Weekender PREVIEW: Oligarchs, Surveillance, and Sex Panic?
Nick Hauselman is still out and about, leaving Jared Yates Sexton to tackle some recent stories, including the revelation that Donald Trump was likely bought off by a TikTok investor, RFK Jr. naming his chief donor his running-mate, NYC deploying AI surveillance, and a deep-dive into a truly wild Ross Douthat column wrestling with "the liberal sex crisis."
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Hey everybody, welcome to the Weekender edition of the MacGregor Podcast.
I'm Jerry D'Alessio.
Nick Halsman's not here.
Nick is gallivanting around the country right now with his family, and good for him.
That means you get me for another day.
Just a reminder, if you want to gain access to this full episode.
And listen, there's a lot of stuff we've got to get into here.
We have to talk about oligarchs.
We've got to talk about this evolving situation with donors and tech industrialists.
We've got to talk about some really weird stuff going on in New York City.
And we're going to go really, really deep into a New York Times, Ross Do That article.
And we've got to get into sexual morality.
I don't know how else to get into that, which is a really interesting topic, particularly the route that Ross takes us.
And we've got to give it some historical, political, and socioeconomic background background.
But a reminder, go over to patreon.com slash mcgreggpodcast in order to gain full access to the Weekender episodes.
If you haven't listened already, last week's Weekender was our live taping from Henderson, Nevada at Pete Dominick's Stand Up Podjam.
It was our first live episode.
It was such a good time.
And for those of you who were down there, man, it was so good getting to meet people and hang out with people and feel the love down there in the community.
You know, and getting to meet some of our listeners and supporters, and like, I walked away from the event, like, I was so happy to hang out with Nick, and I hope you heard our conversation about the Wendy's Frosty, because, man, is he wrong about that?
But it was so good to get to hang out with Nick.
It was so good to get to hang out with listeners and like really feel the love and the support of these communities that we're building up because we have to.
Years ago, when I started doing bourbon talks back during the pandemic, you know, I was talking a lot about intentional communities and how the situation that is currently escalating in front of our very eyes, that we were going to have to find others that we could rely on, that we could find hope in and support in and energy and love.
And it's It's one of those things that when you realize that that's what's missing and when you realize that that is the antidote to authoritarianism and fascism, You know it, but you don't always know if you're going to find it, or if you're going to grow it.
And, you know, there have been moments over the course of this podcast, the Muckrake podcast, and even in the other relationships I've had, you know, with other like-minded people, you know, whether it's Pete Dominick or Daniel Moody, who was on Tuesday's episode, or Sarah Kinzier, or a whole host of these people,
You know, sometimes you're so busy living in it that you don't necessarily have the moment or the realization that, wow, this is really coming together and wow, this is actually meaningful and I'm existing within something that I knew needed to happen.
The event down in Henderson, Nevada was a really good opportunity to take a breath and look around and say, wow, this is happening.
And I just want to say before we get into any of these stories and the analysis that I'm so grateful for all of you for supporting this podcast, for, you know, there are moments Where Nick and I, you know, are tired, or we're having moments where, like, even we are a little, you know, weary.
And you keep us going, and you make us believe in something better, and that it's possible to defeat these forces that we're talking about.
And I just, I can't thank you enough.
Just thank you, thank you, thank you.
All the love in the world to you.
For this episode, unfortunately, we need to start with some developments that, you know, upon first blush, they don't necessarily seem massive, but it's a little bit like an archaeological dig where you find something.
And it's like maybe small or maybe it's not that significant.
And you start looking at it and you start to realize, wow, this is just the tip of something larger.
And these are the types of things that analysts like myself and other like-minded analysts have known and looked for.
But as it starts to reveal itself, it's really kind of crazy, honestly.
And you know, I spent a lot of time Whether it was in American Rule or eventually Midnight Kingdom, I started to realize how much society goes through these cycles where the wealthy and the powerful sort of control things as they're accumulating power and more and more capital.
and holding more and more sway over government and culture and politics.
And eventually what happens on the other side is like not only are they like donating money and putting their influence towards candidates and initiatives, they actually start coming into the arena in a much, much more aggressive way.
So on that note, it has been revealed this week.
And Nick and I talked about, this was from the live taping of The Weekender down in Henderson.
We had talked about Trump's, not just legal troubles, but possibilities of where he might end up getting the millions upon millions of dollars that he needs to pay his bail and his legal fees and also his, you know, his judgments.
And we had brought up that Digital World Accusation Corporation was merging with Truth Social, which was getting in line a deal that would probably get Donald Trump roughly three to four billion dollars.
Now you don't need me to tell you how suspicious all of this is.
Truth Social Not exactly the most influential social media company.
Of course, it's more of a haven for far-right lunatics who left Twitter and wanted to spend time with Donald Trump.
It's a very self-selecting group of people.
This merger, which is dubious in tons of ways because Truth Social doesn't even have like a true tech apparatus.
It doesn't have the structure of a company that would be acquired or brought together in a merger like this.
It turns out that the main investor in Digital World Acquisition Corporation is Jeff Yass, who is a Wall Street oligarch and a major, major Republican donor.
That's right, everybody.
A Republican donor is using his wealth to help bring in Truth Social and get Donald Trump a windfall of three to four billion dollars.
It's also interesting that Yass is also an investor in ByteDance, which is the company behind TikTok.
And that prior to Donald Trump announcing that he opposed the official banning of TikTok, which again, I remind you, was a bipartisan effort, he met with Jeff Yass.
Which is really fascinating, right, that Trump sort of changed his stance on TikTok, which is invested in by Jeff Yass, who is also carrying out this merger that's going to get Donald Trump three to four billion dollars, a giant, giant windfall.
And God knows if Yass is possibly going to pay some of his legal fees or help with this campaign.
In other words, We have a situation where we have one of these investor oligarchs who is using their money to buy a presidential candidate.
Now, so far, what has happened with the attempted banning of TikTok?
And let's not, you know, let's not make any bones about it.
This is a shakedown of a corporation that is using a Cold War, Red Scare type ideology in order to shake down a corporation.
And hand it over, possibly, not just to Steve Mnuchin and the right, but also the Saudis, who have a vested interest in controlling all these different modes, including Twitter, which they more or less run, with Elon Musk as sort of a figurehead.
But here we have a situation where Donald Trump, who holds significant sway over the Republican Party, is often the person who tells the Republicans how to vote and what to believe, who is more or less having his opinion bought off by an oligarch.
So we have a situation where, yes, he's going ahead and putting his money and his influence toward the Republican Party anyway.
It looks a lot like he's getting Donald Trump to help him maintain his position behind a social media tech company.
Now, we've all been taught, obviously, that politics is the grandest of all the stages.
That's where all the power lies.
But look what's happening here.
This is less about politics.
It's more about maintaining a position in a company.
Which is way more important than the presidency at this point.
It's all just out in front of it.
It is a mascot, so to speak.
Sure, Donald Trump can go ahead and hold sway over Republicans and, you know, jam up the works on this thing, which is likely what has happened with the TikTok ban anyway.
but you now have a situation where oligarchs, billionaires, you name it, are going to be able to take someone like a Donald Trump, who is incredibly vulnerable, and by the way, after him, whether it's people with debt or otherwise, Otherwise, it's going to be people who are going to be dependent on these oligarchs who have been the main thrust of the Republican Party for decades now, since the 1970s, when they started pulling their resources and creating an anti-intelligentsia.
They started going into our universities.
They started going into our media.
They started going into our science.
They went everywhere in order to create a counter reality that has created the absolute shitshow that we live in now.
And now it's becoming more and more obvious what's actually going on.
They're not even hiding it.
Similarly, another piece of news, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who I don't know if you all saw, has come out with the brave position that chemicals in our water are what are causing people to become transgender.
I mean, this guy is a very serious person.
There have been rumors that as a vice presidential running mate, he was trying to choose between professional wrestler turned independent governor Jesse the body Ventura, who had never met a conspiracy theory he didn't like.
And Aaron Rodgers, who had that's an NFL quarterback, Aaron Rodgers, who licked a bunch of toad poison and went into complete and utter darkness and isolation and came out like questioning mass shootings.
That was supposed to be the choice.
For his running mate.
Well, he made a different decision this week.
And I don't know if you've heard of this because it hasn't been widely reported, but I actually think that this is a really, really significant development.
it.
RFK Jr.
picked Nicole Shanahan, tech entrepreneur and his main donor, as his running mate.
Again, we have another oligarchical situation where a donor is asserting more and more control over the process.
Now, Shanahan, who is the ex-wife of a Google co-founder, which is where a lot of this money comes from, has been spreading money throughout tech, but has been very, very happy to give RFK Jr.
just tons of money.
So far.
She is the one that funded that really, really despicable Super PAC ad that superimposed RFK Jr.' 's face over JFK and RFK in an old ad.
It was just very, very macabre.
It was grave robbing at its absolute worst.
Well, now, because she is the spigot of money for RFK Jr., she's now going to be a vice presidential candidate, she's going to have a higher profile, and good news for everybody, she now gets to spend however much money she wants to on this process.
She can light millions upon millions of her own dollars on fire because she's loaning it to the campaign at this point.
I hope you can go ahead and see how alarming this is.
The idea that a billionaire is just now going to run for this office with absolutely no experience, no ideas, nothing but this surplus of money, which has been created again because of neoliberalism, which we'll continue talking about on this episode, don't you worry, has created record inequality and an oligarchical class.
Particularly as, you know, tech giants created a new economy which the United States government just absolutely flooded with billions of dollars.
They have become the industrialist of the 21st century.
And as they've done that, they are absolutely going to follow in the footsteps of the oligarchs that we had in the early 20th century who threw their support behind fascists and Nazis as the rubber meets the road.
They'll do this in order to protect themselves.
Elon Musk is already showing us exactly how this is going to play out and how it's going to look.
He's giving us an early glimpse at it.
But literally a presidential campaign being sold off to a donor?
That's spine-chilling.
Never mind, of course, that this is a Kennedy.
One of the most venerated political names and dynasties that America has ever seen.
And by the way, it's time that we stop looking at all of these things as royalty or there's some sort of hereditary talent in any of this.
We need to tear that that bullshit down to the studs and never ever look back.
But a Kennedy has sold his presidential campaign to a donor.
I mean, if that doesn't show you what's going on in this country, I don't know what else to tell you.
We have this situation where we have had a neo-fascist authoritarian movement that has been absolutely funded and directed by libertarian donors and right-wing donors Who have seen an opportunity to get their will carried out by a bunch of political servants.
And they've done it for years.
And now they're going to have a heavier hand in all of this.
The Republican Party has carried their water for a very long time.
