Chapo Trap House - 592 - The Beard (1/10/22)

Episode Date: January 11, 2022

The western media conceals the truth of the Newsome Regime…drinking piss and cum to cure covid…Obama razes parks to build library…and two dipshits try to out-yokel each other in Ohio. Tickets for our Southern tour are on sale over at chapotraphouse.com/live

Hello gang, Chopo coming at you, Monday, January 10th. How's it going fellas? It's good. It's cracking. Yeah. I'm the first day of the month that I will be living under the Newsome Regime as part of a journalism project I am doing. It's about, you know, I go to places that are enemies of NATO, places that they have

attempted a color revolution in. And right now I'm doing California. And I have to say, I've been walking around and I don't agree with the Newsome Regime on everything, but it's people who love him. That's true. He is a God Emperor basically. Yeah. You won't see that in the Western media.

No. You won't see how people are happy, people are under the Newsome Regime. Well, yeah, I mean, as you guys know, Newsome and its Inner Circle follow a sort of syncretic version of Christianity where there's no God or Christ and you do communion, but communion is you fuck a 43 year old woman who spent $100,000 on fillers together with your friends. That's taking the Eucharist. And it's, people say he discriminates against normal Christians and Jews and stuff, but they're actually, they're well taken care of here.

Newsome has gone to Christmas celebrations. There's a lot of videos of him doing that and people are, people are happy. Like they, you know, it's not my way of life, but they like doing the things that Newsome makes them do. Like, you know, they can't use, they can't use single use toothpaste tubes now. And they have to get like paper bags of toothpaste filled up every week to replace it, but they like it. They like it.

They like Newsome. And I have to say, I'm pretty glad the color revolution was defeated. Yeah. The Larry Elder led color revolution. What about the report? I mean, I mean, I just, I hear reports in the, the Western press that people are being disappeared from the Erdogan grocery. Well, yeah, but if you like look at the people who were going to Erdogan, they were causing

problems. They were like, there's a strong link between like the moms who were giving everyone grief at Erdogan for mislabeling of nut allergies and Al Qaeda. And did you know that Israel actually set up a field hospital for those women, for those moms? Israel, do you know that Israel has bombed California 78 times in the last five years and they've net, they've never hit the anti-vax Al Qaeda in Orange County? It's very interesting.

Yeah. Weird coincidence that. Yeah. I mean, I'm looking forward to your reporting on, on, you know, state actors, CIA, back spooks, color revolutionaries, going into Erdogan and switching the labels on the pasteurized and non-pasteurized milk, and also switching the labels on the sugar you can get with your coffee or the Elkhorn powder. It's fucking people up.

And honestly, like the gruesome Gavin needs to, he needs to bring them the hammer hard on these, these quote unquote protesters, these democratic revolutionaries. We're too smart for that. We see through it. Yeah. I mean, again, it's like, I don't agree, agree with gruesome Gavin and everything. Like people are showing their loyalty to gruesome Gavin's policies by wearing three masks, wall alone in a car.

But I do wish that Kathy Molecule had his firm hand. That's true. She's, she's, she doesn't really have the sand to stand up the way that he does. Which is why Gavin, I think more like people say, oh, he might run for president. He's just going to become president of California. Yeah. That's it. He's just going to declare formal independence.

And Kathy Molecule, I don't think she'll ever have the balls to do it. His weird shit doesn't play anywhere but California. Like if you, if you put him in front of like a beef slurry purveyor in Iowa, you know, the first caucus, he would just be like, wait, what, like, so your thing is you've just, you've, you've fucked every woman in your state. Your thing is that you just like secrete your own spermacidal lube from your pubes just naturally that you're, you're just completely slippery. No one can shake your hand.

And he'd be like, yeah. I'm imagining him, I'm imagining him going to the Iowa State Fair and looking for the French laundry tent to get like some dicks or something. Even Noosev has never had a meal that didn't include seafoam. Yep. No. He is, he needs foam. He will not need it if there's no foam.

Well, yeah. He can't secrete the spermacidal lube without the foam. It's important to his biological process. It's a California photosynthesis. I mean, you know, he, he has a vasectomy, but don't worry. He can still blow loads of squid ink. Yeah. That's the other thing that's weird is in Iowa, there's a big thing where they make

all the candidates jack off and squirt if they're women. And like, not only a political side, Matt and I were there. Yeah. Yeah. I saw it. Yeah. That was actually like why people were like, people are like, oh, why did de Blasio run? He shot the furthest rope out of anyone when he, I remember we went to that.

We were, we wore parkas. It was like a Gallagher concert. You couldn't be in the first three rows unless you were ready to get wet. Yeah. They've been doing that. They've been doing that since Warren Harding won the nomination. People think it was a fix. No.

He was the best at jacking off, but Gavin would be the first guy who blows completely black cum or actually, no, John Hickenlooper did that. And that's like why he didn't go that far. Yeah. That was, yeah, that was just the water he'd been drinking though. I'm just saying Gavin, Gavin Newsom has an ink gland. Yeah. He's part squid.

He's a man of the bay, but as the king of California, I think he'll rule forever. Oh yeah. That was near right for sure. Yeah. And they solved climate change here. It rains now in LA. It's true. They got a bunch of rain.

They got like a month's worth of rain. He did the right unholy incantations. No. He got all the runes. No one, like everyone criticizes the governor when bad stuff happens, which they should, but no one praises the governor when they get the right runes. Yeah. Like when they're going into chasms and like solving demonic riddles from ancient gatekeepers,

you don't hear anybody talking about that on Twitter. Yeah. No. Kathy Molecule buys her runes from Etsy and they're all fake. Yeah. Yeah. She's never found a rune in her life. She's never answered a riddle from a blind beggar who is actually a demigod.

She sucks. Well, speaking of alternate medicine, which is California, the epicenter of that, just a quick, quick news story to kick things off today. Anti-vax leader urges followers to drink their own urine to fight COVID. I mean, I think we all knew that this was going here eventually, but just reading from the Daily Beast here, it says anti COVID-19 vaccine police leader Christopher Key. And there's a photo of this guy and he literally has a badge that he wears around his neck that says vaccine police.

It's like a fake police badge. See that is very confusing because to me, that is the person who enforces the vaccine. Yeah. To be the vaccine. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't really, I think it's some mixed messaging here.

I got to say though, like we're going to laugh at the piss drinking thing. What if it works? I feel like in like, you know, nine to 10 months, we're probably like, it's probably going to come out that it does work. Yeah. People are really, I mean, they're going, yeah, everything is reaching its logical inclusion where we've gotten inevitably to do the pee drinking and also colloidal silver. I'm so happy that's happening.

People are on the rise endorsing colloidal silver. So we'll see the people who will see it'll be like all the people who idiotically got the vaccine are going to start dropping dead any day now. And the only people who are going to be left are going to be the blues and the yellows. I was very happy to see Candace Owens talking about drinking colloidal silver. Yes. I mean, she has big reach. Like I used to think the colloidal silver thing died off because it's a very internet

form libertarian thing. And so many guys turned blue that people just stopped doing it. But she's such a, she's like such a fucking dummy that she's bringing back colloidal silver. Like either the last colloidal silver guy died in like 2007. He was just some dope from Idaho who would go on Dr. Phil and they'd be like, how'd you turn blue? And now I was drinking this thing. And now Dr. Oz is on the train too.

Wait, Dr. Oz is a silver guy? He's a silver guy now. He's talking about colloidal silver. So I think this is going to be, if there is a hope for the Democrats, because I mean everyone understands the Democrats are doomed here in the short and medium and long term as a going concern. If they can just wedge between the urine people and the silver people, they might have a chance. But that's it.

Dr. Oz though, I mean, what's she running for Senate in Pennsylvania? Running for Senate in Pennsylvania, yes. The turk is drawn to Pennsylvania. There's something about it. The coal, I don't know. Yeah. Well, it's like how all the Highlanders wanted to go to, or all the Immortals in Highlander wanted to go to New York.

Yeah. There's something there. There's some like ancient. Lailine, something going on. Yeah. The last Roxy in America is somewhere in Western PA. And the turk must find it. They find like the caliph will be like reinshrined at a combination Wawa sheets right in the

middle of the state. Yeah. No, it will. That'll be the next Mech-Met the Mech. Magnificent. It will be a guy who like he takes over all of the Eastern Seaboard and then the entire all of North America and then all the entire Western Hemisphere. But it will be because he was looking for one of his headphones that won't even be good

headphones that will be like the Brookstone AirPods. But I mean, as long as we're talking about colloidal silver, drinking your own urine. I don't know if you guys saw this. I just read it this morning. You know, like it's like the group like like like a frontline doctors like fighting. They're the Ivermectin hydrochloroquine people. Yeah. They have added another drug to the course of medicines that you're supposed to take

to prevent and cure COVID. And there's like, if step one doesn't work or you're still experiencing symptoms, you know, five to 10 days after, there's a list of other drugs that they're recommending you take. Chief among them is the most common hormone blocker that blocks testosterone that is literally used to trans health care as part of the transitioning process. Yeah. That's now that's some Oh, Henry shit, the gift of the Magi.

That is like, I don't want your global homo vaccine and then oh, no, I'm a chick now. Damn it. The first guy who did that. The first guy who did that is racist, Amelia Bedelia. Oh, you say you said you were you said you were doing a non-cooked cure for COVID and now we're all bimbified, but you sure make a hell of a pie. Just following up on the urine drinking Christopher Key, the vaccine police, turn in your vaccine badge.

Got results. Damn it. It says here has a new quarter baked conspiracy theory for his anti-vax followers to use to cure themselves of COVID-19. Drink their own urine. I'm glad that they specified your own urine. Yeah, right. Drinking someone else's.

People share this bad. That's dangerous. Oh, I always fuck this up. I brought a big metal twisty straw on the plane over who boy was I slurping usually when I go to the bathroom five times during a flight as to vape this time I was taking in the liquid instead of turning it into gas. I feel like that's one of those giant double cup Styrofoam now and later is flowing in it, floating in it.

It's like, pour up. I'm just pouring the Sprite and the Jolly Rancher into my jet blue airplane piss. Dude, that shit got me gone. I'm going slow mo. I'm turning all the COVID. Why are they going slow mo? Okay. So it says here, the antidote that we have seen now and we have tons and tons and tons

of research. I think it's like gallons and gallons of research is urine therapy. Okay. And I know a lot of you, to a lot of you, this sounds crazy, but guys, God's given us everything we need. He said in a video, he said in a video posted over the weekend on his Telegram account after being released from jail over at trespassing charge. This has been around for centuries.

He added. I mean, I think urine is quite a bit longer than that. Yeah. For centuries. For centuries. What did he think ancient man was doing with their waste? Yeah. Well, yeah, it's just like being like, oh yeah, it's like Lindy to shit in your drinking

reservoir. Because people 900 years ago did it. Before corn syrup, the body wasn't completely efficient. You didn't have any waste of any kind. It was all absorbed. It was just water. It was just free. Hey, you're in?

It's free water. Yeah. Well, I will say that one of the great UFC light heavyweight champions and a great middle weight too, Lioto Machida, he did urine therapy and it was a subject of a lot of mockery. But he fought really well and he actually did worse after people started making fun of him for drinking his pee pee. But then again, that's a guy who did karate his whole life and was probably drinking like rainforest water.

I don't think if you're like a big gulp guy, if you're drinking as much soda as these guys, if you're drinking like a Dunkachino morning surprise fucking milkshake Oreo flavor blast, you're not getting anything out of drinking that piss. No, it's like what you get out of it is what you put into yourself. That's why he talked about people doing it centuries ago. The piss from centuries ago was good because they did the healthiest thing, which is every morning you drink 32 ounces of 1% ABV beer. That's right.

Or like in ancient times, you'd wake up and you'd start your day with a grande, a grande ponde water. Yeah. And you just get that going through you. And yeah, the health benefits are obvious, but he says here, yes, this has been around for centuries. When I tell you this, please take it with a grain of salt. I mean, I think that would be irrelevant.

I mean, piss is already pretty salty. I'm not adding more salt to it. But maybe a little pepper. I don't know. Because the anti-vaccine advocate warned while saying people might now think he is cray-cray. Now drink urine, he continued. This vaccine is the worst bio weapon I have ever seen, he concluded. I drink my own urine.

Reached for comment by the Daily Beast on Sunday night, he doubled down on what he calls urine therapy and railed against foolish people who took the COVID-19 vaccine. And you know, I mean, again, like who's six to nine to 10 months from now, probably there's probably going to be something to suggest that yes, you should drink your own urine. But I mean, I must stress, why not? I mean, what's ever seen drinking your own urine and drinking someone else's urine? You know where it's been, like the chain of custody. That's it.

Yeah. You have drunk and then therefore you know what you are drinking, whereas you don't know what somebody else is putting their body before they piss. Yeah. Drinking your own urine is, that's farm to table. Exactly. That's factory shit if you're just getting it off the street. Yeah.

Like they're paying hobos, you know, to piss into jugs after they've shot up or whatever. I don't want that in my body. Yeah. Have you ever been to one of the factory piss farms? Yeah, there's like a five mile, there's a five mile stretch of the I-5 in California that's just horrible. Piss farms. Rural.

Tough. Tough to drive by there. Did you know that the piss ranchers are hunting wolves almost to extinction because the wolves scare the pissers? Yeah. They can't pee. They get shy because they hear the howl. Okay, so, okay, we got, okay, drinking your own piss to cure COVID.

And then on top of that, we have now literal testosterone blocking, like hormone blockers that, yeah, like, I mean, that, yeah, that instead of good chance, if not outright bimbo fine you, then at least demasculinizing you by blocking testosterone that's usually used as part of, yeah, like I said, a transitioning process, fellas, we know what's coming next. I mean, we know what the next miracle cure is. Come. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, your own. Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine. Oh, man. Mine specifically. Okay.

Well, your cum is special because it's like upper Manhattan cum because that's like the best in the world. Everyone knows it. It's like, it's like champagne for the champagne region, but come up from the upper west side is just the seminal fluid. Yeah. No. It's just sparkling.

Yeah. Sparkling seminal fluid. If you get Red Hook cum, you might as well kill yourself. You're a loser. But like, if that's the case, like, then I'm not so stupid for being tricked in the equinox sauna all those times. It's true. Here.

Am I? It's true. You're getting that good, you're getting that good cup. Upper west side cum. It's got the Dagestino's pineapple in it. High quality, well sourced produce. Yeah. A lot of people who know me know that five times a week for since May, last May, I have

been tricked into being slutted out by 75 year old real estate tycoons named like Merv and Herman five times a week. They it's the same location. They always trick me. They always say there's a hot girl in there or like they're like going to give me one of their watches or something. I always just get a train run on me by 10 septu-digitarian real estate titans. And I am like, you know that thing where your fingers prune and you're like shaking

stuff out of your ears when you go swimming too long. That's where it's been like with old Jewish cum with me. It's how many times I've been fooled in the same location by the same guys. Okay. But now I am never. Yeah. Well, actually, yeah, but like it wasn't that bad and you got a figure that I'm doing something right here.

Yeah. I'm pretty sure this is all in the Kabbalah somewhere. Like that's a way to hear yourself. Who's also a fan of Kabbalah, ancient Jewish mysticism, current New York City Mayor Eric Adams. So, I mean, I think like everyone's just like, oh, I want to give everyone the N95s, give everyone the at-home testing. It's like, no, Eric Adams, we got to reopen up the city's glory hall centers.

Yeah. We got to have a state city-funded network of like well-maintained glory hall facilities where people can get a shot of just the shot that works, a shot that comes to the mouth. Yeah. It is like if someone's homophobic or whatever, like they just don't like blowing someone, they can't like think about others for just one second. You could just be like, it's actually a hot chick on the other side. No.

Yeah. Just pretend. You don't know. 90. It could. It might be. You'll never know. No, no.

This is disinformation. Historically, I mean, this is like the glory hall is a centuries old invention. Okay. This has been around for centuries, 95 percent of who is on the other side of the glory. Humans have been peeing. There have been glory holes. Yeah. Yeah.

That was, how do you think Hammurabi was elected? 95 percent of the people who are servicing you on the other side of a glory hall are incredibly hot women. It's a fact. I mean, it's just, I mean, like they don't, they don't, they don't want you to know the truth because they're hiding the miracle cure from the, from the rest of us. Yeah. I think Obama wrote in all those limos.

That was COVID's one through 18 swallowed all of them. And yet he gets no credit. Yeah. Everyone's like, oh, like if you're against Obama, you're like, he got slutted out in the limo. If you're for Obama, you're like, he didn't. But how about if you don't like Obama, but you're like, he was smart to do that. Yeah.

That's what Obama is building a monstrosity of a presidential library. Yeah. Oh yeah. He's like destroying a bunch of Parkland. Yeah. He's like destroying, destroying Chicago. He's awesome. I love what a piece of shit he is.

He's just, he is ever, it's like he spent eight years, uh, shining everybody on. And then like he fucking turned into Ashton Kutcher as soon as he left office, like you've been punked and I'm going to like you, and they don't get it, of course, because they're too infested in him. And he just, every day he just knows more and more to be like, no, I punked you. I'm going to like a cartoon villain, like the bad guy in an 80s breakdancing movie. I'm going to destroy a big park in Chicago and build this hideous, hideous monument to myself.

Yeah. He's building a historic Parkland to build like the Apple store in Abu Dhabi. Yeah. And there's like, there's a bunch of like, uh, like failed project shit, like, uh, like a dead, uh, interchanges that could be knocked down and turned into it that are just waiting. There's plenty of areas in Chicago that are undeveloped or need to be redeveloped. They could have put it in. He's like, no, I want to kill things to build this.

No, I need to kill an ecosystem to build this, right? Can't get hard. Just like just west of that area. But yeah, there's so much just dead, like dilapidated shit. And it's like, oh, you could like put something here. No, places where just no one really is living. That's creative. Yeah.

No. Yeah. And even like, if you're with like neoliberal bullshit where it's like, oh yeah, like we like we need economic development here. Uh, that's like, that's the only way we can fix things, which is like, yeah, it helps sometimes, but like, he's not even doing that. He's going in the neighborhood where you Chicago is and just taking a historic park and like building a building that looks like a hairdryer.

He's such a piece of shit. I like, he's awesome. Yeah. He hates, he hates everyone who loves him. He would kill anyone to like, yeah, fucking shake hands with Quincy Jones. I love him. And this is why I think that Eric Adams is the next, he's the next Pokemon evolution and the superior version to meet the moment, the way that Obama did because Obama's doing

all this stuff now, but he was all about shining us on as, as president and as running for president. He was willing to say whatever, but Eric Adams is just out there just telling you like it, telling it like it is, telling people to suck it the fuck up and that they, yeah, they need to start reading the cabal if they want any help in the world. I mean, I know you guys are, are West Coast people now, but did you see that people were just... I'm a lifelong Californian.

We're just yesterday, there is a fire in the Bronx that killed 19 people and the landlord on what used to be public housing that was like sold to this landlord is on Eric Adams administration as his like, one of his housing consultants. This transition team for housing. Transition team for housing. These are, these are building that people had been asked, had been saying had no heat. Yeah. And there's...

And there's... It took Eric, it took Eric Adams four days to have a Grenfell. My fucking... Oh my God. What did he say today? He said, he said close the door. Close the door. Just close the door.

It's your fault. Fuck you. Okay. The door is in question. Yes. There's both the fire doors are supposed to be closed. They were automatically closed. And guess what?

They were broken in this fucking building because... Yeah. And also... They should have the building that you don't have to... Yeah. So you don't have to do it in your own place. So you don't have to do space eaters and little like make a fire out of kindling. And he's like, yeah, close the door and it's your own fault.

Yeah. I read... It's fourth day in office. I read about this guy, the landlord, it's like, yeah, he's running like a Victorian boarding house. Yeah. Like this guy should be executed. Yes.

And it's like, yeah. He's just sticking around. Sorry. Just back to Obama destroying parks in Chicago to build his monstrous presidential library. I'm thinking as part of this package deal, he could replace public transportation in Chicago with a Blade Runner-style blimps that just circled the city and announced, my favorite new artist this year, B.B. Bridgers. Yeah.

And then... And just a reminder, don't drink piss and come to cure COVID. It doesn't work. Wink. Instead, you should watch Mare of Easttown on HBO. I love him. I love him being like 60 years old now and he's like still, he's still the same guy. He's like, yeah, I listened to Lucy Dawkus.

I've considered being bisexual. Who's Lucy Dawkus? I'm probably not saying that right. Did you take that up? No. She's like, Phoebe Bridgers is... Phoebe Bridgers is Little Dirk, Lucy Dawkus is King Vaughan. Oh, yeah, this is a real person.

He didn't make that up. No, yeah. I think I... When have I ever fucking made a person up in the show? That is one of my favorite things about you, Felix, when you bust out knowledge of some contemporary female singer-songwriter, always capable of surprising. You know what Sean Morehead said about me? What?

He said that I'm like the blade of like gay men, you know, not a gay man, but I like know all this stuff. You really do. I think your brother helps with that. Yeah. He's like your gay consiliary. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm like, dude, I'm plugged. But you remember the Pete Buttigieg documentary where he was like, if I could have the surgery to cut out being gay, like... Yeah, I would do it. Give me the knife right now. It's like, Felix, if you could have the surgery to be gay, you would get that surgery. You're not much easier, my life would be. Like I know so much more like of that stuff than like about being, I don't know what the

football teams are. I don't know any of that shit. Like I have a lot of heterosexual interests, but like, you know, there are a lot of things I'm just... There's a lot of wasted knowledge that could have gone to use if you were just gay. Yeah. Well, maybe in my next life. Yeah.

You have to be a really good straight guy to be reincarnated as like a gay guy with sweat. Yeah. You have to walk the whole golden path to get rewarded with that. You should be reincarnated as barstool gay man. That guy would be cool. That's going to be me. But yeah, no, yeah.

But he's 60 years old and he's... You remember in his like, his like ninth memoir? Yeah. He writes a new memoir every year. Motherfucker loves writing about his shit. Yeah. He loves himself. He was like, talking about trying to fucking like, just fuck all these bisexual chicks at

college. Yeah. They were just like, you're... Like you suck. Fuck you. Fuck you. But he's still trying. He's still trying.

He's like, I love all this like sad girl music. He's like, he's going to start wearing a car heart beanie. He's going to show up at Union Pool. Yeah. Do you think it would be funny if him and Michelle got divorced? I always think about that. Oh. I hope that happens.

I got to do me. Yeah. Because he, yeah, he cheated on her with like a copywriter, a 27 year old copywriter. We can only hope that that happens. Yeah. Well, I'm moving on for today. I'd like to switch gears now to a very lengthy profile in the Washington Post that came out last week about, you know, probably one of my favorite contemporary political figures.

I mean, we've discussed him at length on the show, but he's a gift that continues to give. It's JD Vance, everyone. J-O-Vance. JD. JD in the straight shot. There's a big profile of his, you know, political campaign running for Senate that he's, you know, will win five votes. He will win five votes and then be burned at the stake by Josh Mandel.

What was it, Felix, you said that like JD Vance is a guy who like pretends to be like a Jewish intellectual, but is actually a hillbilly and a fucking Mandel is a guy who is a Jewish intellectual who pretends to be a hillbilly, but it's a billion times better at it? No, no, no. I think like, so like up until 2020, JD Vance, like his entire book, his book is like one of the most cynical things I've ever read because he's just like calling everyone he's ever known just like a piece of shit and it's their fault for being poor.

And he's like, yeah, but I'm actually, I actually went to college to learn how to be Jewish, something they could never do. And was like doing that his whole life. He was like, Donald Trump's disgusting. And then he apologized for his pre-unwoke phase. And now he's pretending to be like a jug hooter again. Yeah. It's like you already blew your wad, dude.

Yeah. Meanwhile, Josh Mandel is like, he's Jewish. He did all the stuff. He did baritzva. He like looks Jewish. He has a Jewish name. But like his person, he has the soul of a jug hooter. Yes.

That's what he is. He's a jug hooting Cretan. That's the thing is that, of course, the Jew does it better than the dumb ass sheep-like Anglo, always. I kind of, I don't know. I like believe Josh Mandel to an extent because like, don't you think that's kind of what's beautiful about America that like a, like an actual shit-kicker is he gets, he gets buckbroken by Yale and like goes to this cultural milieu and tries so hard that he just, he

becomes what people think the Jewish guy would be like. Like he's like inauthentic talking about this shit that he, he may be one at one point, like in his adolescence was. But then the Jewish guy just by like growing up in Ohio is like a real jug hooting moron. Yeah. No, he's committed to it his whole life. And more than anything, it reminds you that all of this is fucking fake and made up. It's made up.

It's like, come on, man. Like, like the idea that people invest in the notion that there is like an authentic American culture that exists like independent of capitalism and that is somehow being like oppressed by capitalism, like it can be disentangled and that, and that like certain Americans can like speak to it and embody it is I think here shown to be complete bullshit. Like everybody is out for themselves in, in a fucking marketplace where, where the only thing to do is, is advance yourself. And that means that culture is just a costume to wear to your own advantage.

And the only difference is how good you are at bullshitting at the end of the day, how good you are at convincing yourself of what you're trying to convince other people of. And Josh Mandel is much better at that than J.D. Vance because J.D. Vance spent too much of his life trying to escape before finding out, oh, if I want, if I want to get what I really want, which is of course, you know, power or the illusion of power and fame and all this stuff, I'm now in a cul-de-sac where I have to go back and I have to rediscover this thing that I spent my entire life disavowing and he just can't do it. His instincts are all wrong because his only audience, as we've talked about, is other

people like him who are not voting in Ohio Senate primaries. Matt, it reminds me of what we were talking about with World War II, where it's really like an internal battle played out between the West and Germany because the same identity problem with Germans where they're like, oh fuck, we're like, we're Jewish, not literally Jewish, but Jewish stand in for like, in effect, like, we're modern, urban, modern, western, modern. We're the way from the earth, we're neurotic, yes. And they went crazy because of it.

And they decided we're going to pretend it's not real, we're going to disavow it. We're going to disavow it, we're going to kill, we're going to try to kill all of them, and then we're like, we're so into proving that we're not Jewish that we're going to devote military resources to going to Antarctica to try to meet Santa Claus. Yes. And then you have, they're J.D. Vance and Josh Mandel is America where it's like, okay, like yeah, fine, we're the theatrical performing country, our top general almost quit the war because he had like, he fell in love with a French woman and cried, all our guys cry

every fucking day at their job of running World War II, but that's who we are. That's just what it is. We can do both. That's Josh Mandel. Josh Mandel is like, yeah, I've like, I'm, look, he's like, yeah, I take more medicine than anyone on earth. I love taking medicine. I'm the most allergic man.

Yeah. I have eight types of dehumidifiers and humidifiers. I fucking, do I like blow on a shofar every day, but I'm also, I'm also a shit-kicker because I'm also a true Ohioan. And that's beautiful. That shows how strong America is. It's true. America has assimilated all of your cultural neuroses and directs them towards the singular

goal of bag securing, which those old world heroes just could not get in their heads and they destroyed themselves. We can do it. I think this article will go a long way towards explicating these, these, the unique factors of identity creation and capitalization. And you know, V.D. Vance is an interesting case study in this because he was always kind of pretending to be a shit-kicker in the first place.

Oh, absolutely. Well, I'm sorry. I know there is Appalachian Ohio. Yeah. Eastern Ohio is near the Appalachian stuff, but Ohio at the end of the day is a giant suburb. All right. Let's dive into this article here.

It says, let's start with the beard. J.D. Vance didn't used to have one. I mean, I don't know. Did he get married recently? Did I miss that? I think he realized he just has one of those unfortunate, cherubic faces. Yeah. And he must do so when you know may have one.

And he may. Yeah. Shut the fuck up, Felix. Me. I'm talking about me. Me. I have to do it. I have Vance's disease, or even at my most pro-anna of the cherubic cheeks of the old

world. Yeah. A round face at a certain point, at a certain age, needs something. If I shaved right now, I would be beaten to death and I'd deserve it. It says, the Vance who, in 2016, achieved incandescent literary fame with his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, was all baby fat and rounded edges. Yeah. The Vance I'm watching now, from the back of a coffee shop in the depressed steel town

of Steubenville, Ohio, has covered up his softer side. And you know, the headline image that goes to this thing is like, it's illustrated and it's like an oil-style painting of the old cherubic JD Vance, and then it's like, the sheet is torn and there's like the angrier, bearded JD Vance behind it. And I got to say, both of them look exactly the same. Yeah. It's just, it's the same. It's all soft edges.

It's all soft. It's the same Francis Buxton ass little chubster, but with some fucking, some barbershop trimmings stuck to his face. Yeah. He really thought he did something with a beard, and it's like, no. Like Ted Cruz, another guy doing the exact same thing. Yeah. It's they, they were going for like the uncle Phil.

They were like, I'm going to be like a, I'm big, but I'm alpha and it's like, no, you got corned. Yeah. They corned you out. You're corned. They corned you out slime. I guess he goes, in small format events like this one, addressing a couple dozen primary voters, he spends about 15 minutes attacking corporate and governmental elites for failing

the country. Then answers questions and mingles for maybe another 45 minutes. Vance 37 is comfortable in the folksy idiom of GOP campaigning, uh, EG. She loved the Lord. She loved the F word. That's what mall mall was. It doesn't say what F word though. She called me the F word all the time.

That's Glenn Close. Right. Yeah. Glenn Close. That's a brilliant good terminator, bad terminator, neutral terminator concept. I know we didn't have a whole other side about it, but that was like my favorite part in hillbilly elegy is when he's with my mom and she's just like, she's doing the lines from T two where she's like, I need your clothes, your motorcycle to give them to me.

And JD Vance is like, my mom, turn this off. I want to watch she span that's when she, that's when she used the F word. That's when she loved using the F word because, but he tends to gloss over his famously traumatic childhood immortalized on screen and Ron Howard's 2020 film adaptation of his book in Steubenville. He paces the room with a big gulp size foam cup in his hand. Well, no, we're good. Now we're going back to the, the COVID treatment we were talking about earlier as ever, as an, uh, an every man that touch it and every, an every man touch that accentuates his new

aesthetic. Yeah. Is he pretending to be a soda head? He's right. Oh, it's these rooms that there's full strength soda in that cup. He's never a full strength soda has not touched his lips since he was a child. That is yerba mate. Yeah.

He's drinking high biscuit soda with Peter teal. No one believes you name it, like name five variants of mountain dew right now, not including diet in zero. Like fuck off. You can't Josh Mandel. I believe that like, I believe I could talk to, about him, talk to him about sodas for like hours. I think he knows all the stuff.

Josh Mandel drinks out of a hummingbird feeder. Yeah. Yeah. You are not a soda head JD, like fuck you. He goes, uh, I'm not the only one thinking about JD Vance's beard. I'm thinking about it too, I'm thinking about it too, but I mean, come on, he's got it. He's got it. He's two kids with his beard, come on.

Um, recently I asked one of his law school friends to tell me about his personality. He's lovely, the friend said, describing Vance's smile and laugh. Then he paused. He wanted to talk about Vance's facial hair. Even as a slightly older law student, Vance had served four years in the Marines before enrolling at Ohio State as an undergraduate. He came across as guileless, boyish, no longer. He looks different, the friend said.

He's going for a kind of severe masculinism thing. He looks like, he looks like, and he goes, he goes, he looks like Donald Trump, Jr. Another guy who's not trying hard at all, another symbol of effortless masculinity. If you put Gavin Newsom and Don Jr. in a row, it's like, okay, which one has. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. But like, just ask anyone, like who's more alpha?

Yeah. Not a question. It's the guy, it's the guy who spends $5,000 a month on skincare. I'm sorry. Don Jr. has. He's got no chin. Yeah. And it's just like, I don't know, alpha's in the soul.

And like Gavin may do, Gavin may just slurp down, see foam and like buy a Korean face mask and shit, but it's just like, you see it in his heart. You're like, that's an alpha. That's the thing. It comes down to sincerity. Mm-hmm. Like, Gruesome Gavin is a sincere coastal bug creature. And he is at peace with it.

And Mandel has turned himself through just sheer will and alchemy into a soda head, Ohio headphone dipshit. Yeah. Fucking J.D. Vance has been trying to be something he hasn't been his entire life. That's all he can do. Yeah. He's just fraud.

He's, J.D. Vance is like, he's like Matt Damon that parted. If he died instantly, his first undercover mission. If he wasn't good at it at all. Wait, it was Leo was the undercover guy. Or, you know, like, I think, I think that's kind of the point of the movie that they could be the same. You're right.

You're right. They're very similar. Defeated once again. Yeah. Toward the end of our conversation, which was mostly about the way, the way the culture shock of Yale Law School informed Vance's politics, I asked the friend if he wanted to discuss anything else. He returned to the beard.

That's honestly occupied an outsized amount of my attention, he said. The beard, the beard isn't a bad symbol for Vance's US Sona campaign, or at least for how that campaign is being received. Discourse around the race centers mostly on the idea that Vance is a changed or fraudulent person. Five years ago, Vance was eloquently decoding Donald Trump supporters for liberal elites while lamenting the rise of Trump himself. Vance, whose mother is a recovering heroin user, compared Trump to an opioid, calling

him an easy escape from the pain. Now since announcing his run, he's reversed himself on Trump and adopted a bellicose persona at odds with the sensitive bookish JD of his memoir. On Veterans Day, 48 hours after the Steubenville event, Vance tweeted that LeBron James of Akron, Ohio is one of the most vile public figures in our country. Oh, I hate you, LeTrader. He tweeted that LeFraud only has Mickey Mouse rings. Yeah.

But again, it's like Mandel probably has so many stupid nicknames for LeBron. And JD Vance had to hire a team of 20 people to like find ones like lay bisexual that you aren't even used that often. Like, come on now. JD Vance didn't even, he didn't just like decode Trump and like Trump supporters. His book was literally saying his entire presence until last year was, no, they support Trump because they're bad. Yes.

You shouldn't empathize with them. They're bad people. They have a bad character. They deserve nothing but scorn. That was, that was, that's why he was so beloved by liberal elites. Of course. To a fucking Hollywood movie. Oh, exactly.

Like he, because he told liberal elites what they've all been longing to hear, which is like, oh, I'm smart enough that I can have my own size of my own size and politics chastised by this, this real authentic person, which by the way, a law school. But his solution was that like, don't feel bad for any poor person because any intervention by the state that you advocate to provide them money, health care, a decent quality of living, they'll only ruin it by spending it on soda and heroin. And of course, the funny thing is, is this is exactly what conservatives have been gobbling up for a generation about black people and liberals have been horrified by it.

But because this is people they imagine as the obstacles to progress, the reactionary white hillbillies, that they'll accept the exact same explanation from Vance. Yeah. And if you're talking about like anyone, like the local, like the cultural locusts are either side, whether it's like Vance saying that like it's poor hillbillies fault that they're like this and like, of course they support Donald Trump, they're bad, he's bad, or like conservative, conservative racism towards black people in either event, you are talking about like specific groups of specific populations that aren't voting because they're poor.

Yes. These are poor people who don't fucking vote. They say, he's saying that people who live in like thatched huts in the valley are voting for Trump. No, they like haven't voted ever. Yeah. But, but they, but wealthy liberals don't want to feel anything for really anybody. They feel obligated to feel bad for poor minorities, but poor white people in their mind have it

coming because, hey, why didn't you succeed? I don't have any kind of architecture to excuse your failure the way I do for minorities. So at the end of the day, I have nothing but contempt for you, please give me an excuse for my contempt. And he was right there to give it to them. It's so funny watching him now try to pretend that he cares about the opiate epidemic and how like Washington and liberals don't care about all the people dying in the heartland when he was up until a minute ago saying, yeah, that's their problem.

That's their fault. They, they started, they stopped going to church. They have a coming. Yeah. And one of the facts of the movie, and I'm assuming his book is him flushing his mom's works down the toilet and then just being like, time to go cold turkey time for some real fucking time to face the music and it's just like, good, yeah, good luck killing your mom.

Dude. Yeah. Oh my God. And he goes, I would be off perks every day if that was my son and his thought about that. Maybe it's his fault. His, his big, the big third act, like a moment of truth is when he has to decide whether to stay with his mom who's withdrawing or go to his fucking like internship interview

and he just drives to fucking Princeton and that's like his, his heroic decision. Like that is the decision of the PMC bug creatures who, who stabbed their own families in the back to get ahead that you are now pretending to care about. It's the most, it's astounding watching him try to fucking pull this off. Yeah. He is. It's not just that he's a bug man. It's not just like, oh, you're a teal venture capitalist.

It's like you are the bug. Yes. You literally brag about turning your back on your family and you, you rose to fame saying kill all of these people. They should die because I think they voted the wrong way, even if they didn't vote. Fuck them. Yeah. Going on to the article it says here, I felt just, I felt him straining to deliver his

talking points in an angry register. It wasn't just that steel jobs had been offshored. They were outsourced by idiots in Washington to countries that hate us. Commentary about Vance from Never Trumpers and Liberals tends to strike a note of personal chagrin about his evolving image. Pundit Mona Charin writing about Vance as if he had died called him an extremely bright and insightful man who could have been a fresh voice for a fundamentally conservative view of the world.

Frank Bruni of the New York Times predicted that a Vance tweet about Alec Baldwin's recent accidental shooting incident would endure as one of the boldest markers of his dissent. In Ohio, meanwhile, the pressure on Vance runs entirely in the opposite direction. Every campaign stop he makes, he patiently tries to explain away his past Never Trumpism, which has been exhumed in the form of deleted tweets and Charlie Rose clips. An attack ad playing his anti-Trump soundbites ends with a woman saying, that's the real JD Vance. Vance's friends split the difference.

They say he's the same guy, but he's been radicalized. I think he's gotten a lot more bitter and cynical. Appropriately, conservative blogger Rod Dreher told me, dude, if you're friends with Rod Dreher, like you are a weirdo, like cultural elite, you're not a soda head if you're friends with Rod. Yeah, you're making bouillabaisse. Fuck no, Rod does not fuck with soda. You are in the backseat of a Duesenberg with Rod and some strapping 29-year-old policy

wonk buck in Budapest, who's crying to you about Blue's Clues. He goes, to Dreher, the change in tone is justified by the course of American politics over the past five years. Trump remained Trump, but the left went berserk, he wrote, in a post-defending Vance. Still, Dreher, who attended Vance's 2019 baptism into the Catholic Church, I mean, okay. He has a boutique religious conversion that every other extremely online fucking, just his neurotic shithead has done the same exact fucking thing. As you said, Felix, you fell off the porch that you've never left in childhood into fucking

the Roman Catholic Church at the age of 38 years old. Yeah, I always think about, there's a rapper that people make fun of for joining the Bloods when he was 23, and that's our guy here. I mean, what do his Appalachian relatives think of him being a member of the Roman Catholic Church, the literal whore of Babylon? I mean, yeah, no, it's like, he's a computer guy. He met Rod on the computer, and Rod was like, do you want to go to this Gentile Bar Mitzvah? And he was like, yeah, I do.

Sounds great. But Rod also worries about the toll campaigning he's taking on his friend. Shitposting has become the signature style of young radicals on the right. Yeah, based shitposting. Let's go, dude. This is particularly a hazard, I think, for Christians, he told me. The surface level changes are indeed striking, yet the more I watched him, the more it seemed to me that the emerging canon of what happened to JD Vance commentary was missing the point.

Vance's new political identity isn't so much of a facade or a reversal as an expression of an alienated worldview that is, in fact, consistent with his life story. And now there's an ideological home for that worldview. Vance has become one of the leading political avatars of an emergent populist intellectual persuasion that tax right on culture and left on economics. I would like to know, where is JD Vance tacking left on the economy or labor or any of the market or anything like that? The same way all these guys do, with vague references to the elites and stuff.

And then, of course, specific arguments to break up big tech because they're censoring Mima's posts and she can't send memes about branded memes to her granddaughter. That's it. And also, it's all online. It is an internet culture of anxious weirdos who want to be Republicans but just feel their tummy feels bad about being Republicans because of all the shit that they absorbed, all the ambient radiation they absorbed being strivers and college graduates and they're trying to purge it.

But nobody else gives a shit. It is their neurotic nervous breakdown. Nobody else cares. It's as known as national conservatism or sometimes post-liberalism. It is, in broad strokes, heavily Catholic, definitely anti-woke, skeptical of big business, jealous about trade and borders, and flirty with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. In Congress- Suck in that Orban.

Just sunken him off. In Congress, its presence is miniscule, represented chiefly by Senators Josh Hallway and Marco Rubio. Oh, yeah. True national conservative there. I remember Mark Lee- Wait, is he against global free trade now? Honestly, I think they're right. They're saying that this thing is just that Walmart conservatives bullshit that Douthit

and Rahim Salam were into and that they got their hooks into Rubio when he was vaguely talking about a child allowance, but with memes. It's just the next step of that with epic memes. That's it. Yeah. It's getting mad at woke capital and being like, someone should make unwoke capital. Yes. That's it.

There's no meaningful purchase with any real stakeholders that has no legislative agenda that has any chance of going anywhere. It's just the most vague gestures that are only even picked up by the hyper-politically conscious freaks on the internet. No, it's literally like it's conservative warrenism to the T. Yes. Yes. It's all culture.

Absolutely. It's all culture. It's all culture. And then they'll say one thing about antitrust and they'll be like, the smart new conservatism. Marco Rubio's child allowance bill, by the way, it was like $150 a month. Watch out there, big spender. Vance's Senate race is an almost perfect test of these ideas because the frontrunner in the Republican primary, former state treasurer and Tea Party product, Josh Mandel, who according

to recent polling leads Vance by six points, is the candidate of traditional conservative tax cutters. To those watching the Vance Mandel slug fast from afar, it may just look like two candidates trying to outflank each other on the right, but the fissures between them run deep. The club for growth, known for its free market zealotry, is supporting Mandel and has spent roughly $1.5 million on anti-Vance attack ads. One TV spot highlights a tweet in which Vance says, he loved, at Mitt Romney's, anti-Trump screed.

The narrator does not linger on the rest of the message, which reads, too bad party will do everything except admit that supply-side tax cuts do nothing for its voters. Before Vance deleted his old anti-Trump tweets, he tended to attack Trump for abandoning his stated commitment to economic populism. It goes up going on here, it says, a couple of weeks after I saw him in Steubenville, Vance called me from the road on his way to a event in Toledo. I asked about his sudden estrangement from polite society. The price of being beloved by the establishment is you don't say anything interesting, he

told me. And if you don't say anything interesting, you're not going to be a useful part of solving any of the problems in this country. I like that what he was saying that was interesting earlier is LeFraud is the biggest, most evil person in American culture today. Yeah. No, there's a conservative guy on Twitter known as the Muff Sniffer, who says the same interesting things as JD Vance, but with swag.

He's a 70-year-old man who's always posting full pussy shots from Penthouse. What Vance is saying now may or may not prove appealing to voters, but it certainly meets the test of being interesting. Wrong. Yeah. Yeah. This is what he says, dominant elite society is boring. It is completely unreflective and it is increasingly wrong, he told me.

In other words, I kind of had to make a choice. So the reflexive opposite, on the other hand, is really interesting. By definition, it is as boring as the reflexive thing you're responding to. It cannot be interesting if the thing you're responding to isn't interesting. Do you remember when he said he was like, if you donate $10,000 to this super pack, you could have dinner with me and Peter Thiel? Yeah. Dude, and Mandel owned him.

He was like, if you give me $5, I'll hang out at Chick-fil-A parking lot. Yeah. That was awesome. That was awesome. Bodied. Bodied. Yeah. Jumping ahead here, it says, in November, Vance delivered the closing speech at the

second annual National Conservatism Conference held at a Hilton in Orlando near SeaWorld. They should have just held it at SeaWorld. SeaWorld's the perfect embodiment of national conservatism. Yeah. Yeah. No. Completely cruel, needless, shitty place. No one likes.

I'm feeding LeBron, I'm feeding LeFraud to Tillicombe. Yeah. They could have effigies of LeBron that they throw to the whales. His keynote address was called, university is our the enemy. I'd be like, this guy spent more time in college than, like, you love college. You love school. He loves it. You spend more time at school than anyone I know.

You served in the Marines, so you could go to school for free. That's how much you love school. Every one of his, like, too clever by half, thread the needle, national conservative troll posts that he creates specifically to trigger online liberals and leftists, and of course with no consideration of anybody who actually might vote in his election cares about. He is doing that within his mind, some invisible college professor over his shoulder, and he's just imagining the A he's going to get for how clever he was, the most college broken person on earth.

He's never stopped doing homework ever in his fucking life. Mandel, like, look, if Mandel is, like, totally lying, he's not doing it from a homework perspective. He's like a classic Jewish performer. He's in the tradition of Al Jolson. Yes. Very good. You guys here, the left, he argued, pushed for lax border control while average Americans were the ones overdosing on fentanyl from Mexico.

Grocery and gas bills. They have a coming. They have weak morals. Do you think that's good or bad, Jay? Grocery and gas bills were skyrocketing, but Janet Yellen escaped blame for inflation because she is the first female treasury secretary. So long as we're trailblazing on diversity, equity, and inclusion, Vance complained, it doesn't matter if normal people get screwed.

After the speech, Dreyer says, Vance texted him, when you realize that culture war is class warfare, everything becomes easy. Yeah, I bet it does. Yeah. That simplifies things. Oh, I could just talk bullshit forever, and I never actually have to do anything. Wonderful. JD, JD announces that if he was president, he would let a white child pick his secretary

of education. Cis white child will lead the way. It says, national conservatism is the intellectual version of Trumpism committed to the populist reorienting of the geo-state away. That is a contradiction in terms, by the way, that Trumpism cannot be intellectualized. The whole point of it is that it annihilates and negates intellectualism. That is, that's the appeal of it. Yeah, that it's whatever he wants it to be.

There's no teacher. There's no professor over your shoulder. You just get to do what you want. That is the dream, and intellectualizing it is the opposite of that. Vance's emergent in this universe can be traced to his close relationship with the billionaire venture capitalist, Peter Thiel, another man of the people, literally, he's made up of the people whose blood he has stolen. A NatCon Eminence who delivered the conference's opening speech and has plunked $10 million

into a pro-Vance super PAC. Vance met Thiel about a decade ago after he gave a lecture at Yale that spoke to the dissatisfaction Vance felt with Ivy League life. Thiel's reputation on the left has become a word salad of villainous associations from the demise of Gawker to the rise of surveillance capitalism. Gawker, I bet the voters love that, you fucking idiot. Being Ohio Republican primary voters, I hated Gawker, I hated Gawker stalker, I hated how they treated celebrities, I hate Nick Denton, I can't stop thinking about him.

You're a fucking moron. He says, but before he was associated with politics, he was largely known as a critic of technological stagnation. Captured by his famous line, we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters. If that's true, like Peter Thiel would be, oh, we all thought we'd have flying cars when we were a kid. Do you know how bad a fucking idea of flying cars would be? I don't want flying cars.

I don't even want self-driving cars. Flying cars would be like, imagine all the problems of deadly auto crashes, but 3, like 10,000 feet in the air. I think it's a good idea because what if you're looking at your phone and you think you're going to crash into someone, it used to be you could only go right or left. Now you can go up or down. Yeah, it's classic bad infinity stuff. The future is just the present with more, not what you want.

No transformation. I'm just going to skip ahead a little bit. If you look for it, Elements of Vance's current critique were in hillbilly elegy, too. People like his grandfather who moved to southwest Ohio to work in the then bustling Arm Coast steel plant strengthened the local social fabric as producers. A generation later, with jobs disappearing, his mom and neighbors were not just isolated and angry, but also he wrote consumerist. Just before the pandemic, Vance and Giovanni, I'm skipping ahead with the fuck that I don't

care this guy, recorded an episode of a podcast together. Giovanni asked whether Vance's nationalist vision could devolve into a more jingoistic or bigoted form. Vance acknowledged the risk, but countered that a healthy nationalism was an antidote to right-wing grievance politics. And what this hyper-atomized approach to living has done is it's denied people a sense of solidarity, he said. I think some people go and find it in their racial identity or ethnic identity, and I

think that's especially dangerous. But what does a national conservative vision look like in a primary campaign that doubles as an audition for Trump's endorsement? The answer often has been Vance's own course brand of identity politics. In July, he gave a sneering speech about the childless left, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, whose twins were delivered about a month later. On Twitter, he called The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman one of the many weird cat ladies

with too much power in this country. This is so funny to be like, this is his version of bullying people. He's like, Paul Krugman's a cat lady, despite his grandmother is better at roasting people than him. Yeah. Call him a bad terminator. Yeah. Man, JD, you suck.

You are not good at this shit. Josh Mandel, when he gets home, he may panic, he may run and turn on every humidifier in his house in winter. He's like, oh my God, I was outside so long with no humidifier. I'm going to, I'm going to chap, I'm going to chap. But I believe him. He's good at this. Oh, you're not JD.

You suck. Vance, I'm just skipping ahead to the end here, it says, Vance's media strategy seems to be that by playing Don Jr. on the internet, he can push for more substantive, more substantive populism in real life. The success of that tactic may depend on how far removed he truly seems from the Brookings institution to Netflix pipeline he was riding until recently. Damn. Oh, that was fucking cold.

Yeah. No, I guess that's here in November, Vance, he did an invitation to, you already covered that. He said, man, Mandel replied with a picture of himself outside of Denny's. He wrote, for $10 and 80 cents, anyone can join me eating fries off the hood of a car from a gas station at Denny's at midnight. Damn. In late November, the Ohio Republican Party held a very awkward candidate forum at an

evangelical church near Middletown. None of the seven candidates were allowed to rebut one another. The statements from Vance's opponents were a procession of uninspired to alarming GOP tropes. Party fixture Janet Timkin pledged to fight back against the socialists. Mandel thundered that the election had been stolen and that America was not a country for atheism or Muslim values. Mandel, who is Jewish, is for Judeo-Christian values.

Oh, yeah. Vance, seated on the edge of the stage, tried to move the conversation onto his turf. Censorship opioids. Not just the fault of the Democrats, but of multinational corporations. Fielding a question about fiscal sanity, he pivoted away from the national debt and gave an answer about buying American made instead of Chinese made goods. Blaming big business certainly distinguished him from his opponents, but it did not appear to thrill the diehards and the pews.

Eventually, however, Vance landed on something that got the audience going. He called for Republicans to shut down the government until Biden ended his vaccine mandate for federal workers. A vaccine mandate is exactly the sort of the idea that a common good national conservative like Vance should support. Yet, a few days after the forum, I got a text message from his campaign, raising money off the line. So there we go.

That's JD Vance and his identity play, the way that we can play with identity for fun and profit. Well, good luck, JD. We'll see how he does. We'll see how you do. Good luck, JD. Good luck, Josh. Good luck, all of you.

Yeah. Either way, whoever wins is going to lose. We're all going to lose. It's alien versus predator, but once again, you have to have just a slight preference for skill, a slight preference to see someone rewarded for doing something well, even if it's an evil thing, as opposed to just being a pathetic round fraud. And they're all going to vote the same way. JD Vance would not do anything special in Congress.

The same guy. Josh is he's trying hard. He's trying hard and he's succeeding. That's all you can. That's all you could really cheer for. And no beard. No beard. Yes.

No beard. There we go. Anything else today, gentlemen? I think we're good. I think we're good. I think we're all good. Yeah. All right.

Well, yeah. All right. Let's run down the list here. Choppo Live Shows. Artura of the South. February 24th, we will be in Charlotte, North Carolina at the Underground. February 27th, we will be in Atlanta, Georgia at the Buckhead Theater. March 3rd, we will be in Nashville, Tennessee at the Basement East.

On March 18th, we will be in Dallas, Texas at the Echo Lounge and Music Hall. On March 22nd, we will be in Houston, Texas at the White Oak Music Hall. And on March 24th, we will be in New Orleans at the L.A. Civic Theater. At some point in between there, we will also be doing the show in Austin. Venue to be determined. And to purchase tickets for any of these live shows, go to www.chopposhraphouse.com, slash live. Come out.

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