Chapo Trap House - 382 - Falcon Seeks Falconer feat. Briahna Joy Gray (1/6/20)

Episode Date: January 7, 2020

We vent about Iran, the catastrophic implication of the Trump administration's actions, and the effects on the world in general and US politics specifically. SPEAKING OF, we're then joined by Bernie Sanders' national press secretary Briahna Joy Gray to discuss the state of the Sanders campaign and what YOU can do to help out TODAY. So, listen up screwheads, this is what you gotta do: Bernie volunteer options, in order of importance: 1. If you’re in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, or South Carolina: - find an event near you: events.BernieSanders.com - Download BERN and add everyone you know and ask them to support Bernie: BernieSanders.app.link  2. If you’re not in one of those first four early states, the most important thing you can do is get to one of those first four early states, especially IA and NH. Take the “Bernie Journey” and travel there to knock on doors: BernieSanders.com/BernieJourney  3. If you can’t get there in person, make calls to early states. We have a huge goal of 5 million calls before Iowa. You can do it on your own from home, there’s a chatbox if you need help, and there’s a community on Slack of other callers to talk to. BernieSanders.com/call 4. If you don’t like making calls, join our texting team. It’s like tweeting but you’re convincing actual voters and is very easy. BernieSanders.com/text 5. If you live in a state that votes on Super Tuesday (AL, AR, AS, CA, CO, MA, ME, MN, NC, OK, TN, TX, UT, VA, VT): - find an event near you: events.BernieSanders.com  - And make sure you download BERN to organize your friends and family members for Bernie: BernieSanders.app.link  All volunteer options are also listed here: BernieSanders.com/volunteer

Hello, friends. It's Choppa. We're back again. And for our last episode, I know I said 2020 was off to a bang in a start that was a little too on the nose. Let's just say it seemed like bad screenwriting. About three hours after we recorded that episode, the United States killed one of Iran's top military commanders, Qasim Soleimane, in what is apparently a drone strike at the Baghdad airport. As he was invited to Iraq, which is technically our ally, as a diplomatic guest, we just took out the head, not a terrorist, despite what you may have heard from media, a top commander in a foreign country's military in a drone strike while he was on a diplomatic mission in a country that is technically our ally.

Kicking off what is kicking off, you know, inaugurating, you know, the thing that I've been fucking fearing ever since, I don't know, 2002, which is, you know, the military conflict between America and Iran that many of the people in our military government and intelligence services and everyone, every fucking hagfish that hang, you know, is consuming their corpses in Washington, D.C. has been fucking drooling over. It's the only thing that gets them hard is thinking about a military conflict between America and Iran. And it does seem like, again, I don't want to be like, I don't mean to be too apocalyptic about this, but like it does seem that like, if this continues, this is certainly, here we go, we're just heading

down that fucking, that path to fucking absolute oblivion. So I got a lot to say about this shit, but I don't know where do you guys want to start? Where are you going to kick it off? Because I mean, it's all bad. I mean, this is a fucking nightmare. It's not good. It's, it's less than optimal. No, it's a horrifying escalation of an already escalating situation there tit for tat thing of, we were basically on the same side there for the ISIS fight, which was always going to cause a conflict. And then as soon as ISIS was no longer a direct threat and that conflict between Iraq and Iran or the United States and Iran in Iraq came back to the four tit for tat shit. They launching missiles at our bases. They, we

kill commanders. There's a rating of the embassy, which we talked about. And then they decided apparently according to sources, they presented Trump with a bunch of options to respond to the embassy attack. And Soleimani was on there as the crazy outlier to make everything else look reasonable. And of course, That's a Dilbert ass fucking strategizing. Of course, Trump immediately goes to the stupidest, most violent choice. Yeah, I've read media reports of that. You should listen to the bonus episode that Felix recorded with a chapeau champion, Derek Davidson about this issue. And I, where I think Derek

does shed some, I think warranted skepticism narrative about how this is kind of like the military covering their own ass because of like, a, how badly this is going to go. But like, this is something, the idea that like they're kind of washing their own, like we made, we gave him the crazy option and the crazy man did the crazy thing is just a little too convenient. Like I think, I think they're, this is covering their own ass and using Trump's incompetence and, you know, sloth as a kind of cover for how bad this shit is going to go or like, just how quickly things have gotten completely out of their control. Because almost immediately, as anyone probably could have predicted, the Iraqi government

comes out and says, all right, that's it. No more of US troops. Get out. Get out. Bye bye. And Trump responded at first by saying, we're going to sanction you. We're going to sanction quote, like you've never seen, as he likes to say, uh, for want wanting a foreign government countries, military in your country, blowing up people at their airports. Uh, but then today, the best, we had a report come out that Reuters ran with saying that their US is going to say, we're going to leave because they told us to, and then 10 minutes later, the Mike Esper, Mark Esper, whatever the fuck his name is, the, the one of the 15 interim, that defense secretaries is saying, actually, no, disregard that we're staying, which means

who the fuck did that report come from? What is going on? There is no unified anything. It's just, it's factions trying to get ahead of this thing somehow, uh, put their version out in the media. And, and of course, since Trump's in charge, there's no one actually directing any of it. So honestly, it could spiral in any direction. The really terrifying thing about this is like right now, how bad this gets depends entirely on how hard Iran chooses to retaliate. Yes. And the thing is they're going to retaliate because Soleimani, I mean, was a major, major figure in Iran. And even if the, you know, Iranian government is not popular or there is like, you know, popular unrest or democratic

or forces reforming and protests, blah, blah, blah. The fact of the matter is like, this is an attack on their country. Yeah. And you can say, oh, it's a dictatorship. They made all those people march to the streets. They didn't make a million people fucking march. They did not have that functionality. And the fact of the matter is like this guy is a national hero for the most part in that country and some in a way that is largely totally incomparable to anything we have in this country. No. And like, so the question is like, how hard are they going to retaliate? I hope I, and I think they are canny enough to know that like, they don't have to do a lot to get almost all of what they want because

like, you know, up to the moment that we snuffed him out, Soleimani had won entirely. Like he had accomplished all of his goals in terms of stitching up America in the region. Saved, saved Assad. God kicked ISIS out. Yeah. Beat ISIS. And is now as the final coup de gras, having the Iraqi government that has become a client of Iran, formally requests the United States to leave. Well, the funny thing is, is that for a minute there, it looked like they might have overplayed their hand in Iraq because there were a bunch of anti Iranian protests in Iraq. They were, they were mad about all the Iranian influence in the government because people have a base. Like there's nationalism is unfortunately

a real thing and people, regardless of religious affiliation, even in Shia communities, like even Makhtar al-Sidar were making noises about how they were sick of Iran based being overbearing in Iraq. And all of that, of course, now completely obliterated. I mean, again, like, listen to the Derek and Felix episode, but I can't be stressed enough. Soleimani was probably our single most prominent and effective adversary in the region. The difference is, it's not like you just like take him out and there's no one to replace him. Like his whole infrastructure and like everything, like everything around, like it's all in place. It's ready to be picked up. And it's like, there's no victory here for

us in terms like, oh, we got him or whatever. But like, again, the thing that's so terrifying is it depends on how hard Iran retaliates. And if they do, if they kill, you know, our soldiers or like, you know, God forbid, American civilians, then like, you know, our retaliation is going to be even worse. And then it's just like, then we're off to the fucking races. And it's just like the apocalypse. Like then any fucking thing could happen. But like leaving that aside, what's really terrifying is that like, forget like the neoconservatives who for which Iran has always been the centerpiece of their sort of Pax Americana vision of American imperial hegemony and like, you know, democratic world building, right? This is the only thing

that gets their dick hard. And as bad as Iraq has went, they haven't forgot about it for a second. And they're they're, you know, salivating right now thinking about this. It's like the only thing that's gotten them stiff in probably 10 years now since the surge, leaving them aside the entire entire US foreign policy establishment regards Iran as our number one enemy, regards it as just and natural that they are our enemy and should be treated as such. And then many of the senior leadership of the military blame them for why we lost Iraq. Oh, yeah. And they want and they want payback. Well, it was no fair. I mean, yeah, it's no fair. We go in and smash up Iraq, radically destabilize the entire country.

It's not fair that them who are literally right next to it and co-religionist with a huge percentage of the population would dare to also be involved. That's cheating. We only we get to do that. You got to watch. So I mean, I have, I mean, Matt, you said in our New Year's episode, you know, predictions for the New Year, you see an increase in blood dim tides and Falcons having increasing problems hearing their falconers called it. So yeah, called it that really does seem like what's good. It's happening again. It's not like it's like the worst case scenario hasn't happened yet, but it's like we are rapidly approaching that point. I mean, it's hard to imagine something worse than this happening to begin the fucking

year. And I cannot stress enough, it's not Trist Trump. It's not just the New York conservatives every single person in charge of our military intelligence and foreign policy apparatus in this country is a lunatic. They're a lunatic top to bottom. And I want to talk particularly about the presidential election and like the Democrats as far as this goes, Bernie Sanders and then I guess Gabbard and actually Andrew Yang, too, but Bernie Sanders mainly and Marianne and Marianne. Let's not forget, they were the only ones who had Bernie is the only one of consequence who had not just a good response to it, but one that even surprised me and about how good it was. Everyone else is doing the absolute worst thing possible, which is

just run the Democrat program, which is just nervously run to the right on all foreign policy. I'm going to use Elizabeth Warren as the perfect example. Her first statement on this was, of course, he's a monster that's killed hundreds of Americans. Americans, by the way, who were troops fighting in a war. And I mean, like these are not. Yeah, it's not civilian. It's not civilian. Yeah. Those are our friends in Saudi Arabia who did 9 11 that he's talking about. This is a war that's being fought. Of course, he's a monster. He's killed hundreds of Americans, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but and then say, Oh, but like, you know, this is very concerning. The wrong channels. I cannot. I can't just

wait. God, like just that might when I fucking just saw that shit coming across my phone. I was like, when Catherine and I were watching a movie and I had to pause it in the middle of it and just understand what was happening. And as soon as I realized what was happening, like, honestly, I, I, I like, I wept. Like I wept because of how terrifying, like, how much of this, like, of my nightmare about this shit is coming true. And the big part of that is just seeing once again, I cannot stress how fucking dangerous it is for any of these Democrats, much less ones that are potentially going to face a general election against a Republican party. And, you know, Trump as commander in chief, who's, you know,

taking out the bad guys, I cannot stress how fucking dangerous it is for them to wedge open the door of fucking nuance and reasonability. Just even a crack about this idea of talking about like, Oh, well, we can all agree. Iran is an evil monstrous country. And this guy was our number one bad guy in the region. No, no, no. There is no nuance. There is no reasonable position on this. It is simple. This mystification, you're going to, they're going to make it like they're going to nuance us all into our fucking graves. It is simple. No war with Iran, no escalation, no military response. This is unjust, unnecessary. This is pure madness and lunacy. And the way that response, that Democrat response. And, you

know, I'm sure that Elizabeth Warren's fans who love her savvy and her plans and all that will, will say this is that, well, no, that's actually, you got to do that. You got to, otherwise you're going to get red baited or you're going to look like a pussy or soft on terrorists. But what do you think is the actual message when you say this guy was a horrible menace, a danger to the lives of everyone in the Middle East and American troops or also when I didn't want to kill him because they didn't fill out the forms properly. Whereas Donald Trump is like, yeah, this guy is a fucking threat. And I fucking murked him. What looks stronger there representative that this is a, this was Mayor Pete's statement,

which took him what a day to hack. He was the last one. The top priority of a commander in chief must be to protect Americans and our national security interests. There is no question that Kasim Sulamani was a threat to that safety and security and that he masterminded threats and attacks on Americans and our allies, leading to hundreds of deaths. But there are serious questions about how the decision was made and whether we are prepared for the consequences. You're literally being the pussy cop in Cobra. Listen, no, listen, listen to me like, ah, well, do you have you considered talking to the X gang before engaging in military action that could destabilize the entire region? We must take a strategic deliberate approach

that includes consultation with Congress, our allies and stakeholders in the Middle East. So you're agreeing with the premise, but you're saying I'm too much of a fucking wuss to actually protect you from this horrible menace, this man who none of you heard about until yesterday. There is no middle ground on this. And again, it is so fucking dangerous for the Democrats to do this. You want to talk about, oh, what's going to swing the fucking election to Trump? It's going into a fucking election where there's like war shit happening. We've seen this fucking happen where, oh, I was, you know, I was for the Iraq war, but you know, against the way the Bush administration did it or, you know, like, oh, like this

dithering on it. And again, like this is not 2001. Yes, we're like 9 11 happened in like 90% of the country was bang for blood. This should be and is a brutally unpopular thing to do. There is no appetite in this country for another fucking war in the Middle East or any of the or even the drone strikes or any of this shit. I think people are fucking thrilled to fucking see another war happen in this country. Even even the fucking chudge for the most part won't. I mean, they'll line up and fucking they'll they'll, you know, they'll line up because they're all bloodthirsty hogs. But like, they don't, there's no real enthusiasm for any of this shit. Well, no, no, no, no, no, you could even explain it.

Yeah, this is wrong. This is another endless war. This is Iraq. Again, it's going to cost us trillions of dollars, thousands of lives. The people who are doing it are lying to you. And like this just full stop. A lot of people like, you know, like interacting there, it's just people like on Twitter, responding to this stuff of like, you know, our younger fans have been like, this is crazy. Like, is this what America was like after 9 11? Like, God, no. And I want to say is like, in a way, kind of yes, because the script is and people selling it to you are exactly the fucking same. Judy Miller on TV talking about this shit. Arie Fleischer and Karl Rove going on Fox News.

I think that Iran, they're actually good. They're happy he's dead. Arie Fleischer literally said the assassination of this guy would be like a a catalyst to topple the regime and like unite the people of Iran against their leadership. And for America and pro-democratic forces, Mike Pence was tweeting that Sulamani was literally involved in smuggling the 9 11 hijackers or putting literally saying he's involved in 9 11. It's the exact same script. And it's the exact same people selling it to you. And I don't just mean Arie Fleischer and fucking Karl Rove. I mean, the New York Times front page a one above the fold, anonymous military sources saying, oh, yeah, like he was he was

hours away from killing Americans when we pulled the trigger on him. He was going to go up the fud ruckers in the green zone. All of it are lies. It's not true. It's not fucking difficult to parse this. They're lying to you because we've seen this all happen before. But here's the crucial difference though. It's not like America was after 9 11, which was a genuinely terrifying moment. Oh, we're like 90% of the country was just like absolutely bloodthirsty, 100% on board for just anything military, jingoistic, nationalist. We go to war anywhere in the fucking world. They'd be on on board for fucking anything. And if you were against it, you were in an

extreme minority that could be painted as a fringe who hates America, doesn't love the troops, etc, etc. That that is so not the climate of what the country is now. But here's the thing. It kind of even more depressing. It kind of doesn't matter. Everyone like it's like I don't want to make people feel like helpless. The most important thing about a war with Iran is that it hasn't actually happened yet. Like we can stop this from happening. Like it's important to be against this. But like what's depressing to me is Matt, you and I were talking about this the other day is it's almost quaint how hard the Bush administration and media tried to sell the war in Iraq based on a complete top to bottom fraudulence. How

hard they sold it. Whereas now I just feel like they're doing it, but they're doing it in the most half ass way possible. And what really again, what really terrifies me is that just nobody wants it. Everybody knows it's bullshit, but everyone is just so like demoralized and fucking depressed that like almost doesn't matter. Yeah, it's that it's just an inertia. Like it's just it's just a habit. It's a routine that they don't really even need to sell it that bad that much. And every all events have just been flattened. You know, war in Iran is just another fucking spectacle. I mean, it's probably not going to touch most people in America. It'll be untold horror and like, you know, worst case

scenario. Yes, it could lead to an escalation that, you know, leads to an actual conflagration, but much more likely it's just going to be a rock on an even grander, more horrifyingly bloody scale. And it'll just be another goddamn channel on the TV that you don't watch. But again, this is not America right after 9 11. Like they like this is like based on opinion, like 80 percent of America wants nothing to fucking do with this space to create a counter argument or counter movement. But that space only exists if there is someone who is clearly articulating an anti war position that does not accept that you could like does not accept all of the premises baked into why we had to kill Sulamani or why Iran is

our enemy chief among them, by the way. And I hear this from politicians, journalists, foreign policy fucking walks. This idea that Iran and Sulamani in particular has done so much to destabilize the region, destabilize the region. Who the fuck are you? What were you been at? Were you in a coma the last 20 years? What the fuck do you think America has done in the Middle East? We did. We did the stabilizing and then they came along and destabilized everything. I just cannot be stressing up. Did you like the Iraq war? Did that go well? Even if you like America or like think our empire is a good thing or that we should be a leader in the world, you think Iraq or in Afghanistan, you think we looked

strong to the rest of the fucking world? We're on a great winning streak as a military and I just think it's going to keep continuing into the 21st century. I mean, we're what? We're 0 for 2 now in the 21st century. Depends which ones are counting. Yeah, at least 0 for 2. We're definitely 0 for 2. We're over something. Yeah, we're sitting on a goose egg for a while now, probably since Persian Gulf one, maybe Bosnia, I don't know. Here's the thing though. It just like, it doesn't take that much and when it becomes like a partisan issue in which there is not a clear anti-war position being articulated by a political leader, people's default will be to eventually fucking fall in line and especially if it's

a Democratic candidate that's talking out of both sides of their mouth and like, you know, making the other side's case for them and in the process looking weak and dithering because like, again, if you're thinking about like, oh, like it's war, Americans' lives are on the line, most people are just going to go with the default of like, I'm going to go with the guy who's fucking waving the flag. Well, the guy who's going to do something about it. Yeah, the Democrats are saying to you, there is this horrible man wandering around the Middle East, like some sort of milit, like some sort of Shiite Grinch ruining all of our, our, our carefully made plans in Iraq and Syria, wherever else, killing

American troops, being a threat. My God, he was probably going to carry out attacks in the near future, according to our solid intel. But hold on a minute, we got to get approval from the chief. When does that guy ever look good compared to the guy who's like, there's a fucking threat and I'm going to neutralize it right now because I care. I care about American safety. On that note, I have a mini reading series. I just saw this from the Washington Post opinions headline on Iran, one presidential contender rises to the moment another dozen seat is a Pete by Jennifer Rubin. Oh, leading Iraq war picks. Yes, absolutely. It's well, there's a picture of Mayor Pete. So that's a little hint for you. The one

that fucked up was Elizabeth Warren, a long quote from her at meet the press. Contrast that with former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who appeared on CNN State of the Union, reading from the transcript. Jake Tapper asked him, are you saying the president deserves some credit for the strike? Pete. No, not until we know whether this was a good decision and how the decision was made. And the president has failed to demonstrate. Now let's be clear. Soleimani was a bad figure. He has American blood on his hands. None of us should shed a tear for his death. But just because he deserved it doesn't mean it was the right strategic move. This is about consequences going on later on in this transcript. I would

never hesitate to use force if it was necessary in order to protect American lives. The question is, was it necessary and was it better than the alternative? It's not hard to believe that General Soleimani was in the middle of a campaign of violence. He was a walking campaign of violence. But when you're dealing with the Middle East, you need to think about the next and the next and the next move. This is not checkers. And I'm not sure any of us really believe that this president and the people around him is really going through all the consequences of what can happen next. I'm...

This is the ancient Chinese game of go, not checkers. You bums. He was a walking campaign of violence. How are you? Okay. Let's take that at face value. I'm sure he has killed a lot of people. He's a military commander. What the fuck is America? We are a fucking carnival of violence. We are a fucking tent revival of fucking slaughter and bloodshed all over the fucking world. And here's the thing. I saw so many fucking of the Biden and like these fucking Democrats

got so angry at the thing that Bersander's campaign tweeted where he's just like, Shuja described it as like big lose yourself, eight mile energy. He just says like, I was against the Vietnam war. I was against the Iraq war. I'm against this one. I'm against all the horrible imperial bloodlettings that are now universally regarded as disasters. Guess what? I was unequivocally against them and like, you know, fought against them, voted against them, marched against them at the time. And I'm against this one now too. Who are you going to fucking trust? And by the way, Joe Biden, when he's asked about this, the Iraq war shit, he's just lying now.

Oh yeah. He's just straight up saying I was always against the Iraq war now. He said as soon as it started, I was against it. What good, how good does that do anyone? Guess what? You helped start it, asshole. There's no fucking shit. No backsies on this one, dude. The blood is on your hands too. It's on fucking Pete's hands. It's on all their fucking hands. It's on all of our hands unless you unequivocally oppose any military action against Iran or in the Middle East broader. Get every fucking troupe out of there.

Bring them home. That is a really good fucking point. Like when we're talking about, oh, American interests in the region, first of all, when they say that they're not talking about, uh, American civilians, they're not even talking about troops at a base somewhere. They're talking about Saudi oil tankers. That's what they mean by American interests in the region. But if you are talking about Americans, Oh God, they're going to get attacked. How about they not be there? How about that solution to the problem that doesn't leave the potential for an escalating series of attacks that lead to a full scale invasion or some horrifying

bloodletting? This is a nightmare. And like the thing is, what do we know about Trump? He's like, he's lazy. He's stupid. And thus far, that's been kind of his saving grace as far as foreign policy goes in that like, he's done a lot of bad shit. But like, we know for sure they had the strikes on Iran, all queued up for him to go. And he canceled it at the last minute. They were like 10 minutes away from hitting, you know, retaliating for Iran, shooting down a drone or attacking an oil tank or apparently allegedly. I think Trump, like at his bottom, doesn't, his instinct is not always to go to war. Like most of the US foreign policy

establishment, like he is slightly an outlier of that. But it doesn't mean like he won't do it. The thing is, is just like, he fears war because he fears being a loser more than anything or looking bad. And you know, like if you have half a fucking brain, if you imagine America going to war with Iran, guess what, we're going to lose. It's not going to, it's not going to fucking go well. But the thing is, just as true, is that if he thought it would make him look good or stop him from having to say he was wrong about something, he would kill hundreds of thousands of people in the blink of a fucking eye. Like he, like he's, he's a lunatic. I'm like, there isn't, like there's, there's not a single person

whose hand is on the rudder of any of the apocalyptic war making powers of the US state right now who isn't a moron or a lunatic. And first, and both of those is the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, a snake handling fucking revivalist, a hick psychopath, a real, a real fucking like end times guy who has been pushing Trump as, as much as he can towards confrontation with Iran ever since he got in there. It's the real version. I mean, it's the farce version of what people accuse the Bush administration of being, of, of their, their fighting a new crusade in the Middle East. Here's a guy who's

explicitly saying, yeah, I want to do a new crusade for Christianity. Yeah. I mean, yeah, Bush would always talk about like, you know, the battle of, uh, was it of Gog, the Gog and Magog. And he would say less of dumb shit like that because he's just a dry drunk dumb, dumb who like filled the gap in his fucking soul and brain with, you know, Christianity after he had to quit booze and coke or whatever. And like, like the people who ran the Iraq war, none of them believe that shit. I think a fucking, you think a fucking lizard like Dick Cheney believes anything deep in his heart about Christianity

or the book of revelation, but, but they were happy to have the play up the support of those people. Guess what? 10, 20 years later, those people are in charge now. And if you're talking about Pence and Pompeo and those people, they believe it. Yeah. They believe it. Alex Pring wrote a great article about that, about how the modern GOP is defined by the people who made the bullshit for the rubes got replaced by the rubes because they were

the only ones in line then after they were, after they left. And so now the, it's all actually staffed by real people who believe all the crap that was just supposed to get the hoopleheads into the tent. I don't want more to say like, here's where I want to go with this. Like, so we were talking about the politics of this, like, you know, the military strategy, these grand gestures, just that how, what an absolute nightmare it is to consider her military conflict with Iran, both in terms of, you know, mostly what it would do to the people in Iraq and Iran, but you know, also like this country, like how badly we would get washed. But like, here's

the thing, we're not, we're not experts on any of these things, but let's talk about something we are experts on, posting. Yes. There's a, there is a new theater of combat in the 21st century that is just, it's just now beginning to, to form. And that is the meme war. And if this is any indication, you're rooting for America, it cannot look good. Yeah. This is not a good indication. Our, our troops, they're out there posting absolute cringe.

They're posting cringe folks. They're on TikTok, either they're like, you know, teary-eyed, being like, I don't know why it runs, gotta fuck with us, y'all. You better, you better, you better watch out or, you know, or, you know, like, or just are praying or more, more, most likely they're doing TikToks or they're like lip syncing, horny dialogue, like, are you ready little girl to be punished? Yes. All right. And then just like winking at the camera, they're doing dances and shit. The Iran, the Iranians, they are posting strong. They are posting so strong right now. And they're coming with some, some real fire. I'm talking in particular, someone who animated, you know, in Farsi, like

animated that low res American flag, Trump posted to like, yeah, kick off World War Three. An animation of that just slowly like, like rising towards you, like coming out of the screen and turning into a flag draped coffin as the number of not likes, but U.S. casualties just tick up. I'm talking about just random Iranians just replying to people just saying like, you were, you were the, you were the, you were a line of the seventh generation of bastards and swine. And like, just, just being like, I hope your son gets deployed to a forward military base in Iraq in the next week. They're posting real hard. And I just want to use, I want to have one, maybe a more hopeful example of some of the, some of the, not just the

meme warfare, but, you know, cultural exchange that's going on now between America and Iran. Because genuinely the American people and the Iranian people, there shouldn't, there's no, there's no stress here. There shouldn't be any beef here where they were not each other's enemies. There's no conflict that any of them are aware of on either end of it. Probably have a lot in common. So this comes courtesy of Jack Wagner of Yeah, but still podcast. He is a very good sort of minor and a documentarian of the world of Instagram. But he discovered something he says, watching unofficial civilian peace negotiations happening

in TI's Instagram comments. So this is a TI posted on Instagram, a screenshot of the Supreme Leader of Iran. And the cat, the subtitle is death to America is about the rulers of America. And his Instagram comment to this image is, yep, uh-huh. Exactly what he said, exclamation point, exclamation point. Ain't no Iranian, no, ain't no Iranian never called me no. Infested our communities with dope and then locked us up for it, allowed the police to pull us over and gun us down with no accountability or enslaved us and tried to act like that shit never happened. So as I pray for our soldiers, I'm also praying for theirs. This ain't our war champ. Don't start no shit. Won't be no shit. Maga hats

ought to go first. So this, this is the rapper TI's comments about a potential war of Iran. Then immediately his comments, uh, from official, official C short says here, I want no smoke with these people, zero, none, nada, zilch. Next comment, just something, something in Farsi. Then the next comment from Eli Elham Ham to official C short, Iranian flag, Iranian flag, Iranian flag, flag, flag, flag, flag, flag, because you don't have civilization and nobility. Nor you can't smoke with Iranian people, nor you can't eat their poo poo shit emoji. Next is a salar wannabe responding to official C short. Sorry, man, for all these negative

comments from Iranians. They think you mean, they think by to want no smoke, you meant something bad. We want no smoke with no nation too, man. Official C short. Emotions are high right now. I understand. I just know we do not want an issue with Iran. Our president does shaking my damn head. Next comment from, uh, Sharam, Ghassimi, six. We, the Iranian people, again, responding to official C short, we, the Iranian people, our friends are the American people and have no problem with us, just like the American leaders with Trump and Pompeii. Our problem was with American domination and self control. We Iranians say to the American people, we have nothing to do with you, but give such a lesson to Secretary

Trump that even in the grave, he would shake his head when he heard the name of Iran and General Soleimani, Iranian flag, flag, flag, flag. So maybe some hope there, you know, if everybody just gets talking in the Instagram comment sections, uh, go, go, uh, go where they're where the, uh, the muscle man are, the Iranian muscle man, uh, make some connections like love. Let's create sort of a Christmas truce in the Instagram comment sections so that we can deescalate amongst the populations. Yeah. Okay. Wait. This is the last thing I want to talk about. Trump also said by via, you know, Twitter again, ha, ha, another thing we're experts in this thing was like, uh,

I'm supposed to give like, you know, legal notification for starting a war. Consider this tweet that thank you're welcome. Then he went on to outline like if Iran retaliates in any way, he already has a list of like targets, including 52 quote cultural sites inside Iran that he's willing to military and cultural military and cultural sites, including 52 specific cultural sites in Iran or I guess the shield world of their, their holy sites and like sites of like world cultural heritage that he's willing to just wipe off the mat with fucking missiles, which is hilarious because that is literally the argument we use for why first the Taliban and then ISIS are evil. The Taliban blew up those statues

in Afghanistan. ISIS destroys cultural heritage sites and like not to mention just like how utterly monstrous that is to contemplate doing. It's also something that like I was thinking about this like America, like as a culture, we really don't have any analog for the, the, these incredible like breathtaking religious and cultural sites in Iran that are like centuries if not thousands of years old that represent like some of the most like beautiful like architecture and places of worship and culture that have no parallel whatsoever in American culture. Spoken like someone who has not visited the original TGI fried eyes on the Upper East side, the very first one. I don't know if you guys are aware of that.

Really? Yeah. It used to be a singles club. That was the original concept. Wow. Yeah. It's a singles bar. I mean, we have, we have, we have symbols of our power and might, which is certainly what the World Trade Center was, but like there's nothing that's like this. And if I mean, again, like doing that would be not just a war crime, but it would be unleashing something that we cannot possibly imagine the consequences of or what it means to not just the people of Iran, but like an entire part of the world. And you know, there was another example of posting strong. It was just some random comment who said like Americans don't understand what it means. Like a hero means there are no heroes in American culture

that we can retaliate against that are sent there would be analogous to General Soleimani. He said, who are you going to kill? Spider-Man or Spongebob? And like that, that just really stuck with me. Yeah, no, definitely. It really does feel like we are the fucking vandal culture, or an absence of culture, just exemplified by the most disgusting Philistine in human history, just sitting at the prowl of the most powerful military ever with the ability to just wipe out centuries and millennia of fucking cultural heritage by pressing a button. And the idea that we let it ever get to that point, even if he doesn't press the button, that we let it get to this point is just a massive indictment of the entire structures

that led that we've created. I mean, it's just like the thing that keeps getting me is like Soleimani, whatever you think of a good guy, bad guy, just that like this is a guy who, you know, he spent 40 years going up through the ranks of the Iranian military and fought through Middle East diplomacy, all that internecine back channels and stuff, fucking showed down against Saddam during the 80s and fucking the IDF a million times and saved Assad and beat ISIS. And then he gets blown up on a fucking tarmac by some fucking pimple face dipshit in an air conditioned trailer in Nevada on the order of the stupidest man in history, a man who could not pronounce Soleimani's name correctly with a fucking gun to his head.

And it's just like this. We're bringing everything down on purpose. We're like fucking, we're just like a fucking cheese covered Samson just pulling the fucking temple down around us as the whole thing. And you know, I would recommend again, check out the bonus episode, the Felix recorder with Derek Davidson, like they go into, you know, much more of the detail of who Soleimani was, what the history there is, and like, you know, what this escalation like why it is so terrifying and what it actually means to Iran. But like, you know, just like the entire geopolitical scene, Derek Davidson, absolute chapeau boss, please subscribe to his newsletter and Patreon as well. I guess that's just the last thing I'll say before

we, you know, switch into our interview part of the show is this is a fucking nightmare. I would say that there's nothing to do but like the only thing we have right now is the one viable presidential candidate who is articulating an anti opposition that is clearly anti war. And that is Bernie Sanders. And if this is faster than that, we're going to have to start rethinking what anti war movements mean, because we have a pretty fresh, relatively fresh experience in Iraq with what doesn't work. So I don't know what will, but we're gonna have to start thinking pretty quickly. But I'm saying like, I can't stress enough how different it is now that there is a popular

viable contender for the presidency in the United States who is articulating exactly the case, saying the things that you or I would say in that position, who has a very real shot of being president. There is absolutely no comparison in my lifetime in American history, particularly as it comes to war in our post 9-11 world. You know, immediately after the assassination of Soleimani, Sanders rushed out with a comment calling it an assassination, which was just terribly gauche and which he was then later criticized for by Michael Bloomberg. Monocle shattered across the beltway.

In that Jennifer Rubin article, in that transcript, it ends with Tapper asking Buttigieg if he thought it was an assassination. It doesn't matter what you call it there. He was definitely a very evil man, but Trump didn't, he didn't send the right memo to the proper email channels. Not post about it in the correct Slack channel. I love Buttigieg as this thing of like, well, we need to know if it was a good decision or a bad decision. No, sure. Oh, let me see the fucking spreadsheets on that. You fucking, just you husk of a man.

Not even a man, you husk of a rat. I would say, you know, it's easy to get demoralized because, as we know, we have no political power and the most evil, contemptuous, stupid people are in charge. And found rails. It's on rails. And I mean, the only thing that's really given me hope in the past few days, you know, when we're surrounded by the insane hogs, you know, bang for murder of people that they never met, cannot even contemplate their lives. And the people who are gratuitously lying to them for personal profit or, or to be in the good graces of elite opinion makers.

The only thing that's given me hope is one black Twitter, which has had the correct line throughout all of this. And of course, Bernie Sanders and AOC as well. But Bernie Sanders is the one running for president right now who has articulated, again, the clearest line. Oh, this Middle East stuff that you all hate, I'm getting out of there. That's it. Done. Next. And everyone, you know, in the liberal foreign policy establishment, every was, you know, Democrats and Republicans, like, you know, they're clutching pearls about it. No, you've got to say, can't say it was assassination. You've got to say he was a bad guy. And you've

got to say the problem was, you know, Trump didn't, you know, place a phone call to lying at him, Schiff or something like that. No, he's putting this on stark moral terms that, frankly, anyone can understand. That's, that's the line that you need to go with if you need to convince someone that, hey, this was a bad thing. Hey, this is leading to more bad things. You don't really have to get too cute with it. Just say, hey, this guy Bernie Sanders, he's going to get us out of there to that end. And I mean, if you want, if you want to have any hope of one, not going to war with Iran, but two, more critically, extirpating the national security ghouls, the ones who were wrong about Iraq, who were wrong about Afghanistan,

who are now pushing, you know, for a war with Iran, the ones who put the fucking menu of options in front of Donald Trump, then you need to elect this guy. That's it. This is, this is the shot. This is, this is your time. Fine. You want to make your criticisms that like Bernie isn't left enough on a lot of these foreign policy issues? Fine. Have at it. But like, I mean, it's, it's not going to win you any points with me right now. I'm not going to be like, you know, move from this position because like compared to anyone else who's even close to the position he has in the U.S. government, he has light years in a different galaxy about this shit and of

morality and just the necessity of not starting these fucking wars. And it's the only one, he's honestly the only one with the integrity to say it. The integrity and record, 30 year voting record against wars, against hiking military budgets. He voted against Trump's military budget and he was one of the voted against the sanctions on Iran. Yes. He was one of exactly two senators to vote against the Iran sanctions, something that the resistance lunatics still hate him for because that was the bill that included Russia sanctions. Even though Iran was still fucking in the treaty, the nuclear treaty and we're abiding

by its fucking specifics at the point where they said, well, we'll throw some more sanctions on there. How can you trust anyone, even a Democrat who says, well, you know, I think the problem was that Trump broke the Iran treaty, you know, we should, I want to go back to that. I want to reset the clock. How can you trust any of them? How does any one of them have the moral credibility to make that case after the entire fucking party voted to add more, you know, what is essentially an act of war or more murderous

sanctions on the country? That is the only, that's the real difference between now and the read up to Iraq is that now we have a leading presidential candidate with the unequivocal anti-war argument and the war in Iraq, it was Phil Donahue was the guy who like topped out highest. He got his fucking show canceled for his trouble. So that is a big difference because there has to be if there isn't a fucking other option on the table and all you're getting is a media Borg mind telling you and both parties telling you that there's this horrible, dangerous man out there, this horrible, dangerous country

that has to be done with, done about, then there's no real meaningful barriers to the worst thing happening. But not like, you know, not to leave you with total, you know, black deal here again, especially to our younger listeners who either weren't alive or just don't remember what this country was like after 9-11 and during the lead up to and prosecution of the war in Iraq. I can't stress enough, despite how, like I said, despite how similar it seems, I cannot stress enough how different it is to be anti-war now. The anti-war movement was like to totally ignored and marginalized, but like I cannot

stress enough like how alien you were made to feel to speak out against the war on terror or war in Iraq at the time up until maybe 2007, whereas now basically everyone feels that way. Most of the people in the military probably feel that fucking way and like, I don't think like that makes them any better or more moral or whatever, but like the climate of the country is different. For you to say forthrightly, I am against war is not to feel like you are the only person left alive on earth.

There are millions, tens, if not hundreds of millions of your countrymen and certainly billions of people around the world who feel exactly as you do. And I'm sure that the media will still lie to you and they will still bullshit you, but it is not, they do not have the same foundation to make you feel as totally isolated, insane, and alone as they did at that point in time. That's the last thing I'll say on that. That's that on that. And we go into our interview with Breonna Joy Gray, who will tell you about perhaps

even with more immediacy because of recent events exactly how we can get Bernie Sanders into the White House. Joining us now making her second appearance at Chapel Trap House is Breonna Joy Gray, National Press Secretary Bernie Sanders campaign. How are you? I'm doing well. Thanks for having me on. We should make note that, yes, you get your two-time appearance choppo challenge coin.

Look for that in the mail. But since you've last been on, yes, you are National Press Secretary for the Bernie Sanders campaign, but also, and I think more importantly, fellow podcast host. That is true. I have the great honor and privilege of hosting the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign podcast called Here the Burn. We have done something like 40 episodes straight, I started my second week of work for any came in and I was like, I think we should have a podcast.

I said, OK, he said, I want it up by next Tuesday. I said, OK. Does he know what a podcast is? Well, he does. I mean, he's he's the one who has this really interesting history doing all of this kind of grassroots media, right, with this public access show, his his spoken word record, but he doesn't really like to talk about very often. So he he really was invested in it and came on our first episode and, you know, drops

by periodically. But what I really love about the podcast is that we don't just focus on Bernie. It's not one of these kind of obsequious, you know, I love my candidate, isn't he? Just God's gift to humanity kind of campaign podcast. We really like to talk to people behind the scenes, people who are part of the movement, both folks that work on the staff at junior and more senior levels. Once we meet on the campaign trail, debunking some of the media mythology that goes on and really trying to give a sense of the underlying ideology and ethos that's driving the movement

beyond any particular policy point. And I think it provides a kind of catharsis for some people, the same way that Chapo absolutely provided that catharsis for me in 2016, who can feel at times gaslit by the overwhelming avalanche of kind of misinformation and kind of bad faith attacks that can kind of come our way in particular. We will put a link to Hear the Burn in the description of this episode. But if you're listening, do not stop listening to this episode to listen to that competing podcast.

Just curious, though, as now that you're a member of the podcast host Inner Circle, on Hear the Burn, have you yet encountered a situation in which you record like a really fire interview or segment and like you're just, you're like, yeah, like that was on point. And then you check your recorder and like there was no memory card in or the audio is just complete dog shit. So you have to spin the entire thing. Because once that happens, I feel like you're really, then you've really become a podcaster. Well, thankfully, my podcast producer is really excellent, Ben Dalton.

But once when I was without him on the road, I was covering the Hottiman Hospital protests over the summer. I remember that hospital in Philadelphia that was closing down because of venture capitalists was buying it up. I spoke to this doctor who was there. He was from South America. I forget where now because I obviously didn't record it. And he was a great intersection of an immigration story and a health care story.

And after I spoke to him and a couple of other of the best interviews that day, I checked and I just completely bungled using my little Zoom recorder. So that haunts me and stays with me forever. But Ben is a great podcaster, has saved me from that. And for the second season of our podcast, all of the episodes are also watchable on YouTube. So for people who aren't engaged entirely by just listening to audio, you can watch everything and it's really beautifully done in video.

So that's out there. Welcome. Sorry to compete. Welcome to the game. And it means to ratchet it up and try to one up the chaff over. I just had to put that out there. Well, let's get into the race. How's it looking?

What's the view from Bernie Central Committee? It's a really exciting time to be part of this campaign. No one wants to jinx it. I think all of us are a lot more comfortable being in the position of coming up from behind. But we just have these two amazing polls in Iowa and New Hampshire where we are first. We've been strong in national polls in a solid second place and closing the gap there. We are doing really well with constituencies that are really important to this race, including in states like California and Nevada, principally talking about leading with Latino voters.

This comes as a shock to a lot of people and we can't say it enough that Bernie Sanders has the most diverse coalition in this race, both in terms of racial diversity and economic diversity, both of which are incredibly important to form a kind of coalition we need to win and also to advance these policies that we are putting out there that are unlike anybody else in the race has to offer and that are going to be difficult in the work of a movement to get through. So we're feeling really positive and optimistic, but we need to make sure that people don't rest on their laurels and make sure that we are all doing everything that we can to push

us through during this home stretch. And Bernie's also leading in the fundraising. Oh, by a mile. And by a mile, I mean $10 million. So fourth quarter fundraising, we are at $34.5 million and even more impressively than that, I think, we had 300,000 new donors in the fourth quarter, right? People who had never given to our campaign before, 300,000 new donors and in the last day, 40,000 new donors.

How much of that can be used in the primary? As opposed to saving up for the general election. I don't need the specific number for that, but what this really proves is that we have the staying power that other campaigns just don't have. Maybe 9% of the people who have given our to our campaign can give again. So when in a world where people are debating whose wine cave fundraiser was least offensive, we have the ability to defend our ethical fundraising unlike any other candidate. And you know, if you think about what we saw in 2016, we know that Donald Trump is not

above exploiting weaknesses and his opponents that reveal his own hypocrisy, right? That sometimes are overly invested in this notion that we can shame people or talk about Republican hypocrisy and make them stop making these arguments. But the reality is, if you look at the kind of exchange that happened on the debate stage during the last debate, you know, between some of the other candidates, Bernie was able to remain above the fray and I think that's going to be really important going forward into the general to make sure that we don't end up in a place where Bernie is able, sorry, where Trump is able to get to the left of candidates the way that happened in 2016.

Because of now, how many unique donors does Bernie have? It's over, it's five million individual donations, unique, the unique donor number is I think a little bit more difficult to parse, but we're talking about well over a million, right? So if you think about at this stage in the race, it's January of 2020. We've been in this horse race for nearly two years now, but a lot of Americans are just tuning in now. And to think about how many people have not just said, oh, I'm interested in this candidate, right?

Haven't just opened a rate, picked up their landline and told someone that they are kind of superficially interested in a candidate. These are people who have gone into their pocketbook and actually given money to the campaign at this early juncture. And that really demonstrates a kind of enthusiasm that is unlike anything that anybody else can tout. Something that we've talked about on this show is, you know, for the past few months, I know that the, you know, professional press corps competing wonks have only very recently

come around to this realization that Bernie is within spinning distance of running the table with the early States. Like you said, that poll shows a three-way race in Iowa between him, Mayor Pete and Joe Biden, and is currently in the lead in New Hampshire and is, I think, favorite to win their respective of what happens in Iowa. Yeah, to your point about the media just coming around to it, I think that basically they've gotten to a tipping point where it becomes a real credibility issue for them to continue to ignore it the way they've done this whole race.

And when you start to get that kind of acknowledgement, when you've seen the kind of resistance we've seen so far to acknowledging the basic viability of the Bernie Sanders campaign, I think it's a really good sign that we're doing extremely well. And everybody should be heartened, but not again complacent, because there's a lot to do to translate the enthusiasm we're seeing in terms of crown size and donations, et cetera, into actual caucusing and voting. We definitely want to get into just those specific things, because like I said, it's 30 days, do or die pretty much right now, and we want to talk specifically about why

the early States and Iowa are so important for, you know, the game board we're playing here. I'm curious to Virgil's point, you know, the view from the brain segment of the Bernie Mech that you are a part of. What do you guys see, like particularly from like a press outlook, like what do you notice or see differently as like the sort of congealing narratives as the press attempts to kind of metabolize, if not Bernie's front runner status, then the fact that he has to be mentioned among the front runners.

Is there a way that they're finding a way to address this or competing narratives that you find sort of gelling into place? Well, one narrative I noticed, and it came up during an appearance I did last weekend on politics nation with Al Sharpton, is this discussion of the winnowing numbers of non-white candidates in the race, and that being kind of a talking point for the remaining non-white candidates, in the same way that, you know, Bernie Sanders' POC support in 2016 was kind of leveraged as a kind of like evidence of him not having the policies or the commitments to communities of color.

So now this time around, when Bernie has the most support from people of color, the new line is, you know, isn't it, you know, isn't it a disaster that we don't have more people of color in the race? And of course, you know, as a black woman, I'm equally invested in having diversity among the candidates, but there's an interesting way that the interest of voters of color is being erased in that conversation, right? So what the voters are actually asking for, disproportionately black and brown voters, has never, during the whole course of this race, been the candidates of color, right?

I remember right before I left the intercept, there was an article that was talking about how Bernie Sanders had twice the amount of black support as, for example, Kamala Harris. So this is a really interesting way that some of the kind of the identity stuff that I thought was going to be left behind, at least early in those race, if not in like 2017 era, has started to resurface a little bit, but I think it's really important for that reason to focus in on not only how diverse our constituency, our voters are racially, but how this campaign is getting donations from a economically diverse workforce that reflects kind of racially diverse workplaces as well.

So the primary profession of people who give to this campaign is teacher. The main employers of people who give to this campaign include Starbucks and Amazon and Walmart and people who work at the U.S. Postal Service, right? And those are all places that disproportionately employ black and brown people. Walmart's the largest employer of people of color in this country. The post office has historically always employed people of color. Well, I mean, heck, the last two boyfriends I've had have both had parents who work at the U.S. Post Office.

So like it's really both economically and racially an incredibly powerful endorsement to see what part of America is on our side. And I think that's the most important thing when we're looking at whose views and interests are being represented by the candidates in this race. I mean, the other thing, at least it's like, you know, like the polls can't be ignored anymore. Like you said, like the latest polls have them in a three-way dead tie for first place in Iowa, first place in New Hampshire, and then the usually discussion stops there.

And what like, and usually like the way to dismiss it is saying like, well, the early states, Iowa and New Hampshire are overwhelmingly white, which they are. But then if you go on to, he's leading in Nevada and in California in many polls as well. But the other really interesting thing is South Carolina is always set up as the kind of like bulwark. Like, yeah, even if he does well in the graveyard for the Cassandres game, yeah, like even if he does well in New Hampshire and Iowa, he's going to get romped in South Carolina because

like that's not his support or his base or whatever. But you look at some of those polls and he's like in second place in South Carolina and some of the ones I looked at, like, and not, not like a distant second. It's like Biden at 27, Bernie at 23. So like, you know, if this holds, like he's going to come out of not just the like, you know, Iowa, New Hampshire, but potentially South Carolina with like a really strong second or third place finish. Yeah, I think that's right.

And our team in South Carolina has been doing really amazing work, amazing outreach and our surrogates have been pounding the pavement. They're like crazy. Folks like Phillip Agnew, the founder of the Dream Defenders, Killer Mike, Musno Introduction, and of course, Senator Nina Turner have been spending a lot of time there doing a lot of events focused on communities that have been broadly ignored by a lot of other campaigns, including doing a lot of events focused on Black male outreach. And if you recall in 2016, that was one area that was particularly depressed with respect

to turnout. Certainly in Wisconsin and Michigan. Well, right. I mean, in Wisconsin, famously, I think about 87,000 Black Americans who voted in 2012 didn't vote in 2016. And people's first response when they hear that is to say, well, what about voter suppression? And of course, voter suppression is important and you can't ignore it. But when polled, only about 3% of respondents said that the reason they didn't vote was voter

suppression. The overwhelming majority, about 60% cited issues like I didn't feel like either candidate, you know, spoke to my interest or would materially change my life or would make a really making any kind of a difference, right? So that is what the heart soul and power behind this campaign, which is that it's able to actually offer us people who have felt disenchanted by the political process, something new and feel for the first time in sometimes decades that something could actually change about their material circumstances.

And it's really exciting to be a part of something like that. And it's something that's galvanized me as well from being just a civilian in 2016 to becoming a writer and then joining this campaign. Well, yeah, let's talk about that because, you know, I mean, like what you describe, I'm sure is deeply felt by many people. I know for certainly, you know, most of our listeners who represent a passionate but, but let's shall we say extremely online segment of the community and like, but, but nonetheless, who wants to be a part of this, who wants to make a difference, you know, who correctly

understand that this is like, as we described that our only off ramp are like, you know, from a highway that just leads to oblivion, like, or like outcomes that we've seen what this produces. But as we've said before, you know, posting is fun. We love to, we love to have fun with our friends, but it's not, it's not politics. And at the end of the day, that's not going to make the difference. So I like, I think we're going to now let's talk about to our listeners or anyone listening to this, like what will really move the needle, what can you do specifically that will absolutely

make a difference, especially in a state like Iowa, where it is a three way dead heat at the top less than 30 days ago and as well as state where organization is so important. So I want to first, you know, shout out to the all the online people I consider myself among your ranks, no, no shade here to the, to the very online Twitter community. But the reality is we also have to make sure we're channeling that in constructive direction. So first and foremost, the priority has got to be the early states. So to the extent that people are excited and wanting to doorknock in states that are coming farther down the line, it would be most helpful to redirect those energies into doing phone

calls into the early states and or doing what we're calling a my Bernie journey. So you can go to Bernie's website and look up my Bernie journey and see whether their bus tours coming from your city or state, going into Iowa to knock doors, or if that is, you know, too much of an investment or not what you're able to do right now, given your time constraints, you should absolutely use our dialer to phone bank and text into the early states. So when you go to the website, you'll be directed to buttons that that basically will prioritize what we need done first, right?

So the phone bank will tell you, okay, what we're doing right now is a caller into Iowa because Iowa is the biggest priority. And so it will direct you to where the energy is most needed. But to me, to just be really clear, there are some Super Tuesday states like California, which we're also focused on, but for the most part, unless you are living in one of those first four states, it's probably best to hold off door knocking in favor of calling into one of the more high priority states at this point. Yeah, I think that's a really good thing to remember because, you know, like, if you're

if you're really motivated, like, let's say in, you know, New York or California, if you're for a coastal elite, it's, you know, it's hard to, you know, stop work or pick up your life and just go to Iowa for like a week or two or even a couple days. That is obviously the MVP status, like that's that's the best possible thing you can do. That will go to your that will take your efforts the furthest to getting to where we all want to and need to go. But if you can't do that, yeah, the phone banking stuff where you're calling people in Iowa or these early states would probably be the next best thing, right?

Absolutely. You can find that at berniestanders.com backslash volunteer for all of those volunteer links. I think that this next best thing to do, especially given the audience that you have here at Chapeau is if every single person who is listening to this, many of whom are listening on their phones right now, could download the burn app that's B-E-R-N. The burn app is our organizing tool and it does a lot more than I think most people recognize. It's an app that both gives you all of the policies that we've put out at your fingertips. So if you're trying to talk to people, convince people, if there's any confusion about what

we stand for, it's right there. But more importantly, it's a way for you to organize your friends and peer cohorts. So one of the first prompts that you get when you download the app is to put in the names of people that you would like to organize. And it will prompt you to say are they likely to be a strong burning supporter, not a burning supporter at all. And you can then push and share information to them, whether it's the new podcast episode that comes out, whether it's a new informational video we've done, whether it's a live stream

of a burning event that seems to be particularly germane to their interest. And you can also find out important information about whether or not they're registered and identify like I did, oh, hey, my close family member isn't actually registered if they're new address. Let me make sure that everyone who says they want to vote for Bernie is actually able to do so when the time comes. Now, we can also use the app to report any friends or colleagues or family members who have counter-revolutionary tendencies.

So one important thing to know about the app is that the app doesn't give any information to... This is not handing out your friends or colleagues information, right? They're not going to get random emails or spam from the campaign as a result of you organizing them. It really is about relational organizing. So it's the premise that people are most likely to believe someone they already know and to trust the views and opinions of someone they already know as opposed to the campaign

reaching out to them directly. And we've had an enormous amount of success encouraging folks just to talk to people in their communities and local environments about why they're supporting the campaign. So again, as opposed to online where we tend to get into these policy debates and what happened in 2016 and yada, yada, yada, yada, what we're hoping for and what we found to be successful in this context is really talking about your Bernie story. That's a hashtag we've used in the past, hashtag my Bernie story, but talking about what it is about your personal life that has connected you to the Bernie campaign and why this is

such a visceral, passionate issue for you, right? Whether it's personal health care experiences, whether it's how the burden of student debt has negatively impacted your life and your ability to achieve certain goals, whether it's your experience with environmental crises or environmental racism or lack of access to clean water, whether it's your fears about, you know, engaging in international conflict and whether you have veterans in your family who have, you know, negative experiences of fighting wars that they feel like weren't valid. So, you know, it's those kind of one-to-one interactions that are more persuasive in most

cases than saying, you know, let me give you a spreadsheet of the differences between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren's debt cancellation policies, although that's an important point to make. Yeah, no, to your point about this kind of like one-to-one, you know, relational organizing, like two points I make on that is, yeah, like contrary to the sort of the arguments and jokes that people make on Twitter, genuinely I think like one of the most effective pitches or things to share or like how to get someone on board who's like maybe not totally committed or interested but doesn't know what the, what all the excitement is or why people are so

into, why you might be so into Bernie Sanders is the, the clips of the way he relates to people at these town halls, particularly on the issue of health care and particularly relating to people's, quite frankly, their pain and misery caused by the cruelties of the American health care system and like the way he responds, the way people share these very sensitive and harrowing stories about their life and the way he responds to that I think is a very, very useful and important tool. Yeah, I think that's right. Our most popular episode of Here the Burn was one in which I had a Megan Day from Jack

Ben and Michael Moran and in the intro I talk about how sometimes I feel like what's happening is akin to that scene in Goodwill Hunting where Robin Williams tells Matt Damon, it's not your fault and he finally internalizes that truth and starts crying because his whole life, you know, so many of us are told that our failures which are largely structural in nature are our own, based on our own failings, our personal failings, right? And we're told that we should have a lot of shame around those kinds of things and that we shouldn't talk about them and when you start hearing people sharing their stories in the context of these rallies and it emboldens more and more people to come forward and say,

hey, this happened to me, there is this I think really emotionally cathartic thing that happens where people really do recognize for the first time or see themselves as part of like a structural problem for the first time when they've been doing a lot of self-blaming and the shame is now being shifted from the individual to being placed on a system, right? When Bernie says we're the richest country in the history of the world and we're still treating our citizens this way, when we have 500,000 people who go homeless every year in the richest country in the history of the world, we're on the brink of another $2 trillion war potentially and it only costs $81 billion to cancel medical debt.

When we have constant conversations about how we're going to pay for X, Y and Z and Bernie is challenged on all the minutiae of his policies and none of the other candidates in the race to my knowledge have ever been asked why they don't back any kind of plan to cancel medical debt, it's exhausting but it is enormously gratifying and into a certain kind of gaslighting to begin an environment where everyone's ripping the veil off and talking honestly about all of the problems that too many of us share so if you are able to share those stories in your intimate personal context, I think it really goes a really far way to advancing the cause of this campaign and this movement.

And if you talk about like the electability issue or what a general election between Sanders and Trump would look like, which is I think something that a lot of Democrats or liberals who are on the fence or is at the forefront of their mind or is a hurdle to be cleared for them just saying like, I like Bernie, but I'm just afraid he's going to, you know, he's not the guy to, it'll be a landslide election for Trump. I mean, I think the thing that I always come back to and we've talked about it on the show a lot, as far as drawing a contrast between the two of them, I think liberals don't really understand or like they don't quite get the way in which Trump appeals to the people who

vote for him who may otherwise not vote for even a Republican or could vote for a candidate like Sanders is that he channels people's pain and rage and hatred in a way that gives them permission to express it, but express it at people who are, that they regard as like less than or different than they are, whereas Sanders is responding to the same, you know, rage and pain and quite frankly, hatred that exists in this country, but crucially gives people permission not to hate themselves for it rather than give people permission to hate other people. Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

I think that some liberals not to paint with too broad a brush will are reluctant to acknowledge that Trump in a lot of ways accurately diagnosed problems, even though he either offered the wrong prescription or lied about the prescription he was offering, right? And it's not enough just to kind of blanket, say, Trump is wrong and America was already great and we're going to return to the status quo. You've got to really take on some of the accurate diagnosis that he had. I mean, I remember there was this one moment shortly after the election, I think it was in early 2017, when Bernie did a town hall with Ted Cruz about healthcare.

And you could tell Ted Cruz had its Harvard debate team hat on and was all ready to go with his talking points about how there were failures of Medicare, sorry, Obamacare were myriad and yada, yada, yada, and premiums had gone up and all this stuff. And then it's Bernie's time to talk after the opening remarks and he's like, you know what, Ted's right. There are problems with the Affordable Care Act and that's why I think we should have Medicare for all. It resolves all of these concerns, right?

And Ted Cruz didn't really know where to go from there. And so there's a way that instead of trying to play on their turf, Bernie is consistently able to reframe the arguments in a way that actually addresses the underlying concerns that have been raised by Republicans and raised by Trump in particular in a really visceral way, but redirect in a way that's a lot more constructive. And I do think that stressing electability is incredibly important, both talking about polls and talking about these kind of substantive ways that Bernie Sanders is like designed in a lab to go up against Donald Trump because he doesn't have the same kind of vulnerabilities

that most politicians have from having to flip flop on a number of positions over the course of their career to have to justify their votes on trade issues, the Iraq war, previously advocating to cut Social Security the way that Joe Biden has done, issue after issue after issue. Other candidates, the longevity of their political career is a liability and for Bernie Sanders is something that he can run on rather than run away from. And so both hard metrics like fundraising out of Obama and Trump districts, which dwarfs fundraising there from all the other candidates, all the things we talked about at the top

of this segment, those are important, but also stressing that we don't want to repeat 2016 by electing or not dominating a candidate with the same kind of vulnerabilities that we had then. Getting back to the early states, could we just talk about Iowa specifically and like for as far as you guys, as far as the campaign goes, how important is Iowa to your overall path to victory? I mean, I don't think it's any surprise to say that Iowa sets the tone for what's coming forward, right?

And it was a large part for me coming so close to winning an Iowa in 2016 that galvanized a lot of the momentum for him later on, right? And so we want to win Iowa. We can win Iowa and with your help, we will win Iowa. It's just a matter of continuing to set records with respect to calling and the way that we've done. If anybody is interested in calling, you should go to BernieSanders.com backslash call. It's really easy to do surprisingly so you can do it on your phone or through the computer

interface. So that makes it even easier. You can do it as part of a community call and have that kind of community engagement or you can do it solo. Those kinds of efforts are crucial because these stats have shown that more voters and Bernie supporters in Iowa are sticky, are committed to us than any other candidate, right? But we have to make sure that those people actually come out and grow those numbers as

much as possible because that means other people's voters are not as sticky. Those are still people who are able to be persuaded, particularly with respect to the electability argument because that's a lot of where the Joe Biden supporters are. That's why the Joe Biden supporters are committed to Joe Biden as opposed to any particular policy or overarching agenda. Bernie is also, per that recent poll, crushing with first-time caucus goers. How integral to Bernie's canvassing strategy in Iowa is bringing people in who are totally new to the process?

Very much so. We saw this in 2016 and we're seeing it now that a lot of the enthusiasm behind Bernie Sanders came from people who are historically non-voters and people who are independents. So Bernie Sanders has a unique ability to bring new people into the Democratic Party, something which should be championed by the party as a whole, even if it's not always the case. That's why I think we're going to, hopefully, again, I don't want to stress on our laurels, but hopefully what we're going to see is that some of these polls which often track voters,

historical voters, we're going to see even more of a turnout and more of a backing up for any Sanders when votes actually start to be cast because there are a lot of people who have been overlooked historically in this process, often low-income people who haven't voted in the past because policies aren't pitched to them, there's a lot of talk about the middle class and very little talk about the poor, typically, in politics, and also people who historically have identified as independents because of some legitimate concerns they've had with both the Republican and Democratic parties. And also, the youth vote, which is a lot of people who are new voters and people who just

couldn't vote before because they weren't of age. We also did a recent episode with the U.S. climate strike kids, Isra Hersey, Ilhan Omar's daughter, the Gravel teens, in which they were all incredibly cogent about the reasons why young people are disproportionately backing Bernie and its substantive reasons, and not just because they want him to do ASMR, which is another thing that we entertain on the podcast about Snyder Henry there. Let's talk a little bit about the Bernie journey. I know that this is really a place where our fail listeners would excel.

They don't have what you might call a job to keep them in Chicago or St. Louis or another state or something like that. They have the opportunity to enlist in the Bernie shock troops. What new life awaits them on the Bernie journey? Describe that experience. OK, so if you go to berniestanders.com backslash Bernie journey, you can sign up and get connected to staff members on the ground in various states that will coordinate with you to put together a trip that you can travel to an early state and actually do door knocking

there. It's an incredible opportunity to have a community relationship here and not just be doing these sometimes isolating process of posting online. You can actually meet people and talk to people and learn how to talk to people. I think that something that I didn't necessarily anticipate was how much my arguments would be shaped by vetting them with real life humans on the campaign trail as opposed to being a writer or just being a Twitter edge lord. So I strongly encourage you, if you can, to do that.

People will facilitate you getting to where you need to go. There's a lot of hand holding here if you just make your way to the website. I know that these kinds of things can seem administratively daunting, but it really, really isn't. Both with respect to the calling and the Bernie journey. If you want a sense of the kind of things that people are doing, you should also take a look at the My Bernie Story hashtag where people are talking about their journeys and also the kinds of stories that we want to be able to communicate when you do go and

take the step of knocking doors in early states. What would you say to someone who's never canvassed before and for whom the idea of canvassing is pretty daunting? It seems like that's outside their skill set. Yeah. Well, there is training and there are scripts. Again, this goes for the calling too. In fact, in preparation of this, I have to confess I had never done a call before, so

I sat with the head of our organizing team and she walked me through it. I was really surprised by how easy it was. I'm not just the technical administration of doing the call through my computer, but you have the little opening guideline sentence, which is, I'm Brianna from the Bernie Sanders campaign and I want to talk to you about my support for Bernie Sanders so you have a moment and how organically the conversations tend to flow. I mean, yes, you're going to find people who are busy, who hang up, those kinds of things happen, but a surprising number of people really are invested in hearing what you have

to say. Also, a surprising number of people haven't heard as much as you might think and the arguments that we think are really old and tired and why am I saying this over again? Everybody knows that Bernie is canceling all student debt, right? Everybody knows that Bernie is for Medicare for all. It's not actually as true as you might think. I was surprised. I was recently on an HBCU tour visiting colleges in the South at the end of last year and a

lot of kids don't actually know that Bernie is canceling all student debt and they certainly don't know that Bernie is the only one with a plan to cancel all student debt with Elizabeth Warren only canceling up to 50,000 and it petering off depending on your salary over a certain amount, right? I think that you should have confidence in the fact that most voters are starting out at a place where they can actually learn a great deal from you on the phone, not just because you're a knowledgeable chapel listener, but also because you can basically just arm them with things like, hey, download the burn app if you want to know more.

I don't have to convince everybody in every interaction, but to arm them with the tools that enable them to find out more going forward is also extremely powerful. It's certainly a different experience talking to someone who does not have online politics, brain poisoning, and that's arguably the majority of people and especially of people who are so outside this process that this would be their first time going to a caucus. Yeah, absolutely. I cannot stress enough that, look, I'm not one of the people who says Twitter doesn't matter because Twitter ultimately does matter to journalists and there is a snowballing

effect. Yeah, that's why it's fun. They're the only people who think it does matter and that's why it's so fun. We have to win the posting wars and we are winning the posting wars. Right, and we are winning though, which I think is partly why you get this. There's a recent resurgence of the Bernie people online are so intense. I think that there is some frustration that Bernie people, unlike I think anybody else that I've ever spoken to, they know their stuff.

If I meet a Bernie supporter at a rally or on the street, there's no equivocation about why they support Bernie. There's none of this, you know, I think he's just cool. I want to have a beer with him, stuff like that. It's so specific that I routinely think to myself, gosh, you could be the national press secretary like you're doing an excellent job of making the case. And that translates, I think, into the online battles where our supporters are very articulate and knowledgeable about the historical scope of what Bernie has stood for, what he's accomplished,

and about the policy prescriptions that he has on the table right now. So all that being said, it requires so much less than that to talk to people in real life, many of whom are just tuning in now for the first time. I mean, yeah, it is certainly fun and funny to do this online. And thank you all out there. I think one of the things that drives people the most crazy is just how much fun the Bernie people are obviously having as opposed to the finger wagging skulls on the other sides. But the thing is, it's fun to do this in real life too, it's different.

And I would imagine you will go through some sort of a boot camp facility to turn you from a wet lump of clay into a hardened machine of Bernie support and canvassing. But yeah, no, it's fun and more importantly, it matters. To the point about Iowa in particular as kind of the starting gun for this presidential race that will set the tone and it's one that I think Bernie truly has to win because even a very strong second place finish will be regarded as a loss and interpreted that way because of how much Iowa is set up for him to win, specifically in terms of it being a caucus state and how much that privileges candidates with, like you said, a sticky, dedicated core

of support. And I said this before, but I really want to emphasize it again. You can't take any of this for granted. It's just all there for the taking. And if you allow yourself to get outworked or outhustled by these Buttigieg, Biden or Warren people or their campaign and you wake up the morning after the Iowa caucus, how is that going to feel? I would hazard a guess that you will feel like shit for the rest of your life or what

little is left of it after these people have their way with our country. So no matter what happens, you can just have an insurance policy on a lifetime of self-doubt and regret of just doing even the smallest amount of these things that we talked about. And I think there's something transformative about the experience as well. It's something ennobling to participate in this campaign either by making the Bernie journey to a place like Iowa and New Hampshire or Nevada or making phone calls from the comfort of your gaming area. Yeah.

It really reminds you what the stakes are too. When you're hearing, yeah, we watch the MyBernie stories, those are deeply affecting watching the town halls. But there is something about having someone say to your face or say in your ear they're a very particular story of a tragedy and a struggle that makes you remember why we're doing this and galvanizes you to keep at it. And I also want to say how many people listen to Chapa, like 100,000 or some enormous? A couple hundred thousand.

Yeah. A couple hundred thousand. I think our highest we've ever gotten on one episode is probably 300k. So let's say between two and 300,000 listeners. So if you might be thinking, okay, I'm reading all of these stats about how many calls Bernie is making, you know, they got to, you know, they're trying to get 5 million people. We always are posting about the hundreds of thousands of calls we're able to do during our pushes.

What difference does my calling make? Well, I would say to you that we're able to do an enormous volume of calls with only, you know, a few hundred people on the lines at once. Imagine what would happen if even a small percentage of Chapa listeners started to engage in these calls, right? Like the smallest percentage of people, the same way that, you know, Patreon is able to pay dividends with a small number of people, relatively small number of people paying could manifest in terms of relational organizing through the Bernie app, through the burn app,

doing calls, doing these burning journeys, right? So I don't want you to think that you're just too small a drop in the ocean. What you're doing truly, truly does matter, particularly on the relational organizing front. So really, really, really, like, if everybody who listened to this episode at very least downloaded the burn app, you know, to that one small concrete step that you can do literally while you're listening to this on the train or what have you, that would wonders because you can get a lot and do a lot through the app and the app can give you push notifications

and alert you to whatever next steps you should be taking, whether there's an event in your area, whether there's a dialer that you should be a part of, you know, whether there are people in your network that you should send an updated text to reminding them to register or what have you. I mean, there are concrete steps that can really make this nebulous thing called organizing, which, you know, as a layperson a few years ago, you know, just largely seem an abstraction, really come home and make it feel like you're a part of this process in the way that we need to do to get this this campaign rolling into a genuine movement.

We've got to get organized. And you know, like, you know, these things are kind of, you know, cliche to say, like, you know, oh, look in politics, like, you know, money isn't everything, or at least that's what they're saying now that Bernie has lapped everyone by millions of dollars. But it is kind of true. And what does really do really, really does matter, again, really, especially in Iowa, New Hampshire and these early states is just, you know, knocking on doors, actual bodies, you know, on the ground, people doing the work of organizing, reaching out to and making

sure people vote, whether it's in your own sort of like community, family, friend network, but most importantly, outside of that in a state like Iowa. Yeah, because remember, you know, Trump also had that Trump had that enthusiasm. And we need to make sure that someone who similarly has that kind of fervor among their supporters is going up against Trump in the general election. I want, you know, everyone think really critically about the last time they encountered, you know, a highly enthusiastic Biden supporter or, you know, a Biden supporter. I mean, yeah, well, we deal with that every time Felix is on the show.

So, you know, we have a, we're well versed in how to talk to them. I truly don't mean it, you know, in a shady way, but the reality is it's not enough to have people making an electability, a false electability calculus in a primary without considering the kind of enthusiasm you're going to need to go up against someone like Trump, who is more than able to turn out 10s of thousands of people to his rallies and is more than able to light the fire under his base to go knocking on doors and making sure every member of their family is our coming out to vote in fundraising like a fiend. Right.

You know, this is a lesson, you know, we learned the hard way in 2016 when we, when we condescended to the great Bill Mitchell when he said the real ground game is in our hearts. And was talking. What fools we were. Yeah. What fools we were. But like, again, to that point, talking about like, it's not like the polls are one thing. But if you look at crowd sizes and things like lawn signs, like you're not a fool to

take that into consideration of who's really going to get it done. And like, as far as the Democratic side goes, nobody is turning out the people to actually come out and see him and listen to him speak or go to an event like Sanders does. And it's not even close. We should, we should, I think we should wrap up this segment, but before we go on a personal note, I would like to pass along as far as family activism and organizing goes. I have finally got all of my immediate family members on board the Bernie train. Obviously, my sister was already there.

My father, he was going to be a, he, I knew he was going to be a pushover. His only thing that prevented him from immediately going for Bernie is that he's just too much like him. Like he just sees too much of himself in Bernie and doesn't like that. You know, because in New York thing, you know, pollsters call that the doppelganger. Yeah. The doppelganger. Yeah.

It's sort of like a New York thing. You're too much like yourself, you think as an asshole or, you know, you're instantly wary sort of in a self-deprecating way. But most importantly, right before the New Year, I got a text from my mom that she was finally coming over to team Bernie and was going to vote for him in the New York primary and give money, which I mean, I don't know if you guys, how you guys want to input that into your, into the central Bernie AI as far as sort of like older liberal white women who were super, super into Hillary Clinton in 2016.

And more importantly, way, way, way team Warren for 12 months of 2019 up until the very, very end. So. Well done. You are a champion. May I ask you, do you have any tips? What do you think? What do you think did it at the end of the day?

She just listens to the podcast. No, but. Well, that's an important point. No, I haven't. That's very important. And I want to say also, you know, I adore Chapa, I have sincerely been listening nonstop since 2016, but for, for those people, you know, have older relatives who might want something like a different style, a little bit, a little bit, you know, less online,

maybe. Yes. Say no more. Say no more. I do recommend. And this is what I did for my older family members as well. I do recommend hear the burn and I have been told that folks who didn't get it, who didn't understand, you know, why the old white guy who doesn't really understand the philosophy

because, you know, I think a lot of us don't actually support for me because of like one particular policy, Medicare for all, perhaps, yes, but there is a, and on top of the policies, there is this understanding that he's a person who is reasoning from a place that is human centered and moralistic and understands how power operates in this country and doesn't think that we can tinker and technocrat our way into getting change done. And that kind of a persuasion, if you get people to understand that, then it doesn't come down to any one policy or another, then it suddenly becomes, I trust this candidate because of his record and his approach to issues that has borne out to be the most effective

approach, the most ethical approach, the most progressive and humanistic approach. And then you don't have to keep leading the horse to water every time they just drink without prodding. Another thing that works, especially if you have an older parent who keeps saying things like, I just don't think Bernie's electable is you can leave pamphlets for nursing homes set strategically place locations around the house. Yeah. No, but I, you know, but like to that exact argument, and this is the last thing I'll

say, like the electability thing, I think is probably the biggest hurdle for many, many, you know, lifelong democratic or even progressive or liberal voters, like that is the biggest hurdle towards bringing them on board is that they're just sort of haunted by memories of, you know, George McGovern or something like that, or they just think like, you know, he's just not electable. He's not going to, the thing is that electability argument, you can, you can bullshit it if you have to, but the good news is that you don't have to because all of the arguments are on your side and you can make them very easily about exactly why Sanders is electable

and especially in a general election against Trump, but the most key thing to that is winning these early states because that is what will really make the argument and that is what I believe you will begin to see a tectonic shift as people realize sort of, I mean, I hate to compare the two, but kind of similar to as they did with Obama in 2008. I think that's right. And that includes, you know, South Carolina, you know, because I think a lot of what's going on with black voters is a lot of discourse about what's going on with black voters, but it's largely about electability and not any particular policy and black voters trying

to anticipate what white voters are going to vote for, right? And electability arguments, I think are going to go a lot farther than trying to, to, to pander to any particular policy issue because the policy issues that black people have said that they care about the most are in fact, the shared broadly with healthcare being number one for black women. So electability, electability, electability over holidays, as you talk to your parents and remember, we did an episode with Peter Dow, which a lot of people really enjoyed because we all remember him as one of the most strident Hillary supporters in 2016.

And if he can come around and be one of the biggest champions of Bernie's cause, then really it can be anyone. Well, Brianna, I want to thank you so much for your time and everything you guys have done here at Virgil. And let's get those URLs again. The Bernie journey, you can find information at berniestanders.com backslash bernie journey. If you want to call what you absolutely should, you should go to berniestanders.com backslash call.

And yeah, if, if you do do a my Bernie story, you can do it through the burn app, which you can download at whatever Google player, Apple, I, you know, app store is your preference. You can also download it on your computer. If you don't have a smartphone or prefer to use the computer interface and use the hashtag my Bernie story, if you just record and want to post it online, so we can, we can track those and follow them and help them to go viral. I do think those are forward slashes. Are they?

Well, they'll be in the show. My bad. They will be in the show description. Sorry, I can't do that. All right. Five Pinocchios next. They will be in the show description and the burn app on your phone, burn app. You kids love apps.

Come on. We have, we have less than 30 days to save the world here to end the madness. I mean, that's not even, that's not a joke. I recommend we do it, honestly. That's not hyperbole at all. And, you know, please, if you go to Iowa, do not, if you're knocking on doors or making phone calls, don't tell them you're doing it because of something called choppo trap house.

But if you see us or me in particular in Iowa, please say hello. I would love to hear from you guys and I would, more than anything, love to see you in Iowa, especially if you are not from that state. That's right. We are also making journeys of our own to Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada. We are hoping to canvas. We are canvassing for Amy Klawbuchar, but it's, I think any, any canvassing is good. Just get involved in the political process.

Once again, Brianna Joy Gray, National Press Secretary for the Bernie Sanders campaign and host of competing podcast, hear the burn. Yes. Lesser known competitor. Brianna, once again, thank you so much for your time and joining us today. Thank you. Thank you guys. Always a pleasure.

Yes. Oh, ain't got a home This will take it back, no bags, stuff which I've been over for Just for the surety's here Close enough and not too far Maybe you know where you are Waiting for you, waiting for you