say this not only as Secretary of Defense, but also as a former soldier and a former member of the National Guard.

The option to use active duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort,

and only in the most urgent and dire of situations. We are not in one of those situations now.

He also called Trump a threat to the Constitution.

Accusing the president of trying to divide America, Mattis said, quote, Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people, does not even pretend to try.

Hey, everybody.

Welcome to the Muckrake podcast.

I'm your co-host, Jared Gates Sexton.

As always, I'm joined by my loyal friend and co-host, Nick Houselsoman.

You know, we deal with a lot of serious subjects on this show.

We try really hard to bring some hope. I think we've got some today.

It feels like the protest have at least affected the national conversation. There's a lot of

events to go over. Later on in the episode, we'll also be talking about online extremism and radicalism and the Q&ON movement, which I know a lot of people like to make fun of, but we have Mark Andre Argentina, an expert in online extremism and radicalization.

Here to tell us why we need to pay attention to this stuff.

But in the meantime, before we get to hope, we talk about progress made. Unfortunately, everyone, we got to talk about Arkansas

Senator Tom Cotton, who published an op-ed, an indefensible op-ed in The New York Times. The New

Times has now, I don't know, imploded Nick, has pretty much set

themselves on fire trying to argue that apparently nobody read this op-ed before it came out. For those

who are not familiar with it, Cotton, who is a fascist. There's no other word for it, argued for getting

troops in the street to put down a rebellion by the American people,

and more or less said that we should have widespread killing in order to restore law and order.

Yeah, so it's another Thursday or whatever.

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