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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman figure out whether President Joe Biden's low poll numbers mean anything as we head into the 2024 Presidential race. It boggles the mind that Trump can be leading considering his indictments and being the leader of a party that could appoint someone as ill-qualified as Mike Johnson to be Speaker Of The House. They discuss what to expect during the GOP Debate on Wednesday before covering what the UAW has in store now that they successfully negotiated a pay raise for their members.
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You were going 75 miles an hour, like, just to get started.
And then you just pumped the brakes.
It felt good for a second there.
And then you remember, like, you know, some of the things that are going on in and about.
That bodes well.
There's some local news around here that's like making me think, well, I don't know, I forgot.
Are you completely against the Second Amendment or do you have a problem with having like guns that can protect you?
No, I've said before, I'm a gun owner.
Where's this going?
Do we want to get into the local... I'm a responsible gun owner.
I don't think that people should have anything more than rifles.
What's happening here?
It's that footage.
A guy was going into his house with his young kid and his wife and a nanny, and then they run up on him with guns.
This is right down the street from me.
And he pulls out his gun, though, starts firing, and they run away.
So thank God.
It ended up being a happy ending.
And then you start to wonder, well, you know, I would prefer to have every single gun that's ever been amended.
You know, melted into wax or whatever, but guns are not made of wax right now.
No, we're not.
We're made of metal, mostly.
Yes, yes.
And so, but there's the moment where, like, you know, okay, well, luckily for him, he had a gun, I guess.
Of course, you see that he takes it out and he's firing.
He doesn't hit anything.
Nope, you know, it's hard to hit something when you want to, I guess, and actually when you're thinking about it, right?
But they ran away.
The only thing that made me feel good about it was that it was covered in one of these sort of right-wing things, what's wrong with liberal cities.
So they described my neighborhood as a affluent neighborhood.
You've been here.
That sounds nice.
I would like to know that I live in an affluent neighborhood, even though that's completely ludicrous.
You live in an affluent neighborhood.
I'm not going to put you on blast, but it's an affluent neighborhood.
It's not like a ritzy neighborhood.
It's affluent.
Okay, well, now we've got to parse the... Yeah, semantics, my friend.
All right, I guess.
But, you know, they're trying to make it seem like, oh, even the rich people are going to get attacked by... The fact that they pulled that out, that was an aggressive semantic choice, is what it was.
Yeah.
Well, I'll just say, first of all, for people listening, we have not talked about any of this.
This came completely out of left field.
We talked about what we were going to talk about on the show.
We did not get into this.
Apparently there was gun violence in your neighborhood.
Things are getting weird out there.
I ran to Lowe's actually last night and like I walked in to get something and like one of the employees was like, they just tased a guy.
The cops had to chase the guy in and tase him and pull him out.
And I was like, what is going on?
Well, thank God they tased him and not shot him.
I mean, maybe.
I don't want to be tased.
I don't want anyone to be tased.
It's awful.
Hi, everybody.
Welcome to the McCrae Podcast.
That's the title of the podcast.
I don't want to be tased.
This podcast is, again, we went from 75, pumping on the brakes, and then right back to 95.
So here we are.
It's all my fault.
Before we get to everything that we're talking about besides the gun violence in your neighborhood, wow.
A reminder, this Wednesday at 8 p.m.
Eastern is the third Republican primary debate.
It's going to be on NBC News.
Lester Holt's going to be there.
Hugh Hewitt is going to be there, which is going to suck.
It's going to be so terrible.
But, as always, we're going to be broadcasting live after the GOP debate.
That's right, go over to patreon.com slash one correct podcast to watch that live stream recording.
If you have been to these things before, you know.
Nick and I are going to give you the type of analysis you're not going to find anywhere else.
We'll tell you what's going to happen over the next few weeks.
We'll tell you where the polls are going.
We'll tell you where the race is going.
We'll do what nobody else does.
If you haven't been before, Come join!
That's patreon.com slash mccraigpodcast.
In the world of politics, Nick, there's a lot going on.
We are a year out from the 2024 election, and to commemorate the one year out mark, the New York Times and Siena released a poll that has literally everybody running around with their hair on fire.
For some good reason.
In other ways, not so much.
But right now, it shows Donald Trump, who last time I checked, is under indictment for, I think, 90, 100, 120 counts of felonies, whatever you want to call it.
And it has him leading Biden right now in five battleground states.
It has him up 11 points in Nevada, six in Georgia, five in Arizona, five in Michigan, and four in Pennsylvania.
We'll get into the actual specifics of the polling, but just to start, Nick, it's not great.
It's not the end-all be-all, but it's not where you want to be a year out from this thing.
So, you remember in 2020 when they were running and the campaigns were at full speed, and Trump used to say that Biden was sitting in his basement.
Remember that?
The solid days of the 2020 election?
There was a little bit of truth to that, I think.
Not that necessarily he was in the basement, but he wasn't out and about and really liked talking a lot of the time.
So in some respect, like that is sort of what's going on now where he is talking and he is in front of microphones and cameras.
And we all have our concerns about, you know, now, you know, three years later of what his progression is, you know, as an older person.
But I also think that Trump is benefiting greatly from being in his own basement to some degree.
Where people are, you know, they've kind of forgotten.
Well, he's in a courtroom.
Right, he's in a courtroom.
That's right.
Fair enough.
He's in a courtroom.
It doesn't matter which courtroom.
He's in a courtroom somewhere.
By the way, testifying today.
Today.
You know, so you know when people are guilty and they're being questioned and they like just can't stop talking and they keep throwing in non sequiturs.
I think they call that the Trump.
Yes.
Yeah, and so the transcription of this stuff, while it's satisfying, is exactly this, where he just keeps trying to, you know, turn left at every question and throw in stuff about how much he's worth and how... By the way, he starts to just call out the judge to the judge's face and call the whole thing a sham.
It's fascinating.
It's going to make it probably an interesting Mayford TV movie, whatever, but...
Yes.
So I think that, you know, that's still a bit of a limited scale.
It's not on TV.
It's not televised, so we don't watch it directly.
We have to read the transcript.
So anyway, once Trump kind of gets back out and becomes another one of those sort of races that we see later on or, you know, into 2024, people will remind themselves of what they're dealing with in terms of Trump.
And I think some of these numbers might change a little bit.
Well, so to begin with, every time that we ever talk about a poll, it's really important to say a couple of things.
One, does it mean something?
Yeah, it does.
Does it mean everything?
No, it does not.
Polling is not the exact science that everybody makes it out to be.
But on top of it, listen, Joe Biden has a problem.
And we've talked about it on this podcast.
And there are a lot of reasons why that's taken place.
One, Being president of the United States of America sucks right now.
Nobody really wants to support the person who's president because they want the president to fix all the things that are wrong.
This country is in decline right now.
This country is in a real crisis right now.
Multiple crises.
This is because of the economy.
You can go out and you can spend millions of dollars telling people the economy is good, but if inflation is making everything expensive, if precarity is a financial strategy, and by the way, I say it all the time, the numbers are always measuring how well people are being exploited.
So yeah, some people are getting raises.
Some people are feeling really good about themselves.
Millions of Americans feel really poorly about what's going on economically for a good reason.
On top of that, the American hegemonic empire is falling apart.
That's all we keep talking about, whether it's Ukraine or what's going on in Gaza.
Like, if you're the President of the United States while this is going on, it doesn't reflect well on you.
It doesn't go very well.
On top of that, his stance and the way he's handled this situation in the Middle East, people aren't happy with it.
I mean, if you actually take a look at the numbers right now, the base is starting to crumble.
And not only is it in these numbers, which I got to tell you, Nick, right now, 22% more, 22 points more prefer the economy when it comes to Trump That's disgusting.
When it comes to Israel, the economy, when it comes to national security, immigration, the numbers are overwhelmingly in support of Donald Trump.
Not because he's great, but because he's not Joe Biden.
Right?
That's the issue in a lot of this.
People are not happy with what's going on.
They're not happy with the direction of the country.
It wouldn't matter if it was Joe Biden or Donald Trump.
And on top of that, as I've said on this podcast, I do not think that Joe Biden is the man for the moment.
I think it is time for him to move aside, for new leadership to come in.
I think you also need somebody who can articulate a vision of the future, which is not what Joe Biden is good at.
He's good at mourning the past, as opposed to talking about where things are going.
This is, again, something, but it's not everything.
Fair enough.
Let's get some context, shall we?
They interview some people.
They go to these places like in Pennsylvania, and they interviewed a woman from Allentown who says, quote, jobs are down because Biden didn't know how to handle the pandemic.
I want to say again, and maybe this is going to become a catchphrase, the terminally confused American voter who has no idea what they're talking about.
They just have talking points that they'll just say out loud.
Right.
Well, we can explain exactly why you say that.
Well, jobs are up!
Yes, exactly.
Unemployment is down at record levels.
And who was in charge during the pandemic?
Trump.
And so she said Trump didn't know at first, but Biden was even worse.
So this is what we're dealing with when you're talking about these polls, right?
And the articles that have been written about this, the hand-wringing, and you say this all the time, they need a horse race.
They want to make this thing as close as possible.
They need to be able to milk this as early as they can for more eyeballs.
All of these things are factoring into how they're covering this.
But when you look at the electorate, you look at who they're talking to, it gives you some insight.
But that's the electorate!
Right.
Oh, you're right.
They're going to cast a vote.
That is the electorate.
And listen, we spend so much time on this podcast and this is our calling card.
We do deep politics in this.
We get in the context, we get in the history, all that stuff.
Let's go shallower for a second.
Eventually at some point, if the most uninformed voters and also the national narrative in total is like, wow, this president doesn't have it.
At some point or another, the president needs to fix that.
Do they not?
Like, that is the problem, if you aren't able to give people a different narrative.
Like Jimmy Carter.
Jimmy Carter was not able to articulate to people why things were happening.
He was not able to assuage the fears, and there was a narrative that took over.
Joe Biden has not been able to shake a narrative, whether it's earned or not, and as a result, you have to say, wow, maybe this isn't working.
I can't tolerate Jimmy Carter's slander.
It's not Jimmy Carter's slander.
It's the fact that he didn't know how to communicate in a modern presidential way.
They wanted Ronald Reagan.
They wanted soundbites that didn't really mean anything that made people feel better.
Jimmy Carter wanted to talk to people like adults.
That was the problem.
Fair enough.
And by the way, Biden could have done that, but not now.
Biden seems like he's truly struggling, right?
The funny thing was, you listen to Trump and he seems like he's struggling as well with a different version.
He might have more energy, but he certainly isn't coherent.
But Biden struggles.
And again, this is what we said last time.
It's like there needs to be particular oration skills that you need to be able to have that will inspire and uplift and connect.
Uh, and I think that everybody listens to it.
Certainly when you see in these polls too, they just don't have any of those three things right now.
Um, and that's going to be an albatross around his neck.
There's no question.
I don't know how he does it.
Uh, you know, when we actually start the campaign.
Like at a, at a macro level, people want something different.
That's, I mean, that, that, that is what it is.
And like, like when it comes to this, I'm sorry, you look at these Trump things, you trust Trump on Israel.
What is he, what is, what is Trump's position been on Israel?
Well, you know, the Abraham Accords were under his watch.
Oh, right, and also when he moved the embassy.
Great.
How did Trump do with the economy, Nick?
Okay, listen, okay, I'll be a Trump person.
You know, awesome, until this uncontrollable event happened that he had nothing to do with, and then, you know, it caused him to do... Bad Nick!
That is not true.
He started a trade war that basically, like, put America in a rut, and also did nothing but, like, give tax cuts to the rich.
That was all he was able to do.
Well, and also, they didn't manage the pandemic properly either, which would have helped the economy get through it better.
So, yes.
How did he do on immigration?
Oh, I mean, it was a hellscape of torture and abuse.
It was literally a fascist hellscape.
How'd he do on national security?
Oh, that's right.
He handed over secrets to anybody who asked for them, did he not?
Oh, yeah.
Well, then, yeah.
And then Afghanistan, all sorts of stuff.
So what actually has happened?
People are just saying, well, I mean, I guess I got to choose something else.
They have forgotten who he is or they have now like put it in the light of how they feel about Joe Biden.
It is now just like slander to just simply say, you know, thanks Joe Biden.
That's, I mean, that is literally like shorthand for what's happened to this country at this point.
So, and you said this last time, you think that what's going on in the Middle East is definitely affecting his numbers?
Oh yeah.
Nobody in America likes how America's handling this.
And matter of fact, we don't have to get into the whole thing.
America doesn't like how this whole thing's being handled.
Blinken went to the Middle East and Netanyahu basically told him to pound sand.
And it was like, you don't tell us how to prosecute this war, and Blinken's just like, shit, nobody's happy about this.
Biden knows it as well.
And that's what I was trying to tell you.
I don't think that Biden snaps his fingers and then they just suddenly stop doing what they're doing in Gaza.
Well, I think when Benjamin Netanyahu realizes that his entire career and possibly his freedom as a citizen relies on this thing going the way it's going, you're right.
But that's the whole point.
If the president of the United States of America can at least make a situation better, he's not going to win much.
Right.
You know what I mean?
Again, not to bring up Jimmy Carter, but that's a lot of what happened with Jimmy Carter.
He faced a lot of intractable situations that he couldn't handle.
Okay, fair enough.
Now, so the interesting thing would be to solve what's going on in Ukraine and solve what's going on in the Middle East, you know, right around October of next year, right?
That's gonna be their timing, right?
That's what they have to do, and that'll change everything, right?
Well, and Trump would handle it within 24 hours.
That's the whole thing.
Like, he's able to just say that, which is amazing if you're not President of the United States of America.
Well, but wait a minute.
I'm speaking of which Biden could snap his fingers in theory in Ukraine, Right?
I mean, he could, I guess, maybe hand Ukraine over to Russia if he wanted to, but I don't know what happens after that.
Yeah, or under the guise of some peace treaty thing and Russia gets ahead, whatever.
I mean, listen, I'm cynical today.
I guess this is what's going on, but I just feel like, you know, if you are on the Biden side and you need to figure out ways to, like, get this thing turned around and get everybody back on your side, You need to have these wins that are going to be splashing big and headlines, but you can't do it too early, right?
You can't do these things.
Like if you fixed the economy, quote unquote, or somehow got prices of the market to go down, you kind of want to wait until like the summer, right?
It's got to be closer to the election because the people are going to freaking forget about it.
And then they're going to hate you again by the time they have to vote.
I don't know if he has until the summer.
I'll be honest with you.
This is like a make or break thing.
If they're going to replace him, and the Democratic Party can't kick Biden out.
That can't happen.
Like even a phone call from Barack Obama will not get rid of Joe Biden.
You know, Obama can call and be like, hey, you know, we need to talk about what's going on here.
Biden has to make that decision.
And again, it would be like a Lyndon B. Johnson type situation.
I will not seek nor will I accept the nomination of my party.
It has to start happening.
It has to start happening before, like, I don't know, January, February, March of next year?
It's got to be going down that road, and I don't know if he's going to get this ship turned around.
I don't know if that's going to happen at this point.
Like, this narrative, Nick, and it doesn't matter what he has done, and we've called balls and strikes on this show.
We've told you when he's done the good things.
We've told you when he's really, really disappointed people.
The overall narrative of this presidency as it's heading into November of 2024, and you can be the most diehard Biden supporter in the world, but you will have to understand that the narrative of this thing, not just in the media, but within the political class, is that this thing is running aground on the rocks.
I don't know if there's time to get this thing turned around in time.
I'm just trying to quickly remind myself exactly when LBJ stepped down.
It was early in 68.
Not to be overlooked that the Tet Offensive happens and then he steps down because it sort of shifted the war completely, you know, as most of the country shifted against it from that.
So God forbid that something like that would happen for Biden to step down.
But let's just pretend it's a polls thing then.
It's not even just necessarily a polls thing.
Nick, we have the beginnings of one of the largest anti-war movements this country has seen since at least Iraq, if not since the 1970s.
Like, what is happening in this country is, like, really, really seismic.
And that looks a lot like what that time period did, where the Democratic Party basically, young people said, hey, we don't want anything to do with you for a while.
Are you folding Ukraine into Gaza?
As far as anti-war?
I think it was anti-war, the fact that Russia shouldn't have invaded Ukraine.
But at this point, I think it is opposition to what Israel is doing.
I mean, you can't go into a major city right now without basically running into a massive protest.
I mean, yes, there's a lot of anti-Semitism as well connected to all of this.
And that's that's also troubling.
I don't think you can paint the anti-war movement as anti-Semitic.
I know what you're saying, but I don't agree with that.
Well, I am saying that these things are moving, you know, parallel or separately, but there are parallel movements here with this.
Do you do you wait do you think that like the like thousands of people who are showing up at this like you think like a large portion of them are being anti-semitic?
Well no well the worry here is that as an anti-israel rhetoric ratchets up it taps into anti-semitism as well on a parallel track.
I don't think they have to I think they can but I don't think they have to.
Well we're seeing it I mean I think it's happening across across the world.
Well, yeah, I mean, anti-Semitism has been growing for years.
I mean, I don't think that the two are necessarily laced together, but I am telling you, I'm seeing, like, what I am seeing right now is that Biden, like, in terms of support, I mean, you don't have to take it from me.
Look at the numbers.
I mean, the base is crumbling around Biden.
Right.
The fact is that even now, like, 54% of Democrats are saying that he's too old at this point and that they want new leadership.
I mean, that in and of itself, outside of the anti-war movement is, I think it should tell you that something's happening.
Right.
Which is why I got to pull that apart and say, OK, let's say he brokers a piece in Gaza.
Right.
That would be a monumental thing that would really should help him.
But I don't know if it does.
Right.
I don't I don't know if I don't know if it could at this point or if he can.
I don't know if he can.
Yeah, right.
Could he do it?
Would Blinken be the person who's like the guy who's going to be shaking their hands or whatever instead of him?
He's been sort of, the Democrats generally are notorious for being awful at getting credit for good things that they actually do.
So I'm worried about all these things.
I mean, I'm basically agreeing with everything you're saying.
I'm just also throwing in some ideas about what would they do to actually solve this stuff.
And I, again, I think we're both saying that it's not necessarily solvable.
It's not a great situation is what it is.
It's a really, really bad situation.
And the Democratic Party is struggling and Joe Biden is struggling.
And it goes back to the point where everybody says, like, I I don't know how many people I've heard, whether they're political strategists, politicians, people who talk behind the scenes, never tell me that they think it's a good idea for Joe Biden to run again.
They say of course they'll support him, they're not going to vote for Donald Trump, but they don't feel confident about this.
The way that it's gone, the way it's been perceived, and the way that it's taking off.
Well, on that note, because of this debate that we're going to be covering, you know, you'll be listening to this on Tuesday.
On Wednesday is when the debate will be.
A reminder, go to patreon.com slash mcgreggpodcast to hang out with us after the debate.
It's going to be, well, it'll be a good time, you and me and everybody hanging out.
I mean, the debate's not going to be a good time, but let's take a look at exactly what is happening leading up into this thing.
As I've said, the scuttlebutt is that Nikki Haley has become the establishment candidate.
She has taken over for Ron DeSantis.
She has basically got in line a lot of the major donors who were with DeSantis.
They saw him as a Trump killer.
But DeSantis actually just picked up an endorsement from the governor of Iowa, which is a weird kind of out of nowhere situation.
There isn't a real clear field that has emerged.
We know Chris Christie will be there.
He's floundering.
Vivek Ramaswamy will be there.
I can't wait to hear what Vivek has to say about Israel-Gaza, because that's going to be awful.
It's going to be just absolutely awful.
We also, going into this debate on Tuesday, when you listen to this, Nick, The Virginia elections will be held.
Glenn Youngkin, who is also considered one of the dark horses that everyone's trying to get into this race, he has gone hard on abortion restrictions in the Virginia legislature elections on Tuesday.
God knows what that's going to look like going into the debate on Wednesday.
What are you looking for in this debate?
I mean, someone's gonna have to make a move.
Somebody's gotta do something.
Yes, it's been a little bit quiet.
They haven't quite figured out what the wedge is like to get them to the next step, right?
They've exhausted a lot of the talking points on Ukraine.
Israel is interesting because it's continually unfolding, so that'll be awful, the takes there.
Either way, and I would suspect that a lot of these takes are going to be some version of You know, actually, it seems like they're much more like warmongering than the regular general population in America is, right?
They're going to want to defend Israel.
They're going to want to make sure that Israel has a chance to defend themselves and go after Hamas, all that stuff.
So you'll hear a lot of that, which will then be the absence of any kind of sympathy towards the innocent Palestinians who are trapped in Gaza.
Um, you'll see so that that might be the one big one.
I'm just trying to kind of parse to figure out exactly like what is the way someone's going to bring out something, you know, you never want Kamala Harris, it was able to hit Joe Biden on the chin with the busing.
Like I feel like we're waiting for one of those things to happen here.
And I can't quite figure it out.
For what it's worth, I did see Chris Christie talking at one of these Trump convention things in Florida.
And he was really interesting because he kind of called them out to their faces.
And it didn't really go well.
They continued to boo him.
But I really, I enjoy Chris Christie now, just as a guy who is, you know, going to get 3% of the vote and then sort of speak a little more freely.
Well, first of all, I'll go ahead and give some analysis here that you're not going to hear anywhere else.
The fact that NBC News is hosting this thing over Fox News or Fox Nation or, you know, Fox at Home or whatever it is, that tells me they're going to spend a lot of time talking about Israel and Gaza.
Fox wants to talk about the culture war issues.
NBC is going to want answers from these people.
That is right up Nikki Haley's, like, avenue.
And quite frankly, she's a neoconservative, you know, with some, like, Trump maga sort of on her, which she's been more than happy to have.
She is probably going to command the greater amount of time and attention when it comes to that.
I think on that alone, she'll probably walk away from this debate having won.
Also, I don't know how anybody else is necessarily going to go after her.
Ron DeSantis has been going after Trump like nobody's business lately.
He realized, finally, he was like, if I have any chance in this whatsoever, I have to hit Trump hard.
And so he's going to basically, every other answer, probably go after Trump.
Christie, I mean, hopefully he has another zinger on the level of Donald Duck.
Like, let's just hope that he can trot something out.
For entertainment purposes.
Please.
Chris Christie's campaign is in utter disarray, and that is actually Uh, probably offensive to most things and utter disarray because this thing has never gotten off to a start.
Uh, he's going to go in swinging just haymakers, trying to figure something out.
Maybe he'll go after Haley.
I don't know.
Um, but yeah, it's going to be very, very strange.
And like you said, somebody has to make a move.
And Nikki Haley is emerging, as we've talked about, as the establishment alternative to Donald Trump.
Doesn't mean she's going to beat him.
Doesn't mean that she's necessarily going to even give him a contest.
But with this war and what is happening, she is the person that a lot of these people are flocking to.
She's the last serious person.
That's what's happening right now.
So, it'll be interesting to see if she can handle that.
She hasn't had that type of a spotlight on her.
She hasn't had that much pressure.
She basically made her name, as we covered, Nick, in the first couple of debates, going after Vivek.
Like, that was her big thing.
She was like, you're not a serious candidate.
And Ramaswamy just sort of smiled and dealt with it.
But it will be interesting to see what happens with her, because she is emerging as the new frontrunner in this thing.
Well, and then I feel so much better about my reaction to her.
No, you should not.
You should not feel good about that.
You should feel terrible about that.
Listen, as I'm going to quote you, as you said, she's the only serious candidate left.
So I'm going to take... Heavy, heavy scare quotes on serious.
All right, fair enough.
But, you know, I'm actually kind of forgetting.
I had to remember exactly what she was saying.
I was like, oh, she sounded like a progressive.
Well, she said you can't ban abortion outright.
She was like, that's not a way to let go about this and all of that.
She was the one person on the stage who was even like answering that question with any seriousness.
Yeah, so I look forward, listen, anybody who's going to be an adult out here, I'm more than happy to have participate in these things because we need more of that.
But we've already, the cat's out of the bag on all this stuff and the way you have to behave and the way and even your platform as a GOP candidate is so awful these days and so unpopular that it's never, there's no redeeming that no matter what.
I can't picture any GOP candidate ever emerging out of that cesspool.
Like, for instance, Romney in 2012.
Like, would it have been the worst thing if he ended up beating Obama?
It would have been bad.
It would have been bad.
But like, you know, we would have taken that.
Listen, the thing about Trump here is it makes fucking W look like a guy you'd want to have back in the White House.
Don't!
No, I'm going to get out the spray bottle, Nick.
Do not say that on this podcast.
All right.
I mean, listen, we're all about hyperbole here, aren't we?
So nonetheless, you know, that's where we are here.
It's going to be a shit show.
We're going to end up, you know, our jaws are going to end up hitting the ground.
But you know what?
Hey, it's content.
It'll be things that people are interested in talking about, and it'll help us and all that stuff.
So I suppose let's get on that horse, just like these polls.
I mean, listen, It will be interesting because the Republican Party has largely allowed the Democratic Party to be the ones who say anything about what's happening in Israel.
That is pretty much what has happened.
Donald Trump, of course, has said, you know, Hezbollah is very smart.
That's basically been the main answer on this stuff.
You know, with some of the MAGA and House Freedom people trying to get rid of any aid whatsoever and try and split it with Ukraine and going after all that.
That is one of the things I'm watching out of this is that maybe we can get an articulation of what the Republican Party is going to say about this going forward, where it's going to lead.
And Haley, I think, is going to be aggressive on a level that is going to be kind of upsetting, I think, is what's going to happen from it.
And on top of it, I think we're going to start to see the formation as we head into December.
We're going to start to see the formation of what the race is going to be.
Because we don't know that yet.
You know, we thought for a while it might be DeSantis and Trump, and of course DeSantis folded like a wet paper bag.
Well, speaking of the GOP, Nick, We have to talk about the ever-increasingly strangeness around the new Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson.
We've talked about this guy.
He's a Christian nationalist extremist.
It is really terrifying that this guy ended up in this position of power.
He's two heartbeats away from the presidency right now, which is Well, it's something.
But things keep getting weirder.
First off, Nick, it turns out with a little bit of digging into his past, besides the fact that he claims he doesn't really have a bank account, which is fun, it turns out that Johnson has advised and worked with a gay conversion therapy group called Exodus International.
Also, his wife, Kelly Johnson, who sounds fantastic, who will tell anyone who's listening that he's been ordained by God for power, she runs a counseling business called, quote, Onward Christian Counseling that equates being gay or being trans with being incestuous, being a sexual predator, and or engaging in bestiality.
Sounds like wonderful people, if you ask me.
Oh, and you know, in front of the break, in front of the pod, Jess Piper, who came on, who had run for Congress, had a really good little video where she describes the voice that his wife speaks in, which is that evangelical baby voice.
Oh, yeah.
I'm forgetting the exact term.
And she's right.
Like, it really is.
And like, the more baby sounding you get with that tone, like, the more, the better wife you are to these people.
It's really awful.
The whole thing is awful.
And here's the thing.
If you want to live your life that way, You know, more power to you.
No, less power to you.
All right, fine.
I mean, listen, to me, it's like if you, you know, in their minds, they've dedicated their lives to this sort of higher power.
They want to follow the Bible.
It's like, listen, I'm not going to tell anybody not to do that.
I have respect for people who want to, you know, live their life a certain way.
But when you get into these roles of, like, Speaker of the House, right?
And that, like, that's really where we have a problem here.
There's no way he makes $175,000 a year.
Where is this money that he's making?
If he doesn't have a bank account and has more like a thousand bucks in it, does he have like 50 different bank accounts that all have $800?
Like, I don't understand how that works at all.
He has a kid that he claims that he adopted when he was, you know, 23 years old or whatever.
The kid was, you know, 10 years younger than him or 11 years younger than him.
That whole thing, which I don't even know how aware you are of that, is a real problem.
I didn't know that until you told me.
And like, man, the GOP is full of weirdness, is it not?
Yeah, you know, and it's like, you know, I hate where it's going because there isn't any information or evidence about what this all really means.
But, you know, there's the parallel to what Matt Gaetz had when he had this adopted son just causes all these, you know, all this stuff to happen.
And that's frustrating as well, because someone just needs to be able to ask him and he needs to be able to explain it.
He needs to be able to explain his bank account.
But you're right.
It keeps getting worse.
And so I will go on the record right now and tell you there's going to be another big bombshell about this guy that we're not going to believe.
And it'll come out sooner or later.
I, first of all, Nick, I don't know that I can believe that you're sitting here saying that this incredibly cloistered, disturbing evangelical man who walked into power, like Selig, like somehow or another that there's something weird under the surface here.
I just want to point out with this, with the gay conversion therapy, with the Christian counseling, all of that, There has been such a weird intertwining.
Of course, if you've read The Midnight Kingdom and History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis, you'll know about this.
But lately, there's been such a huge convergence in terms of capitalism and Christianity, like a brand new type of it.
I mean, like, literally going out and abusing people for money, abusing children in gay conversion therapy, like, abusing them at the behest of parents who are willing to pay a ton of money, a bunch of middle-class, white-collar parents who are like, oh, I don't want my kid to be gay or trans, and so as a result, you pay these types of people Who are influencers and they're celebrities within this whole thing.
And then eventually one of them rises up to the level of Speaker of the House.
That's how bad this situation is.
That's how fucked up this situation is, is that they really have created such a wealth and power base that this type of stuff becomes all the more likely.
You know, in the same vein as anybody who's old enough to remember what Nixon did to this country and still supports a guy like Trump, for instance, they should be ashamed of themselves.
Absolutely.
The gay conversion therapy stuff, this was rife in the 70s and 80s.
This was going on a whole lot.
I mean, my best friend growing up, her brother, they did this to him in the 80s, right?
And he tells it and kind of tries to make it humorous because it was probably so painful to have to go through.
It was torture.
It was ridiculous under the guise of like psychologists, trained psychologists who supposedly were going to be able to do this and convert people, whatever.
The fact that we're now in 2023, and by the way, this would have been not that long ago.
What was it, 10 years ago he was involved in this, whatever.
Anytime after that initial time in the 70s is ridiculous.
And it is soul killing to know that these things not only like didn't ever die, they never went away, weren't like tamped down completely.
They were under the surface and they bubbled up until somebody can somehow unleash this thing again.
We're going backwards.
We are going backwards to, we're not going to have interracial marriage, we're not going to have, you know, people having sex before marriage.
Like, this is what we're going towards at this point with people like this in charge.
And Nick, I'm glad you—well, I'm not glad you brought this up.
It's all soul-killing and awful.
This is a clip that has been unearthed.
This is Johnson at one of these really, really gross Christian TED Talk wannabe things, where he's talking about a product called Covenant Eyes.
And I'll just let him—I'll let him explain it to you, and then we can react.
with covenant eyes within your home.
And so why is that such an effective tool?
Why do parents need to put this into their home? - Yeah, that's great.
Great question.
We probably could have called this more appropriately a war on the darkness of technology. - - Of course, I mean, you know, the Bible apps we all love.
We broadcast our services, you know, on our social media and there's some very positive things, but there's also, as Clint's pointed out aptly, Some really dark things.
So Covenant Eyes is the software that we've been using a long time in our household.
I first learned about it at, I think, a Promise Keepers event in the early 2000s.
I think it was developed in about the year 2000.
But it's the largest accountability software that there is, and there's some paperwork out there on the table that I think everybody may have picked up on the way in.
If not, go get it.
It's a subscription-based, we don't make any money on this, I'm telling you, we use it, okay?
I'm endorsing it because I'm a user.
It's about $15 a month, $16 a month, something like that.
You get up to 10 devices, and what it is, it's accountability software, so men in a church, you know, men's Bible study groups will do it, that's how it's presented at Promise Keepers, but they also mention, hey, when your kids become teenagers, especially if you have boys, dads, they're talking to the guys at this event, You might want to think about doing this with your sons.
And so we've been doing that.
And so what it does real simply is it has an algorithm and software.
It's way above my head how it works, but it scans.
You obviously opt into it, but it scans all the activity on your phone or your devices, your laptop, tablet, what have you.
We do all of it.
And then it sends a report to your accountability partner.
So my accountability partner right now is Jack, my son, right?
And so he's 17.
So he and I get a report of all the things that are on our phones or all of our devices once a week.
If anything objectionable comes up, Your accountability partner gets an immediate notice.
I'm proud to tell you my son has got a clean slate, all right?
But we get a report, and it says, hey, no activity of concern.
And it's really, really sensitive.
It'll pick up almost anything.
It looks for keywords, search terms, and also images.
And it will send your accountability partner a blurred picture of the image.
So on occasion, I get one, I was just looking at the one from this week I got on Jack and it said, this, this is the only one that may be questionable.
And it's this blurred image of two, two women talking in a live screen thing.
And I zoom in and I have to unblur it.
And it's, and it's two middle-aged teachers.
Nick, it's so screwed up.
It's so screwed up that these people, and again, I bring up Mike Pence and Mother, he can't be alone in a room with another woman because the sins of the flesh might be too much.
These people are so repressed and so obsessed with oppressing others because they believe that human beings are disgusting and wretched.
That anything that even comes near sexual expression, sexual experience, has to be completely and utterly evil to the point where they are absolutely jumping in full bore with surveillance technology that is meant to shame and hurt others.
It doesn't get more disgusting.
I mean, okay, I agree.
I will say there is value to having the kind of filters on your Wi-Fi that doesn't allow your kids to get on the porn sites, so that's something.
But this is weird, the accountability partner thing is very strange.
And by the way, just an FYI, these kids figured out how to circumvent that thing in about one minute.
No, absolutely!
No, it's stupid, and he's obviously making money from this thing, trying to peddle it to parents, no doubt about it.
Yeah, so his 17-year-old son with a clean slate, uh, I would really like to know, yeah, be able to, well, I don't want to know, but I would imagine that's completely not, that's not accurate.
Can you imagine if you didn't trust yourself so much that like something like this had to be necessary just without anything even happening and that's what all these promise keepers are about too is it is literally about making people so ashamed of themselves and controlling your children and controlling your spouse and just controlling everybody that like you have to set up a situation in which like everything that you do is reported to another person so that you can be shamed and punished.
It is it is nightmarish.
And so I'm clear with this.
Was it clear to you that everything that Mike Johnson himself sees and whatever gets sent to his son?
Gets sent to his son.
Okay, I shudder.
Yeah, this ain't great.
Yeah, you know, but nonetheless, um, I mean, you know, it's, it's extremely twisted in a way, because in theory, you have this covenant with God, right?
That's the guy you're gonna answer to, and that's the one who you would, uh, you know, that, you know, that, that's who you're accountable to.
No, you're accountable to your promise keepers that meet on Wednesday nights at 7 30 and then drink a non-alcoholic beer.
I mean, like, literally, I'm an ex-evangelical.
I grew up in this community.
This is sicko-ass behavior.
Did you talk about the marriage covenant stuff that they were trying to develop as well?
Yeah.
We did?
I can't remember.
No, we didn't.
Because they invented this thing where when you enter this covenant of marriage with your spouse, there is never going to be any sort of divorce, ever.
Right.
No, there's no ability whatsoever to leave a partner.
And, and like, there's no such thing as abuse either because like you, you own your partner.
Right.
Yeah.
They want to get rid of no fault divorce.
They want to get back to the point where like women can't leave men that they're financially and socially completely chained to them.
Like that's where all this is going.
Right.
And let's make it clear.
When you said you can never leave, it's the woman can never leave the man.
Oh yeah, for sure.
Although I guess, never mind, like the Covenant was both, but like clearly there's the woman thing.
We've already talked about the voice and the whole thing.
It's just, I mean, yeah.
They're disgusting the way they want to practice this sort of pious life where they feel like this is horrible.
I want to make sure I'm on the record saying that.
You know, but again, whatever you want to do in your own home is great.
But when you start spilling it out into like how to control everybody else, you know, and that seems to be the MO.
And then it becomes a political thing.
It sort of makes sense why the Republican right has become this way is because they're channeling the same fervor that the religious sects have, and then they think it's the same thing.
Yeah, and the thing here is, and we talk about this a lot, Nick, there are some people who truly believe this.
Mike Johnson is a zealot.
Like, he is a true believing zealot.
You know, this is a person who is raised up in an authoritarian system and has absolutely just ingratiated himself onto this.
There are others, Republicans, who see this as a really handy weapon.
You know, they're not necessarily spiritual, maybe they're culturally Christian or whatever, but they really like the idea of rolling back women's rights.
They really like the idea of continuing to abuse children in order to, you know, promote some sort of a discipline with them, right?
Or to keep them like themselves.
Yeah.
And this thing, it just continues to perpetuate itself and get worse and worse.
Alright, on our last note, I just wanted to touch on this for a second.
This came out this weekend.
It is something that is worth noting.
After the United Auto Workers absolutely destroyed Ford, GM, and Stellantis and put the fear of God into every car manufacturer, President Sean Fain Has gone out and said that intentionally the UAW set the end of their most recent contract for April 30th, 2028, in order to prepare for what he is calling for a massive strike on May 1st of 2028, which would be May Day.
This is a quote, Nick, from Sean Fain.
We invite unions around the country to align your contract expirations with our own so that together we can begin to flex our collective muscles.
If we are going to truly take on the billionaire class and rebuild the economy so that it starts to work for the benefit of the many, it's important not only that we strike, but that we strike together.
This is big shit, man.
Like, like, however you want to parse it, like the idea that he's trying to put together a giant union for a giant labor action, you can't say that fame isn't ambitious.
We'll say that.
Fair enough.
I mean, in putting the term collective bargaining into a greater context here, which, you know, that's what it's really about.
The more people you have involved in the more sectors, the stronger you are to be able to negotiate.
The only problem I have, because I thought they did a great job with what they did with UAW as far as getting a huge pay raise for most of the people in the union and in better conditions and working.
I don't think anyone's going to complain of what they were able to get concessions from, right?
That seems pretty clear.
So it's like, and not that you want to rest on your laurels and just sort of get lazy or whatever, but it just feels like, you know, it's awfully fast to suddenly now be already planning the next strike, you know, whatever.
And, and I, and I get it.
And it was the headline grabber too, because you want to get as many people on board to get as much publicity on this as possible.
So it's an only, my first reaction was a little bit like, you know, all right, but like, you know, it seems like, you know, there should be a win here and they should maybe just sort of, I don't know.
I just didn't feel like it had to come out today.
I disagree.
I think this is fucking awesome.
This is like an echo of the former industrial workers of the world, the Wobblies, which was the idea of a big union that could finally break the grip of capitalism over labor.
Sean Fain has designs.
I don't know if it's going to work.
I don't know if he's going to put together one big union that's going to lead to a massive strike in order to try and change the trajectory of things.
But I'll tell you, at some point or another, you've got to tip your cap and say, good for you for going for it.
One of the problems with labor unions, and this is something that is hard to understand, There has been an issue in which leaders of the unions have basically been bought off because they have a lot of money, they have a lot of power, and so there's more incentive for them to make contracts with the employers over the actual workers.
And so what you actually end up having is a class system within the unions.
Fain is not messing around and he doesn't mince words.
He's happy talking about class war.
He's happy talking about going after the billionaire class.
This is a gambit.
Like this is a gamble saying we are going to have a massive labor action in 2028.
And by the way, like Mayday, like, like the organized labor, like socialist, you know, sort of idea.
Like he couldn't make it more plain what he's doing.
It is ambitious.
I don't know if it's going to work.
But, I gotta tell you, this is like old stuff.
This is early 20th century, late 19th century stuff is what's going on here.
It's kind of crazy.
I'm not excited by the possibilities because there's no question there needs to be a stronger way of being able to negotiate, especially we're talking about the railroads, we're talking about airports.
Why am I forgetting the term, not airports?
You know, the guys who are, that Reagan forced to come back or fire at everybody.
Oh, the air traffic controllers.
Air traffic controllers, thank you.
But the real union thing that's the most disjointed, that would need to be, it would be incredible if they could figure out how to get this more centralized, would be teachers' unions.
I feel like, having been in the teachers' union for a while, understanding the value of it, it's the most maligned of all of them, I would imagine, right, in terms of what people think about, you know, what these teacher unions mean and how they There's how bad they are.
So but part of the reason why they have a hard time negotiating is because it's so disjointed across the whole country.
That would be interesting to see if they could figure that out too and make it more centralized.
Well, I mean, if teachers continue to be pinched and there's nothing that tells us that they won't be, it's what the Republican Party is doing as a matter of strategy and they don't show any signs of stopping.
Yeah, like teachers union getting in on this would be pretty huge.
Also, just sort of service industry people, which is something that we're starting to see.
We're seeing a lot more radical action in all these places, including at places like Amazon and Starbucks.
Like if we could get to the point where like a lot of this stuff could come to a head, which is what I've been talking about for a while.
Like, you don't reach this point of precarity and this point of inequality and also this point of crisis without this type of labor action starting to become more and more inevitable.
It has to happen if it's going to continue to get worse.
And, like, the fact that Fain is, like, putting this out there, and obviously he's not alone.
He didn't decide this on his own.
Like, it had to go through the union as well.
I think it tells you everything you need to know about what direction things are heading in.
Yeah, and it really sucks that places like Amazon and Starbucks, you have to have a union because they treated the workers so badly.
Now that said, it's almost like the way capitalism works is like you need, that's why unions are necessary, like they need them as badly as the workers do, because they need to be reined in, otherwise capitalism dictates they will not, they'll treat their workers like shit, like it's almost like that's the law.
They can't help themselves.
You know, something moves in there.
So you need that, and they almost need it in order to treat people humanely.
And that's the problem with the way this is all set up.
And when you have democracy and capitalism meeting, we end up getting to this, which could very well be the end of democracy as we know it.
Well, and I gotta tell you, man, like, they signed their own death warrants whenever they went ahead and started destroying unions.
Because what you just said, like, that was the only thing that led to anything even approaching a homeostasis.
Everything else leads to chaos and crisis.
Like, that's just the case.
And history shows us, you know, that happens in cycles.
You can set your watch by it.
But they can't help themselves.
This is how it always ends up happening.
But yeah, interesting, interesting things.
I'm kind of shocked that this came out as quickly as it did after the settlement.
That was pretty, pretty aggressive.
All right, everybody, we will be back tomorrow.
You're listening to this on Tuesday.
We will be back on Wednesday night with your post-Republican GOP That's redundant.
With your post-GOP primary debate analysis show.
That is a mouthful.
Wow.
We will be over at patreon.com slash MonkWrightPodcast immediately following the airing of the debates.
It starts at 8 p.m.
Eastern.
I think it's scheduled for two hours, so probably at 10 p.m.
Eastern.
We hope to see you there.
We always enjoy these live shows, and we always like it when the community gets to come out.
Hope to see you, and in the meantime, you can find Nick at CanHearMeSMH.
