Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman dig into the reported double-tap strike on fishermen ordered under Pete Hegseth, why both the first and second hits are war crimes, and how Trump somehow manages to both deny and admit responsibility in the same breath. From there they track the widening fallout, from a possible Venezuela strike and resource grab to corrupt pardons for drug traffickers and oligarchs, all wrapped in the familiar language of “security” and “freedom.”
The conversation turns to the DC National Guard shooting by a former CIA-linked Afghan asset, the long shadow of blowback, and how decades of unaccountable covert operations have shredded public trust and reality itself. Then it is on to the Olivia Nuzzi and Ryan Lizza mess, the alleged secret Butler, Pennsylvania Trump recording, and how access journalism plus capitalism keeps turning vital evidence into premium content. They close with a sharp look at the real history and purpose of Thanksgiving, and why JD Vance’s war on turkey is perfectly on-brand for a ruling class that hates joy almost as much as it loves power.
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
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Well, what about the Sisyphus thing where, you know, there's nobility in good, meaningful, meaning, meaningless work, I suppose?
If there is a way to explain what it feels like to shovel snow as more snow comes down, it's Sisyphian.
Sisyphian, absolutely.
When's the last time you shoveled snow?
Oh, my goodness, dear Jared.
When's the last time you picked up a snow shovel and got to work?
You know, you're going to get into double figures here in terms of years, if you ask me.
Do you think that you could shovel a drive right now?
You know, that's another good question.
You know, with the back the way it is these days, I probably could do a little bit, but I wouldn't want to go more than about 15.
I went outside and I was just like, okay, today is a wash.
Yeah.
Right.
There have been good things that have happened today.
I've done a little bit of work.
I was just like, I'm going to grab the bottle of Jim Beam.
I'm going to put it in the snow.
It's going to cool it.
I'm going to do half the drive.
I'm going to have a nip and then I'm going to do the rest of the drive.
I didn't want to do this today.
Well, I'm glad to hear that you're functioning as you are.
I am functioning and we are functioning.
Listen, everybody, I'm going to lay it on the line.
I'm going to be frank.
I know you always hear me say, head over to patreon.com slash McCraig podcast.
I always say that because you're listening to the previews of the weekender.
You want to listen to the entire show.
We need your support.
We actually need your support because we need to keep this thing going.
We need to keep this thing growing.
Times are hard right now.
If you are listening to this show, if you support this show, if it has meant something to you, please head over to patreon.com slash montcraigpodcast.
Become a patron, gain full access to the weekender, but also please support us.
We need that more than ever.
Nick, there is, I'm looking at the rundown right now and what a wild time this is, just in general.
I mean, it's this thing where it's like, it evolves every day.
It mutates.
It festers.
It changes constantly.
We begin with a report that Secretary of Defense, and no, I'm not going to call him Secretary of War, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on a September 2nd strike on fishermen.
We're not going to just do the journalistic thing where we're like, maybe they were trafficking drugs.
A strike on fishermen by the U.S. military.
There was one strike which destroyed the ship.
The surveillance noticed that two of the people were still surviving.
They ordered a second strike.
If you're wondering at home what that means, that is a war crime.
And by the way, the first strike was a war crime, but we'll talk more about that in a second.
There is a large controversy growing around this.
There are some things that stick.
There are other things that fall by the wayside when it comes to scandals.
This is not just something that could continue to haunt Hegseth and the Trump administration.
I think it is so repulsive and so indefensible, Nick, that this is the kind of thing that people read about and they see like some sort of twisted, distorted vision of humanity in it.
This is brutal and awful.
Well, it also shows you how horrible it is because someone was willing to leak it because we would never ever have known this at all had somebody not leaked it to the press because this would have been something that was completely top secret in the military.
So we're now getting a little bit clearer sense on why we had this video from the lawmakers who tell everybody not to do unlawful orders.
This could very well have been related to that.
Remember, there were people who survived another attack and they rescued them and then they couldn't charge them because there was no crime to charge them with and then they returned them to their original countries.
It's a little bit strange.
In my mind, this would have been reverse.
They would have done the second strike, no quarter, which is a war crime, and then they would have heard the blowback like this.
And then they would have the next time said, Okay, we're going to rescue somebody, whatever.
They did this in reverse, which is strange to me in the sense that they're just getting more and more emboldened and more and more, like, I guess, fed up with the whole, you know, what they would call bureaucracy, which you and I would call laws.
And so now they're just, you know, issuing orders.
And this is the kind of thing where there's going to be a bipartisan investigation in the Senate.
And so we can only hope that they're going to, you know, either get him on perjury or get him on war crimes.
So I want to say a few things about this because, you know, stories like this, they bubble up.
And I actually think these things are important.
There are moments in American history where war crimes capture the spotlight.
And one of the reasons why they actually hold weight is because the United States of America, for all of the crimes it's committed, for all the abuses it's committed, it needs the veneer of benevolence, right?
It needs the veneer of like actually carrying things out in the right way.
This is so overtly like, and the reporting on this, Nick, I don't know if you did this.
I don't know how you consume news.
I don't know how you sort of experience this.
I took a moment over this weekend when I read about this, and I imagined, first of all, being in a room watching a strike that I had commanded and watching people die, right?
Like watching an attack that I personally, and I couldn't do it.
I could not call for that.
And I understand that there are people who need to call for military strikes and all of that, even though it is so awful.
But like to watch people who had survived this, who were struggling to live after it, to then order another, you know, military precision strike.
I couldn't do it.
My humanity revolted from it.
And I think that's one of the reasons why this actually resonated the way that it did.
And you have to look at Pete Hegseth before he was even the Secretary of Defense, he lobbied for Trump to pardon war criminals, people who had killed innocent people and slaughtered innocent people.
The idea of being in a room and calling for these things reveals something about his character that a man like this should never be anywhere near the levers of power.
And I think that that resonates.
And by the way, the investigation that you talked about, it's bipartisan.
Even Republicans are saying, you know, this isn't okay.
It isn't saying that the fever is breaking.
It's saying that the veneer of benevolence and professionalism, when it comes to the military, that is at the top of the pecking order when it comes to the things that people need to maintain.
And it feels like this type of thing is so overtly wrong that it's actually going to get investigated.
You know, it's so wrong that even President Trump weighed in on this and expressed his opinion in opposition to what happened.
I'm going to play this so they got the soundbite from the airplane.
Well, hopefully you can understand and hear it because it's not always easy on these planes.
But this is what Trump said when they asked him directly about the second strike that killed these people who were just floating in the water.
But Pete said that didn't happen.
Does that mean they'll find out about it?
He said he did not order the death of those civilized.
So a lot of work going on, a lot of parsing of language here, even for him.
Is this man the president of the United States of America?
Yes, he is.
Okay.
Then why in the fight?
And that's the thing about this.
Like his ability to say, I don't know anything about it is the wildest thing that continues to just keep happening.
And like, so at some point you have to ask, like, who is in charge of this thing?
And I'm not asking for everyone to be Truman with the buck stops here.
And by the way, the buck did not stop with Truman.
The military, you know, industrial complex and the intelligence complex like ran rampant over Truman.
But like when, when are we finally going to say, hey, are you in charge or are you not?
Because you can't just say, oh, I don't know anything about it.
I was, you know, hanging out.
I was playing golf.
I was like eating my dinner in bed.
Like, when in the world are we going to actually look at this thing?
I don't know.
I would never is the answer.
Never.
It's never.
But the idea that he would say that and like, I don't really know anything.
And he might not be lying at that point.
He might not have been briefed.
You know, it sounded like they had the discussion because he knew that Hegseph told him that he did not.
Again, he said he didn't kill those people, whatever like the language is not exactly saying.
And what his response was in public was not a denial.
It was not enough of a denial for me, at least to say that, oh, we didn't do that.
And, you know, it's going to come out.
We're going to find out.
It's pretty tough to report on this kind of stuff if he didn't have it dead to rights with multiple sources confirming it, wouldn't you say?
Yeah, nobody messes with the Pentagon if they don't have their reports in a row.
That's the one place where at least journalists, and we'll talk more about journalism and its problems in a little bit, but that is the one place where journalism does not fuck around.
They're not going to mess around with military operations, period.
Yeah.
So I'm more than willing to believe that this is what happened.
And they probably have the video of it as well.
Now, who's in charge of, you know, enforcing war crimes at this point?
And who's going to listen to them?
If the Hague issues some sort of thing, then, you know, Trump's going to dangle his, he's, you know, he's got absolute immunity.
Pete Hegseth is going to hide under that, you know, umbrella and no one's going to respond to it.
Well, and I mean, the United States has stayed out of the International Criminal Court for a reason.
That way they could carry out war crimes without any sort of consequence whatsoever.
You know, and that's the other thing.
You know, a couple of the topics that we're talking about today, they are the consequences of things that the United States has done in the past in the pursuit of their own quote unquote benevolent, you know, hegemonic agenda, which is, well, you know, if we do it, it's not, it's not going to be wrong, but we also don't want to be judged by international bodies, you know, outside of ourselves, whether it's the United Nations or the Hague or the International Criminal Court, whatever it is.
But it is, if you get to the point where Pete Hegseth is in charge of the United States military, this is the type of shit that's going to happen.
And it's the type of shit that's happened before.
It just so happens that it's being talked about now because there is no discipline.
People hate these people.
Also, I just want to remind people, Nick, we talked about it whenever he talked to the generals.
We talked about like the way that he treats the military and the way that he is above them and they don't respect him.
Do you think it's a coincidence that shit like this is being leaked?
Do you think that this is in any way, shape or form like away from that relationship that he has already soured?
Like this stuff does not come up.
This stuff does not get leaked if there is a matter of respect or reciprocity.
So what we're actually seeing here is a little bit of pushback from, you know, the seeds that he has sown already.
Yeah.
And the guy in charge in the military of this area already stepped down, you know, a year early because of this.
We know that.
And now, again, it would be nice if they came out and just sort of made it really explicitly clear, but it is clear anyway that they didn't want any part of these extrajudicial killings.
And, you know, and we can't ignore that, like, Obama was doing this with drone strikes and killing.
Oh, God, yes.
And I suppose we weren't marching and demanding him, you know, his resignation, which is a problem as well.
Yeah.
And I mean, this is the type of, I mean, the United States military has been committing war crimes since there was the United States military.
Right.
You know, and in the modern era, it just so happens that we've picked and chosen, you know, where we care about this stuff.
You're absolutely right.
Like the things that Obama was doing under his presidency, expanding the drone program, it should have been an outrage.
Like some people were pissed off about it, but other people are like, yeah, what are you going to do?
You're president of the United States of America.
Also, by the way, related, Nick, when it comes to Venezuela, Trump just unilaterally announced that the airspace over Venezuela was closed, leading to a lot of conjecture that a U.S. strike was imminent against Venezuela.
We still have not seen that, but that situation continues to develop.
And it feels like the smart money is on the United States of America attacking Venezuela, maybe sometime in the near future.
Well, then we have to talk about Trump pardoning Honduras' ex-president, who was a convicted drug dealer, drug trafficker, right?
For the same reason that they're supposedly attacking Venezuela, he's now letting other people off scot free.
And the corruption part of all of this is just really what's galling because I think it's clear that's what this is.
Somebody gave him a bunch of money and he's going to simply pardon them.
We saw that happen earlier with the Bitcoin, with the, you know, not Bitcoin, but yeah, with the, you know, altcoins scandal where he's like, he didn't even know the guy that he parted because they just sent him a check.
He's like, great.
Let me sign the, you know, the paper.
So that is also very disgusting because it just becomes even more clear that they don't really care about this.
They're not trying to protect anybody from drugs, you know, and keep people alive in this country.
They're just looking for ways to make more money.
Well, and I think, and by the way, the pardoning thing, there has to be a major look at that.
Like whatever goes forward, however we deal with this, there has to be just one measure after another that looks at all of the incriminations that have taken place during the Trump administration and recent history.
I mean, you know, because I want people to know that we're calling balls and strikes where they are.
I mean, Bill Clinton's past with pardons was just abysmal, very, very disturbing shit.
And so we need to take a look at that.
But when it comes to Venezuela, Nick, this started, it really felt like it was a natural resources grab.
We, of course, talked about growing geopolitical tensions, you know, basically trying to grab as many resources as humanly possible before some sort of battle erupted or some sort of a conflagration.
That, of course, was being pushed also by Marco Rubio.
This is one of his pet projects.
He wants to overthrow Maduro in Venezuela.
Am I wrong?
But does it not feel as if this is a serious wag the dog situation in which Trump is trying like hell to change the conversation from the Epstein scandal and also to try and whip his numbers right now are at an all-time low.
Like it is really, really falling apart for a variety of reasons, including a couple of the stories we have to talk about today.
But does it not feel as if we are sprinting into an unnecessary conflict, not just because of resources and not just because of personal predilections, but also because he needs to do this politically at this point?
Doesn't it feel like that's what's driving parts of this?
Well, you know, I would imagine that like all the killings in the ocean would be that would serve that.
That's a nice distraction or whatever.
Why is it escalating to now potentially ground forces and closing down airspace and much more, threatening it to an actual land invasion, is interesting.
Um, and perhaps that was the playbook, I guess.
Right, we'll start with some you know some light killing in the ocean and you know murders, and then we'll go into like you do, like like one yeah, like an authoritarian does um, and so I suppose that could be all part of the escalation, knowing that, like the Epsilon thing, this doesn't really want to go away.
That said, they did get a reprieve.
I haven't heard much about it in the last, you know, over the holiday weekend, part of it which, by the way, I hope you had a great thanksgiving.
I hope you had a wonderful thanksgiving.
Thank you, I did, and so uh, at any rate, I hope everybody out there did, and meanwhile it was probably more wonderful because we didn't have to hear about the Epsilon stuff and all that's you know, going on.
I don't know why it took a break.
Is it coming back up?
I, I don't know.
Is it well?
I mean, we're always a couple of days away.
I i've heard rumors that more tranches of emails are going to be coming out very, very soon.
I mean I.
It's not going to just go away, and neither are these scandals.
I mean, we got to talk about Kash Patel here in just a second who, by the way, is jetting around the country in the Fbi's private jet, going to his girlfriend's.
Like going out to dinner with her and going to her singing the national anthem.
I mean, like it it.
The problem here isn't that like.
The problem here is that this administration is is like by default, crooked right, like nobody in this administration is actually competent.
All of them are on the take.
All of them are stealing money.
All of them have a cravenness to them that most people revolt against.
Like there is no way to make this popular.
Nothing they're doing is going to be supported.
Whether it's austerity, shredding the social safety net, ruining the economy, starting unnecessary wars, enriching themselves.
It doesn't matter what it is.
None of this is going to be popular.
And it reminds me Nick, and I don't know if you ever had this, have you ever had something like in your house right, something that wasn't working or it was broken and you needed to fix it, and you're like messing with it and you're like well, i'll try this thing uh, i'll try this thing.
Uh, i'll try this thing and by the time you get really frustrated and pissed off about it, you just kind of like whack it.
You know what I mean.
Like i've got an ice maker that will not work right now, you know, and it's just like I just want to shake it.
I just want to like, really like, give it a, you know, give it like a quick punch or something like.
That doesn't fix it either, you know.
It's just to the point where you're trying everything and then eventually you're going to lash out as you're trying to fix the thing, but that is actually like the last resort of frustration and none, nothing is going to fix this.
There's no way to make any of this popular in any way, shape or form, and people are like rejecting it because it deserves to be rejected.
I mean, when you say this, I think you're just talking about the Trump administration overall yeah, and culture and politics in general.
Yes, the life that we're living in, the life that we're living right now, Yeah, exactly.
Well, I mean, if you know, it wasn't that long ago that we had to just deal with the most corrupt cabinet we've ever seen in the first Trump administration.
And I remember talking about it then, thinking somebody's got into the room and made it clear from the first minute that they were sworn in that you're going to be allowed to do whatever you want because it was really quick, right?
Oh, I think that was when they were picking the cabinet.
They were in a meeting at Mar-a-Lago, and someone's like, wait, what am I going to be able to do?
And they're like, what can you imagine doing?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, how can we don't ask how we can help you ask how you can.
Well, and by the way, the first administration, the cabinet was picked not just because they were Republicans who would work with Trump, but basically everybody who got picked for a position was obsessed with destroying the cabinet position that they were taking.
Right.
And in this one, it's like finishing the job, but also getting a little bit of scratch while you're at it.
It was also a challenge because you had to find people who didn't criticize Trump in the first, before the first election in 2016.
So that also wasn't as easy.
And who's left who didn't do that?
The grifters and the real corrupt people who knew that they could, you know, bilk this if he did win.
So it's been that way.
It's just really, really gross.
Now, that said, that speech that we're talking about that they must have gotten to say, hey, have at it, probably is told to everybody in Congress on both sides of the aisle.
There's some version of that and some degree of insider trading and whatnot that goes on.
So it is a real problem.
And I want to go back to just point out the fact that if we can't get rid of the presidential power of pardon, pardon people, I don't know that that's going to have to be one of the first things that needs to go to start righting the wrongs.
It has to.
I mean, there's a list of like number one priorities.
One, you have to have like a truth and reconciliation committee.
Like you have to have somebody going through the past few years and, you know, being like, no, this was wrong.
And these were the crimes committed.
Citizens United has to go.
The Supreme Court has to be dealt with.
You name it.
It's any number of these things, but exactly.
Like the presidential pardons and all of these things that create the Unitarian executive situation, they have to go.
There's no way around it.
Nick, another story that took place.
We, of course, did our weekender analysis of the movie One Battle After Another.
And this took place around then.
In Washington, D.C., allegedly, an Afghani national named Ramanallah Lakinawal shot two National Guards member, killed one of them, injured the other.
This story keeps getting weirder and weirder.
Lakinawal was in America because he had worked with the American government in Afghanistan, apparently had a relationship with the CIA.
This story, which of course was being used as, oh, immigrants are committing crime and something needs to be done about it.
500 additional National Guardsmen were dispatched to DC after this.
This is strange.
And one of the things, and I don't know how you feel about it, because you and I, I think, are wired pretty similarly in a lot of regards.
My ears always perk up a little bit when something really big happens.
And in the aftermath of it, I don't feel like I learn much more about it.
It just kind of gets quieter and quieter.
This is one of those stories for me because when it happened, when I heard that there was this shooting, I was like, oh my God, this is going to be a major event that could possibly shift a lot of things.
And since then, it's gotten quieter and quieter and less has been said about it.
Am I wrong here or are your spidey senses going off?
Because I really, really feel very strange about this story.
Well, I think in this era, whatever era we're going to call this, you have to be able to just accept the fact that we're not going to know anything about any of these things.
For some reason, there's been this lack of ability to get more information about Trotty Kirk, about the Butler Pennsylvania assassination attempt.
The Las Vegas shooting.
Las Vegas.
That was a while ago.
That was what, 2019, perhaps.
You know, so that is very, very strange.
Yes, that we can't seem to get anybody on the ground in, I guess it would be journalism to figure out what some of the more of these truths are.
We used to get these really in-depth and long articles that would really dive deep into the people's families and their motivations and stuff like that.
There'd be books written about it.
And now there's nothing.
You're right.
There's just a huge absence of information.
And it's really, really worrying, made worse by the fact that the National Guard troops were ruled illegal and should not have been there starting a week before this all happened.
So then you got to start throwing out, well, is this a false flag operation?
Is this their way of making sure they don't have to take out the National Guard and they can add more National Guard to, you know, to the streets without having to listen to whoever the judges are telling them to do.
It all makes it really, really confusing.
It's so strange.
So Lackinowal, for those who haven't followed up on the story, you've had to like dig deep to find it.
He was living in Bellingham, Washington, Bellingham, Washington state, and then drove across the country to do this.
And Lackinawal wasn't just like, you know, I guess assisting the United States military.
Like in Afghanistan, he was recruited as a child soldier and eventually was put into the equivalent of a CIA-backed death squad, which is really weird, really, really strange.
And I don't exactly know what to say about this besides the word that keeps running laps in my head, which is blowback.
And people who don't know what blowback is, it's whenever an operation leads to some sort of a consequence that was unintended.
It gets out of hand and then eventually it ends up sort of coming back to bite you in the ass.
And in this case, I said it when we did the weekender talking about one battle after another.
I just had a quick little moment.
If I understand this correctly, the National Guard was put into place in order to provoke a reaction, right?
And also to spread the feeling of a police state in control by the government and also to sort of set off altercations.
And a CIA asset ended up shooting two of them for a reason that nobody knows.
We haven't heard any sort of an explanation for why that occurred.
We haven't heard anything.
What this comes down to, and we could sit here and do conspiracy theories all day long, and that's not why we have this show.
But it comes down to this, Nick, which is the CIA has been one of the most destabilizing and damaging forces since it originated in the post-World War II territory.
We don't know why they're necessarily doing, I mean, we haven't even talked about this.
It feels like something is going on in Mexico that is CIA back trying to overthrow the government in Mexico.
Like it is a really weird situation that's taking place right now.
Anytime you see something happening around the world, you have to be like, hmm, are we involved in that?
And there's no, there's not really oversight.
There's no small D democratic sort of energy to it.
It's always trying to manipulate things.
People are getting killed.
People are being hurt constantly.
There's no explanation for it.
It ruins reality as an objective idea.
You never exactly know.
And looking at them in general, it is such a damaging force that something like this occurs.
And I just, and I know that I've been accused of being cynical and pessimistic, but I look at this thing and I'm just like, the numbers don't add up here.
And knowing that he's a CIA asset and knowing what has been put in place, it's another instance where I just say something is really fucked up.
And all I know is that that fucked up, those people should not have been there.
I mean, the woman who got killed did not want to be there.
She didn't want to be doing this duty.
She should not have been in the place to being killed.
I don't know why she got killed.
I don't know what factors led to it.
All I know is that this thing stinks to high heaven.
And by the way, you can bypass the conspiracy part of this by just sort of saying what you said in terms of he they could have been suffering from PTSD, really just a deep mental, you know, anguish that was going on based on his experiences in Afghanistan.
And so coming back here, you know, but that said, there could also be a lot of animus towards the United States and how other people he knew were treated.
Well, and what happened in Afghanistan, which was a failure.
Let's go ahead and call it what it was.
Yeah, exactly.
So, you know, so the blowback, all those things could be this in actual outpouring where he got to the point where he's like, I'm willing to go there and take some people out.
It certainly wasn't targeted because I believe, if I wasn't mistaken from the reporting, that these two National Guardsmen were very new.
They had just sort of joined the National Guard.
They were not, you know, anybody that he would have necessarily targeted.
So, you know, I'm going to go take a shot at these people.
I'm that upset.
I'm that pissed off.
I'm that dysregulated from all the experiences.
You know, I don't know if we're going to find out, you know, just like we're not going to find out about, you know, Charlie Kirk assassinated.
I mean, I don't think we're going to find out either.
And that is the thing about it.
You know, you brought up like what needs to happen on the other side of this thing.
And for, I mean, 80 years now, the CIA has been engaged in one thing after another that shouldn't have happened, like have hurt unknown numbers of people.
I say this all the time.
Almost every war and almost every altercation and almost every tragedy, it has its roots in mistakes the United States of America has made trying to control the world in a way that has failed.
Right.
And we've seen it.
The post-war, if you want to call it the liberal order, whatever it is, it has failed.
It has ruinously failed.
And if you take a look at all of these things, like, and one of the things, you and I talk about this all the time, it comes up.
It's like, what happened with, you know, Kennedy and splintering the CIA, right?
Like somebody at some point or another needs to say, this is an organization that has not only outlived its use, but has done way more damage than it has done good.
And it needs to stop.
This is anti-democratic.
This is oppressive.
It's authoritarian.
And on top of that, make your arguments that it quote unquote works.
It doesn't work.
America's obsession with controlling geopolitics has bit itself in the ass so many times that the jury, the jury's in.
It has failed in every way, shape and form.
Yeah.
At best, it could be a, they could, we could have enough distraction for, you know, five, six, seven years where we start to feel like, oh, things are kind of calm.
Like I'm thinking mid-90s and then leading directly to 9-11, right?
So that's the best case scenario for all these different things there is that you can get a few moments of peace, people forget about it for a little while, and then they're right back up to their tricks.
And we know that they've already, you know, the past these laws, they're not supposed to be meddling in other countries like they used to, right?
That's supposed to be completely against the rules.
And whether or not they were honoring that law, I don't know.
Again, we don't find out any of this stuff.
The lack of transparency for democracy is pretty severe under the guise of national security.
It's a real problem.
And then, you know, the men in black thing spawned from this, right?
This whole, there's all most people probably do believe in that to some degree, that there is this sort of controlling cabal in the shadows.
This doesn't help any of these things.
Well, no, it doesn't.
And one of the reasons that it doesn't help is because it's there is the reason why conspiracy theories take place is because there is a distance between the people and power, right?
And it's intentional.
And it's not the way it's supposed to work.
And I know this seems, this seems quaint.
I know this seems like, you know, it's a wonderful life, what I'm saying here, right?
Like, I understand that a government is going to have secrets because, you know, the course of power and decisions are sometimes going to have secrets.
I'm not sitting here saying that everything that always gets done, everybody has to always know about.
I understand that, right?
I'm not high in the sky utopian here.
But the degree at which the powerful control the government and the economy and culture and all of this stuff, it creates a feeling among the people that something is happening in the rooms that they are not privy to.
And that's earned.
Every time somebody says in an interview, can you believe institutions don't have trust anymore?
I'm like, yes, absolutely.
They've earned that distrust.
And to look at what's happening, like, Nick, literally anything that happens in the world at this point, you kind of have to have a moment where you're like, is the CIA involved in this?
And most of the time, the answer is yes.
Most of the time, the answer is yes.
And that is untenable.
Like, there's a reason why America has lost soft power.
There's a reason why people have lost trust in the United States of America.
We earn that distrust by doing this type of shit.
It doesn't also help that, like, a lot of times these journalists won't even release what they reported or they found out about unless they're writing a book or something.
Well, that is that's a that's a hell of a segue.
That's why you are the best co-host in the business.
Nick, I, I have tried really hard to not talk about the Olivia Nuzzy RFK, Ryan Lizza thing.
Why?
Because it's gossip.
I have no desire to talk about the personal lives of these people.
On top of that, like they have made it my business.
You know, they have really continued to do it.
But in the fallout of the Olivia Nuzzy RFK stuff, her former partner, Ryan Lizza, who is currently trying to drive traffic to his sub stack and gain a bunch of subscribers, has written one awful post after another detailing his personal life with journalist Olivia Nuzzy.
But in the most recent article, something that seems important came up in it.
He was talking about how Nuzzy, in her relationship with RFK, became sort of a campaign flack for RFK, giving him advice, giving him strategy, looking into things, checking on things.
And in the middle of this article or towards the end of it, Ryan Lizza mentioned that she, Olivia Nuzzy, had set up an interview with Donald Trump and wanted to get a sketch of him done for the article.
She was not invited for the sketching, but she sent an artist friend of hers and, by the way, told her to hide a tape recorder in her purse.
And according to Ryan Lizzo, while the sketch artists was at Mar-a-Lago, they overheard multiple meetings that Trump was having in this capacity.
And as a teaser for the next article in Ryan Lizz's Chronicling, he said that Trump at some point was overheard saying something about Butler, Pennsylvania, that could change our understanding of modern history.
There are a lot of things that we could, I guess, suppose in this, but also the larger story here is access journalism, modern journalism, for-profit, capitalistic journalism, how big of a mess this is.
What is your take on this?
What a big, giant fucking mess.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, I would have categorized most of the writings as, you know, I guess high-end pornography, if you will.
It is awful.
It is awful.
You know, listen, you know, you never want to turn up, turn down the opportunity to read, you know, well-written pornography, right?
Isn't there something that's valuable with that?
Probably not.
Nonetheless, because it paints a picture, which nobody needs to necessarily have, especially when you're talking about people who are supposed to be, you know, in government and politics and real, you know, serious people.
So she was accused, by the way, right?
Of relationships with a lot of her subjects or some of her subjects to get.
Yeah, Lizz said that she had a relationship with Mark Sanford.
I don't particularly care outside of like a lapse of journalistic ethics, but like I don't want to know about any of this.
Okay.
Fair enough.
But I mean, it is, it's interesting to see like, okay, these, you know, they were accusing her of these things.
And of course, they were able to say, well, of course, that's ridiculous, whatever.
And it turns out it's completely true.
And so the point about that she's making about with RFK, it's just, that's just, what about him?
How is this guy, is he, is he that kind of magnetic attraction that people will, that's the thing.
And, you know, I don't want to get too much into the Olivia Nuzzy thing, but like at the heart of this thing, it's not about the people.
It's about compulsions.
Yeah.
Right.
It's just about like, and that's the thing.
And at the heart of all these stories, you have to ask, like, what happened to these people?
And instead of being like, can you believe that person X did Y?
The answer is always, yeah, I guess I can if I understood where they're coming from.
So like the salacious aspects of this, like I don't, I don't care about it.
I care more about the humanity of it.
Well, okay.
And then let's just touch upon what you mentioned at the end in terms of this cliffhanger that he left us on, which is always, you know, recommended for a substack, I suppose.
The Butler thing.
And John Carl in his book has, you know, saved some information about what Trump's reaction was when he got to the hospital after the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, which was some version of how is it playing?
You know, are people paying attention to this?
Is this a big news story?
That was what he was concerned with when he gets there, not his ear, not, you know, anybody else hurt, anything like that.
So if you want to combine these things and kind of mix them up into some sort of stew, you know, again, it then lends more credence to these conspiracy theories of, you know, and the reason why they exist is because a lot of things don't make sense.
And so I would think that there's, there's more meat to this bone.
And I guess I'm going to have to sign up to his sub or no, maybe you'll do it and I'll just rely on you to give me a screenshot or something.
I'm not doing that.
All right.
Well, someone's going to get a screenshot.
I want to say, you know, large picture.
Nick, in the time that we've been doing this podcast, how many segments have we done on major journalists who are writing books who hold on to information that would have been pertinent and important earlier on because they wanted to sell books?
How many times have we talked about this now?
I mean, you can count on more than one hand.
Yeah, I mean, you would have a hard time counting them up.
I mean, and it's not just Ryan Lizza or Olivia Newsy or all these Z names.
Bob Woodward, the patron saint of modern American journalism, did this, sat on a ton of information, particularly during COVID, that could have saved God knows how many lives, right?
In order to sell books.
And I personally, as a person who write books, I cannot imagine talking to an editor who would say, hey, why don't you sit on this thing?
This is going to come in really handy whenever it's time for pre-orders.
And in this case, if we are talking about Ryan Lizza and Olivia Nuzzy sitting on an exclusive, that Donald Trump said something that like trended towards the possibility that the assassination attempt at Butler, Pennsylvania was not on the up and up.
Like we're literally looking at a person with Ryan Lizza who is settling a personal score with his former partner and trying to profit off of it by repurposing a book that failed because of what happened within their relationship.
And if that's the case, if they knew about this before Donald Trump was re-elected to be president of the United States of America, that's not just like a journalistic lapse.
This is malfeasance.
Like seriously, like this is disturbing at a certain level.
And I just want to call out what we're dancing around, which is capitalism makes people do unethical and shitty things.
And if this is what has happened here, it exposes not just access journalism, but our major journalistic sort of incentives in general.
If that's where we are, and I think it is, I do think that's where we are.
I do think it's one of the reasons we're in the crisis we are.
That is a very, very serious thing that we need to talk about.
Well, I've got a counterpoint in front of you, Jared.
Are you sitting down?
What if Lizza made it up?
He made this up in order to get Substack subscriptions.
Best of luck to him.
He needs that money more than I do.
What if he sells us what it is?
Really was kind of like, eh, okay, well, that's sort of, I guess, but that could be misconstrued in a hundred different ways.
That could very well be it.
Now, the other thing I think about when you're talking about the editor saying, oh, hold that off until we can publish the book.
I don't even know if it gets to that far.
I think the person reporting has already got that squirreled away, knowing the book's coming out, right?
Well, I mean, they were writing a book on the 2024 campaign together before things imploded.
Right.
So I think this was probably an exclusive that they were sitting on.
But like, can you imagine?
Can you even begin to imagine like having the scoop on like the JFK assassination and holding it until 1965?
Right.
Like, like, why?
What in the hell would compel you?
You're still going to sell books.
Right.
You know what I mean?
Like, even if you just bring it out at the time, you're still going to sell books.
Yeah, you are.
I mean, you know, I think the other piece of that would have been you had evidence that like LBJ was involved and then he runs in 64 and wins.
And then you don't tell anybody those 65.
By the way, just so people at home understand this, because they listen to you and I banter all the time.
That was me walking up to home plate where there's a where there's a tee set up and Nick has the bat.
He's getting ready to like get ready to swing.
And I just place that ball right on the T and I walk away and said, all on you, buddy.
Can't wait to see what you do.
And then it sails way over the scoreboard.
That's what that was.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Thank you for doing that for me.
But I mean, what, what the hell?
Yeah.
Like everything that we're talking about today is about a lack of basic human decency and a basic humanity, right?
Like if that is literally what he's going to reveal, that he knew that the assassination was faked and or doctored in some way, shape or form.
I can't even imagine.
Like, what does he think's going?
What does he think is going to happen out of this?
And that also speaks to a larger thing, which is whether it's Nuzi or Lizza or any of these people, there's no foresight whatsoever.
Like, does whatever he reveals, whether, like you said, he's faking it, lying about it.
He's going to say that we knew he faked the assassination, whatever it is.
There's nothing good that can come of this.
Like, it'll be good if we learn about something, but there's nothing good that happens for him.
It's just self-destruction, like under, you know, sort of the capitalistic pursuit.
Well, he'll tell you, well, listen, I got 500 new signups at five bucks a month.
Best of luck.
Yeah, that's the underlying thing we're talking about.
It's not just that it's unscrupulous or there's lack of humanity.
This is money.
It's pathetic is what it is.
Well, you know, you got to hoard as much money as you possibly can get.
That's what capitalism is, Jared.
And they've got money, right?
That's the other thing about it.
All these people have fucking money.
I don't want to know about their personal lives.
I'm throwing things now.
I don't, I feel like I am being forced to participate in something untoward.
So, right.
Well, okay.
So this one's about revenge, which is maybe the oldest story in the book.
It's disgusting.
Yes.
All of it.
Yeah, it is pretty crazy, which also then ties into the whole notion of what the history of Thanksgiving is about, right?
Because, you know, that's what Lincoln, I don't know if you knew this, but Lincoln, you know, establishes a national holiday because he needed to bring the country back together and remind about what it's really about, democracy, not about power, not about money and all these things.
But we've forgotten that.
It's been too long.
I love how you would have got that in there.
Yeah.
That's so nice.
No, I mean, I, you know, it was actually interesting.
Nick had texted me earlier to ask if I knew about the history of Thanksgiving.
And it got me, this is how autistic and how hyper-fixated I get.
When I was writing The Midnight Kingdom, I got very obsessed with like the South's ritual of humiliation.
After they would lose battles, they would just be like, today is a day in which we all need to get right with God.
And Lincoln's like, let's eat a bunch of food and feel good.
Yeah.
And then you got JD Vance talking about how turkey, no one likes turkey.
I like turkey.
I like turkey.
It's great.
Turkey's good.
Chicken's not better than turkey.
All right, everybody.
That is going to do it for this episode of my Craig podcast.
We'll be back with the weekender on Friday.
Again, head over to patreon.com slash mycraig podcast.
We do need your support.
Please, if you've been on the fence for a while deciding whether or not to subscribe, now's the time to do it.
We need your help.
All right, everybody, if you need us before then, you can find us over at Blue Sky.
