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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss what we know as of now about the horrific attack in New Orleans and the destruction of a Cybertruck in Las Vegas - are they connected? Is it a sign of things to come? They offer some unique insights into the legacy of Jimmy Carter, who just passed away at the age of 100, before dissecting an article about what journalists got wrong in 2024.
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We don't release the video of the Weekender edition, but let me tell you something.
Nick looks like he got some sun.
Nick looks like he got some fun.
He's ready to go, folks.
Yeah, shout out to those all-inclusive places you can go to.
It's nice.
You don't have to spend any money when you get there.
It's really, really nice.
Well, you spend the money.
Yeah.
And by the way, I put on sunscreen.
I put it on and I still got overexposed.
And now I'm looking okay, right?
I look kind of nice and like tan.
You look good now, but let me tell people at home, we are pasty boys.
Yeah.
We're pasty boys.
That's how it is.
Well, welcome everybody to the first Weekender edition of 2025. We hope that you had a good new year.
Thank you for bearing with us as Nick was out doing his thing.
I was recording in a car.
I sounded awful, Nick.
It sounded fine.
Listen, I did a good job, but it sounded terrible.
No problems here.
We're on beautiful microphones.
We're ready to do it.
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Nick, we have so much to get into.
We have the New Year's Eve attacks.
We have the passing of Jimmy Carter.
We have a segment that is going to go over 2024 in a variety of different ways.
But we have to start with New Year's Day.
Nick, a couple of really weird, tragic moments here.
A pair of attacks.
In New Orleans, a suspect drove a truck into pedestrians on Bourbon Street and then engaged in a mass shooting.
He ended up killing, I believe it's 14. He was flying what appeared to be an ISIS flag.
The...
Authorities have shown that he has supposedly pledged himself to ISIS. In Las Vegas, a man rented a cyber truck using the exact same app as the guy in New Orleans, packed it with explosives and fuel, and detonated it in front of the Trump Hotel there in Las Vegas.
He injured seven.
A couple of weird coincidences or possibly links here.
Both are Army veterans.
It appears that maybe they served at the same base at the exact time.
The timing of all of it is strange.
Nick, we have a lot to discuss here, including reaction to this, where we see all of this going.
What was your initial reaction to these attacks happening on New Year's?
You know, it seems like we've seen the car driving through, you know, a crowded place before.
And we've seen it being sponsored by, you know, state terror groups.
For some reason, my mind didn't go there right away in New Orleans.
I don't know.
Is it a coincidence they use the same app and they both have army backgrounds and they did these things?
God, that would be such a boon for ISIS, for instance.
They would have taken credit for it, wouldn't they?
Well, I mean, from what I've been able to see, and I was doing my own research on this, I don't see any official affiliation.
I haven't seen any notes of that.
But who even knows at this point?
I mean, terrorism is so asymmetrical in the way that it works.
And I think before we get into the political reaction and the possibilities down the road, one thing that we have to talk about, Nick, is you and I discussed it.
You know, we had all these assassinations that were taking place, whether it was Abe in Japan or these attempts around the world.
We then, of course, saw the assassination of the UnitedHealthcare CEO.
We've seen a lot of this violence and we've seen terrorism that's built up over the years.
Terrorism comes from a place where people feel like they don't have any other means of sort of affecting politics or culture.
There's a lot of anger that comes with it.
We've also had a spate of mass shootings for years now that have been ideologically connected.
Nobody wants to connect the dots on those things or talk about what's actually happening.
We are entering into a new violent era and things like this are only going to keep happening the more that that occurs.
Also, when it comes to a lack of gun control, a lack of mental health, these things are going to compound and compound and compound.
And these types of tragedies, unfortunately, are going to keep happening unless we address the actual conditions that lead to them.
Absolutely.
Here's the other thing is, is that if I was a state sponsor of terror and I'm looking at a way to, you know, get an attack going on in the United States, you know, would I try and choose a time when I know there won't be much of a retaliation?
And that could very well be now in between, you know, presidencies where, you know, Biden isn't going to launch some sort of, you know, full scale attack on anybody now.
He's going to be out of office in a few days.
That hasn't happened before.
I can't remember a time in between, you know, in this time between, you know, the person assuming office, where we've had a terror attack on our own soil like this anyway.
But it's interesting, right?
Like, you know, and people seem to think that this might be the beginning of whatever, some sort of a season of this.
And I don't know if I would be surprised if that's the case.
I mean, we don't know how Trump's going to react to a lot of these things.
And it is concerning.
And what would we do if we discover that they are sponsored by ISIS officially?
What happens then?
Well, I mean, you know, we're already hearing all of these calls to go, you know, back to war and eliminate ISIS, which, again, I've said this over and over on this show, you can't eliminate ideology.
Like, you can't do it.
Like, you can't kill everybody who believes it because all you end up doing is then sort of, like, expanding it and radicalizing other people.
How is Trump going to react?
act?
Well, let's look at what he said.
Trump said on Truth Social, our country is a disaster, a laughingstock all over the world.
This is what happens when you have open borders with weak, ineffective, and virtually non-existent leadership.
The DOJ, the FBI, and the Democrat state and local prosecutors have not done their job.
They are incompetent and corrupt, having spent all their waking hours unlawfully attacking their political opponent, me, rather than focusing on protecting Americans.
He then went on to say the CIA should get involved in, And Nick, check your notes real fast.
Is the CIA supposed to operate domestically?
Nope.
Oh, they're not.
And actually, that is like a leftover from a period of time in which state power was being used against the people unlawfully and unconstitutionally.
Also, just a quick note, both of these people are American citizens.
Both of these people served in the military and are U.S. citizens.
That hasn't stopped the right or the Republican Party from claiming that it's migrant violence, which is what they're going to do no matter what.
The whole point here is what you just said about a season of this, whether it's an assassination of a CEO or whether it's a terrorist attack, domestic terrorist attack, whatever it is.
Here's what we know for sure.
We don't even need to know the details of what happened here.
Two things are going to occur.
One, they are going to flood law enforcement with incredible amounts of resources and also surveillance technology.
The second thing is that we are going to see more and more ratcheting up of militaristic rhetoric.
And that's been the missing piece in MAGA this entire time.
I keep saying this.
That whole, like, Donald the Dove or, like, an isolationist stance or whatever, what's been missing this entire time from MAGA to take it up to the next level is using the military as a weapon.
And I'm telling you right now that that's the only thing they can be sure from all of this.
And we are not, you know...
We're not that old, but we have already seen what happens when America suffers attacks.
It becomes a bipartisan, media-supported, like, crazy time period in which those things are going to be supported.
So I would not be shocked if this is going to go ahead and inspire more funding for law enforcement and more and more militarism, regardless of where the facts lead.
Right.
And then just more surveillance of everybody.
You know, the other thing is that a lot of times attacks like these are based on sort of a general mentally unstable state.
And it's not that far-fetched.
I know that both of these guys saw action and perhaps weren't treated very well psychologically afterwards.
So these could be lone wolf things where people, you know, Are mentally unwell and sort of lose their sense, their connection with reality.
But that said, that also opens up the possibility that they can be recruited by ISIS or somebody like that.
But I would have to say if you were to ask me, you know, definitively I had to give you an answer.
That's how it feels right now to me that it would be more of a lone wolf situation.
It's really more likely than ISIS somehow recruiting multiple active duty or, you know, recently active duty members of our military.
It seems farfetched to me.
It seems like a Homeland episode.
And I don't think I could be I could be proven wrong.
but I don't think that's what happened here.
I think we are kind of misled a little bit in terms of who belongs to who, right?
I'm a member of the Harlem Globetrotters.
I'm going to put on the uniform and do this.
And one of the things we've had in the modern era is sort of a fracturing of those things.
The guy who did this in New Orleans...
We don't know that he was in contact with ISIS or ISIL or whatever.
There's a very real possibility that he was radicalized and he wanted to carry out violence, and he looked around the world and he said, oh, I agree with that.
We should be doing those types of things.
It could even be a religious thing or whatever.
But the problem here, and you touched on it a little bit, Nick, Like, we have not accounted for the consequences of the war on terror.
We carried out a global war that thrust an entire generation of young men and women into battle.
We didn't give them the support that they deserved.
We put them in situations that they shouldn't have been in.
We had them carry out the agenda of the wealth class and expanding markets and extracting resources.
We didn't give them the mental health that they deserved.
And what happens?
We don't have to, like, you know, be scientists to understand that any mass action like that then traumatizes individuals and radicalizes them.
Like, the same thing happened, you know, with the Soviets in Afghanistan.
The same thing happened with the United States in Vietnam.
These big mass actions like that then lead to other things.
I mean, we saw in the 1990s, Timothy McVeigh was part of, like, a loosely-knit patriot domestic terrorist network.
There are tons of them everywhere.
So what we're seeing here, maybe it's connected, maybe it's not.
I assume we'll hear more about it in the near future.
The only thing you can be certain of is as long as this environment continues, it becomes more and more likely, if not just things like this, but also mass shootings.
Well, especially when you have a guy like Trump who is responding to this.
I'm not sure I even heard it when you were reading what his statement was.
He blames it on people coming across the border.
Yes.
And that was refuted extremely quickly, but it doesn't matter anymore.
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't even begin to matter.
Right.
We realize that as soon as it's out by someone of an important influence like that, it's in there.
It's etched into rigid thinking.
They're not going to accept anything else that would refute that.
And that is what's going to inspire a lot more violence to innocent people as well.
We've seen that over and over again.
Whether you want to say, oh, he's just saying it.
We all understand.
We're all rational.
No.
We've seen attacks on people who...
People think that they're not here legally, and they are, and they're attacked and killed.
I mean, that for sure will ramp up.
The bullying stuff will ramp up just the way that Trump is and the way he behaves.
And that's what we need to be prepared for as well.
We've probably forgotten a little bit of this as we've gotten away from him.
But the other part of his statement that you read, he's not lying.
Right?
It was a failure of local law.
Oh, absolutely.
They didn't have the things up that would stop cars from going down Bourbon Street.
You know, Biden is weak, right?
Like, the things that he's talking about are verifiable, unfortunately.
Only when it gets to the part where he starts to blame, you know, the other who are coming across the border for something that they're not even related to, you know, he can kind of, like, sneak that in there, I guess, and now that's what's going to stick, and that's what's going to incite more violence.
Well, first of all, I don't even think it's just Biden that's weak.
It's that our law enforcement, despite having all the resources in the world, like literally being a domestically funded army, both at the local, the regional, and the national level, they're not good at this.
We know this.
They're not good at it.
Undoubtedly, we're going to find out that the FBI knew about both of these people.
We just had a couple of days ago, a guy got caught with the largest cache of improvised explosive devices ever within Virginia.
God knows how many guys like that there are that haven't been caught.
And it's just whether or not they're going to do what they want to do and if they're going to find the opportunity to do it.
How often does the FBI end up having a huge news conference, they lay out all the explosives, and look at what we did here.
Why didn't they do that on this one?
Well, and so that's the entire question.
The point here is that the administrative state that we're talking about, including the surveillance state, including the law enforcement state, they're not good at what they do.
And they haven't been good at actually stopping this stuff.
It's been a mythology post-9-11 that, you know, we haven't had another 9-11, so they're obviously doing their job.
Meanwhile, the people that they've arrested and they've trotted out as sort of like the examples of it, they're people in large part that they've either entrapped Or they tried to inspire to do things.
Like, it's been a massive mess.
And one last thing before we move on to the next segment, you touched on a little bit, which is there is a cycle with right-wing authoritarianism.
They create an environment of anger and fear, right?
And in that environment of anger and fear, it inspires violence from people who are terrified or who are frustrated or disempowered.
That violence then happens.
And what does the right do after they've inspired that and created the environment for it?
They take advantage of that.
And then the next cycle, and then the next cycle.
All we know about this for sure is that this will further the cycle that the right thrives within.
And that's the only thing that we know for sure.
And in turn, we'll allow them to ramp up spending on the surveillance state.
Exactly.
And that will just go from there.
Nick, while you were gone, and I didn't text you about this because I didn't know if you wanted to know about it while you were gone.
I didn't know how much attention you were paying for it.
But we waited to talk about this on the show.
The 39th President of the United States of America, Jimmy Carter, died at the age of 100 on December 29th.
I wanted to take a little bit of time on this show to talk about our opinions of Jimmy Carter, the legacy of Jimmy Carter, how it's being handled, how people are reacting to it.
Nick, I know that you have a lot of thoughts about Jimmy Carter.
For those who haven't listened to it, the first episode of a documentary that we're going to continue, A Certain Route to Failure, All you have to do is search for it.
We created it about Jimmy Carter's presidency and also his eventual loss to Ronald Reagan.
But I wanted to give you the opportunity to talk about Carter a little bit.
I have a lot of opinions that I want to air here.
For sure.
I mean, if you want to go back, the four-part series we did is really pulling apart his, the quote-unquote, malaise speech, of which he didn't actually say the word malaise in the speech, but the way everyone knows it is that.
It's really a good piece of work, and I think it was good because we both cared deeply about the subject.
And certainly, I mean, I can remember Carter being, or sorry, Reagan being inaugurated in, I think maybe, I think it was in second grade, and we were watching it on the TV at school.
And I kind of like thinking, wishing they would turn the 21-gun salute, like, toward Reagan.
Like, that's my little adult, you know, whatever, seven-year-old mind.
Because we were so disappointed that Carter couldn't win.
But he was probably the last president we had, truly, truly, in earnest, cared about the American people.
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