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Feb. 2, 2021 - The Muckrake Political Podcast
57:34
The Escalating Radicalization Of The Right

Nick Hauselman and Jared Yates Sexton discuss Fox News’s plummet in ratings, the escalating radicalization on the Right, and welcome writer, journalist, and veteran Jerad W. Alexander to talk about the effects of America’s Forever Wars and the coup attempt at the Capitol. To support the show and unlock additional content and episodes, become a patron at http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Time Text
- As Trump loyalist Marjorie Taylor Greene, she's voiced support for executing Nancy Pelosi.
Is she fit to serve and should she be on the education committee? - I don't think we ought to punish people from a disciplinary standpoint, a party standpoint, because they think something a little bit different.
- Republicans let themselves be hijacked by Trump and now Trump is gone and no one has stepped in, right?
So we have a situation where the Republican Party is largely governed by whoever's the loudest.
Hey everybody, welcome to the McCraig Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates-Saxton.
As always, I am joined by The One.
We have a special guest today.
We're going to speak with veteran journalist and the author of Volunteers Growing Up in the Forever War, Jared Alexander, about, you know, the effects on culture and countries when you have wars for Longer than a generation what it does to people and how you end up with them.
I don't know radicalized people Rushing the capital and joining militias and other radicalized groups.
So that'll be in a little bit But before we get there Nick we have to have a conversation About what's going on right now there.
It feels a little bit like Like, there's some movement in terms of COVID relief packages, like maybe we're starting to figure out, I don't know, how to vaccinate people.
But in the meantime, there is a continued sort of malevolent, underpinning, bad feeling to our political ecosystem.
We have the right, which is continuing to march off its fascistic cliff.
God knows what Donald Trump is up to.
We have a bleeding conservative right-wing media apparatus in Fox News that is just hemorrhaging viewers at this point, which tells me, and I assume it tells you as well, that they're going to have to go further right and embrace people like our good friend Marjorie Taylor Greene and beliefs of Jewish space lasers.
We all got one for our bat mitzvahs?
I assume it's wonderful, but I assume that you're concerned about this as well.
Oh, absolutely.
And, you know, here's the thing that I think I'm most interested in, and I wanted to hear your take on it, was the fact that, you know, Fox News, their ratings are going down, right?
It's crazy that we kind of predicted this, but the idea that their ratings would go down so much, they're third in the major demographics in some of these ratings.
And I'm not sure what to make of that.
That's not great.
That's not great.
I'm not a TV executive and or a quote-unquote math wizard, but when there are three major cable news networks, I don't think it's great when you're third.
No, three is not good.
Screw second, too, to quote Burt Reynolds.
I thought we were quoting Ricky Bobby.
I think that we are watching a pretty predictable thing.
We were talking about this in the waning days of the Trump presidency, how Fox News Had created or helped create the Tea Party and the rightward movement of the American reactionary right.
And that there was a bill coming due, particularly as they had to do things like announce that Joe Biden had won states in the presidential election and that that was going to sever reality to them and open up their flank for OANN and Newsmax.
We are now watching that come to the fore.
We're watching Trump has turned the channel off.
And, you know, download Newsmax and OANN.
Meanwhile, their golden god emperor, Donald Trump, nowhere to be found.
At all.
Completely silent.
Not just because he lost his Twitter account.
Not phoning into Hannity.
Not phoning into Tucker.
Judge Jeanine.
Right?
Maria?
Maria.
He's not phoning into these places.
It seems like he's already told everybody, screw off, I'm gonna go enjoy Post-president retirement or whatever it is, but the whole thing feels very very bad And there is no way whatsoever that Fox is going to react to this by coming back Like having a you know a coming to Jesus moment.
They're not going to grow a conscience like this just tells me that They only have one choice, which is to move to the right.
I mean, it's that what's the phrase?
It's it's quiet Too quiet a little too quiet.
Yeah, and so that's what I'm feeling right now.
There's something out there now There's a lot of things swirling around Trump, which would maybe indicate why he's so he is so quiet I suppose he's wringing his hands his small hands over the the impending legal issues he's going to have.
I'm kind of waiting.
It sounded like everyone was waiting for him to get out of the White House to start unleashing all these lawsuits and making them public because he's not protected by the White House anymore.
So I'm kind of waiting for that.
Did you happen to see the delightful letter that was written by the lawyers representing the Lincoln Project to one Rudy Giuliani?
I did.
Again, I'm going to put on my political pundit hat, which looks a lot like a hunting derby.
That's my political pundit hat.
It was a mixed weekend for the Lincoln Project.
On one hand, they sent out a A scathing firebomb of an email to Rudy Giuliani basically saying, take our name out of your mouth.
And then on the other hand, one of their co-founders was found out to be a malicious pervert.
So I think it was, I think it was a rough little weekend for them, but that's sort of the area that they traffic in.
You know, it's a little wobbly a little bit.
That train's always about to come off the tracks.
So I do think that Trump is worried about this impeachment trial.
On top of that, he just loves being in the news.
You know what I mean?
Like, he's ready for his moment.
He's ready to come back and just suddenly be in the center of conversation because that's who he is.
It is still odd that he's not calling into Hannity and Judge Janine and all of these people.
Like, it's an odd choice that he has made.
But we do have to focus for a second.
I don't know, did you see this clip off Newsmax talking about the Second Civil War?
Did you not see this?
No.
Oh my god, Nick.
One of their guys, I don't even know who they are.
They all look alike.
They feel like, um... This happened after our childhoods.
There's like, all of a sudden they had these Play-Doh factories where it was like you could create little molded Play-Doh men.
Like you pushed a little guy and all of a sudden it popped out and they all looked alike?
That's what Newsmax and OANN, they're pumping out the same white dudes who are all kind of aggressive and also paranoid and coming down a conveyor belt.
One of the guys said, I don't know why the Democrats want to push us to a civil war, but I think that they have intentionally made their followers irrationally afraid of weapons so that they'll be slaughtered to help China.
Now, really, I want you to do the math on that thing.
There is a lot.
You've got to carry a couple of ones in this to square that circle.
But I think it's important to point out, if you're Fox News, you have to figure out a way to get to that.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, right now, they're just pushing New World Order conspiracy theories without saying New World Order.
They're talking about stolen elections, crime families, conspiracies.
They have to figure out a way to get to that.
They have to move to that direction.
Right, because you know what they did was, have you ever, like, you know, spring is coming up, right?
And in spring, you kind of go through all your stuff.
You do some cleaning.
You get some things out of the attic, maybe.
You open up, oh, remember this, honey?
This old photo album?
Well, this is what they've done.
You know, they're talking about Guantanamo now.
And they're talking about how, and they're trying to blame as if Trump hadn't been in power for the last four years.
And they're blaming how that's going.
I mean, that is some serious dusting off of the hits here.
They're playing off the greatest hits.
They're playing the greatest hits.
And that's enough to like, you can never know, and then you can release your greatest hits album, and that'll sell a few copies.
Yeah, Billy Joel is awesome live in concert.
I saw Billy Joel, too.
He was great.
Like, he could go for three hours without playing a... But then you somehow or another have to figure out how to compete with your contemporaries, right?
And what has happened is actually what began happening back in 2010, which is when the Tea Party started showing up, Fox News and the Republican Party had to be like, oh, this is new.
You know what I mean?
Like, this is the next evolution of all this conspiracy race mongering that we've done for so long.
We have to catch up or, like the Neanderthals, we're done.
Right?
They have to look at this now and figure out who they are in a post-Trump world, which is Something closer to that, which is the Democrats want their own supporters to be slaughtered to help China.
Like, they have to figure out their own vert.
I know, it makes me dizzy almost.
Well, there's parallels here because they kind of created this themselves.
You know, the first iteration was the Clinton impeachment when they launched, and then they developed this, you know, almost overnight, this incredible following.
And then, you know, part two was 2010, the reawakening.
And here is now, this is the part three, but they've created a lot of this on their own, like the Frankenstein's monster, which is sort of like what the Republican Party itself has done, if you think about it.
They created the mindset and then that recoil in horror when they realize what happens when you do that.
I think we're going to go decades until we fully understand or can appreciate, or whatever the word is, just how serious this was, this Stop the Steal, and what that did to the country, what it did to our elections.
And it's not just going to be like, oh, well, it was an attempted coup and a storming of a Capitol.
This is a movement that we're going to have to have a lot of time to try and combat against.
And we're going to find out just ramifications.
So it's like both these parties.
I mean, what can we argue?
What can we accuse the Democratic Party of doing that does this?
I can't even think.
I mean, people just want to be too safe in their spaces on campuses and be less of assholes.
Is that like what their legacy is?
I think so.
The closest thing is what people like Barry Weiss or oh, who's the one with Snowden?
Greenwald, Glenn Greenwald, right?
These people and Yasha Monk, I think, does this too, which is like it's like Oh, Campus Safe Spaces.
Pretty soon if you say a slur or say that you're a woman or a man, they're gonna pull out the guillotine or whatever.
Like, they truly, honestly have tried to make a brand off of that.
And, you know, you actually look now.
And we talked about this not too long ago.
It's like this new iteration.
You have your Marjorie Taylor Greene.
You've got your Boebert.
You've got your Cawthorn.
You've even got Dan Crenshaw, who, by the way, we talked about his Avengers wannabe video of attacking, you know, Antifa.
And like now, he's like, let's let's get to some civility, people.
And it's like, oh, all right, Dan.
All right, Dan.
Thank you.
You've had your chance.
Won't you sit down?
The whole point is right now, Taylor Greene, Boebert, Cawthorn, they're not on Fox News right now.
You know what I mean?
Like, they're not, they're kept away from it a little bit.
When they start going on there, and what are the stories that Taylor Greene says?
Taylor Greene says that, you know, the quote-unquote deep state and the cabals are carrying off these big giant, like, false flag operations, they're killing people, they're trying to take your freedom.
Boebert is telling a story, which by the way, all this is stories.
All of these are stories, and how many people can you convince to believe your story?
Boebert is telling a story which is, I have to carry a gun into Congress, and guess what?
I'm willing to do it.
And somebody needs to fight these people, and guess who will?
This gal.
I mean, that's what, that's literally the story she's telling.
Fox News is going to go with them.
They have to.
They have to bring them on because they need new stars.
They need the breath into this stuff.
Bringing Karl Rove in isn't going to help anybody.
Those old retreads, like you were saying, that's Mach 2, right?
That's not even like 3.
You're exactly right.
We're on like version 3 of Fox.
And now it has to figure out what it is.
Well, several weeks ago they started experimenting with integrating... because, you know, remember what I've said when I've watched Fox News in those, you know, deep dives for days at a time?
The daytime before the freaks come out at night is actually normal news, right?
Like, it sounds somewhat reasonable for the most part.
Like, you know, they could pass.
Yeah.
But they've been injecting these Tucker Carlson and the hair guy, my goodness, Hannity's... Hannity?
handed these little, you know, little couple minute inserts into the regular news and then they have to react to this.
So you can see what they're already trying to do and now they put Kill Me out.
Nick, do you know when they did that before?
Do you know when they did that before?
No, but it's... No, tell me.
2009-2010 with a fella... Let me check my notes here, Nick.
Let me check my notes here.
Glenn Beck?
Glenn Beck?
Did he have anything to do with the tea party?
A little bit.
A little bit?
Did he inspire the Tea Party to believe in conspiracy theories and he became one of the singular stars of it?
Yeah.
He did?
Yeah, that's what they had to do with him.
They would bring him on in order to spike the day ratings and he'd go on these shows that would report the news and all of a sudden Glenn Beck would be there talking about Van Jones and Acorn and like plans to replace white people.
Oh yeah, and then they're throwing Kill Meat out there in this new morning show they're trying, and that's been tanking as well.
So I get it, because remember, this is all about ratings, this is not about ideology at all.
Here's the thing, it's about ideology to the viewers.
But not at all for the producers and the people at Fox themselves.
So there's no question that they won't have any issue going crazy.
The only thing is, will the hosts have any problems with it?
And it doesn't sound like they were.
Maria Bartiromo, at some point in her career, was respected.
Right?
She was like the money lady, right?
People liked her.
She seemed reasonable.
And she is so far off the deep end.
But you know what?
The reason why she did this was because of money, right?
She gets higher ratings and more money from Fox.
It's almost like if you are a money person and you're looking at, well, how can I make more money?
I want another house or whatever.
This is how you do it.
And there's no moral argument in your psyche about whether this is good or bad.
And by the way, patient X for that is none other than the fish stick heir, Tucker Carlson.
He was on NBC.
Tucker Carlson has been, he has been fired from literally everywhere.
Like this is, this is, I want to say his fourth or his fifth gig because he gets fired constantly because he has like the worst face and he's a smarmy ass, you know?
And eventually what ends up happening is he ends up on Fox and he has an incredible instinct right now of what these people want, which is they want Trumpian white identity, faux populism fed to them over and over again.
And if you actually watch, Tucker's ratings are good.
They still are really, really good.
His show right now is the vanguard.
It's the protector of Trumpism at the moment.
And if you actually watch that show, it is nonstop Perceived aggrievement and perceived persecution and conspiracy theories, white supremacy, and Tucker Carlson is going to get pushed to the moon and he's going to bring Fox News right along with him.
And I mean, like, that's where this thing is heading.
And I want to say, on one hand, I'm so glad that Trump isn't on Twitter.
I'm so glad that Trump isn't on Facebook.
I'm so glad he's not pumping toxin into the body at large.
But for me, and I don't know how you feel about it, Nick, going back to the idea that it's a little too quiet.
It makes me incredibly uncomfortable and anxious knowing that there is stuff out there that is going on, conversations that are happening.
And that report in the New York Times, if people haven't checked it out, they should, about the days between the election and the coup.
If you go back and look at it, there are a lot of people around Trump who are trying to make illiberal democracy a thing.
They're trying to destroy our political system in totality writ large.
The fact that this is happening somewhere out here where I can't see it and I can't watch it makes me really uncomfortable.
Oh, yeah.
You know, I mean, it's funny because you talk about this and the other we don't know about out there in the in the ether.
Well, you know, there's like eight hours of video of Marjorie Taylor Greene that really I'm not sure has been released.
There's more of that that's going to come out, too, which is even crazier because she's it's like the list is is is as is the craziest of Q.
Conspiracies.
And to tie that with Trump, Trump completely backed her, as did Meadows and Jim Jordan.
I kind of studied that this weekend, too.
There was a guy that came out and ran against her in the primaries and described how it happened.
And they kind of tried a little bit of releasing these things to battle against her to try and win.
But I think the guy, it sounded like he was resigned to losing once he realized how much backing she had from Trump.
It's important for us to state because we've been on this story longer than most.
It won't matter at all whether he released that stuff or not or found it, I guess, at least in the primary.
It's important for us to state because we've been on this story longer than most.
It's really important to state that like just saying the crazy shit that QAnon people believe, just like looking them in the eye and saying, you really believe in Jewish space lasers?
You really believe in moon civilization?
Like, JFK Jr.
is still alive.
There is a belief, a misguided belief, particularly on the left, that just telling the person that what they believe is crazy will make it go away, or just Trying to wrap your head around how crazy it is will make it go away.
People voted for Marjorie Taylor Greene because she believes this shit.
They support her because she believes this shit.
And this is an important thing.
I don't know if you saw, but she talked to Trump.
She reached out to Trump while all of this stuff has been swirling around.
And Trump told her, don't apologize.
Which is, by the way, the best lesson that he can give anybody.
Just never apologize.
Ever.
And she was like, I'm not going to apologize.
And he gave her, and we talked about this before.
I don't think Trump's going to run in 2024 regardless what happens in the Senate or whatever.
But we are watching the sweepstakes about who is going to take over Trumpism and who's going to run with it.
She got some daps.
She got some points.
She got some gold stars.
She got some Trump coins, if you will.
Trump ducats, whatever we want to call them.
Like, this is what a certain segment of the population is looking for.
Right.
Now, this is the consequence, by the way, of a free and open society.
It produces insanity, mass insanity, right?
If you're in North Korea, like, they tell you what you have to believe.
And most people ultimately are forced to do that, right?
We've seen people who've escaped, right?
And they talk about it.
And when you're born, the way they raise you is you have to believe that Kim Jong-un is the supreme leader from God, whatever, you know, all this ridiculous stuff.
But when you have an open society like this, you know, it's going to breed this kind of insanity and like in some weird way in our First Amendment, you know, defending You kind of have to sort of, like, that has to be allowed to exist to some degree, I guess.
I mean, I don't know how else to... And by the way, this is what their big grievance is, is that by calling them out on the insanity, that's silencing them, it's the next step toward fascism.
So they want to make a direct connection between us saying you are lying and creating and destroying democracy, To them, this is the same thing that the leadership in North Korea does, or China does, to silence, or Russia.
You know what I mean?
It's a very disarming way of arguing, which is completely intellectually dishonest, but it's very hard to get a footing to come back from that.
It's really, really important also on top of that because you're exactly right that this stuff happens in an open society.
But it also happens in an open society that starts to decay, right?
Like where there's a massive problem.
And we're getting ready to talk with Jared Alexander about radicalization and stuff like that.
But I just want to point out really, really quickly with Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Two things can be true at once.
I think she should be expelled from Congress.
I 100% believe that the rules of expelling a member of Congress should apply to someone who has pushed for the execution of her colleagues, has talked about overthrowing the United States government, and traffics in dangerous radicalized conspiracy theories.
There are reasons for these rules.
But the same thing that is important at that time is, Nick, if she got expelled, She would not consider that to be a bad thing.
She would make so much money and gain so much clout and so much power from that happening.
Because the right, as a reactionary force, is all about perceived persecution.
Who is getting attacked?
Who's getting held back?
Who's being censored?
All of those things, they are desperate for martyrdom.
And so both of those things are true at the exact same time.
But that's something we've got to reckon with.
We've got to figure out because shared open society is hard.
And more on that topic.
We're going to have veteran and journalist and author Jared Alexander joining us here in just just a second.
Hey everybody, welcome back.
We're here with Jared W. Alexander, who is a writer with works in Esquire, Rolling Stone, The Nation, Narratively, and Elsewhere.
He holds an MFA in Literary Reportage from New York University, Arthur L. Carter School of Journalism.
He's the author of the upcoming memoir, Volunteers, Growing Up in the Forever War, out in November.
He is a veteran, but I want to point out first and foremost that I have not talked to him in five years.
The last time I saw Jared, we were hanging out and covering the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio.
Three of the weirdest-ass days of my life, I have to say.
And it was a weird period of watching armed militia groups, extremists, the alt-right.
We went to a Milo Yiannopoulos event where Richard Spencer was hanging out at the bar You'd turn one corner and Alex Jones would be there.
We turned another corner and ran into Roger Stone.
I have to say, Jared, I'm glad to have you here, but I have to say in the time that we haven't talked in the last five years, what we watched in Cleveland, what it's become, the weird shit situation that we're in.
Could you have imagined this from that time?
How are you feeling about things?
You know, I kind of oscillate back and forth on surprise.
I think that, like, the crowd itself was not surprising, given what we saw in Cleveland in 16.
I mean, like you said, every time you turned a corner, you saw insanity.
Low grade or high grade.
But I was a little stunned to see them, you know, storm those barricades and walk themselves into the Capitol.
That was a, I think I said this to you before, I was in a Sherman-esque mode after that.
I was very much like, I kind of want a William Sherman, those kind of ideologies out of the ground.
But at the same time, there's a part of me that's like, no, this is kind of on brand.
This is the local culmination of that.
It's not over by any stretch of the imagination, I don't think.
But for that act, it somehow fit.
It was a narrative of theft, stabbed in the back kind of attitudes that persisted throughout the past four years, irrespective of the fact that the man was president.
And I think that was, in a certain respect, a natural conclusion for that.
So, give us a little idea of your background, because I think it's pretty unique in terms of someone who's a journalist now, and what your connection is to the forever wars.
Well, I grew up around the military.
My mother, stepfather, father, and just about all my grandfathers, including my stepfather's parents, were all military.
Predominantly Air Force.
My grandfather on my father's side was in the army.
And so I just kind of grew up around it.
The Gulf War was a huge chapter in my life when I was about 10.
I have vivid memories of watching the footage of Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings announcing the start of the air campaign.
My stepdad was in the UAE for that.
It was the first time he had ever been deployed.
Deployments were not At least for the Air Force, they were not terribly usual.
They're not a usual occurrence like they are now.
It was unusual for him to go for, I think he was gone for maybe eight months, and that was a remarkably stunning event to have happen.
And then, of course, it's tethered to a piece of history.
But so my formation was just predominantly military, but at the same time, it was a little bit more, I think, maybe give myself too much credit, but it was somewhat retrospective, or at least introspective.
I understood that it was, There was flaws in it.
I mean, I was a big student of Vietnam when I was a teenager.
I got really attracted to the war.
I still do read a lot about it now.
I'm re-reading Neil Sheehan's book on John Paul Vann and Halverson's books.
And I've always been attracted to that conflict, and I was as a kid.
More for the stories of it, the typical rifleman story.
And then that kind of grew from there into the World War II and Civil War.
So I went into the Marine Corps in 1998 as an infantry rifleman and spent four years in the infantry.
I did two years as a rifleman with an infantry company and went to the Mediterranean pre-911, you know, a typical kind of six-month cruise in the Mediterranean with the Navy.
And then I went to this unit in D.C.
that was responsible for Responding to chemical and biological weapons attacks.
So if you remember right after 9-11, there was the anthrax attack in D.C.
Well, if you saw a picture of a guy in a gray suit and rubber boots walking in with a shopping cart in a weird vacuum, that was me and my friends.
We went in those buildings and took air samples and dust samples from the carpets and had that analyzed and dealt with that.
And then from there, I went to, I became a combat correspondent, which I guess in shorthand is basically like Joker from Full Metal Jacket.
And I went down to North Carolina and I spent seven months in, I ran their, I was a military editor of their newspaper for a while and then I went to the Horn of Africa for six months as a, basically their public affairs officer, or public affairs chief.
And then I went from there, I came back to the States briefly and then I went to Iraq A rifle battalion, and was involved in some conventional and non-conventional operations in the Al Anbar province, way up near the Syrian border.
This is in 2005 and 2006, about a year after the Battle of Fallujah.
And I've been around the military even since to some respect, though I kind of pulled away from it considerably after I left the Marine Corps.
I was still working as a contractor, sort of as a day job, while I was moonlighting as a writer of varying events.
And so I've been kind of in close orbit of it.
I keep trying to, it's almost like a godfather syndrome.
I kind of try to get away from it and it sort of sucks me back in.
I think that's kind of a common theme amongst most veterans.
I tell most veterans, listen, when you get out, do anything else.
Anything else.
And it's not because the military is inherently a bad place to work.
It's so you can get some experience from just doing something that's antithetical to that lifestyle.
Or just try something else so you get a little bit more of an education than what that offers.
So yeah, I hope that answers your question.
It's kind of a roundabout way of doing that.
For sure.
I love any time we can talk about regular and irregular actions.
That's all I can say there.
That's always a good time when you can have those conversations.
So what I would say is this.
I was lucky enough to get an early edition of your book, Volunteers, which I think is Fantastic, and I can't wait for it to get out in the world.
But for anybody who's listening to this interview, you'll notice also that Jared already threw in like some pop culture references to try and bring the thing full circle.
And one of the things that I found really interesting about your book, which shouldn't shock me, is how much your experience before you were in the military was based upon
Watching the movies reading the comic books sort of absorbing that sort of culture and we had we had the cartoonist Nate Powell on who is talking about the the rise of fascism through popular culture and Through the forever wars and all this stuff and you write in the book about how you had this idea about the military and what it was and then of course you get ready to go to Iraq and you know that it's a wrongheaded war.
You write at one point, you say that this was a failure of diplomacy, a failure of foreign policy, right?
And you go anyway.
Can you talk a little bit about the narratives of service and the military and sort of the reality of it and what that is for somebody who goes from one to the other and what that does for a veteran or somebody who serves?
Well, I guess to get to what I was kind of iterating in the book in a lot of ways was there's a certain, the military offers a certain adventure that the average life, the average American life in general terms does not offer.
And so when you're, when I was kind of raised with the Indiana Jones and the Star Treks and the Star Wars and all those war films, it was like I was looking around at my outside world.
I even talk about it with the Air Force.
I was, you know, saying eventually got to a place where the Air Force began it seems to date.
Even with all of its, you know, the things that it does, which are, you know, can be pretty incredible.
Even that began to seem stale or just a little pedestrian.
But when you go into a place like that, one of the things that separates it dramatically from the average, from just the American experience, the American civilian experience, is the connection you have with other people and the range of emotions you experience when in stressful situations.
You know, usually the best bonds are formed under duress.
You know, when you have two people who are, you know, being exposed to harsh conditions, either violent conditions or just environmental, those bonds are a lot stronger than just two friends hanging out and having a regular time together.
You know, I think you and I probably shared a little bit of that with Cleveland.
We were sitting there surrounded by batshit craziness and, you know, I remember leaving, when I left, I was like, man, that guy, me and that guy, you know.
I felt something.
There was a little bit more of a bond there than if I was just hanging out with you at the bar, because we had gone through and experienced that sort of thing.
And so when you get out of the military, one thing I do notice, especially my first two years especially, was a little bit tough for this, was that goes away.
It ceases to exist.
Not entirely.
You have your veteran friends that you keep up with, and you have those sort of connections, but they're all in They're all in retrospect.
They're all sort of built on a certain nostalgia for that period when you were doing that thing.
And there's no growth from that.
In fact, it kind of locks you a little bit.
It sort of chains you to the radiator.
As far as my involvement in Iraq, what was interesting to me, and I think I say this about Vietnam too, is I knew Vietnam was mindless.
It was just a mindless war to go to.
Iraq was very similar, you know, and yet I was, I just kind of naturally accepted that because I had one, no agency to change it.
And two, that was the, that was, you know, to quote, to quote many of veterans of Vietnam that, you know, don't, this is the only war I've got, don't knock it.
You know, like this is the, this is the war that I'm fighting and this is the war that my country is fighting.
I have no way of adjusting that.
I think it's wrong on a, Geopolitical and for a larger military picture, but my own involvement is not going to change because of that.
There's no amount of protesting that I was going to be able to do to alter its course.
So the best thing to do is just do the best I can in the very small bubble that I have agency in, and then come out of it and try to have some wisdom.
Maybe learn a little bit extra in the process of going through that experience.
You know I'm so glad you brought that up because I don't have any military in my family so my impressions are basically from books and movies which are most interesting when they deal with that that the grappling of you know whether or not you believe in what you're doing and you still have to do it anyway and I and is it am I wrong in saying am I right in saying that like it seems like the Marines specifically are the ones who are supposed to question authority and you know and make sure that everything is done is right I feel like they're the ones who are more permitted to be Maybe is insubordinate.
Maybe not the right word, but they have more freedom to to be that way.
Oh, no Yeah, it's actually the opposite there there Now what I would say is that they they do have a tendency to be very Fire and brimstone when it comes to basic virtues now that doesn't mean it always applies downstream to the average Lance corporal though I think it does tend to an average
You know, I think that they're very, I had some experiences dealing with the officer corps or the senior officer corps and general officer corps.
And one, you know, they are very big in the structures.
The structures of the military and its relationship to the civilian government is really important.
And that's not just the Marine Corps.
I think the military at large is that way.
I mean, you saw that with the sort of clumsy, I mean, Mark Milley,
Clumsily sort of reluctantly putting himself in a position to be involved in that, that mindless, I keep using the word mindless because I, my adjectives are terrible right now, but, um, that sort of, um, the thing with the Bible and the church, yeah, the photo op, you know, and then, you know, and I'll even go, and I don't, I don't know how, how, how true the statement would be, but I would even, I would even make a loose posit that some of the lack of,
of commitment from the National Guard on January 6th was to avoid the perception of being committed to a political action, either against it or for it.
And so they just sort of set it on their hands.
The military is remarkably, almost sometimes to a fault maybe, tries to stay apolitical.
I mean the Hatch Act sort of forces their hand there in a lot of ways.
I've had a lot of discussions about Jim Mattis.
You know, the late Secretary of Defense who resigned.
And I've had a lot of friends who say, why didn't he speak out after the fact?
I mean, he had all this opportunity to go and, you know, he was in the room.
He could have, him, well, not just him, him and H.R.
McMaster and John Kelly, they've all could have came out and, you know, beat on Trump with their shoes.
And, you know, probably would have been right.
But the structures and the traditions of the military kind of prevents them from doing Almost at fault, almost to a fault.
So in terms of like looking at a problem, now as far as the Iraq war, the military isn't going to, the Marine Corps isn't in a position to look at the foreign policy and effect change in it.
They're going to get a directive from the, they're going to get a directive from top that says, all right, listen, I need you to commit to Marine divisions and I need you to sack Baghdad.
And you know, and I need you to plan for post-occupational or not.
Or in this case, not planned for post-occupation, you know, post-occupational efforts.
And so that's what they did.
They said, OK, well, I'm going to bring over the 1st Marine Division and the 2nd, and we're going to go up Mesopotamia.
And they did it, as far as conventional warfare goes, they did it in exemplary style.
Now, everything that came after that was a disaster.
There are articles of pop culture that sort of point to that.
Have you ever seen Generation Kill?
The adaptation of Evan Wright's reporting from the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion, he does a very good job of showing the Marines attitudes, including junior officers, where they were effectively saying, we have no rules of engagement here.
What are we doing?
Why are we doing this?
And are there strictures coming down from high that can guide our decision making?
Because right now we're losing this in the long run.
So there's a certain, not quite dogmatic, but there is definitely a, Compartmentalizing of dissent, if you will.
So, I'm really glad that you phrased it like that at the end, because there's something, I feel, in all of this that has to be said, which is, not only was the Iraq War mindless, but it was part of a larger geopolitical strategy, right?
It was about American hegemony, it was trying to secure resources.
Revenge.
The idea of revenge, whether real or imagined, or some sort of quixotic type of thing.
A thing, and hearing you talk about this, I think is one of the reasons why we're having this conversation with you, is because you looked at the contradictions and were like, could I learn something from this?
I think a lot of people who go through this, when they go through a war that they necessarily come to become disillusioned with, like let's say a Timothy McVeigh, Who leaves the Persian Gulf, right?
And believes that he went to war for no reason.
He feels completely isolated and he finds comfort with other veterans, paramilitary groups, extremists.
We have now had war wars that have gone on God knows how long you could even say whether or not they're over or not.
They continue.
We have veterans who haven't been taken care of.
They haven't been given necessarily their pay, their health coverage, all of this.
Now we've reached this point where the American experiment is in real trouble in a lot of different ways.
We have a lot of disillusioned veterans who are here at home.
A lot of them obviously are joining these extremist groups.
We had a ton of veterans involved with paramilitary groups storming the Capitol.
If you actually watch the video, and I assume you could tell more than I could, they were organized, trained, they were using nonverbal communication.
There was a lot going on in that operation.
Can you talk about the consequences of having wars like this for so long, and having veterans who aren't necessarily taken care of or valued, and what that eventually leads to?
Well, you know, it's funny, because I think that America, over any country in probably modern history, America has been given examples of how not to, if you excuse my language, how not to fuck this up.
Like, the Vietnam War, they get signals from the Ho Chi Minh appealing to Truman, and the French involvement in Tonkin, right?
Persian Gulf War is a signal to the American policymakers not to invade Iraq later, and yet they do exactly the opposite.
So that's one aspect of it.
Timothy McVeigh, it's funny because I've been reading up on him a little bit and I always thought that it was ironic that he had such a disenfranchised view of that conflict because even the people that were in it, generally speaking, understood their mission, they understood their objectives and they accomplished them and they came home victorious.
So it's almost like I almost sort of reduce his His motivations to him singularly or just that group of people, very, very small group of very cynical and with a very dystopian outlook of the country and the country's involvement overseas.
Now we can look at the, the, the forever war and we can look at Vietnam as analogies to each other, right?
Or you can use it at Vietnam as an analogy, right?
Like after Vietnam, Vietnam last, you know, the major ground combat operations last eight years.
Um, and they come home from that.
And they have this, again, this sort of stab in the back feeling.
They start to mobilize into these John Birch Society type organizations, though John Birch predates it, obviously, but that, you know, they start organizing into these paramilitary groups.
They have this very cynical attitude about the military or about, excuse me, about the country.
They kind of feel that the culture is weakened.
I'm sure you've, you know, it's got a weak culture and that sort of thing.
And I'm sure you hear a lot of this, you see a lot of similarities to, Weimar Republic.
Yeah, you see here the same kind of language is coming out of those organizations and and so I but I think that I think that a lot of the disenfranchisement or a lot of the attitudes of veterans who find themselves aligned with far-right extremist groups some has something to do with that lack of just or that or that that disconnection they feel when they come home they leave the military is you're around a group of people That are like-minded.
The military does have a tendency to sort of value strength above nuance, and that is kind of a conservative mentality.
I think the military is predominantly conservative, and I think it's conservative for that reason.
It has a tendency to view strength as a virtue rather than intellect.
Um, that could probably could probably go right back into some Hofstadter there and find some answer reasons for that.
And, but I do think that modern, uh, the, the guys who are finding themselves a lie to the right wing are looking at, uh, the extreme right or looking at the disenfranchisement they're feeling coming home, finding the VA systems not being taken care of, finding themselves alienated by the majority of the population who is largely forgotten about their conflicts or as just sort of Sort of shoveled them under the rug a little bit because they're a little bit too hard to talk about.
And those kinds of groups have a tendency to recruit based on those principles a little bit, I think.
And it's just a natural fit.
Now, also I think that there's a, one of the things I've been thinking a lot about is the FBI starting to look at these guys as terrorist organizations, which is fantastic.
And I wonder if it took so long because there's always been a natural connection to the right wing in police forces.
It's well documented.
And I do kind of wonder if it's hard for those guys to see themselves as somebody who is engaging in terrorist behavior.
It's hard to leave the military where you're basically paraded around in absence of reason sometimes.
I hope that answers your question, but I think that's a lot of it.
I think a lot of it comes from the disenfranchisement that veterans feel, and that's what shoves them in that direction.
And they're going to say, no, I'm not at all.
I believe in the Constitution and all that.
And I think that it's being corrupted, even though it's patently not.
I hope that answers your question.
But I think that's a lot of it.
I think a lot of it comes from the disenfranchisement that veterans feel.
And that's what shoves them in that direction.
It's a sense of loss.
And if you can go, I mean, Hunter Thompson wrote about this in Hell's Angels.
The guys who were coming back from World War II were banding together to form motorcycle groups because they had no way of reconnecting with a population that just didn't experience what they experienced overseas.
And coming back to normal.
Yeah, yeah.
And so I think that there's a little bit of that going on with the Three Percenters or even Proud Boys.
I think there's a certain camaraderie that exists there that they can't find anywhere else.
You know, I can't help but think there's a parallel between that and, like, people getting out of prison.
Not to say that prison is like the military, but certainly there's a similarity, I think, of adjusting back to... It's an alternate reality.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And it sort of, you know, begets maybe more crime because they kind of gravitate again towards people they met in prison.
All those things, you know, kind of, there is a parallel.
At first glance, in my mind, I was going to say that Vietnam veterans who were treated so poorly coming back, Absolutely, I think there is a direct lineage to those things.
paramilitary groups that are so threatening in places like Michigan.
But I think what you were just saying was that there is a direct connection between that and what we see now.
So I just wanted to explore that for another couple sentences.
Is that really is true that that was happening where it was – would those kind of groups in the 70s and I guess maybe into the 80s be considered the same kind of radical terrorists that we would consider them now?
Absolutely.
I think there is a direct lineage to those things.
I think the core formation of – the groups that existed, the militia groups that existed in the late 70s and 80s is the nucleus of what is there now.
I mean, because it doesn't diminish.
In fact, it only grows even prior to 9-11, right?
I mean, Timothy McVeigh, the Ruby Ridge, and I'm not going to say Waco because that was more religious based.
But they loved having Waco as like a second example.
Right, right.
Yeah.
Though I doubt David Koresh would even remotely consider themselves tethered to that.
I don't think that that would be a fair assessment.
But you're right.
They would use those two in conjunction with each other to motivate their actions.
I mean, that's how Timothy Mubay blows up the building in Oklahoma City is based on those two events.
But that core, yeah, that core predates the 90s definitely.
So the only other place it could have come from is Vietnam.
I think it's also interesting too, I mean, what we're currently watching, I mean every major military campaign has always had an equal and opposite reaction when the people come home.
Particularly if there's not some sort of Achieved goal.
Do you know what I mean?
Like if there's some sort of frustration or some sort of a political tumult I mean because in order and a lot of what we talk about on this podcast is we talk about the difference between Actual reality and actual politics and like the the narrative, you know This right story that you tell people to mobilize them the story for Afghanistan and and especially Iraq was this neoconservative Straussian Idea, right?
We have a crusade and people love crusades.
It doesn't matter if they're real or not but the problem is the crusade and the narrative of the crusade only lasts so long and eventually it has to be replaced by something and eventually people start wondering what in the hell are we doing, you know, in Jerusalem right now?
Why are we here?
And then you got to come back to Europe.
You got to come back to the United States and I think I think when when that narrative sort of gives way, I think that there is a frustration about people who want to believe the narrative, the idea of American exceptionalism, the idea that America is chosen, all of that.
And I think it all kind of gets like tied up in a knot.
I don't know.
Does that ring true?
I think that that's interesting.
I don't know.
That's a good question.
I kind of wonder.
I do think that there's an attitude about the military, especially when it's When it's the average sort of conservative layperson when it comes to the military, that what the military does is inherently right by virtue of the fact that it's doing it.
Right.
And I've always had struggles with that, even when I was in the military.
I've gotten into plenty of arguments over this with other Marines.
That's what I was going to ask.
Is that something that you felt, or that more people felt, or were there discussions about that?
There were not many discussions about it.
Usually, it wasn't a lot of... I won't say that there were...
Our thinking about it was very local, especially on the enlisted side of things.
We weren't really considering the things we had no control over.
It was more just like, well, I've got these few blocks to patrol.
What can I do to be a force of good in this, generally speaking?
Most Marines I met, most Marines I ever worked with, were trying to be a force of good in specific ways.
But what's interesting is that I think that this has probably maybe been one of the first times I've ever seen in the conservative circles where they were just as much about leaving a conflict as liberals were.
Like, nobody wants to be in Afghanistan anymore.
Nobody wants to be in Iraq.
Nobody wants to be in Syria.
And it's funny how it's become this sort of ping pong that gets batted back and forth between the both wings of our government, right?
It's, you know, this guy made a promise to get us out of Afghanistan and he's not doing it.
Then the ball bounces back to the other, to the victor of that election, and, well, that guy didn't get us out of Afghanistan, though he promised to do it.
And, meanwhile, the wars are continually unabated.
Now, the troop levels are incredibly low, comparatively, but that doesn't mean that the reasons for, you know, the fact that we're still there and we're still involved in some military capacity is, those are still there.
Those haven't gone away.
And nobody seems to know how to do it.
You know, and there's a kind of a sort of a Gordian knot in a lot of ways.
If you pull the guys out of there entirely, there are political ramifications to that because we've been there for so long and because we've screwed the place up so bad.
ISIS is an example of that to a certain degree.
I was a believer getting out of Iraq, and I still kind of am, but I also understand that doing so would probably concede Iraq to Iran, at least on a subterranean level.
You know, because based on the Sunni-Shia divides.
But yeah, so I, there's a kind of, so, but as far as like the veterans are concerned, I don't think that there's a lot of animosity, at least from what I've read, a lot of animosity over the fact that the wars are technically lost in terms of, or as being a lot of animosity over the fact that the wars are technically lost in terms of, or as
We can let you go, but I have to ask you something, which is among like the people you served with and the people you know, is QAnon a thing?
Are you watching the people that you've known and you've served with fall under QAnon, or is this something that it feels like it's outside of?
Thankfully, no.
I think that my veteran friends are stunningly in opposition to that.
I've got a few track groups that I'm in.
I keep a loose tie with some others and they think a lot of it's nuts.
They're just patent nuts.
A few of my veteran friends are very much like, you know, they're on the side of the government here.
They're very much like, you don't get to walk into the Capitol building and start demanding heads because you lost an election.
I even have a couple of guys who are friends of mine who are in the Army who are like, you know, I would be willing to
Be in defense of that violently, you know, I don't think that that's right to do and I would defend I would defend her I would defend the institutions before I would defend those people You know really quickly I'm curious, you know around 9-11 is when we noticed and then beyond that where quotas weren't necessarily being met by the military as for recruiting and they had to maybe perhaps lower the standards is what I had read about and remember, you know, I was teaching in high school and they would bring these
I'm curious, you kind of bridged that gap between like around 98 and then past 2001 in a way that, did you see there was, and I wonder if that could connect to Q as well, because perhaps the younger, you know, people in the military now are more susceptible to that.
But the point, the question I was asking was, did you experience firsthand any kind of notion of a lessening of the standards of who would get into the military and how that might have affected how everything was processed after that?
Not really, no.
I never saw anything like that.
I do know that the Marine Corps never really had too much trouble keeping an enlistment quota.
Granted, their quota was always lower.
They don't need as many people.
I know the Army may have had some struggles there.
I don't think it ever got to the level of Vietnam where you had the Army basically recruiting people very low on the mental spectrum and making some really ugly decisions there.
I don't think it ever got to that point.
I never saw anything like that in the field, certainly.
Everybody that I was there with was pretty good at what they did.
Awesome.
And we've been talking with Jared W. Alexander, who is a writer with works in Esquire, Rolling Stone, Nation, Narratively, and Elsewhere, holds an MFA in literary reportage from New York University's Arthur L. Carter School of Journalism.
He's the author of the upcoming memoir, Volunteers, Growing Up in the Forever War, which is out November.
It is fantastic.
Where can the good people find you, Jared?
Twitter mainly, Jared underscore Alexander.
First name is spelled J-E-R-A-D.
Absolutely.
All right.
Thank you so much, man.
All right.
Take care.
Thanks.
All right, everybody.
That was Jared W. Alexander, J-E-R-A-D, if you want to find him out there and about.
Great writer, great thinker.
I'm really glad he was able to join the podcast.
Yeah.
I mean, I get that from when you talk to people like that, the solution to helping veterans tends to be mostly the mental side.
Really, to help them adjust.
There might be something physically wrong too, but it seems like that is a thing, which is also an anathema.
People don't want to deal with psychiatrists and feelings and these things, especially in that environment, which is what precisely would help.
I think you know a thing or two about masculinity and how it's toxic.
Well, and by the way, I just want to point out, this is something we talk about all the time.
Like, is it hard to solve problems?
Absolutely, it's hard to solve problems.
But if you don't solve that problem, it turns into other problems.
Inevitably.
And that's the problem with America, is we have so many problems that we just didn't deal with, and now they've turned into a big, giant, toxic, poisonous snot.
Yeah.
I mean, by the way, we mentioned that, you know, there's so many examples of history teaching us what not to do.
You know, Russia taught us not to go into Afghanistan.
We don't even need to have our own history to teach us these things.
We can look at everybody else.
And by the way, why?
Because we were on the other side.
We were with the Afghanistans.
We were with Osama Bin Laden.
And then we screwed that relationship up, and then next thing we know we have 9-11.
So it's frightening how the foreign policy in America continues to fail, I suppose.
And by the way, it's not just enough to say that Iraq was a wrong war to fight.
We have to talk about the fact that we had an entire generation of people involved in these wars.
We spent trillions of dollars.
We had all of this stuff happen.
That doesn't just occur in a vacuum, right?
You don't just go into one country after another and put, you know, thousands of young men and women in danger and then suddenly you just wake up and you're like, oh, everything's fine.
That wasn't even a big deal.
It changes everything.
Oh, by the way, the 2008 crash, you know, is deeply affected because we were stuck in those wars and had been stuck in those wars for five years previous.
So, absolutely.
And then that's when, you know, you could argue that someone like Osama bin Laden won.
He embroiled us into two wars in trillions and trillions of dollars and now, you know, got everybody angry at each other in a civil unrest.
It's a mess that we're still not recovered from.
No, it's going to take a long time and a lot of hard looks in the mirror, but we are happy that you are involved in listening to this show.
It means a lot to us.
We're trying to look in the mirror.
We're trying to understand this.
We're trying to deal with actual larger problems so we can start to untangle that knot.
A reminder to everybody, we do have an additional bonus show on Fridays.
All you have to do to access that is to become a patron over at patreon.com slash monkrakepodcast.
You'll get that, all kinds of other stuff.
You will get a first glimpse at our audio documentary, A Crisis of Confidence, that is getting ready to come out.
So all you have to do is go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
In the meantime, you can find Nick over at Can You Hear Me SMH.
You can find me at J.Y.
Sexton.
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