Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman divie straight into the week’s whiplash: the Israel/Hamas ceasefire and prisoner exchanges, Netanyahu’s corruption baggage, and Donald Trump’s jaw-dropper about “pardoning” Bibi. From there, the hosts trace the politics behind the pause, Biden’s misreads and missed leverage, and the grim playbook for Gaza’s future dressed up as “reeducation." Then it’s on to the stateside corruption: semantic games over a Qatari facility at Mountain Home AFB, JD Vance’s TV gaslighting, and the brazen crypto windfall that hit minutes before Trump's Taco Tariffs.
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I'm here with my friend Nick Halsman, who enjoyed a birthday weekend.
Um, I'm not gonna say that you're worse for where, but there were some travails.
Oh my goodness gracious.
Well, you know, uh it's always nice when you go to back to like your alma mater.
You want to see some, you know, some good football.
And that did not happen at all.
Um, but I had a good time.
It was really great to go back to the old haunts and see them and haven't changed much, but maybe even a little bit melancholy.
Maybe we'll have to do it on a weekend or talk more about why it's melancholy.
And it's always melancholy.
I mean, you know, you who says you can't go back home, said the the national poet laureate, uh John Bon Jovi.
That that okay.
Um, and you know, the other thing I I That is sarcastic, by the way, for anybody sitting at home.
Well, I don't I don't want to tolerate too much slander for John Bon Jovi because that's fine.
But you know, my mom also went to Wisconsin wherever I was, and uh so that was also part of it.
So yeah, well, we we we can cover all that in the weekender.
Uh yeah, that's and by the way, Madison, Wisconsin.
Shout out to anybody who's there.
Beautiful town, beautiful city.
Some might even say one of the best places to live.
I I would argue one of the best places to live.
Um, all right, we have a whole absolute boatload of things to get into.
Uh some really monumental uh things are occurring.
Before we do that, head over to patreon.com/slash monkgrake podcast.
Support the show.
We're listener supported.
We don't have ads.
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Um, Nick, the the big thing that we need to start with today is that the ceasefire uh between Israel and Hamas has come into effect after two years, and God knows how much human tragedy.
Uh the 20 remaining living hostages were returned to Israel, and over 1900 Palestinian hostages were returned to uh Gaza.
Um, this is a big giant deal after a lot of heartbreak and a lot of suffering.
There's a lot to get into, including what Trump has said, what the legacy of this thing is, but what are your instantaneous reactions to this ceasefire seemingly actually coming to pass?
Well, you know, listen, I'm glad that hostages could be returned.
Um, you know, people could be returned on the other side as well.
Uh, I suppose it at least for the interim, it's always good that there won't be bombing and killing.
That's that that will hold.
Well, Israel certainly went up went up to the deadline.
I'll just say that.
Well, you know, what's what's what's frustrating about all of this is that this kind of deal was on a table for a very long time.
Like at any moment, they could have taken this deal, either side.
And I had said, I would like to pat in the back.
I had uh said it way ahead of the reporting that when Netanyahu visited uh during the Biden administration last year, uh, he had a meeting with Trump.
I'm like, for sure, Trump is gonna tell him you cannot sign a deal uh before the election.
You cannot benefit Biden at all for that.
Because remember, Biden had way more hostages released under under his administration.
Lots of hostages had been released under there, um, compared to what Trump has been doing.
Um, and so that was purported.
It was reported, uh, you know, with multiple sources that that is exactly what happened between Netanyahu and Trump.
They had this devil's deal.
And, you know, you can argue that it took nine months of Trump's um presidency, but it was probably because Netanyahu himself didn't grab as much as he needed to grab yet until now, and now he feels like, okay, we can kind of do a ceasefire, which you know, for Trump, all he wants is the fucking announcement.
He doesn't care if it really holds.
No, and we're gonna hear more from Trump in just a few minutes.
Uh, unfortunately.
I I I want to get into the politics of this because obviously that is important because what you just brought up is is actually uh uh an essential component of this.
But I do want to say one, I hope that this ceasefire holds.
The the tragedy of what has happened here, uh, both in terms of like what happened to people who were taken hostage and also the people who have suffered under this absolutely reprehensible genocide that's been carried out.
Uh, it has been terrible.
And we'll talk in a little bit about what the plans are moving forward, which these plans are also horrific and also problematic.
I just want to acknowledge that.
The second part, based on what you were saying politically, man, uh the more that we move away from the Biden administration, the more it becomes clear how much that man got rolled constantly.
Because you're right, Netanyahu absolutely played his relationship with Donald Trump and his antagonism against Joe Biden.
Biden gave him everything that he wanted constantly, to the point where Netanyahu and uh the leaders of Israel are like, oh my God, I I I we didn't even know we had this much of a blank check.
Let's see what we can do.
And, you know, if you go back to those episodes, you and I talked about this uh before the election even took place.
We have said that Biden had one arrow in his quiver, which was to stop giving weapons and aid to Israel as they were carrying out this genocide.
And he refused to do it.
And, you know, I think it's a combination of things, including the fact that all of these sort of client states of the United States have realized that the tail can wag the dog, right?
It can go ahead and get whatever it wants and basically hold America hostage.
What was it?
A week ago, we talked about Argentina getting 20 million dollars of a bailout and then immediately screwing the United States to go work with China to the detriment of American farmers.
They've just realized that, like, you know, the American order has declined, they can do whatever they want.
But there's also the fact that anybody who has talked to Joe Biden about this issue, he was a true believer in this.
He has always been a Zionist and he has always supported this project.
And as a result, the Democrats and the Biden administration, they got rolled.
Donald Trump comes in, he doesn't do anything.
There's literally nothing that Trump has done outside of make the devil's bargain, as you said, with Netanyahu.
And now, and we'll get to it in a second, what happens after this operation and what happened, and I'm I'm not gonna call it a war.
It wasn't a war, but what happens after this ends, Donald Trump was just there in order to make a buck, however he could, and basically was happy to make this thing in to aggrandize himself and to eventually make money off of this thing.
So it's a failure all the way around.
Am I glad, supposedly, that the bombs are going to stop dropping?
Absolutely, I am.
But this has been, I I think people are going to look back on this for a very, very long time and gasp at not just the cruelty and the tragedy, but the absolute political and human failure of this thing.
I mean, that's uh very well said.
I I think that the um the other question we have to know uh figure out is if it was worth it for Israel to get to this point, because I had said this before that it seems obvious that they want to clear Gaza out, take it over, make it to resort town, and then hope that 25, 30 years later, people will forget.
Now, if that's uh a troubling re recounting of events, just look at what happened in the United States when what uh this country did to Native Americans.
They just simply rely on the fact that after enough time, we would forget uh and then just sort of move on and you know, whatever, right?
Which is a very possible distinct possibility, it's gonna happen here.
But at what cost?
At the cost of turning Israel into a worldwide pariah, a pariah state, yeah.
Which then starts the border or point toward this notion of you know, an existential crisis, because if enough people turn on Israel and they don't get the kind of support that they would feel like they needed, that could lead to some very uh, you know, them losing their existence.
It's like the like the country doesn't isn't able to sustain itself.
So that's the biggest question.
And we knew this going in after October 7th, which was supposed to be I think I don't know how much you need to argue or not, but it seems to me that certainly Hamas knew that that was going to happen once they perpetrated what they did on October 7th, right?
They knew they would that Israel would do what they did.
Well, and it seems like Netanyahu knew it was going to happen before October 7th.
Oh well, yeah.
Well, listen, if you Charlie Kirk was saying that too, Jared.
Well, there you go.
I I mean, I know I don't I don't believe that Charlie Kirk was murdered by Israel, but I do think that basically this situation was seen before it even happened as advantageous.
Right.
And it certainly helped the agenda of not just Benjamin Netanyahu, and we'll hear about what Trump has to say about Netanyahu in a second.
It helped him maintain power.
It helped him consolidate his power base with the far right within the Knesset.
And like as you take a look at all of this stuff, the people in the middle, I think that's what we need to remember.
Like we throw around proper nouns, Israel, Hamas, Palestine, Gaza, all these proper nouns.
And what gets lost in this, Nick, it's not the proper nouns, it's the human beings in the middle of them.
And what has happened here, whether it's Netanyahu propping up Hamas, whether or not it's, you know, part of this far right group standing down possibly on October 7th and thinking it'd be advantageous, or Hamas, like you were saying.
Whatever it is, the people here, whether it's the people who were taken hostage on either side, or the people whose lives have been ruined, the people whose lives have been snuffed out, massive human tragedy because people decided to play with people's lives.
And that I think is the thing.
People can show triumphant things of people being returned.
There are people who are not being returned.
Right.
There are people who don't have a house to sleep in tonight.
There are people who are going to die tonight of starvation.
And that I think is the real story here that gets lost in all these proper nouns.
Absolutely.
And I would recommend, you know, my dear friends, family friends who had lost their uh son, um, are now in in uh the United States and they're they were on MSMEC this morning, and just um do you want to see people who have gone through that and then still have some semblance of a um, you know, it's inspiring to hear someone be able to talk the way they are and and and want peace in the face of what they went through as well.
And I recommend doing that.
I mean, the the one thing I wanted to ask you though is is um, you know, does should Hamas still be in power in Gaza going forward?
I would prefer that there wasn't a need for Hamas in general.
I I mean I mean, like, here's the thing like what's going to happen.
Nick, I I'll answer your question with basically uh laying it out for people uh what is going to happen, right?
Like where this thing is is going.
It's already written down, it's already planned out.
But I do want to say one thing because what I'm about to say is infuriating.
What you said about your family friends and their resilience in the face of this thing.
I think this is such a horrific story, and there's so much tragedy to it that that's what we need to hold on to.
And I I'm not I'm not being flip when I say this, Nick.
I I have been around Holocaust survivors.
I've been around people who survived, you know, Dachau and Auschwitz.
I've been around people who who survived human experimentation.
You know what I mean?
Like just the worst tragedies you could ever imagine.
Their ability, and I'm not sitting here like trumpeting resilience, because I think when we say resilience, sometimes in this modern culture, it means that people need to overcome things and show like personal power.
Their humanity is what does it for me.
You know what I mean?
Like it's talking about this is very brutal.
And what I'm about to lay up is very layout is very brutal.
That ability for humanity to come through is what gives me hope in the face of something like this that is so tragic and so senseless.
And to answer your question, for people who don't know, because it has been covered very well, what is going to happen to Gaza, it's not just that it's going to be a resort town.
Tony Blair, the former prime minister uh of the UK, is going to sweep in with his think tank, all of the neoliberal people who want to make a ton of money off of this shit, as well as Jared Kushner and all those other people.
And they're gonna go in with AI.
This is part of their plan, Nick.
And their plan is to re-educate the Palestinians in order to quote unquote deradicalize them.
And what you brought up earlier is very, very important.
You brought up the native population in the United States of America.
People don't know this history.
People are fed this thing, where like, oh, the the indigenous population in America was really violent and they needed to be run off the land, right?
And then they ended up in reservations.
That's not how this thing actually took place.
They took their children, they put them in schools, they re-educated them, they they reparented them with white families.
They taught them not to be quote unquote savages.
It was a white supremacist enterprise.
And what's being set up right now in Gaza is a much more shiny, veneered thing that is about progress and finding some kind of hope in the middle of this.
And to bring it back to what you said, Nick, the entire purpose is to take Gaza and to turn it into a resort town.
That's it.
And I and I'm not being, again, I'm not being flipped.
Like that is what it boils down to.
All of these people had to die.
All of these people had to be held hostage, and and some of them beaten, some of them tortured.
Like all of these things needed to happen in this current paradigm so that some people could make some bucks off of to borrow the president's phrase, beachside property.
And that's awful.
And we have to look at that and say, you know what, that, and again, to borrow a phrase, never again.
Never again should this type of shit be allowed to happen.
Right.
I mean, listen, it it's a very complicated uh history that we're going back and forth on.
You can you can point to a lot of different inflection points of where it might have worked out and might not have worked out.
So uh I think the other point about Hamas in general is that you could get rid of Hamas and in quotes, but it doesn't necessarily mean that Hamas is gone.
No ideology is gone.
And I I'm I can't correlate people who want to be able to point to the way they've been treated and why they would feel that way, right?
Like I understand because you know, the argument would very well be that you know, people in Palestine or in Gaza do not want to recognize Israel as a country, which is the other question that you kind of want to ask here, because if they'll never recognize it as a country, well, then that becomes a real problem in terms of trying to actually come to some sort of solution on this that's not violent, right?
Um, but then the next question has to be well, why do would Gazans not want to recognize Israel as a country, right?
That's a big question to ask.
Well, just on that note, because this is important.
I I want you to finish your thought.
Nick, you're going to take children whose parents died in front of them.
You're going to take children who have been starving for years now, children who have lost their limbs and been maimed, and they're going to go into a classroom.
And again, this is the legit tragedy of this.
Those children are going to be put in a classroom and being fed neoliberal capitalist propaganda trying to tell them why they shouldn't be angry about losing their families and starving and losing their limbs and being maimed.
That's what's going to happen.
And and no amount of wringing your hands and saying it's collateral damage, it's a war, yeah, yeah.
What you described as a fact, right?
Like, however, you want to look at this and what side you want to pick, what you describe is a fact, right?
That will be exactly what's going to happen and how, and we can it's easy to imagine what the reaction to that will be, but from those people specifically.
And listen, Rachel and John, who uh, you know, are going around and they've been uh talking a lot about how their son was uh a hostage and didn't and didn't survive.
Um they're representative of much more of Israel than the other side in terms of people in Israel who want to be able to have a two-state solution and people living in peace.
Yes, right.
That's why those people were living in those communities so close to the border anyway.
They felt like that was you know, that the tragedy of who ended up getting killed on October 7th, for instance, was was that most of those people believed in the two-state solution and wanted to be able to have Palestinians have you know rights and and live freely.
So, you know, it that's the that's the issue is is you know, it it it the solution that this kind uh that Israel's come up with is the worst solution of them all.
And the problem here is is that it won't be viewed that way in 25, 30 years if they have their way.
Well, and it's the exact same way about what's happening in the United States of America right now.
Like one of the things that I've been like keeping track of, like I watched the entire ceremony that where they were announcing the deal, right?
And and and people are like, oh, we just want to say thank you to Benjamin Netanyahu for like leading us through this.
The assembled people booed so loudly that the speaker couldn't continue.
And what it is, it's the exact same thing that's happening in the United States, Nick, where the government of the United States of America is wildly unpopular and corrupt, and their entire focus is to oppress and disappear people and take away rights and limit democracy.
It's the same thing, whether or not it's the United States of America or Israel or Russia or you name it.
We're talking about the difference between corrupt authoritarian leaders and the people.
And what you just said is very important because you know, most of the people don't support this shit.
That's the reason why it's happening the way that it is.
And again, we're getting ready to listen to our buffoon of a president speaking on this.
And and Nick, what we're getting ready to hear is So detached from the reality of how most people feel that it doesn't matter because the people in power are corrupt authoritarians.
Exactly.
So he's speaking about Netanyahu.
Because again, when we're talking about Israel, we I think there's a separation that needs to happen between Israel, the concept of that, and the Netanyahu government, which needs to be prosecuted to the uh the extent of the law possible for this.
And there is a distinction between that, just like there's a distinction between Hamas and Palestinians.
Dude, there's a distinction between Trump and the United States of America.
But in each situation, Nick, there is a relationship from how each of these things started and how they ended up.
And like what we're getting ready to see, it's it's the inevitable endpoint of living in that type of a twisted reality.
But again, our buffoon president.
These two men are good men right here.
The President: Hey, I have an idea.
Mr. President, why don't you give him a pardon?
Give him a pardon.
Now, in case you're wondering, he's talking to the president of Israel and mention pointing to Netanyahu to get a pardon.
Cool.
Anyway, you can hear uh this is a huge applause in the Knesset, and he goes on to talk about how he wants people to you know drink champagne and cigars and all sorts of things about that in the face of you know the tragedy that's been going on there.
I mean, that's what they're considering, and that's what's so and not only is Netanyahu a genocidal maniac, Nick.
Will you fill the people in on what Netanyahu needs a pardon for?
Uh out now corruption that's been rampant throughout his entire uh uh pre pre premiership or uh and and why why was it that Netanyahu got in league with the far right in order to form a government?
Why did he need to hold on to power?
To delay and be able to control the government more to delay any kind of prosecution of him.
And what kept him at all costs from leading to any type of ceasefire before this?
That the fear of that when you know that case would go through and he'd get found guilty.
Birds of a feather.
That is the thing.
You end up at a point where these types of assholes are the ones who lead nations and they end up causing these things.
And of course, Trump is gonna go in and say he deserves a pardon.
Right.
And in Netanyahu's twisted idea, mine, he thought, oh, if I can get rid of this and take over Gaza and eliminate that as a threat to our you know security, then everyone's gonna forgive me for the corruption.
And you know what?
He might be right.
Some of them have, some of them have.
But if Netanyahu is given a part, and by the way, man, I cannot believe we're talking about this shit.
I didn't watch Trump's comments in Jerusalem.
And when you told me that he said this, like I I literally laughed out loud because of how fucking absurd it is.
But if he is given a pardon, the protests that you have seen in Israel so far against him and his authoritarian government, you're you're going to see something else entirely.
Like if somehow or another Netanyahu is given a pardon away from all of the crimes that he's done, like I I really think you're going to see something.
Well, yeah.
Well, we've already seen in Israel before all this the war that there was massive, massive protests every day against Netanyahu.
Another reason why, well, is that why October 7th happened, was allowed to happen.
That you know, the response was so tepid for so long from the Israeli army.
Um, you you have to at least wonder about some of these things, right?
Well, I mean, why why why was Hamas in power?
Why did they have the money and support that they had?
Yeah, because Benjamin Netanyahu gave it to them.
Whether or not, you know, obviously the official line is gonna be some version of, well, no, they were supposed to be our friends and help us, you know, live peacefully together.
Uh, or it's the boogeyman that he wanted to keep funding to give him more, you know, a control over everything.
Benjamin Netanyahu should spend the rest of his natural life in The Hague.
And for and again, I I know that we're not saying anything that surprises people about Donald Trump.
Of course, we know who he is.
He's a known quantity at this point.
But his love and passion and support for other authoritarians, it just continues to just stagger the imagination.
Right.
And and and part of me feels lucky.
I mean, listen, we are both dealing with this notion of we're Americans living in a country that's with uh a Gestapo-like uh you know entity that's uh uh funded, you know, better than most armies and is causing all manner of tragedy in our country, and we really can't do much about it.
And we're but we are by by virtue of being an American, we are now associated with that as if we somehow testedly support it.
And you know, it's the same thing that's going on in Israel with a lot of Israelis.
I would argue majority of Israelis don't feel this way, that don't support this.
And yet here we are, and they're in control and they cheat and they lie, whereas maybe the other side isn't cheating and lying, and that's no way that you can't win that when you when those are the those are the uh how the odds are stacked.
I I I'm gonna say something just as a uh summary before we move on from the story.
Nick, what we're dealing with right here is the crossroads that I've been screaming about for a decade now.
We were eventually going to get to the point where liberal democracy, and by the way, Israel was held up as this liberal democracy, right?
The the only democracy in the Middle East, all this shit.
And all of these liberal democracies around the world, we are starting to see not just the erosion of liberal democracy, but the utter destruction through corruption and authoritarian energies and what emerges, it's shit.
It's absolute shit, whether it's Donald Trump or Benjamin Netanyahu, like America and Israel are tied.
We know this.
There's a reason why America enabled this genocide and and why our culture struggled to even discuss it and to even name it.
It's not a coincidence that this is happening to the United States of America and Israel at the exact same time.
And I want to make it very clear because conspiracy theorists are out there.
I'm not saying it's because Israel owns the United States of America.
It's because they're very specific types of governments and they're very specific types of corruption.
And the leaders that they have belched forward, they are experiencing at the same time and using the same type of fascist violence and oppression and eradication of people.
It's not a coincidence that all this is happening at the once.
This is the crossroads that we've been waiting into.
I I can agree with that.
I also feel like you know, this timing is again related to the notion of uh the political value of these things, where uh we're gonna wait until Biden, you know, and and you know, you like getting back to what you said about Biden's full throated support of Israel, you know, and they lose the election, the Kamola loses the election because they wrung their hands over how they're supposed to respond.
And um, you know, I think looking back on it now, you'd argue that if they would have cut off aid and they would have forced this kind of ceasefire or more law more impacting ceasefire, they probably would have benefited politically from that versus being so afraid to say anything again against Israel that they didn't they got stuck just sort of supporting them not saying anything and getting stuck in between all of that shit, which is sort of what the Democrats have been, you know, no notorious for.
Yeah, it wasn't trans people, it wasn't black people saying they deserved a right the right to vote.
That's not what lost Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party the election.
Nobody wanted to talk about the Gaza thing because for so long, like the liberals and moderates needed this to happen.
They didn't want to stand in the way of it.
They would have benefited politically.
And what's more, Nick, politic politics aside, it was the right thing to do to stand against this thing.
Right.
And luckily, time has borne that out, and now we're seeing some of the worst enablers of this this genocide coming out and being like, I think this was wrong.
Maybe this was wrong.
The whole point was that political courage demands us to do things that we don't even know if they're going to be popular.
And in the long run, it is popular and they would have benefited from it.
And this is just one tragedy on top of another tragedy.
Right.
And do you remember that Biden did negotiate a ceasefire at the end of 2024?
Because he did, and he negotiated no good negotiated a bunch of uh Hashes returns.
So, you know, uh it's not like they didn't have this deal or they couldn't have used more of their pressure to do this thing.
And, you know, but to hear how Trump talks about it, he's the only one who's ever been able to get anything done.
And most people are probably gonna end up believing that.
And I don't know.
I mean, I suppose some credit is due, uh, you know, for making that happen.
No, uh it's the same as trying to give Reagan credit for freeing the Iranian hostages.
I mean, it it's it's it's and by the way, like we don't we haven't even framed it in this way, but it was in the American interest and the human interest for this thing to end, and if there was a devil's bargain, and it certainly seems like Netanyahu was waiting on Donald Trump to become president of the United States of America, right?
So that he could get things on his terms.
Like that might not be treason, but it's it's it's it's a real real infraction that should not be ignored.
And And we can't ignore like the cutter influence here as well on this because the the outright corruption that's connected to all this in terms of giving him a plane.
Well, now they're allowing him to build a golf course there.
And there's all sorts of crypto stuff that they're doing with him as well.
Uh it's just massive.
And remember, not it wasn't long ago where he was accusing them of funding terrorism across the country.
Oh, no, I mean, and and you know, a lot of people have kept an eye on this, and the details remain a little elusive.
You know, it was announced that the U.S. is going to allow Cutter to both train at an Air Force base in Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho, but likely is going to let them build a structure.
Nick, going back to the first Trump administration, we talked about this with the entire plane thing.
Like he literally held up Cutter uh in order to try and help Jared Kushner.
They didn't understand that they wanted a bribe, and then basically tried to bring Cutter to their knees.
And Cutter was like, Oh, okay, I guess if we give bribes, everything will be fine.
And it turns out not only are you going to have a relationship between the United States and Cutter now, but it's going to be an even closer relationship.
And and you know, something you just said about the golf course.
This is a thing, Nick, that I think is turned into a reoccurring theme of this show.
How fucking petty and small this is.
Like that's literally what we're talking about.
Donald Trump basically helped carry out the in part of a genocide because he envisions a Trump hotel in Gaza, right?
And with Fish with Cutter.
It's a plane that he'll get to use, which is stupid, and possibly a golf course.
And that's all he cares about.
And he's willing to sell out not just the United States of America, but God knows how many living human beings for this thing.
I don't know what's going to happen with this.
I am also one of the things I'm researching right now is the schism within MAGA and where it's going and how it's developing.
The MAGA people are pissed about this thing.
And I think they are rightfully so.
And by the way, uh Nick is getting ready to play a clip here between uh Hegeth and JD Vance, uh, in terms of what's going on with this base as they're trying to sort of like rein in the uh the outrage over this.
I'm also proud that today we're announcing or signing a letter of acceptance to build a Qatari Emiri Air Force facility at the Mountain Home Air Base in Idaho.
Location will be uh host to contingent of Qatari F-15s and pilots to enhance our combined training, increase lethality, interoperability.
It's just another example uh of our partnership.
So just to understand, that's Pete Hexeth, uh department of making the announcement.
Making the announcement that yeah, they're they're they're building literally a Qatari um facility on an Air Force base, which you know basically means they are gonna have their own, you know, what it sounds like an autonomous, you know, uh area on a on a military base.
It's hangar, barracks, mess hall, probably, you name it.
Because what what I thought we really meant, and then he's so dumb that he doesn't even know how to speak, would be, you know, there's lots of countries that will buy our F-15s, and they now need to come here and learn how to fly these, much like in the movie, the show, the TV show The Bear, where they send the guy over to learn how to be a chef or how to be a uh a uh a baker, you know, and learn how to make really great uh desserts over to Amsterdam and he comes back, right?
But uh Jaron, you don't actually agree with that.
I think you think that he actually described what is what's exactly going to happen.
I listen, there's a difference between a giant autonomous base that just so happens to be in the United States and a facility that is housed within a base.
And I think that's probably what we're going to end up having.
Well, they asked JD Vance about this on Stephanopoulos and you know, in in a uh he was having a vendor on the show, but uh basically uh was trying to walk that back, uh, but in a rhetorical way, like he tries to do, and it's uh here's what he said.
The reporting that somehow there's going to be a Qatari base on United States soil, that's just not true.
You know, and he goes on and on to say that how it's false, and then you know that's why your ratings are going down because nobody trusts you and believes you what you're saying.
Um it's interesting why he would he would say that to Stephanopoulos on his show.
Nick, I uh I was an English professor.
I was a writing professor, and in my department, I was housed with a bunch of linguistics professors, okay, and a bunch of people who studied rhetoric and linguistics.
This reminds me a lot of those meetings, which was figuring out the difference in words.
You know what I mean?
And like playing fast and loose with definitions.
Like Cutter isn't going to have a base, but they're going to share space and have autonomous sort of, you know, housing.
That's likely how this thing's going to turn out.
Yeah.
And uh, and the fact that like the way that JD Vance tries to argue these things, it's like it's the gas lighting of the gaslighting stuff.
And it's uh, but here's the other thing I was interested in is that he goes out and he tell he tells Stephanopoulos, well, that's why nobody trusts you and you have no you know, ratings are terrible.
Well, Stephanopolis should be like, okay, if that's really the case, why are you here?
Yeah, I mean, that's I mean, that's the question.
Yeah.
And he ended up kind of maybe they people want to think he cut him off.
I don't think he cut him off.
They had to go to commercial, and then JD Dance keeps trying to talk like an idiot, and then they go to commercial.
So um, it's uh, you know, it's an interesting thing where uh we they can't ask the questions anymore anyway, uh, because they're able to get access anymore, and or they're gonna get taken over, like CBS.
So here's one more thing because now we've moved into the corruption part of this show.
I mean, you know, we kind of started with a little bit of the corruption.
Nick, I I know you're not a baseball guy, uh, but you remember the steroid era, right?
You remember Mark McGuire, Sammy Sosa, all that?
Yeah.
It got to the point, and and people would, you know, give these anonymous interviews, and some of the users would be honest about it, and they'd say, if everybody's using steroids, you have to use steroids in order to compete.
So here's my question.
If you're another nation in the world, why wouldn't you bribe the United States right now?
Why wouldn't you bribe Donald Trump right now?
Right.
And that leads me to my next question, Nick, which is how many countries are bribing Donald Trump and not even doing it in the way that Cutter has done and just handing over a big ornate plane.
How much of that is being done right now?
And I'm not just talking real estate deals.
I'm not just talking like, you know, lavishing him with praise.
How much shit is being done right now that we don't even have the beginnings of an understanding of?
Oh, I mean, how many um suspicious activity reports are banks sending into the Department of Justice right now for money being infused into the Trump organization, right?
Like it's easy to assume that that's what's going on.
Because remember, before it was like the uh the Trump Hotel in DC.
Oh, they were charging the Secret Service extra rent.
Yeah.
Right.
That was really nice.
Let's go back to that.
You know, uh yeah, just like extorting for the uh just when they're there at the you know, with the CR service.
Um, you know, the notion of what they think government is for.
Now, by the way, because of the history of the country, there's been a lot of uh excess and corruption going on.
It probably, if like you were somebody coming from a different planet and you came down and observed for a little while, you would think, yes, that is the purpose of government, is to wring as much money as you can for yourself, no matter what.
And they would have had that feeling probably in the 40s and the 50s too, right?
In a way that, like, you know, they're just doing it, and they and under the guys are being transparent.
That's what like why Mike Johnson needs to sit on something hot and sharp, because I can't stand listening to him in his smug way, trying to say, well, he's just being transparently corrupt.
So we can't say anything about it.
But he's it's he's telling the truth.
He's the only guy really who wants to acknowledge that part.
Well, and and that is the thing, and and we'll talk about this next story in just a second.
Like, we we look at what happened between the first Trump administration and the second.
And the large part of it that we all see is like Project 2025, right?
And the doge stuff and the the rise of ice and like the way that they've like gone in and destroyed institutions and hollowed out the social safety net.
It's really incredible, though, that in those four years that Trump was outside of power.
The other thing they perfected, Nick was the grift.
It was how to turn the United States and all, and they don't miss a thing.
That's the wild part of it, Nick.
I I you know, we we didn't even cover it, but it's like Trump like rolled out his own personal knockoff Rolex watches.
Yeah, right.
It's it's literally like going into a house that like they didn't just take like the the money out of the safe and the diamonds and the jewels.
They like got in the walls and took the copper.
You know what I mean?
And before they left, they like even took the welcome mat.
You know, it they it's literally top to bottom.
The the most greed-driven and shameless assortment of people figuring out new ways to use power to not only oppress, but to also wring every last cent out of this country that they possibly can.
Yeah.
And again, that that sounds familiar.
We've seen this uh for a long, long time in this country.
Um, but at this point, if we're going to talk about something like crypto, you can understand now why they embrace it so much, is because you know, uh, we we I think it's time to talk about this, right?
Oh, so just to get everybody and I'll let you finish your thought.
The other story that we wanted to talk about today before I finish up, it turns out the other day before Trump like threatened 100% tariffs on China completely out of nowhere with no warning.
30 minutes before that threat was announced, an anonymous investor shorted crypto across the board.
And within those 30 minutes, Nick made 200 million dollars.
And I don't want to say anything, but this is the type of like insider trading that would make Nancy Pelosi blush.
Like this is the type of heist that is absolutely wild.
But I I'll let you finish because that is to me, you're exactly right.
It is they have figured out the new thing that will allow them the next level of corruption and crime.
Right.
And so, and that next level is think about that.
Actually, the beauty about crypto is that it is transparent.
You can see every transaction that's made.
You don't know exactly who it is necessarily, unless you've been able to track it and sort of connect a whole bunch of numbers to somebody's account.
But um, you know, Trump comes out with some incendiary things about China, A, to start the process, right?
And then maybe even the signal to people, right?
And then at some point a day later over the weekend, he comes out and says, I will now impose a hundred percent tariffs on China because they're doing it back to us and they're oh, and they're going to other countries and trying to cut us out.
So by the way, did the did that stick?
Did uh is Trump gonna stick to that?
No.
I think he's already there's already evidence that they're gonna get rid of that.
Whatever.
No, they they they made the money, yeah.
They they made the 200 million dollars.
I and I don't know who did it, but somebody put that in and somebody had that that understanding.
So half an hour before this announcement was made, 100% tariffs on China in the retaliation.
Uh somebody created an account, laid down a whole bunch of money as um on options that the betting that the uh crypto will go down, and which it did, and yeah, and made a cool almost 200 million in the in a half an hour.
Um that is how they do it.
That that's this very simple recipe.
And so every time you see Trump uh comment at all on any kind of either foreign policy or monetary policy, you don't have to look very far.
You'll find, I'm sure several, and by the way, that's only one instance.
I'm guarantee you people made 20 million, 10 million, 100 million, whatever that is, a lot less too, all the way across the board because that guy can't keep his mouth shut.
Um I don't know why people think it's okay, but it sounds like people think it's okay.
I think uh the the answer to why they think it's okay, I'll get to that in a second.
But do you know you know what it reminds me of, Nick?
It just popped up into my head.
For anybody who watched the American version of the office.
Um, I I don't know if people remember this.
I I think about this all the time.
I don't know why.
It's one of those things that like sticks in your head.
It was whenever the the what is it, the Nashua office?
It was uh, I believe season three was when uh Jim went and meets Andy in the there's a moment where that office, that branch is being shut and it's being consolidated with the Scranton office.
And there's this very quick gag where the office is being shut down, this branch is being shut down, and Andy Bernard played by Ed Helms.
You just see him carrying out a printer.
And somebody says, somebody says, What are you doing with that printer?
And he goes, What?
And walks out.
Right?
Because the shit's going down, it's falling apart, it's being closed up.
Nobody's paying attention to exactly what's happening.
That's what's happening in the United States of America right now.
The game has gotten to the point where we're in such decline that it's just time to, you know, the the eyes aren't there, the care is not there, the oversight's not there.
Grab whatever you can.
That's what this is.
And it's not just Trump.
And it's not just MAGA.
It's everybody from the top down.
It's like what happened with the Haktua Bitcoin shit.
Right?
Everybody's going to do a pump and dump because we're at the end of something.
And people like it, it has become so institutionalized.
And I talked about the steroid thing.
Nick, when you become a scoff law society, and this starts back in the late 70s, early 1980s, where basically not only is government the problem, but to borrow a quote from the president of the United States of America, I didn't pay taxes because I was dumb.
I didn't pay taxes because I was smart.
Right.
And eventually it gets to the point where if you're not cheating, you're not trying.
And we have gotten to the end of something now to where, like, you're just supposed to grab the bag wherever you can find it.
It doesn't matter who you hurt.
Tons of people lost their lives in this.
Like in this person getting 200 million dollars because of this insider trading.
But it's it's however you can get it.
And it reminds me, and and I don't mean to be ominous here.
It reminds me of back in 2008, Nick, when people started looking around at subprime mortgages and they were like, how the hell did this happen?
And it happened in order to make a buck, right?
It was how to get to the end of the line of something and wring a few more dollars out of it.
Oh, is it my try?
Yeah, I mean, I there isn't really much more to say to that.
And it's almost like I don't know what else.
Because again, you know, if you were to follow the trading patterns of anybody in Congress, oh god, it would be twice as good as anyone else's has ever been, you know, including better than Warren Buffett, yes.
Yeah.
And so it's like, you know, and it feeds into this notion, which ends up becoming disarming when you're talking about like all the politicians are corrupt and they're all lying and they're all doing whatever.
And it's like when we know that that's not fair to try and lump everybody in there because certainly this one party is doing it a lot worse.
But again, at that point, does it matter?
And uh, you know, is this all coming to a head to some sort of thing that we're gonna, you know, uh cause everybody else pain who doesn't have a few hundred million dollars in the bank that can buy themselves out of whatever catastrophe that is?
I don't know.
But um, but yeah, we've gotten to the point now where that's the baseline.
The baseline is corruption.
It's it's corruption, it's it's a culture problem.
Like it, and again, I I I'm not making light of it by using these analogies, but I think it helps to understand it.
Nick, you're you're a basketball guy.
How many teams have you seen they go out and they fail over and over again?
And there's fights on the bench.
There are people getting caught shaving points.
There are people over here who are getting caught like causing problems.
And you look at that, and anybody who understands it, there's a culture problem on that team.
We have a culture problem.
America is greedy and selfish and self-serving.
And what happened is not that Donald Trump came along and he created it.
Donald Trump was again belched forward because he is the best representation of what this country has become.
Right.
Period.
Now, let's go back to that analogy or the example you're using of college basketball and and and all the point shaving and all these different things, and the corruption of, you know, paying players or under the table and giving them money for this and that.
Guess what the solution was?
Making all that legal.
So now overnight, the corruption that was rampant and problematic for a student athletes, whatever, is simply legal.
And anybody who ever got prosecuted for it, even right up until that moment, you know, suddenly, you know, just shouldn't have been.
It didn't have gone through that in some way, because again, they made all that just paying, just make it all legal.
Now and that problem, and and and I think this is a great analogy because that problem wasn't taken care of when it needed to be taken care of.
So not only did they start getting paid, now you have online gambling.
You add another component that is indicate indicative of the culture problem.
So eventually people are like, well, I mean, if the money's there, I'm going to take it, right?
Because it has created a cultural situation where you have people who are just trying to do whatever they can to get ahead, which is also how you end up with Tom Homan taking 50,000 fucking dollars in a kava bag.
Like it's just top to bottom.
It is a cultural rot that is now finding itself expressed.
And again, uh Stefanopoulos tried to do a gotcha moment with JD Vance asking him, did he take the $50,000?
And JD Vance keeps saying he didn't break the law.
Did he take the $50,000?
He didn't break the law.
Like he won't.
Obviously, they're not answering it because they know the answer is yes, he took the $50,000.
But then the next question should be uh isn't it an admission of guilt that he took the the $50,000 in a fucking bag from a restaurant?
You know, and what kind of what is that anyway?
That's a movie.
That's a terrible movie.
That's not even a good movie in terms of capturing that.
Like who does that anyway?
Like out in the open in the middle of public at a at a restaurant.
Like that doesn't make any sense to me, regardless, unless, unless the rampant the corruption is so rampant and so commonplace, you know, that like it does imitate art instead of the other way around.
And that's what you just brought up, and I think this is a a good place to go before we wrap up.
What offends me?
The corruption offends me.
It does.
The cruelty offends me.
What adds an extra layer to this is the shabbiness.
You know what I mean?
It's it's it's like this crypto trade.
This is the most obvious fucking thing in the world.
And and when this happens in the past, there would be if this happened, and of course, this happened with crypto, which is you know, it's like adding the online gambling on top of it.
It's not, it's not really traceable.
That's why it's so popular, right?
But if the if this would have been a trade that got happened with the stock exchange, there would have been an immediate investigation of it because it's craven.
And in fact, if you were the person who told someone, hey, by the way, you can do a little bit of insider trading and make some scratch, and you found out that the person made 200 million, you'd be like, What the fuck, man?
Why would you do that?
Why would you it again to bring it back to culture?
It's good fellas.
They knock over that, you know, that big heist, and he's like, Why are you wearing these coats?
Why are you buying these cars?
Right?
The shabbiness of it adds an element because what does it reveal to us?
Something that you're very fond of saying.
They don't even bother with the mask anymore.
When it's this big and when it's this glaringly brazen, it signals not only that there's a problem, but that the problem is so far along that you they don't even expect there to be consequences of at this point.
They're just being overt with it.
Right.
Well, and then the worst part about this all overall eventually is because you're talking about the safeguards that the stock market has, the SEC, right?
They're the they're the police.
Well, you know, guess who runs the SEC?
Right.
Right.
And we've seen that, you know, with Pam Bondi.
We mentioned earlier when she went in front of the Senate, in the way she treated the senators, should she should have been held in contempt.
Well, guess who is the one who's supposed to enforce contempt of Congress charges?
Her, you know, and so meanwhile, we know they're trying to get another person off of the board of the SEC for another crony to give them a vote.
So in reality, there isn't no safeguard anyway to almost any of this stuff.
And then and then when there used to be with like inspector generals, they're all fired as well.
So there are no safeguards anymore.
And uh, you know, the the way to put this back together eventually will be to increase all of that and have more watchdogs and have a president who's willing to be like, I'm gonna do this correctly.
So I'm not worried about having people looking over my shoulder because I know I'm gonna do this, you know, according to the way the constitution was written.
Um, and that's that's the first step to getting this all back under control.
100%.
And and I will end on this, Nick, because you know, and listen, we're both bands of punchy endings, so I'll I'll finish it here.
I'm working on a book proposal.
And you know, I was looking at the progressive era and the progressives dealt with a lot of the shit we're dealing with now.
They had the party bosses, they had all these favors, all this corruption.
Do you know who it was that exposed it?
The muck rakers.
There's a reason why this is called the Muck Rake podcast, is because we are trying to carry on the tradition of that to talk about the things that people don't really want to talk about.
The answer to this is not to accept it.
It's not to throw up your hands and say, I guess that's how it is now.
It's to say, no, this is repellent.
And this is wrong.
And eventually, what's going to happen if we write this ship is eventually we will say those old safeguards, okay, we at least need to get back to the old safeguards.
We need more.
Because what did We learn those safeguards were not enough.
They got steamrolled the moment that anybody lost any version of shame.
They worked on the honor system.
So we have to say, okay, we have to restore those, but we have to go further.
And the answer to it is to not let this become normal.
Not just to say this is how things are.
You know, I know that's a great way to end, but I don't I want to let this go that remembered.
We were talking about how we can stand up to ice in a way that's uh uh confrontational but not illegal and all that kind of thing.
And that hit me.
You know what we need to do?
You need to go to the toy store and say this to the person by the counter.
Can I buy 10,000 marbles, please?
Right?
That they should do that.
And then that would be a great way.
Just to just to go with it, Nick.
On that note, like we we kind of talked about whether or not to address this.
This thing with protesters getting dressed up in ridiculous costumes is actually kind of brilliant.
Yeah.
It actually goes ahead and takes away sort of the veneer of Antifa, like this fake bullshit.
And it adds to it.
What we're going to find, I think, and these are the moments that we need to actually look at.
We need to take this stuff seriously while also continuing to hold space within ourselves to be like, no, this is fucking absurd.
What these people are doing is absurd.
And what's more, it is disgusting.
So it's staying aware and refusing to normalize any of the things that we talked about today.
It's to say that this is wrong and we are going to treat it like the absurdity and the offense that it is.
And shout out to every naked person who protested in Portland on their bikes the other day because another one of those uh impactful statements that you can, you know, that they're making up there.
By the way, the the the yippies are or you know, in any of these groups that we want to talk about, like back in the day, they understood that to an extent.
They understood that you turn this into a spectacle and you let the people know that they do not have like control over normalcy.
They're absurd.
All right, everybody, that's gonna do it for this episode of the Munk Rick Podcast.
We will be back with the weekender on Friday.
Reminder, head over to patreon.com slash monk podcast to gain full access to that episode and support the show.
We need your support.
In the meantime, you can find us over on Blue Sky.
