Together at last! Co-hosts Nick Hauselman and Jared Yates Sexton are reunited (and it feels so good). In this episode, they dig into the Wall Street Journal’s latest bombshell reporting on Jeffrey Epstein, the flurry of new subpoenas, and whether Ghislaine Maxwell might be cutting a deal from prison. Then: South Park throws major shade at Paramount over Trump, free speech, and streaming power plays. And yes—Nick needs just a minute to talk about Hulk Hogan.
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The boys have not been back in town for long enough.
They're still working their way through things.
We're here.
We're doing it.
It is the weekender edition of the McCrake Podcast.
I'm JoJate Sexton.
I'm here with my friend, my ally, my compatriot, Nick Hasselman.
It is so good to see your face, to be not in the same space, but in the same headspace.
How are you, my friend?
Oh, it's always much better to be this way where we can see each other.
You're not sitting in a car somewhere across the street.
I'm not in a Taco Bell watching a drug deal go down.
Oh, dear.
Well, that's infinitely more interesting than perhaps, well, hopefully not more interesting than what we were talking about, but definitely filled with all sorts of possible content for your channels.
It certainly does have a lot of content.
A reminder to everybody, if you want to listen to this entire episode and we are all over the place today, we have so much to cover.
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I am so excited to do this.
Nick, take us for that spin.
Okay.
Well, let's give a little bit of the lineup of what we're going to talk about today.
It's a chock full of things to discuss.
First, we're going to deal with the Wall Street Journal reporting about when Trump found out that he was definitely in the Epstein files and subsequently lied about it.
We have Delane Maxwell impending deal with the DOJ, perhaps.
We don't know, but it sounds like that's where it's heading to, with a caveat that Bill Clinton is going to be subpoenaed as well to their hearing.
South Park came out with a banger of an episode.
It's amazing how quickly they can get those things out.
Mehdi Hassan perhaps got somebody fired or exposed somebody who ultimately got fired, which we'll talk about as well for fascism reasons.
And then we've had some celebrity people who died this week and Hulk Hogan among them.
And we're going to have to discuss that as well.
I have to say, for fascism reasons, I love that language, for fascism reasons.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, it's kind of accurate.
So we'll have to get to all those things.
You never want that on your HR form as you're being led out of the office.
You never want someone to hand you a sheet of paper and says reason for termination, fascism reasons.
Yeah.
We're like, you know, wouldn't want that like on your tombstone or anything.
You, you really, truly, truly don't.
All right.
So, well, let's talk about the Wall Street Journal because it's fascinating that this is the paper of record that's decided to light some things on fire.
And one thing I didn't bring up in the last episode I really wanted to was the little tidbit that Trump revealed and that he went to Rupert Murdoch directly and begged him or asked him, please, you know, kill this.
This is a very common thing that he would do, the catch and kill stuff.
And I think that Murdoch had even maybe said that he would.
And then poof, here it was.
It got released anyway.
So that's a really interesting thing that I think not many people are exploring.
Yeah.
So a little bit of background on what's going on.
The Wall Street Journal, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch and is a right-wing pro-capitalist rag, published a report that Trump was told by the Department of Justice in May that he was in the Epstein files, which for those keeping track at home means, Nick, that not only have we perceived a cover-up, we are in the middle of a cover-up and we are watching a giant cover-up.
And Nick, remind me if I'm wrong, looking back in time.
I remember an old saying, it is, it's not always the crime.
It's the cover-up.
It's the cover-up.
I mean, in this case, it's both the crime and the cover-up, but there's a reason why this thing is the way that it is.
And I want to talk a little bit.
You brought up Rupert Murdoch, you know, potentially catching and killing this thing.
And I think a lot of people are wondering why would the Wall Street Journal do this?
And one of the things that we talk about when we do the analysis on this show, and we get deeper than anybody else who's talking about this stuff, is we start getting into the motivations of why these things are happening.
And also analysis is about looking at signals and sort of trying to look for, you know, some sort of direction.
Nick, I want you to remember, and I'm sure everybody listening to this remembers at least a little bit, Donald Trump was not the chosen candidate of Fox News or Rupert Murdoch back in 2016.
In fact, they saw him as an ally.
They saw him as somebody who could spice up the Republican primary, but they pushed back against him.
And in fact, what Donald Trump carried out was a hostile takeover of the right-wing media and also the Republican Party writ large.
In this case, it feels, and I would love to hear what you have to say.
And I think the Epstein scandal is an opening for everybody who, one, has a reason to distrust Donald Trump, which is literally every human being on the face of the earth, but also some of his supporters to start questioning things.
But it does appear as if some of the entrenched interest here, including Rupert Murdoch, including other people around the Republican Party and the wealth class, the oligarchical class, Elon Musk, those types of people, it feels like there might be something shifting in terms of Donald Trump's usefulness as a puppet or an avatar or as a mascot for what's happening in this country.
And it sort of feels a little bit like the momentum is shifting.
And I think Rupert Murdoch deciding to go ahead and run this, which reveals a cover-up, I think there are things that we can assume here.
And we're going to talk about J.D. Vance in just a minute and exactly what is happening with MAGA and the potential possibilities.
This does feel like there is some kind of momentum that has shifted here.
I agree.
And as reluctant as I am to believe it, it definitely feels like once we're into week three of the story, which, you know, if you would ask me the first day it came out, if we would last this long, I would have said, no, we'll be on to something else pretty quickly.
And man, had they tried to distract us with all manner of things, which, and not to forget, when he ran in 2016, the whole goal of that campaign was to launch a rival to Fox News.
Remember?
They had already interviewed people.
They were like, they were going to lose this thing by 10 points, but they were going to have generated enough groundswell to start up his own network.
So this whole Fox News synergy only happens after they realize how useful he could be.
But I think the other thing that kind of caught my eye, and I don't know how tenuous it is, I'm glad that you're here to help me figure this out.
But I started to think about McCarthyism and the end of McCarthyism.
What was it exactly that kind of shook us out of that fever?
And part of the reason why I think Trump is doing so well these last few years is that it's been long enough of a time.
We've kind of forgotten what McCarthyism stood for.
And so the outrage that ultimately came out of that, which perhaps governed the behavior of our politicians for several decades, I would imagine out of that had dissipated.
It wasn't there anymore, that standard.
And I thought it was interesting that what led to McCarthy's downfall after four long years of being really popular as a junior senator from Wisconsin was when he went after the army and basically said that there were a whole bunch of economists, which, by the way, he might have been true.
It was not illegal to be economists in America, but nonetheless, he said he impugned the army.
That caused a committee to draw him into an investigation in front of Congress.
And then they had to have you no shame or no decency.
And this kind of feels like maybe that similar moment where he now starts to impugn Obama and calling him a treasonous former president.
And I wonder if there is any kind of connection there, which leads more to what you're talking about as far as his influence waning.
Man, Nick, maybe I'm just feeling happy because we're reunited, but points like that are some of the reasons why I enjoy this partnership so much.
I would not have brought up Joseph McCarthy in this situation, but it is a perfect entry point for what is happening here.
I want to say something that's a little bit controversial because one of the reasons we do this show is to disrupt conventional understanding and conventional history.
McCarthyism, even though everybody looks at him now, he's disgraced.
Everyone looks back at this period and they're like, oh my God, this is awful.
McCarthyism won.
It was successful.
It wasn't successful for Joseph McCarthy, who ended up in disgrace and drank himself to death.
It was successful in that it attacked the New Deal.
It went after the socialists who were involved in the New Deal, the New Deal consensus, started chipping away at it.
And McCarthyism, much like Trump is an expression of the fascistic impulses in this country that are fueled and directed and controlled by the wealth class, that period of time was about chipping away at FDR's legacy and the control of the New Deal.
And it was an expression of things like the John Birch Society.
And the John Birch Society was very much a precursor to MAGA, QAnon, all of those things that basically said that the United States government post-World War II had been taken over by communism.
They even like claimed that Dwight D. Eisenhower was a communist.
And that entire sort of convergence within the Republican Party, it was used by wealth interests in the country who didn't want the New Deal and who didn't want a government that helped people and regulation and all those things, the same type of people who tried to overthrow FDR.
That entire movement seeded the ground for what would eventually become Barry Goldwater's campaign and eventually what would become Reaganism, neoliberalism, this entire turn that we've been dealing with.
And eventually, McCarthy, as you brought up, he was a frontman for this.
His bombast, his audacity, his total lack of decency allowed him to do things and voice things and put things in the culture that the wealth class and the people that I've been discussing, they wanted out there.
And so it changed the conversation and it changed the political paradigm.
Donald Trump is very much the same way.
McCarthy had to go when he started going after the military.
Donald Trump might have to go because he started going after neoliberal globalism and capitalism.
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