What They Did to the Epstein Files, They’re Doing to Democracy
This is a preview of The Weekender edition of the Muckrake Podcast. Please go to our Patreon to gain access to the regular Weekender episodes on Fridays.
Jared Yates Sexton is unavailable, so on this episode, Nick Hauselman is joined by Political Science Professor Jason Neidleman. They dive into the political firestorm erupting around Jeffrey Epstein — from Pam Bondi’s disastrous Fox News appearance to MAGA influencers turning on Trump over his ties to the case. They cover the brutal deportation of innocent people under current policy, including a chilling Stephen Miller sound bite defending the practice. And they examine the drastic cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (NPR, PBS) and how that plays into Right's desire to control educational propaganda.
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Hey everybody, welcome to the Muck Rake Political Podcast.
I am your host, Nick Hauslman.
And for one more episode, GRDH Sexman is out and not available.
But that just means that I am pleased to bring on the show Jason Needleman, who has been on the show before and as professor.
And Jason, thank you so much for coming on here.
You're a professor of Ali Psi.
Fill us in a little bit more, just so I'm exactly accurate what your role is and your knowledge on all things politically.
Well, I teach political science at University of Laverne.
My main field is political theory, which I describe as the intersection of politics and philosophy.
So right now, for example, I'm doing a big project on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Genevan, 18th century Genevan philosopher, tentatively titled Democracy as a Way of Life.
I had some, I think, good news from the peer-reviewed gremlins yesterday.
So a piece of that project should be coming out in a political theory journal soon.
And I teach other subjects in political science broadly, constitutional law and modern Middle East, state and local politics.
So yeah, I'm pretty broadly trained in the field of political science and political philosophy.
Well, you know, I'm glad that you're here because there's a lot to talk about.
But first, I want to tell you that this is a weekender episode.
And that means that if you want to hear the whole episode, go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast and you'll get access to the full length episode.
Plus, we have a Discord with a great community and a great conversation all day, every day.
We have live shows and other special episodes like movies, stuff that we break down.
So please head over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast and check that out.
And I know everyone is sort of talking about the same things over and over again.
Obviously, there's the Epstein files, which we will get to, but I want to touch upon a couple of other things because we noticed that there's been cuts to the CPB, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which leads to money that goes to NPR and PBS.
But there's also interesting things like Jim Comey's daughter got fired from the DOJ randomly, or maybe not so randomly.
And then more people are being deported and the MAGA people are just seem to be celebrating this.
It's really concerning to me.
I actually was having a discussion earlier this morning, though, a little bit about how things worked for a long time or didn't work for a long time in our government.
I guess the term would be gridlock.
But I kind of, and then, and now we don't have gridlock anymore, right?
Trump has simply just snapped his fingers and will, by executive order, be able to get through all the red tape.
And A, I kind of wonder, well, how would I feel if it was somebody who I actually agreed with with the policies?
Like, wouldn't that be amazing?
But I think the epiphany I had, I kind of wanted to hear your take on it was, is that that gridlock that we've been talking about for all these decades, we can remember Jim Stockdale in 1992 screaming gridlock in the vice presidential debate.
That actually is democracy, wouldn't you say?
Well, I don't know about democracy, but you could argue that the American constitutional system is set up to make it difficult to pass laws.
You know, one of the fundamental insights of the founders was this idea that power and liberty are opposites.
And that's based on their experience with the British monarchy.
And so they thought the way to maximize freedom is to limit the capacity of the government to rule over citizens.
And so therefore, the idea was to make it difficult to pass laws at all on the idea that any law is likely to be a limitation on freedom.
And in a certain literal technical sense, that's, of course, true.
Laws place limitations on the liberty of citizens.
And so, yeah, they set up a system, which we now call separation of powers and checks and balances that was designed to make it difficult to pass laws.
But of course, famously, one of the things they didn't anticipate was that we would organize our system into party affiliation or our political participation into party organized political parties.
And what we've seen with MAGA is that one person has been able to take over the party and thereby take over essentially all of those institutions that were meant to act as checks and balances, because for whatever mysterious reason that we'll probably get into here, he's able to basically tell anyone in the party to jump and they say, how high?
So he could pack whatever he wanted, for example, into the one big, beautiful slash bad bill.
And essentially all of them would agree to it.
And he's able to similarly either appoint cronies to the courts or intimidate justices and judges on the court such that, yeah, he's pretty much able to do what he wants.
We might want to talk about the limitations that do remain.
I mean, there are places where he's getting stymied.
But yeah, I think you make a good point that we've definitely broken gridlock.
Yeah, you know, and I'm kind of trying to figure out like, well, what would the policies be, you know, if some Democratic president had gotten in there and started doing these things?
And, you know, and obviously that would, like would cutting defense spending, for instance, would that enrage the right?
You know, like maybe, I suppose.
But I suppose the other, on the flip side, you might see, you know, immigration be treated in a more humane way.
That would probably trigger people.
And you would certainly see rights to people who have been disaffected and who are marginalized strengthened.
And that sort of felt like, at least with the gridlock, quote unquote, what we had going on, it did seem like there was a progression of protections for people who were marginalized that are now being stripped away on purpose.
I don't know.
I mean, I think that's probably the case just because the right is in power.
But I'm one of these guys in the political science literature, they'll call it playing hardball.
I'd argue that we should play hardball too and do as much as we can to set up institutional protections for marginalized people, for example, or pass a left-wing agenda.
So for example, I believe in reforming the supreme court adding justices limiting the power of judicial review so that if we do get majorities we can actually pass laws i mean i actually think it works to the advantage of the right when the government is paralyzed that way if you want to call it gridlock because people look at that and they say well that validates the right-wing um narrative which is that government can't do anything these democrats run promising that they're going to help me they never do um and
