Chapo Trap House - 368 - High, High Hopes feat. Kathryn Ledebur (11/18/19)

Episode Date: November 19, 2019

We talk to the Andean Information Network's Kathryn Ledebur about the ongoing political crisis in Bolivia. We also discuss Elizabeth Warren's dud of an M4A proposal and Mayor Pete's difficult week and mysterious career. Finally, just a dollop of Epstein coverage with a look at Prince Andrew's excellent work clearing the air for the royals on the BBC last week.

Hey everybody, Chapo here. It's me, Matt and Felix. In a little bit, I'm going to be talking to Catherine Ledibor of the Andean Information Network about the coup that is going on in Bolivia right now. But let's just open things up with a little teaser, a little taste. Don't know how much we have to say about this, but I've got to bring it up. Boys, did you watch the Prince Andrew interview? I mean, I mean, I thought he was pretty convincing. He silenced the haters. He basically did the high hopes dance all over the haters. I mean, it does raise the question. Can you blame a man for being too honorable? He literally said my problem is that I'm too honorable. Yeah. And he, you know, he let down, he used some stupid

words. What was the thing he said? I let down the side, the side. Yes. By being too honorable. Yeah. By being too honorable. Okay. So by the way, that can't, that doesn't work. You can't, you can't be too honorable because honorable is one of those things that has a positive value. It's always inherently good. So you should always be honorable. You cannot be too honorable. That cannot make you do something like hang out with a fucking pedophile. But he was, he was doing, he was hanging out to tell him he's bad. Okay. Two things here. One, who in the Royal PR department thought this would be a good idea? I'll tell you who the guy who immediately resigned a day after the interview, not kidding. Or the real at

brain take on this is that they are throwing him to the wolves to make the rest of them seem like not connected to this. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. But here's, here's my favorite thing that he said in the whole interview. When they, okay, there are pictures of him with, what's her name? Virginia got Virginia. Yeah. There are pictures of them together. Yep. So he can't really deny meeting her. So all he can say is I don't recall. I don't recall. Oh, that's the, and the, the person brought us the statement she had made where like, I remember him sweatily, you know, touching me and like, you know, all his, and he goes, he said rather than just saying, I don't remember that interaction, he said that I had a medical

condition at the time that made it impossible for me to sweat. And then I don't have anymore. I'm sorry. That is masterclass. That is absolute masterclass. And he said, Matt, Matt, you should, you would be interested. I mean, like, you're like, how could I catch that condition? And he said he got it when people shot at him during the fall. Are you fucking kidding me? His war heroism gave him a temporary inability to sweat at the exact moment that he would have been getting all over a underage woman. Yeah. No, it's really crazy. Like I took some demons home with me from the Falklands. Like one thing is for about 10 years, I had completely clear skin. I never, never needed a cleanser or anything. It's like, you know, we

all, we all, we all carry baggage with us. It was what I love about that is like, you can, you can like the best you can do in that situation is just say, I don't recall. Yeah, this is the answer that every lawyer says, the best answer you can give if you're guilty of something. Um, but it's, it's the perfect pointless elaboration of a bad liar to try to come up with and what I guess a more plausible excuse. Well, that couldn't have been me. I'm simply unable to do a sweat. You know, and I, I can't like, I've never heard of that. Like what, what is the explanation for that? Like, like his fear glands, like it was just like a CPU overloading and just could also, also he would have died because he was sweating through his mouth like a dog because

I mean, if you ever heard about the kid who covered his body, then a person died. Well, it's like goldfinger. Yeah. You get suffocated. You overheat without having the sweat to regulate your temperature. Sorry. Just one of those is that signaling is wait, maybe he's whistle blowing that he's actually a reptile reptilian. I mean, I don't sweat. No. Yeah. Well, he had that. He, instead of sweating, he had to roll around in mud like a pig. Sorry. Just one other thing on this. God, I love the British press because there's just nothing that they won't say or do. They are absolutely in, in the times. Dominic Lawson, I stayed at Epstein's house. So don't hound Andrew. Cool, dude. Who the fuck are you, buddy? He just says Prince Andrew has been damned

for his choice of friends, but he is blessed in his enemies like labor MP, Chris Bryant. This guy, Dominic Lawson, he's just like one of those columnists. There's a photo of him with his arms crossed looking at you. He looks all complete. But he just says here guilt by association is a conveniently elastic property for the press when it's engaged in a manhunt. In this case, the man is Prince Andrew, Duke of York, and he has been associating with a sex offender named Jeffrey Epstein. Here's the advantage the royal family has in this in the wake of the worst interview in human history or best, depending on your perspective. The British press has something the American press doesn't have, which is a human wave attack. Yes. The sheer volume of

calmness makes it like it's an opinion writing stalling grad. If this guy gets struck down, there are 3000 other guys who have sort of like, how do I describe it like sort of like capillini textured hair, the same like dumb look on their face, the same pose where they're like, I'll be cutting through the crap of both sides, like the same, same like leaning on their elbow type. They're, they're, they're ready to write articles that are like, how do you even like, what even is age? You don't know what it is. It's like the stalling grad, like as each one of them drops the rifle with no bullets in it. By the, by the time it gets to the end, they're going to be people writing columns, like, you know, in the telegraph or whatever would be like,

I'm a nonce too. It's no problem. Like end judgment against it. You know, oh, there's nothing wrong. There's going to be like, it's going to be like, there are two, two turn keys going series of like cryo chambers open, like fucking like bank vault shit, like, and then like just a magneto. Like, here, like last prison, Gary Glitter's in there. And they're like, Gary Glitter, we need you. We need you to write the greatest op-ed of all time. This for the queen. Gary Glitter, we need you to do rock and roll number three. And that's like, that's the issue. That's what this election is about. Boris Johnson's like, I would absolutely, the nuclear option. Gary Glitter writing a column in the song.

Yeah. And Corvin's like, I would absolutely not have Gary Glitter write a column in the song. That's anti-Semitism. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's anti-Semitic. Yeah. Oh, God. Just a quick check in on that. I mean, Chris, could you just edit in some of Andy's responses into this? He's stammering fucking sweaty. But you were staying at the house of a convicted sex offender? It was a convenient place to stay. I mean, I've gone through this in my mind so many times. At the end of the day, with the benefit of all the hindsight that one can have, it was definitely the wrong thing to do. But at the time, I felt it was the, it was the honorable and right thing to do. You know, it's like that, that, that, that. Aurora Borealis on, on Little

St. James Island, this time of year. Oh, yes, actually. You know what it is, though? I watched that interview and it's like, you know, that idiotic thing where like, who's that like, it was a Democrat who was a prosecutor who was like, if you look the way his eyes go to the left, that's the, I mean, total horseshit that everyone, literally the movie, The Negotiator with Samuel L. Jackson and Kevin Spacey invented that. But when I watched that video and you just, or just hear him talk and you see his eyes and face, it's just, there's no other word for it. Yeah. You can't do four Johnny Carson collar tugs in a row. Yeah. Prince Andrew is wearing a cummerbund attached to a piece of string. It was just pulling it back and forth the entire

time. Flapping Dickie. Yeah. Well, why did his bow tie keep spinning every time they brought up? The girls he was reportedly with. He had, he had a top hat that opened like a can of beans every time he lied. Oh, holy shit, though. It's just, they're not even trying. No, we don't have to. Everything now is just a vulgar display of power meant to make us feel totally impotent. Well, on that note, I think let's, let's get into a bit of more of our serious interview today with Catherine Lediber about the coup in Bolivia. And then we'll be back to discuss Mayor Pete. Got some good stuff coming. Okay. We are joined right now by Catherine Lediber, who is a based in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and works for the Andean Information Network,

which is a think tank that covers human rights, politics, and the drug war in Bolivia. And Catherine, thanks for joining us. I do want to get to the background of the circumstances that led up to this coup. But I'd like to start by just talking about what is the situation in Bolivia and specifically Cochabamba, where you are right now, certainly under the shadow of not just this coup, but a regime government that has just passed a secret law that has basically gives the military a blank check or frees them from any prosecution or investigation of anything that they're doing right now. Well, it's a really thanks so much for having me. It's a very surreal situation because we have a government in power that has no right to be in power, that is passing these

extreme measures that you referred to. We have security forces blocking the outside of the city limits so that rural people can't get in. So there's this image or this feeling of calm in downtown Cochabamba and the blockades that we had had in the streets for three weeks have been lifted. But outside the city limits, there is excessive use of force. There was a massacre on Friday night. You know, there's an impediment of people from the Chapari coca growing area and from rural areas from coming into the city. So it's almost a de facto apartheid system where the urban residents in the wealthier neighborhoods feel quite at home and comfortable. But most of this country is excluded and many of them also repressed. And specifically, you talked about a massacre on Friday. What happened

and what were the circumstances that led to that? Well, since last Monday, when Ginny Náñez second secretary or second vice president of the Senate named herself president in front of an empty chamber, these blockades have gone up. Security forces don't let people into the city. So the people who had gathered in Cecava, the neighboring smaller town outside Cochabamba, decided on Friday that they were going to try to peacefully march to Cochabamba. I've worked with this group of people for 20 years. It was a march in an effort to go through Cochabamba to La Paz to advocate their interests, to reject the interim government. It was a march where they had taken their surgical masks off. There's been so much tear gassing that people have taken to wearing

surgical masks to walk through the police line. And they were told they were going to be able to pass through. But at that time, the police shot and military shot tear gas into the crowd and then directly began shooting live ammunition. So there are nine people dead of bullet wounds, nine coca farmers. Most of these bullet wounds to the head. Some of them shot from helicopters from above and from nearby bridges. There are over 100 people wounded. And a clear show of excessive force and no repentance on the part of the government. And then this decree that basically guarantees impunity for the armed forces and obligates all civilian organizations and state organizations to participate fully with the armed forces and police. That is the

dictatorship. And you mentioned, so now there are these mass protests, largely of people coming in from the rural parts of the country into the urban centers to protest this coup that has just happened. But leading up to the coup, there were obviously protests against Morales and his party. But how would you describe the difference in the coverage of these two different protests, one leading to this coup and the other in a reaction to it? Well, I think leading to the coup and during this very tense disputed moment in elections, there was a great deal of coverage of the urban protests, of the blockades in the cities. People complaining that Abraham Morales was a dictator. Let me tell you that if you're blockading the road with your toddlers and your

Yorkies, you are not living in a dictatorship for a three-week period. But that was heightened. There were also gangs of men, masked men on motorcycles with clubs that were going around the city and upper middle class housewives and people at the blockades would cheer them. And they were beating people that they decided were Morales supporters. In other words, there was a racial profiling going on that anybody who was especially brown or dressed in indigenous dress could be a target for these motorcycle gangs. And this was framed by the mainstream Bolivian press. And also by the mainstream U.S. press, in some cases, if you look at New York Times coverage or The Wall Street Journal, this very democratic uprising and the low-income people, the Morales

supporters' voices were, for the most part, not heard or not featured as prominently. It's important to note that after Morales' resignation Sunday night, it was a forced eradication. He had already agreed, a forced resignation. He had already agreed to new elections and a new constitutional tribunal, which was the demand of the right. And then, you know, they were sharing mass public officials' addresses and digital locations and mass messages on social media so that protesters could go. And many mass officials, including Morales himself and the house of his sister, were burned on Sunday. The minister's houses, the head of the lower house of Congress, who was fourth in line for presidency, had his house burned down, his relatives kidnapped,

this wave of violence. And when Morales resigned, this violence continued. And this interim government, when an interim government's role is supposed to be called elections, has very quickly, first they named a new military high command. They're talking about publicly identifying all the seditious people, hunting down mass ministers like animals, that they've identified seditious journalists, foreign journalists and national journalists, and that they would be prosecuted. There have been attacks on Argentine journalists, the eight Jazeera correspondents with tear gas, and you saw almost immediately the great bulk of Bolivian national press flip dramatically to the right. And so, although rural people, indigenous people had received less coverage, now there was

almost no coverage, and there hasn't been, and it's all from the point of view of this government that's engaging in violence and extremely undemocratic behavior. I mean, you mentioned what this interim government is doing right now, mass, a Morales' party, I mean, leaving aside the issue of this presidential election, mass is still a political party that controls something like what, two-thirds of the actual legislature of Bolivia. So, like, independent of the presidency, now they're, none of those elections are in dispute, but now this coup government is basically saying, we are going to hunt down elected lawmaker makers who control the majority of Bolivia's, you know, legislature, right?

That is correct. Sounds like a democracy to me, I don't know. Morales' term is constitutionally elected third term in January 22nd, 2020, and the mass congress is legal and has a two-thirds majority in each house until that date. But please understand that Anya's and a handful of other opposition members appointed her to head of the Senate and President in an eight-minute period in front of an empty chamber, and the next day when mass officials attempted to get in the congress building, the police beat them and tear-gassed them. They eventually got in at midnight the next day and have been inside the building, a portion of them rotating ever since. It's like a Star Trek parallel universe. I don't know if you've seen

Mirror Mirror. Maybe I'm just telling you. Oh, you were talking to the exact right person, Catherine. I have seen every episode of Star Trek, so the reference is not lost. Okay. Well, I used to teach the cultural relevance of Star Trek, so we have to have many important discussions about this. And I'll show you my action figures after we're done. We can talk deep space now and on another episode. But you bring up this woman who is now the self-declared president of Bolivia, Janine Inez. And the party she represents got 4% of the vote. And now this person is the one who has just been declared her self-president. Could you talk about, first of all, who she is, but also what the party she belongs to,

who are they, what do they represent, and what are their policies or ideology? Well, I mean, this is a party where its official leader is the Bolivian Burger King King, Samuel Doria Medina. He used to also be the Bolivian cement king, but he's moved on. But it's not a significant party. I think what we really need to look at is the way that the Bolivian opposition, which was very fractured and coming up into the elections, they couldn't come up with a coalition to come in with the election, which would have improved their electoral possibilities. Although I still think it wouldn't have been a convincing alliance, is that you have Carlos Mesa, the former president who was considered an intellectual centrist historian, although he was

pushed out of power after a year and a half because he didn't comply with the results of a popular referendum on hydrocarbons. But these faces, these centrist faces really have moved into this wave that's been driven by this man Luis Fernando Camacho, far right wing representative of the Pro Santa Cruz Civic Committee. And, you know, he got his start in the Santa Cruz Youth League. This is an organization that in all their official presentations and video use a Nazi salute. Camacho, this is not confusing. This is not subtle. And this is who is driving the train now. You know, it's this charismatic religious laying of hands on Carlos Mesa and other political figures that God had ordained them to be president. It's been a very racist dialogue up until a little bit

of whitewashing in the last couple of weeks. And a man that was elected by a 242 member organization. And so it's really important to note that once you get in bed with a fascist organization, you just don't break up. Yeah, no. It seems like, you know, the opposition to Morales of, you know, like, you know, urban liberals or the centrist or whatever, we're happy to cheer along, yeah, any military, you know, kicking him out of office. And then, oh, surprise, surprise, guess what? The people who we've actually put in power are insane fascists. Well, you know, those are the people who are driving the train. Agnes and her ministers are in the same position. You know, she is from Lowland

Department of Benny. They've recovered her tweets. She erased them all, but they've all been verified on the way back machine, except one where she ridicules indigenous people. She talks about religious ceremonies and indigenous customs as satanic rituals. She makes fun of indigenous people for wearing shoes. She has a whole series of enormously offensive comments and racist comments. It's important to note that with the 2009 Constitution, Bolivia has, as a state, has no official religious affiliation and backs of freedom of religion. But when she swore herself in, she was carrying a Bible the size of a mattress and waving it around. I mean, now I know why her triceps aren't sagging, but it's this terrifying image. Right after-

It was her bringing this gigantic Bible into the presidential palace and placing it like over the flag and saying that we are reclaiming, like, you know, our government in the name of Jesus Christ against these supposedly demonic indigenous cultural or religious practices. Yeah, I guess it was, you know, like, even, it was fascinating because they interviewed in the press, when the press was still covering things, an indigenous woman, and she said, how is this different from the Spanish coming to bash us on the head with the Bible and sticking us with the sword? Here we are back in the same situation again, and I think that that's not lost on Bolivia's indigenous population. And remember that part of this rebellion and the

police rebellion was ripping off and burning that we follow, which is the indigenous flag, which is now, which was under Morales when a Bolivian official flag. So there's this patent rejection. And when we went and documented the massacre and we talked to the witnesses, over and over again, people said, they're killing us like dogs. They don't think we're human. We can't be in part of a government where, to them, we don't exist or have any rights. And that is a compelling feeling. Sorry. Sorry. Could you talk just a little bit more about the issue of the indigenous flag, but also the indigenous population of Bolivia? Like, it's what 70% of that country is indigenous and found in Moss, a party that represented them.

And, of course, now are being, you know, brutally oppressed by a regime that is very much not indigenous. Yes. Well, you know, the figures vary about how you identify someone as indigenous or whether they self-identify, but it's well over half of the population. And it's important to know that during Moss's long tenure and especially in response to the fourth run, there were people, but also indigenous people who had decided that moralists shouldn't run again, that it was time for a change that did not fully support him and that may have voted for the second place candidate Mesa. But it's important to note that what started as apparently a centrist alternative, although no opposition party complied with the gender parity laws where half the candidates

needed to be women, no, none of these parties made any attempt to appeal to indigenous candidates, rural candidates, working class candidates. And those people who were on the line or may have voted against from Rallis, I've really clearly seen this racial linguistic divide, you know, the police hitting people for speaking in Quechua if they don't know one of the indigenous languages in an official language of Bolivia, you know, all women wearing Boyetas, which are traditional indigenous scurfs from some of the cultures getting targeted and beaten, you know, those people who were on the line, the people I've talked to, they could see it pretty clearly now where this is going. And but the problem is in an interim government that doesn't behave like an interim government

doesn't respect the Constitution, doesn't respect basic human rights who do process, where do you go from there? And with the support, the vociferous support and applause of the Trump administration. Could you talk about like in terms of the circumstances leading up to the election, the term limits issue, but very specifically the role of the Organization of American States, the OAS in sort of, I guess, declaring Rallis' victory or this election fraudulent. Who are the OAS and what led them to make that, I guess, that judgment call, which I've seen cited in every major Western news account of, you know, why this coup has happened? I thought they canceled that show. Well, you know, we definitely should cancel their president.

The OAS at Morales' request carried out an audit. It was an audit that was supposed to take approximately 10 days. And the idea on the part of the Morales administration and with the support of the UN, the European Union and other nations was to transparently go through all of the election results and verify them. And Morales agreed that it would be binding. As violence spiraled, and in response to the police rebellion where the police basically walked out of the barracks and sided with the anti-Morales protesters, there were retaliatory attacks and Morales supporters burning down police stations. And the OAS finally on Sunday morning, not last Sunday, but the Sunday before announced hastily and far in advance preliminary results of the audit where they

suggested that there had been improprieties and there were problems with the computer system. It was an initial report in Spanish. I don't think there's going to even be a final report, but Morales faced with the violence and his promise that it was binding, called for new elections, one hour afterwards and called for a multi-party and all political actors to together elect an electoral tribunal. This didn't stop the violence and the following week, Almagro said, oh, there was a coup in Bolivia and the coup was on election day when April Morales committed fraud, which is such a bizarre statement. I mean, we're going, we're flipping back and forth from one end to the other. And, you know, not at all productive, not a focus in engaging

in dialogue or moving forward. Many of the OAS member states, and it's important to know, although the opposition rejected the audit, that, you know, the member states and the organization of American states are no way all Morales backers. You know, you have people like Duque in Colombia, you have people like the Macri administration in Argentina, although they're on the way out, the Moreno administration in Ecuador that are all, you know, basically anti Morales, but this erratic sort of positions on the part of the organization, American states, definitely exacerbated the crisis. And here we are with no clear outcome, an interim government that is repressive and doesn't obey the rules. And most union leaders and journalists and human rights

defenders with severe death threats and no real clue if they're going to make this, make it through this. So you've been covering, you know, like I said, issues like, you know, human rights and politics in Bolivia for, you know, 30 years now. Like, how do you see what's just happened in Bolivia as part of a broader kind of, I don't know, a counterattack on, you know, any even vaguely left-wing or populist government in Latin America, certainly, you know, what has been tried to have been done in Venezuela, but also like the rise of, you know, again, fascist right-wing figures like Bolsonaro in Brazil, who's also a big fan of this latest coup. Yeah, I mean, it's got a lot of cheerleaders. It's fascinating because I almost get the perception that these opposition leaders

wanted to guido it. They were really very interested in actually taking power beyond their hatred of moralists and their shift to the right. There's no real concrete plan or vision or strategy to actually govern. So we see here in Bolivia a shift to the far right, but I think that if this group does stay in power or if during elections, a right-wing group comes in either through non-transparent elections or by any means, you're going to see an Ecuador and a Chile within the next year. In other words, a kind of popular protest and uprising against governments that shrink benefits for the population with increasing costs, with increasing inflation, with perhaps a reduction in the fuel subsidies in Bolivia,

which are significant, definitely a reduction in the state sector, which grew considerably under moralists. So I think we're seeing a pendulum here that has swung to the right, but a pendulum never stays there. And I think that if this is the situation of this right-wing government, it's not going to last. Final question. I just want to get your thoughts on something I read over the weekend from Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch, who tweeted and linked to a New York Times article about what's going on there, said, quote, important that Bolivia's change of government not become an excuse for violence, discrimination, and neglect towards its indigenous communities. What do you think about Kenneth Roth saying that

now after the fact? Well, I would say that after the fact is better than nothing, but not at the right time. And I feel like the same way about the New York Times' coverage of this conflict. They printed false information that there was a state of emergency issue. They presented false information that the military were turning on moralists two weeks before things actually came to a head. And so now there's a mild mekulpa on the part of these people trying to shift their tone, but we're in an untenable undemocratic situation. And some clarity and balance would have been helpful. Even today, a person who's been more balanced the head of the House Foreign Relations Committee of the United States tweeted at Anya's and the security forces that a transition

government should only call new elections and that they had to stop engaging in state violence. There's some cognitive dissonance on people who really supported this push to get moralists out, no matter what. There's a lot of denial and there's a lot of backing up things that are unjustifiable and unforgivable. And so that's where we are. Well, Catherine, I want to leave it there. I want to thank you so much for joining us. Catherine Lettiber of the Andean Information Network, please check out their work. And also, Catherine, please stay safe as you continue to cover this ongoing coup in Bolivia. Thanks so much for having me. Thanks again. My number one invasive thought is like doing the mayor Pete dance. Well,

I hope is just the fight song of 2020. It's better than fight. Oh, it's way better. It's better than fight song because it's the shittiest song I've ever heard in my life. And it's just blasting from your car speakers and you're surrounded by like tacked up cops. It's like the first scene from Ghost in the Shell. And like they're just pointing like M4A1 stop mods at you like a guy as a fucking grenade launcher. And you're just they're like, sir, stop moving, stop moving. Just a minute. You're doing like the little forearm roll thing. Rolls. And they just perforate you. I've been thinking about doing the shuffling part of the dance into a grouping of red dots and just being instantly vaporized by 12 snipers with 50 caliber bear

with bare 50 Kells Felix Felix blasting that song out of the Hindenburg as you fly it into a forest fire. Taking your Tesla and just fucking flooring at full speed with a quarter mile start into into like a semi carrying gasoline riding the nuclear bomb down like snip limb pickings. So many videos of people through that dance. It is terrifying. It's great. It makes me want to vote for him. Okay. It's insane. It's insane behavior. It like it sent me in a downward mental spiral for sure. So it's working. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Well, I got plenty of talked about there's so much to talk about Mayor Pete this week and I want to get into that before before we go. I think it would behoove us to just bring up Elizabeth Warren's big news this week,

which is that she is psych. That's the big thing. Yeah. Later, bitch. That's her saying that to you before any accusations of misogyny. It is not me saying that to her. So the whole thing is like, you know, we've I just like we don't even need to talk about it that much other than to say we were right. We were right. We called it. We called it like as short ago as like a couple weeks. The line out of, you know, you know the precincts, you know the people, I don't have to run it down. But the line was I think it's sort of weird the way the left is just parsing every a single sentence Elizabeth Warren has ever said or not said about Medicare for all. It's just a bit weird and frankly in bad faith. Guess what? We were right. Yep. That parsing was actually

very necessary and led us to the correct conclusion, which is that she does not actually really want or care about Medicare for all. Nope. And you can tell that by this convoluted, this switcheroo she's doing now where she's saying public option for I'm going to split it into two bills, public option first and then like, and then then the third year after my approval rating is like like 30%. And you've lost both houses of Congress after another election cycle. We'll do the actual like, you know, Medicare for all part of it. And it's just, I'm sorry, like this is just the same exact dodge that Pete and Biden and Kamala all do. Medicare for all who want it. It's just a shorter time frame, but it's still the same bullshit. It's dangling the eventual Medicare

for all bill as a carrot out on a string. Yes. It's always around the corner, but it'll never get there. You'll never get there from here. You build this and it's Obamacare too. Remember when Obamacare was going to be the bridge to universal health care? Yep. It's always ooh, we're going to set it up and then ooh, we're going to add this and it's just going to be a natural progression. Meanwhile, it's wildly unpopular when it's past. It's alienating. It's hard to understand. A lot of people don't get the benefits from it and can't afford it. They get resentful for it. They're disillusioned by it. Then there's a huge backlash and it's the whole effort is put back another decade. And then the Republican administration destroys

everything that you built there when you would never lose. It is really funny to watch like the pundit algorithm attempt to rewrite itself after for months saying Bernie and Sanders are exactly the same on Medicare for All. It's ridiculous to imply that she's sort of half-hearted or slightly evasive about this issue despite the clear fact that she is. And now that this happens, the new line is that like, well, it's just about priorities. And she's prioritizing an anti-corruption bill or the wealth tax first, which is fine. Or then they say, there's no chance that the Medicare for All is going to pass this. How are you going to get Jill Manchin or Kristen Sinema to vote for it? Well, how are you going to get them to vote for

Elizabeth Warren? Exactly. They will vote for it if it ends up being an Obamacare style giveaway that they got and rewrite with the insurance companies. Exactly. If it is a real public option that is threatening the way they say it is, they will either undermine it over time or they will not let it pass. This is an existential fight because the health insurance, private health insurance exists or it doesn't. And if it exists, it will dictate the market and it will exploit people and it will cause death because it will ration care by ability to pay. That is inevitable if you have health insurance as an industry. It has to go and it will fight to the end and there's no way you can trick it. Just, oh, they're not even going to know we're going to do it. We're

going to sleep behind it. What? In the third year after, as you say, you had your approval rating just ground down by time and failure. And after a midterm, you'll probably lose if all historical trends are obeyed. I just think there's so many people, especially of the Warren supportive variety, who seem to think that they're being incredibly clever or savvy by preemptively negotiating against their own imagination or political beliefs because it's like, look, this is a campaign. Your campaign plan, it's all theoretical. You're just saying this is my wish list, this is what I want to do. You're doing exactly what the Obama said, which is you start negotiations by destroying your leverage. You start negotiations by already conceding

before you've even started the negotiation. The fact that it's all theoretical. It's like when Obama said that they were going to rule out anything that got rid of insurance when they started. I mean, like Elizabeth Warren is just like a slightly better version of that. But again, it's the same algorithm and we already know the results that that produces, right? But it's like, look, it's all theoretical. Your campaign platform is just a wish list. And I don't think there's anyone who supports Bernie Sanders, who has any real illusions about the likelihood of getting a real Medicare for all or a Green New Deal through this shitty fucking government. But if we all understand that to be the case, isn't that all the more important to just vote

for the person who actually stands up and believes in the things that you do? See, that's the thing. And that is, I think, the fundamental issue here. You can throw all the wonky shit and all the stuff about, you know, payment mechanisms and all that and competition of whatever, all of the details about how you actually pay for and switch to Medicare for all. What is Medicare for all? Is it a thing that is a realistic short-term political goal? No. It's a weapon. It's a weapon to fight the current political structure we have in this country, which will never allow in any context this to happen. Even if you've got a past, guess what? There's the Republican judiciary waiting to invalidate it and say it's unconstitutional,

which they 1,000 percent will. So that means that you can't have it in this system. So that means you have to destroy the system. You have to challenge it and beat it. You have to change the terms of the debate by reorienting the political structure, by massively increasing the number of people who vote, by creating, by re-energizing the labor unions, like by making a labor movement that can create points of leverage and through work stoppages, where you literally can challenge the government and challenge capital on their own terms. And the way you start with that is with a fucking issue that you can say, we want and people want it because they know it will help their lives. And we want it, but why it isn't happening is because of this system. And you

use it to smash it down. You don't already start by negotiating away from it and muddying the waters about what it really means and turning it into this just arid bureaucratic backroom deal that eventually leads to something no one's going to give a shit about. And even if, oh, you don't understand how it really works and what, what is actually more realistic? Making Medicare for all the centerpiece of a winning Democratic presidential campaign and then immediately going all in full core press first fucking days in office or splitting it into two bills and having two separate gigantic drawn out fights that will be leached to support and attack nonstop. And it's like, even with the better scenario, it's still unlikely, but Matt is exactly right.

Medicare for all and not the legislation one that actually as extant exists. The bill's written. This is the difference to the Warren and the plans thing. More important than that, it's a movement. And that movement is a weapon to attack the consensus that surrounds the role of private insurance in our lives. That's the number. You have to look at Medicare as an instrument for this, not as an end to itself, because guess what? We're not getting anything through this. And that's what's so funny about these people who claim that they're so fucking savvy and that they're so fucking evidence based and reasonable. Unlike all these pie in the sky dreamers and demagogues like Bernie, they're insanely naive because they still assume that this system can be

negotiated with. They think that a Mitch McConnell Senate and a trumped up judicial branch is going to let anything through. It won't. They have the points of leverage in this system. It has to be challenged and overthrown. Okay. Like I said, we already said too much about this. We basically don't need to because we've been saying it for months and months now. We're right. Everyone who doubted us looks foolish, but they won't admit it. But I just want to say the same thing that leads people to think that Warren's approach is more savvy or whatever. It's that same desire to think that you're smart. It's that same desire to feel to yourself and to project to other people that you're a smart person

and that you're not some demagogue, I mean, some ideologue or somebody who just like is a knee jerk voter. You're candy and smarter than that. And that's the same thing that make people support the coup in Peru. The coup in Bolivia because they're like, well, we don't know. It's too simplistic to say that this is just a coup or that the US is involved, right? Because why would we do that? And then, oh, Morales did X, Y, and Z. This is a questionable election and there's reason to want to over to challenge it. And then what happens as soon as as soon as it happens, as soon as the coup happens, an insane fascist bringing a Bible and yeah, waving around, they're cutting off the patches. And now they said we can't. We have to have a Morales leave because of the

threat of violence. The police who said we will not fire on these protesters are now just killing people in the streets. Everything and anybody who's approached the coup with this candy, you know, you want to approach you had less of a grasp on the situation than some dipshit kid, marinating in Stalin memes, who calls their parents the I agents because they wouldn't buy him a moistened Nagant for his birthday. That kid has a better grasp of that situation than you did because you could see at least the reality of capitalism and the Western imperialism, which are things you can't accept because those are too simplistic of answers. But I'm sorry, some questions have simple answers. And if you understand those simple answers, you get a hell of a lot closer

to the truth. So what these people end up being is fucking suckers and chumps. They end up being complete fucking boobs who get scammed so easily by people like Warren and by the fucking State Department propaganda. All I will say, though, there's still room on board the Bernie train. Come on over. The water is nice. The water is great. Well, I'll just say this on the on the show is that I have a one week amnesty period. Well, the end of this week, anyone who has been worn curious up until now, they have till the end of the week to come forward and I will take them off of my pain of mind list. This is a one time only offer at the end of the week. You're it's all done. So just let that let you know that moving on from Warren. We're going to spend the rest

of the show talking about Mayor Pete because as vexing as Warren is to me, holy shit. I hate this motherfucker. Pete Buttigieg so much. And here's the thing. I didn't think it was possible, but Mayor Pete is more evil than Joe Biden. And I'll tell you exactly why. Joe Biden has a record that's unparalleled and being one of the most damaging to our society in the history of American politics. We can take that as read. Mayor Pete has, like we said, been the mayor of, you know, a city in Indiana. That's all he's done so far. He got 8000. He won by 8000. He got 8000 votes last time. More people voted in my poll. What is the best car to crash into a wall dying instantly? By about a thousand, actually. Here's the thing. Despite the fact that Mayor Pete's record of

evil is still relatively contained, Mayor Pete is more evil than Joe Biden because he is saying, I am auditioning to be and represent all of the same things Joe Biden has done throughout his career, but I'm auditioning to be that guy in 2019 and continue that for another 30 fucking years. So like that is the fucking like that is what is so evil about him. Also, Joe Biden, like the charming thing about Joe Biden to me is that he has been on the wrong side of pretty much every decision in the Democratic Party. Every single one. Like pretty much like almost his entire adult life. As long as I've been alive, basically. He personally, you know, for growing his sons, he personally, he's just not profited from it at all. Like his idea of like getting one over is he

like makes a bill where it's like, all right, it's illegal for a prosecutor to ever even talk to an investment banker. Like it's you, if you go bankrupt, your bank can kill you, can enslave your kids. And he's like, all right, well, we got a, we got an AIG windbreaker out of this. Getting pretty cold out. Joe, you just saved yourself upwards of $90. Like he just, he's horribly in debt for most of his life. Just doesn't, just like, he always toots his horn about being the poorest senator, but it's like, yeah, that means he's just like, did this for the love of the game because he likes shaking people's hands. He just likes going to meetings. Yeah. But Pete, you know, Pete's a, Pete's a McKinsey bloodsucker. Pete is, he's already personally

profited off the rot. Pete is the baby that Vigo, the Carpathian tries to put his spirit into at the end of the year. It's slightly turning into his face. Yeah. Yeah. Vigo is Joe Biden and the baby is Pete Buttigieg. No, imagine being in 2019 being like, yeah, I'm going to be the next Joe Biden and support all the policies that he has stood for over his career in 2019. But he just thinks that it's a way to power. That's all he cares about. Yes. No. See, and that's the other thing that makes it worse than Biden. I do believe that Biden has some sort of jumbled up ideology in his head that he thinks like equals like American greatness. Like he closes his eyes and he imagines like a kid eating a hot dog in a Cub Scout uniform. And like he imagines that he's

making America like that. You know, it's like a bear. Pete has nothing. Like when you say, what do you believe? It's just a blank screen, just power for its own sake. Yeah. Mayor Pete, like if you sat Joe Biden down in a room and you're like, you asked him to like explain his platform, you would actually get an answer. It would be indecipherable. You know, it would just be like, you know, there's a little league game and the poor kids, they're hanging out with the rich kids, but they're all having a good time. And the thing was, you know, back then, you know, back then, okay, Latino guys didn't didn't ride bicycles. And we get them riding bikes. And that's really, you know, you, you remember, you remember back then, you remember back then,

we didn't know what the hell lipstick was. We thought women women's lips were just getting redder and redder and redder. And we didn't know what the hell to do about it. And, you know, that's really what it's all about is coming together and go, Hey, what the hell are you putting on there? And but like, it would just be insane. It would be word sell it. It would be something in there about like, it'd be the montage from parallax view. Right. But Mayor Pete, like he would just he would try to do the mayor Pete dance. Have an answer. He does not have an answer at all. So there are our two big stories about people to judge that I want to spend the rest of the shift talking about. The first comes courtesy of Ryan Grimm and the intercept.

And I would also like to shout out and thank Ryan Grimm on the show for actually putting us in touch with Catherine for that interview about Bolivia. That was great. Good looking out, Ryan. Good looking out, Ryan Grimm. This is in the intercept. Pete Buttigieg touted three major supporters of his Douglas plan for Black America. They were alarmed when they saw it. And like, this story is basically the Pete Buttigieg campaign is a brochure for a small liberal arts college in the Northeast that has just Photoshopped like just a bunch of smiling college kids and then just like a Photoshop like like Samuel L. Jackson stock photo into the brochure, you know, touting their diverse community and support. But you can still see the watermark like on

the face. Okay, so I'm just gonna start reading here. In July, he released his campaign's chief piece of policy outreach to black voters called the Douglas plan, a comprehensive investment in the empowerment of Black America. The plan covers everything from criminal justice reform to public health care education and beyond. It proposes using federal contracting rules to increase the amount of contracts going to minority and women owned firms to 25% and offer student loan deferment and forgiveness to Pell Grant recipients who go on to start businesses that employ at least three people. That's literally, that's this, I cannot believe it. That's the second time I'm seeing this exact policy. Didn't yeah, Kamala had this exact thing. Yeah. Like the response was

just people making fun of it. And now she's just got to pretend like she never put it out there. It's like, that sounds great. By the way, that policy, that's just a gentrifying supercharger. Yeah, because the people who are going to be in a position to take out the money or have access to the money to start a small business that soon after college in urban areas are going to be white. Basically, I mean, overwhelmingly, like it's just, it doesn't even do what it's supposed to do. And it's, it's, it's amazing. It's like, it's like the fucking benefit of this stuff is that it's supposed to micro target the exact people that are need to be helped and not be all, oh, universal programs. Oh, rich people get some of that. It doesn't help the people who need it. It's too

profligate. This is supposed to help exactly who needs it. And it doesn't even do that. This is a bill. It's like he went into Bushwick and was like, there aren't enough bars called honey plus salt. We needed to just be entirely that. So when pressed on the lack of black support, Buttigieg and his campaign have made repeated references to the Douglas plan named for abolitionist Frederick Douglass to build support for the plan. Buttigieg and his staff lobbied prominent black South Carolinans to endorse it in order to strengthen the cause of racial justice. The Washington Post reported on Monday that Buttigieg persuaded hundreds of prominent black South Carolinans to sign onto the plan, even if they are not supporting Buttigieg himself.

Along with the release of the plan, his campaign directed consultants to convene focus groups with undecided black voters in South Carolina. The resulting research memo finalized in late July concluded that Buttigieg's sexuality was a barrier to winning support among black voters. The memo was leaked to the press this fall. Okay, let's read through the lines there. Buttigieg's campaign is seeing the polling that he has less than 1% African American support overall, but especially in South Carolina, which, you know, you gotta show out there. It's like the third Democratic primary. And I saw a poll this week that said that Buttigieg was leading in Iowa and had like a 14 point balance, which I'm sorry. I don't, I don't believe it's an outlier.

And honestly, even if he is leading in polls right now, at the same time in 2011 was Herman Kane. And I just really feel like Buttigieg is Herman Kane with the rollerback pack. He's a flash in the pan. But I want to be clear about this thing about convening a focus group about his African American support and then leaking it to the press. His campaign convened a focus group that you find an answer for why he has such tepid support among African Americans. And of course, it's a focus group. So you, you know, design it to give you the answer you want and leak to the press, which is surprise, surprise, black people are just too homophobic to support Mayor Pete, which is interesting because he must just be using that as like an excuse for his

current white supporters. Yeah. So they don't feel weird about it. It's like, well, you know, he would have more, but they're just a little, there's a problem in that community. You know, yeah, exactly. Otherwise they would support him so they could feel better about their support. Exactly. And again, fun game to play here about any of this article. Imagine if the Bernie campaign did any of this. Yeah. I mean, yeah, like it is not since, not since prop aid, since people tried to like blame prop aid on homophobic black people. Yeah. Yeah. It's a throwback. Mayor Pete, like for all his forward positioning and like sort of tilt towards a weird, a weird type of LinkedIn futurism is a throwback like more than Biden is. Well, Biden is sort of like

the main message of his campaign is like, do you want it to feel like, you know, 2009 again? Yeah. Mayor Pete is living there. Like that. It's that type of exact type of liberalism. The come back to 2009. Remember, we all loved the oatmeal. Yeah. Mayor Pete should just like, yeah, he should have rage comics on his one, like in place of his policy section, which he didn't have for like six months. I mean, yeah, if Bernie, yeah, imagine if Bernie said that black people didn't vote for him because they're homophobic. Right. We'd first point out that Bernie isn't gay and he's lying. So like, there's a huge, huge thing right there. So going on now, three days later, the Buttigieg campaign

began promoting a list of 400 South Carolina supporters of his Douglas plan and emails to reporters and posts on social media. The supporters were rolled out in a press release open letter published in the HBCU times, which focuses on positive news related to historically black colleges and universities. Listed at the top of the press release were three prominent supporters, Columbia City Councilwoman Tamika Devine, Baptist pastor and state representative Ivory Thigpen, and Johnny Cordero, chair of the state party's Black Caucus. There is one presidential candidate who has proven to have intentional policies designed to make a difference in the black experience. And that's Pete Buttigieg, read the open letter released along with the plan.

That really sounds like an endorsement. The blowback came immediately. Devine, who had not endorsed the candidate yet in the presidential election, told the intercept that she did not intend her support for the plan to be read as an endorsement for Buttigieg's candidacy and believes the campaign was intentionally vague about the way it was presented. Asked if she knew if any of the black supporters of the plan were also supporters of Buttigieg. She said she wasn't sure. The only ones I really know were me and Representative Thigpen, she said. I don't know many actually now to think about it other than the folks working on Mayor Pete's campaign. Thigpen, meanwhile, has endorsed Senator Bernie Sanders for president

and was startled when he learned that the campaign had not only attached his name to the plan, but also listed him as one of the top three supporters atop the letter. Here is the really amazing part. The way they did this is that they sent people an email about this and said, not responding to this email will be used as evidence of your support and endorsement of Buttigieg. See, brilliant, brilliant. That's why I am still charged every month for my browser subscription. The same technique. After the publication, the Buttigieg campaign said it had sent the plan to a list of supporters and asked them to opt out if they did not want their name included on the list. The email also specifically said that the list was meant to

represent over 400 Black South Carolinans. Then, of course, it came out that maybe half of them were just white people. The Buttigieg campaign said that they have never claimed that the list was exclusively prominent Black South Carolinans and that it's important to have a multi-racial coalition to support the end goal of racial justice. Okay. And then also, as part of this plan, the Buttigieg campaign uses stock footage of a Kenyan woman to represent their support among Black South Carolinans. That's like all those guys who were on Twitter was Blacks4Trump, where they just grab it off of Shutterstock. Amazing. Yeah. No, what I love so much about their like, please respond to opt out of this endorsement. By reading this email, you have

agreed to endorse and beat Buttigieg and his Frederick Douglass plan. Amazing. Imagine if pretty Sanders just think about it. Just imagine if you just think about it for a minute and all of imagine all of the people who love and support people to judge and attack Sanders all the time. What? What has been their response to this? Not talking about it to my understanding. Here's my favorite thing about this. The whole thing about creating a focus group to give you an answer that you can leak to the press that basically slanders the Black community as being homophobic for not supporting you, Pete Buttigieg, and your plan to uplift Black people in America, and then being like, by looking at this email, you have agreed to respond to the email within an hour.

That to me, this is all McKinsey mindset. This is what he learned at McKinsey. And the other big article about this week about Pete Buttigieg is even more interesting to me because I just thought, like, okay, we saw those pictures of him in Afghanistan, like holding a rifle and looking down the barrel at it, holding it the wrong way or just looking like a complete fucking prep. He was not a gun guy. Yeah, he was an office guy in Afghanistan. Then he was like, well, like, it turns out like the bulk of what he did was economic development and war zones. Yeah. What does that mean? And then he joined McKinsey. And I remember learning about that, and I was like, holy shit, like just joining up with one of the most evil outfits imaginable.

And then when that first started happening, people started saying that the response was, oh, come on, like the only account he worked on was like a regional grocery chain. Okay. Well, it turns out that's the reason we know about that is because everything else he did for McKinsey is covered by an NDA. And what he did for them was blood curdling shit about, yes, as Felix said, promoting security and economic development in war zones. If you can read that sentence and not just see CIA on it, I don't know what the fuck he went into Afghanistan and Iraq and looked for Pell Grant recipients. So this is a this is a this is a piece at Buzzfeed by Henry J Gomez. Pete Buttigieg's work at McKinsey is a secret.

Buttigieg's campaign says it reached out to the company about the possibility of being released from a confidentiality agreement. But the mayor has so far stayed quiet. For nearly three years, he worked at McKinsey and company, an elite management consulting firm with offices around the world. It was work that took him he has said to Iraq and Afghanistan. And for years after that, in his early campaigns for public office, Buttigieg held up his stint in McKinsey as a selling point and proof that he was a business friendly Democrat, while only vaguely describing what he did and never revealing his clients. Asked by Buzzfeed News this week if Buttigieg would be willing to provide more information about his role at the firm, spokesman Chris Meager confirmed that the

campaign on at least two occasions has asked McKinsey about ways around the non-disclosure pack. Buttigieg's work is largely covered by a non-disclosure agreement Meager said Friday. McKinsey has become known for working with authoritarian regimes and taking on other ethically complicated projects. A New York Times report last year focused on its work for governments or state owned companies in China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. A recent lawsuit against the pharmaceutical company that makes OxyContin raised questions about the firm's role in perpetuating the opioid crisis. That is a hell of a fucking resume right there. It's ethically complicated. Okay. I went on Facebook and I clicked ethically complicated.

Mayor Pete is the anti-hero candidate. He's the FX protagonist candidate. He's like, listen, we've got to get out of the deal with the Saudis so we can make the move out of opioids. We've got to do a deal with the Saudis. Mayor Pete's policies are exactly as convoluted and non-functional as the sun's. All right. So we go into the neighborhood and we find every Pell Grant recipient and they will lease the guns to us and then we'll sell them to other Pell Grant recipients in another neighborhood. And then we get the Chinese to sell us guns from the IRA. And then they'll find people who received over six figures of student loans and they can get an earned income tax credits to buy the guns back from us.

What can you say? But the crow flew straight for a minute. Okay. Buttigieg has in the past described his time at McKinsey, which followed a Harvard education and a Rhodes scholarship at the University of Oxford as a sort of finishing school. In shortest way home, the political memoir he published earlier this year, he wrote that the job was a chance to learn what wasn't on the page and get an education in the real world if there is. He needed to get some street smarts. Pete graduated from the School of Hard Knocks. So the job also allowed Buttigieg

to present himself to Republicans as a businessman and different kind of Democrat when he ran for Indiana State Treasurer in 2010. Isn't that just the exact same kind of Democrat that they've always had in Indiana since like fucking Birchbide retired? What's new about that? Check this out. Buttigieg took his McKinsey pitch to a 2010 South Bend forum sponsored by groups aligned with the nascent Tea Party, an audience partial to the Republican incumbent. Quote, I did math for a living around economics. The economics of energy and the economics of stabilizing very tough places around the world in order to make sure there's less violence there.

Buttigieg told the crowd that night. Well, when you have 50 military age males and then you subtract 24 military age males, you have 80% fewer. It's kind of interesting that all of the places where all of the energy is, all of the violence is there too. Why does that happen? Buttigieg told the crowd that night, but I got to thinking if I'm any good at stabilizing economies, passifying, passifying populations, and stabilizing their economies. If I'm good at moving weight with Brie Ray, Rick Ross.

Maybe I ought to try to stabilize the economy right here in Indiana to use the same techniques learned at McKinsey, his education in the real world. Again, stabilizing, read, passifying restive populations in imperial war zones. We need a Phoenix project for America's entrepreneurs. So he goes, I got my street smarts working in war zones on economic stabilization. Buttigieg told the South Bend Tribune in October, 2007. And I think that experience stands up next to anybody's. Yeah, sure.

Okay, man. And by anybody's, he means all of the characters in James Elroy's Underworld USA trilogy. If you want to put my work up next to Tiger Cab, Tiger Camp, and all of the Tiger associated cadres, then yeah, let's do it. I just, I think that there's two, his career there in like Iraq was one of two things. Either he was a fucking spook and he is an actual CIA agent running for president, which is honestly kind of amazing. Just the idea that they're like, fuck it.

Like all these billionaires have decided they're going to cut out the middleman. Now the CIA has also decided they're going to cut out the middleman. It's like, why do we have to fuck around with these other guys? We'll just have one of our own do it. So he was either doing like deep, deep fucking CIA shit, like fucking Gladio to giving money to ISIS. Yeah, either that or best case scenario is he's charging the coalition provisional authority of like five and a half million dollars that could have gone to, you know, fixing the electrical

grid or, you know, getting rid of some of the giant piles of open sewage that they hadn't bagged at so that they could give him a PowerPoint presentation that's just a bunch of pictures of camels and it says like innovation. Like that's the best case scenario of what he did. I mean, the big secret of McKinsey beyond just like complete moral bankruptcy and outright evil is that like the actual work they do that's beyond, you know, yeah, just make a really addictive drug that feels better than anything for really cheap is just bullshit and shit like that.

It's just like, right. It's just like, you know, going into places and being like, you need to optimize your externalities will be 17 million dollars. I mean, there's a lot of money to be made just sort of like overcharging in war zones. It's one of America's biggest growth industries. So I'm sure there was a bit of that. So he goes here, when another reporter asked about McKinsey later that day, Buttigieg downplayed its relevance to his political and professional life.

The majority of my career has been in public service, he said. It's not something that I think is essential in my story, but also there's a reason why I write about it quite a bit in my book. And there's a reason why I discuss it whenever it comes up because I learned a lot there and it shaped my fluency in business issues. Buttigieg devoted most of a 10 page chapter in shortest way home to his work at McKinsey. Back to the U.S. in 2007, he wrote, I landed a job in Chicago at McKinsey and company, and my classroom was everywhere.

A conference room, a serene corporate office, the break room of a retail store, a safe house in Iraq, or an airplane seat. Well, what's up, man? Well, that's a hell of a gear shift there. Yeah. My classroom was everywhere, you know, in the university, in the boardroom, on the bus at a black site in Syria. What?

Hello? Looking, looking through a sniper scope. Yeah. Well, he never did any of that. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. The oil Derek prison from Face Off. He said a safe house in Iraq or an airplane seat. Any place that could accommodate me in my laptop.

I mean, without my laptop. You know me. You know me. I got to watch my show. All right, dude. The book briefly referenced, and Buttigieg occasionally mentions, work on efforts to promote energy efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. He went into substantive detail only on one other project,

grocery pricing for an unidentified client in Canada. But he offered nothing further on the safe house in Iraq, easily the most tantalizing tidbit in the chapter. And he did not elaborate beyond identifying himself as a civilian advisor on the war zone economic development he trumpeted while running for state treasurer and mayor. If he really is a CIA agent running for president, it would be fun. That makes me think he is because he just keeps accidentally revealing.

That's very, very CIA to just be up there and be like, you know, when I'm talking to my great husband, Chaston, when I'm talking to my handlers, when I'm talking to my supporters. He's like, let's just say I did great work for a company. You might say the company. So Buttigieg wrote reverentially of the firm, referring to McKinsey. I guess, what's up? But saw his future was in public service.

No matter how much I liked my clients and my colleagues, he wrote, delivering for them could not furnish the deep level of purpose that I craved. McKinsey consultants are now delivering for him. It's in place of donated more to him than any other Democrat running for president. Wow, they must have really liked him there. He must have been cool in the workplace. He must have. That's where he started doing the dance.

I've got. Okay, last last bit. Last bit of people are judging. Incredibly, someone has found his husband, Jason Briggs Instagram page, who posted a loving selfie with the caption, this guy of Pete Buttigieg, walking through the Berlin Holocaust Memorial. Just like San Antonio Spurs basketball player, Danny Green, of the famous post of all time.

You know, I had to do it one time. Hashtag holocaust. The hashtag that makes that one of the top 10 posts ever. Well, okay, I got to say to defend the Jason and Pete limited liability partnership. I've been to that memorial and unless someone explicitly told you it's a Holocaust Memorial, you'd have no idea. I mean, it's a German's idea of like trying to be like emotionally profound. So it's like, you know, there was a lot of concrete in the center of the city.

Like they feel bad, but it's just like they have no ability to artistically express that. So you can't walk. It's not like being in fucking doc out or something. Yeah, it's not like making an emotionally profound video in Auschwitz, like Clay Higgins, like cooking gumbo in the gas chambers. Oh, you got it. You go that Auschwitz down there. You go down that Auschwitz down there.

Oh, it's not like bringing your friend, it's not like bringing your friend. It's not like bringing your friend who's a talking crocodile to the mass graves. I like Higgins did a parent, now they got some goulash in there. Oh, man, I mean alligator, but it is right. It's one of those things where it's like, well, imagine a Bernie did it like imagine. Imagine a Bernie took a picture of Jane and also a singing alligator, who's friends with talked about his gumbo recipe, which Pete also did. Pete was the cameraman.

Pete was the cameraman for the Clay Higgins video. A lot of people don't know this. Just like, yeah, yeah, Bernie and Jane at the Holocaust Memorial Caption is like, they want what we got. My day one. Bernie taking a photo of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial caption. If I'm paying, who's going? I just wanted to, I just want to get a girl, get a girl.

We're going to, we're going to drink margaritas at the Holocaust Memorial. If she wakes up at 8am every day, I'm giving her a Louis V bag every week. We, I will take her to get her toes done. Well, imagine a Bernie Sanders just posted multiple videos where he's dancing around in ASA shorts and you can see his dick print and he claimed to be a surgeon. I'm going to buy my girl a college. Yeah. No girlfriend at the moment. Just taking my mom on cute little dates to the Holocaust Memorial.

I swear to God, life is lit when you're the senator from Vermont, you're single. Oh God. Yeah. Well, I mean, so yeah, that's I get paid $50,000 a bill in the Senate. My money's good. So yeah, there you go. Pete Buttigieg just, again, I cannot help but read like again, a weird poll stating that he's like leading in Iowa.

Just, I can't imagine who actually supports this guy, but now we know it's like probably the CIS. Yes. And they can put a hell of a thumb on this. But also, but like, I mean, like those we saw like Pete supporters are die hard. Like they are. Oh yeah. I know they're fully. I think because what we alluded to, there's no more powerful feeling than wanting to go back

to the past. Yeah. That's stronger than anything. No one else really has invited him a little. He could make 2009 real. Yeah. That's a powerful incentive. Virgil said that that the Kamala people were sort of like the Germans at the end of World

War Two, where they still sound the sense of duty, but they were really willing to give up. And the Pete people are like the Japanese. And they're still going to hole up in caves for 20 years after the war. Go home, Yankee. Your wife is on a bumble date with a consultant. Oh man. Yeah. So yeah, that's that's Buddha judge and you know, and Warren too.

Yeah. Um, once again, just one guy. Oh, yep. Such an easy choice. One guy. There's only one guy. You know the deal. Michael Bloomberg.

Come come join. Walk on the golden path. There's only one golden path. Yep. Deval Patrick. Yeah. Okay. We can talk about that real quick.

Yeah. We was wanting down for a second, but Deval Patrick popping in the race. Who the fuck is this for? Like, I was like, like, bleeding through my eyes, trying to figure out what the real angle here is. And people were like speculating that it's just all about making sure there's a brokered convention. Now when then you look into the actual rules, it makes that less likely.

Nope. Nope. Absolutely. And like all it is, it's like, how do they understand that this only will bleed support from everyone who's not Bernie Sanders? It's time for some game theory. This is not at all insanity. This is real game theory spit.

This is what John Nash won a Nobel Prize in economics for. Okay. The idea is, so there is the DNC as an institution, the Democratic Party's institution and the people who are running for the presidency mostly are members of it. It is in their interest to see Bernie not get the nomination. So that is their collective goal. That's the best case for them.

But the individual incentives of all the members of it running for president are different. They have the individual incentive to be president and as long as they think they could be president, they're going to stay in the race. Even if the longer they stay in the race, the harder they make it to beat Bernie. And that's the same collective action problem that fucked over the Republicans last time with Trump. It would have helped.

The thing to do early on would have been for one, everyone with one person to drop out, but they couldn't decide who the one was. So as long as everybody thought they could be the one, they were going to hang around and that's just what's happening now. And now people are jumping in because they feel like they can do it. They could still be the one. And it's because they have the individual incentive that goes against their collective incentive.

Once again, Matt, I think you have you have pierced the veil. Yes, indeed. And that is ironically the same collective action problem that makes climate change such a terrifying problem. But like the hilarious thing to me about Deval Patrick is like, who the fuck? I mean, again, Felix, your point about everyone just like, I will make 2009 real again. Like he's just saying, I'm the Obama candidate, but I worked at Bain Capital,

which is how Obama beat Mitt Romney in 2012. He is the synthesis of Obama and Romney. And everybody loved that election. That was fun. Yeah. There was never any real tension. It was never really that close. Romney was funny, but not scary.

It was great. Everybody had a good time. Why wouldn't you want to go back to that moment by fusing that race of the one man who couldn't embody it forever and we could live with him? Yeah, it's 2012. It's still you. You're still the funniest co-worker because you're sending like a sir memes on chain emails.

You're playing battlefield three. You're considered good at it because everyone who else who plays it is a 37 year old IT guy with shit reflexes. You don't know how bad it will get. Well, I mean, I say Bloomberg, Deval Patrick, come on down. Bring it on. Bring it on. More of them.

And also Eric Holder, I've heard might do it. Also hilariously, Bloomberg gave a speech this weekend where he disowned his support for stop and frisk during his three terms. This is so great. It's so transparently cynical. It's kind of poetic. This guy's got billions of dollars. He's been he was mayor in New York for three terms way more than he ever deserved.

Disgusting, filthy pig man. And yet in his last days on earth, it is like he's his late 70s. He's just throwing away money and humiliating himself for this absurd dream of being president. So I do think that that's nice that he's getting owned a little bit. Same thing for Tom Steyer and John Delaney. Yeah, absolutely. John is that rich. John Delaney is fucking bankrupting himself off the ship.

Right. But like if you look at how those two guys made their money, they're their money just killers. Yeah. Just soulless, fucking, just rip into the inefficiencies and the pain in people's lives. Just every insanity inducing thing about the American healthcare system and a billion other things. Just laser focus on what makes people's lives horrible. Even smelling blood in the water of capitalism and they spend decades doing this.

They come out, they have hoarded piles of money and they're like, I still, I'm still wake up and I'm me. I guess I need to be president and they don't even fucking sniff it. They don't even fucking, they get to, they get to spend a year blowing through their money, a fucking getting parvo by 500 handshakes in an hour and just humiliating themselves, getting made fun of for being losers and they're doing it to themselves. It's all self-inflicted because they're so deluded and they, in this one moment, they cannot be rational actors.

It is sort of poetic because it's like, if you spend your entire life like a Bloomberg, like a stay, or to a lesser extent, like a Delaney, you are, you've been a rational actor to a fault. You can see through everything that's going on. You can pierce through all the emotions and you can exploit everyone and anybody and you do. But, you know, you can't really apply that to yourself. You don't know why you feel like shit. Well, you do.

You do feel like shit. You wouldn't do this if you didn't feel like shit. Well, both there. Maybe if I was in the White House, I'd feel good about myself. Well, I mean, both their insane vanity and, you know, ludicrous need to claim the mantle of the electable Democrat all to the benefit of one Bernard Sanders, I'd say, bring it on. And to everyone who's listening, again, you probably already feel this way. But, you know, let's say if you're on the fence, still time to support Bernie, make phone calls

for him, donate money, volunteer. Let's do it. Get your name written in the Book of Life. Not the Pain of Limeless. Not the Book of Death. Also known as McKinsey and Company's spreadsheet. Yes. Till next time, guys.

Bye-bye. Bye-bye.