Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman get into a discussion about the Iranian attack on Israel, what prompted it, and what Netanyahu might do in response. They shift gears to the Trump trials as they are set to begin if Trump can actually stay awake during the proceedings. And they finish on the most recent David Brook Op-Ed in the New York Times celebrating the managerial class.
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Welcome to a very busy episode of the Mike Craig Podcast.
I'm J.R.D.
Sexton.
I'm here with Nick Halsman.
Nick, how you doing, bud?
I'm doing.
I'm doing.
You know, things are getting busy.
You know, sometimes you get ready to do a podcast and you're like, man, we have a few things we need to talk about.
And then there are times it's just over the weekend, you wish you had a show every day.
Yeah, I guess.
Yes, I follow that line of reasoning.
And unfortunately, there's some things we have to talk about that are extremely serious.
Not fun.
Not fun.
Reminder, everybody, go over to patreon.com slash funcrack podcast and or support the show keeps that free editorially independent.
And also we're gonna be having a live show coming up here soon.
So, you know, keep keep your ears peeled for that.
Hopefully you come join the fun.
What is not fun, Nick?
Is that on Saturday?
Iran retaliated for the April 1st bombing of a consulate in Damascus by Israel.
They sent hundreds of drones, ballistic missiles.
Eventually, 99% roughly were intercepted by Israeli defenses, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Jordan.
We are, though, unfortunately, a little bit on the precipice of an unknown future right here, where this whole thing is going to go.
We have all the coverage here, including all the different angles you're not going to hear anywhere else.
Nick, what was your initial take on this?
This was a horrific thing to watch take place and be unclear about what was going to happen.
Well, I mean, thankfully there wasn't a ton of damage and the defense systems Work when you have some other people also helping you with it.
I think what I go back to is I was trying to wrap my head around exactly why Israel needed to do to take out this general when they did or why they did in the first place.
And I know that there's been skirmishes with Hezbollah on the border of Lebanon for a while and I suppose but it's like they're in the middle of what they're doing with in Gaza.
And they're the ones who are going to suddenly, you know, start firing a missile at Damascus and take the sky out.
That's what is very troubling to me.
And I don't know.
Do you seem to have any insight into why the timing of this would have happened that way?
I said last week that I was starting to get an inkling that Benjamin Netanyahu is very interested in escalating on all different fronts and thought they needed a regional war in order to hold on to power.
Since that episode aired, I have had multiple people reach out to me saying that their instincts and their sources tell them the exact same thing.
I think they want this.
I think that they thought that this was, if it wasn't going to start a regional war to make sure that Netanyahu, who we talk about this constantly, wildly unpopular in Israel.
The people want him gone.
Period.
And on top of that, they have completely and utterly lost world opinion.
I think this was one of those situations, trying to get that back.
But yeah, I think that's why the attack on the consulate took place.
Okay, interesting.
So what sounds like, and he's got some real hawks in his defense department.
Hawks is putting it mildly, yes.
Right, and they wanted him to retaliate like the second it started happening, but it's possible that he won't retaliate, right?
That Iran made their point.
So if the case was he wanted to open up a regional war and then he doesn't retaliate now, I don't know if that's really what the motivation was.
By the way, I don't know if it's a very competent decision anyway.
Like, I don't know if it's going to be a good explanation for why they did this in any kind of sense.
So which is, again, more concerning because of all the things you need in this area of the world, you need competent leaders who know what they're doing and actually act in earnest to, you know, Okay, within the rules of war and the rules of of how we live in our society civilization.
So it is overall completely concerning that they wanted to try and do this in the first place and I and I wonder if if they had any sense of really what they were trying to accomplish.
Well, so, Nick, a couple things.
I don't know if you listen to our podcast or not, but we're living in a time, a dearth of responsible leadership acting in earnest for the best interest of the people they represent.
That is a problem.
I'm also going to tell you something, Nick.
And before I say any of this, do I lob softballs up to Joe Biden as President of the United States of America?
I'd probably say no.
Do I cheerlead him in any way, shape or form?
You know, I would have to think long and hard before I came up with an instance of cheerleading, yes.
Have I been critical about his stance when it comes to Gaza?
Oh, that is for sure.
Okay, I'm gonna say something right now, and I hope everybody understands what just got said between me and Nick here.
The Biden administration handled this situation with Iran retaliating against Israel really well.
Really, really well.
And here's the reason why.
Nick, I remember being in junior high or high school, And there would be a fight brewing between a couple of people.
They were going to fight after school, right?
And everybody's like, oh yeah, there's going to be a fight after school.
And, like, people get bloodlust for that.
They really want a fight to happen.
When it comes to geopolitics, this is what happens.
Oh, you bombed that.
You have to do something in order to show that you just won't be bombed, right?
There's something that you could refer to as retaliation theater.
You know what happened in this?
Iran back-channeled and has been back-channeling with the United States for the last few months.
It is since the beginning of October.
Why?
Because, yes, have they supported some of these proxy groups and attacks on Israel?
Absolutely.
Iran does not want a regional war.
So what happened here?
They back-channeled to the Biden administration.
They said, you understand that we have to do something.
They attacked our consulate in Damascus.
We have no choice whatsoever.
By the way, the regime in Iran needs to go wildly unpopular as well.
Okay, just so everybody understands how the chessboard looks right now.
They said, OK, we're going to do this.
We're not looking for an escalation.
We have to make a show of this thing.
Then what did they do?
They pulled the ripcords on over 100 drones that took hours to get to Israel, right?
They didn't shoot a bunch of cruise missiles.
I'm not going to sit here and tell you they have a bunch of sonic missile, hypersonic missiles, right?
They probably do.
They went ahead, they telegraphed everything.
What they said was, I don't really want to fight after school.
I'll throw one punch and we're done.
And they even said that to the United Nations.
They said, we consider this matter concluded.
Basically, there was a little bit of damage to an airport in Israel.
Iran, to go ahead and save their face, showed a bunch of doctored footage saying there was massive damage in Israel in order to try and make it seem as if they defended themselves.
And what did Biden tell Netanyahu?
He said, take the win.
He said, this thing is over.
You can, I mean, saber rattle all you want.
But if you retaliate, the United States is not going to have your back.
Of course, a lot of Biden's words have been hollow when it comes to Israel and Gaza.
So we don't even know what would happen if they retaliated.
The problem now is it does feel like this thing could be done.
The question is whether or not the hawks are going to get their way and whether or not someone like Netanyahu is going to depend on this.
But this was actually a really well done piece of diplomacy by the Biden administration.
And I think he's dipping his toe into the Gaza, what they're going to have to say to him about Gaza, hopefully sooner than later.
He's going to have to finally say, we're going to stop giving you arms until you, unless you have a ceasefire at the very least, is what he's going to have to say.
And this is, this will be part of that thing.
Now, we also know that Israel would have no chance in a regional war with Iran without the backing of the United States.
So if we know that the United States is not going to participate in that, then that kind of is the break.
I mean, unless Netanyahu intends to lose, if he wants to lose a war with Iran and the Million Man Army, that they don't have nuclear weapons at this point.
But, you know, when we think about what Trump did with the agreement that they had so they wouldn't develop nuclear weapons, you have to imagine at this point right now, Iran is going to fast track whatever they were trying to do from before.
Which is, you know, leading to eventually a war because Israel would probably never win.
So, there's a lot happening here.
And by the way, I really hate whenever people say three-dimensional chess, because geopolitics is actually, if it's done the correct way, it's like nine or ten-dimensional chess.
You know what I mean?
got that close and that who knows what would happen at that point.
So there's a lot happening here.
And by the way, I really hate whenever people say three-dimensional chess because geopolitics is actually, if it's done the correct way, it's like nine or 10 dimensional chess.
You know what I mean?
Like it's all over the place.
Right now, quite frankly, if there was a regional war, everyone knows who is a rational actor.
They understand it's not a limited proxy thing.
It's not going to be whatever.
I'm sorry, but going back to the metaphor of the fight after school, there's not just two people showing up in the alley behind the school.
There's China, there's Russia, there's the United States, there's Great Britain, there's France, there's NATO, you name it.
All these things that are set up right now, everybody is running at maximum capacity, waiting on something large to break out.
You have to wonder how many of them are rational.
Someone like Vladimir Putin has shown that he is not rational, right?
Luckily, he's the underboss when it comes to the Chinese-Russian alliance, right?
He's not the one who's like calling all the shots.
When you look at this thing, does Netanyahu actually want a regional war?
Maybe.
He doesn't have a lot of answers.
And when you don't have a lot of answers and a lot of options, you start making bad decisions.
And he's made so many bad decisions at this point.
The question is, can we go ahead and back away from the precipice of this thing?
Because if this breaks out, it's going to be really bad.
Oh, I agree.
And I feel like, you know, not to make this, to diminish the seriousness of this situation, but like, if you ever saw the movie Dazed and Confused, I don't know if you remember that, but they're having this party and there's a really big, strong asshole guy.
And the other guy says, I'm just going to punch him once.
They got into a mini skirmish and then, you know, everyone's going to jump in and separate us and then it'll be over.
So what happens?
He sucker punches the guy and then everyone just gets in a circle and tears them on and can't wait.
And he gets, Absolutely demolished.
And so obviously, there's two ways that this can happen.
But luckily, at the very least with Putin, he's a little too busy right now dealing with what's going on in Ukraine.
And so as a result, they probably don't even have any weapons to spare to send over to Iran to help them fight, I would think, right?
They already have the weapons.
That's the thing in all of this, and we'll get into it.
Unfortunately, we've got to talk about John fucking Bolton in just a minute, and these other creeps and ghouls who are pushing this thing.
Nick, I want to return real quick to something you said.
You said, you know, Iran would probably at this point decide that they need nuclear weapons.
Yeah.
Why would any nation at this point not want nuclear weapons?
What you have learned is it's the only way that you can deter something like an invasion or being wiped off the map or turning into a proxy in a larger superpower battle, right?
Iraq, like, let's be frank about this.
What did Iraq learn?
Iraq learned that they didn't have weapons of mass destruction.
They probably needed them if they didn't want something terrible to happen to them.
What has happened is we have turned into a rational feedback loop at this point.
And so what we're discussing is the way things are.
We're not discussing the way things could be.
We could back away from this brink and we could have a better world in which innocent people aren't going to be killed and citizens and cultures aren't going to be wiped off the map.
We should back away from that thing.
But when you play this game the way that all of these analysts and strategists and all these people who make so much more money than you and I, for the record, The people who go ahead and engage in this, because the capitalist weapons trade and imperial actions make you way more money, right?
Because you're part of the system, you're jacked into it.
This right now needs to be a moment, and I said this about Ukraine, I said this about what's happening with Gaza, this should be a moment to back away from this in cold horror, right?
But to go ahead, and by the way, Nick, When I turned on CNN and I saw John fucking Bolton not just on there but saying some of the craziest shit and we'll listen to what he had to say and I'll tell you some of the other stuff that we don't we're not even going to actually discuss that that should tell you what's going on when you hear a ghoul like this.
This is a Herman Kahn type figure, Nick.
The type of person who, back during the Cold War, used to tell everybody, limited nuclear war is not a bad thing.
Like, maybe we should wipe Russia off the map.
Yeah, we'll lose hundreds of millions of people, but I mean, you know, in the end, we'll win.
A real Dr. Strangelove it.
But once we see what the damage is, I think it's incumbent on Israel and the United States to reestablish deterrence in a major way.
And I think that means, by definition, Israel's response, and there should be a response, should not be proportionate.
It should be far stronger because when deterrence fails to re-establish it, you have to teach the adversary that any gain they may hope to get by any future attack will be more than outweighed by the damage that will be caused.
Yeah, so CNN had this absolute fucking ghoul on.
And Nick, if you find yourself on national television and you say the response should not be proportionate, not only have you done something wrong, you're advocating for widespread destruction and escalation.
John Bolton has dreamed of a war with Iran, and so has everybody.
Why?
Because if we could get rid of that regime, we could open it up as a capitalist market, we could get to those tasty, tasty resources, and on top of that, their business is war.
And what did CNN do?
CNN's like, absolutely, this is a rational way to discuss it.
It's so incredibly awful and dangerous that these people are out there at this point.
You know, let me take you back way back, Jared, way back to 2020.
You might remember that we had a president who decided to do something very similar where he killed a general in the Iranian army.
Wait, before you say anything, I just want to go ahead and say how far through the looking glass we are, Nick, that all we're doing right now is talking about Iranian restraint.
It's wild, wild.
Go ahead.
Maybe we've misunderstood what was going on there this whole time.
No, we understood what was going on.
Yes, this is bad.
But the point being that Trump orders this strike, they kill Soleimani, and there's a response from the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp, and Mr. Trump chose not to retaliate.
They said that was it.
We're done.
That was it.
It was it was a it was a measured response where they were prepared for it.
Whatever.
Nobody got hurt and it's similar to what happens now in Israel.
So it's not that hard to sort of, you know, especially the guy who actually was Trump's.
What was he NSA?
He would know he was the he was a security.
Yeah.
Yeah, you know, it's not wouldn't be hard for him to reference his own boss and said, yeah, we were really important to have restraint here.
So we don't open this up.
But it's almost like Bolton is living in what year would he be living in to have that kind of description?
It had to be before 1980, I would say.
No, no, John Bolton is perpetually in like a 1958 1959 state of mind.
Yeah, right.
Right.
But but it's a weird dystopian because it's 58, 59.
But we have to remember that Iran doesn't become it doesn't.
So we're actually going to put John Bolton in it.
If we're going to put John Bolton in a line that makes in a light that makes sense, we're not getting this podcast done.
That's not happening.
This is a guy who literally, it's very much a Kissinger type idea in which human life doesn't matter, right?
It's the grand game that you're playing.
And so, and by the way, Nick, I'm so glad you brought up the Iranian Revolution.
We haven't talked about the fact that for people who are keeping track at home, Iran was a near-democracy that the United States overthrew and put in like a bloody dictator in order to carry out what they wanted.
Meanwhile, all of that has been lost in terms of how we talk about any of this, right?
It's just this ugly Middle Eastern regime that just absolutely has to be wiped off the face of the map.
I don't know about you, but watching this take place, watching these hawks do what they do, watching online, was nothing but a giant cesspool of misinformation.
It was one video doctored after another, videos of like old things, video game footage, like, no, this is a time where we're literally, it's, Nick, we're swimming through an ocean of gasoline right now.
And basically, there's just a bunch of idiots and assholes who are just sparking lighters left and right.
And we're so lucky that those sparks haven't caught yet.
But the problem is, the more that you spark those lighters, the more that you light up torches and toss them into that ocean of gasoline, the more chance there is of something really getting out of hand.
By the way, I'm willing to bet that people in the Biden administration could tell you right now, if you only knew, there's probably a dozen more of these kind of things that maybe haven't been brought to light that we don't know about over the last several years, even.
And so that that's we don't even know the half of what's going on and what could be happening, which is why, yeah, it is nice that Biden, with all of his experience and the measured responses that he understands is important here, that he is there.
You know, not not to say that, by the way, not that I want to give Trump any kind of credit.
You know, it's possible Trump would have been the same way and been like, hey, don't you don't need to attack your honor.
We didn't do it.
So you don't need to.
So, you know, there is this notion that there is some sort of order and balance that exists.
And we are still here because we haven't had whatever you're worried about.
I want to be clear because it's very, very important to state things clearly in this moment that.
This is why, when November rolls around, that I will go to a voting booth and vote for Joe Biden.
And again, go home immediately and take a shower because of the genocide in Gaza.
But let me be very obvious about it.
Donald Trump, and anyone like Donald Trump, should not be in a position of power when things are so tenuous.
That doesn't mean that the order we live in is okay.
None of this is okay!
This isn't working.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, so for instance, just to use another analogy or metaphor, Nick, It's like driving down the highway at 80 miles an hour, suddenly realizing, you know, you're in a cyber truck.
And so you can't stop the truck, right?
Like the brakes don't work.
You don't survive that and then are like, oh, I'll go drive again tomorrow.
I'm sure it'll work itself out.
Things need to change.
Joe Biden is not the leader for the moment, but the fact is that we are very fortunate that Donald Trump is not president right now.
Not because he would have necessarily mishandled this thing, but every single day, what you said, we don't always know.
What Israel has created in Gaza has created such a flashpoint With all these proxies, with all these, uh, everything from the hoodies, like firing rockets, to going after ships, to whatever, you name it.
There are so many moments in all of this that are so complicated and so dire that we really can't have someone like Donald Trump.
Who, by the way, we've talked about it how many times, Nick?
If this conflict were to actually break out, the larger, larger conflict, what side would he be on?
He would naturally be on the authoritarian side.
It doesn't mean the United States is the force of good in all this, but it does mean that right now, as long as this situation exists, we don't need pyromaniacs in control.
Right, and by the way, the response doctrine by Bolton is the exact same mindset that has gotten us into Israel and the Gaza issue for all these years, and the Palestinian and Israeli thing.
Israel will always feel like they have to, you know, respond in worse fashion to make their point, whatever, and it's like, you could think that that's true and you can think you can get some some you know resolution from that but in reality you're just going to be in the same situation you are for the next 250 years maybe longer you know we don't have that time right no oh yeah I mean okay right like you don't think that we could have Israel and Palestine having these flare ups every 25 years for the next 200 years no
We can't have the momentum that the world has right now.
First of all, it's global climate change.
Second of all, with neoliberal capitalism.
Third of all, with rising authoritarianism, which those things are all connected.
We can't keep going like this.
And quite frankly, going back to the metaphor of the truck flying down the road without the brakes, we don't need someone who's like, oh, the answer obviously is to hit the gas harder.
You know what I mean?
We can't keep going in this direction.
It has to change and otherwise we're going to fly off a bridge that doesn't exist.
Your mindset actually reveals that you are a lot more optimistic, I almost think, than most.
Because of that, you know what I'm saying?
Like, you are envisioning this world where we're going to finally get some of these things right, get rid of authoritarianism, have people treated decently.
A lot of people would probably just say, you know what, I just want to be able to have the status quo and have like, you know, get through these missile crises that we've had, whatever, and then, you know, rely on the fact that they won't pull the trigger when they had a chance.
I hope that that is true.
I don't think that that means, you know, I don't think Joe Biden needs to be outfitted with Neuralink and be the president for the next, like, 30, 40 years.
Somewhere along the line, something is going to have to change.
And by the way, it's going to look a lot like the social and populist democratic movements of the 60s and 70s.
Not just the United States, but in France and Germany and Europe and even the Soviet Union.
Things have to change.
We can't keep doing this.
This needs to be a moment of clarity and to walk away from what happened this weekend.
We still don't know what's going to happen next.
We still don't know if Netanyahu's going to go ahead and do this.
I'm sure you saw it too.
Every Israeli defensive specialist, and believe me, there are a lot of them.
You can't turn on cable news right now without finding one.
Every single one of them is like, we have to hit Iran and we have to hit them hard, right?
Like, we are constantly just sort of like tiptoeing around a bunch of tripwires.
It could get really, really bad.
Something has to change.
All right, on speaking of Donald Trump, Nick, listen, he is in New York right now in the start of the Stormy Daniels hush money trial.
It sounded like an interesting day.
Jury selection started in this.
He became the first former president to go through, to begin a criminal trial.
Everything that we have heard from this sounds absolutely awful.
Maggie Haberman, I reported that he fell asleep during the entire thing, which is fantastic.
A lot of stuff is happening around Donald Trump.
This isn't just to celebrate that his fortunes are pretty rough right now, because we know that makes him desperate, but there are some signals right now that things are a little bit haywire over there.
I gotta tell you, Jared, I'm a little bit sympathetic to Trump for falling asleep in these proceedings, because I know what that's like, man.
I know you're sitting there, and you're listening, and you're intently, and all of a sudden, next thing you know, your head drops.
You've been in a courtroom as a former president in a trial in which you illegally gave hush money to a porn star that you had a relationship with in order to interfere with an election?
I have not.
However, when I watch the State of the Union and I'm looking at the Speaker of the House and the Minority Leader behind the President speaking, I could not have that job, because I guarantee you, I might nod a little bit.
And that's pretty important, too.
But it does speak volumes of where his mental state is.
He's probably up all night grinding his teeth and really, really troubled by all these things, as he should be.
He's not well.
I know we talk about this a lot.
He looks bad.
He sounds bad.
On top of that, like, the numbers right now, and again, we don't, numbers don't always matter because they can change so much.
And also on top of that, we don't even know if the Republicans, and chances are they're not going to respect democracy and democratic, you know, Objective numbers, but the numbers have changed.
Nick, on top of that, truth social, this whole thing, like the stock has plummeted really, really historically.
He's facing 34 counts here.
We know that he's facing God knows how many other counts everywhere.
He's not even actually campaigning all that much.
And that's something I think is really interesting.
The judge got told today, He said, you know, well, the judge said Trump might actually face some jail time if he just misses a bunch of days of the trial.
And his lawyers are like, I'm sorry, he's running for president of the United States of America.
He might not be here some of the time.
Plus, on top of that, he's facing God knows how many other trials.
This is not sustainable for even like a young person in good condition, much less a 70 plus year old man who doesn't take care of himself and also isn't well.
This is this is a mess.
Yeah, and he's got terrible legal representation as well.
I mean, I guess they don't really have much choice.
But what they're trying to do is such an affront to what the courts would ever feel is appropriate.
And certainly any judge in a federal case like this, who you would tell him, well, he's got to be somewhere else.
They'll be like, I don't give a shit.
Why would you give a shit?
Oh, you have something more important to do than to respect this court in the process?
Oh, that's great.
Cool.
So it's going to be a shit show and they're going to continue to argue stuff.
It's simply, you know, you have to be a less than a first year law student to know that you shouldn't be arguing these things.
And it's gross.
We didn't mention, I mean, he is on the campaign trail a little bit.
He was in Pennsylvania.
I know we didn't quite have it on the rundown, but you did see what he said about even like the Gettysburg, the Battle of Gettysburg.
Beautiful.
It was a beautiful battle and uh he he I saw this and um this is a man who like not only is he tired Nick but he's fraying.
Do you know what I mean?
Like he as a human being trying to say things in front of other people like it's not it's not just unintelligible it's actually worrisome what's happening with him.
Well like word salad isn't really even enough.
No.
It's like Word casserole on Sunday evening or something.
I can't quite figure out because he's, someone did on Twitter, they actually were looking at phrases he's using and looking them up in quotes on Google.
Nobody puts words that he does in the order he puts them in, in any kind of speaking way.
It's really troubling.
We're talking about a person who once referred to a hurricane saying it was historic.
We've never seen anything like this in terms of wet.
Yeah, wet.
You know, he's a little bit like the guy in, to get back to the movies, the Anchorman in Anchorman.
Brick.
Yeah, it's pretty accurate.
Steve Carell's character.
What's his name in it?
Brick.
Brick.
Brick Tamlin.
He's a little bit like that.
It's tough.
And Nick, on top of that, you know, one of the things that we have to talk about, because listen, we could sit here and just like cast stones at Trump all day because he deserves it.
It's everything around him, right?
Because when you talk about Donald John Trump, you have to talk about like what he actually surrounds himself with, which is more important than him as a person.
When it comes to Truth Social, I just want to touch very quickly on this stock.
You know, you, I thought on our live show, you would Kind of nailed this dead to rights.
He said this was going to be a meme stock, much like GameStop was, right?
With people investing.
And of course, what has happened is Trump has figured out every way possible to get, like, his devoted followers to give him as much money as possible.
To the point where we covered this, people were sending him handwritten notes saying, I'm sorry, we don't have any more money to give you.
In this case, I wanted to look at very, very quickly something that Washington Post hit on in terms of, like, they went out and talked to some of his supporters who have been investing in this disastrous stock.
Quote, Jerry Dean McClain first bet on former President Donald Trump's Truth Social two years ago, buying into the Trump company's planned merger partner, Digital World Acquisition, at $90 a share.
Over time, as the price changed, he kept buying, amassing hundreds of shares for $25,000, what he called his, quote, whole nest egg.
That nest egg has lost about half its value in the past two weeks as Trump Media and Technology Group's share price dropped from $66 after its public debut to $32.
McClain, 71 by the way, who owns a tree removal service outside Oklahoma City, said he's not worried.
If anything, he wants to buy more.
Quote, I know good and well it's in Trump's hands and he's got plans.
I have no doubt it's going to explode sometime.
Nick, I'm going to throw a word out there and I want to hear your response.
And that word is faith?
Literally, they have a religious faith in whatever Donald Trump tells them, which is one of the hallmarks of a cult leader for those keeping track at home.
I actually get choked up when I read this kind of stuff.
Me too.
It is that sad.
It's, you know, like, like, it's sort of the same thing, like, for instance, with like crypto, for instance, right?
You know, you buy crypto and it goes down.
Well, I got to buy more because it's cheaper now.
And then it'll be better when it goes up again later.
Like, it's so that cycle of like day trading bullshit anyway, it's already really, really evil.
And it doesn't help anybody.
But when a guy is 71, his whole nest egg that he's worked his entire life to scrape and scram, you know, just a little bit of cash is going to be sunk into a stock that we know has already been predisposed to take a dive because they did a special deal in the beginning where it allows people to sell earlier than they were supposed to.
That's going to drive the price down.
And especially when we know that the business itself isn't viable, then it's going to be a nothing.
They're going to end up losing all their money.
And he or he'll he won't make it to the time whenever we'll see a positive gains.
It's it's it's so distressing to me.
It's rough.
And by the way, in a few minutes, we're going to talk about basically the class that sort of makes up the supporting base of the Democratic Party.
But I want to make it very clear, something that that is sort of not talked about here because it never is.
Trump's support comes largely from four groups of people.
Nick, I guess it would be five now that I'm talking about one is like the faux populist movement, the MAGA movement that has no money.
They're giving him money like he's a televangelist.
The next part are like small business owners, people who feel like they've gotten screwed over because corporations have all of the power and all of the money.
This guy owns his own business.
What has he done with his excess capital?
He's given it to Donald Trump because he believes that Donald Trump will serve him.
Of course you have the far right, your neo-Nazis, you also have your evangelicals, and then of course you have the billionaires at the top who screw over all these people!
Right?
That's who supports Donald Trump.
And like you said, this guy should have just taken this money and put it into an account.
Instead, he's handed it over to Donald Trump because he believes he has the Midas touch.
Another person in that article, and I'm going to think about this for a long time, Nick.
It's another person who gave money to the Truth Social in order to try and help Donald Trump and watch their money vanish.
They said, quote, it feels like I'm trying to catch a falling knife, which I think is poetic and rough as hell and accurate.
What are they trying to do for this person?
They're putting their lives and their livelihoods on the line for someone who doesn't deserve it because they're looking for something to believe in and they're buying what he's selling and that's unfortunate.
You know, if you were going to make a really big decision in your life that would affect your whole family and all these different things, you probably would reach out to people that you know and you trust to get their handle on it.
Maybe they know this thing.
They know this company.
You would get some information, right?
Get some research done.
I'm kind of thinking about it right now where I'm trying to advise somebody to make a big decision in their life and they're young and they're going to be worried about college, where they're going to play basketball, this whole thing.
And it's like I'm calling anybody and everybody I know who I trust and I believe in to give me as much information so I can then pass it along.
So what's worse about the Trump situation and people willing to give their money is that Trump is being validated by quote-unquote like normal GOP people.
People that you would say oh well if that guy says Trump's okay and he'll vote for Trump well then he must be fine to invest all my money my nest egg into him and I think that's probably the piece that we haven't really put all the way together here to realize how devastating this has been.
If Trump had been treated like a pariah, like a lot of the GOP had begun to do this, then maybe these guys like this, who are 70 years old and investing all their money, wouldn't do that because they would finally see the reality.
And it's way too late for that.
Yeah, and on that note, Nick, you sent this over to me.
For my own sanity, I do not watch the Sunday morning shows because I think they are just piss poor.
What we're getting ready to listen to from the governor of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu, I think that this is an artifact.
I think this is a perfect insight into the people that you're talking about.
And I just want people to listen to this and we'll dive deep into it.
But one of the things as we listen to it, Nick, I want people to pay attention to When you hear this, the tuning fork of your soul is going to reject this.
Do you know what I mean?
It's going to be like, oh my god, what the hell are we doing here?
And there's a reason for it, but let's, yeah.
And the context is Sununu has been a vocal Trump critic for a while now.
And vocal, I'm out there.
And I also sent it over because I figured In the context of who his dad was, you would really get excited about him.
So we'll get to that after this.
But here's the question about that.
I hate the election denialism of 2020.
Nobody wants to be talking about that in 2024.
I think all of that was absolutely terrible.
But what people are going to be voting for, the reason I'm supporting, not just the president, but a Republican administration.
That's what this is.
They want a culture change in Washington.
All the rules and policies that pound down on the American people, all the wokeness Right?
The fact that folks in Washington, liberal elites in Washington, want to stand on the shoulders of hard-working American families that built this country, defended this country, and tell them how to live their lives.
They're angry.
They're upset.
That's the culture change that people want to see.
People are upset by January 6th.
They're upset by the election denial.
They have every right to be.
I am.
But at the end of the day, they need a culture change to get America back on track.
But wait a second right there.
Your words were very, very clear on January 11, 2021.
You said that President Trump's rhetoric and actions contributed to the insurrection.
No other president in American history has contributed to an insurrection.
So please explain, given the fact that you believe he contributed to an insurrection, how you can say we should have him back in the Oval Office?
It's not, because for me, it's not about him as much as it is having a Republican administration, Republican secretaries, Republican rules, a sense where states' rights comes first.
I just want to stop it here for a second because that is, we need to make sure people heard that, right?
It's not about him.
They just want to vote a rubber stamp.
They want the robot who's going to stamp exactly all the policies they want.
They don't give a shit who does it or who's in the White House.
I mean, is that fair enough to say?
Absolutely.
And for the record, Chris Sununu, I have problems with his politics in huge ways.
He knows better.
You know what's popping up in my head right now, Nick?
It's a quote from The Office.
This is from Pam Beasley, and I'm just going to read it real fast.
Quote, when a child gets behind the wheel of a car and runs into a tree, you don't blame the child.
He didn't know any better.
You blame the 30-year-old woman who got in the passenger seat and said, drive, kid, I trust you.
You know what?
Donald Trump cannot be trusted.
And for the record, he's so devoid of shame and intelligence and competence.
Like, we know what he is.
Chris Sununu knows who he is.
He even says right here, he created an insurrection that tried to overthrow the government.
This is on him.
This is on the Republicans who have normalized this stuff because of what he's saying right here, which is, I know he's awful, but I care about power.
That's the one thing I care about is power at the end of this.
I know what he can do, but you know, get in the car and drive.
Individual rights comes first.
Parents' rights comes first.
We're going to have a pro-business economy.
We're not going to have a cancel culture that has really infiltrated all across America.
It's not about Trump with me.
It's about bringing those more... But he will be the president.
Right, I'm the governor of the Liberal Democratic State.
Bringing that mentality back.
That doesn't make any sense to me, Governor.
I'm sorry.
You're saying it's not about Trump.
You're saying he would be the president.
And you've said he's someone who's contributed to an insurrection.
I understand it doesn't make sense to you, George, but look at the polls.
What you're telling me is you don't understand why 51% of this country is supporting Donald Trump.
They're not crazy.
They're not conservatives.
They're not extremists.
They want culture change.
I'm not talking about polls.
I'm asking you a very simple question.
You believe Donald Trump contributed to an insurrection.
That's correct, right?
I stand by the statement.
You stand by the statement that he contributed to an insurrection?
And you believe that a president who contributed to an insurrection should be president again?
As does 51% of America, George.
I'm sorry.
And this 51% of America thing is bullshit too.
It's total bullshit.
Absolute total bullshit.
So I mean, I don't think, I mean, but I said it already.
I wanted people to hear it because, um, and everyone knows, we've been talking about this for, I don't know, seven years now, right?
However long it's been.
Um, we all know that they don't really care and have, you know, a, who the person is, has no effect on whether they're going to vote for them or not.
And so that doesn't matter.
But, you know, when you have it encapsulated like that, and he keeps trying to hide behind this, the polling numbers too.
It's like, well, what do you want me to do?
Everybody else likes him.
So I got to go along.
Well, one of the reasons why that many people like him is because assholes like you are saying this bullshit on these shows and they don't understand that.
And that's where we're at.
I just want to point out, before we get to the next Republican asshole who does this, you'll notice, and by the way, we've been talking about this for seven years.
That's the difference.
The people who like recognize what the Republican Party is actually about.
George Stephanopoulos, who has been so close to power within the Clinton administration and has been one of the most influential political commentators in the country, unfortunately, he doesn't get it, Nick.
He still doesn't understand what's happening with the Republican Party and that this is about power.
What Sununu is saying, and if Stephanopoulos had any idea what he was doing as an interviewer, it would come down to this.
Are you telling me that liberal democracy and democratic representation is less important to you than it is carrying out your political agenda?
Make him answer that!
Stop acting like so surprised!
They tell you every time they support this guy.
What actually matters to them is getting what they want done.
It's authoritarianism, it's just different grades of it.
It's how you're able to put it forward.
Also, for anyone who doesn't know this, Trump absolutely pantsed Sununu in New Hampshire during the primary.
Just absolutely went after him, ruined his numbers.
Sununu knows where his bread is buttered.
He has to do this.
He has to support it.
And deep, deep down, he does have this authoritarian mindset.
Well, whatever shower that you're going to take after voting for Biden in November, I gotta go take a shower right now and do the same thing because it's just, it's disgusting.
They talk about family values.
He listed all those things about what he wants and the culture change, whatever.
And it's like, they want to just fall right back into the grossest, you know, exactly like you said.
Power-hungry, you know, non-democratic policy stuff that they've ever had.
And that's what's so soul-killing about all of this, and it's to hear it like that, and to him to try and explain it like, of course you wouldn't understand, you don't get it, Stephanopoulos.
It's why we're here, and it's why it's going to be such a fight to make sure that Trump doesn't win again.
And, you know, to go ahead and I'm not going to miss a chance to criticize J.D.
Vance on my podcast.
That piece of shit is openly, you know, auditioning to be his VP.
I think he's probably the odds-on favorite right now to be Trump's vice presidential candidate.
J.D.
Vance was one of the people who said that, and by the way, it shouldn't shock anyone that he's a hypocrite or that he goes back on what he says and he doesn't care if anybody gets hurt because he sold out his own family and entire region and country of people.
But, you know, he even told people, he said, Donald Trump is dangerous.
And what's he doing now?
He's laundering his viewpoint when it comes to Ukraine.
In order to become a vice president, and he believes to be president, and by the way, if he were president, he'd be one of the most dangerous politicians America's ever seen.
In order to do that, he's literally trying to sacrifice the Ukrainian people to the altar of Vladimir Putin, all to go ahead and normalize the bullshit that Trump spews on a regular basis.
I don't want to talk.
I thought we weren't allowed to talk about him anymore.
I hate him.
Just to even have his name spoken on our show is... I hate him.
He's one of my least favorites.
Well, good transition.
Great transition.
Nick, this is... Before we get into this, this is an op-ed from David Brooks.
And don't turn off the podcast, everybody.
Don't do it.
I know you want to, but we need to talk about this.
And the reason we need to talk about it is this.
Sometimes, Opinion columnists and pundits will put out just some of the, like, most dry toast that you've ever imagined.
Just like, you know, they have a deadline, they're gonna write something.
But you know what's interesting about that, Nick?
And you probably know this, like, from analyzing, like, basketball and sports.
Sometimes you learn more about a game where someone doesn't play well than you do when they play well.
It reveals something about themselves.
And this op-ed from David Brooks reveals a whole lot, and it really needs looked at, because this leads to a better understanding of politics.
Nick, this is from an article, and man, this is something.
This is from the New York Times from David Brooks.
The title is, The Quiet Magic of Middle Managers.
Quote, nobody writes poems about middle managers.
Nobody gets too romantic about the person who runs a department at a company or supervises a construction crew or serves as principal at a school, manager at a restaurant, or deacon at a church.
But I've come to believe that these folks are the unsung heroes of our age.
Amid a wider national atmosphere of division, distrust, bitterness, and exhaustion, these managers are the frontline workers who try to resolve tensions and keep communities working, their teams united, and relationships afloat.
At a time when conflict entrepreneurs see Tucker Carlson and demagogues are trying to rip society apart, I'm beginning to think that these members of the managerial class spread across the institutions of society are serving as the invisible glue that gives us a shot at sticking together.
All right, there's a lot of meat on that bone, Nick.
What are your initial thoughts?
Are middle managers the glue that are keeping us from falling apart?
Well, my initial thought is nobody could have possibly paid him to write this.
He can't be paid many thousands of dollars to write this.
Oh, this doesn't make sense.
But speaking of like John Bolton, I, you know, Not that they if they looked any more alike I would ask you if you've ever seen John Bolton and David Brooks in the same room together but they must be like connected with like tubes in their brains and their essences are flowing because this is he's describing something like you go to any restaurant in any you know part any state in the union and you ask him oh how is you know the the manager of this restaurant how do you how do you feel about them You're not going to find anybody.
I don't think he's going to tell them, oh yeah, he's really good.
He's a good person.
They treat us really well.
And we actually like him.
I mean, this is the biggest complaint you hear from anybody in the service industry.
So I don't know what he's talking about.
I don't know what the purpose of this is and who he's trying to talk to, but it's the most mind-numbing, ridiculous saccharine shit I've ever seen.
Help me.
So Nick, before we jump into this, because there's a lot of political definitions and ideas that we need to get into here.
Who do you think David Brooks writes for?
Right.
Probably like some sort of, you know, centrist, right-leaning people who are educated and, you know, remember him from beyond all the talking head shows.
What do you think they do?
They're definitely not middle managers.
Oh, you don't think so?
I don't think so.
Oh, I think a lot of them are.
I think a lot of them are.
Yes.
I think a large portion of the readership of the New York Times are the professional managerial class.
And I want to define what that is for the record.
Okay.
Professional managerial class.
is the group of Americans who could afford to go to college, who have been entrusted with the responsibility, as Brooks is actually laying out here, to go ahead and carry out the operations of what's going on in the country.
So up top, you have the billionaires who basically own everything, and they're not going to go in and work and tell people how to make quesadillas or how to run, you know, properties or any of that stuff.
So what has happened?
Is as the divide between the people who go to college and the people who don't go to college has grown as inequality has grown, correct?
What has happened is the professional managerial class has become the main base of the Democratic Party.
It's the people who are able to get that education who are able to get these jobs in the middle of things in order to carry out basically the operations of capitalism in the United States of America.
That is who the Democratic Party relies on, as opposed to labor unions, people of color, women.
Those people, they just assume we'll go ahead and vote for them.
The interests are going ahead and representing the interests of these people, and that's a lot of who David Brooks is talking to.
And Nick, what you just said, the centrist right-leaning thing, is why the Democratic Party has moved to become more and more conservative over the last few decades.
Okay, okay.
I respect all of that.
That all makes sense to me.
I will just have to point out that, like, no foreman on a construction crew is reading the New York Times and David Brooks's op-ed, right?
You're thinking about an old construction crew.
You're thinking about the people out there, like, working and sweating as opposed to the people in the office.
The professional managerial class has grown and grown and grown, and, Nick, they are further away from labor than they have ever been.
And deacons at churches?
Okay.
That's fucking bullshit.
The New York Times we're talking about here.
So either way, again, it has to be, it's obviously a very concentrated audience he's going for.
I just don't know.
And then, you know, this is the style of writing is on the line of something like Jack Handy.
Remember Jack Handy?
Yeah.
Oh, I remember.
And let's dive into it because what the crux of this article is, Nick, is it is a list of things that the professional managerial class, And by the way, there's a reason why the Democrats are disliked.
People dislike the professional managerial class.
They don't like that group of people because they're exploiting them.
They're making sure, as Brooke said, that they're showing up to work.
And by the way, the work sucks.
At the crux of this is basically a list of things that he thinks makes good middle managers, right?
And by the way, all of this is about continuing this machine rolling forward.
Nick, let's go through a couple of these.
Let's start with Knowing that moral formation is part of the job.
Here we turn to the Gospel of Ted Lasso.
When Lasso was asked about his goal for his soccer team, he replied, for me, success is not about the wins and losses.
It's about helping these young fellows be the best versions of themselves on and off the field.
The lesson is that if you help your people become the best versions of themselves, the results you seek will take care of themselves.
Nick, this is brainworm shit!
If you are a manager, you're not being tasked with making people better versions of themselves.
You're tasked with making them do their job.
And if where you get the moral version of yourself is at work, something has gone wrong.
Right.
They're tasked with making more money.
Making more money!
Yes!
That's it.
You didn't win me making more money?
You're fired.
We'll find someone else.
That's it.
You're not making enough money for me?
You're fired.
That's it.
That is all there is.
There isn't this notion of what the Ted Lasso thing.
In fact, it's an affront to Ted Lasso that he's referencing in this article.
And for the record, before we move forward, if you haven't noticed the through line already, this is about moralizing and religiosity of capitalism, right?
It's about saying what we're actually doing here is more important than just making money and moving numbers around.
Are you going to point me through another excerpt here?
Unfortunately.
Creating a moral ecology.
I love talking about my old boss Jim Lehrer.
When I was starting out at PBS NewsHour and said something he thought was smart, his eyes would crinkle with pleasure.
When I said something he thought was crass, his mouth would turn down in displeasure.
For 10 years, I chased the eye crinkles and tried to avoid the mouth downturns.
Jim never had had to say anything to me, but with those kinds of slight gestures, he taught us how to do our jobs.
He communicated.
This is how we do things on the news hour.
These are our standards.
Jim is gone, but the standards and moral ecology he helped create live on.
Nick, if I took out Jim Lehrer from all of that and just put in dad or daddy, it's literally making work familial, and it's not That's not what work is!
You don't need to go to work and have a bunch of daddies and mommies that you're trying to please.
That's not how any of this works.
They're trying to put this, like, sheen on it that doesn't exist, and they're trying to hide what it actually is.
And in that situation, when you're working on a news show, like, I would much prefer to have them say, hey, great idea, or that sucked.
You know what I mean?
I don't want to try to read crinkles of your eyes and see if that's actually good or not.
What if he was having indigestion?
Nick, call me crazy.
Do you know what I want?
Well, I don't have a manager because fuck that.
I have a problem with authority and that's one of the reasons we do what we do.
I don't want to have to discern what manager daddy feels about me.
You know what good management is?
Communication.
Not giving people quiet cues.
That's horseshit.
Okay, the last one, I promise.
The absence of a heroic sense.
Albert Schweitzer was genuinely heroic.
In 1905, he decided to leave his successful careers in music and academia to become a missionary doctor serving the poor in Africa.
But he never thought that what he was doing was anything special, and he never hired people who thought their work in those terms.
If you're going to last a life of sacrificial service, he concluded, you have to treat it as something as normal as doing the dishes.
The same humility is observed in the best organizations, the willingness to do the uncelebrated work day after day.
I want to say this to anybody who is listening to this.
The key to your work is not to feel like you are a hero because you're doing your work and you don't get rewarded for it.
That keeps you from getting paid what you're earned.
It makes sure that the people you work with don't get paid what they earn.
And this is a thesis for the professional managerial class who is alienated from actual wealth and actual power.
And they are the ones who have to make sure that people are suffer and that they're exploited.
That's the entire reason why the white liberal managerial class is so screwed up in this country.
And this right here tells on himself over and over.
And if you need to know who David Brooks is, just rewind that and listen to it again.
Absolutely.
I mean, and there's so many people in this country that don't know how to advocate for themselves don't aware of the methods they can.
I can remember when there was trying to do an oil well in our neighborhood and we all rallied around and then you as we do the research we found out these this oil company had been drilling in other neighborhoods in different areas of poor people.
And they just let them and they were getting all sorts of problems with toxic, you know, exposure to chemicals and all these things.
And when they would ask them, people would go door to door.
They had no idea that they could have even said anything.
This is the guy who's like, shut the hell up.
Just put your head down and don't say anything.
Don't aspire to anything more than just being, you know, the complete and utter working class.
And that's supposed to be against what this country is about.
Supposedly.
But what Brooks reveals here is something very, very essential in what's happening in the United States of America.
The answer of the radical center, the center that is moving more and more to the right is, you know what the problem is?
People are just complaining too much.
They're asking for too much.
Whatever happened to putting your head down, being exploited, and not expecting more?
That's it.
That's what this is all about.
It's a quieter, gentler, right-wing, conservative, hierarchical idea.
There are some people who are better than others, you know, and they were born that way and, you know, some of them are going to make their way up the ladder and eventually they'll get something else.
But this right here is essentially the normalization or the trying to normalize exploitation and trying to keep people from having better lives.
All right, everybody, that's going to do it for this episode of the Montclair Podcast.
We will be back on Friday with the Weekender Edition.
Reminder, go over to patreon.com slash Montclair Podcast.
Go ahead, gain access to that, our upcoming live show, our exclusive analysis, and a whole lot more.
In the meantime, you can find Nick... Can you hear me, SMH?
Jeez Louise!
Can you hear me, SMH?
You mess up one thing.
It's like I'm learning that playing guitar.
You mess up like once, and if you just focus on it, you can't get through.
