An Absolute Cesspool Of A**holes | Weekender Teaser
*This is the first 15 minutes of our weekly Patreon series The Weekender*
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It's the weekend, hence another Weekender - as Jared and Nick pull apart more details of the Matt Gaetz Pleasure Train. The thread pulls us to Tucker Carlson's despicable takes on trans people, and they finish up discussing what they're watching, including a documentary whose goal was to identify the Q in Q Anon.
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I'm Nick Hauselmann and this is an announcement to let you know that we are going to be doing a new series called The Weekender over on Patreon that will appear every Friday.
And this is a little sneak preview so you can get a handle on what it's like and why you'd want to go over there and join the Patreon and be part of that community which has been incredible and amazing with a lot of people there and a lot of great conversations.
So Here it is.
Check it out and feel free to check out the actual patreon as well at patreon.com slash muckrake podcast Hey everybody, welcome to the muckrake podcast.
It is the weekender edition Late night one open Cheers everybody.
We made it through another one I am here, as always, with Nick Halseman, and we have a lot to talk about, including Tucker Carlson embracing replacement theory and just absolute straight-out white supremacist, not even dog whistles, bullhorn, volume turned up to 11, white supremacy.
But unfortunately, Nick, we gotta start out in the gutter, man.
It's fascinating, so it doesn't feel like I'm in the gutter.
Only because I think we are both sensing what's going to happen eventually, and that's exciting.
Oh, man.
So, just to go ahead, because this is, of course, our Patreon-exclusive podcast, you know, we can pull back the curtain a little bit.
We can be honest about things here.
And I'll just say first and foremost, Nick and I, Nick, of course, lives in California.
We know this from California segments.
I live in the true blue state of Georgia, and that means that we are in different time zones.
And today we were trying to communicate to set up this recording, and for probably only the second time in our entire broadcast relationship, we crossed wires.
We completely misunderstood time and space because what is time?
But I will say, because we are taping this later than usual, This breaking story came out tonight with the Daily Beast around 9 p.m.
from Jose Pagliari and my friend Roger Sollenberger and I'm just gonna read the headline real fast for everybody.
Gates paid accused sex trafficker who then Venmoed teen.
That's about the sleaziest headline imaginable, wouldn't you say?
Yeah, but it's accurate.
Right?
But it's accurate.
You know, it's like...
It's grotesque.
It's absolutely awful.
It is so disgusting.
And I'm just going to read a couple of lines here.
So in two late night Venmo transactions in May of 2018, Representative Matt Gaetz sent his friend, the accused sex trafficker Joel Greenberg, $900.
By the way, high rollers here, man.
Just really disgusting creeps.
Well, by the way, it's not $900 to one person.
No.
The next morning, over the course of eight minutes, Greenberg used the same app to send three young women varying sums of money.
In total, the transactions amounted to $900.
And before we even take a step forward, we're now talking about laundering money through cash apps.
This is how dumb people are, right?
Like, this would not be the way you would do it if you didn't want anyone to find out.
Oh, it's so repulsive.
The memo field for the first of Gates' transactions to Greenberg was titled, Test, in the second.
And by the way, all of this is coming about because he left his transactions public.
So, again, not the smartest tools in the shed.
In the second, the Florida GOP congressman wrote, quote-unquote, hit up blank, but instead of a blank, Gates wrote a nickname for one of the recipients.
The Daily Beast is not sharing that nickname because the teenager had only turned 18 less than six months before.
When Greenberg then made his Venmo payments to these three young women he described the money as being for, are you ready, Nick?
I'm ready.
Are you ready?
By the way, for people listening, Nick has not.
I have not.
I can't wait.
Are you ready?
Yeah.
Greenberg then made his Venmo payments to these three young women.
He described the money being for tuition, school, and school.
It's so repulsive.
Wow.
You know it's funny because I have Venmo.
I don't often use it but I remember somebody came to wash my car and I paid it and then all of a sudden like the next day a buddy of mine was like hey who do you use to wash your car to come to your house?
I was like how the hell would you even know that and it turned out I had no idea either that it's public.
It's like a feed right that you can see what people are spending money on and I probably wouldn't have put it past a guy like Gates maybe to not realize that you know and not realize oh I should turn that off and make it private.
This is this is disgusting and like you mentioned high rollers because it's like I don't know what the going rate would be To pay a woman to travel with you out of state, right?
I mean, I don't know but nonetheless because I don't know you kind of have these fantasies and in the movies It's thousands of dollars, right?
Don't you have to pay that for I don't it and it's so terrible because it's like I I know you've seen this too, Nick.
It's like everybody who's ever ran across Matt Gaetz at this point is like, we were all waiting on this to happen.
You know what I mean?
And it's people who are his colleagues who are like, oh, he was showing these pictures and videos on the floor of Congress, all this shit.
By the way, my question here, why didn't those people say something?
Right?
Right.
What?
Oh, so you saw all this coming?
You were well aware this was coming?
Why in the hell aren't you saying anything?
Because you're morally and ethically bankrupt, right?
Because you are in a cult of a part, not even a party, right?
It's a, it's a lemming dive off of a cliff.
And then meanwhile, everybody who's looking at this entire case is just like, I have never seen anything so egregious and so obvious and so transparent as what we are watching now.
So it looks like we still have to say alleged crimes from Matt Gaetz, but it feels like alleged is getting on the bus and getting out of town.
Well, here's the thing.
A lot of these laws deal in the fact that he has to knowingly participate in these things.
Like, he has to knowingly either know she was under 18 or should have known she was under 18.
Now, let me ask you this.
Picture yourself, it's before Trump is out of office in January, and he goes to the White House and asks for a blanket pardon.
Does that sound like a guy who didn't know that she was under 18 when he slept with her?
I have to say, by the way, Putting my mindset... Well, first of all, I'll just say this.
Putting my mindset in the most recent past feels gross, too.
You know what I mean?
Even thinking about, like, just hearing you say, go back to 2020, it's just like, no!
No, don't make me do it.
I don't want to do it.
But then on top of it, to look at the gaggle of assholes around Trump and how many of them were coming in looking for these pardons, they really thought the tide was always going to be high.
You know what I mean?
Like, if you look at Gates, it's like, The egregious nature of these crimes, it speaks of somebody who is just so full of themselves and super optimistic, I guess I would say, almost like just a career criminal, like a chronic criminal.
And to hover around Trump and just hope somehow or another he could absolve their sins or hand them freedom or a pardon or something like that.
Like the amount of crime and grift and corruption that took place around Donald Trump and his administration.
If we ever knew the extent of it, I don't know that we would be able to sleep at night.
Well, look at the cabinet.
Like this is what I was trying to say for years now is that like, OK, you probably wouldn't catch Trump saying explicitly to Ben Carson.
go ahead, go spend $50,000 on silverware, right?
Or go make a skiff or whatever, like, you know, you need a private room or whatever, all the other guys in the cabinet did.
But clearly, There was the signal sent across the top, from the bottom of the top all the way down, where everybody felt emboldened to do this.
And there's no question.
I mean, listen, Gates is Trump.
Trump is Gates.
Trump is the guy Gates aspires to be.
He's one of the boys.
And so you know that they're hanging around at the golf club in Mar-a-Lago, and they're probably talking the biggest shit of all time about girls or whatever.
I'm sure Trump was like, God, I can't wait to be hanging out with you guys.
Let's go get some more of those girls for me.
But, I mean, this is now going to the Bahamas.
We've seen travel, right?
I think it's the Bahamas, which then starts to fold in, like, random fever dreams of, like, Epstein and Giselle Maxwell, Ghislaine Maxwell, which we talked about in the last pod.
This is interesting.
And I sent you over an article where they found other texts from an Israeli consulate, which, the way it's been reported, it's fact.
Like, these are confirmed texts.
I want to say, by the way, something happened this week on Twitter.
It was one of my favorite things.
Somebody was like, hey, Jared Sexton was talking about The possibility of CIA connections or off-the-clock CIA connections.
And they asked, like, a CIA intelligence agency person, they're like, does that sound right?
And he's like, oh no, we would never do that.
No, there's no way there's intelligence behind any of these extortion schemes or raising money.
Or, oh my God, can you even imagine if Jeffrey Epstein had weird intelligence connections that still haven't been able to be explained?
Or that Ghislaine Maxwell was in a family of spies?
Or that had weird intelligence connections?
Can you even imagine if all of that were true?
That would be nuts, wouldn't it?
But think about this.
If you are a CIA guy who wants to go in and get one of your boys who got abducted and you think he's still alive, you'd have to have a contact in Israel if you're going to You'd have to if you're coming from America, right?
It's a crazy story, but it seems, at least with the Texar, that this was a real thing.
By the way, the implication is that Matt Gaetz's father was already willing to fund this process, and it did get somehow folded into this notion of, we'll let your kid be the front of this if you help us get a little bit more money because they were running low, they needed more to get whatever.
This guy might be alive, this guy Levinson.
We have no idea.
And it might totally be a front for just trying to run some sort of a scam.
But have you noticed, by the way, nobody else is talking about this.
It isn't on any of the networks.
It's not in any of the papers.
So people are like, well, he made up the extortion.
It's like, he didn't make up the extortion plot.
The extortion plot happened.
It doesn't mean that he's innocent.
It was an extortion plot that didn't work out, that it didn't come into fruition, but nobody's talking about these weird ties behind it.
And there's a reason nobody wants to go on the record or talk about like the deep subtext of this.
But Chris Cuomo had one of the guys on the record, on TV, talking about it in a very reasonable manner.
So let's just pretend you want to take at face value what he was saying.
Levinson's alive in Iran.
They have a proof-of-life video from a year ago, whatever.
I mean, you can't necessarily... you could fake that.
Who knows?
And they need money to get him out.
And Gates, the elder Gates, was, you know, involved in, like, maybe helping fund that.
But, Matt, let's pretend for a second that that's true.
So now you have Matt Gates burdening that whole thing.
Like, Levinson's dead now.
He's not alive anymore, if he was, right?
Like, imagine that.
All to save his ass from sleeping with underage people, he might have ended up foiling what could have been a rescue plot that he would have been facing.
And by the way...
We're not even done with all the Gates shit.
Like, I've been talking to people left and right who are like, hey, we're about 15% through.
Without question.
They're like, listen, this is not just, it's not just Gates, it's not just this asshole from Florida, who, by the way, has already rolled over on him.
Oh, yeah.
If people think it's just the two of them doing this shit, Are you kidding me?
You think that this guy is trafficking and exploiting these people, but he's only doing it with Matt Gaetz?
Are you shitting me?
Because not only is it addictive for these assholes, but they want to find a way to make money off of it.
And do you think that somebody's going to be running a scam like this, who is, by the way, a member of government, he's a tax collector, and he's a high-profile guy, and by the way, he's using a United States representative?
One of the most high-profile United States representatives, and you're telling me that the FBI and the intelligence community didn't know that?
They didn't know that one of the most high-profile outspoken United States representatives, who meets... Are you ready for this?
Who meets...
Regularly with the President of the United States of America You're telling me that they and by the way, the Daily Beast just got on here and looked at his fucking PayPal and Venmo It's not like they were hiding this like they were like top-notch oceans 11, you know heists Oh like You're telling me that they didn't know that?
You're telling me that people didn't know that this shit was going on right underneath everyone's noses?
It was an open secret in Congress!
Right.
Now, you know Matt Gaetz is just a bastion of legislative creation, right?
Just a fount.
Yeah.
Laws being written.
Just changing the world every moment of every day.
Because, you know, the only law he basically tried to sponsor was one about marijuana because his best friend is this, first of all, he's a doctor, but also like a marijuana entrepreneur.
I think I'm going to be a marijuana entrepreneur.
You want to join me?
We'll do an entrepreneur.
You know, actually, that makes me laugh.
A few years ago, something tickled my fancy about... Have you ever heard of people called futurists?
No, tell me.
A futurist is a person who just says, I have thoughts about the future.
So it's like, you just start saying in the future we'll do X or Y. You're a futurist.
That ticked me.
To become a marijuana entrepreneur, I think all you have to do is go outside and yell at the top of your lungs, I'm a marijuana entrepreneur!
And then you are it.
So congratulations.
And you've been listening to a free preview of our Patreon-exclusive Weekender Show.
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