Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman get to the bottom of exactly why ABC agreed to a settlement in Donald Trump's defamation suit against the network and George Stephanopoulos. When they're not harassing journalists, the administration will look to privatize the post office among many other public services, while the Democrats are now worried that the GOP will try and call a Constitutional Convention to permanently implement their unpopular policies. They finish on what could possibly be behind the night time drone sightings that have, up til now, gone unexplained by our politicians and law enforcement.
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Nick, I'm going to get a space heater for my recording studio.
It's way too cold down here.
I need to take care of this.
Well, it's good to know, you know, now before it's too, too cold, right?
I guess so.
I mean, I'm going to be hitting the bricks for a little while.
Also, just an update, all the phoner recordings that I've done, I got a Bluetooth mic for my phone.
Oh, welcome.
Welcome to that world.
Thank you.
So hopefully if I can figure that out, the next couple of weeks are going to sound a whole lot better than they would have in the past.
Good, good, good.
But for those who don't see it, you should go over to YouTube and watch the show because we have it there as well on the video side.
But you can see Jared wrapped up like something out of the, what was it, HBO show we just saw in Alaska?
Oh, True Detective.
Yeah.
Yeah, I look like the child in a Christmas story is what I look like.
And it has to change.
It's time that I take care of myself.
I'm getting a space heater.
That's what's happening.
That's absolutely all you have to do.
It's easy.
We have the technology.
It is.
The technology.
What a segue.
Everybody, we have a packed show.
We have so much to talk about.
And by the way, we've heard the calls.
We're talking about drones today.
Don't worry.
We're getting into the drones.
You knew that me and Nick at some point or another were going to get into this.
Stick around.
That's going to be the last segment.
You know that you want to hear us talk about drones.
In the meantime, everybody go to patreon.com slash MikeCraigPodcast.
I know you're not watching CNN and MSNBC anymore.
And also you'll get the Weekender edition on Friday.
Well, and there's thousands of you that are listening to the show, the free version, for 12 or 14 minutes every Friday.
Thousands!
It really is thousands.
We're not lying.
Thousands!
And it's consistently thousands.
It's really remarkable.
But, you know, come on over.
Join us.
Here's the thing, Nick.
I'm going to make one last hard pitch on this thing.
Are you ready?
Yeah.
I travel all the time.
I drive in my car.
I go everywhere.
Everyone knows I don't like to fly.
I listen to podcasts all the time.
You know what I don't want to do with my favorite podcast?
I don't want to listen to, like, the 10-minute preview of the Patreon shows and then not have that.
I support those shows.
And on top of it, like, it kind of makes things better.
I'm able to listen to those shows.
I'm able to, like, you know, listen to the whole experience.
Patreon.com.
And you actually feel good about it.
You feel like, gosh, I'm literally supporting this show.
I'm actually supporting this show that has been in the trenches.
And by the way, as a segue into our first segment, just to remind everyone, actual journalism is under attack.
So we are going to need your support going into the new year.
I'm so frustrated by the first thing we got to talk about on this thing.
Yeah.
Nick, we gotta start with news.
ABC, the American Broadcasting Corporation, has settled a defamation suit with Donald Trump for $15 million.
This stems from a George Stephanopoulos interview with Nancy Mace.
And it has to deal with Stephanopoulos talking about Trump being held liable for sexual assault.
Trump promised that he was going to start going after people with libel lawsuits, and here we go.
ABC has settled with him for $15 million.
There's a lot that, you know, we can talk about in this actual decision to settle, but also the larger ramifications.
It's not good, Nick.
It's not good at all.
Yeah, I mean, you know, the liberal lawyer people out there insist that ABC would have won this case.
And certainly what the judge had said was pretty much in line with what Stephanopoulos repeated later.
But remember, the one thing I'll say in the beginning is that this is not ABC. This is Disney, right?
We can't forget that Disney is the overarching owner of ABC. And there's a bigger concept here, like we're talking about, because ABC is a big corporation, right?
It's a big thing.
Disney is on orders of magnitude, like probably one of the biggest corporations we have in the country.
And there's something to this where they're like, eh, you know, let's come up with a number, like whatever.
Because remember, how much did Fox News have to pay for their defamation?
Oh my God, just a massive amount.
It was hundreds of millions.
This is $15 million.
So this feels to me like some sort of cigar-smoking backroom, like, whatever, we'll just take care of it thing, which these two people, the Trump administration and Disney, should not be in this room together smoking cigars.
No, but they are.
And, you know, one of the things that we've been watching over the past couple of weeks, it's a who's who of who's going down to Mar-a-Lago and who is donating to Trump's inaugural fund, right?
it's all of these tech companies, Bezos, Zuckerberg, basically anyone in this country that is a member of the oligarchical class.
And why are they doing it?
And we'll get more into this in another story that we unfortunately have to talk about, which is you want to get in while the getting's good, right?
You want to get on the right side of Donald Trump.
side repair relations.
That way, Disney and every other part of their subsidiaries can not be harassed by the Trump administration and could possibly get their beak sweat, right?
See what I did there?
I didn't say weeks bet.
But you want to get your beak sweat in this new administration that is going to be helping corporations and the wealth class to become more and more wealthy.
So what happened here is that Disney and all of the fat cats in this group made an economic decision, which was the $15 million was a paltry sum for them to pay to try and get on Trump's good side so they can be a part of the oligarchical push. which was the $15 million was a paltry sum for
Never mind, of course, that it hurts journalism, that it sets a precedent in the future for a lot more of this lawfare to be used, which we'll talk about in just a minute, and basically just, you know, continues the push to capitulate with Donald Trump as he comes into a second term.
Yeah, and the journalism attack is probably the worst part of it.
I think even it's the law part of it as well.
You know, you're not supposed to have frivolous lawsuits, which he likes to do.
I was actually surprised he even filed it, because a lot of times he'll just, you know, threaten to file these things.
He actually, I believe, he filed a lawsuit against CBS as well for editing Kamala Harris's interview before the election.
And As far as I can tell, that's still up in the air.
That's still somewhere out there, perhaps being ready to go to trial or something like that.
But it's chilling.
It's chilling.
Because imagine that.
He's going to sue CBS and, I don't know, maybe win or maybe get a settlement because they did editing to an interview, which is not illegal.
What are we doing here?
Well, and you know, this comes along with the revelations that Trump and a lot of his cronies, including Pete Hegseth and all of those other people around him, that they have decided that it's in their best interest to start using lawfare against critics of them and journalists and media platforms and you name it.
And Nick, here's the real trucks of this thing.
This class of people has so much wealth that it's absolutely no skin off their nose to throw a few million at something that could potentially break the back of a rival or go after people and make an example out of them.
Here's the problem.
The people on the other side of those lawsuits, they don't have that money.
They don't have those resources.
And on top of that, they don't have the time.
If you think that Donald Trump was meeting with his lawyers around the clock talking about ABC, The Times, CBS, any of those things, it's not even something that he thinks about.
It's something that happens away from him, which is also something we're seeing with Elon Musk as well.
The amount of lawsuits that he's getting involved with and throwing money towards it, much like Peter Thiel did, of course, with Gawker back in the day with the Hulk Hogan lawsuit.
These people aren't bothered by it.
They don't really even have to be in meetings, and the money that they're spending for these lawsuits, it doesn't even affect them.
The problem is the people on the other side of the ledger don't have that time, do not have those resources, and it comes to dominate their lives.
It turns into a form of harassment.
So basically what we have here is that the excess wealth has gotten to the point where it has become a weapon and a cudgel because they don't have to deal with it, but it will absolutely turn your life into a living hell.
Well, we have to mention this really quickly that Musk is also trying to get rid of the accident reports for full self-driving cars because it shows how many times his Tesla's crashed.
Now, in fairness, they're the majority of cars that are full self-driving.
So, of course, they're going to be the majority of crashes as well.
But think about what's going on.
He's just going to try to eliminate that so that no one knows anything about this and there's less accountability for him.
And then on top of that, just to talk a little more about what's going on with the cases that Trump might bring, Lindsey Graham, our old friend of the pod, comes in here.
I believe he's the one who said to Hegseth, hey, you should release that accuser that accused you of sexual rape, basically, or sexual, what's the word I'm looking for?
Assault.
Assault, thank you.
You should just release her from her NDA, and you let her tell her story, and then guess what?
You can sue her then after that.
That's why they're doing this.
Literally, and it turns out they had already removed this, and she didn't talk, I think, because of this.
I think that they got this wind of this and realized, if I try and tell my story and let everybody know what an asshole and horrible person this guy is, they're going to sue me for that, even though I was the one who went through this horrible thing.
You don't get a rape kit when you're making this shit up.
I'm sorry.
I just don't think you go through that whole ordeal after the fact if you're lying.
And so regardless, I think that's why she won't speak out in public is because they think that they're going to get sued themselves for defamation.
It's oligarchy.
It is authoritarian.
It is whatever you want to call it.
It's as bad as it can be.
It is.
And, you know, we've been watching this thing start to formulate and not to sound like a broken record, but there are so many think tanks and institutes that are funded by the wealth class that are sitting around trying to come up with avenues to get this in place.
There's a reason why they captured the judiciary.
There is a reason why they've created a pipeline from these institutes and think tanks to the Supreme Court and also to chosen judges and jurisdictions.
It's because they figured out how to use sort of the vulnerabilities of liberal democracy and all of its institutions and systems to their advantages.
And it turns out that when you have historic wealth, excessive wealth and resources, that this, to be honest, Nick, when it comes to things like Elon Musk paying for Donald Trump, basically buying Donald Trump.
Trump and MAGA, it was worth the investment.
You know what I mean?
Like it really, he, he ended up, I think spending like $200 million and ends up making billions.
That's not enough.
It's more than billions.
It was like 100 billion or something.
It was like 100 to 200 billion, depending upon who you're listening to, because God knows where all this wealth is.
The entire point is that things have been tilted so far that it was going to reach this point where these strategies and their corresponding personalities and pockets of wealth were just going to create overwhelming circumstances.
So, yes, you're going to see Disney and ABC, NBC, CBS, all of these different media platforms.
They have a they have a really clear choice, Nick, which is play ball with Donald Trump and you make a ton of money.
If you don't play ball, you're going to get in the eye of Sauron and your life is going to be turned into a living hell and you risk everything.
And so what has happened is that the game has been completely rigged and we're now starting to see the real fruits of that labor.
I mean, quite frankly, to put it in just very, very clear circumstances, this is like watching an NFL team that has been meticulously put together over decades take on like a ragtag group of people who can't even afford pads.
And what has happened is that this group has so thoroughly rigged Plotted everything and planned everything out.
The people are looking around and they're like, what in the hell happened?
You know, the context tended to be in the back of the day where people would say, well, I'm not bought by, you know, these lobbyists and all that stuff, right?
And Trump could even sort of say that in good faith.
He could say, oh, the lobbyists aren't bought me.
But now he's completely owned by like this white guy.
It's not just Tesla.
It's going to be SpaceX and every other company he has, whether they continue to just stick there.
What do mosquitoes have?
Is it a snout?
Yeah, let's call it snouts.
I like that.
Stick it in there and suck all the blood out.
That's what he's going to do.
I suppose, was there a time in our country where politicians wouldn't have done this?
They would have said, no, no, no, that's too far.
It's not ethical.
Was there ever a time when this would have happened?
Yeah, roughly from the 1930s when FDR was elected and survived an attempted coup on his presidency up until the 1970s where, you know, neoliberal austerity took over.
So there was a period of time where there was a relationship back and forth between politicians and the seats of power and the wealth class.
Although, I mean, that deteriorated and it got us to where we're at.
And the delicious irony is that everything that FDR stood for, they're trying to now walk back to what America is supposed to be, which is...
Crazy.
Think about that.
We've now gotten to the point now where FDR is like the enemy of the state.
Yeah, and actually, you know, a weird thing about that, Nick, is that there's been a push recently, and I'm glad you brought this up.
There's been a push recently to basically, like, you know how the Republicans and the right works.
Like, they just create the environment that they want, and then they talk about it.
They don't worry about the facts.
This neoliberal corporate state is now being referred to because they need to dismantle it.
They need to like, you know, push the final stake in the heart of the New Deal sort of era and regulatory state.
They're saying that this is FDR's oligarchy and FDR's monarchy that needs to be like destroyed.
And meanwhile, what have they done?
They've just absolutely hollowed all of it out until it collapsed in on itself.
And now it's time basically like a building that has collapsed to like clear out the rubble and then put up something new.
So they are in it to win it.
And the stuff that we're talking about, everything from these lawsuits to this open corruption that we've been documenting now for a while, it is about erecting something new and something permanent.
And they want to make it to where there's no ability whatsoever to challenge it.
Would you say that the quote-unquote normal Republicans, the adults, the non-MAGAP Republicans, would you say that they understand what they've been doing for all these decades in terms of starving social services and then saying, oh, we don't have any money we can't pay for, we've got to get rid of them?
Do you think they understand that inherently?
I think that, and again, you know, we're always looking for sort of like a big silver bullet explanation.
I think it shades, right?
There's some of them that understood what they were doing.
Like, they were working, you know, hand-in-hand with places like the Chamber of Commerce and, you know, those groups that were put together through the Powell memo.
You're Kochs and stuff.
The Kochs knew what they were doing, right?
But mainly you had a lot of Republicans who literally, like, just thought that they were, like, protecting liberty.
They grew up in the Bill Kristol, William F. Buckley mold where they truly believed that what they were doing was in the best interest of the state.
And meanwhile, if they got rich as they were doing it and if they helped their business friends, well, so be it.
That's how American capitalism should be.
But some of them have been diehard ideologues and others have sort of lumbered forward with a sort of blissful ignorance, I would say.
Yeah.
I'm picturing one of these people, older white guys, strangling a homeless person while caressing their hair gently, thinking, oh, I'm just helping you.
They're strangling them with the other hand, really, and killing them.
No, some of them truly believe that what they're doing is helping people become independent.
And, you know, trying to get them on their feet and take responsibility for themselves.
And meanwhile, what are they doing?
They're creating a society that perpetuates the suffering and more or less tries to kill the people who aren't being seen as strong enough or part of the institution.
Right.
Because there is a noble pursuit towards helping people be independent and not rely on state assistance, for instance.
But every solution I've seen from the Republican side would be and has been this catastrophic.
And they don't have the reflection to realize that, I guess.
Yeah, some of them do and some of them don't.
You know, one of the things in my work off the podcast and, you know, sort of in my little quiet private space of the things that I'm doing, I'm looking at communities, Nick, and you know, like you live in California, you know that there are places where like there are unhoused people and, you know, they're in the streets and like there's drug addiction and mental illness and all this stuff.
That is like a microcosm of what we're talking about.
There are some people who are like, we need to get these people assistance, right?
We need to, like, get them inside somewhere.
We need to get them help for their substance abuse and their mental health problems and, you know, basically get them back on their feet and try and take care of the situation this way.
Then there are other people, Nick, who literally, and it's a really disturbing thing, they just want to get rid of these people at all costs.
They either want to just push them to the outskirts of society, ship them off to another city, or some of them are actively looking to kill these people.
Whether or not it's getting rid of, like, clean needle programs or, you know, assistance programs.
Like, some of them don't know that they're doing that.
They think they're standing up for, quote-unquote, traditional values, but other ones of them understand we're trying to kill off this population so that we can, quote-unquote, reclaim, you know, a block or two.
Yeah.
And it's part of this has been the media being able to brainwash people into thinking or rationalizing a lot of these actions as well, which is really frustrating.
And maybe not even just like mainstream media, but just the pundits and the leaders of this movement can be persuasive, I suppose.
And that's what's really frustrating as well.
Well, yeah, it taps into a lot of inherent biases.
Speaking of biases, Nick, we also have to talk and this is some weird shit.
The LA Times, which is owned by Patrick Soon-Shong, a billionaire who, by the way, just to remind everybody, lobbied for a job in the first Trump administration.
He was the one who said the LA Times wasn't going to endorse anybody in the 2024 race.
He has announced that the paper will now start featuring a quote-unquote bias meter, which will be fed with what he calls augmented intelligence, and we would just call AI, that basically would show every article's level of bias.
Basically trying to aim towards some sort of moderation.
I don't know.
He said, quote, the only way you can survive is to not be an echo chamber of one side and, quote, we've got to stop being so polarized.
Nick, the LA Times, your hometown paper, is one of the major urban papers of record that has been completely taken over by one of these oligarchical assholes.
And this move, I think, should send shivers up people's spines.
Like, this is some really disturbing stuff.
Kind of.
The relevance of the LA Times these days, that meter has got to be pretty low when you're trying to measure that.
I always marvel when I see somebody in LA who actually has a fiscal paper in their hand.
I'm like, what is that you have?
I don't even know how influential the LA Times is anymore at this point.
You know, the AI-ification of this kind of thing is really is scary because it is just a matter of time until the AI is just writing all these articles anyway.
And then, yeah, you can pretty much shape whatever you want to be whatever you want.
to choose your own adventure, basically, for news, which seems suboptimal, I think, right?
Suboptimal is a very gentle way of putting it.
And, you know, the LA Times is one thing, and I am with you, like the LA Times is not on the level of the New York Times or the Washington Post, although both of those papers have been showing a bias that is moving towards the right, and also an inclination to start bringing in AI elements, both for creation and also what they would call moderation.
A reminder, anybody who wants to pretend like AI is some sort of, I don't know, like a thing that doesn't have bias, it's programmed by people.
Like, Somebody has to write the algorithm, which is, of course, the tech class, which is being shown as more anti-democratic and also authoritarian leaning.
The whole point, and I think this is why we need to pay attention to this, is Soon-Shang bought the LA Times.
He doesn't particularly care about journalism.
See also Bezos Jeff, who bought the Washington Post, one of the papers of record, one of the most influential journalistic organs in American history, if not world history.
He bought it for $250 million.
And Nick, $250 million for Jeff Bezos?
I mean, that's like you or me going and getting a coffee in the afternoon because we want to, you know, get a little pep in our step.
And so what has happened is an oligarchical monopolistic takeover of all media spaces.
So what's going to happen with this?
All of them, including the LA Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, they're all going to start taking on a much, much more ideological bent that falls in line with the people that we're talking about.
So any story that could possibly even get into the dangers of this stuff, what do you think that bias meter is going to say?
Oh, it's going to be, it's going to say, listen to this version, which is going to be completely right-wing.
And what's going to happen to the people who write the stories that are deemed biased?
Uh, they'll get fired?
Yeah, they'll probably end up getting fired.
And so basically, we're going to have a situation where like these, these oligarchs can be like, I wasn't even the one who decided this.
I mean, look at the bias meter.
I mean, you know, like we have this thing, we got to pay attention to it.
It's very much a liberal sort of like, look at this thing over here.
I'm not responsible.
I wish it wasn't like this, right?
So we are going to see a rightward movement in media as long as these people are in control of it and they have total control over it at this point.
Yeah.
And just to talk about AI for a brief second, you know, iRobot by Isaac Asimov is a book that had a profound effect on me.
Please ignore the movie.
Man, is that a bad movie.
You should be able to press that button with a red flash and then it goes away.
You need to erase that movie because it has nothing to do with the book.
That's tough.
But what we saw over the week as Mark Cuban actually released a thing, he was talking to Grok, the AI on Twitter, about wanting to make a meme that made fun of Trump.
And ultimately, he was able to walk it through and prove that even though it says it doesn't know your personal information while it's interacting with you in those instances, it knew exactly who it was, it knew it was Mark Cuban, and it got confused trying to answer these things because there's a lot of programming that is sort of at odds with itself.
And so it kept saying, well, of course we don't know who you are, whatever.
But when he was asking for a meme of Trump, it gave him a meme of Mark Cuban instead.
So he walked him through the directives, the whole thing.
Just like an iRobot, there's a really cool one of the stories in there is about how they, the questioning of the robot and walking through their logic.
And at some points, the logic starts to hit against each other and it doesn't make sense.
And that's when the AI itself could then fall apart.
And it's very concerning.
And I don't think that that's a thing you can solve.
I don't know if that ever gets solved.
You know, I have a reputation as a bit of a Luddite.
And listen, just me saying I got a wireless mic for a recording when I'm on the road, like, I need people to understand that that is a big move for me.
Like, that is not a Jared Yates Sexton thing.
You will admit that, correct?
Correct.
Okay, but it's not that I'm a Luddite.
It's that when you look at technology, you have to understand that the people who program the technology and own the technology, I don't know, I'll just throw out some terms here, the people who own the means of production.
When you start to understand that those people are in control of it, you start to understand the direction that these things are moving.
And when it comes to its usage in like journalism, my God, everyone should have an understanding that, yes, our media is really bad right now.
And it has been bad for a very, very long time.
But adding this stuff that is being programmed by the same people who have now effectively taken over our government and our economy, it's not going to get better.
It's not like those people have an interest in actual journalism and objective reporting.
Like when we say, you know, we have to stay away from echo chambers of one side, what they're saying is they're going to intentionally move the dialogue.
And whether or not people are reading those papers or not, they have a tendency to affect conversation and also the view of the world.
The New York Times and the Washington Post are almost as responsible for the results of the 2024 election as nearly anybody else.
The fact that they have moved the conversation and perception of reality so much because they are under the control of corporate owners.
You know what's even worse than that in society right now?
Oh, God, what?
The Postal Service.
Nick, yeah, we got to talk about the fact that the Washington Post is reporting that as he prepares to become the 47th president of the United States of America, Donald Trump is really, really taking under consideration the goal of privatizing the Postal Service.
This, you know, is one of those stories that I think some people might not pay attention to.
The Postal Service isn't the sexiest topic whatsoever.
But if they are to go ahead and privatize it, which is kind of what they want to do with the entirety of the government at this point, this could have some massive, massive consequences.
You know, something that kept me up at night for a long time was when Louis Sejoy, the Postmaster General, was called before Congress several years ago.
And, you know, they were very smug in the Congress people because they were like, oh, you're going to be gone pretty soon.
And he retorted to them, oh, I'm not going anywhere.
I'm going to be here for a long time.
And I remember it was chilling.
That's paraphrasing.
We said something like that.
Because I'm like, how did he know?
How did he know that he was going to be able to stay in that job?
And then obviously, maybe he didn't know that Trump was going to be reelected.
But it turns out that getting someone out of that position is really, really difficult.
But it usually goes back to the obstructionist Congress that Republicans showed against Obama because...
Just really quickly, there's nine governors who vote on this.
You can't have more than, I think, five from one political party.
But when Obama was president and all the governor's seats were expiring, the Republican Senate would not appoint anybody else.
They completely ground that to a halt.
So the only time they were able to get new governors in was when Trump came into power.
They had control of the Senate.
Oh my God, look at that.
Now we can finally confirm some people.
And that's what got Louis DeJoy elected originally.
And they did spend time, Biden did, trying to get rid of those governors and replacing them with their people.
Ran out of time.
Couldn't do it.
He's still there.
It's amazing.
Yeah, Joyce sucks.
And, you know, he's going to be one of those figures that doesn't get remembered by history, but has been a really important driver in a lot of this.
I want to say a couple things.
When we're talking about the United States Postal Service, I'll be honest with you, Nick.
I don't like going to the post office.
I don't like having to go and deal with that for a variety of reasons.
I don't want to, like, you know, have to deal with sort of the hassle of it.
The same way I don't like to go to the DMV.
There are all of these things that are in place that are sort of remnants of the administrative state that don't feel good and they don't work particularly well.
Well, guess what?
We're talking about the Postal Service not because, oh, my God, look at Trump privatizing.
Nick, we could we could fill up a week's worth of programming talking about what Trump plans on privatizing.
Right.
We could never stop talking about it.
The United States Postal Service is a public service.
It is more or less the connective tissue that keeps Americans who live in a very, very large country for anybody who doesn't keep track of this stuff.
They're able to connect with each other and send each other things through the mail and via communications cheaply and usually pretty effectively.
This idea that it's supposed to, like, not run a deficit.
There's a reason we have a government, which is so the government can run up deficits in order to do the things that we need done.
The idea of it being run like a business is asinine bullshit.
So if we're actually talking about the privatization of the Postal Service, Nick, let's talk about what we're talking about.
There's a reason why Jeff Bezos went and visited Trump.
I don't know.
Nick, oh, you're privatizing the postal service.
I assume that you need a logistical network that can get things to people very, very quickly, right?
And for a lower cost, oh, I have to assume we could probably help with that.
Amazon has a long, long record of doing this.
And Nick, real fast before we move into the next part of the problem with this, Remember when Amazon sold everything cheaply and took a loss on everything?
Why did they do it?
So they could destroy all competitors and then raise their prices.
That's also the Walmart model for anybody keeping track at home.
So what would we be looking at?
We would be looking at a period of probably cheap prices that would rival the United States Postal Service.
And then where would the prices go, Nick?
They would go up because there would be a monopoly over it and they could charge whatever they wanted.
The next part of this, and this is one of the reasons why FedEx, UPS, all of that, why the rise of those private corporations has been such a concern.
Do you know what separates the United States Postal Service from those groups?
And by the way, it's not just cheap prices.
It is a guarantee of privacy.
The United States Postal Service doesn't look in your packages unless they detect some sort of a hazardous material or possibly illicit substances.
In this case, there would be no guarantee of privacy in terms of the communications and the products that you would be sending to people.
This also has its roots in things like the Comstock Act, which was one of the things that got pushed during the eugenics period and also anti-woman period of the 20th century to try and keep women from getting information about Reproductive care and everything from abortion to pills.
This is one of the really frightening parts of this, which is privatization opens up a whole lot of other avenues that would affect our lives in ways that most people aren't even aware of at this point.
Absolutely.
Now, I was thinking about the Bezos thing, and is it pretty safe to say that Trump governed based on who voted for him and would withhold money to communities if they didn't vote for him?
I would go so far to say that the Trump administration during the COVID pandemic more or less damned people in blue areas and places that he didn't find sufficiently loyal to suffering and death.
So yes, I would say that is true.
The stuff he spread about hurricanes in North Carolina in areas that he felt didn't vote for him enough in other elections, he pretended that the FEMA wasn't going to Republican houses.
He was willing to spread absolute horrible lies about the government or about areas if he felt like they had fealty to him.
So you can imagine that if Bezos walks into Mar-a-Lago and says, hey, Donald, remember when we didn't endorse anybody in the Washington Post?
Well, I did that for you.
And he goes, yeah, that's great.
Thanks.
So, okay, you take over the post office now.
Like, that's literally what's the mindset here and what's going on in this whole thing.
And it's going to end up killing people in this next administration because we know that Trump will continue to do this and only govern to people who he feel are sufficiently loyal to him.
People are going to die.
And people are going to die.
I'm not being hyperbolic.
People are going to die because Donald Trump won a second term.
And that reminds me to tell everyone again.
At this point in which you are waiting on Trump to take power, if you are listening to this wondering what you can do, reach out to the mutual aid groups in your area.
The people who are taking care of people who are doing without, who are trying to make up for what the government doesn't actually invest in, ask them how they need help.
Not just in terms of money, but ask how you can volunteer, how you can form relationships.
When it comes to the postal service, God knows what that's going to lead to.
God knows if that's what's going to happen, but it is going to be a rash of privatization, the likes of which I don't think most people are prepared for.
Right.
And then, by the way, to see Louis DeJoy in front of Congress this week, and they're grilling him and they're asking him about all the failures, which are failures, right?
People who have to rely on medications and all sorts of important stuff by mail, which is hard to believe in 2024, but it really does exist.
People still really need it to survive.
You have him putting his hands over his ears and Pretending as if he's just some sort of liberal guy who is attacking him for his politics.
It turns out it was a Republican who was doing the attacking and trying to walk him through this stuff.
That image is going to probably represent everything we need to know about what's going to happen over the next four years.
Yes, and just real fast, on the subject of the Postal Service, the DMV, Veterans Affairs, you name it, right?
Is it fair to say that those institutions need reformed?
Yeah, they do, of course.
Okay, so real fast, Nick, just to go ahead and talk about something from the past, something like a, I don't know, No Child Left Behind, in which quote-unquote failing schools would lose funds.
What do we know happens when something that is struggling gets its funds taken away?
Well, I mean, in that terms, we might get people who will lie about the results to get the funds back.
Well, they'll either lie about the results and it will get worse, or they'll talk about the failing results and then lose more money.
And then all of a sudden, the Republicans look around and say, what are we supposed to do?
We have no choice but to cut this stuff.
The entire point is that there's an actual problem that the Republicans have exploited, saying, here's a problem that needs fixed, and And what is their choice?
It's to privatize and give it to their wealthy cronies and the wealth class as opposed to investing in these things, updating these things, and actually giving them the help that they need.
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy over and over again.
And for what it's worth, I was a teacher during the No Child Left Behind, and there was a grace period where they had to establish a baseline for improvement.
And I think it was like two years.
So they tanked the numbers for those two years.
So, you know, students just didn't get as quality of education because we wanted them to get bad, do badly on these tests so that we could show improvement, you know, two years later.
You want to know something weird, Nick?
The quotas within the Soviet Union, as the Soviet Union started eating shit, they did the exact same thing.
They looked at the quotas, they looked at the numbers they were supposed to have, and what did they do?
They lied.
And so when you start putting these things on, they start failing.
Nick, speaking of concerning numbers, man, we're on fire with segues today.
Let's just stop for a second and appreciate it.
We're actually killing it with the segues today.
Well, until now.
Well, you know, I'm just bringing people on.
There is now a growing fear that the Republican Party is going to trigger a constitutional convention.
For those who don't know, a constitutional convention is where the states get together and they're able to fast-track changes to the Constitution at a breakneck pace.
It requires two-thirds of the states to get on board.
At present, that would be 34 states.
For a little bit of background right now, the Republican Party controls 28 of the 50 states, which means that they're six off from that.
But Nick, wouldn't you know, there are more than 34 applications for a constitutional convention that are on the record before Donald Trump takes power, which I don't know about you, but that doesn't make me feel better.
It's kind of like when you see those movies about cold cases, and they're like, hey, go out in the back.
There's all the files.
And then he walks in there and goes, okay, which file is it?
And he goes, the whole wall are the files you're looking at, right?
So this reminds me of random states from decades ago had filed an application for a constitutional convention.
No one is around from that era anymore, but somehow someone has to remember or realize, oh, you know what?
We still have that outstanding and it's in there where then someone can now, like the Trump administration, take advantage of.
It's pretty crazy.
It really is.
And I think that to look at how this thing has happened, because...
There in California, you have a state rep who's trying to withdraw all of California's applications for a constitutional convention.
God knows if they'll get it done, but there is a possibility that Donald Trump will come in power with a vast majority of the states on record calling for one.
Could they call one?
I don't know.
But then I hear people saying, well, won't someone stand up for him?
Have you looked around at the Democrats lately?
I don't think you're going to get a lot of pushback on that.
We also need to look at this and understand there's a reason why the Republicans have been spending so much time with the likes of Viktor Orban and Javier Malay and all of these right-wing authoritarians around the world.
They are taking notes.
They're looking at how those particular countries have been rigged, how their budgets have been slashed, how things have been privatized, how they've taken over democracy.
They're looking for stuff like this.
I'm not telling you that they're going to do it, but I'm telling you that the right-wing think tanks and institutes have been looking at this for years.
I'm not telling you that they're going to do it, but I'm telling you that the right-wing think tanks and institutes have been looking at this for years.
I've read their files on it.
I've read their files on it.
I've read their reports.
I've read their reports.
They've wanted a constitutional convention more than most anything, basically to scrap the parts of the constitution that so-called quote-unquote originalism runs aground up.
They've wanted a constitutional convention more than most anything, basically to scrap the parts of the Constitution that so-called, quote-unquote, originalism runs aground up.
I also would not be telling the entire story if I didn't talk about the fact that this mess is in part due to the Democratic national strategy, which originally was a 50-state strategy.
I always talk about this with Howard Dean, which made the possibility of Barack Obama's landslide in 2008.
This sort of conceding states, so-called red states, and then just having a slate of, you know, swing states, which, by the way, all went Republican this time around, the Democratic Party owns a large portion of the responsibility for creating a situation like this.
And who even knows?
28 Republican states could all get on the same board because they take all of their talking points from the same think tanks and institutes.
Are you going to tell me there aren't six states that might want to get in a constitutional convention in order to try and move the Constitution in one way or another and then get in the room and get absolutely rolled and have deal-making the likes of which you've never seen, particularly because the wealth class owns a large portion of our political class?
This could happen.
This is something that we should take seriously.
And if Democrats and lovers of freedom or the Constitution or whatever are actually concerned, they should be taking some steps to try and knock this thing out before it gets started.
And just so it's clear what a constitutional convention is, right?
It's like if they have enough votes from the states, they can actually rewrite the Constitution itself.
One scratch, yes.
But there's a vote after that, right?
When they come together to rewrite it, they now have to vote on the actual policy that they're writing, right?
There is a vote, and again, it would take that type of a majority.
But Nick, right now in this present situation, I'm not so sure that you wouldn't have some of the worst chicanery that you've ever seen.
I mean, not just outright corruption, but blackmail, which you're often pointing out, like the amount of people who could be influenced going into this thing.
Like it's better not to get in the door is what I would say.
But what the weirdest thing about this is that if you would ask me this before I realized that the Trump administration was trying to be behind this, I would have been like, rewrite the Constitution.
Awesome.
Let's do that.
Let's rewrite every bit of language in that thing so it's updated to our modern language we know the fuck it's trying to say.
That would be amazing.
Let's finally get the Second Amendment rewritten properly so we can understand what they wanted in the beginning.
But that's what's interesting about that is that there are all these moments where we can all agree, everybody across the board, that certain things, the post office doesn't work that well, or our public schools need to be fixed, right?
And it's amazing how quickly those things turn in different directions depending on what political party you're in.
And I would like to think that from the Democratic side, they're trying to maintain and uphold and progress and make better, whereas the Republicans are just trying to get rich.
So I just want to point out one thing before we get into the much-anticipated discussion about the drone situation, and it's this.
And I want people to remember this and tuck it back into their brains.
Nick, this is something you and I have sort of touched on and we haven't gotten into explicitly.
Have you noticed...
That when Democrats are in control of the country or whenever Republicans are losing elections, everything's ironclad.
You can only do so many things.
The Constitution says this.
The filibuster says this.
You can't really do whatever.
It seems intractable, right?
And when Republicans are in control and have the advantage, it's malleable.
Right?
Like, all of a sudden, like, birthright citizenship might be able to go away.
The entire way that Congress approves or disapproves of nominees could go away.
We could suddenly have a constitutional convention that could change everything, and that would be proposed by the party that says you have to obey the Constitution to the letter and original intent, even beyond what's actually written on the parchment.
That's sort of back and forth between concreteness and malleability.
Notice who it serves, notice how it happens, and notice the times where it's taking place and other times where it's not happening.
Absolutely.
It's too bad that they had such a...
Evil geniuses at these think tanks who really study this stuff.
They can figure out all these back doors and it's frustrating.
Nick, I'll tell you as somebody who is trafficked with non-profit organizations of the liberal and progressive variety, you know what they talk about all the time?
It's trying to raise money to simply keep their lights on.
If you think right-wing think tanks and institutes, the ones who write these laws and create these plans, are worried about keeping their lights on, I have another story for you.
Yeah.
All right, Nick, we have to talk about drones.
So, undoubtedly, everybody listening to this podcast is aware of this, but there has been widespread reports and accounts of God knows how many number of strange drones and aerial phenomenon that have been showing up Particularly on the eastern seaboard around New York and New Jersey.
It has taken on a sort of a UFO-type panic.
The government has been very strange in talking about this.
They've said they don't know what it is, but it's not a threat.
Don't worry about it.
Meanwhile, equipment's been thrown here and thrown there.
We don't exactly know what's going on.
This is a very, very, very strange situation.
I want to talk about what I think it could possibly be and also what it means about our current American sort of reality.
But what were your initial reactions to it, Nick?
How do you feel about this strange phenomenon that's been cooking up lately?
Well, based on the current climate of our world over the last several years, it's almost too predictable that, of course, aliens are now coming.
Of course, that's the next thing, the logical thing that has to happen after all the other stupid stuff that's going on that's so ridiculously crazy.
And listen, whether or not there is intelligent life out there, I am definitely open to that possibility, so I'm always interested in the next thing about that.
But this one, I guess, are we ready to actually say what we want to think it is?
Or are we just going to talk about it?
So basically, I've boiled it down to five things that I think it possibly is.
What do you think is going on?
Okay.
So, you know, the obvious answer, what's the rule?
What's the law?
Murphy's Law?
No.
Occam's Razor.
Occam's Razor.
It's just people flying some drones, you know, around the night.
You know, big deal, right?
Yeah, but some of the size of cars.
Yeah.
Yeah, some of these are really big.
That's true.
So that's like six feet wide or whatever.
So, okay, so it's not me with my little drone filming some stuff at night, right?
Which wouldn't even come out because you can't see at night.
Wait, do you think it's every documentarian in the United States of America?
Well, yeah, right.
Or they're going to make the next Netflix documentary.
Because, you know, you have to have that drone footage now.
Every one of them.
You know what I laugh about every time I watch a documentary is I think about how it must have felt to be a documentarian in the United States of America the moment the drone came out.
And, like, that had to be, like, the first time you saw an electric light.
You're just, like, everything has changed.
He uses photo three times.
This is awesome.
Yeah, this is great.
Yeah.
So...
And by the way, that's happening in other places.
So as it's starting to pop up across other places in the country, I have no doubt it's just people like, wait a minute, I don't want to be...
I want to fly my drone so I can get that attention.
But here's what I read.
Here's what I thought.
I saw somebody thinking that...
It sounds as plausible as anything else is that they're going around looking for nuclear weaponry signatures, which would come out as like a heat map or whatever when they're going.
I mean, it works better at night.
You know, is that tied into like, you know, Ukraine and like missing nuclear weapons or whatever?
Like, I don't know, maybe.
But that is interesting to me in some degree where like they're trying to keep peace and kind of protect the country from that kind of thing.
And that's as plausible as anything else as I can come up with.
Okay, so here's the list of stuff, and I'll just give you my brief little overview.
Here are the things that I think are possible.
I mean, aliens, why not?
I mean, like you, it's just like at this point, like, maybe.
I don't know.
Like, that's the world that we live in.
The next one is U.S. training.
Right, that this is the United States training a lot of their new technology, particularly as we're inching up on a possible World War III situation.
I think I said in the live stream with you that World War, I think someone asked what World War III would be like, and I said that it would largely be based on drone warfare, right?
It would be whose algorithms would most fight against one another, and we'd see a lot of that, so maybe that's it.
There's also the possibility that it's foreign countries that are spying and also something that I'm not seeing a lot of, which is if there is going to be a World War III in a major conflict, you have to solve the problem of nuclear deterrence, which is you have a bunch of nuclear states that if they're attacked, they can simply shoot off nuclear missiles.
Well, you have to figure out a way around that, which could possibly be drones that could, you know, jam signals and electronics that go to nuclear missiles.
The next one is what you just brought up, which is the theory that this is somehow or another looking for a possible dirty bomb within the United States.
If that's the case, that's terrifying.
And I just want to go on the record right now, Nick, and say that if something like that goes off in the United States of America at this point, and by the way, it would be convenient if it happened during a Trump presidency.
I'm just going to leave it there and we don't have to talk very much more about it.
What we would see would be 9-11 times 100. It would change our culture forever, and this right-wing authoritarian push that we're in right now, it would really, really shake off the game board.
And the last thing that I'm just putting out there, security theater.
What do we love in this country?
We love flying our jets and showing people the strength of the military.
We love displays of strength.
We don't know what it is, and I don't know that we're going to know what it is, maybe ever.
But I do want to point this out, Nick.
This is indicative of a point in which most Americans feel like things are completely out of their control and that larger machinations are happening that they can't control and that they can't manipulate and or put pressure on.
This looks a lot like the UFO panic that we had in the 1950s as the Cold War started taking off.
And what inspired that, Nick?
Sputnik, the first satellite, which felt like we were vulnerable and anything could happen.
And then all of a sudden we started looking in the skies and seeing threats everywhere.
I don't know what's happening here.
I think there are some definite ideas that have some attractiveness in terms of explaining it, but I think the larger thing is it represents an inherent fear and powerlessness and lack of control that American citizens have.
Because a lot of these things are just planes and helicopters that people are misidentifying, and they're looking for it.
It's a mass panic in a way.
Yeah, I mean, hopefully it wasn't stars like one of our local politicians thought.
He got roasted endlessly because he showed Orion's belt.
But I have a feeling that whatever picture he showed, like, there were other things in there he meant to show, but that's all that came out in the picture or whatever.
But...
Yeah, I mean, the way that the silence and the strange reactions to things, even like guys like Chuck Schumer, who should be kind of in the know at that point about what it might be, it is wishy-washy enough that it does feel like it could be one of those things where it's really, you know, the explanation would cause a panic, and they can't afford to do that.
But I certainly think that what you mentioned in terms of timing-wise of the Trump administration stuff, you know, definitely gets my...
Well, Nick, on that topic, and I'm just spitballing here.
I'm just throwing some things out.
I'm just remembering some things.
Do you remember during the Republican primary and then during the lead up to the 2024 election, what did every Republican talk about with immigration?
It wasn't just coming and taking dogs, eating dogs and cats and taking jobs and housing.
It was that somebody was going to smuggle something in through the border and we needed to be proactive about it before it happened.
We heard that over and over again.
I'm just saying it would be convenient if something like that were happening.
I'm not like sitting here telling you something's happening.
I'm just telling you that I have seen enough of this stuff take place.
It feels very strange.
They'll have an information packet about the person who brought it in within minutes.
Within minutes.
And the entire point of what I'm talking about here is we can speculate, which, you know, I don't know about you.
I was looking forward to having this conversation.
Like, as this thing started building up, I was like, I can't wait to talk to my friend Nick about this, right?
Because you are the guy that I want to talk to about this.
The larger truth of it, though, is that it reflects a fear within the United States of America that things are completely out of control, that they're on the decline, that people can't actually change things.
And it makes you feel evolutionary wise, it makes you feel like you're lower down on the food chain.
Right?
I mean, that's why we're afraid of lions and, you know, predatory animals and stuff like that.
But this whole thing is very, very strange.
And I don't feel like it's actually getting even the attention it deserves.
And it also shows that, you know, the military industrial complex, it holds all the cards in this country.
And the fact that we're not kept up to date about this stuff, I think is really troubling.
Yeah, and if you are, you know, an authoritarian who wants more fealty to you, then that kind of fear goes a long way.
Long way.
You know, we have a choice.
Just like 9-11, we don't have a choice.
They have to have certain aliens.
We need to know.
We have this fear.
It's not unfounded, per se, especially with the tumultuousness that's going on in Ukraine and Russia.
I mean, I've been worried about it since the fall of the Soviet Union, because apparently there were missiles that disappeared or warheads, and we never really knew where they went.
And so it's on my mind.
I mean, I read the...
Gosh, it's not Meldrum.
Who's the other guy that writes Some of All Fears?
What's that guy?
Oh, Crichton, isn't it?
Is it Crichton?
No, it's the other guy.
He writes, you know, Harrison Ford as the president.
We've now reached the point of the podcast, which has become one of our featured segments in which we vaguely remember something, but we don't remember.
I'm worried, and, you know, we'll be able to trace my...
The guy did Jack Reacher, wasn't it?
Tom Clancy.
Tom Clancy, yeah.
So, we'll be able to trace my mental decline over the course of several episodes, you know, so at least I'll have the record when we get there, but...
And that's what we're doing here, Nick.
We're making a record of the American descent into decline and madness.
All right, everybody, we will be back with The Weekender on Friday.
A reminder, go to patreon.com slash mycraigpodcast.
Support the show!
You don't trust mainstream media, you trust us.
Keep trusting us and support us.
In the meantime, you can find Nick...
By the way, Blue Sky has gotten weird lately.
You know, it's an oiling mass of, you know, moving parts.
I'll just say this, and we maybe can talk about it later.
There are some operations taking place on Blue Sky that are really troubling.
Oh, text me later.
Real disinformation shit going on over there.
You can find Nick on Blue Sky at Nick House when you find me at J.Y. Sexton.
