Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman dive deep into the new release of DeepSeek and how it could upend the US Tech Oligarch's plan for enrichment of their pockets. They move on to the inhumane treatment we're starting to see with immigration, including 2 plane loads of people caught between countries. They finish on the crisis in Gaza and Trump's desire to clear the area out and force all the refugees to relocate to other countries.
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I'm here with my good friend and host Nick Housman.
Nick, how are you doing, bud?
I'm doing okay.
I'm doing fine.
How are you doing?
I'm okay.
I'm okay.
I took the weekend off.
I talked a little bit about taking care of mental health during this time period and how I was going to institute these moments where like...
Trump and the administration and the right wing couldn't get to me, like moments for me.
And I did that, and it helped.
And then I got back to work this morning, and I was like, oh shit, it didn't stop.
And I got to learn that sort of back and forth, if that makes sense.
Yeah, I think I subconsciously did the same thing.
We didn't do anything.
I just pretty much sat on the couch all weekend long to kind of disconnect, which is sometimes detrimental, right?
I think the community and the energy you can share with others and friends is important, and it can give you that recharge.
But yeah, don't forget, whatever that recharge you get in that couple days can get depleted pretty quickly again with what we're dealing with, so it's important to have it so you don't go way too much on the negative side.
Yeah, so as we enter the second week of Trump being back in the presidency and this onslaught, I think what I'm learning from this morning is I need to remind myself to have those moments, to replenish, find the joy, and then I need to maybe sort of ease my way back into it, if that makes sense.
I'm not sure there's a way to ease back into anything Trump-y.
That's my design!
I mean, it makes it really, really awful.
We have a whole lot to talk about today, obviously, but a reminder to go to patreon.com slash mccraigpodcast.
Become a patron.
It gets you not only access to The Weekender Show, which, by the way, the news never ends now, so these are going to be jam-packed shows nearly every single episode.
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Nick, we had an original lineup for this show.
But just to pull the curtain back, I had said we were going to cover something near the end of the episode, but I decided I think it's really important to go ahead and start with this.
And there was breaking news that has taken place, which is a Chinese AI app called DeepSeek has been released.
And this is an app that utilizes AI technology.
It is comparable to OpenAI, All that good stuff.
And I put huge quotes around good.
It's been made cheaper than American AI. It seems to be a real competitor in that space.
Just in a few hours of this thing being released, we've seen a lot of people flock to it.
And on top of that, the stock market has reflected it.
It has led to over a trillion dollars worth of losses within the tech sector.
And I wanted to talk about this, Nick, for a variety of reasons, but I think it's important to get into the material conditions that have led to what's going on.
And we can talk about what Trump is doing and what developments there have been, but there is a deeper reason for what it is that we're dealing with.
And this thing right here, basically, it's the dropping of a cinder block into a bath tub.
Okay, good analogy.
I think that, and also a way to wrap your head around this is...
What I had seen was sort of a side-by-side comparison between ChatGPT and DeepSeek.
And that same prompt, which was, you know, create a website.
And they described the website with all sorts of manner of, you know, how it's supposed to look, what kind of forms it wants, and all that kind of thing.
Which, by the way, if you're not aware, like, AI can do that for you, and it will generate all of the code.
And so I think that this is going to be one of the biggest applications that they're going to have.
And what the fear ultimately ends up being is that you can put everybody out of work at some point once it gets good enough.
I see some of these tech oligarch people thinking, that's great.
People can then have a life of leisure.
If you don't have a job and you live in a capitalist society.
But clearly, DeepSeek was much faster.
And better in terms of what the end product was.
So, you know, accusations flying about how they're stealing the ChatGPT, you know, underlying way of their doing things, which is interesting because obviously China has been accused of that a lot.
And then you have to wonder about the security of using this platform and whether or not they're going to end up being able to get into your personal stuff using it, if you use it.
But, you know, you've been afraid of this for a long time and have been sounding the whistle about AI. And when you start to see just how good it can be, you start to kind of feel like, yes, we're all going to have our own personal Jarvis like we see in the Marvel movies, which in the movie version supposedly makes life easier.
But I think we're going to be able to list a few things here why this is so dangerous.
Well, I have a lot of things that I need to sort of set the table with it.
I don't think it's good.
I think it's actually really bad.
I think it's been marketed to us as this sort of world-changing sort of technology, but it's just bells and whistles.
It's just regurgitated stuff that has been stolen and then sort of gets repackaged and sold back to us.
One of the things that tech insiders have been telling us for a while now is that we've probably already reached peak AI as we know it.
It's not going to be some sort of a sentient sort of creative genius that's going to change It's a gimmick.
And a large reason that we're in the situation we are right now is that we've had decades of neoliberalism that has led to a monopolistic environment, right?
We have all these big major tech corporations that, you know, we've covered it.
They just gobble up all competitors.
Basically, the main goal that you have if you have a tech startup or a business at this point is that a bigger fish will buy you and incorporate you into what they're doing.
It has more or less stalled out innovation in the United States of America.
We're in this weird period where our tech sucks.
Nothing really is making these big advancements.
Everything from your phone to all these programs, they are not impressive and they're not actually pushing things forward.
Now, all of a sudden...
You have an environment where the oligarchs, who made incredible amounts of money, and we've talked about it, merging with the state apparatus.
This is one of the reasons why we now have this oligarchical class.
They were carrying out the functions of empire.
Now, they have reached a point where they're in decay.
You know, they're not really producing anything anymore that people actually want.
They can't even make a car that doesn't explode or, like, crash into a crowd of pedestrians at this point, right?
So they have used their power to basically turn the government into a redistributive machine turned on high.
You know, we saw the other day, Nick, the announcement of the Stargate program, which supposedly was going to see, you know, half a trillion dollars put towards AI. I have a weird instinct at this point that that was meant to anticipate this, right?
To go ahead and kind of blunt the effect of this technology being put out there and put forward by China.
We are now dealing with tech corporations that have effectively taken over nation states that are now competing for who will dominate a market.
We've now moved into a monopolistic sort of competition on the world scale.
I have a few feelings about this, Nick.
I think that the release of Deep Seek is going to lead, you know, Mark Anderson, who's a complete asshole, has already called this AI Sputnik moment.
And for people who don't know the history, when Sputnik got launched by the Soviet Union, everybody freaked out.
And what did they do?
They took the military-industrial complex and turned it into the military-scientific-industrial complex.
They threw ungodly amounts of money into programs.
They basically took over colleges and science to try and meet the Russians where they were.
Now we're going to see more and more money and resources push towards AI, a program that doesn't particularly work, that most people don't actually want.
And like you said, it probably is going to put a lot of people out of jobs.
And on top of that, it's not even going to function in the way that it's being promised to function.
So it's only going to make things worse, which is sort of the self-defeating cycle that we've seen take place over time.
And it's only going to get worse until somebody stands up and calls this for what it is.
You know, your assessment of where we are technologically has gotten me kind of thinking a little bit parallel to what you were saying.
What is progress then?
We've gotten to the point where we have these iPhones, we have these things.
And so it's like, well, what would we be expecting the next thing to be?
What is the Sputnik moment really?
And it's like, you know, we have to dig into like Star Trek stuff where like we need to have hovering crafts and we need to have star travel.
I mean, this is what Musk is trying to talk about now anyway, right?
Like, is that the real frontier?
Because how else can technology really benefit us or help us live better lives, right?
And I think maybe that would be your focus in terms of how technology is supposed to work side-by-side with humans, right?
Is that sort of the idea?
What else can it do?
Can it be like cleaning our house for us?
Is that what we're looking at?
Well, and Nick, one of the things is I want to point out because what you're bringing up right now are luxuries.
You know what I mean?
And I'm not going to...
Dismiss how luxuries have changed, you know, people's lives.
Like, the feminist movement would not have been made possible if we didn't suddenly have luxuries that would have sort of created free time, you know, that they weren't bogged down by having to do these things.
And there have been great leaps in terms of, like, social progress that have been sort of tied to technology.
But what we're talking about now is, like, are you going to be able to go in and ask AI to, like, make a video that makes you laugh?
You know what I mean?
Or sort of like kill some time.
It should be about making lives actually better.
And what have we seen from AI, Nick?
We've seen it give falsified quote-unquote hallucinations that, you know, tell people to drink poison or basically hurt themselves.
And so it's a product that isn't what it purports to be.
Most people don't actually understand it.
It has almost like a religious-type connotation to it now.
We're just supposed to believe that these people who aren't even able to create anything worth a shit, that they're going to make the thing that's going to get us out of all these crises, economic crises, political crises, health crises, mental health crises.
On top of that, the climate change crisis.
And it's not working.
And it's not going to work, particularly with these people in charge.
And the bigger problem here, Nick, and right before we started recording, it came out that the DeepSeat program had been hit with a massive cyber attack, right?
Which is obviously retaliation for it coming in and disrupting the tech market, disrupting the stock market.
This type of thing, I would not be shocked if it has, like, government-level...
You know, sort of coordination for it.
And it's got me thinking, Nick.
And I just had this thought, and I just want to say it, and I would love to hear what you have to say, and I want to hear what listeners have to say.
It's starting to feel more and more like if we do have a World War III, what we're actually looking at is corporations going to war with each other.
And that's sort of what happened in the world wars previously and the major conflicts before, but this would be a more explicit version of that, which is using state power and military power and all those other sort of apparatuses in order to engage in corporate warfare and espionage.
And that feels a lot like the direction that we're heading in with this thing suddenly hitting and disrupting things immediately and then there being this sort of a consequence to it.
I mean, I think if you wanted to go to war with a country, just knock out their internet and you'd win, right?
If there's no internet, none of the systems will work.
And certainly none of the people, the regular everyday folk in the countries, certainly in America, would have a very hard time functioning.
Right?
Without any kind of access to the internet.
So that's a scary thing because in theory, you know, someone can look at that and probably figure out how to do that without too much effort, you know, in terms of being able to knock out a couple satellites here and there or whatever.
Like, you know, that could be the thing.
To get back to the AI thing, like, I have imagined that the people who believe in AI will tell you, oh, well, we'll have a cure for cancer and we'll be able to put it to use with all this brain power and put all these different pieces of information together in a way that human brains can't.
And then we'll be able to solve these things.
Can AI do daycare?
Time out, Nick.
You just brought up something important.
Yes, the idea that it could solve cancer and cure cancer is fantastic.
But do you have any belief whatsoever that this administration that froze all NIH funding and meetings and communication, that any of these people have any interest in doing that as opposed to using this to just automate labor and figure out ways to cut things?
That's the only thing this is toward.
There's also underlying programming.
I think you've alluded to this a lot in the past, where it's like there is a human who's kind of creating it and there's going to be some built-in...
I don't know if you can call it bias, but there's going to be some sort of underlying human element to this, you know, the very root cause.
We all should read iRobot by Isaac Atomov because it dives exactly into all this as it works.
But my other interesting thing was, I'm starting to envision, like, what is this futuristic society?
Which, by the way, just never looks like Blade Runner, where everything is modern, everything is really cool and whatever.
When we go 100 years in the future, you're still going to see, like, a 1980 Ford Pinto, like, someone driving.
One of those, right?
And a ramshackle house somewhere amidst all the other cool stuff.
But if AI ends up taking everyone's jobs and does all those menial things, what would they do?
And you can almost see the wheels churning in some of these different tech people saying, well, they'll just invest in Bitcoin.
And you'll get a return over the year on Bitcoin that will probably be similar to what their low-paying jobs were.
And then they won't have to work.
I can honestly see someone with a straight face pitching that.
And who knows?
In some weird, twisted way, if you look at the math, you might even be able to make that argument.
Well, and you know, what you just described is like a really, really bullshit mode of UBI. That ties it to something that isn't stable and also is very, very corrupt and can be used for nefarious purposes.
One thing that I want to point out, and we're getting ready to get into the actual political developments that have taken place over the last couple of days, and a reminder that behind politics are always material conditions.
There's always things that are happening underneath the surface, particularly economically and in terms of resources and power, that sort of lead to all this stuff.
Nick, what you just asked about what will happen if we keep going down this road, people need to understand that neoliberalism does not reward long-term planning.
There's a reason why we live in a vulture capitalistic society, which is where private equity, right, or these hedge funds, they'll buy a place that's doing well, right?
And remember, I said, like, the small guys who start up, like, a business, they want to get gobbled up by bigger things.
So you sell that business to a hedge fund or finance guys, and what do they do, Nick?
They immediately strip it down for bare parts, make it run at its bare minimum as it's falling apart, and then when it falls apart, They then make money off the falling apart, right?
So it's short-term quote-unquote planning.
It's not actually planning.
So what you just brought up is actually a more coherent questioning of where all of this is going than the people who are roughly controlling it, right?
Because they have a religious-like faith that it will get figured out.
And so you don't...
Reach this point.
That's one of the larger reasons why authoritarianism has to come in and sort of like clean up around.
There's not a lot of consideration about what that disruption will do.
You know, Zuckerberg famously said, move fast and break things.
Well, congratulations, you move fast, you broke things, and now we're looking around and things are broke.
So we're having a discussion about which state power is going to control a technology.
That doesn't seem to work the way that everyone promises that it will.
It doesn't get those results.
And on top of it, what you just brought up about the person behind the programming.
You know what's weird about DeepSeek, which was made by this Chinese AI company?
What's weird, Nick, is it doesn't seem to have an understanding of Tiananmen Square.
It doesn't seem to understand Taiwan.
Like, you'll notice that a large part of this isn't just controlling the economy.
It's controlling the reality that people live within.
So if you get to write the code and everybody's relying on it, basically, it is a monopolization of the modes of production, right?
And you and I... We can't go program this.
Like, if you and I were just like, hey, you know what?
Let's take a break from the podcast.
We'll try and write an algorithm.
We can't do it.
And even if we did, we wouldn't have the resources.
We wouldn't have the cooperation of these monopolies, of the production that gives you the chips that are necessary and the state-level cooperation.
So basically, it is monopoly control over the modes of production that the state powers are now competing over on behalf of corporations.
For what it's worth, I was watching an Instagram video where they were asking Alexa, Amazon Alexa, questions about various presidents in the past, and they could not answer any of them until they got to Trump.
So, yes, that underlying notion of how that's being controlled, especially with something like Bezos behind it, yes, could very well be manipulated, and then you don't know what is real, what's not, and they're in control of all of that, which is probably the point of all of this.
But I do feel like when you say, you know, we've got to break it until we fix it, or whatever that phrase is, breaking it, like, there's probably two different trains of thought, or two different kinds of personalities, or how people would consider that, because...
Some people might shrug and be like, oh, well, we had some people who had to suffer because we had to get through this until it got better.
We figured it out.
But other people would say, well, there's a lot of people who are going to suffer for the rest of their lives and potentially the rest of their family's lives going forward and generationally.
And that doesn't seem to be right.
Why would they have to be some sort of sacrificial lamb?
Because they were unlucky enough to be in one particular place at one particular time when these oligarchs decided to kind of screw around with their shit.
Nick, I just want to say, because when we cover this stuff, there's a tendency to talk about, like, all of the moving parts with it and give context and sort of reaction and analysis.
There's always an important thing that we need to do, which is to go ahead and state something that's very obvious that no one else is stating.
An internet app got released today, and it wiped out over a trillion dollars worth of wealth.
I just want to say that again.
An app got released and over a trillion dollars worth of wealth got erased.
The entire point is this.
We in the stock market has always been a ticking bomb.
We know this.
We've seen it.
We've watched it take place over and over again, right?
We keep throwing money in this.
And for a while, it's like a cash machine that is rigged to just throw out free cash, right?
Like, oh, we're growing and we're growing and we're growing.
Go ahead and put your money in this.
Over a trillion dollars worth of wealth got erased today.
And, like, if stuff like that happens, and this is not just, like, China throwing an app out there, it is economic warfare.
And if stuff like this takes place, and if we're so overinvested in this, and the tech companies have nothing else, they literally do not have anything else besides this current sort of competition over AI. If it continues to go in this direction, you could see not just market instability, you could see a meltdown.
Because we are so tied and so invested in this ticking time bomb, and it could create chaos that a lot of us are going to suffer through, even though we have nothing to do with it.
I agree a lot, absolutely.
And then the people that don't suffer...
Are the people who are incredible wealth as it is and will generally benefit even more.
That's why it's dangerous.
It's not quite incentivized, but they don't give a shit if it goes down because they know they can get cheap stuff on the rebound when it comes back up again.
Rather than have some other version of this where we all can kind of have a stable life and have some upward mobility, that should be the goal.
But obviously, when you get to that amount of power, oftentimes it's not.
It's not.
And so that is what's happening in the material conditions realm.
Let's go ahead and look at the representations and the reactions to it.
We are now in the second week of the Trump presidency and things are heating up in a really awful way.
Immigration raids have begun around the country in places like Chicago.
They've been going on in Florida.
We've heard about small towns here and there.
We've heard about traffic stops, attempted raids in schools and workplaces.
We're watching right-wing influencers now, like Dr. Phil, who are going into this stuff.
We have also heard now, Nick, that individual flights of immigrants being deported are costing roughly $800,000 to transport about 80 immigrants to other countries.
And on top of that, we are already watching a huge investment with the government into private prison corporations.
And by the way, Nick, wouldn't you know, most Republicans who are in power, they're invested in private prisons.
Isn't that strange how that takes place?
But things are starting to move.
They're starting to take off.
And we're watching basically this cruel deportation scheme start to take shape.
You know, I've gotten over the fact that they still can't even get their spelling correct on their press releases, whereas they misspelled the country Columbia.
You know, they have some intern, I don't know what it is, writing these things.
But what was interesting to see play out in real time is Columbia turning away a plane of migrants who are, the United States is returning or whatever they're doing.
But then going back and forth with these very, very intense threats by Trump to increase tariffs and whatnot, and then somehow apparently Colombia backing down and saying, okay, no, we will take them, of which they have been doing that throughout the entire Biden administration.
It wasn't really an issue for them then.
So I suspect we're going to see maybe a little bit of dipping the toe in the water in terms of pushback by some countries, just to see how that's going to feel.
But when you do the math, I suppose, you realize that what Trump is willing to threaten and do might not end up working out economically for them, even if they were to reciprocate with their own tariffs and affect a huge market, which is coffee here in America, which would certainly have a political ramification against Trump.
Part of me kind of wants to see that.
Don't you want to see that?
Don't you want to see them stand up and say, no, we're not going to do this shit and we're going to tear up you right back?
I mean, I don't know.
I feel like I'd like to see what would happen when that begins.
Well, so a lot here, and unfortunately this reflects the chaotic environment that we're talking about.
Before we get into the reactions with Columbia and what I think about that, I just want to remind listeners that you play a role in resisting this.
If you are an immigrant who is listening to this, you need to get up to date.
Quickly on your rights.
Print off a list of your rights as a person who might interact with ICE. If you are an ally or a co-worker or someone who cares about immigrants, you need to get up to date on what your rights are as well and numbers and organizations that you can get a hold of in order to help these people.
Now, when it comes to Colombia...
For people who aren't aware, and I assume there are some people who listen to the podcast who rely on us to give them their news, Columbia had turned down a flight's worth of deported immigrants, and this led to a complete, impromptu, near-trade war in which Donald Trump, as he was playing golf, Nick, He was on the golf course when this took place, then threatened Colombia with 25% tariffs that would then increase to 50%.
This has already driven coffee to historic high levels in terms of prices.
And we're not even sure what took place.
It appears that there was some sort of an agreement that was worked out, but we still don't know because we don't have a lot of access to information under this administration.
So that already had an effect.
That's going to hurt people.
I don't know about political consequences.
I don't know if people who support Trump are going to ever blame him for it or if they're just going to join in and basically say, you know what, we'll just drink coffee from here or do that.
It's unclear.
But it already had a gigantic effect on the economy.
And you know who swooped in almost immediately, Nick?
China.
Because we now live in a system in which the BRICS coalition, which is on the other side of the ledger from all this, they basically said, hey, if you're not going to work with Colombia, we will.
And that's what has driven so much of this is this new sort of bipolar world in which you can swoop in and do this.
He's going to get into these fights.
He's going to basically, you know, make standard of living worse and worse and worse.
We're going to see prices fluctuate and be wild for a while.
Meanwhile, these immigrants are being treated like shit, Nick.
They're being tracked down.
They're being harassed and intimidated.
We're hearing about all kinds of immigrants who aren't showing up to work simply because they're terrified of this new aggressive apartheid situation.
The immigrants who are on these flights, Nick, they're showing up handcuffed.
They're taking these big, long, giant flights without being given water or resources.
The cruelty is already getting to a breaking point.
And, Nick, Trump already told ICE to increase their quotas for deportations from a few hundred a day up to 1,500 per day.
There's no money for this.
All they're doing is they're redistributing money to these private prison groups and also law enforcement.
So what are we watching?
We're watching a complete restructuring of the environment, which is what Trump promised to do and what we knew that he was going to do to an extent.
And this picture is already getting muddied and it's already getting worse and worse.
Oh, I mean, I'm not even sure where I want to go from this.
A lot of things there.
Imagine being on that plane, by the way, having to go from America to Columbia and back, what you're doing.
That had to be absolutely inhumane.
And we've already seen when Trump screws around with tariffs and threatening trade wars, that these other countries are more than happy to start trading with other countries.
This goes there instead.
So it's very dangerous.
I really wish I could argue with you and say, oh, well, eventually Trump supporters would stop supporting him when they realize how detrimental it's making their lives.
I mean, have you seen the price of eggs?
Unfortunately, yes.
Yeah, I mean, they've skyrocketed amongst the...
Well, you know what we haven't even talked about?
Like, we have a bird flu epidemic that's already starting to take shape.
On top of that, I don't know if you've seen it, there's a tuberculosis outbreak, a historic one that's taking place in Kansas and Missouri right now.
This is not getting reported on.
It's happening in the background.
And all this stuff is sort of taking off.
They have no desire whatsoever to address any of it.
And like you said, it leads to these, like, record prices that they have no interest in.
I'm not doing anything about it.
And we've seen this movie before in the midst of a pandemic where they're going to deny it and try and minimize it so it doesn't affect their daily life or they think that won't.
And the birth fluid, already we're hearing Trump say certain things about that, trying to minimize it and not make it seem like a big thing because he's afraid how much it'll hurt him politically.
If we've all forgotten, he wouldn't let a ship full of COVID people onto the mainland because that would simply raise the number of cases in the very beginning.
It's purely disgusting.
And speaking of inhumane treatment of people, That whole thing.
He got off scot-free on that.
When there were thousands of people on ships, they couldn't get medical treatment because of it.
It is all happening, just as according to his plan, and it's really, really frustrating.
Now, let's just say the focus has been on the deportation side, on we're going to get only the violent criminals out of here, which, by the way...
Those laws are already in the books.
They're already scheduled to be deported.
And you have something like 5,000 ICE deputies, whatever they're called, right, in charge of trying to deport people, which is, if I was trying to think of a solution here, okay, and listen, I don't think anyone's going to argue, right, Jared, no one's going to argue that we should keep violent people who are here illegally in this country, right?
I think that's a fair argument, right, that they should be deported.
Yeah, and guess what?
There are already laws on the books for that.
Right, which is why the Lake and Riley thing that passed was redundant, and not even redundant, it was worse and unnecessary.
But speaking of which, well, we'll get to that in a minute, but they got a bunch of Democrats to vote for that, which we had mentioned last time.
But the point being...
That if there's something like, if it was like a million people here that they needed to, who were violent criminals and needed to deport, and even if they were able to do like a thousand a day, like you're talking like years every day of doing that before you get even close to getting those numbers down.
And my wonder is, what is sort of triggering Trump?
What about what's going on with ICE is making him so disappointed?
Because is it a number he has in mind?
And if it's a number, is it just performative?
He just wants to be able to say some big number, probably a bigger number than whatever Biden was doing, and that's it.
It doesn't really matter who these people are, whether or not they're innocent or not being deported.
He just wants to have some sort of random number in his head that seems impressive.
Well, I mean, again, he's intuitively and inherently and instinctually a fascist.
He just wants things to happen.
And one of the things with all this, and we talked about whether or not the full-scale widespread deportation was going to happen, and we talked about it.
There was no way financially to make it work, logistically to make it work, and economically because it would crater the economy in general and it wouldn't help the wealth class.
Trump just wants it done.
They're not good administrators.
Fascists are not good administrators.
They want things done the way that they want them done.
They don't work well with others.
And so what has happened here is that even starting off the raids the way that he wanted to start them off was logistically impossible.
And so he is instead going to go ahead and push these quotas and push these operations.
And Nick, I got to tell you, if you order...
Do you know what they do?
They lie to you, first of all.
And second of all, they get sloppy.
And so not only are we going to see immigrants being deported, we've already heard about American citizens and indigenous people.
That are being rounded up in these raids.
So you're going to see more and more disarray.
You're going to see lying.
And you're going to see this thing become more and more cruel because Trump wants what he wants when he wants it.
I'm not sure sloppy is the right term to use.
I think violent is the term to use.
Violently sloppy.
Yeah.
And people are going to be at risk of being killed in these.
Sure.
We've already heard about someone who served in the military who was a citizen being detained, being questioned about whether or not that Cardi had that proved that he was a veteran was real.
Think about that for someone who really, when it is legitimate, what that...
That effect could have and what kind of rights they're going to stand up to the ICE people for.
And we've seen these footage before of ICE being extremely confrontational, I suppose is the word.
And so, you know, remember how in Vietnam, when we finally started getting actual video, or sorry, film footage of the combat, it turned the country against the war, which, you know, would have probably also happened for the Korean War if we had seen that kind of footage, right?
So my question here is, we're going to end up seeing a lot of, I'm sure, footage online posted of ICE agents dragging people out of their homes, out of schools, out of churches now.
I have to imagine that's going to have an effect, hopefully similarly to what happened in Vietnam, and eventually that will become a thing where they're going to have to stop doing what they're going to do in terms of quotas, which has been unheard of in this sort of thing.
Because I'm trying to think what the other alternative is.
If you wanted to increase the speed of deporting violent criminals from your country, then you'd have to just have more officers and have them better trained, I think.
Wouldn't that be the solution you'd have to do?
Well, and that's...
You know, Nick, one thing that you just said, like in terms of like the civil rights, I mean, you said Vietnam, but I was going to bring up the example of the civil rights movement, right?
Which is what turned the tide there was that white middle class liberals in America had to see the violence and oppression of their privilege playing out on their TV screens.
So what you just brought up is true.
Which is, as these raids pick up speed, we are going to see violence and we're going to see brutality, especially in cities where people are going to stand up to this stuff.
And the question is whether or not Pete Hegseth, who just got in as Secretary of Defense, or any number of these corrupt and brutal cronies of Trump, whether or not they're going to go ahead and push the issue and create conditions in which people get hurt.
And in which people see this brutality playing out in real time.
If that does take place, then you have a question, Nick, which is...
Are the social media platforms that are controlled by the oligarchs who basically bankroll Trump, are they going to censor this stuff?
Are they going to go ahead and manipulate communication, which I have a hunch that they will.
Will it make a difference, or will we go ahead and more or less see a propaganda campaign that says that these are all criminals who are getting what they deserve?
We already saw with the campus protesters who were getting brutalized by police and mobs that those people, like the brutality that they went through was, you know, rejected by a lot of middle-class white liberals, which we'll talk more about that in just a second.
Whether or not that tide will turn.
And that's going to be a big inflection point that we're going to see, is when this turns really, really violent and disturbing, will it be censored and will the propaganda war win out?
And I don't know the answer yet.
There are disturbing trends that tell me that it might not be the inflection point we need it to be.
There are other things that tell me historically that maybe it will be, but we'll find out.
Right.
And, you know, because it's like part of you have to, you know, this is what pastorism does is it beats you down and you start to think, well, well, maybe it will work.
Maybe they'll just get all the guys, the violent criminals out and it will have less crime and all those things they're talking about.
Like maybe Pete Hegseth.
Can run the Department of Defense.
Like, that's where you get to, you know, very quickly.
I'm surprised how, like, those thoughts start to enter my mind.
Like, well, you know, who knows?
I mean, you know, so-and-so wasn't qualified for this, and then they ended up doing a good job.
Like, at this point, it's like I don't even know where.
What the standards are anymore and what I want to have people in charge.
And that's the point, I think.
That's what's scary about all this is because once we lose that sight of that, then these guys get all, you know, then you add.
And the Democrats are helping with this, by the way.
And they all start getting confirmed.
They all start, you know, nefariously doing what they're trying to do in the background, things that we won't see under the guise of being top secret or whatnot.
And ultimately, you have to hope that, you know, enough patriots are out there, real patriots, that...
Yeah, compassionate human beings.
And it's on us to actually do that.
Speaking of those protesters, Nick, a really disturbing development.
As Donald Trump is now calling for Gaza to be quote-unquote cleaned out, he is pressuring Egypt and Jordan to take in the remaining Palestinians who have survived this genocidal violence and is just openly talking about utilizing Gaza as real estate development.
So far, it seems that Egypt and Jordan are pushing back against this call.
There are questions about whether or not economic and diplomatic pressures will be brought to bear.
But this feels really, really bad.
And it is the type of empire and capitalistic brutalism that we expected from Donald Trump.
Trump, but to see it just out in the open is it's so infuriating and disgusting.
Oh, it's also a very egregious, you know, what's the word I'm looking for?
Ignorance of the area, right?
Because we've known for all these years that most of the Arab countries in the area, or all of them around Gaza, don't really necessarily care about the Gazans.
They've never really shown much support to help support them in what's going on between them and Israel.
So the idea that, like, oh, they're going to take refugees in is sort of a non-starter.
That's not really going to happen.
Now, the problem is there is nowhere for them to go.
They can't go back to where they were in Gaza.
They have to go somewhere, right?
Even if it's temporarily.
And it is disgusting to hear him talk about, I'm sure he thinks about beachfront property and all this garbage stuff that they're going to do.
At the very least, though, he is talking about being involved in helping Gaza rebuild, right?
But the problem here is I don't hear him saying rebuild like four gauzes, right?
It doesn't sound like that's his intent either.
He wants to somehow, and by the way, you know what would happen is we would pledge to have aid and help them build and send over all sorts of, you know, building materials and whatever, but then they're going to want, Trump's going to demand rent back or something like that, right?
And that's sort of antithesis of what, like, you know, global aid is supposed to be.
So it's going to be a mess.
And let's not forget really quickly, I didn't mention this last time, but the ceasefire that we have right now, it's really just a hostage exchange.
There's no plan for what to do to make this better.
No, there are still strikes being carried out in Gaza and in Lebanon.
Like, it has not stopped.
Okay, right, right.
So it's like it's not anything that we would even want to celebrate, really.
I mean, the fact that we got the hostage exchange is great, but, like, there is no underlying solution, no underlying talk of a solution, no notion of, like, any kind of a summit or anything to figure out how they can ameliorate the situation.
And so that's really frustrating because, you know, that process takes years.
You know, and when are we ever going to begin that before we can get years into the future where maybe finally something could be done that's better than what is now?
So, you know, if Trump had his way, he'd clear that whole thing out, make a whole resort out of that area, and probably leave the Gazans to die, you know, on the streets somewhere in some other country, I guess.
That would be his, it sounds like what his end goal would be.
There's a lot to cover in this in a very short amount of time.
I want to go back to the material conditions I was talking about in the beginning.
Let's say theoretically that they were to clear out Gaza, which is what Israel has been trying to do for a very long time now under the auspices of, you know, defending themselves.
So who would benefit from that?
Donald Trump would benefit from that, and you better believe that if they cleared out Gaza, there would be some sort of a Trump property that would happen there.
You know who else would benefit from that?
Jared Kushner.
And you know who else would benefit from that?
The Saudis.
You know who else would benefit from that?
The hardliners in Israel who want that territory for their own development.
Right?
So basically, whenever we're talking about nation states or we're talking about wars of defense, of defending a state, what we're actually talking about is this theater of things occurring and then the people underneath who are all on the same page in terms of how to get money and how to profit off of the thing.
But you and I are talking about countries.
These people are not talking about countries.
These people are talking about their investments and their return on investments.
While we're on the subject, Nick, I want to go ahead and point out Joe Biden, Anthony Blinken, and all the people who enabled this thing in the first place, they were just like, well, we're kind of troubled by this, but we need to keep going.
We need to support Israel.
Look where it got us.
It was the quote-unquote well-intentions of these people that have now brought us to the point where Donald Trump, and a reminder, back in the first Trump administration, Nick, whenever Khashoggi got murdered and dismembered, he was like, well, what are you going to do?
The Saudis are going to give us a ton of money.
It's that open...
Sort of brutality and callousness that Donald Trump brings to the situation.
The liberals over here are like, well, you know, it breaks our heart, but we really need to do this.
And then Trump comes in and is like, there's a lot of profit to be made, and this is beautiful territory that we're going to take care of.
It works hand in hand over and over.
Well, one more thing.
The reason why I know that you're not full of shit when you're making this point, and I guess I'm making the same point.
It's because we've seen this before.
We know how this plays out because this is what the United States did to the Native Americans.
This is what the United States was built on.
Yeah.
And so they're looking at this thinking, well, this is the only way.
We're going to clear it out, take their land, and then we'll put them somewhere where we'll throw a casino up for them or something like that.
That's what America did.
It's free real estate.
That's what it is.
Here's the awful cynical take on that.
If that happened, Israel would be able to argue, well, rockets are not being lobbed against, you know, people in our country anymore.
Well, hold on a second.
And on that note, I'm glad you brought that up.
That is the thing that they would say.
Nick, let's go ahead and move from the short term to the long term, based on what we were just talking about a while ago, right?
Like, let's say theoretically, and it's...
Disgusting.
Let's say that the Palestinians are taken away from their homeland and they're thrown in either Egypt or Jordan, right?
So they would be replaced after ethnic and genocidal cleansing.
They would be pushed in these other countries, which those countries don't want for a variety of reasons.
But do you know what just happened?
In this entire situation, and would be made worse if this happened, that would be radicalization of its own right.
So you know where the rockets would be coming from then?
They'd be coming from Jordan or Egypt.
This is not a cycle that solves itself.
And for the record, Marco Rubio, who just got unanimous...
He has already frozen all international aid except for two places, Nick.
One is Israel, and the second is Egypt.
And do you know why?
Because they are going to use the economic weapons of the United States of America to try and make this plan happen.
They're going to try and make this thing take place.
It will lead to short-term profits for people.
It will lead to a lot of suffering for people.
And in the long run, what do we see in the United States?
What you just brought up with Native Americans, but also everything else that the United States has done on behalf of capitalism, it always leads to blowback.
It always leads to something awful that you then have to deal with, and we have cultural amnesia that it ever took place in the first place.
Well, that whole mind thing I was doing before about, well, maybe Hexeth could be, you know, it kind of applies here, too, because you can sort of...
Picture the thought where the United States and whoever else comes together, they give a lot of money to Egypt, and Egypt ends up housing a lot of people from Gaza, refugees, and they end up living in a lot better situation than they were before, and it's safer, and kids can go to school and all that stuff.
And the argument can then be, well, it is better for them.
That's a convenient thing.
They uprooted and had to survive a war, and their entire lives bombed around them.
You know, the Israelis would probably feel that way, too.
It's like, we'll let them live anywhere else in a better life, and they'll eventually forget, I guess.
I think that's sort of the ideology, right?
Eventually, they'll forget their roots.
They'll forget what they so fervently believe, right, about that.
Like, that's the idea, right?
I suppose I love the point you made, although I don't love the point, but it's a great point, that you'd end up seeing the same kind of violence in the other countries because this is something more important than just...
Having a nice apartment, I think is what I'm saying.
Well, yeah!
It is economic warfare and displacement and the, like, do you think that people are going to watch their families get destroyed and have their children murdered?
Entire, like, generations worth of families being obliterated?
And they're just going to be like, you know what?
Fair game!
We're just going to go over here and it will be fine.
Like, there is no way that this just works out like that.
And like in the neoliberal environment, there is no foresight except for constructing economic systems that benefit the powerful.
Otherwise, they just don't take into consideration how it affects normal human beings.
What you just said...
Is a very, very convenient fairy tale.
There is no way whatsoever that that is real, that that has any sort of relationship to actual reality or emotional reality, and it's just going to kick the can down the road so people like Trump and Kushner can, you know, get their beaks wet, and then some other people are going to profit, and then it's just going to continue to get worse and deteriorate.
I mean, part of me thinks that I can understand.
It's a lack of understanding of the region, like I mentioned before, and the ethos there.
I also could think that, you know, we've had plenty of refugees come to America, and they've been set up, and they've gotten whole new lives, and they're ecstatic to be here, right?
So that has to be what they're trying to sort of apply in the Middle East with Gazans.
And I think that that's the fundamental misunderstanding, right?
It's not a solvable problem with just some money.
You know, if the government caused some horrible thing where, God forbid, somebody in your family dies, well, you get a huge amount of money.
The person maybe who is in charge goes to prison.
That is enough for people in America, right, to, like, feel like, okay, I've got my retribution or whatever.
And I suppose that's the fundamental disconnect there, which that's not what would happen.
That's not the solution that, like, people in the West Bank and Gaza are looking for and would accept.
No, not at all.
And it's not going to work out in the long run either way.
But it is wild to see.
The evolution of this thing, how it played out, the steps that it took, and where we've reached.
Nick, if we had had some lead time on this next segment, I would have gone and gotten a special milk carton printed with a red and blue donkey on the side of it.
The Democratic Party, folks!
Where are they?
What are they doing?
Well, we're hearing reports, and this is from a CNN article written by Sarah Faris and Lauren Fox, who reported on meetings that the Democrats are having in terms of, like, where should they go now?
This is titled...
Democrats grapple with their own message in Trump 2.0 and basically talk to every moderate Democrat they could to find out that they want to work with Trump even though he's making it hard to work with him.
And Nick, the best thing that they have to discuss right now is how they can replicate Senator Mark Warner's tuna melt viral video, which...
Did you know that existed?
Nope.
I didn't either.
I had to go look at it.
And basically it was Warner making a tuna melt sandwich.
That sounds disgusting.
And apparently people just dunked on it and said that it was stupid.
The Democrats have nothing to offer.
And the fact that we do not have a resistance right now is a...
Damning, damning indictment of this party.
How are you feeling right now about the Democratic Party?
Well, I'm glad that, you know, it's funny we both sort of responded to the same exact part of the article because just below that tuna...
I would think I'm something we would call extremely online.
You're very online.
Very online.
I never had seen anything about tuna sandwich.
And again, it seems like it was equal parts ridiculed, but they want to recreate that.
The quote I have here from that article says, quote, Senators talked about the need to repost each other's social media to try and organically get their message out, but they also can't abandon traditional media altogether.
And I'm trying to picture fucking Chuck Schumer and all these other old guys talking about, what's that called again?
The Insta Twitter thing?
How do you open that app?
It's mind-boggling that this is the stuff that they're actually wasting their time on and not understanding.
Now, I've got to throw this out here because I know we're kind of running a little bit low on time, but Mitch McConnell.
Became an obstructionist.
And not only that, they didn't hide it.
They said it out loud, right, during the Obama administration.
And we kept trying to say, well, it's a political no-win for them.
It's really bad for them.
And we pulled out foreigners.
What did this incredible amount of obstructionism get the GOP today?
It got them tax cuts in the Supreme Court.
And the White House.
Well, it got him everything.
It got the party taken over by extremists, but that was already in the process of happening.
Right.
Like, it works.
So, like, maybe the Democrats can take a little bit of a page out of that, I guess.
I hate to say this, but, like, they now need to be the obstructionists and fight because it actually rallied people to the GOP cause while they were doing it, and it increased their base and then led to this thing where now fucking Trump is going to have a second term and increase his electorate.
So it's like...
Why don't they look at that a little bit here?
And I don't think anyone on the left is going to argue with them, obstructing what their policies are going to try and put in.
And this notion of, oh, we're going to play along, we'll find a couple things here and there in the margins that we can agree on.
The Republicans really never did that, ever.
I mean, hardly.
I guess there was a very little bit of legislation passing the margins, but to be within the first week already talking that way is insane to me.
It's main members and it's apparatchiks and all of them.
They work with the corporations that currently want what Trump has.
And what he's pushing.
So as a result, they don't want to lose their donors that are the main part of their base and their support.
They don't want to get primaried by people who are being paid for by these corporations and the wealthy.
For the record, Nick, I would not be shocked.
I'm going to go ahead and throw this out there.
If Elon Musk, like, continues this sort of omnipresence in American politics...
I wouldn't be shocked if he bankrolls a bunch of primary opponents in the Democratic Party to try and moderate them or move them further to the right.
I would not be surprised.
That seems like a logical next move.
In the midst of this, this is a party that also doesn't take seriously what's happening because they are part of it and they've laid the groundwork for it.
They're not concerned about it.
Quite frankly, they want what Donald Trump is doing.
They wish that he was a little bit quieter with the brutality and the openness that we've been talking about.
This has to create a generational sea change.
The only person right now who is, and by the way, Elizabeth Warren is saying some stuff here and there, but she's even being careful with it.
The only person who is actually being vocal and open about their resistance to this is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
That's it.
And I'll say this.
Ocasio-Cortez should go ahead and declare herself for the nomination in 2028. There's no reason not to.
We've been doing that for years now.
I mean, Donald Trump basically said he was going to run for president again in 2021, immediately after he left office.
She should go ahead and do that and try and dominate some of the media landscape.
And the only other person, for the record, actually two more.
There's Pritzker in Illinois and Newsom.
In California, those are the only people right now who are pushing forward any sort of actual resistance to Donald Trump.
So go ahead, get your names out there and say, I'm opposed to this.
Here's where we need to go.
And start building within the Democratic Party a generational sea change.
Start bringing in some younger people who understand what's going on and hate this shit.
Because right now, the Democratic Party hasn't just failed to keep Donald Trump from a second term.
They are capitulating and laying down at a speed.
And I'm a critic, Nick, and you've heard me criticize this party for years now.
And I told you that they were going to do this.
It's happening even faster and more dramatically than I expected.
I mean, think of the flip side of like, you know, the opposite of obstructionism is they're going to try and work with the GOP on certain things.
It's just guaranteeing more victories for the GOP longer into the future.
That's right.
That's the biggest problem because no matter what happens, they're not going to get the credit for it.
They're terrible at taking the credit for these things anyway.
That's right.
But I like the idea that you're saying they should start now because it takes a while to build a kind of grassroots excitement, legitimate, real, authentic excitement for a candidate.
What we saw with Kamala Harris was not authentic.
No, it was simulated.
It was simulated, but it was also just, like, relief that Biden had dropped out and, like, we're just going to sort of fake it until we make it, and we never could make it, right?
So that is what they need.
It needs to start now, absolutely, to begin that process of getting people more excited and rallied around a candidate, whether it's AOC or whoever else.
Yeah, you can't just suddenly, a year and a half out, start to try and put together something and hope that people get behind you.
You've got to start now.
You got to start building that base because you more or less have to have an aggressive takeover of the Democratic Party.
That's a large part of this is who takes over sort of the controls.
But the other part with messaging, Nick, and we've seen this, our media is it's a ridiculous affair.
So what we talked about earlier in terms of like the brutality that we're going to see from these ICE raids, right?
So like, let's just say theoretically that AOC says, I'm running for president in 2028 because I oppose what's happening right now.
We have an ICE raid where somebody gets hurt or brutalized, right?
What does our media do if there's somebody who's already declared for the presidency?
What do you have to say about this, right?
It then allows you to have a counterbalance.
Trump has this to say.
His rival has this to say.
We have to choose our sides between it.
It creates these polars or these poles of influence, right?
And so...
That's what's missing right now.
The Democratic Party is just completely out to pasture.
They have no spirit or desire to fight against this for a variety of reasons we already talked about.
But you have to create somebody or some group that when the shit inevitably hits the fan, like we've talked about, and when these openings present themselves, that there will at least be a counterbalance that's being presented.
Right.
And don't forget, Trump will attack the perceived...
I know he's not going to run again in theory, but they'll...
In theory?
Right.
And they'll attack, you know, who he perceives as someone who's going to be a rival to him on the Democratic side.
We saw this a lot.
And that's why new scum, that's their new term for him, which is clearly just beyond the pale.
But if you didn't see it, like when Trump landed in L.A. to go look at the fires and do the whole thing...
Confronted him immediately.
Newsom was waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs on the tarmac.
And I think he surprised Trump and it forced Trump to give him a handshake and a hug almost, which I think was Newsom's calculation.
I think he realized he's been able to catch him off guard and sort of force him into a moment where they can have this image.
And if you're smart enough, you can play off of the attacks that Trump will do when his mind is a preemptive thing to put him down early out of his misery.
You can probably leverage that into getting more airtime yourself and then make that into something positive.
Well, Nick, just to get personal for a second, did you ever have a bully when you were a kid?
Yeah.
Yeah, you had a bully, right?
And was there any way that you neutralized the bully?
What did you end up having to do?
Geez.
I mean, I can remember one in class.
Gosh, I didn't do a good job.
I think usually you can use humor.
It tends to sort of be the best way to do it.
That is a way to do it.
You can go ahead and cut down your bully and that can do it.
Basically, the old idea, I used to have this, I was talking about this not too long ago, Nick.
I had this one bully.
He used to follow me home from school constantly.
And like, he wanted to fight.
You know what I mean?
Like, him and his little bully cronies, like, follow me home from school the entire time trying to antagonize me.
And I beat the shit out of him.
You know?
And one day, I just couldn't do it anymore, and I just beat the living shit out of him.
That stopped it.
You know?
Like, that put an end to the bullying.
Like, Trump is a weak man.
He just is.
Insecure people act this way.
There's a reason why he does it.
And so far, what have we seen in politics, Nick?
We've seen Democrats sort of kind of fight back against him sometimes, but then inevitably they're like, well, you know, when they go low, we go high.
They'll fight back a little bit and then they'll stop or whatever.
Somebody needs to put this guy in his place.
And there needs to be a rival who comes up through this.
And I have to tell you, the Democratic Party is...
Especially in historically weak right now, there is room for someone to emerge and take control over messaging and also the resistance to Trump, because it's just not there right now.
Yeah.
I mean, now you're getting me in my mind, swimming, thinking, okay, now they have to attack his appearance, which I've always felt like, you know, because he'll attack other people's appearance.
It's always beyond the pale, and we just feel like, oh, that's the most horrible thing.
What's wrong with this person?
But part of me feels like it just opens him up and it should be easy.
And we saw Marco try it a little bit.
And Marco's such a, you know...
Well, by the way, look how well it worked for him.
Well, I think it's, you know, one of the things that I was telling people, I was talking about this back in 2016, and then when we got to 2020, I was advising in terms of strategy here and there when people would hear me.
I said, you have to call him out for his insecurity.
Like, his hair, his spray tan, his weight, all that.
Like, that's not what's wrong with Trump.
What's wrong with Trump is he is a definitively small man.
He is very, very sad and pathetic, and you need to tell him how small and pathetic he is.
And that's something that I think people have missed the mark on, and I think that it would have a huge role in sort of cutting through this sort of image of himself that he's created and he uses to his advantage.
I mean, I feel very bad for you, Donald, because you're sort of small and petty.
You're pathetic.
and you're clearly your parents didn't care for you either.
And they had sent you away.
Like, you know, there's lots of things you can do that with him that are true.
So yeah, I can follow that reasoning as well.
And that would be nice.
It would be nice to finally have someone do it successfully and put an end to all this, because this is not where our country is going and, J.D. Vance on Meet the Nation.
He is dangerous because he comes out there and he's got this voice and he tries to, without answering the question, pretend that he sounds reasonable.
And the answers are horrific.
And we've got to be really worried about how this is going to transfer into the future after Trump's gone.
Yeah, thanks Harris-Waltz campaign for not nipping that in the bud and allowing that to take off.
I'll just say that.
We need something else.
All right, everybody.
We are going to come back for our Friday episode, The Weekender.
Reminder, go to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
Become a patron to hear that entire show.
By the way, just a quick thank you to all the people who support this show.
These are hard-ass times, and I know that I, and I think I speak for Nick in this, I find a lot of replenishment and hope within the muckrake community, so thank you all for that.
In the meantime, you can find Nick on Blue Sky at Nick Hausman.
