Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss Morning Joe and Mika visiting Trump at Mar A Lago in order to prop up sagging ratings and what it means for the country now that the media will be desperate for his content. More lurid details come out about his nominations for cabinet positions, accentuating that they never vetted these people. And Alex Jones fights to keep The Onion's hands off his media empire. These are the good times, folks.
To support the show and gain access to the Weekender episode on Friday, as well as live shows and exclusive analysis, head over to Patreon and become a patron.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hey everybody, it is Nick Hauselman here, hosting from my home studio while Jared is with us via phone on the road.
And this is the Muckrake Podcast.
Welcome and lots to talk about.
Jared, are you with us?
I am.
Thank you once more for putting up with me phoning in.
I've got some personal stuff that I've had to take care of, but listen, the news waits for no one man.
That is true, and we wish you safe travels and resolutions with your life, and hopefully it will go okay.
I agree with that, and while I'm at it, I'm not going to miss out on an opportunity to say, everyone listening, go to patreon.com slash mccraigpodcast, because Nick, I know that you're keeping an eye on this as well.
We're going to talk a little bit about our media's complicity when it comes to Donald Trump, And people are absolutely desperate for actual analysis and actual coverage.
And we see that from the people who are coming to us, who trust us after our coverage of the 2024 election.
We hold that sacrosanct.
We are very, very emboldened by it.
To support the show, patreon.com slash Mark Craig podcast.
You also get the Friday show.
But yeah, come on over and join.
And it really helps us stay editorially independent and uninfluenced by the people that are being influenced out there, as our first segment will talk about, which is, you'll never guess, Jared, but it turns out that some of the mainstream media people think that it might be a good idea to, quote-unquote, restart communications with the Trump administration.
Yeah.
Nick, if only we had predicted this.
If only we had not been telling people this for months, that this was going to happen if Trump was going to be elected.
And yet, here we find ourselves, right smack dab in the middle of it.
Yes, and let's hear directly from the horse's mouth of, and that's probably not a great term, but we'll hear right from them directly.
That would be Mika and Morning Joe, who had not spoken, apparently, to Trump for seven years, and they even got on the plane headed down to Mar-a-Lago.
Here they are.
Over the past week, Joe and I have heard from so many people, from political leaders to regular citizens, deeply dismayed by several of President-elect Trump's cabinet selections.
And they are scared.
Last Thursday, we expressed our own concerns on this broadcast and even said we would appreciate the opportunity to speak with the president-elect himself.
On Friday, we were given the opportunity to do just that.
Joe and I went to Mar-a-Lago to meet personally with President-elect Trump.
It was the first time we have seen him in seven years.
Now, we talked about a lot of issues, including abortion, mass deportation, threats of political retribution against political opponents, and media outlets.
We talked about that a good bit.
And it's going to come as no surprise to anybody who watches this show, has watched it over the past year or over the past decade, that we didn't see eye to eye.
Okay.
They didn't see eye to eye in the past few years, Jared.
Yeah, they didn't.
And then they go on to say that Trump was very reassuring and that they are, quote unquote, restarting communications as if they're Saudi Arabia and Israel recognizing one another.
And Nick, the issue here, and listen, am I going to say the journalist shouldn't talk to someone from another party?
Well, you can say what you want about that.
But the problem is...
What we're already seeing with CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, Washington Post, and I'll talk about why this is happening in just a couple of minutes, but what they're doing is they're already laying the foundation for the mass normalization of Donald Trump and his extremist policies.
This is going to come from a variety of different reasons and motivations.
I'll get into more of that in just a second.
But what Joe Scarborough and Mika Brezhnevsky have done here is Is they have already opened up the floodgates to where our media is going, where our politics is going, and unfortunately what we have to look forward to over the next few years and maybe even beyond that.
I can't agree with you more.
I feel like MSNBC was looking at their ratings after the election night and how they're plummeting and are worried.
Now, they also know that their ratings had a nice run during the Trump administration.
So without access, though, without any kind of normalization, they must be thinking to themselves, then we're going to struggle to have those kind of ratings again.
And that's the bottom line here.
So, you know, it's bad enough that they're going to normalize someone like Trump and what he's going to do, but in the name of, like, the almighty dollar, I suppose, in ratings, that's the only reason why they do this.
They don't have any sort of backbone to stand up to this because they know if they do and they lose the ratings, they'll lose their jobs.
Yeah, there's a whole lot going on here, and I just want to break it down as quickly as possible, because there are a lot of reasons why we're going to watch liberal media do this, and liberals in general.
First things first, you already brought up and already alluded to it.
For people who don't know, CNN and MSNBC have seen their ratings drop precipitously.
And the reason is this.
It's because a lot of liberals have now decided that they're just going to tune out politics.
They lost an election, they're not interested in participating, they're burnout, you name it, whatever.
Thank you.
What happens then is that the networks, which are corporations and do not have an actual ideology of their own beyond a product they're selling, they say, hey, listen, Donald Trump has won the popular vote.
Republicans took control of both houses of Congress.
This means that there is now a profit incentive to chase, which is a new audience as they quote-unquote moderate themselves or move towards the right.
The other thing that's happening here, Nick, is something that is a little bit more insidious than that.
Which is, we need to understand within the Democratic Party and within liberal circles and liberal media and institutions, there are a lot of people, and we've talked about this, their problem with Trump is not his ideology, because they tried to pass the exact same immigration statutes, they carried on many things from his first administration.
The problem was aesthetics.
It was how gross he is, how disgusting he is, how racist and sexist he is.
And during his first administration in the last few years, there was not an appetite for that.
They did not want to be seen as condoning this.
With that election, a lot of Democrats who happen to agree with Donald Trump and want to move the party to the right and many liberal institutions, which are more than happy to move towards the right because of market incentives, Those people, because of the election results, they now see it as acceptable to go ahead and reveal their actual ideology, which is neoliberal, hypercapitalistic ideology, and they're more than fine with the authoritarianism that Trump is going to unleash.
I mean, I would be worried that it's going to be worse than that, even, where it's not that they're more than fine with authoritarianism.
They're going to gaslight into saying it's not authoritarianism.
That's exactly right.
Yes.
Yeah.
And, you know, meanwhile, like his most recent pick of Brendan Carr to head the FCC, he's the guy that wrote the chapter about the FCC in the Project 2025 campaign.
Tome, whatever we call that.
So it's like he keeps proving that, A, he obviously had read Project 2025 and knew all about what it was.
B, they're going to implement all these things and rub it in everyone's face and not even try and pretend anymore.
And that's another important part of this because the FCC is what controls a lot of the broadcasters.
Yeah, and what goes along with that, Nick, is, and this is going to be one of the more infuriating parts, and you just absolutely nailed it to the wall, which is, it's not going to just be a normalization of Donald Trump's authoritarianism.
It is going to be an intentional washing and laundering of it.
So, for instance, I'm just going to give people an example of something that they should expect.
So, I've said, I don't think that there's going to be the mass deportation that Donald Trump promised, but there is most definitely going to be raids, there's going to be deportation, there's going to be detention, all for security theater, you name it.
Well, Nick, one of the things that they're going to do at the very beginning is they're going to go after quote-unquote criminals, right?
They're going to go in some of these cities and you're going to have houseless people, you're going to have immigrants that are supposedly criminals, right?
And what has the liberal media done for years?
And the Democratic Party?
They've pushed for more funding for law enforcement, more law and order will take care of the problem.
So what are we going to see?
We're going to see some violence, we're going to see some crackdowns, and it's going to be presented through the lens of, you know what, we don't necessarily like the way this is happening, but somebody needed to do something.
And what's that going to do to culture and politics?
It's going to continue to push us further and further to the right because that is what the market wants.
And people like Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, all of those people, what are they interested in next?
They're interested in serving the interests of the market.
Right.
And even to piggyback on that and make it even easier to have happen, what you described is the attack that Carr wants to have on the media is the censorship, quote-unquote, that he is convinced has been happening.
And I think what we know what that really means is they want to have the right to lie and spread misinformation under the guise of the First Amendment.
And it's a weird...
Sort of push and pull because in theory, you know, you're allowed to believe whatever you want to believe, right?
And you should be allowed to say, you know, to a certain extent, you know, things that you want to be able to say that are not, you know, obviously the things that, you know, We get you in trouble in kind company.
But I think that that's really what the overarching thing that ties into Musk, that ties into who we have to talk about next, is Robert RFK Jr.
as head of the Health and Human Services, is because what they're trying to instill or install is all under the guise of free speech and that kind of thing, when in reality, and railing against censorship, which is that key word that everyone likes to say, oh yeah, censorship, bad.
And instead, it's a complete and utter manipulation.
Yeah, and you know, with RFK Jr., of course, he got pushed forward as the head of Health and Human Services, which we predicted was going to happen.
Everyone said, oh, that's too crazy to happen, and then it happened.
Weird how that happens.
Basically, what we're looking at, Nick, is they're going to be able to push this through a filter of RFK's conspiracy theories, vaccination, quote-unquote skepticism.
Thanks, New York Times.
You keep inventing new ways to do this.
But the whole point is, a lot of the people who are going to support what Kennedy will do at Health and Human Services, which is cutting the budget as they're getting rid of all protections, they don't believe the stuff that RFK Jr. is going to peddle, right?
But they're more than happy for the disinformation to go ahead and give an explanation to a lot of people so that they can cut that money, so they can increase austerity, get rid of a lot of the regulatory sort of muscle of the United States government, what's left over.
So for some people, it's going to be misinformation and disinformation.
For other people, it's going to be about cutting budgets.
And what do we hear constantly from the liberal media, Nick?
We hear constantly, well, you know, we believe in these programs, but we also need to wrestle down the debt, right?
So as this stuff is happening, it's going to be sort of an a la carte decision.
Some people are going to get the conspiracy theories.
Some people are going to get the deficit.
We have to do this for the good of the government and the good of the country.
So it's going to be presented through those different funnels.
And you'll notice that also parallels exactly what's happened with the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.
Right?
Some people get the right-wing conspiracies.
Some people get these other concerns that are just sort of cooked up for their benefit.
Sure.
It's worth noting, because I had pointed out that RFK Jr.
does make a good point every now and then about, you know, our food supply and the additives that are put in there, and it should be cleaned up.
And I'm totally for that.
The funny thing about that is that would require more regulation, not less, right?
Exactly.
So that is bizarre.
But, like, as an example, just very recently, RFK Jr., and the way he tries to come off, like, if you're not informed at all, And you don't know a doctor, you don't know people in your circles that might have that kind of information about health, then he might sound a little bit like reasonable because he'll tell you there was a study that showed that,
you know, when male, young males in the first 30 days of their life had the hepatitis B shot, they are, he quote, 10,000% more likely to get autism.
And first of all, it didn't take long.
I mean, it took me maybe one minute to find this study that had already been debunked several times from shoddy research over a decade ago.
But even when they did, even if you read it on its face and took it as real, it only was like a very infinitesimal amount of higher percentage of males that had autism.
It was, you know, a few percent higher, not 10,000.
And so he must know this, right?
This is where you get into trouble, where he just starts making up shit.
Maybe it's the brain worm that's eating his brain out of his head.
But that's the problem is he ends up taking the kernel of something and then lying about it and then embellishing it on top of the lie.
And now you got people who think he's reasonable.
So, as an autistic person, I find all this incredibly insulting.
And also, I want to point out, it all comes from, like, an increased perception.
It's basically this idea that now that we're actually talking about autistic people, now that we're actually talking about gay people, we're talking about trans people, whatever it is, because those numbers are going up as these other things are going up, we want to say that there's causation there.
And it's not.
That's not what's been happening.
It's the fact that there have been autistic people, trans people, gay people throughout history.
We're just now starting to recognize them as culture has been moving forward.
These numbers are all cooked up.
And what it does is it just goes ahead and fits into whatever narrative that you want it to.
What you said about additives or the way that we treat food or what corporations are able to do with it, that is stuff that we should be dealing with.
That is stuff that should have been regulated.
And for the record, it should have been regulated from the liberal side, right?
Instead of just sort of letting these things go forward in the interest of the market.
So now it just sort of fits into this narrative.
And RFK Jr.
is a profoundly loony person.
It's the one way that it's now being expressed, the same way that the Republican Party is the one way that sort of populist anger over, you know, neoliberal ravages is being expressed.
It's finding its expression, but it's being funneled through this other way in order to push a very particular agenda, which is, again, cutting the regulatory power of the United States.
Well, speaking of loony, I suppose, among the other adjectives you just used, we had a talk about Matt Gaetz, the investigation that the GOP had done at the House investigation, blocked, that won't be released, according to Mike Johnson, who, you know, is a bastion of, you know, of religiosity and morals.
However, as we suspected, a lot of the information is going to come out anyway, the details are coming out.
You know, there was an under oath testimony that a woman saw him have sex with an underage girl back in 2017.
It seems like that would be disqualifying to be the Attorney General.
No?
It seems like it would be, and in the past, it would be enough to basically be ran out of society on a rail.
Yeah.
And instead, and I want to point out, not only is this disturbing and disgusting, like, everyone who's now saying, and Nick, we just need to remind people, and this needs to be a constant thing.
We now live in a society in an era in which, for a very select group of people, there are no consequences for their actions.
And everybody now is saying, well, if you release this report, Matt Gaetz isn't going to get confirmed.
As a matter of fact, you're even seeing Republican senators saying, we do not want to confirm this guy.
Well, what did we talk about?
I think it was in the last episode or the episode before.
There's a plan for that.
You know, like they always said, there's an app for that.
There's a plan for that, which is they're going to push these things during a recess and the Republicans aren't going to say anything because Elon Musk has them by the short hairs and is blackmailing them.
So now we have a situation where Matt Gaetz is literally the personification of QAnon fears, of right-wing groomer fears, of abusers of children and exploiters of children.
It isn't going to matter, unfortunately.
And there's a small chance.
There's like a 5% chance that this will actually get rid of his nomination.
But I don't believe it until I see it.
And in this case, I think what we're saying is that the GOP has created a stratified society in which the wealthy and the powerful that they prefer are not going to have any consequences for any action, no matter how vile.
Well, hang on, Jared, because a friend of the pod, Mitch McConnell, came out with a statement saying that there would be no recess appointments, which seems to be the way that Trump wants to get these forced through.
Oh, Grandpa, that's sweet.
That's sweet, Grandpa.
I appreciate you weighing in, and I have all the power in the Senate.
Congratulations.
Well, Senator Rick Scott of Florida chimes in with a quote of that, a quote tweet of that saying, yes, there will be recess appointments.
So we now are getting into the weeds about how they're going to be able to do this because if you won't remember, I'm old enough to remember that Obama tried this with a recess appointment, but because they weren't adjourned for 10 days, it was less than 10 days, the Supreme Court ruled they were not valid recess appointments.
It's got to be 10 days or longer.
Well, how are they going to make that happen to have a big enough space to do the racist appointments?
So you have two different questions here.
One is, can they make that happen?
And there's a provision in the Constitution that allows the President to adjourn both houses if they don't agree on when they should take an adjournment.
So that could be part of it.
It's not clear how long he's allowed to adjourn with both houses.
But how about this one that hit me this morning when I was thinking about it, Jared?
What if, and just bear with me for a second, what if it goes back to the Supreme Court and they suddenly say, you know what, 10 days is just an arbitrary number.
It only needs to be like one day and you can do the appointments.
What's the likelihood of that happening?
You know, Nick, just because I'm calling in doesn't mean I'm not willing to hang up when you call into question the legitimacy of the United States Supreme Court.
Sure.
Some way or another that they aren't consistent in the way that they handle cases.
This is a reminder to anyone listening who hasn't gotten it yet.
There is one set of rules for the Democrats and the Democrats are more than happy to play by those rules.
And for anybody, Nick, I feel so sad for the people who are still online.
They're like, Joe Biden, use your powers to do that.
No, that's not what the Democrats are going to do.
They're institutionalists who are more than happy to be hobbled by these rules.
The Republican Party are going to move around them.
And the Republican, I about called it the Republican Supreme Court, but it is, The right wing Supreme Court that doesn't care about consistency or actual ideology outside of their authoritarian push, they're more than happy to do this.
And you know what everyone's going to do about it, Nick?
They're gonna snap their fingers and say, shucks, you got us again, guys.
And that's what's going to happen.
And your plan that you just brought up is probably the first plan that got brought up in the think tanks and institutes and all these boardrooms where they cook up the strategies.
They're going to pursue it regardless of consistency and whether or not everybody knows they're hypocrites, because now we know there are no consequences.
Oh, and just to piggyback on that, and before we get to the other nominees real quickly...
You know, there's also reports that they are bypassing the FBI vetting process that would give them top security clearance of people who work in the White House.
You might remember, Jared Kushner could not get approved by the FBI because, A, he lied 100 times on his FS87 form, which is supposed to send you to prison, right?
By the way, just to remind everybody, Jared Kushner, after he couldn't pass his security clearance, could not play a role in the Trump administration, correct?
Well, he wasn't supposed to be able to until...
Oh, until he did it.
Yeah, because, you know, again, Trump just made him.
He said, I'm the president, you have to, and then they had to listen to that, right?
Well, it's the same thing that's going to happen with all these people and everyone else are going to bring in, but instead of going through the FBI process to begin with, they're going to hire a private firm that's supposedly going to do their own background checks and then say, oh, they're fine, they're not a security risk at all, even if somebody like Let's call him Pete Hegseth for shits and giggles.
Even if a guy like that is a serial womanizer cannot seem to cheat on people he's staying with, which makes you a security risk because you can get blackmailed pretty easily that way.
They're going to be able to get his clearance forced through, A, with a recent appointment to get appointed, and then B, be able to get top-secret documents for Because of this.
Some third party company, probably owned by, I don't know, Rudy Giuliani, is going to vet him for them.
Yeah, so Hegstaff, for anyone who doesn't know, has been found out to have paid money to a woman who accused him of sexual assault, which, you know, he did pay.
I mean, whether or not it happened or not, he did pay for it, which should have gotten him fired from Fox News, and now puts him in a position to be the head of the strongest military in the history of the world.
which opens up a whole box of things.
And Nick, for a history lesson, for people who don't know, back during the McCarthyite, like, Red Scare era, people were thrown out of the government for, like, having a drink with a female colleague after work.
Like, this was, like, the big giant construct.
And it's weird how that happened, Nick, because that was a lever that was being used to get so-called socialist or New Dealers out of the government to go ahead and stack the deck and create the situation we're in now, which is where neoliberalism took over for the New Deal in terms of consensus.
Heck Seth is not only unqualified to do this, but now he has been shown to be a security risk.
And what are they going to do?
They're going to bypass everything.
And what's anybody going to do about it, Nick?
They're not going to do anything because they're not interested in doing anything.
They've exposed that the guardrails were imaginary all along, and so they can push any of these people they want, including Tulsi Gabbard, who everyone in the world knows is a bought and sold asset for foreign entities.
But that's not going to matter in the long run because no one is willing to stand up against this stuff.
Absolutely.
And the reporting that I saw was that the Trump administration had no idea that Hegseth had somebody sign an NDA to bury this rape allegation against him.
Right.
Which kind of tells you, you know, if you were going to nominate someone for a cabinet position, you would have probably had done a whole lot of due diligence way before that and had known about all these things.
I did more of a background check on the guy who built my fence than they did for the guy they're putting up for the Department of Defense.
Yeah, yeah, it's kind of scary.
And then here's the other thing is there's probably a thousand people they could choose for that role at the Department of Defense that doesn't have these issues and might even be slightly more qualified even.
But who would, you know, do any bidding that Trump would want?
And it just goes to tell you that, like, they just don't care, right?
Like, you know, I think.
Or maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe what they want him to do is so outrageous, so outlandish, so unpatriotic that he is one of the only people that they could find that would be willing to do it in their secret talks, and that's why they have to push him through.
Either way, it's bad.
Well, it's fascinating.
You know, I invite people to go back and look at the 2017 Trump administration and just kind of look at it side by side by the proposed 2025 Trump administration.
And what happened, Nick, is that Trump, back in 2017, when he took the presidency, he was beginning to humble the Republican Party.
But people like Mitch McConnell still had so much of the power.
He has essentially stolen the Republican Party and purged it of any dissidence or opposition.
And so at this point, he's able to put in any loyalist that he knows is willing to go ahead and break the law, break down the institutions that they want to break down.
So at this point, they don't give a shit.
And they know, because the Democratic Party didn't stand up to them, because the American people didn't get in the streets with all this stuff, and they know that they've captured all these institutions, it doesn't matter anymore.
They could literally go ahead and nominate Vladimir Putin to be the head of American intelligence.
And they probably wouldn't even have any pushback at this point.
I mean, it's basically who they are nominating, right?
Because it seems like there's a direct line between Trump and his new best friend, Elon Musk, who's hanging around the entire time.
He's practically living in Mar-a-Lago.
And so it's gross because it's like we already know the relationship that Musk has with Putin and his willingness to help him in this war, for instance.
We already know what he's trying to do with Twitter and what he's done with the Twitter.
Now he's pretending like he's Trump's right-hand man.
And I suppose Trump is going to use that as long as he can, as long as it benefits him.
And I think that has to mean that someone like Alex Jones will get a position in the White House as well, the way this is going.
I think they like having Alex Jones on the outside because they would rather not have Alex Jones hanging around.
I think it's more of a personality situation.
And for people who don't know, I just want to give people up to speed what's going on in the Alex Jones universe.
So Alex Jones, of course, was found guilty of defaming the Sandy Hook families, which led to his assets being seized and then auctioned off.
Nick, what's happening at this point?
Is that Elon Musk is giving Alex Jones legal assistance in all of this.
And why I wanted to talk about this very quickly was to point out, number one, that Alex Jones has played the role that we've talked about for years, which is going ahead and A-B testing conspiracy theories for the Republican Party, but also B, which is Elon Musk and other billionaires like him have ascended to a point of accumulation of capital where they have enough that they can simply, like...
You know, roll out lawfare at this point, which means they are able to fund all of these things, and I want to remind people of Peter Thiel taking out Deadspin once upon a time, that we have now reached the point where the legal system has been so corrupted and capital has been so accumulated in a few hands that now there are all these pet projects that are going to be pushed by Musk and people like him, and that is going to be basically a non-governmental arm of what it is that we're covering right It's so disgusting.
I thought the corruption of the last cabinet was unprecedented and the most corrupt cabinet we've ever seen.
It's going to be, I mean, it'll make whoever got that free silverware like a bastion of ethics.
And he's going to be, without question, the point for this.
Just like Jared Kushner was.
Probably on steroids.
Remember actually when Elon Musk offered to represent anybody in court if they'd gotten fired for tweets they had written?
Oh, man.
Yes, I do.
And I did some research on this because I wanted to know, did he actually ever do it?
And as far as I could tell, he never, ever backed anybody up and represented them in a case where they got fired because of their tweets.
So it makes me wonder about this, too.
It's like he's trying to get involved with Alex Jones, which, by the way, there was only two bidders.
And the thing that was weird about the InfoWars bid was that Alex Jones was part of the other bid.
Well, he was sort of a part of it, but for legal reasons, couldn't be a part of it.
He was associated, of course, involved Roger Stone, and who even knows who else was in that association.
But yeah, he was basically coordinating with them in the way that he shouldn't have been coordinating.
Yeah, and whatever the quote was that I saw indicated to me that it was like, that should be the forfeiture right there.
He should not be allowed to be part of any bid.
Probably that was part of the deal, but he's making it clear that he was.
Meanwhile, the Sandy Hook families agreed to take less from the settlement as collateral to buy Infowars.
And whoever was arbitrating the sale was like, well, this is clearly a better deal now.
That's why, you know, the Onion is so confident they're going to end up owning InfoWars.
It sounds like they will.
But it wasn't like it was a blind bid and 10 people all put their money, you know, all their bids in there, and then they, you know, illegally chose the Onion.
This is just between two different people, entities.
So it's clear, like, okay, how much do I get for this one?
How much do I get for this one?
Okay, boom.
So I don't think that Alex Jones is going to be able to stand up at all in court for this.
I don't know what's going to happen from the court case legally, like if it was a level playing field, like I think it would go to the onion because this whole thing has just been sort of like, you know, escalated up to make it seem like this big conspiracy theory.
But one of the things that we need to remember, and I'm going to talk more about this on the show and elsewhere because people need to understand it.
It's not just that Elon Musk can go ahead and use his resources to carry out lawfare.
That is certainly one thing that is possible.
But Nick, what we're actually watching with Elon Musk and probably with the other tech fascists who have lined up behind Donald Trump is there's going to be a pressure, which is, OK, your first option is to go ahead and capitulate with Donald Trump's administration.
Just go ahead, accept it, normalize it, move from there.
The other thing that has happened, though, is that the American tech economy, which I know you know and everybody listening to this knows, is built on anticipating and using your data to anticipate what it is that you might want to buy, which means that algorithms and tech surveillance have been used at this point to sell you products.
Well, now there's an implicit threat, Nick, which is you either go along with this thing We're good to go.
They also listen to what you say around your phones in case you've ever gotten an ad that seemed weirdly enough to be related to a conversation you had.
So there is that added threat.
The question is when does that turn on or when do they decide that it's the right time to go ahead and reveal that they have these abilities?
It is truly frightening.
And I just want to go back to what you said about how, you know, it feels like the Democrats have resigned to just accept all of this, right?
There isn't any marching in the streets.
There's, you know, vague notion of, oh, we're going to have to somehow slow all this stuff down, you know, administratively in Congress.
But, you know, Harriet and CNN had just come out and said, this really wasn't a mandate if you're looking at the actual results of the election itself.
Which I've been hearing a lot has been like, well, you know, they had a chance to compare Biden's administration to Trump's from before.
The majority of Americans chose Trump.
So that must be what we all want.
Turns out that his margin ranks since 1824, his margin ranks 44th out of 51 races.
So I'm trying to figure out what to make of that argument when people say, you know, this is a mandate and that we all should just capitulate and let them do this because this is clearly what the majority of Americans want.
Well, so Nick, let me use a metaphor, and oftentimes I'll go ahead and point to the world of sports because it's something that a lot of people have sort of a familiarity with.
So Nick, let's say that Team A plays Team B, right?
And it looks like Team A has a definitive win over Team B, but it's, you know, like, they actually scored some points at the end that really didn't matter.
Well, let's say that Team B that lost that game, they really want to fire their coach.
They really want to bring somebody else in.
They really want to clear the decks or whatever.
They use that as the reason to go ahead and do that.
So over the past few years, the Democratic Party has had to at least pay lip service to some more progressive ideas or coalitions.
Gay, trans people, they can say, hey, we're really concerned about what's going on in Gaza, never mind what's actually occurring.
The whole point is that the party has wanted to move in this direction.
So that mandate you brought up, and we're putting scare quotes around it, it's not actually a mandate.
It's a victory, but you don't have to look at it and say we have to abandon everybody that basically supports us at this point and go along with this and become more Republican-like.
It is actually just an excuse or a narrative to go ahead and carry out what it is that they wanted to go ahead and carry out in the first place.
Yeah, that's a really, really great point.
And hopefully, everyone will get kind of shaken out of their daydream here, because it does feel like that.
People are so shocked that he was able to win again and win, you know, whatever you want to call it, if it's decisive or they just won it.
And, you know, I think part of the reason is that he swept the swing states, right?
Like, that was a big one.
That's a big blow, I think, to everybody.
So we don't need to necessarily roll over and just sort of assume that this is what's going to happen.
But it is definitely demoralizing when you engage in those kind of arguments because it's like there's not much else I could say besides most of the electorate that voted for Trump was so misinformed That, you know, we're now seeing searches for, you know, the root cause of terrorists or what happens when you have terrorists.
You know, like, they're now trying to realize what that means.
And you're seeing all these hysterical replies on Twitter about what they now realize how much our costs are going to go up because of them.
But they didn't realize that until after they voted and after the election.
So maybe this will be the thing that can shake everybody out of it in the next...
I hope it shakes people out of it within the next four months.
You bring up people who are misinformed or who are already captured.
It's actually absurd to say we need to go out and get those MAGA votes.
They're not coming back.
The MAGA votes are in a cult.
We've talked about this.
They've created a hermetically sealed alternate reality.
Those people aren't coming back unless they decide to come back.
What you have to do is you have to enlarge the electorate.
You can't go ahead and accept where it is.
You have to go out and find people who haven't been participating in politics because they've become disillusioned.
Or those people who are just like, you know what?
Nothing is going to happen, so I'm not going to participate.
Which is one of the reasons that the Democratic Party lost the 2024 election and why their support is dwindling over time.
But to continually be told this moderate and centrist thing, going back to Joe Scarborough You know, a lot of these very, very loud people who are now trying to wrestle back control of the party.
That is a false framing.
And quite frankly, we need to pressure the Democratic Party to come to its senses and or start doing things on our own because we can't rely on these people.
They are not going to fight for you as presently constituted.
I agree.
From top bottom to the bottom, they need to sort of refashion how they want to approach this because, you know, she lost the election and got almost 74 million votes compared to Biden, who got 81.
So that's a pretty significant drop.
If she had gotten under like a million votes...
I think it was a couple hundred thousand across some of those states that she would win that election.
So it's not like she needed to completely recreate 2020 in the midst of a pandemic and all the different sessions they had for voting to make it easier.
It just needs to be a little bit more, and at least the White House can be captured.
And then, as also indicated by some of the down-ballot Senate races that went to Democrats, even though that state chose Trump.
So there's an interesting thing there that's moving that could indicate that going into the midterms of 2026, you'll see some more thawing out and some more Democrats winning.
See, I don't know that I necessarily agree with that.
I think the 2026 midterm and the 2028 election, I think people are still viewing those through the lens that they're going to be like 2024.
And what's actually going to occur over the next couple of years before we get to the midterms and before we get to 2028 is a radical changing of not just the way that the country works, but also the way that the parties work.
Like the Trump administration on behalf of the oligarchs who control them, they are looking to crash our economy.
They are looking to go ahead and fundamentally alter the way democracy works and fundamentally alter the way culture works.
And you're going to see, by the way, a lot of corporations going back to the Morning Joe bullshit earlier.
And also, you know, these corporations are very excited about the mergers that they're going to have and the raising of prices and the exploitation they're going to have.
You're going to see a radical shift in terms of how culture appears.
And unfortunately, that changes politics.
So I don't know that 2026 and 2028 are what we should be focusing on.
I mean, I'm not sitting here telling you that there aren't going to be elections, but I am saying that the route that we're going on tells us that you can't just continue to practice politics the way that we have.
You can't just wait for these elections.
You have to start creating something beyond them that can start to change the paradigm itself.
Otherwise, sitting around for the next two years, next four years, I have to tell you, I think the environment is going to be really, really different.
Well, the other thing that could be changing radically is the actual, the way people are behaving in the country itself.
We are seeing, you know, a small group, a small group of Nazis marching through Columbus, Ohio, openly and brazenly.
They are covered.
Their masks, their faces are covered.
But there's been a significant increase recently of these kind of demonstrations of white nationalism and white power and, you know, all the way toward Nazism.
And if we continue to see that as directly inspired by what Trump represents, that could change a lot of the discourse, you know, and sort of just like the the ill at ease that people are going to have just walking down the street in, you know, small town USA.
Yeah.
And, you know, the problem with this, Nick, and this is one of the things I've tried so hard to communicate over the years is, you know, you look at something like Charlottesville and people are like, oh, that's repulsive.
You look at something like January 6th, oh, that's repulsive.
And you just sort of say, the problem is over here.
It's isolated.
If we can just get past this stuff.
What we're actually watching is a sea change in terms of U.S. culture.
We're going to see an open embrace of authoritarianism, which is going to be whitewashed and laundered by our media and through moderates and centrists.
Those things are going to start to happen.
And yes, people marching down Columbus, Ohio streets with Nazi flags, people are still going to say this is disgusting.
But I want to point out that old friend Dana Bash on CNN reporting on that situation in Columbus was saying, you know what, these Nazis are disgusting.
We don't know where they are on the political spectrum.
You know, traditionally Nazis are on the far right that look at the campus protests that have these incidents.
And so what you're actually going to see is sort of a bringing together of liberalism and authoritarianism that is going to have like very defined limits.
Like you can't do this or you're a terrorist.
You can't do this unless you're extremist.
And what happens is the culture starts to shift and that takes politics with it.
And we're not all just in a vacuum.
And all you have to do already is look how American culture is starting to shift with Donald Trump's second victory.
Like, it is already rapidly changing, and we're only a couple of weeks out.
And what's another interesting thing that's developing after all of this, and just to say, Musk being related to the Trump administration speaks to everything he just laid out as well.
And under the guise of censorship, they're going to be able to impose their own version of it.
But before we wrap up, I just wanted to bring up a little interesting tidbit that came up that wasn't even well covered, I feel like.
Or maybe it was, but Joe Biden apparently has seen to authorize Ukraine to use longer-range missiles against Russia.
My question then was, or my instinct was, is Biden going to somehow let Ukraine win this war before he steps out of office in January?
Is that sort of what this is moving towards?
It's a wild thing that isn't getting a whole lot of coverage.
A lot of what's happening in Europe right now, Nick, and this is not being reported, is that a lot of the NATO states are starting to really warn their populaces of impending war with Russia, including nuclear strikes.
that doesn't mean that's what's going to happen, but there is a feeling that this thing is about to escalate.
Meanwhile, as we reported earlier, North Korean troops have now joined Russia.
They're at the Ukrainian border.
We're talking upwards of 100,000 troops are getting ready to invade.
We've seen escalation in terms of drone attacks and bombings.
This thing to give Ukraine long-range missiles, it is a strange thing to look at because Joe Biden is a president who represents the last of a guard, which is the NATO liberal democratic idea of how things are supposed to work.
He knows that Donald Trump is going to be aligned with Russia.
He knows that he's going to discourage Ukraine in this fight.
The question now is, is this a last-ditch effort to go ahead and level the playing field before this giant nation that could lead to a larger war?
Is it somehow or another just tied to arms deals?
Yes.
Like, where is this thing coming from?
And we don't know yet.
The only thing that we know is that right before Donald Trump takes power, and right before, and Nick, do you think it's a coincidence that Russia and North Korea are getting ready to invade Ukraine as Donald Trump is getting ready to take power?
Like, none of that is, like, just happening in a vacuum.
So you have to wonder what the motivation is here and what the consequences are going.
Part of me feels like Biden's trying to take advantage of a situation where he knows that Putin doesn't want to escalate this war knowing that in a couple months he'll just be able to take whatever he's already gotten from Ukraine and there'll be a forced settlement from the U.S. So it would not make a lot of sense to escalate further.
But is Biden kind of sticking his finger in the eye here to try and muck that gentleman's agreement up, maybe to see what the reaction was?
Because you have to remember when Trump first won, And there were so many alarm bells going off in the Obama administration.
They were like leaking documents and trying to hide stuff so they wouldn't get access to, you know, top secret stuff about Russia and all those different things.
They were so afraid that Trump was going to, and rightfully so, give secrets away.
So in the same idea, they might be sort of trying to do another sort of preemptive actions here that not only might help, you know, Ukraine in the long run or even in the short run, but maybe the reaction is what they're more monitoring right now to see how they react.
Thematically, there are sirens running by me as this thing is being discussed.
I want to bring up two quick points on this.
One, like we need to change the way we look at the presidency.
It's not Joe Biden waking up in the middle of the night and saying we need to give these missiles to Ukraine.
It is the military industrial complex, which is a blob, which has its own sort of agenda that it's carrying out.
A lot of these people, Nick, are on the chopping block to be purged by Donald Trump, right?
They see Donald Trump as a threat to the NATO alliance and the American sort of imperial order.
So maybe this is like trying to get some things in order before he comes in and also trying to figure out, like, what's going to happen in the face of a possible World War III type situation.
The second point, speaking of world wars, it's not just Germany invading Poland, Nick.
Before these wars, there's a lot of joustling.
You know what I mean?
There's a lot of like testing things, seeing what's going to happen.
This, of course, should remind people of Chamberlain, you know, coming up with an agreement with Adolf Hitler.
You see what liberal democracies are willing to do in the face of authoritarian aggression.
And in this case, we still don't know.
Are we on the precipice of a larger world changing war?
Or are we sort of like seeing what we can get without trying to break it?
Are people trying to do last ditch efforts before the alignment changes?
We don't know.
And quite frankly, the only thing that we do know is where the game board is right now.
We don't know what the consequences are going to be or how they're going to play out, but this is most definitely a huge story that deserves a lot more attention.
I agree wholeheartedly, and it's a really worrying thing, especially because, A, we know what's going to happen.
We know that Ukraine is going to ultimately cede whatever they had gained.
They're going to have to give up more territory to Russia than what they took back on themselves.
You know what I mean?
And I think Gaza and Israel, similar things there, where Israel will be able to continue until there's no more Gaza.
They're already testing the waters for saying that parts of Lebanon are actually Israeli.
I mean, it is a smash and grab across the board.
People are trying to figure out what they can get.
And that adds to that that there are people in the State Department and the Defense Department right now who are hiring lawyers in anticipation of being arrested or being, you know, indicted by the Trump administration as some sort of retribution and show trial kind of thing, which is also kind of silly and insane and authoritarian.
So it's not great, but I hope that in the next couple of weeks we'll have a little bit more clarity as you get back into the studio when we have a little bit more focus.
Yeah, we'll be back on Friday with The Weekender Show.
Go over to patreon.com slash myquickpodcast.
You listen to these previews, come along.
Also, again, thank you everybody for the trust that you're putting in us, particularly at this very weird time as we're losing faith in our institutions and media.
