Chapo Trap House - 724 - Pipe Lines....Blow Awaaaaay feat. How to Blow Up A Pipeline (4/17/23)

Episode Date: April 18, 2023

We’re joined by the creative team behind the new film How To Blow Up A Pipeline (director Daniel Goldhaber, co-writer/producer/star Ariela Barer, co-writer/producer Jordan Sjol & producer/editor Dan Garber) to discuss their work on the movie. Will talks to the crew about adapting the non-fiction book to narrative film, developing characters’ sense of political motivation, the value and nature of propaganda, and of course, bombs. Then, Felix and Matt join back up to look at Biden’s recent trip to Ireland, and read from Spiked magazine’s lament of the President’s “woke conquest of Ireland”. There may be tickets left for the late show of our screening of John Carpenter’s “In The Mouth of Madness” at the Roxy Cinema on April 27th, come thru. Will and Hesse will be speaking at both screenings: https://www.roxycinemanewyork.com/screenings/chapo-trap-house-movie-mindset-presents-in-the-mouth-of-madness-35mm/

Can I stop the pipeline? Michael, what do you think the odds are we blow ourselves up? I don't really care. Structural damage is kind of the point. They will defame us and claim this was violence, but this was justified. This was an act of self-defense. Hello, everybody. It's Monday, April 17th. It's Will Medeker here. It's Chapo coming at you, and I'm going to jump right into it because I am joined today by the writers, directors, stars of the new film How to Blow Up a Pipeline.

So, gang, can I just get you to introduce yourselves and say what it is you did for this picture? I'm Daniel Goldhaber. I'm the director, co-writer, and co-producer. I'm Ariella Barrere. I co-wrote, co-produced, co-starred, and most importantly, music supervised the movie. I'll get into the very cool synth original score for this movie in a minute. People have many talents working on this film. Jordan? Yeah, I'm Jordan Scholl. I was a co-writer and executive producer. Yeah, and I'm Dan Garber, and I am the editor. All right. Well, let me kick this off by saying congratulations, guys. I just watched the movie last night. It was great.

It gets the official movie mindset. Two thumbs up from me. So, let's talk about the movie itself. I want to begin with you, Daniel, the director, and I want to begin by asking you this. Do you feel that it's responsible to release this movie now when certain unnamed governments are also blowing up pipelines? And do you worry that the violence in this movie will affect the very impressionable, let's just say not U.S. government, to blow up more pipelines in the future? I don't think that the U.S. government is going to be taking any cues from our little direct action movie. I think that whoever blew up the Nord Stream pipeline, not naming any names, that act could not have been more oppositional to the act that happens in the film. I think, as we all know, it's one of the largest methane emissions ecological disasters in history. And in our film, our ragtag bunch do everything in their power to avoid spilling any oil or damaging the environment to the best of their ability.

So, I think it definitely changes the nature of, I think, how maybe a wider audience views the praxis, but it's completely different. Well, I mean, it comes to targeting critical infrastructure of oil. It's sort of what's good for the goose is good for the gander, be it state actors or, you know, non-state actors fighting the same governments pumping all this oil. Or at least it's good marketing for the movie to have right when this movie comes out, one of the biggest international stories is about a mission impossible to blow up a critical piece of oil infrastructure. Yeah, I definitely think it has people thinking about the fragility and unsustainability of basing an entire system on infrastructure that is so easily destroyed, which is absolutely something that, you know, we talk about in the film. Well, this movie is based on a book of the same title called How to Blow Up a Pipeline, which is a, I guess, sort of like a nonfiction polemic, sort of a call to action for the environmental movement. Could you all talk about how, like, your thoughts on, like, the thesis of that book, how it inspired you, and then we're also the decision to turn it into a narrative fictional film rather than just like a documentary of the same title. Yeah, so, so, Andreas' book, so I'm an academic in addition to working in film, and so I'm often reading, you know, academic books and Verso books and all that sort of good stuff.

And I was potted up in COVID with Danny and Ariela, and I was reading this and in contrast to some of the other things I was reading and certainly almost everything about climate change, it was very exciting. It was very viscerally exciting. And I think really at the core of the book is this idea that despite the fossil fuel industry trying to depict itself as absolutely untouchable, as too big to be attacked, as, you know, the sort of unchangeable future that we're all going to have to live in, that there are actually things that people can do, things that people who are not in political positions of power can do, things, you know, tactics that are open to us that have been used in previous movements that have worked in previous movements that we are not using. And so, you know, in adapting that, obviously, there's no story in the book. There's no characters or anything. But the question was, you know, how do we take that core, that kernel of an idea and turn it into something that is exciting and mainstream and can sort of move around in the circles that a movie moves around in? Ariela, as someone who was a co-writer on the movie and also the star, you play Sochi, who's sort of the, you know, the leader of this mission to blow up a pipeline. Like, what did you bring from, like, your experience reading the book to writing a character, did you know that you would be portraying this character? So, initially, I had no intention of being in the movie. But we kind of came out the writing process with the idea of what if this was us and our friends who did this tomorrow. So, all of these characters were immediately very personal to us. And Sochi was actually one of the first characters that I came up with. And she kind of represented my own sort of disillusionment with institutional power and the idea that you can fix a system from within. I had recently, you know, just kind of grown tired of that narrative and was trying to find a way out. And this character just became the vehicle for that. She was someone who believed in this, suffered a great loss, and then had to find another way. But also, just through our conversations that we were having at the time about the subject matter in the book, we were debating, you know, the ethics of this and the immediate consequences of an action like this.

And I found myself often arguing a lot of elitist points. So these, these conversations and these characters came very directly from us. And then once we decided I would play Sochi, she kind of also became a vehicle for us as the writers of the movie to explore our position in this larger movement, like what making this and putting ourselves at the front of this would mean, would that be, would that be hurtful, would that be helpful, etc., asking those questions. Well, there's a very memorable scene in the movie with your character that's sort of a kind of a road to Damascus moment where the character is part of her like your university's like divest from fossil fuels movement. And in a meeting about like, hey, this is our last push to really like use the power we have at our institution to get to get our university to divest from fossil fuels. And your character just sort of collapses and is just sort of like, does any of you get the feeling that this is all totally futile. And I'm wondering, like, like you said, like, coming face to face with like the legal market oriented solutions that are available to us and like the despair that comes from feeling like everything about a peaceful political process is only going to doom us. And I'm just wondering, like, how you how you rendered that feeling but also tried to credibly portray stepping over that line into something deeply illegal and dangerous. That's a really interesting question. I haven't actually been directly asked about that but that was a really hard line to balance as both writer and actor because something we were trying to balance in that scene was that the activists themselves pushing for these ideas are not wrong. The ones who are fighting these fights in other ways are not wrong. There are also people that are like putting their selves on the line to the degrees that they can in their lives at that point. And so she is also not wrong and is also kind of just over it enough that she has to cross these lines that she has to hurt some people along the way.

So that was a balance we were really trying to find in that scene of like how can everyone have a fair perspective and then also me as the actor coming in and being having these kind of like like blinders on. Yeah. Yeah. Something that I really appreciated about what Ariela brought to this role was like as much as she was pushing us to think really critically about you know what the consequences of an act like this would be and and was always kind of pushing the team to kind of make sure that we were thinking about this from as many different angles as we could. One of those angles that she was always focused on was like so she's sense of so she's sense of ego her prickliness her kind of difficulty as a character. And I think that there there's like a very obvious way to like approach that character which is kind of as somebody who's kind of just blanketly kind of like a good charismatic kind obvious like leader. And I think that Ariela always wanted to play so she is somebody who like as right as she is is also driven by ego to a certain extent is also driven by like almost a sociopathic or monomaniacal desire to prove the fact that she's right. And I think that there's something really interesting in that about this question of leadership on you know of movements. It's something that I think that everybody is Selma digs into really effectively too. It's a movie that like grapples with Martin Luther King Jr. sense of ego and sense of self importance and also like the necessary place that that has in leadership and in movement. And the fact that that's complicated especially when you're talking about something that's a progressive act.

And so that was something that as a director is always great to have with an actor is when they're like always like working to push a character in kind of an unexpected and more surprising direction. I think there's something to to your question of like crossing over from mainstream activism into militant tactics. One of the examples that Andreas brings up in the book is the suffragettes and you know he talks about how there was 40 years of mainstream activism and that people felt like they weren't getting anywhere. And that that's when people sort of started moving into militancy and you know torching torching letter boxes and eventually like moving to full scale arson. And I think that's important in part because you can't have a radical flank until you have the sort of build up of consensus and of people wanting to do these things. And without you know without a mainstream movement that is that is massive and that has support like you can't just leap to the militant part of it either. Well Daniel I mean like along similar lines of these sort of like running into the wall of like traditional liberal forms of activism. There's a part in the movie that depicts a bad movie being made within your movie itself. It's sort of the world of like condescending bad liberal documentaries. Like I was just wondering like the inclusion of that like the I mean in terms of like why you made this a narrative film but also sort of a critique of like the documentary industrial complex who like points a camera at people affected by horrible things in the world and they're like please share your pain with our rich audience. I think that I'm you know there were a few things that went into that I think one of them was a desire as well to like acknowledge our own place and our own awareness about you know the kind of complex relationship that making a movie about this at all has with

the subject matter. And I think it was it was something that we really wanted to kind of make clear that we were aware of and engaged with in the film but also you know my background is in like my first jobs in film or working on climate documentaries and never with filmmakers that were you know I think appropriating their subjects in the way that the filmmaker in this movie does but definitely there were experiences that I had on those projects where I think there was an extraordinary sense of frustration with you're doing all this work to raise awareness but there's there's kind of no teeth behind that there's no sense of where that goes and this is something that Dan Garber actually speaks really well to in terms of the questions about kind of a narrative verse narrative in terms of like I think what the balance of that is and why narrative is productive. Well I mean I don't know I think that narrative is sometimes more productive than documentary in part because it's simply less I think inherently more extractive I think you know their their degrees to which documentaries can be exploitive of their subjects or not but to some extent you're always inevitably transforming real people suffering into some form of you know entertainment or something to achieve your ends and sometimes you will dress that up in language about impact and changing the world but I think at a certain point there's a level of saturation within the documentary space around certain types of narratives and so the question becomes like what is the marginal benefit of making yet another documentary or making yet another you know incarceration documentary or something and I think unless you're adding something that's truly unique formally and aesthetically and in terms of the narrative in a documentary you're able to access a much different audience in a fiction film which has I think huge benefits for something that has a political message and is trying to access a broad base.

Along those lines of like broader like tactics in like the climate movement I'm wondering like how you see and then like how the book this movie is based on like how that reacts to like a lot of these high profile sort of extinction rebellion protests have been going on like gluing yourself to a painting or stopping traffic like how do you imagine the characters in your movie and then like when you writing the movie like how do you engage with those tactics as being sort of like very high profile but like do they fall in your opinion under the same kind of like liberal market based utility that these characters slam their head into and then like crossover from. I think that ultimately like with the souping of the paintings and the gluings of oneself to like the road I think that sometimes I feel like the critique of those things comes from a bit of a desire to feel like there's a silver bullet to climate change and I think that there's not there and I think that this is something that are yellow was getting at it's an ecosystem of change you know what I mean it's there are activists that are doing important mutual aid work on the ground and the question that the movie is asking in part is does there also need to be an escalation of tactics and I think that one of the things that I do think has been productive about the painting supers is that was an act with zero collateral damage zero destructive damage that got us culturally and politically discussing and grappling with the question of with this question of tactics with this question of strategy and it was meaningfully disruptive. And I think that that's productive even if it's not going to like solve the crisis all on its own.

So obviously I think that there are definitely characters in the movie that would think it's dumb and there are other characters in the movie that might think it's a productive form of protest and that's what makes the movie I think dramatically interesting. Well moving on from something that's perhaps more dramatically interesting than gluing yourself to a painting let's talk about bombs because I mean one of the most like you know one of the most memorable aspects of this movie is the very the very detailed depiction of building these two bombs and I'm just wondering like what was the research like that you had a you had a bomb consultant for this movie and also did you allied certain steps in the building of this bomb to avoid shall we say legal problems in the future. Yeah, so so as for the bomb building being accurate I think that was actually a sort of core tenant of the movie in part because so much of Andreas's point in the book is that this is a possible action right this is something that people actually could do as opposed to the idea that there's something that they do and so if you're trying to adapt that into a movie you know we wanted to not be waving our hands and saying they're doing a movie magic version of a bomb we wanted to say no actually if the characters decided that they wanted to do this what what would it look like what would it be like they need to buy how would they need to avoid getting you know getting caught while they're buying things all of that stuff. So I think that that's that's part of the motivation behind the behind the exacting this of it and yeah as for research we talked to a bomb expert who is you know sort of huge bomb nerd who had watched a bunch of movies and gotten furious every time he saw them being just extremely inaccurate and wanted to help some you know help us figure out how to do it right and he sent us I mean I guess I have a very dangerous hard drive right now. In terms of the illusion of details I mean there isn't really anything left out of the film necessarily like everything that you see in the film is what you would need to build the bombs.

There's this kind of intermediate explosive that we reference called Etn that Michael swaps out when he's arming the bombs that is just an extraordinarily time intensive process to create and it's also very stable to travel with so he brings it with him from North Dakota. And we absolutely did discuss in the film making like whether or not we wanted to literally show every single step one of the reasons we kind of lighted that was not just for time and because it would be boring but also because like we didn't want to drive this conversation of the movie that like the movie teaches you to build bombs because that's not really what the movie is about like as Jordan saying it's about the like it's about the possibility and the accessibility of the act the the the immediacy of it but not necessarily like the movies about tactics and and I think that you know there's there's not really anything productive about you know showing literally every single step just for the sake of it and like no matter what tactic you're talking about this is a movie that takes seriously and foregrounds the idea that if you want to make change you have to be willing to sacrifice something and you might have to be willing to sacrifice everything or a lot like you know how what how did you bring like a like a moral weight to these decisions and like and creating a like a credible you know like possibility of action for these characters and like following them as real people. I think that something that we wanted with this movie was for it to feel a bit like a cross section of the US climate movement in part like it is a film that is based on a rhetorical text and I think that there is something a bit rhetorical in its structure like you know showing how all these people from all these different walks of life are radicalized in different ways but can come together around a common idea there's there's something that's also very political about that this notion that I think currently exists on the left that you know kind of drives a certain like you know there isn't always room for that in left of spaces and I think that there is something that's kind of a bit fantastical but you know.

But I think wish fulfillment II about the way that all of these different characters come together it's also very Hollywood and that's something that like we wanted in this film but we also just wanted to like. We wanted to pay homage and represent like like. Just how vast climate disruption has impacted the lives of so many different people across the country. And I know that's something that you speak well about in terms of kind of the research process there. Yeah I mean again it goes back to the idea of what if it was us and our friends so we like kind of just started asking around. To everyone we knew if they had any stories if they knew anything I know a lot of this started because I kind of come up with. So she is a character for myself or is like a character that I was processing my own things through and then I had a best friend my friend Clarissa Tiva who I was living with at the time who very much is who Theo is based on. The more we asked around the more we found that these stories are actually not really much further than one or two degrees of separation away from us.

When you just seek them out it's touched all of our lives much more immediately than we had realized at the beginning of this process. And also we had talked to an activist who advised us that these people shouldn't know each other too well to keep their identities safely hidden for it all to go down successfully. Well that was another thing I wanted to ask you about in the research of this film is sort of the details about operational security to pull off an act like this. I mean there are scenes where characters put their cell phones in a refrigerator or advise that you know don't bring your cell phone or turn it off. And I'm just wondering like what did you learn about like the details of planning an event like this or an act like this. Because you know I mean I don't want to give too much away in the movie but the operational security is a big theme in this movie. Operational security is I'll also say that there is one scene in particular that people sometimes bump on because the obstacle is not great. And I would say that that is intentional on both sides.

And that the scene should be read that way. You know both people are looking for each other very very consciously. And I'll just say that but no I mean we talked to activists who spoke about you know the ways that they hide their digital footprint. You know it's worth noting that we stuck with signal because it's kind of immediately recognizable but we were also advised that signal is potentially or probably not as secure as people think it is. That there are actually questions about whether or not there are backdoors that exist in signal as an app and that there are other decentralized apps that. Are potentially more secure in part also because signal servers exist in the United States so that they are. Hypothetically subpoena able as well. So that's that's something that we thought about but decided to stick with signal just because it would it would read a lot better than kind of some of the other apps like element.

And was one that we spoke about with people that is a little bit more reliable because it doesn't have any centralized servers. But yeah it was just on the kind of research process. Well let me ask you from from a filmmaking perspective. Something I thought of when watching this movie is like a problem in a lot of modern movies and I've talked about this before it seems like many a list directors don't want to make movies about the present and a big element to that is that the way people communicate with cell phones and on the Internet now just isn't cinematically interesting. However it is depicted in this movie and I'm wondering either like Daniel or Dan from an editing perspective. Like how did you like weave in the like the fabric of people's digital lives in a way that was cinematically interesting and like narratively compelling. Yeah that's that's a great question in part because I think that this is a project of Daniel's in mind over a number of years.

I also cut his first film called Cam that takes place in large part on screens. I mean it's about a cam girl whose identity gets stolen by a doppelganger. And so much of the film takes place in this sort of shot reverse shot pattern between a woman and then her image on on the screen. And I think that one of the things is that I think that Daniel really recognizes that screens are just a part of of our life. They're an extension of our reality and it's not that you need to create some sort of new fangled completely different way of looking at screens. It is just it is it is sort of a an extension of the fabric of reality for people who experience it now. And people who try to bend over backwards to make to make life online seem particularly interesting. I think are sometimes missing the mark in significant ways because very often I think given all audience members

familiarity with how technology works now it's very easy for people to latch on to very quick moments of realistic depiction of technology and have things make complete sense. I was going to say I think one of the other resistances to making movies about the present is you know it also like I didn't get not resistances but one of the other issues with the fact that we don't have movies made about the present is I think it's one of the reasons that film feels significantly less important these days is because it's like you know most of our great A-list directors are in period piece or sci-fi mode. And I think that there is so much work that can kind of be vaguely allegorical about the moment we're living in. But the moment we're living in is unprecedented in human history. And I think that if we want film to retain a cultural and political relevance it has to kind of tackle those issues directly.

Absolutely. So I guess also I'm wondering like just from a filmmaking perspective Daniel for you as a director, Dan for you as an editor or Ariella for you as an actor were there any films or filmmakers that you were thinking of when you made this movie that you like borrowed from or were inspired by like you were just like it was in your head making this movie. Yeah I think we were all kind of immersed in this soup of various heist movies of all kinds. I know that one of Jordan's favorites is Rafifi. Oh my god yes. Talk about a detailed depiction of stealing something. Yes absolutely. Now we love all these films that depict process and extraordinary detail. I think Melville is somebody who excels at that as well.

Oh yes now you're speaking my language. And Michael Mann of course. I think when I was really stuck at the beginning of the edit I would just rewatch the first ten minutes of Thief over and over again. And I think that that it's obviously a very different movie. The way that he renders process in a way that is both aesthetically satisfying and also incredibly realistic and detailed was something that we really wanted to crib. The movie that I was thinking about watching this was Cluzo's The Wages of Fear. Because it's very much a movie about like the horrible devastation wrought by the oil industry and then like this collection of like disparate but very desperate characters who coalesce around these extremely powerful

but unstable explosive devices. Yeah it's actually kind of funny that like Wages of Fear and Sorcerer are two movies that in retrospect are like pretty foundational to this movie and that we did not watch or think about once while making it consciously. And I think that just speaks to like the level to which I know that there is one Wages of Fear shot in the movie that I did mention like there's like one shot of a tire like a wheel well like POV shot as a car is driving and I knew that like there was like that one moment where I was like oh this is our Wages of Fear moment. And there was kind of no other sense that that was something that the movie was doing. But I think that that's just because like that movie did really prove that if you show that there's a bomb in a scene

that could go off the audience is going to be tense whether or not the scene is actually tense. So I think that we just kind of inherently knew that we would be able to get a lot of mileage out of that. But it's very interesting and fun to kind of reflect back on it and like recognize how much influence that had. Ariela how about for you as an actor because I mean your Sochi is just one character in this in this crew that pulls off this heist. What was it like casting the movie and then like working with this group of actors like you said writing it you were thinking what if this are me and my friends planning to do something like this. But then what was it like to recreate that dynamic with your fellow actors in these roles. Well so we didn't really get a lot of rehearsal time but something that Jordan and Daniel and I did was

every time we would cast a person as whoever they were playing we would do a meeting with them and do a full pass of the script just tailoring the character to that person and what they wanted the character to be what they wanted to showcase what they felt passionately about in the movement or in the subject matter and just like even adding like their little like colloquialisms and all these little things that make everything just sound a lot more natural and real and so then by the time everyone got together and the stakes were so high once we were there we got so few takes I think everyone just got to kind of live in it and put as much of a little of themselves as they wanted into the characters and that's kind of how you get this dynamic and this chemistry without any rehearsal time. I want to ask about two other characters in this movie that make up this crew the first being Dwayne

and whether you like the inclusion of Dwayne as a character and his motivation for partaking in this endeavor was it important you do it like to render a character who didn't have the traditional like liberal progressive left wing view about like the oil industry or environmentalism or the climate or climate and what have you and like how did you go about writing that character? Absolutely I think that was a really important part of what we wanted to do and Dwayne was a very early character who came into it in part because we live in a country in a political situation in which so much multi-dimensional difference and differing opinion has been sort of flattened onto a very pat left right axis that is often more about cultural signifiers than it is about material interest and so part of what the movie what we wanted to have happen in the movie is a group of people who agreed that something should be done and agreed on what should be done come together and do it even if they didn't agree on why right

which is I think something that's very aspirational about politics in America these days because so often we end up fighting about why we think something that we often forget to just organize around material interests right and you know I grew up in Wyoming I grew up you know Dwayne is very similar to a lot of people that I grew up with and you know he's a person who doesn't he doesn't talk about climate change in the movie he talks about eminent domain he talks about pollution he talks about killing of cows property rights right and it's only very recently that conservatism in this country has has become has started to sort of loathe environmentalism right conservatism has a long history of conservationism and of stewardship over the land and the devolution of power over land rights to communities so I think representing that and saying that actually this is this can be a big tent movement in which even people who are not lefties

have very very good reasons to want to fight fossil fuel right and getting distracted by issues that are turned into cultural wedges is is not the way to move forward and the other character I wanted to bring up and by the way I think my favorite scene in the movie is Dwayne and the cop at the bar I don't want to give too much away but the interaction Dwayne and the cop at the bar was I think my favorite part of the movie very like very tense but very funny scene between the two of them and the other character that again sort of I think falls a little bit outside of this like left right dichotomy is Michael the bomb builder who at one point in the movie says I'm not interested in rebuilding anything and he's sort of the most enigmatic character in the movie because he seems most motivated by a kind of like by a by it like a rage based in his like childhood and family circumstances that just kind of wants to blow something up and you know like he just wants to strike back I mean like how do you guys view the Michael character in this film yeah I mean I think that like first off for us good luck who who played that character you know as I always said all the actors really you know rewrote their character and I think that for somebody who took that prompt to its

furthest extreme he he also worked as an executive producer on the film and he he took something that was very very different on the page and he was kind of like this character needs to be from North Dakota that's where my family's from they're these giant like off gas oil flame spires there they got the landscape the locals called the birthday cake we need to go out there and shoot like this is the image that is going to be the like central image of the film and he was right that was the central image of the movie and and you know I think that one of the other things that really inspired that character was we had another script consultant on the film a really amazing writer actor filmmaker activist named eyes copperset copperset who we consulted with early on in the screenwriting process and he you know we kind of had just spoken to him in terms of you know how should we how should we approach this character you know how should we be thinking about him and I was advised us two things he one buys dust that like you know one thing that movies about indigeneity get wrong is they kind of treated as a monolith and he was like you know you you want you know multiple perspectives multiple kinds of characters that are coming to this issue from from different places and so you know we have kind of we do that and the other thing that he said was that you know the people that he knows especially an activist circles who are kind of on the more extremist end of things he said something along the lines of you know their their rage is is kind of you know it's terrifying it's scary it's almost kind of uncontainable and I think that there's a lot of a lot of things to unpack in terms of why and and and the kind of

horrific abuses and lack of historical accountability that there's been for what you know native people have been subject to that I think has kind of led to that rage but I think that that was something that felt really important for us to represent and something that I think that for us brought to life and like both of this really honest and also kind of you know just like it was really honest but it's also just an extraordinary piece of acting and with the Michael character like on the you know they you mentioned the birthday cake and this like indelible image of these like you know spires of flames just shooting up out of the ground but it's not just unlike a reservation in North Dakota because Ariella, Sochi and Thea's character there's another scene that very much frames them in this like this massive cage of like oil refinery infrastructure in Long Beach California and of course Thea's character is you know I don't want to give too much against no spoilers here but environmental like cancers and like just diseases and like devastation caused by oil infrastructure is basically everywhere and much of the movie is kind of framed by these man-made artifices of like you know like thrumming cancerous energy. Well we also we filmed on a ranch in New Mexico too that had used to be used for westerns and then they built a big you know power substation for Facebook to run high power lines across it so nobody wanted to shoot westerns anymore and we were sort of like oh great more fossil fuel infrastructure and you know that was there and we were you know part of the movie happens around an abandoned coal mine and so yeah I think the point that Andreas makes that this infrastructure is absolutely everywhere is also true of the movie. Ariella you mentioned that you were a supervisor on the music for this movie because you talked a little bit about the original score it's this very cool like ambient synth score I mean anytime a synth is used in the movie people are going to make comparisons to

John Carpenter but what were you trying to like communicate with the original score in this movie and like how did you how did you seek to render that in music form? I agree that it's so cool and interesting that was not my job at all my job was I picked out the little songs that go in the soundtrack like the little background songs like here. You did an excellent job of that. I feel very proud of it there's some good needle drops in this movie but I was not responsible for the score that was our composer Gavin Griffith. I mean we all had our opinion I remember really wanting a really synthy Blade Runner-esque Tangerine Dream thing but that was ultimately all Gavin and Daniel as well. Yeah Gavin is an incredible composer who worked with Daniel and me on Cam as well and on every project Gavin really tries to give I think 120% of what he's capable of. At least every project that he does with this particular team it really seems to draw out of him some incredible work. And yeah he actually went down to set and recorded a bunch of sounds down in New Mexico and then sampled a lot of those things to help create some of these really lush and extraordinary ambient textures and percussion for the score.

So you have this sort of melding of the very artificial synth sounds and then also a lot of the more sort of earthy and organic sounds within the score as well. Okay so like the last question I want to ask all you is like this question of propaganda. Like if someone calls this movie a propaganda film would you declaim that or would you embrace it? Because I mean like the problem with propaganda is that if people realize something is propaganda then it doesn't work usually or it works less effectively. Whereas you know smuggling a ideological point of view in a narrative film could perhaps be more fruitful in terms of changing people's attitudes and behavior. So in terms of like making art do you think like it is an artist's role to avoid ever being didactic or propagandistic? Or do you think that given the world that we live in today propaganda is not something to be afraid of or to run away from being labeled as such? Yeah I think that's a complicated question and I think it's maybe a two part question.

I think that in terms of how we see this film I mean I think that the project started for me from a place of genuinely like wanting to make a piece of propaganda. But that was because I was in a very angry place and I think I wanted to feel like I was doing something. But ultimately I think that like what art does best is not prescribe a single thing to go and do. I think that's actually what a lot of bad art does and I think that what great art can do well is shift culture. And shifting culture means meeting a lot of different people in a lot of different places and shifting them all in a slight direction. And you can only do that if there's multiple points of entry for your film. And you can also only do that if you're asking a question not screaming a statement. And I think that that was a place that we got to in the development of this film you know in terms of like the conversations we were having and the ways that we were pushing back on each other.

Why make this movie? What's the purpose of making this movie etc. So I think that you know just because we don't see the movie as nakedly propagandistic doesn't mean that we don't see the movie as having an expressed political purpose. It does. I think that its political purpose is to ask the question is an escalation of tactics necessary to fight climate change. What are the consequences from that and how should the climate movement you know where does the climate movement go from here. It's hard because we've spent such a long time raising awareness and trying to get people to believe that this was happening but in a post covid world everybody has been touched by climate change. And so we need to move from awareness to action. And the movie is asking the question of how we do that and what that might look like.

It's also explicitly about eight characters who believe that the destruction of fossil fuel infrastructure is an act of self defense. And also I think a critical political and legal provocation in the sense that you know there are a lot of people out there who think that you know one of the things that needs to happen for systemic change to occur is for there to be a necessity defense for people to be able to claim self defense for active sabotage and that is something that can cause a legal and systemic reform and something the movie is doing is in a popular medium. It's allowing people to access. Not just that idea but also the human stories behind that idea in a way that like can make something that is otherwise an abstract legal concept. Relatable and emotional and so I think that there are a number of ways in which the movie operates politically and operates inside of a. Activism without either trying to be explicitly propagandistic for a single act nor without thinking that the movie itself making the movie or attending the movie is an act of activism. It's an act of cultural creation and that's valuable but it's different.

Okay. I think that's a great answer. I will leave it there. I would like to say it all you Dan Ariela Daniel and Jordan congratulations on the movie. You guys did an amazing job with it. I'm encouraging everyone to go see it so cheers to you. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Well great to be here. Thank you. Okay we are back. Matt and Felix join me now to which I say to you gentlemen. It's sugar man. It's just sugar. Ew. Ew.

It's sugar man. It's sugar man is it's the way of taking over the country. Kids in school, single moms, absentee fathers, people who work at think tanks called like the apple pie initiative. They're all saying it. Rod DeSantis has captured the nation's heart. Everyone is foregoing sugar and saying it's sugar man. Putting sales have collapsed. No one's eating pudding anymore.

Everyone is doing a weird diet called like the Troy diet. Eat like a Trojan. I've named after Helen of. Yeah. Yeah. Well. You know she launched a launched a thousand ships at that bot. And you think sugar did that?

No. Definitely not. Ew. Even fought that war. Ew. Sugar. It's a woman man. Ew.

I know. I bring this up just because I just saw right before we started recording that Rod DeSantis got married at Disney World. But he insisted that no Disney characters be present at his Disney wedding. Which I think is so funny. And shout out to everyone in my mentions who is now making me imagine. Rod DeSantis getting married like officiated by Uncle Remus and all the racist Disney characters that they brought out of the vault just for his wedding. He was like, no Donald Duck man. I want Uncle Remus.

If I get married, I would like to get married by Dr. Seuss's depictions of Japanese people. That's who I want to preside over my wedding. Why did he get married at Disneyland if he's so against the Disney characters? Because according to the Hill article about this, his wife Casey DeSantis, her family according to Ron is a Disney family. And he deferred to the bride, you know, as a good groom. But he was just like, no goofy man. So that makes it okay then that he was with the grooming company. And he was patronizing the Disney grooming facility.

I don't know. When he got married, Disney probably wasn't doing grooming. Yeah, this was during the Bush administration. You know, they were just a normal American entertainment company, you know, like this before they had gone wild. So then why does he have to specify that there were no characters there? Because he wants to, he doesn't, he wants to think to make people to think he's cool. I didn't get, I did not get married next to goofy. Just want everyone to know he was not standing there in a tuxedo.

Well, I said my vows. Yeah. Okay. So he got married to Casey in 2009. You know, Disney was not woke then. But like, I agree with Matt, I do think this is like an I didn't inhale thing. Yeah. Yeah.

He's like, okay, I did get married at Disney. But like, the Donald Duck was not there with his ass, ass hanging out. Ass protruding look disgusting. I mean, if you get married at Disney, I don't even think that's an option. Like they probably just tell you like, okay, don't get married here. You're either going to have Mickey Mouse here or you're not getting married here. Yeah. Honestly, that's got to be a red flag for the security squad.

Yeah. They want to, they want to get married here, but they don't want to have any characters. What the fuck are they doing? I mean, they have, Mickey observes the right of Prima Nocta on all couples married. The Disney Magic Kingdom amusement park. Well, just like, if you're getting married at Disney, you know, presumably Donald Duck is a major part of your life. Yeah.

Like I should be. Yeah. Well, I don't believe him. I do not believe him again. Yeah. Again. He's just not, I can't take him at his word for anything. Well, he says like, there were no, there were no characters.

I didn't want like, you know, goofy to be in my wedding pictures, but like, hey, journalists out there, find photos of Ron DeSantis's wedding. Because I will bet dollars to donuts that there won't be the characters that are in the full like cartoon, like mascot outfits. But Gaston, Jasmine, I bet they showed up. I bet they were on the list. No, there was there was probably tons of pictures in the DeSantis family fault of Rod DeSantis with like lesser Disney creations, like the aristocrats.

They were all there for the aristocats. The aristocrats are there too. Just diarying all over everything and fucking and sucking children. Well, yeah. Just once again, that continues to be on my mind. What I want to talk about in the latter half of the show is our president, Joe Brandon, having the time of his life in the motherland. The Joe Biden's trip to Ireland was great because Matt, you said this that Joe Biden's

Irish fixation and his like playing up his Irish roots and his it's the best bit he has because it's totally fraudulent, but it drives Angloids insane. It's true seeing some great reactions to this recently. They get so mad about it. So at this, yeah, this transparent plastic battery, but you can't you can't argue with those real results of people getting insanely mad at him. Nor can you argue with the footage that I saw. We are standing on Chris this weekend and he showed me footage of Joe Biden's like

like entrance to this, this public event in Mayo, Ireland, where he came out to the dropkick Murphy's shipping off to Boston. And the crowd, I mean, first of all, I think half the nation of Ireland was in the crowd and they were lit as fuck. This was like this had a better pop than anything that Coachella this weekend, which I'm just ambling out to the dropkick Murphy's departed style. I think we should switch presidents. He would be so much happier as president of Ireland.

And then we could get their charming little leprechaun president, Michael Higgins. But you know, Provo Joe, Provo Joe added again, you know, because like the thing is he took this like, you know, whistle stop tour of the UK and he was in the he was in like England proper for about 10 seconds and then like totally snuffed Rishi. Did you see the footage of him just brushing past him to shake hands with a guy in a uniform? He probably thought the guy in the uniform was like the head of Great Britain or the King or something. But Rishi was there at the tarmac and Joe Biden just gave him the psych.

He just just absolutely dubbed them. There have been some very good, some very good responses to it in the British press. I'm going to get to the one for our reading series this the second half of the show. And this is on top of the fact that he has chosen not to attend King Charles's coronation, which again, they're they're very pissed off about. But you know what? It's like Eisenhower didn't go to Queen Elizabeth's coronation. And we sort of fought a whole war to like not bounce grape before these inbred crowds.

So I mean, I like just how offended, how offended the UK are by supposedly being snubbed by Biden is really funny. And then the fact that he spent most of his time in Northern Ireland and then Ireland, Ireland proper and it's driving. It's driving the Brits insane. One even is going so far as to say, have we forgotten 9-11? Because Joe Biden self-eated up with Jerry Adams in like, you guys see that picture? Yeah.

Very upsetting lighting in that. Yeah. I don't know what filter they had on that. It's a blinding image. But Joe had a, he was in full grin. He was in full grin mode, hanging out with Jerry. And, you know, people in the UK are not happy about that because look, they got to learn. They got to learn some some day somehow that this shit is over, that they are no longer

a first rate nation. Germany is the most powerful country in Europe. This special relationship bullshit, it's coming. It's a one way street. We're not returning your phone calls. We're not going on vacation with you. You may have read. It's over.

Yeah. Just detach yourself already. Fall apart. Go back to the discreet nation's hell. Chop up England back into like the five kingdoms from before Arthur. Just do it. Become the bog monsters that you always were in your hearts. But the crowning achievement of the British press' anger at Provo Joe comes courtesy of

Brendan O'Neill and spikedonline.com with the reading series for today's episode. Joe Biden's woke conquest of Ireland. The president is the president is using his Irish identity to bully Brexit Britain. Oh, no. The bullying Brexit Britain. Bullying Brexit Britain. I mean, I'm sorry. And a pop for Big Ben's bell.

I love the idea of Ireland bullying the UK with the American president. I mean, it's funny. But to the 9 11 thing, Felix, I love the idea of Ireland doing 9 11. And you said that they they did 9 11 by lying about a shortcut. Yeah, they were like, there's a quicker way to Boston. Just let us in the cockpit. And they were like, OK, this is a yeah, Brendan O'Neill's in full froth about the woke conquest of Ireland.

And he begins power often wears the mask of weakness in the 21st century. Think of those strapping angry trans women who cry victimhood even as they harass real women or privileged students in the luxury surrounds of Oxford and Yale heaping pressure on hapless administrators to decolonize the curriculum so that they might be spared the pain of reading Shakespeare, Chaucer and other long dead white men or Hillary Clinton depicting herself as a victim of sexism, even as she wielded her extraordinary power to brand half her compatriots as deplorables. Julie Birchell called Julie Birchell calls them cry bullies, a hideous hybrid of victim and

victor weeper and walloper, which is a great description of the UK. I mean, is there anyone playing victim and it's true that they got away with a global heist of trillions of dollars of wealth from the rest of the world. And then they get to just sit on it. But because they're not in charge anymore, they also insist that you feel bad for them. I mean, it's so like it's so ingrained over there that they I mean, they're a little bit different because I think they actually do enjoy misery. Oh, yeah.

They love it. It's a highlight of their history. But it's yeah, but hiding out the fucking tunnel getting blown up, but sort of like misery on their terms. Right. Yeah, one of the most preferred things I've ever seen was during COVID. Remember Captain Tom? Who is that again?

Captain Tom was this like 100 fucking year old Royal Air Force veteran who was doing laps on his walker in his backyard to raise money for the NHS. And he was made a celebrity overnight, presumably just because like it was obvious he was going to die soon. And like all the Brits were just working themselves into a frenzy, seeing their one last like living vestige of glory die. They were so excited for it. And when it finally happened, they all had to, they were all delighted.

They basically came when that guy's heart gave out. Brennan O'Neill continues. Now there's President Biden, the most powerful cry bully in the world. I mean, once again, this is just like, I know he's the crying like, like snowflake week, like college student cry bullies, which, you know, like, you know, there's a certain impact, but Britain complex, just crying that the president of the United States is bullying them. Really?

But like, but like the Joe, he's saying like Joe Biden is like one of the anti-gamergate people. Yeah. Yeah. They started a gamergate because I had a bad breakup, man. I didn't tell anyone to review my game. It's called, it's called depression quest. It's a cute little game.

Joe Biden's game was called confusion quest. You got it. It's all right. You're waking up. Mission one, find out where you are. Yeah. The president Biden, the most powerful cry bully in the world. He's taken the grievance machine global.

He speaks of his, I mean, once again, like England took the slavery machine global. So maybe like, like calm down with, maybe like, calm down off this cross, Brendan. But he says here, he speaks of his historic pain, even as he impresses his imperial power across the earth. It's like, what? Once again, just bitter that it's not his job anymore. Sorry, Brendan, but you are, you are a columnist for an also ran country. Like you might as well be writing for spiked online Hungary.

Like, you know, like get over yourself here. It's not the empire is no longer yours. And yes, Joe Biden is in charge of it. And he's using wokeness to bully the world. He says he's witnesses visit to Ireland. He's hyping up his status as a descendant of the poor Irish who fled ferriman famine era Ireland on coffin ships. The cry bit in order that he might add some identitarian weight to his bossing around

of Britain and Ireland in the here and now the bully bit. He poses as a victim of imperialism. His ancestors fled the old country because of what the Brits had been doing. He once said, even as he engages in imperialism, behold the weaponization of Irishness, the deployment of that self pitting identity to the cause of fortifying American power in the world. I mean, yeah. Americans are huge fucking whiny cry babies.

They fetishize their identity. I do like the idea though, the telling like some Patrick McPatrick motherfucker in Long Island with an entire house painted with a blue lives matter flag that he's woke. I think that would go well. Yeah. I'm like, that's it. Everybody is that including you.

This article is the thing you're crying. But that is because everyone has forfeited any responsibility over anything. Everybody is going to keep accumulating, you know, the power, the wealth that they have due to their position. But of course they don't want to be responsible for any of the bad stuff that goes with that. So they'll create a narrative where they're actually the victims of everything. Yes, you've cracked the code.

Congratulations. That's how at the end of history, we launder this, our privileges that come from this machine that we have long since lost the ability to have any control over. And also, I mean, before the before the Irish were the, you know, people who fetishize their colonized past and then became, you know, like what, what, like 80% of the joint chiefs are Irish. They became like the, the beach heads of imperialism. For that it was the Scottish. Yeah.

Scottish never shut up about their stupid bullshit and then became like the fucking shock troops of the British Empire. It's true. I mean, Scottish people love to talk about being oppressed, but then ask them why everyone in Jamaica has a Scottish last name and they get really quiet. Yeah. We got oppressed. Oh, we got dominated by England. Oh, what's that? You need a core of NCOs to scream at conscripts until they go and bayonet a bunch of Indians.

We got, we got you chief. Yeah. James Bond was Scottish. The real James Bond. Sean Connery. Yeah. But also to this point about like, oh, America is deploying Irishness to fortify its power in the world. Well, Brendan, I got news for you. We better use something to fortify our power in the world because if it's not us, England is, like I said, like, might as well be hungry. So, you know what I'm saying? Like, you should be glad someone is doing it.

I think it's just funny that someone's doing it to England via Ireland. But are you right? Yeah. I mean, you guys are not in deep one anymore. You know, you've been relegated. Like, there's a term you'll understand. You don't even go here anymore. You're right. Biden's Irish jaunt feels like a new kind of geopolitics. Let's call it identitarian imperialism.

He's just upset it's not imperialism, imperialism anymore. But he goes, power is often underwritten by identity today. As a queer person, as a black trans woman, as a descendant of slaves, people say in solemn preference to their political statements. It's an assertion of authority argues Kwame Anthony Appiah. What they're really saying says Appiah is that as a member of that social group, I have experiences that lend my remarks special way. We've seen power be made contingent on identity everywhere from campus to the workplace.

So why not US foreign policy too? As a survivor of the intergenerational trauma of Irish suffering, Biden essentially says before shaking his mighty fist at Brexit, Britain. And like, look, I mean, it is funny. Like, you know, using the epigenic trauma of the Irish famine, it's like, you know, hang to make you slightly more interesting as a white person in America. Is a phenomenon that we've talked about made fun of quite a bit on this show. But there's point about this idea that people use their identity to accrue for themselves

an unwarranted authority is pretty funny because I don't know Brendan O'Neill's opinion on the British monarchy, but that's pretty much their, that's their bit. It's like literally their identity, like their fucking birth certificate is what gives them literal authority over people's lives. So I don't know, maybe Brendan O'Neill isn't a fan of the royal family. He probably isn't because they're probably woke too. But he says here, shaking his mighty fist at Brexit, Britain. Biden is zipping between Belfast and Luth and Dublin.

He's mixing politics and genealogy. In Belfast, he pretty sternly advised all parties to sign up to the Windsor framework, the new British EU deal that would keep Northern Ireland beholden to certain rules of the EU's single market. In County Louth, he went to Loth or whatever, he went to the pub with his fifth cousins. This gives a sense of how historically distant his links to Ireland are. The average person has 17,000 fifth cousins. Along the way, he's not missed the opportunity to remind folk of the suffering of his forefathers.

My people left during the famine, he said at the start of his speech in Dundalk. Not Dundalk, Maryland, unfortunately. I hate his woke bullshit going around talking about chicken bosses and discovery zone. Yeah, my fifth cousin's a slave. And yeah, if you want to buy him, just hit my DM. I'm trying to sell my cousin. He's going to sell my fifth cousin. They left everything behind, he said.

No one doubts the awfulness of the famine. I dread to think how many of my ancestors perished in it, but it was nearly two centuries ago. Why dwell on it? You're dwelling on the British Empire, asshole. Fuck off! Why dwell on it? In defining himself by a long gone calamity, Biden is embracing the woke fashion for presenting oneself as an heir to historic pain,

an inheritor of the mantle of victimhood. One of those people whose views carry special weight. Everywhere you look today, people are fashioning a victim identity from the suffering of their ancestors. Willow students say they bear the scars of the colonial exploitation of their forefathers. Commenters of color write how hard it is to endure the historical inhumanity of slavery. Unable to find a convincing case for a victimhood in their own comfortable learned lives, they plunder the agony of their ancestors instead. Biden's doing something similar.

A gushing CNN piece on his visit to Ireland says his ancestors' pain left an indelible impression on him. He is seemingly haunted by the image of the famine-era coffin shifts that left Ireland for America, so-called because so many of the passengers died on route. In his memoir, he even refers to life's difficulties as the Irishness of life. Just stop cashing in, stop cashing in on the past, says columnist for Spike Dunlin. And just as he claims, just as claims to historical suffering underwrite power dynamics on campuses and in the cultural sphere, so they do in Biden's woke conquest of Ireland too. Pro-Biden commenters gleefully insist that his identity, that Irishness, that pain increases his power in Anglo-Irish affairs.

The president's heritage is a form of soft power, says the observer, and that soft power will be on full display in Ireland. Biden's touting of his Irish roots, his leaning on personal lore, should add weight to his insistence that Britain and Ireland come to a satisfactory post-Brexit arrangement, says Bloomberg. But he keeps harming on Brexit Britain. People were ganging up on Brexit Britain. It's just like, well, you know, you get what you pay for, man. Like, if you want to go it alone, then go it alone. It's not fucking complaining about- Oh, wait a minute. Oh, no. If we're by ourselves, then we are literally just this absolutely moribund economic unit

that should by rights be fucking paved over, sold for fucking scrap. Like, if it wasn't for, it wasn't for harkening to days of yore and tradition and all this bullshit, there would be no reason for anybody to ever think about England again. The European Union for the UK, it was like Vic Mackie getting to join ICE with full immunity after decades of crimes. And they looked at that offer. They looked at that. They were like, OK, you could do this. All is forgiven. You get our run off. You get to just keep this high standard of living forever. And they said, no, we don't we don't like the color of the passports.

Yeah. Now they're like, what the fuck? Everyone is treating us like a country that has nothing to offer. What's going on here? Devin, they've ever heard of McVitie's digestive biscuits? That's a thing to base an economy on. O'Neill continues, even ostensibly anti-imperialist voices have welcomed the irony of a descendant of the Irish famine, now having the authority to reprimand the nation that ruled Ireland during the famine, the Brits. I mean, I guess that's ironic in like a poetic justice kind of way, because if there's any country on the planet that deserves to have imperialism done to them, it's the UK.

And hopefully done by Ireland. That would be a funny thing to happen. But you know, if Biden does it and whatever, you take what you can get. In 2020, when Biden was bristling at the prospect of a hard Brexit, Emma DeBiri, the Irish author of What White People Can Do Next, celebrated the circularity of the fact that the son of a famine now has the authority to thwart Britain's Brexit ambitions and its continued disregard for Ireland's fate. There you have it. Imperial interference ain't so bad when it comes dressed in the finery of identity. I mean, no, imperialism isn't so bad when it's done to British people.

That's what we're getting at here. Is it ironic? Perhaps. It's also funny and justified. He says, America's arrogant urge to meddle in the affairs of smaller nations, in this case, Brexit Britain, is forgivable, it seems, when it's underwritten by the cult of the victim, rather than the real politic of power. And make no mistake, America's authority to thwart Brexit Britain's ambitions in DeBiri's words is immense. Biden is known to be anti-Brexit. He and other leading Dems have threatened to block trade deals in the UK if we dare to pursue a hard Brexit. In other words, Brexit, the complete leaving of the EU.

In Belfast this week, Biden said that the US would invest $6 billion in Northern Ireland if the Power Sharing Assembly is restored. But that can only happen if the Democratic Unionist Party buys into the Windsor framework with the stipulation that the EU will still play a considerable role in Northern Ireland's affairs. Oh, no. Oh, no, the Democratic Unionist Party is being subjected to colonial rule from a foreign power? Fuck! Oh, God, I can't think of anything more immoral and unjustified historically. It's also a minor quibble, but is it like, okay, so he's saying they're doing, you know, woke imperialism instead of calculating real politic, but you're making it sound like they're just doing real politic with a veneer of wokeism. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is it?

This is every fucking spiked article I've ever read. It just, like, it repeats its thesis nine or ten times during the course of the essay while refuting it. Continuing, it says here, if this is imperial blackmail, no. If Washington were to make the investment of billions of dollars in an African nation contingent on that nation's willingness to acquiesce to a globalist agenda, to an American agenda, we would instantly recognize it as an intolerable colonial-style pressure. No, they do that. What are you talking about? That's all they ever have done. After they took the African colonies off of your hands, that's how they maintain the colonial relationship afterwards.

That's just how this shit works, homeboy. You just don't have the juice to prevent it from happening anymore to you. So sorry. Yeah, can you imagine if America did something like dangle IMF loans in front of Ecuador? On the contingency that they hand over Julian Assange and then use an imperial partner in the UK to apprehend him? That sounds like imperial blackmail to me. Yeah. But you know what? It's not done with the veneer of wokeness and identitarian politics. So, I mean, nobody notices it. It just goes, I unremarked upon, or at least it should be.

But it's okay, it seems, when it does it in Northern Ireland. Why? Because Biden's ancestors boarded coffinships 170 years ago? The president has carried out a woke conquest of Ireland. He has deployed the soft power of his identity. I read this sentence ten times already. Shut the fuck up! Who is this fucking guy? God.

He says, okay, here. Behold, victim imperialism, cry bullying of foreign policy. I'm skipping this. Are you getting paid by a word? What the fuck is this? This is so fucking bad. You would get rejected from a community college with this. This is terrible. It would just be like, said this, redundant.

Already said this. And he says, and Ireland loses out because the more it becomes a patsy state of the globalist elites, whether Washington or Brussels, the less real sovereignty it will enjoy over its political destiny. That entire country is just a fucking tax avoidance haven. That's all it is. It has no sovereignty. What are you fucking talking about? I like the idea that Ireland, one of the smallest poorest countries in the EU,

would look at what being a patsy of the US empire did for the Great Britain, and not just think, hey, maybe it's not so bad compared to what there were. That's a higher... Ireland, I think, has surpassed the UK when we look this up. And also, I think I can guess where he's going with this paragraph about sort of woke imperialism, imposing global homo on Ireland. But Homi, they voted to legalize abortion 15 years ago. That shit's already happened.

I think he's the one who has this plastic patty stereotype in his head of some washerwoman with 30 fucking kids being like, oh, the president's gone woke, isn't it? Okay, here it is. So in 2021, Irish GDP per capita was over $100,000. In the UK, it was under 50. So Ireland is blowing the shit off of the UK in a per capita basis. So once again, the reason people are kind of letting England sink is not because that they've been captured by the woke mind virus.

It's because England is a fucking bad bet. I'm just going to skip ahead to the end here rather than read the same sentence another 10 times. But he says, the irony of Irish Boyden fancies himself as an instrument of vengeance for the historic wrongs committed by Britain in Ireland. But actually, he's reduced Ireland to a playpen for his own identitarian preening and an outpost for American influence in Europe. It was bad when Ireland was a famine-ravaged colony that Catherine Roach and James Finnegan were forced to leave. Those are Bidens, like great, great ancestors.

It will also be bad now if it becomes the personal moral fiefdom of their great-grandson. Brendan O'Neill spiked online. Once again, the effort to make Biden into the woke identity monger, he's mongering his Irish identity, but that's hardly woke. In America, that's called being a cop. He's playing it up for the Irish people. They love it. Irish people in America still love it.

It doesn't fit the mold of the thing that he's trying to make it seem like. Well, the definition of wokeness in everybody's going with is just taking an aspect of a broader phenomenon and pathologizing that. This is a good way of showing that, because in an American context, you would never, considering who likes to fetishize their Irish-American roots, I mean, fucking Peter King was funneling money to the IRA in the 80s. He would not in any world call them woke, but if you're in England, it has the same hallmarks as the whiny identity politics of other people.

And it's like, yeah, because it all is the same thing. It's all that we have. All the same thing is cry-bullying, special-pleading whining from a position of privilege. Because if you didn't have one, you wouldn't have a voice that anyone would be able to hear in the first place. Ireland's gone woke. Armored cars and tanks and guns came to detransition our sons, but every man assigned mail at birth must then be hind. The other men assigned mail at birth behind the wire.

That's my impression of woke Ireland, folks. But yeah, that's it on Provojo's jaunt across to the Emerald Isle. And thank you once again to Brendan O'Neill of Spiked Online. And thank you to the other people who found this article and found the other Brendan O'Neill article where he said, if you were raped by Jimmy Saville, maybe don't come forward. Because it's woke. It's woke, you see. All right, well, that does it for me. That does it for us today. I want to thank again the filmmakers of How to Blow Up a Pipeline

and recommend that you check out that movie if you're looking for something to watch. Chris, is the 9 o'clock showing of In the Mouth of Madness sold out? I'm almost positive it is. I haven't checked. But I'll keep putting that link in. That screening is next week. Matt, do you want to just do the wrap up stream at your regular Friday time, like 4 p.m. Eastern, 1 p.m. Pacific? Sure. OK, great. We're going to do a Hell on Earth wrap up stream

on twitch.tv slash Chapo Trap House this Friday at 4 p.m. EST, 1 p.m. PST. We'll be taking questions from the chat. We'll be taking questions that you called in. We'll be giving some final thoughts. We'll be issuing corrections and revisions and just chatting about the whole series as a whole. And that'll be live on our Twitch channel. And then I'll release it as a podcast later. And also next week will be the last episode of Hell on Earth and the first episode of Movie Mindset.

So the hits keep coming from the Chapo Bonus content. All right. Cheers, gang. Till next time. Bye-bye. Bye. Bye. Hello. Mary, I see light. Hello, Mayo.