Chapo Trap House - UNLOCKED: 389 - Game It Out (1/31/20)

Episode Date: February 2, 2020

We gaze in to the multiverse of electoral possibilities stemming from this inspiring, terrifying singular moment. CANVASSERS PARTY @ Vaudeville Mews in Des Moines https://www.mobilize.us/sandersia/event/205263/?force_banner=true&share_context=event-detail-page-modal&share_medium=twitter TOUR DATES: ALL TICKETS AVAILABLE AT: www.chapotraphouse.com/tour Derry, NH Feb 9, @ Tupelo Music Hall Las Vegas, NV Feb 18, @ House of Blues San Diego, CA, Feb 23, @ The Observatory North Park Sacramento, CA Feb 28 @ Ace of Spades

Sunday, Sunday, Sunday. It's the Super Bowl, the big game. If you're in Des Moines, Iowa, stop by and have Canvas for Bernie Sanders or Phone Banked. Stop by Vaudeville Meuse in downtown Des Moines for an exclusive Canvassers-only Super Bowl party with Chapo Trap House. Give me the details. It'll be the Super Bowl! Two at ten, one must have completed two Canvassing ships or four Phone Banking ships before February 2nd. That's at Vaudeville Meuse, 212 4th Street, Des Moines, Iowa. Starts at 8 p.m. There's a link in the description of this episode.

Oh, there will be the Super Bowl. Oh, I'm sorry. Caught this. We will be showing the big game. Do not sue us, NFL, please. The big game. Chiefs, Niners. Who will win? Chapo Trap House. Come and hang out with us and have fun. Super Bowl, Canvassers party. Big game. And the rest of our tour is Iowa City sold out. Iowa is sold out. We kick off our 2020 election tour this Saturday, February 1st, Iowa City

sold out show. But you can still catch us February 9th in Derry, New Hampshire. There are still a handful of tickets available for that one in Las Vegas, Nevada, February 18th, San Diego, California, February 23rd, Los Angeles, San Francisco are sold out. But there are tickets still available in Sacramento, February 28th. You can find those at www.chapotraphouse.com. Greetings from Sunbaked Des Moines, Iowa. Here it is in by Wyndham. How many of you from Iowa? We are here for the caucus. And we are in the shit right now. We are deep-throating that caucus. Okay, so we have been here two days now. We've gone to a couple field offices, a couple

campaign events. However, I will be saving those sterling anecdotes for Saturday night in Iowa City. But I would like to give you, you know, like I said, we're T minus, how many days now? It's all Monday. Five days. Five, four, three, so what day is it? What time is it? Who are you guys? It's Thursday. Wait a minute. Who are you people? Who am I? Why am I here? All right. Let's do some simple arithmetic. It's on Monday and it is Thursday now. Let's

do the rest. Let's do some game theory. Three days. Three days. Thank you, Chris. No, four days. Inclusive or exclusive? No, Friday, then you got Saturday. Now, then there's your Sunday. And then there's Monday. Oh, yeah. Which kind of set are we doing here? Which set we with? I don't know.

Let's not get bogged down in the math here. Yeah. Sorry to start off with a little bit of wonkery there. You don't want to get you too confused. Yeah, you're not listening to a 538 podcast right now. We're not big graph guys here, but like I said, we're very close to the main event here. This is going to be our last episode before our live show on Saturday. Holy shit.

Is that real? That's true. When we begin our election tour. Yeah. Holy mackerel. Man, it's getting super real. Like I said, at this point, I just can't, I can't look at any poll right now of Iowa or any other state. I don't want to think about it. I don't want to look at it. I don't want to get too excited. Even if you are looking at them,

I think everyone out there, if you're fucking with Bernie, you should be assuming that you're down by five in the polls right now. You got to fucking play like we're from behind here. As Howard said, what? You want to win by one point? You want to win by 30 fucking points? But I would like to give you listeners who aren't here in Iowa right now, just maybe a little bit of a taste of sort of the feeling here on the ground. We've spent a little time with some, with some, you know, some people who work for the Bernie people, you know, just out and about, some wonks, you know, we've had a smattering of everything, politicos,

Gadflies, campaign people, Mildorizers, the guy at the liquor store. Oh yeah. No, we've had some real tough, we've had some real like, yeah, exactly some real encounters with some real Iowa people all up and down. But like specifically, if you're listening to this, I'm assuming that you are rooting for St. Bernard. You understand the importance of this. You understand how close we are and you understand what we're about to do or could potentially do here. So I would say the energy is excited. Very excited, a nervous kind of excitement. It's a kind of like a holy shit, like eyes open, like holy shit, is this for

real? Is this really happening kind of excitement? But yeah. So I think the energy right now, very positive, good vibes here on the ground at this point. Yeah, you can kind of feel it. Everyone's got it in the back of their heads. They don't want to say it. Yes, exactly. They're afraid of ginseng it, but you can see people are really starting to believe. Yeah, it's it's something. Right. Again, you know, these are people, people on the campaign who have been here since the start. They're people who have they have been down at every week in this primary up to last week. Yeah. And I'm sure some people, you know, on the campaign have had the thought

that we have maintained for the past year, which is, no, this is good. This is where we want to be. We have a solid base of support and we don't want to peak too early. We want to peak at just the right time, which would mean that this is the fulfillment of that, you know, long term strategy. Yeah. That's what's so unsettling. I really about feeling this because we, it is like when Homer was the one who predicted what would happen to the comet, Homer, what if this doesn't work? Well, then I have a backup plan. See, while the unprepared are still sitting around twiddling their thumbs and going do.

Do. Do. Do. Do. Do. Do. Do. Do.

Do. Do. Do. Do. Do. Do. Do. Do.

Do. Do. Do. It's absorbing it. I'm very excited. It's easy for me. So yeah, a nervous energy, but there's a thrum here that I'm feeling, and I would say it's a positive one.

Yes. I feel like the beam. We're on the path of the beam. I feel like a small beam, too. But there is something that I was shopping it up with these guys about recently, or I'm sort of beginning to think about that adds another layer to this feeling in this moment we're in. And that is this idea that, you know, we have thus far spent our time.

Let's go down the list here, Beto O'Rourke, Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Sleepy Joe, go to bed. We've like, we've trained our fire on these targets as they've presented themselves. And so for the most part, we're home and right along. Yeah, no, slang, Queens. But there's another figure out there in the selection. A phantom medicine. Yes.

There is a phantom menace lurking out there that we have thus far, we've certainly talked about him. We've definitely made fun of him. But I don't think we've trained our attention or fire on him in quite the same way. But I'm beginning to think about it now. That figure is like a sort of, I won't say a final boss. Oh, no. Trump's the final.

But a secret boss. Yeah. It's just, it's you unlock like a hidden dungeon and you're like, oh wait, I thought I was done. It's like, no. A secret boss. Okay. You can probably figure it out by now.

It's Michael Bloomberg. Hello. I'm the former mayor of New York. Stop drinking that soda, you pig. Don't you remember me? What I did for the city after 9-11? No. He's out there and like, you know, what him and Steyer are doing in this election is

unprecedented. Yep. Like they have both spent now over like $120 million or something on TV ads. Oh, well more than that. Last time I saw it was 180. Yeah. Like it's just an astronomical amount of money. Most ever.

To blanket every state in the country. Like if you were like an average American, no matter what part, in New York City to any other part of the country, you're watching your local news at night. You're going to NCIS Miami and whatever. You're watching your programs. You're going to see like at least three or four Steyer or Bloomberg ads. And you know, as we've seen with Steyer, like, you know, he's been able to buy like, I don't know, what, 8, 9, 10%?

A decent chunk. In some places, you know, in some surveys up to as much as 17%. And those are in the early states. Yeah. Even in like the later super Tuesday and after states. And that's the, that's apparently the quotient of primary voters who just, you know, just like TV, just like something they see on TV, they enjoy all the products and services and people being advertised.

They like having a friend in the house while they're doing cleaning and stuff. No, this is, this is Homer driving by all the billboards and yes, sir, Mr. Billboard. Yep. If Judge Judy was in the race, she would be well, Judge Judy has endorsed Michael Bloomberg. Exactly. So like, so just the controversy in Steyer and Bloomberg, like what they're both doing is, yeah, an unprecedented experiment in like just how far being a billionaire can take you despite having like no real like base of support or real reason for being in the

race. In Bloomberg's case, literally being a member of the opposition party. Yes. Who brought the fucking RNC to New York in 2004, endorsed George W. Bush on stage and had his fucking shock troops beat the shit out of everybody who was there to protest it and put it, corral them into free speech zones. And also cleared out Occupy Wall Street, the first, yeah, Crushed Occupy Wall Street. It was like Steyer though, and hilariously enough, we did get a chance to talk to some

Steyer briefly, like we'll be able to look out for that in the future. But Steyer is running like, he has like a weird message or like he thinks of himself as like a fucking progressive or like, I think he's running because he wants to be president or he wants to meet his political friends and be on the national stage and just sort of live out a kind of like, like a space camp politics. Right. Like if you think about it, if you're a billionaire and you literally think Bernie Sanders is cool, you can't meet him the way that rich people get to meet other politicians like

that's the argument of people who say that political donations aren't bribery. They say these are just rich people who want to meet famous politicians and feel special. Well, if you want to meet Bernie, you can't spend $30,000 on a plate of chicken to see him in a thing. You got to be on the same debate stage with him. And okay, so that's Steyer though, Bloomberg is a completely different animal here. This is a completely different beast with Bloomberg. Bloomberg is running and spending all this money to, yeah, sure, to defeat Donald Trump,

but even more than that, he is running to stop Bernie Sanders from being president. One million percent. That is, like he would have done it in 2016 if he threatened to, if Bernie was, if Bernie and Trump are the nominees, he said he would enter the race as an independent. This time around, he's doing it as a Democrat and he's not even running in the early states. But what he is, like sitting out, if the first, what, three, four states, four states, he's been waiting till Super Tuesday, right? What he is auditioning to be is the guy to stop Bernie, who is there, who can stay in

it as long as he needs to, spend as much money as he has no limit. And collect delegates. He has no limit. Yeah, exactly. And rack up delegates. Yeah. Pick up those. And we've talked about it before here.

Like the goal here for the Democratic Party, as Bernie continues to lead poll after poll, maybe win some of these early states, I don't, I don't, I just don't want to say it. Don't say it. Don't say it. Don't say it. Don't say it. But they are reacting to their thinking it, right? And I think ultimately at the end of the day, Biden, they just, I think they just realized

this guy can't do it. And not like what they're really worried about is even if he did get the nomination, he couldn't be Trump. He just, he just doesn't have it in him. He doesn't, he's, he's a spent force. And the thing about this is, is that when these guys, so once these guys start losing to Bernie, if this is what happens, once you start losing, you start dropping, you stop dropping in the poll, sure.

But that also means your money tries up. It means your donors realize that there's pointless to throw good money after bad and they fix somebody else or they stop donating. So you can't hang around, at least in a credible way. Bloomberg is doing this all himself. He's already spent a hundred million dollars. He'll spend a hundred and other million dollars, he'll spend 500 million dollars and he would never even notice it.

Be gone. I've read something that like the amount of money he's spending on his campaign every week is an unbelievable amount of money, but he has so much money. That's just the equivalent of what his money makes in that week. It's just his interest. It's just the interest. Yeah. He has not touched the nut.

He's spent 500 million dollars for this. He wouldn't touch his nut. So that means that he can hang around and he could be on the ballot and on the air throughout every place throughout the entire thing, no matter what and collect, as we said, delegates because of the proportional way that he's like, we're talking about this, right? Right now, Biden is still a threat. He is still technically leading in national polls and he's very close and he's very close to the only person Biden is right now.

The only other person to place first in any early state survey. It's either Biden who was led in every survey of South Carolina, for instance, or Bernie who's led in, as of earlier today, three out of the past six Iowa polls. Biden leads in another one and is tied with Bernie and the other two. And I will say this. He has led basically every national poll until this week, where Bernie is finally actually at the top. And now it basically comes down to methodology.

But let's be honest, this is a Biden versus Bernie race now. Maybe you have a big showing for some of these all-surface, maybe. I don't know. I don't want to get too... But here's the deal. Biden is... That's the first failsafe. And they're going to see what it works with that, but should something happen that we're

thinking about, it's going to become apparent very quickly that that failsafe has been blown. And Bloomberg is the secret boss that is behind that. And he is only there to get enough delegates to get it to a second vote on the floor of the convention and literally do a coup. A coup, basically a legal coup by money to subvert a popular democratic movement. A Saddam 79. But keep this in mind.

The math has not changed from what it was a year ago when it was exactly as apparent then as it is today that Bernie needs to win a clean majority of delegates and prevent a floor fight at the convention. So there's no new strategic consideration there. But to game it out a little bit, I think Bernie, as of right now in the early States, he profits from the weakness of his opposition. Warren is on a downward trajectory and the kind of love affair with Mayor Pete is certainly on the wane, too, as people realize, yeah, but he's still the fucking mayor of some town

who fucking gives a shit about it. You know, Klobuchar hasn't really taken off. And Biden, his toughest opposition, the last democratic vice president, is melting down on a semi-regular basis and is totally incapable of changing up his campaign strategy in any way. You know, he's not... You're not going to... He's not going to reboot.

You're not going to see a new Joe. I mean, like we just saw here, like that clip of him in Iowa, like the day we flew out here, yelling at that guy about fucking gas pipes, pipelines, and he was just like, yeah, don't vote for me. Vote for the other guy. He was just disagreeing to them about pipelines and he's just like, hey, buddy, let me tell you this. Eat shit.

Fuck off. There's the door. Bye. Vote for someone else. Fuck you. That is what Democrats have done basically for everyone's living existence. Listening to this and even their parents is, what are you going to do? It's us.

It's up me or the other guy. But because his brain has now turned into cottage cheese, he just realized in a primary they have multiple options. He's using the shit you're supposed to use on them once you've got the nomination. That's what he told them to eat shit. He could not be more... It's just somewhere deep down inside of you. He can't help but express like the idea is just like, don't vote for me.

Fuck you. I would rather... I'm offering you nothing. Why would you vote for me? Because he is the avatar of Democrat brain. The Democrat brain is one that from an elected official's perspective hates and is absolutely disgusted with and treats with nothing but contempt his Democratic voter base. They're pigs.

They're little stupid piggies. Donald Emmanuel basically let this slip when he was, he literally called them the R word and you should always dom them and remind them that you were the only thing standing between them and Armageddon. But you love Republican voters and Republicans. That's why he'll spend an hour in a speech talking about how he knows good Republicans and there's good Republicans out there. Your neighbors who are Republicans, they don't really like this Trump guy, do they?

And then somebody says, hey, maybe don't cook the earth. He's like, fuck you. Suck my fucking dick. I just like, and that, and for that reason alone is why when you look at like, like polls and shit, why the age gap between in the Democratic party right now is so profound in that like voters under the age of 40, like prefer Bernie Sanders by an astronomical number. Biden's in single digits. And single did 7%, 7% and then like it's slightly less dramatic over 60, but the gap is huge

between Biden and Sanders huge. And that was played, we saw Biden event today, we'll talk about it later, but one thing we can't say is that that crowd, it looked like the day room of a restaurant. I said it already, but like I'll say it again, all I could think of leaving that event was just the very beginning scene of the Irishman. That's what it felt like, but looking at, but look by the way, and also the crowd was like 50 to 60 people at most. At most.

Yeah. But looking at Bernie's opposition right now, it's pretty clear that Pete who only polls well in Iowa and New Hampshire and has the strongest organization, really the only organization to speak of anywhere in Iowa and New Hampshire has to deliver in those two states, his national polling numbers are single digits across the board. And for him to continue to satisfy his backers and be able to make it, even just make it to Super Tuesday where he has no organization, he's not running any ads or anything like that, he needs a win or a close second in Iowa or New Hampshire.

And even that's not really enough of a springboard for him, I don't think to propel him to the nomination, but just to continue, he has to do better than he's polling right now. Elizabeth Warren, really the similar situation. She probably, you know, she's been in the race longer and has a bigger profile. She probably has some kind of organization, you know, in some Super Tuesday states. But you know, if she's getting like fourth in Iowa or fourth in New Hampshire, both of which are very, very, very possible right now. I think she would hope for a comeback in Nevada where, you know, she's been, she's got like

Harry Reid people there and, you know, she looked like a strong contender earlier in the year in that state. But if she eats it there too, like is, is, especially if she's like losing to Tom Steyer. She might lose to Tom Steyer here, honestly. It's very hard to see her fighting on after that, especially when this would put her at risk of losing her home state, which votes on Super Tuesday, which would be uniquely humiliating. Yeah.

That's what Kamala Harris dropped out to avoid. Tom Steyer is kind of in the inverse situation because he also has enough money to just stay in and run a vanity campaign through all 50 states. So right now, nobody really paid any attention to him and he's kind of sneaking up there in the polls in the early state. I don't think to the degree that he could win any of them, but he would, he would want to come out of the, these first four states and say, okay, look, I'm a, I'm a real candidate. I'm, I'm an actual man.

I would say this. I think that there is actually a stance that Steyer could finish third here in Iowa. But if that happened, the story I think would not be Tom Steyer surging, it would be holy shit. Elizabeth Warren got beat by Tom Steyer. And so I don't think it would be a springboard. I think it's a springboard in the sense that he also thinks he's playing the long game. And I think he, he wants to be one of the last people standing against Bernie.

Because again, we anticipate right now, at least I anticipate right now, Bernie winning Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada and New Hampshire, I think by a very healthy margin, not sure what Iowa would look like right now really depends what happens with the other candidates. And essentially what, you know, Bloomberg, Biden and Steyer, who are the most likely people right now to be able to stay through this entire primary process to the very end. I think they're all generally thinking, okay, once those two other guys get knocked out, it'll just be me and Bernie. And I'll beat that guy because he's a socialist and I'm not.

And I think at Biden's case, he has to win something here, or else the invincibility, the idea that, you know, he could be the inevitable nominee, that, you know, he's the best position, he's the same choice, the best position to be Trump. I think that aura of invincibility will be dispelled. And voters who have otherwise just had him as the default option will start looking for someone else, especially because, you know, his support base, it's not people who like his policies. Yeah.

It's people who think, okay, America probably wants something like that. He seems like the kind of president who would be in, you know, a CBS drama. Risk averse people who want to follow someone who they think could be Trump because that's what they care about more than anything. And that means that they go with who looks like a winner. And going into the next, I swear to God, the first round of, like, next round, he is gonna be the winner. He's gonna be that, the guy who looks like an actual popular winning guy who could take

on Trump. Yeah. And I, if, you know, if, if, if he comes from behind, if he comes back to, to win some of the early States, you know, I think his case would remain credible going into Super Tuesday and further afield. But if he's losing, I think that would be the beginning of the end for his campaign. And that he could struggle on, I think, you know, he, I think, even if he lost in his firewall of South Carolina, I think if he lost all four early States, I think he would,

you know, stay in the race. I think he would anticipate staying through Super Tuesday to the next round of contests. But I think it would just be that much harder. I think he would start to shed a lot of his support. He would shed a lot of his wealthy backers and I think he would just have to struggle on. And I think at that point he would, he would be in Bloomberg's mode and think, okay, well, this is just a delicate collection contest.

I just have to get to Milwaukee. Bloomberg's case, as we know, is let, you know, let them fight it out in the four early States, blanket the airwaves and hope that out of the early States, Bernie's the only one left standing, which is very, very unlikely to be the case for the reasons that I just said. I think that going into Super Tuesday, I think it will be Bernie versus Biden versus Bloomberg possibly versus Steyer, depending on how much, you know, of his children's money he wants to spend here.

Guys, there's, there was a poll, I know we don't want to talk about polls, but there was a poll of California that came out today that had Bernie, not at Bernie at 30% and more importantly had the second place finisher, Elizabeth Warren at 16%. That is one point above the 15% cutoff for delegates. If that bowl, and this is before Bernie is won any primaries or caucuses, if you're going into Super Tuesday, and this is not, and this is something we can trust is like a baseline. And you go to Super Tuesday with Bernie on a hot streak. If that's the lay of the land, Bernie has a chance to take every delegate in California.

And if he also is right now, apparently in a, basically a tie with Biden in Texas. Once again, imagine Texas after four straight Bernie victories, but you win Texas and every delegate in California, I honestly don't think it matters what happens in any other state. All right. That's, so that's the logic. You just say it and you get, that's the logic of the Bernie campaign right now is that the momentum from winning three out of four, even four out of four of the early states, it just becomes so overwhelming going into Super Tuesday, where by the end of the night on Super Tuesday,

38% of pledge delegates will have been allocated. And we know Bernie has an exceptional organization in California in many of the Super Tuesday states. Many of them are states that he won by huge margins last time around in 2016. At that point, you have to think a lot of primary voters will see the guy with the momentum, the guy who they like, by the way, as an 80% favorability rating and say, okay, it looks like the contest over. Let's just vote for this guy and get it over with.

I like Bernie, but can he win? Is America ready? Is this realistic? He just kicked the shit out of everybody for a month. Fucking straight. Guys, guys, guys, no, I'm getting, I'm getting, I'm getting two horned up. I'm getting two horned up. Give me some bad news. Make me, honestly, make me feel bad now. I need to come down.

He needs to come down. He needs to come down. Okay. So the idea is, give me the worst case scenario. The idea is, by the end of Super Tuesday, he's built up such a big pledge delegate. It doesn't matter if it becomes a one-on-one and there's like $500 billion in negative attack ads for a stop Bernie movement because that lead will have been, you know, that lead he's accrued will have been so strong that he will start to look like the presumptive

nominee at that point, much in a similar way that Hillary Clinton accrued such a strong lead by the middle of the primaries that it didn't really matter that much if Bernie was, you know, pulling out some big victories, which he did in places like Michigan and Wisconsin. Yes. Okay. That's the best case scenario where he accrues so many delegates that it will be impossible. Even Bloomberg with $50 billion, it literally will not matter because he will be the nominee

on the first vote. If Bernie really does become the presumptive nominee, there's actually a huge danger in Bloomberg. If he's still running as a Democrat, going hard negatively against the guy who is now the presumptive nominee, I mean, the Democrats do care about that shit. Like the idea of inner part, they hate the idea of going after someone who they think is going to be the one that they're really, they would make an exception for fucking Sanders. I think though, I think I'm talking about like non 8% psychopaths.

Okay. I'm saying that a lot of people who maybe had mild dislike of Bernie because, you know, he's stayed in too long. I think that that that what they actually are serious in that because they want Democrats to win, they don't want criticism of Democrats, especially they wanted to be a coronation. Exactly. And so a significant chunk, I think, of people who might be amenable to the negative stuff is like, you know, I didn't like him either, but this is it.

It would really just be the people who are drawing a salary from their connection to the Democratic establishment, who is still running this out. The best case scenario for Bernie. It's super Tuesday. I'm getting the worst case. I'm too fucking high. Let me just let me just give you that. Let me just finally just give you the best case, which is that Biden hobbles along.

Bloomberg insists on spending, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars. Maybe Tom Steyer is in the mix too, just still spending money for whatever he just hang out and make friends. You know, this is vacation for him. This is like a single screws and Bernie has just accrued so much momentum is just such a lead in the national polling that it doesn't really matter. And he just triumphs over divided opposition. The worst case scenario, I think, would be now that we know that we know that Bloomberg

stated intention is I'm going to spend all the money and I'm going to be there no matter what fucking happens. You know, he's got a plan and he's going to stick to it. The worst case is probably Bloomberg becomes the head of a stop Bernie movement after super Tuesday and it becomes a 1v1 contest where like all of the the the anti Bernie holdouts coalesce around him. And also, he's also buying every mayor in the country. Yes, he has.

He has been for years. He has been spending so much money on what are basically legalized bribes to every democratic politician in this country. Beto O'Rourke showed up at a Bloomberg event last night, according to him, Stacey Abrams has not endorsed him, but has done events with, you know, he's just got the endorsements. She's took his money. Just got the endorsements of the mayors of DC and San Francisco and is about to get it. What it's looking like is going to get it from Chicago as well.

I think I honestly good. This is the niacin I need because that's what I'm saying is we need to be ready for this shit because it's definitely going to happen. They cannot do it through delegates. They cannot do it on a first ballot. It would have to be a coup at the convention. Can you explain what that would mean? Yeah, what it would mean is you have your first ballot and no one gets to the requisite

number. That means you got to vote again. Once the voting begins on the second ballot, because of the deal that Bernie struck with the DNC after 2016, the superdelegates, i.e. delegates who are allowed into the convention as in their status as later big weeks in the party, union leaders and stuff or elected officials, they work. They are called superdelegates because previously to this year after the McGovern reforms before until from 72 to now, they could vote in the first ballot for whoever they wanted, which

is why when Hillary and Bernie ran against each other, they would have like the delegate totals on the pictures on the newspaper. Even before the votes started, they would always have her up to 100 because they already gave her announced, endorsed a superdog, which is of course stupid and propaganda, but whatever. That was one thing that was always over the head of Bernie in 2016 is those superdelegates were already built into Clinton's numbers, even though nobody, they're not from any caucuses or primaries. So, if there's a second ballot in Milwaukee, those superdelegates, according to the new

rules, can vote. They will overwhelmingly vote for a predetermined and coordinated person who would, in order to make it look not as terrible as possible, most likely be the second highest delegate holder, which in this scenario would be Bloomberg. Okay. So, that, every, like, you know, the anti-Bernie movement, you're talking about the entire Democratic Party, like the entire Democratic Party, the entire media, and like let's be honest, really the owners of this country overall, looking at what his movement represents,

and like that, you know, he takes seriously the shit he says. Even if they're going to, even if they can stop him from doing all the things he wants to do politically in Congress or the Supreme Court or whatever, just the idea of someone who actually believes what he says about taking away their wealth and power, that they are against him. And the way they're going to try to stop him, like their ultimate failsafe is Bloomberg, and it is to set up a second vote at a convention where he would be the guy, and then that would, it would split the party in two and stop him from being the nominee.

So that is the one thing that militates against us have. I think the main thing that militates against us happens, I really do think Bernie's going to be going to get the delegates. He will have enough for it not to matter, but if it does matter, the thing that might stay their hand is that if they do this, it will, as you said, split the party, it will guarantee a loss to Trump, and some third party person getting like 10 to 15 percent of the vote, maybe Tulsi Gabbard, and they would have to be willing to allow that to happen.

And they might. They might decide it's worth it, but they might chicken out, because these are Democrats who are talking. By the way, though, if they do do that, it is everyone, certainly my and anyone who listens to this show, your responsibility to not vote or vote for the third party in that election. Absolutely. No, the Democrats must be boycotting completely.

And this is the thing we were thinking about, like the other night, like if they do that, this is the nightmare scenario that I'm talking about, which is a real possibility as we've just discussed, right? It's almost win-win. Absolutely. Because at that point, like the entire point of this show, and like we really feel being here in Iowa, it is the culmination of a long time on this show. A long march.

Then we got started at this exact point, and at the 2016 election, Bernie or bust, Bernie or die. And we've been that way ever since, and we've never ever raved that. And what that means is, like either the Democratic Party can, through a popular Democratic movement, then be taken over, defeated entirely, taken over, and brought to unity on our terms. That's sort of the bend the knee comment was about, that there is no unity with these people or cooperation with them until they are defeated. Yes.

No unity without fielding. Exactly. And like, if we can do that, then like we have a huge opportunity to change this country. If they choose the other option, which is to split the party, then they must be, it should be destroyed. Well, that's going to destroy it. It'll become the wigs, and they will lose that fight, and that's good. That is a step forward.

Either way, Bernie winning or the party breaking in half is a step forward, is a progressive step. Worth supporting. And what I get excited about is, because when I think this through, those are the two most likely options I can imagine. This is why a lot of liberals and like people with Democrat brain get so angry about Bernie, and they always say, oh, he's not a Democrat. Sometimes like, I think he hates our party more than them, or like, he just wants to

destroy the Democratic Party. I know Bernie or his people would never admit to this, but the reason this movement is so important is because it is a gun aimed at the heart of the Democratic Party. And it is a hostage situation, and either they're going to allow us to take over the direction of this party, or it will be destroyed, and we will destroy it. And with a lot of actually ultra-lefts in this addition to smug centralists will say is, you say that, but I guarantee you that if that happens, Bernie will endorse Bloomberg. And you know what?

I bet he would. He would refuse to head a third-party ticket. But guess what? At that point, once they steal it for Bernie, God, I love him like nobody in the world, but his time is over. He is no longer relevant. Bernie is, he's Moses. He didn't get us to the promised land, he got us to the precipice that we have to, we

have to find it, but his point, he will have been done. We will spend 40 years in the desert, but like, yeah, we have been delivered from bondage. We'll take it from you, buddy. Take a rest, for God's sake. To extend this biblical allegory, I was thinking about like in the terms of the Democrat brain that you've talked about and this stark generational gap in the Democratic Party between the Olds and anyone who's under the age of 40. If you've been a Democrat that long, like you have known nothing, but just punishment,

discipline, and submission, the old rumsot of me in the lash, that's it. That's it. And like you were just, you're so... You adopted the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party, I was born in with bold advice. All you know is just like the, just cringing subservience, which is like, you just negotiate to just get a little better treatment. Yep.

And I was thinking like... A few more gruel cups in your fucking pen. And like, I was thinking about the terms of like a World War II POW movement. We're like, Bernie and this whole young generation is like the cocky alpha Steve McQueen, like a hotshot American officer. Yeah. It's like, you know, first gets in the camp and it's just like, okay, we got to organize to break bust out.

We're doing the great escape and then like, you know, all the officers that have been there for years now, the British guys who are just like, been like, we've lost three guys already trying to break out. Just any attempt will all be punished. Like we just have to have good relations with the commandant, you know? Alec Guinness and fucking Bridge on the River Kwai. We got to finish this bridge. Yeah.

Yeah. It's so crucial. We got to finish this bridge to the 21st century. We've got to give all glory to Emperor Hirohito. You'll see how the British bridge, even one that aids the Japanese war effort is superior to that. We've done many. Japanese person.

Yeah. No, that's the Democrat brain mentality. You know, it's just like they, it's, it's, it's learned helplessness. Yeah. Yeah. The Gimp. The Gimp box. Yeah.

They just don't want to get sent to the hole again. Yeah. Also, keep this in mind. I really do think that if after Super Tuesday, there's only two candidates left. It's Bernie and Bloomberg and Bloomberg says, I'm going to spend half a billion dollars on negative attack ads and all this shit. I think could Bloomberg, you know, win some delegates and buy some contest? Sure.

Yeah. But I, I think he would, he would lose to Bernie. I think midway through that process, Bernie would accrue a majority of pledge delegates simply because Bloomberg has no constituency within the Democratic Party. And the, as we know from Bernie's favorability ratings, there aren't enough people who are no Bernie, you know, at all period who would rally around Bloomberg. No one's ever going to say, Hey, did you hear about this Bloomberg guy? Pretty exciting.

No, you would, you would, you would vote for him because you got a picture of a corn cob in your Twitter mentions. Like you're, there's something wrong with you or you're just like one of the members of the 15% stire quotient of people who just vote on whatever's advertised and commercial breaks during wheel of fortune. Yeah. You know, I usually, I usually write in a Jenny Jones, but this year I'm going with Tom Steyer.

Actually, you know what, let's just talk about Bloomberg for a second. Okay. I mean, I know you saw the shit of him just like grabbing dogs faces to grab us now. It's like, he, when he meets a dog and there are two separate photos of this, when he meets an encounter as a dog, he like grabs its upper jaw, what is it when his mouth's up and like shakes it like it's a hand, like a handshake. So we were that like violates some like deep evolution there, like evolution based human behavior in that just approaching a strange dog and putting your hand in its mouth.

This is literally like, this is the race memory of how we domesticated wolves is like, they come down to smell the meat of the campfire and you're a first, you grab your spear, but then you see that they're not, their ears aren't down and then you just reach a hand out on top or down below to smell, to smell, to show you're not at that. That is like ingrained. That is like primal human brain. That's how we survive. Fuck it.

Bloomberg. Hello. I'll put my head directly in your mouth. Oh yeah. I've just been eating these bacon bits. Let me, let me put my head directly into your mouth. Alien. Not.

So again, we've, I think we've established using facts and logic, but what's a Bloomberg nomination for the Democratic Party would guarantee, guarantee a Trump victory. Not like that. Wait, wait, wait. It's like, not only that, imagine a Trump-Bloomberg matchup. The contrast between the two of them is so grotesque and profound, but here's the thing. Bloomberg, I may win, I would imagine New York and California maybe. Probably both of those states, maybe one or two other, but it would, the map after that

election would look so fucking red, it would just be the absolute solidification of the Democratic Party as a thoroughly rump minority party. Yes. A party of urban. It has no national cachet whatsoever. Of upper middle class urban sophisticates. Yeah. I think that would put states like New Jersey in play if Bloomberg were the nominee.

And also something that, you know, no one's really talked about yet because no one's really addressing the Bloomberg threat is that in many ways Bloomberg would be an objectively worse president than Trump. Because Bloomberg, the thing, one thing about Trump is, you know, he's lazy and stupid, which means that, okay, it's dysfunctional. And you know, occasionally you get like an actual white supremacist like Stephen Miller in there who has his own like, you know, pet, you know, fucking, you know, project. Yeah.

Yeah. I got a few notes I've been working on, you know, a couple notebooks I can show you. But otherwise it's just the minutes of the onesie conference. Otherwise, it's the only effective person has been Mitch McConnell in all these years. Bloomberg, as president, we know that he is an efficiency psychotic. And he has a definite agenda, which is militarizing every fucking police department. Could you imagine what the war on drugs would look like under Michael Bloomberg? It would go for, it would not only would they not legalize weed and maybe psychedelics

or whatever under a Bernie or whatever, they would actually add shit to schedule one like caffeine. High fructose. Demolition man. Demolition man. Yes. It would be demolition man. You have to.

There would be a mandatory urine test to ride the bus. Yes. No. Every, every, every element of your life would be means tested and drug tested. Oh, and he would cut that fucking deal. Obama wanted to cut with Boehner. Yeah. Oh God.

Say goodbye to Social Security and Medicare. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Say goodbye to retirement. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Your, your mother's food. No. Oh, that'll be going away. I'm afraid she has, it's not quite efficient enough. My mother shall not be eating. You heard this shit that one of the plans, I, I, this is real. I just, I don't have time to look for it, but one of the clans that I think one of the either one of the parties, it's a Democrat thing.

It was a plan for how to replace social security, how to reform social security. I think it was a Simpsons bowls thing. Let's say it was a Simpsons bowls thing and it was making it a mixture of like a public pension, like privatized stuff and also wages in the form of like micro payment. So basically the theory is replace social security with, uh, with, with like, uh, a reduced, a reduced public, a reduced amount of money, like some stock that you can't really, you know, that's going to go up or down and then like working for a mechanical turk in a nursing home, clicking on McDonald's is, uh, Amazon all day.

Every Ford gruel, every senior citizen will have to put a cash.me in the bio. Yes. Venmo is open. Everyone will be. Everyone will be. All right. Good. Good.

Okay. Dude, this is good. Bad vibes. I want to come down now. Bad vibes. This is really honestly what I'm more used to. No, no, no. I'm like, we were.

Hello, darkness. My old friend. We like, we, I, we see the promised land, but no, it's not real yet. It's not real. It's over. We don't want to walk. Yes. We don't want to walk into an ambush.

I need to know. I need to confront the dark world. But here's the thing. This is the flip side of the Bloomberg disaster of a general election where he would get rinsed. It is this. If Bernie gets the nomination, it will be in the interest of that party that he just defeated for him to lose the general the way and will, will the Democratic party sabotage Bernie, the way that the labor movement in the form of the AFL CIO, George Meany sabotaged George

McGovern in 1972. And if, and, and are they able to do it to such an extent that even though I think we're all in agreement that Bernie would rinse Trump in an election, could they use, do they have enough levers of power to sabotage and make sure Trump gets a second term? Which is their preferred outcome in that scenario? No, I don't think so. You don't think they can do it? My instinct is no.

Okay. I mean, we could, we could walk it out. Here's the thing though. We could talk this out in the future. That's relevant. They will try to do that. Yes. They will do that.

No, it's really just, the question is, will they do it? They will obstruct him. They will not cooperate. The question is, how far will they go? Right. How far can they go far enough? I think, I think there will be some very visible never Bernie types, but I run by like Howard Schultz or something.

I mean, possibly. That's up to Howard Schultz is the thing. And I think there will be some people who say, you know, oh, of course I endorse Bernie. I think like, like Barack Obama would endorse Bernie, but like behind the scenes, I think they would react more within difference than with, you know, like active, like, okay, how are we going to take this guy down? I think, I think as well, you would not see in a never Bernie movement that would come close to the never Trump movement in the Republican Party in 2016, when a whole host of Republican

elected officials like openly said, no, I'm not voting for him. I don't support him. I think that virtually all Democratic elected officials will endorse Bernie. So take, you know, take from that what you will, but what about this? You were talking about how the Bloomberg strategy would involve him falling back to the later states and then just blitzing Bernie with a negative campaign. Essentially. Yeah.

But wouldn't, couldn't that in effect serve as poisoning the wealth for Bernie, even if he is able to be Bloomberg? It might. I mean, it depends what his message is. So like, here's what's actually harrowing about the Bloomberg campaign is that it is the most efficient campaign that I've probably ever seen. Like it is like, imagine if Hillary with her billion dollars did not fuck up. Imagine if she didn't have a bunch of, you know, rubes running the show.

Like she's actually had like, we can afford the best, right? He has purchased the best like total on the, you know, completely on the ball psychotics and like look at his social media operation. It's the slick social media operation that we're all, you know, we all roll our eyes at, but you know, it's, it's what people get paid a lot of money to do is to make Cheetos woke. Like that. It's like that kind of shit.

Heckin' Pupper ad was to us disgusting monsters and this cynical attempt to make him look like a human being. It's like, you know, you know how the people, they used animals in Terminator that these dogs to bark and see if it was really a Terminator. Wolfie's fine. Yeah. We'll prove that he's a human because the dogs don't attack him when he comes on screen. And we, but it's like, Hey, people like heckin' woofers.

Maybe they like that. I don't know. That's exactly what it is. A cynical attempt to make Michael Bloomberg seem like a human being. And it's honestly, like this will be an interesting test case, whether like the traditional form of campaigning can beat what is essentially Bernie Sanders is, is our revolution strategy. Yeah. Well, we're going to find out a lot of stuff at the very near future.

The future is happening more and more every day. But just so, so to wheel back to your, to your original question, Will, I, the worst case scenario is actually that Bernie loses Iowa and New Hampshire. That is the worst case right now. That would be bad. The expectations are too high. And again, like I said, of the last six polls, your credible polls out of Iowa, Bernie leads in three, Biden leads in one.

He's tied with Biden in two. And the thing that keeps nagging at me about Iowa specifically is that between them, Andrew Yang and Tulsi Gabber grab in the neighborhood of 10% between the two of them, which of course means in Iowa, when they go to the caucus, there's no, there's very few precincts where either one of them is going to be at the threshold to get delegates or to go, which means they're going to go somewhere else. And I kind of think it, it seems to me that their next pick with that would be Bernie. Obviously.

Well, that would only be the case if take Yang, for example, if his level support say out of 5%, 8% or whatever it is, if that's evenly distributed around the state, which it is certainly not, because we know his supporters tend to be very, very young, i.e. college students. Yeah. Like in a, like in Iowa city and stuff, that's probably where they mostly are. That's where the university is, right? There's some universities there.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I want to send the message to people that, no, this isn't a wait and see situation. This is a, do you have a future or not situation and you can make an active, you can make a difference. You can make a difference. And we know from going around and just, we've just been here for a couple nights so far. And yes, we spent much of our time in Perkins, you know, having business strategy, breakfast

meals. You know, all hours of the day, you could get a breakfast meal at Perkins. Get a pie. You can get pie. It's always something fresher, though, at Perkins. It's just like lathered in this sort of oil butter, you know, it makes eating much more efficient here. It lubricates your throat as you swallow it.

But as we also know, there is about a thousand people who have come from out of state to work full volunteer shifts for Bernie Sanders to Canvas here in Iowa. And we know a lot of them are listeners of this very program. I saw a tweet the other day from someone in a Bernie Field office in Iowa who said someone walked through their door after driving here from Houston and said, I'm here because I heard, because I heard Brie Joy on Chapeau Trap House said that you needed people to come volunteer. Yeah.

I mean, I honestly like, I just want to say, I'll say this. So in my darker moments, I reflect on the fact that caring about politics is a mental illness kind of American politics. What it is is essentially, it is a mad and desperate search for a sense of control. It's to feel like you have some sort of say in what's going to happen, even though deep down in your darkest heart, you know, that's not true. You know that you were totally at the whim of history and fate, machinations of man and beast, and that you have very little to say about where you end up.

And politics is a way to feel like maybe, maybe I can influence it. For the most part, that's what it is. It's a sort of a sick displacement of one sense of helplessness. And that just goes beyond caring about politics, it goes to voting and being involved and everything because it really is an illusion and politics really is beyond us for the most part. It's huge forces, forces like capitalism and that shape things beyond a scale that we could ever even comprehend because we're so small. But I've been trying to fight against this for a year now because I don't want to lose

my way. I don't want to get stars in my eyes, but I cannot get over this feeling even when I'm feeling at my darkest and most pessimistic that this is a moment that is the beginning of a chance to actually get closer to putting your hand somewhere close to the levers of destiny. Not with this election, not with this primary, not even with Bernie getting in. That's just the opening of the door. You have to step through and you have to walk.

But I really feel like that if we have an ability as a species to come together in a common recognition of humanity, that this is maybe our last chance to do it. But we might actually be able to. I have nothing left to say. I'm going to go to the bathroom and wash my face. I'm not crying. Damn it. Will, what do you say about J.O.'s recording?

Supposed to get your errands done before we meet. But as well, we mentioned, we shout out the listeners who have made the Bernie journey. Absolutely. The shooters. Many of whom have reached out to us, which we normally frown upon. Absolutely. No, thank you. With messages of warm encouragement.

This is not to shame everyone else who did not make the Bernie journey, but rather to say that there are many forms of participation you can engage in that are absolutely critical right now. Because again, it's not just Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, it's also the Super Tuesday States, where we are just over a month away from where they still need people to text bank and to make phone calls. And as well, keep this in mind, the Bernie campaign set a goal for the month of January to make 5 million phone calls over the month.

And they blew past that goal about two weeks ago. Yeah, they raised it to 10 and they might get there. What is so humanizing to me is the idea that we're all really in this one together, that this is like one big fight where everyone is marching in the same army towards a common cause and it's a level of organization that I don't think I've seen in my lifetime. There have been movements such as the anti-war movement for instance, moments like the Obama campaign which had a lot of enthusiasm from the left. But I just don't think anything really compares to this, to the shared sense of humanity I

feel for everyone else who is like, yeah, I get it, we're on the same page. And this is coming as someone who has spent his entire adult life doing what math does, which is watch the TV and get mad, which any sane person would do, is get mad. And it's a very alienating, isolating experience to think that, well, I'm just a crank. Nobody else in the world shares my views except maybe a handful of other cranks. Nobody else who would want to abolish capital, nobody else who sees the people in charge, sees the oligarchs and things like these, they should be pelted when they walk through the street.

Like we need to get rid of them. Yes, they are the fucking problem. And to see like literally thousands, tens, hundreds of thousands of people, as we've seen for just the number of people who have even volunteered or donated to Bernie at all, not only share these views, but millions of people who not only just agree with that perspective now by virtue of the fact they support Bernie Sanders and like what he's saying, but are being converted by the day, that is, I think, the only cure for this awful spectacle-induced alienation in which we live.

Yes. I just, I don't have anything else to say other than what Matt and Virgil just said, that I can really even put into words right now. I just feel that like, echo everything they said and just feel that like right now at this moment, the people working for Bernie, who support him, are the best of my generation. They're the best around, nothing's ever gonna keep them down. Yeah. I don't know what else to say.

And I just, I feel like, well, yeah, we're all a part of it and we can do something. I got something to say. Let's get this bread. Let's get this fucking bread. On Earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one, but the Union makes us strong. Solidarity forever, Solidarity forever, Solidarity forever, For the Union makes us strong. It is we who plow the prairies, built the cities where they trade, dug the mines and built the workshops,

Endless miles of railroad laid. Now we stand out cast and starving, mid the wonders we have made, but the Union makes us strong. Solidarity forever, Solidarity forever, Solidarity forever, For the Union makes us strong.