Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the nomination of Kash Patel to head the FBI - a curious pick considering he was a major player in the January 6th coup attempt. Nevermind that, though, he'll just be busy weaponizing the FBI to attack anyone who disagrees with the administration. Then they have to analyze Trump's intention to use the military in an attack on Mexican soil - something out of their 80's-Action-Movie addled brains. President Biden pardons his son Hunter, which ends up being the chef's kiss ending on a presidency that was... something. They finish on Amazon workers across the world striking for better working conditions and the possibility they'll get what they want/deserve.
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And maybe just omit the word actually if we go back and edit this because I don't have to qualify it.
It was good.
It was a good Thanksgiving.
People ate.
We enjoyed the food.
That's the attitude that we need right now.
Like, things are going to be tough, and so when things are good, you say things were good.
Yeah, you have to own it.
Own the good things.
Own the good things!
How was yours?
It was good.
I mean, it was very, very low-key.
I made some food.
I watched a bunch of college basketball.
I watched my team get absolutely destroyed and humiliated in public.
So, you know, everything's right in the world.
Okay.
As long as that adjusts to your worldview and follows that, then I'm okay with it.
I'm trying to have a good attitude.
And I hope that everyone listening is as well.
We have a whole slew of things we have to get to today.
But a reminder, go to patreon.com slash muckraigpodcast.
Support the show.
Keep us editorially independent.
As traditional media is breaking up, I think everybody is getting a sense that they want to move away from corporate media into people who tell it like it is, and that's what we're here for, patreon.com slash mcgregpodcast.
Support the show, get the week under every Friday.
Nick, we gotta start with some unfortunate news.
And the unfortunate news is that over the weekend, Donald Trump announced that, one, he is firing FBI Director Christopher Wray, who, let me check my notes, oh yeah, he put into office back in 2017, but that is what it is, and he is nominating absolute lunatic psychopath Kash Patel to run the FBI, an absolute loyalist who has already said what he plans to do with absolute power, and now we have that to look forward to.
And it looks like the Senate's going to confirm and no problem.
Oh, is that right?
I mean, I haven't gotten the temperature quite yet on the Senate, but the thing that's really, and this connects to this, because, you know, really what the election in 2024 that just happened did to the country was, it validated a lot of the, like, conspiracy theories that had gone around.
Like, COVID is now validated.
Like, it wasn't the real thing.
We didn't have to wear masks, right?
That's all validated.
Wait, wait, wait.
Time out.
It's been validated by this movement.
Not that that is real.
Right?
Like, it's this alternate reality.
Maybe you could text me later what the difference is at this point now.
That's a great point.
But it validates the fact that the 2020 election was stolen to them, you know.
So this is more of this kind of thing because we might have forgotten who Cash Patel was or how he arrived on the scene.
But if you forgot, Devin Nunes was the head of the House Committee of whatever.
And they discovered that Carter Page, remember Carter Page?
That guy.
They looked at the FISA warrants they had on him, which were completely justified and had been renewed three different times by three different judges.
And he breathlessly runs to the White House to let him know, oh my God, they're spying on you too and we have to let everybody know and we have to start releasing top secret documents that are heavily redacted to make it look really bad when it wasn't.
And so then they had a competition between the Democrats who wanted to release their own private memos from the congressional investigations.
So a lot of this top secret stuff was just filling out from this guy.
He's not a guy who reads things with any kind of normal version of reality, and he's able to twist whatever he wants into whatever you want to say, which is very easy to do when you're talking about this kind of raw intelligence that's coming through.
So, it is really, really concerning because his animosity towards the Justice Department goes back to when he was a public defender in Florida.
So, this is a zealot, this is a believer, and a guy who, you know, like, yeah, he'll read things and we would look at it saying it could be very reasonable, and this guy would, like, be signing an alarm saying it's treason from somebody.
Yeah, no, he is literally just a lunatic, acolyte zealot.
Like, you can't put it any other way.
And there's a few threads that I want to bring together here as we're talking about what's happening.
We haven't said the word FBI since the beginning of this story.
Kash Patel is being put in charge of an agency that is a domestic spy agency on top of being an investigative body in terms of, like, federal crimes.
You know, we're hearing a lot of people, the institutionalists, Nick, I find it endlessly fascinating, all the bullshit they spew.
You know, I've seen like the Tom Nichols and the Frums and all these people saying, the real crime here is that traditionally FBI directors get a 10-year term.
The fact that he's being fired for Kash Patel, it's actually ruining the norm because it's going to ruin the FBI, which is this beautiful institution.
And for years, Nick, what have we seen from the hashtag resistance and Democrat liberals?
It's the idea that the FBI was like one of the last bulwarks against Donald Trump, right?
It was the good guys in the fight.
Well, I just want to remind people, before we get into what Cash Patel in charge of the FBI means, I want to remind people that the FBI has been terrorizing American citizens since its founding.
And Nick, who was the first director of the FBI? Little piece of trivia.
I'm going to refrain from describing him any other way than this by his name, J. Edgar Hoover.
That's right, J. Edgar Hoover, who was the director of the FBI from 1935 to 1972. And for anybody at home that says, hey, why was he in office for so long?
Here's a quick answer.
Because he held presidents hostage for decades.
And how did he run the FBI, Nick?
Was he like a great champion of civil liberties?
Oh dear lord, no.
No, FBI, or FBI, J. Edgar Hoover used the FBI as his own personal KGB-like body to terrorize people around the country, including trampling their civil rights, murdering several people, invading people's privacy, and basically going after any leftist, labor union member, protester, or anybody that the government saw as some sort of a problem.
So here's the entire point of me bringing this up.
Nick, can you run this real fast?
This is a clip of who will probably be running the FBI, Cash Patel, talking about his own personal feelings about, well, something y'all might find interesting.
Where We Go On, Where We Go All is, as you said, from a great movie that I watched a long time ago.
And people took to it.
And so what?
You know, it doesn't mean everyone's a conspiracy theorist.
And people keep asking me about all this Q stuff.
I'm like, what does it matter?
What I'm telling you is that there is truth in a lot of things that many people say.
And what I'm putting out there is the truth.
And how about we have some fun along the way?
There's so many people who subscribe to the Where We Go On, We Go On all mantra.
And it's, what's wrong with it?
Nick, where we go one, we go all.
What conspiracy theory does that belong to?
It's QAnon, right?
That's QAnon.
That's right.
Oh, it was from White Squall.
It was from the Sailing movie, which was used by whoever was posting QAnon memes.
So, Kash Patel, who is now poised to run the FBI, which has, for its entire length of time it's existed, been a terrorist organization towards American citizens, while solving a crime every now and then, and, by the way, trying to push other people to commit crimes so they can gain more power and wealth, Nick...
QAnon is an anti-Semitic New World Order Protocols of the Elders of Zion conspiracy theory, correct?
Oh, yeah, it's very accurate.
What do you think that J. Edgar Hoover thought was going on in the United States of America when he used the FBI as a weapon against the American citizens?
What do I think that he thought about?
Yeah, why do you think J. Edgar Hoover thought that it was necessary for him to violate people's civil liberties and murder people?
Well, I think one of the big concepts was probably a battle against communism and all sorts of other people who were doing alternative things in their lives.
And Nick, who was behind communism according to the right-wing zealots of the 1940s, 50s, 60s, and 70s?
And 80s, for that matter.
Oh, geez.
Are we going to the Jews?
Yes, we are, my friend.
That's right.
For everybody who's sitting here saying that Kash Patel is somehow or another completely different from everybody who's ever run the FBI, what they're missing is the truth of it, which is we've always had right-wing zealots who are running this thing.
It all depends on how they run it.
And if you want to know how Kash Patel is going to run the FBI in the future underneath Donald Trump, What you need to understand is it's going to look a lot like J. Edgar Hoover's tenure using the FBI. And that was when it ran across everybody's civil liberties.
It absolutely surveilled people.
It undermined protesters.
It undermined civil rights activists, feminist rights, anti-war activists.
It was a weapon of the state that interfered with the state back and forth.
So the whole point here is that people have missed the forest for the trees.
We already know what this asshole is going to do if he's given this power.
So there's a deeper context as well with J. Edgar Hoover.
Because he was closeted and a cross-dresser, I believe that some of that sort of self-hatred perhaps of what he was going through and had to be hiding could have easily motivated him to be such a terrible person and persecute people of the LGBTQ community and beyond that by far.
So my parents...
Tell me stories when we were going to Florida and seeing him with his boyfriend walking down the beach, which is also interesting because he could be public about it like that, but then also having to hide it.
That was sort of my fear when you study what Hoover was about, is that when someone gets stuck in that kind of inner turmoil, a lot of horrible shit could come out of that.
Not to say that, you know, Castratel has any connection to that in terms of inner turmoil, but the guy certainly seems, when you're like a MAGA like that, we've documented time and time again how much inner torque there has to be in your psyche to be able to handle all the different kind of ideologies that exist in that movement.
What's really frightening about it, and first of all, I think it's sort of one of the themes of our podcast, has been if people could just love themselves and be themselves, we would have a lot less problems.
Right?
Like, it wouldn't just be, like, people being able to have their rights and their protections.
It's the fact that this is a regime of abuse.
And authoritarian energies come from a group of people who have so much self-hatred, and so, torque is a good way to put it.
There is a thing that they have to project out on society.
The point that I'm trying to make here is that this guy is one of the worst picks that you could have to have that amount of control at his fingertips.
And Nick, when we look at someone like J Edgar Hoover, the history of what, how Hoover's relationship worked with the presidency.
And I love again, that from and Nichols are all just like, well, they were never weapons of the presidency.
Bullshit.
You know who used J Edgar Hoover and who J Edgar Hoover used L.
LBJ. He went into the White House as the Vietnam War was going on and said, you know why people are against your war?
It's the communists and it's the Jews and let me take care of them.
You think Donald Trump won't be open to that in the same way LBJ was?
And then after LBJ, it was Nixon.
And he was even more receptive toward Hoover doing that.
So what we're watching now, it's not that a wall is being broken down between the presidency and the director of the FBI. It's that we're seeing something happen that we've already seen happen.
And we've seen this movie, Nick.
We know where this goes.
And what that tells us is that we are going to have a weaponized FBI that is going to work exactly like it was in the past, and we can already tell you where this thing is going to go and what the consequences are going to be.
But I think it's even worse than that now, because there was still an uneasy alliance between LBJ and then Nixon, because they knew that Hoover had the goods on them.
So there was always a little bit where they had to kind of...
Same with JFK for that record.
Yes, absolutely.
And so it's no surprise that the second L.B. Hoover, he dies.
That would get him on office, right?
He dies or he doesn't retire.
I think he dies.
I think he died.
I think that's because Mark Felt wasn't promoted, which we can talk about for two seconds.
He ends up being deep throat, which takes down the presidency.
This will let you know how powerful the FBI can be.
It could take down the presidency as well.
There's your deep state for you.
But the interesting question on that one, as an aside, would be, had Mark Felt been promoted like he felt he should have been, would he have become deep-throat and would he have had this animosity, or would he continue to allow administrations to be status quo for all those years and allow them to monitor American citizens and spy on them and that whole thing?
This is not like that in that sense.
This is more like another wing of the White House at this point, and they will do their bidding without any questions and without any pushback.
Well, and to go ahead and go along with that, because, I mean, you just nailed it dead to the wall.
When it comes to this, this is the actual deep state.
We have watched intelligence communities and also the military industrial complex work hand in hand against American citizens, unelected, unaccountable, you name it.
And in this situation, Nick, it's even worse because we now live in an era in which we have a tech oligarch and other tech oligarchs who have God knows how much information at their disposal, right?
I mean, like cookies on websites and social media sites.
Track what you're doing.
We already know what the other surveillance looks like.
We also have basically lived on the Internet now for a few decades, which is a digital manifestation of what's going on in our heads.
God knows how many communications.
Patel's already said he's going to go after the media, he's going to go after political enemies, you name it.
The amount of stuff at his disposal, and let's listen to him here in a second and talk to Steve Bannon, what he has at his disposal is an overwhelming amount of information and data, and we have no idea how these things are going to interact and what they're eventually going to produce.
Well, ironically, I've always wished that we would have more transparency, get more access to top secret, just really know what the government's up to.
But obviously, there's a reason sometimes these things don't come out, can't come out, all that stuff.
This guy is not the guy.
Well, Nick, real fast before you play this clip, I just want you to do a quick thought experiment for our listeners.
You know a lot about J. Edgar Hoover.
You know a lot about that time period.
I mean, they ransacked people's offices.
They wiretapped people who didn't have warrants.
They just did it.
Again, they roughed people up.
They sabotaged groups.
You name it.
What would J. Edgar Hoover have been able to do if he had access to digital data, the likes of which that we have now?
He would just be thankful that his job is that much easier.
It would be the easiest job imaginable, which is why we need to be worried.
This is Kash Patel talking to...
God, Steve Bannon looks terrible.
This is him talking to Steve Bannon.
I'm highly confident that when you go back and is a senior member of this administration, President Trump's administration, starting in the afternoon of the 20th of January of 2025, do you feel confident that you will be able to deliver the goods, that we can have serious prosecutions and accountability?
And I want the Morning Joe producers to watch us and all the producers to watch us.
This is just not rhetoric.
We're absolutely dead serious.
You cannot have a constitutional republic and allow what these deep staters have done to the country.
The deep state, the administrative state, the fourth branch of government never mentioned in the Constitution is going to be taken apart brick by brick.
And the people that did these evil deeds will be held accountable and prosecuted, criminal prosecutions, cash.
I know you're probably going to be head of the CIA, but do you believe that you can deliver the goods on this in a pretty short order the first couple of months so we can get rolling on prosecutions?
Yes.
We got the bench for it, Bannon, and you know those guys.
I'm not going to go out there and say their names right now so the radical left-wing media can terrorize them.
But, excuse me, the one thing we learned in the Trump administration the first go-round is we got to put in All-America Patriots top to bottom.
And we got them for law enforcement.
We got them for intel collection.
We got them for offensive operations.
We got them for DOD, CIA, everywhere.
And the one thing we will do that they never will do is we will follow the facts and the law and go to courts of law.
And correct these justices and lawyers who have been prosecuting these cases based on politics and actually issuing them as lawfare.
We will go out and find the conspirators not just in government but in the media.
Yes, we're gonna come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.
We're gonna come after you.
Whether it's criminally or civilly, we'll figure that out.
But yeah, we're putting you all on notice.
And Steve, this is why they hate us.
This is why we're tyrannical.
This is why we're dictators.
Okay, so Nick, before we get into some of the other stuff, and you'll notice, by the way, that this was back when they thought he was going to run the CIA and not the FBI. Nick, you'll notice that they brought up Morning Joe, right?
Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski.
Notice what happened with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski.
They bent the knee immediately and capitulated with Donald Trump.
This is twofold.
One, it's letting people know, you need to make nice with us because we will use our powers to go ahead and make them capitulate.
Or if you go ahead and stand in our way, we'll also use our powers.
That's when that comes in.
It's blackmail.
It's trying to get people to capitulate beforehand.
But they are making it very clear that they are going to go after people and they are going to use their powers towards that purpose.
Without question.
And like Jack Smith is going to probably be prosecuted for being a special counsel.
Now, speaking of this, we might be able to assert this here.
I was thinking about that because it's like, who else are they going to go after like that?
Because Jack Smith is a guy they brought in from The Hague, you know, to do the investigation.
That's all he did.
The lawful investigation.
Didn't do anything untowards.
Biden probably should just pardon him.
We'll get to pardons in a minute, but yes.
Right.
This is where we're at, right?
We should talk about who else Biden is in the midst of pardoning.
We're going to talk about it.
Don't worry.
At this point, like, you know, do we play like the Republicans is sort of what, like, people want to say a lot.
And while I don't think that, you know, the Democrats seem to be lying and sort of obfuscating and changing the reality, there is a certain sort of ruthlessness that they could sort of adopt here.
And blanket pardons for a lot of people, like, in Jack Smith's position would probably be called for and might need to be done because certainly he's somebody who doesn't deserve to be prosecuted or investigated at this point.
But you're going to see that's going to happen without question.
Listen, Jack Smith can take care of himself.
I'm not particularly worried about him or any of these other people.
I have people in my life that I worry about.
Jack Smith is a powerful person.
I just want to say before we move to the next segment, Nick, because I'm trying very hard to give some advice to people as we're facing this stuff because it feels very large.
This is a dangerous thing that we're talking about.
Here's what I want to tell people.
Keep your nose clean as much as humanly possible.
You do not want to give any of these assholes a reason to come after you.
That's number one.
But you also don't want to capitulate.
You don't want to live in fear of them and just let everything happen the way it's happening.
What I will say, speaking of J. Edgar Hoover, speaking of what happened in the 50s, 60s, 70s, you name it.
If we are going to build stuff or if we're going to build coalitions, organizations or labor unions, you need to be on the lookout for both digital surveillance and also saboteurs.
It's one of their favorite things in the world.
So you are now going to be living in a much, much more dangerous world because people like Kash Patel are going to have power.
You need to be aware of it and you need to look back in history to someone like J. Edgar Hoover and actually learn how this power was used in the past.
But like why do the Democrats have to like be squeaky clean and not have to can't do anything, you know, while the Republicans can be as corrupt as they possibly can?
I mean, they're going to make the last cabinet look like the cleanest thing in the world.
Nick, welcome to the new world.
I don't know what to tell you on that front.
It's the way authoritarian cycles work.
Yeah, and it's sort of been that way the entire time since Trump got involved in this.
Why does Al Franken have to step down from the Senate?
I mean, the Al Franken thing is a different conversation.
I mean, I think Al Franken did some weird shit that shouldn't have been done.
But that being said, yes, it is a weird thing that Republicans pull.
They pull you into the mud, and then immediately they try and throw mud at you.
Nick, we also need to talk about reports that have been coming out.
Rolling Stone had a recent investigation on this, but all you have to do is listen to any of these people talk.
They're now talking about a quote-unquote limited invasion of Mexico, which is something that you and I have covered in the past.
One advisor around Trump, an anonymous advisor, was quoted as saying, quote, how much should we invade Mexico?
How much should we invade Mexico?
That is the question.
And what we've seen so far...
We have seen Pete Hegseth, this absolute criminal person, saying that he supports it.
We're hearing all these other people saying it.
It looks like at this point a major agenda part of a second Trump administration would involve a limited invasion and possible military operations in Mexico.
I've seen this movie.
I think it's Commando.
This is what they did.
Commando, right?
Or maybe it's Predator.
One of those two, Schwarzenegger.
They go in there, they go to attack the cartels with some sort of pseudo-military whatever.
I seriously think that they're living in this weird world, like back in the 80s, where this is what you do.
Well, that's a part of it.
One, the reason, I want to get into the reasons why this would happen, because I think it's very likely that there will be some military excursions into Mexico.
Of course, they'll say it's to stop fentanyl, and of course, that's the kind of stuff that we heard, you know, in commando during the 1980s.
And Nick, remind the people, the Reagan administration didn't have any weird interactions with groups in, like, the Global South that involved drugs, did they?
Oh, I saw that movie too, Jared.
Oh yeah, it didn't get as big of a box office show, right?
Tom Cruise movie where he's flying back and forth as a CIA person with drugs and facilitating all of that, or a huge chunk of whatever was going across the border.
Nick, would it surprise you or maybe some of our listeners that the United States has played a huge part in the international drug trade for a variety of reasons, including the fact that it raises dark money that can't be traced and also changes the balance of power in geopolitics?
Would that be a surprise if you heard that?
I pray that's not a surprise to anybody in 2024. And Nick, if we did invade parts of Mexico and went after these cartels, the cartels have a lot of guns, don't they?
Oh, yeah.
Where'd they get those guns?
Oh, from us.
Oh, they got them from us!
Yeah.
Oh, that's weird, because if you actually look at American history, if you look at things like Panama Grenada or whatever, there are a lot of instances—oh, Iraq, while we're talking about it—of America going into countries that have guns and weapons because the United States worked with them for a variety of reasons, including forwarding the drug trade, correct?
Yeah, but who says America doesn't make anything anymore, Jared?
Yeah.
Yeah, we're just killing it, Nick, literally.
So what is this about?
This is about getting control of a drug trade and wresting it from the hands of narco gangs under the visage of saying that we're doing it to take care of fentanyl.
And by the way, this would probably be in concert with the government of Mexico that has a problem with a lot of these narco gangs and cartels.
So what we're actually talking about here is a scheme, like you said, that was dreamed up the idea of American adventurism, right?
Sending in special forces and drones and missile strikes.
And what is it about?
It's about taking down a competitor.
Because what does the United States of America do and what has it always done?
It's always worked with organized crime, including the mafia, cartels, gangs, revolutionaries, whoever it is.
They work with them.
And then what do they do to those gangs and organized criminals, Nick?
Oh, they put them to work?
They put them to work, and then eventually when they don't need them anymore, they either kill them or throw them in jail.
Is that correct?
That is correct as well.
Okay, so now we're talking about Trump's first war, which is going to basically be a power grab and cash grab to get control of the illicit drug trade.
Lots of fun all the way around.
I mean, part of what his allure to his followers was that he wasn't going to get into any wars, right?
He wants to get into any wars, whatever.
Oh, but in Mexico, that's okay.
It's close by.
We're going to maybe, yeah, stop fentanyl from coming in to kill people.
So that's okay.
I have a quick question, too, while we're talking about this and giving it context.
A lot of the people who are immigrants coming in the country, which Trump obviously wants to stop, those people, are they not running from cartels?
They are running for cartels.
Okay, and what happens when we start lobbing in cruise missiles against those cartels and going in and having gun battles?
What are the people who are still remaining in those areas going to do?
Die.
Well, they'll die, and the ones who don't die, where are they going to go?
I don't know.
Here.
They're going to come here.
I mean, right.
Yes, they're going to still come here.
By the way, newsflash, they're going to always come here, no matter what.
There's going to be people that want to come to this country.
And who's that help?
What political party does that help?
Well, if you want to insist that the Democrats are going to turn them into voters in 25 years, then...
But they're not.
But that crisis, that immigration crisis that this will expound, that will help the Republican Party and Trump.
Right.
Yeah, that's what they call a win-win-win.
When they cut taxes and then they pretend there's no money for anything, any social safety nets.
God, Nick, I just, the blood, the blood in my face, my anger, the flames that are coming out of my face.
Oh, well, you want more to come out of your face?
Oh, I would love it.
Let's talk about speaking of the border.
Let's hear from border czar incoming Tom Homan on Fox.
This is wonderful.
And if they don't want to help and sit aside, don't help, fine.
Don't help.
But don't get in our way.
And I've said this for the past week over and over again.
Do not harbor and conceal an illegal alien.
Knowingly harbor and conceal an illegal alien from us because it's a crime.
Don't impede us because it's a crime.
Don't obstruct because it's a crime.
If you want to sit aside and let us do your job of securing the communities, fine.
We'll do that.
But don't cross that line.
Cool.
I'm glad that the border czar is already warning American citizens that they will prosecute them and hurt them if they help immigrants who are being cracked down on.
I can already see this scene.
Like, they're, like, herding people up, like, in one of those sci-fi movies, and they grab them, and they're trying to throw them in vans, and they're screaming and yelling, and someone's like, wait, wait, what's going on here?
This doesn't look right.
And then they're going to get, like, beaten down and thrown in the van, or who knows what.
It's, uh, the The thing that I think, over the holiday, the only conversation we tended to have, because nobody really wanted to talk about politics at this point, was whether or not that was really going to happen.
Were they really going to go house to house, have ice across the country, and then flushing out people and the whole thing, like some military thing?
I think it's 50-50 whether people believe it's really going to happen, but when you hear a guy like Holman talking like that over and over again, I think it's going to happen in some version of that, right?
Well, like I keep saying, there's no way that they're going to get rid of all immigrants.
It's not going to happen.
There's no financial way to do it.
There's no logistical way to do it.
I think what we're looking at, and Nick, and I can see it as clear as day, it's going to be using the concept of criminality.
It's going to be going after quote-unquote criminal immigrants.
And so we'll see a violent crackdown of those people.
And basically what you'll hear in our media, which has already capitulated on the quote-unquote illegal immigrant crisis, you'll hear them, they'll be like, yeah, you know, this isn't great, but they are taking care of criminals.
And so we're going to see a lot of that, but it's not going to be the widespread thing.
It's going to be enough, including what Homan is saying to people.
It's going to be enough for people to say, you know, I don't want to get involved in this.
I don't want to, like, take care of criminals.
I don't want to suffer the consequences.
It's much like the building of the wall, which they built some of the wall, but they didn't build all the wall.
Just enough to say that they were building the wall.
It will be just enough of that to go ahead and communicate that That you don't want to get involved.
You could get hurt.
Let us do what we're doing.
And on top of that, we'll go ahead and create the apartheid state that we've been talking about in which these people will be used for even further exploitation.
And they'll jump for joy if they can get on the, you know, evening news with some of this footage.
Like, that's what they want.
Absolutely.
Breaking down the doors and people running around.
So they're going to love that.
And it's just, yeah.
It's bad.
What's that?
It's bad.
It's bad.
I had another point.
I'll remember it later.
Well, speaking of criminals, how do you like that for a segue, Nick?
We also have to talk about one of the biggest pieces of breaking news, which is on Sunday night, President Joe Biden went back on his promise not to pardon his son, Hunter Biden, who, of course, pleaded guilty to tax fraud with a bill of $1.4 million and lying to purchase a gun.
The president will pardon his son.
There are tons of things to talk about here, our reactions to it.
I think the reactions out in the public are pretty starkly divided for a variety of different reasons.
I never want to talk about Hunter Biden again.
I really want this to be the last time that Hunter Biden's name is ever said on this podcast, but I do think it is something that we should address.
Nick, what are your feelings on this news?
I mean, listen, we've seen this from presidents probably since the pardon existed, right?
As long as I can think of from Clinton on, they'll pardon people who are close in their circle, things that, you know, clearly were guilty.
You know, Trump did it with Kushner's father.
You know, now, you know, sometimes it's after the fact that kind of expunged their record versus actually saving them from a prison term.
You know, it's just added to the list of things he said he wouldn't do and then did.
It was unnecessary to even go so far as he did earlier this year to say he wouldn't do this.
He didn't have to do that and put him in this corner.
So, but, you know, it's not surprising.
It's something that the Republicans would do.
So, you know, okay, why don't we play by those same rules then and do this?
You know, I do think that there are kind of mental gymnastics going on as far as what the plea deal was supposed to be for Hunter and how political...
I believe that there was some political pressure on there to sort of negate what they thought they had arranged for him that would have kept him out of prison.
And then once he went down the path where then he pled guilty, I think...
I don't necessarily blame Joe for doing it, to be honest with you.
Yeah, I want to talk in a minute about his legacy and how this and a lot of things play into it.
But first things first, Nick, you had brought up the pardon power of the presidency.
When I was writing American Rule, one of the things that I read front to back and back to front was the Constitutional Convention, which a reminder, they didn't have a mandate to actually do.
They didn't have the authority to create the United States of America Constitution.
They did it anyway!
One of the most vocal opponents of that was founding father George Mason.
And what did he say?
That this would happen.
That it would create a corruptible power within the presidency and we would see exactly what we've seen.
The president should not have pardon power.
It is just an invitation for corruption and overreach.
As I say that, Nick, as a human being, if I had a child who was going to go to prison, And I had the power to keep them from it.
I couldn't stop myself.
That's the honesty of truth.
As a human being, I understand it.
As I'm saying that, I am still, frankly, disappointed.
I'm seeing people celebrating this left and right.
Basically, the same people that I'm seeing celebrating this are the ones who are calling for Joe Biden to overthrow the 2024 election, who are calling for them, you know, to Biden to use his, quote unquote, presidential immunity, which wouldn't apply in any way, shape or form, to kill Donald Trump or whatever.
I'm disappointed because, yes, this is corruption.
That's what this is.
I'm sorry, but this isn't the type of thing that should happen.
At the same time, I'm a human being.
I understand why Biden is doing this.
And by the way, what has he done his entire late career?
It's been him standing by his son, Hunter Biden, as he struggled with addiction and all these problems.
So as a human being, I get it.
As a political observer, I'm disappointed by it.
And I think we should be able to hold both of those things at once, contradictory things at once, and also understand that this is the kind of thing that if Donald Trump did with Donald Trump Jr. or Eric or Tiffany or whoever, we would have a problem with it.
So you have to be able to do all of those things all at once.
I mean, thankfully, we know that Donald Trump doesn't care about his kids.
Yeah, no shit.
Um, but, uh, yeah, it's, um, the, gosh, um, I, I, yeah, it's, it, it, it should just be business as usual at this point.
Perhaps it should limit the amount of pardons you can give out, I suppose, could be something like, you know, if you wanted to ever fix that as a, this is a throwaway.
This is a, this is a callback to a monarchy, right?
This notion of a pardon that they kind of tossed into the, to the constitution, which is silly, but, um, you know, for what it's worth, like, you know, the gun charge, um, Hardly anybody ever got prosecuted for that, so it did feel a little bit like political.
It's still a law!
I mean, that's the thing.
I get it.
It's still a law.
And I mean, he does owe back taxes, or he did owe back taxes.
I mean, that's the whole point.
We either have laws or we don't.
But it's worth noting what the right response to this was.
I don't know if you saw this, but everyone's plastering.
No man's above the law.
And they're trying to rub it in the, you know, the left space because we kept saying that about, you know, how Trump is not above the law, he's not above the law, and then they're making him above the law.
And, you know, again, they're just trolling, right, because obviously they know that they got away with it with Trump, and Trump is above the law.
And, you know, but it is interesting that they will be able to sort of trot this out as a vapid response without ever any kind of realization that you're kind of dunking on yourself when you're saying that, right?
Well, they also don't care.
I mean, that's the other thing about it is, you know, as we've talked about the GOP, quote unquote, principles don't apply.
They're just cudgels and weapons.
And I do want to say, and before I make this last point about the legacy and what this is going to be, if Joe Biden is going to go ahead and pardon his son, he better damn well lay out a whole host of pardons going forward.
And I'm talking about everybody who involves trafficking of drugs, particularly marijuana, which is now legal and, you know, has been changed by the government.
Also, on top of that, clearing out federal death row.
Get rid of that shit.
And matter of fact, if this is literally how you're going to approach the end of your presidency, go ahead and wipe out student debt.
But I want to say something, Nick.
He's not going to do that.
I will eat crow if he does, but it's not going to happen.
And later on, speaking of the legacy, Nick, Joe Biden's legacy is going to be a tough one.
It's going to be a really hard one in the history books.
And when it comes to this time period, if we have history, and if we have an actual dealing with this moment, him pardoning Hunter Biden is going to be right there in the same paragraph as Donald Trump's corruption.
And that needs to be clear that what we're watching right now is not just norms that are falling by the wayside, but each time that we're cheering this stuff on, the actual way that government and power and responsibility works, it is shifting.
And people need to keep that in mind to celebrate all you want, but do understand that this does have repercussions.
Well, what left out in the discussion we've had was that, you know, Biden also extended that pardon to his time with Parisma, to Hunter Biden's time with Parisma.
So that's probably the worst part about the whole thing, that he's trying to cover that so that if they ever try to dig up, it kind of almost sounds like maybe they would, although at this point, They've tried digging up any kind of corruption from that connected to Biden for so long, and they haven't come up with anything.
That's the other problem with this whole thing, and this goes back to Cash Patel and Nunes.
They had breathlessly tried to publicize all of these investigations and tried to hint at stuff with the full power of Congress behind them to investigate whatever they needed to, and they'd never come up with anything.
Meanwhile, Trump is the guy who's caught red-handed and admits everything.
Who's going to have the worst legacy, though, Jared?
Is it going to be Biden or Merrick Garland?
Oh, my God.
Merrick Garland shouldn't be able to go out and get a public dinner for the rest of his life without people chanting shame at him.
You know, Cash Patel was under a Department of Justice investigation out of that whole thing of spreading, you know, top secret information out in the public.
I cannot for the life of me find, after it was announced that he was being investigated, there is never any follow-up to that.
And as best I could tell from there is Garland just, it just let it, he let it go.
It just died.
They never, you know, January 6th committee comes in, and then they interviewed him.
But whatever happened to the Department of Justice investigation?
Like, nothing.
Like, all the other ones.
And if he had started his other stuff earlier, I know that Mueller, she wrote, is breathlessly, you know, insisting that...
From day one, he started as soon as Biden took over.
But that's bullshit.
We know that he didn't appoint Jack Smith in the special counsel until the day that Trump announced he was running again.
So, at any rate, yeah, I would put Garland below Biden, and then they both reside in a pretty deep, dark pit of despair.
Well, and you know, you're up, Erisma.
Like, one of the things that we need to recognize, and we talked about this again, like, we have tried to, like, cover this stuff objectively.
Like, Joe Biden loves his son, and his son has had major, major issues and has cashed in on his name.
It doesn't mean that Joe Biden was in some sort of a money laundering scheme or something like that.
God knows the Republicans tried to find it.
But the entire point was this stuff should not have happened.
And while we're talking about Garland, the whole point here, the only thing you can say about Garland's tenure, and thank God I wish he would have been on the Supreme Court, but I can't even imagine what his tenure on the Supreme Court would have been like.
I wish that he wouldn't have been nominated.
They would have nominated someone else and pushed it through.
I guess that's the caveat I'll make there.
Garland's tenure as the Attorney General.
It's an absolute stain on the Biden administration, and there are a few of them, and that's one of them.
And he has either been complicit or absolutely dedicated to institutional power worship, and there's no way around either of those things.
And as many people can tell you that there's a secret plan and just wait, you'll see how it works out.
That is bullshit.
They have absolutely dropped the ball, and they share a large portion of the blame of why we're at it.
Finally, Nick, in a little bit of good news, we always like to try and bring a little bit of that in, solidarity to the Amazon unions in the U.S., India, Germany, U.K., Japan, and Brazil, who have been on a strike from Black Friday now to Cyber Monday.
That made me feel gross saying that out loud.
In a, quote, make Amazon pay move in cooperation with other labor unions around the world.
Amazon is absolutely crying, you know, holy murder on this thing.
But what we are seeing, Nick, is probably the future of labor organization that is probably going to be the future of the actual resistance against people like Donald Trump and authoritarianism.
Right, and you just have to hope that Donald Trump won't unleash the power of the military or whatever to combat these kind of strikes.
Now, the future will ultimately be silent strikes or hidden strikes where they're not marching anywhere.
They're just not showing up for work so that they're not like objects of violence where they could get attacked.
But yeah, unfortunately, we don't have enough days in the year that really hurt retailers like Black Friday.
We had more than that, and then they had even more leverage to then not work on those specific days.
But it's probably only a few days in the year, right, where they can really make their point and make them feel it.
Because the other problem is, don't forget, if you have a prolonged strike, It tends to really hurt the workers, right?
They're not working.
It's really hard to get through.
You can have cracks in the solidarity.
So if we had enough of these days where you force Amazon to the table a lot easier, that would help.
But I would imagine they're going to get some concessions here.
Yeah, so I'll get into what the listener can do in terms of this and how to prepare for the future of this.
But people need to understand that part of the issue that happened in the attacks on labor unions and industry, you name it, was the creation of neoliberal globalism.
You know, oh, you're going to go on strike?
We're going to move our plan over here.
Good luck with that strike, right?
Well, guess what?
Eventually that creates, like, vulnerabilities.
And one of the things that we're going to start seeing is global labor actions in which people in the United States start working with other countries so that they can start doing that.
And Nick, over the last few years, to our own detriment, we've started to notice all these cracks in the supply chain, the resource chain, the logistical chains.
We've seen that, right?
Like not being able to get toilet paper and not being able to get certain things in stores.
Those things are going to be taken advantage of by labor unions.
And what you just brought up is really important, which is the idea of bringing in the military or the FBI, which is going to be helmed by an absolute psychopath.
They also went after labor unions during that entire period that we were talking about.
We are going to see moments where labor unions are going to get this shit figured out as we realize the privilege of the quote unquote first world was dependent on the exploitation and resource extraction of the second and third world.
Eventually, these people are going to get on the same page.
And here's where I get to this.
The pieces of advice I have for listeners.
One...
Talk to your co-workers because eventually the austerity is going to come for you and you're going to need to figure out where you might need to either start a labor union or work with a labor union.
The second part, and this is important, Nick, what you just brought up is really essential.
When these things happen, they become very inconvenient, right?
And what is Amazon based on?
It's getting what you want as quickly as possible and as cheaply as possible.
Labor unions and labor actions are going to make sure that they don't get to you as fast, that you're not going to necessarily get what you want, and it might not cost as little as it used to.
If we are going to actually show solidarity in the future with stuff like this, we are going to have to change the way that we consume and the way that we live our lives.
That's the only way this thing moves forward.
Yeah.
And imagine a world where you're not ordering from Amazon and you're going to go down to the corner or the store or whatever and buy stuff.
I mean, it is tough.
And I would imagine that even if you try to buy stuff at like the box store nearby, they might lean on Amazon anyway.
Yeah, for sure.
So it's going to be really hard to disrupt that.
But I certainly think that the workers themselves not working is going to have a huge impact.
And we keep seeing it, even though it sounds like a titanic effort to make it happen.
We keep seeing labor unions win, right?
So they're getting...
Every time they have these strikes and they agree upon some agreement, it ends up being, if not slightly, a little bit better than it was before.
The progress is important, at the very least, to get some better conditions for them so they're not peeing in bottles and passing out and dying on the work floor.
Yeah, there's a reason why I think it was a couple of weeks ago we talked about the fact that Amazon and Musk and Bezos, all these people were trying to destroy the National Labor Relations Board.
And why?
Because people are figuring it out.
And they're getting their shit together.
And exactly what you just said, they're winning right now.
And the fact that they're winning right now is part of the reason why people like Musk bought into MAGA and bought it out and basically have now given themselves like ultimate power.
It's because the tide has been changing.
And what you're talking about is that if it continues the way that it is, the workers are going to have like an actual fighting chance.
But they are going to try and rig this on either side.
And if that doesn't work, Nick, they are going to use physical force and violence.
All right, everybody, that brings us to the end of this episode.
We will be back on Friday with the Weekender.
Reminder, go to patreon.com slash muckrickpodcast, gain access to that, and also support this podcast as it grows.
Everybody, until then, you can find Nick at Nick Halselman?
That's it.
Okay, I did it.
And I am at J.Y. Saxton.
That is on Blue Sky.
Yes, on Blue Sky.
I want to make sure you said Blue Sky.
Yeah, because I, listen, I'm not messing around with Twitter or X the Everything site anymore.
