Failed Impeachment & Incitement To Violence: The GOP, Everybody
This is a preview episode of The Muckrake Podcast's Patreon show that happens every Friday. To unlock the full show and a host of other great things, visit http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast
Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss Tom Cotton's call for violence against protesters in Arkansas, while Mike Johnson fights for his job as he moves to put funding for Ukraine to the floor for a vote. They then move on to the drastic moves the University of Texas is making in the wake of the state abolishing DEI.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Here's a cheers to the students at Columbia University.
Shut that motherfucker down.
Solidarity to y'all.
If any of you want to talk or want to get into it, let me know.
I'm Jared Jade Sexton.
I'm here with Nick Halseman.
Nick, how are you doing, bud?
I'm okay.
We're getting close to the end, you know, for the weekend and maybe the weather is going to start to change.
But like, I gotta tell you, even like in L.A., it's been pretty, like, not nice.
Not great.
Is it not?
Is it cold?
Give us the cold report.
People love it.
People at home, Nick, love it when L.A.
gets cold.
It's one of our highest rated beloved segments.
Yeah, it's been like, you know, low 60s, and then at night it gets chilly, and it's like unacceptable.
This is now, you know, past mid-April.
The Ides of April have passed, and we're still dealing with this, and I don't know what's happening.
Oh, and then it's like really hot one day, and then it goes right back to being chilly, so I can't figure it out.
The trade-off of living in Los Angeles, I mean, you gotta deal with landslides, you gotta deal with weird trillion-gallon floodings, you gotta deal with earthquakes, you gotta deal with sky-high, rocketed prices.
You're supposed to get good weather.
Yeah, I mean, that is the exchange.
Taxes, you didn't mention that, I don't think.
Taxes, taxes.
All sorts of stuff.
But, you know, here we are, and every day we wake up is a good day.
Oh, that's a great way to look at it.
I'll take it.
Yeah, sure.
All right, everybody.
This is the Weekender Edition.
A reminder, go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast in order to listen to the whole thing.
If you're listening to the preview, bring yourself to the party.
We need your support.
We need your help.
Stay editorially independent and ad-free.
Nick, we got to start off with Tom Cotton getting wild.
Just absolutely getting wild.
This week, Uh, Senator Tom Cotton from the great state of Arkansas.
Which, by the way, Nick, I didn't realize until this week that Arkansas is, uh, Arkansas.
I didn't, I did not.
I had never, did you, did you ever do that?
Do you ever think about that?
It's almost like, remember Trump made that, I don't know, a thing like that.
I'm forgetting what the word was that was so dumb.
Um, history, history, history, I don't know.
But I didn't know that either.
Arkansas.
I, it's, it's like when I figured out that Flo Rida was just Florida.
Well, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, he's tired of these protesters.
Speaking of protesters, Nick, he tweeted on Monday that he wants supporters to, quote, take matters into their own hands.
And since then, he's only doubled, tripled and quadrupled down on this thing.
To begin with, Nick, let's call this what it is.
It's a call for violence from a sitting senator of the United States of America.
Pretty incredible stuff.
Well, I feel very deeply for all those people who are trying to get to work or trying to pick up a kid, very worried about the diversion of police resources when it needs to be stopping crime in cities like San Francisco, where firefighters are having to go there when they might have calls for fires out.
I have to say, Sandra, I agree with you that you have to get to these criminals early.
If something like this happened in Arkansas on a bridge there, let's just say I think there'd be a lot of very wet criminals that have been tossed overboard, not by law enforcement, but by the people whose road they're blocking.
If they glued their hands to a car or the pavement, well, probably pretty painful to have their skin ripped off.
But I think that's the way we'd handle it in Arkansas, and I would encourage Wow.
Yikes.
What is the wet thing?
They're going to hose them down?
Is that what he's talking about?
You're going to literally throw them off of a bridge.
Oh my God.
That's right.
A senator...
from the state of Arkansas is advocating for citizens to go and grab protesters in roadways, beat them up, beat the shit out of them, throw them off of bridges, and if they happen to do something where, I don't know, they glue their hands to something, rip their skin off.
For days, Nick, before he went on Fox News and made these utterances, A lot of people, including liberals, and I will get into them in just a minute, were like trying to bend over backwards saying, he's not talking about violence, he's talking about just very safely moving people out of the way.
But what's he do, Nick?
He goes on Fox News and makes it very, very clear.
We should be throwing protesters off of bridges and ripping their skin off.
You know, yeah, I mean, but this is the guy who talks about drawing and quartering people or no quarter, that kind of stuff.
You know, I talked it up to the guy.
He hasn't been in the news for a while, right?
This is one of those things I have.
How do I get back in the news?
But, you know, protesting, it's not illegal, right?
He's trying to make it seem like these are law breakers.
Criminals, if you will, which is part of the rhetorical strategy here, Nick, is to go ahead and you'll notice he had to catch himself on Fox News.
He about said protestors and the protestors, criminals, right?
Because what is the idea here?
And going back also, this is the same guy who was published in the New York Times calling on the United States Military National Guard to stop the Black Lives Matters protest of 2020.
I mean, this is what he cares about.
This is where he's at.
He is not making any bones about it.
He is saying that we need a violent society.
Now, the problem here, Nick...
Is that we live in a liberal democracy.
And in a liberal democracy... Nick, what happens if you and I are out in the world and we have a disagreement?
Let's say, for instance, that you don't like a Wendy's Frosty and I take offense to that.
And what happens if I haul off and just deck you?
What happens then?
I mean, you know, one of my options would be to call the police and tell them that you assaulted me.
And then what happens after that?
Well, if I have proof, then they'll arrest you.
Yes, and then what happens?
You go to jail.
I go to jail, and then I go through the legal system, and the legal system sorts it out.
The reason that we have a liberal democracy, and liberalism in general, is because it is supposed to be the arbiter between me and you.
We are supposed to live in a society in which we have certain rights, and those rights, whenever they are infringed upon, between the two of us, Physical force is not what's supposed to take care of this, right?
That is the difference between a liberal democracy and what it is that Tom Cotton wants, which is an authoritarian sort of society in which, if you have right on your side, you can just beat the living shit out of people or throw them off of bridges or kill them.
This is a philosophical difference between liberalism and fascism, authoritarianism, whatever you want to call it.
And I have to tell you, Nick, one of the things that's really upsetting me is how cozy a lot of people are getting with this.
And I'm not just talking about Republicans, who are absolutely in favor of this.
We've talked about it.
They've passed laws in places like Florida that you can simply run people over.
If they're protesting on a roadway, right, and you won't face any charges.
They are very, very interested in a vigilante society that, like Tom Cotton's describing here.
Well, you know, also in a liberal society there might be instances of things that are, I don't know, maybe a little inconvenient.
Inconvenient!
Right?
It might just be a minor inconvenience.
You know, some traffic, making a point because people really believe in protesting, of which there are plenty of people on the right that will protest and do things.
But it's interesting that there's a certain group of people or a certain mindset of people in this country who, when faced with any kind of inconvenience like this, resort to the most extreme reactions imaginable.
It's going to come up in a second with the next second that we talk about.
But I find that really fascinating to me where, you know, I'm always trying to find like solutions.
OK, this is happening.
This is a problem.
This is an obstacle.
We need to figure out a way where we can kind of adjust and move on and overcome.
And instead, their reaction is kill them.
You know, I'm not going to deal with this.
I don't want to have... And again, these are inconveniences that doesn't have to be anything above, you know, just finding a different solution around, you know, a minor problem.
And instead, it really is the anger and the fomenting of this disgust and stuff is really troubling.
And I think it makes a beeline right to what you're talking about in terms of authoritarianism.
Yeah, there's a problem within liberalism.
There's a natural contradiction that's been there from the beginning.
The founding of this country was, how do I put this, hypocritical, right?
It was the idea that we were all created equal, but meanwhile, African Americans were not equal, women were not equal, poor people were not equal.
It was a society for white, wealthy men.
Well, that hypocrisy is at the heart of the American project now.
You can't escape it.
And what you just brought up, and you know, sometimes when we talk about politics, we miss out on some of the simpler but more important aspects.
The word inconvenience.
Inconvenience in the 21st century is akin to murder or assault.
Right?
Oh, I'm not going to get the thing that I want as quickly as I want it, as cheap as I want it.
That is part of the problem, is that the American Neoliberal Project has told us, if we're paying for it, or if we're living in it, we're going to get everything when we want it, and how we want it, and the price we want it.
Here's the issue, Nick.
Sometimes you are going to be inconvenienced because it is a moral or ethical thing.
I'm sorry, but, like, people during the Civil Rights Movement were inconvenienced sometimes because people were marching and they weren't able to cross a bridge or they weren't able to get where they wanted to go.
Or, by the way, just to go the genesis of a lot of what we're seeing now, people just want to watch damn football, Nick.
They don't want to see players kneeling.
Grab them, throw them off the field.
The problem now is that it's not just Tom Cotton who's saying this.
It's not just the Republican Party that's saying this.
It's even Democrats.
It's even liberals.
I found, while this was happening, I was pretty shocked how many people reached out to me and they're like, I'm a Democrat and I actually stand in agreement with Tom Cotton right now.
And why?
Because there are so many people who are more interested in their convenience and not being made uncomfortable in these moments than they are in upholding the so-called principles of liberalism.
And that's one of the reasons why authoritarianism grows in societies like ours.
Right, and let's not forget why he's saying something like this, because, you know, I know in this day and age, when you want to decide to go to a protest, one of the factors that has to go in that decision now is, is it going to be safe?
Is there some nutjob who's going to start shooting everybody, whatever, you know?
Throwing you off a bridge, for the love of God!
Yes, off my head, like whatever that is.
And so and the only reason why that would be a calculation now is because we're having more and more of these politicians saying this stuff.
And that's not that is not acceptable at all.
This country was supposedly founded on the right to be able to protest.
And so, you know, to be in that situation is the more and more people get more, you know, more frightened about this, the less protests you have, the less effective they're going to be.
Yeah, there's such a thing as managed protest or managed dissent, right?
I think you can change of change.
And that's that's that goes against what, you know, at least what I believe is what the country is supposed to be about.
Yeah, there's there's such a thing as managed protest or managed dissent.
Right.
I was actually it was Nick.
I was rewatching Arrested Development not too long ago.
And Arrested Development takes place in the early 2000s around the time of the Iraq war.
And there's like a segment that's pretty funny in which like Lindsey, the sister, goes to like an anti-war protest and the military takes them to a quote-unquote free speech zone.
And there are a lot of, and it sounds so funny, but a free speech zone is always like a cage away from what's going on where nobody will hear you and nobody will see you, right?
There are other protests where you march, but it's also the police make sure that you have a direct route, they manage the traffic, all of that.
Those things might make people feel like they're expressing themselves, but actual protests and revolutionary action, which is what we're talking about here, is supposed to inconvenience you.
It's supposed to make you think about everyday life.
It's supposed to make you think about your participation in a machine that, you know, does things like enables ethnic cleansing.
This type of a thing is what actually changes things.
It's what actually creates movements.
But what you just said is correct.
It's supposed to make you think twice before you engage in any type of a protest or before you speak up.
Because it could mean your job, it could mean your funding at school, it could mean, you know, whether it's a social credit system later on, or if it simply means that Tom Cotton supporters are going to throw you off of a bridge.
There's a reason for this.
They're changing society very, very quickly, but very, very quietly.
You've been listening to the free part of this episode.
If you'd like to hear the rest of this great conversation, head over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcasts and subscribe for lots more additional content, including a Discord server and live shows.
We'd really appreciate it if you could give it a try.