Hey, everybody. Welcome to an extremely slapped together edition of the Weekender edition of the Muckrake podcast. I'm Jared J.J. Sexton. Nick Houselman, our good, good friend, has left for nicer climates, an impromptu vacation. We wish him well. We hope he gets all rested up, all replenished as we head

into the new year to do the business that we have to do. A reminder, go over to patreon.com

slash muckrake podcast, support the show, keep us editorially independent. And as always,

I know you don't trust the corporate media because you shouldn't

that's why you support this show keep us rolling keep us growing and yeah you're going to want

to listen to the entirety of this rant that I am about to go on because I you know when when

Nick takes off for a couple of days and I'm left to helm the show,

yeah, you don't get opening music, but you know what you do get?

You get just me sitting in a parking lot talking about all the shit that I want to talk about.

And there's a lot that I want to get to today.

I hope you've all had good holidays, whatever it is that you celebrate or don't celebrate,

or if you just like to hang out and look at the clock and wind down the seconds, I hope it's

been good to you. It's been a little bit of getting away from it all for me and just kind of getting my breath back, getting my feet back under me.

And meanwhile, the stupid just continues on as we roll towards January 20th and this brand new accelerated era of politics.

But I have felt very grateful for all of you, the people who have reached out to, you know,

say some nice things, wish us happy holidays, you know, talk about the fact that, you know, you trust us and give us your faith.

It really means the world.

Speaking of the corporate media, everybody, I want to go ahead and start with, you know,

something that I saw coming a little bit, and I've sort of talked about trying to tell people exactly how the second Trump administration was going to play out in terms of the normalizing of it and the reaction to it.

You might have seen CNN covering Trump's recent rantings about his wanting to take control of the Panama Canal, wanting to buy Greenland, and maybe even welcoming Canada in as the 51st state.

And I got to tell you, the more that I think about Canada being the 51st state, I don't know if you all have looked at a map recently, that's a big-ass state.

I would argue that maybe possibly that is too big of a land area to be one state.

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