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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman answer Haden's question about the need to tear it all down to perhaps get to a better place eventually. They then discuss how Trump is advocating for the death penalty for drug offenses before addressing the latest in AI and politics.
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Welcome to the Weekender Edition of the Craig Podcast.
I'm here with Nick Allison.
How you doing, Nick Allison?
I'm doing pretty well, J.D.
Sexton.
I appreciate that.
Let's not make this a habit.
Okay, that's too much of a mouthful.
It's too much of a mouthful.
Again, not that I don't like the melodic tones of my name bouncing around on a podcast.
But how you doing, pal?
You know, I'm doing okay.
I think there might be a little bit of a... the anxiety might be a little bit lower today, perhaps.
Like some things maybe aren't bothering me as much as they would normally do politically and then life-wise.
So yeah, maybe there's something going on.
Summer...
Summer is here, the time is right.
I love summertime.
Summertime is a great season, although it's hot.
It's real, real hot.
I know that's not news, but it's hot.
It is hot, and I like hot, though.
I like hot, too.
I do well in hot.
Maybe for the weekend, we should introduce an anxiety meter.
Yeah.
People might not know this, but back in the day for the Chicago Cubs, they had this shortstop named Sean Dunstan, who didn't hit that well, and they had a Shano meter in the stands that would show where his batting average was, usually not on the right side of the ledger.
Maybe we need an anxiety meter.
Well, this is The Weekender.
I have a Sean Dunstan story I could add to this.
Should I do it now?
Make it brief, but I want to hear the Sean Dunstan story.
Alright, here's the briefest version.
This is literally five people listening to this.
Okay, we'll get through it.
We used to go to spring training in Mesa, Arizona for the Cubs.
I grew up right down the street from Ripley Field.
And so we would go to Arizona for a few of those years, and I remember You know, Jay Baller, who's another one of, I think Baller, maybe his name was, was a pitcher, and he was pitching to Sean Dunstan in the batting cage thing.
Back, you know, they don't have machines throwing the ball.
They have pitchers sometimes.
So I think I even call out, I'm like, like, strike him out, Jay!
Like, I was kind of all excited, because I knew who Jay was, and I wanted to give him some encouragement, but then Sean Dunstan turns and glared at me, because he's like, what the hell are you doing?
And I'm like, uh...
Hit a homer, Sean!
I will never forget that as a lapsed Cubs fan and someone who's had to endure quite a bit of Cubbery.
Sean Dunstan owns so much real estate in my mind, not just because of the Seano meter, but also just like the wild way that he played shortstop.
So it's when I'm when I'm passing from this mortal coil, I will think a lot about people like Sean Dunstan in a way that probably is unexpected.
Yeah, well, the Duke could throw from deep short and had a cannon.
Had an absolute canon.
Uh, by the way, there's no way for me to artfully segue from that.
Hey everybody, next week, actually a week from the day that we're recording this, we're recording this on Thursday, June 20th.
Uh, next Thursday, June 27th, we are supposed to have a presidential debate between Joseph Robinette Biden and Donald John Trump.
I have my doubts about whether or not this thing is going to take place.
Nick thinks it will.
I'm about 50-50 coin flipping it.
Here's the thing, everybody.
If there is a presidential debate next week, Thursday, the 27th of June, we will be covering it immediately live after that debate.
We will be taping the weekender.
That means patrons can come and hang out with us, see our immediate reaction.
I promise you'll be better than what's on the news.
All you gotta do is go to patreon.com slash my great podcast.
Nick, this is basically the early, early kickoff of main presidential campaign season.
That's what we're looking at now.
That means that we're going to be doing our job in the way that only this podcast can do.
I think that I would put our coverage of the presidential campaigns against anybody else, including our prognostication and analysis.
Before we get into the week that is supposed to kick this thing off, if Donald Trump comes through, I wanted to take a chance to sort of take the temperature, the anxiety meter, as we've been talking about.
We got this email from a listener named Hayden.
Of course, we did a mailbag last week.
This came in a little bit late, but I wanted to go ahead and start this episode off with it, and I think this is a good prompt for everything that we have to talk about today.
Hayden says, I miss the mailbag, but I do wonder what you all think of something I'm seeing a lot online and amongst progressive slash leftist friends.
Many people are saying they're not going to vote Democrat again because of the genocide and Biden's support of Israel.
They also talk about how material conditions have not gotten better for the average person, despite a lot of bragging by the Biden campaign.
What do you think when people are saying things like, we have to let this country and democracy fall to pieces in order to rebuild it?
Because I don't disagree with the problems they're voicing, but also the process of everything going to hell and needing to be rebuilt sounds like a death sentence for many of us.
I feel like we really may get more years of Trump, and maybe there's no coming back from that.
So, Nick, I certainly have thoughts about this.
I want to hear yours.
Let's talk a little bit about Hayden's question, because I think it's really important, particularly where we are in this process, and also how we're feeling about this campaign as we're heading into the main thrust of the season.
I mean sure you can ask Susan Sarandon what she thinks about this because that's why she was basically one like almost support Trump because she felt like we needed to have this complete wipe out of the system and rebuild it.
But the length of time it would take to do that means so much suffering in the meantime.
And I don't think that's fair to anybody, much less people who might not live, you know, much longer than, you know, they could take 25 years to see some sort of rebuilding of the country, which is why, in my mind, the tearing down thing just isn't realistic.
And it's time to, in that progressive way, begin to enact, you know, legislation and policies that will move us closer and closer to what would be better versions of all different, you know, systems that we have in place.
That seems to be the most pragmatic way to do it.
What do you think?
Well, so that type of philosophy in a lot of circles is called accelerationism.
The idea is that we have a situation that is really, really bad.
There aren't a lot of solutions that are in place, particularly with the way that our system and the status quo looks.
As a result, some people do believe the best thing possible would get someone like a Donald Trump, an authoritarian, into power in order to crystallize the problem.
I think there's some problems with that idea.
First and foremost being that there are so many vulnerable people in this country who are going to be absolutely crushed if Donald Trump becomes president, if Project 2025 comes into fruition, if the neoliberal authoritarian agenda goes into full force.
On top of that, you better be careful what you wish for, because if you plunge into an authoritarian dystopia, it's really hard to get out of them, particularly as the trajectory of American political philosophy moves further and further right.
What I say is this.
I have a lot of people of color that I am fond of.
I have a lot of women and young women that I am fond of.
I have a lot of gay and trans people that I am fond of.
I have a lot of immigrants that I am fond of.
I do not think it is a good idea to play games with their well-being.
Particularly in red states that are gaining a lot of... We'll talk in a second about what's going on in Louisiana.
They have just become laboratories of authoritarianism.
I do not want to give power to these people.
I understand the mindset.
Like a lot of them are rebelling against the liberal or sort of moderate idea that Joe Biden and the Democratic Party will save us.
I've been a loud critic of that idea.
I believe that we have a duopoly that is largely run by a neoliberal consensus that needs to be broken.
I personally would rather organize against a Joe Biden second term.
I would rather be in an, like the idea that just because a Democrat is in power, people are going to suddenly say everything's okay.
We've seen a lot of people do that, but the dissatisfaction with Biden, the dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party, what I'm seeing is a lot of people are starting to understand that the Democratic Party, like every other politician, every other party is not a savior, right?
That something has to change.
Where I'm at is I think that Donald Trump, and again, he is a symptom of a larger problem.
Him being in power again creates such a noxious, poisonous environment that, again, I am planning on voting for Joe Biden.
I'm going to take a long... I just got a new showerhead.
Let me tell you, Nick, the pressure on that thing is very, very strong.
I'm going to camp out underneath of it.
I'm going to wake up the next day and I'm going to get back to the hard work, the hard, necessary work.
That's how I look at it.
How do you feel about the election right now, where we are before this debate?
Well, I have a counterpoint to what you said, and I think to what I said, because I've often thought about, you know, when Martin Luther King was marching for civil rights in the 60s, there was this notion of, whoa, whoa, whoa, you gotta, it's gotta be, you gotta take your time.
These things don't happen overnight.
We gotta slowly get there.
And in my mind, why would, People of color have to wait.
Why would we have to have 10 years of people still being oppressed for all the time to finally get civil rights moving, right?
So there is this notion that there are certain aspects of our society that need to be changed right away.
And I guess the question then is, it's not necessarily tearing it down to then get to where we need to go.
So that's the interesting balance on that one.
So I was just sort of thinking on those terms because I don't want to come off where I'm a guy who's always saying, whoa, whoa, we got everything's got to go slowly and everyone's got to get enough people on board and that kind of thing.
So that's that's the big difference there.
But again, if we're talking strictly about, you know, the way the government functions, that's another I guess that's the separates the difference there, which is why.
which is why you got to figure out a way to not like when the Republicans want to get rid of Obamacare, they have nothing to replace it.
Like, so now you're going to have people dying until somehow someone wakes up one morning and goes, oh shit, we don't have any, anybody, any way to help people.
Um, so that kind of just, uh, addresses that you did have a question for me though, about the election.
Yeah.
How do you feel about the state of play right now where we are in this campaign?
Um, that's another interesting question.
And I think everyone's sort of bringing their hands.
I I think, you know, I would be lying to you if I told you that, you know, Trump doesn't seem to be favored right now.
It seems like he's got some version of, you know, wind behind his sails.
But I also sort of feel like we tend to forget that it's a vociferous and loud minority that seems bigger than it is, and certainly we're not going to get the true numbers about rally size and all that stuff from them anyway.
So I'm choosing to sort of just be pragmatic and remember that with women's rights being on the ballot as much as anything else, there's going to be a big turning out of people like we saw in 2020.
So that's what I'm focusing on.
That's what I'm trying to keep myself convinced of.
Um, the polls lately in the fallout of Trump's conviction have moved things around a little bit.
If I had to put a number on it and, you know, listen, take this with a grain of salt, I would say it's a coin flip election right now, which says more about the health of this country than it does anything else.
But if I had to put an actual number on it, I would say Biden 53, Donald Trump 47.
That's where I would say things are right now.
But again, I mean, listen, we lived through 2016.
We saw, like, how weird of a campaign season it is.
We have a president who is older, who definitely makes missteps.
I mean, listen, Nick, we're not even going to cover it on today's show, but Benjamin Netanyahu basically was like, thanks for all the weapons and the money.
Now I'm going to stab you between the ribs.
I mean, like, things are weird and they get weird all the time.
Things are changing so quickly.
I don't know where this thing is going.
If there is a debate that gets held next week, I certainly and a lot of other analysts are going to be watching it, trying to get a sense of what this race is going to look like outside of the madness that has already played out.
But yeah, I definitely, I don't feel good about this election.
I'll just say that.
And the polling really doesn't matter because we're talking about the 30,000 people in three states, so 50,000 people are going to decide this thing.
We don't know.
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