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Co-hosts Jared Yates and Nick Hauselman discuss the creep of authoritarianism as Donald Trump announced one pick after another for cabinet positions, including Marco Rubio for Secretary of State and Matt Gaetz as Attorney General. They analyze the Democrats' post mortem and where they can possibly go from here.
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This is the Weekender Edition of My Creek Podcast.
Nick, I don't know about you, my head is spinning a little bit, the speed at which things are changing and happening.
How are you doing, pal?
I think we had forgotten what it was like when he was in office last time, just how on a daily, hourly basis, you know, the news would come fast and furious.
You know, we get more ridiculous as every item comes through the wire.
But he's reminding us pretty quickly how it's a fire hose, Jared.
It's a fire hose and our mouths are all wide open.
Have you ever had a friend?
I've been thinking about this a lot.
Have you ever had a friend who you were around for a long period of time and that friend was wild?
Go on.
Just sort of like chaotic.
Like just lots of things going on all the time.
Like a manic chaos.
Do you know what I'm talking about?
Okay, I can follow that.
And like when you're friends with them and when they're in your lives all the time, you sort of like become normalized to it.
And then if you don't see them for a very long time and then maybe you meet for a beer or something and you're like, whoa, I forgot what this was like.
You know what I'm talking about?
That I know for sure, yes.
That's what's happening right now.
We're being reacquainted very, very quickly to the chaos that happens when Donald Trump is in power.
That is true.
And I think that we also remind ourselves of why we stopped hanging out with this person.
Absolutely.
Don't hang out with that person anymore.
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Nick, we prep these episodes and, you know, we sort of like bring sort of an apparatus to it, right?
Like a scaffolding to it.
In the past couple of days, things have been happening so quickly that it is a major, major challenge to approach all of it at once.
And we have seen an absolute maelstrom of nominations by Donald Trump.
I assume wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
He's the one making all these decisions.
But we're going to go through just this whole gaggle of assholes.
And, Nick, we are going to start with the newly founded Department of Government Efficiency.
That's doge for everyone who cares about cryptocurrency.
And we have now had nominated Elon Musk, the oligarch who bought Donald Trump's presidency in the MAGA movement, who's going to be given unchecked power over the United States budget.
And if that wasn't bad enough, Vivek Ramaswamy.
We have to have a discussion about this whole thing, I think, Jared, because, you know, what's that called again?
We have, it's already in place, a government, right?
Oh, right.
Yeah, sure.
Yeah.
And it has those pesky things that we've come accustomed to.
Yes, laws and rules, right?
Laws.
Checks and balances, yes.
Yes, exactly.
And here's the problem with this DOGE, this Office of Efficiency, is that there's only one body in our government that can create these kind of governmental bodies.
That would be Congress.
Oh, you mean the people that we vote for in order to handle the budget of the United States of America?
Yes, of which exo facto is called democracy.
Yes, that's exactly what this is.
So you think, okay, these are guys who are going to do shitposts all day long and embarrass people for working in different agencies that will spend money on trans monkeys, whatever they're testing these days.
Whatever it is that they want to point a thing at and misrepresent, yeah.
And go, tee-hee-hee, look out, whatever ridiculous this is, right?
And maybe that puts some pressure on somebody somewhere to, you know, cut something or whatever.
But I hate to inform you, Jared, that there might be, again, it's never Trump.
He is not smart enough, can't read, doesn't process.
But somebody has been going through all the pages of the Constitution.
We know who, by the way.
It's the think tanks and the institutes that are funded by the people who have put this entire thing forward.
Yeah, so you can picture like it's a library and amongst all the stacks and they're like digging all of a sudden there's the one guy, like the big realization in the movie.
Wait a minute!
And he comes running around the hallways and bursts the door open and says, basically he says, what they're looking for is the Presidential Reorganization Authority.
Have you ever heard of this before, Jim?
I have, unfortunately.
And this is one of those moments where the things that I have as specialized knowledge, things that I never thought that I was going to have to really deal with, I anticipated this, I was worried about this, and now here we are.
Yes, this authority actually grants on a temporary basis, quote unquote, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more, a temporary basis that the president could basically abolish whole departments if he wants to.
And it's stunning to me that this actually exists now.
And that they've even used it in the past because this is the way that he can open up, and this is going to influence how we're talking about the nominations as well, but he'll be able to open up a can of whoop-ass, I suppose, if we call it, and just start redlining things and then crossing them out and getting rid of them.
You know what the ultimate irony of all this is?
Do you know who the last president was that used this for a major reorganization of the government?
If I am not incorrect, I believe it was Jimmy Carter.
I don't, that's not what my information stands for.
I'm talking about major.
There's been little tweaks.
I think Reagan used it as well, like an 80-something, 83, for some minor tweaks here.
Well, they've used it almost like going in and getting a trim instead of a new haircut.
Exactly.
You know, too much red tape.
I get it.
It makes sense to kind of cut through this stuff, which is sort of what Musk's whole MO tends to be, right?
Because he thinks he knows so much better than everybody else.
The pesky laws and things that protect people he just wants to get rid of.
But the last time we saw, according to my research, a major adjustment using this authority was Dwight D. Eisenhower.
And you know what he created?
He actually didn't abolish.
He created departments from this.
You know what he did?
He created?
Go ahead.
Yeah, I do, actually.
Yeah, go ahead.
Okay.
Well, I'll tell you if you want.
But basically, he created, I wrote it down, the health department.
The Education Department and the Welfare Department.
The big three, right?
The ones that they've been probably trying to tear down this entire time on the Republican side and the MAGA side.
So how crazy is it going to be that the last time we've seen this used was to establish the exact departments that will now be destroyed?
Well, and it goes back to one of the things we've been talking about for the past few years, Nick, which is the entire point of this project is to roll back the progress of the 20th century.
A reminder that Dwight D. Eisenhower, who is a Republican, was operating within the New Deal consensus, which was the idea that the government should invest in the future of America and also take care of people.
And now that we are in the neoliberal consensus, you have to get rid of those things.
So what are we looking at, Nick?
We've already said that Elon Musk has said he wants to get rid of $2 trillion.
Elon Musk wants to merge with the federal apparatus and basically funnel any type of money that comes through into his own pocket for his own projects and his own enrichment.
On top of that, Vivek Ramaswamy, who, need I remind people, is a bloodthirsty psychopath.
And him even being near this thing should absolutely turn your blood cold.
And while we're talking about it, Nick, not only did they find that loophole, but also they're looking at another strategy to go ahead and make Congress go into recess to go ahead and push forward all of the appointments without any consideration of any of these things.
On top of that, we've already seen from Ramaswamy a public acknowledgement that he's open to using another couple of loopholes to cut Social Security.
And by the way, I say cut, but I mean deal at a fatal blow is what it is.
On top of that, Veterans Affairs and a bunch of other very, very vulnerable programs that most people would have never considered cutting.
What is Musk going to do in order to make this happen is...
Is he going to sit there and crunch the numbers?
No, he's going to have a bunch of these sycophants go through and figure out what is going to hurt people the most and where they can make these cuts to again deal this mortal blow.
Musk though has to make sure that the Republican Party, which has been mostly taken over by this authoritarian movement, that those other people are going to play ball.
And so, Nick, we've already seen the beginnings of the stirrings of how that's going to happen, including where Elon Musk is now threatening to use his own money and his own resources to blackmail any member of the Republican Party who would think about standing up to any of this and automatically bringing to bear a primary challenger that will get rid of them and replace them with a sycophant who will play ball.
Right.
And because it felt like to me they would just be using the platform that he's, you know, now has control over on X to embarrass, you know, politicians, which, again, is sort of that blackmail.
Like, if you don't want them to find out that you supported this bill, that will, you know, that it definitely goes against your people's values, then you're going to have to play ball.
It is frightening.
So there's a lot of influence here.
Here's the other thing that's really kind of galling.
Like, Musk has, he runs SpaceX, right?
He runs X. He runs Tesla, right?
I believe he's on the board of Tesla.
The boring company, yes.
He needs to have his posting time every hour or two.
Not to mention his time getting acquainted with all the substances that keep him going.
Sure.
Yeah.
So it's like, this is ridiculous to think that he's now going to take this on and have any time.
Oh, Vivek will help him, I guess, right?
Because, you know, two guys have to do this job instead of more.
That is also the most ridiculous thing of all.
Because again, if you watch how often he posts, he's not working.
He's not working for more than like 20 minutes at a time before he's going to stop and start.
Because he's not even just posting, he's reacting.
So clearly he's scrolling.
He's not working.
He's just looking at Twitter all day long.
Which is not unlike Trump, who would just watch Fox News.
I mean, I think the reports, and I believe them, were he'd watch Fox News eight to nine hours a day.
Isn't that what he would do?
Any golf?
So this is kind of all sorts of crazy stuff because we know that these people don't have the kind of work ethics that would require anywhere near being able to pull any stuff off.
And we're going to realize that there's a lot of nefarious actors behind the scenes here doing a lot of other bullshit.
And the other weirdest thing is that Dwight D. Eisenhower not only was a Republican, he's MAGA. He is the time they want to go back to.
That's his time.
That's his happy days.
And he's the guy like Nixon who looks like a complete pink Okami liberal now.
Yeah, and I want to, by the way, you couldn't have nailed that more.
That's exactly how this thing has shifted.
What you just said is correct if you were trying to do this in a way that would, like, make anything better, right?
That it would make government actually work.
We need to look at everything, and that's how we're looking at these appointments.
It's not just saying here's the way they want to make the government work better and it will fail.
The point of all of this is this is a planned demolition.
It is to finally eradicate representative government as a regulatory body and to turn it into what it's been turning into, which is a redistributing organ to the wealthy and the powerful.
What this government efficiency thing is meant to do isn't to trim fat.
It is to deliver advanced hyper austerity.
What they are attempting to do is completely evaporate whatever remains of the social safety net, any regulatory power that still resides within the government, and basically put us into a situation where our standard of living craters— Our economy is going to fall apart while this happens, if they're allowed to do all of this.
And what happens in that situation?
People get more scared and more desperate.
They'll turn more and more towards authoritarianism.
And in the midst of all of this, the United States is going to lessen I want to be on the record about this, Nick.
It's the same thing that we've done to countries in the so-called second and third world.
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