The Most Shocking Revelations About The Epstein Files
Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman kick off by diving into the latest drop of Epstein Files. They break down how Trump's name is mentioned 38,000+ times, with some really nasty tips the feds posted for a hot second before redacting everything and pulling it once screenshots started circulating. Epstein appears to be a straight-up intelligence asset as he received obvious legal protection due to his ties to the CIA, Mossad, and Russian money.
They hit the crazy new angle of Epstein linking up with 4chan founder Christopher Poole right around the time the site became a launchpad for extreme online movements. Jared and Nick explain how that ecosystem fed the alt-right surge into 2016 and created QAnon, which flipped the script and pinned the same crimes these files keep exposing on everyone else. Blackmail to get in the door, rituals to keep people tied, elite power running on straight abuse.
They close out on the bigger mess: Democrats folding on the budget again, just delaying the funding of ICE, who is continues to spend on concentration camps with basically no real resistance to the fascism building. The corruption cuts across both parties. Trust in the whole system is dead. Something's going to snap.
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I've been thinking, we talked before we started recording about you had your glasses broken by an errant basketball play.
And since then, since you mentioned that, I've had that happen to me too.
And I just keep thinking about the physical of it.
I can't get it out of my head now.
Oh, I know.
Well, you know, it's funny is I've been coaching for, I don't know, 30 years now.
I had never gotten hit in the face with the basketball for 29 years.
And in the last year or so, I've gotten at least two or three right to the face.
And I'm like, what is happening here?
I guess it makes sense.
What a, what, what a streak you were on.
I know, I know.
I mean, even for more, you know, one of the first one I did happen, the kid just threw it.
I wasn't looking at all in the direction.
And it should have hit me in the chest, right?
You throw a good path to hits you in the chest.
I mean, that's what I got told back in the Hoosier State.
But, you know, speaking of basketball is hitting yourselves in the face, we got a show today.
We got a ton of awful shit that we got to talk about, which is what we do.
A reminder, everybody, head over to patreon.com slash muckrake podcast.
Support the show, get access to the weekender.
Thank you so much for the people who are supporting us.
We need your help more than ever.
These are really, really hard times and we need that support in order to keep going.
Nick, unfortunately, we have to start with Jeffrey Epstein.
Right.
And it has been, you know, we're a little over a year into the second Trump presidency, and it just feels like every few weeks, there are new releases of files that are more disgusting than the last.
At this point, estimates are that this is about 50% of the government's Epstein files, and that's not even counting the things that they haven't given us.
They've said it's been redacted or it's not allowed to be released to the public.
There is so much to go over and actually so many implications in what came out in this tranche of files.
It starts, Nick, with what was revealed, but then what was taken back.
In true Department of Justice malfeasance, incompetence, whatever it is, while trying to get rid of any mention of Donald Trump in the Epstein files.
And by the way, we've already had 5,300 mentions of him so far.
And we're only halfway through these files.
They revealed a list of tips that lawmakers and law enforcement had received regarding Jeffrey Epstein.
Donald Trump was all over these things, Nick.
And we have been told over and over, yeah, it looks bad that Trump was a friend of Epstein's and yeah, he made that birthday card or whatever, but they've never received any tips.
There was never anybody who claimed any type of harm.
These tips, Nick, are so disgusting and so vile that we can't even discuss what was actually in them.
Thank God people actually caught them, screenshotted them and saved them for posterity.
But what was revealed that the DOJ then redacted is some of the more disgusting things I've ever seen.
And looking at the president of the United States of America, if it didn't already make you nauseous, I don't know how you can do it now.
Oh, I can go on left that, Jared, because first of all, I got like 38,000 mentions of him in this things.
What was your number?
38?
Yeah, I'm seeing the Lincoln Project saying, referencing that in the latest batch only.
Yeah, I had I had 5,300, but apparently I missed a couple.
Yeah, right.
And it could just be like maybe there's multiple references on one thing and they're counting that as two or three instead of one page.
Whatever.
Anyway, the point being that he is, I would guarantee he's mentioned more than almost anybody else in all of this.
But it gets worse because Todd Blanch has already come out and said that they're not going to release the videos.
So, whatever you're reading and whatever innuendo is out there, and some of these things read as if Jeffrey Epstein knew these were going to get discovered one day, and he laid it out in a way that you don't normally write in emails.
But it's like, my name is Jeffrey Epstein, this is what's going on.
You know, writing them to himself sometimes.
But the videos would certainly be the one that were horrifically damning.
We know that they Bondi said that she had them, but Blanche says they're not going to release because it's child porn.
But they exist, they're out there in theory, and that would be the most damning thing I can imagine if those should be used as evidence, right?
Is my point.
Well, and you know, speaking of that, we were talking even before we started recording again, you know, pull back the curtain a little bit.
We were talking about what we think is going on here, why these things keep getting revealed, you know, and they're obviously they slow walk parts of it, they're not going to reveal other things.
It feels like this thing is being done in such a way as to say, Look at all of this, look at all of these people implicated.
And meanwhile, Donald Trump's not implicated whatsoever, right?
It feels like they are trying to make the best out of an absolutely horrific situation.
And everything that gets released, you know, you brought up the idea of videos, the pictures that have been released.
I mean, it is so there's no other word for it, Nick.
It's so demonic, all of it.
It's so, and every time it happens, every time this gets released, and by the way, we haven't even scratched the surface on the implications of all of this.
There's a lot to go over in this particular release that we haven't even gotten to yet.
But I think the important thing here is that it really rubbing it in our faces that they're doing this, that Donald Trump is all over this thing.
Everyone knows that he is as guilty as sin, and there are not going to be repercussions.
Right.
Right?
It's, it's just, it is, it is rubbing our face in not just sordid mess.
We're talking about literally demonic shit here.
Right.
I mean, this is why we've been, I've been railing about the notion of having the Department of Justice has to be separate independent of the White House.
And, you know, there's lots of reasons for this, but this one's a good one, right?
Because the repercussions would be coming from the Department of Justice.
They would be investigating.
Certainly, the House would also, in their oversight capacity, be investigating this as well.
And so now you have to start to wonder, like, well, maybe we need to be able to, whatever party in the White House is in charge cannot have the same party in charge of Congress or something like that.
I don't even know that doesn't work, but like, this is what's the inevitable result of this.
I mean, it's even as bad as some of the lawsuits are trying to bring against people for various things.
You know, there's a penalty for bringing a lawsuit that's frivolous.
But if it's a federal lawsuit, the person, the people in charge of prosecuting the frivolousness is the Department of Justice, who are the ones bringing these lawsuits.
So it's this weird thing where the whole thing was designed in a problematic way that shouldn't function this way.
But the point of all this in terms of what the Epstein files are, you know, it's confirming so much of what we already knew, like at least, you know, personality-wise about Trump.
But I think what you were starting to get into is a little bit about who Epstein really was and what the purpose of all this stuff was.
Why was he really so hell-bent on getting into everyone's lives and being this person and this wealthy person that's having all these connections with everybody?
Well, and that brings us to the next step in this, which is there's, and we talked about this in the last release.
And we talk, so just to go ahead and scaffold it, because this has been an ongoing conversation now for years that we've been having.
We knew before a single piece of the Epstein files was ever released, we knew the major mystery was, where did Jeffrey Epstein get his money?
And two, did he, and the answer is most certainly yes, did he have a relationship with intelligence agencies?
And the idea has always been that, yes, he had a relationship with the CIA.
That's why he was protected in the United States of America.
Did he have a relationship with Mossad?
We almost all knew that he had some sort of a relationship with Israeli intelligence.
Now, after the last tranche, all of a sudden, now we start having these Russian connections that start coming up.
Now, all of a sudden, it looks very much like Jeffrey Epstein had a relationship with the CIA, had a relationship with Mossad, and likely had a relationship with Russia.
And that his wealth, according to some people, very well could have come from Vladimir Putin and the oligarchs within Russia in order to run operations within the United States of America.
And by the way, a lot of this is conjecture because what are we doing, Nick?
I've said this before.
We're in a dark room.
We're feeling around the room.
We're getting an idea of what is in that room, right?
Because we're like trying to get ourselves figured out and oriented.
We now have, and we'll talk more about this in just a second, some of the most major mysteries of the 21st century that now have started to shape themselves to look like Jeffrey Epstein might be in the middle of them.
And that's a wild thing.
The idea that this guy might very well have been the smoking gun between Russia and Donald Trump and the right-wing takeover and authoritarian takeover.
Yeah.
He very well could have been one of the facilitators in the middle of all of that.
Absolutely.
I mean, that dark room is a good metaphor.
You know, it's kind of like we have a black light, but that would be gross.
So it's more like a strobe is going on, right?
You can get a glimpse.
Wait, I saw something, but I couldn't read it all the way through, right?
We can't quite figure this out.
We can't put it all together.
But without question, if you're the CIA and you're looking for assets, a really wealthy person who travels the world on their own plane, perfect.
Man, is that guy a honeypot?
And Nick, that's why they always worked with international businessmen, including oil producers, financiers, all of that.
Yes.
Oh, yeah.
Clay Shaw, for instance, if you want.
If you want to, sure.
But so you had that.
Now, any relations he might have had with Russia or with, yeah, with Putin and Russia.
Do you think that that would preclude the CIA from wanting to work with him?
No.
It's probably a bonus.
They're going to think, oh, we can turn him.
This would be great.
Almost everybody who is involved in intelligence work is involved in multiple intelligence webs that is working one against another.
It's sort of the price of doing business.
Yeah.
Someone's got to look for the, oh, crap.
What's the guy's name?
The first guy that they got the FOIA on using the, you know, he was on Chris Chris Hayes, the guy who they appointed, Connor, whatever.
Anyway, they have to find his name.
I'll look it up in a second.
But at any rate, yeah, there's no question that as we sit through this, we're going to find more of these levels to this.
And it definitely doesn't, we always suspected that there was an underlying motive for what Epstein was trying to do.
Because if you want to take it at face value, he was recording everything.
And we can also take it for face value that there are underage people that he is now luring into for others to violate the law.
I mean, did you happen to see the Bill Gates stuff?
Yeah.
You know, the Bill Gates stuff is insane.
No, it's bad.
It's real bad.
Someone needs to get Melinda Gates on the record here.
You know, they had a huge breakup where she was really upset.
And if you read these, we don't have to get into it.
I guess too much menu I know, but if you read those emails, you realize, oh, okay, that's why she was upset and she got divorced and refused to let him talk to Epstein anymore.
And then she got a half or whatever she got from the estate.
And it was a horrible, horrible stuff, which sounds as horrible as it is.
It sounds as plausible as possible too, too.
And before we get into the next depth of it, which is deep politics, we'll get into it in just a second.
Everybody needs to go to jail.
Everybody involved in this needs to go to jail.
There needs to be an investigation.
They've already said they're not going to investigate anymore, that they're not interested in doing it.
And all they're doing is revealing all of these crimes and accomplices.
These people need to go to fucking jail.
And there is not, there's no way.
And here's the thing.
We're talking about this.
You and I are in, we call this the Muck Craig podcast because we're in the muck, because we don't want to look away from the ugly things that are going on.
We want to be honest about it.
I didn't trust representative government.
You didn't trust representative government when we started this.
This makes me trust it less.
This system is not going to continue and is not going to work if everybody knows there are pedophile cabals that control power and control information and control wealth.
It's true.
It's actually true that the powerful have been doing this shit and this is part of their currency.
And like the fact that that has happened, unless something is done here, there's no way to reinstitute trust.
I agree.
And I don't know how you that even that reinstitution of that trust doesn't, you know, you're always going to end up being like, like it used to be a fringe group of people that would say, hey, men in black, be careful, right?
We used to treat them as weird.
That percentage of people will never get lower than the 35%, 40%, right?
Which is a huge chunk and it may be higher than that in a way that, yes, I think that cats out of the bag.
I don't think you're ever going to get it back.
You could fire everybody in the government.
You could literally level the White House, rebuild it, which is what I think someone should propose, by the way, if they want to run for the White House again.
And like, what would it be?
What would it take to like finally get that kind of trust?
Because I think it's obviously rooted in naivete, perhaps, you know, and people just, you know, we finally figured out Watergate wasn't enough.
Iran-Contra wasn't enough.
And this is finally it.
So in France, before World War II, there was this thing called the Dreyfus affair.
And I'm not going to get into the very particulars of it, but it was a controversy that took place and it divided the country.
And it was over whether or not this guy named Dreyfus had given away secrets to Germans, right?
And he happened to be Jewish, shocker of shockers in the that he was accused of this, like betraying the country.
Turns out he didn't actually do it.
But guess what?
The far-right fascists who were anti-Semitic and eventually would welcome the Germans into France, right?
And Vichiera, France, they believed it and they were attacking Jews and they were trying to gain power.
There are moments like that, like the Dreyfus affair that brought the French Republic to the edge of ruin, you know, like a controversy, some sort of a, of a giant sort of a schism-causing issue.
Another Party's Platform00:02:09
This feels like it.
And it feels like it also, Nick, because it's bipartisan.
It's not just Democrat or Republican.
It's both.
It's just the wealthy, which as we talk about deep politics, what do we keep finding ourselves talking about?
We got to talk about the fucking Democrats here in just a second.
What do we keep finding?
It's you, me, and the people who listen to this show and 99% of the country.
And then there's 1% of the country that's doing everything else.
It's Elon Musk banging on the door.
Let me in.
I want to come to these like abusive orgies, right?
And the rest of us are like, oh my God, I just want someone to vote to give us health care or to have it where we can buy houses or afford food.
It feels like this thing is the tension of it doesn't feel like it's going to release itself naturally, is what I'm saying.
Right.
I agree.
I feel like this is finally starting to take on something.
We just saw a special election in Texas, right?
Where Trump won by 17 and now a Democrat won that seat after Trump endorsed the other, the Republican candidate.
So like, you know, that's really what the bottom line is here.
Although, again, we've also said this.
Whatever fever dream we have of like restoring our republic by the Democrats getting back into power is also equally bullshit.
It's not going to happen.
They're all, these are, they're too entwined here.
And was it in the last show or were we talking privately about the Whigs and the Tories?
That was the last show.
Yeah.
That was public.
Yeah.
You know, we, it does feel like that.
I've been stewing on that a little bit more about how, you know, there is an opening here for another party to somehow sweep into power with a better platform.
And by the way, the platform is right there.
Like it's reform.
Yeah.
It's reform.
Yeah.
These super assholes, they are not taking care of you.
They are corrupt.
Now we need to reform this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Everything that we just talked about, Nick, the tips against Trump, the, the, the, the Putin stuff, all of it.
The Biden administration had this information.
They had it.
Yeah.
Now, they had it.
Ridiculous Qanon Secret Society00:11:02
As far as the Epstein files go, like, you know, there was this one report, you know, that that's written, you know, soberly, like this is what, you know, from a guy who was for saying that they were killing babies and eating the feces out of their intestines on some yacht.
I could see why, okay, this is the kind of stuff we're not going to release, right?
Like, you know, fill with that kind of stuff.
I kind of get it, right?
Some of the, but that's the thing is the tips are tips, but at the same time, it breaks open the entire facade that Donald Trump has never been accused of something.
And by the way, while we're on this subject, let's go a little bit deeper.
And this is a story not a lot of people are touching.
But in this new tranche of Epstein files, it has been revealed that a guy named Christopher Poole, some of you might know this name, most of you probably don't, that he is the founder of 4chan, which if, and by the way, we got to remind people what 4chan is.
It was the absolute toxic abyss on the internet, right?
It's where Pepe the Frog and all that shit came from.
And then eventually 8chan and so on and so forth.
Christopher Poole, the founder of 4chan, met with Jeffrey Epstein the day that he created the sub-4chan board poll.
And for people who might remember, might not, poll was the radicalizing forum where all of the alt-right, neo-fascists, neo-Nazis, Chuds all got together, created memes, did all this shit, and created part of the momentum for Donald Trump in 2016.
So he meets with him, he creates poll.
And here's the thing, Nick.
Wouldn't you know, coincidence of coincidence, that 4chan, the poll board, is also the board that would eventually birth, you guessed it, everybody, QAnon.
And QAnon, again, for people who need brought up to speed in order to remember life, QAnon is the conspiracy theory that the United States government and the world had been taken over by a satanic pedophile cabal that was doing all of the shit that Jeffrey Epstein and all of his clients were doing.
You start putting that together and you mix in the fact that Epstein and Steve Bannon were planning all kinds of things.
We suddenly have a very weird possibility that QAnon might have a at least tangential, if not direct and concrete line to Jeffrey Epstein, which opens up a whole new situation.
And I want to make people familiar with one term, Nick, which is limited hangout.
And for people who don't know what limited hangout is in intelligence agencies, it's the practice of letting a little bit of your intelligence activities be seen to make it seem like either it's not real and it's just rumors, or that's all there is to know about it.
So that is a very interesting possibility that opened up with this tranche.
Absolutely.
And it does make sense.
I mean, there was always the whispers that he was working with Mossad and the Israelis, but it seems clear that he was.
And by the way, Glenn Maxwell's father was knee deep in all this as well.
So it kind of keeps folding in, you know, which it almost is hard to believe like it's that one family is going to be involved in like the spying operation over the, you know, Nick, I want to say I don't even think it's, it's, it's even arguable at this point that Epstein was an intelligence agent.
I don't even, I think that's beyond any sort of argument at this point.
Right.
And by the way, what you didn't mention as well is that he got off from the original absolutely damning horrible case against him in Florida.
Alex Acosta got let him off with a slap on the wrist is being nice to the wrists.
And so that would also lend credence to what you are saying, that he was protected and he had people in those upper echelons of the government who were able to get him out of that situation and he knew it.
You know, you know, listen, have people forgotten that he supposedly Epstein tried to kill himself two weeks before he died?
Yeah.
You know, it's like the whole thing is ridiculous, like as if he tried, he was really suicidal when he wasn't.
They killed him.
And, you know, we had, we're starting to see that as well, that they realized they needed to get in a situation where they could do this without the protection that he that he had from, you know, if it's the CIA, you know, it's got to be someone in the American government that gave him that protection, right?
It's not the Russians, you know, somehow protecting him, unless it's even crazier.
Now, this also falls into what we heard about a whistleblower with Tulsi Gabbard, right?
You know, that is now slowly coming out.
And it just, it just reeks of the same thing of, if you remember Alex Vinman, who was listening on the phone call to Ukraine that led to his first, Trump's first impeachment, they tried to bury that phone record as well.
And they tried to like eat a transcript or something so no one saw it.
The same thing is now happening to Tulsi Gabbard.
And what we're hearing from some of the reporting, it hasn't gotten locked down yet, is that it's as explosive as the Epstein stuff.
Well, and so what it boils down to is this.
And I used to say this, I used to get in fights with people years ago, whenever the QAnon stuff was first sort of percolating.
And people will be like, what do you think about all this deep state stuff?
And I was like, there is a deep state.
There has been a deep state for a very long time.
And the fact is, because Donald Trump said it, people are like, oh, there's no such thing as a deep state.
Nick, there's always been a deep state.
There has always been a group of people that use nations and nationalism and all of that in order to hide their affairs, right?
To hide their manipulations, to hide their actions, all of that stuff.
The CIA is just a new iteration of that.
Post-World War II, the CIA did whatever in the fuck it wanted to.
The president could not control them.
Some president died possibly because of that.
The deep state was real.
It was everybody who wanted to believe that the institutions were fine before Donald Trump who didn't want to think about it.
The idea that the CIA, Mossad, and possibly Russian intelligence were all entangled at one point or another.
I'm not shocked by that.
These people screw each other over and work with each other all the time.
They're all sort of incestuous in that idea.
But the idea that QAnon was potentially a psyop that was run by a conglomerate of intelligence agencies.
And by the way, Jeffrey Epstein wasn't that smart, Nick.
He wasn't that smart.
He wasn't a brilliant person.
In fact, if you read any of his emails, you can realize he's kind of stupid.
He actually was kind of, he didn't come up with all these ideas on his own.
He was a great point man for it because he could go in as a white dude with a bunch of money and make deals.
Right.
And he could go through New York socialite scenes.
But the idea that this is somehow or another, it feels Nick, it feels like, again, we're in the room and like, my God, I just realized there's another room.
It's, it's a wild thing what these people do.
And they have to be reined in.
Have to be.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I, again, how you are supposed to do that when the machinations of government are kind of built this way, right?
Like, like, even if you want to look at like when the Bushes were in the White House and Skull and Bones, it starts, you know, in college, you begin to do this.
Yes.
Yes.
And certainly, you know, we're getting to a different era where it's probably obviously a less structured scenario like that, but it's they're clinging, right?
They're still hanging on with dear, you know, their every last breath they have to kind of keep this power they have over it.
At some point, it damn breaks.
You know what, Nick?
I'm glad you said it like that because this is, that just fired something off of my brain.
It feels like the Epstein group, right?
It feels like it was a modern iteration of what skull and crossbones and all those groups were, you know, which was like a mid-20th century sort of thing.
And of course, skull and bones is still there, but like that's when the secret society stuff was like really hopping, right?
It feels like a new version of that, in which these people are trying to sort of like create that sort of secret society feeling to it.
And what's at the heart of it?
It's just money moving around, right?
It's just a group of people who are just trying to gain more money and more power and more resources for themselves.
But what do they do, Nick?
It's the same thing we see with all these people.
They're creating stories for themselves to feel larger than that.
Right.
And so the appeal was to like move them who are vectors from moving money around, right?
Because it's just capitalism trying to like consolidate and grow and move and change and liquidate itself.
And instead, it's these people who are hurting people and hurting the people that they abused, hurting the people doubtlessly that they murdered.
On top of that, the rest of us that they keep, we keep from having decent lives, living our full, healthy lives, enjoying ourselves, having health care, having a representative government.
And instead, they have created for themselves this simulacrum of like what they think that they're doing.
And it's just it's just absolute like hedonistic abuse.
Oh, yeah.
And it reminds me of like, yeah, you go into like the secret room and you put on this ridiculous hat and you're like smoking cigars and smelling each other's farts.
Like that's how ridiculous it ends up being now.
And you realize in 2026, it doesn't have that same weight.
However, if you wanted to go back in time in 1940 or whatever, you know, and they're in there, we're going to realize that the people in that room in Yale doing all this shit, they do end up controlling a lot of the world.
Well, okay.
On okay, what you just hit is really important.
On one hand, the people are in a room smoking cigars, having their private rituals include abuse, right?
Right.
Okay.
So that is like the representation of what?
Going into Venezuela and taking their oil.
Right.
Right.
So you're going in Venezuela and taking the oil.
Who for the oil companies, the wealthy people, Donald Trump and the people around him, slush funds, all of that.
You're in a room hurting people is a representation of this over here, which is like bloodless.
Well, I mean, it's bloody, but you know what I mean?
It's just, it's a transaction.
Yeah, absolutely.
And so it's just this thing that like stands in for it.
And what we're, I think what's being revealed is not just the rottenness of the edifice, but it's the fact that this is what happens at the highest levels of power.
It's just an example of what they're trying to do in order to like make themselves feel important for what is happening over here, which is genocide and murder and displacement and theft.
Blackmail and Ritual00:03:31
The only thing I can't quite figure out is I would have thought, even though Jeffrey Epstein is not a criminal mastermind, I suppose I would have thought he would have had some sort of ticking clock where all this shit he had on everybody would just get released, you know, and they got it before he could get it out.
I don't know, whatever that meant.
Maybe he, maybe he went down.
The last breath he took was he fully intended to be able to use, still use that to get him out of his situation, which is probably what had happened every other time, you know, because I have a feeling we might ultimately find out that this, the 2009 conviction, I think it was in Florida.
I have a feeling that wasn't the only time he sat there staring at a guilty verdict in the face and was able to get it dismissed without going much farther.
And so he might have assumed he can continue to do that.
But it is a little surprising because, again, the video stuff, in my mind, would be the most damning and the most visceral, even in the era of AI video, which now we don't know what it is or what's not there.
But yeah, that's going to go into the same vault as all the UFO evidence that we have.
Well, and I think there's partial truth to that, but I think it comes back to the fact that it really doesn't matter if Epstein died to these groups.
He was a pawn, right?
He was a facilitator.
What actually mattered was that they had something on people, which led to things.
And what's weird about it, Nick, the only way I can think to explain this, have you ever seen, and sometimes we use movies as examples, right?
You ever seen where like a couple of mobsters have a situation where they get one up on the other one and maybe even steal their money and then they're working together in a couple of weeks?
You know what I mean?
Yeah, you pull a gun on him and you take his money and the next thing you know, you're on the same side.
Like that's kind of what this is.
Like what the blackmail, it wasn't like, oh, you're now in our thrall for the rest of your lives.
It's sort of like the price for being a part of the group, right?
Like, oh, we now have this blackmail.
You're now part of us.
And it's like, yeah, of course, I'm part of you.
Let's do this.
I'm not going to turn you in, right?
I'm not going to do that.
So now you're part of the group.
And by the way, you brought up Skull and Bones.
There are ritual hazing humiliations that you do in a place like Skull and Bones.
Everybody sees you do it.
And so you have made yourself vulnerable to the group.
They've seen you take place in the humiliation ritual.
And everybody who's part of the group has done it.
So it's just him dying.
And by the way, like, I don't know the specifics of it.
I don't know who called it.
It just transferred on.
And Nick, it looks like it transferred on to Trump.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, and by the way, the thing about the rituals you're talking about is I bet people actually enjoyed some of them.
Sure, because they're sick.
What we're doing, right?
They want to create that ritual again and again for whatever personality issues they have.
And that's, you know, that's always the thing that trips them up, right?
They can't resist.
They can't stop themselves, whatever.
You know, by the way, does this fold into like what Diddy and all that stuff?
Well, it feels like it's in different places.
That's the problem is it's what is the Spider-Man quote?
Awesome power requires awesome responsibility, something along those lines.
Yeah, it feels like great power in this modern world, which is fucked up, requires you to commit great atrocities.
Would They Actually Get It Done?00:05:50
Right.
Yeah.
Either to prove you're in the group, right?
You got to do it or because you're taking it.
Exactly.
Interesting.
That's exactly right.
By the way, it's a little dangerous, though, because you kind of start to get into that toe dipping of the Pizzagate.
Well, by the way, we didn't even talk about that.
There are tons of things in the Epstein files that read like Pizzagate.
And so then all of a sudden, going back to what I was talking about with 4chan, where did Pizzagate come from?
It was the projection of what they had been doing onto their political enemies.
So you're sold that Hillary wasn't in the basement of a Pizza Place.
No, I don't.
But I do think that it was a projection of what it was that they had done.
Reasonable.
Yeah.
By the way, Nick, we got to talk about this before we get out of here, just to update the story that we're having about the potential government shutdown.
I hate to inform everybody.
The Dems caved.
I don't know what to tell you.
Terrible news.
A vote of, I believe, 71 to 29.
They passed a $1.2 trillion budget.
They kicked the reform of ICE, which I am putting giant scare quotes around off a couple of weeks.
Yeah, Nick, they're going along.
You knew it.
You called it.
I was a little bit more on the other side, but you're right.
If Chuck Schumer is involved, then of course, in the name of the Republic, they're going to do some sort of deal.
And like you said, talking about kick the can, I mean, they've gotten that down perfectly where, you know, all of this, just so they can hold up some DHS funding for a couple of weeks until they figure it out.
But like, I don't know what that's going to look like other than just how much?
Great.
Where do I sign?
And I mean, ICE has more than enough funding.
They're not in any danger.
DHS isn't in any danger.
I knew that there was going to be some sort of a continuing resolution, some sort of stopgap.
They don't want to get rid of ICE.
They don't want to.
They have no desire to rein in ICE.
Meanwhile, ICE is going around the country buying up a bunch of defunct real estate to create concentration camps, which isn't it amazing how economic downturns then lead to fascism and the capitalism capitalizing off of the downturn.
They have no desire to rein in ICE.
And it doesn't make me happy to say this.
It doesn't give me hope.
The Democratic Party is not going to help us.
They want ICE for themselves.
They want to have ICE to carry out the missions that they think are important because they carry out the same missions as Republicans.
They just do it with less open fascism.
So if they got control of the Senate and Congress, you don't think that they'd be passing laws to abolish ICE?
No.
Okay.
But you think that they pass laws to reduce funding for ICE when they get into power?
No, I don't think that they would reduce.
No.
I mean, I would think they'd throw us a bone.
I don't think so.
I think that they would do what they're doing now, which is like ICE can't wear masks or they have to have a badge or a body camp.
Nick, I'm telling you, if they gain control, if there are elections, we don't even know if there's going to be elections.
If they gain control, no, I don't think that when's the last time you saw the Democratic Party reduce the funding of a law enforcement agency?
Oh, boy.
Well, again, and we talk about this all the time where it's not about, you know, what they like.
They're going to wring their hands because they're so afraid of being labeled this, you know, soft on crime.
I don't think that's what it is.
Newsflash, they're going to label that anyway.
I don't think they're afraid of being labeled that way.
It shouldn't be hard to be able to do that and call for that and be that way.
I don't think that they're going to be viewed negatively if they say that.
Even if they want to use abolish ICE, and they don't really mean abolish ICE, they mean cut the budget, whatever.
But that's the thing, Nick, is I think that we've gotten it wrong in the past.
I don't think it's that the Democrats are afraid of being mislabeled or being misunderstood.
I think the Democrats are in favor of strong law enforcement.
Well, you were certainly right about what happened the past week.
So I don't want to be.
I want to have an actual opposition power in our party within ascendant fascism.
Well, now I'm starting to think, oh, gosh, how great would it be if they had 75 senators and 480 congress people or whatever the number, like a huge number.
I don't know.
And maybe in the White House too, like now I shudder to think, like, what would they do if they actually had ultimate power and veto-proof majorities and all the legislative branches?
Like, I don't know.
Would they actually get this shit done that we've been talking about?
You don't think so?
No.
They'd probably get more stuff done than Republicans do.
They would probably.
So here's the thing.
And going back into the idea of deep politics, I think the way that voting works in this country is that it sort of vacillates back and forth.
It's sort of a pressure relief valve, right?
And we've seen it.
We've seen it work this way.
Republicans come in, they tear up the economy, they help the wealthy.
Then the Democrats come in and they like, you know, kind of do some slight reforms.
They'll pass some necessary sort of, you know, spending bills in order to put some money in people's pockets and then they'll move forward.
I just think that that's how it works.
I think it's a reaction to what the country is feeling and what capitalism wants.
I don't think the Democrats would go in and like make everything go crazy.
They've had the votes before.
And then suddenly a couple of senators materialize that don't want to do it.
Well, I don't think that's an accident.
And they got Obamacare passed.
Yeah, but it was also a compromise.
I mean, they didn't get what they wanted, did they?
Right.
And then overnight, they lost that majority.
And who benefited the most from Obamacare?
Yes, millions of Americans were able to get health care, but the healthcare companies benefited from it.
Yeah.
And guess what?
It led to arguably where we are.
Protests And Waning Engagement00:03:00
Right.
And so what I'm saying is I do not think that they actually want to do what it is that we all say we want them to do.
They'll pretend with it in order to keep control and, you know, sort of keep us where we're at.
But this party is not interested in doing what we want them to do.
Right.
Right.
And I hate that.
I don't think that they want to abolish ICE.
They don't even want to say it.
They don't even want to talk about it.
What major Democrat have you heard say that?
Yeah, Van Holland's talked about it here and there and Murphy's brought it up here and there.
But like, who's really been leading the charge in leadership?
No.
No, because, well, they've AB tested abolish ICE and they've realized, oh, we can't say that.
You can't say those two words.
But 50% of the country wants it.
Yeah, without question.
Without question, 50% is absolutely in favor of it.
And like another 20% are open to it.
Right.
And then 30% are like, no, that's where it's at.
Yeah.
I mean, I went to the protests on Saturday.
And I got to tell you, this steam is being lost here.
It's not as engaged as they have been in the past.
I'm very worried about this.
And as the threat of the repercussions against protesters is ramping up in terms of rhetoric, which is scary.
I think part of it is people have lost their faith in protests.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That might be.
Because I'll tell you the truth.
I talked about it the first No Kings march, right?
I said, my fear is that this is going to allow catharsis and it's going to vent off some steam.
I think people have started to feel that, that like the protests aren't actually doing anything and that something else has to happen.
It just happens that nobody has offered that solution yet.
Right.
Well, and for what it's worth, the federal building around the corner from where we would normally protest downtown, it was getting a bit violent with clashes between protesters and ICE.
So there is that anger underlying for a select few.
I think we're seeing it also like in Portland, but it's that silent majority, man.
It's the silence is definitely.
Yeah, I don't know.
I still think something is going to happen.
I still feel like we're going to have another flashpoint because ICE is not stopping.
Right.
You know, it's gotten out of the, it's gotten out of mass media.
Mass media is not talking about it because, quite frankly, it got very hot and they want it to cool down.
But I'm worried about getting arrested for being like Don Lemon just like John Lemon.
Yeah.
Yeah.
By the way, you know what sucks about that is if you really read some of the stuff, I really, I'm worried for him.
I really am.
I'm worried that they're going to be able to manipulate the law that was supposed to be for KKK members.
You know, there's a sentence that he said in there that might just be enough in a random way to convince a jury.
I don't know.
It's frightening.
Like a weary boxer, we're all going to have to answer the bell at some point.
As long as this is going on.
Like, that's the bad thing about this.
There are going to be some people who are going to be first against the wall, but we're all going to be against the wall if we don't stop this.
Wall Stop Worries00:00:28
Well, hopefully we all have a Mickey as our trainer.
I would really, really like not to go against the wall, but here we are.
All right, everybody.
That's going to do it for this episode of the McCraig Podcast.
We will be back with the Weekender Edition on Friday.
In the meantime, please head over to patreon.com/slash my craig podcast.
We really, really need your support and your help.
In the meantime, you can find us over on Blue Sky at Nick Houseman.