Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the fall of the Assad regime in Syria and what's next in the region. They move on to Trump's promises to go after his political enemies, as authoritarians do, before covering a breaking story that shows the Harris campaign acted in bad faith with voter outreach organizers in poor neighborhoods.
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Thank you to my friend and partner, Nick, and everybody for putting up with it.
Nick, how you doing, bud?
I'm doing.
I'm well.
It's busy.
Busy keeps you, your mind occupied, which is a good thing in these days, the same age.
That's a very positive way to put it.
I'm blinking three times, Jared, to tell you, to signal.
We must go on.
The show must go on.
It does keep us active.
It certainly does.
And we would like for you...
How's this for a segue?
We would like for you to be active over at patreon.com slash mycraigpodcast where you can join the community.
Post.
Also get the Friday Weekender.
Keep the show going.
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All right, Nick, we got to start with a little bit of breaking news that has been coming out over the past few hours.
Police have arrested a suspect in the UnitedHealthcare assassination that took place the other day.
Right now, they have arrested a 26-year-old named Luigi Mangiano in Altoona, Pennsylvania at a McDonald's because, of course, they arrested a 26-year-old at a McDonald's.
What we have learned so far about Luigi is that he is a wealthy resort heir, that he is a graduate of Penn, an Ivy League grad.
And in the past few hours, as people have been combing the online spaces, we're finding out he has a very, very strange but also somewhat understandable ideology, which makes this entire story very weird.
We'll get into those particular things.
But Nick, what are your initial thoughts on this arrest as it's taking place?
Well, I would think that if there's a countrywide manhunt for me, eating at McDonald's wouldn't probably be a high priority unless you want to get caught with, apparently, the gun and with the IDs and all sorts of things that would incriminate you.
But, you know, it's interesting he comes from the liberal bastion of the Ivy League, as known as Penn, which created another graduate that we all are well aware of, named Donald Trump, among other very liberal people, I'm sure, that have come out of that institution.
So, We're already seeing the hand-wringing about what his ideology is like, where the background is from.
And then I don't know if you saw, I feel like I saw in some of his postings, there's some notion of back surgery, x-ray, or something like that.
So there seems to be maybe something about having to have dealt with this company, perhaps individually, in terms of getting terrible care or terrible results from what the insurance company is supposed to be doing in terms of helping people.
I don't know.
I suppose it's fascinating that they found him, I guess, is what I'm saying.
It's been a very weird case.
And, you know, one of the things that I want to do is I both want to talk about the alleged shooter, the person who has been arrested, but also the larger milieu that you and I were starting to touch on last week when we talked about this story.
Just to go ahead and start with him.
Nick, what people have found so far is that this guy has posted regularly, whether it's on Goodreads or other pieces of social media, about Jordan Peterson, Tucker Carlson, tech utopianism, strange opinions about sex and demographics and birth rates.
We've seen him, you know, review everything from the Lorax to the Unabomber manifesto.
What I want to say about this is this, Nick.
The American mind is cooked.
It is cooked to a crispy, crispy, like, like cinder at this point.
Like the whole point here is, and we've talked about this when there have been other assassinations or attempted assassinations.
You know, when a society gets really, really sick and radicalized, like some people, they get turned on, right?
Like something, a switch flips on them and then they go out and they do, you know, crazy things.
I think the bigger story in this, besides the fact that we're going to have a bunch of people like this person, allegedly, who are going to carry out these types of attacks as things get worse, is largely been the reaction to it.
And I think a lot of people have been looking for this to make some sort of ideological sense, right?
They saw the assassination of a healthcare CEO. Everyone in this country who isn't a healthcare CEO hates healthcare CEOs.
I think that's what we need to really, really think about when we're thinking about this story.
Well, I think the reaction, what's interesting to me, is that there's a big question about whether he's a hero or not.
That's a big reaction when you're watching all this social media stuff.
It's like people want to lionize the guy because he made a stand or he made a statement with what he did.
We talked about this last time where the statement doesn't have a lot of weight because...
You know, the next CEO is not going to change policies.
They're just going to get more security, right?
Like, that's not going to have the effect that maybe he wants, I don't think.
That said, wouldn't it be remarkable if we finally had a bit of a come-to-Jesus moment with what our healthcare industry is doing to us?
Because out of all this, I don't know if you've seen it, but certainly everyone's sharing every version of horrible nightmare scenarios that they dealt with directly with This company and then all manner of other companies as well.
And, you know, is this going to lead to some sort of collective outrage that will ultimately affect change is the real question.
Well, Nick, I have a question for you.
We've been doing this for a while.
We know each other ideologically, correct?
Like, at this point, we know each other pretty well, right?
Sure.
This guy's into Jordan Peterson, Tucker Carlson, tech utopianism, again, strange sex opinions, all these really, really out there sort of right-wing libertarian things, correct?
Yeah, I'd add another word in there, but go on.
Okay, do we have something in common in the fact that we see that one of the major problems are wealthy corporations that are absolutely plundering this country to the point of disaster?
Absolutely, I agree with that.
This is one of the great secrets of what is happening in this country, which is for all of these differences that have been expounded on by whether it's culture war stuff or online radicalization, there is a growing sentiment in this country that something has gone very, very wrong and something needs to be done to fix it.
And that sort of a sentiment is one of the only ways out.
And some people are going to say it calls for open violence and rebellion and murder.
I mean, like some people are going to call for that.
I still think that we need to figure out a way to put together some sort of a plan or an alternative to the political status quo that we have that actually calls out the problems for what they are.
And I just wanted to point that out.
At the heart of a lot of these things, we're not going to agree with a lot of these people, but there is a deep, shared populist sentiment that needs to be paid attention to.
I agree.
And again, otherwise we'll continue to have these things.
What he was able to do was he used a ghost gun.
Apparently, that's the reporting.
I don't know if you saw that as well.
Thanks to the Supreme Court.
Yeah.
So there are parts you can order separately and then put them together.
Untraceable, you know.
So again, if he really wanted to get away, he would have.
I'm just saying.
I don't know if there's anything going on with him emotionally and psychologically where there's just something that, you know, he's obviously not a trained killer because if you were a trained killer, you would have gotten away with this.
Like, did you see the footage of the cops in New York looking through Central Park?
Do you happen to see this?
America's finest.
It was embarrassing.
And they were embarrassed.
It's like, it's days later, whatever it was, they're not going to find much.
Anyway, but they, they're like, they, you know, poking in a bush.
And it was embarrassing.
Like, you know, not that, you know, of course, they even referenced one of the, the commissioner referenced one of these TV shows I don't watch, these procedurals.
And he said, it's not like that.
We don't just suddenly find the killer within 60 minutes.
But I think not only are we having the issues that you described really well in terms of where our psyche is, we have this really inflated version of what police work is.
Oh, no.
We are getting a just prime time example of how bad law enforcement is in this country.
But you know what will fix it, Nick?
More resources.
More money.
Being pushed towards that.
And I said this on the last podcast.
I think now that we're talking about it, it was on the Weekender.
I want to say it for the record.
We've talked about these intractable issues, whether it's gun regulation or, you know, investment in things and austerity.
You better believe that something like this is going to lead to some changes, including things like ghost guns, who can get guns, and how much money is going to be given to the police.
Nick, speaking of really messed up situations that have reached some sort of conclusion, God knows where it's going to go.
I was out in the wilderness.
I was without cell phone reception.
I was away from the world.
I didn't know what was going on.
Eventually, when I got my cell phone reception back, I found out that Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria had fallen.
Assad had fallen to his regime, which by the way, his family has been in control.
For 50 years, more than 50 years, Assad himself has been in charge for 24 years.
There's been 13 years worth of civil war in Syria.
It's been one of the largest humanitarian crises we've seen in the modern era.
Rebels have taken control of Syria.
Assad hopped a plane and went and hung out with his buddy Vladimir Putin.
I hope the two of them have a lot to talk about in Moscow.
This is a big, giant story.
There's a lot of stuff that has occurred in the past couple of days that we need to get people up to speed about.
What was your initial reaction to finding that Assad was finally deposed in Syria?
I mean, I think, obviously, it's extremely encouraging and positive to be able to have an authoritarian dictator like that removed or leave or be forced out.
An absolute shitbag, yes.
I mean, remember, he used chemical weapons against his own people.
This was some sort of red line in the sand that Obama never really did anything about, which also caused him issues politically.
And so, yeah, we're seeing footage now of the dungeons that they had kept.
There was a guy who was released after 43 years of being in prison for doing basically nothing.
And so the repairing of the country is going to take a long time.
And you can feel, you know, however excited they might be to be able to have freedom, it's going to take a long time to repair the psychic healing of that.
And this destabilization in the area is really, really concerning, especially because, you know, things aren't going that stably right now everywhere else right around that.
Yeah, and I'll go ahead and start with your last point, then I'll work my way out.
Nick, you know, one thing that we've been covering over the past couple of years is the decline of the American empire.
There was one hegemonic country that basically was the world's policeman, you know, carried the big stick, whatever you want to call it.
And now that we've entered decline, the American order has started to disintegrate and weird stuff happens when that occurs.
And by the way, Assad, the only thing I'm sad about in this is that he got away.
Because dictators who kill their own people, and by the way, we're talking up to half a million people who were killed in this civil war, civilians.
We're talking about tens of millions of refugees.
God knows how many more there's going to be.
People like that, who torture their citizens and kill their own citizens, they shouldn't be able to hop a flight to Moscow.
You know what I mean?
There is an end that these people usually meet and Assad deserved it.
When we talk about this story, though, this was a proxy for Russia.
The only reason Assad was able to hold on to any power over the last 13 years was because Russia took care of them.
And one of the only reasons this was allowed to occur was because of the invasion of Ukraine, right?
So we talk a lot about moments of sorting, how the American order is being pushed against and how this axis of other countries is starting to coalesce and do all kinds of things.
There's going to be weird movements in all of this.
There's going to be weird associations.
Israel's already trying to take advantage of this.
They've already sent in troops that are meant to try and take as much land and resources as they possibly can.
Uh, Meanwhile, we don't know exactly what's going to happen from the Rebels taking over.
You know what you don't find in any story, Nick?
Do you know where these Rebels came from?
Do you know where they got their training and they got their motivation for things?
ISIS? That'd be Al-Qaeda.
This is an Al-Qaeda adjacent group.
You'll notice that all of the coverage of this just always talks about them as, you know, rebels.
They don't talk about how the HTS has as its beginnings in Al-Qaeda and radical, you know, Islamic groups.
Well, what's interesting is that they took over in about a week, right?
An entire government that was backed by Russia falls in a week to rebels who don't have planes.
They don't have long-range bombs, right?
They just kind of swept through, and it sort of tells you, you're describing the decline of the United States, but you're describing the decline of Russia on an even steeper path.
And so that's really what was probably the most interesting thing to me there, was how easy it was for rebels to take over an entire country.
Yeah, I want you to imagine Assad, and by the way, like, dictatorial assholes like this guy.
I want you to put yourself in his mind for a second as you start to realize that Russia is getting ready to push this offensive with North Korea into Ukraine, and you read the writing on the wall, right?
And all of a sudden, all the Ashton Martins that you have used blood money to buy, they're not going to make you safe anymore, right?
You suddenly realize the priorities have changed.
I imagine, you know, Benito Mussolini in Italy had a sudden realization that the Third Reich was going to let things fall apart for him.
And you start realizing where you are on the pecking order.
And meanwhile, there's all kinds of other weird things that are happening here, Nick.
We've got Turkish militias that are taking place here.
We have no idea what's going to happen to the Kurds in Syria.
You know, one of the main, like, components in all of this was Iran's relationship with this regime.
Iran has to be looking around saying, what in the hell is going on?
Things do not feel good.
And the whole point that I want to bring forward, because this is, as we talk about all this stuff, the fall of the American Empire and the emerging axis opposed to America, there's going to be a lot of weirdness that takes place everywhere.
And things start destabilizing.
And I keep talking about flashpoints, Nick.
You'll remember, God, what was it?
Three or four months ago, we had a conversation and we counted them up.
There were like seven major flashpoints around the world that at any given moment, you had different multiple nations, belligerents that were in a place where something could go wrong at any given moment.
We've just now had one of the flashpoints actually become a larger flashpoint.
It's a vacuum where a lot of people are going to try and fill stuff.
We don't know what's going to happen in Syria.
We don't know if this is going to be a happy ending overall.
All we know is that Bashar al-Assad is out of power, and that in and of itself is a good thing.
What happens after it?
Up in the air.
You know, it's funny because I think we felt pretty fortunate while Trump was in office last time that we didn't have a ton of these flashpoints happening all at once.
It's weird, isn't it?
Yeah.
And I know we were thankful for that because I don't think he would have handled any of those things like that very well.
Well, he's going to take office in the middle of this now.
Lord knows what is going to happen, especially because he's continuing to try and prop up Russia.
He's continuing to prop up the old world order, even though he claims to be an isolationist.
The other thing that's interesting to me is that the last time we had something like this with a Russian-backed dictator being ousted was Yanukovych in Ukraine, of all places.
And so what happened to Ukraine?
Well, they experienced democracy.
They were reawakening, and the country was taking itself back.
And then, sure enough, 10 years later, whatever, 12 years later, Russia invades.
So I'm now trying to figure out if there's any kind of path that that's going to happen with Syria.
Are they now ripe for someone else nearby to overrun them and try and take them over?
No idea.
None.
We really don't know where this is going to go.
But again, I think a couple of things can be true at once.
The world has one less murderous asshole dictator in it.
That's a good thing.
What happens after, we don't know.
But also, Nick, American leadership in all of this, pretty quiet.
Yeah.
They're taking stock of it, but there's no real push for American leadership in what's happening.
And that is, again, a symptom of this larger shifting order that we're watching take place right Well, and they know what a political dud it is to try and back Ukraine or to back another country.
They're going to say, you're going to give them money?
You know, what about the money we're not getting here and all the expenses?
It's like that's going to be a tough one for anyone to argue.
And I believe Lindsey Graham has already gone out on there and insisting we have to start bombing, all sorts of stuff are in there in Syria.
But yeah, I think it's going to be a real problem because obviously as soon as Trump takes over, they're going to cut off all aid to Ukraine.
And that'll go away.
And I think people will cheer that, unfortunately.
And then from there, I can't see the Trump administration giving one iota about Syria or trying to help them rebuild the country at all.
No, I mean, you know, that's the entire point.
Trump is basically an agent to strip down the United States of America.
And by the way, we need to talk about this, Nick.
Trump went on Meet the Press.
Thanks, NBC, for giving this asshole platform.
He said a few things that we need to discuss.
On tariffs and prices, quote, I can't guarantee anything, but he will make us rich, of course.
On the January 6th committee, he has said that they, honestly, they should go to jail.
I have the absolute right.
I am the chief law enforcement officer.
You do know that.
He floats an ending of birthright citizenship and says that the only way that you don't break up families is you keep them together and you have to send them all back.
He also asserts, again, his right to get rid of NATO, which, you know, going back to the story we just talked about, the declining American order.
So Trump just went on a TV show and said everything out loud, and instead of people, like, actually freaking out, this stuff is being normalized.
He's telling us exactly who he is, what he's planning on doing, how he's going to do it, and meanwhile, just normalizing all of it.
Yeah, thanks.
Thanks, Christian Welker.
And he's back either on anything, which is really frustrating.
You know, he's not the chief law enforcement officer.
The attorney general is.
That's a wild thing to say, isn't it?
It is.
It is.
And it's not even like he's, he believes it, though.
Like, it's not even like he's just trolling at this point.
And he will be that way because he's going to have an attorney general that will be under his thumb and do whatever he wants him to do.
So we're going to finally find out what a lot of the fears the founding fathers had about the checks and balances they're trying to put into the Constitution that will no longer be there.
But yeah, it's disgusting about deporting citizens of this country.
You can think that he's doing it as a showman thing and just sort of saying stuff, but every time we try to say, oh, he's not going to do that, don't worry about it, He does it.
And all those things get activated.
So we're in for, I mean, you know, if you're not already kind of thinking about living in another country, you probably should just start to kind of think about it a little bit more.
This is my country.
I'm not going anywhere.
I want to go through this list very, very quickly.
Nick, do you think Donald Trump understands tariffs?
He does not understand tariffs.
I don't have to think about it.
Okay, so his entire plan to do tariffs on everything, who's telling him to do that?
Oh, you know, I don't know.
What's your answer for that?
It's the Heritage Foundation.
It's Elon Musk.
It's all the people behind him.
So what's he going to do?
He says, I can't guarantee anything.
He admits that prices very well could go up, but he's going to make us rich.
So I've said, people keep asking me, are people going to realize that Donald Trump is actually ruining the country?
No, it's the exact same dog and pony dance that we've seen all along.
He's going to blame all of his failures and all the suffering on his political enemies and conspiracy theories.
January 6th committee.
Honestly, they should go to jail.
Meanwhile, what's everyone saying?
Maybe Trump's not going to be so bad.
Maybe he'll moderate this time.
Maybe he, you know, I think he's just a lot of bluster.
He's telling people outwardly what he wants to do, which is to send his political enemies to prison.
And Nick, I just want to read this again.
I have the absolute right.
I'm the chief law enforcement officer.
You do know that.
It's one of the wildest statements that I've ever heard from a politician, much less the president-elect of the United States of America.
Then the idea of getting rid of birthright citizenship.
And I want to make this clear because I assume some people are listening to this and they have a notion of it.
People who were born in the United States of America, it doesn't matter who their family is, it doesn't matter who their parents are, where they came from, they have all the rights, protections, and liberties of a United States citizen.
We're talking about literally getting rid of U.S. citizens.
When we come to the right to break up NATO, we've seen this movie!
What did he do during his first term?
He weakened the alliance with all of these other countries.
It's time for people to come around to an understanding.
Donald Trump is a hatchet man.
He doesn't know what he's talking about.
He is being controlled by the wealth class, and he is meaning to demolish not only the federal government and all the protections the federal government is supposed to give everyday people, He is in there to isolate the United States of America while Russia, China, all of these countries make their moves.
He has telegraphed everything because he can't hide it, Nick.
This is one of the main themes that we have covered on this show.
When Donald Trump tells you what he's going to do and what he wants to do, listen to him.
He can't help himself.
He telegraphs every single move that he makes.
I mean, you know, the thing about the terrorists, I want to make clear, is that he's going to carve out exceptions to his cronies, okay?
Absolutely, yes.
But here's what's really awful about it.
Are you ready?
Those cronies are going to not have to pay the tariffs, but they're going to raise their prices anyway.
That's right.
Yep.
And that is what is going to be awful about that part of it.
The idea that he would say that he needs to end birthright citizenship, and then he says to her, he goes, you know that we're the only country that has that?
Jared, do you know how many countries have birthright citizenship?
You know, if I had to sit here and count them up, I think I'd take up the rest of this.
Yeah, Google has it over like 30 or 40 other countries in the world that do that.
And no pushback.
They probably weren't ready for that kind of lie, right?
In her earpiece.
How can you not be ready for that lie?
I don't know.
I don't know.
Do you not have time?
Do you not have a research staff?
We don't have a research staff.
Is she worried that he's going to call her a nasty person because she's pushing back?
I think a large part of what's happening, and by the way, we haven't covered the Joe Scarborough reaction to all the pushback online, right?
Because he's lost his mind.
Like yelling at people, what do you want me to do?
Yeah, he says fascist things.
You talk to...
Okay, great, Joe.
The whole point is that all of these media members have a couple of things that are happening.
One, they're absolutely terrified about being singled out, right?
Because they know at this point that he has a willing Department of Justice and basically all the cronies that they need, and he has authoritarian power coming in.
They have already made both the conscious and unconscious decision.
It's better to make nice with this guy.
And we're going to talk more about that in a second, where people go with it.
But they have made the decision they're not going to push back on him.
And what's even more, Nick, I think the problem that they had with Trump back in 2016 was the aesthetics of Trump.
And because he didn't win the popular vote.
And there was like all this pushback against Trump in the culture, politics and also popular culture.
Now that he won the Electoral College and the popular vote, and now that the country has been properly, like, made ready for a second Trump presidency and what comes with it, I think they're fine with it.
I really, truly do.
I don't think that they want to push back.
I don't think that they want to have an actual discussion with him.
At this point, it's full speed ahead.
They're all in on this corporate game, and that's where it goes.
I don't think she's interested in pushing back on him because, quite frankly, we're not going to see the media push back against Trump except for, like, little gestures of it every now and I mean, I guess what you're saying is they check the ratings and they're like, okay.
Yeah, fine.
Cool.
Yeah.
You know, that's all they care about.
And that's, you know...
There's no solution to that, Jared, because when you introduce the bottom line to a news corporation, you can't have the government control it, right?
And so I don't see how anyway else we're going to do it.
Like, how else are we ever going to work?
Well, it doesn't work anymore.
That's one of the reasons why people are paying more attention to shows like ours, because they understand that that entire game is rigged.
Nick, the people who watch MSNBC now are people who can't get up and change the channel and pets that have been left at home while their owners go get dinner.
I mean, they can't get anyone to watch this stuff, and there's always been a lack of trust there, and there's always been a moment where it's like, what are you doing?
Why are you doing this?
Now they have the permission structure in place that they don't even have to pretend anymore.
They can normalize all this shit, and they know it can't hurt them anymore.
The people who know that this is bullshit aren't tuning in, so there you go.
The country almost has the same attitude towards Trump himself, where they're like, well, he's in power now.
What else can we do?
It's going to have to happen.
So here we are.
I feel like ennui has settled in on everybody at this point.
I don't have ennui.
Do you have ennui?
Don't have ennui.
I suppose.
I don't know.
I don't know what else to do.
It feels like I just want to give up and there's nothing to do.
Don't give up.
Don't give up.
Listeners, don't give up.
That actually, I'm glad you said that.
Well, I'm not glad you said it.
You're my friend and I don't want you to feel this way.
I have written down over here in terms of talking to people about what they can do personally.
Do not just let this become normal.
Do you remember, Nick, do you still have an emotional memory of what 2017 through 2021 was like?
Every single day, it was five to six to seven stories that were overwhelming and they washed over you and felt like you were drowning in them.
Like, at some point or another, you can just let the tide take you and you're like, I can't deal with this anymore.
But my advice is to not, not let that set in.
That's what these people want you to do.
I mean, my question then was like, how are we going to find, you know, pleasure in our everyday life and whatever?
And I'm, you know, I keep falling back to like, we need to, you know, enjoy the arts and culture and all those good things that are important, which, of course, are going to be defunded with the next, you know, very shortly once Doge gets their hands on it.
So, you know, not the E.A., Department of...
Endowment of the Arts, all that stuff.
So it's like you know they're going to start cutting all that stuff.
Musk is going to try and tell Trump, oh, we have workers.
We need to have skills.
We need to teach them how to fix things.
And that's what makes me worried.
I'll be watching the movie The Giver from every other week.
If you don't know that movie, it was a movie where they hid all of our great artworks from the country.
And at the very end, the guy finally releases it and everyone can see Mona Lisa again and remember how good life is supposed to be.
Well, I mean, I think one thing is that we need to understand that, like, the government can do a lot of things, but they, like, resistance, actual resistance, and I don't mean hashtag gestures of resistance and grifter resistance.
Actual resistance relies on not letting these people have control over you.
Right?
I mean, they can do things to your body.
They can come after you.
They can tell you lies all day long.
But it's...
I hate to give it away, but like...
I'm not trying to spoil anything from 1984, Nick.
But if they can't make you add together 2 plus 2 into 5...
They can't win, right?
Like, you gotta find the pleasure where you can find it.
By the way, speaking of quizlings who are already giving up, Nick, we gotta talk about these two pair of Democratic jokers here.
First of all, Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, who, what a turn this guy has had.
What a stretch of time Fetterman has had.
I remember when we looked at Fetterman and we said, this guy might be decent.
He has not been decent.
John Fetterman, in interviews on Capitol Hill, said he supports the Hunter Biden pardon and then compared it to the Trump hush money case in New York and says, quote, I think it's appropriate for both sides to receive a pardon.
He called it a bullshit case that was weaponized for political gain.
And next up, Nick, let's go down to South Carolina where Representative Jim Clyburn, who has a role in everything that's going on right now, this is Jim Clyburn talking about his thoughts about the possibility of Joe Biden pardoning Donald Trump.
Clear something up because I'm a little confused.
On Tuesday, you were asked on CNN whether you thought President Biden should pardon Donald Trump.
And I'm just going to ask you the question directly.
Do you think that President Biden should pardon Donald Trump?
And if so, why?
Yes, I do think so.
And I think you should pardon all of those people that have been accused and have been targeted so that we can clean the slate.
We can have an air of possibilities for the future.
If we keep digging at things in the past, I'm not too sure the country would not lose its way.
Nick, who are these people who have been targeted?
Who do you think Jim Clyburn is talking about here?
Because I picked up on a little something.
I don't even know.
I don't know.
Tell me what you're picking up on.
I think he might be talking about the January Sixers.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, I think he might be advocating for Joe Biden before he leaves office to pardon both Donald Trump and the people who are in prison for January 6th.
Wow.
You can't fire me.
I quit.
You can't pardon him.
I mean, that won't happen, right?
Biden is not going to pardon the January 6th people.
Well, okay, before we get into why this is happening, or what is happening within the uppercase D Democratic mind, Nick, I want to ask you right now, because this has been an ongoing thing where we talk about this.
Do you think that Joe Biden will give Donald Trump a pardon before he leaves office?
Yeah, no, no.
You don't think so?
Well, I mean, I listen to him, I just want to say in my mind, thanks Nixon.
Actually, thanks Ford, I guess, right?
This notion, I mean, he's old enough, at least Clyburn's old enough to remember this, where the notion of we must heal, we must move on, we must take all of this horrible corruption that destroyed the country and just pretend it didn't happen, right?
And say things like the cover-up was worse than the crime, right?
It's like, you know what?
It goes back to the fucking Civil War, you know?
Let's just cover up all that stuff, and we'll give them statues everywhere, and we'll just kind of move on in the history of healing the country.
And then look where we are.
We don't heal.
We don't move on.
We don't progress, and we're back where we were.
So this is what I'm feeling is ridiculous.
First of all, I'm feeling we need to get rid of everybody over age 70 in the government.
Let's just start there.
Well, I want to say, first of all, this is textbook quizzling behavior.
This is exactly what the Democratic Party is suffering from right now.
First of all, Fetterman called the hush money thing bullshit.
Nick, did Donald Trump, am I incorrect, was he not convicted of a crime?
Oh, he was convicted of a crime and it was the worst defense possible because they had no defense.
They had no defense because he was caught dead on, dead to rights, committing a crime.
Yeah, their defense was, this is a political thing.
But he was prosecuted.
He shouldn't have been prosecuted for his crime.
Him being prosecuted for his actual crime was weaponizing the legal system against a political rival.
Fetterman is so far out there at this point.
Like, he has his own thing, and he has shown his ass repeatedly.
Clyburn is an institutionalist.
He's one of the reasons, by the way, not only that Joe Biden won the election of 2020, the Democratic nomination for the election, but why 2024 happened was because Jim Clyburn and Barack Obama got together and said to everybody within the Democratic primary, you're done, it's Biden, because we cannot risk Bernie Sanders possibly winning the nomination at this point.
That is one of the die that got cast to get us to this point.
He is an institutionalist.
And Nick, I can tell you as someone who studies authoritarianism and the history of authoritarianism, people like this dot the landscape.
They think if you just make a deal with it, it'll go away.
If you're just nice to Donald Trump, all of a sudden he'll play nice with you.
But the truth is that these decisions, whether it's Fetterman, whether it's Clyburn, whether it's Joe Scarborough, any number of these assholes who are doing this thing, they're saving themselves, Nick.
They don't actually think this is going to end the authoritarian cycle.
They're saving themselves.
And I'm sure that they don't think that.
I'm sure there's like a voice that pops up every now and then, and they're like, no, no, no, no, that's not what I'm doing.
I'm trying to preserve the republic.
This is what the history is littered with.
It's people who want to make deal with authoritarians because subconsciously they want to save themselves.
Yeah, it's disgusting.
And again, he could even just say, thinking, well, I could just say this, I know it won't happen, so I can just kind of get out there and then not worry about the consequences of that.
But there are consequences.
People form opinions, they form ideologies on this kind of shit.
And it's so deeply embedded in our country that it makes you wonder how we got this far, honestly.
Well, I'll be honest with you.
If I woke up tomorrow and read an article that the White House was having senior-level meetings about pardoning Donald Trump, I would not be shocked.
Really?
Yeah.
I mean, I'd be pissed off, but I would not be shocked because this is what ends up happening is at these levels of power, these people care more about the institutions and sort of the manners of things than they do anything else.
And Biden is an institutionalist.
And I would not be shocked if someone says to Joe Biden, this will cement your legacy and something goes off in Joe Biden's mind.
And he's like, yeah, you know what?
That's actually right.
I think that would be the olive branch that we need.
We've already seen him welcome to the White House, say welcome back.
We've already seen him pal around, like, take pictures with him.
Like, that is the type of quote-unquote opposition that we're dealing with.
It's people who are going to roll over and show their belly, and I would not be shocked if Biden pardons Trump.
I mean, well, you know, Gerald Ford knew he wasn't getting re-elected as soon as he pardoned Nixon, right?
I don't know.
I've never read anything that Ford actually said about it, but it's all about sort of like duty to the country, when in fact what we're actually talking about is duty to power.
Because in my memory of studying it, you know, it was a big reason why he lost, but maybe perhaps the calculation wasn't there on the day he signed the pardon.
Although, you had to imagine it was.
But at the very least, Biden should be looking at that.
Now, that said, Biden's not running again, and so he doesn't have to worry about another election.
But it would so further tarnish his already troubled legacy as it is that...
You know, I mean, I think it's the notion of him staying in the race as long as he did is going to end up becoming a big albatross around his legacy.
Oh, I agree with that.
And pardoning Trump.
Nick, if he pardons Trump, I, you know, one of the stories, and we're getting ready to talk a little bit about another one of these postmortem reports that I actually think shines a little bit of light on what happened in the election, and we need to think about it.
But I do think that one of the things that's been underreported in all of this is how many people didn't show up to the polls.
Because they just got to the point where they're like, okay, one side enables Gaza and is just helping with corporations, and the other side is fascist.
I don't want to play a role in this.
If Biden were to pardon Trump, the ramifications of that, like in terms of how many people would say, I'm just done.
I'm not going to deal with this anymore.
Like, I really think that that would be a substantial number of people who would just be like, I'm done caring about this.
I can't do it anymore.
I agree.
It would be a death knell, in a way, to democracy.
It would be another nail in the coffin.
So let's just sort of hope that this mindset is communicated to the proper authorities and they recognize how detrimental that would be.
It would be pouring gasoline on an authoritarian fire.
I just want to say, by the way, if that happens, how terrible is the show that we're going to have to record?
How terrible would that show be?
I mean, it would force us to have to relitigate all the other horrible things they've done in this country.
That's a tough show that I hope that we never have to record.
Nick, speaking of the 2024 election and the Democratic Party's failure, a new report in the Times from Nicholas Nahamas, Maya King, and Zolan Cano-Youngs with a report out of Philadelphia where the Democratic Party underperformed, leading to the state of Pennsylvania, one of the main swing states in the election, ended up falling.
Organizers have been reaching out, and particularly organizers in communities of color who deal with Black and Latino voters.
They have come out to say that they were so worried about the lack of outreach to voters of color by the Harris campaign that they went rogue, that they started doing it themselves without permission.
And over the time, they said that thousands of voters in these communities of color said that they hadn't heard from the campaign.
They didn't feel like the campaign cared about them and that instead the focus of the race was on not only digital ads, but digital ads and outreach that was focused on white suburban voters, white professionals, and basically that they weren't allowed to do their job that they traditionally do.
And quite frankly, I think this report is very convincing.
And it sounds a lot like reports that I've heard from around the country so far.
Well, I think we spent a lot of time in denial during the campaign, honestly.
And I think part of it was, you know, it seems to me that there were huge sections of people of color who didn't trust Kamala Harris for a variety of reasons.
Looking at this reporting...
And showing how they put all of their resources, because it's really damning when you're talking about having campaign offices in the inner city areas that are like, don't have any paper, they don't have like office supplies, and then they have to go to the nice areas and like raid them for supplies like that speaks volumes to why maybe they didn't trust her right.
And so I suspect that to see this now, and we can expect all sorts of people lighting the campaign on fire who were part of the campaign, but this one really hit hard because the Harris campaign had purported to be standing up for marginalized communities and people of color and trying to use her identity as part of that campaign.
And there, I guess, was a real reason.
They were justified in feeling that distrust for what she was standing for.
Yeah, there's a couple of things going off of what you were saying that I just want to highlight.
The first thing is this.
When Harris took over as the nominee from Biden, I had said, I will learn a lot about what's going on with how long the Biden campaign team stays in control of the Harris campaign.
which happened the entire time.
We're now hearing a bunch of reports that Harris brought in a couple of people that she felt close to, but that mainly it was the Biden campaign team that took care of things.
That isn't necessarily a Kamala Harris decision.
That isn't necessarily about Harris as a candidate.
I don't think she had much control over the campaign, to be honest with you.
And by the way, not winning a primary kind of does that sometimes to just sort of get the baton and then run with it.
When you have a primary, we've talked about the Barack Obama campaign back in 2008. He effectively wrestled control of the Democratic Party away from the Clinton machine, right?
And then restructured it, which we're still dealing with, right?
What we are seeing here is the consequence of a couple of things.
The Biden team, you might remember, and we covered it, Nick, they held calls back whenever the red states, the Republican states, were starting to gerrymander stuff and take away, like, purge voting rolls of black people.
Black communities said, we need your help, and they said, hey, good luck out organizing it.
Right?
And what did they say?
Since the election, they've said over and over that the problem was the base.
It was all of these interest groups that got too woke.
And what is woke?
It's a code name for saying we actually care about people of color and oppressed peoples, right?
Meanwhile...
This entire apparatus of the Democratic Party is basically controlled by a group of technocratic analysts and strategists.
Who got rich off of this?
It was the strategist and all of the analytical groups that they worked with.
And they didn't see people of color as one of the bases they needed to take care of.
They took them for granted.
And reporting like this, the actual on-the-ground experience of this stuff, and we're starting to see things floating up about Harris campaign staffers, people of color who say that they were discriminated against by this campaign.
There was a black woman at the front of the ticket, but the people behind the scenes were the same old white retread campaign strategists that were behind Joe Biden and have controlled the party for a while.
And they've taken this space completely for granted, which is one of the reasons why Donald Trump was able to change the demographics of the electorate is because his campaign, as bad as it was, as bad as the ground game was, they went into these places.
We've said on this podcast, we said he's going into New York City.
He shouldn't be in New York City.
That's not a place for him to be campaigning.
But a lot of what happened here, it reflects a larger problem in the Democratic Party that is only getting worse at the moment.
I mean, he went in front of the National Black Journalist Association to question her race.
Yes.
And nothing happened to him.
Like, that would have been a campaign-ending blunder of all blunders.
20 years ago, yes.
Instead, he increased that electorate.
What does it say about the Harris campaign, that he can increase the electorate after saying shit like that?
I don't know if you were aware, but I was talking to someone who was kind of tentatively connected to the Harris campaign.
Yes.
And they were saying to me the other day that the internal polling before the Biden debate was really bad, right?
Like he was gonna get waxed by 20 points, something like that, right?
And so, by the way, when I heard that, I was like, that's interesting, because, like, you know, that wasn't what we were seeing necessarily in the front-facing poll.
Nick, I saw an archived internal poll before the debate that had Biden down 11 points.
Right.
So, what that tells me was that they, and the Biden campaign wanted the debate early.
And the only, and I think I question this when it happened, but the only explanation for that is because they knew how bad it was going to be.
They needed to get him out of the race, right?
And then the fact that had they done it in a normal time, Biden wouldn't have dropped out.
Because again, the reason I bring this up is that the Harris campaign continues to rest on their laurels that they were so far behind when they started that like, look, we got all the way to- Oh, we won!
We actually won by losing.
Yeah, you know, it's like, you know, in the aggregate.
But, like, that said, you know, she had, like, a four-point lead at some point in a month and a half out, and then every day, 0.1%, lower, lower, every day, there was an inexorable leaking of votes.
They could not stop, couldn't do anything, and they had six weeks to do something, and they could not stop.
That graph is, oh, we're going to take care of prices.
Oh, they're weird.
Those people shouldn't be doing that.
Oh, Goldman Sachs.
Liz Cheney, Dick Cheney, you know, economists are behind me.
Like, it was so obvious what happened, but, like, the people behind this have not reckoned with anything that you and I have been talking about or anybody who's even been, like, tangentially related to the campaign.
It was an absolute disaster, and we're talking about this not because it's the 2024 campaign, but because this can't happen again.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It has to change.
Going back to the previous segment, you can't pardon Trump and talk about how it was a political hit job.
We talked about it on the weekend or for Friday.
You can't pardon everybody in the administration and be like, our bad.
I guess we committed some crimes, according to some people.
We need to be careful.
The Democratic Party is in a moment of crisis, and this type of stuff is an invitation to accept reality and change course.
Because if this doesn't get fixed...
Oh, it's going to get real bad.
But the status quo, normal course on the Democratic side running a campaign, it's mind boggling that they end up turning into like what a typical Republican state would do to, you know, reduce votes by limiting the amount of campaign headquarters they have in different areas and then limiting the resources they have.
They spent a billion dollars.
A billion plus.
A billion, maybe like more than a billion dollars.
And they had the offices that weren't staffed properly, like in, you know, in areas like it wouldn't have cost very much more money to do that thing.
That's what's so horrible about it.
And I don't even know if it has to be a shift in the mindset, which is like competency.
You don't even have to pay for one of those offices.
If you want to go into one of these communities, you find a local group, a local organizing group, a mutual aid group in one of these neighborhoods, and you say, hey, we really can't afford to open this office.
Can we be here?
And they're like, absolutely, please.
They left all these people on the outside.
And what happened when they lost?
They blamed them.
They said it's those people.
They didn't come through.
We did great.
And why?
Because the billion plus dollars that you just talked about, whose pockets did it go into?
It went into the pockets of the strategist and it went into the pockets of the groups that the strategist are associated with.
All of these analytical startups.
And by the way, a lot of the people who were part of the Harris Brain Trust, and I feel bad continuing to say Harris, because I don't think she had any control over much of any of this.
It sounds very much like this group was like pulling all the strings.
And meanwhile, she was being told by Tony West, don't go after corporations or whatever.
This campaign, like a lot of the people are going to now go work for those analytical firms and those messaging firms and those digital ad firms.
So, like, it's this, basically, it's this little fundraising scheme among a bunch of, a very small group of people who have gotten exorbitantly rich.
And what are we hearing now, Nick?
It's just them bullshitting and saying, we actually ran a fantastic campaign.
It was perfect.
Nothing was wrong.
And meanwhile, the people who were in the crosshairs.
The people of color, the poor people, women, gay and trans people, they are the ones who are being left with the check and being told that they are responsible.
I mean, I can't wait for the candidate that's going to come out of this from out of nowhere with a different, you know, network behind them.
I agree.
To take control of the narrative.
That said, you know, Bernie was kind of like that guy.
And look what they did to him.
And so you have to be very concerned that they're going to do that again to anybody else who's an outsider like that.
But we desperately need someone who can tap into that.
And it's ridiculous that the Bernie doctrine is going to be what's going to carry us out, right?
Because we had Bernie.
Well, again, I think I said this again on The Weekender.
I think I said that they're trying to construct their own version of the Bernie Sanders movement, but without the politics, right?
The aesthetics and sort of the talking points.
But Nick, that's the question, right?
One of the reasons Donald Trump was able to gain purchase in the Republican Party, it wasn't just the racism.
It was also the fact that he came out and he said, the Democrats are full of shit and the Republicans are full of shit.
How do I know?
I've worked with them.
There needs to be somebody who comes out and says the Democrats are full of shit and here are the things that they've done wrong.
And the Democratic Party doesn't deal with that very well.
One of the reasons that Barack Obama won in 2008 wasn't just because he was like, you know, he gave great speeches.
It's because he stood on the stage and said Hillary Clinton voted for the Iraq war.
And I thought it was wrong.
And that, like, was refreshing to a lot of people.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, but they also knew the value of knocking on doors.
They also knew the value of knocking on doors.
Which apparently did not persist in this last one.
God, that makes me mad.
That is a piss-offing report.
Anyway, alright, we will be back with The Weekender on Friday.
In the meantime, you can find Nick at Nick Houselman at Blue Sky.
