Chapo Trap House - 638 - Real Matt & Felix Hours (6/21/22)

Episode Date: June 22, 2022

With Will stuck in the Schengen Zone, Matt & Felix hold down the fort discussing Rod Dreher’s similar visa predicament, as well as elections in Colombia and France, Herschel Walker’s rapidly multiplying secret families, and the potential hyper-federalization of America. Tickets to our upcoming live shows + our summer merch sale can be found over on www.chapotraphouse.com

One of the greatest travesties of all is to see a person in the White House who, even after years of political experience, has absolutely no clue how to be the President of the United States. And I hope he has recovered because, as you know, he fell off his bicycle today. No, I'm serious. I hope he's okay. Fell off a bicycle. I make this pledge to you today, I will never, ever ride a bicycle.

All I know is he'll come, all I know is he'll come, all I know is he'll come. Well, you know what that sound means, the sound when it's me starting the episode. The awkward silence. No, it wasn't all. I immediately started. I'm a professional. I've been doing this for, you know, like nine years now since EmoFrog Radio as one of the first hosts.

I'm a nine-year podcast veteran, sort of a 20-year internet veteran, though I'd prefer, you know, not to go into my own personal history. The reason you're hearing my voice at the beginning is because, well, we have an absence. Will Medeker has fled to the European Union. He's trying to follow in the footsteps of some of his ancestors by defecting. He erroneously thought he could defect to Russia from France in the footsteps of his ancestors, and that turned out not to be true. He's defected to the EU, who have in turn defected him back to America.

So he will be back this week. He's in the same international, like, passport control limbo as Rod Dreher. Oh, okay. All right. See, we don't need him. We have a segue already. There's a fucking, there's a fire new rod. Okay.

Everyone knows Rod Dreher has been in, he's been in Hungary the past little while. He's been witnessing the last bastion of Christendom. He's been defending the, the West while taking livery cab rives with 27 year olds. Tell them about how scary blue scluse is. It's been fighting against global homo by. With brunches mostly. Yeah. It seems like having oyster brunch is his main zone of combat against the decadence encroaching.

I don't get it. Well, global homo hates it when you soy face in front of oysters. I hate that. What do you have? What do you have? Bottomless mimosas with the boys. Yeah. I love all of his dispatches from Hungary because it's like, it is all stuff like that,

like just the normal like cosmopolitan stuff he does. But then it would also be like some, like, he'll be like, Oh, I was doing the thing that like everyone hungry does where you give a bath to your friend in a big ballfoot bathtub, like three stooches. And my friend told me that his niece is gay now. Isn't that scary? But all good things must come to an end. And we have a new entry from Rod detailing this end.

This is called My Life is a Tom Hanks movie. Tom Hanks. Tom Hanks. It's not Forest Gump where Forest Gump accidentally has a gay experience with several historical figures throughout his life. It's terminal. Okay. You know that 2004 Tom Hanks movie, the terminal about the guy who gets stranded in an airport

and can't leave for years. Because I'm an idiot, I'm going to leave that movie tonight. It's a little rare self deprecation from Rod. I just, it just shows what at the end of the day, just what a dandy little guy he is. Like, where does he's mind go to a fucking Tom Hanks movie? Just a light entertainment. I guess it does kind of show him as a dandy, because if this happened to me, I would immediately be threatening to kill myself.

Yeah. Let's see what happened. I flew into Vienna late tonight from London, but got hung up on the border crossing at the airport. Turns out that I overstated my allotted period in the Schengen area of the European Union. All the time I spent in Hungary earlier this year, counted against my credit. Oh no. Yeah.

Tough. I had this crazy idea. The clock started over after going back to the U.S. for a month. Nope. I thought that you could get more than 90 days in a particularly country. Nope. It's the whole Schengen zone. Boom.

He's been Schengen found. Gosh. I'm thick. Oh, Fortuna. Oh, Fortuna. He's such a fruitcake. He's fucking, like, it's like, no matter how homophobic he is or anything. He is Martin Prince.

Yep. At the end of the day, his geode must be acknowledged. Yeah. You just can't change who you are. Nope. I still remember him making that bouliabase for his Hillbilly family and them, like, we're going to Arby's. Yeah.

Yeah. All of his family are like the supporting cast from Witcher's Bone. And he's, he's like, ooh, I've added a vanilla reduction to the profiteroles. The Australian, Australian border police say we're very nice to be honest, but they couldn't let me in. Everybody loves an Austrian cop noted worldwide for their friendliness. I mean, you know, a lot's changed probably. Yeah.

I'm sure they're much chiller now. Yeah. I had to be escorted by armed guards to go fetch my bag at the baggage carousel. I'm leaving for London on the first flight out in the morning and we'll be staying with friends while I appeal to the Austrian embassy for a residence visa so I can come back to the place I rented in Vienna and spend the rest of the summer. Matt and I were supposed to go next week to Mont Saint-Michel, Rokamondor and other places, but I can't get back into Europe at all without a visa.

Who's Matt? Yeah. Who is Matt? I just want to say, not me. It's not me. He's going, he's going on a tour of religious sites with Matt in the, in the Austrian country side, I guess. Maybe he's doing like a kind of racist call me by your name.

Well, we don't know who Matt is. If you out there, if you know who Matt is, please contact us. Yeah, please. We want to know about Matt. If you are. I would love to interview Matt, honestly. I know what the deal is with Rod. If you, if you were Matt Christman, you've been taking baths with Rod.

Rod? No. He's on his own. I, whoever it is. Okay. The police escorted me to an empty wing of the air here at the airport. It's desolate. Find a bench.

If you can, one of them kindly suggested, I'm not being sarcastic. The two young officers, Gregor and Boutel really did feel sorry for me, but rules are rules. And I'm in the wrong. But I do want to thank them for their kindness and hope their bosses reward them for treating a bumbling American traveler with courtesy and compassion. As it happens, the door to the airport chapel was open and I thought, yep, I'm going to bed down where people pray to God.

I shoved some benches together and I'm about to sleep for three hours before I wake up and go meet the police to be escorted to my flight. What an adventure. I tell you what, they need to build walls to keep dumbasses like me out of Europe. I'll probably end up having to be in England all next week. So maybe I can keep up, maybe I can get up to the Anglo-Saxon holy sites or something. This is, I guess this is kind of like a boring Tintin book. It's kind of the vibe I'm getting here.

A friend in Cambridge gave me a book called The Age of Bead After Lunch and I read the Venerable Bead's Life of St. Cuthbert on the Flight Back. Just take his ad-ox. Congratulations, buddy. You want you to know he did his homework. I read about bead on my airplane. On the flight back, I closed my eyes and asked St. Cuthbert to pray to a friend who is suffering. Maybe this current travail of mine is St. Cuthbert's way to get me to come to Littisfarne

without delay. There's a lot of, there's a lot of lore in here. I'm not just talking like religious lore, but there's like a lot of friends and people. There's Matt. There's his suffering friend. Yeah, there's an old divorce subplot and he always, he refers to this stuff always, yeah, like very peripherally and you just sort of have to know. I think that that's because most of the people who read Rod, read him obsessively through

a parasocial lens, honestly. Well, it does kind of seem like a soap opera, right? Yeah, exactly. Like there are a lot of storylines that get dropped and picked up, like the drag queens in the movie theater. And even all, as they're saying, all of his culture war pieces are always couched in some narrative of him hanging out in Budapest, going to garden parties with young grad students. Like that's part of every post, no matter what the ostensible subject is.

I always picture the garden parties, like the Clay Shaw parties in JFK, where I'm gaining gold for some reason. So like, okay, did he go on this journey like right after getting divorced? No, he is, he announced his divorce, like in the middle of this, like we've been joking about how he just was still married, everybody thought he was married, and then he was just in Hungary by himself for months. And then in the middle of that, he was like, yeah, I'm not going to say this is what this is.

It's a perfect example of what we're talking about. He says, I'm not going to get into the details. Okay. We just, it's a tragedy and it's happening and we're both very, very distraught. But this has been a torture that my wife and I have been in since 2013. And it's like, why are you going to drop that specific date? And now you've got everybody asking, what the fuck happened in 2013? You didn't have to bring that up.

Well, it's kind of like world building, you know, in fantasy writing. Yeah. Yeah. Like fantasy writing, when, you know, like George RR Martin, when he's not writing like a rhapsodic description of meals. Oh, baby. And he's like, yeah, he'll be like, oh, the, the carriage tilted like a, like a Gorphonox monster.

And a Gorphonox monster was never mentioned before. And now you, you're like, oh, what's the world of Gorphonox? Yeah. Northeeros or wherever. It's the same thing with Rod, where it's like, oh, well, you know, everyone knows what happened in 2013 and he never mentioned it. Yeah. It's his summer hall.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a cataclysm that destroys the family and we can never know. Yeah. I, I would like to know what it is, but I love to know. He said, one thing he said emphatically was it's not infidelity on either side. So you could take that and does him at his word there, like, what else could it be? You know, like, isn't that most of the real cataclysmic traumatic relationships in a marriage

or it was something revealed, you know, was there some like a secret that was made known because that could happen and then technically there's no infidelity, you know what I mean? Well, I mean, that's weird though, because it's like, okay, well, if they're not in love anymore, if you're Rod, isn't your thing like, well, like, who gives a shit if you're not in love anymore? Absolutely. No, that's the whole. That's the traditional view of, of marriage is that it is not for your happiness.

You don't get married to be happy. You get married as part of a like a vow to someone that that transcends like your personal desires. It adheres you to higher goals. And in that case, like, I'm sorry, the fact that something happened, capital letters in 2013, that doesn't cut it to, you know, justify divorce under your own moral principles. So that's why we're all really, that's why no one can ask anything other than, well, what the hell happened?

What is the actual scope of this? How do you, how are you able to carve out this exception? If that's what you're doing, you know, but he won't, he won't tell us. He just leaves us hanging by a thread, getting tantalized. Well, okay. Do you, do you remember when like Jim McGreevy turned out he was gay? Oh yeah. And then it's like, oh, and by the way, I also got my massage boyfriend job in the New Jersey

government. Yeah. That was the real thing I was kind of mad about. Well, that's obviously why he came out because he knew it was going to, it was going to drop and he wanted protection. It was very smart. Yeah. But before they can impeach him, it'd be like, Hey, he has a gay lover in the massage in

our, in the government. He's able to go, I'm gay, first gay governor, put it to the rafters, first gay governor called it. I did. He did say one of my favorite phrases in politics when he was like, I'm a gay American. Yeah. That was a lot of our names in IRC that week after he said that. I'm gay American.

But I do. I'm just saying like, gay American, but like, do you remember how after that he was like, yeah, but like, don't worry, me and my wife are going into counseling. Yeah, right. She's like, I feel like for what it seems like a pretty open and shut deal. I am in no way comparing this to Rod Ray her and his divorce or anything that happened. Okay. Anyway, back to back to Rod's tinted adventure update.

Good morning. Slept three hours as I put my recharge laptop away to leave. I saw a sign in English on the far wall, instructing visitors not to sleep in the chapel. I'm sure you have a way of bumbling right across other people's rules and regulations, don't I? Well, I'm glad I didn't see it because I would have ended up sleeping in the hallway off the blighty. This is a freaking orthodox Mr. Bean just causing shenanigans everywhere he goes.

Well, it just like, I don't remember this level of self-deprecation in his writing before. No, no, no. It was always very tortured. But I mean, I guess it's hard to really spin this because this is a boneheaded move on his part. He just fucked up. Like, how do you not read the conditions of like a long-term stay in Europe?

It seems like it's pretty basic. So he's got to kind of be like, yeah, I'm a dumb ass. Yeah. And then in time, it's like, there wasn't anything else he could have written about that week. I'm sure there was like, you know, a brunch, like a drag brunch or something he could have written about. I don't know.

It's sort of like, do you remember when David Brooks, after he got divorced, he, you know, he wrote all those weird articles where he goes to Penn Station and he's like, just to think, everyone walking through here sucks and fucks each other and it's beautiful. And I guess that's kind of what Rod's going through. But yeah, his is a, you know, sort of pathetic, annoying self-deprecation, the kind that makes everyone uncomfortable. Well, that's, that's the Rod update. Yeah.

Rod's doing great. And we're going to see if he gets back into mainland Europe so that he can visit, you know, like, St. Stephen's, Coxxx or whatever the fuck he's going to do as a pilgrimage. Yeah. So he's going to go all around the Baltic nations and see every saint that was killed by being encased in wax and, you know, related to his divorce or whatever, at his new, new persona of like a bumbling world traveler, sort of a racist Carl Pilkington. Carl Pilkington who's always seeing the trans men that's lurking everywhere.

You know, we'll, we'll see. I will not, I would not say that's one of Rod's strongest works, but yeah, sometimes you got to phone it in, right? You got to give a little slice of life. No, that's the thing is he doesn't have the heat. He just brings the schmaltz. He brings his personal relationship, which, you know, the readers are there for that too. So it is a value for them.

I mean, look at the comments. I looked at the comments of this piece, a lot of people being like, oh yeah, when, if you're, if you have to spend time in England, you need to go to Southwick upon Buttockshire and there's, there's a, there's a Merovingian temple that you need to visit. It's in a heath. You know, it's like, you got to, you got to find a, you know, you got to basically directions to the holy grail is what they're giving them. And then other people saying charming stuff like, you know, it's fucked up that they did

this to poor Rod, but they'll let all those African refugees in there. No problem, actually saying that compared to refugees, Rod is being discriminated against. I'm reading the comments. Now it looks like Rod may have worse replies than me. Oh yeah. They're pretty bad. All right. We got crispy from five days ago.

I had to be escorted by armed guards sensible. I wouldn't trust you as far as I could throw you. It's a classic bad riff, you know, sort of attempted, attempted levity by being mean to the author. Yeah. Yeah. Implying intimacy. Yeah.

I hope when you get back to the States that your house hasn't collapsed in parentheses. Money pit. Since you're on the road and you'd be asked about Austrian writers, Road to Mecca by Muhammad Assad. I know it's the title that's unlikely to tickle your fancy, but the writing is good as exuperies and chat wins. Now that you're on kind of a desert island, which three books apart from the Bible would you have with you and Rod does not reply to this.

Oh man. Brutal. Just reaching out, trying to have a convo. Ouch. I don't think Rod ever replies to these people. Perhaps the Vatican finally found a refugee. They would be comfortable deporting. Wow.

I guess these are all my replyers when they become conservative in 20 years. Yeah. After they get bitter because you spurred them. Yeah. In any such cases. If you and Matt are considering secular entertainments, I strongly suggest checking out the Festival of San Ferman in Pamplona, Spain from July 5th to the 15th, the famous running of the bowls.

It's the most insane thing I've ever seen in my life. Is Matt his son? No. That's, yes. Is he? Who's Matt? If it's his son, that's one thing. But wouldn't you say like my son Matt, just to contextualize it first time it's mentioned

in an article? Well, I mean, like, hmm. Okay. Okay. I think we found a picture. No. This is some asshole named John Morgan. God damn it.

Is it there a fucking Rob Drodd-Drey or Wikio who answers his questions? Yeah. We need a Wiki here. Honestly, given his commenters, there might be. His commenters? It would be very useful. I need to know the lore here. His commenters are fucking worthless.

They're like, they're as shitty as mine. All right. Well, we're done with the serious news of the episode. So yeah. Now we can talk about the later stuff. Yeah. Lighter fare. Okay.

Estava Petro has become the first leftist president of Columbia. Oh yeah. That's a huge, that's very significant because like all throughout the pink tide, Columbia was like the bulwark of against any kind of real like left-wing search there. And it's largely because of the level of violence they were able to apply on the left during that period to essentially keep them out of government that whole time. Yeah. No, this one is particularly interesting.

And I think significantly like more, more, more significant than Chile or really anywhere else that we see in the pink tide because yeah, Columbia is like the death star for America's operations in South America. Yeah. This is incredibly significant. It was not like, it wasn't a massive margin of victory, I think about like three points, but not like quite wide enough to challenge. Yeah.

I mean, like other guys have challenged much wider victory margins and I'm sure Bolsonaro will do that. A big time. He's like droved by like 20 points, but yeah, this is, you know, to quote Brandon, big fucking deal. Indeed. Petra. Petra is an interesting guy.

I mean, he's said some not horribly encouraging things about Venezuela and other places in the sphere, but you know, I play in the game, trying to distance himself from when he was 17 and part of the M19 movement and had a brief stint as like a child armed insurgent, which is pretty cool. But I mean, you know, this is one of those things where in the immediate, it's very exciting and very good, but also holy shit, we're going to see some terrible things attempted. Yeah, absolutely. And the real just structural challenge facing all these new left governments is that they

don't really have any kind of legislative mandate that was true of the earlier pink time. Like they're all governing on like as executives on the top of a government system where the legislative side is dominated by the conservatives. So it's going to be hard to, to, you know, work through the system, but also there's going to be plenty of extra legal and extra constitutional pressure put on them, especially in fucking Columbia, where like every other country like in Latin America had to deal with like the shift towards mass democracy after World War Two.

And they all assimilated it like to one degree or another and like sometimes they had to be preempted in the crisis moment in like the 60s and 70s with a coup. But that, that was something that had been developed. That whole process in 1948 in Columbia got like absolutely just head off by this like assassination followed by a 10 year civil war in the countryside between liberals and conservatives that basically ensured that there would be no like mass entry into politics by like the Colombian like workers and peasants. And that's been maintained by a drug fueled murder machine that's funded both by the cocaine

that we buy and also by the military hardware that our government gives to the Colombian state. Yeah. The thing that we kind of turned Columbia into is pretty interesting because obviously there's like, yeah, the narco ankle, but the, the other byproduct, I think it has been arguably farther reaching in the last 20 years. The right wing mercenaries have been sort of like an all per, they're like the spackle of armed mercenaries.

Yeah. You literally send them anywhere, any repressive government in the last 20 years. Whenever they have a war that their army is too shitty to fight, they hire Colombians. Yep. The same guys that were like, who, who, who, you know, killed thousands of people during the false positive scandal. They are now like in Yemen or wherever hired by whatever, whatever company has an army and name only.

But I don't know, like Petro, Petro might face a Brandonization in the way that it seems that Borek and Chile is Castillo too. Yeah. Well, Castillo, I, Castillo, I feel like it's a little different because he doesn't seem like terribly ideological. Well, yeah. I mean, but that's just it that, that leads them kind of like flapping in the breeze compared and the rest of these guys are like doing something that's more self-consciously attacked.

But like, what's the alternative? You know, I mean, yeah, if you're going to try to assert, you know, electoral power in this moment of crisis, then you're going to have to deal with the conditions, which is strong headwinds. Like it really is just the residual democracy, you know, that we still are capable of expressing that even as allows these people to take power, because every other force is pushing in the same direction to just break up any kind of democratic intervention and the functions of the state and totally privatize it at every level.

Yeah. Well, I mean, one thing that Petro does have going for him is that it will be more difficult to assassinate him than most guys. Yeah. He's, he's, he's got an entourage. He's always surrounded by guys who are strapped up. Yeah. It'll be harder to get him that way.

Well, what he would. They have the previous left-wing challengers to the Colombian government have been blown up in airplanes too. They could pull that one off. We'll see. Wow. Maybe he'll take a dirigible. Oh my God, an armored, an armored blimp.

I mean, maybe they'll make a comeback. He's been, people have said that he's always been surrounded by tons of security since he was an opposition figure to the Uribe government, because this big thing under Uribe was the parapolitics scandal, which is the involvement in, with paramilitaries among Colombia's right wing. Well, very, very shocking, very significant event. I hope, I hope all my prayer warriors can, you know, at least keep an immediate brand in its station from happening.

I mean, I'm very interested by his proposals to wean the Colombian government off of cocaine and oil, because it's like, yeah, that those are sources of reactionary power, but also it's like, where else are you getting the money? You know? Yeah. What can you do? Yeah. I did really like his opponent.

Oh, that guy ruled. Redulfo Hernandez. Yeah. Well, he was. It made sense that he came down to those two though, because the center, like the respectable political center is collapsing. All you have that's viable that can get people's attention or any kind of investment is, like, you know, this ghost of like a left wing populism, and then just pure clownish reactionary spectacle.

Yeah. Hernandez, Hernandez kind of, he ran as kind of like a, you know, neither left or right, kind of like an agro Andrew Yang type, but the five star movement style. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly like that. The thing that the main mention of him in international press that I saw was when he said that he idolized Adolf Hitler as a great German thinker.

And then later was like, no, I meant Einstein, which is like, I think like even funnier because like if you're a politics guy, it's like, oh yeah, no, I'm just really, really like Einstein. Yeah. Like the theory of relativity is so important. Yeah. It's really crucial to my, my designs as president. I forget, forget Prince Machiavelli and the art of war.

I need, I need to find out more about the relativity in order to govern. Yeah. It was a good save. Yeah. I just like the idea is like, who's the smartest person? Like, doesn't that make sense that who should you admire the most? This is the smartest guy and that's Einstein. Yeah.

Well, I mean, it is, that is sort of like something that Andrew Yang would try. Yeah. It's like he was trying to do Andrew Yang, but filter through like being an 80 year old Colombian reactionary. Yes. Well, you know, I got, I got a transition here if you want it. Hit me.

So speaking of the center collapsing and leaving only the cartoonish reactionary wing and like the, the, the remaining residual memory of a left, you got a French election for a part for the legislature where the, where the centrist Macron faction, which had dominated just gutted collapses with a huge resurgence in the, the national front on the right and a big, big boost for the Melanchon led left coalition. So it's happening everywhere. And here you have the very interesting and definitely repeatable phenomenon of the Macron voters who had, you know, always met, always claimed that the most important thing is keeping

the, the far right out of power and who the left wing usually votes for reliably when it's a question of them versus the right for that very reason, instead of coming out and voting for the left to prevent the national front from getting power, they fucking stayed home. Yeah. So you've been made statements about how they're against all extremes. Yep. They did the shit that the Hillary people are mad about Bernie Bros for doing because

that's who does that. The people who at the end of the day don't actually give a shit about any of these categories. They're not really worried about fascism. That's a, that's a fun, scary story. They tell themselves to make their boring fucking lives interesting. Yeah. The trend line in general in France, pretty bad. I mean, I remember, um, last time we had these elections immediately following the French

presidential election on March did like amazing. Yeah. They swept it. Like historic games. Cause they're like, let's try this. This is a new thing. Even though it's literally just fucking taking the, the socialist party and like removing the label and just slapping a new name on it and it's like, Hey, when there's no other

option and people don't want in the majority, don't want to go to the extremes, sure, let's go for it. They get power. And what do they do? They preside over decline and their only policy response is more decline, managed decline, cutting pensions, uh, extending the, um, pushing back the retirement age, like campaigning on this stuff. And of course people are going to say, hell no.

And that's, that's what's so terrifying is like what I think a lot of the centrists understand at some basic level is that like this is no longer repeatable. And therefore the only real alternative to this right would have to be a like actual socialist left, which is not, cannot be countenanced and can't really assert itself politically, especially in the United States, because of its weak institutional character. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of talk about like a collapse of agreed upon reality and that usually, usually speaks to things like, um, you know, no one can agree on whether the

election was legitimate or not, or whether COVID is real or not, but it extends to all corridors and by that, I mean that there's no ethos among the right or center where it's like, well, life is going to get significantly shittier and we're going to have to give up some of these gains at the top in order to keep this thing going. Yeah. There used to be, there used to be like some kind of that ethos, even during the Cold War and even during the late, even during Reagan, this idea that like, there had to be these concessions given to middle and lower end, uh, to, to, to maintain some type of legitimacy

in institutions. And now there's just none of that at all. Yeah. And so now, which is, it's going to be this dance in every country every four years between like a brand and I center or center left candidate and an increasingly debased right wing because there's lapsing consensus reality of having to give concessions to anybody on the side of the center or even center right. Yeah.

And it's, it's because like the political project of, of neoliberalism was dismantling all of those, uh, connective ties, those institutional, uh, political, uh, ties between regular people, people who are not defined as, you know, capitalists, uh, as owners, but as just citizens and the institutions that manage the state and manage its economies. Uh, and, and not, and it all happened very slowly and it was, it was like tying, it's like how they sterilize bulls by tying rubber bands around their balls and that just cuts off circulation and they literally fucking just fall off. I mean, that's been, that's been the remnant of like New Deal state, uh, and it's like

political, it's democratic, political, uh, like legitimacy, you know, the, the mass, it stood for mass politics in this country and that actually did provide this like others, uh, other poll because you couldn't just do whatever capital wanted because you had institutions that you people were able to assert influence over and that, and that the people within those structures, like the parties had to represent if they wanted to keep their positions. Now it's all gone. The only people who are going to keep you in your position are people with money. The citizen has nothing to offer you as you, as we've said, they're all entrepreneurs

and where, where are they going to go is, is they're going to move towards money, like a fucking centrifugal force, like light bending towards a black hole. And then there's no other, there's no counter pressure because we've been depoliticized. Yeah. And then when the final, the final breaking point in all institutions happen when there has been no concession given to people and any, any attempt at a concession in the way that it may have been done 40, 50, 60 years ago is attempted, which I always manifest as something like, you know, the PPP program.

Yeah. Just a ridiculous, unmanaged, absurd thing that only benefits people at the very top. And when, you know, a normal person attempts it, they go to prison. Yeah. Uh, who knows what happens? I mean, people love these, people love these like civil war and apocalyptic scenarios. I, I don't really like predicting the apocalypse or an immediate revolution where everything is great thereafter, just because the certainty of it bothers me.

Yeah. Right. But it is completely uncharted territory for America. Absolutely. Yeah. No, nobody, I don't think anybody should be offering any confident predictions because this, the fucking cracks are, are spreading and tessellating at such a velocity. How the hell are you supposed to get any, any percentage, any fraction of the variables

in mind at any one time when you're thinking about it? I have no fucking idea that it's, it's, I think the thing that pushes me to, to reject a apocalyptic framing is just how seductive it is and how much I know that there's a motivated reasoning to those theories, which is that I get to see the breach, I get to see the rupture, I get to see beyond the veil, you know, and that is a very appealing thing. But it also has the function of sort of soothing you in your current agony and uncertainty because it, it provides a attractive and a real meaningful like deep sense endpoint

rather than the real horror, the prospect of just muddling along the same but worse unto death. Yeah. I mean, I have a very simple, maybe a bit of a truism for predicting the future. Whenever I repeatedly see an outcome predicted in viral tweets, I immediately assume it will not happen. Yeah. But it is very rarely led me astray.

That's solid. Yeah. I mean, the thing is though, like even in the end of the world or the end of the world, as you know it, you're still you, you still live your life, you still have the same greed and vanity and desires and loves and hates. The unfortunate fact is even when the world ends, you're still you. Yeah. I would hope that the people who try to soothe themselves with apocalyptic predictions would

realize that. Yeah. But we truly do not know. I mean, again, I don't want to make any predictions and I will say this couching it in that I really do not know and that none of us know. But I feel like the most likely scenario is, you know, the great American breakup, which is not to say that like, you know, America ends, but that it's a type of super federalism. Yes.

We're like democracy, like we have to keep democratic structures, but we cannot let them be governed by the death drive that way. It's, it's, it's a fundamental contradiction that can't be allowed to maintain itself if the system is going to maintain itself. And if the system has the vigor to prevent total collapse, which I think we agree it does, then it will figure out a way to reduce that democratic participation in such a way that it's like a stable element. And the way to do that is the federal government, as we understand it, collapses to the degree

that it's no longer like necessary to maintain our beloved, our beloved supply chains and like the flow of currency and, and like institutions like the, like the military. But its political value is completely deleted, it's, it's exanguinated by probably some sort of Thailand style military government that like runs the actual business of, of the state from a imagined post political perspective. And then that means that the states get to do politics and you get to see the creation of like these dueling regimes that get to have like a cold war within the United States, like a cultural and economic competition to try to prove the, the worthiness of their

way of life. I would say that that does present a greater opening that exists in our current system. Certainly. The very least it means that the damn a fucking cratic party, the most, this maybe what perhaps the single most politically deleterious institution left in America, like it's, it, it can only now inhibit anything good. It certainly would not be able to survive that kind of fracturing. Right.

No, there would be like a set of regional parties. Yeah. They shake up this like awful fucking deadlock where he's just got two factions of like steadily, like mentally breaking down, nervous breakdown, having like homeowners, like that's all this is. That's what we're stuck with is like two groups of clinically insane delusional homeowners trying to perform this like apocalypse, apocalyptic politics of cleansing on one another. And we're all just literally a hostage to it.

Yeah. And then every federal election for every federal position thereafter is it is what it is now, but more so in that it's, it's like American Idol in that you get, you know, people will win or people will be runners up, but the real prize is that they get to be celebrity or they get to extend their own celebrity. And that is the thing that's pushing, that's really militating swim most strongly against some sort of apocalyptic confrontation. It's certainly not the power of our institutions.

It's not the fucking January 6th committee hearings or any of this bullshit. It's not the better angels of our nature. It's the fact that far overriding anybody's desire to be part of some apocalyptic warfare over like righteousness, a far higher motive of that in people's mind is the desire to be famous, the desire to succeed within the attention and therefore money economy. Because hey, if you can thrive in the system as it exists, isn't that better than destroying yourself in apocalyptic violence? And most people in America are to the end going to say yes, because as you said, we're

all dreaming of apocalypse, but we're still us when it happens. Yeah, I was, this weekend I read that that was from like a week ago or so, that really long profile in the New Yorker about DeSantis. And the thing that struck me in it is that, you know, DeSantis doesn't fit any of the, it doesn't fit the profile of like a hooting chud in any way. And I don't think he would ever describe himself as such. That's certainly not who he is. He's a lifelong overachiever, an incredibly clever guy, a very competent person, sort

of aloof and awkward with people. He reminds me a lot of, you know, maybe Richard Russell in Master of the Senate a little bit. But after that, I did sort of a deep dive on Kevin McCarthy. And it sort of stemmed out after, do you remember when there was that rumor of him fucking that South Carolina rap and it kept him being speaker in 2015? Yes, yes. But yeah, I just thought that was interesting. I was just imagining them having sex for a little bit and maybe vomiting spells.

My vomiting spells had nothing to do with that, but the thing that struck me is not like, oh, you know, compare these to like Tip O'Neill and Robert Taft and the old dealmakers of old and look how different they are and how venal they are. No, they're the exact same people. They're the exact same people, but towards a different meta. The Tafts and the Russells and the fucking Hubert Humphries, they're all the same people. But the meta they played to was this agreed upon reality and this consensus reality and agreed upon idea that we have to keep managing the state and give, you know, their debates

over what concessions will be given, but give concessions because we are competing with the Soviet Union and the overall system of communism and that we have to manage, that we have to manage this empire. Their successors, the DeSantis's and McCarthy's, the Eric Swalwell's, whatever, they're all pretty much the same in personality. I mean, there's an increasing amount of jug hooters, but for the most part, the most important players are this same sort of competent transactional people, but the meta they're playing to is the celebrity meta.

So they're taking that same competence and calculation and transactional nature and using it in the same way that you would use them to become a celebrity, which is what DeSantis has done and what McCarthy has done. Meanwhile, although that work that they have to do that was supposed to take all these other skills and was designed for people who have these other skills are going essentially uncompleted because they have no HP there. They have no, their stats are out of that quadrant. So it ends up just being the staffer is doing it, which means it's just the fucking money.

So like the whole point of having an elected representative is annihilated. Well, there is a new type of politics out there. There a better world is possible. There is a type of leader that is not a lifelong overachiever, a one-time manager of the system who now cynically gears himself towards press releases and his own celebrity, but a true exemplary American, someone who maybe is a little bit like you or me in that he has a secret family. I'm talking about the future of politics, future Senator Herschel Walker.

Yep. I mean, we've been talking about the process whereby these people have been slowly lobotomized over time. It makes sense to just have a guy with full-blown CTE in the Senate. Yeah. I love Herschel Walker because there's such a gulf between this smugness of his presentation because all the MAGA guys are kind of a smug under Brandon, at least. But when Herschel Walker talks, it's fucking gibberish beyond Biden's worst days.

Oh, way worse. Yeah. Nonsense. I saw a clip of him. They're asking him about Ivalde and how we would stop mass shootings and he's like, look, you just got to, instead of having someone and you try to take away our rights, have a whole department for that, you just got to have somebody on social media to look at the guys who are looking at the girls on social media.

That's the problem that we have. And I said, what we need to do is look into how we can stop those things. They talked about doing a disinformation. What about getting a department that can look at young men that's looking at women that's looking at just social media? What about doing that? They're looking into things like that and we can stop that that way. But yet they want to just continue to talk about taking away your constitutional rights.

Oh, yeah. The looking for the guys looking at girls on social media. What the fuck? Yeah. I mean, it's a new type of politics, all right. Put it on a fucking statue. The guys looking at girls, looking at guys on the internet. So they have, they've found three secret Walker children in like the past week.

And this is, of course, after campaigning on a dad's need to be there, quit being deadbeat. It's about that's the cause of crime, et cetera, blah, blah, blah. And just like, oh, yeah, I have secret families who I never visit scattered across the state. I gotta say, I'm not really sold on him winning. You don't think so? I mean, I kind of died. Just kind of don't see it.

It's interesting. Cause this will honestly be one of the most interesting races in 2022 because you have this thing where you have the headwinds we were talking about, like all pushing against branded big time, you know, like this is the kind of thing where like the economic conditions are going to see people voting Republican in big numbers. But at the same time, you have a personal candidate who's supposed to be like embodying the party just in every level, manifestly in front of everyone in, uh, incapable of doing the job, you know, in a way that is, is new data, new and more advanced than I

think we've seen. And now like just a parody of all of this, the social morals he's supposed to represent. If he wins, uh, I don't know. I think it just shows that like, that like the partisan identity is now so fully embraced by people who vote that there's really nothing that you can do as a candidate. As long as you get that nomination to have that, that, uh, ballot line that will make any significant number of them think twice about voting for you. Because in their mind, it is just, it's, it's that, it's that number.

It's that, it's that one more vote in the Senate because they understand it to be about exerting power, not about deliberation or like somebody, you know, being a representative, it's about them executing a directive. Yeah, no, I think that's true. And I think that, okay, I think that Eric Gretens will win. Oh boy, that's depressing. Yeah. Jesus Christ.

Yeah. That's an ugly one. Do you know who he's Jewish? Oh my God. No way. Isn't that crazy? Wow. That's, that's very shocking to me.

Isn't that crazy? That's wild. He's way better than Josh Mandel then. Yeah. He's matrilineally Jewish. Oh wow. Yeah. Tip of the cap there.

Do you think his mom brags? Do you think it's like, oh, your, oh, your son abused his child? Well, my son knocked his kid's teeth out. Oh, yeah, your son was, your son was elected to the state house, the state house of representatives. My son was impeached as governor or no, did he have to resign? I think he resigned, but rather than getting impeached. Yeah. No, it was a Nixon type thing where they had the votes to impeach and he's like, all right,

I'll step down. And boy, just, just wait, just wait a little bit. It's like, there are lines, but it's not definitive anymore. It's like, you can come back from basically anything if you have the right presentation and you have the right buy-in. And at a certain level, getting driven out of office for, you know, manifest crimes actually works to your benefit because it means that they don't like you and they're trying to get you.

And it means that you have the option as a voter to just decide, oh, I don't believe any of that. I'm just deciding, I'm pressing not believe on this. I'm playing LA Noir and I go doubt every time it comes up. I just fucking, I just mashed doubt because I don't care. I find that significantly more depressing than if Walker won. I mean, Walker also like an awful guy in his own right. Yeah.

But. domestic views are also. Yeah. I believe. I don't know, but I, going back to him, I don't know. My hesitance to say that Walker will win is not so much in his weakness as a candidate, which I think we can both agree on is like, you know, that's a pre-2016 calculus, like who gives a shit.

It's wild. But it's more that I don't think they know what to do with Warnock. It's that the opposition stuff on Warnock, it feels so like pre-2016. Yeah. Oh, his, his church hosted Hugo Chavez. What? Who gives a shit? What are you talking about?

No one cares. I, I think that like their problem is Warnock is himself too, too liked in a way that like, I don't even know who's running against Greetings. Some fuck is some sacrificial loser. But Warnock does, however small his margin was does seem to be pretty well liked. I mean, yeah, he was, he was able to put together like a really likable image that, that a lot of people could kind of judge separate from like the democratic label and can like, you know, the fact that he's a literal minister, I think that gives him credibility that allows

him to, you know, skirt some of the culture war stuff that is really what really makes these races so predetermined in the South. But at the same time, he's got to be the face of Brandon's economy right now. You know? Yeah, that's true. But the trend line, I don't know, the trend line in Georgia elections is significantly more positive than like, you know, Texas or Missouri. Oh, sure.

No, that's true. Yeah. And that's why they're having to do the big time, the new voter suppression. Although from what I understand, the fact of the voter suppression mechanisms now has like kind of turbocharged, like voter outreach efforts, I don't know, it might end up being that they cancel each other out and there's no real big difference, but you know, you always got to factor that in. Yeah.

It makes Democrats do this shit that they should have always been doing. Right. Exactly. If they actually wanted to win. Like, hey, you guys have been taken for granted that you're both playing by the same rules at the end of the day about like, who gets to sit in what chair, and it turns out, no, they are playing a completely different game. And so they've spent every moment that they've been empowered in every state in this country,

having like the struts of Democratic representation to advantage their shrinking electorate. And that means that like, if a crisis really hits, like you're not going to be able to depend on just like title gravity pulling things back towards you, which is what you've only been able to do since, since Reagan, because every time they get back into power, they make it harder for you, no matter what happens to, to defeat them in the future. I mean, I feel like the great American crackup, the super federalism will be pretty gradual rather than. Oh yeah.

Like soothing into a hot bath, but you know, let's say it's 30 years from now and the process is already completed. I wonder what side Georgia falls on. I mean, I think with a lot of these states, it would probably not, you'd probably see the state structures themselves kind of fall apart because of the huge dynamic between like rural and urban counties, you know, like more of a Syria type situation. Oh yeah. Okay.

Yeah. Archipelagos of power and then like a sea of, you know, a no-go zone with a, with a completely different municipal like legal structures and laws like, yeah. So like Atlanta and Athens and shit, that would be like a take you. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, honestly, that's a pretty good analogy. Yeah.

Texas is Saudi Arabia. Okay. Yeah. Oh. You want to talk about the Lauren Boebert leaving her family to die? I just briefly, I do, yes. So the story is that she fucking bailed out on her four-wheeler, well, her sister-in-law and her daughter and who else was on there, her ex-husband.

And she just left them there and then she of course covered it up. So that it didn't hurt her campaign. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's just crazy to me because it's like, isn't the thing with mothers that they like, they'll get superhuman strength if they pick their family. Yeah. We think she gets superhuman strength to run away from her kid in danger. Yeah.

She got superhuman speed. Yeah. She's awesome. Won't hurt her at all. Also. No, that's the thing that we're talking about. Won't hurt her at all. The Uvalde cops just like being like, yeah, but we didn't want to get shot.

Like we didn't sign up for that. We signed up to shoot people. And now today it drops. Oh yeah. Now they said that they waited for an hour because they needed the key to get in. It wasn't locked. The door wasn't locked. Well, it's like.

I'm lying about that this entire time. Even if it wasn't locked, think about, think about all the fucking locked doors the cops kick into like shoot a dog in the face 87 times. Yeah. But you got, you just, it's such, it's so transparent, like, uh, perfidity, like these people are not honorable, you know, and like the thing that's supposed to uphold the martial values of like, you know, reactionary culture is supposed to be honor, right? Like it's supposed to be an honor culture that like is what is what affirms a hierarchy

is that those within it act honorably. And now you got it's these people now who are supposed to represent the honor culture within American politics, who just transparently are the most selfish, craven, cowardly pieces of shit on earth. And nobody cares because we've given up the pretense. It's like, actually, I said honor, but what I really meant is my personal, uh, comfort. I'm sorry. I'm sorry we had that, uh, mistake.

Now what I want is somebody who reflects my own venality back to me. Yeah. Yeah. And the fact and the fact that they will get attacked on this just like makes it a positive. Well, uh, what can we say, but look forward to the great crack up, um, it should be fun. Look forward to an X factor, like maybe a charismatic military officer like we've talked about before. I mean, the sad thing is, is that like a Napoleon free officers movement style, a carnation

revolution, like one, one version of that, uh, is our best hope at this point, a shout out for Freddie Jameson there on that one, the army is like the only model for any kind of egalitarian social order, uh, any kind of actual honor based culture that we have in this country. Yeah. Well, you know, the tough one with that is like usually one of the free officers movement takes over or there's like a charismatic individual who's leading a core within the military. They're, they're taking over from some like overbearing system.

Is there really any precedent for a free officer movement doing that in just like a collapsing shitty system that's decaying? Yeah. Where they just like step into the breach rather than like decapitate a machine. Yeah. Going against the void rather than resistance. Right. Yeah.

I don't know. I mean, the thing going against it is that even at this point, even the middle officers of our military have been selected to be craving shitheads, you know, if there's any hope it's like at the lowest levels, like lieutenants, not, not fuck a colonels movement, a lieutenants movement. That's it. Or fuck staff, staff, sergeant. I don't know.

Maybe, maybe it's has to be NCOs. I don't know. You know what? Maybe it's, it'll be, it'll, uh, if it's NCOs, then we get a starship troopers, but if it's lieutenants, we get like a carnation revolution. We'll see. We're a lieutenant out there and, you know, 30 is kicking up and you're looking for something to do.

Hey, this is your best shot. Mm hmm. Yeah. Hit our lineup. But don't tell us any illegal things you're planning on doing. Yeah. No. That's yourself.

All right. Well, until the, until super federalism, until the southern states become sort of the collegiate, oil rich, uh, Gulf monarchies and I guess the northern Great Lakes, that could be like northern Europe. Yeah. Scandinavia. Yeah. I mean, then it, it literally is a filled with scandals.

It'd be perfect. Yeah. California is France. Yeah. Until then, uh, you know, just keep on holding on, keep on, keep it on. Uh, I'm just going to do some quick plugs here. Remember, we still have, uh, two live shows coming up in the Portland area that is on, uh, August 4th at the Aladdin theater, uh, and then August 6th, of course, at the pickup

by music festival and also everything on our merch store is 25% off, uh, through July. You can find links to all those things on chapotraphouse.com. There are only two links on that site. One goes to merch, one goes to live shows. It's easy to find. That's it. All right. We'll see you in the next one.

Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.