This is a preview of The Weekender edition of the Muckrake Podcast. Please go to our Patreon to gain access to the regular Weekender episodes on Fridays.
Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman begin the show talking about Hasan Piker, a popular streamer who was detained by Customs and Border Protection officers upon his return to the US from out of the country. This was a chilling revelation especially in light of the administration trying to eradicate birthright citizenship, which the Supreme Court heard arguments about yesterday. The Democrats continue to fall into disarray as they look to potentially oust David Hogg.
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I don't have any cold drinks in the house, so I have to do the ASMR of pouring it into a glass.
I enjoy that.
Here we are for the Weekender edition of the Mike Craig Podcast.
I'm Jerry J. Sexton.
I'm here with my friend Nick Hausman.
Nick, how are you?
I'm okay.
I'm okay.
Things are moving along, and every day is a different new adventure.
I spit up my water because that is certainly a way to look at it.
We have a full show.
We have just so much that we always have to talk about.
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Nick, we got to start today with a pretty alarming revelation in terms of what is happening at our borders, both moving out and moving in.
Incredibly popular left-wing personality, Hassan Piker, revealed on his Twitch stream this week that he was detained by U.S. Customs at O 'Hare Airport in Chicago and questioned repeatedly about his political opinions, his stances, all of that.
Here is Hassan describing the incident himself.
I'm sitting there, and they're asking me about Trump.
They're asking me about Hamas.
And he kept saying stuff like, do you like Hamas?
Do you support Hamas?
Do you think Hamas is a resistance group?
Do you think Hamas is a terrorist group or a resistance group?
He just kept asking over and over again.
And I kept repeating the same statement over and over again.
I kept saying, I kept saying a couple different things.
One, in terms of Israel and all the wars, I was like, I'm on the side of civilians.
I want the endless bloodshed to end.
I am a pacifist.
I want wars to end.
I just kept repeating that over and over again.
Every single time he asked me a question, I just kept repeating that.
And every single time he asked me a question, a leading question about Hamas, I kept saying...
The United States State Department recognizes Hamas as a terrorist organization.
The United States State Department recognizes Hamas as a terrorist organization.
Depending on how I answer those questions, I'm fucking going to jail.
Because the first stuff was just illegal for him to ask me those questions.
And completely idiotic and ridiculous.
And I think they did it because they know who the fuck I am.
And they wanted to put...
The fear of God into me.
So, Piker, for those who aren't aware...
is one of the most popular leftist streamers in the world right now.
He is also an American citizen.
This situation, Nick, I think reflects what you and I have been expecting for a while, which is the targeting of U.S. citizens who have, quote-unquote, bad political opinions and bad political stances.
And hearing this...
I think reveals something that we both knew was both probably going on and also was coming down the road.
Yeah, I think what you do is when you're facing a situation like this, and I'm going out of the country in July, I'm coming back, and I was fretting this for about a month already, and this is going to get worse.
We're going to have more of these, by the way.
More of these people are going to end up coming out and having these stories.
You have two choices.
Either you tell the truth, right, or you don't.
And depending on which one you choose, we'll simply either extend the detention that you're going to be in place under, or you can get out a little bit earlier and lie.
So basically what I'm saying is you can pretty much lie about what you think if you are opposed to Trump, and they probably will limit the amount of time that you are stuck in that detention room.
But if you don't, that will extend that detention for untold amount of hours.
Yeah, that's exactly right, is how that entire situation works.
And an authoritarian regime, what we've seen a lot of, Nick, is we've seen a lot of people being disappeared out of the country.
But an authoritarian country keeps people out and keeps people from being able to leave.
It's both.
It's in and out.
It is the total control using the border and using state power.
In this case, what this reveals, and what you said about there are going to be more people, there is no way this is the first time this has happened.
It just so happens that Hasan Piker has the type of platform, and by the way, we're not even talking about his politics, we're not even talking about any of the things around him or his personality or anything like that.
He has the type of platform where he feels comfortable saying this out loud.
I cannot imagine how many people that this has happened to.
It put the fear of God into them, and they didn't speak out about it.
There's no way that the number one leftist streamer in the world is the first person to have this happen.
And this is, I think, what's been missing a lot in the discourse.
For them to spotlight Hasan...
It means that they have created either an enemies list that they are keeping track of when these people leave the country and come back, or they have created some sort of a database or AI program that takes care of all of this that is starting to compile an enemies list.
And it won't stop with him.
Like, one thing that we cover all the time, Nick, in terms of this authoritarian slide that we've been talking about for years now, they never stop.
It has to keep growing and growing and growing.
So this is not going to be the only time that this has happened.
It's going to happen more, and that type of database is going to grow and grow and grow, period.
And also, absolutely, forgive me for not fleshing it out completely, but right now, as of this week, the choices are you can lie or you can tell the truth, and that will depend on how long you're going to be detained.
But eventually, soon, whatever that will be, They won't let you into the country.
They will end up either sending you back from where you came if you were just visiting another country, or it could then turn into, well, they'll just send you to El Salvador and a prison like that.
And that is obviously a really horrible fear.
And we've already seen this precedent.
There was an immigration lawyer in Michigan who came back with his family from, I want to say, Puerto Rico or something like that in a vacation.
And they detained him as well.
And he knew that they knew.
Who he was.
So this database that you're talking about, without question, exists.
And, you know, what the fear is, is what Doge was doing.
This is what Doge is probably doing a lot of, is building these databases and they're able to combine all sorts of information from all different places that are not supposed to be combined.
That was the beauty, by the way, of all the red tape in our government, was that they won't talk to each other so well.
It's really hard to mesh different databases of all these really important information we all have.
And I think Musk has solved that.
And now there's going to be a repository for everything that they're going to be monitoring instantaneously.
And I'm telling you, I'm going to have to make a decision, I think, when I come back from Japan, of how I want to behave during that moment if that happens.
And I'm not quite sure how I want to do that yet.
Well, one of the things that history teaches us is when you're dealing with an authoritarian regime, you have to understand that you are in danger.
And as a result, like, it's the old idea of you're going through a checkpoint, you're showing your papers, like, you are going to have to learn to live in a different type of way.
In the way that you speak about things, the type of things that you espouse.
At the same time, you don't want to get caught lying to the government or lying to an officer, whatever these things are.
God knows that they're going to take advantage of that type of stuff.
To go ahead and go off of what we've been talking about, Nick, not only did they probably figure out how to access a lot of these things, let's not forget that's the public sphere.
There is the private sphere.
And that includes not just social media sites and posts and messages, but the fact that all of these sites have cookies that track almost everything that you do.
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