Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman break down the rapidly spiraling Pete Hegseth scandal, the September strike on Venezuelan fishermen, and why the second “rescue” mission amounts to a tacit admission of wrongdoing. They dig into how a non-war became a war crime, the crumbling veneer of U.S. legitimacy, and the political panic now radiating through Trump’s cabinet.
From there, the guys turn to the FBI’s suddenly convenient arrest in the January 6th pipe-bomb case, the paper-thin evidence behind it, and why incompetence has become the defining feature of every institution now claiming to restore order. Then it’s on to the right wing’s newest manufactured martyr, a Bible-citing psychology student whose zero-point assignment has been weaponized into yet another grift about free speech.
They wrap with a dive into Stranger Things, trauma allegories, Ken Burns’s America, and what it means to watch childhood, democracy, and reality all get bent out of shape by the same forces.
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Welcome to the weekender edition of the Mutt Craig Podcast.
I'm Jerry D. Sex and I'm here with Nick Houseman.
How you doing, bud?
I'm doing.
I'm doing fine.
How are you doing?
I really do want to know.
How are you doing?
I'm doing.
I'm doing fine.
I mean, it's kind of relative.
We're all fine in our own way.
Is everything fine?
Everything's fine.
I feel like if I don't talk anymore, we're just going to go down a real existential rabbit hole.
We're just waiting for Godot.
I'm okay.
I'm cold.
I am cold.
Yeah.
I'm cold too, but it's warmer here, but it's still cold.
It's cold.
The world is a cold place.
I disagree.
I think the world is a warm place and seeing your lovely face makes me feel warmth.
Oh, okay.
Friendship makes me feel warmth.
That is very important to remember.
Yeah.
I mean, I thought you were going to go for like the core of the earth is warm and, you know, but I don't know.
Not as much.
No.
I just need the warmth of kin is what I need.
Yeah.
And I think everybody else here needs us to talk about what's going on.
Oh my God, is there a lot going on?
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Nick, the Hegseth, Pete Hegseth scandal continues to grow.
This is one of those things that is not going away.
We're recording this on Thursday, December 4th, and Congress has now watched video of the striking of a fisherman ship off the coast outside of Venezuela on September 2nd.
After we talked about this, Hegseth, I mean, what a leader, immediately threw Admiral Frank Bradley, the head of Special Operations Command, under the bus saying, oh, he's a wonderful hero.
Nobody should be judging him for this.
Trump, Donald Trump then had a weird situation in which he said he didn't know anything about it, which that's something to eventually saying that he would release the video.
Members of Congress have seen it.
Representative Jim Hines called the video, quote, one of the most troubling things that I've seen in my time of public service.
Rand Paul has said that Hegseth is either lying or incompetent regarding his role in these war crimes and has said the video should be released to the public so that people will be horrified and we will stop doing this shit.
How are you feeling about this developing scandal?
Because it certainly seems like it is moving quick.
I think what they're trying to rely on is the video footage turning public opinion, much like we did what happened in Vietnam when we finally start seeing actual war footage.
But the problem here is that this is not a war.
War has not been declared.
They're trying to apply all manner of different mental gymnastics to justify what they're doing because as if it's a war.
So part of me really is really angry because at some point around 9-11, we got, or maybe before that, the United States and the presidents were allowed to somehow declare war without Congress approving it.
And we need to get back to figuring out how to get back the democracy of that, where we can't just willingly do this and just start killing people in the name of some sort of war on terror, war on drugs, and not have any kind of standards to uphold in terms of our behavior and how the international law and military law works.
So that's my biggest issue is that they're trying to treat this like a war and it is not a war and it never has been.
So on that specific thing that you have brought up, there is something wild here that as an analyst of authoritarianism and sort of polarization and radicalization is fascinating to me because there is actually several segments happening, right?
Which is we're now saying, oh, was this second strike of these fishermen who were who were left to die?
Is that a war crime?
First of all, no war.
Second of all, the first strike was a crime, which never should have happened.
And on top of that, the reason that they have given is that they're trying to stop drug trafficking, which is not a use of the military to be used like this.
So you'll notice we're several steps away from where this thing is wrong.
This never should have happened in the first place.
And the issue here is about how this represents the military, what it shows the supposed benevolent fighting force of the American military, what it says.
Meanwhile, underneath that veneer, the United States military has been carrying out war crimes for forever, been carrying out illegal actions for forever.
Also, Nick, weirdly coincidental, has been trafficking drugs and engaging in like, you know, toppling regimes, setting up puppets, having, you know, criminal syndicates within the military.
The larger issue here, and you'll notice a theme in what we talk about a lot of times.
When do things actually happen, right?
When do people say something's wrong here?
Somebody needs to do something about this.
It's not necessarily when people are getting hurt.
It's not as the world is getting worse.
The main thing that is most important to the people in power right now is maintaining even the flimsiest veneer of legitimacy.
And in this case, what Hegseth and the people under him did is they committed one of the cardinal sins of American power, which is don't do anything that will be transparently illegitimate.
And in this case, this obvious crime, this thing, and Hegseth not only should be removed from his post, he should spend the rest of his natural life in The Hague, right?
And by the way, so should Donald Trump and all these criminal fucks.
But the cardinal sin here is basically that Pete Hegseth messed with the veneer and sort of facade that this is a benevolent fighting force that will not be used for evil or harm.
Right.
Hegseth screwed up.
Shocking, really.
Shocking.
You know, it's hard to believe that that's the guy they put in.
Here's another thing.
Remember, I was a bit confused as to the order of how these things were unfolding based on the reporting.
And it turns out I was off in the last episode because this was September 2nd when they killed the people.
They rescued two other people and then had to return them to their countries of origin rather than, I don't know, charge them with drug crimes if they were really guilty of being drug dealers, right?
And that's why they, because they didn't have any evidence to prove that.
That was after this.
It's another layer of a tacit admission of wrongdoing that they killed the people there.
Oh, fuck, wait.
We probably shouldn't have done that.
We're going to have to rescue them the next time.
Otherwise, they will have killed the people the next time too.
So all these things are starting to swirl around and become a political issue too, which unfortunately hides the fact that people are being murdered and we don't even know really who they are.
It's hard to believe after the first couple that the drug dealers themselves would continue to then send these boats with all the drugs on.
I mean, is it hard or not?
You think they just keep doing it anyway and hope they didn't get shot down?
Well, I mean, they're not drug runners anyway.
I mean, it's going to happen.
Also, by the way, like the larger thing, looking at like when it comes to Venezuela or when it comes to, I mean, Afghanistan, whatever it is, the United States of America and something you brought up in the past, Nick, you've brought up the, how do I put this?
You have brought up the resemblance of organized crime with what Trump and his cronies do, meaning that they will go in and say, hey, you got a nice little racket going on here.
It's our racket now.
And what has happened with the U.S. is that the U.S. has gone into places and been like, oh, you got opioids here.
Interesting.
Also, by the way, it's weird, isn't it, that like after all of that happened, we had opioid problems in this country or, you know, like any number of times that these have been the activities that have been going on.
So in a way, this isn't necessarily about stopping drug trafficking.
It never was in the beginning, right?
It is about basically honing in on the action while also trying to get other resources.
So you take a look at this.
It's never been about stopping drug trafficking ever.
It's been about the appearance that the United States military and the strength of the state can do anything at any given time to anyone, which is what's been happening with not just intelligence operations, but in the era of drones, right?
It's about constantly sort of amplifying that power and communicating to people.
Hey, we can murder people at any given moment wherever we want.
It just so happens that we haven't gotten to the point where you can do something like this without people acting out of outrage because it is so obviously wrong.
Absolutely.
But the one thing I want to clear is that the opioid thing that we had issues like Iran-Contra and all sorts of things, that's CIA, not the military.
Yeah, but they've been getting in on it.
There's a reason why we've been having like cabals within the United States military that have been found to be trafficking drugs.
That's been a giant thing in the 21st century.
But I also argue that certainly with the extrajudicial killings we're seeing is rooted in the leaks that are coming out.
Clearly are people, underlings here who are in the military who know this is against law, which then brings me to my other point, which is I also had mused when the video came out with Mark Kelly and Stefanik and all the other people about you can't follow unlawful orders.
They knew that this was coming out.
This had to have been known if they hadn't seen the video yet, which was released to Congress just today, I believe, but they had heard about it.
I guarantee you this was what they were referring to.
They got out ahead of it at the end of November.
And here we are now, December 4th, when we're recording this, finding out, you know, that there is video and this is really, all this stuff really happened.
So I'm convinced that that whole video thing was in, you know, we were wondering why they're doing it.
It wasn't just a vague notion of, oh, you should follow orders.
They definitely knew that this was going to be a thing and they could use it politically for their advantage.
Just a quick thing on that video.
I, like a lot of people, I was like, oh, I'm glad the Democrats are speaking out.
I've now come around to thinking that's one of the more cowardly things the Democrats have done because it has the veneer of courage saying something.
These people are in power.
They shouldn't be releasing videos on social media.
Like whether it's the military killing civilians or the possibility the military might kill American civilians, you know, while they're patrolling cities, like you have power.
Put your ass on the line.
Don't release like an edited video that people can be like, oh, I'm glad they're speaking out.
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