Weekender Live: AOC’s Opening, Newsom’s Ceiling, and Fighting the Surveillance State
This is a preview of our full Weekender. Support the show by signing up to our Patreon and get access to the full Weekender episode each Friday as well as special Live Shows and access to our community discord: http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast
In a live Weekender taping, Jared Yates Sexton holds down the fort while Nick Hauselman battles the “Socialist Republic of New York,” then tags in for a fast, sharp Q&A. The guys break down what Zoran Mamdani’s win actually signals, whether AOC just gained real 2028 juice, and why Gavin Newsom looks like yesterday’s model in a changing market. They torch the Heritage crowd’s flirtation with Nick Fuentes, talk shutdown brinkmanship and mutual-aid politics, and lay out practical protest security in a surveillance state. There’s a quick detour through JFK/FDR alt-history, a brutal review of that Springsteen movie, and a courtside reality check on a foul-fest Lakers–Spurs game featuring a very mortal Wemby. It’s smart, a little spicy, and deeply unsentimental—just how Muckrake listeners like it.
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Welcome to a live taping of the weekender edition of the Mutt Craig podcast.
I'm Jared Yate Sexton.
Nick Houseman is not here.
He is currently navigating the socialist republic of New York.
He will be with us in a few short minutes.
Before we get going, first things first, I'm so happy to be doing a live show and watching the chat play out with all of our subscribers.
As we're answering these questions, feel free to ask questions there in the chat.
If we see them and it sparks something, we will refer to them.
And yeah, really looking forward to it.
For those who are listening to this as a preview of the weekender, head over to patreon.com slash montraigpodcast and support the show, do live tapings like this, specials, all of that, and to hear the entirety of the weekender.
And I got to tell you, the questions that have been sent in so far are really, really good.
And I am looking forward to getting to all this stuff.
So patreon.com slash Mutt Craigpodcast.
So I'm sitting here.
By the way, I saw that some people have their beers ready.
I am taking down a Red Bull because it has been one of those kinds of days.
I hope wherever you are, whatever you're doing, it's been a decent day.
There's a lot to talk about.
Of course, there is a little bit of excitement stemming from the elections on Tuesday.
Our first question is going to be about Zorhan Mamdani.
And before we get to that, I just want to speak on what we saw on Tuesday, which is a complete repudiation of the Trump administration, rising fascism within the United States of America.
It was one of those moments that I think for a lot of people who've been very frustrated and afraid, a nice little respite.
And I hope you felt that.
I hope that you were able to bring that in and hold it a little bit because this is a long fight that we are in the middle of, a very, very long and arduous fight.
And victories in politics.
And I said this the other day when I was talking with Danielle Moody, that politics will break your heart constantly.
And I don't think that we need to look at what happened on Tuesday as a victory for the Democratic Party, but more as a victory for the people.
And that there are more of you than there are of them.
The oligarchs, the wealth class, and all of their stooges, their numbers are minuscule compared to us.
So I hope wherever you're listening to this or watching this, I hope that you felt a little bit of emboldening in the spirit because that is going to be absolutely vital moving forward.
And with that, we're going to get to the questions.
The first question is from Heather.
Zoron.
Oh, I'm so happy he actually won.
I feel hopeful for the first time in forever.
What do you think is going to happen?
And do you think this will shift the Democratic Party?
So I, first of all, I felt similarly.
You know, I watched this rise of Zorhan Mamdani as a candidate.
And for me, it was like a breath of fresh air after so long.
Here was an authentic person who also happened to be a leftist.
And his politics spoke to me in a really big way.
And, you know, leading up to the election on Tuesday, I was so worried for a variety of reasons.
One is, of course, how many people in this country have been indoctrinated against anything that helps actual people.
On top of that, the fear-mongering, the racism, all of it, just putrid, putrid shit.
Andrew Cuomo disgraced himself yet again, which is really saying something because he has disgraced himself constantly as a politician.
And for him to perform like this in the campaign, I was really worried that people were going to go into the ballot box and be won over by fear.
But what we actually saw on Tuesday was an act of tremendous courage.
Voters went out and they said, you know what, I'm not going to let fear keep me from trying to make things better.
And I think that is incredibly encouraging and a beautiful thing.
Now, the question is, do I think that this will somehow or another portend a shift within the Democratic Party?
And what I was watching for in the wake of the election on Tuesday, I was watching for how moderates, centrist, establishment Democrats, how they would react, how the media would react, and of course, how the far right would react.
And what I saw, the biggest reaction to it was actually among the right.
And it wasn't just fear, and there was an ungodly amount of fear that happened.
I was watching Fox News and Newsmax and all of those putrid places.
And they were so frightened by the idea of a Democratic socialist gaining power in the United States of America in any way, shape, or form that they were incoherent.
They weren't even able to actually communicate with each other.
They were talking past each other.
It was a big, giant, confusing soup.
I don't know how else to explain it.
But what else has sort of manifested in the past couple of days?
For those who haven't seen it, and I couldn't even tell you where it was at at this point, Steve Bannon was interviewed about Mamdani.
And I think he actually nailed it to a certain extent in saying that Mamdani is serious, that the leftists are serious, the Democratic Socialists, the socialists, and you name it, that those people are very, very serious and talented and driven.
And he recognized that the real threat to his political project and the political project of MAGA and the white nationalists and the fascists in this country, the actual threat is going to come from a real, actually organized left.
And that's how it always works in history.
If you look back through the cycles, when you have rising fascism, you have a leftist response to it.
And in the middle with the moderates, more often than not, because they are part of the system, they've been treated well by the system, they've been rewarded for their allegiance to the system, they usually go ahead and move towards the right and ally with the fascists because they are the ones who are going to, they think, protect the status quo and to maintain their standard of living and wealth and influence.
And watching the Democratic Party react to this, it was predictably tepid.
I think a lot of the strategists, I think a lot of the consultants who are paid, of course, by corporations to keep the Democratic Party locked in as a conservative alternative to fascism, there was bewilderment.
There was denial.
I think that they are continuing to think somehow or another that maintaining their status as a conservative party is going to somehow or another win out or is going to in some way, shape, or form, carry the day.
We know that isn't true, but we can also see panic from the Democratic Party in recognizing that the people will. vote for a leftist, particularly if that leftist is offering answers to the material conditions and problems.
So I don't think that this is necessarily going to portend the future of the party.
I think what we're going to see is a larger battle.
We already have a civil war demolition derby going on within the Democratic Party.
It just so happens that Momdani's candidacy, winning the primary and eventually winning the election, it made apparent what was already festering underneath the surface.
And if you pay attention to deep politics, if you have any relationship with the Democratic Party, whether it's being on strategy calls or getting these memos and white papers and all of that, all of the money has been pushed towards making the Democratic Party more conservative.
And that is simply because all of the money that is given to them by corporations and the wealth class, which also fund the Democratic Party, they want the Democratic Party to be moderate at best and conservative always.
I don't know exactly where this battle is going to go.
And it is one of the great lingering questions that we have.
And on that note, I'll go ahead and move on to the next question, which is from Bill.
Tuesday's elections seem to reflect the growing power of AOC and Gavin Newsom.
I couldn't help but feel like this gave us a preview of what we're going to look at heading into 2028.
Am I off base here?
And I'll go ahead and start with my standard disclaimer, which is we don't know what 2028 is going to look like.
We don't know what 2026 is going to look like.
So we have to be careful and couch ourselves when we start talking about those future elections.
A lot has happened in the past nine months of the first Trump presidency and conditions are rapidly deteriorating.
We don't know where power is going to be at that point.
We only know that unless there is an alternative and an actual fight about this thing, that conditions are going to get worse.
And if conditions get worse and there's no actual counterbalance to it, we're going to move further and further into fascism.
So we don't know what 2028 is going to look like.
But to take the question from Bill at its face value and get into the actual mechanics of it, it was clear that on election night on Tuesday, that the focus was on who gained the most from those elections.
Mamdani, of course, cannot run for president.
And so the light sort of moves over to Alexandria Casio-Cortez.
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