Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss what Donald Trump is already putting into place, including Tom Holman as border czar (family separation will be a feature, not a bug), while mainstream media are all pledging to normalize Trump even more than they had been doing. The desperation from the Democrats is palpable, going so far as to suggest that Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor retire right now.
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Another week, the sun came up, we got out of bed, and that's all you can ask for until January 20th.
Yeah, yeah, I think that's exactly right.
I mean, you know, last week, I don't know how you felt and how the listeners felt, but that was a pure adrenaline drive to get through the election, try and make sense of it, and then try and start wrapping our heads around what it is we're getting ready to face.
It's been a week.
People are going to listen to this, you know, one week after the election has actually happened.
It is a whole gamut of emotions.
And here's the problem, Nick.
They don't pause to let you get your feet underneath you.
The right and Trump and the oligarchs behind him, they are marching full speed ahead.
And, right, they learned their lesson, which is why they shouldn't have been re-elected, is now that they have Project 2025 in place.
You know, we talked about this.
It came out that, you know, they were always, that was the plan.
Just kidding.
We just pretended we didn't know about it.
We didn't care about it.
And, yeah, it's going to be a light speed, you know, in terms of implementing what they want to get done.
And that's going to be that much harder to slow it down.
Thank you.
Keep an eye on it so we can fight back against it.
A reminder, everybody, go to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
Support the show.
I just want to say we have new listeners.
We have people who are trying to understand this and take on the realistic tech.
I understand that for a long time people didn't want to, and it didn't feel good, and I realize that a lot of people are waking up right now and joining us.
Welcome to the show.
If you want to listen to The Weekender on Fridays, it is a different kind of recording that we have.
It's an additional episode on Friday, patreon.com slash mccraigpodcast.
So Nick, let's keep an eye on the bullshit where it's going.
Donald Trump, president-elect of the United States of America, has wasted no time.
We have to document what has been coming out.
And if you will, please roll this dumbass bean footage.
Here are 10 key ideas that will power our movement for great schools.
First, we will respect the right of parents to control the education of their children.
Second, We will empower parents and local school board to hire and reward great principals and teachers, and also to fire the poor ones, the one whose performance is unsatisfactory.
They will be fired.
Like on The Apprentice, you're fired.
Third, we will ensure our classrooms are focused not on political indoctrination, but on teaching the knowledge and skills needed to succeed.
Reading, writing, math, science, arithmetic.
Another truly useful subject.
That was actually math and arithmetic are the same thing, Jerry.
It turns out it helps if you have an educated person be leader of the free world, but yeah.
Let's keep going.
We will teach students to love their country, not to hate their country like they're taught right now.
Fifth, we will support bringing back prayer to our schools.
Sixth, we will achieve schools that are safe, secure, and drug-free, with immediate expulsion for any student who harms a teacher or another student.
Seventh, we will give all parents the right to choose another school for their children if they want.
It's called school choice.
Eighth, we will ensure students have access to project-based learning experiences inside the classroom to help train them for meaningful work outside the classroom.
Ninth, we will strive to give all students access to internships and work experiences that can set them on a path To their first job.
They're going to be very, very successful.
I want them to be more successful than Trump.
Let them go out and be more successful.
I will be the happiest person in the world.
Okay.
You know what?
I'm pulling the jackhorn on this bullshit.
Nick, I'm going to go down the list of what we just got communicated for us.
Are you ready?
Yeah.
I mean, and there is more, but yeah.
Okay, so with all of this, we have to understand that what Trump presents, there's always something behind it, right?
Like it's presented as quote-unquote common sense.
So we have school choice, which of course is going to continue the war on public education to drain away one of the greatest achievements ever.
Of liberalism writ large.
Next up we have control over school boards, the hiring and firing of principals and teachers, which means that basically the community and right-wing radicalized people will be able to control what happens in the classroom.
Political indoctrination, you know as well as I do that that means that they're going to get rid of gay and trans teachers and anybody who even promotes tolerance at any level.
Teach them to love the country.
There's your political indoctrination right there, which is a rollback of their curriculum in general.
Prayer in the school, which is all about control and indoctrinating people into Christianity.
Safe.
That means we're going to get guns in schools.
We're going to get police in schools.
Next up, project-based vocation and internships.
We're going to go ahead and funnel people into jobs and make sure that there's no sort of upward mobility whatsoever.
Not that people shouldn't have that type of training, but we know that these assholes are not going to go in that direction.
Oh, what was also notable was when he said safe and secure schools, he only points out drug-free.
Does not say anything about guns-free.
So you're saying that they're going to bring more guns, like the teachers are going to have guns?
Oh, yeah, yeah, the teachers are going to have guns.
They might as well start taking the training.
But the idea that he wouldn't even say we're going to keep guns out of school or to keep people who have guns from killing our students, he can't even muster that courage to say anything like that.
Prayer in schools is, you know, truly frightening.
And I had sort of maybe even tongue-in-cheek had said, you know, one of the reasons why they don't like the public system is because they're not teaching creationism.
But that's basically what we're talking about, right?
You can't really separate incorporating religion in school or prayer in school.
Like, it just feels like the next logical step would be to start pairing away the things that make us hate our country, which is like the real history, but also, you know, the history of like, you know, evolution, right?
I tend to feel like those are going to get wrapped up in the same issue.
This is what a dictator sounds like, right?
It is.
And if, you know, I said last week, Nick, that I wanted to talk about solutions.
And I wanted to talk about the things that actually need to be done as opposed to just diagnosing the problem.
I want to take a quick second.
I'm an educator.
I spent a large portion of my life being an educator.
I was within the academic institution as it started to crumble and be destroyed by assholes like Donald Trump and the people behind him.
I want to say something to any teachers listening to this podcast right now.
Right now, before Donald Trump is inaugurated, before they're able to do any of this stuff, you need to talk to your co-workers and you need to start talking about the possibility of collective action.
You cannot just capitulate.
You cannot just accept this.
If this stuff starts coming down the pike, there is no working within it.
You are going to spend the rest of your career and the rest of your life looking over your shoulder and unfortunately being made to follow these directives.
That is exactly what Donald Trump is saying, and that's what the oligarchs behind him want.
We are going to have to start considering collective action and mass action.
You might have to walk out of your job.
You might have to go on strike in order to push against this.
And you very well might be putting a lot of your livelihood on the line, but you need to understand that when he says this, he means it.
This isn't just floating things out anymore.
It's not just spewing out a bunch of bullshit.
You need to prepare for this, and it needs to start happening now.
And you always have to wrap your head around the things that could actually, things could always get worse.
They could get worse.
And I know we can, you know, everyone can agree that the public school system doesn't work well for everybody.
But the idea that you'd want to put the curriculum in charge of the parents versus people who are professionals at that, because that's not the issue.
Like, the curriculum isn't necessarily the issue.
It's like the methods.
And I'll tell you one thing.
I taught high school for years.
I was an awesome teacher.
First and second period when I had 12 kids in every class or each class.
And I was a terrible teacher in fourth and fifth right before lunch when I had 40 kids in my class and half of them had ADHD and the blood sugar was dropping.
I could barely keep control of that.
So in my mind, it's pretty clear and simple to figure out how you can solve a lot of these issues and the curriculum itself necessarily.
It's funding is what it is.
What's that?
It's funding.
Funding, yeah.
We need like the smaller classrooms and, you know, and more teachers and higher wages for the teachers.
Like that really would go a long way toward everything else.
But the idea that they're going to, when you see the crazies, you know, in those school town halls or whatever, railing against the things that they want to rail against that fly in the face of what good teaching is, it makes sense why we have a department of education.
But let's make one thing clear.
The department of education doesn't create the curriculum.
No.
So that's one of the issues.
They put this boogeyman out there.
It's this department that's like one big computer system.
Like a Stalinist regime.
Yeah.
That's what they think it is.
As far as I understand it, the Department of Education is really just the one who meets out the money.
They hands out the money and distributes it properly across the country and maybe has some of the testing standards.
Yeah.
So anyway, it really is frustrating to think that this is their method of control.
It's been what they've been trying to do, knowing how generally younger populations tend to be more liberal at that age, and then continue that way if it's not interrupted by assholes like this.
This is about two things and this can be our final point on this.
It's about two things and two things in general.
The first thing is destroying the public school system as a means of educating people and preparing them to not just be in an economy, but also to be citizens of a country, which is what it was set out to be in the first place.
It is about starving the public school system, which is what has been happening since desegregation, because assholes like this believe that only certain people deserve an actual education.
And that brings us to our second point, Nick, and that is creating a permanent underclass within the United States of America.
People who do not understand history, who do not understand economics, they do not understand power.
And on top of that, that they are more exploitable by the wealth class.
So, for instance, if you get a job with one corporation, you don't know any better.
You might not go out and find another thing.
You might be damned to work there, much like people were in company towns a while back.
That is the entire point of this.
It isn't about solving problems.
It isn't about making a better education.
It's about creating a group of people who are infinitely exploitable.
And, Nick, and this is something that we're going to have to touch on many, many times over the next few years.
It's about creating an airtight control over ideology.
It's making sure that people are not exposed to different ideas.
People aren't exposed to different cultures or different ways of thinking.
That they are going to be permanently attached to the Republican Party and the wealth class that controls them.
That's it.
And the first thing they're going to start with is how January 6th is taught in your work.
And we heard Bill Barr say this, that the winners get to write the history.
And that is the case, as we've known, across the entire history of our civilization.
But when we have the evidence, we have the information in front of us, every day that goes by, the longer we get away from that, the harder it is to remember and the easier it is for someone like this to just rewrite the history.
Getting rid of slavery, getting rid of any of the things that would be negative against the United States that helped us grow and progress.
But the January 6th stuff, I think, is the first thing that's going to go.
They're going to control how that narrative was taught.
And within a few years, I bet you people are all going to be shrugged and think, oh, you know, it wasn't a big deal.
I just want to say, and I'm sure you've heard this and other people have heard this as well.
If you've ever been advised when it comes to, like, protecting yourself during, like, a kidnapping attempt, the secret is to never get taken to a second location.
Right?
You don't go.
The way that you avoid the consequences of what we're discussing, because those are long-reaching consequences, and this is speaking, and you taught people who were being educated under the no child left behind, right?
That is still there.
It has not been undone.
The consequences are still there.
What Trump just laid out here on behalf of the wealth class, if this gets put in place, game over.
That's it.
Because education controls the future.
You have to stop this before it happens, because if they go ahead and they gain control over it to this extent, it's done.
Nick, next up in terms of developments, if you want to know what this is all about, how about this reporting from Barack Reved and Axios?
Apparently, Donald Trump took a call with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky.
They needed to talk, of course, about the ongoing war in Ukraine, where 50,000 Russian troops and North Korean troops are massing on the border and getting ready to go into Ukraine to bring about the next part of this war.
Well, Trump wasn't alone on that call with Vladimir Zelensky, which is what usually happens when a president-elect talks to another president.
Who was on that call?
You guessed it, everybody.
The one and only Elon Musk.
He had to be there to watch what his puppet was going to do during one of his most important phone calls.
Well, you know, we remember we made fun of Trump when he asked, who's the guy that he was going to ask to be his vice president?
Kasich.
Kasich.
And he's basically going to give him everything.
Well, I have a feeling that Musk is going to take him up on that offer.
I think Musk is more than happy to take him up on that offer.
Yeah.
Now, J.D. Vance might actually get in there and be like, hey, hey, wait about me.
I definitely need some power myself.
But at the very least, you know, we know he's going to bring Musk in and let Musk just...
If you thought that Trump was corrupt, then Musk is going to do so much corruption and he's going to build so much money from the government because he's already primed the pump as it is.
I'm willing to go on the record.
He might double his wealth in four years.
Okay.
Oh, this is how you become a trillionaire.
Like he might have cracked the code.
The way you become a trillionaire from a billionaire is probably to merge with the state apparatus.
And he's figuring that out in real time.
In case I need to remind anybody, Elon Musk in the Starlink system, he denied Ukraine access to Starlink when he thought that they were going to carry out an assault on the Crimean Peninsula against Russia.
The message that was given to Zelensky on this call, and it wasn't said.
Of course, Trump lied to him and told him whatever he wanted to hear.
But the message that Musk being on this call made it abundantly clear, undoubtedly, which is Ukraine is very likely about to face this new offensive.
And Nick, isn't it weird that this new offensive is being prepped just in time for Donald Trump to potentially become president of the United States of America?
Very strange how that happens.
What we're looking at now...
It's almost like this whole thing benefited Trump from the beginning, and that's why they waited until now to do it.
It's almost like that.
It's almost like there's a worldwide authoritarian movement that Donald Trump is in thrall to.
Also, one of the things that I've been keeping an eye on, Nick, I talked to a couple of people with security briefings about they do believe that Russia is starting to build up a wish list in terms of the next few places that it could potentially hit once it finally puts Ukraine to bed.
We're talking about former Soviet provinces, which are basically there for the taking.
And I couldn't tell you right now that NATO would be there for them because Donald Trump's going to be the leader of America.
And on top of that, they're starting to talk about expanding into Africa.
And anybody at home who's listening to this and maybe they're like, man, where have I heard this before?
A reminder that in the 20th century, we had another couple of groups of people, fascists and Nazis, that when they started chipping away at the established British order at that time, what did they do?
They started gobbling up the provinces around them and they started trying to create for themselves a new colonial empire.
Do not be surprised if Russia starts making inroads in these places and, And Nick, I don't know, let me just come up off the top of my head of a couple of places that might do the same.
I don't know, like China, maybe a North Korea, maybe the other members of this authoritarian worldwide movement are going to start getting a little froggy when it comes to this stuff.
Well, certainly they might get a lot even more chummy.
And we have a name for that, right?
I think maybe it's Axis could be the name we have.
Axis fits pretty well, sure.
But I'm willing to come up with a prediction, which would be, you know, like some of these agreements that you're hearing floated out about how they're going to end the war in Ukraine would be that Russia takes everything they already have, that they've gained, and that Ukraine will agree not to join NATO for 20 years.
And I have a feeling that if this starts to expand and they want to get into other countries and figure out some ways that would threaten NATO, NATO could very well go, you know, defend those countries, but without the United States.
I could easily see Trump saying, yeah, we're not doing it, sorry, and breaking their pact to be a coalition, which would probably effectively end in NATO without him having to even do much besides just say, you know, go pound sand.
So that probably would happen.
And then out of all of this, Russia gets rewarded.
Even though they lost a lot of troops, they will ultimately be rewarded for their efforts because Ukraine cannot sustain any kind of war without the United States supplying them with weapons.
Welcome to my show!
If NATO at all starts to stand in Putin's way, or Xi Jinping's way, or any of his dictatorial friends, Trump will start talking about taking away the economic incentives for NATO, which relies on the United States of America as a proxy arm of America.
You want to talk about 4D chess?
What happens then, Nick?
The other liberal democracies of so-called Western civilization, including France and Germany and the United Kingdom, How are those countries doing right now?
Big time.
Yeah, they're struggling.
Are they going to be able, in the middle of an economic crisis of their own type, are they going to be able to then make up the United States funding of NATO? No, no.
They'll have to do some smaller version of it that will probably be not very effective.
What happens in a country like Germany or France or Great Britain?
What happens in one of those countries when things start getting worse and economics start getting worse?
Don't those liberals usually end up getting replaced by strongmen on the right?
Absolutely.
Yeah, it's weird.
It's weird how that happens and these things keep happening, isn't it?
Yeah.
And Germany is also under attack by the ultra-right-wing forces.
Oh, France do!
And Great Britain.
Yeah.
You know, and it's...
Yeah, it's a frightening world now.
I'm more pro-NATO, I guess, than you are.
I feel like NATO has been one of those things that's been very reactive.
They haven't really preemptively attacked other countries.
No, they haven't preemptively attacked, but I'm saying that the way that NATO has sort of continued to play games with war and the way that it's basically worked in a lot of ways in order to push American economic interests, those are the things that concern me about NATO. All right, fair enough.
And then there's a hand-in-hand going on.
They can each help each other.
And it's just ironic that the reason why it was created was to stop Soviet aggression.
And here we are again.
And the reason why we're in this mess with Ukraine right now is because they wanted to join NATO so that Russia wouldn't invade.
And guess what?
Russia didn't invade anyway before letting them in.
So it's clear who the good guys and bad guys are in this one, I think.
It is right now.
Yeah, and that's about to get very murky.
Speaking of Trump rolling on and putting pieces into place, the administration is starting to take on some real shape here.
Tom Homan is poised to become the border czar, and he is promising that he is going to carry out some workplace raids.
That sounds great.
So we can meet the guy.
Here is him being interrogated, I suppose, by ALC. Mr.
Holman, your name is on this.
Is this correct?
Yes, I signed that memo.
So you are the author of the family separation policy?
I am not the author of this memo.
You're not the author, but you signed the memo.
Yes, a zero tolerance memo.
So you provided the official recommendation to Secretary Nielsen for the United States to pursue family separation.
I gave Secretary Nielsen numerous recommendations on how to secure the border and save lives.
But it says here that you gave her numerous options, but the recommendation was option three, family separation.
What I'm saying, this is not the only paper where we've given the Secretary numerous options to secure the border and save lives.
And so the recommendation of the many that you recommended, you recommended family separation.
I recommended zero tolerance.
Which includes family separation.
The same as it is when every U.S. citizen parent gets arrested when they're with a child.
Zero tolerance was interpreted as the policy that separated children from their parents.
If I get arrested for DUI and I have a young child in a car, I'm going to be separated.
When I was a police officer in New York and I arrested a father for domestic violence, I separated that father from his family.
Mr.
Holman, with all due respect, legal asylees are not charged with any crime.
When you're in the country, it's a violation of the United States Code 1325.
Seeking asylum is legal.
If you want to seek asylum and go to the port of entry, do it the legal way.
The Attorney General of the United States has made that clear.
Okay.
He's a real sweetheart, isn't he?
Yeah, and AOC does a good job, I think, with this.
She's good at this.
She's going to be someone we need to keep our eye on.
We know her, but she's good in these situations.
But I have one more thing in case you really want to know where he's coming from here and how evil the guy is.
I would encourage everyone to go to the YouTube side to watch this because you can see his face.
You can see him pointing and all this other horrible shit that he's doing.
But here's one more instance on a much shorter take here to get really, the case is not clear who he is.
We have seen one estimate that says it would cost $88 billion to deport a million people a year.
I don't know if that's accurate or not.
Is that what American taxpayers should expect?
What price do you put on national security?
Is that worth it?
Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families?
Of course there is.
Families can be deported together.
And a chill filled the room.
Yeah, so we've got this asshole coming in.
We've also now heard that Stephen Miller is likely to become the deputy chief of staff.
The reason that we're talking about this, Nick, is this.
Anybody who still wants to pretend that there are going to be adults in the room or that Donald Trump is going to moderate himself, let me make it abundantly clear.
They're going for it.
Period.
This is not 2017.
This is a brand new ballgame, and their intentions are very obvious at this point.
And why wouldn't they be?
This is a mandate.
Considering how close these elections are in the last couple cycles and then going forward, winning the popular vote, winning 300 Electoral College votes, that's a mandate.
And of course they're going to do this.
And nothing is going to get in their way.
That's what's worse about this.
Tom Holman's the guy that invented or created the notion of mass deportation.
That phrase, I think, was his.
And you saw people holding up signs.
And we talk about this all the time.
It wasn't just the fact that they threw little red meat out to the crowd.
It was that they devoured it.
Help me with that word.
Devoured it.
Devoured it.
And blood dripping down their face as they're doing this like a vampire feeding frenzy.
So that is what they've whipped the country up.
And this is what won the election for them, I would think.
I think it's one of the things that won the election for them, but they are going to do what they have said they are going to do.
I still think they're going to create an apartheid state for illegal immigrants.
I don't think it's going to be the mass deportation necessarily that they've laid out, which is impossible.
But they are going to make this as cruel and as explicitly clear as they have promised.
On that note, Nick...
Now that we know all of this, let's go ahead and turn at exactly what the reaction has been in terms of communication and how people are starting to sort of process this stuff.
Before I read you a quote from an article in The Atlantic, Nick, we've talked recently about The Atlantic, which it's a wild publication now that vacillates back and forth between different things.
But The Atlantic, up until the past couple of weeks, was talking about how Donald Trump was one of the most dire threats against democracy that we have ever seen.
What I'm getting ready to read to you is from an article titled, The Case for Treating Trump Like a Normal President.
This is written by an idiot, Conor Friedersdorf.
And I'm going to read you a quote from this very quickly.
Quote, Nick,
what we are now seeing in real time is that we, as we talked about last week, We are now seeing the media, the pundit class, all of them start to normalize Donald Trump and say once more, it doesn't matter what you've heard, it doesn't matter what you've seen, what you've experienced, it's time to start treating this guy like he is normal, and it's time to stop pushing against this as if he is an existential threat.
Thanks a lot, Friedrichsdorf.
I'm kind of upset that you made me read this, to be honest with you, Jared.
But it is useful to kind of see, because this guy is full of shit.
If he thinks he was a never-Trumper, or if he thinks he's some sort of moderate libertarian or whatever he is, I mean, this is ridiculous, because the baseline view of reality that he has throughout this whole article is so skewed.
And even the suggestions he's making come from just Mars.
Let me jump in here because I don't know if you're going to read this part, but I got to do it because I can't believe it.
He goes, be the John Boehner to his Obama.
Our constitutional and civil checks on executive power are formidable, frustrating every administration.
So, he's pretending as if, oh, really, all the systems worked really well, kept them in a box, and he has no idea what the plan is going forward.
This is ridiculous.
Basically, he's trying to tell you, you know, if you're going to get sexually assaulted, well, you might as well enjoy it then.
Yeah, and I hate to have it in that crude terms, but basically what is being said here is that you, this entire time, have been naive and you have been overreacting and hysterical.
And basically what is happening right now is the way the United States is supposed to work and Donald Trump is going to come in and be a normal president.
And Friedersdorf has pretended for years now to be a voice of reason, and he's talked about how dangerous Donald Trump is.
But guess what happened?
The moment the whistle got blown, he snapped his heels together and threw up the salute.
He's ready to go.
And guess what?
He's not alone.
There are tons of people who should know better or who stand to profit from all of this.
And by the way, Nick, we now need to turn our eye towards the great American media.
David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery, whatever the hell they're calling themselves, might as well throw in Raising Cane's while we're at it.
He has now said that Donald Trump will bring, quote, positive opportunity for consolidation.
Of course, he is talking about the fact that Biden's Department of Justice and FTC has opposed mergers of media conglomerates for a while.
But Donald Trump's going to come along and he's going to bring some common sense deregulation.
This is going to turn into what we used to have when you had like two stations.
Or three stations, right?
And half of it was propaganda anyway.
So imagine that.
Imagine all these apps that we have that we stream.
There's some notion of, oh, wouldn't it be great if we didn't have to pay for so many different things?
But if you realize what's going to happen, they're all going to merge.
And then not only that, they're going to merge into two different ones.
They're all going to be way more expensive than you'd ever have paid before.
And we'd be right back where we were when we were paying all that money for cable or for regular TV. So...
And, by the way, the content will become shit as well.
That'll be the worst part of all this stuff, if you're talking about wanting to enjoy good art.
So I am scared.
But that's not even the most scary thing about that article.
The scary thing about the article is when they start mentioning Sinclair.
Yeah, because Sinclair, which has already gobbled up one local station after another, is going to continue to gobble up local stations.
And, you know, you've probably seen those edits in the past where they find the script for all the local news stations speak the same way.
And then it's overlay them.
And it sounds like, what's the Star Trek?
The Borg.
That's what it sounds like, basically.
They're all collectively saying the same exact things.
And it's all right-wing nutjob conspiracy stuff.
So what Sinclair is excited about is the deregulation that they'll be allowed to buy more and more of these TV stations in the same markets and really blast out their influence across the nation and coordinate with the administration without question.
So we thought that Fox News was bad and was a mouthpiece for the ultra-right-wing MAGA stuff.
Then they're about to have control of the entire apparatus here.
Yeah, and I want to go back real fast to these giant corporate conglomerates, right?
So, first of all, the Biden administration, for all of the critiques, and man, there is a lot to talk about when this guy's run is over about what his legacy is going to be.
For all of that, Biden's administration has been really good when it comes to antitrust.
And it has flustered a lot of these corporations that want to go ahead and merge.
Basically, for people who haven't thought about it this way, Cable television was broken up and turned into streaming channels in which the major corporations were able to sort of untether themselves from a bunch of other networks and groups, right?
So they created their own little tiny monopolies.
And by the way, Nick, they've been terrible.
They don't know what they're doing.
They don't know how to program things.
They've all been losing money besides having all of the power and influence and reach in the world.
Now that they're losing money, they want to go ahead and consolidate.
There's a reason for this.
It's because of what you just said.
They basically want to create their own version of cable television is what it is that they control that is no longer tethered to these things.
So why do they want to do this?
One is so they can create these monopolies that they can charge whatever they want for, which is what we're already seeing from the streaming things, except for the prices are going to go up.
The amount of content is going to go down in terms of quality, but guess what else is going to happen, Nick?
The only reason that they gave you some pleasing programs that sort of scratched that multicultural, quote-unquote, woke itch is because they saw a market potential for it.
What are they going to do now that America is moving to the right?
You guessed it, everybody.
You have a ton of right-wing ideological content coming down the stream.
If you thought the early 2000s had a lot of pro-America entertainment, hold on to your hats.
You are going to be inundated with so much jingoistic right-wing propaganda you can't even believe it.
And why do they want to do this, Nick?
They want to do it not just for the money of being able to do this.
People like Zaslav, and by the way, there are tons of CEOs and vice presidents of these groups, correct?
Yeah, absolutely.
Okay, so when one giant corporate blob eats another one, what happens to all those VPs and CEOs?
They either find a new job at the new conglomerate, or what do they get in return for walking away?
sweetheart deals and balloon payments?
They get a ton of golden parachutes on their way out.
These people see that this thing is going to fall apart and it's going to fall apart fast and they want to get paid off and they want to go.
Speaking of that, Nick, let's talk about news media and how are they reacting to the election of Donald Trump?
Because remember, democracy dies in darkness.
Well, recent meetings post-election at Axios, Washington Post, the New York Times, they are now pushing, quote unquote, accuracy.
And in the words of Axios CEO Jim Vander Hei, he said this was a, quote unquote, gut check and that the public feels that reporters feel that they cover Republicans like a crime beat and Democrats like friends in need.
So what are we going to see?
And I want to remind everybody of a couple of weeks ago, we had Jeff Bezos declining to endorse somebody in this.
And who congratulated Donald Trump first?
It was Jeff Bezos.
He tripped all over himself, basically, to congratulate Trump.
So what are we going to now see with the American news media?
They're going to move towards the right.
And they also have now had a market analysis, which is, oh, tens of millions of people voted for this guy, more than they voted for the Democrat.
What does that say about the market?
You have a market opportunity to move to the right.
So when people canceled their subscriptions by like a quarter of a million because the Washington Post refused to endorse Kamala Harris, where are they going to make up those subscriptions now, Nick?
The right.
Because our media is going to go ahead and move to the right right along with the country and right along with Donald Trump.
I have to imagine they're going to bank on the fact that a portion of those people that unsubscribe will resubscribe again after X amount of time.
Made their point, but I've got to read some of my news or whatever they like from the Washington Post.
It is...
It's not hard, but it's not hard to predict any of this stuff, right?
That's what's so frustrating about this.
It's very clear.
And I'm willing to say, like, they're going to find out.
MAGA will find out at some point that this hurts them.
And its only question is sort of when or how many at one time or figures that out.
And maybe it'll happen by the midterms or something, but maybe not.
But I would hope so.
I'm willing to put enough of a prediction on that just because we know already what these policies are going to do to democracy, basically.
Yeah, no, they're going to harm people.
They're also going to crater the economy and cause untold suffering.
The question at this point, going back to the first segment of this, is are they going to rig the educational system and also the cultural wavelengths in order to mitigate that damage, right?
So it's a race against time.
You're basically, you know, setting a bank on fire and seeing how much money you can get out of the bank before like you die from asphyxiation or from like exposure to, you know, fourth degree burn.
I don't even know.
I think it goes up to third.
Third degree burns.
Right.
So they are going to smash and try and get as much as they can out of it before the whole thing collapses.
Yeah, absolutely.
And, you know, we'll slowly get less and less of what the news release is, what's supposed to be.
Now, that said, we've been on that trajectory for a long time anyway, because these are businesses that have bottom lines all across, if it's journalism or if it's entertainment.
And so that's why you're constantly seeing consolidation.
And eventually, you know, the New York Times and the Washington Post will consolidate and they'll be one entity.
Yeah, or they'll get bought out by, you know, another billionaire or they'll stay with the current billionaire that they're with or, you know, it's the whole point of this is it's about serving the interest of the wealth class as opposed to giving people information or, you know, giving people a decent product.
That's how America has changed.
Even though the model has changed as far as having a literal new piece of paper delivered to your door, although I've met someone who that still happens to.
I was dumbfounded.
I couldn't believe it.
Have you seen a newspaper in real life in a while?
I have read a physical newspaper very recently.
I haven't seen one.
It's like a dystopian future where they hear about Pez dispensers.
I'm watching Silo now.
So now we have to go ahead and turn to the other side of the aisle where the chaos within the Democratic Party is continuing to spin out of control for a variety of reasons.
News came out this week that in preparation for Donald Trump's second administration that a lot of Democratic senators are currently trying to put together a plan to push out 70-year-old Sonia Sotomayor from the Supreme Court.
It doesn't seem yet as if this plan has much of a chance of succeeding.
Sotomayor doesn't want to go, apparently, and it's hard to push a Supreme Court justice out.
But the Democratic Party wants to believe at this point that between now and January 20th that they might be able to push forward a Supreme Court justice.
How do you feel about this, Nick?
I mean, at first I thought that was insane, but then as you read the article and you realize that, you know, there might be some potential health issues in the vein of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, you're like, well, we got to do whatever we can to keep, you know, her or that seat liberal.
So, I don't know.
I mean, listen, it's got to be a hellish job.
And she could make a lot of money retiring and writing books and whatever in speeches.
So it's like, in my mind, it's like, please, why would you want to do this yourself, you know, when you can protect the country and live up to your part of the bargain, which has been amazing.
Her dissents, unfortunately, they're all dissents of the majority opinions, are fantastic and they're scathing and they're like, you know, what we need more of.
But, you know, if there is a case where there's a chance within the next few years she would have to step down, then it would be an utter catastrophe.
I'm going to say something, and I want people to understand that what I'm about to say is really applicable to a lot of things that the Democratic Party has done and not done, which is the time to have taken care of this was a while ago.
If they were going to go ahead and replace Sotomayor, it should have happened already.
And there's not enough time to get it done at this point.
The Ruth Bader Ginsburg decision back in 2016, both by her and also the Obama administration, that was a failure.
And it really screwed things up in a big, giant way.
There's not time to do this.
This is desperation.
It is as far-fetched as people taking to Twitter and saying, Joe Biden, you have total immunity from the law.
You can do whatever you want.
He's not going to do any of those things.
The party, as presently constituted, is not going to take radical action like this, just like they should have taken care of the Supreme Court before this election, or at least actually floated real, tangible Supreme Court reform.
So at this point, if you want to push out a Supreme Court justice, I don't know how you feel about it, Nick, but if they manage to convince her to leave the court, chances are you're just opening up an appointment for Donald Trump at this point.
Right, because they have to do the whole process between now and January, which, I mean, they could.
But I think it was your suggestion, when they wouldn't put up Merrick Garland and they delayed that, then Obama should have just said, well, your job is only to advise and consent.
And if you don't want to do that, we will just put Merrick Garland in.
Let's find out if that's going to stick.
So I suppose Biden could do the same thing now, right?
Would he?
Yeah.
Is there anything about Joe Biden that tells you that he would do that?
No, not at all.
What's weird, though, is we just saw Biden talk the other day.
He sounds more vigorous and energetic and with it than we'd seen in two years.
And I don't understand that either.
Well, I mean, I think he has good moments and tough moments.
I don't want to sit here and tell you that I know Joe Biden's heart, but I also know who Joe Biden has been as a public figure for the last half century.
I imagine that he's feeling something of, I don't know, probably validation.
That he got pushed out of the presidential race.
And I assume that he believes that he was the one person who could beat Donald Trump.
So I have to imagine that from his point of hubris, that he probably feels some validation from all of this.
You know, maybe one more sentence about that would be interesting in terms of, does he get at least the amount of votes that Kamala got?
No, he would have been absolutely washed.
Okay.
So you don't think it was the misogyny is what ultimately doomed her not getting over the top?
I think there are multiple things that played into a role.
And we'll talk about this in just a second.
I think misogyny played into it.
I think racism played into it.
But those are also expressions of other things.
And so I think it was a big giant ball of things.
And I think Joe Biden would have lost by much more than Kamala Harris lost by.
I don't think I'm going to argue with you on that.
Alright, speaking of the Democratic Party and a lot of finger pointing, we currently have an inter-party war.
Bernie Sanders has come out and said the Democratic Party turned their back on the working class and the working class turned their back on them.
Jamie Harrison, who for some inexplicable reason, Nick, has a job.
One of the worst party chairs that we have ever seen thinks that he can come out and tell someone that they're wrong.
We have also had liberal media saying that Kamala Harris ran a quote-unquote flawless campaign.
Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton has come out and said, quote, Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone.
I have two little girls.
I don't want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.
But as a Democrat, I'm supposed to be afraid to say that.
Oh, I forgot to mention that Joe Biden and Barack Obama, their respective groups, are absolutely going to war over each other and blaming one another for this thing.
This is a party in total and utter disarray at this point.
And facing an authoritarian presidency, God, I wish not only would they have done better in this election and had a better strategy and actually had a message, but But I wish that we could sit here and say that there will be a viable opposition to him.
I haven't seen anything in that direction so far.
Well, you know what's kind of crazy is that after the 2020 election, the Republicans shouldn't have felt that bad about the state of the play because Trump was going to be around and they knew he was going to run again.
And they had this leader of the party that was going to generate a lot of interest and obviously ended up winning the election.
So, you know, so even to have them have an insurrection was kind of almost in a way like, what we're going to do here, we're going to bide our time, wait the four years out and get another president here.
But there isn't anybody, right?
There is no version of that for the Democratic Party.
We haven't really had anybody, right?
I'm trying to think, like, as we ran, you know, Biden wasn't on the radar to run in 2020 until he announced in, you know, what, in March of 2018 or 19, like later, You know what I mean?
And we have, Obama came out of nowhere, kind of, in 04, and then was on the scene.
So anyway, the point being that, like, who do we have that we can look to and say, this is our shining star?
Even though there were people at the convention that felt really nice to hear from, and they seemed like they were on their way, and the trajectory's up, I'm kind of forgetting everybody.
Maybe Colin Allred was the one guy, but I gotta tell you, and you weren't excited about him, he couldn't even beat Ted Cruz.
Yeah, I mean, like, that's the whole point here.
The Democratic Party does not have a direction right now.
These are going to be wilderness years in which we're waiting on somebody to take up the mantle.
Your Governor Gavin Newsom seems more than willing to be one of the people to do so.
I have my problems with him and I don't think that his message will resonate in this environment.
I don't think like a tech adjacent neoliberal is going to be the one who turns the tide on this.
But the Democratic Party seems absolutely intent on one thing and one thing only, which is blaming anybody but actually the Democratic Party.
And what we have seen so far in the wake of this electoral disaster is that they are willing to throw gay and trans people under the bus.
They are willing to throw black and Hispanic people under the bus.
Basically, it is this.
This disaster is not our own making.
And if it is our own making, it's because we were too liberal or we were too woke or we were too left.
The only person that I've seen, besides Bernie Sanders, who has actually talked about the economic motives behind this defeat, is Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who doesn't understand what the left is.
We do not have a functioning left in the United States of America, but at least was talking about neoliberalism and the fact that the Democratic Party has lost touch with a large part of the voting electorate.
I don't know who the leader is going to be, Nick.
I don't think you do either.
I don't think anyone listening to this actually knows.
But the question now is not whether or not the party will get their shit together.
It's whether the American people will get their shit together.
We have to do things ourselves in order to put this thing right.
And waiting on some knight on a white horse to ride in and put this thing correct, that's not going to get us anywhere.
That got us where we are today.
Well, it sounds like maybe you're getting a little excited about some Irish Catholic from the Northeast senator who just did this tweet.
Chris Murphy, you know, certainly had a bit of a moment of clarity, right, and willing to say some things.
And I've reflected about this a lot in terms of Bernie because your focus has always been that it's not progressive enough.
The Democrats always tack way to the right in the hand-wringing notion of they can't appear too liberal.
Am I wrong about that?
You're not wrong about that.
Thank you.
Okay, are you wrong about that?
I would like to see it.
Because we've done it the other way this whole time, right?
And it's been okay.
Clinton won, Obama won, whatever.
But we haven't.
We've had mixed success.
I would like to try and find a truly progressive candidate who can tap into all these things and not be afraid to be branded.
Even if Newsom is too liberal for whatever people.
I don't even think he is, honestly, to be frank.
I think it's too neoliberal.
Okay, too market tested, too A-B testing?
Way too close in turning California into a tech paradise, but yes.
Okay, fair enough.
But that's the real question.
And when you're saying what we're missing is leadership, right?
I know it's messaging, but we need some sort of galvanizing leader, I guess, like Trump.
But if someone who actually cares about America and who cares about people, that would be nice, too, if we could throw that in there.
So I don't know who that was.
I mean, there's been people who popped up here and there, but can't even win their local race, much less get to the national stage.
And as you and I know, this happens very quickly.
This could happen in 2026.
All of a sudden, somebody appears and then a lightning rod becomes the...
It could happen in 2025.
Could happen, yeah.
So, that could all materialize, but it is frustrating that we got to this point where they don't seem to be able to, and even if it's in hindsight, oh, we can all be armchair quarterbacks, but it's too clear.
And certainly the way you were ringing the bell was clear beforehand that they have to figure ways to tap into more of the progressives.
You know, policies that will be popular.
But I still think that when you have the other side willing to lie as much as they do, it does become disarming to the point of, like, it is not as clear how you're supposed to get your message out when they're going to lie about you.
You know, something that I was thinking about this weekend, I got away.
I went out into the wilderness and walked around and did some thinking.
And Nick, I want to posit something for you right now.
Hypothetically, if liberals or the left carried out something like January 6th, what would the Democratic Party do?
They would disappear.
Yeah.
They would disown them.
They would speak out against them, correct?
I mean, okay, yeah.
I'm kind of thinking if they were so slightly branded, they'd just slink away in shame and just dissolve.
But okay.
They would certainly condemn.
They would condemn them immediately, correct?
Would they pardon them?
No.
Okay.
Would they in any way give a speech that gave those people support?
No.
Okay.
A reminder, what did the Democratic Party do during the BLM protest of 2020?
Supported it.
They did until it came time to talk about, like, what needed to be done, including reinvesting in public services, correct?
Yeah.
I mean, you saw plenty of people kneeling and supporting, you know, that way.
But yeah, nothing ever changed.
The difference here is this.
Say what you want about the Republican Party.
Say what you want about MAGA. What they understand at this point is that in Donald Trump, even if he's going to lie to them about how he's going to help them economically and politically, he has their back.
Is that fair?
Okay.
Like, he'll leave people out, like, by his rallies to die of hypothermia or get rained on for hours at a time or swelter in the heat.
But at least when it comes to political causes, he's there and says, these people are beautiful people, correct?
Mm-hmm.
The Democratic Party has lost the faith of anybody within their coalition.
Black people looked around after all the gerrymandering that took place and the Biden administration told them to out-organize themselves, that they couldn't help them.
Women had their right to reproductive freedom taken away and the Democratic Party said, we're going to help you, I promise you, and then didn't do anything really to help those people.
Gay and trans people, their only hope was the Democratic Party.
Kamala Harris couldn't be bothered to say the words gay or trans during the 2024 campaign.
Immigrants were supposed to be a big part of this party, but guess what?
They allowed them to be fear-mongered, scapegoated, all these things for months and didn't really stand up and say these are good, hard-working people who deserve your support.
The Democratic Party needs to re-establish trust.
They do not have it right now.
And I would go so far, Nick, as to say, when it comes to economic populist messages, I think that's a component of it.
The Democratic Party, people have come to understand that they cannot trust them.
That's a large part about it.
The Democratic Party will not fight for them.
They will not put themselves on the line.
What do you feel when you hear a Democratic politician give a speech?
Nick, you feel every speechwriter, you feel every strategist, you feel every word carefully chosen so it will do this or it won't do that.
You need to start having somebody who isn't afraid of that stuff and will just become an iconoclast.
Someone who will say what they believe, and at the very, very least, you can believe what they say, even if they're full of shit, like Donald Trump.
The problem is the Democratic Party has a trust deficit.
And to be frank, they've earned it.
And until they get that figured out, you can have all the strategies in the world, and those strategies aren't going to amount to shit.
I think what you're also saying then is that the politicians themselves in the Democratic Party cannot...
It is a talent that someone like Donald Trump has figured out how to do, right?
Improbably and in a really concerning way.
But part of me feels like, you know, is that what we want?
We want our Trump?
Dude, I don't know that you want a Trump.
Because that would be somebody who doesn't actually believe in these things.
We've talked about it.
I think the Republican Party started to understand the postmodern nature of American politics, which is, and I've heard people say this in so many words, Nick, he's a liar, but you can believe him.
And that is a wild thing to be able to hold in your head.
And Democrats are not immune to that.
Like, they have had demagogues in the past.
I mean, Huey Long was a Democrat, you know?
Like, there are all kinds of people who can kind of do those things.
But Democrats want someone who is going to fight and be willing to lose.
That's the other thing about it.
Like the Kamala Harris campaign, they campaigned not to lose.
And when you campaign not to lose, you lose.
And so as a result, I think it's economic populism mixed with needing someone who is a fighter and a party that is a group of fighters.
I don't know that they're going to get there.
We might need to create it ourselves.
We might need to, much like the rise of the Republican Party, which came out of the demise of the Whigs, who would not stand up for emancipation.
Right?
There might need to be something that comes out of this that is completely different or the party changes.
I don't know what the answer is yet.
Well, how about this for the last question before we wrap up?
Are we ever going to see six swing states elect Democratic senators and Trump on the same ticket?
That is a hell of a question, isn't it?
And I'm not, you know, there's no evidence, so I can't say anything, but that was the election.
But I got to tell you, I would hope that that won't happen again, where you have a situation like we had people who voted for in favor of abortion and then Trump.
Lots of people did that.
Can I speak on that for a second?
Sure.
I think what has been misunderstood in that is two things.
One, like reproductive access.
That is actually a fundamentally overwhelmingly like supported idea, right?
Which a lot of these things are.
There is a massive majority of people in the United States of America who are not being represented by politicians right now.
The other part of it is this, and this is hard to talk about.
These people were self-interested.
They didn't want their rights to be taken away, right?
They didn't care if other people had their rights taken away.
You have to offer people something.
You have to offer them a material way that their lives will get better.
And in the way that the vote got split and what you're talking about, it was voting to give themselves a right while also voting for a politician who promised them things.
And so, yes, how many times have we read a New York Times focus group?
And the people were fundamentally illogical.
Right.
That's the American electorate.
The majority of people in this country are not listening to the Muckrake podcast and diving deep into politics and like discerning the context and the history.
There's a certain group of us who do that.
Other people are very much voting from a selfish point of view.
And that selfishness can overwhelm everything from like race and socioeconomic status and even ideology.
The selfishness can override that stuff, which, you know, if you're going to sit around and make a campaign off people making making people feel like they're on the right side of history, that's not going to win in the face of this.
You know what I mean?
Right, right.
And I do think that, you know, with Trump's sun setting himself after this one, I hope, Your lips to God's ears, my man.
I'm calling the cult ballot, which would be people only voting for Trump and no down ballot at all.
I think that happens.
People don't know any of the other races, but they care about Trump and just want to vote for him and don't know who else to vote for after that.
That's the only explanation for the hundreds of thousands of votes across states that that happened to as well.
Hard to believe, but here we are.
I think a lot of people have given up on politics.
And I think that's the larger story of this election that people are talking about, which is how many people have given up on politics actually changing.
How many people, Nick, and this is something for people to sit with, how many people in this country didn't vote for Kamala Harris who happened to be gay, trans, black, or immigrants?
How many of them didn't vote for her because they didn't believe she would actually represent them?
Or they didn't want to go ahead and give a stamp of approval for an administration that has been responsible for what's happened in Gaza?
That tells me that they have given up on the Democratic Party being a lever of representation and change.
And I think that's something that a lot of people need to sit with.
All right, everybody.
That's going to do it for this episode of the Mike Craig Podcast.
We'll be back with The Weekender on Friday.
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In the meantime, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?
