Chapo Trap House - 432 - Entourage Every Day feat. Adam Friedland (6/29/20)

Episode Date: June 30, 2020

Adam stops by to lament the untimely end of HBO’s Entourage, and demand its return under a Biden administration. We also talk about the thing with the Russian bounties, Obama’s re-emergence from retirement and Kevin D. Williamson’s weird fixation on leaf blowers.

Alright, so Phyllis, on entourage, what episode have you been watching? Well, before I was really interrupted and had to start recording, I was watching Dayfuckers, which is actually one of my favorite classic episodes of the show. Dayfuckers? Dayfuckers, yeah. So at the beginning of the episode, they're at breakfast, the gang, you know, the four of them, and a girl's making eyes at E, and then they find out through Witty Bantor that he's never had sex with a woman and not had some sort of emotional attachment.

So they concoct some sort of bet, where E and Turtle, they decide that they want to see which one of them can fuck first that day. So Vincent takes E under his wing, and Turtle takes, or Johnny Drama takes Turtle under his wing. Also, upon revisiting the show, the comic duo of Kevin Dillon's character, Johnny Drama, and what's his name, Jerry Ferrera, who plays Turtle, it's just, they are really a match made in heaven. I completely forgot about it.

Did you know that Randall Emmett of Vanderpump Rolls fame is the person whom Turtle is based on, of Mark Wahlberg's friends? And who is he again? Is he LaLa's boyfriend? Yes, he's LaLa's boyfriend, and he's sort of an aspiring film producer. He had a, like a co-producer credit on The Irishman, and he also was the main producer of, I bless we forget, Gotti. Oh, that's right.

That's right. E directed Gotti. No, no, no. He didn't do it. Oh yes, E directed Gotti. E directed Gotti. Oh, interesting. I mean, it's like you'd really see who runs that town, people from Boston, and they're

all over the fuck. That's honestly true. They're all, they're all over the Federal Reserve. They're fucking 60. It's on the Supreme Court. It's all Boston guys. When are we going to wake up? That's true.

Like what are they? Are they Queens? Michael sure is responsible for 90% of sitcoms now that are, that last more than one season. And he's another one of these Boston mafia guys. Like BJ Novak and the rest of them. That's probably why Ben Ben Shapiro is a Celtics fan. Yeah. That's how you get in.

It's like Scientology. I mean, think about this. Boston guys make up 2% of the population. Approximately. I think that's right. Yeah. And look how they're represented. I mean, how do you get going on?

How do you have two Walberg brothers be famous and then another one gets a burger chain? Give me a fucking break. No. Well, I think there's more Walberg brothers. I think there's about 14 wall. Yeah. But even two of them being even remotely famous is ridiculous. That's, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a

wide array. Yeah. Yeah. Those are terrible. I haven't been there. I kind of want to, I know that they have a special edition of Jordan's that are wall burgers edition, which I'm definitely going to check out those on the resale mark. But, but, but Adam, so you've been, you've been sort of a, you've been binging even just

doing a sort of a, a rewatch of entourage. I mean, what do you, what do you, does it hold up? The world is a nightmare right now. And this is the one thing that's making me feel good is this show. Yes. But hijinks ensue and turtle and Johnny drama go to an internet cafe and then hit up Craigslist casual encounters and a very beautiful woman. He meets up with her in public.

She's looking for a small cuddly man and then it turns out that she wants him to dress up as she's a furry fetishist. And I think I haven't finished the episode, but I believe that a turtle does win the bed. So he does. He yips it up. The thing about entourage and I think the reason it makes me feel so good is that the stakes could not be lower.

I mean, even in a plot convincing through the movie, that's, that's it. Can he do the movie? It always works out in the end. And then maybe it doesn't work out, but then it works out again. That's why that's why the last seasons were bad is because they tried to change that formula. Like the formula. Yeah. The formula for the first like four seasons is like, can the guys hang out today?

But then the formula for like, yeah, the last few seasons are like, Oh no, is it sober? Is it going to be okay? I recently, I watched an episode earlier today where the entire sea plot was Johnny drama sees, he wants to appear younger. So we see someone wearing a trucker hat with a marijuana leaf on it. And the entire episode he goes around Los Angeles trying to find this hat. You know, it's just so, so many things don't make sense right now. And it's just like, there's something about that formula that just is so comforting.

It's really like it's, there's, there's absolutely, the stakes could not be lower. I remember on entourage, like, like a big plot point was, was Vincent starring in James Cameron's Aquaman. And the big joke was that like Aquaman would be like the, the stupidest superhero to make a movie franchise about, but lo and behold, they've, they've gone and done it. And you know what? That's their only like out of the park hit of the DC fucking universe is more than Aquaman made more money than Wonder Woman.

Yeah, but I, I couldn't, I couldn't bring myself to watch it because Vincent Chase is Aquaman. Jason Momoa is a joke. I mean, Adrian Greenie is, you know, I did see him. I think he used to live in the neighborhood. I did see him at a coffee shop in Clinton Hill, Adrian Greenie asked the, and he asked the barista to turn the music down. No, he was, he was getting, he was getting, he was getting a free latte at playground

while you were being shown the door. Yeah. Um, no, the, no, the community loves Vincent Chase. My brother is an Adrian Greenie story. It like doesn't make him, I think we can keep this in. It doesn't make him sound bad at all. He was like, he's just overheard these two girls talking like mid to late twenties, like pretty hot.

And they were talking about how they had spent the weekend with Adrian Greenie and he gave them money to take a cab back to like, I don't know, Westchester or some shit, but they just pocketed it and took the train. But it's like, he's a good guy. He was going to pay for their cab back after fucking them. Like good for him. That's better than the David Jeter or the Derek Jeter gift basket because you've got to lug that thing home.

No. Yeah. How are you going to do it? Transporting things in New York sucks. Only Adrian Greenie is thinking about your transportation. Yeah. That is, that's good on him. Honestly.

He is Queens. Good guy. He is Queens Boulevard. No, that's New York City. That's Queens. That's how we do it in Queens, baby. My friend, my friend did see E in a, in a bar once and he, he said he is five foot two.

No, he is. Well, that's all celebrities. There are no celebrities. The entourage crew is a manly crew. Entourage was representation for manlets and I'd honestly think we'd have less violence in the country if it was still on TV, like showing manlets that they can overcome. I think I'm pretending that these people are normal height, which is what we do with movie magic and CGI.

Yeah. There's something, there's just something so nice about it. About like, it kind of is like after the world has, has fallen apart like it has in the last six months, there's something about entourage is so comforting. I know what you're, yeah, I know what you mean though, because like you would watch entourage after you watched Sopranos because Sopranos was so tense. But now, you know, what, what were the last two seasons of Sopranos about the collapse of America?

Now we're living in it. That's so true. But we just bits and chases gone. I used to watch Oz and then the Sopranos. I remember that when that was the lineup and I'd watched just a prison shower sex rapes. Yeah. With my family, Felix, Felix on a Sunday night, Felix, you say you say that Vinny Chase is gone.

I say that he is merely occluded. Yes. Well, will Biden bring him back? Yes. Biden is going to bring back his spine and the low stakes of the entourage reverse to America. I mean, that is the Biden pitch though, right? It's like, it's like, you don't have to stop watching Maddo.

We can go back to entourage. Yes. Yes. I say Biden is going to save the culture is because all the people who have now, since Trump became president, have gone, moved all their poker chips in on fighting every political battle on the terrain of culture will immediately go back to not giving a shit about any of this. And we can go back to watching, you know, Hollywood him bows, fuck movie stars.

I was thinking about, remember the episode where the entire stakes is like, is Vincent going to like do the movie and the stakes is he wants like Warner Brothers to get him a date with Scarlett Johansson? Simpler time. Like fuck. I'm going to start, I'm going to start watching that show. Even the style of hot girl is so antiquated at this point. Yes.

It's like what it was kind of like the golden age of like girls with no ass and like incredibly long hair and dark, dark, dark tans and frayed jeans skirts. That was like, yeah. Every every woman that Vince Fox or E or whatever, like, they all are the color of like mango jewel. They're white, but they're the color of that. Just glowing orange. Yeah.

Well, now no one can do that because this goddamn cheeto in the white house, he's giving it a bad name to look like nobody, nobody can do the cheeto look anymore. It's like he used to denote beauty. Yeah. He took, he took away these, these angels. He took it away from them. Well, you know, that's just a little bit of nostalgia, just a reminder of what they have.

What they've taken from us. You know, I might, I might just start my own entourage podcast. No, no, you got to. That's a great idea. You got to come on. This is us. You got to, you know, I will do. Adam, you want to do.

Yeah. Yeah. I got Ben and Palma tomorrow, but yeah, next week or whatever. Let's do it. I'm down, dude. Well, before, before this turns into an episode of this is us, I think I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I officially start the show, hello, it's Joppo, it's me, Matt and Felix joined by our good

friend Adam Friedland of come town. Adam, how's it going? Not good, honestly, because there was a community of fellas on Reddit. Oh, okay. All right. Well, I was going to go straight into that world world, we're all down and member of the family. I was going to go straight into that and just announce at the top of the show, I was going

to, you know, a little bit of show house cleaning and by house cleaning, I mean that in the very literal sense of like sweeping up and putting out the dead skin that collects around your stuff. And I'm talking, of course, about the permanent banning of both our Choppo trap house and our come town. Oh, no. We have a Choppo come town quorum right now. So starting with you, Adam, you know, how are you going to function?

How is the show going to continue without its collection of, you know, socially maledurate editors who contribute so much to the, you know, everything to being funny to us being funny to the show being good. Well, yeah, they are the fourth mic of our of our show for sure. You know, and we do actually have a seat at the table, much like Elijah on Passover. There's an empty seat for the for the come town subreddit, you know, no. I feel I for what I've heard because they've been private for a long time, they like me because enough bad things have gone wrong in my life, decided that they like me.

So you know, and I was really playing along with them. It's really useful. Sometimes I was playing along. They don't want to see. They don't want to see us win. I think I when they found out Nick had muscles, they felt they had like a brain, like a collective brain aneurysm because you really want to see your heroes lose. I think.

So I found I've what I found out is that I was I was finally in their good books and now and now they've been iced by Serena Williams husband and now they won't make any nice. You could have you were going to get nice memes and now there's no nice memes of you. They're going to make nice memes about me. They would have been very funny. I'm sure it wasn't just going to be your head on a bug forever. I mean I think the thing is is like our fans are like think that they're as funny as come town and then your fans think they're as smart as job and I think to some extent that's probably

worse. Well, I think like being a fan of a podcast drives you insane because I will admit the podcasting paradox that podcasting is incredibly easy yet barely anyone is good at it. So you see it and you're like this is so fucking easy but you also suck too much to do it. So if you're like if you're an intense fan long enough, you're just like, hey, dude, big fan, I'm going to come to your house and kill you fucking fat piece of shit. You know? Well, apparently what happened is like, you know, this is part of like a big crackdown

on social media. These companies, you know, are, you know, they're getting a little bit nervous again about the, you know, the fever swamps of, you know, racism and terrorism and whatnot that are proliferating on their platforms and trying to cover their ass on the back end. So apparently what they were, what Reddit at least was trying, really trying to do was get rid of r slash the Donald, which is like the big clearinghouse of, you know, epic based Trump memes, but they couldn't do that without having some sort of equal

and opposite reaction on the left. So they decided to sort of balance it out by giving the axe to the Donald by getting rid of our chapeau trap house and our come town. To show that they were being even hand in hot bed. Yeah. Exactly. Chapeau alone is not as powerful as Donald Trump, but chapeau and come town together. Well, there you go.

You know, it wasn't just chapeau. It wasn't just a chapeau, trapeau separate. There were, I knew about one of them. I did not know about the other one. There was a chapeau trap house two and a chapeau trap house three, all of which got banned as well. So that's how you know you're really vibing when you've got a space where people are just budding off like spores every six months.

Yeah. I, uh, every forum I ever posted on had like an insane offshoot forum because like someone got into a fight with a mod and then it died after a few months and it's like even on the, on the new internet that's happening. So, you know, good. Some things ever change. I mean, just post might not be as good as they used to, but it's still the same disorders going on.

Oh yeah. Everyone's just as mentally normal as they've ever been. I mean, you know, I mean, like, I know there are, there are, there are worse Reddit, Reddit's out there that, you know, if you were considering banning one, but none as personally offensive to me. So cheers to Reddit, the CEO of Reddit for finally doing what, you know, I endeavored to accomplish on my own. And by that, I mean, I did, I did literally nothing, but it's just some of your family

connections. Well, Will's dad, Will's dad, a lot of people don't know this, Will's dad was a Redditor at the New Yorker, was a moderator of r slash New Yorker and was responsible for like this and very respected threads in the seventies. Like, you know, here's some, here's some heckin' chonkers at the, at the flat iron building or fucking whatever. Yeah. They have like a drawing of like a guy coming home, like just a line drawing of a guy coming

home and then a birthday cake and there's birthday cake all over his dog's mouth. And then Will's dad would put like captions at the bottom, like a, you know, and he would write like the N word at the bottom. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. Yeah.

Reddit stuff like that. Reddit stuff like that. That's how Will got a job on the computer. Yeah. Well, you know, like, like God's justice will find all of these sickos eventually. But I'm hoping, you know, now that they're both banned. I mean, there's always been a sort of healthy antagonism between your subreddit and ours and that that was my understanding that your subredditors were very, very, very cruel and

nasty. This is a truth. Act. They had a some sort of script written where if you had posted on the chapo subreddit more than once or twice, yeah, bot would pop up and point you out as a chapo. That's very funny. I would say like a chapo, like the chapo detector. Yeah.

And they had a term for people from that subreddit that is very, very, I guess I'd call it un PC. Yeah. Well, I mean, that is, yeah, that is, that is, oh man, no, it's a great war. I guess that is the grand culture war of the internet. Like, you know, y'all versus, you know, Triter and member of things you've heard on Legion of Skanks. Those are the two, those are the two internet.

I wonder if the O and A Reddit. Okay. I want to check it on those. Come on. I hope so. If they, that's, that's I think more serious. Those guys have been there for decades, you know, those guys are part of the foundation. Well, they got rid of the O and A subreddit, then that's, you know, that's really spitting

in the face. That's burning the library of Alexandria, basically. Exactly. Well, I mean, like, I know, you know, it was sort of like our subreddit became sort of the de facto clearinghouse for all, you know, epic shitpost, leftist shitposting or whatever. And it got to the point where I think like, it only had a tangential connection to the show.

And then I think people are lamenting that, that loss of a sort of a leftist shitposting space. But, you know, I mean, look, you can always just start a new subreddit, right? Yeah. How hard, how difficult could that be? I would just like to not have my show's name attached to terrible memes. We'll have our own terrible memes. I don't want to be responsible for someone else's bad memes.

Yeah. If you want to make those memes, it's like, yeah, it's a fucking stock photo of like a man looking at a woman and the woman's labeled like postmodernism and the man is labeled like late capitalism, my boss, depression, anxiety, my therapist, me, my husband, don't say it, the restaurant, Wendy's, this is Wendy's, the fucking MAGA chuds, liberals, these are the same gritty. You could do that with, so just do that, say that you're doing it for like Pod Save America.

Listen, you know what, do something healthy, go outside and just start shouting the gritty memes from a street corner, like an actual insane person. No, yeah, go to a coffee shop and when they ask you what you want, just be like liberals, both these things are the same. Just pull up two headlines and put them side by side and say normal world. Well, I was going to say, you know, I mean, obviously, you know, there are probably listeners at the show that are annoyed at us taking this unseemly victory lap over, you know, our own subreddit.

I'm not taking a victory lap, it's part of life and death. I don't give a shit, you know, I don't like, it doesn't affect me one way or the other whether it exists or doesn't. I just think it's funny when an internet forum gets banned. Well, I was going to say, I mean, if you are annoyed by us joking about this on the show, you can always go to your favorite subreddit and nope, nope, nope, you can't, you can't anymore. You can't.

Well, you have email version. That's still a possibility. No, yeah, that is that is still the main forum for fans of actual fans of the show. You can email Virgil, like comments, complaints, just to check in. He likes being asked how he is. You can still do that. I think you do that. I think people have been asking Nick if he could do anything about it today.

Oh, man, he said us that he said us that video of Mufasa falling off the rock and then scarred digging his nails. I was going to say, I mean, like, you know, if, if, if some new subreddits are going to bloom, I would, I would like to take this opportunity to have, you know, I think someone should start a new subreddit that is the synthesis of the choppo and come town fan communities that is only for fans who listen and enjoy both programs because I think that that is the most enlightened of fans because that is a subreddit that I would be proud to, you know, be associated with and not, you know, those are people who can wrangle, they can

wrangle conflicts and contradictions and resolve them in their minds. The cool thing about the ONA Reddit, which I, and the reason I hope it wasn't taken down is because you can really see how a community can grow out of one thing and then become something totally different because that hasn't been a show on the radio for years, but there are still thousands of posts a day on that Reddit. And they're like, I mean, they like harassed Anthony, Anthony Kumi is like brother who lives on Long Island and has a covers band and they just like, they've made it their life's work, you know, to, to follow these people.

Well, you know, uh, salutes up to all the fallen subreddits. I'm sure a million more will be created, you know, this afternoon. So just start a forum. You could start your own forum. You, there's not like, in fact, it's a better format than Reddit. You don't have to pay money for gold or maybe be sure like an enterprise and guy you could maybe say have people pay $10 to register. I don't know.

Here's an idea. I'll move to the woods, build a shack, a mail packages to airline executives and college professors. Wait, why, but why did the chopper Reddit get taken down? All right. Actually, no, I know the background of this. Yeah. Yeah.

It happened. It's been under quarantine for months. I don't even know what that means. You have to, I think it just means you have to click to say you're agreeing to go into it because it's, it's dangerous or something, but it got quarantined because they were doing epic memes about how slave owners deserve to die, which into 2019 or whatever. I mean, pretty, pretty shocking and edgy stuff. I have to say.

Yeah. Oh man. If John C. Calhoun was here right now, oh boy, I would, I would dab all over him. Kick his ass. Yeah. Yeah. Mitch is bit about giving death threats to celebrities who like just recently died. Yes.

One of the greatest bits, but this, but people took it seriously that they got quarantined for advocating violence. And so they've been like on the shit list. And so when, when presumably what I think happened is Reddit decides, yeah, we don't want to be in the spotlight under the, in this moment of like highly tense racial politics and, and a very intensive medium focused atmosphere. We don't want to be connected to things that are going to refound badly to the general website and things like the Donald and stuff are sort of the, the flagship for that.

And so, but you don't want to alienate all the conservatives who use your platform. So you make a sacrificial goat out of someone on the other side to show my understanding, the reason that come down subreddit was private was because in their battle with the choppo subreddit, there were choppo fans that were going in and posting racial slurs in the come down Reddit. It only to get it banned for racism. Oh my God. That is so gladio shit, which is flagged.

That's, that's, which, yeah, exactly, and that's, it's funny because if you assume who those guys are, those are like the care lords, yeah, they're just weeping as they type those words out. They were good. They were good. They were good. They were, they printed out a picture of, they printed out a picture of John Brown and we're apologizing to it.

No, I have to do this. They had the same look on their faces George did when he like, you know, draw, draw a bead on Lenny just asking, Hey, think of, think of, think of the rabbits Lenny and they typed out the n word on just come down subreddit, you know, they had a tickle tear rolling down their cheek. That's so funny. It's so funny that they hated each other. Yeah.

I mean, it is funny. They should have been fighting forever. I mean, we, we all love each other though. So like, you know, what does that tell you friends? I mean, I would like honestly, as long as we're complaining about Reddit, I would like the CEO of Reddit to do something about the fact that literally every post on MI the asshole and our relationships is 1000% fake. So it's like, get some fricking quality control on this and fact checking on these stories

that people write to go viral. I'm tired of looking at. So yeah, I'm so sick of people just posting and repo like who've never seen a fake post in their life, getting like 20,000 retweets for being like, uh, so saw this today. And it's just the most obvious fucking fake post I've ever seen. They're like, Oh, am I the asshole for killing my wife? And it's like, what the fuck dude, there is, I think one thing was like, I was like a red ending.

There's a Reddit like parenting forum. And there was the, the post that went mega viral was like purporting to be parents who had raised their child from birth to believe that they were a wizard in the world of Harry Potter. And then eventually they were going to get to go to Hogwarts and were able to do magic and they were just sort of asked that, how do we, how do we ease our child into breaking the news to them that none of this is true? And everyone was just like, Oh, can you believe this?

Oh, I just took that kid's therapy bills later and I'm just like, there's no child. This is made up. This is not real. It didn't happen. Hey, chapeau, you see these limbs cord-cubbed, they raised their kid to be Harry Potter. They're Karen's. You're calling the manager. Oh, that's just enough of that.

Fucking get rid of it. I hope they haven't touched small r slash small dick problems. That's the only one that I want. Those guys need each other. Well, that's one of the only like lasting true communities of friendship. I know. Yeah. We did an entire episode on the small penises.

Yeah. The best is when big dick guys go in from r slash big dick problems to brigade to no, they go to console them. They're like, Hey, just so you know, it's not that good. It's not that great. Every time I get hard, I can't do every position because my penis is too big. And then the small dick problems guys ban them and get furious and they're like, I would just for one day, just to hurt a woman with my penis one time, I would die tomorrow.

It's almost like Reddit, you know, just as a phenomenon is just a giant honeypot for antisocial personalities to get even worse. Not like Twitter. That doesn't happen. No, no. Twitter is good. All right. Well, moving on from online drama, let's go to some drama that's happening in the real

world because and this is an update to our last episode in which Virgil brought up some sort of like, you know, vigilante groups forming to protect the incredibly shitty statues in the villages, Florida. And wouldn't you know it, things have popped off even further since we last talked about the villages, which was just on our last episode. I'm reading here from local news site, CBS 12 in Florida. Pro-supporters and anti-Trump protesters clash in the villages. President chimes in.

A pro-Trump parade made up of golf carts encountered some anti-Trump protesters in the villages, which is in central Florida. Video of the encounter was posted to Twitter and it caught the president's eye. The now viral video shows a parade of electric carts decked out with pro-Trump paraphernalia parading down a street before reaching a group of protesters holding anti-Trump signs. In the video, the president retweeted then deleted with a comment, thank you to the great people of the villages, one man in a golf cart is heard screaming white power while a woman can be seen hurting, heard shouting fuck Trump as the parade passes by.

No one is seen wearing a mask or following social distancing guidelines. The villages is well known for its elderly and retired population. So yeah, that was a bit of a controversy to come out of the villages is that the president voted that video of a guy from a sort of a armada of golf carts yelling white power at an anti-Trump protest. So that was going on today and then he deleted the tweet like a coward. I just want to know when are they going to bust out irons? When are they going to put the lead to it?

What are you doing? That's how you believe problems are solved is through violence. Let's see some, let's see a good old fashioned fucking villages, civil war. I would love to be the Johnny Adair of the villages. Yeah. Yeah. Let's turn it into Belfast. Yeah.

Throw up some peace walls, just fucking rocks over the top of it each other. I would love to see what statues there. Yeah. Oh God. Who are the statues of? The statues of one of the two schmucks who created the villages. It's like sitting. Yeah.

I was going to say it's like sitting Marty Croft, it's like statues of them have created a universe. We have pulled them up. Yeah. Didn't Leopold move to Florida? I think he might have. It's probably, it's the no-state income tax, that was the thing that brought him there. But yeah, I know.

So the villages shit is popping off, but you know, I would love, you said like they should make it like Belfast in the 80s and I was just wondering, I would love to see what some of the murals in the pro-trump villages would look like. Oh my God. It was just like, it'd be like a giant wall painted with Dan Bongino's head, his big square head and it was just like freedom fighter, band. Yeah, it would be like Robert E. Lee Grimace, the Israeli flag, like Bolsonaro's dumbest son, just like wall of solidarity.

They would put on. I don't know what the like the lib wall in villages would be. It would be, it would be like MSNBC stuff. Yeah, I'd be like Rachel Maddow smiling upon them, like look at like Mao. Yeah, no, but like in Falls Road in Belfast, they have all these murals to like, yeah, like international solidarity with other like kind of like nationalist guerrilla movements. Yeah, like the Palestinians and the Kurds and like, there's a lot of that stuff and like, you know, anti-Israeli stuff.

And so I was thinking like, you know, the Trump wall in the villages, they could have solidarity with like you said, Felix Bolsonaro, Duterte, Kim Jong-un, depending on if it's a good day for him or not, you know, Victor Orban. Yeah, Victor Orban, the approach on people could chip in their money to do a Manhattan project style research program to create a 100 foot long big mouth Billy Bass to put on the wall. Yeah, yeah, there's going to be like an operation paperclip to find the most racist next door neighbors, next door posters in the entire country, bring them to the villages.

You've called, you've made 500 next door posts because you heard a Lou Bega song. Nick Fury shows up at your front door. I want to talk to you about the village's initiative. Operation golf cart. That should be retirement for like, if you were part of like the Phoenix program or something, this should be like, yeah, this is your retirement project. Well, moving on here, I mean, as those are talking about cold wars that are heating up, could one of you explain to me this story that I've been seeing a lot about, about how

Russia has been paying bounties to the Taliban to murk US soldiers in Afghanistan because people are riled up about this. This is the latest, you know, sort of date that will live in infamy. The final last straw of Trump's, you know, traitorous presidency is that, you know, apparently he was briefed on this a couple of months ago and then didn't do anything about it. But like, I don't know what all the people like all like the Libs and the MSNBC types that are so incensed about this. What do they want Trump to do?

Escalate the war in Afghanistan or like, you know, attack Russia? I mean, what's going on with this? Yeah, they want, they want, they want brinksmanship with Russia to prove that Trump isn't secretly a Putin puppet. So anything, any, any time that he doesn't sanction Russia or do some terrifying piece of military buildup around Russia or antagonize Russia, then he's doing their bidding. I'm just reading here for the New York Times, the headline Russia secretly offered Afghan militants bounties to kill US troops, intelligence says, the Trump administration has been deliberating

for months about what to do about a stunning intelligence assessment. And this has got like, you know, three different people's names on the byline of this New York Times article, but like only one source, you know, feeding them this, this, you know, intelligence. And given the New York Times history with this, it's pretty funny to read. But I'm just reading here at the top, it says American intelligence officials have concluded that a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban linked militants for killing the coalition forces in Afghanistan, including targeting American troops amid the peace talks to end the long running war there, according to officials

briefed on the matter. The United States concluded months ago that the Russian unit, which has been linked to assassination attempts and other covert operations in Europe, intended to destabilize the West or take revenge on turncoats had offered covert had covertly offered rewards for successful attacks last year. And I just like, I mean, I like the idea that like, all the coalition forces that are there to, you know, kill people, it's like, and they're just doing their job, the fair is fair.

But like, you know, they're not destabilizing the region or this country by, you know, by extension, by just simply being there and drawing out this disastrous, longest war. But I mean, it's just, it, it's just like, yeah, like, are the coalition forces that are there killing people are doing their correct and rightly ordered job. And then the Russians who are just, you know, giving people, I don't know, a little, a little loot, a loot crate for fucking smoking a US troop or whatever. And it's just like, why the fuck? I mean, if we don't want these bounties getting paid to, to, you know, kill US troops, how

about they just not be in Afghanistan? That would seem to be like the correct way to deal with this intelligence assessment. Well, that, that is my question for people like a, you know, as has been pointing out, this is incredibly thinly sourced and it hasn't been verified by anyone, but, you know, anonymous fucking Natset community sources, which yeah, sorry, not fucking good enough, not good enough for this. I don't know. Anonymous New York, anonymous intelligence community sources in the New York times.

When has that ever steered anyone wrong? New York times. You're right. Uh, but yeah, that is the thing because it's like, what should we do? Everybody who's fucking is just convinced this is happening. What the fuck should we do? Because we've sanctioned Russia to the hilt. This is, is you're telling me this is still happening?

Then what the fuck is it doing? Do you want it? Should we stay in Afghanistan forever? Should we open up another front against the right? Should we openly fight the Russians in Afghanistan? Should we fucking pay the Taliban more to kill the like, what, what the fuck do you want? Should we go going to bidding war for the Hikkai's? Everyone's, everyone's just, what the fuck do you want?

What are we doing? What the fuck are we doing here? People, they're vibing. Okay. Where people are just trying to one day at a time. That's the US attitude towards Afghanistan. Yeah. This, I mean, the only, the, the literally the only thing we're patient on this fucking

war. Well, no, I mean, like what I, what I like about this story, and I think like the reason people have sort of caught on to it. And by the way, this story has gotten 10,000 times more media attention and controversy than the giant Washington post piece that came out last year that covered like the entire secret history of the Afghan war that showed that like three different presidential administrations has conspired to fucking cover up just, has just lied openly to cover up the fucking slaughterhouse that they've held create in that country.

And if you know, lied to the press and the public repeatedly for decades now about their conduct during the Afghan war, that, that story came and went like that. But because this is a presidential election year now and people think Trump is vulnerable, they're really, you know, they're pushing this one as far as it can go. And I think the reason people are responding to it is because it's sort of like a, a story that they get because I think it, it calls to mind similar pseudo controversies like in the NFL when it comes out that like, I don't know, like the Pittsburgh Steelers defensive coordinator was paying bounties to, to players to, you know, for injuries on other star players

on opposing teams, where it's just like people, you know, they get outraged about that in the NFL, but they still like watching a game that is literally played by causing brain damage to all, all involved. And it's just sort of like with this, it's just like, oh, you're telling me, oh, they're paying bounties to kill soldiers in a war where it's like, well, what the fuck do you think our soldiers have been doing there for 20 fucking years now? It's just sort of like, oh, oh, if there's a, if there's a, if there's a monetary incentive to it, hey, what if I told you that, um, yeah, like we said, you could lease a Dodge Charger

for killing people in Afghanistan. Is that a bounty that's being paid out by the US government seems like to me. Some of those kill teams actually did have bounties on how many Afghans they killed. Uh, I also, I'm just wondering what if the US government, the CIA had only offered bounties on Russian soldiers in the 80s in Afghanistan, that would have been a model of restraint compared to actively giving them stinger missiles to shoot down helicopters with, which is what we actually did. Yeah.

Fun-ling, fun-ling, hundreds of millions, not billions of Saudi money into just God knows where into a county and other things there through, through Saudi intelligence. Just put it wherever it ends up, wherever, whatever happens, who gives a shit. It's not your country. Right. I mean, this is sort of like the perfect for the Libs now who are feeling their oats because yeah, Trump is very weak. This is the perfect story.

This is the perfect Biden story because it's saying the US empire is being managed poorly. Yeah. That's the, that's the whole crux of it. We get Biden in there and he's going to shoe those Russians out of there with a big, with a big cartoon broom, like the Sandman at the Apollo theater, going to sweep all those Russians out of there and we're finally going to win. And we can be in that fucking country forever. Don't worry about it.

Hell yeah. Fudruckers and Kandahar. It's coming. Yeah. Yeah. Don't worry. Other people's kids are going to fight for some vague national glory of this war that the entire fucking world knows we lost.

Who the fuck are we fooling at this point? I'm not. Who thinks it's going to be? It's not even ourselves because as Chris, as we'll point it out, we have the fucking Afghan papers showing that this whole thing has been a fraud the whole time. There's no plan to win. There's no way to win. And we were just all like, yeah, but that's just what it is now.

We're in Afghanistan. Everyone's dying of opium, who isn't dying of coronavirus, who isn't dying of gun violence. And there's no solution to any of these problems because we have, we have lost the capacity to manage our own affairs. Everything is going on through its own momentum and we're just being carried along down the hill. And it'd be very nice if the Russians would not get in there and make it harder for us in this thing that we have no choices about over.

But I would like to stress it is most likely complete bullshit. Yeah. No. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, I don't doubt that Russia is up to some bullshit. Like no one should be occupying that country is what I'm saying. But that said, no one, no one who's fucking raising a thing about this story, they have

no positive vision for Afghanistan. Their vision is that Americans go and kill and fucking die and Afghans die for what? So you can, so you can go back to fucking watching Will and Grace. So you can feel good when you close your eyes thinking about this country and the conduct of empire. I mean, yeah. Imagine if, imagine if Russia was just giving out challenge coins to Taliban militants for every grizzly atrocity they perpetrated against, you know, American soldiers.

I mean, oh, imagine that. Imagine if, imagine if a military was giving out trinkets to its soldiers for every fucking war crime that they carried out. I mean, that would be, that would really be something if that were a real thing that took place and happened in this world. Remember when the captain of the USS Vincennes got a medal for shooting down an Iranian passenger plane? Mm-hmm.

And George H.W. Bush, one of the good Republicans said, I will never apologize for my country, right or wrong. Yeah. Well, moving on, but this is connected because it very much has to do with a guy who was president for eight years at the Afghanistan War, I'm talking about Barack Obama. And if you guys haven't felt nauseated yet, this New York Times article is sure to bring you there. This is an account of how Obama has shaken off the doldrums of retirement to assert himself

into the American political theater once again and preserve his legacy and save the country. This is a headline how the Trump campaign is drawing Obama out of retirement. He's like, he's like John Wick, basically. Mr. Trump, he killed Bo Obama, and Obama was saving that for Christmas dinner. And it was a gift from Tony Resko as the last thing he gave him. It was the guy in the limousine tipped him with a puppy. And there's the like, yeah, and you know, is Obama back? Yeah, I'm thinking he's back.

So listen to this. Just after Donald J. Trump was elected president, Barack Obama slumped in his chair in the Oval Office and addressed an aide standing near a conspicuously placed bowl of apples, emblem of a healthy snacking policy, soon to be swept aside, along with so much else. I am so done with all of this, Mr. Obama said of his job, according to several people familiar with the exchange. Oh. Oh.

He's Barack Obama. Are you tired of deciding to kill Whisper Walk? I know it hurts you what a wist. What I love about this is it's the conspicuously placed bowl of apples, the emblem of the healthy snacking policy, soon to be. This is what they've taken from us. That's the thing they're leading in, is just as that's what Trump is going to come in and get rid of is all of the healthy snacks being offered to America.

You know, forget forget the Iran deal or the Affordable Care Act or like any of the federal judiciary. No, won't be swept aside in this new reactionary tide is healthy snacks. Now they say Apple a day keeps the doctor away. Are we totally sure that if Trump hadn't come in there and it ended the snacking policy, the Corona even would have been an issue? Well, you know, an Apple a day better that than dealing with one of these healthcare exchanges.

Am I right, folks? So going on here, it says there is no model for my kind of post presidency. He told the aid. I'm clearly renting space in that guy's head. Oh, fucking corn cob the bitch. Oh God. Fuck off. Don't you dumb bitch?

He swiped. He just took all your shit, your apples and everything else and just swept it off the table with this cheeto dust soaked fucking hands. And he canceled literally every accomplishment of Obama on day one. It was done. He owned your ass. He wrecked it, which is not to say that Mr. Obama was not committed to use his pre Trump retirement vision, a placid life that was to consist of writing, sun flecked fairways,

policy work through his foundation, producing documentaries with Netflix and family time aplenty at his new $11.7 million spread on Martha's vineyard. The stakes of that reengagement were always going to be high. Mr. Obama is nothing if not protective of his legacy, especially in the face of Mr. Trump's many attacks, yet interviews the more than 50 people in the former president's orbit portray a conflicted combatant trying to balance deep anger at his successor with an instinct to refrain from a brawl that he fears may dent his popularity and challenge his place in history.

He goes here, he is doing so very carefully, characteristically intent on keeping his cool, his reputation, his political capital, and his dreams of a costed retirement intact. I don't think he is in hesitant. I think he is strategic, said Dan Pfeiffer, our old friend, top advisor for over a decade. He has always been strategic about using his voice. It is his most valuable commodity. Oh, it's just, I mean, if this is the retirement he wanted, I mean, couldn't he have just stuck to that?

Because I mean, has he actually produced anything for Netflix? Yeah, yeah. He did a show about a Chinese company opening an American factory, like a documentary sort of like gung-ho but real, and I think it was called The Factory. Yeah. Was that good? Most of the other videos he's produced are only available for private screenings in the discrete homes of certain well-connected people in the entertainment industry and finance,

if you know what I mean. Going on here, it seems like the only thing he did is just rat-fuck Bernie. Yeah. That's where I'm going with this article. That seems like the only thing he's actually accomplished as in his post-presidency in four years. Yeah. No, it's just like he stayed silent, you know, because of course he wanted to preserve

his calm, cool, collected, you know, presentation of himself as well as his legacy that's, but like, okay, so he's preserving his legacy. And the biggest thing he's done in that regard is make it absolutely certain that Joe Biden will be the Democratic nominee for president. Oh, yes. And it's like, that's your legacy, dude. Hope you're fucking happy with it. That's what people are going to think of you, if they think of you at all after Trump is

making sure. And do you think Mayor Pete did the Obama voice when he called him and told him to drop out? Yeah, there was a bunch of feedback in them, like they couldn't hold the phone to their heads because they kept getting the feedback popping in because they had the identical vocal frequency. He did. He went, he went into Obama.

Mr. President, let me be clear. Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. Oh, golly. Yeah, he was just sitting on hold waiting for Obama to come on and going, hello, Mayor Pete, you're quite good at turning me on. I'd like to imagine the hold music while you're waiting for Obama to get on the phone is it's all just selections from CDs that are sold at Starbucks.

Yeah. It's Jason Mraz, Nora Jones joint effort. Yeah, he says many supporters have been pressing him to be more aggressive. It would be nice for a change if Barack Obama could emerge from his cave and offer no weight demand a way forward. The columnist Drew Marjorie wrote in his much shared medium post in April titled, Where the hell is Barack Obama? The counter argument, he did his job and deserves to be left alone.

No, yeah. Look how well he did. Look how, look what a good job he did. That reminds me when he like his first public appearance after going parasailing with Richard Branson. His first public appearance was that to talk at like Goldman Sachs, right? Yeah. And then people were like, they were like, don't you can't tell, you can't tell a black

president how he can make his living. That was like the defense of it, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. Oh, you had no problem with all these white presidents taking money. All of a sudden. Yeah.

The best thing was they weren't even saying, they were saying, you want him to speak the Goldman Sachs for free? That was great. And by the way, he had already signed a $65 million publishing contract for his memoir of his presidential, his two terms in office. Has it dropped? No. He's still writing it right now.

But he says, hurry up. He's like, he's like, George R.R. Martin, fucking drop it already. Christ. No, but to your point, my favorite thing people would say was when they would go, Obama doesn't owe you anything. It's like, he was president. He ran for president. He ran for all of our approval.

And quite frankly, I mean, if he was president for two terms, and I voted for him at least one of those times the first time, yeah, considering what he accomplished as president, yeah, he owes me a lot. He owes us all a great fucking deal, considering what he actually did in office. Well, yeah, he gave us all Trump, I mean, it's his fault. But he goes here to your point about how like, you know, don't tell Obama he can't speak at Goldman Sachs quote here, it says, Obama has now been out of office for three and a half years, and he is still facing this kind of scrutiny.

No one is pressuring white ex-presidents like George W. Bush and Jimmy Carter the same way. So they say that Monique Judge, news editor of the online magazine, The Root, an author of a 2018 article arguing Mr. Obama no longer owed the country a thing. Well, first of all, if you're talking about Jimmy Carter, such a ridiculous argument, Jimmy Carter gets shit on all the fucking time for being like mildly critical of Israel. And if you're talking about George W. Bush, I mean, the model is not to just warmly embrace everything a fucking ex-president does. All this fucking guy to do is start painting portraits of his fucking victims, sort of

similar to your experience of quarantine. I think they're pretty good, honestly. I mean, they are pretty good, but it's like, you know, it's like John Wayne Gacy. That's all it took for him to be fucking, that and give a piece of like a Werther's original to Michelle Obama. That's all he had to do to be fucking fully embraced as like a decent man who, you know, say what you will about him. At least he, at least he loved his country and had had a decency to him.

It's like, were you fucking, were you awake during the George Bush administration, W. Bush? Because he has not an ounce of humanity in him. I mean, he's like one of the worst monsters ever to occupy the Oval Office. So like, if we're at, I don't think the standard that we should be holding ex-presidents do is just totally uncritical embrace of them and everything they've done. And just to allow them to ease into a life of just absolute splendor and comfort and just, you know, frictionless praise and fucking veneration from the public and media alike. But Mr. Obama's head appears to be somewhere in the middle.

He is not planning to scrap his summer vineyard vacation and is still anguishing over the publication of his long-awaited memoir. But last week, he stepped up his nominally indirect criticism of Mr. Trump's administration, decrying a shambolic, disorganized, mean-spirited approach to governance during an online Biden fundraiser. So going on here, I had to sort of term the keyword search the article for Bernie Sanders because this is what I was wondering if they were going to address this at all. Because this is, as you mentioned, Adam, this is the only actual meaningful thing he's

done with his power and his post-presidency is behind the scenes to intervene as strongly as possible in the Democratic primary, if not fix it outright from the beginning to make sure that Joe Biden got the nomination, his guy. And in doing that to coordinate the, you know, Super Tuesday mass dropout of Klobuchar and Buttigieg at the exact same time. And lest we forget Elizabeth Warren staying in at the same time to really stick the knife in Bernie and finish his chances of getting the nomination. But it says here, Mr. Obama was supportive of Mr. Biden personally from the start of

the campaign. But he promised Senator Bernie Sanders in one of their early chats that his public profession of neutrality was genuine and that he was not working secretly to elect his friend, according to party official familiar with the exchange. God, I hope Bernie Sanders believed that. Well, that settles that. Yeah. Still, he is an enthusiastic supporter and played a central role in pushing Mr. Sanders

to accelerate the end game quote that led to Mr. Biden's earlier than expected victory in April. He spent the next few weeks tidying up a few messy political loose ends, working to improve his chilly relationship with Senator Elizabeth Warren, who irked him by criticizing Wall Street's speaking fees as emblematic of the scourge of money and politics, calling it quote, a snake that slithers through Washington. See? So she fired the first shot about calling someone a snake.

Well, she's right. Yeah. So, yeah. So, I mean, like, I'm not gonna, there's not much more in this article, but I just thought it was a, you know, just all the details about how, you know, he was just really hoping to spend some time in, you know, on America's own mid-summer island in Martha's Vineyard and just produce Netflix documentaries and write a book that preserves his legacy. But, you know, unfortunately, he's had to, he's had to come out of retirement to lightly

criticize Donald Trump. And largely, I mean, it is mentioned, but it's not given the weight it should in this article is that, like, his only meaningful intervention was fixing the Democratic primary to the extent that that was possible. I mean, if he's going to be a producer now, like get Doug Elin on the phone, get Mark Wahlberg on the phone and let's bring back entourage. All right. Netflix is the perfect fucking platform for a relaunched entourage.

Give us another 100 seasons of entourage. Let's bring peace. Let's bring some, some modicum of normalcy back and we could have Obama cameo. He could, he could be, he could share like a right conference between Johnny drama and turtle over some sort of e-cigarette based business dispute that they have. Yes, exactly. He could, he could give that like he could give them his basketball tickets if they're trying to get into a big game and Obama can show up and like give him their tickets and

they could be like, oh my God, it's the president, it's president Obama. Oh my God, the president turtle, I believe you're sitting in my seat time for you to go. Oh, you're not friends with Barack Obama. I've been friends with him for years. He helped me with avion tequila launch. He was friends with Saigon, the rapper that I signed in season two. Jesus Christ, man.

That guy's a loser. I can't. He sucks. I hate him worse than Bush at this point. Oh, absolutely. Because I wouldn't go that far, but I mean, he did all this shit for fucking for nothing. He did all this shit just to be the asshole with the shitty mansion in St. Louis just to do that.

He did all that stuff. He became president. He ate the adrenochrome. He sat in the vaulted chamber looking into Satan's assholes and opens up at the top of a pyramid of blood so that he could produce a fucking Netflix special and jet ski. He couldn't have done that as a senator. Just no imagination like our bad guys aren't even motivated by any sort of grand strategic vision like a Nixon or a Kissinger anymore.

They're just they're just the most striving little fucking hollow assholes who just just don't want to be famous, which is the worst thing you could possibly want to be. Yeah. Bush at least wanted to impress his dad. Exactly. There's some psychology there. Yeah. Like, what do you think Obama would see if he went on a DMT journey and like ventured

to the center of his spirit to saw his most core desire? Like, what is he see? The food and wine, the food and wine festival in Aspen where he gets to meet the winner of Top Chef. Yeah. No. That's it. Just a completely a completely dull man kind of the I mean, actually like a very good

predecessor to Trump because they both mirror each other's lack of imagination and the and the complete death of any vision and their respective movements. Yeah. So Obama, good luck to that guy. Yeah. See you. Take a hike. Go bungle somewhere else.

Hey, get this. Thanks, Obama. Being sarcastic there. Nice. That was good, dude. All right. Well, I wish there was a place on the Internet you could have posted that. All right.

It's a round out today. I have a reading series to cap off this episode that is a return to form for us. This guy lives in the Chapo Pantheon. He was featured in a reading series on our second ever episode. The episode where things really took off and we were like, hey, we got a little something here. We got a little lightning in the bottle. I'm talking, of course, about, as Felix referred to him on that episode, Cold Stone

Steve Austin. I'm speaking, of course, about the National Reviews Roving Correspondent of Kevin D. Williamson. Roving Correspondent is such a good name. It is such a good name. It's like peeping Tom Correspondent. Yeah. You know, it's like Roving Correspondent is the title they give you when like you have no area of expertise or knowledge in any given subject, but you certainly like to stalk suburban

subdivisions sort of glowering in people's front yards. And this is exactly what this article is all about. This is an article so pointless and pretentious that it could only come from a Roving Correspondent. This is, of course, blowing. It's called blowing in the wind. The subhead is the leaf blower man and America's contempt for public spaces. Yes. Oh boy.

Kevin D. Williamson has written an entire article on how leaf blowers annoy him and what that says about America in 2020. Oh hell yeah. Now this is a shit I love where you just lost even the barest filigree of ideology and you are just purely raging about the thing that is annoying you in front of you, the Andy Rooney move. Yeah. And I just, as I read this article, I'd like to just, I'd like to stress once again that

I think back to the moment in which Kevin D. Williamson was unceremoniously dumped from his new perch at the Atlantic when it came out that he did actually believe all those things he said and wrote about how women who obtained an abortion should be executed by the state, preferably by hanging, as he suggested. There were a lot of people who like, you know, before it became obvious that they couldn't defend any of these things he actually said, were sort of trying to be like, look, you know, yes, he has some controversial points of view and, you know, he's an unapologetic conservative in his beliefs, but you gotta give the guy this, he really can churn out

a sentence, you know, his prose really sings. So I would just like you to keep that in mind as you read this unbearably ponderous and tedious article. So let's just go in here. He says, begins, on Sundays, I get up early to hear the word. On Saturdays, I get up early to hear the leaf blower. Saturdays are for the boys, Kevin, you know, what can I tell you? Traffic noise or that vacuum cleaner that runs around 70 decibels, a loud alarm clock

is about 80 decibels, a leaf blower by the way of comparison punishes those nearby with about 115 decibels, midway between the noise of a car horn, 110, and a jetliner taking off 120. I do not usually sleep very late, but I do not get up early as Hortulanus Americanus, the leaf blower man and his colleague. So he created his own sort of Latin genus specification of leaf blower man, Hortulanus Americanus. Well, you Dave Berry, shut the fuck up.

Yeah, a very, a very special species. The lawnmower has a distinct breeding pattern. This is terrible. The leaf blower man and his colleagues work from dawn to dusk. They're almost unvaried white pickup trucks prowling and parking, sometimes four or five blocks on a busy day where I live, constricting the typically wide residential avenues in my town to practically European proportions. The nice people around here can hardly get their outies past one another.

If you do not think very hard about the legal situation, more than a fifth of the landscaping workforce is composed of illegal immigrants, and there is some reason to believe that some of these outfits are less than scrupulous about payroll taxes and the like. There is much to admire about the entrepreneurial spirit and work ethic on display. So he's like, yeah, there's, there's much to admire about them if you, if you allow yourself for even a second to forget that they're all filthy alien viruses invading our country and not paying payroll tax. Love the hustle.

Hate the noise. An unexpected episode of the coronavirus quarantine. Many of our gardens have never looked so good. We had a fine spring that is turning into a hot summer, and with the golf court of courses barricaded and Jim shuttered, the bourgeoisie, who in the course of our workdays seldom lift anything heavier than money, had no place to get exercise. And so we turned to our yards and gardens. What to plant?

There is a superstition that lavender repels mosquitoes, so I planted two kinds. I dug up old grass and planted better grass, and of course there were tools to buy. I do not like the noise, and I do not like the smell of gasoline. My motorcycle is relatively quiet and a clean one. And if you want to avoid that unpleasantness and also get some exercise, then the thing is an old fashioned real mower, which is a human powered rather than gasoline or electricity. And so I get to have some experience of being a kind of bipedal draft animal. Oh, this is just, they're letting him publish his diary.

This is just, this is just him scribbling notes about what I did today. I heard a, I heard a very rude lawn mower outside. I mean, I was sad. And just like over the course of this one paragraph, he establishes that he lives in some kind of rich suburban cul-de-sac in which people, there's golf courses nearby and people drive outies. So it's like fairly well off. And then he tags himself as being a member of the bourgeoisie, the sort of the money

lifting class. But then he says, oh, you know, just so you know, in addition to loud noises frightening me, I also very much dislike the smell of gasoline. But then he makes sure parenthetically to let you know that he also drives a motorcycle, but it's a quiet and clean one. Uh, yeah, this is, um, this is William. Is it, is it like, does he drive on it with his twin on weekends? Is he allowed to go by himself?

He goes here, my neighbors look at me a little funny, possibly because I'm the only man on the block who cuts his own grass. Uh, Kevin, they're- And I do while wearing a cape. Yeah. I was going to say, Kevin, they're looking at you funny because of the way you look in dress, not because that you're pushing a lawn mower up and down your fucking garden. He goes, uh, and in some ways the real mower really does not work all that well, but I'd

rather push that contraption over the same spot six times and get the job done with a single sweep of a gasoline lawn mower. I can let my mind wander and then finish up with a perfectly good piece of medieval technology, a broom. Who gives a shit? Shut the fuck up. He's like, he's like, I wouldn't lower myself to, to ride around or push a gasoline powered mower because this, uh, this piece of shit that doesn't even work allows my brain to

produce these reveries of thought that will, I will eventually craft into such a brilliant column such as this one, which I share the fact that I can use a broom with you, my dear reader. Uh, Leaf Blower Man watches this and smiles and roars and enchants into whirling motion, a furious little cyclone of minced vegetation. God, you can really tell how happy he is writing, you know, you can really tell how, how much he likes. He's like, minced, minced vegetation.

Yeah. Yeah. This pro, this pro is tough to read, but you can tell while writing it, he was like himself and shit. Oh, yes. It's a mean, minced vegetable vegetation. He was laughing. Yeah.

So, yeah. Oh man. It's one of those guys who goes to a restaurant and he's like, oh, I'll have a, I'll have a potable and some commestibles and then they just put like 50 pounds of pubes in his food in the fucking kitchen. Yeah. This is like, this pro style is written for like pedophiles that live in hot air balloons. It's like, what the fuck?

Yeah. Who enjoys this? Who would know? But at this point, like who is reading the national review because the Republican party has changed so much and there's been such an anti-intellectual bent. There's no, like, there's no, like, we're smart and we're republic like that's so out at this point. No, it's other Cape guys.

It's all other Cape guys who are also yelling $5 words at, uh, at leaf flora guys who have headphones in and can't hear them. Yeah. This article is for people who have like a marble bust as their avi and walk around with a cane, even though they don't need it. And when they see like a guy on a gasoline lawn mower, they're just like this, the shabbiness of modernity is just thrust in my face every time I leave my castle. Uh, it goes on here.

There's a lot of stuff about immigrants and like there's really no actual like political immigrants. Wean venting here. He's just, he talks about how one of the, he just talks about how he spends a lot of time around immigrants and he likes immigrants because they like America and even though his family are of old stock, he feels sort of at home among immigrants. Then he goes back to talking about leaf blowers and America being a sort of convenient place to live and it's a, the leaf blower is a pretty good emblem for them and that it effectuates

our inexplicable national contempt for public spaces. Leaf blower man is king of his castle. If he blows his yard waste into the street, that is someone else's problem. Not my problem. Translate that into Latin and inscribe it on the capital rotunda. The leaf blower man blows his trash rotunda. Is that what they call you? I don't know.

I kind of like it now. Is it, I'm imagining like, uh, what's the name Martin from the Simpsons grown up? Wait, is he, is he, is he unhappy about the fact that in America we tend to public, take externalities from our actions and put them on the public and have that be unpriced and unconsidered? Is he, is he unhappy about that? Because it seems like the defining characteristic of American capitalism. Matt, you, I mean, the subhead to this piece was leaf blower man and the contempt, American

contempt for public spaces. I think if you'll, if you'll remember back, the last Kevin D. Williams and reading series I did on this show was his article about how we should bring back public executions. So I think that's, he wants to hear the snap of someone's neck or the fucking thud of a head on the tumbrel, uh, instead of hearing a leaf blower, why are you guys am I alone here or would you rather see a gallows than a, and a leaf blower in public? Oh, I am alone. Oh, you're calling the police.

Oh, I'm sorry. Never mind. I think Adam gets to the heart of it here is that like, yeah, like who is this for? And that like the national review doesn't really have, I mean, this audience is just so diminished because it used to be like the intellectual engine of, of the conservative movement politics. And like they would, they would always have that sort of, that sheen on it. But now there's absolutely no need to have the sheen anymore.

They've cut out the middleman entirely. And now, you know, it's the, it's the OAN and network and Dan Bong-Jung. I mean, that's the best thing that Trump has done is like made like the Republican party like proud to be stupid, you know? And you know, like when, when, when that wasn't the case, Kevin D. Williamson was a much more, he was much more of a fire breather. You know, he was a court in controversy and sort of venting his, his sort of, uh, sort of proud reactionary political spleen in these columns.

And now that he's been fired from the Atlantic and, you know, it's just sort of the, the political moment has passed him by, uh, he had his sort of chance at, you know, media celebrity, which is of course what all these people really crave. And he, he blew it with his idiotic opinions that he authored like a decade before. So life has passed him by and it's just like, he can't even sort of muster the energy to churn out like some good sort of fire breathing, you know, condemnatory, uh, prose about, you know, liberalism or immigrants or anything like that. He's just sharing his thoughts about how leaf blowers, you know, sort of annoy him.

And then just sort of grafting on Frankenstein, like these like incredibly labored digressions about Americans and public space and immigration and, and, uh, sort of the American character. And it just goes on and on like this. Uh, I, I got to, I got to cut in for a second in 2011 in an interview, uh, when the final season of entourage was airing President Barack Obama claimed it was his favorite television show. All right.

Well, this is going to happen. Let's do this. Come on, bro. Yeah. You don't even have the fucking, you don't have the vision to bring back entourage. Nothing pathetic. You know, it's just like, I mean, I think you can make a connection here to what Kevin D. Williamson is doing because in Trump, you have a, a politics and a leader in a political

movement that represents everything Kevin D. Williamson has been striving for his entire career. It's like he's got what he wanted, but it, you know, it tastes like ashes in his mouth. The sweetness has turned to bitterness because there's, once, once he's been achieved, there's, there's no need for him anymore. There's no, he doesn't have anyone's ear anymore. He's not being fed it as sort of like a daring cutting edge, uh, raconteur and, uh, you know, sort of his poison pen dipping into his inkwell to, you know, churn out another vicious takedown.

There's just no need for him anymore. So what he's retreating into is this kind of, this is his version of watching entourage is just sort of like musings on my suburban neighborhood. And you know, and if, if Barack Obama's legacy is fulfilled and Joe Biden becomes president, you know, yeah, we can all, we can all sort of like the, the liberal and left wing side of it. Like, you know, we will have that opportunity as well to, you know, just sort of not care anymore about the things that, you know, be so loudly protested for the last four years.

Oh man, it's going to be so good. New episodes of entourage every night. Like they write them that day and then like, they make it like the tonight show. There's a, there's a, they write and produce a new entourage every day. I mean, it should be like, it should be like big brother. It should just be like the actors living in their Hollywood Hills mansion, having parties, hanging out, getting in hijinks, but there's just all filmed with sort of a surveillance cameras in the house so that it can wake up, you know, being in the role of turtle E, Vincent

Chase and Johnny drama, get out of bed and just sort of go about their lives and we, and it's edited down every night and then we watch it on TV. I can't wait. It's going to be great. Everyone will be dead from Corona, but everyone else will be dead from laughter. One more thing about Kevin D. Williamson wasn't the article that you reviewed on episode two, basically about how if you're not getting what you need or want from your community, you should just pack up your shit and move.

Yeah, yeah, that was it. Kevin, you should move. Yeah, move, if the lumblers too loud, just pack up your oaky wagon and move on to the next town. Yeah, but the thing is with Kevin D. Williamson though, he makes clear that his neighborhood is quite a rich neighborhood, so like in his worldview, there's like even if they do things to annoy him or that he finds vulgar or uncouth, rich people by virtue of their wealth can't really be morally wrong or subject to any kind of scolding or correction or discipline

because by virtue of their status that they've achieved in society, they're sort of above that. Whereas like his contempt and hatred for poor people of any kind gives him the right to administer a sort of justice, discipline and instruction for their benighted lives. So he can easily tell people in the hollers of Appalachia to just pick up and move to get out of there the fent holler that they're stuck in, but for him being wildly annoyed by his neighbors, he would never deign to move himself or correct any of his social betters.

Wait, so what's his point? There is no point in doing yards or anything. There's no point, yeah. There's no point to any of this. I'll just wrap up. I'll finish reading the last two paragraphs and you tell me what you think you can wring out of this. The smell of gasoline might be understood as the bouquet of our contempt for public places.

Where did the homeless congregate, under freeway overpasses, outside of gas stations, begging drivers waiting in lines at drive-through windows or jammed up at busy intersections, tattered infantry to our high-riding armored cavalry? Half of the commercial and hospitality spaces in our country, from 7-Eleven to Starbucks, serve as part-time homeless shelters and mental wards for people blown out onto the street like, I won't believe the metaphor, I'll let Dante do it for me. Standing outside the gates of hell, the great pilgrim sees the souls of the dead making their final procession.

As the leaves fall away in autumn, one after another, till the bough sees all its spoils upon the ground, so there the evil seed of Adam, one by one, casts themselves from that shore at signals, like a bird at its call. So yeah, he says, I won't belabor the metaphor, I'll just share a quote from Dante with you. So you just stretch out this leaf thing I'm talking about just a little longer. And then he just says at the end, when life got back to normal for a little bit, I had accumulated things to do, some errands to run, and I started going back to the gym. I was so busy that I neglected my backyard for a few weeks.

I was shocked by how quickly the weeds take over once again if you let them. I think he's aiming at this to be some sort of, I don't know, bemused trinity for American culture or some element of our character, but it is just him just farting into his computer. I'd love to see him try out his leaf blower bit and just bomb at a Trump rally. Hey, you guys, it's leaf blowers! Fuck you, I love my fucking leaf blower! I put a bird on a fucking day, fuck, I'll kill you! It's just like he starts talking and he's like, you know, if I may belabor the metaphor

a bit further, I believe William Wordsworth once said, and then you're just a fucking like a wall of leaf blowers, just leaves just get blown straight at them as everyone in the front row just unholsters a fucking blower and blasts it right in his fucking dumb, bad face. Yeah, then Trump gets up there and he's like, fabric softener, doesn't make things soft enough anymore, and everyone's just like, fucking love you, sir! I'm imagining modding my leaf blower to roll coal to take it to the Trump rally. Yes, yes.

But you know, as Heinrich Heiney wrote in 19, 1821, where they burn leaves, they will in the end burn human beings too. Chris means a good point, because like those guys love being publicly annoying. Yeah, that's all the reason they're alive is what like everybody who's freaking out about where to mask everything, it's what are you going to do about it? That's the entire ethos. That's what they should put on the stupid snake flag. Instead of don't tread on me.

It should just say, what are you going to do about it? That's the entire conservative ethos freedom and liberating this country is the freedom to go in public and have no expectation or understanding that your desires have any boundary. It's like a predecessor to what's happened to the Republican Party is kind of could be seen in John like was almost the pest, right? That's kind of like what they've all become. Yeah, originally the RNC invited Trump into the fold because they wanted to hunt him for sport on one of their islands, but he got the better of them.

He certainly did. That widely passed. No, but I mean, I guess like it's just Kevin is, he's not trying anymore. He's given up because we haven't talked about him enough on a lot on this show recently because it used to be when he would come out with some new fire, like there would definitely be something in there to, I don't know, feel angry about because of how it's just sort of inhumane and cruel he was in addition to being stupid. But this is just like there's nothing there.

It's because it just like I said, like he is finally, we finally achieved a society as cruel as the one that Kevin would like to live in, but he still doesn't like living in it. So. Nothing's ever enough. No, I mean, really what the national motto of America should be, it should reflect the idea of getting exactly what you want and hating it and crying about it. Yeah.

Yeah. That's what we're really about. The avatar of that avatar is Trump has gotten only what he has wanted for the past 75 years of his life and he is miserable. He has been more miserable every day that he's been alive and he has never gotten anything other than exactly what he is one of the only good day of his life was the hamburger party with the football hamburger, hand-supported hamburger party and when he put the metal on the door.

Those are the only good moments of his life. Those eclipse like the birth of his children, any of his marriages, anything like that. Yeah. Someone was speculating on Twitter the other day about this and it was like a very, very funny scenario to play out to imagine happening is if Don Jr. or Eric died before Donald did, like what his eulogy for them would be like, we'd just be like, many people said, many people said Don Jr. was a good son, but then again, many people said he wasn't. He sure liked the things that he liked though.

He liked shooting the animals. He loved it with the animals. He had fun with that. I thought his beard was very nasty towards the end though. Well, there we go. I think that about does it for today's episode. I want to thank Adam Friedland for hanging out with us once again. Always a pleasure.

And you know, I would like this, I think your third or fourth appearance on the show now. I think I would like this episode to serve as a monument or sort of a blueprint going forward for the newly formed choppo and come town joint subreddit only for good vibes and fans of both programs who have the correct mindset to imbibe the sort of mutually reinforcing truths that both of our shows are providing for you. Only the ascendant can can touch this realm. Yes. It's the choppo come town fan that that synthesis.

Those are the ascended ones. Yes, they will. They will enter the kingdom of God all all others will be cast into Gehenna indeed. So till next time guys. Bye. Bye. Salutes. Right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I need to gasp for air And I need to gasp for air I wanna be your support, you know I wanna be your support, you know