Grubstakers - [Patreon Unlock] Episode 156: Bernie retrospective during Corona

Episode Date: April 14, 2020

Due to (thankfully mild) illness, we had to delay this week's regularly scheduled episode. In it's stead, here's the most recent Patreon episode, the Grubstakers' reactions to the end of the Bernie campaign. Stay safe stay healthy.

We'll be right back. I don't like, you know, I don't like what I read about. We are more than just one coin. We create the world around this coin. Cop. Invention. Cop. Cop. In 5, 4, 3, two, the evil has gone. Hello and welcome back to Grubstakers, the podcast about billionaires. My name is Sean P. McCarthy and I'm joined by all of my co-hosts today. With me is Yogi Paywall, Steve Jeffries, Andy Palmer. And so we're coming to you on a solemn day, a solemn week,

apart from the continuing coronavirus news that we'll talk about. We all got the news on April 8th, 2020, that Bernie Sanders has suspended his campaign for president. This is, of course, a big bummer. A big thing we've been talking about since we started this podcast has been the hope and the possibility offered by a Bernie Sanders presidency. So we're going to talk about that, how we're feeling, where we go from here. But first, I guess we will, as usual, kind of update about what's been going on with the coronavirus situation, particularly in New York State. And our resident coronavirus dead numbers guy, Andy Palmer, has your morning update. Here's Andy with the weather.

Well, today, Sean, we got 799 new deaths in New York State. But we have an update here at Grubstakers. We don't just have New York deaths, actually. Today, I can also add that we have plus 45 new deaths in Connecticut, where Sean is reporting from. There are 9,784 cases of coronavirus in Connecticut, with 1,003 new cases. It would have been 1,001, but Sean had to take an Uber up to an Airbnb in Connecticut to wait out. First of all, I will address Andy's slanderander to me but i do think it'd be nice if we uh got the sound effects for the grub stakers chopper and uh here's andy and the grub

stakers chopper to give us our coronavirus death update and then he like looks out the window of the chopper and counts the bodies in the mass grave all right uh all right sean it looks like we got uh we got uh 1940 new deaths in the united states on April 8th and then 1,724 so far on April 9th. Actually, that's the total number. We're hitting what looks like a bit of a plateau here on the deaths. It's about the same number every day, and we'll see that until we tell everyone to go back to work in, I would say, mid-May, and then they're going to spike up again. Yeah, Sean, slander implies Andy saying something false. Nothing he said is false. Slander is the Bernie bro narrative.

Saying Sean went to Connecticut and then didn't post it on social media because he didn't want to get owned, like Cath Barbadero and Talia Levin. That's just accurate. Well, all right, yes, the listeners deserve a response. Yes, after my wife and I tested negative for coronavirus, we took an Uber, not public transit, up to an Airbnb in Connecticut. And I will not be giving the town name

because I don't want people on Twitter linking the town name to an outbreak the way they did with Talia Lavin going to the Catskills and then an outbreak starting there immediately. But yes, look, own me. I'm sorry. I'm a piece of shit. But again, my wife and I did get tests.

We are both tested negative. We're both feeling fine. We are sheltered in place for two weeks. I wanted to stay in the apartment, but a one-bedroom apartment in New York, uh, you make compromises in a marriage to keep people happy. They want to have a place to walk around while they're sheltering in place. We have not been interacting with anybody.

We are in this Airbnb for two weeks. Uh, but yes, please own me. I'm really disappointed that I can't do the drops because I just pulled up the YouTube video of... Wait, let's see if I can get this in here. How are you feeling, Secretary Clinton? Really great. Really great. What happened? Give us a little statement.

It's a beautiful day in New York. So real strong, I feel great energy from Sean McCarthy in his Connecticut bunker. He's like Isaac Newton running away from the plague so he could invent calculus. Now, here's what I'll say. I would be perfectly fine sitting in my new york city apartment playing final fantasy 7 so you know what if you are a single person like i you have no place to judge me if you are married or in a serious relationship and you're sheltering in

place all right i will take your abuse but if if you don't have to respond to these social pressures to have a place to walk around and, you know, a partner who perhaps is not as accommodating to just sitting indoors and playing video games for months, then you have no standing. And these are the types of compromises we make in a marriage. All right? There are places to walk.

I just went for a bike ride, dude. Well, no, we make in a marriage all right there are places to walk i just went for a bike ride dude well no we're we uh we live in manhattan like there's no it's not like you can walk out in uh in bushwick and not have 50 people in your face immediately i mean i'm in i'm in i'm not in bushwick but there's people all over the place and i don't know man i mean I can go to the park whenever I want so it sounds like you're blaming your wife Sean no no no no no no this is you know what this is my choice and I will live with my choice and if

if I am a vector and I spread to this innocent population I you know what I will kill myself I will commit suicide because I will not be able to live with the guilt. But again, this is not me not having an idea. We both have tests. We both test it negative.

Two weeks, shelter in place. So you took the swab and the nose test? We did, yeah. That thing will fuck you up. I mean, you know, it only lasts a second but yes it goes very far back and it's extremely uncomfortable your your test came in a little later than your wife's right her test came in negative and then it was yours yeah for whatever reason they just didn't call me till after like several a few days after but yeah they both came

back negative they dropped a couple of tests on the floor. One of them came back positive. One of them came back negative. And they were like, you know what? Let's send the negative one to the guy whose wife came back negative. Let's see. I'm looking at livescience.com, and it says here that false negatives result about 30% of the time. So I'd say within the next week, maybe call your Uber driver that

you had made drive you for two hours and check up on how that guy's doing or lady's doing. First of all, Andy, they are a driver in New York City, so that's not necessarily my fault. And second of all, all three of us were wearing masks in the car. I would like to note that. No sneezing or coughing, and gloves. No sneezing or coughing took place. But yes, look, I know. All right?

I know. And you said it was a surgical mask, not the kind that covers your entire face? Not the kind that covers, that seals in your mouth and nose, but the one where it's very easy for air to travel out the sides? You know what?

In my defense, I will say there are no ethical consumer decisions under capitalism. I think staying home in a pandemic is an ethical consideration, no matter what the economic situation is. Becoming a silent pathogen carrier is, you know, this is liberal boycottism and liberal shaming. You think you can change these larger structural forces through individual decisions, but I as a materialist recognize that me going to an Airbnb in Connecticut does not make a difference for these larger structural forces that operate on us and create

pandemics. That sounds like something a super spreader would say. Now, as usual, I am proud to be the only socialist on this podcast who recognizes that only structural forces affect pandemics and not individual decisions or consumption choices, such as renting an Airbnb. What are you going to do after two weeks? Are you going to go back to New York? Are you going to go on to your next victim? I'm going to

go on a tour. Yeah, no, I wanted to go back to New York, but the virus began giving me instructions to spread it in Vermont and other regions in Connecticut. It has not been to yet. You're going to kill Bernie Sanders.

On to the next one. I'm going to go back to New York at the end of these two weeks unless I develop symptoms, in which case I will self-quarantine until they disappear. But yes.

And you know what? I will reveal the town name to the listeners after I have safely left so that we can see if I am responsible for mass death here. But I will not be because we are social distancing, six feet away, shelter in place. All right. Now, were you in a limousine with that Uber driver? or was it a warm day so you could have the windows open so that air would circulate out of that car so that that poor working person wouldn't contract your virus

after sitting in a car with you for two hours? We had the windows open, yes. Weren't you complaining about your Uber driver's smell? You said he smelled like the basement. No, I did not say that. You made that up and i offered i gave a 50 tip at the end uh so you know that's that's the cost of a human life i took economics actually speaking of the cost of a human life steven you were looking into this it's apparently very little if they're digging mass graves in Bronx.

Yeah, Hard Island. Oh, they've got mass graves. Wait, oh, well, they've always been digging mass graves on Hard Island. Okay, well, recently, though, not 50 years ago. No, no, I mean, it's ongoing. It's been ongoing. They're just digging more now and faster. Okay. What were they digging more now and faster. Oh, okay.

What were they digging it for before? Poor people. Like unclaimed bodies that they just don't know what to do with? Just someone who can't afford to have their own plot or can't afford a cremation fee, things like that. That's fucked up. So my Uber driver. And his family.

Jesus. Look, yeah, all right. Roast me. If you, the listener, wants to roast me, go ahead. I feel shitty about this, but hey, it is what it is. We did our best. And again, except for the Uber, we have not been anywhere near any people for the entirety of this. I think I'm going to get out of this never contracting coronavirus.

I would like to remind the listener that this is a Patreon episode. So if you could do your part by also harassing sean on twitter where everyone can see it um that would be extremely helpful so steven you were looking into uh the economic impact yeah so just this past week they released a new set of jobless initial jobless claims and it was 6.6 million and that brings the total tally up for this crisis to about 17 million, which is a little bit over 10% of the labor force is out of a job specifically due to this. So next month, when we get the unemployment data, it, you know, it's going to be, it was up to 4.4% last month and and adding, just conservatively adding in this,

it'll be in like the 13 to 14% range. Yeah, give me a sec. I'm coming up with 32.33, repeating of course, percentage of survival. In one month, it's already at where it was during the depth of the last recession. It's fucking wild. Yeah, I'm sure when we all go back to work it'll uh you know it'll go right back to normal you know world's shortest bull market

and uh it'll be like this never even happened i was looking into uh the cares act the um specifically the payrollroll Protection Program, which is like a lending facility for small businesses. So there are 30 million small businesses in the U.S., and most of them are in hospitality and services, things that would be closed down right now. So I did some math and math, and if 15 million of them each need an average of about $45,000 in credit for maybe six months or so, which would be sort of in line with the SBA's normal lending guidelines for a line of credit to a business, that's about $630 billion.

Wow. And the CARES Act only authorized $350 billion in such loans. And to date, only about $120 billion of that has been approved. So, and even less dispersed. So it's just like freaking peanuts compared to what they need and like uh it's been there's a lot of youtubes of like business owners being like i applied like a hundred times to x number of banks and they're either just too busy or they declined me for some reason yes i i actually heard or I read that a lot of states are facing overloads in their unemployment mainframes largely because they run on an outdated or they can't improve the processing speed because their mainframes run on cobalt which is a coding language that was created in 1958 and fell out of use in the 80s and nobody knows the language so they can't update their like dusty mainframes that nobody's touched in decades to fix them. And now there's just like a massive search for COBOL programmers.

Oh my, yeah. So COBOL is like a mainframe language that other, like I've heard of other companies that they're like, their base sort of mainframe runs on COBOL and they have to find like one of like the six different boomers who knows the language yeah apparently night well yeah in it's it's incredibly prevalent in banking and apparently 95 of all atm transactions uh are run through COBOL at some level. Yeah. It's really common for ATM payment systems and stuff.

Yeah. And I could just say my wife lost her job because of, obviously, shutdowns with coronavirus. Or theoretically, she'll get it back whenever this is over, but she applied for unemployment. And, you know, it's something where obviously, if you're calling in, which you are usually supposed to do, that is literally impossible. You cannot get through the phone lines in New York State unemployment at all. And if you're using the website, that is also impossible about 90% of the time.

And so we managed to make an application, but they're only sending my wife $200 a week, which is far less than she actually made. And you can't get anybody on the phone to be like, hey, this number is wrong. Why are you only sending $200 a week? So it's just something where we don't really know what we're actually going to do about that. And that's even a massive improvement over what it was originally, because originally when I filed for unemployment back in November, it was a you had a one week waiting period where you wouldn't get any money um which makes no sense i guess they assume that you know you're getting uh your last paycheck or something stupid like that um but it's basically it's a week or two until you even get any money at all uh in addition to the time that they take to process it and so even getting money immediately immediately is something that they waived just because it's something they could have done the whole time.

But they just implemented it now for the coronavirus thing. And also, Sean, your wife should be getting an extra $600 because that came into effect. Yeah, that came into effect this week. I got my extra little money boost this week, which felt great. And whenever someone fucking, like, whenever, you know, you have that clip recently of Hillary Clinton saying, oh, Bernie Sanders never got anything done when he was in the senate well he's given me thousands of dollars by the time this is done like 600 a week for the next uh i don't i don't however many weeks this this fucking thing is like that's yeah he's legitimately saved lives. Yeah. And he extended unemployment for an extra 13 weeks.

That's his work, is sticking that on the bill. He did that. And that's been his legacy throughout. He hasn't passed major bills, but he's stuck things like that on other bills that have saved lives and you know uh we didn't dwell on it enough last time but it turns out that donating to bernie sanders was actually the savviest investment decision andy palmer ever made 400 return on that one i mean by the time this pandemic's over it's going to be bigger than that, maybe. But also, an interesting thing I discovered while on unemployment, because while I was on unemployment, and I haven't talked about this on the show, I think I told you guys this

off the show, though, was that my girlfriend, actually, she got on unemployment several months before I did. And so everything I did was kind of an echo of what she did. Like she was able to like say, okay, here's what you have to do, this, that, and the other thing. And what ended up happening is that within that, I'd say about three-month gap, we could actually catch changes in the unemployment process as they were happening. By January, it was clear that the New York State Unemployment Office was actually making preparations for larger volumes of people. For instance, when she went in. Yeah, yeah. When she went in, she had more like one-on-one meetings with the unemployment staff. Because you have to go in for like, and they've probably gotten rid of this now.

When you first go in, you have an orientation meeting. Now it's probably over some kind of like off-brand video chat that was made 15 years ago um but it you it used to be you would go in and there you would have your orientation meeting and then about three months into it you would have a follow-up meeting um where it'd be a one-on-one where they'd be like man you don't you don't have a fucking job yet do you uh let's figure out how to do that um and so when she went in it was one-on-one when i went in it was a group thing like the orientation where there were like 10 of us so clearly they were preparing the unemployment office of new york for an increase in uh volume of unemployed people and this was in about january so this was

you know there were hints of the coronavirus i don't know if they got a directive from the top down or if they just decided you know what there's a bubble this thing's gonna explode any day now uh but they were definitely preparing or it could have just been cuomo budget cuts um and so they were saying like oh we don't want to have as many um one-on-one meetings so we can hire fewer people. But whatever the case, before this even blew up, they were in the process of changing the system. Yeah. I did want to just build on some of those economic stats that Steve gave just a minute earlier. According to a data for progress poll, which take or leave leave them but this seems accurate according to this poll released april 9th 52 percent of americans under 45 has have lost their job had hours reduced or been

furloughed 52 percent uh and it should be noted congress is on vacation right now after more than half of americans have either lost their jobs or had their hours cut so i mean this is an insane and unprecedented situation it's it's called self-care sean it's very stressful having to work in congress during a pandemic and i think they deserve a break right oh and then from that same poll 35 percent of americans under 35 now say they don't have health insurance so more than a third of americans under 35 report they do not have health insurance now because of all these uh furloughs and layoffs and such and in a fucking pandemic too yeah for the for people who do have who are fortunate enough to have health insurance their

premiums might very well go up i'd actually like to give some advice to any of our listeners who lost their health insurance and maybe we're on antidepressants uh best way to get through the withdrawals well first uh you taper what you got to do is um as soon as you've lost your health insurance and you've got your last supply of your pills, you've got to cut them in half every two weeks to taper off of them if you have no other way to get pills. And then once you finally go off of them for good, Counter-Strike Go is very good for that

with weed and, I don't know, Bud Light Seltzer if you can't find White Claw or whatever. That's how I did it. Would you also say shaving your head helps, Andy? Only a few weeks later. This is how I found out that I've got a receding hairline. Yeah, I mean, all your hair is receding a little bit. It's just weird to be to to be like oh hey

the this is much higher than it used to be back when i got a buzz cut as a kid sure you know what though like uh with this covet 19 shit i mean it makes you think a lot about mortality so you know like it sucks to find out like oh hey i'm sort of balding but like at the same time if you're alive that's a good problem to have so it's like you know i bought a new computer and i uh gambled and lost uh four hundred dollars on the stock market uh entirely on the mentality that it's like if i care about these things it's actually great because it will mean i'm alive you know if i die i'm not going to give a shit that i lost $400 on the stock market, but if I do give a shit,

then that's a great problem to have, isn't it? Sort of like YOLO? Yes, exactly. The modern philosopher of our age, Drake. I'm going to say, you're shitting on me for shaving my head, but you just gambled $400 on the stock market. Who's having a bigger breakdown sean wanted me to join that gaming computer well that's not sean sean was like yogi you want to do

the robin hood app with me and i was like nah i'm all right i see too much pain in best brokers anyway and he said he told me about the airbnb in connecticut and i thought he meant like two months from now. And I was like, I don't know, bro. I mean, maybe sometime someplace, but not during Corona. Yeah, it's also worth noting to the listeners that Sean just went to Yogi about the Airbnb in Connecticut. No, I originally went to Yogi, but it seems like in terms of super spreader. So actually, my wife found an Airbnb that was like a farmhouse that actually had its own recording studio.

And she was pitching me on inviting all three of you guys and actually doing the podcast from up there, which would have been a cool idea. But I did consider that multiple people going increases the odds of a super spreader. So it would even be more irresponsible if all of us had gone instead of just me and my wife. But that was considered. It'd be least risky if none of us had gone instead of just me and my wife but that was considered it'd be least risky if none of us had gone i think we should make that clear uh but alas uh we are uh here together today to reflect on um the end of the Bernie Sanders campaign for president and, you know, kind of mainly what we're feeling about this and what we think can be done from here. I think each of us will have explanations for, you know, backseat quarterbacking to mix metaphors completely there. But each of us will have ideas about what could have been done differently. But I think

everybody's just guessing at this point. And, you know, like at least with myself, I had things I said at the time that I wish they had been doing differently. But up until Nevada or up until right after Nevada, up until Super Tuesday, it looked like everything was working fine. And it looked like they were going to get away with it the exact same way Trump did by taking 35% of the field that refused to consolidate. But the Democrats managed to consolidate and he got beat. But yeah, I guess that'll be kind of the topic of discussion here. Does anybody have any particularly pertinent thoughts to kick this off with now? Well, my take on it is that what we're going to hear ad nauseum is that we lost and it's true we did lose um that's there's no disputing that but the reason that we're going

to be told that we lost is not going to be the actual reason that we lost you know we're going to be told oh bernie you know didn't have the right kind of appeal. He, you know, made this or that tactical mistake. When the reality is that we were trying to, the best analogy I can think of is that we were trying to get to the top of, to the height of power by climbing a rope that the people at the top could cut whenever they wanted. And that doesn't mean that it wasn't worth trying to make that climb, that there wasn't a possibility that we could get to the top before they cut it. But ultimately, the reason we lost is that we were going up against people who were so powerful

that they were not going to let that power slip away and something as trivial as an election to them. And so, you know, obviously, yeah, saying, you know the best we could have done trying to take this path to power i think the the message to take away um to build on this stupid analogy is that we need to build a ladder because we're not gonna we're not going to get there um trying to go the standard way like the people who make it to the presidency are the people who already have this kind of, um, this, uh, how do you, how would you say it? Like they, they've already made an agreement with the powers that be to maintain the status quo. Looking at Trump and Obama, who by superficial measures are completely different in terms of who they are as president, but in terms of their

governing are relatively similar, especially in terms of how they react to the status quo. You know, Obama came in during a recession and just, you know, made the fall as comfortable as possible for the bankers. And Trump is going to more or less do that with this recession. You know, he's going to bail out the people at the top with the help of Congress. And that's just how things are going to go. And when you have someone who is actually threatening that status quo, that's very comfortable for the billionaire class, the hedge fund class, all of those people, they are going to use every tool at their disposal to stop that person. And, you know, we, we were building towards a mass movement and we took, we took one strategy and ultimately it didn't work out,

but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have fought that battle because we were able to gain some ground in that battle, even though we ultimately lost it. And so it's, it wasn't a lost cause. Um, it's definitely a setback that he lost, but it was never guaranteed that he was going to win in the first place. Um, it's also very clear that, uh, it also lets us know how far, um, the establishment will go to keep someone like Bernie, uh, away from the levers of power. Um, especially like during this election, you know, we saw everything from the, the shadow app, um, all through the, uh, uh, the discrepancy in exit polling, the voter suppression that was carried out by the Democratic Party, the thing that they consistently argue that the Republicans are doing, the Democrats did it themselves. In Democrat-controlled states, even like California, you saw massive lines of voters because polls were closed or they just didn't have the resources to, uh, carry out the primary. And so that pushed away a lot of people, you know, a lot of working class people who, who couldn't wait in line for hours because they had to go to their jobs. an article in Politico that came out either today or the last few days that talked about kind of Obama's kind of backroom dealings where you really get a sense of what a piece of shit this guy is,

because while he's talking to these candidates, you know, convince them to drop out and line up behind Biden, he's also very concerned about not looking like he's putting his thumb on the scale for Biden. So you had Obama doing that. And then, of course, finally, you had Tom Perez basically playing chicken with people's lives, saying, yeah, if you want your vote to count, you have to risk your life to go out and vote while there is a pandemic raging. And if your state tries to save people's lives i will take away their delegates at the convention like just a craven um just being a craven bloodless psychopath to keep bernie out of it one of the lines actually in the politico article was that um someone one of like obama's aides because they like someone who said this anonymously because they all say anonymously in these, one of Obama's aides, because someone who said this anonymously,

because they all say it anonymously in these articles, one of these aides was saying, Obama doesn't want to step into this, but if it looks like Bernie's going to run away with it, he's going to have to do something. Meaning that the plan always was to do everything that they can to stop Bernie, while at the same time making it look like they're not trying to stop Bernie. They just had to balance it so that their hand wouldn't show that much. And, you know, building on that, what I would say is actually everybody, you guys were all roasting me earlier, but everybody who voted is actually more of a piece of shit than me because they put their community in danger in order to

cast their ballot um no but look what i would say is when we talk about like the lengths these people went to to stop bernie sanders like obviously the shadow app and that kind of stuff is important but they literally committed mass murder like that can't be underlined enough because the thing is yes as, as of Super Tuesday, Bernie Sanders was down in the delegate count, but it was a very slight length or he was only very slightly down in the delegate count after Super Tuesday. These people, the Democrats, the DNC knew coronavirus was here and it was mass murder to have, you know, the people in Illinois, Florida, Arizona, Wisconsin, they knew to send these people out. They tried to get Ohio to vote here and it was mass murder to have you know the people in illinois florida arizona wisconsin they

knew to send these people out they tried to get ohio to vote too to send these people out to their deaths to kill their families they knew but they had to run up the score before they froze it because they couldn't freeze it at super tuesday and run the risk of say in june you know when things settle down people see a pandemic and are like, oh, shit, maybe we should try that Medicare for all. They need it to run up the score so that, you know, like Bernie said in his concession, it was almost mathematically impossible for him to get the delegates from the position he dropped out in. But had they waited on all those states until after the pandemic, you never know. You never know. And they just didn't want to run that risk. So they murdered their own fucking voters to do it. And, you know, yeah, they're and they just didn't want to run that risk so they murdered their own fucking voters to do it and you know yeah they're like i don't want to be

fatalistic about maybe there are things that we can talk about that bernie could have done differently but yes the dnc was willing to literally kill people to stop him and a one important thing to note about the dC, and some of you probably remember this, but in 2016, there was a class action lawsuit brought against the DNC for putting that, but because according to the judge, to the extent plaintiffs wish to air their general grievances with the DNC or its candidate selection process, their redress is through the ballot box, the DNC's internal workings, or their right of free speech, not through the judiciary, which means that the DNC is legally allowed to rig the election to whatever degree they want, because if the DNC is rigging the election, that's not going to be an option unless you vote, uh, you know, for the fucking green party or what have you, um, then, or through DNC's internal workings. Well, if the DNC is rigging the elections, then you can never get the right number of, um, delegates into the DNC to change the

internal workings, which is part of why they pushed so hard to get Tom Perez there instead of Keith Ellison. And then, of course, the right of free speech, which is basically what we're doing right now. And this wasn't just something that the judge said, but the DNC's counsel, the DNC's lawyer, this guy Bruce Spiva, made this argument. He said, the party has the freedom of association to decide how it's going to select its representatives to the convention and to the state party. Even to define what constitutes even-handedness and impartiality really would already drag the court well into a political question and a question of how the party runs its

own affairs. The party could have favored a candidate. I'll put it that way. Basically saying we are legally allowed to pick our candidate ahead of time and the voters can go fuck themselves because we are not actually bound to a free and fair election process within our primaries. That last part was me. That last part wasn't Spiva, but I, you know, paraphrasing him. But they, so to, it's not even a conspiracy to say that the DNC was rigged. It's, it is the DNC policy that we can pick whoever we want and we can rig it if we want and fuck you and the only reason that they're hiding it

is just the uh to maintain that illusion for enough people uh mostly in the um i'd say professional managerial class the the the people who are kind of vote blue no matter who just to rig it enough that those people aren't or to hide it enough while they're rigging it that those people won't catch on and won't get hip to that and get disillusioned and step away from the DNC. So, I mean, the fix was basically in from the beginning. And on top of that, it's obviously also, they also obviously had to kill Bernie before the general election because they can't, it's, it's a lot, they, they don't have the legal cover to rig a general election, but they do have the legal cover to rig a primary selection process. I've been a Bernie supporter for five years, basically. I mean, I think that's the case for all of us here, actually. But yeah, I mean, I'll defend that guy until basically I die.

And I really love him and I love his policies. And the structural reasons that you guys bring up for why the democratic party was basically just going to make they're going to try to cheat him out of any potential major gains he made yeah that's all correct i guess the only thing that i would say that if i had to sum up one of his main failings as like an unforced error if you will it's that um he his mission which he mostly succeeded in to create a political revolution was kind of undermined by his basic approach to his personal politics where you you have a chance to attack the main standard bearer of the Democratic establishment, namely Biden, and he shies away from it because, you know, Joe's my friend and, you know, they,

they've both been senators. They're part, they're kind of part of the world of the Beltway. And they have this sort of collegiality that he doesn't want to, you know, sort of cross that line in public anyway. And I think, so like, if you're going to go around and say, we're forming a political revolution, we're building up this mass base, we're going to build up a power outside of Washington, essentially. I don't think you can say that and then go around and then not attack these people who don't want us to have health care. They don't want us to have free college. They want us to be saddled with student debt. They, yeah, I mean, they're just fundamentally opposed to social democratic reform so i guess

that's all i would have to say for like what could bernie have done differently but all of the structural considerations of like the dnc with like the shadow app and all that that's totally valid and i think it was sort of like maybe a bit more a little over half of why he failed was the DNC is just so fucking powerful. But an important chunk of it is, like, you know, Bernie was able to build this movement up from essentially nothing. And I'm going to be defending him on that basis for, like, the rest of my life. But also, I think he he maybe he wasn't the right guy to get us over the finish line so to speak so he's built up the machine that we could we can take and use for the future but we need to find you know new candidates and build continue

to build on the movement on the momentum to like to really finally for real in this thing and get somebody we want we like in the presidency yeah and you know like what i would say is with regards to the democratic party i think bernie running as a democrat in 2016 makes perfect sense because had bernie ran third party in 2016 he would have been you know a novelty a novelty, another 2-1% Green Party candidate. He runs in the Democratic Party in 2016, and he buys himself all of this credibility to the point where I think right now Bernie Sanders is the only person who could establish a credible left party in the United States. So, you know, something that, and again,

you know, I agree with Steve, I think Bernie is a hero in American politics, and I don't want to criticize him, but one strategic disagreement would, I would say, be that in 2020, I think the general electorate is more amenable to social democracy than the Democratic primary electorate. And I think you obviously require two different electoral strategies to reach the general electorate. And I think you obviously require two different electoral strategies to reach the general electorate and the people who are registered Democrats and vote in a Democratic primary.

So I think using the credibility that he had from 2016, I do think that if this wasn't anathema to his nature, he could say, I'm gonna start a new American Labor Party. I'm going to make a third party bid against Trump and Biden or whatever. And apparently there are sore loser laws that in a lot of states to kind of prevent people from doing that, which is, again, another fuck you to democracy that the two parties did. But I do think it is unfortunate that he's, you know, as we all know, going to line up behind Biden when there might really be a shot for him to make a third-party bid this year. Yeah, so Bernie's campaign has ended, but in my view, reality is endorsing his ideas right now.

Because we're in the midst of basically a wartime escalation, and no one's talking about how to pay for stuff anymore. People are just looking at supply chains and who what, who needs to go where do they have what they need to do their jobs. It's like, it's like you're in a war. And in order to fight this thing, you need Medicare for all so that people don't have to worry about their finances when they, you know, follow the CDC guidelines. And like, you know, if they need to go to the hospital, they just go, they don't worry

about their, their household's finances. And I think if Medicare for all had a durable majority support among both Democrats and Republicans before all this, this happened, like going into super Tuesday, it's only going to get stronger. And I't i mean i i mean biden stupidly said that italy was an example of a place where single-payer health care doesn't do anything in his in to paraphrase him doesn't do anything to help the situation with the coronavirus and i'm just i was just screaming at the screen when he said that in the coronavirus and i'm just i was just screaming at the screen when he said that in the debate because i'm like motherfucker no one is saying that it would eliminate the virus somehow because by having people be able to pay for their health insurance

they're saying that would just help a lot and you know what the joke's on him well the joke's on him and also us because we're about to surpass italy in terms of deaths so even on like the his like caricature sort of argument against single payer it doesn't even work on those grounds actually steven i'm uh reporting for my death copter now and it looks like with the the numbers coming in i'm looking at the numbers uh worldwide the united states has already surpassed spain in the number of deaths in the united states is uh as of this recording just 100 behind italy in the number of deaths and with america having over one death per minute at the current rate by the time we have finished recording this it is likely that america will be the number one death center of the coronavirus in the world that's good i mean bad

but that that just like that shows that even biden's like stupid ass like uh argument against single payer it doesn't even work on its own terms and like i was saying like reality is just proving bernie's ideas are correct and that the American people increasingly want them. Another, another thing to note about the Italy thing is that, you know, you can make your, you can even say like, oh, well, you know, proportional to the population, uh, they didn't have as many deaths as America. But the real question is going to be after these, um, excuse me, uh, after, after after the virus passes how many people in italy are going to be fifty thousand dollars in debt because they had to go to the hospital

so that they wouldn't die choking on their own blood on their floor yeah that's true well and yeah and that actually does set up kind of the question probably next year after we have the presidential election will be either, I think we mentioned this earlier, either there's going to be something like a 40% spike in health insurance premiums for everyone, which I don't think will be tolerated by the political class, but I think their solution will be we're going to have a massive bailout for the health insurance companies. And, you know, I was disappointed. I thought this most recent round of bailout of the banks that we had would generate more public anger. But I like to think at least maybe another bailout of the health insurance industry, if the alternative is like, okay, so we're going to spend just as much as we would on Medicare for all, but just give it to these middlemen instead of just doing Medicare or Medicaid for all, you know, I hope there will be a public movement opposing that bailout and saying, no, fuck you, just have a single payer. So we'll see what happens with that. Yeah, because ultimately, you know, the bailout is going to be it. It's like a Obama Obamacare had the, Rappaport Obamacare had that, what was it?

It had a subsidy that would, if you were low enough income, it would pay the difference on your premium, which allowed health insurers to still charge high premiums on people who couldn't afford them with the government stepping in and paying the difference, ultimately with that being taken out of everyone's taxes. And of course, that money isn't real or anything. But the pressure, it gives them an excuse to make cuts in other places and reduce social programs by saying, oh, look at the budget deficit. And it's just going to be that same sort of thing over again where they're just going to be pumping money, public money, into the insurance companies. And, you know, they'll say it's for everyone's benefit. And also, you know, now we have to cut, you know, whatever services are left in the United States that

aren't military. And going back to Bernie Sanders for a second, I do want to say, and I don't think this person is primarily responsible, but I do honestly believe it's unfalsifiable, but I 100% believe that had Elizabeth Warren before Super Tuesday dropped out and I'm going to get the finest handcrafted Belgian monastery beer and I'm going to put it away in my cellar and I'm going to wait for that special day where we're drawing closer to it every day now where there is a military coup in this country and the military arrests Elizabeth Warren and puts her before a firing squad. And I will turn on my live stream and I will share with you as I enjoy one of the finest beers ever crafted on earth by Jesuit monks, you know, or the Shemay monks. We'll see, but I will enjoy every second of this beer as Elizabeth Warren shot by Firing Squad displays

across the CNN screen. And I would would even suggest you know what if that does not come to pass then i think whenever elizabeth warren loses her fucking senate seat to that you know uh kennedy degenerate idiot moron whenever he kicks her out of her senate seat i think that should replace labor day as the holiday of the left i think that should be a cause for celebration because fuck elizabeth warren and absolutely i can't wait for the military coup and or she just loses her senate seat we will actually uh hopefully have the twitch stream up and running and be able to route audio through our computers into twitch uh ideally before the military coup uh but it might be

pretty close it might be pretty down to the wire for warren's execution but we will stream that with commentary from all the hosts from garb stakers right like do you have anything you want to say sean why are you hard here's what i'll promise the listeners i will you know first i want to enjoy the beer and have a moment to savor elizabeth warren's execution but you know after that it'll be more party so i'll shotgun maybe a cheaper beer like a rainier or something but you know at first you want to kind of enjoy the moment and then you kind of transition to more of a celebratory party atmosphere. Sean's going to join the military for the coup and learn sleight of hand magic so that he can slip out the blank bullet that they give him in the firing line or just make sure

that he has a live bullet while he's doing Warren's execution. I, you know, I do want to say I don't want to dwell on it too much because you know i guess maybe we sound hysterical or whatever but yeah i was pleased that we sound hysterical i was pleased that matt chrisman of chapo has endorsed my theory that a military coup is extremely unlikely to impose barrack socialism but at this point is more likely than electoralism imposing socialism. Because, you know, there is a situation with coronavirus. If we saw an actual collapse of civil society. When was that your theory?

My theory was that in the United States, it's, you know, I was being sarcastic. Of course, a military coup would be horrible and would result in suppression of civil liberties, mass violence, and all sorts of things. But I was kind of making a facetious point that I'm going to start looking for a Hugo Chavez figure in the U.S. military, because just like any other country, you could have a young officer class that sees the total collapse of civil society and essentially cuts, like Matt Chrisman said, cuts the head off the snake and takes over government. So I was pleased to see him somewhat endorse my theory of the possibility of that.

My theory is we're just getting into a civil war, so California will secede from the Union and form Cascadia with oregon and washington gavin news gavin newsom will lead our fledgling socialist republic oh man i there's like a zero percent chance of that with all the major industries uh along the west coast as much as i love the idea of cascadia uh and have a flag in my room for it embarrassingly because it's uh because the washington flag state flag is a piece of shit and i want you know something from i want to show where i came from uh to myself but uh as much as i like that like there is no chance that socialism is going to come out of the Pacific Northwest or the West Coast with between Silicon Valley and Bellevue, Washington and Amazon.

The capitalism has strengthened its chokehold on that region to a degree where, you know, know whenever it's unknown whenever it's going to recover from that yeah i mean so maybe we don't get a socialist republic but gavin newsom did say did call refer to california as a nation state the other day and i thought that was really neat okay also i i don't know if it was him or one of his subordinates but when they were imposing the lockdown order they uh initially made an exception for disneyland because they also referred to that as a nation state wow oh it's like luxembourg yeah uh yeah and you want to talk about evil corporate actors disney has blocked the ufc from holding fights on indian reservations during coronavirus because i guess the bad publicity of spreading

the virus throughout native american reservations was just a little bit too much for disney why did you switch from indian reservations to native american reservations because saying i had already started i like how when it comes to them getting the virus it's native americans but when it comes to the ufc fights on the land it's indian because like because land fuck them it's just them but them getting a virus uh Native Americans watch out now because I had already started talking and I realized that I should say Native American instead of Indian so I corrected myself the second time it's a perfectly acceptable speech pattern that I engaged in there I think one thing that that is interesting to speculate about is what's going to happen next with the Democrats. I mean, this is just for fun. I think there's nothing left to the socialist

project in this presidential election, or maybe even any presidential election after this. But it is kind of interesting to see where they're going to go with the presidential election after this, but it is kind of interesting to see where they're going to go with the presidential election, whether they're going to try to actually force Biden out and shoehorn in Cuomo, or whether Biden himself is against all odds going to possibly win this, or just have an old man moment and eat total shit in front of the country, losing it again to Trump, just like the DNC is likely planning for. Dog, it's Trump for four more years.

Hindsight's 20-20. Trump's winning. I'm calling it. The DNC is more elitist than it is democratic. And Biden was fucked from the get i watched a lot of wire recently and you know it's clear to me they had a gat on bernie since day one and they knew that no socialist had a gat on them and honestly they weren't wrong at a moment's notice buddha judge gone fucking klobuchar gone on all both of them are just like, you know what? Biden's our person. In that moment, we should have known.

It's over. Because the United States choosing people over profits and choosing to not divide and conquer all their enemies, including their own citizens, it's probably not happening. And Sanders certainly opened people's eyes but in a middle of a pandemic we can't get people to get on board with hey everyone should have fucking health care the country has lost whatever moral integrity that they thought they had with any sense of the united states being a country of moral obligation when it comes to doing the right thing by the people of the world and you know it's one of those things where like you know that one person linked to clinton uh died because

of corona and on twitter people were just going another murder by the clinton campaign and honestly like that's how i fucking feel at this point how many people you got to murder someone else that's that's that's the true sense of power in this country. Yeah, I mean, I think Trump will probably run away with it. But there's still a chance that Biden might win. I mean, if unemployment, if you're sitting at 30% unemployment, which isn't out of the question for long enough, I mean, can a president you survive that under normal circumstances the moment trump made fun of bloomberg um and he called him short or some shit i had so many people that would self-identify as liberals or democrats or even leftists being like oh man i fucking hate

that our dictator of a president trump is funny and i was like in that moment i was like it's done the only person he can't fucking go up with like that is sanders and it's sanders is not happening and it's so fucking frustrating because you saw those polls you saw how things were fucked with i mean the only people that seem to have had any real fear are the you people on wall street because the stock prices of humana cvs signa united health and anthem all went up uh riding that wave that boosted shares by as much as 10 percent uh this is from fastcompany.com like i mean those people were the only people that were like this shit might fucking happen and the moment it didn't they were out they're like all right fucking we're making money.

We ain't going to be shut down anytime soon. Yep. I have a slightly different view. I think most likely scenario in this election is that Joe Biden dies of coronavirus before November. Because you have to imagine, they've got him on on lockdown now but this is the democrats we're talking about there's no way they don't fuck it up you know let like some 18 year old intern in there to sneeze on him when like bringing him a latte or whatever uh so i think that's the most likely scenario but in the event that joe biden is alive on election day i do think joe biden will

win and i think that's because, you know, Trump had a window where he could have done shut down the country for four months, send everybody four months of UBI checks, and just do the Boris Johnson thing, where you essentially just take some left economics and mix that with nativism. And, you know, you're untouchable from the usual kind of signaling of people in New York and Los Angeles who most of the country hates. So I think he had that opportunity, but instead he listened to the Chamber of Commerce. And the United States is going to, I think, without a doubt, have the worst coronavirus outbreak in the world and probably the least amount of government support for it. So I just think at some point when

you're at, you know, 30 or 40 percent unemployment and, you know, more dead than anywhere else on Earth, I just don't think anybody I shouldn't say it's an impossibility. The Democrats could certainly fuck it up. But I think 90 percent of Biden's alive, he wins. And lastly, I do just want to say as much as it won't really make a difference in people's lives it will be kind of funny to see all those trump supporters get mad when they lose to a guy with fucking dementia who makes fewer public appearances than osama bin laden because people are just like fuck it we don't like the government and they vote for the only other option on the ballot yeah i'm hoping osama bin laden makes an appearance soon because i'm getting a bit worried about him um yeah i think there's a there's several like different ways that this

could play out one of them to counter it's entirely possible that biden could win another possibility is that you know it's with numbers plateauing they're going to start to go down eventually, maybe in the next month or so, who knows. But I get the feeling that with Trump listening to the Chamber of Commerce, what's going to happen is they're going to go down to a level where people think, okay, it's safe to open things up and send everyone back to work. And then because it's going to be more evenly spread throughout the population, it's just going to spike right up again. And then it's possible that Trump will say, you know what, no elections, it's not safe. And then, I mean, that's kind of unlikely because I think it is entirely possible to do a vote-by-ballot system,

but Trump could just cancel the election. It's a remote possibility possibility but it's a possibility um isn't the the general election is mandated constitutionally like well uh i mean it it yeah i who i who knows what what really is going to work out constitutionally like obama was supposed to uh be able to choose a justice at the end of his term um and maybe that wasn't as set in stone as the uh election day but um he certainly was not given that i think another possibility and this is one that i hope for there's been talk about uh joe biden getting swapped out by the dnc for quote health reasons and uh getting cuomo put in there who's now got a lot of like good publicity because he does his

like dumb ass um things where he's like we're beating it we're new york strong and you know you've got people like that randy rainbow dipshit who are eating every second of it um and i i want to say that i really hope that that happens because i hate cuomo more than maybe anyone but i think that the best case scenario for new New Yorkers is if Cuomo runs for president. If Cuomo gets swapped into that presidential run. Because if he loses, that's the second best scenario. He'll become just this... He'll be shown to the whole country to be just an incompetent asshole, the actual incompetent asshole he is, and not the one that people seem to think, not the like, you know, strong leader that everyone seems to think he is during this Corona thing.

And if he wins, that's even better because we don't have to deal with him in New York anymore. We can get a better fucking governor. And on top of that uh he he'll probably get impeached it's possible he'll either be a really shitty president he'll be better than trump but he'll still be a shitty president and he might even get midterm impeached uh by the republicans and i don't know put a bullet in his head out of shame that that's like best case scenario for me so i'm i'm i i've kind of come around to really hoping that the dnc uh pushes like swaps out biden for cuomo right now just as a selfish new yorker who wants to get rid of him you do wonder how long they can keep polishing

that turd though because i mean we've talked about about New York State has more cases than any country on Earth, like the state itself. I mean, this is an abysmal failure at every level. And they saw what was happening in Italy and they still waited weeks to shut down. I mean, this guy has thousands of unnecessary deaths on his hand and so you know i mean like uh i just think that as the news goes on perhaps some of the shine comes off of cuomo um and you know maybe they go to gavin newsom or something but we'll see i mean they polished the biden turd long enough for him to take the nomination so and you know they completely slanderedered Bernie. So like the media is already in Cuomo's corner. And so they can just kind of like they just need to polish that turd long enough for him to get the nomination. That's all I really care about.

And then after that, once it all falls apart, who gives a shit? But. That's that's. That's that's my best case scenario now is that they swap in Cuomo. I know we're already at just over an hour, but I guess if we have a second, I did want to talk just a little bit, don't dwell on it too much, but about what, if anything, Bernie could have done different. And more importantly, where we go from here, what we think things look like from here. And, you know, I think it's a totally unknowable,

unfalsifiable hypothesis as to what he could have done different, and I think people will, myself included, kind of insert their own pre-biases into that. Though I do think, like, in the context of running within a democratic primary perhaps uh we should have run he should have run more ads with you know voiceovers from obama and talked about how and he doesn't get enough credit for this he was the only senator who voted to defend obama's nuclear deal so you know i mean like there is maybe he should have

made the argument more that i'm the heir to Obama. I think that's a possibility. Even with the Obama thing, though, like I got like a text from my lib family from this thing. It completely flew under the radar of the left. But he ran an ad with Obama complimenting him. But some there was some CNN article about how it was like, well, actually, Obama was complimenting Hillary in that ad. And maybe it was a fuck up on the part of the Obama administration. Maybe it was a or not. I'm sorry. Maybe it was CNN lying.

But Obama did actually campaign for Bernie in 2006. But whatever the case there, I don't know how well that would have worked, because even in the extent that he did do it it apparently broke through to the uh democratic primary voters um or it backfired for you know a bunch of liberal uh democratic primary voters well i i don't really know and again you know this is all unfalsifiable but one thing that we do see is that white people without college educations, by and large, in 2016, voted for Bernie over Hillary, whereas in 2020, they, by and large, voted for Joe Biden over Bernie. And libs kind of make the argument, oh, they were just misogynist,

they were just voting against Hillary Clinton or whatever. And I don't know how true that is. But, you know, perhaps there is an argument that we already hashed out to death on the tough crowd that maybe some of the cultural signifiers might have turned against Bernie in 2020 as opposed to 2016. Maybe his kind of focus on a more economic message in 2016 did that there's no way of um proving this and you know people know from my twitter and our discussions uh what i believe the left strategy should be but i do think you do have to look at why bernie lost white people without college educations because i think people without college educations are necessarily the future of a working class movement of all races but in the u.s white people are the majority to uh i think i already made this point during my bernie post-mortem but uh yeah to me it was always i'm like an ardent supporter of his but it was always a bit

confusing when he said like i want a political revolution but then he also has this like collegial sort of relationship with the people who are supposed to be like the the standard bearers of the establishment that he's railing against like biden so like i was always that was always a bit confusing to me even as like someone who's been with in in his camp the whole time i wonder if what you what you guys think of that i think on that point um it's the thing there is that you can't expect the next linen to come out of the senate i think bernie made it up to that level to do what change he could at that level um but you're not going to get a real revolutionary who is in the Senate. And, you know, he did talk a lot about revolution, but, you know, ultimately a lot of his reforms were, they would have been in some ways revolutionary because as we've talked about, you know, they would have definitely undermined some of the backbones,

some of the most pernicious backbones of some of the most pernicious elements of American capitalism. But on the other hand, yeah, you just can't go that far with someone who makes it through that environment. Yeah, I feel like he took us right up to just before the finish line. And if we really want to cross the finish line, we need to find someone who's more radical, basically. Yeah. And I mean, I'm a believer that I think there are strategic choices that were made by the campaign that might have probably made a difference, like such as we saw after they launched all these Social Security ad attacks on Joe Biden. Pete Buttigieg was going to be the threat. So, you know, and this is all, you know, hindsight 2020

stuff. But I did want to say, with the argument that nothing could have been done here, the most convincing data point I saw was somebody shared it on Twitter, Democrat versus Republican primary voters trust in the media. And what you saw is, you know, obviously Donald Trump voters have, I believe it was most recently polled at less than 20 percent believe the media is honest and tells the truth, whereas Democratic primary voters is over 60 percent. And in fact, after Donald Trump won, you saw a big spike in trust in the media among Democratic primary voters where, you know, they think the media is holding Trump accountable. So, of course, the media is telling the truth. Well, if the media is holding Trump accountable. So, of course, the media is telling the truth. Well, if the media is spending all day trashing Bernie and the voters in your primary trust the media, like it's going to make a difference if they trust the media. But if they don't trust the media,

it doesn't make a difference. So, I mean, that's to me the most compelling data point for the other side of the argument. Yeah, I would I would say that is another big indicator that like it, it doesn't necessarily make sense to argue what he could or could have done differently know you have a demagogue who's shitting on the media 24 7 um and so a lot of people who associate themselves with his opposition party are going to um tend to trust the media more and then even though that same media is ultimately on the same side as um that candidate and that their interests line up more with trump's than their own interests um and so it's i i i find it to be kind of a fool's errand to try to say like what he could have done differently for the next presidential run because i don't i i don't i don't think this is our way to power. I think we have to build up.

I think it was a very good shot that we had, and I'm glad that we took it, but I don't think we're going to have another Bernie for generations to come, or at least for a generation. And in the meantime, instead of focusing on what he could have done differently, or what, you know, if he had just done this with his campaign, or just, you know, reached out to these people in a hypothetical sense, I think we need to focus more on, all right, well, you know, what are the other ways that we build power? How are we going to do that? What are the next steps? How do we take back unions from their like PMC leadership in a lot of cases? You know, how do we turn the labor movement into an actual political tool that we can use to, because I mean, another side effect of the coronavirus is that you know the uh

suddenly with everyone being taken out of labor the economy is collapsing and so if if you want to really it if you want something that's going to give people an idea of the value of their own labor um that that's one thing for certain and i i think that's, in its own perverse way, maybe going to help in that direction. But I think we have to stop focusing so much on this semi-illusion of getting socialism through just this electoral pathway. Yeah, I think Andy is right. We have to, there are ways in which we can build up a dual power using the movement that Bernie created from nothing and just get handed to us, basically. Like, in just the last 10 days, DSA had 2 000 new members sign up um there are waves of worker strikes going on in the sectors of the economy that are still active so like i think it was

workers that uh when i say gm striked until they the company agreed to start making like devote more resources to making ventilators things like that so like there's there's like seeds of worker militancy that can be built up without any electoral involvement whatsoever and then maybe links back into another candidate who shows promise in like the sort of maybe like the Bernie or AOC sort of thing in the future so there are ways you know it's not elections are just one small part of politics and the movement that we use to build up Bernie can be used to support other things like more worker militancy and stuff well yeah and you know I want to agree with what both Andy and Steve are saying there regarding as terms of what is constructive that can be done from here, particularly the

labor union movement and labor militancy is the most constructive path. And hopefully we can talk about that for a quick minute. But I did want to share one last thing regarding, you know, hypotheticals. And this is a pet theory of mine I've shared on Twitter, but I want to clarify because maybe people think I'm trolling or doing a bit. I honestly believe that had Kamala Harris not apologized for agreeing with that voter who called Donald Trump retarded, she would be the Democratic nominee right now. And I want to defend my thesis here because i think something that we saw with bernie sanders i don't know if he could have taken

advantage of this the same way donald trump did but something we saw with bernie sanders is before he was you know winning in nevada and uh you know new hampshire the media ignored him they gave him no airplay whatsoever whereas with with don Trump, you know, there have been studies that calculated that he got tens of millions of dollars worth of free ad buys because he would just say controversial shit. So he would be on CNN all the time and they would literally play his entire rallies live. They would just play his campaign rallies, the entire thing, on hopes that he says something controversial. This is free advertising, tens of millions of dollars. So I do think something that Donald Trump did was hack the media outrage machine to buy

tens of millions of dollars of free ads. And I think there was space for Kamala Harris to just, like, we should, I did want to just give it a quick bit of context here for those who don't remember, just according to a CNN write-up. It was a voter in New Hampshire. And I do just want to note, this guy was actually originally from Chennai, India. He's an immigrant. He was an immigrant voter. So he wasn't trying to be an asshole. This is just, you know, the way normal people talks. He's in New Hampshire. He asked Kamala a question. He asks her, somehow a racist bigot gets into the White House. And then he says, if you're not my color, you need to go back to your own country. He spoke with a thick Indian accent. So I am scared for this country. I'm scared for the

people of color in this country. He asked, in the next year, what would you do to diminish the mentally retarded action of this guy? And the audience in New Hampshire laughed and Kamala said, well said, well said. And then there was a Hampshire laughed and Kamala said, well said, well said. And then there was a media firestorm. And she, of course, apologized. She said, you know, I never I would have corrected him if I noticed him using that kind of language. And I think if she'd just been like, now, you know what? People are passionate. I'm not here to lecture people. We're too politically correct. And just allow the media to get mad at her for three weeks or two weeks you just get tons of free publicity and whenever people get mad at you you just pivot back to your talking points and i think there there was a lane for a candidate to

be kind of the establishment uh medicare for all candidate which what what she was originally but i think uh she kind of undermined herself by walking away from a great free publicity opportunity. And I don't know if Bernie Sanders could have exploited this kind of media hack the same way, but it is interesting to me that no candidate since Donald Trump has seen all that free ad money lying on the table if you just call Trump retarded or, you know, be controversial in whatever way you want to. I think something like that maybe has a bit of diminishing returns. Maybe Kamala could have gotten away with it. I think she right now is in a much better position to get elected president,

not elected president, but become president because she's, you know, she's speculated to be one of Biden's top picks for VP. And you know, he's not going to make it through first term if he does get elected. So I'd say maybe she has a one in five chance of being the president through that doorway. Well, she'll get a chance to correct her mistake. Like, I want to apologize for the voters for earlier saying that Donald Trump was not retarded. I have learned my lesson. He is, in fact, retarded. Though she did that, I'm willing to guess that a bunch of her PMC staffers would have just quit to go over to Buttigieg's campaign or something. like yeah but they are they are the people who sabotaged her like she she uh during a debate her got you on elizabeth warren was demanding that she sign a letter to twitter to ban donald trump's twitter account like nobody but the richest people on earth give a shit about this like harris could have been the nominee she just hired the stupidest people she got like the fucking um harlem globetrotters of the washington

generals of idiotic political operators who just fucked this up at every single opportunity they weren't hanging out in the back of that debate with like an infrared laser dot on her head making sure that she said the line like the buck stops with her for the shitty campaign that she ran and the shitty stupid attempts to go viral that she ran with at the debates but in fairness i did tweet at her multiple times saying that i would take over her campaign and double down on calling trump retarded so she knew an alternative was out there i could have i could have brought her over the finish line. I think if de Blasio weren't such a fucking useless wet blanket, he might have been able to take that tack and make it look convincing with his New Yorker credits.

But yeah, imagining Kamala Harris being like, Donald Trump is retarded. I love it already. It doesn't seem to have a sustainable authenticity in the way that Trump being Trump does in the way that got him through the primary in general yeah but like harris doing it is like such a combo breaker for the media so like they i mean yeah you know this is a lot like a white guy new yorker calling someone retarded everyone is already expecting that and the media would just immediately shit on them but harris uh you know because of her background like she can uh i think they just wouldn't know what to do with that and they would just be like sort of like weirdly interested and give her free air time but like it would be sort of like not necessarily a negative thing yeah because guess I sort of agree with Sean, maybe. Yeah, I mean, just Andy saying it in that accent

actually made me go from hard commit to Bernie to just lean Bernie. So I think this actually could have sold me over to her camp. But Yogi, did you have any thoughts on, i guess bernie all this campaign how are you feeling because you know obviously we we kind of knew this was coming but it's been a fucking bummer because a lot of vulnerable people are going to get hurt because we don't have the levers of power in the federal government and you know this is the absolute worst fucking time to have the uh the status quo in power um yeah so how are how are you feeling buddy i just think that the radicalization of people in this country that has not happened under the sanders 2020 campaign

or the warren 2020 campaign that is people being like hey uh i'm not i'm not lying when i say this but if you don't come in line i'm gonna beat the shit out of you i really think that is kind of where people are going to go soon because it seems like the trump army has got more enthusiasm and just blind trust than anyone else's campaign. And I don't think anybody that wasn't a Biden fan isn't defeated by Biden being the nominee right now. And there's that quote I posted on our Instagram for our Grubstakers about this, like, professor at, I think it's Harvard, talking about why people in the UK

stopped believing in the royalty and the person uh that's being quoted is like saying that she was like writing down notes because she was in this class and the teacher said they just stopped believing that this was the way shit was supposed to happen and in this country this idea that a elections are run correctly and fairly, B, that money is somehow as finite as the clean water and air that we try and put in our bodies, to the fact that any of this shit is supposed to run correctly. My favorite phrase being that the system isn't broken, it's fixed for those that are in power and the elites.

So, I mean, mean honestly i think at this point when it comes to sanders and him dropping out it's been a bummer but it also has just been a reminder of like you gotta you gotta mobilize how many people do you know connect them to the other people you know because as it stands i mean even if something as small as our leftist podcast we're not really connected to the other people doing podcasts in Brooklyn in a way where we have communication with one another one on one about what we think of the world tomorrow. And it's like it's the ultimate Voltron, you know, stronger in numbers type of thing. It's not even that hard to comprehend. And the fact that on such a small scale in this country we are failing at that time and time again is indicative of why these ideas that are mostly universal, as we've seen from this election, are being rejected wholeheartedly. It's frustrating. that in the same way that the 20s of the last century were indicative to how the rest of the

century played out, I think we're in a similar moment right now. By the way, I'm reporting from the coronavirus stats helicopter right now, and it looks like the final numbers counted for the United States on April 10th. We have officially crossed the 2,000 deaths line in daily coronavirus deaths, with 2,035 for April 10th reporting in. So I was wrong saying that it was going to be a 9-11 per day. It's just two-thirds of a 9-11 per day. Well, that's a great success for the Trump administration. Nobody could have done it better um yeah but i guess i kind of wanted to just close this episode by each of us

talk about where we go from here because i think you know it's easy to give into despair but i think we have an obligation not to you know like uh we're not two-thirds of an island per day we're not the people who will be most impacted by this going wrong if you have the option to just tune out and play video games like you're not the person who's gonna feel the biggest impact of this and i i think as altruistic people as you know uh people who care about the world around you everybody has an obligation if they are in that situation to try and and make that world better for the the most vulnerable people and in terms of where we go from here i think what we were saying about the labor movement earlier where you do have like an afl-cio uh the labor union the trumpka is going

to be up for election the president of that union he's a total boomer sellout maybe you can throw him out get some actual radicals in there there's a lot there are going to be union elections where we can make the union movement as it exists in the u.s more militant hopefully in the years to come yeah i think sarah nelson the flight attendants union president i think she's trying to run so for afl-cio yeah oh yeah absolutely i mean that's an improvement i didn't like her hedging on warren versus sanders but again compared to trumpka yeah and and yeah and just we were talking about with like amazon and uh you know uh instacart and these other strikes because of coronavirus i i did post a thread about this on um on twitter and i got some replies from a guy named rust belt at rust belt jacobin uh and he said that he was

actually assault you know assault is a guy who joins a company or a guy or girl joins a company or uh yes uh assault is a person who joins a company uh to try and make that company's workforce unionized and so he salted an amazon warehouse in delaware in 2000 and he just kind of talked about that where uh unionizing the logistical chains in this country is a project that's been ongoing and that's very difficult because, and we have talked about this a bit on this podcast, companies like Walmart and Amazon, as they move into such monopolistic territory, are built to resist unionization if one plant or one location unionizes they will shut it down and fire everybody and just reroute that supply chain so it is very difficult to unionize these places but he says you know there's uh there is hope in health care in um you know franchises like mcdonald's and these sorts of things and teachers also yeah yeah absolutely you saw a lot of wildcat strikes with regards to teachers and with coronavirus and a great depression situation this stuff could change so i think the left has

to just be in a position where we're willing those of us who can afford it to contribute to strike funds and you know if workers at amazon go on strike you have to cancel your fucking prime account you can't be putting yourself first on this stuff you have to say we have an obligation to support unionization wherever it appears because in terms of real power the only way we're going to get that is having a militant labor union and i guess one last thing is chomsky always talks about the low point of american labor was the 1920s which leads into the great depression the 1930s the high point of American labor. So, you know, it's easy to get dejected, but things can change in an instant. So just look for the green shoots where they are and keep your eye on the labor movement

is what I would say for going forward. Cool. And with that, this has been Grubstickers. I'm Yogi Paywall. I'm Andy Palmer. I'm Steve Jeffries. I'm Andy Palmer I'm Steve Jeffries I'm Sean P. McCarthy thanks for listening take care of yourself

and your neighbors goodnight alright stop your recorders Sean which neighbors were you talking about the Connecticut ones or the New York ones