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On this Weekender, hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman break down the leaked Telegram messages from young GOP leaders that read less like edgy jokes and more like a neo-Nazi starter kit,followed by JD Vance’s “they’re just kids” defense. The guys connect the dots to the broader fascist pipeline (hi, Stephen Miller), preview the nationwide No Kings protests with a sober look at what real next steps require, and side-eye the missile-flyover spectacle in California while assessing reports of CIA black ops ramping up in Venezuela. Plus: what they’re watching, from gritty hospital drama to gleefully unhinged sketch comedy, and one very gnarly horror pick for the sickos in the Discord.
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Welcome to the weekender edition of the Muck Craig Podcast.
Jared Yates Sax Time here with my friend Nick Houseman.
Nick, do you do you have weekend plans?
What are you doing?
Oh, I think I'll be a little bit busy on um Saturday, you know, walking around uh outside in the beautiful air and uh making my voice heard.
Oh, that's right, everybody.
We're gonna talk about the No Kings protest here in a little bit.
Hopefully, people are have all kinds of plans, including fighting fascism, enjoying life, replenishing themselves.
Hopefully, uh everyone stays safe while we're at it.
That is important.
And I know in California, I think I feel pretty good about it, but I know there's other places that you gotta you gotta see, you know, there's strength in numbers.
Well, as as we'll talk about California, you might just have errant missiles flying around.
So, you know, we'll get to all of that and more.
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You get to join the community, all that good stuff.
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Nick, we start with a story.
Um, you know, I'm gonna file this in the predictable, unsurprising and yet disturbing file.
Uh Politico uh has a report by Jason Bieferman and Emily Nago that reveals that multiple uh GOP young GOP leaders, including chairs from Kansas, New York, other members, leaked telegram chats, uh show them voicing openly neo-Nazi sentiments, uh, racism, sexism, and and I don't just mean casual, I mean like hardcore shit.
Praise for Adolf Hitler and genocide.
Um, this is a big giant leak of something that we've all known was there.
I've seen some of these things.
On top of it, Capitol Police are investigating a an American flag that includes a swastika that was filmed in GOP rep David Taylor's office.
Uh Nick, also the vice president of the United States of America, JD Vance, is telling everyone that he doesn't think these young lives should be ruined because they're just you know kids, they're just doing what they can, they're just trying to take care of themselves.
Here's the vice president himself.
Grow up.
I'm sorry, focus on the real issues, don't focus what on what kids say in group chats.
But there's another angle to this that I just have to be honest about.
I mean, I'm like an old guy at this point.
I'm 41 years old.
I have three kids.
Uh, you know, we we I I grew up in a different world, right?
Where not most of what I the stupid things that I did when I was a teenager and a young adult, they're they're not on the internet.
Like I'm gonna tell Um I think some of the stupid things you do as a teenager are on the internet, aren't they, Jared?
Uh some of them are, yes.
Some of them my kids, especially my boys, don't put things on the internet.
Like be careful with what you post.
If you put something in a group chat, assume that some scumbag is gonna leak it in an effort to try to cause you harm or cause your family harm.
But the reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys, they tell edgy, offensive jokes.
Like that's what kids do.
And I really don't want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke, telling a very offensive stupid joke is caused to ruin their lives.
And at some point, we're all gonna have to say enough of this BS.
We're not going to allow the worst moment in a 21-year-old's group chat to ruin a kid's life for the rest of time.
That's just not okay.
Like Yep.
These kids, these these basically Dennis the Menace, Nick.
And and just posting things about wanting to carry out genocides, uh, you know, praising Adolf Hitler and some of the hard most hardcore racism and sexism you'll ever see.
Kids.
Well, you know, now, Jared, I I'm gonna play devil's advocate because I have a feeling, you know, you're a bit edgy.
I certainly like I think dark humor, you know.
So there are things wait, am I edgy?
Uh I don't know.
It maybe maybe you're oh, I'll take it.
Fine.
I'll uh fine.
Uh Jared Yates, edgy sex, then I'll take it.
I mean, it's not like I don't know you that well, so maybe I'm making some stuff up.
But uh the point being that, you know, listen, dark humor is always, you know, it works or doesn't work on a group tack text, which is one of the reasons why I hate group text, but but uh so there, but that's the the the key Here is is that this does go way beyond what would normally be like sort of edgy humor.
And I'm not asking for anybody in that group text to have their life canceled or have anything ruined or even gonna be fired or anything like that.
I'm not even care about that.
What I do want to make sure people understand is this is the mindset that this party, like Rit Large has.
And I think that's the bigger overall thing.
So when he tries to make it seem like some scumbag wants to, you know, ruin someone's life like that, and then turn the tables on this as if the scumbags aren't really in the group chat.
You know, it's somebody else who's like leaking in the group chat.
That is what becomes so galling, but you know, is necessary for that party because they need the hatred to fuel themselves.
So I'll I'll start with one thing.
Uh, I I think these people should lose their jobs.
Okay, I I absolutely think that if this comes out, like you should lose your job, particularly if you are a political leader and organizer.
And for people who don't know, and there's a couple of things I want to touch on with this, young GOP, young Republican leaders, uh, they're basically on a pipeline to become politicians and organizers.
Like this is a very hierarchical uh sort of like legacy institution.
So the people that we're talking about who are saying these things, even in the leaked chats, Nick, they are already sharpening their knives in order to carry this out.
And by the way, like that that group, the young Republicans, Nick, they they have produced such luminaries as Carl Rove.
I mean, the that's the pipeline.
That's how this works.
The they're waiting in the wings to become the future of the GOP and already sharpening their knives to become the future of the GOP.
The other part of this that you brought up, Nick, and and I want to say this explicitly the GOP is a fascist party, period.
That that's the end of the story there.
What these people were caught saying is exactly the type of shit that most of the ideologues within the Republican Party are saying and feeling and plotting toward.
But there's another element of this that I really want to get into that that is extremely important.
And it gets missed in all of the mainstream sort of coverage and also analysis.
And we've been seeing it a lot recently, Nick.
A lot of voices are saying, you know what?
We're hearing from Trump supporters that they're disillusioned with Donald Trump.
They don't like what he's doing with tariffs, they don't like the Epstein stuff, they don't like his support of Israel or whatever.
There's become this new sort of flawed consensus that those people who look at Trump's presidency and say he's not coming through on what he said he's going to do, that they're suddenly going to vote Democrat, that they're suddenly going to wake up.
Tell me, tell me if you've heard this one, Nick.
The fever's going to break and they're going to wake up.
No, the truth is that the system that is in place and from the research and sort of the surveillance that I've been doing, those people aren't going to become Democrats, Nick.
They're going to become literal neo-Nazis because they're paying attention to people like Nick Fuentes or Tucker Carlson.
There's a pipeline in place.
And so this is what I say, and I want people to hear me when I say this.
If we don't change things, and and the idea that those people are going to come over and be Democrats, it's the exact same thing we heard back during the Obama years.
What was it?
It was uh demographics or destiny, right?
The Democrats were going to win every election because we had a changing population.
If we don't do something and we don't answer the material conditions that have created this problem, there is a possibility in the future that we look back on the Trump era as something that wasn't so bad.
Because the people who are becoming disenchanted are becoming more extreme.
And what we see here is it's not only the people on the outside, it's the people on the inside.
I I don't even know where to begin because so many of those things that you know I want to respond to.
First of all, you if you're gonna list like Karl Rove being the thing, like I can't believe the list stops there.
I mean, I know you threw Nick Fuentes in there as well, but we gotta one of the things that all the people in that group chat I have no doubt followed religiously would be Charlie Kirk.
Yep, he's the guy too that was spearheading a lot of that ideology in between all these other bullshit stuff he wants to talk about in terms of you know religious things that sounded nice uh in little sound bites.
But uh the thing I think with the people that want to follow Trump and be part of the movement, uh, it's not about politics at all.
It's not about policy.
They don't care about any of those things, right?
They are all they care about is sort of the rage bait and need they need to be angry about something.
And so I I you're you're correct, but eventually over time, if they are radicalized, they will want to use the powers of government, not just to be rageful, but to literally murder people on a large scale.
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