn.
There's a whole other network.
Nobody wants to talk about the fact that John Eastman, it's not like he was freelancing.
All of this legal thing, like this is what the entire right-wing donor system is for.
The Supreme Court's been completely stolen and turned into an aggressive weapon against progress.
It's rolling back as a reactionary force.
And meanwhile, We're supposed to be happy that we're here.
Somehow or another, we're supposed to be clapping seals that it's not worse somehow.
And I know you and I are on the same page on this.
I look around and I know it can get worse, but at the moment, it's pretty damn bad.
And you didn't even mention the pandemic.
Yes, right.
Honestly, Biden's response was worse than Trump's.
I mean, that was mostly because Biden's been in office longer during the pandemic than Trump.
It's not like I think Trump would have eventually turned around and done a good job.
But you know, we're in a country that does not keep accurate public health data, you know, which is a kind way of saying, yes.
Yeah, you know, it's a sign that you're living in a rising authoritarian state.
Like, that is a major, major symptom.
It's when they will not release basic data about things like health, education, you know, accurate economic data, and so forth.
Like, this is a very dark time.
I certainly have fewer rights than I did four years ago.
You know, that's the fall of the Supreme Court.
But was there any concern or reaction, you know, when Roe vs. Wade was overturned?
No!
I was told that I deserved it, you know, and I deserved it because I live in Missouri, and I live in Missouri because I don't have any money, or I didn't have any money when I moved to Missouri, and Missouri's a cheap state.
That's the thing that people want to ignore when they do this whole red state thing.
Well, they want to ignore a bunch of things.
One, states are cheaper.
That's why people who come, you know, from middle class or impoverished backgrounds tend to settle down here, especially if they want to, you know, have children.
The other thing is these are heavily black states or states with Native American reservations, Or states with a large Latino population.
So everybody goes on about, oh my god, they brought it upon themselves, or they should secede, or blah blah blah.
You know, one wants to hand all of these historically marginalized and vulnerable communities to right-wing maniacs.
And, you know, secondly, they're ignoring what people actually want in our states and what they fought for and what they've actually won.
Because you'll see a lot of rollbacks of votes, of movements, of, you know, all sorts of policies and, you know, positions.
And so, you know, there is no will of the people that is actually upheld by representatives of these states.
Instead of blaming the representatives, they blame the people.
Like, we the people, living in Missouri or Texas or Florida or what have you, are the ones who the Democrats blame.
And it's very interesting to me to watch this, because for decades, the Republicans have just abandoned taking over the American people.
They're not trying to be liked, they're not trying to be popular, they're not trying to do anything that benefits the public.
And they don't care.
Who knows?
They at least used to pretend, you know, they'd come up with, like, compassionate conservatism or whatever and pretend that they were, like, actually nice guys.
They're not even pretending anymore.
And now the Democrats are doing the same thing, but only to those who they're trying to just completely write off, which is people in states like mine who are suffering and who often have tried, you know, to get, you know, funding and attention for the National Democratic Party in order to defeat, you know, the Josh Hawleys and so forth.
In our midst.
But no, it's total abandonment combined with complicity.
It's worse than it's been since this phase of American history started in 2015, 2016.
I'd say it's certainly worse now.
I really thought that 2020 and early 2021 were the low between the pandemic and the coup, but this is worse.
The apathy toward mass death and toward mass suffering is one of the hardest things that I've had to witness, and I keep hearing people say, That they have compassion fatigue and that's how they excuse their abhorrent behavior.
I don't understand this concept.
Like, I don't understand how you run out of compassion.
I understand being fatigued and exhausted and worn down, everybody is, but when you lose your compassion for other people, you know, you're surrendering your own humanity.
And there is no greater triumph for an aspiring fascist movement than to have the quote-unquote good guys voluntarily submit their humanity to the worst of impulses.
Yeah, and on that note, something I wanted to talk to you about.
You know, I think you and I both kind of had this moment going back to 2016, where there was this, you know, Donald Trump was like so much bad food.
There was an immediate reaction in the body politic.
You know, how could this person come to this point?
They were revolted by him.
Obviously, he was going to lose.
Then he won.
And then for four years, absolute organized criminal activity, chaos, gaslighting, abuse, you name it.
After that, of course, and I always point to the Biden campaign, I always thought the promise to return everything to normal was both politically stupid and also damaging on a level that historically is going to be really hard to sit around with.
And you look at what has happened now with how social media is breaking up.
And you're starting to see that, you know, there are plenty of reasons for why this is happening.
There are economic reasons, tech reasons, I don't know, fascistic ideology reasons and all of this.
But you're also starting to see this strange thing where I really truly believe That our media is addicted to Donald Trump in terms of squeezing out every bit of profit and click and attention that they possibly can.
But I think that, and you can tell me if I'm wrong on this, but what I've noticed both in conversations and anecdotally and just sort of witnessing is that even the outright offensiveness and trauma of having Donald Trump as a public figure and president of the United States People have become numb to it.
People have become just, and even if he gets a second term, and my god, a second term doesn't mean it's going to be his last term, the way this man works and the way this system is working.
Like, I think there are people who were shocked and part of the hashtag resistance and they were out there, you know, tweeting for Mueller time and all of that stuff for years.
There are people who are, they're going to tune out and just basically hope That they can buy their way out of the damage that is coming almost.
And it goes back to what you were saying in terms of the so-called red states.
You know, the idea that if you can make enough or inundate yourself from this stuff or pay a premium to get away from it, that it doesn't exist.
And as a result, I really think a lot of people are sort of preparing themselves to just sort of shut this stuff out, which I think is going to be catastrophic in the long run.
Oh, absolutely.
And it's one of the reasons that Musk bought Twitter and split it up.
And then you had this, you know, slow rise of all of these rival social networks, and then all of these social movements and activist movements torn apart.
And that's intentional.
And I do think people are addicted to Trump.
It's more like they're addicted to the idea of having a king.
They're addicted to the idea of authority, because you saw the exact same sort of cultish movements surrounding Mueller, the FBI, Merrick Garland, sidebans, you know, all of these other failures and abettors of the Trump, you know, mafia operation.
And they do the same thing with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
You know, we have these political figures that have cults around them, and that I think are also filling in For like, a loss of broader American pop culture, which we've experienced slowly over decades.
You know, first with the music industry, then kind of with movies, and then finally, you know, with TV.
Like, once we lost Americans sitting around watching television together, you know, all at once at the same time, I think we actually lost something very significant.
And the only thing kind of left is sports, and then politics.
And so politics fills that gap.
But it's this obedience to authority that is so puzzling to me and so grotesque because I see it everywhere.
Like I can count on two hands really like the people who work in media and I'll count like you and me as people in media, you know, even though we're an independent media that don't bow down to it in some form or the other that don't show this fear of the FBI or of Trump or of Biden,
You know, they live with it chronically, and it taints everything that they say, and it's marred their ability to remember things with accuracy, and it's marred their understanding of history, and the need to contextualize history.
You know, they really seem to have somehow bought into this move-forward mentality, when that's the most dangerous thing to do, and I do think some of that has to do with the pandemic.
Is this inability to deal with that death toll and with that fear?
And it's kind of merged with the political moment of the Biden administration.
But yeah, it's very disappointing because as a country, we were founded in opposition, ostensibly, to a king.
And that seems to be what people want.
And that's across the political board.
It's certainly there with, you know, MAGA and Trump and the Republican Party, you know, which allows no opposition.
And it's increasingly there with the Democrats as well.
Yeah.
And I think a lot of it.
I, you know, I don't know if you felt like this, but watching all of the palace drama that took place around Harry and Meghan and then the Queen dying and all of that, like it sort of feels like as this larger machine has sort of taken over in the United States, you know, I basically at this point, every aspect of human life has been taken over by private equity and forces and artificial intelligence that most people don't understand and don't even know is behind the scenes.
Instead, they talk about reptilian people and, you know, satanic cabals.
I think people want a president that entertains them to some extent.
They want a president that they can sort of hoot and holler at.
And meanwhile, he is obviously a figurehead of something larger and more insidious, which is why I think people like you and I are not really impressed when he's being indicted for certain crimes and other people are not.
And there's something there, you know, that that people are desperate for, that they want this to be a television show, which obviously our media has profited off of.
There is no information out there about what's going on.
You can watch 24 hours a day on our media.
And by the way, you can get online and spend every moment of your life Looking for whatever narrative you want, except for actual intensive analysis that explains what's going on, what's actually happening behind the scenes.
Instead, it's all personality-driven, and as a result, it's literally empty.
It's vapid.
It's cotton candy that doesn't even do anything besides make people feel sick, mislead them, and make it more readily available for them to fall for disinformation and conspiracy theories.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, I've said from the start, one of the most dangerous things to do is to make this about Trump and Trump alone and forget the fact that there is a network.
There are actually multiple networks.
There's the network of organized crime.
There's the network of right-wing donors.
You know, there's the network of the court system.
You know, all of this needs to be examined.
And to be honest with you, I don't watch the news.
And Gaslit Nation's been on vacation for two months.
This was planned long ago.
And as a result, I haven't had to keep up with the news on a regular basis.
But during that time, a number of media sources were gutted.
BuzzFeed went down, Vice, all these other ones.
And then others became paywalled.
And if I had to go and try to research, you know, a topic in depth, like a recent indictment of Trump, it would just be propaganda, lies, bullshit, very superficial analysis.
Like, I'm not even quite sure where it would go besides to primary sources and so forth, in order to form some sort of analysis of the situation.
And, you know, this is made slightly easier by the fact that You know, we both know Trump and his history very well, and in many ways we're living in a rerun.
Like, on top of being horrifying and dangerous, it's incredibly boring, because we know that unless he is actually contained and this broader network is contained in terms of its criminal elements, And then examined, gutted, reformed, whatever you want to do, in terms of its structural elements, you know, the financial elements, the court system, etc., that there's basically no meaning to these indictments.
You know, these are facile actions from broken institutions, and I wish they meant something, but they don't even drain him of his power on a superficial level, because there's not going to be any follow-through.
If these indictments had happened in, say, 2021, it could be meaningful because there would be enough time, you know, for the court system to at least let them play out.
If it allowed the second impeachment hearing to play out longer and to actually encapsulate all of the crimes or most of the crimes that Trump had committed and also the roles of all these backers in January 6th, we would have had something meaningful.
So that's not what they wanted.
What we wanted to do was run a clock on Trump's legal proceedings while building this giant right wing movement that is in many ways a backlash to, you know, the 1619 project and Me Too and all of these other movements that emerged, you know, during those years.
And they've done that very successfully.
And as usual for the Republicans, they did it on a local level.
You know, they did it through school boards.
They did it through city councils and so forth, while people were either just exhausted from everything we've gone through, especially the pandemic, or looking the other way.
And now we have so many problems that, you know, I'm very reluctant to.
I've always been very reluctant to say that it's too late.
I've never really believed that, and I think it's not really, like, an attitude to have in terms of, well, like, whether it's too late or not, it doesn't matter.
It's like, you keep going anyway, you keep fighting anyway, you keep documenting everything anyway.
But there is a point where, you know, we have actual statutes of limitations and this DOJ let them run out.
And you also have a point when it comes to collective memory and when a population believes something is serious or dangerous or not.
And if Trump or others commit a crime and nobody holds them accountable for that crime for three years, they begin to think that that crime is not serious, which means they think sedition is not serious, treason is not serious, you know, decades of ties to organized crime.
That must not be serious or it must not be true, as Fox News is saying it's not true.
Tucker Carlson saying it's not true.
Steve Bannon, who is not in jail, is saying it's not true.
And so there's a really logical reason that so many Americans believe that, you know, Trump must be more innocent than he is, you know, and that's because there's been a lack of accountability.
And then on the flip side of that, when they look at Hunter Biden and so forth, they see at least movement in that arena.
And they think, oh, wow, you know, that must be more serious than I'd given it credit for.
There must be something to that, because the legal institutions are moving towards him.
And what people need to understand is that we're living in a mafia State, especially in terms of our court system.
So what the actual innocence or guilt is of various individuals is often hard to discern.
It's not hard for Trump because he confesses his crimes all the time, so that one's pretty easy.
But it's harder for others and, you know, more to the point, it is a broken system.
So if you're basing your analysis on whether somebody is guilty or innocent based on what the rulings are, you know, that is the wrong way to go about it.
Look at their actions.
So you look at what they've actually done, what's in plain sight right in front of you.
Like, there's a lot of information right there.
I mean, honestly, everyone mocks the do-your-own-research mantra.
They associate it with QAnon and so forth, but that is the best way to go.
It's just that it's very difficult in this environment to do your own research, because they're purposely trying to keep us from finding pertinent information.
You know, I had one of those and I know you've had these before, like I had one of these radio interviews a few weeks ago and I was talking to the person and they said, can you believe this record distrust in our institutions?
Like what damage did Donald Trump do?
And, you know, I just sort of paused and I said, you know, it wasn't that Donald Trump did anything.
It's that he took advantage of it.
He recognized an opening that people do not trust our institutions.
And then I said something that literally stopped the interview.
I said, they deserve the lack of trust.
Yes, thank you.
They've cut me off after I say that to you.
They don't like it.
They don't like that at all.
And it reminds me a little bit of, you know, this sort of goldfish mentality where, you know, one moment the FBI, and if anybody wants to spend some time, speaking of doing your own research, anybody who's listening who isn't aware of this, just go and look up the history of the FBI.
Just do it!
Go have a ball, you know?
And suddenly the FBI becomes like this Justice League that's ready to take down everything simply because Joe Biden is President of the United States of America.
Or, one moment, because Donald Trump is President, we're supposed to believe our criminal justice system is completely corrupt, and the next minute, they are the champions of justice.
And what actually needs to happen in this country is to recognize that there is a problem, and it's on all levels.
Greed, corruption, criminality has absolutely infected every level of everything.
And in order to have an actual nuanced idea of what's going on, you have to move beyond this blue-red paradigm, which is just absolute insanity at this point.
And it feels like people are made not just uncomfortable with that, they're terrified of it.
And I think in part because their own stories and their own narratives and their own realities are built upon it.
And I think that's intentional.
I think we're supposed to see an indictment like this and literally think, oh thank God someone's taking care of it.
It doesn't matter that it's watered down.
It doesn't matter that it's worded in a very particular way.
It doesn't matter that the people who funded and organized and intellectualized this thing.
Because listen, Donald Trump did not come up with this stuff.
This is not an intellectual heavyweight.
He wasn't sitting there with John Eastman going through the legalese, trying to twist it around.
But the idea that things go that heavy, that things are that deep in these institutions, I think it's almost impossible for some people, and particularly tastemakers, pundits, analysts, so-called analysts, policy makers, you name it, not only are they incapable, but they're unwilling.
And the entire basis of their existence and the entire basis of their careers, the entire basis of their income, you name it, status, it is based on never ever starting to trouble any of these very obvious facts.
Yes, that and, you know, as soon as Bill Barr came in, there is a sea change in, you know, who was hired to talk about the law and to talk about these legal institutions, especially the DOJ.
And you had a lot of quote-unquote liberal networks like NPR, MSNBC, or so forth, bringing in former employees of Bill Barr and former employees of the DOJ.
Have you been able to handle that with Bill Barr?
I shut it out, man.
Because I know his whole history.
I mean, starting with his dad hiring Jeffrey Epstein.
It's like, I mean, there's really a treasure trove.
It's the fact that, like, the Bill Barr history was not at all secret.
Like, William Sapphire, ultra-conservative William Sapphire, called Bill Barr the cover-up general in a covered story in 1992.
Basically saying, like, this guy is so slimy and so crazy.
Like, he's too much even for me.
Like, for me, William Safire.
And then all of these DOJ alums get on there, you know, get on television in 2019, and are like, Bill Barr, the fine institutionalist who always plays fair, I'm sure he'll follow through with the Mueller report.
I remember being on a panel with him on live television, and he, like, what?
You know, like, literally, like, what are we talking about?
Are we talking about the same Bill Barr?
And I just bring up basic kind of facts about him, like his cover-up of Iran-Contra.
These are really, this is like Bill Barr 101.
And they all pretended they didn't know anything and that's when I knew something was up because there's no way in hell that they did not know this stuff.
It's like Wikipedia level knowledge.
These are supposed to be legal experts and they have been lying non-stop to people for four years and the Biden administration has this hired propaganda apparatus of people who bet talking points from the government and they bleep them out on social media.
I think this is less effective now.
And it was always, always, you know, Barlin's got it, Mueller's got it, this insurance.
And also implying that if you criticize institutions for anything, even, you know, things that are like systemic racism, that you are some kind of traitor.
And I'm sorry, this all bears the hallmark of the FBI.
This all bears the hallmark of Cointelpro, or the CIA, or Operation Mockingbird, or all of these, you know, fast movements.
Like you said, people need to look at the actual history of the FBI.
Like, does that mean everyone in the FBI is just a terrible person?
No.
I mean, there are probably people in there trying to stop white supremacist militants, trying to maybe even stop the coup plotters.
But, on the whole, not a great track record, and the kind of stuff we're getting now, you know, the impression I get is that the Biden administration is not All that independent, although I don't think it necessarily minds, I think it's comfortable in its complicity, and I think it's stage-managed by the same donors and backers that stage-managed Trump, many of whom are connected deeply to the FBI.
If Trump's fan base understood how deeply Trump has been connected to the FBI through people like Giuliani and Stone and all these others, especially through the New York FBI, And how deeply the FBI is connected to the mafia, and that I actually think they do understand, then maybe, you know, they'd all put it together.
Every now and again, I get an email from one, you know, they've seen the light, like they read Hiding and Fleeing Sight or something, they're like, whoa, you know, like, this is all, everything I've been reeling against, I didn't know Trump was involved in it.
And I'm like, yeah, he's kind of, you know, I don't know if he's a ringleader, but he's certainly the showman for it.
He's the public face of it.
But yeah, it's a terrible thing to live through, and it's very disorienting to see people who straight out knew all this stuff in 2018, 2019, and would talk about it, suddenly feigning ignorance, and suddenly pretending they've never heard of it, and that, you know, like, if they're hearing of it now, they're shocked.
And I'm like, you're feigning shock to avoid accountability.
But it's really, it's a sad situation.
I have no idea how ordinary Americans Stay well informed when they're being let down so severely by both journalism and politics.
Well, I wanted to talk to you about this, and I hope, I hope like hell you've avoided this, but just to go ahead and fill you in, there's this guy named Richard Hanania, who apparently years ago anonymously used to write for, I know this is shocking, the alt-right used to talk about white ethnostates as racist, sexist, as imaginable.
Richard, though, went out and got him a degree, and has got him some credentials.
And since then, he's been published in, let me look, these obscure places.
The New York Times, NBC News.
You know, he's received glaring endorsements.
And Matt Iglesias.
I don't know if anybody has lowered the level of discourse in this country nearly in the same way as Matt Iglesias.
After being made aware that he had been endorsing this, white supremacists said, yeah, he's racist, but he wrote some interesting pieces.
Which has been this echo everywhere and really what has been happening, speaking of that media apparatus that we were discussing, is that over and over and over again, whether it's quote-unquote wokeness or CRT or social justice or gay and trans issues or free speech issues, you name it, It's being revealed how many of these people, who are the most successful, well-paid, most influential people.
I mean, Matt Iglesias is one of those people who, for whatever reason, his absolutely absurd ideas are almost pumped into the White House every single day.
These people not only gravitate to these fascists and these authoritarians, But it's obvious that deep, deep down, they have no problem with illiberalism.
They have no problem with people being exploited, rights, liberties, protections being taken away.
And what gets revealed is this idea of the left-right paradigm, blue-red paradigm.
It's not true.
It's simply different shades of what these certain types of people who have no interest in taking care of others and no interest in actually changing things for the better, only divvying up the Profits from destroying things and making people's lives worse.
Those are the people who are vying for control.
It's just the different shades of how they're going to do it and what type of face they're going to give to it when they do it.
Yeah, that's absolutely right.
And, you know, the answer with Matt Iglesias is he's from a very wealthy, prestigious family, and that's how he got the job he did.
And that's why people in the Biden administration take him seriously.
And, you know, you could have all the degrees you want, like you and I both have PhDs, but you and I both don't live in anywhere wealthy.
So, you know, it's canceled out.
Like, it's really, We're living in a system that functions like a mafia state oligarchy, which always rely very heavily on nepotism and on nepotistic ties and on inherited wealth.
And if you're out of that system, then you're out of it.
That, of course, leaves you free You know, to comment on it.
But it also creates, you know, this dynamic where people are very terrified to see what you say.
And yes, I think there is natural affinity within these groups for kind of soft focus, white supremacist ideas.
They don't want competition.
They don't want, you know, black and Latino and other non-white authors and creators and politicians and so forth.
We have a whole league of Jared Kushners out there, and that's how this country is currently working.
And I think a lot of the backlash we're seeing is tied to that and the support that people like Matt Iglesias and others who are viewed as centrists, but they're really not.
they're pretty right wing.
Oddly, Iglesias sometimes gets labeled as left wing, but I think it's just 'cause he hangs out with wealthy other people who label themselves left wing.
Anyway, that backlash has a lot to do with, I think, the loss of jobs, the loss of stability, the fact that the economy is rough right now with inflation, Like you said, people are at a level of precariousness that they haven't been to in a while.
I mean, I really feel like we went back a full decade.
I can look at the essays that I wrote in The View from Flyover Country, which I wrote between 2012 and 2014, when You know, nobody I knew had a full-time job with benefits, nobody could afford their skyrocketing rent or mortgage, and so forth.
And that is what life is like now, only you also added a plague, fascism, organized crime, and all the other things that, you know, we've discussed.
And, of course, Trump running Again, so it's really like the worst of all worlds.
Like, you took all three of my books and like, you know, witches grew out of them just, you know, rolling them together.
It's not good.
Not good.
Well, Sarah, on that note, I wanted to, before we get off here, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about The Long View.
We're a couple of weeks out from what is sure to be a substantial Republican debate.
I can't wait for those Standerbeards to get on stage and just really get into some ideas.
How are you feeling roughly a year and a half out from the 2024 election?
What does it look like to you?
Because I have to tell you, it doesn't feel great.
Not only the idea that Donald Trump is going to be the highlight of this, the presumptive nominee, more or less his indictments in January 6th and whether or not free and fair elections should even be held is probably going to be one of the main issues, even if he's not on the debate stage.
We're going to have the threat of artificial intelligence not just being used in campaigns and being used for misinformation and disinformation, but also as a specter of white-collar jobs and a lot of the people that you and I are talking about in all of this with fascistic leanings and hidden white supremacist urges.
Uh, their jobs are in trouble.
Uh, we are seeing a really, really weird sea change of a moment that usually does not favor administrations that are for keeping the status quo or saying that everything is fine.
What are your thoughts leading into 2024?
I mean, what I'm worried about is that people will focus so much on this election and not focus on the issues behind it and the crises that we've been in since the previous election.
Like, it's all going to be horse race politics and analysis of minutiae or ads or, you know, one-liners or so forth.
That's the thing I'm worried about.
It's like the election, because we've already lived through Trump, you know, I know what he's going to do.
I know it's coming.
I mean, honestly, a lot of it is not very different than what we're having under the Biden administration.
You know, they are friends with dictators.
Trump will be friends with many of the same dictators.
Like, the biggest change you would see under Trump is going to be with Russia and Ukraine, because I do think that he will stop funding Ukraine and he will take that money.
He will support Putin.
That is the biggest difference between Biden and Trump.
You know, other than that, you still have abuse of migrants.
You have, you know, Defunding of our education system.
You have lies about the pandemic.
You know, you have many of the exact same policies with Biden simply continuing them.
So I'm not sure how much they're going to ramp that up.
They've realized what they can get away with.
And a lot of what the first Trump term was, was decimating what was left of, you know, any vestiges of integrity within those institutions to allow them to escape accountability and scrutiny.
And since they've already accomplished that, I don't think Trump even wants the presidency.
I don't think he gives a shit.
I think he just wants to go golfing and stay out of prison, and then he'll get in and pardon himself.
I do think, and I hate to say this, I do think the fix is in because if he's even allowed to run again, that shows how decimated our institutions are.
The fact that he's even in this position after launching a full-fledged coup against our country in addition to all of his other crimes, that shows that things are truly broken.
And so the way to fix them is not through the election.
The election is not going to fix anything.
Like if Biden wins again, it's obviously not going to fix anything.
We just lived through three years of him not fixing anything.
Like you can't fix things, you know, through people's, you know, local actions and communities and organizing and all this stuff.
But what I really hope people do more than anything is hold on to their old expectations and to their moral core and to their sense of criticism and to their sense of what they and others deserve.
And, you know, look around this country and say, do people really deserve this?
Do they deserve to live in a pandemic?
Do they deserve to have their rights taken away regardless who they are, regardless where they live?
The answer is no.
There are certain things that are universal rights, you know, and we used to be able to agree on that.
And I think, you know, one of the biggest ones that will come up is the right to clean air, to clean water, you know, to other natural resources that are threatened by climate change.
That's a huge concern right now.
Um, so yeah, it's looking bleak, but as it looks bleak, you know, I tend to look more inward, in part because I feel like I've seen the show before, and I'm watching a repeat, and I know that my actions in it are not going to have much of an impact, but maybe they'll have an impact elsewhere.
So, you know, I'll continue to speak out and fight, but, you know, the way people are suggesting this red-blue dynamic and so forth is not the way forward.
Yeah, and I completely agree with you, because the one thing that I have come to the understanding of is I have to find the places where I can be effective in the things that give me energy and hope.
And that's within relationships, within communities, with organizing on a basic level.
And sitting around rooting on this like you're rooting on, I don't know, a horse race, it does nothing.
It absolutely does nothing.
And on top of that, I'm sorry, but if you find yourself online arguing that people should lose their rights, or I don't know, a debt ceiling faux crisis should allow for cuts here and cuts there, and people's lives being made worse, and don't worry, there's a plan, everything's going to work out.
That's selling humanity, is what it's doing.
It's seeding ground that is just going to continue to get worse and worse.
The only thing that is really up for debate at this point is whether or not it's given to us with a smile and a gee whiz, I wish I could do better, or if it's just blatant cruelty that is for the enjoyment of maybe a few million people who enjoy that cruelty.
Yeah, that's absolutely right, and it's a relief for me to hear you admit that, and I wish that more people would admit that and come to terms with that, because that's simply the reality.
Like, we're not trying to, you know, I think, shake anybody up here in terms of angering them, although I'm sure both of us will.
We're simply describing what's right in front of us, and it's a very painful reality, which is why people want to look away.
But in order to change that reality, they need to look at it head-on.
Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
Sarah Kinzer, all-time great, the co-host of Gaslit Nation, the writer of The View from Flyover Country, Hiding in Plain Sight.
Most recently, they knew How Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent.
Thank you so much.
You're one of my favorites.
I'm so glad you're out there doing your thing.
Oh, same.
Thank you so much for having me back.
Again, that was Sarah Kinzier.
Always an absolute joy every time she's able to come by the podcast and keep us good company.
I'm going to be back for Friday, the Weekender Edition.
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All right, everybody.
In the meantime, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?
