Will The Conflict In Gaza Expand To More Countries?
Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the situation in Gaza as it appears as if Israeli troops will enter into the north of Gaza. Does this cause other countries like Iran to get involved? They then shift to the utter chaos that is the GOP as they widen their search for someone... ANYONE... to lead their party in the house. Nikki Haley has started to separate herself in this GOP presidential nomination race, as she is poised to jump over Ron DeSantis in the polls. They then finish up on an article covering West Virginia University's cuts to academic classes by crying poor despite ballooning their administrative state.
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Nick Halseman, I'm tired of doing this from my car.
I hear you.
But you know, you love your car, don't you?
I like driving, I like going places, I like seeing things, I like looking at this country, I like taking in the sights, I like the freedom of it, but yeah, a man can only take so much, after all.
I hear you.
Well, you know, it's interesting because I used to really disdain having to drive many, many hours.
But with the advent of podcasts and the integration of a phone nicely into your stereos, I have to tell you, it's made those kind of drives a little bit easier for me and also, I suppose, more educational.
I agree.
I listen to a ton of podcasts.
I listen to a ton of audiobooks just in the trip I've been doing.
I've learned so much.
I've grown so much.
I'm gonna stop complaining.
There's a lot going on in the world.
Listen, we gotta talk about what's happening at West Virginia University.
It's an absolute disaster.
We've got to talk about what's happening with the Republican Party.
Things are moving.
Things are shaking.
They are completely falling apart in every possible way.
We have to talk about where that's going, what it looks like.
But, Nick, we're going to start, of course, with Israel and Gaza.
A reminder to everybody to support the show, go to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
You can gain access to the coverage we've been doing of this developing crisis.
Things are still happening in weird different ways.
Nick, to get everybody up to speed, two American hostages have been released.
All of the word right now is that the American government, the administration, of course the military-industrial complex is champing at the bit.
The diplomatic corps is pushing for a delay of the invasion of Gaza, which I have things I need to say about that.
We've got Joe Biden warning against basically 9-11 brain, which we've talked about on this show.
We've got warships in the region, United States warships.
We've got Chinese warships.
It is a gigantic and utter mess.
And I just want to remind everybody again, at the heart of this are absolutely innocent people who are caught between terrible, terrible circumstances.
I mean, you know, the one thing that is reminding me of is we all know I think maybe who Sean King is he's an activist.
Oh, he tried to take credit for getting the two hostages released on his Instagram and the family came out I don't know if you saw that Jared and was was was so unequivocal.
That he had nothing to do with anything.
They don't know who he is or what he was saying that it just kind of keeps showing you where there's opportunities here that people are trying to with misinformation and all sorts of things like that.
Just muddy muddle the waters in here and it's really hard to figure out what is true.
What's not what to believe what you know, what take you're supposed to have and all those things are making this even worse before we talk about the geopolitical implications of you know, some of these countries like Iran getting involved.
Yeah, and that's the thing, is it's such an absolute mess.
And listen, I know I speak for everyone else, I'm absolutely shocked that Sean King is out there trying to get people's money and notoriety.
I know that I'm alone in that.
Yeah, it's an absolute mess in every way, shape, and form.
Basically, to dip your toe into it at any given moment is to be completely and utterly immersed and drowned in misinformation and disinformation.
But here's what we know so far.
We know that attacks on Gaza, airstrikes have been reaching a fever pitch over the last 24 hours or so.
Meanwhile, we have not seen the long-anticipated invasion of Gaza, which of course is going to be a humanitarian disaster on so many levels.
In every way, shape, and form, and we do know that the U.S.
administration is trying to hold this thing back.
There's a hope, particularly as some of these hostages have been released, that possibly more bloodshed and tragedy can be prevented.
Biden's comments on this, and listen, I'll be honest with you, Nick, I just want to, again, we call it balls and strikes on this show, Um, Joe Biden, I think is trying really hard to be a United States president in the middle of this.
He is old and frail and it is, it's, it's tough messaging.
Meanwhile, our diplomatic corps is doing all kinds of stuff.
Um, I personally.
I'm hoping like hell that this invasion doesn't happen.
I'm hoping that we can get people taken care of.
And I'm hoping like hell that we can end up taking this situation and turning it into something positive where people can have safety and they can have their lives.
Perhaps we can take care of this hornet's nest in general and get something better for everybody involved on the other side of it.
But it does feel in ways that we'll talk about here in just a second that there are all kinds of variables, there are all kinds of things that are taking place, and it is a very, very tenuous situation.
Yeah, and it's interesting to see, like, who gets to be rescued, or who gets to be released, and how, you know, two people who had American connections that got out first.
I don't know if you noticed, it's kind of a breaking news, there's two more that were released just recently, older Israeli women.
So suddenly, the notion could very well be that as the ground The invasion is being prepared in the northern part of Gaza, and no one can kind of figure out exactly what the plan here is or what the end game is anyway.
Well, there's no plan.
That's the whole point.
There's no plan.
But it seemed like, I mean, they dropped flyers to say, like, the notion was they were going to now try to invade with ground troops.
Again, to dismantle Hamas, right?
Hamas is the terrorist organization.
Well, hold on.
I just want to say on that note, like, I You know, the reports that keep coming out, Nick, and this is like the back channel stuff, and of course this ends up in papers and magazines because there are messages being sent.
There is no plan in terms of like what this would look like, how it would be handled, what happens on the other end of it.
Of course, a lot of this is revenge seeking.
It's targeting of populations.
There's no way to get innocent people out.
There's no way to make sure that you're not going to go door to door And by the way, I'll tell you this again, I have my problems with Joe Biden.
I'm very glad in his comments he said, America made mistakes after 9-11, please avoid them.
We don't do what we did.
And so we just need to, we really need to not go in there and just kill innocent people.
Right.
Well, by the way, the argument would then be, again, from the Israeli standpoint, if they were going to put boots on the ground, that is their way of trying not to kill innocent civilians, because when they're firing rockets, it could either go wrong or it's just a huge radius to where the damage can occur.
That's when you can kind of limit, I suppose, if that's what their thinking is.
I guess, but I reject it wholeheartedly.
I know that that's what people are saying, but I don't see any way around it.
You're going to kill innocent people here.
Right.
That is all fair.
True.
But at some point, if the goal is to dismantle Hamas, then you need to go in there and take their guns, take their weapons, get rid of their infrastructure.
And that would probably be the loose version of the plan so far.
But again, you're right.
There isn't anything beyond.
But there's no.
But if we want to learn from Iraq, if we want to learn from Afghanistan, you don't, quote unquote, dismantle terrorist organizations.
You can't do it.
Like, like for every person, like even if you were to go in with like some sort of like laser precision missile that will take out, quote unquote, terrorists like that just leads to more people being radicalized.
Like the war on terror tells us that you can't do this.
There's no way whatsoever.
Like, like it is a never ending.
And that's one of the problems when it comes to a group like Hamas or Al Qaeda or ISIS or any of them.
Whatever they do by responding in kind and killing and doing that, like you are literally just engaging in a cycle of violence.
That's the problem here.
And the other problem is, is that, okay, great, then the alternative, well, let's negotiate.
But there's no way to negotiate with Hamas because their charter is to see every Israeli in the Mediterranean Sea.
So this is... So I don't, I don't, that's the thing though, is I don't think that there is a solution with Hamas.
I think the only thing that you can do is possibly start engaging with the Palestinian people.
That's it.
I don't think there is any negotiating with Hamas.
I think you have to take care of this situation.
And quite frankly, like, Nick, we talked about this last week on The Weekender a little bit.
And I had alluded to it on the episode last Tuesday.
Like, this in so many ways is a trap situation.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, we had talked about it on The Weekender, and actually I called you immediately after the show.
There were reports coming in that the weapons that were used by Hamas Possibly could have come from Iran, North Korea.
Like, this whole situation, it's a lot like what happened with Afghanistan and the Soviet Union.
Like, the United States seeded those things in order to drag people into larger situations that aren't going to work no matter how.
I think the only thing you can do in any given situation like this is refuse to play that dichotomous game.
I think The only way that this has a decent outcome is if, in the end, you can figure out this major problem that is taking place with Israel and Palestine.
You take care of the apartheid situation.
You take care of the state solution situation.
But otherwise, like, I don't see how a cycle of violence solves anything.
I agree.
I do feel like and by the way, there was probably a couple of days in the immediate response where the world was willing to tolerate Israel's aggression against Hamas or against Palestine in general.
Right.
Like there was a couple of days there, just like out of 9-11, where people were, you know, sympathizing with Israel because of the atrocious attack that Hamas pulled off.
But there's no question that now, you know, the pressure across the board is going to be really great to stop Israel from doing anything more.
And it might actually indicate why two more Israeli hostages were released, because it's possible that, you know, Hamas is realizing this and they now need to figure out a way.
So this might be a way to break the ice to some degree.
But again, this doesn't end between Israel.
You're not going to have an Oslo Accords where the leader of Hamas and Joe Biden and Netanyahu are out there shaking hands on a podium.
That's not going to happen that way.
And as a result, if Israel wants to defend themselves and eliminate the possibility of more of these attacks happening, I suppose their take on it is going to be that we have to dismantle Hamas, and I agree.
If you kill somebody in Hamas, then that just spawns ten more people who are nine years old who are related to that person who are going to now become radicalized, right?
That's going to be the problem.
What we need to learn.
And again, I, you know, I wonder if Joe Biden had anything to do in this.
I don't know if people pay very much attention to how presidential remarks are put together.
Biden, of course, unfortunately supported the action in Iraq.
And along with a lot of other Democrats, you know, and I hope that he maybe had something to say about it.
I hope somebody somewhere holds this to be true, because looking at what happened in the War on Terror, Nick, we were in a fugue state, a trauma state, after what happened on 9-11.
You know, the anger, the fear, all of that stuff that was churned up.
And we were sold not just a false bill of goods, but we were sold like a poison pill, like nobody's business, that you could go out and you could defeat terror.
You can make the world safe for democracy by fighting terror.
And it just doesn't work that way.
The only thing you can possibly begin to do, I think, is actually address the roots of what conflicts are there.
That's it.
And I think by doing that, you can start to get somewhere.
But yeah, you're not going to sit down at a table.
There's no quote-unquote unconditional surrender of a terrorist group.
It just never works like that.
And even if you do, look at what happened with Al Qaeda.
This threat of Al Qaeda, which obviously did a major, major attack on the United States of America and led to all these problems, like even taking care of that situation destabilized other regions and led to the rise of things like ISIS and other really bad situations.
And it's led to the power vacuum, so to speak, that we're dealing with now.
So It is a really complicated-ass situation, but at the heart of it, I want the world to learn from 9-11, and what happened afterwards, and the War on Terror.
And I think that by having that be your North Star, that innocent people of any stripe shouldn't be killed, or hurt, or traumatized.
I think that's the right direction to go in, and in this The delay of the ground invasion gives me a little bit of hope that maybe something better can happen on the other side of this.
But hour to hour, Nick, I worry.
Like, for instance, I had mentioned, like, we have the USS Carnia warship that engaged in a nine-hour skirmish outside of Yemen with the Houthi forces.
Obviously with their relationship with Iran.
We've got the Chinese sending in, I want to say it's somewhere between six and nine warships now into the region.
Escapes me the exact number.
Like this is a situation that in any given If it's not handled well, if it's not handled through humanitarian reasons, and if we don't find something on the other side of it that's better than what we had before, like, it's going to domino.
And there's just really no way around that at this point.
It's just lining up in a really concerning, tragic way.
Well, I'm really glad you brought that up in that context, because that's the difference between this and us going into Afghanistan and Iraq, was there, it was much more of a contained conflict where it wasn't necessarily going to spill over into a potential World War Three, where like it is now, because you have, you have the access, access forming, right?
You have Russia and Iran, North Korea, China, You know, on one side, I think I'm missing somebody.
But either way, you know, these are the forces that are now being joined together here on a couple different fronts.
That's what's so concerning.
And I think Iran is actually a little bit worried about that, too.
I mean, you saw the response from, as another aside, we saw the response from Egypt and, like, Saudi Arabia refusing to take any Palestinians.
If you're wondering how the Palestinians are viewed by other Arab states around the area, they don't seem to care about them either.
And so we're seeing this notion of some of the surrounding areas, you know, having that concern.
And I think that's a relatively good thing in the sense that Iran clearly understands if they decide to get involved in this, that will probably be the thing that cascades into something really, really terrible.
Well, and then the question is whether or not that developing alliance that we've covered on this show, whether or not like, you know, it's, um, it's where you're looking for possible movement, right?
So like Russia going into Ukraine, we've said this, there was no way that Russia went into Ukraine without at least first talking about it with China.
You know, like they're not going to put that sort of an alliance at risk.
It was also a way of seeing what happens with the West, what happens with NATO, what happens with all of these groups.
Are they going to like fall in line or is their alliance going to be stressed?
This situation, you know, how is it going to escalate, right?
And again, I want to say something again.
We are talking about geopolitics.
It can get really lost at the bottom of geopolitics.
Again, something like a World War II or World War I, you forget how many innocent people were killed in it.
You know what I mean?
Soldiers, citizens, people, maimed, killed, tortured, starved, died of thirst.
Like, We cannot let this jockeying between these two sides, and it doesn't matter which part it is or what we're talking about, we can't let this jockeying and these power plays get to the point where they're going to escalate to, like, I'm sorry, but this would be the first world war.
Well, you can call the War on Terror a world war because, I mean, we were in, like, nearly a hundred countries.
But this would be the first world war fought After the invention of nuclear weapons.
You know what I mean?
Like, and on top of that, like in an era of worsening climate change, mad inequality, like this thing, you can never tell exactly what the aggressor states, in this case, Russia, China, that alliance, which wants to change the world order, you never know when they're going to see an opening to go forward with things.
And going ahead and just saying, okay, we're on this side and we're going to do Without any sort of nuance, without any sort of understanding of the humanitarian situation or the human situation, you can't block things out like that.
You have to look at what is right and what is wrong.
And what is right is that innocent people deserve to live and be safe.
And I think if you use that as your north star, you can get out of this thing.
But if you continue playing geopolitical quote-unquote realist games with it, I think it could get real bad real fast.
Yeah, and I think that Israel is thinking that, yeah, they can get out of this thing, get the hostages back, and go back to, like, status quo, which would then be a severe threat of terrorism from Hamas again.
So, you know, that's, I'm just giving you the, whether or not I agree with that, I'm on, I'm not gonna even have a position, but The Israel stance would be, this is our chance once and for all.
You know, and again, this is the myopic version of it, where they assume that if I would kill every last person who has a card in their pocket, in their wallet, it says I'm part of it.
You know, that that'll be the end of it.
Now, you know, it could severely degrade it.
We've seen that when we what we did when we when we attacked Al Qaeda.
And but again, it just spawns other versions of that.
So there would have to be the kind of thing where an immediate You know, the movie version is that Israel comes in and rebuilds Gaza and rebuilds hospitals and services for them.
You know what I mean?
And shows them in earnest that they are trying to help them improve their quality of life and live.
You know, the only problem here is that, you know, how many of the people in the Palestine are willing to have a two-state solution versus wanting to get rid of Israel?
And that would be the thing that, you know, is a burden on Israel, I suppose, as well, to convince them that their world can exist like that.
But I just don't see how any of these things get resolved without getting stuck in the same status quo we've been in.
And it really makes me worried about America because we're the same political issues and upheaval that Israel was when Hamas decided to take advantage of this on October 7th.
Well, and this is one of the things, Nick, and listen, I don't, rebuilding Gaza to me, like, I don't, I don't, I don't accept leveling it.
Like, I don't accept going door to door.
I don't accept that sort of, like, like, literally taking it on as if it's an extermination.
I don't, I don't accept that.
But I will say this.
One thing you just said, it's the first time That we've said on this podcast and in a couple of episodes, it's the first time that we've said one state or two state solution.
That's important.
In the midst of all of this, what has happened is that the American hegemonic regime has lost the ability to not just solve problems.
We're going to talk about the Speaker of the House in a second.
Like, our own house is out of order.
Like, the American representative system is out of order.
We've lost the ability to create new things and think about new solutions.
The answer here is to not be reactive, which is what has happened in America.
We're reacting to all of these problems, right?
We're being defensive about it.
We're like, ah, we'll do this.
We'll react to whatever just happened.
The answer here is to be proactive.
The answer is to say, I know that we are in this death cycle right now.
We have a regime that has carried out an apartheid state against these people.
We have a terrorist organization that has gone out and done this.
This cycle, when you're in it, can only kill.
That's it.
That's the only thing it can do.
There's really not anything productive that can come out of a cycle of violence.
The only thing that you can do at some point in any dysfunctional cycle is say, you know what, let's not do this and let's do something else.
And that's the hope here is that, like, and I wish America had it.
And this is one of the reasons why I have a problem with Joe Biden being the president at this moment.
He doesn't have a future vision.
We've talked about this.
Ad nauseum.
There's not some sort of a bridge to the future that he's presenting.
Somebody somewhere has to say, this is where we can go.
Let's at least talk about getting there.
And right now it feels like a lot of sitting around and waiting to react.
And when that happens, power vacuums are created, people see opportunities, and there is a great, great possibility of tragedy.
Nick, on that note, we gotta talk about the House.
We gotta talk about this Speaker situation.
Jim Jordan has been thoroughly defeated in his quest for Speaker of the House.
It does not look like the Republican Party is going to coalesce around any leader at this point.
We do have a new field.
When you read this to me earlier, I want to be honest, like you read this to me over the phone, I hadn't seen it yet.
Before Nick reads it for the audience, I just want to say, I literally, it was the equivalent of seeing a person across the room yawn and having an unconscious reaction and yawning back.
Can you read this to us?
Yeah, you want to hear a list of the nine who are now vying for this thing?
Yes.
I'm going to try and scroll quickly because I have the thing open.
So the first, the top of the list is Majority Whip Tom Emmer of Minnesota.
Oh.
He's got the ranking of anybody there.
Oh, oh, okay.
Yeah, superstar.
Yeah.
Then we have GOP Conference Vice Chair Mike Johnson of Louisiana.
Can't be stopped.
Jack Bergman of Michigan.
Hmm.
Byron Donalds of Florida.
Oh.
Kevin Hearn of Oklahoma.
Okay.
I feel like I'm on movie phone.
Dan Miser of Pennsylvania.
Wait, wait, wait.
Time out, Nick.
Time out, Nick.
Did you know that Dan Miser existed?
Is it Miser?
Muser?
I don't even know how to say his name.
Do you know this person?
Have you ever heard of this person?
Never even heard of him.
Okay, good talk.
Gary Palmer of Alabama, Austin Scott of Georgia, and Pete Cousins of Texas.
They're very nice of them to include pictures of them so we can actually see what they look like, but you know what?
It's similar to all of them except for one.
Nick, can we let the audience for just a moment think that over?
I mean, sure.
It's pretty easy.
I mean, besides the fact that they're all men, but...
Yeah, a whole bunch of old white guys.
It really is what's left of the Republican Party.
What do you make of this?
I have my thoughts on it.
What do you make of not just this terrible field, but also just the fact that they've just completely abandoned the speakership at this point?
I mean, I think what I make of it, what's frustrating to me, from a leadership standpoint, is that you always should have a very distinct pecking order of who's in charge, who's next in command, so that this is taken care of ahead of time.
It's very clear.
Like, we know that Hakeem Jeffries would be the nominee for the Democrats.
And they also would know, presumably, who's behind him if something really bad happened to him in a way that, like, there's leadership there.
There's just a clear hierarchy.
This is just a bunch of guys sitting around screaming and yelling about wokeness and stuff.
I don't know anything else how to characterize it, especially because they don't have a platform.
They don't have any sense of how to govern.
And if we were unsure about it until today, this is what's the exclamation point on that.
So, we talked about it on the Weekender a little bit, as this was sort of starting to develop, and I've said it ad nauseam, so I'll start with the thesis, which is, the Republican Party doesn't want to actually govern, they want to stall.
They want to grind government to an absolute, like, just bone dust.
Whenever they're not in power, and on top of that, like, they are there as tools of the wealth class to go ahead and destroy the government as it stands.
The fact that you just read those names, it's incredible that the Speaker of the House, which is third in line for the presidency, Nick, Like, they can't even bolster somebody who can get elected, much less somebody who would make a difference.
What this shows, and I wanted to bring this up because, Nick, Donald Trump, outside of being fined for violating a gag order, has been more or less silent in our discourse.
The Republican Party has no discernible leader.
There is, like you said, no platform whatsoever.
This is a party that isn't just adrift.
It's like Wilson the volleyball in Castaway.
Like, it is out to sea.
There's nothing for them to, like, put any sort of a principle down.
There's no direction for them whatsoever.
One part of the party wants to destroy government, The other part of the party is ready to retire and hope that neoliberalism will be carried out.
In this situation, particularly, again, the Israel-Gaza developing world geopolitical crisis, the only thing that they have is yelling to people who listen on talk radio or social media that Joe Biden funded the attack.
That's all they have to say about anything.
There's no solution.
There's no thought.
There's no conversation.
They've got nothing.
And this party, and I gotta tell you, I still think Donald Trump could possibly become the next president of the United States of America.
But I think it shows not just how bankrupt and ideologically bankrupt this party is, but just how far out to sea they are.
We knew it was going there, but watching it in such stark relief is incredible.
Yeah, and I think that, you know, if you're trying to figure out, like Paul Ryan, for instance, when he became Speaker of the House, he had been a vice presidential candidate before that.
He was a known person who had a presence on the national stage.
So let's think for a second of who does, in the House, on the GOP side, have a national presence, okay?
Are you ready for this list?
It's guys like Matt Gaetz.
Lauren Boebert.
Jim Jordan was also up there, but I wouldn't even put Jim Jordan as high as like Matt Gaetz as far as recognition.
Marjorie Taylor Greene.
I would almost even say Gohmert has, you know, some written name recognition.
This is the party.
Those are the people who, you know, would be the ones you would have to say they're the ones who have enough name recognition.
They're the ones who should be, you know, voted for speaker.
But the problem here is they're such horrible candidates.
You know, Jim Jordan gets outvoted in a private in a in a not private secret ballot when they can really let him know what they think.
Can't even get close to half the number of votes he needs.
That's what's so frightening about what this party has become.
There aren't any adults left anymore.
There aren't any serious people.
I mean, suppose if there are any, because there's a lot of representatives out there, they're completely silenced.
They completely have no agency in this thing.
And what's worse is that the loudest people who are the constituents who want to vote are just bloodthirsty about it.
They love it.
They love what they're doing.
So, Nick, I'm not a Democratic Party apologist, but I can tell you this.
If this were happening in the Democratic Party, the next midterm, the next election that would take place, there would be a mass movement away from the people who caused this, and there would basically be a reshuffling of candidates.
That would be what the election would be about.
I'm telling you this right now.
I think Republican voters far and wide are going to support this.
I think they like it.
I think they enjoy that there's a disdain being showed for government.
That they don't really want anything to be done.
Why?
Because they're anti-government to begin with.
They don't want the government to work.
They don't want bills to be passed.
They want this thing to be destroyed.
And in that way, they have been seeded by wealthy donors to not only distrust the government, but to actively hate it and to wish for its demise.
Jared, there's a scientific way to prove what you just said.
You want to know what it is?
Oh, I can't wait.
It's the polling that shows that Trump is ahead of Biden right now.
Sure.
That tells you everything, because here you have a former president who has 91 indictments.
He keeps admitting to the things he's accused of in court, and yet he is ahead.
It's not like it's close, not like, okay, Biden's up by one or two, whatever.
Trump is ahead.
No one can dispute that across all the different polls.
That tells you everything.
It tells you that what you just said is exactly right.
That the Republican fans, we have to call them that, Team GOP, are going to full-throatedly cheer for this until they quote-unquote win, which is a big loss.
They'll find out pretty soon.
Yeah, and I hadn't even seen that poll, but I'm not shocked.
And while I'm on the subject, before I address the Trump thing, Nick, what's the last you've heard from Trump?
Oh, no, he keeps coming out there and admitting stuff about the suit in New York that he's dealing with.
He comes out, he incriminates himself, obviously.
And I mean, that's what he does.
And that's all he can do.
Right?
Has he offered any leadership on the crisis whatsoever?
Oh my god, no.
I mean, maybe, the only thing I can think about him is him like, you know, flirting with, he'll be speaker, you know?
That's it!
Over a burger and a Diet Coke.
That's literally all that he's done.
There has been no... and that's the other thing.
In situations like this, and you and I are old enough, we've paid attention for politics long enough, what happens when there's a crisis?
Traditionally, you have the person who's in charge trying to deal with the crisis, and then you have the opposite party that is putting forth different solutions, correct?
Correct.
Is there anything in that direction happening?
No, there's nothing.
There's an emotional outpouring.
What the Republican Party has become is an emotional expression of the hatred and anger towards government and society at large.
They don't have answers.
There's nothing they can do, which is, through that reactionary reason, why they will instinctively join with Russia.
Why they have supported Vladimir Putin over Barack Obama and now Joe Biden.
Like, the entire point of this is, they're not going to participate in government.
They're not going to try and make things worse.
Why?
Because ideologically, they are expressing psychologically this absolute hatred of what things are.
They don't care what the other reaction is, which is why, quite frankly, we cannot play into right-wing reactionary politics.
We have to be careful with it.
We have to remember what our principles are, that human life matters.
And by doing that, we can get away from this.
But they're not going to offer an alternative.
They don't have it in them, and they just don't have a capability of it whatsoever.
Well, if you're wondering when the last time we heard from Trump was, in the sense that he's a little bit quieter, having to deal with all the other headlines going on, think about how Ron DeSantis must feel right now.
Oh, God.
So, Nick, I'm glad you bring up Ron.
DeSantis' campaign, as we've covered extensively, has been in just absolute freefall.
We have reached The rats fleeing the sinking ship part of this thing.
Nikki Haley has been making inroads as this crisis has taken hold, and we'll talk about why in just a second, but it has reached the point where he is probably getting ready to lose his second in-place status.
We're seeing one anonymously leaked article after another about what went wrong in the DeSantis campaign, and I have to tell you, when you start seeing those things, people are looking for jobs.
This thing is in not just freefall, it's reaching terminal velocity.
And again, we're seeing Nikki Haley start to pick up speed and will probably become the Trump alternative here pretty soon.
And in the too little too late category, I thought what DeSantis did as they were welcoming Americans from Israel back to Florida, he had a little bit of a TV moment when they were flying into Tampa.
That was one opportunity I thought he could make some hay out of that.
But it's already been, it's just been such a disaster that he couldn't even get any traction with that, which would have, I thought would have been pretty successful for him.
So there's no question.
And you know, again, Nikki Haley, She intrigued me after the first debate during our live show.
People were, I think, making fun of me for reacting in some weird... I couldn't understand it because she was saying very progressive things to me.
And it's kind of weird.
But again, this doesn't mean anything, right?
We know who's going to be the nominee.
So what are they all vying for at this point?
Well, I'll just say this.
You deserve the mockery.
I say that with as much affection as possible.
Thank you.
You're embracing Nikki Haley in the first debate.
Not one of our best live show situations we've ever had, but that's okay.
What Nikki Haley's doing is representing the Trump critic Republican.
She has become the quote-unquote adult-in-the-room choice.
You know, you're also starting to see some things from Iowa.
If Mike Pence can't compete in Iowa, he needs to get out.
Like, there are articles about him drawing in like five to six people, probably most of them his relatives, to events in Iowa.
He was supposed to be the person who went out there and actually like resonated with people.
The conversations I've had are that he has embarrassed himself and the people in Iowa that I talked to.
They basically looked at Ron DeSantis, Nick, and they said, no thanks.
And then, you know, they're starting to look at Nikki Haley, who of course has the credentials as having worked with the UN.
She's also the one who toes the line for the neoconservative ideology, which is that America has a right to go out in the world and remake it, right?
In the interest of, you know, freedom and democracy or whatever these people tell themselves when they go to sleep.
So she's going to pick up some support.
But like you said, Trump has a chokehold on this thing.
He has the nomination regardless of what happens.
If he can legally run, he'll run and probably win the nomination.
And quite frankly, the people who have supported Haley, they're just going to go ahead and support him.
They'll tell everyone that they don't want to.
They'll tell everyone that they're not interested in voting for Donald Trump.
But when push comes to shove, they'll vote for him.
So that means that whatever Haley's poll numbers are represents however many people are left in the GOP that are quote-unquote normal, right?
I wouldn't give them that much, but sure.
Yeah, I mean, there is that subset, right?
And the problem is they would, like you just said exactly right, they'll vote for Trump because they have to vote for their team, but they'll hold their nose and then whatever.
And they would have in the past been the people probably would have told Nixon, yeah, you got to step down after the Watergate, right?
Those are those kind of GOP people.
Who, in the 50 years since then now, have figured out, you know what, we don't need to kick the guy out.
We'll just scold him, wag our finger, weigh in on a poll before the election, but then when push comes to shove, yeah, they'll just re-elect him again.
It's just a sad state of affairs and a shame on people who are old enough to remember what Nixon did to this country and are willing to try and do it again, even worse with Trump.
I couldn't agree more, and I think what's happening, particularly as this crisis continues to churn, the lack of any sort of serious conversation about it, like, that's the thing, is like, literally, politically, what we're seeing, any debate about what's going on in Israel, it's actually a debate between members of the Democratic-Liberal-Progressive-Leftist grouping.
That's it.
They're the only ones who are actually talking about this situation, about what needs to happen, what shouldn't happen, what's right, what's wrong.
Meanwhile, the right, it has evolved into, like, depending upon who you listen to, and I pay way too much attention to this, and I've been real keyed in on it because I've been traveling, and unfortunately I've had to do all this research on what their reaction is.
Nick, it is Just an absolute cavalcade of nonsense.
There's white supremacy.
There's, you know, anti-semitic conspiracy theories.
There's one conspiracy theory after another.
I can't even begin to tell you.
Like, that makes QAnon kind of look cute by comparison.
But there's nothing that even approaches coherency.
You know what I mean?
There's nobody, really, in any right-wing sector of this, Who is having a conversation about how to solve anything because they basically represent a movement in politics that says, I have no interest in actually making things better.
The only thing I have an interest in is making my life better.
It's having more money, more power, more control over other people.
Everything else doesn't matter.
And it's amazing that one of our two major parties, and Nick, you and I are old enough to remember this, the Republican Party used to be very concerned with foreign policy.
They have no interest in this whatsoever.
They're basically watching from the sidelines and throwing peanuts at the referees.
That's it.
That's all that's happening.
And they've become so successful in that that... Remember back in the day, not that long ago, when a guy like Joe Manchin was in the news all the time because he was able to shift everything?
And now that the DMP has ground this all to a halt, we don't even hear about him anymore.
Or cinema.
Barely.
And it just makes me think of, you know, I guess his home state a little bit and what's going on there, because... That is a professional-level segue.
It was so bad, but I'll take it.
No, that was really, really good.
Okay, we gotta talk, finally, on this episode.
I cannot recommend this article highly enough.
It's by Aaron P. Hanlon over at New Republic.
It's called, West Virginia University is Everything That's Wrong with Higher Education Today.
This is one of the best takedowns about something that I've talked about and warned about for a while.
Basically, at West Virginia University, a quote-unquote budget shortfall, which we can talk about a little bit more in depth, ...led to just an absolute razing of programs and faculty members as this completely terrible university president was pushing a new program.
There's been a ton of protest, a ton of pushback on this stuff, but it represents something that I saw in my former life as a professor, which is that the American public university is being systematically dismantled.
And it's happening in a lot of different ways, but it's particularly happening because the administrative class—and we talked about this with John Warner on a past episode—the administrative class has so taken over the public university that it's literally treating them the way—and bringing in venture capitalists and vulture capitalists and all of that.
To basically come in and tear these things down to the studs in order to try and make a profit and to protect themselves.
It's not just an education problem.
It is functionally a cultural and social crisis that this thing represents.
Right, because it allows them to hide behind the budget cuts and constraints of smaller enrollment to eliminate the things that they don't agree with ideologically, right?
Like that's a big interesting, you know, control here.
And what was interesting in the article is that they talk all about how the budgets are now allocated.
And here's the thing, you know, the buildings are there, the classrooms are already built.
It doesn't cost that much to have a person come up You know, and teach that class.
Nick, you graduated too long ago, my friend.
What has actually happened?
is that university presidents and provosts and all these people, what they do is they go to a university and then they take out giant loans to buy land and build new buildings.
And as they're building new buildings, they use that experience to get different jobs and to move up to other universities.
So what you've had over the past generation is an explosion of costs and debt and buildings and infrastructure.
And you're right.
On most college campuses, you have a bunch of buildings in there that are largely very functional and great.
Go in there and learn and do your thing.
You don't have to worry about all that stuff.
But these administrators have wormed into the foundations of these things, and they've completely destroyed them from the inside out.
And then they go ahead and they blame their their problems.
They go ahead and blame what they've done on faculty members and students and staff.
And they go ahead and say, listen, we got to bring in these capitalists in order to tear this thing down.
It is a terrible cycle.
Right.
And it's all about enrollment, right?
They need to try and keep so in West Virginia, the whole goal was they were going to go from the 27,000 students.
That's a 40.
That was the goal.
In fact, it's going the other way, you know, less and less people are joining are going to college now.
Anyway, there's a what's the opposite of a baby boom?
A baby drought.
Yes, a deficit, you know, so there's just less potential students that will go to these colleges anyway.
So I hear you.
I was waiting for means testing to come out from you in terms of trying to figure out how to solve this issue, but that's not what's going to ultimately draw more and more students to go to their universities.
That's the worst part about it.
They're just completely Lost and how how this actually works and what convinces people to go to those schools.
Listen, I'm going to go to 40,000 feet and I'm going to drop back down.
I'm going to go on campus.
Listen, one of the major things happening in the world right now, and this drives everything from a developing World War III to what's happening in the United States, a woman's right to choose our politics, all of it.
Our numbers of children being born have declined like crazy.
You have a population such as the baby boom that is getting older.
It was a record historical number of children being born.
You create a world that accommodates that record number of people, and you build it on the idea of sustained growth.
That's impossible.
And it's even more impossible when you do it and you don't support families, and you don't have programs that support families, and you don't foster what, you know, everybody says pro-family.
That's not what we have.
We have an anti-family culture.
Capitalism is an anti-family culture.
It keeps people from having more kids.
So, meanwhile, like you said, they wanted to go from 27,000 up to 40.
Well, I gotta tell you, I'm not a realist.
That's unrealistic!
That's absurd!
And, quite frankly, if a business person, an administrator, couldn't see that coming, if they couldn't make those numbers work, call me crazy, Nick, they don't deserve the job that they have.
Meanwhile, they make God knows how much money, all the people around them make a ton of money, and they look around and they say, ah, get rid of this program, get rid of this program.
They are destroying it from the inside out because they do not value it, and in fact, they hate it.
It is a bunch of parasitical relationships that are destroying public university, which is really necessary if you want a country that has a working democracy.
You need public education to not only get people prepared for careers in which they can innovate, but you also need to keep people up to date about what has happened, what is going on, understandings, larger understandings.
You need that for a working democracy, which is what these people and the people they represent want nothing to do with.
Oh, and by the way, I don't think it would be hard to get to 40,000, because what they're describing isn't 40,000 students, specifically.
What they're describing is 40,000 paying students.
That money to go there.
That's right.
If they wanted to take all that money from the administrative state that has ballooned, you know, 500% in that over the last 20 years, and then give them scholarships, they probably could get close to 40,000.
Wouldn't you say?
I agree.
And something you just brought up, which is really important to point out, Nick, The administrative state, and it's not just in public universities, it's everywhere in this country, they have absolutely looted this country and gorged on it.
And now that the check is coming due, it's between them and the rest of us.
And I got bad news for you.
They're not going to choose you.
They're not going to help you.
They are going to protect themselves.
And so what you just brought up is absolutely crucial.
They have created a situation for themselves, and they're not going to change it in any way that inconveniences them.
And for anybody who doesn't understand this, spend some time today researching the 2008 financial crisis.
Go and look at what these people do.
Unrestrained capitalism in the era of hypercapitalism and Neoliberalism has led to this moment and they're not going to look back.
They're not going to give up their perks.
They're not going to give up their private jets.
They're not going to give up any of this stuff.
We're the ones who are going to be left holding the bag.
If you don't want to look up 2008 then look up the reason why Nancy Pelosi won't ban stock trading for congressional members.
Yeah, absolutely.
It is a situation where the people who are in charge of society have made this society shit.
And instead of looking at how they've made this society shit, they're going to pass the buck and find other people to blame.
But again, this makes us less safe, this makes democracy less insured, and it makes everything so much harder.
This is not just an educational situation.
This is basically an example of what's going on culture-wide and what we need to fight against.
All right, everybody, that's going to bring us to an end of the Muckering Podcast this episode.
Man, the next time we do this, Nick, I think I'm going to be in my studio.
I'm going to be sitting in my comfy chair with my mic, all that stuff.
I can't wait.
A reminder, if you want to gain access to the Weekender Edition on Fridays, go over to patreon.com slash muckeringpodcast.
You get that show, you get into the community, and also you support the show as it grows, and we do need that.
Not like a public university that needs to double its enrollment, but we need to keep this going.
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Go to patreon.com slash Smart Month Break Podcast.
If you need us before then, you can find Nick at Kinder Amie SMH.
You can find me at J.Y.
Sexton.
In addition to always saying everybody stay safe, let's just hope that everybody stays safe in general.
