Chapo Trap House - 586 - Christmas in Heaven feat. Danny Bessner (12/20/21)

Episode Date: December 21, 2021

Time was, a Will-less episode meant a cavalcade of kids-running-the-candy-store bullshit. But, we think we’ve cracked the code to a reasonably focused Will-less eps with the Chris/Danny sub-in combo. Which of course means you hogs will find something else to complain about here. We’ve got Omicron updates, the BBB implosion, Chile’s new president, tensions in Ukraine, and of course, medieval cum hell. Tickets for our Southern tour are on sale over at chapotraphouse.com/live

Hello. It is your chapeau. It's your chapeau today for Monday, December 20th, getting into the red zone of the holiday season. Today, you may notice that it is me here talking instead of Will. Will is traveling. Will has passed away. Will is traveling into another stage of life. He is making his transition into death. Will is on the River Styx right now. Will is in the Delta Lounge on the River Styx. Will is listening to Styx. He's listening to Styx. Will did not die of the Omicron virus. He got every vaccine except the flu shot and has passed away from the flu. I'm just imagining that, you know, you're on your deathbed. You've lived a long fuel full life. You feel like you've come to some kind of understanding

about the world, the universe, your soul and spirit. And you see that white light and you move into it. And you are transported across space and time to the eternal Chicago O'Hare Terminal B. And it's all decorated for Christmas. And you're like, oh, this is this is eternity. This is the afterlife. It's Chicago O'Hare forever. Well, Chicago O'Hare during Christmas is heaven. But Chicago O'Hare during just like summer travel seasons as hell. Yeah, exactly. It is Chicago O'Hare Christmas. It's the end of Monty Python's meaning of life. And you're at Christmas. It's Christmas in heaven every day is Christmas Day. See, this is where we validate the medieval Catholic view of the afterlife. This is purgatory what you're describing. And you have to spend a certain

amount of time waiting for your flight in purgatory. And your family can, if they want to, do things like, you know, pay for a prayer chapel or buy an indulgence to maybe bump up your departure time. And what's so like which version of heaven is LaGuardia? By LaGuardia, I mean the airport you can steal from, which is the purgatory where you can get away with the most. I think LaGuardia works good because it's filled with temptations. And you could really show that you're not worthy of heaven and end up going to hell. I don't know if this is true, but I remember learning in Jewish day school that the Jewish hell, at least in some medieval texts, had sort of like a Dante ironic punishment thing. And that one of the punishments was you actually boiled in a pot of

your own semen, all of the semen that you spilled in your life that, you know, not through procreative sex. So that's always struck me as a particular novel form of hell invented in medieval time. God damn. A sticky and bukkake. No, thank you. And of course, filling in with me as well for Will, we have Danny Bessner. Welcome back to the show, Danny. Thanks, Chris. Thanks for having me. Judaism used to be a lot more intense. It was more fun. If they did ironic punishment Jewish hell now, it would be like, oh, now your soup's too hot. You have to finish all of it. I thought Jewish hell was like, as I understood it, it was just like, okay, if you're good, you get to be in our heaven that

isn't really heaven that much. But if you're bad, you're just dead. Which is like, okay, that sounds like fair. There's like different ones over time. I'm actually looking up yet. Seems like I'm correct. And in 1557, a guy named Balam is said and held to boil in semen. The quote is, uncle, I said to him, what is the punishment of that man, a euphemism for Balam himself in the next world? Balam said to him, he is cooked in boiling semen as he caused Israel to engage in licentious behavior with the daughters of Moab. So yeah, there you go. There's hell. I hope Will isn't there. That would be a mix up. That means he went to the wrong terminal. If he went to the Jewish one. He went to the medieval Jewish one. Yeah. Well, that's if he

went to the medieval Jewish one, that's like he went to Meg's field. Be like, wow, we still have that one. Well, fam, we do have a lot on the docket today. It has been a kind of startlingly big news weekend. And so I do want to just hop right into it and ask the question that is, of course, on everyone's mind today. Are they making orcs? They're making orcs, folks. They're making orcs. They're making orcs. Okay. Who is they? And for what purpose are the orcs being made? Bill Gates. All those people, the ones who are instituting biosecurity fascism. Part of it is the manufacture and distribution of orcs. Credit to Everett, Agent Napoleon, Trillburn for raising the alarm here about the danger of orc manufacture. He's a point man in the info war to let it not be known that

they're out there making orcs. Is this like Lord of the Rings orcs? I haven't heard about this. Yeah. It's a reference to one of our favorite chapeau critics, someone, let's say, named Rhymes with Fred Kahuna, who has gotten it in her head that like the Gates Foundation and all these people who are creating the new fascist hellscape are doing it through the manufacturing of orcs. Lord of the Rings. Oh, nice. That's cool. Using drugs and propaganda and regimes of compliance to make an army of unfeeling monsters who will enforce the new world order. Got it. Thank you. To me, this just sounds like, because I feel like the past version of the same thing was the bug men, right? So it just feels like you have maybe moved from the rainforest level

onto the dungeon level. Well, they're both happening at the same time. Remember, like at the periphery, they're making orcs. And at the center, they're making bug men. And eventually you end up with, in another few thousand years, the Eloi Moorlach HG Wells future. Well, I guess then from the discussion of the orcs that they are all making us into, the thing that we should probably talk about first is Omicron. We've got a new strain and everybody's getting it. Everybody's getting it, folks. It's the hottest thing in town, Omicron. People can't stop getting it. They love it. Yeah. And we're talking about, like, you know, let's be clear here. We're talking about New York City. If you're in New York City

and you're getting COVID, you're getting Omicron. I don't care. I don't give a shit if you live in fucking ATV County, Pennsylvania. Oh, we're still doing Delta. I don't care. I'm not talking about you. Shut the fuck up. I'm talking real New York shit, real New York hip hop, real New York Omicron. So the thing that everybody, this came out a few days ago, but everybody today is the day that everybody wanted to get mad about it. The Biden statement. You guys want to just go off about what the White House said in that press release. Yeah. So what they said was we are intent on not letting Omicron disrupt work in school for the vaccinated. You've done the right thing and we will get through this for the unvaccinated. You're looking at a winter of severe illness and death

for yourselves, your families, and the hospitals you may soon overwhelm. So just saying, fuck you to the unvaccinated and that they're on their own, but that everybody who got vaccinated will probably be okay because it does appear, don't yell at me. I'm not a scientist, but it does appear from everything that's been happening in the countries that have been hit by Omicron first, that it is a milder strain that certainly coupled with vaccination will not hopefully result in a mass explosion of hospitalizations and deaths that go along with the inevitable now and already happening spike in cases. That statement is just the id of kind of the liberal communication specialist Ivy League graduate who definitely put that together. It's like the perfect embodiment of

that particular approach of the we believe in science, but we also think we're meritocrats because we made the right decision. We're smarter and more elite than you. And really, if you just listen to us, you stupid rubes, everything would be going well. Because I mean, I imagine that's the communications team who's coming up with that, right? This is some... Yeah, Biden read that. Ivy person. No, yeah, I don't think Biden was out of that. Yeah, he wasn't writing that. So it's just...

It would be very funny imagining him in the overall office being like, they're going to get sick, Mac, they're going to, they're going to dive. And I don't even care. And you know, honestly, this is why I like that statement. That's why I think it was actually the right thing to do because, yes, that is the id of professional class liberalism. If you do the right thing, you get rewarded. If you do the wrong thing, you're punished. But given our the state of America's response infrastructure to COVID, given the fact that we are not in any way prepared to do any of the like massive lockdown stuff that people imagine might halt Omicron spread. And by the way, if we tried, we wouldn't be able to. Like,

there's no way that people would, because to have a lockdown, you need social buy-in. It cannot be enforced by the law. It's enforced by people deciding it's the right thing to do, which you had plenty of that in March of 2020. There is none of it left. So there will be no lockdowns. It's like it is not a thing that this government at this point is capable of. So if that's the case, if we're all just going to have to grin and bear as Omicron just overwhelms us and gets all the nooks and crannies that were avoided by the previous waves, well, then what do you tell people? Do you lie to them about how much their suffering means to them? Or do you say, look, there's going to be the saved and the damned and which do you want to be?

It's at the very least, it is a, it's a communication for the first time. It is not just some anti-speech that exists to completely obscure reality. Like, this is where we are, and you can accept it or you can try to fight it. But what you cannot do is demand from the government that they put any other spin on this, because there is no, at this late date, there is no other spin to put. Yeah, I don't know, like, any critique of it that you can make is, like, I guess there are better ways to do it. But at this point, like with everything else with COVID and especially with Omicron, it's way too late. Yeah. Like, okay, okay. So you could, I guess, theoretically, yeah, not theoretically, but definitely in all avenues have done a better

job communicating with this since the beginning, right? But the idea that there has to be a Fauci, like, a guy who has a dual function as both, like, the chief salesman of U.S. medical systems and pharmaceuticals and, like, the leading public health authority, the fact that that guy is so important is because for most Americans, like, look, I bet doctors pull high, I bet it's one of those things that pull high, but a lot of people respect them. But in practice, doctors to a huge slice of Americans to tens, if not hundreds of millions of them, are a guy you see once every three years who, like, tells you you're fat, and then you have to pay a certain amount out of pocket. So having a doctor, just their doctor, much less a doctor, be like, oh, you should take this,

is not going to work. You have to have this guy in this role. He's going to be on TV all the time. By virtue of him being on TV all the time, and by virtue of the kinds of people that are telling you what to do, some of it right, some of it wrong, just by function of us not knowing what this was for the longest time, that is going to be inherently politicized, and you'll end up here. And after Delta, after, like, a shitload of fucking unvaccinated people and especially people who were making a point of not getting it died or got very sick, I mean, what the fuck can you say? What the fuck can we say or do at this point? Well, that's what I don't understand about the revulsion of this. I think, as is often the case, what people are really revolted by is,

you know, just where we are as people and our inability to live any other way. But they have to express it through, like, discrete events. And in this case, you have this statement by the White House. They are horrified by its blunt bluntness and by its smugness and by its cold-hearted rejection of any ability, any duty of the government to act on behalf of its citizens. But I've got to ask, given exactly what has happened until this point, given what the Biden administration has done to respond to COVID ever since they came into office, would you have really felt better reading a statement that was clothed in concern, was wrapped in earnest empathy for the suffering of Americans? Would that have really felt better? And would it

have done its job any more effectively, given the polarized political atmosphere? And I got to say, no, it would have been gross then, too. At least this has the virtue of embracing honesty to it, that will then at least maybe allow us to look at things a little differently instead of just more of the same, just saccharine bullshit that we then have to have the same reflexive revulsion to in its own right. Yeah, this is the Joe I know. This is the Joe, and we've talked about this, this is the Joe whose job it is to lead us into the afterlife. This is the Joe who we elected to be our psychopomp. This is the Joe that we said, Trump is raging against the dying of the light, but for those of us who recognize that there's no fighting anymore, who can best carry us

into Elysium? And the answer is Joe, because what has Joe done since being in office, besides embodying personally in himself the incredible vulnerability and finite nature of humanity? Like, look at me, I'm a literal mummy decaying in front of you. But then every major decision of this presidency has been one to disabuse us of a fantasy of American victory. He said, he told us, you weak did not win Afghanistan, we lost, and we need to reckon with that. Now he is saying, we have failed to meet COVID, and we have to reckon with that. Hell, him and Joe Manchin just made a duet to let us all know that we have failed in regards to climate change. And we need to deal with that. Now, does that mean just giving up on politics? Does it mean

deciding that this politics is dead and we need a new one? That's up to the individual to decide. But no matter what it is, Joe is here to let us know that the party is fucking over and that we have to figure out where else we're going, because we can't stay here. And I think that's exactly what accounts for the revulsion is that it's such an anti political statement. It's an honest form of political communication as opposed to propaganda. There's no attempt to persuade zero, which is in the liberal imagination, at least the foundation of politics, it's about rationality, and it's about exchange. But this one is essentially in a very, you know, I would almost Calvinist Protestant way, like you said, Matt, is aligning oneself with the elect and with the

saved. And it's essentially saying, we are the saved, you are the damned, we know you're not going to do anything about it. So we're essentially going to revel in the enjoyment and the pleasure of knowing that we are the elect. So again, it's an apotheosis of liberalism. This is where liberalism absent ideological others winds up in this sort of power politics organized around a particular elect that's presented itself as rational as pro science and all of these things. And I think it's bracing to people who, you know, have spent 20 years, 30 years their entire lives being propagandized that in a sense. I think that's where the revolution comes from. And that is revolting. I mean, this is this is the final legacy of a Puritan American

Protestantism, the Calvinist project of America embodied is embodied in liberalism. And that's gross. But it's also truthful, not just in it's the fact that it's revealing the heart, but it's also truthful in the sense that they finally get at least the person who wrote this gets that persuasion is dead. They because that's the thing. Why shouldn't liberals crawl up their own asses? Persuasion has died. The necessary social structures to encourage the civic trust necessary to have a persuadable public have completely collapsed. So we are now armed camps who cannot cross into another boundary epistemically and heuristically. So what is the point of trying to persuade? And they have finally realized that there isn't one.

And that's another one of that the bracing truths that this thing reveals is that at least on some level, the liberals have given up their fantasy that there is a persuadable public. And that's what I do have to say, like credit to the liberals on their Calvinism, though. Yes, because at least their Calvinism here is like, Oh, you should have like gotten the shot that most people got. But with conservative COVID Calvinism is it is literally just like drawing numbers out of the hat. Because it's like, it's like, yeah, a bunch of like just fat guys who haven't exercised since the mid 80s, like their friend dies, who's exactly like them. They're like, Yeah, he was like, he was unhealthy. Let's see, they're the exact same person.

And it's it's Trump and Stanchera standing next week in front of the pearly gates wondering who's going to go through. Yeah, it is the Trump and it's Trump and Stanchera. That's the that's their response to it is like, Well, yeah, if you died, you, you like you were doing the wrong stuff, which is the same stuff that I do. But that's because you can't forget when talking about liberal Calvinism, that this is not confined to the liberals. This is the American project is this kelvin's dividing of the elect and the and the damned. But it's expressed differently, depending on, you know, if you're a member of the intellectual, post religious, urban elite, or if you're a member of that, of that landed like petty bourgeois, that while the liberals imagine

a left that is determined by virtue by personal virtue, the conservatives, the Republicans, the petty bourgeois, the more earthy, less intellectualized of our elites, realize that if you really want to look for the elect, you don't have to look inside, you just look at the fruits of nature, you look at what God has decreed on the land. And that is who's a winner and who's a loser, who's got money, who doesn't, because the one with money, the one who succeeded, the one with power is favored by God, the one who has not those things has been disfavored by God. You don't have to do a lot of fancy internal auditing of your own soul and your behaviors, and then trying to turn that into politics to figure out if you're good or not. If you have

succeeded in life, you are good. And that is the COVID response on the right is oh good, here's another thing to separate the save from the damned. Here's another scouring wave to purify the land and burn off the dead weight. And they're able, they're so internalized, they say yeah, even when their friends die, even when their Stan Sharer's die, it's like well, I liked him, he was a friend of mine, but at the end of the day, he was a bitch. At the end of the day, he was not in the book of life, I am. Why? That was God's decision. I can't figure that out, but I know that I'm still here, and I've got a house, and I've got a boat, and I've got a pool, and I've got a jet ski. So that means that until that is gone, until that stops, that I am in God's

favor. When Trump said about Stan Sharer, he's a little bit heavier. Yep. It's like no, no, you guys are the exact same. The exact same guy. Exactly. Like if you guys both did that Alfred Hitchcock in profile logo, they'd be like, that's the same guy. They'd fit the same outline. And people say like, what's it going to take for them to stop thinking that way? Never going to happen, because the ones on this side of the line have no incentive to, because it's till the moment you're dead, you're a member of the elite. And then at that point, you are no longer in the conversation. The only people left are those other people who watched you die and now think, you know, he was a great guy, but he just didn't have it in him. I'm different.

I like the only thing that could stop them is if they were forcibly converted to Islam. Yeah. That's the only and then even then they would still be assholes. It was just like their kids would be like better. That's it. That's it. That's it. Like because it's like when one of these people almost fucking dies, it is like in the ICU and like makes it out like thankfully, and it's like, I really want to get the vaccine now. Their friends are like, fuck you. Yeah. And I think this is a conflict that's been going on for for hundreds of years. It's earth versus mind. It's romanticism versus rationality and it's two sides of the same coin. It's a dialectic, but we've reached a moment where there's no form of transcendence because I think like the

algorithm has become conscious. It exists outside of the human will. So we have this stasis. Throughout American history, while we were a growing entity, while we were conquering the globe with our markets and our dollar, that dialectic was being worked out in a condition of plenty, and not just plenty, but more importantly, the promise of more plenty in the future, the promise of upward mobility for the masses. And in that context, that dialectic can play out and then produce material politics as a side product, things like the Great Society. When you have a thing like a working class movement that connects with one of these groups, the elect seekers, and then are able to direct a social democratic politics. But once you reach this

terminal point where we have no more growth and no more hope for upward mobility or generational accumulation as opposed to loss of position and stability, in those conditions, then there's nothing left to point fingers because the politics can no longer as a byproduct produce effective ameliorance to social dislocation, the way that they could during the New Deal and Great Society era. And I think this is even true as a species because there's a dawning recognition that like the Chinese middle class or the Indian middle class cannot consume like the American middle class. No. Because that would literally cook the planet. So like as a species, there's no fantasy anymore. The Fantasian no longer exists. So we have people retreating into their individual

electedness or not, particularly in this country, which is at the height of the whole order. I think you see this throughout the world of the spear. Yeah. Well, just speaking of persuasion and Trump and just to kind of ran it back in a little bit from the realm of the spiritual, I did want to play this one Trump clip that came out. I believe he was talking to Bill O'Reilly last night at a rally in Dallas. And here is here's Trump's position on all of this at this point. But look, we did something that was historic. We saved tens of millions of lives worldwide. We together, all of us. Not me. We. We got a vaccine done, three vaccines done, and tremendous therapeutics like Regeneron and other things that have saved a lot of lives. We got a vaccine done

in less than nine months. It was supposed to take from five to 12 years because of that vaccine, because of that vaccine, millions and millions of people. I think this would have been the Spanish flu of 1917, where a hundred million people died. This was going to ravage the country far beyond what it is right now. Take credit for it. Take credit for it. It's a great, what we've done is historic. Don't let them take it away. Don't take it away from ourselves. You're playing that, you're playing right into their hands when you sort of like, oh, the vaccine, if you don't want to take it, you shouldn't be forced to take it. No mandates, but take credit because we saved tens of millions of lives. Take credit. Don't let them take that away from you. Okay, so the president

made new. Do you agree with that? That if the only scenario I see where Trump runs in 2024 and doesn't get the nomination is one where DeSantis decides to go for it and runs against him on vaccines as a wedge issue. I think that's the only way he wouldn't get the nomination. But I honestly think before it got to that point, he would read the room and decide vaccines were a bad idea. Even though he has an ego connection to vaccines, he is an even greater visceral disgust at being booed and being rejected by these people. You can see it the way he cringes away from criticizing them in his speeches as soon as he gets a bad response. I think he would have to remake himself and he would figure out a way to justify it. And we saw in that little speech that

it wouldn't be hard for him because he talks about how absent the vaccine we would have had Spanish influenza millions and millions killed, which is directly a contradictory to what he said at the very beginning of the pandemic before the vaccine was even close to being created when he was talking about how it's not a big deal. And it's the flu and how you shouldn't even be counting it. And he is now as time has gone by and after the vaccine decided, you know what, actually I saved the human race by allowing a vaccine to go forward. And he can move in that he'll have whatever mental gymnastics that takes him to find a new hatred of vaccines. He'll do it as long as he keeps just that adulation that he literally needs to survive at this point. He

is a fucking energy vampire. What's keeping him going? It is interesting hearing him talk about these speeches and rallies at this point because, you know, we've seen Trump live and he is a maestro of his crowd. They are in the palm of his hand. You can tell whenever the vaccines come up that the vibe in the crowd is very confused, that they don't know what side they're on. And I think it's more like the crowd doesn't can't quite figure out what side they're on in that moment when Trump is saying it's a good thing we've done. And I do find it fascinating that, yeah, as you're saying, the needle that he's threading is not like you should take it or you should even have to think about it, but you got to give me credit for how I'm not asking you to

take it. I'm just asking you to not think it's bad because I have connected it psychically to myself. But increasingly, that's too much to ask, you know, like this thing gets more calcified. It becomes more a key component of identity. And he's pushing against that. He's asking for a kind of A to C reasoning that is not often asked of his audience, you know. Yeah, I mean, and this is a guy who got a room full of fucking stadium full of coal miners in West Virginia to applaud his complaints about the lack of stick tuativeness of modern hair sprays. So they are willing to meet him on anything. But this is one where they just can't in their mind in that moment, make make the leap to say like, Yes, sir. And that is the first real wedge

you've seen between him and the people who at this point are just the Republican Party at the voting room. I have a I have a little bit of a hinge point for you guys. What I've been what I've been thinking about a lot. So I think like, I feel like everyone when they talk about like, you know, it didn't have to be this bad in America. It's like, I always my thoughts on that now at this point are like, I don't know, maybe because because it's like, if you if you look at if you look at America in the UK, like, we like, I don't think any nations have a higher ratio of trucks needed per person to fulfill an individual person's consumption desires. We are that like the two pig nations were the two truck nations. We're just there. Bring us the treats on the trucks. We need

them. Yeah, it's just it's just how we decided it's it's how life found us. You know, it was decisions made before all of us that led us here, that we are the truck nations were the, you know, drop the slop in our in our gaping mouths nations. I mean, it was the negotiated like during the crisis of the 20th century, like our political, our political citizenry, like who can whom the people who make up like the American civic nation decided amongst themselves through hard fought negotiations without anyone realizing that's what they were doing. Everybody thought they were just doing like momentary politics. What they were actually building was a consensus that said, look, we know that there is a class conflict at the center of American life as there is everywhere,

and that that conflict plays out daily in alienation and the battle to redress alienation. Here's the deal. We are at the center, the pivot point of this new global economy that will allow us to distribute not workers control over their conditions of their life, because that is a non-starter for the one side of this party. You know, this is not this is not negotiable for capital. What we can give you instead is a percentage of profit that our algorithm would otherwise reject. And then you can do with that what you want. And an alienated population unable to assert real control over the conditions of their work in life falls into the sort of the sort of necessary recompense of turning consumption into their life, creating, finding

some place to express their need to control their fucking lives, which has denied them elsewhere. And that is without any of us knowing that's what we're doing. That is the engine of state we were creating. And so now at the end of history with these extraction mechanisms finally buckling under the declining rate of profit, we're here now at the at the other end of like the gullet awaiting to to gnaw on things and they're not there. But my hinge point is the thing that that I've been thinking about a lot is, okay, like we know that like just the fact that we didn't we were like behind everyone on testing, we just we did not literally have enough N95s, the only mass that you can like type of mass that you can point to like really stopping the

spread as you would want to, as they've done in other places. The fact that like if you tried to do like Korean style contact tracing in America, your computer would probably just like autoplay trailers for Hulu shows. Like, but say that like this hat like in February, okay, which is really you'd need to start in January. Let's say that Trump makes it so it's like, okay, we're PCR testing everyone that comes in. There's, you know, Australia style mandatory two week quarantine for everyone who arrives from overseas, even citizens, blah, blah, blah. There's some attempt at early contact tracing. Then you start to go really crazy, because what you would actually need, because it would still hit no matter what, what you would actually need to get close to like a COVID zero style

strategy, you would need like the military to make Coca Cola, you know, like, you need national requisition of a lot of production, essentially, could Trump have done this? And what would the outcome be if we were if we were relatively very unscathed, if we had like, let's say, one 1000th of the death toll, and the case count versus the rest of the world. Do you think he could do it? And what what is the outcome? I that's very interesting, because I think that Trump could have pursued that course. Like, I really think he could have committed to pursuing that course. And it could have moved the needle significantly. But I think any attempt to really stress test the capacity of the American state, at some point, hitting that gas pedal,

you're going to run into just the fact that these mechanisms are rusted, and decaying, and when put under pressure, are going to fall apart, not thrive. And that means that, like the crucial connectivity that would have allowed for a virtuous cycle to emerge between, you know, suppression and efforts and actual results, that it would have eventually sputtered to a halt, people would have demanded resumption of their way of life, and he would have given up his commitment to it. Because at the end of the day, he doesn't really have any political beliefs. He doesn't have any ideological commitments. And he therefore doesn't have any commitments to practical efforts. He has no commitments to to specific actions. He just

wants results. And the real result he will always want is people to like him. I think the question you're ultimately asking is what he would have been able to do something like invoke the Defense Production Act of 1950 and essentially use the military to overtake the productive capacities of the American state, the American government, and whether that's possible. And I think what Matt indicated is kind of correct. I think that the American state hasn't been tested in that way in in literal decades. And so you are essentially asking people to go around the country and seize the means of production on behalf of the American military. That seems like that would have been tough to do, at least given his side of the political aisle. I don't

think that would have been logistically and bureaucratically possible. So in some sense, I think, Felix, what you're getting at is that this was, you know, over determined in a way with a pandemic, it would have been very difficult for the American polity is organized to mobilize in a way that would prevent it from getting what it eventually became. I think everything is organized against that. Yeah. And I started thinking about this because I'm obsessed with like TV writers who are like, if everyone just locked down for four weeks like I did, and I'm obsessed with like how liberal Americans think like what they think a lockdown is kind of, because you compare, you know, compare, compare, okay, New York City or Los Angeles or like any

of these places for the first like two months or so, compare what we were able to do and what a lot of these people did versus even like the UK, it's night and day. Like I don't think they get that actual lockdown doesn't mean, oh, you're going to be able to go to the grocery store and like go on a car trip, you know, to four towns over. Like no, you can't lockdown means the government takes over Amazon and Walmart effectively and you have people in fatigues delivering you food for two weeks. That's what a real one would look like. When I started to think like an actual lockdown in America, I mean, I think part of the reason that they were slow to react in the UK is they probably had this similar crisis to us where it's

like, wait, okay, if we do, if we do an actual lockdown like we're going to do where you can't, you know, go from fucking Manchester to, I don't know, Surrey, you would like, how are we going to get people their Cadbury eggs? And I think that's like, if I had to guess why they were late to start, but with America, it's so hard to solve that you start to think like, okay, if we did that, how we would need to fill in all the gaps of American life and we would, yeah, we would literally need the military to give people Mountain Dew because it would come to that. I guess one thing that that question makes me think about Felix, which is related, but kind of independent is that would there have been a chance at any time could Trump through pure

personal messaging culturally have made beating COVID like a MAGA project, you know, among his base? Like, what is that? Would it have been possible to get those people on board with it? I absolutely think not because the key premise of the MAGA project is I get to do whatever I want. There's no patriotism. There's no genuine patriotism. That is populist. Right. Like that is a populist goal. You cannot say that that, that, that, oh, that's, that's what the elite want. Like that's actually, you know, the Koch brothers ideology. No, no, this is true American populism, because Western freedom is the freedom from obligation. It is

not any like more, more like involved and socially bounded like European idea of freedom, where there is an assumption embedded in it that there are social obligations. American freedom is defined by its absence of obligation. And any competent, meaningful COVID response would have required people to act out of social obligation. And I do not know how Trump turns the fucking 18 Wheeler quickly enough on his entire political project to make that different. And that was actually different in the fifties. Like in the fifties, there was a sense of social obligation because all these World War II veterans and people who had been mobilized for decades actually had a sense of belonging to some political community. And I think that's

really a major transformation in capitalism itself from the seventies and eighties when you essentially have the American state shift from protecting American capital to multinational and then eventually global capital. And so you have a total redefinition of freedom on the American right and left. I would say that makes the sort of project that Chris is referring to the sort of like we're going to we're going to get together. We're going to all have victory gardens and we're going to beat COVID effectively impossible in the United States of 2021. Yeah. And I was thinking like I was racking my brain just now trying to think of like how he could have made that a salable goal. Like the idea of like, okay, we're going to lock down until these like the we're I'm putting the

military in charge of making Pepsi and fucking on crustables. And you can't leave your shitty town. We're going to do that until we have these mRNA vaccines. And then we're not going to let anyone in the country. Those like let's be generous and give him what like seven months before the mRNAs are available. Right. Yeah. Let's say that I was trying to compare it to like a recent example. And I realized like there are a lot of periods of, you know, tens of millions of Americans experiencing horrible hardship, people who weren't experiencing that same hardship the year before, but it's never like in pursuit of the goal. It's the it's a consequence. It's the result of like a gap or a fuck up or just the the strip mining of everything like 2008. I and

then you try to bring us back to our last like the last time that it felt like everyone was involved in the same thing. I guess the warrant error, but that that you can't count that because that was just like we did the people did the opposite of sacrifice. You were supposed to do the complete opposite of that. Yeah. That was literally the government message. And the thing I remember no frame of reference. Yeah. The thing to remember is that it wouldn't just be Trump trying to change the the the id based politics of his followers. The whole time he would be trying to do that, the libs would still be there living it up in pop culture and in and in politics. And all of them would be just killing each other to be the most virtuous and to publicly perform virtue the most

ostentatiously. And that would poison any attempt to make sacrifice a social good for people who weren't on the liberal trained who weren't already in some way committed to the liberal cultural project. People who are today revolted by the liberal cultural product, which is like 40 percent of the adult population. We're like a nation without a patria in a sense, which is sort of this this weird thing. There's no real genuine sense of patriotism or belief in the project. We just have these decaying structures, which is another reason for the stasis that we're always talking about. No one believes in anything. And that's why no one could do it. And that was pre covid. Covid's just the accelerants of all of these. Yes, exactly. It's a gas on the fire.

That's why like when you apply a crisis to a a situation and a structure that is at a fatal like compromise point of legitimacy and effectiveness, it's not going to make it thrive. It's going to be the final push of against the fucking tottering coke machine. And it doesn't matter what what cultural, you know, costuming the crisis have the end result is going to be a failure of the institutions to respond to the crisis. I feel like if this hypothetical plays out now that we've talked about it a bit, I feel like now I kind of know what the outcome is. I feel like slightly less, slightly fewer people die. I don't know if Trump wins the election. I actually think probably not in this. I actually think he probably does worse because he's not associated with only

the candy parts of the covid response, which is what he ended up getting credit for. He loses the romantic element of it totally. Yeah, I'm just a fucking bureaucrat and organizer who likes those. All right, well, we got a bunch more shit to talk about. And I do want to get to the international stuff because we got Danny here. So let's move on to topic two today. Look how organized this is. You guys want to talk about the build back better thing for just a bit build back branded branded folks will not be built back. They lied when they said that they could rebuild him. Yeah, not making three billion dollars. The six billion dollar man. The six billion dollar man. I'm sorry. No, the three trillion dollar man. I'm hearing one trillion dollar man. No. Oh, he's flat

lining. So Brandon, Brandon Dumpty fell off the wall. No one should put him back together. Yeah. And like this is of his that covid response. This is the domestic policy face of that. It's like, yeah, this this thing, this machine cannot respond in any way. And that means even though some sort of climate based, like some climate infrastructure investment is demanded by the conditions and not just by the the lights of the Democrats by the lights of capitalism, the markets dropped after this thing failed. There was sex downgrade their downgrade the credit downgraded the because this is a lot less money that's going to get put into the economy and everyone's and that means we cannot respond. So that's so we're getting to drag Joe Manchin

for filth. But at the end of the day, it's just it's just a personal problem. We got one guy who won't change his mind. And oh, well, we're not going to let this thing go forward. It would be really interesting if Biden like did a rogue thing and passed a thousand executive orders in the next week. Because that's I think what someone like Bernie would have had to do if oh, 100 spacing. Yeah, it's interesting to me as a political as FDR passed over 3000 executive orders by far more than anyone. So it's interesting. I it's too bad that he won't at least try something, you know, try to do 30 executive orders, declare all sorts of national emergencies and begin to funnel things because that's the only way that a Bernie candidacy would have been able to get anything done. And

it's just sad we won't be able to see that counterfeit. Yeah, yeah, he's not going to fuck with the established order by doing that. Yeah, it's it's not his type of thing either. Like I mean, I do this entire thing has been I think we all feel the same way. We don't want to spend that much time talking about it, because it's like, yeah, I think I think we've been here before. And not just this exact legislative outcome, but anything, anything we would say to the point that now when I look at anyone else talk about it. Yeah, I'm going, someone listened to an episode from like a fucking year ago. Yeah, lots of lots of lots of people staring at our test where they turn it in. But I mean, this is it's kind of funny. It's kind of like a gotcha. If

you still even give a shit about those, which you shouldn't, I shouldn't, no one should. But it's like, I mean, this was the selling point of Biden or any moderate that he could get something like this done. Do a deal surprise surprise. He can't. No one can't machines broken. Yep, legislation machine broke. It is interesting and grimly entertaining to watch people try to to parse the, you know, the, the criminal analogy of what's going on with Manchin and the White House and it's like, oh, Manchin says that he's, he pulled, pulled his support because the White House was mean to him and then the White House was like, no, but Manchin said, like watching people try to dissect these things is like, you know, watching a whole school room full of people

try to solve a Rubik's Cube together. And if they were all the star of Memento, if they all had Memento disease, because this is a literal recapitulation of the last few cycles of democratic governance. It is what happens. It's not some sort of drama with like specific stakes and outcomes. It is just a rope rehashing. The names may change and the specific names of legislation might change, but the fundamental dynamic is unchanging. And so the meaningful fundamental result is also unchanging. Do you guys feel like the passions are a bit tempered? It did seem like people were like less inflamed over this one than they had been in the past. Well, yeah, because people are kind of getting into their heads through everything that like, oh, like,

it really, if I do, if I take the real implications of my analysis of the political system seriously, then my, the justification for my personal rage at members of the political class is undermined. Because like, if this is true, then even though these people are all individually criminal scumbags who belong in prison, their actual individual culpability for any outcome is relatively marginal, which is why they can all sleep at night and participate in this fucking thing. Because it's going to happen anyway. And that doesn't mean it's good. And it certainly doesn't mean that your politics should not focus on challenging its structures. But it does mean you can't really spend that much time getting mad at these people. Yeah, I wish I would,

I mean, polling, one of the greatest junk sciences there is. But if we had actual useful polling, some of it's fun to look at, you know, sometimes you can catch a, I caught a poll the other day that had Brandon at 48 versus 46. Yeah, looks like looks like looks like people like that communication that everyone screenshotted. I wish there was a way to poll people about their involvement in like how like, if the if polling was good, and you were like, how much are you paying attention to this shit? Right. How much like, do you give a shit, basically, if that instead of the presidential approval rating, which is like, it could be whatever, unless it's like, unless it's like, you know, fucking Bush after 9 11, or Francois

Hollande, it could be whatever. No one cares. Yeah. If you tracked people's engagement with it, then you might be getting somewhere. I would like to look at it now versus a few months ago. Engagement with it speaks to the that reservoir of desire to actually do something other than just sit on your ass, watch politics and then vote every two fucking years. Like maybe actually do become a political subject in a meaningful way. But the reality is, is that all we really end up doing is voting. And those votes count whether you are giving them with all the passion and fury of your mind. If you've spent all of your waking hours, like getting really meaningful and deeply held political beliefs, it matters the same as the election of the vote of somebody who has

given it not a single thought. Like that that is wasted in in the voting booth. Like that excess enthusiasm can only be channeled by like extra electoral political action, because what we are getting around here is the fundamental breakdown of this political system and its inability to absorb anything through its conventional mechanisms of feedback like the electoral system. And the extra perversity is that by the engagement you wind up producing data that is bought packaged and sold by all these companies. So then you just become a even more of a cog in this data economy, which is providing liquidity to the entire system, which basically produces almost nothing at this point. That's why it needs to be at the end of the day funny to you,

you know, it has assumed at the level of entertainment. Now, if you still have a reservoir of political desire and anger and rage and fear, do something with it. But it's something else than consuming information about the fucking news and about politics. Did you guys see dumb dumb ass David David Axelrod accidentally give up the game when he was trying to run cover for Biden, where he's like, Well, yeah, you know, if you if you guys remember, Obama had 60 votes. And most of what we did, we wanted to do felt he probably he got he probably got yelled at so much. Yeah, it's like that. Yeah. If you hear that, you immediately realize, Oh, that means that there can never be a number. It doesn't. Yeah. Because if 60 didn't do it,

why the hell should you believe them when they say 62 would do it? Or seven? I mean, or you get to and then you get to the point where, OK, this is not scientifically possible in the cartoon party system to get enough votes in the Senate to do what you're saying we can do with it. Yeah, Obama, Obama, like, got out of his isolation tank to yell at David over that one. After he didn't invite him to his birthday party, remember that that's pretty. I know it's so sad said this before. One of the few things very few things about Obama that I like. And I think Felix agrees with me is the open contempt he shows for his minions. Oh my God, he hates. He hates John's Axelrod. Anybody who helped get him where he is, because he is the ultimate climber.

And the thing about being a climber is that you have to scorn and hate everybody around you because you have to view them as competition has nothing but contempt for anybody below him. And he also ranks entertainment higher than politics. I think that's perhaps accurately, actually, definitely accurately. And I think that's a big part of it. Like Beyonce is way more important to him than David Axelrod. Absolutely. Because politics is like the lowest form of entertainment. Exactly. For a guy who's always kissing up like Obama, once you run out of political people, which you do pretty quickly when you're the president, you have to move on to celebrity people because that's the real ladder you're climbing.

And everybody behind you and politics can suck your ass. I don't even think he's like, oh, fuck David Axelrod. I'll get Beyonce. I think for like, he's like David Axelrod, a guy who has been with me literally since the beginning. You pluck me off the bench, really. Yeah, who said, OK, I'll go with you. The guy who saw me saying bullshit platitudes in an alleyway and said, hey, kid, that's good form. I think he would let David Axelrod drown for the guy who played Will from Will and Grace. And not out of, like you said, not out of any contempt or hatred for Axelrod, just a simple cost benefit analysis. Oh, I need more celebs in my wedding. Oh, I mean, I have celebs and politics people at my wedding

or at my hootenanny or at my ball sacrifice, whatever the fuck it was. I got to lose some of them because of COVID. Well, celebrities are worth X number of points and political people are worth Y and Y is lower than X. So get the fuck out of here, Axelrod. This is this is neither here nor there. But you know how last last week we were talking about the new type of guy I was fantasizing about? Yes, the truck probably exists. I have a new one. Yeah, absolutely exists. Hell, yes. This is his son. This is the traumatized millennial racist. Hell, yes. Because I was thinking about, like, you know, those awful, like, like millennial things are like, how was my childhood? I don't know. I had to watch

three thousand people die on TV. And then when I graduated, there was a recession. Yeah. You do all that, but it ends with and to top it off, we had a president who was an illegal immigrant from Kenya who ate dogs. Jesse, our friend Jesse had one where it was like, if you don't know the link between ADHD and affirmative action, I don't know what. Yeah. Just a little quick empirical evidence on Obama's care about politicians versus entertainment. Just a quick search for news results for Obama build back better has zero returns while a quick new search for Obama Mitzki has hundreds of returns. Oh, my God, the last popular Democrat, literally the last Democratic politician that like a

bare majority of Americans have any positive feelings for. And he is he is just tweeting at his celeb faves so that they'll pop into the DMs and leaving politics completely out of it. Build back better. Never heard of it. My best American girl slaps. He said his music list. There was some really funny stuff on there. Mitzki hilarious. Imagining Obama just throwing on puberty to and viving out is very funny to me. Yeah. He put on that one of those like songs from that like bullshit, sigh up, Cuban protest that you listening right now, you probably don't even remember. I had to be reminded like no one remembers it because it didn't happen, basically.

He was listening to a song called Patria Evita and it's like, yeah, no, I'm sure you're listening to that. I'm sure you just you were just burnt. You were that was on every playlist. Joe Biden never heard of him. Call me back when you've got J Balvin on the phone. I've heard of that name. I loved also his film list. And of course, these are all like put together by interns, but like he is at the end of the day, a celeb guy. I bet he does watch a lot of these movies and watch the streaming shows and listen to this shit. I think he actually does. And people got very mad that he put the card, the card counter on his best of films for the year list because that movie is about spoiler alert, like the somebody reckoning with their guilt

as a Abu Ghraib torture. Of course, Obama loved torturing Arabs and of course kept Guantanamo pay open. So this thought is horrifying to people. And they say, what if they think like, what is Obama thinking when he's watching this? He must just let it go so far by him. And it's like, no, Obama's entire self conception is that he is he it is good that he was president. And that he is a good president. Be precisely because he presided over the war on terror and then watch that movie because because that the end point of that liberal cosmology is that like your fitness to rule is down to your virtue. And if you're a pragmatic liberal like Obama, you have accepted capitalism, imperialism and the suffocation of the earth on behalf of fucking

profit as unalterable. So the question is, how do you react to that? And as a politician, the response is you need to embrace that Neburian tragedy of humanity and account for that tragedy by by intellectually grappling with its implications, which means watching things like the card counter and then thinking about them. And what's so interesting about Obama himself, and I think what really the pathology that to me explains basically his entire worldview is that he identifies his own life path with the like the life path of his country, and that it's like the prosperity gospel that we were talking about earlier. His own success is the indication that his country is successful. But he has not succeeded because oh, he inherited

a boat dealership or whatever, which is which is good enough for a conservative. He is he is the elect because he has been chosen due to his virtues, his intellect above all. All right, well, we've got Danny here and we've got two fairly big international stories. So let's turn around the world and just yesterday we have in Chile a fairly important election. So Danny, want to start running some some background on this? What should what should we make of the election of Gabriel? I think that the I mean, I think it indicates a couple of things. The big question when we're thinking about geopolitics in Latin America in particular is this does this indicate that there's some form of new pink tide. So in the 2000s, there were all these

left-leaning governments there. There's Chavez and Lula most famously. But then there was a type of white ring white right wing reaction embodied most famously by Jair Bolsonaro. But now the question is whether in a post COVID world, you're going to get another leftward lurch in Latin America. So there's what's going on in Chile right now. And then there's what's going on in Brazil. And it looks like Bolsonaro might lose the next election and Lula might replace him. So the question is, is there going to be sort of a new social democratic turn in Latin America broadly speaking? It also indicates and I think this is not just a story about Chile, but also I think the Finnish Prime Minister was another example. This is that other countries have less gerontocratic political

structures. So then the big question is, is this going to be meaningful? Is there going to be a meaningful generational shift when effectively millennials who have a different personal generational experience broadly speaking assume office in places throughout the world? You know, are we going to then go out? What did the Finnish Prime Minister do? She went out partying and then she left her phone at home. They were like, hey man, she wanted to live in the moment. I get it. So I think those are like the two big macro questions surrounding what this means. And of course with Chile, there's also the fact that this is the, you know, the socialist party of Salvador Allende, which the United States helped overthrow in 1973 under Kissinger. And of course Kissinger

is still a lot of people are referencing the fact that Kissinger is still alive and he's able to see this transition now. But I think it's really, it's very much an open question because you see these, you know, shifts back and forth in the history of Latin America broadly speaking and whether this is something meaningful or not remains to be seen. I do think that the Latin America is like the last place in the world that has a vibrant electoral left, like an electoral left that you can imagine exercising power in crisis conditions and vying for power. That doesn't really, I don't think exist in most other parts of the world. Not all of them don't yell at me, but I think like it's concentrated in Latin America. And there is this, this new, if there's

a new pink tide, it's going to be pushing against some significant headwinds. You're not going to have the economic booming rise international trade of that era of the first pink tide that's going to be like a wind in the sails of your economic efforts. And also a lot of these left-wing regimes have very thin parliamentary support. Porco Stio in Peru has basically none and Porcats isn't going to have much and Lula is going to depend on the same, you know, corrupt parties that he did when he was in power last time. But at the same time, you know, the bloom is off the rose much more, you know, like everyone, like the, the, a lot of illusions have been sanded away by experience, which means that maybe, you know, in crisis conditions, there

could be more effective action directed from the top. Like the fact that, the fact that Porcats wins in Chile, and I'm sure that's not the way to say it, you don't yell at me, I don't know, you know, it hasn't, maybe it would have a limited input impact on Chile, given the distribution of the parliament, but he's going to be presiding over this incredibly important constitutional referendum on a new post-Pinochet constitution, which that's a huge deal, because that is literally breaking open the social contract and rewriting it. And in moments like that, like popular energies actually can be in a very rapid way, can be coalesced and like formed into, you know, meaningful areas of organization. So it's certainly, it's good that he won over the

literal child of Nazis. And, you know, I'll be rooting for him, certainly. And Latin America has a relatively strong history of genuine social democracy. I mean, basically post-NAFTA, that, that has gone a little bit by the wayside. Again, like Matt said, it's different in different countries. But I think you could see a return to that, a sort of corporatist vision where labor has a real, you know, seat at the table and there's able to be patronage distributed throughout these various, through Chile and also various other countries. And that would be a positive development. The limits of that will always be shaped, unfortunately, by the United States, which still has an enormous impact on the

consonants as a whole. But you could see some genuine... But the hope there, honestly, is China. Yeah, possibility that Latin America can try to triangulate against China to, to neutralize some of the United States' overwhelming influence there. I think the hard part there is I'm not sure China is genuinely that interested in expanding beyond its, beyond its own region. I think you hear a lot about that from the foreign policy, like blob and establishment. But I don't think the party or she is especially interested. I don't, I don't think so either. But I think personally, I'm just assuming a continuing condition of waning American influence. And if that's the case, then someone's going to have to,

by necessity, some got global power is going to come in just to fill the vacuum, not necessarily out of their commitment to a project. I guess that was going to be my, my question then is, do we see or imagine much continued will at the top level to, you know, continue resisting from the, from the Americans, from the U.S. government, from the blob to muster whatever will is needed to continue fucking with all of these places? If there is indeed a pink wave? Yeah, I mean, that it's the only thing we know how to do. We're going to be doing that till the bitter end. And I mean, everywhere. Yeah, there's a lot of money and just domestic interests,

I think that are organized around that. What you've seen under Biden is this sort of turn to hegemonic stabilization where there's not even really geo strategic or security arguments made anymore. It's just the system functioning as is for a lot of pork and a lot of continuation. And I think that there would have to be what I was going to say in response to Matt, like, maybe you could see some actually genuine Latin American organizing where you could see like a Brazil and a Chile coming together and doing types of transnational exchanges in order to balance against the United States. That hasn't worked out so well in the past, but it doesn't mean that it can't work out in the future, particularly as the U.S.

gets more exhausted and the domestic society continues to come apart. Yeah, I mean, the fact that we are going to continue doing that everywhere till the bitter end does not mean that we were, we're going to be as effective as we would be doing it even 20 years ago. I think it's, I think like saying that the empire is now like on the verge of death is very premature, very ridiculous to say. But, you know, if you want to, if you want to take benchmarks, if you want to take playoff games, do you like the, the team that I knew, the team that I grew up with, they would have had no problem getting rid of Maduro. Yeah, that's what I was kind of thinking. Kind of a limpness of like what went on with Guaido

a few years ago and Bolivia. Was that just last year? You know, you know, it seems like the mechanism obviously runs in the background without much input or thought or even effort, but it's like, what is, what is the output at this point? I mean, we also, we also are, I talked, we talked about this on an episode with just me, Daniel and Derek, how limp America is at trying to get the EU to play our brand of petro politics and gas politics. We're not like, again, we're not on the verge of death, but it really is not what it once was, which I think is a very positive, positive thing for any genuine, yeah, pink tide in Latin America.

And that's why I think there, there is a little bit of room for hope, or there was at least if a Bernie had one, because the system is so sclerotic and so weak, identifying weak points at the level of the president would have been a way to actually attack things. The problem is, yeah, what Trump would have that you would need is an actual agenda in office, like reasons to do things. And Bernie would have, even if he'd had to obviously accommodate American capitalism and empire from its position as president of that, would have been able to also independently in a concert with the movement that brought him to power, test out weak spots as he pursued an attempt to actually exert the power of the office instead

of leaving it inert as all these other democratic presidents have, because they have no interest in pressing against them. Like they're living as like alchemized Taoists, like they're doing, what they want to, what they do is what they want to do, right? Like they've totally resolved that contradiction. Whereas president like Bernie would, I think really, I do believe would have had that schizophrenic agenda of keeping himself in power as president of the United States, but also seeking to challenge the prerogatives of things like capitalism and empire within the structure of the American political system. I just had a, I did a flashback. I almost felt like I cracked my back and a chemical got released causing me to remember this. February 2020 of somebody,

somebody saying, it's equally important for me to vote for Bernie and also to hope that one day I will, I will be part of a movement that overthrows him. Beautiful poetry. Well, that's just self-flattery. It's like, well, my place in history is surely to be there at the end, right? I cannot just exist as a compromised human like the rest of us carrying out my historic role. No, I am there to bring about the eschaton. And so the idea that I might at my point in history sort of have to assume some condition of cooperation with a project. No, no. If I'm not at the vanguard, I can't be involved because my politics are at the end of the day, narcissism.

Exactly. And I think that's a theme that we've been coming back to throughout this episode. It's all about being the elect, the individual elect. And you're talking about in totally different social spaces with totally different political projects. And that's what I mean when I say things like we're all liberal. We all use that discursive language of individual narcissism and electedness to define our own politics. Like, yeah, you'll be the one to overthrow Bernie because he's not good enough. I.e., you're the most pure person in history. I.e., it's a Calvinist elect thing. And so it's interesting to see these permeations. Yeah, but what if that guy was right?

Yeah. I don't know about you guys. I don't know about you three, but I am immunitizing the eschaton every fucking day. I'm doing it. I'm doing it right now. Rise and immunitize. That's my entire credo. All right. So last in this excellent roundtable of high-minded discussion, Ukraine. I don't know shit about what's going on in Ukraine. So you guys. You say Ukraine week. I take your little pot and smash. So you guys, you guys lead on this one. I just know you wanted to talk about it. So could I, could I cite Derek Davidson over here? So Derek Davidson, co-host of American

Precision Pod, thinks that it's much ado about nothing, that Putin would is not on the verge of invasion and that the previous instances where he intervened in Georgia and Crimea, he just did it. He didn't, you know, sort of like stage set these things. But Derek also thinks that Putin made a miscalculation with his list of demands, which essentially, as Derek put it, would make him king of NATO. So he doesn't, he's not quite sure what Putin wants. I have my own take on the situation, but I just wanted to give you, you know, the real experts low down there. Just, just for the real rubes. The situation is that there is a,

a massing of Russian forces on the border of Ukraine right now, just kind of hanging out there. Yeah. And the question is whether Putin is going to go in like he did in Georgia and Crimea. Because there have been relatively recent instances of a form of cross-border invasion. I just think Putin is basically telling the EU again and again to stay out of what he considers to be Russia's near frontier. And that, you know, in the last 30 years, he's very skeptical about both the initial promise not to expand NATO, which seems to have been something that was truly said. And then the later, you know, attempts to expand the EU into Eastern Europe. And Putin is essentially saying, you're not getting a piece of Ukraine at all. And Crimea

was part of that. And this is part of that. I think it's mostly much to do about nothing. I feel like he is sharpening the stakes for US and NATO. He's saying like, do you guys really want to go to war over fucking Ukraine? Do you really want to make sure that you militarily secure all these track suit supplies? Is it worth it? And as they kind of realize, no, it's not. Maybe they back off a little bit. And it's interesting to me to think about this in the context of Taiwan, because I think that's a very similar situation, that there's going to be some form of massing, some form of breaking point where it's just the United States, the elites essentially realize we're not going to fight

a war over Ukraine, just as I don't think we're going to fight a war over Taiwan. So you get some sort of like unplanned withdrawal that is going to be even more chaotic and worse than if we just acknowledge what is the obvious geo-strategic reality. Kind of disappointed in these answers. I think the most important thing right now is which of these kleptocracies with authoritarian tendencies is the better one, because there is an answer to that. And what's interesting is like, unlike the Cold War, there's no even arguments made to defend these places really any longer. So grand project, it's just inertial, which indicates that it is actually weak and there will be change in my opinion. Yeah. And obviously, I do think at some point the Chinese are just

going to wait till our back has started to just go back into Taiwan. And good, go for it. The idea that that is like a red line that we should support, like people were badgering Liz Bruning on Twitter the other day for failing to insist that invading Taiwan needs to be a red line for the American military, meaning that she wants to land war in Asia over fucking Formosa in Sanity. Yeah, no. As always, you first. Yeah. That's the one where you got to sign up. You have to actually be committed. You can't be looking for a communications degree and a Dodge Challenger. You are not. No one is going to be able to look you in the eyes, giving you a draft card for that war. You could just not show up. Yeah. I think that,

like something what Matt said is going to happen in 10, 15, 20 years, China is going to do that. The United States is not going to really do much. And then that'll be that. It's not even going to be super dramatic. Yeah. We'll have deflated all of the expectations around it. A reasonable interval just like South Vietnam got. Yeah. And Afghanistan a week and a half. Yes. I guess I kind of draw a thread between all of these stories. The thing that I've been thinking about, connecting them together, at least from the American domestic side, is this pervasive sense that there is no real agenda anywhere, that whether it's internationally for America or domestically, like even the Build Back Better Thing, that program has always been more of a vague

vibe from Brandon than any specific agenda. A grab bag of amorphous grab bag of policies that continually changes as different stakeholders get their time to tinker with it. But no, no real project about any with any specific goal or destination. And it's same with the COVID handling at this point and same with what I was asking about. Like what is our stake in Latin America now or what we might be thinking about in the future of NATO or China like that sense that. And you know, I think that this is something that I saw some of you guys talking about, about like what the promise of Biden was that things would stop feeling crazy that they would go back to normal in some way. But I don't think that there is any

sense of normalcy without any sense of like movement towards somewhere. You can't just literally stop the plate spinning. You have to be moving towards something for anything to feel real. And just across all of these stories, this sense that the Biden administration, this era is just, you know, where are we going? Where's the truck headed? Where are we driving to? You know, we're on our way to the graveyard. That is what is going on. Yeah. No, Biden is driving the hearse and we are slowly finally in fits and starts accepting the reality of the, of that world that we live in and how we're going to respond to it is going to determine our politics. And that's why it's only going to get more crazy hysterical and committed to, to empty

cultural conflict as just a place to express and vent all of these feelings that people aren't going to be able to really address unless they're willing to confront the state. It'll be interesting. You know what I mean by that? You mean like actually risk things by participating in politics and absent a willingness to sacrifice. It can only be expressed through the most hollow cultural conflict because that's the only one that's socially sanctioned. It will be interesting if the agents of the state begin to do what they did and the statement that we talked about at the beginning of the episode, if they just get increasingly honest and increasingly associated with the, this type of partisan political rhetoric, that would be something

genuinely new in modern American history or return to Daxonian democracy. I think that's the only move, which is like a hilarious, like it was never going to be Pete, but like, holy shit, wrong place, wrong time, pal. You were 10 years too late. Oh boy. Oh boy. Someone got really good at soaring platitudes at just the wrong time. Biden is getting a cat. Just saw that come across the, oh yeah, why not? Because they're sick of euthanizing all their feral dogs that they just have running around the White House. Biden should get a serval. He should get a serval. He should get like an un-neutered pit bull. Yeah. One of those like 100 pounders and just let it run around the White House. And then when it starts gnawing on a secret service station, they could just be

like, he's really friendly. Yeah. He likes you. I'm excited to see the Biden cat. I hope they named him Jack. I think we might, Matt might have been frozen. Hopefully we'll get him back. I think very, very good. Again, high-minded episode. I think we have cracked the willless code between me and Danny of figuring out how to do these without will. But we'll be back for Thursday. So hopefully Thursday and maybe next Monday we'll do some like lighthearted holiday stuff. And then we do have some special holiday treat episodes coming up along the lines of stuff we put out over the past holidays. So look forward to those coming up in the future. I will assume Matt is logged off for this. Any final thoughts, Felix or Danny? If you are in Cook County, Chicago,

Illinois, there's a great thing you can do. You can get on the CTA's Christmas train. There is the Christmas train. Yeah. If you're anywhere else, no, a lot of people have contacted me. Oh, Philadelphia is a Christmas trolley. Not what I was talking about. I was talking about a train, a thing that people going to work take every day. Not something that Gene Kelly took to sing on. I'm talking about a train. If you're in Philadelphia, do not contact me ever about anything. If you're in Illinois, have a great ride on the Christmas train and we'll see you later in the week. Come on and ride it. The Christmas train. Yeah. All right. Bye everybody.