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 the delay in Trump's Georgia case - a self inflicted gaffe by Fulton County DA Fani Willis. They then pull apart a New York TImes article that interviewed a number of undecided voters to figure out how that is even possible and how far they're willing to stretch their brains. They finish on the border and Biden's executive order that pushes him closer to Trump's policies.
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Welcome to the Weekender Edition of the Crank Podcast.
I'm Jerry J. Heist.
I'm here with Nick Hauselman.
Nick, how are you?
How's your weekend looking?
It's gonna be warm, finally.
It's gonna be warm.
So I'll be excited to kind of do outdoor activities, perhaps.
And so, yeah, maybe that'll make me feel better.
But I don't know.
General unease all around has been making, you know, anxiety levels are higher than normal.
It's a little frustrating right now.
Unease?
What?
The country's going great!
What are you talking about?
I know!
The country's going great!
The world is going awesome!
Everything is great!
Uh, I went to the... I don't even want to tell you what I went... I bought steak dinner for, like, my family for, like, four.
I won't even tell you what it cost, but holy moly!
Forgive me for ever pretending that the, uh, inflation was going down.
Thanks, Joe Brandon.
Am I right?
Yeah, you can't go out and buy your entire family a steak dinner anymore.
I mean, things are great.
Russia's doing military exercises in the Caribbean, which we'll get into.
It's all wonderful.
We got a banger of a show today.
We got so many different things that we got to get into.
Go to patreon.com slash mccraigpodcast.
You'll gain access to the full weekender.
You'll listen to the preview.
You want to listen to this.
I promise.
We have so much that we have to get into.
On top of that, you support the show.
Keep us ad-free.
Editorially independent.
You keep us growing.
You join the community.
We have all kinds of... We have a debate coming up, Nick!
Which we are going to cover and react to.
We give you analysis you're not going to get anywhere else.
Patreon.com slash Montclair Podcast.
And just last week, we released the entire episode for everybody to hear so they can get a sense of what that live show sounds like.
And I think people are really digging it.
People loved it.
They keep coming over.
They say, you know, we got a taste of this thing.
We have to have the entire dinner, if you will, without the expense of having to go like young Nick Haussleman and drop his AMX Gold, or what's the highest one now?
Is it black?
Platinum.
Platinum?
Sure.
Platinum.
Cool.
Alright, everybody.
So, before we get going, we gotta talk.
We are recording this on June 6th.
For your enjoyment on Friday, we need to talk about the 80th anniversary of D-Day, which was the beginning of the liberation of the continent of Europe from Nazi domination.
This is one of those major turning points of history.
I don't need to tell you.
I think the movies and your teachers and your grandparents and everybody has done a decent enough job of telling you.
This was not a foregone conclusion that D-Day was going to work.
The greatest invasion assault of all time.
You know, it's incredible that it did work.
We're all very lucky we live in a post-Third Reich world, although we're dealing with some of the remnants and consequences of that.
This is a good time to sit for a moment and sort of reflect on that.
Nick, what are your thoughts 80 years out from D-Day?
Well, you know, by the way, in the speeches that we saw today from Biden, Macron, and everybody that was there, it was really a powerful moment in time when everyone came together to commemorate this.
Obviously, you know, there are some cultural touchstones that we associate, like the movie Saving Private Ryan, which even, you know, now the people who had survived that had attested to how real that felt.
You remember the feeling I had when I finally watched the movie about the Civil War?
Glory.
And how they just charged straight ahead into all the volleying of, you know, they didn't change tactics from the time, you know, before guns.
Have you read anywhere, has anyone ever had any kind of looking at the strategic attack on D-Day and Omaha Beach?
Have you read anywhere where someone with like the Naval College, whatever, knowledge had criticized the tactics that they used at all?
There wasn't a lot to do.
Literally, and that's the incredible thing about D-Day.
And by the way, Nick, if you want information on the war tactics of D-Day, let me tell you, there are at least 25 magazines on the newsstand right now that you can go and enjoy.
God knows how many books.
You know, one of the amazing things is that they ran straight into the fire.
Like, you get off that boat, you don't know what's coming except for bullets, and maybe you'll survive, maybe your buddy will survive.
An incredible act of heroism.
There's no other way to put it just and I always try and tell people that, you know, we have a misunderstanding of what bravery is.
Bravery isn't like not being afraid, you know, like there's nothing brave about not being afraid and, you know, knowing everything will be fine.
It's being afraid and going ahead and doing the thing, and to get off those boats and do that.
On top of that, to fight the Nazis, to fight the Japanese fascistic empire, to fight the fascists themselves.
What a debt of gratitude we have to these people.
Unfortunately, we dropped the ball immediately before the war had even ended.
We went ahead and allied with the Nazis and the fascists because we were more afraid of the communists.
Now we live in a world, you're right, Biden, Macron, all these people giving speeches, they say, you know, we need to be on our guard, we need to make sure that this doesn't happen again.
Meanwhile, here we are!
It's happening again.
We're watching a right-wing authoritarian movement sweep around the world.
I would love if it was more than just speeches, if, like, people were taking, like, actual action to address the things that they say they know are lurking in the shadows.
But we need to look back at this, and we need to recognize what it was.
Two things.
A really quick Google search indicates that they did try to drop bombs on all the, you know, machine gun towers that were mowing everybody down.
Overshot their targets.
Tons and tons of armaments completely.
That failed, which is what I was wondering.
Why they just couldn't just take out the entire beach with bombs.
But did you just say that they were willing to partner with the Nazis because they were so afraid of the communists?
Is that what you said?
Yeah, unfortunately.
So, does that mean, like, when they helped all the Nazis get out of Germany to, like, Argentina and whatnot?
Well, not only did they help them get out of Argentina, they helped them come to America to help our weapons programs, our rocket programs, and then on top of that, the United States and Great Britain, after fighting these people, they then went ahead and helped them take over countries in order to suppress communists and socialists and leftist elements.
So, you know, it was, we were more than fine to work with them as soon as they took the armbands off.
And, unfortunately, we decided that fascism and Nazism was fine as long as they were our fascists and our Nazis.
The consequences of that have been immeasurable, and that's the world that we live in now.
And to signal what we're going to talk about a little bit later in the show, there's a reason why a lot of people in the South American countries are continually coming here for a better life, and it's because of a lot of that overthrowing of governments that we spent a lot of time doing in the 50s with the CIA anyway.
It's fascinating how all these things are as a circle, basically.
Yeah, it is.
And you know, what's the worst part about it, Nick, is like so much of this could have been totally prevented.
You know, I, there was actually, and you know, Nick, I don't spend a lot of time praising articles in The Atlantic on this show because of what they now represent and the viewpoint that they give people.
There was a good article about the transferring of hegemony from Great Britain to the United States through D-Day.
I thought it was a really, really good point.
But there was an opportunity to not embrace hegemony.
There was an opportunity to build off the partnership of the Soviet Union and the Allies and to create a better world.
God knows what would have happened if, you know, Franklin D. Roosevelt would have survived, if we would have had medication that could have lowered, you know, his blood pressure at the time.
We don't know what the world could have been, but we do know that the world that we live in now was shaped by those quote-unquote pragmatic decisions to work with Nazis, to shield them, to work with fascists, to shield them.
It has given us this.
So the fact that that circle that you're talking about has wound its way around, that's not accidental.
It's based on a lot of different choices that have been made, and we kicked the can down the road a very long time.
It turns out you can only make so many deals with authoritarianism before you're an authoritarian yourself.
It just kind of struck me that so many people, I mean, you know, the millions and millions of people who are willing to vote for Trump, and the vociferousness of their arguments and their presence on social media, it mirrors what we saw in, you know, with the fascist movement in the 30s.
The full-throated support by Americans of the German government up until World War II.
So that's why we keep ringing this bell, because it mirrors exactly what happened through this course, and we're in that same sort of timeline now.
It really, again, this unease I'm talking about isn't related to the weather in LA, it's related to that.
Yeah, and I think it's an earned unease, which again is one of the reasons why I'm glad that we do this show and that we do it the way that we do.
We say we don't want to look away from this stuff.
It's very easy to say if Donald Trump could be gotten rid of in some way, shape, or form that we could, you know, suddenly get back on some path, but that path is studded with this.
And it shouldn't be.
Like, we should not be in a position again where we're dealing with another fascistic movement.
Speaking of Trump, we got some rough news here.
Down in Georgia, where I live for a decade and, you know, miss every now and then, I've got some thoughts about it, but man, there's some messed up stuff going down there.
The state of Georgia has halted the election subversion trial that Donald Trump was a part of.
The Georgia Court of Appeals has ruled that they have to rule on Fulton County District Attorney Fannie Willis's ability to go forward with this trial.
That is a side effect of some alleged impropriety.
There's some rough stuff there for people who, well, we don't have a video component of the weekender.
Nick just spent that entire lead in rubbing his eyes in frustration.
It looks, Nick, like they have a deadline of March 2025, which, according to my watch, is two months after Donald Trump could presumably become the next president of the United States of America.
There's no telling if they'll rule on it, but this is a major setback.
This was something that you and I talked about on an earlier show when the scandal started emerging.
This sucks all the way around, and here we are.
I don't remember exactly what you said, but I know you can go back and hear me say that this was going to derail this case.
I said it had the possibility because here we are.
And people might not remember the impropriety you're talking about was an affair that she had with the person who was on the staff of investigating for the case.
And then, you know, who paid for what when they were having their, you know, their interactions, romantic interactions?
It seemed like it had nothing to do with the case.
It doesn't have anything to do with the case.
But, you know, in these kind of situations, the scrutiny that goes under, it does not matter.
They had a choice whether they needed to engage in this kind of relationship while knowing how appropriate it was going to be or not or wait until the thing was over before they did this.
And she couldn't.
They didn't.
And it's mind boggling.
You know, the sense that New York has already been decided and he's already been convicted.
That was the weakest case of all of these things.
And cut to now, we're going to find out that none of the other cases are going to go through before the election at this rate.
And if that happens and he wins, then none of those cases are ever finished.
And we haven't discussed what a lot of people in this country would feel about that because I, shockingly, you know, there are people who think, I guess, that the president is above the law.
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