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Feb. 7, 2023 - The Muckrake Political Podcast

44:54

Balloon Fight

Now Nick Hauselman is out and Jared Yates Sexton is back in! He's recording from the road and talking about spy balloons, idiots standing outside and taking pot shots at a target in the troposphere, and the implications of a new Cold War. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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	Hey everybody, it's JRJ Sexton here, manning the mothership while Nick Halsman is out.
	We've been doing this tag teaming now for the past week.
	We should be back on Friday's Weekender Edition, ready to team up again.
	Reminder for everybody who is listening to this, if you want the Weekender Edition, go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
	We need your support, we need you to subscribe.
	Keeps the show ad-free, editorially independent, and rolling on and growing.
	I have to assume, first and foremost, that if you are listening to this, you have survived the great Chinese balloon terror of 2023.
	I've been on the road for the past week doing book tour stuff, and I gotta tell you, watching this hysteria play out From one hotel room and four bedroom after another has been absolutely surreal.
	I am 41 years old, which means that I grew up during the Cold War, and I had my fair share of Soviet Union paranoia situations.
	Of course, I grew up in radical evangelical circles, which meant that Not only were we made to be afraid of the Soviet Union, but it was of course tinged with satanic supernatural qualities.
	A very, very bizarre experience growing up in that situation.
	Popular culture, of course, was filled with anti-Soviet propaganda that was then ran through the lens of American experience and American exceptionalism, which, you know, posited the idea that America was the representative of supernatural good and historical good.
	This takes place in, you know, everything from movies like Rocky and Rambo, a lot of those Sylvester Stallone flicks.
	And, you know, you kind of, over time, despite any awareness of it, or maybe even a lack of awareness, you become indoctrinated by these ideas.
	Cold Wars are really strange, and they produce very strange circumstances.
	This balloon situation was really, really strange.
	We'll talk a little bit about what happened there, what to expect.
	Let's go ahead and set the table for anybody who hopefully was able to tune this stuff out.
	A Chinese spy balloon was found floating over the continental United States.
	I believe floated mostly over the state of Montana, probably around the areas where a lot of our ICBMs and silos are located.
	We still don't know what was on board of the Chinese spy balloon.
	Maybe it was some sort of new technology that was able to gain new insight into our weaponry.
	Maybe It was a test run to see about carrying an EMP, an electromagnetic pulse weapon, which would knock out all of our power.
	I don't know what our fever dreams are cooking up at this point.
	All of it's possible.
	It might have simply been a psychological operation to see what we would do in any case.
	Of course, the Republican Party went after Joe Biden, saying that perhaps he was seeking permission from the Chinese Communist Party.
	Which is a fun thing, by the way.
	This is a wrinkle that I'm looking forward to in the next few years as this new Cold War heats up.
	They can't just say China, they have to say Chinese Communist Party.
	Wonderful little piece of linguistic Strategy.
	The idea that he had to ask permission from them in order to shoot it down.
	Of course he ended up shooting it down over Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
	An F-22 Raptor, which for anybody keeping track at home is one of the biggest boondoggles In the history of the military-industrial complex.
	Unbelievable amounts of money spent on a plane that is virtually unusable.
	But I'll tell you what, it shot down that balloon damn good.
	Flew out there, shot a missile at the balloon.
	At the balloon.
	Of course, There's something more to this story.
	Uh, we, we, this isn't anything out of the ordinary, really.
	Uh, there've been other Chinese spy balloons, uh, that have gone over the United States of America.
	Uh, it has been revealed.
	And of course the Republican Party has been, you know, mum on this.
	It's been revealed that at least three of them passed over the United States, uh, during the presidency of Donald Trump.
	Because of course they did.
	But this whole thing is one of the most absurd things in a long, long time.
	On top of making me say balloon and having a discourse where you have to pop the balloon.
	Why have we not shot down the balloon yet?
	We saw JD Vance and others like him.
	These Republican just absolute pretend cowboys sitting outside with their guns.
	Swear to God if that balloon passes over my house I'm gonna shoot it down.
	His house probably in the Cincinnati suburbs.
	You gotta love it.
	You have to love the posturing.
	It's incredible.
	But of course it was a perfectly made event in all ways, shapes, and forms.
	It was something that people could go outside and see.
	Even as it was floating around the troposphere, right?
	It was something that people could look up and see.
	It felt foreboding.
	It was a piece of intelligence gathering material for our world rival.
	It could be tracked.
	I mean, it had all of the pieces in place for something that would just be ready-made for a media sensation, a media feeding frenzy, and our media totally played into it for all those reasons.
	It was, it probably, I don't have access to it right now, but it probably drove
	You know, some pretty incredible traffic on the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN probably had a hell of a ratings bonanza with one graphic after another showing you what the balloon was, where it was going, its track, its trace, like the possibility that you might go outside and see it pass over your house as it gathered, I don't know, how many cars you've got.
	Which is going to be absolutely essential in winning the new Cold War.
	It is.
	All I can say is this.
	Spying is unfortunately part of a nation state driven world.
	That's how this stuff works.
	Undoubtedly, there's probably a spy satellite passing over your house right now, figuring out how many cars you've got, maybe even how many trees there are in your yard.
	The United States spies on everybody constantly.
	I can't imagine how many balloons we've got flying around the world right now, much less satellites.
	The idea that the United States is the one country that can't be spied on is ludicrous.
	It's just another part of American exceptionalism.
	So the spying aspect of it It's it's it's par for the course.
	We know where China's weapons are.
	We know what they're doing.
	And they know what we're doing.
	Hell, basically everybody knows where our silos are and where our weapons are.
	There is a possibility, of course, that this spy balloon might have had new technology on it that could have figured out new things.
	Sure, absolutely, undoubtedly, that's happening constantly.
	There's probably An amazing amount of technology that has been loosed on the world in recent years that we are not completely privy to.
	I would not be shocked if that is part of course of why we have seen all of these UFO or UAP reports.
	That probably has something to do with innovative drone technology that we haven't been told about yet.
	This is what happens in a nation-state driven world, particularly in a hyper-capitalistic world.
	You're going to have cold wars like this.
	There is a constant incentive for nation-states to clash like this.
	The United States of America, of course, in fighting the Soviet Union in the Cold War, following World War II and up until the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was an incredible cover for a war over resources.
	It provided an ideological story that people could follow.
	I was indoctrinated into that, and you were likely indoctrinated into that as well.
	We were taught that we were good, and they were bad, they were out to get us, and as a result we should do anything to stop them.
	You might even have been alive during the Vietnam War era, where that indoctrination led to a catastrophic war, and on top of that, like, led to just absolute barbarism On a group of people who simply wanted freedom based on the American model.
	That indoctrination has reached millions upon millions of Americans.
	And what does it do?
	These cold wars are incredibly useful for superpowers like the United States and China.
	China has its own issues.
	Xi Jinping's hold over power has been a little bit shaky.
	Particularly, Xi has pushed and pushed and pushed for more powers and a more sweeping and long-term use of powers.
	The people in China are starting to demand democratic reform, liberalism, much like they did in the 1980s.
	And that situation has led to a little bit of a faltering within China.
	As I talked about in The Midnight Kingdom, one of the things that happens consistently is whenever internal frictions start to hurt the stability of a nation-state, it's time to push outwards.
	It's time to pick a fight.
	Because what does it do?
	It unites people against an outside enemy.
	It allows you to scapegoat internal political rivals, saying that they are traitors, that they are working with the external enemy, and it allows you to go ahead and consolidate power.
	China has every reason to push this issue.
	The fight over Taiwan is one of those like pawns in a chess game where there's always something up ahead that you need to prepare for.
	Now Xi has gone ahead and prepared Chinese forces reportedly to be prepared for an invasion of Taiwan by 2027.
	That was the goal.
	Does that mean that they're going to invade Taiwan?
	No, it does not.
	It means that it gives them a goal up ahead.
	This is something to go ahead and prepare for.
	When you are number two on the pecking order, you have to continue to prepare for the eventual confrontation with number one.
	This is one of the reasons why capitalism never leads to sustained peace.
	This has to happen.
	In the United States, since the fall of the Soviet Union, there has been a consistent push, particularly by people like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld.
	These types of neoconservatives were the ones who were pushing consistently to create a permanent American hegemony.
	This was the Project for a New American Century, all of its affiliated projects, including, of course, the disastrous Iraq War.
	The idea was that through an aggressive policy that the United States might be in charge of the world forever.
	Which is an incredible goal, really.
	Imagine sitting in a room with other people and saying that out loud.
	Try that out.
	Try saying that.
	That feels bad in the mouth.
	The idea was to go ahead and corner the world's resources.
	And while they were cornering the world's resources, they were going to intentionally suppress any potential future rival.
	We have seen the United States for the last 20 years, more than 20 years actually at this point, so we're talking back into the 90s.
	Even the Clinton administration was playing into this.
	The United States, for decades now, has intentionally tried to create a situation that would curb any of this.
	Congratulations, fellas.
	Heck of a job.
	And the reason why it was never possible is because it is never possible.
	You can never have a permanent hegemonic situation.
	Anybody who pays any attention to history whatsoever has to understand this.
	The only thing you can do is that you can perpetuate conditions to make any sort of hegemonic situation more conducive to surviving.
	You can be benevolent.
	You can treat people well.
	You can not invade other countries and create wars that kill upwards of a million people.
	You can probably go ahead and invest in the well-being of your people.
	You can create more democracy instead of destroying it.
	Creating more internal frictions which then have to be vented outwards Neoliberalism was a poison pill.
	It was always going to happen within this type of a situation, but it was also going to destroy itself consistently over and over and over.
	If there was a computer program to run simulations of this, there's no situation where it doesn't end up destroying itself like a snake eating its own tail.
	So now we've arrived here.
	Where we were always going to arrive underneath this particular worldview and philosophy.
	And what do we have to show for it?
	An America that's coming apart at the seams, a democracy that's fraying, and now burgeoning new Cold War.
	This Cold War, luckily enough, is going to be something that a lot of hardliners, right-wingers, and even moderates are going to use to go ahead and address the material conditions that have created the American decline.
	The problem is they're going to steer into it like a car skidding on the ice.
	We now have Air Force General.
	This is fun.
	This is a lot of fun.
	I can't wait for all of this.
	This is a peak of where things are going.
	This balloon situation in the past couple days.
	Also, Air Force General Michael Minahan.
	And by the way, the Air Force is just absolutely brimming with these types of psychos.
	They love it.
	They love sounding off on this stuff.
	And if you pay attention to any of these military channels of information, like, this stuff happens all the time.
	Like, we think these generals are just absolutely serious people, but someone like Michael Flynn, he was very instructive in showing you what's actually going on within the general class of the United States.
	These generals just pop off all the time.
	Like, at least three, four times a year, if you pay attention to it, these generals are gonna say some wacky shit.
	And they're just gonna go out there and like talk to some media group, or a reporter, and they're just, or they'll give a speech, or they'll release a memo, and then, you know, go ahead and leak it to the media.
	And they're just going to say, listen, World War III is two weeks away.
	We have to prepare.
	Because that's who they are.
	That's their mindset.
	So Air Force General Michael Minahan has basically run down every reporter and every media outlet that he could find and declared, we're going to war with China in 2025.
	in 2025.
	Hell of a prediction.
	So within two years, we're going to be in an outright war with China, which by the way, would mean World War III, possibly a nuclear Armageddon.
	And the reason that Minahan throws this out is because we have a presidential election in 2024, and Taiwan has a presidential election in 2024.
	So obviously in 2025, we'll be at war with China.
	This is what's called saber rattling.
	It's a bunch of military people just sitting around waiting to go to war.
	Because it's what they want to do.
	It's what they fantasize about.
	It's how they define themselves.
	And if you actually go back through history and you take a look at these military endeavors, and you take a look at these battles, what happens always is that the people who end up fighting them are dying to fight them constantly.
	One of the things that I found researching both American rule and the Midnight Kingdom, like going in and reading the books and the papers and the speeches of like the generals, but also the specialists, the theorists, all these people.
	The first Cold War, you would not believe how many of these people were absolutely stewing for war with Russia.
	And we're not just talking about limited engagement.
	We're not talking Korean War.
	We're not talking Vietnam War.
	We're talking total, outright nuclear war.
	And at that point, I mean, they had one analyst after another who was coming out saying, hey, guess what?
	You can win a nuclear war.
	Like, yeah, you're gonna lose 25, 30 million Americans.
	I mean, yeah, yeah, the entire eastern seaboard would be vaporized.
	You know, maybe middle America would be fried to a crisp, you know, the temperature of the sun.
	But I guarantee that our people dwelling in the mountains would survive.
	That stuff was taking place in the 1950s, 1960s.
	the 1950s, 1960s, and there wasn't social media, there wasn't the internet, there wasn't You know, it still ended up in the papers.
	It still ended up in books.
	I mean, some of these people were treated like real respectable intellectuals.
	They were invited on talk shows and the like.
	But there wasn't this media apparatus that we have now, where someone like this Minahan can just absolutely pop off and say some wacky shit, and the next thing you know, it's just making the rounds.
	And the content mine, that is the internet and social media, it demands spicy stories like this.
	People are going to click on stories that say, US General says war with China in 2025.
	And what ends up happening is that the United States as a nation-state, China as a nation-state, and they do the exact same thing.
	Their state apparatus is constantly saber-rattling against the United States.
	You end up in a feedback loop.
	You communicate with each other through these speeches, through these press releases, through these pieces of popular culture.
	Because you're not necessarily talking.
	Like, sure, maybe you have a moment where Biden and Xi, you know, have a summit.
	I mean, those are moments maybe where you can lower the temperature a little bit.
	But so much of this is a feedback loop that goes back and forth.
	So you have wild for war generals who are going to increase the temperature, and you have a Republican Party that, again, has absolutely no electoral appeal to the people.
	There's nothing that the Republican Party has to offer.
	They have no policy.
	They have no principles.
	The only thing they can do is go into your bedroom, tell you what to do, go into your schools, ban your books, and tell you what to do with your body and what to do with your mind.
	That's all they've got.
	They've got no programs.
	They've got no roadmap to making anyone's life better.
	But the only thing that they've got is fear.
	And this is a perfect situation for fear.
	Nativism and paranoia are incredible entry points to an electorate and to a people.
	This new Cold War was both predictable but also terrifying in its ability to go ahead and create a Trojan horse situation in order to give a right-wing hardline party like the Republican Party power.
	This is one of those situations that kind of takes the game board and shakes it up a little bit.
	Much like how global climate change is going to do that once the resources start dwindling.
	Once the land masses start dwindling.
	Once the massive refugee crises take place.
	This is a serious thing.
	The balloon isn't.
	The balloon is stupid.
	The balloon is a vehicle to get stuff like this going.
	It's going to lead to more provocation, more incidents, and what's going to happen is the perception that America is vulnerable is going to grow, much like what happened with Sputnik, much like what happened with the supposed missile gap, and what happened during the Cold War, and we now have all of the research, we have all the materials, all the information, all of the statistics available.
	We now know decades later That what the United States said about the Soviet Union was not true.
	We now know that all of those analysts, we now know that all of those generals, all of those theorists, all those right-wing hardliners, that they were creating an alternate Soviet Union that was capable and competent and was ready to fight.
	And once the Soviet Union fell and we gained access to all those materials, we knew that wasn't true.
	They have allowed an alternate reality vision of what was happening to go ahead and move American opinion, plus also American policy.
	This is what created the military-industrial complex in the first place.
	Following World War II, we should have demobilized.
	We should have worked toward creating a peaceful world in which the people enjoyed better lives.
	In which they had more social safety nets.
	Which they lived longer, they had more education, their health was better taken care of.
	We should have invested in people and also created a longer peace.
	Instead, we refused to demobilize and we completely shifted all of our resources toward war making and war production when there was no war except for the war in these people's minds.
	That eventually, over time, Created a cycle that nearly led us to World War 3.
	Of course, with what happened in Cuba.
	And multiple other incidents that should be taught in school, but aren't.
	It led to a feedback loop in which the United States and the Soviet Union continued to draw up their weapons and to raise the heat constantly, unnecessarily.
	And, by the way, everybody suffered.
	Americans suffered.
	Russians suffered.
	The Vietnamese suffered.
	People around the world suffered.
	And the result was that they were plunged into a world war over resources that eventually created this monstrous neoliberal global system.
	That has hurt all of us.
	The authoritarianism that is going to be necessary to fortify this global capitalist system, it rides on the back of something like this.
	Now, that's not to say that we're underestimating China's capabilities.
	I don't know that.
	But I will tell you that people knew at the time that the Soviet Union was not this monster that everybody was portraying it as.
	There were analysts left and right who said that this simply wasn't true.
	We don't know.
	And we don't know where this is going.
	But the last thing that we need at this point is for an unnecessary Cold War to go ahead and get started, because I have to tell you that the only way that this works is that the hardlining, right-wing Republican Party pushes paranoia, pushes nativism, pushes militarism, which by the way, Ron DeSantis is going to reap the benefits of.
	And what would the Democratic Party do?
	Let's go take a look at the Cold War.
	Because I have to tell you, the Democratic Party capitulated.
	Following World War II, the fear that Republicans perpetuated during the second Red Scare through people like McCarthy, The Democratic Party absolutely folded like a wet paper bag and threw so many of its own that it created the New Deal coalition overboard.
	And what did the Red Scare do?
	It targeted women, it targeted people of color, and it targeted gay people.
	And the left, by the way.
	Let's go ahead and throw that in there because they rejected them and threw them overboard without even a second thought.
	And what happened was the New Deal coalition was systematically dismantled.
	The Democratic Party was consistently terrified that it was going to be seen as socialist or communist or Russian sympathizers.
	And as a result, they all postured consistently as, you know, Cold War warriors.
	If you're ever interested in that, take a look at somebody like a John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who is now seen as sort of like this anti-war president, but absolutely campaigned as a Cold War warrior.
	Because the Democratic Party was terrified that they were going to get linked to the Communist Party in Russia.
	Have you seen anything within this Democratic Party that makes you think for a second that they wouldn't do the same thing?
	This is an Overton window situation.
	This is how a country moves further and further right.
	This, going back into the 1980s, is how you end up having Reaganism, which moved the Overton window so far right that it was almost unrecognizable, which set the table for where we are now.
	This type of stuff This is bad.
	Real bad.
	But as I was writing on my sub stack this week, or I guess last week, what is time?
	We now have the privilege of having this information at our hands.
	We know what happened.
	We know what can occur.
	We can look back at the first Cold War and learn lessons.
	You don't win a Cold War by fighting.
	You win a Cold War by not fighting.
	We can shore up our problems, we can answer the material conditions that have led us here, and we can avoid this situation.
	Now, everybody who is covering this is absolutely, shockingly, getting it wrong.
	They are looking at this, again, through the lens of crisis incentive.
	Talking about this constantly, ramping up the paranoia about it.
	What are the Chinese doing?
	What do they know?
	On top of that, they are not looking through the lens of these escalating crises that are all part of the exact same problem.
	They want to believe that the Republican Party is going to moderate as opposed to, again, swerving into this thing full force and probably going even further right.
	A reminder, by the way, that Donald Trump, despite all of his trade warring with China, basically walked around singing Xi's praises.
	Constantly.
	We're talking now about this potential presidential race in 2024, and already our media, because they are mostly moderates, They're already seeing this through a lens of moderation.
	The Donald Trump fever has passed.
	Thank you January 6th Commission and Liz Cheney.
	We appreciate your service because you fed us an absolute line of bullshit that corresponds with the type of bullshit that we really, really want.
	So now the conversation is, what is the Republican Party going to do?
	Of course, Ron DeSantis is being legitimized, which tells you everything you need to know about where this thing is going.
	We're watching the New York Times cover his absolute destruction of public education in Florida and the erasure of people of color and gay people and trans people, saying that he's quote-unquote taking on the establishment and building his brand.
	If you don't hear that in Chuck Todd's voice, I don't know what to tell you.
	Because that's what this is.
	It absolutely is DC Cosmopolitan Monday morning quarterbacking.
	Any strategy is good strategy.
	Did the strategy work?
	Then it was good strategy.
	DeSantis is already getting high grades from a lot of these Never Trumpers who are saying, you know, listen, he knows how to control the state.
	And on top of that, you know, he's not this clown that Donald Trump was, which was their only problem in the first place.
	They didn't like how Trump carried himself, they didn't like that he was an embarrassment, they didn't like that he didn't come from the right places, and that he was a reality TV D-lister, and also the fact that his base was made up of the people within the Republican Party that they think are disgusting and just needed to go away.
	The problem with Donald Trump was that he turned the controls around a little bit and used this faux populist movement.
	It was never what he believed.
	It was never what he advocated.
	It was his style and how he did it.
	So now they're going ahead and jumping behind DeSantis.
	I was in shock that Tom Nichols said that Florida has a right to destroy its public universities.
	Of course he believes that.
	Of course he believes that.
	This is, this is exactly what they want.
	They want to destroy public education they always have.
	They want to destroy Social Security, which we'll find out with the debt ceiling fight whether they can do.
	They want to go after Medicare, Medicaid.
	They want to do all that.
	And, by the way, this Cold War situation, if you think that people like Tom Nichols aren't just, like, dying for this thing, I don't know what to tell you.
	Wakes back some of those old ideas about who they think that they are.
	This is how they're able to square the circle when it comes to someone like Ronald Reagan.
	They want their own Cold War.
	They want their own generational defining moment in fight.
	It's all about ideology.
	It's what helps you sleep at night.
	You don't have to think about taking public education away from poor kids and feel bad about that because you're fighting a war.
	You're fighting on the side of good.
	So of course they're laundering Ron DeSantis.
	Not shocking.
	Exactly what we predicted.
	Exactly what we expected.
	But now there's some really gross kind of... You know, a lot of it is twiddling of thumbs and it's wasting a lot of people's time.
	But it also, it goes a long way in sort of showing us how these people perceive the world.
	And not just how they perceive it, but how wrongly they perceive it.
	Right now there is a push within the moderates of the Republican Party to start pushing some of these more moderate Republican candidates because of course they don't want a Donald Trump and of course they're ready to turn the page and get back to quote-unquote respectability.
	So, for instance, we have here on the Hill another one of these moments where they're floating out these potential narratives.
	The title is Kemp's Political Clout Grows Ahead of 2024.
	And we're talking about Brian Kemp in Georgia saying that he's playing a leading role in the party's bid to take back the White House and starting to chew on the possibility that maybe Brian Kemp might be the answer.
	I gotta tell you, as somebody who, you know, lived in Georgia for 10 years, Brian Kemp is absolutely not going to be President of the United States, he's not going to be the Republican nominee.
	By the way, if I'm wrong about that, I'm happy, my words, and I'll apologize and eat some crow on that, but he is not going to be the Republican nominee!
	I don't know if people remember this, but he was absolutely loathed by Trump supporters because he was seen as handing the 2020 election to Joe Biden.
	Now that doesn't mean that Kemp didn't handle that situation well.
	He did what, and basically created the blueprint for what DeSantis is following now because DeSantis and the people around him are very intelligent and the donors and the institutions behind him know what they're doing.
	He laid out the blueprint for how to deal with Trump coming after you, which is just let him come after you and don't respond.
	You don't get into a rock fight with this asshole.
	Kemp was able to navigate that very, very well.
	And on top of that, the thing that no one's talking about in these articles is that the Stacey Abrams campaign in 2023 didn't work.
	Or 2022?
	What is time?
	It didn't work.
	It was a bad campaign.
	Kemp was going to win that.
	And on top of that, this split Georgia, this idea that you need Republicans in charge of your legislature, but you want to send some Democrats to the Capitol.
	That's what happened there.
	Brian Kemp is not going to be the nominee of the Republican Party.
	For that matter, neither is Nikki Haley.
	They're trying to make Nikki Haley a thing now.
	Nikki Haley was part of this new Republican generation along with Marco Rubio.
	And if you've been paying attention to politics for long enough now, and I know some people have just been waking up with what's been going on with Donald Trump, so maybe you have a memory of this.
	Marco Rubio was supposed to be the savior of the Republican Party.
	Go back to 2016.
	He's the future.
	And that's not even counting his weird State of the Union response with the water.
	Like, Marco Rubio was always supposed to be the smart, talented, dependable Republican that was going to take the torch.
	That's not where this party is going.
	They're not going to nominate a Haley.
	They're not going to nominate a Kemp.
	They're not going to nominate a Mitt Romney.
	That ship has sailed.
	They're going to find someone who can harness the authoritarian energies of Donald Trump.
	And they're going to find somebody who can handle the controls of state.
	It's a Ron DeSantis.
	Someone like a Ron DeSantis.
	And this new Cold War scenario plays right into his hands.
	He will tie wokeness to the Chinese Communist Party.
	They will talk about cultural Marxism.
	They will hit all of these same notes over and over and over again.
	But notice that our media, notice that the moderates, notice that these people are consistently going down the same wrong paths in terms of how they understand how things work.
	And it's because they see it only through the lens of their own ideology and worldview.
	This is why they've gotten it all so wrong.
	It's because they haven't had the malleability to adjust their analysis to understand exactly where the Republican Party is going and where the state of play is.
	DeSantis has all of the momentum and all of the makings of this.
	Maybe there will be somebody else, I don't know.
	Maybe there will be somebody pop up that maybe we don't even imagine right now.
	But I gotta tell you, this idea that Nikki Haley or Brian Kemp is going to be the nominee, that's madness.
	They truly think, like we keep hearing, and unfortunately what Joe Biden says, that their fever is going to break and they're going to return to normalcy, even though normalcy was never normal in the first place.
	That's simply not how this is going to work.
	Speaking of Joe Biden, just a quick little note.
	We do have the State of the Union this week.
	What we can expect already, and we'll have more analysis of this later, This is going to be a moderating speech.
	This ain't going to be great, folks.
	Ain't going to be great.
	This is going to be setting out an agenda that is more than likely going to be more moderate than you could ever imagine.
	There's going to be a lot of talk of crossing the aisle trying to make legislation happen.
	There is going to be some real walking around of the agenda that is not going to be totally pleasant.
	On top of that, just a note, keep an eye out for Digs of China, because there's going to be some saber rattling at this baby, you better believe it.
	It's, um, it's not fun.
	It's not great.
	And you know, states of the union aren't great anyway, but it's these ones that are really bad.
	If you get, if you lose some semblance of power in the midterms, the Democratic Party comes crawling across an entire floor of broken glass, offering everything that could possibly be offered.
	Um, maybe I'm wrong and maybe he'll strike a defiant tone.
	Uh, that's not what I see coming up.
	But we will have coverage of that and more.
	Nick and I are going to be back together on Friday.
	I'm so excited.
	I've missed podcasting with my friend.
	It's been sad.
	It was nice of him, of course, to take the reins for a week.
	Thank you, of course, to Pete Dominick and Mike Leone for guest hosting.
	I've missed this show.
	I've missed you as well.
	Again, if you want access to the Weekender Edition on Friday, you need to go over to patreon.com slash mccrakepodcast and support the show.
	It keeps us editorially independent, ad-free, keeps us rolling along and growing, which we are, and we need that help.
	So again, that's patreon.com slash mccrakepodcast.
	In the meantime, maybe avoid going out in your backyard, shooting up into the air with semi-automatic weapons.
	Trying to take down spy balloons?
	That's the job of F-22 Raptors.
	It's what they were made for.
	It's what we sank all that money into them for, to go off of Myrtle Beach and fire off a missile while a bunch of people drunk on a beach cheered them on.
	Gotta love it, folks.
	What a time.
	What a strange, strange time we're in, but we're going to continue covering this and talking about what's actually occurring, where these things are going, Weird, weird stuff.
	In the meantime, if you need us, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?
	SMH.
	You can find me at J.Y.
	Saxton.

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