RFK Jr's Health Department Would Put People In Work Camps
Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss how Robert Kennedy Jr is angling to get rid of SSRI's while trying to insist exercise will cure all mental health issues. Meanwhile, JD Vance's lecture to the European Union on the destruction of Democracy under the guise of free speech is met with stone cold silence and indifference. They finish by discussing the fecklessness of the Democratic Party in the face of fascistic creep.
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And since we last recorded, you can't talk about everything that's going on.
Once more, we have another situation where we all just need to be happy for Nick Hausman.
So that's what we'll say.
Nick, how are you doing, my friend?
I am doing pretty well.
I'm pretty well.
I don't want to be too cryptic at this point, but at some point, we'll be able to talk a little more about it.
Cool stuff.
Cool stuff, you know, sort of the culmination of, you know, a lifelong obsession or something it is, and just rewarding, and it feels great to sort of be in this position.
But, you know, we'll let everybody know sooner than later, but as of now, I'm walking around, you know, I've got a good posture right now.
Well, and I only bring that up.
I don't do it to be coy.
I do it because we are living in hard times, and so we need to be happy when we can be happy.
So if the people listening, part of the Muckrake community, can send happiness Nick's way, he will surely send it back.
We have a lot to talk about today.
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All of that good stuff.
Not good stuff, Nick.
We have to start with the wake of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. being confirmed as the Secretary of Health and Human Services, which is a national embarrassment.
But since being confirmed, RFK Jr. has released a nightmare list of priorities that he wants to get done.
It's also been helped by the establishment of what is now being called the Make America Healthy Again Commission.
And a couple of the choice little things that we're seeing right now.
Is not just studying vaccines to possibly get rid of them and possibly keep them from being a part of American life, which would be disastrous.
But Nick, we're also hearing now about possible action on SSRIs, or serotonin reuptake inhibitors.
And for the record, 13% of the population.
And that is only counting people who are adults.
We're not even talking about children in general.
This is a major, major part of American culture.
On top of that, we also have heard, and he hasn't been real shy about it, the possibility of what is being called wellness farms, which are rural encampments around the country in which people who are on these types of drugs or have mental illness could be sent to, let me check this, And he has hypothesized that it might take up to three to four years for some of these people to get clean.
Nick, we've been covering a lot of nightmarish stuff from the Trump administration, but this right here, this is right up there at the top.
I mean, I would love to tell you, Jared, that, you know, I live in a world like of Rocky IV, where you see Drago, who's getting, you know, injected by all these things, and he's training, and then you see Rocky, who's just running up a mountain in the snow, right?
It's like, and listen, is there a huge part of the population that thinks if people just did exercise and got some more sun, they wouldn't have clinical depression?
Like, yeah, and would I like to believe that that's the answer?
Like, sure, that sounds great, but it just seems like the science is too clear, and the chemical...
Imbalance that happens that causes a lot of these crippling issues with people.
This is just another version of treating the chemicals that are going on in your brain.
And certainly, having seen it firsthand, the benefits are myriad, really.
And I would think that it's kind of settled scientifically as well.
But we have to keep going about more of the RFK stuff because, again...
He's trying to shroud a lot of this stuff in some sort of this folksy thing about how, yeah, we'll just feel better if we make ourselves feel better.
And it's concerning because there's a bit of a powerful lure to this, don't you think?
Well, yeah, there is.
And I want to get into why this is happening, what the thought is, what the right-wing ideology behind it.
I do want to go ahead and make something clear.
We're talking about over 40 million people.
Right now, the idea that these people might have their medications taken from them, or they might be forcibly put into work camps, concentration camp, work camps.
That's what we're talking about.
When it comes to SSRIs, the right wing has created their own alternate reality, shocker of shockers, that this is what is causing school shootings.
This is what's causing the houselessness crisis.
That these people are insane or addicted criminals or whatever.
That's how they go ahead.
And we talk a lot about narratives on this show.
Like, if you were going to do this to people, and I cannot tell you how many people right now are panicking because these medications are absolutely crucial to their lives and the idea that they would be taken away.
I mean, personally, I saw people during the Adderall crisis that were just like, I cannot feel good right now.
This is a real mess of a situation.
And that was just a temporary shortage.
The whole truth of this, and it always has a little morsel of truth, right?
So when we're talking about these medications, they don't necessarily cure people.
Right?
Like, it does help with things.
There are other aspects of this.
And we have to talk about the fact that we do have a mental health crisis in this country.
It's because we don't invest in mental health.
It's because, you know, if you look at American history, it's a parallel of all of this.
Like, there was an attempt by JFK, you know, irony of ironies, it was his uncle who tried to solve this problem.
And then during that, it sort of languished and then eventually Ronald Reagan slashed it and destroyed it and plunged us all into a for-profit type environment, right?
And it allowed pharmaceutical companies to become incredibly rich, incredibly powerful as they were treating sort of some of the side effects of things that weren't being taken care of.
Everything from trauma to, you know, personal histories that need dealt with, those types of things.
We've created a problem that does need to be taken care of, but going ahead and creating, first of all, work camps, which could very likely be done to try and replace migrant labor that is being deported or thrown out of the country, making young people and people in the country on medication do this stuff.
Not only would that be torturous, it's exploitative, and it's more like a gulag.
That's what we're talking about.
But the next part of it is what we keep talking about, Nick, which is they identify an actual problem.
America does have a mental health crisis that needs taken care of, but they find a way that they can profit off of it, that they can take advantage of it, and then they can create a quote-unquote solution that doesn't actually solve anything.
It just goes ahead and creates a worsening environment for everybody involved.
Yeah, I know you probably pushed back on this when I said this in the past, but like, you know, there is a certain incentive for a lot of these pharmaceutical or all the pharmaceutical companies to not kill the people that they are producing these medications for.
And it's bad business, right?
If they don't test properly and they don't make sure these things have efficacy.
So there's sort of a built-in notion there.
But listen, it's another one of those things.
It's easy to be able to argue that those evil, and they are evil, are exploiting everybody.
But what's also worse is that it's a two-fisted approach here where they're also getting rid of the federal employees who are in charge of overseeing to make sure that those tests are legitimate and are very rigorous.
And so they're kind of mixing a lot of things here that are making it so unsafe for Americans in general anyway, and particularly in this realm, although we can go across for the FAA and everywhere, other important body in the government that protects our citizens.
It doesn't make sense.
You can't be slashing that, but then also trying to get rid of people taking the pills.
None of this stuff makes any sense to me.
It doesn't really fit together right.
And as a result, people are going to suffer.
Well, yeah, people are going to suffer, and quite frankly, people are going to die.
I mean, everything that we talk about in this administration, a lot of people are going to suffer and some people are going to die.
And I've had people reach out and they've said, what do you think's going on?
Like, what do you think's happening underneath the surface?
And I talked to a friend who's a mental health professional, and he said something that actually kind of struck me kind of deeply.
And I think he's right about this, which is, on one hand, this is a shakedown.
Like, the big pharma has a ton of money and a ton of power, and obviously they're going to try and get their cut.
Right?
They're going to try and get in on the business, which anybody looking for a reoccurring theme of this episode, it's people trying to get their cut of business.
The other aspect of it could be the possibility that they are going to try and get rid of things like generics and actually pump the prices up.
Or, you know, you were talking about the lack of regulation, allowing big pharma to get rid of the unsafe drugs and then make new drugs, which then creates a brand new market and the possibility that those things will not be safe or, you know, they might be more addictive or whatever.
We don't know.
The other aspect of it, because they're always doing three or four or five things at a time.
You know what I mean?
It's multifaceted because they have so many people working on these things.
It could also be a situation like what happened with TikTok, Nick, in which, oh, we're going to get rid of TikTok.
No, we'll save it.
Right?
Like, we'll go ahead and we'll appeal to younger voters.
We'll go ahead and save TikTok, even though we set it in motion to get rid of it.
All of a sudden, you have a building panic.
We're going to get rid of these medications that people are reliant on, but we'll go ahead and save it at the last second and also get a cut from Big Pharma.
And also, by the way, we'll go ahead and probably set up some of these work camps, right?
And to go ahead and sort of not just make a profit, not just gain support and gain more authority, but also to go ahead and sort of instill a discipline that these people take advantage of.
Yeah.
And I can even see like, remember, there's a stigma attached to taking SSRIs and getting therapy.
You know, and the irony there is it's like, you know, okay, if you get off of SSRIs and you kind of do alternative methods of helping yourself, you know, therapy would have to be part of that.
Which, again, I have to imagine anybody Trump's age or in that whole era looks at therapy as the biggest sign of weakness and you can never even go in that way.
And Nick, they're more than happy to create an alternative medication.
I'm putting big quotes around medication.
They're more than happy to create their own pseudo-cures that they will market, and they'll go ahead and try and replace this with the population because of the pseudoscience we're talking about.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe RFK is on the record saying that SSRIs cause frogs to become...
No, you're talking about Alex Jones.
Are you sure?
No, I haven't heard RFK say that.
No, the idea is that the chemicals from Pharma have done that.
Look it up, because it might be.
But either way, listen, even if RFK didn't say that, the other things he's said in the past have been equally ridiculous.
And so that's also the other problem here is, again, I want to give him credit.
RFK Jr. says that our food supply is poisoned.
And I will not push back on that at all.
And that's something that could be cleaned up very easily.
And then you have to wonder how it got to that point.
But again, there's nothing about his background at all within a shred of percent that indicates he has any qualifications to do that at all.
And that's what's so frightening about this as well.
And then, by the way, he just represents everybody else who got cabinet positions as well.
It's the morsel of truth of the problem of American society that they're going to quote-unquote solve.
Right.
Speaking of fake solutions, Nick, another crisis that's bubbling up.
The Department of Education, as it's been taken over by Doge and the Trump administration, is now threatening to cut funding to all public schools and universities in the country if they do not cut their quote-unquote DEI programs, which of course is their catch-all for whatever it is that they hate and want to get rid of.
This is a threat that is rippling through public education in the country.
Again, a thing that has been under attack by the wealth class for decades now, since desegregation.
This right here is a developing story that I think has the possibility of having massive, massive ramifications.
Oh, absolutely.
And by the way, I kind of was going to throw this in there before you started talking on this subject, but Lyndon McMahon, right?
She's the one who's in charge.
You know, I'm a little bit fuzzy.
This is your realm.
She has something to do with wrestling, right?
Yeah.
Well, they're still married.
She's married to Vince McMahon, who, a reminder to everybody, has been charged with sex trafficking.
And is one of the more repugnant individuals that you can find.
But, you know, who's keeping track?
Right.
And I think that, you know, during her hearing, like, you know, the questions they were asking her, she seemed to have no background.
No clue.
And any idea.
I mean, it kind of makes, it almost makes the last one that he hired.
DeVos.
DeVos, thank you.
It almost makes her look qualified.
Because at least she, I don't, let's not even justify her position either, but like.
This is frightening.
It's exactly the thing where you think the only reason they put her there is because they know they're going to get rid of the whole thing anyway.
So I don't even know why they're bothering even showing up at the Department of Education anyway.
As far as I can tell, what we've heard and what we've seen, they simply want to...
Change the, you know, the door, the locks, get rid of the sign in front of the building, and then have it just go away.
However they're going to approach this, the notion of, you know, like, for instance, they fired everybody who was involved in a, I believe that the department was about, had the word transition in it, okay?
But the transition, what they assumed meant trans.
Was simply to help disabled people transition from high school to the workforce.
Gone.
Poof.
Because they're literally doing a search, right?
And they're looking for the words transition, and boom, and they're pressing a button, and they fire everybody.
So this is what's happening on this, and for the full dismantling of that, and really it's disabled people, I think, who are going to be the ultimate victims of this because there's so much support that they need and should be getting and are required by law to get in the school system, and that's going to be gone.
It's repulsive.
So Betsy DeVos was named education secretary because her and her wealthy family were some of the main attackers of public education.
She was put in that position to not just weaken public education, but to put it in a place where it could be fatalistically destroyed.
And that's where we are now.
And the people who are going to suffer the most are the poor people in rural areas who are not going to have choices.
And then we're going to see the privatization of education.
Meanwhile, we're also going to see, and, you know, they keep saying DEI, which is just their catch-all word.
We're talking about gender.
We're talking about race.
We're talking about actual history.
We're talking about actual standards.
People getting educations that prepare them for anything besides labor that is being vastly exploited.
And I want to say a couple of things very quickly, just for listeners.
First things first, this is what administrative capture...
Which is, things happen in a place like Washington, D.C. You have the threats against the schools.
Then every single school, every elementary school, every middle school, every high school, every university in the country that relies on federal funds, they are put into a panic.
And they have to make a choice, which is, do we comply with this?
And it starts with small things.
You get rid of your departments, you get rid of any sort of curricula that they might not like, and you put people in a position of power in those departments and in those schools who will go along with all this.
One of the great untold histories of all of this is how authoritarianism, particularly in the 20th century with fascism, Nazism, and other reactionary authoritarian regimes, they all did this, Nick.
They all looked up one day and all of a sudden the authoritarians were in the room and they were like, you're going to teach what we want and you're going to run your schools the way that we want you to.
And I want to say to our listeners, I know we have a lot of teachers.
You need to be prepared for when this comes down.
Like, you have now seen the warning flare.
You know what is coming.
You need to be prepared.
And if you give this up, if you just simply go softly into that good night, like, it's not going to come back.
Like, this has to be a moment where people draw a line in the sand, they get organized, and they say, absolutely not, and they turn this into a giant conflict.
And that is the only way that we're going to stop this, because this is happening very quickly, and if you allow this to take over, I'm telling you, not just in the moment is it going to be bad, but long-term, the administrative capture of public education is going to be incredibly detrimental.
Absolutely.
And I posted this on social media the other day where I said, all these people who are getting fired, and by the way, when you're thinking even about SSRIs, what they're moving towards, it sounds like, is, okay, let's say a prescription is written for somebody out of state, and they try and fill it, and then they're going to try and arrest the doctors who are brought to the prescriptions.
And then the same thing with teachers.
If they violate whatever these vague notions of DEI are by teaching something they don't agree with, what are the ramifications?
Most likely it is...
We're going to have to have people, the Rosa Parks, who are willing to have social defiance and get arrested and make a big deal of it.
Even the people who are working for the government now who are unfairly being removed, don't leave your office.
Just, you know, make them...
Now, again, the problem with that is that that becomes a stain on your record, right?
That you may not ever live down again, the way this is going with this, you know?
I think in the 60s when you get, that was a badge of honor, right?
Because, again, you know, there were probably still employers who said, oh, you were processing the Vietnam War and you got arrested?
Great.
Like, we want you on our team, right?
But that's not the same thing that can happen now, but we're going to have to have people who are willing to do that, I think.
I think we're going to need to have some sort of disobedience there because there's...
There's nothing to inspire and spark a counter-movement to this right now.
And that's one thing I think that would help.
So you have to spark it yourself.
You have to make sure that the people around you are aware this is going on, that they do not simply accept it and accept it as fait accompli, that there's nothing that they can do.
There has to be collective action.
Because what you just brought up is a really important way to frame it.
If you are one individual doing it, it is an act of courage.
But if multiple people who are together fight back against this, you're not as vulnerable.
And that's one thing that people need to take into consideration.
Nick, every time we're putting together one of these shows, I just look at the rundown and it just reminds me of the old adage, which is there are years where absolutely nothing happens, decades where absolutely nothing happens, and then days where entire decades happen.
I cannot believe the incredible...
The amount of things that we're talking about here, they're massive.
In Europe, we have a developing situation.
Apparently, and this was an exclusive of The Telegraph, they got a hold of a memorandum that the Trump administration sent Ukraine as they prepare for quote-unquote peace talks with the Ukrainian war.
Apparently, the Trump administration had delivered a plan to Ukraine for their acceptance or denial, there's no real denial here, that would amount to reparations from the Ukraine war and the support of Ukraine.
And if you're thinking, oh, maybe they might want a little bit of money, no, they want almost all of it.
We are talking about U.S. control of 50% of minerals.
50% of businesses, we're talking about oil, we're talking about ports, we're talking about literally everything that Ukraine has.
Statistically and percentage-wise, this is actually worse than the reparations that were put on Germany following World War I. And more or less, Nick, what we're talking about here is the United States of America blackmailing and shaking down Ukraine, saying, you don't have our support anymore.
We're not going to give you any money.
You're going to be at the mercy of Vladimir Putin and Russia.
You have a deal and it's a bad deal, but you'd better go with it.
And this is seismic.
It's a massive, massive shakedown and an absolute blight on America.
I'm glad you brought up World War I because, remind me, what's the prevailing wisdom about the peace talks of World War I and what that led to?
Bad.
Bad.
I mean, worse.
Bad.
Yes, and what we're alluding to is, and I don't think it's a hot take to think that the way they ended up negotiating a treaty for World War I led to World War II. Well, that mixed with the meltdown of global capitalism, yes.
Those things together.
Well, yeah, and then those goddamn Nazis, right?
It turns out that that helped lead to Nazism.
And they're going to come back in not too long.
Yeah, we've got to talk more about that in a second.
Yeah, and so you're looking at this, and here's the thing is, If you're looking at an overview, it's the Russian-Ukraine war, and America is somehow now angling to have 50% of the spoils.
Don't you think that Russia would not accept that because they would feel like they won this war and then they deserve their share of the pillage and the booty?
So that's a great way to put it because I've been sitting with this.
And I think what we're actually talking about here is, one, Russia would get land and resources.
It also would go ahead and create a situation.
And listen, we were covering this just a few months ago.
This was at a stalemate, but there were also opportunities for Vladimir Putin to lose power in this.
This would allow him to not just claim victory, but also to continue mobilizing his army.
And as we talked about the other day, there is a reported five-year plan for a larger war and invasion.
And so if you take a look at this, I kind of feel like this new...
I kind of feel like the big, powerful nation-states, as they become more authoritarian and more aligned, I think we're looking at them shaking down other countries and other countries sort of getting in the middle of them and then them working back and forth to kind of extort everything out of them that they possibly can.
Yeah.
The other thing is, if you were some sort of military expert and you're looking at the X's and O's, if you will, of this war, and then in Uyghur's World War I as an example, it's clear when you watch how the troops moved across Europe who won World War I. Who took enough land?
Who really decimated?
And it was also clear what the purpose was of the treaty to end that war.
The objective was to make sure Germany really couldn't do that again.
It didn't work, but that was the idea.
But if you look at this agreement, not only does it seem like...
I think the X's and O's people looking at the war stuff, you couldn't possibly say that Russia has won this war.
This is a brand new thing.
This is a brand new type of thing.
And B, any kind of agreement, don't you think, should sort of, I don't know if the word guarantee is a good word, but, like, ensure that Russia can't do this again?
Wouldn't that be part of it?
Like, maybe you could even throw them a bone for something in terms of spoils, but, like, there would need to be something that would kind of guarantee they're not going to go into a democratic country and try and take the whole thing over again, unprovoked.
Yeah, but what we're talking about here is a completely different paradigm.
And, you know, when we were going into the November election, I basically was saying, if Donald Trump wins, we're going to see a massive realignment of the United States of America, right?
Now we are ideologically aligned with Russia.
We're now watching, if it was an allies-axis situation, we're now axis-curious.
If not fundamentally in the Axis camp.
So things change to the point where we now have the United States, which was propping up Ukraine.
And now that they're more or less on the other side of the ideological spectrum, black is white, white is black, up is down, down is up.
I mean, that's what this is.
And it ends up being an opportunity to shake them down.
And Nick, right now, as we're speaking...
Marco Rubio and his team at the State Department is in Saudi Arabia carrying out, again, quote-unquote peace talks.
And why do I say quote-unquote peace talks, Nick?
I say it because Russia's there.
You know who's not there?
Ukraine.
Ukraine is not represented there.
They haven't been given any sort of an outline outside the proposal that the Trump administration has sent them.
So what are we seeing now?
The thing's rigged.
It's completely rigged top to bottom.
We're helping Vladimir Putin out.
We've even now seen Donald Trump say that he would like Vladimir Putin to come visit the United States of America.
And I want people to remember, back when Putin invaded, everyone said, well, he's persona non grata.
He'll never be welcome back into the world community.
Well, here we are.
He now has an open invite to come hang out at the White House.
And it's because the entire paradigm has changed.
Like, a lot of what we're talking about, whether it's World War I or World War II, It's not the same anymore.
We're now talking about the United States of America, which has been a mafia state in the past and is engaged in mafia state tactics.
And certainly they've done some stuff like this back during the Cold War.
But what we're actually talking about at this point is a brand new paradigm that really resists anything that even approaches what you just said, which is logic.
It doesn't have any logic besides they're obviously trying to blunder and shake down Ukraine and more or less probably shake down the nations of Europe, which we'll talk more about in a second.
Right.
And that's why it's interesting that, you know, Zelensky, in my mind, isn't going to accept any kind of deal like that.
Now, if you play that out, then they immediately cease getting any aid, military aid from the United States, which would then, in theory, collapse Ukraine and cause Russia to take over the whole thing.
I don't even know if that's what their trajectory is or that's what Russia is blanking on.
But we're also seeing that Europe will try and band together to save Ukraine as well, because they know full well that if Ukraine falls, then they are next, right?
You had mentioned that before.
There does seem to be plans for other countries that Russia has their eyes on.
And the idea that Russia could play this victim game is if they have to do this to combat NATO, people joining NATO, is ridiculous.
And I don't think...
Please, correct me if I'm wrong.
As far as I understand, NATO has never preemptively attacked another country.
Is that true?
I don't believe so, yeah.
I don't believe so, preemptively.
They've always kind of had to come in and step in and try and...
I think there have been claims of preemptive actions or trying to draw people into conflicts, but the idea that they would somehow or another be like an outright aggressor, no.
Right.
But I think that the funny thing is, and it gives you insight into how certain people in this world, sort of how color the reality is, is that the act of joining NATO is the aggression.
Yep.
You know what I mean?
And the act of even asking or wondering about joining NATO is an aggression.
And that's where we're at in a way that it seems so ridiculous because, again, that act of even thinking about joining is simply protection and defense, you know, and not so that they won't be taken over by somebody else.
But I don't think it's that far-fetched to assume that the United States is going to cut off aid as soon as they can, and then the front will crumble, and then perhaps Europe can stabilize a little bit and keep them out of Kiev.
You know what I mean?
Maybe.
That's the line.
But Kiev is halfway toward the middle of the country in a way that they could get all of that.
I don't know if Putin is satisfied with the edge of the country that they've already taken over.
And plus, maybe they have legitimate control of Crimea as well now.
You know, you would like to think that maybe you could stop all the bloodshed, keep it where they are now, as long as Trump says we'll get rid of all the sanctions, which should never be taken off.
But let's just say he said that.
At the very least, okay, maybe that would be just enough for finally Putin to be able to start making more money again and deal with that.
But I don't know if it's a whole face-saving thing at this point where he has to be the victor.
I'll say this.
The die has been cast.
Like Vladimir Putin and his allies within the BRICS, whatever we want to call them, you know, I assume at some point or another we'll have a name for them, you know, because this thing is heating up quick.
They're in it.
They have been, and this is what I was saying back when he was preparing to invade Ukraine and then he invaded Ukraine.
The entire point is, this has been an ideological project.
It was like, we're going to go at some point.
We are going to fight the American hegemonic world order.
And we're going to change it.
And we're going to take it over.
And so far, they have been incredibly successful at it.
There's not a whole lot of playing footsie with this anymore.
It's not even just saving face.
Ending this thing so they can move on to the next sort of step.
And quite frankly, I would be remiss if I talked about this, Nick, without saying Joe Biden and the Biden administration should have ended this war.
They should, like the entire geopolitical idea that it was better to bleed Russia, that that was better for American geopolitical goals, as opposed to ending this and like putting Putin in his place while doing it.
Was a mistake.
And it was this idea of continuity of government that whoever came in and they expected either Biden or Harris was going to be president right now, that they would avoid the worst case scenario, which is the geopolitical alliance is crumbling.
And Nick, again, as we're talking.
In Paris right now, Emmanuel Macron has called an emergency meeting of all of the major leaders in Europe.
We're talking France, the UK, Italy, Germany, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark.
They are calling this a generational challenge, an existential threat, because it is.
They recognize right now that their ally has abandoned them, that it's been corrupted, it's moved along the ideological spectrum, and that...
Vladimir Putin is going to get what he wants, and the game board is changing.
I mean, this thing is evolving, or rather, I guess I should say, devolving rather rapidly.
I agree.
And it's funny because, you know, they look at maybe the Americans as a savior who came into World War II and saved the rest.
But I don't think you can really...
That's not an accurate assessment when you really take back and look at who really was the savior of World War II, right?
I mean, I think you have to say, ironically, that it was the Soviet Union that ended up having...
Militarily, maybe the most effect on the outcome.
Economically, the U.S. was the savior because they took control of global capitalism.
But yes, like militarily, it was the Soviet Union.
Right, right.
But taking control of that was the result of winning World War II, right?
Like that's sort of the after effect.
But like the fact that they could stretch a German army into Russia or into, you know, Soviet Union was probably as profound as anything the Americans ended up doing besides from landing.
I mean, listen, you remember my problem I had with the Civil War tactics of just running through the forest, getting mowed down by the, you know, like, storming in Normandy, same thing.
But nonetheless, you know, so that's the irony on that one as well, that somehow Russia, even then, we had a chance.
You know what, in this weird way, I don't have to go too far into this weeds, but, you know, signing the Declaration of Independence basically causes the Civil War, right?
The signing of the Peace Treaty in World War I causes World War II. You know, these things sort of all have these connections.
It turns out history is the longer narrative, yes.
Right, exactly.
But if you're not smart enough about these things, then, like, you'll just create the same thing again, and you want to ignore that for, like, very short-term gains.
I suppose it's, yeah, that's sort of how Trump exists, and he's been able to get a lot of people in that mindset.
It's really, really frustrating.
Just before I move on to the next part of this, Nick, I just want to say it's not a coincidence that we're back living in the early 20th century where the United States was obsessed with getting rid of immigration, eugenics, and more or less American fascism.
It's because we didn't deal with that.
We fought the Nazis and beat back their colonial sort of overtaking, and we brought them into the Imperial Corps and then didn't really deal with our problems.
Oh, I'm sorry.
You were describing America?
I thought you were describing Germany in 1929 or 30. I mean, it all works the same way.
I mean, Germany was inspired by America in the early 20th century.
Right.
All of that.
So, yeah, it's all very, very concerning.
And it's like because I feel like we're a lot farther along than people really want to accept and admit.
Yes.
And that's the other crux.
And that's sort of how that works, right?
But before you know it, you're like, oh, my God, this is like overnight.
This happened.
And, you know, it was not overnight.
It was a decade in the making.
It was decades.
Decades in the making.
And some people wondering why is Europe freaking out so much?
J.D. fucking Vance went over to the Munich Security Conference and yeah, the little butcher boy went out and talked.
And Nick, this is J.D. Vance lecturing the Europeans when it comes to Alternative for Deutschland, which for anybody keeping track at home is a neo-Nazi group that is gaining power in Germany.
But this is J.D. fucking Vance.
With all humor, if American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg's scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.
But what German democracy, what no democracy, American, German, or...
Wait, I'm sorry.
There's a pause.
He wanted the laugh line there, right?
Yeah, we've covered this.
Not good at it.
No.
Not good at it.
I think the term is read the room.
He's not good at that at all.
Here we go.
European will survive.
It's telling millions of voters that their thoughts and concerns, their aspirations, their pleas for relief are invalid or unworthy of even being considered.
Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters.
There's no room for firewalls.
You either uphold the principle or you don't.
Europeans, the people.
Have a voice.
European leaders have a choice.
And my strong belief is that we do not need to be afraid of the future.
You can embrace what your people tell you, even when it's surprising, even when you don't agree.
And if you do so, you can face the future with certainty and with confidence, knowing that the nation stands behind each of you.
It's not in these stone buildings or beautiful hotels.
It's not even in the great institutions that we have built together as a shared society.
To believe in democracy is to understand that each of our citizens has wisdom and has a voice.
And if we refuse to listen to that voice, even our most successful fights will secure.
So there's a reason, Nick, why he used the word firewall.
So within Europe and especially within Germany, there has been that phrase, a firewall.
Which was about not allowing Alternative for Deutschland, which is a Nazi, sane-washing, revisionist history, racist, white supremacist group, not allowing them to participate in the elections in Germany as they are gaining power.
More or less what J.D. Vance just did is he went to Munich and he told the leaders of Europe, you need to let these neo-Nazis participate in your elections.
So he voiced approval.
And for the record, Nick, when he was done speaking, instead of going and meeting with all the regular people, he went and met with AFD, including their leader, Alice Weidel, which I think sends the message pretty loud and pretty clear.
This is stand by and stand, stand.
What do you say?
What did Trump say? - Stand by and, you know, Standby.
Yeah.
Yeah, this is the signal.
And if you wonder why so many white supremacists support this administration, this is it.
And the fact that he'd go there and scold the European Union for having free speech.
Margaret Brennan had him on her show also and asked him about how the stifling of this kind of thing, of free speech, or the adjustment of free speech, I have to use that term, led to the Nazis taking over.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Was that J.D. Vance or was that Marco Rubio?
Who was the difference at this point?
But at any rate, the point being that what they're doing now with the notion of censorship, because it's kind of...
Going on with what J.D. Dance was talking about was that if you don't let us use the N-word, right, if you don't let us spout hate speech, that is censorship that will lead to the destruction of democracy, right?
That's sort of what their, this is their intellectual depth is what they've gotten to.
Whereas we know like in places like in Germany, they have laws that you cannot, you know, say Nazi slogans.
And you cannot use inflammatory speech like that because they know, they've gone through it.
They know what that leads to.
So it's this really bizarre twisting.
Of the reality that you can sort of say, we must have the ability to say incendiary things and repeat the most noxious, horrible stuff.
Or else that's the end of democracy when it's the opposite.
And that's where we are.
There's no way to sort of...
The butting of heads on this one is intractable.
I don't know how you're supposed to argue with someone who's so intellectually dishonest about that.
You know, I'm glad you said it the way you did.
How are you supposed to argue?
With these people, right?
And the answer is you can't.
Because what happens is when authoritarianism, right-wing authoritarianism, starts to take hold...
First of all, they take advantage of liberal democracy, which, for the record, is what they always say that Jewish people do.
And in this speech, for the record, J.D. Vance talks about the quote-unquote enemy within, which is a wink-wink, nudge-nudge, nudge-nudge kind of, you know, sort of gesture at that.
They always say, well, the big Jewish conspiracy is they take advantage of liberal democracy and hurt countries.
What they do, they project that.
Because they take advantage of those things.
And they create a situation where you can't argue with them.
There is no rationalizing with these people.
There is no coming to some sort of a middle ground.
Because not only can you not agree on reality, they weaponize reality.
So we have a situation in Germany where a neo-Nazi group is gaining power and purchase.
Maybe in Germany they shouldn't be allowed to use neo-Nazism.
I would go so far as to say in the United States of America, you probably shouldn't be able to use neoconfederacy, right?
You shouldn't be able to put up statues of people who committed treason, and on top of that, we're fighting to keep people enslaved.
So, you know, you can talk about liberal democracy and tolerance and free speech and all of that.
But maybe sometimes you should not be engaging in these rhetorical arguments with these people.
Maybe at some point or another you should say, enough is enough.
You should not be able to do this, and we have made a decision as a society that you're not allowed to be a neo-Nazi and run for office.
It's not enough to beat them at the ballot box, because simply allowing them to exist, it keeps this cycle going, and they're always going to gain power when things start to get a little wonky, particularly when you have an era of exploitation.
So maybe the whole point is you win the argument by not having the argument.
Okay.
Not having argument is one thing, but it sounded like you wanted to then institute censorship of the hate stuff.
Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.
And then the response is, well, you just lost the next election and the next three elections, And that's kind of almost a powerful thing.
It's disarming as well when they say that.
This is why all these Democrats lose elections because you're being too woke.
You're being too whatever they're going to argue on that.
And that's what's frustrating because it seems pretty reasonable that we should have some guidelines on how you can share information and what you can spout out and how you incite people to do things.
There should be that.
And we do have some of those laws too.
But yeah, to hear what J.D. Vance is saying is such an out-in-the-open You know, manipulation of that idea.
And we're not supposed to have leaders who can, who spout this kind of stuff either.
And the idea that he'd be doing this in the middle of Europe in front of European leaders is ridiculous.
It's why he was met with so much silence.
Oh, and hatred.
I mean, absolute antipathy.
Oh, by the way, Nick, if you want to go ahead, this is the enemy within quote.
If you want to go ahead and play this so people can hear it with their own ears.
The threat that I worry the most about.
Vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it's not China, it's not any other external actor.
And what I worry about is the threat from within.
The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.
Yeah, the threat from within.
Like, that is so, so heavy.
Just so everyone can be reminded about AFD, not only now do they have the support of the Trump administration, they also have the funding and backing and rhetorical and also propaganda support of, let me check my notes.
Oh yeah, Elon Musk.
Yep.
Oh yeah.
And that's what he mentioned in the first part, the first clip, when he says, you can deal with Musk for a couple months, right?
And, you know, if you get involved in, trust me, don't, but I have, you get involved in these arguments on Twitter or X, and you look at the bios sometimes, right?
And it's like, there's little markers that let you know what you're dealing with right away.
And a lot of times, Patriot or a flag, an icon flag.
Western civilization.
Yep.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's really too bad that, like, you know, calling yourself a patriot now sort of means MAGA. It means really, you know, far-right stuff.
But the other watchword you hear is values, right?
They've gotten so far away from their European values.
And it's like, what are you trying to say there?
What are you signaling with that kind of...
Right male-dominated culture.
Yeah, the kind that was colonial, you know, and that was just destroying anybody who didn't look like you.
Because, I don't know, when I think about European values now, I think of socialism.
I think of welcoming people from all manner of, all walks of life, from all different backgrounds.
You know what I mean?
And understanding the value of the balance of work versus leisure.
You know what I mean?
Like, that's what European values should be.
Maybe even a little bit, you know...
Gosh, what's the term I could use?
It's not crazy, but, you know, their sexual revolution, you know, and their values seems to be a lot more in line with where we should be in 2025 than where we are here.
Yeah, like, European culture has been more liberal, but also still intolerant.
I mean, there's still incredible racism and sexism and xenophobia.
I mean, it just so happens that the political structures have done a good job of hiding a lot of that stuff.
We're talking about the revitalization of it.
I just want to remind people before we go to the last segment, If it feels like this is a worldwide authoritarian takeover, it's because it is.
I'm telling you, everyone who wants to talk about moving or leaving or whatever, this is going around the world.
You're going to have to fight this battle.
Speaking of people who aren't fighting the battle, Nick, we also have to check in with the Democratic Party.
A couple of notes that we need to go over here.
One, reports that the Democratic Party is quote-unquote pissed at groups like Indivisible and MoveOn, as well as their voters who want them to do something.
Meanwhile, fundraising is absolutely in the toilet.
Not only are people not responding to these absolutely embarrassing calls for fundraising because they see what the Democratic Party isn't doing, but it also turns out that their larger donors are either not donating because they're pissed at the party for not doing enough, or they're going towards the Republican Party, either because they agree with them or because they're afraid of retribution from Trump.
We bring this up not just as an update on the party, but because we are watching come to fruition A little bit of crossroads for the Democratic Party and who they've been and who they are and who they're going to be in the future.
And it does feel right now that because of the way that they're handling all of this, that things are starting to reach a little bit of a boil with this stuff.
You know, it would have been nice in 2016 in the wake of Hillary losing to Trump the first time or the only time they ran that like maybe a third party kind of sprouted up a little bit in response and that we would now have nine years worth of sort of developing a growth where we could finally, you know, you can have a different party kind of.
Hard to have the wheels spinning on the ground and going, right?
I don't think it'd be possible to have a third party that would be invented today that could possibly mount any kind of thing within a few years for the next presidential election.
Do you?
In two years?
I mean, remember, they're going to start campaigning in two years, right?
No, I don't think in two years you're going to see a possibility of a third party emerge.
You could see the possibility within the next four.
Okay, so you don't think it's 10?
You think it's 4?
Either way, we don't have it.
It's not there for the next one.
Let me ask you this, because I've been doing informal polls across the country as I've been traveling a little bit.
What do you think the percentage likelihood is that we'll have a free and fair election in 2028?
I mean, with the way that they're taking over agencies and weaponizing governmental control, I would say right now it's a coin flip.
You think 50-50?
I think it's 50-50 right now.
Yeah.
Way higher.
Your thought is way higher than everybody else I've talked to.
Well, I mean, it all depends on whether or not they want to get really aggressive with it.
And we've already seen that they want to get very aggressive with it.
So yeah, there is a question about whether or not that is going to come.
And then we'll get back to Democrats.
But it sparks, you know, there are people way more conservative than me who suddenly, out of that question, start to discuss the things that could have happened in 2024 in terms of what Musk might have done to affect the count, right?
And I never would have.
I mean, listen, I'm that guy.
I like to dive deep into conspiracy all the time.
I'm not even really willing to go there.
I felt like, you know, ballots are printed out.
They're hand-counted.
There should have been plenty of Democrats overseeing these things to make sure the counts were right, right?
And then on top of that, the embarrassment where no one would want to accuse Trump of stealing the election because of what happened in 2020. So they kind of feel like, oh, we can't appear to be crazy like that, so we can't say anything.
And meanwhile, there's a big push for that, where people really do feel like, A, there might have been some stuff going on in 2024, and that, B, there's a 10% chance we'll have a free and fair election in 2028. So I don't know what you're supposed to do, because they have control over all these things.
And they have a guy like Musk, which we didn't even really talk about.
And he's got so much control.
We didn't even bring up the fact that he's now probably going to get control of all of our IRS information.
And the FAA. What's that?
And the FAA. The FAA. Okay, right.
So he's going to end up having so much control over everything that, like I keep saying, he's going to get kicked out of the circle eventually because Trump does that to everybody.
But, you know, either Musk did something in 2024 for the election.
Trump knows it, and that's why he can't get rid of him now?
He got him tens of billions of dollars, first of all.
I think that's more than enough to gain the favor of Donald Trump.
Fair enough.
Fair enough.
So either way, he's going to be so stuck in all of this.
And then Starlink, oh, you have Musk meeting with Modi, and Trump doesn't even know.
By the way, do you know where they met?
Where they were?
What building they were in?
No, I'm not even sure.
I think it's called the White House.
Oh, they did mean the White House.
I know he actually met with Modi before Modi met with Trump.
I want to say a couple things because you just threw a lot of things out.
I want to go on the record about a few of them and I want to bring it back to the Democratic Party.
First things first.
I have had extensive meetings with election watchdogs and the people who keep track of this.
All of them have a suspicion that something happened.
There has been no proof of it.
Right?
That's the issue here.
It's a suspicion.
It feels bad.
It feels, and for the record, like, would I trust these people with an election?
No, I would not.
Not even for a second.
I keep waiting for some sort of a smoking gun.
If I got it, I would not be shocked, to be frank.
I also think that we go ahead and we ignore the idea that a lot of people support this stuff to our own detriment.
I think that's what we need to remember as we figure out how to move forward.
Then we bring in...
What necessarily is going to happen in the future?
I don't know, except for everything I'm seeing out of the Democratic Party, Nick, is that they are more than fine being a fake opposition party.
They're more than fine just going out and shrugging their shoulders and saying, what are we supposed to do?
In fact, they did that when they had power.
That was their main mover was saying, we can't do anything about this.
So I don't know if these elections are going to go forward.
I certainly have my suspicions, and I have to tell you, they're following the playbook of authoritarians around the world who create fake elections, right?
But I'll tell you this right now from the Democratic Party.
They are losing their base.
They are losing their grassroots fundraising apparatus because people don't trust them anymore and they don't feel like they're actually going to use their money for anything that's actually going to oppose this.
On top of this, all of their major donors either don't believe they're going to do anything on behalf of them, so why would they donate to them, or they see in the Republican Party what they want.
Why would they trust the Democratic Party to get done what the Republican Party is getting done?
They already see what the sure bet is.
So then you start wondering, The Democratic Party wants to move towards the right, right?
The Democratic Party wants to become more like the Republican Party.
Well, why are people going to donate to that, right?
So then the question is, what will this party do?
And you brought up the idea of the third party.
There has to be some type of a grassroots pushback on this.
I don't know if that's going to be a primarying of people going into 26 and then 28. I don't know if there's going to be some sort of uprising in terms of a third party that's going to announce itself and push back.
I don't know.
But for years now, Nick, I've been saying...
If the Democratic Party doesn't get their shit together and they don't show the ability to fight against this Republican Party, we saw what happened to the Whigs.
We saw what happened when the Whigs lost their power base and their fundraising base.
All of a sudden, they didn't have a constituency.
And on top of that, the people did not trust that they were going to fight the white supremacists of the South.
So then you have a question, which is, are you going to be a party or are you going to be a fake opposition?
And are you going to allow this to sort of coalesce and come up against you?
I don't know yet, but the indicators right now are following a very strong trend towards the Democratic Party, either going away, saying bye-bye, and leaving room for something else, or more or less becoming a fundraising apparatus that has no desire whatsoever, and basically captured opposition.
And we've seen that happen in right-wing authoritarian regimes around the world.
If they want to become a captured opposition party, best of luck to them, but otherwise we've got to find something else.
But wait, they're fighting back.
A bunch of lawmakers showed up in front of the Department of Education, demanded to be let in.
One guy just sort of stood in front of the door looking really sheepish about having to do that and said, sorry, you can't go in.
All the cameras were there.
Come on, Jared.
They were fighting back.
It's a parliamentarian all over again.
He told us we couldn't come in.
I said this the other day.
They should have got arrested.
They should have gotten arrested and made a big giant spectacle out of it.
That's what you do if you're an actual opposition party, but they don't want to do it.
Well, you know why?
Because what the right was able to do is turn down their head and say, it looks just like January 6th to me, right?
But if it wasn't because they didn't get arrested, they might as well have gotten arrested then because they knew they were going to get accused of January 6th appearance anyway, then fine, make it look a little bit more like that and have something to fight for and actually stir up emotions.
Because remember, it's the dopamine rush the right gets when they dunk on a liberal, right?
And they get to say what they want and they feel like, I'm winning and they're losing.
Well, you could probably tap into the liberal side of that, not by having to put people down, but by showing, and martyrdom is not the right way.
We're by showing the courage, right, to stand up to the authority.
And, you know, it could still be a peaceful protest where you get arrested, where you cause civil disobedience.
That's what we kind of need to start to have here.
That said, I just worry.
I mean, I worry about the conditions of people like that in prisons and how Trump would end up dealing with that and how they'd be treated.
We know what, you know, the laws have been adjusted a little bit in terms of protests in cars and driving around protests.
So it's like...
You have to be worried as this authoritarian creep moves in that the floodgates will open up into violence for this kind of opposition.
And that's what's going to scare people away.
Again, as this thing starts to heat up, I think this might be a little bit of a division between the two of us because I do see this as a fight.
I do see this as a conflict.
And to be frank, I... I have a lot of people in my life who are gay or trans or now people who are on SSRIs or people who are poor and people who are disabled.
And I'm worried about their lives.
I'm not worried about Democratic lawmakers getting arrested.
Quite frankly, they all should have gotten arrested at this point.
It changes the political paradigm.
It changes the story of the thing.
I'm not worried about them.
And quite frankly, I detest them right now.
For them to make the money that they make through political insider trading and to exist as a fundraising apparatus for billionaires in this country, I find them disgusting.
Oh, yeah.
I'm not looking into figuring out how to follow their trades and just piggyback on them.
The returns that Congress people get is so far and away beyond what any normal person gets from the stock market.
It's insane.
There's no way to argue any other reason than they know.
Man, we deserve a better class of leaders.
All right, everybody.
We are going to come back with The Weekender on Friday.
In the meantime, you can find Nick over at Blue Sky at Nick Housman.
You can find me at J.Y. Saxton.
Hey, head over to patreon.com slash my correct podcast.
