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Dec. 27, 2024 - The Muckrake Political Podcast
44:31
The Weekender: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Destruction

Nick Hauselman is off on an excursion, leaving Jared Yates Sexton to man the pod and deliver this rant about liberal media permission structures, Manifest Destiny, and the need for opponents of authoritarianism to get ready, get prepared, and get ready to fight. This is a free preview of the patron-exclusive Weekender episode that comes out every Friday. If you enjoyed this episode and want to support the show, head over to Patreon and become a patron today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hey, everybody.
Welcome to an extremely slapped-together edition of the Weekender Edition of the McRig Podcast.
I'm Jared Jade Sexton.
Nick Houselman, our good, good friend, has left for nicer climates, an impromptu vacation.
We wish him well.
We hope he gets all rested up, all replenished as we head into the new year to do the business that we have to do.
A reminder, go over to patreon.com slash mccrakepodcast.
Support the show.
Keep us editorially independent.
And as always, I know you don't trust the corporate media because you shouldn't.
That's why you support this show.
Keep us rolling.
Keep us growing.
And yeah, you're going to want to listen to the entirety of this rant that I am about to go on.
Because, you know, when Nick takes off for a couple of days and I'm left to helm the show, yeah, you don't get opening music, but you know what you do get?
You get just me sitting in a parking lot talking about all the shit that I want to talk about.
And there's a lot that I want to get to today.
I hope you've all had good holidays.
Whatever it is that you celebrate or don't celebrate, or if you just like to hang out and look at the clock and wind down the seconds, I hope it's been good to you.
It's been a little bit of getting away from it all for me and just kind of getting my breath back, getting my feet back under me.
And meanwhile, the stupid just continues on as we roll towards January 20th and this brand new accelerated era of politics.
But I have felt...
Very grateful for all of you, the people who have reached out to, you know, say some nice things, wish us happy holidays, you know, talk about the fact that, you know, you trust us and give us your faith.
It really means the world.
Speaking of the corporate media, everybody, I want to go ahead and start with, you know, something that I... I saw coming a little bit and I've sort of talked about trying to tell people exactly how the second Trump administration was going to play out in terms of the normalizing of it and the reaction to it.
You might have seen CNN covering Trump's recent rantings About his wanting to take control of the Panama Canal, wanting to buy Greenland, and maybe even welcoming Canada in as the 51st state.
And I gotta tell you, the more that I think about Canada being the 51st state, I don't know if y'all have looked at a map recently.
That's a big-ass state.
I would argue that maybe, possibly, that is too big of a land area to be one state.
And actually, if we want to go ahead and take Trump's rantings seriously, let's go.
Let's make a bunch of new states.
Let's get a bunch of new senators and representatives in there.
And I don't think him and the other Republicans have given a lot of thought to what a group of people, millions of people who have been enjoying socialized medicine and, you know, more liberal policies.
I don't think they've given a thought to what that would mean in terms of the makeup of the House and the Senate.
It might be the thing that puts us over the edge in terms of, like, getting some constitutional amendments going, but neither here nor there.
CNN, which we'll get into how it's floundering in just a little bit, ran this article the other day that treated Trump's rantings as if they were serious.
Things to actually discuss and maybe look forward to.
It included one of my favorite quotes in a long time.
If he's serious, it would rival the Louisiana Purchase.
Which is a pretty tremendous thing to type out, have an editor look at it, and then go ahead and just hit post, you know, for S's and G's.
In this article, CNN refers to the divine right of manifest destiny.
And, just to get everybody up to speed, Manifest Destiny, of course, was what animated the United States as it carried out the genocide of the indigenous population and moved further and further to the West.
Which was an interesting time, if you will.
A time period that was marked by an American belief Thank God the creator of the universe just absolutely adored, you know, white Americans and really, really, really wanted them to have control over the continent.
Fundamentally, though...
Down at the material conditions level, this was necessary in order to vent and push the tensions that were brewing between slave states and non-slave states further and further to the West, using free real estate almost as creating a frontier that could push all of those tensions out to the side.
You know, you could take a lot of people Who didn't feel like they were getting a fair deal from the economy and the government.
And they could go ahead and instead of fighting one another, they could fight one another and also the indigenous population on the frontier.
It shouldn't shock anyone that once we reach California and once we had realized quote-unquote manifest destiny, weirdly enough all those tensions just turned back around and we just started killing one another in a civil war.
Well, now that we're in an era of just boiling tensions between each other, we're now talking once again about expanding that frontier and moving some people around.
Of course, now we're talking about the Panama Canal.
We're talking about Greenland, which I'm sure the people of Greenland are real excited about being purchased.
Speaking of purchasing human beings as commodities.
And of course, Canadians.
I'm sure they're really happy about the idea of just being consumed by the United States of America.
Not to mention, and we'll talk more about this in a second, the possibility of a military excursion into Mexico, which was another casualty of Manifest Destiny.
Yeah, it is wild that Trump is just having conversations, as we've followed in the past, just talking to anybody who just throws, you know, spaghetti at the wall and sees what sticks.
And he'll just go out and rant about it.
And those rantings of a madman are then taken seriously and weighed and questioned.
You know, we very well might carry out some of these things because, as I've talked about with Joe Biden, who is an institutionalist, who, as president, you sort of have a choice.
You either let the moment control the moment or you sort of put your thumb on the scale and make things happen.
Trump isn't necessarily going to be the one to make things happen, although his histrionics and sort of outbursts and rantings, they can occasionally sort of change the situation, but the oligarchs and the wealth class behind him are very interested in deciding what the moment is as opposed to letting the moment decide what the moment is.
So, for all I know, we could possibly see these things happen.
But within these wild fantasies, what we're now watching is the liberal permission structures, including places like CNN, New York Times, The Washington Post.
We're now watching them begin to take Trump's rantings and treat them seriously.
And in that moment, what happens is that it activates fantasies of American exceptionalism.
And I want you to think about what America has felt like over the past half century or so.
And it's been a depressive period because America has gone into decline as neoliberal globalism has sort of taken over the consensus.
And what we're looking at now is sort of a moment of manic imagination.
And this is one of the reasons, and Nick and I have talked about this particularly in our discussions about the movement from Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan and the movement from the New Deal consensus to the neoliberal consensus.
Just by going out and talking about American exceptionalism, And it's mourning in America.
It activates one of the defining frameworks that made America such an aggressive and destructive nation.
This also includes white supremacy.
Chauvinistic nationalism, which basically says of course that the universe, it favors us and as a result we should be able to do whatever it is that we want to do.
And it creates this illusion and delusion that is able to be taken advantage of by the wealth class as they want to gather resources and further their extraction of wealth and consolidation of wealth.
Here, a lot of this has to do with climate change, the fact that we are inching up on an existential crisis that none of the shareholders and none of the wealth class actually want to take care of because, Of course, they have created the situation in which climate change has grown as an existential threat.
But also, all of their incentives are based on cashing in on those problems.
So, because disaster capitalism means that this is going to take place unless something radical changes and shifts, what we have now is a mad dash to go ahead and gobble up as much stuff as humanly possible.
So of course, Panama Canal is about controlling access to shipping and resources, but when it comes to Canada and Greenland, There are a lot of people on the right who want to go ahead and gobble up some of that colder territory so that when things get warmer, America has more access to some of the more temperate places, as well as access to more resources and more labor.
Mexico is, man, I gotta tell you, I feel a lot of energy growing in terms of an American excursion, a limited war with Mexico, whatever they want to call that, which would include, as I talked about on a prior episode, sort of teaming up with elements within Mexico to fight the drug cartels.
Who are armed with American weapons and money to go ahead and sort of take over a large part of their production and distribution.
I could see this stuff happening.
And one of the reasons it could happen Is because when Trump says this shit and when they push this absolute madness, like we should be looking at this and saying, you know, these are, this is the type of stuff that if you heard people screaming about it, you know, in a grocery store, you would get as far away from them as humanly possible.
But because Donald Trump has won the presidency a second time, and because the American Foundation relies on normalizing power, particularly at that level, we now have to grant it permission.
And places like CNN talking about this, and anybody listening to the McCrake podcast knows that this is absolute horseshit.
This is crazy horseshit.
But a lot of liberal America, which is starting to normalize Donald Trump, and is starting to just move further and further to the right, while also being granted permission by places like CNN, even MSNBC, and the Democratic Party, and a lot of these liberal platforms like the New York Times and the Washington Post, And the Atlantic, for that matter.
They're sort of getting permission from them to go ahead and accept this stuff.
And so, as that happens, it becomes more possible.
Reality starts to shift.
It becomes more malleable.
And for anybody who questions whether or not this is possible, all you have to do...
Is go back to the beginning of the 21st century.
And where George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the neoconservatives, who have all come under the umbrella of the Democratic Party now, had widespread support by all these liberal structures.
You know, blame for the invasion of Iraq and the war on terror, it now largely goes to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, even as they've been, you know, sort of Laundered of any guilt of killing millions of people and raiding America's resources and then destroying the economy.
It's just sort of become this blob.
We don't really talk about how it happened or how it took place.
We don't talk about the fact that the New York Times was one of the leading drivers towards that.
Or that after September 11th, it wasn't just Fox News that was pushing for this aggression.
It was CNN. It was MSNBC. It was the Democratic Party.
So that moment of mass psychosis That is the environment that, if we're not careful, we are going to find ourselves in once more.
And that environment, it only fuels this stuff.
It only makes it more and more possible that it's going to happen, and quite frankly, and I want people to understand this, There is a relief among many people, even among liberals.
There is a relief when a strongman and chauvinistic policies start to take over.
Nobody wants to live in a declining country.
Nobody wants to think about how the country that has defined them as people and defined their realities.
No one wants to live in this sinking ship.
So as a result, it suddenly becomes very exciting for some the idea that we're going to have a reinvigoration of the American project.
This is one of the reasons why Ronald Reagan was able to win two terms so convincingly, and why the Democratic Party was more than happy to become more conservative and more and more dedicated to neoliberalism.
In this entire structure, you can even start to see how it's taking shape.
So, I brought up CNN, and CNN is struggling.
If you take a look at the numbers that CNN has right now, I mean, it has less than 300,000 viewers.
And in that, we largely have a lot of people within the political class who are turning to CNN and things like Morning Joe, which has already licked the boot, of course.
We've already covered that.
But the people who are still watching it are largely liberal tastemakers.
They're largely the political class who will go ahead and also provide permission structures.
People like John Fetterman, who are going to go ahead and go along with these things.
And before long, if we're not careful, if we don't push back, if we don't fight this, we're going to see a large-scale capitulation and acceptance of this stuff.
With this, the Wall Street Journal, who, listen, I have been very critical of the Wall Street Journal because this is the wealth class's newspaper of record.
The Wall Street Journal has been doing some decent reportage lately.
And again, I will give credit where credit is due.
And they have done some pretty decent things lately in terms of actually telling people what's going on.
Because there are a lot of people within the wealth class who, they see Trump, who is a chaotic, destructive figure.
They want to know what's going on.
The wealth class needs to understand what's actually occurring in American politics.
So as all of these liberal bastions and liberal platforms and liberal tastemakers are creating the permission structures, places like the Wall Street Journal have to fill the vacuum and give accurate news and an accurate portrayal of what's occurring.
And what the Wall Street Journal has found is that all of these major corporations are getting in line.
Ford, Facebook, Amazon, Goldman Sachs, General Motors, AT&T, all of these major corporations that once upon a time decried Donald Trump and decried the attempted coup of January 6th, they're flooding Trump's coffers with donations.
They're trying to buy in to what is being created.
Because not only do they want to benefit from the destruction of the regulatory state, they're also very, very excited that, and again, Joe Biden, lots of reasons to be critical of him.
His administration was one of the most aggressive antitrust administrations that we've seen in a long time.
They want to get rid of all of that.
They want to move more toward not just a laissez-faire environment, but a more, not just friendly, but a government helmed by the wealth class and for the wealth class.
They are all getting on board with what's happening.
And if you want to know where things are going, look where they put their money.
Look what they're going along with.
Anything that Donald Trump can cook up that could benefit them, and especially all of the things that Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, that entire oligarchical clique, all of the things that they can cook up that these corporations...
Who, by the way, look how fast they moved away from the Democratic Party when they realized that Donald Trump and the Republican Party was the organ to actually get things done.
So they're putting all their chips on the table and pushing them in with Trump and with this new administration.
And what's happening on the ground?
What we're now seeing, and the Associated Press just released a poll of this, Democrats, overwhelmingly, are moving away from political news.
They're not quite interested in being as informed anymore.
And we've speculated on this through the viewership of places like CNN, MSNBC, as well as the drop in subscriptions from the New York Times and the Washington Post.
This new poll has found that 70% of self-identified Democrats, they're checking out.
They're not interested in having anything to do with this.
And so what are we seeing?
We're seeing the raising of a white flag.
And the reason is because the last few years of political struggle, and of course this was all culture war struggle, which is designed and implemented and weaponized by the wealth class, It has worn people out, which was by design.
That's what it's intended to do.
It's to keep us from talking about class.
It's to keep us from talking about actual reform and corruption.
It's designed to keep us arguing amongst ourselves and, quite frankly, wear people out.
The thing in all of this that makes it possible...
Is the idea that, you know what, I'm done fighting about this.
Maybe it was some fun sport for a while, particularly as social media was on the uprise and people could post about it and retweet things and do memes about it, you name it.
Now it's not, quote unquote, fun to be in the hashtag resistance.
Maybe it's okay just to sit back and let it happen.
There's a weird thing that occurs within the human mind.
It is an unconscious reaction to it.
All of a sudden, it's over and done with.
Donald Trump not only won, he won the popular vote.
There's going to be four more years of Donald Trump.
And quite frankly, people were tired of those culture war battles.
Hearing him talk about Make America Great Again...
Maybe they'll give him a chance.
And that's a slippery slope.
You start giving him a chance.
You start giving him the benefit of the doubt.
And then each emerging story and decision, the cognitive dissonance has to be dealt with.
So you give Donald Trump the benefit of the doubt.
He does something like, I don't know, utilizes the military, local sheriffs, and paramilitary groups to start rounding up, quote-unquote, criminal immigrants.
Well, maybe you don't want to see the violence being done, but they're criminals.
So, okay, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.
The next thing that occurs, the mind is much more likely to go along with that thing.
Because every time you have to deal with cognitive dissonance, your brain has to make a decision, an unconscious decision.
Am I going to change everything that I thought I knew, or am I going to go ahead and give myself a way to sort of ease it and sort of make myself feel better?
So each decision that occurs as you move down that road, you're more and more likely to go along with things.
And this comes after years of watching the Democratic Party foil itself as Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema torpedoed Joe Biden's agenda.
As we watched Joe Biden and the Democrats not stand up for voting rights.
As we watched them not stand up for reproductive rights.
As we watched them not stand up for gay and trans rights.
And then, has they armed Israel during the genocide and the atrocities being carried out in Gaza and then Lebanon?
So we're already a ways down that road.
And this is one of the reasons why, as it was occurring, it wasn't about purity.
And I can hear a lot of liberal moderates yelling about, well, we can't have a purity test.
It's not about that.
It's about not making deals with the devil along the way.
Because with each deal, the next deal, the next deal gets easier to make.
And then the next deal, and then the next deal.
What aids this, once more, are the liberal platforms that create these permission structures.
You might even have doubts at times.
I'm not talking to you, the listener of the McCreek Podcast, because you're clued in on all of this.
You understand what is right or wrong, and you've taken what is probably some unpopular stands within liberal circles and the hashtag resistance or whatever the hell we're talking about.
I'm talking about the larger liberal ecosystem.
They take a lot of their cues from these articles and from this coverage.
And, you know, it's not official.
The Republican Party has taken its marching orders largely from Fox News and largely from the institutes and think tanks that are funded by the wealth class that help give birth to the new oligarchical class.
Going back to the George W. Bush era, there were daily talking points that were handed down from Fox News in terms.
They were all designed by these think tanks and institutes and then given to Roger Ailes and the Fox News rank and file of how to talk about things, what positions to take, you name it.
That was a tightly constructed permission structure.
That was a tightly constructed political agenda and propaganda machine.
The liberal permission structures are a lot looser.
It's moderates talking to one another and giving each other permission to move further and further right over time.
Now that comes with a lot of other incentives that are taking place.
CNN is hemorrhaging viewers.
One of the things we've heard from them, you know, each time they keep bringing in new heads of the network, every single one of them says, well, we need to be less of an echo chamber.
We need to be, you know, a lot more independent.
And that doesn't mean bringing in voices from the left or even progressives, of course.
That means bringing in more and more right-wing voices and figures and coverage.
So, as they're hemorrhaging viewers, they are most definitely going to move towards the right.
They're going to have articles and opinion pieces that treat Donald Trump's rantings as if they're normal, that do not critique Elon Musk and other members of the oligarchical class.
So, they themselves are engaged in their own battle against cognitive dissonance.
I mean, all the people who run those networks and run those platforms who are from the wealth class and who are much incentivized in order to carry out the actions of the wealth class, that's what they're doing.
But the water in the pot is being turned up and up and up into a boil.
Until these things are no longer, well, we're just asking questions.
Well, we're just covering both sides.
Then all of a sudden we start hearing about invading Canada, invading Mexico, buying Greenland, taking over the Panama Canal.
We're not even to January 20th yet.
And all we're seeing, articles and coverage that goes ahead and creates permission structures for liberals and moderates to go along with this stuff.
CNN is hoping to bring along more Republican viewers.
Best of luck with that.
They're going to continue moving towards the right.
MSNBC, which is similarly hemorrhaging viewers, I mean, I don't even know what's going to happen with them at this point.
They very well could be sold in these upcoming mergers and acquisitions that we're getting ready to watch take place during the Trump administration.
These people are just licking their lips and sharpening their knives.
They are so excited.
And if you pay any attention whatsoever...
To what executives are saying about what they expect.
It's just one larger merger and acquisition after another consolidating and creating media monopolies.
Which is all that they want to do and they were biding their time during Biden's administration.
This thing hasn't even started and it's already off to a galloping start.
Going through that list again.
Ford, which God knows how much money they've got trying to get their electric vehicles off the ground because of the Biden administration.
Facebook, we've seen Mark Zuckerberg trying to go full MAGA even after him and the Democrats were basically playing footsie underneath the table for years.
Amazon, Jeff Bezos was, you know, doing the same thing that Zuckerberg was.
Goldman Sachs, I mean, my God, Kamala Harris basically campaigned with Goldman Sachs.
General Motors, another EV beneficiary and another corporation that's been in bed with the Democrats.
AT&T, the exact same.
Not only are they giving money to Trump at this point, trying to bribe him and curry his favor, They're also bringing in MAGA and GOP consultants to go ahead and quote-unquote de-woke themselves.
Getting rid of DEI statements, getting rid of ideological, and I'm putting giant scare quotes around that, ideological statements of purpose that they've had on their websites and in their corporate documents.
They're getting prepared.
They're getting ready.
They're setting the table for what is coming on January 20th.
We're already seeing the bleed of the second Trump administration into the days before Trump even takes the oath of office.
I'm talking about this, and again, one of my resolutions in the post-2024 election period, it's not just to diagnose this stuff.
It's to talk about this as a means of being prepared and allowing you an opportunity to not just get ready, but to start doing the work that's necessary to stop this power grab and this authoritarian slide.
I wanted to talk about this so you could understand what it is that you're up against.
Every time you see one of these articles, every time you glimpse some of this coverage, first things first, stop thinking it's a mistake.
And we watched for years where every time the New York Times or the Washington Post or CNN would do a little bit of this, they would flirt with it.
People would scream on social media, oh my god, don't you know what you're doing?
Think about this.
What's this headline?
They were seeing the opening salvos of this.
They were watching the wealth class use liberal platforms to give a permission structure to liberals and moderates and Democrats to get ready to be prepared for this.
This is a very, very large thing.
It's institutional.
It's foundational.
I bring all this up as a means of telling you we have a lot of work to do.
And as we're in winter, as mild as this winter has been, speaking of climate change, It's good to think about what you need to do to prepare for the harshness of winter when resources aren't as available as things start getting a little harder in terms of survival.
Now's the time to recognize what you're up against and to start making plans yourself.
I've spent a lot of time on my substack, Dispatches from a Collapsing State, trying to get people prepared for the mindset of organizing, coalition building, and hopefully building a movement that will fight back against this stuff.
They've got a head start.
Buy a head start, depending upon how you all look at time.
I mean, this has been going on since 1971 with the Powell Memo.
It's been going on since the founding of the country.
And it's not like we're going to be able to harness as much in terms of resources as the rest of these people.
You know, when I do my organizing work and I'm talking with people who rely on things like fundraising, like, you are not going to match Elon Musk.
He's the richest man in the world.
You are not going to match the wealth class and the amount of wealth and resources that they put into all this stuff.
You and I are not going to be able to create our very own heritage foundation.
These people are awash in an ocean of wealth and resources.
But you know what we do have?
Numbers.
There is a lot more of us than there is of them.
That is why we have all these culture war flashpoints instead of class war flashpoints, which is what we're in, a class war.
We have to talk to other people and find other people who understand this stuff and care about this stuff and are passionate about this stuff.
And the race is on.
The race is on because as the Times, as CNN, as the Post, as all of these liberal platforms, corporate, liberal, wealth class platforms, the more of a head start that they have in terms of creating these permission structures, the harder it's going to be finding allies who are going to oppose this.
I know the people listening to this podcast have a very strong idea of what it is that they believe in, which I always say when people talk about the McCray Podcast.
I say we are a very self-selecting group of people.
This podcast is not for everybody.
Some people, you know, are just like, well, this is hard to really wrap your head around, and man, it's bleak sometimes.
Yeah, it is, because it's the reality of the situation.
It is a really pressing, dangerous situation.
I know a lot of us look at this and we think that opinions don't really change and they're just completely baked in.
But in the liberal world, the moderate, liberal, middle-class, white world, opinion does shift.
And that is the defining characteristic of our situation.
I tried warning people for years that this country was moving towards the right, that many liberals were becoming not just more comfortable with authoritarianism, but actually moving more towards the right and becoming more conservative.
It didn't happen in a vacuum.
It happened because Trump, of course, was continually platformed by our media, but also via the Republican Party and the American voters in the Electoral College system.
But also because our media was working overtime to do this.
Oftentimes unconsciously.
Oftentimes consciously.
There's a race on.
And the race is to win the minds of people.
We can't rest on our laurels right now.
We need to prepare for what's coming.
We need to prepare ourselves mentally and spiritually and emotionally.
But we also need to start having these conversations.
Because if we don't have these conversations, a lot of people are going to get lost because that's what these permission structures do.
They do it intentionally, and they do it unintentionally.
There's already movement in the polls.
We've covered it in the show.
Donald Trump has a high approval rating right now that has just grown and grown since the election.
It's not just because of the results of the election and people now see the permission structure of electoral results, but also what our media is feeding them by normalizing Trump.
I don't know what's coming exactly.
I know in terms of what the agenda is.
I know it's about concentrating wealth and also destroying what's left of the regulatory state and turning the government into a further redistributive and supportive model for the oligarchical wealth class.
We know that for sure.
We don't know what else is coming.
I brought up 9-11 earlier, and George W. Bush, who stole the 2000 election, his approval rating was at nearly 90% post-9-11.
We live in a very, very fragile geopolitical ecosystem.
We don't know if there's going to be another flashpoint.
We don't know if there's going to be a terrorist attack.
We don't know if there's going to be some sort of a larger moment that then consolidates support and approval behind whatever it is that Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and the oligarchical class want to carry out.
Right now, in the time period between the holidays and January 20th, We need to work our asses off.
We need to have as many frank and honest conversations with people as we possibly can We have to abandon red versus blue, Democrat versus Republican talking points.
We have to talk about the politics of class.
We have to talk about what the Trump administration is poised to do on behalf of the wealth and oligarchical class, but also what our media system has put in place.
People do not trust it.
People do not trust our institutions.
They do not trust politicians.
That works to our advantage.
They shouldn't trust those people.
They don't deserve trust.
But as long as we have this window where we can talk to people before these permission structures reach critical mass, we have to do that.
We have to find the people that not necessarily convince but give voice to them the suspicions that they already have.
They know this whole thing's rigged.
They know this whole thing's crooked.
And what are they looking for?
The same thing that MAGA cultists have been looking for.
Hope and answers.
And I know it sounds sacrilegious to say that Donald Trump gives them hope and that Donald Trump gives them answers.
But he does.
That's the only reason he's been able to gain the power and purchase that he has.
Of course...
That hope isn't real.
It's a lie.
And the answers aren't real, and they're lies.
Scapegoating vulnerable communities, creating conspiracy theories, which are in and of themselves permission structures in terms of accepting authoritarianism and power grabs and the erosion of liberal democracy.
But that's the exact same thing that happened with Manifest Destiny.
That's the exact same thing that happened during the War on Terror.
And that's the exact same thing that we're currently looking at right now.
We only have so much time.
But there's a lot of us listening to this podcast, but also your friends, your co-workers, your neighbors, your family members.
They need to understand what's going on.
They don't trust the institutions, they don't trust the media, they don't trust politicians, and they shouldn't.
But, the propaganda and permission structures that are being put together right now are going to be disastrous, unless they're pushed back on.
People aren't going to just wake up one day and everybody who says, well, Donald Trump isn't going to be a good president and he's not going to be able to carry out his promises, that is not how any of this works.
It's what liberal pundits will tell you and they tell you to just wait because they want this to work.
They might not know that they want it to work, but they want this to work because they don't actually want anything to change outside of the wealth class consolidating more power and more wealth.
We got time.
And what's more, we've got actual answers on our side.
We've got the actual truth on our side.
But we can't wait anymore.
The media's not going to save us.
The Democrats aren't going to save us.
We have to save ourselves.
And that's the message that I wanted to deliver today.
I'm so grateful for you.
I am so grateful once more for your trust and your faith.
You keep me going when times are hard.
I just couldn't be more thankful for you.
I hope wherever you are, whoever you're with, whatever your circumstances, that you're finding moments of joy and replenishment and reasons to be inspired to fight against this thing.
We're going to win over time.
It's not going to be easy.
But I truly, truly believe we're going to win.
And I hope wherever you are that you hear that, and you believe it, and you feel it, and it moves you to action.
I'll be back next week with a regular edition of the Munkerake Podcast.
I've got a guest lined up.
I'm excited about that conversation.
And then I think the next weekender, next Friday, I believe Nick will be back.
You'll have your boys back.
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