Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman kick things off by announcing a live Patreon Q&A this Thursday, November 6 at 5 p.m. ET, then dive into New York City’s mayoral shockwave. They break down Zoran Mamdani’s surge, Andrew Cuomo’s Trump-backed Islamophobic ad blitz, and why the Democratic establishment looks allergic to enthusiasm. From there, they game out what a Mamdani win could mean for AOC, party power brokers, and a whole lot of donor panic. Plus, Trump’s itchy trigger finger toward Nigeria, Venezuela, and Mexico gets the full reality check, and the guys unpack reports of ICE showing up near polling places alongside talk of bounty-style enforcement that sounds less like policy and more like state racketeering. Come for the outrage therapy, stay for the receipts.
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I'm Jerry G. At Sexton here with my friend Nick Hausman.
Nick, we've decided on a live show.
All right.
What do we decide?
What do you mean?
We were just talking.
Well, you just made it seem like, well, you're right.
You did say we, but tell us, tell the people.
Can we just tell people that Nick is feeling low energy today and that by the end of the show, he's going to be so outraged, he's going to be high energy.
Yeah, that's, you know what?
That's the way we can get our energy back.
We don't need pills.
We don't need caffeine.
We need pure political outrage.
Yes, that's right.
So this Thursday, November 5th at 5 p.m. Eastern, for subscribers, and a reminder, head over to patreon.com slash muttrakepodcast.
We're going to be doing a live show.
We hope you will join us over on the Patreon page, and we're going to do an old-fashioned question and answer episode.
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Support the show, gain access to the weekender and do things like this live episode on this Thursday.
Nick, the first story that we're going to talk about today, this is coming out on Tuesday, November 4th.
Wait, Thursday.
That is going to be November 6th.
Okay.
Yeah, it's going to be Thursday, November 6th.
Oh my God, we're correcting ourselves in real time.
This is going to be coming out on Tuesday, November 4th, which is going to involve a spade of elections around the country, including the mayoral race in New York City.
Based on polling, it looks like the Democratic nominee, Zoron Momdani, it looks like is favored to win this race.
The numbers are starting to move a little bit.
This is to be expected moving closer to the election.
The larger story in all of this, it is what would a Momdani win mean for the Democratic Party?
We can talk about that, but also the fact that Andrew Cuomo, who is running as an independent, the former disgraced governor of New York, has now been endorsed by Donald Trump and that New York City has been absolutely overrun with millions of dollars worth of, I don't know how else to say this, Islamophobic, terror-centric ads from the Cuomo campaign.
Nick, what are you seeing here?
How are you feeling about this race?
What are your general thoughts about this?
Because this feels like it could be a rather seismic moment in American politics, particularly at this moment.
I mean, we're seeing probably something similar to Obama when he burst on the national stage and was able to galvanize because the early numbers for voting are beyond anything that the New Yorkers have seen ever.
I think it's like three quarters of a million people have already cast their vote over in the early voting at the ballot boxes.
So that indicates a level of excitement we have not seen before in a long time around a candidate.
So that's great.
And, you know, I think it's to be expected, cue the music of the, you know, the Darth Vader music as they, you know, while, again, just like they did for Obama, right?
It's the same kind of playbook here where they're going to try and question his citizenship and whether he, you know, or should he have it be stripped, among other things.
It's kind of gross.
And then what we're going to find out is that I'm sure he'll govern, hopefully in a progressive way, but certainly won't resemble anything that they're accusing him of in terms of, you know, wild sympathizing with ISIS and also all manner of terrorism bullshit.
It's kind of crazy.
Well, I'll start by saying that any of our listeners in New York City, I hope that you have already gone to the polls or are going to the polls on Tuesday in order to vote for Zoran Momdani.
I think what we have seen from him, you touched on something, which is this has been a galvanizing campaign.
This is a person who is obviously generationally talented, at least as a campaigner and organizer.
The reason why he's come from virtually nowhere to defeat Andrew Cuomo in the primary and now to gain this type of momentum is quite frankly because he's offering to do some things and he's doing it in a way that people can relate to.
And what is it that people are getting excited about?
Number one, the difference between Momdani and Cuomo in terms of being campaigners, Momdani seems to actually like New York City.
He actually seems like he wants to make it better.
Andrew Cuomo approaches this as if New York City is a shithole that needs to be brought to heal, which is more or less the modern sort of campaigning.
You have a lot of people like a Donald Trump who basically says everything is terrible and we need to instill discipline and change everything.
And then you have a bunch of lukewarm moderate Democrats who are like, hey, everything's pretty okay.
We don't really need to change that much.
The fact that the Democratic Party has reacted like this, Chuck Schumer still has not endorsed Mom Dani.
Hakeem Jeffries refuses to do it and is basically going on TV and saying that he's not the future of the Democratic Party.
I also want to point out, Nick, I find it very interesting that Barack Obama is getting very, very invested in some judicial elections, but hasn't endorsed Mom Dani, right?
And what we're seeing here, quite frankly, with this is the fear of having a leftist in a place of power.
Because if you have a leftist, they're going to do something.
They're at least going to try and make living conditions better and at least try and redistribute a little bit of resources and power.
That is a threat to both the Republican Party, which straddles the left and the right to bring people over from a leftist critique of capitalism into like far-right reactionary politics.
And the Democrats' power base right now, based on their corporate, you know, sort of relationship, is to not really change anything, to maybe make things a little bit better at the margins or whatever.
But the moment a leftist comes in, it becomes threat number one, right?
Because that would mean that you would actually have to do things and actually have to reform and change things.
So the reaction here, if he wins, and I feel like he, I feel like he'll probably pull this thing out, if he wins, this is at least the beginnings of a message that we could possibly see a realignment between what the voters want and what the Democratic Party is offering.
And I think that's the schism and the tension that you and I have been talking about now for the past few years, at the very, very least, that really is going to come to the forefront, particularly if he wins this election.
Yeah, I think some of the watchwords you hear from the right are stuff like, you know, rich people are going to just leave the city because they're going to taxes are going to go up.
And I got to tell you, a half point or a point or two increase in marginal tax rate on the wealthiest people in New York, it's already so ridiculously expensive to live there as it is.
That isn't going to affect anybody.
No one is going to leave the city, you know, willingly at least for the tax rate going up a little bit.
And certainly, if you're going to go running a campaign of making food cheaper, you know, and helping people with their lives and other ways of making things more livable, then that's going to be really resonant for a lot of people.
So I'm glad to see that.
And what you said is right, as far as like the mapping of like what a modern campaign will look like going forward is someone like that who is terrific on camera, understands social media to the nth degree, does some of the best stuff I've seen.
And it's not even complicated or whatever, but it's just real and authentic, which is really important for the younger people now.
So I think he's laying out a really good blueprint for hopefully what you'll end up getting in the future are more people who, at the very least, he seems earnest in his desire to help people.
It seems like he's coming in fresh like that.
Then the question is, is that Obama was also that way?
And it somewhat quickly found out, right, that it wasn't so easy to enact a progressive agenda.
And by the end of his terms, didn't.
And I think what you just laid out is it's the recipe.
And a lot of us have been screaming this, even on Democratic strategic calls, which is Democrats are so concerned about how they appear that it comes across as artificial, right?
You have to have all these policy positions that are not going to threaten the corporate base.
And meanwhile, say sort of a, and I actually think you brought up Obama.
I think it's really interesting because post-Obama, Democrats want the rhetoric of Obama, but without the promise of change that Obama gave.
And also, I think what you brought up is exactly right.
Obama seemed comfortable all the time because he was just being himself.
And that makes it a lot easy.
Anytime I've ever advised like a campaign, I've always said the number one thing that you can do is just figure out who you are and figure out how to be that person wherever you are.
You know, we spent months talking about the disaster of the Ron DeSantis campaign.
And I said it once upon a time.
The problem there, besides the fact that he's repelling and disgusting, was that every time he spoke, he had been so coached that he couldn't, you know, it's whether it's sports or politics or whatever it is.
If you have too much in your mind and you're trying to do too many things at once, you freeze and it comes across inauthentic because it is.
And so this guy, everything that I've seen, and God knows how politicians are, maybe there's something that we don't know about him that would absolutely disgust us and make us right away.
But everything that's been presented so far, it's the combination of a guy who seems comfortable in his own skin and seems like a real human being who is just saying what he thinks and is presenting a plan to make life better for people.
And that right there is the antithesis of the Democratic Party, which is so bought and sold and so lashed to these corporate donors and interest that there's no way for them to go out and be authentic because to say what it is that they actually believe.
And we've heard them time and time again, whenever they go and do like an interview in a particular like corporate friendly place, that doesn't come across to people who are dying for something to feel better in this country and for their lives to somehow or another to improve.
It kind of feels like, look, why are they afraid of the change?
Why do they tolerate the rhetoric of that, but not the actual change?
And I guess part of it feels like they're afraid that to get smeared with, well, trans issues.
We can't have, you know, that's going to be a losing effort thing if we try and embrace that or any number of woke policies that they are afraid of, right?
So it seems to me like, yes, let's try and thread that needle where we're going to talk the talk to some degree, but no, we can never really enact those things because then we're going to get tarred and feathered with that and smeared with those with those accusations.
And then, you know, the narrator's voice will tell you, you're going to get smeared with that anyway.
Period.
No matter what you do, you might as well just do it then because that is the right thing to do.
And eventually you'll break through.
So we'll have to see.
I'm a little bit, I'm curious.
I have an eyebrow raised to see if he's going to be able to take on the bureaucracy of Manhattan and affect the kind of change he wants to do.
Some of this stuff is radical.
Well, I'm interested.
And I think this is the other side of this.
I am interested to find out because Cuomo's attacks, which some of the worst AI slop that anybody has ever seen, his attacks have all had a fear-mongering component to them.
The idea that Mom Dani is going to take their money, that he's a radical communist or whatever it is, but also an Islamic phobic bent to them.
Basically trying to bring up 9-11 to say, do you want someone like this in order to run the city?
I will be interested to see.
And if I had to make a prediction right now, I would say that the margin of victory might be smaller than most people are anticipating, because when you get in the voting booth, you're alone.
You know what I mean?
Like you have your fears, all the soaring rhetoric, all of that.
I will be interested to see what happens there.
And from there, let's say that Mom Dani is able to win.
I'm very curious about two things, Nick.
One, which is this will essentially be the mayor of the largest city in the country who is absolutely loathed and hated by moneyed interest.
He's going, like, it's not like he's going to be trying to do these reforms like in a vacuum.
He's going to be doing it more or less in an active class war with one of the most moneyed interest populations in the country.
The second part is whether or not, like, what will the Democratic Party do in terms of messaging and reacting if he wins?
And the rank and file of the Democratic Party hopes he loses.
Like, they really do, because they will have to deal with a representative leftist in a major, high-profile position.
So I'm curious.
I have my thoughts on it, but how do you see both of those things shaking out?
The war against the money class in New York City and also what will happen with the Democratic Party in terms of its relationship with him and its base.
Let's attack that last, the second question, I guess, first, because you would like to think that I think he's going to win.
I don't even know if I want to even entertain a thought he's not going to win this one, right?
So let's just say I think he's going to win as well.
Yeah.
And so you like to think that that's finally going to be the thing where they embrace and they realize, okay, he's part of the fold.
We now need to have him be part of the family.
But I would imagine that you're going to have those old head dinosaurs in there who are just simply not going to, they're just going to continue to waffle and not really commit and be worried about the things he might have said about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
By the way, the local GOP wants to cite him for insurrection for those things, right?
Whatever happened to him.
And deport him out of the United States of America.
Yeah, and have him be deported, right?
And then the major GOP party is also trying to do that as well with certain things he might have said something on his application form to be the citizen that was accurate, but like they don't like it.
So at any rate, so you like to think that he would be embraced further, but I would imagine, yes, he'll end up being at arm's length with quite a number of the Democratic top, right?
Which will be ridiculous.
And then you have to imagine after a year and they realize, oh, he actually is, you know, maybe affecting change in a way that's positive.
It's working and it's not this insane thing.
We're not going to get, you know, all thrown into some weird boat.
Then, yeah, eventually maybe you'll have him.
Obama, by the way, did call him, had a phone call.
He told him if he wins, he's willing to like talk to him.
Yeah, you can always, you know, I'll be a sounding board.
So, you know, that's, that's something, but it's hard to believe that they couldn't even quite get a, you know, Hokul did.
Hoko appeared, you know, he raised your arm and victory and the triumphant, you know, a sense on that stage.
So there's a following there, I suppose.
But yeah, so I would like to think that that would be part of it.
What was the first part of the question you were asking?
The battle that he's going to have against the moneyed population of New York City if he actually tries to carry out his reforms.
I don't know.
I think, I mean, I think it'll be a battle.
And I think there's a lot of entrenched power there.
And he might end up being like, you know, I remember that shot of Clinton, like, he got in the office, and it was gonna be Camelot again.
And he was all excited.
And then they had smiles on their faces and about I don't know, like three, there's three months later, they have a shot of him.
He's sitting in there on the phone.
He's sitting in that office, you could just see on his face.
He's like, Well, that's when that's when Alan Greenspan came to talk to him was like, hey, wonderful campaign governor, you're gonna have to play ball or else this whole thing is going down.
Yeah, yeah.
And, and I mean, that's the that's the Warren Beatty speech on network, right?
Like, like, Mr. Beale, you will atone.
That's what that is.
Oh, it's Ed Beatty.
It's Ed Beatty, not Warren Beatty.
My god, come on, Jared.
No, I think, I think both of those things are going to be fascinating.
He is going to be absolutely deluged by constant propaganda.
And honestly, weirdly enough, reverse class warfare from the money to interest of New York City, like he will be like, it is going to be a really, really tense battle if he wins afterwards.
In the Democratic Party, what I'm going to be keeping my eye on as a as an analyst, Nick, is let's say he wins on Tuesday, by Tuesday afternoon, or Wednesday, I'm going to be looking to see what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is doing.
Because you're going to start seeing a discussion.
She's wrapped her arms around him.
And she is basically staked the future of the left wing of the Democratic Party on her association with him.
Then all of a sudden, the next domino to fall, Nick, is whether or not Ocasio-Cortez takes aim at Chuck Schumer, or whether or not we're looking at a possible presidential campaign.
The discussion will then start to reveal something, Nick, which is, you will watch the centrist corporate Democrats start talking even louder about how the party needs to move towards the center, which is, of course, the right, and how many of them sort of wake up to the future of this and realize that there is a possibility for an ascendant movement, much like what happened with Obama.
I am very interested to see what that discourse is going to look like, what signals start to emerge from it.
Because I do think the Democratic Party is currently going through a stress test.
But the stress test, if he wins, I think is only going to increase, especially as all these things with the Trump administration and the authoritarian overreach, they continue.
So I think we're in for a very, very fascinating sort of potential schism within the party.
Yeah, it's crazy that you brought up AOC right at that moment, I was literally had just typed in her name in my other tab, because exactly that is like how that dynamic is really interesting.
And I also kind of want to, you know, examine a little bit of like AOC's legislative accomplishments as well, because she comes in in a similar way.
And, you know, also I'm sure, has endured like the kind of intractable forces that push against those kind of things and change.
And so, you know, the thing about their hand-wringing that we've been having for 10 years plus with the Democratic Party about who we can run, who, you know, Bernie can't possibly win.
And at some point, you're going to have to look at yourself and say, okay, we've done this.
We've tried this.
It's not only not working, you know, in a positive way for us, it's allowing authoritarian creep to continue to get worse.
That's the problem.
So you might as well, we have to pivot on this one and try and find more progressive candidates.
I think, and listen, I'm not a meme guy.
I do not enjoy memes, but over the past couple of days, one of the more, I think, powerful memes, and I'm sure you saw it.
You're very online.
You're a very online dude.
It was when Jon Stewart was interviewing Kamala Harris and he's interviewing her and he's talking about like what might happen if she runs for something in the future.
And she, and he's like, you know, obviously the Democratic Party has to try some new things.
And she starts espousing on incrementalism.
And you look at Jon Stewart and he looks like he saw a ghost, right?
And I think that that feeling, and Jon Stewart is far from a leftist.
Like he is not a fire-breathing leftist.
For him to look at her in the middle of an interview, which was a huge get for him to have her like on his podcast, but for him to recognize, oh my God, you're going to continue going in this direction.
I think that that argument, there's going to be public support for people with leftist positions who are starting to call for actually different solutions.
And I think that's going to come to the forefront and it's going to get very loud very quick, I think, especially if he wins.
And especially because incrementalists are generally Republicans, just paying lip service to those things, right?
They'll probably say, like, even back before, let's say, gay marriage was enacted, they would have said, oh, well, you know, not, it's too fast.
You know, that can't happen so quickly.
Like eventually, yeah, we can see an area, whatever.
But that was always fake because we know they're going to try and reverse it now, right?
But it's what they say.
And when you start to mirror what the GOP is saying, then it really comes off as inauthentic and really well, they became the conservative party.
That's what happened.
And what we're seeing right now is more or less sort of an insurrectional act to try and tug the Democrats back towards the left because they've become conservative, period.
Right.
Give it a shot, I guess what we're here.
You got to give something a shot.
But I am, as a person who sees what I think needs to happen, I'm very excited.
And as an analyst, I'm very excited to see what emerges from this.
Things I'm not excited about, Nick.
In just a random truth social post, the president of the United States of America, Donald Trump, demanded that the military prepare for quick strikes on the nation of Nigeria, citing supposed dangers to Christians in that country, even though that doesn't exist.
It has also come out, as, by the way, targets have been identified in Venezuela for a potential regime change in that country, that plans are in place for strikes in Mexico.
We're now talking about the possibility of three separate theaters of engagement that are just coming completely out of nowhere.
Maybe I'm old-fashioned, Nick, but I don't like the idea that the president of the United States of America reads this information, gets amped up about it, and suddenly we could be possibly striking another country.
I mean, I don't like the idea that he has his own phone.
And this is a situation where the family should be taking the phone away.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, you know, it's like some, you know, fundamentalist Christian heard about somebody maybe gotten mugged or whatever that was.
And you know, on an unfortunate terrible event in Nigeria.
And now, we heard this in South Africa.
It was the same thing.
And then, like, nothing really happened out of that either, except for the fact that he's now letting only South Africans pretty much immigrate to America.
But, um, you know, this has to be a thing where he gets a text and he's like, oh, and the other thing I keep picturing is like John Laroquette plays a colonel in the movie Stripes, and you know, he's supposed to be a serious guy, and he's got these little war toys, what are those called?
Those little soldiers, the 10 inches, whatever, and he's and he's playing with them and he's like blowing them up.
He's got a tank.
It kind of just feels like that's what Trump is doing in his office.
He's kind of playing around with stuff.
He's like, Well, let's do this in real life.
Oh, that sounds like a lot of fun.
And he has no conception of any of this and what how that the planning and everything that involves.
I would be not surprised if Pete Exeth responded to that by saying, Yes, sir.
But it indicated to me, it was like, Yes, sir, like we have no idea what you're talking about.
We're going to get on it like right now as if, you know, no one had this is just on a whim that he just sort of randomly posted about.
Well, I think, on one hand, this is I think a late stage symptom of another thing that happened just recently.
And Nick, it happened over the weekend that Cash Patel came out and said that they had foiled a terror plot in Michigan.
And meanwhile, the people associated with it were like, there was no terror plot.
I don't know what he's talking about.
The U.S. government and the FBI are just saying that they foiled this.
It also reminds me of, I want to say it was a month ago, but what is time, right?
That they found this place in New York City and they said it was a terrorist hub that was ready to knock down the cellular services and internet and all of that.
And everyone's like, what are you talking about?
What's the information here?
There's no background here.
What's happening?
The late stage symptom of this destruction of reality, it isn't just that you can just say, oh, COVID's done.
We're all over, whatever, move along.
Or whatever else, like these cities are, you know, on fire.
So we're going to send federal troops and we're going to send the National Guard.
It literally is always, if left unchecked, if it doesn't stop, it is going to turn into military belligerence.
This is how all of a sudden you just start.
I mean, my God, Nick, I don't even know how many people we've killed outside of Venezuela now with the boats.
I mean, it's not stopping.
It's continuing.
It's just become part of the day at this point.
You can make up whatever story you want that will validate you going into another country and killing God knows how many people.
The fact that we're now on the cusp, and I don't know if any of these three wars are going to come to pass.
They won't shut up about Mexico.
They talked about this before the election even happened.
Venezuela, we have basically a war-like mobilization around that country.
Now, all of a sudden, we're talking about Nigeria.
We are experiencing the symptoms of what happens when the ruling class, the regime, basically is lost completely in their own violent fantasies, their own white supremacist terror fantasies, which means at any given moment, the United States of America can go to war and flex its military might completely and utterly based on insecurity and delusional sort of visions of the world.
Well, what does it say about a president who can't even say in the interview whether he would protect Taiwan if China invades, but it's like willing to go willy-nilly into Nigeria for some reason.
Can you imagine, by the way, the knock on the door to Xi Jinping?
And it's like, Supreme Leader, you won't believe what just got said.
And he's like, oh, great.
This is a wonderful Tuesday.
I love hearing this.
Yeah.
Because like, you know, he's like, oh, they'll know what's going to happen if they go into Taiwan.
China does.
But the interviewer is like, well, why don't you just say it?
Tell us what that would be.
I can't tell you everything.
It's like, he's not going to, I mean, listen, do you think that he would even mount any kind of opposition against China going to Taiwan?
I mean, at this point, I haven't seen anything that tells me that he would.
I mean, you know, I keep talking about the Mad King.
People come to him and give him information that'll move him in one way or another.
I'd have to imagine the military would be like, hey, this is.
you know, basically the D-Day of the modern generation.
It's on.
But I don't know what he would do at this point.
I literally, isn't that crazy?
I really don't know if he would defend Taiwan, which a few months ago, Nick, that was the signal of overt open war with China.
And I don't have a clue at this point.
Yeah, I mean, I don't think he would.
I don't think he's even really thought about it much or cares.
That's the thing.
You know, are we talking like about boots on the ground here in Venezuela or Nigeria?
We've done that in the past.
We went into Somalia, you know, to try and stop, you know, the warlords there.
So, but, but remind me, Jared, you know, it wasn't so long ago he was on the campaign trail amassing millions of votes for certain things he was saying about our presence around the world.
Can you remind me what was happening?
If I remember correctly, it was under the banner of America first and no new wars.
Yeah.
And here we are, right, on the verge of whatever is going to happen here.
And I think there's something else that happens here too, man, because we were talking last week about Venezuela, and we were talking about how as we sort of approach what looks like the possibility of a global conflict, the state powers, much like Russia with Ukraine, are going to start taking over as much territory as possible and as many resources as possible, almost to get ready for a big, giant species threatening game of risk, right?
What happens along with that, though, is that that schism that we've also been discussing with MAGA with all of its internal contradictions, that we have isolationists and white nationalists, neo-Nazis, who at this point are more focused on kind of radicalizing the population and changing American culture than they are going to war elsewhere.
And it's that weird straddling of the left and the right because they're saying we need to invest in communities.
We need to like, you know, like help people.
I thought it was wild.
I don't know if you saw this, Nick.
Josh Hawley pinned an op-ed for the New York Times saying that SNAP benefits needed to be reinstated.
And that right there, that is a signal that like the contradictions of MAGA are starting to really wrench against each other.
If any of these things happen, Venezuela, Mexico, Nigeria, if any of these things happen, you are going to see another schism, much like we were talking about with the Democratic Party.
Like that is going to grind into MAGA, not necessarily to loosen the grip that MAGA has, but I think to deliver more and more people to the further right, like those white nationalists and those isolationists and those extremists.
Like I think those contradictions will come to bear.
For sure.
And don't forget, it's not just Josh Hawley.
It's Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Yep.
It's gone way over her skis criticizing the GOP.
It's truly remarkable.
She still can throw in a nice comment for Trump here and there, but like, I don't know what's going on there.
That's fascinating.
She sounds rational almost, right?
I wouldn't go that far.
I wouldn't go that far.
I'm sorry.
But, you know, she said, compared to where she normally is, it's really, you know, from the Jewish space laser stuff, it's like, this sounds like, hey, what you're saying on healthcare is right.
We need to fix that.
We have to stop.
We have to continue to subsidize so people don't go poor or not have health insurance.
I think Marjorie Taylor Greene is one of the ultimate opportunists that we've ever seen.
Like, I think one of the reasons that she came to power in the first place, and people might not remember this, she was a QAnon candidate.
Like when QAnon was in its heyday, she was, you know, amplifying all these QAnon conspiracy theories and then sort of floated in on that.
Then remember what happened.
I mean, she got embraced like during the Speaker of the House battle because she actually was ascending the ranks of like sort of the rank and file of the Republican Party.
I think now what I'm watching, and unfortunately, my job means that I have to pay a lot of attention to Marjorie Taylor Greene and the things that she says, the language that she's using is much closer to Grouper language.
And by Grouper language, what I mean is that her attacks on MAGA and particularly on the Republican Party at this point, she's basically calling them cucks is what it is, how weak they are and how they're, you know, they're, they're, they're, they're like afraid of, you know, upsetting the deep state or whatever it is, right?
I think Marjorie Taylor Green has recognized that her political future is tied to the ascendant Grouper neo-Nazi crypto-Nazi project, which by the way, I think, I think Josh Hawley is too.
I think they recognize that that's where the Republican Party is going and the future post-Trump is further and further to the extreme right, which I think is why she's making arguments that to a person who is progressive or leftist, like that's what they do.
They start with that critique and then they move to the far right.
And I think that's what she's doing.
Okay.
Fair enough.
I mean, I guess, right, it's all in the manner of all in the getting more votes, I suppose, whatever you can do to do that.
But it was, it's still no less striking and startling.
And, you know, again, the movement on the right indicates that at some point they're going to eat each other and it'll just become a garbled mess of alien versus the thing.
And oh, wow, that would, now that would be an interesting movie, wouldn't it?
That's an interesting movie.
I'd watch that movie.
And I think that's the thing is MAGA as a political project.
And we've made this point.
It's so chained to Donald Trump that like he is the personality engine of MAGA.
But that doesn't mean that it ends with him.
It just means that it changes into something else.
And there will be personalities involved and perhaps there's a person who will take over sort of the reins of it.
And by the way, J.D. Vance is perfectly positioned to be that person.
He has both feet in MAGA and that sort of Groiper tech oligarch world.
But the question is, how is this going to play out and when?
And each thing that happens, such as these belligerencies with these other countries, because fascism cannot stay within itself.
It will fight itself.
It will oppress itself.
It will self-destroy itself.
But eventually it has to project its anger onto people outside, particularly as it needs more resources and more power.
And so we're kind of watching that come to bear now, but I don't know that MAGA has sort of a coherent strategy or ideology on this.
It shows itself to be constantly contradictory, which opens itself up for someone or something that has a coherence to it, at least more of a coherence.
Right.
I shudder when they find that.
I really don't want it to happen.
And I'll tell you what else I don't want it to do.
I don't want it to merge with militarism.
Right.
Well, that's a little bit, you're a little late to that party.
Well, yeah, that you're not wrong.
I'm really afraid about this thing escalating.
Speaking of things I'm scared about escalating, Nick, the reports are right now that ICE is starting to show up around polling stations around the country.
Also fears that this is going to continue.
We've also had from the Department of Homeland Security and all of the ICE leadership, including Tom Holman.
It seems like they are going to start a bounty hunter system in which regular Americans are going to be able to get cash rewards for turning in immigrants to be targeted by ICE.
This to me feels like two giant escalations that unfortunately I think we're going to have to talk about in the near future.
This had already been happening, I think.
There was evidence in my mind.
We'd seen some video of a woman who was like in a parking lot and like some random guy gets out of his car, one person, and kind of goes over and it's kind of indicative of how poorly ICE is trained, right?
They're just signing people up willy-nilly to try and they're incentivizing them.
The more people you can catch, the more money you're going to make.
So I think he literally was like either pulling into a parking lot or a SAR.
And this, I'm going to get, here's one.
I got one.
This is like Planet of the Apes.
And, but he like kind of grabs her by the hand and she's pulling back.
And it's preposterous.
It's like this guy doesn't know anything about enforcement or anything like that.
Like, and in a good way, because, you know, if he was trained, they probably, they take people down and they do this and whatever.
You know, they use that kind of advanced techniques to get them in the cups, whatever.
And it was just, it was, I don't know the other word to say, but preposterous because she's like pulling and he's pulling on her fingers.
And it was just, it was so ridiculous.
And that's what we're going to see more of.
And I got to tell you, in those situations, that's where people get really hurt because Lord knows what's going to happen as that situation spirals out of control.
And probably for the one guy when he's by himself in a situation where people all started to mass around him.
And so I just shuddered to think again more about like what, where we're going to, where we get to the point where it's brother against brother or neighbor against neighbor.
And, you know, turning people in.
We saw this before.
We saw this in Amsterdam in 1941.
Like, this is what you do.
And then people are now going to be hiding in basements or attics.
Well, and by the way, we've already seen this to an extent without necessarily the financial incentive from the government.
Like what happened in Chicago where they came in in Blackhawks and basically arrested everybody in the building and detained them.
It sounds like that was very likely a situation where the landlord wanted to get rid of everybody in the building and then tipped off ICE and then created a cascading series of affairs.
Sell the building because that would raise the value of the property.
Right.
And so as that happens, those are intrinsic economic incentives.
But now all of a sudden, to put it into context, Nick, the standard of living is lowering.
That is part of this project, the self-destructive project.
We also now have a situation.
And by the way, a reminder to everybody, we don't know what's going to happen with these snap relief funds that got ordered by the court.
We don't know if they're actually going to be distributed.
We don't know when.
We don't know how much.
Donate to your local food pantries, women shelters, animal shelters, all of it.
We have to build those systems.
But while people are suffering, Nick, you're then going to add on an incentive, which is, hey, you can join ICE.
We have all the money in the world.
Come over and get a job and do this and become ideologically tethered to Trumpism and MAGA and fascism.
Also, you can start turning people in.
And that turning people in, it's not going to just stop with immigrants.
It's going to be turning in Antifa.
It's going to be turning in thought criminals, you name it.
So putting that out there, that is a major escalation.
But when it comes to the polling stations, that right there, the idea that ICE is going to be intimidating people as they're getting ready to carry out their right to vote, that I think is really the beginnings of something that you and we've sort of touched on this a little bit,
how they might be used as shock troops in order to interfere with elections and that there might be these reactionary forces that can come in in case, you know, they don't like what's happening in a polling place or they don't like what's happening in a city.
I feel like all of the dominoes are starting to line up.
And what's really, I think, disturbing about this is that it's not like it's really being hidden.
You know what I mean?
Like they're really getting out in front of this thing and they're really telegraphing where they're going.
And in both cases, if either of these programs, whether it's voter intimidation or this bounty hunter system, if these things are allowed to really set into place, like these are game-changing, you know, initiatives that really change not just how our society functions in terms of free and fair elections and the freedom to move and the freedom to privacy, but it also changes the incentive structures and it also changes the way that we sort of experience life within the United States of America.
Oh, I agree wholeheartedly.
I mean, picture this scenario.
You are a big real estate person.
You have a big competitor in the same city who is, you know, hires a lot of people to be working on these buildings.
And all of a sudden they get raided by ICE.
And now suddenly that company can't finish this building because all the people there.
It almost sounds like organized crime, Nick.
Almost.
Now, I want you to understand.
I'm describing a scenario that happened in 1975, Jared.
Like this has been something that they've been doing anyway, right?
This is already standard practice.
I know in LA, what a lot of times they'll do is if you don't know like what CEQA is, it's like environmental protection.
And so these developers will just invoke CEQA to try and grind to a halt other, their competitors' stuff.
And then eventually the competitors will pay the other person off and they'll drop the suit.
It's almost like a tax.
So it's, is it that far-fetched to get beyond that into really what was supposed to be, and I don't even know if I'm going to say this properly, but like in some twisted way, right?
The right thinks that, well, they're not here illegally.
So they have to be kicked out, right?
It's a legal thing, right?
But in this respect, it's going to turn into a monetary thing, right?
And a weapon terrible.
And that's what we're going to end up moving.
And let's take that to the next step because you just hit on something very, very important, which is a part of fascism that I think goes underneath the radar.
So like, let's say, for instance, let's just take your scenario, right?
Let's say that there's like two developers and one of the developers calls ICE and says, hey, there's some immigrants over here working on this thing, right?
So then the government comes in, takes those people.
What have we already seen, Nick, that they're creating programs in which the government will detain those people and then lease them out to people to do labor?
So what has actually happened here is that state power and state terror has now allowed the state to get in on that action a little bit.
So the person who would use immigrants for labor would then pay the state for the ability to use that labor.
So it's going to go ahead and send money into the coffers of the people who are carrying this out.
It's organized crime, but on the state level.
And this will give you some whiplash.
I think what you described kind of pretty much closely resembles slavery.
Slavery.
So wrap your head around that.
You know how it's like when we had streaming services and now it's going to end up coming back just like it was before with TV and they had to pay whatever, the four different channels.
This country, right, feels like it's going to be whiplash bookended all the way back around to like slavery.
And, you know, and, you know, certain people won't be able to get married again, it looks like.
And then God knows if women will be able to vote.
Like that, it feels like.
It is the unwinding of the progress of the 20th century.
Yeah, it's not far fetched to find a percentage of the right who want to have handmade stale.
That's a romantic.
They want something worse than handmaid's tale.
I actually think handmaid's tale would be considered quaint compared to what we would have here with digital surveillance and propaganda techniques.
I think it would actually be quaint compared to what these people want.
Okay, they'll watch it like it's a rom-com.
Well, I mean, more or less, they would look at that almost like we look at the honeymooners and are like, oh, what a quaint time.
Right.
Yeah.
And I think when you actually look at this, this is why I always push back when they, when people are like, oh, they want to get rid of, you know, everybody who's not white in this country.
No, that it doesn't work that way.
You can't actually have a country that works that way.
You have to have an underclass that does the labor for you.
So we're actually talking about, and I mean, it's the same thing as bounties as what took place with enslaved people.
Like you can't be everywhere all at once.
You're not able to find all the people that you want.
So you make an economic incentive.
And by the way, back in the day, who were the people who were doing these things?
It was people who were looking to make money.
They were people who needed some sort of a financial sort of support.
And as a result, they carried out the oppressive apparatus of the state and the oppressive apparatus of the wealth class.
So here we have another situation where as things get worse, where are you going to get a job?
Where, you know, tens of millions of people are going to be laid off, you know, theoretically when it comes to AI.
What are they going to do?
Where are they going to look?
They're going to look to ICE.
They're going to look towards, you know, fascist apparatus.
So this whole point is what you just brought up, which is the unwinding of the progress, which goes back to where state violence and state power is going to be more overt as these incentives start to shift.
And looking at this, I mean, and by the way, free and fair elections, that's going back even past like 1776.
You know what I mean?
Like, and by the way, it has shades of Jim Crow in there too.
Like, it's, it's, it's the worst hits that are being put together on a mixtape, more or less.
I, it, it's, you know, I don't know if we've ever really distilled it that way, but, you know, and perhaps the world goes around, it rotates around in a circle, and we're doomed to do that as well.
That's what it feels like.
And then evil Superman goes in the opposite direction.
Thanks, Richard Donner.
Right.
Well, no, but we need the good Superman to do that, right?
No, I see what you mean.
We don't want to go back.
We don't want to go back and we cannot go back and we have to refuse because the things are being put into place are absolutely reprehensible.
Unless you can go back just a few spins until 2015 and then stop it there.
But then you still have 2016.
Going back to the first story when it's talking about Mom Donnie and necessary change and reform, you can't get to 2016 without 2015.
The ground was fertile.
You can't go back there, unfortunately, because everyone forgets what they've learned in the meantime and you go through the whole thing again.
All right, everybody, we are going to be back again with a live show.
Thursday, November 6th, not 5th, 6th, this Thursday at 5 p.m. Eastern on the Patreon page.
We will be answering your questions.
Send those questions to muckrakepodcast at gmail.com or record something over at speakpipe.com slash muckrake podcast.
Looking forward to that live show.
I hope you all come out.
In the meantime, you can find Nick and I over at Blue Sky.
