The New Dark Ages

Mainstream media is being blacked out. Democracy as we know it is dying. The possibility of America is gone. All we have is each other.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:11):
Good morning, Peepsen, and welcome to wok F Daily with
me your girl, Danielle Moody, recording from the home Bunker, Folks,
I woke up earlier in the week to news that
Mika Brazinski and Joe Scarsborough of Mourning Joe at MSNBC

(00:31):
spent the weekend making a trip to mar A Lago
to sit down and reconnect with Donald Trump. And you know,
I will tell you that I have never been a
fan of Mourning Joe for this particular reason. I think

(00:52):
that their coverage is softball. I think that they are opportunists.
I think that they really work to sainwash Donald Trump
and Republicans, because Scarsborough is a Republican. And you know
what pisces me off about this is that cable news

(01:15):
and MSNBC particularly is in a ratings downward spiral. They
are in a just a tail spin because following the
election two weeks ago, millions of people have tuned them out,
and you are seeing that MSNBC's ratings are down by
fifty percent, CNN's ratings down by thirty percent. And you know,

(01:41):
many people are thinking that, well, maybe folks are just
exhausted and they'll tune back in once the administration takes over.
But what we are seeing by Amika and Joe is
what folks who study dictatorships and a authoritarianism say not

(02:02):
to do. Do not preemptively bend the knee, do not
obey in advance. And what Mika and Joe have done
by going over to mar Lago to sit down with
Donald Trump, who is called Joe Scarsboa murderer, who has
said awful, sexist, misogynistic things about Meka, is that, oh,
the door is open, and we're willing to treat your

(02:25):
appointees and treat this Trump regime as if it is
just a normal function of our democracy and say wash
it for the American people as a way to show that, oh,
look at us, we exist in the middle. Look at us,
we're objective. And the fact is is that this is
as far from objective as you can possibly fucking get.

(02:48):
They are not objective, right, They are in the business
of cya covering their own asses. And so by virtue
of seeing this, the leading show on MSM make this decision. Folks.
You know where this is headed. You know that MSNBC
is most likely going to make a hard pivot for

(03:11):
the right. And this is what Democrats have done over
the last decade. This is why you see that progressives
have wanted to abandon this party, vote third party, or
not vote at all. And it's because as Republicans became
more and more radicalized, more and more extreme in their

(03:32):
policy views, in their ideology, Democrats have just followed behind
them at what they believe is a safe distance. But
it actually hasn't been because it has compromised our democracy
entirely as they continue to search for the white voter
to come back to them. And so here you are

(03:53):
right where I will tell you this. I do not
think that after tuning out cable news for however many
weeks that it's been right now about two weeks in time,
that people are going to then say to themselves, you know,
I think I'm ready to ingest poison again. I think
that what is ultimately going to happen is that those

(04:13):
people in this interim have either just jumped ship altogether
from ingesting the news, or they have found independent media
outlets like podcasts, YouTube, where voices like mine and many
others exist. Because we saw the writing on the wall
for cable news a long time ago, and with now

(04:38):
the announcement of a Brendan Carr taking over the FCC
and saying that he is going to use the authority
of the FCC not to increase broadband or increase speed
or compete with other countries in terms of what it
is that we're doing with telecommunications. No, he is going

(04:59):
to go after networks and go after places and spaces
that have elevated the voices of diverse people and underserved communities.
And instead he's going to weaponize these agencies that want
to be able to tell the truth about what is
happening inside of this regime. He's going to take away licenses,

(05:21):
he's going to bring lawsuits. And so again I've been
saying this for how long, guys, that if Donald Trump
were to ever sees power again, we would see the
end of democracy as we know it. And that is
exactly where we are. So I don't know why anybody,
because there's all this outrage on the internet right now

(05:43):
around Mika and Joe. How dare they? How could they?
And I'm like, y'all run the tapes. They've been like this,
they've been doing this. But what you were going to
see is more capitulation, right, is more organizations, more networks,
and more people who are going to turn their backs
on the truth, who are going to turn their backs

(06:04):
on their journalistic integrity, all for the sake of saving
their own asses at the expense of educating the American public.
And you know this is and I say this, I
don't know how many times, this is how democracies die.
And our democracy, for all intensive purposes, folks, is dead

(06:25):
right when you have the amount of voter suppression that
we've seen take place, the gutting of the Civil Rights Act,
the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, and now you
have all of these champions of extremism taking over some
of our most important agencies, Like what do we expect
is going to happen over the next four years? America

(06:48):
is being hollowed out by the inside out. The keys
of the kingdom have been given to Republican extremists, and
all we can do is basically hold on. But here's
the reality, and this is what we talked about last
week on wokef everybody's not making it so, whether it

(07:09):
be the deregulation that we are going to see at
the hands of the FDA and Health and Human services,
that again is going to make America sicker. Whether it's
going to be at the hands of the National Intelligence Director,
who is going to give our most intimate and deepest
secrets of American operations over to our biggest enemies right

(07:31):
in Tulca, Gabbard, whether we're going to see how again
the Department of Justice is not going to be looking
out for the American people. It is going to be
Donald Trump's legal arm for the folks that voted for disruption.
They wanted to disrupt the status quo. And oh everything

(07:53):
was about the economy and Democrats just didn't speak to
the economy. Give me a fucking break, because what these
people are now getting is not going to be disruption
of the status quo. It is going to be a
destruction of our democracy, of our constitution, of our free
and fair society. That is what is happening. And you know,

(08:18):
Americans are going to be sicker, They're going to be broke,
They're going to be unhinged, a more violent because our
resources are going to dwindle, right, And so I'm just like,
you know, and what's going to happen as what is
already evidence is that some people are waking up and

(08:40):
they're like, oh, man, I didn't vote for this, this
isn't what I wanted. Well, this is now what we're
all in for. And you know, I just it breaks
my heart because I had more faith in the American
people than I should have. I genuinely thought that there
were more good people, thoughtful people, strategic people, then there

(09:03):
were those that really just cared about themselves. Because at
the end of the day, it is selfishness that won
in this election, because if you were thinking collectively minded,
then someone like Donald Trump would have never come into
your consciousness because he had already talked about attacking the

(09:25):
most vulnerable, he had already talked about attacking the most marginalized.
He's made targets of every single community that is not white, right,
and so just by that alone, America should have been like, no,
we don't want this person. This is not who we
are and this is not who we want to be.

(09:45):
But because Donald Trump said, don't worry, I'm just gonna
hurt the people that you don't like, Americans said, yeah,
go do that. So here we are with you know,
about two months until it is full steam ahead with
PROJECTI twenty twenty five becoming institutionalized across this country, where
no one will have any safety nets or outlets to

(10:07):
go to and look towards for their information, for their
health and well being. And you know, it's so frustrating
because it didn't have to be this way, and there
are so many millions of people are going to be
so harmed by this. Just thinking about Donald Trump saying

(10:28):
this week that he is going to utilize the US
military in order to deport eleven million Americans, and by
the way, that number continues to grow every time somebody
from his administration speaks, and they're going to utilize the
military and the National Guard, and he's going to declare
an emergency, and people are going to be scooped up

(10:50):
at schools and workplaces and churches and in the streets,
and it will be a mix, right of those that
they want to denaturalize for this country. And people will say, oh, well,
you know, I'm certain it will just be those that
have that you know, just got here and just got
their naturalization. No, it won't, folks. And again I've talked

(11:11):
about this on the Danielle Moody Show. I talked about
this horrible, disgusting operation that was called Operation wetback in
the nineteen fifties that rounded up a million Mexican migrants
and disappeared people. This is something that was done before, right,

(11:31):
and you can see where the American mindset was just
by the title of the operation. So I continue to
say that Donald Trump is not doing anything new. He
is just resurrecting old laws that we actually never got
rid of, and we never put any safeguards into our
system to make sure that they couldn't be resurrected in

(11:53):
the first place. You know what I've learned over the
last decade of covering Trumps and the rise of MAGA
is that too many of what we thought were actual
laws in this country were just political norms that were
easily disrupted by someone that is criminally minded, somebody that

(12:17):
is only in it for themselves. Never before had we
seen a presidency that was totally in it for the grift,
totally in it for the power over rather than the
power with. That is this sole difference between autocracies and
democracies is that an autocrat wants power over right. In

(12:39):
a democracy, a president wants power with and sees their
role as protecting their constituents protecting the citizens of this country,
all of them. But that's no longer where we are.
And so when we're in this moment and we see
the writing on the wall, we know in many ways

(13:02):
how this story ends, right, And I have to tell
you that I cannot express it enough that people need
to fortify themselves. I am about to go through a
series of doctor's appointments because as an entrepreneur, I get

(13:22):
my healthcare through the marketplace in New York. And they
are going to eliminate the ACA, which means that people
like me, I am one of the twenty million or
twenty seven million Americans that will lose their healthcare right
when this trifecta of power that the Republicans now have
decide that they are going to repeal the ACA and

(13:44):
by the way, put nothing in its place, right, so
that is already going to ensure that tens of millions
of Americans are sick and will see the emergency room
as their primary care physician. Right on top of which
you were talking about raising of the retirement age, gutting

(14:06):
of Social Security, gutting of Medicaid, right creating the conditions
for absolute despair in this country. We've seen this done before,
we just have not seen it done in America. Right now,
they are talking about the fact that Russia is on
the verge of like an economic collapse because the price

(14:29):
of food has soared like twenty some odd percent over
the last year. No one can buy homes right, debt
has soared. And what does Putent care. He does not
care about his people. He cares about the oligarch. He
cares about his ability to continue to make money. He
cares about his ability to gobble up Europe and recreate

(14:54):
the USSR. This is who American Republicans are modeling themselves after,
a man that has completely and totally gutted his country.
You know, the term eat the rich comes from when
the fat cats become so fucking greedy and there is
absolutely nothing for anyone else, and then the people turn

(15:16):
on them. And that's where I fear that America is headed.
In this place that we have been told is so abundant,
and yet we don't feed the poor, and yet we
don't take care of our most vulnerable. The people that
are going to make out the most in Donald Trump's regime,
the prison industrial complex, because crime is going to soar

(15:37):
because when people have limited amount of resources, they will
resort to anything in order to provide for themselves, and
the media is just going to go along with it,
right and say that this is normal. So, folks, what
I will tell you is make your doctor's appointments, make
arrangements for yourselves and your family. Right if you were

(16:01):
in a mixed status household, I told people, you know,
contact an immigration attorney so that you understand or have
a plan of operation in place. If January twenty first,
twenty twenty five, your loved ones are scooped up, right,
so you know where to go and what to do.
The road ahead is incredibly dark and incredibly bumpy, and

(16:24):
all we can do in the next two months is
try and prepare as much as possible for the next
iteration of the dark Ages. I don't know for how
long a free press is going to exist. I don't
know for how long free speech is going to exist.
But these are the first things to go. And we've

(16:45):
already seen signs that our biggest agencies, this entire government
is going to be weaponized against the people of the
United States, And so you need to protect yourselves in
the best way possible. You know, the last thing that
I will say today is that over the weekend was

(17:09):
with my friends and their you know, very small children,
and I'm looking at these, you know, three year olds,
five year olds, and I'm just like, I'm scared for
them because the America that they're getting ready to grow
up in is light years away from what we all

(17:30):
grew up in and knowing this safety that we felt,
the security that we felt that came with being American.
And I say this, folks, as a black queer person
that understands very much in the ways that government has
been weaponized against black people, against indigenous people, Like I
know all of these things to be true, but still,

(17:52):
the possibility of America was greater than many of its missteps.
But now the possibility is gone. And I don't know
how we exist in a space and in a country
where hopefulness is being squeezed out. So when I talk

(18:13):
about fortifying, I mean figuring out what resistance looks like
for you, looks like for your family. Right, if your
children are not going to be given the rigorous public
education that is going to allow them to be globally competitive,
then what are you doing? How are you supplementing their

(18:34):
education in your home? Right? Because everybody can't afford tutors.
So the pain that we're in for in the next
four plus years is going to have generational impact. And
I don't yet think that Americans really understand and can
wrap their minds around where everything is headed in the

(18:56):
next two months. But it's extraordinary and all I can say,
friends is fortify and buckle up. That is it for
me today here on wok F as always Power to
the people and to all the people. Power, get woke

(19:17):
and stay woke as fuck.