Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman begin with Trump's Department of Justice arresting a circuit court judge in Milwaukee for allegedly obstructing an ICE deportation. Do we get to a point where it's worth it to obstruct an immoral act? They discuss how the White House is seemingly giving insider trading information to wealthy donors as they discuss tariff policy with them.
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Here with my friend, my compatriot, my cohort, Nick Housman.
How you doing, man?
I'm good.
I'm good.
I had some caffeine earlier, but I don't usually drink that.
And it was like taking a few Adderall, I gotta tell you.
Man, an ongoing narrative point of the McRake Podcast.
It's when is Nick having caffeine?
When is Nick having sugar?
Yeah.
It's an ongoing saga.
I've got to tell you, though, I've been really free of sugar and caffeine.
It's good.
It's very good.
All is good.
But you forget, like, man, a little bit of caffeine is a drug, man.
It will do some stuff.
It's a drug that I am addicted to.
I run on it, and it barely even has the effect that it used to.
That's when you know it's a problem.
All right, everybody.
We have a completely full show.
Our opening story, for the record, is one that we nearly did an emergency pod on, but we needed to wait around for information on it to figure out what in the hell happened.
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Look at these faces.
Yeah.
Yeah, get a look.
Nick, Jared, interacting.
He's spinning around in his chair.
Wonderful times.
Less wonderful times, Nick, on Friday.
The Federal Bureau of Investigations arrested Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan for allegedly obstructing the apprehension of Eduardo Flores Ruiz by ICE.
This is a really shocking type of situation.
The reports that have come out, the first thing that I read, Nick, was I read the charging document, which we'll talk a little bit more about in a second, I have to assume, because there's a lot of choice language in that document.
But the more that this story has been revealed, there is a lot going on here about whether or not Dugan committed any crime in any way, shape, or another, but also just a reminder that we need to change the way we look at criminality under the Trump administration,
under authoritarianism.
Nick, I'm troubled by this, and I'm troubled by this for a few very specific reasons we'll get into.
What was your reaction about hearing about Hannah Dugan being arrested?
Well, I think the top line thing that I'm starting to put together here, which is concerning, is that what they're doing is they have a database of people who are here on documented names.
They have a database of people who are being called into court.
And they match those up, and then they know, okay, they won't be armed, so we can go snag them there, right?
And this is not really new.
This is something that they've been doing.
You know, it's concerning in a lot of ways where they're showing up in plain clothes.
They don't identify themselves a lot of the time.
It's not the case in this one.
They identified themselves.
They had a warrant.
I am worried about the judge.
I do think that there's some issues here.
Two of the three reports that I try to dig into leaned in my mind towards her obstructing this proceeding.
Whether or not she believes in it, whether or not it's right and ethical or anything, aside from the fact that there is...
You know, this ridiculous situation of the law behind them in trying to deport people who are not here illegally.
They also are choosing people like the guy, he was up for battery.
So they can argue, here's a guy who's a really bad hombre and we want to get him out of the country.
So I think that, like, you know, these are the cases they're trying to, not as test cases, but they're just sort of using them and they know they can win, you know, whatever court of public opinion they're trying to win.
So I'm worried about her in terms of her exposure to the legal side of things.
Well, so first things first, and I think this is the important thing to say.
Whether or not Hannah Dugan broke the law or not, whether she committed a crime, I don't care.
I don't care at all.
And I think that's something that a lot of Americans right now who look at what the Trump administration is doing and they're concerned because they should be concerned about rising authoritarianism.
We've talked about this a little bit, but let me say it definitively.
When authoritarians take over structures, legality becomes a weapon.
It becomes the means of dividing who deserves rights and protections and who deserves the iron fist.
And in this case, I can say I wasn't in the courtroom when Hannah Dugan did this.
There are conflicting sort of stories about how this happened.
ICE burst into her courtroom, which is disrespectful.
It's unprofessional.
Some people have told a story that she simply had Flores Ruiz leave the courtroom with his lawyer and go into a public hallway.
That way they could go ahead and do their business outside of a courtroom.
Also, when people break the law under an authoritarian regime, sometimes people tell a story about it that goes ahead and tries to manipulate it.
I don't know what happened.
I can't tell you whether what she did was illegal in a crime or it wasn't, but I can tell you one thing definitively, Nick.
I don't care.
Right.
She did the right thing.
If she actually was trying to protect this guy from getting grabbed by the Gestapo of our modern times, hats off to her.
She did the right thing.
And we have to become a lot more comfortable with accepting that, quote-unquote, criminality under an authoritarian regime doesn't mean what other people have thought it has meant in the past.
I hear you, and that's really consistent with your views on a lot of these things, so I'm glad that you maintain that.
And, you know, there's an affidavit in the court case that says that, you know, she put them in the jury box for a little while, sent them to the chief judge's office, and then...
had them leave out the side door.
They consider that non-public area.
By the way, it did sound a little bit like Keystone Cops, like they were just idiots.
Oh, these are idiots.
And some of the accounts that we've heard is that they simply didn't grab him when they had the opportunity to, and then they had another situation on their hands.
The entire point is that authoritarians are not necessarily competent people, and a lot of the times they're going to be decidedly incompetent.
So that might be what happened here.
But if she did this as a means of saying, you know what, I'm not going to cooperate with these assholes, I have no problem with that whatsoever.
And she faces, I saw one report saying that, you know, obstruction of justice like this could be six years.
The good news is that she will no doubt have a terrific lawyer representing her because she's got means and she's in the community, so that should be an issue.
And then, you know, most likely she could...
You know, do some sort of deal, get dinged, and avoid prison time and have some sort of fine or whatever.
But I think that the more times we have people getting into the kind of good trouble that you're describing is good.
And I think that if you can overwhelm that part of the system, you can make the point that we need to make, which is people are going to have to.
There are going to be doctors who perform abortions in states that, you know, that is illegal, you know, and know that they're going to be the subject of, like, some landmark case.
Maybe we'll shift this thing.
Because at some point, it's going to have to get to the point where a case gets to the Supreme Court where it's against the president.
He's going to try and plead official duties and he's immune.
And they're going to be forced to at least confront the notion that official duties he's claiming are illegal.
And that would ultimately, the dam will have to break at that point.
That's the hope.
Well, and a few points on that.
First things first, there's a real possibility that this judge who is in the legal system is going to be taken care of by the legal system that looks at what Trump is doing and they're like, no, you're not doing this to one of our own, which is both problematic and also for her sake.
I hope it happens because, again, if she broke the law and she broke the law for the right reasons, I would love to see her skate from this thing.
The second part is this, and I think you probably feel the way that I do, and I'm sure a lot of our listeners do.
The FBI and the Trump administration were undoubtedly salivating over arresting this judge because they have been fighting with the judiciary now for a few weeks.
They've been going back and forth, calling into question their legitimacy.
The idea of making...
An example out of this judge, I have to assume they were more than happy to do it.
Because one of the things that authoritarians do is they bring to heel anybody that they see as an impediment.
And I think it's important to point out that before we started recording today, Levitt, the press secretary for the Trump administration, was asked by Ducey over at Fox News if they were willing to arrest other judges and at what level they would draw a line.
And he brought up the Supreme Court.
And Levitt even sort of motioned at the idea that they would be more than happy to arrest a Supreme Court judge.
And what you just brought up in terms of Trump going up with the Supreme Court talking about official powers or actions or whatever, that's another warning shot.
Because what has happened so far, and we've documented this for a few weeks.
They want to bring the judiciary to heel.
They want to either make them capitulate and collaborate or make an example out of the people who don't.
And now the Supreme Court is on notice, and Trump has put them on notice before, but now it's escalated.
And that's how this situation grows, and it gets worse and worse, is now they have proof.
We will go out and arrest a judge, and we're not afraid to do it.
And they did it at the courthouse.
Like, they didn't have to do that.
They made a big, giant spectacle out of it, and obviously the administration and all the lackeys, including Kash Patel, wanted to do it in this way in order to set an example.
Well, just to know how my mind works, I'm always trying to sort of draw what the logical conclusion of all these things and these activities would lead us to.
Like the Kilmar Abrego Garcia issue is really like an episode out of the 18 where she had the means.
She would hire, you know, this group.
They would go down to El Salvador and break him out.
Right. And if this judge, you know, gets arrested, is in there for years, like if this continues to go there and we're having thousands of people and citizens and everybody being locked up for these kind of things.
And then, you know, maybe it's a different version of a civil war.
Well, and real fast, Nick, just for the record, would that be considered illegal?
Absolutely it would.
Absolutely.
But is it right?
Yes, it is.
We're cheering for that.
You know, the A-team was a vigilante.
Vigilante is breaking the law every episode, and we cheered for that.
Taken, you know, Liam Neeson.
Like, that's the other kind of thing.
Like, someone like that, people who have the means.
Because, you know, at some point, someone's going to get wrapped up who's from a wealthier family, right?
Right now, they're preying on people who don't have means to protect themselves, right?
But the judge is certainly somebody who is necessarily in that category, which is why this is an interesting case.
But, you know, it could very well happen that way.
And we're going to get into some sort of bizarre stuff without question where you might end up seeing some sort of break of something and an attack to try and get them out, whisk them out of the country and save them from being thrown in prison for a long time as a political prisoner in America.
And what we're talking about here is uncomfortable.
This isn't something that I particularly like going on the air and saying, under an authoritarian regime, crimes are malleable.
The idea of criminality and crimes are malleable.
That's how things happen.
But it also plays right into how the right has portrayed a lot of the laws they don't like anyway for decades.
They've always wanted to pick and choose which laws wanted to be enforced and which ones didn't as well.
So this is all part of the natural evolution.
It's the cycle.
It's the cycle that we're in.
Right, so that doesn't have to be stopped.
And when you take a look at this, and that brings us to the next subject, because what we're actually dealing with when you get into the full-blown authoritarian cycle, basically what we're talking about, Nick, is a wild, manic abuse of power, right?
It's just lashing out in all directions and doing things that I think any normal human being looks like, and they're like, this is wrong, and somebody needs to do something about this.
When you pair that with the fact that, Nick, we're now getting multiple reports of children who are legal citizens of the United States of America, and we've already heard of a few cases, ages 2 and 4 and 7, with parents who have been rounded up and disappeared, have had absolutely no due process.
And the only reason why that was able to happen at this point is because they can't necessarily speak up for themselves.
They've been tethered to their parents.
Then on top of it, we keep getting reports that because of Doge...
Cutting and slashing of programs that now we're looking around at immigration courts with toddlers who have no idea what's going on, who are being forced to quote-unquote defend themselves in immigration hearings.
So what we're actually talking about here is something that, is it legal?
That's a gray area, and the Trump administration is going to try and make these things legal, and they're going to try and make the court system, and even Congress itself, or through executive orders, make these things have the appearance of legality.
But what we're actually talking about, Nick, here is morality crimes.
We're talking about crimes against humans, and whether or not any of this is legal or not doesn't matter.
This is abhorrent.
Yeah, it's also the mindset of making, as a deterrence, making it as awful as possible.
That's right.
But it just plays right into the humanity of the situation where they turn people into lower-than-humans.
And because they are here illegally, because they're looking for a better life, and they help in a lot of ways in our communities, undocumented immigrants are now subhuman people who deserve this treatment.
And to hear this notion, The position of these kids who are citizens being deported to other countries like that and then defending themselves in court as well is really beyond the pale.
But it just continues the same process we've seen from the first time they were in the White House, which makes you think that it's been tamed so far.
There's going to get a lot worse stuff that we'd already seen before, and what's the next worst thing they're going to come up with?
Well, and what you're talking about, and, you know, I've said this on the show before, and we didn't have enough time to necessarily get into it.
I've talked about the malleability of the concept of whiteness, how, like, over time...
Depending upon what the capitalist class and the power class needs, they can expand whiteness, right?
Like originally it was like a very core group of people.
Then all of a sudden they considered Italians to be white.
All of a sudden they considered, you know, immigrants to be white.
All of a sudden they started to consider Jewish people to be white.
And it expanded because they needed a power base for it.
The opposite of that is true, Nick, which is...
The criminal element or the people who don't deserve protection, that shrinks and shrinks and shrinks and shrinks, right?
Like the amount of people and authoritarians are constantly like putting that into a vice and basically letting everyone know at some point we will label you just as we have labeled immigrants, just as we have labeled terrorists and criminals.
And so what ends up happening is that they use this system of legality.
The last thing I want to say about this, and I made a...
I made an audio about this over on my substack.
Like, the abuse of children here, I think, is really telling, Nick.
And what it actually tells us is that, and you look through history, authoritarian regimes know that the abuse and the dehumanization of children...
We've talked about what they've done with education, which they're now turning that into an indoctrination machine.
We've talked about how, like, they basically have said that they want to save children, and meanwhile they're making children more and more endangered and taking away any aspect of their childhood.
What we're dealing with here is a huge cultural shift that I don't think most people have started to wrestle with.
Which is the idea that much like legality versus illegal, this idea of who deserves protection and who doesn't, that's not just happening to adults.
That's happening to children.
Which children deserve education?
Which children deserve to be protected?
Which children deserve not to be thrown into a sweatshop and turned into labor?
And so as this is happening, it sort of funnels up.
Like, there's a reason why the Hitler Youth was a thing.
It's because you have to create a next generation of people who are not just ready to accept authoritarianism, but they have been abused properly by the state and by their communities and their families so that they will go along with these types of things.
And our children so far, they have gone through an incredible amount of abuse.
From everything from the defunding of public education, what happened during COVID, the plague of school shootings, a culture of paranoia and fear.
And so what is happening is it's like squeezing a toothpaste tube.
And it's just making it grow and grow and grow.
And that is the environment that these people want and the environment that they thrive in.
How about modeling bullying and modeling awful behavior to each other for the kids?
Absolutely.
I mean, that's worse.
And there really shouldn't be much worse than what you just described in terms of this treatment of children.
But it does get worse, Jared, because we used to use the threat of, let's just say, you know, trade, for instance, to try and get a lot of other countries to behave and have better human rights, right?
Rather than have to send troops in, which we'll do as well.
Some countries.
Yes.
Some countries, right?
And what happened in the other countries?
The other countries were allowed to do this, and we would make some money.
They'd pay us money, whatever, right?
And what did they do to their children?
Well, which countries are you talking about?
I'm talking about the ones who got the stick and not the carrot.
Right.
Oh, the stick, yeah.
Well, the children would just suffer, and they would not have any resources.
They would not have any access to things that would keep them healthy.
And what did they do for a living?
They worked in the factories that created the products that we buy on the cheap.
So here's how this turns around and becomes an even worse situation.
No, and we've already created the scenario, and we're going to talk more about trade here in just a second, because things are happening very rapidly.
We have moved into the authoritarian category.
And the way that we're treating human beings, the way that we're treating children is an example to the world of what our values are and whether or not they want to do business with us.
And what's more, we're doing to our kids now what we did to these other so-called second and third world countries.
It's that imperial boomerang, Nick.
If you do it to the rest of the world...
And we've done it to the rest of the world.
Eventually, it's going to come back to us.
And all of the weapons, all of the surveillance, all of the cruelty, all the brutality, it will eventually come back to the homeland.
This was a deal with the devil.
There's no other way to say it.
Like, you cannot...
Fund genocides in which children are being, like, cut down constantly and you don't worry about them.
You can't fund sweatshop organizations so that you and I can have cheap iPhones.
You can't do that without it eventually rotting the moral core of a country.
And now we're watching the side effects of that.
Like, it was always going to come back to us.
It's truly, truly fascinating.
And the double whammy is that Trump wanted to crash the economy.
I'm sort of thinking it was to lower interest rates.
It's never about the country.
It's never about like they want to be able to refinance the debt of the country.
I think it was he wanted to refinance.
His own debt, right?
That was all for him.
Now, so he's thinking this is a genius plan.
We're going to do all these things.
It's going to benefit me.
But now they don't realize is that, guess what?
As the economy starts to slow down, people are going to be buying less.
We are suddenly not this big power that they were relying on that will pressure other countries to want to sell us all these goods.
So now, if that starts to go down, it's a lot easier for all the other countries in the world to say, F you guys.
You're horrible on human rights now.
You're completely erratic with these trade deals anyway.
We're not going to make trade deals with you.
And guess what?
They're going to end up making partners and making power stations across the world in terms of trade that never existed before and might never be able to be broken once Trump is gone.
It's really an incredible situation here and frightening in terms of what it could do to the economy.
Well, and Nick, that is another one of these major stories because this could have easily been the number one story.
All of the indicators are right now that these tariffs and the trade war with China are getting ready to really, really kick off in terms of consequences.
Reports around the U.S., particularly through ports like Los Angeles and Seattle.
Show that China has stopped shipping us imports.
And one of the things is you don't see it at first because they always stock ahead of time, right?
The things that are on the shelves right now in the major stores, they were shipped months ago, if not years ago.
And so what has happened now is an absolute disastrous...
Like drying up of these imports.
And now we're looking at a situation where not only will there probably be good shortages in the next couple of weeks, but we're also looking at the trucking industry, which has not been in good shape for a while either.
That thing is now looking like it could possibly collapse because there's nothing to ship around the country.
You know, I have railed against neoliberal globalism for a long time.
I've been on the record saying that I thought it needed to be dismantled.
Doing it in the way that this has been done will be disastrous.
And I think here in a couple of weeks, if experts are to be believed, and I've had a few conversations over the last few days with experts on this, it sounds like the best case scenario at this point is that our stores are going to look like they did during COVID.
Right.
That right now sounds like maybe the best case scenario.
And there's no, unlike COVID where the supply chain needed to be repaired, now it's like there's not even a repairing of that supply chain.
There's not even really a negotiating.
And like Trump, I don't know that Trump understood this because again, man brain bad, right?
Like we have probably handed China a situation in which They have all the cards now.
They not only aren't shipping us things, but as you just pointed out, they are creating the perfect scenario for themselves in creating trade partnerships that rely on China as the hinge of all of this.
And I think here in the next couple of weeks, we're going to get like a really, really bad dose of medicine.
Yeah, and I'm really glad you used all the cards phrase because that man, bad brain, understand card, no have.
That's right.
That's right.
He gets that, I think, when it's right up in front of him.
And this is like a guy, you know, the guy that's architected this whole thing is the one who's supposed to be in prison right now for, again, not observing a congressional subpoena in Pete Navarro and his alter egos as well.
So it's remarkable.
I mean, when he got back in his position there, it was staggering to me that somehow even Trump would have said, oh, yeah, we need him back and his insanity.
And then you got Scott Besson going out.
And pretending to try and put toilet paper Mona Lisa is, like, basically what he's trying to do.
I don't know.
What a horrible thing.
But, you know, he's clearly a hostage of this situation and doesn't believe anything he says out there in the media.
So it's really, really troubling.
Sometimes it's not the worst thing if the country goes into a period where we all have to kind of tighten our belts a little bit, save some of our money, learn a little bit more about how we can't just be free spending and like that, like we've always done.
That's not the worst thing, but when you combine it with the tariffs and you combine it with eliminating supply chains, which I think is what's going to start happening, these lines are going to be severed.
That's when you're talking about long-term issues.
And I hope people are probably going out there.
I'm writing it down right now.
I'm going to go buy a whole bunch more toilet paper and paper towels today.
You heard it here, folks.
Nick is going to hoard.
I'm going to hoard.
I have a neighbor.
I'm going to buy some toilet paper in Papertown.
We have a cross-street neighbor, by the way, who does that.
She's got like a couple of those mini, not minivans, van things.
And she will, you can go by and be like, hey, let me have a couple of toilet paper.
She's got it all.
When this entire thing breaks down, you might be over there bartering with her.
And like, if you actually, the equivalent of this, and we get real squeamish with this because we like to think that addiction to substances.
It's sort of this ugly thing over here that it's just like they can't quit the drug, you know what I mean?
But there's like a lot of reasons for addiction.
America has been addicted to wild, rampant consumerism, and it's been addicted to cheap goods.
And what we're talking about now is that we needed to get off that addiction.
But there's a difference between going cold turkey when you are physically addicted to it and it can cause massive problems and weaning off of it and going into like a different strategy.
Absolutely.
And that's, you know, that could be one of the good things that kind of comes out of this.
But the absolute destruction of the economy in the process of that is going to be devastating.
And that's where people die.
Natural people's, you know, their whole family line can be devastated that way.
Their entire lives can be, and that's the thing, if it goes into a recession, which it looks like is probable, or if it goes into a depression, the likes of which we've never seen, and my God, if people don't understand, like, what it would be like if Donald Trump was in charge of a country during a depression,
just imagine it for a second.
It's terrifying.
Real quickly, if you're in a different kind of scenario here, it's like we've seen this in the past.
And if you want to be one of the right-wing people who's trying to deny our history and rewriting the curriculum in schools and making slavery not be so bad and they learn to trade, whatever, it's like imagine some of the families after the slaves were emancipated, they would still have to buy their...
Children back from the slave owners and their wives.
And it's such an amazingly high sum that that family never recovered.
From that debt that they got stuck in right from the very beginning.
And it's the same kind of stuff you end up seeing here when we did see in 08 when the housing crisis and people got saddled with the kind of debt that would never allow anybody to get out of.
And if they could barely do it, they're just a slave to that debt for the rest of their lives and their grandchildren and so forth.
No, we're 17 years beyond that.
And there are still people who have not recovered fully from it.
And what's happening right now, all of the cards, they are stacked in a way that this could make 2008 look like a picnic.
That's how bad everything is because the lessons of 2008 weren't learned.
Well, if you're worried about this, everybody, like, I understand it, but, you know, the good news here is that Fox News is reporting that the Trump administration is handing out inside information to corporate CEOs about their negotiations with other countries about the tariffs.
Nick, I can't imagine anything illegal happening from this.
This seems all above board.
I don't know why anybody would be upset about this.
Well, you know what's amazing?
Because as a parallel track, non-friend of the pod, Senator Hawley, has introduced, have you seen this, a bill?
There is hardly anyone who is less of a friend of the pod than Josh Hawley.
Right, but he wants to introduce a bill that would prevent people in Congress from trading.
On the stock market.
And did you see the acronym for it?
Godspeed, for the record.
Yeah.
And I love it.
The acronym is Pelosi.
People elected for a letter or whatever.
Oh, my God.
I haven't seen that.
Is that true?
Yeah, it is.
It just came out earlier today.
And so, you know what?
I'm going to pour one out for Hawley on that one.
But there's obviously some other weird stuff that we have to figure out exactly why he's doing this.
This is the one that really gets me outraged as well, because I've already been outraged by the fact that they can use insider training if they're in Congress, and then the fact that they're going, they're literally just, yeah.
Telegraphing these things to allow wealthy people to then make millions upon millions of dollars in single days in games is disgusting.
And again, it feeds into my addled brain and makes me think there is some strange climate catastrophe on the horizon, and they're trying to build up as many of these people so they can afford to get into the underground paradise they've built.
I will say, and I want to, this particular nugget.
And also the story about the children that we were talking about who have disappeared.
I want to say this definitively.
I don't want to sugarcoat this.
These motherfuckers need to go to jail.
Period.
That's it.
We'll talk more about that in a second and how the Democrats aren't prepared for that.
They need to go to jail.
Period.
That's it.
Now, what about people who are using the information and trading on it?
Go to jail.
Yeah, right.
That's illegal.
Yeah, that's illegal.
Nick, speaking of tariffs and the consequences and the fallout from them, we're recording this on Monday, April 28th, which is the date of the Canadian elections.
This has been a weird, fluctuating thing that has completely turned around.
After Justin Trudeau announced that he was stepping down, it seemed like the Conservative Party, and particularly Pierre Polyev, were ready to take this thing over and that the Liberals were going to have...
Because of Donald Trump's trade war, it has ignited within Canada a nationalism Which, by the way, it sounds weird saying it out loud.
Canadian nationalism has been flared up in opposition to Trump.
It looks now, before the election has taken place, that the Liberals and Mark Carney, the possible new Prime Minister of Canada, it looks like Donald Trump has shifted the balance of power in Canada by simply pissing them off and try pissing Canadians off to the point that they embrace nationalism.
Congratulations, I guess.
It looks like that is what's going to happen in this election.
And while it's happening, Nick, good news here, Elon Musk and X the Everything app has absolutely reached over to the dial that says right-wing propaganda, misinformation, disinformation slash Canada and has just turned that thing up to 11 and is trying to interfere in this election.
There's a lot to talk about here, but the unintended consequences of what has happened with this tariff and trade war situation is going to continue to play out, I think, for years.
The level of incompetency you need to possess to be able to get that many Canadians to form a consensus, because Canada's an interesting country, right?
It's extremely large, and it's a lot of different disparate communities sort of stitched together, too.
And so for them to rally around this, and then as a nationalist movement against the...
United States is really something.
The other thing that they're doing, by the way, is they own a lot of our bonds.
They own a lot of our debt.
They started to sell some of that.
And again, just like Japan did and China did, that puts a lot of pressure on the United States.
It could cause the dollar to go down.
It could cause the long-term interest rates to go up.
All the things that Trump does not want.
And so these cards that Trump thought he had are not there for him at all.
And the pushback from Canada is severe.
And to the point where he went back to his trope of saying that Canada should just join America and all this kind of stuff.
And man, I think it was all caps today when he did it.
And it was, that's going to fall on deaf ears and inflame even more of the tensions that exist.
And so, hey, this is what you were trying to tap into last week that I wasn't really buying into as far as like some sort of shift and some sort of momentum maybe, maybe this pendulum.
This is the kind of thing that makes you think that maybe there's going to be some pendulum pushback against this Trump stuff.
Well, I want to talk about the Canadian aspect of this in just a second.
I want to start with the X thing.
And Nick, you're a student of history.
You pay attention to all of this.
Has the United States of America ever meddled in elections around the world?
Yes.
Okay.
Who usually did that?
Who was the organization that did that?
They got the three letters.
CIA.
That's them.
That would be the CIA.
I think it's very interesting.
That in the era of neoliberal privatization in which the government doesn't do as much and private companies take it over, it hadn't occurred to me until right now that what Musk is doing with X is an attempt to privatize what the CIA used to do with elections.
Oh, wow.
It's literally like the oligarch has taken over control of that in the same way that Putin and all of his organizations are interfering in elections.
We're actually watching a private business at this point do that.
This is the pamphlets being dropped from the airplane.
This is the weird radio station that's playing propaganda that the CIA used to fund.
And instead now it's the privatization of it through a person who, by the way, isn't even as good as the CIA was.
And when you take a look at the Canadian situation, like, I think there's something here, Nick, because you and I, we've been doing this podcast for years, we've been documenting the international authoritarian movement, right?
That all of these countries, particularly the so-called Western democracies, the ones where neoliberals were in charge, that people were losing faith in the neoliberals and they were moving more and more towards right-wing authoritarianism.
Right?
These conservative right-wing parties.
This change that we're about to probably see in Canada, we'll probably know about this by the time that this episode is released tomorrow.
That is, it's almost like, what is it?
It's in a card game.
It's like you throw down the Trump card, for lack of a better phrase.
And all of a sudden it changes the face of things.
And that momentum that you were talking about.
I think it comes from the incompetence and the over-aggressiveness of authoritarians.
If Trump wasn't constantly talking about making Canada the 51st state, if he hadn't created these trade wars that weren't necessary, there's a really...
Like, giant possibility that Pierre Polyev would be the next Prime Minister of Canada.
Why?
Because the Liberals haven't afforded themselves well.
They haven't actually helped people the way that they want to be helped.
People have lost faith in them.
Now, all of a sudden, they look at Polyev and they go, that guy would work with Trump.
And we could possibly lose.
Our country, if we're not careful right now.
So there is sort of a survival instinct that kicks in.
It's happening in Canada.
It's happening in these other Western democracies that have been under siege for a long time.
We'll see what those elections look like.
But I think that this will be like one of those markers where when you look at the numbers, you'll say, oh my God, there's been a reaction to this.
And I think that that is obvious at this point.
Yeah, I just can't wait for the next time or if it starts to happen where, like, Trump has one of his rallies.
And, like, remember that happened in, like, Oklahoma City or something where, like, nobody showed up and maybe a bunch of Democrats bought tickets, you know?
If that starts to happen more and now he's in front of, like, hardly anybody and no one's really laughing at all of his jokes and the energy is really low and he's exuding that same low energy and realizing, I can't wait for that day.
I mean, I think that's the natural ebb of these things happening.
But it might take too long.
Might not be able to get to that point, but like that, that's
We need more emotional moments in public where somebody stands up to this guy and voices what we all want them to say to him.
We get to see him react to that in real time.
I'm hoping that that's where we're getting to.
This moment, and there are going to be a lot of these, so get used to me talking about these.
I talked about malleable moments.
Right?
Where, like, the momentum changes and when there's openings.
Right now, Donald Trump is historically unpopular.
Like, according to all of the major polls, he's now under 40%.
And on top of that, people are just like, what the shit is this?
This is wrong, and you're doing the wrong things.
And that could shift.
For all we know, since we started recording, there's been some sort of international incident.
Or there's been some type of threat where the pendulum could swing and they could reclaim and even gain more power.
But what we're talking about now is a moment to seize.
We are in a war with authoritarianism, and if you're on a battlefield, you have to sense when you can push and when you have to draw back and defend yourself.
And speaking of that, Nick, let's talk about the Democratic Party and let's have a conversation about a party that is actually two or three or four different parties.
Here's Chuck Schumer.
Speaking of Profiles in Courage, he went on the Sunday shows, and here's what he had to say when asked if the Democratic Party, if they gained power, was considering whether or not to go after impeaching President Donald Trump.
Your colleague from Georgia, Senator Don Ossoff, told voters at a town hall that he strongly agrees that President Trump should be impeached.
Do you agree with him?
Would that be a priority if Democrats were to take back Congress?
Well, look, right now, President Trump is violating rule of law in every way.
And we're fighting him every single day in every way.
And our goal is to show the American people over and over again, whether it's the economy, whether it's tariffs, whether it's Russia and overseas, and whether it's rule of law, how bad he is.
And, you know, two years is too far away to predict.
Our job is day to day to day to show who Trump is, what he is doing, and it's having an effect.
But you're not ruling out.
American people are realizing.
You're not saying no.
Look, it's too far away to even judge.
Okay.
Cool, Chuck.
Nick, two quick things here.
First things first, one of the lessons that I learned in communications back when I was just cutting my teeth on it was that if you're rhyming unintentionally, you're not on the right path.
So saying Donald Trump is breaking the rule of law every day and we're fighting in every way and we're fighting him every day.
Something went wrong.
It means that you're not thinking clearly.
He obviously didn't want to answer this question.
The second part, I'm no legal scholar.
I'm not a lawyer.
But if the President of the United States of America is, quote, breaking the rule of law in every way, doesn't that mean that there should probably be an impeachment?
I mean, like, literally that sort of a logic jump to not answer the question, I think, says everything and says it at a very loud volume.
I mean, it would have been so hard to say, yeah.
I mean, certainly impeachment investigation is on the table, whatever they call that, the preliminary part of that.
Like, at least get to that part and say that for sure.
I think that they're just so afraid.
You know, it's like if we were to say the 2024 election was stolen, we can't say that because the right said that and we were vilifying them and whatever, so we don't want to say that.
Look what happened to the first two impeachments.
Like, we didn't get anything there.
He probably got stronger.
So we can't say it again now.
I mean, that's sort of what I'm sure what the triangulation here is and the wringing in the hands.
But I think that people don't want accountability at this point.
They want to hear these leaders say something that's stronger than what we're hearing from Mr. Trump.
He's a coward.
He's a coward and he should no longer be in a position.
He's old.
He's tired.
It's been too long.
You know, Dick Durbin, God bless you, he's stepping down in Illinois at 80. But, you know, why can't Schumer take that in?
I don't know.
Schumer needs to go away.
And everybody who is in alignment with Chuck Schumer within the Democratic Party needs to go away.
That is not a position that, literally, all you need to do is go out and say, These people need to go to jail.
They've broken the law.
And what Chuck Schumer and people like him within the Democratic Party, what do they want, Nick?
They want to win in 2026, and then they want to win in 2028, and then they just want to be like, well, the Trump thing happened, and now we're moving forward.
And we have crossed a river at this point that there's no one crossing.
A Rubicon, if you will.
We have reached a point in which so many laws have been broken, so many institutions have been corrupted, and so many crimes and brutal violence have been perpetrated.
I don't know why anybody would vote for them.
Outside of voting against the worst.
I mean, if they're going to run the clock out, they tried that a couple different times, didn't work.
Yeah, it didn't work.
They probably feel like, well, we need to be the adults in the room and be shrewd with our decision-making and be, you know, it's the solemn halls of the Senate.
We have to be, you know, we have to behave a certain way.
But it's like, I think Batcat's out of the bag as well.
And I think what the American people want at this point, yes, is less cowards, more people willing to speak up, willing to stand up at the very least and be a spectacle, if we have to, to get this thing turned around.
Yeah, and you know, one of the things I've been thinking about, Nick, do you remember there was like a two-week period where when Kamala Harris secured the nomination for the Democratic Party, she kept talking about how she was a prosecutor and she knew how to deal with criminals like Donald Trump?
Yeah, yeah.
Like, you know, what was missing in that was, I'm going to hold Donald Trump accountable.
I promise you.
She wasn't able to say it, and instead they talked about the veiled threat of it all, and they never gave, like, an explanation of how they were going to take care of it outside of gaining power.
On the other side of Chuck Schumer, here is Governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker, in New Hampshire, Nick.
Do you know of any reason why Pritzker would be in New Hampshire?
It's really nice this time of year, Jared.
Oh yeah, beautiful this time of year.
It's really interesting that he went to New Hampshire.
I'm shocked that he didn't go over to Iowa immediately when he was done.
Or maybe South Carolina, you know.
But here is J.B. Pritzker giving an address in New Hampshire.
Before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption.
but I am now.
These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace.
They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have.
We must castigate them on the soapbox and then punish them at the ballot box.
Sorry, Nick.
You're going to have to comment on this first.
I'm too busy collecting the heart eyes that are falling out of me.
I can't.
I have to really ground myself.
Yes, that was, you know, great to hear him do that and rally.
And people were giving him a standing ovation in this, wherever he was, in this dinner.
And it was, this is the kind of thing we're talking about, right?
We need to have spectacle.
We need to have the emotional release of this.
We need to have ways to stand up.
In a lot more of an overt way to stop this.
And then that will, I think the other key is it will lead to the wave that we're looking for, where everyone's sort of in their houses, they're all in their little bubbles, where everyone's a little afraid and intimidated, like, what's going on.
But the more of that public, you know, community rallying we can have, the more aggressive people will get.
Nick, You've been a successful basketball coach and basketball analyst.
You've watched a lot of games.
You've watched a lot of playoff games, a lot of championship games.
When the clock starts running down and the score is close, am I wrong, or do those moments reveal who people are?
Oh, they do.
They reveal.
It's like, you know, losing doesn't build character.
It reveals character, Jared.
Exactly.
And there are times in which those moments of intense pressure, they reveal who people actually are and how they'll react.
On one hand, you have a Gavin Newsom who is just like, I'm going to hang out with Steve Bannon.
That's my solution.
Or Whitmer, who's hiding behind a bunch of folders in the Oval Office.
We have Chuck Schumer who, his entire, I don't say this lightly.
Chuck Schumer's legacy has been completely and utterly exposed.
That this is one of the guys, and by the way, for anyone watching on YouTube, Nick is doing an incredible Chuck Schumer impression with his glasses.
It is really, really impressive.
His legacy has been tainted for forever.
There is no ability whatsoever for him to come back from this.
That's who he is.
J.B. Pritzker.
Is showing right now that he has the Constitution within himself and he has the fight within himself in order to be a leader in not just the movement against Donald Trump, but possibly in the movement that will end authoritarianism in this country.
What he has been saying, and it's not being in a room and saying there should be mass protest as a governor, that's actually putting yourself on the line.
Because let's say there are mass protests in Illinois, and there's some damage that's done, right?
Somebody gets hurt, there's like some sort of a big riot, whatever.
He could suffer for that.
This was a courageous act that he did, and the things that he said from the moment this threat revealed himself, Pritzker has shown he's a leader.
He actually is, and he might be up to this task, and I think that we're seeing him maybe come into fruition there.
I mean, it's interesting that he's been dipping his toe for so long and not really sort of making that jump into the pool.
And so it could very well be just some people take a little bit longer to get really warm and comfortable to this kind of thing.
And I think he is.
He has that oration skill that he could tap into.
You know, again, there's a couple of things that work against him in the behind the scenes as well, which could be interesting.
But, you know, on the national stage, we'll have to keep your eye on that because, yes, these are the moments where people start to...
You know, feel that out, and then you can kind of call it way ahead of time whether or not they're going to get into this thing.
So certainly, like the New Hampshire thing is speaking so loudly, he's probably monitoring right now what people are saying about it, like us, and that's going to end up helping him decide what he wants to do.
And I'll just say, well done.
Keep it up.
I mean, this is the start.
Basically saying, and this is something that no Democrat outside of a Bernie Sanders or an Ocasio-Cortez has really said, which is, The Republican Party has so devolved and sort of turned into an authoritarian party that capitulates and collaborates on these crimes,
they shouldn't know a moment of peace.
You can't work with them.
You can't hope that they, like, wake up from their fever or wake up from this nightmare or whatever.
He's saying that we are in an existential crisis.
And that takes courage, and I think people are going to respond to that.
And I think that this is a real...
It's a real possibility that in this speech that we saw the beginnings of a J.B. Pritzker presidential campaign that could very well turn into something of importance, something that we might remember for a long time.
Do you know what the nickname of Illinois is?
It's like on all the license plates?
The land of Lincoln.
The land of Lincoln.
That sounds nice.
I'm J.B. Pritzker and I hail from the land of Lincoln.
You know what, Nick?
That's not bad.
That's not bad.
Yeah.
Not bad to hark on that and really, you know, make sure people, because, you know, those Republicans love Lincoln.
Well, I mean, they used to love Lincoln.
Well, they loved him.
They can pretend that he was, like, in their party.
Yeah, well, I mean, there's that.
But when, how, and why did Lincoln come into power?
It's because the Whigs failed and the Republican Party came out and said, we're willing to do battle.
We will do what needs to be done.
And now we're in a situation where leaders are in short supply.
And anytime you see something like this that has actual fire behind it, that has actual conviction to it, it rings so loudly.
And I will just say, I know there are a lot of Democratic strategists and members of the party who listen to this podcast.
If you have a congressperson, if you have a senator, if you have someone who's running for office, go out and tell the truth.
Go out and be courageous, and I'm telling you, you're going to be rewarded.
This cowardice is going to be punished, and this courage is going to be rewarded in the long run.
All right, everybody.
That's going to do it for this episode of the Moncrack Podcast.
We'll be back on Friday with a weekender edition.
A reminder, go over to patreon.com slash moncrackpodcast, become a patron, support the show, and also get the full weekender episode on Friday, which everybody who's been doing it lately, the support has been growing.
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