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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman had to talk about the latest news of a 32 year old man in Pennsylvania who not only killed his father by beheading him, but live streamed it to the world, all because his father worked for the federal government. Add to this the news that a caravan of American citizens are driving down to the border to make some sort of statement about the immigration crisis at the border, and we're moving towards a real crisis. They finish the show with a breakdown of the latest David Brooks article in The Atlantic that purports to take the temperature of the country and gets things amazingly wrong.
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Welcome to the MuttCrank Podcast, The Weekender Edition.
Nick, I am popping that can.
We made it out of January.
The longest January that I could ever possibly imagine.
We're in February.
We did it, baby.
Okay, great.
High five.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know how I feel.
I don't feel accomplished.
You don't feel like you did something by making it through this January?
The problem here is the weather is so bad here right now.
It's a downer.
I want that sunny day again.
You need the sunny days back.
Well, listen, Nick, I could fly today.
The only thing that could possibly bring me down is if some right-wing insane person committed an atrocity that we had to talk about in the A segment of this show.
Well, be prepared to be brought down then.
All right, everybody.
We have a humdinger of a show here.
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Nick, we, um...
We usually on the weekend, we loosen up.
We undo the tie.
You've got on, is that like a quarter zip?
Or is that a full zip?
It's a full zip.
Okay, you've got a full zip, you pull down the full zip, right?
I'm here in a t-shirt.
We like to take it easy.
But every now and then something happens in the news, or in the case of today's show, everything happens in the news and suddenly we have to talk about like serious, awful shit.
This story, again, is a McCraig Podcast special.
I hate this.
I hate that this happened, but we gotta cover it.
32-year-old Justin Moen of Pennsylvania beheaded his 68-year-old father on Wednesday, airing the execution live on YouTube under the title, Call to arms for America's patriots.
And that's right, in case you needed to read between the lines, his father was a federal employee who he called a quote-unquote traitor.
He called on a revolution to quote, end the Biden regime and attack Black Lives Matter and gay and trans people.
A really, really disturbing thing and part of a larger disturbing trend.
I agree and I will guarantee you this, you know, they're gonna report more about this and it'll become worse.
Whatever we know now, which is not a lot, will become colored with all sorts of heinous descriptions of what he really did as people probably had ripped that video or whatever it is and more details will come out.
So, it really is...
This is sort of the mind rot that Reagan started, right?
This is Reagan starting it?
I mean, there's a lot of people.
There's a lot of chefs in that kitchen who started this thing, for sure.
Fair enough.
And this guy's young enough to not really be directly affected by Reagan, necessarily, in his nine words that you don't want to hear.
But it really is frustrating because it used to be, or almost still should be, if you're willing to work for the federal government, And the bureaucracy and all that entails and usually not for a lot of money.
You know, that should be commended.
You are one of the good people who are trying to help.
Right.
And so to be vilified like this to the point where you're willing to kill your own father, which it sounds exactly like that.
It's a political thing that he did.
It just shows you how deep we are, even though people might want to deny that we're that far.
You know, one of the things that we we've documented on this show, Nick, is I think when we started this, it was almost like, hey, here's where we are.
And just so everyone knows, history can tell us that this is where we're going.
All along, we've said, you know, there are consequences of rhetoric.
There's consequences of spreading conspiracy theories.
There are consequences of fear mongering, turning that hatred and fear up and continuing to amplify this thing.
I want to state for the record something that I've tried to say more and more of because this is something I think people need to hear.
The people who are already committing political violence, and he's not alone.
This guy is not alone in terms of killing a family member.
He's not alone in carrying out a political murder.
He's not alone in carrying out political violence.
Like, these are not the acts of lone wolves or lone nuts.
This is part of a broader tapestry in this country.
This country is not well.
And we'll talk more about that in just a second, but specifically, this country is becoming more politically radicalized.
And in that radicalization, people like this, this Justin Moen, they hear the message loud and clear.
They hear, oh, immigrants are coming to take our lives and our jobs and replace us.
I'm going to grab an AR-15 and I'm going to go into a Walmart and just shoot people.
I'm going to send mail bombs to politicians and media members.
I'm going to make this YouTube video where I kill my father and do this.
This is part of a larger movement.
These people who are specifically not well, Nick, it's not that they're inventing the message.
They're getting the message before other people get it.
Other people are prepared for violence.
These people are jumping the gun before the rest of culture meets them.
And that's the unfortunate truth of this entire situation.
Also, what does it say about the fact that he broadcast it, which means he was going to get caught?
He had no intention of, like, quote-unquote, getting away with this.
The other scary thing is they ended up finding him in a military base in Pennsylvania, with a gun.
Lord knows, they tried to make it sound like, oh, nothing was going to happen, he surrendered peacefully, but why else are you hopping a fence with a gun into a military establishment unless you're trying to do something worse?
So this is the other issue, right?
Is when you get to that point where life doesn't mean anything, right?
I feel like it didn't mean anything to him and he could just take it and then maybe wanted to take more.
So we need to figure out a way to help people better.
And of course the cops were familiar with this person because he had issues in the past.
He had gotten fired from a job and had, you know, done something violent there as well.
So we really need I guess we're going to sound like Republicans that we really need more mental health care.
Well, we need more mental health care, but also like we're not Republicans because we're talking about the issue without using it as a cudgel and as an excuse without having to talk about the larger issue, which is violence and guns in this country.
Nick, this guy absolutely had a history of this stuff, but also I can I can tell you right now, like if you even just take a cursory look at this guy's past, he had filed three lawsuits against the federal government.
He had fired these lawsuits against federal agencies claiming that his student loans were an act of fraud because he wasn't able to get a job as a white man.
Of course, going after DEI and affirmative action, those types of things.
So already right there, we have an aggrieved white man, which is one of the most dangerous things in the world, right?
On top of that, what was his former history?
And you brought up the fact that he live-broadcasted this, or he live-casted it.
He had tried to be a musician.
He had tried to be an author.
He self-published multiple books, including multiple books about revolutions, one of which he wrote a letter to Donald Trump calling for a revolution, getting rid of the deep state.
He did this.
Like a lot of people do, a lot of these quote-unquote lone wolves or lone nuts, they reach a point in their life where they feel powerless, where they don't feel like they have anything else to do, and so they try to make themselves larger.
They make manifestos.
They go out and try and kill as many people as they possibly can in order to make themselves seem more important.
This guy was trying to start a revolution because he was basically told a revolution was needed.
He heard Republicans.
He heard Donald Trump.
He heard the MAGA people.
He believed them.
He took them at their word and he acted upon it.
So as a result, you have an unwell person in an unwell society where a lot of people don't have meaning and a lot of people don't have anything that sustains them.
And meanwhile, white men are told the only thing that you have as a recourse when you have nothing else, violence.
So, you can hurt yourself, or you can hurt others, or you can hurt society, but that's the way, as a man, you're supposed to, like, assert yourself, you know, when you finally reach rock bottom.
And this type of stuff, sadly, Nick, this isn't surprising.
This is inevitable, and this is how these things work.
And what's unique about this one, though, is that it's his father.
He's living at home, they were giving him money, like, helping to support him, and that was who he turned his ire on, right?
This isn't somebody randomly that he didn't know.
You know, and that probably is also fraught with a whole lot of other things.
And, you know, I don't want to speculate about their relationship, but certainly that is different.
This does cross a different kind of a boundary, I think, which makes it even more scary.
And it almost feels like, I mean, the movie version of this would be that, like, the government would have to start monitoring every white man from age 26 until age 40.
So they get out of, you know, there's a range, right, of age.
Where they are most likely to do these kind of things.
And if they get out of that, then maybe they won't do it.
But like that... I think they have that!
Like, like you said, this guy had a history.
Like, he got fired for violence.
Like, that all the, like, these things aren't hard to predict.
It doesn't have to be everybody.
It's that people like this who are not able to function you know, who are violent and threatening and those types of things.
Like, it's just the fact that, like, nobody thinks that white men should be watched or investigated or actually looked at as a group.
Meanwhile, every brown person in this fucking country basically has, you know, a camera and an algorithm up their ass.
But, like, white men, they're the bedrock of the country.
They shouldn't be investigated whatsoever or surveilled.
That's the problem.
Do you remember that incident I had at my friend's rehearsal dinner where I talked about where he was a real right-wing person from a middle state in the country?
He worked for the government.
And that was what got me to think we could have a discussion about this because I thought, oh, well then he must kind of be into regulations a little bit.
He was making sure water was clean on farms.
But it turns out, like, from what I gathered at that point, like, he must have absolutely hated that.
So what I just found that it just kind of reminded me of this, because the guy who killed his father has placed all of his anger towards, like, government workers.
When it turns out, like, a lot of those government workers are going to people who probably align with him.
Well, Nick, think about how much of the end.
Listen, we're getting into psychological principles here.
First of all, this guy was being taken care of by his parents.
The reportage that is out there already is that he was basically living on his parents' dime.
That eventually causes, like, you know, this feeling of powerlessness and worthlessness and resentment, right?
Men, by the way, are constantly told that you have to be strong and you have to stand on your own.
The guy you talked to probably hated the fact that he had to rely on the federal government.
One of the reasons why white men hate the federal government is because it makes them feel like they're weak, that something is above them, and as a result they have to be like a warrior or a revolutionary.
This happens constantly.
I mean, like, think about how many people in this country are on some form of government assistance, and they hate the deep state.
Right.
How much of that takes place?
And it has to do with the fact that and this is this is becoming a refrain, especially in twenty twenty four.
Nick, Americans are historically confused.
They do not understand why they do the things that they do.
They do not understand the things that they feel.
And that's not like accidental.
We live in a country where we're kept from understanding ourselves, where we don't really have a basic education of our motivations or principles or what goes on, you know, underneath the hood.
Like, this whole thing, like, is a country that is deeply, deeply confused.
Well, I am equally confused, but I'm just not violent, I guess.
I don't know how else to, you know... I think you're a little bit more aware than maybe the average mayor, is what I would say.
Because this is a tough country right now.
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