Weekender PREVIEW: The Lay of the Land and Listener Questions
Nick Hauselman is still globe-hopping, leaving Jared Yates Sexton to keep the show going. He gets into Nikki Haley's answer about the causes of the Civil War, the state of the GOP Primary, and the worsening media landscape. Then? A whole slew of great listener questions.
This is a preview of The Weekender episode. To listen to the whole show, and support The Muckrake Podcast, head over to Patreon and subscribe.
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Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast, the Weekender Edition.
I'm Jared Yates Sexton.
Our friend Nick Hausman, he's still out of the country.
He'll be back next week.
We should be ready to do our two-man regular pod, starting with Tuesday's episode.
A couple things to get on your schedule before we get into our regularly scheduled program.
First of all, next week, Wednesday, January 10th, they're going to debate again.
That's right, the GOP is going to hold their last, absolute last debate before the caucuses in Iowa.
That is on the 10th, and you better believe it, that we're going to host exclusive post-debate coverage.
We will talk about what has happened, has anything changed, has anything moved, what it looks like going into Iowa.
And, that's right, if you listened on Tuesday with my conversation with Sarah Kinzier, and by the way, as an old professor...
Mandatory listening.
Mandatory homework.
You have to go and listen to that conversation I had with Sarah Kinsey on Tuesday.
But if you listened, you know, I'm going to Iowa again.
That's right.
Back in 2020, I went to Iowa to cover the caucuses.
I was there when Joe Biden was on the ropes and it seemed like he might end up dropping out and be replaced by John Kerry.
What a weird time.
I also got COVID before we knew what COVID was and thought I was going to die in a Des Moines hotel room.
Weird stuff.
Well, I'm going back.
I'm going back to Iowa starting on, I believe, the 13th, and I'll be there for a couple of days and through the caucuses to provide the Muckrake audience an exclusive on-the-ground look of what's going on in Iowa.
If you have been around for a while, if you've listened to this show for the past few years, you know that I'm going to offer you absolutely one-of-a-kind coverage.
If you want to get a hold of all of that, if you want to listen to the rest of this weekender, and I'm going to get to a bunch of listener questions and they're fantastic, you need to go over to patreon.com slash mccraigpodcast.
Supports the show, keeps us ad-free, keeps us editorially independent, which we will talk about later because things are getting rough out there.
Go on over to patreon.com slash mccraigpodcast.
Also, a weird thing that's happened over the past couple of days.
I think it's a combination of, I don't know, the fact that a lot of things are coming to bear that I've been warning about for a while, mixed with a couple of media appearances I've done recently.
The Midnight Kingdom.
A history of power, paranoia, and the coming crisis.
It's selling like hotcakes, people.
That's right, my book The Midnight Kingdom is doing pretty well right now.
And as a result, a lot of bookstores, online retailers, they've been dropping the price to try and sell more copies.
So if you haven't gotten a copy of The Midnight Kingdom, Go head over to whatever your favorite retailer is, your independent bookshop.
If you have to go to Amazon, I guess go to Amazon.
I think there are even discounted audiobook versions out there if you want to hang out with me for about 11 hours and hear about the history of the modern world and why things are happening the way they are.
But yeah, it's a good time to pick up The Midnight Kingdom.
So yeah, go do all of that.
Also, just to go ahead and hawk one more thing, my sub stack, Dispatches from a Collapsing State, I have a series over there called The Stakes, where I'm breaking down the 2024 election and what's going on in the country right now to get you ready for what is bound to be one of the most chaotic election years of our lives.
All right, everybody.
So that is going to bring us to our first segment.
We took a little bit of time off for the holidays in order to get our heads right and, you know, spend some time healing up and preparing for the election.
But there was a story that took place over the holidays that, listen, I wasn't going to let the Muckrake podcast not cover this.
It hits All of the right notes for us.
It is a Republican politician saying white supremacist coded things and trying to appeal to an extremist audience.
It has the bastardization of history.
It's got everything.
That's right.
So last week, Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina and current second place runner in the GOP primary, went to Berlin, New Hampshire.
And I'm about to play you a clip from a question that was asked of her in Berlin.
This person asked Haley to tell them what caused the American Civil War.
You can't really hear what this guy is saying, but eventually, at some point, he says, this is astonishing.
And then Haley takes it from there.
of the United States Civil War.
Well, don't come with an easy question or anything.
I mean, I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run.
The freedoms and what people could and couldn't do.
What do you think the cause of the Civil War was?
I'm sorry?
I'm not ready for president.
I want to see your view of the cause and safety.
I mean, I think it always comes down to the role of government.
We need to have capitalism.
We need to have economic freedom.
We need to make sure that we do all things so that individuals have the liberties, so that they can have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to do or be anything they want to be without government getting in the way.
Thank you.
And in the year 2023, if it's the strongest you may be, if you answer that question without mentioning the word slavery.
What do you want me to say about slavery?
No problem.
You guys have a question.
Next question.
A truly remarkable performance there by Nikki Haley.
You can hear right in the beginning, if you want to go back and listen to the clip, it wouldn't be the worst thing.
She hears this question, what were the causes of the American Civil War?
And at first, her voice kind of stumbles over it because, as a politician, Within the Republican Party, she's doing the mental math.
She knows that the Civil War was largely due in part to slavery.
The largest part of all of it, the economic freedom that she's speaking of, I love the idea that government shouldn't get involved in what people do.
That has like so many connotations to it in this conversation.
She knows not to talk about slavery.
She knows the best thing she can do is to filibuster, which is something that strategists teach politicians.
If you don't like the question and you don't want to answer it, you talk around it.
You turn it into something that you do want to answer.
It's a revealing moment.
Haley here knows That the Republican Party is built on white supremacy and the denial of white supremacy.
Meaning she needs to appeal to a Republican voter base that is white supremacist and also wants to deny that white supremacy exists.
She knows that there are absolutely no points or support to be had if she talks about the rights of people of color.
That calculation gives the game away in a way that hardly anything else does.
She's...
She knows full and well what caused the Civil War.
Everybody knows what caused the Civil War except for people who are in extreme denial.
The Republican Party and the think tanks and the institutes that support them, they concocted the idea of states' rights.
That was what Ronald Reagan presented, which allowed the Republican Party to enjoy a certain amount of plausible deniability, you know, when they were talking about quote-unquote colorblind society.
But she knows where her bread is buttered.
She knows exactly what she isn't supposed to say.
This is who the Republican Party is.
And Nikki Haley knows it full and well.
What is also telling in this as Nikki Haley catches up to Donald Trump in the polls and she's still pretty far behind in New Hampshire she's making strides depending upon what polls and what numbers you're looking at.
But she is starting to challenge Donald Trump and she is starting to become the dominant second place candidate as Ron DeSantis is not long for this world.
But you'll notice she's not comfortable with it.
She really dislikes having to play this game.
If Donald Trump were asked this question, and God forbid if he were to ever, you know, really take questions from an audience, there would be no hesitation.
He would say what he believes.
He would go ahead and spread the white supremacist propaganda.
He would make sure to go ahead and, you know, toe that party line and say the things the supporters would appreciate and also change history.
Before we get to what Nikki Haley said after this became a controversy, and by the way, what a time to do it during the holiday quiet time.
This became the major story for a couple of days for good reason, by the way.
But let's talk about the history very quickly.
What caused the Civil War?
Let's make sure we're all on the same page.
What caused the Civil War was that the expansion of the United States started to threaten the political stranglehold of the slave-owning states.
The slave-owning states had a stranglehold over American politics because The Constitutional Convention, which didn't have authority to be a constitutional convention in the first place, gave it to them because they wanted to bring along the slave states and they gave them all of the power that they could possibly want.
Then, as the country started to grow and as industrialization started to take over, they saw the writing on the wall that their society was not long for this world if they stayed within the United States.
And what was the bedrock of that society?
That's correct, everybody.
Slavery.
The total exploitation of people of color.
That's it.
That's what the Civil War was about.
Did it clear the way for economic expansion and full industrialism as capitalism?
Yes, absolutely.
And weirdly enough, Nikki Haley kind of touches on that, but you can tell she short circuits as she's trying to give it to her audience.
But slavery is right in the middle of that because it was the expression of the Southern culture that was at the heart of the conflict.
So Nikki Haley has to come out within the next couple of days and respond to what has happened.
And yeah, she does great.
A+.
No suggestions.
...was about slavery.
We know that.
That's the easy part of it.
What I was saying was, what does it mean to us today?
What it means to us today is about freedom.
That's what that was all about.
It was about individual freedom.
It was about economic freedom.
It was about individual rights.
Our goal is to make sure, no, we never go back to the stain of slavery, but what's the lesson in all of that?
Yes.
What is the lesson of all of that?
An incredible amount of bullshit here.
Economic freedom.
That's what the Civil War was about.
So it was the South's economic freedom?
The North's economic freedom?
Black people's economic freedom?
Just incredible bullshit.
Politically, do you think for a second that Donald Trump would even care to walk any of this back?
Not at all.
And what this again shows is the divide within the Republican Party that I talk about all the time.
There's one part that is absolutely fine with rolling around in the muck and the shit.
The Trumps.
The Gates.
The Taylor Greens.
The ones who have absolutely no problem saying the worst things imaginable.
About vulnerable people, about society, about democracy in general.
These people who are more than happy to do constant damage and never once apologize for it.
And then there are others that they'll do it.
They'll pinch their nose and they'll engage in the ugliness.
But they don't feel good doing it.
Or rather, maybe they do enjoy it, but they at least have A moment of hesitation.
And that is the difference between Donald Trump, MAGA Republicans, and the rest of them.
That is why he's not only leading in the primary, but why the Republican Party cannot reform itself.
As long as there is that divide, and as long as the base wants Trump and the rest of these mongrel Republicans who not only say the awful thing, but they will never apologize for it, there's no going back.
On the subject of Trump, by the way, in case you hadn't seen it, it came out today from a Democratic investigation that, as president, he was paid millions upon millions of dollars by foreign governments using his properties.
Which, from where I'm from, is... what's the word?
Oh my god.
Oh, what is it?
It's where people... bribery.
It's bribery.
China, Saudi Arabia, multiple other governments gave Trump over $7 million, close to $8 million, and probably more, except for that these investigations were shut down by Republicans because they didn't want to talk about this obvious corruption while they're trying to go after Joe Biden and Hunter Biden.
Just didn't want to do it.
Meanwhile, our predictions continue to come true about the state of politics and the volatile environment we're living in.
Multiple state houses in the past week have received valid threats, including bomb threats, threats of attacks and shootings.
In Colorado, where Trump was recently removed from the ballot, a man broke in, grabbed a gun, and fired off a few shots.
People are a little unclear about whether or not this had anything to do with Donald Trump or not, but man, this is not a healthy country.
