Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman take on the Department of Justice opening an investigation into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, a move they argue has nothing to do with accountability and everything to do with pressure and punishment. They break down how Trump’s long campaign against the Fed fits into a larger effort to control interest rates, bend institutions to his will, and reshape the economy around the needs of himself and his allies, regardless of the consequences for everyone else.
From there, they connect it to what’s happening in the streets, the expanding role of ICE, the escalation following the killing of René Nicole Good, and the way intimidation, propaganda, and selective enforcement are becoming standard operating procedure. It’s a conversation about power, fear, and what happens when the people at the top decide that stability, norms, and even basic rights are expendable.
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I'm J.D. H. Sexton, here with my friend, my co-conspirator, my compatriot, Nick Houseman.
How you doing, bud?
I'm good.
I'm trying to figure out how I can become somebody who harasses ICE on the streets.
I want to do that.
I'm ready.
Get you the whistle?
whistle um i there's got to be a way to i don't know i guess we can't talk about it publicly but i have Yeah, we probably need to keep strategizing off the air.
Yeah.
But I have ideas.
I don't know.
There's got to be ways that are legal or not going to injure anybody that can thwart what's going on.
Think banana in a tailpipe, Jared.
That's what I'm talking about.
Luckily, these motherfuckers are cowards.
Yeah.
And we're seeing a lot more evidence of that around the country.
We will talk more about ICE and of course the aftermath of what happened in Minneapolis here in just a second.
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Head over to patreon.com slash mycraigpodcast in order to gain full access to The Weekender on Fridays as well as specials, our community, and also to support the podcast. That's patreon.com slash mycraigpodcast. Nick, before we get into ICE, we need to get into a new development, which is disturbing in its own way.
It has been revealed this weekend that the Department of Justice has opened an investigation into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell following a supposed, I don't even want to call it a controversy.
They're cooking this whole thing up.
Renovations of the Fed's offices and testimony from Powell in June.
Powell, to his credit, has released a statement regarding what he sees, and I think everybody else sees, as targeted harassment. And using of state power as Donald Trump tries to wrest him out of leadership of the Fed. Here is Jerome Powell commenting on this new tactic. No one,
certainly not the chair of the Federal Reserve, is above the law. But this unprecedented action should be seen in the broader context of the administration's threats and ongoing pressure. This new threat is not about my testimony last June or about the renovation of the Federal Reserve buildings. It is not about Congress's oversight role. The Fed,
through testimony and other public disclosures, made every effort to keep Congress informed about the renovation project. Those are pretexts. The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public,
rather than following the preferences of the President. This is a new chapter in an ongoing saga of Donald Trump first wanting Jerome Powell to lower interest rates in order to sort of cook the economy a little bit to help him and his administration,
and then eventually trying to get him to leave that position so that he can probably go ahead and appoint Kevin Hassett to the position who will basically be in his pocket and do what he wants. Listen, I have no love lost for either the Federal Reserve or Jerome Powell, but this is another one of those instances where you kind of look at it and you go, oh, the President of the United States of America right now is not just a dictator,
but is trying to control literally everything going on within the United States. You know what's really disgusting about this is that there are going to be people who support the President who are going to back him up on this because they'll say some version of, well, this is what they did to him. Right? All the lawsuits against Trump and all that lawfare they're calling it. Well, you know, of course, he's right to be able to do it back to anybody else, which really makes it worse,
because then they're kind of acknowledging that this is simply just a political thing that he's trying to do to punish people who are against him. You know, Jerome Powell's a serious person. Whatever you want to agree or not disagree with him or not in terms of his policies, whatever. He's a serious person who shepherds the economy the best way he sees and follows in the very conventional sense what we're supposed to be doing in terms of setting interest rates. So the idea that they're now going to try and do a criminal investigation with this in particular,
you know, there's a lot of reasons why the cost overruns went and it has nothing to do with Jerome Powell. I'm going to go on the limb, Jerry. You ready? I'm going to say that Jerome Powell did not pocket any money via fraud from the budget overruns of the renovation of his building. Yeah,
I'm going to go ahead and double down on that. If you can find a betting market, which it seems like everything now is actionable when it comes to that. You know, to put this into context, and before we even get into the context, Nick, it's a it's a nesting doll of authoritarian overreach.
The president of the United States of America should not have any contact with the Department of Justice and the president of the United States of America should not really have any contact with the chair of the Federal Reserve.
So now the DOJ, which isn't supposed to do what the president wants them to do, is now going to go after the chair of the Federal Reserve.
It's it's it it harkens back to what was going on outside of Venezuela, which was, well, which which which missile strike against the people on a boat was actually illegal, the first one or the second one.
And it just keeps compounding.
The context here is pretty simple.
The Federal Reserve controls interest rates.
which they attempt to manipulate the market, which is always funny when you consider free market capitalism and it's actually controlled. But in order to deal with interest rates, however, they think will help the economy moving forward. The reason why interest rates have been raised is in order to try and stave off inflation. Donald Trump wants the economy to get goosed with basically no interest rates whatsoever. And also,
just a reminder that Donald Trump is the puppet of a wealth and oligarchical class that, Nick, they benefited and became the wealth and oligarchical modern classes because of no interest rates. An era of free money in which all of them were successful because they just kept borrowing and borrowing and borrowing. And then, weirdly enough, Nick, whenever they raised interest rates and the money wasn't free anymore, they weren't money geniuses anymore. So it is a back and forth, but the real story here,
it's not just the overreach. But it's the fact that if he were to go ahead and lower interest rates, Powell and the people at the Reserve believe that it will lead to crushing inflation moving forward, which will hurt the economy and hurt Americans and hurt the nation as a whole. Trump doesn't care about that. The people around him don't care about that. They're more than happy to demolish the economy,
which, by the way, even opening this investigation against Powell is hurting the markets. This is a smashing grab that has absolutely no long-term sort of like plan outside of consolidation of wealth and resources by the people who already have consolidated wealth and resources. I mean,
for what it's worth, the Dow is pretty much where it was when it opened today, as we're recording this on a Monday. Just to kind of maybe further illustrate that, it's all sort of manipulated, right? Well, it's manipulated, but they also, they're doing the thing that they did with tariffs, which is, well, he's being wild right now, but I assume he'll bring it back in. Yeah. And hang on for one second, because I have another quote I want to share with you, a little soundbite on that one. Just to be clear on the interest rates, it's the short-term interest rates that they control. And if we're talking about mortgages and long-term interest rates,
They don't necessarily have to fall in line with the short -term.
And there can conceivably be an area where the market doesn't trust what Trump is doing, is not happy, and you'll still see long -term interest rates go up and cost a lot of people a lot of money in the housing department there because of that.
All of these things are contributing to a terrible economy.
The only explanation you have is that Trump has so much debt still that he wants to refinance more of it with a lower interest rate.
That's the only thing you can really point to, and probably a bunch of his cronies are the same way. We could get those interest rates down just so they can pay less in their interest rates on their loans. But let me just share with you this, because this is the lovely senator from Kansas. Did Jay Powell break the law? Well,
Maria, we'll let the system play through here. I think there's other issues that we should be focused on. I think this is the president throwing out one more. Maybe he's even almost trolling here as well. You hear that? He's almost trolling. He's almost trolling. Which is,
it may be true. Like, let's just announce the investigation. We'll kind of smear him a little bit more and make it life harder. I don't know. Do you think that there's going to be criminal charges formally filed against Powell? You know, I don't know. I really don't. I don't know if there are or they're not. I mean, Trump could announce that he's firing Jerome Powell and push Congress and everybody to act within the next couple of days, which, you know, can't really do. But I could see it happening. I could see them bringing charges. I could see, at this point. Where we are in this process,
Nick, like, I could literally see anything happening. That's sort of the chaos zone that we're in at this point. Yeah. And, you know, and then who did they try to fire off the board? I mean, if you look at the pictures, just look at the pictures of people that are on the board of the Fed. One thing stands out about the person that he's trying to fire,
right, and get rid of and smear as well. So the whole thing continues to play into this, you know, new order that they're trying to form. Or, I guess, return to another order that they used to be here. And I just don't, You know, the guardrails aren't there.
They really aren't.
The Department of Justice is in charge of making sure people behave and follow the law.
Well, they're in his pocket as well.
I don't think anybody could have figured that a president could have control over both the DOJ and the SCOTUS.
Like, this is a hat trick here.
It's, yeah, it's truly something.
And then there's the question.
I mean, when I look at stories like this, and it's kind of interesting, actually, you know, it's like looking in a tree where you can sort of see where the rings are and you can sort of track how old it is and the periods that it's gone through.
It's really interesting every now and then to revert almost to your factory settings of how things used to be.
So, for instance.
if a president fucked with money bad enough in the past. They would have been reined in by the stakeholders, right? Who wanted to make sure that the so-called golden goose was going to continue. But now we're in this new territory where maybe fucking with the golden goose and driving the thing into the ground is what the moneyed shareholders want,
right? Because they're able again to liquidate and then consolidate and sort of bring in, you know, more resources and more wealth. So now we're in this strange place where it's like, oh, even the Federal Reserve Is on the menu. Like, you can go out and actually, and then all of a sudden that starts to speak from analysis. They don't want controlled economy in even a body that isn't democratic. They want it to be controlled by them,
which is why they have all of these markets that they can pump and dump, all of these markets that they can manipulate. And basically, it sort of signals a new evolution into a capitalism in which it is controlled, but it's not even controlled by a group that has any of the markers of small D democratic representation.
And by the way, the way you look at it, if you're a really wealthy person who's diversified in the market is a crash is not a crash to them.
It is a buying spree.
It's an opportunity.
It's a big sale.
And I can guarantee you if their portfolios go down 20, 25% of, you know, and the portfolios are probably, you know, tens and hundreds of millions of dollars.
What's the big deal when they know that once it crashes and they get in and they can buy all these other things so much cheaper, they'll double their money within a year or two.
And that's a much, you know, worthwhile investment.
Meanwhile, everybody else. The hundreds of millions of people in the country who don't have that situation are the ones who end up paying for it for the rest of their lives, right? End up being indentured servants under the weight of whatever mortgage you might be under or whatever,
even if you're just renting. Any of those things, as the economy is much slower to respond to them, causes people to end up having to make life-changing decisions that they will never get out of. And that is the horrible reality. That alludes to, I think, one of the larger secrets about why we are in a time of ascendant fascism that a lot of people don't like to sit with. There used to be a veneer within the United States of America that, yeah, there was a wealth class,
right? There were people who were living better than the rest of us. But then that was almost like stratified air. Those people were doing their own things. They were at least paying taxes. They were at least opening up art museums. And, you know, like, investing in a school at Harvard, right? They were at least sort of paying it forward, so to speak, and some of them would serve in government. And underneath that rarefied air,
the rest of us were trying to sort of save money. We were trying to just get a house and a car and have a family and have a job that we went to, and then when we turned, you know, 65 years old, they gave us a watch, and then we went and rested. And that idea of that stable capitalism, it never existed. It was always hiding this turbulent winner-takes-all game that eventually,
when it reached the point of winner-takes-all and the game got exposed, it's 2008, right? All these things, subprime mortgages, whatever it is that are hidden underneath the system, those things come to the forefront, and you're like, oh, this didn't work the way that I thought it would. And then, like we were talking about, the ultra-wealthy in the rarefied air, they consolidate and then bring together as many assets as they possibly can during the fire sale. Now,
we know that that isn't true. And now, the people in that rarefied air, there's fewer of them, but they are now wrestling for more and more control. They don't want anything to do with representative democracy. They don't want anything to do with even the veneer of people being okay. The only thing that they want is to continue to consume and consolidate. And the appearance of all the other shit, But it's completely, you know, it doesn't matter to them whatsoever.
And it makes you wonder if we should have some pause about having somebody who's in that class in the White House.
It probably isn't a great idea in these time periods.
Right.
And I'm kind of going back to trying to think, you know, because, you know, whatever value Trump has of his assets, whatever you can.
He's in that air.
Right.
He's in the billion, whatever, half a billion.
Right.
I don't think we've had we had a president before.
Remind me if we had one who's who's been in the in the point one percent of wealth class.
No, we've had wealthy.
I mean, actually, the in terms of like shifting things around, the closest thing that you can think of is George Washington, who was arguably the wealthiest man in the United States of America, which is why this captured system started off with him.
Right.
Not just that he was a general, but the fact it was the wealthiest.
And it's really weird if you look back at the history, like 2008, the collapse, you've got George W. Bush in charge and Bush's.
Bush comes from old money, he comes from, like, the, you know, the smugglers and the oil and petroleum family and all of that, CIA money, whatever it is, but he's still not a billionaire, right? Right, right, I mean, yeah, I guess not, yeah. No, I mean, I imagine that George W. Bush is worth millions of dollars, he's not a billionaire. And so he's still part, and that split from what used to be called the wealth class, which are the people who, you know, the Kochs,
the more Cubans of the world, right? Like those people are part of like a different class than the tech oligarchs. I would say Cubans probably very on the edge of those things,
but now you have a group of people. It's almost like Neanderthals meeting Homo sapiens. It's like the next evolution from the wealth class into the oligarchs. They don't want things to be stable. They want to break things and then create something of their own. They don't want a Fed reserve that's going to do what it wants to do. Right. But meanwhile, Everybody could benefit.
You could have a system that that helps, you know, people who are that wealthy can continue to make the money they want to make, while we have a middle class as well.
I mean we've, we've had moments of that, you know.
It kind of reminded me when you said it never really existed.
This this, the American dream, I think, is what you were describing right, like the house and uh, you know, working up and making more money over time, all those different things which again, the veneer of stability under the American dream didn't exist.
Okay right, and certainly it doesn't now.
I mean, if you're aware of what's going on, anybody who's like graduating college right now right, has to probably be one of the worst markets you can imagine to have to try and get into.
It sounds like you know from in this anecdotally, from what i'm talking about, from my family um, you know.
but to go off that for one second, you know, I was watching the movie Friday the 13th not too long ago, and it takes place in a small town in the USA, right? Somewhere in Illinois. Maybe is that where it is? Illinois? And Crystal Lake, perhaps? And if you look carefully, I don't know if you do this Jared, but whenever I watch movies, i'm always like looking in the background, at the people in the background, at the streets, whatever you could already see.
This is released in 1980, filmed in 79, probably.
This is a small town.
The infrastructure is completely devastated.
It's just falling apart everything, the houses, the streets, whatever.
And that was in 79, which wouldn't have been that long ago, long after, like when you would imagine the country was prosperous and these small towns.
But that's when neoliberalism started to come into focus, because the infinite growth had stalled and you end up with stagflation and then there's like no ability for America to keep expanding.
It has to contract and austerity has to come right.
And it didn't stall in 1977, you know.
or 75. Like, I'm sensing that you look around, you realize 1980. Oh, my God, look at what's going on. It's like it happened overnight. But you realize this has been creeping for decades up until that point. So yeah, there was this moment where we can point to post World War II, I suppose, where, you know, middle class people were prosperous, but it takes a while until you start seeing it, you know, in the infrastructure, right? Even though and then it seems like it's overnight, but it really had been doing that for a long, long time and being neglected. And that's all these things are part of it,
which is why It's just frightening that it's taken so long to do anything about it. And what needs to happen now? They have to liquidate the middle class. Yeah. Right? They have to take what those people have because in order to expand their wealth and become trillionaires and to move into the next level of wealth and control. That is why things like the Federal Reserve have to go away. Like,
maybe they'll still exist in name, but they have to become manipulatable. They don't actually want even the veneer of stability. That's the issue here. Right. But in the best of times, right, in theory, the Fed is not a bad idea. Well, I mean,
if you're going to have capitalism, and I would argue that you don't need to have capitalism, but if you're going to argue that capitalism needs to exist, then you have to have something. You have to have some regulations. You have to have something around that is going to make sure that this thing,
and Nick, history shows us, it's booms and busts. It's just one after another, and if you don't do something to sort of straighten it out, that plane is going to dive into the ground. I have an analogy that will encapsulate how you feel. So the Fed is to the economy as the UN is to geopolitics. Yep,
and there's a reason why the UN is where it's at. Right? It's interesting. You've got to have something, right? You've got to have something. But if you're just going to say, well, it's not going to really do this, or it's not really going to do that, or we're not really going to have this,
eventually at some point or another, you come for it. And there is, I've got to say, Powell and the other people around him, this old guard. They helped create this modern oligarchical fascist class. And it's much like, we used to talk about Mitch McConnell like this, right? What was Mitch McConnell thinking as Donald Trump was coming around? And they had to look at it and say, oh my God, I birthed this,
right? It's Frankenstein's monster. You look up and you're like, oh my God, in trying to do this. In trying to sort of, like, do it in little steps or whatever, I have created the worst possible outcome imaginable. So there's an entire group of people,
the neoliberals, the ones who have controlled this entire system now since that era that you brought up, they're looking around and they're like, holy shit, the instruments of our destruction, we gave birth to them. Yeah. And karma is a bitch, If you're asking him and karma is a bitch when it comes to this and a guy and listen, who knows, like I, I don't wish what happens to what has happened to him health-wise, but um, but man um, you have to think that sometimes there's there's things that are related.
But the other thing I think is interesting is they asked Trump, you know speaking about how the economy is working and the undue influence of the White House.
Yeah, you know, he had announced by fiat whatever you want to call it that you know the credit card companies were not gonna, we're gonna put a cap on interest rates at 10 for a year.
Now, if that really happened, like i'm not a number of vote for Donald Trump, but I tell you that would be a huge win.
But they asked him what happens when the credit card companies just ignore that?
Because guess what they could ignore that?
Good, he says they'd be breaking the law.
Because in his adult mind he thinks this is now the law.
And that is probably the most concerning thing i've heard all week.
and we've heard a lot of concerning things from everybody right now, right? He literally has convinced himself, or in his addled brain, that when he decrees something, it is a law that somebody would be violating that somehow you could prosecute, when it's like, it was just a tweet he wrote, and that was it. But I think part of what's happened here, and we can go ahead and start moving into the next segment here, because it's related. Because what happens, and I'm sure you saw it,
the New York Times hung out in the Oval Office for like two hours talking to Trump. And they asked him, what are the actual limitations on his power? And his answer was, myself, my own morals. And I think that Donald Trump, we've talked about him being addled and falling apart. You spend enough time with dictatorial power, like it just starts seeping into you. Like, Donald Trump talks about how he wants free and fair elections. He doesn't want elections,
right? He talks about wanting to, like, defend the law and going after criminals. Like, he has lived criminally for so long that he has essentially started seeing the world through a dictatorial lens. And this is what happens. This is how they don't wake up one day and they're like,
oh, I'm now going to be a 1920s silent film villain. Right? Or I'm going to, like, twirl my handlebar mustache and, you know, tie women down to railroad tracks. Yeah. And eventually, at some point, you arrive at this place, and we talked about it on The Weekender on Friday. We talked about what happened in Minneapolis. Immediately after it, Nick, a couple was shot in Portland, Oregon. There was more violence that took place in Minneapolis. We saw ICE going door to door,
shutting down entire streets, and going door to door, knocking on doors, demanding papers, you name it. Meanwhile, Kristi Noem gave a press conference in New York City the other day with the slogan, One of Ours, All of Yours, on the podium, which is a bastardized restatement of Spanish fascist propaganda and ideology, Nazi ideology, particularly in taking care of the ghettos where they had hoarded all these people together and sort of kept them, you know,
under watchful eye. And it's worth noting that the U.S. Department of Labor,
who in front of their building had put up Nazi-style propaganda flags, right, with Trump's visage on it. To also release, it has to be coordinated, right? Like, these things are all, I'm sure the social media stuff is coordinated now. They did one where it says, one homeland,
one people, one heritage, and then new space, remember who you are, comma, American, with a little 11-second video, and it's all really quickly cut with George Washington in the foreground, and you're looking at, like, the imagery is problematic. Right? Because you have to, And i'm pre-framing it to see, like you know, uh gosh, who's the painter?
Uh Rockwell, like these Rockwell-esque paintings.
Uh, these white families with the two kids in the yard and the whole thing.
This is what they want to go back to and correct me if i'm wrong.
I'm actually an art major, I don't?
We never studied Rockwell and somehow it eluded me.
He paints all those and it's ironic, right?
I don't know if it's ironic, I don't think so.
I think it's earnest.
It's earnestly just portraying the American.
I both, I believe so.
I've never heard anybody called Norman Rockwell ironic.
That's interesting.
I kind of thought that maybe there was a bit of that where he's like trying to point it out to you.
That it's, you know, this is how.
Yeah, I i've never.
I've never heard that.
I that is.
Though Nick, and as an art major, I don't know how much time you spent looking at fascist art.
Um, it it began.
Fascist art begins with uh futurism, this like a bunch of, like sort of uh experimental, you know, art that focuses on speed, but eventually, whenever power is consolidated around the fascist and around the Nazi, it all begins to focus on white supremacist propaganda. But it shows a supposed utopia. And it's really weird, Nick. For years now,
I've been studying the radicalization of younger people and how people get brought over into neo-fascism. It's actually based on nostalgia. It's based around, like, we used to drink from hoses. We would play all day, and it was safe. For some of them, it's watching Saturday morning cartoons. Like, it's basically an escape into childhood. And in order to have a world,
the argument that the fascists are making at this point is that if you allow people like Renee Nicole Good, if you allow people that you don't know to be killed and murdered and abused and thrown into concentration camps, we will deliver to you basically your childhood. Like a reenacted, re-envisioned childhood. And it's not true, right? I mean, if they had their druthers,
they would have control in order to create a facsimile of that. But nothing can ever bring that back. It's the fantasy. The Make America Great Again thing is a fantasy that then allows a permission structure in order to hurt and kill people. I got a couple questions for you specifically, Jared. Would you want to relive your childhood? No, not even a little bit. How many people in the country do you think have similar experiences? I mean, that is the question, right? Because what has actually occurred,
I think, in the psychology of the United States of America is that there are large groups of people who don't actually understand what happened to them in their childhood. Yeah. They live in a fantasy of what their childhoods were, and now they want to hand over power to a dictatorial father figure because they want to escape back into what they think is a simpler time. But then there are other people like myself who look at what childhood is that we don't really want anything to do with it. Now,
Now, the other part of that is the generational trauma that gets handed down out of situations like that.
So you can probably figure out who I'm talking about, right?
Because now we have this person in the White House who, and again, I hate to say it like this, and people in my family get upset when I do, because clearly, somewhat like Donald Trump had had an abusive relationship with.
We know we did.
And so, you know, you worry that it's like, well, it's giving him an excuse now to behave the way he is.
And there's a whole lot of other reasons, but it's the other reason why we need to be aware of these things.
And so if somebody hasn't been able to deal with this properly in a professional way, generally, they really shouldn't be in a position of power like this.
And we needed to be able to recognize that this a little bit way ahead of time.
Well, and you look at it, Nick, and that is the that that's the basis of this thing, is that we are essentially in a period of time in which the levers of power.
like you do not become a billionaire in this country without hurting people. You can't. There's no possible way. I would make an argument that you can't become a millionaire in this country without having hurt somebody, but that could be an argument for inflation or whatever. You can't become a billionaire in this country without hurting somebody. As a result, they've taken over the levers of power. So we have state power that is being directed by people who have shown the ability to hurt others,
right? And a willingness to do it. And what are they doing now? Who are prepared to kill people. And Nick, I just want to, because we're scaffolding stuff, How long have we talked about MAGA adherents and followers who have fantasized about violence?
How long have we talked about that?
The whole time.
The entire time that we've talked about it on the show.
And everyone says, oh, they're just full of shit.
They don't actually want to hurt people.
Yeah, they're just collecting guns.
They don't actually want.
Now they're being employed to hurt people, right?
So what's happening?
Going back to what we talked about.
They are being given their fantasy.
Which is that they can go into a Minneapolis, Minnesota and shoot someone and not have any consequences for it.
So they have prepared tens of thousands, if not millions of people to carry out violence.
and they're now giving them a legal structure and legal cover to do it. And I would make the argument, I published an article, we're recording this on Monday, January 12th. I just published an article today. We're in the middle of the Second American Civil War. Mm-hmm. And we have been for a while. I mean, Lawson, the whole thing with Walls, when he spoke after Nicole Good was shot,
he basically intimated to some degree that, like, he might have to use a National Guard to go up against ICE. And if you remember that, we talked about this. We're going to have a moment sooner than later where you'll have a local law enforcement having to, you know, have to make a decision. Are they going to confront a federal law enforcement agency? Can I just say very quickly, because what you're bringing up is exactly right, Nick. Minneapolis,
the Minneapolis Police Department. I'm not so old that I have forgotten that is the police department that killed George Floyd. Mm-hmm. Fair? Yeah. Okay. And by the way,
what was the calling in 2020? Defund the police. Yeah. Reform these people. They're out of control. What are we doing now? We're saying, oh, I hope these people will protect us against this worse police. Yeah. How crazy is that? That's authoritarian creep. That's what we keep trying to talk about, Nick, which is, if things don't get fixed, it's going to continue to get worse, and you're going to continue to say, oh, I hope these people will help us. It's what we keep talking about with Amy Coney Barrett. Oh, God,
I hope Amy Coney Barrett is the swing vote. We'll make sure that all of our rights aren't taken away. It's the creep that keeps going on, and you're right. The hope for most people at this point is at some point the police department that murdered George Floyd in cold blood will save us from the worst police that is now trying to knock in the doors. Yeah,
and I was just talking with somebody who lives in Minneapolis and was there this whole time until today. You know, they're terrorizing this city. They are a police ice presence. They're everywhere. They're ripping citizens out of their places, like out of targets, and then dropping them off after beating them up. I don't understand why there aren't myriads of lawsuits right now, even if it's civil suits, for violating their rights. It's so ridiculous,
and it's part of the deal. This is what they want to have happen. The Atlantic has a good article that came out, and they discussed a little bit about the training, because I'm kind of curious. We haven't really delved in too much. We've mentioned, who are I? It's the proud boys,
right? It's the people like that who are relishing this role, and we keep seeing the evidence of that every time we see a video about them. Do you know how many days they train for? They train for 47 days. Why 47? Because Donald Trump is the 47th president of the United States of America. Yeah. This is how ridiculous and how adult— Yeah,
they don't take it seriously beyond their ability to multiply force. That's it. And they're not, it was cosplayed before when they were in the Proud Boys. Now they're not even trained seriously anyway. Here, in this article, they discuss how, like, they just seem bewildered by the most basic procedures that they're supposed to know backwards and forwards if they're going to be in this position. That's what's so scary about it. And I think that's the important part. That's what they want. They also film everything. And not only for propaganda purposes,
because they're creating these things that are more, like, I guess more recruitment videos for more Proud Boys. But they're also filming everything so that they can scan your face, have the databases that Palantir has already put together, and it's what Doge did to combine databases. This is where, I mean, that is also a thing. I can't believe we haven't had a whistleblower yet come out and kind of illustrate what's going on with any kind of veracity because there isn't much other explanation for this,
right? I would make the argument that we haven't had a whistleblower because the people who are still involved in tech at this point are the people who are the ones who are constructing these things. Like, over the years, you've had to make decisions about whether or not you want to develop surveillance tech for oppression. Right? Yeah. And what you brought up in terms of training, yes, they like, anybody should be trained more than that, but I am tired of arguing about whether or not training is the right thing or not. Like,
I don't think ICE should be given more money or more training. I think that they not only need to be disbanded and abolished, the people who have been involved in this, and this is the most conservative opinion you can have, that they should go to jail for their crimes. Yeah. And in a society that is being attacked, the people should, people like ICE who survive an uprising among the population,
they should consider themselves lucky if they end up in jail. Yeah. And that's where we're heading. Right. So it's not even about Trump. It's about the fact that we again have a,
and I talked about it whenever the bill passed, the big, beautiful bill, that they had created a recruitment tool and basically a secret army that is ideologically and financially loyal to Donald Trump. It not only needs to be abolished,
the Department of Homeland Security needs to be abolished, and everybody involved in it needs to go to jail, and that is the best-case scenario for them. Now, let's just get to a couple of minutes or a minute about the Nicole Good shooting. Jonathan Ross, since we last recorded,
they released who this person was who shot her. You know, it turns out he was dragged by a car in June, 100 yards, I think. First of all, I can't figure out how you get dragged that long unless you're hanging on, like, purposefully. Well, I mean, you can get caught, but, like, I also don't think it's a shock, going back to the idea of trauma, that a person who went through something like that then ended up shooting somebody. So thank you. That's exactly the point I was going to make,
because J.B. Vance goes on and tries to connect this to, like, you know, they're under siege or whatever, but no, I think in a court of law, if a good prosecutor had that information, Just rip the guy apart and say, you're still suffering from PTSD. And that, by the way, is a failure not just of, like, ice, but that's a failure of society. When you look at law enforcement, when you look at these sort of oppressive bodies,
they recruit for people who have gone through these things and have metastasized, like, what they've gone through into violence outwards. Been arrested for domestic abuse. Like there is a,
like it is, that is the issue is that our institutions have always been towards the prioritization of maintaining security for capital and for property. And as a result, They have used people who are likely and conditioned and living in order to be weapons against the people that they would need to oppress.
So our systems are inherently invalid and no amount of training, no amount of investment, no amount of culture shifts is going to fix that.
You have to change the structures or else you're going to continue to get the exact same results over and over and over again.
Right, but that's the problem is, they're not looking to fix or change or whatever you're describing.
They want these incidents, they want these things.
That's what's so horrible about all of this.
Like they, you know.
That's why you know when he pulled his gun and again, i've already talked about this, there is contact between the car and the guy from one angle and it's blurry, whatever.
But uh, we've seen in the president in the past where, like you know, when they and I don't I don't believe you agree with this, but like if there was contact like that, then it's, it's open season. They could fire any shot they want to fire, right? That's what they're going to argue, right? And there's, I think that's what they'll argue and what they've already argued. Yeah. And I, and I, by the way, there's more argument that should put them away anyway, Right, independent of that uh, but it was clear what she was doing.
She's going.
You know we were going to get in some good trouble.
We're going to protest, we're going to be blocked through a little bit and then you know when?
Oh, they're going to try, we're just going to drive away and then we'll be gone, then we'll be out of it.
That's what.
That's what would happen 99.9 percent of the time.
Right uh, and there's no question in my mind that that the shooter knew this.
Right, the wheels were turned the other direction.
When she accelerates uh, he and as, he's pulling out the gun while he's filming all these things.
So um, you know, the only thing that we're going to end up being uh, it's going to be a tragedy, is that I don't think this is ever going to see a courtroom.
By the way there's I don't know if you've seen the footage they have the car and then the car that the uh that um, she crashed into on a flatbed driving down the road.
open to the wind. This is not what you do when you have a crime scene and you have to do forensic evidence. No, and the FBI stepped in and completely took away jurisdiction over the investigation. I mean, we know top to bottom that this is a cover-up. And so then we reach a point, Nick, you know, you just brought up the circumstances. We have with Nicole Renee Good, we even have the body cam footage from the shooter,
from the killer. And she says, I'm not mad at you. And then she starts to pull away, right? So we know where that happened. With respect,
you can do something that is not intended. As a matter of fact, you can even try and get out of their way in order to follow the law, right? And they'll murder you. Yeah. Fair? Yeah. Okay, at what point is it, okay,
so even if you interact legally and respectfully, you might end up being killed. At what point is the populace like, you're going to shoot me whether or not I'm trying to run you over or not? Mm-hmm. So what does that then equal for certain people,
Nick? It equals, I'm going to run you over. And there is a developing escalation series of situations that is starting to show itself. And I've said this before, that these flashpoints,
you never know which direction they're going to lead. But everything here, if this government wants to survive, they should let him be prosecuted and not cover things up. They shouldn't have gone out and said, you know, one of ours, all of yours. They should have been like, oh, this is a tragedy. We're going to find out where the facts lie. But they can't do it. That's the difference here. Yeah. And if you just want to chart the way Trump has characterized this whole event,
he goes from he was run over, lucky to be alive, to the most recent statement was she was very disrespectful. Yep. And what is that telling us? It's telling us if you are disrespectful to an ICE officer,
they can shoot you. That's literally what he's now trying to say. And Republicans have said you have a choice, which is respect law enforcement and keep your life, or don't, and risk it. What would Nixon say? Nixon's government would have said,
this is terrible, I'm so sorry that this happened, we're going to figure out what happened here. I mean, yeah. They would probably cover it up. Don't get me wrong. They would probably cover it up. They would say it, and they would at least have some sort of measure of assurance as every other rational,
sane person. It's remarkable that they've been able to find so many people who would be able to prostitute themselves to be part of this administration. Right? I mean, they're getting what they want out of it. I mean,
you know. I actually Nixon condemned the violence but also went after the protesters so I mean game recognized game you know. Yeah and I'm enjoying and I'm enjoying because I want to try and get plugged into the NLA like where When you get a notice when they're somewhere and we can go and blow the whistles and do all sorts of things. It seems like people are more and more emboldened,
but they're also more and more angry. Sure. They're very concerned with the training that they have and they don't have any kind of sense. I don't blame the people for being angry. I don't blame the people if they want to commit violence against these assholes. I don't. I can't even in good conscience say that I blame them anymore. How could you? I agree. I agree. That's why we're seeing people,
you know, and there was a target where Bovino, the resident Nazi head of immigration, is walking through a target with like surrounded by all those people and they are screaming at him. And you can tell how upset and frustrated and annoyed he's getting with the disrespect. And at one point he turns to one of his guys, Like literally, look like he's like.
You know, just shoot him.
Something like that.
I think they were like you keep your eye on that guy because he was threatening them.
But you know what the first amendment rights you can.
You can say a lot of stuff to these people and they can't do anything to you.
They don't.
They don't deserve to show their faces in polite society without being spit on and chased out.
And instead, what do you see?
As soon as they get out outside of the target, one of the agents pulls his gun up and aims it at them.
You know, and it's like you don't know how, what the hell you're doing.
That's not what you're supposed to, which is supposed to be diffusing the situation.
Instead, they're looking for ways they can ramp it up, especially because it was with Nicole Good.
You have a guy who jumps right out of the car right away and is going right from the door screaming at her, um it's it's, uh.
There's no other alternative than than they're trying to ramp up the responses so that they can commit violence.
Well, no. I mean, you get into one of these cycles. That's one of the reasons I said we're already in the middle of a civil war. It's been going on for a while. And, you know, the cycle of violence, it continues to grow and escalate. It just so happens that it's becoming clearer and clearer. Alright, we will be back with The Weekender on Friday. In the meantime, please head over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast. That way you'll get the entirety of the Weekender episode. Also support us. Keep us ad-free, editorially independent. In the meantime,