The Muckrake Political Podcast - Cold Hard Kash: Patel To The Metal
Aired: 2026-04-21
Duration: 53:59


=== The Muckrake Returns (14:55) ===

[00:00:01]  Hey, everybody, welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
[00:00:03]  I'm Jerry Dave Sexton.
[00:00:04]  I'm in front of a professional microphone, Nick.
[00:00:08]  Yeah, you are.
[00:00:09]  I thought we were almost at the beginning of the Monkees episode with Hey, hey, everybody.
[00:00:14]  Hey, everybody, it's the Muckrake.
[00:00:17]  That's the new song, All the Kids.
[00:00:19]  I can't even say it.
[00:00:21]  They're not singing that.
[00:00:22]  Anyway, we are back in studio.
[00:00:24]  The boys are still back in town, reunited, and it feels so good.
[00:00:27]  I'm here with my friend Nick Hausman.
[00:00:29]  Nick, how are you doing, bud?
[00:00:31]  I'm just a little frazzled.
[00:00:32]  It's been a couple days of a lot of playoff basketball.
[00:00:36]  And never ending games back to back.
[00:00:38]  I can't wait.
[00:00:39]  So, for those who have been longtime listeners of the show, when the NBA playoffs start up, the demand on your time is crazy.
[00:00:46]  And I, for one, I can't wait to see what happens with NBA playoffs, Nick, and live war in the Middle East, Nick, at the exact same time.
[00:00:55]  Like, how's that going to shake out?
[00:00:58]  Multi screen, what's it called?
[00:01:01]  Picture in picture.
[00:01:02]  Picture in picture.
[00:01:03]  Yeah, I think that's the solution right there.
[00:01:06]  I'm watching, you know, Wemben Yama hitting threes over people and then.
[00:01:10]  Bombs exploding across Tehran.
[00:01:14]  It's going to be, it's like clockwork orange or something like that.
[00:01:17]  It's going to be wild.
[00:01:19]  And luckily, everyone is along for the ride.
[00:01:22]  Reminder everybody we need your support more than ever.
[00:01:25]  Head over to patreon.comslash monkgreggpodcast.
[00:01:27]  Keeps us editorially independent, keeps us ad free.
[00:01:30]  And it also allows you access to the Weekender shows on Friday, which you're listening to the previews.
[00:01:36]  You could be spending an hour with me and Nick.
[00:01:38]  And also on the Weekenders, reminder we go way off record.
[00:01:44]  We go all over the place.
[00:01:45]  Patreon.com slash Patreon.com slash Muckrake Podcast.
[00:01:49]  Nick, we start today with one of our favorite members, one of our favorite characters in the ongoing saga of the Trump fascist collapse.
[00:01:58]  The Atlantic has published a story by Sarah Fitzpatrick.
[00:02:02]  And you know, there's a lot of these stories that get published, Nick, but this one is special.
[00:02:07]  There are tons of leaks.
[00:02:09]  Most of the anecdotes that are brought up in this story were verified by upwards of nine people.
[00:02:15]  Which tells you a lot about everything.
[00:02:17]  Saying that FBI Director Kash Patel is having multiple, quote, freakouts.
[00:02:21]  He's engaging in, quote, bouts of excessive drinking, which have caused multiple meetings to be rescheduled and multiple times where security details have been unable to wake the director of the FBI and once requested, quote, breaching equipment in order to break into his locked room.
[00:02:37]  He, including also the fact that he fired multiple counterintelligence members right before the beginning of the Iran war.
[00:02:45]  Nick, I was thinking about this and I have a lot of thoughts on what this is revealing, but I'm remembering back when Cash was going up for this job and the Senate was hearing his case.
[00:02:55]  And we talked about how dangerous it would be to have a radical like Kash Patel running the FBI.
[00:03:01]  In a way, we are lucky as hell in some regards that Kash Patel is obviously such a fucking dumpster fire.
[00:03:11]  But that being said, it also makes us all less safe.
[00:03:13]  So I don't know.
[00:03:15]  Well, are we lucky in the sense that he's hungover so much that there's like limited time of him in the office actually making bad decisions?
[00:03:22]  Is that what you're trying to say?
[00:03:23]  Isn't that wild?
[00:03:26]  What do you think the chances are that this story is true?
[00:03:30]  Well, I mean, first of all, I should mention that Kash Patel has brought a $250 million defamation suit against The Atlantic, but nothing like this gets published without sources.
[00:03:43]  I'll just say that.
[00:03:44]  Yeah.
[00:03:45]  When you say sources, you're talking dead to rights, locked.
[00:03:49]  Down, like you know, Watergate style vetting of these things.
[00:03:52]  We're talking not just about members of the FBI who obviously are tired of Kash Patel.
[00:03:58]  I read this, and you have to develop a certain eye for these types of stories.
[00:04:04]  It's pretty obvious that these stories about security detail not being able to wake him up and needing to break into his room is coming from members of the security detail.
[00:04:13]  So, like, what we're talking about here is like a total move against Kash Patel within the FBI and all of its apparatuses.
[00:04:21]  Like it is quite obvious they've got him dead to rights on this one.
[00:04:24]  Yeah.
[00:04:24]  And just for some context, because that's why we're here, right?
[00:04:26]  We like to talk about historical context.
[00:04:28]  We're talking about an entity or a group of people, a government agency, if you will, that was led by a person that would like to put on women's clothing.
[00:04:41]  And it was also a closeted gay man.
[00:04:44]  That never leaked.
[00:04:46]  Those things were never used against J. Edgar Hoover.
[00:04:49]  And here we have Kash Patel, who they're more than willing to now go on, you know, On background and let people know what really is going on.
[00:04:55]  That kind of tells you something, doesn't it?
[00:04:57]  Well, J. Edgar Hoover, and for those who don't know, I hope everybody has a working understanding of history.
[00:05:03]  J. Edgar Hoover, as director of the FBI, had an entire closet full of skeletons that nobody touched on.
[00:05:10]  And in part, Nick, because he was an anti democratic fascist power hoarder who basically blackmailed everybody who ever stepped foot in Washington, D.C.
[00:05:23]  And the FBI, I mean, I don't get me wrong.
[00:05:26]  The FBI can be very chatty.
[00:05:28]  Like they're very, very chatty.
[00:05:30]  There's a difference in these two sort of bodies the FBI and the CIA.
[00:05:34]  The CIA talks all the time, all the time.
[00:05:37]  There's all kinds of power plays that are always happening.
[00:05:39]  The FBI does not usually leak like this, which I think speaks to a larger situation in the FBI where it is completely and utterly off the rails.
[00:05:50]  Yeah.
[00:05:50]  And that's how bad it has to be.
[00:05:53]  Now, did you mention?
[00:05:54]  I can't remember now that they actually need, they requested, Equipment that would let you know, equipment swat things to break down doors because they weren't able to get to Kash Patel because he was either so drunk or hungover that he wouldn't open the door and they thought something had happened to him, right?
[00:06:12]  I mean, we've heard all sorts of things.
[00:06:13]  We've heard of him, like, you know, he wouldn't go out off of the plane without a proper FBI jacket, you know, because he needed to look like you know, the part or whatever.
[00:06:22]  So, you know, this guy is deeply unwell, deeply, you know, like you kind of have to have a certain.
[00:06:29]  Um, confidence to lead an agency like this, I don't think he's got it, and I think it's leading to a lot of this stuff too.
[00:06:36]  But but there's no it's confidence and it's competence, and he's never been, uh, you know, qualified to handle this.
[00:06:42]  And you're right, it's you know, not to say not to jinx anything, but like the fact that we were we haven't had any kind of major issues to deal with with security is a little bit remarkable.
[00:06:54]  Well, and, and, you know, there's a couple of things happening here.
[00:06:57]  And I want to give sort of the larger thing, like, because what do we do here?
[00:07:00]  We talk about the historical stuff, but we also talk about the context of where stuff is leading.
[00:07:05]  So here we have a situation that we've discussed in the past where a lot of the crimes, and by the way, it infers, it does not say explicitly in this article, it infers that because of his drunkenness, it led to him making these big proclamations about having caught people and having suspects in custody, all of that.
[00:07:24]  Like, we now have reached a point.
[00:07:26]  Where for the second Trump administration, the first Trump administration, it was stocked with old Republican guards, right?
[00:07:33]  It was people who were like, we'll hold our nose and work with Trump and kind of use it.
[00:07:38]  The second one is so extreme that it became smaller in size in terms of the people they could go out and get.
[00:07:46]  Like, at this point, Nick, I wouldn't be shocked if Cash gets fired and you start hearing rumors that Matt Gaetz could end up being the new FBI director.
[00:07:55]  There's such a small, in sports terms, it's not a deep bench.
[00:07:59]  And this is what happens when a corrupt sort of fascist group takes over the apparatuses of power.
[00:08:06]  I mean, let's not forget, Kash Patel is a podcaster, and his deputy was Dan Bongioni, who left because he couldn't handle the job.
[00:08:16]  And so, what's happening now is we have a lot of people.
[00:08:19]  It's sort of what happens at an institution when it finally reaches sort of its death knell, right?
[00:08:24]  The FBI has always been anti democratic, it's always been oppressive.
[00:08:27]  And now, in order to carry out the things that Trump wants them to carry out, you have to go out and get people who are not.
[00:08:33]  Capable or competent, and hope that they're able to use the powers they're given to them.
[00:08:38]  But what is Kash Patel?
[00:08:39]  Kash Patel is a clown.
[00:08:41]  What is he most concerned with, Nick?
[00:08:43]  It's personal beefs and going after his critics.
[00:08:46]  But the thing he's most obsessed with, it's not leading the FBI, it's dating Alexis Wilkins, his wannabe country singer girlfriend that they're using the apparatus of the FBI to protect more than anybody else who is from private life ever.
[00:09:05]  We are lucky that he is in charge, but it also speaks to the fact that this is like a train that is starting to really wobble on the tracks.
[00:09:14]  And the fact that we haven't suffered something really badly because of him, right now at this point, it's kind of a miracle.
[00:09:20]  Right.
[00:09:21]  And I'd like to push back a little bit on the notion of the anti democratic FBI, because let's not forget, they were the backstop to our democracy with Nixon.
[00:09:29]  And while we have the Woodward and Bernstein to thank for the reporting, it was the number two in the FBI who basically took him down.
[00:09:36]  Well, you could make the argument that the FBI in its deep state apparatus went after Nixon in large part because he was the last president that we've had that really tried to exert personal power over the system as opposed to sort of working as a conduit for things.
[00:09:55]  So it depends on which way you're looking at it for sure.
[00:09:58]  That's perfect.
[00:09:59]  And that is true because you said last president until now, right?
[00:10:03]  We're kind of rehashing this again.
[00:10:06]  And so I would be definitely concerned about this.
[00:10:09]  I mean, we've had.
[00:10:11]  In the context of what we've had, like I'm choosing to believe that cabinet members, I'm not sure the head of the FBI is in the cabinet, is a cabinet member, but even still, the point being that up until Trump, I would choose to believe that there was some solemnity to the office.
[00:10:27]  There was some sort of ethical nature where people weren't going to abuse the privileges that they were getting from these offices that much because the public would find out.
[00:10:37]  This, what Cash has been doing, especially the things where he's traveling to Nashville all the time, traveling back to Las Vegas, doing all these different things.
[00:10:44]  It's such a emblematic of the corruption that we've seen since the first Trump administration across the cabinet members and what they've been willing to do.
[00:10:50]  That the only conclusion I can come to all of this is that it's tacitly approved by Trump.
[00:10:56]  They've been informed, yes, have at it, get whatever planes you want.
[00:11:00]  Christine Noam had this plane that she was all set to trick out for herself with a shower and everything.
[00:11:05]  There had to have been some sort of from down on high approval for all these things to let them know that they can now unleash their own personal.
[00:11:15]  What's it called?
[00:11:16]  Picadillos?
[00:11:17]  Is that the word I'm looking for?
[00:11:18]  Yeah.
[00:11:19]  And I think what you just touched on is important because I think the main problem in this, weirdly enough, the one thing that we've heard that Trump has been unhappy with Kash Patel was that he was videotaped binge drinking with the US hockey team during the Olympics.
[00:11:36]  And because that happened, Trump, who is an infamous teetotaler, it was obvious that that was the thing he was pissed about, right?
[00:11:43]  It's always appearances because essentially what we have at this point.
[00:11:47]  Strangely enough, as oligarchs have taken over the apparatus of government and the levers of power, we now have an influencer regime, right?
[00:11:57]  Trump is an influencer.
[00:11:59]  Everyone around him is an influencer.
[00:12:01]  Basically, all they're worried about is what they present to the world.
[00:12:04]  So, for Trump, speaking of peccadilloes, it's his own personal sort of thing, which is he doesn't want to see people drinking.
[00:12:10]  And meanwhile, we talked not too long ago about Todd Lyons, who is the active director of ICE, who is having multiple mental breakdowns and apparently is going to leave the administration shortly.
[00:12:21]  We talked about in order to do the shit that these people do, they have to self medicate to a certain extent, right?
[00:12:28]  And it's obvious that cash is not capable of doing this job.
[00:12:33]  It's incredibly stressful to have actual power as opposed to critiquing power.
[00:12:37]  And so now we have a guy, and I'm sure that he was doing this shit before he took over the FBI.
[00:12:42]  Now that he's taken over the FBI, he's not able to do the job, and he's also self medicating in order to deal with the stress of not being able to do the job.
[00:12:50]  And as a result, the real problem here isn't that he's incompetent.
[00:12:54]  The problem here for Trump is that he is letting his bullshit out in public, which speaks to the larger issue of why people like this should never be put in power.
[00:13:06]  First of all, if Dan Bongino couldn't hack it and was talking about how hard the job was and got out of there, remember, he is infinitely more qualified than Kash Patel would be to lead the entire FBI if they had picked him.
[00:13:18]  He is the same.
[00:13:19]  And by the way, for people who don't remember, because my God, this is like dog years, Dan Bongino was going on Fox News and holding back tears, talking about how stressful it was to have this job.
[00:13:31]  Yeah.
[00:13:32]  So you can imagine, right?
[00:13:33]  And remember, again, he would be infinitely more qualified than Patel is for this job as it is if he was the director.
[00:13:39]  And the thing about the hockey thing, I think that's really interesting because there's no doubt that the drinking thing was a thing.
[00:13:45]  And we all know about Trump and his uncle and whatever.
[00:13:48]  But I also think that he was jealous.
[00:13:51]  We now know how much Trump wants to be part of these celebrations, right?
[00:13:54]  I think it was soccer.
[00:13:55]  What was the thing where he gets on the stage?
[00:13:57]  Yeah, he wants to be with the big, handsome boys and pro burger parties.
[00:14:01]  Well, did we talk about the MFA?
[00:14:04]  The UFC shit where he got with a fighter and was like, You're so handsome, you should be a puddle.
[00:14:09]  All of it.
[00:14:10]  And by the way, I just want to say, as a giant sort of thing, The right is a psychosexual disaster.
[00:14:15]  Period.
[00:14:16]  That is simply the whole point here.
[00:14:18]  But yes, there is a weirdness here.
[00:14:20]  It's not that Cash isn't doing the job.
[00:14:24]  The problem here is that Cash is not doing the job, but he's not presenting a public spectacle that Trump approves of.
[00:14:32]  That's it.
[00:14:34]  And he doesn't have the ability to.
[00:14:35]  He's just not that guy.
[00:14:37]  He doesn't have that cast, central casting that Trump loves to have, like Dan Kane kind of look, right?
[00:14:42]  It's unfortunate for him.
[00:14:43]  He just doesn't have it.
[00:14:44]  He doesn't have the gravity of personality either.
[00:14:47]  And so I almost think that he was so jealous he wasn't part of that celebration and Cash is on the TV doing it.
[00:14:53]  That might be why he had the hockey team come to the State of the Union.

=== Shifting Power Dynamics (16:18) ===

[00:14:57]  I'm going to show you.
[00:14:58]  I'm going to have them come and we're going to have them fill the aisles and all that stuff too.
[00:15:01]  That was a little bit weird.
[00:15:02]  I think we commented on that.
[00:15:04]  That was very strange.
[00:15:05]  Yes.
[00:15:05]  Yeah.
[00:15:06]  And kind of walk in, kind of stood around for a little while and like kind of wait.
[00:15:09]  Like it was strange for a state of the union to say the least.
[00:15:11]  So I think all these things are part of that.
[00:15:13]  And it's just, it's just not, just Jared, it's not the way we should be running a country.
[00:15:18]  It's not the way anything should be running.
[00:15:19]  But I will say two quick things.
[00:15:21]  One, as an analyst who is starting to put together different theories of modern power, this administration, and even more so than the first administration, that was a little bit of a different animal because, you know, Trumpism was a relatively new phenomenon.
[00:15:35]  And now it's like a, Now, it's a matured, I would argue, terminally and dying political project that is getting ready to give birth to the next thing.
[00:15:43]  I think you could boil down Trump's, I hesitate, Nick, to say governing philosophy, but it's the celebrity apprentice.
[00:15:52]  That's what it is.
[00:15:53]  It's literally, he's not actually capable of understanding good management.
[00:15:58]  What he actually cares more about are these, like, sort of perceived slights of his own.
[00:16:03]  And no, it's not the way anything should work, but I will say one last thing on this cash story, Nick, which is, If this brings about the death of the Federal Bureau of Investigations and opens the door for something else, I am all for it.
[00:16:16]  And that is one of the places where I'm at presently, which is, you know, this shit is bankrupt and it's destructive and it's self destructive.
[00:16:25]  And the way that it's all coming together, it really feels like a lot of these old, decrepit, sclerotic institutions that have stood in the way of actual democracy, they're meeting their final end because they were always heading in a direction like this.
[00:16:39]  And was the FBI offered now?
[00:16:41]  There's absolutely nothing that the FBI is doing at this point.
[00:16:44]  And I would make the argument, Nick, that the reason why all of these leaks are coming out are because a lot of the agents and a lot of the major people in the Bureau now recognize the writing on the wall, which is this is going to get worse unless somehow or another something changes.
[00:17:00]  It's their worry about whether or not their particular position will be able to hold sway over American politics anymore.
[00:17:07]  Yeah.
[00:17:07]  And again, we have to recognize these kinds of articles for what they are.
[00:17:11]  Like when you mentioned in terms of why the FBI agents are willing to leak like this too.
[00:17:15]  Well, we in the Wall Street Journal just had an article in a similar way about Trump and how his misgivings about what's going on in Iran behind closed doors are causing all manner of displays of emotion from Trump that are indicative and I think are worrying.
[00:17:29]  And just like we had heard about them a little bit, you know, in the first administration, too, that's what these things are.
[00:17:35]  These are a cry for help from inside the house.
[00:17:38]  Yeah.
[00:17:38]  And I mean, that article, and we'll talk more Iran news here in just a second because, man, it just keeps going.
[00:17:45]  I think you're exactly right.
[00:17:46]  It's why, from the very beginning, that we were talking, well, we weren't talking, the U.S. wasn't as a body talking about it, but the administration was making the plans to hit Iran.
[00:17:56]  You heard from one leak from another from the military and the intelligence and also the diplomatic corps.
[00:18:02]  So, what is happening now?
[00:18:04]  All of a sudden, we're hearing about how Donald Trump is emotionally disturbed by what's going on.
[00:18:10]  I do think it's Cover in a way, but it's also saying, hey, nobody is really steering this ship.
[00:18:17]  And what's more, like he's simply waiting on something to present itself to fix the situation.
[00:18:23]  And even when there is something to fix the situation, he is such a fucking mental case and emotional case that there's absolutely no way for him to go forward, which I think is, again, and I said this on the weekend or on Friday, that's why these diplomatic talks, these ceasefire talks, were never going to work.
[00:18:43]  Because there's absolutely nothing happening here that Donald Trump has control over so far as he wants to have control over anything.
[00:18:50]  Right.
[00:18:50]  And then we ultimately get back to like whatever the goals he might have are going to look an awful lot like the world was the day before this all started, if you're honest.
[00:18:59]  And we ain't going back there.
[00:19:02]  Okay.
[00:19:02]  Well, we can just explore that a little bit.
[00:19:04]  It sounds like you're going to point out maybe the Strait of Hormuz will be managed a little bit differently.
[00:19:09]  Is that possible?
[00:19:09]  Well, it's already.
[00:19:11]  I actually, again, as a political analyst, Nick, on one hand, I'm horrified by what's going on.
[00:19:17]  The other, I'm absolutely fascinated.
[00:19:19]  It's like over the weekend, there were, you know, the U.S. seized an Iranian taker.
[00:19:23]  Then you hear about like three or four cruise ships that just sort of like speed ran the Strait of Hormuz as they were getting fired at.
[00:19:31]  Like nothing here is actually working because there's no, it's Humpty Dumpty.
[00:19:36]  The Humpty Dumpty has fallen.
[00:19:38]  There's no way to put him back.
[00:19:39]  And quite frankly, like there's no leverage whatsoever to actually make this thing work the way it used to.
[00:19:46]  It's irrevocably broken at this point.
[00:19:48]  Yeah.
[00:19:49]  And if I'm not mistaken, I was reading a report that the U.S. ships sunk a ship or like or put torpedoes into another ship's engine room.
[00:19:58]  So this is Iranian flagship.
[00:20:00]  More footing on the sea, which we haven't seen a lot of recently from two major or two of big power.
[00:20:06]  This is, yeah, I don't see.
[00:20:09]  How is this going to end up getting turned down anytime soon?
[00:20:11]  This is going to be the kind of thing like the rest of the year we'll have some sort of version of a live war in this area.
[00:20:18]  And again, it's right.
[00:20:20]  It's driven by the ego that Trump has, where he can't, like, there isn't going to ever be a concession, right?
[00:20:25]  And I think what they discovered was Iran doesn't have a lot of pressure to concede a lot of things either, you know?
[00:20:32]  So it sounds like, correct me if I'm wrong, I think that the initial, like, they must have been sitting around Hegsef and Trump.
[00:20:38]  Imagine the smell in the room.
[00:20:40]  I don't know.
[00:20:40]  But they're trying to figure out what the goal is here.
[00:20:44]  And they probably figured we'll take out the Ayatollah and then it's going to crumble.
[00:20:49]  It'll all be done.
[00:20:50]  Literally, that was their solution there.
[00:20:53]  They did not take into account any of the things that Iran has done subsequently.
[00:20:57]  And I think the attack now from the United States and Israel has hardened their control over the country.
[00:21:04]  And they just didn't fathom that.
[00:21:06]  No.
[00:21:07]  And it is one of those things where, A couple of matters are taking place all at once.
[00:21:12]  You know, I had mentioned how Nixon was the last president who basically was up on the wheel, right?
[00:21:18]  Was able to control things.
[00:21:19]  Everything after Nixon, particularly because of stagflation.
[00:21:23]  And, you know, I think Nixon is a great place to jump off from because Nixon believed before he got in the White House that he was going to be able to end Vietnam rather easily, right?
[00:21:34]  And Vietnam was a war that America got drug into largely because.
[00:21:40]  The military industrial complex.
[00:21:42]  If you're going to build that army, Nick, at some point or another, you need to fucking use it.
[00:21:46]  You know?
[00:21:46]  And so you had a lot of people in the military who were like, yeah, let's go ahead.
[00:21:49]  Now you have a situation where Trump and the people around him, I imagine the meetings you're talking about, which we've even got leaks about this.
[00:21:58]  Netanyahu is sitting at the head of the table being like, oh, we'll take care of this thing.
[00:22:02]  It's not going to be a problem.
[00:22:03]  Meanwhile, intelligence and military are like, no, that's not going to happen.
[00:22:07]  Then Netanyahu leaves and Trump and Hegsteth are doing their bullshit.
[00:22:11]  And everybody is in the room going, hey, sorry to interrupt your big boy party here.
[00:22:16]  It's not going to work this way.
[00:22:18]  Meanwhile, everybody now, including the military, is caught up in this thing that is just churning and churning and churning forces none of them can control.
[00:22:27]  Meanwhile, you brought up that Iran's hand is growing.
[00:22:32]  I talked about on the weekend how Saudi Arabia was starting to get a little bit wobbly.
[00:22:37]  Nick, now we're hearing that the UAE, as the Strait of Hormuz is closed again, Has started talks with the United States to carry out what they're calling a currency swap line, or me as a layperson from Greene County, Indiana, would call a bailout because the financial situation is getting worse.
[00:22:56]  Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, the signals out of there are that they're having to reconsider their investments.
[00:23:01]  We'll talk a little bit more about that.
[00:23:04]  Basically, what has happened is Iran just sort of sat back and was like, well, we'll see how this plays out.
[00:23:09]  We'll do our best.
[00:23:09]  And now they're looking around and it's like all of the political economy right now is absolutely on their side.
[00:23:18]  I have a thought exercise for you really quickly.
[00:23:20]  Because we're talking about Nixon, and kind of there's a through line between Nixon and Reagan in the sense that the Bay of Pigs, if we go back far enough, was actually planned by Nixon as a vice president right before the election in 1960.
[00:23:33]  So that's how we would do things, right?
[00:23:36]  We would have proxies who would try and do these attacks.
[00:23:38]  We didn't have to do direct wars and all that stuff.
[00:23:40]  And that's a direct through line through Vietnam.
[00:23:44]  And then if you think about the Iran Contra scandal, it's a little bit like Bay of Pigs.
[00:23:48]  Where they were going to try and fund and do a similar kind of encroachment into another country that way.
[00:23:54]  And that's the thread that the Republicans have lost.
[00:23:56]  Like, that's sort of been the way they should be doing it.
[00:23:58]  And here we are directly involved, and it's going to end up becoming one of those Vietnam style debacles.
[00:24:06]  Well, and to go ahead and bring all these components together, Nick, because I think the context is really important here.
[00:24:11]  I'm glad we've opened up this talk.
[00:24:13]  Like, when JFK got in office, JFK, first of all, dealt with the Bay of Pigs, which wasn't even his plan.
[00:24:20]  Right.
[00:24:20]  This is contingency.
[00:24:21]  It has nothing.
[00:24:22]  So many of the projects post World War II are projects that are being carried out by multiple parties.
[00:24:29]  Like we see something that gets started with a Republican, it gets finished with a Democrat, right?
[00:24:34]  They're working hand in hand.
[00:24:35]  JFK comes in and like basically keeps us from World War III.
[00:24:38]  He's, and by the way, like somehow or another ends up dead pretty soon after that.
[00:24:43]  Yeah.
[00:24:43]  Then you get into like this era that has taken place.
[00:24:46]  You brought up Reagan.
[00:24:48]  Reagan wasn't in fucking control.
[00:24:51]  Reagan was an actor who said the lines and everybody behind him was working and churning on this stuff.
[00:24:56]  Now we've reached a point, and by the way, for a long time, these extra democratic, unaccountable agencies like the CIA are going around carrying out coups, which is how the Iranian shit started in the first place.
[00:25:08]  So, what would have happened here, Nick, in the past is that the CIA would have seeded some sort of a rebellion in Iran.
[00:25:16]  Guess what?
[00:25:17]  They tried.
[00:25:18]  They have tried for a long time now.
[00:25:20]  They even tried before this whole thing started.
[00:25:23]  Trump.
[00:25:24]  Because his brain is melting, he told everybody about a plan that was going to give weapons to the protesters in Iran.
[00:25:30]  It didn't work.
[00:25:31]  So, what happens when those things don't work anymore?
[00:25:34]  All of a sudden, it has to be military, right?
[00:25:38]  It has to be using the last weapon that we have.
[00:25:41]  And if you use it and it doesn't work, then shit starts to change.
[00:25:47]  So, that hegemony we talk about starts shifting.
[00:25:50]  And now the UAE is asking for a bailout.
[00:25:53]  Saudi Arabia is asking for this.
[00:25:55]  Israel is asking for this.
[00:25:57]  Nick, we have now got a set of material conditions that are lining up against American interests.
[00:26:03]  What are we going to do?
[00:26:04]  Are we going to bail out the UAE in order to try and maintain a semblance of the petrodollar?
[00:26:10]  That is an incredible thing, particularly as the American economy is getting ready to crumble.
[00:26:14]  Everything's going terrible right now.
[00:26:16]  The idea of bailing them out and possibly working with Saudi Arabia on some sort of a similar plan, none of this works.
[00:26:24]  This is the equivalent of getting your tax bill and saying, oh shit, like things are going to have to change or we're going to have to put up the going out of business sign.
[00:26:32]  Well, how fragile are these countries that, like, after a few weeks of a conflict like this, it's going to be the whole thing is going to start to fall apart?
[00:26:39]  That's what's scary to me about it because you have to imagine Saudi Arabia and UAE are flush, you know, and have all manner of money flowing in everywhere and could handle this.
[00:26:50]  And if they can't already, then yeah, you have to imagine that the house of cards is going to be hitting here pretty quick as well.
[00:26:55]  Well, and I, and this, I think, there's a couple of things that we can glean from this.
[00:27:00]  And I'm glad you put it this way because.
[00:27:02]  The stability of the American world order, which was also backed by the petrodollar, which going back to Nixon going into Carter, like this was sort of the deal that got made, right?
[00:27:13]  Eventually, America was going to rule the world in large part because of the petrodollar.
[00:27:18]  It was always under the auspice of nobody could challenge the United States of America.
[00:27:22]  If we put our brunt force against somebody, we would win, right?
[00:27:26]  Which, by the way, Vietnam did a really good job of showing that that wasn't true, but we continued sort of going down this route.
[00:27:33]  Now, All it took was Iran hitting some of this infrastructure.
[00:27:37]  And I want to point out what's hopeful about this.
[00:27:40]  Nick, we've done shows after show after show, which talks about how Saudi Arabia has used petrodollar money to invest in American investments and sort of take over a lot of our cultural apparatus.
[00:27:52]  If I would have gone back in time a year ago or two years ago and said Saudi Arabia's petrodollar grip over American culture was going to shift and change, both of us would have said, there's no way.
[00:28:04]  It just looked like it was going to grow and grow and grow.
[00:28:07]  And it took a month of missile attacks from Iran to basically destroy the entire facade of what was going on.
[00:28:15]  And now we have entered into a really, I would argue, exciting moment in which things that seemed inevitable are now murkier, right?
[00:28:24]  Which allows things to shift.
[00:28:26]  So if Saudi Arabia is going to pull back its investment in shit, that tells me that a lot of the assumptions we've made about power have been wrong because we need to understand that it can shift and change at like a moment's notice.
[00:28:38]  Well, let me ask you this.
[00:28:40]  Is it safe to say that a lot of the issues we have now with the Trump administration are due to the fact that he's got way more power than, let's say, presidents used to have?
[00:28:48]  Is that fair to say?
[00:28:49]  I would say that, man, and everything about this is really contradictory.
[00:28:55]  Trump has more power than recent presidents because he's willing to use it.
[00:29:01]  Right?
[00:29:02]  He's willing to use all of these.
[00:29:04]  And by the way, not a secret here Congress has been utterly bypassed and Congress is dead in the water.
[00:29:10]  So he has more power in that.
[00:29:13]  Realm with these executive orders and war powers.
[00:29:16]  But on the other side, he is more boxed in by material conditions than basically any president that I can think of since probably Jimmy Carter, weirdly enough.
[00:29:28]  Well, I think the point I was going to maybe try and connect, I'm not sure if I can or not, is that out of the Nixon administration and his failure and his ousting, the presidency kind of got neutered a bit, right?
[00:29:40]  They were able to pass laws and try to control that so that he wouldn't, you know, a president wouldn't be able to do that kind of thing.
[00:29:45]  And we had guys like Dick Cheney just stewing at this for all those years and being part of administrations where they're like planning to somehow get power back for the imperial presidency.
[00:29:54]  That was definitely a thing.
[00:29:56]  They were writing about it, think tanks, the whole thing.
[00:29:58]  So it's almost like, We needed something to happen in this country that would somehow shift the dynamic of power and get that back to the presidency.
[00:30:07]  And it's almost like when something like 9 11 happens and flips that whole switch, that's the point we can draw from there to where we are now.
[00:30:15]  And so you have to then worry that this is what the escalation is going to end up looking like in Iran, too.
[00:30:21]  Because what would stop anybody from, I don't know, having some sort of operation that maybe Iran doesn't do that they say they did, and then that ends up, you know.
[00:30:31]  Leading us down this other path, which, you know, if that was going to happen, it would probably happen very soon.
[00:30:36]  Well, and here in a second, we're going to talk about neoliberalism because we got to talk about the fucking Supreme Court.
[00:30:42]  But before we talk about neoliberalism, we need to talk about neoconservatism.
[00:30:46]  And neoconservatism, which, you know, included like Dick Cheney and those other monsters around him, Nick, that was a political philosophy that was a reaction to capitalist realism, right?
[00:30:58]  Capitalist realism says this thing, this thing, profit pushes all of it, markets push all of it.
[00:31:05]  The neoconservatives wanted to move beyond that.
[00:31:08]  They wanted ideology to be the driver.
[00:31:10]  And we've talked so many times on this show how ideology is a cover for what people want to do.

=== Geopolitical Realpolitik (06:59) ===

[00:31:16]  And they wanted to create a situation in which ideology led this, but it was still carrying out the capitalist forces.
[00:31:23]  In a way, it was really misplaced faith.
[00:31:26]  It was the idea that if you had an imperial presidency that would, I don't know, start a war on terror that went everywhere in the world in order to shore up markets and neoliberal globalism.
[00:31:36]  That it would somehow or another spur an American revival.
[00:31:39]  So here we have a moment where Donald Trump and truthfully, Nick, Trump doesn't have an ideology beyond self serving fascism, right?
[00:31:47]  Like he just wants to crush it.
[00:31:49]  Like we've talked about it, he has an intuition towards it.
[00:31:52]  So what happens now when those conditions are so bad that there's nothing America can do?
[00:31:57]  Neoconservatism says drop some fucking bombs on it, start a war over here, do this.
[00:32:03]  And yeah, I don't think that it's so far outside the realm.
[00:32:07]  To think that you need these moments and disasters and tragedies that spur that type of shit.
[00:32:15]  So now we're looking at a possibility of escalation in Iran.
[00:32:18]  By the way, we've already got an invasion of Cuba basically written in our iPhone calendars for May.
[00:32:25]  The only thing they can do is go out and use that military.
[00:32:28]  There's nothing materially that they can do outside of using the military, which is the only thing that has any money anymore and any sort of like energy or kinetic energy behind it.
[00:32:37]  So, yeah.
[00:32:38]  The chance that something is going to emerge that's going to help those actions, I don't think that's a wild thing to guess after or predict.
[00:32:47]  No.
[00:32:47]  Right.
[00:32:47]  And then we're going to find out pretty soon that we're not going to be able to prosecute a war in two different areas of the world either.
[00:32:52]  And that's going to be another notch in the belt of everybody else who is an enemy of the United States.
[00:32:58]  And one idea I really want to point out because you're talking about the ideology that neoconservatism took over and wanted to do.
[00:33:05]  When I hear ideology, I just hear basically market manipulation.
[00:33:09]  Well, yeah.
[00:33:10]  I mean, it's that's the wild thing about this is that there's so many people who live in this market based society, which, by the way, took over after Nixon and Stagvallation, right?
[00:33:22]  They still want their cake and they want to eat it too.
[00:33:26]  So you just said we can't do two wars at a time.
[00:33:29]  Basically, America has been on a constant war footing around the world for decades now.
[00:33:34]  It became more live at the turn of the 21st century with the war on terror.
[00:33:38]  It's not just two wars going on at once.
[00:33:41]  We have to be on war footing everywhere in the world for even these economies to work.
[00:33:47]  So now all of a sudden, we have a place where there's a major kink, this trade of Hormuz, and there's no reason for Iran to do anything there besides continue to hold it ransom.
[00:33:57]  All of a sudden, then those kinks in that hose are going to lead to more belligerence.
[00:34:04]  Like America is going to keep meddling in things, particularly in the Western hemisphere.
[00:34:09]  And on top of that, Nick, All of these issues are going to lead to some other flashpoint in the Middle East, somewhere, whether it's Lebanon or in Assyria or somewhere, there's going to be unrest that comes from this sort of economic interruption.
[00:34:24]  And the US has promised to intervene.
[00:34:28]  We've already shown that we're on a war footing everywhere.
[00:34:31]  So it's not just Iran and it's not just Cuba.
[00:34:35]  It's multiple places where we're going to be playing whack a mole.
[00:34:38]  And by the way, we can't even take care of the Iran situation.
[00:34:41]  So it's just going to continue to get worse and worse and worse.
[00:34:46]  You remember when Trump said on day one or day three, he would have the Ukraine Russia thing settled?
[00:34:53]  Just like that, just done.
[00:34:54]  Yeah.
[00:34:55]  I mean, it's kind of indicative of all of this, right?
[00:34:58]  Like, just the lack of understanding of how any of this works.
[00:35:02]  And the fact that he could say the Strait of Hormuz is open, right?
[00:35:04]  He said that.
[00:35:05]  He kept saying that.
[00:35:06]  Yep.
[00:35:06]  Yep.
[00:35:07]  Narrator's voice, it's not open.
[00:35:08]  It's not open.
[00:35:09]  It started going, and then they're all turning back.
[00:35:11]  I'm looking at all the radar stuff right now, and they're all turning back, or some of them are getting blown up.
[00:35:17]  So this is, you know, This notion of the power of positive thinking and whatever he likes to subscribe to that helps him create his own reality.
[00:35:25]  You know, it's nice if you're on a TV show and it's nice if you're boxed in by a bunch of adults like he was who were willing to commit a daily coup during the first administration, which is basically what's happening.
[00:35:35]  And it's just going to get worse.
[00:35:37]  And, you know, if the guy, if Trump wasn't in whatever stage of dementia, then I don't know what I would think.
[00:35:46]  It'd probably be a little bit different.
[00:35:48]  But because of that, and because we just don't know what kind of tether he has to reality, This is where you have to be really, really concerned that a decision is going to be made that will be so catastrophic that we can't recover for a long time.
[00:36:02]  I would.
[00:36:02]  So, you know, when we're talking about these sort of forces, a lot of it's baked in, right?
[00:36:08]  So, you know, a lot of people are like, well, we wouldn't be in this situation if X was president.
[00:36:13]  We would be in a similar situation, right?
[00:36:16]  It wouldn't be as chaotic moment to moment, and there wouldn't be so many casualties and giant tragedies that would be happening very, very quickly.
[00:36:26]  It might be spread out a little bit.
[00:36:28]  But because we have an idiot as president who's not capable of understanding these things, it is going to compound it and make it worse.
[00:36:34]  But there's all kinds, I mean, nobody was going to settle the Russian Ukrainian conflict.
[00:36:40]  This thing is going to go and go.
[00:36:42]  And by the way, Ukraine has absolutely, you want to talk about changing circumstances.
[00:36:47]  Ukraine has absolutely no incentive to settle this war right now.
[00:36:51]  Russia is currently going through a major, major economic crisis that is building with every single day.
[00:36:58]  So then all of a sudden, I mean, We're talking about the big risk board here, right?
[00:37:03]  If you actually want to get in geopolitics and realpolitik, like Vladimir Putin is in trouble, which tells me that he's going to become more aggressive.
[00:37:11]  And what happens whenever an aggressive tribe loses its resources?
[00:37:15]  It tries to take the resources of the next tribe over, which tells me he's going to get more aggressive.
[00:37:20]  And it also tells me that the US is going to either be drawn into something like that or basically tell people that they're on their own.
[00:37:27]  So now we have a situation where the order is rapidly crumbling.
[00:37:32]  And we have a guy, much like Kash Patel, who's much more comfortable going on a podcast or Fox and Friends and talking about how he would settle it.
[00:37:39]  But his own personal failings and his own personal mortality at this point are adding to it.
[00:37:45]  And it's escalating not just the tension, but the chaos, which tells me that things are going to become more chaotic and much more sort of fragile, like basically with every passing day at this point.
[00:37:58]  Yeah.
[00:37:58]  And as we kind of discuss leadership and Trump and his inability to differentiate from reality, We didn't talk what broke at some point in between the last time we recorded was that Pete Hegseth went in front of a group of people and tried to read a Bible verse.
[00:38:12]  And I'm not sure if you really want to even talk about it much.

=== Mystification in Decline (04:17) ===

[00:38:15]  I do think that there's a connection here because what he ended up reading was a quote from Pulp Fiction.
[00:38:22]  From Pulp Fiction.
[00:38:24]  Yeah.
[00:38:24]  And I got to tell you, I'm going to be honest, Jared.
[00:38:27]  I probably assumed when I, and I've seen that movie, I don't know, 25 times.
[00:38:31]  I probably assumed that, yes, it was Ezekiel 49, 30, whatever it was, right?
[00:38:35]  Well, my understanding is it's from the book of Letters of Samuel L. Jackson.
[00:38:41]  Okay.
[00:38:41]  Right.
[00:38:42]  And by the way, that's a really good book.
[00:38:44]  A really good book.
[00:38:45]  But it also speaks to something larger, which is I just wrote an article, Nick, about the Christian nationalist point of this.
[00:38:54]  It's an extremely unique mixture of not just.
[00:38:58]  Religious fanaticism, which by the way, it grows in times like this.
[00:39:03]  Like, there's no reason for us to be in this war.
[00:39:06]  It's disastrous.
[00:39:07]  There needs to be an ideology that covers for it.
[00:39:09]  But there's also an extra mixture to it, Nick, which is fucking stupidity.
[00:39:14]  American stupid is the secret ingredient of what's going on right now.
[00:39:17]  So when that happened, I chuckled as well, but I looked at that and I was like, oh my God, that is a symptom of failing structures and the type of religious fanaticism that starts to fill those things.
[00:39:28]  So we have a lot of things against us right now.
[00:39:32]  We have a dying king who can't handle the situation, we have an empire that is.
[00:39:36]  crumbling, an order that is coming to an end, which often leads to a lot of belligerence.
[00:39:40]  And we have idiots at the post who believe in a faith that covers up all of their inadequacies and incompetence.
[00:39:48]  So they're going to fill it with bullshit like that.
[00:39:51]  And the context was talking about the rescuing of this down jet pilot, which is still murky, right?
[00:40:00]  Like maybe they released the name of a jet pilot, I think.
[00:40:03]  Maybe, perhaps.
[00:40:04]  I don't know that they released the name, they released his call sign.
[00:40:07]  And by the way, just real fast, because we can talk about this more on the weekender, not only is that story getting murkier, but non friend of the pod, Marjorie Taylor Greene, is now using whatever remaining power that she has. to call for an investigation in the attempted assassination of Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.
[00:40:30]  So one of the things that happens, not just that things get murkier, we've talked about this, mystification takes over, right?
[00:40:37]  We don't know all the facts.
[00:40:38]  We have theories.
[00:40:39]  We're trying to put them together.
[00:40:41]  And what ends up occurring is a big, giant cloud of mystification takes over, which keeps us from information, but also gives us a larger feeling that something is going on that we don't know what it is and a lack of powerlessness.
[00:40:54]  And the people who are losing power and losing sway and losing authority are going to act more aggressively because of it.
[00:41:00]  Well, should we be surprised that the people who have already displayed an outrageous ability to believe things that are insane will then shift that to a thing that actually goes against the president?
[00:41:13]  That's not hard.
[00:41:14]  It's easy.
[00:41:15]  And listen, JFK is one of my favorite conspiracies, and you know it's been well documented.
[00:41:21]  And yeah, the Butler stuff, even the layman would have to make you scratch your head.
[00:41:28]  So, man, that would be a juicy, spicy meatball.
[00:41:32]  If they could, if they started to do any kind of investigation on that.
[00:41:35]  And, you know, there's a lot of weird stuff.
[00:41:36]  I mean, the fact that Trump doesn't even want to talk about it tells you something as well.
[00:41:41]  It's so fucking insane.
[00:41:45]  It all is so nuts.
[00:41:47]  And this is what happens in times of decline.
[00:41:51]  And so as things are starting to fall apart, it's so funny.
[00:41:54]  You know, you brought up Marjorie Taylor Greene as sort of like using their extremism against it.
[00:41:59]  If you have ever watched a documentary or read a book about a cult, The people who speak out against the cult were some of the biggest adherents of the cult, right?
[00:42:08]  And eventually they get out and they're like, we got ripped off.
[00:42:11]  And matter of fact, like a lot of people died and a lot of bad things happened.
[00:42:15]  This is a cult like environment.
[00:42:16]  That's what we're discussing here.
[00:42:18]  It just so happens that this cult is completely linked into the controls of a dying superpower during one of the most intrinsically important and dangerous moments in modern history.

=== Neoliberalism's Dangerous Project (07:23) ===

[00:42:32]  Yeah, I wish it weren't.
[00:42:35]  That's the problem.
[00:42:36]  I wish it weren't.
[00:42:37]  Well, going from one call to another of a completely different color, the New York Times has released a report on leaked Supreme Court memos from 2016 as the justices debated an emergency action on Obama administration climate change agenda proposals.
[00:42:54]  Within it, John Roberts, who you can't talk about any of this without putting a lot of blame to that guy, he called it a, quote, substantial and irreversible reordering of the domestic power sector that would cause, quote, irreparable harm.
[00:43:07]  To American business.
[00:43:09]  This, for me, we can talk about Trump and his personal peccadilloes and psychology and all of that.
[00:43:15]  Looking at the court and getting this glimpse into it.
[00:43:18]  And by the way, the leaks, you want to talk about leaks?
[00:43:21]  It's just more people saying business is really fucked up here.
[00:43:24]  It gives a really good insight into what the court actually cares about and where they see themselves and what their roles are.
[00:43:31]  Absolutely.
[00:43:31]  I was astounded when I read this article.
[00:43:33]  In fact, I had to do a screenshot of this and I sent it to a bunch of people, I think you among them.
[00:43:37]  And I'm just going to read this to you because.
[00:43:40]  It just doesn't make any sense.
[00:43:41]  Here's what it says In public, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has cultivated a reputation for care and caution.
[00:43:48]  The guy, really good PR, by the way, whoever he has doing that for him.
[00:43:51]  The papers reveal a different side of him.
[00:43:53]  At a critical moment for the country and the court, the papers show, he acts as a bulldozer in pushing the stop of Mr. Obama's plan to address the global climate crisis.
[00:44:02]  Now, you and I believe that there is a global climate crisis, right?
[00:44:06]  Absolutely.
[00:44:07]  Okay.
[00:44:08]  So you have to imagine that as someone in that role who's already willing to kind of go ahead of his skis to try and To thwart this, probably, maybe doesn't believe that there's a crisis.
[00:44:19]  But okay.
[00:44:20]  The next part of it says when colleagues warned the Chief Justice that he was proposing an unprecedented move, he was dismissive.
[00:44:27]  Quote, I recognize that the posture of this stake request is not typical, he wrote.
[00:44:32]  But he argued that the Obama plan, which aimed to regulate coal fired plants, was, quote, the most expensive regulation ever imposed on the power sector, quote, and too big.
[00:44:43]  Costly and consequential for the court not to act immediately.
[00:44:47]  And I responded to think to you and everybody else saying, in what world does the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court have any bearing on economic implications of policy?
[00:44:59]  That seems insane to me.
[00:45:00]  There's nothing legal about that opinion.
[00:45:03]  So that's because you were looking at it from reality.
[00:45:07]  But in the material reality, the Supreme Court is and has always been a check on government on behalf of business.
[00:45:15]  So we had talked a little bit earlier about Richard Nixon, right?
[00:45:19]  And about eventually stagflation.
[00:45:21]  So in the New Deal consensus, following FDR, saving the country and saving capitalism, all the way up to Jimmy Carter, which is where neoliberalism came in.
[00:45:32]  Basically, and we throw around the term neoliberalism a lot, but I want to do a very, very Quick little dive on this to get people to understand what is actually happening behind the scenes and why this shit occurs.
[00:45:43]  The idea of the New Deal was that the government had a responsibility to regulate capitalism on behalf of the people, right?
[00:45:51]  The government should be putting out projects that help people, that give them more security, and gives them, quote, a new deal in the giant social arrangement, social contract.
[00:46:01]  Eventually, because stagflation happens, there's this idea that it should no longer be that way.
[00:46:07]  Neoliberal doesn't have to do with liberalism as a lot of people now think about it in terms of Democrats.
[00:46:13]  It's the original liberal idea of liberal democracy, which is what the founders believed in in the first place, which is that there was only one type of freedom, Nick, and that's economic freedom or freedom to do with your property what it is that you would like to do.
[00:46:27]  The government should never infringe on that.
[00:46:30]  That resurrection of neoliberalism, that's what's happening here.
[00:46:34]  John G. Roberts is saying, without putting it in writing, that John Locke's idea of liberalism is only concerned with property.
[00:46:42]  So, as a result, the Obama administration, which remember, Obama came in promising hope and change after the 2008 crisis, right?
[00:46:51]  He was going to come in and change things.
[00:46:53]  This right here, and for people like me, a leftist who studies these things, this is a smoking gun.
[00:46:59]  This is, it's the equivalent of the JFK conspiracy theory finding the CIA being like, well, We did it.
[00:47:06]  This is the Supreme Court saying that this government is going to step in and hurt private corporate interests.
[00:47:14]  This is going to harm the energy sector.
[00:47:17]  We have to put a check on government because the entire idea of neoliberalism is the idea that there is a project, which is the construction of a larger global capitalism that is too important to be interrupted by people who have been voted into office because democracy is dangerous.
[00:47:35]  You can't, much like what's going on right now, Nick.
[00:47:37]  People don't trust the United States of America because it's not going to fulfill the bargains that it creates.
[00:47:43]  And whoever comes after Trump, maybe they'll put in a deal with another country, but that country's going to understand that in four years, that deal could go away.
[00:47:51]  The economic project cannot be interfered with that way.
[00:47:56]  So this was why the emergency was taking place.
[00:47:59]  And I think that this is perhaps the most perfect example of what the court intends to do, what it believes its responsibility is, and why our current politics are as fucked up as they are.
[00:48:12]  Oh, absolutely.
[00:48:13]  And then you know what's interesting is that in theory, the way certain government agencies were set up, we would trust that they actually had the people's interests in mind.
[00:48:21]  So, like the CDC or the FDA or the EPA, right?
[00:48:25]  These are supposed to be all of these are New Deal organizations.
[00:48:28]  Yeah.
[00:48:28]  Exactly.
[00:48:29]  And so, in a sense, that like, you know, since they're not beholden to capitalism necessarily directly, we could get the straight answers.
[00:48:35]  We can get things that people in earnest are trying to do to help everybody else.
[00:48:38]  We also know that at least two, and probably Roberts has to be now considered as part of that group.
[00:48:44]  Feel like the EPA, for instance, doesn't really have any legal power to do anything.
[00:48:48]  Well, they've now basically destroyed that.
[00:48:52]  Yes.
[00:48:52]  In some years, they've destroyed that.
[00:48:54]  Yes.
[00:48:54]  And it's so transparent that the reason why they feel that is not because they think that the EPA or the science is backwards or whatever.
[00:49:00]  It's simply because big businesses complain so much about the regulations that are, again, were put into place to protect the American people.
[00:49:09]  Those are just too expensive.
[00:49:11]  They don't want to have to deal with them.
[00:49:12]  And then that means that these lovely trips that they get to be fed on, you know, on the, on the, On the bus and with the shirts and whatever that Clarence Thomas loves so much.
[00:49:24]  Like, you know, maybe he's in danger of not getting a lot of those if those companies have to pay too much money for, you know, EPA standards.
[00:49:30]  So, this is a dangerous thing where you kind of realize that there were really good intentions and certain things in the government, like that Doge found out too, they actually work.
[00:49:39]  It might not be completely efficient, but there is an earnestness to some of these things that actually help people.
[00:49:45]  And you have this mindset of like from the right that, That's just, it's a knee jerk, have to destroy these things.
[00:49:52]  And as a result, it makes people's lives worse, if not kills them.

=== Property Rights of the Moneyed Class (04:03) ===

[00:49:55]  Yeah.
[00:49:56]  And their concern is never whether or not these things work.
[00:49:59]  As a matter of fact, the very existence of these organizations they believe is unconstitutional.
[00:50:06]  And by the way, is standing, and this is the wildest thing about it.
[00:50:10]  This is one of the reasons, Nick, why they have done things like giving Donald Trump immunity from any prosecution.
[00:50:17]  The entire idea has always been that the government was created from the very beginning.
[00:50:22]  This is the essence of originalism.
[00:50:24]  It was created to serve the interest of private property.
[00:50:28]  And by the way, they're not wrong.
[00:50:31]  It was created for that purpose.
[00:50:33]  The question is whether or not it needs to change.
[00:50:36]  And looking at these things, this is the reason why I always say it doesn't matter if the Democrats win in November.
[00:50:42]  It doesn't matter if the Democrats win in 2028, if there are even elections.
[00:50:46]  Nothing is going to change at a larger scale until you start dealing with these institutions, which were created for this purpose.
[00:50:55]  So, for instance, FDR, going back to larger historical context, Nick, the New Deal was almost dead in the crib before it was ever carried out.
[00:51:03]  Because the Supreme Court continually said, you can't do this.
[00:51:07]  And FDR said, well, I guess I'm going to have to add a bunch of members to the court.
[00:51:11]  And at which point the Supreme Court was like, well, maybe we can let some of these go through.
[00:51:17]  Right.
[00:51:18]  So until somebody comes in and says the Supreme Court needs reformed, expanded, or completely reorganized, nothing is going to change.
[00:51:27]  And people have this idea of the Warren Court, which was the liberal court that allowed a lot of these things to happen.
[00:51:33]  Like, That's not going to happen naturally.
[00:51:37]  There's going to have to be a figure or political movement that is going to force the change because what we're seeing in these memos, they have a responsibility for one thing and one thing only, and that is the property rights of the moneyed class.
[00:51:50]  That's it.
[00:51:51]  You know, it's amazing how much we think alike.
[00:51:53]  It's while you were very, this just started that answer.
[00:51:56]  I had already typed in Brown versus Board of Education.
[00:51:58]  So I wanted to make sure it was, I thought it was 52, it's 54.
[00:52:00]  Not that long after the New Deal stuff had been implemented and the Warren Court.
[00:52:05]  So you have to, so imagine that a court that would feel as liberal as any court we've ever had that would do anything to help anybody, right?
[00:52:13]  Would also be pushing back, not the entire court, but some of those main elements would be pushing back against the New Deal as well.
[00:52:19]  Yeah, it's insane that we've ever gotten anything done, Jared, as far as I know.
[00:52:23]  The only reason that we've, and, and, I say this not to, I'm not being a doomer here.
[00:52:28]  I'm trying to point out the moments at which things are vulnerable.
[00:52:32]  The only reason that the New Deal happened was because of multiple, multiple things that took place.
[00:52:37]  One, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the right man for the right time.
[00:52:40]  He was a class trader who had been part of the ruling class, who saw that capitalism needed to be saved from itself.
[00:52:47]  Second, you had a labor situation in the country that brought it to a point of crisis, an economic collapse that made it possible to change things.
[00:52:55]  Those things came together at once under very direct conditions.
[00:52:59]  They didn't just happen because people went to a ballot box in November.
[00:53:02]  Right.
[00:53:02]  Right.
[00:53:03]  It was now we're reaching another point.
[00:53:05]  You want to talk about an ongoing theme of the show?
[00:53:08]  The American order is falling apart.
[00:53:10]  We're looking at a possible economic crisis.
[00:53:13]  We're looking at a labor crisis, which, if we can get figured out, will change things.
[00:53:17]  But first, people have to develop a class consciousness.
[00:53:20]  But there are moments where change is possible.
[00:53:23]  And we are rapidly approaching a moment where change is possible.
[00:53:28]  But it's not going to happen by being like, oh, I really hope the Supreme Court rules the way I hope they do.
[00:53:33]  No.
[00:53:34]  They have a reason that they rule the way that they do.
[00:53:36]  It's because it's what their actual creation was about in the first place.
[00:53:41]  All right, everybody.
[00:53:42]  That's going to do it for this episode of the Muckrake Podcast.
[00:53:44]  We'll be back with the Weekender on Friday.
[00:53:46]  A reminder to head over to patreon.comslash muckrakepodcast, support the show, get the Weekenders.
[00:53:51]  You're already listening to them.
[00:53:52]  Might as well come along for the ride.
[00:53:54]  In the meantime, you can invite us over on Blue Sky when it's operating.
[00:53:56]  Nick is at Nick Houseman.
[00:53:58]  I'm Jay West Exton.
[00:53:59]  Be safe, everybody.