#287 — Why Wealth Matters

Okay, well, it's been a big week for news.

There are many things happening in the world.

Of course, there were the January 6.

Hearings, which are not at all the partisan witch hunt that Republicans are claiming. Most of the witnesses have been Republicans. That should be a pretty obvious point. And most have been avid Trump supporters.

Most of them did this lunatics bidding.

Up until the last moment when they were staring into the abyss. Some of them, like Cassidy Hutchinson, whose testimony was the most damaging to Trump, have everything to lose from coming forward. No doubt.

She and her family are now besieged.

By death threats and very real security concerns. She was an extremely compelling witness. She was obviously a republican partisan down to her toes, and yet she recognized.

That what happened in the run up.

To January 6, all the cultic hysteria whipped up by the big lie, and then what happened on the day itself, was an abomination.

Perhaps I should emphasize for the hundredth.

Time that political partisanship has nothing to do with this. Liz Cheney is one of the people running these hearings. She is a conservative Republican. She is pro life and against gay marriage. She is, by my lights, a religious extremist.

I am sure I disagree with 95%.

Of her politics, but she is a.

Straight up american hero.

In my book, on a bad day, she's doing more to support and defend the Constitution of the United States than.

The rest of the republican party has done in years. She is standing between us and the.

Utter dismantling and desecration of our democracy. This is not a partisan point.

For instance, I'll concede that almost anything bad that is said about the Democrats.

Now is probably true. Biden appears unfit for office. Whether he's actually senile, I don't know. But he simply can't communicate the way the president needs to.

You watch these speeches and interviews and.

Press conferences insofar as they even take place. Every sentence is a death defying feat. It's like watching your mom do parkour. You're just waiting for the worst thing.

That has ever happened every fucking second.

And he is totally unfit to run again in 2024. And Kamala Harris is probably worse. Though she might be fine neurologically, she still manages to speak in word salad in an apparent effort to talk down to people. Have you seen these snippets of her circulating? Many of the things she says are completely mystifying. It's like someone trained an AI on woke Twitter and had it talk to.

Itself for the equivalent of a thousand.

Years, and it went properly insane. And as a political candidate, she manages to convey a disingenuousness that makes Hillary Clinton seem like Will Rogers. This administration is doomed, right?

And has been doomed almost since the very beginning.

But Biden and Harris saved our democracy by beating Trump.

And as odious and as incompetent as.

The democrats have become, there is simply no comparison between them and what the.

Republicans have become under Trump.

Trump and Trumpism is not just a symptom of a deeper problem. They are that, too. But they are also a cancer that.

Has been actively destroying our politics.

You have to cut out the cancer. Trump has always been and remains a litmus test. The real Trump derangement syndrome is to not see how abnormal he is as a person, and to not see or to not care how abnormal it is.

That such a person could have ever become the president of the United States.

That's the real Trump derangement syndrome. To say or to think things like, well, all politicians lie, right? What's the difference with Trump? There's no both sides to this political moment. Making Trump president was like making Alex Jones the lead anchor on the nightly news. Whatever you want to say about the media, whatever you want to say about CNN, for instance, about the errors of journalism they make over there and about how woke everyone is, it would be orders of magnitude worse.

And the degradation of our journalistic standards would be complete.

If they swapped in Alex Jones for Anderson Cooper. That would be a totally different world, journalistically speaking. And that's where we are with the republican party, apart from the few brave people like Liz Cheney who are trying.

To save it from itself.

Anyway.

If you haven't been following the hearings.

For whatever reason, you're missing something.

The window they have opened onto the.

Last days of the Trump administration is beyond unflattering. And the prospect that we may 1.

Day see the orange man in an.

Orange jumpsuit seems to have grown a little. It's hard to imagine him not being prosecuted now after what we've learned. That is, of course, if he doesn't become president again in the meantime, which.

Remains a real possibility.

Now, of course, the biggest development in.

Recent weeks was the overturning of Roe.

V. Wade by the Supreme Court. Some people have asked for my thoughts on that and about the ethics of abortion generally. Perhaps I'll do a podcast on that at some point. But briefly, I guess the first thing.

To say about Roe is that the.

Writing was always on the wall for Roe, right?

It has always seemed like a dubious.

Judicial decision and just the wrong way to enshrine abortion rights at the federal level. And the fact that we've been relying on it for 50 years has been a failure of governance.

The Democrats knew how precarious Roe was.

And yet they completely failed to pass legislation, much less an amendment to the constitution, to properly guarantee this right for women.

So there's a lot of blame to.

Go around, and the Democrats share in that blame. That said, I think repealing Roe is.

Going to be unambiguously bad for women.

In particular, poor women in red states. And it'll be bad for the red states, too. I think the spectacle of having desperate women prosecuted as murderers for going out of state to terminate a pregnancy or taking illegal medication at home, this will.

Be bad for business.

I think you'll find that corporations don't.

Much like being associated with a real.

Life version of the handmaid's tale. But again, this will only hurt red states. But I don't think the problem necessarily stops here. I do think there's a larger concern about creeping theocracy.

Let's call this for what it is.

Right what happened here.

The unjustified and unjustifiable religious beliefs of.

Catholics on the Supreme Court have delivered this change in our society. This is religion, pure and simple. There is simply no valid ethical argument.

That privileges the interests of a single.

Fertilized ovum over those of a woman.

Whose life is going to be completely.

Deranged by being forced to have a child.

It's not just that pro life absolutists have bad arguments. They have no arguments for banning abortion.

At the earliest stages. But then prochoice absolutists are also extremists. Anyone who would argue for abortion as an absolute right of a woman at every stage of pregnancy, as though terminating.

A fetus in the third trimester had no ethical implications beyond a woman's bodily autonomy. Such people are just not making contact.

With the real ethical terrain here. So our political debate about abortion seems pretty confused, and