Chapo Trap House - Episode 212 - Borderline feat. Brendan James (5/21/18)

Episode Date: May 21, 2018

It's been a miserable and grim week in terms of the news so we brought Chapo fam and extended universe associate Brendan James back and after a long shaggy dog story about Virgil and Matt going to a video game expo at NYU (seriously the real show starts at 0:12:45), we wade into the badness and discuss the massacres carried out by the IDF in Gaza, and the ever-increasing complicity of America's media and elected officials in accelerating it. We then turn to America's own borders and discuss the conflation of immigration and terror street gang MS-13. Finally we present a classic reading series from a dear old friend and debut a brand new form of reading series: our own book. Buy our book. Buy our book, we say? Yes, friends, buy our book. Pre-order the book here: chapotraphouse.com

Oh god, George, fifth attempt for that Christmas. Man, man, y'all in the superstructure too much. Immediately delete all of this. Yo, are y'all everything and everyone nowadays? Cause y'all motherfuckers are the spectacle. Fuck, we're fucked. Here we go, here we go. All I'm gonna do is ill choke, all I'm gonna do is ill choke.

Bring me all the damn presents, all I'm gonna do is ill choke. Am I Diane Arbus? Cause I just got done with a photo shoot of a bunch of hairy freaks. That's right folks. Watch Charlie go into the chocolate factory cause I just took his tour of some goddamn treats and snacks. Am I Ouija because I just witnessed some crime scenes being photographed? That's very, very funny and only the fuck are we doing today? Only people of a high IQ will get that joke.

I want every one of them to DM me after this episode. All of Matt's jokes are like about like Pokemon Snap today. Like what the fuck is going on? Weegee was a 1930s crime scene photographer in New York City. Oh of course dude, yeah I got it. He's also known as the guy Peter Sellers stole the Dr. Strangelove voice from. Yeah. And he was the inspiration for Jude Law's character in Road to Perdition.

That classic character you all love. That classic character you know and love. One of the finest actors of our generation. I'll tell you about Jude Law, sir. So yeah, it's riffing with the boys' day. Yeah. You know it's just been a really lighthearted week. So we're going to give you a lighthearted reaction.

Yeah like a lot of fun things have happened. Nothing is right for us. Honestly look, okay so we did a photo shoot today. It was an unreasonably early hour. For me, I'm not saying like for the world but for me, I physically am excruciating pain. It was 11 AM. I had to wake up at 9.

I just sort of stayed up. I couldn't get to sleep. We had a guest lined up to talk about Gaza but she couldn't do, like the photo shoot pushed back. We're going to do it mid-week. But in instead of the serious episode today, like I was just physically excruciating pain. I should get a purple heart for what I'm going through right now.

Brazil mentioned the book. Of course we will be for the first time ever doing a chapel world premiere reading of a sample from the book for the first time ever. But also book related, sitting in with us this week. Long time friend, short time trader, Brendan James. Hey everybody. It's very awkward. It's super excited too.

Because Brendan helped write the book. He's part of one of the author team. And then in the middle of that process, he abandoned us. And so now we have this awkward sort of, you know, divorce parents coming together to visit their kid at camp thing where he has to show up and do things for us even though he has left us. I can't believe we betrayed the revolution. So he went to the hills with a small cadre.

I may not be too, I'm not going to pitch in as much maybe because I'm looking for what excerpt we should read. But I think I think I know what we should do. So we'll do that at the end. Always good to have Brendan back in sitting in on the trap, even behind a mic instead of behind the boards. Yeah. Yeah.

So as we mentioned, we just got done with a little photo shoot. A little blow up chapel. Yeah, exactly. Did we inadvertently capture photographic evidence of a murder? I don't know. We'll find out later in the touch ups. But before then, yeah. This week, nothing but terrible news, you know,

like just bad things happening all over the world. Massacres in Gaza, another school shooting in this country. Pretty grim all around. Brutal stuff. I may not be Leonard Cohen, but I have seen the future and it is murder. I don't know. Where do you guys want to start?

Do you guys want to begin with your report from your field report from your trip to NYU? Did it, did it, did it, did it, did it, did it, did it. Yes, I've got a dispatch from the field with my co-correspondent, Matt Crisman. We were invited to go to the NYU Game Center for I believe these were the senior projects of the game students.

The students who are learning to game. Who are learning to make the game. They're spending five hundred thousand dollars to learn how to do gaming. Have you ever wondered why every game, they're like huge directional arrows telling you exactly what to do now? Well, they found out.

We were invited by Jesse Fuchs, our good friend from NYU, who is a professor of some sort of the introductory level of video gaming. So he teaches them the to be cultural Marxists. He teaches them how to do speed runs in Super Mario. And they go through the process and this is their final, final thing

that they create after twelve years of being in video game school. And I would say it was fun. It was a blast. It was interesting. There was a large variety of games. There were classic actual video games. There were tabletop games.

There were deck based games. We played the boy band simulator, which was based on the concept of those, you know, those Japanese dating sims. Yeah, it's called Lou Pearlman 2K18. It's an extremely controversial game. Okay, press X to lure this child onto your hot air balloon.

And when we were walking around, press F to call your lawyer. When we were walking around, I spied a poker table. So we went to this room. That was the VR games. That was the VR room. And the game was not poker at all.

I actually would not have minded just sitting down and playing poker for six hours. It was a VR game where you are a dealer in purgatory and you, like, you actually have to do the job of a dealer and deal the cards and everything. And the people playing the game are people trapped in purgatory and I guess they tell you their stories.

Yeah, and then you develop relationships with them. The other one was... There was the other... Wait, hold on a second. This game was just purgatory sim. Yes. What it's like... Purgatory sim. But you're an employee of purgatory.

Yes, exactly. You work in purgatory and you're a blackjack dealer. Wait, guys, hold on a second. How about this? Purgatory. I actually play... That would be heaven, sir. Sign me up.

I actually play a mod of the purgatory sim called Colob Sim. I'm actually ranked in Colob Sim. I main George Romney. People say that's cheap, but like, come on. There were three... Another one was a bartender simulator. It was just simulating drudgery.

One of them was called a flight simulator. Yes. And it was a simulation of being on an airplane. Yes. You're sitting in an airplane seat. You're sitting in the seat in an airplane. And you can interact with that shitty touchscreen thing that they have there.

Like, you can watch a movie or play a game on the back of the other person's seat. That's for a meta. It's a super meta, but it's one of those things where... It's like, I get your point after two seconds. Yeah. It's like, I get the joke. I don't actually need to play it.

Is Gerard J. Pardue an unlockable character or not? Yeah. It's like, fill five carafs of water on this drink cart. You could get the Flight 93 expansion pack where they hijack the plane and these guys are going to organize to, you know, push a beverage cart through the fucking flight doors. But you just still sit there.

Well, that reminds me... And you just still watch fucking Lilo and Stitch. Gamifying the plane does actually remind me of when we would take flights. Every time we got on a flight, my screen on the seat in front of me would light up and it would be like, passenger 97 wants to talk to you about...

And it would always be virtual. Making use of the messaging system, which I don't think anyone's ever used before and we would all click cancel like, no, fuck off. You know, I kept trying to talk to those guys. I picked them up, but I was right next to them. No, I responded with Art U Horny. And it wasn't virtual.

Man, I can't imagine why you left. Oh, it was a big thing. There were also tabletop games and the most interesting one was the simplest one. All of these games, like all of these, you know, seniors had, like, swag and shit. They had, like, cutouts and whistles. Yeah, just all kinds of stuff to, like, draw you in,

like the poker table for that game, which is unnecessary. Or there were bottles of liquor for the bartender game. The game that we spent the most time playing to the extent that I think we chased away the creator of the game and she couldn't handle us was a very simple card game. It's just a table with a few cards laid out on it. It's just a deck of cards, basically.

And it's actually ingenious. It was a combination of clue and apples to apples, basically, is how I would describe it. Which makes it sound terrible, if you think about it. Yeah, but it was cool. No, it was great. So the problems of the game is, oh, wait, the flip of the card, here's the victim.

And the flip of the card, here's what they do. Here's something about them. The flip of the card, here's where they were found dead. And you have five cards that indicate, like, plot points, basically. And you have to tell a story of how that person died. And you can play this with six people and everyone tells a concocts a story of how they died.

And one person is a judge. And the judge has cards of items. They're the detective. The detective, yeah. And they have item cards that they throw in in the middle of your story to kind of throw a wrench in it. And you have to improvise through that. And then they decide who told the most plausible narrative.

It's actually very postmodern because it implies that there's no actual answer. There's only the most satisfying narrative. Yes, we all read the New York trilogy. I get it. Yeah, I felt very Austerian playing it. But Matt and I had a big disagreement at the table because I insisted that, as a competitor,

I should get to challenge your story. I should get to point out any logical inconsistencies that you make when you're spinning your yarn. And I think everything needs to be determined by the cards you're dealt because that's what makes it a game. Otherwise, it's just a bunch of people having a conversation. But it's a social game and an interactive game. Right.

But it has to be structured by the cards you get. Oh, you think conversation is a new game? Social climbing is a game. I'm Mr. Robot. Welcome to Mr. Robot. So we played this game multiple times. And anyone could go to this event. And so there were just like normies there

and they could not handle us at all. Because we were spinning some interesting games. Yeah, you guys were like, Pickle Rick. Doing all your little jokes. We were pretty epic. We would always incorporate bacon into all of our narrative. What was the best actual video game you saw? No, there were a lot of art games that were not designed

to be enjoyable. And the games that were designed to be played looked, I don't know. There was no Pac-Man. Somebody should have done Pac-Man. Yeah, nobody reinvented Pac-Man, which is a big strike against them. So here's what I thought. Somebody should have made, because like some of these people, they make games with cabinets, right?

And I thought, imagine if one puckish student just went through, you know, spent $8 million to go to video game university and spent 87 years of their life there. And their senior project was making the video game from The Simpsons, my dinner with Andre game, with the full cabinet with like all the controls. Tell me more and all of that. A full game, a full game.

And if that kid existed, I would have to give them all my money. That would be it. To know the unknowable, to say the unsayable. By the way, Wallace Sean, if you're listening, please come on the show. Yeah, come on the show. Wallace Sean, come on, Chapel, please. Or Come Town, if you want. The best game was the game that we played in the Jaggery about a lot,

and that I think that woman who could not handle us and wanted us to go away very much so should kickstart it for $83 million. And you will get a fine sawbuck from me for a copy of that game. What was the name of the game? I don't remember. I don't remember. Man, you guys learned a lot there. This is like being in Butthead going on a field trip.

This is fucking pointless. This is like a report on the shape of the ice cubes and the soda that you had. So as I mentioned earlier, this has been a week of all just completely bleak and dystopian news. Chief among that being what's going on in the Gaza Strip right now, just the wholesale massacre of protesters by the IDF. I think we should let you know that we are going to have another episode about this topic, speaking with a guest who can speak more deeply and intelligently

and from experience about these things. I think it's an issue that warrants a deeper dive. We'll limit ourselves this week to, I think, discussing some of the media reaction to this has been really stunning, and it really goes to show you just how into overdrive the propaganda arm of the Israeli government and Israeli lobby in America is to not just apologize or cover up this or shove it to the side, but I think we are seeing a transition now where the official organs of, like I said, Israeli propaganda in America are just openly embracing this now.

Senator Chuck Schumer, welcome to the resistance. Openly embracing. The New York Times is as good as any of bellwether, like the crown jewel of the liberal media. And in their actual opinion section, the range of opinion on this massacre runs the gamut from Thomas Friedman saying it's an act of human sacrifice on behalf of the Palestinians to Barry Weiss saying the exact same thing. She went on Bill Maher's show on Friday and said, all these Palestinians, they timed this, you know, fence protest.

They timed being murdered. Including doctors and women and children timed this to the photo op of the Israeli embassy. How dare they? I'm sorry, the American embassy. How dare you make Jared Kushner look bad? She said just so they could have the split screen of Ivanka smiling, contrasted with, you know, men, women and children being shot with high powered rifles from hunting blinds by the IDF. And what she said on that show on Friday was let's not give them what they want.

So her argument is these crafty Palestinians timed their protest to make it look, make Israel look bad. So the way we beat them is to just not feel bad at all. Like I said, wholesale mass murder. Yeah, it's basically the sharpville massacre of the 21st century. But don't fall for it. Yeah, don't fall for it. And here's the other thing, like the idea that somehow they're cheating because they timed their protest

to make it more politically effective. Ooh, how dare they? They're playoff protesters. Yeah, Israel, Israel's actions and guys on the last, say like since 2000. Since Cass led? Well, since Lebanon really have been, it's been like, since that, since their humiliation in the hands of as well has been, okay, we need to do a military demo to show our awesome destructive might against, you know, people are pretty much helpless.

But I think the other part of that has been, let's up the ante of what we can get away with. And the reaction to this in particular, because, you know, there has been a big liberal reaction of like, this is awful. This is blah, blah, blah, which again, I hate to be a pessimist. Like I remember this type of shit under Bush. This is the type of thing where the liberal quarters, they notice something that is bad under a Republican president and you think it's a sea change and then they go back conveniently not noticing it. I hope I'm fucking wrong.

But in the liberal quarters, yeah, there's been that. But I feel like with the reliably pro-Israel, more like American Lacudinic set, it's been, okay, we're up in the ante to this. Yeah, okay. Full steam ahead. Let's go. I'm just shocked that I'm on a show with these bros who are violating Barry Weiss's free speech right now. Speaking of like, Felix, as you said, like pushing the limits or like I said that they're now, I think there is, I'm noticing a shift in just the open embrace of this kind of murder and violence.

Back in the pages of the New York Times, this one really stood out for me in terms of how just blood curdling and awful it is. And again, I don't want to say shocking that this is in the pages of the New York Times, but I think it's very telling that the New York Times publishes this. And it's by Shmuel Rosner, in the opinion section, really distinguished himself with this one. The headline is, Israel needs to protect its borders by whatever means necessary. That's not a border. Well, yeah, first and most important, this Gaza fence is not a border. No. It is not anything close to an internationally recognized border.

If it was, it would beg the question, what nation are they crossing over from? Yeah. They very, very consciously don't have a nation. And if they did, if this was a border, then Israel would be enacting a blockade of a sovereign nation, which is an act of war. Yes. If they did have a sovereign nation, they would also have the rights of the natural gas and the Mediterranean in their territorial order. They basically turned Gaza into the jail from face off, not recognized by any government, a fucking phantom zone, something that is in a quantum state at any time. Right.

Depending on what you need for rhetorical purposes, it is a sovereign country or it's part of Israel, and it just shifts from one to the other. All that matters is that Israel, and this is the thing that matters more than anything, is that Israel is entirely responsible for everything that happens in Gaza. They created an open air prison. They're in charge of everything that goes in or out of that place. They put up these fucking fences. They man them. They control how much water they get. They control how far they can go into the Mediterranean to seek fish.

That is their creation. And then they say, well, look at what they did. But anything they're doing is literally what people would do in any kind of concentration camp. It's like judging the Sobobor fucking people for rebelling against the SS. Also going all the way back, because I think Hamas is still a boogeyman. I don't think that that's old, but it's just, oh, there's this genocidal government and blah, blah, blah, ignoring all the nuances that have actually taken place over the past basically like 15 years now. But they were masks. Well, yeah, exactly.

I think that's the image is still among people who don't either know or care a lot about this. Is they just saying, well, yeah, but what are you going to do? There's terrorists running that strip. And apart from that being really essentializing what the government is there, it also excuses the massacre of innocents who have, you know, no stake in whether or not Hamas were to fall out of government or not. And they just live there. But that was a U.S.-Egyptian-Israeli forced error in 2006 when Hamas won the elections in 2006 freely and fairly by all accounts. And we sponsored a coup with Egypt and Israel to start a civil war between Fatah and Hamas.

And then that resulted in Hamas being driven into super militant mode and taking over Gaza. They're supposed to just be the regular government of the territory. So this whole idea like Hamas took over Gaza and it's a tyranny that they rule under a military dictatorship. It's like that again happened. As you said, Israel owns everything. I think the U.S. also owns it and Egypt owns it. Yes. By making that into a hot crowded corner of, I would say, yeah, a pretty authoritarian party,

but one that resembles a lot of other authoritarian parties when they govern a place that has been made unhabitable by the larger colonial neighborhoods. And also, stepping back another step further, a fucking party that was boosted at its inception by Israel to undermine the PLO. They got what they fucking wanted with Hamas. That's true. Here's another thread to all this. And a lot of the reaction I'm seeing about these people who are being, again, just mowed down. 68 dead, but like thousands wounded. And wounded here is almost too weak a term.

We're talking about being shot with high caliber bullets, sniper rifles being maimed permanently. So like crippled for life or worse. They're saying, oh, well, these people are Hamas, the people who are approaching the fence. Oh my God. Oh, they're Hamas or whatever. So, yeah. Oh, I was about to say that. Yes.

If Hamas is the, if you lived in the Gaza Strip, which as we said is a prison, is a functionally a concentration camp. And Hamas is the group that is organizing to stand up against your jailers or to even die in an act of like sort of defiance or even self-respect to like instead of living on your fucking knees. Yeah. Good. Yeah. Good for now. It's brave. Any expression of militancy in that context is an expression of humanity.

It's an assertion of one's humanity in the face of a hegemonic power that is denying you the ability to live at all. And this is another thing that I think, Virgil, you nodded at before with the Chuck Schumer reference, is that the way that the, I would still say a lot of liberals, but mostly now, like the real chest beating conservative prosial types, talk about this and talk about unarmed people, even though they don't consider them unarmed in some way or whatever, like being gunned down and it's fine. They're in a way preparing you for more domestic insurrections. Yes. In which black people or anyone of any class or any race want to rise up and, you know, for whatever grievances they have and are gunned down. They're saying, well, I mean, look, I mean, we saw this in Gaza and are you really going to say those people were innocent?

You know, the state needs to take the measures it takes. And we also remember that this stuff is not theoretical. And I'm not just pulling this out of my ass because Black Lives Matter protesters during Ferguson, during Baltimore were in touch with Palestinian people because the strategies and sometimes the actual material were linked to the same ideas and tactics that Israel uses against the Palestinians. So this stuff links up beyond, oh, it's Israel. It's always going to be fucked up. They're talking about every event that could happen here, too. Yeah.

I mean, IDF does train American cops, too. Right. That point about, you know, we could see this and repeat, where I really think we're going to see this and repeat like a sort of gray area, stateless, non-sovereign, non-state entering a non-border region. They just at all costs cannot be let in. What do you think is going to happen when, you know, most of the world starts fucking sinking? Yeah. Yeah. If things don't get drastically better, this is what the future is going to look like.

The fact of the matter is white people in this country would support putting walls and armed guards and dogs around every black neighborhood before they even think about reparations. Yes. And that's citizens of the United States. And what Felix talks about is that we like to imagine that there's a thing called human rights. But in reality, because of the national system, the international system of nation states, the UN, these concepts, your rights really are linked to your citizenship. And if you are deprived of citizenship in a mutually recognized sovereign entity, you're basically not a human being. Same way that felons that turning, you know, so many mostly black males into felons is a way to abrogate their rights. Exactly.

And then it's like, oh, well, we're dealing with criminals and drug dealers here, and then it's basically a racial caste system. So the future is going to be creating these categories like the Palestinians, like refugees, like illegal immigrants who by virtue of the fact that they have been forced by the vagaries of the power of others to try to seek some sort of life in any way they can, their assertion of humanity becomes a crime. Right. And because they cannot refer to a citizenship of a sovereign body that is mutually recognized by other countries, they essentially don't have rights, and they can be disposed of any way that the most powerful local government can imagine to do so. What it also reminds me of is remember when Trump said shithole countries is that the huge missed point there with and this definitely was libs is, okay, obviously he was being an idiot and racist and just probably thinking that entire cultures or shitholes, etc. But the idea beneath that that these countries are in poor shape and other parts of the world to say, oh, I'm so offended that he called them shithole countries. I'm sure they're vibrant places.

Well, a lot of them aren't great places to live right now because of America. Yeah. Or because of other imperial designs that have been imposed upon them. And that is a more offensive thing and a deeper critique of American racism and foreign policy than just saying, oh, Trump was mean on the air once again. A great example of that sadistic line of thought is the Ben Shapiro thing, that quote that I never see in any of the fawning profiles of him, where he says, Mr. Tudor, I'm logical. Israel is just Jews are just better than Arabs. Arabs like living and they like riding and they like living in Seattle and Iraq.

And he's referring to, of course, the Gaza Strip where there is just open sewage. But again, this is a function of the absolutely conscious and systematic decisions by their jailers. Yes. That is the way to that. And I just want to say one other thing, like in sort of trying to metabolize the rotten and just morally hideous people who are trying to get you to like accept this or think that it is. And in any way, just will say things like, well, what are you going to do? They're armed. They want to cross this fence and they want to kill Jews.

What are you going to do? Just let them across the border? Well, obviously, yes. But the like the broader question is in dying and in showing the world what Israel is prepared to do to stop them from crossing this again, not border. I think it is important to show to the world exactly what the state of Israel has to do to maintain itself in its current form. And if you're OK with that, well, then just fuck it. Like, forget it. Then you're admitting that you want to live in a state or you think that we should support a state in which this kind of wholesale murder is just doing business.

Yeah. That's just how we want to live in a murderous war of all against all. Yeah. And that's what that's the undergirding conservative idea. And that you we were talking about how this connects to Black Lives Matter and protests in the United States and also the American border with Mexico is that the undergirding conservative idea is that this that you must in any given situation ignore the context that created what's happening. Right. You are if someone does something that you perceive as violent to yourself, that is hostility. Why are they are in that position?

Why are they deprived in this way? That is not something to be considered. That is that is sophistry. Right. All that matters is that they're trying to get my stuff. Why I have this stuff and they don't have anything that's for that's for academics to talk about. A perfect example. A footage not found.

A perfect example that the IDF this week and their sort of savvy social media shop cut together a video of Palestinians, you know, approaching the fence and being tear gas and shot. And they were like the caption was, imagine you lived a mile away from this. Right. And the obvious question is if the Gaza Strip had a fancy Twitter app, social media account, PR shop, they could make the exact same video asking the exact same question. Yes. But it wouldn't work because they're pitching it to an American audience and the American audience are pitching that that can only imagine themselves inside the gated community. Right. They cannot imagine themselves deprived.

Well, they cannot imagine themselves the one trying to fight for their lives. They are the ones on the other side of the thing. So because that video you're talking about, it shows this sterile little suburb Israeli settlement and then it pans out and it shows the border and every American is subconsciously going to relate to that. Right. They're going to relate to that more than they can relate to any kind of abject lifestyle created by by colonialism or imperialism or capitalism or anything because they think that they're on the inside looking out. And because of that, the appeal is going to be these people are coming for you. Right. And you need to be able to do what you need to do to keep them from literally the door. It's David.

It's literally the TV commercial of every Republican candidate. Yes. Running for off. You're under siege. You have an amount and maybe it's some part you have this this patronage. You have this mess of potage that you've inherited from from your parents and your parents. You have a fucking house that's underwater. Exactly.

And maybe even if you really interrogated it, you'd be able to say, I probably don't deserve it in any sort of philosophical sense. Yeah. But it's mine. I'm not giving it up and I'll do whatever it takes to protect it. And that's what binds the relationship to Gaza, to the American border, to black communities in America. It is that throw up the fences, put out the guards, shoot them so that I don't have to worry about them coming for my shit. Well, we don't need to ventriloquize the thoughts of these people. Let's just read from them.

Yes. This is Shmuel Rosner, again, writing in the op-ed pages of the New York Times, America's biggest paper. The paper of record. The paper of record. It was brave of the New York Times to start putting triple parentheses around their op-ed. The old gray man. Let's listen to what Shmuel writes here. It is customary to adopt an apologetic tone when scores of people have been killed as they were this week in Gaza.

Bitch-ass cuck move. But I will avoid this sanctimonious instinct and declare coldly. Israel had a clear objective when it was shooting, sometimes to kill, well-organized quote, this isn't scare quotes, demonstrators near the border. Israel was determined to prevent these people, some of whom believed to have been armed, most apparently encouraged by their radical government from crossing the fence, separating Israel from Gaza. Israel achieved all its objectives and completed all of its daily quests and received a loot box. That objective was achieved.

Of course, the death of humans is never a happy occasion. Still, I feel no need to engage in ingenue mourning. Guarding the border was more... I'm a logic guy. I have no rash, I have no emotions other than rationality right now. Guarding the border was more important than avoiding killing. What border? And guarding the border is...

Not a fucking border! Is what Israel did successfully. Yeah, we've discussed that. You know though, this guy, this I will take over the liberal Zionist line to this, which has been like, well, I love Israel, but I don't love this. It's like, what the fuck do you think Israel is? This is the exact idea that Israel was founded on, and that it's not a fucking border. In the founding idea of Israel, it is, because the only border is between Arab and not Arab.

That's your border. There's your only fucking border. There's the founding idea that undergirds all this. This is the reality of an ethno state. To these freaks, to these people who, you know, the handjob at birthright was that much more evocative than the liberal Zionist. That Adam Friedler. God bless you for just giving me the ethno state thing straight.

Right. Fucking God bless. No, it's the classic preference for someone who tells you at least what they actually believe over the border. And then they get to, like this guy, that whole fucking paragraph is oozes with self-congratulation because of his clear eyes. Realism. Realism. The difference between the Trump supporters and the never Trump people who substantially

believe the same evil things. Right. And I will say, though, before you go on, if you do go on about that, guys, like the, I remember there have been a lot of activists or speakers who said that they don't really now when they go on speaking tours or go to college campuses, which is obviously a huge battleground for all this stuff. A lot of them say from the pro-Palestine side that they don't really have to convince a lot of college kids anymore, including Jewish college kids.

They're like, that battle is kind of over. Like, I'm sure, you know, there's still the Charlie Kirk style, you know, grant standards, but like, Oh, you like socialism? How about living in Gaza? Right. Damn, got them, dude. Yeah.

So like, those guys are still there, but the real refusal to kind of grapple with the realities that actually happen in the West Bank and Gaza versus Israel, those don't seem to be that complicated for college kids anymore. And therefore the next generation of Americans and American Jews. But that just means that the Brett Stevens is and his ilk and the New York Times editorial guys who want to chime in are going to get more honest and more real because there's, they're not going to be able to really rely on slipping it by anybody anymore. They're going to have to go if they're either with us or against us.

So I'm just going to say, yeah, I like killing them to paraphrase Chuck Schumer for every one of the American Jewish college students they lose. Right. They will gain five rabidly evangelical lunatics according to the end of the world. Right. Because which, by the way, this embassy move to Jerusalem is 1000% for the snake handling lunatics in this country. Yes.

Who believe like Huckabee went there. That the rapture is going to happen in their lifetime. I find this quote because it's genuinely amazing in the New York Times article about Huckabee and a bunch of the evangelical psychos going to the opening of the embassy in Jerusalem. I think it's really amazing and frankly a sign of his commitment that Mike Huckabee keeps going to Israel, a place where he can't get his delicious fatback and pork sausage and wet ribs that he fucking subsist on. I like to imagine that when he goes to Ben Gurion airport and they ask him if he has

anything to declare, he's sweating bullets because he has 12 condoms full of pork gravy stuffed up his ass. I love this fat like goofy the dogs uncle character who's also a psychotic. Ironically, given what his sons have done that he's going back and forth Israel on this like apocalyptic mission. But he just showed like he's going there because he's like, oh, the world's going to end. I have to secure this for the forces of Satan to fight Jesus Christ forever and all these people will go to hell.

It's very real and heavy to him. Yeah. But also like when he gets there, he's like, yeah, that their flop looks like a big old wasp puppy. Oh, by the way, all you can be exterminated the war between good and evil. Oh, is that Tahiti sauce or is that ranch? Oh, boy, that's a long thought. I would take either.

Oh, boy, these guys should have been made to my daughter. I'm sorry, folks. Oh, y'all got a swimming hole over here. By the way, literally everyone you know will go to hell. And they're like, oh, this is fine. This is the normal destiny for our people. I'm sorry, folks. I go on my face.

The article wasn't he wasn't there at the embassy opening this article from 2015. Play the egg on the face. No, it's flat. Oh, you go. You go. What are you going to do with their eggs? I make them into a little little omelet. I like to put some pork gravy on that.

I'm going to eat that up. I wish you got egg on my plate instead. Wait, is Tim Faust in the room? He does laugh like that. Okay. This article is from 2015. The Hakebi goes to Israel. I stand here on Mount Carmel today.

He continued, and I hope that if called upon, I would be willing to stand all by myself and to call fire from heaven and believe that God will answer. Even if there are hundreds and hundreds of false prophets on the other side, you may stand here someday and be called upon to call fire from heaven. I hope you're ready to believe that God will answer that prayer. He is casting Dungeons and Dragons spells by the way. By the way, I hope that turns the belt in Carmel. All these besides psychopaths staring at him like great speech, governor.

I vow that I will stand at the golden corral and I will demand the prime rib. Even if the carbon station is out of it. I actually, I don't even want to read anymore. We're fine. I just want to say one thing though about the Hakebi thing. A lot of people like to talk about how it is insane and horrifying that so many people in the highest echelons of our government are essentially apocalyptic psychopaths who believe that millennial dispensationalists who want to.

They got a lot of Hebrews here in Israel. They want to destroy the temple on the rock. They want to rebuild the fucking temple or the dome on the rock to create the temple to bring about the apocalypse. That is fucked up. But honestly, it doesn't require evangelical mania to believe to do the things that Israel and the United States have been doing. But you know, it has made it more politically feasible over the past couple of decades because

30 years ago evangelicals were anti-Semites. Now they're all supporters of Israel. Just two notes on the evangelical thing. The big difference is over the last 30, 40 years, the introduction of the completely made up phrase and horseshit concept, Judeo-Christian. Not a thing. Made up nonsense. Tell that to the guys that Edward I stuck on a fucking boat and kicked out of England.

Tell them that Judeo fucking Christian is a term. I could have lived there. I could have lived in the movie Layer Cake and now I'm fucking here. I'm sorry, I feel like you could not have lived anywhere. Point number two about this idea that, as Ayn Rand said, the civilized man has a right to kill the barbarians. What culture has Israel actually produced? As far as I can see, it's like EDM DJs.

Oh, okay. What culture has the Eurovision winner? Just one Eurovision subcontext, sir. Well, I've seen you wear pre-pants. You know, you have to think for popularizing. Well, I have seen you get into fussy arguments with guys over who's found the Marley and me Blu-ray. Israeli's invented that.

Yeah, well, Israeli's invented wearing a lot of necklaces to go to restaurants called like Pizza Bonanzo. Getting into shoving matches over complete nonsense. Well, I've seen you send soup back at a restaurant because the temperature wasn't to your liking. That is diaspora Jewish culture. Yeah, you're right. You're right. I've never worn capri pants ever.

Piers Lander. You should, though. The last point I want to make on, I do have nice calves. Thank you, Virgil. The last one I want to make on this, and do be serious for a second, the other thing, the media response in terms of the moral nihilism or just pure nihilism that's on display here is Thomas Friedman said it. Shmuel said it.

I'm not going to read the rest of his monstrous article. But this sort of hand wringing over how could they do this to themselves? It's human sacrifice. Thomas Friedman said they're throwing the flower of their youth away rather than, I don't know, teaching them to code or some bullshit like that. Rather than having them die a fucking giardia in open sewers created by Israel. What I want to say about that is, again, the fact that these people can't fathom the idea that you would give your life for something bigger than yourself is very telling.

And I think that the people, the men and women and doctors who were blown away because they approached a fence or threw a rock did that knowing that they were facing death and they did it anyway. And I think that is the word for that is heroism. It speaks to two things. It speaks to their heroism, a heroism that the, to borrow a term from my hated Pepe villains, small sold, you can't imagine that kind of sacrifice. Also, it speaks to the horror that Israel is created in Gaza, that living is no longer

preferable if you can't live on your own terms and you're willing to fucking die for it. In any other context, like especially in American culture, we love the idea like they're better to die on your feet. Yes, exactly. That's exactly what we're seeing. We talked about this in the thing about how, in the last episode, about how America turns Goliath into David. Right.

And we have so many stories about Americans who are willing to do anything for their freedom. And when we see it happening somewhere else, it's clearly some sort of perverse death drive and cult created by some awful Hamas government or by the wickedness of Islam and not people in an untenable, horrible, torturous nightmare existence created by our ally in Israel who are willing to do anything to try to stop it. And two things I want to say before we move on, speaking of the doctors who went there, the medical staff, one of the medical staff who went there, a number of whom were shot,

one of whom was killed, who went there to provide aid for the people who went on the march to the not the fucking border, to the fucking fence, is a Canadian doctor named Tarek Lubani who was shot in the leg and I believe is still recovering. And according to a friend of his who messaged me is a fan of this show. And I wanted to say, and he asked if we could shout him out and I say, absolutely. And I think that you want to talk about heroism, this is a person who is an absolute example of fucking heroism and we should all thank him for his literal, that's actual service. And another point I'd like to make on that, the IDF when these things started had a tweet

that they hastily deleted where they said, we know where every one of these bullets went. All the shots are precise, snipers are firing these shots, they know exactly who they're pulling the trigger on. These people are clearly designated as doctors or are they have large symbol of every indication that they are medical there is no and the pressure people to that they there is no conclusion other than they are intentionally targeting doctors and the press. Many people point this out, but there were all those tweets of American hand wringers being like, oh, it's just it's tough out there.

You know, it's all blurry, you know, sometimes they don't know who they're hitting. And you know, the classic two tweets next to each other response is all those versus that tweet of the IDF spokesperson going, we know where every bullet landed. There were no mistakes. We come prepared. We know what we're going to do each time. Is there anything that they can do to resist? No, because BDS doesn't isn't good either.

BDS is an act of war violence is violence and anti Semitism. There is literally nothing legal in many jurisdictions. There is. Yes. And they want to increase that they want to make it an illegal thing to to participate in BDS. You're a college professor and you said a nice thing about Palestinians. Sorry, you're fired.

Yeah. You're doing business in any Southern American state. You literally have to sign a checkbox with the state saying that your business will never boycott Israel. Why are you doing this? Oh, I just do that to just do that. Because it's logical. But yeah.

No, but what we've learned is called coordination because because during the second and the fada, while they were mowing down Palestinians and crying the whole time, the Israeli answer is, well, where is the Mandela? Where is the peace? Just ran him over. And there is no fucking peaceful protest that would be acceptable because this is not a thing that's negotiable, right? Because the ethno state isn't negotiable.

And that is where we are. And I wanted to end this because I think we want to move on to talk about the M.S. 13 and the fucking the domestic parameters of this panic about borders and control and get to the fun part of the contamination is that after Operation Barbarossa began, Heinrich Himmler gave a speech to a Waffen SS battalion. And the quote that he said was, it is a time of iron and we must sweep with iron brooms. And I want to ask anybody who thinks of themselves as in solidarity with Israel or with America in its battle against these phantom terrorists or M.S. 13 or anything, anybody who wants

to protect the West, do you disagree with that idea, right? And they don't. That is the proof. That is the presiding ideology of the West, quote unquote, that these people are trying to defend. The presiding ideology is the Nazi concept of complete domination and extermination or defeat. That is what we're living in.

Are you ready to laugh? Yeah. All right. Just to play us out. Thomas Friedman and anyone who looks like Thomas Friedman should never say the phrase the flower of youth ever again. Fucking repulsive. Anyway, guys, on to sun your days.

I did want to mention the the there any memes in the ongoing border panic in this country just real quickly. This thing back the M.S. 13 thing, Trump keeps talking about M.S. 13 every time he talks about immigration and the border and ice and anything like that. We talked to Jake Forez just last week about how he's running with DHS and over his joke about killing ice agents. I saw the head of ice testify this week crying in front of Congress because people were mean to him.

They're literally talking about separate there. They're now literally separating children from their families and putting them on privately run concentration camps on military bases because because John Kelly said we're going to separate them and they'll go to foster care or whatever. And this is the week where we found out what whatever means and whatever means concentration camps on military. Well, for John Kelly, you know, foster care or whatever. That's a superior parenting choice to whatever he did.

Superior parenting choice to Afghanistan or whatever. Good word. General shithead. So Trump said in one of his idiotic speeches, he's talking about, you know, they're chopping people's heads off. It's terrible. Bad. No good.

And, you know, everyone reacted to that like, you know, this is disgusting that again, he's comparing all basically all Spanish speaking people in this country to a violent machete wielding street gang and, you know, connecting the two in the minds of his hog followers. And so that was the initial reaction. And then the sort of the turn was people who were like, now, now we have to be very careful in the media. It was clear that he was just referencing MSN, MS third MSNBC Chris Hayes with a fucking like Santa Muerte tattoo on his forehead, Rachel, Rachel Maddow in a dark alley.

Have we got some news for you? We're going to burn down your building unless we can sell in front of your corner. Laurence O'Donnell was just a full grill. And you know, this, this, this idiotic back and forth about, oh, does Trump know what he's talking about? What he means when he does this, who gives a shit? The people who support his agenda know why this is useful. And we saw a story this week about how ICE routinely designates the people in their

dragnet like the dreamers as gang members as part of MSN 13, because they have a tattoo and they're like, oh, that's that's a gang tattoo, definitely a gang tattoo. And they know it greases the skids for their ongoing, you know, just pipeline out of the country. Wearing a Cardinals hat. That's red. That's a gang. And one of the, one of the things this week was this guy, I think he writes to the Daily

Beast. His name is Lachlan. Lachlan Marquet. Lachlan Marquet. He had this, this comment where he was like, um, actually calling MSN 13 animals like, I don't, you know, protest. I don't think that's the hill to die on, you know, they are animals or whatever. Yeah.

He was, uh, is defending the, the humanity of gang members, uh, like MS 13, really the hill you guys want to die on. And what I'll say to that is on a one to one like individual opinion basis, like I could imagine being like, yeah, MS 13, like they do crimes that I would say fairly might eject you from humanity or at least polite society. That being said, for the government, yeah, that is the hill to die on. The government classifying people as unhuman or subhuman. Yeah.

No, that actually absolutely. And then all these stories about a guy who was lumped into MS 13 because now it's just a way to slap a leg just like terror is on his arm that was literally just the town he was born in. Yeah. And they said, that's a gang. So he's an animal now. According to Mark Markay, that's the bad scrabble hand name.

Yeah. Yeah. Lachlan Markay sounds like an Indonesian businessman using a fake name to check into a hotel. Yeah. Like the gang thing, like every, this type of like Markay type media shit had everything is taken in pure isolation, zero context. It's just, oh, are you saying gangs are okay? Their value neutral, maybe?

And it's like, yeah, this is like you said, this is good. Let's look at hero of the resistance, Preet Bahara. What was one of Preet Bahara's favorite things to do? It was to hit like black kids with Rico charges because of who their friends were on Facebook. Because guess what? They were gang affiliated. Yep. Yep.

That's enough to throw federal Rico charges and give somebody a fucking gas price sentence who literally did nothing. What's like Matt? It's like what you said before. All the things we're discussing link up because there are ways to eject someone from not just polite society from human rights, from human rights, because they're not a citizen or they're a gang member or they're a felon or they're a Palestinian terrorist and say, well, the rules don't apply to them.

Sorry. Just finding creative ways to make that tent bigger and then saying go hog wild. And that's what happens here. It's what happens. We are in a situation where all of the brightest fucking lines of the media in the quote unquote first world are creating ways to make unpeople whose death won't trouble the masses, whose massacre and whose transportation and whose illegal detention will not trouble the mass of people.

And the way to do that is to take them outside of the generally conceived of notion of a human being with human rights. And that is why these fucking hair splitting scumbags trying to well actually Trump's obvious fucking dog whistle Nazism about animals are doing the work. They are indistinguishable from you the fucking Julius Strykers and Alfred Rosenbergs of the twenty first century. They're doing the work of the people who want to create new categories of unpeople to be disappeared and eliminated and destroyed without anybody batten and eyelash about it.

And that because if you really think that that fucking precious distinction that you want to fucking point out on Twitter between the MS 13 and well, you know, he didn't specifically refer to all. But who is being we know who is being arrested in these fucking ice crackdowns. They're dragging dads out of fucking hospital wards where their kids are being treated. We know who is going to fucking into these ice detentions pregnant women fucking people who've been in America for fucking decades without any kind of brush with the law. We know that's what's happening.

We see it every fucking day and they want to say well when he says eight animals, he's not referring to them and yet those people are getting the same fucking treatment as these MS 13 quote unquote animals. So what is the distinction meaningfully and there is no meaningful distinction. And that is why it matters. And that is why anyone who wants to fucking parse this shit is doing the job of the future genocid airs, the fucking future Rwandan hate radio people who want to fucking cut down the tall trees and smash the fucking cockroaches.

By the way, look forward to Barry Weiss's tour of colleges coming up next year. Cut the tall trees 2019. So moving on, you know, we've it's been a it's been a dark show or talking about serious things about the ways in which, you know, governments and the media dehumanize inconvenient populations that they'd rather not, you know, have around or it's been a real weenie killer. It's been. And I have a reading series this week, the perfect person to check in on that touches on this issue, but does so in the most hilarious way possible.

I'm talking about Rod Dreher. Oh, you're damn normal. It's been a while. It's been a while since we talked about Roger here and all those bathrooms. I can't remember. It's been a while since we've checked in with Brother Rod, shout out to Roy and Rosso for founding this this rod piece. It's a Rod Dreher post from this week that he in which he decides to take on the phenomenon

that's been happening as of late that we've talked about in the last show with Jake Flores of white people being filmed calling the cops and shrieking at minorities and black people on the street. She's talking about the barbecue lady, the viral video of the woman calling the cops on those people in Oakland for grilling. Oh, yeah. This is coming on the heels of a week where we saw the amazing Aaron Schlossberg, the viral video star who is in not just one, three separate videos filmed by three different

people of three distinct instances of this guy behaving like a psychopath on the streets of New York. It's been a big week for the very specific type of guy that Schlossberg is, which is the Steakhouse and Statement Watch guy. Yes. Schlossberg is like he has like a David Blaine early tape of racism. There's several different locations around New York. He's like, I was hideously racist to a black person here, actually got to sell the Dorian

here. You'd never guess who I threatened to call Ison here. So, and then, as you said, the three different videos, all funnier than last. Yeah. He just kept out doing them. And then, of course, and then the videos after that of him running away from the media were. Yes.

Where he's hiding underneath an umbrella for five minutes. Yeah. Go and please. And then you can hear him from behind the umbrella at one point go, please send help. Yes. And that made my week. Yeah. So.

What the proud boy? The new superhero that only protects racism, guys. So yeah, there's been a lot of these videos going around. So you know, there's going to be people who have to find a way to be like, now this looks bad for the people in the videos. But actually, what's really bad is the people taking the videos and the mob mentality. Shout out to Julia Rafi for that fucking stinker, Julia Rafi, you know, Rafi, her immediate instinct is to take the side of the monstrous asshole and not the people who are deservedly

mocking his downfall. I honestly don't give a shit about Julia, I feel like it just I feel like every week it's like we have a new media asshole like that, who I've never heard of. They're like, yeah, they suck, OK. But the one funny thing about it was when she's like, look, I'm a political refugee and she was bored during Perestroika. Yeah. Moved here when she was three.

Yeah. By that, like I'm a refugee. The Midwest is very cold. Yeah. So Rod Dreher, back to Rod, he's not he's not a take on the barbecue lady video that goes to some pretty extraordinary places and I like the powers. And by the way, the funniest part of the video was the end of it where the police come and she's crying and she starts crying and saying, I've been victimized.

So Rod begins checkmate. Did you see the video of the white woman in Oakland who called the cops on some black people who were cooking in a public park with a charcoal grill? My view is this, unless they've set up the grill in your house or in the ICU, you leave people with charcoal grills alone because they are contributing to the sum total of human happiness. Now, you think Rod is setting this up like, oh, he's going to take a reasonable point. That's a brave bipartisan pro grilling stance that we can all get behind, right, fellas?

Yeah. Hey Rod. Charles is motherfucking a Hank Hill. He goes on and on. And he says, again, I believe the white woman may have been technically correct, but was morally wrong. Wow. Oh my God.

That is the old Rod I know. Yeah. It drops off immediately. Something right back into the game. You can't ignore technical correctness when you see it. She says, Rod, every Rod article, he can hold it together for like maybe a sentence and a half. Yeah.

And he's like, y'all mind if I wow out? Yeah. It's like, it'll start out like, of course, I don't think you should go into a bathroom with a Spos 12 automatic shotgun with a flashlight attached. That's not good, people. But there are several exceptions. Yeah. Racist lady, you are technically correct.

The best kind of correct. But, you know, he does say she was technically correct, but morally wrong. And besides, she's a pill. So you think you think that's like, I can relate to the old maid. This Stenford wife, motherfucker. So she goes, maybe the barbecue griper is a racist, but we have no reason to assume that. No.

Maybe she's just a pet hero. Maybe she's just a petty person who sees a violation of the law and went all nanny state. So he's going on and on like this. And maybe she's just an asshole that we would all hate anyway. Maybe she's a Democrat. Yeah. I like how he's actually saying she's a liberal, actually. That's a rod like behind the back.

Absolutely. Sneaky play. That's why you play the game. That's why he's the best, dude. So here's where here's where here's where it gets interesting. You know, a rod describes what happened in his inimitable fashion and creates several outs for this woman to be anything other than what she appears as. So he goes here.

He goes, here's a story. So Rod's dipping back into his mind palace for instances from his real life that he's going to share. Oh, no. I was I was just calmly barbecuing in my own backyard and somebody said, hey, whitey. No, he goes, here's a little Obama called me white. Here's a story. Here's a story.

We lived in an apartment complex not too long ago. There were three young unmarried guys living in the flat above ours. They would get loud on the weekend. We decided that being good neighbors meant that we should put up with banging and hooting until 10 p.m. I'll put up with hooting, but not for a second while I tolerate hollering. But not after that because that was bedtime. The first few occasions we went up to ask them to knock it off.

They were nice about it, but then they got obnoxious, usually after they had been drinking. Only one night after multiple attempts to ask them to stop, we had to call the apartment security people. We didn't want to be those neighbors, but they left us no choice. The difference is that those bad neighbors were causing actual harm, yelling and banging on the floor and playing loud music until late in the night. They were literally slapping the floor like with hammers. They were playing.

They were they were auditioning for an off-broadway production of Stomp. Yeah, I'm picturing Rod's neighbors, just like a conga line of three men wearing lanshade through their heads. You try living below a old timey jug band where one person will not stop scraping on a washboard. Let me tell you the story. That's the thing. It's blowing into a jug at all hours of the night.

That's the thing. Rod is one of those people who like his experiences are formed by movies, but because he's like sort of like a vintage, weird, like vintagey guy, all those movies are like actually just radio plays like Fibre McGee and Molly and he's like, yeah, you know what young men do? Just hooting and hollering. Let me tell you the story of when I lived next to the Fat Albert gang and they were playing drums on trash cans. I used to have an apartment that was beneath the rehearsal space for gold diggers of 33.

Do I regret the fact that the country bear jamboree was massacred by the police after I called them on them? Yes. Right. I still think I was in the right. Rod Dreyer walking into a Chuck E. Cheese just seeing a Terminator vision. Okay. Here's where it gets interesting.

So he goes, um, the people grilling in the park were not harming barbecue griper one bit barbecue griper barbecue griper replied to your post. Interesting for interesting take from a Neo Cuckbug man. You griper still had the jerks upstairs been three young black guys, not white guys. I wonder if I would have said anything to them at all for fear of them turning it into a racial confrontation. If I had, if I had called Department Security on them, like I eventually did with the white guys after they ignored our repeated requests to stop banging on the floor, would they have

confronted me in the parking lot with a smartphone camera calling me a racist and distributing it to social media. There's a crisis in this country of white people being afraid to call the police. Okay. And turning me into a racist pariah that griping white woman's life must be miserable today and now that she's become a meme. Who wants that? I noticed that many places on the internet celebrating the public shaming of the white

woman never stopped to ask whether or not this is a proportionate to her offense. What I love here is that this is a favorite tactic of mine among all the conservative intelligentsia, and that is inventing scenarios on their head and then getting angry at what happens in their imagination. So, what, looking at this story of this obviously racist or incredibly anal retentive woman, like either she's a racist or she is the most psychotically rule fixated person on, on earth, making this ridiculously wasteful call to the cops in this situation. It made Rob Dreyer mad at imaginary black man.

Yep. Yep. Black men who literally do not exist. And I love that Rod's fear, it wasn't like, oh, oh, you know, they'll kill me with their hip hop guys. It's like the usual type of thing. It's like, they're going to make me into a meme. Yeah.

Oh, no, they're going to post me and say that they had to do it to them. That's it. Does she really deserve that to become a meme? Yeah. Like, damn Daniel. Anyway, I also like about Rod. Does a man deserve to be dabbed on just because he's trying to sleep? What I also like about Rod here is that he says, like, imagine being turned into a pariah.

You're Mr. Benedict option. You want to be a pariah. Yeah. I live in the fucking woods. Yeah. Imagine being exposed for all your weird. Yeah. You do it yourself, Rod.

Yeah. You volunteer it. You write a column every week where it's like, well, yeah, I saw another piece of driftwood that looked like a nipple. Yeah. Definitely whipped myself. I have thrown my computer into the river. Anyway.

So he goes, if he's so worried about becoming a meme, someone should have him listen to the show. Yeah. We've turned this motherfucker into a meme plenty of times. I don't think Rod is a meme. Like he it's too inaccessible for people. It's like, imagine so in the past year. Rod is lore.

He's not a me. Right. So you can, you probably are just barely getting to the point where you can explain to like extended family members what your job is. Yes. You can't explain to them what Rod Ray is. Can you picture yourself doing that? Point of clarification.

Where do you start? The woman who recorded Kenny Powers lady, the barbecue griper, is named Michelle Snyder. She's another white woman and Rod writes here, but it's easy to imagine yourself tormented by a heredin like Michelle Snyder. The woman with the camera phone and knowing what came next for her national infamy thanks to social media is pretty horrifying. This is the next paragraph. If you read Ta-Nehisi Coates big book, he then goes on to quote extensively from Ta-Nehisi

and then quote his own review of the Ta-Nehisi Coates book at length. Here's where it gets really good guys. When Rod dips into the mail bag, this is pretty good so far. Yeah, like Rod just bit a hot 32 and he's like, let me get some of my little homies out of here. We have a terrified in Baton Rouge. Yeah. No, I just Rod.

Now that we're done, there's a shape in my closet that looks like a new era cap with the sticker still on. I shot 87 bullets into there. Yeah. Rod, you guys normal? Yes. Before we get to that, just we need to reexamine what we've seen here, which is that Rob Dreyer saw a story of a woman who is clearly racially panicked and called the cops on people who

were doing literally nothing and his thought was, yeah, but what if they had been doing something? Yeah. Okay, wait till you get to this reader. This is update number two. Reader Dunn writes, and by the way, as a long time fan of Rod's, there is an open question in the Rod community, whether these reader letters are just Rod writing to himself. I honestly think that we are witnessing a M Night Shyamalan joint.

No, Rod is split to Rod is the child from St. Elsewhere. Yeah. Listen to this. The snow globe is just a fucking bathroom. Listen to this note to Rod. This is going to be a rant. So feel free to edit or even toss. Oh boy.

I understand. You are now entering the rant zone. The rant zone, babe. Still ramping after all these years. Yep. That was great. All right. This.

Okay. This is terrible. Okay. He goes, reader Dunn writes, okay, I've read most of the comments, clearly none of you live in Oakland. If you did, I'm certain your reactions to this incident would be different. If you were saying that is, I know because I've lived there for over 20 years, including near Lake Merritt, the location of this incident.

First, let's dispense with the notion that this was a racially motivated incident between a white woman and some black folks. This lady is not white. What? What? The lady is not white. What? It is clear to me from her facial features and body type that her racial and ethnic background

is mixed. Possibly white and Pacific Islander. Oh my God. Oh my God. I did not see that coming. This began with like, this began with like, feel free to edit this. Like, what did Rod, what did Rod take out that this is what remains? So he's setting up this whole thing where it's just like, why do we always assume that

this is racial and his reader, his fan is like, I'm an expert in skull types and fat low groups. Yeah. This woman is not white. This woman who was at least one 30 second weager, so here she is not white. He goes possibly white and Pacific Islander, which would not be uncommon in the Bay Area. Oh, Commander Dreyer, the area is crawling with mixed types of Islandoids. Listen to this.

When you live in a racially and ethnically diverse area for a long time, you begin to detect and distinguish ethnic and racial differences and any combinations thereof that often go unnoticed by people who have not been exposed to such racially non psychopaths who have not been exposed to such racial and ethnic diversity again, the race mixing terminator just sitting in fucking like El Pollo Loco in line and just like evaluating the racial breakdown like by his every one he sees and then he's like, people who don't live here would never be able to distinguish that this person is a freesian. I have always wondered about Northern California because my favorite and the most one of the

most in mentally unwell at times and May fighters are from there. The Diaz brothers Dan Quinn is from there. It's a absurd area. The people there see the people there seem to love driving around in their cars and making videos addressed at their enemies, then crashing their cars. Yes. But then it's like, then you see this, like this guy who like gets behind people's Toyota Sienas and like licks the tire.

He goes, that's a Polynesian type. And it's like, oh, the ones I know about are the most normal ones. Like Dan Quinn is probably a pillar in his community for Northern California guys. It's not just this this letter gets even more normal. Oh, wow. I can't. Second. There's a second point he's making.

I'm going to play the sex card here, even though I don't normally do this, but whoa, the comments here are pretty well sexist, nosy, busy body, killjoy, grouchy, old, oh, sure. She's a regular Mrs. Kravitz. Google the reference. If you don't get it. It's Lady Kravitz's mom. And I will tell you, I always get the reference. I always get the reference.

That's for bewitched. Yep. Yeah. I'm fairly certain most of you wouldn't have used those words to describe her if she were a man. Why don't you just toss in frigid for good measure? Just saying. Next, let me explain to everyone how things work in Oakland.

They don't, nobody, and I mean, nobody respects common courtesy and the rule of law. Not to mention, bothers to comport themselves appropriately in public spaces. The area around Lake Merritt is in complete chaos all the time. Again, if you see the video, it's a beautiful part by a completely normal scene in a park. Literally just standing around cooking meat on a grill. It's chaos. No one will tell me what race they are. Are they even playing music?

I don't even remember if there's like no music. They're just standing there making food. He yelled at them because they're playing like Kenny Chesney and they're like, he's like, this is fucking up my spreadsheets. This is one of the race identifiers I use all the time. Why was this petty, nosy, busy body, so-called white woman calling the police over such a seemingly innocuous incident as people wanting to barbecue using charcoal? Maybe because the city of Oakland is located in a severe high fire danger area and it's

against the law. In Hills Fire of 1991, anyone Google images. I survived it, but that's the thing. It wasn't illegal to cook there. It was that they were using. I don't even fucking remember it was. That's how petty it was. It was like they weren't using the ones that were provided.

They were using their own or vice versa. Either way, it was a name thing that no normal human being would see another person doing that and think, I got to call the police. Should we stop disrespecting the experience of a fire survivor? Yeah. Oh, yeah. This guy. He's one of mine.

I see even the meanings. But yeah. I survived the Oakland fire. Come get your man. Yeah. Come get your man feeling. This guy. He's transcended, but this is the most Seth Rogen observant report guy.

Oh, yes. Yes. I observed in my perimeter that there was someone violating fire codes. By the way, all I remember, all I know about the Oakland Hills fires of 1991 is that it was one of the disaster scenarios you could play in SimCity 2000. It was. It ruled it. And it was caused by a rowdy pack of black hooligans barbecuing without a permit.

Yeah. Dude, you think SimCity is hard? Try playing it on expert race identifiers mode. Okay. So your city has no police, so the National Guard has been deployed. So going on from Travis Bickel's diary, he goes, and why does a citizen have to report someone breaking the law? Because people regularly, openly, and brazenly break the law in Oakland and asking them nicely

to desist does not work. And what does the Oakland PD do? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. That's why she was waiting for over two hours for the police to respond. I'm surprised they came at all. My car was stolen and did the police come when I reported it? No.

Owned? Yeah. But this goes on and on and on, and he goes talking about miscreants in his neighborhood, threatening to kill him, and then just on and on and on. I live by this young man named Dennis, who's constantly getting in my business, stealing pies from my windowsill. This is the only guy left in America who gets bullied by a gang that's like Jeff Goldblum with a mohawk.

This young man named Bart destroyed my memoirs. His father is also bad, but I don't remember what was the name of the man. I don't remember. My mental image of this person is conservative grandpa. Yeah. But that's the thing is that that's clearly a crank. That's a maniac. And like many neighborhoods have just a psychotic person who cannot handle other people existing

and is just driven to abstraction by other people like being in their field of vision. But the fact that fucking Rod felt like he needed to give this maniac that much real estate in his column really speaks to how Rod, for all of his pretensions to being some sort of some sort of neo fucking gothic intellectual, is just a cranky fucking weirdo, Matt, Matt. It goes on like so he goes, what I see from this video is a relatively reserved woman reporting illegal behavior and being absolutely harangued by the woman filming the incident who assumed one, that this woman was white and two, that she was motivated by race. I'm sorry, but did this woman have calipers?

I don't think so. If you do not have calipers on your person, you are not qualified to speak on the race of anyone who you're interacting with. Well if you live in Oakland for 20 years, you get the perk that lets you identify races and puts it on the mini map. OMG. Are you kidding me? The woman who filmed the incident and browbeat the other woman to tears should be ashamed

of herself. I think her behavior even meets the requirements of menacing and another criminal statute this guy's living. He's so excited. He's got the entire California criminal code tattooed on the inside of his eyelids. He goes, there's, you know, SJW virtue signaling, PC bullshit, run him up, he says PC BS, run him up. He goes, this is my favorite part.

And now this poor woman is being viciously attacked on social media. Have you seen the memes? They're brutal. So it goes on like this for another thousand words, at least talking about a pregnant woman who was shot and killed in Oakland, just death wish, everything. It goes on and on murder. You let somebody cook in a public park and then the next day they're massacring pregnant women.

He's going, civility and decency are dead in Oakland. They're dead in California and soon they'll be dead in the entire United States going on a cold-blooded murder and broad daylight, blah, blah, blah. Keep it up. Oakland produce soon. There won't be one decent law abiding citizen. White person. Because lawlessness and incivility are rewarded and responsible citizenship is vilified.

Decent person means non-Polynesian white. Rod's, Rod's postscript to this gigantic letter is any Oakland or former Oakland readers want to challenge this? I'm sorry, but if I don't have any other readers who are completely insane and live in this guy's zip code, I'm going to have to take what he says for granted. I'm sorry. Hey, Rod. Hey, Rod.

Another reader from Oakland here. Yeah. You know, I may have gone a different skill tree than this guy. I can usually only identify top school teen homes. This guy seems to have the Pacific Islander perk. But I mean, I remember some of these stories. There was one story I read about a woman in, it wasn't that app, but it was one of those Facebook groups.

Yeah. The Neighborhood Watch thing. It was, a teen showed up at her door with a solo cup because they were going to a party in the neighborhood and they didn't know where it was. And he said, is this, this person's house and I said, no, and they left and she took a picture of them and she put a post where she said their teens running around the neighborhood, they might have cups of acid. They might be throwing acid at you.

There's something about suburbia that makes people mostly insane. Not the drug acid. Like throwing acid in your face. No, literal acid in your face. Well, we can do an entire episode about suburbia. No, suburban mania is important. But the thing I want to point out is that, is that the guy says all this law is being violated and no one is doing it.

And the thing is that every person listening to this violates the law every fucking day. Everyone does. I'm not laying three of them right now. Everyone violates the law all the fucking time. And what matters materially is who gets held accountable for it. And that is a racial caste system, essentially, is that everybody is like just trying to live their life. Some people violate statutes and the statutes to get fucking enforced are the statutes that

are enforced by racial strata. And that's the thing to remember. So this motherfucker acting like, oh, you people, you're, you're flaunting the law. No, that everyone's flaunting the law all the time. It's these people who are being disproportionately enforced on laws that everybody breaks all the time. Thanks. Boner law.

Thank you. Thank you for the measured response to the guy who sleeps in a ghillie suit in Oakland. I just, just to close out on, on Rod, what I like about here is Rod begins attempting to make like a point that a normal human being would, but ends up going completely opposite. And inescapably, one would have to include that either Rod himself or his readers are all deeply insane. We throw it to Brendan. So man.

Wow. It's been a, it's been a packed show today. We've covered a lot of ground. Every emotion. It's just, we've, yeah, it's been the whole colors of the rainbow we've experienced today. And we'd like to close now with a reading from our own book, The Chapeau Guide to Revolution in stores August 24th. Oh, by the way, I want to say something very quickly.

You can do it at the very end. Well, no, I just want to say something right now. Okay. By the book. Okay. All right. Good point. The Chapeau Guide to Revolution in stores August 21st, available to pre-order now.

Brendan James, take us away, the world premiere reading from the book. Thanks guys. So this is the media chapter. You know, we don't sign each chapter, but I think Virgil and I worked on, on this one the most. And I'm just going to start at the very beginning and read you a bit of the introduction that, that we, in which we track the history of American journalism to where, to where it ended up today.

Extre, extre, read all about it, daring dirtbags, disrupt Daffy Democrats, discombobulated discourse. That's how this chapter might have read if we still lived in the ink-stained era of print news. However, virtually all Americans get their news, opinions, and pornography through the internet. How did we get from dead? Oh, this is so bad. How did we get from dead logs?

Shut up. I wrote that. I know. How did we get from dead logs to live blocks? From, from, from, from editorial boards, from editorial boards, to circuit boards? Oh, fuck. Put on your news boy cap and read on because Chapeau Trap House has the scoop. That's in quotation marks.

Scoop. Okay. This is a section called Sir Have You No Shame, Sir, A History of Journalism. The first mass-produced newspapers emerged in Germany shortly after the invention of the printing press. They included Relation à la Forménie und Glendon-Wichtergen Historien, which translates as account of all distinguished and commemorable news, and Lister backenten Juden, list of known Jews.

These publications disseminated vital information about the current affairs to the literate masses. The concept spread to London, where Gazettas on Fleet Street added such innovations as editorials and the page three slags, across the Atlantic, a media culture flourished in the 13 colonies, where the issues of the day were hotly debated within the pages of newsletters and pamphlets. Among the early commentators was a young publisher's apprentice named Benjamin Franklin. He was a polymath and the first true American man of letters in that he generated reams and reams of extremely horny correspondence.

As a sexual degenerate who disseminated totally useless advice to the ignorant masses, a sample aphorism, the fool wakes up to the cuckoo's crow whilst the wise man rises to the songbird of reason. Ben Franklin was also our nation's first pundit. Out of the colonist pamphleteering, culture emerged an uncompromising devotion to freedom of speech, which produced such rightly red radical polemics as common sense and no taxation without fringeless flags. After the revolution, ratification of the proposed U.S. Constitution was hotly debated

through the competing cereals, such as the Federalist Papers, and the massively more popular, wow, I had no idea about these ten bills of rights. Number six will shock you. The journalism in the first part of the 19th century consisted mostly of libelous attacks on politicians, illegitimate octaroon children, classified ads for bounties on escaped slaves, and advice columns. Newspapers tended to be partisan outlets, loyal to single-issue parties like the Anti-Masonics and the Hose Down the Irish League.

Some periodicals, however, were brave enough to challenge entrenched power. Notable among them was Harper's Weekly, which ran Thomas Nass' political cartoons depicting corrupt politicians as retunned glutton with dollar signs adorning bags over their heads, part of the American media's long and disgraceful legacy of body-shaming, and showing the Catholic clergy as vicious crocodiles crawling out of the Potomac to hunt for children, part of the American media's long and honorable tradition of truth-telling. But such publications were few and far between. The progressive movements spawned a class of hard-nosed investigative journalists who

dedicated their lives to rooting out corruption, challenging the entrenched power of monopolists, exposing the horrifying conditions in which the working classes lived, and doing their best to make sure those working classes didn't breed too prodigiously. Fearless muckrakers like Upton Sinclair, Ida Tarbell, and Jacob Rees showed how dedicated journalists could improve the lives of the millions by doggedly pursuing the truth. But most journalists were not fearless muckrakers. 99% of news hawks what we like to call hacks. In this era, long before Columbia J. School and valuable resume building unpaid internships,

the job of reporting the news was not the province of failed sons of the educated upper class like it is today. Indeed, instead, most journalists were the children of impoverished immigrants. They were the seven sons of a proletariat deemed too sickly and weak to pursue a respectable child labor trade like Coal Runner or Triangle Shirt Waster. These young cowards were plucked from the slums at an early age and sold to the Hearst Corporation. The media industry put these amorphous lumps of raw humanity through a brutal baptism by

fire. The cubs were instilled with a healthy fear of challenging entrenched power, taught to fairly report on both sides of any given issue, such as women's suffrage or lynching, and totally sequestered from contact with females, so they would emerge from their chrysalids as weird sexual neurotics. The one who survived earned the right to call themselves bonafide journalists. Some of them became investigative reporters, adopting the moniker Gumshoe, a reference to their habit of stopping women on the street and offering to inspect their feet for grime,

often even going so far as to offer a thorough tongue cleaning free of charge. The cream of the crop became pundits, regular columnists paid to pontificate about every single issue, with special emphasis on the issues they knew absolutely nothing about. In the rapidly modernizing world of the 1920s, when women's skirts were getting shorter and wearable tech like polio braces proliferated, the common man relied on these noble perverts to analyze, predict, and explain. To today's reader, the concept of an individual possessing a perfectly average level of intelligence and education at best, shitting out half-baked analyses of complex political and social matters

to be closely read by millions as if they were the divinely inspired words of a prophet to sending a mountaintop, may seem absurd. But remember that people were stupid back then and didn't have yahoo answers and our legal advice to explain things to them. Some examples of punditry from the early 20th century. Union organizers are murdered in some parts of the country and that's okay. Why we need a second great war to toughen up the entitled greatest generation. What my rickshaw driver taught me about Nanking, the next up in coming global hotspot, limiting

the work week to just 80 hours will hurt the people it's meant to help. Spanish flu or Spanish boo-hoo, new influenza, nothing to worry about. We need to talk about Al, we need to talk about Al Jolson. Is he ashamed of being white? Civility and compromise, why the Weimar Republic will last for a thousand years? So that's a snippet for more media check. Damn! That's a good book.

You should all buy it. Snap, everybody snap. Yeah, you should buy that shit. That sounds good. Buy it now. That was a pre-order. Available now. Buy the books folks.

Get more readings to come, to juice you, to entice you to buy this wonderful tome that we've all written. Before we go, I have two things. Yeah, we're wrapping up today but we have two quick notes from Virgil. Number one, buy the book, folks. Buy the book. Buy the book. You like the book.

Buy the book. It was delightful. You want to buy the book. Buy the book. You want to buy the book. Buy the book. Buy the book. I want to give a shout out to our Irish friends who will be voting this week on repealing the

Eighth Amendments to the Irish Constitution and essentially legalizing abortion in Ireland. You'll be voting to repeal the Eighth and polls show repeal winning, but you know what? We've seen in recent elections, nobody knows, so Aaron, go to the polls and vote to repeal the Eighth. Repeal, repeal the fucking Eighth. Much love to our Irish friends. Yes, repeal the fucking Eighth one. Also if you're in Ireland buy the book.

Buy the fucking book. Put the book in a fairy ring. Till next time guys. Bye. Bye. Bye.