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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss how one tweet by Elon Musk can torpedo a bill that had bipartisan support that could lead to a government shutdown for Christmas. Oh, and they're floating him as a replacement as Speaker of the House since Mike Johnson is in hot water for sullying himself by negotiating a deal with the Democrats. South Carolina pushes a bill that would execute women for having an abortion, while AOC gets pushed aside in her quest to lead the House Oversight Committee - a sign that the octogenarians in the party refuse to relinquish power.
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Welcome to the Weekender edition of the McCrack Podcast.
I'm Jared D. Sexton.
Here is Nick Hausman.
Nick, I told you off mic.
I'm going to go ahead because it's accountability.
I bought new technology to have a better mic as I'm traveling, as I'm out in the middle of nowhere.
I bought the wrong damn thing.
You know, if you just went wireless, I think we wouldn't have to worry about interfacing things.
I tried.
No, it has a receiver that goes into it.
I am my grandfather's grandson.
I go to the store.
I buy the wrong things.
Here we are.
It's okay.
It's going to be okay.
I appreciate it.
It is going to be okay.
I'm going to have to do the return process.
By the way, as we're talking about that, Nick, just want to say for the show, solidarity to the Amazon strike that's taking place right now.
Good luck to everybody doing that.
In the meantime, everybody go to patreon.com slash muckraigpodcast to get the whole show, support the show, keep us going, editorially free and independent, anti-corporate media.
And speaking of corporations, Nick, we have to start with...
Unfortunately, it's a story that we should have seen coming.
It is another mile marker on exactly what you and I have been covering recently.
On Wednesday, Elon Musk came out against the spending compromise that was put forward by Speaker Mike Johnson of the Republican Party.
Immediately after coming out against that, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance followed him with the rest of the GOP, which effectively killed the bill, which will very likely lead to a government shutdown while people are listening to this on Friday.
Musk single-handedly did this and is more or less wagging the tail of the GOP's dog.
Nick, what we've been talking about with the oligarchical takeover, it is here and we're watching the consequences.
I cannot believe that Trump is allowing Musk to take the oxygen here.
And I know people are trying to tweak him by calling it President Musk.
And then that's clearly what they're, you know, the opposition is trying to do here, which I suppose could then incite some sort of infighting, which we'll have anyway.
At some point, Musk is going to be out of the loop, right?
He's going to get kicked out.
Is that safe to say?
I don't know that we can say that for sure.
I will say that any conversations I've had with, how do I put this carefully, Democrats who are willing to resist this stuff, I have pushed for them to continually harangue Donald Trump and say, who's in charge, you or Elon Musk?
And Nick, we watched back in 2017 when Steve Bannon was kicked out of Trump's circle at that point, because it wasn't because of Charlottesville.
I don't know.
Right.
And who can forget that image we have when he walked on stage during one of Trump's rallies in the election, and they looked at each other, or he looked at Trump with that look, sort of like, we discussed this, the evil takeovers started.
It really was laid on thick there.
So I have no doubt, yes, that whatever financial arrangement that's been spoken to or about in private, It's some sort of pretty rock-solid connection here.
I don't know.
At some point, it just feels like he's going to tee-hee himself, tee-hee like a little kid, out of the circle, as most people are.
But you're right, it might end up being too strong of a lure because there's too much money to be made between these two.
So I just want to reiterate because we cannot let this become normalized.
We cannot become desensitized to this.
This is the world's richest man buying a presidency, getting for himself unelected, unaccountable power over the budget and spending of the United States government.
And a total takeover of the Republican Party and a Democratic Party that is lining up to fawn over him as their strategy going forward.
Nick, meanwhile, this spending bill, it includes hundreds of billions of dollars for disaster relief for farmers, for poor people.
Musk just called it pork on X, Twitter, whatever you want to call it.
Turned it into a bully pulpit.
And by the way, a reminder that Mike Johnson was one of the key drivers to getting this done.
And almost immediately, Mike Johnson rolled over like an obedient dog and showed Musk his belly, has come out against the bill that he pushed.
He's now going around talking about Musk and him are texting constantly about Republican strategy moving forward.
Musk wants to shut down the government until January 20th when Donald Trump takes over.
Meanwhile, Republicans like Rand Paul are coming out calling for Elon Musk to become the Speaker of the House of Representatives.
This is an actual quote from Rand Paul.
Quote, Nick, the richest man in the world has taken over the Republican Party almost to a person at this point.
This is a major development, and watching the government getting ready to shut down because of this asshole should disturb everybody.
I mean, they haven't even assumed power yet.
It's not supposed to be this way, and this has to be why Mike Johnson figured, well, we can get this done before they take over and at least have some normalcy before then, have a CR, have the government stay open, right?
Like, that must have been his calculation because we can't forget that, you know, Kevin McCarthy was primarily kicked out of his speakership because he made a deal with the Democrats, you know, a normal deal that, you know, was a bipartisan thing, just like Mike Johnson did.
So I suppose Mike Johnson's an idiot because he should have already foresaw that and not done this deal, right?
It puts egg on his face no matter how you slice it because now he has to go back and do what you described in terms of rolling over on his back.
So I don't think he's long for the position anyway.
I don't understand how someone like Elon Musk is supposed to take it over, although I have no doubt in those private discussions he said, sure, I'll do that.
How many companies is he supposedly running at this point, Jared?
Yeah.
I have lost track at this point.
And that is, I was actually having a moment with this where I was sort of, you know, one of the things that I have to do, and we sort of simulate this on the show sometimes, we'll sort of go down a logical ground.
And then unfortunately, over the years, you and I have sort of forecasted Where things are going and then it comes true.
I was sitting this morning and, you know, there's a part of the brain that sort of recoils from this.
And I was like, no, there's no way they would make him Speaker of the House.
He's already so busy with all of his companies and Doge and all of that shit.
And I was like, no, it doesn't matter because he's actually, this is what he does.
And so, yes, he shouldn't become Speaker of the House, but I do think there's a non-zero chance that That Elon Musk becomes Speaker of the House.
And by the way, as long as we're talking about this, Nick, he would be in line for the presidency.
And if you think the Republican Party wouldn't try to figure out a way to get a non-U.S. born person.
Yes.
Yeah, they would absolutely try and make that happen.
Yeah, so birthright citizenship is going to be ended, or they think that they're going to end it.
Right.
And then they're going to flip it and say, okay, but if you're not born here, you can still be president.
Like, this is the upside down, if there ever was one, in terms of how our democracy is supposed to, or any democracy is supposed to function.
But, you know, it's not going to be hard to, like, predict a lot of these things now because part of me wants to say it's so insane, so crazy.
There's just nothing we can predict anymore because how can you do that?
But, you know, certainly the easy one will be the oligarchical takeover of this, which has already started.
Yeah.
And we pretty much follow, like, what Russia has had, what happened to them.
And so maybe some of these guys won't get thrown to windows is, like, maybe the only difference I can picture.
Well, I mean, to be clear, we haven't covered it extensively, but one corporate whistleblower after another has been found dead.
You know, like, they're not falling out of windows.
Maybe that's the Moscow style.
Maybe the American style is, you know, he was really isolating a lot there at the end.
Or suiciding in a prison cell.
Exactly.
So, you know, what we're talking about here, and again, like, I'm trying to be very careful in this new era, because a lot of political analysis and conversation and commentary is based around sort of letting people sort of connect the dots.
What we are talking about is the richest man in the world outside of crypto and blood money background channels that might very well be Vladimir Putin and maybe even Xi Jinping, we don't know.
Outside of that, the most public wealthy man in the world has effectively bought the US government at this point.
He owns one of the major political parties.
He is already experiencing the fealty of the quote-unquote resistance party, opposition party.
We know that the only way to actually lubricate things and get things done in this country and around the world at this point is excessive wealth.
So whatever you can imagine Elon Musk doing or assuming or taking over at this point...
The whole point of it is that Elon Musk is so egregious about this.
What sets him apart from others is not talent.
It's not intelligence.
It's how craven he is, how he is willing to do things that other people aren't willing to do, to put himself out there and to grasp power.
It just so happens that our establishment and our systems are completely ripe for the picking, and he's taking advantage of that.
Yeah, and he can justify it pretty easily thinking, well, I'm going to save the civilization by getting us to Mars.
And I got to cut through all this red tape to get there.
So this is how the best way to do that.
But this is really more about money, it sounds like to me, where he really just wants the money.
The interesting thing about what you said, though, about excessive wealth, which ends up being like the common denominator behind, you know, controlling this government.
Well, what do you think the founding fathers would have said about that?
Because I know that there was rhetoric and there were the Federalist Papers and whatnot, but the facts of how it was set up would probably indicate that they wouldn't have a problem with this.
Well, the first president of the United States of America, George Washington, was the wealthiest man in the country at the time he became president.
I mean, they associated this entire thing with wealth equaling competency.
So, you know, I think if they got out of their graves, you know, at first they would be like absolutely shocked that, you know, black Americans are allowed to have rights and that women are allowed to vote.
That would be their first shock in all of this.
But their second shock would probably be not just that the wealthiest man in the world has gained this much power over government, but that he's a non-citizen.
And they would probably be very, very surprised by that and very troubled by that.
But I have to say that a lot of the founding fathers would probably put whatever problems they had to the side the moment that they saw the amount of money that Musk had accrued at that point.
Well, putting those problems aside seems to be a real thing going on these days.
I would.
And Nick, there's a couple of things.
You know, I just want to say before we talk about these two stories that we need to get into, that One of the conversations that we were having going back into 2018 all the way up to 2020 was how the political environment was shifting and how we needed to get prepared for this very, very quick shift in movement.
I want to look at two articles very quickly.
One is by Brett Stevens, and I'm so sorry that we have to talk about Brett Stevens, but this is an artifact that gives us a little bit of insight into stuff.
A reminder?
Brett Stevens, at the New York Times, is the conservative, never-Trump voice.
He is the person who has been on the editorial staff, who has written one article after another about how much he dislikes Trump, how he thinks he's dangerous.
He basically defined, within the liberal orthodoxy, the anti-Trump conservative.
Well, that brings us to his latest column, Done With Never Trump.
And that goes ahead and sets the table for what we're getting ready to read.
This is the beginning of Stevens' column.
Quote, It's been more than nine years since I first announced Donald Trump as a loudmouthed Bulgarian appealing to quieter Bulgarians.
I've called myself a Never Trump conservative ever since, even when I agreed with his policies from time to time.
I also opposed him throughout his run this year.
Could his second term be as bad as his most fervent critics fear?
Yes.
Is it time to drop the heavy moralizing and incessant doomsaying that typified so much of the Never Trump movement and that rendered it politically impotent and frequently obtuse?
Yes, please.
Nick, this is...
I expected this to happen.
I knew eventually if Trump was re-elected that people like Stevens and the Never Trumpers were going to go ahead and jump on board.
But this right here, it's almost like the shot heard around the world.
This is a permission structure from Stevens, from the New York Times, for a lot of the Never Trump conservatives to go ahead and jump back in line and click their heels.
Well, there's just sort of like gateways that allow you to kind of wrap your head around how you can embrace Trump and sort of pretend that it was all overblown.
And that seems to be what the big thing is, is everything that we warned about was overblown.
Like, no World War III, you know, wasn't an oligarchy then, whatever.
But it's like, it's intentional, right, Jared?
The intentional ignoring of the context here of Project 2025, for instance, You've been listening to the free part of this episode.
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