Chapo Trap House - 290 - Maximum Boot feat. Lyle Jeremy Rubin and Lyndon LaRouche (2/17/19)

Episode Date: February 18, 2019

Possibly deceased politician, economist, philosopher and musicologist Lyndon LaRouche* calls in to explain the secret KGB-House of Windsor population reduction cabal. We're then joined by writer Lyle Jeremy Rubin to fully dissect the resurrection of Max Boot, the enduring grift of the neocons, and how we must resist The Blob. Read Lyle's piece in the Baffler here: https://thebaffler.com/latest/under-the-boot-rubin *James Adomian

Hello, friends. It's your chapeau for the week. It's me, Will, here. I'm going to kick things off with a very interesting interview. You might remember on our most recent episode we ended with about a 10-15 minute retrospective on the career of Lyndon LaRouche. But I got to say, ever since we recorded that episode, we've been contacted by various sources who have sent us sort of missives and feelers about setting up this interview. It's an odd one. It's unexpected, but I'm pleased to say that we now have Lyndon LaRouche on the phone. Lyndon, are you there? Indeed, we are here. Thank you for reaching out, of course. And we are tuned to the correct tuning for this interview, which is a tune of the note of A equals 432 hertz.

Lyndon, I got to say this is a bit odd for me because we brought you up on the show because we thought you were dead. Are you alive? This was addressed clearly in a memorandum to the president in 1977, a memo that was both telephased and also printed for backup copy. And it was distributed to President Reagan and members of the State Department. What we knew then through our contacts or intelligence contacts with the National Caucus of Labor Committees is that the entire regime of the establishment on both sides of the Atlantic was a project of the British royal family, which itself is invested heavily in the propagation of a number of Reichstag fire events in order to distract from the necessity of the primacy

of advancement of the physical economy. And this is clear. This is not only clear, this is clear and true. This is true, and this is clear. And we have evidence also that Henry Kissinger is homosexual. Mr. Lewis, though, I mean, it doesn't quite answer my question. You know, it was widely reported in the media that you passed away. Oh, now, these are facts. Of course, if you have a problem with that, then you have a problem with facts. Continue, continue. But Mr. LaRouche, though, why has it been reported that you died this week? We are clearly looking at a Reichstag fire event. And this Reichstag fire event comes straight from Queen Elizabeth and her co-work prince,

Philip, who, of course, we all know are KGB assets going back to the Reichstag fire. And we know, of course, that Hitler himself, when he manipulated the events of the Reichstag fire of 1933, was acting in accordance with the KGB. In order to set himself up as an asset for itself to be taken down, ultimately culminating in the Kabuki event of the Battle of Stalingrad. That's true. That's true. And I know it because I was active. I was active as a pacifist during World War II in that theater of conflict. So, to me, that's personal knowledge. That's the back of my hand. That's the garden in the bottom of my flower. It's funny. In last week and then the same week that I suppose it was erroneously reported that you had passed away at the age of 97,

it was also reported that California has finally scrapped their long planned plan to have high speed rail in the central corridor of California as a long time proponent of high speed rail. What do you make of that? There is a media reporting the death of so-and-so figure within the New Federalist Schiller Institute and so forth. And at the same time, concomitantly, as part of the same intelligence operation going back all the way to the KGB, which is still operative, on orders of Leonid Brezhnev, which have never been countermandered, orders to sabotage the very land bridge rail project that the high speed rail project in California would have been an integral part of, hadn't even been able to steer it and sabotage it

in certain ways. That is the kind of movement that will build a new Bretton Woods. And I know this because of my economics background. I have a background in economics, and that's why I say New Bretton Woods is the way to reinvest in a physical economy while accelerating global warming, which is necessary to prevent the kind of major population reduction that the KGB, Henry Kissinger, Queen Elizabeth, Texas would have on this planet if it is in fact a planet. That's the Snowpiercer Global High Speed Rail Network taking a hit this week. Snowpiercer was partly funded with funds from the National Caucus of Labor Committees. That was something that the LaRouche Network was proud to get behind. And we invested heavily, heavily,

in that project to try to popularize a land bridge that would go at high speed in a global cooling scenario. The opposite of what we are being told, a global cooling scenario. We invested as much as we could. We saw every matinee that was available in New Hampshire for the two weeks that it was in the movie theaters. That kind of investment is real physical economy. And that's the kind of investment. Matinee tickets and early evening tickets, because obviously we have to go to bed at a certain time. But early evening tickets are very important when you're making a massive global investment from the LaRouche Network into a counter propaganda project as important, as vital to countering the KGB propaganda

as Snowpiercer was. I will also point out to you that the movie Snowpiercer due to our agitation and due to some of our funding and behind the scenes manipulation was tuned correctly to the Verdi tuning of the 1840s. It is proper for the playing of all classical music and also it is the proper tuning for any soundtrack in an emotion picture. You'll notice my voice has been tuned to the original Giuseppe Verdi tuning, which is to say A equals 432 Hertz. Allow me to demonstrate the Verdi scale for you, if you're not familiar. The notes become lower. So what would sound to someone propagandized by KGB musicology into saying that it was a flat note is actually the way that Giuseppe Verdi intended his music to sound. So the famous Brindisi drinking

song from La Traviata is intended to sound like... That is the music. That is the melodious music of Giuseppe Verdi in the 1800s. In a pioneering documentary which has yet to be released, we conclusively prove that Verdi, in what was known to us as the 1800s or the 19th century, actually took place in the 1700s or the 21st century. We're all clearly laid out in a memorandum that I screamed over the White House gates to President Carol Ford. Well, Mr. LaRouche, I'm, again, still not quite sure whether you are alive, faked your own death, or coming to us from beyond the grave. With Mr. LaRouche, everybody. Thank you.

All right. Here we are, everybody. It's me, Matt, and Felix, but we've got a special guest sitting in with us today. It's Lyle Jeremy Rubin, and he's here to talk about boot. As we said over the last couple shows in the last couple weeks, the boot levels have become just dangerously high. The containment wall has been breached. Boot is just getting everywhere. It's getting into the ocean. Lyle, you wrote a review of Max's latest book, The Corrosion of Conservatism in the Balfour, and I read a piece and I really loved it, and I wanted to have you on, as someone who's actually read this book. Usually, I'm doing the hard work of reading just an op-ed that you wouldn't touch with, you know, in a Stage 4 biohazard suit, but you've read Max's boots, The Corrosion of

Conservatism, and reviewed it in the Balfour. So you've exposed yourself to a great deal of boot. Yeah, it was painful, more painful than a boot camp or, you know, pretty much anything else. Well, you begin the review by discussing, in sort of slang, the difference between a boot and a salt, and you sort of carry that throughout the review. So what's a boot and what's a salt? So a salt, usually it's in reference to marines that have been in for a while, salty staff sergeants, general sergeants, stuff like that. So originally it meant marines that had been out at sea for a long time. You know, they collected a lot of salt. So these are people that have been in combat or just been in the Corps for a long time. They know what's really up. They're disillusioned with all

the kind of like bullshit mythologies that tend to go along with the Marine Corps and with like America in general. And then you've got boots, and these are people straight out of boot camp, and these are folks that, you know, still are very gung-ho and rah-rah and kind of believe everything their drill instructors told them. So, you know, I definitely put max boot in the ladder column. And, you know, they believe that, you know, sincerely that this is my rifle, this is my gun, one's for fighting, the other's for fun. You know, you have to lose that illusion after a while and, you know, and change the name from a girl to maybe something else. No, but I'm just like, what is, like, this was his big like book that was like, you know, I'm breaking with the

right. And now he's become like, you know, a prominent critic of, you know, Donald Trump. And, you know, what he regards as kind of Yahoo conservatism. But like, in this book, what actually is his case against the right or conservatism? Yeah, I think, I don't think there's much of a case there. I think it's mostly kind of public relations at the end of the day. I mean, he generally agrees with the kind of fundamentals of the Trumpist policy across the board. You know, you can pick anything, whether it's immigration, whether it's tax cuts for the rich, whether it's, you know, intervening in Venezuela, it could go on and on. I think he generally agrees with the Trump platform. To be honest with you,

I think it's more of a career move than anything else. Now, I mean, he would claim and his defenders would claim that he's an anti-racist, right? Like Trump and the Republican party has been taken over by racists. And that was kind of the breaking point for the neocons, including boot. But, you know, I mean, the fact that the other day he used, you know, the genocide of, you know, the Indians as kind of the model moving forward, I don't think he really ever departed from any kind of like racist, you know, Republican past. But I mean, he has said, and to what extent has he said that the Iraq war was like a mistake and on what terms does he make that claim? You know, he never really does. Okay. It's pretty shocking, actually. He goes on, it's really, it was actually

a lot worse than I thought it would be because I read a lot of reviews and I just assumed he was at least going to play the part of a of a contrite, you know, repentant, you know, former support of the Iraq war. But he really didn't. He went on for like five pages explaining that he was just in support of it, what everyone else was in support of. And, and, you know, he went on in that vein. And then he eventually just said, you know, it was a mistake. And he never really explained why, like, I guess we never brought democracy there, like he thought we would bring democracy there. Left it on the bus. Damn it. Yeah. But it was reading from your review now, you right here. The bootness of Max Boot and the bootness of his memoir in particular, a book that purports to

have abandoned the exact bootness it embodies, reflects the overriding bootness of the military industrial media conflicts that is so lavishly rewarded talking heads like boot. The contradiction between boots affected saltiness and his actual bootness marks the principle if unwitting drama of the corrosion of conservatism. It also happens to epitomize one of the stubborn absurdities of our time, namely an inane but lethal ruling class lecturing us with one side of their mouth that Trumpism signals the worst chauvinist of America. And with the other telling us that we must resurrect the chauvinist status quo that brought us Trumpism in the first place. So that this is basically the that he's saying Trump is an outlier. And, you know, he's this

horrible aberration. But what we really need to return to is what America was like 10 years ago. Yeah. I mean, this is this has been the line since Trump Trump assumed the Oval Office, right? I mean, it's pretty I mean, this whole world we live in is just so shocking. But it's somehow managed to get like even more shocking the past two years in my mind. Like, yeah, I mean, the answer to Trumpism, you know, from MSNBC and a good part of the liberal pundit class is to return to everything that brought us Trumpism. And it really doesn't, you know, I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that. I mean, they literally made like the entire lineup of MSNBC now like everyone like in the Bush administration.

I mean, MSNBC, I mean, cable news in general, but especially MSNBC is like this utterly dull sort of life force sapping version of pro wrestling. And Max Boot is his character now is that he is, you know, he's a weary but principled traveler. He's Barristan Salome. He's left the he's left King's Landing. But it's so funny that he he he affects this attitude like he's I've seen it all. Now I'm going to fight back. And it's like all you've done this entire time is write articles that 5000 asexuals Manhattan read. And it just it's all pointless. All these people lead utterly pointless lives. No one will remember any of this in, you know, five years, much less a generation. It's just complete crap in the face

of the existential crises we face, everything that they do. But boot, especially he's a pointless person. I mean, we all love to yell at him because he just he has that wretched kidney bean head and he wears those repulsive fucking hats. But he yeah. And he looks like yeah, some sort of detective who who recreationally takes chemotherapy. But he is an utterly you could make an AI that writes Max Boot columns. But he just they need to have him on and they need to have all these people on and they need to have this. They don't even remember their own lives. Rachel Maddow doesn't remember her own book she wrote in 2013. None of these people will remember what animated them during the Bush years, because they have now believed themselves

that they have now tricked themselves into thinking that they felt normal. Then when they did not, you never feel normal. You never feel happy. Neither of those are a state of being that is permanent or manageable. It's never a baseline unless you're one of the people who makes posts on Facebook that's like wheat thins are freaking addicted. But you're not. And I think one of the things Trump did is he absolutely destroyed our concept of past because we want to feel anything but what we feel now. But he also completely destroyed our version of the our idea of the future. The never ending cycle since about 2015 of like this is he's going to get taken down now now now. And we all know now that it's never going to be the easy thing.

It's never going to be the one shot that takes parody not shot in that way. It's not going to be the thing that takes him out. And we know we're condemned to every week there's going to be a four day cycle where he's like, let's get rid of Zimbabwe. And then, you know, the principal conservatives condemn him and the Libs are like, George W Bush would never say this. And then people like, Oh, there are conflicting reports. He actually said, let's get rid of this, you know, the Zimbabwe ambassador, he was rude to me. And so it's different. And then there's just a counter cycle. And it's the same thing. And absolutely nothing happens. And because we have no concept of the future, we can only go back to this false past, we have to go back, we have to pretend that

like 2006 2007, it was these years of common consensus between regular liberals and neocons. And not just that it felt pretty much as bad as now, the world felt like it was falling apart just as much the bottom felt like it was falling out because it was it created the necessary conditions for this now. And before that, like there was some common cause, not just conservatives completely beating the shit out of liberals in every arena of public life. And so now we're just condemned to live in a false past of the late 2000s, but not even the good kind, no sense of anarchy, no, you know, when Justin Timberlake would wear an express vest and make a song with the game, none of the fun stuff, no Chrysler 300s, no going to take your

best gal to see the interpreter with Nicole Kittman and drinking a Coke Zero, which had just come out. No pretend no thinking the crash was a good movie being that stupid. None of that. None of that. You keep bringing up the interpreter. I don't get this movie. What movie was it's the most imminent. It's the most people are going to look back at the interpreter as it is a rare movie that you've seen that I have it. Guess what? I've only seen half of it. But it's the most. It's like, you know, when I have kids and they ask me the inevitable question, everyone's going to get what was 2005 like, we're going to sit in my home theater that's made to look like the backseat of a Chrysler 300. We're going to drink Coke Zero and we're going to watch the interpreter and I'll

be like, now you get it. But yeah, my point is that we love it. We love to see all this. Hey, we love to see it. I think I think it's a broader point is that there does see like with Max Boop being a perfect example, this like sort of eternal reoccurrence of the Bush era, neocons, all the people who sold us the Iraq war bafflingly are never going away. And as you describe in this in this review, are beginning to find common cause and formal alliances with yet like the liberal media and democratic politicians. Right. I mean, I think in a lot of ways, the kind of liberal center of the democratic party is using the neocons to kind of push back against the left insurgents. I think that's a lot of what's going on. They see a common ally. I mean,

they're both anti left. They both want to, you know, maintain the basic capitalist imperialist order. And I think if anything, the kind of neocon craze is a sign of the kind of insurgent power of a new left that they're willing to be so out and open about, you know, being allies with people like Bill Crystal and Max Boot. Right. You know, Max Boot, like his books before this one, like he fancies himself, he was like a sort of an expert on the history and practice of counterinsurgency and small wars. You wrote blogs. I mean, I consider myself an expert in mechanized warfare. This is a very vintage blog post I had from 2005 with several 19 year olds from Indiana were getting blown up by radio shack equipment that literally affected absolutely

nothing. And George Bush coined the nickname for me hat beans. He writes in his book, he's very impressed about, you know, the times he embedded with the troops and like, you know, came under fire and a convoy or whatever. You know, I've disclosed this before on the show, but I'll do it again. My Max Boot connection, dear reader, it was one of the first jobs I had in my former career at Livrite. No smoke to the good people at WW Norton Livrite, but essentially I too am also slightly responsible for war crimes by being the editorial assistant on his history of counterinsurgency invisible armies. And the first time I ever met him, yes, for friends and listeners, he was wearing that hat. Was it cocked a rakish angle? Yeah, absolutely. That dude, that's how bad Max Boot

wants to live in 2006. He's dressing like prime Justin Timberlake. He wants to have so bad. Yeah, that book begins the description of, you know, going out on patrol in Iraq and, you know, sort of he was very he had a lot of rapturous detail about, you know, sitting on your helmet so you don't get your balls and dick blown off by an IED. And he, you know, loved General Petraeus. That was like the whole book was just basically essentially. That guy has read several books. He begins with, like, you know, from the Maccabees up until it gets you to the point where he's just like, Petraeus has the answer. So like, have you ever read any of his stuff? Like, what do you make of his, like, theory of small wars and counterinsurgencies? I'm just a small bean here with a small war.

Well, I could only like waste so much time on my life. So I haven't read much of the other boot books, but I read a lot of his columns through the years. And like, I mean, my own personal history, like I was on the right, like that's how I ended up in the Marine Corps in the first place. So like, I read a lot of his columns back in the day. And so you didn't join the Marines to change it from the inside? Yeah, I had my reasons. But yeah, I mean, I was a true I really I mean, in some ways, I feel like, you know, one of the reasons boot pisses me off so much is like, I kind of was that, but I was that I was that at like the age of 19, you know, and then you grow up. And like that guy just never that motherfucking never grows up or just makes a shit ton of money

and and is like famous and like everyone tells like tells me he's great because like, you have two choices, you can grow up like a nerd, or you can take a hot glue gun and just fucking put that fucking hat on your head so you can never come off. That's that's what I love about war college. As you keep getting older, and the kids in Iraq just keep getting the kids in comic ping pong. They say the same age. What nobody nobody likes you when you look like me. The one thing I will say about boot though, he's an impressive guy in the sense that like, he's never accomplished anything. He's been wrong about everything. His face is just like repulsive in every way. And yet he's managed to get where he got like that that requires some kind of talent,

like it's intangible. I don't know exactly know how to like describe it. But, you know, mad props to him for that accomplishment. He seems like I mean, his personality type is like, from like fourth grade on, they're like, Max, you're amazing at worksheets. He's like, that's right, I am. And that was it. That was it. He's just done the worksheets of life. He's written all the right blogs and shitty books at the right time for, you know, not a massive amount of people, but the right people to go, wow, this from Max is great. You quote one part of the book. This is Max Boots writing now. And I love I love this part. He's writing about how Trump's your violation of norms sort of freed him to sort of do the same and attack a president in the way he wouldn't

normally consider because he writes here and introduce a third. I was influenced by watching old black and white movies from the fifties in which the chief executive was such a mighty personage that he could only be glimpsed in silhouette or from the back. Seeing his face would have seemed as sacrilegious as glimpsing the face of God. Okay, well, does he know like the truth about movies in the fifties that the president was always just a silhouette of Orson Wells? And he just he always had he always had sauce on his face. They had to film in shadows. And he says I had some trepidation about calling out a presidential candidate and a Republican debut in terms there's that word again, in terms normally reserved for foreign

tyrants. But my indignation propelled me forward. I could not stay silent. And as you of course pointed out after this, he had no such compunction about describing John Kerry as like appeasing terrorists or whatever. I mean, also, like, I love the like, I could not stay silent. Just pure numbers. How many votes do you think were affected by that? Not staying silent. Pure numbers. Five. Exactly. In the boot family. Well, so there's another thing about that that passage. I actually had a whole other section just talking about the writing style of the book, which I got left on the cutting room floor. But like, there's a certain aesthetic that comes with this kind of centrist politics, like it's not just that they have really shitty, in fact, like absolutely

reprehensible views and politics. It's like their style is just so juvenile. And so like he says, like they're just stuck in this like, you know, 10 year old watching like old black and white movies moment, and they can never escape that. And, you know, he talks at one point, he talks about how he was regretting one of the book you I think I think was his first first book ever, he regrets that. Savage Wars of Peace. Yeah, he knows even before that. It was like some other book that no one knows about that. He loves all his other books, but his first book he hates. He feels bad about. And like the metaphors he uses are just hilarious. Like he says, like, I feel like in a porn actress, like a former porn actress that now is ashamed of their porn videos.

Oh, blow me. Blow me, Max. A fucking porn actress is so much more talented and a accomplished person than Max Booth. At least fucking people look at their work. The only people that like read this are people like you who had to, you know, you wrote an article about how shit it was. And like the last living vampire who lives in Northern Virginia. A porn actress who is that part of his fantasy, who's ashamed of her work, you know, when she meets a nice, you know, former neocon pundit now and, you know, she sees past his old age and you can maybe teach her a few things and she can show him a few things. You know, it starts out, he goes like, I've had a hard life. People took over my entire political party. Could I please just

get access to your private Snapchat? And she's like, yes. And she one day just saunters up to him and puts on his hat and goes, you know, I see an invisible army down there. And then we kiss. And then Donald Trump is like, ah, fake news. And then he gets owned by the ghost of John Bedortz's grandfather. And everyone cheers for me. Nuri Al-Maliki apologizes to me for ruining my plan. Cool, Max. Yeah, no, I mean, like, talking about Max's post-porn career, he hasn't done anything halfway as good as Tracy Lawrence's appearances in John Waters movies or the original Blade starring Wesley Snipes and Steven Dorf through every every woman I know who's like has like a private Snapchat is like that is like a significantly smarter person than Max Boot.

That just fucking who he's said that's such an old guy thing to say. I feel like I'm in a freaking porn. He actually said cool. And I'm now remembering he actually said Pono film. That is the funniest way to say it's a prop sit on that. Max boot. Dude, jacks off by like typing bing.com into his notes app, copy and pasting it into his browser and then typing in porno and clicking on images. He's like, hell, yeah, let's go. By the way, one more thing. He actually said at one point that after Trump won, he was drinking scotch or something. He was drinking something, but he had also taken like Tylenol that day. So he's like, I know you're not supposed to mix like Tylenol with

Tylenol. I don't know. He had taken like something lame. Like it was like, yeah, it was like something like Tylenol. And it was I swear it's like this the entire way through Amstel. It's actually the only thing that got me through the book because it was it was funny. I'm on that Amstel light and Flintstone vitamin. Trump's got me being the real me. I'm pouring up in public. Damn. I'm fucked up. Do, you know, Donald Trump, I swear to God, if you tweet again, I'm going to take half this bottle of St. John's wort. My body is on your hands, sir. Here are some other some of the drivel in his book. You know, again, for all his, you know,

sort of conversion, he speaks glowingly about Hillary Clinton being a politician admirably free from political can't. And then he says in private because, you know, he can't quite breach that chasm of what Hillary Clinton is actually like. But you know, he goes on to talk about, you know, Obama was still too Obama was too non interventionist conspicuously living out, as you say, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen and our drone war in Africa and the I don't know, everywhere else on the planet, apparently, that that's still not enough for him. And he also goes on to say John McCain was one of the greatest American war heroes. Wow. Ronald and that's he's one of the best. What a bunch of fucking bots. We have no one good

then. He said the whole nation was, of course, touched and uplifted by Reagan's speech about the Challenger explosion. Like this is just a greatest hits here. And then my favorite, he says, we have to be concerned about demagogues who are preying on the fears of their constituents and villain vilifying minorities such as the rich. Yeah, he really said that. I just want to make sure everyone. Yeah, this is a quote. Yeah. Man, that's a real high level of boot right there. Oh my God. The Geiger counters are going off. The boot is overflowing in the glass right now. But I want to read you the paragraph that you list this some some good some good hyperlinks to some some greatest hits here. You write, I really like this paragraph. You write, what's most revealing

about this capsule of neoconservative bromides, all of which dissipate after the slightest contact with reality, spend some time with those links, if you don't believe me, is that they now pass just as well as liberal bromides. It's become a bipartisan affair to praise men who have devoted their lives to the violent redistribution of wealth and power upwards, and to run interference for the capitalist empire or in boot parlance, the rules based international order that allowed them to do so. The great conceit is that this is that this alliance between the left and right is merely strategic. As the recent partnering letter of veteran NBC MSNBC reporter William Arkin attests, what we're actually seeing is a long simmering ideological romance coming out of the shadows.

In Arkin's word, NBC and other supposedly liberal media outlets have begun emulating the national security state, busy and profitable. That speaks to why boot went from being the hardcore defender and promoter of the Iraq war to now someone in good standing on MSNBC. As we were talking about a little bit earlier, this is revealing all the people who were on the liberal side of the foreign policy question during the Bush years, who were against the Iraq war or against it in so much as they thought it was poorly executed and not the fact that it was morally wrong. That was the bravest position. Yeah, we're really basically just closet neocons themselves. Yeah, I think this is a real kabuki dance that goes on. I think I really like the scene with with with boot and Clinton at

the Council of Foreign Relations like, you know, cozying up behind the scenes, because I think that really speaks to the nature of the foreign policy establishment. Yeah, I think they put on a show, you know, they're not putting on a show anymore. It's clear that they agree on foreign policy. But for a while, they were putting on a show that they had these major disagreements. And, you know, I think that this moment is really useful. I think I think we're going to see, I think I'm actually somewhat hopeful that there's going to be a little we haven't seen it yet. But I think we will start seeing some pushback on our foreign policy in part because of what we've seen that for the past two years that there's just the spaces is open wide open. I know we've talked

about this a couple times now, but every time we get done recording, something happens that's so dumbfounding that, you know, I have to to bring it up now. You talk about, you know, sort of teachable moments. For me, it was this week, literally right after we got done recording the episode about Ilan Omar and her grilling of Elliott Abrams in front of Congress, I saw a tweet from the VP of the Center for American Progress, Kelly Magsman, that essentially said, let's not caricature Elliott Abrams. Like I know him as like a decent man and a good mentor. And like, yes, he's made mistakes, but like, literally just saying, like, hey, like the slow, whoa, slow down, let's not call it, calling him a war criminal.

And it's just like, first of all, you're at the Center for American Progress and you're finding a way to, I don't know, say Elliott Abrams is a decent human being. He works for the Trump administration. You can't even have the fig leaf of, he's one of the good neocons who's seen the light and is now on our side. He's working for the Putin's puppet or whatever the fuck you think it is. And then she went on to say, we share goals in Venezuela. That's reassuring. Both of them wanted, I mean, and it was like, she did it. And then there was this guy, Nicholas Burns, like a whole bunch of like DC foreign policy hands and good standing on the liberal Democratic side just came out to say, this is too much. It's gone too far. Yes, he's made mistakes,

but he's a good man. And you know, we shouldn't, you know, let's not tear people down was one of them. And I'm like, if you can't, if you can't get on board with, we need to tear down Elliott Abrams and like, what fucking use are you? And that's what you're saying about like a teachable moment. Like, I'm glad all of these people have revealed themselves as morally cretinist at best and like absolute monsters at worst. And it was just, I know it shouldn't shock me, but I was genuinely gobsmacked by like, are these people unaware of what happened in Central America in the 80s? Or did they just not connect it to the guy who they know personally? So yeah, we were talking about this a little before the recording, but you know, I've thought

about this a long time. And I kind of talk about it a little bit in the piece. But, you know, I think there are some real hacks and shills that are just doing it for the money and the power. But these aren't the people that we know. Like these aren't people that hang out on Twitter all day arguing with people. They're not, you know, they're not, they don't, they're kind of behind the scenes that they show up on MSNBC and CNN as like consultants or, you know, I'm thinking of like the Podesta dynasty, people like that. Like, you know, I think that, you know, it's all about the money and the power. But I think what's interesting about the blob is like the face of the blob, the foreign policy blob, are they're true believers. I mean, this is why I did this

piece on boot. Like it's not just about boot. Like boot was the best of them. He is the goat of the boots. And, but I think, I think what's made them effective for a very long time is they actually believe their own bullshit. And I think, you know, and, you know, at this point, it's just like it's gotten, they've reached the kind of peak, peak bullshit moment. And I think, I think there's going to be some pushback. But, you know, if they were just hacks or shills, I don't think they would have made it this far. Well, like she, the Kelly Magsman or whatever, she deleted the tweet because she was like, you know, I'm sorry that a lot of people interpreted this that like I was, you know, defending atrocities that happened. But like, you know, I'll try to do better. And

it's just like, so you're aware of like these things happened. Right. But you don't think and like, she said like, yes, he's made mistakes. And they've all said, oh, he made mistakes. But like, it was very clear that they were all talking about his mistake was lying to Congress. Like the mistake is not the actual genocides that they think they think that's going to happen. That's just part of the machinery that we're all, you know, slaves to basically that's that's part and parcel of of imperial management is there's going to be some massacres. He was a guy in a room whose job it was to massage the massacres, make the massacres palatable, make sure they didn't cause too much trouble, didn't cause too much of a pushback against the program in their

minds. That has nothing to do with the actual machinery of violence. They think that it's a totally separate role as this person in this air conditioned room, whose job it is to make us okay with what we have to do. So, you know, he's not an agent in their mind. He's not an agent of violence. He is a person who is dealt a hand up like his first day on the job. Oh, yeah, they were massacred 800 people in El Salvador. Well, boy, got to roll up my sleeves. That's how they see it. They don't see him as having any kind of connection, any kind of criminal relationship to actual murder. Yeah, I mean, it just reminds me of my time. I was in Afghanistan for a year when I was in the Marines. And, you know, it was interesting, you go to the front lines and

people know no one believed in the mission of the, you know, the mission at all. I mean, in the front lines, you were just protecting yourself and you were protecting those to your left and your right. And then I'd go to the big bases where all the colonels and generals were and the staff officers. And a lot of them believed it. And, you know, it was a very simple logic. It was a boot logic where it was like, you know, yeah, sure, we're doing some bad things. You know, I'd report back and talk about some things I saw. And they'd be like, yeah, we're doing bad things, but the Taliban's worse, you know, and that's really what it comes down to. Is these people believe it's either the Taliban or whatever, whoever the hell the new Hitler is at any moment,

or it's us. And we're, we're not Hitler. Yeah, we're like, yeah, we are like, by definition, the good guys, because you know, World War Two or whatever. But yeah, it's like, for someone like Elliot Abrams and his like the people who are his actual defenders, not like people who are just like, oh, he was nice to me at a party or I worked with him one time and he's not a, he's not a monster. Like for the people who like actually defended like Reagan, our government's policy towards Central America, they're like, oh, like for them, the specter is always like, you know, totalitarian communism and the horrors of the gulags or the cultural revolution. They're like, so obviously we got to get our hands dirty to prevent some greater evil from happening. But

it's just like, once you're bayonetting babies, it's just like, what greater evil are you really trying to prevent? Like, like, what's like, what if we just didn't do that? Like, what would be something worse than that that would happen? Nationalizing unused banana fields. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's the actual answer. But I was just like thinking about this week, like this Elliot Abrams moment was just just been fascinating to me, like that people are still willing to defend this guy. And what's interesting to me is like, in the consensus of like politics, like things that are been removed from the realm of ideology that are just considered objectively true, like about America's conduct in its own borders within our own history, like it's unideological

to be like slavery was an atrocity, horrible. And then like after that, the history of reconstruction and Jim Crow, that's evil and bad. But everything outside of our borders in terms of our foreign policy, it's like, there's just this giant, it's not just politics ends at the like the water's edge. It's like your consciousness does. There's just a giant wall, specifically about like America's role in the Cold War that like, even though you're aware of evil, bad things happening, it's like never connected. It just exists in a different moral universe. And it's never like, Oh, we're, oh, we're the bad guys. Actually, because it's they could they see it as as necessary, like we were saying, they see that this was an existential conflict and anything you had to do

was not required by the moment, you're not making a moral choice. Like there's no, there's no agency, you're not deciding to do a coup and a chalet or something, you're not deciding to, you know, back psychotic murders and Angola or something, you are reacting to the enemy. And your victory is the victory for humanity. And so anything that you have to do to win that war, it's not a morality can enter into it because you're not making choices. You are doing the only thing you have to do in that moment. Yeah, I'd say the difference here between, you know, the neocon and these people. The neocon, they are a true believer, but a true believer in the sense that this is a choice, but we must do it because it gives us meaning. And because it either if they're

depending on what shade of true believer they are, it either gives us meaning or it, you know, it makes money for someone who pays me to write a sixth grade caliber essays for, you know, the foundation of liberty and defense of democracy, voting, egalitarian, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But for this, the other side, the sort of like more liberal Natsak person, they just, they're an unwitting stression. They just, they genuinely believe they're in a battle between good and evil that they cannot, there's no choice. None, none. You have to be in it. It has to be accepted on face value that we have to be everywhere. We have to have bases in every country. We have to have, we have to have a horse in every race of every fucking leader of every

fucking country in the world of every natural resource, because if we don't get it, someone else won't. If they get it, not us, well, look out. It's equally pointless lives. But, you know, the MSNBC person, they just, they really do think they're in game, game of war, fire age, you know? But like, if you're, yeah, if you're in the blob, like, no matter what side you're on in the blob, it's just like, essentially, the language is always in terms of like, well, these are our national interests and strategic and, you know, nudging, or whether you're either if you're a liberal, you want to nudge countries in the right direction. And if you're conservative, you want to, you know, force them to do it. But it's all backed up with American military violence and power.

So it's never in the language of, oh, here are the children we shot into mass graves in Central America. It's like the Samantha Power thing, that she can write an entire book about a problem from hell genocide in the American state and not mention Indonesia or Central America or Guatemala, even once in the fucking book. And then she can go to fucking Yankee games with Henry Kissinger and like clap him on the back. It's like, again, she's not stupid. It's like she's presumably aware that all this shit happened. And it's not like a denialist or anything. It's just like, there's no connection. It just doesn't link up in her mind, which is just, it's so perverse and fascinating to me. Yeah, it's very much. I think it really is kind of same as it ever was.

I mean, you mentioned slavery a little earlier. And I think, you know, if you look at the arguments these people make, it's not that different than the apologists, the northern apologists for slavery, you know, decades before the actual civil war, you know, it's the same shit where you say, you know, it's always been this way. We've always had slavery or you say, you know, our own way of life is dependent on this. It's regrettable. But until we can find a way to get out of this, we kind of have to tolerate it. You know, this whole idea of the state of exception, like, you know, in the north, we can, we can have some, some form of freedom. But the south is kind of a state of exception. And this is kind of the same thinking when it comes to empire today is that there's

these states of exception beyond America's borders or even within America's, you know, there's, you know, I mean, Baltimore, I mean, there's also lots of places where I think the states of exception were basically anything's game. But you say that that's just, that's necessary for right now and maybe eventually we can get beyond this. What, like, what do you make of the fact that now you have figures on the right, and I'm thinking of Tucker Carlson specifically, who wrote an op-ed this week saying flat out, why are people like Max Booth and Bill Crystal still around? Like, why, why are they still in the media? These people have been wrong about everything. And it's just like, that's 100% right. But like, I'm, it's very dangerous that like someone like

Tucker Carlson is making that argument, not because the Tucker Carlson himself is inherently, you know, he sucks, but he's not like a danger in and of itself. It's only dangerous because there is literally no, almost nobody representing the liberal or democratic side who would make that argument in public. Yeah. Like from places like CAP, you're hearing, oh, actually, like, no, they're good and we should ally with them because they have important things to say, not, they should be in a fucking cage. Oh, totally. And like one of the, going back to the slavery thing, I mean, one of the leading anti-imperialists in the early 19th century was Calhoun. You know, it was, it was the slave math, you know, the pro-slavery guy. And the reason he was, you know, anti-imperialist

is he knew that empire led, led to a race, race mixing. It would end up bringing, you know, non-white peoples into, into our borders. And I think, I think that's really what's kind of driving people like Carlson and a lot of the other anti-imperialists on the right. Not all of them. I wouldn't say all of them, but a good chunk of them, you know, they, they, they're, they're smart enough to realize that empire, you know, if you, if you're against, you know, influxes of immigrants, if you're, if you're against. From countries like El Salvador or Honduras. I wonder why they're coming to America. Right, right. If, you know, I mean, the majority of our immigration, immigrant populations come from all the places that we've warded. So I think that's really the

logic on that. I mean, as far as Tucker Carlson goes, like, he was 100% pro-Iraq war until, I don't know, a month ago. And not just that, but he was a guy who, like, would go on cable TV and be like, if you criticize George W. Bush or the war on terrorism and be like, oh, it sounds like you like Saddam, you know, some of it, like, do you, do you like terrorism? Do you want more 9-11s to happen? So I mean, like, he's an utterly shameless person, but you know, we should take note of the fact that it is, yes, it actually is dangerous that like he is, if he, if he fucking, if we let Tucker Carlson become a prominent voice against the neoconservative, like imperialist vision or even like the liberal foreign policy world order, like that's fucking dangerous. Because like, if,

if no one who's been, who's actually right and has an actual real moral case to make against empire that is, you know, not completely cynical and self-serving, then guess what? Like, it's like, people are going to respond to it because they know it's true. Carlson is uniquely dangerous, too, because all these, they're the exact same fucking asshole where, you know, they're either a gifted kid who is never afflicted with the greatest disorder of all time, imposter syndrome, or they're like an heir just was sort of ignominious, but hyper wealthy dynasty, like, you know, frozen dinners, like Tucker Carlson was. And they're all, they have all the same like shitty personality where they know which way the wind's blowing and they'll switch on a dime, but Tucker's just the

best at it. He's the best at knowing which way the wind's blowing. And he's also like one of the most, he's like, this is, you know, as nebulous and stupid a talent as being good at podcasts, because he's like good at TV. He's talented at this, this part of his career. He's verbally very quick. He articulates his thoughts in a way that like just like a normal-ish person will watch and go, oh, that makes sense. While also selling you this complete, just fucking psychotic blood and soil white nationalism. And yeah, you let him be the voice, the opposition to Max Booth's very good blog for precocious 13 year olds, a friendless war. We love to see it. Yeah. You love to see it. You love to see the future we have.

Yeah, like if the VP of CAP is basically of the center for American progress, if we can't rely on them to be like Max Booth and everyone who promoted the Iraq war should go away forever, they should have nothing of value to add to any current foreign policy debate or even any of the past. But to literally be like, actually, there's something to that. And maybe Max Booth is right that we need to be at war on the imperial frontiers for centuries. And not only that, like you point out, cut Social Security, Medicare and every social program in America to do that. And if we're going to let the fascist right be the people to say, um, no, let's not do that, that's fucking dangerous. But it makes sense, though, and it's inevitable that

the neocons are going to end up migrating to their Democrats because it is in the long started out exactly in the long stretch. It's like a title gravity. They started off as Democrats. They started off as sort of the intellectual class at the tail end of the liberal imperial hegemony after World War Two, whose job it was to synthesize the needs of the American Empire to do things like Vietnam with the self conception that Americans had about who they were. And so they created this vocabulary of human rights and, you know, humanitarianism. And but then, just as soon as they had created it and made a coherent thing out of it, the liberal moment ended and the conservative moment began. And because they just follow power, because they are

there to be courteous to power and to justify power, there's no point hanging around with Democrats. They got nothing to do. What hang around like, oh, you get, you get, you hold the house. Congratulations. You know, that's as Nixon said, building outhouses in Peoria. What about world stage, the real power shit? So they had to go to the Republicans and they were like, Hey, we have these, this, this vocabulary, this, this language to talk about empire, to sell it essentially to the American people to allow them to integrate something that should be horrible to their idea of what America is supposed to stand for. That we were going all these places, telling people what to do, murdering children. That's horrible. That has to be synthesized. And that's the whole,

that was their position. That was what they brought to the Republicans was this vocabulary. And then they used it at the height of it was during Iraq, when they brought it all out and they were able to use a liberal language to sell this, this military adventure. And then when it fractured and the Republican party kind of went into a nervous breakdown that resulted in Trump becoming president, they're on the right no longer had anything to sell because the Republican base no longer gave a shit about any of that stuff. Like they had looked, they had, they have to any degree that they ever even embrace those tropes as anything other than a cynical way to kind of undermine liberal opponents of war. By now, they're done. They don't give a fuck. Like, you know,

I don't give a shit. I don't want a nation bill. I don't want to fucking crime me a river. You know, we should, we should be bombing to the extent that we need to to protect our homeland. And that's it. And, and so what were they supposed to do? They are superfluous on the right. But the liberal, the Democratic party never lost that. They never lost that need to, to maintain a vocabulary for a empire that can be sold to their base who is more sensitive to that kind of thing. And so now they're the only game in town. And so of course, the neocons are all going to end up going back to the Democrats. Yeah. And I want just to add to that, I think one of the reasons that they're no longer wanted on the right is, you know, the common tactic that you always saw throughout

the Cold War, particularly in the Republican Party was if you opposed X or Y foreign policy, you were a communist, you know, you supported the Soviets. And you've seen that over and over again with the beginning of the war on terror, you know, you support the Taliban, you support Saddam Hussein. And I think what Trump did, and this is why Trump is very useful, is he basically told the right what they really wanted to hear. And he attached it to being opposed to these foreign policies, at least nominally, you know, not not in reality, but nominally. So he basically freed up the right to really get down, you know, get down to what they really care about, which is, which is race war. Yeah, they want the death squads in this country. Right. Exactly. Right.

So some of some guy whining about, oh, we're gonna building hospitals in Afghanistan for the for the girls. Like, Republican voters don't give a fuck anymore. But Democratic voters still do. They hear that and they start crying. Think of that fucking National Geographic. So what's interesting, that tactic, though, basically just smearing anyone who opposes the foreign policy with being on the side of whoever the enemy is at the time, that's moved to the Democratic party now. I mean, that's part of the meaning behind, you know, we're all apparently agents of Putin's government. But it's right. Yes, because because anti imperialism is coming from Moscow, because Russia doesn't want us to be the benevolent global hegemon we should be. And Russia will be able to

take over the entire world. Right. You know, the country that like, you know, is at this point, just like half widows who are married to raccoons, because they're technically the legal brother, the guy who died when he when he doves head first into an empty swimming pool, the country with the GDP of like Cook County, Illinois. I thought diving head first into an empty swimming pool was a neocon thing. Good point. Yeah, no, they're going to do it. They're going to have the empire that the sun never sets on, not because of territory, but because they just piled up a mountain of discarded boat across vehicles in harebrained stunts. Yeah, no, they're going to do it. They got it. So that's that's why it's that's that's the dangerous moment. But also,

as we were saying, it's a moment of possibility because a lot of because this is a clarifying thing to see to be like, oh, these guys who we hated, these guys who sold this war that we find viscerally horrible and or at least we did 10 years ago. They're bad. They're on our side now and they're explicitly telling you that the reason they're on your side is because we need to prop up this machinery. We need to find a new like marketing sector to appeal to to prop this up to keep this brand sellable for until the fucking wheels come off. And if that's the choice, yeah, like people are going to be like, no, what? What? What is the point of this? Like you're going to give me like a tax incentive to, you know, like open a skidoo

dealership and then my three of my kids get returned home and fucking takeout bags. Well, you end you end your piece by making a contrast between the max boots of the world and Andrew Bacevich. Can you talk about Andrew Bacevich who is a writer is, you know, on the right, but he's a writer of actually quite admire as a very principled and morally serious anti interventionist. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is a guy that I think he got out as a colonel in the army. He served in the Vietnam War. He is, you know, a distinguished professor of international relations or what emeritus now at Boston University, his son served in the army and got killed in 2007 in the Iraq war. And he's one of the most, you know, I say most one of the

more most perceptive critics of American foreign policy around, at least in the United States. And, you know, yeah, and I draw that contrast between him and boot and it's precisely because Bacevich is the opposite of boot that boot is an MSNBC celebrity. And Bacevich is not a household name. And like you said, like, yeah, and then Bacevich doesn't have all the like the stupid, you know, illusions and stories that people like boot tell themselves. Like, but because of that, he's a guy who is morally serious about what American foreign policy in the military, what the use of our military and war and statecraft is actually like. Yeah, what it actually means. And there isn't that, like I said, that that self lobotomizing that goes on that like separates

the consequences of policy from the people who do them or the people who decide them for the people the rest of the world. Yeah, I mean, I was talking a little earlier about my own history. And I think if you're young and you believe all the bullshit about America, you either join the military and fight the wars, or you join it, I think, and one of the reasons the foreign policy blob is just so like evil and disgusting is like, you have to be pretty evil and disgusting to support the wars when you're a young person and not actually join and instead join a fucking think tank. Yeah, these are the people we're dealing with. Now, there's some good people, you know, who end up in these think tanks. I don't want to tell you know, smear all of them,

but yeah, broader brush. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But that's the general dynamic. I'm sorry. It takes it takes some sort of courage to eat nothing but think tank like crudité all day every day. The goal the goal isn't to get fired for your cause, it's to get the other son of the bitch fired for his cause. Just eating room temperature rolled up deli turkey. Well, you don't you don't like eating adult Lunchables while the Kagan spin you an epic yarn about the time that they played blackjack with the fucking minister of cars for Lichtenstein. You don't like that? You don't think that's like a fun way to spend your life? Well, you know, you said you joined the Marines and you were 19 and because you know,

a little older, a little older, but like you sort of like believe the same things Max booted. Like did you have any like, was just the experience of like actually doing it that like disabused you of that? Or was there like a road to Damascus moment? Yeah, I mean, I I'll be honest with you the moment I joined the moment I showed up at boot camp, I was like, shit, the world isn't what I thought it was. And, you know, as a gradual kind of shift from then on. But obviously, once I made it to Afghanistan, I saw the distinction. I talked about that a little bit from the front lines and the flagpole. And that's, you know, that's really what I write about is that just that gap between what it's actually like on the front lines, not just the front lines of

our wars, but like, you know, the front lines of the class war, the front lines of, you know, the police, you know, policing war, and and what, you know, what the pundits write about. And they're the flagpole. I mean, that's that's why they believe what they believe is they've spent their entire lives just right next to that damn flagpole. But I guess like at the big base. Yeah, going back to the point I was trying to articulate a little bit earlier about how it's like, you know, generally a political and non ideological to be like slave, not just the slavery or like the Jim Crow was evil, but like the people who engaged in it, like the individual slave owners are were evil. They were evil people like participating in an evil institution.

And that's the connection that's never made with foreign policy is that like that there, yes, there are evil effects in the world. And now it's uncontroversial to be like, oh, Vietnam war, oopsie, that was a bad one. But it's always in the terms of like, well, you know, it was done. It was just like we had the best of intentions and that like, it's never like the people who make the decision, the proactive decision to start a war are evil or the people in the think tanks who, you know, sell it or create policies to justify it. Like there's never the connection between Elliot Abrams and fucking, you know, Guatemala. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, even if you acknowledge that what happened in Central America was evil,

there's no connection that like the people who carried it out or made it happen are evil. Like, yeah, I mean, not to use like the cliched example, but, you know, Eichmann only went to one of the camps once and he was sickened by it. He never personally killed anyone. So everyone has good in them. So the people in charge of our, you know, the people creating the narrative in our media and our government, you know, in my mind, they're not all that different than the tankies that cheered on the invasion of Hungary in 56 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 68. And, you know, the after the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the 80s, you know, these are like Brezhnev, Brezhnev fight,

if I'm pronouncing it correctly, like aporachics, you know, and then you worry about it. There's going to be an insufferable argument on the subreddit. No matter what. Just heard was the Chapo subreddit. I apologize. I'm going to take the fire from you. Yeah. All those countries, they're part of greater Poland. Next question. So, so I just want to say like, so then, so then the Soviet empire falls and you come out with this big book, the black book of communism, which is like everyone loves in the United States. You know, if we survive the climate apocalypse, like at some point, there's going to be a black book of capitalism or a black book of imperialism. It's going to be obvious to everyone that we lived in an incredibly

evil moment that all the fuckers on TV defending that moment were all really evil. The problem is, we're not there yet. Well, I think we're hopefully kind of getting there. And I was, yeah, I was impressed with the relentless pushback on Kelly Magsman and everyone else who tried to claim that let's not caricature Elliott Abramson. Don't caricature the strength that he brings. Yeah, you can take me to the boardwalk in Atlantic City and draw a picture of me flying a tiny biplane with my worst facial features, highly exaggerated to make me some sort of comic object with scorn. If you do that to Elliott Abrams, it's onside pussy. So I think we should issue a small corrective. Max Booth is not a chicken shit who didn't join the military and

just chose to, you know, do worksheets for his entire life so other people could die. He medically wasn't able to join the Marines because he, that is a medical hat. He has to dress like Bruno Mars from the chin up, or he will die. And the Marines were not accommodating to him. They did not give him a combat bowler or fedora or even a pork pie, even a combat pork pie made out of Kevlar. And so we are issuing a full apology to Mr. Max Booth. Well, Jeremy Rubin, I want to thank you so much for your article in the baffler and for joining us. But before you go, I think you need to issue some shout outs. Yeah, I want to make a shout out to my own squad, my beer summit squad. This is what we call ourselves. They're the ones who sponsored

my trip into the city. Shout out shout out to my friends, the stupid cop and Henry Louis Gates, Barack Obama. Damn, those are all your friends, dude. Yeah, I don't have a lot. So Holden, DP Miller, Jeremy Poopman, Waddles, I'm not kidding. That's what we call him. Hell, yes. And Joe Henderson, he doesn't have a middle name. Gang shit. But yeah, they're they're devoted Chopo fans who sponsored your little trip to the city this weekend. Yeah, they're going crazy right now. Just listening to this. Oh, yeah. And yeah, so so so is our so is our Reddit because you criticize the invasion of Hungary. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, hey, hey, guess what? Losers, you want to have an opinion on the invasion of 100? You want to yell at our guests? Guess

what? Were you live back then? Checkmate, shut up, bitch. Argument over forums defeated once again by logic. Oh, you think it was good or bad? Guess what? Are you Brezhnev? Then you don't really know. Shut the fuck up. So yeah, that about does it for us today. But before we sign off on a more somber note, I we do have to make note that the Chopo family has experienced the loss over the last couple days of, you know, a presence that has become a was a sort of major character in the creation and, you know, a chopo as an institution and as a family who will can't forget Felix and will failing to scoop up a box of catch it. Alex said this last night, you know, the first ever Alex Nichols episode that was that Ernest took the nastiest shit ever. Yeah. In

case you haven't figured out, we I do want to say a sincere rest in peace to the good boy, Amber's beloved cat, Ernest, passed away at what 57? He's like Winston Churchill's fucking parrot. But no, Amber couldn't be here. Obviously, I think this would be emotional for her. But we will miss Ernest very dearly. He was a major part of really the show. So many of the so many of the early episodes of the show were recorded at Amber's house with Ernest, you know, crawling around on us. And then in one classic golden chopo moment, almost ruining an episode by filling his litter box while we were recording. Ernest, you will be missed, but you were a good cat and you're all cats go to heaven. He's he's shitting up heaven right now. He was the heaviest,

sweetest boy. He was so he was like, he was like, you looked at him and you're like, that's a pretty big cat, but I've seen bigger. And then he crawled on you and it was like a kettle bell. But he was so he was so affectionate. He was like a dog. He was just he had so much personality. He had a great life, though. He did indeed. And he was he was on a fence for the last years of it. So, you know, he went out good. He had a great, great life. So good for him. No, he had miss him. He passed peacefully at home in his favorite bed. And like I said, our condolences to Amber and RIP to the good boy, Ernest. And I think we should go out playing the clip of yes, yes, the cat makes the rules till next time, guys. Oh, man. Oh, man. Oh, my God. I wish I was there to smell it.

Oh, my God. Smells awful. Why don't you guys just put newspaper down or something? I need to leave. I really got used to it. I know. I know. Should we power through guys? Oh, yeah. Is there anything we can do at all? Can we take a break for a second? Yeah. All right. All right. Keep rolling. I don't understand this. Is it is it illegal for you guys to fucking scoop it? Is there like a log and scooping it? Just pick up the poop. You can't hear you, Matt. Put it in a bag and throw it away. That's what I have a cat. It's illegal for me to do that. I'm not doing that. Is this all going to be kept in the final show? I hope so. Yeah. Well, I'm going to shorten this. This should be bonus for a $10 subscribers. Well, yeah, before we started to actually

record it, Alex, you said you were going to do a super cut of Chop-Bow and Come Town all the times that the cat has just shit in front of us or thrown up. This is why I don't have to get to that. This is going to be this is a great addition. Take him out. Yeah, he's what are you people doing? He's throwing out the window. I mean, do you not have a procedure for cleaning a cat box? It just take, let's throw it out. We'll help, but let's take them. Well, just let's dump it. Let's just dump. Go outside. You have a bag. Dump it out the window. Dump it out the window. Alex keeps saying to dump it out the window, but we should definitely get rid of it because if they're not like a plastic bag, Felix is doing it guys. He's doing it.

He's doing it. He's doing it. He's doing it. Oh, this is the worst episode we've ever done. This is what people like about our show is the badness of it. It's endearing. I'm just glad it's gone. Oh, it's better. Thank God. Segway and none of that cat shit sketch that we wrote and prepared for the show. Pretty good. That went down well.