Chapo Trap House - BONUS - Beltway Garage: Reboot feat. Branko Marcetic (3/15/20)

Episode Date: March 15, 2020

Defying quarantine Matt and Virgil go to back to work tuning up electoral politics. Can Bernie still win? Will we all die? Does Biden know how to open PDF? Our greased up pundits go under the hood to find the answers to those questions and more. Later they speak with Branko Marcetic, writer for Jacobin and In These Times and author of Yesterday's Man: The Case Against Joe Biden. Don't bother buying tickets for our NYC live show because it will be cancelled, unless you're just really into getting refunds. (Also the Roger Rabbit screening is cancelled, but you could have guessed that.)

This is Virgil Texas, senior medical correspondent of Jappo Trap House, coming to you from an hermetically sealed podcasting chamber. There are six centimeters of plexiglass that separate me from any alien pathogens, multiplying in society at large. I have with me a gallon of soylent, an Evian water filter, Wi-Fi, and 1600 rolls of toilet paper, a three-month supply that should last me the duration of the current pandemic. The only portal between this isolation cell and the outside world is a quadruple-locked security door that can only be opened by a 19-character alphanumeric code, known only

to me and one other individual who is proscribed under the threat of contract law from revealing- What the fuck, Matt? What? What are you doing in the podcasting containment chamber? I'm eating your fucking food. It's delicious. How did you get in here? The door was open.

I just walked in. That's a fire exit. You're not supposed to open a fire exit. Well, I mean, tell me. The alarm will set. It's a sign that says the alarm will sound. And none went off. And this is some delicious ramen.

You're supposed to heat the sign and not open it. No. You know, ramen's actually pretty good raw. I don't know if you guys have ever tried it that way. It's pretty tasty. Have you interacted with anyone who has the symptoms of the COVID-19 virus? I mean, you know, just last night, I was at a spin the bottle party. Everybody seemed like they were doing pretty good, a few coughs and stifles.

Social distancing. Yeah. I'm good. Oh, God. That better be a dry cough. Can I have some of these grapefruit? Chris. I know that you don't.

What did you get here? Oh, I'm always here. I am your shadow. I am gathering content in the night as you sleep. He's your dark uncle. Is that why Matt has a microphone? Did you give him a microphone? Well, I figured since we were all here, we might as well do a.

Let's pot it up. Let's pot it up. Well, it was a nice virus proof content. By the way, you're out of toilet paper. It was a nice virus proof content room while it lasted. I guess we're all getting the fucking disease that kills Republicans now. Darn it. It's great.

That's just great. I was going to do a six hour exegesis of the first chapter of Samuel Richardson's masterwork, Clarissa. But since you braying animals are here, we might as well pop open the hood of democracy. Take another visit to the Beltway Garage. Welcome back to the Beltway Garage, where we rotate the tires of public opinion and sell you the shoddy brake pads of conventional wisdom with me as always as patient zero Matt Christmas later, we will be joined by Bronco Marcha teach, author of yesterday's man, the

case against Joe Biden, the only communist besides Lenin, whose book is doing great right now. Let's get right into the state of the race. Last Tuesday, Idaho, North Dakota, Washington, Michigan, Missouri and Mississippi voted in the Democratic primary and Joe Biden won at least four of those six states. In Michigan, the site of Bernie Sanders dramatic pull defying victory in 2016. The former vice president triumphed over the center from Vermont by 16 points, winning every single county in the Wolverine state.

Biden has an estimated 905 pledge delegates to Sanders 741, 1,991 are needed to win on the first ballot at the purely hypothetical Democratic convention in Milwaukee. It's going to be a teleconference is Bernie Sanders still in this race, I mean, obviously we're not going to die, but I wasn't, I mean, honestly, the thing that I am more hooked up on than hung up on than even the pandemic shit is just what's going to happen to the economy. I mean, when people, I mean, this is a absolute collect, we're looking at a demand collapse that's basically unprecedented in the modern era, and I do not know how we're going to

respond to that. I don't know anything. One is going to respond to anything. And then there is the real fact that you're likely to see a healthcare system is about to get a stress test that is not capable of withstanding. And I don't know how we respond to that either. I don't know anything. I have stopped thinking more than an hour ahead of my life.

That is as far as I am planning or predicting anything happening because I do not, I do not, I don't know. I don't know what's going to happen. What's interesting about the quarantine measures going into place and many workplaces closing down is the implicit admission that most jobs are just paperwork factory bullshit jobs that aren't necessary. Oh, dip. Oh, that's fine.

Just stay at home. It doesn't matter. Whereas this is indicating to us what the actual socially necessary work is, which is anyone working in transportation or grocery stores or at electric companies, utilities and things like that, and of course the medical sector. These are the jobs necessary in order to, how do you say it, keep civilization a thing that exists. Yeah, that thing.

The civilization, that stuff. But otherwise, it seems that most people I know are just like, yeah, my bullshit graphic design job. They said, you're not socially necessary or that you can work from home and it turns out that's not a big deal. And it's fine. And the reason they don't want you to do that is all for HR, like a panopticon reasons, not having anything to do with the necessity of the job.

I mean, that's kind of like the biggest complaint that people have is like, I don't, why do I have to go to these meetings? I have to go into a fucking office. It's pointless. I can do my job. It's, you don't really want to point it out because for a lot of people, they realize, well, I get paid for eight hours and it takes me one hour to do my day's labor. And I feel like if I said that, some gears would start turning in these, like, you know,

my boomer fucking boss's head. Yeah. And they'd be like, oh, I'll never mind. One industry, you know, I'm very concerned about as an entertainer is the entertainment industry, which has long been the recession proof industry. We still, we still need, we still need movies. We still need laughs, folks. In the dark times, that's when we need them more than ever.

But anyone who works in live entertainment right now is screwed. And honestly, I don't know, I don't know how long it's going to be before we see another theatrically released film. That's a good point too. Well, I mean, you know, you can do a lot with CGI. I just mean like movie theaters, no one's, that's not going to be a thing for a while. And those places aren't really rolling in money. No, they tend to have pretty narrow margins.

If you are a, not even just an independent movie theater, even like a corporate chain, you don't have enough money to last two weeks without income. No, you need people buying those $500 popcorns. And the same goes for, you know, any number of, you know, small theaters or comedy clubs, like any live performance space in New York, often these are, you know, these are nonprofits and they rely on fundraisers and the largesse of benefactors to stay open in the first place. Like they will all shut down permanently if their landlords keep charging them rent unless there is an actual rent suspension just for these enterprises.

I think it's fair to say that we're entering uncharted territory as well. If they close down every bar in New York, which honestly, they really absolutely need to do that yesterday. I don't know, man, I don't think we're containing anything at this point. I mean, the same would go for every bar. I mean, honestly, most restaurants are the same. If you're a restaurant, you don't have more than, you can't stay open without income for more than two weeks.

No, there's going to have to be some sort of massive rent and debt jubilee, of course, temporary as for the duration of the emergency. Now, we're going to see some amazing lifeboat socialism, but they're going to tell us, don't get used to the shit. This is just for now. Even though if we'd had this, it would have prevented this from happening, we're going to get rid of it as soon as the crisis has passed. What's interesting is, you know, so the Democrats late last night just passed the coronavirus

emergency bill that provides paid leave, which they wanted to make a permanent entitlement, and probably said no, and so they backed down. It provides paid leave, sick leave to every worker in the country temporarily, but with two big carve-outs. One is companies that employ over 500 people are exempt. Oh, you mean the ones that have the most employees? 52%, 54%? That's about half the country, half the workforce.

And the company is richest, most probably likely to be able to afford that kind of thing? The other carve-out was the Trump administration would be able to give waivers to anyone who employs fewer than 50 people, meaning that 80% of the workforce would not be covered in this bill. So the two exempt groups are if your company owns, has more than 500 workers, or if you have a Mar-a-Lago membership. That's those two type of companies that are exempt from this, good to know. Yeah, no, we're seeing firsthand our awful, bombed-out, shredded safety net not being

there when people start falling off the fucking tightrope, and we're going to try, there's going to be this desperate attempt to like, cherry-rig one, and I'm really frankly happy that this process of sort of improvising our way out of this massive crisis is going to be first in the hands of Donald Trump, and then maybe next year, fingers crossed, Joe Biden. I mean, either way, I feel like we're in good hands. Joe Biden, who is championing at the bit to slash what's left of our social safety net, even now.

Yeah. How do we get owned so bad? Have you thought about that, Virgil, have you considered this? I'm not owned. I've never been owned. Well, I mean, you did say, and I mostly agreed with you throughout the year of 2019 and even earlier this year that Biden was not a threat, that Biden wasn't going to be a contender. And it looked like a good bet after Iowa and New Hampshire, where he campaigned vigorously,

whatever counts for vigorously for him. And when voters met him, they said, no, we don't want that. Give me the rat. So how did he own us so badly, Virgil? How do you think he owned us so, so badly? The thing is, and we talk about this when we're off mic, the thing is, it's not Joe Biden owning anyone because Joe Biden is rapidly losing sentience. Yes.

No, he's not. He's the... Smelling toast and drawing clocks. Yeah. He is the vessel of the donor class and the Democratic Party elites who woke up to the threat of Bernie Sanders more quickly than we anticipated and had a sway over the other candidates for the nomination that was stronger than we anticipated to wit that they were able to compel Pete Buttigieg, who placed second in Iowa and second in New Hampshire,

coming way from behind, to drop out before Super Tuesday, which is utterly unprecedented. Yeah. And I mean, I've read that there was... that the guy who helped make that happen in the few hours before Super Tuesday was one Barf Sacco-Crumbo himself, Barack Hussein Obama, which honestly, kudos to him because we talked on the show about how he was sort of boxed in publicly by his fear of appearing less influential than he was, than he was thought to be by endorsing somebody who then didn't do well. God bless him.

He figured out a way around that, and that was to do it all behind the scenes. I kept having this grim fantasy of the call between Barack Obama and Pete Buttigieg, which as soon as he hears Barack's voice, he just glitches out and it's like, uh, hello, Pete. This is Barack and Pete's like, uh, hello, Barack. This is Pete. Uh, Pete, I'm going to need you to drop out, uh, Barack, I'm going to need you to drop out. Excuse me, Pete.

Excuse me. There must have. They can't. There must have just been feedback in the background, like when you call a radio station, but you don't turn your radio off. Uh, it really does remind you that Barack Obama is, I'd say the most, the single biggest villain of the 21st century, uh, from what he did in terms of taking all of the energy and anger at the collapsing, uh, system, uh, during 2008 and cynically leveraging it for

his personal success, uh, while knowing that he was going to be recapitalizing every bad actor who made it happen in the first place and slather a bunch of hopey change bullshit on top of that. And then to hand off the presidency after spending eight years assuring credulous libs that he had a plan and that you couldn't see it and that the next move was going to be the coup de gras. I got this. The next move, the 11th dimensional chess checkmate ended up being fucking Donald Trump

winning the presidency. And then he responded to that by saying, uh, well, good luck guys, I'm going to be a parasailing with Jeffrey Epstein. Have fun. And he's just been off the grid, but not off the grid enough to not intervene to prevent Bernie from being the nominee. Instead, he decided to intervene on behalf of a man who he knows for a fact is senile and not up to the job just to stop Bernie.

Here's what we, he's the most joker fight of all of us. All, I feel like all those people, all those tea party people who were carrying, uh, around those signs with, uh, Obama and the joker makeup in 2009 that we all thought were just like, Oh boy, look at these guys. No, they were the rightest people of all he's, he is the joker of joker. He is the jokie joker, the tooty jokie, uh, just wants the world to fucking burn and, and well, and make a bunch of fucking money off Netflix deals. It's really breathtaking.

He is, he is the worst man. So take a Bob Rock. Well done. Here, if we want to watch the tape, the Bernie Sanders campaign had a strategy going into this race. We, we intubated what that strategy was and it made a lot of sense. We're going to win the early States, three out of four at least, and then ride a wave of momentum going into super Tuesday where we're treating California as an early state

and we're going to organize that early before anyone else has staff there. And they met every benchmark in that strategy. They planned it and then they did it and they won those States, but they didn't get the momentum and that's like one law of politics that has just gone out the window. Well, in this case, that was helped by the fact that the entire media was in a concerted effort to deny him any kind of momentum from it. And I think we all sort of, I guess naively assumed that the mere fact of these victories would provide all the momentum, but no, it turns out that mere facts don't mean anything

if they are being always blunted and questioned and undermined by a, a universal chorus that is all most people who vote in democratic primaries are going to hear. And the hope was, and I talked about this before Iowa, and I talked about this when people were tearing their hair out about the bias against Bernie, that the Bernie's strategy was going to require reaching out to people who aren't captured by the democratic party either because they're part of its patriotic network or because they've basically signed off their, signed over their brain, their political brain to say MSNBC and let them do their thinking for them, which is what most of these people have done.

And if those people were the only, or those people were the predominant number of voters, Bernie was going to lose. Bernie needed to get people who were not in that context. And the tragedy of campaign has been that he has not been able to get enough of those people. And at the same time, there has been a suburban insurgency, once Bernie won South Carolina or once Bernie won Nevada, and it looked like he was a threat of people of those suburbanites, those college educated suburbanites, the ones that Chuck Schumer coveted so much in 2016.

Just having a huge spike in turnout in order to defeat Bernie. So I think also that there has been a realignment since 2016 that we have underestimated. And to wit that, non-college educated white voters in places like the Midwest who voted for Obama twice and then flipped to Trump, they left the party permanently. And that was the base of Bernie Sanders campaign last time around. And those voters just were like, no, we're full MAGA now. Bernie was the guy who stood a chance of keeping them in the Democratic Fold in 2016 or clawing some of them back in 2020.

Now, if he's not the nominee, that's out the window. But the other one is, and the counterbalance there is obviously, like you were talking about, an influx of reactionary, wealthy, college educated white suburbanites who normally are Republican and they certainly are far to the right on fiscal issues, but who are for various reasons appalled by Trump and his bluishness. And they are the never Trump reactionary sickos who are now entering the Democratic primaries and entering the Democratic Fold, at least for now. And they were not balanced out by new entrants who were not part of that.

Because the whole gamble here is that the Bernie campaign was always a gamble just by the fact that it was an inversion of the traditional mechanism by which you try to cheat power, which is you have a social movement and then a political campaign is something that emerges out of the social movement. Well, there's no such thing as social movements in the United States. There's no such thing as social anything other than media, am I right, folks? So that means that they had to do it on their head. They had to use a presidential election, a presidential campaign to create a social

movement. And to an extent they have, I mean, millions of people on precedent amounts of small donors and volunteers, we saw them in every one of the early states, an army that no one else could match. But the fact is that they were trying to get people who, for many reasonable, absolutely justifiable reasons, have decided that politics is fake and that they don't care and that it doesn't matter. And I think that if those people could be reached in large enough numbers, whatever

Bernie tried to do was not sufficient. And what we realized is that we talked before Super Tuesday when we were trying to talk ourselves out of doom that Bernie has the army, he has the troops, Biden doesn't. And then we watched Biden winning in states that he didn't even have a single office in. And that's because traditional Democratic voters don't need to be canvassed. Traditional Democratic voters don't need to be contacted. They are self-organizing, they're self-canvassing, they watch MSNBC, they know voting is their civic duty.

They do it robotically. The people that the intent, it requires essentially no work to get them out for you if you are the one who is the option. And that's where Obama getting the field cleared for Biden did the trick. To get the other, to get the kind of people who aren't going to be in that hive mind to vote, it requires so much goddamn work. And even with all that work, I think people, a lot of people are just too gone. Well, there's one, I mean, one note is there has been increased turnout among young voters.

But it wasn't enough is the thing. That's the thing. It was counterbalanced by increased turnout by the MSNBC resistance types. That's no good. That's a bad, that's a bad equation. By anyone who has a, like anyone who has a single positive feeling about Anna Navarro should be legally barred from voting. And I got to say, I, yesterday I was watching Chris Haves like freak out.

He's been freaking out about coronavirus for two weeks now. Every other tweet is about how this is not normal. This is, this is the apocalypse because Trump, the Cheeto in chief, his corruption and his incompetence is finally going to get us all killed. It's like, maybe you shouldn't be on the network that spends 23 and a half hours a day telling everybody that the only alternative to him is a different scenario reactionary old idiot who is going to do, you really think, you really think Joe Biden's going to do a better fucking job?

It's not 23 hours. There's like at least two hours where they just play a lockup. Yeah. You really think it's going to be a better job. And you're going to be like, Oh, we're going to talk about coronavirus for an hour. And then I'm going to hand it over to fucking Joanne Reed for her to talk about Venezuela for three hours. Fuck off.

If you fucking cared about any of this shit, you would fucking at least resign like Shepard Smith had the balls to do. Okay. So let's, let's go back to the tape for a second because here's what was also unexpected. I mean, it was anticipated that at some point the establishment is going to find their candidate and get their act together. But that happened more quickly and more precipitously than anyone anticipated. And the voters, the voters went in, uh, they fell in line.

Yeah. Uh, and these are, keep in mind over 60% of Democratic primary voters support Medicare for all. Who gives a shit? It doesn't matter. Nobody, nobody, nobody supports anything or nobody has a co-he talked about this a million times. Nobody has coherent beliefs.

You're okay. You got a quiz. I got it. You got a fucking poll that gets, that gets to 60% of people saying, yeah, sure. But like, what do they think? How do they think? How do they think that would come about? What do they think the process would be to get Medicare for all in this country?

It's totally in, it's, it's going to have no coherence to it. There's going to be no coherent, uh, strategy uniting those 60% of people. So it just becomes a thing they believe. Like we should bring Alf back. Well, we should. I mean, honestly, more puppets on TV, but it shouldn't be a CGI out. I would be a hold. It needs to be real, absolute creature.

Alf. I would prefer honestly some sort of like, I don't know, a genetic freak that we made in a lab. That'd be fun. Matt, Matt, just throwing this out there, just spitballing right now, brainstorming. Baby Alf. Okay. That's epic.

Now that's fucking epic. Okay. That is money in the bank right there. Oh my God. Holy shit. Do you have Paul Fusco's number? Give Frank Oz on the phone. Uh, yeah, well, I mean, just thinking about, uh, this realignment stuff, you know, I was

thinking about how all the Russia shit worked. It did its job, not politically, but socially because it's that thing. It's basically like Benghazi for, for Libs, right? Where you spend, have a network that's talking about how big of a threat, how dangerous every moment is. And that inherently makes people more reactionary and that caused the, the spike in voters because they're afraid. You know, the, the spike in older, uh, right, right.

And that's the easiest, you know, I mean, in terms of if, if you want to run entertainment news, which is, you know, what cable news is, uh, that's the easiest emotion to prey on, right? Right. I mean, at the end of the day, it's just all about ad sales and the fucking investors and Comcast. Uh, but I want to get back to the race. If we could be slightly less catastrophic and just look at the numbers so far again,

neither candidate has 50% even of the delegates needed to win the nomination and crucially over 50% of the country has not voted yet, including New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kansas, New Jersey, Oregon, Illinois, Puerto Rico, Wisconsin, Arizona, DC, Florida, Georgia, and you know, those loser States or there won't be, I mean, they just announced they're closing a third of polling places in Maricopa County. And then the guy who they got to say that literally walked off in the middle of the fucking press conference. He said, I can't do this.

Yeah. Let's play that clip. Uh, we can get this now. We're taking this from those voters had 41 voting locations before these 151. Now they have, um, 50, 151 vote locations that they can choose from. And then with that, um, we're also going to be, um, providing, uh, those voters with, uh, uh, the options and the ability to, uh, I'm sorry, I can't do this. Go ahead, Steve.

Well, first, yeah, I mean, this is like, this is the stand. This is the stand mini series when like the TV is just showing some guy like playing the harmonic or something. Nobody knows what the fuck's going to happen. Okay. I'm saying put aside the pandemic and just understand that that is what the race is in the absence of a pandemic. Don't fall for any of the bullshit you're about to hear right now.

This is halftime in the democratic race. Now consider what the, how the pandemic impacts that already Louisiana's primary, which was scheduled for April 4th has been postponed to June 20th, uh, something of a self-owned for Louisiana's to place themselves dead last in the primary calendar. But as I'm sure we all agree, a rational decision. Other states hustle to be first because people assume the race is over after the first states vote, as many, uh, Biden supporters are assuming now, uh, but Louisiana's saying fuck off. It is irresponsible to continue with Tuesday's primaries.

Yeah, but they're going to do it anyway because they want to get it over with. They don't want to give people time to think about this and they share shit. They want to give people time to look at Joe Biden on television and think about what it really means to make that motherfucker, the camp, the fucking, uh, uh, candidate. That's the thing. They're obviously, they obviously just want to get this thing over with. But when I say they, I mean the elites in the democratic party who are not in charge outside of Illinois, uh, they are not in charge of Arizona, Ohio, or Florida.

Those are all Republicans making those calls. And they can make those calls to say, uh, no, we're going to push this back one or two months and then the vote will take place. Or maybe if two months from now, uh, they're still a pandemic, uh, and you know, we need to devote resources to wheelbarrows to, uh, you know, uh, you know, like play cards, the plague masks and the lie, then we'll do, then we'll work out. Then we'll work out some mail system or some, some digital system, whatever, like they have in other countries and it works fucking fine.

That would be outside of any political consideration, the rational thing to do. The political consideration is this, if Bernie loses on Tuesday, that will no longer be an option to postpone the primary. And the consensus will be, Hey, we played five innings, we're going to call the game. Irrespective of what the Sanders campaign does and irrespective of the fact that coming out of Tuesday, neither candidate will even be close to 1,991 delegates required to win the nomination on the first ballot, Milwaukee. But they're in charge of it and they want Biden.

So it's going to happen. And I mean, Well, does Ron DeSantis want Joe Biden to be the nominee? Uh, I mean, I don't think they care. The thing is there are also Democrats in the government, you know, it's not, and they need them to cooperate at a basic level with the Republicans just to like keep the state functioning. And they don't, if they're, if they're, if they don't really care, they're going to

defer to them and we know what they want. But if you actually care, if you are Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, you actually do, you actually would look pretty bad if a quarter of your elderly population drops dead under your watch. Well, yeah. But if that was the thing any of these people really cared about, they wouldn't have done the half of the things they've done in the last two months. I mean, if you, if we could talk about like, I think rational actor theory is not really

explaining anything here. I mean, if Fox News was rational, they would not be having people on there saying to their 900 year old audience, Hey guys, don't worry about it. It'll be fine. Since it's like, that's their fucking revenue stream. They need those people to buy gold point coins and fucking delivery catheters. And they're saying, yeah, no, go cough at each other's mouths, go lick the door knobs at fucking cheesecake factory.

By the way, are you, are you sick of going to the catheter store is going to the catheter store every week? I sure am. You can get catheters delivered to your home and Medicare will pay for it. That's not a joke. That's a literal fucking commercial. It's on Fox News, like every 20 minutes and say, same thing with dropbacks, like these are your fucking constituents and you're telling them to go die because sometimes, and especially

in the situation of crisis where the system that you have fully invested in, in every sense is not up to the task. Denial is really your only option and everyone's going with that. So I don't know. I don't, I don't think you can judge anybody through a really rational fucking lens right now. Well, the disaster, the crisis presents an opportunity to disrupt the race where of course the momentum in the past couple of weeks since super Tuesday has been against

Bernie Sanders. But it's an open question whether he can capitalize on it when, for all intents and purposes, there is not a physical election happening, that it is a purely virtual race and we are in totally uncharted territory. And the question I want to pose to you is, what impact do you think the pandemic will have on actual voting Tuesday should those four states not reverse course and should they go on ahead as planned, which again, is a totally irresponsible decision, irrespective of what you think about the race.

I have no idea. I don't know. Like I said, I don't know. Ohio is... I mean, what am I going to look, what is the last time we had a fucking election during a pandemic? 1920? I don't fucking know.

I have no idea. Well, you could guess. Okay, fine. I don't know. But Biden's going to win. I mean, nothing's changed the momentum, so he's going to win them all. There you go. There's my prediction.

They have decided, and the people who vote in these things get their cues from party leaders and the TV, and the TV and the party leaders have decided. Well, the TV has stopped talking about the race. So at this point, I'm not sure, and again, it's a virtual race, so I'm not even sure where people are getting their cues. Nobody gets... I don't... Who the...

I mean, I was talking about this with Chris before we started the show. I remember the 08 financial crisis and the way Obama used that. Yeah. So, statistically, in a fraudulent attempt to gain power for himself, totally aware the entire time that he was just going to recapitalize all the bad actors that made it happen and didn't give a fuck, and just destroyed basically anyone's belief that any politician is ever not lying to them. And I really feel like one of the things Bernie has had as a unspoken barrier for a

lot of people is that memory of Obama. And so I feel like even though this is another situation where we have an awful Republican president seeing his awful policies result and seeing the greater capitalist edifices policies result in a crisis that it can't fucking handle, I just don't think we have it in us anymore to imagine an alternative to it. I feel like we have fully embraced just a cynical fatalism. Let's say this. Let's say this.

If you live in Florida, you watch MSNBC religiously. If you do that, all you are seeing is wall-to-wall coronavirus stuff. And unlike your Fox News voter, who is told that everything is peachy-keen, MSNBC obviously wants to prey on your contempt for Donald Trump by playing up, I mean, accurately, of course, how bad this is. So you're 75 and you're in the age cohort where there's like what, a 10% chance you will die of pneumonia if you contract this disease, even with hospitalizations. And a substantial chance you would be hospitalized.

And maybe if you follow the news closely enough, you might get it at a point where there's just no more ventilators. And you are, if you're old enough, sorry, like that, we need that for you. Italy is literally doing death panels right now. If you're 80 or older, they don't treat you. That's the new recommendation. Would you go out and vote for Joe Biden, a guy you don't even care about, in a race that you have been told is over?

Maybe, I don't know. They vote. They love voting. They love it. Like, that's the thing. They love it. And it's because they're old. It's not nothing to do with generations.

Like these smug motherfuckers like to be like, yeah, you young people, if you cared more, you'd vote more. None of them voted when they were that age either. They changed the voting age to 18 and for 1972, and they got like 15% of the fucking 18-year-olds voted. It's always been the case. So all these boomers now who vote like clockwork for fucking county rat catcher, none of them were fucking voting when they were kids either.

They don't do it. Old people do it. And so they're going to do it. Because what else are they going to do? Wait for death? That's what they're doing anyway. Pickleball. Even if it kills them, they're going to vote.

I don't think they think that. Old people don't think this is a big deal. That is the other thing is that even if they watch MSNBC, old people don't think this is a big deal. Young people are much more plugged into this thing. And that's the cynical version of this is that the virus actually keeps more young people in. Right.

Because we're by and large, much more astute about threats in the world around us. They go out more in the first place. So they have more activity to curtail. Yes. Like old people, it's like staying at your home. It's like done. I don't leave. Don't leave.

Dare me to stay at my home. I only leave my house to vote and yell at a red Robin waitress. That's my. I mean, let me frame that. That's my excursions a year. Let me frame that a different way. And again, Bernie does have the highest floor in this race. I will vote for Bernie no matter what.

I don't give a shit if there's a pandemic. I cannot imagine someone thinking who is fucking in the age cohort that will die thinking I will vote for Biden no matter what I can't get in the head of anyone who would vote for Biden for any reason. So I can't get into their head enough to know whether it would they would get out to vote for him. I don't know. I don't know.

These people are death-eating psychopaths and I don't fucking know. I mean, the thing we have to really get around get our head around here is that like generational politics are facile, but due to the specific distribution of resources and post-war America, age has gained age in the electorate anyway has gained a class characteristic. And that is the thing that we haven't really dealt with is the fact that the generous social spending overwhelmingly goes to the elderly. Right. So they have no reason to want to change anything anyway.

Let's talk about this. But it is a purely virtual race. Again, it's totally unprecedented, a race where there is no face-to-face interaction, no public rallies or town halls or even press conferences. The candidates are basically Max Headroom. And I have a story, kind of a mini reading series, which I think is a first for the Beltway Garage. This is from CNN's Eric Bradner.

Former Vice President Joe Biden's first virtual town hall was a technical calamity as his campaign confronts the same challenges of unexpected remote work that millions of Americans are facing as a result of coronavirus pandemic. Great fucking framing there. Yeah, it's like, oh, of course, of course, he was stammering and slurring and wandering off of the screen. It's the internet. It's hard.

His stuff. His campaign wanted those who attended to be able to ask him questions. So it added an extra layer of complication to the Try and True method of broadcasting on Facebook Live. It really is. We figured it out. Yes. Getting questions is not hard.

I set up that 2018 election live stream in like an hour. Those who sign up to participate could dial in on their phones or stream a video on Zoom, a business video conferencing app. Then the Zoom feed would also be broadcast on Facebook Live to the entire social media world. None of it went as planned. The start time of Friday's virtual town hall was pushed back by two hours and then it still started 15 minutes late.

It's interesting how they're focusing on the technical issues because that's not really the problem I remember when I watched the clip. As those on Zoom waited to watch, the video alternated between confused looking Democratic Senators Tammy Duckworth and Dick Durbin of Illinois, as well as Vivek Murthy, the former Surgeon General and a member of committee advising Biden on how to handle campaigning amid a pandemic. The event started with brief remarks from Durbin who wasn't visible to those watching on Zoom.

Then Biden came on and he was visible, but no one could hear him. His audio was so choppy that it could not be understood. Yeah, that's why it could be understood. At one point he stopped and restarted, but the audio problem hadn't been solved. He is clipping. This is the first clipping presidential candidate, which makes sense because he's from the clipping state of Delaware. None of it was being broadcast on Facebook Live as intended, leaving some who had planned

to watch it confused. As we always feel confused. Well, I'm confused about why you would plan to watch it, you freak. Murthy spoke briefly. Then the campaign went to questions from those who had clicked a raise the hand button on Zoom or had pressed star nine on their phones. The first person using my rotary phone, so how many paragraphs and we still haven't gotten to him wandering off set.

The first person who was invited to ask a question instead offered a comment. Mr. Classic Q&A Mr. Biden's speech was garbly the entire time. Listen here, Jack. What is this? A film for him? The campaign tried a second person who had apparently dropped off. By that point, Biden wasn't yet live on Facebook, but his team had found a solution to the audio problem.

He was holding a cell phone under his chin and the audio feed was clear. He was able to deliver clear answers for the remaining 10 or so minutes of the event. As the third questioner began, Biden asked, am I live? As the fourth started, he wondered, am I on camera? Finally, after that answer, Biden's team had figured out its technical difficulties and started the broadcast on Facebook Live almost immediately seeing the audience jump to 5,000. Oh snap, I want to point out in the middle right here, Bernie Sanders is probably wrapping up his fireside chat as we're recording this enough concurrent views to make him the most

popular Twitch stream on Twitch, beating out Tifu, streaming, yelling at children on Fortnite in a place where things mattered, Biden going up on Facebook Live for five minutes and then clipping and stroking out and wandering, wandering off the camera. Watch your marks, Joe, and then the next day, Bernie going out there and actually being the only, clearly being the only person who's competent and has an actual alternative to everyone dying, would mean something. But I don't know. The one who has been, whose entire political career has been vindicated by the current

moment that we live in. You'd think that would mean something, but I don't know if it does. I don't know if it does. Well, you're talking to a joker-fied Matt Christmas right now, and I really can't get too invested in the notion of anything mattering. But this is shades of the rank incompetence of Hillary Clinton's campaign team, that they can't figure out what 12-year-olds can do. Well, the funny thing is, is that even though he is clipping and drooling and stroking out

and his team is a bunch of Robby, Sub, Mookie, and dipshits, he's still going to win. The fucking economy collapses in the next month, and we're talking about like an 08-level cratering. He's going to win. You don't get reelected in that. As the nominee is a general election. No one has ever won an election. I actually want to address that point.

Before we move on, I do just want to say that it heartens me personally that my dipshit AV skills running this spit and scotch tape operation here is better than the entire Biden campaign. Whenever I see an AV operation, I'm like, I could fucking own that. I'm like, yes, good, good job. Matt could own this AV operation. I've seen Matt do live streams on his phone. He figured it out too.

The other day, you know, the hashtag resistance people, they got trending on Twitter, the Trump administration is over. And how many times have you heard that in the past three years? See, it matters what means by that, though. Hang on, hang on. A poll came out even after Trump's batshit Oval Office address, 42% approve of his handling of the coronavirus. Yeah.

And if he gets 42% in November, he's going to lose that's 42% of adults, which translates to 46% of likely voters, which he got 46.9% last time around, which was enough to win in the electoral college. The economy has not collapsed yet. And that's happening. Okay. There will be a recession of significant size. I think that's the last question.

And that I think this is interesting, because the past three years has just been unprecedented thing after unprecedented thing. And Trump has defied every single ironclad law of political reality. And the last one is kind of fucking president preside over recession. That is definitely his fault and still win reelection. And I think if anyone could do it, it's Donald Trump, especially if he just post bones the election, especially, I mean, especially if and as, as, as this is the hell world thesis that nothing matters, that there's no reality that matters.

That's why I mean, I'm, like I said, I'm trying to predict. I'm trying not to. And honestly, that's a heuristic that we, that has that, that should have guided us this entire time. Yeah. Because every time you were, I deviate from that thesis, you know, we, we, we, we get owned. Well, I've never been owned.

Well, we got owned. Come on. Be honest. No, we got owned because we thought things mattered. We thought that communication and, and, and grassroots activism and talking to people could, could get enough of us to pay attention and imagine an alternative and imagine a new way of doing things and imagine a, you know, new politics, a new, a new paradigm. And if it's possible, we didn't do it yet.

I don't know if it's, if it could still happen, but the providing sense you get from watching the country descend into some sort of pandemic frenzy, a risk of a massive economic collapse and a man who is visibly and clearly mentally declining being the unquestioned candidate who's going to challenge the other clearly visibly declining president. I don't know how you're supposed to think anything matters. I don't know how you're supposed to think that you can move, that the social fabric can be repaired. That's the thing that keep coming back to the idea that we have spent 40 years just

stripping all the piping and wiring out of the building. And now the toilets don't work and the light swishes don't work. And that's because we sold it all for fucking math. We sold it all to, we sold it all so that we could pretend that the rate of profit hasn't been falling since the fucking stagflation crisis. I will be, I will be somewhat less of a doomer here because what I've seen is a level of self-organization among young people, not for their own benefits, a denial of immediate pleasures, not for their own benefit, but for the benefit of someone that they don't

know. And we see that across the country as it looks like the majority of young people are voluntarily staying home, voluntarily avoiding social spaces. That's what I've seen. That's what I see in my own neighborhood. What are you talking about? What are you saying? I have no idea.

I have, you have no idea and I have no idea how many people are staying home at this point. All I know is I've been out, hell, we're out, we're, we're, we're disobeying that fucking thing. No, I'm a meter away from you. I'm a meter away from you. But I'm saying we're in the office right now. We left our apartments.

We're not the selfless fucking young people you're talking about. And the people I see, I'm walking here, out on the streets and in restaurants and bars, they're not the selfless young people you're talking about. So where, I mean, obviously you said, where are they? They're home. I don't know. I don't know. I admit, I can't quantify it.

Fine. Some of that is anecdotal and some of that is from my own observations. I just don't think you can, you can make any conclusions. How are you supposed to say, will you have any number on any of this stuff? We don't know. We know there weren't enough people in there, in the, through super Tuesday, in, in these states to counter fail the old and the reactionary. We know that.

We know the numbers. That's a number. I know. I don't know anything else. I have no idea who's, who's being selfless right now. I have no idea. And by the way, I don't know how many of those young people are doing it because they think they're going to die.

And they're not because they're selfless. I mean, just like your disease and like, oh, shit, oh, dip. I don't want that. I don't know. I don't know anything. I don't know anything. None of us do. I have a lot of faith in the fundamental decency of people by and large, just not in the circumstances

that mold them. I will say that I will, I'll split the, the side on this and that it is very heartening to see so many people. And I, as I plan to do, like basically not leave the house other than to make the podcast, you know, especially online, like basically vol, voluntarily can like process information and make the choice for themselves that no, I need to take actions to, to support the greater good. At the same time, seeing the pictures on Twitter that I've been seeing today out of like Chicago

of like a thousand people, uh, gathering into Patty McFools, yeah, yeah, basically Santa con type cycles to do, uh, uh, St. Patrick's Day shit is equally as disheartening as it is heartening that people have some kind of sensor obligation to, to do the right thing about this. I would like to read a tweet. So AOC today, the tweet saying, Hey, if you're in New York and you're young, don't, don't go out there. Don't do it.

Stay home. Don't do the thing. She was replied to, uh, by this woman, Katie Williams, who is a former Miss Nevada, who is running for some small bore office there and is clearly looking to be like the old person's young person for the future of that state. And she says, quote, I just went to a crowded red Robin and I'm 30. It was delicious. And I took my sweet time eating my meal because this is America and I'll do what I want.

Yeah. I mean, that's just, that's, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a that's a, that's a, that's as prevalent as Chicago. This is as prevalent if not more so a fucking sentiment than what you're talking about. If it wasn't, I mean, you, you, you say, I don't have any numbers. You don't have any numbers either. So what the fuck are we even saying? Why are we pretending we know anything?

Because this is the fucking Beltway garage, Matt. We're pundits. We're in the Beltway garage. Well, I put on your smock. I gotta say, I feel like the last year has kind of revealed that it's a fake job and no one should have it. Yeah. No shit.

Well, okay. I'm glad we're all on agreement then. Yeah. You want a real job? Don't be stupid. No, I don't want to be a pundit. I just want to be, I want to be a cut them up. You want to be, you want to be a real boy.

You don't want to be a pundit. Yeah. Well, too bad. Too bad. This is life. This life wasn't, you didn't choose this life. It was chosen for you. Yeah.

Punding into the void. Yeah. Let's move on to this. If Bernie were to concede the race after Tuesday, and again, keeping in mind that, one, we, the consensus in this room is we do not know what will happen Tuesday because we do not know how the pandemic will affect either turnout or people's voting preferences. And two, that there is a big fucking debate happening Sunday night. If Bernie did concede, what do you think Biden would do from now until Labor Day?

He would be kept in a hyperbaric chamber. Exactly. He would not be running against Donald Trump. There would be no problem. It would do what John McCain did in 2008, which was fucking disappear until the convention. And Hillary did that too. I think she was like completely off the grid for the entire month of August. I mean, we know it's the fucking, it's the explicit strategy of the Biden campaign to

hide him. Yes. Which is not stupid considering how bad he does when people fucking listen to him. The only way they fuck this up at this point is if he gets on TV too long. Does that give you, does that give you a lot of faith in him running a general election campaign knowing that? The idea, like ask yourself the actual question, does Joe Biden have the stamina to run against Donald Trump?

Actually, you know what? That's why that very reason is why I don't actually think he's going to be the nominee. Really? I think if this pandemic shit hadn't happened, like say, say, like, because, you know, we, we didn't know in super two, but when super Tuesday happened, it was still in China like, oh, wow, that's weird. It was not going to affect us, of course, because USA, like say, if it had been Corona got contained and it was never caught over here and it's not a big deal.

But Biden still would have won super Tuesday and he still would have become the front runner and they would all gravitated behind him and they would have been running against Trump probably with the economy still strong, you know, because like this, obviously the Trump economy was always incredibly fragile, but it was going to take something, some exogenous thing to kind of knock it over and absent one, it was going to go smooth sailing probably through at least, I mean, you could kind of assume maybe there would have been some crisis, but most likely the economy would have been fine and kept growing through November, in which case, Trump probably wouldn't have beaten anybody, maybe even Bernie.

So let by in 3.1% unemployment rate GDP to exactly let by and go out there. Who cares? We stop Bernie. That's what matters. If now though, they have a chance. They could beat Trump. In fact, beyond that, they will probably be Trump, but not if they have to run a guy who every public appearance for three months, you could literally drop dead, have both of

his eyes turned bright red, or just start singing camp town races and dropping a lot of gratuitous and words. So I could totally see a situation where at the virtual convention in, in, in, in cyber Milwaukee, where they nominate Biden on the first ballot, nominate his right where the floor looks like that TV show reboot. Yep. We have a candidate cube nominate by first ballot, nominate his chosen VP. And then like last day of the convention, he steps down for health reasons or something.

Yeah. And then they say, all right, well, let's then acclaim the VP as the presidential nominee and then get a new VP nominee and then go from there. I mean, if he is looking, if he is, I mean, the thing is, is that his line is down. His line and the vote, the, uh, profit line are both going in the same way. Go down. Yeah. Line, go down, which means his medical charts, the number is very, it's like his fucking

brain. Like his best days are just like holding the line, but he's not getting better. Yeah. Yeah. So that means that they can, he can extrapolate even to the convention. He's going to be a wreck to a fucking election to, to November beyond that. And I can see them being like, we don't want to blow a winnable election and hurt down ballot races, which they actually do care about, uh, by having this guy on the ticket

when we can just swap them out and who's going to do anything? I was going to, who's going to stop them? I mean, the people that are going to be asking to do this are Biden, uh, Biden delegates. And I think the one thing we can all agree about them is that they will do what they're fucking told if they wouldn't, they wouldn't be Biden delegates. So if the fucking, if Perez or whoever the fuck or, or, or barf sack comes out and says, we're doing this, they're going to do it. Well, who do you think it would be then?

Well, see the problem there is it has to be somebody with a huge, huge, huge name recognition because you cannot start from scratch with somebody even like moderately well-known Bernie Sanders, the president of the United States. Honestly, people have joked about it, but like the one that kind of does make sense in a horrifying, hilarious way would be Hillary Clinton, uh, but I think they learned their lesson maybe about her personal unpopularity. I don't know. Uh, I don't know.

I mean, like if she wanted it, Michelle Obama, but I don't think she wants to run. So it wouldn't matter. Uh, I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to pull that because like he's just not, he's not viable. And I just want to say this, this whole thing, the, the Biden switch, the Biden turnaround starting on Saturday before super Tuesday, it is honestly the most disgusting and cynical thing I've ever seen. Yeah, because you've got the, a huge swap, basically the entire Democratic Party establishment,

the entire media coming together, like $80 million in free earned media around a guy who all of them, if you strap them to a lie detector would tell you is not up to it. They know his brain isn't working. They know that he is smelling toast. They know that and they're like, yeah, sure. He'll be whatever. They don't care, these guys who spent the last four years gnashing their teeth about what Trump's doing to the presidency are not even blinking at the prospect of putting

a guy who's basically going to be at the mental age of an infant by November. Forget about January, uh, in the White House, just absolute cynicism. They don't believe in anything. They are the most disgusting and noxious bunches of criminals, scum, Fox on earth. And the fact that some of them will say that people like us are nihilistic or, or, or, uh, or mean and they are willing to put the fate of the fucking planet in Joe Biden's hands, knowing what they know about him. It's, I want to fucking cough my fucking coronavirus right into all of their faces.

God damn it. What? I knew you had the coronavirus. God, I don't have it. I'm fine. Yeah. But when I get it, I'm going on tour. It's onsite.

It's onsite. I went site. Once I know I have it, I'm just going to, I'm going around. You're going to go, you're going to go to coughing and you're going to show up at Louis Gohmert's a fucking constituent meet and greet that he's no, no, no, no, no, no, no. All Democrats. No. I mean, honestly, this election should really tell people that you see all these people

freaking out. Oh, the Republican party is the worst party in the world. It's, it's, and it is, it's like, oh, it's a bunch of fascist and psychos and it's a death cult. Yes. Yes. Yes. But right now it is not the fucking reason we're in this situation.

They're the worst party. And I would cough in the faces of every elected Democrat if I could, if I had it, which I think, uh, I think it's, it's not irrational to suspect that's how the convention could turn out. But keep in mind, there is a big stumbling block to that turn of events, which is Joe Biden himself, who as in his entire life wanted to be president to the degree that as his mental state declines, that is the, the only core thing that operates at this point. That's where that West Wing Oval Office that comes in, they, they bleed them in and say,

Joe, you won. And they put him behind the desk like the dictator of Portugal. Exactly. And then they go, Hey, we're going to actually nominate someone who's, who has their marbles because the thing is that Biden does not have institutional pull within the party. That's why 500 people ran. That's why he was not able to keep anybody out of the race because even though he's a popular figure and had all the name recognition and add the loyalty of people who still love

the Obama years, he had, he did not have a network if he, and he did not have a influence if he did. All those people wouldn't have run against him, which means that if the fucking party decides that he's a liability, he's not going to have any fucking strings to pull. They're going to have the whip hand and they're going to fucking turf him out. It's, it's incredibly disheartening that the thing that we all know is that Joe Biden is not a candidate. The party is the cancer.

Yes. He is just a cipher, which means they can replace him. The other funny thing that I keep thinking about is then taking the, you know, what they learned from Super Tuesday is like, oh, we don't need to run this guy. He can just exist as an idea and it would be very funny for me if like he makes like a 20 minute speech at the DNC and then other than that is just like completely gone through the entire election. And they're just like, yeah, he's, he's running there won't be a DNC.

So what there will be instead is he will, he will release an acceptance speech that will be just a subtly cobbled together edited collection of his prior speeches. And it's like, it'll be like the rock bottom thing from the Simpsons, like his tie will change color, his hairplug situation will go back and forth. Yeah. And they'll be fine. They'll be like, that seems worse. Like what?

Actually, it was great. Your race is for saying it's not good. I do want to give, as we close the segment, a brief counterpoint to Matt's prophetic nihilism. It's joker, it's joker pill. Okay. It's clown pill. It's the cloud.

I know. I know. We all, uh, we all know about joker vacation and the hell world thesis at this point, but I want to leave people with this. We are not in the fifth inning yet. We're at halftime on Sunday night. There is a halftime in baseball games. I'm, I'm, I'm mixing sports, I'm mixing sports metaphors at this point, uh, because earlier

I alluded to it being the fifth, whatever, whatever, God damn it, whatever, God damn it, Chris. I'm doing my, I'm doing my monologue, dammit. Where the fuck was I? Okay. It's not, we're at the halftime of the baseball game. Those famous baseball halftimes we all love. Look, we're, uh, we're at the halftime at the baseball game and I'm going to the ball

game and eating bullet base at halftime on Sunday night, everyone is going to be eating their baseball paella watching the first opportunity that we have had to make Joe Biden address the country for two hours straight and be challenged by Bernie Sanders on his core argument. The one thing over everything else that just that, that is the engine of his electoral successes so far in the first 50% of the country, which is that people intuit that he is the safe option to beat Donald Trump. And if voters assume that Joe Biden is the safe choice, he ought to demonstrate that he has the stamina to run against Donald Trump by first running against Bernie Sanders in

the rest of these primaries. And he will make it clear that he does not have the stamina to do that. And these doubts will continue to emerge in people's heads. And there are arguments to be made by the Bernie Sanders campaign, which again is still a campaign that has a chance to win the presidency of the United States right now, where there is a level of uncertainty as we're living in this unprecedented crisis right now, where maybe it simply makes people more reactionary as Matt argues, or maybe it turns people around to the idea that, yeah, Bernie Sanders was right and we actually can't afford to nominate

someone like Joe Biden. And I want you to know there are no Joe Biden volunteers. They do not exist. He does not have a competent staff as we've seen in recent days. But there are Bernie Sanders volunteers who are in their homes living in a obviously decrepit failing society. But they're in front of their keyboards, which means that they can phone bank and they can text bank for Bernie Sanders as a thousand people just signed up immediately when the

call was put out for virtual canvassers just in the state of Illinois. And I hope you will be among us if you are listening to this and that you will not give up. I mean this this fucking elect this debate tomorrow is a big deal because sports is canceled. You know and people are always there a sports not know there's yes there is a sports not happening. And I mean every single moment that Joe Biden is on on television is a potential disaster waiting to happen.

That is the thing that gives me the glimmer of hope is seeing it how quickly and thickly the primary electorate has hopped from candidate to candidate and again going back to the thing that I was saying earlier is that the primary emotion of that I see in the Democratic base is fear and if Bernie Sanders is able through this debate to put the fear in to the electorate that Joe Biden is simply not a viable candidate. I think that there is possibility for another game change because you should look at Joe Biden and be afraid be very afraid that he is I will say this simply incompetent. I have given up the hope that Bernie is going to be able to turn it around with policies

with a vision with you know Medicare for all even in the face of the pandemic. I feel like if that was going to work it would have by now it's really coming down to will will Joe Biden's teeth fall out and then his diaper explode. That's that's what we have and the thing is though there is a non. I wouldn't say non zero there is a non 50 percent chance of that fucking happening. So we need to be able to be there we need to be in the right position and we take advantage of it. We need to continue the organization because while Joe Biden's campaign is still trying

to open PDF Bernie Sanders is still fighting for us which means we are going to continue fighting for him and let's give you a little bit of ammunition when you make these phone calls and send these texts leading up to Tuesday by introducing our special guest. Joining us now in the Beltway garage is Bronco Marcha teach staff writer at Jackman investigative fellow at in these times and author of yesterday's man the case against Joe Biden Bronco fellow book writer. Thank you for joining us. It was great to be with you guys.

You know when this book was when we originally received a copy of this book from your publisher Verso I think is it Verso it is okay when Verso sent us a copy of your book. This was it was about two weeks before the Iowa caucus and they asked if we wanted to have you on and I just kind of chuckled and said well you know he's about to eat shit in Iowa and New Hampshire so I don't think we'll have to worry about Joe Biden anymore after that. And as we have just spoken about he is currently the front runner for the Democratic nomination this year.

So how does it feel. I mean I am probably the most miserable person whose book is doing well in history you know I read and researched this man's career and obviously wrote this book and everything it's just all I was doing was coming upon one red flag after another after another you know that showed how inadequate he was for really tackling the moment that they were in. And so yeah it's funny because by the time the book came out you had Iowa and New Hampshire you had Nevada obviously all terrible for Biden and so when the book launched you know we were on a book tour and it was pretty good but the launch itself came a day before South

Carolina and you know it was a very muted launch because I think people you know just like you were figuring well this guy's finished there's no way he's going to come back and then within not even a week within five days it had completely to my horror in many ways flipped in on his head and so now we're in this position where the you know people are taking a lot of interest in the book which I guess is great but you know the cost of it is that Joe Biden is the front runner. What surprised you more Joe Biden collapsing so catastrophically in Iowa and New Hampshire or Joe Biden bouncing back so rapidly?

That was a good question I do not know where I would rank both of those I mean his collapse that I went to New Hampshire was I you know I figured maybe he'll lose I didn't think that he would come fourth fourth and fifth I believe if I'm not mistaken I mean that was so catastrophic catastrophic to his campaign and also completely undermined his whole selling point right I mean his wife herself said that you know let's be honest Joe is probably worse on most of the issues that you care about but this is just about picking the guy who's going to be most electable and his whole thing was I will be the one to win back those white voters that Trump won you know whether they're conservative white voters or they're people

who you know switched from Democrats to Republicans in 2016 I'll win them back and he completely failed to do that didn't didn't saw even a loss of Sanders you lost to several other lesser known Democrat candidates centrist candidates so I just figured as obviously you did as well that when it came to South Carolina the voters would go well there's no way this guy can actually be Trump right he failed to even win a primary so far he can't be David Klobuchar and so now he's in this position where I mean I think that the overwhelming reason behind what's happening right now is because of this I mean it's the fear that has been drummed into Democratic voters for years now not just about Trump but you know about a whole host

of other issues you know Russia and everything and Biden has been cast as the antidote to these things you know I did a study last year looking at MSNBC's coverage in around August September if I remember correctly and you know it's astounding when you watch MSNBC that the discussion has nothing to do with policy or you know things like you know the things that we would read about on the online world you know the donations that Biden is taking the aspects of his record they're disquieting none of that it is entirely about electability and it's entirely about whatever the days polls say and the overwhelming message for people watching MSNBC day in day out which obviously we know voters have been doing since

2016 is that Joe Biden he's the he's the quote designated driver is what they call him you know I don't know if you guys would ever trust Joe Biden of 2020 we don't use designated drivers but you know that's this idea that he's the he's the most steady stable one to not just go against Trump but then steer the country through whatever comes next and it's it I think people have just have just you know just through sheer relentless broadcasting of this message have just swallowed this and so in some ways it is a testament to I think the power and the influence of news media on a democratic electorate we have to remember that the democratic electorate is very different it turns out now from the Republican electorate

which has very little trust in media and these institutions still have power among Democrats now is Joe Biden not the safe option is he in fact the unsafe option it may shock you to find out that my answer is no you know given the name of the book the case against Joe Biden you know this is not going to be a very surprising thing but yeah for multiple reasons I mean the one being the most obvious one which is that we ran this experiment already in 2016 you know Trump this buffoonish ridiculous extreme right-wing Republican won the election and the thought was we'll just pick the establishment friendly centrist boring pick that that you know that there's sort of cast in a traditional mold of every Democrat pick over the last

you know 40 years and she lost and and now we're doing that again we're not just doing that again but even just the issues that hurt Hillary Clinton in 2016 against Trump corruption her criminal justice record her hawkishness in the world stage a support of trade deals chumming us with Wall Street and called America I mean you know on and on and on Biden has all those weaknesses but you know turned up to 11 I mean Clinton's big thing in 2016 was the 994 crime bill and a speech of her talking about super praetors well Biden only authored the crime bill and and you can easily find a speech of him making a very similar video of him I'm sorry making a very similar speech as Clinton about you know child praetors need

to stop them but the man is literally one of the leading architects of the the racist system of mass incarceration in the United States Biden didn't just vote for the Iraq war he was one of the leading architects of that war on the Democratic side he was the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee he was very much working with Bush to sell the Iraq war I mean the corruption obviously the stuff with Hunter Biden just just a week ago I think the FBI raided some company that was associated with with James Biden Biden's brother who like his son has just been cashing in on his name from basically the beginning of Biden's political career I mean James Biden is the name Joe Biden uses to kite checks

it's just Joe with a handlebar mustache I mean it's just I feel like I'm watching a car crash happen in slow motion and you know you're trying to alert people and and no one seems to be listening because people are still voting for him you know in huge numbers I think thinking that he is the more capable choice it's it's madness so I think that the media obsession with Joe Biden has been built around his supposed reputation as the white working class whisperer which obviously became the obsession after 2016 because of those Midwestern Obama to Trump voters who among other voting blocks were sufficient to swing the presidency from what seemed like a slam dunk from here for Hillary to a tight win

for Trump in the Electoral College do you think that that is an earned reputation that Biden appeals to white working class voters because we have we've had a disagreement on this very program about that question and I'm I took the con side and I'm starting to think that I may have underestimated that it depends on what you are meaning I mean is he someone who can command the support of working class voters I think I think they can I think he's showing now that he can but is it because of anything substantial in his record in his history that he's done for working class people no I think it's it's the loyalty commands among that that kind of people is entirely because of aesthetic charisma you

know it's because he's a big grinning back slapping guy yeah yeah he's a very charming man he's he's you know he sort of has a bit of that working class affectation that he can he can bring out every now and then he he has you know the reason that he always brings up the fact that he's Irish even though he's not really that Irish absolutely you know plastic daddy motherfucker right and you know the whole the use of Malachi the constant use of Malachi I mean that is that's part of that it's to remind people hey I have this ethnic heritage that I you know sort of having yeah one of Biden's grandfather's was was Irish that's that's sort of the extent of it he says he's as English as he is Irish but you know

I think that sort of is one of the tools that he has used throughout his career to to kind of I guess signal to people that you know hey I come from the same communities as you and everything but you know what's funny is that for all the working class stuff that the Biden's kind of pushing now his focus throughout his career has has always been on the you know what he called the middle class which you know if you dig into it isn't really that middle but that's always been his big thing I mean in the 80s he was one of the people touring around with the DLC going to you know southern southern cities telling Democrats that they had to change that they had to stop being so liberal that they had to move towards the

center become become more like Reagan and as part of this pitch he was saying you know we have to stop looking after you have to quote special interests and we were saying that you know we think a special interest is being big business lobbyists and that kind of thing in that period this is a very common phrase special interest was meant you were meaning American voters Latino voters gay voters feminists poor people organized labor and that I mean there's actually a quote from Biden we're talking to the NAACP convention in 1986 and he says and the sort of time when he was gearing up to run against Jesse Jackson and he says you can't put the rainbow coalition blacks Hispanics poor whites gays against the middle

class and really if you look at Biden's rhetoric throughout the 80s and beyond when he when he's talking about the middle class he really means a specific sector of the middle class which is more affluent suburban white conservatives a kind of people that are for Reagan and then Nixon and really have become you know pretty pretty important to the Republican part and you know even in 2016 Biden Biden was looking at the aftermath of Clinton's loss and he said you know the reason she lost was because she she failed to talk about the struggles of ordinary people of working people and he said you know the the she didn't talk about the family sitting in their living room pouring over bills trying to figure out how they're

going to get the money to survive for another month and that used to be our core constituency and he says you know you never heard about that couple making a hundred thousand dollars a year which is you know exactly I mean this is a time when in 2016 when the median household income in the US was fifty seven thousand dollars and that shows you what Biden really thinks about what the middle class is for him and that's really become the the ethos of the Democratic Party I mean that's that's what they're trying to build you know build on from 2018 on so so Joe Biden's one of Joe Biden's grandparents was Irish so he is his grandfather he is part Irish and part English which means he gets his arm light from the

Sendsbury but oh it was funny about that I'm sorry it is well it's funny because I said it and I said I say clever things it's kind of what I'm known for I do I would I do want to drill down on this one point though so he's you know his public persona is Scranton Joe but his actual constituency is reactionary wealthy suburban whites now well and and African American voters yes I mean this is the trick that Biden's pulled off throughout his career he has been able to win over Republican voting kind of suburban conservatives now isn't that an asset in a general election if if if he would say we if he would say win the upscale affluent whites who tend to vote Republican simply because he that is his core constituency

and he's his messaging is devoted to them and claw back just enough of the white you know non-college educated Midwestern voters who voted for Obama and then flip to Trump so not because he prop not because he represents them or promises them anything but you know solely for aesthetic reasons maybe I mean that's certainly the bet that the party is making this year and that the party is made for so many elections they've lost to often extreme and incompetent Republican candidates so you know I mean they can keep trying to do this and maybe it'll work out this time but the thing is Biden's also lacking support from young people which was key to Obama's victories in 2008 and 2012 the other thing

as well that the people don't know about Joe Biden's record they don't know who he is they don't have the the receipts as the kids say for all the lying and the sourcing so we know what the strategy is going to be for the Democrat side they're all but broadcasting and it's roughly what I just laid out plus you know you know trying to drive up turnout in their traditional constituencies then let's say you're advising Donald Trump to run against Joe Biden what is the most what are how would you blow up that strategy I will say I can see this being taken out of context and like being used against me no this is this is role playing so just say something like okay just say I support Donald Trump and here's my advice

for how to destroy Joe Biden because I want Donald Trump to win just say those words I I will say that I imagine as Donald Trump strategist sitting around you know a table possibly on a castle on a cliff is lightning and rain thumbs in the background they're all spitting into each other's mouths first sport how are we going to run up run against Biden I would say one they're going to go after his atrocious record on criminal justice I know he's going to move left on this for general election but it's going to be too little too late the man was instrumental in erecting the horrific system that exists in the United States and Trump has very clearly and strategically done some things on criminal justice to be able

to you know wield that over whoever the candidate is most likely by that I would advise them to point to well I would not advise them but the his strategist will certainly tell him to run ads about his record on cutting Social Security and Medicare those programs are vital to to to seniors to be able to survive many of them past retirement and you know Biden will say again well actually no I'm running on protecting Medicare Social Security but I'm sure the Trump's advisers will simply say well you know that may be true but look at what you've done for your entire career look at what you did when you were Obama's vice president what you've been bragging about explicitly because Biden's entire career

is one of saying the quiet part loud and the loud part quiet and that is exactly right and and they will also point to the many many times that Biden has been dishonest about not just what he believes and what he wants to do but simply just about details of his own life and family history and they will hit his credibility I mean there's obviously in terms of the corruption you know we all know that that for Trump it doesn't matter if he comes up as a hypocrite he has no problem doing that and he will absolutely make hay out of Biden's corruption the way his family has made money off him the you know the barisma thing which is genuinely pretty scandalous even you know the media can try and say that

that no this wasn't a big deal it was all legal but it's very clear people people ordinary people will look at that and they will say that that's that's right and of course Democrats refuse to admit that this but you know the MSNBC liberal types because that is at the core of what they impeach Donald Trump over so they would you know they would say that well actually the bigger crime is Trump doing this for inclusion which is arguable but that's not a great that's not exactly a defense of Biden or Hunter it's a very weak defense and we've already seen that it didn't work actually I mean the impeachment made Trump's prurating jump off I like that you so I like that you mentioned credibility because you

know Biden's lies we kind of write them off as the the the goofs of a senile man but you know right now many are talking now that you know Biden has a delegate lead over Sanders many are asking okay if Sanders doesn't win what concessions should he and his supporters be demanding from Joe Biden in exchange for their support going into the general election and even if Joe Biden himself wanted to you know he wanted to be conciliatory which I don't think he does right now to be honest with you even if he was willing to make concessions I mean I don't I don't really care to get a promise from Joe Biden because I don't trust him I don't think he has any credibility I mean what's he gonna say I'm just fine I'll

add some Medicaid expansion to the fucking you know 900 page Democratic Party platform that nobody reads and cares about and that I'm not even held to when I'm president like that's not that's not leverage one of the most absurd ideas of this in the entire elections that you know I'm sure you've seen these takes people saying well actually if you look at Joe Biden's platform he's really the most progressive candidate that the party has really ever run or at least run in the last hundred years right okay so and and part of this is you know he's pursuing the public option and he's pursuing all these other well supposedly he's he's saying he's gonna do all these things yeah okay sure so he's written that down but

for example it's like the public option I mean the public option in 2009 was killed thanks to a very well financed relentless campaign that basically attacked it in the same terms that Biden is now attacking Medicare for who financed that campaign it was the private health insurance and pharmaceutical industries who also coincidentally happened to be now bankrolling Biden's current campaign so you know I mean when we take that into consideration I ask you with a straight face can you really tell me that the same industry that killed the public option in 2009 is now going to be funding Biden's campaign because they really believe that he's going to fight for this I mean it's it's embarrassing to even even

put it in those terms it's also I saw a story the other day that said essentially you know Joe Biden you know he's thinking about how to reach out to young voters now and you mentioned that he's going to do a some kind of turn on criminal justice which is really funny to imagine to me that Joe Biden is going to try to do the woke intersectional language stuff to paper over his god awful criminal justice record because as he famously said when he was asked how many genders there are he said at least three at least three so that's the kind of that's the kind of shit I think we would get from him as he tries to pander to say anyone who opposes mass incarceration yeah I mean he I think he he probably would

pursue his things because it's such you know that the mood has shifted so much in the United States and the political landscape that there's not really any cost I mean you know if Donald Trump this far right Republican is is also sort of making gestures at criminal justice reform then you know there really isn't any cost for Biden to do this but I mean you know another one that he said recently I think he said that he is excuse me that he's going to adopt Elizabeth Warren's policy and bankruptcy so you know it seems like his campaign is the message is going to be elect me so I can undo the terrible things I've already yeah yeah I saw someone claiming that this is proof that Warren has moved Biden to the left and

it's like I so I mean this this is a good segue to another part of this conversation that's very very important because nobody nobody has really spent any imaginative energy on this very central question right now which is what would a Biden president presidency look like I suspect that the most likely thing that we're gonna see aside from just the Republicans inflicting defeat after defeat after defeat on Biden if he ever even managed to make it to the White House the most likely thing that will happen is that Biden will try and do another grand bargain with Mitch McConnell that all the wheels are turning they're putting this in place you know they've already done the Reagan trick of exploding the deficit

with a ridiculous tax cut and then saying oh look how bad the deficit is we have to now cut spending on these entitlement programs Mitch McConnell has said that this is what he wants to do in you know either a Trump second term or you know at some point after the election Biden of course famously has spent this entire campaign talking about how no no it's still possible to work with Republicans you know there are people that I can work with and what are they gonna collaborate on the to me clearly the project that Biden and Republicans like McConnell have been trying and failing to do for decades which is finally really cripple those programs because Biden won't look at that way he'll he'll you know if he

does it he will do a speech where he'll praise Mitch McConnell say look by partisanship is still possible look at this the system can still work after after you know generation after after years of gridlock and you know and then he'll make a perfect lane for the next fascist a much more serious ideologically committed fascist to run to the next Democrats left and saying well I will actually restore these cuts and so to me a really big danger of the Biden presidency and I have no idea how things are going to line up because you know we've already seen how how history can can throw a wrench into our best laid plans with this pandemic but to me there's a real danger that that Biden becomes the Hindenburg

of the United States yeah that he unwittingly allows a a it's very dangerous far right force to take over so this would be like if Clinton were triangulating from day one like not even the first two years of the Clinton administration where he tried to push through a kind of laundry list of liberal asks like right off the bat wants to go after social welfare spending well I mean I know whether it's gonna be day one but I feel like it's gonna it'll it'll happen at some point it this is just this is what their careers are building up to I mean look I will say if that does happen it doesn't necessarily mean that it will work it could be that you know whether it's um saying this thing is in the Senate and and

you know other other progressive lawmakers maybe mount some sort of opposition maybe there is a a large uprising of people you know there's protests against this who knows we'll have to see I mean that that could happen the left have to resist Biden yes exactly um you know and it'll be a big question of what is mbc going to do are they gonna support them in this are they gonna like loyally snap into line as fox news would or are they going to actually criticize them I mean I think they would I think they would mostly be loyalist maybe you have someone like Chris Hayes who would be against entitlement cuts but I don't think the rest of them would be against it by and large I would be very skeptical yeah

uh now so this this question is it's it's kind of a um kind of off the path here but I do have to ask it why does Biden have such a high level of support among older African American voters are you know one of us he's a great kind of retail politician at least up until now for the same deal is why he's good with the white non-college educated voters well he's a back slapper hard of hard of being a politician is that you you have to have charm you have to be likable you have to you know get people to even if they don't really care or know what you actually support that they you know they'll just say well you seem like a decent good person and I'll vote for you and I think Biden does that very well

he he obviously plays up this image of the kind of scrappy working-class uh Santa you know fighting the good fight for the ordinary ordinary guy you know he's famously takes the Amtrak to to Washington and everything so I think that's part of it I think um you know he's he's uh since the beginning of his career he's been able to win black voters um over uh and and I think that's sort of stuck I think another part of it is that um in his career he very early figured out the trick that if there was a kind of scary seeming Republican that was going up against them um that he could run as right as possible and still count on the support of unions count on the support of African American voters

liberals uh because they were going well we can't do anything else which is really working for him now um because he has been sold as sort of the only option for uh for stopping Trump and you know I mean we can't discount the fact that the guy was vice president to Obama for eight years and and Obama is especially among older African Americans very beloved uh he is he remains what the most popular democratic president in in uh history at the moment or something uh I mean you know it's a testament you know just the way that every candidate including Sanders has tried to wrap themselves around Obama you know we saw that when the the Bloomberg ad and everything yeah uh Obama has a lot of power and as a symbol

is is very very influential within the democratic electorate and and Biden has that so I think that's all of that is sort of coming into this and playing a role even though Obama himself has refrained from endorsing Biden so far yeah which you know is a little bit embarrassing for Biden but you know Obama has justified it in the sense of I'm going to let this play out I don't want to influence things even though we know he he most certainly did influence things behind scenes um and uh it even if you don't have that endorsement it's still you know a lot of voters will still associate Biden with him because I mean you know Biden was you know maybe not on tv every single day for for eight years but he was

constantly being mentioned he was Obama's kind of zany psychic I mean for christ sakes they wrote a book where they are solving mysteries together so yeah yeah the Matt uh Matt's book hoped eyes last yes very proud of that very proud of there's more coming uh there's going to be another 15 in the next year and a half uh Bronco here's my last question and I think it's the most important one right now on Tuesday you know four very big important states vote and so far Biden is still winning on the question of who is more electable and that's probably the greatest source of his strength in this campaign what should the Bernie campaign and what should we as as messengers or or phone bankers what should we be saying to convince

democrats who are going to vote on Tuesday that that is not the case what is what is the the the most potent argument and succinct argument against Joe Biden that would peel off his support I think point out that he has the exact same weaknesses of as Hillary Clinton that that sunken campaign that Trump was able to run to the left on I think also point out the fact that Joe Biden again he is the architect of the Iraq war Donald Trump not for lack of trying but he has ended up in a position where he's going to be running as the first president in at least 40 years to not take the United States into a new war not only that but already the democrats have nominated two candidates who voted for the

Iraq war and they both lost I mean you know they had other similarities behind besides that but I think that's really key his stance is on American Social Security again Trump is going to eat his lunch on that I think also you know if you can subtly call attention to the fact you know this thing that we all know but we are not allowed to say which is that Joe Biden of 2020 is not the Joe Biden of 2015 he is tired he is struggling to form coherent sentences and thoughts and honestly to me he makes even the notoriously incoherent Trump you know seemed like a power laureate so I think all those things I mentioned and some of these things I think are key and I think also mentioned that you know centrist

establishment candidates do not actually have a good track record Walter Mondale was exactly this thing he was considered less risky than someone like Jesse Jackson and he was walloped by Reagan do caucus to go carry all these people you know the one person that they always point to is McGovern who is a completely different politician to Sanders and meanwhile you have this 40 year track record of just centrist after centrist being absolutely destroyed in a general election by you know usually an extreme right Republican it very much feels like we're watching 2016 all over again in slow motion it is in terms of the confidence of Biden supporters right now that oh there's no way we could possibly lose this election

well you know confidence and yet there's a lot of panic I can see among people who support him about the idea of him having to even sit down for a two hour debate and have to you know formulate thoughts and ideas in real time on off the cuff you know I mean Jim Cliburn called for the debate to be cancelled there was someone else recently I saw who was saying well let's just cancel the primaries and the debate and just wrap this thing up I mean it is not exactly a sign of confidence that his supporters are saying I'm so desperate to try and just shut down Biden having to appear in front of an audience you know for every regular thing he's going to do three times in the general election just so that

people don't see him basically Bronco Marchatis author of yesterday's man the case against Joe Biden you can acquire that if it has not already been hoarded on the internet from Verso books it's halftime in the Democratic primaries we will see you Sunday night for the Chappell Trap House live stream of the pretty damn big Democratic presidential debate between Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden I think the last chance for a game change thanks again for joining us twitch.tv slash Chappell Trap House bye bye bye bye bye bye bye