Hey everybody. Welcome to the Muckraig podcast. I'm Jared Yates Sexton. Nick and I are both traveling like ships in the night. And so I'm going to handle this episode by myself. We have a lot of hope that we'll be able to reconnect for the Weekender episode on Friday. Reminders, support the show, gain access to

the Weekender, go to patreon.com slash Moncrack podcast. I'm doing this in a hotel, not the most

ideal setup as the air pops on or heat or whatever is going on at this point.

There's a lot to talk about today. A lot of things, a lot of threads to pull at.

I hope you will be patient as I do just that. I'll get to the recent developments in the Israel-Palestine situation.

It continues to deteriorate and change and become weirder by the moment.

I'm also going to be touching on developments with Donald Trump, the Republican Party,

and the absolute madness that is taking place in the House Speaker race.

We told everybody, listen, this thing was going to get very weird, very gridlocked.

There was no real movement, obvious, no real direction.

And guess what?

Absolute madness, no direction direction total gridlock before we talk about that though I want to spend a little bit of time not just setting the table on what is

happening in the Middle East right now but also starting to pick at the different threads, give you the analysis that you

have come to expect here on the Muckrake podcast. Before I do, I want to state something that I said,

I did a small audio for my substack dispatches from a collapsing state. And I want to reiterate it here.

I want to say a couple of things here in case maybe you hadn't heard that. And just I think

it's important. First things first is I want to reiterate what I said last week in our coverage of the

Israel-Palestine situation, which is in the midst of all of this, in the midst of discussing

geopolitics, because it is always messy. And we have a real tendency when discussing geopolitics to forget that as we're talking about

nations, as we're talking about trends, movements, alliances, we have a real tendency to get

focused on the leaders involved.

We have a real tendency to get focused on the leaders involved. We have a real tendency to get really focused on those nation states and those alliances and those movements and those trends.

...