Chapo Trap House - 422 - Can We Beat 9? (5/25/20)

Episode Date: May 26, 2020

We take a look at the myriad goofs and spoofs Joe Biden produced on his Breakfast Club interview last Friday. We then consider the relative “manly” appeal of Trump to his male base through Tom Nichols’ Atlantic piece “Donald Trump, the Most Unmanly President”

All right, so we're running on the list of Democratic candidate appearances on The Breakfast Club. We've got, starting with Hillary Clinton's famous hot sauce in the purse incident. That was pretty good, hot sauce in the purse. We've got Kamala Harris saying, I smoked weed and listened to Tupac mixtapes in college before Tupac was even a solo artist. We have Charlemagne particularly humiliating Elizabeth Warren and making her look like to be a fool. That is tough to do. I mean, Meghan McCain pulled it off, so it's clearly difficult. Well, I like the Charlemagne clip of Elizabeth Warren because he was just like, well, like, how were you, how were you a Republican when they were doing all this evil shit? And she

was just like, oh, I wasn't political then. Like, I wasn't paying attention to politics. She was just a lost student. I was about that money. And I know she was securing the bag. She was like literally in like, like college Republicans or something. Like. And yeah, no, Charlemagne just said to her like, oh, like he was like, you thought you were a Native American and then like you thought you were Republican. He was like, you just, you sound confused.

I don't like that. She was like, she was like, skirt. I'm going to hit the Rory. Well, it's funny. It's like, uh, Chris just bothers. I was like, what's funny about like Charlemagne and the Breakfast Club as a platform for these political interviews is like, he's like, they're really not going out of their way to do like gotcha questions or like, like come up with like embarrassing sound bites or that they're like looking to catch them out. They just get good material by asking them fairly normal questions that because they're not normal people. They're mute folks. They're lizards in like real ways. They're

lizards. People always ask that when they try to figure out someone's baseline sort of normalness, they always do that stupid thing where they're like, how much does a gallon of milk cost? Right. And it's like, no, they learned those things. Yeah. They have a little laminated card in their wallet with all the prices on them. Yeah. They have, they have a dossier on normal people things, which by the way, I regularly, I just throw it at the basket. I don't, I don't look at how much milk costs. It's not, it's not my most expensive item. So I tend to not to, I couldn't tell you how much a gallon of milk costs.

Um, of course this is all Amber. Wow. Podcasting celebrity. Just wild out on milk. I never, even when I was super broke, I was just like, well, it's milk. This is not going to be, this is not my high price item. I don't think I could tell you how much a gallon of milk cost because I never buy milk in the gallon size because then I have to carry it home and it's like, that's just too heavy. That's too heavy, baby. I'll get, I'll get a, you know, a pint or a liter or something.

I get the little guy. Yeah. Yeah. It's suss. Why? Your products are suss. Uh, he doesn't, Matt doesn't buy milk because it's too spicy for him. It is too, exactly. Yes. Well, I mean, this, this, this is all by way of, uh, introducing both the show. It's

Schoppo. Hello. Welcome. No, it's me again. And, uh, and your friends. Um, but, uh, Joe Biden just appeared on, uh, the breakfast club. He was interviewed by Charlemagne and, you know, I guess made a lot of headlines just because of how hard he was vibing. And I would like to spend some time talking about Joe Vibe. And obviously like the thing that, uh, everyone has been incensed about or making fun of or talking about is the, is the clip at the end of the interview where like, I forget what point in the interview, but like it's the clip everyone shared where Joe Biden is just like, Hey, like, Hey, listen, Matt, like if you ain't voting for Joe, you ain't black. You know, I'm like, it's just, it's

sort of like he was, he was, it's just like sort of the, um, it's the bad podcast guest thing that, you know, I think we all fall victim to where you're just, you're trying to riff too hard and everything is, is come just like fall flat. You know, sometimes you fall out of the riff zone and you get into race play. It's all happened to us. It all, it all happened. Like I will never forget when I went on my favorite podcast, The Daily with Michael Barbero and spent like, I had already done a good two hours about the, you know, like the, the, uh, morning show primary, as we called it, and, uh, who's winning the eating primary. Then I ruined the whole interview by talking about if the, uh, Nintendo character

Kirby was a Korean gentleman and I had a very offensive impression of a Korean man that I greatly regret and I haven't been invited back on the program since and it's like, it's just sort of sad to see Joe has the same thing happened to Joe. It's like an easily avoidable mistake. Joe Biden go on come town. I like, it's, uh, the, the, the clip was funny, you know, like I'm, I'm, I'm obviously, I'm sympathetic to Joe because I know what it's like when a, you know, a riff doesn't work, you know, you, you flex too hard and it's just, it didn't come across right. You, you much better strategy is you just sort of lay in the cut, pick your spots and then also sort of display like disdain for the person you're talking to. Like that's,

that's the correct riffing, fighting you on their podcast. You are above them. Yes, exactly. They're lower than shit and you should spread your wings and do the riffs. You know, are good. It's not a good time to experiment. Like Joe was like, Joe is probably in the group DM with that one. And he's like, I've been thinking about, um, this new one and like the problem is Joe's in a group DM with too many yes men who are like, that's a group because he's probably the biggest account in there. Yeah. Yeah. And they're like, that's a great riff, Joe. And so he just sort of like really didn't test it out before. Yeah. He doesn't have like the perfect balance of like, uh, like a group DM that has like three people that are like, um, completely incapable of

taking care of themselves and are just funny because they can't really function very well in society. Um, people, you know, who get caught like shoplifting cleaning chemicals. Um, you need like a few, like at least one or two normal dads, uh, who are like involved family men. There's a gamer contingency. One girl, a guy who never says anything except once a month, and it's the funniest thing. Like it's a very delicate balance. Yeah. In Joe Biden's case, the girl is, um, needed done though. So I think, I think that's where some of the advice is coming from. And also crucially to the DM, you got to have the guy who shows up once a month, lurks the rest of the time, and then just shows up once a month to tell you about what's going on

in his life. He's just like, Hey, hey, hey everybody. Like I got, I got, I got, I got an oil change for my car and he sends you a picture of like what it looks like under the hood. It's like, nice car, man. Cool, man. Yeah. All right. Just a great guy and you're happy is there. So obviously, like, you know, the clip of Joe Biden's failed riff is the one getting a lot of burn. But of course, immediately when people started like, you know, making fun of that or, or, you know, even implying that, you know, it was perhaps racist of Joe Biden to, you know, say, you ain't black if you're not voting for Joe, Joe Jack, is that all of the, um, all of the people who have, who spent like all of last year convincing everyone that Bernie Sanders and

his supporters are racist have found every way to just tell me, you have to listen to the whole interview to get the context of what triggered Joe into saying that. And you know what, you know what? I took their advice and saw the rest of the interview and people really, really missed a beat by making this the thing that everyone talked about. Cause there was a lot of other great stuff in this Joe Biden interview that, you know, I've been assured is okay to say it's an okay thing to say. It's not bad. It's not wrong. And certainly it shouldn't affect your like judgment of his character or morality in saying these things. Never. And, uh, so like I would just like to go through, um, some of the other clips from the Joe Biden, Charlemagne interview that I think have gotten

unfairly, um, sort of shunted to the side amidst this, this, this pseudo controversy. In many ways he's a, he's suffering from his own success. He had this one hit wonder and, and no one really listens to the deep cuts. I think that's a, that's a Biden thing. All right. So, uh, Chris, once you pull up the, uh, the first one, uh, the first clip, which is, uh, I've titled Carnival Games. And I would like to, uh, just give a thank you to Jack Allison, who was the one who actually pulled all of these clips, um, and, uh, compiled them for us here. So, uh, yeah, let's, let's, let's, what's that first clip? Joe Biden talks about carnival games. Yeah. We, we know polls, polls can be illusions though. Like, you know, we, we looked at all the

polls in 2016 too. And look what happened. Totally different, man. 2016 is totally different. What you had then is you had somebody who didn't, they didn't know it all. They wanted to just change the system the way it was. He was the biggest change. He had no serious opposition that turned out to materialize. And, uh, so it's totally different. Right now we're in a situation where it's like, you know, that Carni show goes through town once and you find out there's no P under any one of those three shells that get pushed around. Um, next time it comes back, what do you do? Next time back, you ain't playing. You got to figure it out. Let me tell you something. My community figured it out a while ago,

but here's the deal. What I have to do is I have to continue to talk about the things that matter and the things that matter are, for example, right now we study out at Columbia University and the disease control center up there. They pointed out that if he had listened to me and others and acted just one week earlier to deal with this virus, there'd be 36,000 fewer people dead, dead, dead. And you guys are wondering, what are we, what's he doing? Come on, man. There's so much great shit in this clip. There's so much going on here. I want to, I want to say the thing I love most about Joe's verbal style is like, like whenever he has to end a sentence, he's like, oh, oh, oh, shit. I don't know where,

how'd I even get in here, man? So he has to start yelling to get out of it. It's like he echo locates his way out of a sentence and you saw this a lot. Like when he was, when it was his, um, like when, the first debate, his closing statement was hilarious. It was something like, I remember when John McCain said, can you carry my coffee? I said, it's an honor, man. You're a never man. And that's what it's really all about. And then he's like, oh no, how do I get out of this? And he's just like, and that's what it's all about. And this one, like he's in the middle of this thing about this study that like God knows how that's being filtered in his brain. And the Carney show, which is a great thing to call carnival and the P under the shell, but he's like, oh man,

I don't recognize this neighborhood. I want, I want their families dead. I want the place where they work burns to the ground. Um, okay. So yeah, I just, I feel like this, this tribute, I mean, this, this, this clip of Biden pays such tribute to you, Felix, because like, he has more E one Biden than, than, than Joe Biden was before you guys did that episode. And when I'd like, you know, I think you guys should take some, no small amount of credit for willingness into being like he is becoming that guy with more and more with every passing day. I mean, just talking about the carnival game with the P in it. And then when he, okay, so he says like, you know, we like, we got to beat him. He's like, we got to beat him by talking about what's important.

Like, I'm like, but I said, but I'm saying that after this anecdote about a P game at the Carney show. And like, and then the other thing, like it starts out with him saying, um, like Charlemagne is, is bringing up the, um, you know, reasonable point that, you know, while national polls may be, or even state ones may be showing him with a good lead on Trump right now, uh, we know, based on prior experience, so that those can be perhaps, you know, fool's goal, that we shouldn't put too much stock in them. And then he just immediately is like, it's wrong, man, wrong, 2016, totally different, totally different than now. And explanation of 2016 is so incit like, is he saying that Trump had no serious opposition? Like he beat 16 candidates in the

prime. And also does Hillary, is he just owning Hillary there? In which case, uh, that's pretty funny. If he's essentially saying Hillary wasn't actually competition. Well, we know that Joe resents Hillary. So like, yeah, I mean, she stole the spot. Like he clearly was going to run in 2016. Obama talked him out of it. And then he allowed that to happen. And then he looks back and he's like, that was my shot. And so now, yeah, he's going to be tormented about it until he gets there. Man, that was the last year of my good brain, man. I could have actually done something as president. I could have remembered some of it. Man, I didn't get lost in the sentences before that. And he's shout so much, man. And what I like about this is that he's

using the metaphor of the carnival barker of the sort of the big top grifter, you know, fleecing pigeons on the on the on the boardwalk or whatever with a three card money or whatever to as a stand in for Trump and the election. And he was like, well, 2016 was the election where we all got fleeced by, you know, we figured out we couldn't actually throw that ring over the thing that would let us get the giant, you know, teddy bear. Then he's like, and then, you know, and then, but you realize when there's no P under the cup, you know, you learn, you come back. And it's just like, if he's using this as a metaphor for American democracy and like sort of amoral hucksterism and demagoguery and representative vis-a-vis Trump, he like he's got it all backwards.

Like the whole point of it, this country is that like you go back to the, the, the P cup game every single fucking time and Joe Biden is proof positive of that. He's the nominee because so many fucking rooms are still going back to the Obama carnival game where they didn't have their entire, the entire, the, like the middle class basically wiped out and replaced with gig economy, hamster wheel, misery, even before the fucking COVID or whatever the fuck. And like, you know, like even explaining that the game is rigged is no barrier to a line around the block of potential contestants. Cause they want, they want to figure it out. They think they're smarter than it. That's why it works. Like Joe should be coming up with a better, a better game. He should be

doing the, like the little, the BB gun game or the ring toss or something. He should be providing a better rigged game for people to play. Certainly. I mean, and also I have never seen, but that's like three card Monty, right? I've never seen any variation of three card Monty at a carnival. I'm just going to say that. I mean, it's like, it's a little different with cups and a P you know. Yeah, but I've never seen the P in the cups either now at an actual ring toss. It's ring toss. It's the, yeah, it's the gun. It's like spraying the water in the clown's mouth so that you can win the, the horse race throwing a baseball at milk bottles. Yeah, there's got to be some sort of infrastructure to it. I mean, some guys got like a tent next to

the carnival with a fucking P in it. I think is where he went. Joe, where did you go with the, with the carnival man? Um, but yeah, there was no carnival in town, Joe, but, but, but all of this and like the subsequent clips as well, but just, just, just Joe, the personality, the figure of Joe vibing in this moment in his life and the world, largely due to Felix, I'm coming around to the position that it is more and more likely that Joe Biden will win this election and maybe even win it easily because Felix, as you put it out, he's become funnier than Trump to like have to listen to and talk to you. Like it is, it's the dumbest possible outcome. It's the one that will lead to people not only not learning anything, but like erasing shit that they might

have already learned. You know what I mean? Like it's the perfect capstone to the last like decade, decade and a half of the culture where it's like, uh, just every, every fucking media concern that's owned by a guy in the emperor's suit from Warhammer 40,000, uh, just the most evil fucking cunts alive. They stopped writing articles about how we need to, well, they still wrote articles about how we need to take care of the deficit by, uh, incinerating people on Medicaid, but, um, they began like telling you, being more didactic, like cynically adopting social justice and academic language, and every Netflix thing became like, uh, just, uh, a mic dropping marathon, uh, with no jokes. It was this liberal takeover of the cult, like liberal anxiety that took over

the culture that accelerated when Trump won. And when Trump won, they're like, we're going to take on the structural problems that led to this. And it led to just a few years of the shittiest culture ever because they don't actually have a political solution to it. And all they could think of was just like being very didactic to people and, uh, coming up with the weirdest workarounds for the problems of American culture. But what would be a better outcome for that? A better, for this least memorable stretch of American culture for just a man with no memory who gets in there and erases all of that. We just go back to like the culture of 2008 and the political culture of 2008. None of this fucking meant anything. We just get this man whose brain is room temperature

shit. And he wins not because of like all this shit that like Democrats and the liberal media pretended to care about. It turns out no one cared about that. If you look at what happened in the primary, he wins because most Americans are like, oh, Joe Biden is stupid. Like my boss. So I'm voting for him. No, but like I haven't talked about it before. It's like whether it's basically erasing like all of the culture and politics of me too, pretty much overnight. Like he's also destroyed like, and it's like of the politics of if you're an old white guy, you can't say shit like, hey, listen, Mac, your hood pass is revoked if you vote for my opponent. You know what I mean? And all the same people are assuring us now that this is fine and good.

And like, yeah, remember, these people found 500 reasons why you were raised this for wanting Medicare for all. Joe Biden is like, you could practically just see like his long joggy in the frame of interviews. And it's like, they're like, oh, that's actually cool. And it's like, I don't give a shit. And you know what? And you know what? Like the thing is, most people like, like they don't give a shit about that. It's certainly apparently based on the outcome, black voters certainly don't give a shit about any of this. No, look who they voted for. They voted for this guy. So like, it must not bother them in the same way that like, but I'm just saying like, I know, I know this is cheap to do. But imagine if Bernie Sanders had said anything like the stuff he did

in this interview, right? Like he would have like, he would have been made to drop out like the day after. Why the same people telling you now that like this is fine. It's okay. Right. Because none of this clearly none of these people have fucking ever gave a shit about this. And you were a fool if you ever thought you could square the circle of like, either whether it was, you know, democratic social values or social values, or whatever to show them how good you were doing, because it was never about that. Yeah. Yeah, which is why also like, literally, you have to view any sort of opportunity to talk to them or debate them as essentially a show you're putting on for an audience of people that might be amenable, because you're not actually trying to convince

them of anything. Oh, no. Yeah, they're in a they're in a pecinature. It depends on them continuing to sell this bullshit. Like all the all the tap dancing and mental gymnastics that go into defending Biden, it's really defending their own place in the discourse and saying, okay, I still have to defend Biden because I'm part of this media political complex known as the Democratic Party. But I'm not just a dumb ass who is hostage to the whims of this senile old maniac. No, let me let me tell you why this actually isn't bad. And you have somebody like Hannah Jones, the lady who that Hannah Jones who helped who got a Pulitzer, I think. Yeah, she got the 16 by the way for a for like that entire project is a historical mess. Like, oh,

yeah, because it's trying to like, describe racism and as like the fundamental thing that shapes America, not its mode of production. Yeah, but I mean, also just in terms of like basic fact checking. Well, yes, it's so sloppy. It's all motivated. So the thesis is ridiculous, but also like, like every like, you know, American historian is like losing their shit that this is the sort of bullshit that we're fucking like now being, it's now being exported into curriculums, because a lot of schools, by the way, are very underfunded. And this is an NGO now, like the 1692 project is is is an NGO now. Yeah. And so they'll just take the fucking, they'll like whatever will take the money we're underfunded. So that has

become a part of the curriculum, like they've strong armed their way into like public schools. By the way, that is going to result in a pretty bad, understandable reactionary backlash. And you have to like it because Ben Shapiro doesn't like it. That means it has to be good. Right. But her whole project has been saying no, forget capitalism, capitalism, misbeam with that white nonsense. Racism is the only real thing. Race is the only real thing. And then when Biden says this, actually, you can be black, you could be white if you vote for Democrat, you could be black if you vote for Democrats, I guess, because I mean, if you can, if you're not black and you are, if you're a black person who doesn't vote Democrat,

then you're not a black person. According to what she's, she was implying. That means by the transit property, a white person who votes for Democrats can be a black person. And so she destroys her entire in her entire political edifice of ideology for like for a half a day's worth of relief from the pressure of being a fucking public Biden supporter and the intellectual humiliation that goes along with that. It's astounding. Think about if you, yeah, you have a mom who's like mom and dad, they're like, we knew him before they were like, well-meaning, like John Kerry, Bill Clinton, whatever voters. And then like for the past five years, just every time you talk to them, you're like, yeah, my mom and dad are like really into

black women. What the fuck? Like, well, although they, it's all they talk about. It's like, they're both white, all the people they know are white, anyone they interact with is white. But all they talk about is like to have the grace of a black woman. Like it's very weird. Like the racial politics of the last few years that have been made for mass consumption are bizarre because the result is just, it's through Marvel brain. And it's like these white people just like, oh, what's the best kind? Oh, a black woman? Yeah, no, that's my favorite. And, but what Biden means, what Biden means, if Biden wins is like, your parents will stop doing that. And Navarro will stop talking about like black or all that. Like it just, it's a license for these people to stop doing this,

basically. That's, I think why it was so easy for a lot of these people to like, jump on Biden. I mean, like, yeah, basically everyone owes Rachel Dolezal a huge apology. Absolutely. Yeah. Like, and I mean, the other, the other move to come out of this is to say, it's, you know, oh, like, you know, this, this is, this is a bit awkward. But like, you know, it's, it's for the reasons like this, that Joe Biden really needs to choose Stacey Abrams as his VP or a black woman or Kamala Harris, right? So that they can prevent him or like from making gaps like this or show that he understands. And it's just like, well, what are you going to do if he doesn't? What? Like you've already, you've already said that like, it is like, if you don't

vote for Joe Biden, like you are like morally diseased in some way or like, you know, you're throwing, you know, every, every poor and marginalized person into a fucking like corn thresher by not voting for this asshole. And it's just like, well, what are you going to do if he doesn't? What if you do is he picks Amy Klobuchar. You've, you've staked out a position for yourself where you have no leverage here. Like we are, we are not on this show since fucking Bernie dropped out. We are not demanding anything of Joe Biden or the Democratic Party. Yeah. We're, we're not positioned to who gives a shit. Like it's their problem. Yeah. That's stupid to demand that he like nominate or like that he get a black woman VP. It's

fucking stupid to release a statement saying he should drop out. Like it's just stupid. Like it has nothing to do with you. You're just talking to hear yourself talk. Yeah. At least we know that like, that's the purpose of a podcast. Yeah. And I also know like it may, it may be distasteful to you personally, but voters don't give a fuck about any of this. They like Joe Biden because he says shit like, you wait, if you ain't voting for Joe, you ain't black, Jack. Like, yeah, they like a stupid epic old man. Like, did you see you one last time? That's you won. Yeah. I'm like, yeah, even going after him, like you don't have any credit for shit like that. You don't have any credibility anymore. If you were any one of

the people who like tried to assassinate our beautiful Korean Rachel, you're already like you've proven yourself as like a humorless person who tried to just, you know, destroy the life of a harmless eccentric that just so happened to absorb all of the incoherence of America's racial politics in a creative and charming way, by the way. And so like, why would anyone listen to you? Like literally, you're not going to assassinate Joe Biden's character. You don't have any credibility. No one shares your values. I tried to assassinate Joe Biden's character and it didn't work. So I'm enjoying it. I'm enjoying him now. Yeah. Okay, let's see. Let's see another couple clips from the Joe Biden interview. Hell yeah. There's a lot of other gems in here.

These delicious bonbons. Yeah. I don't know if you saw a couple weeks ago, Sean Combs, you might know him as Diddy. Yeah. Including myself, Phil, and that's that Democrats take black voters for granted, you know, votes are quid pro pro, right? It's not like I don't want to vote. I just want to know what candidates will do for us. And it's changed for our votes. The same way young, progressive Latinos, the LGBT community, absolutely. We want the same thing. Do you feel like black people are owed that from the Democratic Party? Absolutely, Bob. What would I say? Remember when I said Biden can't win the primaries? Yes. I kicked everybody's ass. I need you to say that. I won overwhelmingly. I told you when I got to South Carolina, I won every single county.

I won a larger share of the black vote than anybody has, including Barack. I increased the vote in Virginia overwhelmingly by 70%. Look, what people don't know about me is I come from a state as the eighth largest black population in America, the eighth largest. I get 96% of that vote for the last 40 years. They're the folks, as they say it my way, brung me to the dance. That's how I get elected every single time. And everybody's shocked. I get overwhelming support from the black leadership, young and old. Every poll shows me way ahead. And it's not just, I hear this, oh yeah, old blacks are with Biden, but young aren't. Look at the polling data. Polling data, let's say it's off by half. Give me a little break here.

Okay. I got to break this down a couple of ways. So, Charlemagne begins by asking and articulating a very simple and easy to understand point that so many people are offended by. Charlemagne, he is our, I guess, publishing label mate. He has some goofy political opinions. But what he says here is essentially, do you think Democrats take black voters for granted? And that in voting for a politician, it's a quid pro quo. You vote for a politician because you expect something in return from them. Right. And Joe decides to talk about something completely different. Yes. And not, okay. So, the question is, if you assume a model of that voters should get something, politicians should do something for the people who vote for them and that you

should expect them to. The standard liberal Democrat brain now is that that is deeply, that's blasphemy to even to describe that politicians need to do something for you outside of not being a Republican. They don't owe you anything. Okay. So, then he says, do you think that Democrats take the black vote for granted? And then he proceeds to rattle off, again, a couple of actual lies. I don't think he did win a bigger share of the black vote in the South Carolina primary than Barack Obama did. And nor do I think polls would show that he has overwhelming black support under the age of 40. Well, no, I'm sure he doesn't know against Trump. Yeah, he does. Okay. For sure. Of course. But the thing is, what percentage of the, what percentage

of that people, what a percentage of that group are going to vote for him are going to come out? Like, if you're talking about people who are going to vote, we know what the turnout is for younger voters of all races. It's dog shit, which means most of them don't like him. And what I like about this is the question is, do you think Democrats take the black vote for granted? And then his answer says that for 40 years, I've gotten 99% of the black vote. Every black person votes for me. So, like, yeah, fuck you. Like, he gets angry at this. And then he gets angry at the implication that he's taking his 99, like his unbroken record of, you know, the winning the support of every black person for granted by not answering the question and just

staying like literally taking all those votes for granted by just saying, well, I have them. So, how can anyone question it? Exactly. Cause they have no answer anymore. The Republican Democratic Party has been stripped of any enticement to vote for them positively. Obviously, they have no economic platform, but with Biden, they don't even have representational benefits for minority groups who would like to see someone of their group in a high position. All they have is not Republican. And so when he's pushed because he doesn't have a brain anymore, all that's left is like the reptile brain response, which is, Obey. I own you because I am the only thing standing between you and what you imagine to be the apocalypse unrestrained Republican government.

And then nobody wants to, and the reason these are gaps is because you're supposed to pretty that up. You're supposed to deny it's true, but he doesn't have the bandwidth anymore to pull out anything because there's nothing to do except use flowery words to get around the hole at the center of it. And he is not very flowery these days. Yeah. I mean, Hillary, like Hillary to her credit was like understood what the purpose of this question was. And she'd talk about like, yeah, some weird like means tested thing, like similar to the Kamala thing. If you got a Pell grants and started a small business, blah, blah, blah, like a uniquely, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, Pete, anyone, like name anyone, Michael Bennett would know

how to do this. Joe doesn't, but maybe that's kind of why people just fell in line for Joe. During the primary, we were making analogs for Bernie in 2020 to Trump 2016. And it worked in some ways, but it ultimately fell apart. And the reason it fell apart is because the Republican base is obstinate and they know exactly what they want. The Democratic base falls in line. They are more malleable than the Republican base and they don't like it when their own party is attacked unlike the Republican base. Yeah. They love it when you get your mean to Republicans because they think they're all rhinos. Yeah. But who is the Democratic Trump then? It's Joe Biden. He is embodying all of their image. He's such a mirror image. There's the fucking family self-dealing.

There's the mental collapse. There's just the decades and decades of baggage that you would think disqualify him and no one gives a shit. It's shocking. It's shocking. What Biden did rather with Bristava and Hunter is like, it's a fucking mirror of some Trump family bird brain bullshit. They both have the same shitty type of corruption that results from their small imaginations. They're both these entitled old pieces of shit. And that's also what people like about both of them. Yes. And the answer to his question though is when he was just like, well, what do you owe black voters? And his answer is basically, well, if 95% of them are going to vote for me no matter what I do, why do I owe them anything? And he has a point. He has a point,

honestly. If Trump got 96% of the, like if Trump had got 96% of the black vote, that's exactly what he would say. Yeah. Look at them. They love me. Look at how much they love me. Right. Love it. So it's like this is the perfect mirror election. Yeah. And they both reflect their party's base. The older people who make up the base of both parties in terms of who votes in primaries specifically, they saw the guy and they're like, that's basically me. I want him to be president. They got representation, but just old cranky, senile, miserable prick who is also hilarious. No, he's funnier. He's funnier than Trump is now. And like, I think Felix is right. I think that's why he's in a very good position to win this election. I think if they held this

election today, Joe Biden would win. I think there's like, there's a lot that could happen though. Like, I think if I had to bet what's going to happen November, I still favor Trump to win a little bit more. I think if this was even Biden with his brain from two years ago, he would stop Trump. But the problem that Biden's going to have in this election is that the worst thing he can look like is what he is, which is a stupid baby who needs to be led around. And it's going to be very easy for team Trump to make it look that way. Oh, did you see the interview where they asked him? When the interviewer asked him, what do you think Joe Biden, what does he bring to the campaign? What are his strengths as an opponent? And he goes, well, I was going to say experience,

but I don't know if Joe remembers anything. I don't know if he knows where he is. And it's like, when you have someone, the president saying that all day, and you have no way of rebutting it, because what do you do? Have him go out and talk to prove he's wrong? Come on, man. I remember my life. Who are you kidding? I recall events. There was a man in suspenders. I remember him. He'll just describe Don Draper's childhood. Yeah, the hobo code. We etched it out of the fence posts back in those days. It was easier to take a man's identity. My name is Joe Biden, man. A lot of people say I went to Korea. I knew I didn't want to go back to the farm, man. We couldn't even grow any sorghum. Who are you kidding? Get a life.

A lot of people said, listen, Jack, a lot of people said my dad was an untrustworthy man, but they were just doing graffiti, and he's not even my dad. He's just owned the whorehouse I was raised in, Jack. All right. Well, all right. Listen, listen, I'm sorry. I'm talking about Main Street. Oh, come on. Like, who do you kidding? I met Conrad Hilton, okay? No, okay. If you do blackface at your own wedding, that's one thing, but I'm sorry. That's stupid. I shouldn't have said that. I talk too much about the tax credit, man. That is my absolute favorite thing that he does. And I hope he does it more and more. And I think he will is when he realizes that he is in a blind alley of a sentence and instead of yelling, just kind of goes, ah, shucks, I messed that up. Those are the two

ways he gets into it. Like, he's either Joe Biden's verbal style now is walking into the wrong house. And the two things he can do are like, what the hell are you doing in my house, man? Get out of here. Or like, oh, I'm sorry. That's a bad mistake. It's like, you come home, he's in your living room, making a sandwich in your refrigerator, and you're like, oh my God, how the hell did you get in my house? And then he just goes, they're dead, man. By the way, that's the one thing that could actually fuck this up for him because obviously if they beat Trump, a big reason is because enough people blame him for all the dead people. Thanks to this virus and it hurts your case when you hit it that hard because then people really do see it as instrumental as you're taking, you literally

are politicizing death. And I know obviously that's an absurd thing to say and it's a dumb belief everything's politicized, certainly during a political campaign, but people think that way. People do have that idea of like, it's tawdry to exploit death for politics. And you can get around that if you finesse it, but just yelling dead is not going to do that. It's like he's happy about it because it's giving him a chance to be president. Okay. Let's watch another Joe Biden clip. Hell yes. Let's go. Keep it rolling. This is, I believe this is him talking about the crime bill. Cool. I had a job, a country cub kind of job at a swimming pool. I was the only white employee in Eastside because I wanted to work in the projects because I wanted to understand.

That's how I got involved in the politics. That's what this is all about for me. It's about equality. It's about dignity. It's about treating people with respect. And so, you know, when you take a look at my record, people talk about the crime bill. Crime bill didn't increase mass incarceration. Everything's increased mass incarceration. And the reason why if you go back and look, and I know you talk about it, you go back and take a look. That's why you had the vast majority of the black caucus at the time supporting the crime bill. Almost every major city black mayor supported the crime bill because blacks were getting killed overwhelmingly as well. Okay. Nailed it. Yeah. You know, one thing I will say that I truly love about this

is that Joe Biden will always have more black friends, supporters, and admirers than any of the women who say things like black Twitter ain't having no Bernie. Like any of the women that use like black women gifts as hieroglyphics as sort of like avatars of sassiness who's so badly, so badly when a black friend will never have the number of friends, admirers, or supporters that are black that Joe Biden does. And that makes me feel so good. It's no one likes to say. Part of that is though, because he was the fastest white boy in the big 10. It was this interview that I realized, because obviously Felix has talked about how Joe Biden is Dan Quinn, but it occurred me that Trump is demonious X. This is the YouTube maniac election,

and it's demonious X versus Dan Quinn. And I got to say, if we're at the state, if we're at the terminal state where all we could do is like watch things fall apart in the most amusing and root for the most amusing combination of falling objects, you can't beat that really. By the way, I got to say I am trying to figure out how to stop looking into the snow globe and make everyone realize the last 10 years I was just sort of daydreaming. I'm like trying to do it. Damn it, Felix. I'm really trying. We're living in your fucking dying DMT fantasy. No, this is St. Elsewhere and I'm the child of the snow globe. I want to talk about Dan or Trump as demonious X because that's genius. I never thought about that. Like Trump, if Trump was born

poor, he would be demonious. Because it's like that. The Hyax is Hollywood and demonious is inaugural rant about flashlights and having the bitch over there on that bed. And I was surrounding her and I was like, there's no tomorrow. It's the same context, which is like, you don't believe I've had sex. So let me talk about sex in the least sexual terms you've ever heard, ever possible. They're so similar. It's incredible. It's incredible. I mean, demonious sex is actually doing much better now. He's on an arc of self-improvement that Donald Trump would never have. Joe is so Dan Quinn because I feel like maybe 1% of his stories are true. They have that in common. Yeah. It's incredible. This is the perfect end to American

culture and empire. The guy defended his vote on the crime bill by saying he worked at a fucking swimming pool. That's like what Dan Quinn would say if he was in Congress. And then he also said the crime bill did not result in mass incarceration and then defends it by saying black people supported it. Like I did it for you. That is true. I mean, like talking about black politicians, yeah, shit, even Bernie voted for the crime bill. So there's a lot of blame to go around there, but you can't say 30 years after the fact that it did not lead to like this insane explosion in our prison. Well, I mean, obviously it was a confluence of factors, but one of them has got to be a law that increased how long people stay in prison for crimes. Yeah. That increases

the number of people in prison. It was length of sentences and not just in fractions. It's length of sentences that keep people in prison because if you're not in there for that long, you don't have that many people in the prison. They stack up when you keep keeping them in there for decades. I do want to, this clip is an example of one of Biden's, I think it's kind of a strength. And we saw it during the last debate. And remember when Bernie was like, you, you voted, you argued for decreasing socially security payouts and gutting it. He was like, no, I didn't. Even though there's hours of video of it. It's like, he has the gift that Trump has also Democrats, like they, they, there's something in their brain where it's like,

they have trouble like lying directly. So they have to come up with a bunch of somatic workarounds and weird and out like Pete's a great example of someone who does this. But Joe will just be like, no, it didn't. Yeah. He also just, maybe he doesn't think he did at this point. Oh no. He, it's not a lie. If you believe it, my favorite Biden quote is one, I think from a few years ago, they got a video of him and he said, they asked him if he regretted any vote or anything. And he said, I've not, I don't regret anything I have ever done. By the way, Trump has literally said that. Yeah. By the way, by the way, just this week, Pod saved John in, set Biden in contrast with Trump, says that Biden has always admitted when he was in the wrong.

And he's like, sure, I wish we could have a president like that again. Yeah. So Just a question for the Johns. How much next time you have Biden on how much of his audio do you think you're going to have to edit out? They're going to give Joe Biden the Felix treatment next time he comes on the fucking show. Come up like it'll just be like 30 minutes of ad reads and then like I had a nice day. You know, again, I have to add Joe Biden has refused to ever come on pod save America. Awesome. Too hard. Too tough. Hey, hey, I got, I'm not going to go into the lion's den. I mean, that's why that's probably why he's that's probably why that's why he's a winner. So that like you think that is Chad, by the way, that's Chad as shit.

Do you think he went on Charlemagne because he thought he was the Holy Roman Emperor? All right, we're too old school guys, your dad was in politics, pipping the short. I knew him. Man, I'll never forget. I was the first non prussian to go over that side. I wanted to see what they were about. I wanted one of those hats. Okay. Last Joe Biden clip. Last Joe Biden clip. Why does it make sense to have African Americans who are getting out of prison serve their time? Everybody for that man be able to have public housing. Why doesn't make sense that they can have Pell Grants to go to school? Pell Grants makes sense. They can have access to what are we nuts? We keep doing. Sorry. That's our time there. No, no, I'm sorry. I know Jill

has to use this, but I want to talk too much. Jill has to use this. Jill has to use the computer den. That's why I have to leave the interview. No, that was his campaign stepping in to be like, okay, time to wrap it up. But I did like that because I think they decided to wrap it up because they realized that he had just committed himself to guaranteeing federal housing for recently released felons. And they're like, Oh, we're definitely not going to do that. Yeah. I also very much enjoyed. They're not going to. But the thing is, he's not talking about that. Like, well, the way he talked about education, he didn't say free college. He said fucking Pell Grants. The idea that someone gets out of jail and it's like, Hey, you can go to college now. You got a

Pell Grant. Well, fuck me running. No, I know you heard his campaign guy going like Joe's, Joe's brain is malfunctioning. He's like, Oh, Jill has to go on the email. Jill needs to record some only fans content. Wait, sorry. We have one more, one more Joe Biden clip. This is the, this is the weed smoking one. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Let's just, yeah, this one you say that you would decriminalize marijuana. What's the difference between legalizing it and decriminalizing it? Because they're trying to find out whether or not there is any impact on the use of marijuana, not in leading you to other drugs, but what it affects that doesn't affect long term development of the brain. And we should wait till the studies are done. I think science matters. I think we got decade,

I think we got decades and decades and studies from actual weed smokers though. Yeah, I do. I know a lot of weed smokers. Okay. So he responded to a question that asked, what's the difference between two things with, because, which that's not how you can respond to that. That's not allowed because that's, he does, he does like the, like, the, like, he knows he can't get away with saying that we have to keep marijuana illegal because it's a gateway drug. Right. Because that's been debunked so thoroughly now. It's just uncontroversial to state otherwise. So he says, no, we have to wait another 30 years because we've got to wait for the next round of studies to show whether it like harms your brain or something. It's like, he'll change his mind

on that really quickly though. Like, I like, even Republicans are really coming around to that because there's just too much money in it. There's too much money and there's public opinion is too strongly in favor of us at this point. So like, he's trying to have, he's trying to have it both ways here, but like, not again, not answering the question. And then when Charlemagne says, like, I think we have all the studies we need just based on all the people who've been smoking weed regularly for like decades and, you know, or I do. And he goes, yeah, I do. I do. What do you do? I do. What? What did you think he said? I know what he said. I know a lot of weed smokers. I mean, I think, I think it's referring to Barak and the chum gang.

Yeah. Chum gang. We go hoop. I was the first whiteboard to go to Hawaii and help find them seeds. I wanted to say, Felix, I wanted to start, I wanted to start away. What if a dro could cure Joe Biden's dementia? I wanted to start talking about how you can like add water to the bag you just bought. And he's like, yo, I'm paying, I'm paying for weight, not water. I can do eight, eight bong rips in early in a row in my car off one load. A lot of people don't think I could beat nine. Okay. Listen, you got to get a life if you think I put orange bills in it. Okay. Oh, here comes my mom to clear the deal. Go into YouTube and type, can he beat nine and tell me that isn't a Joe Biden speech? Yeah. Yeah. It's uncanny, honestly.

It's insane. We just all watch too much damn YouTube maniacs that they, they, they, they've turned into topos. Yeah. Like Joe Biden used to just be like a boring shitty Democrat. And then he just became Dan Quinn. Yeah. Like the thing, they talk about, oh, Joe guy, he was always a gas bag and he was always prone to gaffes. Yeah. But it was just boring political bullshit. Not this, that's this majesty, this, this, this joy scene, logarithm. It's amazing. It's so good. And that is why I know what they will not debate because that's too fun. No, yeah. We don't get that in this world. It's the DNC that's going to be held on zoom and start with like fight song too is it's going to suck so much

because it's going to suck because they're going to give Joe like everything a Hollywood producer gives his hyperactive child. Yep. And he's just going to talk about like Pell Grants for three hours. It's going to fucking blow. They should just like, let him go off the cuff. That would be awesome. Just like Trump should have. I will, I will put this down now. If they do have a, if they do have the trappings of a convention and they don't just scrap it entirely, which they honestly could, they could just have everyone vote via email. If he gives an acceptance speech, it will be the shortest in history. They're not going to allow him to go out there for how long are those things? Half an hour, even off a teleprompter. They don't,

they don't trust that. So it's going to be like a five minute like list of, of, of, of, like, basically just a string of rejected campaign slogans and then they're going to wheel them off stage. All right. That, that was a jailbiden on the breakfast club. I mean, honestly, just kind of demonstrating why he, he ran the table on everyone, including us. I mean, the guys, the guys unstoppable. And again, like, like none of this shit is going to like become a controversy that's going to ding his appeal in any way to anyone other, to anyone other than who was already firmly not voting for him, you know? So just, just make your piece of it. Like, don't try to correct him. Don't try to scold him. Don't try to like, you know, mold him into

something different or better. Because honestly, you're probably, if you want him to be elected, you should want him to do more shit like this, which is just wild the fuck out on, on TV and internet clubs. I do. All right. Let's close out the share screen. I got, I got a couple other things we got to, we got to get to today. And I would like to switch now the focus to, you know, as we normally do, to our current president. Uh, talking about the damn cheeto. Yeah, the damn cheeto in chief. And I want to talk about just, just real quick, just, just one thing that Trump has done over the last couple of weeks that I'm really here for. And that is like, you know, he's, you know, we've established that you can't de-platform the president of the United States

as much as you wish you could. Sorry, Kamala Harris. But given that he has a platform, I'm glad he is using it in this one particular detail. And that is reopening the cold case about the murder of an intern in Joe Scarborough's office when he was a Florida Congressman. God damn justice. And I'm just going to, I'm going to read here from, uh, okay. So he's, I love this. He goes, this is a Trump tweet. He goes, a lot of interest in this story about psycho Joe Scarborough. So a young marathon runner just happened to faint in his office, hit her head on a desk and die. I would think there is a lot more to the story than that. An affair. What about the so-called investigator? Read story. So he, I just like for weeks now,

he keeps calling Joe Scarborough psycho Joe, which is so fucking cool. Um, somebody's going to try to affect the citizen's arrest. Yeah. And then he goes here, uh, a bloater her head, body found under his desk, left Congress suddenly, big topic of discussion in Florida. And he's a nut job with bad ratings. Keep digging. Use forensics, geniuses. That's, there's so much gold in here. I like that. It's like there's so much good shit in here, but my favorite has to be like, he killed this woman and also his ratings. So yeah, yeah. This is terrible ratings. Equal. Those are of equal weight. Yeah. Like, oh, Jay's great. Did you see the ratings for the trial? They were amazing. Uh, and then it just,

at the bottom of the article, it says Scarborough's co-host and wife, Mika Brzezinski announced last week that she was going to speak to Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey about getting Trump banned from Twitter in an apparent response to the president's tweets about Scarborough. They want to fire him for truth. Yeah. Good luck with that. Good luck with that. I just, um, you know, President Trump, you know, and all the junior Russ Cole brigade out there on Twitter, like, yes, reopen this case. There's a there's a lot of incredibly fishy. Follow the money. Follow the money. He was like, he was like tight bros with like the cops, like the police chief or something in the county. It was like a pro forma investigation. And then he left Congress that term. Like he'd just gotten in there with

the, with the Republican revolution. He was in a safe, very young. The guy was going to be like governor or fucking president someday. A guarantee. We thought he was. And then all of a sudden he's out of Congress. Come on. You get to lie low. Yeah. He was his chap. Aquatic. And he knew it. And like the other thing about this article is it talks about how like, or a lot of the coverage of this talks about how like, you know, a lot of people, like, you know, even know Fox news is just like this, this universal like closing of ranks around Joe Scarborough across like every platform of cable news where they're like, Oh, now the president's finally gone too far. And it's like, given what we know about fucking Redstone, Matt Lauer,

fucking Ailes, fucking all these guys, like, it just, they're worried that their dead interns are going to come back to haunt them. Yeah. Yeah. Whenever the media, whenever the media forms a shield wall around one of themselves accused of horrible crime or their families, perhaps accused of horrible crimes, it is because they all have the same shit in their fucking closets and they want to make sure that they're going to have their back when it comes out. Yeah. All right. So to close out this week, I've got a doozy of a reading series for you that attempts to tackle a question that we have, you know, that we have attempted to take a stab at ourselves. And the question is, how is Donald Trump heralded as this like avatar of a rugged

American virtues and masculinity, despite being like the queenest oaf in human history? The only problem is that this article comes courtesy of my favorite magazine, The Atlantic, and is written by the world's biggest pussy. I'm referring to, of course, Tom Nichols, also known as Radio Free Tom on Twitter, and author of such books as The Death of Expertise. Writing in The Atlantic, he asks Donald Trump, the most unmanly president, why don't the president's supporters hold him to their own standard of masculinity? And if there is any guy... It's an interesting question. Yeah. There's any guy who's qualified to pose this question. It is a man who does open role

play with a woman pretending to be his daughter on Twitter. Swag. So this is a long article. I'm not going to read all of it. Let's just dive in here. Tom Nichols attempting to answer the question, why is Trump, why do manly men love Trump so much despite what a... Despite his, I don't know, flaming is kind of the only word for it. Like, I don't think Trump is gay, but he just has very, like, Queenie characteristics to it. Yeah. I'm going to repeat something my brother said, which I think is, like, genius. My brother is gay, and he said that he wishes when he was a kid that Donald Trump was, like, in his form now, because it would be great to have this guy who is...

Because representation is important. Well, sort of. Like, he meant, like, it would be great to have this guy who's, like, a pussy, vain, cowardly, backstabbing, gossipy, just, like... Shallow. ...spannish, obsessed, shallow, but it wouldn't be a straight man. They see that to show that, like, the worst stereotypes of a gay man could be all in a straight man. It's true. Yeah.

And they're not. So I think Tom's sort of inability to answer this question or, like, wrestle with his own issues is what's interesting about this article. All right. So Radio Free Tom begins by saying here, so many mysteries surround Donald Trump. The contents of his tax returns, the apparent miracle of his graduation from college, some of them are merely curiosities. Others are of national importance, such as to whether he understood the nuclear weapons

briefing given to every president. I prefer not to dwell on this question. But since his first day as a presidential candidate, I have been baffled by one mystery in particular. Why do working class white men, the most reliable component of Donald Trump's base, support someone who is, by their own standards, the least masculine man ever to hold the modern presidency? The question is not whether Trump fails to meet some archaic or idealized version of

masculinity. The president's inability to measure up to Marcus Aurelius or Omar Bradley is not the issue. Rather, the question is why so many of Trump's working class white male voters refuse to hold Trump to their own standards of masculinity? Why they support a man who behaves more like a little boy? So to begin here, I like, in some ways, Tom is right that Trump is, I guess, technically the least masculine man to ever hold the modern presidency.

But the bar is very low there. It's not like Trump is a wild divergence from previous presidents. Like, oh, I don't know, Ronald Reagan, who is just like a drooling jellybean popping like actor. Like, I mean, he was a guy who literally just played tough guy. Ronald Reagan never even played tough guys in movies. He was always square or like a cut. Even the actual like so-called tough guys, like going back, you would say.

Teddy Roosevelt. Did you ever read like Teddy Roosevelt's like journals when he was like slumming it? Yeah. And on his gap year in the American West when he's just like, I'm so sad right now. It's all just like emo bullshit. Yeah. People think he's badass because of the turn of the century, 90% of being badass was just being fat.

Being fat and having a mustache. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know what, you know what you did if you were gay until like really like I'd say, honestly, let's have fun here. Let's say 2006, you would go into the military and if you were straight and wanted to get tons of pussy, you got into musical theater. Yeah. Yeah.

Honestly, yeah. I mean, you go where the action is. Yeah. I also like here that his two idealized visions of masculinity here are Marcus Aurelius and Omar Bradley. And it's like Omar Bradley, fair enough he did, you know, he was, he did, you know, European theater and World War II. But like Marcus Aurelius, I love because it is the classic like dumb guy.

Like it's a classic like invocation that every dumb guy who thinks they're smart goes to because they saw the movie Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal Lecter name checks Marcus Aurelius. Rain Marcus Aurelius. Well, like looking at the masculine feminine economy throughout history through a modern lens of it makes no fucking sense. It makes zero sense. Like it doesn't even really make sense now because like people always are like bring up a four to star general is like the avatar of traditional masculinity when it's like generals

are obsessed with their appearance. They're obsessed with like little fucking trinkets. They have a very like showman personalities. That's how you become a fucking general. Like they have this weird performer personality. Yeah. David Petraeus at David Petraeus at the fucking cheat on his wife with his his biographer. That's that's how that's how version that dude is.

Also, if I'm remembering from seeing Patton, Omar Bradley, it was kind of a cuck. Yeah, he was sort of a bookish guy. Yeah. He was sort of a bookish, you know, like, hey, let's maybe not launch a full skill attack right now. Stop slapping that shell shocked soldier. Yeah. Goal and all the other generals of the Western like they were just all divas.

Yeah. Oh, big time. Fucking ivory handled pistols that Patton had for God's sake. Yeah. Well, if you think about like the pomp and circumstance and like the theatrics of Napoleon or let's be honest here, Alexander the Great. Yeah. Like that's a conqueror.

I'll tell you what. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, like his his alpha macho on this is for his his sense of confidence in his I can be a queenie lady. I don't have to compensate. Yeah. Well, you know what it is?

Is that like, you know, Radio Free Tom here has underestimated like the elasticity and the sort of prescriptiveness or he's overestimated how prescriptive working class men actually are about gender. Like maybe they on like maybe a guy like Radio Free Tom know the difference between someone who's fancy and someone who's a sissy. I mean, my God, Trump went in front of a a sea of hooting yahoo's in West Virginia to complain that hairspray doesn't hold as much as it used to. But like I know that feel.

My wife tells me about it all the time. Anyone who is around like, you know, whatever mercenary homosexuals know that fussy men can be really aggro and really. I mean, like, you know, so-called sissies or whatever, feminine men a lot of times have to be very tough and like actually tough because they get their asses kicked. And like and like the thing is like with Trump, he's just like a little prince. But I don't think that anyone, I think that he's he really thinks that like working class men are more like homophobic or anti-feminine than they actually are.

They're like, ah, yeah, he's kind of a bitch. Well, Amber, here, Radio Free Tom is going to give you his sort of bona fides here. So he says here, I am a son of the working class and I know these cultural standards. The men I grew up with think of themselves as pretty tough guys and most of them are. They are not the products of elite universities and cosmopolitan thinking. These are men whose fathers and grandfathers came from a culture that looks down upon lying, cheating and bragging, especially about sex or courage. Okay, I'm going to stop right there and just say like, I don't care.

This is one, this is one cultural standard that I think will hold true across all eras of history, nationalities, you know, men of any type all lie about sex. They all brag about it and they all exaggerate their perceived sexual conquest. Every man pretends to have the average dick length of 10 inches. Every one of the guys who like lived through the D-Day invasion came home and then multiplied by 20 the number of French women that they had talked to. I actually don't necessarily, I mean, I'm not a guy or whatever, but I don't necessarily think that's true.

I think a lot of guys are way too just repressed to engage in like locker room talk. Like, and they're like alarmed when they know how explicitly like women discuss sex. I'm going to do a little bit of phrenology here. I'm assuming Tom Nichols, Radio Free Tom is a Irish heritage. So, there's no culture of lying. You say Thomas. Interesting. He goes on here.

You say that. He goes on here. This is interesting. He goes, my father's best friend got the silver star for wiping out a German machine gun nest in Europe and I never heard a word about it until after the man's funeral. Yeah, Tom, I guess you probably didn't hear a word about it because killing all those people probably really fucked him up for the rest of his life and probably didn't want to. He didn't want to talk to his friend's weiner kid about it.

Yeah. Let me tell you about the time I just snuffed out a dozen people and I still see their faces every time I close my eyes. Oh, what's that? What's that? You've been reading Klaus Schwitz fucking cool little kid. He goes, they admire and value the understated swagger, the rock solid confidence and the quiet reserve of such cultural heroes as John Wayne's Green Beret Colonel Mike Kirby

and Sylvester Stallone's and Sylvester Stallone's John Rambo. Also, as it turns out, a former Green Beret. So two made up people. And by the way, the whole point of Rambo was that his brain was totally fucked up from war as well. Yeah, by the way, we saw like we saw like a real Green Beret in the fucking psycho wanted to invade Venezuela. He's a complete lying idiot. Yeah.

And a big weepy queen, too. Most people lie all the time, talking how much just normal people lie. That's a big part of our comedy on the show is the amount that just like there are people, so many people in my lives who like fit like, I guess, Tom's standard of masculine outward appearances, but they were just intervented liars. Like they just couldn't stop. They loved it. But I also don't get what Tom's like working definition of masculinity is here.

Like he goes back and forth between saying like actually like real men don't brag as if bravado isn't like, you know, or hasn't historically been like a major part of masculinity, depending on the culture. But then it's like, oh, but he's a bad guy. And he lies and he's mixing up sort of affect with sort of what are considered the positive masculine virtues. Amber, it's like he meant to write about masculinity, but he wrote about being a good boy. These are all things that good boy knows.

This is a good boy talk. Well, Amber, he actually does give a working definition of masculinity. OK. All right. So here he goes. They are, as an American Psychological Association feature describes them, men who adhere to norms such as toughness, dominance, self-reliance, heterosexual behaviors, restriction of emotional expression, and the avoidance of traditionally feminine attitudes and behavior.

I assume Tom is reading from a version of the American Psychological Association that was from an addition when they like, you know, homosexuality was considered a mental disorder. Yeah. This is right next to the page over next to, this is the page adjacent to wandering wombs. Well, let's go through these one by one. What was the first one? Toughness. Toughness, yes.

I think actually like pretty universally, like it's considered good to be tough, whatever that might be, and that's considered a positive masculine virtue. Next one. Dominance. Yeah. Self-reliance. That's politically and historically contingent. Whether or not you're like a good citizen that contributes to, you know, whatever the

tribe or the Soviet, like that one's flexible, but, you know, for Americans, I'd say yes. Heterosexual behaviors. Yeah, we tend to want them to do that historically speaking. Restriction of emotional expression. Stoicism, if only that was valued for, like, I mean, F4, F5, F5, F5, F5, F5, F5, F5, F5, F5, F5, F5, F5, F5, F5, F5, F5, F5, F5, F5, F5, F5, F5, F5, F5, F5, F5, F5, F5, F5, F5, F5, F5, F5, F5, F5, F5, F5, F5, F5, F5. And finally, the avoidance of traditionally feminine attitudes and behaviors.

Yeah. I mean, that's just a tautology though. Yeah. Thomas never been to Italy. Yeah, but he goes, yeah, well, they're all just that's why they had to have that hard quarantine. They can't stop making out with their brother. Yeah. Yeah. Dude, that the quarantine in Italy is so funny because it's like, oh, no, you mean I have to live with my mom for an indefinite period? Oh, that's the last thing I wanted. He continues though. He goes, but I didn't need an expert

study to tell me this. They are all men like my late father and his friends who understood that a man's word is his bond and that a handshake means something. They are men who still believe in a day's work for a day's wages. They feel that you should never thank another man when he hands you a paycheck that you earned. They shoulder most burdens in silence, perhaps to an unhealthy degree, and know there is honor in making an honest living and raising a family. And yet, many of these same men expect none of those characteristics from Trump, who is a vain, cowardly, lying, vulgar, jabbering blowhard. Put another way, as a question I've asked many of the men I know, is Trump a man your father and grandfather would have respected? Here's

what I like about this. I know Tom thinks this is bulletproof, but I've got news for you. Your father and grandfather would have loved fucking Donald Trump and respected him more than they respect you, who's a college professor who writes about expertise and military strategy, despite never actually having gunned down a German machine. Maybe not. Maybe not. Maybe he's totally right that, you know, what about Gary Cooper? Like, maybe he is right that there is something gone. But that is completely irrelevant, because you are assuming that when people vote, they're trying to vote for America's dad. That's not what the president is. Like, people don't necessarily care about the character of the president. They want

to know if he's going to do things that are good for them politically and economically. Like, they don't care that he doesn't remind them of their fathers, because normal, healthy people don't look at politicians as father figures. He continues here, I should point out that I'm not criticizing Trump's manifest lack of masculinity solely because he offends my personal sense of maleness. He does, of course, but then again, a lot about the president offends me as a man, as a Christian, and as an American. Nor do I make these observations as a role model of male virtue. I was, in every way, an immature cat as a younger man. In the late middle age, I still struggle with the eternal issues of manhood, including what it means to be a good father and husband, especially

the second time around after failing at marriage once already. And truth be told, I'm not particularly manly. I wear Italian shoes with little buckles. I schedule my haircuts on Boston's Newberry Streak weeks in advance. My shower is full of soaps and shampoos claiming scents like tobacco and caramel. And my shaving cream has bergamot in it, whatever that is. I use a shaving cream with little or no alcohol, because alcohol drives your skin out and makes you look older. I am not a psychologist, and I cannot adjudicate the theories of male behavior that might explain some of this. Others have tried. Two researchers who looked back at the 2016 presidential election suggested that support for Trump was higher in areas where there were

more internet searches for topics such as erectile dysfunction, how to get girls, and penis enlargement than in pro-Hillary areas of the country. One can only hope that correlation is not causation. The idea that insecure men support bullies and authoritarians is hardly new. Recall that one of George Orwell's characters in 1984, there we go, there we go. A reference to 1984, that is the calling card of every fucking lazy, reactionary hack, writing in the Atlantic, or any other supposedly high-brow media platform. You have to throw in a reference to Animal Form in 1984 to prove to the people reading it that you've read a book that everyone else read in high school. Same way as we'll remember when we read those Atlantic articles, everybody has,

when they're talking about conspiracy theories, everyone's got a reference Hofstetter for the exact same reason, just as a shibboleth indicating that they're worthy to talk about the subject. And okay, so the rest of the article is like he just breaks it down, like is Trump honorable? Is Trump courageous? Is Trump a man who respects- That's irrelevant. No one fucking cares. Like the idea that people would vote for tax breaks or economic protectionism, or just because they fucking think that he's going to blow up the corrupt political system. They don't fucking care if he's a fucking prancing fairy. No one gives a shit.

Is Trump a man who respects women? Does Trump accept responsibility and look out for his team? And of course, the answer to all these questions is no. These are all things where he's supposedly flouting the traditional masculine virtues, blah, blah, blah. Whatever. I'm not going to read the rest of it, but what I think is actually going on here and what Tom Nichols and people who bring up this obvious fact that Trump is in his personality and the weird way he stands, his billowy suits, the diapers that he wears, and just generally, in every way, his personality is not someone who would embody the traditional sort of stoic, you know, John Ford, John Wayne, American cowboy hero, right? But here's the thing that I think he misses. And Amber, you're 100% right

about like, you know, the idea that people would vote for things that they expect to receive from president and not vague personality traits that they see in their father and grandfather seems to be eluded him entirely. But what's also eluded him is that I think what he misses is that it's too easy to say, oh, well, Trump is a phony. He doesn't, he's obviously a phony about all these things that he's supposed to embody. But it misses the fact that I think Trump is very authentic in one crucial way that does resonate with people. He's a prick. He's an asshole. He's a cruel, cowardly little shit. And I think basically everybody in this country is in one way or another that stoic, tough guy model that he thinks he's failing to live up to. Nobody is that anymore.

Everyone is a venal little coward nowadays. And that's why they like Donald Trump, because he is one of them. He is one of them. And crucially, he also, he makes people like Tom Nichols mad. Well, he doesn't kiss ass. And he doesn't kiss the ass of people like Tom Nichols. And that's fucking cool. And people fucking respect that. And also, I'll be honest, it's some of Biden's appeal to older voters. Yes. Yes. Yeah. He put that. He put that Charlemagne, the God kid in his place. This youngster talk, the whipper snapper talking, talking to Joe Biden, like he's not, it doesn't get respect. Let me tell you, Jack. So like, yeah, they saw that and they're like, yeah, you should talk down to that little kid for,

for not respecting you. And what is more alpha than when you're criticized by someone in the press accusing them of murder? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And like Trump, like literally, you know, again, people are, are mixing up the difference between like affect or feminine or whatever. And, and being like a pussy and a wimp and a pushover. And Trump is a very tough, mean, vicious, effet dandy man. Like that's the thing. Like, haven't you ever met a fashion guy? They could be fucking ruthless. You know, these are not, not tough people. This reminds me of during the Bush administration. Like every liberal thought it was the biggest gotcha to be like, you know, this, this guy swaggering around in a cowboy hat. Like, you know,

he doesn't work on that ranch. He's from Maine in Connecticut. He's not a Texas oil man. He's not a tough swaggering cowboy. And it's like, of course, they were right about that. All that brush clearing, I'm going to smoke them out, dead or alive shit was all contrived macho nonsense that bared no resemblance to George W. Bush's life or personality. And it was sold like on that. But like, I think they're underestimating like the, I don't want to say the intelligence, but just like the sort of cannyness for the Americans may be dumb, but they can, they can spot a phony pretty fucking well. And the thing about George W. Bush that wasn't phony is like Trump, he was generally a spiteful little prick. It was that meat. It was that

meanness that frat boy sadism is what was real and not phony and what people wanted and responded to because they knew deep down inside. They were that person as well. They are also spiteful, vicious little cowards. And I don't even think it's about identifying with someone. Like I think I like, I don't like whatever weakness discussed to me too. Like it's fucking gross. Like, I don't think that like, you know, Trump, well, no, I do think he's cool. I don't want Trump to be president. Like I would really prefer that, you know, he could have run against, say a Bernie Sanders to actually put this stuff into contrast because Bernie's another person who doesn't kiss ass. But like, no, it's, it's disgusting watching this like parade of like

just unctuous, sycophantic, like, you know, like, like the whole the Biden interview, when they're like, do you feel like, you know, black voters, oh, the Democratic Party votes, they have figured out that you're not allowed to fucking say that anymore. And instead of actually like offering like basic social democratic reforms, what they offer is, I, I, I see you, I hear you, you're valid. Like that's politics now. And it's disgusting. I just think like, you know, Tom even, he mentions it in the article, like he compares Trump to his father and grandfather, and then he can't help but compare himself to his father and grandfather. This is all, this is all Oedipal shit. Yeah, he goes, I know I'm a little fancy boy, like I have

a college degree and I wear little Italian shoes with buckles on them. And like I get my, I get fancy haircuts and shit. And I think he's just like, as a guy, like Tom Nichols, who is someone who, you know, was a, you know, bloodthirsty neocon until about two weeks ago, who was his emotionally and like pathologically needs to identify with like the American empire and military as an avatar of his own perceived masculinity. The fact that Trump can like lap him 10 times over among that demographic and embody those and embody that and actually be like the commander-in-chief guy that is beloved by military operator guys, cops, firefighters, like, you know, the tough guy avatar. He's more alpha than you, Tom. He just is. He is more alpha

than you. And I think it's just, it just brings into even more sharp focus for these never Trump guys that they've always been pussies. They've always been pussies who need the U.S. military to like back up their own fucking, the fact that they're divorced fucking just, just winers. And like, and the fact that Trump is so visibly, everything that they, everything that they claim to be like embodying like weakness or venality and decadence in American culture shows that none of that shit matters. And they could have gotten away with being just that thing if they had wanted to instead of pretending to be a fucking, you know, tough guy their entire life, even though they, all they, all they do is write articles about Marcus Aurelius.

Remember Milo? Sure. Remember how beloved Milo was by a bunch of like downwardly mobile, like middle-class kind of alt-right guys who were mostly straight, by the way. Yep. Yes. Yeah. He was, he was their queen. They, they, I think it was UC Santa Cruz at the UC Santa Cruz. They brought him into the auditorium for his speech on a palanquin. Yeah. Four nerds in sport coats carried him into the thing and he was on a chair. Yeah. And they loved it. Yeah. It's almost like, I don't know, people aren't like being fancy isn't the same thing as like being a pussy. Like he was a mean fucking shit and they liked that he was a mean shit and that he antagonized people that they hated and like people aren't, no one cares about Gary Cooper. Fuck off. I want one more

paragraph here. He says, Trump's media enablers do their best to shore up the fiction that Trump and the men who follow him are the most macho of men. The former White House aides, Sebastian Gorka, one of Trump's most dedicated sycophants, has described Trump as a man's man, despite the fact that Trump has no hobbies or interests common to many American men other than sex. In this game, in this gang of sweat hogs, Gorka is the Arnold Horschach to Trump's Vinny Barberino, always admiring him as the most alpha of alphas. To listen to Gorka and others in Trump world, the president can turn his enemies to ash through sheer testosterone overload. Some Trump voters have even airbrushed the president's face onto the bodies of both Rambo

and Rocky Balboa. The president has himself approvingly retweeted the Trump as Rocky meme. So he's saying that like, it's Trump supporters are foolishly pretending that Trump is Rocky or Rambo. Whereas five paragraphs earlier, I use those same fictional characters to uphold the traditional value virtues of masculinity that I think that he's failing to live up to. Well, he's not. And the people who love Rambo and Rocky also love Trump. And this is the point I'm really trying to get at here. Is it like everyone cues to these fictional representations of cowboys or soldiers or cops or fucking construction workers or whatever? I mean, the village people essentially. But they're covering up for the fact that like the extent to that ever

existed, it doesn't anymore. Everybody is larping as this shit. And Trump does embody the, I'm sorry, American Western male at his heart more than any of those fictional representations of things that we'd like to imagine are virtuous. Trump is the American male. He gets it. He is it. And who is the American male? Bitchy, Queenie, Vane, Vino loves gossip, loves drama, soft. Yeah. And would listen to his podcast. Yep. Exactly. So and it's just all of it is just causing this great anxiety and radio free time because he knows that deep down that's him. Trump is him. Yep. And he hates it. He hates looking in the mirror. And you know, like Trump, like just get, get on board the Trump train, like all these never Trump conservatives, you'd be a lot fucking

better off. It's really true. I don't, just stay the fuck away from me. Yeah, they really do. Their anger of Trump is jealousy more than anything that he's, he is comfortable with himself. Yeah. I mean, obviously he's very insecure in some ways, but he is wildly comfortable being perceived anyway, so long as it's on his terms. Yeah. They don't have that. By the way, the only way to like really like, oh, being like a fat, it's just to be like, yeah, bitch, like, you got to work it. Yeah. And he figured it out. He works it. He works. He works at complete moron. Works that runway. Yeah, he does. He works like, and I like, despite being a complete fucking moron, he has this fantastic talent for bullying. And like, that's fucking cool. He bullies people that I also hate.

Like, I, I get the appeal of Trump. And if you don't, and he refused to say that you can't, you're either willfully ignorant, and you're afraid that knowing why people, you know, like Trump will somehow make you into a Trump supporter, like, or you're just a fucking idiot and a fucking pussy. There you go. Tom Nichols, idiot, pussy, Atlantic contributor. There we go. I think that sums it up for this week's show. Yeah. Look at the way he's, look at the way he stands. That is alpha posture. Trump does alpha posture all the time, the way he leans forward slightly. Yeah. He has, he has, he has a signature walk. It's not the Naomi Campbell signature walk, but it, you know, it works for him. Just like you. How does he looks like he's

defying gravity? It is amazing. How does he have that much pendulous gut and spine and like head and center of that gravity that far in front of his little old man knees? Maybe he's like, waited in a strange way, like those, you know, those bird toys that you could balance them on their beak. Yeah. He uses the special suit, the shoes that Michael Jackson used to do the smooth criminal. Yes. I love the shoes. It's got to be the shoes. So there we go. That sums it up for this week's episode and I leave you with this question. Which way Western man, Donald Trump or Joe Biden? I do or Dan Quinn? I do. We do. We do is the answer to that question. We all do. We all do, baby. Till next time, guys. Bye. Bye. Bye.

Hey, hey, I've got to be on my job.