It is Super Bowl weekend and neither the co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton or Nick Hauselman can pretend to care about the game. Jared is in full "They Live" mode and he is not being polite about it. The conversation quickly turns to the Washington Post gutting itself under Jeff Bezos, and what it means when a billionaire can buy a load bearing newsroom with pocket change. They argue that this is not a business mistake, it is the point, and they connect it to the bigger pattern of institutions being neutralized on purpose. Then they jump to the bitcoin slide, and how gambling keeps getting sold as hope in a collapsing economy. From there they hit Kamala’s new “Headquarters” relaunch and why it reads like brand management in the middle of an emergency. They close with France raiding X’s offices over sexual abuse material and deepfakes, and why Europe still has levers the US refuses to pull. The Weekender ends with what they’re watching and what they’re reading, including a rough movie recommendation and a couple books that actually land. 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
Welcome to the weekender edition of the Mutt Craig Podcast.
I'm Jerry JH Sexton here with my friend Nick Houseman.
Nick, how you doing?
How's your weekend shaping up?
It's Super Bowl weekend.
Are you having a party?
Is it Super Bowl weekend?
No.
Wow.
By the way, later on in the show, we're going to talk about the Super Bowl halftime show.
Am I wrong or is this the like least anticipated, least talked about Super Bowl that you can remember?
It feels like nobody gives a shit about this game.
They care more about the halftime show.
You didn't even know it's happening this weekend.
Yeah, I mean, I guess I did.
We were going to actually have a little shindig and then a bunch of our neighbors were busy.
And so we're going to, I invited myself over to someone else's house.
Well, I mean, we love, we love to do that.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, it's got that Oscars feel where it's like, okay, we want to watch all the commercials or something, or we want to watch commercials for the Super Bowl too versus the actual game and all that.
It's always sort of been the thing, I think, you know, certainly in recent years.
Commercials, though, how quaint is that to like want to watch a national?
I'll go ahead and since it's the weekender, I'll put my two cents out there.
I hate the modern Super Bowl commercials.
They're all, hey, do you remember this celebrity?
Do you remember this thing that happened with this celebrity?
Yeah.
Here it is again.
You know, don't you want to see like Fonzie jump on the shark at age?
No, it's brain dead.
It's the most brain dead shit imaginable.
And it is, for me, it is a signifier of the decline of the United States of America.
I hate it.
That's what the Bigfoot discovered, Jared.
That's my, by the way, I really do.
You know, I'm sure I'll be at least one commercial about it.
I'm such a grumpy man during the Ascendance of Fascism and the fall of America that I'm just like, I see these things are like, hey, here's this little preview of our Super Bowl.
Go to hell.
Yeah.
Well, if you're new to hell listen to this, Jared probably looks at this like the movie They Live and he's got the sunglasses on.
Yeah.
He knows exactly what everything, all the billboards are really saying to us.
Nick, I'll take that a step further.
Right now, where I am politically and where I am in terms of how I'm feeling about America, I'm not just the guys from They Live putting on the sunglasses and like seeing what the messages are.
I'm the Joker putting on those glasses.
I'm those two things brought together.
That's my level of radicalization and anger at this point.
Yeah.
And I believe I'm referred to as the classic liberal.
I also love, by the way, that we can hang out and talk about politics.
And meanwhile, every time I'm talking to anybody else, I'm just like screaming at this point.
I'm so angry.
All right, everybody.
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Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post00:08:11
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Nick, we've got so many different things to talk about, so many different directions.
I'm actually really excited Excited to get into all of these things, but we have to start with the Washington Post, which once warned us that democracy dies in the darkness.
In the 13th year of its ownership under Jeff Bezos, massive, massive layoffs to the Washington Post.
Roughly 30%, almost a third of the entire staff of the newspaper has been cut.
More or less, the sports and book review sections have been completely called and destroyed.
I look at this not just in terms of like a tragedy, you know, when you talk about journalism, and I'll talk more about that in just a second, but like everything we're talking about today, I see this as a signifier of something larger that's going on in terms of our culture.
How are you feeling about this?
Well, you know how I am about optics, I suppose, right?
And so, you know, you have a guy that owns the Washington Post who I think he pretty much rented Venice, Italy.
Right.
For his wedding.
Pretty much, we just rented the whole place out.
And by the way, one of my favorite stretches in the history of the Muck Rig podcast was leading up to his wedding, where you, as a person who has worked in a wedding, was trying to figure out where all the money was being spent.
That was my favorite little stretch.
Like it's way up there on my leaderboard.
Yeah, absolutely.
So it's like, you know, you know, shocker of shocker that somehow he realizes after, you know, buying this thing.
And apparently in the beginning, he was, you know, earnestly trying to keep this thing going and figure out how to expand the business model or whatever.
And I don't know, like the kind of things that they're talking about now as they're shrinking everything, it just doesn't sound sincere when they're talking about any kind of plans to keep this thing going at all.
Like this just seems like a death rattle on the way to WAPO just ceasing to exist.
Yeah.
And I think it's really important.
I posted something about this.
We're recording this on Thursday, February 5th.
I think I posted something about this yesterday on Wednesday.
And I got into a bunch of discussions about it because it's important to parse something out.
Jeff Bezos, and by the way, do you remember how much he bought the Washington Post for?
Billions?
No, he bought it for $250 million.
Oh, the low, low sum.
This man, by the way, is worth nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars.
And looking at all of this, it really makes sense and gives context to how fucked up everything is that Jeff Bezos basically bought the Washington Post, one of the twin pillars of American journalism, with the change he had in his pocket when he took his pants off at night and bought this.
And at the beginning, yeah, I think Bezos wanted to be seen as like, you know, a titan of industry who is going to like raise up the Washington Post to new heights.
And what ends up happening, though, is what we've been covering for a while, which is these billionaires, these oligarchs who aren't really all that talented, they fail at everything constantly, especially considering they think they can do everything.
They think they're the biggest brain geniuses who have ever existed.
And then as things shift, what did we see from the Washington Post, Nick?
We saw it become his little toy.
He used it for political purposes, PR purposes, tried to change the culture, the way things get talked about.
That's, of course, where oligarchs go when they gain enough power and enough resources.
Nobody wanted it.
Everybody was like, get this out of my face.
You are obviously propaganda.
It started to fail.
And now here's the thing.
Our economy is set up for people like Bezos to win regardless if they lose.
So now the Washington Post is in the shitter.
It could very well be in its own death spiral.
But guess what, Nick?
It serves the oligarch's purposes to get rid of something that could have spoke truth to power and could have covered them and educated people on what's going on.
So again, win-win, even if he drives this thing into the dirt, it's serving both his interest and the interest of fascist capitalism as it goes forward.
Yes, very well put.
I mean, you know, it's almost like he took a gamble or he bet on the fact that if they go full right-wing propaganda MAGA, it's very lucrative.
And we've talked about that before, where on different kind of platforms, it can be, right?
You can actually bilk a lot of money from a lot of really conservative people.
We will talk about Bitcoin in a minute.
But yes.
To tease that.
But I suppose the mistake here was that they're already dealing with an existing platform, right?
This, the Washington Post is something that stood for something else, right?
And to morph that ultimately just alienated them.
And so if you look at like New York Times, they were also in the same, going down the same road of being insolvent and they expanded and they figured out a way to get more monthly subscriptions.
That's the name of the game for everything now, right?
And everyone, we're seeing people cutting back on all their monthly stuff, but that was what the New York Times was able to do.
And they're doing it pretty well.
Like I think they've survived that and I think they're doing they're doing fine.
Washington Post never figured that out.
And you know, when you start to get those bias arguments, like when they wouldn't endorse or they wouldn't, when they were starting to F around with their opinion columnists, that's when you run the risk as a newspaper of alienating your audience and for them to never come back.
And I know I canceled my subscription when that happened immediately.
Well, and there's a side part to this that's really important.
And Nick, I'm just going to ask you just a rhetorical question.
Is fascism popular?
Oh, geez, Louise.
Well, if you ask somebody a poll, is it popular?
They probably will know to say no.
But is it alluring?
And is it?
Oh, it's very much like the dark side of the force.
It can start to work against you.
And a lot of readers of the Washington Post and the New York Times have had fascism sort of work itself into them, right?
But technically, fascism and oligarchical rule, these things are not popular.
Right now, roughly 60 to 80%, depending upon the issues, there is a broad mass consensus in the American public that don't like Jeff Bezos, they don't like the oligarchs, and they don't like fascism.
So as a result, the more that they cater in that direction, people are going to, like you, cancel their subscriptions.
They're going to stop trusting the Washington Post.
And this has happened over and over.
What we're watching right now is a preview of what's going to happen to CBS.
CBS is not popular.
People aren't going to watch it.
Their ratings are going to be low because it's serving the interest of the wealth class that owns it.
And now the interest of the wealth class isn't popular, but they own everything.
So they're going to tailor it towards themselves.
So it is very much, it's a self-destructive mission.
But what happens with CBS?
What has already happened?
It's already been neutralized.
CBS used to be a trusted broker in news, and it used to tell you what was going on in the world and allowed you to criticize and think more about like what was happening in the world.
That's done.
It's gone.
And all of these old load-bearing sort of institutions, they're all being bought off.
They're all very quickly being sort of mutated into some sort of oligarch-led thing.
It's being rejected and then it's being destroyed, which again, win-win, it neutralizes something that could hurt them.
And it's the same thing with CBS.
Barry Weiss is not at CBS to turn CBS around.
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