Chapo Trap House - 312 - Kenneth Friendly's Scorpio Smiling feat. Yael Bridge and Morgan Spector (5/6/19)

Episode Date: May 6, 2019

We talk to filmmakers Yael Bridge and Morgan Spector about their upcoming documentary "Socialism: An American Story." We also discuss the ongoing failed coup in Venezuela, Nancy Pelosi & Joe Biden, and Trump's assertion that PC culture is ruining horse racing. Support Socialism: An American Story here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/socialismmovie/socialism-an-american-story-post-production?ref=user_menu Tickets for the May 16th screening of Gremlins 2 with director Joe Dante here: http://www.americancinemathequecalendar.com/content/gremlins-2-the-new-batch-1 Tickets on sale for our European tour here: www.chapotraphouse.com/tour

Let's kick it off, hello everybody, it's your choppo. Let's just get into this right away. We are visiting us today are the filmmakers Morgan Spector and Yale Bridges who have been working on a documentary feature called Socialism An American Story. So thanks guys for being here, just to kick things off. So if socialism is an American story, where does that story begin and what was your entry into this saga? Do you mean kind of how we started making the film? Why make this film now? I mean we're sort of in a moment where socialism I guess is having another moment but as far as you know the American story goes it seems like there's a big gap there in between you know the you know

the banger that everyone loved. It's an American story with a huge intermission. There's a long intermission. Now the long-awaited sequel is here. Spoiler alert, we're a character in this in this saga but just like why make the film? Like or just like what was the story you set out to capture in this movie? Well I think you know we were intrigued by all of the people that voted for Bernie and witnessed that moment I think just like all of us and we're surprised and then just there were a bunch of people who were willing to vote for a socialist but didn't really know what that word meant and we're interested in exploring what that word meant and then letting you know bring you that answer out to a bunch of other people. And to that question of like you know what

that means like as you've been traveling around and I want to get into some of the things you've documented like in in this moment where people are you know Bernie Sanders is the first major politician most successful politician in American history who's ever called himself a socialist. What do you think people mean when they say like socialism or I consider myself a socialist now? No I think I mean I think like the the if you can the policy positions that you would say would be the kind of democratic socialist platform they're social democratic positions I mean they're not in they're not people aren't calling for central planning they're not even calling for something as radical as the like labor manifesto from 2016 which I think would be like more fairly

termed socialist but I think it's still an exciting development I mean I think the idea that there's there is you know Bosker I was listening to interview with him recently Bosker Sankara as he's doing his book tour and he was talking about this as class struggle social democracy and I think that's a fairly accurate assessment because there is a kind of reawakening of this idea of class struggle and the idea that you know the interests of workers are opposed to the interests of capital and I think just once once you start grasping that once that divide is clear and once people are willing to fight along those lines and that's you know that's that's a sea change in American politics. What are some of the like the people that you've profiled or some of these like the the political

events and stories that you guys have captured in this film like what are some of the things that you've that you've documented so far? Yeah well we've been filming for a few years now and just trying to trace the the movement as well as some individual characters so you know we've been filming with Stephanie who's a teacher in Oklahoma just outside of Oklahoma City and we're filming with her before during and after the strike there we've also been filming with Lee Carter down in Virginia we filmed some with you guys we filmed with a bunch of different DSA chapters we've done like over a dozen interviews with different organizers and activists and politicians and academics a bunch of history in Wisconsin and other places and you know we've still got a few

shoots lined up and was there anything that surprised you in terms of like what you believed going in and then what you found when you actually started filming and covering these events and people that like you know sort of took you out took you by surprise or you know was different than what you were expecting? Yeah I think because we've been working on it for a few years the surprise is just how much has changed since we started the project so just how popular it has become and how you know in the beginning I would tell my friends I'm working on film about socialism and they go why or they think that was weird or a fringe and now everyone's like oh yeah I'm a socialist and it's like I know you weren't a socialist two years ago like that was not a word

that you were claiming for yourself and so I think that's been the most surprising how much more support and enthusiasm we're experiencing sort of every day with this project. So you're surprised by all the posers? Yeah I think so. There's a lot of the fake friends, a lot of posers, a lot of clout sharks out there but you know hopefully we can defeat them all. Or my old friends who are now on the bandwagon that I have to... No no no kick them off the bandwagon we want to get rid of them. We want socialism to be like as small as ten people who all have the same book show. I don't know if I'd have any friends left or I'd have all of you guys I'd have my new friends. But I mean you do connect this to like a longer history it's not just like you know

socialism began with Bernie so like like where historically does like your movie begin in terms of this yeah the story that you're trying to tell? We definitely go back to like the utopian socialists just because I think people feel like there's a all of this is a kind of you know East like German or Soviet import and so to to to let people know that you know it's this has been here since like the middle of the 19th century you know Lincoln corresponded with Marx however sort of glancingly you know Marx wrote for the herald tribune like these ideas have been sort of integrated into the fabric of American life you know one of the great one of the one of the episodes that we talk about is that you know the the people who founded the Republican party were

actually part of an early utopian socialist project and that that sort of abolitionist movement that led to that the founding of that party came out of some of those those early experiments. And I think this is stuff that people people just don't know I mean that kind of the the deeply radical tradition in American politics that runs all throughout its history and it's led to like every single meaningful fucking reform that's ever happened you know that's all been alighted and sort of and sort of painted over with a much more like garden variety liberalism as if just by showing up for protests and like voting and being good like eventually you know the arc of whatever bends toward justice and you know I think part of what our project hopes to do is that

actually it's been radicals and more specifically socialists being willing to really put themselves on the line that have achieved a lot of these things that people think are deeply American rights. Republican party, socialist, another fact most people don't know. Yeah actually it was the democratic party that was pro-slavery in the civil war and actually anti-civil rights for a long time. They don't teach that in schools anymore. Thank you Bill Clinton, Obama. No I think that's probably where the history in the film begins and we're in the middle of cutting it but I think that that's probably like the first scene in the film is actually going to rip in Wisconsin and going to the little white school house where where it was the socialist abolitionists who

founded the Republican party and sort of kicking it off from there. I like going through American history like of labor radicalism and like the CPUSA very early involvement in the civil rights movement like before what we even think of like the 1960s certainly throughout all of the 1920s and 30s much of the organizing in the American South was being spearheaded by CPUSA members but like how do you view like like the 60s is what in American history what like a lot of people associate with like a a left-wing moment or turn like how do you see that? That's where people think politics started. Yeah politics started in the 1960s basically the you know Billy Joel song that's when the fire started was in the 1960s but like how do you view that moment as both

a continuation or break from the kind of earlier forms of American radicalism and how like what do you think that that's like indicative of like a difference in this current moment or like does it share something? I know what Amber feels about that. I mean no it's just like it's we haven't actually thought about the 60s at all because as far as as far as yeah well as far as like actual socialism it was in such retreat like you know socialism and the unions have been really separated and there was no I don't know I look at that's my parent generation right they were real they were hippies they were back to landers they went in but they had no ideology they had no real analysis they didn't come from the fucking whole earth catalog and so

when they I mean literally when and then when they got older and they was like time to get jobs and have kids they just like went and got jobs and had kids and like came normal middle-class people. But surely your film has a 10 minute long montage in the middle of it with a footage from Vietnam. This is the problem with you know fundraising you got to pay the royalties for all those Creedence Clearwater songs. I wrote to JC Chandor and see if they would help us out with that frontier money but no. You said like you know you guys you guys filmed us recording our podcast a few times so I think you know it's it's funny to me that we've become you know inadvertent characters in in this story because genuinely like when we when I started doing the podcast

like I did not envision the show at all as like being a socialist podcast or speaking for a socialist nascent socialist movement in America it just sort of ended up that way because these are sort of the things that we already believed or it felt like you know it felt like I was just talking dang common sense you know. Well yeah I didn't think we would invent a movement that would be called socially. You know when you just get people together and you just you just figure things out you know. I remember that thing where we were all sitting on the table and we were writing down our ideas for the name of it and Virgil said a humanism and we're like no that's stupid that's something else already. I think you know when you're talking about things that are surprising

here I guess it wasn't surprising but you guys as you know are so popular in places and that one of the questions I always get asked is like oh are you are you filming with Chapo. Like there are so many people in sort of these smaller towns and places across the country that are not in urban centers where your voice is such a solace and comfort for people. Oh yeah. So you know which you know but of course we would want to you know include you guys as part of this movement because it's just you know the popularity the people people are obviously really interested in Hungary for this information for this analysis for this perspective that they're just not getting in other places. Again it's surprising and more than a little alarming to me because I only wanted

to provide entertainment solace for people in Brooklyn New York yeah and maybe Silver Lake Los Angeles but largely no one else. Yeah we only know this because Virgil gets 300 emails a day saying come to Tallahassee. Well we're never coming. We're never coming. But like you know you you talk about how like you know Bernie was sort of the linchpin for this news story like the fact that like how many votes he got in 2016 and now you know going into 2020 his campaign he's you know as you may be aware of listening to the show he's running for president again. Like how do you think like is he is he driving a lot of the this new interest in socialism and like you know if so how and like would rather but like more importantly beyond Bernie like what are

people looking for of those you've talked to. I don't know if Morgan do you want to say something. I'm not sure I guess if this is like a popular answer or not but I don't know if Bernie's like pushing the movement at this point. It seems I mean in terms of like mainstream sort of taking these these ideas or at least these this language right and becoming more popular you know I think you see that coming from more AOC and Rashida Tlaib and stuff than you do from Bernie in terms of bringing it more popular. I mean I don't know I think like you know to me the reason to like that Bernie should become president is that his vision has like completely redefined the like democratic politics and you know the sort of political spectrum generally

in this country and I think that's what you're what you want in a president somebody with that kind of vision so I think as much as the rest of the rest of the political field has kind of caught up to him and is articulate like and has you know started branching out from that starting play hit the starting place that he kind of created. What are the horizons beyond Bernie or like a like a socialist candidate running for president. Yeah I mean I think I mean I think it's sort of as simple as like I guess the horizon beyond it is is to me is the creation of a look like the creation of a of an infrastructure that can facilitate the interest of the constituency that Bernie has begun to speak to so whether that's like ultimately a new party or something

else like that where you can that where you can essentially run candidates and discipline them as well so that you can you can you can know that okay you know AOC you're you're you're you're you know the proposal of Green New Deal is fantastic we love that but like say at a certain point she fucks up she you know allies herself with somebody that she shouldn't or whatever it is that the the some entity can say okay actually we're gonna withdraw our support or we're gonna at least say you know you we're gonna at least voice our displeasure or something like that that there is actually a democratic organization that can participate in American politics with real force on behalf of workers and I think that's to me that is that is the kind of horizon and I

think Bernie is certainly making something like it's making it possible to think about that realistically but I do think that's I don't know at least this would be one of the near-term goals and do you think part of the the this popularity of you know the socialist moment among young people comes from the fact that young people are more and more thinking of themselves as workers and not like like I said more of like a individualized or cultural element of just being on the left or against the establishment like do you think that's sort of an important part of this and then what you've discovered I can sort of speak to my experience with this was that I was like my experience of the Bush years was like this was like a horrible fucking nightmare like this was

this was America descending into authoritarianism and fascism in a much more extreme way than I think during the president administration and then it was much worse we're fucking people being killed because of that administration like by the hundreds of thousands yeah anyway and they were much better organized I think that's the other thing yeah they were still an anti-war movement on some level yeah but yeah and then I think sort of having Obama come along and represent I mean I was I was on board I believed you know 2008 I was so happy to vote for him I felt he was saying everything and then watching you know sort of what became of of that sort of what I think was actually radical energy immediately dissipated I mean I hired Rahm Emanuel and you were like oh great this is the

Rahm Emanuel, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner like yeah like the people he staffed his administration with are probably like a much bigger and then also Rick Warren at the inauguration come on right no but that's I think to me that's the journey of like our of this generation is like we've gone from thinking that you know a kind of you know the progressive wing of the Democratic Party was sufficiently left and now we've seen that actually that that wing of the party can't accomplish anything meaningful and that and now Bernie's opened up this space that's further to the left than that and I think that's where people are sort of starting to invest their hopes you know I mean he has very much opened up that space but just something that I know like Matt and I and Virgin and I were talking about just over

the last couple weeks is like there's also the prospect of the danger of everyone getting exactly what they want which is Bernie becoming president because like the reality is he will be completely alone almost entirely and I know he takes pains to stress that you know like his slogan it's not me it's us these things that we want depend on a very large mobilized electorate however that's also you know that's that's kind of that that's a hope as well and the reality is if he does become president he's going to face a congress that's going to be and forget the senate but like his own party is going to be pretty much united top to bottom against any agenda that he's going to want to fulfill and then there's a real you know danger of it sort of being like an obama thing

again where you get what you want but what you want isn't enough and then people just sort of give up they sort of just sort of like move on or whatever but like the dissipation of energy that happened under obama when basically people would just realize we got what we want oh it's better than the alternative but it's still not enough but what can I do I think like there is a real danger if Bernie does become president which again I'm rooting for that that will happen again because of all the structural blockades that are set up in our government to prevent any real change like that happening that like you know how do we be realistic about that but like I hate to sound like a like an optimist or naive but I think the you know I think we can look at the

the strike wave that happened last year that's continuing right now and I do feel optimistic and I feel like we we are generating worker power in these organizations that will be better equipped to to hold uh Bernie and the rest of the democrats whatever to accountable which obama right we all just sort of like because it was all about him there wasn't as much community organizing um ironically to to hold him accountable right and then it just became this fundraising wing I don't I just don't see that happening again but again I maybe I'm just well and also like obama didn't really have positions like yeah he was a horoscope yeah he was just vague enough so that everyone could project what they wanted on him um and then they realized you know energy is nothing with without a platform

Bernie is a very clear platform um and when he inevitably is you know stymied at at a free turn or whatever people will be at least angry about it because that won't feel like uh you know he's not gonna like what was it a what did obama call his like putting all of the horrible right wing ghouls in in his team of rivals yes yes that team of rivals the dumbest the dumbest fucking idea in the world um and I don't know I think like people will see the the conflict will be more obvious because he won't act like there's no conflict that's what I was gonna say is I think my hope would for him would be that he would be willing to lose he wouldn't do that the thing that about the obama team seemed to do is they would look at an issue they would say are we going to

win or lose on this fight and then if they were going to lose they wouldn't fight yeah they would just capitulate immediately behind the scenes and if bernie will transparently fight and transparently lose and say here's why I lost here were the forces are ready against me and what they did to beat me yeah then I think would still instill instructive you still learn something even by getting defeated yeah keep in mind your your idea of a bernie presidency where his own parties against him and congress is against him is different from the situation obama was in his first two years in the office that was not he was not facing facing up meaningful obstruction no yeah and then we all know what happened with that but yeah like for like the I think that's

a good point you made about uh losing but being upfront about why you're losing like for instance what's so important about uh medicare for all as an issue is that in order to talk about it it requires that you identify the structures that are blocking such a thing from happening which are largely private insurance companies uh pharmaceutical companies and much of the medical establishment and industry themselves like the willingness to identify uh villains in in the story is something we've talked about and it is encouraging to me that that seems to be something he's willing to do yeah well and I think like taking the pressure off workers that are trying to build institutions that have been beat back by the democratic party as well as the

republican party for the last like 60 years like we're going to need a reinvigorated trade union movement and the idea that that's just going to I mean like it's never been easy to organize unions in america it's never been easy to organize unions anywhere but like a presidential administration that would take the boot off the neck of the unions that's gonna help yeah other other than us of course uh who are some of your uh favorite people that you've that you've profiled in the film so far other than you um who i mean besides like lee carter um who's like probably a bigger a bigger name um than most i don't know we filmed with javanka beckles a bunch who ran um first state legislate first state senate assembly state assembly in uh california um we filmed with

with you guys when you did an event with julia salazar we've been doing like little vignettes and then also like larger characters so those are like main characters and then um other events and stuff as they as they come across we're at the socialism conference last year in chicago yeah that was cool i i just think like we so we're following stephanie she's this oklahoma teacher um and so at the socialism conference they had invited they're you know a lot of the strike with it happened and they invited her and they invited um some of the leaders of the west virginia strike and the arizona strike um and it was this panel of mostly women and mostly people who had not been organizers prior to the strike they've been sort of they were rank and file teachers who

who just like participated um and that conference is several thousand people and these i don't know these most these women these people got up and they just sort of i don't know they had such incredible poise and sense of themselves and it was clear that the experience of being part of a strike the experience of winning concessions from the state and from their employers um i guess one in the same in this case um had been transformative for them i mean it was absolutely like palpable in the room that these people were not who they'd been before and that i think was i don't know you asked earlier did you come across anything surprising i think that that experience of solidarity that lived experience of what that really means i think it's hard to i think it's

hard to actually understand what that is until you've gone through it and i wouldn't say that i have but observe just seeing how much it changed those people uh was was was pretty uh astonishing and who are your influences who are your guys um how do you feel about kenneth anger uh how do i feel about what kenneth anger like i'm better if you was you know kenneth not anger kenneth friendly kenneth friendly or are like film influences or just like fashion icons or oh it's the met ball tonight god i wish i'd gotten invited um gosh i mean when i'm looking at the type of film that we're trying to make right now which is like a political issue documentary for the mainstream so bringing

these ideas to people who are open to them but might not know anything about them right so they'll see it on like netflix or something like oh socialism i've been meaning to know what that means um and then we'll watch it right uh so thinking about films that have been really successful along those lines i think a lot about um food ink and some of those early michael more films that really shaped discourse where you know no one was really or some people where i was living in portland wearing at the time so i was thinking about like where my chicken was coming from but it wasn't necessarily where everyone and now you know 10 years later like all restaurants source where their food comes from and i don't want to say like oh it's just because of food ink but sort

of the way they were able to tackle a topic um and really shift the discourse or things that we that we're trying to do in terms of like the films that i enjoy just watching on my own there um um there's a there's a lot of there's a lot of documentaries out there how do you stand out how do you kind of break through the model they make the best one or they make the best one there's a it's the better one and you know this movie doesn't exist there's nothing about like if you are scrolling through netflix and you've been hearing about socialism there isn't this movie it's actually there actually isn't there's not a movie that like kind of post cold war appraises in any way like the history of the left broadly or and it's particularly in america like

it's crazy how it sounds actually interesting now when you go on netflix you will see a ton of like foreign films and bad history show propaganda like anti-soviet propaganda all of the sudden which is really interesting so they're scrambling for things they just have in the library that is loosely related to socialism but it's all like history channel dads well do you know what drops you did like it's all terrible it's really funny i'm watching all of them they're amazing yeah there's there's the one about how my grandfather killed him and a few other ones no yeah no you got to you got to mix in the michael more and the the sort of morgan spurlock stuff and then you feature us in the kind of arrow morris gates of heaven vernon florida type characters in your movie as well

or yeah burn in florida that's virtual brother well you know there's not even like the good history stuff i think that was one of the things that surprised me when we started was like okay well let's just go look and see like there must be some mini series or ken burns thing there's sort of nothing that that we've been able to find at least maybe someone will call you know email you guys and be like those jerks need to go see this movie that we haven't come across yet but in terms of something that covers that even just the history and certainly you know there's not another feature right now that's been covering the last few years but just going back there's there's nothing there's like a there's a biopic on debbs that's on canopy um and otherwise you know not much and then in

terms of like looking at these like how the economy works there are other examples of documentaries that do stuff like that um i don't know if you guys have ever seen um john kenneth galbraith did a tv show in like the 70s on bbc called the age of uncertainty um i've heard of this i had sort of a deep reference um but it's pretty funny um just in terms of like people that have been trying to look at how you know capitalism works or could work and and that type of stuff that's sort of i would i would say worth like a youtube afternoon if you have nothing else to do right so like a carl sagan's cosmos for economics yes yeah kind of freeman was so pissed off about it he did a whole piece melton freeman did a whole like rebuttal series about it i i bet that was fun too but that

was really entertaining yeah i bet it was great cool guy oh well hopefully you guys can inspire a rebuttal documentary series by turning point usa or whatever like socialism skanks dinesh to susah to come out and yeah we'll be in that one too an unamerican story you'll have a thousand rebuttals of guys sitting in their car in a parked car talking to a dash cam um definitely i would consider um you know stealing a lot from ken burns because everyone loves those movies and if you'd like anyone to maybe read a letter as you pan over like a photo i could read maybe if you could dig up some of uh bernie's letter reading reading a medium my dear my dearest jane well no i was like thinking i'm reading some of bernie's letters that like the i don't know vermont utilities company

or it's like dear dear true north electricity i fear i should be paying this month's heating bill we'll have like a drunk history interstitials where we can all just hang out and read random letters to each other yeah well uh morgan and yale uh thank you so much for for joining us to talk about socialism and american story but uh people like that you are also in the process of you know getting this movie produced and financed to you know film some of the stuff you guys haven't done yet if people would like to see more of this film here it comes yeah all right uh no where where should they go to check out uh socialism american story and uh maybe contribute to you guys sure yeah we have a Kickstarter that's going on right now if you go to socialismmovie.com um or probably if you

just google socialismmovie because there's nothing else like we were saying uh you can watch a trailer you can read a little bit more about the film um and then you can give us some money we've got some rewards some perks um that we've got we've got totes you know every little dollar counts so once again uh morgan specter and yale bridge is social yale bridge yale bridge sorry oh yeah just one star wow can't believe i got someone's name wrong on the show thank you for having us you're thinking of jeff richard yale bridge morgan specter once again apologies but thank you so much for joining us and thank you for uh working on this film great thank you so much yeah thanks thanks for having us on you guys i like this uh venus in repose thank you got going on it's the ideal

podcast and posture we're recording again okay once again thank you to yale bridge that's bridge singular not plural and morgan specter who uh honestly we didn't we didn't big it up too much but you know morgan's uh he's he's a hollywood actor and you might remember him from a little show called homeland and boardwalk empire which he when which he played uh al Capone's brother steve capone you play no no you play uh morgan played al capone's brother on boardwalk empire chad capone in it but it in a great capone there was chad capone in a great role which he played a real historical character who did get literally riddled with probably a thousand tommy gun bullets by the chicago pd in a great scene captured in that show uh last time i talked to

him he said he had to spend like like a day and a half just getting the squibs put on his body for that scene so hey they were doing squids they were doing squids i give them props quick using ggi the only thing i care about in films this point i don't care that everything is marvel or whatever disney owns everything just put real bullets in there under socialism we will go back to squib squids but no that was a classic sunny corleone moment there's an iconic scene for for morgan and yeah that's that's another thing um you know the mafia has in common with uh socialism is that you know they were also murdered by the chicago police all right gang um let's see what what's what else is going on in the in the news these days you guys want to talk about uh little international

news i always want to talk about the dang news how about uh how about venezuela venezuela we're gonna be those people now yeah that's uh that's been the international story this week there's been yet another i don't know i guess uh sort of flash mob for guano and in caracas uh he very uh you know very um amusingly this week did the kind of nathan fielder thing where he's just like i'm here with all of the people who've defected from the military we're having a great time fighting for this uprising they're all here too just out of frame yep um currently right now the venezuelan embassy in dc is sort of been besieged by supporters of this i'm using in quotes you're uprising you might know it better as a coup attempt um but yeah like there are like there are supporters

of guaiido who are outside the dc embassy trying to sort of take it over and there are american volunteers or they're like occupiers holding it down with uh the other parts of the people who are you know in the embassy but they want they want to take back the embassy because let's be honest their attempts to take back caracas have not gone swimmingly this yeah this is the consolation prize it's pretty nuts that the cops are just letting them do this and the secret service as well yeah it's sort of weird it makes you wonder if that would have been possible in a reverse type situation and i kind of don't think so well that's because this is an uprising and not a coup oh right i forgot if it was a coup they definitely would not stand for this but this is

definitely like an authentic you know grassroots uprising that has the support of all the venezuelan people absolutely yeah just like a couple things about uh obviously good news uh bolson aro has said that the 20 members of the venezuelan military who defected will be given you know they can settle in brazil they can they can live in brazil they can they can they can live there they all get their own waxing shops to run now but um i don't know just like it's it's following the venezuelan story from america is so difficult because the mainstream media i mean it's a cliche but like the the media in the newspapers in america do a notoriously horrible job covering anything that goes on in in central or latin america and it's very hard to find like even like otherwise decent papers of

record like the wall street journal or new york or new york times they they they do a really bad job about this like you can all get almost no coverage of it as well that doesn't almost entirely ape like the state oh no it's just all straight propaganda and i mean i like i thought the wall street journal did an okay job covering the events that went down there this week but like both the times in the wall street journal they do this thing where like the even otherwise it was objective dry news articles not leaving aside the hilarious you know uh ucb sponsored viral videos about you know why you have to support uh this uprising they'll say things like uh you know on tuesday supporters of you know self-declared president or they'll just say president oh yeah

no they just call the president guaido guido how do you pronounce his name yeah okay who cares uh they'll say they'll say supporters president nyc guido president nyc guaido voice you know supporters of him faced off against uh forces supporting the maduro government which i guess i think it sounds like they have mechs well yeah i mean i suppose like you know there are the military and police largely are still on his side so in a sense that's true but there are still also many many people who also support the maduro government who are showing out in the streets in equal or let's be honest greater numbers than the people who want him to leave and it's just little things like that in reading the news accounts of what's going on there and not to

mention that like every one of these events that gets played up in the media for big effect like you'll remember a couple weeks back there was that um uh aid convoy coming in from columbia that was supposedly uh burned by uh maduro like the maduro troops or government or whatever the molotov cocktail that was you know pretty much shown within the hour to be a literal false flag by guaido supporters and a similar thing happened this week with that armored personnel character carrier that drove into a crowd of people yeah for an hour that was the that was the the that was like the napalm girl of the show the horror of the maduro regime look at them running over protesters what they're doing again that was the the people who got into that apc were the

defecting soldiers not the maduro like not the government soldiers didn't get as much press when that was revealed but you know again the new york times covered that like they stated that plainly that that had happened and it was the maduro uh military that drove into a crowd of people now these are it's it's it's the hand of of sort of guiding ideologies can often be hidden when you see like talking about domestic politics because you've got this right a supposed range of positions that are all acceptable you know the different political parties but wherever the united states is like vested kind of neocolonial interests are at play all of a sudden it gets real flattened and uh all that nuance disappears and uh and the good guys and bad guys are just

presented to you yeah and it's pretty predictable who's who whenever that happens like nobody's talking about reports those the studies saying like 40 000 people have been killed by the uh uh sanctions the united states has put on venezuela that's like 10 more than 10 9 11's worth of people killed by our what is essentially an act of war i mean sanctions is just it's i mean in the old days you would do you know a blockade with a bunch of uh you know iron side ships going around your border and saying nothing can get in now you're just doing that with the u.s. is control of international financial institutions but it's still basically an act of war that has the result of an act of war which is to kill a lot of innocent people and you

know we discussed this before the last time we talked about uh venezuela but also a new character that's showing up a lot in these reports are the cuban advisors yeah what is that about and like bolton and Pompeo are going ham on this you know like all the cuban advisors must leave it's the cuban advisors that are stopping literally all the military like they stopped everyone but those 20 guys this little poor country is still the biggest fucking boogie man good for them they have such i mean it's passe i know but big dick energy like that's actually what that phrase is used for people still quiver in fear from the phrase cuban advisors and they're like oh we're going to put cuba under even double more secret sanctions and travel ban it's like

well shit i mean they've been dealing with us for 60 years now i don't think it's going to be that big of a problem for them but uh that you and i were talking to the uh when we were out the other night about talk about bde from uh from the cuban military uh the war in angola when cuba when castra sent cuban soldiers to like uh that was the first time uh the white african army had been defeated by non-white people and it was like they had this myth of invincibility that like a huge part of their um sort of ideology and success was it's hinged on this idea that you know like a disciplined white army would could never be defeated in combat by a non-white one and cuba sorted them out real fucking quick and honestly contributed maybe more to the

downfall of apartheid south africa than almost than a lot many than like you know the boycott for instance no it's bob gildo who did it uh no it was yeah because like losing control of uh what became namibia and areas like that's what ruined their sort of cordon sanitaire that they had between them and the rest of uh of quote-unquote like black africa and it made their ability to hold out uh much more tenuous uh yeah no cuba generally uh have done very well as a as a force sort of supportive during the cold war more they haven't done it since uh militarily uh i doubt they're doing much in venezuela i mean it's all state department horseshit it's it's just trying to tie the two together so that you can you know get a two for one special when you're just deciding to

carpet bomb countries when everyone just decides to go go yolo about the whole damn thing uh but now what they do a lot is uh send doctors that's their big foreign policy uh venture is sending their surplus of doctors to places that are underserved medical humanitarianism including uh brazil where bolsonero once he took power expelled them and helped make it harder for a lot of people in remote regions of brazil and poor areas to get medical treatments so well done we got to stop this these invasions of cuban doctors yeah and no and what's interesting though is like god who is i mean bolton has said like the munro doctrine is back oh yeah maybe he said that but you know like i've even like who's the other politician america i think it was even

a democrat who said this week like you know uh like cuban needs to stay out of our part of the world or they need to stop they need to stop meddling in the western hemisphere and yeah no it's just what everything everything old is new again um real quick though also uh aoc uh when asked is maduro the legitimate governor legitimate head of state of venezuela said i'm deferring to party leadership on this matter which i gotta say i'm gonna put that i'm gonna put that in the do better column she's not a latin americanist like i mean like let's be honest she's a nice progressive person that got a little shot in the arm from working under bernie and knowing that like oh wait class politics are actually maybe a bigger motivator than this i do not expect her to have a comprehensive

like foreign policy position i mean bernie barely has one is still better than everyone we've been we've existed without an anti-war movement in this country since like our efforts to stop the invasion of iraq just completely flopped and the thing is is that you as an individual politician your willingness to stick your neck out is relevant is related to your support on any given issue from any given constituency and domestically there's a lot of issues and especially now where politicians feel like they can kind of put their neck out but foreign policy-wise there just is no infrastructure to support you if you if you get out of line yeah on the other hand a huge institutional establishment designed to keep you in line yeah that's the thing venezuela

is not a salient issue and you're most likely to hear about it when it's being used as a cudgel by the right yeah like that that is that's going to be a lagging indicator of any genuine you know anti-capitalist political movement but it will come eventually but it's it's never going to lead the horse just because that has never traditionally been how you've gotten to american people politically with foreign policy stuff right i mean also i i do think the best way to build one is to get a large group of working-class people with some degree of class consciousness and then you have i think a more uh like comprehensive understanding of how populaces might relate to their governments and maybe might dissent from their governments but that

still doesn't justify us intervention and yeah and and well i mean if you think about things in a class way you eventually get to the idea that oh you know the government is organized along class interests too they're just not mine which means that this foreign policy that i've been told about my whole life is not about american interest in any way that includes me but rather much more narrowly considered as the interests of the capitalists ruling class and you know a lot of the other the other thing that's going on is like you mentioned that venezuela is primarily used as a rhetorical cudgel to bash socialism it's like you know oh you like socialism well what about venezuela they're eating rats and zoo animals there and i gotta say you know better to eat a zoo

animal than keep one in a zoo you know if you ever think about that that's a snappy answer to that question you know better to put it up put them out of their misery and maybe feed someone rather than keep a tiger in a fucking four by six cage no but um this kind of moral blackmail about all like the deprivations uh in terms of food and medicine largely because of the sanctions that are going on but like the venn diagram of the people who are using um you know oh maduro and this horrible poverty and the again the the the immiseration of the venezuelan people as a reason for america to you know quote you know support this uprising and the people who are totally fine with saudi arabia doing that but a million times worse the emin is a circle like what saudi

arabia like yemen is experiencing the worst famine in the world right now largest cholera largest cholera outbreak like an actual genocide right now that is being aided not not just aided in a bit being largely carried out by american support like entirely like i mean the saudis would be they wouldn't be doing it were it not for the green light and in some cases like i said we're actually refueling their jets midair before they fucking triple tap a wedding we stop doing that but just because now their planes don't need the re in air refills i thought people just uh stopped getting married they should probably honestly live in yemen that's the real problem if you live in yemen you should probably just go habitat for a while don't don't get married so again

i mean it should this is this is very elementary this is very basic but it should give you some pause that all the people that seem to their hearts are fucking swelling with concern for the venezuelan people are the exact same ones who are killing an entire country of people in yemen and in mike Pompeo and john bolton's case uh already plotting the next war in iran well and you also hear from like weird trots and stuff that it's like well you know the venezuelan government has been very poor administrators and they've handled this very poorly to which i would answer so still none of your fucking business like what are we going to do make it better we're going to go through and sort all their files out until it works out great eric prince is going to take

care of everything he's the disruptor we need i don't know if you guys are aware of that but apparently he's been shopping a plan to high level trump donors and uh venezuelan uh expats to get a 5000 man mercenary army to overthrow maduro the expendables it's that basically yes we're going to do the expendables of venezuela and that's they haven't it hasn't apparently caught on yet but i mean if guaidou keeps fucking the dog with this they might decide anything is worth trying because that's the release like it's funny kind of watching him just absolutely faceplant every time he tries to get everyone on his side for a revolution but the other thing is is that you know as long as we're have our neck on venezuela and we have

them in our crosshairs the as the ira used to say you know you have to be lucky every day we only have to be lucky once and that's the same thing that the u.s position is right now they only have to have things come together one time to give an overthrow they like chile wasn't their first attempt of guadamala either 1954 so the they're going to be looking through the rolodex for guys to pick i pretty i think pretty soon i think guaidou might his days might be numbered as the washington man but he might be behind he might be getting a ride to a country farm where they just open the door and they just go they go you're free they're a white fangam you're free just throw a rocket get out of here you stupid go on a rising leader go on get out of here

quite oh what i mean that is the uh was it bolton or rubio who had this post that was it was a picture of guaidou uh caption you know wall maduro is hiding in a bunker somewhere here's here's guaidou out here leading the leading his people and it's the guy he looks like that picture of jared kushner in iraq he's like standing on an a tv he like fucking bet old rork or something well i mean this matthew but the scary thing is though i mean obviously it has been amusing to see them uh faceplant in almost every attempt to turn people out or get the military to defect they've also failed spectacularly but like that's frightening because like it's the more the more their efforts to do this fuck up uh like that means the more desperate and insane their

their plans to pull this off are going to get right so it's not they're just going to be like oh well the people didn't rise up with us oh well i guess it's not really have was legitimately supported as we thought yeah uh we'll just forget that yeah there's 500 guys in polo shirts in northern virginia whose entire job is figuring out how to make this happen and like i said like the more thwarted it gets the more uh sadistic cruel and insane their plans to for the venezuelan people are going to get i mean they're already probably blowing up uh like transformers and and uh and sabotaging dams and shit to cause blackouts so who knows what the next step will be fucking locusts well again yeah these people obviously first and foremost in the minds of all these people

is the safety and well-being and freedom of the venezuelan people always are humanitarians first and foremost well uh moving on from uh international news i want to touch on a couple articles uh that caught my eye this week and dealing with domestic politics you know we talked about um you know how aoc said you know i'm going to defer to party leadership on the question of venezuela well on other questions the party leadership has other opinions and i want to talk real real quick right now there's a big article in times this week by uh glenn thrush headline polosi warns democrats stay in the center or trump may contest the election results okay let's talk about that for a second polosi warns democrats by the pricking of my thumbs

that fucking evil crown she is literally saying nominate biden or someone comparably moderate quote unquote or trope may do a coup in this country like does she think that if it's a landslide election he won't contest the results exactly as many have pointed out he contested the results of the election he won yeah he's he's contesting the results of his fucking inauguration crowds he's yelling about the kentucky derby right now by the way what the fuck happened in the kentucky derby that he said was caused by political correctness i don't know i had the the the horse the horse at one it was declared the winner because it crossed the finish line at first but then on replay it was indicated that it had hit another horse like it had bones

hidden up it had made contact with another horse and that's not allowed that's not allowed and so no and so he was disqualified so second place one and trump thinks that that's bullshit they should just make it like a horse a demolition derby the horses should just bang head first is it enough of them don't fucking die already put landmines on them yes i just love the fucking tweet it was a rough and tumble race on a wet and sloppy track actually actually a beautiful thing to watch this this reinforces matt and i's theory that he's fundamentally like a not sexual person yeah because who could make that tweet and not think oh that sounds a little pornographic only someone like trump he would have made such a great roman emperor we love we love this is the love of

violent spectacle is really yeah folks the gladiators okay sometimes different he puts his thumbs down and they don't execute him what is this yeah we're getting soft no it's like yeah every all the horse you know liberal america all the horses in america with the kentucky derby they all get a garland of the flowers but trump every horse gets shot in the head and then the winning horse gets made into a steak because some of the mara lago kitchen no yeah we love seeing these thugs get wet and sloppy folks love it oh god yeah i had no idea what that was about no political correctness there we go no he is mad that we that that you don't see people and animals die every time there's a sporting event so uh just just this this the thing about policy is just this was dumb founding

to me like this is blackmailing your own fucking constituency i know it's amazing she's a nasty evil bitch she's a bad person yeah she's a bad person yeah she goes a speaker nancy policy does not believe trump can be removed through impeachment the only way to do it she said this week is to defeat him in 2020 by a margin so big he cannot challenge the legitimacy of a democratic victory he would do it anyway and also the also premise there is that the moderate will get most votes possible yeah the moderate will win what happened i mean in 2016 i think she's right about impeachment i think we all agree that that's like a dead end and i think it's weird that she's like oh we should start focusing on the next election which i think we also agree with and then she ends on and therefore

basically a republican yeah no i mean yeah because you're going to get the big landslide with the most moderate candidate which is what happened in 2016 as we all remember i think it's pretty clear you know the strategy she's going for here and i think we should hear her out about is that they should run a middle of the road candidate that runs election based on personal revulsion to donald trump as a human being right and reaches out to moderate republican right because his main his main claim to fein is someone else's presidential administration here i got an idea the thing is about it is that for every blue collar worker you lose you pick up two in the philadelphia suburbs and like the thing is like

like biden could win against trump i mean i think she's like just discount that like i mean it was so close with highly unlikely but uh he is he does actually have a base in a way that like like buddha just gonna fucking get it like biden actually does have a base well and again it is largely because it he is associated with among the democratic base like a beloved popular president in obama that they there is this you know need to go back to that yeah people want things to be normal it does feel like there's an emergency every like 20 minutes but amber to your point about impeachment like yes no like if they chose to bring articles impeachment of against them based on uh is the obstruction of justice or the things that are in the Mueller report uh no the senate would

absolutely not impeach donald trump it would it would stall out there right however they could make a national case or at least you know have hearings or whatever that could damage him politically but what's amazing about her saying like we're not going to do impeachment is that you know like i know uh we various people have gotten mad at us for you know poo pooing the muller report i know what you're talking about no one's ever been mad or you know or seeming to they think like we're taking trump's side at some point before by saying that like you know don't put all your hopes in this the 70 ancient fbi agent is not gonna you know slap the handcuffs on donald trump but the thing is like why the fuck should i take impeachment seriously when all the people who have

been banging for we have to get trump out of here we have to impeach him all manty pelosi has to say is like no we're not going to do that and then it's just like well okay good that's over all right so like i mean why the fuck should i take impeachment seriously when none of these people do either i mean if you take impeachment seriously as like a constitutional like mandate for a president who breaks the law you would have to fucking impeach him sure but they don't yeah so going on here she says we have to inoculate against that we have to be prepared for that mr pelosi says as an anti-vaxxer i don't prepared for a close election yeah basically which necessarily this is going to be i'm sorry no one is going to be donald trump by a landslide out of some sense of outrage that

these people the people that this measure would appeal to believe that their fellow countrymen share where he goes uh miss pelosi said during an interview at the capital on wednesday as she discussed her concern that mr trump would not give up power voluntarily if he lost reelection by a slim margin next year i mean how seriously do you guys take that though i know donald trump he like he said he can test the you know turnout at his inauguration and the results of the kentucky derby no but you think he would really less you will yeah i'm gonna say i'm not gonna i'm not going to say he might i'm going to say he will yeah he will not acknowledge the result of the election i'm gonna say he won't yeah but also he's not like energized enough to do anything

about it it'll be a big pr to do well that's just another thing is that he can say that but it's not the only reason it has any power is if everyone else agrees to like not just take him out of the like they could literally just send the garmy in or like the capitol police just like take him out yeah just literally lead him out uh out of the white house say no you have to have to go it's time to go moderate position is to just let him stay there but he doesn't have any power he just kind of hangs out in the hallways i think what she's indicating here is part of it is total cynicism of just trying to scare people into voting for biden because and they're so scared of trump that they believe anything that yes he's just gonna say he's president forever and say and honestly

you know look he's done whatever he's wanted and nothing is enough no one has there's been no accountability for it he's now now that the democrats are in charge of congress he's basically made it his policy we're not going to submit to subpoenas which is against the law like it's flatly illegal what they're doing by just not showing up for congressional hearings not honoring subpoenas but what are you gonna do about it and the fact that was one of the that was one of the articles of peachman against nixon and was contempt of congress and they're already doing that like that is their right but but they're not right so there's there's no accountability that was the thing i really wanted to ask you matt uh that you know you your whole thing about bernie potentially

winning is that he would be so constrained by by the system that he'd be unable to accomplish any kind of change and i mean i i think that's a good analysis but would you do you still think that the presidency is is not you know not that powerful when it's now basically settled that the president is above the law well this president is above the law because the his party controls the senate and his party controls the judiciary so he is above the law and he's not doing anything that is really against the will of any vested interest the only thing he's even threatened to do in the last while that really could have messed with anybody we were talking about this is a larry yeah he tried to put herman cain on the federal the the fed board and you know hey you

want to make him hud secretary you know you want to you want him to turn all of the housing into fucking chucky cheese we don't give a shit have all those organizations i have every department of education have all that shit fall apart we don't care understaff it put clowns in there we don't give a shit sell the fucking copper out of the buildings put your federal reserve where we get the money to do everything where we get the fucking discount window no you don't fuck around with that you don't you don't put any clown on there that's our fucking purview and that is why there's trump can do what he wants because he's not really opposing any vested power right and he has actual people supporting him and that's the

specter that support pelosi is raising is she's got support among the establishment republicans and he's got these millions of idiots who love him uh meanwhile we the democratic party basically have no one who gives a shit whether we live or die which means that if there was a sing where trump says i'm not going to acknowledge the results of the selection all right who among the democrats is going to turn out just to install biden you know what army is going to march on the white house to install joe biden as president uh cap notice they stalling famously said how many divisions do they have um no that the the example you bring up about uh herman kane is and then steven more yeah the other like he's the matthew lesko of like of supply side economics and like

that is such a way you cut the taxes and the way you get the money that is such an instructive example of like uh where power and ideology and washington dc really lie because like you said everything else trump can staff it with his caddy or just leave it unstaffed let it completely go to pot nobody gives a shit when you try to get someone on the fed reserve board who actually believes in this snake oil horseshit that they pitch to the rest of these punters they're like deaded that shit immediately and they tried to say it was like you know steven more had all of these insulting jokes and comments about women's sports yeah that's what kept him off the fed board as he was mean to the w n b a like come on you could you could get on the supreme court if you

had said i mean you know we know what you could do and get still get on the bottom of the supreme court yeah but yeah no they they know the people the federal reserve people again where all our money comes from they know it's bullshit they know it's a lie they can't get someone who actually believes that shit in there because they'll know it'll take the global fucking economy and the other thing trump threatened to do uh recently that actually would have gone against vencedus was closed the border with mexico oh yeah what happened to that what i thought the caravans were still coming and they were going to close the border all of a sudden he doesn't talk about that anymore maybe you got a fucking meeting with somebody who wasn't going to fucking like just compliment his

fucking giant tie and actually tell him you know what was at stake here so that's the thing is that he can do whatever he wants because there's no meaningful opposition to him and they have institutional control of major branches of government which bernie wouldn't have that's the free and he would be threatening ideally he would be a threat but the way you counteract that is with them is with mobilized people like that's the only theory of change that work bernie is that him being president activates yes citizenry well as a counter way to establishment control what we said earlier like bernie's not going to you know install a cabinet for rivals like the fact that there is going to be a big open conflict between him and the in the rest of the government

him not accomplishing anything but being uh making obvious who is responsible for that like his might be the most we could get of it and it's honestly it's not nothing no i mean no polarizing and and and uh polarizing the population and and raising and and identifying something about the contradictions something about heightening contradictions and identifying right the actual malefactors the actual impediments to practice as opposed to this miasma we have now where nobody really knows who's in charge but the president's the top guy so you just kind of vaguely blame him for or give him credit regardless of yeah how things are going if you have an open war an ideological war over the future of the country and the opposition is coming what's this also from

the leadership of his own political party all of a sudden like you know the threat of of voter anger or or citizen uh mobilization is a real counterweight to just the sort of somehow you know the the sleepwalking towards a armageddon that we're doing now with the people in charge uh once again back to that leadership of the party uh Pelosi says here own the center left own the mainstream save the cheer they own themselves they constantly own themselves yeah yeah uh own the center left own the mainstream our passions were for healthcare bigger paychecks cleaner government a simple message miss Pelosi said the meaningless yeah of the 40 seat democratic pickup last year i've never heard the phrase cleaner government before in her second ascent to the

speakership we did not engage in some of the other exuberances that exist in our party a reference to some of the most ambitious fans advocated by the left wing of the party and some 2020 candidates including medicare for all in the green new deal was it like how can you say like your message is healthcare but i mean okay we know why they their message is help medicare for plus some all america platinum medicare for asterisk and uh just just one other this is the other i mean Pelosi literally say again vote for one of the bees other than bernie or trump may do a coup in this country incredible here's what joe biden one of the bees and now i think kind of the front runner or neck and neck with bernie depending on how you look at it but i eat yep uh he says biden thinks

trump this is another new york times article by uh shane goldmacher biden thinks trump is the problem not all republicans other democrats disagree as joseph r biden made his way across iowa on his first trip as a 2020 presidential candidate the former vice president repeatedly returned to one term aberration when he referred to the trump presidency limited to four years mr biden pleaded with a ballroom crowd of 600 in the eastern iowa city of debuque history will treat this administration's time as an aberration this is not the republican party he added citing his relationships with quote my republican friends in the house like strump thurman democrat yeah the only not republican thing about donald trump is the fact that he's a big sloppy hedonist is he seems

to actually enjoy being rich like romney or glassy eyed maniac yeah waiting for no reason yeah he likes hunting people for sport there's no actual like cultural conservatism to him yeah and again like it's just all this just warning people trump highest approval rating of republican president among voting republicans ever i think i think he said 88 or 90 90 upwards of 90 upwards of 90 approval among republican voters yep just an aberration certainly not the republican party that i know and love like my many friends in the senate like lindsay graham yeah or fucking god christ knows who else yeah well chuck grassley yeah uh he is but you know the thing is is it's obviously absurd but it also is a thing people want to hear because i mean that's one of the

thing that's been chart that has been pushing the russia gate thing all this time is people don't want to think that trump is a the natural outgrowth the american political system it's too horrifying it's too destabilizing to their worldview so there has to be some sort of foreign intervention that caused it to happen there has to be some sort of aberrant freakishness to his candidacy and and his presidency and the pitch of get me back in there and we can basically just do the men in black mind eradicator and pretend it never happens cycle very appealing psychoanalyst would say this stems from an inability to mourn yeah like they can't accept that actually america is really bad and sad and mean and they can't actually mourn for it and they can't do anything

about it they just live in that denial stage and then we should care ourselves if that is going to be a potent message i mean people talk about how fucking stupid the republican bases all the time but i think we should probably consider how fucking done the most of the democratic bases as well yeah i can understand it you don't want to think that 80 million of your countrymen are just monsters at this point you have to believe oh no they've been hypnotized by something from above they've been hypnotized by this this incredibly charismatic devious Machiavellian genius donald trump or by fox news or something i think they're monsters either i just think that like we have a very limited number of choices in america american political life

is extremely perverted it squishes people's brains into deranged paranoia no one knows what the actual conflict is and i don't know people are fucking insane does anyone remember again like we were just talking about this like the bush years like we've been pretty insane for a while oh yeah but i think the fact that that that everyone involved in media and in politics has a vested interest in obscuring the sources of conflict and tension in politics right is what drives you crazy because how are you you don't even have a frame of reference or an explanatory model all you just have are these these figures there's moralism you can lean back on moralism yeah well the difference between me and them is that i'm a good person and they're bad that's all

you can do because nothing out there's no other framework for explaining the world around you and so then the person who tells you the nicest story gets your attention and in this case the guy's like hey remember me the cool grandpa from the obama years get me back there and it's like basically like it never happened it's like it was like a bit it was all a dream it's jr stepping out of the shower everything's fine i mean it's funny to think as i think i make that i think we should kid ourselves that like oh this is uh oh this is going to go tits up you know biden's going to fuck up sure biden is really good at losing fucking up running for president yeah but the thing is slurring his way through shit it's amazing i mean yeah he's very good at he called

teresa may margaret thatcher twice in row try he he was called he was talking about teresa may bragging about how he knows all the people in government in the world he goes that the prime minister teresa may and then goes oh i you know he says margaret thatcher oh i'm sorry freddie at slip anyway margaret thatcher oh wait no i'm sorry teresa may yeah he got wet brain and then also when he said uh he like he's like when f dr would go on television and like he's like that's an art yeah but he is he's a goof monster and he's he's failed presidential campaigns are hilarious all of them have been incompetent but of course we aren't ever looking for sophistication in a politician like we've just proven that so i'm not gonna rely on that don't really work and also

this time he has institutional support and yeah so i was on council against uh you know that he's going to be easy to get rid of biden however it is hilarious to think that he has kicked off his presidential campaign over the last two weeks the message that is basically says i have no empathy for young people fuck them they're lazy i do have great sympathy for dick cheney as a man and a person i'm not what he did in office but just as a human being i'm more optimistic because i think the democratic coalition is currently constituted is substantially different from what it was in 2004 where everyone can see john carrey and say uh he looks like a president that's fine we need a guy like that i don't know it's literally a lot of the same people he i mean

he appealed i mean a lot of those people died since 2004 and the other thing is he uh definitely appeals to a large sector of the democratic electorate that would just be amenable to a pitch of hey remember when you could go to brunch and then and mommy and daddy were in charge uh now though i mean most i would say well over half of the people who will vote in these primaries are about to learn who the fuck joe biden is and what his fucking record is and would categorically reject that i don't think he's someone who will just start with like can run away with this thing and start winning primaries with 70 of the vote or anything like that i think he has a ceiling right all of a sudden it's still like i still think like we as people on the left have a lot of work to do to

illustrate no joe biden isn't like you know fawn uncle who gives you two hard handshakes here's his record we really really need to reiterate that because honestly most people don't spend all their time thinking about politics and they just want normalcy absolutely and i think i mean this the first votes are going to be cast in eight months and that's plenty of time for all of this to get out just as well you know the the the basic idea of the Pelosi uh pitch here that you know we need a centrist who's going to who's going to appeal to these suburban moderates that that that you know they a lot of them flipped over from republican to to democrat and the midterms last time around and we're gonna we're going to replicate that success i don't think joe biden's the horse for

that is the thing i mean now we now we're all just starting to be familiar with this this this rolling scandal involving his son that cuts right at the heart of the basic critique of donald trump remit not just swooping on his dead brother's wife not just that this is the uh chinese facial facial recognition software he would be our first appellation president in spirit anyway the fucking ukrainian natural gas company what i don't know about any of this stuff that's yeah that sounds like submarine biden's son is like donald nixon she's surprised the deal was uh in like 2015 the uh obama administration threatened to withhold like a billion dollars in loan guarantees from ukraine unless they fired their top prosecutor uh who was probably corrupt i mean

i assume so but that prosecutor was investigating this natural gas company of which joe biden's son was on the board and this is a thing that you're going to hear investigated by right wing media of course uh which obviously you can't trust and you shouldn't trust but hopefully be investigated by you know real media or left media as well right because it is a real fucking story and it is the fucking message of why we fucking hate all these political elites because and that's exactly why clinton was never able to get any traction against no exactly there were there was a mirror scandal for every problem with trump there was a mirror one with clinton from the sexual harassment to the corruption to everything and if you're someone like joe biden you can't

credibly say oh you know it is actually pretty fucked up to you know keep use your office to enrich yourself and your fucking family and to have your fucking son sit on all these weird foreign corporate boards i mean our job is going to be pointing out the fact that joe biden is an anti working class elite and but to that point despite also being a bumpkin yes to that point though i think it is um encouraging that i've you know i've read in several news accounts that uh bernie sanders himself has said like leading his campaign that like we are going to i'm using the word attack he of course would never say that he said i'm not you know i'm not here to attack joe biden but he did vote for the iraq war that goofy motherfucker um no but like like the contract is like

introducing voters to joe biden's actual record and making him defend his actual current positions and believes is the strategy that must be employed early and often if you are on the left or in the bernie campaign and i've seen encouraging signs that that is exactly what they are going to do i've heard people say uh you know oh it's it's unfair to bring up this thing joe biden said in the 90s or the early 2000s he's learned he he'd do better now he's he's written the the uh a note in the iphone note sap and posted it uh but all of the all of the liberal me too feminists again they just hate socialism like it has nothing to do with any of that shit they just hate socialism but it's not they're going to continue to paint bernie as the sexist next to joe biden not even

just the sexist stuff it's it's not even just his voting record but his seniority and how he has been a prime mover of things like uh the fucking bankruptcy bill in the during the bush administration it's like you know the problems he's part of the reason why the problems are here he's literally done the things he wasn't just sitting there and voting for and he was literally bankrupt is going to be a good one we really got to push uh and like a neat bronze or whatever was talking about like why would you bring up like all this old stuff from joe biden when he's mostly associated with the great obama years then everyone pointed out they literally tried to cut social security in the obama administration but that he's pointing that he was being very dumb

and obtuse in that uh argument but the and he should have really teased us out more to make his point is that to say you know the problem is then you have to go after obama right but you know that's i have no problem democratic primary voters like obama that's the thing they like obama and it's not normalcy it's not it's not personally it's it's it's not effective to go after obama but you can go after joe biden vc you can go after the obama administration i don't think that you need to say is that you don't need to moralize it you just have to say these were terrible mistakes that did terrible things to the working people of this country you can say that the obama charm isn't going to rub off on joe biden i want to put a chip down and say that now just like it didn't

rub off i think it i think it already did i think i mean i think a little bit but it's not going to it's not going to uh immunize him from criticism of things that the administration was engaged in it's a trickier to to criticize stuff he did stuff he supported during the obama years with the democratic primary electorate than other stuff it's just because there is this residual affection for obama as a person i really think that's also let's not discount uh biden's huge reservoirs of his own charm and magic oh god maybe the obama stuff is smudged off but uncle joe's still got gallons of it to spread around all right quick plug uh tickets are still on sale for we've added a second london show and i believe they're still on sale in dublin and mad

chester there might be a couple tickets left in glasco but i think that's done i think berlin sold out get those chapel trap house dot com slash tour it's gonna be mad in it we're gonna be at the hacienda no we're not not going to be performing there i wish uh reporting at the the manchester dance house every venue in europe is just called the dance hall or the disco we will see you in berlin at the funky beat hosted by kim dot com uh no and then uh also plug uh may 16th may 16th in los angeles matt amber and i will be at the egyptian theater for a screening of the legendary film gremlins 2 and a discussion with the director joe dante i'm very excited and matt is the foremost scholar of the gremlins movies other than the institute for gremlins 2 studies i will be i

will be the visiting scholar from the institute of ghostbuster studies but yeah i can't uh i can never i could never claim to be above him but i'm number two uh no this is this is a really fun event i'm really looking forward to it we're going to be in la um that week but uh yeah gremlins 2 at the egyptian theater featuring choppo trap house and director joe dante uh i think tickets are still available for that that is going to be a really fun cool event one of our favorite movies and one of our favorite directors so it'll be in discussion uh matt will get to the bottom of why gremlins 2 is in your opinion the only non-reactionary postmodern art ever created correct so if you're a fan of gremlins joe dante or choppo trap house please look out for us in

the egyptian theater in la on day 60 till next time guys bye bye you