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Feb. 11, 2025 - The Muckrake Political Podcast
50:12
The Constitutional Crisis Trump Didn't Know We Needed

Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss how Donald Trump is pushing the limits of our democracy by ignoring the Federal Judiciary. Meanwhile, billions of dollars are being slashed at the NIH, which will cause all manner of suffering by the American people. And it should come as no surprise that DOGE has its sights set on Social Security next. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the Munkeric Podcast.
I'm Jared D. It's Sexton.
I'm here with Nick Houseman.
Nick, how was your weekend?
Well, the weekend was good.
I had a little Super Bowl party.
Too bad the game wasn't any better than it was.
Terrible.
Terrible game.
You know, I wasn't barely even watching.
We had a lot of people over, and I was kind of just chatting with a lot of people.
So, it was that bad, just because it was the score?
It was a bad game in general.
And then on top of it, everything around it was a mess.
Like, we talked in past years about how, like, the commercials have gotten worse.
And now it's just, like, AI slop.
Every major corporation in America telling us it's time to come together and let's put differences aside, which is a regular course.
I thought it was pretty reprehensible.
Yeah.
I did doom scroll the rights reaction to the halftime show.
Who would have thought?
That MAGA would be upset about a black artist.
I mean, there's nothing deeper than that in that sense.
No, pure, unadulterated white supremacy, which, unfortunately, we've got to talk more about today.
Reminder, everybody, go to patreon.com slash moncraigpodcast, support the show, keep us editorially independent, ad-free, all that good stuff.
We appreciate your support.
Also, you gain access to the Weekender Edition on Fridays, and we know that you're listening, so come on aboard.
Nick, we got so much to talk about, as we always do in these things, but we have a growing crisis that I think we're seeing the beginnings of something really huge here.
On Saturday, a suit by 19 attorneys general won a temporary pause on...
Trump actions after U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmeyer said that Musk and Doge could cause, quote, irreparable harm.
Immediately following that, we saw from the Republican Party a lot of concerning messaging, including J.D. Vance, who said, quote, judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power.
Senator Mike Lee said that this was a, quote, judicial coup.
What followed on Sunday night, Trump filed a lawsuit that challenges the judiciary more or less and says that he has, quote, absolute power.
What we're dealing with at this point is more or less a constitutional crisis that is already underway and is threatening now to boil over and will have probably consequences that we're going to have to deal with for a very long time.
We're well beyond underway at this point for constitutional crisis.
And It's like this is the crisis and this is the ground zero when we look back at this.
This is the moment, especially because what the judge did, this is not like overpowering the executive or anything.
This is just like a couple days worth of pause until they can have a hearing in court and then present their evidence and then the judge can decide.
This is nothing.
It's not a ruling.
This is not a decision.
This is just a temporary thing to make sure that they can now...
The elephant in the room ends up becoming, because the SCOTUS gave him absolute immunity, then there doesn't seem to be any incentive for him to follow the law anymore, because he's cleared, he's exonerated before he even does it.
So this is why it's a crisis.
This is why we were ringing the bell really loudly and trying to do this.
But this is a scenario we didn't really pitch, I think, when that ruling came down.
But this is it.
This is the one.
When we're talking about spending, which is supposed to be Congress's purview, they're taking over the congressional duties, which is basically the biggest thing that they have to do anyway when you're talking about Congress.
It's like driving a car and the check engine light comes on.
And when you see the check engine light, you're like, I'm sure it's nothing.
And then like the car starts driving a little bit harder and rougher.
And like every now and then a little thing pops up and you're like, I'm sure it's nothing.
Right.
And then eventually you're on the side of the road and you're wondering what the hell happened.
This thing has been going on for a very long time.
We have covered the emergence of Trump and the authoritarian GOP for years now.
We said, hey, they're knocking down every guardrail and proving that these guardrails are not particularly interested in stopping Donald Trump.
And they all relied basically on good faith.
That an executive is always going to sort of be limited by shame and the appearance of impropriety, right?
That they were always going to...
You know, this isn't the first time that they have ignored all of this stuff and basically said the courts don't matter.
We covered, you know, not too long ago where they, the judge said that the freezing of funds was illegal and that they needed to, you know, go back on it.
And they released that statement that, you know, got rid of the memo, but they admitted.
As they did it, that they weren't going to pay attention to it, and even today we saw another federal judge say that the administration ignored that ruling and just continued doing what they were going to do.
Now we've reached the point where the car is breaking down.
The guardrails that we thought were there were fictional all along, and now it is being shown that there is really no check or balance on this president.
It's not just this moment either.
It's been going on for decades.
We saw with the Unitarian executive theory back with George W. Bush that they were able to get away with whatever they wanted to do at any given moment, and the law and norms and guardrails didn't matter whatsoever.
This is the logical conclusion of this.
And quite frankly, I just want to caution our listeners again.
For years and years and years, Nick, we've been inundated with people who watched what Trump and the Republican Party were doing, and they said, hey, The institutions are actually holding.
It's not all that bad.
Look at this court ruling.
Look at this.
Look at that.
They're gone.
They're gone.
And they are not going to listen to judges.
God knows what's going to happen in this situation.
Whether or not Trump's lawsuit wins or not, they're not going to pay attention to judges.
We cannot continue to rely on politicians and institutions to solve this for us.
I just want to remind listeners once more, talk to the people around you, talk to people in your workplace.
We have to be ready for collective action because when this thing goes down, it's literally going to be a dam that breaks.
Once they realize that they can get away with this and any possible check or balance is completely gone, that's when stuff starts to get very, very rough.
If I may, I'd like to expand on your metaphor of the car breaking down the side of the road because the car is broken down, but it's on the side of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge while it's twisting, about to completely collapse because of high winds.
That's where we are.
It's not just like a nice country road where someone's going to pull over and help you.
Well, a fire is up over the hills getting ready to jump.
Yes.
Yeah, and aliens have just come down and landed and are about to take over and it's a cookbook.
So this is where we're at.
And what's interesting to me is that, okay, they want to control the spending that the federal government is doing.
And they're kind of claiming this weird dominion over the executive branch, right, which has all of these different entities that they're trying to control.
So, but they could easily go to Congress, right?
They have control over both Congress and the Senate.
But they won't do, and by the way, they would rubber stamp this in a second.
The easiest job in the world right now is to be a member of Congress.
You're not doing anything.
You have more or less been completely isolated, and you have been given the most ceremonial job in the world.
They are not interested in dealing with Congress.
Mike Johnson is fully on board with advocating his power because in my mind, you always talk about how it's like power.
I've always felt like it was money.
Those things are synonymous, yes.
Okay, but to me it's like, I think that they're just going to enrich themselves to the point where they don't care about the power or whatever, the signing of those bills or whatever.
But the question then is, okay, well, why?
And it's the same thing they did when they were firing attorneys general, is that they had 30 days where they had to submit it to Congress before.
We knew Congress was going to rubber stamp that too, so they just kind of cut to the chase.
And it's like, the argument on the right would be...
Well, all that bureaucracy would make us, it would take us, you know, two years before we got any kind of look into these books and figure out how we want to get rid of waste.
So let's just get to that now.
And, like, that actually is a very powerful argument for the people that voted for Trump, because that's what they wanted, and that's what he touted he was going to do.
So this is the problem with doom-scrolling Twitter now, and I kind of stayed on there to kind of keep my news feed going, is that it's that argument, I have to be honest, is starting to sway me to some degree, knowing that There is probably an intense amount of waste that is going on in the government, so they're not lying about that.
The problem is they're misreading a lot of these line items and these spreadsheets, probably intentionally, to weaponize it.
But I'm getting a little bit pulled in different directions here on this because, again, we would all say, oh, bureaucracy, they'd never be able to get anything done.
This is the only way to do it.
Well, my friend, because I love you and you're one of my best friends, I have to tell you.
You have to stop going on Twitter.
One of the things about swimming around in this cesspool is being inundated with stuff constantly that you look at and you realize is full of shit and you spend enough time with it and it starts to mess with your head.
I've said this constantly and I need to restate it again because of what you just said.
The problem in all of this is that the right wing in the critiques that they have made, they are correct that there's a problem.
That's what's really attractive in all of this, is that America does have a problem.
The government is a mess, and it does need reform.
The other problem, Nick, is that there's not a countervailing force with the Democratic Party making any sort of suggestions about how to do that.
So you're left with one party that has its quote-unquote solutions.
Meanwhile, it's just about taking control for themselves, empowering themselves, enriching themselves.
Taking all this stuff over.
And what are they saying?
They're making a lot of arguments that are not in good faith.
Like, this isn't how you do it.
If you actually want to take care of this stuff, and there's an alternate universe, for the record, where there's...
Some other left-wing president who is in power right now, where you and I are having a conversation about, oh, they're troubling the system.
If there were podcasts back in the 1930s, 1940s, we would be having a conversation about Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal and how it was remaking the federal government so quickly, and you need someone to come in and do this.
There's a difference between people who do this in good faith and people who come in in order to destroy things.
And right now, the federal judiciary, which is sort of the last firewall, right?
It's the last thing that is trying to keep all of these assholes away from changing this stuff permanently.
And meanwhile, the rhetoric makes sense.
It really, truly does.
Like, we talked about USAID the other day, and we talked about the dangerous things that it's done.
We've talked about the fact that, like, Yes, it does some good things, and meanwhile, it's done some awful things.
That makes sense, but it's the lack of a voice on the other side that is actually articulating this stuff and talking about the problem that allows them to sort of dominate the rhetorical space.
Right, that is true.
The methods of how they're going about to do this with no oversight is a real problem, but it does bring up this notion that if it was a Democratic candidate...
You know, would we be upset?
I mean, I was trying to figure out what the equivalent is.
It's like they would go in and start cutting defense spending, right?
That would be a big one.
And maybe, like, I mean, we'd want, like, more regulations for, like, the environment.
So that's the opposite of what they'd be doing.
But, like, you know, that's the kind of thing.
Or even, like, you know, Trump spends, I don't know, it's like $3, $4, $5 million every time he goes to Mar-a-Lago, which he's done, like, three times in, like, the five weeks he's been there or whatever it is, right?
So, that's the thing.
It's like, what would our response be?
I would imagine I would still be upset that they weren't following the law and proper ethical, you know, considerations in terms of conflict of interest for these things.
I think I would be, you know, I'd be rambling against it.
But then again, if it was some sort of cause that I really agreed with, would we be upset about it?
I, again, I think one of the things, and I think that this is a useful space to have this conversation.
I do think this is where our own personal political stances and ideologies, like this is where a little bit of friction comes in.
I'm a leftist.
I do think that sometimes you have to do things that are not necessarily like tried and true.
Like, so for instance, Joe Biden wasn't the person to do it, but a Democrat coming in.
And saying, hey, I really want to remake this thing because it's unequal.
For instance, FDR, going back to, he said, you know what?
I don't really recognize the power of the Supreme Court right now.
We might need to do something about that.
If Joe Biden, and he never would have done this, would have been like, oh, the Supreme Court has made its ruling.
Now let it enforce it.
I would champion that.
That comes down to this point, which is, we're in a moment of ideological conflict.
You know what I mean?
Like, really, the rubber has met the road.
And the time to sort of, like, sit with these sort of institutional niceties, I think we need to move away from that.
I think that things have broken down to the point where we are in a roiling.
That is getting worse.
And we need to recognize that these people are breaking these things down in order to take advantage of them, in order to carry out an oligarchical takeover.
The difference between that and turning towards redistribution that makes things more equal and small-d democratic, I think, is very stark.
Absolutely.
Do you think that Trump is worried about being arrested and being prosecuted?
It would be hard to get into that hall of mirrors and understand that.
I think Donald Trump probably has a lot of things that he should be worried about, but I do not think it is his own personal makeup to do that.
Okay, I mean, fair enough.
But the answer in my mind is no, he's not worried because, again, absolute immunity.
Absolute immunity, yeah.
Is Trump, I mean, sorry, is Musk worried about prosecution?
No, he would be pardoned immediately.
Right?
And anybody working for him would be pardoned.
Yeah, this doesn't work.
That's the whole point.
This doesn't work.
There's nothing there right now to make this work.
Exactly.
Because, again, they could get in there and discover that Musk had violated all manner of laws of privacy, the way he's doing it, which he probably has.
And he doesn't give one shit about that because he knows he'd just get pardoned right away if they even brought it.
By the way, what version of this Department of Justice would even bring charges?
Which, by the way, is why we have to move from looking at the institutions to stop this.
We have to move towards stopping it ourselves.
The only way to deal with any of this is for us to get in the streets to walk off of our jobs and make people very uncomfortable and bring the thing to a point of question.
Interesting.
Because, again, we're supposed to have three co-equal branches of government, right?
That's in the Constitution, I imagine, right?
That was the original design by our brilliant founders, and look how it turned out.
Yeah.
I mean, listen, it lasted as long as it did, so kudos to them.
But here's the thing.
What is the goal of these...
Wow, I almost said riots in the streets, but certainly of protesting the streets.
The goal would be to make our voice heard and influence who?
That's not what it is.
It's to go ahead and change the entire focus of this thing, which is we have developing crises.
We have to talk about another major crisis that's starting to develop on top of God knows how many other ones.
It needs to create another crisis that goes ahead and changes the perspective both from the media and the political parties.
I don't know that collective action would necessarily rouse the Democrats.
Maybe they would kneel with some kinta cloths.
Maybe that's what they would do.
Maybe they would sing God Bless America on the steps of the Capitol.
I've given up hope on this party waking up from their slumber.
But what it would do, as we have seen in past times, is it would put pressure on the circumstances, which allows the possibility of change.
It allows the possibility of the dynamic and the paradigm to change, as opposed to suddenly having Hakeem Jeffries wake up and do something, or Chuck Schumer wake up and do something.
It actually goes ahead and changes the paradigm and keeps it from this inevitable decline and inevitable takeover that we're dealing with now.
Okay.
I mean, I hope that that's true.
But I started to follow that rationale because, again, theory, you know, in the back of the day, it would influence Nixon or influence lawmakers, and they would actually, you know, adjust the way they were voting on these things in a democratic way, which we really aren't in that situation now with what's going on here.
And we know that the Republican Party across the board is not going to vote against, you know, Trump or whatever his policies are.
And in my mind, you know, I just read an article about a kid who grew up in Moscow in the Soviet Union.
And his parents visited one of the satellites, and they came back.
They got to watch Cabaret, which was not allowed, I guess, in the Soviet Union.
And all the parents could talk about, this was in the 80s or something, was how the scene in Cabaret, where they're out in the countryside, one person starts singing this fascist song, and then three people, and the next thing you know, they're running away because the entire town is out and standing full-throatedly singing this thing.
And in my mind, that is what we have to stop.
Because the people in the streets are going to start singing the MAGA, the Lee Greenwood bullshit.
Like, that's basically the equivalent here.
And more and more people are going to start joining in on this song as they start singing it.
And that's what we have to figure out, how to stop those people from singing that song and joining this thing.
And the only worry I have is that after BLM and things like that, you know, it's...
The term DEI, all these things are now so negative and so toxic.
It seems like it turns people instantly.
As soon as they see it or they're exposed, oh, look, it would be a riot to them.
Well, so stop saying DEI. Okay.
Like, that is their chosen decision.
Like, you brought up the Super Bowl.
Like, we saw what DEI means.
It means the N-word.
Right.
It's what they've figured out to say in order to do that, and they use, like, the antipathy between the working class and the middle class to go ahead and add this.
It's corporatize.
It's administrative language.
That's why they use it.
And it's come in and become sort of a shibboleth as a slur, is what it is.
So stop using that.
The whole point, and Nick, you brought up, like, people...
Getting behind this thing.
Like, there are scattered polls that show that Donald Trump's approval rating is going up, and part of it is because there is a growing sense that this is inevitable.
You might as well jump on board with this.
And, like, what you were talking about in terms of, like, immersing yourself in, like, this language and the rhetoric of it, the more that people only get that and they get capitulation from corporate media and they see capitulation from the Democratic Party, it does start to feel inevitable.
Like, we can't just look at these cascading crises and say, ah, what are you going to do?
Because the next thing you know, it's that choice I talk about all the time, which is, standing up means you get destroyed, there's no way possible to win, you either collapse in on yourself and hope that it doesn't get to you, or you join.
And that's what's happening right now.
Like, this thing is picking up speed, and unless something provides that actual countervailing force, that's where it's going to go.
And it's worth bringing up after the Super Bowl was yesterday that they got rid of the slogan, end racism.
And I think Bill Maher, can you brain, what was it called, to erase my brain?
I can't believe, I can't watch that guy anymore.
Oh, he's repulsed.
Anyway, he had this screed about it, but basically how it just encourages people to be more racist in some weird way.
And in my take, it was like...
If you see that end racism, it's just signaling to the people who believe in racism that you need to go back into your holes like we did before Trump unleashed all this.
That's where I think that's sort of what it is.
You're not going to change anyone's hearts, but you might remind them that it's uncouth to have those in public, those thoughts and saying those things out loud.
And this is the...
The tug of war we're having, right?
There's a big section of the country that wants to use the N-word, is basically what we're saying, right?
Oh, they're dying for it.
They want it so bad at this point.
Yeah, and so it's like that's where we're at, and it's such a toxic situation that I don't know if even the protesting is the right way to do it.
Now, the next question would be is when all of these things start kicking in and the pain is felt by everybody across the board with all the cuts that George is doing.
I asked this last time.
I don't even know if that's going to have the proper effect that it should on people who voted for this.
Well, you can't just sit there and say nothing's going to work.
I know.
Because if you say that, like, it's over.
That's the entire point.
Like, you have to try something, you know?
On YouTube, you know, Jared was basically trying to slap me in the face at this point.
Well, I, no, I... I think this goes back to, you know, we had a discussion in the last podcast about, like, the entire rhetorical power of being like, well, there's nothing to do.
Might as well move on, right?
This whole thing, man, is an assault on resilience.
It's an assault on our ability to stand against it.
And so now we're seeing them roll over judges, and it's like, well, shit.
I mean, there's just really nothing that we can do at this point.
And then it offers up the rhetorical answer, which is, well, I guess we join in on it.
Nick, speaking of escalating crises and the Super Bowl and all of it, Donald Trump was on his way to the Super Bowl, the first sitting president to go to the game and get booed, neither here nor there.
He was on Air Force One announcing the Gulf of America with the dumbest placard next to him that showed the name.
I don't even want to get into that.
And he was talking to reporters.
And yeah, let's just listen to what he said here in a second.
There could be a problem.
You've been reading about that with treasuries.
And that could be an interesting problem because it could be that a lot of those things don't count.
In other words, that some of that stuff that we're finding is very fraudulent.
Therefore, maybe we have less debt than we thought of.
Think of that.
So, Nick, I'm just going to go ahead and translate the madman's language here.
Well, I think.
These are the ramblings of an idiot.
And a reminder, he doesn't know what he's saying, but this is music to Donald Trump's ears.
And it allows him to do the thing that he always does, which is, oh, you haven't noticed?
I built the wall.
Even though he didn't build the wall.
It's a completely bullshit victory, announcing victory without actually having victory.
The problem here, Nick, is that it turns out that the United States paying its debts is central to capitalism in general.
And if the United States stops paying debt and its debtors start to realize that the United States is not good to pay its debt, there is a cascading domino effect that could actually melt down the economic system in general.
So Donald Trump can say that the debt's much better than we thought it was.
Look how I cut debt.
But there would be giant consequences if this actually were to be something that they embrace.
Well, I know, but the meltdown of the economy, even the world economy, is someone like Trump would just be considered Black Friday.
You know, it's like a perfect opportunity to buy all sorts of things low.
You know what I mean?
Like, that's the problem with this whole thing.
There's an incentive to all the, especially Musk as well, who's got dead up the wazoo, to suddenly find a lot of great deals.
And it does go in line with what we're talking about with Doge as well because of the way they're doing this.
It's not even necessarily – the method of this overnight and cutting things causes such tremendous pain across the board to most normal folk that that's the problem.
And even if you think you had to wait, oh, just wait a little while.
Because remember, the whole thing about the Republicans was we have to be able to get our policies in.
You'll see.
Everyone will be – it'll be like heaven for everybody.
Just wait until we do it.
Well, now that they've gotten in and they're doing it, okay, now it's – well, now you're going to have to wait a little while.
It's not going to be overnight.
It's going to be whatever.
And then what that means is you are going to suffer and die for four years, three years, whatever it's going to be, until we can get to the Shangri-La that we're promising, of which we know it will not happen.
No, it's completely fictional, and it always has been, which is how this whole thing works, is, hey, we're doing this, but trust us, we have a plan.
The plan is and has always been to crater the standard of living in the United States of America.
We've talked about it on past episodes, and I feel terrible that we're going to have to repeat it constantly, which is the capitalist economy is a cycle of booms and busts.
There are boom periods in which there's incredible wealth that is being made, and as it happens, they take off all of the breaks and all of the regulations, which allows it to go into overdrive and to go into excess growth, right?
To go ahead and just, like, overheat and grow more and more dangerous.
Inevitably, there is a bust period.
When the bust period happens, the United States government acts as a support organ for the wealthy and corporations, goes ahead and makes them whole.
We saw it in 2008. And then the cycle continues on.
And what happens during the bust period?
The wealthy go on a spending spree.
As the rest of us don't know how to get food, we don't know how to have shelter, we don't know how to get our medication, many people die, and the standard of living plummets.
They take advantage of it to get cheap labor and more and more resources.
Nick, we have an awful confluence of things.
One, you know what Donald Trump loves even more than looking at his face on TV? Stiffing people that work for him.
Not paying them for the work that they've done, not paying them for the services they've done.
This is catnip for Donald Trump.
The idea that he is going to be able to leave a lot of people sitting there hat in hand and have nothing to show for it.
The people behind him...
The puppeteers who control Donald Trump, including the wealth and oligarchical classes, they know him to a T. They know that this right here is really, really attractive to him.
It also goes into their larger plan, which is they're not interested in the fate of the United States of America.
What are they interested in?
The fate of the United States of America and going ahead and taking over the system into an international authoritarian larger system.
So as a result...
We go ahead and say we're not going to pay our debts.
Donald Trump gets a symbolic victory.
The people who support him will go ahead and blame whoever he tells them to blame for the suffering that they're going to have.
Things go down.
They get cheaper labor.
And on top of that, they get to buy up as many assets as possible.
This is everything that we've been looking at.
And by the way, go ahead and throw crypto on there so we can get off the U.S. dollar and onto a thing that they control and also doesn't have any regulations.
You have a perfect storm, and this thing is starting to take off, and it's taking off very quickly.
Yeah, and I'm not sure if I was trying to weed through to figure out the answer to the question as far as the people who would they actually continue to vote for him despite the tremendous pain he's going to cause them intentionally.
It's still not clear.
I think part of the offshoot of the answer would have been they're going to learn to blame the Democrats.
Despite not being in power.
And that's sort of the other notion of how our government is built and the economy is built this way, where we were talking about highs and lows.
And the one thing that never really gets addressed is the middle class, right?
Like, I would say, I'm going to go from 1787, you know, let's just kind of give a bit of the doubts of the country, of when we can start measuring these things in terms of the economy and impact.
You know, that's 238 years.
How many years do we actually see the middle class really benefit and prosper from anything?
It was a very short period of time.
Right.
In the aggregate, maybe it's like 20 years.
Maybe sometime after World War II. I don't even know.
And by the way, that wasn't because of anything that the government was doing.
It happened to be a very specific period in time in which Europe, let me check my notes, was destroyed.
Right.
Right.
So, you know, so the economy itself and the way capitalism is structured, it doesn't benefit the majority of people.
And I think everyone can even recognize that.
But, you know, I don't know.
I mean, listen, I guess we're not here to do a treatise about like why we shouldn't have capitalism in this country.
Right.
I am.
Let's do it.
Let's go.
OK, absolutely.
You know.
All right, comrade.
I mean, you know, it's like, you know, you want to do you want to do communism.
It's like, you know, what do we what would work at that point?
Well, I mean, that's a different conversation that at some point or another we're going to have in the midst of this.
I mean, like that is that is a large thing that is occurring here, which is we are entering into a period.
And Nick, going back to the first segment where we were talking about what are we supposed to do and how are we supposed to handle this?
There are moments where capitalism and power and world events are very concrete and solid.
And then there are other moments where they're malleable.
And when they are malleable, we see a great clash of ideologies.
Right.
And right now we are in a moment where it's very, very malleable.
A lot of things can happen.
A lot of things can go different ways.
And by the way, I just want to say the markets aren't reacting to this because they do not take Donald Trump seriously.
They think that this is just the ramblings of an idiot as opposed to a larger, wide-scale plan, which also has to do with the fact that our media and our corporations, they do not understand the ideology that's taking place here.
They do not understand exactly what's being carried out.
But it is going to reach that point.
Everything right now points to a planned demolition.
of the U.S. economy and the transfer of capitalism from its place within the United States into a larger sort of a ethereal network state.
That's what all these people want.
They want to move to basically away from the nation state into a tech controlled new era is what this is into.
And it relies on freeing, quote unquote, freeing capitalism from the United States, which for the record, you know, you and I, we love we love talking about movies as metaphors.
It's like the thing, right?
Capitalism is the thing.
It jumps from person to person and looks like them, takes them over as a host, and then kills them.
Right.
And then it jumps to the next thing.
Capitalism is and has always been a parasitic ideology that is now looking to get away from the United States, the same as it got away from Great Britain following the destruction of Europe.
At this point, this is what these assholes have planned.
And what it ends up becoming, whether or not it becomes an authoritarian, neoliberal authoritarianism, capitalism, or whether it becomes something more democratically socialist or socialist or whatever, that is a conversation that we are probably going to end up facing.
Well, so isn't the solution then, because you're talking about, you know, marching the streets and having our voices heard, but isn't the real true solution we vote them out?
Well, sure, if you have free and fair elections, we'll see if that takes place.
On top of that, Nick, at some point or another, you have to start questioning representative democracy in general.
Do you see it working?
Do you see an opposition party that's standing up to the party in power?
So now we're getting to somewhere because, you know, and so this is an opportunity probably, although the notion of a third party emerging that had any kind of, you know, traction, this seems ludicrous, but...
Well, Nick, there is roughly 70 to 80 percent of the population that's not being represented right now.
Yeah.
So what would you think about someone, like, if somebody just ran on universal health care, sensible gun laws, and abortion rights?
Like, you know, and really full-throated, I'm talking like, you know, as left as you can be on those things.
I mean, maybe even on the guns.
Let the guns just be sensible gun laws.
How well would that person do?
I would have to imagine it would be a watershed moment in politics.
Well, let's not even stop there, Nick.
Let's go ahead and talk about bodily autonomy.
Let's go ahead and talk about getting money out of politics.
Let's talk about term limits.
Let's talk about regulating corporations and monopolies.
Like, these things are...
Historically popular.
And so what we're dealing with now, I want to go ahead and say it explicitly.
We're in a class war.
And the people listening, I know there are some people in the government who are listening to this.
They are also on this side.
I'm guessing there are probably a few billionaires and millionaires who listen to this who might be on one side of the equation.
The majority of us are on one side of this thing.
And it isn't working.
This right now is taking us in a very, very specific direction.
And what we're looking at right now, Nick, with what we're talking about with the debt and all the things that they're pushing with this planned crash, we're in a car and we're driving towards a brick wall, right?
We are pushing towards a brick wall.
The question right now is whether or not we're going to have the courage and the bravery to grab the wheel.
That's the question at this point, because we know where this car is heading.
It is not even being particularly hidden at this point.
For sure.
And if you're wondering how the Republicans are going to try and, I guess, put the blinders on so they don't know they're about to hit the wall, it's kind of elucidating there.
Because they're the ones who are going to have to try and calm everybody down, their constituents, right, who are MAGA people, and somehow use some, you know, hypnosis, I suppose, to convince them that we're not on that path, even though it looks pretty clear to everybody out there.
Nick, I mean, have you ever studied, like, Heaven's Gate?
There is a small group of people who got convinced by a couple of leaders that if they unalived themselves, they would join a UFO and go into the heavens and ascend.
Like when you are in a cult, that brick wall starts to look like deliverance.
It starts to look like something very important.
By the way, speaking of trying to explain to people how these things are good, cuts to the National Institutes for Health with billions of dollars is basically going to leave medical innovation and research and technological research in this country in the lurch.
We're talking about billions of dollars for support services, facilities, and workers.
This is a massive blow to research, innovation, and academia.
On the heels of this, Nick, we are now seeing Republicans like Senator Katie Britt of Alabama promising that they are going to work with the administration to get their funding reestablished, which I have to tell you kind of shows where this thing is going, which is the Trump administration and Doge is going which is the Trump administration and Doge is going to basically cut all funding and then use that This is pretty obvious this is where it's going, and now it's taking shape.
Yeah.
You know, I don't even know if I wrap my head around the notion of blackmail, because obviously when I first saw that, I was like, yeah, yeah, red states will simply get the benefits of these things and nobody else.
Well, can I give you a quick little idea of how this works?
Yeah.
For people listening, give context.
As we've been covering what Trump is doing, one thing that I keep pointing out is you need to learn how globalism has worked around the world to other countries, right?
And how it always boomerangs back.
So, for instance, if you're a quote-unquote second or third world country and you come across some hard times, maybe you have trouble with debt, you start reaching out to places like the World Bank.
Right?
Or the Economic Forum.
And you're like, hey, we really need help.
And those institutions, Nick, and by the way, if this sounds like organized crime, good, because it should.
What do they say?
We would love to help you.
Oh, my God.
We're so sorry you're going through this.
We'll go ahead and give you the money you need, but we're going to have to have some changes.
So you're going to have to change your laws in your country.
And how are you going to change them?
You're going to have to make them more towards the economic conditions that the United States and global capitalism wants, right?
So you're going to have to get rid of worker protections.
You're going to have to carry out austerity within the country.
You're going to have to get rid of labor unions.
More or less, we're going to call the shots in your country.
In return for giving you the money.
So now we're going to have the federal spigot turned off, and all of a sudden if a blue state comes calling for help, well, we would love to help you, but we really want to talk to you, California, about your environmental regulations and your worker protections.
And all of a sudden then the money that is supposed to be yours and has already been earmarked and approved to be yours now becomes conditional based on you doing what Doge and the Trump administration wants you to do.
So just so we're clear, that's what you're describing going forward.
It's not necessarily how NIH worked at all before this.
This was a well-meaning institute.
And to show you how petty these people are, this is really just a backlash against Anthony Fauci, right?
It's a large chunk of it, yeah.
And the COVID vaccine, really.
And they're all vaccinated.
They all got the vaccine, and they all were happy to get it and be protected.
But they realize how much of a movement, and I haven't seen the latest numbers, but I'm pretty sure you'd be able to confirm that with me, Jared, is that the anti-vax movement has grown and has become powerful.
Sure.
Yeah, and for the record, going back to what we've talked about, and it's always important to put this caveat in there.
Nick, would...
Would it be fair to say that the NIH has waste in it?
Yeah, that's probably fair.
Would it be fair to say that healthcare in the United States of America and the medical world, that it is not perfect?
It is not perfect.
Okay, so does it need reform?
Yes.
Okay, it does.
But meanwhile, we have a system set up that has been able to do some good things.
It needs actual reform.
But what we're actually looking at now is that this thing...
This is something that is going to be felt in all 50 states.
On top of that, it's going to hurt people who are currently in medical trials, people who are currently hoping that their life-threatening conditions will somehow or another be treated.
We were on a path, for the record, in doing some real damage to cancer.
And, you know, Nick, for the record...
We were very critical of Joe Biden when he deserved it.
The amount of attention that he gave going after cancer is one of the better things of his presidency.
There's a dwindling list of them at this point, but that was actually a big thing.
We're going to see those things set back.
We're going to see communities around the country that are going to be harmed.
I have heard from so many academics over the past couple of days who are absolutely terrified because what did the Republicans do?
They starved the academy.
They starved every college, every place of higher education.
They carried out a war against them.
And this right here could be one of the defining killer blows against them.
And what are they going to use?
They're going to use the purse and the entire notion that this does need reform.
That's the hidden thing.
That's the mask that they put on it.
Everything underneath it is malicious.
It's retributive, which you're speaking about.
And on top of it, it is about going ahead and holding these places hostage.
Right.
This is the dark times.
This is what fashion isn't really what it looks like.
That's why it's already there.
We're already there.
And again, the legal machinations are trying to twist in terms of the control over the executive branch.
It's just...
What's the word?
It's like a child.
It's like a seven-year-old's version of how they think rules are supposed to be followed, I guess.
But not even just a normal seven-year-old child.
It's a seven-year-old child that's always in trouble and always in the principal's office because they don't get it.
And Musk is that guy because he doesn't think that the law has ever applied to him anyway.
And this is the best way to short-circuit that and to get his cronies involved, too.
And that's trickling down to people that are working for him, too.
It is a mess.
And again, I don't know how...
I mean, the Republicans, if they were on the other side of this, would bring patients who are dying of cancer out on the stage with them and say, look at what the Democrats are doing.
This woman's going to die next week because of whatever they know.
Will the Democrats do that?
You know, will they once and for all play on that level field and use, and that's what they're doing, right?
You're using victims of these things as pawns, but it clearly is very effective for the Republicans.
And will the Democrats ever do something like that?
No, I don't.
I don't particularly think so.
I mean, they haven't shown a willingness to do it so far.
And I want to reply to a couple things you've said which are correct.
Yes, this does feel childish because it's childish.
It's a bunch of people who have not grown up and have not dealt with their own trauma and have not dealt with their own problems.
As a result, what do we deal with?
We deal with an abusive administration.
That's what authoritarianism is.
And for the record, I am so pissed off.
By the gleeful cruelty.
Watching the way that it's happening.
Like, it's not just that it's happening.
It's the nature of how it's happening.
It's having to endure their bullshit.
And as this happens, I do want to say before we move into the stories coming out of Doge here in a second, Nick, and it goes back to exactly what you're talking about.
Before we move on, this is going to affect every state in the union.
This is going to cause unbelievable...
I don't care if you hate academia.
I was in academia for a very long time.
I have a lot of misgivings about higher education.
This is going to affect every university in the country.
And the amounts of people, staff, administrative help, academics themselves, those people are suddenly waking up to a new world.
And the entire point of why I'm bringing this up is, you said, I don't know where this goes.
When you have this push, Nick, when you go ahead and cause this much pain and you seize this much power very, very quickly, you create resistance.
Like, there are millions upon millions of people in this country who might have been like, I don't know about Trump.
I kind of dislike him as a person, but reform needs to happen.
To people who are suddenly either losing their jobs or their entire work has been stifled at this point.
The seeds are being planted for a large popular backlash.
The question is whether or not it actually happens or not, whether or not it actually goes ahead and crosses that barrier.
But right now, every time you see this, there is an equal and opposite reaction of people who oppose it because of the obvious cruelty and unfairness of it.
Right.
And that's the point.
That's the hope, is that people get so despondent that they give up and do not resist, and then they get even further control over everything.
That's right.
And will ultimately turn the society into these dystopian movies that we now see where, you know, like, what's the one with the Star Wars one where he's the one guy?
You know, anyway, they're building the Death Star, I think, ultimately.
They're talking about Rogue One.
Yeah.
Rogue One, but then it's right before Rogue One.
It's on the TV that I watched.
I don't know.
All you have to look at is Putinist Russia.
Yeah.
That's it.
Everybody knows the fix is happening.
They can't do anything about it.
It's hard to stay off of the...
I don't want to be connected.
I don't want the government to know anything about what's going on because they're abusing it.
And that's where we're on the way.
Musk wants to launch a payment system on X. Well, he now has access to every competitor that he would want, all their data through the government's websites and databases.
And so that's half of his motivation, at least, to doing all this stuff.
Yeah.
I'm just making a quick little nod that as an ex-evangelical, like the apocalyptic...
Book of Revelation undertones to all of this is really upsetting.
Just watching the evangelicals go along with it is a lot.
Speaking of Doge, Nick, a couple of stories I want to talk about before we finish this episode.
One, Doge Stooge, Marco Alez, was found out that he had a history of making white supremacist statements online.
A couple of choice ones.
Quote, I was racist before it was cool.
You cannot pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.
Normalize Indian hate.
He was fired from Doge and then immediately rehired by Elon Musk.
We have also found out that 19-year-old...
19!
19-year-old Edward Korstein, who has access to historic levels of private and confidential data, was previously fired from an internship for leaking companies' data.
That was over at PATH Network.
This sucks, and when coupled with the fact that not only has Doge taken control of multiple agencies and killed things at will, including going after the Treasury and all these payments, next up, supposedly, they're going into the Pentagon, the Social Security Administration.
Lots of fun.
Well, for what it's worth, 19 years old was the average age of the Vietnam combat soldier.
And if you know, you know.
But yes, certainly not someone who has enough experience to be doing what they're doing here.
And then the fact that they...
And the reason why they rehired the guy after those inflammatory statements...
I'm sorry if I diminish the statements by saying inflammatory.
Racist, right?
You know, J.D. Vance weighs in on Twitter, on X for this, and somehow that convinces, that's the conduit that he has to Musk, it sounds like.
I don't know if they're texting each other or talking directly.
They're talking through, you know, Twitter.
He says, I believe in redemption, so, you know, everybody should be able to, you know.
Be, you know, forgiven for their sins or whatever.
But I think he missed an important step, which would be you're supposed to ask for that forgiveness, right, in a way that seems contrite and earnest.
And, like, that doesn't happen.
These guys, you know, Trump doesn't refuse to ever apologize for anything.
And so even just playing the game would have been probably sufficient.
Just, oh, put out a statement, I'm sorry, yada, yada, that kind of thing.
And then, you know, whatever.
We probably would have been like, okay.
But as a result, yeah, we have, this is the unqualified part of the thing, which is scary, which is why at the very least, if they're going to be doing this, cutting through red tape and bureaucracy, you might as well have, you know, accountants or people who have been certified and trained in this kind of forensic stuff to be able to do it.
Well, that interferes when you want to move fast and break things, which is the ethos of Silicon Valley and this current tech fascist class.
I want to say something, well, I want to say two things.
First of all, fuck J.D. Vance.
It's been way too long since I've said that out loud.
Fuck J.D. Vance.
Fuck J.D. Vance.
The podcast title, the name of our podcast to that.
The next thing is this.
This guy, he wasn't hired to doge and it turned out he was white supremacist.
That is one of the things that they want.
Period.
This is a fascist, white supremacist, patriarchal misogynist.
That's what they want.
They want people who don't care about other people.
They want people who want to dole out pain, particularly to vulnerable communities, particularly the quote-unquote other, which is what they're interested in.
In all of this, this runs into place, which is they are looking for people who don't care about rules.
They are looking at people who do not respect authority whatsoever or any limitations on their power.
That is one of the main...
Motivating parts of the tech fascist movement, and they want people who are more than happy with white supremacists, patriarchal, misogynistic behavior.
That is exactly in their wheelhouse and what they were looking for.
If I had experience in any of these kind of things, I'd be more than happy to lie on those forms to get the job so I can be in there and monitoring this, whatever.
The problem is, is when it came time to alert whoever, what's going on, I would die.
They would kill me, right?
They would just, I'd be eliminated.
There's no whistleblower thing.
This is just, you're dead.
And I don't know.
That would be a real concern, right?
Right.
Like this is definitely the kind of power they're wielding now.
And it's too bad because that would be the most in the moment where like someone's going to finally have a conscience and say, wait a minute, this is we're going way too far here.
And that might even happen.
You never know.
But you have to sense that the whistleblower protections do not exist with this administration.
I can't imagine anybody within Doge.
If you take that job, I don't think at any point you're going to have a moral or ethical awakening.
Well, but real quick, did they know about these statements he made in the past, or did they not vet him at all?
Well, both are damning.
If they knew about it and they hired him anyway, that gives the game up.
If they didn't know about it, how in the hell are they giving this much control to people that they haven't given actual thorough backgrounds to?
And for the record, Nick, the major ideologues of this, everyone from Curtis Yarvin and everybody within that space...
Basically have all said, we hate democracy.
We think that some races are genetically better than others.
Like, this isn't something that they're concerned with.
It's something that they are obsessed with.
Right?
Like, it's not a red flag for them.
It's a green flag.
And it earns you a welcome into the arena of taking over the federal government and using it as a weapon to give tech fascists ultimate power.
That's the whole point.
On that note, everybody, I just wanted to bring all this up because you need to know who it is taking over the government so you can have conversations with other people and you can be ready for collective action.
Please, please, please get ready for that.
We will be back with The Weekender on Friday.
In the meantime, you can find Nick over on Blue Sky at Nick Housman.
You can find me at JY Saxton.
Be safe.
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