Jared Yates Sexton goes solo this episode to dive into the situation in Israel, the larger geopolitical possibilities, and then gets into the shameful, but telling, mess with the GOP's Speaker of the House debacle. To support the show and gain access to the weekly Weekender episode on Fridays, head over to Patreon and become a patron. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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| Hey everybody. | |
| Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast. | |
| I'm Jared Yates Sexton. | |
| Nick and I are both traveling like ships in the night. | |
| And so I'm going to handle this episode by myself. | |
| We have a lot of hope that we'll be able to reconnect for the Weekender episode on Friday. | |
| Reminders, support the show, gain access to the Weekender, go to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast. | |
| I'm doing this in a hotel. | |
| Not the most ideal setup as the air pops on or heat or whatever is going on at this point. | |
| There's a lot to talk about today. | |
| A lot of things, a lot of threads to pull at. | |
| I hope you will be patient as I do just that. | |
| I'll get to the recent developments in the Israel-Palestine situation. | |
| It continues to deteriorate and change and become weirder by the moment. | |
| I'm also going to be touching on developments with Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and the absolute madness that is taking place in the House Speaker race. | |
| We told everybody, listen, this thing was going to get very weird, very gridlocked, there was no real movement, obvious, no real direction, and guess what? | |
| Absolute madness, no direction, total gridlock. | |
| Before we talk about that, though, I want to spend a little bit of time not just setting the table on what is happening in the Middle East right now, but also starting to pick at the different threads, give you the analysis that you have come to expect here on the Muckrake Podcast. | |
| Before I do, I want to state something that I said. | |
| I did a small audio for my substack, Dispatches from a Collapsing State. | |
| And I want to reiterate it here. | |
| I want to say a couple of things here in case maybe you hadn't heard that and just I think it's important. | |
| First things first is I want to reiterate what I said last week in our coverage of the the Israel-Palestine situation which is | |
| In the midst of all of this, in the midst of discussing geopolitics, because it is always messy, and we have a real tendency when discussing geopolitics to forget that as we're talking about nations, as we're talking about trends, movements, alliances, we have a real tendency to get focused on the leaders involved. | |
| We have a real tendency to get really focused on those nation states and those alliances and those movements and those trends. | |
| But we have to remember that we're talking about human beings. | |
| Living, breathing human beings. | |
| The Israeli people who were attacked when Hamas invaded The Palestinian people who were just trying to live their lives in the midst of an apartheid state, who are now being bombarded with military strikes and are currently running out of clean water and food, doing without electricity, medical care. | |
| It's awful. | |
| It's absolutely awful that in the midst of all of these things, that living, breathing human beings are being attacked, are being killed, are being wounded, being traumatized. | |
| And this is the nature of war. | |
| When we talk about world wars, which unfortunately we have to remember this as we dance on this narrow precipice. | |
| We're not just talking about tanks and planes and soldiers. | |
| We're talking about people caught in between powerful forces that they often don't understand and are often way beyond their control. | |
| We're in another such situation. | |
| And I just want to remind everybody, as we talk about these developments, this is a very serious situation with massive, massive repercussions. | |
| And focusing on what is happening, again, geopolitics, nation states, leaders, alliances, movements, trends. | |
| When we do that, we have to remember we're talking about human beings at the core of all of it. | |
| And before we get into any of this, as I talked about over at my sub stack, Dispatches from a Collapsing State, this is really hard. | |
| This is real time trauma that you are not just watching, but you are experiencing. | |
| I feel it and you feel it. | |
| I am struggling for a variety of reasons. | |
| But it's almost impossible not to point out that everybody right now is struggling. | |
| We are all being pushed to our limits, not just in a worsening political condition in the United States, worsening exploitation, growing authoritarianism, clashes that are cultural and economic and political. | |
| We're all struggling in this. | |
| And these types of wars and these flashpoints are expressions of that struggle, but also renew that struggle. | |
| It worsens the struggle. | |
| It worsens the way it makes us feel. | |
| With that in mind, in the Middle East, things are continuing to develop and get very, very strange. | |
| President Joe Biden is planning on making a trip to the Middle East, to Israel, and then eventually meetings with Egypt and Jordan, intending to try and hold together a very, very Stretch thin alliances in the Middle East to try and keep things together. | |
| Biden, first of all, just a reaction to that news. | |
| This is a really aggressive tactic to go to Israel, which of course is a A tinderbox right now. | |
| I think Biden wants to go and try and lead, particularly as the American world leadership is being put to the test in ways that we haven't seen in decades, if ever. | |
| We'll get more into that in a little bit. | |
| His His approach so far as a president has been muddled at times, decent at other times to remind people that the Palestinians are human beings as well. | |
| It's it's it's been a hard political environment to operate within, particularly as the Republican Party continues to try and paint his agreement with Iran as somehow or another, not just state sanctioning, but state funding of the attack on Israel. | |
| We have currently thousands of Americans who are being prepared for deployment in the Middle East. | |
| We have special units in the area that are ready in the case of some sort of a larger conflict. | |
| I believe we have a few carriers either in the region or heading towards the region. | |
| Biden and the United States government are taking this thing seriously, which they should. | |
| Meanwhile, in Israel, what seemed an imminent invasion into Gaza, airstrikes, intelligence units, and also men on the ground, it has been delayed so far. | |
| It seemed inevitable after the 24-hour period was given for people to leave Gaza, which was an unreasonable amount of time, which was setting up a massive humanitarian crisis. | |
| There's already a humanitarian crisis, but this was going to make it worse. | |
| We've seen people fleeing Gaza. | |
| We've seen misinformation abound about whether or not airstrikes or bombs have killed civilians. | |
| There's a lot happening politically and socially in Israel. | |
| It seems as if the vast majority of the people rightfully have turned to Benjamin Netanyahu Listen, you hold incredible amounts of responsibility here, not just for not keeping us safe, but also the things that you have been doing are hurting Israel and making us less safe. | |
| That internal pressure and reaction undoubtedly has had an effect. | |
| Many people are saying in Israeli media and culture that Netanyahu needs to go. | |
| I happen to agree with that. | |
| He should have been out of government a long time ago. | |
| He should be held accountable for his corruption and his crimes. | |
| There's a difference in opinion within the world sort of opinion and reaction to this. | |
| I talked about this a little bit during our last episode where I was talking with Nick. | |
| I said, you know, There's a very strange relationship between what happens within Israel and what is imposed on Israel. | |
| For an example of that, I had someone email me to ask for an example. | |
| Think, of course, of the relationship between evangelicals and the State of Israel, many of whom look at Israel not because they support Jewish people, but because Israel and the Jewish people play a role within their messianic apocalyptic visions. | |
| That is a very strange thing that is imprinted upon it. | |
| And, you know, the American right and white supremacist and a lot of these sort of interlocking groups within America have a very strange opinion of Israel and the Jews. | |
| Meanwhile, looking around, there has been a really troubling re-emergence of what I've come to call 9-11 brain, which is a traumatic state that societies and the world in general can get to. | |
| It's a state of fear in which rationality is completely overridden. | |
| It leads to bloodlust. | |
| It leads to war. | |
| It leads to atrocities. | |
| But within Israel, the ground invasion in Gaza, which will most likely kill unbelievable amounts of people, it has so far been delayed. | |
| The international community, including the United Nations, has pushed back on this. | |
| Including apparent war crimes, focusing on group punishment, white phosphorus. | |
| Now of course we have the turning off of water or food or blockades. | |
| Really awful, awful situation. | |
| Along with that, Israel has backed its troops and forces away from the Lebanese border after skirmishes with Hezbollah. | |
| Hezbollah, of course, is aligned with Iran. | |
| We are seeing a real concern that things on that border could escalate. | |
| We have seen rockets being fired, we've seen shots being fired, skirmishes. | |
| There is a feeling that things could pour out of Israel if they're not careful. | |
| I've been paying attention to a lot of back channels with analysts who, by the way, are both analyzing politics but they're also doing it for financial sectors. | |
| People who watch the market and invest in the market pay close attention to these things because it could affect trading, it could affect supply chains, you name it. | |
| And a lot of people right now, both within politics and within economics, are very afraid of this situation spilling outside of the borders of Israel. | |
| This is what I was talking about last week. | |
| I said the real concern here is that Israel is a flashpoint at this moment that could bleed out into the larger Middle East as it has before, but it could also become a receptacle that larger geopolitical tensions could pour into. | |
| We'll talk more about that in just a few minutes. | |
| Iran has now issued a preemptive threat that should Israel invade Gaza, or should there be signs that Israel will invade Gaza, that there will be retaliations or preemptive strikes. | |
| There is more or less been a wink-wink, nudge-nudge sort of hint that it would involve Hezbollah or possibly Hamas, who knows. | |
| But a resistance to Israel would be undertaken. | |
| I talked last week about a lot of reports that Iran had helped Hamas and had given the green light to Hamas. | |
| I'd said then that it was unsure what was happening and whether or not that had actually occurred. | |
| Hamas, or at least parts of Hamas, had validated that. | |
| There were moments out of Iran where it seemed like they very much had, while other times they said that they weren't sure or that they hadn't. | |
| It's been very confusing. | |
| And as that has happened, you have seen a lot of sort of dancing around the subject of Iran in this situation. | |
| There's a very good reason for that, as this situation has the people have been trying to keep a lid on it to keep it contained. | |
| I actually think what Biden and other allies involved in this have done so far has been effective. | |
| I don't know if effective is the right word. | |
| I don't know if it will hold, right? | |
| It's a lot like trying to carry around a trash bag full of water and hoping it doesn't explode or leak all over the place. | |
| But so far the rhetoric and the focus around all of this Has been adequate, I suppose. | |
| Meanwhile, innocent people are dying. | |
| It's hard to weigh these things again in a geopolitical context, but I will say that limiting the spread of this so far, particularly keeping the Iranian situation quieter or less hot or less focused on, has been effective. | |
| There have been parts of the far right which have focused on this and obviously the GOP because it is a completely irresponsible body, which we will get to further on in a later segment. | |
| They have attempted to push this thing. | |
| Thank God they haven't found a whole lot of purchase. | |
| At any given moment, if that does start to take off, this situation will escalate and it will get much, much more out of control. | |
| Part of the reason for that, of course, is that there is an anti-American hegemonic order axis that has come into being. | |
| What America has done over the course of its dominance. | |
| Of course, since the end of World War II to this moment, with a lot of other things in between, including neocolonialism, the CIA interfering in elections, the oppression and exploitation of the Global South, this globalism that has put countries in quote-unquote second and third world statuses, exploited their people, taken their resources, and just absolutely ruined them politically and socially and economically. | |
| That has led to an opening. | |
| Not to mention, by the way, that we haven't even talked about the War on Terror, another trauma state that was used by right-wing and corporate interests to go ahead and push those There has been room for this anti-American hegemonic axis to form. | |
| dead, a lot of stability undermined, America taking any goodwill that was given to it post 9-11 and just absolutely flushing it down the toilet. | |
| There has been room for this anti-American hegemonic axis to form. | |
| Iran is part of that. | |
| God knows what could have happened had we worked with them or maybe if our deals hadn't have been submarined. | |
| Of course, that includes other so-called rogue nations, North Korea, but also now Russia, China, which have been trying to bring on other nations, other areas of the world, into an agreement that basically opposes American hegemonic order. | |
| Right now, Vladimir Putin is in China to meet with Xi Jinping. | |
| They have been meeting pretty regularly to talk about things such as the Ukrainian war, but also their efforts to end the American world order. | |
| This is a really good time for Xi and Putin to talk about these things and to Marshall, not just their support, but also to go ahead and bolster their alliance. | |
| I've been talking about this for a very, very long time. | |
| If you haven't read The Midnight Kingdom, A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis, I highly recommend that this would be a good time to do it. | |
| To understand that the American order is being challenged, that there is a rising alternative with China and Russia and Iran and the rest of them. | |
| They've been looking for every opportunity possible to challenge America in that world order, which is one of the reasons why we saw the invasion of Ukraine. | |
| China has its own problems right now, economically. | |
| It's feeling a lot of pressures. | |
| Russia, obviously, has not had the luck it hoped to have in Ukraine. | |
| I think Putin thought, with the help of his ideologues, that this thing would have been put to bed a long time ago. | |
| Meanwhile, they're pushing in that direction. | |
| But this situation in Israel offers them a hellacious opportunity to pounce upon it. | |
| Again, the problems that are taking place right now in Israel and Gaza, it is a mess already with human beings on the ground who are being killed and wounded and traumatized and even taken hostage. | |
| But on top of that, it also is a perfect receptacle for all of these global geopolitical tensions to pour within. | |
| This is why you have world wars. | |
| This is how this stuff happens. | |
| You start to have this push and pull. | |
| Basically, you have a group of people in the first two world wars. | |
| It was Germany, which was late to the colonial table, and then of course was still trying to make up for that colonial slow start, but also the economic and political fallout from World War I. | |
| Basically, you have these big giant world skirmishes when the people who are not in control of the global order see an opportunity economically, socially, historically, they see an opportunity to take the snow globe and shake it up. | |
| Russia and China are looking for that moment at any given moment. | |
| That doesn't mean, and I want to make this very clear, that doesn't mean that the United States hegemonic global order is a good thing. | |
| That also doesn't mean that Russia and China and what they're offering is a good thing. | |
| I tweeted something the other day. | |
| I said, you know, it's a lot easier when you stop thinking in these black and white mindsets. | |
| You have to have a good and a bad. | |
| You have to stop thinking about nation states and alliances as being good or bad. | |
| You have to remember that human beings are in the middle of this and they're being exploited in all directions. | |
| The problem is that the American hegemonic order since World War II has been anti-democratic and authoritarian in energy and ideology and operation. | |
| It's had a hell of a public relations bent to it, telling everyone, of course, it's the champion of freedom and democracy. | |
| But what has happened is that with that overwhelming power, the United States has subjugated people around the world. | |
| It has been incredibly warlike. | |
| And in that, it creates an opening for things like this to take place. | |
| The less benevolent you are, the worse that these things get. | |
| If America would have operated based on its espoused principles, we wouldn't be in this situation in the first place. | |
| What needed to happen was that we needed to move away from globalism and the American global hegemonic structure. | |
| But that's not something you can necessarily run on. | |
| You can't necessarily run for president and say, hey, I think American empire needs to be drawn back. | |
| What has happened, of course, and I've documented this in Midnight Kingdom, American Rule, and on this podcast from time to time, but this is a good time to get this down as a thesis. | |
| What has happened is that neoliberalism, starting in the late 70s, moving into the 80s, it took that American empire, that hegemonic system, and it corporatized it. | |
| It privatized it. | |
| basically had hyper-capitalism take over the American empire, which before worked in tandem with capitalism in order to push all these things. | |
| Nation-states have always been avenues for this stuff to work. | |
| But what you saw here was more or less an overwhelming of everything by private interest, by corporations, by markets. | |
| So now we're in a place where you basically have this system, this globalism, which has already been authoritarian around the world. | |
| It's It's now starting to need America to become more authoritarian or else the system isn't going to work. | |
| It has to go ahead and come back home. | |
| It also needs to go ahead and start relying on more overtly authoritarian tactics. | |
| You can't hide behind benevolent markets. | |
| Self-interest will save us, as an Adam Smith would have told us, even though he would have warned us that this type of a system was going to be corrosive and dangerous. | |
| That merging of interest, by the way, involves the authoritarianism that takes place in China, the authoritarianism that takes place in Russia. | |
| If you haven't already listened to the Weekender episode from last week, my conversation with Carl Folk got into a lot of this. | |
| But more or less, we're now watching as these tensions are going to start to slip out of control. | |
| You can't hold on to that big bag of water forever. | |
| I think last week I described it as trying to juggle into infinity. | |
| It doesn't work. | |
| Eventually things are going to crash. | |
| That bag's going to fall down. | |
| You're going to lose everything. | |
| This situation is bad. | |
| Really, really bad. | |
| And if we're not careful, we're going to find ourselves, much like the people who looked around at the destruction of World War I, we're going to realize that we sleptwalked. | |
| Sleepwalked? | |
| Sleepwalked into absolute terror and horror. | |
| I've been watching this with bated breath. | |
| I'm not going to sit here and lie to you and tell you that this doesn't concern me. | |
| It concerns me a lot. | |
| It scares me a lot. | |
| The possibilities that are taking place here and also that 9-11 trauma brain that we're seeing play out. | |
| I am hopeful because I have seen a bit of a pause. | |
| I have seen some hesitation. | |
| I have seen people take a breath even while atrocities are mounting. | |
| Like the main triggers that are still on the board here have not been played and I'm hoping like hell I mean, I don't know what Biden's trip is going to amount to. | |
| I don't know what pressure from the U.S., from Great Britain, from France, from the U.N. | |
| I don't know what that amounts to anymore. | |
| I'm hoping the cooler heads will prevail here because the less death and destruction, the better. | |
| And the less death and less destruction that we have, the more chance we have of avoiding something really, really bad here. | |
| And that's the geopolitical take. | |
| But again, I want to bookend it. | |
| We're also talking about human beings. | |
| We're talking about men, women, children, wildlife, environment being absolutely destroyed, rolled over in the pursuit of power and vengeance. | |
| On all fronts, this is awful. | |
| If we can get out of this with the least amount of death and destruction, not only should we count that as a victory in just general morality, but also in terms of avoiding the larger escalation that this has all the potential in the world to have. | |
| This is a problem that has been just simmering for forever. | |
| And if you had to look around, like everyone's had their eye on Taiwan and you know, like, might not be a bad move to go ahead and move on Taiwan, right? | |
| Like everybody's been really concerned with that. | |
| People very moved in Ukraine. | |
| Why not move on Taiwan? | |
| But the Middle East is, is a tinderbox and it has been for a very, very long time. | |
| And getting into Israel and Palestine and inflaming all those tensions, It could have some really bad effects. | |
| And I got to tell you, it's a perfect, perfect container for all of this. | |
| Particularly with all this coordination between these authoritarian states that are opposing the American hegemonic order, which itself is becoming more and more authoritarian by the day. | |
| I'm hopeful, as always. | |
| And I'm going to keep following this and I just want people to know how this is working out or what could happen. | |
| But every day that I wake up, since October 7th, my birthday, woke up and saw this had happened. | |
| Every single day that I'm waking up, I'm hoping like hell that more cooler heads will have prevailed and less death and destruction will have been achieved. | |
| Because there have already been too many people dead. | |
| There have been too many people suffering. | |
| This is a grotesque situation. | |
| And I just hope, hope, hope, hope that we can avoid the worst possible outcome from all of this. | |
| And maybe learn something. | |
| And maybe get better as a species. | |
| And maybe move more towards getting away from these old conceptions or getting away from that sort of mindset that we have to heal from. | |
| I hope. | |
| Hope, hope, hope. | |
| On a different but seemingly related subject, I mean it's all connected and interrelated, the Republican Party is an absolute mess. | |
| I know I'm not teaching you anything with that. | |
| Just very briefly, Donald Trump has been hit with a gag order in his D.C. | |
| case. | |
| But also he's just going around saying that Hezbollah is smart because this is what he does. | |
| He doesn't care and it doesn't matter and it's barely made a squeak in this primary race. | |
| DeSantis can say whatever he wants. | |
| Nikki Haley can go out there and do her thing. | |
| It hasn't changed any of the numbers because none of the people supporting Donald Trump care about any of this. | |
| Similarly, the people they support in Congress, the House of Representatives, the House Freedom Caucus is just in an absolute free fall. | |
| Last week, when Nick and I recorded, we had talked about the fact that Jim Jordan, the representative out of Ohio, had emerged as the front runner for the vacant Speaker of the House. | |
| And then, completely out of nowhere, Steve Scalise became the frontrunner for like a brief moment. | |
| I said something about this over on the Discord, and if you're not on there, again, go to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast, support the show, get on Patreon, talk to some good people. | |
| See behind the scenes, I guess. | |
| I had said, you know, everybody that I talked to on Capitol Hill and in DC was absolutely shocked. | |
| They had no idea how it was that Scalise ended up sort of seizing the moment. | |
| And I had a lot of conversations with people and they said, you know, this situation, we all knew it was going to be bad. | |
| Like, we knew that the tensions within the GOP were going to erupt. | |
| We knew that whenever Gates went after McCarthy and succeeded. | |
| Because this, again, like everybody likes to think that the GOP is this homogenous, like, disciplined front. | |
| It is not at all. | |
| We're watching a total demolition derby civil war within the GOP and I told everybody this was going to be the case after the last election. | |
| I said these things have been brewing up for a while and we're just going to see them absolutely come into the clear blue day. | |
| And that's what happened here. | |
| But the people I talked to said, you know, when the Scalise thing happened, they said, this is gonna get messy because there's no leadership within the GOP. | |
| You have the group of, you know, old sort of traditional Republicans. | |
| Many of them are libertarian or neoliberal. | |
| The ones who are looking around, they're like, I don't know what you're up to and I don't know why you're doing it. | |
| The only link between them and the MAGA New Right House Freedom Caucus. | |
| The only person who could have done that job. | |
| And by the way, there was one, there were two people who could have done that job. | |
| One was Marjorie Taylor Greene because she was originally from the House Freedom Caucus, but they chewed her up and spit her out. | |
| They rejected Marjorie Taylor Greene and she became a mainstream Republican with Kevin McCarthy. | |
| Kevin McCarthy was the only person who could have provided an active working link between those two sides of the House Republican Party. | |
| When he was gone, When he was ousted, there was no doubt that this was going to be a mess. | |
| Because there was no functional way for them to immediately land on a successor. | |
| Jim Jordan is the closest thing that they've got to a Kevin McCarthy. | |
| And even he, he's too far on one side of the line. | |
| But for Scalise to jump completely out of nowhere and seemingly get the go-ahead to do this and then have to remove himself from the race, it left a lot of jaws on the floor. | |
| I gotta tell you, the politicos and the pundits that I spoke to were absolutely shocked by what took place with Scalise. | |
| Then, of course, Jim Jordan has emerged once more as the frontrunner for the speakership. | |
| That was more predictable, but the fact that he's the second choice in this, it just has led everyone to believe that this thing is so much more dysfunctional than anybody thought. | |
| And of course it is, because as I have told you on this podcast, The House Freedom Caucus does not have a coherent ideology. | |
| If they were to be given the keys to the car, they wouldn't know where to drive. | |
| Because what they are there to do is to voice opposition to government, not make government work. | |
| Not make government somehow or another function in any way, shape, or form. | |
| Of course, they'll go ahead and they'll approve the deals that are corporate and private interest in nature because that is what our government has been turned into. | |
| That neoliberal march that I talked about earlier in terms of putting together globalism, it has turned our government into basically a body that can pass things on behalf of those corporate and private interests and meanwhile not do anything else. | |
| Because those corporate and private interests don't believe that the government should do anything else. | |
| The government shouldn't be spending money on people. | |
| The government shouldn't be holding people accountable. | |
| It's not that our government is failing. | |
| Our government's being choked to death. | |
| And as that happens, you have something like the House Freedom Caucus. | |
| They are functionally holding our government hostage. | |
| We are currently without a Speaker of the House. | |
| Of course, over in the Senate, we have Tommy Tuberville, who has been holding back all of these appointments. | |
| Rand Paul does similar things. | |
| The new right isn't there to govern. | |
| The new right is there to sabotage from within. | |
| You cannot form coalitions with them. | |
| You cannot put together a government that does anything, because they're not supposed to do anything. | |
| This is a new evolution of the plan to destroy government and governance. | |
| That has been the purpose of this from the very beginning. | |
| That is why it's wild dysfunction. | |
| That's why it's a sideshow. | |
| That's why all of this works the way that it does. | |
| It's supposed to take the government to that next level. | |
| It has went ahead and pulled any sort of funding or support for actual social safety nets or programs, and that's by design. | |
| Because what does it do? | |
| It makes precarity institutional. | |
| You're not supposed to think that things are safe for you. | |
| You're supposed to work harder. | |
| You're supposed to not call into work. | |
| You're not supposed to take vacations. | |
| You're not supposed to take your job for granted. | |
| Because you need to make more money in order to avoid the chaos and the despair. | |
| It's a motivating factor. | |
| You take all of that away, government is being choked to death. | |
| Meanwhile, well, We can probably go ahead and turn it into an engine that will force our interest if you're a corporation or the wealthy or private interest. | |
| So now you need to get a bunch of people elected who are going to do that for you. | |
| Already been done. | |
| We've been down that road time and time again, both Democrat and Republican. | |
| Now you just need someone on the inside. | |
| We don't really need government anymore, right? | |
| We can go ahead and get rid of all these different appendages of government because we need more money, we need more power, we need more leverage. | |
| We're effectively seeing the Speaker of the House being held hostage. | |
| The position. | |
| That's wild if you think about it. | |
| And there's just enough of them that they can do it. | |
| Because this has been a long, long process. | |
| If I had to put money on it right now, I'd say that Jim Jordan probably becomes Speaker of the House and he uses his own particular ideology and his own particular agenda to turn the speakership into just another method of obfuscating. | |
| Holding things back. | |
| Just another saboteur, more or less. | |
| If it's not him, I don't know who it is. | |
| I don't know how you do it. | |
| I don't know where you go. | |
| But that's the whole point of it. | |
| It's where this thing's going. | |
| And there's a lot of people who are really enjoying this. | |
| There are people hooting from the stands and there are people hooting from the luxury boxes where the owners and the wealthy are hanging out. | |
| That's how this whole thing works. | |
| And meanwhile, going back to the subject at hand when it comes to Israel and Gaza, America's situation is deteriorating. | |
| And it's deteriorating in a way that goes ahead and makes people very aware that that American-led global hegemonic globalism, that it is vulnerable. | |
| Because the same people who want to co-op that, who want to introduce those authoritarian ideas, those are the same people who are paying for these clowns and these fools to serve as saboteurs within the House of Representatives! | |
| They're the same ones who were paying for Donald Trump to be Donald Trump. | |
| They're the same ones who are more than fine undermining every democratically elected representative and government in the world because what they're actually interested in is a neo-feudal order with them at the top. | |
| In which they cannot be challenged through elections or laws or anything. | |
| In which basically they have their own neo-feudal orders. | |
| That has been the purpose that they have found and that they believe in. | |
| And that is the operating procedure of the right. | |
| The main operating procedure of the right is not fiscal responsibility. | |
| It's not social traditions. | |
| It is the idea that there is a natural hierarchy between those who deserve power and those who need to be restrained by power. | |
| And that is it. | |
| And when it is revealed in its final form, it is nothing short of total authoritarianism. | |
| Alright, that's going to bring us to the end of this solo episode of the Muckrake Podcast. | |
| I just want to reiterate again, keeping a close eye on everything that's going on in the Middle East and around the world. | |
| Like I said, I'm struggling. | |
| I know a lot of you are struggling. | |
| This is not a fun time. | |
| Try your damnedest to find moments of joy. | |
| Try your damnedest to find moments of peace, because we have to soldier forward. | |
| And it doesn't make it easy. | |
| It doesn't make for easy work. | |
| But it's worth it. | |
| And in this fight, we have to keep our heads up and our chins up, even when we don't feel like lifting our heads, you know? | |
| Alright everybody, we will be back later in the week. | |
| Head over to patreon.com slash mcgreggpodcast. | |
| Thank you as always for your support. | |
| If you need us before then, you can find Nick. | |
| If you can hear me, ask me. | |
| If you can't find me, enjoy my sexting. |