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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the breaking news that Matt Gaetz decided to take himself out of the running for Attorney General. Nancy Mace continues her particular brand of hate by harassing incoming representative Sarah McBride, and Comcast will be spinning off a bunch of their properties including MSNBC.
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I am back in my recording area and I'm here with my good friend Nick Hausman.
How you doing, Nick?
It's always good to have you back in the familiar climes of your studio.
It is nice to be back.
And unfortunately, we have a lot of shit that we have to talk about.
That's right, everybody.
Matt Gaetz is back down to the nomination.
We got to talk about this terrible, terrible bathroom situation in Congress.
A lot of what the new Trump administration is planning to do.
And also MSNBC, maybe not long for this world.
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And in case, you know, you can't read between the lines when it comes to something like MSNBC, now's the time to support independent media.
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Matt Gaetz is not going to be the next Attorney General of the United States of America.
After a turbulent few days, which we will talk more about in just a second, Gaetz has announced that he is withdrawing his nomination after multiple pieces of evidence have emerged that he is engaged in sex trafficking and assaulting underage women.
I thought that he was going to end up being nominated through the recess process, but it turns out that there are some things, particularly if you're a completely hateable piece of shit and you have the entire party against you, that aren't going to necessarily fall by the wayside.
Well, hang on, though, because yesterday I thought...
First of all, yeah, I was on the same page with you in terms of recess appointment.
We were looking into all of that, how Trump was going to force him to recess.
But then yesterday, Senator Thune met with Gates and said that it went well.
He said he's doing what he should be doing.
So my take on that as of midday yesterday...
Was that they were going to get enough votes normally to get him in.
That's what it felt like it was moving towards.
He's going to lie and say it never happened.
It's not whatever.
They're going to shrug and be like, well, he's under oath.
He's saying it didn't happen.
It must not have happened, right?
Or, especially because you have a whole section of the GOP that thinks that 17-year-olds are not minors.
You can't.
We've seen this.
This is not a thing I'm making up.
But don't forget, Jared, there's always a second sexual encounter.
Oh, it's so...
And I can't believe that that was the one.
By the way, the second sexual encounter was at the same party.
Yeah.
And, you know, Nick, I want to be clear and talk about exactly what happened here.
It isn't all of this evidence that did in Matt Gaetz.
It isn't that they discovered a money trail of him paying these people.
It's not that they have photographs and videos.
The GOP voted to bury this report in order to protect Matt Gaetz.
And by the way, you brought up the Thune meeting.
He said it went well.
He's doing what he should do.
They had talked about the fact that he needed to back out.
The problem here with Gates and what ultimately submarined him is not his deviant behavior.
It's not his crimes.
It's that he has spent the entirety of his career being an abusive shithead to his colleagues.
He was so disliked by these people and so repulsive in his behavior that eventually they were like, guess what?
You little snot nose brat.
You're not getting through here.
That's the end of it.
That's how it goes.
That's how it works.
I mean, Donald Trump is their nominee.
He's going to be their president.
On top of that, we're seeing all this stuff from Pete Hegseth, who might very well become the next Secretary of Defense, despite the allegations against him.
What happened here was basically a party foul.
It was Matt Gaetz alienating Republicans and making them hate him on a personal level, as opposed to what it is that he did in his personal life.
Okay, so you don't think, right, okay, I guess what you're saying is, even this, they already knew about all this stuff, is what you're saying.
Oh, they've known about it for years.
So something in Gates' brain finally, like, broke and was like, oh, I'm gonna, because, like, again, with the full-throated support of Donald Trump, and you have everybody saying that Trump deserves, we need to talk about this, the language they're using.
Trump deserves the cabinet that he wants.
is a real authoritarian take on this. - Absolutely it is. - You know, it sounded like it was going to, no matter what, as long as, you know, Gates had to hang out.
Now, I suspect that in the Senate confirmation hearing, if they were to go that route, it would come out and then you would be able to turn Republican against Republican in theory, because there's all this evidence of Republicans bad mouthing him too.
I don't know.
You think that was enough for him to look at and be like, yeah, I don't want this anymore?
I think that the situation would have been turbulent if Gates wasn't such a shitheel.
I think all this stuff that we found out would have made it tough for him if there was an actual nomination process.
But eventually, it reaches a point where it's like, okay, we have the crimes, X. We have the bad PR, Y. X plus Y plus Z, which is...
That Gates is a shitheel who everybody hates.
And a reminder, Nick, we've talked about it on here before.
It's not just that everybody knew about these crimes.
It's that Matt Gates was on the floor of Congress showing people videos and photographs from his sexual exploits.
And on top of that, forming little boys clubs with colleagues talking about how they were going to prey on staffers and other vulnerable people.
It just got to be too much.
And eventually, you have to pull the plug on this thing.
And they probably made him a deal.
Like, we're already hearing rumors that DeSantis might go ahead and appoint him, you know, to replace Marco Rubio.
I don't think that's what's going to happen.
But also, they're like, hey, Matt, guess what?
You're going to get an incredibly cushy, lucrative job at a GOP corporation or firm.
Matter of fact, you'll make more money doing that than you would as Attorney General.
So he got bought out because he's a shit heel and people hate him, and it went ahead and it's, you know, greased the track.
Now Trump will find somebody else who is willing to do his bidding at the DOJ. Yeah, of which there should be no shortage.
No shortage.
Yeah.
I suppose, like, his mistake seems to be that he resigned from Congress.
Because now he's left with nothing.
However, he resigns from Congress so that the report doesn't come out.
And so there was levels here to the idiocy, I suppose.
But I can't quite...
Maybe he was through no matter what at this point.
That's what maybe it sounded like.
He was going to get Madison Cawthorn or something like that.
Which, by the way, he sounds pretty prescient, right?
Madison Cawthorn didn't lie.
Well, okay.
He didn't lie about this.
Yeah, right?
Like, you know, and remember, like, Cawthorn was probably in a similar personality type as Gates, I suppose.
Oh, yeah, they're cut from the same cloth, for sure.
Yeah, and he had a little bit of stuff where, like, you know, there was some notion of, like, I never, I don't think, formally accused of sexual assault, but there were some issues, whatever.
There might have been some things that a traditional conservative Republican would be against in terms of lifestyle, but...
You know, he got thrown out so much more unceremoniously than Gates did finally that it's kind of fascinating to sort of track those two things in a parallel universe.
Yeah, they are definitely in conversation with each other.
And they both broke cardinal rules, which is you don't screw with other GOP members.
Right.
And also, you don't talk about what it is you see behind closed doors.
Right.
I mean, he was talking about crushing ED medication and chasing with Red Bull.
I wouldn't recommend that, Jared.
No, we're not going to endorse that as a show.
And on top of that, I want to say a couple of quick things before we get to the other aspect of this we need to talk about.
And that is simply that look at what the GOP does.
This entire QAnon thing about sex trafficking and the abuse of minors.
Like, look at why it is.
It's deflection from who they are.
And that's the straight-up purpose of it.
The amount of sexual predators that are already being lined up to be in this administration and also head the administration, for that matter.
Nick, we need to also talk about a little bit of a side note, an anecdote from this entire soap opera, which is that after they buried the report, they voted to bury the report, it turned out that a hacker gained access to some of the testimony from the investigation it turned out that a hacker gained access to some of the testimony from the And I just want to say that I think that we need to prepare ourselves for a lot of this stuff.
In the near future.
Because in an authoritarian society, particularly where information is controlled and these people like bury things left and right, we're going to have to sort of change the paradigm in which we think about things.
Like, you know, we heard about WikiLeaks, of course, like, you know, bringing out stuff during the war on terror.
We've heard them called criminals and terrorists.
I think we're going to see a lot of outlaws during the second Trump administration that are going to try and bring things to light.
And I think that paradigm is about to shift.
Are you also worried that the hacking could be just faked anyway?
Oh, yeah.
No, I mean, that's what happens when the zone floods for shit, right?
Right.
It's going to be a thing, especially when you're talking even about AI and that stuff, too, which is really crazy.
I mean, did you see, by the way, the AI animation of the picture of Musk and Trump and RFK Jr. eating McDonald's on the plane?
No, I stay away from that.
Well, you saw the picture, right?
Oh, I did.
Oh, I did.
Talk about it.
I mean, talk about RFK Jr. discussing our food and then eating McDonald's on the plane.
But yeah, they did a thing, which by the way, I thought was hilarious because it just continues to...
First, they pull out guns and they're just shooting them.
And it doesn't look real, real, but it's real enough where you can imagine in a year from now...
It will look exactly like Trump and Musk pulling out Uzis and just firing indiscriminately while they're eating the McDonald's on the plane.
It is concerning, to say the least.
Yeah, and I think that we're going to have to prepare ourselves.
I mean, one of the themes that we have coming up, which is we're going to have to develop a real advanced type of literacy, which is understanding not just misinformation and disinformation, but also finding our own information that is checked out.
Evaluating sources.
And also starting to reconsider the way we think about words like criminals and terrorists.
Like, these things have been used against people in a lot of different places.
And I'm just, I'm sounding a warning, which is, things are about to get wild and wooly, and we're going to have to update how we interact with these things.
Well, the piggyback on that, and I just had this sort of epiphany this morning and I'm kind of pissed about it, is that, you know, I don't know if enough people are talking about the sheer misinformation that the electorate had on the right.
Oh, sure.
And obviously it's driven utterly and completely by Musk.
And what he did to Twitter.
We could try and deny that Twitter doesn't have as much influence as it does, but it does.
Because even if you're not doing it, you're going to hear from someone else who it is, and they're going to spread it, and it's real easy for him to do that and mess with the algorithm to make sure that many people see it.
And it wouldn't be far-fetched to assume that Russia did what they did in 2016 with their collusion, their Facebook groups, getting Americans to host these pro-propaganda, Russian propaganda stuff.
They could have been like, you know what, let's just get Musk to do it now.
And it's not far-fetched to sort of pontificate on that or sort of assume that's what happened.
And that's because it is what happened.
Musk created such a vortex of bullshit that people were willing to believe that that's one of the reasons why Trump got more votes than he did last time.
And so that's even worse than anything that I'm worried about right now.
I agree.
And before we move on to the next topic, just on what you're saying, Nick, one of the things that I want to do on this show and elsewhere is I want to start giving people actionable advice, things to consider as they move forward.
Any kind of a movement that's going to be created to face off against this...
I think reforming social media and the control over communications by billionaires like Elon Musk is absolutely essential, as are calls to reform corruption like what we're seeing with this Gates stuff.
Like, this should not be buried.
This stuff should not be kept from us.
So these are going to be massive planks in any sort of movement going forward.
Speaking of corruption and awfulness, Nick, the incoming GOP Congress has already taken a hard stand.
Led by Representative Nancy Mace, they have targeted incoming Representative Sarah McBride by pushing for a ban on transgender people in bathrooms.
Mike Johnson has already signaled Republican support, and yeah, let's hear what good old Nancy has to say about this.
And the Speaker said it would be in the House rules package.
If it's not, I'll be ready with a motion, a privileged motion, to force a vote on this.
This is not okay.
I'm a survivor of rape.
I'm a survivor of sexual abuse.
And I'm not going to allow any man in any female private space.
End of story.
And by the way, I'm getting death threats from men pretending to be women.
Why is it that these crazy people, the insanity, the radical left, are willing to kill women over a man's right to be in a women's restroom?
Speaker Johnson has said he wants to treat every new member with the words dignity and respect.
Forcing this congressperson to go into a male restroom, is that dignity and respect?
Forcing women to share private spaces with men is not dignity and not respect.
I'm absolutely going to stand in the way of anyone who thinks it's okay for a man to be in our locker room, in our changing rooms, in our dressing rooms, in women's bathrooms.
And in fact, if you agree with that, you're crazy.
Because that's not okay.
It's not okay.
Congress...
All right, Nick.
So before we get into the response and what needs to happen with all of this, Nancy Mace just gave everybody a fine, fine introduction into how the right has used TERF-style rhetoric in order to discriminate against trans people.
This was a master class of that, talking about safety in terms of, like, you don't want women to be unsafe and Meanwhile, taking people who aren't meaning any harm to anybody and then also going ahead and misgendering them.
Nancy Mace is repugnant.
And forgive me, there was a part where she even, you know, she uses the word penis.
Like, I will not let a penis into our locker room.
Hell no.
And it's, you know, it's...
It is repugnant.
You're not supposed to just...
And she's doing it specifically against McBride, the congressman.
One person.
Yes.
And that's also just gross.
Like, this is a co-worker of yours.
And I don't even know.
It's just hatred, right?
It's hatred.
But is it hard to understand why this is going to get a lot of people to nod their head vociferously?
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