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Things have taken a turn as co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss not-so-new revelations from Donald Trump's former chief of staff John Kelly that Trump is, indeed, a fascist who pines for Hitler's generals. They shift to an op-ed from a conservative who claims Democrats are forcing her to vote for Trump as if she wasn't doing it anyway, and they wrap up on the little reported on fact that foreign actors are trying to hack into our election systems once again.
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Welcome to the Weekender Edition of the McCrack Podcast.
I'm Jared G. Sexton.
Hey, Nick Halsman.
How you doing, bud?
I'm great, Jared.
I'm great.
I'm going to be great until I'm not great.
I think that's fair.
I want to make a disclaimer before we begin this.
Because it's autumn, easily my favorite month, I drank some tea.
I made some hot tea.
I wanted the vocal cords to sound good on this episode.
And Nick, as I always do, I forgot that Earl Grey has caffeine in it, which is going to affect this broadcast.
Awesome.
You know what's funny?
I don't drink caffeine anymore either.
It's been two months.
I had a little caffeine last night in the form of a sugar-free Coke.
I was bouncing off the walls, Jared.
I tell you, we underestimate how the substances affect us.
In the past, when I normally would drink it, I could drink a Coke and then fall asleep on the couch immediately.
No problem.
I was wired.
I had probably some residual energy myself, so let's do it.
Let's bring it.
A reminder to everybody listening to the free preview, and if you want to hear me go into the absolute thrall of caffeine, you need to go over to patreon.com slash muckraigpodcast, which Not only get you the weekly, weekender edition of the McRae podcast, you're going to get to hang out with us after the election here in a week and a half.
You're going to see, I mean, we do these marathon post-election broadcasts.
You're going to get more analysis and reaction.
And also, you'll get to go through this thing with us.
And anyone who is tuned in for one of our election broadcasts, you understand this is cathartic.
We can come together as a community.
We can deal with it together.
Patreon.com slash McRae podcast.
Absolutely.
Great community.
Great place to be.
You're already listening to this show anyway.
Come on over.
Come on over.
Well, Nick, here in the last week and a half of the campaign, we have now seen a marked turn.
And a lot of this is revolving around the reappearance of former Trump chief of staff, John Kelly, who's making the round, sounding the alarm bells, saying that Trump is unequivocally a fascist.
This also was done in accordance with an article by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic that reports news sources that say that Trump disparaged a dead Hispanic soldier and that two witnesses now report that he said, and I quote, "...I need the kind of generals Hitler had, people who were totally loyal to him that follow orders." Nick, this is something that we've heard about before.
We've heard about his admiration of Adolf Hitler.
We've heard him lust after dictatorial powers.
Now it does feel like there is a new emphasis on this part of the election.
It's coming across in a lot of different forms, but it does feel as if this is the last push in the 2024 presidential election.
I agree.
And the problem is it comes down to a he said, dictator said, you know, situation.
Those are my least favorite he said, she said.
You have to figure out, you know, who's telling the truth, right?
And there's never really even been like a full-throated, you know, complete denial, I feel like, from the Trump campaign.
I know that spokesman say it didn't happen, but...
You know, do you want to believe a guy who has been proven to be a liar consistently every single day?
Or, you know, a general who has, you know, dedicated his entire life in services country?
And by the way, the funny thing is, is there's been times when I would have been like, I don't know, this guy's part of the industrial military complex.
Why would we believe anything he says, right?
Okay.
The whole thing is very strange in the sense that everyone's switching sides daily to figure out how to make it work for what they already want to believe.
But I don't know.
For someone like John Kelly, it just seems like he was kind of above reproach as far as whether he would just blatantly lie about stuff that happened.
It seems like he could lie about other things and it would be a lot easier to do.
I happen to believe him and for the same reason that I think a lot of listeners probably do as well, which is we know Donald Trump's corrosive, wicked heart.
We know deep down, I mean, we've seen him over and over again, Nick, lavish praise over the dictatorial regimes of Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, wanting total control over the apparatus of power and also the media.
He wants those things for himself.
He has lusted after them openly.
Nick, before we get into the campaign ramifications, which I think are important here, a little bit of historical context, which is one of the things I like to offer on this show.
A reminder to everybody who doesn't know this, because our history books and conventional narratives paper over this stuff all the time.
Adolf Hitler was a notoriously awful and destructive strategist.
One of the reasons that the Third Reich met its demise was because Adolf Hitler was a terrible leader who played generals and officials and party members against one another, much like Donald Trump, because that's what authoritarians do, creating a dysfunctional regime around himself.
And by the way, the idea that he was totally supported by generals is historically inaccurate.
He was hated by his generals, so much so that multiple times they tried to kill him.
Most famously was the 20th of July plot, which was carried out by Klaus von Steffenberg, Hennig von Treschkow, and Hans Oster, in which Operation Valkyrie was undertaken in order to kill Hitler with a bomb so that they could destroy the Nazi regime and restore some kind of order.
Before that, there was Operation Spark.
There were other moments where Hitler was being targeted by these people because it was understood that he was inherently destructive and dangerous.
So not only is Donald Trump disgusting for admiring Adolf Hitler, but shocker of shockers again, Nick, he is completely wrong about history and just has his own version of reality that he lives within.
Yeah, and Hitler is also extremely, I guess the term would be emotionally unstable.
And a guy who, you know, is letting his decisions be affected by that, which is never a good way to do it if you're trying to manage a country.
Yeah.
But, you know, the other question about, like, the Kelly thing then, too, is, well, how many more generals do we need to hear from?
And we've heard from dozens upon dozens.
I mean, I think Kamala wanted to reference, like, 60, but there's a whole lot of generals and people, you know, deep in the Army and the armed services who have condemned Trump and said this guy is a fascist and he can't be in charge of anything.
So it's like it's not just Kelly saying this.
It's like completely corroborated and backed up over and over again.
And that's what's so frustrating because it's just so easy to say they're lying.
It's not true.
He didn't say it.
You know, did we even bring up the burial?
We talked about that last week, I think, right?
No, we did not touch on that, but I referenced it.
At the beginning of this article is this whole long story about how Donald Trump offered to pay for a funeral for a dead service person and then railed against him saying, you know, should it cost this much to bury a blanking Mexican, which is repulsive?
I believe it's true.
It falls in line with everything about himself.
The question now...
Is whether or not this information, which by the way, Nick, we've known this forever.
We've seen him lust after this.
We've heard these reports before.
The question is, is this enough to actually change the face of the race?
And before we get into the actual ramifications of it, I want to listen to a couple of clips.
Because I think Kamala Harris, finally somebody talked to her and said, hey, this might be a decent strategy.
These are remarks that she made directly referencing the Adolf Hitlers.
So yesterday we learned that Donald Trump's former chief of staff, John Kelly, a retired four-star general, confirmed that while Donald Trump was president, he said he wanted generals like Adolf Hitler had.
Donald Trump said that because he does not want a military that is loyal to the United States Constitution.
He wants a military that is loyal to him.
He wants a military who will be loyal to him personally.
One that will obey his orders even when he tells them to break the law or abandon their oath to the Constitution of the United States.
In just the past week, Donald Trump Trump has repeatedly called his fellow Americans the enemy from within, and even said that he would use the United States military to go after American citizens.
And let's be clear about who he considers to be the enemy from within.
Anyone who refuses to bend a knee or dares to criticize him would qualify in his mind as the enemy within, like judges Like journalists.
Like nonpartisan election officials.
It is deeply troubling and incredibly dangerous that Donald Trump would invoke Adolf Hitler, the man who is responsible for the deaths of six million Jews and hundreds of thousands of Americans.
All of this is further evidence for the American people of who Donald Trump really is.
Now, I don't think anybody cares.
I don't think anybody who follows Trump cares about this.
Well, nobody that follows Trump cares about it.
The real appeal here that Harris is trying to make, and we've talked about this on recent episodes, they have to grow the pie of voters.
You have to get across to people who are otherwise thinking about sitting this thing out.
Who, and by the way, the Democratic Party is in real danger of an entire generation of voters writing them off.
These were voters that the Democratic Party believed that they were going to have as they went forward.
Everybody said demographics are destiny.
They have to make that appeal.
I do want to make a point here with those statements, which this is an unequivocal critique of Donald Trump that should be made.
This is the tone that Harris should be making.
One thing that we missed in this, Nick, we heard six million Jews.
We heard hundreds of thousands of Americans.
You know who didn't get mentioned in this?
Gay people who were also slaughtered by Hitler.
That is a point that needs to be made.
You know who else got slaughtered by Hitler?
A bunch of vulnerable minorities within Germany who were basically without any sort of representation.
This is another moment where unequivocal support of the people who were in the crosshairs of MAGA and what is coming for them, it could have been pointless.
pointed at and it could have been a point.
I don't know if it was intentionally left out.
But on this subject, Nick, let's take a look at, on Wednesday night, Harris went on CNN and did a town hall, which, by the way, was supposed to be another debate, which Donald Trump ducked because she beat the living hell out of him last time.
And this exchange, I think, is important.
You've quoted General Milley calling Donald Trump a fascist.
You yourself have not used that word to describe him.
Let me ask you tonight, do you think Donald Trump is a fascist?
Yes, I do.
Yes, I do.
And I also believe that the people who know him best on this subject should be trusted.
Again, look at their careers.
You've There it is.
As unequivocal and straightforward as it can get, which if somebody asks you, is Donald Trump a fascist, the correct answer is to say yes.
It's not to dance around it, it's to put it in plain, stark terms.
Jared, she must really want to get him killed then.
Oh, God.
This is it.
This is her.
She must want Trump killed because of all these terrible things she's saying about him.
Meanwhile, this is just the reporting that she's reacting to.
It's reporting that's been vetted.
Do you think that The Atlantic or other publications would go to print with this stuff if they didn't have multiple sources locked down over a long period of time to make sure they got this right?
I guess it's such a cynical, easy answer to say, no, they don't do anything anymore.
They just print whatever, right?
And that's what people are convinced that what happened is due to Trump.
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