Chapo Trap House - 674 - Stew for Demons (10/24/22)

Episode Date: October 25, 2022

It’s Halloween season so we’re taking a look at the increasing amount terror many Americans are now experiencing previously-benign concepts like “school” and “voting.” We also take a look at the “retvrn” type traditionalists, and how the fantasy of what they want to “retvrn” to so badly keeps getting more and more recent. We are going to do a CALL-IN show in the next week or so. Email us an audio question of NO LONGER THAN 30 SECONDS to [e-mail] by end of day 10/25/22 and we may answer it on an upcoming episode. Finally, last few days to grab your tickets to Ft. Lauderdale. This show is ALMOST sold out so buy while you still can. Three big acts, Donzii, [STAND-UP NAME REDACTED] and of course us at Chapo. Tix here: https://www.jointherevolution.net/concerts/chapo-trap-house/

Okay, hello gang, Chapo coming at you, but before we start the show, just a little bit of house cleaning, we rarely do this because of how much we despise it, but we are giving you an opportunity to call in and submit questions to us. So here are the following instructions. In the next week or so, we are doing yet another call in show. So here's how we're going to do it this time. We've run this in various ways in the past, but we're going to do it, pay close attention to these instructions.

If you would like to submit an audio question for us to be aired in a future episode, record a message of under 30 seconds, a voice memo on your phone, fill out the voice memo, and record a message of no more than 30 seconds. If it is even one second past 30, it will not even be listened to. You can record, you don't have to do a voice memo, you can do audacity, any method that you would like of recording audio. Send your question of under 30 seconds and email it to calls at chopotraphouse.com. You can please put the subject of the question in the subject line of the email and maybe

a brief description of what you're asking for in the email body, but if the text is longer than like three or four lines, we will also be immediately deleting it. So keep it simple. Okay. So you will have 24 hours from the moment this episode is published to midnight tomorrow, Tuesday, October 25th to submit your questions. So say again, email your audio questions to calls at chopotraphouse.com within the next 24 hours, and you will stand the best chance for having your question aired and answered

by us on a future call in episode. One more time, an audio message of no longer than 30 seconds emailed to calls at chopotraphouse.com. Subject of the question in the subject line of the email. Okay. Let's start the show. Greetings, friends. It's Monday, October 24th. We've got a chopo coming at you, me, Matt Felix as usual, and I suppose to kick off

this episode. I'd like to talk about, you know, Halloween is coming up, the crisp chill in the autumn air, augurs, dead souls coming back to haunt the living. And this spooky season, it seems to me like Americans are more frightened than ever. What are they afraid of? Well, I'd like to talk about two things Americans are afraid of. The first is murals in schools that possibly contain demons, and the other is voting. So just two things on Americans mind, but the first story, the first story of Halloween

defright comes courtesy of a Michigan high school. They commissioned a teen high schooler to draw a mural for them, and that's where our story begins. Have you guys seen this story? Yeah. I was too scared. I was too scared to read it. A bone-chilling 13-year-old, I believe, drew some type of mural, like the type of mural

that you see in any school or under any bridge where some part of your city is doing an urban renewal project, just something you walk by, and I think a dozen people have been sucked into hell through it. Am I getting that right? Yeah. Is there a number as of the time of the recording? Yeah, the hellmouth has been opened by this horrific bosh-like canvas of demonic horrors. Let's just read the article here, this courtesy of NBC News.

A high school artist was chosen to paint a mural, then came the outrage. A mural painted by a high school student came under fire when parents alleged it was promoting LGBTQ imagery and witchcraft. After this year, a Grant, Michigan high school sophomore won a contest to brighten up the middle school health center, according to a statement from Grant Public Schools. Grant Public Schools said the student received approval to paint images of smiling children, as well as the message, stay healthy. Okay, well, I mean, that's a problem right there.

That's pretty fucked up. You're going to tell me that health is better than being sickly? You're going to tell me that that is a superior state of being? This is neither here nor there, but is it kind of funny that conservatives did the current bad activism that we see now when Michelle Obama did the school lunches? I was just thinking about that. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, that was like 10, 12 years ago, the Michelle Obama, hey, kids, how about eating vegetables? And then they were like, how dare you? How dare you tell me to do my bodies and spaces? But now that everyone's obsessed with seed oils and soy and shit like that, can we get some vegetables for kids, please? Sorry. Kids, they would be eating carrots and celery and things like that, but no, their souls

are being sucked into hell through murals. Yeah. It's tough. No one wants that to happen. You send your kid off to school, hoping that they'll be like a Rudy-type walk-on to the football team. Maybe they'll make friends with a chemistry teacher, develop a relationship that goes past that.

Maybe they find another boy and they stop smugglers. Maybe they'll be euphoria themselves. What you don't want is your kid to be sucked into eternal damnation forever. You can't get them out. You've tried calling the superintendent. They say that they have to call their boss to contact hell. I mean, well, one thing's for sure. You cannot get your kid's soul back from the underworld at a PTA meeting, although parents

are trying. So this year, in the painting, there are three children. A boy is seen in a light blue pink and white t-shirt, the colors of the transgender pride flag. A girl wears pink, royal blue, and purple, the colors of the bisexual flag. And a second girl is in a rainbow pride colors. It says, GPS superintendent Brett Zuber was a contest judge. He did not respond to an email asking if he understood the meaning of the colors when

the student's design was chosen as the winner. GPS said the final mural included some features that were not part of the agreement, including a demon face inspired by a popular video game called Genshin Impact. Felix, are you familiar with Genshin Impact or any potential demonic influences? I've heard of it. I've never played it. I think it's one of those games where you play as a girl who's just not dressed right for her mission of beating up monsters.

She's wearing a pencil skirt. She has a big sword. If it's the one I'm thinking of, people always send me angry emails when I get the premise of these types of things wrong. But you know, is the video game demon related? Okay. Well, oh, wow. Okay.

I don't think this is, I think if there's any demons in this, the girl in the pencil skirt is fighting them. Okay. Chapter three, the traveler, I guess that's the pencil skirt girl's name, I would change it to something, some type of pants doing that if you're traveling. She departs for Samuru in search of Lester Lord Kunisali. She realizes she's the Dendro Archon. That sounds a little demon, but I mean, it sounds like she's fighting demons.

I don't know. What do I know? I've never played this game. Dendro Archon. So the Hare Demon, is that the idea? Yeah. It's this awful demon that when it curses you, you have to use head and shoulders which is one of the worst smelling shampoos and makes your hair really dry.

Yeah. So it's contained a demon face from the popular video game and also a hamsa hand, also known as the hand of Fatima or hand of Mary. The palm shaped design has been a symbol for good luck or protection for centuries and many cultures, including Latin America. Okay. That sounds like Catholic devilry to me. So that's one possible demonic influence and then one absolutely confirmed demonic

influence in this high school mural. Going on here, it says at a school board meeting on October 10th, parents accused the student artist of promoting witchcraft by including the hamsa hand, as well as the video game character that bears the likeness of a demon. Parents also objected to the use of LGBTQ colors. I put my art up there to make people feel welcome, the student artist said, her voice breaking and footage captured at the meeting by WZMTV, a local news station based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

I put my art up there to make people feel welcomed. That's how Grant High School student Evelyn Gonzalez describes this mural. She painted it inside the middle school's teen health center and parents are concerned about some of its content. I feel like she did a really good job finding excuses to defend the things she put on. None of us are that stupid. Parents alleged the video game character is actually a depiction of Satan and that the hand symbol is demonic with several even using the word witchcraft to describe it.

That's not what I'm a part of, that's not what I'm trying to put out there. As for the transgender flag, one parent implied it's a sickness. When adults pretend things that are like real life, it's a mental illness. We need counselors. We need the medication that's going to help bipolar disorder fix their brains. With another saying, it's discriminatory against Christian beliefs. We and our administration should embrace that and get all of this hate material out of our schools because it is hate material.

I feel she did a good job finding excuses to defend the things you put on. None of us are that stupid. To that unnamed adult at this parent-teacher association meeting, I can assure you that you are that stupid. I guess this story has left me in feeling fairly bleak because it's just sort of like, it's 2022 now and it seems like pretty much half the country is convinced that witchcraft is real. Basically like teachers and students at local high schools are agents of the devil.

The best way I saw this described is mostly middle-class or well-off people in the wealthiest nation in the 21st century now have fully the mindset of medieval peasants but without any of the socioeconomic justifications for it. What do we make of this? What do we make of this country descending into the total ignorance savagery of just being haunted by literal demons and witchcraft and seeking to prosecute children essentially for doing devilry to them? Yeah, no, not everyone, just like a very big part of this country is like as stupid as

people were when you used to have like 13 kids because you did 10 of them were going to die. I don't know, I gotta say it's the phones, it's a ton of things but phones aren't helping. You have the conditions of like this vague feeling that you're at the end of something, that you got in at the end of something that like just gives you this like ambient shitty feeling and I mean that you're already going to do goofy shit and like you know at best irritate people at worst like kill somebody because someone told you that they levitated but when you have this feeling that you're at the end of something and you're given the

opportunity to like solve a puzzle created in a collaborative fiction environment by people exactly as stupid as you, this will be like the exact outcome. Yeah, I mean people are trying to figure out what's going on, why do they feel the way they do and there's no help coming from any of the institutions that are supposed to generate our collective reality because they have been delegitimized by the fact that they keep telling you that everything's okay, which clearly isn't and so where are you going to go to find an answer and the only place is to the people who you have the most like cultural affinity with because they're the ones you're going to be able to communicate most effectively

with and where are they getting their ideas, just they're pulling them off of the fucking junk pile of information that's being dumped into their face by people trying to make a fucking buck off of them and then they're going to create their own narratives that have the benefit of being against whatever discredited mainstream structures exist but have a base in just their ambient cultural anxieties so they'll never be able to address like any real sources of their disquiet, they can only find a scapegoat because that's the only path forward, like you can't meaningfully confront the people responsible for anything going wrong in this country, you can go and make a fucking teenager cry at a school board

meeting though, you can do that, then you can feel like you're doing something because you had the experience of totally owning this demon child. Yeah, and I don't necessarily like, I don't really think like it's like poor people or like working class people or like even necessarily like struggling middle class people doing a lot of this, right? I feel like it's a lot of the times this is like, this is people who are comfortable but just like are kind of aware that the party is going to be done soon without verbalizing it.

Well, I mean, some of them aren't poor necessarily but they're not confident that whatever comfort they have is going to last and if they have kids, they certainly don't think their kids are going to have anything like what they had. But it is interesting how many of the people who show up for these things don't even fucking have kids. Yeah, that's the best type of person. Just be like, yeah, like if I had a teenager or children at all, I would be terrified of this mural being in their school.

And I guess like, I mean, like the really the sinister thing about all this is like, yeah, like they've always been like wacky people who are obsessed with things like, you know, like that Satan is in heavy metal music and shit like that, but it does seem to me like that a real driving force behind all of this is a hatred of children. And like the fact that like this is all done under the guise of preventing children from being abused and the way they're going to go about doing that is abusing children. Well, yeah, hating children is hating the future, right? Yeah, because they have no place in the future.

So to make, I think it's interesting that schools are now being made like the battleground of this culture war because I think like every new life represents to these people a future that they won't belong to. Right. Well, they won't be in. I don't know. I think that most like the people are the most like antipathy towards children publicly used to be like the most misanthropic like Reddit or foreign posters, right?

Like the r slash child free people or just like before that, the people on something awful who coined crotch spawn, you know, people who, whether they saw children or not, we're not entirely optimistic about their future. I don't know how articulated these people's feelings about the future is, but I do. I don't know. I feel like there is a an awareness on some level that the America where you can get, you could get like the fucking seven pounds of food for five dollars is not going to exist that the spoils of empire are not going to be as easily wanted distributed as maybe they

were. And of course, like I'd say it's never like verbalized like that or maybe maybe they're not aware of it in that sense. I don't know if it's consciously something like, oh, there's a future without us. I think for some of them, for some of the more explicitly like racialized ones, right? Yeah, definitely. I don't know. I feel like for this type of person, like the demon hunting moms and in some cases,

childless people, it's just this ambient air like when a child when a child finds out about mortality for the first time, a screaming child realizing that one day they and everyone they know will die. I don't know. I'm just like, I'm just showing things like, you know, previous like, you know, witch panics in American history. And if you were like, you know, some Calvinist psycho in the 17th century living in like what wasn't even like a developed part of New England, like, you know, the witch basically,

you're eating urgot, you're fucking talking to God every day. I could easily imagine how, you know, some widow who has a cow that gives milk and yours doesn't. I could easily understand how that could like manifest into some sort of hallucinatory witch panic. But because, you know, like life was fucking dangerous and hard back then. But I think like whether it's this satanic panic shit now, or like those tick tocks about like, you know, oh, if someone leaves a bag by your car, they're going to kidnap

you. I mean, this is just sort of like, yeah, on the one hand, we feel like the sort of threads and sort of the tied society together and our feeling of sort of our feeling of being assured of the future is less founded than it used to be. But at the same time, overwhelmingly, life in America in the 21st century is unbelievably safe and boring. So like, is this like the sort of auto fiction in which people can create a reality for themselves that is more, I don't know, vital or terrifying, that are like, you know, just sort of exciting,

entertaining than the one they currently inhabit. Yeah. And also talking themselves up to the point where they can enjoy a future of politics where all their vote, all they're really voting for is who gets to be publicly punished and brutalized, who they get to vicariously enjoy the suffering of. Because there's nothing else, there's no other political choices to be made. There's no, there's no ameliorating of conditions. That ship is sailed, but we still have the capacity to punish.

And the more we are terrified of some self generated enemy that's internal and is going to get us, the more relief we can feel when we watch them be destroyed by agents of the state. And now it's like, you know, the people who these people want to punish are like high school kids or younger. I mean, and like, but it's all done under the guise of preventing child abuse. Like, you know, Phil, if you're talking about the Reddit child free crotchbone people, like those people genuinely hated kids and wouldn't care one way or the other whether they lived

or died. But these people are all claimed to be protecting children while they are carrying out, you know, literal child abuse, you know, I'm sure plenty of it is sexual in nature. But like, so a lot of most of it, I would just hazard a guess is just plain old run of the mill child abuse. Yeah, no, I mean, I think like, despite what they say, they do hate children. I mean, it's you don't keep doing the same thing if you don't like it. You don't accidentally, oh, whoops, I made a girl cry.

Oh, whoops, I terrified all the kids at my school. Oh, whoops. No, you like doing it. I mean, I guess this recalls to mind the Travis Scott Astro World Week. I remember like two days when like people were convinced that Travis Scott was harvesting souls as part of some demonic energy ritual. You don't know he didn't. Did anyone follow up on that?

Did anyone follow up on that, though? Yeah, we solved it. We got to the bottom of it. Travis Scott said he'll never do that again. Okay, good. And we can move on to other things. You can move on to this mural that's harvesting souls. Yeah.

Well, I mean, like, okay, so everyone, everyone wants like some type of meaning in their life, like some struggle they can overcome. Every American wants the feeling of wearing shoes that are too tight and then taking them off. Or, you know, even worse, going to see live music and then the concert mercilessly ending to overcome something. But no one actually, you don't actually want to do the part where you go to the concert or put the shoes on.

You need some type of struggle and it's very easy to struggle against children. Yeah, you win, you fucking rinse kids. But in general, yeah, you end up struggling against people who it's very easy to struggle against. I think that's sort of the heart of the function of it, of a lot of this stuff. The cause is multi-headed. I don't know. I mean, it's just like, it seems now we're in a situation in which both sides of like

this, I don't know, culture war split in this country, regardless of the other, as basically, it cannot be reasoned with, cannot be, you know, democratically assuaged and represent a kind of ignorant savagery that is leading to like a full on like national suicide. And the thing is, I'm not making any kind of moral fucking moral comparison or equivalence here. But like both sides believe that to be true of the other side and are in their own internal coherent logic, basically right about the other. I'm not saying like, I think obviously one is more justified than the other.

But the thing is like, you know, if schools and our society in general became more accepting of gay people or transgender people, that would represent a certain sense, an existential threat not to the lives of these people, obviously, but to their kind of, I don't know, what they would regard as something that gives their life a meaning, which is in a way like in their minds kind of like being killed. Yeah, I mean, there's no, they're incompatible social visions and like the importance that people put on them is, I think, distorted by the, that, yeah, this weird anxiety field, because it's the only way that they can describe any of the other things going wrong.

Like every material cause of anxiety, precarity that we feel is essentially unspeakable. It is unaddressable. So that means every, and every personal, you know, conflict is largely intractable for people who aren't able to change their conditions. So this becomes the, these, these models, these visions of, of like social justice or social virtue become the only terrain of any meaningful contest because politicians are actually addressing them because there is a sense that one side or another can move them in one way or another.

You can vote to get somebody on the school board who will do X or Y. And so this becomes, of course it becomes the place where the most psychic energy goes is because it's the place where there is a sense that there is a contest to be won. Do you think that part of it is sort of the frontier coming home? If we're going to expand it to all, all, all factions of politically engaged American life, at least in the mainstream, that like, yeah, yeah, yeah, on one side, you know, the more like liberal Russia gets side has taken on the, the national security state's posture of looking for traders and, and subversion and foreign actors.

And the weirdly enough, the right wing side has taken a cue from liberal interventionists. They have almost a Samantha Powers view of the, of the domestic that they have to, they have to rescue children and women from these awful liberals who are now the Taliban. Everyone took cues from the other side and brought home the things that we've been inflicting on the rest of the world. Yeah. I mean, I guess like if, if you're the, the, the PTA school mom who sees any kind of acceptance of gay or transgender kids as a kind of a threat to your cultural life, I think the

response that these people, their solution to that is to threaten the actual lives of everyone else. And as long as we're talking about democracy, let's talk about voting. The other thing that is terrifying most Americans these days. And I'm just going to talk a little bit about this is a Washington post piece by Dana Milbank in Nevada election deniers prepared to sabotage the midterms. So this is about like just like the, the spate of sort of poll watchers, sort of like a vigilante poll and election integrity advocates that are going to make this midterm election and

a lot of states kind of a disaster or at least like has the potential to be like, let's look at this piece, uh, Dateline, Perump, Nevada, that's where the, uh, all the prostitution is by the way. If the Nevada midterm elections degenerate into chaos in a couple of weeks, a very real possibility, then Nevada is poised to lead the way. Indeed the chaos here has already begun. The election supervisors in 10 of the state's 17 counties have already quit, been forced out or announced their departures.

Four level election workers have quit in the face of consistent abuse. The state's election staff has lost eight of its 12 employees. The Republican secretary of state who vigorously defends the integrity of the 2020 election is term limited and the GOP nominee to replace her, Jim Marchant, leads a national group of election deniers running for office. Marchant is on record saying that if he and his fellow candidates are elected, we are going to fix the whole country and President Trump is going to be president again. So I guess like, uh, how I'm thinking about like this article in conjunction with the

school, the school mural one is like in the face of a, I think largely, uh, corporate engineered price crisis that's, you know, referred to on the news as inflation and a federal reserve instigated recession that we're all dealing with now. We are, we're, we're heading into the midterms, like in, in, coming out of a pandemic, going into a recession at, you know, at which people's lives are like more precarious than they've maybe ever been, just drug addiction, uh, just social alienation across the board. And I guess the question is like, as you look at these things like are already shitty democracy and just like the basic functionaries of like counting votes and affirming elections are

now being sort of hounded out of their ability to do so by people who refuse to accept any democratic outcome that they don't favor. So I guess my question is, how does it feel and like what, where's this all going as America, I think now transforms itself from a fake managed democracy into a very real and authentic non-democracy. Do you think there's a difference between the two or like, what, what do you make of like the, the, the vote panic stuff in addition to the satanic panic stuff? I think it's the only way it makes, it's, it, the only way it, uh, resolves is, uh,

what Marjorie Taylor Green likes to talk about the national divorce, uh, but not formally. I think you would just have, uh, you're just going to end up in a situation where whatever, uh, coalition of political, uh, power is able to, uh, hold on to state governance in the near future and then codify their role, the rule through their control of the ballots is then going to impose, uh, a, uh, a settlement onto the state in question of these culture questions, you know, the, the, the economic questions are going to be as always, uh, not up for, up for even debate, let alone vote. And people are going to the, the, the remaining democracy will be, uh, voting with your feet

going to a state who's, uh, strut, who's, whose structures, who's like, uh, for official values are in line with your own. If you can afford it, if you can't, you will suffer under whatever consequences, uh, that those systems have, which are going to be about the same, the lower you are on the socioeconomic level. Uh, it'll be similar to live in any of them. But if you have a little bit of money, uh, and you have, uh, a skill or you have credentials, you're going to move to where, uh, it's amenable and that will replace, uh, voting as like

the meaningful act of choosing your representation. The great American divorce though, uh, it would be unsustainable because states cannot, you know, issue their own currency. They can't, uh, well, no, I, all that stuff is not, I don't think that stuff's going to divorce. I think you're still going to have some sort of technocratic, probably military backed like, uh, Matthew McConaughey or the rock facing national government, but all real politics will be done at the state level and we'll be done by these, uh, whatever, uh, group

of interests, you know, whatever, whatever collection of, uh, agitated middle class voters connected to local regimes of political and economic power are going to impose on everybody else a sort of permanent settlement that's not going to be up for voting anymore. I mean, I, I see, I, I almost see that as like a transitory step too though and I don't know what comes after. Yeah. No, no, nothing. I mean, this is all like just steps in a process like nothing, there is no more.

I don't think anybody can have any more fantasy that there are, uh, uh, there's anything more than a temporary, uh, evolutionary development. Like there is no, there's no stability. There's no bedrock that anything could be built on. Just people reacting to changing conditions, uh, essentially, uh, ad hoc without the ability to coordinate effectively, without the ability to rely on institutions that have been completely hollowed out, uh, just basically riffing, uh, just trying to keep the lights on and trying to stay in power more importantly than anything.

I could see maybe over a 200 or 300 year period walking backwards into the EU where event like we do, yeah, no, like we do the, um, we do the, we do the divorce and then like after a hundred years, like the red states are like, actually, you know what? We don't want to be in a currency union. Like the, the, the, we're going to be using the Amaro at this point. The Amaro is cocked. We know what? There's too much debt on it.

Fuck the Amaro. And then, you know, like the Florida, Alabama, whatever Confederacy becomes, you know, Italy, there are all these analogs. And then eventually, uh, we walk backwards into an EU type setup where the union of Pennsylvania, New York, Illinois, that's Germany and the entire, the entire currency union reforms and the finance capital blue super center is the Germany that sets off policy. And I don't know. I guess, uh, where, where would Greece be or I guess most, most places would be Greece.

Yeah. Like, yeah. Florida is a good, would be a good Greece, I think. Yeah. So I can see us going into that. If you're one of our listeners, it's going to live 300 years, you know, let us know if this happens. Send, send, send some messages back in our dreams.

If you're an alien who's listening to this in the future, let us know, was, were we right? If you're the successor species to humanity, the octopus, uh, lobster, ape, hybrid, were we right? Yeah. So I'm going to pass card care of chopper trap house, uh, just a real quick from the, from the Nevada voting article, it's just this year, a few in Nevada counties meanwhile are in the process of sabotaging their vote counting procedures. After March on travel, the state making presentations with false allegations of voting machine fraud,

at least four counties have taken steps sort of ending voting machines and running elections by paper ballot and hand counting a process certain to delay results and introduce more errors. Now, I know data Milbing says that, but like, and look, I, I, I think like, you know, all of the things about how voting machines are rigged or whatever is, you know, bullshit. But I mean, they could be rigged, right? I mean, I don't, I don't, I don't, I guess I, I guess I don't see like that. We should just go back to pulling the lever.

I'm tired. I never got to pull the lever. I want to pull the fucking lever. I want to pull the fucking lever. I mean, plenty of other countries do hand ballots too, but like, look, the point is that like the, the GOP, like should they get power again, which they almost certainly will do, is going to go full throttle to, I mean, like, like any like remaining shard of democratic consent is a threat to their ongoing power.

And they're going to get rid of it in addition to getting rid of Social Security and Medicare. Like that's, that's going to happen. And I guess like, as long as we're talking about voting, I mean, where things stand now in the midterms is it's like, it's pretty much reverting to form in that like the Democrats are going to lose control of Congress. I mean, that's almost for certain at this point, which am I, am I crazy? You guys agree with me on that? Yeah.

No, I think it's not. I don't know about Felix. No, I mean, I think I've, it's always been extremely likely that they lose the house, no matter what. I still don't know about the Senate. I don't know. Reddit man, John Reddit man hit some, hit a skid in the road, so to speak, but he's still like, I don't know, I still kind of think Reddit man wins.

I obviously think Warlock wins in general. I don't think it's going to be, I think I'm still right because I said, I don't think it's going to be a slaughter back in March. I still don't really think it's going to be that. But we'll see. I mean, like, if we've learned anything, it's that polls absolutely suck. Yeah. That's for sure.

So who knows, it would be hilarious if it was like an off year blue wave. That would be the fun, that would be hysterical. It's not going to happen, but I don't know, I feel like there's going to be some surprises in there. Well, I mean, look, the situation as it currently exists is that the more people who vote generally benefits the Democratic Party, and the less people able to vote benefits the Republicans, and they're going to push that advantage as much as they possibly can, if not outright canceling democracy in states where they have control.

So I suppose, dear listener, you're thinking to yourself, look, this is horrible, even in our shit sham democracy, like just certain things, this is a bridge too far. I would like, you still like to have your vote count even in a fake election. So there's got to be someone on the Democratic side who has made voting their number one issue and voting rights their number one issue, and they have an organization set up to counteract the disenfranchisement of voters in a state like Georgia. Let's check in on what the Democratic side is doing to preserve democracy. Stacey Abrams' campaign chair collected millions in legal fees from voting rights organization.

Great action, the non-profit founded by Abrams, paid her close friend and ally's law firm $9.4 million in 2019 and 2020 with two more years of billing yet to be disclosed. It's consulting all the way down in the Democratic Party. Well, this is a new one. Usually you just pay the consultant. I've not seen it done through a law firm. I do like, I like Abrams' whole thing, which was like that demographics were going in like, and voting was going in like one direction in Georgia over the last eight years.

And for her to just be like, yeah, I did that. I always thought that was, that was awesome. And it worked in the sense that enough people were like, yeah, she did that. I mean, turnout in Georgia, like turnout for early voting in Georgia has been, I think it's been past 2020 and possibly past 2018, I don't know. But I still don't think she's going to win, but she'll be able to be like, hey, look, I did that. I built this whole NGO around it.

The voting rights organization founded by Stacy Abrams spent more than $25 million over two years on legal fees, mostly on a single case, with the largest amount going to the self-described boutique law firm of the candidate's campaign, Chairwoman. Allegra Lawrence Hardy, Abrams' close friend who chaired her gubernatorial campaign both in 2018 and her current bid to unseat Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, is one of two parties named in Lawrence and Bundy, a small firm with fewer than two dozen attorneys. The firm received $9.4 million from Abrams Group Fair Fight Action in 2019 and 2020, the last years for which federal tax filings are available.

Fair Fight Action has maintained at the suit, which ended last month when a federal judge ruled against the group on all three remaining claims, served an important role in drawing attention to voting inequities. But some outside the group questioned both the level of expenditures devoted to a single, largely unsuccessful legal action, and the fact that such a large payout went to the firm of Abrams' close friend and campaign chair. Those concerns were heightened by the fact that Abrams' national campaign against voter suppression galvanized the Democratic Party, many of whose top donors helped fill its coffers.

Well, that's the way the world turns. Everyone has a different way of doing things. Republicans have a different way of paying people. It goes through eight layers, and then you have to pay the national inquirer guy for a woman that a fat guy knocked up. There are a lot of confusing steps. This is generally how the Democratic ship goes around. Republicans also love just having a dark money syndicate just buy someone's book in giant

pallets. That's a good one. I think Democrats are doing that now, though. They should. I mean, hey, you know, that's easy money. If you're not doing that, you're fucking up. Well, yeah. I mean, like, do you really believe it when they're like, oh, Eric Swalwell's book is

a bestseller? Did they claim that Eric Swalwell's book was a bestseller? I don't even know. I don't even know if he fucking wrote a book. But I've seen too many things like that happen, you know? Chelsea, Chelsea Clinton's Choose Your Own Mystery book actually sold 20 million copies. Don't forget on the Republican side that a certain level payment is always meted out in sports memorabilia or resources.

That's a very important figure of Republican graft. But yeah, like, so the Stacey Abrams people are saying that this is a hit piece against her. She's down by 10 points in the guy's face at this point. Oh, no. We need to stop Stacey Abrams. Like, she's doing a great job of that herself. She's walking L. I would be shocked if she won.

No, she's not going to win. I mean, somebody should be fucking, I don't know, challenging the distance and franchisement of voters on a massive scale. But it just seems like this is just like the number one Democrat person who's like, I'm here to stand for voting rights is just, you know, just like, how many voters did her group actually register versus how much money did they spend on like administrative costs? It just seems like, yeah, like this is this is the way things are done. Though, hey, the problems are real, but the solutions, folks, they all involve paying

my friend $9 million. And they don't actually solve anything. Yeah, no, there's no, yeah, the solutions, they don't exist. Yeah, the solution to me not having a houseboat that exists. I do have to say, though, early numbers just my warlock pick is dead on. I will say it does look like warlock might have cast a deadly spell on the voters of Georgia and one, which is honestly too bad, because I was really looking forward to Herschel Walker in the Senate going ham.

That would have been, oh, man, it's like time to do a citizen's arrest of Charles Schumer with like a fucking badge he got out of a cracker jack box, putting, putting into M60 machine gun in Dianne Feinstein's mouth. That's just good old wholesome fun. You know, we didn't talk about, like the last, the last episode we talked about sheriff's departments. I mean, exhibit A in the case against should sheriff's departments exist is that they gave that fucking moron like a badge and were like, yeah, you're a cop now, you can help us in

this county. There was a great video where he was standing right next to like one of those like one of those sheriffs who shaped exactly like grimace and the guy was like, well, here we go. For all the people who doubted, I am declaring that Herschel Walker officially has a wife killing license in Georgia. I guess I'm like, you know, as, as the polls tighten up or like, you know, I think we're all on the same page here is that like, you know, the GOP is going to take back control of Congress, but it's not going to be like a complete washout for them.

But at the same time, it's like, if you look at like polls to the extent to which we take them seriously, it does seem to me that like among the normal white contingent that we're so interested in as a demographically powerful voting block, it does seem that their concern has shifted away from abortion being criminalized to serial is too damn expensive and gas and things like that. Bullsuck don't care until whatever happens happens. But I mean, yeah, I mean, like, like we say, like we said, even when the Democrats are doing, doing better in stupid polls, all they really have is abortion, right?

Because what it like, what is, what is their straightforward message on any economic issue? They don't have any. There's nothing that they can really say. Abortion was always the only thing that they really add. Well, I mean, like now they're looking at a situation in which they're like, you know, they know what's going to happen in 2023, which is that the Republicans are going to use the debt ceiling to, you know, basically force cuts to Medicare and Social Security. Their response to that, well, we can't, we definitely can't get rid of the debt ceiling.

I mean, we have to keep, yeah, I mean, just a debt house with no debt ceiling. The rain will just get over my debt. Yeah. But I mean, once again, I think that's probably because they would like to cut Social Security and Medicare themselves. But oh, the Republicans are going to force them to do it by holding the nation's debt hostage. Oh, darn it.

Oh, jeez. Oh, no. I twisted my arm here. And, you know, like, you know, the Federal Reserve is conjuring, they're in the, they got the, they got the Volcker Summoning Circle right now. They're conjuring a recession right now and they're saying it quite openly because, you know, they need a recession to deal with inflation, ha-ha, or so they say. I mean, it's really a recession intended to discipline the labor force.

I mean, you could, you could have deflationary measures by taxing the wealthy. That would bring prices down or like, that would, you know, the dollar would be worth more in that case. But like, what do you guys make of just inflation as the number one issue that people are concerned about or that the politicians have to pretend to have to deal with? I think that it's a valid sexual practice. I don't think, I think I understand that sometimes people get triggered seeing it like the Fulton Street Fair or something.

But, you know, it's not harmful. Actors have assured me that the, the testicles can be inflated repeatedly without damage. So I think people just need to stop yucking people's young. I mean, what is there to say about it? It's not surprising that it's an issue. It's like the exact type of thing that would piss voters off. Yeah, regardless of whether you go like, okay, we were due for inflation. We had red hot equities market with weirdly low inflation for forever.

Whatever explanation you choose to use, whether it's this is the Vladimir Putin inflation tax or whatever, I mean, yeah, I don't, what else is there to say about it? There's nothing to be, there's nothing that anyone will do about it other than the one button they have, which is to try to create a recession, which is not working even on inflation. We're instead now deep into brandonization, which is stagflation for the 21st century. Yeah. They unexpectedly added 270,000 jobs, all political cartoonists hired to draw the fiscal

cliff in next year's political cartoons. Yeah, jobs program for people labeling things in cartoons, taxes, the national debt. It's like an anvil. Yeah, with the edge of a cliff, well, I mean, you know, what is there to really say about any of this? Polls suck. You can't pull one thing or another out of them. People will vote, maybe not as much as they like, maybe more than they'd like.

Maybe they were forced by someone else to vote. And we're going to keep on branded in something we've talked about on this episode and others is this kind of like, you know, Felix, you said we are sort of going backwards in time into a sort of EU situation. We've talked before about how culture is slowly moving backwards in time so that like our current trends are somewhere around the early aughts, maybe. But this is all part and parcel of, you know, a growing political movement. And by political movement, I mean some memes that are online of those who would entreat

us to continue moving back in time and in fact return to a more traditional era of sort of social homogeneity and social trust, right? Return to tradition. We've all seen the memes, but the return to tradition people are actually moving forward in history. And this is what's interesting to me because, you know, when these memes started, they'd be like return to being a medieval peasant and being sure of your faith in God and your place in his kingdom and, you know, feast days and, you know, backbreaking agricultural

labor for the other two thirds of the year. That's one form of tradition. Then another return to tradition is like the ads of the 1950s, you know, like Don Draper coming home and there's Sally and she's got a drink from and smoking a cigarette and he's in a crisp suit looking good. But the latest iteration of returning to tradition would have us return to a, that bygone era, the Halcyon days of like the mid to late 90s. I'm referring about, this is a Twitter thread that got some juice this week and Rolling

Stone has an article about it that I think was kind of funny. So headline anti woke crusader is trying a new recruitment tool, 1990s nostalgia theorist Michael Young used retro video game art by an unwitting designer to argue that the post modern world has killed traditional values. Have you guys seen the art in question here? It's these two toe headed boys and propeller caps playing a video Metal Gear Solid actually on PSX while they eat a meal that has not been seen since 1999, spaghetti and meatballs. The article begins, it's been years since the heyday of only 90s kids will remember

clickbait, the listicles that sent us back to a neon flecked era of Power Ranger CDs, Beanie Babies and VHS tape. But nostalgia dies hard and now a Canadian man considering, considered a leading intellectual and far right media is trying to convince people that woke culture obliterated the happiness he once felt playing Nintendo 64. Michael Young is a visiting fellow at the Center for Renewing America. Okay, this guy's a Canadian and he's a visiting fellow at the Center for Renewing America. Get out of here.

Get the fuck out of here. Go and renew fucking Canada, get out of my face. Yeah, I don't see Center for Renewing the Americas. Center for Renewing North America. Yeah. A conservative think tank that exists to combat supposed threats to the nation like vaccine mandates and critical race theory. Apart from his work with CRA, Young has written for right-wing publications like The Federalist

and co-authored an anti-LGBTQ pamphlet titled A Parents' Guide to Radical Gender Theory with the conservative agitator Christopher Ruffo. But Young's real audience is on Twitter, whereas at woke call distance, he unspools grandiose threads about the collapse of a once proud Western culture for some 220,000 followers. Even this involves attacking woke politics, but recently Young went viral with a different strategy, presenting artwork of blissful children with retro games consoles and toys to play on millennial nostalgia.

The overwrought self-serious tweets backfired as people parodied Young's comments and accused him of yearning for Pokemon cards. Critics helped heaped so much ridicule on Young's infantilizing theory of a lost world worth fighting for that he locked his account for at least a day. Although already blocked on Twitter for lightly roasting his thread, this Rolling Stone reporter attempted to contact Young through the communications director of the Center for Renewing America, who did not provide a way of getting in touch with Young or offer comment on his tweets. So this is a funny thing because I guess it's just like these Halcyon images of usually

it's like young boys on Christmas and they're ripping open the package and it's a Nintendo 64. You get to play a game, you get to play GoldenEye with your friends. I mean, we talked before about how 90s nostalgia or people pining for how happy they were as kids is sort of like a byproduct of, well, yeah, of course everyone was happier as kids because you got PlayStation on Christmas and you didn't have a fucking job to worry about. But at the same time, it's like, isn't on a certain level everyone has this kind of curdled nostalgia for the 90s because it really was the last decade when the future existed

and now we've gotten to the future in the 21st century and come to find out that there is none. There is no future. It's only going backwards in time. Yeah, I gotta say, it definitely makes you want to go back and apologize to everyone who is a Y2K hysteric because they were effectively correct because you had the millennium coming and everyone was excited, oh, the next millennium, what will it bring? And then you had these hysterical party poopers freaking out about some computer glitch.

But it turns out that they were right, that things were going to go on a completely different trajectory than what anybody in general culture was assuming at that time. The vibrations were there and that they were really the only ones feeling that, of course, as is always the case, like the specific content of their argument, the computers are gonna go on the fritz, was wrong, but the broader sense that the computers, among other things, were going to destroy us is absolutely correct. I think it's funny to choose the 90s because that's when they did the actual great reset. That's when they actually did it, that's when they did NAFTA and welfare reform and everything.

That's the actual great reset, but I don't know. As always, I think it's phones, but I tell you guys about the trad opinion that I came up with. No. Okay, so hobos, classic train riding hobos, they had a code of honor, they had their own culture and language, they performed feats of trickery and they were honest in a sense. They had a code. They had a code, they wore suits.

Modern homeless people are just mindless drug zombies. Yeah, they would never make beans with sterno. No, they would never carefully put all of their items into a spindle. No, they would never have a competition to become emperor of the North Pole. All right, here's my anti-trad opinion. The modern unhoused actually exists in a state of anarcho-communal horizontal organization, where as the bad reactionary hobos of yore submitted themselves and others to a cruel system of hierarchical monarchy ruled over by the so-called emperor of the North Pole.

Folks, let's decolonize hobos, let's decolonize raytrans. I want to clarify this is not my actual opinion, but I do think a trad guy should do that. Should point out that there was a code of honor. Maybe don't mention those things that Carl Pansram said about being slutted out by hobos. But again, it's not my view, I don't think the drug zombie thing, I'm offering an opinion for sale. Oh wait, who got slutted out by hobos? A lot of people in history, but Carl Pansram allegedly said that when he wrote his autobiography.

Oh my God, Will, you have not been following Felix's true crime arc enough. Carl Pansram, classic hobo murderer from the early 20th century. Yeah, he was very early American serial killer, early in modernity. I do like people keep pointing out to this guy, you can play video games and eat spaghetti and meatballs now, but it won't feel like it felt when you were a kid. No, it won't. That is actually correct. He has correctly identified a real absence, because if you cannot move forward as an adult,

if you have no hope that you will be able to shape your destiny, which is what the promise of adulthood has traditionally been, then what is left but nostalgia for the total lack of responsibility, the total, the pleasant, you know, unalienated, unstructured leisure time of childhood. And so what else is to be sought but making that your goal since you're not going to realistically be in charge of anything? I do think he's like it like the thing is stupid. It's stupid for a billion reasons.

It's stupid, especially because it's like he's putting it up like it's a thing you can vote for kind of. Yeah, like if you if you turn out in enough midterms, like you won't be depressed anymore. But like there is some like in the literal exact thing he's talking about, right? Like the you don't have the feeling you used to have when you were like playing video games with your friends. And like part of that obviously no shit. You're not a child anymore.

But there is like there's some truth to the sense that like just being around other people post phones, it does feel like something is kind of lost like a little bit, a little bit of the way that we relate to each other and understand each other in social relationships has irreparably changed just by virtue of, you know, having having a thing that lights up your brain in the same way that a fucking slot machine does in your pocket that you look at for like 18 hours a fucking day. But that's I mean, that's it, that's not like the literal thing he's saying again, his point is like, you'll feel exactly like you did on the best day of your life when you were

nine forever, if like Donald Trump is elected. I think like the 90s were fun, but I think people today have lost sight of a different period in American history. And it's one that, similar to the renewing America guy, I would like to renew. It's a land that I think we would like to return to it's a land that I've probably felt the most myself upon visiting. It's how should I describe it? It's a land it's far away, but it's beside the crystal fountains.

And you know, it's a great place. The handouts growing bushes, the boxcars are all empty, the sun shines every day. They've got birds and bees and cigarette trees. And you know, you just pick them right off the pick them have a smoke. They grow on trees. That's right, folks. I'm talking about the big rock candy mountain. And I think it's time to renew the big rock candy mountain.

I think we should all live there. I think we need to go back to the feeling that we had when we found out that all the rail yard bulls, their dogs have rubber teeth and we can just chill in a boxcar, have a little fire or smoke cigarettes and eat beans with your friends. And quite frankly, I think a wokeness has deprives us of our birthright to live and you know, or even visit the big rock candy mountain. Well, the big rock candy mountain was is the it's the lump in articulation of the post scarcity utopia promised by communism.

And that's what's so infuriating about all of this is that everybody is grasping towards a actual approach like real political horizon. But because the institutions and the cultural structures they live in have have been designed to deny even the possibility to deny even the articulation publicly of that horizon. It just gets curdled and turned inward and made into reactionary fantasies. You have to like if you were a kid in the 30s and you found out your dad like left the family and he was a hobo now, you had to have felt like such a loser. Like such a bad kid like he didn't even start a new family.

He's just like he's just riding the train and getting slutted out because he's a new hobo. That's why you fought in the Korean War if you were born in the 30s. I mean, I'd be pissed that he was, you know, I had to go to school and he was, you know, a fucking picking cigarettes off trees and getting soft boiled eggs that are just laid by the hens. Yeah. I got to eat hardtack.

We should bring back hardtack to give to unviable males. There's a lake of stew and whiskey too. A lake of stew? Okay. We need to get rid of the debt ceiling and create a stew lake tomorrow. See, this is an actual concrete proposal that people could get excited about that would not involve doing which trials on teenagers. If people, okay, if people had better access to stew, do you think that they would be so

fucking, I don't know, scared of demons all the time? It's a little basic stew. That's what we're talking about. I'd argue, I mean, isn't like, isn't that what, like, witches are cooking in that big pot? No, no, no. They're not eating that. No, I'd say stew is one of the most evil foods, definitely like a, definitely a boiling

cauldron. Yeah. What goes in there? Evil stuff? Or sometimes an explorer. It's like, it's traditionally the food of pre-Christian cultures or anti-Christian cultures, like witches. If I can't have stew, then I don't want to be part of your revolution.

I always, I always thought that was funny, like the, the drawings of the explorer, like just standing in the cauldron, like how long, that has to take like seven weeks to cook it. To break down the meat and everything. Yeah. Well, yeah. He's like always up to like his knees. Are you just like, are you just hoping that like the broth tenderizes his legs until

the point that they just like, did they're gone? I don't know. I don't think I, maybe I'm not looking at the same pictures of explorers in stew pots as you are. Well, no, I mean, I always think that I always see that like they're up there to their, their neck or something. Yeah. And then there's like, then there's like the chef and he's like cutting carrots and celery

into the broth as the guy is slowly, you know, on, on, on a simmer, I would say if you get an, if you get an explorer, you're gonna need, I mean, I cannot recommend LaCruzé enough, you know, some of that enamel cast iron really captures and holds temperature and even, evenly distributed. So I'd say like for your average explorer, two to three hours at a low simmer. I'm just, I'm just starting to think like just going by logistics of it, I don't think it ever happened. No way.

No way. I'm not starting to think that. Bullshit. Bullshit. Ever put, ever put a fully clothed explorer into a pot? No, I just don't think it happened like that. I'm starting to think. If you're a professor who's teaching this to kids.

I'm calling bullshit. Yeah. Stop it. Where's Snopes on this? I just, I don't think it's right that we still think that, that everyone still thinks that happened. Oh, this is interesting. Just checking Snopes.

It says that the idea that explorers were ever cooked whole well-clothed impots is Russian disinformation. Oh, wow. Wow. Okay. And to me, the lost feeling of warmth and camaraderie I had with my best friends when we played GoldenEye together, waiting for an explorer to fucking melt off the bone in the kitchen.

And the smells wafted into the living room and just, there was a white blanket of snow outside and your mom would come into the room and she'd say, who wants his nose? I've got toenails here, toenail chips. That is, that is like the, I mean, there's like a ton of stupid things about like making that a political program, but like that, like that specific like new genre of art and like post about like, remember what it was like when you were nine? It's like, yeah, no, I remember like the good sleepovers, but I also remember like the average day when I was nine or 10 or 11, which is like, did I get no pussy?

Yeah. Get it? Well, like, you know, did I ruin my dick by jacking off before I could ejaculate like actual semen? Like just with the weird things that you think when you're a kid, finding about, you know, you've only known about like the concept of death for a few years, you're still working around that. The concept of death was not as disturbing to me as when I realized that at some point

in the future, our son would expand to the point that would incinerate the entire, making it all ashes for eternity. Yeah, that's hard to onboard when you're nine years old. But hey, I mean, like overall thinking about it, like, you know, where are things better in the 90s? Did you have more fun as a kid? You know, maybe, but like in life, we trade our innocence for self-awareness. And I think, you know, like if you want to add a political dimension to that, I mean,

I think there is something very sinister about inculcating in people a sense that they should remain innocent and blissful forever, or that they need to be, as a child would be, you need to be, need to be protected from, you know, the evils and terrors of this half-worn world. But if there's no, if there's no protection against them, I mean, if there is no way to negotiate the wider world to your, to your demands, to your preferences, to what you think is the right, then a retreat is the only solution. Right?

Like, that's it. Like, the only thing to do is to vote, to protect you from having to negotiate with a wider world that refuses your, in any, in every way, refuses to take into account or metabolize your demands or your desires. Well, I think we just need to, need to hang the jerk who invented work. Indeed. I mean, always. That's always been the goal.

That's always been the, that's the mission of humanity, but, but it doesn't look like we're going to get our shit together to actually do it. Okay. All right. So I'm going to wrap up the show here for today. We'll talk to you guys again soon and just a reminder, we'll be at Revolution in Fort Lauderdale, Florida on this upcoming Saturday. So hope to see you guys in Florida to round out our fall tour, which has gone spectacularly

so far. Like, again, Chicago, LA, New York, everyone who came out and saw us, it's been fantastic. Stavie Baby, 95 Bulls, Salips, LA Witch, and then coming up in Fort Lauderdale, Donzie. So hope to see you guys in Florida on Saturday. Sunday, Sunday? Sunday. To see you Sunday in sunny South Florida, rounding out the tour, yeah, we are going to Miami.

I'm going to get my clothes officially going to Miami. I'm going to get my clothes officially going to Miami. I'm going to get my clothes officially going to Miami. I'm going to get my clothes officially going to Miami.