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Aug. 15, 2023 - The Muckrake Political Podcast
52:40
Trump Has Georgia On His Mind With Fourth Indictment

Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the latest round of charges in Georgia filed by Fani Willis, including how dumb some of the plots were to overthrow the government. They move on to Iowa, where Ron DeSantis was having. a heckuva time overcoming the Trump trolls, before focusing on a retaliatory police raid in Kansas of a local newspaper. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the Muckrank Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates Sexton.
My friend, my buddy, my co-host, Nick Halseman.
You are off the boat.
We were all so worried you were going to get stuck on the boat.
There was going to be some sort of big story, a stomach virus, some sort of an issue.
You made it back to the land.
I did.
We made it.
I feel okay.
The biggest issue was the, you know, they have Wi-Fi there that you can pay for, and it makes it sound like, oh, it's going to be really good high speed.
I experienced probably like third world Wi-Fi, and I gotta tell you, like, I know it's sort of like, you know, whining about being privileged, but Trying to imagine being productive in a country that doesn't have good internet speed.
It would be impossible.
I couldn't load up spreadsheets to do some tax stuff I needed to do.
I don't know how you would do it.
And it's a severe disadvantage in a lot of countries around the world.
It's funny how the things you take for granted, the moment that they get disrupted, it's almost an immediate different perspective.
You start to understand how, like, access to the internet and access to technology has more or less become a human right at this point, or it should be.
But yeah, like, that type of stuff, I exactly know what you're talking about.
I stayed in a hotel a few weeks ago, and like, I mean, it was disastrously bad.
And I have to tell you, like, it really hindered me professionally.
Like in a huge huge way and you don't you don't really realize it until you get into the thick of it.
I know it really um it's fascinating and I will back anybody in politics who wants to advocate for people getting faster.
Don't say that you're going to get into some bad situations.
Oh, why?
Because there are some, like, horrible conservative Republicans?
I guarantee some horrible conservatives are going to bring that out.
I'm sorry.
Well, OK, fair enough.
But it's certainly that's a worthwhile issue to be backing.
So I completely agree.
And by the way, it's so nice to have you back.
We have a full show today.
The Trump thing obviously is heating up.
We have so many stories from Iowa.
I got to tell you, Nick, I'm getting a little bit of the Iowa fever.
I'm getting a little bit excited about having to go over and cover this stuff.
We've got all kinds of weird stuff happening in Kansas.
We've got some artificial intelligence stuff that we got to get into.
Before we do, Nick, I got to tell you, and I want to tell the listeners right now, you know what's a big hit?
Question and answer segments on The Weekender.
The people love it.
They love calling in, leaving a voicemail.
They like sending questions.
I think it's a humdinger.
It is taking off.
And if the people want to participate, they need to go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast to become a patron.
But also don't forget to get your questions in.
We record on Thursdays.
If you can get them in by Wednesday, that would be fantastic.
Absolutely.
And I'm a little bit surprised, I have to admit.
I wasn't sure how interested people would be in doing that, but certainly it is clear after two short weeks that people love it.
People are into it!
People like to, not necessarily to hear their own voice, they like to participate.
They want to feel like they're a part of the show.
And by the way, I have to tell you the thing that I'm excited about, because I've always done these bourbon talks on these Sunday nights and everything.
The questions that people ask, Nick, are oftentimes not what you expect.
Our audience wants to know what we have to say about some interesting things.
One of the things last week, while you were sailing the high seas, was whether or not I thought there was a possibility that Donald Trump might make a run for it.
And if you want to listen to that, go over to patreon.com slash my Craig podcast.
In the meantime, I got to tell you, Nick, while we're recording this, it is Monday, August 14, in the afternoon, as we're doing this right now, across the United States in the state of Georgia, where I lived for a decade, A grand jury right now is sitting and listening to evidence that is being brought forth that Donald Trump interfered in the state of Georgia's election in 2020.
I got to tell you, first of all, it looks like he's going to get charged.
And this might be one of the more serious charges against him.
We also now have word from a CNN report that the state has in its possession messages from the Trump team that show they were involved in a January 2021 voter systems breach in Coffey County, Georgia, which I'm just going to give you my expert opinion.
Ain't good.
It's not good.
But Nick, it looks like it looks bad.
I'll just say that it looks bad for Donald Trump and the people around him.
Yeah, I mean, especially because it looks like they still have text messages and emails directly to, like, Rudy Giuliani.
And they also have some sort of connection between a meeting they had in the White House about this with Trump and Giuliani.
So it feels like they're going to be able to make a pretty direct connection to Trump, which is, you know, always the hardest thing to do.
He usually can get off because he wasn't there.
He didn't say it exactly.
He gestured with his thumb and his finger, whatever that means.
But this one is bad.
But it gets worse.
Did you hear just, you know, a few hours ago, Accidentally what the Georgia state posted on their website for 10 minutes back then?
It was a fake.
It turns out.
Really?
It turns out that this was, yes, it was a false document.
Oh, okay.
Fair enough.
Nevermind.
That's how quick things are moving at this point.
You have no idea whether or not this stuff is real.
Okay well good I'm glad you know I'm still on vacation a little bit so I'm not completely plugged in and I actually was waiting for one of my texts which I hadn't gotten back thinking that okay that must mean it's legit.
Fair enough but by the way it wouldn't be surprising to me if they've already prepared the documents of all the charges as early as when this is airing tomorrow on Tuesday that they'll come out.
So you know the the hand-wringing going on here on the on the right is is you know only warranted in the sense that they just simply are completely biased and don't Yeah, it turns out there's a lot of evidence.
It goes back to what we've been covering with... What indictment is this?
At some point do you get a free sub with your indictments?
Is there like a point?
Well, you know, they're going to start slicing the meat in front of you at Subway now.
So... Well, no, I, by the way, this is one of my favorite little subplots in modern American history is how the Subway brand is just completely, you know, eating shit.
And now it's just like trying to do whatever it can to save itself.
Maybe, maybe we need a sub-loyal program.
Maybe if you get indicted a half dozen times, maybe at that point you get at least a six enter.
You know, like at that point, you can at least get a double meat on the house.
Donald Trump right now is looking around.
I've lost count of how many years he could potentially spend in prison at this point.
It's well over the century mark.
We're also talking, I mean, these messages, the people around him, we've talked about this, Nick, they're not smart.
They're not capable.
The people in the Trump orbit, right, are particularly, they're a motley crew.
They're a bunch of people who are either completely out of it and otherwise looking for fame and fortune and the ability to overthrow democracy.
The smarter people are on the outskirts.
Those are the ones who have more or less sort of like given themselves an out, you know?
The Trump people, I mean, it's literally like following a trail of destruction that leads to your cat.
They don't even have the ability to hide what they've done.
It looks like, based on these messages, Not only did they breach voting systems, but that there were high level meetings in the White House, the people's house where the president lives.
There were meetings in the White House.
It turns out that a witness to the January 6th commission has shown that Trump and his cronies were talking about in the White House, breaching voting systems in Georgia.
It now appears that they did.
I gotta tell you, and we gotta talk about prosecutor Fannie Willis here in just a second.
Nick, they're probably going to go after him in these charges and in their prosecution of him.
They're going to use RICO laws.
And for anybody who isn't familiar with this, this is racketeering.
This is organized crime, which is the most accurate way to describe what Donald Trump and the cronies around him do.
And I gotta tell you, if you get charged under RICO, Like, you better be ready to hand over everything that you've ever owned, everything that you've ever read, everything that you've ever touched.
I gotta tell you, this one, this one's bad.
It's real bad for Donald Trump.
Well, let's go back to the part where you were saying that they were not bright, because I think we need to unpack that a little bit.
Because the scheme that they just were able to connect, we were talking about, is that one of these electors, the commission on the Republican side, invited campaign members in the Trump campaign down to Georgia, to her county, whatever, to look at voting machines, right? whatever, to look at voting machines, right?
The weird thing is that the county that she had jurisdiction over allowed them to go into, Trump won by like 70%.
So what were they going to be looking at with those specific voting machines?
Can I just very quickly do like a really, really inside historical analogy on this?
This election official invited the Trump team to come and get into the voting systems the same way That the British invited William of Orange to come over.
Like, I mean, it literally was an invitation for Trump and everybody to come and steal the election.
And you're exactly right.
It was with, obviously, a Trump person in a Trump area.
But basically, it was like inviting Dracula into your house.
If Dracula's on the outside, he can't get in unless he's invited in.
People don't know that, by the way.
That's a little-known piece of Dracula lore that everybody needs to know.
You gotta invite the vampire in.
We've all watched, everyone's seen Lost Boys, haven't they?
Oh man, I haven't thought about Lost Boys in a while, but yeah, that's right.
That's the big thing.
You gotta invite them in.
And I guess there's a real possibility that Trump and the people around him are gonna say, hey, we got invited, I don't know what to tell you, but that don't cut it.
No, well, especially because, um, so here's where I'm thinking they were going to try and do.
They were going to say, here, play around with these voting machines.
And I'm sure you're going to figure out a way that if you had 12 hours by yourself in a room with a bunch of these, you're going to figure out a way where you could alter votes after the fact.
And then that's going to be your evidence that maybe that happened despite, you know, oversight of all the other machines.
Now, what they are going to conveniently forget is that when they get into these roles in the government, official roles, they have to acknowledge that what that is, what they did was illegal.
You cannot break the chain of command and the chain of custody of these machines.
They become worthless at that point because who knows what they did to those.
And again, this was a county that won 70 percent for Trump.
It's just preposterous that they thought that that would even work.
They're going to say, we were invited.
What is the big deal?
We just wanted to show how easy these machines were hackable.
That said, they're not that easy.
And you have people on both sides staring at them 24-7, making sure that nothing happens like that.
That's what's so frustrating.
We talked about this before.
It's the magic thinking of, if I can imagine something happening, Ipso facto, ergo, whatever, QED, it happened, right?
That's sort of where they reside, independent evidence.
Well, and it goes back to this idea where it's like, I know that there are conspiracies because I would carry out a conspiracy if I could.
I mean, literally, that was, you know, while researching this and kind of looking into this, Nick, I was having so many 2021, like, deja vu moments.
Like how many instances there were and Arizona was sort of ground zero for it.
Do you remember that when it was like they were like coming in they had so many people going over this stuff obviously they were talking about there being like bamboo shoots and in these ballots because they were from China and what you saw from all of it was basically these people who they wanted to steal an election That was what they were interested in.
They either knew that they had lost the 2020 election, or they were so in denial about it that they had projected their own fears of what they would do onto other people.
And they were going into these systems and basically going in and seeing what was in the guts of them, learning how to reverse engineer them, possibly to go ahead and move things around, because in their fevered brains, they were thinking the Democrats had done that.
Right?
As opposed to the fact that, I don't know, people didn't like your president and they didn't want to vote for him.
Now, we're looking at this situation and it's just, it's dead to rights.
It's literal election interference and it's as bad and worse than what Trump and all of the idiots around him have said that the Democrats and everybody else did.
They were the ones who were out there doing that and there's just no arguing it anymore.
Well, you know, the overarching motivation for this is that if they let Democrats win the White House, it will be the destruction of America.
Right.
And you have made it very clear.
We talk about this a lot with, like, Clinton and with Biden and even Obama.
These people are not radical progressives.
There is no basis for this hysteria that they've been building up.
And it's been, it has been building up year over year, starting from, you know, Carter and going forward.
That's the stupid thing.
On the margins, they will run the country slightly differently, you know what I mean?
But nothing like, and I can remember people in my family talking about how literally Obamacare, you would see the destruction of buildings in rubble because of Obamacare.
Nick, I was at a tea party rally, and this guy was talking about not only how Obamacare would bring about the total fruition of the dreams of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, but at one point in the midst of all of it, he broke And he was just like, I'm just thinking about my family, you know?
And I was like, oh my god, literally, you have taken, like, giving a little bit of accessibility to a terrible insurance system and turned it into your absolute worst fear.
And as a result, what do you got to do, Nick?
You got to catch a flight down to the Peach State and literally try and steal an election.
And we've now gotten to the point where there's no more speculating about it.
I mean, when this indictment comes out, I'm sure it'll be just as clear as what has been laid out so far.
Like, we now see what has happened.
We now know why it has happened.
We now know the extent of it.
And I got to tell you, Nick, how long have I told you that I'll believe it when I see it, when Donald Trump is held accountable?
How long have I been... You're never going to convince me at this point that you think he's going to go to prison.
I don't know how you get past this.
It's only changed.
You said it so often.
I don't believe I don't believe you if you think that he's going to go to prison.
I don't know how you get past this.
Yeah, I really, truly don't.
But wait this.
So you're talking about we don't know everything.
That's the thing.
It is worse.
We're going to find out worse now.
Now, here's, I got three things I want to throw out here, and the third one's a question to you, but, you know, they want to reference, as we're pulling apart all the communications and these people who, you know, did have some brains in them, they referenced, you know, the Nixon-Kennedy election in 1960, when they prepared alternate electors then, because Hawaii hadn't really, they were, was under dispute.
But you have to remember, that doesn't connect at all to 2020, because they were still doing the recount at that point.
So they were simply doing that to have it in place for this bullshit deadline of December 12th or the 18th, where like January 6th is the deadline.
Now, what's more galling about that is that, so for instance, the Hawaii thing doesn't work legally as far as using that as precedent, because again, they were in the middle of a recount.
This hadn't been certified yet, like it was in 2020.
But then in 2000, if you remember Bush versus Gore in the Supreme Court, The Supreme Court voted to stop the recount because they claimed that December 12th was this hardline cutoff.
The Gore lawyers argued it was January 6th.
Well, guess what?
Now the Trump lawyers are arguing Gore's position and saying that Gore's lawyers were horrible, which they kind of were.
They didn't argue properly that in the Supreme Court.
But now that we know how much Clarence Thomas has been on the dole, which, by the way, is coming out even more, he was part of that five-man decision in 2000.
And so now we knew that it wouldn't even matter what they argued in front of that court.
They were going to stop the recount ahead of Gore taking Florida.
Nick, I gotta tell you, uh, when you told me that you were going on this cruise, I, I expected there to be about a 10 to 15% chance that, uh, Clarence and Jenny Thomas were going to be hanging out playing some shuffleboard.
I really like, you know, just basically using drink tickets left and right that were signed off by Harlan.
Oh, but no, they would have been in the classy area.
We were down in the regular, you know, stateroom, whatever.
You were down there with Jack from the Titanic.
Absolutely, yeah, dancing with the bootleg beer.
But here's my question for you.
So, you know, I think we talked about this before because, you know, it seems like the biggest part of the scheme, when we're talking about the electors and we're talking about Mike Pence, Remember when Chuck Grassley had said at one point that he was going to preside over the count because they didn't expect Pence to be there?
And then they covered it up, like, really quickly.
You know, Grassley is a confused man.
He's an old man.
He says stuff, you know.
But I think somebody on Twitter might have convinced me that the conspiracy was, or no, that the plan was, that to foment the insurrection would have caused so much chaos that the Secret Service would have whisked Pence away far away on a plane somewhere, and he wouldn't be around and that is why Grassley would step in and then refuse to count these because the six states had submitted fake electors.
Is that, is that the, was that the plan?
You don't know anything.
And I gotta tell you, so, meanwhile, I love that Mike Pence is walking around with, like, a swagger in his step, just being like, elections should never be interfered with, and we need to believe in the Constitution.
It's like, thanks, Mike.
I appreciate it.
Why don't you go over here and lose, first of all, and never be heard from again?
Save for going on, like, some Sunday morning show on CBS where we want to treat you like you're a hero.
I like to imagine that in every one of these Trump meetings, besides Mike Lindell just throwing, you know, just crazy ideas out and people being like, Mike, that's a great idea.
We'll think about that.
Just whiteboards where basically in every one of them, it's either Mike Pence has been removed and or somebody has taken his place or he's been hung.
I don't know.
And Pence just peeking his head and being like, boss, did you need me?
And it's like, "No, Mike, go, go, we're good." Like there were probably, And that's the thing about this.
I think they tried eight or nine different schemes at once.
You know what I mean?
Like, they literally tried everything that they could possibly imagine all at once, hoping in some way, shape, or form it was going to work out.
And here's the amazing thing about it, Nick.
Let's just go ahead and say it like it is.
It kind of almost worked.
Like, it worked way better than it had any right to work.
And meanwhile, to see this stuff, like, you want to talk about an election official who invites them in to get into this voting material?
You want to talk about how many people at every level, whether it's fake electors or Ronna McDaniel with the RNC, Nick, look at how many people were more than happy to jump on this crazy train.
This attempted coup, top to bottom within the Republican Party, not just national, not just state, not just regional, not just local, all across the board.
Everybody was game for this thing.
And I gotta tell you, It doesn't feel like even raking him over the coals is going to make that stop.
Like, this literally feels like it was one step in another step.
Like, I gotta tell you at this point, Nick, I don't know if you paid attention to this while you were gone, Trump hasn't shut up.
He will not stop.
He went after the prosecutor Fannie Willis.
He's called her, and by the way, the next two women I'm going to talk about are black women.
I just want to make that very, very clear and we can talk about that.
He called prosecutor Fannie Willis in Georgia a racist, which is fun, and also has accused her of having an affair with a gang leader.
On the January 6 trial, Judge Tanya Chutkan has warned him repeatedly to shut up about this trial.
He will not stop.
He's attacked her.
He's basically called her corrupt, that she shouldn't be involved in this.
I think he might go to jail.
And I don't know if that's going to stop everything.
I don't think it will.
That's something I keep saying.
I think he's going to, in one way, shape, or form, I think there's a very real possibility that, at the very, very least, house arrest.
Because, you know, it's almost impossible to throw this guy in prison, but in some way, shape, or form, I do not see at this point how he doesn't at least contempt of court, at the very, very least.
Like, I don't see how this stops.
Well, I mean, I like what she's doing because, you know, she's not going to throw him in jail.
They probably have this concern again about not appearing too political.
But what I like about this, she's just like, great, if you keep doing that, we'll just move the trial up and you'll have it a lot quicker.
And that's what they don't want.
They want to delay this.
So and I think that she probably senses and has probably seen a lot of the evidence.
She knows how this is going to go.
Right.
And so, you know, the faster they move that up and the quicker he gets, you know, probably a guilty plea in this, the more it's going to hurt him.
It does feel like there is a little shifting here on the margins, like we talked about a couple of weeks ago.
You know, in Iowa, we did see, you know, a few of these Trump supporters were like, you know what, I am ready to move on now.
Meanwhile, it's funny because who we're going to move on to is a whole other interesting discussion that really, you know, we used to complain about having to pick between, you know, the lesser of two evils.
But man, this is getting really to the bottom of the barrel on that one.
So I like what Chuck is doing.
And remember, he's used the race card with any of the black members of law enforcement that go after him.
That's his thing, he says, no matter what, just blurts it out.
So no one is surprised at that one.
But I I was trying to find what the thing about having the affair comes from.
So ridiculous.
The only thing that you can see is that she represented a gang member when she was in private practice.
You know, and that's it.
There's no other, nothing.
And the gang member himself, you know, says nothing.
So it really is, this is how desperate they are, like that they're willing to make up that far of a lie.
Well, first of all, it's disgusting, and Trump will say whatever it is that his addled mind wants to put out there.
You know, you were talking a little bit about people starting to move away from him.
You know, you and I messaged about this a little bit.
Are weirdly enough starting to say, hey, we think maybe he should be disqualified.
I mean, you know, when the Federalist Society starts bringing this stuff up, you kind of got to start to wonder what's happening there.
I want to point out, as I've said in the past, the mainstream Republican Party does not want Donald Trump to be the nominee going into 2024.
They want him to go away.
I think they feel like this is one of those ways that they could possibly do away with him.
I mean, if you want to really go ahead and roll the dice with Ron DeSantis, I guess good luck.
I don't know what else to say to you.
I gotta tell you, the way that this country works, the ways that its laws work, the way the Constitution works, Nick, I don't think even if he gets thrown in jail, I don't think that they're going to disqualify him.
It feels like everybody's so afraid of seeming political or seeming biased.
Like, I don't think that these things are going to hold on.
And I don't know what that means for this race.
I know it means that these conservative institutions are grasping at straws.
It's really interesting to have them go out and show their true colors.
Nobody pays attention to this stuff except for political sickos like the MAGA crowd.
They don't have any consequences of saying this stuff, but it is very obvious that they're quite interested in the possibility of Trump being disqualified here.
You know, it's funny because they might be able to sort of capitalize on the martyrdom of Trump.
being persecuted and let him be the figurehead.
And they can still, that's, you know, in the past they've used things like abortion.
That's their big rallying cry of the hatred of the other to get them to get out of the vote.
So this could very well be the thing that they think they can then direct them to somewhere else.
It's worth noting, not that I wanna toot my own horn, but you might remember like a month ago or two months ago, I was talking about the Bekramaswami and he went from like 3% to 5% in about five weeks.
He's now at like 7.7%.
He's doubled his polling in about a month and a half.
Again, it's low, but that's kind of meteoric when you're talking about doubling your numbers in a very short time, which happens to coincide with your friend and mine, Ron DeSantis, his absolute No!
Raidering.
And did you feel bad for the guy?
You saw all the clips in Iowa.
You got to feel.
I kind of felt bad for the guy.
You know, he's such a bumbling idiot and they were flunking on him left and right.
He's an absolute fool.
And I gotta tell you, um, you know, I told you about this, like, uh, before, like, the Iowa thing, it's, it's, it's really telling what happens when you finally get on the ground there.
For those who don't follow this stuff, the Iowa State Fair is going, which, uh, is, is a wild, wild thing, Nick.
My favorite is that all of these, uh, these wannabe candidates, they're having to go and, and, and the stories are filled with this stuff.
They gotta go to the pork tent.
And they gotta chow down on some pork and talk to the people.
They gotta go over and pose in front of the butter cow.
They gotta have their fair tent conversation with the governor.
You know, they gotta hang out with big steers and all this.
And in the midst of all of it, first of all, Trump just hasn't been doing it.
He shows up in his helicopter or his plane and he goes out and he throws people some hats and he's not interested in talking to the governor.
He's completely overturned what you're supposed to do in Iowa.
Meanwhile, Ron DeSantis, first of all, one of my favorite anecdotes in the past couple of days, Nick, is that DeSantis was giving a speech at the Iowa State Fair and a plane kept flying and circling around that had a banner that said, quote, "Be likable, Ron." And it turned out that it had been paid for by the Trump campaign, which was trolling him.
Meanwhile, DeSantis' supporters got into a brawl with Trump supporters at this bar called the Copper Cup, where I gotta tell you, I have gone to more than my fair share of political events and Have wandered out into an Uber that I forgot that I called.
And if people are brawling at the Copper Cup, this is not the place for people to be getting in political fights.
It's wild.
Meanwhile, DeSantis is trying to make headlines, Nick, and what he's talking about is actually kind of important.
Would you be willing to use drones, whatever military it takes, to take out those drug cartels in Mexico?
Yes, I've already said that.
We will lean in against the drug cartels.
We will absolutely reserve the right.
If they're invading our country and killing our people, we have the right to defend this country.
We have the right to hold them accountable.
And it's not just if they happen to come over our border.
And if Mexico's not going to help us with that, well then we're going to have to do what we have to do.
Did you say you'd use drones on the Mexican drug cartels?
I said I would use whatever force we need to to defend the country.
They're killing tens of thousands of Americans right now.
They're trafficking people into this country.
They're abusing people.
Sexual abuse.
It's really the worst of humanity.
I would categorize them as something akin to a foreign terrorist organization.
I think that that's what they've proven to be.
The Mexican government is not doing what they need to do to help with this.
But we said from day one on our border announcement, we'd be willing to lean in against them, and we reserve the right to defend the country.
So, Nick, I want to point out in the beginning of that clip where DeSantis is doing a Q&A in Iowa, you'll notice as he's talking about basically declaring war on Mexico for the cartels and fentanyl and all that good stuff, nobody cheered.
Nobody clapped.
There was absolutely nothing to it.
There's no juice to it whatsoever.
They've basically written him off.
But the important thing here, that is now the mainstream opinion of the Republican Party, is the idea that you should be using drones and bombs on Mexico.
Which started, by the way, within the Trump administration.
It was one of those things that the right-wing institutes and think tanks are always floating.
I gotta tell you, there's a non-zero chance that that happens.
Nay, if Trump's elected, someone down the line, this has been brewing for a while.
This feels like something that starts to pick up speed and starts to actually become a reality.
The idea that we will actually have a border skirmish with the nation of Mexico.
Sure, we've had a war with them before.
We have!
Yeah, I think we got Texas out of that, maybe.
We got a couple things out of that.
Not great.
Here's my thing.
Like, I don't know what the solution is to the fentanyl crisis, necessarily, or sex trafficking and all these horrible things.
I do sense, though, that the best solution would be for the United States and Mexico to work together on this one.
Right?
Am I crazy?
I'm not crazy, am I?
Wait, time out.
Are you starting a second Cold War with China, a nation it would be absolutely impossible to have a war with, without nuclear annihilation or massive casualties, and you would like to go ahead and use that aggression somewhere else?
Is that part of it?
No, I don't know.
I was just thinking that sometimes the solutions are a lot better when you actually work together with other countries.
I'm sorry, I'm just going to give Grenada a quick call and see how they're feeling.
We love these things!
We love the ability to say that we're going after drugs or that we're fighting something in, you know, a southern country with people who don't look like us.
We love to go in and throw our weight around.
And this, for whatever reason, whether it's the need to show off our arsenal, to give China a heads up of what we're about to do, there are always these proxies.
You know, like these things always happen.
And it feels like this thing, for whatever reason, is actually picking up momentum.
Yeah.
And that's actually a fascinating concept in the notion of we will threaten Mexico and be with violence.
And that will make China sit up in their chair a little bit.
That's interesting to me.
I'm not sure.
But either way, I mean, you know, listen, it's a good it's probably the only good platform they have.
Right.
Politically.
Well, I mean, if you want to call that good, I mean, it's what they've got.
You know, it's also the start, Nick, of this new, more fascistic tone.
I mean, what happened down in Texas with Greg Abbott, like, putting together these buoys that ended up drowning children, which, by the way, What a fucking coward Greg Abbott is.
What a disgusting person.
He couldn't even say that two children had died.
He had to call them bodies.
Meanwhile, reports are coming out that like some of these booze have like saws on them.
I mean, like just the cruelty.
It's unimaginable.
We laughed, by the way, whenever Donald Trump talked about putting alligators and moats and all of that, you know, by walls.
Oh yeah, but there's a three-year-old that died on the bus that he shipped up north to Chicago.
Oh yeah!
This is what is happening, and meanwhile, things are getting worse and worse.
The Republican Party is becoming more and more extreme, and this is like where the rubber meets the road on this stuff.
It's cruelty, it's not just death, it's war, and I gotta tell you, like, there's gonna be an appetite for this thing.
And as long as Democrats continue to talk about the crisis at the border, and they continue to talk about fentanyl as if it's something that it isn't, and it doesn't mean it's not a problem, but going ahead and playing in the sandbox the Republicans have, you're gonna end up with a small border war.
I mean, that's what's cooking right now, and it doesn't mean it's gonna happen in the next four years, but I gotta tell you, this thing's cooking right now.
Well, even independent of that, to take a left turn, the war between these two, the campaigns, you know, in the past, and you've been on the ground, and you've seen, in my opinion, what I've seen, when you back out far enough on the videos of, like, the fights that you see during the protests, during these events, like in Iowa, whatever, it's usually, like, the one or two people are, like, yelling, screaming, maybe they push each other, and there's 50 people with cameras, desperate to capture this, right?
But I'm sensing now that, like, you know, with that, the brawl, the bar, whatever, like, I'm sensing some real fervent, you know, feelings here on this one where you might get a lot more riots and a lot more violence in between the campaigns.
I'm prepared for it.
So I'm going to be heading into Iowa as the primary starts to heat up.
And I got to tell you, There is no shortage of people interested in dirty tricks.
I mean, the Trump campaign ran circles around everybody.
The other people, and this is one of the reasons why Trump was able to obviously just destroy the field in 2016, like the other people weren't necessarily, like Marco Rubio wasn't going to pay people to go into Trump rallies and, you know, interfere.
DeSantis would.
That's who he is.
And I will go ahead and predict there's going to be some scuffles.
Heading into the primary in January.
And I'm not looking forward to it.
You know, I value my health.
I've aged a few years since my days in the trenches of the Trump campaign.
But yeah, I think going into this primary, it's going to be a wild time.
Well, maybe I'll even consider joining you.
I better start growing my beard right now.
That's what I want.
I want you to come out to Iowa and actually experience some of this.
You know what?
I would love to do that.
And again, fair is not the right word.
We can blend in in a way that others can't and get some of the stuff that you originally blew up with.
And that's important because, you know, you want the real behavior.
You want to hear what they really think about, what they really say.
And the whole notion of the First Amendment stuff, which is what Donald Trump's going to run, or is going to defend himself in court on, it goes downhill from there.
Everybody wants to be able to say anything that's under the First Amendment, and it's going to get disgusting.
Man, that's going to be real bad.
Speaking of the First Amendment, Nick, we wouldn't be the McCraig Podcast if we didn't talk about what's going down in Kansas.
Some people might have heard about this story.
It's been a little bit under the radar, unfortunately.
It's really disturbing.
In Marion, Kansas, a newspaper, the local newspaper, the Marion County Record, Recently, police raided the newspaper.
They took files, phones, computers.
The entire police department descended on this place and also the home of Eric Meyer, who is the editor.
It's really, really chilling.
The background of the story, it appears that the newspaper had covered a problem with a local restaurant owner, and it appears that the cops intervened.
First Amendment rights were really, really on the line here.
I don't know how to look at this thing and not feel troubled by it.
It also is so stupid.
And when I say that, I mean, in my, you know, the internet I had was so bad, right?
And it took so long to load even like the one page of the website.
But I did try and look into this last week.
From what I could gather, there was a like a local politician who was speaking at a restaurant and they barred some of the press from getting in.
And so this became the woman who runs the restaurant became the target, right?
And so as I understand it, they received information that she had gotten a DUI a long time ago, but continued to drive anyway, as if this is going to be some sort of get back at you for stopping us from covering something that was important.
It turns out they never ran the story.
They thought they were being set up by this because she's in the middle of a divorce.
And it sounds like it was her ex-husband who was leaking all this terrible information about her because he's mad about his divorce.
That's how ridiculous this thing, really, the seeds of this were.
And then, yeah, they turned Gestapo on them and seized everything.
It really is amazing to me that that can happen.
And you have to hope that the DOJ is going to come in here and clean this whole thing up.
I hope so.
I want to point out, and I kind of feel like I need almost like a deputy who puts the stick-up alarm on top of his car, you know what I mean?
The light that suddenly tells everybody you're on duty.
I need one of those, because here's where somebody says, this isn't America, and I grab the light and I put it on top of my car, and I'm like, here's another segment of Jared telling you this is America, and America has A very, very rich history of this.
Newspapers, for as long as they've been in the United States of America, have been raided.
They've been destroyed.
The people who ran them have been harassed.
They've taken their machines and thrown them into rivers for even speaking out against slavery.
The freedom of the press is always, always, always, always endangered.
And when stuff like this starts happening, it's like the canary in the coal mine, Nick.
It tells you, oh wow.
The line between constitutional rights and the authority of law enforcement, and by authority I mean their ability to step over the line of authority, it's very, very thin.
And stuff like this, if there were more local newspapers, Yeah.
Which is an industry which has been intentionally destroyed for decades now, leaving very, very few local newspapers.
If there were more, you would be hearing a lot more stories like this.
This is the type of stuff that happens as authoritarian energies are gathering and building in the United States.
This is America.
We've seen it time and time and time again.
And yeah, this is a reason to perk up and pay attention.
Well, and also, let's not forget that they got a judge to sign off on this raid when, in reality, what all he was supposed to be able to do is let them have a subpoena, where you would subpoena the records that they wanted from the press.
This is going to go up to that level because, again, the cops are going to argue that they did the proper channels and they went to the judge.
But it also shows you what these judges can be like, especially in the era of Trump and beyond.
And that's really, really crazy.
I mean, listen, Eileen Cannon, you know, in Florida who's overseeing Trump's first indictment, is it his first?
Maybe it's his second.
You know, the Mar-a-Lago one, she forgot to swear in the jury pool last week.
You know what I mean?
That would be the equivalent of us for getting to like hit record when we started our podcast today. - Yeah, but with just a few more repercussions.
Yeah, I mean, and I got to tell you, I know this is going to shock some people.
So if you're driving, go ahead and pull over and just steal yourself.
Law enforcement in this country and the judicial system are a disaster, an absolute disaster.
And it's full of zealots who are either bad at their job, not qualified for their job, or they believe that the Constitution is only for them.
It's a weapon to be used against other people.
And otherwise, all bets are off.
And they're our only hope for keeping democracy in place.
That's supposedly our only hope for keeping democracy in place.
We'll keep an eye on this thing.
By the way, terrible part of this, I don't know if you heard this, Eric Meyer, the publisher, his 98-year-old mom, they raided his home and apparently the stress from it killed her.
Just Awful, tragic stuff.
We move from this troubling story into a little... I still think this is troubling, Nick.
I have an issue with this, but this is a story that has been made up for the McGregg Podcast.
It appears, in the wonderful world of AI, A YouTube musician named Kid Klava, who apparently, by the way, performs with a ski mask on.
I watched some of this person's stuff.
Apparently created an artificial intelligence driven version of a song that they wrote And it's sung by an AI version of John Lennon.
I want to talk about what's happening here, the implications for it.
But first of all, Nick, let's hear this abomination.
Okay, here you go.
Isn't it obvious?
Isn't it clear?
Every time you needed someone, wasn't out here.
Either you're stupid Or you don't even care But I've been holding on The feelings I gotta share Oh, do I really have to spell it out?
Everybody knows it I've been crazy over you Everybody knows it Alright Nick, so what are your initial thoughts before we get into the larger implications here?
I mean, it sounds just like John Lennon, right?
Well, the voice.
Yeah.
So, that's cool.
By the way, I had shared with you, I think a few weeks ago, my voice.
I had sent him the script, and then it comes back two seconds later in my voice.
It's amazing.
They make you promise that you have the rights to this voice when you upload it, right?
Like, you can't do stuff like this.
Obviously, it's not legally binding.
You know, the real fear is when you get people, you know, on tape supposedly admitting to crimes, right?
And they didn't really do that.
And that is probably going to happen in this, you know, presidential cycle.
DeSantis is going to come out talking about eating, you know, cake with something.
I don't know what they're going to make him say.
But that is a very, you know, a very concerning thing that I don't know how you're supposed to stop.
Well, I'll just go ahead and say I thought this was an interesting entry point because most people are very aware of the Beatles and John Lennon.
Obviously, I thought this was a good way of thinking about it because, Nick, the composition of the song, like the sort of sparse, you know, sort of everything musically around it, that's good.
There's even like the little thing I was talking about this the other day with somebody.
You know, Lenin is kind of cruel in his songwriting.
Like, even in love songs, he has a tendency to say some really cruel things, and there's like this moment in it where he's like, either you're stupid or you don't care, which is actually a very Leninist kind of thing to say.
That being said, It kind of just sucks.
It just kind of sucks.
And it doesn't have the human spirit behind it.
It's a computer replicating the voice of a famous person.
And like, you can mess around with it.
You can move controls around or whatever.
It's literally like digging up John Lennon and using him as a puppet.
It blows.
And it upsets me as somebody who appreciates Lennon and The Beatles and music and humanity.
And I gotta tell you, there's going to be no end to this stuff.
And yes, it's going to interfere with our politics.
Yes, it's going to interfere with society at large.
But from an art standpoint?
Man, it's a bummer.
I mean, at the very least, there's probably a handful of people in the world right now that could create a song that would sound like what John Lennon would have written, right?
Because they were that much of a genius, right?
So we know right off the bat this is, you know, so inferior to anything they would have done.
Did you not see, by the way, interesting I said not see, did you not see the Raiders of the Lost Ark movie, the last one?
No, oh no, the Indiana Jones movie.
I can't, I can't, I'll watch it when it streams.
I can't.
I'm going to ruin it for you the first 10 minutes.
Oh, I know they de-aged him.
I know that.
Right.
And only for the purpose of de-aging him.
It didn't really even have much of an effect on the story.
They didn't have to do it, but they just simply, let's just have a young Indiana Jones, you know, new footage that no one's seen before.
You know, in a way, that was a primary motivation I got from that.
It was cool, you know, for a few minutes, but you're right.
It's cheapening the artistic creation process, right?
And that's going to be a problem because we all suffer going forward from that.
And it's going to be something, again, that creates a bunch of, like, content.
And I mean, this is something, you know, the actual clip of it is about a minute long.
Like, it's something to do with a minute and to share with people and to look at it or whatever.
Like, you know, the content must flow.
But it just...
This is what the future is.
This is one of the reasons why the strike is happening in Hollywood.
You know, it's literally going to be a stream of pretty soulless entertainments and content, and we got to recognize that.
I have a problem, and I don't know if you think about this that long or that much, but I have been lately.
For years and years and years, starting with Napster, And I don't know what your experience was with Napster, but man, when I was using it, I was happy to get all this free music and spend all my time with it.
I never thought about the consequences of it because I was getting the music that I wanted and I didn't have to pay anything for it.
You know, a lot like how we're looking at climate change as a result of how life has, you know, unfurled and the things we enjoy.
Like, we're finally, I think, we're reaching a point where we are going to reap a lot of what we have sown.
And unless we like start to actually consider different ways forward, we are really looking at like a cultural Armageddon.
I don't know how else to say that like we've sort of as a writer.
You know, I'm sitting here talking to you in front of the cover of my book.
I gotta tell you that writing has been completely devalued.
Authors and books and all of that have just been spit upon.
It's been awful in the academy, in culture, everything at large.
We're now in a place where we're really staring down the barrel of a gun with this stuff.
It's really upsetting.
I mean, as I'm looking at the side on the YouTube, the suggestions from the video we just watched, there's one that's called Thanos vs. Oppenheimer Epic Rap Battle.
Would you like to guess how many views that one's gotten?
Oh my god.
I'm not going to play it.
We could play it, but I bet you it's Thanos' voice and Oppenheimer rapping, right?
31 million views from three years ago.
31 million?! !
Yeah, that's crazy.
That's a lot of views.
Yes, that's what we're moving towards.
Now, by the way, I don't remember if I had brought this up a few weeks ago when we were talking about the strike, but in their effort to get more transparency, they're going to find out how barren the shelves are at Netflix and at Prime, how few views they really are getting.
And the stock tanks and then the whole business tanks and all because of this strike in a weird way, if they are able to get that information, which is probably why they won't get it.
But I think that speaks to the bigger thing as well, where a lot of this is smoke and mirrors, right?
And it's all sort of fake.
We don't really know what's happening across the whole thing to the point where it becomes like the matrix.
Everything was fun and games when there was 0% interest rate.
Right, that's a good point.
You know what I mean?
When the spigots were turned on full force, it was a party to be had.
Now that they're not, like, you know, a lot of this moving around, and, you know, you're out in California, you're around a lot of this stuff.
Big tech for years was basically telling everybody, don't worry about numbers and profitability, we'll get there.
Right.
Eventually it'll get figured out.
We'll figure out how to make all this stuff profit.
We're changing the world.
You know, we're historic geniuses.
And then eventually what happens is the check comes due.
And you know, this is one of the reasons why we have this situation with Twitter.
It's one of the reasons why we have this problem economically.
It's one of the reasons why we have these labor actions.
But it has reached a point where the check has come due.
And again, zero percent interest rates.
Everybody's a genius.
You move away from that and everybody's kind of in trouble.
And meanwhile, you have artificial intelligence, which is going to give you, I guess, dead singers.
I don't know what else to do with that.
Man, that sucks.
That's really, really lame.
All right.
Everybody, that brings an end to this episode of the Muckrake Podcast.
A reminder, go to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
First of all, to gain access to the weekly Weekender on Fridays, I promise you it's worth it.
This question and answer thing, it's hidden.
But also, that way you can ask your questions.
And again, if you are a patron, please go to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
We'll post a link this week to the voicemail, I don't know what to call it, Nick, the voicemail link Where you can leave your voicemails with questions for the show for this weekend.
Muckmail.
Doesn't work.
Muckmail sounds bad.
Yeah.
We'll get there.
We will take voicemails.
We'll also take emails to muckrigpodcast at gmail.com.
But yeah, thanks everybody for hanging out.
If you need us before then, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?
SMH.
It's good to have you back, buddy.
And you can find me at J.Y.
Sexton.
All right.
Be safe.
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