Chapo Trap House - 362 - Wet Sauce feat. Kenzo Shibata (10/28/19)

Episode Date: October 29, 2019

We catch up on President Trump's recent cavalcade of triumphs and humiliations. We're then joined by CTU member Kenzo Shibata to discuss the Chicago teacher's strike, what the union is fighting for, and what they're up against. Finally, we finish with a little lesson from Eric Trump on Marcus Aurelius, and the meaning of "hypocrisy". Please consider supporting & reading more on the teachers' strike: Bread for Ed gofundme: https://www.gofundme.com/f/bread-for-ed A piece Kenzo wrote on the context of the current strike: https://truthout.org/articles/teacher-strike-confronts-chicagos-long-history-of-racial-injustice/ A history of CORE and Karen Lewis: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/04/cores-coming-out-party A thread on one of Lori's ghouls, if you're ready for some game theory https://twitter.com/KenzoShibata/status/1187455086093467648

Alright, I see a book on your shelf. We're just gonna roast this book. The complete works of primo leavey I don't know what this is, but let's fucking do. I bet there's some funny shit in there Yeah, if this is a man, we're like if this is a bitch Fucking goofy ass lame. Yeah. Oh monsters are real. What are you six? Shut up with your goofy ass. It's just not knowing it's about the holocaust. This motherfucker talking about draculas and ghouls, just not getting to any part about him being in pain. Yo, this dude's up his own ass. He'd be crying. Yo, the periodic cable. Yo, that's just chemistry, dawg. I learned that in high school. Get the fuck out of here.

This is the most ignorant review possible of primo leavey. Are you Italian or Jewish? You're lying. Pick one. You can't be both. Alright guys, it's Chapo. Got me Matt and Felix here and a little bit. We'll be talking to Kenzo Shibata about the Chicago teachers union strike that's going on right now. Gonna sort of a live update from the picket lines and the bargaining cable. But before we get into that, I guess like let's just kick things off. Gotta say, RIP to a real one, friend of the pod, Al Bugdotti. Yo, you up in heaven right now, dawg with Robert Evans. Just print it. Yo, was he an abuser to some extent? Shit, probably. But did he touch millions of lives through both his music and his videos? Absolutely. I have so many messages, not just the Bugdotti, but of people who fucked the Bugdotti and the movement, like messaging people who are struggling, saying, bro, come to Jihad and fuck with us. If you're like feeling down, you can sing some fucking Nashi.

Old heads are going to say, oh, this is nothing like Tupac. Dude, I was around for Tupac. This is exactly like Tupac. No, I'm trying to think, who could be the third that could match that in the rule of three celebrity deaths? Who could be next? Who could be? It's actually poetic. Robert Evans produced some of those videos, but now they're making, now they're working on movie magic up there in heaven. Maybe Betty White, I don't know. She's always a good. She's always a good option. She's a good pocket pick. Kissinger. Yeah. Kissinger. Yeah. Never happened, though. Was I a fan of the man's politics or religious beliefs? No. Did he have that movie magic? You bet your ass. So apparently the dog chased him into a tunnel where he blew himself up. Would we have? Did you see the Trump Tweet? Yeah. Oh yeah. I want to talk about that. Declassified the heck. We've declassified the Papparino 15 out of 10. I saw that fucking tweet where he fucking

would have declassified the picture of the good boy. You can't make any and it's just the president literally saluting a dog and it just made me immediately flash on that Simpsons headline hippo promoted to the tech, which was the second headline. If anyone remembers that episode, the first being that Springfield was about to be nuked. So it feels very end times. This is actually like if they, if there was like bizarre world, there's a conservative Aaron Sorkin and there's like a Trump West Wing. This would be like a huge yes because Trump obviously doesn't like dogs. No, that's just fascinating about it because usually this is the first dog he's ever encountered that he's had anything positive to say about somebody up. I was I was I have to admit I misjudged you your ethnic group like it is. It turns out dogs can hate Muslims too. I didn't know it would be like a huge dramatic arc in the Trump West Wing of him coming like shaking the dogs and the cameras are going crazy. They've been the middle of honor on Trump hurts his paw by doing his weird crushing. They have to put him down. Well, guess he wasn't so tough after all dog stands on high legs and looks more natural that way than Trump.

Okay, so he said, well, the dog was injured as well. When when all about daddy blew himself up real fucking every hour. And then also Trump said like he died crying like a little bitch. Yeah, you went down like a dog. This dog. This is you know, he said about daddy died died crying and whimpering. Yeah, which like, you know, that's kind of firmed fact. But but you bring up Aaron Sorkin in the West Wing. And what's so fucking funny about this is like we all remember, you know, probably top TV moment of all time. The Bin Laden episode of the newsroom. Oh, God, we're the guy that tells the United Airlines pilots that he's just berating this poor flight attendant who's just trying to do her job and about to just lay in door and then he sees the fucking pilots wings. He's their fake military insignia bullshit fucking David Buster's ass Valor theft and remembers. Oh yeah, you guys died on 9 11. Meanwhile, way more fucking flight attendants died on 9 11 the pilots. But those are just bitch women who won't let a guy tell people the fucking news. But what they they, you know, could have stopped the hijackers, but they were just thinking about shopping. What's so funny about that is like that that TV moment is one of the funniest things ever because it was like, you know, years after the actual Bin Laden, you know, killing or when we got him.

And that was already a total joke. Like I remember when when when Obama announced that they got Bin Laden, like there was a couple dumbasses who turned out in the streets and we're like, hello man off and then in front of the White House. Yeah, they're hanging off like Tommy V to our ass motherfuckers. Yeah, they're like hanging off like, you know, stop lights going like we got America number one. There was so much. It was so forced. It was. Yeah, there was no organ and a lot of like leftist tried to be like the celebration of this death is sickening. It's like five fraction. Settle the fuck down. It's like shit. Yeah, literally just like a rich kid who got really interreligently. I don't care. Like I guess it's illegal, but like all this shit's illegal. Anyway, my point. Yeah. No, that was the people who forced the celebration of Bin Laden. That was just like the most people who have ever gotten drunk just drinking. They were drinking Miklo Baltra. Absolutely. What a pathetic party. Even when Bin Laden was killed. It was already. And like they made newsroom. They made a whole fucking movie about that. But like, again, felt totally forced. The idea that anyone would take a victory lap when they killed his ass in like 2014 and like surprise surprise. He's been spending the last, you know, 10, 15 years coincidentally just living in a nice suburb in Pakistan. In the headquarters of like the military.

Yeah. The West Point of Pakistan. Yeah. Hanging out, like lip-syncing the lady Gaga, watching porn, you know, like. And back daddy, when they went and got him, apparently he was in Idlib, which is not supposed to have any ISIS guys in it. And it's like Turkish-aligned militias and stuff. And then he's there. So if he went to Idlib on his own volition, it would have been a superhuman effort by him and whoever he was traveling with. You know, it's funny you bring up the Bin Laden thing. I wonder who we could have made a deal with. That's what I'm saying. In both these cases, we're supposed to like go crazy for our brave operators who basically like some guy from a foreign intelligence as he drove up with him in the trunk of their fucking car. And they just shot him in the head and they want the fucking Medal of Honor for that. Meanwhile, they still managed to destroy a helicopter and get a dog blown up. Yeah. This is like, it's like, you remember when Dick Cheney shot that guy, but the thing they were doing is like they were just hunting like drug defesers. Drugs and like a clip. They're wings are clipped. They could not fly. They could just hop over the walk, hop around. This is the equivalent of that for Navy Seals. You just get like a drug fat, clipped, terrorist leader. And then for the rest of their lives, they're like, I am the guy who bravely.

He was reaching for a tactical nuke. I disarmed him with a throwing knife. I had a kill streak, actually. It is so funny, just like the degradation of this like already absurd official state propaganda. Remember when we saw that video from like the war room of Obama and Clinton, like looking raptly at like a live feed of like, again, what was a totally contrived staged hit. Like people, everyone tried to give Obama credit for that. Like he did anything other than just say like, oh, yep, go ahead. Let's go. Some folks like the degradation now from that, which is already absurd. And like, again, it was pretty nauseating because a lot of especially Libs just sucked him off for like finally, you know, delivering 9 11 or whatever. Yeah, to go from that to the Trump war room. Did you guys see that photo of him or it was just like the cords on the fucking war room table looked like dog. It looked like Felix's house. Like, honestly, I don't fuck off. I have so much better court management than that. My court management is like, it was like they were it's like they're trying to start an electrical fire.

And like everything that photo owns because like no one's looking in the same direction. Yeah. Trump sitting there one of his trademark baggy ass. It's an academic sweatsuit. Someone said like the general who's sitting next to him looks like they just like he was in his car ready to go home. They're like, you got to come back and sit at this table for a second. He's like, oh Christ, I'm trying. I'm trying to watch NCIS, you know, but again, hilariously the way Trump has now tried to play this off that like it's even bigger than bin Laden. He had the caliphate. Everyone knew he was and my favorite part of it though. So he tries to big up a bag daddy is bigger than bin Laden and then he also then back door tries to take credit for bin Laden to by claiming for about 20 minutes. Just in an insane rant that would get you your dosage up if you were in a nursing home talks about how, you know, before I was the first one who knew about bin Laden. I warned people. I wrote a book a year before, a year before and I said, Hey, what about this bin Laden guy? Not good. You got to do something.

And then World Trade Center happened. So apparently there is a reference in his book to, you know, there's threats. We got to watch out for him. And he probably had seen 60 minutes or something. So he's like, Hey, what about this bin Laden guy? But in his mind now, and what he's saying is that he was the only person who knew about bin Laden. And the thing is, that's obviously not true. There'd been the fucking, there'd been an attack on Afghanistan by Clinton to kill him when they also bombed the Aspirate Factory in Sudan, like the coal bombing. People knew about bin Laden. He was not a household name, but people knew him and Trump has created a new world where he was the one guy, a real estate developer who at that point wasn't, he didn't even have the apprentice that he knew about bin Laden and no one else did. And what I want to know, I want to remake the movie, The Cell. Remember that movie with Vincent D'Onofrio and Jero, where you go into the mine palace of someone? I want to, because you can't talk to him about this. You can't talk to him about anything and extract information.

I want to get into The Cell and see a visual approximation of in his mind where he thinks he got this information, where he got the scoop on bin Laden in 1998. I want to know what he thinks, where he thinks he got the information. I was actually, in the 90s, I was a CIA agent with a bipolar, and I actually had an affair with a very handsome soldier who looked like Damien Lewis. But together we looked for bin Laden. He'd been turned by bin Laden. But my, I had bomb pussy and brought him back to America, but he was secretly Muslim and I was the only one who knew. He just thinks, actually, Trump doesn't even have the attention span to watch Homeland. Oh God, way too complicated. No, I was fast forward blood sport. That's on record. I want to know, like, so you know how like the rock found out because like some seal told him?

Yeah. Who do you think like Trump told? Like, who do you think knew before the world? That guy Wayne Allen root. Yeah. That's Jim Duggan. Yeah. That was, yeah, he was in front of his house with the fucking two by four. The guy who looks like like Minecraft and Bong Bong, I know. Bank of Nino. Oh, well, Hannity, obviously. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Trump. Yeah. Trump called like who's the my pillow guy. Just like all the 80s actors who are now like running for like running doom. Antonio Sabato Jr. Like he called like every former like Scott Baio.

He called them on like Dean Cain. He just called them on. They all had they all had an impromptu like cigar party. They went out somebody's deck in his Baio and Robert Davi and Sorbo and Ken Wall and Johnny Sack. And they're out there with this cigar. Hey, back daddy. Hasta la vista, baby. Frank Stallone is there, of course. Rotten hell. Yeah. It was probably like, yeah, no, I can I can see that so clearly. They're fucking cranking Sinatra. They're not doing Sinatra because those guys are like they've like convinced themselves that back daddy did 9 11.

Somehow and they're like, this is a solemn day of celebration. Like playing. Have you forgotten? Yeah. No, it's just that is sickening. Just imagine it. Just solemnly eating room temperature prime rib. We're doing this for the soldiers. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. They're just oh, they all have martinis that have grapes in them. I wanted to bring this up real quick.

Matt, my favorite thing is like when you when you ask like how the fuck did Trump does Trump think that like he found out about bin Laden 21? And I saw someone reply to you on Twitter attending to answer that question by telling you to read Molly Hemingway from the federal. Yes, because sincerely, this was not a joke. Someone said this during the run of the election and every half bright Trump person who feels like they need to justify standing for an obvious, you know, adelpate is. And I think it might have been Mary Molly Hemingway. It might have been Serena Zito. Somebody said, you people in Washington, you take Trump literally, but not seriously. But us out here in the heartland, we take Trump seriously, but not literally.

And they have glommed on to that as the catch all to explain every time that it sounds like he's having a stroke. Every time that he just gets into a he gets like locked into a like a circle and he just gives us the same sentence over and over again. What he just looks like he's stroking out. They had they say that, you know, and when he talks about Bin Laden, this big guy, he's beautiful. Look at him. He was huge. Bin Laden, we love how big he was. He was so strong and handsome. They go typical.

You don't get it. He's and basically what they're saying is, is that they dig his what he does and so they don't care what he says. Yeah. But they need some fucking way of making it sound like there's like a strawcy and deep text that they just decode and that you dumb libs can't. That's not the case. You can't really say there's subtext with Trump because there's barely primary text. There's barely fucking verbs and nouns in the same fucking sentence. Two other things I want to bring up.

You talked about the Johnny Sack, Scott Bale, Frank Stallone drinking martinis with grapes in them. You know, and smoking like, you know, a Dutch master cigars on someone's like Hollywood, you know, like a like a Michael Mann as balcony overlooking like glittery LA nighttime. They're just dramatically overlooking their courtyard that just has like fake spider web. Just like just like pumpkins, like just cartoonish pumpkins and like animatronic witches that are triggered every 10 seconds by rat. Well, you brought up the other guy. He wants we want. We got to have the house made dinner. We got to get the real dinner that we got to get the spaghetti and like, you know, since all their wives are presumably 40 years younger than them and not Italian.

They're just like making those fucking lean cuisines like she's making like 15 and microwave lasagnas in a row to take out to the boys. They think it's like the prison scene in Goodfellas. Oh, my God. That sounds like the greatest party in history. They have one of those like a plastic jack-o-lanterns just filled with like miniature Halloween candy and they're like, hey, now we can eat. John, John Voight is there just stumbling around the house making his skeleton faces looking like a cartoon skeleton. Just petrified. He still thinks he's in Ray Donovan.

Yeah. Every time the kids come to trick-or-treat the house, they just see Voight and run screaming in the other direction. But no, with a martini with a grape in it, did you guys see today the latest piece of trope food from Air Force One? Oh, my God. Where it's a it's like a salad with just a whole pepper carved with a jack-o-lantern face on the front of it filled with something filled with like cottage cheese or something. And then like a few just like miserable looking tomatoes are laid. And then in the corner what I'm experts are still divided. I am sorry.

I think it's a scone. I hope. I hope. Like scone is there. But again, why would you just get like, like here's lunch today, like a salad, ooh, a healthy choice and then some gigantic pastry covered with icing. Covered with icing. The more disturbing thing is that as David Roth called it, it could be boiled bird meat with wet sauce. You know, the White House chefs, when Trump came in, they had to learn how to make wet sauce real fast.

Yes, yes. It's not normally something you learn at your escoffee school, but he asked for it and they had to figure it out. You know, you learn a lot in your early 70s. He is just a kid from New York. Donald Trump would be Mikey Miles if he wasn't rich. He'd just be pursuing some poor woman who scammed him in MLM. Nancy O'Dell. Yeah.

He is. That's him. That is hard because he probably like he probably is the same level of competence as Mikey Miles. Absolutely. Yeah. The other thing I want to bring up though is last night, Trump went to the World Series in DC at the Nats game and they put him up on the Jumbotron. He got booed instantly and then. No, that's not okay.

That's that's that's lying fake news. So Lisa, Lisa Page and Peter's and and Nelly or and Brewster were all hugging and kissing each other. And Graydon Carter was there serving them shitty food and the Jumbotron was on them and everyone was booing them. Like they were all mad at them. So Glenn Simpson was there. Did you even know that Glenn Simpson was there? I mean, what I've read in the media is that the crowd booed him last night and chanted lock him up, which, you know, whatever. They're Nats fans.

They're fucking lanyard scum. Yeah. They're larval mayors. Yeah. So but I was shocked to wake up this morning and find that like fucking like Joe Scarborough and other people were just being like, we need to have more respect for the office. Or like, you know, like it is not a good look when people are, you know, jeering to lock up their political opponents. Like how can you talk about Trump every day on like an MSNBC show that he's like an imminent threat to the world and our Republic and then get pissy when people are rude to him in a public setting. For one reason, for one reason, because there's literally nothing Trump could do in power that would be more threatening and scary to you than some sort of revolution.

End of sentence. OK. And so therefore maintaining decorum and maintaining norms of behavior specifically for the lowers is incredibly important because some thousand year Trump Imperium where they graft him to a fucking sandworm and it becomes the God of the universe. God of birth. More materially advantageous to her than a system that overthrows the monstrous of a revolution that overthrows this monstrous system that allows something like Mika fucking Brajimski having a fucking morning political talk show. And so yeah, they want people to follow the rules way more than they care about what Trump does. Yeah. Now I mean like it's the same like even though Trump is supposed to be a existential threat to all of this.

It's unequal footing to that. I feel like I'm seeing a rewind to the reaction to the 2005 White House Correspond Center. You're just not supposed to be that mean to these people. And it is. It is funny. Like it is. You really are so beaten down when he literally like made a post. It's like she tried to come to my party and she was bleeding out of her face.

Disgusting. Like don't be mean to him. Oh God. We are so beaten down, man. When I think about where we are, what condition people are in. People literally dying because they can't get fucking insulin. Bombing 700 fucking countries at once. Just poisoning the earth.

Like putting it on an absolute crash force for oblivion. The biggest, the most important state we have is on fire right now. Basically the entire thing. And it's going to basically be like that six months a year for now on. And then we're just fucking what? Booying a guy in a fucking baseball compare that to what's going on in Chile right now. I was going to say the streets and the cops have already decided that they're going to go fucking.

They're going to party like it's 1973. They have like they're in full Pinochet sicko mode right now. Did you see that video of them fucking like tuning up on coke before they went out? Yeah, they're shooting people to death in the streets, but they're mean, but people aren't stopping. They're still doing it. A million people in Santiago. They're burning down like the fuck evil.

They burned down that right wing newspaper down. I always be meanwhile, everyone fucking gets an Instagram with them giving the finger to the Fox News building. I mean, that's us too. No, absolutely. It's all of us. We're completely condition. Yeah.

It's Americans are incredibly conditioned. We believe in this myth that will just like Texas. I feel like Texas is like the key, key case and point for this because no one believes in the myth of every American is an atomized cowboy who can take down the government more than them because the government gives them permission to take a rifle to big lots. And meanwhile, they have to sign like a loyalty pledge to Israel for some fucking reason. But yeah, I always thought it's funny that Americans have always made such a big show of thinking the French are pussies.

Yeah, because like, you don't even have to look to Chile and like this mass uprising, the French, like the French, the people who we've been told are pussies our entire lives. They would just never stand for any of this. They're not like middle middle class white guys in France, like decking cops. You know, these, these are the people that in America are conditioned to reflexively shake their fucking hands if they see them in public at this point. Well, before we get too dire in the state of the American population, I think we should transition into our interview, which maybe gives a slightly, slightly more bright spot

in terms of how, you know, an engaged American public. You got your Chicago strike. You got the fucking UAW strike. You got God bless some Bernie Sanders out there. People starting to come together. It's happening, maybe. All right. Well, let's, let's bring you back here and talk to a little bit with a, once again,

Kenzo Shibata of the CTU about the strike that they got going on right there. And we'll be back with a, a reading series that I think you guys are going to enjoy. Ooh, how do you like enjoy it? Well, you know, that's a relative. No, I think you actually will enjoy this. I love enjoying. All right. So we're here now with Kenzo Shibata, who is on the CTU bargaining team.

And Kenzo, you guys are coming out of a weekend of what I presume were some pretty tough negotiations. So I'm just going to input my Pete Buttigieg labor reporting script. I'm going to run that on my hardware and just say like, how's it going? I think you guys can hold out. What's the strike fund looking like? Are there any concessions that you'd be willing to make to management? It's funny. You should actually mention Pete Buttigieg, because he and Klubuchar are the only two Democratic party nominees that are candidates that are not actually doing anything in support of CTU.

Even Joe Biden did. It's, it's really crazy. It's, it used to be like when old man Daley was mayor of Chicago, you'd almost have to give him to run for president. And now it's like every single front runner is trying to stay far away from Mayor Lloyd Lightfoot during this strike. It's beautiful and insane to watch. Well, what did Joe Biden do?

Did he come by to like, you know, squeeze the shoulders of some of the kids on the picket line or what? So, I mean, well, first I want to stop that. You know, Zady Bernie was the first one here. He came in a couple of weeks ago and gave a pep talk to the entire bargaining team and then spoke at our rally. He talked in quite detail about how his Medicare for all program coupled with a strong union contract would actually put money in our pockets. And really did just kind of gas up the troops by doing that. A couple of weeks later, Elizabeth Warren came at a rally, came to a rally to speak and do the kind of the same thing. And while her rally was going on, our president Jesse Sharkey got a call from Joe Biden.

And I must say, I kind of get the appeal of Joe Biden after watching it. He had this one line in there where he's just like, you know, Jesse's probably someone he's never met before. He's like, I'm really proud of you, man. Like he's talking to his nephew that graduated from eighth grade. And but it like, it warmed my heart. Like, I'm like, oh, I kind of see it. I'll never vote for this guy or support him. But I get Uncle Joe's appeal now.

I mean, that's what people say about him. He's just got that. He's got the touch. He's got the power. And you touched me. No, but seriously, though, Kenzo, you guys are coming out. So like right now, for those of you, I guess, who don't know, the CTU, the Chicago Teachers Union is on strike right now. It's probably one of the most visible labor actions going on in the country.

Could you just give us like a general overview? How many people are on strike? And like, what is the sort of state of play right now regarding your demands and like the mayor and the people you're negotiating with? Well, the currently there's 30 about 32,000 members workers on strike. That includes the Chicago Teachers Union. We have about 25,000 strong and then also 7,000 members of SEIU local 73. They represent bus aides, classrooms, special education assistance, security guards and a few other like probably pretty much our lowest paid workers, which is huge because during our 2012 strike, you know, they settled early and crossed the line. This time we had a solidarity agreement with them.

So we came out together. We're staying out together. In fact, we just got word that they got a tentative agreement. I haven't had a chance to see it. Their members are reviewing it now. And since I'm not a SEIU 73 member, I haven't seen it yet. But from what I've been told, it's one of the richest contracts they ever had. So solidarity kicks ass. And, you know, we're getting raises now and better working conditions for the lowest paid workers in the Chicago public schools.

So all tables in the teacher's lounge. That's our teacher's lounge is a converted bathroom. And it's going to fucking foosball table. Thank God. OK, because I'm going to just give you some unsolicited advice right now. Hold out for the air hockey table. Oh, yeah. The air hockey is pretty cool.

The fucking thing vibrates off at the top of it. It literally hovers. So it's like, yeah, like Chicago public school teachers on strike. You know, it's still ongoing. What precipitated this action by the CTU? So we decided that this was the year on what we're in a contract or a contract open and the school system actually has money for the first time in my memory. We have about a billion dollars in additional funding thanks to changes in the state funding formula that allows more money for student for schools, school districts that have poor and working class populations. And then we also have this thing called tax increment financing, which is like this do Hickey like wonkish way of basically creating a mayoral slush fund where money that extra money that comes into like gentrifying areas when property taxes increase.

That money then goes into this bucket called a tiff bucket. We now have about $800 million in that tiff bucket. And traditionally what Ram and Mayor Daily before him would do was he would dole that out then to his favorite, their favorite alderman. So like if you're doing campaign work for Ram, you're defending him. If you're trashing the socialists, you get money. Lori right life foot hasn't really been playing with that money yet, but we definitely need that in the schools like that was money that was initially made its property tax money. It was supposed to go to schools in the first place so we're looking at $1.8 billion in additional funding. So we decided this was going to be the contract where we write all the historical wrongs of the Chicago public schools.

You know we have some schools where we have counselors who have four to 500 600 kids and their caseload. I can talk about my school where I teach. We have a nurse one day a week. So if you have an allergic reaction to get a nosebleed on Wednesday, you know, you better just pinch that shit. Yeah, you're going to bleed out. You know, you wait until that and like we don't always know when that nurse is going to be there either. And we're not unusual. Like that's very common.

We need social workers, you know, we're a highly traumatized school system, both workers and students. And we need to have social workers in the building. We have a large number of schools that don't have libraries because they haven't even hired librarians. So everyone is kind of pinching to get pulling together to make sure the kids learn how to do research. So we wanted to make sure that we're getting these workers back into school. We want to make sure that class sizes can be reduced, particularly in the south and the west sides, the black and brown parts of the city. We have larger class sizes and we have fewer of these care workers. So we want equity in this contract where we're hyper focused on those areas, but also creating equality with everyone else too.

Because all the schools need relief and we figured we can do that with this contract. And we were very fortunate, we felt that we have a mayor that ran on a platform of all of those things. Additional nurses, librarians, social workers, counselors, small class sizes. She even ran on police accountability and she has gone back on all of these promises. This was a fight that we didn't think would get to this point because we thought we had a mayor who would be kind of on the same page as us. Even though we all knew that she's a corporate lawyer and a former prosecutor, you just kind of have to approach it with good faith once the deal's already been sealed. And now we're finding that she is kind of wrong in a sheep's clothing. So I guess what's interesting about this is as far as this contract negotiation goes, like you said, you have a mayor who ran on supporting the things that you want.

She's not Rahm Emanuel, who was the guy that you faced off against the last time. But unlike other teacher strikes where budgets have been cut down to the bone and they've just been totally stripped bare and you're fighting for any kind of basic administration of education or support for teachers. What you're saying is that for the first time, the Chicago city school system is flush with money and now you're going through this to be like, okay, this is what we want, let's spend it. Exactly. And one of the things that was really insidious that our school board did was write a law called 4.5, which is written into our school code, which basically only allows for teachers to strike over, I'm sorry, only allowed to strike over pay and benefits. So essentially anything that we strike over legally are something that they can message as being just greedy teachers. So we're not out for those things, but we are fighting for those things while we're on strike. In fact, this is really the insidious part is that Jim Franzyk, the lawyer that's worked for the board through the last three administrations. He holds multiple city contracts. He's multimillionaire off of public worker dollars, even though he's a private lawyer. He helped write that law. So basically he wrote this law. The Chicago public schools lobbied for it and got it and now it's limited what he is mandatory, what's mandatory for him to bargain for us with.

So it's like he set the game table up and put all the pieces on the table and now we have to basically fight playing his game. So we have to get creative with how we fight back. We've had to use a lot of direct action, public education, ways of just getting our message out in public that's not like working with the traditional media or working through the regular confines of a labor fight. And what's really insidious is that even though Mayor Lori Lightfoot ran as a reformer, she's held on to Franzyk who worked for ROM and for daily and basically the entire cast of ghouls on her side of the table hasn't changed. And Lightfoot was elected fairly resoundingly. And did people in Chicago view this as like a sort of sea change from the ROM administration? Yes. So her opponent was Tony Preckwinkle, who's the head of the Cook County Democratic Party and also the president of the Cook County Board. And she's someone that, you know, she's worked her way up through the rungs of the machine. She's done good. You know, I'll give her that. And she was definitely someone who understood Chicago politics very well. This was a year where one of actually the most powerful alderman, Ed Burke, was indicted and got reelected while indicted, very Chicago, for shaking down a Burger King chain.

I can't make that. You know what? I mean, look, people can criticize Illinois, but I think our corruption scandals are much more charming. Think about corruption scandals in like Maryland. It's always like some spooky, like fucking, you know, federal contractor is they're having steroid parties and fucking each other. And they're worshiping mallock. It's all it's all demonic. There's nothing demonic about Chicago about Cook County corruption. It's always just a really stupid guy demanding a bag of hamburgers and $72,000. I mean, I know I teach my students about Chicago corruption, too, and they're like their jaws drop, but they're like, oh, my God, this is why we don't vote. And I'm like, no, this is why you have to vote. My favorite, I've brought it up before, but like my favorite thing was that the thing that sort of brought Dennis Haster down, this isn't Cook County.

This is like, I do like the distinction, by the way, between like Cook County Dems and like sort of down and upstate Republicans where they're the Republicans in the state are just like, oh, those stupid corrupt Cook County Dems. And then they just go down for even dumber schemes. Oh, yeah. It's like a hog, swindling, bezzlement case or something. They're same crap, which is different stuff to steal. Case in point, the thing that really brought Haster down was being sort of beholden to an ice cream baron, not being the Gary Glitter of the house. He did some corrupt, idiotic real estate thing where he basically like signed on the deed. I am committing a crime. That was over Weiss for talking about, right? Yeah, yeah. Do you remember that commercial that he made where he like flew over Soldier Field in a helicopter and was like, we could fiddle us up with immigrants right now.

And that was his ad. People were like, is that a challenge? Over Weiss. So over Weiss for people who don't know, Jim Over Weiss made admittedly probably the best milk and ice cream in the state. Like if we're being honest, they're really good. Like is it's really good milk and it's sort of a problem every urban Cook County liberal had where they're like over Weiss is so bad. Is milk so good? It comes in these high quality glass bottles. It's the Chick-fil-A Dilemma.

It is. But with over Weiss, it was like less. Obviously, he funded awful political causes and like you should not buy his delicious, delicious milk. But he would spend, by a conservative estimate, $75 billion every four years and come in fifth place in the Republican primary. Kenzo, I will probably have to do some research on my own into the Burger King fiasco. But I wanted to ask you about. I was going to connect that to Tony Prequinkle. Oh, no, go ahead.

Ed Burke, basically the whole entire Lori Lightfoot campaign was, you know, this positive agenda. And then connecting Lori Light, or connecting Tony Prequinkle to Ed Burke and all these corrupt members of the Chicago Democratic Party machine. And we're in a year where people hate incumbents and people went out. And I actually don't think people voted for Lori as much as they voted against Tony or stayed home. One thing I wanted to ask you about is like, obviously, the CTU had a very high profile strike during Rahm Emanuel's tenure. That was one of the first like big, you know, labor actions of this current era that we're in that kind of like woke people up to what union action and public unions could accomplish. But like, what do you find is that what do you find is the difference now in like the current political climate than what it was several years ago? Well, I mean, part of it was us.

You know, we as CTU in 2010, I should back up a little bit. You know, we started as a small group of scrappy leftist teachers. We call ourselves the caucus of rank and file educators. And we ran Karen Lewis for president in 2010. We found a great political opening when the ruling caucus of the union had a split three ways, and we won. And we basically realized at that point, we have to fight to have a strong contract campaign. So for like two years between 2010 and 2012, we organized with the communities. We organized within our ranks.

We really tried to build tried our best to build like democratic structures. So one of the things was we have a 40 member bargaining team where all of the different types of job roles in the schools are represented. And that was really that the 2012 strike was us building the union and part of what helped us build the union was having this fight with a single target, which is around manual. So we didn't have we didn't really didn't have the luxury of fighting with each other because we all were fighting the boss and that allowed us to build a really strong union. That's something that's not a it's not a finite deal process either. Like we're continuously improving ourselves and trying to get better at things. But, you know, that created a lot of possibilities for people like I talked to teachers in Arizona, Oklahoma, West Virginia. And they were all very much inspired by the CTU strike.

In fact, Rebecca Gorelli, who's one of the leaders in Arizona about what their strike, she came out of the CTU and that's what really trained her to do this kind of work. And we're just hearing everywhere that folks have been inspired by CTU to fight on their own. And now we're inspired by them to go out again. Plus, there's been this huge shift in Chicago politics since 2012. In 2012, we had maybe one or two progressive alderman and a whole bunch of bootleggers who were with Ram, you know, way up of his keyster, like, you know, just trying to get whatever they can for their communities. Like I was talking about the TIF monies. So this year, by the work of both the Democratic Socialists of America and the United Working Families, which is like an independent political group in Chicago, that's actually independent from the United from the Working Families Party as well, works to get six socialists and a whole lot of progressives on the city council.

And so now through our work through the Chicago DSA, we have a program called Bread for Ed, which is there's a go fund me for that. We've raised $40,000 in about a week and a half. And out of these aldermanic offices, we're setting up food for students and parents and families and also teachers to come by to eat during the strike. It's called Bread for Ed been extremely successful. We've had a lot of support from DSA on the strike lines. And really we're pushing these alderman in the right direction. So huge sea change right now. It's at this point, you know, like with the presidential candidates and even our local politicians, it really is strange that the mayor doesn't seem to feel like she has any pressure on her to come to a fair deal.

And like speaking of that fair deal, just like how are things, how have things been, like what are things like on the picket line among, you know, supporters, friends, colleagues, even students? It's been great. Picket lines have been amazing. We know we're on day eight right now of the strike today. And, you know, the school where I teach, people got really creative. They dubbed the corner where we've been marching Loriville. And we had a soup kitchen today. We're going to do a great British bake off on Wednesday if we're still out.

We keep joking. Hopefully we'll have that in the teacher's lounge, you know, the converted bathroom. But if not, we'll be on the strike line. And people are just kind of keeping their spirits up about its hunks, you know, people are very supportive. We have lots of parents and students on the line. So that part right now, really successful. Lori Lightfoot does not seem to understand that all of these people are going to be voting in a few years. It doesn't really seem like she has any fear of like hurting herself politically.

She has no base in the city right now, which is interesting too. She's never held an elected office. And she's kind of running on a wing and a prayer and forcing the strike out now into eight days. And then I guess finally, like, what do you think, like the experience of the CTU and your own personal experience? Like, what lessons do you think can be drawn or like a template for not just other unions, both public and private sector, but for, you know, people just activism of any kind, like for organization and, like you said, direct action? Like, what lessons have you learned that you think could be applicable in other situations or struggles? I think like real intersectionality in your organizing is important.

It's not just, you know, to cancel people. Like what we're some of the things we're bargaining for right now are for the common good, like rent control. One of the things that we really want to push the Chicago public schools is into being a partner with us to make sure that our students are no longer being kicked out of their houses and even teachers. Like we have a residency requirement in the city, which is getting more and more expensive to live in. So we're fighting for things like that. And, you know, if even if we don't end up getting any kind of rent control, we have secured some funding for schools that have had. We're fighting for schools that have high homeless populations. So just using the strike to put the issue out there has already gotten us some relief for our most vulnerable students.

It's Monday, you know, you're looking at the week ahead. I mean, just generally, like, where do you think your demands are? And like, like, where do you see this going? If you're just looking at the number of items that are still on the table and our capacity to bargain over them, we could land a deal in a day or so. The problem is, is that the Board of Ed will say that they're broke. We would have some sort of massive action like we shut down the highway last week and then they find more money. So this is, you know, it's a pattern. We're willing to follow it if it means more money for our schools.

But, you know, it's exhausting. And I really hope to get back in the schools. But, you know, we're willing to do whatever it takes. And if it takes shutting the city down, I think we're going to do it. I mean, I guess just like my final thought is what's interesting to me about this is a lesson of like, you know, you don't always strike from like, like I said, like, because there's, you know, no money for the schools. No, like you should also strike when there apparently is money for the schools just to make sure that it gets spent or that like you reap the benefits of like these supposedly good policies. I mean, it's neoliberalism. And this is a neoliberal mayor.

And part of neoliberalism is taking money from workers and flowing and having it flow up to the ruling class. And that's exactly what she's doing. The only way we can really stop that is through stopping our labor. All right, Kenzo, we should let you go there. But please send us any links or just anything that listeners who heard this interview can do to support you guys in the CTU and you're on going straight. Yeah, so once again, that is Kenzo Shibata of the CTU on the bargaining team reporting on the strike going on right now in Chicago. Kenzo, thank you so much for your time. All right, thanks for having me on, guys.

Cheers. Thank you, Kenzo. Okay. All right, we are back. Thanks again. I actually have no idea what it is this week, not even the title. Well, this is one that I've been, it's like a couple weeks old now, but I've been saving it in my back pocket for just such an occasion. And I think it definitely, it's a nice pairing with the beginning of our show.

This is courtesy of TheHill.com. Oh, no. We have the lesser Trump son, Eric, with an op-ed that he wrote all by himself. Oh, God, the big boy. I remember this. Oh, I was so proud of him. This is Eric Trump, opinion contributor to TheHill headline, hypocrisy creates unlevel playing field in politics. Extree, Extree, read all about it.

So this is, yeah, from the desk, from the mind of Eric Trump, you know, I mean, he definitely was just like, got his secretary. He was like, take a memo. And then he just spit all this out. Just a fucking stream of consciousness, James Joyce style. I hear that his process, it's very similar to William S. Burroughs. He just opens his desk drawer full of Twizzlers, red vines, sour patch kids, and just, you know, he just sort of goes on a k-hole, so to speak. I have a theory for how he writes. Remember when we watched the amazing Trump documentary about him?

Yes, the Fox News Action Service. Fox Nation, yeah. They showed him doing his job at the Trump magazine, which by the way is something they just put at the toilet at the fucking resorts. It's not an actual magazine. And they needed to pick a cover. And they had him come into an office room and they had four covers. And they said, this one, this one. And then they said, this is the one we like.

And then this one. And then, you know, they kind of leading him. And he goes, yeah, I'll go with that one, the one that they suggested. They do that. And it's four pieces of paper with four different letters on it. And then one by one, they suggest one to him until it's written. So here we go. This is Eric Trump.

And yeah, like this is a throwback to our episode where we watched the Fox Nation documentary about Eric Trump. Episode 267. Eric, though bewitched. You know, like he's the guy, he's like, I know, I'm going to step back from politics. And I'm going to, you know, do the, I want to be the good son and run my father's business empire. Again, completely separate from the political operate. I'm sure that there's, there's no connection at all. No talk, even though he has literally admitted it in on tape that his dad still runs stuff.

I mean, again, slight digression before we start the reading series, but God, it was so funny. When he was just like, tried to pitch having the G seven at his failing golf resort in Florida. So great. Just that was so awesome. So fucking funny. Oh God. He was like, there are these wonderful buildings. We call them bungalows in each nation.

They would be our own bungalow. I would even take money. And then when, and then when like he like, he wasn't allowed to do that because like even that was like, he like, honestly, he could have been impeached for that. Well, that's the thing. It's like, if he wasn't literally in the process of being impeached. Yeah. Then maybe he would have gotten away with it. And then like, it's a little too much.

It was a little too much. It was a hat on a hat. He had to back out of it and then was so petulant about it. He was like, I guess we'll have the G seven in another location. It'll be a dump and it won't be nearly as good. I hate it. It's so boring. That would have been one of the Trump things that like, yeah, I guess it's, but it like, I wouldn't have cared.

It would have been really. Oh, what about hilarious? All the immortal lizard vampires of the G seven having to like just trouble leering over their shoulder. Try the meatloaf. Also, we know. It's so funny. We know the conditions to imagine. We know the fucking upkeep at the Trump properties.

That's anti-file action. Yes. Have to put my die of legionary. Yes. Yeah. Just imagining Alonzo Merkel, McCrone, Boris Johnson, Boris Johnson. Shinzo Abe shitting his stomach lining out. Yeah.

Having to eat the boiled bird. Yep. Having to eat like just plates full of wet sauce and pretend to like it. I've been under fucking 20 watt heat lab for 10 hours. Imagine the most powerful people from the IMF who just bully fucking. Christine LeGron. Yeah. Imagine the people who just spend their entire fucking professional careers bullying South American

nations who even think about like fucking repaid like just having water. Having water. Yeah. Not having to pay for water. Having any standard of living of like any control over their natural resources or budget or anything. These people's entire job is to make sure like private equity guys in New York are paid like double what they paid on distress debt from these countries. Imagine them going to this shitty fucking dump and just this moron just putting his hands

too heavy on their shoulder and being like, try the shrimp surprise. Oh my God. It's getting food poisoning that like it's not it's so again it's one of those things it's like not even close to what they deserve but it would be funny just for them to suffer like a week of indignities just like all the idiotic cocktails that Trump came up with because they just they have to two hand these punch bowls fucking like magenta diet coke and control. It's like these people are used to having their like secret conclaves at like the fucking

overlook hotel or like the Eagles Nest or something like that. Greenbrier. It's something like like Atlantis it's real and that's what they mean or like on the moon or something like the highest level of like palatial splendor in the most evil place imaginable and like the Austrian. That's why you do that shit. And then they have to go to some fucking like this is like you know someplace in Florida where like you know you drive down the road and there's just like an alligator farm or

something. And there'd be no security. There'd just be dentists wandering up to like the directors of the World Bank and being like so are you so are you you in the money business. Like just just like just fucking just fucking unlicensed plastic surgeons from Palm Beach just fucking glad handing the crown dentist hot sub salesman. And then as we know from Mar-a-Lago literally Rubin tug operators who are actual agents of the Chinese state.

Yeah. Just like like hey like can I put this thumb drive into your laptop for a second. I got to check my emails and then they're just like OK. If I was a congressional Democrat I would have been like no you can absolutely do this. All we need is you know card check deal Mr. President. He would have done it. Dude if they were smart they could get a deal like that. It's a win win.

It would have been I wish it happened. I thought the more we talk about it the more sad I am that this isn't happening and they're just holding it in fucking Elysium like they do. This sucks. Yeah we can't have fun things. At the Trump golf resort it's like the Overlook Hotel but when you're walking down some like empty like scary hallway instead of seeing those twin girls you see the twin fat guys on motorcycles.

Trump sees him do is like. Look at the big big guys. You owe the elevator opens is just all the meatloaf wet sauce. Hey well that OK. This is just like this is straight from room two thirty seven at the one of the bungalows. This is Eric Trump on essentially hypocrisy in public life. So here he goes. And this is of course about Joe and Hunter Biden.

Oh yeah. So he's taking shots at our boy. Yeah. They work so much harder. Absolutely. And there you go. And he's a cool guy and a realer G. This is like this is pure self-awareness going on right now.

So he goes here. Eric Trump I am keenly aware of how fortunate I was to be born the son of one of the wealthiest and most well-known businessmen. If you were you would not write this. So already a lie fact check 50,000 Pinocchio. I am also the first to admit that things are different when you grow up as a Trump. Yes. You get smarter than anyone else.

You get here at the greatest brain of all time. You get drop kicked if you don't wear a pinstripe suit to a baseball game. Anyone who has paid attention to the news. Oh, by the way, Don Jr. said of why Trump didn't take Baron to the baseball game last night. Yeah. He was like, why would you take Baron there? Just so we could be abused by all the swamp.

Yeah. That's why you want people. He did not expect it. That's what the only good thing about that is the video of him realizing when it happens because his face just freezes into a rictus. Hilarious. He was not expecting that. That Don Jr. is bringing up with him, his dad taking Baron to a baseball game because

we all know the famous story about Donald smacking Don Jr. in the mouth for trying to go to a Yankee game in anything other than a complete three piece suit. Exactly. I got to say, though, I don't think that Baron would have wanted to go. No. He is not. He is an indoor kid. I don't think he's a fan of sports ball.

No. Baron was probably like achieving gold in CS go like no way. I wonder if my brother posed a good question the other week. I think like out of all the Trump kids, Don Jr. tries to like relate to Baron the most because he thinks he has like a touch of the youth and he's like sending him groipers. And Baron's like, cool, thanks. He has no interest in politics. Yeah.

He's just like, check this out. They made a groiper of dad. He's like, cool. You're 40. He's absolutely smarter than all the rest of them already. Sure. You can tell. Eric continues.

He goes, anyone who has paid attention to the news, especially since my father announced his run for the White House knows the media has attacked every member of my family viciously and given us anything but kind treatment. Wow. See, that makes you think he kind of did write this because that phrase here, given us anything but kind treatment is just a terrible, awkward turn of phrase. Classic Trump verb. Classic Trump.

It's just you complicate. You just put things in a fucking blender. I believe they're German. Yeah. Their sentences are like German sentences. No. Absolutely. Trump family sentence is just like trying to fit a ladder through a doorway sideways.

He goes here. The adult quote, children in our family are certainly not off limits. Well, I mean, you're not children and like you're literally part of his political operation. Yeah. So like, why the fuck would you be off limits? Literally is 40 year old man. But like, I'm sorry. Like has anyone in the media like actually been like attacked Baron Trump?

No. No one has ever attacked Baron Trump. No matter what those bikers are worried about. Yeah. There's no reason to defend. And we have always defended Baron Trump. I remember the first time that we were watching the inaugural party, the inaugural parade party and they showed Baron looking at the tractors, like the parade of tractors and he was lighting

up. He was the only one I wasn't casting in like, you know, the Rick Dalton scene from once upon a time, you know, yeah, from the fists of McCluskey. Yeah. No, I know. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, the only media I've ever seen that like said has attacked Baron has been daily

caller when they like demanded he wear more suit. Yeah. Caller episode because we did after all fight alongside our father in his quest to win the presidency. We stood on that. You're a cheer one operator for dad. Some gave all because here we stood on that stage and campaigned across the nation and are certainly willing to take the punches where they are warranted and deserved.

Like where does he think they're ever like, I would love to know he like, he was like, we're one of the one of the few times and you think, yeah, fair enough. We deserve that shot. Yeah. You are right. I do give too much money to charity. If you want to have a go at my legendary love of cashews, you have at it. So he goes, the double standard, however, is nothing short of glaring again, like such

an awful sense. Nothing short. However, it is nothing short of glaring this double standard is glaring. Yeah. Like that's a punchier. It's more powerful. I think like stupid person writing exactly where you try to make something sound complicated because you think it's like pithy where you're just like, you know, by all terms of the debate,

it is clearest to all that I am the winner. Yeah. That's like where every time you you write dialogue, you have to go to the scissorist for for something that's like a synonym for you said, interjected, right? Yeah. Exclaimed. You have providence upon the happenstance that we are both in. Yet only one of us will walk out of this predicament inside of a quagmire.

It would be a waste of print to recount every smear, hit piece, an invasion of privacy in my family's face, but allow me to sum it up by highlighting an article published by Forbes and reposted it in virtually every major news outlet attacking a charity that I started when I was 20 years old. I mean, I'm clicking through here to see what this attack. Yeah. They were funneling money through his chair. New filing shows.

I think Trump raised millions lies about lied about his foundation's expense money on an operation because of a charity. I started when I was 20 in less than 10 years. I raised more than $20 million for terminally no children. Why? Jude's children's. He's lying. He's lying.

No. They funneled. They used it to funnel money through. I maintain just over a 9% cumulative expense ratio, one of the lowest expense ratios of any charity in the nation and funded the construction of one of the most cutting edge intensive care units and surgery centers dedicated to children. Word. The Eric Trump Foundation intensive care unit treats some of the sickest children in the

world 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. That would be a really shitty hospital if they just off on weekends. You'd be so stupid that you brag about that. You know, a lot of hospitals, they're just, you know, what a shock. They're always celebrating four day weekends. They've got to have your four walls. We have all of those. Yet I was viciously chastised by the Democrats and the media who relentlessly tried to manufacture

stories about me, my mission, and my, what are you Mormon? What the fuck? Eric Trump. Like a solid snake? Select difficulty for Eric Trump campaign. Story mode. Yeah. At the same time, the Clinton Foundation controversy was in full swing and the media knew that it

could use me as their punching bag to distract from one of their own. I mean, fair enough about the Clinton Foundation, just festering sore of just like unspeakable exploitation and criminal. We're like just scratching the surface of what we, they do in Haiti is like the best case situation you're dealing with just a monstrous fraud and bribery scheme on an international level. Worst case you're talking some fucking pizza gate is real type. Right.

That I do love how both their bullshit foundations mirror the exact values of both family. The Clintons is like a murky, influencing, influenced peddling tax dodge that like probably had like at least some people who worked for it had some role in sex trafficking. And the Trump thing is just like a way for them to buy more paintings of themselves. Yes. Exactly. Correct. It's amazing.

One of them is just the sad penny ante thing of like cutting the heads off of fucking parking it. It is so funny. Yeah. International cabal. No, it's funny, like, yeah, like exactly the, the low stakes of what the Trumps do to like launder their public image is like, so they just want a charity where they can show up on a whim and get photographed next to a bald child, you know, whereas like the Clintons

have set up this like international like leviathan, like just black box, like octopus that has its tentacles and like every like drug trafficking, like a nation destroyed by one of the worst earthquakes and humanitarian efforts ever get harvesting. And like, again, it is just this giant black box of like, of just evil and like money goes in one end and we don't even know what comes out. Absolutely. But it certainly isn't like, you know, children know one way or the other. Some of them are children, but yeah, it's not good.

Yeah. And the Trump thing is just literally like, oh my God, dad's going to let me drive a limo to the hospital. No, he said when Felix said the thing about getting pictures of themselves, that wasn't a joke. And one of the ones that one of the things that happened is that Trump solicited a donation from someone else to his foundation. And then at a charity auction, there was a painting of Trump and he won the bid and paid

for it with the donut foundation's money. So that's a deal. He had this guy's donation laundered in the form of a fucking painting of himself. So one might say it comes with the territory and that is absolutely true. As a Trump, I'm held to an incredibly high public standard and I have lived an exceptionally clean and honest life with that in mind. But can you imagine if they were willing to try and destroy a kid, just a kid from New York, and destroy a kid who dedicated his life to pediatric cancer and philanthropy?

What the media would say if I had secured a $50,000 a month job on the board of a Ukrainian company with no discernible duties in the industry I knew nothing about? You're too stupid to even pull that grab. Yes. Like Hunter went like, you think Eric Trump knows anything about any of the businesses or cancer research or even real estate? He knows nothing. We saw a day in the worst work day, a bunch of people below him move him around and steer

him to the decision they've already made. A big part of that Trump documentary was him showing off one of the Trump properties, which is like a vineyard slash hotel resort in California. And just the people who work there, walk him around the vineyard and show them how they make one. And he's like, wow, great stuff. Incredible. Yeah.

Like hands-on. Hunter worked way, like Hunter obviously doesn't know anything about any of that shit. But to get in that position, he worked way harder than Eric ever has. Oh God. Wall smoking crack. As we've said, the heart it took for him to walk into Skid Row in LA, get a gun put to his head to score a crack and then to go back again, again, compare that to whatever the fucking Trump kids have done.

Just like the heart to do anything like that. Yeah. They could go. They could walk up to a tiger that's been shamed to a tree and sedated and blow its brains out. That's what they can do. Yeah. They literally cry about articles being written about them.

Meanwhile, like Hunter has been the biggest national news story and everyone in America is like, Joe Biden's kid is a crackhead and he's like, whatever you fucking throw at me, I will come back 10 times stronger. Yeah. I'm involved. He is not writing a book called Triggered, Silencing Liberals Being Mean to Me. Like in all of Hunter Biden's difficulties and struggles in life, has he ever killed a fucking elephant, murdered a basically like a conscious living being just for fun?

Hunter probably has saved elephants. Yeah. And he doesn't even remember it. So he goes here to make the hypothetical picture sufficiently vivid. This is where he goes in on Hunter. So Felix, just like restrain yourself like, you know, I'd say whatever the fuck you want about me, Eric, to go into my homie, my homie, Hunter. Okay.

So you guys here to make the hypothetical picture again, to make the hypothetical picture. The word picture there is totally, totally like not, not necessary. Clippy killed the hypothetical is. It's a picture. Clippy fucking hung himself to make the hypothetical picture sufficiently vivid. Also imagine that I had previously been kicked out of the United States Naval Reserve after testing positive for cocaine or was given a contract potentially worth 1.5 billion by China weeks after traveling to Beijing with my father aboard Air Force two.

I worked hard to raise millions of dollars for dying children and yet crickets from the media and weekly parodies on Saturday Night Live. I always think like Saturday Night Live is the lamest shit in the world who could get a rise out of this and it's like, no, the Trumps are like actually upset by their fears. It is. The funny thing is, is if satire is about afflicting the comfortable, no satire in history has ever directly annoyed the direct subject of it more than Saturday Night Live, which makes it in some like qualitative sense, the greatest satire of all time.

So he says, for the record, I do not know exactly what Hunter Biden did or did not do in Ukraine and China or elsewhere. There are plenty of other controversies that measure below the dignity and character of this article to regurgitate below the dignity and character of this article. Like you didn't say below the dignity or character or below the dignity and character of the hill.com, which would be hilarious, the hill.com famously for publishing anything. Yeah. So like there is nothing below the dignity and character of the hill, but he just said,

no, this article article that cannot have the stats that character, he just he's describing dignity and character to the word document. He typed this on amazing. He goes, I used to think Don Jr. is the dumbest. No, it's him. I do not like to give people the benefit. And he goes, I do like to give people the benefit of the doubt since that courtesy is so seldom bestowed upon me and my like, Hey, it's like classic like I'm the most abused

man in history, but but also like all these things he clearly saw, like he's picked these up. He didn't read these. He heard them from like a scene in law and order where a judge is sentencing somebody like that he'd never heard the word seldom in his life. One thing, however, is absolutely certain. If the situation were reversed, I would have been front page news in every newspaper, online publication.

The situation has been reversed. But like, I mean, that has been front page, well, beyond that, he has been in the same position as Biden in terms of being in a position where he is leveraging his father's political position for private gain. He's been doing that since the first day of Trump's administration. So it's like, if I was doing it, no, he is doing it and it isn't a story. So he's like proven incorrect. So he goes here, reporters would be camping outside my door.

My family would have been picked and my family would have been picked apart. My name would have been smeared in every single in the news every single week. And my father arguably would not even be president of the United States today. Oh God, don't make us even imagine what that would be like. Can you imagine? Okay, last few paragraphs, this is the gold here. I do not always agree with Bill Maher. But the late night host was honest enough to admit that if my brother or I had done what

Hunter Biden did, it would be all Rachel Maddow was talking about. I do not know what he learned while growing up as a Biden. But if what we knew about his life indicates anything, it is that there are different rules if you are the son of a powerful democratic politician. Money grows on trees. There are no rules and the press will always cover for you if it benefits the political left. Isn't that like the entire biography of his father?

Yes. There are no rules. Everything works out for you. Money does literally grow on trees. Money grows on trees. It's like you just open the door and here's another giant check from someone who wants to like launder, you know, fentanyl proceeds or something. So he goes here.

Then finally, this is the best part. To quote the great Marcus Aurelius from the gladiator. Your faults as a son are my failures as a father. I owe all of my work ethic, character, integrity and moral fiber to my father. Hunter Biden can say the same. He got so much done in that sense. Like, uncharacteristically, he accomplished a lot. So just this is so fucking good.

To quote to quote the great Marcus Aurelius from the gladiator. He 1000% thinks that that's a character from the movie and not a real person. This isn't madness. This is Spartus said King Gerard Gerald Butler from the 300 also by the way. It's gladiator. It's gladiator. Literally every part of this is wrong and like a small infuriating. Remember when?

Remember when the common assess? What is your name? And he goes. My name is gladiator. Not the gladiator. You know the most famous line for he does the speech gladiator. I am. I am the spoon from the matrix character in the movie.

The matrix. So what's so funny is like he could like like we've talked before about how quoting Marcus Aurelius is like is like alpha level dumb guy shit because because of the movie silence of the lambs Hannibal Lecter quotes Marcus Aurelius when he says to Clarice read Marcus Aurelius of each thing ask what is the nature in and of itself. What is he does? He comets Clarice. So everyone's just like damn the smartest serial killer in the world known about this

like you know. He was Albert Einstein's dad and he can't even manage to actually quote the real Marcus Aurelius who I'm again. He thinks Richard Harris is a fictional character playing a guy named Marcus Aurelius and the quote he does is your faults as a son or my failures as a father extreme psychology going on there because as we remember from that movie Joaquin Phoenix kills him and meet his father immediately after he says it tells him that yeah he walked like glad the gladiator is one of those movies that he watched probably with his father but on fast forward just to

get the scene where he kills a tiger. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. Look at him. Look at him. He died like a dog. Not so tough now.

Mr. Cat. He doesn't feel great anymore. The scene. The scene. Sorry. That's too clever for me to have said. Your cereal is not so good now is it Tony. It's selling like trash.

That's more like it. Like if they watch it on fast forward they get to like the quotable parts where he goes are you not entertained and then he goes yes we are very much so entertaining. It's wonderful. We love the show. We have to watch it by the again the belief that Ridley Scott's The Gladiator is a good movie. Yep.

It's like one of the most telltale signs that you are talking to a room temperature IQ person. Yeah. Absolute. Just duller. Yes. That is just such a like entry level. It's like you're trying to like prove you're not an idiot and that's like just jumping

in the first hole in Mario. Someone loves Gladiator. They would have to do like a new tropic stack and the purest coke available to have an eternal monologue. So you'll remember deep call back. You'll remember which Shapo character had a poster in their college normal Ross motherfucking doubt that Ross motherfucking doubt that he got so much done in that sentence and it's like also like I'm sorry.

Hunter's a better person. Absolutely. Like any of those kids is a good dude that part of the story where he like he does it like the Trump kids do you think they've ever like given a homeless person money short of like making them do a trick for them. Hunter like there was a homeless woman who like was near the liquor store where Hunter would just like yeah. Yeah.

He had to live with me. He further under his first fucking roof. I think Hunter Hunter is interesting to me because I think he has a problem a lot of Americans have where he genuinely has all the intentions in the world to be a good person but he literally doesn't know what that would mean. He's never seen an example that is like right he's grown up by Hollywood or political scumbags right he's like just grown up in a completely morally bankrupt voided world but he does have this like impulse to be a good person and doesn't know how to do this.

And the Trumps are also a very American thing. They think they are good people despite showing just zero impulses or intentions to do anything for anybody. I just want to read one of the last lines here he says here I owe all of my work ethic character integrity and moral fiber to my father for Eric Trump to write that sentence it's just like okay first of all you look like like one of the alien resurrecting resurrection rejected clones of your father and in every way like to the extent that Trump has a work ethic or anything in his body at all like Eric has even less of that like the idea that

he has a work ethic and moral integrity or that his father gifted it to him. It's like zero times zero is zero dude like there's not there like seriously he has less than zero like it's like well he's got less charisma which is maybe the one trait you can say the corrupt Trump has maybe even though I don't really get it but I've just been thinking about how how traitless like positive traitless Trump is yes no positive virtues as a person well okay even even ones that are amoral like sense of humor you know like things that could be love of animals don't make me a good person or something but are like a texture to your personality yes nothing is the most repulsive person in history and now he's got these disgusting

budlets popping off of his carcass coming out even without his base level of yeah like cunning or charisma that got him this far and just wanting to skate by on the vapor of his already nothing trail awful you know you know how we're always saying nothing changes everything stays the same except it gets slightly worse yeah there's an example I think that like if we call this age anything these past few years a few years what it would be the age of the suns because the world is more we have like more concurrent just sort of like far right like fake populist leaders in numerous powerful countries than we have in a while we have Bolsonaro, Varadoan, we have Trump and they just they all have these gormless

shithead fucking idiot sons Netanyahu, Bolsonaro yeah and the original men are all very similar they all lack any positive traits but they have some like will they have some charisma that allows them to just through sheer force and all the advantages they already have forced themselves through the system yet we're also it's not enough that we have them we're also forced to just look at their hideous sons all the time the entire world is that CPAC panel with the son the son's panel yep Jerry follow Jerry follow it on junior junior these off off off center copies of already shit origin right these hold these guys who are the same as their father's except even worse even worse just drowning in kiddie pools just

fucking face down in a cereal bowl choking through punch lines and that's the world and they're in charge and we have to just watch them come and go yeah they're gonna take over everything it's it's not just that these guys are in charge it's they're like you think I'm great check out my son his son's up there yeah you can see on the horizon did you assume my attack gender helicopter there's a there's a great line in Charles Portes's dog of the south where Ray Midge the main character says we're weaker than our fathers do pre we don't even look like them except like in Eric's case he does kind of look like him but in the worst way yeah all the worst features congealing together but he has ten times the gums of

his father yeah that is one of his so don and Eric junior all these sons they're all born from their fathers like but like out of like you know those that species of frog that like hatches their tadpoles out of little holes on their back yes yes that's how all of these people I say people because I don't know what other word to use but like that's how they're born that's how they are like they're like fucking Mogwai when they get wet yeah exactly like but in a grosser way which does of course confirm with my theory that he's never had sex has been a still more he's just popping these kids off of him well we're gonna leave you with that wholesome mental image and I think say goodbye for this week please also

check the episode description for links to ctu stuff or go fund me or just anything you can do or if you're interested in supporting that much much needed labor action right now going on in Chicago so till next time guys bye bye