Chapo Trap House - Episode 220 - Camp Donald feat. Libby Watson (6/17/18)

Episode Date: June 18, 2018

Felix gamed so dang hard on the new Chapo Twitch Stream he overslept our crack-of-3 p.m. call time, so a skeleton crew of Will and Matt are joined by Chapo associate and fan favorite Libby Watson to discuss the delightful topics of America's child concentration camps, a D.C. ballot measure to get tipped workers actually paid a living wage, and yet another attempt to understand the country club-dwelling, restaurant-owning Trump-supporting common folk of our heartland, but all after we receive a special call-in from former governor Jesse Ventura* to talk about the lighter side of the news and the recent raccoon antics in the Minneapolis/St Paul region. *James Adomian Donate to the RAICES Family Reunification and Bond Fund: FREE our Families: https://www.raicestexas.org/#donate Buy tickets for Felix's Show July 1st at The Hideout in Chicago https://www.ticketfly.com/purchase/event/1717301?utm_source=tw1&utm_medium=amp

So, uh, in the lighter side of the news this past week, there's a funny story coming out of a Minneapolis, uh, Minneapolis earlier this week, and I don't know if you saw this one, Matt. Uh, is that, is that Spider-Man climbing a building? No, no, no, it's, it's Raccoon Man climbing a building. Uh, I don't know if you guys saw this one. It's, uh, a bit of, a bit of light viral video of a, uh, it's, uh, a raccoon climbing the UBS building in downtown Minneapolis. But, uh, hey, when you know it, we've got, uh, we've got a special guest to talk about this wacky critter. It's a Minnesota native, former governor, Jesse Ventura. Jesse, welcome to the show. Yep. Yep. We've got Confer. I'm on with him. We've

got Chapel on a secure channel. They're coming through loud and clear on the fibers. Jesse, former former governor of the great state, former governor of great state of Minnesota. So I know you must have seen this raccoon and his ascent to the top of this office building. We were all riveted by it. Let me tell you something. I was glued to my Linux laptop. I was in Mexico and let me tell you, I saw that little critter and I knew immediately that there was more to the story. You call it light news. Well, let me tell you something, Vince McMahon. There's always a dark side to the lighter side of the news. I saw that and I zeroed in on the fact. First off, he was in St. Paul. I've, I'm on the record.

St. Paul is the dump of Minnesota. So he was trying to crawl out of that. Who can blame him? If you're a raccoon in St. Paul, you want to get to Minneapolis, but you can't because of the highways. So you're going to go up. Secondly, look at the facts. Look at the signs. Look at what he was pointing to that little raccoon was climbing up the building. He was looking for answers. Wait. So what's going on in this UBS building? It was the UBS building. He's pointing us. He knows that he has the attention of Minnesota public radio. He knows that immediately he's going to have the top minds of the great state of Minnesota following. So what does he do? He climbs straight for the logo UBS and he

that's, he wants to go straight to the heart of the banking system. What's happening? $2 billion down a black hole. And he went up and you know what? The mainstream authorities tried to distract him and bring him back down and he was confused for a second. He was like Ricky the dragon steamboat blinded by blood in his eye, stumbling around the ring and then that, and then he raised his arm and they said, keep going for it raccoon. It was all written out in the Beatles white album. It's all there. Rocky raccoon. He started in Minnesota. He checked into his room. There was a Gideon's Bible. It wasn't enough. What was this raccoon trying to bring attention to? What's going on in this building?

Well, you know, I have a theory. I don't believe in deities or gods, but I believe that when you human beings fail to do what we should be doing, that the nature sends the animals to step up. This is sort of an animal spirit imbued in an animal, but representing us all in a way. When the situation calls for it, nature boy will show up whether it's Ric Flair or a common Prussianidae. Jesse, I mean, are we going to see more of these super intelligent raccoons? I mean, they're certainly becoming more popular in movies. Yeah. Well, I want to know. I want to know if he was climbing up that far. We've got

it. What we need to do is we need to follow his work and help him and get the resources there. We need to be putting boots on the ground. We need to have, if I was still governor, I would have had frogmen descending every level, scaffolding, just as a matter of policy every day of the week. And then they would have been there to intercept the raccoon when he chose to go up. But I think we've got to put the resources on the ground and find out if he was scaling that, if he's the guardians of the galaxy raccoon, where's Groot? Is there a Groot growing off that building? Is he a big one or a little one?

You know, Jesse, it's just like you always said, you know, like the Democrats, the Republicans, they're not talking about real issues. So as I said before, you've got the Republicans or the Demo publicans. Or sometimes I like to say the Republic Rata Dickens. So yeah, no, we've got to turn to sources outside the mainstream media. The two parties have failed. And so the American people, they tag in, Jesse Ventura, he tags out, then the raccoon tags him. That's how freedom works. Look, I'm a tag team partner of billions of organic creatures on this planet. I can hear you chortling, but I guarantee you somebody who's not chortling is any citizen of Minnesota. They're proud of the light rail

that I installed in many. You can go right to the state fairground on that goddamn light ray. When I'm surfing, when I'm surfing in Mexico, that's one of two things that my mind goes too proudly. I think of that. And I think of the one time I couldn't get out of a camel clutch. Jesse, I got to say what I was watching the raccoon scale this building. A thought that sprung to mind was an issue that I know you've brought light on before. The issue of, I was thinking maybe this raccoon escaped from some sort of government lab where they're making animals. Maybe he's trying to bring to light the issue of animals and they're

going on in these government labs that we don't know about. The first, that's obviously square one. That's what we're building our theories on. That's the concrete. That's what we know. That's what we know. We're looking for unknowns. Obviously, yeah, Minnesota is the land of 10,000 lakes. You've seen it on the side of the butterbox. It's the land of lakes. We've got islands in those lakes. And I have information when I was governor delivered to me in Manila folders that the island of Dr. Moreau really was a lake in Minnesota. I know we've been experimenting with raccoons. They were experimenting when I was governor. I tried to get to the bottom of it, but I was stopped by the two

party system and Garrison Keeler to stop my investigation. But I was onto it. They were experimenting on raccoons, giving them different colored rings. They had peppermint colored raccoons running around. That is the St. Paul area. Let me tell you, if I had two terms, I would have put a stop to it. I mean, I think we need to know more about what's going on at the Lake Wobagon Research Facility. Yep. Look, Garrison Keeler went down, but the dark money behind him is still outpating Lake Wobagon unchecked. Ask questions. Follow the raccoons. Follow the raccoon. It will not give you a stray. Follow the raccoon. Follow the raccoon. That is where all the answers lead. Go down the raccoon hole. Hashtag, follow the raccoon,

folks. Yeah. Put it on social media. We're going to be devoting three hours to that on our teaser. All right. We are back. It's your chopper for this week. Just Matt and I this week. Felix could be with us. He games for 13 hours straight last night and slept through his non-existent alarm. But don't worry. Do not fear. We are not completely unmanned. Joining us is Libby Watson. Libby, what's up? Hello. Hello. I'm really sorry to hear that Felix has died, like one of those Korean kids from just gaming too hard, but we'll miss him greatly. He was gaming in the same room with a fan when he went to sleep. That's what happened. Libby, thanks so much for joining us. Originally, we want to have you on to talk about this ballot measure that's going on in DC right

now about tipped wages or making a uniform minimum wage for tipped employees. We'll get to that in a little bit. It's an interesting local labor issue. But before then, just overwhelmingly, we were thinking, what are we going to talk about on the weekend show? Overwhelmingly, to me, the only news story really worth addressing from a broad perspective right now in the news is the reality that the writers for Season 2018 of America have decided to, I think, push their luck a little bit and go with something really outrageous like child concentration camps to get viewers back now that it's become a little boring. And I got to say, I'm not liking it. Yeah, no, me neither. They've jumped the shark over the walls of a concentration camp. It's

pretty lame. And I guess I don't even know where to begin with this topic. But we're now living in a country where ICE steals children from families trying to cross the US-Mexican border, rends them from their arms, and puts them into privately run concentration camps. I mean, hard to know where to go, but I don't know. I'll just begin with this account from NPR, who, writing here, says, kids started appearing at the shelter who didn't know the drill. They had just been separated from their parents, so they were experiencing an increased amount of trauma, said Antar Davidson, who worked for Southwest Key, a non-profit that operates more than two dozen shelters from migrant children from Texas to California. Davidson quit this week

because the shelter where he worked in Tucson, Arizona, didn't have the trained staffing to handle the influx of younger, more traumatized children, he said. The breaking point for Davidson came, he says, when he was asked to tell two siblings ages six and 10 that they couldn't hug each other. They called me over the radio, and they wanted to translate to these kids that the rule of the shelter is that they are not allowed to hug, he says. And these are kids that had just been separated from their mom, basically just huddling and hugging each other in a desperate attempt to remain together. Southwest Key says it has a clear policy that allows touching and hugging in certain circumstances. Oh, well, never mind. Well, yeah, they're allowed to hug in certain

circumstances. Going off that, I don't know if you guys saw Joel Pollock of Breitbart apparently visited one of these child concentration camps and said that they had a prom for the kids and that they also, there were field trips to the zoo. So all in all, we've been misinformed about what these things are and what goes down on them. Right. The super stupid thing about that is that Joel Pollock didn't go to one of the new centers for boys that have been separated from their parents as a result of the new policy. He went to an office of refugee resettlement center where unaccompanied child minors have been housed since 2014. So not to excuse, you know, not to say so it's fine, but he was visiting a completely different facility from

the ones that everyone else has been visiting. Another facility that got visited this week, we saw one of the reporters who are allowed into one of these, again, child prisons. We saw they had a, one of these facilities had a giant mural of Donald Trump behind an American flag with an inspirational quote from the Art of the Deal that reads, sometimes when you lose the battle, you find a way to win the war. And again, you know, I don't want to belabor this comparison too much. You know, reports came in that parents were told that their children were being taken to a shower. And then hours later realized that they had just been taken away. The parallels there are too striking to miss. But a quote from the Art of the Deal that leads you into a child

concentration camp really is the Arbok, might mark five of our times. Only even stupider, which is the real hallmark of everything, is that it's, it's always this, it's the stupidest version of anything you could imagine and the cruelest. And yeah, it's, it's, it's deeply American, I would say. It's, it's definitely got that absurd separation from reality sense that things in America have. I think the only way it could be more American would be if it was, you know, sponsored by McDonald's or something. Or if it was in an abandoned Walmart. Oh, wait, a lot of them are fucking abandoned Walmart. I just, you know, you see stuff like this. And like I said, the accounts of ICE agents doing the old, we're taking your kids to the shower trick,

which again, I don't like anyone saying that it's inappropriate to compare this to the Holocaust is completely full of shit. It's like, it doesn't have to be a death camp for it to be a concentration camp. The original definition of a concentration camp was a place it was a camp in which ethnic minorities could be segregated from the rest of the population, including women and children, to make the, you know, fighting male population. This was first used in the Boer War by the British. I mean, it's literally by definition, these are child concentration camps. And it's just, we're dealing with a case of like, such obvious staggering evil confronting us, evil that is, I'm sorry, if you're a citizen of this country, you are responsible for,

it's all of our fault, whether you voted for Donald Trump or not. This is our country. This is happening within our borders. It's happening in plain sight. Everybody knows where these facilities are. Everybody knows what's going on. There's thousands of kids being held right now. And it's going on, like I said, all in the open. And I guess my question is, you know, how do we, how do we deal with this? And I don't mean deal with it like psychologically, like how do we, how do we stop this? Because like, we just, we feel like we're confronted with both this, the staggering evil of what's going on, but also this like terrible sense that, you know, this sense of paralysis or fatigue that it's just like where you throw up your arms and

just go, oh, well, that's just 2018 dumpster fire year of the stupidest fucking century ever in human history. What do we do? No, I completely agree. I've been thinking about that all week. And, you know, a lot of the times with stuff under Trump, you know, my instinct has been to, you know, with, with, for example, the healthcare bill that almost happened last year and the tax cuts. You know, I keep thinking like, you know, we need, we need Democrats to be stronger and stand up more and, and everything because, you know, the Republican party is pretty much beyond any kind of, you know, influence other than by its most disgusting elements. You know, the reason people always, you know, rag on people like us for criticizing

Democrats too much when Republicans are worse, but it's because Republicans are just beyond the fucking pale. It's like, what can you even say to a Republican party anymore? They're just, you know, they're clearly just, you know, beyond. But I've been thinking about, I mean, Democrats are being, they're saying all the right things on this and, you know, some of them are going to the facilities and stuff and all that's great, but it just feels so futile because what can we do? Again, the Republican party is never going to, they're not going to hold Donald Trump or his administration accountable at all. And they want this, you know, a good chunk of them want this. So I don't know how we overcome the machinery of the state, you know, let alone public opinion and,

you know, the like good, I don't know what 30% of Americans who will just support whatever it is that Donald Trump does. It's, it's really hard to think about, you know, I mean, I wish I had a good answer. Well, I mean, I have been seeing some representatives have been going to these facilities and demanding entrance to inspect, you know, inspect these facilities or talk to some of these kids, but, you know, you mentioned Democrats saying the right things. I mean, not all of them are. I'm speaking in particular of Kamala Harris, 2020 hopeful, went on Chris Hayes' show and Chris Hayes asked her point blank, should ICE exist? ICE, a government agency that literally didn't exist 20 years ago. And Kamala Harris gave a long stem winding qualification about how, you know, Chris,

I'm a prosecutor. And, you know, my most important thing, if people are committing murders and rapes, like they need to be punished. And if they're illegal, they need to be deported. So yes, I think ICE should exist. But no, I don't think they should be, you know, separating children from their families. And it's like, if you can't get Kamala Harris, this should be the easiest fucking question to ask any Democratic hopeful for 2020, should ICE exist? The answer is no, easy without any qualification. To give her the, just to be clear, that, that clear, that wasn't from last week, it was actually from March that she said that this week. But it doesn't excuse not, you know, it should have been fucking clear years ago, let alone in March that we should

abolish ICE. But that was, that wasn't this week. But people were resharing it because it's like, yeah, you said this two months ago, one over three months ago, when it still should have been clear. So yeah, I mean, I don't have a lot of faith that the 2020 field is going to articulate a complete and reasoned response to this. And, you know, it is, it must be said, like, you know, as extreme and horrendous as what's going on now is, you know, there has been a machine in place to, you know, torture and exploit and abuse immigrants for years now. It was happening under Obama and it's been happening for years. So, you know, it needs to be a broader reckoning than just the small matter of child separation. Absolutely. And, you know, you know, Obama

deported more people than like the last two presidents before him combined. But what we're seeing right now is, you know, a policy put in place that is crafted, you know, to buy and to appeal to, again, like, it shouldn't be controversial to say this in the slightest, the white supremacist part of our population and government. And I'm speaking, of course, about Jeff Sessions, who, you know, absolutely believes this is the right thing to do because he believes America is a white country. And in particular, also in the Trump administration, Stephen Miller, there's been several news items this week about how this whole child separation policy was his brainchild from the get-go. And, you know, he's a guy who's just

sort of been in the background of the Trump administration the entire time and has been very much under the radar. And he's like the one fucking just absolute reptile who I think is like probably more suited to this White House than anyone because his name is out of the news and he's getting what he wants. And it's just, it just blows my mind. Like, I mean, in general, again, I think the media has been largely pretty good about treating this as the extreme disgusting thing that it is. But we're just not equipped for this level of, you know, illegal and open and evil activity. Like, you see the reporters, you know, saying, you know, Stephen Miller is taking credit for this and stuff. And like in a sensible society, that would be,

that would be, that would participate in him being sent to the Hague, you know, that would be like, oh, okay, well, we'll send this bitch to jail then, you know, there would be an inquiry, there would be an investigation, there would be some kind of way to say, oh, it was this guy's idea. All right, well, he's going to prison for the rest of his life. That's never going to happen. Like, he's going to leave the White House and he's going to found some fucking consulting firm for the most disgusting Republicans and make a good salary for the rest of his life. And he'll be fine. I mean, again, it gets back to this question of, you know, what is to be done, as someone once said. But I mean, again, like, we know where these facilities are. And it's just

like, what we're seeing is like, you know, the limits of what normal politics can accomplish. Our normal politics have accomplished something. And it's rending children from the mother, you know, their mother's arms and putting them in tent cities in the middle of the desert, as a specific policy of torturing their parents. And as Stephen Miller has said, you know, raising the price of trying to live in this country if you weren't born here. Yeah, I mean, it's just heartbreaking. I was at the gym earlier working out, which I do all the time, because I'm incredibly impressive. And I was watching MSNBC. And there was a girl being interviewed, because she had been she was there as part of a protest. And she had brought letters

from like other kids and people in America and stuff. And she was just going to read them out loud outside the facility to let the kids know that they're not alone and stuff. And it's just like, when you have other children, you know, it's like the the Parkland thing again, it's like when you have other children having to stand up and do, you know, just like the only thing they can do like that, it's just the most heartbreaking fucking thing. But I think you're right, it has to be there has to be direct action, like people have got to go there and they've got to disrupt it, you know, they've like physically doing things that are illegal, you know, to physically blocking the entrances and exits, not letting people leave or go to work, you know, demanding

being arrested themselves. Again, for starters, we could get rid of every one of these, you know, camps tomorrow if enough people just decided to literally storm them and dismantle them and free the children inside or, you know, take them into their own homes and a kind of underground railroad it's been done before. But I think what we see now is obviously the retaliation from the state would probably be swift and overwhelming and as well as the surveillance of anyone involved in, you know, fuck, we saw what happened to Jake Flores for just tweeting that an ice agent should be killed, let alone if you actually tried to physically stops one of them from doing their jobs. Right, of course. And, you know, we know that Border Patrol would have no problem, you know,

shooting anyone who tries to help, you know, immigrants at all. That is where the mind has to go if you're a rational person is to like irrational means or things that seem like beyond the pale. I mean, it's happened before in the history of this country and it probably should happen again, to be honest. At the very least, Jeff Sessions shouldn't be allowed to, he shouldn't be able to leave his home without people yelling at him. You know, like in the Home A Bad Man episode where Homer gets in the car and he's smoking the car, that should be Jeff Sessions' life for the rest of his life. I just want to share something briefly that just came across the wires that I think is a counterpoint to me saying that the media has been

generally pretty good on this, which is Melania Trump put out a statement saying, Mrs. Trump hates to see children separated from their families and hopes both side of the aisle can finally come together to achieve successful immigration reform. She believes we need to be a country that follows all laws, but also a country that governs with heart. And Philip Rucker, who is the White House bureau chief for the Washington Post, said Melania Trump seems to break with the Trump administration here on zero tolerance enforcement at the border. Bitch, no. No, she doesn't. That's exactly what they're saying. She's reiterating the whole point of this, which is to strong arm the Democrats in the passing

a comprehensive immigration reform that gives them things like the precious wall and also limits legal immigration. This is all an effort to try to create leverage to pass something that will be brutally restrictive and do things like legal immigration, which hardliners always insist isn't their problem. They always say, no, we're worried about illegal immigration. If you obey the law, then we have no problem with you. But the goal of this bill that they're trying to wring out of the Democrats by means of this sadistic fucking grand gulion display is to limit legal immigration and drastically increase penalties for trying to get in this country at all in any way.

That is the other thing about when these sort of immigration hardliners are like the Facebook people. Facebook America talks about this issue. It's always people who is fucking Irish or Italian grandparents, oh, they came to this country the right way. My ancestors came here at a time when there literally was no immigration laws. You just came up and said, hi, I'm Linguini Scalapini. And they're like, your name is Louis Skolnick. Here you go. And that's it. But the other thing is, even people who talk about it now, they're like, don't blame Trump. Don't blame these parents for breaking the law and putting their kids at harm. This is a civil offense we're talking about. These are misdemeanor laws that are being broken here. If you have ever

driven drunk or driven faster than the legal speed limit, you're committing a more serious crime than overstaying a visa or crossing an invisible line without permission. And of course, some of these people are coming here to seek asylum, which is not illegal. It's not illegal to come to a country and seek asylum. But everyone is being treated as a criminal for just crossing the border, which is completely insane. Well, also, again, if you're talking about people who are coming seeking asylum from Central American countries like El Salvador, a lot of them are seeking asylum from the catastrophic gang violence in their countries, which is in turn being used as a reason not

to let them in the country from MS-13 or whatever. And I'm sorry, the reason El Salvador is such a violent country is because of this country in the first fucking place. Yeah, there was that case recently where the Justice Department prosecuted a Salvadoran woman for immigration violation. And they said that because she had been forced to work, she had been forced into labor by a Salvadoran gang, she had therefore given material support to the Salvadoran gang. And therefore, she was ineligible for a visa. I mean, it's just the most fucked up shit. Pretty cruel sadism just writ large out all out in the open as part of, again, a part of a policy

that is about hurting people who want to come live in this country because they're not the right color and we don't want them or the idea that we just don't have enough space or money in this country to let any any more people in. And the people who work there should, I mean, my God, anyone who's working for ICE in 2018, they have essentially disqualified themselves from any any job with more responsibility than a fucking dog walker. The idea that they should have a federal law enforcement authority is insane. And any kind of immigration mechanism that we have to have because you have to have immigration enforcement in some way or another, she can't involve anyone in this organization.

They would they'd have to be entirely completely fucking purged. I mean, as a fucking compromise to not throwing them in prison. Yeah, I want to quickly shout out Alex Koch, who wrote a piece for TYT last week about how everyone correctly refers to Southwest Key as a nonprofit because it is. But I think people don't realize how well paid their executives are. He wrote about how the nine nineties show that that. I mean, those executives are making like hundreds of thousands, if not millions of this this work. And that was, you know, those figures are from a few years ago. But there's no doubt that these people are rich off this absolutely insane, disgusting practice. And yeah, they

should be prosecuted to absolutely, you know, it's easy to fall into the trap of just being like, oh, you know, Trump is doing this. Obviously, if Hillary Clinton were president, ICE would still exist. And these deportations would be continuing a pace, probably not with the same level of ire or outrage that we're seeing now. However, I think to say that is also kind of an out for how uniquely awful and evil Trump and the people who surround him really are. Again, to return to a guy like Stephen Miller, like that this is something he's been working his basically, since he was 12 years old, calling into conservative talk radio to complain about how, you know, his classmates wouldn't stand for the fucking flag or had sex without, you know,

his permission or something. Yeah. Like when you think about him and the people in the right wing media and the Trump voters themselves, I mean, again, it's racism that's motivating them. But like, I don't know, like, what at base do you think it like motivates someone like Stephen Miller to get this foreign life being so fucking rotten and evil? I do not fucking know, dude. Like, you're right. I mean, he's been this way since he was a teenager. McKay Coppins had that profile of him. And he was tweeting the other day that, you know, that this fits with he like he's basically just a troll and that he enjoys to see, like people, you know, liberals, for example, having,

having connections over child concentration camps. But I don't think that can fully explain it. Like, that's a lot of work just to get people riled up. I don't think he's like a sort of 4chan edgelord. You were just if like, if he was just a troll, he would be like teasing people by being like, haha, I'm going to put your kid into a tent prison in the middle of the desert. But he's actually doing that. Like that's not trolling anymore. Like that's policy. That's like, that's, that's reality. That's not just like teasing people. Right. Putting, putting kids in concentration camps to own the lips isn't a thing. I mean, it starts that way though. I mean, start talking about anti semis before the Holocaust. He talks about how you can't really debate them or argue

on points because they don't really care about points. They don't really care about any, if it doesn't even make sense. They get off on your discomfort and anger. And like that, that can become an all consuming worldview. And, and I mean, like, what else are you going to do? I mean, if you're, if you're a person like Stephen Miller, this little carbuncle from, from Santa Monica, who is just filled with nothing but deep antipathy for the majority of your fellow citizens. I mean, why not just basically commit yourself to becoming a fucking comic book villain in the, in the hopes of crossing as much grief to the people you don't like as possible. But I mean, as it's, it's, it's trolling, but, but like all, like a lot of these people who claim to be trolls, it's driven by

genuine racism. That's the, that's what kind of gets elided when people talk about trolling, as if it's value neutral, as if just big, but there's, there's such a thing of these guys who don't actually believe it that you could spend that much time devoted to that kind of goal without having any real investment in what you're saying. I think that that's, that's sort of a thing people tell themselves to not acknowledge the reality of so many of the people that they encounter every day online and in real life. And the fact is, is that, you know, you, you become a troll because you, you want to see people you don't like suffer and the people you don't like tend to be people who don't look like you. And it's, and he's getting to do that. He's getting

the best of both worlds. He gets to troll people and make the libs mad and also maintain white majority in America for a few more decades than might otherwise have been the case. Yeah, I think that's right. I think the fact that he enjoys pissing off liberals doesn't change the fact that he is just a fucking white nationalist is what he is. And I think, again, with Trump, and this is something I've said before, but I think what we're really seeing is that people with authoritarian personalities need permission from an authoritarian leader to really let this all out. You know, and I think what we're seeing is to a greater degree, people are being less and less shy about just saying the quiet part loud in terms of, you know, running for office

as Republicans on platforms of explicit white nationalism, or just not even denying that they are, I don't know, a neoconfederate or a Nazi or someone who genuinely believes that white people are superior to other races and should be treated as such. Yeah, and like as Perine said, that's the direction of the Republican Party. It's only going to get worse because there's like an entire generation of fucking Stephen Millers out there filled, you know, all the college Republicans are just like this awful combo of like Stephen Millers and Charlie Kirk's. I mean, we are so fucked. We are fucked. I mean, I saw another comment, you brought up Perine, and he had another comment about

sort of like during the Obama administration, all of the semi-ridiculous paranoia about FEMA camps and things like that. Well, like now we see that that's just an obvious projection of what they what they want to do to people who are not them, and they assume that because Obama is not like them doesn't look like them that that's what he's going to do to them. So it's this like prisoner's dilemma thing of like who can staff and fill the FEMA camps first because that's what they believe, you know, is going to happen or should happen. Yeah, someone's getting locked up and it's not going to be them. I think that that is a core belief for a lot of them at the grassroots. But a lot of this is made worse by the fact that

that the nature of American two party system and norms of journalism is that you have to keep treating the Republican Party like a regular party. You have to treat it as like the broad expression of sort of a center rightism that that like encompasses everyone from, you know, fucking Eisenhower to Donald Trump when it's fastly. It's very rapidly turning into a very sort of accelerationist racist party. And if there's no equipment in the American political system or in journalism to handle that, there's no way to talk about a party like that when it is one of the two, you know, because you have to sort of keep them in your mind as this balanced forces between these two broad coalitions instead of instead of one sort of hyper racist sort of

apocalyptic death cult completely. And they're so vulnerable to the old soft bigotry of low expectations. There was that tweet by a Capitol Hill reporter saying no small thing. Paul Ryan says he is quote not comfortable with the concentration camp. That is the smallest possible thing that is a grain of rice. I mean, that is tiny. I mean, again, I just feel like discussing this issue or talking about how evil how evil and bad it is just seems inadequate. And I'm almost embarrassed to be doing it because like I said, this is all going on in broad daylight in front of all literally in front of our eyes and talking about it or just saying that this is evil isn't enough because it's still going on. And you know, it can outrage you and you can,

you know, vote against the Republican Party or like the people that are carrying this out. But at the same time, I mean, these camps are still being built and built and filled with people and ice is still around. And like I said, it's going to take something more than that. And I think it just a matter of, you know, and I feel like a hypocrite because I'm not, you know, putting my life and body on the line to stop this either. But I think we all have to ask ourselves the question is like, you know, what are you willing to do or what are you willing to give up in your own life to stop this from going on? And until we until we each individually can answer that for ourselves, it's just, I don't know, it doesn't seem like it just seems like it's going to get worse.

And we're just going to be left to comment on how dumb and evil and awful everything is. Yeah, I agree. There are there are some good organizations that provide legal services for immigrants on the border. There's one the refugee and immigrant center for education and legal services that I donated to last week. And they do really good work. So there are there are things like that for us coastal elites that are thousands of miles away from the from the crisis. Well, I mean, I think I mean, that that's a very good thing that everyone can start to do is, you know, find the organizations that are providing aid and support to immigrants and their families and are trying to get into these facilities in any way possible to find organizations that are

doing that work and support them at the very least with money. Okay, moving on to another issue, a sort of local issue in your neck of the woods Libby. This Tuesday, there is a vote in Washington DC for something called Initiative 77. Can you describe for us what this initiative is? And sort of some of the sort of intense lobbying battle that has cropped up over what is otherwise a sort of seemingly minor local issue? Yeah, so Initiative 77 would eliminate the tipped minimum wage. Obviously, as in many states tipped workers in DC can be paid lower $3.33 an hour. And the difference can be made up in tips. Current law is that if the employers have to make up the difference if they don't receive enough tips to get to minimum wage. And so this bill would do away with that

system. And after an eight year phase in period by 2026, they would have to pay tipped employees the regular minimum wage, which by then will be $15 an hour. So that's the basic structure of it. Sounds pretty non-controversial, you would think, except there has been a massive lobbying effort by the mostly by the National Restaurant Association, known as the other NRA. And they have started a campaign called Save Our Tips, which is they have framed this very cleverly and very disingenuously as taking, you know, as something that would take away workers' tips, which, you know, in principle, it wouldn't. There's nothing in the initiative that says that people can't tip anymore. But I suppose their idea is that people won't tip if they know their

servers are making $15 an hour, which... Well, Scott Pruitt certainly wouldn't, but, you know... Yeah, I mean, I can't imagine a lot of fucking Chino wearing dickheads in DC saying, oh, excuse me, I know that you make $15 an hour, bitch, so you're not getting the tip. I can imagine a lot of people here doing that. But actually, you know, I really don't think that is... I don't know where they're getting that from. I don't know what evidence there. I mean, it's obviously like a huge cultural norm in America to fucking tip. So... And as proponents of the initiative point out, there are many other states that have a sort of one fair wage policy. Alaska, Montana, Nevada, Minnesota, California, Oregon, and Washington all have this system

where there's no separate tipped minimum wage. And as far as I know, people still tip in those states. It's still pretty normal to do so. Tipping is so ingrained in me when I've visited Holland when I went to Amsterdam. You know, like all the tips are included in like the restaurants there, and I still couldn't stop myself from tipping because it felt so rude to just like leave without leaving a tip. But... Oh, completely. I mean, when I go back to England, people are getting massive tips that they've never experienced before in their lives, because people in the UK tip like 5%, because we're mean fuckers. Now, the American thing to do is I've heard these horror stories about people that will come in,

particularly in the Sunday after church rush, and literally like line up like a series of ones on the edge of the table, and then begin to subtract each dollar for every like, you know, not coffee refill, not smile. Or if your waitress or waiter says no problem, instead of your welcome, that's immediately the whole tip is subtracted. Everything is taken away. But that's the other thing about this weird imbalance between wage jobs and tipped jobs, because people who work for tips as bartenders or waiters do tend to make more money in terms of like the cash they take home than someone who works for just $12 or $15 an hour at like, you know, a box store or another retail job. However, tipping, like having like so much,

like your entire income depending on tips does open the door to this whole other world of kind of, I don't know, harassment and just sort of like this idea of your server being a kind of, you know, servant for you that you can reward and punish at a whim. And just another thing I want to mention, Brendan passed this along to us from a DC fan of the show who's involved with this campaign. And he says another huge thing about if the initiative were to pass is that it would also put a huge dent into wage theft by restaurant owners, which is a huge issue that especially people like who are bussers, food runners and barbacks who are overwhelmingly immigrants and people who speak English as a second language. So in this like tipping economy,

because it is cash and like it's easier for employers to essentially steal money from their employees. Yeah. Yeah. So the the Economic Policy Institute has a really good guide to the Initiative 77 stuff. And they point out that absolutely this would make it so much harder for oh, you know, I mean, obviously wage stuff goes on in all all industries, but it is rampant in the restaurant industry. And they say in investigations of over 9000 restaurants, the US Department of Labor found that 84% of investigated restaurants were in violation of wage in our laws, including nearly 1200 violations of the requirement to bring tipped workers wages up to the minimum wage. And, you know, it happens all the time, there's like study

after study of how tipped workers are more prone to this to this wage theft. And that is something that would be addressed by this issue. And yet the Save Our Tips campaign has just obviously not addressed that in any way. And framed this I actually have a card here that I took from founding farmers in DC when I was hit there this weekend. And there's obviously no mention of that. It says this measure would eliminate the tip credit system. I mean, they don't say anything about what that is. I mean, that sounds great. I love tip credit. Doesn't explain what that is. And, you know, basically like everything else is about killing jobs over time and forcing restaurants to close, which is another thing that the data doesn't necessarily back up at all.

Libby, did you see this thing where the anti-77 campaigners or like the restaurant industry people, they did this thing where they created this kind of pop up restaurant that was intentionally bad and shitty to give diners an experience of like, it was called like restaurant 2020. And it was to give customers like a taste of what the dining out experience would be like if this measure passes. Yeah, it was super fucking embarrassing. It's just like a very DC thing. I'm saying that restaurant already exists in DC. It's called Boss Burger on Avenue U. Oh, God, don't fucking do not. I think Boss Burger is gone, by the way. It's clearly your power that is. Well, no, they've clearly just reopened under a different name to, you know. So they had this

2026 pop up where they raised the prices of the cocktails and like had fewer servers and stuff. But Dan Crawford, who's with the EPI pointed out on Twitter that the prices that they listed, the prices that they listed the cocktails at were not even very much above inflation, like what inflation would do to prices in 2026 anyway. So they're saying that if initiative 77 passes, their cocktail prices will be one dollar and 10 cents more and servers will make 15 bucks. Sounds great. I mean, honestly, yeah, I would pay a dollar and 10 cents more for my shitty cocktail if it meant that work has got a living wage. I mean, it was, it should have been a cell phone, but the media coverage of this has been really, really poor. So yes, but if they have a minimum

wage like that, then they're not going to be desperate enough to compliment my big boy blazer when I go in to eat and they're not going to treat me like the special boy that I am. They're going to just treat me like a regular customer. They're not going to make me a big boy and they're not going to give me the special treats. Right. Right. They're not going to be telling old ladies that they look like their daughters or any of that. I don't want to live in that world. Hey, a pop up restaurant where cocktails cost $15. What is this? The New York restaurant experience? Matt, that touches on what I said earlier is that I think when you hear a lot of the pushback to this idea of servers making a standard minimum wage rather

than a tipped one, I think a lot of hostility, again, comes from that suburban authoritarian mindset where you're being a waiter is an easy job. So to be able to feed yourself, you're going to really have to impress me. I bust my ass sitting in my air conditioned office at my dad's jet ski dealership six hours a day and I come in there. I want to see you hustling. I want to see you smiling. I want you to ask about my biceps. I want to feel like I'm the king of that particular restaurant because I am because I'm buying a $12 Salisbury steak. One of the many correct things, correct opinions offered by Anthony Bourdain was if you are rude or imperious to wait staff or servers ever, you can be written off from

humanity immediately. Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, the correct approach is that, you know, unless the waiter literally shits on your plate, then they have to get the 20% tip. That's just like the normal opinion as far as I'm concerned. But yeah, there's a lot of like suburban dads that seem to think that being a waiter is like a cushy job. So the vote for this is on Tuesday, this upcoming Tuesday. So if you listen to this episode, know that there is still time if you're in DC to vote for 77 against the other NRA, the National Restaurants Association, and vote for the fair treatment of waiters by their employers. And also, I mean, the Save Our Tips campaign is just so disgusting. I think it's understandable for people to see the messaging about restaurants

having to close or whatever. And, you know, honestly, a lot of people in the service industry have been lied to by their bosses about this and, you know, told that their tips are going to go away. So, you know, I've talked to people here who are like, well, you know, everyone I've talked to in the service industry is against this. And I understand that. But the Save Our Tips campaign is just like, it's run by some of the worst people. The guy running it is this guy, Nathan Sproul, who works at this Lincoln strategy group. They work for the Trump campaign. They also ran a nonprofit that is, this guy is one of my personal enemies, because when I was at the Sunlight Foundation, I wrote about this organization called Protect America's Consumers, which was like running fake

ads against the CFPB. And, you know, they were all very, they're all very like shiny and glitzy and meant to be, you know, sort of moderate looking. But it was clearly fucking funded by the payday loan industry or some nefarious group. But because it was, it was a completely dark money group. And this guy was one of the guys running it. So, defeat the awful bastard, Nathan Sproul on Tuesday. Also, all these fucking celebrity asshole chefs who are fucking fretting about what it's going to do. They're fucking businesses. They're fucking selling $50 vaporized pig dicks under their mask. And they're going to fucking say, I don't know. I don't think I can afford to pay my staff a living wage. Hey, how about this in Jose Andres? Yeah, how about this? No more foam

dishes. Get that foam shit out of here. Serve a real meal. Hey, how about this? No more appetizers. That's just a single date served on a plate with like a little olive oil around it. That shit's not food. Do some work. Yeah. And also, how about some real fucking coffee? Okay. Hey, coffee flavored coffee. And let us smoke in restaurants again. Hell yeah. Let us smoke everywhere. Let me shoot up. My version of this is when they bring you bread and olive oil. Like, fuck off. I want butter. Give me hot, warm, salty butter. I don't want that gross olive oil that tastes like a vegetable's ass. Like, give me, give me butter. No, no, no, no. That's my version of this. Spruce it up with olive oil with like a little of that vinegar, the vinaigrette port in it.

Sometimes you don't even get that. Sometimes you just get a gross glob of oil. It's just just disgusting. I want some nice warm butter, not like melted butter, but butter that you can easily spread on the bread. Yeah, none of that from the fridge shit. Yeah. And then I want like a little tiny little bowl of like some nice like malden sea salt to just sort of sprinkle over the top of my bread and butter. You know, this is a real treat boy shit here. And Will would also like the waiter to be very nice to him because it's his birthday. It's my fucking birthday. To close out this week, I have a reading series that absolutely touches on a lot of what we talked about in the first part of the show. We were talking about, you know, what it's like to live

like in a country that's actually evil and doing things that like if you read about in a history book, you would ask yourself how the fuck did like the majority of people just acquiesce to this and let it happen without doing anything to stop it. And moreover, what is the media's responsibility in any of this or what are their strategies for dealing with it? Well, one of their strategies is again, trying to better understand the people who all think that this is really good and that kids should be put in cages. And I have a reading series that comes courtesy of the New York Post's Selena Zito. Now, if you're not familiar with Selena Zito, she is a just fucking one of those hag fish, you know, at the bottom of the ocean that consume the corpses of whales that drift to the

bottom. She's like one of those except for the Trump Make America Great movement. And essentially what she does is she offers her services to the media and in a book she's just published as a kind of a white working class whisperer to where she sort of always finds people in the heartland of America who are, you know, overlooked by the Democratic Party or abandoned by them, which, you know, on one level isn't wrong. But these the people she finds always seem to, oh, I don't know, be actual employees of local Republican parties or say exactly the things that a Republican pundit would want them to. Or our fucking bosses. Yeah, aren't actually working class. Yeah. Small business tyrants and whatnot. So this is a Selena Zito writing in the New York Post.

And this is an opinion piece called these Harvard kids got a lesson of their life in the heartland. On a blustery afternoon in April, I filed into a van along with 10 students from Harvard. We had just spent the last few days in Chickpea, Massachusetts, where we had chatted with the police chief and his force, the mayor and his staff, small business owners, waitresses and firemen about the struggles living in small about their struggles living in small town America. The undergrads were buzzing with their impressions. So I said, who do you think most of the people you just got to know voted for president? None of the students had an answer. It hadn't come up in their conversations. And they didn't know I had privately asked each person who they'd voted for.

So I let a minute and pass and told them nearly every one of them voted for Trump. My students looked stunned at first, but then a recognition crossed their faces. Okay, that's the beginning here. And my first impression here is, what this piece is doing is actually, instead of exploding my prejudice stereotype views, it's absolutely reinforcing them that Harvard University is a cancer on our society and that everyone who attends there and works for it is an even bigger rube than these fucking Trump voters that they're reaching out to. For the idea that they would allow someone like Selena Zito to create this propaganda tour and goal some of their more credulous students into attending is absurd to me. Well, what it does is it really shows

one of the real cultural benefits for the elite of this post 2016 election, exoticization, exoticization, whatever, fucking shut up. Don't fucking tell me how to pronounce. I don't know. But exoticizing Trump supporters and turning them into this other species, you could say it's condescending or whatever or but what it really is is it's giving people who basically are too scared and worried and cut off from people on in other socioeconomic areas and certainly in other races like immigrants or black communities or true poverty in America. That's too scary. That's a bridge too far for being an adventurous seeker of other experiences. But a guy who, like I said, owns a boat dealership but voted for Trump, you get to treat him

as much of an exotic species as like a Thai immigrant or something like that and you get to then have an interaction that you're more comfortable with because the person shares your basic sociopolitical and racial background but get to feel like you're fucking Margaret Mead or something because actually going outside of your bubble of whiteness and privilege is too scary. Yeah, it's like it's the guy who owns a hundred and fifty thousand dollar pickup truck, but it's a pickup truck. Yeah. And he listens to like top 40 country radio that that's working class. And you get that's what they mean by that. And you get to feel like, wow, I'm learning something about other people like, no, you're not. These people are just slightly different

versions of you. They just grew up watching different television shows. But this is like all part and parcel of this, this scolding, this kind of hectoring from people who are bog standard conservative Republicans who essentially support every one of the policies of Donald Trump, but nonetheless find him personally distasteful. Or again, there's now a cottage industry of these people to come along and tell you the people who, you know, are has a fucking conscience and opposes everything that they stand for that actually it's your opposition to the president and his supporters or you're being mean to them is the reason that they vote for him. As if there is someone out there who's just voting for

President Trump because it makes liberals mad that isn't living in a fucking bubble of their own creation. Yes. Yeah, I think it is. It's like partly comes from the fact that Trump's election just surprised so many people in the media who could never have seen it coming. And I think they're a little embarrassed about that and kind of trying to make up for it. But every time they do one of these stories, they show that they still don't get how this happened, like how Trump won at all. It doesn't matter how many of these people you interview, you're right. Like when you're interviewing the guy with the $150,000 pickup truck, because he's got a pickup truck, then you are displaying your complete lack of understanding of the systems of power in America.

And this stuff works because, as I mentioned before, it works on liberals because liberals really love believing that they're better or different than the people that they oppose. They're like, oh, I would never unfairly judge someone or because of their politics or, you know, I'm open-minded enough to reach out. And it's like, all you're doing, like this is the Tom Sawyer fence-painting trick in politics. And what these people are trying to do, what the Salinas Jito's of the world are trying to do to these bright-eyed college students, is convince them that your political opposition to Trump is why Trump is president. And if you don't want him to be president, you should meet us halfway and essentially accept all of the

conservative policies that we would prefer that the country be run under. And if you oppose that, just don't say it too loudly or question the motivations of anyone who, like, for instance, thinks that children need to be put in jail. So it goes on here and it says, we were only a few days into a new course I had developed with Harvard's Institute of Politics. Again, Harvard's Institute of Politics, if there's anyone who goes to Harvard or is part of that program, drop out now, like seriously, it's what you're doing is worthless. I don't know how you look at yourself in the mirror, that they're literally being conned by this absolute fraud. It says here, it's called the Main Street Project, where students are immersed in small-town America,

even though these kids had almost all been raised in the United States, or journey sometimes felt like an anthropology course as though they were seeing the rest of the country for the first time. And that was their opening lesson. I had been a national political journalist for nearly 15 years. This is really funny, by the way. Whenever and wherever I travel in this country, I abide by a few simple rules. No planes, no interstates, and no hotels, and definitely no chain restaurants. The reason is simple. Planes fly over and interstates swiftly pass by what's really happening in the suburbs. But she's a fucking dromedary? What the fuck? What does she do? Is she hitchhikes? Yeah, she only travels. She's like the original

Incredible Hulk TV shows. She just sort of backpacks through the back roads of America, helping people. She takes the only truly proletarian form of transportation to hot air balloon. So she goes, you know, interstates swiftly pass by what's really happening in the suburbs, towns, and ex-urbs of this nation. You know what's going on in all those areas? People are watching television. That's all that's happening. She's not missing some sort of magical community. Is everybody sitting at home watching television? I'm just really hoping on her travels, Selena Zito on the back roads away from the highways and byways of America. She will encounter a working class family, either the ones from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre,

or the Hills Have Eyes. Yeah, the Sawyer family has a lot to tell you about deindustrialization and the broken promises to American workers. So she says staying in a hotel doesn't give me the same connection I can get. Staying in a bed and breakfast where the first person I meet is a small business person who runs the place and knows all the neighborhood secrets. The same is true of going to locally owned restaurants versus chains. Now, the funny thing about this is if you wrote this article from the opposite side, like as a liberal. Yeah, I don't go to chain restaurants. I don't eat. I would never dream of going to the local Applebee's. I need to find the local, like, farm-to-table restaurant and stay at a little bed and breakfast where the old woman

wants to talk your ear off about her entire family and then makes you go to bed at nine o'clock every night. I mean, like, think how fucking stuck up that is. What she's talking about, like, this small-town American culture is fucking chain restaurants and the mall and the fucking highway and that bland monoculture that permeates all of American life. That is what it is. That is what is there. It's only fucking snooty cosmopolitan types who go out seeking authentic experience elsewhere in America. Chili's is good enough for the rest of us. If you want authentic, like, authentic small, like, experience, you have to go to a fucking city to get that. I'm sorry. Yeah. No, go to Buffalo Wild Wings during a game. If you want to see the closest thing these places

happen to, like, a community. And I do like how she says the first thing I'm talking to is a small business owner, which once again just shows her actual interest in who she wants to get her pearls of simple wisdom from, which are the fucking mini Mussolini's of America's vast middle, not the actual workers. And by the way, most fucking fast food and chain restaurants are owned by local people. It's called a fucking franchise. So she goes, also, you have to spend your time in a community to really report on it. Parachuting in for a few hours to interview the locals can lead to flawed evaluations. That's exactly what she's doing with this Operation Main Street bullshit. She's parachuting in these gullible fucking politics students at Harvard and giving them a tour of

preselected small business owners to tell them, hey, I'm not racist. I just think all immigrants should be kicked out of the country. And Donald Trump is a great leader because he cut my taxes and regulations, which allow for small community to exist in America. So he goes, when you are short on time, your instincts can get blurred and you gravitate towards the shiny objects, the oddball people and conditions that make the most noise instead of taking a broader focus on the bigger, fuller picture. Those simple rules are what intrigue students at the Harvard Institute of Politics. Again, any of these students just baby brains, absolute baby brain if you were intrigued by any of this nonsense. I mean, God, it's obviously like the student, the young person

urged to sort of immerse yourself in a foreign land and a strange culture. That's very condescending and it's a classic cliche of sort of obnoxious cluelessness. But it seems it's somehow even worse to try to fit going to like, you know, jerk off fucking excerpt in America and talk to a bunch of fucking white middle-class people and act like you've actually done that. That seems somehow even worse than doing the real. Dude, take your semester abroad in fucking France or Spain or Italy or something. Don't go to the worst suburbs of America to talk to literally the worst people our nation can produce as some sort of authentic experience. And then act like you're doing something brave. You're actually doing something incredibly fucking cowardly because you are too afraid to cross any

kind of cultural or economic gap bigger than that, bigger than voting preference literally and zip code. It is so beautiful and funny to me, though, to imagine like a bunch of Harvard students being shipped into like the South and tasting sweet tea and being like, what on earth is this? Or like asking a guy about his curly fries or whatever. Like, what exactly are you eating here? You know, what do you people eat? Like, it's a very funny image. Hey, I'm not afraid to say it. I'm not afraid to judge other cultures. Sweet tea? Too fucking sweet. It's disgusting. Yeah. It's way too much fucking sugar. It's ridiculous. Get your shit together. Just have a Dr. Pepper. It's way better. So it says, days after my speech, two IOP directors said the students wanted to learn more

from me. I told them the best course would be a total immersion in the less populated parts of the country. No different from the way I approached my daily job. Your daily grift on behalf of the Koch brothers, whoever underwrites this bullshit. Chris Quang, a 20 year old sophomore from Winchester Massachusetts, and Sam Kessler, a junior from Bluebell, Pennsylvania, led the charge recruiting 18 other students for the class, which began in February. Because Quang is chair of the Harvard Union, the nation's oldest collegiate debating society. Oh, there you go. He's a debate team, kid. It's all falling into place. And Kessler is president of the Harvard political review. They were both hungry to learn what shapes people's voting habits, particularly the 2016 election

when Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in an upset almost no one predicted. The best way to blow apart a stereotype is to challenge it, Quang, an applied math and economics major told me. So before we started traveling, we had several workshops to discuss their ideas about the other America. Again, it's not the other America. No, it's the most mainstream part of American culture. It's the most ass-kissed. It's the most largely economically blessed. I mean, from what she's talking about, the people she's talking about are the people who even in areas that are economically distressed are the ones who have sort of generational and residual wealth. Yeah, no, they actually go to a factory in Youngstown, Ohio where the guy says, yeah,

this community has been hard hit recently, but I just feel really proud of the business I own. Two weeks later in London, Derry, New Hampshire, the students visited a gun range at Fish and Game Club and saw something else they didn't expect. 40 women of all ages, shapes and colors pointing pistols at a target. Hmm, I'm going to guess here in London, Derry, New Hampshire, there wasn't actually a lot of ethnic diversity at the gun range. You shot everybody from Irish people to French Canadians, even a stray croat. Susan Olson, a silver-haired instructor, made her way over to the students with a broad smile and swagger. For women, knowing how to operate a gun, she told them, is the most empowering thing

we can do. Again, who are these fucking college-age students who were surprised to find out that women, there are women gun culture in America too? Or that going to a gun range would seem like, ooh, this is so exciting and different. I mean, these are people who are brought up in fucking terrariums. I mean, they've spent their entire life incubated to go to these fucking Ivy League schools. So who the hell knows what they actually think about the world around them. So he goes, oh, here it is. In May, the students found more insights in the Mahoning Valley of Ohio where they broke bread at the iconic MVR restaurant with Joe Casice, the third member of his family to own the eatery. Of course. Yeah, and he goes, his enthusiasm kept students wrapped as he told

them how he developed and grew a business in the downtown area. Wait a minute, the third generation? Yeah, he inherited it. I developed Inside My Mom's Boom, which really helped me with my job of taking over for my dad. I could have gone anywhere, and I did, said Casice, who worked for several teams in the NFL as an equipment manager. But in the end, I wanted to come home to this, he added, as he made a 360 sweep of his restaurant. This is the greatest city in America, the people, the heart. I love my community. Fact check, five pants on fire. Youngstown is not even in the top 100 greatest cities in America. Amid the, here, I'm just going on here, later they dined at the famed Trumbull Country Club where the robber barons of yesteryear once made their deals.

Today, a new generation of leaders is helping the club regain its footing in the post industrial age. So it's like, yeah, we want to bring back the gilded age. That's, that's what these real America want. I remember when my great-grandpappy used to hunt peasants from the back of a horse. The students course is coming to an end. And while no one got college credit or earned a grade, thank God, they had all passed the most important tests. They had taken a walk down Main Street and made a lot more friends than judgments. They had learned that in order to understand the country's politics, you first have to understand its people. That means getting out of your bubble and spending time away from people like you. If you don't, Kwong said, you lose the ability

to spark the evolution needed to bridge this country's divide. Again, this comes back to something that I just, it fucking, it's like a canker sore that just won't go away and I can't stop pressing my tongue against it. What we need to do, politics is about defeating the other side, not bridging a divide with them. The people who support Trump and like him need to be defeated entire politically. They don't need to be coddled and catered to. And the people who disagree with them don't need to be told that, you know, you really need to come to them and agree with them before you can get what you want. No, it's the fundamental delusion of sort of the folk understanding of politics, that it's about coming together, that it's about people putting their

differences aside because politics is literally differences. So you're putting them aside is that's defeating the point of politics. The point is to resolve the differences and you resolve the differences when they're attached to economic, economic interests with fucking numbers by over steamrolling them. That's it. I just think I'm, I don't like the idea of Kwong and others, other future political leaders being inculcated with the idea that they need to understand and come together with small business tyrants that make up America's rancid reactionary middle class instead of working to defeat them entirely. But they don't want to expropriate their wealth. The thing is they don't want to defeat them. They go to

fucking Harvard. They're fully bought into this. The people who sell the idea that politics is about bridging gaps and resolving conflict, they all have an interest in that because they don't want people to look at politics as a conflict of interests because then people will realize that, oh, they're all basically on the same side. Like all these fucking, these larping spelunker anthropologist Harvard students have essentially very similar interests as the people who they're exotically exploring in America's smaller towns. But again, I just like this idea that just going to some American suburb is getting out of the bubble. That is the fucking bubble. Yes. Like I've lived in New York City my whole life. If I go to London, Derry, New Hampshire,

I wouldn't feel out of place for even a second because I'm, guess what? I'm white and upper middle class. I can go anywhere in this fucking country. Oh, except the only places I might not feel comfortable are the actual poor neighborhoods in America's cities. That's why these people actually would feel uncomfortable. Exactly. And why do that when you can go and listen to fucking some psychopath talk about how he uses a BB gun to motivate his workforce in his prime rib shop? So just at the end here, it says the students even came up with a better name for the Main Street Project. They call it hashtag eye opening. Blending their eye opening experiences with the acronym for their Institute. Again, an eye opening experience visiting a

fucking bed and breakfast in Youngstown, Ohio. Well, we have to remember that the Institute of Politics is where Sean Spicer was hired and that there were actually Harvard kids who went to like his fucking breakfast sessions or whatever. So you got to remember that these people are challenged. They are. So it closes out here. In our final week, the class attended Mass at Stanislaus, a Polish church. Mass? What's that? Mass? What's that? It's a Polish church in the strip district of downtown Pittsburgh. Before then, only two of my students had stepped foot in a Catholic church. Oh my God. Imagine stepping foot in a Catholic church. Imagine how weird an alien that would feel if you grew up in fucking America in 21st century America. So it goes at the end

of mass. Here's something that absolutely definitely happened, by the way. At the end of mass, an older gentleman came up to me and said how nice it was to see young people dressed up and going to church. Yeah, he's saying that because no one under the age of 60 does attend Catholic Church anymore. So yeah, it is nice for him. Good to know that the religion he's a member of isn't dying in the first world. He goes, when I told him they were students from Harvard, he beamed. I've been reading for years that college kids these days are thin-skinned. What's that word? Snowbirds? Snowflakes? Anyway, that they have no easiness with meeting someone new or trying something different or won't be open to opposing opinions, he said. He smiled as he gave my kids an approving

thumbs up. Don't you just love it when a stereotype is blown up right in front of you? Fucking that confirms every stereotype I already have. This article did, by the way. In closing here, this idea that it's college kids who have a problem with things that are new or things changing or things that are different from what they're used to. This is weird in policy in America in general, like this rhetorical idea that you can decide what America is and who has a monopoly on what America is. It's the same principle that leaves people to say, this isn't us when ICE is deporting people or whatever. Obviously, the answer to that is it clearly fucking is us. That is exactly what we've done for hundreds of years. This is weird

impulse, especially from liberals and kind of centrists who want to say, oh, this is what America is. It's small towns and small business owners and people going to church. It's like, no, I mean, sure, it's that. It's also IHOP and Denny's and huge motorways with chain restaurant after chain restaurant. It's also people who don't own small businesses. It's people who wash dishes and everything. It's a lot of these things. There's just weird rhetorical move on her part to define by picking these examples what America is because those are the people that she fucking talked to. I mean, who is listening to this person? I mean, not to be parochial from my own background and biases, but you know what's also America? All of our gigantic fucking cities

where most of the people live. Yeah, where most of the fucking people live, seriously. So yeah, if you want to have new and different experiences, you're way more likely to find that in a major metropolitan area than in small town America. But again, the idea that visiting American suburbs represents some kind of earth shattering uncomfortable experience for any of these Harvard kids is a fucking laugh. And anyone who gives credence to it is a pigeon waiting to be plucked. So yeah, for the Selena Zitos of the world, I'm sure it's gonna be plenty. It's gonna be boom times for them as they continue to work this act with a great effect on, like you said, mostly liberals and centrists who are buying it as they rob them blind with the other hand.

So I think that just about does it for this week. Libby, thank you so much for basically co-hosting with us this week. Anytime. I'm sorry to your listeners, you must be getting sick of me by now. Just don't read the Reddit, you know. Actually, they'll probably say you're better than all of us. But before we go, just want to give a little plug here on behalf of Felix. Felix will be doing, if you are in the Chicago area, he will be doing a live show on July 1st at the Hideout venue we've performed at before. He's doing the monkey rent show with a friend of the show, Arish. We did that show, or Matt, you did that show, right? Yes, I did. It's good. So yeah, Felix is doing a show at the Hideout

venue in Chicago on Sunday, July 1st. We will put a link to get tickets for that in the show description. Libby, please send us the link to the organization you mentioned earlier if you'd like to donate money to that as well. Definitely. OK. Libby Watson, once again, always a pleasure. Thank you for joining us. Until next time. Bye. Bye. Bye.