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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman have a jam packed show where they discuss more problematic flag waving from Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito. Then they run down a veritable grab bag of GOP ridiculousness from Marjorie Taylor Green insisting that Biden wants Trump assassinated to Dr. Phil going full anti-woke.
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Do you know why I popped an energy drink on The Weekender?
Generally, it's because people, you need energy, I think, is what you're saying.
I need a little pep in my step.
I wanted to bring it, and I wanted to bring it hard this episode.
This is The Weekender edition of the McCrae Podcast.
I'm Judah Sexton.
I'm here with Nick Halseman.
You don't drink energy drinks at all, do you?
Listen, I just had a Coke because I needed some energy myself, so we're on the same wavelength.
That's your pep, though.
But you're not gonna, like, crush a Red Bull or a Monster, correct?
No, I would anticipate that my heart would be fluttering and all sorts of craziness, because that happens when I have too much caffeine anyway.
You're a sensitive lad.
My heart is sensitive, yes.
Yeah, my heart pours out for everyone.
That's so sweet.
All right, everybody.
Well, Nick, his sensitive heart and my tender organ as well are going to go through just a cavalcade of stories.
That's why I needed the energy today.
We have so many things to touch on.
I just want to tell people, for the people who are listening to the preview, this is going to be a weird-ass episode of The Weekender.
And if you are thinking of coming along, This would probably be a good place to start.
Go over to patreon.com slash Mark Craig Podcast.
Nick, I can't believe that this is the opening story of the show.
We had recently covered Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was flying an upside-down American flag, a distressed American flag, you know, following January 6th and the so-called stolen election of 2020.
The New York Times getting after his ass, Nick.
It turns out that in the summer of 2023, at Alito's vacation home in New Jersey, he displayed what is called the Pine Tree Flag.
And this is a flag, some people might have seen it, others might not.
If you unfortunately swim around in the morass of right-wing authoritarianism like me, you happen to see this all the time, you understand what it is.
It's a flag that shows a pine tree along with the words, an appeal to heaven.
This is a revolutionary flag that originally flew during the American Revolution.
It has now been tied to Moggism, the hard right, Christian nationalism.
I wonder if Alito's wife flew it and he had no idea what was going on.
So much to unpack.
I'm so glad that you're here, Jared, because this flag, you know, that you can provide even the slightest bit of context to what this means is important, because I don't think anybody really knows what this is.
And I think that it's really telling, in my mind, That the initial story by a purportedly smart man, right?
Alito was supposed to be smart, right?
I mean, that's what they tell us.
If you probably go in his office behind him on the wall, there's probably lots of Latin in frame stuff, right?
Oh, I was assuming it would just be like a Trump 2024, 2028, 2030 sign.
But, you know.
Yeah, right.
I'm sure a picture with him and Trump, like, you know, on a deal.
Pointing to a sign that says we're in lockstep ideologically and I don't support democracy.
Thumbs up.
Exactly, exactly.
With like a Mar-a-Lago roast beef in the background?
Yeah, that might be a little wordy of a sign, but something to that effect, yes.
So the initial story though, that his wife did it in response to the C-word, really starts to fall apart now because clearly he is aware of like this other flag and clearly there's an ideology here.
But the worst part about it is that to make up the story basically admits that he knows it was wrong that he did it, that he had it that way.
And that this could be something.
This might end up leading down a path where we find some more stuff and then maybe we find out, you know, impeachable things.
Well, I mean, I wish I shared your hope on that matter.
Nick, I know you've been in a deep, deep coma for a few months.
Just let me point out that we have a Supreme Court justice who was completely bought by a billionaire named Harlan Crowe in exchange for I don't, probably at this point we're going to find out it was a few float trips down a river, you know, like just basically for polos, shits and giggles, and maybe some RV, you know, apparatuses.
I don't trust that this is going to necessarily lead to an impeachment of Alito in a sane world.
You would at least have hearings on this.
You would at least have a Democratic Party that would talk about it constantly, that would bring it up as well as what the consequences of it might be.
Right now we've already had Chuck Schumer, who, man, he is just coming through on this one.
His quotes about the upside-down flag, he said he had, quote, some doubt.
about whether or not Alito was impartial.
He keeps telling people, like, the Democrats are talking about this.
To borrow a parlance, a term from somebody that we have covered, I assume the Democrats are looking into it strongly, right?
They're spending some real time looking at this thing strongly.
There's no way that you are flying This particular flag, Nick, right now, and this was in 2023, there's no way in 2023 that you are flying this flag as a member of the conservative establishment and you don't know what it means.
There's no way.
And by the way, to give people historical background, this was a Revolutionary War flag.
And I want to make this clear because, Nick, we need to be careful because when people talk about the founding of a country and they talk about God and religion and Christianity, they get it wrong.
This was an ideological front that basically was trying to appeal to people to say that God wants America to be free, God loves liberty, which, you know, the founders didn't actually believe.
Most of them were deist, if not, you know, outright opponents of Christianity itself.
Like, they have taken this and they know that this is a religious appeal.
It is a Christian nationalist symbol.
It is a hard far-right symbol.
There is no defending this whatsoever.
Unless he wants to throw his wife under the bus again.
And if he does want to do that, I mean, good for you, man.
I hope you enjoy the couch.
Well, I'm sure she's a good trad wife who would be more than happy to be thrown under the bus in the service of her man.
Now, here's the other thing is, this is not necessarily about money, right?
Even though a lot of it is, they're rewarded, right?
Ted Thomas has been rewarded, Alito's been rewarded.
There is monetary benefit from being a Supreme Court Justice, which is a complete, and it ends up becoming a real big issue of, of recusal when they see these, you know, cases by the people who are paying them.
But I don't think it's about money, necessarily.
I think these are true believers, right?
I think Alito and Thomas, and we'll have to get into what Thomas is thinking, they believe it so fervently, as of every fiber of their being, that of course they wouldn't recuse themselves of any January 6th cases, because there isn't any appearance of bias or anything.
Like, this is just me.
I am this.
This is who I am.
This is what I believe.
And this is why I am here, right?
So that's what's kind of dangerous about this.
There isn't any notion of Applying the law fairly and reading the text of the Constitution and then using that.
It is 100% what they have been led to believe, what they choose to believe, which is that this is a divine route that I've taken and I have a standard to uphold and nobody under penalty of death can get in my way.
Yes, so you had said sort of sarcastically, Alito's supposed to be smart.
I think there are different types of ways of being intelligent.
For instance, Nick, Donald Trump, would you say that Donald Trump is an intelligent man?
No!
No, he's not.
But do you know how he's intelligent?
He's intelligent in how he's able to grift people, how he's able to create sort of these swindling opportunities.
He's also intelligent one other way, and it's through experience.
It's organized crime.
He knows really well how to go ahead and hide the things that he does that are wrong, right?
Like, you know, we've seen that time and time again, how he has committed obvious crimes, but he's known how to sort of like move things around.
Alito here.
Look at these flags, Nick.
One is an upside-down American flag, right?
The other is this Revolutionary War era flag.
You can pretend like, well, my wife flew it because this was going on.
It doesn't say Trump 2020, right?
It doesn't say stop the steal.
This other flag, it doesn't say stop the steal.
It doesn't say, you know, go Brandon or let's go Brandon, right?
Like it's not overtly contemporarily political.
So what you're actually looking at is a person who knows full and well what they're doing.
They know what these flags are.
They know what they mean.
They know what the metaphorical intent is, but he's doing it in such a way as to skirt even the slimmest sort of ideological boundaries of the court.
And the problem here, Nick, is that if the Democratic Party had any interest in going after the Supreme Court, which they don't, because the Supreme Court, again, is sort of a keystone in keeping together the integrity of institutions.
They don't want to mess with that.
They don't want to.
They really, really, really don't even want to threaten the court.
You know, they could go after them and play hardball.
They could drag Alito in front of a committee.
They could do an investigation.
They could, you know, find things that are a little bit, like, more overt than this.
But they don't have an interest to.
Because he has done the absolute bare minimum to hide what is happening while also just, you know, proudly admitting what he believes.
Well, for what it's worth, as a procedural notion, it's Congress that has to start the impeachment process, not the Senate.
So Chuck Schumer, sit this one out, okay?
Thank you.
And then also, for what it is worth, Hakeem Jeffries, a few hours ago, did come out and then insist that he must recuse himself of every case that goes before him that's related to January 6th.
Did he in that statement make any inroads into how he's going to make sure that Alito recuses himself?
Yeah, I mean that's the procedural part I might have left out.
Oh, that's weird, Nick!
It's almost like a lot of this is just performance, but that's okay.
Right, right.
Is he intimating they would like to begin the process of investigating?
The only problem here is that there are a couple of seats short of control of Congress, so they can't do it, right?
So there is a legitimate sort of reason why they wouldn't.
Nick, I would love to stop drinking energy drinks because I think they're probably not very good for you.
You would argue the Democrats have control of Congress right now.
They would not begin a process to look into this.
No, they absolutely wouldn't.
They, you know, what I could see them doing, and this is unfortunate, is I could see them holding some sort of a hearing, which is like, they would title it something like upholding the legal systems, Impartiality or you know what I mean?
It would be some kind of a little sham thing.
It would probably end up on MSNBC on a D block and that would be it.
That would probably be about it right now.
I mean, I get it.
You know, the Supreme Court is very popular right now.
Very popular.
Very popular.
It would be a mistake politically to go after anybody on that court, I'm sure.
Yeah, I'm sure the people would absolutely hate that.
By the way, in Supreme Court news, a 6-3 decision lets South Carolina's overtly racist white supremacist voting map go.
What's fun here, Nick, is that Alito wrote the statement on it.
Also, by the way, this is great.
They basically alluded to the idea that the court has no power to make states, you know, have fair voting maps.
And then Clarence Thomas, who woke up from, you know, a billionaire-sponsored nap, he wrote some things, Nick, that basically cast light on the possibility of getting rid of things like Brown v. Board of Education and desegregation.
You know, laid the foundation for those types of cases to be brought forth so a 6-3 majority can get rid of basically any racial progress in the United States.
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