Jerj Sexton and Nick Houseman dissect the escalating Iran-Israel conflict, analyzing strikes on oil refineries and Trump's retaliatory threats while questioning U.S. policy goals ranging from halting nuclear development to seizing oil production. They critique the hypocrisy of ignoring civilian suffering under sanctions despite America's reduced reliance on Middle Eastern imports, suggesting financial markets anticipate an economic collapse driven by these wars. Ultimately, the hosts frame this chaotic moment as history's event horizon where illogical occurrences define "deep politics," challenging listeners to look beyond surface-level aggression toward underlying existential motivations. [Automatically generated summary]
Let's just go ahead and tell people for reference purposes, in case the entire world blows up after we're done recording.
We're doing this early on Thursday because it's NCAA tournament day.
Of course.
It's my personal Christmas, Nick.
It's my Christmas.
It's my high holy days.
It is what it is.
All right.
And listen, I'm kind of right there with you.
Certainly basketball, you know, compelling storylines, intense pressure.
We love it.
We love it.
And Wisconsin is good this year.
So we're rooting for Nick.
We're hoping good things happen there.
No, but they gave us the dreaded fifth seed.
They gave you the fifth seed.
It's going to be all right, everybody.
Listen, I am so excited about this, but I'm also, I'm excited to talk about the world exploding.
Nick, people who want to be in the historic moment, welcome to it.
We are here.
It's the weekender edition of the McCraig podcast.
I'm Jerj Sexton with Nick Houseman.
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Nick, fun stuff.
We are still in a war with Iran with absolutely no off-ramp in sight.
We'll talk more about that in a second.
But in the past couple of days, we've seen an escalation of strikes on oil refineries, which wouldn't be a problem except for that the modern world runs on.
Let me check my notes.
Oil.
Capital O. Capital O, Texas T, black gold.
We have reached the point we saw Israel hit the South Pars field, which is the largest.
Trump had lost his mind, is now threatening to absolutely destroy it if there's retaliation.
And even more fun than that, Nick, it appears that the market is finally recognizing that this is a problem and that we are speed running toward absolute economic collapse.
This is great.
We're even talking about taking sanctions off of Iranian oil, which hold on, let me check my notes again.
Oh, shit, we're at war with them.
So we got a situation on our hands.
Is it possible?
I don't know.
I'm the spitball in here, but is it possible that if you are aware of decisions inside the government, you could make money off of this information?
Can you even imagine how much money is being made off of this?
The absolute destruction of everything right now.
How many people are not just getting, they're already rich.
They're getting filthy, obscenely rich at this point.
And last I checked, it doesn't matter what direction the market goes with options that you could actually leverage all of this stuff.
So, you know, it's the argument that the markets are manipulated has always been there.
And people, there are people with the beautiful minds who think it's, you know, 100-year cycles that are just predetermined from a couple hundred years ago.
But this doesn't do you any favors if you want to argue against that.
This looks completely manipulated at their floating information.
And certainly the incompetence of this.
Let's just go through this again.
Remind me, Jared, because it's not clear to me.
What are the possible, what are the possible goals here that the United States would have policy-wise in Iran?
It would stop it.
The stated goals are to stop them from having nuclear weapons, which I was told that they were only a couple of weeks away from having.
But you were also told that they were.
We completely obliterated their nuclear program, sure.
Okay.
So, so, okay.
So, and there, are there people who are plugged into the intelligence community that have information that would indicate that Iran was not that close to a nuclear bomb?
Is that possible?
I would say that everybody in the intelligence community said that they were definitely not that close to it, which we'll talk more about in a little bit.
Okay, good.
Great.
So I just want to make that clear.
So there's that element.
Are there any other reasons or any other goals perhaps that we would have as American foreign policy in Iran?
You mean absolute fealty to Israel and whatever they do?
Is that what we're getting to here?
I mean, no, I mean, actually just looking forward, even snark aside, okay, like I suppose they want to take over the oil.
Is that what they want to probably do?
I mean, there is the idea of taking out Iran and bringing their oil production basically in under the Venezuelan model.
Sure.
I'm sure when Donald Trump was his addled, milky mind was moving between being in the Oval Office and remembering a vanity fair party he went to in 1984.
And he and he thought that maybe he had a chance with like Miss America.
Like, I assume maybe that occurred to him.
Yes.
Now, would there be any other possible goals for doing this kind of a thing and dismantling the Iranian state?
Pure and utter profit by the people who make the weapons and by the people who control the markets.
Yes.
Because what we haven't mentioned is like, this would be like arguing that we stormed Normandy for the oil, right?
That's why we went into World War II, just because, oh, we can get rich off of this.
Do you want to hear something wild, though?
Oh, no, don't.
If you actually want to sit with it long enough and you actually want to dive deeply enough, you can say that we stormed Normandy for oil.
You could make that argument.
Well, I like to pretend that there was a humanitarian effort going on.
Well, that dressed it up for sure.
I mean, the problem was that Nazi Germany was taking over our bloc, which is colonial imperialism.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, listen, we don't want to ignore the Holocaust aspect of this where they had to put a stop to that finally.
Although, listen, Roosevelt did ignore it for a long time.
Sure, no.
Okay.
So that's not even part of the calculation here, you know, because the people in Iran have been suffering under sanctions for decades and decades.
It's not a great place to live.
And then also just the government itself is oppressive.
So, you know, you don't hear one word about any of that really.
I do feel like at one point there was a notion that Trump said, well, you know, they should rise up now.
And the intelligence community, of which he doesn't want to listen to, said, yeah, if they were to take the streets right now, they would be slaughtered and they would, and the government would be justified.
I think the just, I think when we had, how many people were slaughtered during the original a few months ago during their protests?
Estimates are 50 to 60,000.
Right.
And I have to imagine that there was a lot more people protesting.
So there might have even been slight, even the slightest bit of like, maybe we shouldn't be slaughtering everybody right now.
Like, I think that the military might have had that feeling, but now in the middle of the war, I don't think there, yeah, there wouldn't be any holding them back.
This would be a complete and utter destruction of innocent civilians.
So that ain't going to work.
But it's frustrating because this is why we're doing this, especially in the sense that, you know, the vanity fair party in 1984 is a really good imagery because the United States pumps more oil than anybody these days.
We have more oil than we need.
We don't have to rely on the oil coming out from the Middle East anymore to do this.
We're going to find out real soon.
Right.
We had no reserves anymore.
That's the only problem.
I'm glad that you approached it this way because, and it's a weekend edition of a great podcast, right?
So here, let's go a little bit deeper in the weeds than we usually would.
Are you ready?
Yeah.
Okay.
I'm going to start with just a conversation between me and my friend Nick.
Nick, have you ever had a stretch of your life where you looked up and you were like, I don't really know why I'm doing what I'm doing?
Sure.
Yeah.
You mean job-wise or just anything?
Job-wise, relationship-wise, life-wise, right?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
How did I get here?
This is not my beautiful house, right?
And all of a sudden, you're like, I'm not really sure what's happening here.
You know what I'm saying?
And then you have a moment where you're like, I need to reassess and I need to figure out what it is that's driving me.
Well, really quickly, so this is how the difference between you and I, when you say, How do we get here?
You reference talking heads.
When I hear that, I think Frank Drebin at the end of the sidewalk in Naked Gun.
Oh, yeah, that's a great, that's a great pull.
That's actually a great moment.
He looks around and he's just in the middle of nowhere.
That's a great moment.
But yeah, Nick, when it really comes down to it, you know, one of the things that we talk about is we talk about deep politics where it's like, oh, here's the story that everybody tells you about why things are happening.
Let's actually talk about the motivations here.
We are in right now.
It's almost like the black hole.
You ever seen a movie where like you go into the black hole and it's crunching all matter up and things don't make sense in the same way anymore?
Yeah, sure.
We have arrived at the event horizon of modern history.
There are so many different things happening right now that are illogical.
And let me tell you one of the big things that I'm thinking about.
Nick, we've talked for years, not just on this show, but just as a country and as people who are interested in politics.
It's like, when are we going to kick oil?
Right?
This is a finite substance.
There's only so much of it.
It's also destroying the world.
It's also leading to one war and instability and corruption and greed all over the place.
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