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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman examine the fallout from the group chat from hell as the GOP has circled the wagons with some gold medal winning mental gymnastics. They shift to more students on visas being disappeared for voicing their concerns with that is happening between Israel and Gaza before having to go into the morass that is dismantling child labor laws in Florida.
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Welcome to the Weekender Edition of The Great Podcast.
I'm Derek Sexton here with my good friend Nick Housman.
Nick, how you doing, bud?
I'm good.
I'm good.
I'm fine.
That's the type of energy we want to bring into the weekend.
Everything is fine, Jared.
I'm okay.
That's perfect.
Yeah. I can't blink any louder, can I?
I don't think so.
Yeah, I think that's the consensus feeling at the moment.
We have so much to get into.
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Well, Nick, we have an update.
When we were getting ready to record, we recorded on Monday for the Tuesday episode, and right before we started recording, this major blockbuster report came out that basically the entirety of the Trump administration got on signal illegally and shared national and military secrets in a really haphazard and, let me check my notes, illegal way.
And since that story has come out, we have watched multiple iterations of an attempt to explain what has happened.
Don't worry, everybody.
Pam Bondi's not going to investigate this, in case you're, like, really concerned about it.
But this major scandal has now played out in so many different acts and forms.
And, Nick, it started out with the White House denying that anything had happened.
Pete Hegseth saying basically nothing had occurred here.
The Atlantic was more or less dared to release the entirety of the exchange on Signal.
And since then, it's more or less been one of the most slapdash, haphazard bullshit denial stories.
It's partly a cover-up.
How have you felt watching this thing start to develop over this week?
Well, I'm pleasantly surprised that it's managed to stay in the news as long as it has.
There's a reason for that, yeah.
Yeah, it kind of felt like this is the one they'll be able to put it away.
And usually they put it away or goes away because something else, equally or worse, has happened in between then and now, usually self-inflicted by the Trump administration.
So that is one thing.
They've kind of hunkered down a little bit, and nothing else has kind of taken its place, which is great.
I think that Pam Bondi, her response isn't even that they're not going to investigate this.
But she just turns it to, but her emails.
And that is her talking point.
Good for her.
And I think that the biggest issue I have with the entire thing, and I've been kind of railing about it on whatever the thing is called now.
I've been railing on it is they targeted a residential building and turned it to rubble, injuring untold amount of people and killing at least the one person I suppose that they were targeting.
I don't even know if they even confirmed that.
Usually they like to crow about that stuff.
But that is a huge deal that nobody wants to talk about.
Yep. Yep.
Absolutely. And the things you've already started to touch on these things.
I just want to hit on them just to kind of give my reaction to it.
First things first, the reason why this is staying is because when it comes to, One is their money, and two is the military.
Yeah, it just froze.
Oh, it all froze?
Yeah, right when you started that.
Okay, let me just start over.
Yeah, can you?
Yeah, can you mark that down?
3.30, you got it.
Whenever you're ready.
Okay. So Nick, you've touched on a few of these things and I just want to get on the record about some of the things you've talked about and also my personal reactions because it's aligned with yours.
There's a reason why this has stayed in the news.
And that is because there are two things that you don't fuck with when it comes to the political class and the media class.
And that is their money and the military, which by the way is an extension of their money.
So as a result...
Anything that happens to the economy, that's a crisis.
The judicial system, which by the way is about protecting money and property, that's a crisis.
Messing with the military, which is an extension of your economic goals, big giant deal, right?
So we're not focusing on people being targeted, which we'll talk more about in a second, our rights being absolutely destroyed, the election system being screwed with, which we'll talk about in a little bit.
The entire thing I'm trying to point out here is we need to understand why this is at the top of everybody's, like, freak-out charts, right?
Because it shows that they're incapable of handling the military.
And on that note, Nick, you brought up that they leveled a residential building.
And in that text message exchange, to see it so openly, this is the type of stuff that our government does via the military.
They kill innocent people almost every single day.
In black and white and seeing it so obvious and these assholes celebrating it, I actually think as they said that that building was leveled, I think J.D. fucking Vance's, and this is verbatim, I believe his response was excellent, right?
And so instead of talking about what the military would do or the sort of atrocities and crimes that the United States government and the military commits, we're instead talking about no, no, no.
The real problem is that we're not keeping that secret.
Right? The conversations are in a place where they're not supposed to be, which I think it betrays a rot that's in the institutions that has gotten us to this point and made it possible for these assholes to be in charge.
I mean, yeah, I suppose there's a rot like you're describing, but it's also these specific people.
You know, nobody in this chat asks about casualties.
Nope. Any collateral damage, even using the term that is also dismissive of human life.
Can I ask you a question on that note?
Yeah. I've been thinking about this.
Why do you think this signal chat existed in the first place?
Right. Great question, really, because it's like, do all these principles need to be briefed in real time for this kind of thing?
Like, I believe I saw some people who are in the military weighing in and saying, no, like, Secretary of State does not need to be in this kind of a, you know, group.
So, you know, yeah, like, what was it about?
Because they also seem to have operational control over this mission.
All of them, in a way.
Like, if somebody wanted to chime in, like J.D. Vance made it sound like if he had more strongly objected to this, maybe they would have delayed the month like they talked about.
Like, that's kind of crazy, isn't it?
So there are so many things here that we have to talk about because this isn't being put into context for people.
First of all, the Trump administration is obviously breaking the law in order to hide their conversations, period.
That's number one.
This is probably their modus operandi, right?
Like they're doing this for everything.
The second part is, why did they do this?
Why were they having a conversation about this on Signal in general when they didn't need to?
And you know what I think it is, Nick?
And this is the larger issue here that you and I have touched on multiple times.
It's the fact that these assholes wanted to revel in their ability to do this.
Like, they wanted to have a bro conversation about, yeah, we're getting ready to use the military to hit this base.
It wasn't actually about planning and execution.
It was about Pete Hegseth bragging to his bros in the Trump administration and impressing them.
That's what was happening here, which is why people like this should never be within a breathing distance of power.
And so it is the combination of the illegality, the haphazardness, but also the lack of moral and ethical character that these people have.
Their children is what it is.
And they were trying to impress each other.
And when you watch it...
And, you know, people have been laughing about the emoji use in all of this.
You are watching people who are using the most lethal military in the history of the world, and they're not treating it seriously.
That's the issue here, is that this literally was a group chat.
It wasn't just on Signal because it's illegal.
That's part of it.
But it also was a group chat with them sort of feeling themselves and sort of enjoying having that type of power.
Right. I mean, and listen, if we're talking about finger-pointing, and I'm like the Secretary of State, and I'm invited to a group chat that has Hegseth and all these people in it, Tulsi Gabbard, yada, yada, you know, I don't know.
It could very well be reasonably assumed that, like, there isn't a journalist also in the chat to check.
Now, that's why Mike Waltz is the guy who added him, and by the way, we'll talk about him in a second anyway, who certainly is the person on the hook for a lot of this, right?
But I think you're right.
The notion that the...
These chats go away on a setting that you could already see very transparently, would have been within a week going away, means that they cannot preserve their records.
Now, whether or not what they did in the chat was legal or not legal, the act of not saving these records...
Is illegal.
Lots of administrations tend to ignore this at their leisure, but it's certainly the Trump campaign made an art of it in the last time, and they're obviously going to just, you know, cut to the chase right now as quickly as they can.
And by the way, like, Hegseth giving away operational details, weapons packages, intelligence, you name it, unnecessary.
Like, there's no reason for him to do that in any way, shape, or form.
He wanted to brag.
I'm in control of this.
This is what I can make happen, right?
And while that's occurring, and by the way, Tulsi Gabbard wasn't even in America at the time.
She can't remember what country she was in using this type of, and by the way, they're all probably infiltrated with some sort of malware at some point.
These are the type of idiots who can't even handle an email attachment.
This whole thing.
It speaks to a larger problem, which is not only should they not have control over this, they aren't capable of having control over this.
They shouldn't be anywhere near any kind of a locus of power.
Remember, Lloyd Austin had surgery and they demanded his scalp, practically, just from having a surgery and being in the hospital for a day and a half.
That was weird.
Let's be fair about that.
That was a weird situation.
But, you know, either way, like that happens there.
And then here we have, you know, the walls that have been put up and the, you know, the amount of hand-wringing that they have to do on the right to sort of combat this push against has been flexible, I suppose.
Mentally flexible, if you will.
Well, let's take a look at how they've tried to handle this and a little bit of the fallout.
Mike Waltz, who went on Fox News, and last time I checked, Nick, Fox News was a network that was created to be a friendly space for Republicans.
Here's Mike Waltz talking to Laura Ingram, who is never going to actually push back against a Republican, except for when somebody like Mike Waltz comes in and says bullshit like this.
So you don't know what staffer is responsible for this right now?
Well, look, a staffer wasn't responsible.
And look, I take full responsibility.
I built the group.
My job is to make sure everything's coordinated.
But how did the number...
I mean, I don't mean to be pedantic here, but how did the number...
Have you ever had somebody's contact that shows their name and then you have somebody else's number there?
Oh, I never make those mistakes.
Right? You got somebody else's number on someone else's contact.
No. Of course I didn't see this loser in the group.
It looked like someone else.
Now, whether he did it deliberately, Or it happened in some other technical mean is something we're trying to figure out.
No, no, no, no, no.
That's not right.
And he's my age.
So this is not like a geriatric person who doesn't know buttons and how to tap on the phone.
I want you to imagine, the listener, that you're someone at home watching Fox News.
Like, you buy into most everything that's fed to you.
Are you supposed to believe?
That what Mike Waltz is trying to say is that Jeffrey Goldberg went into his phone and changed his contact information?
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, this is how bad.
Let me give you a brief thing about the thought of this, because this is how people on Fox News or watching Fox News think.
So at one point, I had posted a video on my Facebook for my basketball side, right?
And a friend of mine on Facebook was following that page.
And so it must have put the link of the video on his timeline.
This is years ago.
And, you know, he calls me on the phone to berate me for how dare I place my video on his timeline in Facebook.
And I'm looking at him going, I don't even know.
What you're talking about.
So this is sort of the same idea where it's like, you know, how dare you have your number in my phone?
Did you hear about his Venmo?
It's not private.
You ever heard that whole thing?
Oh, God.
You didn't?
Almighty. No.
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