『We've Canceled International Election Observers for the Midterms?!』のカバーアート

We've Canceled International Election Observers for the Midterms?!

We've Canceled International Election Observers for the Midterms?!

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10月19日まで。※適用条件あり
Dr. Craig Johnson opens this week’s Autocratic Despair at a seven, and he gets there fast. On the morning they recorded, federal agents searched the Washington home of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota as part of an immigration investigation reportedly tied to paperwork her late father filed when she was a child. Craig, a UC Berkeley lecturer with a PhD in Global Fascism Studies, walks new listeners through what denaturalization is, who the United States has historically stripped of citizenship (war criminals, terrorists, Nazis who slipped in after the war), and why it has never once been attempted against a sitting member of Congress. He calls it a new low, and the show agrees. Nick Mortensen, the former comedian from Green Bay who serves as the show’s audience proxy, explains how this summer the State Department convened a symposium on “far-left political terrorism,” and Marco Rubio told foreign officials the left is now counterterrorism’s target, and then the government published a hundred-page report titled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism” naming forty-three people and groups as tools of Cuban subversion. Black Lives Matter, CodePink, the Democratic Socialists of America, the mayor of New York, Ben of Ben & Jerry’s, George Floyd, who is dead, and Ilhan Omar. The list came first. The search warrant came later. Craig connects it to the Red Scares of the 1920s and 1950s and to the way a real kernel, foreign influence networks like the one tied to Neville Roy Singham, gets stretched until it covers anyone the administration doesn’t like. They also work out, live, what happens to a House seat when its member is removed. Short version: nobody gets appointed, and the district goes dark.Co-host Nick Mortensen is also at a 7, but for completely different reasons. Nick's driver, which is about an invitation nobody sent. For the first time since 2002, the United States didn’t invite the OSCE, the 57-nation body whose observers have watched every federal election for twenty-four years. The only other countries to shut them out recently are Russia and Belarus, which prompts a lengthy and possibly libelous comparison to Wisconsin’s exclusion from lists of top party schools on the grounds that amateurs and professionals don’t belong on the same list, and Craig’s confession about why he chose Berkeley over Madison: a union, and a couch on fire in the street on his visit day. Nick concedes the honest kernel, which comes from David Becker, one of the most credentialed election experts in the country, who says the observers’ absence will have zero effect on the election’s security. Nick spends a while convinced Becker is having an existential crisis, then looks up his résumé and realizes the crisis is his own. Becker’s right about the ballots. The question is why an administration wouldn’t want an independent report saying the election was clean, and who’s watching instead. The Justice Department says it’ll send a record thousand federal monitors in November, drawn from a gutted Civil Rights Division and volunteers from somewhere in the government. Picture the home team telling the league not to send refs this year, because their assistant coaches have it covered. Nobody’s saying the game’s rigged. Nobody would accept it from the Bears either.The back half of the episode is a tribute, and the show means it. Nick and Craig play an extended clip from the subscriber-only Weekender edition of The Muckrake, hosted by Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman, which Jared generously let them run outside the paywall. The clip is from a Byron Donalds for Governor event in Florida, where a woman takes the microphone and the conversation turns, unexpectedly and sadly, to grandparents’ rights and a grandson she hasn’t seen since August. What Jared does with that moment is the reason it’s here: fifteen different contexts, all of them right, delivered with an insight that makes everyone else in this space look like they’re guessing. Nick says plainly that The Muckrake is the standard this show measures itself against, that it may be unreachable, and that getting seventy percent of the way there would make for a pretty good podcast. Craig takes the clip somewhere new: why the grandparents now voting in American elections are Gen X as much as boomers, why Gen X has voted more conservatively than the generations around it, what mass politics looked like when millions showed up to rallies, and what atomization means for a country where nobody knows what anybody else knows and the only politics that cuts through is grievance. Nick predicts Christopher Rufo has just found his next campaign.It’s an episode about authoritarian drift told by two people who would honestly rather be laughing, and mostly are. A commedia for your particular brand of tragedy, on the subject of fascism, from a Green Bay dad and a Berkeley scholar who keep finding a way to have fun with the end ...
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