Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss Mike Pence dropping out of the race, Trump's battle with making sense, Mike Johnson's extreme religious beliefs. They then pull apart more of the issues surrounding Israel as they attempt to eradicate Hamas while innocent people continue to be killed.
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Nick, you and I were talking before we started recording this thing about big candy.
I dropped about $80 on candy yesterday.
I still don't think it's enough.
It's out of control.
We need to do something about it.
Well, I guess I'm going to be, you're getting me prepared.
I have to go this tour today.
Maybe there won't be any candy left to buy.
I have no idea.
Is that, was that a feeling for you?
It looked, it looked like peak pandemic levels of empty shelves with candy.
Big candy's out of control.
I, I, I'm sorry.
I, listen, I'm a candy fanatic.
I love chocolate.
I love fruit candy.
I love it all.
I'm an equal opportunity candy enthusiast, but even I have to admit that there's a problem.
Well, this would be my chance to say that I think something like Skittles should be eradicated from the... I'm going to be honest with you.
There are some things that you and I disagree on, and you know, it's coming to the forefront here and there when we're talking about current politics, but man, your candy takes are god-awful.
It crunches and it becomes this little granular, like you're biting sand.
I don't understand.
Nick, I just want to bring the new Muckrake podcast listeners up to speed in case they didn't know this.
Nick Halseman was the one who once said on a live show, I've never had a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.
And then we made you eat a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup and you said, it's fine.
Your candy takes are garbage.
I'm sorry.
What's a good candy to you?
Snickers is the best candy.
It's a good candy.
Nestle's Crunch.
Nestle's Crunch is a decent candy.
I don't know what else.
I don't eat a ton of that stuff.
Even growing up, when I drank Coke for breakfast, I didn't do much more than Snickers, I suppose.
Now you're talking the song of my people, drinking coke and soda for breakfast.
Out of a bottle, like a tall bottle.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I'll tell you what, I enjoy Halloween.
I hope you're enjoying Halloween, starting it with us.
I mean, why not?
We scare the living shit out of you all the time.
Nick, I'll tell you, somebody who isn't having a good Halloween That's right.
It's the former vice president of the United States of America, the former governor of Indiana, Mike Pence, has suspended his campaign for the presidency.
Let's hear it from the man himself.
Traveling across the country over the past six months, I came here to say it's become clear to me, this is not my time.
So after much prayer and deliberation, I have decided to suspend my campaign for President-effective today.
Now, I'm leaving this campaign, but let me promise you, I will never leave the fight for conservative values, and I will never stop fighting to elect principled Republican leaders to every office in the land.
So help me God.
We're good.
He went out like he came in with all of the popularity of tetanus.
Mike Pence has left the campaign.
You know, Nick, we've been covering this for a while.
We joked before the field was even set that Mike Pence It's really hard to win the nomination for a party that largely believes that you are a treasonous traitor and that you should be hung.
We joke that he should run on the campaign of hang Mike Pence.
He did not take our advice in that regard.
And what happened was that he went down in an absolute flame of mediocrity.
Not an important political situation in general, but overall, his political autopsy is really, really important and it deserves a moment of examination.
It's interesting that, like, the Republican Party in particular has had these huge fields, right, for several, you know, things in a row.
And so you're gonna get these, you're gonna get randos who, like, try, not a rando, but he jumps in the race.
He thinks he's gonna have a shot at it.
There's so many people on the thing.
They all have to just have this.
Everyone is going to have the speech except one.
And man, I think he probably thought that Trump would show up for some debates.
And I think he thought he was going to be able to like do some, you know, the fly on his head thing and maybe like, you know, get at him and say the things he never did say before.
And that would boost him up, whatever.
But Trump doesn't show up.
So he doesn't have any of that stuff.
And then he fizzles out.
That would take actual courage, Nick.
If Trump would have come on stage, I think Mike Pence would have excused himself to have a big bowl of lukewarm, plain vanilla ice cream.
I have to say, you know, first of all, I want to set the record straight.
I saw these articles all weekend.
And by the way, this isn't even on our show, Nick.
I was so pissed off all weekend for a variety of reasons, for some that we'll talk about in a little bit, but also because George W. Bush threw out the first pitch of a World Series game.
Great work, everybody, continuing to rehabilitate that war criminal who should be hanging out at The Hague and not throwing out first pitches in Arlington, but also in these articles talking about Mike Pence, calling him a true Reagan conservative, and how the Republican Party has moved away from that, which isn't true at all.
It isn't even close to being true.
Reagan conservatism was never real in the first place.
It was the beginning of the evolution of the modern Republican Party.
They weren't for small government.
They weren't for fiscal conservatism.
These were just cudgels in order to go after people, hurt people, and cut taxes for the rich.
Mike Pence didn't lose because he was a Reagan conservative.
He lost because they don't like him.
They hate him.
They've never liked him.
His absolute continued adherence to the evangelical right bothers them because they're not interested in that.
They're interested in power.
They don't want to hear this rhetoric anymore.
They don't want, you know, to sit around shaking each other's hands and patting each other on the back for how good they are.
They literally want power and that's why Mike Pence couldn't do anything because he wasn't even a person who would go in there and carry out a coup for them even though he enabled everything that Donald Trump wanted to do constantly 99% of the time.
Okay, good.
I mean, that's a good thing to parse because, you know, a guy like Mike Johnson, who we're going to talk about, is as religious as, you know, Mike Pence is.
And so he's probably thinking, I'm religious.
They're going to love this.
Look how much fervor we were able to stir up during the thing.
But you're right.
It was never about that.
It was always about, you know, my team winning and anything you can do to make sure that our team wins.
Because, you know, if we don't cheat, well, the Democrats are going to cheat.
They're gonna be these, you know, by the way, I love it when Trump describes Democrats as being vicious and all those words, right?
It kind of vicariously makes me feel good.
But that's the thing, that they don't like him.
They don't like the fact that he was, you know, a God-fearing man, whatever.
It has nothing to do with anything.
It simply is that he didn't cheat.
And that's where we're starting.
I don't even know if Reagan realized at the time that all the rhetoric that he did use to manipulate his wins continued to metastasize.
I think they probably thought it was harmless, right?
We're just going to get people to like us and vote for us, but they didn't realize it was going to continue to... I don't know what the word is.
Can you help me describe what happened to the people that followed Reagan?
Yeah, what happened was the evangelical right, they got pandered to.
The Republican Party realized that there was an opportunity, particularly with a bunch of different things, including school choice, including women's rights, like all these things coalesced and allowed them to pander to a new block of voters.
The thing is, the evangelical voters, they believe what they say.
The Republicans never believed any of this shit.
They thought that it was like, Weird, superstitious, and odd.
It put them off.
They didn't want to hang out with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.
You know, they didn't want to sit around talking in tongues and receiving visions.
They were interested in tax cuts.
They were interested in destroying the government and democracy.
That was the entire point all along.
And you're right about Mike Johnson, who unfortunately we have to talk about in a little bit.
The evangelical fervor is a great weapon for dismantling democracy.
Because you say, I don't care what other people say, I have God on my side.
That's why I should have control.
That's why you should listen to me.
My God is more powerful than your opinions and your votes.
Mike Pence had to continue playing this charade while the Republican Party was like, that's nice, man.
Why don't you save that for your Wednesday and Sundays and leave us alone with it?
We've got some things to do.
And you're exactly right.
It was never about evangelicalism.
It was a means to an end.
Well, for what it's worth, you did mention Falwell, and I think we'd be remiss if we didn't mention that.
At least Jerry Falwell Jr.
sounds like a lot of fun to hang out with.
Jerry Falwell Jr.
came out and said, my family didn't believe in it either.
We just saw a hell of an opportunity to make a lot of money.
Meanwhile, we're going to run around the country and do everything that we want and indulge in our own, and again, I'm using their terms, their own sins of the flesh.
They were more than happy to do that.
The entire point is, at the top of all of this, The Republican Party, their donors, all of it, they look around, they see these people as rubes.
They see them as people who are willing to hand over their money, which is all that Mike Pence has ever been.
Mike Pence has been a person who believed it too much.
He creeped everybody out because he was an actual true believer.
Because he had to be in order to keep his own sort of self in his politics.
And guess what?
Nobody wanted that.
They wanted the guy who would go in on January 6th and go ahead and hand things over to Trump and the rest of the Republican Party.
They didn't care how many prayers he did.
They didn't care how loyal he was to mother.
But this idea that somehow or another he's a Republican of a bygone era, it's bullshit.
It was never real to begin with.
It was never an actual principle.
It was always a cudgel to be used against others.
And again, I know this is shocking.
Our media misses the point.
It's not like it wasn't his time.
He just simply didn't have any more money.
Right?
That's what it comes down to.
By the way, can we say real fast, just I want to throw one up, Nick, who I feel really bad for today is not Mike Pence.
It's not Mother Pence who I feel bad for today.
It's the strategist who aren't getting their paychecks anymore.
We talked about this in the beginning.
Mike Pence got told by a lot of people who wanted paydays, hey, it's your time.
You're going to be President of the United States of America.
Meanwhile, his poll numbers never got north of like 2%.
You're exactly right.
A lot of people are not getting paid anymore.
I might have to beep out the word mother.
I don't know.
The way you say it is really troubling to me.
It's bad.
It's bad.
Yeah, maybe.
It's really bad.
It really is.
And it's maybe this is it.
He's now it's going to sunset into the when we won't see him anymore.
Right.
He's gone.
He's done.
You know, I have to imagine that he'll be like a Mike Huckabee.
You know what I mean?
Like he'll have some sort of like a radio show or he'll have something on not Fox and probably not maybe Fox Nation or maybe like, you know, one of these things you can find like American Family or something.
He'll he'll do something like that, I'm sure.
Now you got me thinking about Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
It's bad.
No matter how you cut it.
It's all bad.
Those are things I do not like.
I don't want to spend my Monday afternoon... I don't blame you.
And by the way, the reason he dropped out, Nick, is not only because he couldn't draw a married couple to the pizza ranch outside of Des Moines, Iowa.
It's because he wasn't going to qualify for next week's third GOP debate.
He didn't have the numbers.
He didn't have the funders, which, by the way, it's going to be November 8th.
We haven't talked about we're going to cover that, right?
Sure.
Yeah.
One way or another, you know, we'll cover it in some way, shape or form.
That's going to be November 8th, the third, which, by the way, is going to be wild with what's happening between Nikki Haley taking over the second place from Ron DeSantis and Chris Christie chomping at the hills.
It's going to be a weird time.
It's going to be a weird show.
I'll just say that.
Yeah, well, you know, as long as there's not a run on beer, I think I'll be okay.
Okay, good deal.
And by the way, let's check in with Donald Trump.
Let's see how he's taking the news of his former running mate dropping out of this race.
A lot of everybody that leaves seems to be endorsing me.
You know, people are leaving now and they're all endorsing me.
I don't know about Mike Pence.
He should endorse me.
He should endorse me.
You know why?
Because I had a great, successful presidency, and he was the vice president.
He should endorse me.
I chose him, made him vice president.
But people in politics can be very disloyal.
I've never seen a lot of it.
Never change Donald Trump.
Yeah, I mean, listen, in his addled mind, that makes sense to him, and why not?
And by the way, speaking of addled mind, he's not well.
We wanted to talk about this.
He's still the presumptive frontrunner within the GOP primary.
Nick, things are getting weird with Donald Trump.
And of course, he's always been weird.
He's always said a bunch of weird stuff, and he's always said a bunch of dumb shit.
But there are some things that have been piling up.
People want to call them gaffes, but they're not.
It seems more and more that when Donald Trump makes a speech or gives comments on something, it does not seem like he's capable of holding a thought for very long.
In the past, he was at least able to sort of spin it into other things.
A couple highlights.
Recently, he's been warning about World War II breaking out.
He said that he beat Barack Obama in a presidential contest.
He's said in multiple places that he was in the wrong place and an aide had to come up and tell him where he was, a la like Spinal Tap.
It doesn't feel good around the Trump campaign right now.
I don't know, man.
This feels like the same shit we saw while he was president, while he was running.
I mean, the slurring thing, when he kind of catches himself, and then he kind of says other stuff.
I wasn't even going to play that one, but we all know that.
We all know what that sounds like.
So, I don't, you know, at this point, the way we were predicting this was going to be a downhill slide for him over the years, and he hasn't done it.
The hamburger, Diet Coke, and chocolate cake diet, something about it seems to be sustaining him enough where I don't think we can hold our breath that he's gonna end up getting any worse than he is now and making a fool of himself.
I gotta tell you, Dick, what you just described was sort of an unspoken theory that sort of lingered through a lot of our discourse.
Almost the pickling theory.
The idea that Donald Trump eats so badly and lives so poorly that somehow or another it's rendered him almost, like, invulnerable to aging.
That is actually something that has sort of, like, been in the ether.
I don't know.
And I want to talk about this for a second, Nick, because there's a couple of other things that are going on.
Donald Trump's world is getting very, very small, and it is getting very dangerous.
For anybody who hasn't been paying attention to this, Jenna Ellis, another person in these trials who has gone ahead and pled guilty, seems to be cooperating with the authorities.
Mark Meadows has most definitely been singing to the authorities left and right, so much so that the right has made up these theories that he wore a wire around Donald Trump in order to incriminate him.
On top of that, I feel like Trump, for a quote-unquote leader, isn't really speaking to what's happening in the world right now.
Like, he's having these moments where he'll come out and he'll say, like, Hezbollah's smart or whatever.
I kind of feel like culturally he has power, but I also feel like politically, like, something is shifting and moving.
I'm not sitting here telling you that he's not going to win the nomination, but I I don't know that we've ever seen a figure who, first of all, seems to be declining in real time.
His political and legal situation is worsening by the second.
And on top of that, he really isn't figuring into anything going on right now.
It is a really... I don't know.
What's your take on this?
I do feel like there's probably a little bit of lack of energy.
I mean, it's a little early in the game here before we get to, you know, next year.
But, you know, we have to keep our eye on the numbers of people who are going to show up at the rallies when he speaks.
It's a really cool, a really key indicator, I think, of where he stands.
Because, again, this whole thing is kind of silly when we're looking at polls, we're looking at numbers across the country.
This race is going to come down to, what, 60,000 votes in three states, right?
That's who it is.
I don't know.
You don't know?
You don't think?
I don't know right now.
No.
You know, I mean, call it seven, eight, four states, whatever it's going to be.
So the question here is, is that all these lawsuits, like, you know, there might be enough of an effect where you cleave off a few thousand here and a few thousand there, which is going to be instrumental in deciding the election.
It does feel like, yes, as the walls close in, I guess you're going to be an internal optimist if you think that, you know, even guilty convictions in all of these cases will sway anybody in the public opinion.
But it does, there is something there where after enough, and you've been to the rallies, it's like after enough of them, and it's the same thing over and over again, and it goes on and on and on.
When the highlights people cheering, there's one thing, but there's huge gaps where they're just sitting there and like they're leaving or they're like falling asleep.
So it's possible that after, you know, now, what are we on here?
2015 till, you know, eight years of this.
It's possible, right?
That like, you know, his shtick isn't going to work anymore.
I think the people who are going to this are like the diehards.
You know, I think it's the people who couldn't quit Trump if they had to.
I think to go to a Trump rally right now, and I built my career originally on going to Trump rallies.
Like I couldn't imagine going to one right now, which actually makes me curious to try and go to one.
You know, like, to see what's going on now.
I think, I don't know if you heard me, I said, like, Eagles fans or the Diehards, but, like, you know, there's not many left.
It's, or, like, Kool & The Gang, or not, uh, yeah.
Is it Kool & The Gang?
One of them doesn't even have any, like, the original members and they're still touring.
Oh, yeah, and they just kind of, like, move people in and out.
Yeah.
I do, however, and this is one of the things I wanted to talk about before we got out of this segment, Nick, I don't have like total certainty that this coming election will look like the last couple of elections.
And you know something you said about we all know it's going to come down to this or it's going to come down to this.
Electorates change and elections change in really big ways and what I'm looking at now I don't know that you could predict what's going to happen next year for anything.
I really, truly don't.
What's happening with Biden's numbers right now with the Democratic Party are, the closest thing that you can find is what happened to Lyndon Johnson with the commencement of the Vietnam War.
I really don't know if that's going to hold.
I don't know what's going to happen in terms of, like, political affiliations.
I was sitting there going through some analysis this morning and going through some, you know, just sort of thought experiments, you know?
Like, where does this go?
How does this happen?
If this happens, this happens.
Like, I think we're looking also at, like, maybe a possible generational shift from liberal to more conservative.
You know, someone like a Nikki Haley like does appeal to a lot of people who probably still consider themselves Democrats.
I don't know.
I really don't know what's going to happen.
That's not putting a marker down or a prediction down, but I was talking to Daniel Moody a couple of days ago and I told her this looks a lot like 1968 to me, like the way that this is sort of coming together.
I don't know that we can predict it based on the past models of the past couple of years as unprecedented as those models were.
I mean, that's actually a fascinating take I hadn't really considered, which also makes me think, you know, what would have happened if LBJ actually ran in 68 and didn't step down?
No idea.
Which then would pull holes in all of my, you know, JFK conspiracies.
But nonetheless, I'm looking at it right now.
You can actually call up polling from, you know, March and July before he stepped down in 68.
And he looked like he had a pretty solid lead across the board on Nixon, like he would have won.
Yeah, it looked like he probably would have won, but also he was looking at possibly people who were going to come after him and primary him.
And, you know, we just saw, of course, we saw someone jump into the primary, the Democratic primary.
It's not to be taken seriously.
It's not even something we have to analyze.
I have to tell you, I think a large segment of the Democratic Party is really pissed off at Biden.
I think for a variety of reasons.
I don't think it's just what's happening in the Middle East.
I think there are a lot of things that have happened over the past few years.
And again, we've talked about it.
If we're going to call balls and strikes, we're going to sit here and tell you that Joe Biden has had some successes as President of the United States of America.
Like, he's done some things.
He's put some numbers on the board.
But at the same time, there are a lot of things that have pushed Democrats to the point where, like, what in the hell is happening here?
Why are we doing this?
Why are we continuing to act this way?
This new wrinkle of what's happening in the Middle East and how unpopular it is, even within the Democratic Party.
I want to say he's dropped 13 points with the Democratic base just in the past couple of weeks.
We don't know.
And we don't even know what this is going to look like in a year.
I mean, in six months, it could look completely different.
I don't know right now if I feel comfortable predicting in any way, shape or form what's going to happen in November 2024.
I've said before, I don't even know if the main two competitors are going to make it to it alive.
I don't know.
I mean, obviously, the main thing we everyone's on everyone's mind is the economy.
And as the economy struggles and we have issues with, you know, whatever inflation is now, if it's up or down, it hasn't nothing's changed at the supermarket.
Like those prices never went down.
And obviously, even though it's simplified, that is a thing, a barometer that people will use.
And then on top of that, he's old and he mumbles and he struggles to communicate well a lot of the time.
And it becomes a thing where it's like, we don't want someone at this age to run again.
Um, so I, all those things probably contribute to, I think, because he has done some things.
He's been able to get some things done, uh, that you would, you know, tip your cap to and say, okay, that he got us going in the right direction.
So I'm not exactly understanding exactly why, other than we're just like, we can't bear to deal with another Biden Trump race.
And that's just a sort of depressing everybody.
Other than that, it's hard to put my finger on exactly what the root of this is.
Well, I said it, you know, I want to say it was in the last episode.
I think it's time to move on beyond Joe Biden.
I don't think he's the right president for the moment.
I don't think he's the right person for the job right now.
By the way, I'd be completely remiss, Nick, if I didn't say I almost forgot at the beginning because I was, you know, complaining about Big Candy.
Congratulations to the United Auto Workers.
Racking up victories and breaking the back of Big Otto.
Congratulations, Solidarity, winning those things.
Also, from the Muckrake podcast, Solidarity to the CVS and Walgreens workers who are walking out over the next few days.
I hope you absolutely take them to the woodshed as well.
By the way, speaking of Biden and what's going to happen in the next few months, this is one of the more predictable things.
New Speaker of the House Mike Johnson went on to talk to America's favorite journalist, friend of the pod Sean Hannity.
And Mike Johnson, you know, wanted to let everybody know, hey, don't worry, that impeachment inquiry, it's still ongoing.
It's a real problem.
That's the reason that we shifted into the impeachment inquiry stage on the president himself.
If, in fact, all the evidence leads to where we believe it will, that's very likely impeachable offenses.
You know, that's listed as a cause for impeachment in the Constitution.
You know, bribery and other high crimes of misdemeanor, bribery is listed there.
And it looks and smells a lot like that.
And I think the evidence we're going to follow the truth where it leads.
We're going to engage in due process because, again, we're the rule of law party.
I know people are getting anxious and they're getting restless and they just want somebody to be impeached.
We don't do that like the other team.
We have to base it upon the evidence.
And the evidence is coming together.
We'll see where it leads.
Man, he's a smarmy little shit, isn't he?
Yeah, and that's why he's slightly dangerous is because he loves to couch it in legalese and sort of reasonableness.
But then they'll throw shit in there like, is it the Democrats impeached Trump for nothing?
And there was no evidence when Trump admitted to everything that they brought him up on charges.
I can't get over this notion though that like he was a private citizen and if they were doing deals where he can then make a phone call to somebody he still knew in the government to say hey can we do something like that's not bribery it's it's all so inane and they keep trying to pretend that they find that they found a check from his brother that seems to be something and it's not you know it's embarrassing it's it would be it should be embarrassing and yet it's nefarious and troubling all at the same time.
I find it rich that this smarmy little asshole is talking about how they're the party of the rule of law, and he was trying to overthrow the government of the United States of America.
Well done!
Also, he gives the whole game away, which is actually interesting.
Like, there's something in his personality that I don't think can handle this job, necessarily.
He even says if this leads where we think it will lead, like, he can't even just, like, let it sit.
You know, he has to go ahead and push that extra step.
We've said it before on this podcast, if Joe Biden did something impeachable, we would support the impeachment of Joe Biden.
This is a fishing expedition.
This was a fait accompli from the very beginning.
They probably are going to impeach him, and it probably is going to happen as a world crisis continues to worsen.
Like, I want to point that out again.
They're going to probably impeach the President of the United States of America while a world crisis is coursing.
Which, you know, if you want to talk about them being a national security party, is wild.
Well, here's the thing, though.
They need to time it properly, right?
They need to time it to where we are in the race.
And so they might end up trying to string it out longer until we get closer to the presidential election, because it can still be up in the air.
They're in the middle of it.
Because remember, they're not going to be able to prove any of this stuff, most likely.
And so they need to have it in the air, whatever.
And if it becomes a thing where he gets exonerated and the impeachment isn't successful in the Senate, Then they, that will be bad, right?
So they, they, they, I feel like they need to keep the smoke going, uh, as much as, as long as they can.
That's a real possibility.
Well, speaking of this piece of shit, um, Nick, I wanted to go over this article.
This was in the Washington Post and, and by the way, for anyone who doesn't follow this stuff, I don't know if you saw this, but Jeff Bezos basically like met with them and sent off a warning shot, which was like, you're doing a lot of good work.
I assume that eventually we will get back to the point where we're making money.
We love it when our oligarchs tell our news media that we hope that they make money.
The Washington Post had this article about Mike Johnson.
It was titled, How Speaker Mike Johnson's Louisiana hometown guided by faith and family.
It was by Molly Hennessy Fisk.
Nick, how do you think I felt when I read that headline?
I don't know.
I don't know.
I'm assuming that you don't believe that his faith and his family are really things that guide him in his life.
Well, I think he thinks that.
And on top of that, I really love whenever we do this old song and dance talking about communities as homogenous groups.
So what I did was, Cracked my old knuckles.
I put my, you know, leaned back, put my feet up.
Nick, let's take a look at a little bit of this.
This is from the beginning.
Oh, man.
Shreveport, Louisiana.
In this small town masquerading as a city.
Awful opening.
A mention of newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson during the lunchtime rush at Strawn's Eat Shop 2, home of the icebox pie, drew an interruption.
Are you talking about Mike Johnson, said a woman in a flowered blouse, gold cross necklace, and gray ponytail?
I'm his mom.
Jean Gigi Johnson, 69, had been sharing a celebration lunch Thursday with her cousin here in the central Broadmoor neighborhood, pausing to greet fellow diners as her cell phone exploded with well wishes.
Johnson saw her son's selection in spiritual terms.
Quote, God did this, she said.
It's so good for America.
Great start!
This is a great start to this article.
But do you need to have the sarcasm fonts in there or are people going to know what you mean?
Nick, Nick, before we go any further, first of all, this guy, this Mike Johnson asshole going everywhere says that, you know, God has made him Speaker of the House.
He said, you know, that women and gay people deserve to be oppressed and has done white nationalistic shit, tried to overthrow an election.
This is how one of the major papers of record is going to start.
We were in a restaurant and we came across his mom and she said God did this.
Can you?
I mean, really?
Really?
It's an advertisement for the restaurant, too.
I mean, that's the other thing.
I wonder how that got in there.
Listen, I wouldn't mind a little Icebox Pie right now.
Yeah, Icebox Pie does sound good.
It's really good.
Moving forward, in Northwest Louisiana, people navigate their lives by family and faith.
What a sentence!
I'm glad you got taught to do that, Molly.
That's a wonderful sentence that means nothing.
The politician raised here shares a heavy reliance on both.
What a great value statement.
Mike Johnson, 51, is a staunch conservative who championed religious causes before he was elected to the state legislature in 2015 and to Congress the following year.
Although more low profile than other Donald Trump supporters in Congress, he played a pivotal role in the effort to overturn the 2020 election and opposes abortion rights, gun control, and same-sex marriage, views shared by many supporters at home.
In accepting the speakership last week, Johnson prayed on the House floor and said, quote, God is the one that raises up those in authority.
Wonderful stuff.
Great stuff.
Yeah, I guess.
Which God?
Which God are we talking about?
Oh, we'll get to that.
That's the fun part in all of this.
I want to say before we read any more of this, Nick, Molly Hennessy Fisk and the Washington Post should be ashamed of themselves for this article.
Like, we've seen Trump diner articles that are really, really bad.
This thing, this thing is one of the worst I've read.
Go on.
I will.
Moving forward, quote, It's a cultural conservatism, a view not only of politics but of religion and faith, said Royal Alexander, 56, a conservative lawyer, referring to what guides much of the community in Johnson, who he got to know after college.
Quote, People here are rugged individuals who want to make their own decisions.
I don't know about you, Nick, but nothing says to me that a person is a rugged individual making up their own mind about things than being a part of organized religion.
Oh, or how about forcing other people to adhere to this religion that you believe in?
We just think that we... I'll tell you what, Nick.
Around here, we like to believe that people should do what we tell them to do, and that is rugged individualism.
I'm glad that you brought out the accent, because I was surprised that you didn't give royal treatment there.
It's interesting.
And by the way, that's the song of my people.
I'm not even talking down at these people.
That's how my people talk.
And all of this bullshit.
Like, if this was written about my community, it's so full of faith and religion.
Oh man, this pisses me off.
Moving forward.
Customer Beth Hayes, a retired registered nurse from Shreveport, said she was proud of Johnson and had high hopes for him as Speaker.
A registered Democrat, Hayes, 83, said she has become more independent in recent years.
She's a Methodist who respects LGBTQ rights, even though her church doesn't allow same-sex marriage or ministers, feels conflicted about abortion, and voted for Trump twice.
I want to say that again.
Voted for Trump twice.
She said she appreciated Johnson's support for Trump's fight to overturn the 2020 election, but believes Biden ultimately won.
She called the January 6th attack on the Capitol the worst thing I've ever seen in my life and said she isn't so sure who she will vote for in 2024.
Quote, we need to stand up for our rights, but we can do it in a more civilized manner than Trump does, Hayes said.
She hopes Johnson will be able to do that by working with Democrats.
Nick, For the 14,000th time on this show, I present to you the fundamentally confused American voter.
I mean, how can you describe the January 6th insurrection as the worst thing I've ever seen in my life, and then not be sure if she'll vote for Trump again?
I know!
What is possible?
Everything else she says sounds like she's from 1976, right?
Something like that.
I don't know.
Some era around that time, right?
They can work together, yadda yadda.
But, like, I cannot believe, as a registered Democrat who voted for Trump twice and said that stuff, This is the torque that must exist and must make life unbearable to people like this.
The average American voter, and more specifically the average quote-unquote independent voter of the United States of America, are so confused about literally everything.
They are walking around as living, breathing contradictions.
Like here, like literally she supported Trump going after the election, But thought that Biden won, hated January 6th, but is supporting one of the people who tried to carry it out, and on top of that, hopes he works with Democrats.
What world are we talking about here?
Like, what world is this?
It's an inherent unhappiness from that confusion that you described.
It doesn't matter who would win.
No!
It would be exactly like the graduate in the bus where, like, Trump gets in there and they win and then they're sitting there in the back of the bus realizing, oh, what the hell did we just do?
They'll never be happy with these kind of dichotomous things, you know, swirling around their brains.
It doesn't fit.
So this is the root of the issue here, is there constantly a continuous sense of outrage and uneasiness, and it has nothing to do with who's in the White House.
I want to I'm going to read this next excerpt real fast, Nick.
And while I'm doing it, I think this is a prime moment for some media literacy to see what The Washington Post and The New York Times like what happens in these things.
So I'm going to break this section up into two just very, very quickly.
Quote, others here have their doubts, particularly in Shreveport's mostly black and low-income Moortown neighborhood.
Do you notice here, by the way, that we have the main community that hopes that Johnson will work with Democrats, and then we have a black community that has its doubts?
Do you notice that the white community gets first and the black community gets put second?
That's what's called the white gaze, people.
Which is that normal, regular people are white.
Then everybody else is different.
Okay?
Yes.
Wait, what?
Others.
Yes, they are others.
So, okay, let's see what's said here.
He was part of that exodus from Shreveport.
He didn't stay and make the community better, and as a congressman, he has done little to make the community better, said the Reverend Theron Jackson, the black pastor of 94-year-old Morningstar Missionary Baptist Church.
By the way, this is a great point, that Johnson was actually part of the white flight away from the main city.
He was a product of people who were worried about being around black people.
That might inform his politics.
That might be important in understanding how he carries himself.
Would it not be, Nick?
Listen, anybody from those areas, I'm sorry if you're from Alabama, but some of these places are almost disqualifying, I would think.
Well, no!
Like, if you are poor and you can't get out of these places, that's one thing.
White flight is about not being poor.
White flight is about having the resources and saying, you know what we don't want?
We don't want to be around people of color.
So, like, let's see what continues.
This is amazing, Nick.
A former Shreveport City Council member, Jackson, 54, was once a Democrat but said he now considers himself an independent.
He's working to counter homelessness and what he calls transgenerational poverty that dates to segregation.
Did you catch that, Nick?
What he calls transgenerational poverty.
I mean, okay.
They don't want to put words in his mouth, I guess, right?
Nick, it's not that.
It's not something he's making up.
It is a statistically, empirically proven thing that since segregation, you have people of color who have been kept from having the same opportunities as white people.
That is something that academics and experts have proven time and again.
The Washington Post, though, goes ahead and throws what he calls... Did you notice any of that with Johnson's relatives or the people looking to support him?
No.
It is a really, really weird, weird inclusion.
Now, real fast to get to the end of this, Nick, because you nailed it a second ago.
Orlando's Cafe, run by the same family since 1921, has been a mainstay of Shreveport's Black community, a popular spot for Democrats to declare their candidacy.
As security guard Jesse Lee, 72, lined up for takeout stuffed shrimp Friday at the... Man, that sounds good right now.
I know.
Whew!
To stuff shrimp Friday at the bar overlooking Cross Lake, he said his top concerns were the economy, crime, and looking out for the needy.
Lee, a Democrat and U.S.
Air Force veteran who is Black, agreed with Johnson that more needs to be done to help the welfare of the city.
He's been following Johnson's career and is waiting to see whether he takes action as a speaker to help all of those back home.
I think he will.
Our state of Louisiana has been so divided for so long, it's about time we come together, Lee said, because we all serve the same God.
Thank you.
Who's this God?
You're telling me everybody in Shreveport serves the same God?
Like what kind of a quote is that to end the article on?
Right, in case it wasn't clear, that's the end of the article.
That's the end of the article!
Yeah, and a nice little prosaic bow of Jesus.
We can say Jesus, right?
That's who we're talking about.
No, we're talking about Jesus Christ and Yahweh is what we're talking about.
We're like, that's what this is.
What the hell is this article?
Right, I don't know.
I mean, because, you know, somehow Jesus has really intervened really a lot in the last, you know, 20 years in our politics.
Did you notice as well the undercurrent in this article, which is the people of Shreveport are like, man, this city has not been well taken care of.
And Mike Johnson is one of the guys who hasn't taken care of this city.
I hope that he does now.
Right.
You know, I don't know.
I think he's a little busy.
He's probably too busy to be paying attention to Shreveport now.
How in the living hell do they keep doing this, Nick?
I have my thoughts.
What do you think?
Why does an article like this come out?
I have thoughts.
What are yours?
Well, I mean, at the very least, you taught us a lot in terms of people who are really religious are already primed to believe.
And so it's easily swayed to whatever the leader is guiding them towards.
So that's part of it.
But as far as like how this gets into the into the into the Washington Post is another all together.
I mean, you know how this works.
The guy just got elected to Speaker of the House.
You need to have content that has a headline that has the word Mike Johnson in it.
You need to quickly find someone to write something, you know, whatever.
She's based in Texas, by the way.
Molly Hennessey.
Get her over there.
She's a couple states away.
And, you know, and just get something up.
Right.
I almost feel like that that might be a big part of this as well.
Well, and they're the same.
You would really have a problem understanding this if it didn't happen with everybody.
They did the same thing with Jim Jordan, whenever it looked like he was going to become the next Speaker of the House.
And they put out an article that was like, a grizzled wrestler, blah blah blah.
They have to take even the most extreme people.
And Mike Johnson is incredibly extreme.
This is a person who not only believes he was chosen by God to do what he does, but that everything that he is doing, including oppressing people, overthrowing democracy, has been gone ahead and been given the go ahead by that God.
That's an incredibly dangerous person.
What they have to do is they have to couch them in some sort of a homey haze of, you know, something that makes him seem less dangerous because they are part of the establishment.
They do not want to believe that the people taking over the institutions, that they're actually dangerous.
Because then they might be dangerous, or they might be a problem.
So what are they going to do?
They're going to go ahead and wrap this person in the veil of acceptability.
They do it constantly with everybody, except for Trump, right?
Because they hate Donald Trump.
And they will give Trump a here and there.
They're like, well, his what were the his untruths or his mistruths?
Right.
His exaggerations.
Alternative reality is alternative reality.
Right.
And every now and then they'd be like, we think he might be dangerous for democracy, especially if it helps them sell newspapers and subscriptions.
But what they have to do is they have to continue telling this story.
And it doesn't matter what they're normalizing because they're fine with it.
They have no problem with Mike Johnson or anything that he's pushing.
I guess.
I mean, you know, the whitewashing of this stuff is, there's lots of reasons to do it.
I'm getting stuck on the notion of if I was the editor and I know that he just got appointed out of nowhere, we don't have anything prepared, you know, get somebody out there, just write it.
Like they probably didn't edit this piece very much either.
Like they were such a hurry to get it out there too.
So I wonder if it's even that much thought put into it other than headline, first sentence, picture, you know, tweet it.
I gotta tell you, though, Nick, the stuff that happens in this article, if this is just the default, like, out-of-nowhere response to it, this is so finely crafted, like, in terms of point of view and linguistically and rhetorically, that if that's the case, then they are just running on straight, white gaze and normalization.
Like, if this was an accident, I, you know, and I think it's unconscious.
I don't think anyone goes about writing this article and being like, man, I'm gonna take this monster and make everybody feel better about them.
But, like, this is regular, regular Americana bullshit.
No, that actually is a really good point.
Like, for what it's worth, like, and the reason why I'm on this thing is it's basically what I do on the basketball side, right?
I have to react to big news.
I have to quickly get something out.
I don't do anything I know I'm not interested in, and I'm not making it high quality, so I don't just, you know, do clickbait bullshit.
But I will say that I have people who do stuff for me sometimes, and I have to edit quickly.
Can you do a little da-da-da-da?
They send it over, and do I, like, watch the whole thing all the way through, frame by frame, before I send it over to get published?
Maybe not.
Maybe they've done it a few times and I feel pretty good about it.
So, you know, that, you know, those are the things that you kind of sometimes wonder about how this goes as well.
But, but you are right.
There is a craftedness to this that is clearly been thought out.
And it'd be interesting to go through some of Molly Hennessey Fisk's other, you know, articles to see if this is a through line.
I looked around.
It's got some, there's some notes to it.
I'll just say that.
Yeah, that was a lot.
Real fast, before we finish this episode, and obviously there will be more developments and we'll get into them on the weekend or and beyond.
Nick, the ground invasion in Gaza has begun in limited terms.
There have been some forays, some movement there.
It's been Heating up in a lot of different ways.
God knows how many people have been killed.
There have been so many journalists that have been just absolutely mowed down in the middle of this by last count.
It's dozens.
We've also seen Israel strike Lebanon and Syria.
The U.S.
retaliated against Iranian targets in Syria.
We've also got a lot of other things, including Erdogan in Turkey, who is starting to make noise about declaring war on Israel.
Hamas was in Russia.
There was a Russian mob in an airport that was attempting to carry out a pogrom.
An absolute disastrous mess.
My heart is breaking every single day in new ways that I didn't even expect.
This thing just continues to roll completely out of control.
I agree.
I think that, you know, again, it's a there's two versions of what the war expanding is.
Is it like Turkey and in the immediacy are there or does it go out to Iran?
Iran is the second circle we have to be much more concerned about because it seems like, you know, they're used to having a lot of rockets logged in from Turkey or from, you know, from Gaza or from other places nearby.
That's all sort of ho-hum stuff that we've seen before.
But here's, I think, a question.
I was going to ask, because, you know, there's a lot of sort of anti-Israel sentiment going around across the world.
We're seeing a lot of, you know, marches in different cities across the world.
And so one of the takes could very well be, you know, all they have to do is release the hostages and Israel would stop.
But here's the question.
I wonder what your answer would be.
Would Israel, if all of a sudden, in an hour from now, all 253 hostages are marched across the border back to Israel, would Israel then stop this insurgency through Gaza?
No.
You don't think so?
No, I don't.
Not for a second.
I think the hostage, first of all, I want the hostages to be safe.
I want to be very clear about that because, you know, I don't want to be flippant in how I answer this stuff.
I want the hostages to be safe.
I want the Israeli citizens to be safe.
But I also want the Palestinian people to be safe.
I think that you always have to talk about the individuals caught in the middle of this.
But no, I feel like when people say the hostage is first, I'm sorry, but you don't carry out a bombing of Palestine if you really worry like this, especially if you're worried about the hostages.
I don't think you do.
I think that I think what we're watching here is an indiscriminate attack on that area that isn't particularly worried about that.
I think that that's a really quick way to answer things, but I would much rather have a ceasefire and figure out how to get the hostages back and go from there.
That's that's my opinion.
By the way, so we continue that train of thought then.
This is really more of an excuse to try and just get rid of Hamas militarily.
I think that's safe to say.
I don't think that they have any other solutions.
I don't think that Benjamin Netanyahu has the beginnings of a solution.
By the way, and I wanted to hit on this, I'm glad you asked this.
Netanyahu has been asked multiple times by the Israeli media, have you thought about stepping down?
No one wants you to be the leader right now.
And his answer every time is, I'm going to take down Hamas.
That's all that he said.
This is about elite, who, by the way, would probably go to jail if he ended up out of power, much like Donald Trump.
There's nothing else that they have to offer.
They're not willing to talk about figuring out how to have two states or how to have safety.
That's not at all what Netanyahu's interested in.
This is all he's got.
Right, and I'm going to specify that it's Netanyahu who's not interested in that.
His quote was, calls for a ceasefire are calls for Israel to surrender to Hamas.
That's bullshit.
But here's the interesting question then, is if this is now going to be the pretext to get rid of Hamas militarily, and they had Understood this was going to happen beforehand and it wasn't perhaps this was not a huge intelligence failure and they were thinking okay this is our chance now to finally get rid of Hamas which is what they're doing now and it's sort of reverse engineering what we've learned since
I wonder if that's ultimately going to come out that, you know, there were a lot more warning signs that they did ignore.
And I know it might be a little bit of a conspiracy theory, but it does, it's something rings true to this when you factor in everything we know about Netanyahu anyway.
I was having a conversation the other day.
I think, I think in modern terms, it is much better to err on the side of thinking that things happen because of incompetence or weakness.
You know, I think going back to the idea that Netanyahu or right-wing strongman like, you know, saying like a George W. Bush could have understood that 9-11 was coming.
Of course, our intelligence told us that was happening.
It wasn't a priority.
They were not interested in it.
And on top of that, they're bad leaders.
I think in all of this, it's much more likely that, you know, there was intelligence failures all the way around.
There was not good governance.
Netanyahu is much more interested in saving his own ass and also engaging in corruption for him, his friends, his family, and you name it.
Like, I think it's much more likely that that happened.
And now that it's happened, there's no other way to go.
There's no imagination.
And by the way, the idea of quote-unquote militarily destroying Hamas, you can't do that.
There is no way to militarily destroy terrorism.
That doesn't work.
It's not like going in and destroying a nation state.
You're not taking out leaders.
One leader dies, another one takes their place.
It's not like they're going to hold elections or something's going to cease to exist.
Right now...
You're right.
Like, Iran is the next circle of this thing.
And we're already seeing, I mean, Lebanon and Syria are already like these circles that are being brought into all of this.
Iran's the next one.
We told everybody when this happened, undoubtedly, that Iran played a role in this in some way, shape, or form, that Russia and China had to have known that something was going on.
This just continues to be shown left and right.
Now, all of a sudden, you have Erdogan in Turkey, Who, for the record, for people who aren't aware of this, is a NATO ally who is now talking about possibly declaring war on Israel after, originally, he said that he felt bad for Israel.
The energies in his state have moved around so much that now he's out on front saying he could possibly send troops to Gaza and declare war.
Also, we're watching.
We haven't talked about this at all, Nick.
Donald Trump's attacking of NATO, and I have a lot of criticism for NATO.
I really, truly do.
I have a lot of reasons to sit here and tell you that NATO has had problems, but the attacks that Donald Trump had on NATO, they did what they were supposed to do.
And it's not like he woke up one day and felt this, right?
This was the right-wing authoritarian movement Okay, fair enough.
He has gone ahead and chipped into the alliance.
And you can't look at what's happening in Turkey with Erdogan without realizing that Donald Trump and the right-wing attack on NATO absolutely played into it. - But it wasn't a right-wing attack, it was a Russian attack.
That's why-- - That's what I'm saying, that larger movement, yes. - Okay, fair enough.
Yeah, that's why it was so concerning that we thought that Trump was some sort of asset of Russia because here's the leader of the free world, spouting off the exact same rhetoric that Putin would.
And that was as concerning as anything.
In fact, that quote came up recently where somebody in NATO was like, what does that mean?
You mean you're not going to protect us if somebody attacks us?
And he goes, you're darn right I won't.
That's what Trump had told them, you know, in one of those meetings.
So it is really, really frightening to think that these alliances that were, you know, the kind of things that kept the world in some sort of balance are now going to be thrown out of this.
And especially, we've always known that the Middle East is going to be an area That's gonna be a real problem if it does break out.
It was the American order.
And the American order has almost completely collapsed at this point.
Like, this stuff does not happen if there is some sort of a power over all of it.
Like, right now, you again have a large situation where America is just groping around in the dark.
There's not a lot in terms of leadership here outside of trying to keep this thing from escalating.
Meanwhile, our culture, Nick, is just absolutely a mess.
Like any conversation about what should happen, like literally you are in two camps and there's no way whatsoever for a conversation to even begin to happen.
The right is so far a mess.
Like, they have no coherent message on any of this.
Some of it goes through anti-Semitism.
Some of it goes through, you know, American first sort of ideology.
Like, they've got all kinds of different things going on.
Meanwhile, having a conversation about maybe we shouldn't be bombing civilians, I have watched it personally.
Like, you can't say that without it just absolutely descending into chaos at this point.
Like, this is a mess.
And not only is it a mess because of what's happening on the ground and the tragedies that are unfurling, but the culture and the discourse that we have at this point, it's disastrous.
And I don't know, honestly, I don't know how, like, this Pandora's box gets closed.
I've told people that You know, things were gonna get a lot worse before they got better, and it feels like that's what's happening.
It feels like things are deteriorating in a hurry, and I am, again, my heart is broken every single day now, and I just look at this and I'm like, I don't know how this gets put back together at this point.
For what it's worth, Israel is allowing aid to get in through into Gaza.
There's like two trucks with like a loaf of bread for people.
Well, they need a hundred trucks a day to actually service everybody that's there.
And there, they were, no, there was, there was, I think, 30 or 40 trucks is what they were quoting in a day.
So there's, you know, they're getting stuff in there, but the first aid workers are all getting slaughtered as well.
It's part of this.
And that's another issue, aside from even the journalists.
And so, again, this is a war, and they're in the midst of trying to prosecute a war.
The interesting thing that J.D.
Vance, friend of the show, came on one of the shows and was talking about how he didn't want to vote for aid to Gaza because he was convinced that none of it would get to where it needed to go because Hamas would steal it and take it and give it to the soldiers instead of the civilians.
I'm not so sure how unreasonable that take is at this point.
I mean, there has been evidence in the past where Hamas has taken that aid and not distributed it properly.
But at this point, I guess there's no evidence either way.
Do you know how much U.S.
aid has gone to warlords that we knew full and well that they were going to take it the moment it fell off a plane?
That's been the vast majority of U.S.
aid following World War II.
The amount of dictators and authoritarians that we've propped up, like it would make your head spin if you had an actual list in front of you.
I just want to say this, and this I think is something I'm going to say a lot.
I do not know in any way shape or form how you can square in your head innocent people not only dying but starving and dying of thirst.
I don't know how you do it.
I don't know how anybody can do it.
And you can talk strategically.
You can talk about what has happened.
You can talk about geopolitics.
You can talk about geopolitical reality.
I don't know how you do it.
And, and I, I don't, I don't know how anybody can look at this and just be like, you know, these people, they're, they're not so innocent.
Like that's the, that's the shit we said about Al Qaeda.
That's the shit we said about ISIS.
And I, I, I just, I reject that.
I feel, I feel like if, if, if you take a look at this through human eyes and you get rid of labels like Israel or Hamas or any of it, like you look at another human being and they deserve to live.
I don't, I don't care where they are or who they are.
They deserve to live.
No, all very good sentiment.
I mean, for me, if you're gonna ask me about the militants in Hamas who, you know, committed the atrocities, I'm not feeling very sorry for them.
Well, I'm not sitting here defending them either.
I also, I reject that idea that, like, if you're for the Palestinian people living and not being terrorized, that somehow or another you're supporting Hamas.
And I know that in this dichotomous culture, a lot of people are starting to do that.
I don't.
I don't think that, I don't think a group of people should, like, go into people's houses and take them physically and hurt them and kill them.
I'm not for that.
But I also think that we should look at other people and see people.
Right, and it's unreasonable to assume that any innocent Gazan would support Hamas willingly.
That's the other thing.
You're not going to be on a corner talking badly about Hamas and survive that.
You're not voting against them in an election and surviving.
Do you know how long it's been since they've had a vote?
Hamas took over and created an authoritarian rule of these people.
And by the way, that doesn't mean that they're going to greet the Israelis as liberators, you know, as friend of the pod Dick Cheney would say.
But I just, I think that all this... Strategically, it's a mess.
Ethically, morally, it's a mess.
And I just... Nick, I don't know what we're going to be talking about when we come in here on Friday.
Like, every single day, it's just developing.
And geopolitically, it's a mess.
And like I said, humanitarian-wise, it's an absolute mess.
It's awful.
It does feel a little bit like the Republican, you know, the biggest Republican motivator is wait till we get all these horrible policies in that are so unpopular because you'll see eventually that it'll be great for everybody.
And I kind of feel like Netanyahu is doing the same thing here.
Yeah.
We can't just sit here and say this side is good and this side is bad.
There are no good sides here.
great for anybody and it would take it's going to take 50 years before they could get anything settled if they do everything perfectly starting from today we can't just sit here and say this side is good and this side is bad there are no good sides here like there really are not any good sides in any way no matter how you scrap this the united states of america is not good right but They're not white hat cowboys.
Israel certainly is not.
Basically, the Netanyahu regime is an authoritarian regime.
And by the way, idolizes someone like Orban, who's one of the world's biggest anti-Semites.
And why does he look to him?
Because of his authoritarian energies.
Loves it!
Loves it!
Absolutely has flirted with all of these people all along.
But you also can't sit here and look at Hamas and Iran and Russia and China and say that they're good because they're on the other side from this.
It's a big, complicated mess because that's what geopolitics is.
When you lose track of human beings and you're caring about power and profit over human beings, that's when bad shit happens.
Unfortunately, that's where we are.
Well said.
Yeah, I was going to talk about pogroms in Russia.
We were going to get into that.
There's not enough time for it.
Maybe we'll save it for the weekend or because that was like where the original elders of the Protocols of Zion, or Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
That's a hard one to...
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, listen, it was straight out of Fiddler on the Roof going on at that airport in Russia.
Awful.
Awful.
And we're going to see more of that shit.
I hate it.
All right, everybody.
We're going to come back with The Weekender on Friday.
If you need us before then... Well, actually, if you want to listen to that, go to patreon.com slash MyCurrentPodcast.
If you need us before then, you can find Nick at CanYouHearMe?