This is a preview of the full Weekender Friday episode. To unlock the full 50+ minute show, and all future episodes, head over to patreon.com/muckrakepodcast and become a subscriber. You'll gain access to more content, as well as live tapings, and more.
Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss how Elon Musk is trying to blame the ADL for his business failures, the abuse of power in Georgia as a Republican Attorney General is trying to file RICO charges on protesters as a blatant retaliatory strike against Fani Willis, and focus on the downfall of former Project Veritas clown James O'Keefe. They then answer a number of your questions.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
That is the sound of the end of an abbreviated week.
I'm Jared Yates.
I'm here with Nick Halseman.
Nick, the holiday has me all thrown off timing wise.
Are you feeling similarly?
No, I don't know.
I kind of feel normal, although normal is not normal anyway.
So maybe I feel the way you're describing all the time.
You don't feel like this week is just sped by at light speed?
I mean, I guess, you know, there is, there is something to that.
Yeah.
I can, I can see what you mean, but that is my life, Jared.
Oh, I'm not mine too.
All right, good.
I'm glad we're on the same page.
Welcome to the Weekender Edition of the Muckrag Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates Saxton.
I'm here with Nick Halseman.
For everybody's information, you're in your car.
I am.
I'm in my really quiet car, isn't it?
It sounds quiet here, doesn't it?
I, I'm the one who's always in this car.
I know.
Well, listen, things have to happen.
I have to drive to San Diego.
I'm in, by the way, lovely, lovely La Jolla, by the way.
Just a beautiful place.
Couldn't be better.
Well, we're so glad you could make it, and we're so glad that y'all are tuning in.
A reminder, if you want to listen to the whole Weekender podcast, go to patreon.com slash mcgreggpodcast.
Supports the show.
You get an extra show every week.
Again, we're going to answer questions from our listeners.
They're fantastic.
Once again, that's patreon.com slash mcgreggpodcast.
Nick, we got a jam-packed show.
Things in Georgia have gotten weird.
Things with James O'Keefe and Project Veritas.
One of my favorite rundowns in a while, in terms of what happened there.
But first, Nick, we have to talk about the hellsite that is Twitter X, whatever we want to call it.
Elon Musk Who continues to be radicalized in public at speeds that defy the imagination, has recently blamed the Anti-Defamation League, the ADL, that's right, the group that tracks anti-Semitic attacks and conspiracy theories.
and hatred.
He has blamed them for what he calls a 60% ad decline on Twitter.
He has said that he plans on suing them, that they're behind all of the problems that are going on on Twitter.
Rightfully, everyone has called this an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory because, let me check my notes, it is.
What do you think about this, Nick?
I I think it's telling in a lot of different ways.
It's also indicative of what's happening in our culture right now, but to see Elon making an anti-Semitic accusation so obviously and so clear, it's a little staggering until you realize, well, we're living when we are.
You know, it's been eye-opening for me, directly.
The Leo Frank thing had popped up, and if you don't really know about it, you can look it up.
It was a court case from the early 1900s, where a Jewish guy was ripped out of jail and hung because he was acquitted, or I think from the, no, he was found guilty, whatever, he was gonna get acquitted from the charges.
And the townsfolk were so upset about that that they wanted to hang the guy.
The ADL comes in, like, later and tries to say that, like, he actually was innocent and, like, it was a weird trial.
But I weighed in on that.
I dipped my toe into this, because this is a few weeks ago.
And just really quickly, the ADL, like, you know, growing up was, it's like, you know how the WHO or the, yeah, WHO or the CDC, these used to be things That were impeccable, like their reputations.
They were there to help people and no one would ever have thought anything different.
And now they become such vilified entities and the ADL apparently has been a lightning rod.
I had no idea.
And so, when I dip my toe and say, well, you know, there's evidence that perhaps, you know, that he wasn't guilty of this thing.
Man, it filled my timeline for a while.
It's even now, it's still, you know, and it's a lot of anti-Semitic stuff.
So it opened my eyes to the fact that there is a lot of this hatred towards institutions that are really just there to try and keep hate off of these platforms.
And they come with receipts.
It's not like they're making shit up.
You can show the tweets that are anti-Semitic.
You can show the rise of the tweets that are anti-Semitic.
That's what's so galling.
And guess who is the one guy who knows how many tweets are on the platform that are anti-Semitic?
Yeah, it's the guy.
And for the record, for people who don't know about this, one of the reasons the ADL has become a lightning rod is because, you know, there's been a political function there.
Obviously, they're trying to keep anti-Semitism off platforms like this.
They're trying to keep track of, you know, all of these issues and basically to point out when these things are problematic.
And then there are other times where, of course, you get into Israeli politics, the Palestinian situation.
There are plenty of reasons to sit here and talk about, like, whether or not this group is always on target or they're not.
To say that they're working behind the scenes and If you might remember this, Nick, Elon kind of debuted his anti-Semitism by going after George Soros, right?
It was like George Soros is like Magneto.
He's trying to destroy culture.
He's trying to destroy civilization.
That is that is like entry level anti-Semitism, right?
That's something that you start to learn on Fox News.
And then all of a sudden you start hanging around with like some harder guys.
You know what I mean?
Like you and this is what happens as radicalization takes place.
I want to ask you something, because you were talking about your experience with this.
You know, you're a guy.
You've lived in America for years now.
You have Jewish heritage.
Did you feel like this stuff, like, in the past?
Or is this like a brand new experience?
Because I had noticed, like, when you dealt with this, you were actually pretty shocked.
And to sort of experience it, I have to imagine it's got to be bracing, right?
Yeah, yeah, I had never experienced that before.
And, you know, it's possible that, and by the way, I had seen, I'd seen like a lot of the people on Twitter, you know, they add the three parentheses around their names.
And I, so I'd seen that, which indicated to me that like, they are trying to like almost spit in the face of the people who want to use that symbol as, you know.
And so, so I was aware of something, but it was never, ever directly.
And, you know, even every so often, maybe something would pop up, but I am willing to believe that when the ADL says that there is an increase in hate speech on Twitter, Twitter on X, I will be willing to believe that.
And I, cause again, it's really difficult to, as any kind of entity, bring up these kinds of charges unless you are showing the receipts.
And by the way, it's not behind the scenes.
Like, you know, they're talking about how ADL is behind the scenes doing all that stuff.
It's in front.
They told everybody that they went to advertisers and said you shouldn't advertise on this platform because it's filled with this.
And last time I checked, it's pretty clear to me that there's a direct connection between the hate speech that you see there and actual violence in the streets.
Am I wrong?
Well, you know, it's not like...
Elon and his friends had to discover a protocol of elders of Zion having a meeting discussing how they were going to use the media in order to screw him.
You know, what's happening here is the same thing that's happened now for millennia.
Which is, and particularly in the last couple centuries, a white man, a wealthy, powerful white man, screwed up.
And because he is white and wealthy and powerful, he can't even conceive, Nick, that it's his fault.
Like, what we're watching is Elon Musk, like so many of the people around him and like so many people on the right now, he's having a complete and utter personal, emotional mental health breakdown.
Right?
And he can't even fathom that he has lost the money that he has.
The reason why Twitter has lost its value, first of all, is because he bought it.
Right?
Like, it was on the market, and they were, like, looking around for someone to buy.
He bought it.
That was, like, the baseline for what somebody would pay for Twitter.
What's happened since then?
He threw shit at the walls, and no one else is interested in it.
No one's interested in putting advertisements on this.
I don't know about you, but the advertisements I get are things that, like, probably should be on TV, like, public access at, like, 3 or 4 in the morning, you know, back in the 1990s.
Like, he has driven this thing down.
Every corporation that he's in charge of, every business he's in charge of, is suffering because he's incompetent, he's offensive, he doesn't listen to anybody, and he's gone off the rails.
But because he is a white, wealthy, powerful man, like I said, for millennia, for centuries, the easiest thing in the world to do is to blame Jews.
That's it.
That's what happens when you are of that persuasion.
You either look in the mirror and you say, I did something wrong.
I need to do something better.
I need to own up for this.
Or, obviously there's somebody who's coming after me and there's a conspiracy.
And this is the easiest track to go down.
I don't know if you mentioned, he came up with a percentage of how much of the loss is due to the ADL and them going, I think he said 60% was what he wanted to argue?
He said 60%, Nick, which I would go ahead and say that comes from the exact same brain palace that Donald Trump created.
What was it?
3 million people who didn't vote for him or who were made up in the 2016 election?
It's whatever you want it to be.
It's, you know, how many angels can you fit on the pin?
That's the question.
Yeah, and it's just disgusting, because you're right.
And by the way, he didn't buy Twitter because it was just for sale and there was a price out there.
He outbid nobody.
By orders of magnitude, he overpaid, and he knew he overpaid for this.
Because a court made him.
Right, exactly, right.
He was so egregious, a court made him buy it.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, when you jump in the pool with no pants on, you get the ticket, you know, you get the public indecency ticket.
That's what's going to happen.
So, here's the thing, you know, because what's even more frightening in a bigger overall picture is that, did he buy this to do what he's doing with misinformation in the platform ahead of the 2024 election?
Because that's a conspiracy theory.
I get it.
But like at some point, it's going to be a factor, right?
We're really going to have a problem with misinformation going on all around what's going to happen in next year's election.
So this is not going to help whether or not it was intentional or not.
But I think it is.
I think he certainly is intentionally saying we must have quote unquote free speech.
And that means that anybody can say whatever they want, no matter how hateful it is.
And you have been listening to a free preview of our Patreon-exclusive Weekender Show.
word they want to get to the k word i suppose we're talking about jews it's like this is where we're moving towards and it's it's just so frustrating and you've been listening to a free preview of our patreon exclusive weekender show if you want to get in on all the fun and get that bonus episode every week not to mention exclusive content uh live hangouts question and answer We're even going to do some of these live so you can come and watch how the sausage is made.
All you have to do is go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
On top of that, you get to hang out with the muckrake community, which are a really good group of people.
