Chapo Trap House - 584 - Let’s Fuck Brandon (12/14/21)

Episode Date: December 14, 2021

Having left their bubble of east coast elites, the boys are finally ready to accept (and accept responsibility for) the Let’s Go Brandon movement. They also revise the American Conservative’s revision of W.E.B. Du Bois’ Reconstruction revisionism. Dates and tickets for our Southern Tour now live at chapotraphouse.com/live

Let's go Brandon. Let's go Brandon. Let's go Brandon. Let's go Brandon. Let's go Brandon. Let's go Brandon. That's sounding good. Chris Brandon. So, um. The whole crew's here. All the Brandon's. Yeah. We're all getting Brandon. We're getting the Brandon train run on us. So, I think you've got, I, I, yeah, we're getting, yeah, Brandon's let's going. We're getting slutted up by Brandon. So I think people remember the first time we talked about, let's go Brandon. We're like, oh, this is lame.

Like this is like a mirror image of dotard and all that other lib stuff. Like everyone's just the same person. It's like, I get why it's fun. I just don't get it. Well, we all left, you know, our sanctuaries, our sanctuary cities that is. We got out of our bubble.

We got out of our bubble. We're the real America. Yeah. Buffalo, and we drove through, let's go Brandon country. And holy shit, we're totally on board. Absolutely. It's a promising social movement that, I mean, like perhaps you made fun of it.

That was before we realized that we invented that this social movement. We did do it. Of the let's go Brandon movement. We actually invented let's go Brandon in Chaz, which we also started. It's like a Brandon is like, it's like ASAP. Like all of us now it's like, like Brandon Felix,

Brandon Matt, Brandon will we're all, let's go Brandon on the track. Yeah, exactly. Let's go Brandon made it. And just like ASAP, it stands for different things. Like ASAP stood for a lot of things, but they would mainly say like always drive and prosper. Brandon stands for being real always,

now doing on top of now. And that just means that you're being real, but you're in the moment. And yeah, it's like city, city dwellers, people outside the let's go Brandon movement. They drink smart water because they think they're smarter than everyone. Let's go Brandon, aquafina.

We were dry. Yeah, that's the first thing we noticed. That's when we first like got brandified was when we went to, you know, a gas station in Pennsylvania, zero smart water, zero Fiji, zero any of that shit, only aquafina. Most people would be like,

oh, I'm not going to drink water. If I can't have, if I have to drink aquafina, I will just die. If there's no electrolytes in it, I don't even want to look at it. This isn't that water that is silica in it. So it tastes wetter. My stupid brain won't even accept it as water.

And I could drink a liter of it and they'll still die. Might as well be distilled. Distilled water, they're just doing a water cleanse and they don't even realize it because it's psychosomatic. But we drank that aquafina and we were like, damn, this is like actually better than any other water. It was wonderful. I went branding all over that aquafina.

Yeah. That's when we started to get into Let's Go Brand and stuff. We saw these, we saw a truck with like tons of Let's Go Brand and stuff on it. And instead of being like, that's our enemy, we were like, that's our friend. Yeah, that's our follower. Yes.

That's our subscriber. Yeah. He said, yeah, they're on the Patreon. And like now that we are accepting of the Let's Go Brand movement that we started last year in Chas, we decided that like, you know, if you look up Let's Go Brand and unspotified, let's be honest. It's a lot of like bullshit country music.

Well, can't you hear that sound of all the glory she's throwing her hands up? And we're singing that all new American anthem. Let's Go Brand and... It's like the Latino song for Cubans who voted for Trump. The Spanish Let's Go Brand and song. We're bringing something new. We're bringing like a real New York coolness.

Yeah. I thought about if Lou Reed was alive to see the Let's Go Brand and movement and he made Oh, Sweet Brandon instead of Oh, Sweet Nothing. Linger Run. Brandon, Let's Go Brandon. Yeah. Oh, and then who could forget his song?

I want to be Brandon. Yeah. I love Street Hassel. And the fact that the shelves are empty only proves that you are Brandon. That's in pale blue Brandon. Street Hassel is actually a song about how it's a hassle that there's a nationwide Gatorade shortage

caused by Brandon. And you know, when I read about the Gatorade crisis, I was like, I go out to the store, I see Gatorade, I see Powerade, I see all the colors of Gatorade, I see all the electrolyte, you know, thirst quenching beverages available. But then I just took a little bit of research on my part to realize that Brandon

has been punishing disloyal states by creating a false supply chain crisis that prevents them from getting the Gatorade that they need to hydrate and drench their thirst. Another thing about Brandon country is that they still have Christmas there. Yes. They're not doing a biological warfare on Santas

the way that Brandon is in the big cities. There's tons of decorations and merriment and wassling. People are going Brandon all over Christmas. I didn't even know what wassling was until this weekend. Yeah. Now I'm dedicating myself to the wassling lifestyle. For those who don't know, I mean, for those of you who are familiar with Let's Go Brandon,

wassling is I'm spreading Christmas cheer and merriment. Yep, usually while hammered, that helps. Yeah. Can you imagine if Lou Reed got to go wassling during the Let's Go Brandon movement? Makes you wonder why a perfectly healthy man died the way he did. It is very suspicious.

Yeah. What do you think? Yeah, just like Lou Reed, sad song. And then in parentheses, this song is about Brandon. This song is about Brandon being president. When I put the milk on quite on the shelves, I tell you things aren't quite the same. When they when they put Adderall and Joe Biden's brain.

It's just a way to bring people together. Because then instead of getting mad at people in your life, even strangers you have to deal with, you can all just get together and bond over how it's all Brandon's fault. Yes. And then you can just vibe. Like you're at the bank and it's taken a long time

and it's a whole hassle and there's not enough tellers. You don't have to all get pissy and start bumping into each other and yelling. You just like, let's go Brandon. I mean, the fact that I have not bought any of my friends, family members, or Katharine's family members, Christmas presents yet, it's Brandon's fault. Spletching.

It's Brandon's fault. If you are my family and you're listening now and you're wondering why you're getting just one earbud and it's the waxiest one you've ever seen. Well, let's go Brandon. Let's go Brandon. Let's go Brandon. Let's go Brandon.

It's awesome to try saying it. Yeah. I like using it as a verb. Like I am gonna go Brandon on these chicken wings. Yeah. It's just, it's all purpose. It's a, what's our favorite thing? What's the thing that always works?

Horizontal social movement. Yep. And I think it's safe to say this is conservative occupy and we started it. We got Brandon on the track. Damn, Brandon, where do you find this? Real Brandon shit. Have you ever heard the Trapahogs voice guy,

the like forbidden line that you can't find anywhere? It was on like, it was on like a plies tape. And in like 2008, and it was like, we got Ron crack and Molly and then he says the N word. The world wasn't ready for that one. I don't think it ever will be selling Brandon. You got that branded pack. No, no, we're not smoking branded pack.

No, no, no, no. Well, actually there is an article in the Atlantic that attempts to apply an academic gloss to this growing social movement of let's go Brandon. So I mean, like, let's just, let's just see how, how correct or not, I mean, let's see if they get it or not. This is, this is an article in the Atlantic called the serendipity of let's go Brandon.

Hell yes. That's the prequel to my favorite movie, Serendipity. The anti-Biden meme is meaner than your grandfather's shoot or heck. It also offers a fascinating view of how language changes. This is by America's number one linguist, John McWhorter. Oh boy. John McWhorter, he's probably, he's the top,

he's the top linguist in America. Yeah, no, he's the number one lingual man. Like nobody understands words better than him. He's the word God. But I gotta say, he's not starting, he's not setting this article up for success by using the word serendipity in the headline. Yeah, get out of here nerd.

So is he like, did he surpass Chomsky in the ratings, in the linguist ratings? He beat him in a foot race. I think that's how it happened. Damn, you missed one paper view and the game's all changed. He writes, I know how I am supposed to feel about let's go Brandon mocking the president this way is uncivil, a sign of the collapse of the once routine

public courtesy, et cetera, et cetera. How I really feel about it though, is that it's fascinatingly serendipitous, seriously funny, and intriguingly fecund from that, from that one meme, others are being born. Okay, this guy, he does not understand let's go Brandon. Not at all. You're bullshit fucking SAT language out of here.

This guy, he's never said let's go Brandon in his life. Not one time. He's never, yeah, I would be surprised if he even had a chuckle to himself when he looked at gas prices and there's a sticker with an arrow saying let's go Brandon did this. No, he doesn't even own the stickers that you can put in empty supermarkets

that say Brandon is responsible for this. He's never blamed anything on Brandon. I bet $50,000, he's never tasted a fuck with Ina. Not one time, no, he's got that glacial shit with the extra infused electrolytes. He's got water from Iceland. He's drinking water from Iceland.

Yeah, get out of here with this shit. So he says, last month, an NBC reporter interviewing the victorious NASCAR driver, Brandon Brown, heard fans in the stand chanting, fuck Joe Biden, in lustily contemptuous unison. That is true, that is true. He understands the libidinal, the lusty forces at work because it means like, you know, let's go Brandon.

It's like, you know, they said it has multiple meanings. There are many layers of meanings here and one of them is let's fuck Joe Biden. Yeah, let's have sex with him. Let's remember train on the president. Yeah, let's eat his pussy disrespectfully. Yeah. Let's leave, if Joe Biden is getting up

at 7 a.m. every day to be president, we should leave him money to get his nails done. That's what we're saying. And we're also like, it's also like, if you're like us and you're not from Brandon country, it's like a role playing exercise. Every time we've been in a crowd shouting, let's go Brandon, it always turns into like an orgy.

Yeah, just fucking and fucking. Yeah, like summer of law say goodbye to winter of 2021, winter of Brandon. But the fun for us personally comes in when we are in this orgy and we are just, you know, we are balls deep in like a leather mom. We're getting fucked by just like a grape like stepdad. And they're saying, you know, they're saying to us,

let's go Brandon, let's go Brandon. And we get to pretend that we don't have our names. You know, some of us have names that a hemophiliac would have. Some of us do have that name. Some of us were almost named Wolf or Lafayette and the name that we have is actually the least weird name that we could have gotten. Our name is Felix.

And so being called Brandon while I'm engaged in this sexual Congress, the only Congress that can pass something. Oh, let's go Brandon. Let's go Brandon, let's go Brandon. I get to role play like I am a guy named Brandon, which I've never been. And I always wanted to be.

Yeah. I love to, I love to ski on Brandon. Oh, he says here, okay. The reporter insisted to viewers that fans were in fact chanting, let's go Brandon. I mean, the way the press lies about the, let's go Brandon. Okay. You get a lie to my face.

This is literally I was saying boo words. Yep. The improvisation made no sense. Brown had won. So why would anyone share him on by saying, let's go after he just accomplished quite a bit of going. That's so stupid, man. You, you fucking dumbass.

Since then, Biden's detractors have adopted, let's go Brandon as a kind of in group salute, a coded way of saying, well, the other thing. The meme has found its way onto t-shirts, masks, signs and other sporting events, the house floor and reportedly airplane intercoms. And was parodied this weekend in an online video form from an online, in an online video from Saturday Night Live.

Oh, I'm sure that was what I was probably really good. I did, let's go Brandon mask is perfect for the new guy that I've been thinking about the help of my friend Avery, the Trump voter COVID scold. Yeah. The thing is America is such a wondrous place that you know that they exist. They're out there.

Oh my God. Yeah. No, there is a guy who like was at January 6th and he's wearing two, let's go Brandon masks. And he's like, yeah, liberals won't double mask because they don't go to work. However, the inside Biden euphemism is of a meaner tone. This is not your, this is not your grandfather's

darn heck shoot or fudge. What kind of grandfather did this guy have? Fuck it. My grandfather cursed like an insane person. I mean, like my grandfather didn't hurt. I mean, he didn't, he didn't curse, but he wasn't saying a darn heck or fudge. Yeah.

You know? Yeah. Was this guy's grandfather is Winnie the Pooh. Oh, bother. He was saying, let's go Bill Clinton, but he meant he meant the fuck Bill Clinton. This is unambiguously. I mean, like this is before people had,

people had invented the idea that you can say a name that means something else. So it was just straight up fuck Bill Clinton, but he didn't say, he didn't say the F word. Yeah, F star, star, star, Bill Clinton. Those are polite terms expressed without the teeth bearing ardor of the words they stand in for imaginable as things

that characters played by Eddie McCleurig might say in 80s movies, such as Ferris Bueller's day off. Okay, so he's already, he's already used the word, he's already used the word serendipitous, fecund, and now ardor. This is not very Brandon of him. Oh wait, he doesn't understand it. He doesn't get it.

Oh shit, I skipped a paragraph here. So just some context here. He says, interestingly, despite its very American origins, the catchphrase is rather South African. Stay with me. In traditional societies there, such as in Zulu and Zosia communities,

a woman marrying into a family shows respect by refraining from using any words that sound like her husband's or in-laws' names and subbing in other words. Imagine if someone married William Green, the son of Robert Green, and instead of saying she will not eat green yogurt, had to say she refuses to eat grass-colored yo mix

because Will and Green are her husband's names and the second half of yogurt sounds like the end of Robert. This practice is called Halanafa and Let's Go Brandon is a coy substitution of the same kind. But that one's about respecting people and not by not saying their names. This is about disrespecting Joe Biden. It's the exact opposite concept.

I gotta say, John McWhorter, you said stay with me here and you lost me immediately. Well, this is my favorite bad writing move, is to bring up something that isn't at all like the thing you're describing and then being like, well, it's like that, but not at all. And it's like, oh, someone either had to fill space

or is showing off something that they learned recently. Well, I mean, because he's the world's number one leader. Exactly, he knows about the South African language practice of saying milk sludge instead of yogurt because you don't want to defend your in-laws' families. Yeah, let's go, Brandon, is supposed to be offensive. That's the point of it. Those who dislike seeing President Biden's name

used disparagingly should welcome the latest development. People on the left are declaring thank you, Brandon, in praise of the administration's accomplishments. Is that catching on? I do remember that, I do remember that hashtag trending for like two hours along like Occupy Democrats. This is pointless because if you're saying Brandon, it means fuck Joe Biden.

If you're referring to Joe Biden as Brandon Biden. He's already been fucked. He's already been fucked. His whole, just annihilated. We are witnessing the birth of a diagonal reference to Biden. Jesus Christ. He doesn't get it.

He does not understand it. He does not understand what let's go over to this about. But not the music, classic linguist business. We are witnessing the birth of a diagonal reference to Biden that signals a defense of him from the slurs of the right. Brandon could well take its place as one of those bemusingly opaque code names

such as Yeezy for Kanye West or Baaz for Charles Dickens or as one of those pseudonyms that some members of Congress direct their staff views for them when talking about work and social setting. A friend of mine who worked on Capitol Hill in the late 1980s referred to her boss as Boobo. Lest eavesdroppers in public spaces pick up insider gossip about congressional business.

All right. This is so, I mean like, this article is a disgrace. He's just talking about shit that he knows personally. Yep, it's nerd bullshit. Anti-Brandon, while we were wading through that bog, I finally came up with a good acronym for Brandon. I'll get the let's go next, like 9,000 words he uses to describe like how movie posters used to be changed

to follow the code and that's like let's go Brandon. Okay, being real always, never denying our inflation. Let's see, Capitol Hill staffers coming up with cute nicknames for their bosses. Like if you're listening in context, it wouldn't be that hard to figure out who Boobo is. I gotta be honest, I was so locked in to figuring out the acronym.

I don't know who Boobo is, so it worked. We might simply embrace that sentiments will differ about this Brandon person in exactly the same way they do about, well, Biden. But like, Brandon is Biden. What is he talking about? What the fuck is he talking about? I've never seen, like this is like,

this is like undercover cop at Lollapaloo, so. Hello, Brandon Maniacs. I also have complex feelings about Brandon. I mean, I guess the idea, at least as I understand it, is like you got Joe Biden, the guy, you know, the old man in the White House pooping his pants. And then you have Joe Biden as a symbol of American decline and that is Brandon.

So I guess you could say that that is a distinction, but it is not a meaningful one because none of us will ever meet him. He's literally, the only one we can interact with is the cultural miasmatic, Biden, AKA Brandon. We mean the royal we though, I mean, like not us, but you. We are going to meet Biden because we're either going to win the war of Brandon.

Brandon's rebellion or we're, because we're sort of the house Baratheon of the Brandon rebellion. Certainly, yes. Yeah, I don't, I didn't have a betroth or anything, but like I'm not getting pussy because of Brandon. And that's like the same thing that happened to Robert, but it's, if we lose, it's going to be like a James Bond

situation where we're brought in front of Brandon, in front of Biden. And we're like tied up and he's like beating us up and he's like, renounce, let's go, Brandon. He's doing CBT to us. He's wailing on our balls with the knotted piece of rope. Yeah. And in that event, like we'll either die for like the start

being the heads of the let's go Brandon movement or the secret service will be like, you know, reveal similar to the Praetorian Guard that they're standing with the people. Right. So sir, calling him Brandon when dissing him could they're dissing Brandon. The kids are dissing Brandon out here. Brandon was talking crazy.

He got fried too. Unreleased King Vaughn song. Calling him Brandon. When dissing him could be seen. He's dissing my Brandon. Why do they got a front? Could be seen as a kind of American halanafa. Oh, shut the fuck up.

It could be seen that way if you're the most annoying fucking person ever. And yet in elite circles, one senses a bifurcation. There's another. Oh, God. Oh my God. Let's go, John McWhorter. Brandon is warm and wise when preceded by thank you, but an

unacceptable epithet coming from Republicans. It's not warm and wise when preceded by thank you because it means the same thing. Exactly. All that is communicating is that the person saying it is a huge bitch is a huge bitch. He doesn't get it. Yeah, it doesn't get it.

Because yes, because Brandon is fucked Biden. Yeah. It is not just Biden original. It's not by classic. It's fucked by. It's punished by this, Brandon. He's punished right. Exactly.

Punished Brandon. It's like you are by giving the thank you by branded people. And by the way, they're not even saying that anymore. Any kind of credit assuming it's a real symmetrical thing, you are showing yourself to not understand it. Yeah. And also like saying thank you, Brandon. Like you can hear how sarcastic that sounds.

It's like thanks Obama. Yeah. We already did that with a bongler. Like thanks Brandon is like, OK, for instance, when we were coming back and we were outside a huge like just bumper to bumper traffic outside the Lincoln Tunnel. And you know, this is true. Before Joe Biden, there was no traffic.

Never. You can get in and out as a breeze. Yeah. So we said thank you, Brandon. But then everyone heard us and started saying thank you, Brandon. All in unison in the traffic move. Yep. Did you know, Brandon, that the people who collect, you know,

all the tolls that get collected from the Holland Lincoln Tunnels, they go to illegal immigrants. Yeah. They pocket all of it. It goes directly to them. Yeah. They pocket all of it. It's a really fucked up situation.

They spend it on Gatorade that's being taken away from let's go, Brandon, country. Yeah. The thing that the Gatorade policy, a lot of people are like, why would Brandon do that? That's just like mean to do. It doesn't accomplish any goal. No, it's so that at the high school football championships,

a blue state will win. And a team wearing masks will win. They've been hydrated with electrolytes. OK. Going on, it says, a few of the commentators who decried the supposed vitriol and vulgarity of let's go, Brandon, appear to mind Democrats attempt to repurpose the race car driver's name.

I just like it's not the race car driver is irrelevant. Nothing to do with it. It's totally irrelevant. It's just an accident of that. Like he was a guy being interviewed when NASCAR fans were chanting fuck Joe Biden. Yeah. You know, how do you be a linguist and not understand

that at a certain point there's a detachment between the sign and the signifier. And no longer there's no longer a relationship between them, idiot. It would be really funny if that NASCAR driver was like the one guy who's like a 2013 Obama bot. Like he's the one guy who's still like, you're only bringing up drones because you're racist.

He's like an amazing NASCAR driver. Everyone has to just tolerate him. And he's just he's sort of like the accidental fulcrum for this entire thing. The tacit idea would seem to be that when the left throw shade, it counts as speaking truths to power and is thus OK. Until the late 80s, some people on the left

used politically correct, unironically, to suggest without saying so, that right wing views are inherently and incontestably wrong. The designation of conservatives outside Democratic enclaves as deplorables didn't come from the right either. Overall, let's go Brandon is simply fascinating. A time traveler from 2019 would have been mystified as the bewigged people going as Karen this Halloween,

I saw two, as well as those in mustaches going as Ted Lasso, of which I also saw two. This guy is just talking about shit. He is not talking about let's go Brandon or the people that it means something to. Nope. He's talking about things that he personally, that like the facts about Halanafa,

that like literally him and two other people are aware of. And then he's talking about the Halloween costumes he saw in 2019. Yeah, or no, it's 2021. Yeah, someone from 2021 of 2019, if they went two years into the future, would be confused by people dressed as Ted Lasso, because that fucking show hadn't come out there.

I just like, I like the world's shittiest time traveler. They're like, okay, you only get to do this once. And he's like, I want to go two years in the future. Also, like, couldn't you just like go to sleep a lot? He is like, what's wrong with you? Yeah, just take a bunch of cops. He is showing himself to be talking out of his ass, because if he's seeing people dressed like Karen

and fucking Ted Lasso on Halloween, he is not around Brandon country. He does not understand their hopes and dreams. Absolutely not. Oh, I think in Brandon country, like the funniest guy in town does a Karen costume. Maybe a Karen, but certainly not. I'm not drawing the line of Ted Lasso.

No, Ted Lasso, fuck no, fuck no. Like no one, the only people with Apple TV are people who have voted Democratic in 300 straight elections. Like people who go to their kid's school and sit on their knees and pretend to be a kid and vote in mock elections for Democrats. So the people who have Apple TV,

if you are an actor on an Apple TV show, or you make an Apple TV show, this is not an attack at you. This is, I'm supporting it. Yeah, it's great. It gives you guys some programs to watch. If you are Apple TV and you were thinking of giving me a show.

I enjoyed foundation. I wrote for, I invented foundation in Chas. There are no records of it, but I did do it. You guys, in the same way, think how utterly opaque Let's Go Brandon would be to a time traveler from just Labor Day. Okay, okay, yeah. The time traveler from Labor Day of this year

goes to the future and then sees, Let's Go Brandon bumper stickers. And they're like, hey, what's that? It would take me two seconds to explain to them what it is. Yeah, it's not that difficult. It's not opaque at all. It's just Let's Go Brandon. Let's Go Brandon is a stand in for a fuck Joe Biden

or I wants to fuck Joe Biden. Right. Easy. Isn't like almost everyone alive a time traveler from Labor Day? What the fuck are you talking about? We are all time travelers from Labor Day. We traveled from that time to this time.

What minute of time? Yeah, and I've lost a lot of that time. Like if I might as well be time traveling because I don't know what the fuck's going on. I forgot at most of the things that have happened. It's also like, well, yeah, he would be confused. And then he would Google like, what is this Brandon shit? And he'd be like, oh, there is a NASCAR thing.

Just like how most people did. Most people, most people alive today who know what Let's Go Brandon is, weren't like at the NASCAR race and witnessing that. Most people had the same way of figuring it out. They just looked it up. Yeah, the final thing, you close it out by saying, the meme is a wild wooly kink in the intersection

of language, politics, wit, and creativity. And as a prime example of why language change is a spectator sport. What the fuck? No, no, no, this guy, okay. Guy's never seen a sporting event in his life. I never said Let's Go Brandon in his life. It is not an intersection of language, politics,

certainly not wit or creativity. No, it is an expression of the folk ways of real people and their desire to fuck Joe Biden. That's it. Or just fuck him over or just be like, fuck Joe Biden. Sometimes fucking Joe Biden is just fucking Joe Biden. That's it. You don't have to think too much about it.

And the funny thing is he clearly didn't because there's nothing in there. That article has no insight or even a thesis. It's just, yeah, that's something, huh? Weird. People didn't use to say it, that's for sure. Yeah. That article someone from several months ago

might be confused if they've been fucking held hostage over the last couple of days. If someone was denied by a court order from using computers like I have been, that article was the literary equivalent, the article equivalent below literary of one of those cakes that like looks like a record player. But it's just the worst cake ever inside.

How about this though? This is the chorus for Oh, Sweet Brandon. Oh, sweet Brandon stores ain't got nothing at all. Say a word for the 13 Marines got killed by Brandon at the airport, by Brandon in Kabul. By the way, RIP to the 13 Marines. I think that they have officially been forgotten. No one gives it.

It's hilarious. Wait, who are these? Who the fuck are these? Yes, what happens? They got blown up by MI6 at the Kabul airport. Right. And there were a bunch of dipshits like leaving out drinks for them at bars or such.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember. Yeah. If you have the worst restaurant ever, like if you if you have a restaurant that combines like the worst, the worst qualities of like a Brooklyn gastropub and chilies. Yes. Like just one of those bullshit ass restaurants where everything's on a buttered brioche roll.

Yeah. You were like, I'm we're going to leave out 13 beers for the Marines every night. Yeah. And then you realize that you're still losing $450,000 a year because you restaurant like no one. There are too many restaurants everywhere. Yeah.

And you're like, oh, those guys aren't dead. I mean, you should stop doing it after a day. I mean, you know, I mean, you know who I blame for the proliferation of so many bad food restaurants in this country. Graydon Carter. Brandon. Oh.

That's true. No, Brandon, he is entered. I mean, those PPE loans that he put out there have so many businesses that should have otherwise gone out of business like 10 years ago. He's just keeping them afloat. Brandon is like, hey, eat more bad food. It's more Cisco chicken tenders and shit.

I do have a chicken tender shortage in that too. Let's go, Brandon. Let's go, Brandon. I do have to say PVP was Trump. They were Trump. Those were Trump, but like it was Biden's choice, just like Afghanistan where it's like, yes, technically Trump pussied out of leaving Afghanistan,

but it's Biden's fault. Yes, Trump kept all the shittiest restaurants in America alive, but Brandon could have been like, okay, we're clawing back that money with 25% interest. He could have done it. And he could have given us fewer terrible options. Instead, we're washing nothing in the restaurants or nothing in the grocery stores,

but all these restaurants, all thanks to Brandon. That's why there's a chicken tenders shortage because there are so many restaurants where it's like, oh, it's the mac and cheese restaurant where three people go there a day and they're just, they're wasting chicken tenders making like, oh, it's lobster bisque, but with chicken fingers and mac and cheese.

And we're calling it like birth as a surprise. It's a po-boy with lobster bisque, chicken tenders, and shredded lettuce. Yeah. It's called the Brandon. Man, fuck restaurants. Let's go restaurants. I'm so sick of them.

I'm so sick of them. If you own a restaurant, it's about like, people who own restaurants, they're structural victims. Like we can agree that like, we don't want to individually criticize that behavior because it's like, yeah, you don't know what else to do. You have all this, your aunt died,

the one aunt that liked you and you're like, oh, I should start a restaurant. That's not your fault. If you work at a restaurant, if you're a server or worse yet, a bar back, fuck you. You need to die. Those are the people that are saying, I mean, like waiters,

they're the ones who are saying, thank you, Brandon. Yeah. Thank you for making the supermarkets empty. So we get tips. You can steal more money from people through tipping. Do you realize they get paid even if they don't get tipped? That's insane.

It's crazy. Well, I mean, I think, you know, I think we explained it. We've explained the social movement that is growing. You know, no political change happens outside of independent social movements. And I think let's go Brandon is a very promising one that I'm proud to have started.

So happy we started. I'm so glad we remembered we started it. Yeah. Because we almost did it. Honestly, yeah. Hopefully our copyright claim is going to go through and the checks are going to start rolling in. Every piece of Brandon merch coming home to daddy.

Oh yeah. We're going to be the bird man of Brandon. Cash Brandon records. We're kissing all our sons. Yeah. I was going to say, I would be the bird man of Brandon because I love kissing you. I love kissing my son.

I love kissing you on the mouth. Yeah. I'm the, yeah. Well, I'm the bird man and Weezy because I'm like the best brand and Sarah alive. But I also have a son who I kiss. I kiss Mike Racine on the mouth. Paul said I was the bird man.

It is his little Weezy and I was like, very much so. I. Very much so. Yeah. I kissed all the pod about this guys. Cause all of you won. Gets everyone. Kiss him on the forehead.

Kiss him on the lips. Nibble their ears a little bit. If you don't leave a hickey for your friend, you might as well be Brandon. I just whisper, let's go Brandon. I just get Caleb's ear as I nibble it softly. This is kind of in the vein of let's go Brandon. But I was laughing about earlier.

I think like the, none of these girls really listened to our show. They more listened to like Truinon and like, really all of our friends except for us. But like, you know, scary art girls, like 24 year old, like weird haircut, but hot. If they, they should start wearing Kekistan stuff. That would be so fucking funny to do.

Well, we should start selling Kekistan merch. Honestly, there's no copyright right now. No, I mean, we also found a Kekistan. You guys remember that? We did start Kekistan. Yeah. You guys remember that? I remember it.

We did that. In 2015, we were like, we're the most based shit posters ever. If there's a me more, we're going to win it. We did. We won't be more. Can't argue against it. Now the whole nation streamer, let's go Brandon.

They're trying to cancel the culture, but they can't ban us. I told Santa, we need Trump back. Four more years of 45, I'm good with that. I know we all tired of Sleepy Joe. But Kamala is a ho ho ho. Call a comment and vixen. We headed straight to the White House.

Now they cancel 46. I'm gonna need some White House. Moving on from up, let's go Brandon. I wanted to dive into this. I mean, once again, this is, comes courtesy of the American conservative and like it's not Rod Dreher, but they stay delivering.

I'm referring of course to their latest article about reconstruction. And wouldn't you know it? They're going in on W.E.B. Du Bois. Finally. And by the way, I mean, I have a personal stake in this because he was born in the great town of Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

A local favorite, a local favorite of mine, but like this is the American conservative's answer to critical race theory, which you know, like they've won that meme war and to replace critical race theory, they're introducing a new curriculum into schools called critical racism theory. So this is by, this is by one of the,

one of the editor-in-chief of the American conservative, Helen Andrews. The article is called Reconstruction Revisionism. The library of America is reissuing W.E.B. Du Bois, black reconstruction, a ferrago of distortions. God damn. Why does everybody got sound like a fucking nerd all the damn time?

This woman also never once, she has never once chuckled about, let's go Brandon. No, she's never, she has no Brandon merch. Nope. She has no merch. It's got no juice in the Brandon community. She's drinking her smart water at her Zumba class or whatever they're doing and then goes to cocktail parties

with other elite conservatives, none of whom have any opinions on Brandon at all. So that's what all these people are doing. They're like, they're going to, they're going to like one NASCAR thing a year and they look like they're drinking aquafina, but it just, they took a Fiji bottle and changed the labels on it.

They poured it through a funnel into an empty aquafina bottle that they pass around among themselves so that they can pass themselves off as Brandon has. They're not, dude, they're not rocking with the movement. Okay, so Helen Andrews writes, the wholesale reinterpretation of history around a left-wing narrative about race,

which the 1619 project is trying to accomplish for the rest of the American story, was first trialed on the history of Reconstruction. For most of the 20th century, Reconstruction was seen as a squalid and shameful coda to the Civil War when Northern radicals and carpetbaggers enacted their wildest fantasies of humiliation

and spoilation on a prostrate South. Starting in the 1960s, a group of revisionist historians began arguing that Reconstruction had actually been a noble experiment in interracial democracy, too quickly abandoned. It is noteworthy that this line started being touted only after the last people with firsthand memories of Reconstruction had died.

Okay, I'm just gonna note that that's not... People have pointed this out, but noting that our attitude about what Reconstruction was changed after all of the people who were viewed it as a humiliation of the South, the fact that our attitudes changed after those people died out, it doesn't necessarily mean that it was correct

that they believed that. Yeah, yeah, and also it's like, a lot of people lived through Reconstruction, and only a few of them got to determine how we collectively thought about it. And yeah, it's good that they're dead. Oh yeah, no, you know, throughout most of the 20th century, Reconstruction was seen as a squalid

and shameful coda to the Civil War, when Northern radicals and carpetbaggers enacted their wildest fantasies of humiliation on a prostrate South. Like, yeah, like having black senators. That's really, yeah, that's really, yeah, that's it. Like, huge black populations, yeah. Like, they gave those assholes,

like they let them come back into the Union very quickly. They basically had to do was apologize. Basically, nobody got executed or tried for all the treason or any of that. There's so much they could have done if they wanted to humiliate the South. Do you wanna talk about actually making the South prostrate at a moment that they had been defeated?

Every single officer in the Confederacy should have been, you liked up, and then all their land repossessed by the state and divvied up among the newly freed slaves. Every plantation was basically just like a smaller scale concentration camp. And we did like, how few of the planters we executed is like one of the biggest historical fuck up.

The fact that Ryan Reynolds can still get married at one of these places, it just shows you that they were not humiliated at all after the fucking Civil War. The only guy that they executed for doing anything during the war was poor old Henry Wurz, the Swiss commandant of Andersonville, for all the deaths that happened there,

largely because he had no fucking supplies or money to keep the camp up. Nobody else, including guys like Nathan Bedford Forrest, who did just documented war crimes, got even put in jail. Jefferson Davis spent like two years in jail, got to write a fucking memoir where he said, actually, it was all about states' rights.

Shut up about slavery and everything. Then got to go home. Nobody went, people who fought in the Confederacy ended up back in the Senate. I mean, the only thing that you could possibly think is humiliation is, yeah, having black representatives. No, it is, it is, it is. The idea, the only way that Reconstruction fits that model

is if racial caste is considered part and parcel of Southern civilization and disrupting it is some sort of violence or humiliation. Yeah, it's doing violence against them. So Helen Andrews continues, the ur text of this revisionist school is W.E.B. Du Bois' Black Reconstruction, 1935, now reissued in a deluxe edition by the Library of America. In his introduction, Du Bois promises a straightforward history

differing from its predecessors, only in that, quote, I'm going to tell this story as though Negroes were ordinary human beings. In fact, the book is much more than that, a bold attempt to apply a Marxist framework to the Civil War period, from the general strike of labor that supposedly crippled the Confederate war effort to the counterrevolution of 1876 that

overthrew the Reconstruction government's dictatorship of labor. Black Reconstruction is not the sort of book any scholar would want as the foundation of a new interpretive school. Du Bois was no historian. He had a degree from history from Harvard. He consulted only limited sources and did no original archival research.

Can you take a guess why he was not given access to any of those original archives? I'll let you fill that out in your head. An omission that disturbed many scholars, several of whom dispeptically noted the author's generous foundation support, according to his biographer, David Levering Lewis. The germ of the project was a dispute Du Bois

had with the editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1929. They commissioned an entry on Black History from him, which he withdrew when they asked him to delete some excessively rosy passages on Reconstruction. Obviously, the Britannica editors wanted a racially progressive spin on history, or they would not have gone with Du Bois. There is a line between creative reinterpretation

and outright fantasy, and in their professional opinion, Du Bois had crossed it. I mean, again, what were the excessively rosy paragraphs? I mean, I just want to know what these people think. I mean, I think they view Reconstruction like the Holocaust, essentially. And that doing revisionism on it is like asking, oh, why were there swimming pools at algebras or whatever?

No, yeah, it was the Dunning School that dominated the understanding of Reconstruction at the turn of the century through the early 20th was created by the intellectual elite of the victorious reconstituted southern aristocracy that was able to fight back and reclaim power thanks to the failure of Reconstruction and the mass use of political violence, and then to reimpose this idea.

It was not like the folk wisdom of the American experience. It was a project. This person is talking about how Du Bois was part of a project of reinterpreting the Reconstruction. But he was responding to a project of creating a narrative of Reconstruction. It was not dispassionate or grounded in some authentic experience any more

than any other historical narrative. And she sort of gives up the game in the beginning by quoting his own words about, look, if you view black people as normal human beings, then this won't seem at all radical or upsetting to you. But if you don't, obviously, that's what you're going to take issue with. Because the idea that they could be part of a democracy

and hold office is what she finds a disturbing horror show that correctly we understand is a shameful coda to the Civil War. There is no point in beating around the bush. The version of Reconstruction history that Du Bois presents is based on motivated reasoning and tendentious distortions of the evidence. That is why it is so disturbing that this school is now

the conventional wisdom. With no tools other than repetition and vehemence, these brazen innovators succeeded in getting their misrepresentations enthroned as orthodoxy and the common sense histories of yesterday, not just super. Common sense history. It is.

He's talking about birth of a nation. Yeah. Dunnings, the Dunning School wasn't a bunch of crackers sitting around the fucking fire, telling tales about their experience. It was a bunch of Columbia University professors creating a orthodoxy out of their own motivated reasoning. Is her because I don't know anything about the lost

cause theory getting traction. But is her, she's saying what happened is that just a bunch of who's the rooster in the cartoon? Foghorn, leghorn. They were like, five of those were like, I'm not a big city historian, but it seems to me. Now whose response I say who's responsible for this unwarranted attack on my person?

Because to begin with a simple example, Du Bois attempted to refute one of the major accusations against the Reconstruction state legislatures that they were profligate and corrupt. The increase of debts under the Reconstruction regime was not large. There can be no possible proof that all this increased indebtedness represented theft, nor is there

any adequate reason for believing that most of it did. There is nothing on the face of the figures that proves unusual theft. Perhaps the figures do not prove theft, but they certainly suggest it. Between 1868 and 1872, the South Carolina legislature approved $200,000 for furniture. When auditors examined the state house in 1877,

only $17,715 worth of furniture in the original prices was found. In 1890, the chamber was refurbished for $3,061. Expenditure on champagne and whiskey for the Columbia State House was $125,000 in a single year, equivalent to about $1.5 million today. Other states, such as Louisiana, saw 10-fold increases in their budget

relative to pre-war averages. Du Bois suggests this money might have been spent carefully and honestly upon legitimate and necessary matters of restoration and government. No one at the time was so naive. I mean, I just love here the expectation of how the defeated half of the country that started the bloodiest war in American history

over their right to own other human beings as cattle. How do they expect to get treated after this? Honestly, we did not loot enough from the coffers of these fucking state governments. Well, for one thing, there was a huge explosion in spending in the southern states after the war. That is because until the Civil War, the southern states never didn't spend any money.

That they had no public provision of basically anything, including public education or any kind of internal infrastructure, because their economies were based on just this massive accumulation at the top through the slave economy, which was maintained privately and was not distributed publicly. And because all power was vested in these aristocratic factions who held complete control over the state

governments, like South Carolina. At the beginning of the Civil War, South Carolina was the last state that still did not directly elect their US presidential electors. They were chosen by the state legislature. Essentially, what she's interpreting as corruption is the actual creation in the South

for the first time of a significant public expenditure. And also, to say that they were corrupt, honestly, I don't even know why you would bother. I understand why Du Bois wants to defend the virtue of reconstruction governments, but you really don't have to. All you have to point out is that during this period, every fucking government in the United States was insanely corrupt here in New York City.

Boss Tweed spent a zillion dollars on building the city hall, and all of it basically was graphed. And you know what, I got a lot of shit done. Well, they did build the city hall given that. But at every level of government, there was massive corruption. And in Washington, the entire apparatus of government was being purchased by railroad money.

There is nowhere where you can point to during this period and say there is uncorrupt government being carried out in any location by any political party or faction. So pointing, so saying that the reconstruction corruption in the South was somehow notable or distinct from the general pattern of governance in the post war period is a non sequitur unless you're just trying to make a case against the idea

of black governance of any kind. I mean, he never explicitly states that, but I think corruption here is a stand in for the way they use the Chicago politics or big city politics, meaning that tax money or state funds will be appropriated towards non white people or non taxpayers. And the corruption here, the creation

of a corrupt government in a society that's dispoiled in some way means any attempt to bring the South into the 19th century at that point. And if you're going to talk about corruption or humiliation, how about a society that existed for several centuries based on a feudal aristocracy based on the thefts of labor and the selling of human beings? I would think that's pretty fucking corrupt.

The bias for anything that exists, that's the American conservative for you. She actually does bring up Tammany Hall. She goes, when he does acknowledge that corruption occurred, Du Bois draws a false equivalence between the carpet bag governments and their corrupt northern contemporaries, which included urban machines like Tammany Hall.

The absurdity of this comparison can be easily illustrated. During the years of reconstruction, Tammany-controlled New York saw the opening of Central Park and Prospect Park and groundbreaking on the Brooklyn Bridge, three all time marvels of urban engineering. North Carolina, by contrast, spent tens of millions of dollars on railroads that were never built.

By 1880, New York was the biggest richest city in America, while the South was still poorer than it had been before the war. Southern corruption was not just a matter of a little graft here and there. It was the complete subordination of every level of government to the personal enrichment of a few, like slavery.

But also, yes, also comparing urban infrastructure to railroad is no good, because once again, they were building railroads to nowhere all over the fucking country. And what they did do in the South was build hospitals and schools that had never existed. They built an actual public infrastructure for the first time, and that's not mentioned at all.

And yes, it was poor because of the, I mean, I would say it's because of the fucking gold standard being reimposed after the war, that that's the thing that strangled Reconstruction and doomed it as a project. But that was not the actions and certainly not the desire of the political factions that were able to briefly hold multiracial democratic power

in the South. And Tom Skoga made this point, because what he said is like, OK, so if the Brooklyn Bridge and Central Park, there was like Manhattan became what we think of it today during this time period. Well, then after Reconstruction was basically gutted and apartheid, Jim Crow, just basically the same conditions were once again imposed on the freed black population

of the South, you think at that point, you would see Manhattan springing up all over the South? Yeah. But that didn't fucking happen either. So she goes here, if budget numbers are not eloquent enough, we also have the testimony of thousands of Southerners in books, diaries, and letters describing legislators who openly sold their votes for cash and judges who

refused to convict thieves who were caught red-handed unless the victims paid a going rate for justice. Du Bois discounts this eyewitness evidence as worthless. Quote, three-fourths of the testimony against the Negro in Reconstruction is on the unsupported evidence of men who hated and despised Negroes and regarded it as loyalty to blood, patriotism, to country, and filial tribute to the fathers

to lie, steal, or kill in order to discredit these black folks, he writes. This is how all Reconstruction revisionists must treat primary sources as so many lies and delusions. Perhaps they are indeed instances when modern readers might usefully interrogate the motivations behind written testimony when Southerners write over and over

that undisciplined militias of armed freedmen made them feel unsafe. Oh my god. I'm glad that there's somebody's lived experience that we're supposed to honor. I'm glad that there are some bodies and spaces that we're supposed to give credit to. They're just fucking the Ku Klux Klan in 1875.

Everyone is the same person. It's incredible. No, yeah, it's the only grievance with anti-bias training is that it's not anti-bias training at the behest of that school in Kentucky where the students climbed on the teachers. Yeah, when Southerners write over and over again that undisciplined militias of armed freedmen

made them feel unsafe, they were heckin' small beings. They were doing them a frighten. Yeah, just a shy mass rapist. Why do you have slaves? I'm shy. Drilling in the middle of the street and intimidating local Democrats confident in their immunity from legal consequences.

It's just like, I'm sorry, like, I'm like, those local Democrats were killing people in mass numbers in vastly disproportionate numbers. There's a base there are almost no instances of reconstruction, government, and honestly, this was one of the problems of reconstruction. There was not enough violence on behalf of the state governments themselves

to defend their mandates. All of the violence, the vast majority of it was carried out by small being Democrats. It has to be this feels unsafe shit, because if you actually ask, OK, what's the body count of reconstruction, there's no pales in the face of what the Democrats were doing. Or ask, why do these people feel so, so unsafe

by the sight of black people being part of the police department or government? It's almost like they did something horrible to them. It's almost like they deserve it. A very short time ago, yeah. It may be that these fears were partially motivated by racial prejudice. It may be.

Well, I mean, it's a very generous effort to admit that. But Du Bois is glib to write off all the evidence this way. In Gaston County, North Carolina, the Union League came to town, and soon after, 28 white farmers had their barns burned down in a single week, leaving the victim's destitute and near starvation. Did Gastonians dream that? Did the barns burn themselves?

How many people got fucking castrated by the Ku Klux Klan? This is insane. You're literally talking about buildings. How many Americans died in the Civil War period? The most persuasive testimony we have is not from ex-Confederates, but from true believing liberals, who nonetheless became convinced that reconstruction was a betrayal of their ideas.

James S. Pike. Well, that's true, though. I will give her credit for that, because they were liberals. And they thought, if we get rid of slavery, then everything will be fine. And we can finally impose market logic onto the whole of the country, and we can have freedom. And then that didn't work.

And it turns out that you actually need to reconfigure the relationship between the citizens and government in order to actually have liberty in a condition of the abolition of that incredibly persistent and deeply embedded social structure of slavery. And they didn't want to do it. They didn't want to take the next step.

And they were like, you know what? Actually, this was all a mistake. But that's just because they were incorrect. Because even better here, it says, author of this gazing book, The Prostrate State about Reconstruction South Carolina, was a radical Republican from Maine and former ally of Faddeus Stevens.

Daniel Chamberlain of Massachusetts commanded a black regiment in the Union Army. Yet in 1901, he published the overwhelmingly negative assessment, Reconstruction in South Carolina in Atlantic Monthly. Itself, the house magazine of high-minded Boston abolitionism. Reconstruction ended not because Southerners overthrew it,

but because Northern liberals could no longer in good conscience defend it. OK. OK. Well, I mean, once again, yes, because Northern liberalism was incompatible with a successful reconstruction. And so there was no will to carry it out. I mean, that is accurate.

I mean, if there's only some sort of, I don't know, heuristic through viewing history that maybe someone like W.E.B. Du Bois attempted to impose upon this narrative, they could make sense of why high-minded Boston liberals turned against Reconstruction because they couldn't stomach it in good conscience. Yeah, I know. It was just, oh, it took us a couple of barns being burned.

And they were like, think of the hay. Oh my god. Were there like, I mean, the more things changed, the more this is the same. I'm assuming there were like Selina Zito-type articles around then that were like, actually, I talked to a guy who owned the biggest plantation. Oh, no, 100%.

The plain truth is that Reconstruction was bad, objectively bad. It was a time of school commissioners who signed their names with an X, tax collectors who pocketed huge sums for private use, tin pot tyrants who had citizens court-martialed and sent to the dry tortugas for the crime of insulting the Republican Party.

The only possible reason for lionizing- Let's go, Brandon. The only possible reason for lionizing this traumatic episode would be if you had an ulterior political reason to do so. Everyone has an ulterior- What was the political reason for creating the narrative in the first place?

Like the premise here is that there is such a thing as a authentic historical narrative about any event that is untainted by motivated reasoning or politics and that it can only be overthrown or abnegated by some sort of conspiratorial effort to propagandize. Not that you just have these consensuses that change over time due to changing

political and social conditions. Also, like her horrifying description of Reconstruction states, it sounds like what those states are like now. Like just shitty, shitty kleptocracies. Yeah, like, all right. There was a redemption. You got what you wanted.

All of the awful corrupt governments were overthrown by the 1880s. Then the South just killed it after that, right? Yeah, it was so traumatic that they're stuck re-enacting that behavior forever. It is no coincidence that the two most prominent Reconstruction revisionists, Dubois and Eric Foner, I was waiting for Foner to get brought up,

are both Marxists. Dubois died a Stalinist and appointed prominent communist historian Herbert Aptheker as his literary executor. Foner is a longtime Soviet sympathizer whose father and uncles were CPUSA members. In 1990, he encouraged Mikhail Gorbachev, faced with upstart successionists in the Baltics, to imitate Abraham Lincoln's example and preserve his union.

These men's communist affiliations are not just a gotcha. When revisionists say that Reconstruction only failed because it was not tried hard enough, what they mean is that America did not go all the way through a 1917-style revolution. Yeah, correct. Yes, yes.

Foner is circumspect about this, referring delicately to expropriation and the make or break issue of land redistribution. I mean, what right did any of these people have to their fucking land after the Civil War? I know. Like, who would be making that article? Like, oh, we can't just take the land away.

There's no argument that you can make in an abstract sense. Forgetting even the question of the immorality of slavery, they had taken up arms against the government. And you can say, well, they had the rights, blah, blah, blah. It was there. Yeah, any argument that you want to make that there was a justification for their land holding was premised on a social order that was defeated

by the Civil War. It was a contest of sides, one side, one. And what that means is that the side who wins gets to determine what your fucking rights are. There is no transcendent right that they must be respected. The reason that northern liberals did respect their rights is because the most influential, especially after the assassination of Lincoln,

members of the Republican Party were ideological liberals committed to American capitalism. And as such, were horrified by any actions that would have undermined property rights as the basis for the social order. That doesn't mean that they shouldn't have, though. I mean, the study of history is about determining what the conditions were, what's driving the action.

It's not about taking the ideological matrix that existed then, preserving it in amber, and saying that it had some sort of transcendent universal truth that we have to respect forever. But that is the conservative historical project. She goes on. Du Bois comes right out and says it, quote, only a vast and single-odd dictatorship of the nation

could guide us up from the murder in the South and robbery and cheating in the North into a nation whose infinite resources would be developed in the interest of the mass of the nation, that is, of the laboring poor. I mean, very brave of her to just include Du Bois' own words in this, because I mean, she's proving why black reconstruction still matters,

and will probably continue to be taught for another 100 years. Du Bois describes reconstruction as one of the most extraordinary experiments in Marxism that the world before the Russian Revolution had seen. The parallel is apt. The only question is why the Library of America would reissue the book of a man who argued that America's never attempting a Leninist dictatorship of the proletariat

on a national scale was a bad thing. What was the political reality in the South after the Civil War, and what was it after reconstruction? Was it democracy? Would she call it that? And if it wasn't, what was it? And if it was a dictatorship, what did that dictatorship lead to?

Like, these people hate what America is now, right? Yeah. And the failure of reconstruction is part of that tapestry that got us to where we are. And all the shitty stuff, the condition of the South, the objection of the South that has persisted ever since reconstruction, has been, at every point, dominated by a aristocracy.

Yeah, and the thing is like, OK, she's against a Leninist dictatorship of the proletariat. But we read the American conservative all the time. They're not huge fans of democracy, either. No. I mean, like, you know, she's putting it delicately. In fact, like, she's way more cowardly than Foner or Du Bois is, because what she's saying is really

that the organic natural order that's worth fighting for and preserving is a slave aristocracy, and that any attempt by the state or individuals themselves to enfranchise black people in the American experiment or allow them political representation or freedom at all is some kind of unnatural intervention in a social order or in a natural hierarchy that is America in some abstract sense.

Yes. And that doing it is un-American and should not be taught in schools, blah, blah, blah. But also the thing of like, I mean, this is a smaller point within this, but the idea that they shouldn't reissue it because Du Bois said that America should have followed Leninism, should have had a Leninist revolution, doesn't it just

run counter to everything they said from like 2018 till now that you should evaluate people, you shouldn't evaluate people by the views they held? Yeah, exactly. To the prism of today. Like, if that's what you're doing, like, who's who? Yeah, I mean, like, she could make that same argument about like, people who want Nathan Bedford Forrest's

statues to get taken down because you're like, look, you just have to judge them by the times that they lived in. Right. And like that, you know, what he was doing was like, you know, considered moral or heroic at the time, you know, and it's just part of our history. Well, that's because it's all bullshit. Nobody actually holds any of these liberal values.

Liberal values are luxuries of conditions of plenty. And as soon as people begin to feel that there is a decline rather than an ascent, all of a sudden, no matter where you are, they start going away. And the thing about the beauty of American ideology, though, is that you can, in your own mind, slowly discard all of these trappings of liberal idealism

without ever thinking you're doing it. Without always assuming, though, I'm still holding onto it. It's all these other people who are. Right. And because they're discarding it, well, I guess I have to also. Right. I do hate the idea of having like legally declared hate speech.

And most of these people would probably say the same thing. But they do agree with that in concept, just like a different type of hate speech and a different type of like getting it out of there. Yeah, absolutely. That's the great thing about the term unsafe is that everyone really does use it. And it's the line where you can draw restricted language

or restricted person to look at. Yep. At the end of the day, everybody is trying to protect their subjective emotional experience. And whatever has to happen, whatever rules have to be changed or enforced to allow that to happen, need to occur. And then whatever mental gymnastics

you have to go through to justify it are worth it. Because at the end of the day, that's all you have. As you close it out, here's the last paragraph. Reconstruction has been called a piece of the 20th century that fell into the 19th. It certainly bears a resemblance to the post-colonial regimes that arose in Africa in the 1960s, both in the ruin that followed and the how dare you reaction

of defenders who insist that any more gradual path would have been an unspeakable moral enormity. I mean, she's like, we should have. But what they're saying is that the civil war should never have been fought, or there's no need for it to have been fought. And that gradually, like, oh, hey, Brazil got rid of slavery in the 1880s without a war. Take it up with the slave owners.

They started the god damned war. And they were able to stop the war. Because they started? Because they wanted to protect slavery. But because they saw it as ending, and they were masters of a political and social order that they didn't want to see go away. And nothing was going to make them do it,

as long as they felt that they could hold on to it. And when she says here that, like, people who insist that any more, quote, gradual path would have been some sort of moral abomination. I mean, again, she is being delicate and cowardly in a way here, because what she really wants to say is that fighting a war to overthrow slave aristocracy was the moral abomination.

Yes. And the anti-bellum South was a normal, natural social order that, like, if it lasted another few decades, or no matter how long, it just would have gradually been phased out. But, like, it's that the reconstruction itself was worse than slavery. Recently, we have seen a push to do for the last 400 years

what Du Bois and his heirs did for reconstruction, rewrite history so that good is bad, heroes are villains, and the solution to every problem, no matter the circumstance, is to give money and power to racial minorities. If that push succeeds, it may equally be said in the future that reconstruction historiography was a piece of the 21st century that fell into the 20th. Helen Andrews, the American conservative.

I'm doing a Google image search. Oh, yeah, no, she's a. Damn, she's fire. She's so fucking fire, damn. What the, I don't know. I don't know, I don't want to be too mean. Well, I mean, she's, I mean, like, look, I mean, like. Sometimes you just have a big forehead, which can you do?

I mean, she's just like a piece of shit, so I don't care. But I mean, like, she's still tiptoeing up to the fucking line. And, like, I'm sure she feels very, like, saucy about publishing this, and like, a lot of people are, you know, roasting her for it, and I'm sure she gets a throw out of that. But she is still putting around the central issues. She is still, for her own reasons, she is still unable to admit what she's really arguing here, which is that getting rid of

slavery was worse than slavery. Yeah, slavery is, has a virtue of emerging as a natural progress or process. And then the evil modern mind has to rebel against nature. And it's the same idea that says that there's such a thing as a, is a organic historical memory that transcends politics. OK, she got a B.A. from Yale. That's, I mean, that's really where you learn how to stay unsafe.

And. B.A. from Yale. Your boy says that, a degree in history from Harvard. Yeah. And she's like, oh, he is no historian. Your boys would be more comfortable at a Let's Go Brandon rally. Yes, absolutely. He was a Stalinist.

You think he wanted to thank Joe Biden? No, yeah, he loved Gatorade. He started Gatorade. No, that was a Booker T. Washington. Peanut flavor was kind of gross, but. But you know what, not like, I mean, like most of the history of the 20th century was, did explicitly favor a Booker T. Washington's vision of like history and progress over

Du Bois, because Du Bois was correct. Because Du Bois had the fucking right idea. And if you're ever in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, you can visit his boyhood home. So yeah, there we go. So we got a show on Thursday this week. We do. Sold out at Warsaw.

Yeah, sorry for you guys. Sucks. Sucks to suck. I mean, and it will determine, you know, I hate to say it, but depending on how our crowd is in Brooklyn, at Warsaw in Brooklyn, a lot is riding on this. Because like, you cannot, you will get to decide what is the number one city in New York.

Is it the city the state is named after or is it Buffalo? Let's go Buffalo. But I mean that like, I don't mean there's no double meaning. No, no, there's no double meaning there. I mean, like that is straight up one to one. Let's go Buffalo. I want to thank everyone who came to see us in Buffalo. And I'd like to thank the city of Buffalo

for once again being wonderful hosts, wonderful hosts and friends to the show. We had such a good time in Buffalo. Great Lakes Energy just radiating off of that place. We saw Niagara Falls. We saw the car that's still stuck in Niagara Falls, which is wild. It's probably going to be there for another 100 years.

Another great monument in Erie County. But yeah, the show unfortunately is sold out if you're still thinking to come in. But you can sort of cheer for us. I'll get to that in a second. I'll get to our new dates in a second. But I just want to like put it out there now. There are certain people we're putting on the guest list

for the show. I'm just going to broadcast it as wide as possible. Eric Adams, Bill de Blasio, Chris and Andrew Cuomo, Kathy Molecule, Liz Smith. Melissa DeRosa. Melissa DeRosa are all on the list for our Warsaw show this Thursday. Please come out.

I think you will really enjoy, especially the second act of the show. It is, I think, a cinematic triumph. I think it's safe to say. We're real excited. Oh, and also, so talking about reconstruction, we're going to be doing some reconstruction of our own as we tour the Great American South next year.

Starting February 24th in Charlotte, North Carolina at the Underground. Then February 27th in Atlanta, Georgia at Buckhead Theater. March 3rd in Nashville, Tennessee at the Basement East, a real featuring special guest, the Trillbillies. February 18th in Dallas, Texas at the Echo Lounge and Music Hall.

March 22nd in Houston, Texas at the White Oak Music Hall. And then rounding it out, March 24th in New Orleans, Louisiana at Civic Theater. Oh, I guarantee that's going to be like my own one. I guarantee Matt will be doing that voice the entire show. Can't wait. Oh, and there's also a possibility that a third Texas date will be added in Austin.

Oh, for the Texas dates, I think for at least some, if not all of them, we are going to have Thomas and Jake from Pateo, Thomas as well. Which we're very excited for, I guess. We are very excited. I've never even been to Texas. Me neither. I've been to the Dallas airport one time,

but I've never been to Texas. It's not the same thing. I've also been to the airport and I just, I didn't feel like it was that much bigger. I have also not been to Atlanta, Georgia. I mean, I basically have been there one time and that's when I was born. So I'm coming back.

It's a big homecoming. It's a big homecoming for me. So I expect to be feted by the city, the city of my birth. I'm excited. I'm very happy we're ending the tour in America's wettest city, New Orleans. I can't wait. I'm so fucking excited.

I really am. We're gonna eat so much good food in New Orleans. You're gonna be glistening like John Candy on the stand in JFK. I'm cutting weight now. I'm cutting weight now. So I am 104 pounds before the tour and we're gonna see how big I can get. I'm so excited.

What is John Candy saying in the city? He's like, right ho ho, wrong whoo. You're at the right TT, but the wrong ho ho, Daniel, the cat's spanking you. Okay, John Candy, is that crab meat you're eating? Let's all dress like John Candy from JFK. Get those Ray Bans on. I, yeah.

Nothing but seersuckers. I'm excited. We're going to the Let's Go Brandon capital of the world. And look, we love New York City. We love all the New York City stuff. CVS, Equinox, all the stuff that's only here in the world. Grace Papaya, the Wendy's in Midtown. All the stuff that's nowhere else.

But like, man, when we're in the South, we can buy whatever vape flavors we want. It's just probably the world's greatest selection of soda. Oh yeah. South you have to admit. Yeah, we're honestly like, we've been discussing it. And I think like on the tour of the South, we're just switching sets permanently

and we're going to become Southern guys. Yeah. I know we've been shitting on the American South for like good five years now. We've only just, we just did. But like when we get there, we're officially switching sets. I'm now anti-vaccine. I'm not getting a fourth shot ever.

I'm getting all the shots I have taken out of my life. Yeah. Unless someone asks me to. But we're absolutely done, Brandon. It's Let's Go Brandon time. It's finished. It's done, yes. Have I gotten literally more boosters

than anyone in the world at 58? Yes. But that's all the past now. We're flipping over. We're changing sides. We're going to be so fucking good at being conservative. You have no idea. It's not even about being conservative.

I'm going to be so good at just being from the South. Yes. Yes. It's like all of my, all of my epigenetic memories are going to come back to me. I don't have any Southern epigenetic memories. I only have the road trip we went on when I was a kid. When my dad, we took a road trip at the South

when it was like 13 or 14. And my dad read the book Ghost of Mississippi before. So just like every white person he saw over the age of like 50, he was just disgusted by. It's like ruined his crib personally. But I thought it was, you know, I'd never been. So. Well, we're coming.

We're coming. We're coming, baby. See you at Warsaw on Thursday. Absolutely. Links to all those dates and links to buy tickets to all them at chapotraphouse.com slash live. Till next time, gentlemen. Till next time.

Let's go, Brandon. Let's go, Brandon.