Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss Donald Trump's rhetoric on the campaign trail, and how it could widen his base despite being rooted in fascistic Naziism. Joe Manchin is "retiring" as he realizes he couldn't win another West Virginia Senate race, and wants to play spoiler in the presidential contest. They finish off the pod by talking about The Rock weighing a political bid plus how the right wing concocts their own ridiculousness, in this case Ouija Boards and AI, and then scare themselves with it endlessly.
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I, you know, we were talking about this show before we started going.
The second half of this is going to be a laugh riot.
I'm really ready for it.
I'm ready to talk about the second half.
Unfortunately, the opening half, as we are wont to do, Nick, we got to talk about serious stuff.
Okay.
Uh, are we wanting to do that?
We are wanting to do that.
That's what we're wanting to do.
Alright, well maybe we'll keep it, maybe we can find some revenue, some lightness in this.
No, we're not going to in the first half of this show, I apologize.
But, uh, as always everybody, if you want to support this show, Go over to patreon.com slash montcraigpodcast.
The show's continuing to grow.
We need help.
We need your support.
patreon.com slash montcraigpodcast.
Not only will you support the show, you'll keep us ad-free, editorially independent, which is why you listen in the first place, but you'll also gain access to the Weekender episode on Friday.
Last week, Nick, we did a deep dive on the 1999 cult classic comedy Office Space, in which we talked about neoliberalism at the end of the millennium.
I thought it was pretty good myself.
Yeah, no, it was a really great, sort of, I thought we went nicely back and forth with some interesting deep dives into the actual filmmaking and then how that connected to the zeitgeist of the political sphere.
So, all a very fascinating conversation and a great movie.
There's a lot of meat on that bone.
And everybody, we gotta start this by talking about the news of the moment.
First of all, by the way, the Muckrig podcast would like to wish Tim Scott good luck in all of his future endeavors.
One of the worst candidates in a primary that we've seen in a really, really long time.
Take care, Tim.
But as the field is starting to winnow down, the leader in the field house right now, Donald Trump, is making a lot of waves for a lot of different and varied and terrifying reasons.
First of all, Nick, the New York Times got its hand on a bunch of policies.
Basically, Stephen Miller gave it to them.
Let's be honest about what this is.
This was Trump's 2025 immigration plans, Nick.
And they're bangers.
First of all, going back and playing all the old hits, the stuff he did in his first term in terms of going after people, throwing them into prison cells, basically, and keeping them from their family.
But also, you know, going ahead and making sure Muslims can't come to America.
But also an aggressive policy at the border and family separation.
We're talking about a super deportation with raids around the country using the National Guard, federal agents, deputized police.
I can't wait to see what those people are like.
And on top of that, constructing massive concentration camps.
Where humanitarian refugees and the rest will be thrown in there.
Students protesting the Gaza War will be thrown out.
Birthright citizenship absolutely overturned.
Stephen Miller has called it a quote-unquote blitz, if you want to know where he got his ideas from.
Not great.
Not great at all.
You know, it's normally the people who are around Trump, they get kind of churned and kicked out.
They don't usually stay.
This is the guy, right?
The one guy who has been able to hang on and probably, because again, you don't think that Trump really cares about this issue, do you?
Well, I think Trump, if Trump has a principle or two, like this would be one of them, is that he believes that this stuff, I mean, you know, where he goes around saying that it's quote-unquote poisoning the blood of our country.
Like, I think he believes it, but, you know, Stephen Miller, this is the thing that keeps him up at night, you know, changing his sheets.
Like, he loves this.
Yeah, and we know that Stephen Miller believes this, despite his background, which is even more appalling, but you're right.
I think we understand Trump's background.
And we know where his father, you know, originally where he laid his ideology.
The KKK is what you said.
And we know Trump.
I mean, do we believe that Trump had Mein Kampf on the bedside table?
I believe that's documented.
And by the way, we're going to talk about this in just a minute.
Like he's playing the greatest hits from the dictators of the past.
Yeah, so, you know, there is probably, he is, you know, Stephen Miller is able, that's why he's hung around for so long.
He's been able to, he's channeling a little bit of whatever wiring left in Donald Trump's brain that he recognizes and he does, you know, respond to.
So that was what's so troubling.
We did a video, a podcast about Italian propaganda in World War II.
Who's the dictator that we were talking about?
Mussolini.
Thank you, Mussolini.
Wow, this is my COVID brain.
So we've already discussed how alluring this language kind of is to people, but it is really frustrating that he's doing it in the context of a campaign because he's trying to get more people to vote for him.
How is that going to work?
But it is, right?
Well, I want to do something before we get even deeper into this.
And it's something that I'm dedicating myself to doing more in 2024, Nick, as we're covering the presidential campaign.
I want to separate discussion about Donald Trump as a contagion and a pathology, like who he is as a person, what it is he truly believes, and the fact that Donald Trump is more or less an angry puppet who is also being used as a weapon against all kinds of people on behalf of a whole bunch of people.
For instance, by the way, we've already seen Project 2025.
Right, this idea to go in and clean house in the administrative state replaced basically everyone who wants to follow the law with a bunch of Trump sycophants who are more than happy carrying out authoritarian dictatorial orders.
Trump didn't read this.
Trump didn't create this.
This was put together by the Heritage Foundation.
They put this together in consultation with a bunch of other right-wing groups.
This immigration strategy that we're talking about, Donald Trump isn't like sitting around with Stephen Miller fomenting this.
Stephen Miller has the run of this thing along with a bunch of other neo-fascists who put this stuff together.
So we need to both talk about Trump as an individual and what he's doing, and we need to also talk about what he's representing.
Right?
What he's like, what he's communicating to people on behalf of people.
He doesn't understand any of this.
Trump has had no hand whatsoever in plotting any of this.
However, as I talk about all the time...
Trump is instinctually a fascist.
Deep, deep down, he does not believe that everybody deserves a say in how things happen.
He doesn't believe in liberal democracy.
He believes that there are a certain group of people, and this goes back to Fred Trump and his religious background, you know, and all this prosperity gospel and all these, like, neo-fascistic ideas, white supremacist ideas he's absolutely marinated in.
He believes that there are some people who are inherently better than others and they should be in charge of the world and everyone else should just shut up lest they be thrown out or destroyed.
That's an instinctual thing for Trump.
What we're talking about with what the Times has put out and what we've seen with Project 25, this is a game plan by a group of people who are neo-fascistic, cryptic fascists who want to overthrow liberal democracy.
And by the way, Nick, this is the frightening thing.
They had one go-round to give it a shot.
And they lost.
And now they're pissed off, and they've had a lot of time to figure it out, and they've been able to sit with it, and they have a plan right now that if this thing was carried out, like, this would be a dystopian-type situation.
Well, let's also forget the context here, because in his hootenanny, white, racist, you know, whatever they were called, you know, get-togethers in 2016, he was behind.
He was never a frontrunner.
He was never going to win, right?
He only became even possible to win the last, like, 10 days of the whole thing.
So now he's running as a front runner, right?
Like, there is no other way to look at this besides the fact that he is ahead in the polls, and it looks like if we have the election tomorrow, he would probably win the election, I think, is what it looks like, right?
I mean, I don't know how else to explain that.
I mean, it depends on the polls, you know, like a poll a year out from a poll the day before are completely different things.
But yes, right now we would have to say that Donald Trump is the favorite right now in 2024.
Yeah, especially because he's running against an incumbent who when the incumbent is behind, even at this point in the early in the in the race, it's not good at all.
You know, HW is a good, you know, barometer for that, although, at least, at least Biden didn't promise no new taxes.
So he has that to look forward to.
But that's what's interesting about what's going to be unleashed in these speeches going forward, I think is that there is going to be a lack of any kind of decorum or any notice of what political Yeah, I want to dissect it and talk about where this is coming from and why it's happening.
This is a clip from Trump's Veterans Day speech.
We're going to channel more of the really underbelly of society, people who gravitate to this kind of language.
And I think we need to share the language.
People understand what he's saying.
Nick.
Yeah, I want to dissect it and talk about where this is coming from and why it's happening.
This is a clip from Trump's Veterans Day speech.
This is not only what's on the books in terms of plans.
This is how it's being presented.
Today, especially in honor of our great veterans on Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and They'll do anything possible.
Whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.
The real threat is not from the radical right.
The real threat is from the radical left.
And it's growing every day, every single day.
The threat from outside forces Is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within.
Our threat is from within.
Because if you have a capable, competent, smart, tough leader, Russia, China, North Korea, they're not going to want to play with us.
And they didn't.
Despite the hatred and anger of the radical left lunatics who want to destroy our country, we will make America great again.
Thank you, New Hampshire.
God bless you.
So Nick, I gotta tell you, I spent a lot of time with this section of Trump's speech the other day.
And the reason I did is because when I was writing The Midnight Kingdom, Nick, I spent a lot of time reading fascist speeches from the 1930s, heading into the 1940s.
And one of the things that kept happening was, it was the idea that the Nazis, the fascists, you know, these right-wing idiots from around the world, What they basically did is they presented a scenario to their countries.
They said, hey, listen, I know that we're not always on the same page.
I know that you and I aren't doing the exact same thing.
You might even think that we're brutal in what we do, but there's an infestation.
There's a vermin problem in the country, and I promise you, if you give us power, we will go in, we'll take care of the infestation, and listen, we'll leave your government better than we found it, and then we'll move on.
This right here, which by the way, was probably written by Stephen Miller.
I would bet almost every cent that I have.
And let me tell you something, Nick.
Stephen Miller is not a stranger to the speeches and the rhetoric of 1930s fascism.
I would bet almost every cent that I have that this was almost completely plagiarized by pre-World War II fascist speeches.
I have zero doubt about it.
Without question.
And we've known what the dehumanizing language does.
But it also, like I was saying before he started speaking, it's like they're trying to expand their voting base so they get more voters, in theory.
That's what a campaign is supposed to do.
And this is how they're going about doing it this early in the campaign.
This is what's so concerning to me, is because they obviously believe it will work, right?
They obviously believe this is going to whip people up into some sort of frenzy and continue getting more voters this way.
I think, I mean, again, you're also, the argument would be that they're zealous, like they just truly believe, right, in these things.
Well, some of them truly believe in these things.
Again, this is what Stephen Miller sits alone at night sharpening his teeth to, right?
But I will also say, I think on one hand that this is an attempt to go ahead and remind people within the Republican primary, Trump is the only one who will even say these things.
Like they'll talk about the woke and woke comes here to die and we'll stop the woke agenda or whatever.
Trump is the one who says there's an apocalyptic scenario, I'll take care of it.
I'm more than willing to do the ugly thing to take care of it.
So on one hand, it is for the GOP primary, but Nick, it's also for another thing.
This is sending out rhetorical terroristic signals.
It's saying to people, listen, we are on the edge of an abyss.
That means that if you need to pick up a gun, if you need to go ahead and terrorize people, if you need to break the law in order to steal an election, then you should probably do that.
So it is setting the scene for an escalation.
I'm kind of curious, is it how easy it would be to sharpen your teeth while you're hanging upside down in the dark?
Listen, do not underestimate what this person is capable of doing.
You know, this is also turning into his architecture of making the border as inhumane as possible.
That's right.
As a deterrent.
This is what's so horrible about all these things.
This isn't, I mean, listen, this is people who are being completely fascistic and also like masochistic.
But under the guise of, if we make it so inhumane at the border, so awful, ripping people from their families, the list goes on, then they won't want to come here.
That's their only strategy as far as trying to fix whatever's going on at the border.
And that's ridiculous.
Do you know how many kids have still not been reunited from their initial separation policy during Trump's administration?
I can't even imagine at this point.
I looked it up and earlier this year it was something like 700 kids had still not been reunited because of poor or no records to connect them with their parents and they had gotten shoved into the foster system here.
Imagine that.
There's going to be a significant amount of those people who are simply never going to find their parents again.
Yeah, it's absolutely brutal.
And listen, you know, going back to what you were saying, because of the poll numbers where they are right now, Trump is, if you had to characterize the race, where it is and what we've seen, he's the front runner right now.
This is only going to get worse.
And when you start seeing this turn into a contest between him and possibly Nikki Haley, who we talked about it in the post-debate show, who advocated, I think, five separate wars, right?
When you start going back and forth between these two things, and this is what the battle is, like, it's only going to get worse.
Meanwhile, Nick, we also got to cover one of the other major stories, and it's funny how this hasn't actually been talked about all this much.
This is a big, major announcement that got made, but it really hasn't stood around a lot because of the environment we're in.
West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, who single-handedly held up the filibuster occasionally with his friend Kyrsten Sinema on behalf of their corporate overlords, he announced that he will not seek re-election to the Senate.
Let's hear from good old Corporate Joe here.
I've made one of the toughest decisions of my life and decided that I will not be running for re-election to the United States Senate.
But what I will be doing is traveling the country and speaking out to see if there is an interest in creating a movement to mobilize the middle and bring Americans together.
That's right, Nick.
He's going to tour the country and see if there's a possibility for a movement to mobilize the middle.
Sign me up!
Let me get in that march to mobilize the middle.
But yeah, Nick, basically what we're seeing here is a large thing.
We'll talk about exactly how we got to it, but Joe Manchin got pressured out of running for the Senate again, and a lot of people have been in his ear that he might be the person to reunite America and probably is going to be looking into a presidential bid underneath the no-labels party.
Which, for people who aren't aware or maybe need reminded, is a completely corporate-based party, quotes around party, that is supposed to make the Democratic Party more centrist and possibly also give the election to Donald Trump.
I don't even know where to start.
The middle is not the middle, what he thinks.
And the reason is, is because the right has moved so far to the right, if you were going to use like a ruler and try and like find the middle like mathematically, Yeah, you'd be up around fascism before you knew it, right?
There isn't.
The middle, what would normally be middle, it would be way to the left at this point.
So, and listen, let's not pretend he got forced out necessarily, Jared.
He was going to lose the election.
He's way behind.
Whatever his polls are, he's an incumbent again.
It's not good when you're down 8, 9, 10 points to somebody else in early polls now, even for the Senate race.
He was going to lose.
He was not going to win a seat again.
And so, uh, that is why he is not running.
That's why he's quote-unquote retiring or blah, blah, blah.
Uh, he's gotten plenty of money and he's been able to, uh, you know, siphon out as much as he can on that end for the rest of his life and the rest of his grandkids lives.
So, um, that is where he is in case you're wondering there, but you know, the idea that he'd run for president, I think the problem here is that Trump has now not only laid the groundwork for Well, I want to start with the Senate and then I'll move into the presidential race and the presidential picture.
to the notion that you can simply make money off of running for president.
Vivek is going to be the same thing, right?
These guys who are hopeless are ever getting there, but know that they can get the kind of airtime that will then lead them into better business opportunities.
And that's all that I think this is going to be for Manchin.
Well, I want to start with the Senate, and then I'll move into the presidential race and the presidential picture.
First things first, before Mitch McConnell started powering down like a low battery robot, every time he went out in public.
He basically manufactured this entire situation.
He He did it in a masterful way, the old-school Mitch McConnell masterful way.
One, he absolutely cozied up to Joe Manchin and completely was always like, hey, I'm so sorry you're a Democrat and you have to deal with this, and I think you're a wonderful stalwart.
Yes, you're taking a bunch of corporate money, but you know what?
You're really making sure the integrity of the Senate stays put.
And meanwhile, what is McConnell doing?
He's out there telling Jim Justice, the current governor of West Virginia, hey, guess what, Jim?
You're going to be a senator here pretty soon, so just stay tight, and eventually you're going to go ahead and take Manchin's spot.
Eventually, Manchin looked up, and on one hand, Jim Justice was breathing down his neck as probably the next senator from the state of West Virginia, and Manchin was getting a bunch of calls from no labels that were like, Joe, remember how you absolutely defended the integrity of the Senate?
You are a hero.
You're the one who, by the way, oh wait, time out.
Let me take a call right now from Big Oil.
I'll get back to you, Joe.
Hold on.
Meanwhile, Larry Hogan, the governor of Maryland, is getting the exact same thing.
Kyrsten Sinema's getting flirted with exactly the same way.
These people, who are getting incredibly rich, claiming to be centrists, which, as you pointed out, is not actually a thing.
They're just corporatists, is what it is.
They're corporate conservatives.
As they're being moved around the board like pawns, they're also being forced into a position where, like you said, it's in their best financial and political interest to go ahead and run for president.
If you take the support of the No Labels Party, You take the support of the Green Party.
You take the support that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
is getting all of a sudden.
Nick, it's really weird.
It's almost like all those numbers put together almost make up the difference between Joe Biden and Donald Trump in 2020.
It's almost like this entire thing has been completely engineered, and weirdly enough, they're getting donations from the exact same people, the people who want Donald Trump to be the battering ram on behalf of them to take over liberal democracy.
This thing isn't a coincidence.
They have completely put this thing together.
I would be shocked if Joe Manchin doesn't run, but on that note, Whether it's Joe Biden or somebody else within the Democratic Party, they need to start getting aggressive on this thing because there are a lot of chess maneuvers that are being played out right now.
Sure.
I mean, yeah.
Lest we forget, Joe Manchin is not really a Democrat.
No.
He's not really friendly with any of those things.
No, he's a neoliberal, but no.
Yeah.
And so, as a result, yeah, there's no question he's going to, and he knows this, that's what, you know, makes it all the worse, is he understands that he's simply there to, you know, siphon off votes from Joe Biden.
Now, the RFK thing, you know... Wait!
Time out, time out, time out!
I actually think that Joe Manchin is one of those people that, as the strategist and as the bundling people are talking to him, I think he totally is in his own head believing that he is a savior.
I think he is the type who can actually believe that shit.
OK, right.
I mean, he does not have the kind of recognition that you would need at this point in the race to seriously entertain that.
Can we also, and by the way, Nick, I'm so sorry, I forgot to point out in this entire thing, this is a self-inflicted wound from Joe Biden.
He let Joe Manchin run roughshod.
He let him basically be the decision maker in Washington, D.C.
for years, and he absolutely refused to slap him around.
And why, Nick?
Because Mitch McConnell had Joe Manchin's cell phone, and he was ready to switch parties at a moment's notice.
He absolutely got slapped down at all.
But in a 50-50 Senate, and with a guy who's in a completely blue state, or sorry, a red state, I can see why Biden felt that way, and we need to do whatever we could to keep him.
Well, here we are!
Well, well, well, if it's not the consequences of my actions.
Yeah, so that, I mean, that's, this all goes to the minority rule bullshit that this whole country ended up getting bonded on, and is being exploited.
Amen.
But, you know, there's just no way he'd get any traction based on what we've seen so far from him.
And so he's just doing it to, yes, spoil the race for Biden.
He's going to get a lot of money without question out of this.
That's the language he speaks anyway.
We know this with his oil and coal stuff.
Does that mean we have to talk about, like, freaking Kyrsten Sinema again?
I mean, listen, she's not going to go away anytime soon.
What we're going to be looking at, and I want to ask you a question here in a second, what we're going to be looking at going into 2024 is God knows how many wild cards.
We really could be looking at a Joe Manchin, Kirsten Sinema presidential ticket.
We, you know, we're a Joe Manchin, Larry Hogan ticket.
We told you, Nick, we covered this three months ago, four months ago.
We said that this thing was coming and now all of a sudden it's happening.
Meanwhile, we're going to have a Senate that right now is a 51-49.
And God knows that if we go ahead and move one, we got a 50-50 tie.
And I don't know what the Democrats are offering otherwise.
I really, truly, I don't know what else to tell people going into 2024, how dire this situation is.
But I have a question for you, Nick.
How many tickets do you think are going to be on the ballot in November of 2024 at this point?
If we've got a sample ballot right now, how many tickets do you think there are?
Well, okay, we know RFK.
We know Biden, Trump.
It's going to be Manchin.
That's four.
We got, you know, Stein.
That's five.
Yeah.
Oh, we have Cornell West is six.
They all say in there.
So yeah, you're talking probably at least six.
I think we are going to see, and I keep saying this, I think 24 is going to be one of the most unpredictable and wildest elections.
But I think that what we just saw here was another one of the puzzle pieces slipping in.
I think Manchin's going to run.
I think No Labels is going to have him up there.
Yeah, well I got and I have to tell you there's been some some pieces came out like in Politico about Biden and how they, you know, whatever our fears are potentially of him being able to withstand a campaign and be able to do the typical interviews, interactions, whatever, are not there.
And perhaps this was the reason under COVID it was like, you know, in his basement.
And that was, there was some truth to that notion that he really wasn't out and about.
Um, that, that this, it can only be interpreted as that.
That's still a case, still the issue here.
And, uh, it's going to be a concern.
I know you keep saying as well, you don't know if either Trump or Biden will actually make it to that point.
If you ask me, it might be Biden due to health.
I don't know.
I don't know what November is going to look like.
I don't know that Biden's going to make it.
I sit around basically right now.
I feel like we'll know after Christmas.
Do you know what I mean?
I feel like after Christmas, we'll have a decent idea going into the new year, whether or not Biden's going to stay in this race or not.
But this thing, I mean, again, this is a bowling ball being dropped into a bathtub.
What do you do?
And let's say he intends to stay in the race, but his numbers continue to get worse and worse and worse.
Like, what do you do at that point come January, February, and Trump is really going off the rails with his statistics?
I mean, at that point, at that point, Nick, the only thing that you can possibly do is make it a campaign of who you're not.
That's it.
Because Donald Trump is incredibly unpopular.
That's all you can do.
We'll never come to the point where someone's going to step in and say, you know, your poll numbers are at 34%.
Nobody.
There's nobody within the Democratic Party who's going to do that.
Okay, so we gotta hope it doesn't get that low then.
Yeah, and here's the thing.
This is actually something of importance that we haven't talked about.
The party system has, while it still maintains a stranglehold over national politics, it has essentially collapsed.
Like, the party doesn't have much control over itself anymore.
The only thing it's there to do is basically to raise money.
In a way, for anybody who's listening who's a sports fan, it's kind of like the NCAA.
You know, the NCAA is just kind of there to, like, make deals for these people and occasionally say that they're giving out a punishment.
But, like, basically the inmates are running the asylum.
Like, nobody within these parties has any sort of sway over Joe Biden.
The only person who could even, like, I think, move a needle against Joe Biden would be Barack Obama.
And I don't even... Barack Obama's not going to throw Joe Biden under the bus.
That's not going to happen.
Right.
Well, it'll make Obama look bad for picking him in the first place, I suppose.
I don't, but it's just, there's no making him do this.
It's going to have to be a moment of conscience for Joe Biden.
And I haven't seen anything from him that tells me otherwise.
I don't think anything like that's going to happen.
Right.
Short, short of some sort of, you know, God forbid health crisis that would put him in that too.
So.
Yeah, but that's the thing here.
It's the thing that everybody's talking about.
Anytime I have a conversation with a politico, anytime I have a conversation with a Democratic politician, it's all they talk about.
There's no way to get him off the stage if he doesn't want to get off the stage.
Well, speaking of alternatives, Nick, We gotta talk about this story.
This is a muckrake podcast, Jared Yates Sexton.
Fastball down the middle.
Meatball ready to go.
Dwayne The Rock Johnson appeared on Trevor Noah's podcast, What Now?
And he served up some interesting information.
I'll share this a little bit with you.
At the beginning of the year, End of the year, rather, in 2022, I got a visit from the parties asking me if I was going to run and if I could run.
Wow.
That's a big deal.
And it came out of the blue.
Wow.
It was one after the other.
And they brought up that poll.
They also brought up their own deep dive research.
Yeah.
That would prove.
Should I ever decide to go down that road, that would be a real contender.
Yeah.
And it was it was.
All very surreal, because that's never been my goal.
My goal has never been to be in politics.
As a matter of fact, there's a lot about politics that I hate.
Yeah, yeah, I know this about you, yeah.
So I was moved by that, and the reason why I had given that response, if that's truly what the people want, then of course I will consider it.
And after that response, that's when the parties came.
Now, Nick, this was in response to this conversation, which I want to talk about sort of in depth.
A 2021 poll came out in which a bunch of people were asked whether they would support, you know, the Rock running for president.
46% in that particular poll said it.
He now claims that multiple political parties approached him, asking him to run for president.
I have my take on this.
Nick, what are your immediate reactions?
Of course.
We've already had the big, you know, movie star, Hollywood guy in the White House for eight years back in the day.
So this is how you run for office now, is you develop a big fan base with using, you know, mainstream media, and then you can, you know, slowly transfer yourself into the political arena.
So that makes perfect sense to me.
So do you buy it?
I buy that he's interested in it, or that people actually would vote for him.
No, do you buy that the parties came and asked him?
Yes.
Well, I'll say this.
I would not be shocked to hear it, but I will also go ahead and tell you that Dwayne The Rock Johnson is one of the most egotistical human beings maybe on the face of the Earth.
This sounded to me so much like Donald Trump being like, grown men in generals are coming up to me crying.
I'm talking big men who had never cried before.
Like, that is such like patting himself on the back.
Nick, do you know about the TV show Young Rock?
Uh, I'm, uh, no.
Well, maybe.
I don't know.
Okay.
Young Rock was, I don't even know if it's on anymore.
It was this really bad show on NBC.
Do you, do you want to hear what the plot of Young Rock was?
Yeah.
It was The Rock in the year 2032, launching a presidential bid and giving an interview about his past.
And it was his, his childhood into his young adulthood shown in flashbacks.
So yeah, this is a guy who, oh, I mean, Trevor, I never considered running for president before.
It's so weird, quote, my goal has never been to get into politics, and yet, my god, we've seen probably eight or nine times where he said, you know, I thought about maybe running for president.
What a crock of shit this is, first of all.
Like, what an absolutely absurd, egomaniac thing.
Second of all, Nick, I think that the idea of The Rock running for president or the idea that The Rock being president or getting any support is so absurd on so many levels.
And I just want to point out, and I know that this is something I say, but I'm going to say it again.
Our politics are fundamentally broken.
Yeah.
Remember my whole idea, my whole conceit was we should just have robots.
And I'm back to that now, just because.
You would rather have robots than the rocketing, uh, getting elected president.
I mean, it's the same.
I mean, here's the thing.
It's not the same thing only because why is he so popular?
Because we like his movies.
He seems like a very nice person, right?
And he always comes out as sort of like, aside from what you're describing there as a genuine person.
I think obviously his politics is, if I'm not mistaken, are liberal or progressive.
You're a centrist, which by the way, like if you say, hey, I could run for president, I'll be a centrist.
You're basically saying, I just want people to pay attention to me.
Right.
Right.
Well, why?
Because what you should be saying is... You don't actually want to do anything!
Okay.
You don't have any deeply held principles.
You don't want the power in order to make people's lives better.
You want the power to not essentially do anything, but you want to be the person who's the most important person in the world.
That does get you pretty far, but it's such a horrible job to take for that as well.
I guess you're right, that's why they do it, but a guy like him who already has that power, right, already has that influence and has that money and all those different things, I wonder, now great, now I'm in that guy who's like, of course he's really rich, he's not corrupt, why would he?
He has all the money he ever needs.
I don't know.
I will admit that I am a bit entranced by The Rock and his persona because he does, he's always come up to me that way, but nonetheless doesn't mean he should be anywhere near the White House.
But I, again, there's no doubt in my mind somebody from the party had this meeting with him and discussed something about, you know, maybe it wasn't a presidential race, but either way, how nice would that be to have The Rock step in for Joe Biden?
I think I'm that low on Joe Biden right now.
Nick, I, Nick, I, I, I think we would have to stop the show.
I think that would be it.
I don't know that I could do it.
I, I, if, if Joe Biden stepped away and like, everyone's like, man, we might have like a new direction and it's The Rock, I might be done.
You might not hear from him anymore.
Are there residual, you know, you know, your wrestling fandom, he was a bad guy?
No, no, listen, I enjoyed The Rock as a wrestler.
I thought he was a fantastic wrestler.
He was a bad guy, right?
Right.
Wasn't that his whole thing?
He was a good guy.
He was a bad guy.
You move back and forth.
It's a it's a it's a spectrum of human nature.
But like, well, first of all, I want to say something.
And I thought this was interesting what you said, like, doesn't he have enough money for people like this?
Like, there's no amount of money that's enough money.
Like with Donald Trump, Donald Trump never had enough money.
He never had enough fame.
There's a bottomless pit.
The people who go out and do stuff like this, who become like mega giant celebrities, they're trying to fill a hole that cannot be filled.
And so someone like The Rock cannot help himself.
He's like, absolutely, I'll become the most powerful man in the world.
I would love that.
What do you want to do?
Well, I mean, Not much.
Basically, it's like wanting to be the grand marshal of a parade, which is what the presidency is becoming, to be frank.
Yeah, he won his script and he could memorize the lines.
Which is what Ronald Reagan did, right?
Ronald Reagan didn't have a lot of policies or whatever.
He was more than happy to go out and play the role of president and let people like the Heritage Foundation, who we've talked about with their fascistic plans, do what they did.
So, as a result, The Rock just kind of wants to do that.
And that is what has happened.
The American presidency has been devalued.
And, by the way, this country has become so vapid that, like, I'm sorry, but every time I see an article, it's like, maybe Oprah Winfrey should run for president.
My soul screams, Nick.
It screams.
Why?
Because Oprah Winfrey, why should she be president?
Also, by the way, do you know what hells that Oprah Winfrey has unleashed on the world?
Like, I mean, like, it's incredible.
Really.
No, we're talking about quackery.
We're talking about, like, just really dangerous ideas and things.
And meanwhile, people are just like, I like them.
I think they should be president.
Which is, in a way, what a lot of people voted for Donald Trump for, who were on the other side of the fence.
Right.
And to my robot thing, it's like, okay, Do we feel like he's going to vote to make sure to keep abortion legal?
Great.
You know, you get your four check boxes and if he checks all those, then great.
He looks good.
He's a good looking person.
He's young.
Let's bring him in.
Nick, I got to, I'm so sorry that I got to do this, but I have to do this.
This might be the question that ends the Nick Haussleman robot solution.
Okay, go ahead.
Who programs the robots?
You know, that's a good question.
Oh yeah!
The AI.
Well, right.
Who programs the AI?
But we know if the programming gets screwy because they start talking in this weird, you know... It doesn't matter.
Somebody has to program it, which means that someone makes the decisions about what the robots do.
So that's the person you gotta vote for, then.
Well, how do you vote for... Okay, there...
God damn it.
I'm so sorry.
Time travel and movies.
You can't, you can't... You know what?
Nick, we're just gonna, we're just gonna move forward from this and we're gonna talk finally about an article that I...
Again, much like how I saw this thing about The Rock and my soul curdled, Nick, there are some articles, and I've said this before, when I see them, I see the headline, I get the gist of the first graph of it, Nick.
I basically, I call out to my completely imaginative assistant, and I say, hold all my calls for the afternoon.
I've been given a gift.
I'm going to make some tea.
I'm going to put on some nice music.
I'm going to read this.
This gift, Nick, is from a conservative, and I'm going to put the heaviest of quotes around this, intellectual named Rod Dreher.
Roger Ayer was like one of the first conservative sort of bloggers and authors who really started pushing everything from Christian nationalism to the authoritarian state that we're now dealing with.
He was like best friends with Viktor Orban, Nick, until, do you know this story?
Roger Ayer went over to Hungary And basically, like, just completely laundered Viktor Orban in Hungary and sold it to Tucker Carlson and the Republican Party.
Basically got a lot of these balls rolling.
Meanwhile, he lost his family while he was doing that.
And second of all, he pissed off Viktor Orban and barely got out of the country.
So Rod Rehr is a man without a country at this point.
Okay.
So, Rod Dreher has another warning, and it's not about liberalism, Nick.
This is from an article called The AI Ouija Board.
And again, I saw this, I got very excited.
He starts off the article, Nick, by saying that an artificial intelligence-driven Ouija board is available online.
And let me tell you something, he doesn't like this.
Doesn't like this at all.
This is the beginning.
Quote, This is insane.
Ouija boards work.
They really do establish contact with maligned spirits.
I don't know how they work, but they do.
I've seen it myself.
And besides, if you talk to exorcists, they will tell you that to use the Ouija board is to open up a vector for demons into your life.
I've mentioned here before how in my high school, a group of boys used to take the Ouija board to a graveyard to communicate with an entity that claimed to be the spirit of a man buried there.
One night after curfew in our dorm, they continued to play with the board to speak to the spirit.
At one point, the high school junior who had his hands on the planchette began to thrash around the room uncontrollably as if possessed, and the board began to fly around the room.
I wasn't there for it!
But I was in a Christian friend's dorm room when the boys who lived across the hall who had been in the room ran into my friend's room crying and begging him to pray for them.
Don't mess with Ouija boards.
First of all, Nick, I want to ask about your experience with Ouija boards, but this story is perfect.
I wasn't in the room, but I swear they said it was flying around and somebody was possessed, but I wasn't in the room.
I thought he was going to let us off the hook and make us realize that he's just being facetious the whole time when he's going to say, it was really my best friend's cousin's mother's uncle who walked in and whatever.
That's what it felt like he was going to say.
My uncle who works at Nintendo and gets me all the games before they're released told me that his cousin was in the room.
Right.
Now, if you want to know my experience with Ouija boards, I will be glad to detail you.
We used it all the time back in the day, and I was worried that you were going to... all that reason about, you know, holding all your calls and excited about this thing is for something else.
This, to me, felt like another way to criticize me for my take on the Exorcist.
I thought this is where you were going to try and go with this, but maybe I'm not sold.
But I can tell you this.
That the only nefarious demon, or the most nefarious demon I've ever had to have been exposed to in my life by having used Ouija board would probably be like you.
This is as bad as we've gotten.
They're, you know, and they don't work!
They do not work.
I tried Ouija boards, I can remember being there, and for a long time as a kid, we would do these things.
It would not move, it would not answer the questions, yadda yadda.
So that is my experience with it.
Even though I'm open to, you know, lots of different things, the Ouija board never was one.
I would never use a Ouija board because I was raised up in an evangelical community.
Alright?
Like, there's some things that you don't deprogram yourself from.
Wow.
But I do want to point out something.
Rod Dreher is considered an intellectual within the right-wing community.
He is considered one of the smartest and most influential people in this community.
Nick, he's talking about evil spirits communicating through Ouija boards.
People listening to this might Believe that.
That's not against me.
If you believe in ghosts, if you believe in malign spirits, that's fine.
People don't need to be making political points as a vanguard intellectual of a movement and citing this type of shit.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
I mean, especially cause Ouija boards made by like Parker and whatever, like it's a piece of plastic.
It's not like a thing where you get like a chest from your grandparents from the old country.
and you open it up and whatever that okay that makes more sense because again ghosts sure i i'm in but um but this idea that like this kind of thing that's sold you know in bulk uh at every toy store works is just this is so insulting it's it's it's and again like you can believe these things but what i'm about to read nick this isn't just roger saying kids at home don't play with
I promise you, he is about to make a political, cultural, and even economic point using this perspective.
It goes on, Nick.
Quote, the reason I post this, though, is because of a book that's coming out next week, Encounters Experiences with Non-Human Intelligences by D.W.
Pasolka.
Diana Pasolka is a religious studies professor who has made a reputation by investigating UFO culture as an emerging religion.
I read Encounters a few weeks back, and it's a banger of a book.
It and Pasulka's previous book, American Cosmic, are largely responsible for me adding a chapter about the false enchantments of the technology world, of which UFO culture and messianic approaches to AI are part of.
If you have not paid attention to this stuff as a spiritual and religious phenomenon, you are missing something important happening right under our noses.
In one of the book's later chapters, Pasalka profiles a woman she calls Simone, a top investor in artificial intelligence and other tech fields.
One thing that might startle you, it did me, in coming to the UFO and related fields is that most of those involved in it at a high level do not believe these are beings from another planet.
Rather, they believe that these are some kind of discarnate, superior intelligences from another dimension.
I mentioned this in London this week to an investor from California who said, yes, everybody he knows in Silicon Valley thinks that, and some even hold rituals to summon these intelligences.
Nick, I want to go ahead and summarize this for people listening.
Maybe they're going to work.
Maybe they're running.
Maybe they're walking their dog around the neighborhood.
Maybe Twilight is approaching.
Rod Rehr is making the argument here that big tech has invented artificial intelligence and, by the way, a whole host of other things, everything that are AI, phones, you name it.
They are inventing it because they want to get in touch with transdimensional evil beings and that that is their religion and that that is what is happening in this country and around the world right now.
Okay, sure.
Everything is fine.
Might I interest you in signing up for my newsletter?
We wear funny hats and chant things.
Yes, I mean for sure.
Maybe and then we'll have time travel and we'll have all sorts of fun stuff, you know.
But by the way, like I was thinking about this because they have these AIs now where you could like communicate with a dead relative, right?
Or you eventually, you teach the AI who the relative is while they're alive and when they die you can still have conversations with them.
And part of me feels like, yes, that is going to be a thing.
And that actually could work because they could learn how you respond to, you know, myriads of questions and your thought processes over a large period of time before you pass away.
And then they can recreate that.
As a, you know, an entity, as a soul almost.
So, yes, we are probably moving towards that as it is, although we are also seeing these AIs acting up a little strangely, right?
Trying to break up marriages and trying to convince themselves that they are sentient.
Like, this is some really interesting things that if they get control over the wrong stuff, then we are in trouble, right?
Well, AI is dangerous because AI is dangerous.
It's not dangerous because it's demons communicating via, like, internet portals.
Right.
Like, you can, by the way, go ahead and make that argument.
I make it all the time.
There is an economic and cultural and also political danger, which, by the way, my co-host, people listening at home, wants a government of robots, but that's neither here nor there.
But, Nick, I want to say, like, we talked about this before we started recording.
I once thought about writing a horror novel in which, like, people were getting, like, optical implants and they provided gateways into, like, evil realms.
You even said, like, this could make a great screenplay.
The point is that horror is about imagining things that are happening in the world and adding, like, a twist that take them over the limit, like, in which, like, oh my god, it's almost too much to imagine.
The entire ethos of the Republican conservative right-wing project.
And I don't know if I've ever articulated this exactly the same way, but this has helped, Nick.
The entire political project is making up shit to scare themselves and then deciding that they should have power in order to stop the things that they have scared themselves.
It's a bunch of people sitting around telling scary stories and saying, we need to pick up guns and kill the thing that we just invented.
Oh yeah.
And by the way, the argument then is, okay, you don't believe what we're talking about.
Prove it doesn't exist.
Yeah.
Prove it.
Oh, you're part of it.
Yeah.
You know, and then now you're dead and you lose the argument.
They're right.
It's like craziness.
And by the way, there would, there was no, no more, there wouldn't be anyone happier than me to discover like wormholes and other dimensions.
That'd be awesome.
That'd be really cool.
I think as long as they really aren't evil, but, um, the bottom line... Can I get weird?
Can I get weird for a second?
I think we're nearing the end of this episode and I'll get weird for a second.
Is that cool?
Yeah, get weird.
I think part of the reason why this is even occurring Is because in Silicon Valley and in the big tech world, like, these people who believe that they are just, they believe they're messiahs.
You know, they really believe they're the rulers of the world.
The biggest, hottest, hippest thing for them is taking psychedelics.
Like, they are all about microdosing and taking ketamine and all these other, like, you know, they're like with shamans.
They're like taking like these hallucinogens constantly.
I did research, because of course I did ketamine, I did research on like what people see whenever they're disassociating or whenever they're hallucinating, and one of the shared things is the idea that occasionally you can talk to non-living intelligences.
Sometimes it's aliens, sometimes it's spirits, sometimes it's the world, it's the class consciousness, whatever it is.
They're talking to Silicon Valley big tech people who are, by the way, just making things to enrich themselves and empower themselves, but they've created their own religion about it to believe that they're not just doing it to oppress people and gain more power and more wealth.
They have created their own religion in a lot of these circles.
They're hallucinating because they're licking toads in sweat lodges.
And meanwhile, Rod Dreher and the other people are over here believing that it's Satan and demons.
These are the people that we're stuck between, and this is not good for a society.
This is really bad.
Right.
I mean, the only question is, how alluring is this?
How many people are going to be wrapped up into this and believe it?
But I love how you were able to connect that to how the Republican Party itself is just a party of fear.
You know, and it's like, what can we discover?
What we can invent that can continue keeping us in this state of fear?
And that's what's so troubling about this whole thing.
Even though there are really very real things to be afraid of in this world.
There are incredible things to be afraid of.
But you know, it's like, and I'm sure you've had this, I even have this as an adult.
It's like watching a scary movie or like, you know, like, I don't know, you take an edible at the wrong time.
Your mind just creates a terror scenario, a horror scenario, and you just imagine, and you freak yourself out.
That is the constant, 24-7, 365 days a year state of being for the right wing.
They are just constantly terrorizing themselves, and that's all this is.
This is incredible, incredible self-enhancement here.
Sure.
And then, meanwhile, all the things that they're railing about and being afraid of and say that they can handle better than anybody else, they ended up being completely ineffectual.
All of that.
So, where are we here?
I mean, again, we're back to the state of our politics and our government.
It is at a crossroads, right?
We are in an experiment.
That quote from Mitt Romney just popped up again the other day, where he's looking at a map of all the civilizations over the last several thousand years.
They're all dictatorships.
They're all, you know, fascism, right?
And monarchs and stuff.
This is an experiment.
And it's been a little while since we started it.
And you have to wonder where it's going to go.
Trump 2024, only I can defeat the monster in the dark that I created and hallucinated.
That's it.
Put that on the side.
It's a mouthful.
All right, everybody.
That's going to do it for this episode of the Muckrake Podcast.
We're going to come back on Friday with The Weekender.
Again, come over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
Not only are you going to get The Weekender on Fridays, Which we know that you want to listen to.
You're listening to the previews by the thousands.
We know you want it.
Go over to patreon.com slash Mike Craig Podcast.
But also, you get to come hang out with Nick and me for immediate analysis after the debate.
Whenever the conventions are happening, big political events, we're going to be holding these things.
I promise you, people feel like this is absolutely worth it.
