Chapo Trap House - 534 - Cranks For Thee (6/22/21)

Episode Date: June 22, 2021

NYC mayoral elections are tomorrow so we give our final review of the candidates - not great! Then we check in with a Chapo favorite we’ve not discussed in quite a bit but are happy to return to, offering a tentative defense of perhaps The Baseball Crank’s best ever take. Finally, a long and surprisingly thoughtful discussion of modern male intimacy.

Greetings, friends. It's Chapeau. We're back again. It's me, Matt and Felix, coming to you on the day before New York City is mayoral primary. Who you guys got? What are you thinking? Right now, it looks like Eric Adams is the favorite. My general consensus on how to vote tomorrow is rank the whoever you want to vote for, however you want, but just don't vote for Adams or Andrew Yang. If you rank the same candidate five times, it counts as five votes. If you really want Eric Adams to win, I think Eric Adams says what it takes to win. I think, so you think about like what the job of New York City mayor is, and it's that everyone hates you and constantly disrespects you, and you're also the weirdest person in the city. Eric Adams has

that because like I consider his front-runner moment was when the news came to his son's house and told him how disgusting it was, and he was like, no, yeah, no, I'm gross. This is my house, my house smells bad. And then ran an audit on what was in his refrigerator because Eric Adams, of course, is a vegan, and they found all kinds of smoked salmon in the refrigerator of what was clearly his son's house. I mean, the guy lives in New Jersey, but yeah, you're right. He's already doing the job of being New York City mayor, which is just to have basically to just get clout on. Yeah, yeah, just like you sit in an office with your legs open and people queue up to just give you squarely kick you in the nose over and over again. They should replace the mayor's

office. They should replace the desk there with a dunk tank. And if you're a citizen of New York, you should be able to sign up to get in line to dunk the mayor into the tank. And if you want to skip the line, because obviously it's going to be very long, you can pay and that money can go into the city budget. And that would make the mayor of New York, even if he did nothing else the rest of the time, more useful than any of them have ever been, because they would at least be raising fucking revenue. The last mayor who like people liked for any period of time was Giuliani, and that's like you can't cheat death because because he presided over the apocalypse. But now yeah, because he was fucking master Blaster in barter town for a year and a half. Master Blaster

runs barter town. Yeah, well, I mean, but it's like you can't cheat death. And it's like if you you owe like a debt. And now I would consider Giuliani the most disrespected man in America. Oh, yeah, the FBI showed up at his house that they were just like tooling around through his shit like he's Richard Jewel. He went from like, yeah, being beloved by everyone to still carrying the curse of the New York mayors, like going around like butt dialing reporters, like his teeth falling out, just something gross and confusing like David Ross said happening every two weeks. But Eric Adams is perfect for that because like, there's so much weird shit about him, like the thing of him referring to himself in third person because he keeps a diary. This

is a lot of people writes about himself like he's the protagonist of a fucking novel. Yeah, Eric Adams is treated very rudely by the New York Post when they claim that my bed was sloppy and unmade. I keep tight corners on it every morning. Like you're calling your adult son on the phone and you're like, hey, like a bunch of guys that hate me are going to come to your house and call it gross and look at everything. You have to let me do that. Okay. Yeah. They're going to be coming through your shit like Michael Tracy at fucking Kurt Eichenwald's garage sale. Remember that? Yeah. It's exactly like that. That'll be fun for you. It's like people were like clouding on the shoes he had. Yeah. Yeah. They were like, what are those? He had like Air Force

Ones, but for like teams that are no longer part of the NBA. It was awesome. And also like, there's so much about him that's perfect for this, like his personality, like how he started the race and he's like, I will not be playing. I'm against the race card, like to do very antiquated term to say in 2021. But then like the moment that like people are exploiting a ranked choice, like Garcia and Yang, he's like, oh, so you want to keep a black guy out of office. He literally said today that Garcia and Yang forming a pact to like be like Garcia, be like the number two choice of Yang voters to form a sort of coalition against Adams is sort of like leading in the polls. He said that that harken back to the days of the poll tax and literacy test. Jim Crow. Yeah,

he's awesome. He's right. Like he should just make him. After he said that, you should make him mayor. Did you also know that Adams used to be pretty close to Luis Veracan or they were allied at one point? I mean, I mean, honestly, I'm making the case that you should vote for him right now. But I would like already there pretty much. He comes from a robust tradition of like black conservative, like nationalism. Yeah. Yeah. He's sort of like a kind of Clarence Thomas in that respect. I think there's also something perfect about him becoming mayor in this moment, because after the explosion of the Black Lives Matter summer last year and all this ferment and the twilight of the debungler era, this like big bird scarecrow motherfucker, reenacting John

Lindsey's presidency to a T. And then we get this huge field of candidates, no clear favorite. They have ranked choice voting for the first time to like make it more quote unquote democratic. And the likely outcome is that this fucking former cop who lives in New Jersey and has the politics of like the average Mike and the Mad Dog caller is going to get elected by the same coalition of voters who made Joe Biden, the Democrat nominee, older non whites in the outer boroughs are gonna just like in South Carolina are gonna they don't care about any of the bullshit. Everybody is talking about all the issues, all of these, all of these like supposedly heightened political stakes. They're gonna fucking vote for the machine, Paul, the way that they did for Biden in 2020,

because all of this ferment of politics that we invest ourselves in, it doesn't permeate beyond this layer of the people who are most online, but least likely to vote in a mayoral fucking primary, or maybe are likely to vote, but are not numerically significant. They're just not the bit, they're not the center of gravity of the electorate in the city. Well, any more than they were in the country. I watched a very interesting movie last week. Maybe you guys heard of it. It's called buck breaking. I gotta, I want to watch it very much. There are some, there are some, there are some different choices I would have made if I directed it. I'm trying. I've made it award nominated documentary. That's true. You have. I would love your

take on buck breaking because like I'm not going to comment on whether I agree with a thesis or not. I don't feel like that's constructive, but it's like, if it was my job to make that argument, I would have done it like, let's be honest, judge Joe Brown has a big role as like an expert in it. And a lot of what he says just makes, there's this part where he's like, yeah, if you look at the most popular genre of music, it's rap and hip hop, but it hasn't changed for 30 years. And then you go to places, this is verbatim, by the way, I wrote it down because it was sort of, then if you go to places like Japan, Paris, or Liverpool, people are doing it. But then a Japanese guy will be, will be listening to it and he'll try to dance and he

doesn't know how to dance. He just jumps up and down. But the reason is all those countries are LGBT. It just like, even if you were like, believe the central thesis of buck breaking, that doesn't even make sense as a sentence. I had to, it's so demented, but like, I like buck breaking and like some part, it's like, yes, you heard of your first, Felix likes to break buck. He loves it. He loves it. He loves buck breaking. It is like, it's okay. There are a lot of like black conservatives in America and their voice, like genuinely isn't heard a lot. And I don't mean black conservatives, like a black guy who happens to agree with Donald Trump. I mean, like a very unique thing, black conservatism.

And I consider buck breaking like a continuation of this tradition that, you know, Farrakhan is a part of. And I, even though it's not exactly the same thing, there are many strains of it. And I, I am very interested in that line of thinking. And there's something we're going to talk about later in the show that's like, it's a white guy doing the buck breaking pieces, but doing a shittier job and is less like interesting or charismatic than Tariq Nishid. And it's like, I don't know if I like really wanted like, would want that like represented like, like corally, I mean, I don't really have a say in it. But like, I do think it should be in the New York times, like more people believe that than believe what the fuck, whatever the

fuck Brett Stevens does. And it's like, it's like genuinely a very interesting, like uniquely American line of thinking. And I like, I like do kind of think people should watch it. Like I don't agree with the central thesis, obviously, but it's like, it is like, I've met a lot of like normal people who are like good people and like, they're nice people in their lives. And I wouldn't really call them like personally bigoted, but like, do believe like a lot of the shit that I saw in that movie. And it's like, you just, if you pay attention to American media, there's just no representation of that in there. And so when, you know, in an electoral situation like this, people I feel like are constantly taken by surprise. And it's like, no, there are millions of Americans who

like, even okay, if they're not exactly there, they're not exactly where buck breaking is, or they're not exactly where if you want to go further to the right, they're not exactly where Farrakhan is, or if you want to go further towards the center, like they're not exactly there. But they're like broadly in this sort of like, the uniquely black idea of conservatism. Well, you heard it here first, folks. Felix Biedermann endorses buck breaking for New York City mayor. Yeah, yeah. Buck breaking porn star and amateur politics. Well, it's like, you know why that movie is great is because when, when you consume something that isn't like conservative Inc. that's not like mainstream conservatism, like sort of a more outsidery conservatism,

and they'll do that thing where it's like, they say one thing where you're like, oh, that's completely true and no one really covers it. And then it will be like, the next thing is like, and Japanese guys just jump up and down with their dance. And Japan is an LGBTQ nation. I don't know what the fuck hit me. I mean, and also I'd like to go back to judge Joe Brown's original statement that hip hop and rap music hasn't changed much in 30 years changed a lot. I mean, like it's, it's, it's, yeah, I don't, that doesn't, that doesn't hold water. Judge, Judge Brown is like, I think he's just like old. Well, yeah. I mean, they used to be talking about having a house party or, you know, what to do when a fine female steps into the wedding and you've been eating too much. And now it's just sort of

mumbling about taking painkillers. I got obsessed with Judge Brown because I think he's like an a Biden type thing where he's like sundowning. And I watched Kwame Brown. Have you seen his podcast? Oh my God, the, you know, the shit he was going in on fucking, what's his name on Robert Arenas and Matt Barnes. That was like, that was, dude, he cut a promo on those guys with the hardest I've ever seen. No, that guy goes awesome. He said, he's like, you guys keep tapping jokes about me and basketball. Then he goes, Matt Barnes, I got a joke about your motherfucking life. You Oh, he's, he's awesome. Like, I hope he has kids media. He's very, he's very good at that. But Judge Joe Brown was on a recent episode and like Kwame Brown starts it off and he's talking about

that. He's like, um, yeah, you may have heard there was like a sort of controversy with me and Charlemagne. A lot of people are mad at me and Judge Joe Brown's like, all right, no, I know exactly what you're talking about. I'm going to keep this brief and then talks for 30 minutes. And the thing he starts off with is, yeah, during the sixties, during the anti-war movement, what people thought was if you raised a boy like a girl, war would stop. It's like this whole insane 30 minute thing, like rambling, like Biden-esque thing about like the sixties and like gender politics. But, um, I do think, uh, I don't know, we need more of that in mainstream media because it is like when I looked at the comments and a lot of people watch us, the comments were like,

I'm a 62 year old nurse. I agree with everything Judge Brown said. You know, like there's fucking stuff that, there's stuff that you've never heard of if you've like lived a certain life and there are millions of adherents to it in America and you'd never know if you only watch mainstream media. Well, we've got a pretty far field from the New York City Mayor's but, uh, yeah, I know, I mean, I just, just back, if you're voting tomorrow, I'd just say uh, anyone other than Yang and Adams, I mean, they're all goofy, they all stank, uh, you know, Maya Wiley seems to be the progressive choice, but she seems like an absolute sap to me. I mean, she's like spent most of the primary shitting on Bernie Sanders. But, you know, if you want to rank

her number one, go ahead. It just seems like all the real estate money and like, uh, police shit is behind uh, Andrew Yang and Eric Adams. Um, but just another, another, uh, just little development in the New York City local politics sort of, sort of bore most of the country. But, you know, I mean, we, this is, this is the number one podcast about the number one city in America, New York. So I'd like to just continue for a little bit. Uh, the city council candidate who got, um, uh, revenge porn to an S and M dungeon and, uh, and a state of, uh, sort of erotic bondage and ecstasy, you know, that was leaked to the New York Post by his own campaign. His name is Zach Wiener. You folks heard of this? I saw that. I mean, I'm having trouble with this one. I mean,

I mean, if I wanted to be a conspiracy theorist, I would say that this guy who has a total long shot candidacy, like why would they release it? This guy is like, had no real chance of winning. Like, why did this come out? I don't know. I don't know. I thought his, uh, his response to it. Come on. I mean, I don't know that, but my guess, if I had the guess, I would say that he fucking put it out there himself. Yeah. I thought his response to it, um, showed a lot of class and dignity and just being like, so I did a thing. And, you know, like, I don't feel guilty about it or bad. No, you shouldn't. You shouldn't. Yeah, exactly. I don't feel guilty about it or bad. It's almost like I wouldn't mind if it got out there and then my campaign got more attention because of that.

I'm sort of wondering if someone with a humiliation fetish wouldn't run for city council as part of a strategy for a grand denouement in which he is shamed on a national level in a way that really, really fires his, uh, gears, turns his crank. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I mean, takes all kinds. New York politics is cool. Everyone should get to be mayor. Everyone should get to be a councilman at some point in their lives. Well, actually, speaking of crank, uh, this is the perfect segue into an old friend of ours, an old friend of the show. I'm talking about really, um, I'm actually, uh, recording this show now on the original Blue Yeti mic I got to, uh, when we started being like, oh, hey,

audios should be sound good on a podcast. And it still has the baseball crank sticker on the base of it. So the baseball crank is honestly like a foundational figure to the chapeau mythos. And honestly, like, I feel guilty because we haven't talked about crank in a long time. Very, it's been a while. Well, the fuckers act like they forgot about crank. But he came back this week with a, a pseudo controversy that I loved because it involved, I would say, probably the only funny thing that baseball crank has ever tweeted. I mean, honestly, give the guy credit for, for finding a, that squirrel finding a nut eventually after years of posting.

Yeah. He, I mean, he's done unintentionally funny things before. I think he did one of the funniest things I've ever seen, which was his blog post on September 12th, 2001, why baseball still matters. So this was, um, okay. I mean, you guys, uh, I'm sure you guys saw the note, the new, the news that, um, the, the Biden's dog champ was, uh, is no more. He was, you know, obviously, whether it was behavioral issues or not, I don't know. I mean, but dog killing is back in a big way. It's the hottest thing. I mean, we are trend centers here. We, we shown, we shown a light onto the huge American subculture of people who adopt dogs to kill them. And has it spread to the White House? I don't know. But, um,

was there a woman in the room with champ in a, uh, in some sort of dark ceremonial robe with a jade inlay bagger doing some sort of, uh, uh, eldritch chant before she, uh, split them open? I mean, we don't know for sure. There's no way of finding out. We don't know. Well, champ is going to live in that, that, that big old country farm in the sky. Um, and you know, like people are, people are, you know, a lot of prayers up for the Biden family, a lot of, but, um, curiously, no word on major. We're folk. Where's major? Every time I go to the debates days, I'm going to say, where's major? Where's major Biden? Where's major at? Champ is no more, but major is still around somewhere. We don't know. Um, so yeah, I feel like, I think

this is probably how the Trump people felt, you know, when the, the ban infection was pushed out and the Javanca factions started winning and he just started governing like my Marco Rubio as if he would have done anything else. Um, I feel like I was part of the contingent of patriotic Americans who loved huge, dirty, poorly behaved dogs. And I feel like the globalists have sort of killed champ. Well, uh, baseball crank has been killing it. Uh, you know, I mean, he's, he's, he's keke. I mean, champ has been, he's died once, but he's been killed again by the baseball crank in the following tweet. So Dan McLaughlin, the baseball crank tweeted, uh, over the weekend, uh, champ, Biden dies, major lives on the Biden family tragedy in miniature.

And to which he received a title wave of outraged replies, including from, I'm just, just right after the, I'm looking at Tommy Vitor and John Favreau who replied to baseball crank, you are a truly awful person. And then Favreau says, imagine how utterly broken you must be to proudly display that level of public cruelty to other human beings. Obama made jokes about drone striking teenagers. Yeah. Like you probably wrote those fucking jokes to the correspondent center. The Jonas brothers are here. They're out there somewhere. Sasha and Malia are huge fans, but boys don't get any ideas. I have two words for you. Predator drones. You will never see it coming. Yeah, no, it's like, give me a fucking break here. I mean, like, I'm sorry, Joe

Biden's president and like, I'm sorry, the dog dying is in a national tragedy. And also, like, when you run for president and like your chief point of appeal to the public and is that your son died a long time ago and you feel like fucking sad about it. Like, I mean, that was a major part of Joe Biden's fucking said, that's why we can't have universal health care. Yeah. I mean, like, I, I don't even think that I feel like the consolation prize you get for like, you know, that world word we all love no accountability for these people for Joe Biden, the guy who supported the Iraq war or the guy who, you know, is behind every major piece of financial deregulation, blah, blah, blah, we could go on forever. You guys all know everything he's done. The consolation

for people like that sticking around their entire and our entire fucking lives and just sometimes doing the bare minimum is that you get to make fun of them in their lives. Like, yeah, I don't respect this guy like as a person. And in fact, like his main utility to me is that he's just falling apart is the wheels are falling off of him. And like his life is kind of funny. And it's like you take that away. What do we have? And you know, it's weird. Like, I mean, obviously, it's not I don't think it's entirely the same people doing it. But it is funny to contrast the blue check media reactions to the slate story about losing Luna, where they're all like, so brave of you to share this story. Thank you so much for sharing. This is, you know,

it's a hard choice, but you made the right one. We're all staying with you. And then baseball crank our boy crank tweets a joke about a dead dog. And these people, they lose their minds. They can't handle it. They're like, I can't I can't imagine doing a human being doing something so profoundly cruel to someone else. It's just like, look, it was a good joke. Okay, it was a good joke. And this is coming on the heels of a week where like there are fucking like copious leaked emails and text messages from Hunter, where he's calling his lawyer, the n word, and arranging trists with escorts with his cousin, who's like his female cousin. He's asking for dates and with a caveat, no, no yellows, please. And then he said that amazing line about like,

I need someone who's very attuned to evil and against it. No, that's what the cousin said. These are all these women are like me. They're, they're aware. They're distrustful and very wary of evil. I love it. I love it when Irish are human eight balls. They're made entirely of cocaine. Like, dude, we are both equally attuned to evil. And we are very, very wary of it. But we're like two Irish American relatives talk to each other. And it's just like, you know, just it's like watching a great duet of lies. I mean, like the text exchanges with his cousin were weird because it seemed like he was trying to set him up with dates with her friends. But it could have been also, I don't know, something a little bit more nefarious.

Absolutely. It looked like he was ordering off of the pizza menu. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Some guys like to buy their wives. Yeah. Yeah. But like, are you telling me that if you couldn't get, uh, if you had a machine that the Pentagon had built that would allow like some sort of temporal, like quantum rifle that allowed you to shoot Hunter in the head, and it would like pull from another dimension that they wouldn't do that. They would do that in a fucking heartbeat. I mean, like, I'm sorry, if you can't see the, the, well, like there's the parallel in that, like someone else pointed this out, but there's the parallel in that Joe Biden gave both of his son's dog names. Yes. I wish I remember

you said that. Hunter and Bo, that's such a good point. And then like champ and major, I mean, like Hunter is the one he keeps biting people. He can't stop biting people. He keeps going to biting rehab, but he just won't stop acting up. He won't stop being bad. Well, well, um, major has been doing some really, like really good and really soulful, uh, stick piles in the backyard, helping him get over his need to bite people. I've been, I've been taking some time to work on me and digging holes in the backyard. I've been doing a lot of that lately. It helps me center myself. Yeah. Champ bought it, brought in a dead squirrel from the backyard, and it just sold for $750,000 at a gallery in Soho. So, I mean, obviously like, look, everyone's

mad at the baseball cranks. And I was just like, look, fair is fair. A funny tweet is a funny tweet. Um, however, baseball crank, I mean, you know, obviously not being one to, um, enjoy humor or, and also obviously someone who always needs to have the last word has gone and shot himself in the foot by writing a piece for the national review in which he attempts to explain this tweet away in a way that it like makes it like seem like he wasn't joking. So, I mean, I wanted to give, I wanted to give this week's Amazon gift card to the baseball crank, but no, he had to go and explain the joke rather than just letting it stand on its own two feet. So I'm going to read now here from the book of crank. This is a baseball crank writing in the

national review, the Shakespearean father son tragedy of the Biden family. And like, obviously this is not exactly new territory for the baseball crank or anyone to plum. This is very old hat at this point, but I just like, I just, I just love the way the crank attempts to, um, uh, defend his, um, rather funny observation from the slings and arrows of the Pod Save Johns. So he writes here, it was announced Saturday that Joe Biden's dog champ has died at the age of 13. By all accounts, the family German Shepherd was, as we would say, a good boy. Dogs are with us too briefly and saying goodbye to them is inevitable, but never easy. That leaves the family with another German Shepherd major who was kicked out of the White

House for a month after reportedly biting a Secret Service agent and a National Park Service employee. On the eve of Father's Day, the contrast between the two dogs, one uncomplicatedly beloved, the other a constant source of trouble, put me in mind of the Shakespearean tragedy at the heart of Biden, of the Biden family, Joe's son's bow and hunter. We've seen many sides of Joe Biden over the past half century, and there is no more sympathetic side than that of the wounded, grieving father. Uh, he goes on here, uh, Joe was a man of boundless ambition and self-regard. Elected to the Senate in his 20s, full of quick-tongued Irish Blarney, able to talk at length without tiring, convinced that he could become president in his 40s as the young voice of the

Baby Boom generation. Blah, blah, blah, going on and on. And he goes, uh, talks about Beau, and then he talks, Hunter was another story, a drug addict, a repeat peddler of influence on his dad's good name, a guy who used the N-word. It is natural for a father, busy with his career, to be indulgent of sons who have lost the rest of the family as toddlers. It's not hard to picture Joe seeing that the family was in good hands with Beau, being all the more indulgent of Hunter. Or maybe that's all armchair hogwash. We all have known the wise and uptight parents who did everything right, and one or more, one or more of their kids just got away from them. Sometimes there's nothing you can do. Sometimes you just gotta, gotta put them down. Do you think that's,

uh, like Crank's situation? Like he has one son who also, like, like Crank does, every picture of him looks like it's a colorized erogatype of someone from before World War I, where he's just like that uncanny looking, and he's like some type of like bullshit conservative lawyer. But then he has one son who like got an earring, and he doesn't speak to him. He has an evil, there's an evil Crank. It's, yeah, he doesn't even like baseball. Yeah, he hates baseball. He likes foot, footy, and he has an earring. So he goes on, he says, uh, then the tragedy. The first born son died. Beau got a brain tumor, and as with the brain tumor that took my mother 19 years ago, there was no good news along the way. He died in the spring of 2015. Bearing a child is brutal. Doing it twice

is worse. My dad buried two sons, much like Biden, one of them in 1972, one in 2010. The second one broke him. My dad was in a home by the time he was the age Joe is now. Ooh, so like baseball Crank's like really turning it around. He's like, Oh, you don't think I can joke about family tragedy? Well, let me one up you. He just standpoint theoryed your ass. Yeah. Baseball Crank is doing my favorite thing that people do when they argue online where they're like, Oh yeah, you think my life's easy? Well, my grandparents died. And they're like 38. Yeah, you know, yeah, you're like 75. Of course, your parents are dead. I'm an or I have the baseball crank and I'm an orphan now. Well, yeah, but I mean, his brother's also died. So he's got that going for him. That's got a little extra. It's

true. I mean, like, that's the thing. It's like, I don't really, I think it's sort of lame to moralize against the baseball crank, but I just don't get it. It's like, all he had that article where he's bragging about his dad writing the letter to Reagan about apartheid. Oh, baseball crack. Yeah, do you remember that? No, what was that again? Remember his like, he's like, my dad wrote a letter. My dad was a New York City cop who wrote a letter to Reagan about the situation. Oh, yeah, veto sanctions or whatever. No, it's like, it's evident why he's like a bad guy or at least like believes bad things. But I don't know. I don't know what I think this thing where people like, Matt, you pointed it out how it's like equally lame to when people would get offended on behalf

of the Trumps. Like, honestly, it's like, come on. Like, remember when they were saying that Barron might have seen the picture of Kathy Griffith holding Trump's fake separate ed and that was come. It's like, do you like defense? Do you like having to deal with that? Sanctimony is bullshit. And the answer is, I only don't like being on the other end of it. I love doing this. This is their favorite thing to do to wet, to pretend to be morally superior to their opponents. That's their favorite thing that they get frustrated when Republicans do it because they think that they're cheating because they think they're not being honest because they know in their heart that they love doing that stuff and they're being disingenuous. But they want to

be doing this. They love it. Well, they love it way more than doing jokes about someone. That's kind of uncomfortable. Getting to get offended about jokes. That's their fucking comfort zone. Yeah. That's what they love doing. This would be such a better country if there was just like an agreement that all these people are like disgusting. And if we don't get any. Thanks. I'm telling you. The Eric Adams. The Eric Adams nation. It's just like, I feel like if you reach a certain level of power, it's okay to make fun of their intensely personal terms even dealing with family tragedy because it's just like, look, he's president of the United States. You fucking mounted a spiral staircase made of human skulls to get where you are. You have broken free of humanity in most

respects. You've turned into a reptile. You treat the rest of humanity with an Olympian cannibalistic disdain. Why the hell can't we do that too? Come on. I actually think it's funny though that Crank has to put this in terms of a Shakespearean tragedy and just be like, actually, I'm being quite sympathetic to the Biden family because I too acknowledge that it's hard to lose a child. To have a child die. It's like, hey, I'm not made of stone here, people. Also, yeah, you're right. I do remember that Baseball Crank's dad was like a fucking hard-nosed New York City cop in the Bronx in the 60s and 70s. He was like the Dudley Smith of the East Coast. Michael Corley on shot. Michael Corley on shot his dad in the head in an Italian restaurant. No, I was going

to say, his dad was really broken up when he had to shoot his friend Frank Serpico for talking out of school. He goes on to compare the Biden family to the Kennedys and talk about how the Kennedys had two good sons that had to be put down. Then they ended up with Ted, who was the fat kid in the family. Ted, the fat kid in the family that valued looks and vigor, the one who almost got kicked out of Harvard for cheating, the one who destroyed his own White House hopes and he killed a girl and covered it up. Even that did not mend his boozy, womanizing ways for decades. Well, he still got to get a ding in on the Kennedy family while he's going at the Bidens. I mean, you can criticize Ted Kennedy, but he was the inspiration for the film Tommy Boy.

So he goes on to write, with no good son to inherit the Biden legacy, the black sheep of the family assumed unexpected prominence that nobody had planned or wanted. Joe, unable to step back and bask in the glow of Beau's rise the way George H. W. Bush did after 1992, decided to run again himself in 2020, visibly well past his prime. Hunter embarrassed him at every possible term, but Joe would never turn on the only remaining son, the last remnant of the family he brought with him in 1972. No matter what ethical compromises he demanded, no matter how many people warned him about what Hunter was doing. We can blame Joe Biden for all the risks he is willing to run and the things he is willing to overlook in order to let his son and brother Jim cash in with shady

foreigners and for an approach to nepotism that makes a mockery of democratic crocodile tears about the Trumps. But that is all political fair game and it always is. We can't blame Joe Biden for having an unshakable devotion to his last remaining son or for the independent misbehavior of a kid who is now 51 years old. Baseball crank kind of spitting facts here, not gonna lie. I mean like that is, he is sort of dead on here because it's like, isn't that one of the most hilarious things about Hunter? Like it's equally lame, the Libs making like getting mad at Crank, it's equally lame to like the fucking shithead maggot people who are like, Hunter said the n-word, like you don't care, like how many times do you think Donald Trump said it? Like what the

fuck? But the funny thing is that Hunter is a 51 year old man who is saving memes about his dad saying the n-word. Yep, like that's hysterical. He's sending it to his lawyer. Yeah, to his fucking, like his poor fucking lawyer, just sick of the shit. And like that was, that was always the thing where I thought that like Biden was, he is the true king of whites. Like there are so many Bidens in this country and very few Trumps. Biden, you know, kissing his 52 year old son on the lips for way too long and being like, you're my most handsome little guy. That's what, you know, that's, there are a lot of people who do that in this country and that's really the funny thing about them. One of the many funny things about them. Crank finishes out by writing,

the tragedy of Joe Biden in the years when he ought to be enjoying his retirement is that being a dad means the family doesn't always work out the way you planned it. Sometimes you can't retire when you wanted to and the things you would do for your kids sometimes go beyond the things you might ever have done just for yourself. Joe Biden would have done all of this for himself and also like, I'm sorry, Joe's having the time of his life. He is so happy. Did you see him? He was like, him at the G7 was like, it's like when you bring a dog to the dog park. It was great for him. St. Patrick's Day. Like, he's been dreaming about doing this stupid bullshit forever. He loves it. This is the happiest he's ever been. Well, I mean,

just, it's been too long since we've talked about Crank. I mean, he was such an important part about the early rise of Chappo and it's just, I'd like to see more of his little baseball face everywhere. I miss him. I do miss him a lot. I, you know, like, I guess like, I don't know. I guess we have two sons. We have two sons that we brought with us when we first came here, unlike the Bidens. We have Crank and we had Rod. We have Rod, but we do a lot of the other people. Let's not forget Caleb Jacobi, our other unofficial son. When was the last time we read a Jeff Jacobi? Yeah, no. I mean, Caleb, Caleb, Caleb thinks up his ways. He's a DJ now. He's not running away from home anymore. But yeah, Rod and baseball Crank. I mean, just two giants and, you know, I mean, I just, I mean,

Crank is a hilarious dork in so many ways, but I mean, more nerdy, all the fucking people getting angry at him for being like, oh, God, how could you make fun of Joe Biden's dog and his dead son or whatever? It's just like, okay. I mean, maybe if Joe Biden never ever talked about Bo because he was like, that grief is private, but no, he shares it every chance he gets. No, yeah. I mean, I'm not shitting him on him for that either. People process grief in different ways and he's a blubbery Irish guy who doesn't drink. So it's got to come out somewhere. None of no one who's elected is really like, you should never really see the Missy human being really. Yeah. There are a few, very few Jeremy Corvins out there who are genuinely beautiful, beautiful people,

but for the most part, whether it's Joe, whether it's Donald Trump, whether it's, you know, fucking Chris Coons or whoever that's not, none of them are real people. None of these people like make the decisions or see the world the same way that like a norm, even a normal weird person that you would know does. They're freaks. They're one of the ways to know that is that if you've ever seen a picture of a politician that they post on Twitter to show them watching a sporting event across the Anglosphere, you see someone like on a bar stool three feet away from like a fucking portable television. Like these people do not sit and relax and enjoy things like sporting events the way that you and I do. They don't relate to their time on earth the same way. Yeah,

the way, do you remember like those disgusting pictures that Scott Walker would be in post where he's like, yeah, his horrifying ham meals. Well, he'd be like watching the brewers with my sons and he's just, yeah, he's just standing straight up like this. He looks like he's a coat hanger in his polo shirt and he's eating like he's eating like a perfectly room temperature brought and a hot beer with his shitty kids. Matt, another standard watching tactic for Western politicians is it will be like instead of like the tiny portable television that they're like staring into, it's like a big sort of den, sort of TV style like furnished basement room. And it's like an 80 inch television, but they're standing right in front of it like bolt upright.

Hands in their pockets. Yeah, they love standing in front of large televisions too. Like they're just like, they're so close that all they're seeing is just pixels move around. Yeah. Yeah. And if they do sit, it's never in a chair that anyone would sit into watching an entire sporting event. That's why America rejected Mitt Romney was because he was like, he was openly that. The last guy since HW who is openly that thing where it's like, yeah, my favorite game is this thing where we torture a horse and make it dance. Remember what he said? His favorite food was hot dog. My favorite meat was hot dog. His hot dog. Yeah. My second favorite meat is hamburger. Yeah. Yeah. And he also referred

to sports sport as he sport. He could refer to sports as sport. That was was that the same interview where he's like, I like jokes and things to be humor. Yeah, sure. Awesome. I wish I could vote for him. So moving on from the baseball crane, I'd like to go into this week's official reading series, which is a, it's a rare one because it's a tweet thread that I thought was so wonderful that I think, and I think for a lot of reason it warrants, including in a reading series, Canon. But going back to the beginning, Felix mentioned that like this is the, a certain style of kind of weepy white European conservative version of buck breaking. But the main thread of this, the sweet thread I'm going to get into is being gay with your homies. Yeah. Or rather

not, it's not, let me correct myself. It is not about being gay with your homies. It is about being perceived as being gay with your homies when in actuality, what you were doing is cultivating a sense of intimate male partnership and friendship that because of the acceptance of homosexuality is now coded as being gay. Whereas it used to be you could just like oil wrestle with your friends and love them and write, you know, letters and poetry to your best friend all the time. Die in each other's arms fighting the Macedonians. Yeah, exactly. Like, yeah, just get gas together in a trench in World War One. Okay, so this is a thread by Peg. This is a Peg, Peg Obrey, Peg Obrey, Peg, we'll just call him Peg. He's, this guy's been around for a while. He's, he lives

in France. And like I said, he's this, he's a species of conservative that I wish we had more of in America, which is the sort of like these restorationists kind of pro-monarchy types that have been crying ever since the French Revolution, but they've never toughened up. And in that way, they remind me a lot of the left is because like they, the left in America is because they like, they stay losing all the time. And because of that, they haven't gotten smarter or tougher. They've just gotten like weepier and weepier. Yeah. I do like, I do have to say, you know, when I was reading this thread, it was like, you know, you look at the guy's bio, you look at where every, everywhere he writes, it's like, why can't that be Tarik Nishid?

He's doing this, but better. Like he's better at it. So I mean, like, yeah, like, I mean, you said at the beginning of the show, and I wasn't planning like, I wasn't planning on your impromptu review of Tarik Nishid's buck breaking, but you're right. This whole thread is like the white guy version of buck breaking. Yeah. It's like the exact same thing that like, yeah, it's shittier, but it's like the exact same thing that, that, that, that animates like the, the buck breaking narrative. But, but, so let's go into it's a peg here. So like the whole thing that kicked off this, this mega tweet thread is the New Yorker had some, some post about, just says here, the skeletons of 254 warriors from the fearsome sacred band of thieves were discovered

in a mass grave in Chironia. A number were buried with arms linked. If you look closely, you can see that some were holding hands. Now, you know, for, for fans of antiquity in classical Greek history, you know, the sacred band of thieves were pretty much, I mean, this was written about by contemporary historians as being, I mean, this is the whole sleight of hand he's doing in this thread, because I guess like, you know, they weren't gay in the sense that like modern gay people consider themselves gay, but they loved fucking each other. Well, they were love fucking men, like exclusively. At your average, like ancient warrior of antiquity, like elite forces, they were exactly like jock from seeking derangements. Well, Felix, you had a really good point that

like in, in, in the past, before this, this wretched modern era that we all live in, if you were a gay guy, like the gayest thing you could do was join the military of any country. And if you were real, and if you were like, like 100% like just a pussy destroyer, you would be, you could go into theater, you'd become an actor. No, yeah, that's the thing is like one, who is one of the greatest military leaders of all time, Frederick the Great. Frederick the Great, baby. Frederick the Great was gayer than any modern man. Like he was, if he saw a woman, he would be like, oh, fucking gross. Get that fucking shit out of here. Fuck you. I want to look at that fucking gash, get her out of here. Fucking throw up. Get me some dudes. And very tough guy, like brilliant

commander. But that was more the norm for like great military commanders. And like, like not even, you go even like to World War II, like was it Eisenhower, who is like, I think I'm going to leave my wife and have enough. I'm going to marry absolutely. In the middle, in the middle of the war, he sent his fucking resignation to Marshall and said, I'm in love with my Jeep driver and I'm getting divorced and I'm going to resign. And he just said, it's fucking World War II. Can you get it together? Like it's like not even gay, like sometimes, like even if they're not gay, like Queenie, like Patton. MacArthur, for God's sake. MacArthur. Patton. Patton of his outfits that he designed for himself. Patton wanted to have a custom made tank commander outfit that he designed

himself with like pinstrikes. Homo social relationships created the theatrical aesthetic that then was legitimized into being an open gay identity. Yeah. That he thinks is awful. But that was, yeah, before it was really an option. It's like, yeah, you'd go in the military and you'd go in front of like all these fucking poor conscripts who can't read in front of you and be like, places everybody, come on. It's like a mean theater guy and you were, you were still tough. But yeah, if you were like, I just like pussy, it's like, yeah, I'm going to put on a wig and become Gilbert and Sullivan. Yeah. Did you say Gilbert and Sullivan? No, I think Gilbert and Sullivan. I would walk back. Not really interested in Gilbert and Sullivan, but I would see a

Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera for sure. There's an amazing thing in Buckbreaking where like one of the experts is like, he is talking about this, like he is, is like a way better grasp on history than Peg and he's like, yeah, they were like gay soldiers in Greek antiquity. But then he like fucks up and he's like, and they would actually tie them together at the ankle if they loved each other. And then he goes, I think he's confusing the story of Achilles and Petropoulos with, yeah, he does that. And then he goes, and that's where the phrase tie together at the ankle comes from. And it's like, no, it's joint. I've never heard that phrase in my life. One time. But zero times. But I mean, his, the thing he starts with is right, that a lot of these guys were.

Well, what is the thing that they're stumbling over is that like, you know, homosexuality or just like the act itself of, right? It was not an act. It wasn't like a social identity. Of almost all of human civilization in almost every human civilization. It's just like, well, what Peg is complaining about is, and like a lot of these guys, like Rod Dreher, too, like I'm taking like the civic brand of conservative that is really obsessed with, you know, being afraid of gay culture, and now trans issues is like, they really want to go back to an old, an older way of being gay before gay identity was a thing that could be acknowledged. They thought it was a, it's a better superior way to be gay than the modern version. And I think that's what troubles in

the moment. Because it doesn't mean being gay. It doesn't, it doesn't involve the, the alienation from like a culture that you have some sort of fixation on. Like for guys like Rod and Peg, they're looking, they're looking at gay sex across, like longingly across this cultural divide, but they can't cross it because doing gay sex now means being gay. And that alienates them from a sense of themselves that they find very, very crucial. And they resent that that, they resent that's been taken from them. And the thing is, they're right. That is a thing that we don't have anymore. Yeah, like, like, you can't be like a guy, like a, like a, like a normal square John type with a wife and kids who nonetheless is primarily, primarily romantically interested

and sexually interested in liaisons with members of the same sex. Like that, that doesn't mean you're a gay guy. You're a straight guy who happens to have sex with men. That does suck. I mean, that should be an option that kind of conflict within you. That sucks. And I can see why you might get pissed, especially if you really hold on to like notions of traditional society, you feel, you feel like those give you a sense of meaning and like old religious notions give you a sense of identity. You don't want to trade them for the like, you know, the furred of pleasures of gay liberation. But man, wouldn't it be nice if you could? And who's fault is it? It's this culture that he is totally otherwise hates. So why wouldn't he want to blame that? Do you, do you, but do you

think like Peg or Rod would have the ability to be like a friend? Because they are fully modern people. Their fixation on that old way is, is a, it's a, it's fake. It is, it's synthetic. It is, it is itself a costume. Yeah. No, the thing they want, they couldn't handle either because they are like us, like we all are modern creatures. We are creatures of the world that we live in. And their whole project is doomed because it imagines that they can turn back into different people regressively. And you can't, the only way out is through. So, I mean, so Peg has a lot of thoughts on this. And like he kicks off this thread by saying, on top of being a stupid lie, the retconning of ancient male friendship as homosexuality has damaging implications today.

So right off the bat, he's claiming that the sacred band at Thebes were just good friends with each other. That is this, the fundamental like, uh, and like he, I guess it later posts, he backs away from it a little bit because he gets into that distinction between gay acts and gay identity. But that first post really does seem to be denying the well-established historic fact. Look at any Grecian urn. Each other. They've got buried in a giant daisy chain for Christ's sake. Yeah. Most Grecian urns, if you go to like the, the, the Met or any like established collection of, of the art of antiquity, uh, half of them just have shit that looks like Palma's Twitter feed. All right. So, uh, getting, getting into the thread, uh, Peg continues. He says,

it seems harder and harder to deny that the normalization of homosexuality has killed intimate male friendships. I like bronze age mantises spin on this. Okay. He's name checking bronze age mantis. Okay. First, they're perverted in the bronze age. Now they're turning into fucking insects. Uh, he, I enjoy the bronze age mantis spin on this, that the powers that be made strong male bonding impossible because it's too politically dangerous. Small bands of men bound together and do or die friendships can destroy a regime. I mean, I think, I think chopper trap house is a good, uh, chopper trap house in the 9-11 hijackers are like good examples of this phenomenon. Yeah. I, I also agree with bronze age mantis on

this point. Uh, the homies having fun, dudes having fun is, is dangerous and it seems increasingly taboo in our society. If you have to ask her, qui bono, who benefits? If you're three men, it's like one of you is an Eisenhower, one of you is a patent and one of you is a marshal. There has to be one. You decide which. Yeah. One guy has to be like, all right, get it together, guys. He goes, and he goes, okay. So he's, he's getting some attention here. And he goes, oh, okay. This thread has gotten lots of attention. So ha, ha, ha, you have no friends, funny, inventive, uh, Erastus, Errandumus, relationships in ancient Greece were not at all the same thing we are told today is gay identity. And yes, I believe the normalization of homosexuality

has had a chilling effect on certain forms of male bonding. Many other things have played into the current situation from Anglo puritanism to the erosion of male only spaces. But that too, the very fact that past male friendships like Montaigne and La Botte today read as a gay to some people is evidence of this. Have a nice day. God damn it. I will die on this hill. So he's gonna, he's gonna die on this hill and he goes further to it. But I mean, with his bros, um, people like, I don't know. I mean, like, I just, uh, this does, this takes on the flavor of another, sort of another species of argument where people are just, um, uh, uh, complaining about that no one has friends anymore, but they're only talking about themselves. The main, the main

problem here is that his argument stems on the idea that the dastardly elites normalized homosexual ity so that straight dudes would be too insecure to be friends with one another because the whole argument is premised not, uh, that there are any direct attempt to interfere with male friendships. It's, well, the males themselves, the straight males themselves are going to be so afraid of appearing gay that they won't be able to be intimate with one another. I mean, isn't the opposite true though? Cause I mean, like, I, I mean, just from a casual observation, wouldn't it seem that like the, the, the normalization of homosexuality to use pegs phrase has led to it being much more okay to like express emotion and be vulnerable as a man who's a heterosexual or, or to display

affection. No, but only, no, but the thing is, I think what he means is that you have to acknowledge it. Like you have to do a no homo thing. You have to make a joke of it, which means you can't be truly intimate in your relationships. You have to keep, you have to keep all male relationships ironized to prevent against the, the encroaching anxiety about being gay. Uh, and like what he's complaining about is, uh, it's not some dastardly fucking, uh, mechanism of power. It's the fact that all their fucking friendships are less potent than they used to be. All human connection is less potent than it used to be. All of our relationships are, are thinner and more tenuous than they used to be because our relationships have been dissolved in the fucking acid vat of

capitalism to the point where we cannot believe in anything beyond ourselves, where we cannot operate, uh, in the world without having an entirely self-focused motivation, because otherwise we will be grounded to fucking paste. We've all been turned into the homo economicus that libertarian psychos said we always were. And that means we could, we cannot, we literally cannot afford to have relationships that obligate us beyond our self-interest. And we all know that. And that means our relationships are thinner. It has nothing to do with the type and it certainly doesn't have anything to do with liberalization of, uh, sexual mores. It has to do with the fact that no one can, uh, no one can sacrifice realistically. Yeah. And, and also that emotion has been totally coded female

in the modern era. Yeah. I mean, like it's, if your goal was to, you know, dissolve male friendships or make them thinner and, uh, uh, weaker. Ironic. Yeah. Um, the most roundabout way you could do that is by, uh, gay sex, I guess. But the easiest, the easier way you can do that, if you control capital and control everything, make it so that the line between work and not work is blurred. Yeah. Make it so that none of you, none of your moments are really for you, but you're told to really only think about yourself, to really only focus on yourself, your success, your personal feelings as, uh, your personal feelings is the only true thing in the world. That seems like it would work better for dissolving male friendships and everyone's friendships. And it has, like, I

don't agree. I don't disagree with the idea that like there are fewer friendships and people are lonelier than they have been a while. I completely agree with that. But it's, I mean, we were talking about this when there was a conservative thing where it's like they point out a problem or they point out a, uh, they, they point out like a historical facet where you're like, Oh, okay. Yeah. No, that's true. And then it's like, and it's because of people are afraid that, uh, people will think they're gay. And it's like, well, okay, well, what the fuck? Are we talking about the same thing here? I mean, the thing is, is like, okay, people will think you're gay. The whole point now that is that's okay, right? So the thing stopping you is, is, is, uh, an internal insecurity.

Yeah. This is, it's a perfect example of, I mean, really doing a very modern thing of taking a broad social problem like loneliness and lack of friends and then putting your own extremely fucked up weird personal thing on it where it's like, well, my, you know, my reason and therefore everyone's reason is that if I have a male friend, people will think we're gay. Yep. I'm just imagining like, uh, like Herman Melville's letters to Hawthorne where he's like, he's pouring his heart out. And at the end of it, he just signs post script, no homo. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but so, so Peg continues here. He goes, uh, the point isn't that no Greeks didn't engage in homosexual conduct. Duh. But to say some Greeks, uh, but to say of some Greeks, they were lovers and leave it as that implying that

they had a gay identity in our sense is either simply, is simply either ignorant or a lie. And all good scholarship backs this view. I mean, like, I mean, like, so like, it's, it's, it's, like I said, it all becomes this thing about gay identity. And it's just like, yeah, like nobody thought of themselves as like, no one thought of themselves in like the, I mean, shit, Foucault made this point is history of sexuality. Like nobody thought of themselves as having a sex life until the modern era. Until like, you know, until time had been segmented by productions, that areas of your life became discrete things that formed an identity. Right. So like, if you had gay sex, of which plenty of people were doing throughout all of history, it didn't necessarily make you gay.

It was just a thing you did, even if it was like, you know, kept quiet or whatever. But like, I mean, so he's like, it's like, for him, it's not about the sex act itself. It's not about homosexuality, but it's about just, it's about, it's about those, it's about those sex acts forming an identity that is a, then a political category that is then a, you know, sort of a, a group that needs to be advocated on behalf of, or that certain disparities in law and society need to be redressed on behalf of that group. But like, it's really, I mean, but with all these guys, it really is just about sodomy. I mean, like, that's really what they're thinking about. Or I mean, like, what is more, like, what's more threatening here? Is it the, is it the act of sodomy, or is it the,

what he calls the social acceptance of? Well, I'd, I'd presume it's probably like, his argument is the social acceptance. Yeah, it's the social acceptance. But that, that's what, that's what gives it the, that's what gives the social breathing room to a, a, a cultureate, like a, a public persona that can be associated or a public set of behaviors and attitudes that can be associated with the act. Yeah, well, yeah, this is so insane, though, because it's like, okay, if your argument is like, this problem exists because of like, acceptance of homosexuality as its own concept, or, and gayness as like a lifestyle is, or an identity rather. Okay, that toothpaste isn't really going back in the tube. Right. How, how, what is your plan to like, get people to forget

that gayness is an option? What are you going to do? Like, none of these sort of like, you know, an integralists or whatever you want to call them monarchists or what are these return to tradition types? I mean, none of them are like ever very explicit about how they would get that toothpaste back in the tube, because they know if they'd stated it outright, I mean, like most people would regard it as, you know, thoroughly monstrous. I honestly think that their plan is they finger crossed that they survived the apocalypse, and then them and their buddies can all like do a fucking society of creative andachronism rewriting of the earth, like, oh good, like we could, we could take this, the bricks out of this Walmart and turn them into a castle

keep and start having tournaments. Yeah. I mean, again, I gotta say favorably compare buck breaking to that. One of the, uh, theses is the buck breaking, uh, that they say at the start of the movie is that the default state for like a lot of white people is just homosexuality, which is like an amazing thing to say. But it's like, again, it's way more interesting than this. Yeah. Yeah. No, awesome movie. I mean, like, would Peg agree with that statement or not? No, no, he wouldn't, because he'd be like, what the fuck are you talking about? But he's saying this kind of very, uh, intimate flowery, um, pseudo erotic connection between men of the past is superior to that of today, but that's not gay. Right. Well, yeah, that's the

argument. Like with buck breaking, the argument is like, no, that's gay. Like, even if you, there, they had no concept of gayness back then that's still, they're still gay as I see them today. Whereas Peg is going, no, it's not gay. They didn't invent that until like 1951. Okay. I mean, he's going on here. He says, um, on the link between normalization of homosexuality and the decay of male friendships, perhaps the, perhaps the best way to go about this is through pop culture, since it's both a mirror to society, to its society and amuse. John Woo's a better tomorrow. The dramatic knot of the story is the conflicts between friendship, family, loyalty, and honor. To establish the friendship of the two main characters, the opening scene shows them

engaging in horseplay, wrestling, et cetera. At one point, Cheyenne's fat character tries to shove a piece of food in his friend's mouth. You would never have those scenes in a Western movie today. Why? You know why it would look gay. Asian cinema is an interesting point of comparison, since it's so often concerned with those classical themes of friendship and culture, and it comes from a contemporary society where homosexuality is or was very taboo. Contrasts Red Letter Media's review of the J.J. Abram Star Trek movie, where he very astutely points out that the movies need to establish that all of the male characters have a case of the not-gays. The point is that, subliminally but inevitably,

normalization of homosexuality has added a question mark to countless male interactions. This acts as a subtle but nonetheless real break on male intimacy. That rosetta stone of American culture friends, the intense male friendship of the series is Joey and Chandler, and the show never stops getting laughed from creating an is-it-gay subtext. Whenever Joey and Chandler move for a hug, there's an awkward pause, followed by a laugh track, which works precisely because the show and the audience is having inevitably the same split-second is-it-gay moment. Every time Joey and Chandler have an intense emotional moment, they suddenly feel the need to do something manly, with the implication that intense male bonding is a little bit gay. Laugh track.

It's funny that he brings up John Woo's movie because the killer is another movie that's very homoerotic in its themes. Very homoerotic. The question is, from Moby Dick or Huck Finn on, it's a major theme in American literature, or even not American literature, is the eroticized friendships between two men. It's Ishmael and Kuikwag or Huck and Jim. Much ink has been written about this, but the question is, for Peg, is he saying that those authors like Herman Melville, for instance, was unaware of the subtext here, that this was an accident, or it's only read as gay through a modern lens? I mean, I don't think that's the case. Yeah, that's moronic. The literary trope for maybe hundreds of years was the idea that this is

sort of tragic because it's not even an option. To fully consummate this and to fully, for these two men to live their life as romantic partners, it's not even forbidden. It's like, you can't even do that. That's not available in any sense. I don't know what Peg's deal is, but I read this into a lot of Rod's work on the subject as well. Now that we live in a modern era in which being gay is an identity, and you can be gay and form a family and be an openly gay and fully integrated member of our society, and indeed a very successful one. It's like that option being available whereas in the past it wasn't. I think there's a certain sense of a loss of the frisson created by the taboo of it, but also a sense of the loss of I've wasted my life, because if I could have just been

doing this all along, maybe you would have. Well, yeah. The character Javert, not literally the same thing, but why do I think Javert kills himself at the end of his storyline in Les Miserables? I don't think he kills himself because he's like, oh, I broke my moral code. Time to kill myself. He kills himself because he realizes he can break his code, and that way he can adhere to a grander sense of morality. And then he goes, oh my god, I wasted my life. How many years did I devote to this code? I could have done this 40 years ago, and I wouldn't have wasted my life. I would have lived my life as an actual moral guy. Okay, I have to kill myself. I mean, how many people do you know that live a life they don't really like,

but won't deviate from it because that fear of trying it a different way, whether they're 30 or 40 or 50 or 60, that the moment it works, which in some mobile they know it will, they'll go, oh my god, I wasted my entire fucking life. That's the fear that keeps a lot of people where they are. And the other interesting thread to this peg thread is that he's writing from a sort of European sensibility. And what he's talking about, like this smirking, winking sense about, oh, you can't be too emotional as a man, or be too physical with another male friend, or else you have this kind of, this no homo moment. And like he's harkening back to like, yeah, I mean, he goes on to talk about Sam and Frodo and Lord of the Rings, or like,

you know, British guys who were writing sonnets to each other before they got ripped apart by Turkish machine guns at Gallipoli or whatever. But the thing is, like, that old sense of masculinity that he's harkening back to of this intense man love, this platonic male love and dedication to one another and really like deep sense of intimacy has never really like taken root in America as like a frontier culture. Like America's codes of masculinity are very different than European ones, I feel. So like, you don't make out when you meet somebody, for example. Yeah. That is a funny thing in the he has something in the thread where he's like, this guy, he knows like, is doing some deal with like a Ramco, I think, Saudi a Ramco. And a European lawyer comes in and like kisses him.

And he's like, you can only do that in Europe. And I think the difference comes down to the fact that we're the frontier country, we're the we're the country of individuals and isolated stoic killers like like Lawrence called us. And that means that intimacy has always been less in America. And that now and then because of that, we capitalism became enthroned and headquartered there and then made things even less fucking communal and less intimate and more individualistic. And yeah, like, and particularly for like a male displays of vulnerability or emotion have always been more circumspect in American culture. You had you had to be like you had you had to be the strong silent type, you know, out on the frontier or whatever.

He goes on he writes here, I used to blame Anglo Protestant Puritanism and I still do, but obviously normalization of homosexuality plays a role. A lot of things that used to be natural between men are less so. Maybe you think this is just because people need to become even more accepting of homosexuality. One wonders how that could even be possible. Maybe it doesn't affect you. Good. Good for you. You're very special. But don't gaslight me that this isn't real. And then he goes like 3D. Lord of the Rings, if you know anything about Lord of the Rings and Tolkien, you know that Frodo and Sam, I just love like that that tweet right there is like a perfect tweet for me because it's just I don't know maybe because I am affected by today's sort of ironic

distancing between masculinity and feelings or whatever. I mean to me it's funny that he's lamenting the normalization of homosexuality but he's an adult man talking about don't gaslight me. Yeah, an adult don't gaslight me. Here's what happens to my favorite. And here's what happens in Lord of the Rings. Lord of the Rings, Frodo and Sam. I mean like as as we're reading through this babble, the thing I think about is like all the close male friendships that I know that I see. And you know what, make no mistake, a lot of them are between people who if not necessarily rich do get to escape a lot of the raddiness and collapsed and fledged existence that most people with who are totally reliant on office jobs or manual labor or service jobs are subject to.

It's people who like are able to get have a supplemental or primary income from like an internet entertainment thing. And I think I don't think there's a total across the board correlation but it is noticeable that people who aren't as subject to the flattening effects of our current reality are able to have these very deep male friendships but of course also Frodo and Sam aren't gay. And also just like this is only really a problem to the extent to like you know okay so homosexuality has been normalized in our culture. I mean you know what his prescription is for turning the clock back on that who fucking knows but now that that's the case and like like you said if you're a straight man and you're being affectionate with another man there's always

this tension of like publicly of like oh well someone think I'm gay or not. Well I mean like that's a yp. It's only a problem and to the extent that you let it into your head to begin with. Yeah. I mean you can do whatever you want. I mean you can like write sonnets to your homies, wrestle with them, sacrifice for them, love them. I mean if someone snickers at it and you feel like your back is up against the wall well I mean like that's your problem. Maybe you're not as close, maybe you're not as close to friends as you fucking thought you were. I think if some anonymous snicker is all it takes you to just be like oh I'm not being gay. What he's saying is is that the effect of this scheme by the elites is to over time disincentivize it among all men. So yeah

this is essentially your fault but hey this most guys are gonna feel that way and so guys are going to tend to be less intimate with each other even though it is just in their own head. It is still that it is part of this evil strategy of like demobilizing masculinity away from what specifically he doesn't say. All he says is homies are a threat to power. How and why, like what that means, he has no, that's the extent to which he sets up this entire theory that well you know if guys were friendly more friendly with each other they would maybe overthrow the government. Well how exactly that's supposed to happen and like defining that as like the load-bearing element of any kind of revolutionary movement is it's all just picking through like

the whole broken pottery of history just to find the one thing to justify your weird hang-up. Yeah I mean like I do think like very generally like genuine friendships and genuine connection are like you know sometimes they can be of great use to any political movement or social movement. I think they're, I think they're just important as a facet of life but also I mean guys during the British Empire wrote fucking poems to each other that didn't really destroy any of the great evil of the empire they lived in. That was good though. Even though it was the British Empire and the capitalist system that they unleashed that gave us all of this. Yeah like the system that and these guys who want to go back to before that yeah your only chance of doing that is building

a fucking a medieval times on the wreckage because we are not those people anymore at a fundamental level. I mean if you want to point to like the real thing that normalized homosexuality as a lifestyle and an identity separate from the act it was fucking advertising. It was, it was the commercial instinct to take the desire to have gay sex and turn it into a market and then an identity is formed around those markets like that's how all identities get formed. And a valuable market because it reflects it you know it uh it reflects a group of people with a lot of disposable income and you know and as such capital and power in our in our current society. And so if once again you're not find you don't you find the culprit and it's not your

scheming uh Judeo-Masonic cabal which is the uh European Catholic traditional explanation for what happened but the good old fucking profit motive. So you have to pull the machine out of this thing that's pulling us away from each other and turning us more and more into just fucking demographics but you can't turn the clock back on the identities that have been formed. We are those people now and to put and to repress it is to fatally alienate huge chunks of the population from any communal project which a non-capitalist government would have to be. Also another thing I would really like guys like this to to I think we should have to explicate like a lot more clearly what exactly they think is wrong with being gay or homosexual acts themselves because I mean if

you go down further in the post he just says well I'm a you know I'm a conservative Christian and I think that there you know human beings are naturally ordered to certain behaviors and unnatural quote unnatural behaviors makes us you know uh sad and miserable and like that's why they're prescribed by God or whatever but like I mean if these acts are so unnatural how come they're so common in all of history and human civilization yeah seems like one of the most natural things for people to do right but once again as a uh as a occasional you know uh uh indulgence or as a parallel structure not as a thing that uh is validated by the I mean like getting an organ transplant is pretty unnatural too but I mean you're gonna turn it down if you need a new kidney

I mean this always breaks down because that's why they always have to end up arguing about things either very they either have to make very thin metaphysical arguments like it somehow it it it uh reduces the the strength of straight relationships or the idea that it it literally spreads through recruitment and you have to make an argument that it somehow undermines uh uh conventional relationships like straight relationships and and every argument to do that is is very very the previous classical model like I mean it didn't exactly uphold uh heterosexual relationships I mean that was the standard but it was very clear that like your your your wife or husband was just like assigned to you like that was the that was your function system well that's the

other man all of your actual like romantic and creative and like imaginative flights of fantasy interests or just like uh creativity come from outside the the the marriage and family unit well that's the highest love that you could have or have for another person would be someone of your own sex whether that was sexualized or not is is is another question I mean sometimes it was sometimes it wasn't but it wasn't like guys who freaking love their wife didn't exist until about 1985 yeah I mean it is a relatively modern moment but even more moment even more so than the fact that romantic love between men and women is is a relatively recent uh innovation of like the early modern era the Renaissance and stuff uh the other thing these guys are fetishizing uh about you

know conventional relationships the nuclear family is a complete product of not of fucking like modern capitalism that is that is a absolutely modern artifact like those social relationships are as tied into capitalism and as tied into every godless move march away from the sacred that these guys have been bemoaning since 1789 uh as a homosexual identity it is as much a modern uh uh a social artifact and so they want one they want to keep one that they have uh they have turned eternal and and and elevated uh and they want to get rid of another because they're not they're operating just from a a sense of what they're uh horrified by and what they fetishize that is entirely generated by their specific uh array of uh fucking repressions and and

psychological uh like pathologies not any uh clear eyed analysis of like the the state of the political economy um but like back to back to the point I made about like the for the the sort of split between Europe and America as it regards masculinity I mean I think the other thing that's going on here is like he's bemoaning the fact that a lot of these things that were traditionally regarded as being normal and masculine are now coded in in our modern context which let's be honest only means in American context because like we create culture for the world and like we we set the standard for everyone else are coded now as being fruity and I think that these guys are upset that like their natural setting which is soft and a little bit theatrical is coded as being kind of

being a swish now yeah and like they want to go back to a time when like you know like that was you you could you know like there was there was no difference between being a cowboy and being a montane a poet who writes you know yeah like the three musketeers were like the butchest dudes on earth that they would just wore cravats and and long ringlets and scented scented handkerchiefs and they're fucking uh sleeve callers well I mean I'm not gonna read like the whole thing he he goes on for a long time on this thread as you might imagine but uh he continues he says why will I die on this hill I'm going to do something incredibly stupid and actually expose some vulnerability to the pack of hyenas on this hell site I mean again it's just

just you know this is not traditionally masculine behavior to me but that's because like I'm in an American context and I'm in a modern context that like you know uh men talking about the hell site and normal world and being gaslit by popular culture is like not something I stereotypically associate with heterosexual men but perhaps in a more classical context that wouldn't be the case so uh ped continues here he writes um ha ha ha you have no friends loser well not only do I have friends but not all of them are internet anons so there but k through 12 I was three years younger than everyone else in my class so that made making friends difficult and yes I was bullied but thankfully unlike libs who act out their trauma by trying to recreate their bullying at the level of politics

I grew out of my loser nerd past in the immortal it by in the immortal words of the great justice Brett Kavanaugh lifting weights drinking beer and hanging out in any case typically in whatever year I was in I had one friend and so I invested in this friendship with a lot of meaning and intensity and since I was a nerd I was yes inspired by some of the great friendships of classical literature including yes the Iliad some ancient writers speculated about the achilles patrocles relationship but Homer himself never says or implies anything that's not projected by the reader but also the great stories the Knights of the uh chansons the guests and others when I eventually found out that some of those scholars asserted those relationships are gays were gay I felt like an incredible

in violation I knew it had to be false because I knew that the way that they describe those relationships describe my relationships and I knew they weren't gay it's intrinsically debasing to suggest that someone's friendship is really based on some other motive whatever it is and just to be clear I'm describing experiences that happened before puberty so please no talk of sublimated or repressed homosexual attraction I grew up in a household where sex was openly discussed so I was aware of homosexuality as a concept but it had about as much relevance to me personally as the rings of Neptune the point is that I know what it's like to experience this kind of pure intense male friendship and I know that it's different from sexual or romantic interests

and I know that that's I know that it is the same thing as the great classical friendships it's just an it's just incredibly destructive for the discourse to point out at these examples and go wink wink nudge nudge shana more on top of ignorant and stupid of course hey look I'm a Christian conservative I believe that human beings are naturally ordered towards certain kinds of relationships that engaging in homosexual conduct is intrinsically unhealthy and that society shouldn't encourage it today some people find this view not only shocking but fundamentally unfathomable incomprehensible that's fine I find the contemporary live your truth ethos of the self-creating rootless atomistic individual both laughably absurd and horribly crude anyway the

I'm not crying virulence and stupidity of the replies has confirmed for me that we need more critiques of the consequences of the normalization of homosexuality thank you for attending my TED talk so there he goes um it's just I I think he's just he doesn't want to be called queer I mean I think he just doesn't want people to make fun of him for his in today's society very very gay coded behavior he wants to be able to wear a cape in public that's it I do you should have just written the thing about why why can men no longer uh why can't why are young men no longer dressed in velvet culottes and stockings the way that you were the victorian era that that's all he wants why aren't we dressing boys as girls until they're eight yeah um that would be just want to

be able to be a little bit publicly fabulous without yes that's it I think that's it I think he wants just to be like a little bit flamboyant and I don't mean this in a gay way I'm not I'm not saying that he's a closet case or whatever I just think like maybe it maybe it is a tragedy that like people have this internal sensor in their head if they're heterosexual about being a little allergic to swag like they should be a little allergic to feelings they should take all the money out of the f-35 program and have a completely ceremonial branch of the military that's like the cavalry where you can do this and like have a silk pistol holder and all that shit yeah yeah like that would be yeah positive uh I want to go back to a real man uh I have a

good Eric Adams thing to close this out what's the best concert you've ever been to Curtis Mayfield at windgate concert series at that concert there was a rainstorm and the lights fell in Curtis Mayfield and they actually paralyzed him at that concert he died a few years ago but it was an amazing concert before that happened just so unfortunate what the best concert you ever saw was one that was rained out and where Curtis Curtis Mayfield was paralyzed paralyzed by the falling lights killed Curtis Mayfield it's like if someone he didn't die but if that's he was literally paralyzed for life after that that's like literally how was the play other than that mrs. Lincoln but she responds like my favorite live music experience great wife yeah yeah it was

the Rolling Stones set at Altamont yeah they also asked him about uh Israel because he's going to be new york's mayor and how he's going to advocate for it and he said I visited Israel twice I'm going back again and I'm going to try to find a plot of land so it can be my retirement place I love the people of Israel the culture the dance everything about Israel okay they ask him where in Israel do you plan on retiring and he says in the goal on heights oh my god holy shit okay he's gonna be mayor yeah he's sorry don't vote for him but he's gonna win tomorrow I'm sorry don't vote for him but like that's it like you know you know what he didn't even think that before he was like oh fuck Israel really I'm gonna retire and go on heights I love the number one

number one controversy that his dog Derrick Adams in this mayoral race is the fact that he lives in New Jersey and then he's just like yeah I'm gonna move to the goal on heights yeah I'm gonna buy property there and move there like you after I'm he's gonna be a settler like he's amazing I would love to see how how how warm the warm embrace that Eric Adams and his family will receive among fellow Israeli settlers would go on heights they'll love him it'll be great they'll be so nice to him no he's they'll give him so many vegan pizza meals that he can enjoy well he's like I mean I don't want him to win but it's like he's so he's such a completely like fucked up person that it's like yeah I kind of think he is going to win he's the Biden of the race in every respect

I mean if if if if our national politics holds to form at a local level I mean Eric Adams has got this sewn up I mean I hate to say it yeah my favorite concert was when Curtis Mayfield got paralyzed before he got paralyzed of course like what a great interview I mean yeah no I don't like his policies but just he has the right personality to be yelled at all the time well you know he does because they asked him about how he's feeling about being up in the polls and he said not happy not sad the man with the wax wings flew just enough not too close to the sun not too close to the water steady what are you talking about no that's the opposite of what happened in that story at all I think he's imagining like he probably heard that story and then just thought

well if I had wax okay oh yeah if I was Icarus I would have just stayed at exactly the right altitude so that the wax wouldn't melt yeah I yeah no again like he sucks pretty much everyone else running for mayor sucks um the job is just to take the orders of the cops and uh at real estate what what else are you supposed to do I will tank I mean I wish I could go for it to bungalow for the third honestly yes they should do the the bloomberg thing for him give him another term yeah sorry but he's finally having fun after fate eight fucking years because he realized the thing that every new york mayor should know going in you will never get another fucking position you will never win another election after your new york city mayor and you should just accept that

and then have fun with it look to bungalow beat the trump virus no we have sins or buds and he beat it for the entire east coast the bungalow is my mayor there'll be statues of him soon yeah no he's a guy who's like not really gonna get appreciated but by history yes history will redeem him yeah I will beat the bungalow just like castor it will be resolved by history well uh that does it for uh today's episode guys ask not who the baseball cranks for it cranks for the bye bye cheers I am the very model of a modern major general life information vegetable animal and mineral I know the kings of England and the codes of ice historical from marathon to waterloo in order category I am very well acquainted to with matters mathematical I understand the

equations for the simple and quadratical about paranormal theorem I am teaming with a lot of news with many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse I am very good at integral and differential calculus I know the scientific names of beings and in malchalice in short it matters vegetable animal and mineral I am the very model of a modern major general