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In last night's live show, Jared and Nick discussed Liz Truss's ouster as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom before sharing a good clip of Ohio Senate candidate Tim Ryan dismantling his opponent JD Vance to explain why he's holding his own in a race the Dems had given up on.
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Welcome to the Weekender Edition of the Muckrake Podcast.
A thank you to everybody who is not only a patron, but also we've got a live show taping today, which means that all of our supporters are here hanging out, being good to one another, talking about hair care tips, because my co-host Nick Halsman, unfortunately, is out of condition.
I am.
I don't know, but I'm going to make it through.
I really am.
I'm going to, you know, I'm a gamer.
I have faith in you.
I just want to say, that was the sound of a cold beverage.
Hope the week has been kind.
I hope the weekend is even kinder.
Nick, we gotta hop on a plane.
We gotta fly on over the pond.
And we have to start in merry old England.
And I have to tell you, Nick, things ain't great!
Things ain't great in Great Britain, man.
Listen, the Queen was alive before she took over, and then the Queen was dead after she took over.
You can't come back from that.
Nick, you cannot blame Liz Truss with the death of Queen Elizabeth.
You can't do that.
I'm just stating facts.
I'm asking questions.
That's all I'm doing.
You and Alex Jones, my friend.
But that is correct for anybody who hasn't noticed.
Prime Minister Liz Truss has resigned after 45 days.
That's correct.
Four.
Five.
Days.
As Prime Minister of Great Britain.
Let's hear it from the Iron Woman herself, Liz Truss.
We set out a vision for a low-tax, high-growth economy that would take advantage of the freedoms of Brexit.
I recognise though, given the situation, I cannot deliver the mandate on which I was elected by the Conservative Party.
I have therefore spoken to His Majesty the King to notify him that I am resigning as leader of the Conservative Party.
I gotta tell you, by the way, before we get into this actual subject, Nick, one of my favorite things about England and Great Britain is whenever this happens, inevitably there are people in the background just absolutely taking the piss out of these people.
Yelling at them, heckling them, because that honestly is probably the type of reaction that these people deserve.
They probably do deserve to be heckled by people telling them that they're not worth a shit and they probably need to go and go away for a while.
You know, you'll know this better than me, but I wonder if, you know, this has been going on for a long time in England, where you can be rowdy, you know, in government.
And is it possible that when we decided to set up our government, we were like, we don't want to do that, and we made a conscious decision not to have that?
Because I would love to have that happen more often, you know, in Congress.
You know, that's interesting that you bring that up, because actually, part of the deal in Great Britain is that it's a society of duty, right?
You understand your place in the world, you take it with quiet dignity that that is your place in the world.
And then, like, in America, like, it's the idea that we're able to sort of, like, you know, go wherever we want, do whatever we want, the society of the individual.
And the weird thing is, the side effect of that is, no, we respect our leaders here.
And in Great Britain, it's like, well, I guess your consolation prize is you, you know, get to call these people out on their bullshit.
I kind of like that.
Yeah, well, you know, what's funny is that, like, Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene are trying to, like, kind of recreate this, right?
They've been misbehaving in Congress a little bit and doing stuff that is normally not accepted.
Although, by the way, we shouldn't say this, because I know you talked about in the past, we've had, like, duels or something, right, on the floor of Congress, right?
Yeah, we've had duels, we've had canings, we've had all that good stuff.
Hopefully we can get away from that and not have that come back at some point.
But I gotta tell you, this whole LizTrust thing, there's so much to get into.
Just so we're all on the same page here.
This 45-day administration.
First of all, head-shaking.
But what has happened here is that Liz Truss was brought in, of course, because Boris Johnson had to resign, which we'll get to good old Boris here in just a second, had to resign because one scandal after another had lost the faith of the Tories and the Conservatives.
Liz Trust comes in immediately to try and handle the bad economic situation in Britain, does the one thing that people like Liz Trust can do, which is we're going to lower taxes on the wealthy and everything's going to work out there, immediately destroyed the pound, worsened the economy.
Since then, it has been just inter-party chaos.
We had a situation where Labor brought out a fracking bill, And you actually saw Tories not just fighting with one another, manhandling one another, going in front of cameras and saying, you know what, I'm fucking tired of this.
And we have reached a point where Liz Truss, who was completely not up for the job in the first place, has now had to resign almost immediately after taking power.
The Tories, I don't know if you've seen this, Nick, right now, the Conservatives trail Labor 23 to 52 in terms of, like, preference.
They do not have to have a general election for months.
They could just go ahead and announce a new person.
We'll talk a little bit about who might possibly take over.
Again, Boris Johnson jumping back up here.
But Nick, as funny as this is, and just absolutely head-scratchingly stupid as this is, This doesn't portend very well for the future in not just Great Britain, but also in the United States of America, because the fact that leaders aren't able to do anything right now to address these problems, it doesn't go anywhere good.
I'll just say that before we get further and further into this thing.
I mean, is it worth bringing up again the point that I make all the time, which is that, you know, in the in the US, at least presidents tend to get way too much credit and way too much blame for the economy, right?
Like a lot of times it's a lot of other factors.
This one, though, seemed like it was kind of a mix, right?
Because the pound begins to fall before it even goes into effect, the tax cuts they wanted to install.
So it was almost like a groupthink took over and everyone sort of panicked before the fact.
But I guess sometimes it's just if you're not, you don't have the political capital, you don't have it.
And you know what I mean?
And you certainly need to be able to maintain it in your own party, you know, to stay in power.
That's what's kind of, you know, nice about their system, right?
Is the second you start to lose enough, you know, a certain percentage of people in your own party, you're on the chopping block pretty quick.
Yeah, I mean, there is a little bit different of a mechanism that takes place there, obviously, because you have to enjoy the confidence of your party.
But I do want to point out that basically trust comes from this background, the Institute of Economic Affairs, which is one of these neoliberal free market think tank groups.
This is, you know, she's been cultivated by them.
Her rival, the other person who was in contention for taking over after Boris, Rishi Sunak, is from the same background.
another neoliberal, another quote unquote free market person.
And I got to tell you, Nick, the idea here was that they were going to cut taxes for the wealthy.
That's one of the neoliberal pushes, right?
You go ahead and you say, you know what?
You're wealth creators.
You're going to run the economy.
Everything else is going to trickle down.
But here's the thing, man.
If Sunak comes in, and I got to tell you, this is what the market is looking for.
And this is where everything is going.
Sunak is an austerity person.
Like, we're talking about going in and trying to make things work by cutting back on spending.
And one of the things that we need to start wrapping our heads around, and Americans need to learn from this as well, The standard of living that you enjoy and I enjoy, and you know, we both grew up in the 1980s.
We were basically told the United States was going to be on top forever.
You know, it was morning in America.
Everything was just going to go up and up and up.
The type of standard of living that we enjoy, and listen, America is very exploitative and brutal in a lot of ways.
But that standard of living that Western nations have reached is dependent on continuing to grow and continuing to hold on to the power and growing that power and growing that influence and growing these economies.
Nick, the engine's running out of steam, and if the engine's running out of steam and things start falling back a little bit, the only thing you can do is start to roll back that standard of living.
And you wanna talk about Britain, and by the way, you and I have been paying attention to politics long enough that we've always said, look at somewhere like Britain where they have like National Health Service, right?
Take care.
I hope you get to keep your health care.
I'll just say that.
On top of that, we're getting ready to face a winter where God knows what's going to happen.
Who has any idea what levels that Britain is going to sink to over the next couple of years?
We are watching the previous empire suffer through the convulsions of the end of that expansion of power.
And the United States, we're back here looking at them, laughing, and I got to tell you, we're walking down the same path.
Well, there's something to be learned, certainly from, you know, inflation is also a huge problem there.
And people are really dealing with it on that end, especially now that when the pound craters, that just makes that worse.
And what I think what we can learn from that in the short term going into November, is that the notion of what we're dealing with with our inflation, kind of, you know, will supersede, you know, the anger we had for Roe v. Wade.
And I'm back.
And so that's what's happened.
The timing we talked about in the last podcast is off.
The initial energy we had and people registering to vote and the excitement earlier this year when they got rid of Roe v. Wade is now dissipated.
What it's taken hold is a discontent with the economy itself.
And like what you said, you know, the only way to get out of a recession or the only way to get rid of inflation is to sort of force a recession.
Force, you know, the demand to go down and then... I mean, that's the theory.
That's the theory.
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