Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss a series of polls from CBS News that indicate pretty clearly that even progressives are accepting their fate and resigned to let Donald Trump have his way with the government. They tackle the Elon Musk issue and how he wants to dismantle Unions in order to maximize profits before moving on to the new social media platform BlueSky and the dangers of living in an echo chamber.
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Nick, I think you'll join me in saying Happy Thanksgiving to all of our listeners.
I hope you have things to be thankful for at this time of the year.
I mean, sure.
We're going to celebrate, you know, real Americans who welcome people to give them all sorts of terrible diseases and take all their land and all sorts of things.
So, yes, I guess we're thankful for all that, aren't we?
Yeah, happy American, well, not Americans, happy immigrants came to America, couldn't make it on their own, and indigenous people helped them to survive, and then, yeah, look what we ended up doing.
Yeah, so, well, as long as we understand the context, maybe we can still find some way to move forward through it.
That's right.
And everybody, before we get going, just a quick little note.
Because it is Thanksgiving week, we usually record the weekender on Thursdays.
We're still going to have the weekender on Friday.
A reminder, go to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast, gain access to that, and join the community and support the program.
But Nick and I are going to celebrate Thanksgiving by answering your questions.
So we're going to record this.
Nick, we're doing it Wednesday morning, right?
That's when we're doing this?
Yep.
Okay, so here's the deal.
I will post after we have recorded this episode, I will post on the Patreon a call for questions.
You can also email us at muckrigpodcast at gmail.com.
We look forward to hearing, you know, your questions, what you want us to discuss, and yeah, that'll come out on Friday.
In the meantime, Nick, we gotta catch up on a few important stories that unfortunately have been falling through the cracks.
First things first, two dozen of the biggest corporations and companies in the United States, including SpaceX and Tesla, fronted by Elon Musk and Amazon with Jeff Bezos, basically these little pocket corporations of the most powerful and richest people in the country and the history of the world, are filing multiple basically these little pocket corporations of the most powerful and richest people in the country and the history of the world, are filing multiple federal lawsuits, trying to go after the National Labor Relations Board in an attempt to
That the main body that serves as a liaison and support system between the United States federal government and organized labor will be ruled unconstitutional and completely struck down.
Nick, no other way to put this.
Bad, bad news.
Extremely bad news, especially because this is just the beginning of all manner of government control.
I mean, we already know they want to get rid of things like the EPA, for instance, because they don't think that that has any sort of constitutional authority over anything.
And technically, it kind of doesn't.
But I think, you know, we could all agree that these are very important bodies that will help people, you know, not be exploited in the workplace.
And I wouldn't, I would say, I'd give the benefit of the doubt to the employers if we didn't have, I don't know, is it thousands of years of data to prove that they would exploit the little workers?
Is that what it is?
I would say since the beginning of labor, we have proof that employers and the hoarders of resources, and yeah, we understand exactly what will happen if that avenue isn't available to workers to organize and advocate and push for their own actual fair treatment or something approaching fair treatment.
Let me give you an idea of what my mindset is because you know the times when you get onboarded to maybe a new job or you're working somewhere and they have you do those training sessions and they show the videos and it's usually people roll their eyes on how they're supposed to behave in the workplace and all those different things.
I always tend to like them because they seem to be pretty valuable.
Like, these are things that we all should know.
We should treat people certain ways because that'll help make the workplace work better.
And we should have these kind of protections in place for the worker in general that the government needs to make sure it's happening.
So I think that they're thinking it's a nuisance.
It's a thing that gets in the way.
It might cost a lot of extra money.
But I don't know.
In my mind, it seems like you can leverage a lot of what they end up doing at the To increase profits because you'll increase workplace and workers' happiness and they'll be more productive.
Yeah.
So just to go ahead and touch on a bunch of things to set the table.
First things first.
Listen, we've been critics of the Biden administration for a variety of reasons.
One of the bright spots of the Biden administration was their support of organized labor.
Although, of course, they threw several labor unions over the side of the of the boat and under the bus.
But that being said, this is going to be a reactionary period in which the wealth class, which recognizes Donald Trump as a cudgel and a weapon, they are going to go for it all.
And what do we know, Nick?
We know that without labor unions and without the ability of representation and solidarity, that the wealth class is going to create a workplace where you have to work constantly.
You're going to be in conditions that are going to be destructive and unhealthy and even fatal.
We've seen that, you know, before labor unions were able to fight for this type of representation and solidarity.
They were feeding people into the maw of dangerous, destructive machines and not just like able bodied people.
We're talking about children.
Right.
That's that's what this was before we actually got to this point.
The point here is that Nick.
Nick, you just brought up a really good point, which is that they could actually make a ton of money and maybe even more money by treating the workers well.
Scientific studies show consistently that happy workers who are motivated are better workers, right?
And in the long term, you're actually going to make more money.
But that's not how capitalism is oriented now.
It's for the quick buck.
Right?
It's making as much as possible as quickly as you can and then watching the machine break down.
The machine broke down in the 20th century with the Great Depression.
And Nick, what happened in America during the Great Depression?
Did everybody just like come together automatically?
They weren't necessarily attracted to authoritarian movements, were they?
Oh, I mean...
If they hadn't been, we would have probably gotten rid of the Great Depression a lot earlier than it actually took.
So yeah, it looked like it created the conditions to allow the Nazi socialist party's idealism to fester in America without question.
Yeah, which was supported by the oligarchical class that created the problem in the first place, as they're doing again.
The National Labor Relations Board was created in 1935, and if that sets off some alarm bells about why this might have happened, it should.
Because it was under those type conditions in which Franklin D. Roosevelt recognized that, I don't know, something like a New Deal was necessary in order to actually restructure capitalism so it didn't melt down entirely and fascism didn't take over.
This came after so many years of open warfare in the streets.
And by the way, I'm trying to get in the habit, Nick, of whenever we cover this stuff to give people actionable advice for things they can do to understand and move things in a better direction.
First piece of advice, go back and look at actual labor history.
There were wars in the streets in which corporate armies and the U.S. Army banded together on behalf of capital are going to make it possible for labor to get representation.
That being said, we also need to understand that the whole point right now is to stave off any type of organized labor and any type of solidarity that can push back against the wealth class right now.
They're going for it.
That's the only way that I can explain it.
It's like a player who is running towards the end zone and they see it in the distance.
They're going to speed up.
They're going to do everything in their power to go ahead and roll back all of this progress that we've seen.
All of these lawsuits put together, Nick, we've talked so much about how these think tanks and institutes, they coordinate in order to get to the Supreme Court that they have stolen and captured.
That's what this is about.
And they are going to kill this off if they possibly can and get rid of organized labor in the United States of America the same way they have in so-called second and third world countries in order to further exploit the workers.
I think what's going hand-in-hand with this is this notion of wanting to expel anybody who's not documented as an immigrant from other countries.
I'm trying to think of how this works hand-in-hand, because obviously there is a connection here.
If they can get rid of workers, and they also, by the way, will spread this notion that workers who are coming here from other countries are taking the jobs of American citizens.
We know that's not really true, right?
They're doing jobs that American citizens don't want to do.
But if you remove protections there and destroy unions, then suddenly you are going to end up forcing Americans to take whatever job they can under any kind of conditions they can or that exist by the employer, right?
So it seems to me that this is another way of being able to funnel lower class people into horrible jobs for their lives, maybe to the point where they don't feel like there's any hope for them bettering that at all.
Everybody wants a silver bullet explanation for everything that the right does, right?
And usually it follows whatever line or ideology that you're trying to prove, and that's the way it goes.
It's multiple things at once.
They are not going to deport all people who are in America illegally.
They're going to keep an underclass of people that are going to work for cents on the dollar.
That is just what capitalism wants at this point.
But what you just brought up, Nick, is something that people need to understand.
Implicit in all of MAGA's racism, sexism, all of it is a very, very thinly veiled economic program.
And here's the promise.
We are going to get immigrants out of jobs.
We're going to get women out of jobs.
We're going to get people of color out of jobs.
And you'll get those jobs.
But guess what happens there, Nick?
It's a devil's Faustian bargain.
If you're going to open up some of these jobs, including immigrants like you brought up, you're going to then be further exploited.
And you're giving up your possibility of engaging in solidarity and advocating for more money.
We've already seen what the wealth class will do.
They'll open up the borders and send jobs to second and third world countries, right?
If you want money.
The re-industrialization of the United States of America, which is happening right now, they have to get rid of labor unions in order to pay people's cents on the dollar.
So it's a lot of these different factors happening at once.
And again, it's a Faustian bargain that sets people up to be exploited.
That's the entire purpose of it.
I can picture an economist understanding the goal, right?
We want to get back to industrialization, get rid of all the competition from other countries that are undercutting us.
So he would say, okay, these were the conditions that really worked for us when we had that.
So obviously, we have to raise tariffs, get rid of labor unions.
There's no thought beyond that.
Like, there's simply just a math thing where, like, that's what they're looking at.
Forgetting the entire, you know, the decade upon decade of absolutely inhumane treatment people had to suffer through.
Children, I think, is, I don't know if you even stress it enough, how many children are forced into that.
Because that isn't even that long ago.
Right?
Children being required to go to school and not being able to work is a relatively modern law, if I'm not mistaken, right?
It is.
And Nick, you'll notice something because you just brought some things up that need underlined very quickly.
Notice what we've seen in the last few years.
We've seen investment in U.S. manufacturing.
Great!
We were all for that.
That was fantastic.
And what did we say at the time?
This is going to lead to bad things unless there is representation and solidarity and protections, right?
Nick, isn't it weird that the GOP has been pushing for children to work in places now, like slaughterhouses and factories?
It's weird that that's been set up.
Oh, wait, they should be going to school.
Wait, we're not funding schools!
And we're talking about different ways of doing school.
You'll notice that all of the factors that we've been talking about have now been coming together.
And now this is one of the last dominoes to fall to make sure that this can get rid of any sort of resistance that makes it possible to re-industrialize and do it on the cheap and exploit excessively.
I mean, if you could prove to me that when we had conditions like that, that people were happy and that they were able to- They were not.
Then I'd be like, I'll be all for it.
But it's like, that doesn't matter.
This is simply the meat grinder of people who are on that conveyor belt and then they fly over the edge right into the grinder.
And that's- That's what we'd be returning to.
I suppose this would have been a good opportunity for someone, I don't know if they were running for president, to outline or sort of make that clear what was happening.
I don't know.
It wouldn't hurt.
It wouldn't hurt to talk about these things and what's going to happen to the people who are going to be displaced by things like artificial intelligence.
It might have helped.
Real fast, Nick, before we move to the next story, I just want to give one more piece of actionable advice for people.
If you are in a labor union in your workplace, you need to talk to your labor union about connecting with the UAW's general strike in 2028. We're good to go.
Nick, on a similar note about where we are going, CBS released an incredibly telling poll that we need to wrestle with.
Nick, I'm going to read you and the listeners a couple of the findings from this poll.
This CBS poll finds that 59% of Americans approve of the Trump transition.
55% of Americans are happy or satisfied with Trump winning the election.
46% of Democrats do not feel motivated to oppose Donald Trump and are tuning out.
And 57% of Americans now say they are in favor of deporting all immigrants who are in the United States of America illegally.
These are shocking findings, but they do go ahead and communicate what you and I have been talking about for a while, which is the rightward trajectory in this country as well as the liberal capitulation towards Trump and authoritarianism.
You know, the 57% of Americans who approve of deporting all immigrants in the U.S. illegally is probably the most soul-killing thing I'm going to read today.
You know what I mean?
It just seems like that is the indicative of everything.
Well, real fast, Nick, you just referenced very slyly the Harris campaign of 2024. How can it not be over 50% if both political parties agreed that this was a major, major issue that needed to be dealt with?
It changed the calculation in people's minds.
They had to support Harris.
So as a result, ipso de facto, I think that's what it's called.
I've never been good at the Latin.
Therefore, they have to go ahead and support this thing, and they're now in favor of it.
I suppose, yeah, I mean, listen, to her credit, I mean, she stressed that there are things that needed to be done at the border, but they had had a bipartisan bill that would have done things that would have sped up judicial processes and had more people at the border to make it more humane.
But I agree, and it's obviously more comprehensive than that anyway, but...
It was soul killing.
I think the whole thing.
The whole thing that he swept every swing state and what this is giving rise to.
We talked about this the last couple times.
It's palpable how people on the left simply are going to want to tune out, not pay attention to the news.
We've already seen how CNN and MSNBC have plummeted so drastically that Musk might end up buying MSNBC. MSNBC is very likely to die.
The result of this is so dire and their coverage of stuff is so awful.
It's very likely to die now.
Yes.
Yeah.
You know, and so it's like, you know, whether that's going to be worth, you know...
Spilling a drink over your shoulder or not, it's simply just indicative of what that segment of the political sphere thinks about and cares about and whether they do care.
We need to figure out a way to motivate people again.
And I don't even know if it's fight.
Is fight the right word?
Because that scares people away.
It does.
And quite frankly, like, what has been communicated to us now for years, and actually decades now that we're talking about it, it's the idea that your experience as an individual in the United States of America when it comes to politics is you go to the polls every two to four years and you cast a vote.
And then the adults in the room take care of everything else.
And what else has been communicated to us, Nick?
And just we don't even have to talk about Gaza and Israel.
What happens when you protest in this country?
What do we see?
Violence?
We see violence, right?
And on top of that, economic and political consequences.
We've even seen that major firms and corporations have said, if you protested in favor of this, or as opposed to this, you might not get a job.
And matter of fact, we've even tested the ability to take away federal loans, federal employment, federal assistance, based on whether or not you participate in protests.
So people have gotten to the point...
Yes, it's frightening.
And to ask people to put their livelihoods and their personal safety on the line, it's a big ask.
The problem is that we should have been doing it before.
It should have been done before all these things locked into place.
And now we have a big problem.
And I will say to you and also listeners, if I would have said two months ago that Trump would have had approval over 50% at this point, would anybody believe that?
And why is it happening?
It's happening because a lot of people have just said, you know what, I'm done.
I can't do this anymore.
They were fed, like, overly optimistic, hope-peddling messages.
They got crushed, and now they're done.
And what have they engaged in?
They've been engaged in consumer politics, you know, buying shirts and hats and all these little baubles, you know, that have RBG on them or whatever.
And now, like, as the rubber meets the road and the shit hits the fan...
They're not feeling motivated anymore.
They don't have any hope or aspiration or any sort of a pull.
So as a result, yeah, 46% of Democrats now say that they're not motivated to oppose Donald Trump.
That is a wild thing to see, but also not really that unexpected after everything we've been covering and talking about.
I agree.
I think, you know, we talked about this a lot in the past in terms of democracy only exists in so far as people are willing to believe that it exists.
That's right.
And I think that the second that Trump stepped down on the escalator, that destruction of that belief doesn't come back.
It's very hard.
I don't know how you're supposed to get that back.
And when you're playing against a team like what the Republicans are doing with misinformation, again, there's an inevitability to a lot of this because the other team wants to try and play fairly.
They want to try and deal with facts.
And, you know, obviously the other side of that would have been, okay, let's lie just like the Republicans lie and let's play out by their rules and let's get R.E. Emanuel back in the fold and doing that.
Or sorry, Rahm Emanuel.
Rahm Emanuel.
Although Ari might join too.
Oh yeah, I'm sure the Emanuel brothers will be right on the forefront of all of this.
And so that's a weird situation to be in, but it also tells you how much democracy had been teetering where all it took...
Was a guy like Trump to do this?
And you kind of scratch your head saying, why hadn't anyone even tried that before?
There were these norms we talk about all the time and everyone seemed to believe that maybe we should have them for whatever reason, but it was that easy, right?
It was that easy for Trump to do what he did and take over and win two out of three races.
I think a couple things here.
One, I think we saw a little bit of this with the Bush administration.
And the only reason that, like, it didn't take the form that it did right now is because George W. Bush was the scion of a political legacy, right?
He had the Bush name.
And on top of that, he still talked about norms.
You know, I think George W. Bush belongs in The Hague.
And I think he should never see a shred of daylight for the rest of his life.
But in, you know, in his defense, Nick, even during the War on Terror, he would still make speeches where he was like, do not blame Muslims, you know, do not target Muslims.
So you at least had that sort of emoticum of norms.
You still had sort of that thing.
You needed someone as shameless as Donald Trump to take it over the finish line.
An anecdote that I think can help explain this stuff.
Nick, my stepdad, the most important thing in his life a lot of the time is NFL football and the Dallas Cowboys.
He's the biggest fan of the Dallas Cowboys I've ever met.
Guess what?
The Cowboys stink.
And they have stunk for years.
You know what happens during a season where the Cowboys stink?
He stops caring about the NFL. He stops watching it because it makes him feel bad and it makes him feel like he doesn't have control over things.
What happens when the Democratic Party stinks?
People who have aligned themselves completely with the Democratic Party and don't have the framework that you and I talk about on here, they're not able to see a larger picture and it becomes a reflection on themselves.
And it's a pastime.
They're not interested in doing it.
I think the good news here, Nick, is while 46% of Democrats say that they're not motivated to oppose Donald Trump, the 54% that are left over from that are actually getting more radicalized and motivated and actually starting to look at how to bring things together to actually affect change.
And so the 46% is demoralizing and I think really, really telling.
I think the people who are still tuning in, including people who listen to this podcast, they're like, you know what?
Fuck this.
I'm not going to just let this happen.
I'm not going to live in a society like this.
So I think that there is a motivating aspect to this, but we can't like delude ourselves and pretend like a lot of liberals aren't turning off and are just going to go about their lives and or support this thing.
I think the other thing that they missed the ball on was when Trump won 74 million votes in 2020, which is the most ever, aside from Biden, and had increased significantly his vote tally from 2016, that should have been a huge red flag.
Now that I'm sort of reflecting on it now, right?
He continued to broaden his base, continued to broaden the appeal from even, quote unquote, the normal Republicans.
So it's almost like it was not inevitable, but certainly kind of clear in 2020, even though he lost, that we were in for a real problem here because he would be able to, from the outside of the White House, spend four years just criticizing and stirring up hate and anger.
And then leading to another couple million votes that he got, and then also leading to cleaving off a lot of the votes that Biden had gotten in 2020. By the way, we never really brought this up, but, you know, the other problem we have with this result is that it seems to get even more grist to the people who want to say that 2020 was stolen.
Yeah.
Right?
Well, I mean, you just say what?
The Democrats just didn't do as good of a job of stealing this time?
Because you'll notice, like, you want to talk about cognitive dissonance, you'll notice that they're not concerned talking about any voter fraud.
If the Democrats were actually trying to steal elections, Nick, then why wasn't there at least evidence that it wasn't even as close as the actual results gave?
You'll notice there's just not any conversation about ballot mules or bamboo ballots or any of those things.
It just disappeared.
So the only way you can actually talk about it is to say you'll notice when they lose, it's rigged, and when they win, it's not.
So it's actually a pretty absurdist argument, even though I think they absolutely are using that to stoke more and more...
You know, sort of conspiracy theories that undermine liberal democracy.
Yeah, absolutely.
And so it really is frustrating when you kind of mix all these things together to realize that it's just not quite stacked in a fair way, the way this is going.
And so what we have to be very concerned about now is what's going to happen with the government and what they're going to do to make sure that they can continue to winning and really making it rigged.
And I worry that what's going to happen now is the people of like-mindedness are going to end up populating amongst themselves.
And you're going to see much more of a segmentation that, by the way, which already exists now, I worry you're going to see it even worse.
And then at that point, you won't really have a United States, whether it's a civil war or a quiet civil war, where you simply end up having everybody like in California and New York and, you know, in a couple different states.
And then the rest of the people who are more of the MAGA people are living amongst the rest of the country.
Well, you know, Nick, I think that brings up an interesting topic that we were planning on talking about, which was the migration of users from Twitter, X, whatever the hell they're calling it nowadays, over to Blue Sky.
Blue Sky has now become sort of the liberal slash left alternative to X. It's ballooning at a massive rate.
And this idea that we are now entering echo chambers in all the facets of our lives...
And I'm of a couple of minds about this, and I wanted to have a discussion with you.
I think it merits some looking over.
And I think on one hand...
What you talked about, the segmentation, this is what happens when politics is consumerized, right?
When basically, instead of it being representative democracy, feeling like you can vote for a massive change, it sort of finds itself in consumer expression, right?
It's the same thing, like, do you buy Coke or do you buy Pepsi?
In this case, we have two parallel economies that have now emerged.
We've talked about this where you have like the quote unquote woke economy and you have the anti woke economy.
But meanwhile, they're feeding the same sources.
They're being supplied by the same people.
It's almost like how, again, speaking of soft drinks, Coca-Cola makes Coke for people who want cola and they make Sprite for people who want the lemon lime un-cola.
Right.
And so what we're actually doing at this point is we are being immersed into boutique realities.
Like you're able to pay a certain amount or use your patronage in order to have a reality that reflects what you want reality to look like.
And then meanwhile, the points where those things come together, whether it's the legal system or the political system, that's where all the friction is.
And when that friction gets worse because those boutique realities do not mix, you're going to see worsening polarization and radicalization.
So I guess my question to you, and I have my thoughts on this, do you think that the migration away from Twitter and X over to Blue Sky, do you think this is a good thing?
Do you think it's a troubling thing?
Or do you think that there are elements of both?
Well, we'll look at it this way in terms of real life, because people will move into a certain neighborhood if the schools are better or not, or if they agree with the politics of that state, right?
So we see that kind of segmentation anyway.
And, you know, and you certainly have a, it's not a hot take to think, yeah, I don't want to live there because abortion rights, because I have a daughter and who knows what might happen.
We need to have her rights and her ability to have medical care.
So, you know, you already kind of see that anyway.
And as far as the echo chamber notion of going, because I've obviously gone over to Blue Sky for both basketball and the politics side.
And, you know, I will fully admit the one thing that frustrated me now is I had built up a really big, you know, following on the basketball side on Twitter.
I don't have that right now on Blue Sky.
And I'm frustrated.
I'm like, why did that person have more than me?
And, you know, and I'm working hard to do that.
But I do.
Hold on, hold on.
Before you go forward.
Okay.
I just want to say something as your friend and your compatriot.
Yes, help me.
You are worth so much more than your follower count.
Please.
Every day that I have to say that, that's my mantra, that I do now let my content creation affect my life.
We have to remember that.
I made light of it, but that actually is something that we need to remember, which is like we have been taught to like value ourselves based on how much we earn, what we're able to build, all these artificial numbers.
And in the midst of all this and rising authoritarianism, we have to remember that we are worth way more than those things.
Yeah.
And what we're discovering on Blue Sky now, the community, even on the politics side, is a little bit like what it used to be way back in the salad days of Twitter.
And people are like, God, this is nice.
It didn't turn into a box.
It didn't turn into all this hatred-filled stuff.
And then I think even just the For You or the Discover tab...
It really is stark when you compare that to what Musk has done.
Because Musk obviously, or we clearly, has created a 4U tab that is completely slanted towards right-wing insanity.
Really.
It's completely clear.
So that's nice.
It's nice to have a break.
We can have some, you know, a little vitamin for your spiky.
And I suspect there will be people out there who are also on the other side that will hopefully engage.
And I think that might have been the biggest thing.
It was the finger on the scale that Musk was putting on it since he bought it, right, that really was creating the exodus now.
So in theory, it will be okay, and you'll be able to find what we had before that, at least to some degree, which is a little bit more of a rational discussion.
So I don't think that that's bad.
I would have no problem seeing Twitter crash and burn in Musk's face because of his idiotic way of running a company.
Would that cause any self-reflection on his part?
No.
But, you know, the results would be there and I would not shed a tear.
So I'm of a few minds on this and I think there are a lot of intersecting parts here.
First things first, social media is a corporatized public space.
That's all it is.
It's literally a place to go feel like you are part of a community or part of a discussion and meanwhile it's controlled by corporations which have always had corporate interest at the heart of it.
I don't have a problem being on a space that I'm not constantly being trolled by neo-Nazis and spammed by one scam after another.
I'm fine with that.
I'm looking at the migration over to Blue Sky as an opportunity to reset.
You know what I'm not doing?
I'm not going to interact with bullshit resistance grifters anymore.
Period.
I'm done with them.
These hope peddlers who are absolutely reaching into people's wallets and dealing them drugs of hopium and fantasies that have no reality to material conditions or actual political situations, I'm done with them.
And I couldn't, I wouldn't, I would cross the street not to be near these people at this point.
It's a time to get serious about what's going on and it's a time to actually reorient ourselves away from consumer politics that has ruined everything.
At the same time, Nick, I want to highlight something.
Which is, we're seeing all these articles about Blue Sky being an echo chamber or being a bubble for people to get away from things.
Notice where they're coming from.
They're coming from liberal media.
And why are they doing it?
They're doing it for the same reasons they've been publishing articles that are going after gay and trans people and the dangers of wokeness, which we'll get into so-called leftism here in just a second.
Why are they doing that, Nick?
They're doing that because they don't want people to have conversations that are ideologically anti-corporate.
That's it.
They don't want people having conversations that talk about actual politics.
They need the presence of right-wing figures to modulate the political spectrum.
They need us to say, you know what, we really need to talk to these people and we really need to go ahead and meet them on middle ground.
That is the entire purpose of liberal media at this point.
It's to moderate politics as politics keep moving to the right.
There's a reason why it's the same old actors that are producing these same articles that they were writing about wokeness and gay and trans people.
It's because they have to change the conversation.
That's actually very interesting.
Okay.
I also find it interesting that apparently over back on X, all the trolls and all the right-wing people are really frustrated.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Why, Nick?
Because they got meaning and purpose out of trolling people.
Right.
Right.
And then when they go away, you take the ball home.
They don't have that purpose anymore.
And that's just sort of, again, would there be any self-reflection out of that?
No, right?
They're not going to think to themselves, well, shit, maybe I should change a little bit or interact a little bit better with people, you know?
Let me ask you a question, Nick, because I want to illuminate something that you're talking about, which is really important.
When the Catholic Church took over, basically, the Western world, right, and gained control over continents and kingdoms and even colonization, when they gained total control, do you think that they were just happy and they just, like, enjoyed that control?
I suppose they wanted to continue to expand it.
Well, they did want to expand it, but do you think they just got along with each other?
No.
What do you think they did?
Well, we saw this movie.
Did we talk about the movie where they were picking the new Pope?
Conclave!
I talked about it.
Yeah, and I saw it.
And, you know, talk about the backbiting and machinations behind the scenes.
It was basically a soap opera you would have seen at primetime on a Wednesday evening.
And I'll tell you why.
The people who want to take over the world and the people who want to hoard power are miserable people.
They're doing it because they're not happy with themselves.
And inevitably, like, let's say tomorrow, like, what was the Avengers movie, Endgame?
Is that what it was with Thanos?
And he snapped his fingers, right?
If the right-wing authoritarian movement could snap their fingers and get rid of liberals and leftists and anybody that they disliked, Do you think that they would have like a white ethno state that they were happy in?
No, absolutely not.
Do you think that their alliances would hold?
Oh, no.
They would be fighting each other in the streets.
They would be fighting each other in the streets almost immediately.
So what is necessary?
And going back to the Catholic Church, it's actually interesting when you start thinking about the Crusades.
Why did the Crusades happen?
Because they needed to vent internal frictions and put them elsewhere.
That's why the Crusades took place.
So they need liberals and leftists around in order to have them be the focus of their misery.
Otherwise, they're going to destroy each other.
And that is an insight into the actual psychology that leads to all of this and will inevitably lead to them basically destroying one another.
But they don't understand that part.
No, they do not.
Yeah, they can't have enough self-reflection to realize that part, the secondary part, which would be that they turn on each other.
They don't know that yet.
But yeah, it would be like, you know, I guess when the zombies realized that they could eat each other's brains.
I don't think I saw that movie.
We've never seen the zombies turn on each other.
Hey, there's a million dollar script idea, Jared.
Zombies realize that they can use you.
While wearing red hats, absolutely.
No, they do not understand that.
Right.
And so we're in a really strange, you know, part of this experiment, right?
Where how are we going to extricate out of this and progress anywhere out of this going forward?
And again, the segmentation of society ends up being like one of the only or the easiest way to do that.
And then we're back in this echo chamber notion.
But I would be a lot happier living in my little island where I have the government run the way I like it to be.
And, you know, if you want to have all those archaic things in your state, you know, okay, I guess.
You go over there and do that.
Well, let me throw something at you real fast, Nick, which is a quick lesson in how capitalism works.
I want people to think about cable and streaming, right?
Okay, just as an example.
So we had cable, which took like local TV networks.
You only had a few of them.
Cable expands out.
You have a ton of them, right?
And you have a ton of them that are like the golf channel.
You have E! Entertainment, right?
You have all these different things.
What happens when they expand out?
They come back together, right?
All of a sudden, you have like a few streaming choices that have all these different corporations together.
It is expansion.
And collapsing.
Does that make sense?
So what happened with social media?
What happened with the internet?
Big, big, expansive, tons of websites everywhere.
Oh, we only have a few websites that everybody pays attention to.
Oh, they're starting to split.
They're starting to split.
What's going to happen eventually?
Come back together.
Yeah, blue sky will get bought by Musk.
Don't, man, we've already now talked about two major corporate conglomerates that are probably going to be bought by Elon Musk at some point.
Right.
And let's not forget how that happened with Twitter.
Twitter had no choice.
He offered such a ridiculous amount of money that the board for Twitter is like, we basically forced him to do it.
Be like, we cannot ignore that.
And that's capitalism as well.
It would be nice to say we're never going to sell it to that guy.
Nick, it's almost like capitalism needs regulated.
Almost, yeah.
Speaking of media consistently getting wrong, Nick, before we finish up, I want to talk about an article here.
This was by Brad Glassner in SEMA4, which I only read in order to get angry and do research.
This was an article titled, Conservative Leftists Want to Upset the Political Spectrum.
This was a really, really shallow treatment of what we've talked about in the past, which is Republicans feigning leftist, big scare quotes around that, leftist appeals to people and talking about elites and corporations and all of this, and treating it leftist appeals to people and talking about elites and corporations and all of this, and treating it as if these people are serious, that they actually want to enact leftist ideals and And again, I want to remind people this isn't what's actually happening.
Our media doesn't get it because they have not been researching this or paying attention to it.
And what is most necessary here is giving the right the appearance that they somehow or another actually want to help people and actually want to carry out leftist ideas.
But meanwhile, we're seeing the media fall forward once again.
It's a very smart, shrewd move, right?
It's brilliant.
It's a brilliant move.
Right.
And it's like, it's the kind of conversations you'll have with Republicans, or no, you'll have with Democrats, like maybe older people.
And, you know, they're lifelong Democrats.
They believe in the cause, whatever.
And then after about 10 minutes, you start to hear this sort of, you know, gymnastics going on.
Any way they can go, but they really are just Republicans.
They really are actually very conservative.
And they were They just sort of have the talking points in their mind, but you know that there's a shift there.
And we've seen that.
That's what happened in the election this time in 2024. So I wonder if that whole adage about when you get older, you become a Republican, whatever that is, you know, you're younger than 40 and you're older than 40. If you're not a socialist when you're young, you have no heart.
If you're not a conservative as you get older, you've got no brain.
Yeah, so that actually might be coming back into, not fruition, but into more of a truism.
Well, a lot of people in the United States of America are in complete and utter denial about the fact that they have become more conservative.
And that's one of our problems that we've currently got.
People don't like to sit with that.
Nick, could the Republican Party field a fake leftist appeal if the Democratic Party had a left flank?
Could it fake it?
Absolutely.
They could, but would it be effective?
Well, here's the thing.
Because they don't have to actually say anything that's true when they're campaigning, yeah, it could be really effective.
They could actually...
We've seen it.
We've seen it in the getting rid of taxes for waiters and waitresses, right?
For tips.
Yeah, I'm not going to hold my breath on that one.
Right.
That's the point.
He can chew all that stuff out, throw out all that red meat for people who are slightly left, and then never enact any of it.
But he'll win on the short term in the actual election for that.
So, yeah.
Welcome to my show!
For people who might not be familiar with it, it took place in the early, mid-20th century in Germany.
And you know why it was the Nationalist Socialist Party, Nick?
It was the Nationalist Socialist Party because the authoritarian Nazi party saw an opportunity to radicalize workers who saw that capitalism wasn't working and they had a frustration with the elite.
Did that mean that they were going to help those people?
Some of them, they were going to put them in a plan, you know, a fascist plan that actually mobilized the military and did some projects here and there.
But it was based on a racist and a fearful leftist appeal that hid ultra-right-wing ideology.
What's happening here is that the horseshoe effect is true, which is, if you are far right enough, and you said it perfectly, Nick, It's an ingenious move.
It has worked time and time again.
You wait until liberalism moves far enough to the right and gives you an opening to go ahead and swing around on the left.
Because deep down, if you went to a Trump supporter, Nick, and you said, hey, I don't know if you know this, but some of the stuff that you've been fed is actually socialism in disguise.
They'd be like, what the hell are you talking about?
That's crazy.
Then if you went ahead and talked about those things, they'd be like, yeah, I'm absolutely in favor of that.
We've seen that firsthand with things like the Affordable Care Act, which they opposed when it was Obamacare.
They loved when it's the Affordable Care Act and helped them.
So there is an opportunity because of, and if this hasn't become apparent to people, it needs to become apparent.
American voters are not that informed.
They are not really up to date on what things are.
They haven't been taught what ideologies are and what programs actually mean.
There is an opening for them to do that.
I think what I'm more pissed off about is that our media, who is paid to do this and is actually supposed to inform people, they are so far off base, they don't know the history of this, how authoritarianism works through this lens, and they're going ahead and legitimizing it as it happens, even as they don't understand it.
Right.
Unintentionally, I suppose, in theory.
Sure.
Yeah.
So, I'm kind of curious.
So, it's 1935-36, and I'm really pissed off at the way capitalism has been, you know, exploiting me for all these years.
You're wheeling wheelbarrows of Deutsche Marks to go and buy, like, a cup of flour.
Yes.
Right, right.
And so and I'm realizing that, you know, I'm going to end up dying poor and I'll have to work until I die just to barely survive.
So someone comes in and says to me, you know, there's a way we can rally against this.
We can fight against the elites who are doing this.
So you get, oh, that's interesting.
I want to go to that meeting.
You go to the meeting.
And then at that point, that's when they start slipping in the other nefarious things.
Right.
Like they start talking about immigrants, I suppose.
Is this how this is?
Is this how this works when you do this?
It's exactly that.
So one of the things that happens in the Weimar Republic, you know, gets thrown around without a lot of understanding.
The liberals in charge of the Weimar Republic, they had no ability to communicate to people why things were happening, right?
And on top of that, if they did communicate to people, they would have to say, hey, we have a responsibility in this and we've messed up.
Instead, and if this sounds familiar, Nick, they're like, everything's going to be fine.
Just calm down.
You should go ahead and vote for us.
Things will be fine.
Which, again, mirrors the cycle we're in now.
So you go to these meetings.
You know things suck.
You know your life is getting worse and the country is heading in the wrong direction.
No one has told you yet where the problem is.
But guess what?
You and your family members and your parents and your grandparents lived in a country that had inherent prejudices.
Germany and the empire before it hated Jews.
This is one of the places where Jews were one of the major scapegoats, much like immigrants have been a major scapegoat in America.
Black people have been a scapegoat.
Women have been a scapegoat.
Gay and trans people have been scapegoats.
So all of a sudden you go to a meeting and the person says, things are wrong.
Things need to change.
You can join us and have power.
We know who did this.
And by the way, good news, it's the people that you already have a prejudice against.
So then all of a sudden you're brought into the cycle and what do you have to lose?
You go ahead and join and put the armband on.
And there's enough people, because you might even say to yourself, you know, I'm not supposed to really think that way about other people like that.
But when you're amongst enough people who are really vociferous in this, and you feel a kinship to that because you have that other connection in terms of being exploited as a worker, I suppose, yeah, it's easy to sort of get swept up in that.
Well, and I want to go ahead and, you know, sometimes we do these podcasts and I think I really want people to latch on to something and hold on to it.
Especially, we've talked about, like, quote-unquote mass deportation and the violence that is very likely to come in the next year or two.
Nick, the people who think, my God, the Nazis are disgusting, right?
Like, these things that they're saying, they're awful.
I'm not even going to vote for them.
You start seeing them in the streets beating people with clubs and shooting people and like just absolutely ritually harassing people.
You start seeing their signs and their flags everywhere.
You start knowing people who are involved in it.
The incentive is to not push against it.
Right?
Like it's, hey, I understand watching someone get beat by a club that if I stand against that, I might get beat by the club.
Plus they're promising better economics for me, even protection if I don't say things about it.
So it's the way that the appeals happen and people need to keep that in mind as certain vulnerable communities are being oppressed and being taken advantage of.
It communicates something to people.
Yeah, especially because there is a method that it's not somebody trying to help you, right?
They're trying to turn you and they have these methods and they learn them and they have these meetings that you don't get to see how they're doing that.
It's kind of like if you might have had a friend that might have gotten involved in some sort of like a pyramid scheme.
And they try and turn you on to that.
You know, I was smart enough.
That's happened to me a couple times.
I'm like, yeah, I'm like kind of already looking on the side of my eye at this.
And then I'm waiting and waiting.
Okay, there it is.
No, thank you.
I'm gone.
You know that the words, some people don't, right?
They don't know those words.
Next thing you know, they're all, I'm thinking of the movie Cabaret, which I just seen in a theater in a beautiful print, where the next thing, they're all singing these nationalistic, prideful songs about Germany.
And you're looking around thinking, well, if everybody is doing this, Either I'm going to run and go hide, or I might just start singing with them as well without even realizing it.
And Nick, what you just touched on is essential, which is the time to have stopped this from becoming more popular has passed.
We watched people fail and fail and fail.
Here's the issue with it, and this is the truly gross thing, and just to bring back the poll that we looked at, Nick, it feels really, really bad to watch this ascend.
Do you know what I mean?
To watch it take off.
It feels really bad and frightening and demoralizing.
These people are having fun.
Like you said on X, they love triggering these people.
They love having their memes and all this stuff.
The bullying to some people feels good.
The idea is to create a fantasy, which is what a cult is.
It's creating the fantasy that you are engaging in something that's joyful, that has a fun component to it, and it's empowering.
Think about what you just said, which is all these things are going wrong.
It feels very large and out of your reach.
What if someone tells you...
It's within your reach.
All you have to do is join us, have fun, gain power and wealth, and it goes from there.
It's one of the ultimate scams, and it goes the exact same way that you talked about, which is just like, there's easy money and power to be had.
All right, everybody.
That's going to do it for us today.
A reminder, we're going to do a question and answer segment for our weekender on Friday.
Go ahead and reply to the call for questions on Patreon or email us at muckrakepodcast at gmail.com.
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All right, everybody, we hope you have a fantastic Thanksgiving.
If you need us before the weekend, or you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me Ask Me?
