Red Scare - Coupvid-19

Episode Date: January 8, 2021

The ladies discuss Kim and Kanye's divorce and the riot on Capitol Hill.

One, two, three, okay, I think we nailed it. Yeah, we're bad. We're bad. This is intimidating. We're recording remotely again, which is not really our forte. No. Because I was exposed to the fake virus COVID-19, Coke's 19. Did you take the test?

I took a test. I haven't gotten my results yet, but I feel fine and I don't think that I have it. But, per the instructions of the COVID tracer person, I'm supposed to quarantine until tomorrow. So, we will see. But I am definitely feeling stir-crazy and paranoid that I am sick and mentally ill, etc. Well, just because you're mentally ill doesn't mean you have coronavirus. I have the mind, but a lot to talk about, I guess.

Yeah. Well, we were supposed to record yesterday, but then we blew it, but then this popped off. So then we were right all along on the right side of history once again. I'm just going to take, yeah, we can just take credit for being prescient. I'm going to get my, I'm going to get my jewel. Hold on. Okay. I'm going to run to the bathroom.

Okay, I'm back. Thank God. I think it's, I hope it's not too loud. Anna, Anna. Okay, you're back. Yeah. Should you be jeweling if you have a devastating respiratory illness? That's all I have.

I'm only, I'm all out of edibles too, so I'm really just spending a lot of, a lot of time with my, my inner thoughts. Yeah. So how's quarantine going? It's, does it remind you of the other quarantine? Yeah, it's definitely. From like slightly earlier? It's, it's fine.

It's, I'm, I'm in a dance, so it's not devastating. Yeah. I, I watched Amadeus the other night. Oh, cute. How was that? Really good. Um, has all the, has all that stuff I like. Yeah.

Wigs and. Yeah. So I was wondering why, like, cause Mozart was like, he wrote us for a symphony when he was seven. And I was wondering like how come kids don't do stuff like that anymore? Cause they have iPads. They're just, social media. I mean, cause they're not wearing wigs.

I think that there's a direct correlation when people stop wearing wigs and we stop producing like prodigies and geniuses. Yeah, government breaks down, all those guys wearing powdered wigs are onto something that seemed to function way more smoothly than what we have now. Um, yeah. I think Mozart had a lot of time on his hands. Yeah. They didn't have anything else to do.

Yeah. They had to like burn candles for like. Wow. But didn't he die also at a really young, just like age, he was like 32 or something? Yeah. Like he had to get, get it all in. Yeah. The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long.

Is that? That sounds right. Like a Blade Runner quote. Burn it at both holes. So there was a protest in Washington DC yesterday. They were protesting that John Ossoff follows me on Twitter. I'm so, so jealous. I had to Google who John Ossoff is.

I don't even know. Dude, I can't even find his Twitter. I don't know if it's two S's or one or two F's or one, but once I find it, I'm gonna, I'm gonna hit that follow. Yeah. And hope he returns the favor. He has to. Yeah.

Um, yeah. Well, first there was some kind of election again. Yeah. In Georgia. Yeah. It was a vaginal runoff election. And I guess the Dems won. And now they have control of, they have the Senate majority.

Yeah. I think so. You know something in the world ain't right when the Dems win Georgia. Um, Ossoff was one of these guys that won. He looks like, he's one of these like baby faced, new gen politicians, um, who looks like he was created in a lab to appeal to like horny wine ons, who are fundamentally conservative, but vote liberal, but are socially conservative. Yeah.

Yeah. Uh, and then yesterday, a bunch of Trump supporters stormed Capitol Hill and did a little chas of their own that bore a striking resemblance to many of the other chases we've seen. Yeah. Uh, last year, I was thinking about how the real horseshoe theory is that, um, like the warlords of all these extremist political demonstrators end up looking like Dr. Seuss hat as Bertie made people.

Yeah. No, I was really disappointed to see that right wing aesthetics are just as gay as left wing aesthetics. Just a bunch of people wearing stupid ass Spencer's gift costumes. I know. I had to guess his crowd stormed to the Capitol building in protest of Kim and Kanye's divorce. I was surprised that they got divorced. Um, I'm not, I should have seen it coming, but I guess I thought, I don't know.

He's religious. He seems loyal. I thought they would have worked it out. Yeah. I, I was more like, he's black. She's Armenian. There's a lot of traditionalism happening. No.

I mean, I think they, they stuck it out for like very long and celebrity dog years and they have a bunch of like really cute kids to show for it. So it's not a total failure of a marriage. Yeah. But the, so I guess they, the crowds stormed the Capitol building. I had to Google whether the Capitol building was different from the White House. Yes. That's another thing I Googled last night.

Um, cause I was like, you know, like, no, not Melania's Christmas decorations. Cause you know, those are still up, you know, we have both had a lot of questions for sure. Um, yeah, I know he, the Capitol Hill is where Congress does their, their business. It's where they convene. Yeah. Um, which I thought was cool initially. I thought it was cool when that guy went in Pelosi's office and took some selfies. I would have done something similar.

I was happy for them. They seemed like they were having a lot of fun. Yeah. They, it was very carnival-esque. Yes. The Grapple-Azian. Um, yeah, initially I was like fine with it. The Congress or Capitol Hill is where the Bob Duke known as a Nancy Pelosi stock.

So I was like happy to see her office being defiled and vandalized. She deserves it. Um, but ultimately I think all of this feels very fake and gay to me, agreed. I don't even know if like, do we even know for sure if these are like necessarily even right-wingers or Trump supporters, like who knows anymore? I think they're- Everything feels so, like, sile. Exactly.

Everything feels like a crisis-actors scenario. Well, because immediately people started pointing out that the police were not as, um, brutal to the Trump protesters as they were to the BLM protesters. There was like lots of contradictory videos floating around. Um, I was, I guess, astounded but not surprised by, um, the hypocrisy kind of on both the left and the right of sanctioning some forms of political uprising and violence and condemning others. Yeah.

The same, some of the same people who I called, who were calling for like abolishing the police were now like bemoaning that the police weren't being brutal enough when the unwashed masses lacked the ideological convictions of, like, BLM people, uh, it is, it is weird that a relatively small crowd of like unorganized marauders were able to break into Congress that does seem suspicious. That does make the whole thing feel like a weird sigh of, um, yeah, no, it does. But I think, like, just like, I don't know what to think as a career shoplifter since reformed.

I know how easy it is to get by security and never, never attribute, uh, to malice that which could be attributed to like incompetence or stupidity and never attribute, you know, like, I feel like everything is kind of way more incompetent and retarded than people think it is. But also I could be totally wrong. And there, you know, like I, um, I saw like, or somebody mentioned, I didn't, I haven't seen it yet, but I'm going to watch this clip that like apparently, um, Jimmy Dorr, the guy that we met briefly in New Hampshire when we were interviewing Tulsi, he screened a

video on his show of, of cops of Capitol Hill cops letting people in. Yeah, I saw that video as well, but then I also saw videos that did look like relatively violent clashes between police and protesters. Yeah, this feels like that time that, um, Putin blamed the Chechens for blowing up those apartment buildings. Um, but like, yeah, I don't know, I mean, I guess, of course, like the liberal narrative is going to be that the cops are in cahoots with Trump, like the law and order state and they're, and they were making it easy for his supporters.

Um, I feel like they're probably more in cahoots with the DNC and the GOP and moreover doing whatever is expedient for them as an organization. And like, as someone else pointed out, I mean, maybe the strategy here is like to let these people in to discredit Trump under the banner of insurrection and to inflame the left under the banner of like white privilege. You kill two birds at the same time, you know? Right. And then using the threat of insurrection to justify like increasingly authoritarian,

anti-insurrection measure. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And it's like, you know, there are certain things like, you know, people were pointing out that, that the Viking guy is like kind of a protest ambulance chaser. Yeah. Someone, well, someone found his, um, his like backstage casting profile. Oh, okay.

So he's literally a paid crisis actor. Well, I actually don't, I think he is an actor, um, but I don't think he's like, I don't think the CIA is casting him off of backstage to do their bidding. I think he's more than so just kind of like a useful idiot. Right. Yeah. Yeah. The guy next to him had like a hammer and sickle tattoo, as other people pointed out.

Yeah. It was like all over the place. A lot of people were asking me if the Viking guy was a one or a zero on the binary and I was like, dude, like I don't care if he has a six pack, there's nothing more revolting than a man who voluntarily dons a con costume to show up to protests. To wear a funny hat. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I think that it's very difficult to parse reality. So the only really useful conversation to have is sort of, um, to conduct an analysis of like media narrative building. Yeah. I watched some CNN and MSNBC yesterday and they, you know, predictably were talking in this very like horrified hysterical tone about what a depressing day and what a, you know, it's like the 9-eleven of Mago protests, they really sort of doubled down on what they've been doing for the last four years of like the deplorable narrative.

Anderson Cooper made a weird comment about how they were, all the protesters were going to go eat at Olive Garden later. And then I watched him talk over the sort of the live feed footage of people literally like milling around. It was literally people like standing around and Anderson Cooper attempting to describe their activity as some sort of neo fascistic threat. He was like, they're high fiving, they're wandering around aimlessly. Anderson Cooper.

Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead. No, that's it. No. Anderson Cooper like thinks he's like the human pastis or something, but he is the human Olive Garden. He hosts the socially distanced New Year's live show with Andy Cohen.

Yeah. Exactly. They're like lump in whispers. He's third middle brow. Yeah. And like those comments just like show such a contempt for the poor and also reveal the full extent of liberal ignorance because what they're really lashing out at, I mean, they hate and are repulsed by poor people.

I said that in that spiked interview that I got a lot of flak for and a hundred percent stand by it. But like, they're also what they're really repulsed by what really gets them is like the kind of upper left of Michael Lynn's horseshoe. So like the small businessmen that are locked in battle with like the PMC, it's not so much that they hate the economic working class, which they totally do, but they also just hate working class culture, which is not necessarily economically determined at this point.

Like they hate affluent people with working class kind of sensibilities just as much as they hate poor working class people. Right. Olive Garden is an apt kind of symbol for Kuber to use because it's not it's not like it's that inexpensive. They have unlimited breadsticks, but it's like it's basically like a middle class establishment. Yeah. It used to be like everything in American culture is seers, Bloomingdale's or whatever.

Like it's fallen and prestige. Well, okay. But I mean that like it's funny to like see people like I was at the doctor and there was and CBS was on and this stupid bitch anchor woman was like, do you think Trump incited the insurrection? Like the word of the day was insurrection, right? And I was like, first of all, turn this off. This is like the waiting room, well, insurrection and coup also.

Yeah. Yeah. Lots of people were very quick to call this a coup, which I don't think it is because they don't they clearly didn't have any. It was not an agenda. It was an organized. It was like it seemed like they basically walked in and then walked out. Yeah.

And I saw a lot of people being like, well, at least the right-wingers know how to organize a protest. At least they made some gains. They stormed the Capitol building. What were you guys doing looting targets or whatever? And I was thinking like, okay, they stormed the Capitol building and then they took selfies in Nancy Pelosi's office. Like nothing happened.

They put MAGA hats on some statues and like, yeah. Well, and that's I mean, but, but everybody kind of like framing this as like a coup or an insurrection. And that's the real coup. It's the control of the information channels and the cultural meta narrative. Like I'm going to just repeat myself over and over again. Like Facebook banned Trump today and definitely Shopify took down the MAGA store. The levers of power are all aligning against him.

Twitter suspended him for 12 hours. Yeah. For they, they did. They even suspended him. I thought they were just deleting his tweets. You know, I think that he got a suspension because you don't even, yeah, the, the narrative is that he incited this violence by, um, talking incessantly about the election fraud. I mean, like he has to talk about incessantly about election fraud to like galvanize his

followers and to not come out of office looking like a loser. Well that's the, that's the argument is that he galvanized his followers into a, into a violent goofy ass insurrection. Into a violent siege that lasted like, what, like three hours? I mean, it's even hard to find out how many, I was trying to get like a count of how many people were there. And there were many sources that said like hundreds and then some that said tens of thousands. Yeah.

1300. Yeah. It seemed like it couldn't have been more than 2000. And from much of the footage I saw, it looked like basically like a couple hundred. Yeah. It didn't. It was pretty, it looked pretty sparse, thin. Um, yeah, I mean, like, I think like, you know, like as someone pointed out to me also,

this is a lot like Charlottesville 2.0, um, to which I would reply that, yeah, it is like Charlottesville in the sense that it's a total blip on the radar that's going to be heralded as a flashpoint to like justify future austerity and censorship measures. Well, I feel like Glenn, um, very presciently sort of foretold this when he came on our pod, um, after election day, and we asked him what the Libs were going to do without the specter of Trump to sort of scapegoat. He said that basically he predicted that they would find like some fringe mentally ill extremists to overinflate a fascist threat.

To say see like fascism is alive and well, look at all these unwashed masses trying to take violent control of our, of our government. Yeah. This is why we have to. I mean, I also heard on CNN, an anchor, a bitch anchor lady talking about how, um, yeah, like Democrats and Republicans used to, uh, differ on ideology and policy. But now that the real division was between people who, um, understood reality and people who couldn't grapple with facts.

And that kind of, whenever the media is sort of appealing to some universal truth that their dissidents fail to fall in line with, that's very scary. Yeah. And it's like all of the, like there was a swift and unanimous condemnation of these people by the media, uh, even though no such condemnation, uh, you know, happened with the BLM protests, I don't want to make stupid comparisons because I feel like truffle swinning for like hypocrisy is the lowest form of discourse, but it's really interesting how that went down.

Um, the hypocrisy is, is flagrant. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's like, you know, I'm, I'm also like, you know, I said this in that interview with Nicolo fisted by Foucault, like it really feels like we've entered kind of a new segment, a new era. I don't, I don't want to also, I'm like very leery of labeling anything as new because I think it differs maybe mostly on an aesthetic or symbolic level, but we've entered this new phase where everything is like out in the open and people are not like the ruling

elites are not even trying to hide things or flagrantly rubbing it in our faces, um, asking us to like rationalize the contradictions or whatever. Um, and it was just like a disgusting and pathetic display from the mainstream media companies and the political rulers and elites like Ed Markey had a tweet with almost a hundred thousand likes, Donald Trump is responsible for the coup that is unfolding in the capital. He's a fascist and a direct threat to our country to which like Marianne Williamson chimed in. We get that senator, we're hoping that you and your colleagues are going to do something

about it. And I was just like, you know, Marianne Williamson, I think is the perfect person for our moment because she looks great. She sounds great. You know, like, uh, she says all the right things. She manages to package one, Mondanities as novelties, which is like the great talent of all self-help gurus, you know? Um, and I think she's like really kind of incredibly attractive and appealing to us

image conscious women and gays, uh, and we really want to believe, but like if you peel back the layers and engage with what she's actually saying, everything falls apart. Like it's so incredibly retarded and misleading, you know, she sounds the part looks the part, but she's on their team at the end of the day. She's on Markey's team, not on the team of the people. Right. Well, because her, what they're going to do about it is kind of heighten the machinations of censorship, authoritarian, bipartisan rule, really.

Yeah. No, totally. And like, you know, in, I tweeted and deleted, I responded to them and I was like, you guys should watch the video on Trump's timeline where he's literally telling people to go home and keep the peace. And I like didn't want the trouble, but I stand by what I said. It's like, okay, yeah, I understand the argument that he's dog whistling to his followers and saying things that he doesn't really mean and they're reading between the lines.

But those people don't really respect the mainstream channels of information anyway, and they're going to get the dog whistle anyway. Well, they, they also shouldn't because the mainstream channels of information sort of confirm their bias by censoring any dissident, yeah, language. And I think I was watching the news when he, he made that video and I, it really seemed like there was nothing he could have said that would have been adequate, you know, it was like, irregardless of any treatment that Trump made, they would have found a way with via Trump derangement syndrome to confirm their bias again, yeah, that he was dog whistling

and inciting violence. Yeah, and it's like, I mean, just literally, I mean, literally in the literal sense, he is telling people to go home, disband, deescalate, and they're censoring a sitting president citing the risk of violence while laying the groundwork for future violence and division. Because it's like, you know, it's ridiculous. I don't care what you think of Trump, it's ridiculous to censor a sitting president. And then to complain that he's like launching a coup, there, he's not launching or inciting a coup.

They're launching and inciting a coup against him. And you know, every time I say this, people are like, you're a Trump supporter, which like, I don't even know how to like, respond to those kind of people because they're so far gone, they're such victims out of their own like, psychic cowardice and confirmation bias. Like, if you know, I'm not defending Trump because I love him and I want to see him be the president forever. If it looks like I'm defending him, it's because he's totally disposable and irrelevant in all of this.

He was a useful figure for the time being, and it's like this is a total reconciliation of power, and it's like what we've, I mean, like literally, Emirata was tweeting about this, like the tech firms taking like everybody's wise to the facts. Well I think also much, I don't know, like the like the BLM protests and the civil unrest over the summer, the election fraud is really just kind of like a red herring for a general political uprising against the status quo in a government that has completely failed. Like, everyone ought to be storming the Capitol, you know, and it's the fact that people are so caught up in these kind of partisan divisions and delusions about dog whistling and white

supremacy and stuff really obscures that it is in everyone's sort of collective best interest to be storming the Capitol and to be holding Congress people accountable for a massive failure. Yeah, I mean, like, it's ridiculous to me that like, kind of ordinary people are vilified as like disruptors of democracy and the elites are lionized as like defenders of democracy. Yeah, it's like all the vitriol, the hatred should be toward Nancy Pelosi. Yeah, I liked the angle where they were people of course were kind of like the worst libtards were freaking out about how excited Putin was because he orchestrated all of this obviously.

I missed that, that angle. I had to, I had to disengage at a certain point. And somebody shared a video of him at like mass lighting a candle because it's Orthodox Christmas like he literally didn't give a shit he was just like going to church. I mean, he probably thinks all of this is really funny and I don't blame him. I mean, it's yeah, it's exhausting and I think that we can expect to see more of the same. Yeah.

But probably with increasingly brutal crackdown. Yeah, I mean, there was, well, everybody seems to like nobody cared about the woman who was like shot in the neck with a rubber bullet and died. I like I shoot her is that what Yeah, I think she was shot by a Capitol Hill cop, but you know, again, like, nobody, you know, there was this parallel between the kind of like BLM protests. I think like the, the big like, I guess, you know, parallel for me is that none of these protests are really about what they claim to be about, like that's the, the, the feature

of contemporary protests, like the chief feature, you know, like this, this protest is ostensibly about like the fact that the election was stolen from Trump and that there's been a media conspiracy waging against him for the last four years. But really, it's about COVID lockdown disenfranchisement. Yeah, that's what I mean. Yeah, that's what I mean by those by the election fraud and like the protests over the summer being red herrings really for Yeah, a shared disenfranchisement of Yeah.

majority of the country. Well, right. Yeah. And the George Floyd protests, yeah, they were definitely not about George Floyd. They were probably not about black lives. They're also about COVID lockdown disenfranchisement and like deaths of despair. And like, I think like another feature of contemporary protests is that attacking the physical environment no longer poses a threat to the power structure.

Like, you know, we saw how quickly this was mobilized and demobilized. They just factor any sort of like property damage into their calculus, right? And the symbolic gains are really overshadowed because that's you could make the case, right? That much like leading a target, storming the Capitol is sort of like a symbolic gesture of people sort of rising up against capitalism or against a failing government, but really the symbolic gains are just overshadowed by how political violence legitimizes state violence. Yeah.

Yeah, and I think that these protests also exist for social media. Well, yeah, that's also to be like shared and images like kind of it's like, you know, the beauty of war, the beauty of protest, there's all these like images of like shit burning to the ground and people wearing fatigues like running around and like, I don't know. And they're compelling, but in the same way that I think people are really quick to dismiss protesters on the left and right as sort of useful idiots or tools. I think even engaging with these narratives, you're like offering yourself up to be instrumentalized. Yeah.

Yeah. That's a really good point. And also the two sides, like the only two sides that we can have in this country or have way more in common with each other than either side would care to admit. Exactly. Yeah. Like they're responding to the kind of same inputs and coming up with the same conclusions ultimately, even if they're not always like rationally expressed.

And they ought to feel solidarity with one another rather than being so quick to kind of hypocritically illustrate in this case, like the lack of police brutality or something. Yeah. But the business model literally prevents them like by design from seeking any sort of solidarity. And I had somebody tell me the other day that like any kind of like their kind of outlook was that any kind of conservative policy that does not protect and defend the working in middle class, especially in a time of crisis such as this one does not deserve to survive. And I was like, well, the same goes for any leftist policy like conservatives who are

not GOP are expressing a lot of the same grievances as like leftists who are not part of like the DNC-DSA complex. By conservatives who are not GOP, you mean like Trump supporters? Well, yeah, I mean, not necessarily even, but like people who identify as conservatives, I don't know what these labels mean increasingly. Right. I think that's also getting very lost is that like the MAGA constituency is not really representative of of the GOP of Republicans.

Yeah. It's, I mean, I'm hesitant to say it's like a fringe movement because it's obviously not marginal, but it isn't. It doesn't really fall neatly into like the two-party divide. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, totally. But those are the people that are like kind of locked out.

And I think like, you know, another thing that always comes to my mind when people accuse me of like being a Trump supporter, I have to think like, well, also, what's wrong with being a Trump supporter? How is it meaningfully any worse than being a Biden supporter or a Pelosi supporter? Yeah. Like that's half the country. I mean, it's not really, but like. I can't imagine what kind of person would be a Pelosi supporter.

Yeah. I don't know, I mean, it's hard for me to like support any politician and be like enthusiastic about any politician. I mean, I hope that Trump leaves office and then comes on our podcast so we can talk about who we were persecuted by Shopify. Yeah. He should get Barron to do what we did, just sit on the phone with Shopify and then do personal fulfillment.

It's like him and Barron squatting on the ground. Think about MAGA hats. Yeah. We should do like a collab of drop MAGA X red scare make, I don't know, I'm too brained like a good pun, but I was like walking down the street, like on canal near Soho and saw like a MAGA hoodie and was like, damn, that looks fresh. That's even cooler than the hat. The hoodies.

The red hoodie. It looks great. The branding is strong. The branding will will endure. People just like people hate his superb marketing and branding sensibility. Did you see that Ariel Pink and John Mouse were at the the coup? Yeah. What's all that about?

And I know they're kind of like all right, I guess. I mean, Ariel Pink's definitely been like gesturing in a reactionary fashion for some time, but they were there with Lee Moyer, that girl who made the that feeling with no girlfriend doc. I think she's making another documentary. I think that's why they were there. I don't think John Mouse was personally storming the Capitol building, but on my feed today, there's definitely a lot of people like renouncing Ariel Pink and John Mouse and pathetically

begging them to clarify their political positions so they can continue to listen to their music, which is just, I mean, pathetic first and then also like portrays a real just contempt kind of for art, I think. I know. I know. To like demand a kind of unambiguous ideology from the artists you enjoy. I know you're supposed to be able to enjoy the art, irrespective of the views of the artists. Yeah.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. I think the way that Morrissey handled getting dogpiled for playing in Israel was the best way I've seen anybody handle it. What did Morrissey do? I shouldn't you play for Israeli civilians, like, I mean, I'm sorry, but there are people too. They like Morrissey too. There's enough Morrissey to go around.

Everybody loves Morrissey. But yeah, I don't know, that's always funny that together like, bro, do you even organize or do you even elift us like holding like Ariel pink hostage and asking him to like justify his views. I mean, it's so stupid. I was thinking about like how stupid it is that like make or like whatever it means that make being an artist just like identifying as an artist or not even identifying but being identified by others as an artist automatically implies that you're somehow leftist.

Right. Like it just goes without saying. Yeah. Well, that's that. That's that liberal media bias, baby. Yeah, it's like, I mean, it's really so stupid. And I was thinking, I know that people hate when I make like generalizations like sweeping generalizations about Americans and are quick to point out that I too am an American.

But I was like, what does it say about our society that we're the only society in the world that like thinks of itself in terms of like high school metaphors? Yeah. Like bullying and like the lunch table. Mean girls. Yeah. People are like out there getting very triggered by mean girls. Yeah.

I like that people think we're mean girls. It's like never correct a mistake in your favor. I like that people think I have a trust fund or like work for the CIA or Peter Thiel or something. I'm not going to bother to dispute or refute those myths. Yeah. Well, I see lots of people speculating that we were like ourselves bullied in high school and that this is our kind of adult vendetta or something.

And I would I would like to set the record straight that I was not popular in high school but I but you know, I had my own thing going on. I wasn't really. Yeah. I've always been an iconic class. So these sort of petty popularity contests were on my agenda and still are not. Yeah. I think like I was going to ask you if you were like bullied in high school.

I also was not bullied in high school. I went to a performing arts high school where everybody was like a huge fag. Exactly. No one had any grounds to bully me. Wait, what was your what was your curriculum in a at a performance art high school? It's just more like more art space. It was you had to it was a charter school. So you had to it was a public school, but you had to like audition to be admitted and

then you were slotted into I was actually a visual art major. So I went to art class. Yeah, every day and my other classes every other day, like it was like a split curriculum that way. It was good. Oh, nice. Whatever. That sounds great.

They like measured your thigh gap with calipers and made sure that you never went over a hundred ten pounds. Exactly. That's right. But I graduated early because I just hated being in high school in general. I wasn't. Yeah. Well, that's the thing.

It's like, you know, I hate I hate thinking about high school. It was like also like a meaningless blip on the radar time. It's not like a formative like moment. Yeah. Well, Americans are in this kind of arrested development where their college and high school years are heralded as like the best years of their life. And that's why I think there's such an enduring metaphor in people's psychological, emotional and political lives.

Yeah. I mean, I guess they are probably just like technically speaking the best years of your life because you look like an adult, but lack the responsibilities of adulthood, which seems like the best case. That's why there's all these movies about like hot teens or whatever. But it seems weird. And I was thinking about like that Wellbeck thing about how like the problem isn't like feminism or other forms of progressive activism, it's that there's like a hatred for aging.

It's not even a youth cult like it takes the form of a youth cult. It's just like in America, there is this like hatred for mortality for aging, which is a very dysfunctional attitude to have because the fact of the matter is that we're all slowly aging and dying. So if you refuse to recognize that reality, it makes for a very depressing life. Definitely. Yeah, I think mortality is really the big one. Americans don't have a very integrated or resolved attitude around death.

And that's why. Well, yeah. Yeah. It's weird because on one hand, yeah, there's a hysteria. Because it's like an unreconciled attitude because on one hand, like everyone is horribly afraid of dying. And on the other hand, they all wish they could die. No, I'm serious.

It's like, oh, like your weight loss regimen, your skincare routine, doing genetic testing to figure out like what if you're susceptible to some like cancer gene or whatever. And all this is like enough to give you cancer because it ceases to be like fun and becomes like futile. Stress. Stress is the real killer. Yeah. It is.

I was, I watched Cassavetti's Husbands the other day and Peter Falk says this line like right in like the first five minutes. What? That basically like stress is the thing that will do it, not the, not smoking or drinking or cancer or anything. COVID. Yeah. Fuck, Anna.

Did you, did you take a COVID test? I took a at home test and then I'm getting one, another one tomorrow just to be extra sure, but I feel fine. What's the, what's the at home test? Is it like when you shove a thing up your nose? They're all, so all of them. It's all stuff up your nose, basically. But the at home one is through like a company I saw advertised on Shark Tank.

Yeah. I got some like Theranos-esque ladies stuff. And they, they mail you the kit and you watch a little video and then you mail it back to them. I will keep that rule posted on my COVID results. Yeah. Cause we're like a human centipede and we've all like exposed each other and I was like, I have to go visit my, my mom.

My mom's like ready to die, but I'm not ready for her to die, so I'm going to do like the responsible thing. My mom thinks she's ready to die. She's like on this tip, like I'm a boomer. I've lived a full life. It's very Russian. Yeah. I've had two children.

Da, da, da. I mean, my parents are very young, relatively, and they, um, act like they're debilitated by aging sometimes. Wait, really? I think that's also a Russian thing. Yeah. They're like, oh yeah. We can't read the menu.

We have to wear glasses. We're getting so old. No Russian people love those reading glasses. They love having those. Yeah. My mom's literally like 50 years old. Yeah. And like she has reading.

Yeah. They buy, my mom, like my mom was bragging to me about her reading glasses. I was like, you stupid bitch, you have like 20, 20 visions. Stop playing. But when you're in a candle at bistro, it's hard to, it's hard to read the menu. Yeah. Yeah, AOC, speaking of a hystericizing, wearing fake glasses. She weighed in on, um, both she and Ilhan called for Trump's impeachment on Twitter.

Okay. On the grounds of inciting an insurrection. I don't, yeah, I don't even know. I mean, what would be the point at this, at this point, we're in the last, like, week of his presidency, basically. Yeah, I think he'll leave voluntarily. Yeah. He'll go through, like, the doggy door, um, uh, but she, she tweeted, I'm okay, period,

like full stop. So annoying. I know. I was sitting there thinking like, well, you know, in, in the midst of this, like, Brad Tramell-ass protest where, like, a Viking, Ruffians, and like Larry the Cable guy guys were, like, bursting through the doors of the Capitol building. All I could think of was like, we're AOC and we're big naturals alive and well. I mean, I wish the, the women's march had that kind of audacity.

Maybe they would have, uh, accomplished their resistance a little more successfully, but I guess they weren't that upset about Hillary's loss. I wonder what Hillary thinks of this. I'm sure. Has anyone checked? Is she okay? I blocked her. So I don't know.

I don't get it. Wait, why? And she was harassing you. I'm going to look at Hillary's Twitter. I've, uh, I've blocked Hillary Clinton, Camp Bot, and, uh, Kuma Yule, Nandjari, or whatever. Wait, why did you block Kuma Yule? I just get, you know, I get frustrated. I don't feel like, I don't feel like it's good for my equilibrium to, to see them on

the feed. Yeah. Fair enough. He's, I, I never want to see, it's, it's weird for like, um, the, the, the roiding is unpleasant and off-putting. Definitely. It ain't right. I don't think like, I don't think like, um, looks like a fucking freak.

Yeah. It doesn't suit him. No. Like Indian and Pakistani guys are cute when they're like natural. They don't need to be like ripped when they're big naturals. Yeah. Um, Hillary's last tweet is today, domestic terrorists attack the foundation of our democracy, the peaceful transfer of power following free elections.

Okay. We must re-establish the rule of law and hold them boring. Democracy is fragile. Yeah. Uh, she's, I wish it was like at least more riveting and interesting, but she can't even say anything like compelling. It's, um, fatigue is really setting in for, for everyone I feel. Then she has a tweet from January 6th that's just Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell

period. Oh, very good. Um, yeah. I know, yeah. People give a shit for dragging AOC, but the I'm okay period is, is extremely annoying. It's just manipulative and history on it, yenta behavior and I'm okay and just, I was scared and alone and I was barricaded, but I guess I'm okay. I wish my grandchildren would call me a little more, but I'm okay.

Um, imagine an actual like Puerto Rican girl being like, actually, I'm okay. Like that would never happen. And then the funniest part of the thread is that she, she apologized to tweets down, like, uh, for having a comma typo because quote, it's been a day. It's like she really can't help those Jenny from the block bonafides. I said it wrong this time. Shining through like she's such a fucking spelling BS bitch, you know, just to clarify, I forgot to answer the correct multiple choice question on the scantron, but I'm okay.

I know a lot of I at my performing arts high school, I obviously encountered a lot of theater ass nerds. Yeah, I can really spot one when I see one. Well, that's the biggest thing. It's like, I don't forget the fact that our elites are the greatest threat to our democracy. I don't want to be ruled over by such corny ass elites, you know, it's like the corny, the corniness is really trickling down to even to our political dissidents. Like who?

Like are the protesters. Oh yeah. Yeah. I think everything has this like a binocous theatrical quality, I think. Yeah, I was going to I was going to go on my like anti American high horse and be like everything here has to look like a Spencer's gifts and then I remembered Pussy Riot happened in Russia. So I take that back.

I know. But that was the influence of the decadent West, Anna. That's true. Yeah. I think their aesthetic was very informed by the corny cornyness epidemic. Yeah, it sucks. It's corny because it's like commercial. It's like the cheapest thing that you can buy at like Walmart or Target.

That's all it is. It's just like whatever can be fabricated on the cheap from like Chinese yardage, like surplus yardage. I don't know. Should we talk about the Pauline Kale duck? I didn't watch it. Oh, shit. Oops.

That's okay. But we can save it for yeah, we can maybe we can do that and the because I think the friendly but what stock is out tomorrow or something. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Good thinking. We can pair them another another like instance of us dropping the ball, but being able to reframe it as a strategic.

But do you think did you hear that Kanye was having an affair with Jeffrey star? Oh, yeah. I wanted to ask you about that. First of all, who is Jeffrey star? Secondly, is Kanye gay? I know who Jeffrey star is sort of. He's a makeup. He's like a cosmetics person.

I don't know how he rose to prominence through YouTube, I would guess. I'm looking at the at the Wikipedia now. Oh, my space. He like was like an early influencer who then had a failed pop career and then started a cosmetics line. We our makeup artist on the numero shoot was using Jeff, right? Yeah, that I remember and they're all made. But so do you think Kanye is gay?

Yeah, that's the real the real question. Oh my god, I don't even know. I mean, I guess the rumors have been a swirling for a very long time. That's like the Tom Cruise gay rumors. Yeah. It's, I don't think he's, I think he is, but I don't think he's closeted. I don't think he's even cognizant of it, you know? That's why I think the women that he's romantically paired with are these kind of exaggerated hyper

feminine. Yeah. Icons. They're very gay. Someone who dates an Armenian woman is clearly gay. But it's, it feels like a, like, yeah, he's compensating for some innate, innate gayness by seeking out the most kind of grotesquely feminine women he can partner with. Yeah.

Like grotesquely and artificially feminine. Yeah. I mean, like, I think he just wanted to be Kim's stylist. And he did a good job. Yeah. He did a great job. But now she's divorcing him because women are inherently disloyal and ungrateful and no, I mean, I, I, I guess he's possibly gay.

I don't, I think like when you're that famous and that embattled and that mentally ill actually, I think like the parallel between him and Tom Cruise is like not totally trivial. They're like a similar kind of guy, like, uh, like they're basically they're both intelligent in the same way, in the sense that they're not intelligent at all, but they are intellectually curious and they're extremely talented, extremely talented. Yeah. And their intellectual curiosity constantly hits the wall of their intellectual limitations in like real time and other people can feel it, you know?

Yeah. Yeah. He's like post gay, they've like transcended normal sexual orientation and now they live in this like, um, hyper real, hyper famous framework where it's not even like relevant, whether they're gay or straight, they don't have authentic desires. Yeah. I like that term post gay. Post gay.

Exactly. We have to make that happen. I think that's the next step after trans because we went from non binary to like trans now it's like the post gay era where people are going to be like aggressively heteronormative but actually like devoid of any sexual desire. Like I don't think he's like a particularly like libidinal or horny guy, even at that point. But yeah, I was like watching, I've been like on a documentary bit binge lately. Cool.

Cause I feel like the culture dying around me and I'm like trying to like. Like this respite from the exhausting media cycle. Yeah. And I was watching the Kubrick documentary drinking a Red Bull. No, I'm drinking a spin drift. Oh, me too. Cool. Raspberry one.

But, um, I don't know one of the one that's narrated by Tom Cruise, but then he also appears in it. And I felt so bad. Like I like the kind of Kim and Kanye divorce mirrored the Nicole Kidman Tom Cruise divorce for me. Cause they were both interviewed toward the end of the movie for, you know, their work on eyes wide shut. And I felt kind of a nagging pain and sympathy for Nicole Kidman cause she's just like so

much smarter than Tom Cruise. Definitely. And it was married to him for like 10 years. I know. And such a like this, the spectacle around it. Well there's that photo, you know that famous paparazzi photo where she's like after she signed the divorce papers and she's leaving her lawyer's office and she looks like overjoyed. Yeah.

Um, but, um, it was crazy to watch Tom Cruise cause he's like Coco, the gorilla, you know, like that's like the register he operates on and, and he just like makes a lot of like plows of smacking. No. He's very, very strong. And Stan was like, Stan was just like, Cruise, let's go, let's do this. It's like, um, he definitely didn't say that, but I feel like Kanye is like the same kind of guy.

He's like a jump on the couch kind of guy. Totally. Definitely. So probably gay. Do you think, um, Kim will regress post divorce to her old like, um, Armenian cheetah clad style? Um, that's a good question. I don't know.

But I hope so. I've been tracking the, the aesthetic trajectory of the Kardashians post post Kanye. Yeah. Who's she going to date next is what I want to know. I know. I wonder. I mean, she really like how many more men's lives the major Kardashian clan will ruin. How many kids does, does she, do they have like four or eight or five?

I don't know. Three or four? I don't, I don't know. I don't know. Yeah. There's like North, Saint, uh, I'm running a fact check. Yeah. Let's fact check this.

Oh, Chicago and song for kids, North, Saint, Chicago and Psalm. That's a bad name. It sucks. It sucks being named Psalm. It sounds like a, like a Vietnamese or like Thai dish. Like no one can pronounce it correctly. Um, I mean, good for her. She got a bunch of cute little black kids out of this.

Adorable. That's like a liberal stream. Like they're set for life. I mean, I don't know. I think it's like sad. Like it's sad for us anytime a mega famous celebrity couple gets divorced. Of course. It's a collective loss.

Oh, Psalm is so cute. Oh my God. You got to look at Psalm when you get a chance. I'm going to Google, I'm going to Google Psalm. He looks like he has Instagram face. He has like Foxy eyes. Um, is he cuter or less cute than Allie Marzela's baby? Allie Marzela's baby is extreme.

Like the cutest baby of all time. No, this one's really cute too. Um, I also like how she's like the same color as her kids because she wears so much like black things, bronzer and black face. Um, I wonder if Kim is going to get skinnier or fat or post divorce. Um, she'll probably slim down and she'll lose some, some breakup weight. Do you want to get divorced? Um, no, hopefully not.

It seems like a terrible thing to go through. Yeah, but it's a great thing to like, you know, brandish over other people. To be a dorsi. It's chic. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Only slightly worse than being a widow.

A widow is actually more glamorous. Yeah. And, you know, you could be like a total like fem cell and nobody can second guess you on it because you could be like, just like I'm honoring my dead husband's memory and refuse to fuck. You can get like really fat and ugly and they can't say shit. Um, well, is there anything else on the docket? Is anything else happened?

Um, I don't know. That's a good question. I feel like every time I start to get bored with political discourse, something awful happened. So, wait, are you, are you bored now or now I'm overwhelmed and exhausted. Those are, that's really the spectrum. Yeah. I feel like we have to, um, forever, um, like toggle between like extreme boredom and extreme

fatigue, which are like the same emotion. Yeah. It's like life during wartime. Yeah. Yeah. Like I was thinking like I had this like extremely gay galaxy brain take in my head that I like decided not to share with the world, but which I will because I'm like coming to terms with like constantly humiliating and embarrassing myself now.

Um, but I was like, you know, like who needs a gulag when we have, uh, the internet. It's like a crowdsource to user generated gulag that we keep ourselves in. Yeah. Somebody was like, I'm, I'm waiting for all the arrests to happen. And I was thinking like, well, you're already on house arrest because it's COVID and you're fat. So they don't even have to, they don't, you know, they can have like a lean gulag. They, it's like a decentralized gulag.

Right. They don't even have to build the barracks. They have the whole gulag network. Yeah. Um, I've also like every time I, every time I, um, check my notifications today, there's people tweeting at us and being like, we need the Anacacha and nobody stopped me take on the latest Raya and I'm just like dreading releasing this episode because I think so. So the next pay walled one, because we have nothing to add.

We'll do Pauline Kale and the friendly, but with stock. Yeah. Fun. Stately old dykes of a, of the cultural golden age of America. Damn. Are you, are you a fan of like the seventies golden age period of American cinema? Or do you think it's overrated? I think it's definitely a little overrated, but I am, you know, a big, a big straighter

head. Yeah. And he was pretty instrumental in that period. So I think it's, um, very special and I would like to see something similar to it materialized somehow. Yeah. Well, it's up to you basically. It would be cool.

It'd be cool to have like a. To break it to you. I have to do everything myself, but yeah, it would be cool to have like a click of like consistent and interesting filmmakers working with relatively free reign from the studio system. But I don't, I'm not optimistic, I guess. Um, I, I am, but I feel like the channels are going to be like independent. Yeah.

Like you're going to have to build your own institutions from the ground up. Because like, they're not going to go through the official channels. I mean, like what is Hollywood now? It's literally like that Wonder Woman movie that nobody saw that looks like shit. That's like streaming on HBO Max and yeah, like I want to watch it. Yeah. Like who, they're like shoving it down our throats at every step of the way, like who watches this shit?

Like blue checks. I think I've already asked this, but like, yeah, it's the. Silent majority. I don't know. They're, I'm sure they're out there, but I don't think it's sustainable. I mean, like that's my like naive utopian libtard hope is that like people can at least reconstruct something artistically by themselves by taking matters into their own hands. Excuse me.

I don't think it's naive. I think that yeah, we're in a peer, we're in a transitional period and it might take a while, but more will be revealed. Yeah, I'm like cautiously optimistic. Yeah. Um, but I, I do feel once again, a little clairvoyant with my don't kill yourself because something retarded might happen. Yeah, it just keeps happening, just keeps getting more retarded.

Yeah. I wonder what's next around the corner. This was kind of, this feels like the kind of the season finale of the, of the Trump administration. And it was a, it was a pretty entertaining one. Yeah. I mean, listen, if they, if they lay a finger on Baron, I'm going to go full mask off. Yeah.

Like MAG guitar. No, seriously. He's safe. He's, he's, he's okay. If they touch my big, beautiful, bouncing TV boy. It would actually be funny if Melania and Baron went back to Slovenia. That would be funny. I mean, they should, there's nothing here for them anymore.

Yeah. And Baron already has a weird autistic accent that sounds Eastern European. I might, I might just pack up and go back to Belarus. Yeah. Like, well, I mean, well, what would you do there? I guess that's a good question. Podcast. I, like, I, I was thinking like, oh, I should just like go, go back to Russian.

It's like the, the Russian people will look at me and, and they should call me like an American ski. Yeah. I don't know if we could, we could hack it. I wonder what the Russian podcasting scene is. I'd be interested to know. Yeah. Yeah.

We should do a tour when COVID is over and like perform for 12 people and like a bass and St. Petersburg. Yeah. I don't know. What else? I mean, it's, we can call it if we've done like an hour, an hour and eight, eight minutes. Yeah. On one topic, which is pretty impressive, but you got to hand it to us.

Careful, careful what you wish for. Yeah. We might just take up our podcasting mics. We might just, yeah, spin those wheels. Is Alex Jones in DC? I feel like we would have, we, he would have been spotted. Alex Jones. I'm Googling this.

I, uh, he claims that the White House directed him to lead the crowd to the U.S. Capitol. Oh. Um, I don't know. This is for media matters for America. I don't, I don't trust, he's, he, um, claims to have spent $500,000 organizing the event where a mob violently stormed the U.S. Capitol. So he's like ISIS. He's like taking credit.

I see. Claiming responsibility for this. Yeah. Yeah. I'm seeing lots of takes about how Trump and social media are to blame. Yeah. I guess that's the, some more censorship to look forward to, I guess. Yeah.

It's going to suck. I just, yeah. I mean, I guess to, to, to, to leave on a positive note, um, I think like, yeah, it, it really like boggles the mind that people don't understand that the censorship they're cheerleading now because it is used against their so-called political enemies, uh, won't come back and bite them in the ass twofold. Like how people don't understand that this has always been the case. Right.

It's like, I mean, you have like the example of the Soviet Union. And that they have more in common with the, the marauding, all of garden patrons than they do with the members of Congress who they purport to protect. Yeah. Defending members of Congress is like the gayest thing I've ever heard of. I mean, being a civilian, defending them on social media, I don't know, I'm not talking about like a security apparatus, but like, I mean, but also imagine caring about Trump enough.

And of course, as we said, he's really just a red herring for, yeah, larger scale political disenfranchisement. But I can't imagine taking abarms for him either. Yeah. Great guy, great sense of humor, beautiful family, don't care at this moment if he's president or not, um, though I do wish for his, uh, health and well-being and the health and well-being of his big, beautiful son, um, see you in hell. Yeah.

I guess we'll see you in hell.