Chapo Trap House - 384 - Beltway Garage: Warren Strikes Back (1/14/20)

Episode Date: January 14, 2020

Matt and Virgil once again venture under the hood of politics, this time joined by TV’s Will Menaker. The gang talks Matt and Virgil’s surreal encounter with Beltway insiders, possible Iowa caucus outcomes, Warren’s low blows against Bernie, and this week’s final debate before voting starts. Matt & Virgil on the Skullduggery podcast (starts at 37:00): https://t.co/Pl9JFmBhey?amp=1 Preorder Good Vibes at the Iowa State Fair: http://iowagoodvibes.com Tickets for live shows in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada: http://chapotraphouse.com/tour Register for an absentee Iowa caucus: https://action.iowademocrats.org/page/s/online-Satellite-Caucus-Pre-Registration

Is your Congress making a knocking sound when you stop at red lights? Is your fuel gauge on E for election interference? And then it sounds like you need to come in for a tune-up at the Beltway Garage. Welcome to the Beltway Garage, where we crack open the hood of our nation's politics to check the windshield wiper fluid of democracy and upsell you on the brake pads of the discourse. I'm Chappo Trapp, House Senior Political Analyst, Virgil Texas, with me as always as Ariaman Matt Christman. Hey, hey. And joining us in the garage for the first time is a guest mechanic. He's the co-host of a podcast called Chappo Trapp House. Mr. Will Menaker, welcome.

Feels good. Feels good to be here in the garage. Feels good to just be hanging, you know, not in the driver's seat, in the back seat. Just imagine that you're... I would just like to say though, I have selected the don't talk to me option before coming in for this ride. So just keep that in mind. Wow. Now, just imagine that you brought your car in for a tune-up and you're shooting the shit with the boys in the garage. Yeah, just guys, me and dudes. We got some oil on our car mechanic smocks. Just getting greased up. We got handkerchiefs dangling out of our rear pockets for reasons that are obscure but important. Just no rude language, please. Leading off, one of the models we service here at the Beltway garage is the media. Now, I know a lot of you

have listened to this already, but if you haven't, you absolutely need to hear this. It's one of the most fantastical things that we've done. And I think it's something that in the span of about 30 minutes, like totally explicates our politics right now. Like totally... is the perfect example of what the divide is, particularly in the context of the primaries. But I think in our generational politics, more broadly. I would argue that it is a case of Kunian incommensurability. There is a link in the description of this episode. It starts at around 37 minutes. Yeah, don't listen to the beginning. Unless you're a real pain pig. Last week, the classic Matt and Virgil dyad made a house call to a competing podcast.

Yahoo News' flagship podcast, Skull Duggery, hosted by veteran journalist Michael Isikoff and editor Daniel Klaidman, both formerly of Newsweek, now with theoretically existing news source Yahoo News. Yeah, they're from Newsweek. And remember, for the younger kids, there was a period where the Newsweek was an actual magazine. It came out every week. You could buy it in the airports. It was not just an aggregator of nipslips and side boob shenanigans as it is now. Wasn't it also bought out by one of those competing like Mooney sex, and not the one that bought out IBT where Brendan used to work? Newsweek was, Tina Brown took over of Memory Serves. Oh yeah.

And it was either absorbed by the Daily Beast or merged with it in some fashion. And that didn't work. The Daily Beast spun out, and Newsweek, I guess, became an orphan. Just a poor, boundling child wandering the streets. Just a ragamuffin walking through the news alley. So, and as often happens with orphan news sources, yeah, it's been purchased by a religious sex. That's the future. Just cults. Well, I wouldn't really call it a cult. It's more like a scientific method for living. But we are talking about Yahoo News. And this was, I want to give some context for this. When Matt and I agreed to do this, I mean, we regretted it. We had no idea why we said yes to this. I honestly, he said, Hey, who wants to do the Yahoo News podcast with me?

And I'm like, Oh, that sounds kind of interesting. And then they wanted to do it before noon. And I was like, Oh God, kill me instead. See, I sympathize with you guys because I feel I have a, you know, when some of my New Year's resolutions is to say no more often, like I always say yes, because I want to be like an agreeable, you know, likable person. I want to help people out, do their podcast. And then like, as the day of comes, I'm almost always just like, Why did I, why did I agree to do this? Well, I think it's not really, really regret it. But when the offer came through to do Michael Issacoff's podcast, I was just like, No, that's okay. You guys can have this one. I think there's some value in leaving the mansion from time to time to, you know,

check in, see how the other podcasts are doing. Yeah. And well, that was what made it so funny for me because all I heard was, I didn't know anything else about it. All were just said was Yahoo News podcast didn't know the name, didn't know who was on it. And so we show up at the Huffpo building and Midtown or now take off Union Square, right? Yeah. In Manhattan and we're ushered into one of those tech campus things. It's like there's a room. There's a big giant lobby. There's an desk, but then there's a big dark room with a bunch of people behind screens and then giant screens. It literally looked like they were, there was a guy in there talking about where Jason Bourne was and about fucking black, a briar. It was a legit multi

feed like control center for like, like a real news network would have, but the images on the screens, the kairos, I recognized none of it. It was very alienating and confusing. And then we went past a satellite zooming in and then some guy in a suit is like, Oh my God, that's Matt Kristen. And then we go past of course, because it was around the lunchtime, the mandatory tech free lunch buffet of like Asians, rice bowls and shit. And then to this tiny little room where I'm introduced to Michael Escoff, who I recognized as a big dick reporter from the Clinton and Bush era, the guy who broke the Lewinsky story, who broke a bunch of stories about the about the war on terror and torture. And I sit down with Virgil in this tiny little room, they close the

door and they're settling it up. And I just like, Oh shit, this is a fucking ambush. It was a hot room too. So I had to take my clothes off. Got nice. He was totally new during that time. But on the way there, little baby seal on the way there, I was, I was very hungover and sleepy. Not, I was not on my best. I was feeling very bad. I was, it's not really awful feeling when your body's temperature is just not, it's just not working. It's just wrong everywhere. Yeah. So I'm like incredibly hot wearing a winter coat when it's like 25 degrees out. Yeah, not good. Not good, folks. Not good. So I demanded to see the snack area. And I got a slice from the Coke freestyle machine, a Fanta, I suppose, and a banana. And then we go in there and they sit us down and

Escoff explains that he had no idea who we were until two weeks ago during Christmas break when he was confronted by three 20-somethings who are relatives of his who all listed a chapeau and they were, I guess, like being, giving him the okay boomer, you know, old man, your, your, your power does not run here. We don't care about your fucking. Yeah. The future is now old man. Yeah. It's like, we don't care about your takes on the political space. You're fucking fossil. We don't give a shit. Keep in mind, Escoff is, you know, he is a veteran journalist and he's an old man. He's like 67. And he was in the warrant area. He broke, like, for instance, the story about that we were desecrating Korans. We were flushing them down the doodoo toilet. Yeah. And that was like in 2005.

And, you know, that was a story that caused riots overseas because it cut against the heart of the Bush administration's message, which is, no, this isn't like a religious thing. We respect his law. I mean, all that shit. And they were actually forced to retract the story, but it came out as a separate report came out a month later saying, oh yeah, by the way, we're desecrating Korans left and right. This whole, this whole torture base is like a whole, like Koran desecration fact. See, I just remember Escoff from like, he was like a perennial guest on like Overman and MSNBC at like the height of the Bush administration and the war on terror and kind of a perennial thorn in the side of like, no, I recognize him when he introduced himself like,

oh shit, I remember he wrote a book called Hubris, which was about how the Bush administration lied of the war and how we're torturing people. I mean, well, I mean, I guess I don't want to jump ahead of you too much, but like, that's why when I listened to it, it was so surreal, like knowing his, his, you know, his CV and the questions he was coming up or like trying to nail you guys with, he's like, well, are you telling me that you think the CIA is inherently evil? When we sat down and after he explained that, I was like, oh shit, this guy wants to own us. Like he's inviting us on here because he was annoyed by his smug younger relatives and he wants to like show them up, have their heroes on the show and then flay them. So you'd be like,

see these the guys you think are smart? No, I'm smart. So again, just to set the scene, this was an ambush and they, they, they, they said that at the beginning that this is, this is, this is, this is, we got you. And we were not ready for that. I thought we were just going to be patiently explaining the show and its premise. So you guys met on Twitter, you know, like 30 minutes of that bullshit. Well, I mean, you guys like Bernie Sanders. That's crazy. Well, the guys, the thing is, you guys basically did explain the premise of the show quite well. Yeah. And so we'll, we're, and you know, I'm like, I'm hung over as shit and dying in this hot room eating a banana. Yeah. And, you know, Matt's like, well, what, what, what's going on?

Yeah. I was like, oh shit. Matt's, it's like, like, Matt's like, you know, he's like doing a line of coke in the cops walk in. Yeah. No, I was, because I was, because I am incredibly insecure. I think I'm always worried that someone's going to expose my fraudulence. Then I'm like, this is a real reporter here. He doesn't just read books. He writes them. Yeah. Multiple books. And again, I mean, we thought Isikoff was a, you know, he was like a critic of the Bush ministry, which I guess is the case, but he's also, I'm told, like he's a conservative guy. And I don't think he's necessarily anti-war because like generally, if you're like a Natsek reporter for 25 years and you're like held in esteem by other Natsek

reporters, you know, that they're pretty narrow parameters. Like there's boundaries you cannot cross. You spend way too much time breathing in the fumes at fucking Pentagon and Langley to not be affected by it. So the only exception to that would be like Seymour Hirsch, but he's mostly hated by his fellow. And he has his small like collection of sources who are secret and he's never, you know, whoever the hell they are, but like, it's not like he's hanging out at the commissary in like a fucking Alexandria, Virginia or something, or like a fucking Tyson's corners or whatever. So he, he just, they call him up and he does it. Yeah. Because if you spend too much time hanging around with, with military dudes, you're eventually going to absorb their worldview.

So you should listen to this entire thing, but I want to play three representative clips to give you an idea of how this interview went. No, it's like an ironic counterpoint between, you know, a name that sounds like a hip hop mix tape or something, and then a bunch of squeaky voice nerds talking about politics. Okay. So look, we're talking here in the second week of January in the aftermath of President Trump has taken out Kasam Salamani, the head of the Revolutionary Guard Cuds Force. Are you guys celebrating the death of this enemy of America? I'm not either. I've been disassociating since the news and I'm just, just now kind of putting myself back together. No, it's, yeah, it seems like a disaster and horrible in every way. Very

bad. Folks, we don't like to see it. Yeah. Because I want to tease out your future. Well, I mean, we shouldn't be there, I think is our like easy, easy sort of slug answer is that, is that the United States presence in the Middle East as this attempt to be, you know, the arbiter of whatever is actually only at every point makes things worse, makes things more fraught. And then we, to explain the chaos we create, decide to blame people actually in the region, like Iran, for destabilization that is all of it comes directly from US intervention. And so the idea that we're going to make anything safer by deepening military actions in the Middle East and doing something as radically destabilizing as attack the top military officer and diplomat for one of the

biggest countries in the region is, is horrified. Do you think that the United States is the main destabilizing presence in the Middle East? I mean, obviously the Iraq war. And how would you assess Iran as a destabilizing force? I mean, they're responding. That's the thing that I can't get over is the idea that every opportunity that Iran has taken to infiltrate themselves into countries from Iraq to Syria on none of these. These are all vacuums created by American military action and occupation and the chaos unleashed by that. And they actually live there. And it seems insane to me to be condemning a country for trying to stabilize the their neighbors on their own terms, because who wouldn't do that when we are insisting on dictating the terms in the Middle

East from 5000 miles away. So just one follow up question on that. So do you think that Iran has the right to pursue a nuclear weapon? I think honestly, they have more responsibility to pursue and acquire a nuclear weapon, because at this point, you should be pretty clear, the only guarantee against them US military aggression is if you have a nuke. So they should get one as soon as they can. Well, I don't think that's a position that your candidate for President Bernie Sanders actually endorses. Those were the first questions after the preliminary question. After asking us where we got the name from. Is that is that a drug thing? Yeah. Which is babbling, which means again, you know, the Wisconsin National Security Service, he knows how the sausage is made. And

I thought these questions were just fucking with us because they're kind of delivering it in this smirky way. Oh yeah. They were there. He had smug little smiles on their faces the entire time. I would like to say that that question like are you happy? Soleimani is dead. That's literally something that Bill Mitchell put as a poll on his fucking. The other thing that happened like a little bit after that clip, you said is the other guy, not is a cough. Yeah, the other guy, he was just like, well, like, you know, like, like are you concerned at all about like how I ran with like would use a nuclear weapon? So like intimidate Israel. And I don't know if you guys like touched on this, but like my response to that is like, well, Israel has like a whole host of

nuclear strike and counter strike options. So if Iran intimidated them with a nuclear weapon, I mean, they'd just be like, that's just deterrent. Like Israel is free to intimidate back with their existing arsenal of nuclear weapons, right? We're not supposed to talk about that, even though BB literally just let it slip the other day that they have a nuclear weapons. So, you know, like as this is happening, I'm still kind of disassociating and I'm just thinking, you know, what are they screwing with us? Is this, you know, like, are you playing devil's advocate here in the competing beltway garage? And I mean, I guess they're not. That's kind of a fucking frightening thought, especially since like that the follow up to the Soleimani thing about

nukes. It presupposes that the Iran has an existing nuclear weapons program, which I'm sorry, they don't. There's been no evidence that they actually are pursuing a new. That's the other thing. It's purely a thing. We have ginned up because they're enriching uranium, which you also use for domestic reasons, but they're buying into a premise that is pure liquid propaganda and then throwing it at us like it's a real thing. Well, Matt, I'm just slightly pushed back on you there. I mean, I think they are. They're certainly enriching uranium is, you know, any of the international observers is verified, but is there right to do under the terms of the treaty? But no, I mean, like they're at such a point where like if you can enrich your uranium to a

certain point, it wouldn't take very much for them to spin it up at a level that you would need to create a new. Also, why even ask any of these questions? Like you wrote a book about the Bush administration, which was also an incompetent administration, but one that could, you know, like dress itself and put the right shoes on the right feet. You wrote a book about how they lie to get us to war in Iraq. And the murder of Soleimani was conducted by a senile game show host who gave the options presented to him about as much scrutiny as he would give a McDonald's drive through menu. Oh, the fish delight, please. So why even like why like this is this interview literally happened days after that, when things were still looking incredibly fucking dicey and

when it was just this miserable fucking experience of seeing, you know, like millions of mega hogs paying for the murder of millions of people that they never met and Trump threatening war crimes. And to send this like tiny little hot box in the Yahoo News News Center is like just, you know, smirking giggle about this. It's kind of appalling. Yeah. Oh, the great the reader. It's so funny because I'm sure they imagine themselves to be these stalwart opponents of Trump, but as soon as the, you know, the state pokes its head out, they're willing to fucking accept anything. I mean, the title of the episode we ended up being on is called is Trump are OJ. I don't even know what that means. I'm not going to find out. I mean, don't tell me if you know it gets away with crimes.

I guess. But it's like, you want OJ? If OJ told you actually the killers of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were the Kutz Force under the direction of Kasim Soleimani, are you going to believe him? I'm sure it is a reference like, you know, OJ is a guy who gets away with crimes and is on Twitter again. But like the crimes that they're like, in this analogy, the crimes Trump are getting away with is like, you know, extorting the president of the Ukraine over Hunter Biden. Whereas the crime that they're literally saying, are you celebrating is murder, which is what OJ got away with. Yes. I also want to know what's in front of us during this interview. Clayman has a copy of our book, which I think he read. And like Clayback,

I think it was more fair throughout the interview. It just seemed like his ambition was to like get us on the record at things is a cop power could not hold back as contempt, which is why you hear him in the interview, go on these like these these these little tiny like West Wing rants throughout. Like, okay, he like definitely wants to have his version of an argument, which is we say something, and then he gives us the real deal. Yeah. In front of him was the printout of our Wikipedia page. I didn't see that. And in front of me was a banana and and only two beverages. So I did not really you're fighting with one arm type health health bar is like halfway degraded. Yeah. And that's like that's not take much more hit damage. Like that's bad pool in my opinion. Like to limit

me to a dual Bev situation when I always try wheeled. So I want to play another clip here, which was also I think a question that exposed quite a bit about the ideas of these hosts. I hear that you guys are not big fans of the West Wing and that the West Wing has kind of poisoned a generation of democratic operatives that, you know, the belief that you can make, you know, a high minded speech and transform American politics might now 15 year old daughter just discovered West Wing and she's been binge watching it. So I guess I might be poisoning her mind. So what's the problem with West Wing? I think the essential problem with West Wing is that it says that what matters in politics is intentions that the way that political change happens is

through persuasion, persuasion, but not of the people, importantly, of other people in the room with you of the other party, people, the assumption is a TV show that everybody right. I'm just saying is that that that's not what gets communicated is that you get Republicans and Democrats in a room and they all want what's best for the country. And you talk it out. And I think that the Obama administration by their own admission operated under those principles. They all have said as much. And then they ran into the modern Republican Party in the form of Mitch McConnell and they were absolutely polaxed by it because they kept waiting for him to act like someone from the West Wing, someone who had some higher thing that he cared about and it never happened. And

then they had no response to it. That's my main issue. So look, I mean, the principle Obama operated under is that we're a diverse country with diverse interests and they are reflected in the Congress in our political system with people with vastly different perspectives on the world than you guys have. And so then the question is, do you try to work with people like that to compromise? Or is it all my way or the highway? And what and what gets something accomplished here? Okay. What are the diverse interests? What are the diverse interests? We're a country of diverse interests. Some people are very Christian and other people are very secular. Those are diverse interests. Those are not really political interests. Like generally, we have some 90% support for

religious pluralism. Very few people want to make a theocracy. When you say diverse interests like that, it sounds like, you know, I want to eat spaghetti for dinner. I want to eat, you know, what's another food? I was going to say lasagna, but that's too close to spaghetti. Those are not very diverse interests. That sounds like we're closer. That's intro party. Okay. When you say diverse interests, that's what you make it sound like. What I think of diverse interests, I think, I own this copper, fucking copper wire factory. I want to pollute this river. I want to dump fucking toxic waste in the poor people neighborhood. And then another interest might be, hey, I live in the poor people neighborhood. I don't want to die, please.

Yeah. Well, look, I mean, there are perspectives that the free market system and capitalism is is a better way of managing and of having an economy than state-run bureaucrats telling you and I what we should do or what healthcare we should have or whatever. I mean, that is, you know, you may not agree, but there are people who legitimately have different philosophical perspectives on the best way for a good society than the ones that you do. And they've got some pretty powerful arguments in their favor by looking for starters. No, they don't. False of socialist systems over the many decades and their many failures. How about, you know, they have powerful arguments. So what are you, what are you going to do?

They've got powerful arguments. They've got args on their arms. What else? Because that's what it's about. It's about winning in the battle of ideas. It's not a contrast of powers. It's not, we have more people in our coalition than you do because they have a common interest that unites them and that we can dictate to you the small minority who would literally exploit them for profit. No, it's a battle of ideas. First, we win the argument on Facebook against my racist brother-in-law. Then we win the argument at the Thanksgiving table against my in great Bernie Bro nephews. Then we win the argument on the podcast. Then we win. Well, I mean, I think like that, that, that thing there is pitching about the diverse interests in this country and,

you know, what are you going to do to compromise with them? Or like, you know, we have to come together. It's a diverse nation, blah, blah, blah, interest. I think it's very telling because it gets to your point exactly, Matt, about how politics is not about having good arguments. It's about wielding power. And the thing, the fact of the matter is the left doesn't have any power so that when someone like you, you know, you know, articulates your vision of politics, then it becomes a question about like persuasion and articulating a point and winning an argument or compromising to get a portion of what you want. But this is fascinating because the Republicans control all three branches of government and they like, it's a cough and people like that.

The terms of that debate are very different. Like the Republicans are never, ever expected to like, oh, like, how about we just have some abortion, you know, somewhere or like, how about like we only, only a little, yeah, just like just like a half of the tax cut that we want, you know, it's just like, they don't have to because they have the power, they have the power to impose again, as a minority to impose their will on the rest of us. So strangely, it's never incumbent on them to compromise their vision or conversely for the, you know, centrist Democrats or liberals to compromise with the left, broadly speaking, is always to compromise with the right. I think it's because they view the right as a undifferentiated, adivistic mass that cannot

be reasoned with. It's just a fact of life and that governing is done by the, they're the Morlocks. And then you got the Eloi, whose job it is to like govern and figure out how to portion things and keep them in their Chick-fil-A and a golden corral. All you can eat, a fucking chocolate one. That's the alpha pluses in the absolute. And so there's, it's like, how do we negotiate with this black throbbing force that's within us, this eldritch horror where and then so and everyone else is sort of like left in the liberals are all on the same side of civilization against this uncivilized horde, which can't be reasoned with. And so therefore all politics becomes a question of negotiating with this unreasoning force. But if you're on the left, well, you know better.

You're not, you're not a savage. You're not at Oaf. You're not an, you're not a morlock. You need to be reasoned with. You need to be dealt with. We need to make a deal. They're also mad that we were angry. That was insane. When the guy asked, are you angry? I was just like my first, like I was saying, I was panicked when we got in there because like, are we going to get owned? And then they started asking questions and about five minutes into it. I realized they have nothing nothing. This is nothing that I haven't heard from a dozen like sad centrist accounts on Twitter. We've been making one of this talking about like how having his celebrating Christmas alone with his pot pie and his black coffee. He has the same owns that these professional fucking journalists

have. These are like literally 30 plus year Beltway veterans and it's like you just sound like the fucking imbecile accounts we've been owning for 10 years. Yeah, like I think I forgot who said this, but what this comes down to is that like for the leftist, you hear this, it's like, this is your fucking argument. This is nothing. We've been hearing this. We've been arguing this by our entire lives, but for people like Issacoff, they've only been in social situations where these people smugly say these owns back and forth. They've never heard a response to one, so they assume there isn't one. And it's like, well, we'll have they consider to Venezuela, and then they chuckle over their Chardonnays, and then they talk to someone who actually has

heard that five million goddamn times and knows a fucking response and they literally have no way to deal with it, which is why there was no follow up to any of your answers. Well, that was what they just moved on. That was a funny thing because they were operating under the fiction that, oh, okay, we're, you know, we're getting them on the record. This is just like a hard ball interview when Issacoff gives away the game because he can't resist doing his dinner table owns. Yeah. And then when we respond and he has nothing to say, it's like, well, let's go to the next question on the sheet. It's like, how is that not, since you're the one making the questions, how is all of that not an admission that you have no response? So you're the one who decides what

the questions are. So I want to play one more quick clip here. And this is a good segue into what we will be talking about for the rest of the episode. They pivoted to the election and by what they wanted to talk about was, okay, Pete Buttigieg, will you support him if he's the nominee? Okay, next up, Amy Klaubuchar, will you support her if she's the nominee? And I sort of got, if Matt hadn't told him, shut the fuck up, they would have just gone down the list of everyone. What if Michael Bennett were the nominee? Would you support him? So John Delaney, if he were the nominee, would you support him? So eventually, Matt delivered this excellent response. What about Klobuchar? I don't care. I live in New York, as I said. For me, I mean,

it really depends what the general election campaign, how that shakes out. All right. So this is a maybe vote for Klobuchar. But here's what's absurd about the question. We know that what people like Mayor Pete and Klobuchar are saying now, as kind of frankly, shitty is what they're saying now is what they're going to be saying in eight months is going to be different all over again. All right. More broadly. So if Amy Klaubuchar, if she gets the nomination and then pivots at the convention and says, I'm a Nazi, I have a national socialist in the Hitler kind, and I'm more of a Nazi than Trump, sir. And, you know, she says that she wants to make America a white ethno state and murder all the minorities. I would not support her.

I would want her to lose rather than asking about you guys. Let me ask you where you think your audience would be if you obviously have this very intense Bernie Bro audience. You know what? If Bernie doesn't get the nomination and it's not Warren, who I assume would be your second pick, and it's one of the others, Biden, Buttigieg. A lot more on that later. Where do you think your audience, I'll tell you this. And I hope everyone listening who is on the fence, maybe they're, maybe they don't like Bernie, maybe they're, they don't think he can win or whatever. I'll tell you right this. Our audience will as a block refuse to vote for whoever gets the nomination, which means, well, if it's not Bernie, yes, which means that for everybody who, as you

said, is concerned first and foremost with defeating Trump, they are morally obligated to vote for Bernie in the, in the primaries, because he is the only one who has a significant chunk of people who will not vote for the nominee, which means you have to pick him because if he doesn't get the nomination, you're as well. So if you're really concerned, as you said earlier, with electability, right, you have to pick Bernie. Okay. God bless Matthew P stats. Matthew, Matt Bertig, the ultimate response to all the shit about, about will you vote is no. So you have to pick Bernie. Yeah. If you care about electability, you have to pick Bernie because the Bernie Bros won't vote for any alternative. Yeah. Shout out to Matty V and Carl Bayer, too, who was also,

also a pioneer of this particular line of argumentation. And it's, it's, it's really, it's really the, it's really the perfect answer because originally the way this conversation went was they were asking us as individuals who we might vote for. And Matt says, I live in New York. What, what do you fucking care? What does it matter? I think that it doesn't matter anywhere what your individual voting decision is because that's just like, what do you, what do you fucking care? That's like, that's just saying politics just boils down to basically an individual consumer choice. Well, what it is, is that they're trying, because the big problem for the centrists, I've been thinking about this and this is what I've come up with. You guys can

tell me if I'm wrong. The big issue for the centrist is that they prize their moral high ground. They have reason for either Republicans. It's their entire identity. And they are one of the reasons they hate leftists so much is because leftists take the moral high ground from them, leaving them to have to say like, look, you might have more of these ideals, but I live in the real world. You fucking little pieces of shit. And one of the few ways that they could try to regain the high ground morally is to say, well, yes, the greater danger is we would all agree are these horrible Republicans, which means you, if you won't vote for whoever our nominee is, then you're a bad person. And it's purely about psychically feeling superior. But what they

don't realize is that they have opened the door and it's like, if you care about this hardboiled shit about just winning at all costs, then guess what? The guy with the biggest group of voters who won't show up to vote for the nominee, if it's not them, I'm sorry. He is the winner of any argument about electability. The other thing that I rolled around in my head was, again, it doesn't matter what I decide to do. I probably would, if the nominee is anyone but Bernie, I probably wouldn't make up my mind until election day, honestly. And but what does is something that does matter is what people would collectively do if someone like Pete Buttigieg won the nomination. And something I realized was if Pete Buttigieg were the nominee,

it's not just whether or not I vote for him. It's whether I would do anything on his behalf. And the answer is I would do nothing for him. You would do nothing for Pete Buttigieg. I would not. Like I said, like if I, I mean, I wouldn't have to wait that long. I mean, living in New York City, I would not vote for Pete Buttigieg. Well, it's not even vote. What? Again, it's would you would you volunteer for him? I would not. Would you donate money to him? Would you like defend him against the Republican attacks when they swithbode him about I wouldn't I would not lift military record. And our show would not talk about him in any positive way. Yeah. Would you hold back from criticizing the presidential election? If it was those guys,

I mean, would you even hold back from criticizing not in the slightest? Oh, and that's honestly the sentiment like whether or not they're willing to say it. That's really the sentiment from most people that I know and people that I'm familiar with who are like prominent Bernie supporters. It's like not that. Oh, all the Bernie people will get absorbed into Pete Buttigieg's general election campaign. It's that. Well, all right, fuck off. No, I mean, like if, if like, you know, if, if Bernie does not get the nominee nomination, then it's no longer my problem. Absolutely. It's yours. It's not my race. It's like, it's your problem now. Like good luck. And the thing that they like to harp on and the thing that they have used in the past is always

well, look, we have to do the most to mitigate harm. Now that you don't have your nominee, we have to mitigate harm, but a large percentage and I would say a significant enough to maybe even determine the outcome percentage of Bernie supporters. See this election. I know I do as the last off ramp to apocalypse. So I'm sorry. In the long term, there is no difference between a Biden presidency and a second Trump term. There is no difference between a Mayo Pete, a Mayo Pete term and a Trump term in that we are not bending the curve away from Armageddon enough for it to matter. So the question isn't really, do I support if, if people are the nominee, would I support Pete or a third party candidate? The question is more, would I even care about

the electoral process at that point? I think one thing that really gives it away is a number of people who are pre angry at Tulsi Gabbard because they see her doing a third party run and then like being the nadir of 2020 and you could, when you, when you see the people mad at Tulsi, like they're all heading themselves off as Putin is going to get her to be the third party and she's going to split the debt when we, and it's like, you know what, that might happen if you nominate a Biden or a Buttigieg, but guess what? You don't have to nominate a Biden or a Buttigieg. If Bernie's the nominee, there's basically a 0% chance that Tulsi runs some like a dis, like a disaffected, leftist third party candidacy. That's not going to happen. So I've been rolling this around in my

head whether, which tech makes more sense to give the threat and essentially make the argument that okay, you have to support Bernie if you want to beat Trump because you've said that beating Trump is your only issue. It's not the most salient issue. It's the only issue, which means by definition, you do not care about anything else. You don't care about policy differences. You don't care about like who was the better health plan or whatever was the better vision for the country. You don't even care who the fucking nominee is. You just want a meat sack that will beat Trump. And that means you have to support Bernie if, you know, if we make the argument that Bernie supporters as a block, a big chunk of them will not vote for any other nominee. And I mean, let me finish this

thought. Let me finish this thought. And like that can backfire, I think, and just make people more pissed off because that's essentially asking them to call their bluff and say, you know, okay, either you do that or you can see that you're a liar and you're actually perfectly fine with four years of Trump, which most of them are because here's the thing, you could not factually make that argument. I saw a recent opinion survey that as supporters of the top four candidates, okay, if your guy doesn't win, will you support, you know, whoever the nominee is, it's something like 10, 15% of buying supporters, 10, 15% of people who just support us will not support the ticket. That percentage for Bernie supporters who will, who will, you know, take their ball and go

home, 4% according to one survey. Like I would say like, you know, I, knowing our listeners, the extent that I do, I would imagine that like a good percentage of them will vote for Elizabeth Warren or if you live in a swing state, just hold their nose and vote for the Democrat. But I think, you know, it gets to your point, Virgil, it's really more about, will I do anything actively to help this campaign or say anything nice about it? Like fight for this thing. Will I fight for it to happen? Will I be really invested in the outcome? No, not really. I mean, again, like gun to my head, would I want a Democrat or Republican to win this election? Like, I'll guess I'll choose the Democrat. But like to me, that's like not really like

something I emotionally feel in my core, you know what I mean? And like, and like, I think it's like, it is about calling their bluff because they're all bluffing. They're all bluffing. I think some voters aren't bluffing. I think a lot of voters do generally care about electability. I think that's Biden's pitch. But among the pundit class who say they care about electability, I would say it's close to 100% are full of shit. Yeah, it's a it's a it's a gotcha. And like for the reasons that I laid out, you should never take any of that seriously. Unfortunately, the vast majority of voters do not care about any of this shit. Yeah, I saw a post from a guy I follow who said, you know, one of the questions I didn't expect to get while canvassing for Bernie

was who the fuck is Bernie Sanders? And that's kind of where a lot of people are because a lot of people are not paying attention. They're not listening to Skull Duggery. No, they're not listening to the Beltway wisdom. The vast majority of people make their decisions, as we've discussed before, two weeks out ahead of time. Let's move on. And I want to give a quick announcement here, because Will's in the Beltway garage. The three of us a few months ago over the summer went to the Iowa State Fair, and we had a jolly old time. And fortunately, we had cameras running during it. We got to see a bunch of candidates go to the political soap box, which is a venerated Iowa State Fair tradition dating back many, many primaries and caucuses where every person

running for president from Joe C. Stack to Joe Biden is able to go up in front of a crowd and give a little pitch. And we were there for a bunch of them. We saw the candidates up front and close. We graded them based on the Westminster dog show checklist. It's about confirming to the breed type. I checked their teeth and balls, all of them. Give them a little cup, a little pat. And when I said, I said, here, just walk down there and come back. And I go, that's all like a one, two, three. And we've made a short film about our experiences called Good Vibes at the Iowa State Fair, where in you can see us interacting with those hecking candidates as well. You can watch Matt disassociate because during while we were there in the state fair, we, the news broke

that our friend Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide. Yeah, that was a fun day. Just walking around watching everyone just eating their pork chops on a stick and thinking about the cabal. You know, we interact with the candidates. We ask them questions. I asked a pretty spicy question to Elizabeth Warren. That ended up being fairly, I'd say. Who's the answer to it? I asked her about Medicare for All. Let's just say her answer presaged her dive in the polls a couple of weeks later. You can also see Will Get Intimidated by Amy Klobuchar. Amy is terrifying. Well, I was terrified too. And I didn't even ask the question about whether you'll open an investigation into Jeffrey Epstein's death. I mean, like I said, I think you will see

us interact with the candidates. But as far as the film goes, you will also, it's really about us interacting with the Iowa State Fair as a sort of a psychic landscape, a liminal space in the American imagination. And I sort of wandering through this zone, if you will, because there's just as much of us interacting with prize winning livestock as there is with the candidates. Absolutely. But it makes for a very nice contrast, I should say. As a concept, the Iowa State Fair is, I mean, according to the Beltway insiders like us, it is important to this entire process. So to navigate that landscape in the context of a presidential election, I don't know, I think it just says something, you know, you can pre-order

the film, which will be released Friday at iowagoodvibes.com. And pre-order before Friday or pay an extra dollar like a complete chump. The ball's in your court. Yeah. If you want to make a deal, what you want to do is deal. You want to do some savings. We're about deals here. You want to save one dollar? Order now. Order now. I love it. Some people, they pay the picture. I make deals. It's going to get me off. But before we get into the news of the day or the week that I suspect we'll be talking about for the fucking weeks to come before Iowa, I do want to say genuinely, I am so, so happy with how this movie came out. And I really, really want you guys to see it. And I think you guys are going to enjoy it a lot. It's our first real foray into the medium of film.

And I just, I really, we didn't really know what it was going to turn out like or like what we were really going for while we were doing it. But like in the process of doing it, we, we figured it out and I could not be happier with how it turned out. It's really funny. And it's like, it's exactly what we like, it captures the experience perfectly. And as an exuberant dance of light and shadow. And I'm also very proud of our collaborators, Chris Wade, of course, directed the film, Molly, who operated the second camera, Joe Sestak, who came to our house. Yeah, our co-star, Joe Sestak, the, our editor, editor, Chris and Moses from Dear Hunter, who did the delightful soundtrack. So please check that out at IowaGoodVibes.com. Now, before we get into the state of the 2020

presidential race, let's have a 21 wrench salute for the candidates we've lost. Can we get taps going for this one? Last month saw the capitulation of Montana Governor Steve Bullock. Bye-bye, Senator Kamala Harris and Admiral Joe Sestak. There's one big one today. There was a big one today. We'll get to it. Earlier this month, Julian Castro left the race, immediately endorsed Elizabeth Warren over VP Grubbin Motherfugger. Over the weekend, Marianne Williamson, another guest of this program, dropped out. Or yeah, or power or orb life forever. Marianne also immediately endorsed Bernie. She will, but I trust she will. She did. Not yet. I don't believe that was for 2015. Oh, okay. No, I believe that she will give all of her or power to Bernie and the primaries,

and I think it will help. And late breaking news here, Senator Cory Booker is officially out of the race. And then there were 12. Oh, fuck. I blame dirty dozen. I blame Q tip. What was the name of that guy? The fake gangster that he hung out with T bone. I blame T bone for this. Cory Booker, which is, I mean, again, like a blip in the polls, never made a dent. And yet this is just another opportunity for all the shameless people we hate in the media to say, well, he was forced out of the race. Yep. Like, like he's at the Indy 500 and someone just banks him into a corner. And it's like, you don't even care. That's the thing. If he was pulling at like 10% or something and you were like a hardcore Cory Booker supporter, then fine. But it's obvious you're just using this

as an opportunity to make some abstract point that pretty much boils down to Bernie bros. Yeah, racist Bernie bros didn't give a friend of pharmaceutical companies and Wall Street Cory Booker a fair shake or alternatively just a racist Midwesters. Yeah. Oh, but the other thing I saw at least at least as regards Cory Booker is the narrative I'm seeing about him is like, again, a guy who could barely crack 1% in any any national poll, much let alone a state one. They're just saying like, you know, it's it's a real shame because the things that were liabilities for him in this primary would be like the best possible assets in a general. And like Democrats are really shooting themselves in the foot by not having Cory Booker be like in the conversation

to be like they're, you know, they're leading their flagship to be the free hugs candidate. Yeah. His whole thing is like, can't we all just get along? And I think the last three years are very explicit. No, we fucking can't. Someone's got to win this thing because we're all going to go insane. He's running on a plur platform. Yes. It is interesting though, because there was always, I think anyone even, but as soon as Trump won, everyone would understand that in 2020, there would be an Obama lane where you just try to be Obama again. And the number of guys tried to get the Obama Lane Booker, Judge. Well, I would argue that Buttigieg took the lane, but his competitors, his big ones were Booker and Beto. And I think it's actually fascinating

that the small town fucking mayor is the guy who defeated sitting Senator and a guy who had an incredibly high profile Senate race just a year previously, but either way, it's like, I'm sorry, you are like a malfunctioning Chuck E cheese animatronic. No one buys your thing because you look sweaty and desperate at all times. Well, it is, it is really interesting because on paper, yeah, Booker and Harris look like hardcore contenders and they look like they would go the distance. Nobody thought it would be Pete Buttigieg. And I mean, you know, as well, better work seemed like the one who was like, Oh, this is all, you know, this is all flash and no substance. But even he's gone from the race. Remember when Amanda Marcotte said that now

that better was in the race, like the youth vote was all just go away from a number of people said that that was a common take is that, well, wow. And he had a decent first quarter fundraising hall and I was like, wow, Bernie, you've been superseded. Beto has all the youth energy. Now let's get to the state of the race. It is four days until you want to do like a, like a state of the race type hardcore cycle. State of the race. What's going on? Who's going to win those first caucuses and primaries? It's four days until the first votes in the 2020 primaries will be cast as early voting begins in Minnesota this Friday. But far more pressing is the first in the nation, Iowa caucus just three weeks away. This is the critical vote that will

establish the field in what has been an incredibly fluid race so far. Three polls out of Iowa this month, one showing Joe Biden up by six over Bernie Sanders. Another from the Des Moines Register showing Bernie Sanders up by three over Liz Warren. And yet another showing a dead heat, a three way tie between Biden Sanders and Pete Buttigieg. I think you can say that it is a tight race. And also interestingly, when voters are asked who their second choices are, and only the top four contenders, the ones who have been consistently polling above the 15% threshold. Which is important in a caucus state like Iowa. Yes, because at a caucus location, if your candidate is beneath the below the 15% threshold, you will get the opportunity to pick

door number two. In that case, it's a three car pile up between Biden Sanders and Buttigieg. Again, Warren does not advance at all. Because it turns out that the people who have Warren as their second choice tend to have Biden, Bernie and or Buttigieg as their first choice. Yet the people who have say Amy Klobuchar as their first choice or Andrew Yang as their first choice, they are going to candidates who are not Warren. I gotta say, this is very terrifying to me, because it seems like the most likely scenario is either a Bernie, a Biden or a Mayor Pete win in Iowa. And Bernie, a Bernie win in Iowa to me, it's not guaranteeing him the nomination, but it's, it's good. It's good. Very good thing. I see it leading to a cascading effect that could

make him just unstoppable by the end of super Tuesday. Mayor Pete win, I think muddles everything because he has a difficulty in national polling. He could jump up, but I think there's still obstacles to him. Honestly, a Mayor Pete, I don't know what happens then, but if Biden wins, my real fear is that it's 2004 all over again, where it's a guy comes out of Iowa after a contentious primary and a traumatized Democratic electorate who wants nothing more than to beat the awful incumbent that they all hate, rallies behind the winner of Iowa and decides to just steamroll the whole process. I think if Pete wins, he'd get momentum, but he would not be able to steamroll the process because I think everyone, I think his liabilities are too obvious. And I think a lot

of people say, well, I like him, but he's also the mayor of a tiny fucking town and it's like 17 years old. That's the most votes he's ever received in an election. But I agree with you there that if it is Biden, who most people we know are fine with as the nominee, most Democratic primary voters, yeah, I think it's a good shot that everyone says, all right, well, whatever, Iowa decided it for us. In fighting, we'll get us nowhere. We need to beat Trump. Let's all rally behind the guy who won the first prize contest. And just keep in mind losing both Iowa and New Hampshire or at least not placing a solid second would probably be a mortal blow to Mayor Pete's campaign. Absolutely. Because it's interesting. Iowa is actually kind of non-dispositive among

Republicans. I can't remember. What was the last Republican nominee to win Iowa? I can't even think of one. Did Bush win Iowa in 2000? Yes, he did. The winner of the Republican nomination is not one Iowa since then. That was the last one. Right. Romney declared victory in 2012, but when the final talent was in, Santorum had topped him. Yeah. But on the Democrat side, it's a entirely different story. Iowa is incredibly influential and powerful. It was in 2004. In 2004, I think is a pretty decent model for this election. Yeah. I think so. Yeah. The idea of Democratic electorate traumatized by their hatred of the sitting president wanting nothing more than to defeat them. I can see them being made anxious by any continued inner-party argument, especially since

so many of them are walking around thinking that it was that long primary in 2016 that cost Hillary the election. So just like I would say, a moment now to say though, should the worst case scenario happen? And Bernie takes a fatal or very strong hit to his health bar. With all the money he has, I think it is really incumbent on him to, no matter what, go as far as he can go into the primary itself and hopefully, a shout of the Democratic Party permanently. I will say this. The party must die if he can't take it over. Gaming this out of my head. I do not think Biden will win Iowa. I think the only way he would win Iowa is if our just imagination is totally depleted as a populist, which might be the case. It might be. Who knows?

It's not a bad bet to make. Because nobody is going door-to-door for Joe Biden in Iowa. It really does seem like he just does not. He is resting on just legacy shit. He does not have a grassroots. And in something like a caucus where all your neighbors, enthusiasm and endurance, you're in public, you're voting, your vote is a matter of public record at that point, then it matters having things like precinct captains, people who are there because they give little speeches and say, here's why you should support my candidate. And who the hell is saying that for Joe Biden? I'm picturing every caucus location just has a version of Joe Biden. Give a used old man a rambling speech of, you know, but Iowa flavored. So, you know, he had corn pop,

but in the Des Moines public. Remember, there used to be a drive-in town on I-90 and you could go there. It was two bits and you get to see a double feature and we get the popcorn. Remember the popcorn? It was so good. What? Who? And that would be it. That's the speech. And the case for Biden is, I mean, you basically just said what it is. It's, hey, we're just going to turn back the clock. Things will be good again. Yeah. And it's not, I mean, it seems good if you devote zero thought to the entire thing. Right. And that's the only message you hear. Which most people have to this point. Right. But once you're faced with competing messages that might be more persuasive than that, which I personally think the arguments that, you know,

the closing arguments that Sanders, Warren and Buttigieg are making are all three of them are more persuasive for more people than Biden's just half-assed. Hey, you know me. Hey, I'm the guy from the billboard. It has no, like the Biden thing has no content at all. So that's why I just don't think Biden will win Iowa. And I don't think he'll outperform the polls is another thing. I do think there's a big opportunity for Bernie to outperform the polls, especially because of one, his volunteer army in Iowa. And two, because he probably stands to be the second choice for a lot of people who say their first choice is Tulsi Gabber and Andrew Yang. That's absolutely true. I feel like he'll grab a ton of those people. And like, it doesn't

look like a lot individually, but, you know, in each one of these things, it could be enough to change the balance. But keep in mind, there's another X factor, which is there's freaks who say that Tom Steyer and Amy Klobuchar are their first choice. That's true. But those are people who just watch TV a lot. And as well, I mean, well, I mean, everyone likes TV, man. Yeah, we all like our shows. And as well, keep in mind, it's still a fluid race. And it's, again, there's still a lot of people who have not made up their truly made up their mind. That's the maddening thing for people like us with the sickness. The most maddening thing about, about especially primaries is knowing that you're getting your worked up about all these stories and all

this moves and counter moves shit. And the vast majority of people, the people we're going to make or break a candidacy are not paying attention to any of it. And it's, I mean, with four candidates with comparable favorability ratings, it's not hard to see any one of them just catching fire for reasons that, you know, us not on the ground in Iowa, we cannot even define. I would say this. I gamed out the three things I think could happen. And it was only three, because as, even though it's a four-way race, I honestly don't think Warren can win Iowa. I just don't see it. Like the polling aggregates, I see she's never in the lead. She's like, you could see, you can find one with Bernie, you can find one with Biden, you can find one with

Blue to Josh if you look, but you cannot find anything with Warren in the lead in Iowa. And if that just, if, if she doesn't have a better ground game than Bernie, that might be comparable, but it's not better than Bernie's. And if he's already doing better at this point, I just don't see Warren winning Iowa. And also, I agree with that. And also keep this in mind though, I thought Buttigieg was on a downswing after the New Year's. And, you know, right before the holidays, he was down. Before the holidays, he got hit with, you know, he was leading the polls in Iowa, but he got hit with a lot of negative press coverage. He had that bad debate when everyone was ganging up on him. The wine cave. Right. And the made up black people who support him.

And what concerns me is that it seems like the media has gotten bored with beating up on Buttigieg. And it seems like the media has given up on trying to beat up on Biden. Well, there's someone who they're definitely paying attention to now. Which was inevitable. As soon as they stopped ignoring him because he was no longer ignorable, they were going to turn on him. That was the next step that was anticipated. As we told you on this very program in this very garage, the gloves are officially off with Bernie yesterday. Can I just say though, shit just got real. Oh, shit has gotten real because the 2019, the story was their theory of Bernie was, oh, this isn't real. This isn't serious. Just like dumbass Obama. Oh, we can ignore him.

Yeah. They thought he was Ron Paul. And they thought that they could just ignore him and he go away. And then baby New Year showed up and he looked too much like Bernie. And they fucking now they had that. There was that big two weeks or a week ago. There was a big spate of pieces. Bernie could win this thing, which is funny because fucking clockwork. A week later, the fucking knives are out. Well, what's funny about that is their rationale for why Bernie could win this thing that they've only just now figured out lesser wonks was the rationale that I gave on this program and on the majority report a year ago. It's true. No, you've been correct. If you want to know, if you're a member of the ruling class and you want to know, oh, fuck,

how do we prevent people from gaining class consciousness? Just listen to this program and just go after the things we're telling you are happening. The only thing that you were actually know, don't do that. The only thing you were wrong about is that Biden has not collapsed as we expect. Well, here's the thing. His numbers have gone down in Iowa. He's not collapsing the way that I thought he would because I thought wrongly, I would say now that the media would go after him because the media people as much as he loathed them, they also loathed Biden because he's not woke enough. I kind of wonder if they've just stopped bothering with Biden because Kamala, the thing that they liked and could lord over other people and say, I'm such a good person,

I support Kamala Harris, is out of the race. They're just kind of nihilistic at this point. I honestly think what happened is that Biden's obvious and unarguable senility has worked in his favor in that the press feels bad about attacking a clearly confused old man. I also, my other banner prediction was that it would come down to Bernie versus Warren. And there's still a chance of that happening though. I think Warren's window is closing. I think it's getting worse for her, but she's trying to turn that around. Yesterday, Politico made a hay of a supposed script for Bernie canvassers in Iowa, instructing them to warn possible Warren voters that, quote, the people who support her are highly educated, more affluent people who are

going to show up and vote Democratic no matter what. She's bringing no new bases into the Democratic Party. We need to turn out disaffected working class voters if we are going to beat Trump, end quote, which is true. I don't know about the province of this supposed call sheet. I would like to just underscore again. Let's say that that was 100% a script coordinated and done by the Bernie Sanders campaign. Not only is it one, 100% true, it is two, the latest possible attack. It's not an attack at all. What you're saying is that in a primary campaign, you cannot draw distinctions with voters who are leaning another way and give them an argument for why you support your candidate or not. Like I said, this has been driving me crazy for fucking months now.

The Bernie campaign has said that this was the work of a single canvasser posting in a slack and was never an official campaign script, but that hasn't stopped Warren from fundraising off the shocking allegation that her supporters are exactly who you think they are. We got a rat problem, folks. We clearly have a rat problem. That's not you're correct. One is that's on attack. That's persuasion. And two is that's also true. It's also unequivocally true. They're running against each other at the end of the day. Pooling delegates. This is all fantasy horse shit. You don't get to do that until the second fucking ballot at which point the shit hammer, the thousand pound shit hammer is under as Thompson called it of the fucking super

delegates comes down and smashes your fucking ball sack. The other thing is like, at least it's like, you know, and the Sanders Warren thing is, you know, heated up even more so since then, because I think the Warren people realize that this is their last chance to get any heat before the votes start getting cast. But the thing that drives me fucking crazy about all this shit is like, as far as the Sanders Warren beef goes, because like the narrative goes is like, well, they're so close together. Like, you know, why don't they just be friends and like have the best of both worlds and like unite everyone on broadly speaking, the progressive left side of the Democratic Party. But like it's just what I see like from like the most dedicated Warren supporters, they

respond to any distinction between their candidate and Sanders as an attack, if not like outright violence against them personally, that they always say that like, you know, this is, you know, even if you win, this is really bad in the long term because you need people like us. Or like, you know, there's always just this thing where like, you know, my, I don't know, my fear and anxiety about being having to argue with people will make it harder for Sanders in the general election. And like, well, number one, a, we don't need any of these people. The campaign script is exactly right. They will vote for a Democrat no matter who it is. And they would absolutely vote for Bernie. But number two, I just think as far as like, very specifically, this very specific kind

of Warren voter, as is accurately described in that script, they are what they want to do, especially the ones who just wanted to sell this Kumbaya narrative and be like, oh, like, it's the Bernie supporters by attacking us, you're blowing your opportunity for like, the two best candidates to like, hold hands together and walk across the finish line like fucking, you know, the Ford team at LeMond or whatever. They are just entirely projecting the anxieties that they personally face in their social and professional contexts about being forthrightly for Bernie. I'm sorry, that's all it is. And like, I like, I like, you're, you're, they always say like, oh, it's really bad look of you to like, hold hostage,

like a whole electorate through the thing that we just spent the first half hour of this show talking about. But they're attempting to hold everyone else hostage through their own fragility and anxiety. Well, let's, let's walk out on some data because we talk about polls here. Oh God. According to Quinnipiac's latest national poll, which shows that Bernie has cut Biden's lead over him from 14% to 6% in one month, 50% of Warren supporters have Bernie as their second choice. Well, 50% of Bernie supporters have Warren as their second choice. This is a lot more stark than the morning console tracking polling, which is a bit more muddled on the matter. They usually say Warren's supporter's second choice is Bernie, but only 30% and 20% would

go to Biden, 20% would go to Pete. That's honestly, that scans a lot more to me just in terms of how again, most people following this process who are going to vote, they see the four candidates to think, oh, they all sound pretty good. Like they are not seeing the, the, what, what the distinctions among them that, you know, we're focused on because it just doesn't seem like that based on the information that they're receiving. That being said, if Quinnipiac is right, then it's got to be one of them. Then Bernie or Warren? Basically, yeah. But the thing is, I mean, I just, what I do is I just game it out and I can see Bernie winning Iowa and moving on from that. I can certainly see fucking Biden winning Iowa and then just rolling forward. I don't,

if I don't see, if I can't see Warren winning Iowa, I don't see her winning anything. And therefore, I don't see her gaining any kind of momentum to become the alternative to the Biden. No, this one's interesting. So if Bernie won Iowa, he's a lot to win New Hampshire. And he's already leading in New Hampshire. His team is very confident. He won by a landslide there last time around. And it's also an open primary. If he wins Iowa and New Hampshire, I think he would surge and win Nevada, which he's already. There's an interesting data point about Nevada, which is of all people, Andrew Yang released internal polling that you cannot argue is biased for him because it showed him at 5% in Nevada, but also showed Biden and Sanders

at about 30% each in Nevada, where Warren is like in fail jail. They've also, there's also a poll, a national poll or not an internal poll showing a stay or 15% in Nevada in South Carolina. No, in Nevada too, 10% in Nevada, 10% in Nevada, 15% South Carolina too. Well, those ads must be working. Well, that's the thing that is the, that those voters you could basically just say are not paying attention. And so when they get a phone call, it's who they're thinking of. And the guy on TV literally all day. What about him? Yeah, the guy I'm looking at right now, the guy who is on TV while I'm on the phone with the pollster. Yeah, that's a name. And those are the people who will guarantee go for the hot hand when it comes time because they're not paying any

attention. Well, let's go back into the Warren versus Sanders thing. And up until the past few days, it looked like, especially from the last debate, it looked like Warren realized, fuck, I lost the left lane to Bernie and that his base is rock solid and I'm not going to be able to go there. So I can't, I can't advance on my left wing. So I'm going to go to my right flank and attack Pete Buttigieg, which he did at the debate. That was the whole wine cave span. And now today, in what is possibly the dirtiest story of the election, I cannot think of a filthier smear. Honestly, the funny thing is, is I actually, I was telling you guys about this, my like, I joked about how if we've, we know on, we know for a fact that Obama doesn't want Bernie to be the

nominee. Right. And I said, if Bernie, if Obama wanted to end this tomorrow, he could just come out and have a press conference to say, uh, we were the Senate cloakroom in, uh, 2007. And Bernie called me boy. Yep. No, I said that to you. You and I were talking about that. Yeah. It was like, uh, and that would have been the end of it. The thing that actually has saved us and the thing that saved us from the wrath of Obama coming down to fuck Bernie is that I honestly think that what it comes down to is that post-presidency Obama sort of has hero Hito syndrome because hero Hito was, you know, Japanese emperor during World War II. And he was according to not only the state ideology, but the literal religion of most Japanese people, a God on earth, which meant

his power was unlimited. But what that meant is that if he actually tried to assert his power and someone said, no, the entire facade explodes and like everyone assumes that everyone loves Obama and though Obama is still this, this power, uh, among the democratic electorate, but if he were to say, endorse someone or make an actual argument or a pitch for something, and it didn't happen, then the entire thing falls apart. The other thing is Obama is never going to do just a big dick smear like Trump does on an hourly basis or like Harry Reid did in 2012 saying, yeah, I saw him in Robbie Sasha turns. He's a crook. That was awesome. He said it. It was an absolute 100% lie. Yeah, but it's like everyone said, do you have evidence? He just, oh, I saw

it. There's your evidence. There's your fucking source. What are you going to do about it? Well, this is what helped. Well, this is what Warren has just done to Sanders. Right. Okay. So today, I think the dirtiest smear of the election, three sources told CNN that in a private meeting between Warren and Sanders in late 2018, Sanders told Warren that a woman couldn't win a presidential election. The sources source for that is Elizabeth Warren. And she is saying that now. She's saying apparently they're confirming. I thought they were denying it. No, no. The Sanders campaign has denied it. The Warren campaign has said nothing. Yeah. They've had no comment to all this stuff. Yes. This is because I mean, I'm sorry. There's a 0% chance this happened. I'm just going to say it.

Yep. 0% 0% chance as Bernie wanted Warren to run for president in 2016 and she's a fucking coward to do it. And then she waited in the cut and then endorsed Hillary and then ran against Bernie four years later. The idea that she's anybody's ally in this is fucking ridiculous. She is there to absorb up all of the fucking hate to use the word. Everyone hates a PMC fucking left liberal energy and use it and hide it. Take it away from Bernie so that he doesn't have the connection you need to fucking win a goddamn primary. She also has to look at, you know, what the polls are in Iowa and think, you know, I mean, I haven't led in a single fucking poll since summer of last year, but I'm still, you know, I'm still in the race. I'm still pretty close. And as you and I have been

talking about, a lot of people have not made up their minds and Iowa produces some weird results. So she has every reason to think, okay, I'm still in this one. I still want the brass ring and I'll do what it takes. But she needs those votes from Bernie. She realized she's not getting them for the right. If that Q poll is right. And if that, you know, correlates to what Iowa caucus goers are also thinking, then yeah, maybe the they've recalculated and thought, well, the path of least resistance might actually be the kneecap Bernie. Yeah, because if he looks, if everyone all of a sudden simultaneously gets Bernie bro flashbacks for 2016 and decides, oh, Bernie is too divisive and he's, oh, his, his supporters are too, too aggressive. And we'll look at that. Is

that misogyny? I see. Yeah. There's some misogyny. And then they're going to flee to fucking Warren and give her just that last minute toadstool boost to get across the finish line ahead of Biden and may OP. I love that. Bernie bro flashbacks, just choppers, machine gun fire, snatches of Vietnamese, playing in the background now. I mean, the standards, I mean, as far as like journalistically go, the standards for sourcing that article were, it was like, you know, fucking Ralph Wiggum shit. It's, it's, it's funny of all the genres of bullshit story from the cycle. The stories of Obama people don't like Bernie or just like any other like general like, you know, insiders war and Bernie would cause him the election. Those are the ones that often have

all anonymous sources. Nobody's on the record for those things. And then within like an hour of the story coming out, people were finding a fucking in a Bernie speech from 1988, where he was being a, where he was a campaign surrogate for Jesse Jackson saying that he believes a woman could be elected president in 1988. Here's another interesting thing to this story. So like, uh, you know, Bernie is the villain here for allegedly telling Elizabeth Warren to her face at a private meeting that he doesn't think that a woman can be president. And I'm sure Matt, the people who believe this shit would react to you by saying, well, of course he would say that in public in 1988 and then reverse it 20 years later. That's why she spent two years after

that talking about how great Bernie was. So yeah, the interesting thing is like the, the, the, the people for which this attack has the most resonance and valence of which is like, I always knew it. I knew it all along. I knew it all along. This is Bernie's misogynist have spent the last three years opining about the fact that America is just too sexist to elect a woman president. That's why we defeated our precious Hillary. Yeah. So they like, so they believe that that's true, but that Sanders is a villain for allegedly stating that the same thing that they believe. There's no co, see, here's the thing. If you try to like map a coherent political ideology and praxis among these liberals, you can't do it because it is such a combination of

like, I have to use the word, but like virtue signaling and, and, and like there's no, there's no coherence to it because it's purely spectacle driven. It's purely ornamental. They don't actually care if anything changes. They're not invested. What they care about is, is, is cultivating some sort of a niche within the, the, the discourse. They have no actual investment in changing anything. So they don't have to think through any of this shit about what actually is going to fucking get someone elected who is not a senile game show host, quasi fascist psychopath. What's interesting is multiple people have pointed out is Biden himself has been explicitly saying, hey, I can win because I'm not a woman. Yeah, explicitly, you know, why I would be

Trump and Hillary did. I'm a guy. I'm a guy. I got it. So, um, so what you have here is like, it's like, it's two, two news stories in a row. Like I said, I mean, the, again, we all saw this coming. There was a week, as Matt pointed out, a week of stories from like the mainstream press going, Hey, Bernie's the real deal. He could win this whole thing next week. Two stories in a row. That's putting up the bats of spurious bullshit, attacking him on, like, and making it seem like him and his supporters are mean to Elizabeth Warren, i.e. every woman who's going to cast a row, right? Um, both of those stories seem to be like mostly bullshit entirely, right? Yeah. But like, what's, what's so well, they're so, you know,

why this affected this is the classic Lyndon Johnson thing, make the son of a bitch deny it. And Bernie's in a tough, tough position here. I mean, because like they're coming at you. So what do you do? The wankers are coming at you. Like the wankers. I'm sorry, not, not just the wankers. Elizabeth Warren is coming at him. And it was her people who fucking did the, the CNN story. That did not just happen. Like this is her campaign. She's the ultimate source of the story. Yeah. Like, uh, she's coming at you on this. So like, do you deny it? All right. I mean, I would like to see the debate tomorrow night. That's the thing. He did deny it. He denied it. His campaign denied it to every media outlet. And Elizabeth Warren's campaign

has no commented. Everyone who talked about this. So at the debate tomorrow night, I think a very good question to ask Elizabeth Warren right off the bat. First question is, did this happen? Yes. And then she's going to get that question. And she better get that fucking question. Well, here's the thing. What if she says yes to it? Well, if she says yes, well, then, then Bernie's in a position of having to deny it or having to say basically that she's a liar. Well, there you go. But what I'm saying is she makes that choice. She says it's happened. Well, that's, that's, and Bernie has to say, no, it didn't. And I think she, I think she's already proven that she's willing to say that it did happen. And here's the thing. What do you do

if you're Bernie in this situation? This, well, it's time for some game theory, folks. Cause like the, honestly, I think the best thing you can do that this is just try to ignore it as much as possible. Right. But I'm saying this, you're literally going to have it in your face tomorrow night. It's going to be impossible. They're going to have to try to like play it off. I think he's got to like do what he does, which is like answer it briefly and then refocus and talk about global warming. What's the answer? What is the answer? I just said, I didn't do it. Like it never happened. That's pretty much it. That's it. Either you can deny it or you can, what is he going to do? Admit it to say like, well, something that's also striking is the tone of the coverage of it.

Because even if you think, okay, this is a big newsworthy thing, the way that the news sources have characterized these two little controversies has been undeniably biased against Bernie Sanders. Of course. I mean, like, because the thing is, like, I think it'll come down to like as the specificity of it. And like, you know, Bernie's responsive, he says, no, this is like, well, if I believe that, then why did I try to get you to run for president in 2016? That would be a very good repost because that is, that's not a fucking, that's a well-documented fact that is the first, because he wanted someone to oppose Hillary's neoliberalism. And he was like, I'm an old white dude. That's probably not a good idea. And he

went to Warren and said, run against her. And she, because her heart is that of a coward said no. And then she waited to run against him now without Hillary there as the big bad dog, the chill dog, two words, two words. Come on, man. Come on, man. Come on, man. Come on, man. Well, the thing that I try to remind myself to say Zen, and I've said on the show before, when we see this awful bias media versus it was ignoring and now it's attacking is that if the Bernie theory of change is true, that the people are going to make him the nominee are not caring about any of this. And that's going to be impossible in polls and it's not going to show up until it's election day. And that is terrifying to, to, to leave it to that, but his whole theory

of change is energizing. See all that money they've been spending, barely any of it, relatively has been on ads. It's been on creating a paid network of people to go door to door, to create networks, to bring people into the process who have been alienated from politics. And those people are not giving a shit about what any of these fucking people are saying. Let me remind you of this. At the Iowa caucus, they have same day registration. If you are registered for another political party, you can just show up. I don't know offhand if you could just walk in and say, I'm not registered to vote at all and do it there. But I do know that if you're registered independent, you can show up. The likely voter screens I've seen

anticipate about one in three caucus goers will be first timers. And then Bernie, Bernie overwhelmingly wins that cohort. Those people are not paying attention to this bullshit that's driving us all insane. Bernie's campaign is in their, like in their huge canvassing strategy. They're going for people outside the process and it's really rolling the dice because obviously it seems like your ROI is going to be lower for people who have not caucus before, right? Because you have to, as a practical matter, you have to convince them of two things. Somebody who goes to every single caucus, you just have to convince them of one thing, who to vote for, vote for my candidate. Someone who has, is just totally outside the process, convince them to do two things. One,

go to the caucus to vote for my guys. But that is what, that is the path that the Bernie Sanders campaign has taken. And it is a strategy that emanates from Bernie's broader concept of political change, which is the only way we're going to be Trump is to bring millions more people into the political process. I mean, just like, one last thing I want to say about like the Warren Sanders beef is that like, you know, it's infuriating, particularly because I've just, I've had to see over and over again from Warren people, the implication that like any argument or contrast being drawn between her and Bernie Sanders is like, like I said before, is violence, is essentially violence or dirty pool, or this is like the bad kind of, the big line this week is

even attacking Joe Biden on the Iraq war vote is factionalism. That's factionalism. And that's just going to destroy, I mean, this goes back to my fuck, when I got in trouble for telling them to bend the fucking knee. It's the same thing. It's just like, it's as long as the onus is always on our side to capitulate. And if you act like you're winning or that like, no, like, in fact, like you're the way you, how dare you, like that's unfair or cheating. How dare you win? And I've exactly how dare you win. How dare you want a thing? How dare you want to win or how dare Bernie Sanders run this race like he wants to be president, which by the way, that is where everyone who the response I have ever gotten from when I've deployed the Maddie B stats troll about

you have to vote for Bernie because his people will take their ball and go home. It's that's not fair. I actually saw someone in the wild when presented with the Maddie B stats troll said, shit, I mean, they did cost Hillary the election this time around. Maybe that's, maybe I do it. Let me finish on this. It's, it's, it's, it's infuriating to me because particularly from Warren people, as the shit has gotten, you know, further on and they're realizing that they have not, they have not an overtaken Bernie and that it's like Bernie operates, holds the left lane and among her left ish supporters, I, you know, I, I just see so much of their fucking, like they're merely, they're merely mouth bullshit about how mean Bernie supporters are or their,

their aggression or their, the fact that like they, you know, you care about Sanders or willing to argue a case for him against their candidate is unfair at best or mean to them personally and millions of other like, of course, although the oppressed peoples that they claim to speak for is even meaner to them. Quickly, Google's who is having oppression. I mean, I see this shit from them all the time and like what's infuriated about this is that they've now gone to, as you said, Virgil, what is absolutely one of the dirtiest fucking thing. Probably the dirtiest so far. Like this, this is an actual political attack. This is not like drawing contrast between candidates based on their entire lifetime of public service or record in government. Yeah. Like, like, this is

just like, I, I heard someone say something who said something that you said some in a private meeting, something very nasty. Yeah. It's 100% bullshit. And either we're just gonna have to like hit back or just swallow it. I don't know what the best thing to do is, but I want to be clear that I'm not 100% convinced that this will work or will matter a great deal. Well, what's striking to me is, I think Warren realized a few months ago with her hedging on Medicare for All that oh shit, I've lost the, that lane. I've lost the left. She unquestionably took Dove after her capitulation on Medicare for All and the difference came from her supporters that were more left or progressive. Well, she, she lost that. Went to Bernie. She lost that lane over that issue specifically.

She lost a lane. She shedded to some of her support. I mean, but a big part of that was because she was kind of the stalking horse for Medicare for All somethings. Remember, the media was ignoring Bernie. So Elizabeth Warren, who's promising big structural change of Medicare for All and all that shit, she became the one that the media went after as having like big impractical promises. And I do think that did some damage to her. And I do think that that damaged her credibility among us, you know, certain subset of voters who, you know, probably went to Biden or Pete Buttigieg after that. So that she's here right now pulling this shit. I mean, it's like what we've been saying for a long time, which is if you actually do care about the disgusting

moral crisis in this country of people dying because they can't afford medication, because they get screwed by their health insurance company, or the fact that people might have so much medical debt that they know they will never ever retire. And they're scared that they will be a burden on their families. If you actually care about that, you must support Bernie Sanders. And most people do. But there is still a rump group of people that support Elizabeth Warren, because supporting Bernie is going to get them dirty looks at the Swarthmore alumni mixer. And she has realized, I would say correctly, what thinking like about her strategic options here, that, okay, the only way I'm going to make hay right now, and like squeeze out the votes to maybe get a little win

in Iowa is to emphasize that you are you're doing bro stuff. If you support Bernie, she's not a good look. You're you are doing a no growth by the last moment she is pulling a fucking Hillary. Yeah. And I was it was Felix who said this today. And I thought it was very, very true and insightful. He says, he said, look at fucking Bernie, he has had a million different types of people in his campaign from fucking true believers to time servers and grifters or whatever. And they have all ended up being bound to his will, his idea of what the campaign is, what he wants it to be. Warren, on the other hand, has been absorbing the casts off of all these failed campaigns. And I guarantee you that those fucking Hillary dead enders went it up with the hill with the

Cahive are now migrated to more and are helping decide to make this late campaign turned towards well, but here's the agreement. And it's like, what does that tell you about their fucking presidencies? The guy who takes everybody and puts them on his goddamn agenda or the person who is able to be talked into any bullshit by their fucking scam artist ass fucking staff. Here's the thing. I think she's being a push for them. But in my limited experience with the very normal human beings known as the Cahive, they hate her for some inscrutable reason, but like Bernie for some equally inscrutable reason. But I see what you're saying that she's making that pitch to the staff level. The actual Cahive, they are maniacs and I respect them for

their they are. They are going kamikaze against Tulsi. They are devoting their efforts to stopping the Tulsi juggernaut. The thing I like about the people that are coming to Warren now belatedly is they're like, yeah, I'm finally doing it. I'm endorsing Elizabeth Warren. And then like the tweet or statement they make after that is like, I've supported Gillibrand, Harris, Picker, Betta. And like everyone has dropped out of the race. They're like, hey, can I get some love for the five other dipshits that I supported before this? They say that and they think that makes them sound like smart consumers of politics. Like, you know, I supported all these decent folks when it actually makes you sound like an imbecile. You just support loser after loser after loser for

inscrutable stupid reason. People who are like literally saying that either Betta or Christian Gillibrand was going to steal all of Sanders thunder. Amazing. And they're like, I just like before I endorse Elizabeth Warren, I would just like to take a little bit of time out to just like acknowledge all the good work that Julian Castro, Christian Gillibrand and Cory Booker have done when I was supporting them for a couple months at a time. So let's talk about the debate tomorrow night, the last debate before the Iowa caucus. Oh boy, it's going to be a doozy. The nut cutting. We are kind of planning to stream tomorrow on twitch.tv. Chris is away. So yes, producer Chris, who knows how to do things is away, which means that if you ever bitched about and

the stream is out of sync, guess what, fucker, you are getting a pair sub periscope quality stream. You're getting a I'm doing journalism. I'm doing journalism type some sort of pitch level shit. If all spells were just we'll just stream it on periscope. It'll it'll be terrible, but you can watch us anyway. Yeah, it's it's it's slop. Enjoy your slop. Yeah. I was thinking and you know, this actually might help explain some of Warren's behavior right now because I was thinking a week ago, okay, this is they're going to talk about Iran. That's going to be half the fucking debate. And they've not really done a lot of foreign policy stuff in the debate so far. No, they tried to highlight the Medicare for all stuff, which would which turned out to be incredibly boring,

fucking convoluted discussions that sucked. The Iran stuff would be some fucking red meat. And that you know, Bernie could go right at Biden on the Iraq war. That's the thing. Bernie, you know, for what it looked like before, you know, thought, okay, I'll make hay about Biden because again, he's just the default option. He's just smiling Joe. And the fact that he voted for the Iraq war and he was fucking on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he was involved in all of this awful shit. Not just voted for it, but like gave speeches on TV and on the floor of the Senate many times supporting it and and chastising other Democrats for not being as enthusiastic as he is. Here's what I'm saying. Iran, you could you could game out it benefiting Biden, Bernie and

Buttigieg in a different way. Bernie by virtue of having the only distinct view in the entire field, which is I'm going to get us the fuck out of the Middle East, which is what most people want and especially most Democratic primary voters. Biden by virtue of saying, oh, you know, I got all this experience in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And I was with Brock when we did the Iran deal, which so turn back the clock to Iran deal. That's my pitch. And Buttigieg by saying, you know, I was in I was I served for six years. I served in Afghanistan. Those are the upsides for the three projects broadly X 2.0. But here's the thing. There is no upside to Warren talking about Iran. She got owned by Megan McCain on the view talking about Iran. It was one of the most

humiliating things I've ever seen. And she knows it. She knows like, look, I don't do war stuff in the Senate. Okay, I'm not a war person. Fuck. So she very clearly does not want to talk about any of this shit because she knows there's no upside there because one, she did not take a position and will not take a position as radically anti war is Bernie. Yeah, that's the real thing. So she's boxed in already. So there's just no upside anywhere, which is kind of why I mean, it makes sense that she's going to throw such a low punch right now, knowing that fuck, this just like takes all the oxygen out of the room. We're not talking about Soleimani anymore. We're not talking about Iran, something that could help by three rivals. Now the question is going to be, it's going to be

about me. I'm going to debate tomorrow, which leads me to conclude that she knows what she's doing and she will not back down, but in and or and say, you know, oh, that was a mischaracterization. Those were just anonymous sources just say, yeah, I said that to me. I mean, I could be wrong, but it just kind of makes sense. If she did that, if she did it on it tomorrow, she'd look like a huge fucking asshole. Absolutely. So she has she has to stand by it, which means Bernie has to have a response when she fucking accuses him to his face of saying something he didn't fucking say. Well, like I said, you know, we've been talking about it forever now. But like now that like, you know, this is there's beef in the street. Shit is real. And we're going to have to see now what Sanders

does when he's got not just being ignored and doing his thing and building a movement. But when he's when he's going to have to deal with the real real scum, the real bullshit, we will the real news always coming. We've warned you about this for months that and I hope that people will come to real rain will come. Yeah. And that you know, if you like Warren as your second choice, whatever, I don't give a shit. It's the question is whether you're all in for Bernie right now or not. That's it. Period. End of sentence. Yes. All that matters right now is electing Bernie, not whatever you think in your fucking head, gaming out. Well, actually, maybe if Warren wins New Hampshire and Bernie wins Iowa, they could do a unity ticket and pull their death. No, shut the fuck up. It's all

about electing Bernie right now. I just like, I'd like to add to that. Yes, that it is without that, but it's also about, Hey, if you're out there on your team, Warren over team Sanders, I'm really curious to hear from you. No, I'm not. Keep that shit to yourself, loser. Fuck off. No one cares. He came to her in 2016 and said Hillary Clinton is going to run and she's going to try to enshrine this monstrous neoliberal hell state within create a situation where there's no alternative to the worst policies that have just made everyone literally on earth fucking sick and dying. And she said no. And then she waited. And then when it was determined, she endorsed Hillary and then she decided to run now. This is not someone who gives a shit. I also want to say

this. If you are one of those people who is still deciding for some reason between Sanders and Warren, which I know it's rich that that sort of person is listening to our show, but a lot of different sorts of perverts listen to this. We got a lot of perverts. If you're that kind of person, you think, well, they're the same. Oh, gosh, I don't even know. I'm just a small town voter. Remember this, right now, Bernie is in on online betting markets, unpredicted, considered an even bet to straight out win the Iowa caucus, even bet to straight out win the New Hampshire primary. Those back to back victories, I think would propel him to the nomination. Absolutely. That combined with his organizational strength in the Super Tuesday states, which

no other candidate has. Bloomberg is trying to buy it. That's the best thing. Yeah. Just add TV ads until your brain has been warped. But Bernie actually has people who for months have been canvassing, making phone calls in places like California, places like Colorado, places like Texas that will vote on Super Tuesday. He is the only one out of those two candidates with a viable path to the nomination. You can make a guess that maybe Warren has an outside shot if X, Y, and Z happen. But with Bernie, it's one thing happens and he wins the nomination. That's it. Get it to Iowa.

So if you really think they're the same person, and it doesn't matter to you, okay, you want one of them to win, then you have to support Bernie Sanders. That's it. I just like to say out there, you can you can tell all the people you work with at the university or magazine that you work for that you voted for Warren. It's true. There's nobody in the fucking polls to tell you to announce. Oh, no, this is a Bernie, bro coming. It's not like that's Mr. Show sketch. There's not going to be a guy with a sandwich board standing next to you at work when you're trying to talk. You're trying to decolonize Chaucer.

He's not going to be staying there with a fucking sandwich board that says Bernie, bro. Yeah. I mean, the only thing that would be a public record is if you donated to Bernie Sanders. But you know, nobody writes it down when you fucking make phone calls for you or make syntax messages or fucking canvas for him. It's true. You could. It's all our secret. I think that about does it. Yeah, this edition of the Beltway garage. One last pitch. We will be in Iowa. We will be in New Hampshire. We'll be in Nevada. We are doing live shows, Iowa City for the Iowa Caucus, Dairy, New Hampshire for the New

Hampshire primary and Las Vegas, baby. Roll the dice baby on the Nevada Caucus. Tickets are available at chapeltraphouse.com slash tour. Also, somebody wanted me to say this. Did you know that if you are registered to vote in Iowa and you live in New York City, the big Apple, greatest city on the planet. Thank you. Go Jets. Go Rangers. There are virtual caucus sites in Brooklyn and Manhattan. I forget where they are. I forget what to do in order to go caucus. With a virtual caucus?

Yeah, basically. Yes. So if you are basically an Iowa expat living in New York City, you're registered to vote in the Democratic primary in Iowa. There is a link to go register. You have to register by a certain deadline that's coming up and then go to the caucus site on the day of the caucus here in New York City. Max Hedrum will personally ask you who your candidate is. If we remember, we'll put a link in order to do that to get the one or two of you who that might apply to to go. Actually, I don't know. Maybe there are a lot of Iowa people in

New York. I mean, there's not a lot of Iowa people in Iowa, so they got to be somewhere. Yeah. I mean, there's probably like an ethnic enclave of Iowa and somewhere in Queens. And a bunch of people just shucking corn together. Yeah. Just go down to Iowa town. It's a canvas there. I would like to just do a pitch again to go to iowavgoodvibes.com and just at least watch the trailer for our movie and then consider preordering it. I would really like you to see the movie. It's very good. So that does it for the last Beltway Garage. But for the Iowa caucus, Iowa,

we will see you in two weeks time. Woo. All right, baby. Let's go. Bye. Bye. We could jam in Joe's Garage. His mama was screaming and his dad was mad. We was playing the same old song in the afternoon and sometimes we would play it all night long. It was all we knew and easy to do, so we wouldn't get it wrong. Oh, all we did was bend the string like...