In your preview of the Weekender Edition of the Muckrake Podcast, Nick is still in Florida and Jared Yates Sexton uses his time at the helm to work out the kinks in his theory of "stream politics," involving the War on Terror, the invasion of Iraq, and a certain governor's time serving at Guantanamo Bay.
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Welcome to the Weekender Edition of the Butt Crack Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates Sexton.
Nick Halseman is, I presume, still in Florida.
Hoping that he'll return unscratched, unbruised next week where we can resume our regular podcast sensibilities.
I am holding down the fort on my own.
We're going to do something a little bit different today.
I am working on a little something, a little political theory.
And so, because we have these weekenders and, you know, we like to pull the curtains back a little bit and do them a little bit different, I'm going to work it out here in real time.
I hope what I do here is beneficial.
I hope it coalesces.
I hope it comes together.
It's a little bit like watching someone walk across a tightrope.
Hopefully I will not fall.
But, you know, I could always press pause or stop and edit out one of those falls.
So let's just pretend that tension is still there.
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The conservative reactionary turn and trajectory of the United States of America.
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This is one of the few places you're going to hear discussions about some really important things.
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So one of the things that I'm working on right now is a little something that I'm just rattling around in my head.
I keep calling it stream politics.
It's a way of looking more, I don't know, more of a fuller context.
of how things happen.
It's a mixture of the material conditions that you might see in a Marxism or something along those lines and a movement away from, you know, this idea of great men of history that is messianic in nature.
It's one of the main errors that we make when we analyze politics.
We get caught up in one individual After another, as if there's something inherently special about them, that forces time to change or history to change or events to change or politics to change.
And what ends up happening is we miss a larger picture.
We stop noticing how echoes of the past Have brought us into the present and are carrying us into the future.
A lot like a stream.
And I want to start this episode and this rambling working on this topic with a revelation that has just come out in the past few days.
Of course, Florida's Governor Ron DeSantis, one of the foremost, most powerful authoritarians in the United States of America, is priming his run for President of the United States.
And his new book has come out.
God knows what it's called.
They were bought up instantly by every one of these Republican billionaire donors.
That's how you know that he's got the seal of approval.
It's part of the smallness of modern politics that every time one of these books is released, you know, all of these like deep, deep pockets and institutes and think tanks and conferences, they buy up these books and turn them into bestsellers.
Basically to give kickbacks on the other side to the political figure who, and I'm using heavy air quotes here, authored them.
So from his book, but also from a couple of investigations that have originated down in Florida, it's come out that Ron DeSantis, who before he got into politics, immediately before he got into politics, served as a JAG in the military, that is a Judge Advocate General.
That is the the legal arm within that that sphere served as a jag and Spent time at Guantanamo Bay And everybody knows what Guantanamo Bay is, but let's go ahead and give it a little bit of a definition here for our purposes.
Guantanamo Bay, a lot like these rendition sites or black sites, where during the War on Terror, and who knows, probably still continues, people are taken beyond borders and beyond regulations and observers.
To places where certain laws are able to be cut out and or ignored.
In Guantanamo Bay, of course, a US military installation where a lot of war on terror targets and a lot of people just randomly caught up in the dragnet of the war on terror were imprisoned without their rights.
DeSantis serving there, and by the way has been on the record saying that he quote unquote actual quote enthusiastically served at Guantanamo Bay, a place where many, many human beings were mistreated, is a really telling thing.
You know, we get caught up in Ron DeSantis down in Florida, the individual, and do not get me wrong, I find him repugnant, I find him repelling.
The smugness, the gleeful cruelty, this is one of the reasons why I think he has been Tapped as a potential successor to the MAGA movement and Donald Trump is he has that ugliness to him as an individual.
This is a person who is more than fine to do the ugly work the dirty work and to look you in the eye.
