Enough Gaslighting - Trumpism Is Fascism.

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:02 Clip: Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.

0:00:18 Clip: What's my crime? I got bold? And a little negligent? Nope!

0:00:26 Clip: Bailiffs are coming to take away my will to live. Well, one count of being a bear, and one count of being an accessory to being a bare. This is a free court!

0:00:44 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Opening Arguments. This is episode 1075. Ooh, what a good number. It also means that next episode we'll have new intro quotes, which I already requested on patreon.com/law. I'm Thomas. That over there is a real life lawyer, Matt Cameron. How are you doing?

0:01:00 Matt: Well, Thomas, I'm here to talk about fascism. So it's a little good, a little bad.

0:01:04 Thomas: Fascism where?

0:01:05 Matt: Where isn't it?

0:01:06 Thomas: I'm hearing about this yeah no this was an episode or a series I think that I'm really excited about matt pitched and I thought it was perfect because for as Much as we all talk about you the obvious fascism of donald trump and and maga and a lot of people it they are actually fascist why donald Trump and the movement is a fascist movement in a, what Matt, a technical sense? I'm sure it's not a legal sense, but is there a legal definition of of fascism though, maybe?

0:01:33 Matt: Is certainly involved. I'm And going to talk with the nuance of it too, because I think we lose a lot of nuance when we use this kind of language. And, I want to try to encourage people to talk things the way they are. So, There's a lot to get into, but I want to provide some history, I want to provide legal context, and just a lot of things that have been on my mind, as we'll get into.

0:01:47 Thomas: So by the time we get done with this, the next time, you asshole MAGA uncle is like, oh, you just lib overreacting, calling everything a fascists that you don't agree with. It's like, no, actually it is fascism. Here's why essentially now

0:02:01 Matt: Yeah, and there's real threats to our democracy right now, and here's what they are, and here is what it looks like if it goes wrong, because we can see it all over the world right now.

0:02:08 Thomas: This must be a tough one to do because there's examples of trump fascism by the minute like and I'm not even making a joke like he he's I think because he senses he's losing uh really dialed up the fascism to a degree and so you've had to kind of to live update your notes, I'm sure, as we're doing this, but

0:02:23 Matt: For sure. One reason I want to talk about it, because I think that we've been living through so much in the last few months that I think it's good to step back for a minute and see how hot the water is that we're sitting in.

0:02:32 Thomas: Yes. Ribbit, course, you can avoid at patreon.com/law. You can also get that really fun Law Awful. About music and about out Weird Al. was a ton of fun. And I'm so glad to see the reception on that, by the way. I think everyone, even the people who wanted to throw tomatoes at me, which I totally understand, I accept all tomatoes. Think people understood the spirit that that was in. I mean, I think we both made interesting points worth thinking about, at least, even in regards to just artistic taste. But also, there was so much about the law and music law, a subject I know you and I care a lot lot about so make sure you check that out second tier and above patreon.com/law, Law Awful Weird Al's. All right after this we'll um descend into fascism I

0:03:13 Matt: For sure. Got it. Want to just check in real quick about why this is important to me particularly, because I know it's important to all of us. But for the last 18 years, I've been working pretty closely with people from failed and failing states. I think about this all the Time because I've only come to realize recently that not everybody gets to talk to people who've been escaping partial or complete dictatorships. It's just such a regular part of my life. And I think it's ingrained in everybody who does asylum work the way that I do, that we're not that far away from any of this at any given time. We're just one or two elections away. We're one or three generations away from any of these things. And just to give you kind of the context, the kinds of people I've worked with the last 18 years, I've working with people from all over the world, from Venezuelans who are escaping Chavez and Maduro, from Angolans have been a big one recently, which I Angola has been under a dictatorship since 1975, and the police and law enforcement, they're doing some of the worst things you can possibly imagine all of the the time to political opponents. From El Salvador, where there's just corruption everywhere and where they survived a civil war that the US paid for. Uruguay, which

0:04:10 Matt: Survived a dictatorship.

0:04:10 Thomas: Good did we pay both sides of it or do we just like reimburse hey if anyone's gonna do a civil war we got you we got it it's on us or

0:04:18 Matt: If you want to slaughter entire villages full of people, one, we're good at that.

0:04:20 Thomas: Did we fund a particular side of it and destabilize As a government, is that – oh, cool. Awesome.

0:04:25 Matt: Yeah, yeah. Just to keep the left from power. Yeah? People from Kenya who lived through all kinds of election violence and instability, they're still concerned about the future. People in Peru who were persecuted by the Fujimori regime. People on Uganda who've We've lived under the same president since 1986 and have the torture scars to prove it. Of course, Russians, who know that there's nothing they can do at this point to stop Putin. We're certainly familiar with Russia. I'm talking a lot about Russia today.

0:04:46 Thomas: Because I was going to bring up like the Daily published – I guess it must have been just a regular article that they decided to read. And did this uh called The Deserters and it's about uh trying to get out of the war in Ukraine like someone one, I and can't believe we're coming on, what, two years of that now? And I bring it up is, A, it was very interesting. Like as much as I, have you my problems with New York Times, I is excellent reporting, over the course of this entire two two years, you know, just interviews. And, this um, is a very sensitive thing, you know, like people, who have deserted people who have fled that war, obviously you know, Putin is like not super chill about that. I don't know if I, I'm not the one dishing out the history and the knowledge, but my impression as a lay person is not a chill guy about that stuff. And it was very fascinating. The reason I bring it up is you hear about this stuff and, just just as a normie, but as a politically engaged person, 2016 certainly was a wake -up call to where you're like, oh, wow, this can happen here. Like many of us, I think, obviously this for granted. Like we just have this system and, and as much

0:05:44 Thomas: As it's not pert, no, I didn't think it was perfect. I thought there was plenty wrong with it, but I thought like, yeah, but it's the system that largely we know, we can work with, we Can, we CAN do stuff with, it's predictable in certain ways. And it showed like, oh, shoot, this this all is held together with gum and like duct tape and straws. And that was what I wanted to express was you hear about Russia, you hear About kind of how things are, they still describe things that sound like a system.

0:06:08 Thomas: They still describe, well, there's the court and in this, in order to be a deserter, you do have to prove intent. Like they talk about these little things where it's like, yeah, that sounds like like what we have, like have, they they have some forms of these things that we think grant us this thing. Like we think we have these written words that we think that's like the ticket. Like, yeah, we have this secret passcode written words. That does it's the constitution that fixed everything, but it's really not like held together by, it's hard to even define what like the thread starts to unravel, there's no telling where it can go. It's really scary.

0:06:39 Matt: That's exactly what I want to talk about today, because it's held together by consensus. And we've had this general consensus that we want it to work. And one thing I just really want to... We're a month ahead of the election right now, and this is why I wantto talk about this. About it again. But I just want to kind of put the pieces together to show where this can actually go, because you hear these kind of dire warnings about the death of democracy and how Trump's going to end democracy and as the end of the United States and all this. I think that's a little much, but I think we can talk about places like Russia and Hungary and Poland and where these things go. And what you're describing when you're talking about the Russian system is competitive authoritarianism. That's the expression that Stephen Levitsky and Luke Conway came up with, the idea that you can have elections without democracy, where it's almost impossible to get the power back. And of course, you know how it works in Russia, where they have managed opposition. They also call it guided democracy.

0:07:13 Thomas: It said, great phrase. I've never heard that. Yes, that's

0:07:26 Matt: That wasn't perfect.

0:07:24 Thomas: An amazing euphemism. Oh, that is fantastic.

0:07:28 Matt: Anocracy is another word for it. And, of course there's, even Viktor Orban in Hungary calls his own system illiberal democracy, which is really really another good way to put it.

0:07:30 Thomas: Anocracy. What's anocracy? I've never heard of that. What is that?

0:07:39 Matt: It's a form of authoritarianism, essentially. And Russia, I think, really qualifies as a democracy where technically there's an election system. It looks kind of a little bit like democracy, but there's nothing there. It's completely corrupt. And that is the direction that we're pulled in right now. And what I'm trying to say here is after talking to people from all of these countries and spending all this time with them, getting to know them and literally taking their stories down and helping them to tell them to a court or to an immigration immigration officer. Has really internalized for me that we cannot take any of this for granted. Also want to mention on top of my personal experience, I started obsessively reading about fascism and authoritarianism in 2015, and I just haven't stopped since then. I have read at least 15 books about this. I'll list a lot of them in the show notes. I will be referencing a lot as we go. One thing you're that reminding me of when you're talking about your impressions of Russia there were what Timothy Snyler called to unfreedom. Writes about the politics of inevitability, which is kind of the way we think about things in the United States, that things are just always going to be the way they are. And the politics eternity, which how Putin thinks about it, which has said things are going to be however Putin wants them to be forever. So inevitability versus eternity. And we right now, I think that when when we talked about the time old metaphor of the frog sitting in the boiling water. What we're talking about is that politics inevitability, that we just kind of assume things are going to keep going as they are as the water keeps heating up. And I want to point out a few places where the water is heating up, and I want make sure that we pull the focus a little back from Trump because Trump obviously is the avatar of all of this. He's the thing that we see and the thing we talk about, and he's a clown. But all great authoritarians throughout history have been clowns. That's actually kind of a universal

0:09:05 Matt: Thing about them.

0:09:04 Thomas: I remember it from tim snyder or somebody yeah I read one of those books too and it was really interesting to think about like why is that but I'm sure we don't have time to go into that psychological question yeah

0:09:11 Matt: For should have mentioned Turkey, which is very much a competitive autocracy at this point. And where Erdogan has lost an election, his party just lost an election, he's promising to step down in 2028, but who knows? Gotten to know a number of Turkish people, asylum seekers, and regular people that I could easily relate to, just talking to them, who have had normal professional lives, had their bank accounts unseized, had their lives changed overnight, had their friends locked up, themselves been locked up had to flee the country overnight and their families are very concerned about now. Kinds of things that can happen very quickly and again the point of this is not to say that the United States is going to turn into a fascist dictatorship in four years. I want to talk about where things go and how things can deteriorate and how quickly they can go in one election cycle and we can know this because these are the things Trump is promising to do and that's really what I wantto look at is what Trump is promising. So today I just want to introduce a lot lot of these concepts. I'm going to come back in the next time we talk about this and look specifically at the way that in the last nine years that Trump has used immigration as the pivotal focus point for his fascism. And when I say fascism, let's start with that real quick

0:10:15 Matt: Here. So Robert Paxton is the Webster Dictionary of fascism like he has come up with a pretty solid definition that has been, I think, pretty well accepted by this point in 2004. If you're going going to read one book about fascism. It really should be The Anatomy of Fascism. It's the first one I read when I started looking into this stuff. And his definition, I think, is so outstanding. This is 20 years old. It holds up very well. I'm just going to read it as we begin here, because what I want to suggest to you is it doesn't really matter if we call it fascism or not, because that word is a little tied to the 20th century, to movements that really don't have a lot to do with today's technology and today's

0:10:15 Thomas: Webster's dictionary sorry sure geez

0:10:49 Matt: Way of doing things. But I do think that as a philosophy and as a kind of political behavior, It is something that we should be aware of. And I think that it's perfectly fair to call the MAGA movement a fascist movement, or at least a neo -fascist or proto -facist movement. So Paxton writes that fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood, and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in

0:11:15 Thomas: Cults what a what are I already love this fantastic yeah holy

0:11:18 Matt: Giving it back, right? Yeah. Compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass -based party of committed nationalist militants working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites. It's a very important point.

0:11:30 Thomas: Shit you said this is 20 years old So this person invented a portal to look to now.

0:11:35 Matt: Right. To today, pretty much.

0:11:38 Thomas: Very excellent definition. Wow.

0:11:39 Matt: It keeps going.

0:11:40 Thomas: Oh, there's more?

0:11:42 Matt: Because every one of these movements has always worked with traditional conservatives. That's conservatives think they can control these people and they never can. Working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons Abandons Democratic liberties and persues. And here's about where things stop as of the moment. Pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints, goals of internal cleansing and external expansion. That last part is the sign I think that we're heading toward, and that's what I want to talk about. Now, again, Russia has been in a state of guided or managed democracy for quite a while. I think that you can call Putin a fascist in every regard, his philosophical approach to government, no question. Certainly the way that he uses ethnic and sexual minorities, the way that he... right now, the kind of nationalism they're pushing in the war with Ukraine. That and others will not go so far as to call Trump an actual fascist, to call MAGA an actual fascist movement, is that they don't have yet at this moment a broad base of militants who are ready to rise up on their behalf, a sort of mass violent movement. We do have the most guns in the world ever that anybody's

0:12:15 Thomas: 100%, yeah. What? Because I feel like they do. We

0:12:42 Matt: Ever had.

0:12:42 Thomas: Had a January 6th. What do you mean? It has to be a certain number of people or something?

0:12:44 Matt: Did. January 6th was not backed by a national militia movement that was ready to rise up and... Yeah, right.

0:12:50 Thomas: Man, I have heard. They are working on this, though, right? I mean, like, right.

0:12:53 Matt: They are, no doubt, no doubt. That's why we're talking about it. Because when you get to that point, you really... ridiculous to say, well, we're not there yet, so it's not fascism. I think that's really the point I want to make, because we have to talk about it now before we get there. And Hitler had brown shirts, and Mussolini had his people that were out in the streets committing mass acts of political violence every day, and keeping down the people that would otherwise wise vote against them or protest against them. We to see these clashes between left and right in the streets and these kinds of protests we've been seeing in the last few years. We're getting to that point, but we're not there. And Paxton talks about fascisms. He talks about how there's no one national definition of fascism because it expresses so differently in every country and every culture. And American fascism is a very different thing from Italian fascism or German Nazism. So I want to just at the beginning suggest it's not helpful, I don't think, to try to directly compare, to make direct parallels between these past things that have already happened and what we're going to call fascism here. I think it's more helpful when we talk about the democracy or the decline of democracy to look ahead to the kinds of things we can see in the world right now, in this century, and to see where we're going. Because once you get to the place where you're in a Russia or you're a Hungary, it's very, very hard to come back once you're In that kind of a place where you can technically vote, but it doesn't mean anything because the system has been so completely completely rigged against you. I strongly want to recommend to everybody, and we'll link to all of these, of course, but a book that I keep coming back to, I've read it more than once now, called They Thought They Were Free. And it's by Milton Mayer. And It's one of the most startling books. Should say the first two thirds of it or so. The last third is a little questionable, but the first two thirds are a study of 10 different Germans. Milton Mayers, an American Jew who went over to Germany, did not identify himself as a Jew when he went there, but he spoke German and was able to go over and talk to people immediately after the war. And he's trying to get a profile of these different, completely regular people who were living in kind of an isolated area, didn't really know what was going on with the Nazis, pretended like they didn't know anything about the Holocaust or what was happening with anti -Semitic violence. There is so much here that is just so startlingly relevant to what we can think about in our lives today. This academic he's talking about is trying to describe how people warmed to the idea and did not end up protesting in mass movements and how you're just kind of looking around and realizing that things are starting to go into Nazism. And again, I'm not saying directly that Trump is a Nazi. He happens to be friends with a lot of Nazis. I'm just saying

0:15:16 Matt: That That's right. Very much so.

0:15:16 Thomas: Nazis are fans of him. It's weird. I wouldn't, that would make me wonder. Like if everybody, if all of a sudden a bunch of Nazis were like, you know what our favorite podcast is? Serious Inquiries Only. I'd be like, what the fuck? What? What am I? For A, I'd quit. I'm pausing until I figure it out. Until we figure out what's going on down there.

0:15:21 Matt: Doing something wrong, right? Yeah.

0:15:36 Thomas: And B, what is happening? I would need to look within. In but no they're uh they seem to be kind of cool the the whole nazis liking them a lot thing

0:15:44 Matt: No, for sure. And I just want to say, because I know there's a certain kind of person who's going to say well, it's not Germany in 1933. You can't say that Trump's a Nazi, and that's true. But I think I think that hearing directly from Germans who lived through that period of time, and especially this person who understands how bad it was and was just there and couldn't do anything about it. Dictatorship and the whole process of its coming into being was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your little men, your baker and so on. I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not Want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about. We were decent people and kept us so busy with continuous changes and crises and so fascinated, yes, fascinated by the machinations of the national enemies within and without that we had no time to think of these dreadful things that were growing little by little around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think? To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it. And please try to believe me, unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness and security than most of us had ever had occasion to develop, each step was so small, so inconsequential so well explained or on occasion regretted that unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle but all those little measures that no patriotic german could resent must someday lead to when no more sought developing from day to day than a farmer in the field sees his corn growing and one day it is over his head and

0:15:50 Thomas: Blah blah I don't care yeah that's a very famous I've definitely heard that quote at a time or two in the last

0:17:05 Matt: Yeah for sure no doubt and there's much more too but it's all kind of the same degree where he's saying you know I was told I was an alarmist People are looking around and saying, well, this isn't so bad. You're seeing things. You can't prove this is going anywhere bad. And remember, the Nazis were saying for many years before they took power that if you give us power, you will be a one -party state. We will not let power go. We're hearing something very similar right now from people on the right. And that's what I want to talk about and why I want make sure that we separate a lot of this conversation from Trump himself, because Trump is willing to say a lot things that other people won't. But there is a giant political movement behind him. And at this point, he has captured the Republican Party. And I think that's really why we have to talk about it.

0:17:05 Thomas: Eight years uh

0:17:44 Matt: I want to start with a clip from Mitch McConnell, just to remind you of how thoroughly he's captured the Republican Party. I think about this all the time. And this is speech, and if you haven't seen it, it's real going back to see, but the speech that he gave immediately after the impeachment vote, the second impeachment vote over January 6th.

0:18:00 Clip: Is no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day. No question about it. The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president. And having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories, and reckless hyperbole. The

0:18:10 Thomas: Forgot about this okay oh okay and that's why I burbly oh

0:18:45 Clip: President kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth.

0:18:52 Matt: Watched this live. I I think, when they finally finished the impeachment, the second impeachment. And I could not sit down. I'm listening to this man stand up. But just after they've acquitted him, after they made sure the Republicans let him out, and he gets up and says, yeah, of course he did it. There's no question. He did January 6th. He's responsible for it. He completely responsible, but we're not going to convict him for it. And I bring this point up not only because it's so craven and it's such a perfect example of who Mitch McConnell is, but also because this was their chance right there.

0:19:06 Thomas: Of course yeah yeah

0:19:22 Matt: If they had just convicted right there, he would not be able to run, we'd not be in this position, and they might have run J.D. Vance or somebody else, but they wouldn't be running Donald Trump right now. And they could have saved themselves a lot of trouble, but yet they still let it happen.

0:19:19 Thomas: Yeah it was yep I, you bring this up, so, I tend to blend my impeachments it's hard to keep them straight Right. It was they they were pretty close together. Right. It was like toward the end of the. Now seemed to, as you say, outline the entire thing. And I think what got me back then was it felt like so much of this was convenience. It felt like so much of Republicans supporting Trump, and definitely a lot of it was. I mean, that's why we saw so many quote -unquote normal Republicans fight against Trump, lose embarrassingly, and then go, oh, okay, I guess I'll join him, and dann change all the rhetoric and do all that stuff. Everybody, basically every Republican from the 2016 primary, pretty that time, especially – and that was Andrew's whole thing throughout OA back then was the Yodel Mountain. It was like at a certain point, these mainstream Republicans, normal Republicans, he'll do something that they can't support and that will be the end. That just doesn't happen.

0:20:23 Matt: No?

0:20:23 Thomas: A non -pathologically optimistic person, I at that impeachment. And I thought, well, maybe, maybe they will do it because like you say, it would have bailed them out. They wouldn't be in this hostage situation anymore. They could just be done with it. They can just be down with Trump. They don't have to put up with his bullshit anymore. More. They can try to vie for, you know, and selfishly for them, like they could try to vie for control of whatever, but they're so terrified. And they know that this is their voting base now. Like they know it's not just Trump. They know that like, is the to, vote against him in this way, even though it would have been better for literally everyone, like in the entire country, even MAGA people would ultimately been better for them um couldn't do it yeah

0:21:06 Matt: Afraid of their own people. They're afraid of the base that they had created by supporting Trump to that point. This is a good time to go back because I've been thinking a lot about the difference between 2016 Trump and 2020 Trump and 2024 Trump. And I think that just stepping back as I have over the last couple of weeks and just sort of examining the rhetoric as it's progressed is shocking. It is actually really shocking to go back because there's a point in 2008 the Republican Party was told that the only way they were going to win elections was if they broadened their tent and if they got Latinos in, if they started talking more about things that working people cared about, and if they actually pulled back from a lot of the oligarchical tendencies that they were otherwise working with. And that's not the direction they chose, of course. They chose the Trump direction direction, and irrevocably, completely chose to go the direction that they're in now. And I was surprised when I went back and looked at the Trump stuff from 2015, 2016. And of course, the beginning of the Trump campaign, and we don't have to talk about, we all know, we all saw the video, it's burned into our brains at this point 2015. in It's completely burned into Our Brains. We know what he said, but it was shocking at the time, and it was a joke at the time that nobody could start a presidential campaign with speech about Mexicans.

0:21:36 Thomas: Famously the oh

0:22:12 Matt: That just wasn't ever going to work. There was no way that he could be elected. But what I didn't remember when I was going back and listening to a lot of these Trump speeches is he was an economic populist. He was trying to run as one, at least. He never actually an economic populist, but that's a common fascist thing is to try to pretend that you're on the side of the people. But I actually, I'd never watched a Trump rally until hours before voting started on November 8th, 2016. And I have a clip here from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Watched a lot of this rally actually late at night

0:22:37 Clip: United States. The corrupt politicians and their special interests have ruled over this country for a very long time. Today is our Independence Day.

0:22:51 Thomas: I like when Bill Pullman said it better.

0:22:53 Clip: Today the American working class is going to strike back.

0:23:00 Matt: So yeah no I did laugh when I heard that but today's our independence day Okay. Alien invasion. He's

0:23:06 Thomas: Race of aliens is going to come blow up all our cities.

0:23:08 Matt: Right. That is again, this is after midnight, Michigan time, just hours before polls are opening on election day. And I had this thought because for months I had been kind of in the back of my mind, a little concerned that maybe this guy could actually pull this thing out. And thought, you know what? I'm going to watch a Trump rally because I've never seen one. And this could be the last one ever. Let's hope. And And I watched it, and I went to bed thinking, this guy's probably going to win. I had that in my head when I went to bed, so maybe I'm responsible for this. I don't know. But, yeah.

0:23:35 Thomas: Matt, I hate to say it. I love you. But really, that sounds like the guy who the bad thing was going to happen. They're like, and there's something in the air. And then they.

0:23:44 Matt: No, it really happened. No, I really was, because I hadn't really said it out loud before, but I went ahead.

0:23:49 Thomas: So what about this told you that?

0:23:51 Matt: Was something about the response to the crowd and just the whole, the rest of the rally, too, not just this moment. I was just playing this moment to remind you that there was actually this economic populist angle. But had not really, I think a lot of us had not really considered the possibility that Donald Trump might actually become the president. And certainly, I don't think Donald Trump was that serious about becoming the president.

0:24:08 Thomas: I a lot of us on the left and me, absolutely. Absolutely. A lot of us on the left, it's again, cliche cliche a little bit to talk about our bubbles, but it's also like we heard Trump talked about in a certain context. We'd hear him, you covered in a sudden way, even though it wasn't great, it was still, you negative. The response was negative. And then there's a little bit of a psychological switch to hear him saying his stuff and then hear all the positive cheers and the whatever. It does kind of switch a little bit to be like, oh, there is a market for this.

0:24:37 Matt: Yeah. No, it was Well, also because in the coverage that I'd seen of the Trump rallies, it was all the stuff about just telling... It was about telling his attendees to beat people up and I'll pay your legal fees, right?

0:24:45 Thomas: And Yeah.

0:24:45 Matt: And it was about all the hate speech and everything else. I hadn't really seen this kind of economic populism message he was pushing. Then, And of course, in his inauguration, we all remember American Carnage, which, of of course, it was like the darkest inauguration speech ever given. And I was actually in the federal building. I was finishing up an immigration interview when I walked out. When I walked into the immigration building, Barack Obama was on the wall, and I walked out and he was gone. It was very strange. They'd taken his portrait down. And I was walking out of the immigration building, and one of the officers was just streaming the inauguration speech, and I heard a little bit of the American Carnage thing. And it was very chilling to be in the federal building walking out of an immigration interview hearing this. But what I didn't remember about this speech is that for That also as much as there was xenophobia and hatred and build the wall and misogyny, obviously all the stuff you'd expect in a fascist movement, there was still This core of economic populism, he never meant it, of course. He never had any actual plans to make anybody's lives better. He was still running on tax cuts for the wealthy, but he was at least trying to give you this veneer of, you know, this is for you. And in his inauguration speech, he talks about how this moment is for You the People. You know, we're bringing you back to Washington. We're kicking out the elites. And that message is gone. We are way

0:25:51 Matt: Past that at this point.

0:25:52 Thomas: I'm glad you say that. You know, as I'm reflecting on this, and for one, I want to comment that we have to realize, Matt, I mean, specifically you and I, this crap was eight years ago. Like, we're a couple olds. There's probably going to be, you number of listeners who might not remember this that clearly. You know? Maybe they were not voting age back then. Maybe they didn't pay attention for whatever reason. And it's crazy to think about how long it's been and also how short it feels to I'm sure you and I feel like yesterday. One thing that is at nice that we don't have that bullshit anymore of the like there isn't really a market for people pretending Trump is anything other than he is much anymore. More. It used to be in 2016, there's so much of that. And know, people to say, Oh yeah, sure. I'm on the left, but here's, you Know, Hillary is. And a lot of that is because of what how they were able to cast hillary that helped them turn trump into this more of the people first oh the corruption that the clintons know of course a billionaire he's not gonna be corrupt in fact they used it the other way he knows how the corruption worked because he's been on the other end of it and now he's gonna fight for you there was a lot of that stuff I don't see that at all anymore now mind you I I don't pay terribly close attention to Trump's rallies or anything, but now it feels like we've distilled it down to just the bullion cube of xenophobia and hatred now,

0:27:01 Matt: Exactly.

0:27:01 Thomas: It seems like, and that's about it. And it's refreshing, I guess I'll say.

0:27:05 Matt: That economic anxiety, the economic populism was always cover, obviously, for all of that. That was the point.

0:27:10 Thomas: Yeah, that was just to get in the door. Obviously, he wasn't going to do any of that. Obviously.

0:27:13 Matt: No, just to be clear, so that everybody understands, I'm not saying that I think he was actually an economic populist. Yeah. Same time, in that same speech, in the American carnage inauguration speech, he's going on and on about how we're a bombed out country and how there's horrible, violent crime in the streets every day. Do you remember George W. Bush's reaction to that speech? Did you ever hear about that?

0:27:31 Thomas: I probably, but I don'T remember right now.

0:27:32 Matt: Was so good. According to three different witnesses, George W. Bush stood up after the speech and he said, well, that was some weird shit, which is pretty accurate.

0:27:39 Thomas: That's right. I remember now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:27:42 Matt: It was the weirdest inauguration speech, I think, in U.S. history.

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0:30:32 Matt: But going again, for maybe those who don't remember or just haven't thought about it in a while, there was just shocking event after shocking event in the 2015 -2016 run -up. So many different things, so many lines he crossed, so much that were destroyed. Whether was even just how you would behave yourself at a debate you know we have um his opponent at the debate that he's going to lock her up whether it's openly talking about how we're going to ban muslims from the country uh bad yeah

0:30:56 Thomas: Looming behind her like a weird, I don't know what, some sort of bully.

0:31:00 Matt: Just and this kind of language that you just never heard anybody using that was very very popular. Went It over very well.

0:31:05 Thomas: I want to disagree. I don'T think it went over well. Because trust you, that, you you had that, uh, that he could win. No one else did. And anyone else who does is lying. No Like one thought he could win in 2016. Now people might be forgetting that we did think he could wait in 2020. We all, we very much had learned our lessons and know that's pretty easy to blend together events like that. I don't think anyone thought he would win in 2016. Like whole argument that has had over Nate Silver and his thing was that, no, my model gave him like a 20 % chance. Like that was like, that was him going for cred. No one thought it was a hundred percent. No, one thought It was 50%. No, maybe some people thought it Was 10%, you everything was covered as this is horrific and I can't believe this is even happening and then it was normalized and and once he won that's another thing a lot of this stuff I think wasn't quite normalized in my opinion until he won I he did as you say a crazy thing every four times a day and had he lost I think a lot of not all of it a lot that could have been undone a lot about that would have been like hey well that's what happens when you do this shit you know like

0:31:33 Matt: It was still there. Won't

0:32:09 Thomas: Yeah exactly we'll put that back in the back but felt like all this stuff was outrageous it would never go over he's definitely going to lose until he won and then now all of this stuff Was almost given permission because he won of

0:32:09 Matt: Try that again. To be clear, I'm saying hours before I went to vote, I started to get doubts that maybe he could win. I'm not saying I knew he was going to win, but I'd never even really thought about it. After watching that rally, it really got in my head. Yeah, even in They Thought They Were Free, the same sort of interview that I'm talking about about here. I was just reminded of when you you were talking here about how on this new level you live, you've been living more comfortably every day with new morals and new principles. You've accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, and things that your father could not have imagined. That's why I really wanted do to do this one, because I just keep thinking about what we were accepting in 2015 and what we're talking about as being unusual, and what we're accepting now, and we're not talking about is being unusual.

0:32:57 Thomas: What almost doing something that's worse. So my memory of the 2016 as a voter, as a podcaster covering it was these I'm not talking About MSNBC. I'M TALKING ABOUT MAINSTREAM LIKE CNN JUST KIND OF MAIN STREAM COVERAGE WAS THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS. This is outrageous. Now we just don't talk about it. There used to be that this is outrageous and then there is a little bit of a sanitation of it, which is bad, obviously. And there's a little, oh, let's invite someone on to defend it because for some reason we think that's a good idea. We'll invite one person to defend It and one person to not defend It. And There's a bit of sanitizing of It, normalizing of it. Now it's like, we just just don't talk about it it's like yep okay we didn't cover four of the we didn't cover even I don't know a tenth of the insane things he said at this rally you can find it somewhere on social media that like that one guy that clips all his rallies uh doing it but like it don't even bother with it I think it's Like that seems worse in a way yeah

0:33:48 Matt: Is. And That's actually one of the other reasons I want to talk about this. I had this realization after the Harris debate, in which, of course, I think she cleaned the floor with him, but we didn't really talk about it because we were talking about some of the funnier moments and some of things he said wrong or whatever. But he took things to another level. There was another ratchet in that debate of fascism and his rhetoric and just the way he was talking about things. And I was realizing afterward, after we recorded that episode where we talked about a little, we didn't really touch on the fact that the kind of language he was using and the way he was talking and the things he was saying, you know, and it was like kind of funny in a shocking way that he's talking about Haitian migrants eating pets, but that's shocking. Like that's actually shocking and it should be. And did you know the other day that he called, he just kind of floated the idea of a purge, like an actual purge like from the movie?

0:34:27 Thomas: I saw that yep just just flowed the idea of a purge uh

0:34:30 Matt: That real quick just to give you an idea of where we're at these days. That's the last clip there.

0:34:35 Clip: Like a guy like mike kelly put him in charge congressman kelly put him in charge for one day mike would you say he's right here he's a great congressman would you say mike that if you were in charge you would say oh please don't touch them don't touch them let them rob your store let all these stores go out of business right they don't pay rent the city doesn't buy the whole it's a chain of events it's so bad One rough hour, and I mean real rough, the word will get out and it will end immediately. End immediately, you

0:35:13 Matt: So just give the cops a purge day. That's what we can do. Just let the cops go for, you know, just a day or an hour in the same way that he said he's going to be dictator for one day, right? That's all it takes. How normal people do. They just be dictator for one day. Is the way he's talking everywhere. I just want to mention, of course, the migrant issue, because I actually didn't catch this until very recently, His the response when he was asked about a bomb threat, multiple bomb threats that were called in in Springfield as a result of his rhetoric and what J.D. Vance was saying about the people in that community, it's acknowledging it. It's so bad.

0:35:40 Thomas: It more or less compassion than when uh people said they were going to kill mike pence so about the same okay you

0:35:48 Clip: Did you denounce the bomb attacks in Springfield, Ohio? I don't know what happened with the bomb threats. I know that it's been taken over by illegal migrants, and that's a terrible thing that happened. Springfield was this beautiful town, and now they're going through hell. It's a sad thing. Not going to happen with me, I can tell you right now. Thank you very much. Thank you.

0:36:10 Matt: This was to a room full of cops. He's speaking at a police event in Las Vegas. Front of a roomful of cops, and he's being asked if he denounced a bomb threat. And he's like, yeah, I don't know anything about that, but those people are really ruining that town. That's his response. That's the way he talks now, just to everything.

0:36:20 Thomas: What a what a great answer love how you hear that and you're like, oh, I guess he, oh, maybe he didn't know about it. Okay.

0:36:29 Matt: And again, just in the last couple of months, that this has been ratcheting up, think it's just worth putting a couple more clips just in case people haven't seen it, or just maybe so they can hear it all in one place. One in New Hampshire that really was shocking, I thought, this the was straight -up Hitler language, and it's not the first time that he's used Hitler language. But this is extra bad, as was his follow -up to it.

0:36:48 Clip: Is rising like never before, and under our leadership, the forgotten man and woman will be forgotten no longer. They're going to be forgotten. With your help, your love, and your vote, we will put America first. And today, especially in honor of our great veterans on Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible. They'll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American dream. The real threat is not from the radical right.

0:36:57 Thomas: So stupid. Always loved

0:37:39 Clip: The real thread is from the Radical Left. And it's growing every day, every single day. The threat from outside forces is far less

0:37:39 Thomas: The laziness too. Too. That's what's amazing. Give Hitler his credit. Don't clip that. Hitler was fired up. You know, you see those speeches. Trump is a lazy, genocidal fascist. He's like, oh, they're really just terrible, you know? And

0:38:05 Matt: Said give Hitler his credit, I assumed you meant his writing credit. It's plagiarizing here.

0:38:09 Thomas: How dare you, sir?

0:38:12 Matt: Come on, at least a citation.

0:38:13 Clip: Sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within, because if you have a capable, competent, smart, tough leader, Russia, China, North Korea, they're not going to want to play with us. And they didn't. Despite the hatred and anger of the radical left lunatics who want to destroy our country, We will make America great again. Thank

0:38:27 Thomas: My best friends that

0:38:40 Matt: So this is crossing over. So in 2020, he goes from economic populism in 2016 to 2020, he gets into negative populism, which is what this is. This is saying not that he's with everybody, but that here's an out group that we can hate together. This Is How I'm Going to Get Elected. And he was doing that, but

0:38:52 Thomas: Well which he did he did that in 2016 as well it was just immigrants and mexicans and

0:38:56 Matt: To the same degree, not this kind of language. This IS openly identifying like regular liberals and people like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as communists and Marxists. That's obviously laughable to people who know what communists or Marxists are, but it seems to be working because that kind of language you're seeing more and more now about saving America from communists and Marxist. And that's exactly the way that Hitler did it as well. Vermin language is directly taken from Third Reich kind rhetoric. Kind of thing about how our enemies are simultaneously everywhere and overpowering, but also they're weak and and that's straight up fascism. That's exactly what that kind of language is. Just good to note it and to pay attention. And there's one more Hitler reference here that I think is worth mentioning, and I'm going to talk more about the immigration stuff, but the poisoning the blood rhetoric. And

0:39:37 Thomas: And we need to have a debate can he just do this and not even ask the artist for permission you know I I don't even think he has the Hitler estate. Hey, can I do a cover of your fascism, of your genocidal rhetoric?

0:39:49 Matt: Well, it is public domain at this point, so good

0:39:51 Thomas: That's how he gets out of it.

0:39:52 Matt: Loophole.

0:39:52 Thomas: Yeah. All right. It's not satire. Although he might pretend it is sometimes. Maybe they get out of these

0:39:58 Matt: We can hear him explain why it's okay to quote Hitler in

0:40:00 Clip: Crazy what's going on. They're ruining our country. And it's true. They're destroying the blood of our country, that's what they're doing. They're DESTROYING our country! They don't like it when I said that. And I never read Mein Kampf. They said, oh, Hitler said that, in a much different way. They're coming from all over the world, people all over the world we have no idea they could be healthy they could be very unhealthy they could bring in disease that's going to catch on in our country but they do bring in crime but they have them coming from all over the world and they're destroying the blood of our country they're destroyed the fabric of our countries and we have to get back we're going to have to get mass numbers of these especially the criminals they're coming from jails, prisons, they're coming from mental institutions. I said, please don't say the words insane asylum, but I have to say that they're emptying out the insane asylums from all over the world.

0:40:32 Thomas: COVID. That's fake. They could bring in a real disease.

0:41:01 Matt: First of all, his defense is I've never read Mein Kampf, but Yeah, exactly. We talked about that. Yeah. Absolutely. I know he hasn't read it.

0:41:03 Thomas: Believe you. When he says I haven't read something, I always believe him.

0:41:09 Matt: That is true. Just for reference from Mein Kampf in the North and the South, the poison of foreign races was eating into the body of our people. And even Vienna was steadily becoming more and more a non -German city. That's just one example. Hitler uses this this expression about poison of foreign races, poisoning the blood, a lot. A very specific expression. And fact that he'd come out and say, well, yeah, Hitler said it, but I'm saying it in a different way. He's not even saying it in different way, but this is where we're at here.

0:41:33 Thomas: Think it's cool, too, telling they said, well, Hitler said it in a slightly different way. Like, Trump's the OG, I guess.

0:41:40 Matt: Right. Is all kind of in the vein of negative populism of identifying the people that we can hate together. But what I'm really worried about at this point is the language about retribution, because that has been the theme of this campaign of 2024, has been straight up, I am your retribution. And

0:41:59 Clip: 2016 I declared, I am your voice, today I add, I AM YOUR WARRIOR, I AM YOUR JUSTICE, and for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I AM YOUR RETRIBUTION, I Am Your Retribution. I'm not going to let this happen. I'm NOT going to LET IT HAPPEN.

0:42:22 Matt: That's not just rhetoric. That is something he actually believes because he's been talking openly about indicting his enemies as soon as possible once

0:42:29 Thomas: Yeah. Part that's obviously fake is it's not your retribution. It's his. It's it's all about him. It'S all his battles. And then he just just tries decides, to assert like, well, you also care about how much they're mean to me, too. And he's not always wrong. I guess they do kind of care about How much people are allegedly mean to him. But yeah, I'm your retribution. Yeah, sure.

0:42:34 Matt: Of course. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

0:42:48 Thomas: My retribution?

0:42:49 Matt: Republican attorney Mike Davis, who actually was a former Neil Gorsuch clerk, says he was trolling, but he tweeted back in April that he was talking about a call that Norm Eisen had with a bunch of known people people that are opposed to Trump. And he said, well, here's a bunch potential targets of our Justice Department's criminal probe of the criminal conspiracy against Trump, just listing off all these people, Andrew Weissman and Robert Mueller and Bill Kristol and Lawrence Tribe and John Dean and all these People that you see on TV a lot talking about how they're opposed to Trump, And even when we're talking about the Smith document, the very, very long sort of novel that lays out the exact case against Trump we were just talking about in the last episode, had this thought at the time that that could the last thing that we hear about that case, the last full accounting of it. And that could Be enough to send Jack Smith to jail, having put that all on paper. A sobering thought to actually consider that that's a real possibility. That's where we're at. That's how hot the water is.

0:43:38 Thomas: How does that happen? How same time, there's something I want to cover, hopefully on Gavel Gavel, maybe people have heard about that that, Trumper lady that just got nine years. So, like, on one hand, there is still justice happening to some degree for everybody but Trump on that stuff. If you could prove out the case of how do we go from now, Now, which obviously isn't great, but there's still justice for January 6th -ers, in the opposite. Now there's going to be prison for somebody who's trying to, you some sort of justice for people who did a coup.

0:44:09 Matt: Happened many times before in many other countries, including the countries I was talking about up front, where the party takes power and they immediately replace everybody in their equivalent of the Department of Justice with loyalists. That's what Putin did as soon as he had power in 1999. The first thing he started to do was replace the prosecutors and make sure that you got the people in the places that you want them. And right now, if you hear the way that Trump is talking about the people who are convicted of January 6th -related crimes, They're martyrs, right? It's like the worst thing I've ever seen that these people are still in there, and just openly talking about how they got a bad deal. This is not, again, this is not tomorrow. We're talking in a period of time here. But we talked before about Hans Lytton, who was an attorney who prosecuted Nazis right up until 1933, and he was one of the first people to be sent to a camp. I they're going to go after first. I wanted to talk a little bit about Russia on the way out, because we're going talk again about a lot of this stuff. I just wanted to introduce some of these concepts, play some of these clips, get people thinking about what's actually on the line here. Again, when we're talking about fascism, when we're taking about this kind of guided or managed democracy, it doesn't necessarily mean jackboots in the streets, although there's certainly the option for that too. It means a complete corruption of everything that we know. It means the end of the rule of law as we know it. And for what that looks like, I want to tell you a story from Russia. Something that's really stuck with me over the years is called Nothing Is True and Nothing Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev. I've read both of his books, they're both so well -written. He's just a really fantastic writer, really makes you think about these things. He has obviously no love for Putin, and he tells a story that I wanted to kind of go out on, just to think about the realities. It's very apropos to this show. Realities of a legal system that is dominated by these kinds of people and that is under this kind of competitive authoritarianism. About what happened to Brittany Greiner, the UNB player, when she was stopped with just residue of cannabis. And this is an American celebrity

0:45:51 Matt: Who has held up and taken in terrible conditions for quite a long time. But I want to tell the story of somebody, somebody, a very rare story in Russia that broke through and someone that actually was able to get justice. 99% of people charged in Russia of crimes are convicted, to start there. Is the kind of system we're talking about. And there's a woman named Yanukovych that he tells the story of in Nothing is True and Everything is Possible. And I keep thinking about this story. Was a pretty ordinary business person. She was importing chemicals for cleaning supplies. And one of those chemicals was called diethyl ether, and it's an ordinary solvent. There's nothing unusual about it. But one day, the Russian equivalent of the DEA showed up and arrested her, took her into terrible conditions, and told her that she was selling a controlled substance, that this was a narcotic. Just not true. Just absolutely, demonstrably not true, and the reason this happened is because Putin had given control of the FDCS, which is their equivalent of DEA, over to an old KGB friend, and this guy decided he was going to clean house and start going after people that were were competing with his friends in different sectors, including pharmaceuticals and chemicals, additives. And even started going after veterinarians for using ketamine, which of course all veterinarians do.

0:46:54 Thomas: It's a hard job, so I get it.

0:46:55 Matt: Right. So you know what I mean. But this story did actually get some international attention, which is very unusual for these kinds of things. And she talks about being in there with a whole lot of other people in the same same kinds of situations, and how there's a lot of white -collar crime, this kind of thing that's being prosecuted as fraud or controlled substances or whatever that are just nothing, that are just completely made up. But this, as a lawyer, really struck me, reading about her account of being in the Russian justice system, because the thing that lawyers do in Russia is so completely unrecognizable to me as an attorney in a system that more or less works. And I complain about our system a lot, but we do have an actual rule of law. We do, for the most part, have neutral magistrates that are overseeing these things. I'm just going to read you his account of how this works. The usual way out was with a bribe. There was a whole network and industry of payoffs. Good quote -unquote lawyers were not those who could defend you in court, the verdicts were predetermined, but those who had the right connections to know whom to pay off in the judiciary and the relevant ministry. Was a complex game. Pay off the wrong person and you'd only wasted money. You had to find the real decision maker. Quickly a whole mass of middlemen would begin to appear who want to persuade you that they and only they know how how to pay off the right person. Yana knew her parents were looking for that person on the outside. They had found a quote -unquote lawyer who said he could help. He suggested that she admit to the charges and he could get everything sorted. Meanwhile, he told Yana's parents to sell their apartment to pay for the bribe, which would be near a million dollars.

0:47:23 Thomas: A million dollars?

0:48:10 Matt: She smelled a rat. Something was wrong. Company had done nothing wrong. Shouldn't she stick to that? And what exactly was she meant to own up to? That she had traded what she had treated? Own up to absurdity? She asked for another lawyer. He said the same thing. These were the rules. She understood the the rules, didn't she? It's so chilling to think about going to law school and participating in a system in which your purpose is to pay off the right person and to know exactly how to get that money to that person, and that's how it happens.

0:48:32 Thomas: You found something that's less law than originalism yeah

0:48:37 Matt: This no law. There is absolutely no law to any of this. And she tells a story of different people that she met, including a cashier at some construction company that got 11 years just because the owner of the company had gotten on the wrong side of Putin. So everybody in the company goes to prison. Nothing had actually been done. There was no crime that was actually committed. This, again, just for context, and we talk about Russia, I think it's very abstract when we're talking about these kinds of systems, because we still are thinking, as you said at the beginning, about courts and judges and prosecutors.

0:49:01 Matt: But this is where things go. And it's not necessarily that people are going to be locked up in camps, although that's always an option. I mean, certainly that kind of Roman language that you heard was also used by the the Hutus when they persecuted the Tutsis Rwanda. In That kind of dehumanizing language goes terrible places. We don't have to think about the most extreme version of this. The middling version of THIS, which ends up with something like Russia or Hungary, is plenty bad. And you don't come back from a place like that. And that's really what I want to try to communicate here as a lawyer, as somebody who cares about due process and justice in the system. Have a lot of improvement to do in our system, but we're still doing better than most of the world in this kind of thing.

0:49:35 Thomas: I think that's important to recognize especially for our audience I think it is really important and not in like some blind optimistic sense I think think it's important in in a realism sense to know that it can get very worse it can always get much much worse

0:49:37 Matt: It is. It doesn't come back once it goes to those places. And that's the places that Trump wants to take to. He's openly talking about indicting people who are opposed to him. And actually, I wanted to play one more quick clip before we go here in is from just a few weeks ago.

0:50:04 Clip: It's a Democrat charging his opponent. Nobody's ever seen anything like it. That means that if I win and somebody wants to run against me I call my attorney general I say listen indict him well he hasn't done anything wrong that we know I don't know indict him on income tax evasion you'll figure it out

0:50:27 Matt: Go. Saying he's got license to do that because he has been prosecuted. So the next time he needs to prosecute a political opponent, just come up with whatever he needs to. Saying it. And at. That's the space we're in here.

0:50:36 Thomas: Made these promises he's told us what he's gonna do uh one might wonder why didn't he do this after 2016 you

0:50:43 Matt: It is a ratcheting process. And we've talked about Project 2025 and the effort with Schedule F to try to actually replace civil servants. He didn't have the full support of the government. He didn't have everybody on his side. He certainly still had what he called the deep state, which is basically just the bureaucrats who are trying to run a normal government. But if you can replace those people, you can get a lot further. And that's what Putin did, is you start to replace the people who are not usually political appointees. You replace the prosecutors who are usually committed to justice rather than any one person. And that's where things go. I should say, we're going to talk specifically about immigration and how that's being used to propel this. But I'm not going to end this in a bleak way. I want to make make sure we talk at the very end, the last time we talk about this, about what we can actually do, because there are ways out of this, besides just making sure that Trump doesn't win, which is obviously what we're here for. But going forward, the way that we can make this movement irrelevant and the way we can pull things back, because we have to now. We don't have any choice. This is the time to do it.

0:51:34 Thomas: I'm gonna share my my recipe cold for cold fusion by

0:51:37 Matt: Couldn't hurt. It couldn't help. Again, maybe I am insanely idealistic, But I remain optimistic about so many of these things and about the future, especially knowing the younger people who are coming up. I know that this doesn't have to be where things go. But I do think that there's a lot to the idea that if we do not fix it now, and if we allow this man a second term, if we allowed this movement another term, that we're going to have a long time to come back from this, if ever.

0:52:00 Thomas: I think we're in big trouble if we don't stop him uh oh shit a month wow that came quickly less than a month all right well um there matt but I'm excited to move forward on this series because I think it's really necessary so So thanks for that breakdown, and we'll be back at it very soon.

0:52:17 Matt: Plenty more to talk about. Thank you.

0:52:18 Clip: This podcast is a production of Opening Arguments Media, LLC, All Rights Reserved. It is produced and edited by Thomas Smith, who also provided the fabulous intro and outro music used with permission.

0:52:35 Thomas: Would like to see matt try to be fascist dude matt's it what was it called the something that like dodged after the evade the dis uh did you see that what is it someone who didn't who got away from the war what isthe word for that the the trip now that damn it I just I just had it it's really good I want to reference it sorry let me pull it up in two seconds here um you didn't catch that I know it's a lot of time but it's really good you should check it out it is the are you fucking kidding me oh it's sorry I have it unplayed on me it is The Deserter that's the word okay so

0:52:49 Matt: I guess a draft dodger. Anocracy. I'm not going to get that right. Let me make sure I say it right. Anocracy, sorry.

0:53:18 Thomas: Do you want to text it to me?

0:53:20 Matt: I got it. Also, anocracy is another