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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman can't believe that the government appeared to function for a minute... to ban TikTok in the United States. Of course it's to benefit corporate America who would be more than happy to swoop in and be the buyers in a forced sale. They move on the shit show at Boeing, a company in charge of our safety who intentionally cut corners and deals with the government so they wouldn't be criminally charged. And they finish off discussing RFK Jr.'s potential VP pick.
EXCITING NEWS: Jared and Nick will be recording the podcast LIVE in VEGAS as part of Pete Dominick's Stand Up PodJam that takes place March 22-23 in Henderson, Nevada. Click HERE for info and tickets: https://events.humanitix.com/stand-up-podjam
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Welcome to the Weekender Edition of the McCray Podcast.
Hey, we got TikToks today, Nick.
We got planes coming out of the sky.
We've got Social Security under attack.
We've got RFK Jr.
choosing between a professional wrestler and a quarterback who gets high on frog poison.
What a show!
Yeah, the frog poison I think I missed, but yeah, awesome.
Wait, you don't know about that?
You know, I remember him going on that whatever podcast, you know, talking about alternative ways of treating COVID.
I guess I'm blanking about... No, the frog poison's not about treating COVID, it's about treating your mind, man!
It's about expanding your horizons, blowing down the doors of perception.
You know what I really think it is?
I think to them it's like First Amendment.
It's a whole rigmarole, everybody.
Welcome to The Weekender.
Before we get to all of these, this is a weird episode, and I'm excited about it.
I think sometimes The Weekender brings out the weird, and I'm all for it.
Quick reminder, next week, for those who are interested, we're going to be in Henderson, Nevada, for the Stand Up Podjam, Friday, March 22nd.
I'm going to be doing a bourbon talk, if you want details on that.
Reach out to me, jysaxson at gmail.com, or muckrakepodcast at gmail.com, whatever you prefer, I don't know.
And then on Saturday, March 23rd, Nick and I are going to be recording a live edition of the Muckrake Podcast.
I'm excited!
We haven't done this.
No, I mean, we had one live together at some point, but then, yeah, this will be fun.
Yeah, we had an audience Q&A thing.
At a bookstore?
Wait, did we have another one?
Oh, in which I was there, we were sharing a room!
- Well, I'm just thinking the one where you were here.
- Oh, in which I was there, we were sharing a room.
- Yes.
- That was a good feeling.
- But now, yeah, no, for sure it's gonna be a lot more fun and a lot more, I guess, interactive as well.
And it's the energy.
I'm looking forward to it.
- Yeah, so anybody who is going down there, I'm looking forward to seeing you, hanging out, getting to know you a little bit.
I think Nick and I have both wanted to meet our audience and get to know people.
That is in Henderson, Nevada next week.
If you're on the fence, come out, hang out.
Meanwhile, to gain access to the rest of this show, as well as exclusive shows, including what we're going to tape in Henderson, Nevada, the first live episode of the Montclair Podcast, Go over to patreon.com slash muckrake podcast.
Nick, we gotta start.
Big news!
The House of Representatives by a vote of 352 to 65.
It's what they call bipartisanship, folks.
They have voted to threaten to ban TikTok unless it is divested from Chinese ownership within the United States.
The Senate is currently deliberating this.
They're slowing the process down.
President Joe Biden has said that he would sign it.
I have a lot of thoughts about this.
None of them are great.
First of all, how do you feel about the TikTok?
I feel like we're not the target demographic for this, even though I'm considering getting on the TikTok in order to help educate folks.
I mean, I've seen it be like when parents talk about kids being on the screens, you know, too much.
Sure.
I would say that an overwhelming majority is referencing TikTok.
That is what keeps the kids on this platform.
So Um, I don't, I honestly, I don't know if, obviously what they're trying to say is that China can have access to your data.
And when they don't want that to happen, and that's their big crusade, right?
I'd almost say the bigger crusade is figure out how to get the kids off of the damn TikTok to begin with, which would be an interesting thing because they've mastered the algorithm to continually feed you.
You don't want to leave.
You do not want to turn it off.
It is.
Is that like a Chinese thing or is that a tech thing?
Ooh, that's an interesting question.
And here's the reason why.
First of all, there's a Chinese company, ByteDance, that runs TikTok.
This is a social media platform that's used by over 140 million U.S.
users.
So here's the question, Nick.
Are you ready?
You ready for a couple of questions?
Yeah.
Are we at war with China?
Uh, you know, not that I've noticed recently.
Has China done something in particular in order to spy on our information that has led to this?
Oh, yeah, probably.
Yeah, but have they done anything that any tech company in the United States of America hasn't already done many times over?
Well, that's another interesting question as well.
These are all interesting questions.
So why is it that the United States government, supposedly the bastion of free enterprise and capitalism, let the market decide?
Why have they decided to single out one company in order to go after them because they operate in another country, which a lot of these websites do, but we've chosen this one.
Also, by the way, Nick, I love that they've been given six months, if this passes, to divest or to sell to a United States company.
By the way, former Treasury Secretary under Donald Trump, Steve Mnuchin, is already lined up with people in order to take this over.
We'll talk more about that in a second.
Doesn't this seem strange that our government can't pass anything, they can't agree on anything, they can't do anything to help the normal American, but they can sure as hell get together and overwhelmingly pass a bill to take a corporation out of another country's hands and sell it to an American conglomerate?
Isn't that bizarre?
That's the last thing you said there.
I don't know if you want to wait any longer, because that's the point I wanted to make about all of this, is that this is a way to get some Americans rich, right?
Because they recognize it might not be the most engagement of any platform.
Instagram might be the highest engagement in terms of that, but there's no question that they've solved some algorithm things that keep you addicted to this app.
Obviously, people want this.
Obviously, within six months, somebody can put together a package and buy this and, you know, and be able to monetize in a very significant way.
So it definitely just feels like they're just trying to, you know, give some of their donors a bone, you know, like minutiae of all people to make more money.
Well, there's, by the way, there's a lot, what both sides are agreeing on, and we've covered parts of this, but I'm going to go ahead and make it explicit, Nick.
You know who Democrats and Republicans can agree upon?
The young ones.
They don't like them.
They don't like what they believe.
They don't like that they're independent.
They don't like that they criticize what's going on.
And by the way, what do they blame?
TikTok.
The exact same way that in the 20th century we blamed such blameable things as jazz.
Baseball, right?
Like The Beatles and Elvis.
This is the same type of thing.
If they didn't have that, Nick, they would just be perfectly in line with the ideas.
The Democrats don't like it.
In part because they believe that TikTok is being used to make their ideas unpopular and, by the way, to foment criticism of Israel.
Which, by the way, I'll just go ahead and throw out there, Israel's doing a bang-up job of fomenting that criticism themselves.
The Republicans don't want it because they believe that it's spreading social contagion.
Right?
Whether it's DEI or awareness of gay and trans people or real history and all those things.
So both parties want to bring this under heel.
I want to point out, we would look up, Nick, if this passes, and let's say that Steve Mnuchin or some other wealthy conglomerate gets a hold of this, we would have two of the most powerful social media companies that would be controlled by far-right leaders.
And as a result, the stream of information would be controlled.
And all I can say is it seems like the Democrats would be more than fine with that.
And it almost seems like some of the Democrats who are currently in power are more than fine with a conservative reactionary situation.
I don't know what else you can sort of draw from this.
Like, this type of control, this type of interference, it tells me that, like, all of them just kind of want to steal this, make money for donors, like you were saying, and also go ahead and change the way people are getting information.
Sure, for sure.
But the political ramifications that you mentioned a little bit ago was that the Democrats are going to get blamed for this if the young people who are- Absolutely they are!
You know, that's who they need, right?
So they've already gotten, you know, they're going to lose votes because of Israel and support of Israel.
They're going to lose votes now if they end up banning TikTok.
Yes.
You know, and so it doesn't make a lot of sense why the Democrats would be have any interest in doing this.
And it also makes sense why the Republicans want to do this.
Now, they could they could cry security and protection of our of our data, of which, like you said, how many American companies screw up our data?
Every one of them.
Yeah.
Every one of them.
It's completely compromised as it is anyway.
That can't be the one, the big reason.
So you have to imagine that what the Republicans are doing is trying to find, again, this is a desperate party that knows they can't win on the issues.
So they're trying to find cudgels that they could use that will hurt the Democrats.
Here's one and the Democrats are sort of walking right into it.
Here's the thing.
There are over 140 million users on TikTok.
It is the social media platform that is by far, outside of YouTube, is preferred by younger people in this country.
I don't know exactly what the Democratic Party is thinking when they look at this thing, but that being said, one of the few things that both parties can agree on is that China is a capital E evil superpower and has to be attacked.
That's one of the only things that these two parties can agree on outside of like maintaining a lot of the status quo.
But you look at this thing and like if they actually take this away from American users, and by the way if Steve Mnuchin or another person does this, they're absolutely going to mess around with it and people are going to be pissed off that the TikTok that they grew to love is going to go away.
So Nick, they are going to deal with the consequences of this.
There is a liberal brain worm at work here, Nick, and we've seen it for years now, if you can pay attention.
It's like with the economy.
Right?
The economy is great.
Why can't people accept that the economy?
They just must not understand it.
There's this idea in the liberal world that if people were just smart enough to understand what was going on, they wouldn't cause a problem.
They wouldn't be against it.
They would all be getting on board.
And as a result, they think it's some sort of misunderstanding among the populace as opposed to a communication problem or a mis-prioritization.
Right, of what should be done and what should happen with the agenda.
This is disastrous.
And actually, looking at it top to bottom, it's government censorship, it's government overreach, it's enabling tech corporatism, it's protectionism, it's racketeering, actually is what it is, it's even actually, great website you have here, it would be a shame if something happened to it.
All the way up and down, this thing is awful.
And the idea that this is going to pass the Senate and Joe Biden would sign this into law is really wild to look at.
Well, it's not clear that the Senate is going to pass it so easily, right?
It seems like there might be a few people here who have realized maybe what we're talking about and maybe want to figure out a way to kind of slow roll this a little bit.
I would think that that would be something they would want to not have to deal with leading up to the election.
I get it.
I man to get the House of Representatives to vote 352 to 65.
You couldn't get them a degree to agree on what day it is by that margin.
Right.
I mean, all it is, it's it's aiding American corporations.
It's aiding the wealthy and it's aiding the censorship of flow of information.
And that should show you where their agendas.
Nick, they're not going after assault weapons.
They're not good.
They're not.
By the way, why would you pass one thing for one corporation?
Why wouldn't you do something that's widespread?
So if you care about data, if that's like your actual concern, which it isn't, if you actually cared about it, why wouldn't you pass like a data bill of rights that affected all corporations within the United States?
That, to me, seems like something that should be done, does it not?
And also primarily because if they only mention one company, then they're probably going to get struck down in the courts because that would be illegal.
Well, I mean, technically.
Well, Nick, on that note, can we move to a corporation that absolutely should have laws passed against them?
They had some of the things that I think you're going to ask for or you want.
OK, well, we'll get into how that happened.
Good idea.
One of the things, sometimes I'll get a DM from you on another one of the social media platforms, and I get so excited, because when I see it from you, I don't know what's on the other side, and I'm getting ready to click on it.
The other day, the link that you sent me, and this is a story top to bottom that, again, there are stories that are muckrake podcast specials, and it starts with this.
Actually, it starts with a tragedy in Charleston, South Carolina, where John Barnett, A whistleblower against the Boeing Corporation was found dead of a quote-unquote self-inflicted gunshot.
He's one of the people who's gone on record saying that this corporation is completely out of control, that they don't take safety seriously.
Nick, we've seen one incident after another on top of doors blowing out, inspections finding doors that were going to blow out.
We've seen wheels falling off.
We've seen fuel leaks.
We've seen emergency landing after emergency landing.
We've seen a system that goes wrong and plunges thousands of feet where the pilot has no control over it.
Recently, they'd failed 33 of 89 audits on the 737 MAX.
Just a complete and utter mess.
And to add on top of it that this whistleblower was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot.
This whole thing is so bizarre and so screwed up, but also I can't think of a more fitting modern story.
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