Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 939: Bravely Hiding in a Catering Truck

Episode Date: September 14, 2026

Navy and USS Lincoln's Problems Are Tied to Attacks on U.S. Base Early in War - The New York Times Trump says Iran war will end after the midterms and gas prices will fall | CNN Politics Trump promises $5,000 to every US adult if Republicans win midterms | AP News At 9/11 Tribute, Trump Claims Firefighters Carried Him Away From Unstable Building After Attacks - The New York Times Majority of Canadians now see U.S. as an enemy, and Trump is the reason: poll Trump shares map that renames New Mexico as 'New America' | CNN Politics A Catering Truck and a Decoy Plane: How Trump's Great Escape Unfolded Far-right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos deported after U.S. immigration arrest, officials say - CBS News

This episode of Cognitive Dissinence is brought to you by our patrons. You fucking rock. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. According live from Glory Hole Studios in Chicago and beyond, this is Cognitive Dissence. Every episode to be blast anyone who gets in our way. We bring critical thinking, skepticism, and irreverence. to any topic that makes the news

makes it big or makes us mad. It's skeptical. It's political. And there is no welcome at. Today is Friday, September 11th, Cecil, the 25th anniversary of September 11th. Hashtag, you can't forget. I did.

I already forgot. You're literally hashtag not allowed. Cicel, hashtag not allowed. Did you see that they were getting, that Trump got mad and had to give his own speech somewhere else because they wouldn't let him at the 9-11 memorial? I didn't know that. I knew he gave like a rambling

60 fucking five hours speech about everyone's gonna get $5,000. He's giving one today. He's giving one today. Today he wanted to give one about 9-11 and they wouldn't let him do it at the at the memorial. And he's the only president

who's not going to be there. All the other alive presidents will be there. He's not going to be there. He's petulantly stomping his foot because they won't let him be there. They won't let him turn it into a fucking a political rally. So, yeah.

Awesome. But it's because of him that I forgot, that's why. All right. So I wanted a couple of things. Obviously, I'm going to give everybody a quick update. I wanted to start this on. I was trying to think about how I wanted to start this today, because obviously I've been gone for a long time.

And the only way to start this is with a note of intense gratitude and appreciation. And I really want to make sure that that's that's the tone here because that's 99% of everything that I feel. Cecil absolutely 100% came to my rescue here when I got hurt and stood up and was an unbelievably good friend. People in our community expressed just like an overwhelming amount of real love and support and appreciation. Yeah, I saw that was really great. Yeah, I saw it was awesome. And I just, I think it's, when I was thinking about this, I was like, I want to talk a little bit about that piece of it because it's such a big deal. It's not just well wishes. It's not. It's not just well wishes. Like to some degree like this show has a financial impact on our lives. And, you know, people in our community came and guessed it on this show so that shows could go out while I was gone. And they did that just to be kind. right, that's like a gift of their time for us, for me. You know, like, and you went through a lot of effort and for me personally.

And then, you know, with this show, it is a professional venture. And like, there's just been this overwhelming amount of support. And people have sent us emails and patron messages and messages, you know, on the fans page. And when you look at that, it's so clear. that this show has meant so much to so many people. Yeah, yeah, you could see that. And I appreciate that very much. And I think what I want to make sure people understand is how much that means right back to me in the reverse.

I've gotten these messages from people like, hey, I've been listening for 10 years, 12 years, 15 years. You really, as you guys have met an impact and I'm so grateful. But like, this show has changed my whole life. It has changed my whole life. And like to tell you guys how great. grateful I am for you and to be listeners and to be supporters and to like come and rally and be supportive when we needed it and to continue to be a listener even if we miss a show here or there. So we've when I was thinking of it. So when I was thinking through this, I just, I just think

I think what I want to let everybody know is that like I really appreciate that this show has meant so much to you guys. But I promise you it means more to me. All right. So I just want to give you guys like an actual it's so I I got hurt randomly because my body is an old piece of shit that just decided it was going to just be hurt

it's just the craziest experience like I oh yeah like I just want to like here's what I did wrong I woke up and was old that is the thing I did rough I literally just woke up and I was like oh I'm broken now I should call an ambulance

I don't even know why you I don't even know why your body's like how dare you sir and it was fucking insane it was absolutely insane. Like, it was, it was crazy. And, like, I had, I have a problem in my lower back, my lumbar spine. And I've had a problem down there before. I've had surgery down there before in 2019. So, like, I immediately knew that I was in some trouble. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, like, if you've had nerve pain, I was trying to explain this to somebody the other day. Like, it's like, nerve pain is different in the same way that, like, sweet is a taste and salty as a taste, right?

They're both tastes, but they've, you can just immediately, you just know the difference. Like, You know the difference. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is as distinct as sweet versus salty. It's like, sure. There is a really distinct characteristic to nerve pain. And the nerve pain for me was very, very, very intense. So I was having a hard time with it.

I needed to get like an ambulance. They got me to the emergency room. And then I had this fucking insane experience, which was like, so I'm in the emergency room and I happen to have a friend of mine who's a doctor at that emergency room. That's part of the reason. A couple of reasons I wanted to go to that hospital. I actually turned away the first ambulance drivers. I was like, get me a different one that takes me to a different

hospital. And they actually did that for me. It was kind of great. So like I'm there and like I actually texted my friend who works in the yard. I'm like, hey, are you working at night? Hopefully I'm gone, because it's early in the morning. Like, hopefully I'm gone. If you're not, stop by, if you stop by and say, hey, I'm in your ER, you know. And so later that evening, they end up taking some pictures and MRIs and what have you. And they admit me into the hospital because I need some pain management. And there's, as soon as they admit me into the hospital, like, everybody gets real excited because they took some pictures. And I've got this fucking. tumor in my spine and my thoracic spine. Nobody gives a shit about the like bottom of the barrel,

like all the pain is coming from the lumbar side. That's not exciting to anybody because that's like ug boots, pumpkin spice, basic bitch shit. Like this, they're just like, yeah, we see this a thousand times a day. Hurts like hell for you, but like pretty routine if you're a neurosurgeon, right? But like if you've got a great big giant tumor in your thoracic spine inside your spinal cord, dude, you are the talk of the town. My buddy Scott is like texting me at two in the morning. He's calling people at home. He's sending me text messages like, ugh, your spine, ugh.

And I'm like, dude, that's not. Jesus Christ, dude. It was crazy. So like, but he's like, he's literally waking people up at home and they're coming in and they're doing all these tests and everything. And so, like, I end up in the hospital for a total of 12 days, set me home after surgery, went back for two. So I was in a hospital for 14 total days.

Yeah, yeah. It was a crazy experience. It was an absolutely crazy experience. I had surgery on my lumbar spine. It was a revision of a previous surgery. The recovery's been kind of a lot. Like, I'm not going to lie. Like, this has been a difficult thing to go through for me.

And then I have this tumor we got to figure out. And I don't know anything about it yet. They got together. This is really fucking funny. So they say, got this thing. I'm like, okay, well, what is it? Well, we don't know. Well, we're going to get the tumor board together. They seem excited about it. Like, they all, this is like an intellectual issue for them, right? Like, they're all like, oh, we can get the tumor board together. Okay. Well, we're going to

tell you what it is on Tuesday. Okay. Tuesday rolls around. Can you imagine the only thing I'm wondering is? Yeah. I can't wait to hear from the tumor board about my mystery tumor that you had to put your heads together to figure out what it is. They don't come back to me on Tuesday. Yeah. All day Tuesday. It's all I'm thinking about. It's all my friends and family are asking me about. Hey, would you hear anything? No, I haven't fucking heard shit. Wednesday, just stroll in all casual, like, oh, yeah, how you feeling? I don't care how I'm feeling. I literally don't even care. Bad or I wouldn't be here. And I'm just like, what did you guys figure out? And they're like, yeah, we're not sure. You know, it could be, you know, this stuff over here

on one end of the spectrum, which is like we watch it and we just look at it and you're just an old dog with a weird thing and I'm, you know, or it could be like really bad news. We're not sure. So we'll just get some more pictures of it later. And then we'll see.

You can't narrow it down at all either. Literally, Cecil. So like, it's the widest spectrum of outcomes that you could possibly imagine. Like, yeah, we can't tell you. The emotional roller coaster of this is insane, right? Fucking amazing. And then like, and then like,

Also, when you're in a fair amount of pain and the pain is just kind of constant, my experience of that, I want to tell anyone else, my experience of that is that, like, I'm just emotionally very thin right now. And it's really hard. I'm not an emotionally fit in person, but I am just like, all, everything is just right at the top and I've got no skin across anything. So, like, like, when I feel something, it feels like, like, there's a, there's an intensity to it and an immediacy to it that, like, I can't, like, um,

I don't have any management ability to it. There's no, like, cognitive, like, structure over the top of my emotions right now. I think I'm just exhausted, you know, like, I'm just, and there's just nothing left. Yeah. So then, like, they get together and they're like, yeah, we don't fucking know what it is. We're going to just look at it again, like six weeks. And I'm like, well, the fuck you are, first of all. Like, I'm going to go find somebody else.

Because, like, your tumor board couldn't even come back to me, like, after your meeting, you guys were all just like, well, we don't know. I bet he doesn't want to know either. Like, no, man, like, people want to know. It's, like, the only thing I cared about in that. They just, they just pick up the rug and sweep you under it. And, like, so, like, so guys, so, so I've got this great, like, on my MRI, it looks insane. It's about the size of a roll of dimes.

It's about as long as the space that covers three vertebra on the, so it's not little. Yeah. And, like, they're like, well, it could be, like, a dame. demilinating process, which could be terrible or it could be less terrible. So it could be some kind of demilating process. It could be a lesion, just some generic lesion inside my spinal cord, no real detail on that. And it could be a tumor that ranges from it's been there forever to, you know, it's got to come out and maybe I'll lose my ability to walk. Like it's really like the like the ranges are that wide. Yeah, man. And there's.

They're just so fucking weirdly blasé about it. It was an insane experience. So I have an appointment in October with a guy at Northwestern who's like, the guy. Like we found like who is the actual guy. So you're starting your own tumor board with hookers and blow. That's it, man. Fuck you. Yeah.

Well, and then let me tell you this funny part too. So like you can't just like make an appointment with this guy. It's not you just like pick up the phone and this guy is just like, sure. before they accept the appointment, they review your images. So you request an appointment, then they review your images, then they call you back with whether or not they're okay. I don't know. So then there's this like, like, then there's this experience as a patient where you're like,

well, I only want to go see this guy. I found him. He's the best guy. Like I'm not interested in seeing anybody else. I'm not going to see fucking Joe Local who's all fucking jerking himself off over something he's not going to see next year. I only want to see this guy. But then you like send him your pictures and party is like,

I hope he doesn't want to see me. I hope he says no. And then they call and you get an appointment and you're like relieved because it's the right guy to see. But then you're like, but would it have been better? Actually, if he was like, no, man. I am conflicted. Yes.

The whole thing has been an insane. I just don't know how to tell you guys how insane the roller coaster of this has been. The consistent piece for me, though, has been like I can't even tell you how much. many people showed up for me. My kids showed up for me. My friends showed up for my family showed up for me. Friends drove in like, you know, Cecil doesn't live close. I have other friends that drove several friends that drove over an hour just to pop by. People like sending me food from my work just randomly like I would get a coffee delivered in the morning. Yeah. Yeah, that's nice. Just the outpouring of like real support that I had was just, I mean, honestly, it was just incredible. It was

It's just incredible. That's great. And I just want to say how fortunate I know I am because it's incredibly fortunate. I had a bad experience and I thought like I suffered so little compared to how much so many people in this country suffer when they have the same thing happen. I suffered no financial loss because I had so many people swoop in from this show and others and help carry that water for me. And I didn't even have to ask. It's just done. And I had listeners and support and messages and friends and family. And it is not lost on me, not one day, how lucky I am to have that.

I think about it all the time. Let's talk some talk. This story is from New York Times. Navy and USS Lincoln's problems are tied to attacks on U.S. base early in the war. So like there's all this talk about like, oh, you know, the fucking aircraft carrier. It sucks to suck on an aircraft carrier. It sure sucks to suck though, dude. It sucks to suck.

Did you see those images? Oh, my God. It looks like it looks like you're spending your entire war inside a toilet. Yes. That's what it looks like. It looks like you. There's shit that doesn't work. There's stuff flooding.

They're serving you what looks like a poo all the time. It's the worst. If Woodstock 99 was at war, right? If Woodstock 99 was the Navy, it would be this show. Yeah, man. It looks terrible. It looks terrible. It's fire festival on water.

Yes, that's amazing. People are like, Woodstock 99. What the fuck is wrong with you? You're so old. Jesus, fire festival, though. You old fuck. But like, it's so funny because it's so fucking predictable. Yeah, man.

These ships. right? They are self-contained, but there's a fucking clock that starts running immediately. As soon as you deploy one of these things, the very self-contained nature of that requires that they be logistically supported. So like one of the first things Iran does is it attacks a base that logistically supports these ships. It shatters the ability for that base to provide logistical support. And now that ship, yeah, can it shoot missiles and run airplanes and do all the stuff that it's supposed to do. Sure, but it's a living hell. Yeah. You know, it's a nightmare for our sailors.

Yeah, it's awful for them. And like, this is so predictable. Yes. If you are somebody who studies history, you know one of the ways that you take out a superior force is to attack the supply chain. Like, the reason why big armies in the past have failed is because of supply chain issues. Sometimes that's because there's hubris on the cash. of the people who are attacking. We got plenty of that, right?

We got plenty of that. We got the USS Hubris every fucking day, bro. SS Hubris is out there. There's no supplies, but it's got plenty of testosterone. You can shoot in to everybody. But you got that going for you. Then you also just have just a very long supply chain. The other thing you have to remember is that it's not right next to the United States,

it turns out. And then when you try to lean on your allies, which happened here, we tried to lean on our allies and they wanted, there's a place called Diego Garcia that is not someone who is deported from the United States.

That is a place called Diego Garcia. They wound up, it's a place that Great Britain has and they were like, no, you can't use it initially. Because they were, they didn't want to get involved, man, because this literally was a joint venture between us and Israel.

It wasn't like the whole world isn't, This isn't a world war. This isn't like a whole group of people are going after him. This is genuinely the whims and fickleness of our president that got us in this, mostly. And also, I would also say that he's easily let around. He's easily convinced.

And the people on his, on his staff are easily convinced to do these sorts of things. So it's not like he, it's something that I think he did because he thinks it's right. I think it was, he was easily, easily goaded into something like this. But in any case,

this is a place, like we're out on our own. So you're far away from everything. So there's a multitude of factors that make this a very difficult position for the United States to be in. And also, the other big elephant in the room is how easy it is to just take over that straight. Even if you do have an aircraft carrier there, it still didn't help. But you put all those factors together, Tom.

And you have what is essentially a very difficult position, even if you were very competent. Even if you were super competent at your position, it would be a hard place to be. And we know they're not. So, of course, it's a fucking shit show. Yeah, man. And this is like, what kills me is that there was an assumption that our allies would be, like, helping to supply our ships and all that. But, like, this is the equivalent of, like, starting a bar fight and then turning to your buddy and being like, are you going to help me kick a his ass.

You're going to pull us apart? We didn't even, I got no beef with this guy. Yeah. I don't want to be in this fight. And then getting butt hurt that somebody doesn't jump in and start swinging with you. Like that's not, there is usually, the typical way stuff happens is you establish your allies ahead of time, even if it's clandestinely. And you make sure that you've got some kind of a coalition.

If you're going to ask them for help, it's not like you just like, hey, why didn't anybody show up on Saturday to help me move? You didn't tell us you were moving. We never said we were going to show up and help you move. That's not how this works. It's such a fine. Also, you set the building on fire before you start moving. The reason you're moving is bullshit.

So what a fucking, so like these poor fucking sailors who are just, they're doing their job, they're out there, they've got no, they have no choice in this matter. Yeah. They're getting deployed. They have, they're living in these appalling conditions. And it's just like, yeah, this is the most predictive. predictable shit ever. Yeah, man. Most predictable. And I guarantee that the actual

like ground level, commander level people, the people who are not like making the like big, big, high level, heggseth level dummy decisions. They knew this was going to be a train wreck from the moment they deployed. Tom, you even said that before they even did anything to Iran, there was already plenty of people in our government who said that if we do this, they're going to fucking take the straight of Hormuz and we're fucked. They already knew they were

going to do this. Like, it's not like, there wasn't, you don't need to be some sort of super genius or look into the future. All this stuff is really predictable. It's just that we are stumbling so fast into these things because we're so incompetent the opera levels that, of course, this is going to be a total shit show. And that's what it was. Yeah, like, just to add a yes to end of that, it's because like, just watch what happened

over the last four and a half years in Ukraine and Russia. It seems very evident if you just like have been paying any attention to anything at all. Yeah. That like it's very easy to just make a place dangerous. You don't have to win a whole territory to make a place dangerous. And if you can make a place dangerous, you can make it economically and politically frozen. And so if you're Iran, you know you don't have to actually hold the straight. You just have to scare people so that they won't put their ships through it.

Yeah. That's it. Well, that's a really easy ask because it's actually like at a military level, it's pretty low bar to make something dangerous. There's a hundred ways to do it. And so they're just like, yeah, all we have to do is make it dangerous. We don't have to win a combat operation. I just have to win. I have to make it dangerous for non-combatants to traverse a danger zone. There's nothing easier in 2026 to do for a modern military. We've essentially turned Iran into into Kavanaugh. from home alone and they've put a big pale above above the straight of Hormuz and every time anybody opens it a big fucking pail swings down full in nails and smacks people in the face we've we've created a home alone situation oh my god in the straight of Hormuz and we're the bad guys

like we're the ones we're the two wet bandits or whatever the wet bandits I was trying to remember what they called themselves the fucking wet bandits please let the ships go through Come on at least a few. If you block me, then I... Blok-od, blocker. I thought this was easy-peasy. Block-od. Now, Maca and Melania leave me.

Lock-od. Surrender is beneath me. Block-od, lock. I think soon I get him peachy. Trump says I ran war, war. will end after the midterms. And gas prices will fall. So it's after the midterms.

And gas prices will go down after that, Tom? After the midterms. It's after. Okay, it's after. Yeah, sure. Now, I do think if you're the president. I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today. You've got to admit that if you're the president and all you have is the House and the Senate and the judiciary,

you definitely need to win the midterms in order for you to accomplish your political. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, you don't already have literally that right now. The whole thing. You pretty much have all of it. Yeah. I don't understand people who are like, well, we got to wait till, you know, the midterms in order to accomplish.

Accomplish what? Having the same. If the Republicans were to win, the House and the Senate, what they would have is exactly what they have. It's the same thing right now. Like, in December, they'll be able to do the exact same things they already can't do now. you already have a magic wand. Yes. And you're asking for a new magic wand.

Hey guys, without a magic wand that I have. I can't do the things I can't do. Admittedly, admittedly, even if they won in this upcoming election, even if they do pull it out, what you have is essentially all they can do is budgetary stuff because there's not going to be anything to get past. the filibuster. So you're not going to pass anything in that sense unless it's bipartisan, unless it's something that both sides actively want. And so really genuinely, the thing that they want to do is they want to make sure that they continue to have all the committees that they want to call. They want to be able to staff those in the ways that they want to staff them. They want to run them

how they want to run them because the people who are in charge, they're the heads of those committees and they're the ones who get to decide who comes in, who has to testify, the questions that get asked, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So they want to make sure they keep those levers of power. That's why they want it. It's not to make your life any better. It's to stop it so that what happens is that the things that they've been doing that are wrong don't get brought up on the media.

That's why they want. This is the fear, if you're on the Republican side of the equation, if you're the Trump administration, et cetera, what you are worried. about right now has nothing to do with political goals. It has everything to do with accountability. They do not want to face accountability. And they certainly have the potential if the House, especially, if the House goes to the Democrats, the House will seat a bunch of committees, they will do some investigations. And there's all kinds of crazy bullshit. And they will absolutely make that man's life a living hell. And he knows it. And like all of his fucking idiot ass allies as well.

And it's not like just if the Republicans win, Trump will somehow become competent and and fix the problem that he created in Iran, he's not going to be able to do that after, before, or during the midterms. No. That's not going to happen. But what he's doing is, and there's another story that dovetails very closely with this,

this is Trump promises $5,000 to every U.S. adult if Republicans win the midterms. So again, there's another thing he's trying to do to essentially, and that the third thing they're trying to do is they put on a midterms convention, which is not anything they've ever done before, but they created a convention to try to drum up excitement for the party that they know they're floundering.

They know that they've created a situation in the United States that many people in the United States don't like. It's economically difficult. Nothing's really changed. It just keeps getting worse and worse economically, and they're trying to change that perception by creating some sort of media buzz about all the great things

they're doing and giving stump speeches. Well, none of these things fix any of the real problems. What they are is an enticement for you to vote for them so that they continue fucking up the entire thing. Yeah, $5,000. Nobody with any sense at all believes that they're going to give out $5,000 to $270 million American adults. That's a trillion-plus dollars.

Yeah, it's too much. We don't have an extra trillion. The economy is in terrible condition. our national debt is skyrocketing. The bond market is an absolute chaos. Inflation continues at 3.4% as of this morning. Like, I will say like unemployment is holding it like 4-1, but beyond that, there's like kind of no good news, no good news at all.

Buy a groceries, and everybody understands how bad things are right now. Imagine here, I fucking hate people. Because let's imagine for a moment that he actually gave $5,000. spent a trillion dollars, a trillion dollar stimulus package, which is what this would be, just dumped overnight into the system. Well, there's not all of a sudden an influx of more goods. Everybody gets $5,000. Some small number of those people will use it to pay debts and otherwise save it.

But most of that money will just end up getting spent. We know that because that's how stimulus always works. But there's not more stuff that got created overnight. There's just more demand. There's not more supply, which pushes inflation up, which would, force the Fed to raise rates to halt inflation, which would make everything in your life more expensive than the $5,000 you just got. It's already so expensive to be people right now. It's outrageous. This would be an economic disaster. No one's going to let him do it. It's a pipe dream.

He makes these crazy promises and never delivers on any of them. I'm going to end the war between Russia and Ukraine in the first 24 hours. Really? Yeah. Remember that? I check my fucking watch. That hasn't happened. Remember that? Yeah. Whoa, we obliterated Iran's nuclear mountain or whatever. But now we have to actually invade Iran because we didn't actually obliterate nuclear mountain or whatever. We have to bring the ring back to Morgan.

You got to bring it back. That's the problem. We would just use the Eagles in the first place. You get the ring, but then you're like, I got to bring it back. It's like a whole thing. It's all such bullshit. And it's bullshit. It's not going to happen.

And then also, even if it did happen, it would be an economic calamity. I just want to say that I'll 100% agree with what you're saying. I also just want to point out too that you can't give a stimulus when you are constantly tearing down the structure and economy of our government, right? So through the actions that are solely of the president, we have an economy that is starting to take a, that is taken a giant shit, right? gas, which basically creates a ton of inflation in all other products and a price increase in all the products because of the shipping, that's gone up astronomically. Right. So we've gotten our gas that we ship everything all across this big country.

Suddenly everything suddenly becomes more expensive because you've got to add more because there's more gas money that you've got to spend. There's tariffs on many, many goods. That changes the price. And it's not just like on, you know, your imported. TV or whatever. It's on all kinds of things. You're talking coffee. I mean, you know, like food goods, things like that's on everything. So there's tons of tariff money that is coming in that they have to, that also has to get added in. So you're taking all these things and you're creating this bad

economy, this sort of terrible environment for the economy. And you're saying what I want to do is give you a stimulus. And this is like the opposite of that old adage where it's like teach a person to fish and they get fish for a life. You're like essentially like you're taking their fishing pole, you're breaking it over your knee and then you're smacking them in the face

of the fish and then you walk away. That's what it is. You're clear cut our economy. You've destroyed our economy. A stimulus is temporary. Tearing down the economy is forever, man. Yes. Yes. Yes. And like the

Republicans up until, I don't know, checks watch the day before yesterday have typically been anti-free money for people, right? Sure. Anytime some kid is like, but I would like to eat a food sometimes. The Republicans are like, fuck you, kid.

Eat a bootstrap, you know? And somebody's like, I don't, maybe I shouldn't have to pay $700 a month for diabetes medicine. And the Republicans are like, fuck you, it's $800 a month. Eat shit. I'm going to eject it into your eyeballs and die. And like, no, they don't give a shit.

They don't give a shit. Yeah. This is just plain electioneering. That's all it is. It's so fucking naked and transparent. And it's like, it feels like when Elon Musk was like, I'm randomly giving away a million fucking Willie Wonka tickets or whatever to the first seven voters who turned purple and float into a blueberry or whatever his fucking game was.

Well, and look at the actions that we've seen leading up to this. Now, you and I, both of us, are for government programs, social safety nets. Those are great things we think often that they can provide essential relief to people who need it. Right? You and I are both very pro these things. What a stimulus is is essentially taking good money that we have in the government that can be used for health care, for wide swaths of people. Because when all that money is pulled together and you are, the government, suddenly that money has a lot of buying power in those different places, right?

So just like when you go to the food pantry and you go to them and you say, here's my old boxes of macaroni, you can have those, that's way less impactful than you giving them a little bit of money because they can make your dollar work better for that food bank. That food bank can use your dollar to find the best deal, to collect the most stuff, to get like the stuff on clearance and get more food for the money that you already spent on that macaroni. It's just better in general. Now, I'm not saying don't give macaroni to food banks if you have it because that's good

to do too. But it's, it's, they can use your money better than you can. So the government can do the same thing often when it comes to health care and other things. But what they've done is they've tore those programs apart. They've chopped them down. They've voted a lot of shit. out of existence and we've taken away all that money and then we've said well here's a tiny bit of it and now you can use that that's a bad use it's just a bad use of the money it's not a good

use of the money we it's our money he's not giving us anything we gave it to him and now he's going to give it back to us badly yeah and there's no tariff money he's talking about it like it's like like there's like a magic pool there's no tariff money that's all imaginary that's nothing this this when you were giving that an i was thinking of an analogy like I just had back surgery, right? So, like, the surgeon, when he was done, he stitched me right up, right? So it cuts me open, he stitches me up. Giving $5,000 to everybody versus, like, targeted aid programs,

it'd be like if he was just, like, randomly put the same number of stitches elsewhere in my body, right? Rather than targeting the stitches to where the wound is, right? Because that's what a social program is. It identifies a need, and it seeks to efficiently meet that need. And so we put our resources there. It'd be like if it was like, I don't know, it was like it was 14 stitches. I just put them one in your ear, one across your dick. It's just like fucking random stitches.

And then your toes are bleeding out over here. On 911, they stepped on our heart. They tried to tear our country apart. But we stood strong. And when the dust cleared, they saw the USA. Yes. still here. Together, together, together, together with the glory.

We're together, together, together, together under God. We're together, together, together. We're the USA, USA, USA. Let's talk about fucking this Trump's co-opting of 9-11. This guy has come up with a different version of his own theatrics. I don't even want to say heroics. Because this story, if this was a story I told about myself, I'd be like, that's embarrassing. At 9-11 tribute, Trump adds new claim to his disputed role after attack.

President Trump has long sought to position himself close to the September 11th recovery effort, has made a series of questionable and provocative statements to burnish his political brand. I want to start off by saying that what we know because we have it on tape that he said was, now my buildings are the tallest buildings in New York. That's on fucking tape. He's literally nowhere near it, right? It's not like he's calling and there are rocks falling around him while he's on the phone. He's calling from the safety of a very tall building somewhat nearby.

So it's not like this is he, it's even remotely provable what he said. What shocks the shit out of me is he can say these things. They're obviously untrue. Everyone knows they're untrue. We're not quite sure because of his advanced age, whether or not he believes these things or not. I don't think he does. I think he's saying it because he's one of these guys who will just lie when there's just a convenient lie. We found this with like the Michigan Man of the Year or whatever.

I forgot about the Michigan Man of the Year. Of course there's no such thing. And of course he didn't win it. But it doesn't matter because you could just say it out loud. And even if somebody calls you on it, they don't, there's never any follow up because tomorrow he's going to say that like he was holding the hand of Mother Teresa when she died or whatever.

He's just going to make up another lie so it doesn't, none of this matters. But the thing that makes me crazy is the tiniest fucking misspeak from Biden and people would like rent their garments. They were so upset that he would make some sort of gaff or something or he would say something that was not as cogent as another thing.

This person literally lost. and could also just be having a moment where there's some blatant senility. Who knows, right? We can't test him. All we can do is make him repeat man, woman, person, camera, TV a couple times. But we don't know. But like, if this were Biden, there would be no assumption that it was a joke or whatever. It would automatically be senility.

That is what you would be talking about. But this person who is older than Biden was when he was in office doesn't matter. It doesn't. And there's a weird. stolen valor kind of element, like flavor or characteristic to this, like, tying yourself to 9-11 for personal or political or, like, other kind of, like, self-aggrandizement. Because 9-11, it was like many people viewed it as an act of war, it was a massive domestic terrorist attack. Like, it's part of our national sort of zeitgeist. So to, like, connect yourself to it for these,

like grotesque personal reasons. Yes. Great point. Super stolen Valerie to me. It feels super gross. And I think it feels really gross to a lot of people. But then I also just, let me just read you the story that he told because there's also an element of like, do you think you look good here?

I read this twice, Cecil. And I genuinely was like, why would you say this? It's strange. The United States steel building was creaking, really creaking. And we thought it was going to fall down. The truth is it creaked. lot. It creaked. It still creaks, but it never came down. And I'll never forget two firemen.

We thought it was coming down on top of us. Two firemen, big, strong guys. And I'm not the strongest guy in the world. They grabbed me under the arm and said, got to get out of here. And they literally lifted me up. This is not easy to do. I'm big. They lifted me up and they started running with me. And I said, fellas, I can run myself, but they were amazing.

So his weird origin story that didn't happen that he decided to invent in order to sort of like put himself there was to be like, I in a building New York by and two people carried me away, I don't, I don't even understand what I'm supposed to get from that tale. It feels like, it feels like like reading like a fucking brother's grim story and being like, the moral was what? What? I mean, don't wear mermaid shoes, maybe? I don't know what the story is here. But you're not also, you're also not part of it either.

It'd be like saying, yeah, I know 9-11 happened, but I also had a really bad hang nail that day. That's right. I know. I know. Like, I put myself in harm's way and people had to rescue me that should have other things to do that day. Times have changed. Our kids are getting worse. Should we blame the government or blame society?

Or should we blame the images on TV? No, right. All right. Cisle, two stories, one from CNN. One from National Post. Majority of Canadians now see U.S. as an enemy and Trump is the reason. This is actually partially a reference to the renaming of Lake Ontario to Lake America. That's really annoying because it went from to memorize, to remember the Great Lakes, the new monic was home.

Huron, Ontario, Holmes, Michigan, Erie, and Superior. Now it's what, Hames? That's annoying as shit. That's nothing. Yeah. I guess it would be shame. I guess that's what you would actually reinan-a. So now it works.

It actually now it works. It works great. Shame. There you go. I take it back. We'll just change the order here. Change it to shame. Yeah. And then the stupid son of a bitch from CNN, he tweets out a picture renaming, and he can't

even do this, renaming New Mexico, New America. Yeah. These sorts of like weird insane distraction nonsense sub-de-like, this is, you're bending a spoon, man. Like, there's nothing here. What is this? Who buys this? It's just flooding the zone. It's flooding the zone.

I mean, like, this is literally what Bannon wanted him to do. This has been sort of the thing that he does. He did it a little less frequently in his first presidency, but he did do it quite a bit where there was just these one or two things, where you're just like, why are, what are you doing? The problem is, is that the things that are bad about him in the news now, all the bad things that are happening are sort of ever present. the economy's in the shitter, the gas prices are up, people are, you know, you're not,

they're not, they're not making as much money, they're spending way too much money, et cetera, et cetera. It's all about the economy. And that's kind of a constant sort of background radiation noise that's in every newscast. They're constantly talking about it. So his plan is to try to just flood the zone. And he doesn't care if you don't, if, if this is a troll, right? If he's just being a troll and being shitty, it's even better for him.

then you're forgetting to talk about the economy. You're forgetting to talk about how, you know, our bond market is, we're paying more and more interest, which is a bad sign for a lot of things when it comes to bonds in the United States, like the amount of interest rate for those going up and up and up is not a good indicator of where our economy is, et cetera, et cetera. But it doesn't matter if that happens in the background, as long as you're talking about changing New Mexico. he's posting, you know,

AI slop of him beating up in a hockey fight with the PM of Canada. I don't know if you saw this. Did you see this? No. No. There's like a back and forth where they're like beating each other up with like a hockey stick and stuff.

It's insane, dude. Like I'm even, it feels on, it feels satirizable a word. It feels unsaturizable. I don't know what word you would use there. I'm sure there's a smart person who knows what word I should use, but it feels like you cannot satirize this anymore.

There is no such thing as parody when this happened. You can't do it. It's like there's nothing there. I can't make it more absurd than it already is. It's already as absurd as you could put, we're at fucking plaid levels of absurd. I can't give you anymore. But that's what's happened.

That's important to him. Because if he can do that, then he can get you talking about it. And getting you to talk about that means you're not talking about really deep. issues that affect people in a real fundamental way every day, and that may cloud your judgment. It may make somebody really happy. It may make somebody out there who's struggling to pay a bill really happy that it makes other people mad, because that's the only enjoyment that they can get in their life is that it's the tiniest sliver of schadenfreude or whatever that someone else is

experiencing some sort of displeasure. Yeah, there's, for the people for whom, like, they are animated on these issues, they were already animated. Yeah. Right? They're like, nobody is waking up and being like, you know, I really haven't been that. I've been pretty disinvested in the events of the last several years. But my issue, you know which one? I'll be goddamn before they take the great state of New Mexico and change.

Like, they're already, they already are. The point you're exactly right is it's a distraction. Like, how do we like, how do we wave over here and make sure that you're not paying attention while I pick your fucking pocket? Because our pockets being picked every fucking day, every day. What I think, though, is that this just, I hope I feel like crazy saying this because I've said something similar so many times and it was always wrong. But Cecil, this has to fail.

Right? Like, right. Because like I bought groceries yesterday. I just went to the grocery store for like a, like what I think of is like a little things trip, the handful of things that like are between big shops. And it was $110. And I had two like. bags, like one bag in one hand and one bag in another hand.

Yeah. And like that is insane. It is insane to be living like this. And everybody is waking up living like this. We're all, we're sharing that experience. We're going to talk in a long form episode about like lack of shared experiences. But like we are at least sharing that experience, right? Well, I here's where I think we're going to find out, right?

Like we are at a point now where people on the left, whether you're, a Democrat or you're farther left or you're more centrist, but you're not Republican, right? Wherever you are in that spectrum, you're going to find out whether or not we're right or wrong about America in this upcoming election. Now, I'm not going to discount that there will be fuckery that will cause some sort of difficulty in voting for people. And there's already, we're seeing that they're trying to take away polling places and succeeding in taking away many polling places.

It's probably going to be a very difficult day to vote that day. That could cause some drop off in different places. But one of the things that I think we're going to see, if there isn't some sort of crazy thing that happens voting-wise, you're going to see whether or not it really was the economy coming into the slacks election. This will be the thing that lets us know this. Because we know that the economy was, it was in recovery. but it's not anymore.

It's literally in free fall and it's been in free fall for a while. There is no way you can look me in the face anybody and be like my groceries are cheaper this year than they were when Biden was in office. There's no way to say that out loud and mean it. There's no way to look me in the face

and be like, well, my gas, it's cheaper to fill up my car. It's all my services that I want to get from like any kind of person who does any kind of service, whether it's an oil change or a person who, you know, fixes something in your yard

or somebody who fixes something on your house or whatever it is that you're paying for. It's all more money now. It's just all more money. So there's no way you could say that it's not the economy anymore. So we know that that is a one big, bright, flaming thing in the middle.

If people still choose during this election to vote on the right because they've been tricked because the only thing the right has now and that the only thing that they're saying are these sort of culture war things that they're bringing up,

any of these wedge issues that they want to bring up. What they're doing is they're picking all these things up. They're saying they're socialist, like look at all the rhetoric that you're hearing, they're saying, look at all these socialists that are out there, the socialists, these communists, these people are,

they're going to ruin your country. They're trying to talk about crime constantly. They're trying to talk about anything that is in the economy is in the Republican site. if people fall for that, if that happens, if we wind up after the midterms and there was no significant change or it was bad for the Democrats,

then we live in a country, Tom, that I didn't think we lived in. I thought we lived in a smarter country than that. I thought that people would be smarter and see this is not helping me, this is bad for me, and they would either be apathetic to voting or they would vote against it.

But if we wind up in this, that place. This is where the rubber hits the road. This is it. You're right. We get to know whether or not this is a lost cause or not. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. While you're talking, I thought like, this is actually a referendum between cruelty and self-interest. Like, if you're voting for your self-interest,

we will vote against the Republicans, right? The economy is in free fall, to your point. If we vote for the Republicans, we are voting and saying, we are more interested in cruelty to other people than we are even in protecting our own personal self-interest. That's a wild referendum to have on the books right now. Yeah. But I don't think there's any way to see it any other way given the state of things.

Because I do feel like the one shared reality that we have right now is that shit's fucking expensive. It's expensive. Shit's insane. And everybody knows it. And it's hurting everybody. And so it's like, all right, well, how much shit am I willing to endure? Because I'm willing to, I want to be, I'm so invested in hurting other people that I'm willing to hurt myself to do it. What a wild way to live.

What an incredible way. Like, what a headspace you have to occupy. What a heart space you have to occupy to wake up and say, God, I, there is a significant amount of personal and familial pain that we are willing here to doer as long as it hurts our enemies, as long as it hurts the people we want hurt. You know when that old myth about the god who would come with the scales, they would put two different things, both of those are on the bad side of the scale, right? I know. Like selfishness or maliciousness.

Both of those are on the side that is bad, right? That's the one weighing you down. And we're like, we're at the point now where we're like, we know we're bad. Right. But are we bad good or bad bad? Yeah. Yeah. What a wild, wild place.

Yeah. To find ourselves culturally and politically. There's no one on board, sir. According to the log, the crew abandoned ship right after takeoff. It must be a decoy, sir. Several of the escape pods have been jettisoned. All right. We got to talk about this decoy plane.

I know this story's old, guys. I've been gone. There's some things we just got to go. New York Times, a catering truck and a decoy plane. How Trump's great escape unfolded. God, I fucking love this. Okay, let me set the scene. Okay.

Trump is getting threats, like he does all the time, but he's getting threats from the Iran government. And he's got these two jumbo jets, one from Qatar, that is his new Air Force one, and one that is the old Air Force one, right? And he's getting these threats, he's getting these threats, and he makes a big show of getting on one of these planes. And I don't remember which one was which.

I can't remember. I don't care. I don't care which one's which. He initially, I do remember. He gets on the Qatari plane first. He gets on the Qatari plane to be like, look at me, I'm on this Katari plane. And he like fucking flips off the camera.

And he lights a match, and he throws it on the staircase that's going up, and it lights it on fire. And he walks inside. and then very quietly they folded him in half and stuffed him in a fucking catering truck

so he goes out the back they basically stick him underneath like I don't know they stuck him in something some sort of fucking case I hope it was small I hope he had to like

contort himself a little or he's like in a big plate and when they reveal him they have to pick a big platter off whatever it is serviette or whatever they're called whoever it happened I don't care

but they stuff him in a catering box and they shove him out the back of the plane and then he gets catered over to the real Air Force one. But the thing is, is nobody on his crew, there's speculation and there's also some different reporting, but many people suggest that nobody in his staff and nobody that was a reporter on that plane or whatever knew that the president was taken out the back of the plane and put out a different plane. They did it because they were afraid of these threats, but he essentially said, as long as I'm okay, I don't give a fuck about anybody else in that other plane. And then that other plane went off essentially as a, as a decoy plane.

And then he comes, lands first on the real Air Force one. And then they smuggle him out. He's like two kids in a trench coat to the other plane so that he can make a big dramatic entrance when it lands eventually. So is one of the funniest things that ever happened is the president, having to do like a bad magic trick where he's underneath the table and like they're sawing it in half

or whatever he's half of him goes one way the other half goes the other it's the best thing that's ever happened top I fucking love this so much I love here the other element of color is like you know that fucking thing stinks you know he's punched over and it smells like a little

tiny one of those little catering things just it's full of all the accumulated fucking like scent detritus of a thousand bad airline meals that have accumulated within it. And his dumb, fat, stupid, poorly suited ass is like hunched over and he's smelling up his stink. And then the other part of it that I love, the part that you've touched on to, that I think

about every time I think about the story is like, what does it mean to know that you were on the expendables plane? Like, how do you wake up and go to work when you like are like, wait, you, but I Huh. I saw some speculation that that's why Carolyn Leavitt was quitting, was that she was on that expendables plane, and then, like, afterwards sort of put in resignation, like, not, it's not that, but, you know, maybe it is that, you know, so I don't know.

But, yeah, who are you, especially all those reporters are just like, yeah, I'm just on a, like, a regular plane. Although I wonder, like, would you feel better if you died with the president or without him? No, yeah, right, yeah. I don't like I love that they because here's here's the other thing that they didn't do. They didn't not fly the decoy full of people. Yeah. Right?

They believed this threat was a severe enough and a real enough threat that they wanted a decoy in the air full of these people. They're just like, yeah, I don't know. If that blows up, we're like, and I understand like this, if you're the secret service, if the middle, like the priority, I understand how all of that works. The priority is always the president and everybody else is actually expendable. But we don't usually just. be like, hey, but we got you name tags. You know? What a fucking crazy thing to wake up and go to work the next day and be like, so I'm,

I'm valued here, right? Like if the plane blew up, you guys would at least be selling. You guys would have cake. Right? You'd have cake on my birthday and remember me? Oh, so funny. I love that the Iranians had to play two plain Monty where they didn't know which one to pick. It's always the other one.

It's always the other one. It's always the other one. Oh, so funny, too. So good. I love this shit. I never thought. Love is going to leave my face. This story is from CBS.

Far-right commentator, Milo Yonopoulos, deported after U.S. immigration arrest. Uh-huh. Oh, no, no, la-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. From this very article. Oh, no. Milo Unoplas, June 2025 on social media. posted this quote. I want to start.

California needs ice checkpoints at supermarket engines, gas stations, strip malls, intersections, and government buildings with on the spot deportation for anyone who cannot prove they're in the U.S. illegally. I was in June of 2025. And that, of course, he's not in the U.S. illegally, and so he gets his ass deported.

Life comes at you fast. Yeah. Very rarely does it suck to suck for the right people. Man. But it is sucked to suck. suck for Milo for kind of a long time and I'm fucking here for it every time.

Dude, do you remember though? I don't know that people remember this. I know I do. He was kind of a force for a little while. It wasn't long. He definitely flew too close to the sun way too quickly, right? So like,

he 100% flew way too close to the sun. But here's the thing. The guy was for a while a darling of the right and a genuine id on social media

that would say the rudest, shittiest, most awful things. And that is literally what propelled him to stardom was his ability

to say awful shit, to be in really confrontational situations. He did a tour around colleges before Charlie Kirk died. And then

wasn't resurrected before Charlie Kirk even got his start. Milo Yonopoulos was traveling college to college to fight with college students, right? He was doing all that stuff years and years and years and years ago. And he was

doing it because he knew that there was a grift to be had. I just don't think he was smart enough to hold on to that grift. And he was also, I think a little too he was a little too vicious. And I think that what that did was that caused him to get kicked off of platforms and lose a lot of his income.

He wound up having to go become born again for a while. I remember that. Did he go straight too at the same time? I think he lied about being, I don't know. I can't tell you about his sex life. I have no idea. But I thought he had said that he was rejecting his gayness or whatever to at that point. But in any case, this is a guy who has had his serious ups and downs throughout his career,

mostly down since, you know, for a long time. But this, watching this happen, the leopards eat my face stuff happen to big names. Because you get a lot of leopards ate my face shit from other people, right? There's all kinds of stuff. And who knows if it's true or not? But when it comes to this, you're just like, oh, man, day a hundred. This is so perfectly leopards ate my face because this is a person who's like, I never thought the leopards we eat my face. Because they knew that it was a leopard.

They knew what it was doing. They were, in fact, trying to sick the leopard on other people. people when their face got bit. It is perfect in every way. I love it so, so much. The only thing that would have made it better, honestly, if he got is if he got deported to like a fucking prison in Sudan or something. Yes, yes, absolutely 100%.

Yeah. Because like, and I want to be very clear, if that happened and he was tortured and killed, he would deserve it. Unlike every other person we've sent there. Just true. It's just true.

I'm not going to take that out. That's true. Milo was a vanguard of the troll first platform. Yes. That is what he was. And that has done, like, he had his own effect. But like, by opening that door, by driving that wedge, by showing that that was possible, like he has had a knock on effect that has damaged the American culture, that has damaged our politics, that has hurt us as people.

So, like, I, it's like, the only sad part is he got deported to. Britain, you know? Like, I wish he got deported of fucking, like, one of these, like, horrid, squalid camps that shouldn't exist. And, like, I wish that that happened. And then I wish that, like, those camps got closed down, but they just left him there alone. And he was the only person.

He has to figure out his own way home. Just like a weird Twilight Zone episode where he just wakes up and everybody's gone but him. And he's just still locked in his own jail. So good. God. Asshole. You know, what this reminds me, what all that.

reminds me of. Because I remember there was pushback against him when he first came out that a lot of people were like, he's saying some really terrible shit, he's promoting some really all right, far right ideas, he's very racist. Like there's like some really terrible shit that he's saying. But there was also this push from, you know, I think some centrist and even people that were, you know, I don't, I don't know, left and right wasn't as evident back then, mainly because it was, we were mostly in an atheist space. It was hard to know, because we really hadn't ventured in. We were political, but many people weren't. So it was hard to know where people stood,

but there was a very big pushback of, that's free speech. You shouldn't be interrupting him. You shouldn't be doing this stuff. And I wonder if after World War II, just like with vaccines, we became complacent in a way where we were just like, no, it's okay to have hate speech.

Like, it's all right if hate speech exists. We can just fight it. We're okay. our natural immunity will take care of it. Because like, I really feel like we missed the boat. There were smart people back then who were like, that's unacceptable. Like, we don't, we didn't do that back then. We didn't let people do that shit back then.

And we actually fought a giant fucking war over it. You know, like the same sort of stuff is starting to happen. We need to nip it in the butt. And there was a bunch of people who were like, no, we're fine. And it reminds me so much of how we treat vaccines, which is, oh, nobody gets sick from me. measles anymore? We don't need a vaccine anymore. What do you need a polio vaccine?

It's essentially eradicated. What do you need that for? Tuberculosis? Come on. Who needs that stuff? It reminds me of that that we just feel too complacent and then we wind up fucking things up because we have no memory. We're all giant goldfish.

To extend your analogy, because it's fascinating, like, do you, what I wonder is like, do we as a culture from time to time need some sort of. tragedy as booster in order to maintain inoculation. You know? Because I think you're right. Like I think that like that's actually a really, really interesting point. And I wonder like what scares me is that as time goes by, the scale and scope of human tragedy gets bigger, worse, faster, better.

Like it doesn't stay the same. Yeah. So there's this like, there's this idea that like, well, how many times can we relearn the same lesson when every time that we get hit, we get hit harder and harder. and harder. It's not the same every time. We reach a point where like the dangers become existential rather than just painful. It's not a bop on the nose anymore. Now it's now we're talking about like maybe we don't survive some of these things. Yeah. But I do wonder just like, socially do we require tragedy to boost our inoculation against cruelty? Because that it seems

to be the only thing that says like, okay, we shouldn't have done that. Yeah. That's, That's a real bad idea. We should have done that. Yeah, I don't disagree. I think that there might be said that might be why, you know, there's sort of always this cycle of wars that happen. Like these cycles of wars, these cycles of, you know, death, the cycles of genocides, et cetera, et cetera, because we just forget. We just, you know, we're talking about it on a day that you can never forget, right? This is 9-11.

You never forget. But we forget so easily. And it's so crazy because writing and communication and knowledge, all that stuff is so that we can stand on the shoulders of the people who came before us. They learn this lesson. They wrote it down. We should know it. But instead, what happens is every once in a while,

we just fucking slide tackle ourselves to knock ourselves down. Like, we're constantly trying. Some of us are trying to stay on the shoulders of the people behind. And there's a bunch of other people being like, It's fucking great down here. What are you talking about? As a final aside to that, Haley and I watched the other night,

an American experiences, PBS something, a documentary about eugenics, the history of eugenics. Yeah, yeah. And to say that like some of the words, like literal actual phrases that were being used and you're just hearing them repeated again.

Yeah, for sure. And they are verbatim. They're verbatim. For sure. And it's like, read if anybody's interested read eberm ex-kendi's book chain of ideas which talks a lot about that but genuinely if you look at that sort of scientific racism and eugenics that came out there are people using the exact same phrases that they used back then that they're using today

one of the guys on uh on rogan who comes on his name's gad sod and i only know him because he was a person who was an atheist and someone who tweeted back when Twitter was sort of an important part of the atheists fear. I remember seeing his tweets, and he was kind of a dick, but like very anti-religious. What it turns out, he was actually really anti-Muslim. He wasn't anti-religious in that sense. He was just an anti-Muslim guy. That's not the same thing, right?

That's genuinely not the same thing. But he tricked a lot of people into thinking he was just sort of blatantly anti-religious. And what he says is that he's sort of coined this phrase, he says suicidal empathy. He'll say that phrase suicidal empathy. And if you look at a guy by the name of Madison Grant, who was one of the founders of the eugenicist sort of movement, his book was so important that Hitler called it his Bible, Madison Grant's book, the following of the, I think it's called the falling of the great race or the passing of the great race. that book was like Hitler's Bible. In that book, he talks about the suicidal ethics of the white person in the United States who is pushing himself out to be replaced.

It is literally the same language. It's the same language that they're using. It's just regurgitated. And it's because of that zero-sum thinking, there's only one path. There's only one path to go. So I don't think that Gad Saad even, he might not even, have read any Madison Grant, but he came up with the same idea

because they have the same sort of basis of what they're thinking about. The same racist ideas will percolate the same thoughts. Hatred always rhymes. It really does. It just says it always rhymes. All right.

So that's going to wrap it up for this week. We have a long form this upcoming week. And the long form is going to be on, it's going to be on connection. We're going to be covering a 2015 article that is, talking about connection and smart devices and how that's changing us. And then we're going to be covering a 2024 article where we didn't learn that lesson.

So you want to check it out this upcoming week on Thursday. But we're going to be back on Monday with a full show. And we're going to leave you like we always do with the skeptics creed. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter, mommy issue, hypno-babelon bullshit. Couched in Scientician, double bubble, toil and trouble, pseudo-quazi alternative acupunctuating, pressurized, stereogram, pyramidal, free energy, healing,

water, downward spiral, brain dead pan, sales pitch, late-night infoducatainment. Leo Pisces, cancer cures, detox, reflex, foot massage, death and towers, tarot cars, psychic healing, crystal balls, Bigfoot, Yeti, aliens, churches, mosques, and synagogues, temples, dragons, giant worms, Atlantis, dolphins, truthers, birthers, witches, wizards, vaccine nuts.

Shaman healers, evangelists, conspiracy, double-speak stigmata nonsense. Expose your signs. Thrust your hands. Bloody, evidential, conclusive. Doubt even this. Thanks for tuning in. If you enjoyed the show, consider supporting us on Patreon at patreon.com forward slash dissonancepod. Help us spread the word by sharing our content.

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