Jared J. Sexton and Nick Hausman dissect Iran's F-15 shootdown as a potential uranium cover-up and Trump's "Praise be to Allah" rhetoric as incitement for martial law. They critique General Randy George's purge and the proposed $1.5 trillion 2027 defense budget, which slashes the EPA and State Department while mirroring pre-WWI arms races driven by capitalist incentives. Ultimately, this trajectory of military expansion and institutional erosion signals an inevitable slide toward fascism and global conflict, necessitating a non-political "end of empire" solution to de-escalate flashpoints in Iran, Ukraine, Israel, and Lebanon. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Supporting The Independent Podcast00:01:58
Hey, everybody, welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
I'm Jared J. Sexton.
I am here with my co host, my friend Nick Hausman, out of office.
Oh, I saw SPF4, Jared, out on the beach yesterday.
How is this possible?
I don't know.
I appreciate you out there risking the sunshine, living the good life.
How are you feeling?
I feel really, really great.
I mean, there's nothing like a little RR and just extra little sleep for everybody.
I recommend it if you can just to kind of have a moment to yourself and relax.
Well, I'm happy for you.
Unfortunately, we're not going to have you on the weekend episode.
And I am getting on the road.
I've got some major organizing stuff that I've got to get to.
So we're doing a bunch of different things.
The next week, week and a half is going to be a little all over the place, but the news doesn't stop.
Well, variety, it's a spice of life.
So the spice of podcast.
Vacation Nick.
Oh, man, he's feeling good.
He's glowing, people.
You can go over on YouTube and look at the glow.
You did get some sun already.
I don't know how.
I was on the shade, but I feel a little, I'm emanating heat at this point.
You know, that's not a great thing.
We're a couple of pale boys.
Yeah, that's right.
We are.
We're a couple of pale boys.
All right, everybody.
A reminder if you want to support the podcast and also you want to get the Weekender, I'm going to be manning the desk on Friday.
You're going to want to listen.
Head over to patreon.comslash muckrakepodcast.
Support the show, keep us editorially independent, and also gain access to the Weekender and special shows.
Nick, there is so much going on right now.
I was putting this show together and I was just like, man, we are, it feels like we're in a little bit of a moment before a big moment.
Right.
And so, like, we're in this sort of a situation now where everything we're talking about today has giant, large implications moving forward.
But we have to start with what happened over the weekend.
Destroyed Aircraft And War Facts00:14:52
The official story is that on Friday morning, Iranians shot down an F 15.
And the pilot and the weapons officer ejected safely.
The pilot was located quickly.
The weapons officer was missing for two days.
There was a massive search and rescue mission as the weapons officer, apparently based on details they've been given, hiked an extremely long distance, climbed a 7,000 foot mountain, was defended by drones, and then a mission that included over 100 special ops.
Um, there were two planes that supposedly were lost due to quote unquote sand, four black hops that were destroyed by us in order to keep the Iranians from capturing them.
Nick, this story the more that it emerges and the more that they talk about it, it seems more and more made up, which I think speaks to a larger situation that we're now kind of staring in the face.
I felt crazy the first time I read the account of what happened here.
I don't know how you're feeling, but for me, it feels like there is.
Probably most likely a very large cover up that has now taken place in the theater in Iran.
Well, I am shocked, Jared, shocked that you would insinuate that the government would not tell us all the details of military operations in a foreign theater of war.
I'd shock you.
But I think that, you know what, sometimes what's is it Murphy's Law?
That's the one where it's probably the most likely outcome is what happened.
I am willing, and by the way, I have no shortage of conspiracy theories that I believe in, but.
I kind of am willing to believe that this was a rescue operation, only because the alternative story would be that they were going to put boots on the ground and steal the uranium from a nearby nuclear facility.
And if I were the chief of the army, I would probably get fired too, saying, guys, this is the dumbest idea I've ever seen planned, because it would have taken weeks, I think, to pull that one off.
But I was told, let's get back to the original idea.
I was told, without a shadow of a doubt, that there was no Iranian capability to defend their skies.
Not at all.
We had complete control over their skies.
And remember, there was some parsing of words because there's a couple of different ways you can describe like complete control or slight control, whatever they say.
So I don't think that's true, Jared.
I don't think that they have complete control of these guys.
Do you?
If they're shooting down F 15s, also they shot down an A 10 as well.
Two planes have been shot down.
They obviously have some kind of capability remaining, which again, we'll get to Trump in a little bit.
He has no idea what the fuck's going on.
None.
And what we're being told about what's happening in this war.
Versus what the facts on the ground are showing.
The amount of planes that have been shot down and destroyed at this point, that, oh, it was this, oh, it was that, oh, it had a hard landing.
Like that adds to the larger murkiness of what's going on because obviously Iran has the capability to shoot down our jets.
Yes.
Now let's walk through the plan though, because rather than send in Black Hawks or some other helicopters that could go into Iran, you know, and get him directly under the cover of night, low, under the radar, all that stuff.
And again, I'm not an expert in tactics.
I like to think that I've studied a little bit of this and I've read.
As much as I can, as a little bit more than a layperson.
But rather than that, here's the plan.
They were going to take, they put these smaller helicopters, I guess are maybe more maneuverable and not as easy to target for their defense systems, put them in a bigger plane, the C 130s.
This plane is going to fly those helicopters over to an abandoned airstrip, land there.
Then they're going to take the helicopters out of the plane.
Apparently, that's all quick.
You can do that.
But you need about 100 or 200 troops to do this.
Then they take off.
And by the way, I think that they were attacked on that airstrip a little bit.
I think they were.
Yes.
I think they were.
He's got a beacon and all that stuff.
God is great, by the way, is what he had said, or the loudspeaker when he was broadcasting.
In the meantime, while they're out there getting him and picking him up in the smaller helicopters, more maneuverable, won't be shot down by their air defense systems, the planes, like quicksand, start to sink into the muck, right?
Which they didn't calculate.
The ground didn't hold.
Those are heavy planes.
So, again, plausible.
Do you think it's plausible that they sunk into the ground because they were too heavy?
I will say that, how do I put this?
I will say that U.S. Special Forces has a history of losing its equipment during operations because they do not understand what they're doing.
In that region, is there already?
They do have problems in that region, yes.
Yeah.
I mean, this time it wasn't a sandstorm.
And, you know, and by the way, listen, I'll give kudos to President Carter because, listen, he tried to get the hostages out.
So you got to give him credit for that.
They didn't realize that there are windstorms in the desert.
I don't know.
But okay, judging by how much decimation of the ranks have been already decimated by this Trump administration, it does sound plausible.
They had forgotten to consider the ground when they landed with those heavy weapons.
You are giving so much room to these people that they do not deserve.
Right.
Because, by the way, they flew them back.
Oh, hey, really happy.
But then they had to blow up the big planes that got stuck in the sand, right?
Because they didn't want the Iranians to have.
Hey, Nick, while you're unfurling this theory, I just want to, as your friend pointed out, Why have you not mentioned the name of the person who was rescued?
They haven't alerted their families yet.
Like, there's never a reason, right?
This is a hero.
He's going to survive.
You're right.
Nobody knows the colonel's name.
Is that correct?
I have not seen any reports.
No, not yet.
Okay.
So now we have to kind of pull this apart a little bit because, okay.
And by the way, after a huge firefight, apparently, right?
They brought more planes in because other planes got shot down.
Anywhere between, like, I don't know, like maybe six to eight or 10.
Aircraft are now destroyed because of this.
And no other casualties.
Well, that we know of.
I mean, I don't know.
You're right.
Since I put it that way, I don't believe it.
So here's the thing like, as we're, I don't know how you felt about it, but the moment that it was announced that an F 15 had been shot down and the pilot, weapons, and officer were not accounted for, it was like, oh God, this is a bad developing situation.
Like, if Iran gets a hostage, that changes a lot of different things and changes the trajectory of the war.
And by the way, like, the way that this has been talked about, there's an article in the New York Times which Is more or less propaganda.
Like the State Department gave them a readout that reads more like the movie Behind Enemy Lines than anything that I've ever read in my entire life.
But let's look at the facts that we haven't stated yet, Nick.
This is in Isfahan, which is near the Natanz nuclear site, which what a coincidence that would be if to track down this guy, you had to be near this nuclear site.
While, by the way, it has been talked about over and over and over again and leaked that there has been a plan.
To go in and seize nuclear material.
And by the way, Nick, shocker of shockers, that would have given Trump an exit route in this war.
If a special operation team went in and seized some nuclear material and got away with it, he could say, We have succeeded.
We've done everything that we've wanted to do.
We don't have to escalate.
We can get out of this war, right?
It would have given the cover story for, I guess, some nations to stay in the Gulf states to stay in the petrodollar system, I guess.
So here, What I'm looking at, and by the way, maybe they did have to find a weapons officer because an F 15 was shut down.
Why was it in the area in the first place and in a place where it was going to get shot?
Why did they have a bunch of refueling planes up in the sky at the exact same time?
This does not look at all like a rescue package.
It looks to me like what happened.
And if this is the case, it changes the entire context of the war.
It looks to me as if the United States of America attempted to put boots on the ground.
And they were ambushed and everything went to shit.
I don't know if anybody died.
I know certainly that the casualty count, I've been told by some people that you can't trust it.
I mean, Iran is saying a bunch of different things.
They have even said now, they released about 20 minutes ago before I started recording a statement that said that they ambushed a special operations.
And I look at all of this, none of it looks like a rescue operation.
It stinks to high heaven.
And if you look at it, This in modern American history, if that's the case, this is like one of the biggest military failures in a long time.
But by the way, you'd have to find a colonel that's willing to go along with this story, if that's what you're saying?
Or are you willing to?
I think that likely an F 15 was shot down.
They retrieved the pilot, and I think that there was a weapons officer that they needed to retrieve.
But the story that they're telling about him getting from one spot in the country to another, I think is the fake.
I think that's the fake story.
This and so I think the next step would be he'd be running for president in a few years, right?
And they'll whisper some special thing to him and then it'll activate him.
Is that what you're doing here, right?
My friend, you are one of my best friends, and I love the way that your mind works.
It's like that.
You just opened that up.
That obviously you are on vacation because we're now in weekender territory.
That is right, yeah, that's fantastic.
Yeah, I don't, I mean, again, because you know, everyone always says about conspiracy theories, they're not possible because.
There would be way too many people that have to keep their mouth shut to keep it a secret.
And how is that possible?
And then I think here we are.
I mean, I think that it is possible.
I think that there are ways to make that happen.
But either way, I just think it's a gross incompetence.
I think this is sort of what it's speaking to.
Either way, because you're right.
Like if we control the skies, we're sending missiles in every other day, whatever it is, and we can bomb whatever we want.
Why would we need to have any F 15s up over the skies anyway doing stuff?
I mean, surveillance, we probably have plenty of, you know.
Oh, we have plenty.
You know, from the thing.
The thing we're not talking, Nick, we now, in the process supposedly of saving this dude, we have nearly half a billion dollars worth of military hardware that gets destroyed.
And to understand, to accept their explanations, like it goes from, oh, that's a little weird to, oh my God, I don't think any of this makes sense.
And I kind of look at it and I want to ask you your feeling on this because we're getting ready to talk about Trump's absolutely unhinged Easter post.
I look at this and I'm like, are they going?
There's two routes here.
This story, which American media has fallen for and people aren't really asking that many questions about, even though they should.
Is this their, hey, we've won this war, we saved our person, we're out?
Or does this block an exit ramp that they thought they were going to take?
And we're now looking at, oh my God, we're really going to go boots on the ground here.
And we've actually already put boots on the ground, but now we're really going to do it.
And I look at it and I think it's more of the latter than the former.
I got another thing, a proverbial bomb to drop on you, Jared.
Are you ready?
What if the provocation that Trump is now talking about, and let's say he goes through with it in terms of bombing infrastructure and committing war crimes, is this possibly a way to incite violence in the United States?
Okay.
So let's get to that.
Because obviously, we have to talk about it.
On the same day where this is going on, and we don't know exactly how things are playing out, The president of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump, posts on Truth Social Tuesday will be power plant day and bridge day, all wrapped up in one in Iran.
There will be nothing like it.
Open the fucking straight, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in hell.
Just watch.
Praise be to Allah, President Donald J. Trump.
We got to talk about what this is even saying.
We got to talk about the insanity of a president who would post something like this or the lack of consequences.
There's really, I'll tell you this, he keeps coming up with ways to be crazy that are surprising.
Right.
You know, trolling, right, would be what he's doing, right?
I guess.
The praise be to Allah is wild, especially on Easter morning.
That is a wild thing to do.
Right.
I mean, especially because we've seen, you know, the casual use of Allah is extremely upsetting to people who have the Muslim faith.
And we've seen all manner of violence carried out in terms of, you know, we remember the, in France, we've seen that when they posted something that was inflammatory.
And he has to sort of have a sense of that, of what he's trying to do.
I mean, it feels.
So here's the other thing, by the way.
Like he was missing.
I don't know how much you've been traveling.
I don't know how much you paid attention to it.
He was missing for so long, not just in public, but not posting, that there was a lot of speculation about whether or not he had had some sort of medical emergency.
I think it's pretty obvious the reason we didn't hear from him was because they took his fucking phone from him, right?
So that he could not post about what was going on in Iran, right?
Like whether it's special ops or a rescue mission, whatever it was.
Meanwhile, he gets it back and he manages to not just say praise be to Allah, which is wild, but also threaten multiple war crimes.
And to go ahead, he put a red line in the sand.
If he could quit talking about opening the Strait of Hormuz, he would have more ability to like navigate things.
And depending upon who he's talking to, Nick, he's telling some people that he's going to make a deal with Iran on Monday or Tuesday or whatever.
Mental Competence And The 25th Amendment00:05:06
Doing this shit, like on top of it, it's so self destructive.
It actually hurts his ability to maneuver.
It's, I guess the only way I can say it is this he's impressively bad at this.
Like, I don't know that anybody has been this bad at this.
And on Easter, no less, a day that you should have some restraint, I suppose, when you're tweeting out, compared to what everyone else is tweeting out, these nice little things about the Lord and whatnot.
So you have to start to imagine that, and again, he's not well, right?
I think it's pretty clear that we are being led by someone who's not competent mentally.
And so it could just be the rage and it, and maybe the reaction, like, I finally got my phone back.
Hey, wait till you see what, now I'll show you.
Now, it also is related to the fact that he tends to be missing for the first couple days of each month.
And he comes back with a much more of a hand that's bruised and a hand that's really swollen.
There's all sorts of stuff that happens there that could be related to this as well.
But if you want to look at this ahead in terms of the elections coming up and you need some sort of event to take control of the government and not allow elections, well, here's your thing.
That said, does he have to go through all this because they could just do a false flag then?
I mean, these things are so fucking convoluted and such a mess.
And it's speaking of like, we were talking about this on a previous episode.
He's so frustrated by this situation.
And, you know, he's so used to being able to bullshit his way around things that the pressure is building and building.
And for anybody, I imagine there's a large percentage of the audience who has been around someone like Trump in their lives.
You know, that's one of the reasons I think our self selecting sort of audience.
The people who understand this understand it to a certain extent because they have been around people who are culturally or personally fascistic, right?
If a person like that, like he does not want to put boots on the ground, he does not want to escalate this thing, he wants to be done with it.
But if that gear sort of turns in his brain, he's like, Well, fuck it.
They want it.
We're going to destroy them.
Like, I think there is like another level.
As my phone goes off, there is another level where if he decides that he's going.
To make this a mess.
Like, there's no end to the things that he could do, whether it's boots on the ground, war crimes, even tactical nuclear weapons or false flags like you brought up.
There's no end to what he is capable of doing if and when that shifts in his head.
Right.
Well, and now we have to go back to the probably the most reasonable voice amidst all of this, the person that we always turn to when we need someone to listen to Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Her response to this was probably as spot on as everything I see because she's like, Israel has a capability of defending themselves.
We don't necessarily need to be involved in any of this anyway.
And so the goading that Netanyahu did to Trump to lure him into this thing, which I'm choosing to believe, they said, hey, we're going to go.
Do you want in on this?
And they knew Trump would be like, oh, I got to be the first guy to do this instead.
I think that's another interesting take that no one's really talking about as well.
And we don't necessarily need to be involved in this as it is.
But he caught himself.
I don't know.
Trump was talking to reporters today outside the White House.
He, I think he became he got within an inch of saying he would use nuclear weapons on Iran.
I think he would, I think he would, and I think that brings up another interesting part of this conversation, which is I'm still seeing people on social media call for the.
I think Chris Murphy even did it.
Uh, they're calling for using the 25th amendment to remove him from power because he's obviously unfit.
And here's the thing should he be?
Absolutely, I can't think of a more textbook case of a president.
Who should have the 25th Amendment invoked and pulled from power?
He is obviously unwell.
He is obviously incapable of doing his job.
But that also adds to the next thing, which is no one will.
That's an impossibility.
No one is going to invoke the 25th Amendment with this guy.
He has shown that the safeguards, the things that have been put in place to try and avoid this situation, they're not going to happen.
The institutions are not going to save us.
He's not going to be impeached and removed from office.
The 25th Amendment isn't going to happen.
The institutions have failed.
And I find this post particularly incredible because it's an artifact for the future.
Like when political science classes are going to talk about the institutional failures of American representative government and constitutional failures, they will show this post and they will say, This is the type of shit this guy was putting out there.
And nobody did anything about it.
Guns Sent To Create A Coup00:13:25
Like I think it is so telling and historic in that regard.
He constantly tells us, and nobody wants to believe him, right?
That's and every time, and we've been on this before anybody else.
Yes, it's time to listen to the guy.
And again, I have no doubt at this point.
Maybe if I did six months ago, there's no doubt now that, yes, they're going to take over the elections in November.
They're going, or not only taking them over, but like not allow them to happen.
And that's going to, and then that will extend into two years from now when the presidential election will come up, if he's still around.
No question.
And so, and that's the blueprint we're now facing in terms of the future of the democracy will always be that way.
You said this, the first person to say it was, why would a Republican ever accept an election result that they lose ever again?
That's all there.
So, yes, I'm seeing the writing on the wall.
And in my mind, it's yeah, what he's trying to do is set up the conditions to end up having something happen here that will then allow them to basically imply and enforce martial law.
I mean, literally saying you have until X day or else I'm going to destroy all of you.
And then the praise be to Allah.
It's wild.
Nick, while we're on the subject of crazy shit, what we're getting ready to play for people, this clip from Fox News.
I, because we lose track of this, Nick, but I always want to give people foundational sort of context.
What you're getting ready to listen to, although this is like it barely made a blip in the past, before we got to this point, what you're getting ready to hear would have turned into one of the biggest scandals in politics.
But this is what you're getting ready to hear here.
Is Trey Yinks on Fox News talking about a conversation with Donald Trump?
And we'll give you the context for what's actually happening here, but I promise you, what you're getting ready to hear has a very, very large magnitude of meaning.
Now, the president also provided new details on what happened earlier this year as the Iranian regime took to the streets and slaughtered what the president tells me is 45,000 civilians in their own country.
After that took place, President Trump told me the United States sent guns to the Iranian protesters.
He tells me we sent them a lot of guns.
We sent them through the Kurds.
And the president says he thinks the Kurds kept them.
He went on to say we sent guns to the protesters, a lot of them.
And so a number of headlines here from my conversation with President Trump.
All of this taking place more than a month into Operation Epic Fury and in the aftermath of that successful U.S. operation overnight to rescue that stranded U.S. service member inside Iranian territory.
Nick, every time I watch this clip, I'm through the looking glass.
Can you try and give a little bit of context of how big of a story that just a random conversation that Donald Trump had with a Fox News reporter?
Would have been in the past, yeah.
I think.
Well, I mean, what you're alluding to is the notion that a uh, you know, a government from another country is now trying to smuggle guns into Iran.
It sounds familiar, actually, it felt wildly familiar, yeah.
And through the Kurds, so okay, they changed the script a little bit.
Good, congratulations, you know.
Um, by the way, knowing what I know about the Kurds, and they're a bunch of tough sons of those guys, like really, really, like you can't conquer that area of their land.
Like, you know, they're going to be like, hmm.
And by the way, I don't even know if we believe any of this, right?
This could have been a dream that Trump had that he now thinks is reality.
And they're, but the Kurds be like, oh my God, we just, they just dropped off 20,000 guns and they expect us to like risk our lives to go into Iran and drop them off.
Like, I can't see how that would work.
So here's the thing this is such a batshit, crazy throw off thing that if, let's do the context thing, okay?
There's two possibilities.
Actually, I guess there's probably three possibilities here.
The first possibility, and by the way, like the Kurds have denied this, they've said this didn't happen.
So the first possibility is that Trump just gave away a major CIA operation.
And if that is the case, if the US shipped an enormous amount of guns in order to try and create a revolutionary coup within Iran, The implications for that, first of all, you have to start asking questions, which, Nick, you'll notice no one's asking questions about this.
It's just now, no one, everyone's like, yeah, I guess maybe that happened.
Where did the money for the guns come from?
Because that would have been an off the pages slush fund that I don't know, maybe, and I'm just talking here, maybe the U.S. sold drugs or maybe the U.S. sold arms elsewhere.
Or maybe the U.S. has come into 100 million gallons of oil from somewhere just happened to be that way.
So, So now all of a sudden we have, and by the way, like Nick, the other implication if we are, and Iran told everybody that the US had propped up this protest movement, right?
So now all of a sudden maybe that happened.
And so now all of a sudden the amount of people who were killed, you now have to have a question did Iran fight a US led insurgency?
And that doesn't make sense to me.
So that's one thing.
That's massive.
The second thing, Nick, is that Donald Trump made this up whole cloth completely.
And if that's the case, he's stark raving fucking mad.
And then the third possibility is a combination of the two.
None of this, this is one of the wildest stories that is getting absolutely no traction.
And it's another historically large one that in the past would have ground everything to a fucking halt.
Yeah.
I mean, it just sounds like King George all over again.
He had syphilis, right?
Wasn't that his problem?
I don't think so.
All right.
So, whatever caused insanity, it's the same thing that's going on here.
But yeah, I think it's probably a combination.
But well, here's my question now because there wasn't a lot of sort of video evidence of all these people getting massacred in the protests.
Right?
And so, in a way, I always sort of pictured it where they're out in the streets protesting in Tiananmen Square and they just started mowing people down.
Are you trying to insinuate, or is this sort of the notion that some of them actually were armed and it was?
Some sort of a battle, and then they got mowed down anyway.
Like, that's that's I can't figure that one out.
I can't either.
I this thing it when this dropped, and again, like it just kind of happened and went away.
Like, the implications of it are very large, like they really truly are.
And at that point, that actually, and again, I want to point out what are we talking about here, Nick?
We're talking about peasant mindset, which is so much is happening behind the cloak, and for the record, that is what the theme of today's episode is apparently.
When the divide between the powerful and the people that they are ruling is this large, you don't know what the fuck is going on.
You don't have a clue.
So, this would change the entire trajectory of how this war got started and why it's being fought.
It's a wild set of circumstances.
Throw on top of that, I don't know if you saw the reporting that the Office of Legal Counsel is going to basically allow the White House to not have to keep any records.
Oh, cool.
Yeah, that's great.
Yeah.
And part of it could just be like they're so incompetent, they just don't want, they can't manage it all and keep it all.
But I think obviously the part of it would be there's got to be incriminating stuff that they would be legally bound to save in case there ever was some sort of investigation.
And now they're going to just torpedo, to destroy all these documents.
You know, if there was like, so, you know, the war crime stuff that he wants to do, let's just say he started to do it in Iran, like if there ever was a case that would finally force the Supreme Court to remove his absolute immunity official duties, this would be the one.
And they're already trying to cover that up and hide any evidence that exists of these orders that he's going to do.
But this is, again, he keeps telling us all these things.
They keep announcing it in public, and nobody wants to put all these things together.
Can you imagine?
Can you imagine?
Like, Ronald Reagan's brain was porridge.
And at least he wasn't on the phone with like newspaper reporters being like, well, we were sending the guns to the Contras.
It's incredible.
Yeah.
Well, for what it's worth, Sarah and I did probably one of the greatest sketches of all time.
He was shot by one Phil Hartman, where It's all a sham, and he really was behind it.
Yeah, the mega mind.
But I think it's absolutely fair to say or accurate to say that Trump is not.
Although, listen, Trump probably said, Yeah, we're going to go in there.
He sent some planes in there and take the, you know, just like we took the president of Venezuela.
Don't take the uranium, no problem.
By the way, if they were going to take the uranium, do you know how heavy that it is?
It's like tons.
No, they were going to take like a half ton of uranium.
Yeah, yeah.
Like, you know, they have hazmat suits, I would hope.
I don't know.
What the hell?
So, on that note, Nick, speaking of the peasant mindset and everything that we're talking about, late last week, Pete Hegseth forced Army Chief of Staff General Randy George into retirement almost completely out of nowhere.
George then penned a goodbye email calling for, quote, courageous leaders of character.
So, here's the thing speaking of the peasant mindset, the idea of not knowing what's going on behind the curtains of power, this one's wild, too.
Nick, because as an analyst who looks at these signals, at first I thought there were two possibilities and I couldn't tell.
And now it appears that there's like three or four possibilities of why George was relieved of his position.
And by the way, forcing out a chief of staff, one of the joint chiefs of staff, is a major, major thing.
So at first I was like, oh, is he opposed to the war in Iran and maybe something that's going on there?
Or is it that he was mad about the Black Hawk pilots who like buzzed Kid Rock's house in Nashville?
Like, And now all of a sudden, it's like, oh, was he in on the planning for this situation that took place over the weekend and like protested against it?
And now you look at it and you're like, I have no fucking clue.
I have no fucking clue.
And there's only more questions with every passing hour.
Well, there's even a better explanation is that Hegseth continued to try and take people of color and women off of the promotion list.
And he kept saying, these people have exemplary records, they need to be promoted.
And so finally, Hegseth had to go over his head basically and remove them from the list.
And that would be another reason.
And, you know, it, by the way, just to shit on Hegseth a little bit farther, it's like the guy's a white supremacist.
He's got the tattoos to prove it.
And he continues to show it with what they're doing with even the website stuff that they have on the army and the government.
So, you know, all those things are probably on the table.
And I would think that part of it is related to that.
I have no doubt he would have looked at the logistical planning and been like, you guys are fucking insane.
And they're like, well, he's in the way, get rid of him.
But I have a feeling much more of it was he just simply wanted to make sure people who deserve to be promoted got promoted.
I, I, and to be honest, like a lot of these things, I think the answer is all of the above.
You know, I think it's a combination because if you, they have done an incredible job of something, they've done it very quickly, which is a purging of knowledgeable experts.
And the only, the best example of this that I can give people is like what happened when Stalin took out all of the doctors in the Soviet Union.
And he basically was like, oh, they're all involved in a plot, they're all coming after to kill, and they got rid of doctors.
And it got to the point where like, They didn't have fucking doctors.
You know, like the doctors had either been killed or sent to Siberia.
It's like, hey, we have a problem that we need to address.
We don't have enough doctors.
And so, what has happened with the military in the US is we have purged so many people at this point because either they weren't fascist yes men or they didn't click their heels fast enough.
Or maybe, I don't know, they didn't tell, you know, Pete Hegseth, good job on your burpees this morning.
Like it's gotten to the point now where I don't even know how much of our command.
Is even capable of carrying out the operations that these fascists are going to tell them to carry out.
Doctors Killed Or Sent Away00:05:41
So I don't even know where this lands.
I mean, this is the theme of the whole administration.
Like Doge cuts all these different things and fires all these different people from different departments.
And then about four months later, they realize, oh shit, we actually needed most of those people.
And it actually will cost us more money now to rehire them and all that stuff.
So no question that this is in that same vein where, yeah, the.
The brain trust has been completely drained, and they don't have people who have enough experience to pull this stuff off.
And so now it's just a question of like, is it going to be an ego thing where Trump can't accept saying that they lost or they had to pull out?
And I had thought, by the way, out of the Iran thing, that he would declare victory no matter what, which he tried to do, right?
And he's been pushing off this date about when they're going to have to have the Strait of Hormuz open for the entire time.
Every time it's a few more weeks later, it's almost like their infrastructure plan.
And so It's like at some point, yeah.
I always thought he would do that, but you're right.
I think that the pressure of his ego and mania might end up being so strong that he will simply lead us into some devastating uh conflict with boots in the grounds.
Well, again, it's a situation that he can't figure out or his way in.
I mean, Asia right now has no oil, okay?
Asia has no oil, it's done, and the shocks of this are going to hit us probably within the next week or two.
Like the actual real shock.
I say, as I filled up my car, like $350 a gallon yesterday, there are more shocks that are coming.
There's no way to bullshit this.
There's no way around it.
And it's only going to get worse if something doesn't get figured out.
There's nothing to get figured out.
And there's a very real likelihood that what happened over the weekend that we've been lied to was an attempt to figure it out.
Right.
But it's not, it's not figured out.
And so then you have a question, which is it goes back to we talked about it months ago when they had their all hands on deck.
They had every officer flown in from around the world.
At some point, is someone in the military going to say, we have fed too many young guys into a wood chipper?
Right.
We have now been exposed.
I mean, we haven't even talked about this.
The amount of exposure that the United States military, and we'll get more into this in the final story of the day, they have been exposed as being incredibly vulnerable.
And Iran, Iran has shown everybody the recipe for beating the United States.
Like they have just absolutely given away the playbook.
And so, how many of the people are going to be happy with the U.S. military being exposed like this?
You know what it's kind of like?
It's like in football terms, it's like a screen pass.
And if you're familiar with that, you know, the quarterback retreats deep into the backfield.
Everybody kind of like, it looks like they're wigging out, oh my God, we're going to get sacked.
And then they just lob the ball over all of the rushers who think that they're doing a great job getting in there to the quarterback.
And then they all they go running down the field, you know, for the.
For a touchdown.
And it feels that way.
Now, Israel also, I've seen reports that more missiles are hitting Israel now than they were before because it turns out that no matter how good their Iron Dome is, it's a limited amount of missiles that they can use to fire.
And if they can lure enough of them out, like if Iran shoots one missile and Israel ends up using two or three to stop that one, right, at some point they're not going to have enough and Iran can stretch it out.
And now here we are.
Because again, I don't see Iran having any interest in capitulating in any kind of discussion.
Their discussions are happening.
I have no doubt through Pakistan and through anybody else that they are having some sort of high level discussions to figure out how to end this.
But I can tell you right now, and I don't blame them.
I hate to sound like I'm anti American, but I don't blame Iran for saying, fuck you, we're not giving up our nuclear weapons now or our program that we might have had or not.
They probably enriched to 60% just as a, in my mind, and again, I may be giving them too much credit, but I would think that they kept it there just for the leverage to get rid of other sanctions.
And that's why.
Because again, they could have had those weapons the whole time.
I kind of choose to believe that there was a fatwa against having nuclear weapons because of the reasons.
But I can also, at this point, say, I reasonably believe that the new people in charge of Iran would say, forget that.
We are now, we need to have these nuclear weapons.
And that's all because of what Trump did.
And, you know, was the JCPOA like amazing and was it awesome?
No, but it was a tremendous start to what could have been another way of bringing Iran into more of the Western side of government and human rights.
And that'll never happen now.
And just two quick points before I move on from this story, Nick.
Yeah, we're negotiating with Iran, but everybody that we talk to, I don't know how a missile strike takes them out.
It's so strange.
They'll talk to us and then them and everybody that they've ever known gets hit by a missile strike.
It's almost like Israel doesn't want us to sue for peace.
And then the next part of this, like there's a very real possibility.
I mean, Iran, they've, man, they have suffered and the amount of people that they've lost already is abhorrent.
They're in a better geopolitical position.
Than maybe they've ever been.
Like it's incredible.
So, speaking of the military being exposed and all of these different components going around, the Trump administration revealed their proposed 2027 budget.
Nick, military spending up to $1.5 trillion from nearly $1 trillion last year.
Budget On A War Footing00:10:31
That is for anybody keeping track at home, that is a new record.
But basically, everything else in the United States government gets a giant cut, including.
The EPA, which is proposed to have over 50% of its budget cut, labor, HUD, the State Department, you name it.
We are looking at one of the most total war industry budgets that you will ever see.
I have my own reactions to this.
I have my own analysis, but how do you feel?
We're just going for it.
Yeah.
I got to check the numbers.
I'm assuming the IRS got cut as well.
And that means that I don't have to do my taxes this year, right, Jared?
I'm not going to have to pay anything because no one's going to be there.
I really, for all the people who are saying they're not going to pay their time, I wish you luck.
I hope it works out.
You know what sucks is that you know it's like whatever is left of the skeleton crew.
Oh, they've got one person.
Yeah, they're going to harass you and I. They're not looking for CEOs, my friend.
No, yeah.
And so, you know, this is the beginning of the end, right?
I mean, I believe the approval rating of Trump is below Nixon just before Nixon had to leave office.
I think we're getting to that point.
And if you combine that with gas and combine it, because services are going to be stopped offering the American people, right?
That'll be clear and that'll be quick.
And all the people who think that bootstraps and all the Republicans who don't think the government should help, they're going to also find out very quickly how vital it is to have those programs.
That's what Doge found out, right?
And so it's going to be a disaster for them.
And the only answer that I have for you would be that these people do not care about elections.
This is not how anybody who's supposed to be elected behaves in any stretch.
And the amount, like, can you imagine what $500 million would do?
Wait, is that half a trillion?
Half a trillion dollars of the increase for the defense budget.
What that could do, that could cover the cost of health care for every citizen for years.
And that's what's so galling about this.
By the way, really quickly, not on a left turn, but it is Artemis.
Do you are you upset about Artemis and like this whole thing going around the moon and coming back?
Wait, wait, what am I upset about?
Artemis, NASA, that all.
Yeah, I mean, I know about it, but yeah, what I mean, it just seems like okay, do we really need to be spending money on that?
Well, that's a different they're doing that to get ready for a moon base, which is a whole different chapter in this whole thing.
Personally, I'll lay my cards on the table.
Um, I have a family member who uh helped design the space toilet, so like I've been pretty excited for that.
Okay, all right, all right, well, all right, fair enough.
But I would have been, you know, in 67, 68, when they were preparing to go to the moon, you know, there was a huge push.
It's not even like covered that much.
I would have been one of the people probably who would have been swayed by this notion of turmoil, very similar to what's now, you know, deficits, the whole thing.
And why are we spending billions of dollars to go to the moon?
I think I would probably be among those.
But either way, it's just the layer here is simply that these people are not running again.
They're not running as a democracy, as somebody who's accountable to voters.
Yeah, I want to start with the larger 30,000 foot view and then I'll move into the analysis of it.
First things first fascism comes in when you don't have to worry about representative government and you don't have to worry about political consequences.
And what it does is it carries out the material desires and needs of capitalism.
So, this budget, this budget is exactly where we were always heading.
And it's disgusting that we have cuts on everything that would help anybody.
One of the things we've covered since these people got elected, Nick, is the fact that this is the final destruction of every program and every place that you can find it that is meant to better the lives of people.
That's gone, right?
What I then look at with this, and by the way, the majority of the manufacturing, it's everything from bases, or the majority of the funding, it's everything from bases, but there's also reestablishing the manufacturing of munitions, right?
It's also putting more and more money into the Navy, which is a part of the issue with the larger, like sort of deficit that we have in terms of what we're looking at going forward.
Nick, this to me, when you pair it with what's happening in Europe, Where every single country is putting more and more money into defense and they're stocking up and they're creating like mutual aid packs outside of NATO and you name it,
it looks a lot to me like what conditions looked like leading up to World War I and World War II, which is where all of the countries move away from any sort of sort of polite society or liberal society and everybody is moving towards a war footing.
And eventually, what happens?
Is you start to have an arms race that makes that type of war almost inevitable because everybody's putting all their money into it and they're all preparing for it.
They're all sort of getting on that war footing.
And the issue here for me is that I don't think the Trump administration, I don't think Trump or Hegseth or any of these people understand that.
They're reacting to the current situation that they're in, but what they're actually doing is sort of like planting the seeds for a larger crisis that is to come.
That doesn't mean World War III is inevitable, but the people who are in charge both here and around the world and also the material conditions are on the path to that.
That's what this budget represents to me.
Yeah, I mean, it's a reasonable take for sure.
Yeah, I mean, I'm trying to kind of figure out exactly if I feel that way in terms of Europe and war footing as well.
I mean, because they're obviously, they're not having no interest in participating in Iran.
But I think what you mean is like they're just looking at protecting their own borders and from Russia.
Yeah.
Right.
And that was the problem the pressure that Russia actually was supposed to bring us all together, right?
We were supposed to have a common enemy, right?
And that keeps everybody in NATO together and friendly.
And then we can avoid that stuff, right?
And that was always the biggest peril, perhaps, of this.
It wasn't even just like, oh, Trump doesn't like Europe, right?
Or he doesn't like the financing, whatever.
He doesn't like the food there, whatever that is, right?
There was more of a geostrategical notion to this, where once you weaken the support that the United States has for NATO, and which, by the way, was most of the support, right?
They propped NATO up this whole time, is yes, suddenly the threat of Russia becomes so great that it will fracture everybody else into their own little corners.
And that's what Russia wanted, right?
And that's what Russia has, and that's what Russia planned.
Right.
I think from the beginning.
Yeah.
And you look at it, I don't, and again, a lot of this stuff happens of its own volition and with its own momentum because it's capitalism moving the incentives around and sort of creating these situations.
I don't think that when they got in a room, they made this budget thinking, oh, this is for fighting the alliance of China and Russia together.
Right.
But that's what it is.
I mean, that's how you get to this point.
Like, I have to assume there's somebody in the Pentagon with a brain who realizes that.
Undoubtedly, they're there.
They're sort of moving the figures around.
But it eventually is a reaction to it where all of these different societies and people need to understand war isn't just where diplomacy.
And Nick, I find it very fascinating that this includes State Department cuts because where we're going, we don't need roads and we don't need diplomacy.
Right, that's what this is.
It is the general movement towards war, which is the final level of extraction, where you don't even have to pretend that you're doing this to make a better society.
Everybody's putting their chips in the middle because it's a greater competition over who is going to extract and who's going to get more resources.
Well, can't we just go back?
Can it just be good old fashioned corruption, you know?
And like, hey, I'm gonna get you that contract, you're gonna build a bunch of those ships and those planes.
I got good news for you, Nick.
That is an arms race, is also the quickest way towards corruption, right?
So, so I guess my point would have been it is good old fashioned corruption and good old boy, we're gonna get you those contracts, but it always inevitably leads to that conflict because they'll end up having all this and it's incompetent leadership as it is, and then poof, we are in it anyway.
So, I got all these missiles, am I not gonna shoot them?
Yeah, now, and then by the way, am I correct in my adult brain on my vacation?
Reagan reduced the amount of warheads we had at some point, right?
At some point, but in a real John Kerry moment, he reduced them after he grew them.
Okay.
Because imagine that.
Like, we're now having to sort of look at Reagan being somebody who, like, realizes, by the way.
And by the way, I would argue that Reagan probably toward the end did realize the evil and the problems and the need to have NATO, the need to have communications.
Well, Nick, do you, I mean, is it a coincidence that, like, part of this is For nuke modernization, and China has been unveiling hypersonic missiles that could possibly have warheads.
It's step for step.
And I'm glad you brought up the Reagan thing because that is how quickly this changes.
One moment you're in an arms race, and the next moment you step away from it.
But you could not be in an arms race, and the next moment you're stepping into it.
And so it's the reversal of that.
We're moving back, as we've talked about now for years, we're moving back into a more dangerous time period and a more dangerous environment.
And every day, every day that we're in Iran, every day that Ukraine continues, every day, name it, I mean, Israel and Lebanon, like whatever it is, the flashpoints grow.
And that means you got to be ready.
And if we're frantically trying to steer away from this terrible, you know, dangerous area of which we had driven into the first place several miles.
So that's, yeah, it's a problem that I don't know.
By the way, there is another solution to all this, and it's not political, and I'll leave it at that.
There certainly is.
Also, end of empire.
It's a motherfucker.
Monitoring Global Flashpoints00:00:37
That's all I'll say in all of this.
All right, everybody.
That is going to do it for this episode of the Muckrake Podcast.
We're going to let Nick get back to the beach, is what we're going to do.
And we will be back, or I'll be back with the Weekender on Friday.
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