Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman can't believe what they heard from former Attorney General Bill Barr, who has explicitly stated why Trump is not fit to be President, yet will gladly vote for him again this year. They discuss what a prison term would be like for our former president before shifting to our friend Ted Cruz, who's under investigation for violating campaign finance laws surrounding his not awesome podcast. They finish on an Atlantic piece that surmises the problems we face now are rooted in the protest movement of the '60s. #GoodTimes
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Awesome!
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Nick, we got a full show.
We got so many things to talk about.
What is life going to be like for Donald Trump if he gets thrown in prison?
Ted Cruz, Has a podcasting problem.
Somebody needs to talk to him about it.
We gotta talk about, like, weird, weird interpretations of what's going on with the campus protest movement.
But first, Nick, we have to check in.
Every now and then on this show, we have to check in with friends of the pod.
And Nick, you and I have been very, very effusive about how we believe that Bill Barr, the former Attorney General of the United States, is on our side, Nick.
He's with us.
He gets it.
He is part of the resistance.
Hashtag resistance.
We are Bill Barr stans, are we not?
I don't know if anyone knows that you're being facetious here.
I'm being absolutely facetious right now.
But Nick, people might remember before we get to what Bill Barr has done this weekend, Bill Barr had a book.
Uh, it was called, uh, One Damn Thing After Another, Memoirs of an Attorney General.
And like all of these disgusting Republicans who, like, helped carry out fascism in the United States of America with Donald Trump, he needed to sell it to centrists in this country.
And that means, Nick, you either go on Dancing with the Stars, Or, I don't know, Good Morning America.
I don't know where these people go.
Let's go back a little while to when Bill Barr had a book to sell.
This is Bill Barr on CBS's Face the Nation when he was selling one damn thing after another.
Well, you know, this is not a circumstance where he's the victim, or this is government overreach.
He provoked this whole problem himself.
Yes, he's been the victim of unfair witch hunts in the past, but that doesn't obviate the fact that he's also a fundamentally flawed person who engages in reckless conduct.
that leads to situations, calamitous situations like this, which are very destructive and hurt any political cause he's associated with.
And this was a case that entirely of his own making.
Okay.
Yeah, that's nice.
It's refreshing, right?
He says something that we may agree with.
I'm taking down some notes, Nick, just so we can make sure that we keep all these things straight.
A fundamentally flawed person who hurts any political cause he's a part of.
We're talking, of course, about Donald Trump.
That's wonderful.
Let's check in again with Bill Barr on Face the Nation.
You say Trump's alleged conduct is indefensible.
So many Republicans continue to defend him.
What will it say if the party, your longtime party, puts him forward as their nominee?
Well, that's the problem.
I don't think they're actually defending his conduct, but they are saying it's unfair to prosecute him.
But that then raises another question.
Okay, if it's unfair to prosecute him, that's not the whole answer.
The question is, should we be putting someone like this forward as the leader of the country, leader of the free world, who's engaged in this kind of conduct?
The other thing is, this is not just an isolated example.
Trump has, you know, has many good qualities and he accomplished some good things.
But the fact of the matter is, he is a consummate narcissist and he constantly engages in reckless conduct that puts his political followers at risk and the conservative and Republican agenda at risk. - Would he put the country at risk if he was in the White House again? - He will always put his own interests and gratifying his own ego ahead of everything else, including the country's interests.
There's no question about it.
This is a perfect example of that.
He's like a nine-year-old, defiant nine-year-old kid who's always pushing the glass toward the edge of the table, defying his parents to stop him from doing it.
It's a means of self-assertion and exerting his dominance over other people.
And he's a very petty individual who will always put his interests ahead of the country's, his personal gratification of his, you know, of his ego.
But our country, our country can't, you know, can't be a therapy session for, you know, a troubled man like Okay.
Let me just, again, I want to make sure we get all this.
His conduct is indefensible.
Should we be putting forward someone like this to leave the country?
A consummate narcissist, reckless, a risk to the country's interest.
Compares him to a nine-year-old, a petty individual who will always put his interests first.
Nick, how's that sound to you?
How's that as an evaluation of a person as a president?
I mean, it's well, I mean, first of all, it's pretty cogent.
I think it's a pretty good assessment of who he is.
And I also think maybe the question you're trying to get to is, should someone like this ever be in a president of a country?
He literally asked if that person should be president of the country again.
And he says this is indefensible.
He's a petty nine year old and the country shouldn't be where this type of therapy happens.
Well, the funny thing is the nine-year-old part doesn't even bother me as much as when he says he'll never do anything in the interest of the country before himself.
You know, that to me ends up being the worst thing that should be disqualifying.
I'm not even joking here.
If we were to decide as a country to grab a random nine-year-old to put them in charge of the country, I would rather have that nine-year-old than Donald Trump.
Sure.
I mean, I would rather have anybody, well, just about anybody, anybody besides Donald Trump.
You know what, I gotta qualify that too because there's a lot of other anybodies out there.
But yes, there are some really smart nine-year-olds out there.
I know, I personally know a couple of really smart nine-year-olds that I'd rather have in charge of the country.
That's Bill Barr, former Attorney General of the United States of America, making incredible, cogent remarks about Donald Trump.
I would absolutely hate if anything in the world that he would say on a Sunday show on CNN this week would even begin to contradict that.
Just to be clear, you're voting for someone who you believe tried to subvert the peaceful transfer of power, that can't even achieve his own policies, that lied about the election even after his attorney general told him that the election wasn't stolen, and as the former chief law enforcement in this country, you're going to vote for someone who is facing 88 criminal counts.
Look, the 88 criminal counts, a lot of those are, and I've said- Even if 10 of them are accurate.
The answer to the question is yes, I'm supporting.
I'm supporting the Republican ticket.
But can you say that you're voting for Donald Trump?
Because you're not saying his name.
You just say you're supporting the Republican ticket.
I've said as between Biden and Trump, I will vote for Trump.
Because I believe.
What?
I mean, yeah, he doesn't have to like stutter or stammer.
He knows exactly what he's saying.
And, you know, like I think I said before the show, this is like when you go to visit a, you know, you go to like a safari and you want to see, like in the wild, how people exist.
This is what this is like.
This is we're going to look at a Republican and get to get his raw brain thing.
I don't know how long we have to keep talking about the notion that they don't give a shit about who the person is if they're going to carry out some sort of unpopular agenda that they're for.
Well, first of all, shame on our media for bringing Bill Barr onto one show after another for years, simply to get that dopamine hit of him saying that Donald Trump is reckless and shouldn't be president.
And by the way, Nick, this wasn't on the clip that we showed.
Bill Barr tried to stop him, Nick.
He, him and John Bolton and all of the other good Republicans, Nick, that were in that administration, they tried to stop it.
I mean, Bill Barr was not interested in using the Office of Attorney General in order to create a weaponized judicial system.
Or to leverage it against his political enemies, or to basically like wedge in Christian nationalist oppression.
But, you know, in the midst of all this, you have to get this guy on all of your shows.
Meanwhile, what are we seeing here?
We are seeing the true face of who these people are.
This is what they believe.
They truly only care about power.
And what does Donald Trump do, Nick?
Donald Trump, as the disgusting individual that he does, it's like the philosopher's stone, right?
It makes it clear who these people are.
It brings out who they are.
And they have no choice whatsoever except for to go ahead and prostrate themselves in front of people.
I mean, Donald Trump has been abusive towards Bill Barr since he left that position.
He has attacked him as Bill Barr has attacked him.
And what's he doing right now?
He's going on the same shows that helped him sell his books, and now he's coming out and saying, yeah, I'm going to vote for him.
What are you going to do about it?
Well, it's almost like he's saying these things because he knew by saying these things that Trump would disown him and say all these horrible things.
But it's almost like he's saying these things because he knows that if Trump had said, hey, I need you to be my AG again, he would do it.
Dude, he would knock over an elderly old woman to become Attorney General again.
Yeah, and so maybe like his wife, somebody in his family is so upset about that, they're like, they made him do this to really make sure that Trump won't ask him again.
Because you know, you know, whatever he's saying, independent of that, is he would definitely, you know, work for Trump again.
And I think that the fact that we shouldn't An attorney general shouldn't have policy influence or care about policy like he seems to do.
And that's really what's startling about it.
Even the worst Republicans, you know, in the Nixon era, you know, would quit before they would do something that Nixon told them to do.
Can we make it clear?
Let's just go ahead and put this out there.
We're recording this on Monday, April 29th.
Let's make it very clear to anyone listening to this.
If Chris Christie, Who spent his entire presidential campaign for the 2024 nomination going after Donald Trump in like the most aggressive way that we've seen any Republican do.
Same way Mitt Romney did, for the record, just so we're keeping this thing rolling.
If Chris Christie were to be offered a spot in this administration, he absolutely would do it.
And what did Chris Christie do all that for?
Was it to take a principled stand?
No, it was to sell his own book.
It was always to sell a book.
It was always to go ahead.
And what is the deal?
We've talked about this.
Their editors are like, hey, can you maybe go on these shows and go after Donald Trump and make sure that like centrist liberals and Democrats are going to buy your book as well in order to feel good about the Republican Party?
That's what they're doing.
And that's what Bill Barr has done.
And we know, you know this, right?
Chris Christie would absolutely join his administration if he was Yeah.
Yeah.
He'd take any job.
Yeah.
He'd take any job.
Yeah.
Um, yeah.
I mean, it's frustrating only because why don't you just sit home?
Don't vote.
If you really are going to say between Biden and Trump and then, but he'll also, I mean, there's a lot, there's some wild stuff in that interview with Caitlyn Collins.
Like they asked him about, uh, were you, were you, did you remember when Trump said, I want to kill the guy who like was leaking this from the white house?
Absolutely.
He's like, oh, he just said stuff.
He doesn't mean it.
You know, he says it all the time.
Didn't mean it.
It's not a big deal.
It's just like what he does.
It's just startling to me that like they don't have the principles that they claim to have.
They don't really follow at all.
They were never real to begin with.
That's the entire point.
They were never real to begin with.
They were simply ways of trying to gain power.
And by the way, on a similar note, Nick, we have to report, speaking of Republicans who went after Donald Trump and are now revealing their true character when it comes to getting close to power, Trump ran up the road this week to go hang out with Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis.
DeSantis is in talks with Trump in order to hand over his donor base.
This is a lot of the billionaires who are supporting Ron DeSantis as the alternative Donald Trump.
Nick, again, we don't like to pat ourselves on the back on this show.
I believe we called that.
I believe we said that that donor base would eventually come all the way around on Trump.
Nick, I was combing my memory banks.
Do you remember, besides Ron DeSanctimonious, do you remember that Donald Trump insinuated that Ron DeSantis was a gay pedophile?
Do you remember that?
I forgot the gay part, but is that part of it?
Yes, he was a gay pedophile.
Who is out trying to groom his students, which by the way, there were allegations of that.
But Trump went full scorched earth on this when he thought that DeSantis was going to be a rival for his in this primary campaign, called him a gay pedophile.
And now DeSantis is getting in a room with him trying to sell off his donor base.
And who knows?
He probably wants the Attorney General spot, speaking of the position.
Probably wants some kind of plum administration place because his political career has completely and utterly plummeted.
And what did he do at the end of his campaign?
He went after Trump as well!
And now he's in a meeting room trying to sell off these people, trying to hand over the same billionaires who claimed that they were never going to support Trump.
And yet, here we are once more.
You know, it's funny.
I was convinced when I first saw that that it was obviously Trump is so hard up for money.
They have to go anywhere they can to find some extra donors and tap into another donor base.
But then yeah, what you just described was it turns out guess what?
DeSantis actually needs him as well.
This is like an interesting match made in hell.
Yeah, I guess.
Hell, I'm thinking of something that smelled worse, but I guess maybe hell smells really bad, right?
It would be somewhere in the idea of like Hades, is what it would be.
Like a mythological version of hell.
Yeah, okay.
As if we need it to be worse than it could be.
So that's fascinating to me, that they are both kind of like having to do this sort of deal with each other, because they both sort of need each other.
And you're right, DeSantis' career really, really suffered.
And my favorite part of the article we were reading was about how Trump decided not only would he want to, you know, beat him in 2024, he wanted to eliminate his possibilities for 2028.
He's that.
Yeah.
Oh, absolutely.
Because he's going to run again.
If he wins, he's absolutely going to try and figure out a way to run and make people like that come off the ballot.
Or, even if he doesn't want to do that, he's so vindictive that he doesn't even care if it's a potential person that could win the nomination for his party.
It's not his party, the Republicans don't mean anything to him, but imagine that.
He's going to torpedo somebody else for a future race that he's not supposedly eligible for out of, out of spite or whatever that is.
And I got to tell you, like, you know, DeSantis never, you know, he dipped his toe in some Trump, you know, criticism, but I don't, I don't know if it was ever anything that, that, that warrants him, you know, burying his career for the rest of his life.
I mean, he tried.
He, he, He tried there at the end.
And one of my favorite things of the political season so far has been watching him and everybody else take the last debate or the last couple of debates to finally start going after Trump.
And what did it matter?
It didn't matter at all.
And here we are exactly where we always expected ourselves to be, which is everybody bending down to kiss Trump's ass.
This is so disgusting, all of it, Nick, that I thought we could use a palate cleanser, which is that everybody, all these legal experts are starting to weigh in now to have a discussion because, first of all, Trump is guilty as sin in every one of his trials.
It is my official position, again, that he is a former president, wealthy white man, so he's not going to be held accountable for what he's done.
But all these legal experts are starting to have to, like, create their own sort of legal framework of what would happen if Trump were to go to prison.
One of my favorites in a while...
This is from the Express.
This is Justy Nickel, the former prosecutor and member of the American Civil Liberties Union, said that the former president would, quote, likely be placed in a protective custody unit rather than having cellmates.
She said, this kind of arrangement is standard practice for anyone whose prominent status might pose risks within the general prison population.
Protective custody units limit interactions with other inmates and are closely monitored to ensure safety.
For protection, besides standard prison security measures, which are very little, additional precautions like increased surveillance and possibly guards assigned specifically to him.
Also, the Secret Service would be there taking care of him within the prison.
Other safety measures in such scenarios would typically include frequent security checks, controlled access to his unit, and potentially special arrangements for transport to and from appearances.
So Nick, we have a situation where even if Trump were to be held accountable, he would be held in a special detention that would be kind of more like a relaxation retreat, if you ask me.
Yeah, he would be slicing garlic so thin that it would liquidate in the pan when you put it in the oil.
A lot of people are raising their fist in the air and cheering you on, Nick.
That's correct.
That's exactly right.
Meanwhile, I read an article that it's not possible to add that garlic does not liquidate like that, even though they made it up in for the movie but um you know or even like house arrest so they would probably do something like that even even easier for him uh if they ever did that but like i mean i guess let's just let's just pretend what's going on that road because we i think we both know basically we do that because things are tough can we go down that road and just sort of imagine it and fantasize i love it let's do it let's do it but yes i mean it would be um you know listen
any kind of inconvenience is not bad for this kind of a person right so it's a To let him know that he committed some crimes.
The worst part about the whole thing, which is, I'm going to take a half step away from the specific idea, is that Like, they're not even arguing that he violated the law anymore.
They're just trying to now argue that he's just immune to the law as part of his thing, which, you know, is a whole other discussion.
But nonetheless, having him be in prison, I would like that.
It could be a reality show of its own, right?
There you go.
Let's see what Trump— Oh, he would negotiate those rights so quickly, no doubt about it.
Yeah, he might be willing to go to prison if they could get him a good deal on the TV.
Well, and house arrest would be him at Mar-a-Lago, and what would we be treated to?
We would be treated to every right-wing, like, personality going to Mar-a-Lago, and pictures of, like, maca-themed weddings with him, like, pointing at his ankle bracelet and everybody giving a thumbs up.
Right.
That's what that would be.
That's the America that we live in.
It would not be actual justice.
You'd have to have, as part of the sentence, some sort of thing where he'd have to come out publicly in a speech and with contrition, right?
Like, I don't know if that would even matter, but, like, that would be nice too, wouldn't it?
Uh, sure?
I mean, we've seen these videos.
They're not, uh... I mean, again, on January 6th, what did he say?
You're all very special.
We love you very much.
Right.
You should go home.
Yeah.
Here's the thing.
There are those professionals who know how to deal with a nine-year-old who keeps putting the glass closer to the edge.
Right, like Bill Barr describes.
And it's amazing, when you see those people come into the room and they instantly do whatever they do, the kid just starts to listen, right?
It's like one of those things.
And it's almost like, is there, I don't think anything exists for Trump in this scenario for me to follow him, right?
I guess it's simply just, they're already formed, they're adults, there isn't any malleability there anymore, and they'll never see this as anything but political.
I happen just to harbor an awful fantasy, which is, you know, if he were to be convicted of this stuff and elected the President of the United States of America, like the idea of a president who is on house arrest, You know what I mean?
Like a president who like had to hang out in the Oval Office and couldn't leave?
Like that's, I mean, that should be a movie.
How's that not a movie already made?
I know, but I feel like we've had that.
Or like a former president under house arrest, we've had that in some country somewhere.
I assume we've had that.
Speaking of people who should be locked up in absolute greatness, Republicans.
Nick, this story has it all.
This is fantastic.
Friend of the pod, Ted Cruz, the Texas Senator, he's got a problem.
In the last year or so, he's been hosting this podcast.
Have you listened to Ted Cruz's podcast, The Verdict?
Hang on, every once in a while it will pop up like a clip, but I can't tell you if I've actually gone on my podcast app and actually listened to it.
I have!
And the reason is because this is what I do.
Again, jumping in the muck and swimming around.
The verdict with Ted Cruz is... Wait, I gotta correct you, Jared, though.
I'm sorry.
It's not THE verdict.
It's called VERDICT.
Verdict with Ted Cruz.
Not the verdict.
So have fun with that because I don't even understand that.
I added the article simply because of how terrible of a title that is.
Sorry, go ahead.
Verdict with Ted Cruz.
It's not just the fact that Ted Cruz has actually avoided his official duties as a senator.
And I don't just mean by going to Cancun in the middle of a power outage in Texas that killed people.
But because he has actually missed responsibilities in order to host Verdict with Ted Cruz.
But that's not even what we're discussing, Nick.
It turns out that Verdict with Ted Cruz is actually quite an ethics conundrum.
And here's the reason why.
I heart media, which is the giant media conglomerate, that it's one of the reasons that we we've talked about the death of rock and roll and we've talked about like changing popular culture.
It's like one of these things that was absolutely unleashed by the Telecommunications Act.
iHeartMedia has paid Ted Cruz over $630,000 for Verdict with Ted Cruz.
Except for that money didn't actually go to Ted Cruz, Nick.
It went to the Truth and Courage Super PAC, which is Ted Cruz's Super PAC.
Here's the problem.
You're not supposed to be in communications with your Super PAC.
They're supposed to be independent bodies.
that work beyond you.
You shouldn't be working for them and getting them money.
As a result, this has led to an actual ethics complaint that according to some of the people I've talked to, Nick, actually has legs.
This could actually be something that Ted Cruz could be held accountable for.
I mean, I don't even know what the law is at this point because it's probably not, I wish it was something severe and that would hurt, but here's the thing.
Do you think that they're just, this is them, like they're giving all this money because you know the $630,000 is, you know, going to the Super PAC.
Do you know what the limit for an individual donor is supposed to be for a Super PAC?
Please tell the people. $5,000.
$5,000.
So, is this their way of paying him, like, you know, for doing the pod?
Well, so here's the thing.
For those who are listening at home, I mean, you know, Nick, I don't want to bring our business out here.
We're not making $630,000 from a podcast.
I think the last time we checked, we're in like the top 1% or 2% in political podcasts.
We're not dragging in over half a million dollars from this podcast.
This podcast is not worth $630,000.
I'm not talking about ours.
I think ours is worth Priceless.
Verdict with Ted Cruz is not worth $630,000.
Would it surprise you, Nick, if I told you that iHeartMedia is a lobbying body that has given money to Ted Cruz and his campaigns and his superbacks in the past?
And if I'm checking my notes here, I'm carrying the two, I'm adding this over here.
Oh, this is corruption.
It is.
It is.
So it's corruption because, wait, I don't think you even filled out the whole picture of what seats Ted Cruz has on certain committees.
He's filled the people in.
Yeah, he's on the Commerce Committee, which is directly related to, you know, media and print and digital.
It's funny because what does iHeartMedia need to lobby for so hard?
And I suppose there's all sorts of tax implications that they can benefit from.
To be frank, iHeartMedia should be broken up as a monopoly.
That's why.
This is one of those monolithic corporations that should absolutely be troubled.
So, yes, I've got to argue enough with the past before anybody tries to say, hey, we should break this up.
And now I hear you.
They got Ted Cruz done.
He's already on their side.
They're not going to change.
Because part of me felt like, all right, they're going to try.
It's like they're passing money through him as a money laundering scheme almost.
But, like, the only problem is it has to be all declared.
I can't quite figure out why iHeartMedia did this knowing that it's a violation of campaign.
Well, I mean, we have a billionaire who owns a Supreme Court justice.
Arguably two.
I mean, like, you idiots.
At this point, you go for it at this point.
Going back to the movie you were talking about, you start wearing the furs.
You don't worry about what people say when it gets to this level of absolute corruption.
You're not even concerned about passing over $630,000 to Truth Encouraged.
Thank you, Supreme Court, for giving us Citizens United.
This is working out great.
But in the movie we're talking about, he was doing so much nose candy, that's how he got to the point where he didn't know what he was doing and was willing to do it.
So, I don't know what Ted Cruz is doing, but either way, it seems like... Is that really where we are now?
Is it just that corrupt?
It's that corrupt, yes.
That's where we're at.
It's that corrupt.
By the way, we've talked about this, Nick.
He's a senator.
Of the United States of America.
Listen, there have been a lot of corrupted senators.
There have been a lot of absolutely contemptible people who have been senators.
You are supposed to be above being corrupted for a podcast.
And the people that I've talked to who have insight into Ted Cruz, on one hand, it is the fact that you're right.
This is absolutely moving money around and total abject corruption.
It turns out he just likes podcasting.
He just likes the cast and Nick.
He likes to get behind the mic.
He likes to put on the, on the, on the headset.
He likes to put on the cans.
He just likes it so much.
And here's the thing.
He probably is going to end up leaving his job as a Senator at some point, hoping to be a podcaster.
And he'll probably still get a ton of money because he'll be used as a lobbyist.
That's what this country is actually about at this point, because you can actually have more influence as a lobbyist and as a revolving door for a lobbyist.
You know, you're making podcaster sound like so pejorative here.
I don't know.
No, I love it.
I love getting on here and hanging out with my friend Nick and telling it like it is.
I love it.
But like, it's absolutely insane that this person, do you think Ted Cruz, when he was going through the Ivy League track, becoming like a, you know, a lawyer and he, Nick, I want to make this clear for people who don't know about Ted Cruz.
He was being prepped by the evangelical community and that legal community around it to be a Messiah-like figure.
Like, if you listen to his father, the preaching was that eventually Ted Cruz, Raphael Ted Cruz, was going to be the man who saved this country.
He was on a mission from God.
Nick, and he has lost so much interest in even being involved in the apparatuses of power that he has become a completely bought and sold senator for a podcast.
Yeah, I'd almost say he wants to be an influencer, like that's what appeals to him, right?
He wants to feel like he has influence, he's cool, he's important.
Like, yeah, you've heard those stories from the Princeton people where he's just, he was not cool.
He tried to be cool and he would have that weird energy that he still has to this day.
Yeah, I don't need to hear from the people who went to college with him.
Like, I know that he was weird and not cool.
Yeah, yeah.
And so it's like, you know, he yearns in that same way, I guess, that Trump does in a different way.
And so that's probably what everybody wants to do now, and all the kids want to do that these days, right?
Everybody wants to be an influencer.
You know what?
The quicker he can become an influencer, Jared, the better.
You know what?
Let's get him a mic.
I'll buy him a mic and we'll get him a background like yours now that's good-looking.
Can you help him design it?
For those who are listening and not watching on YouTube, I've completely re-engineered my recording space.
You need to go check it out.
By hand, you did it.
I did it by hand, dammit.
I did it myself.
I labored.
I put it together.
I'm sure Ted Cruz didn't do that.
No, we'll get him a mic.
We'll get him the Logitech camera.
We'll get him the MPM.
We'll set him up.
And we've talked about this.
It's like Marjorie Taylor Greene.
All it would take is Newsmax to say Marjorie.
We need you so bad to host our flagship program every night, 7pm, 8pm.
Come on here.
Do it.
She would do it for a Sunday night show.
Jared, I would, I would, uh, do this.
I would produce this podcast show for free.
Uh, and I, I would let them, I would come on if they want me to, and I let them dunk on me all day long.
If that would get them out of the Senate and out of the house, I believe it would be MTG being like, uh, we got that negative.
You nailed it.
Nailed it.
You tell me where to sign up and whatever.
I will do that.
Never leave.
And as we get there, believe me.
And you know what?
We can create a whole, a juggernaut with all those gates.
Let's get them all into the podcasting world.
Let's go!
Absolutely.
That's a hell of a plan.
Nick, we gotta get into the weird, and listen, we can go rounds on what's happening with the student protest movement as people are being arrested and as a lot of masks are coming off, but it is revealing a couple of things about our politicians, our commentariat, and a lot of the world right now.
We gotta go through some of the more interesting takes in all of this.
First off, let's go with Nate Silver, one of the most useless people in the political space, who got like one election right and as a result has become a multi-millionaire and has some of the dumbest opinions.
He has now said that this entire thing is about quote-unquote being cool, and he has said that political identity, such as what's happening with the student movement, is quote, a lot like picking your favorite salad dressing.
How do you feel about that?
I've met Nate Silver.
Wait, wait, time out.
Wait, you met Nate?
When did you meet?
Wait, what?
I mean, I was at one of those conferences.
He was there.
We chatted for a minute or two minutes, three minutes, whatever it was.
He's not cool.
He's not, he's awkward.
No, he's not cool.
Wait, Nick Halseman, Nate Silver, did you talk?
We talked.
Listen, I am, you know, I don't know how to put this, but I'm...
I'm a pretty big deal.
You're kind of a big deal.
I'm kind of a big deal in the sports.
Because you have to remember, even though he got one election right in the Alietta, he really made his fortune or whatever because he was able to put some stats together properly in different ways.
He was like one of the first person to pull up an Excel spreadsheet, is what happened.
And by the way, he has gotten passed around by one major news organization, media organization, after another.
And they're like, hey, don't go, Nate!
Please don't go!
You know, and I just, it just reeks of like, you know, maybe there's some, some, something going on, like with his own internal issues, like being at college or whatever, but you know, listen, who, nobody can, Should be out there on some sort of ivory tower criticizing, you know, students who really want to, like, that's what's inspiring to me.
I might not like half of what's being said out there, but what's inspiring to me is that they care, and they're out there, and they're intense, and they're making statements, and they're making things difficult for people to make sure that their point is made, and we see that in airports and in Chicago.
So it's like that's all really, really important, and to shit on it because it's like it's some sort of a cool thing is like ridiculous.
I think what's coming from this, and this is, I've been seeing a lot of this building momentum recently.
And again, we're not even getting into the actual politics or stances of the protesters.
Again, I stand with them.
Total solidarity.
But Nick, here's the thing.
Like, I have been seeing so many people now who are going out and saying they're doing this because it's cool, because it's the trendy thing to do.
First things first, they're putting their educations on the line.
They're getting thrown out of college.
I cannot tell you how much money is invested in a higher education at this point.
On top of that, we're seeing them get thrown around.
We're seeing snipers on roofs.
We're seeing state troopers come out with 100 round magazines.
Nobody, like, is there somebody at one of these things who's doing it because a friend's doing it?
I'm sure that there is.
I couldn't rule that out.
But to go ahead and just say that people are doing this because it's like a cause celebre, like, I think that reveals more about the person who's claiming that.
I think it says that these people are oftentimes expressing themselves in a way that they're trying to get public approval and or become part of an in-group.
I think it says more about transactional politicians than it does about any of the people actually doing this.
Right.
And by the way, it's an interesting time of year because if you want it so, you know, you could say to the people that are running the universities, just let them protest.
Like, in a very cynical way, it'll just fizzle out after X number of... I disagree with that, but I hear what you're saying.
You know, but here's why right now is a problem for them.
It's because everyone's visiting campuses and trying to figure out like where they want to go to school in the fall, you know, all these potential candidates.
They don't want, you know, messy looking lawns and they want people yelling and screaming around the campus while people are trying to visit and see if they want to go there.
People would not want to go there.
I may not want to go to Columbia if I see that the other campus is all in Chaos, right?
So you have to imagine that that's also another reason why they're like, let's get these guys out of here now.
We gave them their week.
Okay, get the cops in here and clear this whole thing out.
We got to have our lawns looking pretty for people to walk through.
That's so superficial.
But isn't that right?
Am I wrong?
No, I think these people are afraid of losing endowments.
I'm sorry, but you have a bunch of billionaires who are like, I'm not going to send my money to Columbia.
Bullshit.
I think a lot of these people are worried about their jobs.
I think enrollment is a problem anyway at a lot of these places.
But the idea that anybody's doing this because it's trendy, it's horseshit.
Nick, another absurd thing, and this is... I want the people listening to do something for me.
If you're driving, maybe wait until you pull over.
If you're at home, turn the lights down.
Maybe roll the window shades down.
Really, really get your brain plastic on this one.
Are you ready, Nick?
Are you ready to go into the mind palace?
I thought you were going to say put an Allman Brothers band record on as well.
You know, if you got it, smoke it.
This is one of the more interesting sort of tracks on this.
I've been following in the right wing sort of hemisphere.
You know, that's one of the things I like to do.
It's how I like to relax.
I like to go look at what the conspiracy theorists are sort of cooking up.
And almost immediately, and I want to set the table for everybody.
These are anti-Israel war in Gaza protests that are calling into question what the Netanyahu regime is doing with Israel.
Correct?
Am I correct in that, Nick?
Yeah, absolutely.
Okay.
There is a conspiracy theory that has been taking hold in the far right-wing fringes that this entire movement is actually... Are you ready, Nick?
Is everybody ready?
You got your brains nice and stretch-arm-strong-y?
It's a plot by the Jews, my man.
The Jews are the ones who are funding this thing.
Of course, the protocols of the Elders of Zion tell us that they're behind all this stuff.
They are actually seeding this.
And Nick, if that isn't bad enough for you, and I should have predicted this on the show the other day, because you will never go wrong predicting this, What started with the far-right fringes, what started in the cesspools of the far-right online conspiracy theory communities, it's now being mainstreamed by, you guessed it, Fox News, which is reporting that George Soros, and anytime the Fox News says George Soros, Wink!
Wink!
Nudge!
Nudge!
You might as well just go ahead and put in the Jews when you say George Soros.
It's now being mainstreamed by Fox News which is saying that that is who is behind this protest movement.
I don't really know what I'm supposed to say.
What do you say?
What do you say at this point?
You know, I don't know.
I don't know.
I mean, college athletes are getting paid to play now or maybe they'll just, you know, they'll do paying for protests and they make that a whole thing.
I don't, I don't know what, it's, it sounds so ridiculous to me, um, that somehow George Soros would be behind us and paying people to protest and say things.
I, I, I, you know, I don't know.
It's just, it's, help me, Jared.
I don't know what to say.
I think what is happening here is that the thing that the right wing needs to do at all times, Nick, is to eliminate cognitive dissonance in any way, shape, or form.
You know what I mean?
Like, to just immediately flesh it out.
We've talked about it.
Like, what Trump has done, which is brilliant, and what everybody has followed suit, is if something doesn't work for you, make up a story about it.
And if you make up a story about it, people are like, okay, I'll accept that.
Let's go.
Like, these people have lived their entire lives based on the idea that everything that happens that they don't like is controlled by the Jews.
And so here's a thing that they don't like.
Nick, we covered it!
Taylor Swift!
Taylor Swift was applied by the Jews to control the election!
Now, all of a sudden, it's like, oh, this thing that is some, you know, by some people being called anti-Semitic, it's being controlled by the Jews!
Like, that entire mindset, like, there's, if you look at it for too long, It's, again, it's like one of those magic eye posters.
Like, you will lose your mind if you spend too much time trying to figure it out.
But here we are, the far-right fringes, and now Fox News could have predicted this, could have written it down like Nostradamus.
This is where this whole thing is going.
The Jews are behind this.
Right, exactly.
So, fill in the blank.
Next time we see something like this that they don't like, something gets unpopular, somebody, you know, catches on with something, yes, it's gonna be funded by George Soros, and we'll just have to, I mean, I guess it's not even the fact that they'll say it and they'll try to, it's the fact that there are people who will believe it, right, and buy into that, and that's why they're doing it, right?
And again, this country is, you know, it's been revealed.
I don't think it's the country we thought we lived in, or we were hoping we lived in, and I don't know.
I mean, how many, what do you think the readership is?
What is the number of people in the country that buy into this?
How many is it?
It's millions, right?
Oh, it's tens of millions.
Yeah.
I mean, when Fox News broadcasts something like this, Nick, one of the things I keep seeing is they're like, all of their tents are the same.
Obviously this was a massive operation.
It's like, no, they're the cheapest tents that you can buy on Amazon or at Walmart.
Come on!
It actually takes a lot of energy to twist your brain that hard, you know?
I know.
I'm trying to finish this podcast out strong.
So in order to do that, I wanted to find an even more absurd argument in all of this, Nick.
We're going to go to the Atlantic, which is, man, it's such a good place for us to find content for this podcast, because this is where the liberal elite is really trying to figure itself out in print and communicating with itself.
For those who don't know, George Packer... Do you read much Packer, Nick?
I have to admit that I do not.
George Packer has some moments.
He has a book called The Unwinding, which was really, really good.
Really, really intelligent.
Got very close into what was going on in this country without probably ever saying the word neoliberalism once.
We're really, really near it.
Well, George Packer has flown in with this article in The Atlantic trying to explain what's happening with these protests.
And, Nick, George Packer has found the actual problem.
And the problem is that the American University was ruined by the protests of the 1960s and 1970s.
That's right!
Because there was an anti-war, free speech, feminist, civil rights, and LGBTQ movement in the 1960s and 1970s, it ruined college forever and has now created this mess.
I just want to read a quick little thing, Nick.
Quote, at Stanford, where my father was an administrator in the late 60s and where students took over a campus building the week after the Columbia revolt, white students compared themselves to Black American slaves.
To them, the university was not a community dedicated to independent inquiry, but a nexus of competing interest groups where power, not ideas, ruled.
They rejected the very possibility of a disinterested pursuit of truth.
In an imaginary dialogue between a student and professor, a member of the Stanford chapter of Students for a Democratic Society wrote, quote, Rights and privacy and these kinds of freedoms are irrelevant.
You old guys got to get it through your heads that to fight the whole corrupt system, power is the only answer.
I have a lot of thoughts about this, Nick, but what are your immediate reactions?
I mean, the tone, just so I'm clear, we're all clear, is that these students are idiots, right?
First of all, idiots.
That's the one thing that's being argued everywhere.
They are idiots.
Right.
And it's like, you know, you were in the academic world, you were behind the curtain.
That is probably as accurate of a description as I've come across.
And, you know, if you're on a campus of Stanford, not to put down any other university, but to get into Stanford, you're going to have to be pretty smart.
Wait, time out, time out.
You said that's an accurate description.
Are you saying that students are idiots?
I'm saying that's, no, that what that student... Oh, what he said!
Okay, okay.
I was like, yeah, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not gonna roll with that.
Right, that they're the ones who are really accurate here.
The idiots are these old folks and who like want to just go back to the 40s or maybe earlier.
I don't even know at that point what Packer wants.
So, yeah, that's my immediate reaction is like, wow, that that is a cogent argument against or in exactly to describe exactly what the situation was now on campus.
Imagine that they were like 45, 50 years ahead of time.
Well, first of all, when I read this, this was another one of those articles.
I basically yelled out, hold all my calls.
Because immediately it became obvious that he was going to make the argument that the social movements and social revolutions of the 60s and 70s were the problem, which is incredible, Nick.
First of all, that paragraph that I picked out, my father, who's an administrator at Stanford in the 1960s, Tells on everything.
Obviously his worldview was given to him by someone who had power in the 1960s who didn't want all these protests.
So that has colored everything that he now believes about these protests, correct?
Correct.
When he says that academies and universities and colleges are places for quote-unquote independent inquiry as opposed to struggles of power, what he's actually saying is, like, I just want them to be quiet and not struggle for power.
Everything is a struggle for power.
I don't know how to make that more clear.
There's not a place in the world where you go and there aren't struggles for power.
That's the nature of human existence in an oppressive hierarchical society.
What people like Packer is saying is they're saying, you need to stop fighting this.
You need to get your place within it.
And people like me and my father and others are the ones who are going to run this thing.
Packer is a lover of power.
He wrote a book called Our Man about Richard Harbrook, who was like, for people who don't know, he was like one of those emissaries, right?
You know, he would go from country to country trying to make deals and stuff like that.
He wants things to stay the way that they are.
He wants to look at elites who are the ones who should be controlling these things.
He would be terrified for me to say that out loud.
He wouldn't admit it, but he makes it very, very clear.
Nick, can we have a quick discussion?
How insane is it to say now in 2024 that the social movements of the 60s and 70s were wrong?
How do you make that argument for real?
Not only would you make that argument, but if you're going to say it's what's wrong with what's happened since then, Like, what we know now is that the movement's kind of died, and we lost all of that momentum that we had coming out of the 60s into the 70s anyway.
So it's like, it's only, his complaint's going to be like that they, that they normalized wearing jeans.
It's basically what he said.
That's right.
You know, and we don't wear the fedoras anymore.
I don't know what else you'd say because we don't really, I mean, thank God we do have it right now.
That's probably the other thing I'm responding to.
Because of this campus unrest, it does show me that at least, you know, some of these students care, but I think there's a long time where I would have figured they did submit and they did do all the things we're supposed to do, but we don't want to get into what they did in the 60s.
And as a result, you know, colleges suffered from that, I think, and, you know, the environment suffered.
So, I'm outraged.
That university system that he wants to go back to, people don't know this.
That blip in the 60s and 70s is not how universities were.
In the 40s and in the 50s, they were weapons factories.
They were where people went to figure out the weapons of the Cold War.
That's where they went to figure out the social sciences of the Cold War.
There's a reason why they wanted to get rid of ROTC programs and kick the CIA out of all of these schools.
People don't understand what these universities and colleges are actually doing.
They are part of the larger, broad system.
What Packer is saying is, like, students need to go around and, like, be sort of lost in an academic world as opposed to pushing back against these things.
And I'm sorry, but anybody in their right mind who goes out and says that the social revolutions of the 60s and 70s were wrong and created the problems that we're in right now, you are either a Republican or you should not be, like, publishing articles in liberal institutions.
I think it shows how things are changing, and I think that's, like, one of the more problematic things at play right now.
Right, and at the very end of the article is revealing in the sense that he's basically saying all these safe spaces that you have on campuses that make it all every one week, and all that stuff like that's what he started really probably end up rambling against is it and by the way it does feel like he's one sided anyway on this on this.
So even though he tries to kind of both sides a little bit, but you know, this has been a long time coming.
I think that the conservative movement since like the 90s probably earlier has been really obsessed with the college campus and how it's a hotbed for liberalism capital or lowercase l right and and it really doesn't necessarily like that at all you know what i mean and so and if there's anything wrong with trying to teach your fellow students how to behave and how to treat each other in a more humane way then why would that be such a horrible thing
but they're going to see it as being like weak and whatever not training them for whatever the real life and it's ridiculous no it's it's absolutely absurd i mean I mean, the university in America has become a corporation.
And one thing, just to note this, if anybody in the world starts screaming about how dare you have safe spaces, what they're actually screaming is, my safe space is what matters.
I don't want you saying things that upset me.
So, like, basically what he wants the university to be is a safe space for his ideology.
He doesn't want anybody around who's going to question that.
They don't want anybody around who's going to, like, bring into question, like, what they believe and how this system is odious to borrow a term from the 1960s, 1970s movement.
Like, they don't want to be confronted with that.
And I just...
Man, my head spun around.
Like, Linda Blair, Nick.
Like, I cannot believe you literally, like, you can tell me that you don't believe that the protest movement right now is good, and you can say that there are problems within it, and obviously there are going to be problems in any protest movement.
And again, I wanted to cry.
Like, there's no place for anti-Semitism in any society whatsoever.
But like, you can have problems with that.
Don't go after the 1960s, 1970s.
It has borne out that those people were not just correct, but that they were on the right side of history, and the fact that they lost is what's wrong with the moment.
Am I correct on that?
Absolutely.
I mean, the Vietnam War was ended in large part because of the protests that we saw on campuses and all manner of other things that were injustices.
So absolutely.
And, you know, and it was supposed to be this inspirational time where we come out of, by the way, you know, the ridiculous tumultuousness of the 60s themselves to a new a new age.
Right.
And it was there was very promising for a little while there.
I was born into that.
And but the idea that we're going to now rehash The 60s and that.
It's the same outrage we have about we have to rehash abortion and birth control pills and women's rights.
It's like how can we possibly be going backwards on these things?
This is like the established.
It's really confounding to me and it'll explain the death of rock and roll too.
They're gonna move past it.
That's the entire point.
It's to continually rewind this thing and get back before that entire period.
That's what all this is about.
Period.
Yeah, they want Lawrence Welk to be on the radio again and have that kind of society, I guess.
I don't know what to make of it.
It's crazy.
It's crazy making.
All right, everybody, that's going to bring us to the end of today's episode.
We will be back with our Weekender Edition on Friday.
A reminder to go to patreon.com slash my great podcast keeps us editorially and then an ad free and growing.
And plus you get the Friday episode, which I know that you'll listen to.
So let's go ahead and go with that.
All right, everybody, we will be back then on Friday.
