Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman dissect what happened when Donald Trump returned to the scene of his earicide and invited Elon Musk to speak in front of a huge crowd. They then have to drag themselves through the morass that is the GOP lying about FEMA's response to hurricane Helene in order to score cheap political points. And in the utterly-not-shocking department, Oklahoma is forcing schools to buy a Trump branded bible to funnel millions into Trump's pocket.
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I'm here with Nick Houselman. Nick, I've got wasps in my house.
So many wasps.
Is this code? Are you speaking in code?
No code! Actual stinging wasps.
I've been stung by a wasp.
I'm fighting wasps.
I'm dealing with wasps.
Not fun. Ah, I'm sorry.
You have to get the Ant-Man. No.
Well, Ant-Man and the Wasp, they kind of get together.
They get along. I don't know. But other than that, there might be somebody you can call, I think, to take care of this.
I know it feels like a waste of time and money to call the exterminator to take care of a bunch of wasps.
I thought we could live in peace and harmony.
We can't. Can't do it.
No, definitely not. You call.
Why are you doing this show with me right now?
I'm at war with wasps.
by the way, it's my birthday and I'm fighting wasps. That's my life right now is wasp fighting.
I would think that a birthday fighting wasps pretty much encapsulates most people's lives
these days. That's 2024 ad. That's exactly what it is. But I'm here with my good friend Nick
Halseman. We are here to talk about the news and the developments and my god, do we have a lot of
them. Before we do a reminder go to go to patreon.com slash my great podcast. It supports the show.
We remain ad-free because we take this job seriously.
It keeps us ad-free, it keeps us editorially independent, and it keeps us growing.
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It also gets you the weekly weekender edition on Friday and all of the exclusive post-debate, post-event, post-election analysis that we have come to be known for.
Go over there and do it.
Nick, we got to start in Butler, Pennsylvania.
With Donald Trump going back to the scene of the attempted assassination, you would think maybe he would go there, he would express himself, he would say thank you to people, he would have grown as a human being.
But roughly a month outside of the election, he decided to bring on stage one of the biggest assholes in the world, Elon Musk.
And here is Elon Musk making his presence known.
Hi everyone. As you can see, I'm not just MAGA, I'm dark MAGA. Oh, he's a hoot.
He's a real hoot and a holler, Nick.
And by the way, in case you didn't understand what I just said, everybody, he declared himself dark MAGA because he's wearing a black Make America Great Again hat.
But also, for anybody who pays any attention to any of this stuff, we know that that is code for being an authoritarian.
And that is what he is announcing by doing a joint appearance with Donald Trump.
I'm so glad that these two assholes founded.
I guess. Good times.
It is gross. There's a picture of him hanging out with Trump in the tents beforehand.
I mean, you can kind of tell.
I have a feeling that Musk is the kind of guy that Trump probably cannot stand.
Can't stand. He talks too much and he just doesn't listen to Trump, doesn't let Trump talk enough.
I mean, they're both sort of along the same branch of personality.
And so it kind of becomes clear now why Musk bought Twitter in the first place.
This wasn't about free speech like he pretended.
There's even a tweet he had where we have to have it biased so that both the far left and the far right would be equally upset.
That's how it would be balanced. And in reality, there's nothing about what he's doing that's balanced at all on this site.
And it's now created to the point where I would like to get off.
Can you help me do this?
Personally, I'm still behind enemy lines trying to communicate and educate and organize wherever I can, so I can't get off of it.
Nick, I think that you can go and delete your account.
I think it would probably feel good.
A reminder that this guy bought Twitter in order to completely
change discourse and move things.
We're going to talk later about conspiracy theories from Hurricane Helene.
He has created like basically a crisis out of thin air, just like
he does over and over again.
A reminder in all of this, that Elon Musk has bought his way into the Trump campaign.
He has thrown ungodly amounts of money at the Trump campaign.
One, because he wanted J.D. Vance on the ticket because he is the biggest puppet of the tech fascists that you can find.
But also, two, he has now engineered with Donald Trump and found in Donald Trump one of the biggest shills around who is more than happy to just slap his name on whatever it is, no matter what it is, no matter whether it's real or not.
Sometimes it's better if it's not real.
We'll get to that in a little bit as well.
And it has given Musk basically an opportunity as an immigrant in this country.
Nick, I want to point that out as an immigrant in this country
who is demonizing other immigrants.
It has now given him the chance as an unelected figure to be on the precipice of having unbelievable amounts of
control over the United States government.
Well, let's not forget that when you say he bought Twitter, He needed a lot of investors to
He sure did. Would you like to mention a few of those investors, Nick?
Yeah, a few of these guys are Russian oligarchs directly connected to Putin.
Also, Saudi Arabia, and also, just so everybody knows, Sean P. Diddy Combs.
Oh, I didn't know that.
Oh, you didn't know that?
Yeah, they're good friends. They're good friends.
No question that you could see him sort of bouncing around his tippy toes across a party of ditties without, you know, having the best time of his life.
But that's the other thing is, you know, Trump seems to me to be beholden to Russia to some degree.
We've kind of seen enough evidence of that.
And it does feel like there's a direct connection like that with Musk as well.
From him interfering with the Ukrainian attack on Russian soil earlier on with his Starlinks to just a lot of his rhetoric coming out.
So, you know, if you want to accept that at face value, then you always want to imagine that the reason why he took Twitter over was to cause enough chaos heading into this election to, you know, give cover to Trump.
And that's if that wasn't his intention, it's what's happening either way.
And that none of it is good.
Well, one of the things that we need to understand about Elon Musk is that when you get to a level of wealth and power that Elon Musk has gotten to, and as you become an essential part of U.S. government structure, including technology, military, industrial complex activities, basically at this point, he has got as much power as he possibly could have had without buying a presidential candidate.
Right? That's the next thing that happens.
On top of that, the economic incentives.
I mean, we again, famously, you called that Elon Musk was, as he was going to the right, that he was going to come out,
that there were reasons that he was going to go to the right.
His economic incentives, his political and social incentives
have all driven him to this.
I think the election is a way stop on the way to other things.
On top of him being given...
He's already talked Trump into giving him this appointed government funds job.
On top of that, he is creating a right-wing conspiracy, loony-brained media network with Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, Andrew Tate.
The list goes on and on and on.
So what we have seen here...
What we've seen here, Nick, is something that I was really, really afraid of for the past few years, which is as oligarchs grow, they are going to become not just authoritarian, but they're going to find inroads into power.
They're not going to get elected.
Elon Musk isn't going to win anything constitutionally.
He can't be president of the United States of America.
They're not popular, so they have to find inroads in.
And watching him on stage with Donald Trump It's like watching a wedding of ugly clans coming together in order to forge a path forward.
And watching the two of them do this, for me, I'm going to remember this for a very long time, because it is important.
And it is another moment, another milestone on the road that we're going down.
Yeah, Musk doesn't care about the United States.
He doesn't care about the policy or government.
All he wants is a way to get rid of regulations where he can make more money.
And you'd see a lot of the people railing against regulations.
And, you know, I get it.
If I want to start a business and I got to deal with regulations, it tends to be a little bit harder.
But, you know, we can't lose sight of the fact that we have those regulations because it tends to prevent companies from killing people.
Wait, do you know who was in favor of that, Nick, just for the record?
Who? Adam Smith, the so-called father of capitalism.
He wanted the government to be able to regulate monopolies.
He knew that this was dangerous.
So this is actually counter to the original philosophy of capitalism, which, by the way, was misguided because basically everyone knew it was going to lead to stuff like this in the first place.
Right. When you get unfettered pure capitalism, you're going to get, you know, government wanting to kill people and being authoritarian.
It's almost like the natural outcome of that, which is why, built in, we have some socialist, you know, policies to actually help people as they generate enough revenue and become this, you know, the greatest power we've ever seen in the face of the earth.
You know, it's incumbent upon the government to help people's lives.
You know, have you lived your entire life, Jared, not never making like one mistake in your life?
I have made more than a few.
Yeah. And you hear Republicans and they behave like as if they know they've never made a mistake.
Not once. Bad choice.
Their lives have been perfect, whatever.
So they don't need any help from anybody else.
And that's that kind of detachment from reality that makes it so disgusting because it turns them into, yeah, mini fascists all across the board.
So speaking of making mistakes, a little bit more background between this just absolutely awful marriage between Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
Nick, real fast, I would love to hear Donald Trump, the salesman, selling us some real Elon Musk garbage.
We will reach Mars before the end of my term.
Elon promised me he was going to do that.
I don't know. Can you do that?
Stand up. Can we do that?
He wants to reach...
I think he's going to do it.
JD, work on him.
Work on him. JD is working on Elon.
Now, he told me that we're going to win and he's going to reach Mars by the end of our term, which is a big thing, before China, before anybody, right?
And my money's on that guy right there.
Oh man, I gotta tell you, this clip is rich, Nick.
It is just, it is a perfect, perfect encapsulation of Donald Trump and Elon Musk and the bullshit that they sell.
Nick, what do you think estimates are on when we're going to reach Mars in terms of like trying to have some sort of a project on Mars?
When do you think that is? I mean, humans to Mars, I think, right?
25 years, I think, would be the minimum.
Like, if this were a moonshot where we put all of our resources and everything into it, it wouldn't be until the 2030s is when it would be.
I also, personally, and I'm not going to talk very much about it, like, I know people who were involved in the space program, and they have said that, like, really, if they had to put a number on it, they would say probably the 2040s.
So, first of all, we're not going to get to Mars during Donald Trump's presidency.
That is absolutely asinine.
But Elon Musk will certainly, as the government finance czar, will take a bunch of money from everything that we could possibly have and any remaining social programs, and he'll go ahead and put it in his own pocket under the auspices of getting to Mars.
That's fine.
But remember, and this is something we've talked about, Nick, Donald Trump can't keep his mouth shut.
He talks constantly and reveals things every time he talks.
JD Vance work on him.
Why?
Because JD Vance is sort of the go-between between the Trump campaign and the tech fascists.
That's why he's saying that.
He also says my money's on him.
Why does he say my money's on him?
Because Elon Musk's money is on Donald Trump.
The entire game is given away here and it is so obvious what's happening
that it blows the imagination that they think they're getting anything over on anybody,
except for our media's not really covering this.
Yeah, I mean, Musk is probably going, tee-hee-hee, we're going to say four years.
Isn't that funny? Now, he could do it.
Like, you know the game like Civilization where you build a mission to Mars and it takes, you know, like a hundred turns to get there?
And you can see the progress. You can launch it early, but then you always get that warning.
I don't know if it's that game, but another game where it says, you know, it blew up a quarter of the way to Mars because you didn't finish, you know, all this testing and all the, you know, safety precautions and all that different stuff.
So, he might think that he can probably get some sort of candle out into the space with a guy on top of it, you know, on the way to Mars, cutting through whatever red tape that Trump might let him do, but it won't be safe, it won't be tested, it won't have any kind of ability to really get there.
They don't care, right?
They don't care. It's another collateral on the way, damage on the way to, you know, the ultimate goal, which we take whenever.
So, You know, does that shift votes?
I don't know. But it's still a lie, right?
And it's still just sort of, you know, indicative of how they're doing this whole campaign.
Well, and the two of them are natural mates in this way.
Neither one of them cares if anything that they hawk works.
I mean, Elon Musk doesn't care if his cars are killing people left and right and mowing over pedestrians.
Like, these things don't actually work.
And one of the things you just said I think is really important in terms of votes, and we need to talk about this because Musk should be in real trouble for what we're getting ready to talk about, but who knows if it'll happen.
Musk has been pushing a scheme telling people that he will give $47, haha, get it, he would be the 47th president, a $47 payout to anyone who promotes people in swing states to sign up for a guns rights petition.
So basically, this is paying people to get people to more or less sign up to vote and get them mobilized to the polls in November.
This is, in case you're wondering at home, highly illegal.
He should be in trouble for this, but this should tell you exactly how desperate these people are to get Trump as a puppet into office.
Yeah, I suppose the DOJ must just be waiting a little bit just to make sure they get enough people who have actually signed up to have the evidence then to bring against him.
That is, I hope that's the case, but previous experience tells me it's not.
Right. Well, you know, for what it's worth, you know, the Supreme Court just denied seeing a case that Musk brought because he was forced to, he was subpoenaed to release Trump's DMs on Twitter, right, from the Jack Smith case.
And the Supreme Court said, yeah, we're not going to hear that case.
You have to give it up.
And so, you know, he didn't win that one.
So maybe there's some, you know, version of the matrix where he will be held accountable for that, too.
But, you know, he'll just say, what?
What? It was just a, we're signing up for a petition.
That's all. That's all, you know, contributing them to.
But again, it's really registering them to vote.
And yeah, I would imagine that would probably end up being illegal.
I will say before we move on from Musk, something that came to me the other day, Nick, and you know, the stuff that we cover, like, sometimes you're able to really, really clearly know where things are going.
This is one of the reasons why the things we've been talking about for years have come into fruition, simply because you follow them logically.
Right? You just see where they're going.
And occasionally there's stuff that you don't think about until it dawns on you.
I was in the middle of a run the other day, and it dawned on me.
So if Donald Trump loses in November, we've already seen what he does.
He's not going to take it gracefully.
How do you think Elon Musk is going to react if Donald Trump loses?
Oh, I'm sure he'll do what Donald Trump did in 2020, and he will continue to push some sort of version of it's stolen.
We have to overturn it. He might even want to incite violence.
You know, I don't know.
Is that the answer you're looking for?
I think it is.
And it's something that's weighing on me now, is exactly how disgusting and despicable Elon Musk will be if Donald Trump loses in November.
Speaking of disgusting Nick, I just want to take a quick little look over Donald Trump, who is willing to say anything and reveal who he is in every single interview.
He went on with Hugh Hewitt, one of the biggest creeps that we have in right-wing media.
And let's see how he's talking about immigrants.
I assume it's in a completely normal, respectful way.
Welcome back. I'm talking with former President Donald Trump.
He also wants to give $25,000 to new homebuilders.
That'll just drive up the price of houses.
That'll drive the prices up.
Your price is going to be $100,000 more now.
No, no. Everything they want to do is wrong.
First of all, you have to let the private sector do it.
She wants to go into government housing.
She wants to go into government feeding.
She wants to feed people. She wants to feed people governmentally.
She wants to go into a Communist Party-type system.
When you look at the things that she proposes, they're so far off.
She has no clue.
How about allowing people to come to an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers.
Many of them murdered far more than one person.
And they're now happily living in the United States.
You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it's in their genes.
And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.
They left. They had four.
So it's bad enough that he says that Kamala Harris is interested in a communistic system.
But Nick, we are now seeing an escalation in rhetoric.
It's not just that they're going to poison our blood.
It's not that they're just going to come in your home and slit your throat.
They've got bad genes.
Yeah. Yeah.
You have bad genes. Mm-hmm.
Bad genes. I don't know.
Yeah, that's kind of a take. But let's not forget why he's doing this, why he's escalating this.
Because the polls are getting better for him.
Right? The polls will influence how you end up campaigning.
And if you're looking at what can get this closer, well, we've been getting more and more violent in our rhetoric about the other.
We've got to keep doing that.
We've got to talk about slitting people's throats in their kitchens and all sorts of horrible stuff.
That's where he's at.
That would be, in a bit of a cynical way, what he's supposed to be doing to make this race closer than it is.
Yep. And in doing so, Trump is being Trump.
And I've said this before, and I want to reiterate it now.
Donald Trump is intuitively and inherently and instinctually a fascist.
What we're hearing from him is exactly what we heard from the proto-fascist in the early 20th century, before the fascists and the Nazis even began.
It originated in the United States of America and Great Britain, in which assholes like Donald Trump talked about people's genes.
And what did they want to do?
They went just absolutely full bore into eugenics.
We needed to make sure that people who didn't have good genes weren't going to breed.
Right? Like animal husbandry.
So what ends up happening, that inspires the Nazis in order to carry out their eugenics programs.
What we're actually hearing now is, in so many words, without any varnish whatsoever, the basis of fascistic and Nazi philosophy and ideology.
What Donald Trump is doing, it isn't even the rhetoric that It's just stating out the worldview, which is some people have better genes than others, and those people with bad genes, they need to be weeded out, they need to be kept out of here.
We are watching this thing escalate along the exact same lines that we saw it escalate in the early 20th century.
I agree. I think, well, you know, the genetic thing is interesting.
You probably could argue that, like, serial killers might have something so horribly wrong with them from the beginning.
You know, it's mostly environmental if you actually look at it.
It's everything from abuse and trauma that they've gone through to environmental factors.
But, like, most of the time, you can't say that there are necessarily genes involved.
Well, you just took my point.
That was what I was going to say.
And that, in fact, it's actually the environment, which is what ends up causing the severe trauma that will lead to this.
I'm watching the Menendez Brothers movie right now, and he wants to talk about what causes killers.
Watching them, the flashbacks is pretty intense.
So, if you understand what that means, and then the conditions on the ground in other countries, which is what Kamala Harris was actually trying to ameliorate.
She wasn't in charge of stopping people from coming over the border at all.
She was trying to head up a program that would make it a little bit better in the countries that they're coming from, so they wouldn't want to leave and risk their lives to come all the way across here to find a better life.
And that's a much more noble cause that she was trying to do.
It's hard to even measure whether or not that worked or not, but the bottom line is that what he is doing to humanize people, both people that the country needs, right?
For our society to function, we need people coming from other countries to do, honestly, to do the work that people here don't want to do.
It's part of it for the economy, but it's what built this country in the first place.
There's a percentage of this country that just seems to be so prejudiced and so biased and so racist that they can't help themselves.
It's red meat being thrown in the water.
So I'm writing a piece right now.
I'm hoping it will come out tomorrow.
And I want to make something clear to people that's getting lost in all this immigration crisis, border crisis bullshit.
I assume, and there's always a difference between what Donald Trump necessarily believes and what the people behind him believe.
The Republican Party, as a puppet of the oligarchical class, they do not want to end immigration.
They do not want to massively deport people.
They will in order to make a show of force.
They rely on these people.
They exploit them for their labor.
They pay them pennies on the dollar.
But guess what they actually want to do, Nick?
They want to create an environment in which the people you just brought up, who make sure
that this economy works, they do service jobs, they do industrial jobs, they do all kinds
of these things.
They want to make them so afraid of being deported and or killed by like lynch mobs
around the country, that they will not push back against that exploitation.
Because as they grow, and by the way, like we're watching labor unions are bringing these
people in and they're organizing them.
You need to create an environment in which there is a permanent working underclass.
And that is what they're interested in.
Donald Trump sees these people as animals.
And people around him do as well.
But they want them for that labor.
They want them for that exploitation.
And what you just said is really important, Nick.
Our economy right now depends on them.
They do not want, they will have mass deportations.
They'll make a show of it.
They'll beat people up.
They'll probably kill some people for the record.
But what they're actually looking forward to is an environment in which they're able
to use white paranoia over immigrants, which they've already stoked and created and inflamed,
while deflecting any blame, which we'll talk more about that in just a little bit.
They'll deflect blame from themselves.
They'll put it on these vulnerable populations and they'll create a subsection of people
who are going to be exploited and everyone's going to think that they deserve to be exploited.
That's the entire purpose of this.
The Republican Party we have seen has no actual interest in taking care of anything having to do with immigration besides inflaming and then using the situation that they've inflamed.
Well, wait a minute. Next thing you're going to tell me that they didn't want to get rid of Roe v.
Wade. Well, they wanted to get rid of Roe v.
Wade for one very specific purpose, well, besides to give the evangelicals a crumb, but also to create a permanent underclass of workers that they could exploit in red states where people can't get abortions.
Or, by the way, middle and upper class people can get abortions because they can travel to other states.
But if you're in a red state and you can't travel out of it, you're going to have children who are going to be much more exploitable.
So it is the situation that we're talking about.
But they also are discovering how much it's hurting them in ballots in the races since they repealed it and probably rue the fact that they did that in the first place because they loved it as a boogeyman.
They loved to be able to use it as a cudgel and as a wedge issue.
And then once it goes away basically because they got what they wanted, now they were losing races they didn't think they were going to lose in the midterms.
And it's probably the only reason that Kamala is going to win.
I mean, if she does, that might be the thing that puts her over the finish line.
And by the way, in case you weren't nauseated by these people, Nick, I just want to put a spotlight over on Oklahoma, where Oklahoma, because in this whole rightward movement here...
In all of their geniusness, has now required public schools to make Bibles available in their classes.
And hear me out, Nick. They need 55,000 of these Bibles.
And here are the requirements.
These Bibles must be King James.
They must also be leather-bound.
They also need to have the Constitution and the Bill of Rights in it.
It's incredible, Nick.
I'm searching my memory banks for any Bible that might actually fit that.
Oh, that's right.
Trump's Bible that he's been hawking with Lee Greenwood.
That's right. Oklahoma has created a situation in which the state has to give Donald Trump and Donald Trump's businesses money to produce Bibles.
It is sacrilegious. Oh, and by the way, Don Jr.
has his own version of this, so they can both wet their beaks.
But they've created a situation where they're throwing crumbs again at the evangelical crowd.
They're going to create control.
And by the way, if you can just get a little bit of that sweet, sweet money on the other side of it, why not do it?
I kind of feel like I got to look again.
There was even something else more related to Trump that's in the actual Bible.
But you're right. He's the one that's like sponsored it in the way that he gets a kickback for everyone that they sell.
Now, are usually Bibles 90 bucks a piece?
I don't know. I haven't bought a Bible.
Are they 90? What are they supposed to be?
I don't know. What are they usually... That's a lot of market for a Bible these days.
Wait, you and yours haven't been buying a bunch of old New Testament Bibles lately.
Is that true?
Is it $90? It says here, it also goes by Donald Trump Jr.
I'm seeing $60, but I mean, you know, why not?
I mean, it's probably like 40 bucks, right?
It's probably less than half of that, right?
Well, I mean, listen, I assume they're going to give Oklahoma a deal because this guy, he just wants to help people.
By the way, the name of this Bible is God Bless the USA. And if that rings alarm bells, that's Christian nationalists, ding, ding, ding, you are correct.
So what is it doing?
It's pushing this ideology.
It's going ahead and like creating a control system for young children to be indoctrinated.
And on top of that, you're going to make sure you get a couple of those sweet greenbacks This is repulsive.
The thing about it, Nick, and I don't know how you feel, sometimes when I really try and wrap my head around the authoritarian grift, like, I honestly, I have to stand back from it every now and then, and besides being nauseated, I actually have to be like, you know what? Well done.
Just a well done scam.
Respect the hustle, I suppose.
But who would ever sully the Bible by putting the government stuff in there as well?
What did they want in there again?
They wanted the Bill of Rights, you said?
The Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
And the reason they did that is because those are the things that would weed out the other Bibles.
Basically, it's Oklahoma saying that they want Christian nationalist Bibles.
Yeah. I mean, you know, separation of church and state is, you know, they just want to violate that as much as they can in the most egregious manner possible.
So, by the way, this is nothing new either, right?
We've seen, you know, the use of books to launder money throughout politics.
Oh, sure. That's one of the big right-wing things.
Yep. Yeah. I mean, it's probably left-wing, too, I think.
But, you know, a lot of these books, they would be on the bestseller list for no reason other than campaigns are just buying huge chunks of them.
You know, C. Cruz, Comic-Con.
I will say, Nick, as a left-wing author, the left-wing does not have a scam like this.
It's unbelievable.
Yeah. Yeah. And again, it doesn't seem to matter, I think.
That's where I feel like we're kind of stuck in the end times, is because however evangelical, however religious the MAGA people want to be, They don't seem to have any requirements of their candidates to behave in that way.
Man, the shamelessness knows no bounds.
Nick, let's head over to the East Coast, which, by the way, is bracing for another hurricane impact in the next couple of days.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, the right-wing conspiracy theories have grown so loud and vocal and
aggressive that FEMA has actually had to publish a rumors response
page in which they say, you know, we're not actually withholding supplies, we're not withholding
funds, we're not actually cracking down on the populace.
This is a really unprecedented thing. It's absolutely wild.
Meanwhile, the GOP is just absolutely banging away at this in just the most shameless manner.
I know that's shocking to everybody.
We have Donald Trump, who has recently spoken about this, and if you've listened to anything that he's said for the past few years, you know where this is going.
You know what he's going to say.
You know, you know, you know.
I'm lucky you brought for one thing a billion dollars was stolen from say watchers to refuse illegal migrants that they approved its criminals to come into our country and figures now busted they're not really honored.
Can you repeat? You stole them this county and this is as bad as it could get.
Because that's the job.
Please, the general government, Amala and Joe have come to enter the job.
Obviously, they have a billion dollars.
What's this? It doesn't pay you.
Let's check it. Nick, I'm going to ask you a couple of questions, just rapid fire.
Are you ready? Yeah. Okay.
Is there a billion dollars in FEMA funds that are just missing?
No. Okay.
Did the Biden-Harris administration relocate funds from FEMA to immigrants?
No. Yes.
Yes, he did, to the tune of $155 million that he took out of FEMA that would take care of disasters, which last time we checked, Hurricane Helene was.
He took $155 million out of that and threw it at the border crisis.
And last time I looked, I don't see anything that he did with it at all.
He took it away and left these people to drown on their own roofs.
Yeah, and even in California, the story goes that he withheld funds for one of the disasters, and they had to go and pull out the numbers from Orange County in California to show that there were more Trump voters in Orange County than in Iowa for him to finally relent and then approve the money to go to help people in California.
So it's all projection.
And George Conway was on the TV yesterday or something talking about how this is really what Hitler did in Mein Kampf was, you know, to sort of tell such egregious lies that people are going to say to themselves, well, you know, they can't be lying that badly, right?
It's got to be true. No one would say anything that ridiculous.
And yet he has it on his bedside table, so he knows exactly how to make this work.
And he's got other people doing it, too.
Dude, I have sometimes...
I'm not a huge gamer.
I don't play a lot of video games.
I thought you were going to say, I'm not a huge Mein Kampf fan.
I'm not. Listen, I found it badly written and the logic to be flawed.
Neither did I. You know, I have at times played video games, and one thing that I've noticed is when I play video games and I put it on the beginner level, they're a lot easier to play.
And I'll tell you what the most beginner level thing in presidential politics is.
You can lie whenever you want and nobody's going to say anything unless you're a Democratic candidate.
Period. That's it.
Like, they have discovered that, like, after years and years, and you and I have been paying attention to politics for decades now.
Like, we have watched politicians try and navigate one controversy and scandal and, like, gotcha thing after another.
And it turns out the mistake all along was that you thought that you had to answer the question honestly, but you could skew it or you could slant it.
It turns out that if you put this thing on beginner mode, all you have to do in any situation is just come up with whatever bullshit is on the tip of your tongue and at the top of your mind and just throw it out in the world.
It is the easiest scam that I've ever seen in politics.
I can't believe nobody thought about it before.
I know. Musk's pastime is to just lay those things out there.
And he loves watching people come and try and correct him.
I think he must get off on that.
And so does Trump in this trollish way.
So they've gotten to the point now where it's like, yeah, I'm going to drop that.
Wait till you see how the libs react.
It's a big pastime for them.
And meanwhile, you're right. Nobody on the right is going to say anything about it.
And then as soon as somebody says something, you know, slanted on the left or in the Democratic circles, it becomes a scandal.
And even with the way that the press reports it, too, sometimes.
So it is this is what we were worried about, Jared.
I think, you know, decades ago, hard to imagine it would have gotten to be this bad.
But, you know, again, the people on the right just are looking for ammunition.
Anything they can do to fire at the left, they would love to do.
And it doesn't have to be true at all.
And the fact that they're now exploiting Helene is, it's just disgusting.
I mean, here's how bad it is.
Republican leaders of these states have to come out on TV to refute what Trump is saying.
Republican leaders.
Sam Tillis is having to go out there and actually acknowledge that FEMA is doing a good job.
Brian Kemp. Yeah, and Brian Kemp.
And that's how bad it's gotten, right?
That even those guys have now had to basically call Trump a liar.
And I suppose they're going to be vilified for it.
I want to go check on Marjorie Taylor Greene and see what she has to say about this situation.
But before I do, I want people to remember that Marjorie Taylor Greene is in the mainstream of the Republican Party at this point.
MAGA has said that she is too far left and she is too mainstream.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, this is a tweet from October 3rd, quote, Yes, they can control the weather.
It's ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can't be done.
I saw this and I was like, oh man, they're finally going to say, you know what, like, this is crazy.
Instead, the Republican Party and all these MAGA operatives have gotten together with Marjorie Taylor Greene to say that the Democrats, along with the deep state, are creating hurricanes to attack parts of the country in order to try and rig elections.
You couldn't make this up if you tried.
You really couldn't. Well, I will say this.
She's tapping into the conspiracy theory because, you know, there's a lot of different kinds.
There's 9-11. There's all the gun ones.
This one is about, like, the chemtrails, right, and all sorts of other stuff that, like, they do that people are convinced affects the weather.
And this is like shooting ducks in a barrel, man, because a lot of people...
I've gone through this rabbit hole.
A lot of people are concerned about this whole thing.
But to notice or to try to come up with some notion that they're...
Because by the way, who is this hurting right now?
I mean, it's hurting the people who need help.
Right, but politically, it's hurting Biden, it's hurting Kamala Harris, because they've turned this whole thing around and made it seem like FEMA's not helping.
So it's like, here she is trying to pretend like they did it on purpose as if that was going to somehow help them politically, right?
I'm not misreading that, right?
Isn't that what she's saying? Yes, absolutely.
But it's like there's no version of any reality that that would ever be true anyway.
And forgive me for even pretending to go along this path where they could create any kind of weather pattern, much less a fucking hurricane where people are going to die.
So chalk it up to she hasn't been in the news for two weeks and needed to get back in.
So, for people who are like, where's this coming from?
This is deep, deep, like, conspiracy theory territory.
So, there's a belief among the tinfoil hat crowd that HAARP, H-A-A-R-P, which is an oral program, that it has, it now has the ability...
To control the weather.
It's not just chemtrails.
It's a larger idea that these things are being used as deep state weapons to depopulate, hurt the population, take over control of things.
I want to point something out in all of this, Nick.
And I think that Hurricane Helene as Hurricane Milton, which looks like it's gonna be a category five
before it shears through Florida, it's important to think about this.
What we're watching is the dawning of a new age.
You and I both know that climate change is real.
Our listeners know that climate change is real.
A lot of Republicans who are saying this stuff know that climate change is real.
So for you and me, if we were in government, knowing climate change is real
and knowing it's going to kill God knows how many people
and hurt the economy and hurt society, you name it, you and I would take action, right?
We would do something to try and curtail the damage of climate change.
These people, they can't.
Why? Because their pockets are lined by money and their support depends on denying it and taking care of fossil fuel companies and all the other people who rely on carbon emissions that are going to create worse and worse climate change.
Well, you have another problem. Climate change is happening and it's going to have worse and worse storms and droughts and disasters, you name it.
So you have a choice at this point, because we are moving past the tipping point as these people are pushing us.
You have a choice. How do you handle it?
You are going to do everything that you can to do what the right wing has always done.
You find where capitalism and the people who have benefited from it, where they have caused the problem.
You then take the problem and then you turn it and you direct it at your political enemies.
So you create a story which takes care of the cognitive dissonance.
So basically what's happening at this point is as Donald Trump and the people that he represents are trying to bankrupt the country to keep any social program or support from ever, ever being instituted again, you need to create a society in which people are going to be at the whims of storms and disasters.
They're going to get worse.
On top of that, you need to create a story that benefits you.
It makes you money, it gives you political power, and you move forward.
What we're watching is the birth of ecofascism, Nick.
And as we're watching ecofascism take off, one thing that we have to remember, think about how they treat immigrants.
Think about what they do to people who are fleeing the political conditions the United States created, right?
They don't just put them in cages, they sterilize them, they brutalize them, they scapegoat them.
People in places like North Carolina, and by the way, in places like California, which is going to suffer from all of this, those people are going to be, they're going to go without any assistance whatsoever.
No one's going to help them.
We've seen that our government doesn't have the capability to do it anymore or willingness to do it.
Those people are going to be treated like refugees.
And this situation that Marjorie Taylor Greene, Donald Trump, and the Republican Party are foretelling here is that the future of America, unless something dramatically and fundamentally changes, this is what we have to look forward to.
Only much, much more extreme than this and with worse and worse consequences.
Lots of things to respond to.
The idea that you heard in that Hugh Hewitt clip with Trump that they're just so upset that money would ever be presented to people to eat.
God forbid anyone goes hungry, especially in schools.
And yet he's also trying to hit the Biden administration for not giving more assistance to people who are in need after the hurricane, which is sort of along the same lines of that.
But the climate denialism that they don't believe, I don't think.
I think they probably sense that it really is a thing, but they're playing to their base.
It's going to kill thousands of people.
Because what we saw in Hilleen were plenty of quotes saying, I couldn't believe it would ever be this bad.
Why couldn't they believe it?
Because they didn't believe that climate change was real.
And it was going to be just like every other storm that they've seen when they were growing up, right?
Even though they were trying to tell them that.
And it's going to happen more and more, and these are going to be more frequent and more violent.
So that's the worst part of all of this, is that what they were trying to do in some sort of cynical political game to try and get more votes is going to kill, just like COVID killed them.
These storms are going to kill them because they're not going to leave.
Now, let me ask you this. If I were in Florida and I saw the path of the hurricane and I'm in the path and I have a friend who's not leaving, I would leave.
Now, the person I know who's not leaving would not be listening to this podcast.
Let's just say that. Wait, time out, time out.
I want to make one quick caveat.
There are a lot of people who do not believe in this stuff who aren't going to leave.
And by the way, we have seen the GOP lie about storms before and people listen to it.
We saw, I mean, a few years ago, I don't know if you remember this, I forget the particular storm.
There were people who didn't believe the hurricane was actually happening.
But on top of that, the other people who aren't going to leave, there's some who aren't going to leave because they don't believe in climate change, they don't believe in weather and all that.
The second person is the person who can't afford to leave.
That's the other issue are the people who aren't going to have the resources necessary to go.
Right, and you saw that in Helene as well, where they probably didn't have resources to get to leave where they lived and they had to hunker down and pray.
But there are people that can leave and don't.
And intentionally, like, I'm sitting through it, so...
I was kind of curious, in that situation, I'm a progressive person, I would leave.
I would get in my car and I'd drive as many hours as I can to get the hell out of the way.
I'd sleep in the car if I had to, I don't know.
You know, people who, you know, are in situations who could do that and don't.
And it's hard to imagine any other reason than, you know, this, well, it could just be fierce independence, you know, and I'm a, you know, tough American, whatever.
You call this a storm kind of thing.
Or, you know, they've been brainwashed into thinking that it isn't going to be as bad as it's going to be, and they're going to end up being in...
Harm's way unnecessarily.
And it's either way, it's terrible.
And it's all as a direct result of, I wish I could say it was just Trump, but we've had climate denialism, you know, for decades and decades, primarily rooted in the fact that people just don't want to be put out, right?
They don't want to have to do any kind of sacrifice, a little extra to help the climate.
Well, and it would literally, for us to address climate change, we would have to change our lives.
We just would. And I'm not just talking about recycling.
I'm not just talking about, like, we've talked about how recycling is kind of a sham the way it works in America.
Like, it would mean things would be more expensive.
We would have to do without luxuries.
We would have to change the way we live.
We'd have to get rid of our car culture.
Like, there would be all kinds of changes that would have to happen and should happen.
We would have to decrease emissions.
We would have to stop our burgeoning Cold War with China.
Our reindustrialization is going to make this worse.
I want to point out, by the way, we're reindustrializing as we need to cut carbon emissions.
Like, these things would require massive changes.
It's a lot easier to have a story, Nick.
And by the way, it's not just going to be the deep state controls the weather.
That is politically beneficial.
What else have we seen people say about hurricanes, Nick?
God sent them. Because there are gay people or because we've become too liberal, Pat Robertson special, right?
Those types of things, it's just a story.
Whatever it is, and this is what's going to accompany worsening climate change.
Speaking of awful developments, Nick, there are reports coming out that corporations and companies are now embracing the use of AI and In order to carry out their interview processes for prospective employees.
There's one company in particular, Appruria, I guess it's what it's called.
They are being rolled out to carry out these interviews.
And we have a humdinger of an article here from Forbes, Nick.
I'm just going to read a couple of things from here.
Alex, who is the name of their AI, is able to manage interviews at a pace far exceeding what a human can do.
It does not need coffee breaks, vacation days, and paid time off, which reduces a company's recruiting overhead and can keep interviewing through rain, heat, and snow days.
Let's look at another piece of this.
If you have spent any time searching for employment opportunities on LinkedIn,
you may have noticed job listings that show hundreds or even thousands of
applicants have applied to the role.
It causes job hunters to feel that there are odds of getting an interview or offers miniscule.
Human resources is inundated with high volumes of resumes.
However, with AI, the applicant tracking system will pick out the top resumes that meet the requirements.
Meanwhile, Alex can review the resumes and interview non-stop all day long.
We can do a personalized interview by asking relevant questions.
It automatically schedules these interviews.
Nick, it just sounds perfect.
I love it. You know, you said the same thing when TV came out, Jared.
That was going to be the end of everything, right?
What are you talking about?
We're going to do it all. We're going to be over, and here we are.
Wait, what do you mean it's the same thing as TV? TV didn't take people's jobs.
Okay, so, but here's the question.
There's always this kind of complaint whenever we make a little jump in technology, but the question could very well be, is this the one?
Is this the one that's really going to be it?
Yes. You think it is?
Yes. Yes. Yes, I do.
You know, listen, I use Grok sometimes now.
You got access to that, which is the AI on Twitter.
And, you know, I got to tell you, give me an idea for a video.
And it's... It's pretty impressive.
And I thought while we're here, like, you know, suggest a guest that the Muckrake podcast should have on.
I'm just kind of curious what AI is going to say before you get so concerned about whether it's going to replace everybody should have on the show.
Are you ready? All right, here's what it says.
And this is how quick it is. Boom. Given the theme of the Muckrake podcast, which focuses on diving deep into political narratives with historical context and alternative perspectives.
Hey, that's really good. Oh, God.
Here's a guest suggestion that could offer fresh insights.
Are you ready? I can't wait.
Glenn Greenwald. You guys went on the show.
Awesome, AI. All right.
That's the first one. Hey, okay. Great answer.
Give me another one. But anyway, all of this stuff is supposed to be able to make life easier, right?
Oh, my God.
No, we're talking about two different things.
Hey, the next suggestion is Joyce Carol Oates.
Joyce Carol Oates?
I don't know. Why not?
Anyhow, I think she was a professor when I was at Wisconsin, maybe there.
Anyway, so you're concerned that it's going to get rid of jobs.
I think that's what the thesis of this segment is.
First of all, I'm concerned because nobody should have to interview with an AI client.
That is demeaning and weird.
I'll just say that.
The second part is this.
Nick, we are watching right now, and I want to give people a definition.
I've thrown this phrase around before.
I want to give a definition for it.
The professional managerial class are the people who went to college, who now work in middle management.
They're administrators.
They work in places like AR. They are creatives.
You name it. Basically, AI is being basically created and programmed in order to collapse the professional managerial class.
For the record, which party represents the professional managerial class, Nick?
The GOP? No, the Democratic Party.
It is the divide between the people who went to college and are now sufficiently middle class.
Okay? So the people who are programming it are trying to collapse the professional managerial class.
On top of it, for anybody at home who works in HR and is listening to this, I apologize for my partner, Nick.
Because he is advocating for your job to be wiped off the face of the map.
But guess what? The people who are going to make your life better, the people who are going to take care of employees, and the people who are going to watch out for things, they do it because of empathy.
They do it because of human recognition of one person to another.
And I'll tell you what, an AIHR bot is not going to worry about laying you off and firing you.
They're not going to worry about your children or your well-being.
I'm just saying this is a planned demolition of the professional managerial class.
Well, some of them might defend AI and say you can teach it to be empathetic.
And certainly my favorite when they throw it back in Musk's face when they ask certain questions about trans people.
We've seen those on Twitter. And it does come off in a progressive way where they actually almost like they do seem to care.
But to get back to the interview thing, in the article that you share with me, they sort of reference this unknown group of people that get anxiety from having interviews with real people.
It makes it better if they can do it with an AI who they're not having to worry about what they're wearing, what they look like, and all that stuff.
So I'm just spitting out back what this article says.
Wait, time out.
What? Time out.
Do you think that they're not going to program artificial intelligence carrying out interviews to analyze what you're wearing or how you look?
Interesting. Maybe.
I suppose I could do that. Okay.
Well, yeah. Well, here's what's interesting about the article itself, too, because the article almost felt like it was written by AI. The article was really upsetting for anybody who wants to read it.
Yeah. And it wasn't really AI, because you can still kind of tell, and we're not going to be able to tell pretty soon, but you can still kind of tell, right?
There's a certain voice and phrasing, whatever.
But this was clearly a paid article by this Alex place, right?
Yeah. Yep. So that's the other thing that we have another layer of this going on where this article isn't a real article.
This was clearly, I mean, call me crazy.
The company said, Forbes, we want to do a sponsor.
I know they're supposed to reveal that if it's sponsored.
I'm going to have to search the page.
I wonder if it's somewhere deep embedded in the code.
But it really felt like this was just a sponsored article that somebody paid someone else to write and publish like it's a real article.
So that's got levels to it as well of like, where are we going here and who's really saying these things?
Well, and it's also, Nick, it's like going to a fast food convention, you know, like where you go.
And by the way, it does not have a disclaimer that there's any paid advertisement on this thing.
But it's almost like...
It's almost like you go to a convention for fast food franchisees, and it's like, the new burger maker!
And it's like, construct your burgers 25% faster than Todd, the employee that you have.
It's basically telling people, the way that places like Forbes or the Wall Street Journal work, they are the more aggressive, capitalistic sort of organs.
It's basically like, here's the future.
You're going to buy this, and it's going to allow you to lay people off.
And by the way, Nick, I don't know if you saw in this article, It's said for those HR people who are going to get laid off, where are they going to land?
You guessed it, everybody!
In tech. Because that is what we get told over and over.
And by the way, Barack Obama helped with this too.
Which was, yes, we're going to radically reorient our economy towards tech.
But you'll learn to code.
It'll be fine. Everything will be alright.
Right. I mean, listen, I'm just waiting for AI. I suppose they can manage all of my billing and all of my recurring emails I've got to send to people reminding them to pay me.
Like, that all is exciting to me.
I get that would make my life a lot easier.
Having a Jarvis to talk to would also be interesting.
But I hear you.
And by the way, by nature of the way you describe Forbes as being, like, aggressive in this space to try and turn out content, Well, you know, how aggressive do you have to be to, like, simply not tell people that this was a paid thing?
You know, just ignore it. I'm not going to disclose that.
That could certainly be a thing that they do, too.
It's a wild, wild decision.
I will say, by the way, that, like, it is...
It is the human interactions, the human nodes within the capitalistic system that make any of it bearable.
I mean, like, you know this as well as I do.
It's like the people who are at, like, the DMV, or it's the people at work who, like, they see you as a human being.
They recognize in the other themselves.
And they, like, they break beyond protocol and, like, this, like, labyrinthian maze that you're supposed to go through.
And they're like, hey, something has happened here.
I want to help you.
And this is about getting rid of that because you don't want to pay these people and pay for their 401k and their benefits.
Although the DMV is an interesting example because I know everyone has an experience waiting in line and wishing, it really would be nice if all this was run by AI, but the problem with the DMV isn't the workers there.
It's the people who come in line and don't follow directions.
It's not true. Yeah, and then they're the ones who end up taking like the 15, 20, 30 minutes of the time, you know, in there where it should be like a five minute.
That is not true.
That is true. You know, they screw up the thing.
They didn't bring in the right form.
They didn't do whatever. And then now they're taking all the time to explain it.
I've heard these conversations going on and on.
They don't stop. They don't stop talking.
Nick, there are people who don't know what they're supposed to do at the DMV. There are people who can't read as well as you and I. There are people who don't speak English.
Yes, so they need the AI. Let them have the AI. By the way, you just very casually, do you know how many people the California DMV employs?
You don't know that, do you?
Yes, I do. Why would you know how many people at California employees in DMV? Maybe because I looked it up.
We're talking upwards of 10,000 people that you just advocated being thrown out on their asses.
No, I'm not. I think you completely misunderstood what I said.
I'm saying that people who are going to DMV to get all their stuff, they're the ones that need the AI. Well, what?
So the people who are going to the DMV should be replaced by AI? Yeah, the AI, the people working at DMV, that's not the issue.
That's not what I'm saying.
I'm saying it's the people in line are the ones who don't know what they're doing and always get screwed up and have to take all this extra time.
I think it's...
Okay, so one thing, and I find what you just said interesting, because I think one thing that you can look at here is...
We're talking about fixing problems in a system that currently exists as opposed to changing the system and how it exists.
Like a DMV is a perfect example.
One of the reasons a DMV is such an awful place to be is because, number one, they don't have a lot of funds.
Number two, all of their technology is like outdated and old.
And on top of that, they have like these practices that just balloon and balloon and balloon and balloon.
Like we could change that and we could streamline the thing and we wouldn't have as many people waiting in line.
Or we could create a program that could like try and quote unquote fix what's going on.
I think what we're talking about is adding more and more sort of layers to something that just needs radically transformed.
Does that make sense? Yeah, right.
Because every time you add another regulation, another rule, another whatever, then they start to contradict each other and they become intractable.
So yeah, I agree.
Even the fact like, you know, why can't I have my driver's license on my phone?
I can have proof of insurance now on my phone in California.
Not every state, but I can have a picture of my insurance card.
That will cover it. But not for my driver's license.
Even though the mere convenience of certain things could be made done, but because there's just random rules that have been built up over years and years without consideration of modern technology, it's like, here we are.
So the whole thing, and eventually it will, right?
I mean, like 150, 200 years from now, I would like to think that a lot of these systems are going to be radically different.
But maybe not. Maybe we're doomed to be stuck in some weird dystopian future.
We're also talking about creeps like Elon Musk controlling how people are hired in this country.
I mean, that's another issue here, is the tech class has shown itself to be untrustworthy, and we're now trusting them to be the ones making the decision about who gets a job and who doesn't.
Right. That's another aspect of it.
I'm going to think about your driver's license on the phone thing, because that strikes me as dangerous.
Why? Because then you can just fake it, I guess?
Well, it could be forged.
You could have data leaks and vulnerabilities.
I don't know. Maybe I'm just a Luddite.
I don't know. I need to think about that.
When you have a ticket with a QR code, they now have them live.
They move, right? So you can't just do an still image.
It's going to have to be a live, real QR code or whatever.
So that could be part of it where the cop would come and he could just scan it and stuff like that.
But then we're getting into that.
What's that movie with the time?
You have time to die before you die.
Is that called In Time?
Is that what that's called? I'm going to be trying to barter for more.
Then we're getting into a little bit of that too.
You are going to welcome the machine overlords.
You are going to be there to shake their metal hands.
I see it coming. I have a friend, a dear friend of my mom's who lives up on the mountain in LA off of Mulholland Drive and I went to visit her and she just sits out and stares at the At the valley, just, you know, the helicopters fly by, the cars, you can see everything.
It's like a huge expanse.
I gotta tell you, like, for all the tech and whatever, whatever, and plugged in stuff, I, I, she says she can sit out there the entire day, and I think I could do that, too.
I really think I was there.
You're, you're a man torn between two worlds, it sounds like.
I am. I, by the way, I just realized that, like, a lot of my, like, uh, anger towards HR, like, is back from when I worked for the Columbia House, like, CD and movie place where they basically had a tyrannical HR structure.
Yeah, yeah. Or you're just watching The Office.
I don't know. I never understood why Michael Scott was so upset with Toby like that.
One of the best running gags on that show is anytime someone had power and they had to interact with HR, they hated HR. That was one of the best running gags.
But it is. Again, there are good...
Lovely people in all of these positions and all of that.
It just so happens that, like, the momentum of capitalism comes in and then you have corporate authoritarian structures, which is what they're trying to now, like, I think, submit with AI, but that's what it is.
All right. On that note, Nick, we're going to finish this show up.
We will be back with The Weekender on Friday.
Remember to go to patreon.com slash muckraigpodcast, get the full show, hang out with us, come to exclusive live events.
We should have another live show here soon.
You don't say the word?
Okay, we should do that.
So we're going to have a live show here soon.
We'll talk about it after we're done recording.
Patreon.com slash Moncrack Podcast.
In the meantime, you can find, well, unless he deletes his Twitter, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?
