Chapo Trap House - 328 - Dios, Patria, Fueros, Rod (7/1/19)

Episode Date: July 2, 2019

It's an overstuffed classic Dry Boys™ ep, with dem debates wrap up, dem leadership incompetence, Bret Stephens' laziness, David Brooks' horniness, Sheldon Adelson's disgusting body, and the ever-bedeviled Rod Dreher.

All I wanna be is hip-jumpin' All I wanna be is hip-jumpin' All I wanna be is hip-jumpin' All I wanna be is hip-jumpin' No one fuckin' cares. Remember when Ezra Klein wrote that thing after one of the debates? It's time to admit what a fantastic politician Hillary Clinton is. Because she expertly dissected Trump on stage. And it was like, you know what? From their point of view, it was true.

She killed him in those debates. I remember them. She said actual things with something close to substance, and he was just like, you go into jail, honey. Bye-bye. But guess what? It didn't matter. So how do you think if four years more of everyone's brains being fucking scrambled is

gonna make them more attentive to what you think matters in debates? It's insane. Also, debates don't matter. Well, that's the thing. We've learned that. It literally don't matter. Everyone talks about how bad McCain looked at the McCain-Obama debates. He was already losing.

Everyone talks that people have already made up their mind. If you want any proof of that, look how everyone reacted to how Joe Biden did at the debates, which was just like, it's like he was trying to beat Trump by becoming Trump and just went up there and God knows what he was talking about. But for most people watching it, they're like, yeah, I thought he did great. It doesn't really matter. A billion other things matter. And the people who make the narrative of these elections, they think in a very linear way,

which is not at all how really 90% of people who vote process information, which is, it's a black box as far as I'm concerned. It's a cube. They obviously haven't listened to the Alan Moore interview. But what was that thing, Felix? I think you posted it the other day, it was like some stat about how voters who were ranked climate change is the issue they're most concerned with overwhelmingly regarding Biden as their number one show.

Yeah. And I can actually figure that one out for you because it's like they look at Biden and they're like, that's the guy who's epic, but he's also been half president before, I think. So he's going to have a plan and I like all these guys, but they don't have experience like Joe Biden does. That's literally how they think of it. All the things that are like, Biden is, he's turning off demographic acts or he's bad on the issue.

Why? The way that people process this, the way they see Biden, this is the consequence of years and years and years of people abandoning power as a concept in politics and abandoning execution of power, especially as a concept in politics and just sort of focusing on personalities, types of people. And we have another year and a half of it. It is terrific. Well, I guess I should formally start the show.

It's your chopper, everybody. Matt Will and Felix here, I'm Will. There is Matt and Felix. Hey, hey. Man, I did one episode as soon as I got back from Europe and then I went away for another week. I was able to call in to one of the debate Twitch streams, which was wonderful. Great job on that, guys.

But let's get back into the swing of things. I'm back in my regular choppo momentum. So we're starting out by talking about just recapping the two debates, the democratic debates that went down last week. I wasn't able to catch much of the first one. I was able to call in about the second one. It seems to be the big takeaway from the second debate is that Kamala has now established herself as a definite front-runner.

Any of the elites are hedging on Biden because, as Felix said, his brain is putting by now. It's not putting now. He's literally always been this way. If you want to know how much the political culture of this country and the way that people see things has changed, look at what Biden said in 2008 about how every Dunkin' Donuts is owned by an Indian during the last Democratic primary he was a part of. It is funny. These people who have never moved from their positions and just self-replicated by advancing

in their careers and putting identical people in place as they move up. You're Glenn Klett-Kessler, who's the guy who was the clips to Mark Halperin's push-a-tee helmet. Those guys, they're just 100%. They just self-replicate and they add identical virtues to themselves, but then something changed in about 2014 where they could no longer be quite as tone deaf as they were, and now they act like everything has changed around them. Like Biden is somehow worse than he ever was, and it's like, nah, he really isn't.

He's the same guy. You just have to notice in this way that you didn't have to before, but I think that people who are thinking everything is different now that this signals his immediate doom. He might not get it. It's definitely possible. More and more people are noticing that he's a stupid old man, but the fact that all these people are saying that Biden is collapsing, the exact same people who said that Trump would never get the nomination and then would never win the presidency just reflexively

makes me think he's going to get the Democratic nomination. I think it's a different thing though. I don't think that Biden has the devoted fandom that Trump did, because like we were talking about, we talked about this with Virgil. Trump had an issue, and it was one of the most important issue to a huge chunk of Republican primary voters, immigration, that the regular Republicans, because they had read all the white papers that the RNC had sent them and that they were all part of the same Borg, couldn't own.

So he was able to get their loyalty based firstly on the fact that they were paying attention to him due to his fame, and secondly, because he was talking about one thing that they really wanted to hear. Biden does not have that. He has this nostalgia thing, he has a connection to Obama, which I think every day gets more tenuous as he says things that are alienating to people who like Obama more importantly as Obama continues to refuse to endorse him. And he doesn't have like an issue.

He doesn't have a thing that Democratic voters care about that can carve out some sort of loyalty to him. It's just a vague sense of nostalgia for him. And the fact that he can't clear the field of a lot of these more establishment Democrats than none of them are scared of the fact that he can't get early endorsements from unions and stuff the way that Hillary did, it just makes me feel like that there is no real, there is no base for Biden other than people who just sort of haven't been paying attention. And the thing is that primary voters, more so than general election voters, eventually

start paying attention. And I don't think that necessarily means those people are going to go to Bernie or anything. And I think a lot of, I think a lot of the establishment people who saw him waver in the debate, just see a future of him doing that over and over again, slowly, over time. It's so long, like, yeah, there's so much more time, slowly bleeding support, slowly looking less formidable, slowly looking less like a guy who can be Trump. And there's Kamala Harris with all the same bona fides, all the same establishment positions. And for a lot of these people who hate Bernie so goddamn much, they don't have the problem

of having to support a different old white guy. And I think that's going to be more and more appealing as time goes on. But it will be really funny when all the, all the sort of like, unofficial support for Warren just immediately shifts. Yeah. And people are like, wait, what the fuck? I thought we were in this together. You just got to laugh.

Oh yeah. You just got to laugh. I mean, we started out by talking about, you know, I, Harris really stuck the knife into Biden over the segregationists and the busing issue and, you know, I mean, good order for it. He has a huge... Well, I don't, I don't, I don't think we should. I mean, I'm not giving her...

He was having... He was talking about his friends. It's hard to find real ass people and what we do. You know that? I know that. And you know, I mean, the last episode I was on, we were talking about this. I was just like, when Biden said like, you know, we worked on getting things done. And I was like, well, what did you get done?

And apparently it was ending school busing in Northern cities. I compromise with racist guys to do something racist. Like, what man? Dude. Awesome. You know, I do, I, Biden's probably going to choke it because he has like the greatest history of choking of all time. Yeah.

No one's a bigger... His performance is any indication. No one's a bigger choke artist. His 1988 race is one of the most hilarious face plants in history. And this one, he sucks so bad, his brain exploded. And this is like, this would be... Now he has new teeth. Yeah.

This would be the most Biden way to do it because there was no advantage in talking about segregationist because like the MAGA shitheads or like disaffected Republicans he's signaling to, they have no idea who those people are. Yeah. Like, oh, wait, you work with a John Russell syrup farmer? I don't think you're an Adrena Chrome harvester anymore. And like the 30 people who know who those fucking guys are, like that, that guy like literally carved the N word into the door of his office.

And it would be the most Biden way to choke this. It really would because it's the most unforced of unforced errors. But yeah, Kamala, again, at least according to the media, came out of this as like a very strong front runner. And I think she remains a very formidable contender here for the nomination. But we started talking out by like, I saw a lot of takes being like Kamala's a prosecutor. She knows how to like turn any argument, you know, in a debate, like Trump is scared. And it's just like, I'm sorry, like these people, like, no.

And this looks as you said, like, yeah, oh, yeah, she was rigorous. And I remember when she totally dismantled Brett Kavanaugh, stopped him from getting on the Supreme Court. American prosecutors are famous for taking on and destroying the most powerful people in America. She shares what they're known for. She shares how did that with Seth Mnuchin in California when he was doing flagrant mortgage crimes.

Yeah. He is literally stealing people's houses through Robo signing and stuff, but he also producing Suicide Squad. And we really want that to be a good movie so we can't throw him in jail. I mean, like if only we knew what it would be like if Trump spent two years head to head against a prosecutor, only we knew also, I don't know what that's supposed to mean. I think I guess the argument is one that she will be able to make a case against Trump during the run up.

In general, she'll be able to just like make she'll do like Jim Garrison at the end of the fucking JFK is pointing out all the crimes Trump is doing. That was if we don't know all the crimes he's doing. That would be if she goes literal Jim Garrison is like literally everyone in the cabinet is gay and in the mob. Might work. Just like a fucking French court is in and like snorting. Getting Seth Mnuchin's nipples while he spray painted like Apollo, how that would be cool.

So they're either talking about that in which case who care who care is a big day would say or they mean she's going to throw him in jail if she gets to be president, which one that wouldn't really be your job. And two, do you really think the establishment Democratic Party as we know it is really ever going to do anything to hold any bad actor accountable once Chuck Schumer would be Herbie Kleinfield getting the mob boss out of prison to like secure like a charter school compromise in the Senate? It'd be fair.

Kleinfield did kill that guy as soon as he broke him out of prison. Schumer would do that by accident. I mean, okay, well, I mean, perfect example of that. Your Democratic Party, they're, you know, Trump is intolerable. Oh my God, separating kids from families. Oh, we're definitely still going to vote to give him all the money that ICE has just requested in this late. Well, we couldn't possibly vote against it.

Well, you just passed that fucking bill and Pelosi wrote a letter to that her own, you know, Democrats and the people in her own party scolding them for making too big of a stink about it. And she basically just said, oh, well, we have to work with them. And the argument here, at least as it comes to funding, you know, ICE and, you know, these border camps is this idea that like, well, look, you're saying that, you know, these kids are living in, you know, in their horrible conditions, but you're saying you don't want to give them money so that they can have beds and blankets.

It's like, okay, so someone kidnapped your child and then called you and was like, in addition to the ransom money, I got to feed this fucking kid or something that's pissing and shitting everywhere. I don't know what the fuck to do. Just give me the extra money in addition to the ransom money. And oh, by the way, I'm going to use some of that money to kidnap more kids. So you just be like, okay, get him some nuggies. Also, I'm not a monster or anything.

That's another classic instance of just giving up the ghost from the beginning, because remember when the original horror was that they were separating these kids from their families in the first place? Yeah. Now it's just that, well, they don't have nice enough conditions in the jails that we're putting them in. Like, if that's the movement, then eventually it'll just be, you know, it'll get to the point where it's like, well, yes, we are putting them in, we are executing them, but you want

it to be humane, right? You want us to use the finest gases. You don't want to use the ones that like make it take like 20 minutes to do it. Yeah. It's like, yeah, you know, obviously, you know, the conditions that these children are living under are horrific. But like, do you think that ICE and the people in charge of it would be more inclined to treat them well if they could have more money?

Well, and it's not money's not the issue. It costs $800 a day to keep these kids in these camps, $800 a day. You could put them in a fucking Holiday Inn Express with their families for a fucking fraction of that. It's not about them not having the money to give these kids the shit. They're doing it punitively. They fucking said that. They said that the reason they're doing this, the reason they're putting the kids in these

camps is to discourage people from coming, which means it has to be punitive and bad or else they're going to keep coming. That has nothing to do with resources. That has everything to do with a strategy of intentionally inflicting pain in order to serve as an example to others. So no matter how much money you give them, they're still going to keep them in the freezer. They're still going to keep them on fucking, on bare blankets and on pallets. They're still going to make their lives miserable because that's the point of the camps in

the first place. So it's like, yeah, Pelosi, Schumer, not going to impeach Trump, going to definitely keep giving him the money to do all the bad things that we're campaigning against. So again, what are they here for? I'm so glad we had a midterm election that they won, apparently. Well, the thing is, is that I have a little bit of sympathy for Nancy Pelosi. She is useless and she is a guardian of totally failed order, but at the end of the day, we are fucked because of the institutions that are currently governing politics.

There is a Republican Senate. There is a Republican president. These people are committed to doing this shit. What can one co-equal, quote unquote, branch of government really do? They could grind the whole thing to a halt, right? Maybe like not let anything pass or something like that. Okay, but you really think you can hold a bunch of wet, weak-bladdered Democrats together to make them hold on to that, especially when you have guys like Josh Godhammer and his

problem solvers caucus promising to suicide bomb you if you don't fucking bend immediately? Well, I mean, if you're the leader of the party, I mean, you could give it a shot. I guess you could. The thing is, it would have to be a different people in power. You were assuming a can opener when you think any of this can change. This cannot change. This cannot function. This is not a functional system.

I mean, it works, but it works not to the benefit of anybody who it's supposed to or who we think it is supposed to work for. And that basic dysfunction is the cause of all of these weird arguments between the people in the Beltway, the reformist types who think that they know what's going on and that you're being naive, is that they're assuming that they have to work within a system that cannot function, that cannot do the things that the vast majority of people within that party want, it's base or anyone who wants to see us fucking not annihilate ourselves in the coming century, what we want.

It is an incompatibility that has to be confronted. And anybody who won't confront that incompatibility and instead will try to manage it is an enemy. But that doesn't mean that they can necessarily do anything now. That there is any, because, I mean, it's the Democratic caucus. These people are not going to change. If the Democrats somehow took the Senate in 2020, say, right, with Bernie presidency or Elizabeth Warren presidency, you think that there would be fucking even 51 votes to end a filibuster or something like that, or to put more people on the Supreme Court

the way that a lot of people are advocating? No, because they would be Democratic fucking senators. And Democratic senators are committed to the Democratic Party and they're committed to a system that they have an investment in. And until they're completely turned out en masse, this system cannot give the results that we were demanding of it. There's a fundamental incongruity there that has not been, people have not really confronted I don't think.

Right. And it's like everything else. Like, I agree with you. Like the role of the leaders should be to get these fucking little worms in line. But like everything else, if she wanted, you know, if Pelosi or Schumer, anyone else wanted to establish a pattern of doing that, they would have had to have started doing that literally 10 years ago. Yeah.

Like literally the only solution is to wait till all the coast sink, millions flood to the Great Lakes and Great Plains region. You've already purchased real estate around there. You erase the identity of being from Texas. There's white Texas from the history books. You establish a six district caliphate, secular caliphate. You have a parliamentary system. This shit's fucked.

You can't, you can't, you can't do anything. You can't do anything with 50 states. You can't do anything with a presidential system. How about that first debate, though? No, I think, yeah, I mean, all right. So first debate, Pinocchios of that debate. Go to John Henry Todd and his representative, Clark Davis, props of the day. Go to Amy Klobisher, who won the debate by fucking saying that we can all work together

to refinance student loans, I think. What did she say? What did she say? If billionaires can pay, if billionaires can pay off their yachts, then students can pay off their loans, which is, that's how math works. That's how anything works at all. It was, that was one of the most blackpilling, that entire debate, both debates, really. I don't see how you can walk away from both debates and not support Hick and Looper's

plans to light the world on fire. Well, I mean, I agree watching this is a brutal and bleak spectacle, but anti-blackpill for me was honestly Bernie's closing statement in the second debate, which I thought was stirring, needed, and I mean, like I said, this is the fucking answer. He's the only morally serious person up there, and the line that really got me was like, I think if you're watching this at home, you probably think that these are good people and they largely want the same things you do with varying ideas about how to get there, and we all have different plans, but none of these plans mean shit unless you're willing

to confront the bad actors that are standing in the way of implementing them. And these plans don't mean anything unless you're willing to take on the insurance company, the fossil fuel industry, pharmaceutical industry, and the fucking military. And you have to name the group that controls the media, sits on the board of the Federal Reserve. That's right, Scott's Irish, to take them down. Yes. Step one, identify the malfactors of great wealth and their bureaucratic handmaidens.

Step two, summon the power of orbs to strike them down. By the way, we totally called it when we said that Marianne was going to rise from the scrum of low tier candidates and show everybody her power. I witnessed it in person. Everyone was talking about her. I witnessed it in person. After we talked to her, Virgil and I were like, she is going to blow up the debates, and it was a perfect contrast because Yang was there too.

Yang was another gimmick fringe candidate. They both had a chance, and Yang went up there and just sputtered like a fucking, the Stem Lord dork that he is, didn't realize until that show that he didn't have a neck, which was genuinely disturbing. He looks swolce. Meanwhile, Marianne gets out there. Boom. Defeat the power of fear with the power of love.

The only person, by the way, who talking about the migration crisis to talk about what we do in Central America with fucking overthrowing governments and supporting violent capitalist dictatorships, she had it. She brought it. She brought the orb power. She brought vibes. She brought energy. She released a few of those blackpilled sad sacks who were thinking about their neat

bucks now realize, hey, maybe I can look within and find the orb magic in myself that could make me not be just a miserable cynical shithead all the time. Marianne popping off, I think, was the most predictable thing about the debate just because these are such dog shit spectacles. It's all like the debate before the virgin debate, literally the line in the regular media is like, John Delaney had a moment, and these are the least charismatic people who have ever lived. It's the most uninspiring fucking pablum.

It's complete dog shit. You just see an old man who's on his third series of hairplugs arguing with a prosecutor, and then like, yeah, you can call Marianne a fringe gimmick candidate. I mean, how much more so is she than like, yeah, fucking Eric Swalwell. But she has like actual charisma, she actually seems like a happy person. And it's like, yeah, even the fucking just bloodless DC scumbags who are like, drinking game, take a shot every time Bernie says billionaires, Biden mentions Obama, every time one of the batteries in the camera in my bathroom runs out, even if you're one of those people who

people, you can't help but watch Marianne pop off and be like, she rocks and it can't be so she's so cool. She has so charismatic. It cannot be stressed enough that every American simultaneously achieving a higher state of consciousness is a more realistic answer to how to combat climate change and the coming disaster and how to create an equitable society, then fucking tax credits for small businesses or whatever the fuck the rest of these people are talking about that is a more realistic solution.

So about this one, you post like a photo of Eric Swalwell and you're like, who is this wrong answers only. My thing was he is the protagonist from pitfall because he's got like an eight bit head like just it's just planes. There's no texture. So explain Swalwell to me. Eric Swalwell was originally Eric Spitz and Swalwell, Eric, Eric stairwell was originally the villain in one of those Netflix shows called like extended or bloodlines where he's Kyle

Chandler's brother, even though they look nothing alike and they're fighting over control of their small town that's scary, but not a cult later produces a Netflix through a deal with the federal government were able to convert him into being a US representative from California, who's a normal born Democrat who's like against Russia and guns, I think. Yeah, you know, he does kind of look like Ben Mendelsohn if he'd never done heroin. You're right. Yeah. I know I swaddle.

I don't I don't understand. Tim Ryan is is doing like he's the most fucking full of shit guy and I fucking hate him. He's doing like yoga mats for in dust, you know, post industrial yoga mats for people on Fent basically is his solution. Molten I think is trying to be like the Russia guy or the gun guy. He's a gun control guy. I don't even know what Swalwell premises he got on the stage, which is more than Molten can say.

Like, maybe it's just that perfectly square head. They just needed somebody on there who looked like one of the presidents from Futurama that Richard Nixon's head defeats. Well, he's he's also a veteran. You may remember him from being the Marine from doom. Oh, speaking of another veteran. How about what's his name? Joe Sliestac.

Joe Sliestac, baby. Yes. Joe Sliestac. The Sliestac. He just showed up out of nowhere was used to be like Congressman from Pennsylvania, former Navy admiral. He lost. He was a he was a member of Congress from Pennsylvania.

Then he ran. He beat Arlen Specter for the Democratic primary race after Specter switched parties. But then he lost the general. And then I think he ran again and lost a primary for another thing or he would ran again. One way or another, he's 0 for two and running for Senate in Pennsylvania. And he hasn't had a job by almost a decade now and got in government. He's like it's literal two time loser and now he's just decided, I think Felix was completely right.

This is just like a rich political board political man with dementia. That's what like they do instead of, I don't know, like wandering out of the home with their pants off. No, I'm saying it's not even dementia. It's like, you know how like girls will be like I had a mental breakdown. So like like I got banged or like I bleached. Yeah. This is what boomer men do.

I honestly know I honestly believe this. I think men and women, like we started gender mental breakdowns is like a women's thing. But men and women really have them at an equal rate. And like, you know, if you're a man, you have a mental breakdown, like a millennial man, maybe you'll like play a free to play children's battle royale for a year and a half straight and an attempt to get really good at it. But if you're a boomer man, like C-Stack and you have history and government, your mental breakdown is like, fuck it, fuck it, I'm out of option.

I have nothing else to do. I'm going to go to Iowa and demand that we have a naval battle with China. And that's no, I honestly believe that I honestly believe he's having a mental. I think a lot of these, I think a lot of people, a lot of these people ready for president are just having mental breakdowns. That's literally it. I think like maybe Tulsi is in the midst of like a decade long mental breakdown. I think C-Stack just like he thought about bleaching his hair and was like, no, I could

just run for president on the platform of thermonuclear war with China. I think that Swalwell is like, I'm a winner. Fuck what everyone says. I'm doing it for me. Well, transitioning out of the debates and even though from what I saw in the media, basically no one wanted to give him any credit. I thought Sanders did excellent and would seem that coming out of it in his polling or otherwise would seem to bear that out.

But like, you know, the line about Sanders is that like, oh, he's just sort of an also ran. It's kind of boring. He's just saying the same things he did four years ago. I mean, like all those problems have been solved. So I don't know what the fuck is still going on about. Trump brought the jobs back. If anyone says that Sanders' message is repetitive, what they mean is that there's no more wealth

and equality because Trump brought the jobs back. They all believe that. Just write them off as believing that. And you know, I'd like to discuss now a couple of reactions to the Democratic debates that I think is going to be like the template going forward. Like, this is a genre of article that you are going to see ad nauseam for the next year and a half. So get ready for it now.

And that genre of article is Iraq war supporting ghoul tells you to be careful or else he might not vote for the Democrats. You know, just like say, hey, be careful or you'll risk alienating me and 200 of my friends, which could swing the selection to Donald Trump. I mean, we didn't want that to happen. You said that they all live in DC on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Those are crucial swing districts. I mean, here's a little tip for the listeners.

You can't like accidentally stumble across one of these articles and just murk your dry wall if you never read. It's a little mental health self care advice for me. Or you could listen to this show and well, I'll make sure you go and say it or I would just say, just donate to Bernie. You know, if you get pissed off, just kick in a few bucks, whatever is a good idea, spare chains in your pocket. What if you say if you see some really obnoxious like fact check or op ed or some shithead on

Twitter that says something that pisses you off, just just kick in just a few bucks, whatever you can spare, big, small, whatever. Just donate to Bernie and send the link in the response to the article or tweet. Here's an example. Before we get to these, these winner geniuses, Glenn Kessler, everyone's favorite fact checker, the Washington Post. I just wrote that up. His job, he's the king of fact checking.

He checks all the facts so that if you try to do non fact, he will fuck you up. He is fact checked the shit out of Bernie Sanders for saying that three people in this country said this during the debate, three human beings in this country own more wealth than the bottom half of American citizens. Now you might think, well, that seems sounds right. I mean, I've seen the numbers that indicate that that's true. You fucking idiot, listen to Glenn Kessler while he fucking fact checks the fucking fact out of his facts.

Can I read this? Yeah, do it. Okay. So this is Kessler. The claim by Senator Bernie Sanders is three people in this country own more wealth than the bottom half of America. This snappy talking point is based on numbers that add up, but it's also a question of comparing apples to oranges.

Sanders is drawing on a 2017 report from the Left Leaning Institute for Policy Studies, which said that three billionaires, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett, had a total wealth of 248.5 billion compared to the 245 billion for the bottom 160 million of the United States. The wealth of these three men has gone up even more since then, but people in the bottom half have essentially no wealth as debts cancel out whatever assets they might have. So the comparison is not especially meaningful. They're losers.

We should kill them. We once gave Sanders three Pinocchios when he asserted that the six wealthiest people had more wealth than half of the world's population. That was even more problematic comparison. As we said at the time, it was better to focus on inequality within a country. So he's just doing that. He did what you requested him, and he's comparing inequality only with an America, and you're saying it's a bad comparison because the bottom half of the country literally has no wealth.

This isn't apples to oranges. This is apples to not having any apples. He's saying it's a bad comparison because the situation is actually much more dire than what Sanders said would lead you to believe. But if you don't have wealth, you're not a person. Oh, okay. Yeah. They're not supposed to be here.

I mean, Kessler. They're not real. They're not supposed to be here. The people that Jeff Bezos hit with his car, they're not really people. I talked to the police. They said it's okay. They said it's okay. I like Kessler's writing style, which is perfect for his audience, a remedial math textbook.

So yeah. You see that fucking fact check? Yeah. Give us the money to burn. A lot. A little like even like just a change in your pocket. Before giving mental health advice, I have one more before we get into this article from one of the like the 15 stupidest guys in Manhattan.

If you're a budding school shooter, which, you know, market research says 98% of our audience is, don't shoot up the school. It's not good to do. You're not going to do well. Your aim sucks. You're fucking dog shit. You're a bot. If you're really black pilled, you have no hope.

There's a candidate you can volunteer for. His name is John Hickenlooper. John Hickenlooper. That should be a program. Like if you're just a total nihilist, like message board would be mass shooter, just volunteer for Hickenlooper accomplishes the same goal. No one gets hurt. Like he's not going to win.

Not yet. Well, give it a little bit of time. If he wins, you kill everybody. Every human. All the charismatic megafauna dead. Yeah. Everyone you don't like starving. Just picture.

Just a millions of miles of dry flat paint plane, just millions of nice little elephants dead evaporating millions dead washing up on the shores, just bones bleaching in the sun. John Hickenlooper putting on his presidential cloak and toasting you a glass of fracking water. There you go. There you go, man. And you could put it on your LinkedIn.

Yeah. And if you're, if you really commit to it and you become a top bundler, you will get invited to one of his dark rituals at the basement of the Denver airport. He will share his adrenochrome with you. If I was Hickenlooper, that's how I would market my like I would pick up pizza gate people by being like, it would be like a good guy with a gun type thing. I'm from a different occult rituals act. You don't do any of that adrenochrome shit.

You listen to green adrenochrome shit. It's fucking over. Yeah. She's done. You know why John Delaney just looks like a giant baby? He's one of Hickenlooper's dark creations. He's like a homunculus. He birthed him out of like blood and mud and fire.

Golem. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So this is this is the first entry and what is sure to be like ubiquitous op ed genre, which is people who have been Republicans their entire life, who helped start the Iraq War and have, I don't know, worked for the Heritage Foundation Weekly Standard and National Review, probably all at the same time, warning you that, hey, if you go too far to the left,

you're risking my vote. And hey, wouldn't it be a shame if Donald Trump had to be president again? I mean, I voted for him in 2016 and I'm definitely going to do it again in 2020, but I'm going to pretend otherwise. So better, better make sure to center me and my needs as a ghoul. So emblematic of that is of course, Brett Stevens of the New York Times and his opinion piece, a wretched start for the Democrats. The party seems interested in helping everyone except the voters it needs.

It does not need your fucking vote, Brett. The voters it needs are the people who didn't vote the last time because they were so fucking depressed by the option of having to choose between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Being caught in this fucking nightmare of eternal recurrence where everybody drilled a hole in their ford to lobe as soon as the election happened to prevent learning anything is is honestly going to drive me insane because that strategy of chasing moderate Republicans who are grossed out by Trump's persona is explicitly the Clinton campaign strategy. It's the one that lost to Trump.

There's not an argument. You can't say that that's not true. You can't fucking try to retroactively argue that she was some sort of class warrior. She never mentioned issues at all. She talked about how Trump was gross and how he wasn't like the Republicans, how Republicans were better than him. That was her refrain for the entire election. You have the quote from Schumer that we've said a million times.

Every blue-collar voter you lose, you gain two suburban Republicans in the suburbs. That was what they tried to do. And it's failed. It was the only thing that could have failed. And it did. And, you know, I get it, like, Stevens and I'm going to do David Brooks, too. I mean, like, they're emblematic of, like, the worst of this. But this is going to be a refrain that you're going to hear from everyone because I need

to, I must be stressed, the entire media is against Bernie Sanders in a way that they were even more against him than Donald Trump. And you're going to hear it from every sector of respectable opinion, from liberals, from Democrats, from Republicans, from conservatives, no matter what. You're going to hear it from everyone. And what they're going to say to you over and over again is, yeah, I know you believe these things and you want these things and you like Bernie, but you know what? Just be sensible.

It's too dangerous, it's too dangerous. Instead, what's not dangerous is doing the exact same thing that failed the first time. So let's look at Brett, let's look at Brett Stevens here. He begins the column by writing, Amigos Demicratas, si ustedes según así van a perder los elecciones y los meres serian. See, I'm not like, I'm not like Cory Booker or Beto. Yeah, you sound like Beto there, I got it. Translation for the linguist, linguistically benighted.

Democratic friends, if you go on like this, you're going to lose the election and you'll deserve it. In this week's Democratic debates, it wasn't just individual candidates who presented themselves to the public. It was also the party itself. What conclusions should ordinary people draw about what Democrats stand for other than a thunderous repudiation of Donald Trump and how they see America other than as a land of unscrupulous profiteers and hapless victims?

God, he's such a bad writer that I can't even read it out loud. It's like I fucking trip over it, his fucking syntax. Here's what. A party that makes too many Americans feel like strangers in their own country. A party that puts more of its face and invets more of its efforts in them instead of us. Okay, here's the first thing I'm going to say about this. I know annoying resistance people like to bring it up, but it is a fact. Hillary Clinton got something like four million more votes than Donald Trump did in the last

election. Yes. So I know it seems like- She didn't buy any measure that is sensible. Yeah. So the majority of people in this country who voted in the last election voted for Hillary Clinton after running one of the most dog shit campaigns- The plurality, but yes.

Yeah. Right. But the majority was people who didn't vote. Well, yes. Right. So the idea here that we have to scrimp for two votes from Brett Stevens and his friend is fallacious. If he cared so much about fucking democracy, he would be attacking the electoral college

instead of trying to fucking do this fucking pantomime about how you're risking alienating him by not nuking Palestine. So he goes, they speak Spanish. We don't. They are not U.S. citizens or legal residents. We are. They broke the rules to get into this country. We didn't.

They pay fewer no taxes. We already pay most of those taxes. So this is the Brett Stevens trick here of sort of ventriloquizing what he imagines to be the ordinary average American voter. And to this question about, oh, they broke the rules to get in this country, they committed a crime. It's like a civil offense. If you've driven drunk even once, you've committed a worse crime than fucking coming

into the country or overstaying a visa. And also congratulations to you for not violating any laws by just being fucking born in this country. Yeah, exactly. Take a fucking bow. You fucking, you virtue king. I can't believe how you did not take the easy path of being born in another country and then having to flee fucking poverty and climate collapse and fucking dictatorship

and civil collapse, civil society collapse. No, you were, you did the right thing by being born here. They willingly got themselves into debt. We're asked to write it off. They don't pay the premiums for private health insurance. We're supposed to give up ours in exchange for some VA type nightmare. They didn't start enterprises that create employment and drive innovation. We're expecting.

You already written essays your entire fucking life, neither of you. Oh my God. Oh my God. Why? Why did we have to fucking hear this? Oh my God. I was about to say something that would get cut, but why? Why does, who the fuck is reading this besides this is fucking dog shit, literally give this

column to like any of the guys who believe in QAnon. This is so fucking trite that he's written this exact same column for three fucking years. There's no new ideas. There's no new idea. Just every time there's a new election, it's like, what if Democrats were even like more like Republican, so I would vote for them while I probably secretly vote for Trump in the fucking first place. There's just nothing new and his writing seems to get worse just like how in every picture

of Brett Stevens, he looks like a different type of ugly guy at the time somehow. His writing just continues to fucking devolve. He's gone from fucking clever college freshmen when he started out to now just like clever little fucking fad eighth grader. He's turned into, just fully devolved into Martin Prince. He's the fucking worst. At least David Brooks writes about fucking getting it in. This is literally the same shit all the time.

It is. It's the same shit. It never stops. It never fucking stops. I never wake up any day and they're like, oh, you know, Brett Stevens fell into a fucking open manhole. We're running dunesberry instead. It's literally just the same fucking bullshit for three fucking years.

I, you know what? Just every newspaper cannot go out of business quick enough. Like fine, fuck it. That's what it takes for me to never see this guy's fucking name again. It's worth it. Here's the thing, like to your point, Felix, what these guys are trying to do is say it's incumbent on you, the Democratic primary voter who stands and believes in things for basically the exact opposite of what I do.

I hate Trump. I can't abide him as president, but he must be defeated. So in order to do that, you have to cater to me. And it's like, if you really are never Trump, if that's your actual position that he can't be allowed to continue to be president, then it's incumbent on you to hold your nose and vote for a candidate who's to the left of you. Obviously, because there's way more fucking leftist Democratic voters than there are never Trump Republican.

They're basically none of them. So you are the smallest, most tertiary fucking appendix-ass part of any coalition against Trump. How the hell do you think you get to call the shots? What kind of delusion is in your head that thinks you have anything like the fucking leverage to be making any demands of anyone? Yeah. It's like, here's my offer to you, never Trump moderate Republicans, nothing.

Not even the fee for the gaming license, which I'd appreciate if you took care of personally. Soledad O'Brien called Brett Stevens racist for this column because he basically attempted to pretend that the ordinary American voter is terrified of Spanish and immigrants. And Max Boot had to pipe up and he gave the entire game away. He said, I've known Brett for 20 years. He doesn't have a racist bone in his body. If you're reverting to that cliche, he might as well have said, Brett doesn't care if you're purple.

Yeah. You know, if you're resorting to that cliche, you really have nothing going on in your brain. He said he brought up that Brett was raised in Mexico. Yeah. That's amazing defense. No, but- By the way, what the fuck were you doing there? Here is where he really gave up the game, though.

He said Brett Stevens is one of the last few principal conservatives left. Really? One of the last few? All right. I can see why we're bringing them out. Then why the fuck do we have to bother about what he thinks? Do you and 20 other guys in Chevy Chase, Maryland, fuck off? We're going to scrap universal health care.

We're going to, you know, I don't know, build the fucking wall, whatever. We're going to go to war with Iran to fucking please you and 15 other guys. Fuck off. Like everyone makes one of the op-ed, like this late, you know, first person essay op-eds that are like, I literally have cheated on a different husband every day of my life for the last 30 years. I replace all of these guys with those people. It's so much better.

Replace it with like, replace it with, you know, the people who write about being poly. Replace it with the woman who wrote that essay that was like, I'm placing my career over my kid. Like it's all better than this. It's all better. Replace it, replace it with like some fucking polygon writer who's like, I played, I played Zelda with my son and it made me hate him because he doesn't appreciate it. All of it.

All of it's better than this. This should be, this should be wiped out of existence. Like the townhouse that Brett cranks his bullshit out of, they should run a river through it. It should be wiped off the map. No one in history should ever read these words. This is the worst bullshit I've ever fucking heard. And you know, just my luck, he's probably just gonna fucking write the same thing for

the next 40 years. Well, to your point, Felix, I'm sure the New York Times as a journalistic institution thinks it has some duty to provide the conservative point of view on what everyone, what they regard as like a liberal op-ed page, ha, ha, ha, hilarious. If that's the case, they should give it to a QAnon guy. They should give it to Bill Mitchell. Yeah, give it, Bill Mitchell would do, he would have such a better column because he would run out of political things after like month two.

Like you can only write so many articles that are like, has anyone ever noticed that Trump's like his very nice smile when he does smile, he does a smile because he's playing a psychological game and he would just write like what his Yahoo Answers page was like. What was it about the condom? The condom? How come they don't make a condom that just covers the tip of your penis? Like he's so much more of an interest. What was he thinking about bees he did?

Yeah, what was the thing about bees? Having sex with them? I mean, hold on it, I'm stopping everything. We need to know what this is. I'm going to Google Bill Mitchell bees because he hits someone saying, okay, how about this? Give a call into Chuck Woolery, do MAGA stuff and then talk about like he's like, I've had five vasectomies. You can get them done any time you want.

I keep having kids, give it, give it. Would a bumblebee the size of a man be able to fly? No, no, that is more interesting than anything. Brett Stevens has ever said, like, like Bill Mitchell is like a boy. He's a boring guy. He's like a boring Nova Boomer who's just like, he's handsome, though, he's handsome. He's handsome. He's tall.

Unlike Brett Stevens, who's a fucking little goblin, a trope will, it's all right. No. Hey, Brett Stevens, can you grow a beard? No, then don't try. He has. Well, I know it looks like shit, though. It's horrible. He looks kind of fire.

No, Bill Mitchell is like a boring guy. He's like a boring Nova Boomer. But Brett Stevens is so just aggressively doled at Bill. Even Bill Mitchell is just like stupid, like Boomer brain shit. Like the bumblebees the size of them of a man is like it's like he looks like Marianne Williamson next to Mitchell said the one the smartest thing anyone did about the 2016 election smarter than anything we said or obviously anything any of these motherfuckers said or anything.

And it was when he said Trump's ground game is not a computer. It's in our hearts. We laughed at him when he said that, but it was 1000 percent correct. He's a genius compared to all of these people, and he makes more sense to have a fucking pilot or a voice than any of these people. He's the opposite of Brett, actually, because Brett is what the opposite of the savant is. He's a guy who's like probably went to like a prep day school. Like literally his entire life has been in elite educational institutions funneled through

the system to make him this guy who goes, I'm using a little flavor of Jonathan Switt meets David Ben Gurion in my latest column. And he's just a fucking adult. If Brett was born under different circumstances, he would be one of those guys that's like retweets a fake Bill Gates account that's like, yo, I'm giving away $10 billion to one random person to retweet. He's that much of a fucking just dunce. He has no abstract thinking abilities.

But Bill Mitchell is a savant because I think Bill Mitchell has a perfect 90 IQ, the best IQ anyone can have. Yeah, any less than you're not really useful anymore and you just get in a trouble. But he is such a master of abstract thinking. He sort of fools himself into these great thoughts like the ground game is in our hearts. And what if I just put a balloon on the end of my day? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. He's out here thinking of horrifying creations that you've only seen in like Lovecraft and Final Fantasy, like the man size bumblebee. He's curious. He's way more curious about the world than Brett, clearly. Like Brett's one of those guys who travels all over the world and just finds other Brett Stevens to hang out with and like Turkey and Italy just finds like the traditionalist

conservative club or expats there. Bill Mitchell will like just be like, oh, it's a nice day out. I have a half day. I'm going to drive to Maryland, see what it's like there. And he like talks to a man about how he got his sign spinning technique down for an entire afternoon. He's like, wow, you learn a lot. All right.

Well, I'm not going to read anymore, Brett, because I don't want to give Felix a stroke. That was, I think, the most animated you've been on this show in a while. I fucking hate him. That's Megan McCain's book, I think. I got scared, actually. I fucking, he sucked so much fucking shit. All right. Let's do David Brooks then, because at least he's horny.

I like David. I honestly. No, the way that he is getting loose, getting nutty with it in his later years here, the way that he's having a public like midlife crisis, I mean, his columns are basically the literary equivalent of getting a Camaro or something. It rules. I literally, I like David Brooks as a person a billion times more than Brett, even though they're probably like equally bad people, but like Brett Stevens is like too much of

a stuff shirt to be like, I've rediscovered sex, like David, David in some ways, like feels bad about himself and his career. He does in a weird way. He does. I mean, it's not going to stop him, but I can sense in Brooks's writing. A kind of shame. Yeah. You're watching something really fascinating unfold in all of his columns because you see

him working through crises and self-awareness and reflection and then it hitting up against his material interests and then crashing back down and being like, well, I can't actually go any farther because that would confront like that's too much of a foundational thing to my disgusting tick like existence. So I have to ignore it or rationalize it away. But that's fascinating. I'm watching someone's brain sort of overheat. I forget who said it, but I saw someone on Twitter describe David Brooks as like a parking

lot for ideas. They go in and come out, but nothing lives there. And I think that's perfect. Yes. The only thing I would add to it though is that Brooks is like a parking lot that's aware of itself and aware that it like bulldozed like a, you know, cathedral to be built. And it has some sense and it's sort of concrete pillars that this is not right. It's a haunted parking lot.

Yeah. It remembers the paradise that was paved over. Yes. All right. So this is David Brooks here. Dems, please don't drive me away. Shut the fuck up. How about this, David?

How about they drive you to the country to live on a nice farm? The dynamic pulling the party leftward. I could never in a million years vote for Donald Trump again, I would bet almost anything he did in 2016, but just hasn't told anyone about it. So my question to Democrats is, will there be a candidate I can vote for? No. You can vote for anyone you want, David. Yeah, you can vote for anybody, dude.

Vote for your young wife, do it. Dude, just go in the voting booth and pork. Awesome. Just leave your cum on the ballot. Just I love the psychotic self obsession to think that anyone on earth would be concerned with who David Brooks votes for. Well, I mean, Brett Stevens, what he does is like in a really boring and obvious way, put his own views in the mouths of an imaginary, ordinary voter, but like David Brooks doesn't

even do that. He's just like, no, me personally. He's a more honest guy, I like him more because it's like with Brett Stevens, like you got a fucking mouse in your pocket. Shut the fuck up. You speak for no one, but David Brooks, he doesn't deign to pretend. There's nothing more painful than Brett Stevens pretending what he thinks, pretending he knows what a normal person is like.

But David Brooks literally meets normal people and he's like, well, look at that. They're too stupid to know what oregano is. No, like, yeah, like Stevens has never done in a column, even pretended to like I interacted with a cab driver, like a normal person or anything like that. I think I think it goes everywhere in a rickshaw. No. Brett Stevens, like he usually when he's photographed, he's standing, gives you an appearance, but actually he goes everywhere in a radio plier wagon that's being toted behind Sheldon

Adelson's little scooter. By the way, did you see these photos of Sheldon Adelson recently? Dripper die. Oh my God. Turing around in that little, the little fucking hovercraft or whatever he's on. They took him into a tunnel underneath the Palestinian neighborhood in the East Jerusalem where they're destroying the walls of this thing so that they can expand some fucking illegal settlement and they got in there in his scooter with a fucking sledgehammer and

they're holding his hand while he smashes down the fucking bricks like grandpa Sawyer at the end of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It's the exact same sequence. The prophet of mercy. Yeah. I feel like you're exactly right. He is like like Sheldon Adelson is going to give $10 billion to the arbiter to go to war with Iran.

Yeah. No. Yeah. Who's the arbiter? It would have to be. Oh. Ehud Barak. Because he's the season disgrace member of the Covenant.

I was just looking at that picture of this mummy basically being kept alive through entirely artificial means. That is unholy. It's just unholy. I mean like he should not be alive and like that's not no cap, no violence, no threats of violence. I'm just saying it's like. It's unnatural.

It's unnatural to like look at him and be like, oh wait, there is still some metabolic process animating. It is unnatural. Bigger. He should honestly to really lean into it. He should get rid of that whore disgusting wig that he wears and he should get that hair, that hair, the butt that Gary Oldman had as old Dracula in the fucking movie. Just lean into it, man.

You are brought to life by eldritch means. You should not exist. And you know, I was just looking at that picture of him and I was just thinking about like all the billions of dollars he spends and like all the fucking people that are going to die for this asshole if he gets his way and it's just like, can't do anything about it. He's just, this is the country we live in like. Monstrous.

Just this fucking mummy is just going to get millions of people killed and he's probably going to die in like a, you know, a month or two. I mean, he's never going to, just like all the shit he does is just, we're totally powerless. I love the idea. Yeah. You just, you see this fucking like earthworm husk, just this fucking snake skin with slightly moving eyes in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a like little covenant prophet hovercraft hover chair fucking kicking this family out and he's spending billions of dollars on it.

People, a guy named like it Tom is holding his hand so they can pretend like this fucking guy who just is kept alive through the most unholy of unholy means is physically knocking this down and you're looking at this and you're like, yeah, this is what God wants. God likes this. I'm making God happy. By the way, Brett Stevens was once on stage at a synagogue in New York City at some big sponsored event. I forget, probably some institution that he works for as a fellow for where they interviewed

Sheldon Adelson on stage and Sheldon Adelson said on stage, we should preemptively nuke Iran. And then they said like, well, wouldn't that be like a massive war crime? Of course, Brett Stevens didn't say that. He clammed up real fucking quick. He didn't say shit. And Adelson said, well, just bomb the desert as a warning. No one lives there.

Oh my God. Oh, what a great country. There's nothing like, and Stevens sat there like a new shot of mass radiation just going into your fucking town. Stevens sat there like a mute and said nothing because guess what? He agrees with him. Of course. The only thing that's good about Sheldon Adelson and his horrible influence on politics

is that when I want to feel better about how horrible everything is, I just think back to 2016 and I just think of how many sponge baths Ted Cruz gave him thinking the whole time it's worth it. You're going to be president getting under the crevices, getting under the tit meat thinking it's okay. You're going to be president going out of those gargoyle talent feet of his going between each one with the sponge man and thinking you're going to be president is all going to be fine when you're taking that fucking don't you love when you're giving Sheldon

Adelson a bath and it like a you know make make a make sort of an oval between your index finger and your thumb a flake of skin that size comes off and his wife looks at you and without saying anything you know that she wants you to eat it like a chip. Just the moment when you're when you're spit shining a mole the size of a hubcap thinking about being president. I love when you're watching his big mole and you see you scrub hard enough that you see eyes in a mouth come out and it looks at you and it says Jerusalem is the capital with when you're tracing Orion's belt on the moles and goiters on his back.

Hey you know those spas were like you can dip your feet in like a pond or like his little fish like eat away all the dead skin on your feet. Ted Cruz literally did that nibbled it off. Oh God oh you love to think about it for sure basketball shirts were a bad choice for me today. You guys get what I'm saying all right let's let's let's that was a little too horny. So let's go back to David Brooks got a dehornify right now. Well Felix is a can I ask one question.

Did these two pieces appear on the Times op-ed page on the same day back to David Brooks June 27th Brett was June 28th. That is even more journalistic malpractice than the Times op-ed is usually guilty of and just one David Brooks joke. The second mountain is when David Brooks found the second titty he was just looking easy you've only seen women in sweaters his entire life he was like what there's two of these I just thought it was a fucking like a fender boing David Brooks Dems please don't drive me away.

He goes I could never in a million years vote for Donald Trump so my question to Democrats is will there be a candidate I can vote for according to a recent Gallup poll 35% of Americans call themselves conservative 35% call themselves moderate and 26% call themselves liberal. The candidates of debates this week fall mostly within the 26% the party seems to think it can win without any of the 35% of us in the moderate camp the ones who actually delivered the 28 midterm win. Okay you see this stat quoted a lot about what percentage of Americans self identify as liberal conservative or moderate.

Every time you see it ball it up throw it in the trash it is a meaningless statistic. No one knows what their own politics are exactly those 35% people who are moderate find out guess what they're in favor of unions they're in favor of Medicare for all they're probably against the Iraq war or like I mean like they are the people who are conservative like they are liberal nobody half of the liberals are probably against unions and for the fucking Iraq war. Yeah like look at things on an issue by issue basis to see where people's commitment's truly a lot.

Yeah no one has any idea what their own politics are they just have this weird grab bag of beliefs and which one is going to actually get them to vote is a mystery even to themselves and again this like this idea because everyone's politics are mostly a mystery to themselves and other they're mostly inscrutable nobody really understands what they believe or have any like serious ideological commitments outside you know a few areas. Because of that it's this is why it's so foolish if you're following their advice if you're like a progressive or a Democrat to follow their advice of like oh you know like this idea that you're going to alienate some mythical moderate voter it's like no this is a primary

go with what you believe in why would you like like stand up for what you believe in and have faith that like the candidate that you support you know can win the election work to make that a reality. Don't fucking amputate your own moral imagination before anyone even cast a fucking vote. And who doesn't do that Republicans. Exactly. They're not ever asked to do that. Do you think the conservative movement like the people at the Federalist Society or Heritage

Foundation do you think that they're unaware of the fact that the vast majority of people in America want abortion to remain legal do you think they're unaware of the fact that the vast majority like and by that I mean like 70 to 80 percent think the wealthy have too much money and influence in our political system do you think they're ever bothered for a second by some pang of doubt they're like oh we're going to we might alienate some moderate voter or you know like a Democrat who's maybe on the fence because the thing they have a rigorous ruthless view of the world and they're they pursue it and without without doubt and I think is almost admirable in a way well the thing they have that helps them

the thing that sort of makes them have to worry about that last is they have all these anti-democratic institutions that right gerrymandered districts the electoral college but the flip side of that is that the thing that a Democratic voter Democrats would have if they fucking actually tried to lean into it is actual popular fucking policies which could act overwhelm those those anti-democratic institutions if they were pursued vigorously no but yeah like the people who got Brett Kavanaugh in the Supreme Court you think it bothers their conscious that supermajorities of American voters want abortion to remain legal and want Roe v. Wade to not be overturned by the court you think they're worried about electoral

backlash if they do that not for a fucking second the progressive narrative is dominating in part because progresses these days have a direct and forceful story to tell and no interest in compromising it it's dominating because no moderate wants to bear the brunt of progressive fury by opposing it it's also dominating because the driving dynamic in this campaign right now is not who can knock off Joe Biden the more moderate front-runner it's who can survive the intense struggle between Elizabeth Warren Bernie Sanders and others survive it to be the surviving left-wing alternative all the energy and competition is on the progressive side Biden tries to bobbin weave above it all while the whole

debate pulls sharply leftward so if that's the case and you're saying if all the people who are active engaged are you know competing to be the like the left-wing candidate then that's democracy right like what why are you sort of sticking your head up for some you know illusory it's all fraudulent yeah it's just it's all bullshit it's because like I said 2016 happened and it invalidated everything and what's more surreal I think than watching Trump you president last two and a half three years has been watching every person in a position of authority in government at most of them and everyone in media acting like nothing has changed trying to pretend that that 2016 didn't happen or it was some sort

of fluke I mean Democrats at least have the excuse that they think it was a Russian operation or something like that but even like moderate Republicans like Brooks are on the same vote of like 2016 did not happen a moderate Democrat did not run trying to break Trump off from the Republican voter base as a whole and appeal to moderate Republicans that all happened Trump was not able to win due in part to the vapid and idiotic nature of political reporting and yet nothing has changed he's still talking about how to appeal to these moderates like it would matter and those fucking debates that we watched last week are the exact same nitwit dog and pony show that Trump was able to dominate and use on his way to victory

nothing has fucking changed no one will acknowledge that the terrain is shifted in any way and so we're just repeating it we're just going to keep repeating it as things get stupider and more vicious because no one has any investment in change also I mean like a lot of what's going on here for people like David Brooks is that they're trying as hard as possible to avoid a situation that would out them for what they truly are what they truly believe in they can pretend to be morally outraged and horrified by I don't know child concentration camps but if it came down to ending that or voting for Bernie Sanders or a left wing candidate we know what they would do they know what they would do that's the shame that

Brooks feels inside the camps bad but calling it a concentration camp is worse I like so Brooks goes on to lay out you know how the Democrats are moving too far to the left on things like health insurance and immigration and populism or whatever but here's the real nut of his article he goes Democrats are trying to start a populist first populist campaign against Trump which is a fight they cannot win oh okay thanks David well all right okay well that's take your fucking work for it there buddy. Democratic populists talk as if the elite in America is big business big pharma the top 1% this allows them to sound populist without after without actually going after

their donor bases the highly educated affluent people along the coasts the big divide in America is not between the top 1% and the bottom 99 it's between the top 20% and the rest these are the highly educated Americans who are pulling away from everybody else and who have built zoning restrictions and meritocratic barriers to make sure outsiders can't catch up okay that's broadly true what he's saying about like a sort of the meritocratic meritocratic upper middle class if you want to call it that in this country who live on the coasts or educated live in cities but this is absolute horseshit there is the divide in this country is between the 1% and everyone else they're they're like in a different galaxy than the

rest of us and guess where David Brooks is he's not in the top 20% I mean in terms of who's actually who's actually functionally controlling policy it is obviously people at the very top I mean that's just the nature of money the more you have the more influential you're going to have the more vitally you are to the system at at large and so those of people making policies that do the macro shit of like deindustrializing the Midwest like that was not the project of you know the professional managerial class that was a pop project of the commanding heights of the economy of the global capitalism but you know because the project of guys like Brooks for 20 years is now has been detaching

class from actual relationships to pretty capitalism and turn it into a cultural thing he doesn't he wants to obscure that because then you get to paint the Democrats as the party of the elite too because they are largely a party of you know college educated white professionals it's like that's true and they and their policies are shitty and the people they like suck thankfully there's a guy running whose support is not that if you look at the base of Bernie Sanders support it is lowest among people making over a hundred thousand dollars a year he is actually doing the thing of reconfiguring the Democratic base around working people and that's what's terrifying to Brooks because as long as the Democrats

and Republicans are both broadly the party of this professional managerial elite and it comes down to whether they drive a fucking Tesla or a two hundred thousand dollar pickup truck then you can kind of play that middle of the road guy like him but if there's actually a class distinction then you have to out yourself as a fucking class warrior for the wealthy which is what he is and that's why guys like Bernie terrify him and seeing other Democrats parrot his rhetoric terrify him because it runs the risk of reformulating politics finally along actual class lines instead of the fake cultural signifying class lines that have dominated politics for the last 30 years now because if Democrats run a populist campaign

against the business elite Trump will run a broader populist campaign against the entire educated elite his populism is more compelling to people who respond to such things after all he is actually despised by the American elite unlike Democrats finally Democrats aren't making the most fucking despised Bernie by the way yeah they love Bernie more than Trump they hate Bernie so that's once again all of this only works if like Kamala Harris gets the nomination or Biden gets the nomination that's what the and they want that he wants that this is all an argument it's it's a fake argument to get them back to get it on that same fucking sterile treadmill between between the wine track and the beer track he goes

finally Democrats aren't making the most compelling moral case against Donald Trump they're good at pointing to Trump's cruelties especially towards immigrants they're good at describing the ways he is homophobic and racist but the rest of the moral case against Trump means hitting him from the right as well as the left this is even more fraudulent than the shit he said about the 1% versus the 20% what is the right wing moral case against Trump that one time that his daughter married a Jewish guy I guess that he is he's the memorial guy that he's been married that he's been married a bunch nobody gives a shit the evangelical Christians the people who make up the majority love him they've anointed you love him Cyrus

to them folks we love him he's take Cyrus we save the Jews so so here's David here's David Brooks his answer a decent society rests on a bed of manners habits traditions and institutions is this more of that like season with with you know a bourgeois diligent shit as stir liberally or whatever the fuck Trump is a disruptor he rips the shreds the codes of politeness decency honesty and fidelity it's David Brooks everybody no no one he notices that I mean I can all his columns are about himself yeah he's talking about himself he feels shame he feels shame he feels he feels disgusted we want someone to fucking go to town on his back with hot wheel tracks for being a hypocrite and a lustful little piggy

but no one will do it and watching Trump get away with it it's like no there has to be some sort of cosmic justice exactly he wants Trump to be punished in lieu of him yes I was the scapegoat I am I have to say this one made me feel nothing Brett Stevens made me you know you're lucky there's no drywall in your apartment but this one maybe you're feeling like Caesar what's his name that guy with yes he's a Romanus the emperor president of Rome no this one I feel like David's heart was in this one I feel like he literally looked at Brett's desk well because Brett hasn't had sex yet David has David's been slacking at school work so he just copied off the nerd in class both their remedial writing class

but yeah I think he should just he should be a sex columnist that's his heart was way more than that he should talk about like going to Penn Station and being like everyone has their lives they go to are you the star of your own story it's way better than this he really obviously wants to do that more I I gotta give I just you know if we're grading by effort probably probably Brett edges him out he didn't really sell me that he gave a shit about this one column well he just goes on to say you know it's a dilemma for moderate voters like either there you know they'll alienate the left to the primary and then but then if they nominate someone from the left and they can't win in the general

do you care more about paying some more in taxes that you can afford or do you care more about child jails how about that how's that a for fucking choice you fucking vampires alright before we go let's have a little fun yeah let's have a little fun let's talk let's talk rod hell yeah let's check it out he's a guy minute it's been a minute since we checked in on rod and you know as usual always having an extremely normal one king of normal rod is being extremely normal all the time the most man really there is rod rare is trying to buy uranium from a former Soviet state because he read about a library in another state having a drag queen reading hour he's trying to buy enriched uranium enriched uranium

from like yeah like some Balkan arms dealer if this is a passion contest rods like the winner oh he like out of all the guys we read he's like he's a passion oh he's violating with with real belief he leaves everything on the field absolutely so this is this is I'm just jumping ahead because it's you know fucking interpretable of course I'll wait for you because I got an email from a reader yeah I mean it basically like someone sent him a photo of like an Anglican church in England again you don't even fucking live there dude and you're not even an Anglican you're a Greek Orthodox what the fuck do you care had some sort of trans inclusive events and of course rod is completely he's like he's the end times

are here you're gonna be a Gnostic by next week you don't even dig these people are Christians I mean like honestly if you're an Anglican you should just like you might as well just like not be religious oh for sure yeah it's it's hilarious I remember that guy from the 90s Bishop Spang he was an Episcopal Archbishop in the US and he wrote a book that I read when I was a kid where he basically just said actually you know we should just be Buddhists Jesus it's just Buddhism like stop believing all the shit Jesus wasn't real what are you doing so he goes on to talk about some some Vatican documents about just sort of like I don't know making peace with the pagan traditions of Central and South America I think is what

it's about I'm not going to read further or educate you mean the way that they made peace with the pagan traditions of Europe that are like foundation exactly like Jesus Christ not big piece of them but just sort of absorb them in the way that the Catholic Church has always done so he goes here read Skogak's entire piece Skogak's anger is completely understandable this official Vatican document endorses religious syncretism this is a very very big deal you're not you don't even go to that school anymore right yeah it's like hanging around the parking lot you know the new principle sucks you graduated 2007 yeah you like you show up at like the fucking pep rally that yell at all they need to fire the fucking football coach as he goes

almost 20 years ago at a social event I met an evangelical who had been a missionary in rural Guatemala he told me that when he arrived in the country he decided to visit the local Catholic parish to get a feel for the area that parish was administered by the Jesuits he was also he was shocked to walk into the worship service and to observe the priest in the front saying mass while in the back a witch doctor was conducting some sort of pagan ritual it's it it turned out that the shaman did so with permission of the pastor I mean that'd be hilarious if he was just freelancing in there call the cops will see I know them call the cops I'll have sex with their ghosts he goes who is all about inculturation

the missionary told me that he understood it once why so many peasants were flocking to evangelical churches syncretism is not a joke these shamans invoke actual malign spirits yeah nothing is funny about yeah there should be a rod silent hill game like the ear like it's the same like lighting and music but it's like you go into a Catholic church and the priest has guitar like that's the that's the you guys last year I was talking with a Catholic priest who works in a heavily Hispanic region of the United States he told me that he is has to spend a surprising amount of time going into the houses of his Hispanic flock blessing the houses to rid them of poltergeist activity this is why rod this is why rod

is the goat because like Brett Stevens he's like oh yeah no they're coming here and making us speak their language by the way I was raised in Mexico David Brooks like oh they're gonna turn off people with higher taxes rod we have to cut immigration because they're practicing witchcraft yep yep that's why yep you want these people coming to this country taking your job in with bewitching your milk cows so that it gives sour milk if this is yet no rod is never the only never Trump Republican who's broke with Trump even though he agrees with him on immigration because Trump wasn't serious about the Santa Rhea threat like rods I'm sick of these Hispanics in my neighborhood flying around on low ride brooms I mean I

was a love that like I mean again rod isn't even a Catholic anymore but he's obsessed with the Catholic Church and every every single thing they do which is like by the way he still has not told us what happened with that fucking exorcism yeah which by the way how the hell are you gonna say oh they're exercising they're doing exorcisms of spirits for poltergeist in these people's houses what is different than thinking that a demon has infested someone's wife who won't fuck her husband anymore no no no no no no no rod thinks that that's real I'm saying you know that's a great point oh wait a minute so he's saying that that they are bringing the poltergeist to their house yes by doing by doing like pagan yeah by

doing sort of pagan rituals and having pagan artifacts like so it's actually not contradictory oh so he he thinks it's all real okay but why I don't understand I don't quite get it either you get a check of what rod is named so he's saying that they're doing they're doing sacredism they're doing witchcraft free which brings poltergeist yes and then a Catholic priest has to do the blessings to make the house that this house is clean oh okay so he's saying that if they were stopped doing that they wouldn't get all these yes he's saying that like it's like how like if you leave food out in your kitchen you're gonna get ants exactly you want poltergeist because that's how you get poltergeist he's saying

that they're bringing it even though they're Catholic they're bringing these these sort of ritualistic or pagan belief systems from an earlier era or tradition into their homes and into their religious life and that is opening the portal to the dark spirits see you can't get this anywhere else yeah there's 50 people who will give you bog standard shit about immigration and about employment taking jobs and the language shit and all that crap and over tax public services blah blah blah no one else will bring you they will haunt your house they will do paranormal activity if we seriously have to entertain the idea of having conservative op ed columnists like this should be the one yes this is what they

believe yeah I gotta give them credit though because you would think there is I would argue a real conflict between being a Christian and having this violent opposition to immigration from the most Catholic countries in the world I mean it'd be what I mean it's like it's one thing for the Europeans who have Muslim immigration to do their deus volt shit right and be like this is a clash of civilizations we gotta do the battle of Lepanto again okay fair enough you know it's wrong but at least it has a basic like a religious framework to it these are Catholics he's figured it out they're not really Catholics they're actually voodoo witch doctors from the jungles of Central America and they will make your crops fail

they will do it so he goes here he warns the people to stop dabbling in syncretic synchronistic practices to stay out of the botanica because they're calling forth maligned spiritual powers that they don't understand I love it's like that these people don't understand it it's like literally been their culture for probably a thousand years though he gets it he understands this shit he knows the names of all these demons and he goes they never listen he said the cycle is never ending this is a this is a big part of Latin American and Caribbean Catholic culture it's like yeah though shit it's their fucking culture dude and you're not Catholic anymore I can't hammer that home and no and what's hilarious about this is

like this is again why rod is just on this Procrustian bed all the time of his religious phase is because like the only parts of the world where the Catholic Church is growing in any amount of any serious numbers not just withering on the fucking vine like in the country's rod cares about i.e. where white people live are Latin America and in Africa that's it and of course that their versions of Catholic culture are going to be imbued with a lot again similar to how the European Church exactly why do you think there are monies at fucking Easter or Christmas tree why do you think like Spanish opus dayfreaks worship their mother's skeleton yes why do you think Catholics are so into worshiping saints it was their way around paganism yes

and rod is cool with all that but it's just it's he's worried about the basically the demons from the southern hemisphere the sun demons you amazing I it's a shame that Kojima and Konami parted ways because the Kojima directed Rod Ray or Silent Hill would be that would be the greatest horror game of all time just fighting demons and your only weapon is a typewriter and you keep having to find more ink you have to find like a laptop charger so you can file a column you save your game by getting like weird emails from your readers I haven't actually I think every person who emails rod and he's like I've known this man for a long time reader and I think it's all ghosts I think it literally is all just demons in his computer sending

him insane emails to drive him even more insane I think Rod honestly I believe in hauntings now and I think Rod Rod's body home car computer classes coursing with demons and they're all just winding him up constantly they're just having a laugh is who is just killing it he's just trolling the fuck out of the email when the woman who called the police on that cookout in Oakland yes the email he got that was like I've noticed how ignorant people are analyzing this story if you look at this woman's face she's clearly Samoan at least yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah that's a demon that's a demon even yeah Azazel Baphomet Beelzebub dude they're all emailing Rod constantly stopping my wife King payment yeah no King payment just writes

the rod is like John M from Virginia there's a new trend among students where they summon the devil you should write about this it is actually I've noticed this is a trend recently kids are having gender reassignment parties Rod you should write a seven columns about this doubt that the first things people that hog from the New York Post so Rob Amiri like all the hard the people who want to reinstate like Franco in America like it was literally over the past couple weeks basically come out and said like democracies over we need a Catholic dictatorship yes to impose religious law on a secular France of Bavaria get over yeah they've gotten okay it's the drag queen story hour yeah really they're they're they're

ready to they've they're like democracies over because I read a story about a library in another state yeah having dread and by the way by the way it's a base irony but could maybe if you're Catholic because you maybe shut the fuck up about your fear oh the drag queens are sexualizing our children oh really dude it's a little late for you to pipe up about that which first of all they aren't yeah they just see anything that it does with gender or gay people and they just assume it's all it's all sex or like they're they're sexualizing children it's just like um you know what religion you are right yeah you have you read the news at all recently I mean this is like a big thing that happened that maybe maybe you should

I don't know get out of the moralizing about other people's sex lives business yeah maybe you just focus on I don't know I don't know what helping the poor that one guy call it the the healing the sick beam in your eye that thing yeah supposed to get out yeah no they're ready to call it the fucking terseos over that shit they're fucking it's it's the drag queen story hours and teenage girls on tumblr talking about astrology and rich craft yeah they are so afraid like there's some article out of like Ross do that was talking about he was like actually the youth aren't so secular afterwards yeah exactly they're doing witchcraft they're doing yo it's this is king payment baby yeah they're doing king

payment stuff and I just love like when these guys like like especially the catholic right when they get angry they're so adorable it's so funny how afraid they are of like like well also they're like trash with yeah it's like yeah like fucking Roger air in his like little fake commune in Louisiana yeah you're gonna like bring back the fucking carlis requites no one fucking cares your your audience if they exist are a bunch of fucking shut-ins just like you peering through their windows and calling the cops on barbecues all the time they're not gonna throw on the big floppy red fucking beret and march out into the street to overthrow democracy can you imagine the boomer terseos just a just a box of fucking

mobility scooters they're gonna do like a reconquista on like a crystal store yeah I mean they would get washed by bushwick which is oh my god wash their asses absolutely easy so like I just think like the just the best role is just to keep saying that like you're putting hexes on these people even if you don't believe in it I think it still works they'll have hard they'll believe it they're already it'll make them stressed out and insane like already probably have their sedentary have heart conditions if they think that they're being cursed every day it's going to slowly raise their blood pressure until their heart pops like a tire and all you need for one of them to just drop dead to the rest of them are like oh my god

it's really happening and then they're all just gonna pop one after the other I'm just imagining rod floating into a treehouse like the end of hereditary just everyone's in there naked bowing before him he's got a little crown on I can't wait to kidnap him and take him to it a showing of midsummer just watch his eyes just get wide I would like to kidnap Rod and just take him to like any magic show at like a night club so I'm the woman in half you're working with powerful forces that you don't understand he's just like show him a David Blaine video and he's just like the darkness is real we're in but we are we have to open the door to it we have to stop this mindfreak I gotta I gotta go at this apartment

yeah all right well we should wrap it up there then all right everybody all right gang good much be back yeah hell yeah bye bye love you babies I I really want to say I can't define Well, it's love, Lately Oh, my soul, I'll do it like it back But honey, oh, my oh