Chapo Trap House - Episode 272 - The Butterfly Effect (12/17/18)

Episode Date: December 18, 2018

We examine Matt’s SNL martyrdom, continue to dance on the grave of the Weekly Standard, then ask: will anyone think of the butterflies?

Alright, hello everybody. It's me, Will Minnaker. It's your chopper for the week. Sitting in today, we got Matt and Amber. Hi. Hi. Amber, how's it going? It's going well. So, it's sort of, I guess, a slow news weekend, unless you're interested in Donald Trump

going to prison, and all the people, you know, lying, lying, and failing. It certainly was. It's been made for some great SNL, I'll say that for sure. Man, every time something happens, one of these losers gets indicted or pleads guilty, I'm just thinking, oh man, they're going to go to town. Well, you've mentioned this before, Matt, but you watch every single episode of SNL. I do. This is like a Maria Abramovich performance art thing for you. This is like the artist is present. You're doing this bizarre feat of endure of public, not even see it's not

a private endurance. Exactly. Self-loathing completist. No. It's a flagellation. I'm sorry. At this point. It's never been about public anything. I will tell people when they're all like, who

watches Saturday Night Live? I will opine. I do every episode, but I did that long before anyone cared, and I will continue. And it's just, I need to know what they're doing. He's like a monk for crap, but like, here's the thing. I know what they're doing because I wake up like the next day and I just like the show will be like, you know, Saturday night, Alec Baldwin, uh, we really, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, or like wrapping Ruth Bader Ginsburg. They do that. Remember that? They did wrap in Ruth Bader.

Don't tell me I will. I actually watched it, but I know what they're doing. No, you don't. You need to see it. And this is why because for what, yeah, the next day there's going to be, there's going to be some article about, oh, they didn't about whatever the political, uh, thing was, but there's a whole 90 minutes. It's like an hour of sketches, basically, or 40 minutes sketches, realistically. And it's just peaks and valleys and different types. And there's, there's the commercial parodies and there's the long, uh, opening sketches with the high

and the high concept ones and the character bits. And I just need to know what they're doing. Exactly. But it's a tapestry. I've seen Saturday Night Live. And if you're, I'm saying, if you're just like, Oh, there, I know what they're doing. You don't unless you're actually paying attention to it, which I do. Why? Like, how do you know? I mean, obviously, like you experienced it on a visceral level,

but like I'm intellectually aware of what they're doing. I need to know. You need to imbibe it fully. I need to absorb it. And that is why, because here's the thing. Everyone says, wow, it's so bad. And then people say, Oh, people are always saying that. That's the, that's the deal. And it's just lazy. All the talk about it is lazy from people who don't really watch it that often. I'm not kidding.

So you want, when you complain about Saturday Night Live, you want like the actual cred. Exactly. Because you don't want when these rubber-neckers passing by on Twitter Sunday morning or whatever. Exactly. Because people could say this is so terrible, but I could say with full confidence in my heart knowledge that the political specifically the political sketches, the Trump era political sketches is the worst content they have ever done on a consistent basis. The worst kind of sketch, including things like mango or the fuck, basically every Chris Catan character who until now was like the lowest possible later, just awful cringe inducing, just idiocy.

But this is just, you know, like the Rocksbury guys, that was the better one because it was half a little feral. Yeah. That was tolerable. Because otherwise you're talking about mango or Mr. Peepers. Just mango and Mr. Peepers. There wasn't much. Mango was gay. No, mango was like a monkey. It was a monkey man. Mr. Peepers ate apples really fast and spit it out.

That was the one bit. And mango, the joke of mango is that straight men wanted to have sex with them. Oh, I remember Garth Brooks was like, mango, please come back. And he said his classic catchphrase, you can't have a the mango. And then would smack his ass. Yes. So I could. Oh man.

Brutally terrible. Oh man. Also, it should not surprise you that Chris Catan later turned out to be like a really gross guy regarding women and made some really disgusting comments about women later because when you play a character like that for both of those characters, your only recourse is to become like like an MRA kind of guy. Well, it's amazing. The track record of mid-tier SNL guys who never became super famous becoming bitter reactionaries

is. Oh, wow. It's unprecedented. Rob Schneider. Dennis Miller. Miller. Love it. But back to current day, like last week's SNL, it's not so much that like people can like

I can't believe how stupid this is. You are sitting there. I assume not like you're not watching it live, right? I usually know. That would be usually, but sometimes I mean, if I'm home and I'm not doing anything, it's on. I'm going to watch it. I'm not doing anything else.

And it's Saturday night. I'm going to watch it. But I'm not going to go. I'm not going to cancel. I'm not going to cancel plans. There are better things to do with Saturday night. All of these, all these other people who are just being like, oh, Saturday life sucks. You're like, no, fuck you.

You were sitting there looking at like Colin Jost is like smirking face and you're just like, let the old flesh die, the new flesh will replace, we will live in the new flesh now. You're just like letting yourself just rattle, like, you know, just rattle away and be replaced in, in, in the, you know, sort of post-singularity. Okay. But I still don't understand why is this just to justify your hate? I think it's because I want to know what, what the normies are thinking.

I want, because the thing is, people are like, who watches this, but it does pretty well ratings wise. And it's actually, it's like the Daily Show with Trevor Noah. They went up for the first time. It's best ever ratings with him. People are watching this stuff and I want to know, and it is really terrible. It starts with the bad Alec Baldwin impression. And then all the jokes are just, oh, these guys are all crooks and they're going to jail.

And that's it. And also Trump's dumb, but just Robert De Niro plays Robert Mueller. And he's all over every time. He's one of the worst people who's ever been on SNL. But what makes it interesting is that you could see exactly why it's bad. Why it's so bad because the entire comedic point of view for the political stuff and all of SNL from the beginning is just, we're not going to have an actual political valence to any of this.

We don't have, we're not going to be doing real satire. All we really do is just take what's already lately absurd about this political figure and then just push it up a notch. Basically embodied by Dana Carvey's impression of George H.W. Bush. That's the whole idea. It's like, instead of going, not going to do it, you go, nah, I got that. That's it. That's the comedy.

Trump's president. Well, you can't do that unless you're going all the way, like we've talked about where you have him wearing a diaper and he's saying, Goo Goo Gaga, I pooped myself, which would be amazing. If all you're doing is just making him slightly more absurd, you can't do it because he's already maxed out. This goes back to an old hobby horse of ours on the show that we need mad TV to come back to have the satire for the moment we live in.

Yes. Would you say Robert De Niro as Robert Mueller or Robert De Niro in any of his SNL performances of late? Would you say he bombed? No, but man, I've noticed that you share your granular and very detailed distaster shot at night live on a timeline and you said that this current iteration, the political sketches they do, the Trump ones are the worst thing they've ever, ever done on the show. And I saw some, I guess, I don't know, some Democrat or like resistance people get pissy

with you. Yeah. It got into resistance Twitter. People got mad at you. Oh, wow. Like the one thing that's like standing up to Donald Trump and you're like, do you realize that they literally had him host the show when he was running for president? I know.

It's amazing. You know, like massively humanizing him or like making it seem like he could take a joke, which he can because just yesterday he literally said the fed should investigate Saturday Night Live. He said, he literally said all the TV shows being mean to him are colluding and that the feds should investigate SNL for their jokes, which is the most darkly horrific thing we could have is toothless, awful comedy like that, getting a patina of subversiveness from the literal president calling it that.

I mean, how could these guys walk around thinking, wow, maybe we're frauds making garbage because the president is calling for the, he's doing a fatwa on them. I'm speaking truth to power and yeah, I am making the comfortable, uncomfortable ones. Yeah. I'm freaking someone rushed you over here. I mean, it is the worst of both worlds because the people who think that like the daring cutting edge subversive comedy of SNL is being given a credence due by the president being like literally the Department of Justice needs to shut down Saturday Night Live for all their

dangerous sketches or like, you know, it's implied that I'm a know nothing, half smart crook or whatever. I don't know. If they put Colin Joest in a black site, I might have to vote for Trump in 2020. I'm not going to lie. Which one is he? Is he the one? The blank faced smirking college boy, head writer and weekend update host, the guy who

said in a few episodes back that New York won the lottery by getting the Amazon headquarters and everyone should stop whining. Oh, yeah. And they did a sketch about how Jeff Bezos, but it was the most this one like made me think, what are they taking in that fucking writer's room to even see the world through? Are they all in ayahuasca? Because if I thought they're on stuff that we have never even heard Chinese research chemicals or something, because their take on the Amazon, this is the Steve Carell, the

one with the jaw. Yeah. I don't like him or his jaw. In the Steve Carell episode, they had a sketch where it was Steve Carell as Jeff Bezos talking about how I built my headquarters in New York and in Washington and in Queens. And their take on it is that, well, that's where Bush, where Trump was born and where he lives now. He doesn't live in Queens now.

No. He lives in DC now. He was born in Queens. Oh, yeah. So that's an own of Trump. That's why they picked him to go there. And of course, they had a line there is like, and I'm actually billionaire, and I was like, I could sit for a year trying to think of an angle about the Amazon and think, yeah,

they're owning Trump. They're owning Trump by putting it in his hometown and in DC. They're owning him. There are people, you know, folding dollar bills to make it look like the towers are flaming. And you're like, oh, how'd you end up there? Well, because it's less embarrassing than that. Oh, absolutely.

It's less and at least those look like flaming towers. Yeah. That shit looks like the fucking burning twin towers. No, that's, and this is another reason to watch us. No, no, no, no, no, I don't recommend anyone else do it. I will be the senior for all of you. Don't worry about it. I will.

I will be the interpreter is that it shows you a degree to which the powerlessness people feel in just the way that they're riveted to this thing that's a pure spectacle in their eyes is turned them all into like medieval peasants and they're looking at fish guts and fucking birds flying in the sky. They're doing augury to try to figure out what's going on in the world because they feel completely helpless. And just like they're at the mercy of this, this new cycle. I mean, that's why they had that sketch a few weeks ago where all the women of the

SNL cast sang a Christmas Carol to Robert Muller asked him to please give them the report so that they can feel normal again and get all this over with because they're just crazy from the news. Okay. Yeah. Okay. You've convinced me. Yeah.

This is your. No. Oh, no. Oh, no. So all the women of SNL and by extension, the women of America are begging this like ancient, like fucking Herman Munster looking fed to restore like their dignity as women painting of him above their head when they were singing it. Yeah.

The Krasnstein's could never. Yeah. Wow. Okay, Matt, you convinced me. This is the passion of the mat. This is like your stations are the cross. You're doing this every week. Yeah.

Like, you know, all our sinners who couldn't do it, like Jesus being flayed and having the crown of thorns on his head being led to Golgotha and then every Saturday night when it's over and you've seen all of it, you're just like, it is accomplished. It is accomplished. You know, I would say that always, but in the last this season and specifically the last two or three or four episodes have been so wire to wire bad, not not even the weird last sketch that sometimes is funny just because they're basically they don't care. They're tired and they're tired.

They figured I was watching. Anyway, that's where sometimes there'd be really funny weird sketches like Robo Chomo or with the Rock, which is in my opinion, an all time great, great sketch. That was only a couple seasons ago. But even now, garbage, the last episode, the last sketch of this last episode, the one with Matt Damon was it was, oh, God, it was Brexit Christmas. Okay. And it was a Christmas special hosted by Theresa May.

She comes out, she sings a song. She's got dancing Bobby's behind her. And the joke is just, wow, everyone sure hates me because of because of Brexit. They're really mad about that's why that Jesus. It's like, wow, everyone's real mad about this. And some and the the last joke of the entire episode is sure first she has David Cameron on played by Matt Damon and he just goes, wow, everyone hates you and she's like, oh, you jerk.

You know, everyone hates David Cameron. But he says they hate me and they hate you more even though I did Brexit. And then she's like, oh, and then then that last next guest is a guy dressed like Voldemort. No. Yes. And he comes out and he goes and she's like, oh, wow, people hate us really a lot. And he goes, you know what, I really can't be associated with you. And then that's just the sketch.

That's the end of the sketch. And the episode. Voldemort, Voldemort. There's like nothing. Okay. They don't even have premises. I've changed my mind. What you're you are.

Matt Christ, man. Yeah. Matt Christ, man. Yeah. This is like the last temptation of Matt because I imagine now as you're watching the Brexit Voldemort Theresa May sketch, actually, like what happens is you begin to receive a vision of coming down, of stopping watching SNL and living life as a man, watching a funny sketch comedy show, like just watching, I don't know, reruns of Brass Eye or something like that.

Or, you know, even the kids in the hall or Mr. Show or SNLs from like the Pharaoh Mikaela when they had good sketches sometimes. So like, yeah, you receive the vision of that, of what it would be like to live as a man and not, you know, take on this pain for the rest of humanity. But no, like God, you know, God shows you that vision to make, to underscore how great the sacrifice you're making is. We'll be praying for you. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I get a little respite now because there won't be another one until I think mid January. So I get to take a break. So moving on. If you all thought I was going to be done dancing on the grave of the weekly standard, you don't know if you thought that. Yeah.

He got new dancing shoes. I mean, Will and I spent the bush years just as like war boys trying to destroy the caravan of shiny and chrome. Just trying to blow the wheels off of the weekly standard mobile while the war wagon. Yeah. As I tried to like just drive my dune buggy under the wheels of, you know, Fred Barnes is, you know, suburban caravan. Yeah.

Headed to Baghdad. Yeah. Yeah. Get under the spokes. Witness me. Witness me. And it's finally dead. Yeah.

It's finally dead hilariously because the they're billionaire sugar daddies, first Rupert Murdoch and now Phil Enschelz is just like, there's no fucking angle to be played in an anti-Trump conservative anymore. Like, who are we playing to all of these? All this respectable opinion we thought had to come along with our conservative retrograde shit. We don't need it anymore. And I want to sup and imbibe deeply of this glee over the misfortune of others by just

checking in on David Brooks who wrote a whole column about it this week called Who Killed the Weekly Standard? In my opinion, a better title and topic for an article would be All the People the Weekly Standard Killed, of which you're talking millions. Yeah. I'd like to see that issue. Just the names. And once again, I mean, I know I'm I know I'm repeating myself here, but I've seen even

more of it this week because there was some hope that they would get a purpreve or another investor. Now it's all fully dead. Yeah. They fucking shut the doors. Yeah, they kicked them all out, gave them the fucking put their desks in the box and kicked them out the door. They cut them off.

Yeah. Basically. It's like you've been living in the boathouse too long. Yeah. I'm going to get to some of like the more ironic reactions of them particular being like how could you do this to working journalists and writers, which is hilarious. But I've seen so many reactions from like liberals be like responding to Bill Crystal, who'd been like, you know, all good things must come to an end, working for the weekly standard.

One of the proudest achievements of my life, blah, blah, blah. And I saw so many responses from like liberals being like, you know, I may not agree with you know, everything that you say, but like, I just think it's a shame that we don't have an outlet for saying conservative voices. These people started the New York Times started the Iraq war. They dreamt it up before it was even a thing. Yeah. And before 9 11, they were trying to start raise tensions with China because they thought

that that would be the 21st century. Yeah, they were they were like, oh, this this this post Cold War Doldrum, this isn't going to work. We need a justification for the people who were literally through at through their own fantasies that they had been like kept close to them since the Reagan and Ford administrations helped start the Iraq war and the war on terror and everything that's come after that. If that isn't insane to you, I know conservatives seem batty now because, you know, like they're saying dumber things.

But like, what could actually be more insane than starting the war in Iraq and actually doing it? Yeah. Well, that's the thing is that's the reason that a lot of these guys think Trump is a dangerous maniac is because one of the crazy things he believes is that the Iraq war was a bad idea at least now he's full of shit. But at the time, he thought it was a good idea, but he retroactively decided it was a bad idea.

And that's when they all realized we have to stop this guy. And then when they couldn't, they're like, well, we're going to just complain about him in our fucking dork ass newsletter that we send to each other's house. But it's just they're going to continue it, but it's just going to be like tin cans on string like spread throughout Virginia. I mean, by the end of it, it was basically just the Rod and Todd's newspapers that slip under each other's door in the Upper West Side and in Northern Virginia. I want to look at this David Brooks piece.

I think it is very indicative of their their mindset. They're now wounded mindset about this, that like they think that like humanity owes them this journal of excellence and thought and intellectual thought things are more important. Exactly. So David Brooks writes here, I've only been around Phil and Schultz and Schultz Phil and Schultz Phil and Schultz Phil and Schultz a few times. My impressions on those occasions was that he was a run of the mill arrogant billionaire. But as opposed to the other kinds that you've had, you mean the people you think should

have total control of society, you fucking dork. He was used. He was used to people courting him and he addressed him condescendingly from the lofty height of his own wealth. Again, as opposed to David Brooks, who like literally every one of his columns is addressing his readers condescendingly from a lofty purge of the New York Times, a job he got, by the way, after making a name for himself at the weekly standard writing insane gibberish. I've never met Ryan McKibbin, who runs part of and and Schultz and and Schultz and Schultz

and Schultz media group, but stories about him have circulated around Washington over the years. The story suggested that he is an ordinary corporate bureaucrat with all the petty vanities and lack of interest in ideas that go with the type. I can just keep this in mind because it's going to get it's going to be relevant. This is a messy bit. This week, they murdered the weekly standard murdered. They dropped a laser guided bomb on the weekly standard.

They murdered it with depleted your radium. They murdered the weekly standards so badly that that are their children will be born with deformities for generations to come. God, I hate it. I mean, a better metaphor would actually be last week, the weekly standards to come to a long battle with prostate cancer. The conservative opinion magazine that and Schultz owned, they didn't merely close it because it was losing money.

Of course, it was never never made money once. They seem to have murdered it out of greed and vengeance again, murdered it out of greed and vengeance. Yeah, this is the one kind of bad billionaire that does that. Yeah, when the Union Carbide kills 20,000 people at Bow Paul out of greed, that's okay. That helps the bottom line. Again, the language here, they're murdering it out of greed and vengeance again. I'm just going to say it again.

These people started the Iraq war. That killed about a million people. And guess what? Guess why they did it? Greed and vanity and vengeance as well. John Pod Horitz. You guys know him, right? Yeah.

John Pod Horitz. Oh, yeah. One of the magazine's founders reports that they actively prevented potential buyers from coming in to take over and keep it alive. They apparently wanted to hurt the employees and harvest the subscription list so they could make money off of it. And Anne Schantz, being a professing Christian, decided to close the magazine at the height of the Christmas season and so cause maximum pain to his former employees and their families.

What if it had been a fucking car factory? What if it had been an auto plant? One of the last articles in the weekly standard, not last, but very recent article in the weekly standard, written by Bill Crystal, the founder and editor-in-chief of the magazine, was basically about how the white working class needs to go and be replaced with a better class. And that they should stop complaining about all their rust belt factory jobs and manufacturing and stop using their other bitter hatred and resentment of other people to bake themselves victims and complain about dynamic global capitalism.

And he basically just said, stop whining, move on, get better skills, better yourselves in your life. And oh, oh, these hardworking guys who have literally had a make-work job their entire life where they got to fart out like, George W. Bush, the modern Pericles, where they used a billionaire's money to literally pay other people to read their writing. That's exactly how these things functioned. I do like the idea that they close on Christmas so they're all going to sleep. They're going to spend Christmas under a fucking overpass or something, passing around a can

of fucking baked beans. Well, Tiny Tim is never going to get that surgery. Yeah. Well, I guess it's just back to the American Enterprise Institute for me. You know that they have like a fantasy to where like Ansheles is going to read this and be like. His heart grew two sizes. Yeah, yeah.

His heart shrunk two sizes or he was he was visited by ghosts and then he wakes up and he's like, what day is it today, boy? And it's not too late and he's going to open it back up. Why? Why it's Operation Enduring Freedom Day, sir? Get me the biggest, fattest Schnippers burger. By the way, friend of the show, friend of the show, friend of the show, Patty Moe, who I'm sure you know, he sent us a picture today of the Snippers restaurant in the New York

Times building. The New York Times building. Like half of the lights in the Snippers sign are out and he was just like, very classy of them to be at half mass in the weekly standard. I'm sure J-Pod appreciated that. So the closing of the weekly standard is being told as a Trump story, as all stories must be these days. The magazine has been critical of Trump and so this is another example of the gradual

hegemony of Trumpism over the conservative world. That is indeed the backdrop to what happened here, but that's not the whole story. In reality, this is what happens when corporate drones take over an opinion magazine, try to drag it down to their level. Oh, now you have a problem with drones. Yeah, yeah. Okay, get ready. Try to drag it down to their level and then grow angry and resentful when the people at

the magazine try to maintain some sense of intellectual standards. This is what happens when people with a populist mindset decide that an uneducated opinion is of the same value as an educated opinion, that ignorance sells better than learning. Again, their educated opinion being here being mostly that Saddam Hussein literally worked with Al Qaeda to plan and to take, pull off 9-11, one of their managing editors, Stephen Hayes wrote an entire book about. That's an educated opinion. Super educated.

So damn educated. He goes, I was on the staff of when the standard was founded, Bill Kristol, Pod Horitz and Fred Barnes. Yeah, think of those intellectual titans right there. They gathered the most concentrated collection of talent I have ever been around. The first mass head featured Charles Krauthammer, dead, P.J. O'Rourke, dead, Robert Kagan, dead, David Frum, dead, Chris Caldwell, dead, Matt Labash, wet, Tucker Carlson, dry, and the greatest political writer of my generation, Andrew Ferguson.

Probably pedophile. Allegedly. Allegedly. I don't know. I just made that. Not actionable. He's British, dude. He's British.

He's British. He's a British Tory from the Oxbridge. Yeah. Alleged is perfectly fine. Early issues featured the writings of Tom Wolf, dead, Gertrude Himmelfarb, mother of all tears, James Q. Wilson, Q, he is QAnon, and Harvey Mansfield. Harvey Mansfield. Yes.

One of my favorite editions that I a little, and this is like, I think I, something I put in the book in second pass, and I'm so glad that I did, Harvey Mansfield is the literal professor of manliness at Harvard. Manliness. He teaches a class at Harvard on manliness. Yeah. And this is like how there are a lot of like weather reporters with the name storm. No.

And he was Bill Kristol's professor at Harvard and he is like the God, neocon Godfather. He teaches a class on manliness and in a famous New York Times profile of him written by Deborah Solomon, she asked him like what personally, like how he personally demonstrated his manly prowess. And he literally said, opening jars for my wife who is very small and moving furniture around our house sometimes, but not regularly, to be fair, I think that's mostly what we want. Is that women want?

I mean, like in terms of manliness, it's like, we can do most of the other stuff. Some of those jars are tight. Open the jars and move the credenza around and hear the lamentations of your woman. No, I don't really need anything else to open the jar and move the couch and then hear the adulation of the women because you are being very manly. No, but in that, he basically demonstrated the lack of functional utility of masculinity in the modern age. It's like, yeah, that's pretty much the only thing and we can do our taxes at everything.

And the other thing is do a Harvard class on manliness, right, which is definitely not pussy shit. I learned my manliness in the streets reading Maddox's alphabets, okay, that's the real street knowledge. Tucker Max, right, Maddox, yes, that's where you get your real Adam Corolla dirty half court manliness. That's behind the back passing man that's will that's what goodwill hunting manliness you go.

You take that street knowledge, manliness, and then you go into the fancy Harvard bar and you shred those preppy manly guys and he's like, he's like, you probably read Gordon Wood on masculinity, I read Maddox is when you get the Maddox, you'll realize the person at the bottom of the editorial mass said a young Nomi Rao Rao has just been nominated to replace Brett Kavanaugh on the US Court of Appeals. How many rapes does she done? It was it was and remains a warm, fun and convivial group. The magazine's tone was part high intellectualism, part street level political reporting and

part Hunter Thompson style, Gonzo journalism, I'm going to need that was when they had a little who can forget when Gertrude Himmelfarb did a whole bunch of ether and then shot a typewriter. No, they're going to remember Jonah Goldberg had one too many cigars on the National Review cruise. They're talking about when PJ O'Rourke, yeah, he went to he went to Paris or something and he just like made fun of the French while while drinking a cognac and he kicked a gypsy down in the metro train stairs.

Yes. They're like, damn, son. The standard was conservative, but frequently dissented from the Republican establishment and delighted in modern pop culture. The staff was never unanimous about anything. The many flavors of conservatism were hashed out on his face. The many flavors of conservatism from I'm flavored for me from shit to vomit. Yeah.

Also, like it's not like these people had particularly like a Serb writing or no, not at all. No. Yeah. Just planned horses. It's like the only things that ever stood out were when they would just it would be needle nerd, needle nose, dorky, very pretentious prose. Like I've read all the books, but all of a sudden they would just drop and they would

just be glassy eyed psychopaths talking about the need for a resurgence. It was mostly like arsenic cream of wheat. It wasn't like, you know. But no, then they would stop it and be like, yes, we must drown the world and not in blood to consecrate it. They'd start just chanting in a dead language. Over the past few years, if all the stories are correct, McKibben tried to change the tone of the magazine.

He tried to get the standard to hire highly partisan shock jock streamers. He tried to tilt it more in the direction of a Republican direct male fundraising letter. When these efforts were blocked, resentment flared and the axe fell. So he tried to make it profitable. Right. Yeah. He tried to make it a going media concern in an era of polarization and like a mass Republican he behaves like a rational capitalist.

Yes. He's a guy who sees the direction of the Republican media class and what they want out of their media and and try to give it to them. So he tried to do capitalism. That's what they could play. The standard is now gone, but the people and ideas, the standard nurtured will continue to flourish. The million or so Iraqis, they will continue to nourish the ground that they now occupy.

Yes. Yes. The depleted uranium left in Fallujah will be nourishing that part of the world for probably the next 10,000 years nourishing those white blood cells. Yeah. The talented young people who are fired this week will go on to have brilliant careers. Yeah. That's the thing.

Yeah, they will. Crying about these guys all have six figure signatures at fucking think tanks or or or you know, like the fucking resort, the federal court system, they're all getting chambered into the shit tornado and the the the the group, they're all put back into the actual machinery of producing policy that's going to destroy everything. So here's the last line. Don't cry for them, Argentina, the courage or many of the early writers for the weekly standard lived after the courage and integrity Hayes has shown during the Trump era will

continue to inspire while the drab corporate bureaucrats fade into the sand. Okay. So again, he began this like we're using the language of murder in the name of greed and vengeance that they can't do their vanity fun newsletter every week. And then Stephen Hayes by being the respectable never Trump can that's courage and integrity he's showing while the drab corporate bureaucrats again, I need to stress here what they're describing of what happened to them were some rich billionaire was just like, fuck you, I own you.

I'm going to close you and fire all of you right before Christmas. They're fine with those people running every other aspect of capitalism in our economy. Exactly. They're not going. They're not saying, you know, are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses? They will literally be fine when this happens to people for whom there are actual repercussions to losing a job.

Then they're like, no shit. When Joe Ricketts literally did the same thing to DNA info and Gothamists, which actually were worthwhile local media operations and DNA info and my opinion, we did a lot of really great local housing, local news reporting at a time when like actual print local news journalism is withering away entirely. When those people literally got not only that, but had their archives deleted all their clips and were given a box and just shoved out that was just punitive. Ron Pothoritz was literally chortling and his flesh was just rippling as he laughed and

chortled at these dumb young people who, you know, were stupid enough to try to find our organizing union. Yeah. What do you think? What do you deserve? Yeah. And yeah. And now, and now he's pretending that what happened with the exact same thing happened

to him is like, I have been murdered. I have been murdered, sir. Wow. Who will stand for the victims of the weekly standard? But again, they're literally letting healthcare, housing, education, everything run at the whim of insane billionaires they're fine with. This is the perfect example of capitalism for the, not me. Well, that's because what they think is that the ideas and they always say, of course,

the weekly standard make made money. But what they keep saying over and over is like the ideas and the intellectual dialogue, the modern agorad that we represent is more important than money. Yeah. No, it fucking isn't. Nothing is more important than money. That's what capitalism is. It's where there's one determiner of value and it's money and that's how it solves all

your problems. You had a great run of it. You don't have to worry about everyone coming together and demagoguery and like, oh, populism taking over and warping the market. You just let the market decide. You had a great run of it. Look, you had a great gap here. Yeah, exactly.

Now it's time to get a job. Yeah. You've been insulated from having your work be subject to the standards of a market economy in that like you've been underwritten or a moral economy. Yeah. Yeah. You've been exempt from both of those standards. Yeah.

But guess what? All of them will be fine. Absolutely. And guess what? And they did the war in the wreck. And they got the war in the wreck. Spondazine all they ever did was give Trump a complex about his hands. That's it.

These fucking guys killed a million people. And I guarantee you this because of all this weeping now. I saw fucking Jake Tapper being like, think of the journalists who like are out of work this week. And I'm like, I'm sorry. Like I am like screwed for these people. Put them in the fucking debtor's prison. Yeah.

None of these people are talented. None of them have done anything good for humanity by like writing an article about like what Plato would think about Donald Rumsfeld or something. They're all legacy fucking cases, too. They're all just like Padura and Goldberg and Crystal. They're all somebody's nephew or somebody's kid. Just slotted in there just just frictionlessly slotted in from the school that they didn't deserve to get into right into these jobs and these fucking Harvey Mansfield magazines

Bill Crystal into Harvard, by the way, right as a favorite of Irving as a favorite of Irving Crystal, who then told him he thought affirmative action undermined the meritocracy. Yeah. Very fun. Also a classic anecdote about these people. But here I want to read another piece. This is from John Schwartz writing in the Intercept this week. John Schwartz is like one of my favorite actual like O.G. bloggers.

Oh, yeah. He was one of the few. He's one of the few who you and I read who is not an insane DNC Russia idiot now. Tiny Revolution was his blog. I was a huge fan of him, but he's still spitting that fire and his hate is still pure. And he came out with the article. I was fucking hoping someone would do. I tried to do a little of it when I read you like some of their Iraq war articles the

other week, but he came out this week with the 10 most appalling articles in the weekly standards, short and dreadful life. No, I love a listicle. And he know, but he had this is a great, most famous, I just want to read this. Most famous for making the case for the catastrophic invasion of Iraq. The magazine was born just one year before Murdoch created Fox News. Both outlets were extremely effective at achieving the same goals by different tactics. Fox was chum for the rubes.

The weekly standard was chum for Ivy League rubes. Fox pushed mindless belligerence, conspiracism, and a deep hatred for reality. The weekly standard did the same thing, but with less cleavage and more quotes from Cicero. And that so perfectly sums up who these people are and what their magazine is for. And I'm sorry, like before we get into this, like all the people who are out of work now, I'm 1000% convinced that because of this and because now that like they have literally are now gladly wrapping themselves in the cloak and mantle of victimhood, it's going to work.

And the Democratic Party is going to be the next organ to which the neoconservative parasite hive mind. Oh, yeah. Rainbug attaches. It's just sticks the thing in the top and sucks the brain out of scoop Jackson. Yeah, it's happening. And they're going to have, you know, there's going to be a muscular foreign policy in the Beto Biden administration.

Let me tell you that. Yeah. So I want to go through now. I don't want to follow them, but I want to go through the top 10 worst weekly standards article with big props to John Schwartz for putting this together. The first one is called the collapse of the dream palaces by David Brooks in 2003. Okay, Hannibal Lecter chooses fucking Christ from the weekly standards April 28, 2003 issue that is a month after the US invasion of Iraq.

This may simultaneously be the worst, funniest and most terrifying writing ever published in the English language. For instance, its opening paragraph includes the phrase, now that the war in Iraq is over, you may read it. You must read it for yourself. It cannot be explained, only experienced. What you may find is that it makes you feel as though a sweaty middle-aged man is pointing a gun at you and fervently explaining that people like you who wear red shirts are human

scum and you, all of you are about to get what's coming to you at last. Then you look down and notice you are not wearing a red shirt, but the man with the gun is. When you finish reading the piece, remember that this was published just five months before the New York Times hired Brooks as an op-ed writer. In other words, the time saw this jibbering so disconnected from reality and it's functionally insane and thought, this is exactly who we want explaining the world to our readers. Paranthetically, it must be emphasized that Bill Crystal also had a New York Times opinion

column. Very, very briefly. And they canned him for being too boring and lazy and bad at writing. They've kept Brooks for what is it now? Ever. It's almost 20 years now. Over ten years. Over decade.

But they had the can, Bill. That's how bad he was at this job. The guy who founded this fucking magazine that's supposed to be the modern partisan review. The next is What to Do About Iraq by Robert Kagan and Bill Crystal. The Iraqi threat is enormous. Robert Kagan and Crystal wrote about the beginning. It is earthy. It is low-key thick.

It'll bust your back walls. At the beginning of 2002, it gets bigger with every day of the passes. That's so big. Damn. We hear from many corners. You could not fit this thread around in your mouth. Never. You choke.

You gag on it. He goes, if too many months go by without a decision to move against Saddam, the risks of the United States may increase exponentially. Grow and grow and grow and grow and grow. Say what you will with your 2020 sign set. This is John now. But you can't deny they totally called this. We know the Muhammad Atta, the reading leader of September 11th, went out of his way to

meet with an Iraqi intelligence official a few months before he flew a plane into the World Trade Center. There is no debate about the facts. That's actually true. There is no debate anymore. No one will make that argument anymore. Case closed by Stephen Hayes, 2004. Hayes spent years trying to prove the case that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were

collaborators. Case closed is a perfect example of his work in that Hayes successfully demonstrates two things. First, Iraq had fewer ties to al-Qaeda than any other Gulf state. And second, he is the world's most gullible human being. Here Hayes faithfully scribbled down the pencies of Douglas J. Fythe, then undersecretary of defense and known as the Pentagon as the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth. The next one, the bumpy road to democracy in Iraq by Fred Barnes, 2004.

Operation Iraqi Freedom has gained impressive momentum. Barnes warned us that when we ventured into Baghdad a year after the Iraq war began, but like so many of history's pith helmeted white people, Barnes was concerned with the recalcitrance of the dusky natives. Iraqis, wrote Barnes, need an attitude adjustment. Iraqis are difficult to deal with. They're sullen and suspicious and conspiracy minded. Papers obsessed on the subject of the brutal treatment of innocent Iraqis by American soldiers,

but Barnes knew Iraqis were being treated well by U.S. troops because the troops were super nice to him. Barnes concluded by saying that he wanted to see Iraqis demonstrate an outbreak of gratitude for the greatest act of benevolence one country has ever done for another. Number five, breaking the climate spell by Rupert Darrell in 2017. This is just 2017. They're still saying, yeah, it's no big deal. The next one is campus disruptor by Naomi Shaffer, I don't even care about that one.

Yeah, that's the only thing that they actually cared about beyond endless war was the campus bullshit. Here's a good one. Because they're perpetually on gap year, their finger firmly on the pulse of their asshole. Here's another good one. Number seven, our serious chemical weapons, Iraq's missing WMD, Obama's director of intelligence thought though by Mark Hemingway, Mr. Molly Hemingway.

Mark Hemingway notes that in 2003, James Clapper, who later became director of national intelligence under Barack Obama, bloviated about how we weren't finding any chemical weapons in Iraq because they'd probably been moved to Syria. But Iraq wouldn't have had any incentive to do this, even if they've been hiding chemical weapons they're easy to make and it would have been far simpler just to dump them than manufacture more when the coast was clear. Then Hemingway learnedly explained that while it was largely downplayed by the media, American troops in Iraq also stumbled across caches of chemical weapons.

Doesn't this suggest that Bush was right and some of them might have ended up in Syria? No. What they meant is that they found mustard gas, decaying mustard gas shells. Old, decroded containers of it from the Iraq War or from the Gulf War, which is very... Here is genuinely the most insane one. They never, because they never manufactured it. Here is the most insane one. The worst thing about gay marriage by Sam Shulman, 2009, not going to explicate the

further connections to Sam Shulman, but... I have certain fans, quote, unquote, of the show might be able to show you those connections on a large cork board with... It's not me, though. It's not me and my family. That's all of us. No, for once. It's not you.

Okay. This one is actually the most insane one and this one actually cuts against the idea that the weekly standard was just concerned with foreign policy and antiquity. National greatness. Yeah. Okay. Sam Shulman first expresses amazement at the rapidity with which gays have attained the right to whole jobs, even as teachers and members of clergy, and explained, all these

rights have made gays not just free, but are neighbors. Also, the only real reason for marriage is protecting and controlling the sexuality of the childbearing sex. Then Shulman frets that gay marriage will obviously lead to brothers marrying brothers and fathers marrying sons. But on the other hand, he's concerned that unmarried gay sex won't face greater social sanction than married gay sex, and plaintively asks, but without social disapproval of unmarried sex, what kind of madman would seek marriage?

The upshot is... Am I right, guys? The upshot is that after the initial excitement of gay incest marriage, all the gay Americans will realize marriage is pointless and will stop getting married. These people always tell on themselves, like, we know where your head is at. You are projecting your incest fantasy on the entire world. Weekly standard of magazine about getting gay with your dad. How could you not say that and immediately think, oh, what?

Is that just me? At the height of the gay marriage debate, that was, every week, some psycho would come out and just blurt out their own weird fetish. Like when Santorum is talking about people fucking dogs and turtles and stuff. Why did your mind go there immediately? One of my favorite moments back at the gay marriage debate, the person who made this exact argument about fathers marrying their sons was Jeremy Irons, who briefly lived Huffington Post Live, which was their sort of like, it was like a streaming daytime news show, and

they would like interview people and sometimes they got some pretty interesting guests. And Jeremy Irons was on one time. Jeremy Irons, wonderful actor, one of my favorite actors, already one of the creepiest people. So insane. One of the creepiest people alive. Yeah. I mean, it's just, you could, he's not just playing.

Yeah. Those characters. In Dead Ringers, it's like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The mental twins or fucking. The Cosmon Bulo. Cosmon Bulo, like, or.

The head Morlock from The Time Machine. Yeah. Simon from Die Hard. Yeah. And he brought up the topic of gay marriage with Jeremy Irons. And he just said. Jeremy's. He just said, very interesting.

Very fascinating to me. Obviously, you know, I'm in favor of love. Love everyone. Everyone thinks you'd be able to be loved. I love my dog. He literally said, you know, I love my dog the same way I think, you know, a gay person would love their spouse. And then he said, it is, it is interesting, though, you know, from a tax perspective.

Could a father not marry his son and not pay, you know, inheritance tax? And like the question, the answer to that is it's currently illegal for a father to marry his daughter to a tax liability. So why would. No, no, no, no, no. He's English. So it's. You're right.

Yeah. You're right. There's another. There's one. I sort of skip it. The number 10 of the most abominable weekly standard articles, Going Soft on Iran by rule Mark Garek 2004. The weekly standard quickly became the most strident voice for neoconservatism in the

U.S. And as we know, there's nothing neoconservatives care more about than democracy. In this article, former CIA case officer rule Mark Garek writes of his yearning for Iranians to experience it. If you want to read more about how much the weekly standard supports democracy in Iran, well, there's a lot for you there. Some people ask why the neoconservatives who care so much about democracy in Iran don't seem to get upset about attacks on democracy here in America, things that they could seemingly do something about, like voter suppression, or why the Bush administration's neoconservatives

tried to stage a coup to overturn the overturn the results of a democratic Palestinian election, or why the neoconservatives in the Reagan administration supported death squads in Central America, or why the proto-neoconservatives in the 1950s cared so much about democracy in China, yet didn't care at all about the civil rights movement in the U.S. Ignore these cynics, the evidence they cite about the actions of the neoconservatives. The weekly standard expressed their love of democracy, not with boring old actions, but with what truly matters, words. That settles that.

So, yeah. I just want to say, last week there was an event in New York. I don't know where, unfortunately, because I'd like to say send a bouquet to the waitstaff of whatever establishment this was, but on the 15th of December, according to one former writer for the weekly standard. Tonight, standard staffers from every moment in its 23-year existence gathered for a week slash Shiva. The botany was irrepressible.

We knew we had been a part of something spectacular and important, and it had taken the kind of pride in it, unknown to the untalented suits who did it in. That was, of course, John Podoritz. And I imagine that whatever this bacchanal was, that the poor waiters had to chew up the burgers and just drop them into their waiting moths like baby birds, because they were too busy having irrepressible bonomy to chew. Well, also, when you're that inbred, your teeth just fall out. Yeah.

I will say that this is indicative of a number of things, the death of the weekly standard. And obviously, one of them is just the way that populist wing has sort of overwhelmed the intellectual wing and then made it redundant. And it is also reflective of something that Alex Prenus talked about, which is the way that the media that was originally designed to speak to the rubes of the Republican Party, the Fox News conspiratorial, hysteric register, was always meant for the Morlocks and not for the Eloy of the conservative movement. Over time, they basically poisoned their own well, media-wise.

And enough of these guys. They got older, and they started watching it, and they started taking it seriously. And so now, there isn't really a lot of intellectual difference between the billionaire class of Republican elites and the people that they're trying to stir up with stuff like Fox News. The billionaires think now the same kind of conspiracy shit as the idiots were supposed to. And so they don't need intellectual patina anymore. They don't need this self-congratulatory little newsletter that they can all put on

their coffee tables and feel smug about. They're all in on the whole suite of just dipshit rubory that was originally just supposed to be instrumental and move votes and not actually affect the opinions of the people in charge. And now, they really believe it. I was talking about network last night, and it's as if, like, at this point, like, Howard Beals kind of, you know, demagogue character has lost any kind of... There's like, everyone has heard what Ned Beatty said, and they're like, oh, there's

only profit. So this idea that there are these ideological battles that the world runs on ideological battles and not battles of power and capital and politics, I don't think... I think that time has kind of passed. That's washing away. Well, I just mean that if you read interviews with a lot of these billionaire people and they believe the same shit, paranoia is rotten as like anyone who watches Fox News, like they believe the same shit about, oh, the Democrats, they've got, they're going to do

Sharia law. Like they think that way. I'd like to share now, remember when David Brooks said like the weekly standard, you know, delighted in pop culture and, you know, things that are, you know, movies and things like that. I'd like to check in with treat ogre, John Podhoritz, in a column, this is his last column for the weekly standard called A Validiction. And this is about his career as a movie reviewer or movie critic that, you know, okay, I just

want to just show you and Amber the actual picture that they chose to illustrate this article. The most accurate representation of Podhoritz I've ever seen is just a giant baby Huey with a dumb grin stuffing popcorn in his giant maw. They didn't have to show it. But like how a baby does, like how a baby has to use two fingers because they only adapt the pincer. Yeah.

They don't have full motor control. Yeah. I just want to read some of this. And like this is ostensibly a column about, you know, movies that stand the test of time and what does and what doesn't. And I would like this is like, this is the level of taste that they're operating at at the high conservative magazine. The question I've been asked the most across the decades besides what's your favorite movie

to which the only correct answer is the Godfather. And that goes for you two and everyone else alive because if you answer differently, you're wrong. And no, the Godfather to isn't better shame on you. The question is, why are movies so liberal and how can you stand it? Okay. To say that the Godfather is the best movie of all time is the most basic fucking answer you could possibly have.

That's an epic bacon. Like response. The Godfather is a good movie. It's good. It's fine. I think Goodfellas is better. Oh, Goodfellas is a million times better than the Godfather. Godfather one and two.

Yeah. Wait, I got, I got to take another digression. Jennifer Albright found this from me from a, a Baffler article. I forget the Baffler article, but this is about Murray Rothbard. Oh God. Murray, Murray Rothbard loved the Godfather too. In a 1990 pan of Goodfellas, he celebrated Coppola's films as opposed to Scorsese. While the Godfather films depicted, quote, an epic world, a world of drama and struggle,

Rothbard complained that Scorsese portrayed the mafia as sordid. The violence is random. The violence is random, gratuitous, pointless, and psychotic. Everyone from the protagonist Henry Hill, and he misspells Ray Liotta's name as Ray Liotta, is a debt, is on, is a boring creep. Rothbard even thought that the Godfather reflected his own worldview. Organized crime is essentially a narco capitalist, a productive industry struggling to govern itself.

Eventually he forgot also that he also called the state his great enemy, a criminal band. So he didn't like Goodfellas because it showed the people that personate, populate the mafia as gratuitous, sleazy psychos whose entire premise of being honorable, they'll drop it. They'll drop instantly if they become threatened in any way, and we'll just murder everyone and don't give a shit. I mean, bad things happen in the Godfather, but it is a romanticized view, which is why that's why all the actual mob guys decided to base their bullshit on because it was so

flattering and it gave them this self perception. There's order. There's a code. And then they all just kill each other and fucking rad at each other out, not to stop. But like for a film critic to say that Godfather is the best movie ever made is the most basic opinion you could possibly have. You could not produce an opinion that would make me less interested in your pungent film criticism than that.

But the question most people ask him is why are movies so liberal and how can you stand it? The answer to how can you stand it is that I stand it just fine. I don't stand. I sit always. It hurts. It hurts my ankles. I stand it just fine so long as it's not rubbed in my face.

No, that the treats are what I rubbed. The chocolate is what I rub on my face, not politics. Oddly enough, that's pretty much the same answer Hollywood gets at the box office. Its most nakedly political offerings have done pretty badly in the decades I've been writing. The most left-wing movie ever to win an Oscar for Best Picture is Probably Platoon, which is supposedly a serious examination of an American crime against humanity during the Vietnam War, but is actually an extended Oliver Stone psychotic fantasy about murdering his platoon's lieutenant.

I mean, again, Vietnam was a work crime. It was bad news people. Whatever. Whatever. Wavy gravy. Most other efforts at direct conservative bashing end up on the trash heap of cinematic history. Scooter Libby has good reason to dance on the grave of Fair Game, the film that sought

to lionize Valerie Plame and earned a whopping $9 million at the domestic box office. Oh, God, dude, I don't know how anyone has not noticed this and I stupidly forgot to point this out. Netflix currently has a director's cut of Fair Game that they re-released for 2018 that is on Netflix now. What is in it that wasn't it? I don't know. I didn't see the first time and so I wouldn't be able to compare it, but it's because they're

trying to capitalize on the Mueller ship. And as we all know, Valerie Plame was the first Mueller thing. Patrick Fitzgerald and his investigation. That was originally. The first Mueller thing that was going to stop was a Robert Mueller himself. No, but it was the same premise of a federal prosecutor was going to stop the bad Republicans because of what they've done to Valerie Plame and that movie is about that and they fucking re-release a version with, I guess, extra footage that's on Netflix now.

It says Fair Game, the 2018 version. So they're they're trying to get the resistance people to get all wild whipped up again at the prospect. But they have no memory. That's what's so funny. They don't have any memory and if they watch it, they'd be like, what happened with this or right? Nobody got in trouble.

Yeah. And the guy who did get indicted got got fucking pardoned. I expressed the great many opinions in this magazine over the past 23 years and looking back on them, I'm reminded of the fact that if you judge a movie critic by the accuracy of his opinions, you're never going to like any movie critic ever. There are views I can't even believe. Accuracy of opinions. Yeah.

Contradiction terms. Yeah. My opinions, the opinion can't be accurate. Accurate. Yeah. He doesn't even know what he's talking about. He goes on to say that in 1996, I wrote Mr. Hallam's Opus was the only movie we were able to remember from that year.

I mean, I just wanted to let you know that The Godfather is in his opinion, the greatest movie ever made. Yeah. Which just goes to show that he has the brain of a child. Yeah. It's just that either. It's like, what adult man says, okay, what's the greatest movie ever made? Like what sophisticated like cinephile sits there and ranks things in that way?

No, that's like, who is the king movie? Who won the movie? Best movie ever. Childish shit anyway. There is no best movie. There's no best movie. I don't even have a favorite movie. I don't either.

And not only say that, but make it like some sort of litmus test. Yeah. It's actually, not only do I say it's best movie, it's objectively the best movie. And he's trying to be cheeky, but it's like, well, he's utterly childish. Yeah. Well, he's covered in cheeks. He's mostly cheek. It's just like utterly childish.

Like I don't know anyone who has, it's like, it's like having a favorite color as an adult man. Anyone who says anything other than great is really wrong. I actually did see fair game and it sucked. Well you should watch the new one. Yeah. Tell me what's in it. Are there like, are they just, did they ADR in references to Trump in the background

just to get people like goose them and remind them this relates to now? But again, like Scooter or Libby actually did do that shit. And again. No, they never proved it. Oh, right. He went to see this. It's amazing. It's the cycle.

It's that circle of time and how people have no memory. Everyone who's so excited about the Miller investigation, all of the most of the shit is about people obstructing justice and lying to the interviewers. That is what they got Libby for and they charge him with it because they couldn't get any evidence that it was rove because nobody would turn on him. And so all they got was Libby for, for basically, I guess, lying to them or refusing to tell them the truth. And then he got.

Yeah, I told you my evolution on that was like, you know, we discussed before I was obsessed with the, you know, flame investigation because I was like, oh my God, they outed a CIA agent. But I guess it's a sign that I've matured because now I'm like, actually, it's good that they outed a CIA agent and all CIA agents should be outed to be that knock list. People point it out. Like what would you have? All these people, all those people were mad in the Bush years about that.

What would you have thought of Philip Agee when he put all the names out on the street in the 70s? I mean, and then went to Cuba, you know, I mean, was he a hero? Or is he basically just doing Carl Rose bidding because I guess what, Jimmy Carter was president or something? Well, that's the weekly standard, folks. May it rot in hell forever. Tamp the dirt down.

Yeah. Elvis Costello said, one last thing today, I just like to close with this in the Washington Post, the perspectives, the post everything section may have reached the nadir of writing entire articles about Trump voters and how they feel about the president. This may be. I hope we'll get them all. Every one of them. Literally every single person who gets up, I have an article written about them and like

how they, how do you feel about all that, man? You know, this may be my favorite headline of the year or one of them, even as we close out the year, I voted for Trump. Now his wall may destroy my butterfly paradise. The Republican Party. You know what, you could have seen some of this coming like, oh, you, you think he's going to resurrect manufacturing? He's probably not going to do that.

You're probably being, you know, snowed on that. Maybe you could even argue, hey, the farmers, if he's serious about this trade stuff, there could be tariffs and they could bite you in the ass. You could maybe argue it. I don't think anybody was going to see this coming though, that voting for Trump would own their, their precious butterfly sanctuary. It says the Republican Party is abandoning the conservative principles I treasure. What?

Giving like monarch butterfly habitats, they would fucking put an oil direct through a fucking, you know, the last white rhinos head. Once again, these people do not remember the 90s when the number one, the number one Republican Party was the spot at all more than any human being. It was that goddamn owl. They would have fucking shot him in the head at the RNC, just have fucking Bob Dole come out with a fucking tommy gun and just machine gun an entire cage full of spotted. I remember Rush Limbaugh would have a barbecue is where we have spotted owl burgers.

Yeah. I mean, not for real. But you know, so this guy, this is his name is Luciano Guerra. Hey, Mr. Trump. What are you doing? You keep them up on the fly. Right now in Mission, Texas, we don't worry about immigrants. We're not so worried about the immigrants.

Right now in Mission, Texas, we don't worry about immigrants who cross the border illegally or drug smugglers. We worry about having to defend our private property from seizure by the federal government. I work at the National Butterfly Center, a fucking overpaid government job. Who is this guy? He's using my tax dollars to fucking look at catch butterflies all day. How do you like that? I need your cash to just look at some butterflies legalized theft, a.k.a. income taxation, yes,

to fund a National Butterfly Center, folks. You think the butterflies would be fine without a pencil net government scientists studying them. They've been around for thousands of years before the U.S. government came along. Actually, they're all dying out along with many other sex support all life on the planet Earth. It's OK. Don't think about that now or ever.

But he said documenting wildlife and leading educational tours for the National Butterfly Center. He's a teacher. He's a government teacher. Oh, my God. And not even a stem or something people could use. Just come look at these butterflies. They're pretty.

He's a butterfly teacher. He's Professor Butterfly. He's a professor of feelings. He's the monarch. This is the monarch. He's a professor of feelings. Many of our visitors are young students from the Rio Grande Valley. When they first arrived, some of the children are scared of everything from the snakes to

the pill bugs. Here, we can show them animals that roam free and teach them not to be afraid. Teach them not to be afraid of butterflies. Who are these weak guys? They're teaching lib children not to be afraid of butterflies. They're teaching them to get fucking safe space from butterflies. These kids need to toughen up. They should run them through fucking obstacle course or something, drop them in a pit with

snakes or something. And instead of being like, don't worry, we'll hug you as the butterflies. And they should do the boo box from Hook, and that will teach them that insects are to be embraced. We talk about how we planted native vines, shrubs, and trees to attract some 240 species of butterflies, as well as dragonflies, grasshoppers, and other insects. The bugs brought the birds, including some you can't see anywhere else in America, like Green Jays and the Chalakas.

This motherfucker's like Jonathan Franza, he's a birder, and from there, bobcats and coyotes. We want to teach these kids what it takes to create a home for all kinds of animals. How did this guy end up as a Trump supporter? There's nothing. Yes. The man... Please tell us something about seizure of property. Yeah, like there's federal...

Well, because they're going to run, I believe what it is, is they're going to run the wall through there. Right? That's the idea. President Trump's new border wall, which he has threatened to shut down the government to fund, will teach them what it takes to destroy it. The first section funded by Congress in 2018 for construction, starting early next year, will cut right through our 100-acre refuge, sealing off 70 acres, bordering the banks

of the Rio Grande. The plan that we've seen calls for 18 feet of concrete and 18 feet of steel bollards with a 150-foot paved enforcement zone for cameras, sensors, lighting, and border patrol traffic on the south side of the barrier. Flooding will worsen. On the north side, animals, including threatened species like the Texas tortoise and Texas horned lizard, will be cut off from ranging beyond the wall for feeding and breeding. You know what I say to the Texas horned lizard?

Get a job. Provide some fucking value for your existence. Or else, tough shit. He goes on to talk about all the other wonderful wildlife refuges that are being threatened by... Well, here's the value add. He says, ecotourism brings 436 million a year to our economy and supports more than 6,600 jobs.

I'm a lifelong Republican who voted for Donald Trump for president in 2016. I want our immigration laws to be enforced, and I don't want open borders. But mission is not a dangerous place. I've lived here all my life. Here at the National Butterfly Center, 6,000 schoolchildren visit every year. Girl scouts come here when they camp overnight just a mile or so from the Rio Grande. Well, you know, put that wall there or else they'll be fucking raped and murdered by the caravan.

Exactly. Do you care more about these butterflies than you do about Girl Scouts? Apparently does. Apparently does. Pretty sick. Pretty sick. Disgusting. You really like the butterflies.

Before this controversy, I voted and sometimes expressed my political views on Facebook. But this issue got me involved in activism for the first time. Butterfly activism. I had never gone to a protest in my entire life, but last year I helped organize one. A four-mile march to the La Lomita Chapel, a historic church on U.S. soil that the wall will block. I also joined a group that succeeded in lobbying the Mission City Council to pass an anti-wall resolution.

People have asked me, didn't you listen to Trump when he said that he would build the wall? That's a good question. I didn't take the idea seriously during the campaign. I knew he couldn't get Mexico to pay for it. That'd be like asking Hurricane Harvey to foot the bill for rebuilding Houston. And I thought it was just talk, another candidate making big promises he couldn't keep.

I never thought it would actually happen. Oh boy. By backing the wall. Oh no. Oh no. My butter. The one thing that was the cornerstone of his entire campaign he pursued? Oh no.

Oh no, my butterflies. By backing the wall, my party has abandoned the conservative principles I treasure. Less government, less spending, and respect for the law and private property. And then he just goes on to talk about how much it's going to cost to build the wall. Still, I want to be able to tell my grandchildren and great-grandchildren that I fought against the wall. I worry that if it goes up, they're only experienced. All of his children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren are just butterflies.

I fear that their only experience of the Rio Grande Valley's natural beauty will be through the photographs that I take today. If Donald Trump runs for a second term, he will not get my vote. Well, there we go. We found the one person. He's lost the butterfly voters. He's lost the butterfly man. If only everyone could meet one butterfly, they would stop voting for Donald Trump.

He's like, I worry that my grandchildren and great-grandchildren will have to form their chrysalis elsewhere and seek pollen in countries without walls. Yeah, countries without walls. Visualize a country without walls. Visualize a country throbbing with chrysalis. That's why I visualize you watching Senator Biden every week. You're a witness to a great becoming. Exactly.

You're answering the afterwards. And again, like it's just someone murdered the weekly standard. Can you believe it, folks? They just straight up murdered. They just murk that shit. They just broad daylight just walked up to it. They pop. They pop.

Pop point right in his brain. Two in the back of his head. Yeah. They pop weekly standard in the vacants. Who will mourn for the weekly standard? Who will get justice for the weekly standard? Who today speaks of the weekly standard? Hopefully no one in a year will ever speak of it.

Hopefully it will be lost in the sense of time and the content. I don't want to get in trouble for this. I'm just the weekly standard was murdered. I'm just hoping literally all of its editors and writers pass on from natural causes as well. Yes. That's all I'm saying. Just keep going to Snippers, guys.

I can tell you, it's all going to be prostate cancer. Even the women, somehow. Somehow. All two of the women. The first ever case of female prostate cancer. Yeah. Gertrude Trimmelfarb is a good candidate for that. Well, folks, until next time, we'll talk to you again soon.

Cheers. Bye. Bye.