Chapo Trap House - 434 - Project for a New American Lincoln (7/6/20)

Episode Date: July 7, 2020

We take a look at The Lincoln Project, a new political ad PAC founded by never-Trumpers taking aim at Donald Trump by bringing their conservativism into the open willing arms of the Democrats.

Hello, hello, it's Choppo, the gang is back with you, once again friends, we are here, it's me, Matt and Felix, coming to you this Monday, and this week I think it's time to talk about the hottest new outfit in American politics. I'm referring of course to the Lincoln Project, I don't know, maybe you've seen their ads, and if there's one thing the entire political media can agree on, it's how scathing, witty and effective this new group's ads being run against Donald Trump are, and how devastating they're going to be for this fall. So I think it would behoove us to take a closer look at who is the Lincoln Project,

and for the purposes of this episode I'm going to be referring to them as the Project for a New American Lincoln. Yeah, you guys, you know, if you watch TV, if you watch the shows on MSNBC, if you're constantly like clicking on news stories about how propitia gives you dementia or whatever, you're getting ads for the Lincoln Project, you're seeing them while you scroll, and we all love the ads, we all think the ads are like funny and poignant, we've seen the one ad gay president, where it superimposes the word gay guy over Donald Trump giving speeches, and then just flashes a picture of Osama bin Laden, and then plays a clip of Donald Trump

2007 saying, I would never be a gay guy, and then it goes, who's the gay guy now, and that's been retweeted 300 million times. These are really good ads, these are good ads, and the sort of minds that took down guys like Max Cleland, and they're being put to a good use now, but unfortunately, creators are kind of yikes, as we say. You remember how effective that ad against Max Cleland was, and they were like, this pussy lost three limbs by accident in Vietnam, loser, yeah, no, it's the minds behind projects like that, but they're working on our side now, they're on Team Anti-Trump, Team Biden,

and the Pod Save guys were gushing about these ads. If I were, I hate to join in with a conventional wisdom crowd, largely, who loved this ad, but I thought it was a terrific spot. I think the one that I saw is called Morning in America, Morning spelled M-O-U-R-N-I-N-G instead of Morning. There's Morning in America. Today, more than 60,000 Americans have died from a deadly virus Donald Trump ignored. With the economy in shambles, more than 26 million Americans are out of work, the worst

economy in decades. Most bailed out Wall Street, but not Main Street. This afternoon, millions of Americans will apply for unemployment, and with their savings run out, many are giving up hope. Millions worry that a loved one won't survive COVID-19. There's Morning in America, and under the leadership of Donald Trump, our country is weaker and sicker and poorer. And now, Americans are asking, if we have another four years like this, will there even

be an America? Because it's like, oh, 100,000 people have died under Trump. And yeah, and it's just like, people are clapping like seals for this shit because it's like, oh, finally, like Democrats have long felt bedeviled by like, oh, God, you know, how do we fight these devastating attack ads? Well, now all the guys that have been creating those ads for as long as you've been alive are on our side now. And by our side now, I mean, they're going to be running the Biden administration and

the DNC because should Biden get elected, I think these guys are going to take all the credit for it. And as such, they're just going to be giving the keys to the Democratic Party. So let's look at who these guys are. Who are your guys, Lincoln Project? Well, let's go to their website here. The website is just a, if you go to the About Us or our team, it says, the founders of the Lincoln Project have spent over 200 years electing Republicans, but now they've sparked

a nationwide movement with a singular mission to defeat Donald Trump and Trumpism. Now they say the mission is to defeat Donald Trump and Trumpism, but what's unspoken is the idea that they are going to replace it with just what the Republican Party was up until the primaries, 2016. Yeah. It'll be the case. That's their idea. It's like, what if we'd gotten the case at administration we'd always dreamed of?

I think like just like the best article I've been able to find that I think gives you really the best handle on who these people are and what their deal is, is in a Vanity Fair by a Kayla Bacarma headline. It had been my personal mission to have him call me a loser. Meet the Lincoln Project video whiz whose ads are driving Trump insane. He's not a resistant superstar like Rick Wilson and George Conway, but Tea Party veteran Ben Howe is the creative force behind the anti-Trump super PAC, pissing off the president, ideally convincing disillusioned Republicans to vote Biden.

Do you guys remember Ben Howe at all? I do. Yeah. Ben Howe was one of the most divorced OG conservatives on Twitter. Yes. Yes. He was like, you know, like all of these guys. If you go back to his post in 2014, he's like, I actually, if Trayvon had attacked me where

all I was wearing my suit of armor, I would have cut his limbs off. I would have dropped a howitzer on Trayvon's house. And then in 2016, they're like, oh, I just like don't have a career anymore. I can act grossed out by Trump, but also unlike a lot of these guys in 2016, Ben Howe was publicly divorced by his wife while battling the Trump trolls. So that was a good thing. What I remember about Ben Howe is, you know, aside from his like, you know, bog standard repellent right wing tanks circa, I don't know, four years ago, I think his political

conversion to being anti-Trump happened in the 2016 election when I guess he was taking it more seriously than others were, like in his crusade against Trump. And the MAGA alt-right people found his old tweets where he talks about how his wife divorced him in Starbucks. And then just like that became their thing on him. That happened during his campaign against Trump. That was, yeah, that was awesome. I got to say, I'm not that interested in Ben Howe.

I'm much more interested in the Ben Y. Like, why is he like that? Because the Howe is, yes, owned by trolls and divorced in Starbucks, but I want to know why. Okay. So the Ben Y is someone took the Matt Forney gene and sort of like, they did the thing where you give your Sims money and that's why Ben looks like that. You do the...

The Umbrella Corporation. Yeah. The Infinite Money Gene. The Umbrella Corporation took it. The Umbrella Corporation got like some filings from the inside of Matt Forney's mouth and then turned it into the G virus, which is, you know, and that's the Ben Howe prototype. We've isolated the getting divorced genome. If you think we're being too mean to Ben Howe, like literally every post he had before 2016

was like, I want to make a time machine to kill Michael Brown myself. Like awful, awful, awful guy. Yeah. Just a sick puppy getting off on the idea of racialized murder, but then the trolls, that's the real awfulness. That's the real horror. No, that's literally it. That is literally the origin story of all these guys.

Like as long as like any of this shit was disconnected from them, they were just jacked off to the idea of murdering like a black 17 year old and like look at all of Rick Wilson shit. Look at all these guys. Yeah. And then the moment someone's like, Hey, you ugly pussy. Your wife looks like shit. They're like America is built in the blood and so of racism and racism is the thing that

we must fight the thing I've always been against because you're being mean to me. Yeah. I think this is Caleb's piece because I think this, this, this does give the best summary of what the Lincoln project, like who they are and what they're about. So beginning here, it says prior to Donald Trump's 1 a.m. Twitter rant last month, raging against the group of Rhino Republican loser types at the so-called Lincoln project, Ben Howe, a video editor and one of the top creative minds behind the super PACs notorious anti-Trump ads had avoided.

No, no. This is like remember when we watched that Roger Stone documentary and all of these lanyard dicks were just stunned by what a character he was and it's like you met one person who didn't, it wasn't just made out of dockers and your fucking monocle popped out because you're amazed at their, their, the texture of their personality. It's the same thing. Like these, these ads are, this is hot fire is like, yeah, you, you, you watch the fucking, you watch those Danish train movies where it's just a go approach strapped to the cow

catcher of a train for 15 hours. Of course you think this is cool. Yeah. Well, I mean, I, I also watch the Danish train movies, man. I think they're a lot more dynamic than any shit that Ben Howe is farting out for this. I like that it's just the top, the top creative mind is just like, what a low bar to clear in that fucking group of people. Like Rick Wilson's creative endeavors prior to this were, yeah, running dog whistle racism

political campaigns and bragging about how he could like field strip a M16 rifle blindfolded. I mean, like, A, that's bullshit. And B, like, you know, he's a psycho, he's a psycho right wing Republican, but I think, I mean, like, you know, I'm going to give a way that goes where I'm going with this is like all these guys are on the outs because like, you know, they went too far with the never Trump thing. And then because of like, unlike, you know, Rich Lowry or like that whole crew, like they have some, they have something inside them that like the, they're feelings of shame and cuckoldry would be too much to come crawling back to Trump.

So they've done the next best thing, which is basically take over the Democratic Party, who is like the softest target imaginable and is going to walk them them right into the fold. Well, I mean, the thing is, it's not just been dying to do this, it's, it's, it's a mutual thing though. Like these guys aren't really doing a Trojan horse move. I mean, I think they're Trojan horsing it for yes, but at the top is level. I mean, I remember in 2016, we talked about how the long term strategy of the Democratic Party

under the Clintons was to turn the Democratic Party into the the party of the new global capitalism and leave the rump of basically just white middle class voters like white older grievance riddled suburbanites to Trump. And then they would have everybody else under a banner of of woke finance capitalism. And this is just this like Biden is just going to actually do what they thought they were going to do. And in fact, having Trump in there for four years ended up helping their project significantly problem is that the Clintons were not able to actually enjoy the benefit of it. They were like Moses. They brought they brought the DLC to the DNC to the promised land of assimilating everything

that wasn't, you know, the MAGA rump into one party, but sadly too late for them to enjoy it. I mean, I think this this has been the dream of yeah, this is the Clinton project. This is the DLC project. And I think this has been the dream of like sort of like the DC elite or like a like the intellectual elite, like the whatever you want to call the foreign policy and policy ruling class, whatever you want to call them, they're going to get their dream come true with this Lincoln project because should it work, what they will be left with is a is a party, the Democratic Party, which will be indistinguishable from

what the Republican Party would have been had John McCain or Mitt Romney been able to win. And crucially, if they had been able to win and and that in a way that would make it so that they wouldn't have to pander for the votes of evangelicals. And if that were to be able to accomplish this is like the policy dream of like every DC establishment thinker for the last probably 40 years is like they want all the Republican policies as far as it comes to Empire and Wall Street and gutting unions and the New Deal and the social safety net and getting rid of all that.

But they don't want the embarrassment of having to pitch it to a group of people who think the world is 5000 years old. Well, also beyond embarrassment, just there is a like take immigration. For example, there is a a cross party consensus for liberal immigration along a line that maintains like a second class citizenship or like a second class position for guest workers or whatever. Like that was the Trump. That was the Bush vision of well of immigration reform that is broadly acceptable to every level of like like high level capital, but that is genuinely rejected by this grumpy bunch of old white people. And if you don't have to split the difference with them, if

you don't have to keep doing things like nominating Donald Trump to get them to stop teething about the fact that America's manufacturing pace has been completely gutted, then you're in the perfect situation to be able to just carry out something that will not get any pushback from the broad woke culture because it's in opposition to the the racial panic and xenophobia of the Trump GOP. But which at the end of the day, just serves the interests of employers. I'm just like continuing with this piece here. It says how told me during a phone interview referencing a viral Lincoln plot project spot blasting the Trump administration's handling

of the coronavirus pandemic. Once he did that, well, it had been my personal mission to have him call me a loser someday. So I was like, okay, I can't stay quiet anymore. I love that from Ben Howe because it's like his mission in life is to get called a loser by bigger and bigger and more powerful people because it's just like spinning your entire career being called a loser by everyone online is one thing. But the president of the United States, hey, buddy, you've arrived. You've arrived. You've made the loser Hall of Fame. Yeah. Ben Howe is like he wants to live his whole life that way, just getting called a loser by everyone. And then in his final moments, his life flashes before his eyes. He sees

different chain restaurants that his wife left him at throughout the years, different wives. And then he arrives at the pearly gates and St. Peter says, Homo says, what? It's the culmination of it all. Yeah. No, it's just like if your wife's boyfriend thinks you're a loser, you're just waiting to come back and be like, guess what? You agree with the president, President Trump. How do you feel about that, buddy? Yeah. So yeah, it's just he's adding the president to the list of like Pilates instructors, you know, scuba, scuba teachers and online denizens. So it says here, like the Lincoln Project, he talks just biting him every time he reaches

his hand down. Like the Lincoln Project's other members, how the creative mind video editor and he said, sometimes narrating voice on many of the group's ads, spent years supporting conservative policies and working on various Republican campaigns. In December, in an effort to help ensure Trump doesn't win a second term, how join forces with Rick Wilson, a defense department appointee under then secretary Dick Cheney. Okay. Yeah. Rick Wilson again, that's who we're talking about here. Defense department appointee under secretary Dick Cheney by far the least talented Beach Boy and GOP strategists who contributed to Rudy Giuliani's winning mayoral ad campaigns, George, which were just pure racial and the Giuliani

ads were literally like, what if you woke up one day and your son was black? If they replaced your wife with a black guy, what would you do then? What if you became Puerto American? Rick Wilson's, his Giuliani super PAC was called their no angels. Okay. And then we got, of course, George Conway, another just like another little shame piggy who loves being humiliated by the president. I mean, like this is a collection of guys who just essentially like being cocked by Donald Trump, but they're going to make a big show of sort of sticking up for sticking up for themselves. I mean, George Conway, the thing where his daughter was going at him on Twitter this week. Oh God, it's not just his, it's not

just his wife, but like his kid is just like, uh, fuck you, loser. Shut the fuck up, bitch. You bitch motherfucker. That was that. Like that exchange was the, the absolute, like people wonder why I'm terrified of the zoomers. That's why his daughter's just like fuck you to her own dad on under the gaze of the entire DC press corps. Just like, fuck you, bitch. That was awesome too. That was awesome too, because like all the applies to it were like lupus mom for Joe being like, your dad is doing a great service to the country. You have to respect him. I don't gotta do shit, bitch. Yeah. Shut up, bitch. No, that was awesome. Um, so yeah, uh, George Conway, a Washington attorney and husband of top Trump

aide Kelly Ann Conway, who in 2017 was considered for a number of justice department posts before turning on the white house. I mean, again, like, what does it tell you about this guy that up until a couple of years ago, he could have been working for fucking, uh, just a William Barr at Trump's justice department. And then I don't know, like, uh, what, what soured him on Trump? That's what I want to know. It sounds like he didn't hire him. Yeah. Steve Schmidt, a top strategist for George W. Bush's 2004 bid. Hey, you remember George W. Bush's 2004 campaign where they tried to, um, get by on the disaster that the Iraq war was by convincing everyone that terrorists were going to have strike at any

moment and that gay people were coming to convert your children. Remember that? That was, that was the brainchild of him. Steve Schmidt. He was also operations cheat for John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign and campaign manager for Arnold Schwarzenegger's 2000 reelection bid for California governor. He also looks like a bar of roller deodorant. Yeah. This is a very hairless gang. All these motherfuckers, these guys all look like those like British middle-aged guys who just punch each other at pubs. Yeah. The Lincoln project was founded when a group of 10 friends had to sleep over at Chernobyl, the social club of guys who don't have cancer, but drink chemotherapy fluid just for fun. They like how it tastes.

And finally we've got, uh, uh, on the mask head, John Weaver, the chief strategist for John Kasich's 2016 presidential campaigns. And this was John Weaver that was like America's top hobo wrangler. I mean, nobody can tie a bindle like this guy, John Weaver, uh, considered John Weaver. John Weaver was paid $400,000 a year to read little dashes on fence posts and see where the candidate could say where he could eat a sandwich having dogs turned on him. Um, just being interviewed by Chris Matthews. So the big problem we ran into in New Hampshire was a dishonest man lived in a lot of these houses. There were no vitals to be found at all. I always liked the Kasich versus Cruz storyline because Ted Cruz does

seem like a guy from the 1800s who just killed hobos. Like if you, if you weren't homeless then you could just kill hobos and it wasn't really illegal. Oh yeah. It was a recreational activity. Yeah. 19th century Tom, uh, 19th century Ted Cruz had a, had a pie cooling on his windowsill all the time and it was just like a hummingbird feeder for, for proto Kasich's, uh, just wandering in and then being hit in the back of the head with a pickaxe while they, uh, tuck in. Yeah. Now he had, he did have the vibe of a murderer from 200 years ago. So it says here, uh, considered turn coats due to their shared opposition to Trump, the group united under the name of Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president

and formed a super pack with the explicit goal of preventing Trump from being reelected by swaying swing voters and moderate Republicans and pissing him off in the process. How first honed his skills as an ad creator working for the anti-Obama Tea Party movement. He launched his political ad making career after his business, a trademark research firm went under during the recession. In 2010, he created a video promoting the Tea Party for Red State, a conservative website where his brother Caleb Howe wrote at the time. Following the clip semi-viral success, Howe was contracted by Freedom Works, a Coke founded advocacy group that played a major role in astroturfing the Tea Party wave. For another video, uh, his

success he said resulted in him working with the Heritage Foundation on video proposals of their own. His new company, Mr. Smith Media, which he told me is named after the 1939 political dramedy starring Jimmy Stewart, went on to craft online clips and ads for Ted Cruz's inaugural Senate campaign, which is arguably proven to be the Tea Party's most enduring success in Washington. Oh boy, uh, real, yeah, this is, uh, this is, this is your new Democratic Party people. In subsequent years, Howe told me his company continued to make videos for Heritage National Review and Senator John Cornyn. He didn't predict nor was he prepared for the rise of Trump, but for him it represented a breaking point. During the 2016 election,

he vowed to phone bank for Hillary Clinton if Trump won the nomination. He subsequently created an oppo documentary about Trump campaign titled The Sociopath. In January of that year before I even left the party, he said. His defection, he said, made him highly unpopular in his former circles. I like that before his defection. I'm sure he was very popular among all political groups. Yeah, he was notorious for hogging all the pussy. I just like, what, what does it say about like what absolute suckers the pod safe guys are that like a guy who was hated by everyone and like all he has to do is just one viral ad and you're like, you know, this guy's got something. Yeah. I mean, even if you were like an earnest

like loser, Democrat, liberal Democrat, it's like, wouldn't you just want these guys to go away forever? It's not like just because like, you know, a bunch of other fucking losers will rise up and take their place in the Trump GOP, but at least one, one of your tormentors, one of your enemies is gone. He's a loser. He's out of the game. He has to like go make ads in Omaha, Nebraska. He has to do the Saul Goodman, but for political ads and his life sucks. He feels bad. He probably like puts one of those like Joker bang guns in his mouth every day. You should like feel good, but instead it's like, no, no, we're pulling you back from from drowning in the loser pond, but that's that's always going to do that

though because that remember we've talked about. Remember we talked about on the top the episode where we talked about Dan Pfeiffer's book for these people. The pool of voters is static and their job is try to get marginal Republicans to agree with them. And so anytime a Republican says, I agree with the Democrats on this, they come themselves to death because that's the sum total of their notion of politics, getting a Republican to agree with them and work for them instead of destroying him, having them work with them. That's the real victory. That's the sense of we've done it. We've got these bald fucks on our side now instead of opposing us. And that means we won. It's also like, I mean, it's obviously the grand Democratic

design of owning the presidency, never having controlled both seats or both houses of Congress because you don't want to have the onus on you to actually do anything. That's the perfect world for them. But I think for the Dan Pfeiffer type specifically, for these guys specifically who like, you know, I've met normie Democrats who actually do want the Democrats to own Congress, the executive branch, all this shit. This isn't what they are. The Dan Pfeiffer types have to believe that the job of making political ads and being a political consultant is like a mystical profession that you can be incredibly skilled at. It's the same reason why there are all those fucking stupid articles in 2016 and 17 about like the dark genius

of Steve Bannon, because the only way that someone could have beat them is if they were like an otherworldly, respite and like genius. They have to believe that this job is not only important but incredibly difficult and not that they're just all, they didn't have the qualifications to make ads for Gillette. And, you know, outside of like electoral math or any of the sort of the actual, you know, party members and their agenda and ideology for like the average Democrat, I just think like that there's such easy marks for this because I think they like nothing more than the idea that like, oh, well, if Bill Crystal, if someone is like Bill Crystal is agreeing

with me, then like we must be right. And, you know, who can argue with, you know, it's incontrovertible like how right we are that like, you know, even X, Y and Z are now on our side or they're willing to say Trump is a threat to the Republic. It's just like, it's catnip to them. They love it. And like I said, and like guys like Bill Crystal, I mean, I mean, like during the, you know, George W. Bush years was the intellectual architect of the Iraq war. And let's just say he was very high on my Walter White list.

I mean, remember, remember the West Wing first season when Ainsley Hayes, the little proto Colter owns Sam Seaborne on a show. How does the White House get back at her? Destroy her. Hire her. Show, just smother her with kindness. It just showed actually these guys, we love America just as much as Republicans do. They just want to be validated by daddy. Going on here, it says, it's rare to see a political ad that says widely praised, decried and covered as a Lincoln project spot. One reason for the group's rapid rise is their weaponization of Trump's own language against him. A willingness to get down in the kind

of dirt that many Democratic ads won't touch. In one recent spot titled hashtag Trump is not well, the Lincoln project zoomed in on clips of the president struggling to walk down a ramp and drink a glass of water with one hand. In a script reminiscent of the Trump campaign's mockery of Joe Biden's health and Hillary Clinton's before him, an ominous voice can be heard calling Trump shaky and weak, questioning his secretive midnight run to Walter Reed Medical Center and announcing something wrong with Trump. The Lincoln project has spent significantly less than PACs receiving comparable levels of media attention or reported 2.75 million in TV ads and 1.2 million in Facebook ads thus far, but it makes it up

for it with ostensibly out of bounds shots. This is getting to another aspect of this. People crowing about how effective these ads are because they're using the Republican playbook against the Republicans. This has been devil Democrats forever. Back when Bernie seemed like a real thing, their biggest fear that they would psych themselves out with sincerely or not would be like, oh, can you just imagine the ads Republicans are going to run against him? Oh, God. And A, it's like making an ad about how Trump's not well and not physically and mentally ready to be president. That's the rove tactic of going at your opponent with your biggest weakness. They're flacking for Joe Biden here. But also, I mean, this

is just part and parcel of all these guys came out of the Russia gate stuff too. Rick Wilson was on MSNBC every day, pushing that line about how Trump is a traitor and a foreign agent to the hilt. And the point is, it's just like it's not a sign of success if all the ads that you like and think are so successful and effective rely on premises that are into 100% right wing. This is what I mean about how this is the Democratic Party now is just what the Republican Party was 10 years ago. Because it's just like if all of your premises, if you're going to see the entire field of your vision of politics in the world to John McCain and George W. Bush's political inner circle and policy political teams, then what

point, I mean, why even run for president? What are you trying to achieve? Mitt Romney's healthcare plan? Oh, wait, Obama did that. You want to be a steward. You want to be a responsible steward of empire. I'm like, in fact, list Donald. I mean, he's a cheeto for God's sakes. You need an actual human and president. It doesn't matter what they believe. They have to not be a snack food. How, who described his efforts right now as the most fulfilling and important of my life. That's correct. I don't even need to fact check that. I know that's sincere and true. Acknowledge the satisfaction he feels when his creations start getting to Trump. At the

personal level, our work has two tracks for me. One is definitely, ha ha, he has said, the other track is electoral. The goal to make one person who has been on the fence or feel like they could never vote for a Democrat or isn't sure about this or that, to just at the very least make them pause and consider that they don't have to be a slave to a binary choice. They don't have to make decisions solely on what one party or another tells them. They can actually just stop, back up, and think for themselves. He hopes those kinds of Republican voters are forced to stop and ask, is this the person someone I'm okay with? Would I have been okay with this guy being in charge in a true crisis like 9-11 when

they watch his videos? If you would be worried, he added, then I want to give somebody else pause to reconsider. Every Republican voter would be fine with Donald Trump being president on 9-11. You know how I know that? Because they were all fine with George W. Bush being president on 9-11, where he fucking read a book to kids and then disappeared for a good 36 hours before he showed up again, when nobody knew what was going on, and also presided over the single greatest breach of national security in the history of this country. This is the ultimate victory of the right wing, is that they've engineered a system, and I got almost credit to them for doing it. It's almost impressive, but they've engineered

a system in which they cannot lose. They can never ever lose, because if this is what the Democrats are now, then this is their agenda. There's no way out of it, because as long as the Republican Party continues to morph into the Trump or blood and soil nationalist party of whatever is coming after him, as long as they're there, then the Democrats are just always going to be picking up the slack of becoming the thing that they were just two elections ago. It's not even believing the same things, but employing the exact same people. Because of the two different dynamics of the base and the party. The Republican Party

is always terrified of and chasing where their base is, whereas the Democratic Party is always pulling away from what their base wants, which means that over time the Republicans will only go right, and that means the Democrats have to follow them. That means that when they're in charge, they have to govern as Republicans, which increases the alienation of their own voters and pisses off right-wingers because it makes things worse, but they filter it through the cultural lens of the political parties rather than the actual policies that are bipartisan, and it guarantees that no one will ever come upon. There will never be a critical mass of people signing on to any left-wing challenge to the status quo,

because it's just not viable, so people aren't even going to be able to conceive of it. Or if they do conceive of it, like Bernie Sanders tried to, the majority of people, even people who would believe in abstract with the proposals, will refuse to believe that they could be acceptable to the rest of the country because of the incredible warping factor of the party politics that pushes everything always eternally right, regardless of people's actual views on issues. Yeah, and further than that, though, really what I see happening here is, if you take for granted that a Joe Biden-led Democratic party will be what a John McCain-led GOP would

have been like had they been able to sever themselves from a socially conservative base without having to pitch to the issues and speak the language of those voters. However, what they will replace it with is the exact inverse of the same culture war that functions in the exact same way, except it will be playing to frightened suburbanites, but with issues that are just like these hysterical church lady-like denunciations of either Trump or like white fragility shit. But it's the same culture war that will cover what really counts to these people, which is actual war. I mean, this is the goal of these people and what you should look forward to in a Biden presidency.

Oh, he's letting you know. I mean, whoever's tweeting for him is out there saying it's on site, Venezuela, China, Russia. We're going to, a Biden presidency will be about making a remaking America's place in the world. And we all know what that means. Right. American global leadership, which is, I mean, Biden is kind of the perfect guy to do it because I, the only way I can describe America's global leadership for the past 30 years is just an old guy wandering out of the frame of a zoom call, except instead of like little trinkets and, and borders dropping out of his pocket, it's just like a pallet with $500 million explosives guns. And it just goes wherever it goes wherever you don't

know where it goes. And then, you know, there's a massacre of X amount of people in this, this version of gladio. And you go, come on, man, I don't, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that. And then repeat, done. We, we are the dementia empire. Hell yeah. And it's, and it's like, you know, I mean, for example, like a Biden, a Biden group ran a Spanish, a Spanish language ad last week that was, I mean, it's funny, their, their Latino outreach apparently is they have no plan, but except save for playing for the like Cuban exile community in Florida. That's like 12 people at this point. And they ran a Spanish language ad comparing Trump to Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro explicitly

like the point of the ad was like Trump's too willing to, you know, deal with Nicolas Maduro or coddle him like these communist dictators, two of whom have been dead for, you know, quite some time now. And it's Matt, you made this point the other week on Twitter where it's like, I mean, if it, if it weren't impossible already, it's getting very embarrassing to make a harm reduction case for voting Biden when all of his ads are explicitly staying. No, more harm, please. No, vote for Trump's not doing enough harm. He's tweeting too much. He's being racist. He's not, he's not focused on harming people, which is the president's job, which honestly

is true. And he's, he's, he's, he's golfing and sheetowing up the place instead of doing all the wonderful, delightful harm that we're always doing that we love to do. The only actual harm reduction case that you can make for Biden is that he's going to make the culture less shitty that like the, the Cleveland voice actor can come back. Yeah. Nothing else yet. Nothing else. That is honestly like the pitch. He should pitch that explicitly to younger people. It's like, Hey, are you sick of all this, all this hand wringing bullshit about every fucking cultural product? Just put Biden in there and all of a sudden all these people who are

waging this war every day because it's the actual front lines, they're all of a sudden they're not going to give a shit anymore. No, they won't give a shit about it anymore because they don't really care about it to begin with. Right. Like what they're, what they're fighting about is the fact that like, like they're like, you know, someone that's like them or that they trust to not be like the evil hateful person like Trump and the Republicans are is in charge. And once they are in charge

and like it goes back to the Obama model of like, Hey, like, and Biden is explicitly saying this, like my pitch is that if I'm president, you won't have to think about who's the president. You can just sort of tune it out, get on with your life and we can bring back entourage and like entourage can be a thing again. Because like, remember when we were talking to Adam, he said the fun, like the incredible thing about watching entourage now is just how low the stakes are for everything that they're doing and engaged in, not just like the characters, but the people making it, writing it and consuming it. It's just this is like a very low chill

frequency where like the stakes could not possibly be lower. And but yeah, if you know, if I were instructing Biden's campaign, I'd just tell him like, yeah, like TV and movies will go back to being like that. You won't like, yeah, you won't have to care so much. You won't have to fight these interminable fucking social culture war battles over every single fucking piece of art, video games, song, fucking TV show imaginable because people feel instinctually that like politics doesn't work. They have no say in it, no power over the direction of the country. And lo and behold, should the Lincoln project work out, they'll be exactly right. So the terrain in which they're able to exact some kind of power or concession

out of people is the symbolic. Yeah, if I was doing a Lincoln project for Biden, my ad would be just it would be very simple, like black and white, it would be a copy of white fragility on a coffee table in a suburban or urban upper middle class home. And then like you hear like a mockup of Biden getting sworn in on the TV, probably in another room, just faintly. And then you just see a hand swipe white fragility off the desk and it gets replaced by like a novelization of the first season of Grey's Anatomy. Yeah, or like, you know, a divorced woman's guide to hang gliding, whatever we're reading

before. Yeah, because we've talked about this. The Republicans have power but want cultural validation. The Democrats have all the cultural validation. They claim to want power, but and so when they get the power, all that culture shit, they don't care anymore. It's gone. We could we can grow now. That's why every liberal every liberal comedian who spent the past four years being like, wake up, realize that we are better than this. All their tweets during Obama were like, Oh, damn, I got AIDS in the Holocaust again by sucking Hitler's gay dick. And then Trump got elected. It was just all like, everyone knows somebody who has mental

health. Let's create awareness today. Yeah, I mean, I always thought one of the most insane things that I ever saw was when the Republicans had every single branch of government, they just wash Democrats in the fucking midterms in 2002. They retained the White House. But the GOP cultural project was to keep making shitty daily show knockoffs. It was like, you have everything you want. You've invaded two nations. You have endless war. You've completely destroyed any, any message of civil liberties. But you just feel bad that people aren't laughing at your thing. That's what do you remember the half hour news hour? Oh, hell yeah.

Half hour news hour, a red eye, the Greg Gutfeld show brown eye. That was a good one. Yeah. There's a couple of them. And the half hour news show, I think they probably made six episodes of that because it was just, yeah, nobody wants to see that shit other than the people who were creating it because they think that's the final key, the final key that will unlock their complete and total domination of the country. Hank, what are the conditions on the ground there? Well, as you can see, last week's tornado has moved on and now comes the hard part. Figuring out how to blame this tragedy on President Bush.

I showed this idea that like, you know, a Biden presidency will be like the final and like really ultimate victory of the Republican Party, the Republican Party that, you know, I became obsessed with during the Iraq war and thought was like the, you know, Malik like evil that, you know, had to be annihilated by any means necessary, i.e. the Democratic Party. And, you know, now obviously like, you know, a decade or two later, like I'm just even more blackpilled on this shit. Like it seems foolish in retrospect. But, you know, I said this and I got some stick for it and like, I forgot the guy, but I mean, I don't want to put him on blast, but his response to me was like, you know, how can you be this

cynical after seeing the huge progressive wave just wash over the city you live in? And I was like, well, you know, not to take anything away from Jamal Bowman or AOC or Jabari-Brisport. I mean, you are talking about like three positions at like, at a city and state level. And if there are better people who like support the Bernie agenda or are closer to my politics, in power and state houses or some Congress even and somewhere in the country, like I'd rather have them than not have them. But like, it's just this is on the margins entirely. Like it's good. And like, if you think that this is the way forward, then what you're talking about is 30 or 40 years from now, we can have enough

people in Congress to get a vote on the public option. And it's like, how long do you think the fuse on this like box of dynamite really is? I mean, like, is this what we're hoping for? I mean, is this the best we can possibly fucking do? And not only that, is it sufficient given the time we have to avoid complete catastrophe? And I would say no. And like, and the idea is like this idea that like, Oh, well, these progressive challengers, like they're feeling their oats, they're coming out. And even if they don't win, they're they're they're challenging and getting close to these like very entrenched, bad democratic politicians, which is, you know, on the surface, good. But if they've just made Joe Biden their nominee, and the

way they did it, and the fact that I'm sorry for most committed democratic voters, they're fine with it. They don't they don't fucking care. They're happy that Joe Biden is an American. Yeah, he can win. Not not angry about it. I mean, like, what incentive would this party as constructed and like the way it's like the way people respond to it, what incentive are they going to have to be pushed to forget a left wing point of view, just a progressive agenda? What like if if if they can do this and Joe Biden is their guy, then like, who are you? Well, that's the thing. And they've explicitly denounced the idea that you can ever pressure the party in any meaningful way because you

owe them your votes unconditionally morally because of the superior awfulness of the Republicans. So there is no leverage to be asserted against them. They basically are making a promise of a just give it time and there will be just like a title shift. But you know, the defining characteristic of the moment we're in is that there is no fucking time for anything. Yeah, I mean, the fact remains, if people keep drinking your garbage, you're gonna keep making that garbage. Yeah. And here's here's a here's like to switch to switch some directions just a little bit. I mean, not direction, but like just a different story that illustrates the same thing. This is a Dilly Beast article by Spencer Ackerman.

The title is proxy war over a top Biden advisor, deputy CIA director Avril Haynes, restricted drone strikes and help thousands of refugees, but enraged the left over torture. What does her rise mean for a Biden presidency? Beginning here, it says the rise of former deputy CIA director on Joe Biden's transition team is drawing furious objection from the left to the shock of her colleagues in the Obama administration who believe Avril Haynes record in government ought to endear her to progressives. In late June, the Biden campaign announced that Haynes, an attorney who served as deputy director of the CIA from 2013 to 2015, will helm the foreign policy and national security aspects of a potential Biden transition team.

To activist security experts, congressional aides who are more left than liberal, as well as mainstream human rights campaigners and at least one ex senator, Haynes' elevation is worrisome or unacceptable. She approved an accountability board that spared CIA personnel reprisal for spying on the Senate's torture investigators and was part of the team that redacted their landmark report. After the administration ended, Haynes supported Gina Haspel for CIA director, someone directly implicated in CIA torture, a decision that remains raw amongst progressive activists. Until late June, she consulted for the Trump favorite data firm, Palantir, which emerged from the CIA.

So this is the person helming Biden's national security agenda for his transition to being potentially president of the United States. What should that tell you about how seriously they take your concerns of the anti-war left or even just progressives in general? I remember what the George W. Bush era was like. People thought it couldn't possibly get more evil than this. So because of that, we have to run these blue dog Democrats and just vote for any Democrat, they'll be better than the Republicans. Now, two presidents later, it's like the same people that we were being warned against is like, you have to prevent the ultimate evil from gaining power because look at what they've done.

Well, that's the beauty part though. They trashed the Constitution. And these are the people now, the same people that we were being warned against are now the people warning us against the other group of even worse. They are worse. That's their argument that they're going to be able to make always. It's like, look, they did do worse. They are objectively worse than we are. And so they will always have that argument to make. You have to break out of the confines that they have been as established by the parties. That's the only way to come anywhere near to the sort of political action that the moment requires because it'll always be the case that they're worse than

the Democrats because they're farther along on the trajectory. But yeah, I mean, and I guess the theme of this episode is like, even if that that that is true in a like technical or pedantic sense, and that's why it's so effective, but give it five, 10 years, that's all it'll take. And you'll be begging fucking Steve Bannon to save the Democratic Party. And but but in doing so, adopting all of his premises and ideology as your own, or at least just learning to live with them. Just a little further from this Avril Haines story, it says here, to Obama administration alumni who are more liberal than left, the antipathy for Haines is stunning. Haines was

perhaps the leading voice inside the administration for restricting the drone campaign. She was a voice of restraint on all counterterrorism issues, said Harold Koh, the former State Department legal advisor. As deputy national security advisor, she was principally responsible for increasing refugee admissions against massive nativist headwinds. Haines, her old colleagues, colleagues say, kept pressing to transfer detainees out of Guantanamo Bay when others conceded defeat. When someone doesn't get everything they seek inside the U. S. government, critics can say that person is legitimating policy by improving it, said Samantha power. Take a drink. The fact of the matter is of Sinai. The fact of the matter

is that more innocent civilians would have died and a far wider set of targets would have been pursued without the changes she secured. Think about that fucking quote from Samantha power. It's just like, oh, look, and she's, and again, once again, she's right in the most basic sense. Probably more civilians would have died had she not been there to have been like, Hey, let's rain it back. At no point, though, is anyone just like, Hey, how about we not kill anyone? Well, you'd have to have somebody in the room with that interest and there's nothing. There's no one and there never will be as long as the parties are in charge. Being someone who values good process doesn't mean that you don't seek

big shifts in policy. It means that that the change you seek once achieved is far more likely to be sustainable. And in a moment, like the one we face today with a president as unpredictable and disdainful of rational evidence-driven decision-making as president Trump is, it wouldn't be bad to have someone working to promote good process. I mean, that good process being the trust, yeah, trust the process, that being the, uh, the conveyor belt of CIA torture and, um, then covering it up. The United States will, will be a non-hellhole as the same year that the, uh, 76ers finally win a championship. You just got to trust the process. It'll happen. When all, when

America is entirely relocated to the Pacific garbage patch, we will have universal health care. Okay. Um, just going on here, Hain supported restraint. She did not sit, she said, support abolition, which she did not consider realistic talking about, about, you know, drone kill lists. The drone program existed and wasn't going away. President Obama saw the risks of power in the program and tasked Avril with making it law-abiding, said power. Avril sought to put the, a lethal instrument of U.S. power into a legal framework to minimize the risk of civilian casualties and to give a pro, the program shrouded in secrecy far more transparency. I mean, isn't this worse in a way that, uh, she, she, okay, she likes

you like, look, the drones are in the air. They're being given big fed targets by our intelligence and they're, and they're killing people and they're killing a lot of innocent people, but they're there. So it's my job to make sure that this is all to the letter of the law legal. Isn't that actually worse? Isn't that actually more evil? And isn't this like a vicious circle in which like the Democrats, uh, as soon as they get in power, what they do is they come in and lock in place everything that the Republican, every fucking blood soaked insane atrocity that the Republicans have committed before them. They come in and just lower the ratchet down and make sure like lock it in and be like, and make it sort

of apolitical in a way, like remove it from the, the sphere of things that we argue about or are angry about. And it just becomes a facet of American life. Right. Like Obama and the drone program and, and ending torture, uh, allegedly without, uh, investigating how it happened or, uh, punishing anyone who, who did it. Yeah. The Democrats job is to take all the horrible shit that comes with being this country and giving it a moral gloss for people who get finicky about those sort of things because of their cultural, uh, their cultural perspective, like that they learned how to feel bad about other countries because they went to college and they know they should. And then the Democrats

are told, are there to tell them, yeah, I know you have these concerns, but this is as, this is as moral as a foreign policy could be. Trust us, we're the good guys. And then because there's no alternative, people are happy to have that taken off of their mind is something that they have to feel bad about. And if you're talking about, uh, like, you know, going back a little bit earlier, the whole thing about how she was, uh, she oversaw the accountability board that let the CIA off the hook for their surveillance of Diane Feinstein's own investigation, like the Democratic grondon that she is, their illegal spying on the Senate itself. She, uh, she made sure

no one saw a jail cell or much let alone even public uproarium for that. So I mean, this is the job that she's going to do. This, this is who they are. This is, I mean, this is what you can expect from a Biden presidency. Yeah, it's going to rule. And just the last thing I want to talk about today, uh, we've talked about, um, the project for a new American Lincoln, we've talked about the Biden transition team, but there's one more, um, insanely obnoxious project out there that I saw happen last week that I think is worth addressing.

Um, uh, talking about the hottest new sub-stack, persuasion, founder and editor in chief, Yasha Mount. Uh, you might remember Yasha, uh, uh, the last time I interacted with him and, um, I was not able to persuade him that what happened to Eva Morales in Bolivia was a military coup because he, uh, blocked me for saying as such. Um, but yeah, Yasha Mount is a guy who was one of the leading voices scolding anyone who, uh, gave the impression that what happened to Morales was anything short of a military coup and that like, in fact, Morales was a legitimately elected democratic leader who was not in any way, shape or form a tyrant or anything close to like what even, even the worship that they accused Maduro of doing

like, Morales had saw like the Bolivian economy grow like four times its size since he took over without any, putting anyone in fucking gulags or fucking like death squads or any shit like that. And Yasha Mount was at the forefront of letting everyone know that, hey, you know that, um, that psycho who was a declared herself president of Bolivia and then walked into their like, uh, the presidential palace holding a gigantic Bible and then like, you know, uh, sort of exercise the, um, indigenous cultural practices that were haunting it. Yeah. No, she, yeah, she's a, she's a, she's a liberal Democrat and, um, represents the will of the people and, uh, good fair and safe elections. That's Yasha Mount and his

new project. I just want to read here, uh, their board of advisors. I'm not even going to go through all of them, but like, listen to some of these, this murderers row of actual murderers here. You've got Ann Applebaum, uh, David French, David from Francis Fukuyama, Jonathan height, Gary Kasparov. I mean, George Packer, uh, Emily Yaffe, like this is just, oh my God. Yeah. I mean, Gary Kasparov is the only actual interesting thinker. Absolutely. Yeah. Last time you saw a New York times op-ed about how the middle ages didn't happen. That's like, yeah. If they just had him talk about that shit, none of his boring political shit,

that would be awesome. Yeah. Give me some new chronology discourse. That would be fun. Everyone else is a stunningly unoriginal cowardly and dole thinker, except for Mr. Uh, the renaissance was a lie. Yeah. Let's talk about how Charlemagne was actually Slavic. This is interesting. Let's talk about, let's talk about how all the Roman emperors were actually rushing things from like, from 200 years ago. Yeah. Yeah. No, you're going to have 50 articles that are like, Trump is bad, but I will subscribe for one article that's like, Jesus Christ and Buddy Holly lived at the same time. And also, I mean, you might be interested because Yasha begins with his, like, you know, he has is the purpose of persuasion to defend the

values of free society with courage and conviction. We need to build institutions of our own. And if we can't make them our own, we'll support a military coup to put us in power. But yeah, no, he talks about how like, you know, the problem of, you know, like institutional legitimacy is such that, you know, in the golden age, you know, everyone watched three TV channels and like got their news from the same sources that everyone trusted. But, you know, he does admit that he says, you know, they suffered from two important shortcomings. First, people, the people they admitted into their gilded halls only represented a small slice of America's population. Sexism, racism, and homophobia were far more prevalent in these institutions

than they are today. The views they considered sometimes included the morally abhorrent. Sorry, just going down the list here. Oh, yes, David Frum and Francis Fukuyama are still on the board of directors, if you're speaking of morally abhorrent views. But the whole thing about how like, oh, like, you know, this, you know, it wasn't inclusive enough, or it was still stained by racism. I would just recommend looking up Gary Kasparov's views on the Black Lives Matter movement and race in America in general. You might be surprised the position he takes, given that he's on the board of directors, or I don't know, board of advisors to the persuasion project. And like, like, I'm not going to read all of it

because it's just too boring. But like, essentially, like the point of this sub stack is that they want to make a defense of just sort of like liberal, like classically liberal values. And they want to make it in like a way that's exciting and dynamic and willing to stand up and not be cowed by what they view as the biggest threat, which is right wing populism. But if you read between the lines, I think what they view the biggest threat is left wing populism, or just populism of any kind, like they're, they're making their stand here with the most boring, uncreative, dullards imaginable, but who are also deeply complicit in, you know, the destruction of the legitimacy of these former institutions and liberal values

and the destruction of entire countries as well. So, Yasha Monk, good luck persuading with the persuasion buddy. I mean, he's doing like a PUA stuff for the Wall Street Journal editorial board, basically. How do I alpha, how do I alpha Kino the American public into supporting a war in Venezuela? I was more, far more excited and there will be far more interesting and reflective of the nation's mind discussions on the return of mom's basement podcast. That is a way greater insight into the heart of America. No, I mean, this is, I guess this is just like Tony or Colette. How long is this going to last like a year and a half, two years? I mean, the answer is it'll last until Biden

takes the oath of office. Yeah. Forget about it immediately. And because, you know, because they will have achieved their goal. This is what they want. He says, instead of lamenting our loss of control over the establishment, we should follow the lead of other movements that have successfully built their own counter-establishment institution. That is the goal I had in mind and starting persuasion. One core element to this project is a publishing platform explicitly devoted to debating, articulating and defending the values of a free society. Emulating what reason Jacobin and the national review have accomplished within their own ideological traditions, I hope to create a space in which philosophical liberals can ask hard questions

and come up with compelling answers. Ask hard questions like, was Shakespeare real? Yeah, I mean, again, like it's just they're the counter-establishment until, I don't know, January 2021 if Biden gets in the White House. That's it. I guess like the thing I was thinking about this today before I knew it, this episode about how like Biden's, like Biden's actual message, the way that most people hear it, not through the Lincoln Project and not through Yasha, Mount or any of this bullshit. His main message is the thing he says the most, which is just sort of like looking exasperated and going like, come on man. But I think that's like that most people that if he is elected, and I think we all agree that if the election

happened today, he would win handily. There's a lot of time to blow that lead and we've seen it before. I believe in him. There's anyone who can do it. If there's anyone who can do it, it's it's the guy knows how to lose a presidential election. Yeah, he's a pro. Come on, man. We'll get him in there because that is in the souls of most voting Americans and especially most Democrat, democratically leaning Americans. This is, you know, all window dressing. But now, yeah, we'll be stuck with it forever. I mean, it's just like, I don't like, I just, I feel like I sort of came into my own politically or like, you know, what redpilled me or radicalized me, I guess it was the experience of living in this country during the first Bush administration

and thinking like, am I insane or is everyone else? Like, how can we possibly do this? Like, this is fucking insane. Like, how are these people in charge? Like, how, how are they getting away with this act with mass murder on like a fucking global scale every single day? And not only like do people not notice it or like talk about it, they're more than happy with it. And now I obsessed over, like, you know, like the real, the, the, the puppet masters are like the guys pulling the strings, the intellectual architects of all this. And it was, you know, like the neoconservatives for lack of a, you know, a better grouping of them. It was, it was those guys who had an ideological project and found a sort of

host body in the Republican Party to enact their view of a kind of being democratic revolutionaries and using, making, you know, using America's sort of embracing America's role as a military hegemon and empire and using it for good in the world. But like, of course, that also meant, you know, controlling all of the Middle East's oil and knocking off Iran and Syria and Iraq and all those other countries. And I remember being obsessed with each of these people in the Bush administration, like Bill Crystal or David Frum or any of these fucking scumbag murderers. And I just, there, there's something like intimately repulsive and hateful to me about the fact that all of these guys not have, have not just not suffered at all,

but are actually better off and probably more influential now in it, in the Democratic Party than they were, maybe not at the height of the Bush administration, but like, they spent like a couple of years in the wilderness and then have been, thanks to Trump, wholeheartedly scooped right back up by the resistance in the Democratic Party. And I guess if I want to leave you with anything, it's, it's not that this is like a Trojan horse thing and they're fooling the Democratic Party or like beware of crystals bearing gifts. I think that they're really disgusting, awful truth is that they all believe the same things and there is no real con being pulled here or like, it's not surprising in any way really

because their vision of the world and the things that they'd like to see happen is really no different than the Brookings Institute, the, you know, the America Foundation or Center for American Progress or anything. Like when it comes to foreign policy and U.S. Empire, they're all on the same side and it works beautifully for everyone, but you, me and I don't know anyone who lives in Venezuela or the Middle East. Sorry to leave you with such a, a bright look at the future, but I mean, just don't say you didn't see it coming, I guess is where I'll leave you for this, this week's episode. Hey, who knows? Maybe coronavirus could mutate in creative zombie apocalypse. Then we don't

have to worry about it. Well, gang, until next time. Cheers, I guess. Be good. Love you. Bye. and the numbers and fire plates, elegantly commemorating each step on America's road humiliating defeat in Iraq.