Alex Jones Back On X Signals How Deep The Grift Goes
Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the return of raspy conspiracy sayer Alex Jones to the website formerly known as Twitter, and how Musk is "getting the band back together," if you will. They then turn to Liz Magill resigning from Penn after her appearance last week in front of congress.
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I will take good over bad any day, and I'm happy that you are good.
I am good.
I'm happy that we're doing this episode.
We were just talking before we started recording, ramping up into the holidays, taking a little bit of time to rest, relax, reset, getting ready for 2024, which I think is going to be one of the wildest years that you and I and everybody listening to this is ever going to spend.
So we are excited about that.
We're excited to be here today.
A reminder, if you want to support the podcast, if you also want to get a hold of the Weekender Edition on Fridays, which by the way, we just discussed, Nick, we know what our next movie deep dive is going to be.
We're doing a Christmas classic!
Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, which has a ton of political and socioeconomic undercurrent and commentary in.
If you want access to those types of things, and I think that you do, and also our exclusive 2024 coverage, which we've already been out there ahead of everybody else, patreon.com slash mccraigpodcast.
Let me ask you this, we did Home Alone, right?
We did Home Alone.
And wasn't that for Christmas?
We did Home Alone for Christmas and we took one of everybody's favorite holiday classics and explained how it was a tale of neoliberalism gone awry.
Right, which is exactly what Eyes Wide Shut is.
It is a little bit.
You know, we don't have time to get into it today.
I got some, just to let everybody know to preview, I got some hot takes on it.
Wow.
What it says about, what it says about politics and culture.
But my concern is that we released that Home Alone one last year at Christmas.
Yeah, that's right.
If you asked me, it would have been, we did that like three months ago.
I know.
Time, what is it?
Time, comma, what is it?
Speaking of time, Nick, It has been five years since the biggest conspiracy theory mogul in the country, Alex Jones, was banned from Twitter.
This was before Elon Musk had ever bought it, before it became...
X. And guess what?
The times, they are a changing.
That's right.
Alex Jones has been reinstated on Twitter.
There's a lot to get into why this has happened.
I think it shows a little bit of where we are, what's going on.
It certainly has revealed a little bit about Elon Musk and his future plans.
Nick, what are your immediate reactions to Alex Jones being reinstated on Twitter?
Oh, I know what you're going to argue.
I'm just going to argue that the ship is sinking economically.
He doesn't have any money coming in or enough money coming in.
So they're looking at how else they can gin up some more cash.
And they figure, well, they bring this guy back, he'll get some more people to sign up, more people to interact, maybe look at some more advertising from his advertisers, that kind of thing.
This is a to me, it's a purely revenue based decision.
Well, I just want to point out, before we get into the actual ins and outs of what's happened with Elon Musk and Alex Jones and their whole just cadre of assholes, everything in America is a multi-level marketing scam.
Everything in this country is based on that.
There are corporations, of course, that are making money hand over fist in historic quantities.
They basically rule the world at this point, and everybody below them is attempting to run an MLM scam.
Which is attempting to have somebody turn their friends and their customers into their friends and their customers in order to convert them through.
And I think what you just said is dead on.
Which is that Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, this entire group of people, They are attempting to create basically a parallel economy for themselves, which is what I've said was going to happen from the culture wars.
It was what was going to happen from people being quote-unquote cancelled.
Basically, there was going to be one economy in which people were quote-unquote woke, and there was going to be one economy where people were anti-woke.
And they are busily constructing what has been constructed for a very long time.
Alex Jones is no longer extreme, Nick.
He is now right in the dead center of an ideological mainstream position, which is the idea, and we had it the other night.
Vivek Ramaswamy said in this debate, the Republican debate, the Great Replacement Theory is not a theory, it's fact.
Right?
And the fact that he's up on stage, the fact that Marjorie Taylor Greene is like a mainstream member of the Republican Party, Alex Jones is no longer a pariah.
He is now just part of the mainstream of what has been created.
And you're exactly right.
This is about expanding audiences, this is about expanding ad revenue, and also just going ahead and saying, hey, you know what?
He's not even out there anymore.
You know, I'm trying to go through really quickly to find what got him banned in the first place, because we know much of it was related to his denial of Sandy Hook and the things that he'd be spouting out on that.
It's harassment.
It really is harassment, because that always triggers these insane people to go harass the parents of the poor families from Sandy Hook and all those different things.
So this is what we're dealing with here.
We're not dealing with free speech necessarily.
We're dealing with someone who, you know, is is intentionally fueling a conspiracy laden genre of people.
I don't know.
Genre is not the word, but, you know, that will but who are active and they're and they get activated.
And I think that's always been the concern about Twitter is how these things will trigger.
Now, you might say, oh, it's just words.
Words don't do anything.
It's like, well, OK, check January 6th.
What do those words do from the Twitter platform itself will be wild.
So, you know, it's going to be an interesting thing where, you know, the way they phrase these things.
In fact, I just saw a tweet the other day where Musk, I think, was opining about how, you know, the threat of when the government came in to help them with COVID misinformation, they wanted to make it seem like people at Twitter would get arrested if they didn't listen to the government, when in fact, they were just the suggestions.
Hey, would you mind like taking these tweets down because it's, you know, wrong info, that kind of thing.
The whole thing is just masked under the guise of free speech and under the guise of Big Brother and all these things, but in reality it's just money.
It absolutely is.
And you know, it makes me think, Nick, You know, we're going to get into exactly, like the other day we were talking about the right wing basically peddling cigarettes for big tobacco and smokeless tobacco for big tobacco and how that is happening and how these things have sort of been rolled out.
We're going to talk about how this has been rolled out because it stinks to high heaven of coordination and a PR reboot of Alex Jones.
But before we do, I just want to remind people You know, for a very long time, and I'm sure you've seen these clips, I'm sure other people have, where Ronald Reagan would host the General Electric Hour on, I don't know if it was NBC or CBS or ABC, whatever it was, you know?
Or, you know, and I know Bob Hope didn't have a show, but it'd be like, Bob Hope's Lucky Strikes!
Hollapalooza!
You know what I mean?
Like it was basically what happened was there was an entertainment on television that was selling a product on the back end.
People would tune in in order to be entertained, right?
To be titillated, entertained, you name it, and then meanwhile they would have stoves sold to them.
Eventually over time it wasn't just the shows being sponsored because that was too much out there.
You know what I mean?
Like, everybody knew they were being peddled to by a corporation.
Suddenly, you started having a lot more commercials.
It was in between the shows, right?
You tuned in for the show, and then all of a sudden it was the commercials that got you.
It's a lot easier to understand that Alex Jones is an entertainer who sells fear to people in order to sell them supplements.
In order to sell them, you know, prepared meals for the apocalypse, in order to sell them collodial silver delivery devices.
Like, he gets on there, talks about the New World Order, peddles very, very thinly veiled anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, anti-democratic conspiracy theories, right-wing extremism, but he's not doing it for any other reason than he's got a bunch of dick pills to sell you, right?
Because if you're worried about all that, you're insecure about your masculinity.
So as a result, psychologically, which is all Sigmund Freud's theories that have been used by American consumerism, that's what he is.
That's why he's done this.
This is why he's useful.
But also the people who watch his show They're also absorbing fascist ideology.
They're also being radicalized, because in order to be frightened enough to buy the dick pills, you have to be afraid of what's going to happen outside your door.
Now, the really dangerous thing, Nick, is that Alex Jones, who is a raving mad lunatic who lies constantly for anyone who pays attention to him, Like, he has affected American culture, and it's because he's been useful in normalizing the alt-right, Trumpism, MAGAism, all these right-wing things.
And now all of a sudden, I think it's very telling that before he got reinstated on Twitter, and before he's had some activities we'll talk about in a second, he was welcomed onto Tucker Carlson's program.
And a reminder, Tucker Carlson was a mainstay on CNN, MSNBC, before he got to Fox News.
This was a guy who was part of the establishment.
He has helped radicalize people as well.
Many times, as you and I have discussed and covered, Nick, he has taken Alex Jones's conspiracy theories verbatim and then rebroadcast them on his shows and just like used that basically as filler.
Well, now all of a sudden, on Tucker Carlson's ex-platform Twitter show, all of a sudden, we get this.
But several years later, I wound up in Austin, Texas, and through a chain of circumstances, wound up meeting Alex Jones.
And I learned what everyone who has met him now knows, which is Alex Jones is not a crazy person.
Alex Jones has said pretty far out things on TV from time to time.
Not that far out.
He hasn't said men can become women or Ukraine is a democracy, but within the bounds of say cable news pretty far out.
But fundamentally, Alex Jones is right about a lot of things.
And in fact, that's why they don't like him.
Alex Jones has an uncanny, really an amazing ability to predict events before they happen.
He has called it and he's done it on tape again and again, to the point where it's a meme on the internet.
Alex Jones profit, not conspiracy nut, profit.
But when you dig into Alex Jones's predictions, they are so spot on.
Then it's remarkable.
How does he do this?
We're guessing there's a kind of spiritual sensitivity to Alex Jones.
Maybe that's his secret.
He was displaying this years before the average person in this country even thought about matters like that.
Now it's pretty obvious to most people that the current war going on in this country is taking place in ways you can't see it most of the time.
But 10 years ago, people were not thinking that way.
Alex Jones was.
Well, case closed.
Nick, I don't know if people heard it, but one of the bigger scoffs I've ever seen from you on this podcast came from Tucker Carlson speculating that Alex Jones's ability to predict things came from a quote-unquote spiritual sensitivity.
Oh, I know.
I mean, because again, you know what I consider spiritual sensitivity, right?
It's like, here's the thing, how many people, what percentage of people watching that who are, I guess, in the ecosystem of Tucker Carlson, how many people don't really, maybe aren't familiar very much with Alex Jones?
There's probably something, right?
A large amount of them.
Yes.
So this is their introduction, right?
They don't know.
He sounds great.
He sounds really reasonable, really cool.
He's always smart and he's always right.
That's amazing.
So that's what's more worrisome because I know a lot of them do.
A lot of them know Alex Jones, if you're watching Tucker, but a lot of them probably don't.
And that's what's so frustrating is that his introduction to that and how he goes back on Twitter is just disgusting.
Well, and a couple of things before we get into exactly what's happening here and getting everybody up to speed.
First of all, Alex Jones does not have a prophetic ability to tell the future.
He just throws shit at the wall all the time.
And then through selective editing and the way that he talks about things, it appears that he's talked about things.
I watch Alex Jones all the time.
I cannot tell you how much of my life I've spent studying Alex Jones in order to study conspiracy theories and authoritarianism.
He is not a serious person.
He is not a serious person, and he has never been a serious person.
He's not right about shit.
He is so wrong about shit all the time.
Also, Tucker Carlson, that spiritual sensitivity, Nick, that's based on the fact that a lot of times, like, Alex Jones will tell people, you know how I know this?
God told me.
God is giving me information directly from on high in order to make me one of, like, the generals in his army.
That's madness, by the way.
And for Tucker to go ahead and to launder that for Alex Jones?
Here's what's happening, Nick.
On one hand, Tucker Carlson just told an audience of people, and again, we know this, Tucker Carlson is extreme.
He is a radicalized person.
He is one of the most racist, misogynistic, anti-democratic people in the media right now.
But he does give people, as we've discussed and analyzed, he does give it to people with sort of a sheen of respectability, right?
He's able to like wash it up a little bit.
That's what he's done here.
He has an audience that Alex Jones might not have complete access to, right?
Alex Jones is able to, I'm sure there are tons of people who listen to Tucker Carlson who also listen to Alex Jones.
Well, guess what?
Tucker's giving him part of his audience.
What's Alex Jones doing?
He's getting part of Tucker's audience while also going ahead and updating his audience so that they might go over and spend time with Tucker Carlson.
It's a marriage.
They're merging their stuff together to be in concert with each other, basically to help form a merged business.
I don't know a word that's appearing in my head, Nick.
It's almost like the difference between Sean Hannity and then Tucker Carlson.
It's almost like a network of some sorts.
Yes.
Interestingly enough, I was almost going to say, okay, let's look at Tucker Carlson's latest episode, View Count, to see what was leading up to the Alex Jones episode.
And it was low.
They were all under $10 million.
Now again, $9 million, $8 million, $7 million, that's pretty good, you know.
We also don't know if those are real, but yes.
Right, that's true too.
God, well, anyway, let's just pretend that they're... We've got to base them on something.
Let's pretend they're like the unemployment numbers that we get every month, right?
Something like that.
So, um, you know, so he was it was down for several episodes in a row and then boom, you know, Alex Jones comes on and they get, uh, you know, 20 million, you know, but not as high as his normal high.
His normal ones are 27, 30, 29, whatever.
The only question I have, though, is, you know, I don't think I don't believe that Tucker is doing the ads in during the videos.
So I still can't figure out how they'd even be monetizing this really anyway, but, you know, short of attaching a random tweet to the tweet itself that has the video embedded.
I think Tucker has formed a deal with Elon Musk for profit sharing from ad revenue.
I think is what has happened.
Right.
Okay.
And you know, I also, it came out today that Tucker's going to launch some sort of a subscription thing for additional videos and things like that.
I have to assume that he's going to get that boosted on X.
I think that's where the rubber's meeting the road.
Right.
And you know, in this whole thing, it's really kind of amazing that they're also laundering Jones, turning him into a reasonable person.
Also, all of his new videos and all of his new content, Nick, is completely updated.
The logos are brand new.
It feels different.
This was an intentional relaunch.
I do want to say, before we talk about this next part of it, which I think is important, Nick, I do want to throw something out there, and you and I sometimes enjoy these types of things.
So Alex Jones hangs out with Joe Rogan every now and then goes on a show, uh, him and Tucker obviously texted each other a bunch of times.
We know that from, from the lawsuits.
Uh, we also know that, you know, uh, him and Elon Musk have had their opportunities to talk to one another.
I'm just going to throw out there, by the way, not that I'm like saying this is what happened, but an anonymous person, when Alex Jones was having, um, uh, financial trouble dropped eight, $8 million worth of Bitcoin in his wallet.
I'm just I'm just I'm just talking I'm just saying I'm just we're just talking here Nick right but I want to tell you something and I want and because you and I are very similar in these regards we don't have to speculate about anything but in the past few weeks
Alex Jones has been going on his show and talking constantly about how Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, and Tucker Carlson are stealing his act but not giving him any credit and also that they're not really giving him any shine.
And I'm not sitting here saying that maybe Alex Jones needs to be controlled and or kept from Grabbing a microphone and saying some things.
But Nick, it certainly feels like that isn't outside the realm of possibility.
Is this the cue for the clip here?
Yeah, let's go ahead and listen to, for people who don't know this, Alex Jones was welcomed back onto Twitter after his high-profile interview with Tucker Carlson.
He got in a Twitter space, Nick, and on that Twitter space was Alex Jones, Elon Musk, Andrew Tate, Matt Gaetz, and Vivek Ramaswamy.
Just a bunch of dudes hanging out!
Yeah.
Your thoughts, Andrew, we had your brother on earlier, Tristan come on earlier.
Your thoughts on Alex Jones being back on X?
I'd rather hear his thoughts on Elon Musk being the biggest maverick of the last 500 years.
I'm not kissing ass here.
Elon, you've got big ones, man.
On every front, you are literally overturning the entire power structure.
I was just going to say this and let Andrew get in.
But I just want to say this while you're here.
I mean, you are literally changing the entire paradigm and you've definitely got the system scared.
And so everybody needs to support X. Everybody needs to support the sponsors on X. I personally am doing all my Christmas shopping this year with all the great gadgets and stuff that are on X, but I'm going to shut up now.
But I would imagine instead of talking about Alex Jones, I'd like to hear Andrew and Tay talk about or ask questions to Elon Musk.
Yeah, well, Alex, I mean, I think we need to respond for a second.
Go ahead.
I've got thoughts as well.
I mean, just the idea that he's going to do a 30s style like coffee ad in the middle of all this thing.
I know!
You know, but by the way, I'm going to do all my shopping on this thing.
I mean, like, what is that about?
Other than they're just almost practically paying you to do it.
It's interesting because Alex Jones has a nice grift going.
Does he need?
I guess everyone's always needing more money.
Is that the idea, Jared?
Well, you forget that he has had a judgment of $1 billion against him.
Yes, I did forget that.
So, okay.
So, right.
He needs money.
So, he doesn't need money.
So, uh, you know, but then they're asking Andrew Tate.
Maybe you want to just break down who Andrew Tate is.
Yeah.
Andrew Tate is a giant piece of shit.
Uh, he's a former MMA fighter who has turned into like one of the biggest manosphere, uh, like, uh, influencers, cult leader, whatever you want to call him.
He of course has been arrested, arrested for human trafficking and, uh, prostitution.
Uh, he, he is a giant piece of shit.
This place.
Again, Elon Musk, Alex Jones, Andrew Tate, Matt Gaetz, Vivek Ramaswamy.
This is a who's who of who you meet in hell.
Like, this could not be a worse gathering of people.
All right, should we continue?
Yeah, this is Andrew Tate, everyone.
Yeah, certainly a friend of mine.
I've known him for a long time.
And I'm extremely happy he's back.
I've celebrated that publicly but Alex nailed it.
Elon is taking the biggest risk here.
It takes unlimited energy to propagate lies.
You have to continually repeat them and you have to continue to try and falsify information and hide the truth to keep lies afloat.
And this simple purchase, you call it simple, the purchase of a simple website has literally cracked the matrix in real time and it becomes extremely difficult now To run the psyops they were previously running and enslave the populace, which is their primary goal.
So Elon is a hero.
Absolutely.
And the risks you are taking, Elon, I don't think many people at home actually understand the gravity of the risks you are taking because your ability to speak freely is heavily leveraged against your insignificance.
You're only allowed to speak if nobody listens to you.
And if you get big and people start listening, they're going to come at you hard.
And I think I'm not completely versed, but Real fast, they could not be kissing Elon Musk's ass anymore, which everybody understands that you have to do.
You have to worship at his altar.
Do you notice, though, Nick, that all of them are starting to bring in the different components of one another in order to form a coherent whole?
And it's a bunch of people who have been cancelled, who are disgusting, who have talked about conspiracy theories, who have been racist and sexist, and basically it's creating a one-stop shop for people who feel that way.
This website that I think where you and I met for the record, and we're like, has changed much lives has basically been turned into a slime universe that is now probably going to be turned into a far extreme right wing media platform.
Exactly.
They're going to, all these guys are going to get their own TV shows, basically their own X shows.
They're all going to be based on with videos.
That's going to be punched out to everybody on their own for you to tab.
And not falsely, what's manipulated the algorithm to push it out more than they should.
And yeah, that's what's going to ultimately probably cause the doom of the platform itself.
It seems like it's teetering on the edge as it is now.
And the only way it stays afloat is that Elon Musk has money from other areas and other income they can just pay people for.
Before you finish this clip, I just want to warn the people who are listening, you might go ahead and schedule a shower very soon.
From what I understand, Elon's already suffering the lawfare tactics, which they're going to do.
They're going to keep pulling out the hat to try and slow him down.
Oh, Andrew, let me interrupt before I forget.
I don't want to give him any attention.
The same law firm that came after me with these PR firms, there is a three-letter agency running this.
Not all of them, but let's just say it starts with a C and it ends with an A. Sorry, go ahead, Andrew.
Yeah, absolutely.
And there's liberal NGOs which will sponsor agents of the Matrix.
They'll sponsor females to end up in a house party and then lie to try and put you in a Romanian jail cell and get you sitting with the cockroaches in a dungeon.
That's right.
What you just watched.
Was Alex Jones going ahead because he's going to be the one who pushes the conspiracy theories that go ahead and get circulated around all these people?
The CIA, Deep State, is coming after Elon Musk.
Anything bad that happens, the CIA is controlling it.
Andrew Tate immediately took that, brought it into his story.
Why did he get arrested?
for for for human trafficking and treating women this way in romania cia it was obviously a deep state push he got too powerful that is going to be the backbone of all of this it is so obvious and also just so disturbing i i i really i've been i've been studying this like for the past couple days and i am just i'm nauseated by it well you're sure that they didn't do that to him - Yeah. - I don't know.
'Cause I do feel like we have heard in the past It seems like a little quaint now, but certainly the CIA doing something to smear somebody or whatever.
I would say this, Nick.
I think Andrew Tate's entire career as a live streamer and personality is basically live streaming his crimes.
You don't need to plan any honeypots.
You don't need to do any of that.
He's done it for himself.
Yeah, and for what it's worth, we talk about Watergate all the time and how that really was, like, deep state, right?
The deep, deep throat Mark felt giving them information, but it was, it was true information, right?
That was the whole point of it.
It wasn't a psy-op where they made shit up.
They just were able to help them along the way a little bit to discover what was the most important thing, which was the truth.
All right, we got, we have to, we have to endure the rest of this?
No, we're done.
That's it.
Pull the plug.
It's too gross.
The entire point, they are constructing a far-right, extreme-right media machine.
Again, that's why Vivek is doing what he's doing in the primary.
Matt Gaetz, it sounds like, is probably going to get on board with this thing if he can offer him anything.
I would not be shocked if this turns into a Fox competitor online here before too long.
Isn't Gates next to be thrown out of Congress?
Man, your lips to God's ears, my friend.
Yeah.
Now, listen, it wouldn't be bad, but, you know, it's all direct.
It took McCarthy getting, him ousting McCarthy to make this happen.
They don't care what the crimes were that he allegedly committed.
It's only when he disrupted the status quo of the Republican Party and threw it into more turmoil, which might actually lead to them losing the control of the House, that, oh, now, now let's really, let's reopen that and look at that again and see if maybe he needs to go.
That's right.
On to our next story.
We had talked about this a little bit on the weekend or on Friday.
Following testimony in front of Congress, three college presidents, Harvard, Penn, and MIT, they came under fire because of an inability to communicate any sort of a stance that made any sense as Elise Stefanik came after them.
We both said, undoubtedly, they were going to be At least one of them was going to be out.
I would like to wish Liz McGill, Penn's former president, best of luck on her future endeavors.
Take care of yourself.
We talked about this a little bit, Nick, in terms of both what it shows about college administrators, their inability to actually be straight shooters or actually leaders.
We also talked about the fact that Stefanik's whole thing is a cudgel and a weapon.
It appears to be working.
And it's a little bit worrisome.
There are already a lot of pushes being put out there in terms of cramping down on speech.
All you have to do is take a look at the major newspapers and media outlets.
They're starting to have conversations about free speech.
It appears that Stefanik and the Republican Party were successful in what they set out to do.
Yeah, and they're, you know, Harvard is next.
If I were MIT's president, I'd be really worried about anything I've ever written at anywhere, ever.
You know, they're scouring through all of these people's writings and work, desperately looking for something they can gin up into some sort of controversy.
Now, the Harvard president Claudia Gay's, gosh darn it, her Dissertation, thank you.
It's interesting because this is a long time ago, right?
This is something she'd done at Harvard.
And you saw, did you have a chance to kind of look and sort of what the original source material is and what she turned it into?
Yeah, I did.
And before we talk about this, so the accusation has now been made that Harvard President Claudine Gay, you know, lifted parts of former works for their dissertation.
That has been spearheaded by Christopher Ruffo.
And I think everybody is aware who Rufo is.
He is a right-wing operative who specializes in information warfare and using sort of things from the left against itself.
You know, plagiarism is a weird thing.
I mean, I taught first-year writing for many, many years.
I cannot tell you how many times I've had to deal with plagiarism.
It is a little bit here.
It's a little bit there.
Sometimes things are just kind of close.
Sometimes things don't get taken you know, taking care of the way that they should.
This thing isn't great.
You know what I mean?
It should have been more careful.
But I think what we actually need to take a look at here is that Rufo and these other jackals are jumping onto this because what have they been doing for years, Nick?
They've been attacking higher education.
They've been trying to transform it.
They've been trying to move it around.
They've been taking it over in places like Florida where Rufo has been put on a board.
This is, for them, a cudgel worth using.
And with Gay here, they smell blood.
And so they're going to go after it.
They want to get another one of these presidents, possibly all three of them, gone.
And why do they want to do it, Nick?
They want to put the scare of God into every university president, into every board member, into every administrator across the country, every professor, if you could possibly do it, and to go ahead and try and use the momentum of this to go ahead and gain a little bit more sway that they've been looking for.
Well, you know, I'm looking at the title of her dissertation.
I'm wondering, do you think that they would have done this against her if the title was something more like, I don't know, how white people have suffered from reverse discrimination for decades?
No, I do not think that this would be happening if this was a fellow traveler on the white grievance train.
No.
Yeah, because the title though is such a it must have been an electric jolt through their entire bodies it through the head out the toes, because the title is race, socio political participation, and black empowerment.
Oh, excuse me, is taking charge colon black electoral success and the redefinition of American policies.
Man, this plays right into everything that Trump has been trying to do to to exhort places like, I don't know, Detroit and Philadelphia and Atlanta.
You know, it's all the same thing.
It must be.
It literally, they must have electrocuted themselves when they saw this.
Well, and, you know, every whether it's Penn or Harvard or any of these Ivy or elite institutions, you need to understand that it's like a game of chess.
Do you like chess?
I don't know if we've ever talked about this.
Do you like playing chess?
You know that line in Blazing Saddles when he goes, I'm your guest, you're my guest and I'm your host and what do you like to do?
And he goes, I don't know.
I like to play chess too.
There are some pieces that I like over others.
I'm never comfortable with rooks.
You know, like bishops are pretty useful for me.
I like the knight.
I really love the queen.
The queen just goes out there and does battle and just goes to town.
These major institutions, these elite institutions, Ivy League institutions, top-tier institutions, these are the queens on the chessboard when it comes to American culture and politics.
Like, they're all, like, everyone wants to believe that they're, like, Marxist, left-leaning groups.
That's not what it is.
You go to one of these institutions to learn how to be one of the powerful political elites, whether it's been politics or in the economy or culture or whatever.
They're always sort of fluctuating, trying to find where politics and culture are.
If you can go ahead and knock off the president of Harvard, Nick, what have we learned from American media?
What happens when a newspaper of record or a network gets called too liberal or too leftist?
Do they respond by saying, how dare you call me a leftist?
What do they do?
They try and prove it.
They try that they're not.
They try and prove that they're not.
And if Gaye gets knocked off here, and Pinn I think will absolutely, they're already lining up to push new things to squash quote unquote leftist ideology.
They are trying really hard to steer this thing away.
Rufo is a genius at this.
He labeled everything that he didn't like, you know, CRT, Critical Race Theory, right?
And the moment that he did that, they could just absolutely use moderates and liberals and sort of move them where they wanted to, and they changed the entire culture of how we talked about things.
This is an incredible operation that they're undertaking.
And quite frankly, they're winning.
And it reminds me a lot, Nick, of what happened during the Red Scare, when the Republican Party used fear of communism and communist infiltration to go after the New Deal coalition.
And what did they do?
Sure, there were some socialists in the government.
Of course there were.
And by the way, there should have been.
The New Deal is one of the crowning achievements in American history.
It's okay that we had socialists in government.
They also went after people of color.
They also went after gay people.
They also went after women.
And they used fear of communism because they knew that it couldn't be argued with.
It was emotional and powerful.
They could use that to their advantage.
They could clear out the New Deal coalition and start their war to roll back the New Deal.
It feels a lot like that's what's happening right now.
And they have picked an issue that I think is really effective for them.
Do you think it would have been that hard for the Penn president just to say, yeah, it is harassment when people call for the genocide of Jews on the campus?
Would it have been that hard for her to just say yes and then move on?
Yes, it would have.
Okay.
Yeah, and I'll tell you why.
Because, first of all, these people, like I said when we taped The Weekender, they're basically speaking for an entire board of lawyers.
That's one thing.
If you go ahead, and, you know, a lot of this is based around the word intifada, right?
Which has a ton of meanings.
Some people argue it's genocidal.
I happen to believe it's not, and it depends on who's using it and how they're using it.
But, like, if you go out and you say that that is, you're going to get sued.
Like, you as a president are damned if you do, damned if you don't.
If you go out and say, yes, if someone says this word, they're going to get sued.
Guess what happens when you go back to Penn Campus?
You're not going to be able to go anywhere without either being sued or being confronted over it.
There was no win here.
They got drug in front of Congress in order, as you correctly pointed out, Nick, to create a perfect Fox News moment.
And guess what happens with Fox News?
Fox News popularizes it.
When it goes quote-unquote viral, it's on CNN, it's on MSNBC, it's in the New York Times, it's in Washington Post.
They created a perfect situation.
And I wouldn't be shocked if someone came down the line and told me that Christopher Rufo and a lot of his associates created this thing from the very beginning.
For sure.
Now, the other thing that's interesting is that the reason why the president of Penn is out is because donors decided to withdraw their money.
And that money, that sounds familiar, right?
Very wealthy people get to decide what another entity does based on the fact that they give money to them.
So I think we can all know what I'm talking about here, where it mimics our political process.
And that's also the bottom line.
And if they were probably, if there were less big donors who didn't have the same views that they do, and wouldn't have, you know, been probably personally connected to this whole thing, i.e.
them being Jewish, then it probably wouldn't have, they may not have pulled out that money.
And maybe she doesn't, and she's surprised, because by the way, they're letting her stay on.
She's still going to keep a job as a law professor, I believe.
Good luck.
Good luck with that.
Yeah.
Good luck with that.
They didn't completely banish her in a walk of shame.
Oh, she got banished.
I'll tell you, as somebody who has known a lot of chairs who have been demoted back to professor, that in and of itself is hard.
Yeah, right.
And so you think maybe she should have just said, you know what, I don't even want that and leave.
I would be shocked if she's at the university within two years.
Okay.
Yeah.
But to your point with the donors, this is important too, because I think it actually, I think it displays something that's really important with this, which is why this is a perfectly designed trap and definitely why it worked and why it's gaining the traction that it has.
You know, on one hand, The donors do not want to be associated giving millions of dollars to an institution that is now being lambasted in public as a place that, you know, puts up with anti-Semitism.
Like, you have this person out front of it who says this thing that, of course, sets off a wildfire.
All of a sudden, it starts, like, it reflects on you.
You know what I mean?
Like all of a sudden you are a part of an institution that is fine with anti-Semitism instead of actually having a conversation about what is actually happening and how these conversations take place, which is what we should do.
And I want to make this very clear.
This is not the first time that the Right has pretended to care about anti-Semitism in order to score political wins.
Like, that is exactly what happened in Great Britain with Jeremy Corbyn.
He could not be reached for comment about how, like, what happens when anti-Semitism becomes a weapon of the Right.
They don't care about this shit.
They love using it.
They love standing behind it.
Meanwhile, they're supported by crypto Nazis the entire time.
Right.
Talking about great replacement theory, which is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.
But they know that those donors don't want to be associated with it.
And that's what is happening with everything from The New York Times, Washington Post, these other liberal bastions.
Like they have spent years, Nick.
And this is important.
They have spent years in a culture war environment, which we started talking about in the first segment of the show, where if you didn't have the correct opinion, it could mean everything.
You know what I mean?
Like, it could mean the end of your career.
It could mean the end of your livelihood.
And that was because of not just culture wars, but because there was a natural Reaction to Donald Trump and so all of a sudden now It's like Christopher Rufo and these other people like they've created these perfect traps, which is oh, you're you're for CRT You're for institutional racism and people.
Oh, no.
No, no.
No.
Oh god.
I'm not I'm not for that Oh, you're for anti-semitism.
Oh, I didn't really oh, no.
No, I'm not for that what ends up happening is that they have a Nick, it's almost like whenever everybody in the world had atomic bombs, and then they started coming up with hydrogen bombs, and then they started coming up with ICBMs.
Like, they are the innovators of this type of culture war space.
And again, they're racking up the wins.
They know exactly what they're doing.
Interestingly enough, it's like when those institutions will shift to prove that they're not these bashings of liberalness or whatever they want to prove, they're not proving it to anybody on the left because that doesn't really spark the kind of controversy.
The left or the progressives will probably say, we get it.
We understand the nuances here.
There's a lot of stuff, moving parts that we understand, yadda yadda.
They're only trying to prove it to the right.
I want to add one more reason why it's that way because you're exactly right.
the whole time.
So that's the other reason why this is completely tilted in a way that's not fair, it's not the right word, it's not balanced, and it's ridiculous.
I want to add one more reason why it's that way, because you're exactly right.
Like they have no interest whatsoever in proving anything to progressives or what actually exists of the left.
The other thing is that a lot of the people that you're talking about, whether they're at institutions like Harvard or Penn, or, you know, again, they're at media institutions like the New York Times and the Washington Post, they're often actually politically aligned with more with the right than they are the left.
And so as a result, like, you know, they don't really want to change things.
This is why we get one article after another about trans people, you know.
And Nick, how many years now have we been hearing about wokeness on the campuses being out of control?
Six spaces, Jared.
It never stops!
So yeah, it's on one hand, you're right.
They need to prove it to the right.
But on the other hand, they also are more ideologically aligned with the right.
They're in denial about the fact that they're aligned with the right, and it makes them uncomfortable.
They would much rather say the right thing.
They would much rather seem like they're on the right side of the moral line.
But they are very much aligned with the right, which is why it's why societies like America do go fascist.
It's because a lot of the people in the middle and a lot of liberals are going to go along with that stuff if push comes to shove.
And we know that, like, you know, the general, let's see, direction of our country has been sometimes, well, I want to say the general inexorably would be to get more and more progressive over time.
We've kind of seen that.
We've seen civil rights movement.
We've seen gay rights movement.
We've seen things that are happening, which makes people who don't want those things even more desperate to stop them.
And this is exactly why we see the attacks on school boards at the younger ages to try and do that.
And then it's a natural extension to get into the colleges as well.
In fact, it probably started with the colleges.
What do you think?
Do you think it started with the colleges and safe spaces and all that?
And then it went down to the, oh, we can really get them when they're younger.
don't say gay bill all those different things and let's attack all the the boards or was it did it originally start way back in the day is it like even trying to teach creationism you know to the elementary school i can't even what's the historical context of this well so it started with desegregation in public schools yeah that was the main problem right like Like, as long as you had an apartheid state in the United States, you could still maintain a hegemony, you know what I mean?
You could still have, like, a money class that wasn't going to be, uh, that troubled, right?
Because you had, like, an entire South which was, um, sort of solidified behind that, and the white supremacist movement was there with it.
So you have desegregation.
All of a sudden the wealthy are like, Shit, how are we going to get around this?
They're going to go, they're going to start doing a bunch of academies, private schools that the federal government can't do anything about.
This is part of the reason why the evangelical right rose to prominence in the first place, is because they needed to create this alternate system of segregation.
But also they realized, oh wow, you know what happened?
And this is really strange to talk about, Nick, but You desegregate.
You start telling everybody as they go to school, everyone's created equal.
Everyone deserves to be treated with respect.
All of a sudden, within a generation, people are going to college and marching in the streets for civil rights and marching in the street to protest wars.
Like, they're right.
That does change shit.
And for the record, civil rights, one of the only reasons it was successful, besides the hard-fought battles that these people put out there, they made white liberals have to own the system that kept them on top.
Like, going back to what we're talking about, people had to look at each other at cocktail parties, over dinner parties, and say, like, do you stand by this?
Like, do you think that Black people should be beaten in Selma?
Like, is that something that you're okay with sitting there watching that?
Like, TV played a huge role in that.
And so it actually made the liberal, the moderate white liberal, have to change who they were.
Then all of a sudden, in the 60s and 70s, you start having a generation that is like, hey, things need to change and that old shit is stupid.
The same people we're talking about, Nick, the same people who have created the problem we're dealing with now, they pooled their money and they went after science, they went after experts, they went after education.
And what are they doing now?
They're trying to bring it down.
They're trying to go ahead and make sure what you just said, they're trying to make sure that they can try and push all this down so they can go back to what it used to be, which is a measure of ideological control from cradle to grave, basically, is what they're interested in.
Yeah.
You said it perfectly.
I don't think I can add to that.
Well, that's going to bring us to the end of this episode, everybody.
We had other things to talk about, but I actually enjoyed what we talked about today.
That was a good time.
Well, I mean, not good time.
It's never a good time, Nick.
Man, the notes I have that we could talk about, too, we'll have to save.
Well, we'll save.
I'm sure we'll get to this on a future episode.
That being said, a reminder, go over to patreon.com slash Mike Craig Podcast to support the show.
Keep us ad-free.
The last thing I want to do, Nick, and I don't know how you feel, I don't want to break into the middle of it and be like, you know, that reminds me, when I get stressed out, I break out a pack of Winston-Salems.
Well, you know, I would be a hypocrite if I didn't tell you that it's not something I do all the time.
Yeah, but that's an okay thing.
You're in a different space.
We don't need to be doing that.
Fair enough, fair enough.
Alright, so let's keep it that way.
Let's keep it that way.
Go over to patreon.com slash mccraigpodcast.
Real quick programming note, everybody.
We are going to be doing a big year-end mailbag answer show.
We're going to be sending out a call for questions.
Please send in your questions.
We need them in order to do this big episode, and we're really looking forward to hearing what you're asking about.
We do have, of course, the voicemail.
We will send out the link to that.
Also, muckrakepodcast at gmail.com is where you can email those.
We will send out all that information here soon.
In the meantime, everybody, you can find Nick at CanYouHearMeSMH.
