Chapo Trap House - 532 - The Power of the Dog (6/15/21)

Episode Date: June 15, 2021

Another triple reading series ep, we’re spoiling you listeners. We start off with a profile of Data For Progress’s new found clout with Dems in the drivers’ seat, but who’s data? And what progress? Then it’s on to the Federalist, for an author who’s simply furious that a living wage for fast food workers might make their precious burritos cost a few cents more. Finally, a doozy of a Slate piece about killing your dog.

We're back again. It's me Matt and Felix coming to you on this Monday afternoon. How's it going fellas? How was your weekend? You know, I did what I usually do but now that you know movies are out again, you know I've done what everyone does during quarantine. We've all done it. It's all part of the new normal. You know, I could go into the whole thing about how, you know, the world's crazy now. The best golfer is a woman. The best rapper is a woman. The three most powerful guys are Bush, Colin, and Biden. All that. But you know, we know it. But you know, one of those rituals that we've all done, I get Annie's canned biscuits and I sit on them till they're warm. And then I stick my finger

in them to stimulate finger-blasting while I watch a movie. Except now that the theaters are back, I want to enjoy in the heights while doing that. But I couldn't concentrate on the simulated finger-blasting, which I'm not doing because it gets me horny. I'm doing it because, like, for practice. Yeah, if I ever do that again. I couldn't concentrate on that because it was too busy clapping along to all the Washington-style, Washington-height-style hits in that film. I have no financial relationship with In the Heights or Lin-Manuel Miranda. I just enjoyed doing this. Was your movie-going experience interrupted at any point when any of the local youths found out that you were fingering dough and decided to yell it at

the entire theater? They called me a very bad word. I can't repeat. All right, well, let's get into the news this week. First up, I'd like to talk about data. That's right, data. And a group of plucky upstarts that are using this thing called data for progress to push the Democrats to the left by giving them the data that they need to enact popular policies that we all love and adore, that, you know, here to four they weren't supporting because they just didn't have data to support it. But luckily, there's data now. Would you guys like some data? I can't get enough data, personally. To me, like, data is sort of the lifeblood

of information. Absolutely. Data is the powerhouse of the cell in my opinion. Data was the star of Star Trek. He's my favorite character on Next Generation. It's true. Yeah. Okay, this comes courtesy of the New York Times. This is just out over the weekend. This is a profile of data for progress by Lisa Lerner. It says, born on the left, data for progress comes of age in Bidens, Washington. A liberal think tank has grown comfortable with mainstream influence. Other activists say that being normie means it's selling out. I mean, I don't know about you guys,

but normies, I say kill them all. Yeah, agreed. Enough of them. Yeah, no, there should be tests. And, you know, you should line up every military-age man in a village and show them XKCD strips. And if they can't explain why it's funny, you behead them. So this is the on politics wrap-up of national politics. And it begins as such. President Biden mentions it in private calls. The White House reads its work. And Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, teams up with its leaders for news conferences, blog posts, and legislation. The embrace of data for progress by the highest ranks of the Democratic Party is a coming-of-age

moment for a left-leaning polling firm and think tank that is barely three years old. This week, legislation that was championed by the group, and that would pour nearly a quarter trillion dollars into scientific research and development past the Senate. Earlier this year, Julian Brave Noisecat, vice president of policy and strategy, led a successful campaign to nominate and confirm Deb Halland, the first Native American cabinet secretary. Part of the group's early success reflects a Democratic Party that shifted to the left during the Trump era, but it also signifies the maturing of a new generation of liberal activists who are grappling with how to wield power when they're no longer in the opposition. For data

for progress, the strategy is Politics 101. Politicians like policies that are popular. So the policies that are popular, like a quarter trillion dollar investment into scientific research. We love science in this country. We fucking love it, in fact. The good thing about putting money into R&D is that we see the returns in pharmaceutical prices and access in this country. That is the good part about it, is that all of that public funding, it comes back to the consumer in the form of lower prices, and we love to see it.

The secret sauce here is that we've developed a currency they're interested in, says Sean McElway, the executive director of the group. We get access... Called Sean Coin. We get access to a lot of offices because everyone wants to learn about the numbers. Once again, that currency, it's numbers, folks, and they got them. They got the ones. You got the numbers.

I got the two, is they have most of the numbers that exist, and Democratic offices, they want access to them. The numbers will say what is popular. The big secret, polling data that's targeted, cheap, and fairly accurate. I like to think that the caveat is fairly accurate. Yes! Pretty good. This is a big secret here.

The secret sauce is polling data. Aides to Democratic congressional leaders say data for progress can quickly poll on policies, like expanding the child care tax credit or unemployment benefits, or spending $400 billion on senior care. That would be considered too specific for a full survey by some other polling firms. And by finding ways to do operations that pollsters traditionally outsource, the organization can charge tens of thousands of dollars less than more established firms, according to Mr. McElway.

Data for progress then uses those quick turn-around surveys to push its version of a progressive agenda, boosting liberal candidates and primaries, and persuading Democrats to rally around popular liberal policies once in office. Okay, it's that last part. Persuading Democrats to rally around popular liberal policies once in office. I guess I'm waiting to see the returns on that, because, I mean, a large amount of polling data would seem to suggest that the single most popular broadly across all categories in America, the single most popular policy is Medicare for all.

And I don't see any Democratic politicians or anyone buying data for progress polls to be rallying around that cause so much. Well, you're forgetting that the real secret sauce of the polling that they do is that they will give you the results you want. That's really it. It's that whatever you want to have in your hand to justify yourself to donors or the press or anybody else, you can get from them. And that's what they provide for you.

It's like, it's custom polling. It's bespoke polling for politicians to validate the policies that they already want to carry out. Well, for instance, representative Wasserman Schultz, 61% of likely voters say that your hair looks normal. You don't have to do anything good. What you've been doing for the past 30 years is fine, it looks good. Representative Gillam, keep doing everything you've been doing.

Everyone loves it. Representative Nadler, no one can smell anything when you run into a room and don't worry about it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, to that end, Data for Progress just released a poll this week that was written up in a box, which defines, surprisingly, that Joe Biden's policies and stances vis of a Israel-Palestine is totally in keeping with the Democratic Party mainstream of voters.

Oh, that's so, oh, okay, cool. All right. No need to think about that ever again. No need to do anything. Think about anything. I know it may seem like there's certain elements of the Democratic base or there's an opinion shift moving on Israel away from America being in lockstep with this country for every single thing it does.

But the new Data for Progress poll is that the mainstream of Democratic voters are totally in line with Joe Biden, and they achieve this result by describing Joe Biden as a neutral arbiter between two parties and the Palestinians as the instigators of the conflict. So on those terms, President Joe Biden and his policies very much in line with the Democratic electorate. So they're doing good work. Do they have anything in there about Richie Torres? I didn't see anything about Richie Torres.

But I mean, yeah, this is a whole other thing, but Data for Progress apparently worked pretty hard in helping him secure the nomination. And his thing is that he's sort of like an off-brand like AOC, but with the added benefit of being a fervent insane Zionist, which I can't think of anything that could help the South Bronx more than keeping Israeli possession of the Golan Heights. I can't think of a more pertinent issue for that part of the country. Well, it's funny. I saw Andrew Yang's campaign tweeted this week that Andrew Yang will live in New York

City and will never leave the city unless it's on official business to New Jersey, Washington, D.C., or Israel. Yeah, no. I mean, if you need to go, you need to go somewhere and learn how to make the shittiest version of shawarma. If you want to make it wet in all the wrong places, that's where you have to go if you're mayor. Data for Progress finds Heshey-Tischler, A-OK.

I don't know. I'll be ranking Heshey number one, two, three, four, and five in my ballot. I don't know about you guys. It doesn't hurt that Mr. McElwee has a talent for self-promotion. Does anyone push out polls to push media narratives more effectively than Sean McElwee? Quipped my colleague Shane Goldmacher last summer after a Data for Progress survey that showed Jamal Bowman, a client of the group leading his primary race, prompted an influx of liberal donations and energy into his campaign to defeat a longtime congressman in New York.

For his part, Mr. McElwee, 28, once described himself as radiohead for donors. You can't really explain why I'm good, but everyone knows that I'm good at it. Data for Progress is funded by a mix of private donations, paid polling work, and support from foundations that back its research on issues like climate change. I would love to know what some of those foundations are and why they back their research on climate change. I'm like a bosom for donors. I call them all Jewish whether I'm right or wrong.

Of course, for many political activists, strategists, and officials, leveraging approval ratings to push an agenda is a pretty basic political strategy. But in a world of young progressive activists who often argue that a central goal is to bring left-wing ideas from the fringes into the mainstream, the Data for Progress approach can be controversial, criticized in some quarters as shrinking expectations and selling out a bolder vision of racial justice and economic equality to appeal to wealthier and more moderate voters. That just describes the Democratic Party.

I don't think this can fairly be blamed on Data for Progress. They're fitting in to a Democratic Party machine in apparatus that does... That is the reason they exist, is to sell out... Exactly. Yeah. Data for Progress, they're not selling anything... They're not selling progressivism or whatever the fuck that means to Democratic office holders. They're selling the Democratic Party to voters to say, hey, no, these guys, they do care about

the things you care about. I promise. Look at the polling we did. This is the actual social purpose of this group. We could get into the institutional point of it. I think we're all pretty aware of that. But the social point of this is it's for a certain type of Atlantic subscriber who, in the same way that boomers got obsessed with World War II, they're now obsessed with the

Civil War. They think they're all Sherman because they voted for Liz Warren. For that type of person, this gets rid of the contradiction and the anxiety they have over just voting Democrat with no problem in every election, even though they're sort of out of sync with a lot of their stated views. This allows them to look at voting for Brad Schneider or whoever the fuck and go, oh, well, he's done this thing that isn't great, or he said this thing that isn't great, and he said it as recently as yesterday.

But if you look at the polling, he's going in the direction of what I want, and I can keep sort of cosplaying as a radical Republican from the 1860s or 70s. And also, let's not forget it, the purpose of all kinds of groups like this, all these associated organizations that sort of hang barnacle-like off of the Democratic Party, which is jobs programs for the most annoying children of investment bankers. You mentioned Richie Torres earlier, I mean, should we note that data for progress supported Richie Torres over the more progressive opponent? Yeah, and they produced a poll showing that candidate in slow single digits and as a long

shot not worth supporting. And then when the actual vote happened, it turns out that they had underestimated their support by a huge percentage, which I'm sure was totally not intentional in any way. Matt, we've all worked with data. Data is a fickle thing. Data is a harsh mystery. Yeah, you can't get them all right. Sometimes you're going to...

Or any of them. And the beauty part is, you don't have to, because it doesn't relate to any actual outcome or process. There's no data that you're pointing to. The data is just a bunch of numbers that you can make say anything, but there's never any point where it has to relate to any actual outcome or any actual opinion of people because you're being paid for your PR abilities, your ability to sell a preexisting agenda. And that doesn't require data, it just requires absolute fucking shamelessness.

Yeah. And I mean, it's also this sort of boutique polling firm where they can push an agenda based on a popular opinion poll. I mean, it's also the questions that you hire them to ask in the first place, because no one's hiring data for progress to ask Democratic voters. Would you rather we spend $4 billion a year on arms sale just giving weapons to Israel or should we spend that $4 billion on, I don't know, anything else here in this country? You could pretty much solve the entire homeless problem in easily New York, probably like

four other states without money. Pretty easily. People like to say, oh, did $3 billion, $4 billion, it's not that much on the federal scale. Well, it's more than nothing. And I also like that this article made sure to include that they led a successful campaign to nominate and confirm Deb Halland as the first Native American cabinet secretary without mentioning all the other people that they endorsed for cabinet positions that got no

love whatsoever. And then they were like retroactively said that they did endorse and support the people after they were nominated. You guys remember that? Yeah. I do like that. I do like that. I consider becoming a donor after that.

I mean, lying is awesome. It's great. Let's be honest. Yeah. It's pretty fun. We have an opposing view here. It says, quote, imagine Sean McElwee giving a keynote address at the Walmart Center for Racial Equity Forever wrote Matt Karp, a history professor at Princeton, and contributor to

the liberal magazine, Jack Ovan, warning of a left that gives away too much of agenda to a corporate Democratic party. And I think one of the first five Choppa guests. Yes. He was a very, very, very early, a very early Choppa guest. He will be held accountable. Yeah. Mr. McElwee and his organization, which now employs nearly two dozen data scientists,

policy experts and communication aides, say spending their political capital now that Democrats control Washington is kind of the point. The point of being a progressive and being involved in politics is to make progress happen, led Noisecat, an activist and author who was Data for Progress's first employee. At a certain point, progress should mean we got X and Y things done that made people's lives better. I think it's kind of ironic that a lot of progressists forget that the main point is what we're supposed to do, the progress thing.

Over the past three... I can't wait. Yeah. Let's do it. Let's go. Let's get some progress. I largely agree with that. Do you guys agree with progress?

I largely agree with it. I'm ready for progress. The point of being a progressive and being involved in politics is to enact policies that improve the material conditions of the people who are your constituents or just Americans overall. We'd love to see that happen. Let's go. Over the past three years, Mr. McElwee made his own shift from self-described overton window

mover to a more pragmatic approach, coming to embrace Mr. Biden. I don't like him very much, he said, in 2019, before meeting with his campaign less than hashtag abolish ice, a slogan he ill-popularized that became a rallying call for the left in 2018. Only about a quarter of voters backed the idea of eliminating immigration and customs enforcement according to polling at the time. Well, I mean, look, they just didn't have the data. They didn't have enough data before they launched that hashtag.

But now, with all the communications aids they have, they're never at a loss for data. I also, like he said, I self-described overton window mover. Like, I'm imagining it's like the guy's moving a huge window pane across a street in like a Three Stooges sketch or something like that, like, oh, the overton window, hope it doesn't break again. Yeah, that was when he would just post abolish ice over and over and over again, and then he would just go, I'm moving the overton window, like Ralph fucking Wiggum. Yeah, Kristen Gillibrand was the wealthy Dowager who ended up getting pie in the face.

So now his group advocates what Mr. McElwee has called a normie progressive theory of change. They're liberal candidates who can build broad coalitions around popular policies. Think lawmakers like Representative Lauren Underwood, who flipped her suburban Illinois district rather than more firebrand progressive leaders like Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. On policy, they've come to embrace what they believe are the most popular parts of a liberal agenda as a way of persuading voters who might be skeptical of bolder rhetoric, emphasizing

a clean electric standard instead of a carbon tax, for example, or focusing on Mr. Passing Mr. Biden's agenda through reconciliation rather than fighting over abolishing the filibuster, a proposal that currently lacks sufficient support among Senate Democrats. Oh, wait, oh, so it lacks support among Senate Democrats. I thought this was about Democratic voters. I thought these are popular policies that appeal to the electorate, but in fact, it seems here that what's popular or not is still largely determined by the people holding office in the Senate.

Yeah. The thing is, though, that progress is sort of, it's the lifeblood of data, but with out progress, you can't move forward. But if you move forward without getting things done, well, that's because you forgot the data. I mean, like all this stuff about like, you know, like, it says, sorry, what was the quote? They said, back in candidates who can build broad coalitions around popular policies. I mean, like, I think that is a winning strategy.

I mean, it's like basically the only strategy that counts. But like the popular policies, like this article, Nor Data for Progress, is really mentioning which of these popular policies that they're really championing here. And if it's like... The popular ones. Well, it's like, if it's a bipartisan infrastructure bill, I mean, I guess that's popular. But like as compared to, like I said, Medicare for All, or I don't know, decriminalizing all drugs or just flatly legalizing marijuana is popular, is like one of the easiest to

accomplish and most popular political pieces of legislation. Not even legislation. It's just one of the most popular policies that you can enact as president. And I don't, like, for some reason, though, I mean, like Joe Biden certainly must have data on this. He's not moving forward with either of these popular policies that would enact broad change and improve the material conditions of everyday life for millions and millions of Americans. I just don't see what the deal is.

Can we get some better data on this? Well, yeah. The entire thing here is, I mean, we've talked about this previously, how there is this sort of fever pitch thing about the end of democracy, all these highly restrictive, like, racist voting laws, they're coming into effect in swing states and, you know, anywhere the Republican governor or legislature. And you know, it's like, it is a serious thing and it is awful, but at the same time, it's just being sort of used as a way to fuel media consumption and, again, that thing

where you have some job with computers and you're like, yeah, no, I'm like John Brown. At the same time, though, this isn't reflected in the democratic control of Congress and the presidency. There's no real sense of urgency. Yeah, there will be a speech by Merrick Garland or Joe Biden that talks about this. But there isn't this sense that, oh, we only have like a few months left to do this. We should get this all done now. And this, you know, all this data, all this data for progress is you can go back to what

you thought before this, before Trump, where you're like, oh, we'll take some time, but we'll get there. But then you can also use the end of democracy thing to browbeat anyone who, you know, is like this sucks, I can't believe I, you know, I got fooled into, you know, whatever poor, poor dummy got fooled into going to Georgia or whatever to get these guys elected. I'm not going to do that again. You can use that to browbeat those people. At the same time, during this next year that they have this, you're going to be able to

point to the data and show that this is all moving at a steady pace eventually. It doesn't matter if those two ideas are completely in conflict with each other. You just get to do that. I just guess it's weird that, I mean, like maybe it's, maybe it's the fault of the person who wrote this article. But in this article, there are no specific examples of any of the popular policies that they're championing or any example of like a shift in policy that has been enabled by their wonderful polling and data because it seems to me like the Democrats are just doing

what they would do regardless. Look, these guys have lanyards now. They have an office. They get to go to meetings. They get to circle back. They get to do all the cool office things. They don't just post anymore. That's the real accomplishment of data for progress is it got these losers jobs.

Yeah. This is sort of like the Constable Bob storyline and justified, but he doesn't go anywhere or never get to be a hero. Yeah. Just his day to day life before you met Rayleigh Givens. Well, actually, no, I spoke too soon because there is two small paragraphs to go before the end of this article. This here, data for progress is also trying to move more into electoral politics, hoping

to expand its list of campaign clients beyond Senator Elizabeth Warren's re-election race and the Senate campaign of John Fetterman, Pennsylvania's Lieutenant Governor and one of the state's most prominent Democrats. We're relatively young, but my belief about progressive politics is that first and foremost, we have a moral obligation to win, Mr. McElwee said. The demands in a lot of corners for policymakers to hold positions that are highly unpopular is wrong. Like I said, I would like some sort of... Because on his face, he's right.

You do have a moral obligation to win, but if that person winning is Richie Torres, I think it's pretty much just throw it in the fucking trash. You have no moral obligation whatsoever. But also when he said, they keep talking about these unpopular policies are an anchor around the necks of Democrats, and we just need data to show us what the popular policies are. Pick the most progressive of them and run campaigns on that. I would just like some delineation of what they're talking about here because it's just if it's simply a matter of choosing the popular policies and shedding the unpopular ones,

it should be pretty easy to state which policies are good and on the docket and which policies you're willing to throw over the lifeboat, throw out of the lifeboat rather. But like I said, I'll be waiting to hear... I'll just be waiting on data for progress as new polls about Medicare for All or a single payer, just any kind of national healthcare system. Also, isn't like the... It's just sort of a broader point about like, oh, the data shows the Democratic voters want to pass things through reconciliation rather than the filibuster, but then they're only referring to Democratic senators and not the people who vote for them.

Isn't it also like a sort of a point of all this micro-targeting polling shit, just an excuse not to do things that are like... It's like sort of a wash whether they're popular or not, but like voters, I don't think really make a choice to vote or not vote for someone based on these sort of policy concerns overwhelmingly. I think it's more just like, can you get shit done? Does it appear that you are strong or weak? And it just seems to me like that this is just like, oh, well, we can't possibly do filibuster reform because it's like 49% unpopular versus 51%.

It's like a 49, 451 split, and we don't want to end up on the wrong side of that issue. So like what you're sacrificing for doing is actually going to care. Nobody actually is going to vote on that. I mean, this should have all gone out the window when Biden won the larger slice of people who supported Medicare for all. Shouldn't none of this matter after that? No one actually knows or understands any of these issues. They're all just sort of responding to the words sort of vaguely, oh, something they

heard on TV, that that's not determining actions in any way. Yeah, and if you do hold this model, like you said, the 51% versus 49%, I mean, okay, if you just accept that and there's no role in the president or role in any other elected official or anyone to move public opinion, where are you going to end up? What happens when some weird generation that has no concept of the future and doesn't have any kids, the main voting block and all the like, it's like you pull them and it's like, all their issues are like r slash child free issues, like you shouldn't allow children. No crotch spot, it's fucking theme parks.

Yeah, they can't see cars six when I'm in the theater. And that's like the Democratic platform because it gets like 57% versus like 32% or some shit. And I'm not saying like, it's just it's just like automated politics. Yeah. And this has a lot of like activist branding, but this is essentially this is the same thing is leaving your life is taking Ubers and getting grub hub everywhere where you just press the button and you don't think about it. It's the same fucking thing.

And like, you know, the use of polish ice as an example of something that is like, you know, popular on Twitter and in activist circles, but like only about a quarter of the country actually approves of that sentiment. Well, you know what, like a quarter of the country is like not any small slice of the country and like there are policies that are enacted by the Republicans and indeed run winning presidential campaigns on that are supported by about only 30 to 25% of the country. And it's not really a problem for them because like, if let's say Biden had got in there and had a ballast ice and like polling had shown it was unpopular, but like he just stuck

by it and ran on it and never apologized for it. Like I don't think it would really make that big of a deal to like whether he were reelected or not. I think it's just a matter of like what voters perceive you as and whether they perceive that you are like cringing away like your gun shy like at every moment from like the things that you ran for office on and and then also go back on or fail to accomplish like any of the things that you promised and like just appear weak. I don't think it really matters what your policies are, how good they are, how in line

they are with the supposed beliefs of the electorate because like the electorate doesn't really know what they want. Not really. I think they just want like a strong competent leadership or the or the impression of strong competent leadership. You know when Joe Biden won, Joe Biden, he won when that like Stephen Crowder wannabe guy asked him like oh how many genders are there and he was like I don't know man at least three.

It just didn't give a shit. That's when he won. You know when he almost lost? You know why it was like kind of close? Because of he looked like a bitch in that first debate. That's it. That's it. That's all that fucking matters.

That's all that matters to the last presidential election. No one knows like if you went to Joe's, first of all, who goes to Joe's website to look at the policies? No one who voted for him in the primary. They like it when he gets up there and like calls the guy fat and like stumbles around and tells a perfectly remembered story from 70 years ago and then is convinced he's in 1981 and is talking to Casper Weinberger. They like that.

They like the image of Joe. I feel like you're right, like he won the majority share of voters who said that they were for Medicare for All after being the only candidate who explicitly said he was against it and then most of the things he did say he ran on, they've either gone back on or like actually like cut 180 degrees against the thing that they said that they were going to deliver if you voted for them. And guess what? His approval rating is like in the fucking in the 60s overall and among the registered

Democratic voters I would imagine even higher than that. Look, it's not going to do him any favors in the long term if he needs to like, you know, I don't know win a midterm election or anything, but like that's not a concern to them. They don't care about that. No, they don't give a shit. No one in the, no one like quoted in this article gives a shit and no, yeah. I mean, well, Joe is sort of the perfection of that Obama model where it's like really

who cares and in fact we'd prefer to lose Congress, but we'll have a popular executive forever. Well, Joe is like more built to be that eternally popular executive. Way more than Obama. Just bring him out there in front of a green screen once every two weeks, have him tell some weird fucking story, have him have the St. Patrick's Day bonanza every year. That's perfect for him. This is a job he was born to do.

By the way, Joe Biden is overseas right now for all like the G7 summits and he's meeting with the Queen of England, Erdogan and meeting with Putin coming up this week. Did you see when he met the Queen of England and he was like, she reminds me of my mom. She reminds me of my mom. And it's like she's five years older than you, but again, like that's why he won. That's why he won. None of this shit matters. It's like that's why he won.

If you think Joe Biden won the White House or the Democratic primary or continues to be a by modern accounts and overwhelmingly popular president because of any policy he has enacted or supported, I don't know what to tell you. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Compare Joe to any Democratic candidate like since Clinton, compare him to John Carrier or Al Gore.

Could you imagine Carrier or Gore saying that to the Queen? No. Could you imagine them like being like, man, it used to be 10 years ago, it was gay bath house. Everyone was taking poppers. That's it. That's it. That's the Joe Biden story.

And he nearly blew it because he didn't give him enough Adderall at the first debate. That's it. That's your fucking story. I just think like the story of Joe. I mean, I brought up Joe Biden being overseas and in England especially because it is like it is a weird feature that is different about Biden than other U.S. presidents is that he is driving the Ulster, the Unionists insane, like they're burning him in effigy and parts of Belfast.

And like, I saw guys walking around with signs picketing him in England that said, Joe Biden is an enemy of Ulster and I thought that was awesome because like, you know, I mean, it's like, it's like his one foreign policy instinct that is correct is he has always been a Republican and he flicks it up with Jerry Adams and he quoted the Yates poem about the birth of the Irish Republic and shit. And he's, he's God, man, he like, he's, he's, he's not afraid to stick his thumb directly in the eye of these fucking, these loyal, these Unionist Irish people. And the best part, he's probably only like 15% Irish, he's like 89% German, like any American.

That's why you go hard that way. Yeah. Assert your, your Irishness in the face of evidence. He's showing. He's showing that big. Yeah. I hated that shit when like Trump won, where people are like, Oh, this isn't who we are. This is exactly who we are.

And it's like, what? Like a Queenie, a sexual outer borough billion, no, like very few people in America are actually like that. You know what America is like a more like passively racist, like a mostly German guy who pretends he's Irish and sundown is sundowning, but still like works at his job and in fact got a promotion. That's who we are. That's where Joe.

Indeed. I mean, it's just like, the last thing I'll say about it, I just, I just saw a thing the other day about how Democrats have identified yet another micro demographic that they've regarded as, that they regard as key to the 2020 midterms. And it's essentially slightly more downwardly mobile suburban moms who like went Obama to Trump or then didn't vote and they're like, we're activating to like the target, this key demographic. And it's like, I don't even know what that means, but it's just like, like all, like

all of this shit, all the, this, this polling about policy or whatever, like it's just, it's an excuse for them to do the things that they're already going to do or not do. It's pretty much baked in. And that if they were like, behave like a real political party, like the Republicans do, they would just simply have an agenda run on it and work and then work to enact it when in office, damned how popular and not popular it is. They would just get it done. And in getting it done, the pop, the policies would probably become popular.

Or if they're, they won't, it won't affect your reelection chances, even if they're brutally unpopular because look at how much, look at how much of the, like the law and like government in this country is popular. But yet, yeah, I mean, like, I mean, the fact that we have 50% voter turnout is astonishing to me at all. That's what's so, that's what's so weird about this entire project is like, they're pointing at all these things that have been laws for like 30 years and being like, oh, actually no one likes it.

It's like, okay, so why are you here? What the fuck are you accomplishing? All right, well, I'd like to move on to the second reading series for today. This one's a little shift in pace. This one is back to the, back to reporting about the labor market and the fact that people, they just don't want to work. And their laziness is being passed on to the customer in the form of increased burrito prices.

That's right. No. I'm reading from, this comes courtesy of the Federalist and one of their Wunderkid staff. This is by Kylie Zempel, writing in the Federalist, Kylie Zempel, German Americans, they really knocked it out of the park with the names. Kylie Zempel, writing in the Federalist, my Chipotle bowl just got more expensive and it's the federal government's fault. Life is breezier on unemployment than behind the Chipotle counter, so the franchise is

trying to lure workers back, but it's making my lunch more spendy and exposing lives about who really eats the cost of rising wages. It's making my lunch more spendy. That's like, when I saw this, I thought that Kylie Zempel was like, she is like a sleeper cell because this is like, this is perfect. This is like, this was gaining some traction in more conservative circles, people who are still unabashedly, openly economically conservative. I'd say that most people, they don't see things this way, but among the more conservative

sectors, this was picking up some speed, but this is so good, this is so, this is that viewpoint so nakedly because it's like, oh, what, what, what, they should work like you do, writing a journal about your lunch. Yeah. I love that. It's just like life's breezier on unemployment than behind a Chipotle counter. It's like, well, yeah, that's true, but life is certainly breezier, it's some like make work job at the Federalist where you fart out stories like this for, you know, like,

I mean, insulated from any market competition whatsoever, I mean, like that's the easiest gig you can get. Yeah. Like, Kyle, for example, you're never going to work at fucking Chipotle, what are you, what the fuck are you complaining about? You get paid to do this, does it really matter if your burrito costs an extra dollar a month? I'm pretty sure it's easier to write articles for the Federalist than it is to fill out forms for unemployment.

Yeah, I mean, like, dude, dude, the forms you fill out for unemployment are scrutinized a hell of a lot more closely than anything that's published in the Federalist. You can write anything in the Federalist, like literally, you anything. If you know the right guy, you can say any pitch, you can, you know, like, oh, like, my lawn jockeys got my kid kicked out of the school band, you know, fight for me. All right, here we go. Chicken bowl, brown rice, black and pinto beans, pico, hot salsa, lettuce, cheese, sour cream, that's all I want.

I love that, just that first sense, because that's all I want. And what I want is every single ingredient at Chipotle in a bowl, cut to cut to cut to American military at every base, endless bombings, people in cages. This is how I get it. This is the entire conservative project, black and Chipotle beans, lady, are you crazy? And you're saying you don't want to pay extra for that? Think of what you're a lot of beans. She's stealing from Chipotle every day when she just asked for a little beans, god damn

it. So here, and I want it for $7.60 plus tax. You fucking greedy pig, $7.60 plus tax for every ingredient in Chipotle stuffed into a bowl. Also, why do you want it for that price, just because that was the price that they put it at? What if they put it at something else? You'll pay for it no matter what.

Yeah, you're just going to do it. You're not going to make your own lunch. You don't know how to do that. So it goes here. Thanks to the ill-named American Rescue Plan and remarkably short-sighted employment decisions, the federal government has jacked up the price of my Chipotle order. Sure, the restaurant is the one raising its prices by about 4%, but the federal government is the cause.

So 4%. 4%. What does that work out of $0.00700? That's under $0.40. Well, also, there's nothing proof. There's no proof that that's why they're doing it, that that's just something that the Bucket Chamber of Commerce says as a propaganda operation to try to make people turn against unemployment benefits.

There's been a big surge in commodities prices, too, that probably had something to do with it. There's a ton of other things that could go into fucking price costs at a place like that, a massive industrial-sized purchaser like them, just taking for their fucking word for it that that's why it's up, it's literally just furthering the propaganda operation. Commodity prices rose way more than that in the past 30 years, far outpacing the CPI, but no articles about that. And I saw the idea that it's like, I want it for $760 plus tax.

Oh, like you won't fucking pay for it at $8.10 plus tax, give me a fucking break. Shut up. And it's still a good deal. We're still getting every ingredient in the Chipotle buffet shoved into a bowl that's then stuffed into your fucking face for under $10. Okay? All right? Across the restaurant industry, change such as Chipotle, Starbucks, and McDonald's have

been increasing hourly pay for employees of company-owned locations in a bid to attract new workers and retain their current ones, NBC News reported. Consumer demand has come roaring back for restaurant meals, but the workforce has been slower to return, pushing eateries to sweeten the deal. Did you catch that? Employees have had to bribe current and prospective workers with fatter paychecks to lure them off their backsides and back to work. That's just called the free market, Ms. Semple.

The bribing them, that's called wages. Bribing them with the surplus value that they created, that's pretty fucked up of them. Yeah. It's like, okay, well, you have a workforce out there that's not willing to do the job for the wage that you're paying, then, oh, I guess you'll just have to bribe. I just love the idea that that's illegal or something, that this is like, they're acting in a corrupt way by asking for more money. And guess what?

Because it's making their treaty treats more expensive. That's the thing about these fucking people is that there's been this half-assed attempt to try to create some worker-centric conservatism, but at the end of the day, everyone sees themselves first and foremost as a fucking customer, as a consumer. And so whenever there becomes a conflict between their consumer interests and what they imagine to be the interests of anyone who is providing them with the service or the good that they're making, they're going to say, yeah, no, you should be forced to work like Corvay Labor. You should be chained to the fucking the Fixins Bar so that I can get food on my term.

It's sort of similar to how- Yeah, you can't make like a heron folk workers' party when 75% of your voting base calls the police when they're grub hubs like five minutes later, when it's all John Bedorets. I mean, it's also like, it's sort of similar to the way that libertarians have been arguing against the Civil Rights Act for the last like five or six decades because they're like, well, I mean, it eliminates the right of free association and private businesses should be able to refuse service to anyone based on any criteria or consideration. You're like, well, okay, well, what's happening now is that a lot of employers and places

of business are saying that you can't work there or shop there unless you've got a vaccine. And wouldn't you know it? Who's the most opposed to that? It's the same group of shithead libertarians. So it's just like, they see no problem with the idea that allowing private businesses to refuse service to people based on their race, gender, or religion isn't a problem because they never would think for even half a second that they would be on the receiving end of that.

But then when it comes to vaccines, it's time to squeal about your liberty. Going on, she says, that's what happens when the federal government steps in with a sweet unemployment deal, incentivizing workers to do a little less labor and a little more lounging. Under the CARES Act, the original coronavirus spending bill, the federal government handed out an extra $600 per week with no eligibility requirements, meaning even millionaires could collect it to unemployed people. According to a report from the Heritage Foundation, oh, well, you know, in that case, from the Heritage Foundation, I'm going to take this very seriously.

The average full-time American worker earning $48,000 a year could take home 15% more from unemployment under the CARES Act than remaining in his full-time job. This sounds a little absurd, and it is in almost every sense. It's important to remember, however, that however spendy and unsustainable these subsidies were, they were the product of a different time when onerous government restrictions slammed business doors and kept many people out of the workplace. But then things changed. Businesses started to reopen, and the unemployment rate dropped from 14% at its peak in April

2020 to 6.7% by the end of the calendar year, meaning many Americans were getting back to work by last Christmas. Okay, so then what are you complaining about? What are you complaining about? What's the problem? The burrito might be more expensive. I love that she just keeps saying spendy as a word. Yeah, she went to the University of Pinterest to learn how to write.

Nonetheless, the short-sighted federal government decided to keep doling out unemployment checks months later. As part of their exorbitant $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan spending bill, Washington Politico's kept writing $300 checks, which would have remained $600 if Democrats got their way, on the taxpayer's dime, and on top of state unemployment benefits to Americans who weren't working. Added to the average state unemployment check of $330 per week, the $300 federal subsidy that Americans could sit at home for $630 a week, or more than $32,000 per year, about

double the national minimum wage. That's a pretty sweet deal. It's no surprise that burger joints in my beloved burrito heaven have struggled to get workers back on the payroll. My beloved burrito heaven, it's Chipotle. It is the worst trash imaginable. Oh my God. It's like the most mid-food.

It's mid. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. Exactly. As Felix said, it's burrito purgatory. Yeah. I mean, look, it's better than some fast food options, but I can't imagine just being like

Chipotle is my neighborhood favorite. If Chipotle is your favorite food, you are just like, yeah, you don't have an internal monologue. Most muscle lids have higher degrees of self-perception than you do. If that's your favorite food, it's fine. There's nothing wrong with it. I mean, sometimes it's like as a food of last resort, when you just want to get a brick of fucking food in your gut to just sort of like, as ballast so that you can continue

on your laborers and functions of a day. You could do worse than Chipotle, but like, I just like eating there every day, calling it my own personal heaven. If you eat there every day, like one of your grandparents was a Labrador, like come on. Because this was precipitated by a Chamber of Commerce announcement about this for the exact purpose of putting this out there. She might never have even gone to fucking Chipotle. This whole thing might just be in the voice of, well, what do American Cretans like?

Well, they really like Chipotle, so I'm going to slather on my Chipotle love in this thing so that they feel like I'm on their side in the consumer war to keep cheaper burritos. That's true. Like this, she could very well be going to, what's that evil steak restaurant in D.C.? Signatures. Diplomat. Yeah. Signatures are gone.

French laundry or whatever the fuck. She could be good. Maybe she goes to an evil restaurant every day. Probably. She probably goes to the fucking $20 salad place like everybody else in D.C. Yeah. Yeah. She writes, conservatives warned about this, of course, people with one ounce of forethought

knew exactly where massive unemployment perks would lead. You can't pay people handsomely to stay home and then expect them to jump back into the Chipotle uniforms. But this whole Chipotle price... Would you ever do that job? Yeah. Would you ever fucking do that job? Would you ever do that job?

Would anyone you know? Yeah. Yeah. You would never fucking do that. She goes, but this whole Chipotle price hike reveals another thing about conservatives, another thing conservatives have long been right about. When companies have to raise their wages, they don't absorb those costs. They pass them off on you.

In an effort to bring in additional 20,000 workers, Chipotle announced in May that it would raise the hourly average wage to $15 by the end of the month. The same dollar figure Democrats have pushed as a federal minimum wage. Give people a living wage they demand for entry-level jobs that were never intended to support full families. Oh, well, they were never intended to, but I need to figure out what they are now. I mean, where are the other jobs? Where are the other jobs for people who are supposed to support full families?

Can they just get a job in a fucking factory? Well, I mean, they should get a job for a think tank or a magazine like The Federalist that is funded entirely out of pocket by some fucking vampire that has no as absolutely like Kylie Zimple's writing has never once been subject to any market force ever. For clicks, for views, for ad dollars, for fucking, for better writers, she's never had any competition. It's just, if you're a conservative college student, you're fed into these fucking programs and they give you a make-work job at some place like The Federalist.

If you have no shame and you come from a family background where this kind of thinking is, I don't know, encouraged, then like you got it made. You got it made. Yeah. This is usually when we read like goofy conservative like Federalist things, it's like fun. It's hard to get too mad at a lot of them because a lot of them are so patently ridiculous, right? Like, you know, a lot of them are like, oh, you know, I called the police because, you

know, a child on my block dressed up like little Xan for Halloween. Like I saw temporary tattoos and I had a panic attack. Some insane personal problem or like Rod Dreher where it gets like a little dark like the exorcism story, but it's still so like, they're so alien to me that it's like kind of funny. But this is just like, this is so fucking repulsive because yeah, that's exactly it. Like writing is such an easy job already. If you can, I'm sorry, like if you dedicate yourself to it and you can't do it, like you probably just suck.

I'm sorry. Yeah. And then to even take what little like market force there is out of writing and to be this person and like demand people just shuffle into these soul crushing positions. Like there's anything, like there's any other fucking job for people that like don't have a college degree or even do just have a four year degree and no personal connections. Or who just don't have the conservative social network to just give you a fucking job like this at the federalists.

Like the Kylie Zemper has ever been paid in her writing career. Anything close to what a market would actually like demand that she earn for the articles like give me cheaper burritos. Yeah. No. Who, if Kylie Zemper left the federal list, who would follow her? What list of subscribers would come? Or is she just, she's sort of like the literary equivalent of someone shoveling slop at Chipotle.

Yeah. But getting paid a hell of a lot more and probably with way more, having a way easier life, never having to worry about the things they worry about. So she goes here, they demand, give people a living wage they demand for entry level jobs that were never intended to support full families. All the while they shush conservatives who protest that a $15 minimum wage at McDonald's for instance, would raise prices, harming many of the same low income Americans who dine there.

That's exactly what's been happening at McDonald's. Not if their wages are higher too. Yes, exactly. They could fucking afford it. Oh, God damn it. Well, the thing here that I enjoy though is that, and this whole genre that has emerged in the last few months, these articles freaking out about unemployment is that it does reveal the coercion, the repressive force at the heart of capitalism that is obscured by the

fact that the thing that is making people go to work is just the threat of poverty, the threat of hunger, the threat of losing your home or your health insurance, because that's not being carried out by the state explicitly in the form of an army of overseers or something. It becomes invisible, but when people get back to work, fucking peons, or it's wrong for you to not fear starvation more than working a demeaning very, very low wage job, they're showing, oh yeah, this thing actually is as coercive as any of the horrible systems that they claim to be opposing.

It's just that the coercion is invisibleized, and here they're just putting it right out in the opening. It seems like it's all free, like in the free market, these are just contracts being entered to by free individuals, and if you don't want the demeaning job, you don't have to do it. In order for it to be a free decision or an actual negotiation, there would have to be an option of surviving without work. There would have to be a generous social welfare system, and on top of that, a UBI that would basically be a permanent federal unemployment insurance that could make it so that you could

get by with just not working a job. That way, if you choose to work a job, well then that choice actually means something. It's a choice that you're actively making rather than being disciplined through the fear of poverty or starvation into doing. Just finishing out here, it says, that's exactly what's been happening at McDonald's, where the traditional dollar menu has become a relic of the past, and prices have soared as wages have gone up. I mean, I understand the restaurant businesses, and the restaurant business right now, prices

are going up because they're having to pay a lot more for things like meat and fish or whatever, but for a company like McDonald's, I don't know if the dollar menu is still there or not, but are their prices rising dramatically? I got there now, I believe, I was just there the other day, the BTS meal, it is $5 per nugget. Well, that's the BTS meal. If you can't buy the same amount of food for $1 that you could literally 20 years ago, yeah, call the police, just get like repurposed ice to force people into these positions

until there is literally no inflation in the price of food. It exists in everything else, it exists in housing, it exists in cars, it exists in everything else that you don't give a shit about. But like, if you can't get the same amount of food, this is a grand societal problem. There's any inflation in food prices over a 20-year period. What the fuck are you talking about? Well, she finishes out here saying, when the federal government pays restaurant workers to stay home, home is where many of them will stay, and when Chipotle needs to compensate

for it by dangling a 15-hour minimum wage in front of the low-skilled teens who work there. Okay, I'm sorry, it is not low-skilled teens who are working at McDonald's in Chipotle anymore. I mean, some of them are, but a lot of these are just people with families. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, the wage that they're paying wasn't intended to support a family when we started the service economy in this country. Well, that doesn't mean anything.

But it doesn't mean anything. It never meant anything. What the fuck? Was there ever a time when restaurants weren't open during school days? Yeah. Was there ever a time when you go to McDonald's at three in the afternoon on a weekday and it was closed? That was never true.

So therefore, those jobs were always for adults. What adult job should the people working at Chipotle get according to her? Well, I mean, like, I think if you put that to her, she would just say, well, they should have invested their time earlier in life and skills so that they could get a job writing for the federalists. They should have gone to college. If ever, yeah. But that is her, like, oh, they should have gone to college.

Well, if everyone goes to college, that doesn't increase the amount of jobs, you fucking ding bet. If she worked at Chipotle, she would drown herself in the cilantro of that within the first hour. So you guys here, by dangling a $15 an hour wage in front of the low-skilled teens who work there, I'd still have that phrase, low-skilled teens, like what a fucking rude thing to say to people who fucking make this food. You're a low-skilled adult and you'll never be anything but that.

You have no skills. If I left you in the woods, you would be like fucking vultures would be circling you within a minute. Within a fucking minute, you have nothing. You're nobody. You could launch you into space and then an identical fucking blonde woman with, like, uneven dimples would replace you. No one fucking cares.

How did you guess she was blonde? Federalist writer. Yeah. Kylie's impulse. I gotta say, I don't think I'd want to meet a high-skilled teen. That would sound terrifying to me. Yeah. So it goes here.

I have a certain set of skills. I always know who an imposter is, goaded. It goes here. Dude, put that in the promo. He says, the franchise will stuff that extra cost right into your burrito. Yeah, by raising prices 4%, give me a fucking break. The final sentence here, she says, Chipotle broke my heart a little today, but big government is breaking my budget.

You don't have a fucking monthly budget. What are you talking about? God. Or a heart. Or the idea that a 4% increase in the cost of your burrito bowl will break your fucking budget when you work a job at the Federalist. Give me a fucking break. It just says here, Kylie Zimbal is an assistant editor at the Federalist.

Follow her on Twitter. It doesn't list any other jobs as she does. No, no. It says, okay, her Twitter account says, her Twitter account says editor, Federalist, previously DC examiner and Nat Geo travel, not the bachelor beat reporter, Wisconsin native. Oh, I'm very sorry. What an amazing CV.

Yeah. God damn it. She got the Joe McCarthy Fellowship at the Heritage Foundation, was like a 16-year-old and she's been riding it ever since. Nothing low, no skill adults getting paid way more money than her fucking labor is worth on any free market. Get the fuck out of here. Eat your burrito bowl.

Shut the fuck up. Yeah. And you're, by the way, if she really does eat this, if like our conspiracy theory that she goes to an evil restaurant isn't true, she's going to keep doing it. Yeah. No, they're going to do the same thing. It's going to be like all those fucking round balls of shit who are like, ah, I'm boycotting the NFL because of Kaepernick.

Well, what are you going to do? Talk to your family. No, you're going to fucking watch that game, Fatso. All right, well, that does it for the Federalists, but we have the first two articles we did today were mere orders before this amazing entree, this feast that I think is maybe one of the best reading series I've ever come across. I am, of course, talking about the article I found in Slate the other day about a woman who adopted a dog and killed it.

So, I mean, you think that might be an exaggeration, but no, that is exactly the article that we're talking about. And I sort of prefaced this article that like, okay, I know when we do Dear Prudy or any of the advice columns to Slate, we always sort of have to preface it by saying, assume that they're all fake letters, that these aren't real people. This is not a letter to Slate. This is an actual article with a woman putting her name to it of a personal essay. So I mean, that gives me, it makes me way less likely, this is not anonymous.

This is not like, you know, bedraggled Beagle and Butte, you know, like, this is... The hacker anonymous wrote this article, we are a legion, we kill dogs. This is a woman writing on her own name in a personal essay in Slate. Again, it must be stressed how she adopted a dog and then killed it. You may think I'm exaggerating, but we're going to get into the article, and I would like to also preface this article by saying that when it was published, if you look at the replies to the author herself on Twitter, the lineup of like, Blue Check media journalists telling her how brave she was for writing this is fairly astonishing.

Also saying like, hey, it's happened to all of us, we don't have to put our dog in a microwave. We have all fantasized about it. It's just like, yeah, that's my favorite thing that happens is when someone writes like, a fucking insane article, like, do you remember that Atlantic article that was like, I inherited my mom's slate, you know, and people are like, this happened to me too, this is so complicated, like we all go through it, it's solidarity, like, what are you talking about, what the fuck, you're insane. Well Felix, listen to the headline here.

This is the headline is when Bonnie came home, subhead, just before Christmas, I adopted a six year old Beagle. She was adorable and violent. I found a resolution. I found a resolution. Many choose, but few acknowledge, so this is, yeah, everyone's doing it, but no one wants to talk about it. We've all done it.

Also keep in mind for this article, and she says that the dog was a violent. And look, it's a sad fact, but there are a lot of like fucked up violent dogs out there that probably shouldn't be home, they're like, it's just, it's hard to know what to do with them, but like they shouldn't be given to people and certainly not families. Look, it's a difficult decision, but like, when she describes the violence that this dog is capable of, keep in mind that she is just talking about a Beagle and not a Pitbull or like a Mastiff or something. It's a Beagle.

It weighs about, I don't know, 10 pounds. How much is a Beagle weigh? Like 15 pounds probably? No, they're a little bigger than that, probably like 25, 30 pounds. Okay, so like, I mean, Beagles can be assholes, you know, they're kind of head case dogs. So I don't want to undersell it, but here I just like, when she makes a decision to do what she does, I think the fact that it's a Beagle she's talking about is a little bit, makes it just adds another layer here.

So like, look, without further ado, last Christmas morning, I padded my bed, inviting my newly adopted Beagle, Bonnie, to jump up and cuddle. My boyfriend still under the covers reached out to pet her soft little head, which was now wedged between us. I turned away to grab my phone and it happened. A guttural bark followed by a human scream. I whipped around to see my boyfriend's hand covered in blood. Before I could figure out how to help him, he was out the door on his way to urgent care.

It was Bonnie's second bite in the week since I adopted her. Okay, okay, we can, we can already tell her boyfriend is not a man of Thulean might. No, no, no, he went to urgent care over a Beagle bite. I think I found your first probably never find the Thulean mysteries. He's a Beagle, he's a Beagle boy. Like many others last year, I was thrilled to adopt the dog. God damn it. I just like, I really hope that this phenomenon is not as widespread as she talks about.

But I fear he may be onto something here, especially among the type of people who write and read articles for Slate.com. I was thrilled to adopt a dog during pandemic. The so-called pandemic puppy boom made for what felt like stiff competition at the time. According to one Nielsen survey, pet adoptions between March and July 2020 rose more than 15% from the same stretch in 2019. After a month of filling out applications, I was eventually contacted by an animal shelter in New Jersey.

A six-year-old Beagle whose photo melted my heart was ready to meet me. Some friends and I drove down from New York City to pick her up. And when we got out of the car, Bonnie trotted up to me immediately. Hymid but curious, she allowed me to scratch one of her velvety ears as she sniffed my jacket. When she leaned into my hands, like the Beagle I had grown up used to, it seemed to meant to be. And then I drew a bead with my laser-guided sight on the crossbow I was holding.

It says, took out my claymore. A few weeks later, I was sitting on the floor of my kitchen with Bonnie and a new dog trainer. We were working on positive reinforcement training and desensitizing her to triggers like the vacuum, which she'd bitten the night before. Vacuums along with almost everything else in my apartment and outside of it terrified Bonnie. I was already familiar with these training messages from a masterclass I'd seen in which a celebrity dog trainer assures new pet owners he can help their dogs overcome things like

accidents in the house, excessive barking, and digging in the yard. At the beginning of each video lesson, an intro sequence plays. There are no untrainable dogs, he asserts, only untrainable people. Well, kind of right here, you know? Yeah. I mean, like, it's just sort of the glimpses into like, you know, should I adopt a dog or not? Well, I watched several TED talks about it and I noticed that everyone else was doing

it. So I thought, hey, a lot of stiff competition out there. Let me check the data. Yeah. And I do want to say I do, like, in some abstract sense, I feel bad for it because it's like the shelter was like, apparently they were like, oh, this is like a chill dog. He's like most beagles and that he's been bred to not be able to stand up for more than a combined 10 minutes a day.

And then it just like, you know, he's clearly traumatized. Sometimes you get a lemon. Yeah. Sometimes you get a mean dog. But the choice to write about this is insane. Okay. The choice to tell people about it is insane. As the article goes on, like this will get more pronounced, but like this to me is like,

look, I'd like to think that I wouldn't kill an otherwise healthy animal just because it was annoying me. But you know, sometimes it's either you or them, you know, a bad pet can really fuck up your life. And sometimes, you know, if you got to do what you got to do, just don't tell anyone about it. Yeah. It's insane enough.

Why are you telling me? Be validating. Oh, I'm like, yeah. Sometimes there's shitty things that you have to do and then part of the shittiness is that you have to live with it on its own terms. You don't get to have a therapeutic compensated public confession where you know like clockwork, every blue check psychopath on earth is going to tell you how brave you are and how you did the right thing.

Yeah. No, it's like you can't just. And I do, I do think like it really was like this woman and her boyfriend or the dog. Like I do think this was a life and death situation for them knowing that the boyfriend instantly went to urgent care after one bite is like, okay, yeah, that dog would have eventually probably killed them if she's telling the full and varnished truth here. But like, again, you couldn't you just write an article that's like, you know, I have, I have a separation and anxiety from Wanda vision not being on TV anymore.

Can you just write that article? You had to write the dog killing her well, no, I mean, that's exactly right. It's like you can't just live with it. You can't just live with the choice and like feeling bad about it, even though you're like, hey, I had to do what I had to do. You have to share it with everyone in the expectation that they're going to tell you how brave you are and how good your decision was for fucking. All right.

Let's just go, go for their that's how that's how our that's how our our creative media class is is dealing with living at this wheezing dying empire as well. We have no real practical imagined way to fix any of this stuff. And frankly, our material conditions would not benefit by any radical change, but we can publicly feel bad about it. And that there you go, consecrates our position because, you know, would you want somebody who didn't feel bad about it enjoying this signature? I bet you wouldn't.

At the same time, though, better writer than Kelly Zemple, for sure. Kelly Zemple used the word, however, about three times in the course of one clause and then made the use the made up word spendy to talking about how a burrito is going to break her budget. So yeah, this woman, yeah, in like, in like the market of ideas and the market of writing, this woman is like, she's bringing a lot more value. Well, I mean, I think the difference in a Slate.com writer and a Federalist writer is that the Slate.com writers have learned how to, because it's their stock and trade, do

a similar simulation of empathy and like, and demonstrate it, whereas Federalist writers have no such compunction whatsoever. And in fact, it's quite the opposite, like, works to their advantage. It's like the less empathy you're capable of showing, though, yeah, like the more useful you are to them, because then you can write things about how low skilled teens don't deserve a living wage. Yeah, like this woman, okay, so this Slate writer, this is like her insane perversion is that she has to tell people about this, like that she did it.

It's like, in some ways, I can kind of understand it. I still don't like, I don't like, I don't think you should go about it that way. I think it deserves some more time. But it's like in some scenarios, I get it, maybe her perversion is clearly like writing about it. The Federalist writer, her perversion is doing this. He's probably like adopted 40 dogs just to kill them. I was imagining someone just pulling up to the dog shelter every week, he's like, need

something new, give me the usual. Can you get me something that lasts this time? So she continues here, Bonnie had sunk in her teeth into my hand during my first full day with her. I'd reached out while she was licking my leg, unaware I'd crossed the boundary. Well, I mean, okay, I mean, did no one ever tell you that you have to like stick your hand out like under a dog's nose before like you do anything? It just seems to me like nobody has really clued her into like certain things like you

can't just like do it when you meet a dog for a first time, just like reach out and grab it. They tend to get a little skittish about these sort of things. You have to like sort of, you have to show sort of like a submission, hold your hand out, let them smell you, let them get, you know, know your name and in a dog sense is when they smell you. So I mean, it's sure like, I think the dog is probably a basket case too, but you know, dogs are very intuitive.

They pick up a lot from the people that they're around. So she goes here, when I explain this to the trainer, she reasoned Bonnie needed time and space to adjust to her new home. Still, I couldn't shake feeling guilty as if I'd done something wrong. When friends and colleagues asked me, I just couldn't shake the guilty feeling as if I'd done something wrong. When friends and colleagues asked me about my new dog, I only half lied. I said she was doing great.

And when I tilted my webcam toward her during Zoom calls, I made sure my swollen, scabbing hand wasn't visible on the screen. After all, it was true that she had happily lounged next to me all day while I type words into my laptop. And that when I sat cross-legged on the floor, she'd come and curl up in my lap, her tail thumping against my legs. As I posted videos of Bonnie gently snoring on Instagram, I didn't mention she was wiped out from a day of gnawing on her own paws so much that they bled.

I couldn't... Like, how much would this woman play with a dog because dogs even beagles need enrichment or they go fucking crazy? Especially beagles. If you're treating a cat, you gotta give a cat some toys and you can play with it sometimes, but the cat mostly makes their own enrichment. I mean, honestly, I think these people need to just be told if you're thinking of adopting a pet, adopt a cat and not a dog.

Yeah. This one was treating her dog like a cat because there was nothing in here that's like, oh, I was playing fetch. I got this new toy for... If it's gnawing on its paws, it's telling you, like, I need to do something. I'm going fucking crazy here. She stuck this dog in like a one-bedroom morgue slot with her and her hemophiliac boyfriend and is like, what the fuck?

He's... My dog... She's anxious and fucked up. And if the dog is... Well, yeah. Of course she is. If the dog is bored and anxious, you can... They like smoking weed, too.

I mean, that's what helps with my boredom and anxiety, so she never even tried the bong-hit method. But yeah, dogs love it when you blow weed smoke in their ears. That's how they get high. Don't do that. I do not endorse doing that. This is a warning. Do not do that.

That's a joke. It's not true. I convinced myself that she just needed more training, that I could help her if I only worked hard enough. The daily dog anxiety meds came next, though they did little to make my otherwise healthy pup less afraid. And despite practicing those desensitization tactics every day, Bonnie regressed, lunging at perceived threats on the street, like joggers, other dogs, and squealing kids.

Because you have her in solitary. Like, it's like, this is so... Okay, I started out like, okay, I understand. And now it's like, okay, so we instantly went to therapy and medication for this fucking dog. Not like, oh, she needs like a more complex toy or like games or attention. Yeah. How about you like, you try tying her out by taking her to the fucking park a couple

times a day. But no, no, I got to... No, I just need something to sit next to me while I type into my laptop and just sort of like, look adoringly at me. I mean, that's what this woman wants. Yeah, yeah. That's what you have a boyfriend for. Well, the boyfriend is like, he's not long for this earth.

No. He's gonna like, a hummingbird's gonna fly into him and he's gonna dive in blood loss. One night before bed, while she was squatting to pee beside a tree, she bolted at a man strolling up to us on the sidewalk. Before I could react, she chomped into his calf, his pant leg, in her teeth as she tried to pull it away. Why wasn't she on a fucking leash? How did this happen?

How did she just bolt for a man walking down the street and chomp into his calf muscle? What... Don't you... If the beagle got out of a leash, it's like, these are like, are you, are her and her boyfriend like skeletons? How are they so routinely overpowered by this beagle? To my surprise, the man brushed off the incident, I did not. From that night on, each time I bent over to pet Bonnie or sat down for a belly rub,

I monitored her every move. Any sudden shift and I'd pull away, flinching. Yeah, hard to imagine why this dog has anxiety. The trainer came back a few days later, Bonnie bit her too. With each incident, there was no growling, no toothy snarling, no indicators that she would pounce. There are no untrainable dogs, I thought, only untrainable people. I became adept at fastening her muzzle on in a matter of seconds, which I now had to

do any time we stepped beyond my door. Each time we came back inside, I tried to feel relief when nothing bad happened. I never did. Months of failing to exhale helped me decide I should find Bonnie a new place to live. Maybe city life didn't agree with her, I reasoned, and a quiet existence in the suburbs is what she needed. Oh yes, that is what Bonnie needs, a quiet existence on a nice farm upstate. So it goes here, I knew that my safety and the safety of my neighbors, I couldn't continue

to manage her behavior. I never was able to anticipate what would set her off, and there was no way to control her environment on the streets of New York. But I soon learned that the shelter where Bonnie came from wouldn't help me. A volunteer explained that Bonnie was too dangerous to adopt out again, and their affiliated sanctuaries, including several Beagle-specific rescues, declined to take her. Another dog rescue organization in New York City told me that her bite history, seven bites at the time, though that number would grow, was too extensive for her to qualify

for a special rehabilitation program. Both conversations ended on the same topic, behavioral euthanasia. I love this story where there are no heroes. There are no heroes in this story. I was dumbfounded to discover you could call a vet's office and ask them to do that. Finally, my new quest to help Bonnie get better, I'd become the decider of her fate. You know what? When you chose to adopt her in the first place, you did, in fact, become decider of her fate.

That's in fact, when you adopt an animal, that's what you're committing to when you take them into your home from any of the agency that rescued them. You are indeed becoming the sole arbiter of their fate. We consider that before you adopt a vet or just adopt a cat, which basically you don't have to take care of. That's what you wanted. That's what she wanted. She should have gotten a fucking cat.

You get two cats, again, they do their own enrichment. They have some bizarre thing where they're looking at each other and then kissing. What they're looking at is the souls of dead people that still inhabit this place. Or they're doing the universal cat consciousness swap program where they're like, oh, my shift in Wellington begins in an hour. I got to get over there. I got to go to sleep. Did we talk about this on a show, Cat Theory?

Yeah, we did. We talked about the Cat Theory. It goes here, almost nobody willingly adopts a biting dog and concealing a history of aggressive behavior is likely how I ended up with mine. Yeah, it is true. It does seem like the rescue agency did behave unethically in giving her this dog in the first place. She says, I'd put a post up on a private rehoming site for her anyway, making sure it

disclosed her history and special needs. I explained she preferred women over men, couldn't be around children, and needed to be muzzled on walks and around visitors. Perhaps a single female hermit in a rural area would be opening to managing her behavior for the next decade or so. I held out hope for a while, but never received any adoption increase. And as her bite count continued to grow, so did my desire to stop living with a dangerous animal.

I feel my heart beating out of my chest every time we got ready to go outside, fearing for the worst for our walk. I only left my apartment without her once per week so I could buy groceries. This way, she wouldn't get nervous about being alone. She'd lash out when I returned. I tiptoed around my two room home each day, hoping I wouldn't cross any invisible boundaries. I just love the idea of this woman just like living in absolute fear in her apartment of her beagle.

Yeah. This is a pr... Yeah. This is like, I know it's intended to be a brave, confessional article, but this is really funny. This is what Kathy Griffin felt like when Yasha was in her house for a fucking nine months. So it goes here, even if I did somehow find someone to take it bonnie, I wondered whether it would just exacerbate her already crippling anxieties.

As the week went by and no new options appeared, I realized I had a choice. I could send her off with a stranger one day, someone she would certainly injure and who would perhaps end up euthanizing her anyway, or I could allow her to leave this terrifying world peacefully with someone she loves. That is such a good way to rationalize it. The world is just too difficult for Bonnie and for me. So I'm just going to give her the choice to leave it with someone who truly loves her. She's like Kevin in Sin City.

So it goes here, behavioral use in Asia is not a decision made out of convenience. No, guess not. Typically it enters a conversation once the safety situation with a dog, cat, or other animal deteriorates beyond an acceptable level of risk, said Christopher Patchell, a veterinary behaviorist with instinct dog behavior and training. There isn't a universal approach to every situation. Often if the police aren't involved, it's up to the pet owner to decide what level of risk they can live with.

If you're the one who finds yourself in a situation where you're actively considering it, choosing to re-home is hard. Choosing to push forward with a treatment when you know it's unsafe is hard. Choosing to make significant accommodations to make it safe, even though it's not easy, that's hard. Choosing to euthanize is hard, Patchell told me. There's no easy way out of that difficult situation. But what we're ultimately having to do is say, which of these hards makes the most sense

for me? I desperately wish someone could come and assess my personal level of risk. I've got a great idea for a new business. Yeah, this is a new job. This is a new boutique service for anxious urbanites. Someone who can come and say, I hereby give you permission to kill your dog. Yep. I'll do the canine risk assessment.

Actually, Branson, he was writing about this article, he said there should be a boutique assassination service where they just take care of it for you anonymously. One shot from 400 meters away, the dog is down, it's over, you can just say, someone assassinated my dog. I don't know what happened. If you're a dog assassin, most dog assassins don't work for the FBI. I'm like human assassins. You could go on the dark web, just go on Craigslist.

Just take out a contract on Bonnie, it's no problem, you don't have to write an article about it. It goes here, I desperately wish someone could come and assess my personal level of risk, something only I could do. It was an excruciatingly lonely decision to make, but when I turned things over in my head, I came up with this, in a comfortable and loving home, Bonnie was always on the defense, even in the calmest of situations. When it came down to it, her quality of life was poor.

I couldn't envision her feeling safe in any situation, no matter how rural the home, no matter how many triggers are eliminated, to prevent her from harming herself or anyone else again. I chose behavioral euthanasia. I love the idea that the dog is going to self harm. No, this is only you and your boyfriend's hands that you're worried about here. The dog is at no risk of hurting herself. On the phone, I wept quietly as I made Bonnie's appointment, taking shallow breaths as the

receptionist instructed me to make sure she was wearing her muzzle when we arrived. Bonnie's last day came sooner than expected. On a quiet Sunday morning, while I pet her on the floor, she inexplicably snapped at my face. Though her mouth clamped down hard around my boyfriend's forearm instead of my cheek, when he jumped up, she held on, piercing deep wounds in his arm and a hole in his sweatshirt. She scampered away from us afterward, head down, trembling. I was so stricken with fear that I didn't realize I was also trembling, forgetting to

breathe. It was then that I knew for certain that Kanaki continued living with Bonnie any longer. I tossed her one of her favorite bones to calm her down. I called to reschedule her appointment to that afternoon, ordered an uber, and put her muzzle on for the last time. Then I hugged her for a while, still too shaken to cry. In the uber, Bonnie, who preferred to sit in my lap during car rides, looked out the window, sweetly unaware.

When we arrived, Bonnie started trembling again. We were shown to a small waiting area, and a staffer at the animal care shelter approached me, approached us to tell me she understood how hard this was, and that she supported my decision. I would have expressed more gratitude if I'd been able to do more than mumble. I'd been warned I wouldn't be allowed in the room with Bonnie during the procedure because of COVID protocols. But instead of saying goodbye in the car like they'd asked, I'd explained that Bonnie was

petrified of the vet, and I insisted I walk her to the exam room so her last moments wouldn't involve resisting a stranger. In a few minutes, I was led down a hallway, I coked Bonnie to follow. A staffer showed me to the room Bonnie needed to enter. I gave Bonnie one last pat, then handed her Kelly Green leash to a tall man in scrubs and a mask. As he shut the door behind me, I heard Bonnie whine, a protest to being separated from me. I'm shattered when I think back to that moment, but at the time, everything was blank.

In the days after Bonnie was put down, I roamed my duly empty home like a zombie. I didn't sleep much, and when I did, I was startled to awake by nightmares of being bitten. Crushed with guilt, I wondered if there was more I could have done to help my sweet beagle. I didn't tell most people what happened. What if they thought I was a monster for not trying hard enough? Well, you solved that problem! Good thing you don't have to worry about that anymore.

That I made a post on Instagram, so I wouldn't have to talk to the people who had been gushing over Bonnie. Rather than detail her situation, I explained she had an illness that went on to undiagnose before I adopted her, and that I had to say goodbye. She was sick just in a way that was impossible for most people to see. I used that to help myself cope. So folk, I mean, this is it. When you adopt a dog for Instagram, people are going to ask questions when they stop

appearing on your stories. So come up with a good backstory, hence the dog assassination agency. I like to compare this to the Russians, who we follow on Instagram, who are like, yeah, these two raccoons just started showing up in my bedroom, and it's been three years, and we've learned to get along. All the people who have sables, these sharp little bear tubes, fly all over the place and learn how to deal with it, and then this woman and her beagle. Not long afterward, my browser tab is still comprising dog behavior reddit threads and

news stories about Major Biden's biting incidents. By the way, how was Major these days? He's doing good? He doesn't have any undiagnosed illnesses that need to be explained after the fact? Do you think Joe is trying to give Major as a gift to the queen? Here, man, it's a perfectly good dog, man. He loves being outside, he got plenty of land. He just kills her instantly.

Just chops down on the throat and starts shredding, whipping the head back and forth. Yeah, he picks her up by the neck and just snaps it, blood everywhere. No one could have seen this coming, man, he was a great woman. He's a great dog. He's a great dog. He reminded me of a great mom, reminded me of my mom, which is also killed by a pack of dogs. So he goes, I came across Losing Lulu.

It's a Facebook support group for pet owners who have had to make the difficult choice to opt for behavioral euthanasia. If love was enough, you'd still be here, read the group's cover photo in bubble letters. I have a new group I'm joining. I later learned that Losing Lulu was founded in 2019 by dog trainers Trish McMillan and Sue Alexander. Yeah, dog trainers, we're like dog killers. Since then, it's amassed more than 10,000 members and sees around a dozen new posts

per day. 10,000 people have done this in the last year. It's the hottest new trend. It's called killing your dog. Sometimes love isn't enough. There's a fucking support group for this. Next thing you're going to have tiktoks with, with women in huge suburban kitchens, just putting a guillotine on their kitchen, you know, it's this really goes back to the first

thing because this is the democratic base, is like members of saying goodbye to Lulu. You know what, maybe this is, maybe I'm reading too much into this, maybe I'm pushing this a little too far, but if we think of it along that lines and all of the just loud congratulations that this woman got and how necessary and brave this was for her to admit, do you not see like that perhaps that this is, I don't know, a rehearsal for how these people think other sort of intractable, shall we say, problems in our society can be solved? Oh, no, no, yeah, this is going to be the solution to the homeless issue. It'll be like, because it keeps getting pushed farther and farther, it went from like, we

should have government housing to like, they should be allowed to eat trash and sleep outside. That's like the humanitarian position. And now it's going to be like, 10 years from now, we'll be like, Republicans are like, we should make, we should draft bigger homeless people to form a homeless chariot that chases other homeless people and beheads them and liberals will be like, we should just give them a shot. Yeah. Just kill them instantly.

It's more humane. It's just sort of like, you know, the world is too tough for them. Yeah. We need to give them a humane exit loving way out. I'm wondering if like, ritually killing your dog is what you do when you don't have the net worth to get invited to the islands and subterranean, arena, chrome parties, also wealthy. Yeah.

It's like a striver thing. Like one of these days is going to be an infant, but for now it's just going to have to settle for a chihuahua. Yeah. My family could tell I was ambitious when I was a little kid because I wanted a Pomeranian to kill. I'm just loving the idea of like a Facebook group for like, people have had to, you know, find a solution to the problem of the lovable neighborhood tramp.

It's called like losing whistle stop Willie. Yeah. So it goes on here and says here, named for Lulu, a foster dog, McMillan, euthanized. The group was founded by Alexander and McMillan for people who experienced a profound loss that was ultimately of their choosing. When I found the group, I suddenly felt less alone. I think it is really hard to find a corner of the internet where people are not cruel. Well, I'm certainly not this corner of the internet.

This is only for cruel people. This is only for the cruel and sadistic, especially when you're talking about high stakes events like euthanizing an animal for behavior, said McMillan, a certified dog behavior consultant with a master's degree in animal behavior. Still, members are often cruel to themselves. The self-chastisement people including their posts stuns Alexander. There's a cultural component, she said, that suggests that an animal's behavior is your fault.

It's one that I'm very familiar with. You go on TV and there is a dog trainer who can fix any problem in 23 minutes with commercial breaks, McMillan said. So we have this idea that anything can be fixed. And I thought that too when I started off in shelters and when I started off as a trainer. In my own post in the group, I described how much I loved Bonnie and how I could never anticipate when she'd strike. Like others, I listed out the what-ifs that lingered.

What if I'd tried a different trainer? What if I'd moved to the country with her? Dozens of comments support in expressing that support and sympathy. Curiously, no questioner was asked, what if I just tried to re-home her for like another couple months? Or like, why did I make this dog live in a two-room apartment? Like that's sort of glossed over. This dog was in solitary.

Maybe you can get used to it if you're on the computer all day. But like the dog? No, you can't have a dog in a fucking tiny two-room apartment in solitary. I mean, well, there are dogs that are good for city living, like Great Danes or something that just like sleep 16 hours a day, take one giant shit and then just come back. Like it depends on the breed. But beagles are a very active kind of brainy and neurotic breed. They need a lot of attention and a lot of fucking...

But even like those low-energy dogs, like two rooms, like come on, man, I'm sorry. Like I know that it's like, in my ideal world, everyone would have a bigger place and everyone could get one if they want. But like, I'm sorry. If you live there, you shouldn't get a dog. It's not good for them. It's not good for you. I don't know.

I mean, it all depends. There's a lot of good city dogs. There's a lot of good city dog owners. I think it all just depends on the dog and, you know, Bonnie, I'm sorry. She had to go. She was very nasty. They called losing Lulu and they were like, ah, there was a problem. Nothing could be done.

And she's gone now. Because there are dog lovers who maintain that you should never euthanize a healthy dog for any reason. Yeah. There's a few people like that. You could put me in that group of extremists. I know because before I adopted Bonnie, I was one of them. It almost makes me tear up a little bit, just thinking about the number of clients I've

had in that situation who have never have just broken down in my office or on a Zoom call saying, I was the person who said, I would never do this. Patchell said, well, you never know, she's the best person in this article. I said there are no heroes in this note. This is the hero. The woman who's like a priestess for the dog killing religion. I love her. My clients, like people who come to me and are like, I want to kill my dog, but I would

feel too bad. And she's like, no, you should do it. I will love her. She what do you think? Okay. You know how when you like make a political donation or something, you have to like list your occupation. What do you think she puts?

A dog trainer. Yeah. A trainer. Yeah. And escort to the afterlife. And there's always going to be something else to try. Alexander and McMillan told me there will always be one more trainer, one more behaviorist, one more medication.

Alexander often tells her clients, you need to try everything that's reasonable for you, not everything. I thought if I love Bonnie, don't get a fucking dog, like if it's too much, don't fucking get one. By the way, by the way, you should be able to do this for adopted children as well. Yeah. Sometimes they're fucked up. What do you, what do you want?

What do you want from me? I can say that I am adopted. And I currently would they would your parents have considered doing this? No, I was, I was very good. Yeah, my sister and I were very good kids, but you know, it's just look, it's just, yes, you should try everything reasonable within your power to love the child you adopted. But like, let's not go crazy here. Okay.

Yeah. You have to, you know, you have to give yourself permission to, to stand up for yourself. I thought if I loved Bonnie enough, trained her enough to help her feel safe enough, she would get better. But like losing Lulu's tagline reads, love alone isn't enough to cure an aggressive animal living in fear. I think the Lulu's are the most loved pets of all. Alexander said trying is hard, but I think to stop trying is much harder.

This is great. This is a boutique excuse service for people who get rid of their fucking bed. This is literally, she's starting a new religion where you just killed up like communion is killing a dog. I love her. I'm obsessed with her. I like, you know, a lot of people are like, I want to smoke a blunt with this bitch. No, we do.

The dog killing priestess is awesome. We love her sometime after I sit. I hope she shows up with a flowing robe and just a fucking necklace of Chihuahua skulls around her neck. I love that these are the most loved animals of all. I actually killing your dog is the highest honor you could pay it. I love about the dog killing, about the dog killing priestess is that like she has like the personality and like values of like a Babylonian warlord.

But she just had to be born like now and live in like some like bullshit like blue city and have some like, yeah, like liberal job and it's like how do I transpose that personality onto this world and this set of values. And she found a way. The last two paragraphs here, sometime after I said goodbye to Bonnie, I took a trip to my parents' house in Massachusetts. After months of pandemic separation, I was reunited with my family and our dog, Lady, a goofy 10 year old Beagle, lady, if only you knew as soon as she steps into the house,

click the fucking Terminator vision, just zeros in on lady, just out of the way. Your Beagle gives them to me. Your foster dog is dead. Wolfie's fine. Bonnie's fine. When I stopped through the front door, the click, click, click of her nails on the tile floor sent me into a panic, unaware of my newfound fear. She lazily plopped down by my side, her face much grayer and body much rounder than Bonnie's.

Her face is gray and she's around. Wait, wait, her family let Lady get gray and fat? Time to go. Sorry. No, this is not good. I didn't love that dog enough. I need to get them a curved sword from the dog killing church. Oh, man.

I stopped over to pet her and though I'd known Lady since she was a puppy, marveled at how gentle she was. My heart rate slowed and something clicked. Lady was a healthy dog, clearly Bonnie was not. I couldn't possibly picture her acting so carefree. I miss Bonnie dearly and desperately wish I could have watched her dart around my parents' backyard. But they're solace in knowing she isn't afraid anymore.

Yeah, she's not anything anymore. She's nothing now. You took her fear away. So there we go. The dog killing habits of the upper middle class. Thank you so much Slate.com. You never fail to come through. I want to subscribe to them just for everything they've given up.

They've been feeding us content for years now. I love them. We should put a link in the description if you want to join the dog killing religion. If you think it's right for you. Next live show, we will let the dog killing church table in the venue. Sorry, DSA, there's a new way forward. What's so stunning about this article is A, that she wrote it in the first place, which is astonishing to me.

B, that so many people would congratulate her on how brave she is. Look, taking the story at face value, sometimes the dog is fucked up. I don't know what to tell you. If you can't live with it, either you just push it out of your car or upstate and go you're free now or you take it to the vet. It's a terrible thing to do. At no point in this article is she like, and this is why you should not adopt dogs on a whim.

At no point is there a lesson learned here at all. The only lesson she learned is that she loved your dog too much to allow it to keep living. That's the lesson. It's not like, yeah, really consider before you get in a dog and get one that a responsible rescue agency will give you a week to a trial period or just make sure that the dog fits your lifestyle. Don't adopt a hyperactive dog if you don't need a hyperactive lifestyle. Don't adopt a really energetic dog or a really big dog if you live in the fucking city.

I don't know what to say about that, but I think one thing is sure, the lady did nothing wrong and she shouldn't feel guilty at all. Absolutely. Especially not writing the article. That was the least questionable thing about all of this. It's like the BTK killer sending letters to the cops. Yeah. How did she, how did, how did I get caught?

Well you wrote, you wrote the article in Slate.com lady. I don't know what to tell you. I gotta go. I gotta go study the dog killing Torah for my dog. We went on. We finally become a man. We went along today. That's that's three full reading series for you, but none as good as the power of the

dog. I like, I had high expectations for that, but that was like the Lulu part, the losing Lulu Facebook group part of it kicked it up into another, another level of the stratosphere. Really fucking God, I 10,000 members and growing every day, every single day. New members. I can't wait to see the new Indiana Jones movie where Indy's fighting them. Yeah. Yeah.

No, that was beyond my expectations. I, I really like, I went into it and was like, okay, this is bad as people say, hey, like I didn't read it on purpose. And it's like, no, it's like worse. It's way worse. All right. That does it for today's episode. Until next time guys.

Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Now I want to be your dog, now I want to be your dog, now I want to be your dog. Now I want to be your dog, now I want to be your dog.