Grubstakers - Bonus: Democracy Later (May 2 2017) feat. Raghav Mehta

Episode Date: April 3, 2019

The old current events podcast we did before Grubstakers was called Democracy Later and we had Raghav Mehta as a guest on May 2, 2017. On this episode we discussed Barack Obama accepting $400,000 to give a speech to a healthcare conference sponsored by the financial company Cantor Fitzgerald, the book 'Shattered' which documented the inside of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, and Raghav shared his stories about Andrew Breitbart and Karl Rove. In the wake of his tragic passing at the age of 31 we decided to re-upload his appearance. We're going to miss our friend dearly and we encourage you to seek out his writing, his stand up, and to go through the archives of his podcast "Pod Damn America" to hear more of his voice. The episode is lightly edited because we sucked at podcasting. Enjoy.

let's uh let's talk about another piece of news was uh obama's uh speech to uh canter fitzgerald sponsored healthcare conference um and and just like a quick bit of background on canter fitzgerald and andy wonderful company yeah um there's a uh they were big in credit default swaps which is essentially insurance you know anytime you hear that that's insurance and so they didn't really sell um mortgages as much but they sold insurance on mortgages and uh uh you know they were it's it's tragic that they lost like 600 some employees in 9-11 but the ceo was was not there um because Mossad gave him the tip off. And it's like, you know, obviously you don't want to make fun of the tragedy.

But the guy, he's worth somewhere between $300 million and a billion dollars. He bought a $22 million Florida condo in 2014. And, you know, there was a fraud case as of December. A former Cantor Fitzgerald trader was charged with securities fraud, where they were falsely overstating the price Cantor had paid for mortgage-backed securities. And they were doing this to people being helped by the Troubled Asset Relief Program, TARP. So they were finding these people, and then they were lying to them about how much Cantor had actually paid for various securities, causing the customers to pay a higher price, or other situations where customers believed Cantor had arranged a sale with a buyer. He would

falsely understate the negotiated price in order to induce the victim to sell them at a lower price. You know, so essentially just textbook fraud um but that's just kind of like a little bit of background on uh on canter fitzgerald and uh you know obama uh is taking four hundred thousand dollars to to go speak to them and then did they like sue like yeah yeah yeah here's their 9-11s so they were they were at the um somewhere between or between like the 103rd and 108th floor of the uh world trade center everyone who was in the office uh when the plane hit died uh the north tower and so they're like more people in canter fitzgerald died than uh police officers or firefighters on 9-11 uh the real heroes the real heroes uh they were able to uh it was most of the company they

were able to survive because they had just implemented an electronic trading system and so they were basically brought the racism factory up to web 2.0 yeah yeah and so they were basically able to survive because i presume they were just gonna like lay off half of the company anyway uh and you know uh actually i think there was an investor note where it's like uh canterford strl is gonna save a lot on pension payouts now yeah they stopped uh they stopped paying the families at a certain point after i mean which is kind of understandable because like if an employee dies yeah you're gonna stop paying them uh but so yeah then they sued american airlines and won 135 million dollars settlement from them distributed among the executives correct yeah yeah most of the money went to them yeah yeah top top shelf

yeah the real victims the real heroes yeah i think which it's like suing Toyota for the rise of ISIS like well in fairness those commercials wouldn't rage anybody yeah it would make anyone jealous yeah that's how people get radicalized

we were rising against the I can't have sex with that Toyota that's why I'm gonna bomb somebody now like so I actually

interviewed with Cantor Fitzgerald a couple years ago it was like right after I moved to New York. I was making $10 an hour. I was like, did you mention the 9-11 thing? Yeah, that's why Andy didn't get it.

He made a very tasteless joke. It was the first interview I went in where I was like, do not bring up 9-11. You want to ask him about 9-11. Don't talk about it. And so I interviewed with them. And one person was like really nice who I interviewed with. And this other guy, I was like talking to him. And it was basically this administrative job.

And they both kind of said, you know, you have to have like a thick skin in this job. You'll get yelled at. And the last guy who was in this job, he was a musician. I guess it didn't work out and he wanted to start trading you have to be uh complacent and where you are so basically what they were telling me was we're not going to pay you a lot and you're gonna uh get ritually abused by the people here with no chance of career advancement so it's like scientology just to go back your rule on uh not talking about 9-11 a job interview actually backfired when I didn't get hired for the 9-11 museum.

It's not always an iron law. What do you guys do here? You walk in, you're like, knock, knock. Who's there? 9-11. 9-11 who? You said you'd never forget. You're hired.

It's also what you want to mention during a comedy writing job interview i walked in i was like so where's the massad exhibit uh where's the ariel chiron wing um okay so uh just like the canter fitzgerald thing yeah and it's actually yeah like andy was saying there's there's apparently a book where like some lady wrote about just like the horrific culture in canter fitzgerald and it's just again this is all endemic to wall street where it's like canter fitzgerald's not even the worst offender but it's like literally any financial firm if you spend 10 minutes on google you can find all of these cases of fraud all these cases of settlements all these cases of the government not prosecuting and not holding people criminally accountable.

But so I did want to talk about like Trevor Noah's take. Oh, Jesus. I don't know if you saw it right now. Oh, I did. Yeah. But it was on The Daily Show where it was like... People were like, oh, why doesn't he not accept the money? No, that.

That. No. No. No, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. F*** that. F*** that. No. No. No, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry. So the first black president must also be the first one to not take money afterwards? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, my friend. He can't be the first of everything. F*** that and f*** you. Yeah, I said it. No. And then the audience applauded. Like, they had just been, like, conditioned to applaud for Trevor Noah raising his voice.

I just want to put that over, like, a screen of people getting evicted and having their fucking shit thrown out on the porch in the winter. You know, a grandma getting locked out by Steve Mnuchin in a fucking blizzard. Well, ever since, ever since leaving the presidency, Obama's just basically been living the life of a rich asshole. He went parasailing with Richard Branson. And then he was... He hung out with Tom Cruise on a cruise ship. Tom Hanks, I'm sorry.

Tom Cruise does sound a little better, though. Tom Cruise on a cruise ship. Yeah, yeah. You know what? I would be forgiven if he hung out with Tom. That would be an Obama post-presidency. That'd be really fun. It's like he becomes really good friends with Tom Cruise

and slowly gets sucked into Scientology. Yeah, he's like embracing his evil roots. Not roots, but evilness. They like go to Yemen and like harvest the organs of a child. Yeah, all these people, the people defending this are like, they're twisting this into like, i don't think the biggest deal i don't think the headline here is he's taking this amount of money the headline is that he's talking to wall street yeah like when you do that you're

going out of your way to be like hey well as him who's you know arguably the leader of the democratic party which i think one of his former aides just said. He's going there and he's like, we value you, we value your institution and your contributions to the party, and we want to continue working with you. And that's such a huge fuck you to everybody. Oh yeah, especially after no one got prosecuted

for the financial crisis. The most widespread fraud in like living, basically living American history. Yeah. Wall Street is woke now, guys. Right. It is frustrating because it's like,

as far as the prosecution thing, it does give you this idea of, you know, pay to play or whatever influence trading where nobody gets prosecuted and now Obama's getting paid out. And it's like,

you look at the argument Tim Geithner and stuff made, and I obama's getting paid out and it's like you look at uh the the argument tim geithner and stuff made and i think he's a snake but they didn't want to uh go breaking up these wall street banks and prosecuting people in the middle of the financial crisis because then that would like exacerbate and spread this contagion and all that and it's like all right that'll buy you a few years but then they spend six years prosecuting nobody and allow all these statutes of limitation to expire. And, you know, Geithner did a frontline interview where he described it as political theater

prosecuting executives, which is like, yeah, you know, the rule of law. There's a lot of political theater there. Or, you know, Eric Holder, of course, said that it keeps him up at night, the idea of prosecuting somebody and then having the financial system collapse as a result. Oh, also, he's now back at a lucrative job at a law firm that represents financial institutions. You want to hear the strident stand-up joke I wrote that never went anywhere?

So it was like, oh, it keeps him up at night eric holder not prosecuting people well i guess uh you know the banks he's in bed with probably do that too did that kill a pine box yeah yeah i was like i was wearing my all black bill hicks outfit and i was smoking a cigarette and then i called the audience cunts when they didn't laugh yeah say that punchline one more time. Oh, so prosecuting a bank keeps him up at night? Well, maybe the banks he's in bed with keep him up at night too.

Yeah, the Nuremberg trials was just political pageantry, guys. I mean, in fairness, they made some great movies out of it. It's just the League of Nations Flexing their muscles Schindler's List was political theater But yeah

I did want to Here's a quote I don't know if you guys saw from Obama's Spokesperson was responding to this And he said quote With regard to this or any other speech involving Wall Street sponsors I'd just like to point out that in 2008, Barack Obama raised more money from Wall Street

than any candidate in history, which is not a good way to start. It's not a good way. It's not a defense. What? I saw that quote and I was like, is that a reporter for The Intercept? No, no, it's his official spokesperson.

But so that's the first half of the quote. And he goes, and still went on to successfully pass and implement the toughest reforms on Wall Street since FDR, which is not hard to do, be the toughest since FDR, since everybody since FDR has been trying to undo what FDR did. So it's like the first guy to not actively try to undo everything put in place to protect us from financial fraud. But yeah, no, it is just funny. Like that first part of the quote was like, yeah, he raised more money than any candidate from Wall Street in history. And then, of course, he listened to people like Tim Geithner,ner who were like don't prosecute anybody don't larry summers yes uh don't prosecute

anybody don't break up too big to fail and even larry summers since leaving has been having regrets like writing op-eds he wrote something about um the the so a lot of the big number settlements part of that uh part of the big number of the fine where they pay fines instead of go to jail, which is bullshit to begin with. But even that is bullshit because part of the number you read when they say they settled for X billion dollars, part of that is set aside for consumer relief. And Larry Summers wrote an op-ed and other people have reported on this where a lot of what they set aside for consumer relief, they essentially just turned into profit making activities where they'll go and like buy up people's mortgages and then sell them for a profit or do whatever. So it's like, this is not consumer relief. This is just

business that they're making a profit off of. Yeah. So there's just a lot of frustrating things like that. And it's like, yeah, of course he took more money than any other candidate in history. And then, you know, this is what we get. But I will say the good thing is, you know, this story hasn't really gone away and a lot of people seem angry about it. And I don't know if I disagree with you guys on this. I think sometimes the vitriol for Obama on the left can be counterproductive.

He remains popular, but it is worth pointing out these kinds of hypocrisies and, you know, the argument is also ultimately against the system and not the man i think what's more alarming is the way people are defending it because i mean like yeah it's okay oh man like i i got i wasted way too much time on twitter yesterday like three people well two people that amani gandhi person gand, Gandhi, accused me, basically implied that I was racist. And then one of her followers was like, yeah, people like you just hold black men to impossible standards. I'm like, who the fuck knows who I am?

That's not an impossible standard to not take money from Wall Street after you're out of office. You're right. That is brilliant. Because it's like somebody read like three of your 140 character or less tweets and was like, this guy holds black men to impossible standards. Another bright fart troll. I know everything about his life. He probably denies that anything bad happened during Reconstruction.

I love there was that Twitter account. It was at Angry black lady and she said yeah i cannot oh that was that's amani gandhi oh that's amani oh and she was going at you yeah because i tweeted at her i'm like yo this is stupid she was very bored oh man it was cool shoot what was it that set it off she was like i can't imagine waking up and thinking about getting angry about wall street that's the widest thing i can imagine and then immediately everyone pointed out that she was a foreclosure attorney jesus christ i didn't know that yeah she was subtweeting meneker uh oh yeah yeah because meneker fucking retarded not to get inside on the podcast but yeah will meneker

tweet is like every day i wake up that's uh for those who don't know that's one of the co-hosts of a chap a trap house a podcast that we rip off rip off yeah that we are desperately trying to be and forge our own independent identity from yeah and he's like i hate wall street and then i kiss my dog and that was the tweet and she's like yeah white ass bitch it's so fun i mean shit on wall street like look the twitter shit like first off i have to just like ignore it to keep from going insane because you see these accounts on twitter and you're like well clearly they're just trying to gain a following by just you know shitting on bernie or uh anyone or young leftists or whatever whereas like s Albright, she doesn't have any principles. She tweets about Bernie 24 hours a day.

Oh, yeah. And you just see accounts like that. So I have to remind myself that Bernie is the most popular politician in the United States, and these people don't represent anybody but this fringe that's determined to do whatever the fuck. But it's like, yeah, the other thing where it's like, you know, being angry about Wall Street is the whitest shit in the world. Well, if you even like, again, do 10 minutes of research on this shit, Wells Fargo, among other financial institutions,

deliberately targeted black churches and other predominantly black organizations for predatory subprime lending. This was entirely in their training materials. They would go into these predominantly black communities and sell them these predatory loans. And so, of course, as a result of the financial crisis, black America lost half of their total wealth. And then you look at who got evicted after the financial crisis. A lot of black and Latino people. The foreclosure epidemic particularly hit black America. So it's like, you know, these people are like,

oh, this Wall Street stuff is a distraction or Wall Street guys are mad at white people. And it's like, I think Natalie Shore, to paraphrase her, she was like, the problem is a lot of people think Wall Street is like a complement to these other problems instead of something that actively exacerbates them. We look at, you know, Wall Street profits off private prisons. They profit off, you know, foreclosures, everything else. They profit off the war machine, Raytheon, et cetera, et cetera.

So it's like, you know, you want to fix these problems. You really have to start with Wall Street. Yeah, yeah. problems you really have to start with wall street yeah yeah she actually also had a great uh point yesterday when everyone was going into the new york times about uh climate denial which is like you can't the like climate denial isn't driven by people's misunderstanding of science it's driven by profit motives to spread misinformation about science so there's no point in going at it from a scientific standpoint because everyone who like can understand that knows that you have to go at the profit motives that are spreading misinformation. You have to fight the capital before you march for the science. Before you can establish the globalist Zog world order.

You have to. Well, it's a lot like that. He's fighting against Alec Jones' right to keep his kids. It's a lot like that liberal fact-checking mentality when it comes to gay marriage and stuff. It's like, well, maybe if we just show them that the Bible says this. It's like as if this doesn't purely come from a place of hate or them just trying to rally up votes.

As if they really believe, all of these politicians really believe that the Bible just hates gays and that's why they believe it. I'm just remembering like it's kind of liberal west wingson well that kind of stuff but also the uh the liberal respectability stuff where i saw some like new york times article where it was like trump was like it was the he he said the major major conflict with north korea thing and like the highest liked comment on Facebook was just some lady like, no, sir, your job is to protect us from war,

not start one. I just love like this kind of stuff where people like still do all this kind of like, sir, and respectability stuff. Or like there was another one where it was like the other 98% quoted David from approvingly, which I always love. They're just like this. uh oh god even andy

richter's like retweeted david from it's like you yeah this guy who fucking thought up the axis of evil he put another country do you guys know the story of the axis of evil so he uh he was the speechwriter who came up with the phrase axis of evil iran north korea iraq george w bush speechwriter right and so the entire thing that happened was uh they had iran and iraq that they called the axis of evil but somebody pointed out axis need three things so they put north korea on it just to add a third country that was their enemy and of course you know that severely antagonized the kim regime rule of threes guys gotta do it they they now they're doing a callback to that bit yeah but um except they already set one of them on fire and then yeah and so now david from is

seen by a bunch of because he's this, because he's critical of the Trump administration, he'll get like, he'll constantly get reach. And he's a head writer at the Atlantic, which has just become this, it, it just become this sort of bullshit, like Russian conspiracy,

uh, think piece factory that's run by David from. And so head writer. Yeah. He's, he's, he's an editor or something. He's, I mean, I think he's, yeah. One one of the don't make things up on the podcast i do enough

of that i i've but my favorite my favorite thing is just like whenever he like tries to like post something where he he puts himself forward as the the head of the resistance like he'll just get a pile on from like uh or he someone he he criticized someone for getting deported over shoplifting and he was like well i mean if you look at their record uh yeah they had a they had a strong background and then someone immediately replied to him oh we're comparing people's criminal history well here's yours and it was a list of civilian deaths in the iraq war it was like a million yeah he's uh he's a real piece huh did he respond no because he's a cowardly piece of shit who just like they were all terrorists yeah he's they were shoplifters too he doesn't acknowledge people like calling him out on his iraq war bullshit because uh like he

just wants it to go away yeah Yeah, and he's probably rationalized all of it. He doesn't see it as a problem. Andy, he's a senior editor, not a head writer. I'm so sorry. Fuck. It's him and Jeffrey Goldberg who also played up the Al-Qaeda connections with Saddam.

Oh, I didn't know Jeffrey did that. All I know is the Atlantic gives you three years for $50 and I sent it to my parents for my dad's birthday and I feel pretty good about that. Yeah. Some good articles. You probably could have saved some money just getting them time magazine. Probably could have got them,

uh, you know, the John Birch society pamphlets. Probably could have just like mailed them a racist right wing pamphlet every month. A link to like three episodes of Pod Save America. I like the idea of like sending my parents like some fucking Ron Paul crank. Mom and dad, you got to check this guy out. He's really making a lot of arguments about, you know the white genotype and uh why we need mass

deportations some some lefty person on twitter was tweeting about how they tried to they introduced their parents to chapo and he's like no you can't just do that it's like this is not for everybody like i like it but no my old people do not need to hear this. It was like, it is interesting how like Chapo and just that culture in general has changed my perspective where I was always kind of outside of the political mainstream. But, you know, it's like the Chapo, it's really concentrated at what the left movement thinks in this country. So it like, it used to be there was a lot of anger at the system,

but you could make the excuse that it's like, oh, these people, they don't know what they want or whatever. There's no unified voice. Right, right. But it's very clear what policies the modern left wants, at least as far as everything Bernie says, or most everything. And so I just saw Meet the Press today, which is a terrible program, but I watch it every Sunday.

And it's just like Susan Collins, you know, the main senator was like, yeah, you know, there's these voices on the left and the right. They're very extreme and they're angry, but they don't know what they want. They just, they do all these purity tests. And it's like, you idiot. Like people have been calling your office about health care, you know, by the hundreds. And you're just being so disingenuous and that's that's the thing is that like nobody will address the policy stuff they just want to criticize bernie as a person or

criticize leftist uh for purity tests or yeah all the criticism of bernie are all personality based all right i mean besides like the very recent like abortion stuff but like which is not out of line with anything democrats have been doing. Look, I just don't think women should have the right to choose. First of all, women cannot be trusted for their own bodily autonomy. And second,

Wall Street actually does good things. I have devoted my entire career to maintaining the structural integrity of the glass ceiling. And I no longer like killer mike i love macklemore that's what i love maybe he could uh you know tone down some of that rhetoric killer mike i think uh he's really encouraging a black lives matter to uh murder police officers how about pro-life mike huh how about that blue lives matter like, Neocon Bernie. That was the other

thing we were doing on the other episode was, like, uh, Bernie as, like, uh, like, radical Zionist. Like, all his same views, but, like, look, I believe in two things. Holding Wall Street accountable and that Palestinians are animals. And, in fact, there is no Palestinian

people. They are Jordanians. I believe that, uh, throwing, uh, a child throwing rocks at a soldier is the equivalent to a gas chamber and should be met with the equivalent force of such an act. I like how yours sounds like an Obama impression, but I just imagine you're doing Obama saying that. Like if Obama was making fun of Bernie. That's what they did. Him and Richard Branson cocked bernie i think politics should all be based on cocking yeah do you think if we told hillary that if she

narrated shattered she could like she would do it if she became president she would probably do it right dude it so i i i oh yeah i wanted to talk about shattered so yeah i listened to the audiobook shattered and what's great is that the narrator sounds like clinton like hillary clinton like hillary clinton yeah uh yeah so for those who don't know i'm chilling in a titanium bunker i'm chilling high above a yemeni wedding i am uh chilling with my analytics team on how we can use black people as a tool uh it's so yeah shattered for those who don't know it's uh it's the inside scoop on the hillary clinton campaign about uh it basically it goes from the it was it was it was written originally like they

got these interviews from people as it was going on and it was clearly originally written to be this triumphant like inside look at the first woman president like shattered was originally meant to be about how she shattered the glass ceiling and um so they got like a lot of really kind of intimate like uh reports from people inside the campaign. And then, of course, it all came tumbling down. And now it's just this really embarrassing look at a dysfunctional campaign. And so it goes from, like, the beginning when she announced her run for president. And the analysis of it is, like, shitty Beltway analysis, where clearly, like, the authors were very on the side of Clinton and her team.

And basically, they kind of blame Bernie for calling Clinton corrupt. And it follows through all that. But what's funny is that on one chapter, they'll blameie for playing up how clinton's corrupt and then two chapters later clinton will be holding a fundraiser in the hamptons with like hundred thousand dollar entry tickets yeah i'm chilling in the hamptons yeah yeah this is like during her with jeffrey epstein it was like and and they they also try to make the the case that all the like basically she surrounded himself herself with like all these shitty career-driven people like robbie mook who was this guy who was obsessed with data yeah but also bill clinton hated him yeah bill clinton hated

him uh john podesta hated him and would repeatedly just yell at him in front of all like podesta would just yell at mook in front of all like podesta would just yell at mook in front of like all the staffers regularly and another thing i said double pepperoni um i don't want children this feisty but uh 12 inch at 16 yeah like i've only read like the news reports about it but there were like a few anecdotes i really enjoyed like there was a thing about how nobody in the campaign could get in contact with clinton yeah and i remembered like during the the presidential campaign that was coming out about trump and like all these stories about how dysfunctional his his campaign was is that

nobody on the campaign could actually get in talk in touch with donald trump and it turns out it was you know the exact same way with clinton because she had to like fucking recharge at her power station 18 hours a day and everyone had to go through like huma abedin right who was whose personal life was slowly falling apart around her with like just because her husband couldn't stop to like tweeting pictures of his dick to children. And, you know, of course, her involvement with the Muslim Brotherhood, as we all know. Ah, yes, yes. And I liked one of those stories.

It's pretty well known now, but about people not being able to get in contact with Clinton was they had Huma reach out to Clinton to ask who her first interview should be with. And Clinton gave her a name. And then Huma misremembered the name and said the wrong name. And they set up the wrong interview with the wrong person, which is just like, and it's like. And it was like Hillary, it was to try to make the first part of the email scandal go away.

And then they like do the interview and hill they describe hillary's eyes as shooting daggers at the interviewer for just asking her about questions like the the running the through line of the book is that like hillary's beleaguered by this email scandal and it's so tragic and you know comey is this sort of like dark overlord who's just trying to like fuck her over with the email thing uh and then you know trump's taking advantage of it but the the what it what it kind of misses is that the whole time like none of this would have happened had hillary not tried to subvert like public uh like just public oversight of her emails and secretary of state like the entire reason she did it was to subvert it was just to basically hide what she was saying from the public as a public official i feel like there's this myth about american voters especially

in like the last you know quarter of the election is that oh no it's these fbi files that cost her like as if anyone who cared about that hadn't made up their mind about hillary by that oh yeah as if they really gave a fuck about it like who she had to win over people who were undecided who people who didn't vote that's who everyone should be talking about like why that was the biggest segment wasn't hillary or trump voters it was non-voters exactly yeah and they were like what was it like there were more, the difference between Hillary and Trump in Michigan was smaller than the number of votes that were, or ballots that were cast without a name in like checked off for president.

Yeah. Right. They voted straight Democrat, but they just didn't vote for Hillary. Yeah. In Michigan. Like, yeah,

there were enough votes that would have flipped it. Like 90,000. It's like that. But yeah, one of my favorite anecdotes from that like and there's so many about robbie mook just being a complete idiot who's you know made a lot of money but uh so one of my favorite anecdotes was for the three weeks leading up to the election they saw that michigan and wisconsin would be close but robbie mook a

didn't do new polling and b didn't invest there because he didn't want to tip off the trump campaign that it might be close which is like the most insane black adder shit where it's like uh you know it makes me think of there's this bit in black adder where they like reveal like how heavily fortified the germans are and the general in world war one and the generals uh played by stephen fry he's like and that is precisely why we must attack at this area because this is what the enemy would least expect massing our forces slowly walking towards the most heavily fortified positions and that just reminds me of the uh the hillary clinton campaign to the t oh my god yeah they so they they scaled back in michigan because like according to their analysis every time the

election was mentioned in the news and michigan hillary would get less popular and so they were like well you know let's just not campaign in michigan because that because just her presence will lower the polls, was their analysis. I just can't believe, like, how fucking detached from reality are you as, like, a campaign person, where you can't understand that it's like, you know, voters, they're not that hard to understand.

They respond to material policies that change their material circumstances. Which is barely mentioned in the book, because they have no concept of that. They don't care about barely mentioned in the book because they have no concept of that they don't care about lebron james in ohio they don't care about you know beyonce headlining a thing with you they don't care about all this cultural signifier shit that so much of the campaign was built on and it just boggles my mind one thing that was really interesting to me was just the casual racism of the hillary campaign like when it came to picking their uh vice president they had like the list of people

for vice president and it the book kind of goes through their mindset for picking people and they wrote racial slurs next to all the minority yeah yeah so it was like there's spook they're like cory booker who was a rising star in the democrats who they liked they decided they didn't go with him because they didn't need an african-american on the ticket which is just the most like racist like dismissive i would love that to be the reason that i dislike cory booker it's like you look at the totality of his like arguing for charter schools and just being like a fucking corporate sellout. Voting against like prescription drugs from Canada.

Well, he's. Well, also her campaign's failure to acknowledge that right wing extremism exists or terrorism exists. Oh, yeah. Which was stemming from the Charleston shooting. And like the Democrats spending the last two years in office trying. Well, they like effectively squashed a report on that pretending it didn't exist because it would be politically uncomfortable uh it's fucking insane because they were like because of this myth about like the moderate

republican is like oh yeah if we go down too hard on these people uh we're gonna lose these level-headed conservative voters as if they give a fuck about you oh yeah no it's it's so again just to go back to how fucking mind-blowing it is where it's like the idea that they were talking about that republicans were gonna vote for them and this is a woman who in 1993 was accused of murdering her best friend, and a large segment of the Republican voting population still believes that she murdered Vince Foster to cover up criminal activities carried out by her. So it's like, yeah, let's focus on winning over the people

who think I'm a fucking murderer rather than the people who might actually vote for me if I just speak to labor and union concerns instead of my fucking bullshit analytics that that actually like have people being turned away from campaign offices because they don't give out campaign literature because they don't believe persuasion matters well you see they're trying to uh save money in those districts and then you know when the uh on election day they were bragging about how you know we're gonna win this and we're still gonna have some money in the bank yeah because they have to

spend 30 million in television advertising in florida and then fucking lose to a guy who spent 700 000 there oh and never go to wisconsin yeah oh another another great uh part of it was uh bill clinton uh and all of his bullshit like apparently yeah like raping somebody yeah yeah so so this is great apparently in the uh in the primary uh sanders brother who lives in england clearly doesn't give a fuck about anything uh was just like giving an interview and during the interview he just goes you know i wonder if bill clinton is like one of those mean rapists or just like a nice rapist. Like the Hiller campaign immediately calls up Jeff Weaver and they're like,

what the fuck are you doing? And they're like, what? We don't control him. Who is this? This is Bernie Sanders brother. Oh, that's hilarious.

And like, apparently like whenever like Bill Clinton gets really mad when he gets called a sexual predator. And so every time something like this would come up, there would just be this Clinton rage, which is like, you know, maybe you shouldn't be a sexual predator. Like when there are 30 or whatever women who accuse you of sexual assault. They have to like lock him in a closet to prevent him from assaulting the interns. He also, Bill Clinton, he has a suspected mistress in Chappaqua who has a Secret Service moniker of Energizer. Oh. Yeah. That's dope.

I love those little Secret Service gags. Yeah. You know what Melania's is? What? Muse. Oh, okay. Yeah. And finally, he was obsessed with Brexit.

And for the whole end of the campaign, he's just walking around muttering to people about Brexit. Just talking about how he's like, this is really the thing. This is what's going to bring us down is Brexit. And right at the end of the campaign, there's little gem here her hands began moving again these guys came in she huffed we were doing better until this happened bill clinton nodded in agreement and muttered something something about brexit that was just yeah there was die yeah there's there's this part where he he talks to loretta lynch on like the tarmac which remember that story yeah yeah good idea thanks guy yeah it's like and if they want to blame comey maybe you shouldn't have talked to fucking the attorney general on the tarmac you you idiot. And then their defense was like, no, they're just having an innocent conversation about Brexit.

I like the idea of Bill Clinton as a late-developing autist who can only talk about Brexit. He just develops this obsessive knowledge about Brexit and polling results. You know, Nigel Farage russian hookers yeah oh and it's apparently like within a day the clinton campaign immediately uh hillary was just talking on the phone to a bunch of people saying what blaming the kgb for her loss which like you could update your acronyms girl it's the fsb now yeah yeah it was just like oh so the narrative was that you were an out of touch out of touch campaign that had no connection to the american people and you're blaming a spy agency that shut down in 1992 yeah i mean it's frustrating i think i i'm hoping we'll purge all these people in 2018

or at least a lot of them it'd be sure it'd be nice i bet you anything they push cory booker yeah but i don't think i don't think you can win the nomination he won't win i think just today i read a story about a guy uh who's challenging nancy pelosi is gonna primary her which would be great you know so it's like my hope is going to primary her, which would be great. So it's like, my hope is these people are fucking gone, but it is frustrating where it's like nobody faces consequences or makes a mistake. Podesta and Robbie Mook,

Podesta's never been held accountable for those children, and Robbie Mook, but in seriousness, they're both fucking rich. They both got paid hundreds of thousands for the most winnable election in history. Oh, yeah. That's my favorite joke is when people are like,

well, there's nothing we could have done to stop Trump. It was just a racist mood in the country or whatever. It's like, are you fucking kidding me? Yeah. Like, do you understand how badly you guys had to fuck up

to lose to this clown car with like like, a 38% approval rating? Yeah. Like, and I said this before. Like, the refrain you hear is like, ah, she won by 3 million votes. She's clearly the winner. It's like, it was fucking Donald Trump. She should have won by 20 million. She should have, like, cleared out everything but, like, Texas.

Yeah. You know that, like, rapist who rapist who offended large segments of the country? And didn't want to win? Yeah. That's the other thing. That's the other thing. Who ran on neo-fascism? Right.

Who ran a presidential campaign as a publicity stunt for himself and never wanted to govern and you fucking lost to him it's like it's just like it blows my mind it i mean i just can't believe we're in the fucking dimension where this shit happened oh also people uh throughout the primary they're like you know it was a bad idea that hillary took all that money from goldman sachs but it was in the past and then like idly they would mention like and then her aides gathered in the living room of the carriage house in her chappaqua like chappaqua manor like she has a carriage house it's so weird because it's like as incompetent as her campaign team was

they were explicitly saying after the email thing like you need to have a press conference and clear house it's so weird because it's like as incompetent as her campaign team was they were explicitly saying after the email thing like you need to have a press conference and clear the air oh yeah she was like oh this will go away and then it fucking didn't yeah because it turns out right exactly it turns out when you like don't address things which is like this is exactly what happened with whitewater was they stonewalled and they refused to cooperate and you know they refused to turn over any documents and suddenly there was an independent prosecutor and it's like how do you just have so much power for so long and you just don't learn anything about how anything works oh yeah and it's like jesus i know this is probably not funny but it is kind of fun to just

yell at this fucking idiot who's like won't face the consequences of what she has done to all of us um because they she just saw the american people as like these objects to manipulate on her way to power like everything with the analytics it's just tools for manipulating the public but you can only like polish the turd so much and they just don't realize that it's a turd. I mean, I probably take a less cynical view where it's like, I don't know what's in her head, but I think she made the decision in the 90s that the business community, and in the case of healthcare, where they ran those ads against her and all that, I think she

essentially has just made the decision that the American public is not powerful enough to defeat the business community. So it's better to just form strategic alliances with big capital and Wall Street and all that. And that worked for a while. Right. Yeah. I mean, that was the Bill Clinton strategy. But it's like, you know, that's not the case anymore, especially since the financial crisis. But even before that, she was part of it.

She was never against the business community. Like, she was a board member of Walmart really early in her career. But I liked, oh, the other anecdote was like, not only did they tell her to give the speech, they told her not to do the Goldman Sachs thing when you're going to run for president. Yeah. Which is like, they explicitly told her this shit. Yeah. And it's like, how can you not fucking know?

Lots of anti-establishment sentiment is going around. Right. She's so arrogant. That's like, and so the other thing is like. And they were completely caught off guard by that. They're like, why is the electorate so weird now? And it's like, you forgot about the financial crisis? Yeah.

You know that whole Occupy movement? Yeah. That you dismissed wholeheartedly? I forgot to say this earlier when we were talking about, you know, Cantor, Fitzgerald, and Obama, but it's like, Wall Street, they're never going to live this down. Like, they think they got away with this. you know and they did they didn't nobody got prosecuted nobody will get prosecuted all the statutes the limitations are gone but the thing is the public is never going to stop being angry no like because things keep getting worse for the

public exactly it's going to come to a head as it always does in history right where you're either going to hit a far left movement or you're going to hit fascism. Open for the latter, baby. Oh, yeah. Dude, I would love to fucking execute Andy in a FEMA camp. I'll execute him here. As soon as I'm... I'm just going to tell you, if there's a camp, I'm going to be a cop.

If Obama implemented those white genocide camps, I would be a cop. Day one, I'd be like, I'm helping you guys. Yeah, I'm a commissar in the white genocide FEMA camp. I'm a death panel officer. You get like a fucking lanyard and you get like really smug about it.

Can you imagine like right after... I went to Winona state university for this it's just like fucking executing all the harvard ivy league people like the rise of the state school bureaucracy has come and we will have our revenge can you imagine like 1946 like all the former like bureaucrats for the Nazis just trying to get a job where they're just on their resume. They're just like train logistics. Yeah, it's like they actually what they did was they just hung low for like two years. And then it's like, oh, we're at war with the Soviet Union and you guys need us again.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. That was the CIA's. I think I forgot to mention in that book about the CIA, apparently the first thing they did right after the war when they formed was they would just pile money on fascists, like former Nazis, to give them information about the Soviets. And then Nazis would just lie to them and take the money just because it was free money.

And they just kept getting screwed over. And that was why they were so obsessed with loyalty that they did the MKUltra experiments. Ah, I see. Because they got burned so many times giving money to fascists. Well, you know, say what you will about Nazis, but smart people. Fool me once, I'm going to brainwash people. In many ways, you might say they've been bred for that purpose i love the

picture online where it's like it's a quote from uh biography of trump where it's like trump believes in the idea of great people breeding together to create uh an elite group of humans and then it's a picture of eric trump with his weird gums did you see but yeah our president actually believes in eugenics that's a true thing yeah one of his ex-wives uh said that he used to keep a a pile of hitler speeches by his bed that he would read and that was you know all the fucking 4chan poll board needed to hear to get behind him. Do you guys think anything's going to happen with North Korea? Yeah.

Will they, won't they situation? Yeah. I'm praying to God nothing happens. But yeah, I mean, I don't think it will, at least short term, because it's like the consequences for South Korea, Japan, and then the world economy. Like you want to talk 2008 financial crisis, a war with North Korea will be devastating for the world economy. And again, you don't want to put human lives into world economic perspectives,

but it's like what incentivizes U.S. policymakers. They don't give a shit about people's lives on the Korean Peninsula, but they do give a shit about the global economy and all that. I'm hopeful nothing happens, but it's just something where there's like so much cross talk and shit that it's it's scary as hell here's the nice thing about a north korean icbm is you know it's not going to be accurate like it's probably just going to hit a mountain and then you know kill some kill some hikers yeah did you guys want to hear my ruby ridge story real quick yeah sure um so uh so i just watched a documentary about ruby ridge uh which was in 1992 there was like this white separatist dude

who like uh refused to comply with a um federal court order because he was got caught doing some sawing off shotgun barrels or something and so then the courts told him to appear at court and he wouldn't he just hold up in his property so there was some u.s marshals going through the property just scouting it out and then he got in a gun battle with them both sides blame the other his uh his son gets killed one of his sons as well as a u.s marshal gets killed and then of course when you kill a u.s marshal then the fucking federal government flips out and it turns into this bureaucratic nightmare where the fbi takes over and the fbi sends in these hostage rescue team snipers with basically just kill on site rules of engagement and the the fucking snipers

arrive before the hostage negotiators so the snipers set up and uh they're just staking out the cabin they shoot him he gets wounded. They shoot him. He gets wounded. They shoot his other son. He gets wounded. They blow his wife's head off, totally unarmed. And then, of course, he, you know, drags his wife back into the cabin, his wife's body, and he's holed up in there.

And then the hostage negotiators arrive like one or two days later. And, of course, they have no idea that his wife is dead. So the hostage negotiators arrive and they've got like this bullhorn and their idea is that they're going to convince him to come out by appealing to his wife so they're just on the bullhorn like talking like vicky we made pancakes for your kids vicky vicky vicky won't you come out and enjoy the pancakes which is like so tragically funny it was the idea funny and this is the idea

that like i love the idea of like the u.s government like going in and like blowing off somebody's wife's head and then just like taunting her to be like this is what happens when you kill a marshal we will murder your children and your wife and then mock their inability to eat pancakes like after the waco massacre while the building's burning and children are burning, they're like, Who wants barbecue? Koresh! David Koresh, won't you come enjoy this charbroiled hamburger? The FBI are so bad at ambushes.

I guess there's, like, no formal training for something like that there's no way to do it bureaucracy is like such a funny thing but it's like it's so absurd once you add in like the license for deadly force yeah because you just have all these like different departments like kicking the can and not wanting to be responsible for shit but also like they can all kill people and it's legal um but yeah i i don't want to keep you if you got to run, but did you want to, like, tell the Andrew Breitbart story or just, like, give the basics? Yeah, so I used to – so I worked – I interned for some papers in college

and I wrote for, like, my student paper and I, like, you know, covered city governments. I interned for, like, the npr affiliate and did a lot of like campaign coverage and just fucking hated it hated the people i worked with hated like i got scoffed by like michelle bachman like carl rove like insulted me once and uh what did he say i was um he was promoting his book i don't know. How I got away with it? Yeah. Like, if I did it.

He's just not that into you, and it's just like a picture of a rich person and poor people. But no, he's promoting some book, and he's speaking on our campus. And they're like, yeah, go cover this. I'm like, yeah, have the brown journalists. Go cover Karl Rove. That'll be great. And so i was like very nervous and i went like there are a lot of protesters people interrupted him such stupid shit and then there are a lot of people in like guantanamo garb outside protesting him and they

so afterward after pretty much everyone left i came up to him it's just like a room for the college republicans just like the just fucking dweebish weirdos just just taking turns blowing them yeah right right um and so um i go up to him like hey a lot of people interrupted your speech today but uh do you have anything to say about the people outside who are protesting your your use of torture during the bush administration which i think is a fair and balanced question i would agree i don't think there's anything wrong with that and he didn't come up to him and be like hey baby killer hey you piece of fucking garbage i want you to burn in hell how do you respond and i think that would be fair too that would also be a fair question and he's just like ha ha i'd love to speak to a real journalist bro and uh

and then everyone laughed at me and some guy and security escorted me out and yeah i'd love to speak to a fucking washington pundit who sucks my dick and allows me on tv after my fucking war crimes yeah yeah and then like some guy was like waterboarding is not torture we got waterboarded all the time in the marines like yeah good for you, guy. You sound really stable. I don't think they waterboard in the Marines. Yeah, exactly. I can't be sure. I haven't been in the Marines,

but I do not think they are actively waterboarding. I think the Marines are your friends who hate you. We pour freezing water on people in the Marines and then leave them overnight to die of hypothermia. That's just something we do. Clearly this guy is confusing his fraternity for the Marines and then leave them overnight to die of hypothermia. That's just something we do. Clearly this guy is confusing his fraternity for the Marines. But yeah, anyway, so I hated

all that. And then I went back. This gets to the Andrew Bart thing, but I went back to my newsroom. Some of my editors were like, oh, what a dick. And then others were like, you led with that question? I'm like, I'm not going to ask them four questions at a book signing yeah the fuck do you this isn't you know 60 minutes and um and they're like i don't know it just seems like a pretty uh bold question like

yeah he's a fucking war criminal yeah what else would you ask them and they thought that was like too editorial so i eventually got ousted from covering uh politics at my college paper went to arch journalism and then they hired me back to cover uh fraternities and crime and then i ended up not to repeat yourself yeah exactly yeah yeah and then uh and then i uh ended up like exposing some frat that was like covering sexual assaults. And then they were like, yeah, we're sorry. I'm like, yeah. And now that editor who fired me is a contributor at The Hill now. That's a great paper.

Yeah, I haven't really kept up with his stuff. But I'm like, yeah, you're part of everything wrong with Beltway journalism. Oh, yeah. The Hill, not only publishing Alan Dershowitz, who is a pedophile, but they also are the people who ran that mike flynn op-ed on the day of the election which is like we gotta protect our ally turkey which he was being paid half a million dollars to say yeah so uh great journalistic standards at the hill yeah uh but anyway so i i became like very jaded uh with like modern journalism i just stopped

uh engaging on a professional level and I just started a blog where we'd fuck around like David comedian David Twight he wrote for it at one point and another guy who is a writer for CNN money who's actually very good Tom Clute check him out contributed to it but so anyway I was like obsessed with Andrew Bart Breitbart in like the summer of 2011 and I would stay up late and I'd stalk his Twitter because he would just stay up till 3 a.m. just tweeting at random liberal people. And he'd retweet people who criticized him so his followers would attack him. He's one of the first people I ever really observed doing this.

And this is way back before Twitter was as abundant as it is now. And so one day I was like, I'm going to write a blog post kind of dissecting his behavior, and then I'm going to tag him in it. And then I know he's going to retweet me, and all of these people are going to come. So I did that, and I turned my phone off. I went to class, and then I left class. I turned my phone on. I went to class, and then I left class. I turned my phone on.

I had like 300 emails all through Twitter, just people calling me like a terrorist and like whatever, like an Obama loyalist and all this other bullshit. And then Andrew Barber died a year later, so I killed him. But even then, I was like like you were clearly on cocaine yeah you were speaking to people you're out of your mind it was like that curb your enthusiasm episode where larry yells at the guy on the golf course who has a heart condition and then he has a heart attack and dies it was like you know i'm not it's not really my fault. It was going to happen anyway. So, yeah, but no, I mean, I would say thank you for your service.

Yeah, yeah. But, you know, hey. All right. Well, thanks for having me, guys. Yeah, thank you so much, buddy. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so thank you to our guest, Raghav Mehta. You got it.

Did I? I'm sorry. No, you did. You got plugs? Yeah, yeah, plugs. Let's see. When's this going up? Tuesday, probably.

Okay. I'm actually doing a show that's a fundraiser for the DSA Star Bar, May 12th. I don't know. Friday? Okay. Is that the one by Alex and Anders? Yeah, yeah, that's it. So come to that.

Yeah. You guys probably have overlap in audiences. So yeah, do that. Yeah, yeah. All right. Well, thanks, guys. audiences. So yeah, do that. Yeah. All right. Well, thanks, guys. Follow me on Twitter, ACLU Official.

That is literally it. It used to be my Venmo, and then Venmo was like, you can't do this. They really stopped? Yeah, they emailed me. And I'm like, I am a comedian. And freedom of expression is like, yeah, I get it. I have the right to get money from people trying to donate to the ACLU. I'm like, I'm going trying to donate to the ACLU. I'm going to report this to the ACLU.

All right. Thanks, guys. Hey, and Andy and I will be back next week. So thank you so much for listening. Bye-bye. Bye.