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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman break down the bizarre Trump–Hegseth meeting with America’s top generals. Instead of commanding respect, Trump rambled through grievances and half-baked ideas while Hegseth postured and pandered, leaving serious military leaders unimpressed. We explore the dangerous implications of a president alienating his own brass, how authoritarian rhetoric collides with sheer incompetence, and why this moment opens up a host of unsettling outcomes. Along the way we look at the government shutdown, a self-defeating Argentina bailout, and the larger picture of American decline before closing with some culture picks.
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Hey everybody, welcome to the weekend edition of the Muck Rick Podcast.
I'm Jared J. Sexton.
I'm joined as always with my friend, my compatriot.
And uh I I gotta tell you, Nick Halsman is in denial about the fact that he's getting sick.
I'm just putting that out there so people understand it.
So now everybody gets to hear what I'm hearing, which is that you are in total denial that you are currently getting ill.
Right.
Don't let the voice fool you.
Uh the other end of his.
Everybody hears it.
But uh, you know, it's my sexy voice now.
Uh as I'm trying to get through this.
But anyway, hopefully everyone else is feeling terrific uh while they're listening to this, and I wish the best self on everyone.
It's sexy stricken voice.
That's what we got today.
Uh, we we have full episode.
We are listening uh we are going to cover aspects of this fascistic uh military meeting, if you want to call it that, that no one else is going to talk about any anywhere.
I I have had some realizations and some thoughts about this that we're gonna share in just a little bit.
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Um, Nick, we cover a lot of things on this show, and uh there are things that are certainly disturbing and problematic.
And then we often cover things that we talk about at the moment and we talk about where it's going in the future.
And you know, it's it's reading the writing on the wall, it's connecting the dots that are there.
And in this instance, this week on uh Tuesday, uh Secretary of Defense uh Pete Hegseth brought in hundreds of top military brass.
We're talking all of the major military leaders of America from around the world, flew them in specifically uh so that he and Donald Trump could speak to them.
Uh, there are so many facets to this story that we have to get into threats, portons of the of the future.
But the first thing that we have to discuss, probably the most important of all of them, this is the president of the United States of America addressing the United States military uh senior leadership.
We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military, National Guard, but military.
Because we're going into Chicago very soon.
That's a big city with an incompetent governor, stupid governor, stupid.
They threw him out of his family business.
He was so stupid.
I know the family.
He becomes governor, he's got money.
Not money that he made, but he ran for governor one, and now he criticizes us all the time.
Last week they had 11 people murdered, 44 people shot.
You know what's interesting about why he keeps attacking Pritzker like this and talking about his family and his family business?
Uh, because Pritzker is basically a mirror version of Donald Trump.
Mirror is a good point.
He was not thrown out of the family business.
They divided it all up equally among the kids, and he's successful in that business.
It's Trump who's not successful.
That's right.
It's Trump who was sped foon sped all this his riches and never made anything on his own.
That's why.
A hundred percent.
And this was a strange situation.
Um, and we'll get into the incompetence and buffooner of it in a second, and actually how that has created more problems for us that we really need to keep on our radar in just a second.
But here we have, and there were other moments in this rambling diatribe.
Donald Trump talked about being at war with the enemy within, that the military was going to play a component of it.
And there you heard in his own words that he wants to use the military, have them go into American cities and carry out a war against the American citizens.
Um, Nick, we we have been on this uh we've been on this mission.
We've been on this job for long enough that you listen to Trump when he tells you what he intends to do.
We've already seen the beginnings of this, and now we have it in so many words being told to the military that the president of the United States of America considers himself at war with the American people and intends to use the military against them.
I mean, neither we have to uh point out that during his first administration, he wanted his military to shoot uh protesters in the legs.
Yep.
And luckily we had military that would refuse to do that.
Um, they asked Pete Heggseth during his uh confirmation hearing if he would follow that order, and Hegseth wouldn't answer, basically.
And I think we're getting the answer now is that he'd be full-throatedly happy to participate in any of these things.
And it's it's frightening, especially because we already know that there isn't training for this, they're not allowed to arrest people.
So think about it that way.
If they're marching these troops to the streets to like, you know, improve some sort of safety, if they're not allowed to arrest anybody, well, what are they going to do then?
I I I mean, that that's what it comes down to.
Well, I mean, they'll resort to what they are trained to do, which would be violence, right?
Which would be to kill and maim.
And this to me, um, I uh there's and again, the absurdity of this, which is again part of a larger story, we'll get into in just a few moments.
And you brought up Hegseth, and and that's a component of it.
But what we saw, I mean, I mean, Heggseth told the military that they were no longer going to pay any attention to the Geneva Convention, which basically says that they have no interest whatsoever in preserving human rights.
And when you take that with what Trump has said in the past, he's already invaded American cities, he's already occupied American cities.
I don't think it's a hop skip and jump to say that he probably intends to use the military to interfere with the democratic process, whether it comes to the midterms or the next presidential election, if either of them are held.
What we got here, and I I Nick, I I just I was staggered that this was broadcast.
Do you know what I mean?
Like it's staggering that they thought that it was a good idea to film this, but of course they did.
And so what we got here, because we're living in an increasingly fascistic society where my safety, your safety, all the people listening's safety is on the line.
We were given a gift here, which is the dictator made it very clear what he wants to do and what he intends to do.
And we have said this for years.
You can live in denial about what's going on, but if you actually pay attention to what these people say and what it is that they they they are very open about, what their ideologues and their quote unquote great thinkers are thinking, they are very serious about using the United States military on the homeland against American citizens.
Yeah, yeah.
And what's troubling is that you know, if you present that to people on the right, they'll they'll probably even like shrug and be like, yeah, that's it's fine because we want these policies that he represents, no matter what.
And we've been waiting for all these years to do it.
We've been brainwashed to believe that they are good policies that will help people.
So, what's the few, you know, broken eggs if we have to march uh, you know, uh troops through the streets.
I literally feel like that's their take on it now, which is exactly what happened in Germany.
Yeah, I'm it's what happens in every authoritarian takeover.
At some point or another, and this is part of the larger story that we'll talk about in just a moment.
The military is leveraged against the citizenship, and that is where rights start to crumble, and and and this is something uh it's uh it's a philosophical thing that people need to wrap their heads around, which is the idea of the nation state needing to defend itself.
That idea of the enemy within, Nick, is a very old right-wing idea.
It's happened in America multiple times.
At the beginning, it was the Native American population, it was the idea of slave revolts, it was the idea of the Illuminati, which by the way, they thought that Thomas Jefferson was an agent of the Illuminati, which is why John Adams cracked down on civil liberties.
Later on, it was communists, leftists, immigrants, uh, you know, uh labor unions.
Like at every time that they want to crack down on people, they claim that there's an enemy within.
Oh, it's been the the Jews multiple times, obviously, communist, all of it.
Anytime that they want to do that, they start to leverage the idea of the nation state needing to defend itself, that they have a right to defense.
And the military, that sort of um, that sort of a philosophy is what allows you to take the monopoly on state violence through the military that would be going around the world to fight supposed threats around the world, they come inside of the homeland and actually fight their own citizenry.
All of these things are locking into place, and it's not hyperbole to say at this point that the chances of Trump or maybe a successor, I don't know what what the hell's gonna happen here, that somebody in that position is going to do this because we are on that track, and history shows us that once you're on that track, eventually you reach the station that you were heading toward.
Well, and we're not we don't learn, we don't learn these instances, and that's why it's so frustrating to see.
And I almost feel like you can plot this on a timeline, and there may even be a natural, like uh a uh a common amount of years in between each of these uh things.
Nylon Latmos, another one where they started to destroy the liberties around that for defense.
Um, it's because we like somehow we'll just forget that it only takes X amount of time, 10, 12, 15 years, whatever, and we go through it all over again in cycles, and it's like I was watching um you know Oppenheimer the other day, and it it what people might forget is that it's filled with anti-communist stuff, where where they they keep showing you what it was like back then and how oppressive the FBI was and investigating people.
We were supposedly put that to bed.
That was supposed to be over with, and you're supposed to be able to have whatever political leanings you want to have in this country, and we're by the by the way, Nick, on that topic.
I'm glad you brought this up.
Is the CIA supposed to operate within the United States of America?
Hell no.
Did they?
Yeah, why?
Oh, well, that's interesting.
Question, the enemy within, yeah.
The communist, they had to stop the communist, and so they operated on the inside, and all of a sudden the war on the outside world comes home.
It's the history that you're talking about.
Absolutely, absolutely.
Well, do you want to hear what Heggseth's uh take on this was in front of all these generals?
So I just want to say very quickly before you play this, that everybody is talking about the threat of the authoritarian military uh uh attack on citizens, which absolutely everyone should be talking about this.
But before we listen to what Hegseth and and what an embarrassing performance he gave, like I was actually I I don't expect very much from these people, and even I was surprised by how embarrassing him and Trump performed, and we could talk about their incompetence, which we need to, but I want people to know that as we're getting ready to listen to Heg Seth, and as we're getting ready to listen to Trump, that there's actually a story beneath the the more apparent story that we have to get to, and it's a new consideration that has now emerged.
But this is the Secretary of Defense Pete Heggseth.
A few months ago, I was at the White House when President Trump announced his liberation day for America's trade policy.
It was a landmark day.
Well, today is another liberation day, the liberation of America's warriors in name, in deed, and in authorities.
You kill people and break things for a living.
You are not politically correct and don't necessarily belong always in polite society.
A few months ago, that's that's a wild thing for the secretary of defense to say, and before we get to the Trump component of this, Nick, I want to talk about who was at this meeting, right?
So Hegseth decides that he wants to prance around on stage in front of uh uh a big giant American flag, and uh I assume you you heard the majority of this thing, he like talked about haircuts, he talked about how fit he is, he hawked his book, he did all this shit telling the military this you're not gonna do this, you're not gonna do that.
The people who were in that audience, Nick, the top leaders of the United States military.
Let me ask you a few questions.
Are you ready?
Are these serious people?
Yep, are these educated people?
Oh, yeah, what is their main concern in anything?
The constitution serving that, maybe serving the constitution, but certainly having a working military, correct?
Yeah, okay.
How many of those people who have reached that echelon of military service and leadership?
Would you say that they have a pretty good bullshit detector?
Yeah.
Okay.
Are they mostly no nonsense people?
Absolutely.
What do they think about former Fox and Friends host?
Uh, and by the way, National Guard Guardian, that's that's the level that Pete Heggseth reached.
He was A veteran, but he was in the National Guard, which it's nothing against the National Guard.
The rank and file of the military does not respect it at the level of who would lead the Pentagon.
Right.
What in the hell are those people in the audience thinking as Pete Heggseth is saying this shit?
Well, let me ask you this.
My question, my turn to ask a question is that what some of the people on the right were trying to say was that those generals would never ever cheer or never ever clap or never do anything.
They would just sit there.
I don't know if that's true.
I know that the enlisted men in the young and lower ranks were going wild or a lot of the stuff that Trump when he would speak to them, and there was a lot of big reaction.
So I'm a little bit confused.
I don't know what to make of that because it's possible that they're just going to sit there completely, you know, uh at you know, uh at attention and not make a word anyway, but you could tell certainly that they were frustrated.
Hexeth and Trump for sure was slurring and low energy because he was getting no response.
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