Chapo Trap House - Episode 256 - Ass, Grass or Sasse(10/22/18)

Episode Date: October 23, 2018

...no one caravans for free We talk caravans, Khashoggi, and Ben Sasse. (Editor's Note: I really didn't want to make Ben Sasse's stupid face the episode image, so here's a spooky image instead)

Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, this is Well the Bad Bad Menaker, Chop Oh Morning Zoo, crew, crew, crew. You're broadcasting live, counting down all your 80s, 90s, and 70s rock classics. We're broadcasting live, live, live from the migrant caravan, caravan, caravan, making its way up to the U.S. border. We've just crossed into Mexico from Guatemala, and we're all here, we're partying, we're rockin' and rollin', we're swishin' addition, we've got our Soros-sponsored Go-Bags. They're full of drugs, guns, and lawyers. We're ready to bring this rock and roll invasion to your doorstep. ISIS is here. They're lovin' it.

We're listenin' to rock, we're listenin' to fog hat. We're lookin' for jobs, no. We're lookin' for blood, blood, blood. Before the midterm elections, elections, we're registering to vote along the way. We're registering all the migrant voters coming soon to a neighborhood near you, you, you. Well now to get tickets to see Jethro Tull, Tull, Tull at the Motor Speedway. Our fourth caller becomes a U.S. citizen-citizen who can vote 10 times, times, times. A little bit later in the show, the hour top of the hour, we talk to George Soros, Soros, Soros, who's bankrolling this entire invasion, invasion, invasion. It's Camp of the Saints all day, day, day on the chopper morning, zoo, crew, crew, rock and roll.

Bringin' the caravan to you, you, you. Pepsi Max is the only sugar-free cola alternative that contains authentic baby parts. We are here at Senior Frogs for the next 42 hours. Two-for-one cocktails for anyone who promises to be head a senior citizen once they get to the United States. Hezbollah-style terrorists are here with Al-Qaeda, with ISIS, with the drug cartels, cartels. There are no women and children in this caravan again. It's just swole dudes, they're doing reps, they're fuckin' takin' steroids. We have the most powerful Muslims, the Shia division.

They're doing pull-ups and covered wagons. There are no women and children, it's boys only. It's a non-stop caravan of a man cave. Dudes, rock, more like a caravan, it's just for fellows. We will be coming soon before the midterm elections, elections, elections. You cannot stop us, us, chopper morning, zoo, crew, crew, crew. Coming up next, it's Led Zeppelin with the immigrant song, ten times in a row, row, row, row. Okay, that was pretty good.

I have another cousin song, ten years ago, on a cold dark night, my cousin and I actually saved Vin Diesel's life. They're a few at the scene, but they all could agree, I killed a pro fighter, my cousin and me. A long black veil? That is a deep cut. I haven't listened to that song in too long, but I'm sure you could imply that the long black veil is caked up. She could tell anyone because her husband's Justin Verlander? I like fucking died.

The judge was like, dude, tell me who you were fucking. I was like, no, he fucking killed me, dude. I'm fucking dead. Actually, my dad won this contest when I was a kid that said if I died, I could sing a song. He could sing a song about why I died. Anyway, guys, it's Champo. We're back to our regularly scheduled program. We're back here in Brooklyn. The tour is over. We're glad to be back, and I guess as I alluded to at the top of the show,

I guess the hottest story right now is the migrant caravan that's coming to your town soon. This is the story that is basically being covered on Fox News 24-7. I, again, cannot believe it's real that this is a real thing that people are concerned about. Well, they're all ISIS. Why wouldn't you be concerned? They're saying, yeah, there's ISIS, and it's just like the perfect made-up story to juice sickos, memos, and pet-peps right before the midterm election. Yeah. I mean, it's not. It's a real thing. Oh, I mean, it's a real thing.

There are some very deprived people who are countries that have been systematically exploited and destroyed largely by the United States. Wait, but did they think that I'm sorry, I'm not up on my Fox News talking points. Did they think that they're like muslim-excepts, and aren't they all like Honduran? Well, I mean, Amber, can you tell a difference? Well, they're using the poorest border to get in, is the idea. Oh, yeah. Today, Trump honestly topped himself. He just said, there's a lot of bad guys in there.

Middle Easterners. He said there's MS-13 and then Middle Easterners. Not even fucking with like ISIS, not terrorists, not even like forgetting that you're supposed to be like I'm only against the bad ones. Yeah. Just literally people from a part of the world are coming. Maybe. Here's the thing. It's supposedly 5,000 strong and like they've just made their way into Mexico. Again, the vast majority of them will probably seek asylum in Mexico and Mexico is a huge fucking country. And then like I would be shocked if like maybe two or three hundred made it to the US border and got into the United States. And again, who the fuck cares? I honestly, I will send them the party bus and drive them. All right. Well, you say that when they fucking suicide bomb your favorite Applebee's

buddy, then you're not gonna be so happy about it. Not my favorite. Yeah, exactly. So fucking stupid. Well, it's the caravan. They're coming. They're coming for you. They're literally coming for you. They're going to show up at the villages. Yep. They're coming to the villages in a bunch of Jalapes. And then they're just going to start mowing people's lawns without permission or something. I don't know. They're all going to come and they're going to come in front of the villages and the leader of the caravan will grab grab the loudspeaker and just go just leave. Leave the precious guzzling. Just go and you won't be harmed. Walk away from the Cheesecake Factory. Just walk away. Walk away. Walk away for the cheesecake. And then they bring out like on

the golf carts, a couple like geezers tied to the front of it. They're like, no, don't give them anything. Protect the villages. I'm is it is like it is really funny because it's just so dilute. It's so delusional. Like this is the sort of thing that was on like the fringes of free republic back in like 2007. This is the plot of that crackpot racist novel camp of the states that Steve Bannon and Rod Dre are like so much like this is their fantasy come true. Right. But it is. I mean, it does betray a horrifying psychosis, which is, you know, the country is just trending towards like complete isolation of the people who care about who are really think this is a real story, a real horrifying story and everyone else where their lives are probably safer than

anyone's at like any point in human history and just US history alone. Right. And because their politics don't really reflect their lives in this aspect, they're going to have to keep creating more and more fantastical phantoms that are animated by the racism that just, you know, just will eventually result in border guards just fucking mowing people like this down. Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, Trump's already talking about sending the army reserves the army to the border and and yeah, the trend there is only going to be towards horrible bloodshed, which these people would be absolutely happy with. And he literally said this upcoming election is the caravan election. He said it's the caravan and the caravan election. I love how he I love how he just talks it out.

You know, like all this stuff that's supposed to happen behind the scenes where it's all the messaging is determined by Frank Luntz, you know, toadstools and then you give them talking points and then they have the talking points. Trump just says, folks, the thing is the caravan, it's big. You're scared of it. You're going to vote for me. And he just says it. He doesn't even have to leave that like to subtext. He just says it. And now as his other closer is his saying, we're going to give the middle class a 10 percent tax cut right before the election. Right. Sure. Congress has gone home. They can't do it. They can't. No one knows what he's talking about. He just made it up. He's like, people like tax cuts. I'll say we're going to get one.

And there he's scared of terrorists. I'm saying they're coming for you. I mean, literally writing mower dads who believe in caravans. I mean, but that's literally it. Like his voters, you don't have to fuck it. You don't. You can't be like, actually, the way he's in means committee isn't even in session. It's just like they're going to click on a bonsai buddy link that says like, you win $300 of that. That's Trump's tax cut. Thank you so much, sir. Congratulations. Yeah. And they just don't have to see anything. It doesn't matter. Like none of the none of the gotchas work like Brett Kavanaugh. It is the Brett Kavanaugh election for them. And Brett Kavanaugh is the biggest swamp creature in Trump's Republican primary parlance that we've

ever seen. He was basically Bush's personal secretary. He's this creature of the DC big law world. And it just, you know, they've just turned this crying prep school pussy into like a cool MAGA guy. Yeah. Yeah. If you set foot outside the beltway, he'd start gasping for air like a fish you pull out of the fucking boat. I mean, he's just the least like regular American you could imagine, but he's gasping for a drink like he's trying to pull it out of a good old truck. He's he's he's a F 150 Kavanaugh. Just just a simple man who likes who loves beer like we all do. Anyway, so yeah, expect to hear just nothing just nonstop. Just expect to hear about the caravan from all of your Facebook relatives and friends who haven't talked to us since high school. Yeah,

it's going to be there. It's going to be the most pressing issue. Oh, Trump also recently said that that his the middle class mower dads. He said there was a riot in California against the sanctuary cities. Yes. Yeah, that there was a riot in the rioting to get away from the sanctuary cities. Just one thousand percent. It wasn't even like based on something. We're like a rider dad like a mower dad fell off. He's like lawn mower. He's like ow caravan did it and he said he said also that Democrats they're going to give illegals cars, luxury cars, luxury cars, luxury automobiles, and it's amazing because in one in two straight rallies, the first rally said they want to give him they want to give him licenses. What's next? They want to give him cars and then he was so

impressed with his rhetoric that the next day he just said, folks, they're going to give him cars and just cut out the hypothetical and said that they're actually going to very specific kind of word salad badness, though, where you say something that you know is not true. And then five seconds later, not only do you believe that you expound upon it, like Red Cajina would do that a lot. Yeah, no, he's convinced of all this stuff. If you were an illegal immigrant, what can I do to put you in this Audi? No money down. No citizenship required. No money at all required. I believe that like members of the caravan deserve the same opportunity as any American Audi driver, which is to get Wendy's at 11 p.m. listen to the national and think about your life.

Free Bentley. That's what you do if you drive an Audi. A free Bentley for any illegal who shows up wearing an I voted sticker. Yeah, show your receipts from voting over 10 times and you get a brand new Lexus. I would do that. The other Trump-adjacent story that I want to touch on briefly is the this Jamal Khashoggi thing. This story continues to evolve. And I mean, again, I don't want to say hilarious because what happened to him is bone chilling. Bone song. I really walked right into that one. No, I mean, so did he. You can cut that if you want. No, leave it. Yeah. It's terrible, but we laugh about death here. Yeah, it's true. I mean, yeah, if you get mad at us for this, how many fucking 911 jokes have

you posted? Yeah, exactly. So here's the thing. Like, I mean, again, shouldn't be surprised at all, but just the way that which official DC is going to go to bat for Saudi Arabia over this, I've seen. First of all, the Saudi Internet squadron is like the tightest shit on Twitter. It's so powerful. So amazing. I saw this one guy who was just like, look, he's like, MBS is a young guy. You can expect him to deal with something like this with the finesse and grace of a west of a, you know, a practiced Western political leader. Yeah. MBS is Matt Saracen, literally kind of Friday night lights. He wasn't meant to be here, but it's just like he's showing up. He's doing his best coach, which is King Solomon is yelling at him,

but he's like he's showing up big. He's got a big heart. I mean, like obviously, like all the reports I'm reading is that Saudi Arabia and rightly so genuinely surprised and caught off guard that people are so mad about this. We just blew up a school bus full of children. You remember that? Nobody gave a shit. We sawing up one fucking op-ed writer and you guys care. What the hell? Yeah. And they feel really underestimated how much the press thinks they're the troops. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. That's the thing they didn't realize. This guy hadn't been a reporter really. If he'd just been some freelance dissident or something, this, I don't think would have been nearly the story it is. It's because he's part of the group. He's part of the in the circle of

American elite and you can't chop them up. And here's that they blow up all the school busses you want, but you can't chop up those people. A lot of their like K street lobbying people have backed away from them. They've had from heading for the exits, but that's like the highest here. And then you're seeing the results of that when they have to do their own PR and it's just like the reply guy brigade. It's just like just like showed up in Saudi is country of justice in America. This murder would be covered up. Google Seth rich and Benghazi. Oh, they're the set. So those are literally the guys from the orb place. Yeah, like that they made. They made basically an internet cafe for guys to work in and reply to you and be like, first of all, this is an internal affair.

Second of all, how come no criticism when Barack Obama persecuted Dennis Astert is not the same thing? Look, you had to work at either the Saudi troll farm or correct the record. Which one would be worse? Think of all that Lulu lemon. Think of think of all those Hillary girls. It's just guzzling down Frappuccinos. Just which one would be worse? Well, at the end of the day, I'm not like legally blocked by the rules of my country from watching like this is us. Which one would you want to work at? I'm going to if it's whole cloth like I'm in that situation, I'm going to go correct the record. But if it's like I'm just working there, I get to stay here. I'm probably going to the Saudi one because you can have more. They're not monitoring you as

close like I feel that Hillary won your hyper micro managed and they're like totally micro managed. You can't get creative. Yeah. Yeah. Fucking improving. They're like, actually, he showed up at the consulate in 13 pieces in a wheelbarrow. Yeah, making up as they go on. I work an easy fun job at exercises you creatively. So we got to talk about like again, now that they're divorced, they're slicker DC PR shops and they have to cover their own asses, you're seeing some truly hilarious thing. And I want to talk in particular about they've had like weeks now to come up with an excuse for what happened. And the one they came up with and this is a highly hyped. Yeah, because because

the Saudi said we're doing an investigation and Trump and those said look we can't condemn them until we hear them out. Trump literally said like he literally said like almost literally said Saudi Arabia is being Kavanaughed. Yeah, like, you know, look, where's the evidence? We can't jump. We can't just assume they're guilty just because a man walked into their consulate and then never walked out. See what they have to say. So what they had to say after they came up with this investigation is that he walked into the consulate to get his marriage certificate and then started a fight with them with and then after which 18 guys proceeded to kill and then chop him up. I don't think they've admitted to the chopping him up part. They just said they say they don't know

where the body is. Yeah, they don't know where the body is people who have some trashy weddings. I don't think that happened. I'm going to go out on a limb and say this like quiet potato man journalism did not just like have too many mics hard lemonade and then call someone a slut and then headbutt is on. He tried to happen. He tried to square up in the consulate and then 18 guys killed who were there for some reason. Yeah, for a couple hours. They wanted to talk to him. The 18 guys flew in before to talk to him and then he got rowdy and then he they killed him and then you might not know this but the Saudi consulate in Istanbul has a parallel dimension room where if like things go in there and then they kind of get like lost in sort of,

you know, a quantum state. What happened to Ozzy Smith? Yeah, exactly. Yes. That's the only way because they literally say they don't know what happened to his body. Couldn't they just say like he was a danger to national security or he was leaking state secrets or something more plausible than he started like throwing bows in the middle of the consulate is that they've admitted that they wanted to basically abduct him back to Saudi Arabia. Like that's the basis of it is all these guys came here to bring him back to Saudi Arabia and they've there's like there's no explanation for why that would be acceptable either. They're like just calm down. We were trying to kidnap him. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, but he's he's not he didn't do it. You don't even have an accusation

of a thing he did that you would kidnap him for and you should be kidnapping people even if they are criminally liable. It just seems like it would be really easy for them to like present a plausible lie that wouldn't make Americans mad and that they just weren't even because everyone is wants to hear something from them. Give us something. Give us something. Yeah. When you saw CNN, the the the that dumb fucking plausibility act that all of the all of the anchors were trying to say they're like, like, well, we don't know what happened. Where is the body? We don't know. And we have to sit here and listen to them act like they're that fucking stupid because they're they're under the impression that their job is to be as plausible or like just just to believe

that every possible consideration is plausible. So they're just begging for anything. They're they're literally like, just give us something because they want to like this out. So it's like yeah, it is it is like a world star hypothetical. You have a trillion dollars basically in liquid assets. You have two weeks to come up with a lie. No one in the world actually really wants to decouple with you. I mean, the journalists are mad that they killed, you know, one of your one of theirs. But you literally it could it is the best scenario you could have to get away with a murder, right? And the thing they come up with was, yo, actually, he doesn't look like it, but he was fucking all of us up. He was beating all of our asses, and we had to end him with sick blade

attacks. And then then he evaporated. And I mean, the thing is, I don't know how much this will matter, because I saw I saw someone say I've never seen the Saudi lobby on its back foot like this. And it's true. It hasn't been on its back foot, you know, again, with much more egregious things with like, say, striking the stuff from the 9 11 report about Prince Bandar giving money to, you know, a few of the hijackers, but they got really greedy. It's a very a D turns into a B so easily situation. Well, it does sort of show the morphing of the kingdom, right? Because they were saying they said, OK, we were, you could say they're trying to rendition him. Well, that's something Gulf States do all the time, not just with dissidents, just with like, say, a kid escapes

the guardianship of their parents, because they're gay or they're an atheist or something. There have been numerous cases of people like the 17 year olds, even a legal adults going to like Malaysia and getting renditioned from the embassy back to their home country, back to their family's home. And I have trouble believing that with all the mercenaries in the world, they couldn't they couldn't do that. But you know, maybe they couldn't. Saudi Arabia under Mohammed bin Salman is about as evil as it's always been, but just 100% more reckless and incompetent. And and Khashoggi himself, he was a holdover from P pre MBS Saudi Arabia. He was not and this is not, you know, this backdoor federalist.com way of saying he deserved to die. But he was not a dissident for most of his

life. He was someone who sort of justified a lot of Saudi soft power and covert regional aims in the region by with his writing, because he was allied with the faction of the family that lost against Mohammed bin Salman. He did, of course, come out against a lot of Saudi practices later. He came out a lot of things that were authentically MBS. And but I think, yeah, he was never like he wasn't exactly one of the people who gets crucified for blogging in Riyadh. He ended up dead just like they did. But he was a relic of the more covert, the more secretive kingdom that wouldn't try to get op ed publicity float photos with the rock to prove that they're a different country now. That is funny. They had a they just had the speaking of the rock. They just had the

wwe crown jewels in Saudi Arabia. That's been a big thing for MBS is bringing wrestling to Saudi Arabia. That 18 on one death match was a real highlight. But no, what it is, is like what happens when you have a country that's ruled by 5000 Don juniors, you know, I mean, we have these fail idiot fail rich kids, but like they generally don't have responsibilities. They give they contract that out to people who actually know what they're doing here. They have all of these inbred fucking dipshit relatives, you know, princes, and they're all with actual jobs, including like, you know, dismembering guys and burning documents and all that. And they do a terrible job of it, as you would expect a bunch of dumb inbred rich assholes to do.

They do things like send 18 guys to kill one dude and then and then forget that his wife is waiting for him outside so that when they send the guy out in his fucking clothes, it doesn't work. They did that. They said they killed him, took his clothes off, put him on another guy, and had that guy walk out to prove that he left the building alive. And then there's drone footage the Turks got of them just burning documents in a giant oil drum in the back of the it's like pain and gain was a country. I I saw somebody post that I've never seen the Saudi, you know, PR machine on its back foot like this, and it's it is true, but it sort of reminds me. Do you remember when everyone made fun of Ed wheeling? Oh yeah, the guy he his his like fucking Susan

Collins essentially endorsed the at the level gang theory when she voted for right. I mean the old axum of Twitter isn't real life is less true in many parts of people's lives than it ever has been, but it still holds in things like this. Just because you see everyone rightfully making fun of these guys rightfully making fun of like Ali Shaba, it should be even all these fucking dumb asses who are just like, you know, honestly, that was the first day. Mohamed bin Salman was ground print. So give him a break. And it's like, yeah, we're rightfully making fun of them and they look desperate and they look stupid. But it ultimately, and I think people should have picked this up from Kavanaugh. It kind of doesn't matter when so much is on the line for the other

party in the what is the cost to them if they maintain weapon sales, they maintain the special relationships with Saudi Arabia. Now this might change things down the line. This might be at this point in time, like a huge watershed moment for, you know, if another faction of another action of another party gets it may change public consciousness on this. But for now, for the foreseeable future, business is usual. Yeah. And to that point, I want to read something from, I mean, again, like, as we said, even with all the the full page ads, demanding answers and all the outrage over this, nobody in official Washington DC really wants this to be true. And they certainly don't want to make trouble between them and Saudi Arabia because guess who pays a lot of their fucking

bills. And I'm not talking about K Street, I'm talking about, let's say, an organization like the Federalist, perhaps, I mean, we don't know who funds them. But an interesting question that might be answered by their reaction to this, who funds, who's a major contributor to virtually every think tank in DC, both conservative and liberal, who pays for people to have social media jobs in DC. I don't know, it's an interesting question. But here's just one example. This is from Martin Indyk. I'm just going to read his bio. Distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, former US Special Envoy for Israel-Palestine Negotiations, US Ambassador to Israel, Assistant Secretary of State for NEA. Martin Indyk, this is an Obama's guy.

Right. Martin Indyk is like, he is sort of the forest gump of just standing around doing, accomplishing zero, nothing. That resume you just read, that's like, you know, pyrotechnics manager for Great White. No, this is what he says about this. And this is like, as official Washington is, you can get, like I said, former ambassador to Israel, Council on Foreign Relations. He says here, Ian Bremmer is right. Nothing justifies the outrageous murder of Jamal Khashoggi. But Saudi Arabia does have strategic value to the US as the swing oil producer in a tightening oil market and the only regional Arab power left standing that's willing to counter Iran. And there you go. There you go. This is all really

about. And what these people will all say is, look, we know Saudi Arabia is evil. We know they do bad evil things. But the fact of the matter is, all countries do bad evil things. And the most evil baddest of them all is Iran. And that's what really counts here. And, you know, my question about this is, given how they're both evil, oil rich countries in a tightening market, how about we just a lie with Iran against Saudi Arabia? Oh, I mean, if we're just being real politic here, silly boy, you can't do that. They killed our fucking friend. Don't look when the other people killed our other friends. Yeah, no, it's just not going to happen. It's just not going to happen. That's what this is about. I mean, that's not going to let that happen. It says unlikely is the

most unlikely thing, which is we get out of everywhere. And we stop making 24 year olds who get flustered at the counter at cozy deal with these hundreds of years of resentment and complex issues. But can we look at the one bright side? This awful tale? Yes. Erdo shits victory. Erdo shit is what our great Turkish friend calls Erdogan. I don't know if it really it may be a pun in a proper Turkish pronunciation. I don't know. I think he's just kind of an asshole. Yeah, that's just how he insults people. I've also heard Erdogan, but we're not going to use that racially charged word. Erdogan, the greatest fake friend in the world. Absolutely. Erdogan, they were pissed when they start. Oh, yeah, we have all of this on tape and we're just going

to tell everybody. Can you? Erdogan fucking, he the most bugged embassy in the world. Like everything. It's like it's like a haunted house where it's like, oh, put your finger in this in the intestines. It's really spaghetti. It's just like every picture, every the eyes, and I love how the Turks are just the releasing one thing a day to keep this at the top of the news for two weeks straight because as much of a fucking petty, stupid assholes Erdogan is, he understands that like Western journalists take this as an attack and he's like, here's some more. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, he gets PR. Well, he's a dude. He's a clever little bitch. So he's like, what the hell dude? We created ISIS together. What are you doing? Yeah, and also a quick note

on Erdogan. So no one gets bad at us. When it comes to disappearing and murdering dissidents, journalists, Turkey is really the best at that. So you got to figure that this is just like it's his way of going like, oh, I see it's amateur hour. Yeah, exactly. They fucking they straight up murdered three Kurdish activists in Paris. Just shot him in their office. So didn't even need a boat. Yeah. When it comes to killing journalists, Erdogan is looking at Saudi Arabia like alcoholics. Look at St. Patrick's Day. But I'd say that like the way to think about this is the same way to think about pretty much everything that happens on Trump is that it's just we're in the era of fucking Max off. We're in the era when all of the niceties that used to like

like, uh, gild the lily and sort of, you know, provide a rhetorical and ideological and imaginative of distortion for what's really happening in the world. They're just kind of all falling away. And we're talking about a thing like this in explicit terms of, look, yeah, they chopped the guy up. Okay, but oil, but Iran, but arms, like we're just all of the bull. It was always bullshit, but we always felt the need to coat things bullshit. And now that that it's just, I think, because people realize no one's actually paying attention. Things move too fast. Nobody's really holding on to anything. There really isn't a public square anymore. There really isn't like a public that could rally around issues. Everyone's just sort of glazed and overwhelmed. So you can

just sort of, you can just say what you really think. You can just be like popular anti Iran sentiment has like, in many ways, kind of dissipated because of that cycle. I mean, there's, it's still like, you know, public enemy number one in the want class, but like, I don't know anyone who like, and any kind of right wingers who kind of organically fear Iran. Now it's all about the, the hordes and the caravans. But the thing about it is that now you don't need to whip up anything. You just go to war. Where are people going to do about it? They're going to probably forget about it. So moving on to this next issue that I've been dying to talk about for a while. I was going to do this when we were on tour, but I think I realized doing things on stage that actually make

me mad kind of sucks for live shows. Like when I do Rod Dreher or John Podhor, it's like, I find them delightful. Oh yeah, I find them just wonderful whimsical characters. I love talking about it fills my heart with joy. Oh God, to read a to read a rod post. Oh yeah, just like put just imagining Padera. It's in a propeller beanie running around the upper west side, yelling at fucking waiters. People is kind of a Squidward character. Yes. Oh yeah. He's just sitting there in his dark bunker in Louisiana. Just getting out at like happy people all day. Yeah. He lives in a bathroom under the sea or for instance, a John Cass in Chicago, discovering the John Cass canon was magical to me. Change our lives. I mean, reading the father's day column that filled

me with joy. I mean, it's like all these all these people. Yeah, they're they're like they have bad opinions. They write bad things, but they're just like they're just wacky. Well, they're largely just powerless, miserable and they're so unhappy that it makes it funny. Exactly. Yes. So this is my way of introducing something that actually does legitimately piss me off. And I'm talking about Ben Sets, Senator from Nebraska Ben Sets. And now the other thing I want to introduce this by way of saying we talked to the beginning about the caravan. And this is the caravan and the Kavanaugh election is what Trump said. And his big slogan, their big Republican slogan for the midterms is jobs, not mobs. And on the venom episode, we talked about how the hot new political

buzzword is tribalism. This is the new buzzword that people are going to use to basically confuse you and make it seem like you should feel guilty for being angry at these evil fucking assholes who are ruining the world and your life with every breath that goes in and out of their disgusting corpse like bodies. And of course, Mitch McConnell getting hassled at eating lunch or Ted Cruz getting yelled out of a restaurant. This is all this is the horrifying spectacle of tribalistic mob violence that is, you know, people that the entire pundit class is trying to stoke up fears about or lament in some way that like, oh, this is where we've all gone wrong. It's an obfuscational term. It completely obfuscates like the fact that

people I think are trying to grapple with something that at its I think clearest is class politics and at its most muddled is at least the realization that there are clear and obvious enemies. Absolutely. Well, yeah, we have what we're talking about. We have like this white minority rule that's like fucking like later era South African regime, where like a third of the population of angry fucking, you know, suburbanites rule over the rest of us and and and are locking in, you know, judicial appointments and dooming us to climb an oblivion right in front of our faces with every avenue of legitimate, you know, opposition closed. You say, hey, vote. Yeah. Okay, a vote. The guy the people with the most votes did not win in basically any of the elections

of the last five fucking eight years. And then you get mad at these fucking scumbags. And that somehow means that you have lost yourself to passions and tribal identity. Yeah, to get to get to try whether you know it or not to get to Ben Sass, though, like if you are Ben Sass, a guy who positions himself as not like Trump as a decent politician that harkens back as this sort of statesman and someone who speaks to our better angels while of course voting to confirm Brett Cavanaugh. Of course, or if you are, he didn't even have the decency to like have that bullshit Jeff flake, you know, like moment of uncertainty. He was never a conflicted. He was the yes. The question ever even pretended he wasn't the problem. How did he get that reputation though? Sass? Yeah,

he wrote a book and he criticized Trump during the election and he did not vote for Trump in 2016. That was like his big thing. Yeah, so you made a big show not voting for Trump, but he votes with Trump as a senator, probably 80 to 90 percent of the time. But like this is this is the problem now faced by someone like Ben Sass or David Brooks who wrote about this topic or Charles Lane at the Washington Post, another absolutely vicious scumbag who would now like to lecture the rest of us on being nice and civility and things like that. What do you do when the political agenda that you support has essentially won? But they but but you're also slightly embarrassed by that and you still want to pretend to be a good thoughtful person. Again, the politics that you

support are going to make life for most people more savage, more alienated and more miserable. So what you what you do is you tell them that politics and an interest in politics or a concern for what is happening in the world or in the news is what's making them sick. Their side has won, they now can Ben Sass, he's won. They can now control all three branches of the government and as we said are filling the courts with all of the vampires that they want that will have a fucking stranglehold on our law and government for probably as long as we are alive. So how are you going to deal with the fact that even though you control most of the government, you're brutally unpopular. There's no popular support for any of these outside of like the

rump 20 to 30 percent of this, you know, MAGA shitheads in these countries. You're brutally unpopular and everybody hates you rightly so for what you're doing to them with every day of your life and the power that you wield. So you tell them that the justified anger that they're feeling is making the making you sick and the subtext to all of this is surrender. Yeah, it's just give up and I want and I want to the apotheosis of this is an op-ed. It's an op-ed that Ben Sass wrote in the Wall Street Journal that is based on a new book that he has coming up. The title is politics can't solve our political problems. Whoa, that's some ideology. That's some fishgale ideology. It's sparkling off the mirror. That's the kind of counterintuitive thinking that intrigues me and

makes me want to read more. Again, the subtext to all of this is surrender. It's give up with engaging with politics as a means to assert any kind of democratic will or popular sovereignty or even just express the anger that you feel about what's being done to you. The bomb's lost. Yeah, condolences. The sub title is our tribalism has a deeper source than the disintegration of communities and an epidemic of loneliness. The only real answers start at home. So again, pay very close attention to what he's doing. This is again, this message will be repeated to you at like the sort of elite highest levels of discourse that your loneliness and your misery and your alienation, you're doing it to yourself by being angry at politics and caring about what's going

on in this country and the world. So this is Ben Sasse writing in the Wall Street Journal. The Supreme Court confirmation process for Brett Kavanaugh didn't fully break the nation, but it did prompt more Americans to wonder if that moment is approaching. It's been a while incoming. Over the past year, I've heard thousands of my Nebraska constituents and dozens of my colleagues in the Senate of both parties say roughly the same thing. It feels like we're at a tipping point and X or Y might be the final make or break battle. More Republicans and Democrats are placing politics at the center of their lives. Both sides seem to believe that a grand solution to our political dysfunction can be found inside

politics. If we could only vanquish those evil people waving a different banner, this thinking goes, we'd be on the road to national recovery. To which I say, Ben, if we could vanquish you totally and completely, it would be a start on getting to a place of decency or recovery for any person living alive in this country or the world right now. No, remember, we must not vanquish our enemies. We can't vanquish them. We mustn't use our tongues upon the social media. Thank you, John Kasich. Yes. A world without Ben Sasse cut to the fucking when Lionel Hutz is imagining a world without lawyers.

So he goes on, but nothing that happens in Washington is going to fix what's wrong with America. So again, he's saying nothing I'm doing in Washington or the party that I represent and the laws that we're passing and the things we're doing. That's not going to help. It's not going to hurt. It doesn't really matter. Stop paying attention. Like I said, just go to sleep. Just think of yourself. Think of how lonely you feel and how you individually can change that. Focus on like your own little atomized space and know that it has no source whatsoever. It's completely idiopathic.

It's not that our battles over the Supreme Court over it's not that our battles over the Supreme Court over dignity for accuser and accused alike over issues like taxes and regulation and immigration don't matter. They matter a lot. The problem is that our ever more ferocious political tribalism and mutual hatred don't originate in politics. So politics isn't going to heal them. Humans are social relational beings. We want and need to be in tribes. In our time, however, all of the traditional tribes that have sustained humans for millennia are simultaneously in collapse. What the fuck is he talking about? America is not filled with

like the pics of the Celtic of Northern Scotland or the Visigoths and Vandals or that like none of these things that he's talking about that that like what his families or like the nuclear family model that has not existed for millennia. Yeah. These are all. Yeah. Okay. But what about anthropology and it's for guys only? Well, this is like everyone in politics. Everyone has to live a life of fantasy now, right? Because if you just post a lot now, you're the resistance. You're a scrappy group of rebels ductating AK-47 banana clips one upside down so you can quickly reload in the heat of battle by replying to President Trump. If you're a MAGA shithead, you think that there

is a human train of millions of Islamic style Mexicans coming to kill you and turn turn Ruby Tuesdays into Ruby Ridge. And if you're this guy, if you're this fucking asshole, which is someone who believes the exact same things as Trump, but is really just upset at how rude he is and it really just breaks my heart to rubber stamp everything he does, you believe that the epidemic of interruptions and yelling means that you are in the midst of a civil war. Yeah. And again, this idea that these traditional tribes have sustained humans for millennia bears no reference to the, like I said, he's going to begin talking about some imagined American past. Everything that he imagines are only the products of like post industrial modern culture entirely. This has

not been around for millennia, what he's talking about America is not. I mean, America is a freak. But also those tribes didn't form, you know, by some kind of, you know, filial kinship or anything like these were, these were social and economic arrangements. They all whatever made, you know, smelted metal or did the what the fuck ever else like this, this stuff even was economic and political then. Yeah, social and economic arrangements that guess what are the result of politics of politics. So he says, things like family, enduring friendship, meaningful shared work, local communities of worship have all grown ever thinner. We are creating thicker, more vehement tribes around our political differences. I believe because there is a

growing vacuum at the heart of our shared or increasingly not so shared everyday lives. Loneliness is everywhere in the US across every sector of society, a survey of more than blah, blah, blah. And he goes on to talk about a loneliness epidemic. None of this should surprise us. Americans today have fewer shared projects than our parents and grandparents did, and we belong to fewer civic groups. Because we change jobs more often, we have fewer lasting work friendships. We delay marriage, have fewer children and live in larger homes and more separate from those of our neighbors. We move from place to place for relationships, economic opportunity and better weather. And we end up with economic opportunity and better weather. Again, listen

to the way he talks about this, that people are just choosing to delay marriage or move around for work or don't have one job for their entire career. This is just individual people who are choosing to make these decisions that make their lives lonelier. Humanity just suddenly became really flaky all of the sudden. I don't know what happens. There's this one economic system that basically forces you to only interact with other people in a transactional individual manner and doesn't really allow for any sort of communal understanding of anything that the only way to be is an individual economic actor, like the idea that we are all novice or, you know, Homo economicus or whatever the fuck. And we just have to activate our own. We can only operate

according to our own personal economic betterment, and we can only make decisions based on that. I mean, there's an economic and political system that sort of insist upon that. In fact, only allows that. This is just incredible. I don't know what it was. I can't remember though. This is like some kind of Randian, Nietzschean. This goes so far beyond. There is no society. This is like the most bleak cynical outlook of human beings I have ever heard. This is why before we get into that, I want to point out that Homo economicus is the proper Latin name for gay for pay. But the thing is, if it was Randian or something, if it was just like, yes, then they would be like, hell, yeah, we're all only good. Fuck that. Long live the new flesh. You know,

the only person who matters is me. And I one day I'm going to commute. I'm going to be part of a computer or something. He is simultaneously championing an economic political system that makes this happen. And then he's crying about it. He said that this stuff is is individuated too at the same time, that it's like it's that this is somehow some kind of active decision that people have made, which implies individualistic free will and that you're not the product of it's completely incoherent. Well, this is very similar. It reminds me of a very similar writer, our friend, Thomas Friedman. Oh, he's our friend. Thomas Friedman. Thomas Friedman would always write about like the loss of American manufacturing jobs, but in the context of Americans have to work

harder. They have to they have to go. They have to strap up and lace up for game time, phase the fuck up boys. Let's work for two dollars an hour like it was their choice. Yeah, they were just like, eh, send my job somewhere else. I don't need it anymore. I'm sick of this bullshit. It is. Yeah, it is. And that thing of you, you know, politics is filled with people who are crying because they got exactly what they fucking wanted. And in this case, you know, he that is exactly it. I just had this column, by the way, that went up about the Durham Miners Gala. And, you know, mining was essentially obliterated by Thatcher in the 80s. I mean, it was it was already under a steady decline, but she really crunched down and crushed the union.

But it was absolutely amazing how much these men mourned for these jobs that filled their lungs with coal that could potentially crush them to death, that, you know, just ravaged their bodies really dangerous, incredibly difficult work. But they what they did like about it was that it gave them like a handle into politics in a way that other jobs did not that you had like industrial policy. And also there are some people that are just freaks and like working really hard and don't form podcasts. But like, like they had a handle on industrial policy, they had a handle on the welfare state, and they had a unified political body in the form of the union that formed, I don't know, the word organically is misleading. But around a workspace,

they they they talked about, it wasn't just that they lost the jobs, it was like, the union was like a de facto kind of micro welfare state, it set up like, retirement homes that were centrally located. So you could like age with dignity and like the city center, you could just like have and it was just houses. Like all of this stuff was was this is this is what community actually was. When when Ben sass mourns the loss of shared meaningful work and community and a sense of united purpose, would it surprise you know, he's not talking about strong labor unions? Yeah. So he goes on, none of us wants to be left out. The same isolation we felt at the edge of the cafeteria or as the last kid picked for kickball causes everyone to yearn for a group. They love

telling on themselves, even though political ideology is a thin basis for intimate connections. And at least our cable news tribes offer the common experience of getting to hate people together. As relational nomads, it's far easier now to be together against something than for something. It's not as fulfilling, but at least we're not totally alone. Americans have always had political disagreements with their neighbors. But in the past, political differences could disappear when Friday night ball games rolled around. And the whole town turned out wearing and the whole town turned out wearing the same colors and cheering for the same team. Today, our towns are hollower, and we're not on the same team anymore. Okay, what I want to

to note about that paragraph where he says, yeah, we had political differences. But in the past, you'll notice all the work that in the past is doing there. He doesn't specify exactly at what point in the past this era took place. Because if he had to specify, what he would really mean is when America was highly segregated. And yeah, essentially politics was for white people. And as such, their political disagreements were a little less severe. But also as a question to that, I don't think there is more conflict at a fucking high school football game than there used to be, like more, you know, like person to person animosity, especially because now schools are more economically

segregated than they've ever been. So you probably vote the same way as every other parent in the in the bandstand. Well, the thing and beyond the racial element, the what the politics he's talking about, the political economic order was the one of strong labor unions and a very compressed economic order with with not a lot of with relatively little inequality. Yes, like that was that was the time that he's talking about and that all changed and these communities aren't there anymore and everyone's dying of fucking opioid overdoses. How did that happen again? These are just things that just chose to do these things. These things are these things are all things that he's talking about.

They just happened and they all happened absent what he politics. So he goes, though, it's tempting to think that the sorry state of our public square has to do with fights over hot button policy issues and the president's latest tweet. The problem runs deeper than that in ways that aren't always personally comfortable. A big part of the problem is the habits and attitudes of elites. By elites, I mean just about everyone reading this, the mobile educated class. And he defines elites, references some professor at Harvard defines elites as someone with at least one parent who graduated from college, which puts them in the top socioeconomic third of society. In the US, there is a growing divide in family structure, educational achievement

and economic prospects between this top third and the bottom two thirds. More than ever before, we are retreating into silos that separate us from people who don't share our socioeconomic background. Again, why is this all happening? Why is everyone just choosing to do that? It's so weird how like jobs that people could survive and sustain a family with without a college degree don't exist anymore. It's kind of funny how that just happened. In the US, the mobile and the stuck categories are growing while the rooted are rapidly dwindling. Place is being undermined by the digital revolution and all of us wherever we fall along the social divide are feeling the resultant hollow pain in our chest.

Exactly. In lieu of politics or economics, what's what he's blaming for on loneliness is the internet in selfies. I knew it was the fucking selfies. It's the internet. It's the Yeah, exactly. So he goes, How do we fix this? Not by legislation, of course, because we're talking about souls and habits, not prohibitions and mandates. Tell you what? You can go to church and we'll do politics then. That's true. If he thinks none of this stuff is if this is the biggest problem we have and politics won't solve it, why is he jacking off for the wash your hands of it? What a waste of time. Yeah, he is basically saying his entire life is pointless. His entire life's work of politics is totally meaningless to the lives of the people he's supposed to be

represented. This I mean, this again, but like that's not that's the message for the suckers. His message is, I want to do I'm going to continue to vastly accelerate income inequality and, you know, increase the power of law enforcement to surveil, harass and imprison you for doing the things that you need to do to, I don't know, ameliorate the pain and misery that you feel as a result of our political and economic system. I'm going to keep doing all of that. But if you're angry and upset about it, just stop paying attention to it and focus on your soul. Focus on your individual soul. I consider this all part of a concerted effort on the part of the very elites that he's talking about. This reminds me very much of an op-ed that was

in the New York Times of not too long ago by Arthur Brooks, the head of the American Enterprise Institute, that was telling his, you know, elite liberal audience. It was a whole article about how it's okay to go on a politics cleanse. And what he was saying is hey, you know, coincidentally at a time right when the midterm elections are starting to heat up, he was saying, you know what, it's just try this. Just don't read the news or talk about anything political for two weeks. You might like it. Maybe you'll like it so much you'll stop caring about politics all together and we can continue to do what we've been planning to do for the last 30 years, which is, you know, worship Mollick, you know, resurrect Vlad the Impaler and, you know, just basically

find a suitable male host for King Payman. It's okay. Just draw a hot bath and just open your veins. Just, yeah, just you're feeling sleepy, very sleepy. It's just like going to bed. Exactly. So I think a lot of people did do that. And now there's this mass hysteria. I've been on Facebook for like six hours. Everyone has lost their fucking mind. So they didn't watch it for a very long time, apparently. And now things have gotten out of hand and now they're panicking and have no idea what to do. Well, but then like the vast majority of people, I mean, it's very telling that sass thinks that the greatest social epidemic is political polarization when it doesn't even affect half the country who are just too beaten down to give a shit about any of this.

Okay, this is what this is what Ben is finally going to give you his own personal example of what he's doing. I mean, not his job as a senator, which is, you know, voting to confirm Brett Kavanaugh and everything that Trump wants to do. He goes, a decade ago, my wife, Melissa, and I decided to put down roots by reinvesting in my hometown of Fremont, Nebraska. And despite, and partly because of the fact that it is showing signs of economic decline, the town's biggest employers are a pig plant and a chicken plant. And the share of the public school students getting free or reduced priced lunching is spiking. Of course, I'm sure as his role as senator, he's working to, you know, axe all funding for, you know, school lunches and turn their entire

education system over to, I don't know, Liberty University or so, someone like that. It's kind of, it'll be fine. Yeah, wealthier people are leaving our town of 26,000. Although first generation immigrants are adding a youthful vitality, there is serious social conflict over the pace of change. Melissa and I youthful vitality, it sounds like he wants to drink their blood. Melissa and I have worked with our children to develop an imperfect provisional strategy for engaging more meaningfully with our community. Oh my God. We've tried how you parent. That's how you talk about parenting. Say that phrase again. An imperfect provisional strategy for engaging more meaningfully with our own community. We've tried through our church and other local groups

to become friends with people from every race and income bracket in Fremont. We've begun doing more community service and we've made an important symbolic commitment to buying cemetery plots here. That's like the Tom Myers show where his parents showed him this is grave that they bought for him. We take our kids to the graveyard and show them, yes, you'll die here. Or even if you move away, your bones will molder in the ground. Wow. I really envy all of the poor, like immigrant people who are trying to go through their day with Ben Sass bothering them. Ben Sass with family in tow. It's like, what are you doing? Selling oranges, huh? That sounds tough. Have you tried logging off? Then it might be less tough. He says, it's not nearly enough and Melissa carries most

of the burden because I'm often DC too many nights a week, but it's a start. Just as happened under rapid industrialization and urbanization, we of the digital age must find creative ways to replenish social capital. You notice he doesn't mention people's actual capital. He's like, I'm going to continue amassing that for myself and taking it away from the rest of you. Wherever there's a disruption, new forms of Republican virtue with a lowercase r must emerge flowing from and reinforcing habits of mutual affection and understanding. If too many Americans feel like we're not in this together right now, it's because we're not. We are screaming at each other and the country no longer has enough real social texture to absorb and wick away the hatred. He's thinking about his

underarmor golf shirt when he's writing this. It's wicking away the hatred. We need a cultural sham. Wow. The only way out is to rebuild our communities and launch new ones. One person-to- person relationship and one local institution at a time. What is this Richard's scary, busy town idea of of society that he has? Well, I mean, he's right in the sense that, you know, people at their local level are in a community as it exists, but like the community is rise and fall by their actual community. I don't know. Like the fucking people you live around, like the town, whatever you want to fucking call it, but it's like, do you even know your neighbors? What I'm saying is if the, yeah, but we live in the atomized hell. If the plant closes and people start leaving,

then how do you rebuild the community? If there's no place for people to actually work meaningfully? Entrepreneurship. That's JD Vance's thing. He wants to teach them all the code and whatnot. They've switched from, I don't know, from some idea of something with roots to, I don't know what the metaphor would be, but like they want to have air plants or something. There's no foundation for anything. I think you could just pull the stuff out of your ass and missed it once a week. No, all of these communities are falling apart for very obvious material tangible reasons. There's no mystery to any of this. You can, any one of these towns, you can fucking look at the economic and political decisions that led them to the point that they are. And now the fabric's broken,

you know, the thing that was holding people together is gone because people need to go anywhere they can to make a living. And if they can't make a living in this shitty little town that you're going to be buried in, then how are they supposed to stay there? How are they supposed to form a bond? Money doesn't exist to this man. Yeah. It's like, that is, that is the fundamental reality of it is you have to be able to support yourself and your family. And in areas with no economic base, you can't do that. And it's going to take politics to return that. It's not going to, what, logging off of fucking Instagram? How is that going to change whether or not you can fucking get a job other than maybe Walmart Greeter in one of these fucking towns?

Yeah, I have to say, though, it is kind of, I don't want to say encouraging, but I feel better about, I think, the response that this, that this piece would elicit from just like basically anyone than maybe it would have like, I don't know, five years ago or whatever during Obama, because at this point, people would respond to this with, what the fuck are you talking about? That is a load of shit. You are a politician and you believe we don't have serious political problems in this country. I mean, he says that like, oh, our political disagreements are real and like these issues matter, but like, caring about them too much is tearing us apart. And that it's making us lonely. And he really just wants to like heal our souls. That's what he,

that's what he wants to do. That's what's so horrifying. My soul is always great. These people think because they're dead inside. Everyone else's problem is that they're dead inside. No, most people are kind of alive inside. They just need some fucking money and security. But he's admitting that he doesn't have an answer to this at the end. It's just like a thing here for you guys to do. Well, he's just, they volunteer at Hayride. Do some soul building. Get on that. Like, he has no actual answer for the real question. It's Boy Scoutism. So this is why I genuinely loathe Ben Sasse more than almost anyone in US politics. It's like him and Ted Cruz or like neck and neck. But I think I may find Ben Sasse more repellent because he's he's not the like

disgusting creep outwardly that Ted Cruz Ted Cruz is. But Ben Sasse like, you know, believes all the same things Ted Cruz does, but he has to can't help but sell himself as America's concerned father. Yeah, he's one of the last people who actually does think that that the forms matter that the that the appearances have to be upheld because he is explicitly speaking as he says in that article to this very thin strata of economic and political elites who actually are paying attention to this shit and haven't just checked out because it's stimulus overload. So again, I just want to close this out by saying, you know, as, you know, Mitch McConnell gets hassled at, you know, his at the cracker barrel or wherever the fuck he eats his cool or flat

rock and the palm that he likes to sit on. And you know, and as people continue to express their very justified anger over things like Brett Kavanaugh and the Trump administration and begin to, you know, organize to do that in a way that does constitute shared and meaningful work to engage in politics and to try to fight back against these people who you are absolutely justified in hating. Don't don't again, don't be fucking fooled by that. It's okay to hate these people. It's okay. Keep that hate close to you. Keep it pure, like a diamond, like Alexander Cobra and said, is your is your hate pure, Eddie? Keep your hate pure for people like Ben Sath, because they're going to keep trying this shit. And they're going to keep trying to say that like, oh, it's all in

your head. And you caring about this is what's making you sick and depressed. Yeah, it's like the doctor and Rosemary's baby. And being angry about this is a sign that you're not sick and depressed or the very least you're not sick and depressed enough to just completely check out. Because that's what'll happen if it really gets bad is that you'll fucking give up. So don't do that. And don't and don't fucking listen to Ben Sath fucking spit on him in public, ruin everyone at his meals and charity fucking baseball game. He hasn't been harassed nearly enough this guy. I haven't heard any viral things about Ben Sath getting owned, I think partially because he's got that incredibly bland, like serial killer face. I couldn't probably pick him

out of a lineup. Well, and he lives in like Fremont or some shit. That's it for us this week. And we don't even have nothing to plug at all. Wow. But on a closing note, thank you again so much to everyone we saw and got to meet and hang out with in the Midwest. You guys were truly, truly the real heroes and a joy at every single city we went to. Absolutely. Nothing but diamonds all across this great country. Until next time, guys. Bye. Bye.