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 dig into the rapidly intensifying standoff in LA, where Marines patrol the streets, Reaper drones fly overhead, and “No Kings” protests are gaining serious momentum. As Trump stages a fascist spectacle with his military parade and loyalty-vetted troops, tensions rise across the country — and abroad, signs point to a potentially catastrophic war on the horizon.
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Welcome to the Weekender Edition of the Munkeric Podcast.
I'm Jared H. Sext.
I'm here with Nick Hausman.
Let's go ahead, Nick, and just get through the regular rigmarole.
We've got really, really disturbing big stuff going on.
Reminder for everybody, go over to patreon.com slash munkericpodcast in order to gain full access to the Weekender Edition of the show, as well as support us, keep us going, keep us growing.
We appreciate all of your support, all of your help.
Right before we started to record this episode in California, your senator, Senator Alex Padilla, went into a presser by Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, and in the middle of that presser, he identified himself as a senator, said that he had a question for the secretary.
He was then forcibly removed from the room, thrown to the floor, and handcuffed in an incredibly disturbing display.
What we're getting ready to listen to here is Gnome speaking as the incident took place.
And, yeah, awful.
We have a constitution.
We follow that constitution and the laws that have been passed by our Congress, and we're going to make sure they are equally applied to every single person as it applies under the Constitution here in Los Angeles, but also across the country.
As our law enforcement officers have been assaulted, they've been pelted with rocks and bricks.
Their cars have been set on fire.
Molotov cocktails have been used.
We have seen people throw bottles and hammers at them.
We've also seen that they have been attacked.
and verbally spit on or punched or assaulted and it's just not acceptable.
The Department of Homeland Security and the officers and the agencies and the departments and the military people that are working on this operation will continue to sustain and increase our operations in this city.
We are not going away.
We are staying here to liberate the city from the So I want to say thank you to every single person that has been able to do this.
Also, I want to talk specifically to the rioters and to the politicians in Los Angeles.
The matter is, half a dozen people that you're rotating on your...
I also want...
Yeah, so that was a senator of the United States of America being detained by an authoritarian regime.
Nick, I have a lot of thoughts about this, and I promise you this episode is going to be filled with a lot of thoughts, quite frankly, a lot of justified anger.
This is your senator.
This is your city.
How are you feeling?
I don't know.
You sound kind of upset about it.
I'm ecstatic.
I am ecstatic to finally hear somebody.
This is what I've been talking about for months.
They need much more dramatic, much more, you know, combative stance in these things that are public that can get more people acknowledging what's going on.
So I am happy that Padilla went in there and decided to muck some things up, trying to get a question in there.
Now, what I'm not happy with, obviously, is that the United States Senator is manhandled to the ground and arrested like that.
When I suppose what would we expect, like maybe just ushering him out would be the thing that they were supposed to do and not literally they had him get they like kind of almost threw him to the ground and then hogtied him basically.
So that is there's no excuse for that.
That's going to be a big, interesting problem that they're going to end up having with how they're going to deal with this.
But again, it just follows this authoritarian path that they're on.
And, you know, I think, you know, kudos to PDA for continuing to expose this.
And we need a lot more of the Democratic leadership to do this.
This is the kind of thing that should be happening in order to bring attention to what's going on in this country.
Already, Kristi Noem and the administration have said that they did not recognize him.
For people who do not know, Padilla is the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Immigration Committee, which undoubtedly has a lot of face time with Kristi Noem.
The idea that she didn't recognize him is horseshit.
To go along with that, I think, Nick, what this brings to bear, and never mind, by the way, what she was saying, I have to respond to it to begin with.
She talks about liberating the city from its governor and its mayor, which is an explicitly authoritarian statement.
And you could hear her voice sort of cracking as she's saying that because it is so far over the place.
I don't care if they spit on them.
I am beyond caring about any of that.
Because these people have revealed themselves to be who they are.
And if they are going to do this to a senator, and, you know, I really don't, there's something here that I need to make clear.
I don't want them doing this to anybody.
I don't want them doing this to just some person on a street.
I don't care if they're a citizen.
I don't care if they're an immigrant.
The fact that they did it to a senator, it's not that that person shouldn't be subject to these things.
It's that no one should.
That the things that they are doing are very clear provocations and escalations.
And at this point, they do not care who it is that they do this to.
They have revealed themselves as being fascist.
They have revealed themselves as being willing to do And we need to recognize the time for speeches, the time for carefully worded tweets or whatever we're calling things now, the time for memes.
All of that is over.
We are in the thick of this thing.
And we're going to talk a lot today about what the next few days and next few weeks are going to look like.
And people need to recognize that they have entered into a brand new world at this point.
And they need to remember what happened today with Padilla because this is an escalation.
It's another benchmark.
Absolutely.
And, you know, I remember I was at the protest on Sunday in L.A. downtown, and for the first couple of hours, it was very much very tame.
Nothing going on that you see, that you saw later on that they've been focusing on.
And now what's coming out, though, is, you know, a lot of blatant disregard for people's rights and for their safety, where the police have been emboldened now.
And I think it has to do with a lot of what Trump and Noam are saying on the national stage.
The local police department are now being much more emboldened.
They're just firing willy-nilly at people with rubber bullets and causing severe injuries for nothing.
You know, there's a woman, and I know you don't have to see the videos, but there's this poor woman who's trying to get to her house, her apartment downtown, and she's just sort of standing by herself on a corner, and they shoot her down with these bullets.
There's no notion of, let's see if we can de-escalate or figure out how to make this where they can have their right to peaceful protest without having to instigate this.
So it is really concerning.
And the only thing I could take as far as being in LA and the solace is that these are very small numbers since Sunday, Monday, the last few days have been small.
And so as a result, you haven't seen widespread panic or widespread violence Yeah, the weekend, and we'll discuss that in a couple of minutes, is really going to be a sign of where we are.
But Nick, I want to say this.
I've been seeing from Democrats, they're like, we need answers.
You've got the answers.
You've got every video imaginable of what happened.
You know, you see Chuck Schumer, who, by the way, needs to fucking retire and get out of everybody's way.
He needs to go.
And he's like, oh, this was very troubling.
No, it's not troubling.
A colleague of yours was shoved out of a room where they had a right to be, and they were thrown on the ground and handcuffed.
The time for asking questions is over.
Are you going to step up into this, or are you not?
And the people who aren't willing to, they need to go.
When it gets to Los Angeles, Nick, what we have to cover here is the fact that we now have over 4,000 National Guard troops.
We have 700 Marines that have been deployed.
It's been revealed that military Reaper drones have been circling the city constantly.
We've been seeing, like, gunships going around this city.
On top of that, we now know that facial recognition has been deployed here.
And what you just brought up is a really essential component of this.
The Angelenos are protesting, and they are engaging in collective action.
This is not an out-of-control riot.
This is not an insurrection.
This is a normal type of protest.
And we'll talk in a little bit about what the MAGA world sees in it.
But what we're seeing is an indication, and we've seen a lot of cops and a lot of military doing this shit over the years.
This is an escalation of that.
We've now reached the point.
Where we are at a tipping point, where every type of protest, particularly in democratic cities, and don't think that it isn't being noticed that they're doing this in democrat, quote-unquote, controlled cities.
There's a reason for that, and I want to get into it in a minute.
That every type of protest that takes place in these cities, and rightful protest, and legal protest, is now going to be met with the full force of state power, military power, and a militarized law enforcement apparatus.
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