North Korean Troops In Ukraine While Trump Marvels At Arnold Palmer's Penis
Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman cover an overlooked story of a widening war in Ukraine as Vladimir Putin asks Kim Jong Un for troops as his own Russian soldiers are dying in the hundreds of thousands on the battlefield. They then turn to the furthering unhinged performances of Donald Trump - from being the fry guy at McDonald's to suggesting that Abraham Lincoln should've just done a deal instead of fighting the Civil War, to the reaction of golf pros to seeing Arnold Palmer's member in the shower.
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I'm here with my friend and my co-host, Nick Housman.
How are you doing, Nick?
I'm okay.
It's a roller coaster, man.
This is pre-election time frame here.
I don't know what to make of it, but I just got to get up and get out of bed in the morning and then I get back in later on in the day.
I mean, I think that's how life works.
Yeah.
I mean, but then you might ask me, like, why get out of bed?
Because you're just going to get back in.
That's a great question that I'm asking myself quite a bit lately.
By the time people are listening to this on Tuesday, Nick, if I'm not incorrect, and I'm bad with calendars, we're two weeks out, correct?
Yeah, I guess you're right.
Right?
Two weeks.
It's the 22nd when this just drops.
It's scary.
Yeah, that's a lot.
Just a reminder, go over to patreon.com slash mccraigpodcast, gain access to the Weekender episode on Friday.
Also, all of our exclusive post-event analysis, including we're going to do a live show on the election night, correct?
You know, we didn't really talk about that, but I suppose...
We're doing that.
Anxiety Fest?
Is that what we're going to have?
I mean, listen, we did it for the midterms.
We went real long, I have to imagine, on this one.
We're going to go long as well.
So there's nowhere else I'd rather be on election night than hanging out with you and the McRae community as we try and navigate this thing that we call life.
Before we get into the election, and we have stuff to talk about, including the deterioration of Donald Trump, extremism with the Republican Party, surprise, surprise.
Before we get to that, Nick, we've actually had a pretty large piece of breaking news that isn't getting a lot of attention right now.
Over the past week, things in Korea have been kind of a mess.
North Korea last week started destroying roads and rail lines that connected it to South Korea.
South Korea then reached out to the United States to say that they had intelligence that North Korea was beginning to send troops to Russia to prepare for battle in Ukraine.
In the past couple of days, we've actually seen more reports that this intelligence is true.
We now have footage and information that North Korean soldiers are getting outfitted with uniforms and weapons.
Estimates run anywhere from 1,500 more wild-eyed ones call for 10,000.
Who even knows?
But it does appear as if another nation is about to join in the hostilities in the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
You know, it's funny.
My first response to that was, oh, that's how bad Russia is doing in this conflict, right?
Do you know how many Russians have died in Ukraine so far?
How many?
Reports now put it at 600,000 human beings.
How many Americans died in Vietnam in 10 years?
I don't think it was 600,000.
I want to say it's 57,000.
I want to say it's somewhere around there.
That's in 10 years.
Or 90, whatever you want to call it.
So you're talking about, I mean, let's just call it, let's just say it's 400,000, right, in very little time.
It's devastating to any kind of army because how many people they really have?
So part of me wants to say, okay, well, that really shows that they're really, I mean, obviously Ukraine's been decimated as well.
Their army probably looks like it's in shambles too.
So, but to think that they now need to bring in reinforcements from another country is on the tactical level, maybe encouraging that they're going to have to give up at some point.
But I suppose that the bigger fear then is that it's sort of bringing another country to this world.
It changes the dynamic of it for sure.
This was something that I was actually incredibly terrified of.
And you and I were texting about this a little bit this weekend as things were coming out.
And, you know, we discussed that the current state of the nuclear state, right?
Like the invention of nuclear weapons created sort of a novel problem, which is how does a nation state that has nuclear weapons, how does it fall apart?
In particular, with Russia, you have a dictator in Vladimir Putin who doesn't care about other human beings or their lives or the dignity of human lives.
What happens when they have nuclear weapons?
We're always sort of going down that road and watching how things take place.
With North Korea now entering this space, it's hard for me to imagine that Vladimir Putin announces, well, you licked us.
Thanks, everybody, for the fight.
We're going to take off now.
Now North Korea is coming in, and for those who don't know, Russia and North Korea formed a mutual defense treaty going back into the summer, which basically welcomed North Korea into the developing axis between Russia, China, Iran, a whole bunch of other different proxies, this sort of new challenging order that's going against the United States of America.
We now have in Ukraine two of these allied nations that are now invading and attacking another sovereign nation that the United States has been supporting.
I was counting this up earlier.
We have the situation in Gaza and Lebanon.
We have the situation in Syria.
We now have the situation in Ukraine.
We have multiple flashpoints around the world where different belligerents belonging to these different opposing orders are Are now in close proximity with violence and war going on at the same time.
This to me shows that something is escalating here.
That we're moving into a next chapter of something that has already been awful and worrying.
And this development right here, and I'm really shocked that this hasn't been covered more or talked about more.
This feels like things are moving into place that are, how do I put this?
Not good.
I hear you.
And I can't help but think that there's a reason why it's all happening now.
Agreed.
And these are the dangers of, you know, with our elections happening.
We have a guy running for the GOP nomination who is so decimating the person who's in power right now.
It could be, in some weird way, an encouragement to other countries.
We don't really exactly know the state of Joe Biden's health right now or his control over his faculties and all that stuff, but at the very least, when you project some version of power, there might be some deterrent there, but With what Trump is doing to destroy the narrative here, it's like it probably does embolden them.
By the way, he's not destroying the narrative.
He's literally calling everybody directly.
He's talking to Putin directly and telling these things.
So we can't overlook that.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think since North Korea has gotten hold of nuclear weapons, they've been in an active war, right?
Have we ever seen them in a hot war yet?
I don't believe so, no.
So now we have to really get worried about something like that, because what if a whole bunch of North Korean troops are killed in battle?
How are they going to respond?
So that's a really problematic thing that we haven't been faced with since they've gotten the weapons.
So it's not good, right?
And you can't help but think that this is all being accelerated by the fact that we're having this election right now.
Yeah, I want to zoom out and then zoom back in, basically, because, you know, you're bringing up Joe Biden and Donald Trump, and I want to make something clear about politics for listeners so they can understand the full breadth of this.
We subscribe often to great men of history narratives, right?
Like an individual makes a choice and then another individual makes a choice.
It turns it into a giant chess match.
There are so many factors underneath the surface here.
And one of the reasons why Joe Biden isn't able to do something about Israel or isn't able to like really handle what's going on in Ukraine.
He is a product of his times.
So is Donald Trump, for the record.
And one of the things that's happening here is deep, deep down, the American hegemonic order, the American century, the American empire, whatever we want to call it, it has lost its ability to really shape what's happening in the world.
The one thing we have left is economic matters, but even that has gone beyond us, right?
We see that international corporations and the oligarchs that we're dealing with We're good to go.
Donald Trump is ideologically and in many ways connected to these people, right?
He's friendly with Vladimir Putin.
He wrote love letters to Kim Jong-un, all of that.
What we're looking at is what is the next step in the evolution or downfall of the American empire.
Do we go ahead and elect someone like a Donald Trump and we're now in line with these people, which happens very quickly and the trajectory of the country is moving in that direction, or do we go with Kamala Harris, who we've been covering this, Nick.
A lot of her foreign policy and a lot of her alliances at this point are neoconservative.
Right?
Which is a group of war hawks that want to go to war with places like Iran.
We now have leaked documents that the US and Israel has been planning joint strikes on Iran, which is another proxy of the axis that we're talking about.
What I would forward in all of this, and this is something you and I have talked about a couple of times, the only way to win the game is to not play the game.
That's it.
That's the only way to avoid massive, massive casualties.
I don't say this lightly, Nick.
I don't.
I don't want to be provocative for the sake of being provocative.
We are in the beginning moments of what is leading up to World War III. That's what this is.
That's how we're watching this whole game board start to come together.
We have to look at a different way to handle this stuff.
We have to stop reacting to all these things, accepting the game board as it has been presented.
We have to move away from what created this moment in the first place, which was capitalist oppression and exploitation.
We have to find a way out of this.
And with each passing day now, whether it's Gaza, Lebanon...
Or now with North Korea and Ukraine, what we are seeing is we are sliding towards something that a lot of people who claim to have power or desire to avoid it, they are now basically powerless by playing this game.
And the game is now going to the next level.
It's kind of amazing that we haven't been faced with this more often in our history, knowing that the elections for the president happen every four years and that there is intense pressure.
Now, we never had it so close a year after presidential campaign, but that's what this reeks of to me.
This reeks of simply, while the parents are out and they're playing, we're going to make all the problems take advantage of that situation.
Now, not to say that, let's just say Trump wins in two weeks from now.
Does all of this go away?
They're like, oh, thank God, he's in charge.
They're going to let us do whatever we want to do.
We're not going to have to ramp this up anymore.
I wonder how much of this is the bluster of being able to take advantage of the fact that they feel like Biden is weak and Kamala Harris is in a situation where, remember, she might not really be neoconservative.
She might not really be in that camp.
She just has to do that for the next two weeks to try and win an election, right?
That's the sad part about all this.
And when you hear people who want to vote for Trump as a one-issue Israel thing, and it's like, well, what has this administration that's currently in the White House done that hasn't been full-throated support of everything Israel's been trying to do?
And somehow you still think that they're not good enough for Israel and we have to vote for Trump.
Like, all those things sort of combine in my mind to indicate that I would say...
It's less World War III and more just trying to take advantage of a fucking political situation and the fact that we're mixing democracy and capitalism for 200 years.
I just want to throw out the capitalistic version of this of what you're saying.
I want you to imagine that a corporation or a company hires a person like Donald Trump, a complete buffoon, right, who has terrible tendencies.
Then all of a sudden there's a hostile takeover.
Another group, a competing corporation, comes in and starts to buy off and trying to buy off that corporation.
Well, the guy who's in charge, who's ideologically aligned with those people, he sort of welcomes them to do it.
And then what happens when that corporation or company gets bought off?
They're hired into the other one.
They get their golden parachute and they end up in line with that.
Yeah, I think.
If Trump won.
In fact, I could see Donald Trump just being like, we're going to cut off support for Ukraine and let this thing happen.
Right.
Same thing with Israel.
For the record, Israel does not want to work with Joe Biden.
Israel doesn't really necessarily want to work with the United States outside of taking its money and taking its weapons.
Donald Trump comes in open for business.
Let's go!
Let's keep doing that.
If we say no to Israel, they've already got a safety spot over in this axis that we're talking about.
They're in friendly with Russia and all of that.
So what we're dealing with right now is, are we going to have a managed fall of the American empire?
Are we going to turn into something better?
And presidents most often, Nick, and you and I know this from studying history, many of them feel bad.
Pulled by the tides of history.
Handling this militarily is a surefire way for this thing to explode.
And we now have a lot of trip wires that are ready to go off.
And we just can't keep doing business as usual.
Right.
You know, it's funny because it's like, this is a stretch, but see if you can spare with me for a second.
You know, Israel was going to try and do a pipeline in joint with Saudi Arabia that would cut out Russia from getting oil to Europe.
And that poses such a huge threat that you can sort of argue that that's why, or not why, but like Hamas attacks Israel and bogs them down in this thing so they can't continue to make that agreement work.
And so then, you know, three steps later, and by the way, that's also part of the Abraham Accords that Trump did.
So like in some weird way, Trump almost...
It was able to create peace in the Middle East and also hurt Russia at the same time.
But now that the solution would end up being diplomatically, it would be like, okay, we're going to settle this thing in Gaza, between Israel and Gaza, and then we're going to make sure that everyone's using Russian oil, and that will make everybody happy again.
That's sort of how you're going to diplomatically solve some of this stuff.
And that's even worse because then it's like Putin comes out of this thing richer than ever and rewarded for all the war crimes he's been committing in Ukraine.
But don't be surprised if that's some sort of version of this where they ended up having to make it where Russia gets their pipelines open again, they're making money again, and then everyone calms down.
One of the main problems in this, and I think you just started to touch on it, is very important.
The G7 nations, all they want in the world is for Russia to come back away from this, right?
They didn't want to cut them out of the G8. They didn't want to take them out of that.
They wanted Russia to continue to produce oil and the goods that they produce.
That's what they wanted.
They are more than happy to rehabilitate Vladimir Putin.
Guess who else wants to rehabilitate Vladimir Putin?
Donald Trump.
So in a way, a lot of these figures and the stances that they take, they bring it in.
So are we just going to basically say, hey, we're just kidding about those years in Ukraine.
Let's go ahead and move forward.
There, the authoritarianism of Russia and China and a lot of these proxies, it becomes accepted and it becomes part of the working fabric of the United States of America.
That isn't worth the deal.
It also isn't worth the deal to go ahead and set off a major battle that is going to kill untold millions of people.
God knows if we would even survive it in a nuclear state.
So those two things aren't acceptable, right?
Which means if I'm talking to you and you and I are trying to come up with a solution for something, we just put forward two solutions that are not acceptable.
What does that demand?
A third solution.
It demands a different tact.
But this needs to be recognized as an escalation.
And this is something that is very, very major, and a lot of people are missing this.
The other piece we didn't mention yet is Iran, because Iran is backed by Russia, and we're about to get into a situation where Israel and Iran are going to go to war.
And if the pipeline thing that I described ultimately came to fruition that benefited Russia, sort of technically Israel and Russia would almost kind of be partners in that.
They'd have to They're already very close, for the record.
Which is weird, because this is how geopolitics works, right?
You end up being close to the people who are supplying your enemies with guns that are going to kill your people.
But they don't give a shit because they want to make money, right?
Well, because the people don't matter.
That's the whole thing here, and what you just said is exactly right.
And for the record, Nick, you know this.
Where did modern anti-Semitism erupt from?
Russia.
Like the entire New World Order protocols of the elders of Zion.
But Netanyahu and the people around him recognize their ability to make money and gain power by partnering with these people because they're not necessarily interested in the fates of the people involved.
That's this next level of authoritarianism we're talking about.
That's how the world works, Jared.
I hate it.
Stop it.
I want to get off.
I really don't like it.
So this is something we will be keeping track of.
Speaking of Donald Trump, Nick, again, two weeks out from the election, we were talking on the last episode about, how do I put this, Trump's decline and how he was being used as a proxy for more powerful people like Elon Musk.
It has been a wild, wild week in terms of watching Donald Trump's decline.
In the final days of the campaign, usually what happens is the candidate ramps up their appearances and the things that they're doing.
Outside of a completely manufactured quote-unquote shift at McDonald's, Donald Trump has been canceling slews of media engagements and interviews.
The campaign has just openly called this quote-unquote exhaustion.
At one point in a rally in Detroit during some technical difficulties, it appeared that Donald Trump literally fell asleep at a presidential campaign rally.
Then, in a clip that we're getting ready to watch, he was being interviewed by Dan Bongino, one of the worst people in the United States of America.
They had scheduled for an hour interview at Mar-a-Lago.
What you're getting ready to hear took place roughly 30 minutes into the interview.
Than Biden.
Yeah, no, she's horrible.
Can I ask you a really...
I got to get going.
Oh, I'm sorry.
They're going crazy.
All right.
Folks, I'm sorry.
We got to wrap it up with the president.
Okay.
Looking and sounding great, by the way.
Low energy.
Just low energy.
Then, at a rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump was there in one of the biggest, most important swing states, Pennsylvania.
And, you know, he really wanted to talk about the big issues, Nick.
Oh, wow.
But Arnold Palmer was all man.
And I say that in all due respect to women, and I love women.
But this guy...
This guy.
This is a guy that was all man.
This man was strong and tough.
And I refuse to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said, oh, my God.
That's unbelievable.
I had to say it.
I had to say it.
We have women that are highly sophisticated here.
That's right, Nick.
In the swing state of Pennsylvania, Donald Trump chose to open his rally by talking about the size of golf legend Arnold Palmer's genitalia.
I'll never order Arnold Palmer the same way again, Jared, is all I can tell you.
You know, what I get more out of this is just the reaction from the audience is really where I take the most from.
It really is disgusting when he goes, and I like women!
You know, he says that, and they all laugh, they all smile, because what are they smiling about?
They're smiling about the fact that he grabs women by their genitalia and assaults them.
And that's funny, and they like that alpha, the whole thing.
And it just kills my soul whenever I see those reactions from people at those rallies.
This is a man who has been held legally liable for sexual assault.
Everybody knows this.
Everybody is aware of it, whether they think it's a deep state, you know, lawfare attack or whatever.
They know that he has been found guilty and liable of sexual assault.
And to hear them laugh at, first of all, is repulsive.
Second of all, Nick, I know that we say this all the time.
I've never seen anything like this.
I have never, ever seen a political candidate in the two weeks leading up to a major election be so unfocused, be so out of it, and have their mental capacity literally just sort of like, you know, rip away in front of everybody, just an edifice that is absolutely collapsing with every passing day.
I mean, and the guy made me look up a Google search, did Arnold Palmer have a big cock?
Look at what he's done to me.
Do not Google that.
I think that was a popular search.
The autofill was already, you know, filling it out.
Oh.
It's like, what are we doing?
I kind of needed to see maybe the rest to figure out how he even got on to Arnold Palmer because I think that guy hated Trump.
Hated him.
Trump cheated at golf.
And that's like, you know, for Arnold Palmer, that's, you know, that you might as well be, you know, he's the bright guy of his life.
So, but it's not that different from, you know, talking about his own genitalia in a debate with Marco, right?
I mean, we already had this moment.
And the only problem is if we're looking at the polls, we haven't really brought that up yet.
And I know everyone gets exasperated when I do when I talk about it in real life.
But like these poll numbers, her lead is shrinking day by day by a tenth of a point every day.
And again, the cynical politician, you know, political advisor would have to say, Trump, keep doing whatever you're doing because it's working.
Right?
That's the only thing they tell him.
So it's not even like they're going to encourage him.
They're just not going to tell him to have any discipline.
I told somebody a couple of days ago, I had a phone call.
With a Democratic strategist.
And I said, if you want to do anything right now, and listen, I don't think two weeks out from the election, you're going to talk a candidate like Kamala Harris into unveiling a new radical, aggressive agenda.
You can't do it.
There's not enough time to do it.
It should have happened months ago.
They dropped the ball on that.
That is neither here nor there.
They have been talking about Donald Trump being unstable, but as of right now with what's happening with Donald Trump, it only makes sense to now turn this election into an indictment of his mental well-being.
He has given more than enough evidence that not only has he always been unhinged, but that he's getting worse with every passing day.
The first story that we talked about with North Korea, I don't know how this isn't being talked about everywhere, that this army is going into Ukraine and that this guy had an open romantic relationship with a dictator who rules that country.
There is no way, shape or form in which that shouldn't be on the docket.
You shouldn't be talking about this.
You shouldn't be showing clips of him doing this.
He is coming unraveled before our very eyes.
And I do think that two weeks out from the election, it would resonate to say, hey, we need to understand not only has this guy always been dangerous, not only did January 6th happen, not only was he the president that he was, but we need to understand that he is getting demonstrably worse.
I don't know, man.
Because here's the thing.
You'd think that she'd cleave off supporters of his after every time he says a little bit here, a little bit there, because he's getting more off the rocker.
And instead, it's the opposite.
More and more people are kind of gravitating towards that, I think, unless the polls are completely off.
And so...
Can I make a quick statement on that?
I think what we're seeing in the polls is not that more people are going towards Donald Trump.
It's that the pool of voters is shrinking.
And I think that she is losing voters who would otherwise show up.
And so, in a way, making this appeal that Donald Trump is getting worse, it could possibly bring some more people to the table who have said, I'm not going to vote for her for this, for this, for this, for this.
Because I think the alarm bells need to go off to go ahead and grow that pie a little bit.
Okay.
And we have a group of these Republicans who are going to vote for her because they recognize that.
And so they have to grow, I guess, that.
So, okay.
Listen, you know, pissing on a spark plug, I thought that would help.
Like, they got to do something here.
And if that's what it is, like, finally go after Trump in his mental state.
Now, I think they were worried about doing that because they felt like they'd get it back on Biden.
They'd just say, well, Biden, you hid this about him and this and that, whatever.
Yeah.
At this point, who cares?
Figure out a better way to explain that where you didn't realize that he didn't seem like that.
He isn't really that diminished.
We just needed a better chance to win.
Whatever that is.
But you're right.
They have to change the narrative and certainly to go on the attack of his mental well-being is easy.
It's just as frustrating that it doesn't cleave off anybody that's already supporting him.
They want more of it.
It's like red meat.
I think the only thing it can do is motivate some people to come out and actually vote who are otherwise going to sit it out.
By the way, Nick, speaking of Trump giving ample evidence of how unworthy he is and how dangerous he is, this is Fox and Friends that welcomed Donald Trump on, and this answer, it had blood coming out of my eyes.
Who was your favorite president when you were little?
So I liked Ronald Reagan.
I thought he was...
Look, I didn't love his trade policy.
I'm a very good driver.
I just want to say, when he was little, they asked him.
When he was little.
Yeah, he was real little in the 1980s.
Anyway, here we go.
Made some great trade deals for us.
That wasn't his strength, but he had a great dignity about him.
Ronald Reagan.
You could say, there's our president.
More than any others, really any of the others.
Great presidents.
Well, Lincoln was probably a great president, although I've always said, why wasn't that settled?
You know, I'm a guy that it doesn't make sense.
We had a civil war.
Well, half the country left before we got there.
Yeah, yeah.
But you'd almost say, like, why wasn't that?
As an example, Ukraine would have never happened, and Russia, if I were president.
Israel would have never happened.
October 7th would have never happened.
As you know, Okay, Nick, before we get into even the Civil War claim, which is just infuriating, I also want to point out, and I know that this is getting a little bit deep in the details, but it also points out how unworthy and how stupid Donald Trump is.
What he says with Ronald Reagan's trade deals, he is wrong, and he's right and he's wrong, in that he is sort of blaming Ronald Reagan for NAFTA. And Ronald Reagan and then George H.W. Bush set up the dominoes for NAFTA with the neoliberal agenda that was eventually leading to this.
Ronald Reagan was one of the spokespeople for a North American free trade agreement.
But, of course, you and I and our listeners know that Bill Clinton was the one who actually signed the documents that put it into action.
So, in a weird way, Donald Trump is both correct and completely and disturbingly wrong on this part.
Second of all, the Civil War thing.
What do you think, Nick, he means when he says he should have settled this?
Because sometimes it helps to get in this guy's mind and figure out exactly what he's saying.
What do you think Donald Trump is saying?
Well, he fancies himself a guy who makes deals.
Makes all kinds of deals.
He felt like, why wouldn't he have just negotiated some sort of settlement between the North and the South?
He wouldn't have had to fight a war and do all that stuff.
Well, you know how that was going to happen.
Basically, if they tried to do that, it would have been the same result as we got with the Constitution, which I had an interesting discussion this weekend.
I kind of wanted to hear your thoughts, where my thesis ended up being that the moment the Constitution was signed, it guaranteed a civil war less than 100 years later.
Absolutely.
They got so...
It's overzealous and overconfident that they believe that that would eventually just go away, and that basically what could have happened from the very beginning was the split of the nation already between slave-owning states and states that weren't into slavery, and you could have had it out right there and gone from there, or you were going to kick the can down the road and put generations into bondage and then lead to slaughter.
And the real question I was asking was, okay, why was it so important for these people to have a United States?
Why did they need the South so fucking badly that they were willing to hold their nose, quote-unquote, and allow slavery in the Constitution?
And I think the answer is what we've said before, which was we're now trying to mix capitalism with democracy.
They needed the money.
They needed the fucking money that the South was making hand over fist on the backs of slavery.
There's a weird thing that happens, Nick, when you are a ruling elite.
And by the way, the Constitution, which they did not have authority to write or put into action, they were there to go over the past uniting documents.
They were looking around, Nick, and they were like, hey, there's a weird thing that happens to ruling elites when the masses are very unhappy.
They tend to rise up and they tend to, you know, hang you and cut your head off, as we would see throughout history.
So it was a moment where they were like, hey, we need to get over these economic differences so we can make a ton of money.
By the way, thank you, Alexander Hamilton, who was one of the main proponents of this and through the Federalist Papers, made it very clear where his priorities laid.
Oh, okay.
That's interesting, because Hamilton is now, you know, exalted as this person.
Yes, because during the Obama era, we had a big, big cultural need to believe that America could be redeemed, and deep, deep down, we had the best ideas at heart, and then, of course, everything went to shift.
And it was before the industrial revolution.
And so the North did not have a way of creating money when, funnily enough, when that starts to pick up steam and they realize, oh, we can be we can actually make money.
Now we can take care of all that slavery that we hated.
Now, that said, people in the North didn't wake up in 1859 and we're like, oh, shit, you know what?
Slavery is horrible.
We should do something about this.
Right.
And I feel like I talked to people like over the weekend who were like, that's what they thought.
They thought, oh, it wasn't on everyone's mind.
Slavery was just like a thing.
Well, whatever.
There wasn't abolitionists then, when there were.
Yes, there were.
Huge thing that ultimately, again, led to the Civil War.
So what he is saying is, yeah, I think his version of a settlement would have been, yes, separate states, right?
North and the South would not be united.
Okay, so a couple things.
One, One of my biggest pet peeves, Nick, is this absolutely absurd notion that everybody grants the Founding Fathers.
It was a different time!
They couldn't have known that slavery...
What, are you kidding me?
Like, you didn't...
And I'm sorry, but if you didn't know slavery was wrong as it was taking place, that's on you.
And you can say, like, it was a different time all you want.
They knew it was awful.
They knew what it was, and they believed that their economic interests were way more important than these millions and millions of people who are going to be in bondage.
The second thing, Nick, to actually settle the Civil War before the Civil War happened, it would have taken a capitulation to the South that would have given them continued control over the United States.
That was the deal in the Constitution.
The Electoral College, the way it was set up, was basically to give the South a guarantee that they would almost always have power over how the nation went forward.
Also, Lincoln and a lot of people around him, they believe the way to avoid the Civil War was to buy the slaves, the enslaved people from the South.
And do you know what they were going to do with them, Nick?
Because I have to tell you, it's not to emancipate them.
Have them start working in factories and whatnot.
No, they were going to ship them to Africa, is what they were going to do.
They were going to settle the issue of slavery by creating an intentional white ethno-state in the United States of America.
So again, Donald Trump is just talking out of his ass.
He has no idea what he's actually getting into.
And I know this is shocking for you and everybody listening.
He is not worthy of the office of the President of the United States of America.
Right.
Period.
But also talking out of his ass, revealing his true nature, which would have been, because by the way, I'm thinking about it now, I don't think his version of settlement would have been separate, you know, north and south.
I think he would have been, no, we're going to let him have slaves.
Sure.
Lincoln, he thinks that Lincoln should have been like, you know what?
Forget it.
We're not going to...
Forget it, man.
Sorry.
You can have them, whatever.
And then whatever else you want, we'll just deal with.
Let's keep sharing all this money.
And just a note, by the way, this shows that the Republican nominee does not understand the roots of the Republican Party.
His own party, which was created because the Whigs didn't have the fight in them to stop slavery.
So the Republican Party was created, the party that he now represents, in order to oppose the South and oppose slavery.
So again, not worth it.
But Nick, luckily, all of these faults, all of these follies, his declining condition, the good news is he has the richest man on Earth outside of probably Vladimir Putin and other undocumented richer people.
The richest man on earth right now, Elon Musk, recognizes that Donald Trump is his ticket to power and continued excessive profit.
Not only has he thrown tens of millions of dollars behind the Trump campaign, not only has he turned Twitter into a propaganda tool to help Donald Trump in a disinformation machine, he's now going out on the road here.
He's been hosting disastrous town halls in Pennsylvania.
And now, Nick, for that petition that we covered the other day in which he's trying to get people to vote for Trump and he's offering them money to do so, upwards of $100 per signing, every day now they're having a little raffle, Nick.
And every day, anyone who signs this petition, which is basically a funnel to voting for Donald Trump, he's now offering a daily $1 million prize.
He's now awarded, I think, two or three of them, which should be legal and should land his ass in hot water.
Right.
Well, let's talk about that a little bit because the law says that you cannot pay someone to register to vote.
So their loophole is, well, we're not paying you to register to vote.
It's a petition.
It's a petition.
But obviously, people are going to register so they can then sign a petition, because you can't sign a petition unless you're registered.
So that's one way that they're being cute about this.
But why or what value is there in signing a petition to basically reaffirm the First and Second Amendments?
These are already amendments.
When you sign a petition, Jared, isn't it something that you want to change?
Isn't it something like the new law you want to enact?
This is just some bullshit like, oh, I like the First Amendment, I like the Second Amendment.
That's not a petition.
That is, again, that's why they're circumventing this.
This is completely corrupt.
But they're going to probably be able to somehow argue this if they get a nice judge that it's not illegal, just like the Russian collusion was not illegal because it wasn't criminal conspiracy.
And I'm sure he's, teehee, teehee, I'm so cute with my little scheme I've cooked up, and it's disgusting, and it's exactly what you said against what should be the law.
Can I ask you a question because this is something I have some thoughts about.
It is obvious that this oligarch is not only using Donald Trump and has bought Donald Trump and bought J.D. Vance and bought the Republican Party at this point.
It is obvious that this oligarch is shoving the shambling, dying corpse of Donald Trump over the finish line in the 2024 election.
This is obvious for anyone paying any amount or any gradient of attention.
How is this not a bigger story, do you think?
Why is this not something that is being more openly discussed outside of places like the McRae podcast?
I have no idea.
I mean, throw in the guy that he bought Twitter to do this as well.
That's all part of this.
He also has the same personality disorder where he creates attention like this.
So he is loving...
Being up in front of a crowd like this and the adulation that he's always gotten anywhere from all the tech bro, Musk people.
So that's feeding that other thing of his as well, that narcissism that he's got.
And so it's like a double whammy for him.
And I don't know why it's not talked about more.
Perhaps because Twitter is his own, he's able to limit the discussion there and maybe that's sort of the part of it.
But it really is...
I just keep adding to the fire here of where we're heading.
Nick, have you ever...
Have you ever had an injury or a health condition that you felt like way before you were diagnosed or had to deal with it?
You ever had that?
You ever lived in denial of something that was very, very obvious within yourself?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, I'm a little bit of a hypochondriac, but yeah, I'm sure I was like, oh, it's nothing.
It's nothing.
Forget it.
And then, yeah.
And the reason we do that is because we don't want to deal with it.
Right?
Like, we don't want to actually, like, I personally, and I'm speaking from experience, like, I've got four or five different things I really need to go to a doctor for.
You know what I mean?
Also, one of the richest people in the world, which shows that the system rewards people like this.
In order to look this thing fully in the face, you have to be ready to understand the full breadth of the problem.
Which is we have reached a point, which one of your favorite and accurate things to say, the relationship between capitalism and democracy is tenuous at best.
And it has reached the point of massive, massive tenuousness.
And to understand now that we have this dangerous fascist who is...
Maybe a couple of weeks away from winning the presidency again or stealing the presidency again and that he is being controlled by this person who has all this power and all this access.
I have to be honest as someone who covers it, Nick, there are times I'll cover it.
And I understand it, and I can intellectualize it.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, I can see it, understand it, and describe it.
But the sheer horror of it to actually, like, let it in is almost all-consuming.
Does that make sense?
Like, to actually sort of wrap your head around it, it actually is something that feels very horrible.
You know, it's funny.
What feels worse?
What's going on as North Korea is going to be sending troops into Ukraine or Musk getting his hooks into a more formal manner to our government?
Can I answer that?
Yeah.
They're the same thing.
Okay, that's a good answer.
It's part of the same problem.
Yeah, yeah.
It's almost like, you know, we're talking about like a health element that you're not paying attention to.
It's like you get one symptom and you're like, eh, there's that.
And then you get another symptom and you're like, eh.
I don't know.
And you start actually drawing the lines.
It's the exact same thing.
It's all radiation poisoning.
It's all radiation.
Speaking of people who have suffered from apparent radiation poisoning, I hate to tell you, Nick, Marjorie Taylor Greene is at it again.
On a recent appearance on the Alex Jones show, Marjorie Taylor Greene had some thoughts on what's been going on in the early stages of early voting.
someone posted up that when they went to vote in Whitfield County here in Georgia's 14th district now remember we're a swing state and we need everyone to vote in my district and so they went to vote we have the Dominion machines and you mark you go through and you mark president you mark you know for Congress that would be me but they mark Donald Trump and they mark who they were voting for the rest of the way down their ballot on the machine
then when they're finished the machine prints their ballot a paper copy a printed copy and each voter has to review that printed copy to make sure that it has selected the candidates that they want to vote for and And so when this voter printed their ballot and they looked, it had changed.
It was not Donald Trump.
It was not me, and it was not the other ones they had voted for.
It had switched.
And so they went up to one of the election workers and they said, here's the problem.
The machine switched it and my printed ballot, I did not vote for these people.
So they had to start over and they went through it several times and it kept on making the same error, kept on switching the votes.
And so this is something we're just starting to look into today.
Can I have things that didn't happen for $200?
Did you notice, because listen, what she says, it always obscures something.
Did you hear where she learned about this?
Somebody posted it, I think.
Yeah, somebody posted about it.
Which, by the way, she has a long history of just, like, repeating things that she's seen online.
Like, the mental faculties of this person are staggering.
And what we have now is the beginning of setting up the long push towards another big lie like we had in 2020.
And you'll notice, Nick, Dominion voting machines.
They're switching votes.
We're hearing about it everywhere.
And for the record, I think Dominion voting should sue the living shit out of her.
Which, you know, they have a good track record of that at this point.
But Nick, the reason why this is happening is to set up a legal challenge against the 2024 election to try and bully their way into winning.
We have covered already that the army of election lawyers, election deniers, has been basically tripled.
This was carried out by Ronna McDaniel, who we now know didn't even believe 2020 was a stolen election.
We've also seen it from all these right-wing think tanks and institutes, you name it, the Republican National Party.
They are preparing to roll this narrative out, and quite frankly, I don't know if we are ready to push against it and actually have the same result we had in 2020.
I hear you.
I mean, I can only pray that the election looks like that Harris wins and then we have to deal with whatever the shenanigans they're going to try and do on the election day itself or after that.
And by the way, what would stop the Democrats from doing the same thing then?
If Trump wins, why don't they just say, and they're in the one power, this is all sham, it's fake, they should do the same thing.
Let's throw it into more chaos.
I don't know what to make of this.
By the way, Trump was just on this Howard Kurtz show, and he was saying the same thing.
He goes, it's been debunked.
There's nobody eating the pets.
He goes, I don't know, I just read it.
I just read it.
I'm recording and I read it.
That's all that matters.
I don't care.
And he's like, well, doesn't it matter?
Because you know it's not true.
Shouldn't you say something now?
He goes, oh, what do I know?
If somebody said it, there's a picture.
That's all I know.
Now, if that really happened, what Marjorie Taylor Greene described, I would expect to see all of these ballots that had kept coming and printed out wrong.
Someone would take a screenshot of that and say, look, here are my six ballots.
They kept trying to do it.
It was not working right.
So, again, none of this is...
It doesn't matter if it's real anymore.
Once it's out there and people are listening, it's like they just want to believe it because it confirms it.
They want to believe it.
And let's, you know, one of the things we've been doing in this episode is taking, like, quick little sojourns into the mind of it.
Let's say this is real.
First of all, I would be horrified to hear in the United States of America that ballots are being changed.
I stand against that.
You stand against that.
I'm sure the people listening stand against that.
If that were to happen, if an individual actually had their ballot changed and they took it to a poll worker, and by the way, people who work polls are good, decent people and have been.
They're people who believe in this process and are taking their own time to do this.
If that actually took place, do you think it would just stop there?
Do you think that they would just be like, oh I finally got the right ballot?
No!
You would have seen press conferences about this.
You would have seen a major story taking place.
It's the seed of the rumor that they want to believe is true.
That's what this has always been about.
It's giving them a reality that's tailored to the reality that they want.
And you don't have to give them facts.
You don't have to give them anything of substance.
All that matters is they already want to win the 2024 election.
They don't care how they do it.
If it takes a narrative and an obvious lie like this, they'll go with that.
Right.
And if something tells me we're going to hear from other people from the murderous row, it's saying the same story in other states.
I'd imagine that's the plan.
So they got...
Maybe they've already pre-booked all these appearances for every few days to keep it in mind until they get to the election.
Because remember, that's the biggest thing.
In order to contest the election and say it's fake, you've got to prime the pump.
It sounds like it's already mad ahead of time before it actually happens.
I agree.
I think this would be reported on in huge amounts if this really did happen.
I'll say this.
Thinking about our live show during the election, I'll make a prediction.
I feel pretty confident in this.
If we know who the winner is by the end of the night, like definitively, it will be Donald Trump having won the election.
Right.
It will be Donald Trump having won and then Kamala Harris coming out and conceding probably in the late hours of the morning.
Okay?
If Donald Trump doesn't quote-unquote run away with this thing, there are going to be legal battles and maneuvering that is once more, much like in 2020, it's going to take several days, if not weeks, to get this thing cleared up.
They are ready to turn this into trench warfare.
And all I can say...
I hope that the Democratic Party and our media apparatus are prepared for it.
That's all I want to say.
I hope that they do not think that they're going to go gently into that good night out of the goodness of their hearts.
Yeah.
I mean, it sounds like we're prepared for it, I think.
I mean, they certainly are aware of what's going to happen.
Do they have teams in place and the law researched and whatever the proof they're going to need?
I don't know.
And it might just be a reactive force, which is always when you're behind the eight ball on that.
But I don't know how else you're supposed to do it because you can't prove something that didn't happen.
Well, that is a problem.
I will say, just as a note of concern, in the lead up to the 2020 election, I heard and was contacted about multiple war games, simulations, all of that, trying to prep for what would happen if Donald Trump continued with the big lie that he was already seeding at that point, what would play out.
I have not been hearing of that, which makes me a little bit worried.
That maybe they feel like they've already learned their lesson, but I think as we've talked about on the show, they need to be prepared for the fact that these people have learned from 2020.
They now have 2020 as earned experience that they are going to use to figure out how to make it actually work out this time.
Yeah, I hope so.
I really hope not, too.
Again, because it's going to be one of those moments that say, you know, Harris does win, and we're excited about that, and then we know it's going to end up being contested, and who knows what's going to happen on the January 6th when it happens again.
So I don't know.
It's all very much, this is not over, right?
Let's just hope he doesn't run away with it on the day of, because I don't think I can handle that.
Yeah, that's a tough one.
Speaking of tough ones, Nick, a clip that I never thought, you know, when I saw this originally, I kind of felt like something had happened to me, like I had broken from reality, possibly.
What you're getting ready to listen to, everyone, is Jesse Waters on Fox News talking to one of the worst people in the world, Stephen Miller.
We just have to address the elephant in the room.
We're getting a lot of texts from women about Miller and his appearances and his appearance.
Our audience at primetime believes you're some sort of sexual matador.
What do you have to say for yourself?
Well, let me give advice to any young man that's out there.
I'm married now.
I have children, but I wasn't married that long ago.
I was single.
I was in the market.
If you're a young man...
It's very important in election season.
Who's looking to impress ladies, to be the alpha, to be attractive.
The best thing you can do is to wear your Trump support on your sleeve.
Show that you are a real man.
Show that you are not a betta, right?
Be a proud and loud Trump supporter, and your dating life will be fantastic.
I cannot wait.
Oh, man.
Why did you make me listen to that again?
Isn't that awful?
Ugh, ick.
And do you hear how he pronounced the word B-E-T-A? Beta.
He said beta, right?
Beta.
Beta.
Don't be a beta, man.
I don't know how to pronounce that right.
He sounds like Lorne Michaels.
Is he Canadian?
I don't know what his problem is.
But anyway, I would not take dating advice from a man like Stephen Miller.
I'm sorry.
This is somehow or another even worse than all the pictures of Donald Trump where they superimpose his face on like Rambo's body.
This is just sort of taking it way too far.
But what I wanted to talk about from this, there are a couple of things taking place in this answer by Stephen Miller.
Oh man, my skin feels...
I want to unzip my skin and go take a long bath after listening to that.
First things first, Nick.
We've heard J.D. Vance and a lot of Republicans, including Josh Hawley, who have been pushing for a return of like patriarchal masculinity and aggressive masculinity.
And one of the things underneath all of that have been actual actionable ideas, such as men should have the vote of the household, right?
They should be able to have multiple votes on behalf of their wives and their children and And that idea, which is a managed democracy, which is incredibly dangerous and scary, is about rewinding the clock and resetting gender roles and patriarchal power.
One of the things that we have seen over the past couple of weeks has been a very, very quiet and delicate nuanced strategy by the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party.
In which they are starting to appeal to women voters who might be married to men who support Donald Trump, who feel as if they have to go along with their partners in order for safety, in order to maintain their households and marital sanctity, whatever you want to call it.
They have started to roll out a lot of influencers and a lot of campaign rhetoric saying, he doesn't know what you're going to do in that booth.
He doesn't know who you vote for.
He doesn't know who you support.
Go ahead and follow your conscience.
I actually think, and again, I've been very critical of the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party lately.
I actually think that this is a smart tactic.
And I think it both shows where we are as a country, where we're going, but it also shows that there is an understanding that that patriarchal infrastructure and intimidation is live and well and needs to be countered.
Right.
It's awful that they have to do that, right?
It's awful that people are in situations where they feel so dominated by their husbands that they can't vote like what they truly believe and what they would want this country to be.
You know, and you have to imagine, there can't be that many couples who, like, one is for Trump and one is for Harris.
It's hard to imagine that anymore.
I know we don't see Matt Lee and, what's her, Mary Matlin and...
James Carville.
James Carville.
We don't see them anymore.
They're not even together, I don't think, right?
But maybe they are.
I don't even know anymore.
But...
The famous couple who were both on either side, which seemed impossible.
I think what they had in common was being part of the consultant class.
They made money off of what was happening, as opposed to their politics, yeah.
And this Carbill was the luckiest guy in the world at the right time, right place, once.
Once.
So, you know, so yeah, I don't even know...
How many people there are in the margins there that they could actually, you know, get Cleveland for votes.
But at the very least, yeah, empowering women is a really good message.
And it seems like that should be something we need to get to.
But again, it's just horrible to think that, like, this pushback about alpha males and what you need to be and you have to have your, you know, testicles irradiated with sunshine or whatever is, it's just, it's not the right direction.
I don't think that that's the solution for any of this stuff.
Yeah, I agree with that.
And by the way, I'm glad you brought up the fact that James Carville had one U.S. election that he won, and then he not only has used that to sell books and wrangle in millions of dollars worth of speaking fees, but also we would be remiss if we didn't point out that he went around the world and sold his services to any autocrat or a corporation that wanted him.
Made the situation much worse, and he's still being treated as a guru for some absurd reason.
And also think about this, because we can talk about the Arnold Palmer line.
So you have a guy who's like a serial womanizer, to put it as best as possible, right?
And he's sort of enamored by the size of Arnold Palmer's genitalia.
It's like, those are latent homosexual...
Things perhaps peeking out here, right?
We saw what Tucker Carlson did with that video that they created, right, for The Ultimate Man, and it was all just homoerotic imagery.
So you have to imagine that there's an underlying part of that as well where these people don't even realize he plays YMCA at every rally and dances around to it without having any idea of what, you know, or maybe he doesn't, what that song is.
It's like a calling out of help they need psychically.
The only thing I can say just definitively, and it's the old adage, the right is a psychosexual disaster.
That's it, period.
You don't act like this if there's not something within you that is full of conflict or anger.
We've talked about the projection of the self onto the world and then having to take it off.
I don't know what Stephen Miller's up to, but the amount of hate and oppression that he brings into the world, there's obviously something that he hates about himself.
When it comes to this whole thing with Vance and Holly and you name it, all of these assholes, what they are doing is they are using inherent psychological triggers and worries and paranoia in men to try and forward their own agenda and literally dismantle democracy.
I just want to say something that's very, very obvious.
It's 2024.
And what we're seeing is literally the types of tactics.
And I do think the Democratic Party is right to do this.
I think the Harris campaign is right to do this.
Those types of tactics are so old.
And so wrong.
Immediately after suffrage, you had to see this stuff.
There were periods of time in which a man could interfere with his wife's ability to vote.
This type of stuff coming around again, it needs to be treated for what it is, which is a canary in the coal mine.
I do think it's a successful tactic, but we need to ask, why is this tactic necessary?
And I think that's where we need to leave that.
All right, everybody.
That's going to do it for this episode.
We will be back with the Weekender edition on Friday.
A reminder, go to patreon.com slash mygreatpodcast.
In order to support the show, keep us editorially independent, ad-free, and also gain access to those Weekender episodes.
In the meantime, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?
