In this episode of The Muckrake Podcast, Jared Yates Sexton discusses the horrific tragedy in Texas with floods killing over 100 people, the rise of climate fascism, and how demand for climate and economic justice have to be at the center of a movement fighting authoritarianism. From there, he digs into Elon Musk's proposed "America Party" as an astroturfed attempt to create a party in the thrall of the oligarchical class, but also a possible precursor to multiple parties challenging our current duopolistic system. The stunt in Los Angeles with federal troops driving tanks gets talked about, as well as the Department of Justice declaring there is no Jeffrey Epstein client list.
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My man, Nick Houseman, still outside of the country, so you're stuck with me.
Hopefully, you're not sick of me by now.
But we're going to do the job.
We're going to go through the stories of the day, and we have interesting stories today that I think we're going to be able to get into deep and get some additional historical and analytical context to.
You know, this is one of the parts of the job that I enjoy, which is taking breaking news and actually getting into the weeds with it and going well beyond the headlines and talking about what is happening and why it is happening and giving that context.
So I am just, I don't know, in the midst of all of this that we are going through, all of this horseshit that we are surviving and fighting against, I just want to say thank you for your support and for your kindness.
This is truly one of the great joys of my life, having this community, having this podcast, and being able to make sense of all of this chaos.
So I just want to say thank you.
I'm feeling very grateful today.
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We start today with horrific news of a disaster in Texas, central Texas, over by the Guadalupe River, which is an area that I've spent a little bit of time with.
And it is beautiful.
And the people that I have encountered there have been very, very kind.
Terribly flash floods have killed upwards of 100 people.
Dozens are still missing.
People are being saved from trees and floating on debris.
The accounts of what happened here, it simply should not have happened.
And living in this accelerated global climate change environment makes it obvious that these types of unnatural disasters are not only taking place, but are going to become much more commonplace.
Word of over 15 inches of rain dropping almost instantaneously.
And what we saw with this, it would be bad enough if it were just a disaster that led to this mass loss of life and incredible damage to people's lives.
But the word is coming from this that this type of tragedy could have been prevented.
We saw here a failure in forecasting, which is severely limited under the best circumstances, in how it can even begin to approximate what is going to happen with one of these superstorms, but also with the warnings that were given out to people who were in harm's way.
For those who've been paying attention, you already can connect the dots.
This is a consequence of years and years of neoliberal austerity, but also the massive and awful cuts that were carried out by Doge and the Trump administration that have left multiple areas vulnerable to worsening disasters.
Positions are unfilled.
There are a lack of resources.
It is an absolutely atrocious situation.
In the wake of this, and we'll get into the larger context here in a minute, we've seen a couple of things in terms of response to this.
We have seen Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has now introduced a bill on quote-unquote weather modification.
And we've seen on the right among MAGA supporters the idea that these weather patterns are unnatural.
And so obviously this is the consequence of some type of weather weapon.
I would love to know, by the way, within the right-wing mine palace exactly how they square that circle.
The Trump administration is under control of the federal government.
And if there were so-called weather weapons, who were using them?
Is it some sort of a deep state cabal?
And where are they?
And who are they?
And how is it that Trump and firing and laying off people and harassing people, how were they able to keep those people away from these weapons?
And if these weapons exist, wouldn't the Trump administration say that they existed?
And we'll get into more of that in a bit because we unfortunately have to talk about this debacle around the Epstein case that the Trump administration is, quote-unquote, handling.
Along with that, we have seen people like Kellyanne Conway going on Fox News saying that overwhelming compassion is a symptom of Trump derangement syndrome.
We've also seen from some liberals, some Democrats, who have said that this is what the people of central Texas voted for without any idea of who they voted for.
It's a really, really messed up thing to imagine that you can somehow or another discern the politics of all of the people who were killed.
It's a moralistic version of the universe, and it actually is closer in line to an evangelical type of mindset than it is anything else.
The idea that there is a omnipresent, omniscient, all-powerful, benevolent, moralistic God who is more than happy to wipe out people who vote incorrectly.
And I just want to reiterate, as I always try to do when we have these stories, we cannot take tragedies and somehow or another put some type of moralistic, one-up viewpoint and perspective on this.
Climate change is coming for all of us.
And there are people in red states who do not support this stuff, who stand with you as allies in solidarity against fascism.
And I know that it's an easy way to look at the world to think, well, if they would have voted different, this wouldn't have happened.
It simply doesn't do anything for us.
It doesn't help in any way, shape, or form.
People in so-called red states deserve our empathy and our solidarity.
And just because they live in gerrymandered, controlled, oppressive states and can't necessarily afford to get out of them doesn't mean that they deserve to die.
But I think I'm speaking to the choir here.
I think you understand that.
That mindset, along with the MAGA wealth class, oligarchical class, austerity movement, in moments like these, what we're actually seeing is the final realization of climate fascism.
Here we are seeing people who are left to the fates, so to speak, when it comes to increasingly worsening weather disasters and natural disasters.
People who in the past at least would have gotten warning or would have received aid from the government.
Because a fascist government is a government of theft, because it is constructed in such a way as to continue the process of redistributing wealth from the working and middle classes to the wealth class and the oligarchical classes,
there's not room for resources for anything else, whether it's vaccination, scientific studies, weather forecasting, alert systems, you name it.
And what we're seeing now with the attacks on immigrants, but also it's not immigrants necessarily, it's refugees.
Most of the people who are being disappeared right now come from other countries where there's been destabilization because of American force and American manipulation.
Those people have come to America in large part because they didn't have anywhere else to go.
And what I talked about on the Weekender edition last Friday in terms of what was happening with Gaza and what was happening around the world to refugees who are being vilified and scapegoated, we need to also understand that the word refugee doesn't just speak of people from other countries.
In this case, in Texas and in other parts of the country that are touched by these kinds of disasters, we're talking about climate refugees.
We're talking about people who lose what they have and are not supported by their government because the government doesn't have money to spare when it's a redistribution organ to the wealth and hierarchical classes.
Because of this, tragedies like what we're seeing in Texas are going to become more and more commonplace.
As the climate change disaster worsens, we're going to see people who are going to suffer in these ways, whether it's fire or floods or any of the other kinds of disasters that we're talking about.
There's not going to be protection and there's not going to be aid.
So in a way, because fascism creates in-groups and out-groups, in-groups deserving of protection, deserving of resources, and deserving of what we used to believe was the American way of life, the out-groups are going to be the people who don't deserve anything beyond brutality that keeps them away from the in-groups,
and also brutality that steals what they have remaining and hands it to the in-groups, which again is the wealth and oligarchical classes.
In this particular situation, you're going to have asymmetrical climate fascism, which means that we're going to have an environment in which everybody is one natural or unnatural disaster away from being treated like a refugee or like a vilified immigrant.
This construction of the apparatus is meant to deal with the existential crisis of climate change.
And the figures that have been coming out recently tell you everything that you need to know.
We've been documenting how insurance companies have stopped insuring certain communities in certain areas that they have deemed to be more and more dangerous because of climate change.
That's just taking away some of the protection that the capitalist apparatus provides.
But it's going to turn into a situation where these disasters are not only going to become more commonplace, but in the entirety of the analysis that is coming from the capitalist class, right now we're looking at every year totals that are nearing $1 trillion in addressing climate damage.
Now, for anybody who isn't aware of this, an actuary in terms of an insurance company or in some other capitalist endeavor, they make a decision, which is what Is the way to save more money?
Is it to address a problem or is it to write a problem out?
And in this case, they see it and the addressing of climate change to be more expensive or more dangerous than it is to go ahead and continue to accumulate this spending that goes along with climate damage.
And eventually, it's all baked into it, to stop paying for that climate damage.
Eventually, when the fascist apparatus and state violence, which we'll talk about more in a bit, by the time that those things are set in place, you're not going to have to spend on those things because you're not going to have to rebuild towns.
You're not going to have to take care of people.
You're going to have weapons and a fascistic system that is then going to punish the people who suffer the asymmetrical climate damage.
Fixing this has to become part of the movement that we have been discussing.
Addressing climate fascism has to become one of the main demands of any movement that is fighting fascism.
This has to be linked to taxes, including fairly taxing the oligarchical and wealth classes, fairly taxing corporations, using that money to create systems of sustainability, but also to create something that starts to push against the worsening climate change.
It is going to take changing the capitalist system.
And over time, if you actually sit with these figures, we would save so much money.
Not that I'm worried about fiscal conservatism, but if somebody needs to hear it, we would save so much money actually changing this stuff.
But it also needs to demand that the energy companies that have created this situation, not only by pushing oil and by pushing fossil fuel, but by knowingly hiding it for the last 70 years and also taking over our politics and sowing misinformation and disinformation and conspiracy theories.
Quite frankly, what they have done, and they have known about this since the 1950s, that's at least what we have on record.
Energy scientists tied to the energy fossil fuel companies knew about this in the 1950s, and they lied about it in the same way that the tobacco industry lied about their products causing cancer.
In fact, they worked together basically to create the proto-environment for what would eventually become the Lewis Powell memo generation that pooled the resources from the wealth class in order to create the think tanks and institutes that have twisted reality and created the modern environment that we live in.
It's not easy to talk about climate change.
In fact, it wears you out.
It bums you out.
This is one of the reasons why it largely doesn't get discussed.
Not just because the fossil fuel companies own so many of our politicians and so much of our politics and culture, but because it is a hard thing to discuss.
But it's here.
We know it's here.
We know it's here from science.
We know it's here from anecdotal evidence.
And we know it's here when we look at central Texas and see these people who have not just died, but have their lives upended.
Any type of platform for the future is going to have to demand change.
And fixing this climate disaster and addressing it and actually changing the way that our economy works, the way we fuel things, the way we live, the way that the world functions, it has to be one of the main demands.
And as we continue this work and as we continue to see exactly what this fascist movement is doing, it reveals every single moment what it's going to take to defeat it and move beyond it.
And on that list, on that demand list that we are making in our minds and in our hearts, this is going to have to be one of them.
And it's going to have to be a step outside of the comfort zone that so many people have had because even politicians within the Democratic Party are afraid to talk about climate change and are afraid to actually discuss actual alternatives.
It's not just electric vehicle credits.
It's not just windmills.
It is a fundamental change of our economy and our culture and a fundamental change of the world.
And right now, even though nobody says it and nobody wants to address it, the apparatus that is going to be used against us as these disasters worsen is being constructed all around us.
The next story I want to talk about over the weekend, after the passage of the Trump administration's domestic bill by the Republican Congress, Elon Musk, who had been sniping at this thing for weeks, he announced that he was going to create his own political party called the America Party after an online poll directed him to do it.
I would love to see the actual numbers on that thing, but it is what it is.
He has promised to end the quote-unquote Uniparty and stand against the Republicans and the Democrats.
He has said that this new party would, quote, represent the middle by affecting key races in order to create coalition deals.
I would be remiss if I didn't point out the irony of a political party called the America Party being started by a South African billionaire working in basically every authoritarian country around the world, owing money to every authoritarian regime, starting this party, which would be the fever dream of most paranoid conspiracy theory-minded Republicans.
Just add on to that, this is a guy who, you know, is implanting chips into brains and has interfered in our politics.
It's really wild that we've gotten here.
This is also a development in the ongoing story of the quote-unquote war between Elon Musk and Donald Trump, which has been strange because the individuals involved are strange.
But I want to talk about what this party could represent and also our political sort of alignment as we currently have it.
I don't know if he's going to follow through with this.
On one hand, Musk was by far the largest political donor in the 2020 election or 2024 election.
He had already promised to affect our politics.
He's interfered in politics around the world.
He certainly has the money and the desire and is audacious enough to try and do something like this.
And I do think that something like this could happen.
And it could have an effect on our politics.
And I will talk about all of the different possible outcomes from this.
But before we do it, I want to talk about why something like this would be happening as well as kind of take a deeper look at our political system and representation.
First things first, there's a schism within the MAGA Republican right-wing community that I've been addressing for a while now.
On one hand, you have the die-hard MAGA acolytes, the true cultist in the cult of Trump.
And a lot of these people, they personally are isolationist and white nationalists.
What they are interested in is creating in America, an apartheid state in which white people, and particularly white men, are in charge and their needs are met as opposed to the United States of America funding the American empire.
Now, that is the belief system that a lot of these people hold.
Of course, if you go down to the actual material conditions of all of this, what you come to understand, as I've talked about at length, is that those people and their goals have been used by the wealth class to continue the project of redistribution and the dismantling of federal regulations and oversight.
So there is one constituency underneath what used to be the big MAGA tent.
As I've talked about also, what happened with Musk and the general attempt to take over MAGA, it had to do a lot with the divergence of class interest between the wealth class and the ascendant oligarchical class.
Here, what you actually find is that this America Party will probably be more oriented if it is carried out, if it actually comes into full force.
It will have libertarian notes to it that we'll get into a little bit more in a bit, that will attract more of the libertarian trollish elements, the people who are inclined to believe that tech and Bitcoin will create some sort of a great awakening or a future for America in the world.
But essentially, what would be happening here is that as MAGA is more or less an astroturfed faux populist movement, this thing, if it actually happens, would be an astroturfed faux populist movement that would serve the oligarchical tech class,
which would attempt, probably like the Tea Party, to move the Republican Party further and further into the interest of the oligarchical class over the wealth class.
And I can already hear you asking, well, where would the wealth class go?
And on one hand, the wealth class would probably still be held hostage by MAGA and probably by the America Party as well if it comes to fruition.
But we're already seeing the wealth class hedging their bets with the Democratic Party.
And it's not just the traditional donors.
We're also starting to see signals that a lot of the former Republican wealth class individuals and groups and think tanks and institutes are starting to find some purchase along Democratic quote-unquote ideologies, including things like the abundance movement, which is basically trying to attempt to turn the Democratic Party into something that looks more like the Republican Party of the 1990s and 2000s.
I think you will probably see, if the America Party comes to fruition and if it gains any sort of power or purchase, you will probably see the wealth class begin to straddle the lines between the Republican Party,
MAGA, and the America Party in the same way that parts of them are straddling the line between the Republican and Democratic Party and how so many members of the middle class, the white middle class specifically, are straddling between the Democratic and Republican parties.
In essence, it's just sort of leveling up the way that this playing field works as the oligarchical class comes in and takes more and more share of the government and the resources and power.
Now, our present environment, and I want to go ahead and connect some dots from some earlier episodes.
Of course, if you heard my conversation with Carl Falk, we talked about the possible schisms and friction in the Democratic Party, particularly as something that looks more like democratic socialism starts to become more and more popular.
I do think that our landscape for boutique secondary Parties is ripe for something.
I don't think it's shocking to see, and again, it's shocking because we know what Elon Musk is up to.
We know that his intentions are not good.
We understand that he's doing this in order to seek out value within the political paradigm and to shift things, you know, more and more in his favor.
But I do think that there is an opening right now for alternatives within our system.
I do not think that our dualistic system is going to continue the way that it is.
The Republican Party and the Democratic Party are going to fight like hell to keep their stranglehold over power and resources.
But I do think that we're seeing how both parties, because they are so captured by special interest and by the wealth and oligarchical classes, that their ability to continue messaging to people is not necessarily going to continue to hold sway.
I mean, we'll talk in a little bit about how there is a little bit of a pushback against MAGA simply because, you know, they're lying and covering up everything that has to do with Jeffrey Epstein.
But you also see how the realities, such as what happened with Israel and Iran, it keeps pushing these issues and this tension continues to grow.
Within the Democratic Party, things are reaching a fever pitch.
The representatives and leaders and rank-and-file Democrats are not able to cauterize the bleeding that is coming from the base.
The vast majority of Democratic voters are unhappy with what they're doing, and they are in a really hard space.
They are not able to do what their base wants them to do and unwilling to do it because, one, it's not their politics, it's not their worldview, but also because it would alienate them from their billionaire and millionaire donors and the corporations that pay the bills.
So I do think the people who are feeling less represented, less seen, and less heard, I do think there is a lot of room for them to look for alternatives.
I don't think that that necessarily means that the Republican Party and the Democratic Party are going to be unseated or replaced, although it's happened before.
It's actually wild the extent to which these two parties have come to monopolize power and resources.
There is a possibility that they could be replaced at some point or another, particularly if they don't address the actual material concerns of their bases.
But here, if you actually take a look at this, it makes sense to create a coalition-style government in which some minor or secondary parties at the margins would need to be brought in to create bargains that would create a ruling coalition.
Again, that doesn't mean that Musk should do it.
I'll be damned if I think that Elon Musk should have anything to do with it.
And I think it's repulsive that this oligarchical tyrant, this oligarchical tech fascist who is damned God knows how many people around the world to die, the last estimate was tens of millions of people, upwards of 100 million people that are going to die just totally unnecessarily.
The idea that he can do it or should do it is disgusting.
But I think him making this move also reveals that the soil is fertile for this type of stuff.
And quite frankly, we might have a better working system of government if we did have secondary parties that could put pressure on the main parties and force them to change and do different things.
Again, we've seen this happen before.
But here, let's take a second to take a look at where maybe the openings are.
In terms of how the parties and how these wings represent themselves, the MAGA Republicans represent themselves as fiscally and socially conservative.
We also know that none of that is true.
They are not afraid to run up records amount of debt.
They're not worried about saving money.
And on top of that, as far as social conservatism, no, they're interested in that for their enemies and controlling them.
They do whatever they want, whenever they want, with whoever they want.
So they actually don't represent anything beyond, of course, the wealth class.
The America Party, and, you know, this is an estimate of what this thing would be based on what Musk has presented and how he's now trying to rebrand himself, would be fiscally conservative and, I guess, socially moderate.
I guess that's how they'll probably bring in some of the libertarian elements.
Of course, that social moderate, like, it doesn't really mean anything.
It's more about telling the people who would be subject of the ruling class that, you know, they should be able to do whatever they want.
There are a lot of elements that would play into this, really disturbing elements.
If you've ever spent any amount of time actually talking to hardcore libertarians, you start to realize like how much financialization of the human being and experience comes into play.
It's a really gross situation.
But my guess is as a ruling party, if the America Party were somehow or another to gain full power, they would not be fiscally conservative and they would not be socially moderate.
They would serve simply to redirect and redistribute wealth, resources, and power to the oligarchical class and just sort of bypass everybody else.
They would fuel one project after another, such as going to Mars or creating market states or whatever it is.
And they would not be shy about spending the money or using power to make those things happen.
The Democrats present themselves as fiscally moderate.
Of course, how often do we hear there's not enough money for that?
We don't want to run up debt.
That's why we can't pass this agenda.
That's why we can't help people, and they present themselves as socially liberal.
In this regard, in how this country has worked and how our political paradigm functions, the Democrats have actually become the fulcrum.
It changes and it moves and it's in flux constantly.
Are they fiscally moderate?
Well, I mean, they are whenever it comes to funding things that they don't want to fund.
Of course, we would love to do these things.
We just don't have the money.
I mean, you got to think about the debt.
But of course, they're more than happy to spend all of the money that they want on, you know, handouts to their donors and also the military-industrial tax complex.
More than happy to do all of that and also fund every war that they possibly can.
Socially liberal, I mean, I guess.
I mean, in a way that they haven't tried to completely disappear, you know, gay and trans people and that they haven't spoken about a desire to, you know, end, you know, a woman's right to choose.
But they certainly haven't done much on that front to stop it from happening.
In fact, they see that as political capital that they don't want to spend.
This is one of the reasons why they've scapegoated gay and trans people and why they've basically told black organizers, well, you're going to have to organize your way out of this.
They're afraid of being seen as too socially liberal.
So in that regard, it changes, it moves.
The opening here is quite obvious.
If this America Party comes to fruition, there is going to have to be a counterbalance.
And if you're going to have three parties, MAGA, which serves the wealth class and also the oligarchical class in turn, the America Party, which undoubtedly will serve the wealth class to an extent, but largely focus on the oligarchical class, and the Democrats, which serve the professional managerial class as well as the wealth class.
At some point or another, it doesn't take a scientist to look at this and understand the piece that's missing, which is a party that focuses on the working class and the parts of the middle class that do not have representation.
And if you look at the numbers, you punch them up on your little calculator, your little Texas instruments calculator that's been in your backpack since you went to junior high, there's a lot of people there.
Some would say the majority of people.
So I don't want the America Party to work.
I think it's an abomination.
I think it's disgusting that Elon Musk is doing this.
But if this is a signal that we are entering into a different time in which the two-party duopolistic system is going to be threatened, well, personally, I'm all game.
I'm ready to go.
Speaking of this fascist regime and the growing fascist policies that we are all enduring, in Los Angeles today, and I'm recording on Monday, July 7th, the federal government sent in federal troops in tanks and armored vehicles mounted on horses to quote-unquote raid a park in Los Angeles.
It actually was a stunt they have codenamed Operation Excalibur.
People have already learned that this was simply a show of force to try and intimidate Angelinos.
To their credit, they showed up and they told them to leave.
And I think that as we talked about recently with this domestic agenda that got passed, we have, of course, ICE, which is going to just be swimming in historic levels of money in terms of creating a domestic occupying force.
I think scenes like this are going to become more and more common.
And I want to say just very quickly, hats off to Angelinos.
They have met this moment and they absolutely recognize that everything is on the line now.
And going out into the street and confronting troops in tanks and armored vehicles, I think it should be instructional for the rest of us.
I think we should probably be prepared to watch ICE with these resources begin to arm itself much like our city's police forces have, creating basically phalanxes of troops that have at their disposal weapons of war.
This is unfortunately one of the realities of running on a war economy is at some point or another you have so much weaponry and so many instruments of death that the only thing left to do with the surplus is not only to sell it around the world, but to begin arming people within the country against their fellow citizens.
I think scenes like this unfortunately are going to become very familiar.
I think you and I and the people we know and the people we love are going to live lives in which we are going to see armored vehicles and tanks and troops who are fully outfitted for war against us.
But this type of action, this type of spectacle, is designed for one reason and one reason only, which is to amplify state power and state violence.
It's to send a message that any type of resistance is going to be met not only with a gun, but with overwhelming weapons of war.
And though this is supposed to be a signal of strength, what this is is a signal of weakness.
These cowards cannot handle for a moment the idea that we would stand against them.
They cannot handle the idea that anyone would criticize them or that anybody would come together and say this is not okay.
This is preemptive intimidation.
You and I are supposed to see this and go about the rest of our lives thinking to ourselves, if I say something, if I do something, if I step out of line, am I going to encounter a column of tanks?
Again, absolute cowardice.
That's all that this is.
It's not about getting a job done.
It's about preventing future impediments to getting the job done.
Angelinos, again, for anybody who is listening to this, hats off.
Solidarity to you.
We have to see what these people are doing.
They are incredibly brave, and they are acting out of moral and ethical courage.
And we need to see this.
And we need to foster in ourselves the belief that when they come to our town, when they come to our city, and they try and take us, or they try and take our neighbors, or they try and take absolute strangers, that you and I are going to step in those streets and say, this isn't okay.
And I bring this up just to talk about it very quickly, because I think it's important for us to foster that now, before we're in that situation, to understand that this is weakness and to understand its purpose, which is intimidation.
It's to communicate that they have all the weapons, they have all the power, they have a monopolization of violence.
And it's not just going to be troops or police or masked thugs.
They're coming with weapons of war that they have used against other people.
And for that matter, those people stood against those things because their countries were invaded, their people were killed, their people were oppressed.
And it's time for us to recognize the same thing in ourselves that those people were able to find and that was able to sustain them in the face of overwhelming fear and danger.
I ask you to go take a look at the pictures and videos of these assholes in tanks and armored vehicles in Los Angeles, California, the United States of America.
Look at it not to feel the fear, but train yourself to look at it with disgust and pity and revulsion.
Speaking of revulsion, very quickly I wanted to talk about the Department of Justice releasing an official statement from a quote-unquote investigation that there is no Jeffrey Epstein client list and that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself while in custody.
They released video footage of the night of his death, although, you know, it is what it is.
And quite frankly, I don't know that you can trust any of it to begin.
Pam Bondi has said in the past that she had the client list on her desk.
Now she says that there is none.
Cash Patel and Dan Bongino built their base, currently the head of the FBI and the second in command, which I still can't believe that's the case.
They built a financial and cultural base on saying that these things were being hidden by one regime to another.
And now they're the messengers.
They're the ones who have to uphold the conspiracy theory.
And in part, of course, it has to do with the fact that Donald Trump was a close personal friend of Jeffrey Epstein.
As even Elon Musk said that he was on the all over the reports and the client list.
Now we're being told to accept that, no, that didn't happen.
Everything that we know, all of the information, everything that we've been told, everything that we've seen is a complete and utter lie.
And this is causing a schism within MAGA that Musk will take advantage of.
And I wouldn't be shocked now to find out that him going after Trump and talking about this in a way was testing how many people would go with him versus staying with MAGA in order to create a base for some type of political party that would do his bidding.
I have to assume that Musk got a great taste of what it was like to be in power by buying Donald Trump and his position within the administration.
I don't think it's a coincidence that he brought up all of this, starting a new party as he went after Trump and tied him to Jeffrey Epstein.
The conspiracy theory-minded part of MAGA is divided into different sects.
Of course, QAnon brought all of these things together, but they all sort of splinter based on evangelical, Epstein-centered things and the more sort of eccentric, sort of weird, esoteric conspiracy theories.
We're now seeing a lot of people within MAGA who are starting to recognize through the Epstein situation that Trump is not trustworthy.
That will work to Musk's advantage.
The larger thing here, I think, to take from it is a big lesson that we all need to have, which is that we live in a corrupted and rigged society in which the powerful cannot be punished.
The only time that that actually happens is when they rip off other white, wealthy men.
That's it.
If you do that and you're Bernie Madoff, you know, your ass is grass.
But it's everything.
It's absolutely everything.
It's Nixon not being punished.
It's every corporate CEO that has done damage.
It's Donald Trump who was charged with God knows how many felonies and hurting how many people, not actually being punished.
Basically, every president of the modern era has committed war crimes and has never once even come close to being held accountable for the crimes and the pain that they have committed.
This is what happens.
And history is littered with moments of monopolization of power and resources in which the wealth class gains control over everything.
There are so many cases of open, undeniable corruption and criminal behavior and exploitation that eventually it happens and it cracks open the facade.
And it makes real for people what has occurred behind closed doors.
It makes it clear that there are things that are happening that are repugnant and repulsive and awful.
And they become symbols of these things.
And this, I hesitate to say final act because I certainly hope at some point or another that we'll understand exactly what happened with Jeffrey Epstein, but I have my doubts.
I mean, they've covered up what happened to an American president being assassinated for 60 years now.
But this seeming final chapter with the Trump administration shoveling dirt onto the Jeffrey Epstein case, I do think that it is indicative of a larger thing.
I think that the Epstein case, him being arrested, his criminal empire being exposed, and all of us seeing it and feeling it and knowing that there's more to this story than what we got, I think it is an incredible symbol.
And it looks so much like so many symbols before of these moments that revealed the decadence and awfulness of the ruling regime.
And here, with Trump and all of his cronies saving him and burying any evidence and trying to put this thing to rest, maybe more people will come to realize just how crooked all of this is.
All right, that's going to do it for this episode of the Mutt Rake Podcast.
I will be back with the weekender edition on Friday.
I have a guest planned for that, so hopefully you won't have to listen to me drone on forever and give you history lessons until you can't stand it anymore.
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