On this episode of the Muckrake Podcast, co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman dig into the disturbing trend of punishing truth-tellers in government, the newly revealed memo outlining plans to deploy more military force on domestic soil, and the latest GOP power grab in Texas as Republican lawmakers attempt yet another redistricting scheme to hold onto power.
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I am pleased to have GRDH sexton alongside me, Nick Halzman, your other co-host, to discuss a lot of things today.
Before I forget, though, I want to make sure that you are aware that we have a Patreon at patreon.com slash muckrake podcast, which allows you to have a lot more information, a lot more content from us.
It's a tremendous community there, and we really encourage you to try it.
Check it out and join what is some fantastic discussion every day.
And let's talk about today, which we have to discuss the firing of the Bureau of Labor and Statistics head over a bad jobs report by Donald Trump.
We also have a memo that was leaked that says that they want to use more military on domestic soil.
And there's a Texas power grab going on as the GOP lawmakers are trying to change the district shapes in ways that would potentially limit or eliminate five Democratic districts.
So, Jared, you're calling from the road, but I'm always glad to have you with me.
Thanks.
I'm out in the middle of absolute nowhere.
So, I'm just glad we can make this happen.
You know, all these stories, they're always developing.
There's never any sort of escape from this stuff.
You know, it's even weird not really having access to the internet, not really being able to stay in touch with things.
It's good to have this as like a touchstone.
I'm glad to be doing it.
Glad to be talking with you.
All right.
Well, I mean, I certainly hope that, you know, sometimes the decompression helps for everybody out there, but it also is important to be aware of what's going on.
And obviously, you could just dismiss this notion of the Trump just having a tantrum and firing somebody, just, you know, dismissing them because he doesn't like the jobs report.
But what I worry about is that it does indicate something more nefarious and something we should expect going on in the future.
So what's your reaction to that, to the firing?
Well, it starts with the economic report, Nick.
And, you know, you and I have been on this for years talking about not only how these reports have been sort of, you know, massaged and changed and sort of like, you know, kind of made to be more palatable, that there's something really, really rotten with this economy and everybody knows it.
Everybody feels it.
Anytime you get a report that speaks otherwise, we know that something is a little bit askew.
When it comes with this thing, a really, really dismal, troubling report that, and listen, I don't like to use this word any more than anybody else, but we are starting to look at neo-stagflation is what we're looking at.
And the fact that Trump obviously lives in this bubble where he doesn't want to receive bad news.
He wants sycophants around him who will tell him what he wants to hear.
First of all, it doesn't matter.
This economy is not just in trouble.
It's in real, real trouble.
It doesn't matter whether or not they cook the books or whatever.
But the fact that this was his reaction to move to create more obfuscation and create something where this administration can sort of hide, you know, whatever rubbish there is.
I mean, it's ugly.
It's disgusting.
And on top of that, like it speaks to what might be the next level of this administration, which is something you and I have been talking about, which is starting to play around with this stuff, starting to falsify documents and really just sort of covering everything up.
Well, in case anybody doesn't want to believe what Jared just laid out there so well, let's have Trump weigh in with exactly how he's trying to characterize these reports.
And on the other side, we can kind of get into why this is so concerning.
Okay, thank you very much.
We had a very good weekend in many respects.
We're seeing phenomenal numbers in terms of the business we do with other countries and the business we do within our own country.
I mean, really phenomenal numbers.
We'll be announcing a new statistician sometime over the next three, four days.
We had no confidence.
I mean, the numbers were ridiculous, what she announced, but that was just one negative number.
Oh, the numbers seem to be great.
And so we'll see how that comes out.
And if you remember, just before the election, this woman came out with these phenomenal numbers on Biden's economy.
Phenomenal numbers.
And then right after the election, they announced that those numbers were wrong.
And that's what they did the other day.
So it's a scam, in my opinion.
My opinion is just, it's just additional scam.
Okay.
Let's clear some things up here because there was a revision of the jobs downwards, but it was before the election.
So in August of 2024, they had a massive reduction of jobs of revision, which, by the way, revisions happen on every one of these reports.
And so it didn't necessarily file to help anybody to help Kamala Harris in her report.
And he was lying about this to make it seem like they had just pumped up the numbers before the election to make him give them an extra advantage and then revise them to the actual numbers.
It's just complete and utter made up verifiably false information.
Yeah.
And, you know, what happened there with that jobs report, and I believe we did a segment on it, was that quite frankly, and just to clear it up for anybody who doesn't pay attention to this, the neoliberal capitalist economist, they don't know what's going on.
They don't know what's going on because they don't want to know what's going on.
They have a religious fealty to neoliberal capitalism.
So as a result, they're always trying to figure out like how to make this equation work that doesn't work.
And the report that you just mentioned that Trump brought up, you're exactly right in exactly how that happened.
But when you're in this weird, liminal, esoteric space where people don't want to face up to what is actually happening with this economy and how so many, you know, businesses and economists are basically cooking this thing in so many different ways, coming up with new variables in order to hide how dire of a situation this is.
That allows people like Donald Trump, and this is one of the only reasons he's ever come to power, to operate with impunity.
They're now able to cover up anything that they want, lie about anything they want, largely because it's sort of the wild, wild west.
There is not a pure understanding among neoliberal capitalists.
So it gives people like him the opening to basically lie about everything and cover up his own bullshit without anyone actually being held accountable.
For sure.
I'm just worried because he's done this a lot in the past for a lot of different things.
CDC has seen firings over things they just didn't agree with.
We've seen it with the elections, which I think is really what we're building towards as we continue focusing on other things in the show, is that the election is really the key here and how they're going to respond to a report, which is basically what a ballot would be that they don't agree with, right?
That they feel deep in their bones is not correct, right?
As we've seen him over and over again in 2020 insisting that he won because it feels like he won.
And that's really, really dangerous when we're talking about, you know, as we creep into authoritarianism, maybe perhaps we're already there.
And then you have the minions going out there and just, it's just, maybe back in the past, we didn't seem to have people who were so willing to whatever, prop up the amper with no clothes.
We have another one that I wanted to show you because there was a crack in the armor here as Kevin Hassett goes on one of the shows.
And if you're unfamiliar with this guy, he's clearly gone to some sort of school of performance where you're on tv where he thinks the more he smiles the more people will listen to him and trust him um doesn't look that way when you watch it just an eerie weird smile the entire time but here's what he actually said about the jobs report uh i thought that was interesting and caught my ear The jobs numbers were slower than we expected.
I think that like one of the explanations for revisions is they have more complete data.
And so I think it is likely that the revisions are a better read of the data if the data are not being manipulated.
And so, yeah, I would say that it's a little bit weaker.
But don't forget, this is before the Big Beautiful bill is really kicking in.
And so with our eyes on the horizon, we're highly optimistic about the future of this economy.
We've got the Big Beautiful Bill.
We've got expensive factories, got no taxes on tips.
We've got incomes going up $10,000 for a typical family.
And we've got all of that happening while the budget deficit's declining rapidly because of the tariff revenue.
And so there are a lot of really good reasons to be super optimistic about the second half of the year.
But absolutely, that jobs number, if the revision turns out to be true, does suggest that there's less momentum than we thought.
And, you know, you could say that the dissenters at the Fed saw this coming.
They specifically mentioned that there were signs of labor market weakening.
They were pointing, I think, to the ADP release as much as anything.
And so, yeah, I think that the pressure on the Fed to get its policy in order is going to be higher because of this.
And that's proving that the president was right about it.
Okay, the very proving the president was right about it.
It's almost like it's backwards.
It's backwards.
And here's an opportunity.
He actually is saying, yes, we were expecting this.
And he goes, if the job revisions are correct, remember, he already went on a bunch of different shows.
And Trump has already gone shows.
And Besson is going on shows saying definitively they're lying and that she has to be fired because they are lying about these numbers without any evidence, but just the fact that there was a revision and they had a revision before that they were referencing.
That's so kind of really false too.
And I guess it's confusing enough where people are just going to shrug and move on.
Woof.
Yeah, that is.
Nick, that, you know, your ability to find these things is unparalleled.
Wow, that is just one of the worst.
I don't even want to call it an explanation, an insult, an actual explanation.
That is literally one of the least convincing things that I've ever heard.
And it's the equivalent of hearing the acolyte of a religion trying to explain sort of the inconsistencies of a religion.
Also, by the way, if the economy is so great, why does Jerome Powell need to lower interest rates?
Right.
Like if things are just absolutely cooking and going, well, they don't need to do that.
But then you add into it this idea of, yeah, the numbers aren't great, but they're actually great.
That goes back to that contradiction that you and I are covering all the time, which is in order to be in the MAGA orbit, and you nailed it dead to rights.
What's different about this administration is what started in 2020, which was that Trump started to surround himself not with old members of the Republican Party, but those people who were willing to be part of his cult.
And what we're seeing now is they will lie about this thing until we're eating dog food and scavenging out in the wilderness.
And what we're seeing from these economic numbers is that the ship is going down.
We're already primed to not just be in a recession, but a deep, dangerous recession that could turn into a collapse or a depression.
They are going to continue to hold this line regardless of what facts and empirical evidence shows.
And that guy's response, oh my God, that is, that's chilling to watch.
I was kind of curious when the last time something like this had happened.
And I'm sure you're going to be very happy to dive into a little bit of Herbert Hoover's administration.
You might remember a name, Ethel Burt Stewart, who was in the same position and had posted job numbers.
And remember, this was 1932.
I think there was something significant going on at that time, right, Jared?
Yeah, I think there were some things moving and shaking at that point.
Yeah, I think the economy was not doing well, I think we would call it.
And he basically was able to pressure Stewart out of his role.
And I was kind of curious how that went for him.
Although in theory, it wasn't necessarily that that became a downfall that led to FDR being elected as much as just sort of piloting us deep into the depression.
But these things, I'm wondering if there's going to be some critical mass here as they start to mount up and as the desperation of the Trump administration continues in a downward spiral, whether or not this will continue to just hurt him politically in leading to control by the Democrats over one of the houses, hopefully, and then into the presidential election.
Well, I think there's something even larger at stake here.
Just anecdotally, one thing that we saw, and it's not on our rundown today, but over in Great Britain, a new party formed under Jeremy Corbyn, a left-wing party, which is already showing signs of maybe eclipsing labor altogether.
And here in America, like it doesn't matter the lies Donald Trump tells.
It doesn't matter what the people around him say.
The economic realities of this are what they are.
And we saw with the Biden administration how that hurt them and eventually Kamala Harris, because they didn't want to look at the economic realities of things.
They would much rather tell people, you don't know what you're talking about.
You're wrong about this.
But the particulars about this economic situation are dire and they've been dire for very long because of vulture capitalism, people taking advantage of other people and never considering what happens later on.
And we have now reached what you just brought up, which is sort of a crisis point, that if that does keep occurring, we're not just talking about 2026 or 2028 if we have those elections.
Like if this continues, the same type of opening that someone like an FDR had, like, if you go out and tell everyone that everything's fine as the realities are falling apart, like there are going to be consequences.
And that doesn't matter if you have a cult around you or not.
You can only insulate yourself so far when it comes to situations like this.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And it goes, yeah, I like how you posted it both ways.
You know, it went for the Democrats as well, Harris and Biden.
And, you know, there were rosier reports then, and the economy was more sound, you know, before the election anyway.
So they weren't necessarily lying completely about that, but we certainly were seeing some indications.
And now the fuel on the fire here was when you're talking about raising tariffs and they're now kicking in.
And, you know, these job reports are just the tip of the iceberg of what we're seeing.
It should be no surprise to any normal person that the revisions would be so devastatingly bad for them because in reality, yes, so many jobs are being cut every week over week now based on the increased prices of everything.
Businesses are going to be shutting down.
There is no way to suddenly fix this and start creating Things in America.
And as we said before, and what we're already seeing evidence of is that the American companies either still have to rely on some version of product from other countries, whether it's machines that they parts for machines they need to fix or things like that.
But then again, you can't tell me, and we're already seeing evidence that when the imported goods go up, the price goes up, the American companies aren't going to just sit there looking around going, oh, that's great.
We're going to be 25, 30% cheaper than everybody else.
They're not going to do that.
They're going to raise their prices.
They are.
And going back to something that you and I have been talking about, which was the reindustrialization of the United States of America, which is now being attempted to, you know, be done through this collapse of sort of the global system, you know, through the tariffs.
Like, as you've said, it's really hard to build these things very quickly.
And the one thing that I was talking about was they would be able to build them quicker because they weren't going to have as many permits, so many regulations, which eventually would turn into death traps neither here nor there.
We're already starting to see reports that are circling around the political classes that say that any type of industrial base that is coming in the future, it's not there yet.
And not only is it not there yet, it's not moving fast enough to create something that will avert this disaster.
And Nick, here's the reason why.
I've said it before.
If you are going to change the economic political paradigm, you have to have a plan and you have to carry it out with like precision and with interest.
The way these tariffs have been done, and you brought it up in the past, and I think you're dead on.
This is like a pump and dump scheme.
It's literally creating these tariffs, allowing people to buy stocks and resources at a lower price and then deal with sort of the panic in the market from all of this chaos.
They're trying to have their cake and eat it too while also rubbing their stomach and patting their head.
So it has created not just chaotic conditions, but it's created perilous conditions.
And there's not going to be a job report or an economic report that shows anything else unless the Trump administration leans into what I was talking about a couple of weeks ago, which is simply fabricating things whole cloth and not worrying about whatever evidence is there, which this firing and probably the new hiring, I think, speaks to that.
I think the HHS has shown them their ability to go ahead and doctor ideas and statistics, big quotes around statistics.
So yeah, they're probably going to tell us a bunch of lies while our conditions deteriorate wildly.
Oh, I mean, even more evidence of that is like the deal that they supposedly made with Japan, where they were going to have hundreds of millions of dollars of investment directly.
And it turns out Japan had real no idea what that was going to be.
They thought, okay, maybe some private sector people would do some money lending is really what it's coming down to now.
No direct investments on in businesses on American soil.
But he doesn't care.
He just makes it up.
Now, what makes me a little bit worried about that as well is independent of him lying about that and then people forget and then a week goes by and then somehow in certain people's minds, oh, it was good.
He said it was good and that's all I care about.
But I also worry about where this tariff in income is going to go.
And I feel like there's going to be some version of this where it goes directly into Trump's pocket, if that's possible.
I really feel like that's the angle here.
Nick, you only say that because that's likely true.
I mean, one of the things that is causing a problem is that this tariff situation, not only being chaotic, it's now creating a new income stream for the United States of America on the backs of the people.
It's a hidden shadow tax is what it is.
And so, you know, I know this is going to be shocking to the people listening to this, but in an era of perpetual profit and growth, it's going to be hard for the government to move away from this new income stream.
And when it just so happens that the God-King emperor of MAGA and the right-wing United States of America is probably getting even more rich off of it through some way, shape, or form.
Not to mention how many bribes that countries are going to pay to get around this thing.
We've already seen facets of that.
So we now have a situation where the chaos is actually feeding not just the market, it's feeding the individuals who control the government.
It's feeding the individuals who are getting their beaks wet from it, which never leads to anything good.
This is what leads to crisis when all of a sudden you don't even have stewards anymore.
You basically have buzzards.
And that's what we're dealing with.
Right.
And, you know, and all this stuff doesn't have to sound like breathless conspiracy mongering or fear mongering.
But when you start to factor it in with other things, and so, you know, this notion of a memo leaking that says they want to use a template of what happened in Los Angeles when they brought the National Guard in and they brought Marines in, they want to be able to expand that and be able to use and have boots on the ground from the military on American soil to either A, back up the police or then to take over from the police.
And we've already talked about the dangers with that is a couple different things.
The police get really on edge because they want to insist they don't need that help.
So they're going to end up being a lot more violent and aggressive than they would normally be.
And then that aggression and violence leads to the kind of situation that Trump can then declare martial law and things like that that will allow him to take over completely and negate elections.
Yeah, so I'm going to take two things here.
They're both threaded together, but they're also separate in parallel at the same time.
They converge.
First things first, Donald Trump is a dictator, not only in action, but in instincts.
He wants to use the United States military against the United States people.
That's simply how this thing works.
He also is a figure that is going to carry out the wishes of the capitalist market.
And going back to this first story, where not only are jobs getting worse, but we know the standard of living is falling apart while prices of things go up and scarcity, intentional scarcity becomes worse and worse and worse.
I've been talking about this for years.
The only way to carry out this project is to put more and more money and emphasis and faith in law enforcement and the military as protectors of capital and protectors of the wealth and oligarchical classes.
So what we saw in Los Angeles in many ways was sort of a test run to see not only what would happen when you had the military out in the streets, but also like how were people going to react to that?
How quickly could they be deployed?
What would their operations look like?
Los Angeles was a perfect testing ground for this.
And they've made it very clear since even the first Trump administration that this is the kind of thing that they wanted to carry out.
So again, then it's always important to remember this.
Is this happening because Donald Trump is Donald Trump?
In part, but it is also happening because as capitalism, neoliberal capitalism moves into authoritarianism, bull-faced, you know, bald-faced authoritarianism, you are going to need those resources to come in and protect capital and protect the capitalist class.
So this thing, like there's a reason why you and I were talking about this years ago.
This was always going to come into fruition as long as nothing changed.
Oh, I agree.
And I think that even local police departments are going to be upset because people, their candidates are being poached for ICE.
With all the money that's going in there now, they're offering such incentives that would definitely lure people from maybe law enforcement to just being in ICE instead, which again, this is just another layer of the authoritarianism they want to be able to create, where you have armed people who are very poorly trained on the streets, you know, causing all manner of havoc and violating all manner of laws.
And then, you know, at the very top of this, you have a guy who is immune from these in his official capacity as the president.
And that's the other thing that's scary.
And I'm just simply waiting.
At some point, he will grossly violate and clearly violate a law that will have to be brought up to the Supreme Court.
And they're going to be forced to have to reconcile that decision they made to give him immunity with the fact that he just broke the law.
And we can only hope that that would end the fever and they would realize that and revoke the immunity they gave him.
You know, and I think one of the, first of all, he's broken many laws.
I mean, the Constitution he's trampled on consistently since he took the oath of office.
But I do think one of the things that you just sort of touched on a little bit, which is important in terms of learning the context of these things, like eventually when a fascist regime comes into its full fruition and power, you actually find that law enforcement.
And it's funny, Nick, we talked about the not just the Supreme Court, but the Republican Party in general.
A lot of the times you create the thing that will eventually replace you.
You know, we talked about how the wealth class, which is like business owners, Koch brothers, you know, those types of people who have controlled government and power for a long time, eventually gave birth to the oligarchical class, which could end up taking over for them.
Law enforcement, which has basically been running a protection scheme on the United States of America and has not seen their resources dip, they might look up very soon and see that a nationally controlled secret police are suddenly not just above them, but replacing them.
And those people become loyal shock troops of the fascist regime.
So what we're watching come into like fruition here, it's really hard to overstate how dangerous of a situation this is.
Right.
Because it's fascinating to picture this notion of, you know, like let's go back to in Germany, stormtroopers who are coming through and doing all sorts of atrocities, you know, they were volunteering and they were signing up to join this military and do these things.
And there's, it's, and they're kind of mixing capitalism with this to try and lure them, but it seems like it's easy now in this day and age, the way they've segmented the population to find those people, right?
And that's what's also, I think, maybe so soul killing about a lot of this is that these people in ICE and people who are signing up, they are full-throatedly joining this movement.
And the decency doesn't seem to exist as much anymore.
And that's, you know, that could be decades worth of damage.
Well, and Nick, where would those people have originally went?
The incentives used to be for the same people who are now going to join ICE.
The incentives used to be for them to join the military or law enforcement.
We're talking about the same individuals who would be making those choices, oftentimes crossing back and forth between those things.
And now we're watching it sort of replaced with this new private secret police force, which is going to have all of the extra incentives.
It will be fascinating to see what happens there.
And when you look at past authoritarian regimes, how that sort of segmentation comes into place.
And all of this is not to say expect this to happen and to come into, again, its full bloom.
This is more about recognizing what threats are on the horizon.
This is why we have to fight against this.
This is why we have to defeat this movement, because they do have the parts in place that could eventually slip in and create just a really, really terrible and dangerous and authoritarian situation.
It gets worse because if you're gazing on that horizon and you turn 180 degrees because you're thinking, oh, it's going to be people who would normally have gone into the military and they're going to join ICE.
ICE is also offering student debt forgiveness as another incentive.
So they're trying to move into that area too, of people who went to college, who are educated, who have just a mountain of debt through nefarious means of predatory loans.
And that could speak to people.
Well, yeah.
And what happens when AI and the oligarchical push starts to eat into white-collar jobs?
All of a sudden, you have a bunch of people who have been displaced out of the labor force who suddenly like they look around and it's like, well, I guess I'm going to handle the logistics and the white collar equivalent within ICE.
And so you end up basically creating, and you know, you brought up FDR earlier.
You know, FDR's New Deal plan in large part was to employ a bunch of the people who would have gotten involved in fascistic activities, who would have joined these paramilitaries and these movements.
He put them out there.
He had them working on conservation.
He had them building parks.
He had them, you know, creating electricity, you name it.
The alternative to that is allowing a fascist structure to come in and not just create a political movement, but to also create more or less a roving game, right?
You don't have any opportunities.
You don't have any sort of thing on the horizon that could make your life better.
You have to rely on them for the money and the resources, which is starting to slowly shift the financial incentives over towards joining a fascistic movement.
Frightening.
Now, what's happening, I want to say in Texas is almost encouraging to me in the sense that what I'm most worried about is that they're behaving in certain ways.
The politicians on the right are behaving in ways that indicate that they don't think that there's going to be free and fair elections going forward.
However, the idea of redistricting to accumulate five more Republican House seats in Texas by terrible, you know, racist gerrymandering indicates to me that they are still trying to at least go through the motions of what a Democratic process looks like, right?
And so there's something there that if they can at least fight back on that, and Democrats are trying to by vacating the House and not having a quorum, which they've done in the past a couple different times.
Just a real quick question for you, Jared.
It's happened twice where Democrats have walked out of the chamber.
And so there wasn't enough people to pass the vote.
In those other two times, do you think that that was effective?
Did it stop the legislation?
No, it did not.
It did not.
It made it, it caused some national focus on it for a little bit.
Maybe on the margins, they got a couple of pieces of words changed of the legislation, but no, it didn't do anything.
They were ended up forced to be back and they had to end up pass that legislation they didn't want to have passed, which was terrible at both times.
And so again, here we are, right, in the same stuff.
I think they need another script at this point for that.
But what's interesting, though, is Governor Abbott is exploring this notion that they could vacate those seats now for the people that have left, which would completely destroy any semblance of democracy in Texas as it exists anyway.
This is truly interesting stuff.
And it's got, it's a roller coaster.
Yeah.
And, you know, that's the problem with going to the well one too many times.
You know, Nick, you're a basketball coach.
If a team runs a play or a strategy enough times, you're like, hey, they're running a play or a strategy.
You got to change it.
And it gives you an opening to do it.
The Texas Democrats have been sort of running the strategy, i want to say going on 20 years now and that strategy eventually will lead to some sort of an authoritarian end around i will say also i think it's important to look at the fact that we're in texas there are other opportunities abbott is struggling right now because of what just happened with the floods and what has happened you know with the energy grid and all of that like he doesn't have momentum necessarily they could
Do something.
I am glad that they are taking this stand and I'm glad that they're not just, you know, going out there and giving interviews and saying that they're troubled by it.
But it is a situation where Texas, which is a powder keg, because it could go purple and even blue at some point if like the conditions were, you know, really taken advantage of.
But it does feel like they're more than willing to throw anything they can at the wall in order to stave that off.
And the Democrats, again, I'm glad they're doing something and they're not just, you know, talking about regrets.
But eventually at some point or another, pulling that same tactic is going to lead to some sort of an end around.
Right.
And let's just discuss really quickly what they're doing exactly, because every 10 years there's a census and that allows states to recalibrate how many congressional representation they have.
And Texas is trying to do it midway through, which is not supposed to be legal.
But they're using the most ridiculous justification where the maps are drawn so poorly now due to racial gerrymandering.
OK, Department of Justice.
Hey, remember a few a few months, six months ago, Department of Justice was actually deserved the name of Department of Justice, I think, or almost deserved it.
Certainly now they don't do it.
They don't deserve it now.
But so it was an earlier version of Department of Justice who had said, you need to fix this because this is underrepresenting minorities in your state.
And because of that decision or that opinion, then Texas is now saying, see, we have to do this now.
But then their solution to that is to make it worse.
And that is what's so astounding to me.
And it sort of speaks to what they're doing on the border and trying to eliminate anybody coming here at all, basically, because they want to cling to some notion of what this country was and some sort of white supremacy ideal that it never really was anyway.
And so it kind of all factors into this things where they want to somehow maintain some sort of autonomy from a white supremacy standpoint and then just completely use the most ridiculous justifications.
It just makes you it makes you wonder, like, at some point, even the Republicans in the state have to say, hey, that's too far.
Well, I think even some of the Republicans in Texas are saying it's too far.
I think a lot of people are tired of Abbott.
I think that his numbers show a real possibility of things shifting in that state.
But what you just brought up is exactly right.
You have two parties right now that are historically unpopular.
If you actually look at the number of numbers of Democrats, it's more dissatisfaction with their inability to fight or put up an alternative.
But the Republicans are reviled and they know that and they know that things are trending into the future in a different way, not just through demographics, but just in terms of like basic human decency.
So, again, it's not just Trump and MAGA at the national level.
It's at the state levels, too.
It is a smashing grab.
They're trying to get everything they can while they can get it.
And no, they're not interested in democracy.
That thing, it's useful when it serves them.
And otherwise, they will throw it overboard as quickly as humanly possible.
And what we're seeing here, not just with redistricting, but also with these authoritarian sort of pushes with ICE, with deportation, with disappearing, they are trying to go ahead and get this thing done while they can.
Right.
And they don't even have to be that clever about it anymore.
At some point, there were moments where we thought, oh, this is actually pretty smart.
Somebody went there, went through the Constitution, found, you know, esoteric clauses and figured out ways that, you know, no one had really thought of before.
This is not even that.
This is smash and grab stuff now right out in the open.
And they've just been priming their constituents this entire time to accept that.
And that's what's so frustrating about it.
And what's even worse is now, you know, Governor Newsom is weighing in in Hochul in New York.
And they're now trying to say, well, we'll do the same thing.
And we'll just recapture even more seats for the left, which, you know, that's not democracy either.
Oh, man.
We really eventually when we get past this point, we got to come up with some sort of federal idea of how to have districts.
Like, you know, if we're actually going to get out of this mess, we got to come up with something completely different and fair and move past this era of gerrymandering because it is way too ripe for corruption.
You know, full transparency, I worked on a campaign in the, you know, 2004, 2005 time during California for a guy that, you know, he was so upset with the redistricting in California, which, and he was legitimately correct.
We had a thing called the ribbon of shame.
And it was literally in order to get just enough liberals into this one congressional district, it literally went, you know, it got incredibly thin for like a mile.
And then it went thick.
It was insane how they drew these to try and capture us enough votes to, you know, to win these elections.
So I'm not going to tell you that you need a lot to reform.
I don't understand why, why it's just not like a grid.
Why isn't it just, you know, straight lines, laterally and horizontally or vertically.
It's like, that should just be it.
And then let that, let the chips fall where they may.
This is what happens when you have two entrenched parties that have been entrenched for so long and able to do basically whatever they've wanted with that challenge.
And what you just brought up is exactly how it should work.
It should be very transparent.
It should be very clear.
And instead, we've allowed these two parties to play games with it.
And eventually and inevitably, you are going to see the results of that.
Frightening.
Yeah.
So we have to talk maybe a little bit about, if we have a minute, what's going on.
Well, first of all, I just wanted to point out, because we're talking about, you know, I wanted to talk about Sidney Sweeney for a second in this ad that everyone seems to be involved with.
And then really quickly, the White House put out a tweet yesterday with a picture of Trump.
It's in silhouette from behind.
So you can kind of make out his hair.
And he's talking to the press, you know, at sunset or something.
And it says the most transparent president in history.
And I just found that fascinating.
You know, it's gotten shared.
It's gotten, you know, retweeted nonstop.
But I just found that fascinating because it's so blatant at this point that they're willing to sort of pretend.
Oh, yes.
I guess they're transparent, Jared.
They're transparent in their corruption.
Yes.
Right?
But it just goes to show you that, like, either it's a messaging thing that they don't even get, because it really wouldn't have been something you should have shared.
Like, it seems stupid, like, what they would do that.
But then it falls into how Trump was commenting on an ad that Sidney Sweeney was in for American Genes, which has all sorts of ramifications.
But I take it, did you see the 30-second ad?
Yeah, I've seen it.
Yeah.
You know, and, you know, remember, there's a long history of this.
Brooke Shields did the original Don't Hate Me Because I'm Beautiful.
Right?
It was provocative, and everyone talked about it, and it was almost, it shot in almost the same exact way, if I'm not mistaken.
But she's, you know, touting her genes, right, and how she has really good genes.
Now, I've got to tell you, I'm progressive.
It didn't bother me as much as somehow there's a...
either it's being created by the right uh and then they're they're they're insisting the left is upset, or maybe the left really is upset that, like, somehow it's saying that, like, it's her superior white genes in the G-E-N-E-S sense that she's touting.
And that's what they're trying to push.
When in fact, to me, it was a pun on the other words.
So, what do you think?
Well, I'll say, first of all, I think this is a manufactured controversy.
You know, basically, what we've entered is to a period of time of polarization where brands and companies and corporations have figured out that they can capture a certain market segmentation by creating faux controversies, getting cable news to talk about it, getting people to post about it.
I do think the Sidney Sweeney American Eagle ad, I think it probably intentionally tried to get people triggered over this.
I don't actually think people got triggered by it.
I don't think people actually got upset about it, but the right runs on cultural agreement.
I think that this entire thing was supposed to create a firestorm of controversy.
And when it didn't, they went ahead and acted like it did anyway.
I mean, there's no end to things that Fox News and right-wing media says liberals are triggered by.
I'm sure some people posted about it on social media.
Of course, they did.
They post about everything.
But I think that this thing was intentionally manufactured for that purpose.
Right.
And then it somehow comes out and perhaps it's verified that Sidney Sweeney is a registered Republican.
And, you know, they asked Trump about that.
And all of a sudden, now Trump really loves her.
But then, you know, he's been really creepy recently.
And whoever is, you know, in charge of how he talks to the press, you know, should be talking to him because, you know, first of all, I'm really excited that we really didn't mention the case that everyone wants to mention that we've been talking about all this time, right?
We actually could get through a whole show without really talking about it.
But to hear him talk about Carolyn Levitt and her lips, which he was mentioning in a very lustful, disgusting way.
And then he kind of was lusting, you know, in some way about how City Sweeney is hot.
It's just gross and creepy and just continues to lay, you know, lay it on thick of where he really stands and why we shouldn't really believe him when he's talking about that case that we're not going to talk about.
Yeah.
And that's the thing.
It is disgusting and it is gross.
And that's his brand.
And everyone who follows him goes along with it.
I don't know anything about Sidney Sweeney's politics.
I don't care to be frank.
But what it is, is it's leaning into all of this bullshit.
I mean, even Steak and Shake jumped on the beef tallow thing from RFK as a marketing segmentation tactic.
Like that's what this is about.
It's about taking things that people care about and are passionate about and then capitalizing on them and then turning them into a market fetishist.
And that's it.
And that's what this thing is.
What Trump says about women, always disgusting, always awful.
I'm not shocked that he said those things, but on top of it, like that, that's where the branding is on this stuff.
Yeah.
And there's just a weird movement.
Like we've already seen how they're trying to pass laws to allow kids to work, you know, at younger, younger ages and to put them into the work force.
Sexualization of things.
And, you know, again, somehow maybe the justification of what we, you know, this case is somehow this notion of like 17 year olds suddenly, if that's okay, 16 year olds are okay for men to be, you know, whatever, you know, it feels like there's a push to do that, all in the service of exonerating Trump from this when it does come out, you know, that he was involved in that.
And it's just, it doesn't, you know, of all the progress we had made.
And however, you know, you don't approve of, you know, political or economic policies and different things like that, but like the progress we've made on those fronts, to have to face the notion that they're going to go backwards on that is, I don't even know I have words to describe how soul-killing that is.
Yeah.
And I think, I think there is a little bit of comfort in the idea that we didn't actually make the progress that we thought that we did.
That sexualization, that objectification, it was always there.
It was just sort of hinted at and winked at.
But yeah, I'm with you.
It's all disgusting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so, yeah, again, the bail is being pulled back and perhaps the progress that we did make, you know, maybe not wasn't as deep as we had thought it was.
So yeah, it just means we need to make it now.
Yeah, exactly.
And that's the benefit of that.
You know, whenever we wake up and realize that, it's a good moment, you know, because we were maybe resting on some laurels or a little bit complacent.
So we got to keep going.
You got to turn this thing around quickly.
Absolutely.
All right.
Well, that's going to do it for this episode of the Muck Rick Podcast.
We will be back with the Weekender Edition on Friday.
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