Fourth Reich Archaeology - 2024 Election Special: Choose Your Hitler

Episode Date: August 30, 2024

This week on Fourth Reich Archaeology, we take a brief hiatus from Jerryworld and travel back to the present day for a special episode on the 2024 election cycle.  A true American spectacle, the sights and sounds of the 2024 campaign trail appear to have been inspired by the pomp and circumstance of modern professional wrestling. In fact, with a steady bombardment of character arcs, secret alliances, double-crosses, over-the-top walkout songs, cheesy catchphrases, and interludes from rappers and comedians to boot, you’ve been so busy being entertained this election cycle that you don’t even realize your favorite politician hasn’t said a lick about policy. While we otherwise may not know exactly what kind of terrible shit is going to come out of the mouths of our political leaders, you can always count on it being unhinged.  But lest you think we are departing from our favorite object of study... to the contrary, we apply the artifacts we've unearthed in the first three episodes of Jerryworld to help make sense of the senselessness of the 2024 presidential election. Indeed, the life and times of Jerry Ford are as relevant as ever. Whereas Gerald Ford's eventual identity as a mere brand ambassador for the entrenched powers that be had a ring of tragedy to it, Kamala and Donald inhabit a world of hyper-farce, playing the role of carnival-barker for feuding (but ultimately compatible) factions of the ruling class. Moreover, while there are issues each nominee has championed for their respective financial backers, or to pacify or incite their faithful followers, the substance of their actual policy positions on the things that really matter don’t meaningfully differ.  Like every election before it, 2024 will likely once again break the record for most expensive election ever. But in our view, money in politics nowadays isn't so much about swaying elections as inflating the spectacle of "democracy," generating viewership through the corporate media machine, and imposing hard limits on what is considered acceptable political discourse. Thus, to paraphrase our favorite Thomas Pynchon quote once again, the true election cycle is not the culmination of a democratic process but a celebration of markets. And to all our Jerry heads out there, don't fret—we will return to our regularly scheduled program next week with Jerryworld Episode 4. Meanwhile, check out our Patreon, which we're finally rolling out. We won't paywall any content just yet, but we do invite and encourage you all to get in on the ground floor. The sooner we can quit our day-jobs, the more time we can pour into the pod, and the deeper we can dig into the hellscape of the Fourth Reich.* * * * * * * Song List: Talking Heads – Once in a LifetimeBob Dylan – Masters of WarMetallica – For Whom the Bell Tolls Neutral Milk Hotel – Oh ComelyTrey Parker and Matt Stone - I’m a Little Bit Country David Bowie – Five Years Opening Clip is from Dr. Oblivion’s monologue in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome 

Colonialism or imperialism, as the slave system of the West is called, is not something that's just confined to England or France or the United States. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. So it's one huge complex or combine. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. And this international power structure is used to suppress the masses of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural resources. We found no evidence of a conspiracy, foreign or domestic, the Warren Commission of science.

I'll never apologize for the United States of America. Ever, I don't care what the facts are. In 1945, we began to require information which showed that there were two wars going. His job, he said, was to protect the Western way of life. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders the more easy victims of a big lie than a small law. For example, we're the CIA.

He has a mile. It usually takes a national crisis. Freedom can never be secure. Pearl Harbor. A lot of killers. You get a lot of killers. Why you think our country's so innocent? Not more than the CIA.

This is a global. This is coming. We need that forth Reich. Archaeology. This is Fourth Reich Archaeology. I'm Dick. And I'm Dic. Don. We'd like to welcome everybody back for another installment of the pod. Thank you, first of all,

once again, to all of our listeners. We really do mean it when we express our deep, deep gratitude that you all have found the show and that you've found something valuable to take away from it. You know, we've always considered ourselves to be our target audience. Our goal has been, you know, to make something that we like and we're enthused that others have been excited by the same things that excite us. So, so thanks. We seriously do mean that from the bottom of our hearts. And we love hearing from you.

So please do shoot us an email. Fourth Reichpod at gmail.com and follow us on Insta and Twitter at Fourth Reich Pod. Seriously, folks, we are so thankful for you, our early adopters. But the truly humbling feedback has come from the listeners who have asked us about how they can financially contribute to our project. To that end, now seems like a good time as any to roll out the Fourth Reich Archaeology Patreon. If you like what you've been hearing and want to secure the future of our infant pod, please visit patreon.com slash fourth rike archaeology and make a contribution today.

The battle for the mind of North America will be fought in the video arena, the video drone. The television screen is the retina of the mind's eye. Therefore, the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore, whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore, television is reality. Your reality is already half video hallucination. If you're not careful, it will become total hallucination.

You'll have to learn to live in a very strange new world. this week we're taking a one-week hiatus from jerry world and traveling back to the present day to revisit the reason we started this podcast which is of course to examine the rotten state of affairs of american political discourse in 2024 with summer coming to a close and the republican and democrat national conventions now in the rearview mirror we thought it appropriate to chime in so please do settle in and join us as we use the artifacts we've picked up in the first three episodes of jerry world to tackle a question that I'm sure is on all our minds. So Don, I wonder if you could kick us off. Yeah, I mean, I think we've hit the point a few different times, especially in episode one, but it's kind of pervaded throughout that, By now, 24, really, there is no American democracy. I don't think it matters that much what title you apply to the current regime under which we live.

But the idea that people control the government and that it is geared towards. reflecting the will of the people is beyond farcical. And that's partly why we chose to focus on Jerry Ford in the first place, because he's kind of a pinch point on the trajectory towards, if you want to call it fascism, or if you want to call it post-democracy, or whatever you want to call this shitty system that we're living under now. It's funny, you mentioned pinch point. and that makes me chuckle because I think of Jerry as the narrow neck of the hourglass. The neck of the glass stands at the point where the sands of the past delivered the future into the empty vessel below.

Jerry was the first president to leverage wholly superficially American ideals and administer the office of the president as an empty vessel, essentially a brand ambassador for his political party. This allowed the voices behind the throne, the permanent bureaucrats, your dicks and dons, to utilize the federal government to serve the interests of massive corporations and wealthy families at the expense of the people. Yeah, Mussolini famously said that fascism is the combination of state and corporate power. I believe he even said, if you want me to define fascism, the word I would use to, to define it is corporatism.

And so in that respect, if you think about this sort of fascist deep state or the corporate power structure behind the governmental power structure, which I think dominates and controls the governmental power structure, its relationship to the voting public has really consolidated since 1963, right? I think we subscribe generally to this idea that, you know, JFK was assassinated by some combination of the intelligence community,

the mafia of the oil industry, really the power behind the throne. But they don't take over the government precisely on November 23rd, 1963. It takes a little bit of time. You've got to tamp out the democratic impulses. And yes, I know that that sounds kind of silly, if you say it, in reference to Richard Nixon. But the fact is, is that many of his policies, right, were inclined towards popular support. He was the last president to impose price controls, something that's in the news again now. He created the EPA. I mean,

he was a Republican president with a Democrat-controlled Congress who actually wanted to pass legislation. Right. And to the extent that involved sidestepping the powers that be, he was unacceptable. Right. And so, you know, with... To me, Dick Nixon is also... a fascinating object of study not only because he was willing to sidestep the powers that be, but also because he was willing to tackle power head on. Remember, Nixon was vice president under Eisenhower, and because of that, he was entitled to reports from the executive in the years before his run in 1968. So you can imagine all of this information that he had before he ever clocked into work in the Oval Office. Right. All of this information except

that one thing that he kept hounding Dick Helms about, Dick Helms being the director of the CIA, appointed first by Lyndon Johnson and extending his term into the Nixon administration. And Dick Nixon would famously, in case listeners are not familiar with this, which absolutely something to look into, but Nixon would always hound Helms

about the quote unquote who shot john angle which he also referred to as the whole bay of pigs thing and the more questions that he asked about that wouldn't you know it the stronger the pressure for him to resign the presidency yeah so he had to go jerry got in and i think that jerry was underestimated to an extent. I think nobody thought he would have any prayer of a chance in 76, but he almost pulled it out. Right. He almost pulled it out because of how effective the Jerry Ford brand was, right? He was able to tap into the hearts and minds of everyday Americans.

Yeah, I like to think of Jerry Ford, as we've used the phrase before, this American Everyman, and he is sort of the audience for the budding neo-conservative sort of perma-fascist state that was only really operating behind the scenes up until that point. Jerry Ford is their audience to pitch their best version of why they should be given the keys, the keys to the kingdom. And we'll get into all this in great detail in Jerry world as we move forward through time. But they do that, you know, through Dick and Don, right, Rumsfeld and Cheney, the Bush family that was involved in the rise of Jerry Ford's star.

And we'll just see exactly how that plays out. Yeah. And the way it plays out is that Jerry Ford ultimately sells the American. people down the river. His successor, Jimmy Carter, albeit an outsider, essentially does the same thing, which brings us to Ronald Reagan. And I think it's totally uncontroversial when I say that ever since Ronald Reagan, the American presidency has just been a different flavor of Ronald Reagan with every election. We'll restore hope and we'll welcome them into a great national crusade to make America great again.

I believe that together we can make America great again. Together, we, I can, we will make America great great. Hi Barbie, hi Barbie, right. I think it was Jeffrey Sinclair from Counterpunch, who tweeted something about the number of times that Reagan was mentioned at the DNC was numerous and Carter didn't get. even a single mention, poor guy. Yeah, and he's still alive, right? Barely, but yeah. As we'll talk a little bit more about today, now we're living in a period of unlimited money in politics.

And this is perhaps a unique spin that we'll put on the money in politics question. But we want to present a view that money in politics is not really an investment in swaying any given election one way or another and favoring one candidate over another. Sure, that plays into it, and the degree to which it matters may depend on the race. But really, the billions of dollars that are poured in to the system every election cycle are much more geared towards inflated. this spectacle and in firming up the limits on political acceptable discourse

and preventing the entry into mainstream discourse of any idea that would challenge the primacy of capital and of the control over all. all aspects of political life by capital. Come your masters of war. Here that build the big guns. Here that build the death planes. Here that build all the bombs. It hide behind walls.

Yeah, that hide behind desks. I just don't want you to know I can see through your masks. The substantive limitation on discourse is compounded by the fact that political messaging in the age of smartphones and social media has become hyper-condensed, with politicians leveraging popular culture and memes to shortcut emotional responses. With the ever-shortening attention span of the modern American, politicians now, more than ever, boil down their platform to these empty signifiers. Name calling, which has always been a problem in politics, is now on hyperdrive. As politicians, in an effort to stay relevant, adopt whatever base-level signifiers have become popular overnight on social media. So now, the battle cry is something like, join the Dems because Kamala is brat, or stay away from the Republicans because they are weird.

The spectacle, now more than ever, is what has taken center stage. politicians with their walkout music, their signature catchphrases, the pack stadiums where speeches are often given alongside interludes with rappers and comedians. As the children of the 90s, we cannot help but think that what we are seeing more closely resembles pro-wrestling, a la the WWF, rather than competent political discourse. then you sit back and watch when the death count gets higher you hide in your mansion

while the young people's blood flows out of their bodies and is buried in the mud Right The enjoyable thing about wrestling Is the fake thing. right you are cheering for somebody who's ostensibly getting the shit beating out of them but you know that that person is going to be okay that they're just playing a role even this idea of arcs

that's so common nowadays right yeah the villain arc the the relationship arc the friendship arc right rivalries now Pelosi is in her anti-Biden art but aOC is back on the on the side of the DNC and you have you know you saw the headlines of like from outsider to everyone in the DNC chanting her name leaders like Kamala and Tim but Chicago just because the Choice is clear to us does not mean that the path will be easy. Over the next 78 days, we will have to pour every ounce, every minute, every moment into making history on November 5th. Let me ask you one question. Is your money that good?

Will it buy your forgiveness? and do you think that it could I think you will find when your death takes its toll all the money you made will never buy back your soul And it's It's like, you know, when

Stone Cold Steve Austin went from villain arc to hero arc or when Hulk Hogan went from Hero Arc to villain arc as Hollywood Hogan

Ladies and gentlemen Hollywood Hulk Hogan What an interest this man makes I wish I could hear you Brain this ovation is thunderous.

I said, what an ovation this man gets. What an interest he makes. There's nobody like him. I don't care for the guy for one bit. I'm going to tell you. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. So in politics, as in wrestling,

the fakeness is the crux of the entertainment value. And the entertainment value is paramount to the at least theoretical, real value of politics, which is enacting policies that help people. Right. And unfortunately, what we've come to expect out of politics is entertainment. And this election cycle more than ever, it just feels like what we're getting into is a tag team type Royal Rumble with the blues, on one side and the reds on the other. And with that, let's get ready to rumble. For the thousands in attendance and the millions watching around the world. From the capital city of the United States of America, Washington, D.C., ladies and gentlemen, let's get ready to rumble.

I think on all fronts, we start from the position that both parties fundamentally are the same, right? As we talked about before, both parties represent capital. now there's obviously factions that compete with each other within the group of owners of capital but their fundamental interests in continued exploitation are the same yeah and when we think about how these two political parties are essentially the same two good examples come to mind the first is how the parties address the issue in the Middle East, where both parties' position is essentially the same, and that is that Israel has a right to defend itself, with neither party acknowledging, let alone engaging in the fact that thousands of innocent Palestinians have been killed

over the last year. And the second example would be with what's going on at the U.S. Mexico border, and namely the U.S. immigration policy. Right. And that's one area where the rhetorical nature of the differences between the parties has really come into sharp focus, I think. And this is something that many other people have pointed out. For example, Daniel Denver, who hosts the Dig podcast, he wrote a book about immigration policies called All-American Nativism. a few years back that basically traced immigration policy on the swinging pendulum from Democrat to Republican and showed how far from being something that Democrats have been on the side of immigrants while Republicans have been against immigrants, both parties have fed off of one

another in ratcheting up the surveillance state and sort of draconian system at the border as a function of labor discipline essentially, right? And I think that's what it's going to be no matter which party wins, right? If the Republicans win, they're not going to deport every quote-unquote illegal immigrant. Right. I think it's like whoever wins what you'll see in actual numbers, it's just going to be more than the last administration, you know, arrests at the border, jailing at the border, removal orders. It's just going to be, the numbers are just going to be greater with every administration. The numbers aren't going to go down. Right. Where there's, where there's potentially a difference is in terms of spectacle, you know, you could certainly

imagine some spectacular violence being meted out and that's obviously unfortunate by a Trump administration that may go above and beyond the level of spectacular violence that a Harris administration would meet out against immigrants. But that being said, you know, the Biden administration over the last several whatever we are at now, almost four years, has meted out plenty of violence at the border and has done plenty to undermine the rights of immigrants in the United States. And indeed, now you see the Democrats are even running on this policy position that, hey, we proposed the harshest immigration policy ever, and it was the Republicans who blocked us from enacting it.

So, yeah, the differences are real in a certain sense, and in ways that affect real people's lives, we're not denying that fact, but we are denying the, but we are denying the level of experience on which that fact matters. And it matters in the grand scheme of things on a superficial level that does not change the underlying reality of exploitation and of the border generally and of immigration and the maintenance of inequality between different countries as a mechanism of labor discipline and of preserving the ability of capital to exploit labor wherever it may be located.

But, you know, the pieces are going to move no matter what. Right. And given that reality, the sort of scope of political discourse, right? of the issues, if you will, of the things that our side cares about and your side doesn't, they're reduced to maybe a handful of what I consider are just red herrings, right? So let's think about the Dems. And the first thing you'll, well, it's, first of all, very basic, right?

It's like, at this point, it's like the number one policy position is, let's keep this criminal away from the White House, right? like no Trump bad I think is the headline of their position but if you go further if you want to if someone if they're thinking that maybe some of our constituency wants to go further they'll say project 2025 or whatever the fuck right and then and then that's when they've sort of you have your branches of the different issues or identities they want to address right so you have the one that's really been a major point is the Roe v. Wade issue, right? The elephant in the room to me is like, well, in the 40 years since the Roe v. Wade decision, Dems have been in power. There could have

been legislation. Most notably in the first Obama administration, when after being elected, Obama was famously asked the question by a reporter, right? Are you going to pursue codification of Roe v. Wade, and he said it was not a legislative priority. Yes, that's exactly what I'm getting at. You have this political model of identity politics, and inherent in that model is this phenomenon where political operators make value-based judgments on whether to pursue an issue based on how much cultural mileage they can get out of it at the time. These cultural issues or rights that, to be clear, are incredibly important and must be protected. These are the issues that become the points of debate at the expense of any other discussion of substance.

Abortion is a major one this cycle for Democrats. LGBTQ rights is another. And it's curious, you know, on the LGBTQ point that Dems again say, don't vote for Trump because he'll take us back to the Stone Age on gay rights. But you don't need to go back to this don't age, right? You can just look as recently as 2010 when Hillary Clinton was against gay marriage. For the Republicans, as far as I can tell, the cultural touch points are outright dastardly, where topics like nativism and white supremacy seem to lead the discussion. I wonder, Don, what's your take on all this?

Yeah, I mean, I think on both sides, what really matters is keeping these cultural issues. and again, using cultural the way that it's commonly used in the political discourse, not in a way that's meant to demean the importance of women's rights, of gay rights, etc. But my point is it's important for both sides to keep these issues in hot dispute and to keep them on the front burner of political discourse precisely because they do not affect the fundamental relations between labor and capital. You know, it certainly matters at an individual level, but I think a swing of the pendulum in a permanent way, in one way or the other, is detrimental.

to the two-party duopoly because they have to go out and pretend that they have these existential deep disagreements with each other in order to get buy-in from their constituents, right? Like, Republicans now certainly rely to a good extent on evangelicals, but evangelicals are so alienated from progress or recognition of the full humanity of women and sexually non-conforming people that they're not really up for grabs in any way. Remember, Jimmy Carter actually won a lot of evangelicals in 1976. And of course, we've got to bring it back.

to Jerry Ford repeatedly, right? That's our frame of reference here. But the fact is, Jerry Ford, thanks to Betty, he supported the Roe v. Wade decision. He supported the Equal Rights Amendment. It was Reagan attacking him in the 76 primary from the right that try to take evangelicals away from Jerry Ford. a lot of them went to support Jimmy Carter, who was culturally pretty conservative on a lot of

this stuff. But back to what we were saying before, ever since Reagan got into office, it's been all Reagan baby. And this is just another one of those things that with Reagan, all of these cultural issues fell, like the chips fell, right? the the roulette wheel stop spinning and anti-abortion fell

in the Republican side, anti-gay fell on the Republican side, pro those things fell on the Democrat side, never to change again regardless of, you know, either party actually

doing anything one way or the other to change the balance. And that's because this is WWF, right? This is not politics. This is the WWF and the... Yeah, the other side, they're the gibronies and, you know, we're not. That's basically what it is, right? Like, we're for action on climate change.

We're for gay rights. They're not. They're the pigs, right? I'm a little bit country. Well, I'm a little bit rock and roll. I'm a little for supporting our troops. And I'm a little for bringing them home. I believe freedom isn't free. No, but war should need. And meanwhile, the actual stakes have shifted because now the Republicans, they're not getting

excited about seeing a gay couple walk hand in hand down the street, right? They're not getting outraged about a lesbian couple. adopting a child. No. The stakes have shifted to accommodate the entertainment value. So now, LGBTQ for the Republican side of the aisle is, they're going to give gender reassignment surgery to your kids in school without telling you. One day they go to school, a boy, and they come back home a girl.

Right. just outrageous stuff that's totally made up but that's the fakeness that's the fakeness becoming real or it could even be and it could be

totally totally detached from reality right like this the trans rights one is an amazing example right like there is no basis for any of that, but these folks believe it as if it were real. And you can see that also in like real policy positions, right? We've been going at length about how both sides

have essentially indistinguishable immigration policies. But if you go into any Republican candidates' webpage, if you go on Trump's website, I'm sure there'll be some discussion about how Kamala Harris would open the borders, right? And it's like, don't vote. for Marxist Kamala because she's going to open the borders and right there's that lie and then there's the other lie about this extraordinary crime wave of MS-13 members running rampant across the whole country and you know killing especially white women right oh yeah that's that's the main thing tale is all this time although I will say on the gay thing the one thing that's not made up and I sincerely wonder whether this person is not some kind

of a plant or a prop but I don't know Dick if you've seen the picture of the military officer who's a furry that has their official photo with like a German Shepherd mask on and their like whole military uniform I have to Why are we talking about it? Well, I'll just say, like, you know, it is very, very funny when they trot out that picture. Yeah. And it's like, we're going to have a whole army of trans furries dressed up as dogs and they have to drink out of a bowl on the floor instead of shooting terrorists. I don't know if furry is ever going to get to the point of suspect classification protections under the law, you know?

Honestly, I'm totally in favor of an all furry armed forces. I'm a furry accelerationist. I think that, you know, instead of shooting guns, all, you know, all armed members of the U.S. Empire should just go out onto a battlefield and just bark, bark at Putin. If they're going the same route as gays in the military, it's going to make, it's, you know, don't ask, don't tell. It's going to be really hard hurdle for them to overcome. But I think we've covered, right? So both sides have their bug bears, right? Their red herrings that they make these gestures about which are largely fabricated.

And then both sides also have their home bases, which overlap to an overwhelming degree, whether it's bipartisan support for the military and for Ukraine and for Israel and for maintenance of the U.S. Empire, as well as both sides fundamentally agreeing that the border needs to be a site of experimentation in new military and surveillance technologies at the expense of people crossing it out of desperation and both sides agree that we need to invest more in police yes and don't forget both sides believe in the American dream the ability for anyone to come and get a fair shake right either that or do a bunch of drugs which I think both Kamala and Trump know they know that American dream very well

your father made fetuses with flesh-licking ladies while you and your mother were asleep in the trailer park thunder a spot From the dark of the stadiums, the music and medicine you needed for comforting, so make all your fat, fleshy fingers to moving. So what we've been seeing this summer through both the DNC and the RNC is this celebration of spectacle, right? one thing that gets me all the time is you look at these crowds and like who are these people that go to these conventions right of course you have the delegates but then there's just random audience members right like at the DNC there's people holding up signs that say USA as if we don't know what country we're in it's it's kind of wild and you know as for like the delegates like it this time This time around watching both parties' conventions, it became clear to me, like, essentially all it is, this political involvement is just, like, how close can I get to power? Right? That's everyone's base motivation. Yeah, it's not unlike a comic con or, you know, one of these other types of conventions of people with similar aesthetic interests, right? 100%.

And so you have that at the actual conventions, but then you have that as viewership. You know, the people watching it on their, I guess on their phones these days, right? They're just watching clips of it. And it's basically become this abstraction where it's just purely theoretical. You've got those ideals we've been talking about, those one or two word sort of issues, and basically your engagement in democracy is just, you know, your participation is just your ability to watch the content and either agree or disagree, right?

And it's pretty wild, right? And you can see how the vehicle for the media, right, it is, you're able to make. these shifts almost overnight you have someone like go ahead yeah no i was going to say i think that's that's totally right like the media displays right you have all of these new media that talk shit on legacy media and this it's another kind of fake battle fake pitched battle the same way that the Republican versus Democrats battle is faked on the same level, namely the level of spectacle. But it goes back to something that I was saying earlier that all of the investment,

both from the sponsors of electoral campaigns who are shaping what goes into the speeches that get aired on air, and the entanglements, the financial entanglements between the media companies, and that transcends legacy or, quote-unquote, new media companies, for the most part, of what gets coverage, and the power of the media and the power of the spectacle, or the power of the spectacle, over the substance is, I think, evidenced through these shifts that you were about to touch on, Dick. So maybe we could talk about a couple of those. Sure. And how they overlap.

Yeah, the obvious one is the, if we want to go back to what we were talking about at the top of the hour, but the arc of Joe Biden from being the man for the job, the only person who can stand up to Trump. to totally, totally, mentally ill, incapacitated, he needs to step down, right? Anderson, this was a game-changing debate in the sense that right now, as we speak, there is a deep, a wide, and a very aggressive panic in the Democratic Party. It started minutes into the debate, and it continues right now. It involves party strategists, it involves elected officials, it involves fundraisers. and they're having conversations about the president's performance, which they think was dismal, which they think will hurt other people down the party in the ticket, and they're having

conversations about what they should do about it. Some of those conversations include, should we go to the White House and ask the president to step aside. Others are other of the conversations are about should prominent Democrats go public. Within a matter of weeks, everything changed. And again, it's something, again, we pointed this out in episode one, too. it's exactly the same point exactly and then again overnight joe biden is a patriot who made the ultimate sacrifice right essentially right in the political world he decided that it was best for the country that someone else and i want to kick us off by celebrating our incredible president joe biden

who will be speaking later tonight Joe thank you for your historic leadership for your lifetime of service to our nation and for all you will continue to do we are forever grateful to you and looking out as as though it was his fucking choice in the first place like it makes you crazy to hear these people just lauding him right it's like it's like incessantly right it's like we are the part so earlier this year it's we are the party of Joe Biden he's a great guy who to maybe days later we are not the party of Joe Biden he is not he's not our party right we are better than that and then back to we are the party of Joe Biden well it was when he got COVID or whatever and he had that long

couple of days with his close team really thinking about the future. I think what that was was everybody being like, dude, you got to fucking step down. Right. It was him, his insane drug addict son, who's on the wrong side of about a dozen pending indictments right now. Jill, who got some insane addiction to power as well, surrounding Joe and telling and hyping him up that he could do the job and he's obviously been no stranger to making shit up to advance his political career for 40 years for 50 years how

the long he's been in politics say what you want to say and pain for your hollow ways moving your mouth to pull out all your for me and so they all had a very common mow that they were going to take all the way until the end until it became impossible to do it. Yeah, it's hard to go against, in this day and age it's really hard to go against, Pelosi and come out of that okay, right? I would say, I think we all knew that, but wherever Pelosi and to some extent the Obamas, wherever they landed, that's what was going to happen. And it did happen, right? And so he decided to step down. Kamala's our person. And this is

another example of how someone can overnight go from the butt of all jokes in the party, right, to being the serious contender, to being the one that's for the people. Don't forget that when, after that debate with Trump, when there was still sort of this uncertainty about what Joe would do, loads of people were talking about Gavin Newsom, right? like it was like kind of sort of up in the air who the Dems would pick

totally not only I mean Newsome Whitmer from Michigan right that there were even names being thrown out that were not the vice president should you know give you some indication of what everyone thought of Kamala

you know two months ago right so this ability to go from just the butt of all jokes to the person that's going to defeat Donald Trump, it's amazing. And it's also amazing to see the content, the very same content that was being put out, right, about Kamala to mock her. Everyone's familiar with the bits. I mean, you talk to anyone. Everyone's got their favorite Kamala.

And I haven't been to Europe. And I don't understand the point that you're making. talking about the significance of the passage of time, right? The significance of the passage of time. So when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time. Ukraine is a country in Europe. It exists next to another country called Russia.

Russia is a bigger country. Russia is a powerful country. Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine. So basically that's wrong. So no longer, are you necessarily? keeping those private files in some file cabinet that's locked in the basement of the house. It's on your laptop, and it's then therefore up here in this cloud that exist above us, right? The Caribbean nations, island nations, in the Western Hemisphere.

That's where the Caribbean is. We are also in the Western Hemisphere. They are our neighbors. I am here standing here on the northern flank, on the eastern flank, talking about what we have in terms of the eastern flank. I can imagine what can be and be unburdened by what has been. But that very same library of content becomes, I guess, sort of like, this folksy thing that she's able to harness and make a part of her sort of positive story, right? her laughing all the time right her ability to just i i agree with you but i think that i wouldn't place the agency there in her hands i don't think it's her taking ownership oh of course i think it's

to what we were talking about before it's this media machine that flips a switch absolutely It flipped a switch from Biden healthy to Biden senile, and then it flipped a switch to Kamala is a joke to Kamala is this amazing force for the future. My mistake, my mistake, I gave her way too much credit. We all know there is only one person, only one political operator that is able to harness that awesome. power to flip the switch. And that man, of course, being Donald Trump. Everyone else is sort of just at the mercy of the media. Yeah, yeah.

That is, and that's why they're going to have such a hard time getting rid of him. Well, let me rephrase. For a period of time, perhaps, there was a contingent. of Republicans who wanted to get rid of Trump. And basically those people have kind of divided into two groups. On the one side, you have the kind of pathetic Rick Wilson Lincoln Project clowns that will just grift off of their identity as anti-Trump Republicans. until it no longer earns them a bunch of money and then on the other side you have the sort of

more practical republicans that more in a more subtle way either just buy in to the trump project and recognize that while trump is very good at running for office and winning elections by his appeal to people's kind of base instincts I don't think that he knows anything about governing right and to the extent that he's going to be successful at all as a president it's going to be a question of delegating the right things to the right people and so the more realistic members of the Bush coalition, for example, just look at John Bolton, right? He got his way in there, and he was able to try a couple more failed coup attempts in Venezuela during the Trump administration. And on and on that these guys will just adapt.

But none of the old right-wing neocons are now politically homeless because if they don't feel comfortable in the Trump world, they have a home waiting for them in the Democrat Party. As you're talking about Trump and those who fall in line, it was my favorite is always seeing the snakes that come. come out of the woodwork, uh, uh, uh, to kiss the ring, right? You're, I'm talking about your Nikki Haley's, your Ronda Santas, your Vivek Ramoswamis. The ones we knew all along as they were talking shit about Donald, um, you were like,

just waiting for the moment that they're going to come up and get on a microphone and say how he's the only guy that can do the job. Um, and I, you know, to be a fly in the room, uh, when they're, having those sort of discussions with the RNC about how much airtime will get or who gets to go first to come and kiss Donald Trump's ass. That is the stuff that brings joy to my heart, these scumbags that are willing to just do whatever it takes to be closer to power. Totally, totally.

Yeah, the whole DeSantis thing, like from the very beginning of his campaign that he approached with a degree of confidence that was just totally ridiculous way beyond way what what some some folks in our in our the legal industry one of their favorite sports metaphors I don't know if you come across us a lot but way over his skis way over his skis and then of of of course of course he comes groveling back and and it's great to see you do love to see yourself i mean yeah you'd love to be proven right time time and again about just how feckless and spineless and gormless all of these people really are. And it tells you something about the system that attracts to the political career

just the absolute worst of the worst of the worst. you could not really find a nastier and I don't mean that like mean spirited I mean like dirty disgusting group of people yeah yeah well it's just these are empty vessels right there I don't even it's hard to think of them as human beings it's like they are just empty vessels that are willing to serve uh whatever you know whatever they think will get them closer and closer to the throne. Yeah. And so when you know that about these people, it's like, it's sort of very predictable where they're going to be. And here I'd like to just make a small aside about somebody that, you know, I embarrassingly supported quite a bit when he was running for president.

Of course, talking about Bernie Sanders. that we think about Bernie. And you said that these people are almost not human beings. And I think that his very public immolation talking about sacrifices. Yeah, yeah. His, you know, especially, especially in 2020, you know after getting rat fucked the first time around in 2016 after Hillary loses states where he was head and shoulders ahead of her in the primary process at like Wisconsin right and she doesn't campaign there and then loses the state to Trump and it contributes to her defeat in the electoral college right and he's got all of that in his bag. chooses not to use any of it in 2020 and then the day i'll never forget was when he went out for

the debate against biden and basically yeah just stroked joe's ego and kissed the ring right then and there yep the coordinated the thing that got me in that time that really got me was the coordinated effort early in the race between the other contenders to step down, right? Behind the scenes, because essentially eliminating any chance Bernie had to sort of prove his sort of case, make his case to the country about why he's the best one out of the field and just making it about, okay, well, do you guys want this Marxist, socialist, guy or do you want Obama 2.0? Right. And in the middle of a pandemic, when he could have easily parlayed his bread and butter policy, right, which was universal health care into such a winning

strategy. And instead is just like, yeah, you know, Joe is my great friend and we really don't have that many disagreements. And I think that he's a very good person. And I'm going to sit here and just say nice things about him. And that sacrifice, to bring it back to the spectacle, that took out of the picture, I think, you know, probably most of our listeners, a huge, huge potential reservoir of political energy into the system.

And it left only whatever paths are available outside of the system, which I think currently there's none, really, if we're being honest about it. And maybe part of this podcast in the long run and part of what a lot of people that are kind of expending their energies, doing political education, whatever you want to call it, communication to the void into the world. Putting this type of analysis out there is a project to coalesce around some other path outside of this spectacle, outside of this political system. Well, there is nothing outside of the spectacle, but outside of the electoral system to make interventions in the spectacle.

Now, I don't think that we have a real prescription there, but I do think that our prescription is there's not a way to work within the system, you know, unless you want to don your clown makeup, or unless you know any celebrities, Right. I mean, case in point, right, AOC, which we saw this turn, right, came in in 2018 as the voice of the people in her district. And what I saw this past week in her speech to the convention was essentially like, all right, I'm ready to fall in line and say whatever you want me to say as long as I get a shot. at the at the throne i think i think she overestimates her own capital a great deal like i don't really think i i don't know yeah time will tell time will tell yeah time will tell yeah time will

tell how it plays out but it's sort of what i'm getting at is like you could just see her wheels turning right with that with her shitting grin um and others right so we talked a bit about the and the Haley's of the world, but it's not like the Dems don't have their own bench of power hungry pod people, right? And now we're thinking, now we're talking about your Hillary Clinton's, your Elizabeth Warren's, your Mayor Pete. It's, it was absurd. It was insane. Yeah, there was some incredible moments there. I thought that the Mayor Pete, getting like eight minutes in an early day of the convention real down the list spot. And one thing that that I registered when I tuned in on YouTube to even at 2X speed

and even an eight-minute speech, I don't think I got all the way through Mayor Pete's. I don't blame you. Just wretched, wretched performance. But they introduced him as the former mayor of. South Bend, Indiana. They didn't introduce him as the currently sitting Secretary of Transportation. Please welcome, former South Bend Indiana mayor, Pete Buttigieg. Why do you think that is? Yeah, good for you. I mean, that's like definitely some lawyership where you know that

when you're referring to someone in the political sphere, the honorific you're going to use is whatever the highest office they held, right? That's what perked your ears up. Am I right? I would not countenance anybody calling post-1974 Jerry Ford, Mr. Vice President, for example. But to me, I mean, I don't know if it was a mistake or what. I doubt it was a mistake. To me, it's more like this theme they're building, this world building they do, of blue-collar folks of the American sort of working class.

So Mayor Pete, don't forget, that's where he's from. He's from South Bend and he serves South Bend and he's of the people. This is exactly what they did with Kamala, right? Like, she fought from the middle class and became who she is today and so can you, right? And this is just straight in line with the Jerry Ford, every man approach to politics, right? Yeah. Yeah. And while we're all gathered here in this convention, let's pander to the fact that, you know, maybe people from Indiana are tuning in.

And let's also not forget that we want to downplay the fact that anybody that we actually want to win is from or associated with Washington, D.C., because that's, you know, where bad things happen. happen and so it's like right that's what got us bit that's what got us bit in 2016 so we don't want to do that again and also um gonna totally ignore the fact that we've got Hillary up doing her exactly her 2016 spiel right down to the walkout music so like fully relying on this psychosis of the masses to deliver the message it's like um And this is another phenomenon that I would be remiss not to comment on here is one of my favorite shows is Veep. Oh, yeah. Right?

And in Veep, the storyline of the show really mirrors what's going on right now. Yes. With Selena Meyer, Julia Louis Dreifetz's character running for president and also, you know, recognizing that everybody hates the administration. And her slogan, I think, is something like continuity with change or something like that. And that's exactly what they're doing now, right? Continuity with change, minus the continuity almost, because it's like they just want to pretend. It's not even a principal distinction from the Biden administration. It's just a pretense of a difference relying, once again,

on this emperor's new clothes ability to convince people to disbelieve their lying eyes and simply ascribe to whatever the football hooligan chant says. Right. And did you see that Julia Louis Dreyfus is like campaigning for Harris? Yes, yes. This was a great, are you talking about how she was approached at the DNC and the media Center? Yeah, yeah. It was great. Julie, we had one quick question for you?

No, we're not going to do press. It's a real quick question. One question is... No, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you. This is the media area, by the way. It's so funny because it's like very meta. And at the same time, it's like, is she that fucking stupid that she just didn't get the show

that she was on and thought it was like about Republicans or something? thing because the show is not about Republicans like the Meyer administration or whatever is clearly a Democrat administration that's why it's funny because it's like the easy thing like the low-hanging fruit is to just like make fun of how ridiculous Republicans are but it's like a little bit more sophisticated a little bit more funny if you take shots at the whole system and recognize that they're all ridiculous and absurd. And then she's like out here saying, no, no, Kamala is nothing like Selena.

Oh, man, her, her acceptance speech. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. one full-ass minute of just thank yous, like psychotic laughing thank yous. And then going into just the most, probably the vaguest sort of policy positions on entrepreneurship and work, you know, bringing jobs to America and essentially the American dream. I think she was mentioning acts of self-determination multiple times. Like, what is she signaling, right? like um right she's a she's a political she's a political she's a political creature of silicon valley

essentially and so it you know that that's the thing is like the current shape of the fake republican versus democrat spectacle it just mirrors the shape of internecing arguments within the tech sector. Right, because that's where the money is. That's where the money is. And to bring it all the way back to Fourth Reich archaeology, to our entire purpose here, it all comes down to which Hitler do you want to represent the interests of the techno-fascist surveillance military industrial infotainment complex right that military industrial complex has now consolidated with so many other industrial complexes that it's one gigantic combine that works around the clock because they've got people on all time zones uh to fuck you to fuck all of us and if

Kamala's presence as a suddenly serious candidate tells us everything, it's that they really relish cackling in your face about it all the while. Maybe we could say this like a couple of our favorite convention speeches real quick before we sign off. Yeah, of course. And then maybe a final thought. Yes. You want to go first?

Sure. I think my favorite, the one that really stood out with me, I think we were talking about it. It was Hillary. There was 2016, when it was the honor of my life to accept our party's nomination for president. And nearly 66 million Americans voted for a future where there are no ceilings on our dreams. She's talking about glass ceilings and being the first and basically about herself for however long she was talking on stage. And essentially being like, well, Kamala is great because she's just like me. Yeah.

Is what I took away from it. But then I left thinking, like, what was Hillary really the first in, right? Like, she wasn't the first female secretary of state. She wasn't the first She wasn't the first woman to try and run for president She wasn't the first woman in the Senate or in Congress And what I came down with was just like I think she's basically the first first lady

Who graduated from suss-ass late Yale law school And so then I left it at that And I was like man God, I hope Hillary doesn't become a thing again because I really was ready to close that chapter. What about you? No, I would like to agree that the Hillary speech was marvelous, especially because I don't know if you caught this,

but she focused a great deal on how narcissistic Donald Trump is and counterposing Kamala's empathy with Trump's narcissistic. which coming from Hillary Rodham Clinton talking about someone else's narcissism in a speech that like you pointed out was entirely about her is a real chef's kiss moment yeah yeah so I my favorite I focused a little bit more on the RNC speeches and and watched sort of an ungodly number of those and so it's hard to pick just one so i hope that you'll indulge me and i can kind of give a two-way tie here um one was Hulk Hogan what happened last week when they took a shot at my hero of course because i mean obviously right so Hulk Hogan speech focused a lot on this that he was talking about real americans and he was essentially describing brown shirts you know like people that will put the dems in their place after Donald trump wins or people who will

prevent like another stolen election from keeping trump out of office again uh just totally calling for insurrection right and then ripping his shirt off which was Very dramatic. I loved the effect. And I also really appreciate the fact that this guy who is an actor, right? I mean, we talked about his arcs that he underwent while he was in pro wrestling. And now for the last however many years, right, it's not cheap to maintain the Hulk Hogan lifestyle and his real patron over the last several years has been the same person who's the

patron of my other favorite speech my other favorite speech being j d vance and that patron is is a little nazi that i like to call peter oh yeah oh yeah the furor teal and myna fureteel is a guy who couldn't convey a thought verbally if his life depended on it. Yeah. Right? If you look at any of his speaking. The Joe Rogan, yeah, the most recent Joe Rogan podcast episode was good. You don't feel that climate science is a real science?

It's, it is, um, it's, it's, it's, um, it's, um, Well, let me, it's, I, I, I, there's several different things one could say. What can you say if, if your idea of litigation finance is to use a pro wrestler sex tape to take down an entire media publication empire. I mean, what a psychopath. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, and a guy who's. you know, no aspersions on listeners who are German here, but Peter Thiel's background and he was born in Germany, right? His father was in the chemical industry. I'll just leave it there

and encourage the listeners to check out. I know Dave Emery has done a lot of coverage on Peter teal's background going way back to the facebook days but um he's a nazi folks he is a fucking nazi full on like would not be surprised if he collects nazi paraphernalia just like clarence thomas's good buddy harlan crow um who i actually heard harlan crow was a secret pothead which i thought was pretty funny. I'm sorry, I'm getting, I digress. Anyway, so, so, yeah, yeah, yeah. Peter Thiel bridging the gap from Hulk Hogan's fascist foot soldier speech to the more sort of gerbils, whereas, whereas Hulk Hogan's brand of fascism is more in the enstrom category, you know, the head of the essay who is purged on the light of the night of the long,

knives um i think j d vance is more of a gerbils like figure you know he's a more much weaker person obviously um physically and kind of in terms of his his bravado but his speech at the rnc what I loved about it was how well it reflected the anti-intellectualism and the real stupidity of American fascism. Like, it was very populist in its messaging, right? Talking about taking power away from the elites and all of this stuff that, like, bro you are at the republican national convention do you know who paid for every set piece around you yeah yeah so talking about the the distance between the expression and the underlying policy like

with jd vance it's it's a gulf so vast that you have to be really psychotic to square what he's saying with the reality of what he represents. And this comes back to something that, again, we mentioned it in our first episode, but this idea of like participation in capital A, capital D American democracy is kind of psychotic in a way. You are taking as your baseline assumptions so many, falsities and outright lies and not just lies but like egregious whoppers that it's insulting to the intelligence and and j d vance's speech really put that in a box with a bow on it and then to have an audience which every few lines it seemed like would break out frat style into a new

chant everything from your classic USA USA to whenever he would reference his Mima or is it Mima or Mama or whatever he calls the Glenn Close character that the crowd would break out into me ma'ma me ma'ma let me tell you another Mammal story my mammal died shortly before I left for Iraq in 2005 and when we went through things we found 19 loaded handguns. They were. Now, the thing is, they were stashed all over her house, under her bed, in her closet, in the silverware drawer. We wondered what was going on. Yeah, yeah.

But to be fair, to the Dems' credits, the Dems credit, they had the same sort of vibe, like, many a time during, at least during Kamala speech, you heard the chance. Totally. U.S.A. USA. And it's scary, man. And look, you got to do two, so I'm going to do two. My second favorite was, for sure, Elizabeth Warren, trying to milk as much as she could out of that scripted couch joke. Groceries, gas, housing, health care, taxes, abortion, trust Donald Trump and J.D. fans to look out for your family. Shoot, I wouldn't let those guys. I wouldn't trust them to move my couch. Totally like bungling the punchline, but still sort of somehow landing with the crowd and like just the shit-eating grin she had on her face.

I was like, man, how far, talk about arcs, right? Like Elizabeth Warren delivering a poorly scripted couch joke as her, it truly, truly is incredible. So good, so good. Yeah, I, yeah, that, and I'll give honorable mention just because I think it's also the same vibe of putting on Amanda Gorman. at the DNC that like everybody has to pretend that this is an artist of the English language like somebody who uses multiple words wrong and just like I think what is it you said I think that yeah go ahead yeah you and I were texting about this when we first saw the clip circulating and And I think it was something like her vibe is a grown-up child actor.

Like somebody who's like impressive because they can, you know, do a 360 jump in the air or something like at age 10. And then like they're doing the same shit when they've got like a full stubble. And Amanda Gorman is kind of the same way. Like, oh, she she grew up and but she didn't really grow up. oh man okay well we said it was going to be a shorter episode but now we're going close to the 90 minute mark yeah we better we better stop and and we'll save listen listener just to whet your appetite and so that next time dick and i get bogged down with our day jobs and don't have time to research and put together a whole cherry world episode uh we'll

refrain for now from talking about the Trump faux assassination attempt, but we'll save that for another one of these, and you've got to listen to his speech on that. I, you know, I don't want to keep the listener hanging too long, though. I think for final thoughts, I was going to say, if this truly is, you know, W. WF-style royal rumble, and you've got Kamala leading the charge on one side and Trump on the other. I think it's a toss-up, but I think as I'm sitting today, my money's got to go on, still on the Trump side, simply because he actually was an employee of Vince McMahon and was a pro wrestler. And you could see that really come out during the assassination attempt, right?

Like the man was in the mind to just put his fist up and say fight just a moment after maybe um, uh, risk, you know, running the risk of dying. So, uh, if we're looking, looking forward, I think right now it's probably a toss up. It's probably a closer fight than it would have been. It definitely is a closer fight than it would have been if, uh, Joe was still around. But, um, I don't know. All the same, I'd say, I'd still give it to the, to the Trump train. final thoughts from you yeah i agree with you there i think you know trump's rnc speech the only thing i'll say about it is that i think that the way that he describes the assassination attempt that he is mandela affecting the future

in order to create a visual image of something that didn't happen uh he talks about gushing blood for example and the ear being one of the most bloody parts of the body i love this take i'm glad we're getting to this take this take of yours is so good he's he's planting the seed for a future mandela effect that basically people in the future just like uh people today say for example oh yeah i saw r fk senior bobby kennedy get shot by Sirhan on film in 1968. Right. Right.

And famously, there's no film. Yeah, famously no film of it. And so I'll share that take. And then I'll say that I agree with you because fundamental political prognosis here, right? I think certainly an election can be thrown one way or another. The 2000 election is the perfect proof in the putting of that stolen for George W. Bush. But there's no need for either side to steal the forthcoming election. And I still think that the Democrats made a choice that they would rather support genocide and support both Israeli but more importantly, American impunity for war crimes on a global scale and fall on their source.

in order to prevent any accountability for the worst crimes against humanity imaginable, namely genocide, that they made that choice, they made their bet on that side, and that a Democrat cannot win without youth vote exceeding a certain threshold. And that's where the tradeoff is, that Kamala has a very, very narrow path to victory. because she's highly unlikely to get that youth vote at the right level. All right. So I think, I mean, we covered a lot, and it was nice to sort of come back to the present day

and talk about, you know, really why it is we started this project. Tune in next week as we get back to our regularly scheduled program with Jerry World, episode four. For now, I'm Dick. And I'm Don, saying farewell. And keep digging. Pushing through the market square. So many mothers sighing.

News had just come over. We had five years left crying. News guy wept and told us. Earth was really dying. Tried so much, his face was wet. Then I knew he was not lying. I heard telephones, opera house, favorite melodies. I saw boys, toys, electric ions and TVs.

A brain hurt like a warehouse. It had no room to spare. I had to cram so many things to store everything in there. And all the fat, skinny people, and all the tall-shot people, along the nobody, people, I'd love somebody, people, I never thought I'd need so many people.

Girl my age went off ahead With some tiny children If the black hadn't pulled her off I'd think she would have killed them I sold you with a broken arm To the stairs to the wheels of a Cadillac A cup knelt and kissed the feet of a bridge of a priest and a queer threw up beside of that.

I think I saw you in an ice cream parlour drinking milkshakes cold and long smiling and waving and looking so fine don't think you knew you were in the song and it was cold and it rained so I felt like an actor And I thought of more And I wanted to get back there

Your face Your race The way that you talk I kiss you, you're beautiful I want you to walk We got Five years Stuck on mine

Five years What a surprise We've got Five years My brain hurts or not Five years That's all we've got We've got

Five years What a surprise Five years That's no minds We've got Five years My brain hurts the Lord Five years

That's all we've got Because Five years Five years Five years My brain hurts a lot Five years That's all we got

We got Five years Unsurried We've got Five years Rock our eyes! We've got five years! A great head to not!

Five years! That's all with God! The five years! Five years! Five years! Five years! Five years! Five yes!

I don't know.