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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the recent leaks of top secret classified documents on a discord server and how such a person of low rank was able to get their hands on them. They had to talk about this ridiculous boycott of Bud Light by the right before pivoting to the possibility of a long and painful recession.
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I can barely move the old back, but the heart is ticking to the right time right now, so I'm happy about that.
And, you know, that's all I could say.
So we have some really cool announcements about a couple of things that are happening in the next couple of weeks.
We have an absolutely jam-packed show.
I got to tell you, I'm actually really excited about what we're talking about today.
Before we do, I would love it if you would indulge me very, very quickly on a story that I think has a thematic relationship with what you just said.
Nick, I'm a runner.
That's my chosen physical activity.
I like to run about seven or eight miles a day for whatever reason, I think, because I like to punish myself.
I'm also a 41-year-old man.
I have to tell you, I've never had trouble running before.
I took a tumble today.
I took I took a hell of a tumble and you've already seen that I've got I've got blood on the on the elbow of my leg is all biffed up my side is all kind of messed up my hands are all and you don't realize that when you scratch your hands like how sensitive they are like aftershave and such.
Yeah.
I started to go down.
And I gotta tell you, in my mind, and I'm sure you feel similarly at some wavelength, I thought I was gonna break every bone in my body.
I thought it was done.
You know what I mean?
I just thought that it was absolutely done.
But that wasn't the worst part about it, Nick.
The worst part about going down and hurting myself was that A young person, I assume that they were probably 19, but they looked 10 or 11, as they do now, came over to me and asked me, Sir, are you all right?
I'm so upset about this.
I don't like what has happened.
Time's cruel.
March continues on.
I'm only, I'm laughing through the tears right now.
Wow.
Well, listen, if you had said the kid was crying, then we'd have a Trump story here with the sir and everything.
So, uh, you know, did I tell you my story about that in the parking lot the other day?
No the moral of the story is don't walk through a parking lot on your phone at night as I you know those those concrete things you pull into that you know keep the car from going too far forward whatever just bifted on there and here's the worst thing about getting to be my age is A little bit older than you.
I was stumbling.
I had about three steps where I was completely doubled over like going for a ground ball and I could have maybe saved it but I don't have the strength in my legs anymore and I just like I have to go down and I kind of did a quick ninja roll on it and I'm still waiting.
Somebody's got that surveillance footage and it's probably the most ridiculous thing you'll ever see.
I'm waiting for that to go viral because you know that that would be something.
When I was younger, I was on campus at Indiana State University, and I was walking into the library.
I was walking down a path, and I hit a patch of ice, and there was a person getting ready to hold the door open for me.
And just complete instinctual muscle memory, I did the splits and came right back up and then walked in the door.
It was one of the coolest moments that's ever happened.
I wish it was on video at some point or another, but that ninja roll, I think, is really impressive.
Yeah, it was the last thing.
Otherwise, I'm going on my face.
You know, that was one of those things where it was like the last ditch effort not to completely, you know, break every bone like you described.
So yeah.
By the way, if you enjoy these old man ramblings, because that is what this is.
That's what we offer to you.
What other people don't, which is, by the way, why you need to go over to patreon.com slash mccrae podcast, because listen, the show is jam packed today.
We have some announcements!
Very quickly, some cool stuff that's actually getting ready to happen.
First of all, Saturday, April 22nd.
I almost forgot what month it was, Nick.
This month is choo-chooing along.
It is not slowing down.
At the LA Festival of Books, which, for you trivia heads, you muckrakers out there, was where the idea for the Muckrake podcast originally occurred, where Nick and I, over a couple of years, decided to do this show.
I'm going to have a panel, 10.30 at the LA Festival of Books.
I hope you'll come out.
But, by the way, for you geography heads out there, doesn't Nick Halseman live out in Los Angeles, you say?
I can confirm that.
Yes, he does!
And guess what?
I'm gonna go out, I'm gonna hang out with my buddy Nick for our first prolonged hang.
And what does that mean?
It means that we are going to produce some of the first in-person, live, together, muckrake podcast shows in history.
We're going to record from Nick's studio.
On top of that, on Tuesday, April 25th at the Changing Hands Bookstore in Phoenix at 6pm.
Is that Mountain or Pacific?
What time is that?
I believe it's Pacific still in Arizona, but let's check it out.
I don't have a clue what that is.
At 6pm local time in Phoenix, Arizona at the Changing Hands Bookstore, Nick Hauselman and Jared Yates Sexton are going to be in live conversation for a live Muckrake podcast taping that we're going to present to our patrons at patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
I for one am excited, Nick.
Oh, absolutely.
Especially because it is Mountain Zone, Mountain Time Zone, but at this point of the year, they are aligned with Pacific, so it is the same time apparently right now.
What?
Yeah.
Maybe we're going to get rid of that finally with a vote, but like right now, for this part of the year, it is the same time.
What?
Yeah.
It's only five hours away.
It's not that far.
What is going on?
OK, well, I'm going to be driving out to Los Angeles.
I'm going to hang out with my good friend, Nick.
Word on the street is we're also going to go see a rock and roll show and hang out, record some shows, and then go to Changing Hands Bookstore in Phoenix, Arizona, 6 p.m.
Tuesday, April 25th.
We hope that you will join us.
The stuff that movies are made of.
I love it.
Absolutely love it.
Listen, people, you want to listen to this whole show.
We are talking about AI taking over the world.
We are talking about beer wars.
The type of content I think that everybody is waiting for.
We're talking about recessions.
But first and foremost, we have some news hot and fresh off the presses as if they still did those hot and fresh off the presses.
A bunch of leaks that have been coming out lately, and we'll describe them.
It is U.S.
intelligence, U.S.
military intelligence that has been dispersed around the internet, including on Discord, including on, you know, such old intelligence mainstays as Roblox.
It has been everywhere.
It's been making the rounds.
We will talk about the background here and what the investigations have shown, but just within the last hour, the alleged originator of these leaks, a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman in Massachusetts named Jack Teixeira, Has been arrested by authorities.
By the way, within seconds, Dinesh D'Souza said that in the past, I would have thought him a traitor, but now he's trying to take the evil bastards down.
What a wonderful party the Republican Party is.
But Nick, you and I have been keeping track of these leaks.
We'll talk about the the contents of them, but it appears, and we'll get more in depth in this in a second, that this was a person who had access to this intelligence.
We'll talk about What that means and why and the problems was literally posting this into a discord to show off for his internet friends.
I mean, what a story.
Oh, yes.
I mean, I am well familiar with Discord and the group chat concept in itself.
And, you know, it's so funny because we've already talked about this in the context of, like, Joe Biden having documents in his garage and Trump having documents in his home or whatever we call that, that godforsaken place.
You know, and the concept that none of this classified material seems to be guarded very well at all.
And, you know, we all saw Falcon and the Snowman, right?
I mean, that's how easy it was for them to sneak it out back in the 70s.
So it's like, what are we doing here?
Like, you know, whatever these movies are, when you're not gonna be able to make any more of these 24, whatever these shows are about, like, you know, really competent intelligence matters.
You know, for a real sicko like me who listens to things like Alex Jones regularly in order to study the far-right and conspiracy theories, you would think that the deep state and the authoritarian state was like just, I mean, gangbusters, fascistic machine.
Like, man, they are tight-lipped, except for like when a brave soul comes out and brings stuff out.
This stuff is just laying around, ready to go.
I mean, this person has a background in intelligence, so has access to this stuff, but he was taking pictures of it on his phone.
He was printing stuff out.
And by the way, let's go ahead and talk about exactly what was happening here.
We're not talking about, like, a couple of things about troop placements or stuff like that.
Nick, these leaks are wild.
And it's unclear how much of it was true and how much of it wasn't.
For instance, really deep intelligence on the war in Ukraine that shows that apparently there is a lot of concern about how that is going and doubt about whether or not Ukraine can sustain, you know, their resistance against Russia.
There is a revelation, which let's be very clear about this revelation and how large it is, that U.S.
and British Special Forces are operating on the ground in Ukraine.
And by the way, Nick, we've talked about that.
Of course they are.
Yeah.
Of course they are.
Whether or not these documents actually said it and meant it and it was real intelligence, whatever.
But of course they are.
That being said, that literally could go ahead and be used in order to say that NATO is at war with Russia.
Which, you know, wink wink, nudge nudge, during the Cold War you can't say that you got shot, but you know.
It also includes revelations about U.S.
intelligence and spying on allies.
It's caused a ton of problems with foreign relations.
This is not small stuff.
Whatever is real, what isn't, this is like big blockbuster stuff that apparently some 21-year-old kid just like got a hold of and sent all over Discord.
I mean it is and I've seen some reporting that says that that's been verified but a lot of this information is legit and you know give credit to the guy initially on this private discord with only you know 20-30 people were on from all across the world by the way he was writing it out by hand like copying it over because he understood that it would be easier to track who was leaking this if the original documents were displayed But it sounds like he got, you know, bored or frustrated by having to take all the time to do that.
Wasn't getting enough response.
Wait, can we talk about that for a second?
Because literally one of the reasons I wanted to talk about this, and the leaks are interesting.
And what they reveal or don't reveal are interesting.
I find fascinating in this the dumbass minutiae of it, right?
Because for those who haven't dived into this, this guy who called himself OG, it was a Discord group channel that called themselves the Doug Shaker Central.
Sorry, that's what they called themselves.
It was all obsessed with video games, guns, military, whatever lifestyle, right?
By the way, the Washington Post had this investigation.
They called him a quote, charismatic gun enthusiast, and then like a couple of lines later said there was a video of him screaming anti-semitic remarks and then shooting his gun.
Charismatic, sure thing.
Like, he literally was trying to impress a bunch of his internet friends By leaking this intelligence, I want to read part of this, Nick, because this is actually fascinating.
I don't want to get into it.
This is from the investigation from the Washington Post.
Quote, OG was the undisputed leader.
The member from this discord described him as strict.
He enforced a pecking order and expected the others to read closely the classified information he had shared.
When their attention waned, he got angry.
Late last year, a peeved OG fired off a message to all the members of the server.
He had spent nearly an hour every day writing up these quote, long and drawn-out posts in which he'd often add annotations and explanations for stuff that we normal citizens would not understand, the member said.
His would-be pupils were more interested in YouTube videos about Battle Gear.
Quote, he got upset and he said on multiple occasions, if you guys aren't going to interact with them, I'm going to stop sending them.
Nick, this is some internet bullshit!
Like, the internet has rotted our brains.
Like, and by the way, I say that as a person with an internet podcast.
Like, it has rotted our brains and our sense of scale and interactions.
Like, I can't believe this.
This isn't even trying necessarily to aid the Soviet Union to overtake the capitalistic, you know, awful, like, empire.
Like, this is literally just trying to impress your buddies.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, they discuss this.
He's not characterized as Edward Snowden or anything like that.
He's not whistleblowing.
He was simply, you know, here's what's interesting about what you mentioned about, like, our interactions online.
He created, like, a family.
The guy that was talking to The Washington Post, who was in that group, makes it sound like he was a mentor, a father figure to him, and a really important influence on him.
So what's fascinating is that the human condition, I think, just seems to always strives to create those kind of relationships, no matter how we can do it.
And we're figuring out that in this modern era, you know, you were able to develop that kind of relationship without ever having to meet anybody in person.
I don't know about you, by the way, but whenever I have done that online with my other stuff, I have met people in person later and they turn out to be terrific.
And it really has been a great, you know, way to increase my, you know, my circle of friends.
So, that is also kind of a fast, and this will be a movie, right?
We'll see this on some theater, you know, Multiplex coming to a theater near you.
I mean, it's gotta be something.
I mean, and by the way, let's not discount, like, how dangerous this is.
Like, on this server and associated servers, there were a lot of, like, foreign nationals who were interacting with this stuff.
And like, God knows that Russia and other authoritarian states have their fingers in all these things, you know?
And it really is a dangerous thing that is so petty.
And I want to read this last part of it, Nick.
This is also from the investigation.
Quote.
Remarkably, the member said he has been in touch with OG in the past few days, even as an FBI manhunt is underway and the Pentagon launches its own inquiry into the leaks.
After shuttering the Discord server, OG moved the community to another server to communicate with his online family.
He, quote, seemed very confused and lost as to what to do, the member said.
Quote, he's fully aware of what's happening and what the consequences may be.
He's just not sure on how to go about solving the situation.
He seems pretty distraught about it.
Yeah, no shit, my man.
You're going to jail.
Probably for a very, very long time.
What did you think was going to happen?
Did you really think that nobody was going to share these things?
That it wasn't ever going to get outside of your server?
Like, when people make mistakes like this, it's almost hard to fathom what they thought was going to happen.
You know what I mean?
Well, you know, I think he realized very quickly that, you know, if he would have gone AWOL, for instance, or, you know, doesn't show up to his job in the military, Massachusetts, that would be a red flag, and they would probably be able to find him quicker that way, right?
The pictures he took, and by the way, remember, Reality Winner was caught because the paper that she used had a special something that I don't think she realized was there, and they were able to find her.
And um what I was going to say but but this is the other thing is he you know he he represented himself sort of as a father figure someone who'd be older than you than 21 but he's not older no he doesn't have a lot of the sense that you develop like so that makes sense as well right like he's sort of living this sort of dual life where He has a role of the respected person who's got information that no one else does.
He's, quote unquote, and smarter than them.
But then when this comes out, the mistakes he made were really, really horrible, unless he didn't, you know, unless he always intended to be caught.
Like, sometimes people, I suppose, have that in subconsciously.
But yeah, this is going to be a real problem.
I don't see how he gets off from, you know, being a spy.
Even if, you know, even if there is a compelling defense that says something to the fact that, yeah, I was just kind of having some fun with very, you know, a private group of people.
But again, that's a big no-no either way.
Headline for the show, Nick Halsman, political analyst.
This is not going to be good for him.
Getting caught stealing the highest level of classified intelligence.
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