Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman reflect on the meaning of January 6th, 2020 on the fourth anniversary, and how the normalization of Trumpism could be a blow to democracy. They also discuss the authoritarian creep across the world as Justin Trudeau steps down and Elon Musk begins funding a campaign to take down Nigel Farage in the UK.
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Do you remember, since you've relocated to California, do you remember at all what it's like to shovel snow?
You know, when I think of something like that, all I have memories of as a kid, like, making igloos in the blizzards and stuff.
But, yeah, I guess I can remember it.
And, yeah, isn't there something, you know, noble about the pursuit of, you know, lifting snow and putting it somewhere else?
Is that noble?
Is that how you see that?
You see that as a noble pursuit?
Zen, perhaps, even?
No?
I mean, there's labor to it.
Yeah.
I guess there's dignity in that.
Listen, I've never seen a storm like this before.
It was incredible.
It was awe-inspiring to see it.
I hope our listeners are okay, but I got the living hell knocked out of me by this thing.
Wow.
Well, you know, it'll make you appreciate the warm weather when it finally comes back.
There you go.
Thank you, Nick, for putting the beautiful face on it.
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Nick, we're recording this on Monday, January 6, 2025, which makes it the fourth anniversary.
It's a weird day.
Congress met today to certify the 2024 election.
Kamala Harris's vice president presided over the ceremony, which for those who maybe don't remember, back in 2020. Thousands of people stormed the Capitol of the United States of America, attempted to overthrow the 2020 election, and reinstall Donald Trump as President of the United States of America.
Nick, we're going to talk about the legacy of the January 6th attack and where we are now.
What are your thoughts?
How do you feel about January 6th now, four years later?
You know, the context is that he got elected again in spite of that, right?
Or because of that.
Both.
Right.
And it's almost like, you know, I kind of get the reasoning now, like the people have spoken.
And however you want to characterize what happened, whether you thought it was a riot, whether you thought it was an insurrection.
You know, it's not good.
There isn't really any way that anybody could have said this was a good thing that happened.
And yet, as a feature, they reelected the guy that inspired this whole thing.
And I think that everyone understands that.
I don't think you're going to get any kind of disconnect between Donald Trump's exhortations and people going to the Capitol and doing what they did.
That is the thing that really sticks with me, is that the people voted in record numbers to affirm this action.
Yeah, I want to talk in a minute about how we arrived there.
Why it was possible for people to say, you know what, I'm still going to vote for this guy, I do not care.
And I think there is a traceable path to how we arrived at that point.
But I do want to say very, very quickly.
This was an attempted coup.
Like, people want very badly to now change the memory of what happened here.
And I think there's a variety of reasons for that.
First of all, it's the sheer and utter horror of having the guy who carried this out.
To get re-elected after we've seen what he did and we somehow or another managed to dodge the bullet, right?
So now it has to be sort of revised in terms of people's memories.
And everybody now looks back on it and they're like, well, it wasn't really a coup attempt.
You know, it was more of a riot that got out of control.
Never mind, of course, that it was paramilitaries that planned to overtake the government who were in seeming contact with the administration itself.
This was part of an ongoing plan, not just between Trump and all of his weird freak cronies, but also the think tanks, the institutes, the right wing donors, spouses of Supreme Court justices.
And these paramilitaries that all came together, it was a big, giant construct that was meant to overthrow the election of 2020 and keep him in power.
But the way that it has now been revised and pushed as something as of an alternative, I think, is going to have repercussions that are going to last far longer than the next four years that we have of a Trump presidency or however long it happens to go.
this revision is going to be revised again as soon as Trump comes into office and pardons every single one of the January 6th defendants.
I refuse to believe that he is going to go through all thousand people who were sentenced and pick and choose some people to get pardons and others not to.
That would take work.
What's that?
That would take work.
It would take work.
I feel like he's just going to say, you know what, blanket pardon.
And again, that's going to increase this dismissive tone of what happened then.
And yes, the repercussions are going to be awful because, again, you know, these people might be willing to sort of deal with what they went through prosecutorily, knowing that, you know, we can get him elected again, and then I'm going to get off.
He'll be expunged.
I won't have to serve my time, this and that, whatever.
And that's really part of the ending of democracy.
Right?
Democracy should be that you get, you know, there is some consequences to breaking the law.
Yeah, and here there weren't, except for, you know, some of the foot soldiers and all this, and inevitably they will probably be pardoned, and they'll be welcomed into the far right, the paramilitary ranks, the militia ranks, and they'll be treated like heroes by the right wing.
And also look where we are nationally at this point.
Trump isn't held accountable.
The government has very little desire to do very much besides put on a photogenic television-ready committee that hears all this evidence and makes suggestions.
Nothing really comes from that.
Congressional members like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, who were part of the entire plot and happy to carry it out, even after the storming of the Capitol.
They get re-elected and they have moved up in the ranks of the Republican Party.
It has now become Republican dogma.
You have to, within the Republican Party, at least say that you believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 election and also carry out the idea that January 6th wasn't really a coup.
It was more of an FBI inside job psyop.
And, Nick, as long as we're talking about that, the new head of the FBI, Kash Patel, believes that it was an FBI inside job and has told everybody who would listen that it was.
So where are we four years later?
Because this wasn't treated seriously outside of a few people, like because it wasn't, we have now continued to go down this slippery slope.
And so as a result, the Republican Party, they realized like they did with Trump.
The guardrails aren't there.
There is absolutely no incentive to play by the rules and to moderate themselves.
They're going to become more and more radical as time goes on.
And you can say, oh, we're sliding towards authoritarianism, things like that.
We're not sliding.
We're already in the middle of the fall, right?
It's already happened.
The sliding has started.
Floating through space down the mountain on the way to the bottom.
So that's the problem.
Anybody who wants to be like, who had pooh-poohed all this before, it's too late at this point.
By the way, you think that Cash Patel is going to get confirmed?
I mean, I don't see any reason why he wouldn't at this point.
I mean...
Adam Schiff was on the show, wringing his hands pretty hard.
Adam Schiff?
Yeah.
No, Adam Schiff?
Was he expressing concern, Nick?
You could hear the skin of his hands.
I didn't realize he was expressing concern on television.
Well, I'll have to look into this.
On certain terms.
Remember, it's close in the Senate, so you never know.
But yeah, if that happens, then we're really in trouble.
Yeah, Kash Patel is one of the more dangerous nominees in all of this.
Well, Nick, I want to talk about...
How this occurred.
And I don't mean January 6th.
Basically, that's all been laid out.
This big, giant conspiracy and all these different modes were coming together.
And also, they learned from it.
They learned what all the vulnerabilities were.
They learned what they could get away with.
They learned where their money should be.
And they came back much, much more prepared.
Nick, in terms of how...
Four years later, we now look back at this, and I think I said this not long after it occurred.
I said, this is either going to be the beginning of the end for right-wing extremism, where finally people say, you know what, we need to do something about this, and they actually hold them accountable, or it would be the Beer Hall Putsch, right?
Which is where, of course, the National Socialists tried to take over, they failed, they went to jail, then they became radicalized, then they were released, and then they became more and more radical and took power.
I remember this moment, and I don't know if you think about it very often.
Like, the day of, everybody basically outside of the most MAGA diehard people, even they were like, oh my god, this is too far, make it stop.
Even Trump's family members and closest allies were like, you need to do something about this.
Even Republicans were like, this is awful.
The media talked about this as the worst thing that ever happened.
And within days, we saw two things happen.
Fox News started saying, like, through Tucker Carlson, that this might have been an inside job with the FBI, right?
That was their cover story.
And it actually wasn't all that bad.
And what did our liberal media do?
They talked about it as norms, right?
This broke some norms.
Oh, we're so worried about the norms.
We have to think about the peaceful transfer of power.
It was not portrayed and dealt with as the attempted coup that it actually was, which gave it a lot of rhetorical and political ground in order to move around and to continue to gestate and become more and more normal.
So it's Fox News' fault.
Well, Fox News certainly holds part of the blame on this.
But our liberal media did as well, and the Democratic Party dropped the ball on top of that.
I know that's a shocker to everybody.
Yeah, I mean, what about even like Mitch McConnell, who had no problem, you know, in no uncertain terms, condemning everything that happened there and blaming Donald Trump for that.
And he was within, again, 48 hours, I suppose, he was just watching Fox News and realized, oh, that was a mistake.
That was a moment where you thought, okay, if Mitch McConnell is willing to go on record and say those things, then there could be something to this.
Maybe the impeachment or whatever would have happened.
Because remember...
If they had just gone through the impeachment and gotten enough of those votes, then Donald Trump wouldn't have been allowed to run again.
Yeah, and I mean, that would have necessarily at least started to take care of the problem, right?
And yeah, you can't tell me that a number of those senators that voted for not guilty, they would have been happy having him not be part of the process anymore, I think.
Well, I mean, it's a long, Nick, it's a trail of the dead of the people who should have held Trump accountable or done something in the right spot.
Everyone from Mitch McConnell to Merrick Garland to the Democratic Party, which just sort of tried to, you know, just sort of norm this thing to death.
And what ends up happening, Nick?
You brought it up, and I think this is essential in understanding.
One of the last pushes that the Democratic Party and the Harris and Waltz campaign made going into the November election was showing January 6th over and over and over again.
Basically every ad, and they didn't put forth any sort of a program in terms of like how to change things, which is where this election hinged on.
It was all that Donald Trump was a danger to democracy.
Well, Nick, here's the thing.
When democracy or liberal democracy or representative democracy, however you want to designate it, when it doesn't get you results and it doesn't make the world better, you don't care.
You actually want people to do things like storm the Capitol if they're going to get things done.
And so what has occurred is the democratic media, the political class, the economic class, the journalist class, whatever you want to call it.
All of these groups have failed so spectacularly that nobody cares if somebody overtakes the Capitol.
And quite frankly, we're in an environment now where if somebody were to go out and hurt a politician, particularly the people who have made things worse, some people would cheer.
And so as a result, you look at something like January 6th, and in a lot of ways, that type of violence has now become normalized and even sort of incentivized and even sort of welcomed in a lot of people.
And then serves as a deterrent for anybody who actually does care about the rule of law to stand up and try and insist that these things, we need to be prosecuted or we need to have oversight because of the fear of being attacked violently, you know, to their person.
It is really, really, you know, that's probably the biggest issue I have with all of this is that it's going to change.
It's not a norm.
It just changes the environment itself.
And adds a level of fear and anger that never should have been involved with us in the first place.
And as you said from the beginning, there is no reason for Republicans to ever concede a race anymore.
Why would you?
Right.
Why would you?
And in that time period, again, you and I are going to talk about the Biden presidency before January 20th in depth.
This is going to go down as one of the most consequential four-year periods in American history.
How many things were failed, not just holding Donald Trump accountable, not just like fixing the authoritarian threat, but also not making things better and sort of breaking the neoliberal stalemate in all of this.
And it allowed this thing to now be revised and changed.
And Nick, I'd be remiss before we move on.
I wanted to talk about the manifesto of the guy who killed himself in Las Vegas in the Cybertruck.
This manifesto has now been made available.
And it's one of those things where our media will sort of like crib from it, but they won't really get in depth about what necessarily is being said, which is unfortunate.
I'm going to read you a few things from this manifesto slash suicide note.
He said, quote, it's time to wake up.
And he said that he was trying to quiet the trauma from the war, which I was talking about when we were talking about these attacks.
He said, military and vets need to move on D.C. starting now.
Militias facilitate and augment this activity.
Occupy every road and be prepared to fight to get the DIMS out of the federal government and military by any means necessary.
There's a need for a hard reset with support for Donald Trump and Elon Musk talking about masculinity, anti-DEI. Nick, that is on New Year's Day, January 1st, 2025. If you were to magically transport that manifesto back to January 6th, 2021, it would fit right in, right?
That would have been somebody who had been right at home with this.
And in fact, I think this is the disturbing part, Nick.
Him killing himself in a cyber truck in front of the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas.
It's actually trying to, like, it is obviously ending his own life, but it's also, I think, in his mind was the equivalent of, like, a monk setting himself on fire to protest the Vietnam War or someone setting themselves on fire to protest climate change or what's going on in Gaza.
Like, this has become a movement simply because it wasn't addressed.
I agree.
And whenever we've said things like, these kind of rhetoric leads to violence, and people are like, oh, no, it doesn't really.
But yes, it does.
It works over again in a lot of different venues in different ways.
And this is another one of those, for sure, where we had thought when we first heard about the reporting that maybe this had something to do with someone who had seen some things and gone through some serious trauma and hadn't been able to.
Now, you mix that with what the kind of things that Trump says, and that's what you get.
There's other stuff that they say was attributed to his writing, which is interesting because it sort of expands into the whole conspiracy theory thing where he was trying to talk about drones and what that means with China.
And then you have people responding who were like, well, this guy was in the military.
He definitely would never have written that.
That doesn't make sense.
So now it's all muddled because that's what I almost thought you were going to talk about because there's that part of the, I guess not the manifesto, but other writing.
He's not well.
He just had gotten off the reality train and was really struggling to maintain some sense of peace.
Thankfully, what ended up happening was no one else got hurt.
But I guess, you know, it just adds more fuel to people who think this is all a setup.
People don't think it was him in that car.
People are saying he didn't shoot himself, you know, and then blow up the truck.
Like, how could that happen?
And all sorts of horrible stuff.
And again, it just serves to distract from what the real issue here is.
And by the way, Nick, of the three groups that were at January 6th and carried out that attempted coup, there were rank-and-file Donald Trump MAGA supporters who thought that they were part of a movement.
Right.
That thought that they needed their president and been repped off and he needed help.
There were the people of the burger class, people who own multiple car lots or are real estate agents who like rented a private plane to go to Washington, D.C. Is that like an H in there?
Burger, B-U-R-G-H-E-R, which that used to be one of the ruling classes of the country.
Right.
If you owned.
Like, the major, I don't know, textile plant in, like, the American Southeast.
Like, you could...
Not just be a senator, but like you could bankroll a president.
And they've been supplanted by the wealth class and the oligarchical class.
The third group were paramilitaries and militias, right?
People who went and wanted to basically fuck shit up.
Of those three groups, Nick, they were all three people looking for something because they needed something to define themselves.
That's why they're part of MAGA. What else, Nick?
Many of them were unwell.
Many of them were very, very unwell.
And when these things come together and there's a person like Donald Trump and the wealth class there ready to capitalize off of it, it coalesces into something larger and very dangerous.
And more evidence of them being unwell is that when the push comes to shove and they got caught, immediately becomes, oh, it was all Antifa.
Yeah.
Yeah, immediately.
Like, when you hear that kind of thing, it's just, to me, it's an acknowledgement that, like, oh, I need to have some other story to make it seem like that was what happened because I can't come to grips with what I did.
Yeah, I simply, I have to come up with some sort of a fantasy and that's what they did.
They have their immediate fantasy.
Well, Nick, let's move away from American politics for a minute.
We have a couple of international stories that we need to talk about.
Earlier today, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, after nine going on ten years in power, he announced that he is going to resign as the leader of the Liberal Party and as the Prime Minister of Canada.
There will be elections coming up soon.
The Liberal Party is in absolute disarray.
It looks like his rival, Pierre Paliyev of the Conservative Party, who we'll talk about in just a minute, is the overall favorite to win.
But here is Justin Trudeau announcing his retirement.
So last night over dinner, I told my kids about the decision that I'm sharing with you today.
Bye.
I intend to resign as party leader, as prime minister.
After the party selects its next leader through a robust, nationwide, competitive process.
Last night, I asked the president of the Liberal Party to begin that process.
This country deserves a real choice in the next election, and it has become clear to me that if I'm having to fight internal battles, I cannot be the best option in that election.
Nick, I don't know about you, but I still remember going back to the beginning of Trudeau's tenure.
Do you remember when Trudeau, Macron, and Obama were just seen as like the next generation of leaders that were going to lead the Western democracies into like a new golden age?
Do you remember that?
I do.
I do.
I mean, hey, he had a good run.
I mean, listen, he had nine years in power.
He has certainly alienated a lot of liberals and leftists and democratic socialists in Canada.
He's leaving office pretty largely not liked.
And on top of that, they're going to see a conservative rise to power who is very Trump-like and going to see that country go in its own direction at this point.
Do you think that there had any connection to Trump trolling him by calling Canada the 51st state?
Absolutely it did.
So Trudeau had lost a lot of traction as the prime minister for a variety of reasons.
For the same reasons that Macron is having trouble, for the same reasons why Germany is moving to the right.
Neoliberal moderates, right?
Just mark it.
You know, liberals in charge and this moment has gotten away from them.
He's lost a lot of power in that regard, Nick.
And on top of that, like, there has been, like, one right-wing conspiracy theory movement after another.
Like, we exported what we had.
If you remember the Ottawa Trucker Convoy, which was largely funded by the same people who were funded January 6th.
So that started chipping away at all of this.
And by the time that Trump...
Called Canada basically saying that they were going to be the 51st state or that they were going to have 25% tariffs.
Eventually, Trudeau had trouble within his own party about how to respond to that and what the strategy was going to be going forward.
And so what we're actually seeing is that Canada is now going to move to the right because of the reactions to not just what has been occurring and the failure of neoliberal moderates, but also...
Because they have to be in conversation with Donald Trump.
So it is a lot of dominoes that are starting to fall simply because Donald Trump posted some things on Truth Social.
I have to imagine that Trump sees a, and you really can't call him a progressive, but, you know, whatever you want to call Trudeau is, you know, somewhere center left.
He must sort of feel like that's weak.
And so I can now, like, he won't do that to every country.
And now I guess every country isn't connected to America like we, like, you know.
Canada and Mexico are.
But you know, he couldn't say Mexico is going to become the 51st state because those people don't look like Canadians.
But...
So that's the question.
It doesn't matter who the prime minister is.
As long as he's some version of a leftist to Trump, he's going to do that and be incendiary to him.
Whereas maybe someone who's a little bit more of a strong man kind of thing, he won't do that towards, right?
So it's like, I don't know if Trudeau had any hope of overcoming that.
Like, there isn't a response that was going to ring true for him either way.
Nick, in two years...
And I'm just putting this out there.
I mean, you know, as long as we're not dragged kicking and screaming out of our respective recording studios or, you know, black bagged on the street somewhere, I have to imagine in about two years, you and I will get on here to record an episode and we will look around and we'll say, who's left standing?
And I don't just mean the people that we've talked about.
I mean the countries in general.
We'll talk about the UK in a second with what's going on in terms of Elon Musk meddling in English affairs.
But on top of that, look what's happening in Germany, right?
Look what's happening in Canada.
Look what's happening in France.
One of the things that I have been afraid of is that the neoliberal failure would deliver state power over to authoritarian hands all around, right?
And we're right now...
Kind of on the precipice of either a showdown with right-wing international authoritarianism or joining it.
And I mean, in Canada, I mean, you take a look at Polyev, you know, this is all just, it's just the MAGA playbook, just rehashed and rewarmed, right?
Radical left socialist, and they're obsessed with utopian wokeism and all of their gender stuff.
And by the way, saying this type of stuff in conversation with Jordan Peterson, like, what has happened is that the right, particularly the authoritarian oligarchical movement, has figured out, like, this is just how you beat it.
And so now we're going to see Canada, who Nick, I don't know if I've ever said this to you.
I never got more requests for interviews than I did from Canadians.
And I'll tell you why.
Because they wanted to know what the hell was going on here.
They were so flummoxed by the American MAGA right-wing movement that they all wanted to ask, how is this happening?
Why is your country losing its mind?
And a few years ago, they looked up and they were like, oh God.
Here we are.
So the question now is, who's going to be left standing?
So you know that thing, the tired and wired, you know, that they do?
Yeah.
So tired would be World War I and World War II, where you had a country overtake other countries, enforce, impose their will and their, you know, the Nazis, impose their Nazis across Europe.
Well, why do that?
Wired is now you do it from within.
Yeah, we'll talk more about that in a minute, for sure.
You don't need to go out there and conquer anybody anymore.
You can do it through social media, and you can do it through capturing the mines, and then it'll sprout from inside the country and then overtake it from inside out much easier than anything that the Germans needed to do in the World Wars.
Well, you know what's interesting about that, Nick, is that the Nazis and the fascists did try that.
They did try and go ahead and win over the other countries of Western democracies.
But guess what?
Those countries all had leftists in the countries.
They had people who stood up to them in the United States, in France, in England.
But after the war, they wiped all those people out.
So it's almost like they wiped out the antibodies and they just, you know, left a bunch of moderates who were going to basically capitulate to this.
Yeah.
Taking advantage of democracy itself.
Right.
Because like even when, you know, in the Middle East, when places like Egypt were like, you know, being sort of threatened with sanctions and stuff, that they didn't impose some version of democracy.
Well, they took a step back and looked at it and said, oh, you mean we just need to have like elections, you know, OK, without any oversight from anybody?
Like, okay, great.
That's what's going to make us look like we're democratic?
Awesome.
You know, and so they just have the sham elections, you know, as all these authoritarian countries do anyway.
And they get to, you know, put a sheen of democracy over the top of it.
It was never that way.
And eventually that creeps across the world.
And so, yes, it is concerning.
I got my money on Finland.
That's who I'm going to say is going to hold out here.
Finland is the place to be.
That's going to be the beachhead.
You know what?
To my Finnish brothers and sisters and listeners, I wish you the best luck.
And for the record, I said this when everyone's like, well, I guess I'll go to Canada.
You can't run from this.
This is a worldwide infection, and you cannot run from it.
You have to defeat it.
And this whole thing, it's gathering up speed.
Speaking of...
In the United Kingdom, we had talked a little bit about Elon Musk starting to endorse an alternative for Deutschland or Germany.
We talked about him planning to pledge millions upon millions of dollars to the UK, where supposedly he was going to help Nigel Farage of Reform UK. Well, now Elon Musk has decided that Farage, one of the main architects of Brexit, Doesn't have what it takes.
And Nick, that's because Nigel Farage doesn't agree with Elon Musk about a guy named Tommy Robinson.
Now, Tommy Robinson is a real piece of shit that I've been following the past few years.
He is a hooligan.
He is a conspiracy theorist.
He's a white supremacist.
He's currently serving an 18-month prison sentence based on a lot of the violence that's been carried out and the decisions that he's run counter to.
Elon Musk, because he's in bed with Alex Jones and that entire crew, once Tommy Robinson not only released, but...
But to be featured in terms of the British far right.
So here we go.
Again, Elon Musk putting his thumb on the scale.
And now even Nigel Farage isn't far enough right wing for him.
It's remarkable.
But again, Tommy Robinson is a psyop.
There is no question in my mind.
And again, this is Russian.
This sounds like Russian propaganda to me because all they're trying to do is foment unrest, right?
And so...
How else would you do that?
There's no reason for Musk to get behind the piece of shit that Tommy Robinson is and has demonstrated that he's been for decades now.
There's nothing redeeming about this guy and nothing worth going on a limb to go out and say he should be released and they should expunge whatever his crimes were.
The only reason, in my mind, would be because Russia knows that that would...
Continue to increase unrest in their designs to attack the Western civilizations.
So that's all I can explain for this.
There's no other way to figure it out for me other than he's being put up to this because of someone like Russia.
Well, I mean, with Elon Musk, sometimes it's kind of hard to tell, Nick.
Because, you know, truthfully, at the wealth and oligarchical class, most of the people are aware of what they're doing.
You know what I mean?
Like, you go in in order to sort of, like, get a military-industrial complex contract, and you sort of know, like, you're in the room together, and you're like, we're on the same side.
We're both wealthy.
We're both influential.
This guy's an idiot.
Like, Elon Musk is a truthful idiot.
And so I have to assume, sometimes, it's almost like Oz.
In Kansas?
Like, sometimes he steps into the Technicolor, and sometimes he steps out, and sometimes he steps in and steps out.
All I know...
is that Robinson has been pushed forward by Alex Jones now for years.
And every time Robinson wants to lie about some sort of refugee or immigrant attack that he wants to turn into something it's not in order to try and push some sort of an idea, it's not only benefiting the wealth class like Elon Musk, but it's absolutely benefiting these same assholes.
Everyone from Vladimir Putin down, like everybody who wants to use white patriarchal...
So, like, it's everybody sort of pot committed, involved, partnering with each other, sometimes turning on each other.
And here we have, again, Nigel Farage, who is one of the people who did most of the things he's done for economic purposes.
He's simply not far enough right.
They need somebody more extreme, which, I mean, Tommy Robinson might end up being the guy for all we know.
Fair enough.
And there's actually an interesting thread I saw on Blue Sky from a guy, Chad Loder, who discussed Elon Musk being someone who has...
He grew up in apartheid, so he's already kind of got the background for a lot of...
Yes.
And he was not well-liked, you know, growing up, and he didn't fit in.
And that's all he's been trying to do this the whole time.
That's what we're seeing with him spending, you know, Thanksgiving at Mar-a-Lago because he won't spend it with his family.
He won't risk leaving for a second and then, you know, being cast out again like he has his whole life.
But the group that he's walked into, you know, you have to kind of be a horrible person to be a member.
And once you are, the adulation that you get and that sense of self and fitting in is so powerful that you begin to then assimilate all of those horrible things as well.
Do you know what else works like that, Nick?
What?
White supremacist groups.
They work the exact same way.
Yeah, and they do that on purpose.
They recognize people like that who can be taken advantage of in that setting.
But Musk is like a goldmine because he already had grown up in that milieu as it is.
So it's not like overnight he suddenly just became this.
But this is his first taste probably of really feeling like he is part of something.
And that's a sweet siren song for certain people.
It'll only get worse from here on out.
And there probably isn't much of a deprogramming that can happen.
Yeah, and I just want to point out in all of these instances, we're talking about very big stories, right?
We're talking about an attempted takeover of the government.
We're talking about a prime minister resigning.
Now we're talking about Elon Musk trying to take over Great Britain and the UK. Again, you can't as a listener.
You can't do anything about this.
You cannot personally stop this stuff.
The only thing you can do is take care of yourself and take care of your communities.
And you better believe that when someone in your community starts talking about Tommy Robinson or they start trying to get together a group of people to help people like Tommy Robinson or to join into a Tommy Robinson type thing.
And by the way, what you just brought up, how these groups make people feel included and empowered.
Like you say, knock that shit off.
And do you know what happened in Great Britain, Nick, when all of a sudden the Great Britain fascists started coming out of the woodwork whenever the fascists were trying to get a foothold in the United States and America?
Do you know what they did?
They beat the living shit out of them.
They said, not here.
You are not going to march down our square.
You are not going to invite our young people into this.
You're not welcome here.
And that's the type of role that everybody can play.
I mean, in Germany, the same thing by outlawing any kind of Nazism.
You could not say anything without being prosecuted for that.
That was very powerful, and that's already now waning, and that affects what we have people who are now able to say Nazi slogans out loud and not be prosecuted.
So, yeah, there's a creep going on across the world right now, and it's troubling.
That's right.
Nick, coming back to the United States, I want to talk about a really, really quiet story that has massive...
The Quincy Institute has released a report that reveals that the top 50 think tanks and institutes in the United States of America have taken in over $100 million in the past five years from foreign governments.
The biggest donors are places like the United Arab Emirates, surprise, surprise, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and that they have more or less, through these donations, become unofficial lobbyists and collaborators with these states.
I'm going to talk a little bit about why this is so important, but Nick, what is your reaction to this?
I mean, is a solution that the think tanks are simply not supposed to take foreign money like that?
I mean, they can.
I mean, they can, right?
This is the back door, right?
And it's like, but so in a perfect world, they'd be like, whoa, you know, that's too far.
We cannot have that kind of influence.
Because obviously, why else would someone like UAE want to be involved with American think tanks, right?
There's no other explanation in my mind other than they're trying to get one over on somebody.
Well, I'll tell you this.
Number one...
The think tank and institute complex of the United States of America is one of the most influential things that we have.
These are the people who provide our politicians with all their white paper, their policy proposals.
They're the ones who write the laws.
They're the ones who create the controversies.
They create the debate.
They are more or less the arm by which the wealth class has controlled American politics for well over half a century now.
That being said, Nick, this is a difference.
In the past, it used to be the wealth class of the United States of America who were trying to sort of get themselves in a position to erode the social safety net and also take over politics.
That is places like the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.
And those are only the places that are on the list that are publicly available.
We do not know how much other money is going through places like Brookings, Heritage, the Atlantic Council.
We have no idea.
Now that we know that, here's what it represents, Nick.
It is the fact that oil and energy has allowed so much U.S. money to be pushed out to other countries and to be prioritized in terms of our trade relationships and our political relationships and resource relationships.
It has made countries like Saudi Arabia and Russia so incredibly wealthy that they've been able to take that money and they're now investing it in U.S. properties as a weapon.
So here we have, in this case, we have investments in U.S. media.
We know We know that the Republican Party and conservative voices and personalities are swimming in this stuff.
I mean, Ben Shapiro basically is like, you know, floating above this like with his little dumb voice.
On top of that, we have communication.
We have Twitter, which was bought with Saudi money and God knows what else has Saudi money in it.
We've got culture, golf, sports, entertainment, all of it.
This is the money of empire, the cost of doing business, of keeping the American empire that is now coming all the way around.
And this money in the think tank and institute complex is incredibly, incredibly destructive and important.
You know, it's funny.
It reminds me of what I think I talked about this a couple of weeks ago in terms of what capitalism is to like the everyday person.
It's I'm struggling for any kind of money that I can then pay to buy some stuff.
And then it comes back to me again.
It's like this small little loop of that's all we're doing.
We're working to get some money to buy some goods to get some money to get some goods.
What you're describing, though, is a similar loop, but in an order of magnitude so great and so influential that, yes, it can shift the course of the human history, basically, with this kind of stuff.
We know that Trump relies on a lot of these think tanks for his legal exploits or strategy, excuse me.
These are the guys who are trying to come up with ways that they can gain the system to, again, further the stripping of the United States in a corrupt manner to make more money and get more power.
I guess the only question I think I have for you is, is this any different than it always has been?
It is changing because the center of power has moved.
Right.
Because in the past, a lot of it was U.S. nationals who were paying for this, who at least when they went to bed at night, like I assume when the Koch brothers went to bed at night, they were like, we're going to make America better.
And this is how you make America better.
And now it's like, how are we going to make Qatar, you know, great?
How are we going to like, you know, basically turn Saudi Arabia into like the next sort of like superpower state?
So what has actually occurred here is that we now have and you brought up.
You know, Trump's entire relationship with think tanks.
Think about Project 2025. He doesn't know what he's doing.
He has no interest in understanding policy.
He doesn't come up with this stuff.
Nor do most of the governors, state legislatures, and even members of the Republican Party.
They don't write these bills.
They're handed to them.
They're photocopied.
The people who write the bills and who create the controversies, everything from DEI to kitty litter in kindergarten classrooms, Those people are now being paid by people outside of the United States in ways that very well might outweigh what the wealth class is paying them.
So for all we know, the administrative perspective and agendas are being written on behalf of people outside of the country.
It is a wild, wild new place to be.
Yeah, you know, it kind of reminds me, if you can bear with me for a second, can you?
There's a movie called Judgment Night.
Where Dennis Leary is the bad guy, right?
And he's a badass.
And he finally gets people I've been chasing.
And he's about to come down on them.
But then he's actually, they ended up having to wander into a different part of the city than he's used to being in to find these people.
So that when he encroaches on this other gang's territory, and he quickly realizes he's not the badass that he thought he was.
And he's looking around like, oh, this is really, now this is bad.
And I kind of picture him like the Koch brothers, right?
This is their domain.
They've had control over this for a long, long time.
But then they're looking at people who are...
Even wealthier than them and now have the power to be even more powerful than them.
And they're looking around going, oh shit, this is a problem.
I'm not going to be able to handle this situation.
Well, Nick, it's not just the Saudis and it's not just the Russians.
What has become immediately clear to me is that one thing that is changing now, the wealth class is being eclipsed.
By the oligarchical class.
Yeah.
Some of them are going to climb up into that class and some of them belong to it.
Other ones aren't.
And I brought up the burgers earlier, right?
The people who own the car lots, who own the real estate, who own like the textile company that's the biggest one in Arizona.
Those people are pissed off, Nick, because they have millions of dollars, but there's a ceiling above them at this point, and they don't have much influence because the money at the wealth class level outweighs them.
Guess what's happening to the wealth class?
There's a new ceiling that's being put up, and it's not just Americans who are over that ceiling.
A lot of them, like Elon Musk and the Saudis and the Russians, Don't happen to be American, and they also happen to own most of the resources and most of the tools of production.
It's probably why you've railed against the existence of billionaires in the past, but whatever wealth Musk has now, it's...
It's tens of billions?
What does he have?
I don't even know what it is.
Oh, no, he's got hundreds of billions.
So you'll see trillionaires.
Like, we all have trillionaires.
Oh, yeah, he will likely be the first trillionaire if he survives, yes.
Yeah, you know, in the next, you know, maybe 10, 15, 20 years.
The way this is going.
So, yeah, that's what's going to be...
A problem because you're going to end up having such disparities in wealth classes.
And we've seen over time, over the history of our civilization, why that's so detrimental, the bigger that gap gets.
And so we're going to have, I mean, you know, I'm watching Silo right now and I'm, you know, it feels like that's our future.
Nick, there are billionaires who are not members of the oligarchical class.
Like, put that into your mind.
There are people who have literally billions of dollars who still don't have that much leverage on what's going on.
They're able to control certain things, right?
They're able to have a lot of influence in certain ways.
It just so happens that it's not at that level, right?
Like, they don't have tens of billions.
They don't have a hundred billion.
Therefore, they are still part of the wealth class.
So what's actually occurred is they've sort of just been...
In a way that, like, you know, it's like one of those things where you sort of look up and you're like, oh, wait, we're not really buying, like, vinyl records anymore.
Oh, we're buying CDs?
Oh, okay.
Oh, we're not buying CDs anymore.
Okay.
It's just changing in a way that I don't think most people have really caught up to at this point.
But I feel like the structure has always sort of been there, right?
We've always talked about there's 10 guys in the room smoking cigars controlling the entire world, right?
Now it's almost like a little...
Now they're doing ketamine.
Now it's ketamine, right?
So that structure is still there.
The room might have changed countries or it might have changed what floor it's on in that building, but there's still a structure of control that exists across this whole thing, if you want to buy into that, the men in black thing or whatever that would be, which probably has existed for the entire history of the United States.
You know, not that it's like national treasure, right, or whatever, but all those, this whole notion has been there for a long time.
And so, but I feel like there is something different about this.
It's more profound, and it's probably just even more threatening once and for all to, like, you know, the structure of our society.
Well, I'll just say very quickly, and I did an audio for my substack, Dispatches from Collapsing State, about this.
Just very quickly, this is the evolution of capitalism.
Like, it's not like a big, giant departure.
That's where all of this was heading, right?
It's just different features and different focuses.
And now the United States of America, as I keep saying on this podcast, the American empire is on the decline.
And so now, all of a sudden, it's going to change in these ways.
Have a great weekend, everybody.
All right, well, it's not the weekender.
Have a great week, everybody.
Have a great week, everybody.
We will be back with The Weekender on Friday.
In the meantime, you can find Nick on Blue Sky at Nick Hausman.
