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In this Weekender, co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman dig into shocking reports that the Trump administration is drawing up plans for airstrikes against Mexican cartels — a move that could destabilize the region and push the U.S. into dangerous territory. They also break down Trump’s attempts to rewrite museum history on slavery, the signals of his declining health, Elon Musk’s embrace of J.D. Vance, and what it all means for America’s slide toward authoritarianism. Plus: Texas gerrymandering, Gavin Newsom’s trolling strategy, and James Dobson’s toxic legacy.
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Hey everybody, welcome to the weekender edition of the Craig podcast.
I'm Jared J. Saxton, my friend, my compatriot, my co-conspirator, Nick Alcaman.
How's it going, man?
It's going.
It's a scorcher out here on the West Coast, 92 degrees, but I'm keeping cool.
Humidity?
Are we talking humidity here?
Dry.
It's a dry heat.
Well, it's a dry heat.
So, okay.
So what are we complaining about?
Nothing.
The rest of us have been broiling.
Is that right?
Have you been broiling?
Been broiling.
Some of the hottest weather imaginable.
My power got knocked out.
A limb fell.
fell on a line and my utility pole snapped in half, went without power for forever.
I mean, on one of the hottest days of the year, tough stuff.
All I can tell you is that I'm amazed that the grid holds up as much as it does across.
It's incredible.
It's held together by spit and scotch tape.
Well, you know, just in case anyone's wondering who has any plumbing background, when I turn on my shower now, it starts to go.
And then the water is pulsing at the same rhythm as well.
And I'm kind of wondering if I'm going to wake up to, you know, a flooded house soon.
Well, hopefully you don't have a flooded house.
And hopefully no.
one is listening to this while paddling around in their basement we appreciate everybody and their support uh if you haven't already head over to patreon.com slash Montcreig podcast become a patron support the show keep us editorially independent keep us going and growing also you get to listen to this whole episode and this thing is jam packed obviously we all know that uh but uh yeah patreon.com slash Montcreig podcast nick we have to start with a story that we've kind of alluded to in the past.
There were rumblings of this and now it feels like it's picking up speed.
Ken Klippenstein, who has been all over everything, he's become a one-stop shop for.
these types of scoops and these types of leaks.
Klippenstein has published an article that he has multiple sources in and around the Pentagon that have confirmed that the Pentagon and the military are putting together plans for airstrikes against Mexican cartels, categorizing them as terrorists.
Nick, this is another one of those things that starts making the rounds.
You start hearing about it and it starts picking up a momentum of its own.
It's been rumored.
They told us that they wanted to do it.
And now it looks like it very well might be coming into fruition.
Do you get the impression that someone like Trump was watching, you know, Netflix and turn on clear and present danger and was like, ah, that's a great idea.
Yeah.
We got to go that route.
Absolutely.
We've seen this movie.
I mean, I kind of thought it was predator, but it turns out it's not the plot of predator, which would make more sense.
I'm sure, you know, Trump wouldn't be watching anything highbrow, like, like clear and present danger.
Even like the predator or the commando, I thought maybe it was sort of like that as well, but there's some weird fever dream that the, I don't know, they want to send troops into a, an ally because i'm trying to think about what would the other uh alternative be for this like i guess you could go to the other governments and ask them to like jointly come up with a program to get out take out the cartels right Well, I mean, okay, so there's multiple things happening here.
First of all, because every time we talk about Donald Trump in this administration, Nick, we need to take a moment to zoom out from it and say, this is crazy shit.
Like this is not only not normal, but this is like profoundly crazy shit.
And this situation is another one of those fever dreams.
The idea that there is some sort of a terroristic thing that they need to do, it feels like another moment where they make up, you know, a city is out of control and they have to send in troops.
There has to be some sort of a show of force, some type of a quote unquote military victory that they can hang their hat on.
Never mind the fact that these cartels, well, it would be, I'll just say it would be interesting to find out exactly where they got their weaponry from and a lot of their support.
I'll leave it at that without going much further.
Mexico doesn't want this.
God knows it would provoke our neighbor and our ally.
We don't have a clue where any of that would go.
There's no need for an international coalition.
There's no need for any of this.
It's basically chasing shadows.
is what it is.
And if it comes to fruition and if it actually happens, I mean, this is the type of thing, and I'll talk more about it in a second.
This is the type of thing that a fascist regime feeds off of, which is creating a problem or creating a threat and then using that as allowance to go in and use your weaponry and use your aggression.
You just sound like you're on the side of the cartels, Jared.
Yeah.
Me and the cartels are real close.
Why are you siding with the terrorist cartels who are...
Because You need your source of cocaine to come to your house easily.
Is this what's going on?
Because otherwise, these are bad people.
And listen, I don't have a problem with going after bad people, right?
Like that's supposed to be something okay.
Like I'm having this weird thing where it's like, what if it turns out that it does start stopping the drug trade into America?
Like, could that happen?
I don't think so.
No.
so no because that's i mean that's not even like what's actually happening it's not the cartels that are necessarily getting that in on top of that if you were going to stop the drug trade into the united states of america um i'll just say this again without going much further the calls coming from within the house right is it possible is it i don't know i mean i'm sure of this but is it possible that maybe the government of the united states has contributed to the uh importing of all these drugs at some point.
Yeah, it's really, it's really strange.
You invade Afghanistan and suddenly you start having all these like weird things happening within the military and it always has to do with some sort of import, export type situation.
It's really strange how that happens.
And like to put it on the cartel, to put it on the cartels, it just sort of throws like jet fuel onto the whole like, you know, anti-immigrant sort of hysteria.
It just sort of gives you a problem that you then have to create the solution for.
And again, they're not actual solutions.
And it could just be another movie where, you know, maybe the government like uses sales of illicit drugs like that to then fund arms sales to other countries.
Wait a minute.
That's not a movie.
Oh, that's not a movie.
That's just what happened and no one got punished for it, basically.
Yeah, yeah.
A Congress that had been controlled by the Democrats for 40 years straight.
did nothing to a Republican president in the middle of all that.
Amazing, amazing.
A president who probably was not all there as it is anyway during the 80s.
Well, luckily, the shadow lord of the United States of America, George H.W. Bush, was there to take care of things.
And, you know, to go along with this, you know, fascistic wise, Nick, like the fascistic country has to attack.
outside of its borders.
It creates so much suffering and so much oppression and so much exploitation within the country that eventually it has to shove it outwards.
It has to be projected outwards.
And we've heard like the possibility that this was going to occur now for a couple of years.
They promised that they were going to do it.
And again, it's creating the simulacrum of a military victory going in and just drone striking or, you know, air striking like cartels, which again are probably, you know, hoarding weapons that have been given to them by state actors.
I'll leave it at that.
And it's literally just theater.
But God knows, Nick.
you go into another country, your neighbor country, and you start bombing them without their permission.
We have no idea where that could go.
And that ends up getting really, like, really touchy and really itchy.
Right, because like maybe some of those ordinance could like ended up dropping on the the paths that people might take to get into the country when they're trying to come across the border and seek asylum.
I don't know.
I'm just kind of thinking.
We kill a lot of people quote unquote by accident.
Yes.
Ah, yeah, yeah.
Well, I can't think of any more reasons why this would go incredibly wrong by trying to do this.
Well, and I do I do just want to put this out there and I was going to ask you this from from the story.
So let's say that this actually comes together and let's say that they decide to start striking within the the Mexican border without any sort of like you know declaration of war, which is not what they would do.
What do you think the reaction would be here?
Like how do you think most people within the United States of America would react to this, particularly with this regime?
Well, I would imagine that a lot of the people who are already on that side would be really excited and, you know, we're bombing and we're sticking it to the drug cartels.
That would be some, you know, dopamine rush for them.
I worry that it's like a shrug for a lot of other people.
We can't see it.
It's not near us.
It's not happening like, which happens all the time when we're involved with these things, which is why it doesn't necessarily, we don't get enough of a movement to like stop the government from doing these things.
So I'm worried that it would be a collective shrug overall.
I'm a little bit worried about that too.
And I think what you just touched on is like one of the markers of the modern American malaise, which is, you know, this didn't start with Trump.
This has been going on since, I mean, well, it happened well before 2001.
You know, it just so happened to take place in different ways.
But particularly when drone warfare started taking off and the war on terror along with it, like you start seeing that.
And it's so isolated and it's so kind of bloodless.
Not that people aren't killed and that there isn't, you know, bloodshed because of course there is, but that sort of expression of American might, it feels like taking soldiers out of that.
And I have no idea exactly how this would take place.
I don't know if special forces would play a role.
God knows that that would be its own giant mess if that were to take place.
And God knows also that our intelligence agencies have been operating in Mexico and basically every other country in some way, shape, or form.
But I'm with you.
This feels like it is the type of expression of imperial might.
And I use that very much with scare quotes because, you know, what does America like to do?
It likes to attack countries that can't defend themselves and particularly, you know, countries.
with black and brown people in them.
And I don't know what the reaction would be.
There's a part of me that hopes that something like this would spur an anti-war sentiment and kind of get people moving again on that front.
But I also don't know because modern warfare, I think, has evolved in order to keep people from feeling that way, if that makes sense.
It all makes sense.
And I'm always trying to look at it from the perspective of the people in the Trump administration, which is a horrible thing to try and do.
But I'm just wondering if they feel, and maybe they're zealots about it, that the cartels that either taken over them the Mexican government, right?
So like, what's the difference?
We can just attack them anyway, or the Mexican government is working in cahoots with the cartels either way.
So we have to do this, you know, and override any kind of.
Oh, you're talking about the paranoid fantasy.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I mean, that is so far from the truth.
And actually, you know, one of the issues that takes place here, and if you actually want to get into the geopolitical sort of context of this, Claudia Scheinbaum, the president of Mexico, is an incredibly effective leader and has done so much to reform Mexico and also is a leftist.
And so it's not a surprise that when you start talking about hitting countries like this, oftentimes you search for countries that have left us.
Also, by the way, it's about, you know, going after, you know, Hispanic countries, things like that.
You know, there's even like some drum beats of war with Venezuela right now.
Like there's like weird shit that's taking place there.
It just feels like what we're sort of inching up on is we are inching up on this, that, that, that projection.
of violence from the interior to the exterior.
And what happens is it projects out, it comes back and projects out, it just goes in constant waves.
And it just feels like at this point, the paranoid fantasies that you're talking about are absolutely what we're going to hear.
Because if we strike Mexican citizens and land, like they're going, like Scheinbaum is going to be like, no, you can't do this and is going to push back against it.
And then what happens?
The paranoid fantasies that you're talking about are going to be the talking points.
Like this country, you know, has been taken over by this.
It's corrupted.
It's run by these gangs, by these cartels.
And then like, like I said, that's when it starts getting really ugly and really weird.
And again, I just want to say what I always have to say.
This is why you don't want Donald Trump as president of the fucking United States of America.
Like this type of a situation is not something that should be happening and somebody like that in charge, it only ensures it's going to go badly.
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