Weekender PREVIEW: A Win in Ohio and Questions From Listeners
Nick Hauselman is still off and sailing and Jared Yates Sexton is here to talk about the landslide win in Ohio and take a whole bunch of questions from listeners, including whether Donald Trump might hightail it to a foreign country and what exactly the "anti-trafficking" Republicans are up to.
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Hey everybody, it's Jared Yates-Sexton here with your Weekender Edition of the Muckrake Podcast.
Again, my buddy Nick Halsman is somewhere being silly on a boat.
I hope he's having a great time.
I haven't heard from him, but I also have not seen in the news that Any boats have capsized or become stranded or victim of some sort of rare stomach disease that is only found on cruises.
So we wish him well.
Hopefully he'll be back for our regular edition on Tuesday.
Listen.
We have a full show.
You did not disappoint.
I reached out and I said, listen, I have to hold down the fort while Nick is gone.
I need some questions.
And you delivered.
We have a full slate of listener questions.
We've got some voicemails.
We've got some emails.
We're going to answer that after we do this initial segment of the show.
A reminder for people who are listening to the free preview of this weekender podcast.
Head over to patreon.com slash montgreggepodcast.
That way you can listen to the full Weekender.
That way you can get in on the fun of asking questions.
That way you can support the show and we can remain editorially independent, ad-free, all that good stuff.
So here we are, the end of the week.
I don't know about you, but I am grateful for it.
This has been quite a week.
I'll just say that.
We're in the doldrums stage of the summer, the dog days as it were.
I know we're all dealing with our own separate things.
The weekend could not get here soon enough for me.
I hope wherever you are, whatever you're doing, you've got something decent lined up.
I want to start, before we get to the question and answer segment of the Weekender, and again, like, I really am glad we're doing this.
Should have done this a lot earlier.
I love answering these questions, these topics that are being brought up.
They're stuff that we wouldn't usually talk about, so I'm very, very excited about that.
Before we get into that, you know, I say all the time, That this is a really hard period to be politically aware, to be a citizen, to be alive, quite frankly, dealing with the rise of authoritarianism, this conservative counter revolution that we're dealing with.
It really takes a toll on a person.
It wears you out.
There's no other way to put it.
And I've said, you know, there are several ways to deal with this.
You have to hold on to what matters to you.
You have to figure out your own reality and find a way to ground yourself within it, figure Find others who can support you and also verify that what you're experiencing is what you're experiencing.
These are all important aspects of surviving moments like this.
But you also have to really cherish the victories.
And you have to build on those victories.
And I would be remiss if I didn't bring up this victory in the state of Ohio.
For those who haven't heard, a special election in Ohio on issue one, which sought to go ahead and raise the standard for passing a constitutional amendment to 60% while also passing restrictions on signature gathering.
All of which was intended to thwart any pro-choice movements to try and protect a woman's right to choose.
It failed.
And it didn't just fail.
It got wiped out.
By double digits, the people of Ohio, in an off-year election, went to the polls Not a lot of people expected turnout like this.
In some places, they ran out of ballots.
In other places, the turnout was so overwhelming that they didn't have the infrastructure in place to handle it.
The young people of Ohio, the people of Ohio in general, turned out and voted Issue 1 down.
This isn't just a victory.
It's a resounding victory.
It took place in the state of Ohio, which has been completely abandoned by most people in terms of even being nearly competitive when it comes to national politics.
Much like the state of Florida, it's pretty much been written off that You know, this is just where liberal leftist politics just go to die.
The voters of Ohio sent a message to everybody, which is this.
They're sick and they're tired of the Republican Party attacking their rights, their liberties, and their protections.
I say again, the Republican Party in the United States of America is historically unpopular.
Historically unpopular.
The only reason that this is, and again putting quotes around it, a viable political party nationally, is because the founding fathers of the United States of America created this country with minoritarian institutions.
The only reason that the Republican Party is able to compete is because the Founding Fathers not only distrusted but hated democracy and wanted to put fail-safes into place in order to protect the white, male, property-owning, slave-owning class.
That's the only reason that the Republican Party can win elections for president.
That's the only reason that they can compete in the Senate.
That's the only reason they can compete in the House of Representatives.
This is not popular.
To go in and take people's rights.
It's not popular to turn women into second-class citizens.
It's not popular to push apartheid politics.
It's not popular to scream at the top of your lungs about trans panic, about gay panic, about anything that is found in the online right and now the Republican Party.
These things are not popular.
People are repelled by it.
They reject it.
If you look at the numbers, it's incredible.
Support for a woman's right to choose is at roughly 70%.
70% of Americans can't agree that the sky is blue.
But they want a woman to have control over her own body.
I wrote about this on my sub stack, Dispatches from a Collapsing State.
There's an obvious path forward.
The Democratic Party needs to wake up and make 2024 a referendum on all of this.
There is more than enough evidence that the repeal of Roe v. Wade, the attacks on minority voting rights, The gay and trans panic?
The anti-science, anti-expert, anti-reality agenda of the Republican Party and their billionaire donors?
It is quite obvious that this is historically unpopular.
There needs to be some sort of a broad agenda that is laid out by the Democratic Party.
And not only addressing these attacks, but providing a path to a future away from this.
I've already heard, since I published that post, I've already heard from a couple of consultants and strategists who say themselves that they are screaming within these meetings that this needs to be the case.
That there's more than enough energy in the labor market.
That young people are absolutely inspired to fight against this stuff.
Meanwhile, the party continues to drag its feet, hopes that at the grassroots level the people will take care of it, which is really the only option we have at this point.
But again, Ohio, like Kansas before it, like all these other supposedly Republican strongholds, when it really comes down to voting, it's obvious that the people reject this stuff.
You have to mobilize, you have to inspire, you have to build an agenda, a broad, ambitious, forward-looking agenda on these facts.
It's time that we stop giving up on so-called red states.
There are no red states.
It's time that we stop playing this electoral trench warfare game and handing these places over.
This is a huge win in Ohio.
And it's obvious.
If the Democratic Party wants to win moving forward, if we want to get out of this crisis, if we want to have a decent, non-corrupted, non-exploitative future, you have to get behind this stuff.
You have to capitalize on distrust of our institutions because it's earned, as I talked about on Tuesday's episode with Sarah Kinzier.
The Supreme Court is so obviously corrupted The Republican Party is so obviously corrupted, the federal government in general has been so corrupted by special interest and dark money, you have to provide an answer and an antidote.
And that's what the Democratic Party must do.
And Ohio is a victory to savor, but it's also a victory to build off of.
And if you don't build on it, then you're just complicit in the problem.
All right, on that note, let's get to some questions and answers.
If you're listening to the free preview, head over to patreon.com slash my great podcast.
