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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss how Texas governor Greg Abbott is defying the Supreme Court's ruling by rolling out more barriers to keep migrants from entering the country, while also making it inhuman and unsafe. Next up, a robo-call using a fake Joe Biden voice went around New Hampshire, previewing the nightmare of what AI has to bring for all public figures. And they finish on a spicy conspiracy Fox News is spreading about the CIA and Taylor Swift.
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Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the McCrae Podcast Weekender Edition.
I'm Jerry J. Sexton.
I'm here with my good friend and co-host Nick Hausman.
Nick, how are we doing?
Are we glad this week's over?
I guess so, but I don't even feel like the week is over.
I guess it's over because we're talking on a Friday, but what is time?
Can we be frank?
Time has been speeding like a demon, but this January has drug on, unlike any month I've seen in a very long time.
That's interesting.
Is that felt like that to you?
I don't know if it feels like that, but yeah, I guess I keep looking at the thing and it's still like the 25th and not like the 31st or whatever.
We still have like three weeks of January left and we've been doing it for a month and a half.
Well, that's okay.
It's okay with me.
I don't mind if time goes a little bit slower these days.
I don't know about all that, but welcome to the Weekender Edition.
We have a whole host of things to talk about.
Nick, we've got CIA psyops with Taylor Swift.
We've got robocall deepfakes.
We gotta talk about Jon Stewart rejoining the Daily Show.
And Nick, something's a-brewin' down in the Lone Star State of Texas.
This week, Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, was informed that the Supreme Court, by a 5-4 ruling, had ruled against the state on their border fences, including razor wire at the Rio Grande and Eagle Pass.
They had ruled in favor of the federal government, which we'll talk about in a little bit, what that means, what it doesn't mean.
And Greg Abbott proceeded to throw himself a little bit of a hissy fit and announced that he wasn't going to recognize the ruling of the court, Nick, which the last time I checked, you're not allowed to do that.
That is supposed to be true, but when we're dealing with a state like Texas that has a history, I suppose, of independence, shall we say, it's not so surprising.
I did want to look up the Constitution to figure out exactly what he's trying to invoke that he thinks allows him to just bypass the Supreme Court, and it's novel.
I'll give him that.
Well, let me read the statement here.
This was Abbott's statement on why he is defying the ruling of the Supreme Court last time I checked, although stolen and corrupted is still the highest court in the land.
Governor Greg Abbott today issued a statement on Texas's constitutional right to defend and protect itself as President Joe Biden continues to attack Texas and refuse to perform his duties to secure the border.
That's an eye-catching opening.
Quote, The executive branch of the United States has a constitutional duty to enforce federal laws protecting states, including immigration laws.
On the books right now reads the statement, President Biden has instructed his agencies to ignore federal statutes that mandate the detention of illegal immigrants.
The failure of the Biden administration to fulfill the duties imposed by Article 4 has triggered Article 1, Clause 3, which reserves to the state the right of self-defense.
For these reasons, I've already declared an invasion under Article 1, Clause 3 to invoke Texas's constitutional authority to defend and protect itself.
That authority is the supreme law of the land and supersedes any federal statutes to the contrary.
Novel strategy!
We'll see if this works out for him.
Yeah, it's also invoking an invasion by the Mexican drug cartels, which is another one of those interesting things.
If he wanted to try and go, I think, to court to prove that, he would have a really hard time proving that, I think.
Well, I mean, it is the dogma of the Republican Party.
We've seen in every debate that we are basically told that we're at war with Mexico.
And if we're not at war with Mexico, we should be at war with Mexico.
Right.
And here's the dumb thing.
The policy is the policy.
The law is the law.
It's been that way under Trump and under every other Republican president as well as Democrats.
The one thing that you could say Trump did was remain in Mexico, that they had to repeal, which was extremely inhumane.
But, you know, this is disgusting.
And what's worse is that it's sort of rooted in this notion.
We had, you know, three immigrants who died, who drowned in the Rio Grande because the Border Patrol could not get to them to save them because the Texas authorities were blocking them and had the razor wire up.
So they would not could not get over to the other side to where the water was to save them.
Even worse.
And then there's this reporting about how there's apparently some Texas military Militia, I guess that Texas has, they claim that they had gone up and down and looked because someone had mentioned to them that there might be people struggling and they claim that they didn't see anybody, but here we are.
There were dead bodies.
So it's just disgusting is really what it is.
And it's no, and the fact that the Republicans won't even, you know, negotiate legislation to try and fix the situation is just, it makes it all the worse.
Well, before we get into the historical context and the present-day circumstances, because the last I checked, multiple Republican states have already signed on to support Texas in this fight, which says a lot about where we're at, I want to set the table for everybody, because we can throw out a lot of words.
Greg Abbott, federal government, Supreme Court, all of that.
Let's make this very clear.
What is going on at the border is an intentional crisis, quote-unquote.
Quotes around it.
A lot of very wealthy and powerful people want the border to more or less be open and for people to come into the states in order to be completely exploited for cheap Labor, right?
That is how it has always been.
Add on top of that the fact that the Republican Party, it always touts itself as the party of safe borders.
Nick, they're even on record saying out loud in so many words that they want this to continue even right now as a means of winning in November.
This is part of their election strategy going into the presidential election.
Let's also go ahead and point out the falsehoods in this.
Joe Biden, like every president in recent history, has a cruel immigration policy that goes after any migrants or immigrants that are coming over the border, subjects them to incredible cruelties and awful treatment.
It just so happens that it's not exactly the same thing that Trump enabled due to the evil imagination of Stephen Miller.
But also that what we're dealing with is a very, like, regular thing.
The states are always fighting with the federal government.
They're always suing the federal government.
The government is always suing the states.
They're going back and forth trying to figure out who has power to do this, who has power to do that.
That happens all the time.
That this is happening right now, Nick, is a signal that something is wrong in the system.
Not just the fact that, like, Abbott is, like, you know, kicking up a bunch of dust, but the fact that a state is saying, I'm not going to recognize federal authority and nothing is going to happen here, particularly a high-profile powerful state like Texas, that sends a message.
And we've seen this happen before, Nick, particularly back in 1832 and 1833.
And I don't need to tell people what happened roughly 20 years after the nullification crisis of that era.
On top of that, we saw another instance of this in 1963, when George Wallace of Alabama stood up against the JFK administration and said, I'm not moving out of this schoolhouse door.
You're going to have to bring in national troops in order to desegregate.
That also led to a larger cultural crisis and battle and changed a lot of American history.
When this stuff happens, it is a clear signifier that something is changing and something is going wrong.
Right, although I wanted to say this isn't new and it has happened and so this is some weird thing because the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education had weighed in on it as well.
That was sort of what the impetus was to have integration down in Alabama and that's why they had to ultimately have the National Guard integrate the schools.
This is obviously a little bit different and probably can get a little bit more traction amongst certain people in this country because they'll say, well, these are not citizens of the United States, so we don't give a shit about them.
It's basically what I think the argument is.
And unfortunately, it's an intoxicating one for a lot of people.
It's going to make so many headlines, and that's a really, really important thing, is that it is going to get, I mean, Greg Abbott, I can't even imagine how many interview hits he had on every single conservative talk radio show.
We've talked a lot about how our politics is driven by people recognizing things that can raise their stature, that can give them more popularity, that can lead to more fundraising.
This is the quickest way to do it.
To go ahead and cause a showdown with Joe Biden.
And by the way, it's not even Joe Biden.
It's just the federal government.
It really wouldn't matter who was even in charge of the federal government, more or less.
You know, this is going to go ahead and give him traction.
It's going to give all of the Republican governors traction.
And I gotta tell you, before the Civil War, before we got into not just the nullification crisis, but also what ended up happening in the Civil War, it was the same sort of a cycle.
Which is people recognize that there was a frustration with federal power and federal authorities and how things were happening.
They were going to score a bunch of political points also in the media.
This was around the beginning of, you know, where magazines were being spread around and newspapers were being spread around.
They recognized that it was in their interest to go ahead and push these things, and it turns into that cycle that you and I are talking about a lot recently.
And when you look at this, Greg Abbott, all these other Republican governors, like, they are escalating the situation.
And the United States is only as good as its bond.
We've seen that before.
We've seen what happens whenever states decide that they don't want to abide by the rules of the Union.
I'm not sitting here telling you this is the beginning of a civil war, but I'm saying that this is one of those things that we should probably do well to pay attention to, and I think we'll remember for a while.
Well, let me ask you this.
Before the Civil War started and we had these kind of pushback on federal mandates and stuff, was it rooted in politics of the day?
Was it because, you know, Greg Abbott wouldn't be doing this if Trump was in the White House, because Trump probably wouldn't then be, you know, trying to, you know, do what they're doing at the border.
So it wasn't.
Did it go along those lines as well?
There's a really interesting, and I'm glad you asked that question, there's a really interesting correlation here.
The South started pushing back, especially against federal mandates and federal ideas and power, the moment that they realized that they weren't going to be politically viable anymore.
Because the way that the founders set everything up, they made a deal with the South, basically handed the presidency to the South in control over the federal government, and then as America expanded outwards and all of a sudden you started getting a whole lot more free states, it became very obvious very quickly that the South wasn't going to hold all of its political power anymore.
What the Republican Party is raging against is that, we've talked about it, they're historically unpopular.
They can only win because of the electoral college and the minoritarian institutions of our government.
They are looking around demographically, politically, culturally, and they're recognizing that they aren't going to have this control much longer.
Like, even if Donald Trump wins the presidency, that doesn't mean that more fair elections would yield the same results.
In fact, that's one of the reasons why they're itching for a dictator right now.
Right.
So, of course, this is what desperation looks like, and this is why the Democrats are going to force them to do this, right?
That's how they get to that mindset so quickly.
It's your fault that we have to be so draconian and why we have to push these through because you guys are just so evil as it is on the Democrat side.
It is.
And here's the thing, Nick.
Whenever we talk about these things, it's important we talk also about why they're happening and particularly the way that they're happening.
I want to talk to people about the emotional impact of this.
This is a perfect issue for Greg Abbott and the Republicans to push back against.
Okay?
Like, no, we shouldn't have razor wire there.
We shouldn't be killing people at the border.
That's a problem.
We should not be doing that.
I need to let everyone know politically.
That's true.
Emotionally, for Republican voters, this is a perfect symbolic situation.
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