Chapo Trap House - 618 - Z Whispers (4/11/22)

Episode Date: April 12, 2022

We’re getting absolutely zooted on microplastics for today’s ep, then looking at Bill Clinton’s “if I didn’t do it” article in the Atlantic on his true intentions behind NATO expansion in the 90’s, and another piece on what the Democrats can do to recapture Gen Z for the midterms.

Okay, gentlemen, it's Choppo, Monday, April 11th, and, you know, before we begin today's episode, I got a little stick in my craw, just something I've been thinking about, just something that's been getting a bad rap lately, and I'd like to stand up for something that people have been beating up on a lot lately, and I think it's time to stop. Beating off to a lot, also. Yeah. I'd like to stop and stand up to the bullying, and of course, I'm talking about seed oils. Folks, let a man eat some seed oils.

I think they're great. I'm having a glass of seed right now, and honestly, I've never felt better. I don't understand why all the hate for seed oils. I don't know. Maybe Felix, do you know why people are mad at seed oils? I mean, no, not really. I think it's just like one of these, like, stupid ways that Americans reconcile their own diets, where it's like, well, everyone eats 4,500 calories for every meal and drinks

200 ounces of soda, and their favorite meal is the bread and tortured cow sandwich with a side of fries and bread on the fries, and they're like, oh, everyone in my family has gotten love handle cancer because of carbs. I just have to stop eating carbs. I should still eat this Bergen-Belsen meat, but I have to stop eating carbs and replace any time I would eat bread with just eating a block of cream cheese. With seed oils, it's like, oh, well, I eat 7 pounds of food every day, but the fact that 5 of those pounds are cooked in seed oils is the reason why I feel bad all the time.

You could just have smaller portions or better food. You don't have to completely cut everything out, but that's kind of the only way we really do things. Well, I say you could take my seed oils when you grab them from my wet, sticky hands. Yeah, I'm going to eat everything with sunflower seeds and the unfortunately named seed that rhymes with grape, but I don't care if it makes me gay or not gay or whatever they do, whatever people say, I'm going to eat them. Full disclosure here, I mean, I have taken an advisory position on the Olive Oil Defense

Council. Well, wait a minute. See, that's the thing. Is olive oil a seed oil? Because it's not a seed. It's a fucking little guy. It's a little vegetable. I actually don't know what seed oils are.

I don't know. But you know, olive oil, grape seed oil, avocado oil, a coconut oil, I mean, are these seed oils? I'm not sure. I don't know. I literally do not know. I think I know that canola oil is a seed oil. It's a sunflower seed oil, right?

Peanut oil. That's got to be a seed oil. That's right. Is that a seed? That's a nut. It's a nut. I don't know. Peanut isn't a seed.

It's a legume. If you plant a peanut in a ground, will it grow more peanuts? No. I just love that. You need like a peanut incantation. It's like we're finding out like, oh, yeah, like everybody now who's been alive for the last 30 years is 90 percent plastic. I got to cut out that seed oil.

Yeah. I look like Americans are the only people who could invent like having an eating disorder where you still eat 7000 calories a day. We're so awesome. Like keto and now like the no seed oil thing where it's like, well, no, like the baseline for every diet is that you eat the most food ever. You just have to like take out one thing that suddenly makes your life incredibly difficult. Yeah.

No, was it was like you eat a credit card's worth of microplastics every day or something like that? Every night while you're asleep, 12 credit cards sneak into your mouth and you eat them. That's what I heard. That's what my cousin told me. Every night when I'm, every night when I'm going to sleep, I have like a master card crawl out of my mouth like in Twin Peaks to return, but then they come back in by the end of the day.

Where does it all come from? Has anyone ever had like sleep paralysis where the five guys hold you down and just sports seed oil into your mouth and then like jam a credit card into your asshole? I'm like, I like the credit card of plastics that I currently eat. It's not like a bullshit one like the Chase Sapphire, you know, the credit cards of millennials that was for millennials because it was like, oh, this gives you points back when you buy a meal in a bowl. I use the, or I eat the Delta Sky Mile Xamex every day and it's great.

I'm getting rewards and it's a higher quality plastic. And most importantly, people to student loans cannot get it. Like I keep getting credit card offers in the mail and obviously like I respond to all of them, so they send me new credit cards that I run over a microplane and just, you know, give a little garnish to any meal I prepare. Yeah. I've been taking a rock of Coke and cutting up credit card fragments and rallying them to really hard, like just like brick of Coke, crush this plastic.

Yeah. You know, I mean, a lot of people cut up cocaine with credit cards. I say just, you know, add a little garnish to get, I mean, you can do, you can do more with a credit card or a hotel room key than just process cocaine. You can like a... Well, yeah, no. Run over the microplane. Yeah.

Cocaine isn't psychoactive. It turns out this entire time it was credit cards. The microplastics were getting us high and I just, you know, I cut out the middleman. Yeah. I enjoy smoking my credit cards, a free based mastercard. That's where it's at. I don't do that because that's more addictive. I do, I do inject in between my toes sometimes.

A skin pop, Mx. Don't you hate it when like you're, there's like your mailman's late, he doesn't send you the new credit cards and you have to like lick the microplastic residue off your shirt to like get a hit. I'm boiling down my urine to get the microplastics in there. Well, okay, yeah, if you put like, if you put like eight ounces of urine, which you like, you know, if you can't make it, you should have it laying around. You just put it in really cold water and run it through a cheesecloth.

You're going to get, you're going to filter all the pee out and get all the nice microplastics and then you can make your very own lean. Yeah. No, I mean, how about some macroplastics? Can I get some of those? Oh, baby. Now we're talking. Now we're talking.

Macroplastics. I don't think I could handle it yet. I got to get my tolerance up before I try to jump to my macroplastics. I just could get a little bit of macroplastic, dip it in some seed oil, swallow it, it'll go down easy. It'll go down nice and smooth and you've got some nice macroplastics rummaging around your intestines. I think it's good though.

Seed oil and microplastics is actually the recipe for the limitless drug from the film about it. As long as you're talking about a merifat excellence and loving burger, I'm wondering it like this in terms of like a contrast to American society, it's a my new television obsession. Have you guys heard of or seen this show old enough on Netflix? No. Okay.

I'm not Google that. Yeah. I know it's a disturbing title, but it's an adorable show. It's a Japanese TV show that I'm making it so it's an American TV show on Netflix. I'm calling the police right now. I hear Japanese TV show. I dial nine and one. I actually have heard about this.

It's like each episode is about 10 minutes long and each episode essentially follows a toddler, like a four or five-year-old, as they attempt to run an errand for their parents. That's like walking a mile to the grocery store, picking up stuff for lunch, walking back, walking back home. It's a great show. It's like riveting television. I'm rooting for these kids so hard as they waddle across the street and attempt not to fall down and hand the clerk 100 yen to pick up some tempura and bring it home.

But these kids, they're doing great. And I was just thinking like, there's obviously a lot of reasons that this show would never work in America, but chief among them is that a self-driving Tesla would wipe out an entire season's worth of these plucky tops. Absolutely. Or one of those SUVs they have now that are so big, have you heard about this guys? Have you heard about this? There are SUVs now where the profile is so high for the cockpit that you can fit like

four cars, like two or three cars below it where it would be in front of it and you wouldn't be able to see it. And they have to have a front-facing camera so that they can see what is underneath the top of the fucking hood. These children would be annihilated. I mean, you kind of need that. Every day at the grocery store, since Brandon got in there, it's a war. You're fighting over grain.

You're fighting over who gets the last $700 bag of gruel. You need a military vehicle to do that. Yeah, no. It's a vision of Japanese society that makes it seem very pleasant, but mostly it just seems it would be nice to have like once again to hammer home this old poppy horse. If every American town and city weren't based around driving cars everywhere, you could send your toddler to the grocery store. But as we just experienced in Dallas and Texas, if we did like Texas version of old

enough, they would have to cross like eight lanes of a freeway just to get to the corner store. Not possible here. I got to say, I think it might make a more entertaining show. The estimated lifespan of like an unaccompanied toddler in most American cities is like seven minutes before they're completely flattened, just fucking pancaked by like one of those 14,000-pound SUVs that Matt mentioned that are named like the Avalanian. Yeah.

It's like being one of the first Red Army wave in the Stalingrad. If the child in front of you drops, they're binky. Pick it up. Well, so I think it's just the, I think in America, people would be just so concerned that like the first 30 seconds your child is out of your field division, like someone will just abduct and kill them or something like that, you know, it's just, people are very afraid in this country. But I think we should let, I think we should put toddlers to work, you know, send them

to the grocery store, make them buy stuff, you know, because it's like, it's a way to inculcate self-confidence that doesn't involve just telling your kid how smart and special they are all the time. Be like, okay, prove it. Yeah. Go to the, go, go, go, go, go, get me some milk. Go give me some seed oils and microplastics because you could just go to the microplastic dispensary and just bring back about 14 grams of microplastics so we can have dinner tonight.

People would want to work again too, like Jesus. Toddlers don't want to work anymore, it's a shame. But you know, in Japan, they've got initiative, they've got pluck. Well, yeah. I mean, like they've, they've already achieved, you know, the American dream very early, which is being on TV. But I think like, I think like everyone gets on TV in Japan, like one way or the other. Like, you know, I mean, like, hey, look, kids, you know, like, you know, like, if you miss

your opportunity to be old enough, there's still a chance for you to go on that show where you have to sing a karaoke song while a woman jacks you off. They should, they should do, they should do old enough, but with like 45 year old Americans trying to like go to this war without driving, just waddling around, they take their phone away too. So they can't like, they can't map Weston or whatever the fuck, just like a 45 year old man who shaped like a grape, just like, just, just like crawling on his belly to 711 four blocks away.

And you take their phone away so they can't record themselves yelling at a cashier. You can't do that too. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, apparently this show has been on TV for in Japan for a while and I can't help but think it's sort of like government propaganda to get people to have kids. They're like, look, you can, you can, you can, you can make them, you can make them pick vegetables for you. You look, look, it'll take, it'll take her 30 minutes to pull a cabbage out of the ground,

but she'll bring it back to you. Well, that's their version of nobody wants to work is like nobody wants to fuck. Nobody wants to fuck anymore, which is, you know, just like our nobody wants to work. It's like, I don't know how this happened. Like I know what, like our birth rate is like the one kid per 2 million people. And I don't know, I don't know what happened. We only like, they only grew up in like the most depressing society, one of them. Not to cast dispersions, but like, damn dude, damn those countries, like those countries,

like this may just be like American delusion. Just like keeping us, keeping us at a relatively low level compared to like, you know, more Western aligned East Asian countries, but like South Korea and Japan have like insanely fucking high suicide rates. I mean, for a lot of reasons, but it's like, yeah, I mean, if you're, if you're going to kill yourself, you're probably not thinking about like busting in a girl raw. Maybe you should. But, you know,

Yeah, get with it. I mean, are you like, you know, are you tired of having to spend 10 minutes every day putting a different hat on the local statue that pays respects to your ancestors? Have a kid. They'll do it for you. Yeah. But you've got to have a kid. Have a kid though.

You've got, you've got to bust raw. You got to be doing that. Yeah. If I grew up in Shinto though, like, which is one of the true religions, um, along with like, we're just going to say all Islam, you guys, you guys are winning. I just got to say that Mormonism and then Shinto, I would be having kids, but I didn't. So, you know, we're, we're going to wait, but, you know, they've got their own problems over there.

Well, you know, every, every, every society has its own problems, which, uh, moving on to the, uh, the problems with our own society, um, would you guys be interested in hearing a former president Bill Clinton's thoughts on NATO expansion? Yes. Okay. What else do I want in this one? Yeah. I was about to throw myself on a train track until you suggested this, you know, I got this

article because, uh, uh, Matt, you posted it this week and it was like, uh, uh, this is Bill Clinton writing in the Atlantic. I tried to put Russia on another path and, you know, your point about this is that this is his version of the OJ Simpson book. If I did it. Yeah. This is him going, if I didn't do it. If I didn't do it.

Yeah. If I had, if I had really good intentions, imagine that. So he says, my policy was to work for the best while expanding NATO to prepare for the worst. Bill Clinton writing in the pages of the Atlantic. Uh, it begins when I first became president, I said I would support Russian president Boris Yeltsin in his efforts to build a good economy and a functioning democracy after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Uh, how did that? Okay. Yeah. So he was, he's supporting Boris Yeltsin's effort to build a good economy and a functioning democracy. Well, mission accomplished. Yeah. Way to go, dude.

Well, one of the strongest economies I've ever seen and, you know, so certain unfair people would say that, uh, Bill Clinton and, uh, Bob Rubin and Larry Summers and everyone else, um, Bill Broder, all these people, that their actions in this country actually reflect how Bill Clinton treats women, which is, uh, just repeatedly penetrating them unconsciously. But I didn't, neither are true. He's done for the economy of Russia, what he's done for every woman he has met. Uh, he says, yes, I would, uh, uh, build a good economy and a functioning democracy

after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. But I would also support an expansion of NATO to include former Warsaw Pact members and post-Soviet states. My policy was to work for the best while preparing for the worst. I was worried about, not about a Russian return to communism, but a return to ultra-nationalism. Replacing democracy and cooperation with the aspirations to empire, like Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. I didn't believe that Yeltsin would do that, but who knew, well, who would come after him?

I think you did. You, you did because, uh, you guys picked him, actually. Yeah. Yeah. If Russia stayed on a path towards democracy and cooperation, we would all be together in meeting the security challenges of our time, terrorism, ethnic, religious and other tribal conflicts, and the proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. If Russia chose to revert to ultra-nationalist imperialism and enlarge NATO in a growing

European Union would bolster the continent's security. Near the end of my second term in 1999, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic joined NATO despite Russian opposition. The alliance gained 11 more members under subsequent administrations, again, over Russian objections. Lately, NATO expansion has been criticized in some, in some quarters for provoking Russia and even laying the groundwork for Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine. The expansion certainly was a consequential decision, one that I continue to believe was

correct. Um, well, like, you know, ignoring like the, um, insane, who knows who would come next. Um, the fear of like ultra-nationalism in Russia specifically leading to, uh, military belligerence, I, I mean, it is useless bringing up what people fucking forget because it's everything. It's everything that was even two weeks ago, much less something that was, you know, over 20 fucking years ago. But Russia's incursion into Chechnya both times was broadly supported by the West.

It was, Tony Blair has made several speeches in public statements saying, you know how we prevent Russia from backsliding. We help them just wantonly kill Muslims. So that was never a fucking fear. Uh, it goes on here, sir. Because United Nations ambassador, sorry, I can't get over the, I can't get over wantonly. What, what is it supposed to be? Wantonly.

Wanton is like, there's this Chinese, Chinese food. Who cares? I think Felix is hungry. That's what that means. No, I just ate. This is like the 700. Was it Chinese food? No.

No. I don't eat China. I like, I only eat that on special occasions because they put the wrongs. Like Christmas. Yeah. I can't get, I can't, I typed in Virgin Boy egg into Grubhub and I got arrested. I'm not doing that again. That's my favorite food from China.

I, I, uh, you know, I did a little trick or treating of my own last year and I was going door to door asking if anyone's son would pee on my egg. No one did. So no, I had Greek where they do that for free. It goes on, as United States ambassador and later secretary of state, my friend Madeline Albright, who was, who recently passed away, was an outspoken supporter of NATO expansion. So were secretary of state Warren Christopher, national security advisor Tony Lake, his successor Sandy Berger and two others with firsthand experience in the area, chairman of the joint

chiefs of staff, John Chakasvili, who was born in Poland to Georgian pimpments and came to the US as a teenager. Joint deputator of state, strobe Talbot, who translated and edited Nikita Khrushchev's memoirs while we were housemates at Oxford in 1969 and 1970. Okay. I would love to talk about all these people that like Bill Clinton, uh, Eiffel Towered on a plane with, but you just, you said, uh, deputary of state. Boom.

Yeah. Fucking roasted. I did say deputary. That isn't even a word. Yeah. I'm sorry. I thought it was, it was also a word in the other way. Very delicious.

Honestly. Can't stop thinking about wantons now. So it's, it's, how should I say it? Wantonly. Wantonly. It's like the same word. Like people will know. People can use context clues.

I'm sorry. Like there, there. I'm sorry. I've been hosted by my own, uh, wait, okay, not right, I'll stop at the time I proposed NATO expansion. However, there was a lot of respected opinion on the other side, the legendary diplomat George Kennan, famous for advocating the policy of containment during the Cold War, argued that with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, NATO had

outlived its usefulness. The New York Times columnist Tom Friedman said Russia would feel humiliated and cornered by an enlarged NATO. When it recovered from the economic weakness of the last years of communist rule, we would see a terrible reaction. Mike Mandelbaum and a respected authority on Russia thought it would be a mistake too, arguing that it wouldn't promote democracy or capitalism. I understood that renewed conflict was a possibility, but in my view, whether it happened depended

less on NATO and more on whether Russia remained a democracy and how it defined its greatness in the 21st century. Would it build a modern economy based on human talent and science, technology, and the arts? Or seek to recreate a version of its 18th century empire fueled by natural resources and characterized by a strong authoritarian government with a powerful military? I love the idea that, um, uh, that, that they would really, like they, they really wanted Russia to build a modern society and an economy that could compete on a global stage. How are they supposed to do that?

When we dismantled their entire fucking, like infrastructure and sold it off to the highest bidder, how was that supposed to happen? Yeah. They didn't get enough. They didn't get a Marshall plan, like, like they asked for one and we told them to fuck off. Yeah. And if we're being honest about, uh, what Clinton and, uh, several underlings and allies

did to Russia in the nineties, allowing them to come back in any form, because it's obviously like still not a fucking great place to live, though it is improved in standards of living from the nineties in a lot of ways, allowing them to come back with a world economy that has any leverage on Western Europe and some on the United States is a catastrophic L, like fucking that country up so bad and then letting them have any leverage on you in the future is probably the absolute worst way you could have done things. And that is how you do it. It's like that.

I mean, like I, I think everyone listening is at this point pretty skeptical about, uh, Trump Russia bullshit, um, despite the fact that it's a great avenue for anti-corruption on the left. Um, but like, you know, as we've said, like with that, if they did steal a US presidential election after what we did to them, you just got to take that, you just got to fucking hold that one. You've got to take that one on the chin. That's like you ran up behind a guy who's half your size, hit him in the head with a

fucking brick and he's permanently disabled. He's in a wheelchair and he like fucks your wife and burns her house down. Well, that's really on you. Fair enough. Yeah. How, how do you, how would that happen? And that's what's like, it's a, you know, uh, or, or, or, or would they want to create an 18th century empire fueled by natural resources and characterized by a strong authoritarian

authority. I mean, the thing they have, what the, what they would want, uh, the natural resources and a big military is the leverage that they have. So he's like, well, well, they should just get rid of that and become a state. They should just give her that as a strong tech sector. Yeah. Yeah. Look at what?

Like it's like, Hey, you know, the country that just abused you and like gave everyone an HIV and crashed your standard of living by like a fourth, um, don't have the things they have. No, don't have a giant military natural resources. Do not under any circumstances, you do not want that projecting military influence on your neighbors. Uh-uh. Do not do that.

Yeah. You know, look inward reminds me of my favorite TI song, be better than me. It does. It's basically exactly what, uh, Bill Clinton said to the, uh, industrial workforce of America after that NAFTA pass, like you guys, uh, go back to school, learn some, uh, learn coding and, and, and you know, to basically find an entirely different set of values that don't involve asking for any fucking money or power or influence over anything. That's called creating a modern economy based on human talent in science, technology and

the arts. So yeah. Sorry. Similar thing. Yeah. I was like looking at those people who you said, uh, learned to code to, uh, was just like, uh, oh, it's weird. There's just like these tens of millions of people who will never vote again.

Yeah. This is so weird. Who did this? I think they should seek to cultivate talents in the arts. Yeah. No, there should have been. Yeah. No.

If, um, if Bill Clinton had been a more proactive president, if, uh, you know, the, the role of government wasn't diminished in American life, um, he could have sent all those former coal miners and guys building washing machines. He could have sent them to NYU and they could have gone to the Tisch School, the performing hearts. That's so awesome too. Because like arts, like make actually making like an economy out of art shit. That's just already where money is.

You don't make money from that. Like people with, uh, like artistic talent move towards concentrations of wealth that already exist. You don't just make one out of no out of thin air when your country is experiencing yes, massive decline in standard of living. Yeah. No. I mean, like the idea of like a Russian tech sector in the nineties, you think about

like what fueled the American tech sector? It's like, oh, why don't you guys just like, um, have decades of public private research, uh, and then an explosion development undergirded by incredibly cheap money. Also, all of which was, uh, initially, uh, military spending, which you're not supposed to do. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, read, read, read plenty for some interesting insights on the Russian computer sector in

the nineties. Uh, it continues, I did everything I could to help Russia make the right choice and become a great 21st century democracy. My first trip outside the United States as president was to Vancouver to meet with Yeltsin and guarantee 1.6 billion for Russia so it could afford to bring its soldiers home from the Baltic States and provide for their housing. I bet that conversation went, went great, uh, Yeltsin was wearing a barrel of suspenders and every time he got up, you saw his balls.

And if you, you looked at his notepad of what he was talking about with Clinton, it was just like a pink elephants playing the trumpet and put a great meeting. I'm sure he took a lot away from it. If this is him, if this is like the, his tenure, uh, in foreign policy in Russia, if that was him trying his best to bring them into the 21st century, I would, I would hate to see what treating them poorly it would look like. Yeah. Just skipping ahead a little bit.

Um, in 1997, we supported the NATO Russia founding act, which gave Russia a voice but not a veto in NATO affairs and supported Russia's entry into the G seven, making it the G eight. In 1999, at the end of the Kosovo conflict, Defense Secretary Bill Cohen reached an agreement with the Russian Defense Minister under which Russian troops could join UN sanctioned NATO peacekeeping forces throughout it all. We left the door open for Russia's eventual membership in NATO. Everything I made clear to Yeltsin and later confirmed to his successor, Vladimir Putin. In addition to all these efforts to involve Russia and NATO's post Cold War missions,

all brightened our entire national security team worked hard to promote positive bilateral relations. Vice President Al Gore co-chair to commission with Russian Prime Minister Victor, uh, uh, Victor, uh, Cherno Mayeron to address issues of mutual interest. We agreed to destroy 34 tons of weapons grade plutonium each. We also agreed to pull Russian, European and NATO conventional forces back from borders, though Putin declined to go ahead with the plan when he assumed the Russian presidency in 2000.

Um, just a quick digression here about those 34 tons of weapons grade plutonium. I don't know if you guys have seen this story, but, uh, have you seen the bit about how Russian soldiers are just taking shit from, uh, Chernobyl and like, like, like glowing rocks and they're just like, I don't know, moving them around with their hands or like keeping them as souvenirs or like they're just like, because like when they were stationed in Chernobyl, they were just like driving jeeps through what's known as the red forest and kicking up like tons of fucking irradiated dust in the air. But there was this one guy who was apparently like a Russian soldier who was like, Hey,

what's this? Cool. And picked up a rock of like pure cobalt 60 or something like that. Well, okay. That's very grim to think about. Look, it is never too late to change course. It is never too late to change your life. Take that real estate class, go to coding school, uh, you know, uh, to go to NYU maybe.

It's never too late, uh, even for Russia, who they're finally going to have the non-military, non-nationalistic, uh, non-natural resources, uh, sector of the economy that Bill Clinton was asking for, you can go and experience the game fallout in real life all over Russia now. I just like tapping just like just a little souvenir, a little souvenir from my time in Ukraine. I can't wait for the Russian X-Men. There's going to be like their, their Professor X is just like a guy who knows the most racist

thing to call every person he knows, even without speaking their language, a guy who can withstand any motorcycle crash, the greatest heroes ever told. I'll have you know, there already is a Russian X-Men. His name is Colossus. Well, that Colossus had, this is a major digression, but, um, my favorite thing in 70s X-Men when just like everyone was on the shittiest coke and weed of all time, just like dirt weed and like bright yellow coke, they, uh, there was a storyline where the Doctor Strange takes the X-Men to hell and Colossus is there and he's like, well, look at that.

Look how bad this is. If you fuck up once, you're tortured forever. This is why I'm glad I'm an atheist. It's like, you're, you're, you're like seeing hell. And they did awesome shit back then because, um, all told, I met with Yeltsin 18 times and Putin five times, twice when he was Yeltsin's prime minister and three times in the 10 plus months that our terms as president overlapped. That's just three short of all the US, USSR leaders meetings from 1943 through 1991.

The idea that we ignored, disrespected or tried to isolate Russia is false. Yes, NATO expanded despite Russia's objections, but expansion was about more than the US relationship with Russia. When my administration started in 1993, no one felt certain that a post Cold War Europe would remain peaceful, stable and democratic. Big questions remained about East Germany's integration with West Germany, whether old conflicts would explode across the continent as they did in the Balkans and how former Warsaw Pact nations and newly independent Soviet republics would seek security, not just against

the threat of the, of Russian invasion, but from one another and from conflicts within their borders. The possibility of EU and NATO membership provided the greatest incentives for central and Eastern European states to invest in political and economic reforms and abandon a go at a lone strategy of militarization. Neither the EU nor NATO could stay within the borders Stalin had imposed in 1945. Many countries that had been behind the Iron Curtain were seeking greater freedom and prosperity and security with the EU and NATO.

Under inspiring leaders such as Wachla Havel in the Czech Republic, Lekwasele in Poland and yes, a young pro-democracy Viktor Orban in Hungary, thousands of everyday citizens crowded the streets of Prague, Warsaw, Budapest, Bucharest, Sofia and beyond whenever I spoke there. He's just bragging about the crowds he got in Hungary. As Carl built, the former Swedish prime minister and foreign minister tweeted in December 2021, it wasn't NATO seeking to go east. It was former satellite Soviet satellites and republics wishing to go west.

Yeah. I mean, that's there. I mean, yeah, I don't know why people call NATO an extortion racket. It is. Yeah. I wonder if they looked east and were like, oh my God, holy shit, we need to get on our knees. And it's like, you know, despite it being their wish to go west, it's like America

is the west and we get to decide who's in and out of the club. So yeah. Yeah. Like, oh, what are we going to do? These poor little Eastern European countries. They wanted to join. What were we going to do? Say no?

Like when the Soviets asked in the 50s? No. But Poland could never be a made guy because his mom was a bunch of Turks and Mongols and his dad was a regular white person. So they could be good earners, but the second they go into a country that uses normal letters, they are they're put on a chain gang and forced to clean toilets, but they get to be a NATO. Enlarging NATO required unanimous consent of the alliances, then 16 members, two thirds consent of some of a sometimes skeptical U.S. Senate, close consultation and with prospective

members to ensure that their military economic and political reforms met NATO's high standards and near constant reassurance to Russia. Madeleine Albright excelled at every step. Indeed, few diplomats have ever been so perfectly suited for the times they served as Madeleine. As a child in war-torn Europe, Madeleine and her family were twice forced to flee their home, first by Hitler, then by Stalin. She understood that at the end of the Cold War provided the chance to build Europe a free, united and prosperous, to build a Europe free, united, prosperous and secure for the

first time since nation states arose on the continent. As UN ambassador and secretary of state, she worked to revital, realize that vision and to beat back the religious, ethnic and other tribal divisions that threatened it. Was that when she was like, yelled, serve pigs, don't touch me? What was that when she screamed at Serbian people at a press conference or something? Yeah, she said, yeah, dirty Serbs get out. Yeah, dirty Serbs. Yeah.

Yeah, I want to go back a little bit to the high standards of NATO. As we like to say, that is certainly one way to put it. What are the high standards here that like to join NATO that we've got to join? The SIG high standards of NATO. Like Jesus fucking Christ. As we have said, I think it's like incredibly unfair and ugly to seriously say that the average Ukrainian is a Nazi, even though there is a problem with Nazi armed groups in the country, say that average Ukrainians are Nazis is ridiculous, it's wrong.

In the worst case, if it has any institutional or national power behind that sentiment, it makes those Nazi groups more powerful. This is absolutely fair to say about Lithuania, though, which is a NATO state. This is 100% fair to say about the nation of Lithuania. I'm sorry. The result has been more than two decades of peace and prosperity for an ever larger portion of Europe and a strengthening of our collective security. Per capita GDPs have more than tripled in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland.

All three countries have participated in a variety of NATO missions since joining, including the peacekeeping force in Kosovo. To date, no member state of our defensive alliance has been invaded. Indeed, even in the early years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, the mere prospect of NATO membership helped cool long simmering disputes between Poland, Lithuania, Hungary and Romania and others. Now Russia's unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Ukraine, far from casting the wisdom of NATO expansion into doubt, proves that this policy was necessary.

Russia under Putin clearly would not have been a content status quo power in the absence of expansion. It wasn't an immediate likelihood of Ukraine joining NATO that led Putin to invade Ukraine twice in 2004 and in February, but rather the country's shift toward democracy that threatened his autocratic power at home and a desire to control the valuable assets beneath Ukrainian soil. And it is the strength of the NATO alliance and its credible threat of defensive force that has prevented Putin from menacing members from the Baltics to Eastern Europe.

As the Atlantic's Ann Applebaum said recently, the expansion of NATO was the most successful, if not the only truly successful piece of American foreign policy of the last 30 years. We would be having this fight in East Germany right now if we hadn't done it. I like that Ann Applebaum is saying that the expansion of NATO was the only successful Western foreign policy initiative of the last 30 years, most of which she was also the author of. So she's like, I'm still banking on this. The intentions were good, okay?

That's what we need to know. Even if everything goes wrong, it's not, and even though we are the most powerful country on earth that presumably have some sort of say on the outcome, it's never our fault. Well, I mean, this is why people are sort of twisting themselves into knots with this to kind of absurd position that the weaker than in any time in the last 150, 200 years, the Western left caused the invasion of Ukraine somehow through posts and blogs. You kind of have to say that because otherwise it sort of rings bare that anything happening in Ukraine, absolutely the onus is on Russia, but it's also an immense failure of a policy

of provocation and expansion. So you have to say just this like insane shit that accounts with 30,000 followers emboldened Putin to act. The failure of Russian democracy and its turn to revanchism was not catalyzed in Brussels at NATO headquarters. It was decided in Moscow by Putin. He could have used Russia's prodigious skills and information technology to create a competitor for Silicon Valley and build strong and build a strong diversity.

I'm sure we would have loved we would have welcomed that certainly for Silicon Valley. Absolutely. We love it. America. We love a little global competition over IP. Oh my God. It's our favorite thing. What's up?

He could have talked to me talking about like if Russia if Russia built something similar to the iPhone, they would have flattened St. Petersburg Jesus fucking Christ fucking Steve just Steve Jobs. They would have grafted his head onto a Mac and fucking launched suitcase nukes all over the fucking country. What are you talking about? Jesus Christ. I know.

I know. He's a former president. They have to run it, but like this is one of them. This is insane. This is like just like print the goat's eye. What the fuck is this? Well, I mean, like, look, they could have invested. I mean, like what they did do was invest in, you know, all their oil and the sort of natural

resources and building up their gigantic military. But what if they used all of those creative productive forces to create a competitor with the US dollar as the global reserve currency? Like, you know, like, you know, it's like they could have had peace and prosperity. They could have been growing their economy. People wouldn't be drinking gasoline over there. They wouldn't be trying to take home pieces of irradiated Chernobyl nuclear power plant to, you know, just, I don't know, next to their dashboard camera when they crash a car

into a fucking dam or something. Yeah. It would be like if Russia created like a serious global competitor to Facebook, you would be killed for accessing it on an iPhone. Like, it would just zap you. You couldn't do it. And if in the 90s they had somehow created like a regional competitor to Kinko's, we would have invaded.

Like, what, what, what are we talking about here? Skipping ahead a little bit. He says, my last conversation with Madeline Albright was just two weeks before she died. She was vintage Madeline, sharp and direct. It was clear she wanted to go out with her boots on, supporting the Ukrainians in their fight for freedom and independence. She wanted to go fight. She was, her and Sean Penn, she was on, she was booking a plane ticket with Sean Penn.

She was like, Sean, we're going to the front lines. I wish someone had fulfilled your core request earlier. They should have sent her over there in 2014. They could have used a helping hand at Don Boss. On her declining health, she said, I've got good care. I'm doing what I can. Let's not waste time on that. The important thing is what kind of world we're going to leave our grandchildren.

Madeline saw her lifelong fight for democracy and security as both an obligation and an opportunity. She was proud of her Czech heritage and certain that her people and their neighbors in Central and Eastern Europe would defend their freedom because they know the price of losing freedom. She was right about NATO when I was president and right about Ukraine now. I miss her so much, but I can still hear her voice. So should we all. That's not Madeline's voice, Bill.

That's the voice of someone who's just like, you know, in a cage in your basement going, let me out, let me out. I want, I want freedom and security, please. I want freedom. It's like Madeline. I can still hear your voice coming through the air ducts of this mansion. Oh, yeah. So yeah, that's Bill Clinton on a former president, Bill Clinton on NATO extension.

He did nothing wrong, folks. I mean, he's, he was right then and he's right now. Never been wrong about a thing, choice of friends, anything that is very, very similar to Albert Fish's letters to the victim's parents. That is sort of a similar deal there. Similar men too, actually. It's true. We just have these like, yeah, these guys who get to be public serial killers for four

or eight years and then they just get to hang around and taunt their victims afterwards. God damn it. Oh my God. It's like a, like George W. Bush's paintings of all the troops that were injured in Iraq. I'm drawing this one as a clown and here's me also as a clown. Okay. Just moving on to the closings out today, let's turn to domestic politics. Midterm elections, they're coming up boys, you know, and you know, the pot is at a simmer

now and you know, Democrats, they're looking around and they're going, hey, is there anything we can do? Oh man. Is there anything we can do? Does this look good? What up? Come on, guys. Let's get some ideas.

Should we be, should we do, should we be doing something else? I don't know. We got to do something though. So courtesy of Politico, we have an article here, our headline, Democrats turn to their Gen Z whisperer as youth support wobbles, Biden's numbers with young voters took a staggering dive at the end of 2021, dipping lower than any Democratic president in decades. So that's a problem. You know, I like to think of ourselves as sort of Gen Z whisperers.

Certainly. I'm always whispering to the, to Gen Z. All the time. I'm always saying, stop doing that thing you're doing. Stop making me feel old. Cut it out. Cut it out, gang. All right.

So this is, this Politico Democrat, they're turning to their Gen Z whisperer. Democratic senators had two charts waiting at their chairs when they arrived at a caucus luncheon in February. They showed youth participation in national elections since the 1980s with two impossible to miss spikes. 2018 and 2020, when huge turnout among 18 to 30 year olds propelled Democrats into power in Washington. These graphs led off Pulsar John Delevalpe's myth-busting tour on young people in politics

across the top levels of the Democratic Party. Young people do vote, he told the senators, and they're not policy purists, snowflakes or socialists either. Perhaps the most important point Delevalpe could make for that audience is that young voters are not locked up for Democrats. His pitch to engage and empower the 30 in under set comes at a uniquely perilous moment for the party. Democrats have faced brutal midterm climates and slim margins in Congress before, but the

current iteration of the Democratic Party has rarely, if ever, been on such shaky ground with young people. Earlier this year, approval for President Joe Biden among people aged 18 to 30 hit depths no Democratic president had plumbed in decades. The mid to low 30s in Gallup and other polls. Barack Obama never dropped below 42 percent among that group in Gallup's service. In some cases, the swing against Biden in 2021 totaled anywhere from 20 to 30 percentage points.

He has since made gains in some polls, but is still on unstable ground. An alienated use vote is an existential threat for Democrats in 2022. They backed Biden by a 25 point margin in 2020, voting at all time highs. And in their hour of need, powerful Democrats are looking for answers from De La Volpe, a 54 year old pollster with salt and pepper hair who is not on TikTok. Well, I will forgive this guy's youth and experience on the young side for that side of things, but we'll see what he has to say. I want to say, I really, I'm finally doing it.

I am going to go out on an insane limb here, a fucking insane limb. But I am confident in my predictive ability and also the ability of the audience and you guys to forget I said this, if I'm wrong, I do not think that Brandon will do historically bad or even as bad as 2010 in the midterms. I do not think that, uh, one, I think that, uh, like the, the collapse in polling among younger voters, as we've said, like inevitable because if a group of people see the government, the federal government help them for the first time in their life ever, you know, and Brandon's the guy who takes it away, of course, they're going to fucking hate him.

That's inevitable. That was always going to happen. But it reminds me of when people would say Trump's unfavorables were worse than Hillary. It was, you know, I could see the assumption he's going to lose to Hillary based on his unfavorables being higher, but not really people don't measure like, Oh, I hate this one more than I hate that one. It comes down to a number of things and I just do not, I do not see like a significant group of under 40s going out of their way to, uh, vote for Republicans in the midterm.

I still think Republicans take both houses, but I just, I do not see that also poll poll today that I saw interesting that like 70 something percent of Americans like think that, uh, higher gas prices are Putin's fault. I mean, the type of numbers, uh, that you would get in 2001 with a different adversary. I think that bodes very poorly for the world in the future and I'm always skeptical and issue polls, but I kind of between that and between, I think like the shorter cycles, the shorter culture cycles that we live in and the propensity of Republicans to like overreach and freak out because you, you keep having to up the ante with culture war.

I kind of don't think at this moment in April, it is going to be that bad for them. I mean, it does make you wonder where the hell Republicans are going to be in fucking November when they're already at like 11. I'm saying like Jesus Christ, like this is does not play. I mean, yeah, it works for your people, but like it really is not, does not appear as anything other than like mental illness, but the thing is they don't have to vote Republican and I don't think they will. They just have to don't vote.

Yeah. And like, yeah, like the real question is, will the Republicans be so like day to day grotesque and like, uh, upping the ante on like savage culture war stuff that younger people because they have been groomed by Disney do not agree with, uh, to the point that they'll feel obligated to vote just to like keep them out or will they just check out. And if they check out, it's going to have a similar effect because they're fucking pissed off. Uh, Brandon going parents sure as hell aren't going to check out.

Yeah. I, I mean, like I want to say that I still think like Democrats lose, uh, both houses. Yeah. With those margins, they can't hold out of those. No. Yeah. Just how, how voting is in this country and like, even if they do win, you know, the popular vote, uh, for midterms in total vote count, that does not mean much.

But I just, I, it is hard for me to see like, I mean, who knows predicting like, you know, fucking nine months from now with anything in the, in the current culture. But it just, when I see it, when I see like 20 pundits all say the same thing, I immediately start thinking it will not happen. I realize that is reactive and a simplistic way to look at things, but it is nonetheless how I predicted a few things. It's true. I mean, like, you know, I probably be like, you know, like a drop off in 18 to 30 year

olds, like actively voting in the midterms, but like that's usually the case in midterm elections. I mean, I don't know, like, I mean, he does mention the word Bernie Sanders in this article. We'll get to it. But like, you know, the enthusiasm, if it's like, uh, tamp down to any degree, it's because like the Democrats and, you know, two presidential elections kneecap the candidate that was actually supported by young people. But as we learned in 2020, like most of them, most of them ended up voting for Biden anyway.

I mean, the same problem is just like the people who don't vote and never will. I will say though, the Democrats are in a tough position right now because the Republicans, you know, they're exciting young people. When you've got stars like David Mamet calling people who give you homework pedophiles. This has always been the problem with education is that teachers are inclined, particularly men because men are predators to pedophilia. I mean, you've got someone who like really speaks to young people like playwright, playwright and film director David Mamet.

Like when he goes on Mark Levin, like the 18 to 30 year olds are going to be like, who's this Mark Levin guy? Wait, he has a book out about socialism. Let me read it. Well, David, uh, David Mamet today, um, the thing I saw, he's redoing scum manifesto because he's, he's gone from, he's gone from saying like all teachers are liberals and therefore pedophiles to like, well, you know, all men are pedophiles and rapists and if they're teachers, you know, what do you think they're going to do is like they're going

to, they're going to, you know, those guys who are just like their head is a 90% US battleship hat and aviator sunglasses are going to write Dworkin books by accident on free republic. Well, no one's a free republican on gab. Just about how all men have an innate desire to abuse and dominate women and therefore there should be no teachers. Um, yeah, no, I, uh, does the, uh, does our 54 year old wonder kids say anything about like the pro act or unions in here? Cause that is kind of the one way I could see Biden, not just, you know, eating shit

by less than expected, but like maybe pulling out one of Irish Joe's famous tricks. Well, let's, let's, let's, let's continue on. Um, so, uh, the, the 54 year old pollster pollster with salt and pepper hair, who is not on tiktok, he's held by industry colleagues and political operatives on both sides of the aisle for an encyclopedic knowledge of young voters, said Kristen saltist, Anderson or Republican pollster, John Anzalone, Biden's lead campaign pollster, said Dela Volpe's data yield so much depth of understanding of a misunderstood group. Dela, Dela Volpe has led Harvard university's Institute of politics youth poll since it's

been set in since it's inception in 2000 with former students, including house GOP conference chair, Elise Stefanik and Republican, I know it's sorry, insect secretary of transportation, Pete Buttigieg, Dela Volpe's longitudinal insight into young voters. Harvard moves them, how they feel about politicians and whether they're going to unplug from politics altogether matters deeply for Democrats, especially ahead of 2022. They're also not as broadly studied or understood as say independence, even though they represent a core part of the party's base and their numbers are fluctuating. The party goes into midterms in an unusual place with young people, Dela Volpe said

in an interview. There are more younger people in play than we were in the last two cycles. The interesting thing there is he says young people are an understudied group in politics as opposed to, I mean, they're probably the most studied group when it comes to marketing, but unlike independence, which are studied meticulously by pollsters, it's like, I don't think that's the case because just like the salt and pepper, the haired pollster has come along to fucking teach them about the young people, it's just that the American independent voter and the issues that matter to them are the issues that politicians already hope to

achieve and care about. So like it's easy to study a group that's telling you exactly what you're doing is right and that you should continue doing it. Or I mean, like independence will say like, I hate politicians, but like, you know, the gas prices are too high and also people aren't paying enough for it, that kind of shit. Going on, where Democrats spent past elections mostly worried about whether young people would vote, this cycle is different, De La Volpe continued. In the face of economic unrest, disinformation, and without former President Donald Trump

as a foil, he said, Democrats need to persuade them and mobilize them. That is the new reality. The pollster who was part of Biden's team during the 2020 general election still has the ear of many in the administration. He's one of those trusted voices people in the White House turned to for advice, said one senior Biden advisor. De La Volpe has recently made some... Is that all you need to hear to know to not listen to him?

De La Volpe has recently made several presentations with the White House staff, according to people familiar with the meetings. Biden's yo-yoing numbers with young people should concern everyone, said John Walsh, Senator Ed Markey's chief of staff, who managed the Massachusetts Democrats' successful primary campaign in 2020, which drew unusually high support among young voters for a 75-year-old senator. Government is not acting with urgency this moment, with the urgency this moment demands, they're frustrated, pissed off.

I worry that some people are not listening to John Walsh edit. I mean, I'm just like, maybe we'll get to it, but I'm just, I'm waiting for something in the piece of like, what is prescriptive here? What is prescriptive? What are they going to do? What are they going to get to get people, to get young people out to vote? Hopefully they'll... Well, this is like the, this is the Democrat special with like anybody or anything.

It's just like pledging to listen in here and to understand voices, I guess. Think about guided by voices, get Jake Ernie on the horn. Felix, this is the next line in this article. Oh boy. De La Volpe has spent much of the last two decades listening to young people. Hell yeah. Wow. Well, so is Bill Clinton.

In 2000, De La Volpe conducted his first youth survey with two Harvard University students who wanted to understand why college students participated in community service, but didn't vote. At the time, De La Volpe had built a polling and market research business around dial testing, cutting edge technology of the day in which participants would rate their reaction to political speeches or campaign ads on a manual dial. His roster of clients included President Bill Clinton, Senator Ted Kennedy, and major corporations. But specifically, polling youth filled the void.

No one was listening to younger people, De La Volpe said. Even now, young people are more difficult and expensive to survey. They're more transient, less comfortable picking up an unknown phone number and more likely to require different language options. They didn't vote, so candidates didn't appeal to them or target them. And then they didn't vote, so it was a vicious cycle repeating, De La Volpe said. I wonder why they don't pick up unusual phone numbers, the thing that we talked about last week.

Yeah. I just, okay, he's been listening to the youth. Most people, he's filling a void. No one's listening to the youth. What are the youth saying, John or De La Volpe, please tell me what young people are saying. You've been listening to them for two decades. What are they saying?

What are they saying? What are the young people saying? Okay. It sounds like the last young people, by the way, that De La Volpe actually spoke with himself or now in their fifties. Since 2000, the Harvard youth poll has grown in scope, publishing twice a year with undergraduates developing questions and De La Volpe editing and sharpening them. In 2018, citing his own data, De La Volpe predicted that young people would show up

in historic numbers calling Trump's first midterm a moment of a once in a generation attitudinal shift around voting. Some pollsters rolled their eyes, but De La Volpe was right. 36% of 18 to 29 year olds voted that cycle, almost doubling 2014 rates and beating any previous midterm participation since the 80s. The Harvard youth poll has been the only consistent data set to look at a change over time on this stuff said Ben Wessel, who served from 2019 to 2021 as executive director of Next Gen America, the largest democratic group focused on youth mobilization.

Because of this longevity, he catches trends between politics and not politics that the rest of their political world could really learn from. What are they? Tell me. Tell me. What are these? What are the gems that he has to impart here? You got to pay for them.

They're behind the payroll. This article is like going to a Turkish ice cream stand. My God. Get to the fucking point. Let me hold the fucking cone. Jesus. De La Volpe also regularly runs focus groups, which make him extremely effective at going beyond percentages and crosstabs.

A much more nuanced way of getting to the true viewpoint says Matt Beretto, a democratic pollster who worked with De La Volpe on the Biden campaign. What's the true viewpoint? I've heard this guy, De La Volpe's name, 15, okay, sorry, got to refocus here. De La Volpe was an Eagle Scout, where in his first encounter with young people, at only age 54, he's been known to wear shorts to a barbecue upsetting the pin straight accolades of a democratic party, De La Volpe doesn't just know young people, he hears them. De La Volpe's interest is less focused on quantitative feedback than on stories, describing

it as almost a kind of political therapy. He's eroded on how Gen Z is defined by anxiety through key events, including Trump's election in 2016 and the Parkland school shooting in 2018. It has made them suspicious of institutions and impatient for change, he wrote in his book, fight how Gen Z is channeling their fear and passion to save America. In recent focus groups conducted over Zoom with two dozen Gen Zers, De La Volpe started by asking them to share something good that had happened to them recently. He followed up by asking if they felt like their personal lives were on the right track

and if they weren't, why? He asked them about their mental health, the pressures and stresses they face. In both 90 minute sessions, it took nearly an hour before he explicitly asked about politics or politicians. Focus on values first, second, and third, De La Volpe said, it's perhaps a unique perspective in politics, no, it's not, that's, that's what, yeah, that's what they all say because it's free. Yeah.

Values is free. You don't have to promise anything. You don't have to say we're going to fund something or change something. You could just say we have these values. It's the cheapest. They love hearing this shit. What you're saying that I could fucking just put out some goddamn tic-tacs with noted celebs saying how much we value young people and how the Republicans are actually not based.

They're actually cringe or whatever the fuck. They love hearing that. So, yeah, this 54-year-old boy genius, he's going to get like Tony Qualo to do a tic-tac where he's like, yo, having anxiety is chuggy. Let's vote blue. All the unindicted characters from the ambition and the power are going to show up. I'm not on a tic-tac, I'm like Vimeo. I'm skipping ahead a little bit because I'm trying to get to the beef here.

Okay. So, he says, it starts with communication. De la Volpe said. De la Volpe, De la Volpe. Fucking god. De la Volpe, De la Volpe. De la Volpe, De la Volpe. That's a political campaign involves communicating.

It starts with communication. It starts with communication. It's been a while that you brought that up, dude. It starts with communication. It's regular check-ins to update them on policy progress and citing Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, discipline cadence of Instagram posts as one example of this practice. Okay.

Hell yeah. I want to see Steny Hoyer dropping it like it's hot on Instagram Live. So it starts with communication, then empower them, De la Volpe said. He noticed that Democrats can sometimes stand in their own way in reaching young people because they're intimidated. They get weighed down in the transactional nature of politics. De la Volpe pointed to the attack Biden took as he locked up the Democratic presidential nomination.

Say, where do we agree with Bernie Sanders groups? Where do we agree? And what's the process to get there? Well, isn't that, yeah, you can only really do that one time though, right? Like, yeah, they said it. And of course, like all of the center left pundits like fell all over themselves because, you know, they all said, look, even the ones who like were pro Bernie and didn't like Biden.

They're like, look, we got to be Trump. This is the most important election of all time. So we have to convince these rubes that Biden shares their values. And yes, so everybody went all in on that and it probably worked to an extent because people wanted it to work because they wanted to get rid of Trump. But now it's been two years that they've just been putting fucking cigarettes out in people's eyes for that entire time. Well, yeah, yeah, I mean, I don't care how many, how many voices you listen to cannot

do that one. But like, again, as we said a million times, your first time ever seek generous federal unemployment checks and then fucking mean old Brandon takes it away, do a million surveys. That's not going to fucking help you. And also, I mean, during the 2020 Democratic primary, all the other candidates had to pretend they agreed with Bernie. Biden probably won because he was the only one who just said straight up, I don't believe in anything Bernie Sanders stands for.

I'm not for universal health care. Yeah. So, I mean, like, everybody decided to just pretend that didn't happen for the general because had to get rid of Trump was on the fucking ballot that the entire the like spectacle of emergency is gone. And yes, they can say, oh, they're coming for us, they're going to get rid of democracy. But if you don't have Trump out there bellowing, it's just not the same thing. I mean, what more does he have to do?

He killed neoliberalism. So where do we agree with Bernie Sanders groups? Where do we agree? And what's the process to get there? I mean, again, the problem here is that they don't agree with anything that Bernie Sanders supported. And so there's no way to get there. So just keep listening, Delevalpe.

He says here, Delevalpe listed a handful of policy areas. Oh, thank God. All right. Listed a handful of policy areas where potential executive actions from Biden would very quickly capture the attention of young people. The list includes student debt, mental health, climate change, and dealing with the rising cost of living. Mental health?

What? In large part, they have been following up on these issues. But what? Well, no. Okay. Yeah. So every time, every time, like the Biden diehards will do this, like any time that there's someone will be like, oh, they're not doing anything.

They'll point to like an executive order that usually does not really go as far as it could or maybe should and go, oh, not doing anything. But it's, I mean, that's, if like people who are online like 18 hours a day are going, what the, have to be shown that, how are you going to get like people who vote maybe every other presidential election? There are especially like 20 year olds. In large part, they have been following up on these issues. But it's about extending the conversation in new and different ways to remind people

that we're not finished, Delevalpe said. Taking as one example is Biden's announcement of a mental health initiative during his State of the Union address. People can't stop talking about it. I do. I can't. Every time I pass the Zoomers going around on their, on their Beyblades, I keep hearing them talk about how fresh that, that proposal was, the one that I remember.

What is this? The mental health initiative. Okay. All right. It's an initiative. What else you want? It's an initiative to improve mental health. They're taking the initiative on mental health.

And we need to, we need to, we need to, but the thing is we need to continue this conversation in new and exciting ways and check in with young people to know that like, hey, that mental health initiative, we're still thinking about it. Yeah. We're still absolutely thinking about initiating mental health. We will initiate mental health any day now. Just wait. Major progressive outside groups, though, think Biden can go much further, much further

than the mental health initiative. Who the fuck are these people? Yeah. What the hell? Just come on. Like politics is the art of the possible. Okay. Yeah.

And announcing a major mental health initiative at the State of the Union Address, I mean, what more do you want from him? He goes, they argue that he should cancel student debt altogether or work more aggressively on his climate agenda. Next Gen America's president, Christine Ramirez says, young people want to see action. And that's why we're yelling as loud as we can, please take action on student debt. Because this is within the power of the Biden administration. Last week, the Biden administration announced another four months extension of the pause

on monthly loan payment and interest. It's been over a year of a democratic trifecta, and young people are really disappointed because not much has been accomplished around student debt or on an ambitious climate goal, said Ellen Scales, a press secretary for the Sunrise Movement. People are losing hope. Biden has turned his numbers around with young people before, a saga that may show a path forward for him in the next six months. During the presidential primary, Biden's numbers of young people were also upside down.

At the time, De La Volpe took a group of students to Charleston to conduct a focus group in February 2020, a week before the South Carolina primary. They dropped by a Biden event, and we probably doubled the size of the crowd, De La Volpe acknowledged. After the event, Valerie Biden Owens, Biden's sister in a former Harvard Institute of Politics fellow, spoke to De La Volpe's students, then pulled him aside for his private assessment of the primary race. It's not looking too good, De La Volpe told her.

Biden had just finished fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire. He was about to come in second place in Nevada. Owens, who got to know De La Volpe during her stint at Harvard, told him, John, you've got to talk to my brother, because you were saying what my brother intuitively and instinctively knows. But you also have all this data here, she recounted in an interview with Politiclo. You relate the way that my brother relates, which is spoken like a true sister, but my brother speaks in stories.

A turning point for the Biden and young voters came before De La Volpe joined the Biden campaign later that year. But De La Volpe pointed to it as a sign Biden knew how to reach them, saying, I hear you to Bernie Sanders supporters, especially young voters in March 2020. Those three simple words De La Volpe wrote in his book were everything millions of Zoomers were waiting to hear. Wait a minute, is he claiming that there was some youth shift to Biden before he secured the nomination?

I think that's what he's saying. Is that the claim here? I don't know if I trust your police work there, Lou, because you can't say anything once he has the nomination. It's meaningless. Where else are you going to go? They're not going to rule for Trump. John reinforced to Joe that people just want to be heard reinforcing Joe's natural way

of doing things. Look, I mean, if De La Volpe, if they just want to be heard, then why are you talking about doing anything about anything? Yeah, exactly. Like if De La Volpe, De La Volpe, De La Volpe. They're building like a giant, you know what, this whole thing, if they were going to be consistent and not try to like, because I think they understand at the end of the day, even a fucking lobotomized DCite will read this and be like, really, just listening?

That's kind of sounds dumb and a cop out. They panic and they're like, oh no, initiatives take stars. If they were really serious about this concept of politics, they should say that what Biden needs to do is go on tour in the fall with one of those old timey ear horns and just lean towards the crowd and say, speak up, Sonny. I like, I do like, I think there is a way to like, at least, you know, maybe retain the house. I don't probably not, but like do decently well, right?

And I think that way is something that, you know, we only see hints of things and never any real follow up with anything. But it would be, you know, we saw Brandon take on Amazon at that pre bedtime press conference. And like, okay, theoretically, we are going into the most theoretical of the theoretical thing that will never fucking happen because this is the Democrats. But if this was like the summer of the fucking pro act, you know, and he's going all over the place, he's going on tour just like us to talk about the pro act and he's bringing out everyone's favorite all stars, like, like Bernie, and, you know, putting public pressure

on and that's all they talk about organized labor, organized labor, organized labor, Starbucks, fucking Amazon, everything. Then I could see some, I could see that thing dividends, but that that is just that is not going to happen. I mean, I could see the Biden Democratic Party pro act summer and fall of rallies, possibly coinciding with the based Republicans proposal to withdraw from NATO. Those are both going to happen at the same time. They're equally likely.

I mean, just reading this article, I think a problem with a lot of these youth polls he's running is that like everyone he's talking to seems to have gone to Harvard. So like for those motherfuckers, like, I mean, yeah, just being listened to by powerful people is like all they want. Yeah, they just want a little therapeutic session and they want, yeah, they're themselves to feel like they're the center of the universe for a second. Yeah, they're the only Americans who like give any stock into being heard. And if De La Volpe's, you know, if these polls and his sort of like youth whispering, if there's

any truth to it all that young people just want to be heard and that's it, then young people deserve nothing and we'll continue to get nothing. And like, honestly, they deserve it if that's the case, just, they just want an old man to listen to them and say, I hear you, especially when you know for a fact that it will immediately shoot from one ear to the other and be replaced by a story about the time that he got a hand job and a 57 to Soto. All right. Finishing out this article here, it says, to reinforce Joe's natural way of doing things,

which is just telling stories. So Scales, who organized on behalf of Elizabeth Warren during the presidential primary, said Biden was not young voters' favorite primary candidate, which that was Elizabeth Warren, of course. But once Biden became the nominee, he honestly stepped up and started listening to young people, putting together the Bernie Biden unity task for moving, sorry, listening to young people, putting together the Bernie Biden unity task for and moving on his climate agenda.

The oldest presidential nominee in history eventually achieved historic support from young people in the general election. But now, but now after two years of a stalled agenda items important to young people, Democrats are worried about where young people are in terms of not feeling engaged or motivated right now, said Ben Tulchin, Democratic pollster whose clients include Sanders and New York City Mayor Eric Adams. You have to give them a reason to show up now, Tulchin said. So that, yeah, that's the end of the article.

But it's just like, I mean, all this listening, all this story stuff, and they're just saying young people, they feel frustrated that these agenda items that are important to them seem to be stalled out. Well, I mean, like, there's no amount of polling that can do away with the fact that the Democratic Party does not want to enact any of these policy items that are popular with young people. They do not, they're ideologically opposed to it, top to bottom. They couldn't if they wanted to either, because there's no party. I mean, they can't, like, one of the biggest things that just destroyed Brandon's poll

numbers is when they got rid of the child allowance. Yeah. That was just because Joe Manchin actually believes in the deficit. And that's because there's no mechanism to make any fucking senator or anything they don't want to do. So they can't act as a party. So it doesn't matter what they want. And yes, it doesn't help that they don't want it either.

Like, they can't, they cannot do a coordinated policy push, especially with the slim margins they have. So they can't do anything and they can listen. That's for sure. They can do that. That's free. Have they tried employing a 53-year-old to listen? I mean, if there's an October surprise for the midterms, it's going to be that they cancel

some significant chunk of student debt, which is a thing that the White House could just do, which is untrue of all those other things, and a thing that wouldn't be, wouldn't fuck off too many powerful institutions. I am, I am, you know, I, by the way, I wish I did not make my prediction before hearing that article. Yeah. So now I think every Democratic representative is going to be murdered, actually, in trials that they vote to be a part of.

But yeah, like, I'm hesitant to, I'm hesitant pessimistic on any student loan thing because it's like, I mean, it's one of the greatest anti-inflation tools the federal government has ever had. You're not just going to get rid of that. I don't think. I could be wrong, though. What if, what if they do that and literally every Democrat loses? It could still happen, as I said, I mean, like, yay, student loans are good.

Maybe I have something else that day that matters more than me than voting for some CIA agent. Yeah. Is Abby Asperger going to win? I hope so. I love her. She's a firecracker. I gotta believe she's not going to get elected in that seat.

We'll see though. I love her. I love her. Cause like in 2018, when all these like shitty CIA agents got elected, they're like, I want to thank black women with an X and blah, blah, blah. And then the second they come within like one point of losing, they're like, these fucking blacks and gays are ruining my life and are going to make me fucking lose. I love, yeah.

Just takes one moment of frustration. You see the mask comes off. God, just like, are reading that whole article, I just had the spinal tap song, listen to what the flower people say, just sort of waffling through my brain. Listen to what the flower people say, listen, it's getting louder every day. And they're all screaming at Delavolpe. Hear us. Listen, tell us stories, grandpa.

Tell us the corn pop story again. For you that may have been what you've experienced, for me, hearing that article, it was like Batman interrogating the Joker. They wouldn't tell me what the fucking point was. I couldn't find out where Rachel was. And I need to talk to her to find out what young voters want. All right. Well, that does it for today's episode.

Gentlemen, until next time. Bye-bye. Do it, do it. Cheers. Listen to what the flower people say. Ah, listen, it's getting louder every day. Listen, it's like a bolt out of the blue.