TRASHFUTURE - *UNLOCKED* Midwestology 1: A Posse, If You Will, of Insane Clowns

Episode Date: March 26, 2022

We changed up Britainology a bit. Now it's the good-natured Midwestern oafs in the driver's seat, and we--Nate, Joe Kassabian, and Francis Horton--explain to Milo the name of the region itself, why ICP had such appeal to our generation, and why literally everyone has a driving-while-intoxicated story involving being thrown out of someone's house. Hope you enjoy! Get more Britainology on our Patreon--you get one a month on the $5 tier and two a month on the $10 tier: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *SEE TRASHFUTURE LIVE ON 4/20* We're doing a make-up live show on 20 April in London now that we've recovered from covid (this time). Get tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/trashfuture-live-podcast-tickets-303412654417 *MILO ALERT* Milo has shows coming up in Berlin, London and Brighton. Learn more here! https://miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello, everybody. Welcome to a special version of Britainology that has nothing to do with Britain whatsoever. Well, as far as we know at this stage, I feel like there are going to be some themes. Oh, of course. No, there's definitely there's definitely there's this, you know, French and Indian war, the war on the Wabash is of English origin. There's all sorts of things we can talk about about the American Midwest. Anywhere where you can find angry fat red dudes or pedophiles, you can find a piece of Britain. It's like Rupert Brookeshit, you know, in that foreigner, in some corner of a foreign field,

in that earth of Richard Dust concealed. Do I have a university to introduce you to that I went to? Well, what I'm just going to say is the following. I have made the joke many a time to Milo on Twitter, to my to Francis and Joe and everyone in our in the zoo crew that Britain I've discovered is just big Indiana or big Michigan or big Illinois. It's the big Midwest. It's just and quite frankly, it may be smaller than the actual American Midwest, but in terms of culture and in terms of individual states, Britain is bigger and has more outsized influence than any

one Midwestern state. But then I realized when I talk about the Midwest, I don't really know what Milo or our British listeners really know about. I wanted to talk about the American Midwest because I am in fact from Indiana. And with me today is my co-host Milo Edwards, of course. Hello. Yeah, coming at you live from big Ohio, or as it's also known, Tower Hamlet. And we brought along two friends of the show and fellow Midwesterners, Joe Cossabian.

Hello, coming from the other island that uses the Union Jack as a flag. Oh, New Zealand. That means Australia. And of course, Francis Horton as well. Oh, good eye, Mike. The Missourian, who we have no Union Jack anywhere. I don't think I've ever seen a Union Jack in this entire state. There's no Missourian, the Union Jack, as they always say.

I don't know if I ever saw one in Indiana. If I did, it was like on a fucking broad ripple or Bloomington having like a sort of twee England themed shop. But I just feel like that would just fail so quickly in Indiana that no one would even bother opening it. So I genuinely don't know if I've ever seen a Union Jack flown in any significant place in Indiana. I really hope that the British color sergeant who was attached to your unit in the Army,

Nate, had had a Union Jack bumper sticker somewhere going on. Of course he did. No, he absolutely did. He had a Union Jack bumper sticker on his on that he had a White Ford Ranger and he had our correction, a White Ford Explorer SUV and he had the Union Jack and he had his regimental like insignia from his unit back in fucking Yorkshire or wherever he was from. Yeah. That's the first P.D.O. rifles to bloody right lads.

St. Louis every once in a while supports one of those stores for a couple of years until it collapses on itself. The last one that I remember, maybe it's still around, but it's like, it's not. You can't be like, this is the England store. It's like, this is the English Scottish Irish Welsh store and we have those things here. And all it is is a bunch of Union Jacks and Guinness shirts and some tricolor stuff. What the fuck would they sell in a Welsh store? Nobody here knows what it was.

This is the cheese on toast section. It's right next to the, to the fucking leak section. And then there's some Dylan Potomac books in the corner. Most Missourians would not be able to point at whales on a map. And like that is just, and that's not a stupid thing. That is just nobody understands how the fuck United Kingdom works either. So that's just the way it is. That's not Missouri.

That's the United States. This is like, I can't explain it. It just is. So the best way we could start, I believe, is to talk about the American Midwest, which if you're not familiar with America is not particularly far west in any capacity. I would go so far as to say, although the census and the American sort of registry of facts and such does call part of the Midwest, the area that is to the west of the Mississippi River, I personally don't fucking buy it because quite frankly, there's no part of

me that believes that Nebraska, Kansas, North Dakota or South Dakota are Midwestern states. However, the US government does in fact think that they are. So that is a frustrating thing for me. Well, but I will also point out that Midwest is really considered the Ohio Valley and the Ohio Valley just kind of touches most of these states. And that's why that's why they get kind of grandfather and like, yeah, South Dakota has nothing to do with being a Midwestern state, but because like the Ohio Valley kind of, and the Ohio Valley is the everything north of the Missouri River and the Ohio

River. And if you don't know where those are, it's perfectly fine. Nobody's going to test you about this, nor do you have. You don't know where those are. You might be our Welsh listeners who in an act of vengeance on the people of Missouri refuse to know where the Ohio Valley is until you learn if we want to if we want to a book like we've got a hundred Welsh people and put down a picture of the United States and ask them to point out where Missouri is.

Do you really? I wonder how many if it would be better. I reckon the Welsh would get a lot closer. I mean, I think I think a lot of them would be pointing maybe not quite the right state, but I think they would get a in the right country and be quite close. They would probably know from their from their whatever they've heard of America that it's because it's not one of the coastal states they've heard of. They'll just point to the dead center of America and they'll be kind of close.

I mean, it won't be it won't be banging on the state of Missouri, but it'll be close. That's the beauty of the Midwest is easy to find. You just point at the middle of America. You're right there, baby. But here's the thing though, right? When we as Francis pointed out, there's there are other terms that we use to describe this region. Some people will just use the Rust Belt in the Midwest interchangeably, but I don't think that's true because the Rust Belt definitely includes states like Pennsylvania and upstate

New York and, you know, parts of Kentucky that those would not be considered Midwest at all. However, the the so you have the Ohio River and the Ohio River Valley. You have a region that's sort of informally known as the Great Lakes and then you also have what would I would I would consider more like the Great Plains. However, where Joe's from, the great state of Michigan, you share an enormous border with Canada, a maritime border with Canada where I'm from. It it's it's more or less shaped like an ice cream cone that's dripping and it does share

a little bit of a lake border with with with the not with Canada, but rather with the state of Illinois and then also a land border with Michigan. However, if you go out to all the way out to Ohio, a state none of us likes and none of us wants to recognize that's sort of the outer limits. I actually joined the anti Ohio Hamas and I don't believe they have the right to exist. So the thing about it is got a meeting with Jeremy Corbyn next to talk about the anti Ohio Hamas, our friends flying the black flag of the Free State of Michigan. So we've we've sort of oriented you to the to some of the borders here.

I'm going to go through this like an army terrain model. You then have the Ohio River, which separates Indiana from Kentucky. Yeah, you can't see, but Nate's doing that five finger point. Yeah, exactly. Army. You also have the Mississippi River, which connects it connects with the Ohio River in a town called Cairo, Illinois, spelled Cairo, pronounced Cairo, like many towns in the Midwest. You will find like Versailles, Indiana, spelled Versailles, pronounced Versailles,

right, which was a French town called Detroit, it was Joe. I know you've got some. I know you've got some good, some good French ones from Michigan, too. Besides, yes, Missouri, St. Louis, doesn't to like we all because the whole thing. I mean, it was the Louisiana purchase. So we bought it from the French. We're just like, what do you call that? That's no, that's just spady.

We're just going to call that spady road because we're Midwesterners. What the fuck you got over there? No, that's fuck that. Well, we'll name our stuff after you got after the French. I mean, St. Louis is named after Louis the 16th, but we're not going to pronounce it correctly around here. Fuck that also. And that brings me that brings me to my next point that, like you said,

the Louisiana purchase and then the I believe it was the Northwest ordinance. So the French America bought a significant amount of land that had previously been claimed as New France from France, I believe, to so Napoleon could fund some fucking wars. I don't know. We do have a historian on here. Yeah, it was Napoleon the first huge fuck up. I could really go for some health care, my man. The French Midwest is a deeply cursed concept.

This is a fine bouquet of monster energy. Some of them they make the monster energy in another state, but then it is just sparkling energy. As this is not different, the monster region. I just like the idea that everything still stays as cursed and awful as it was growing up, but like everybody's fixing kit to do heroin was much fancier. Well, see, that's the thing, right? Is that one of the reasons why there's so many French place names

beyond the fact that obviously, like there were French explorers and it was charted was also because of the fur trade, because at the time, all the fancy lads, all the Riley's of Europe really liked beaver pelts for their hats. And so the French fur traders operated all throughout the area on fucking like early modern depop, like sending a scroll to the group chat with a particularly absurd beaver fur hat in it, going like, oh, guys, can I buy this?

It's it's it's 700 guineas, but I think I'd look cool in it. So talking about beaver pelts start up sending missiles back and forth. Like also the grapes up north are great. I don't know what's going on, but I think. Yeah, so so the situation that you find yourself in here is the fact that. Yeah, so fur trapping was the reason why places in Indiana, Ohio, Illinois got French names and then obviously the the fact that St. Louis is connected to the Mississippi River on the Mississippi River

meant that the French who navigated it, you know, they had New Orleans, they had St. Louis. I don't think they went that much further north than that. But long story short, we we have a place that was mostly settled by the French named by the French, but then purchased, sold by Napoleon and settled and was at the time of the Louisiana purchase in the Northwest Ordinance, more or less the northwest frontier of America. However, as time went on and they sort of expand even further westward,

it was no longer the western border. It was now just the middle west, hence the name. So we've knocked that one out of the fucking park and one quick note about French names told the story to Milo many a time. I went to school in a town called Bloomington, Indiana. Nearby, there is a town called Nalbone, Indiana, G-N-A-W, space, B-O-N-E, a bone that you gnaw on, a gnaw bone. Another great Midwest and culinary tradition, man.

Yeah. Another one of the. Yeah, exactly. You have casserole, you have a gnaw bone. Tell we clean our teeth, actually. Yeah. You got some got some persimmon pudding. You got some, I don't fucking know, whatever those weird hamburger France is always post pictures of from St. Louis, where it's like, oh, we took two cheese patties and fried them enough to make them into a bun. And then we put meat inside it.

However, Americans love to eat like we have free health care, right? Jesus fucking Christ, guys. I was going to say, that is one way in which we are so incredibly inexorably linked with the British. The Americans have that approach to health care, like like those guys with that will it blend YouTube channel? Just fucking throw in the iPhone in the blender, just being like, you know, I'm going to I'm going to eat four cheese patties

and just see if they can get it out of my arteries. How big is the bill going to be, baby? So the point I'm making, though, and bringing this up is that Narbonne, Indiana was originally called apparently was originally called Narbonne, like N-A-R-B-O-N-N-E, a French word. However, over generations of southern Indiana folks living there, they decided they are not pronouncing that shit.

And instead, they just wrote it the way they pronounced it, Narbonne. So you have effectively a big hunk of land that was originally colonized, charted out, mapped, et cetera, by the French. And then, wouldn't you know it, plopped full with a bunch of fucking Germans? Because, let's be honest, over the 19th century, lots and lots of people left Europe for various reasons, and a ton of German Catholics left and settled in places like southern Indiana, southern Ohio, southern Illinois, and of course, St. Louis.

Now there are some of us left for other reasons. Yes, it was going to say Joe, Joe is, of course, Armenian. So that there is there is a little Armenia of America, but it's way further west than this. However, he wound up in, yeah, I'll say he wound up in Michigan for some reason. I think it's because there's a huge population of Kaldians and Assyrians and Dearborn. That makes sense. Yeah. We were like, I guess my family was traveling.

Yeah, fuck it. Close enough. Glendale so far away. What if we just go to Michigan? I hear I think I got a second cousin there. We actually we have a Herman, Missouri. We have a lot of Germans in Missouri, too, and a lot of German German sounding places like Herman with two ends. If you go there, it's great because it's like got a winery

because Missouri has a microclimate that's great for wines, too. But just not the ones that that's Missouri, Riley. If I liked wine, I would absolutely be Missouri, Missouri, Riley. Yeah, we've got a lot of German, a lot of German places, a lot of German named towns that also have a lot of very heavy German influence in the architecture and everything. So places like Herman is great because it's got all it's like a little tiny German, like an actual town from Germany in the in the woodlands.

There's actually a Switzerland County, Indiana, and the overwhelming majority of people are of Swiss origin there. I mean, obviously, because they smuggled gold from all the other Germans. Yeah, exactly. The houses are all really, really neat and prim. And if you do your laundry on Sunday, they call the cops and they shoot you. Everyone lives there was a big cowbell around their neck. And that's also how they elect the like state senators.

But the point I wanted to make, though, having defined the geography of the Midwest and describe a little bit about the history is here's the thing, right? So the whole the draw of a lot of this stuff was that the U.S. government would basically allow you to stake land claims and homestead. And so, you know, in those initial periods called the first half of the 19th century, you had a lot of people who traveled to these regions and settled in. They typically traveled by boat on rivers or before the construction of the Erie Canal, which allowed the Hudson River to connect to Lake Erie, which allowed

you to basically sail from New York City all the way up through the Great Lakes and then get to Great Lakes cities like Chicago that way. Prior to that, you had to navigate on on the river. And so, for example, I went to school, like I said, in Bloomington, there were kids that I knew from Evansville, which is a town in the very far south of Indiana, who, like their grandparents, first language was German and they spoke German at home, you know, and I'm not that old. So you definitely still have that influence.

You also have a lot of to use a similar word similar to Aurelius and lots of little micro regions as far as, like, you know, places where people are super German versus places in, I don't know, like in the upper Midwest, where people are extremely Nordic. If you've watched Fargo, you've got a lot of those weird accents are because most of the people who are from places like that area of, say, Minnesota. I cannot believe that you would suggest that people from Norway or Sweden would be involved in creating a very strange accent.

I didn't see how that could happen. Yeah, there's lots and lots of Nordic people, Nordic descended people up there. So we have this we have this big hodge podge started out as like a homesteader, agricultural place. And then with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, you got lots and lots of factories. You got you have a climate that at least that makes it easier for people to be indoors, working with horrible hot machines year round, as opposed to the south, where you kind of couldn't back in those days.

And then you also had all the river traffic for trade and stuff like that. So that led to a huge industrial boom as time went on. And then when it became cheaper to box all those factories up and ship them to Mexico and then further afield, all of them closed down, which brings us to the state of the Midwest today. Folks, it fucking sucks. So, Joe, could you give us a brief summary of your home city of Detroit? Oh, man.

So like that, that industrial box up and move thing that happened, like in phases right before I was born, everybody was it happened to like Flint first and we all know how that went. Very well. Yeah, everything's great there. Don't Google it. No, it's fine. Obama drank the water. It's good now. Flint being the seat of General Motors that then went to shit there.

There's a documentary from Roger. What's it to Michael Moore called Roger and me. And one of the things he shows in that in the documentary is a news clip of local Flint news people doing like a like a live TV spot in the middle of their broadcast, someone steals their van and drives it away. That's cool. Big love to Flint. And like Detroit is wild because like it's been in a steady downturn of

industrial production since like the white flight of like the 50s, 60s and 70s. Right. And slowly, but surely because the white people moved out to the suburbs, one of which literally has a wall around it. I can't remember which one it is, but it and then they would commute into the city to continue working their very well paid factory jobs. And then slowly, those would go away. Those suburbs would go to shit.

More people would flee the city, which is now why I mean, people are attempting to gentrify it now. I haven't been back in quite some time, but that's why huge swaths of the city are used for like ruin porn. Like it was originally a city built for around two million people, right? And I believe half a million live there now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like 600,000 now with the sort of Detroit

renaissance that they've been talking about with like gentrification and stuff. Yeah. And and one thing I would throw in there, too, is that the godfather of the city of Detroit, modern Detroit is, of course, Henry Ford, who was insanely racist and anti-Semitic and made it a point that he's like, literally no races can ever mix ever. So all of Detroit was segregated by ethnicity. And that didn't really work out very well in the long run.

And then, of course, there were riots in the late 60s and Detroit burned. And and then, yeah, it's been it's been kind of shitty ever since Indianapolis. Famously, there weren't riots because Bobby Kennedy was in Indianapolis the day that Martin Luther King was killed and gave a speech. That was the story people tell themselves. But Indianapolis is also such has a relatively small black community compared to most other big Midwestern cities and also was so incredibly police state racist that I just think that I think they probably showed up armed to the teeth

as well, which, yeah, it's that's another part that we'll get into. Is is the the the segregation and racism, which is a huge deal. But but, yeah, it's going to say, so Francis, could you maybe give us the summary of your home city of St. Louis? St. Louis is a very strange place that. So you know how like a normal city is is large, like London, it's large. It's but you've got your center like urban metropolis. And then it kind of goes out and you've got suburban areas.

I assume Detroit is kind of the same like suburban Detroit is still within the city limits of Detroit, right, Joe? Is that those suburbs have done their best to declare themselves separate cities so they can not have to deal with. Well, if you want to know what that looks like, look at St. Louis, because we did that in the 1800s. The city of St. Louis decided to split from the county of St. Louis. So the city of St. Louis is about 62 square miles, right?

It's kind of this little weird. It looks like a stomach when you look at the entire city limits. And there's 300,000 people in there. We once upon a time had twice that population, but, you know, white flights of motherfucker, as as I'm sure every Midwestern person knows at this point. And so the split meant that we have 88 municipalities. And at one point in time, we had every one of those municipalities.

Well, not every one of them, but we had about probably, I would say, 50 different police forces that were part of all of these cities. So you had the St. Louis police force and then all these little places that would be these little shitty areas that is only like about two or three square miles and it's called Pasadena Hills or fucking, you know, some Webster or whatever. And then inside of those, they would have their own police departments. Now, if you can imagine what a police department in a small town is like,

they're always shitty, right? Because they're it's a small town and you're an outsider. Now, imagine you have to drive through a small town every fucking day. And if you're doing four miles over the speed limit, you will get a hundred and fifty dollar ticket. That's the reality of a large part of St. Louis in some places. Now, the police, the map just looks like pre-unification Germany.

The county has consolidated a lot. And there is very there's a lot of rumblings about smashing everything back together, not necessarily, because, you know, obviously, like all the rich places that are really far out don't want to integrate into St. Louis City because they're like, why should I take on your tax burden? And it's like, cool, just let the city fail. I'm sure I'm sure that like when, you know, the heart of a region grows

cancerous, that the arms will be perfectly fine afterwards. Knock yourself out. So we've got that going for us. We have an arch. That's our big thing is we have an arch. It's six hundred and thirty feet tall. It's half of McDonald's sign. It is not as cool as what we used to have, which was a riverboat McDonald's.

Unfortunately, that was taken from us. What? Oh, hell, yeah. Was that for like regulatory reasons? Like McDonald's was illegal in the city, so it had to be on a riverboat. No. It was like a McDonald's casino. We used to have the gambling clown. You did kind of gamble every time you went over there to eat, but it was. Yeah, we had a we had a McDonald's, a floating McDonald's that it was always

really exciting when you got to go there. And it was like cost twice as much to go to than a regular McDonald's. Join me in the River McDonald's. You pay for the experience. And by the experience, we're in foodborne illness because our friend. Have you got your sea legs, Mr. Chapo? You you you will find me by the clown and the river, the River McDonald's. Just imagine you're just sitting there.

You're enjoying your Big Mac and then all of a sudden like this iron side with the Burger King logo just comes steam chugging up like, oh, civil war era. Iron side just comes up alongside and just starts shooting cannons and just starts hitting you with fucking great shot, just blasting you. Which which one McDonald's or Burger King is trying to preserve slavery in this situation? They're just there for the sweet river boat side. They don't care who they don't care what about the slavery.

So you're saying it's about burger, right? Exactly. I was gonna say burgers, right? Yeah, man. So that's that's St. Louis in a nutshell. Yeah, so I'm from I'm from a city right outside of Indianapolis called Carmel. And I mentioned the fact that I'm from a suburb because it's important. Unlike St. Louis and Detroit, Indianapolis did the complete opposite.

And rather than townships in small cities and such, you know, carving themselves out and forming exclaves to escape the burden of taxation and the burden of common services and the burden of being in a fucking civilized society. Indianapolis actually merged the county of Marion County, which is where where India is with the city of Indianapolis. So all those townships, all of those smaller cities got kind of absorbed into. And there are some exceptions to that, but by and large, everywhere in Marion County is part of Indianapolis, which, okay, great.

Except for the fact that in the 1960s, this whole thing called desegregation happened and lots of people were not interested in desegregating. So they left the city and fled to the surrounding county's suburbs. That's where I'm from, legitimately went from being a town. It was the town with the first stoplight in America and the only stoplight in the town until the 1970s when it went through a huge boom because of all the racist people leaving Indianapolis. I think about Indianapolis is it unlike Detroit, which is such a fucking

bit of American ephemera, like, yeah, the first stoplight in all of America. People come from miles around just to look at it change color. Would you look at that, fellas? The stoplight is also racist. Yeah. Every single light is blackface. And I'm going to say, look, there are, we have several world's largest in Missouri that we're very proud of.

So it is a very Midwest thing to say, like, look, we had the first of a thing because literally, why else are you going to go to Carmel? Oh, no, like, like I'm dead serious. My dad has sent me these weird Indiana Historical Association articles that he loves to share just because they're so bizarre. And one of them is like a magazine entirely devoted to Indiana's unique round barns. And it's just like, who fucking cares? They built circle bars.

I don't give a shit. It's like dedicated only to the preservation of round barns. Like rectangular barns get fucked. We only care about circles. Yeah. It's a whole magazine about round barns. And you're just like, who are all these guys in the ghost outfits outside the barn? Don't worry about that. Local barn enthusiasts.

Well, it's funny that you should mention that because, yeah, the so Indianapolis was formed unlike Detroit, which was on a waterway and St. Louis on a major waterway. Indiana is on the White River, but it wasn't really navigable to any significant extent. So Indianapolis was mostly chosen as like a depot, a stop on the first major road across the U.S. And then they built railroads and they tried to build canals and hilariously.

They actually bankrupted the state trying to build canals like highways in the 1840s. So Indiana has the only like equivalent to or at least the first mandated balanced budget amendment because of the fact that the government was like, all right, we'll pay your debts, but you can never take on external debt ever again because you built too many fucking canals. So it's a strange kind of a basket case state. The Birmingham of the Midwest. Yes. Yes. Absolutely.

Man, like I said, England, big Indiana. And the thing I'm going to say too is that your joke about the Klan there. Indiana is the only state in America that was openly run by the Klan. And now in the South, obviously, the Klan was huge. And but it was it was a sort of a not public facing thing. It was an open secret. Indiana just wasn't even a secret. People ran on Klan party platforms in the 1920s.

And the only thing that, in fact, I believe the governor, who was a Klan governor, got wealthy selling white hoods and sheets to farmers. So like hidden MLM of racism. It's a living press. Yes. The guy who's like, let's take him that advice about, you know, when there's when there's a gold rush, sell picks and shovels and just taking it like a bit too literally and just been like, well, I'm going to go to the most

racist part of America and sell fucking white hoods and sheets. But that's the thing, right? Is that like so a lot of times people will share photos of, you know, as like historical ephemera and be like, this is so horrifying. I can't believe people used to make postcards of lynchings. And there's one photo in particular that gets shared a lot because it's just really grim and like all people watching the lynching are like smiling and posing in the photo. And people always assume that must be like Alabama or Mississippi

or Louisiana or Georgia. It's like, no, it's fucking Indiana in like 1907. Indiana is an insane. You can tell that because look at that wooden stoplight that they're standing around next to that. I do have to double back a bit. Like we just said, like that that picture of the lynching, it was like, oh, that must be Alabama.

That's actually Indiana. That's like whenever you see people openly marching with swastika. Well, maybe not so much anymore, because that just happens everywhere now. But like even like a couple of years ago, they're like, oh, at least fucking because, you know, the swastikas would get flown side by side of like clan shit. So people would always assume it's the South. Well, the American Nazi party's headquarters is in Detroit. Yeah.

So like it's like, yeah, as the Blues Brothers told us about Illinois Nazis, it's got a proud miss wet, Midwestern history. Well, I mean, I'll throw this one out there too, that people in Indiana used to joke about like how these names are just funny and acronyms. They're like, oh, yeah, White'sville and White's Town. It's like, dude, those towns were incorporated in the 1920s. Those names are not accidental. No, like you might as well call it.

It's just they're really into Keto there. Everyone's eating egg whites. They're getting huge. Love meringue in White'sville. All named themselves Sundown Town. So they had to go. Well, that's the thing about Carmel. Is it like where I'm from legitimately?

I never saw it. But I've heard stories that folks said that up until like the early 90s, there was literally a, you know, don't let the sun go down on you here sign involving the N word in Carmel. And like, I mean, it's just first N word sign in America. You'll see the thing, the first stop sign in America and the last actual Sundown Town in America. There was one in West Virginia before that, but they spelled it wrong.

So it didn't count. The thing that I'm going to point out, though, is that having drawn this picture of this region, obviously, there are some regional varieties, but this is pretty much true throughout. You have a farming region that was full of northern and central European immigrants that then industrialized during the Great Migrations. There were significant movements of black Americans

from the South to these Midwestern cities. Those populations were very small prior to the Industrial Revolution. There obviously were some earlier on, but like in large amounts, it didn't happen until basically in and around World War One. And then and then once once desegregation happened post war, basically those cities all were like, we'd rather burn this town to the ground than share with black people. And that brings us to the modern, our beloved home

and blighted hellscape of a region that we're from. And thus, with all of these things discussed, racism, redlining, desegregation, poverty, terrible food. We are brought to something that could only come from the Midwest and only be popular in the Midwest, the insane clown posse. From the clan to the posse, the two defining features of American life. So the insane clown posse who have gone by several, I believe there are the inner city posse once and then nobody believed

that they were hard, so they became clowns. I'm like, wait, what's more reasonable name than the inner city posse? No one's buying it. Insane clown. I believe they're both Violin J and Shaggy Toodope, whose real names excate me at the moment. They're actually both named Joseph like you. God damn it.

Cool. They should have been the insane Joe posse. Yeah, there you go. Joe's just mad that they're more pop, that they are more successful than he is at this point. 100 percent. Yeah. Actually, every time someone on Twitter says they're going to become the

Joker, they're just taking our culture. It's unfair. But yeah, they I think they're from the suburbs of Northern Detroit, but they eventually like drifted downward like a lot of us because it's the only place they could afford to live because you could buy a house for the price of a used VCR. He's not joking. You can literally buy houses in Detroit for like $10,000 now.

I can only imagine that. Oh, shit. Wow. Yeah, I've seen some for like five to seven granted. You probably don't have trash collection services, water or electricity. You can buy one of those houses in Missouri easy or in St. Louis. And it might still be on fire. Fires extra.

But yeah, I mean, maybe you can do an aside about the culture of Detroit and Devil's Night and the fact that like some places you play pranks on Halloween, but if I'm not mistaken in Detroit, the night before Halloween, you burn houses down. That is how I got my first charge. Yeah, I see P's weird because from all outside appearances and even looking at their lyrics, which you shouldn't do. They're just gross people like they they sing about murders and drugs

and I believe sexual assault more than once. Well, you're telling me these insane clowns have a dark side. They have a whole dark carnival actually, which which was weird. It was like their own made up religion, which I don't think I know enough of to talk about or if it's important because it's really just, you know, instead of heaven, it's the dark carnival that you go to. It's nothing. Everybody goes there.

There's a whole like one of their songs, one of them gets shot. One of either Violin Jay or Shaggy Too Dope gets shot at the end of it. He too dope. Too fierce in the end they go. He goes to to the dark carnival and like it's all of his buddies. Getting high and hanging out. So it's just it's it's the it's the idea of heaven that like a gross person would have, you know, just like this is the trouble like find with most

musical, you know, impresarios is they don't have enough of a sort of developed like ideology of the afterlife. Like I would be way more into like, you know, Selena Gomez, if she could give me a more precise taxonomy of what awaits me in the Selena Gomez version of the hereafter, like, is there like a kind of like some kind of Sisyphean task you have to like complete? Just roll like a Fago bottle uphill forever. Yeah, you crawl towards Justin Bieber, but he always recedes from you.

Like, what is it coming out to us as a Scientologist now because Elron Hubbard has just volumes and volumes of the afterlife for you. That's what my next sci-fi book is, baby. Does Elron Hubbard have a cheap sugary beverage that has somehow become associated with a band that has its own religion? I don't think that's the weird part. I think I think the part for me, because I was an ICP fan growing up. I grew up dirt poor to a level of poverty.

I don't think I've seen in the United States until I moved to Hawaii. Like single parent, you know, sometimes you're having sleep for dinner. We didn't have Christmas, things like that. And I see, you know, like if you had pop or soda, whatever the fuck, you call it at home, you had Fago because you could buy a three liter for 75 cents. And, you know, ICP in general, you know, they grew up white trash and poor too. So like they use that as their aesthetic. And they said, like, you know, effectively, this is what the juggles were.

It's like, you know, lyrics aside, nobody really gives a shit. Everybody overlooks all the serial killer songs and shit. Like they're literally called horror core. And like, you know, we can all hang out. We all can be broke white trash together and nobody can judge us. So like and like I say white trash, but it's like quite honestly, the most inclusive group I think I've ever seen ever. It's a very strange phenomenon.

They're fan base because it's such an extreme thing. And because like people who tend to be into ICP are really into them, like they have what are effectively like week long annual meetups, like like the Sturgis motorcycle rally, but just because you're into this band and people just like go there and get high and hang out and drink Fago and alcohol. And they all arrive in this one little car and they all get out of the back. The main difference between the gathering of the juggles and Sturgis is even even ICP was like, no, covid's dangerous.

We should stay home this year. I just fucking didn't yo we might be in sound clay and clowns, but you know what's really crazy? The novel coronavirus. Well, I mean, the thing I would point out, too, is that like because their their appeal is so distinct. I mean, like if you know anything about them, people who are into them tend to be into them enough to like get tattoos and have stuff marked up with ICP

things. Oh yeah, there's no casual ICP fans. It's not a thing that exists. Their logo is basically a silhouette of a guy with like a white guy with dreads, rocking like a cleaver. And I've seen so it's like it looks like a guy. It looks like he's doing like a Super Mario jump, but he's got a cleaver in his hand. And and I've seen when I was in the army, I saw soldiers with with. What's that guy called?

The hatchet man, the hatchet man. Yeah. And no, he is not carrying a hatchet. It's a cleaver. Yeah, a meat cleaver. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But they call him the hatchet man. And he. So I've seen people with hatchet man tattoos. I've seen people obviously like people with a shit on their cars and stuff.

When I was in Korea, there was a shop that did embroidery and sewing, and they made custom patches. And they anytime someone asked them to do a custom patch, they kept an example. So it'd be like, you can buy this here. And I saw like they make where you could sub in instead of your your rank that you wore on the center of your uniform. You could put like a juggler rank and a hatchet man.

Yeah. So I mean, this was in fucking Dongdaecheon, Korea. Oh my God. You can get any patch made in Dongdaecheon, Korea. Yeah, that's the hatchet man is technically equivalent to W02. It's. And what's kind of weird is like, you know, they became super popular in the white trash circles, which went into an area of Detroit.

We talked to we talked about a little bit on a different episode. It was like called Downriver or like the we're like kid rocks from where it's like everybody kind of looks like kid rocker. They're all kind of that racist. Yeah. Oh, it's like it's like Australia. Yeah, it's Michigan's Australia. Um, which is grim though. I don't know if they have a specific island.

They send migrants to maybe Mackinaw. But they would like when ICP found out about that, they like made a whole song called Fuck Your Rebel Flag and like made a shirt with them pissing on the Confederate flag, which is huge in that area. It's just like I'm not an ICP fan. I don't like casually play their music in the background or whatever. Because you can't do that.

You have to be an obscene fan or you have to not listen. Those are the rules. I get it. I get their appeal though. Whatever the fucked up ideology is, like it's an ideology that is A, inclusive and B, they stick to it. Like they're not going to they're like, no, no Confederate flags. And somebody shows up. Yeah, yeah, right.

It's like, no, we will fucking violently throw you out of here. If you fuck around here with your Confederate flags, cover up your fucking tattoos. Yeah, I'm pretty sure if a racist showed up to an ICP show, they'd be physically assaulted. I have no doubt of that. That's the really weird thing about ICP. I've got to say that is that like a lot of the the sort of,

because the sort of like brown sludge rock stuff, like God smack and three doors down and stained and slipknot and all these bands, like they were huge in the Midwest. You know, I can, God, I remember when all that shit was popular and that was the only thing that was on the radio, the sort of like backwash of Allison Chains in the Midwest. That stuff was huge. Allison Chains, but if he met, if Lanes Daily managed to get off heroin.

Yeah, just presiding over like angrily looking across the street at the like brimming fucking slipknot fan club meeting. Is he, is he solemnly age 15 presides over like the two person level 42 fan club of Indianapolis? It's just like him and some old guy. Yeah, I love, I love, I love Brit Funk. But that's the thing, right? Is it the, they're emphatically, they are not racist.

And like three doors down in those bands, we're like really into sort of what you might call kind of like apolitical conservatism. Like they played, they were like, we love the troops, our friends joined the army. They like played shows in Iraq for the USO and stuff like that. I think three doors down got paid by the National Guard to make a song once. Oh yeah.

Yeah, there's a National, there's a three doors down, like recruiting song that, but the National Guard, it's fucking terrible. It's that weird, wasn't three doors down the only band to answer like the Trump administration's like invitation for knocker to turn down a paid gig man. They were just happy to get a gig, man. Yeah, fuck it. Three doors down is actually a reference to sending the National Guard

three doors down to stay in a hotel because of the 13th amendment. Third amendment, third amendment. Third amendment. 13th amendment was freeing the slaves, different amendment. Three doors down is about culling the cops on the house three doors down because you saw someone park outside for five minutes. So the point that I would make though is that, yeah, they unlike a lot of the stuff that would be in the similar wheelhouse.

And I mean, I'm really wary of calling shit white trash because I didn't grow up white trash and my dad kind of like his family kind of did. So he would always get really shitty with me if I use that term. But like the fact of the matter is like, you could use it. It's okay, we can reclaim it. But the fact of the matter is like ICP is absolutely a white trash band that is not racist. Like they are anti-racist.

And that like weirdly, that's such a... It's like, can you be transgressive in a positive way? Can you, if you live in a shitty society, a shitty like regional society and you're opposing that society, so you're transgressive, but it's not a negative context. Like they are, for all of their like, yeah, you said like, horror core was also popular in Southern rap, but it kind of went away. Like there were a few bands like 36 Mafia was into horror core.

They started as, hence the 36, like 666, that whole thing, or bands like Gravediggas and stuff like that. But that kind of went away. Whereas ICP started on that same wave and they never left. Their biggest hit, as I'm aware of in terms of like national prominence, was not a horror core song, but was rather them being like, what the fuck is a rainbow? Magnets, how the fuck do they work?

Yeah, exactly. He's just a hymbo being amazed at every... The human equivalent of golden retrievers who can rap. That whole song is just about, we're surrounded by miracles every day and he's just like, Magnets, I don't give a shit how they work, it's just a miracle and I respect... No, like the song is called Miracles and I'm going to read you a couple of...

Your fridge is a miracle. It is. Tell me how a fridge works, Sam. The video looks like it's made in MS Paint. Yeah, I'm going to read you a couple of stanzas from this song. He says, music is a lot like love, it's all a feeling and it fills the room from the floor to the ceiling. I see miracles all around me.

Stop, look around, it's all astounding. Water, fire, air and dirt, fucking magnets, how do they work? And I don't want to talk to a scientist. Y'all motherfuckers lying and getting me pissed. Solar eclipse and vicious weather, 15,000 juggalos together and I love my mom for giving me time on this planet, taking nothing for granted. I have to point out that during the line about his mom in the music video,

he's literally like, there is a CGI woman giving birth to an infant that shows everything and he's wearing clown makeup. Awesome. You see, that's the kind of shit you learn how to do if you train at Le Cadet Me Gaulier in Paris, right? It's all about breaking down the ego, building it back up again. They did months of like hilarious grapples. We could have kept that education in Michigan if Napoleon never sold us.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly, yeah. We didn't have to be that much of a shithole. Yeah, and I want to say too, I don't know if you're going to get to it, but we do have to eventually answer the question of what a juggalo actually is. Exactly, because I use the term. That's what they call the fans, call themselves and they call their fans. But it's a kill streak you get and call the duty, I believe.

There's a song called, what is a juggalo that goes through it in France? Oh, God, I forgot about that song. Is every one of their songs like written in this sort of like preschool tone of voice? Yes, 100%. I mean, there's also, let's put it this way. I respect them for basically refusing to not be morons and also being anti-racist, because like I said, they refuse to sell out and like a compromise how fucking stupid they are way and also they implicitly or explicitly to their fans like,

you cannot like our band if you're racist and I respect that a lot. However, like the best way I can describe ICP, and I listened to them when I was a young teenager, is that like, what if Eminem was 100 times dumber? That's the best way I could describe it. What if Eminem never went to Detroit to learn how to rap? Man, the other day I was fucking out running in an old like an Eminem album track from like the late 90s or early 2000s came on like shuffle on my music and I just and I just remembered how like for years in the 2000s and like no one was even paying attention to this remotely.

Eminem was playing our album tracks that were called like, Yo, is it gay brackets to fuck my own ass? It was like an album with like three singles and then every other track was just like, Yo, what's up? If I just, if I go fuck myself in the ass, how would you feel about it? And then everyone's just like, yeah, cool, this guy's huge. Speaking of which, ICP and fucking Eminem hate one another and Eminem put out an entire diss. Yeah, he put out a skit of them sucking each other's diss.

Okay, that's quite good. The insane lemon party. He pulled a gun on them if I'm not mistaken. At one point he had to go to court for pulling a gun on them. I find it very funny when rappers who are all millionaires get into these beefs where they like actually end up in court because they like pull guns on one another. It's like, you know, you're rich, right? You know, you don't have to do this.

But they're not like insane clown posse is not jetting around in private jets. And this is Eminem in like the late 90s, early 2000s. So I doubt that he's really, he was, he was on the, he was like coming up in his career, but he hadn't had the huge blowouts yet. Yeah. And to be fair, Eminem had a lot of most of his like, you know, the D12 guys, like get shot and actually killed in some gang shit.

Whereas like ICP's friends all died the same way, minded doing too much of their dad's opiates in the basement. Yes, this is true Eminem. So a side note with Eminem is that if you're familiar with the band D12, particularly famous for the song purple hills or purple pills, depending on if you have the censored version or not, one of the greatest examples I've ever seen of a song completely changing the meaning to make it radio friendly, because the song is literally all about drugs.

And they had to instead make it about like, I'm in this weird landscape where colors are wrong because like the song is literally leaving the chorus, the title, everything is about drugs. It's about. But yeah, like Joe saying Eminem got famous and basically was like, I'm bringing my band with me. These are all of his friends who like he had wrapped with and done music with in Detroit. And they did have, I think, two albums.

But yeah, like a number of them have died violently, particularly one of them died like relatively early on got got shot and killed in Detroit. And yeah, like you were saying, ICP are are basically the they are the soundtrack to like, you know, finding your buddy ice fucking cold from heroin because he OD'd in his sleep. Yeah, I was going to say because that's 100% true. If I was going to kill myself with intravenous drugs, I would do it to the Great Milenco album. Well, I was going to say this to that like Eminem, every song that wasn't a single and

even some of the singles are songs about how he's going to murder his ex-wife or his mom. And a lot of ICP stuff that's not just like, gee golly, like is genuinely like that. It's the same sort of thing. It's about horror and torture and murder and stuff like that. Like I remember the song Great Milenco being about that. I remember there's a song on that album that's basically about like, I'm coming to your house for dinner. I'm going to fuck your 13 year old sister and shit like that.

Like it's just, it's shock, like shock value stuff. But it's like, it's basically it's an Eminem of way, way dumber. So I don't recommend if you're not familiar going out and listening, unless you want to laugh because like, yeah, it's trash. But I love to be in the woke, the woke murder band where it's like, you know, I'm like, I'm murdering a guy horribly, but not in a racially motivated way. Okay. I'm murdering him because I enjoy murdering. Yeah, absolutely.

That's the race of the man is irrelevant. I am a serial killer, sir. Yeah. No, I was going to say that's, that's Detroit progressive is I'm murdering you, but not in a hate crime way. Yeah. And as long as they don't steal anything from me. I just need to murder somebody and I'm sorry. And it's got to be you, but it does have to be you.

Guy who every month does like a statistical analysis of like who he's murdered to make sure that there's an appropriate level of diversity. Oh, no, we means tested our serial serial killer. Shit, fucking Clinton. God damn it. I can't kill anybody until I can find a peruvian somewhere just to really balance myself out. I have to amplify voices so I can kill them all equally. Taking up taking a flight to Hawaii is like, cool. I can get a Hawaiian person and enjoy the beach while I'm here really.

Be fair, you could just, you could just go to Vegas to do that. So I want to, I would like to, I would like to read a couple of the lyrics of what it is a juggler. So people can understand what a juggler is. He gets butt naked and walks through the streets, winking at the freaks with a two litre stuck in his butt cheeks. Is that, is the, okay, hang on, question. Oh, is this a gay if?

First of all, this sounds like an Eminem song. Second of all, is the two litre supposed to be in his asshole or just like kind of between the cheeks? Is it what sort of, like, is he doing this for a sexual reason or is this purely like he doesn't have pockets? And if you're putting it up your asshole, is it like bottle side or bottom side? Cause that, that changes the butt calculus quite a bit.

Call me, call me a simpleton here, but I feel like if he was sticking the two litre up his ass, he would say up his ass. So to me, between his butt cheeks means he's literally like wedged the bottle for easy access between his ass cheeks, but vertically. So basically the bottle is, is fixed in the crack of his ass and he's like, I want some Mountain Dew. I'm gonna reach behind and pull this thing out. If your butt is big enough to keep it too, too, Learman, you're,

you're thick as fuck. ICP fans got cake, the insane cake posse. Let's also remember that this is the time of, uh, Jinko jeans too. The insane back pussy. Sorry. This is the time of Jinko jeans. So you had a lot of, uh, pant, you know, a lot of pant going on that you could fit a lot of things into.

So maybe you could wedge it. I forgot about Jinko's. You have the Jinko and it just like the, the jeans just hold the two leader there. This song is about Kevin Smith and his George. Uh, what, what is a juggalo? He just don't care. He might try and put a weave in his nut hair because he could give a fuck. Less what a bitch thinks.

He'll tell her that her butt stinks and all that. Whoa, crazy. Women hate it when you do that. The women, you know, like if you tell the girl that her butt stinks, they'll be like, so it's like, it's like muscle confusion for their brain. You know, it's like the most powerful nagging technique. They, uh, they also, uh, you got to realize that not all ICP songs, but a lot of them they rap and what I would describe as like,

this is what the guys from Cypress Hill would sound like if they were trying to sound like white people, like it's not good. I mean, so imagine this in like a really kind of like, like imagine Axl Rose rapping. That's what this sounds like. What if Eminem had a TBI? I've got, I've got one more for you. My favorite lyric of this, uh, what is Jegello, a dead body?

Well, he ain't really dead, but he ain't like anybody that you've ever met before, Khalid Monopoly and should out connect for. And then the next lyric after that is a lyric. Okay. Slowly raises for questions. Then the next, the next stands after that is a miniature like of whoever, whoever did that line. The other one saying, what the fuck are you talking about?

And it says, don't mind my shit. Just wrap motherfucker. There's, there's many, there are many lyrics. There's a whole Comaniac, a graduate. He ain't a phony. He'll walk up and bust a nut in your macaroni. I mean, there's just a, a juggalo is kind of a will in fact. The juggalo don't care too much about food sanitation.

Yeah. You're in the, you're in the cafeteria. A guy comes up and nuts in your macaroni and you're like, dude, what the fuck? And then a guy's like, no, you don't understand. He's a, he's a juggalo. It's part of that. It's part of that culture. You're like, oh, I'm so sorry, man.

I didn't know. They do call out parts of, they call Southwest downriver Jefferson, which I assume are all things inside of Detroit. But then at the end it's, you know, they're calling out as who are juggalo cities, Detroit, Cleveland and St. Louis. So. You also nut in your neighbor's macaroni. Good day to you.

Yeah. Why does that look like a fucking MSNBC report? Like they're calling it juggalo. Which cities is the juggalo trend prevalent? Which is funny. They were banned from St. Louis. They were not allowed to play. The FBI put them on like a gang registry.

Dead serious. They were put on a gang registry. Yes. And ICP sued them and won. Yes. This is all true Milo. Fair play to these guys. I like these guys more and more actually.

And their music is dog shit, but as people they're pretty great. Yeah. It's a shame that they never went Trump just because I would have loved to have seen the Trump ICP crossover just being like our friends, our friends in the deranged, the deranged clowns. I've been speaking to them. I've been speaking to them very strongly. They, they love their clowns, but they're, they're true Americans.

Okay. They have followers all over the country up and down and they are the insane clown pussies. That's right. They've got huge, they've got huge pussies. They can get a whole fego up there. And I've been talking to them a great deal. I think we can do a lot of good things with them. These clowns, they just need manufacturing jobs, which is why we have to.

Yeah. We got to make America great again. So these clowns can stop. Oh man, we got to put these clowns back to work. Look, Detroit's full of old, old like places that built cars and stuff. The insane clown posse just needs their own like line of clown cars to start selling. Yeah. I used to steal copper from them.

Everybody. Yeah. They might look, they might look stupid, but the passenger space is incredible. Can't be beat. I was going to talk about this and I feel like this might be a useful point to segue that now that we've talked about the Midwest as a region and ICP, a band that could only exist in the Midwest, we should talk about another aspect of being a juggalo and being a midwesterner. And that is substance abuse.

The sort of thing that leads you to be a fan of the insane clown posse. I'm going to preface this by saying that England obviously has a huge problem with substance abuse. There's a huge culture around binging. We talked about this on the Britonology about the big night out with Tom Usher. But the point I would make about it is that there are different gradations of it. And I feel like me and Joe in France, this can all tell stories, but Joe, before we recorded this, before we even scheduled it, told me about a concept called Detroit straight edge. I feel like the concept of this, now straight edge, and if I don't know if this exists in England

or not, it's basically like it's kind of like a youth, almost a youth cult, kind of a youth movement. Of like, don't you don't drink, you don't like it's based. The name comes from a minor threat song, but basically it's like no, no premarital sex, no stimulants, no drugs, no alcohol, like basically being a fucking Mormon. If you're a straight edge, you don't even drink coffee, right? That depends on it's just Mormon. Yeah, but I was going to say, it's basically like imagine if you're like, I'm a punk rock Mormon, that's what being straight edge is.

But like famously, they get really insane. There's there was this group of guys, I'll tell you about this really quick as an aside before Joe can tell his story, which is that in Indianapolis, and I think these guys existed as like splinter groups or whatever else were in the Midwest, there was this, these guys called the courage crew and literally they were basically, they were straight edgers who like went around beating people's asses for like smoking cigarettes. The whole idea was like, they're like, not only we straight edge, but we'll literally beat your ass for like using a substance that's fucking legal, just because like,

we fucking hate drugs so much and what they do to our community. They were basically were like, they were, they were the closest to actual white Isis in this regard. And that's once again, I know these things exist like there's a huge, there was a huge scene like that in the DC area and also in California, especially Southern California, but like I just knew about in the Midwest, this exists. So straight edge is that now Joe, you've got anti Ohio Hamas and you've also got Michigan Isis. Yeah, Indian Isis bulldozing the border between Toledo and Michigan. That's all right.

When you get down to Ohio, that's where Hezbollah is. Yeah, exactly. I love to do a fucking eight year long call back to an old Isis video. Hello, watchlist. I mean, that's, that's the thing, right? The Bacaw Valley, Missouri, both have great wine cultures. You know, I mean, like why couldn't they be Hezbollah? But Joe, you told me about something called Detroit straight edge. Could you, could you define that for our listeners? So it's a concept that was introduced to me by being someone who did a lot of drugs in Detroit.

And that is like, I'd never used any like crazy hard drugs, never did like meth or heroin or anything like that. But like I smoked a ton of weed, did a lot of various pills that people would get their hands on in hallucinogens. But like, you know, I grew up around the same time that the opiate epidemic truly started. And I believe that Nate and I talked about this on a bonus episode of Hell of a Way a long time ago, where like it started where we were years before anybody actually cared, because like white trash and poor people of color dying from overdoses in the streets.

Nobody really gave a shit. I had to bleed into like the rich suburbs first before anybody cared. It took a ragtag band of clowns to bring it to popular American consciousness. This one trick makes everybody hate them. Like oxy pills were everywhere, which of course led to heroin and methadone being everywhere. So people were doing those like crazy. And a lot of people didn't fuck with those. So you'd go to parties where, you know, people are doing like whippets and random, you know, pills and what was before Adderall's Ritalin. You know, you'd have your collection of candy bowls worth of drugs.

But then like it would always come down. You'd be offered oxy's or methadone or heroin and I'd be like, oh no, I'm good. And then a friend of mine who ended up dying from methadone abuse would be like, oh, so you're straight edge. And I knew what straight edge was. Like I went to punk shows and like I listened to Minor Threat. I was like, the fuck are you talking about straight edge? And like, you know, when we were talking, it dawned on me like literally everybody I knew did drugs. And the concept that I didn't bang shit into my arms meant that I was straight edge

in the city was fucking obscene. Like everybody at minimum had to smoke weed to get by because your existence is just so miserable. And like everybody's getting pills. You can go to pill farms or you could just buy them. Candos like has a land border to the south of us. So like people go over and get fake scripts and bring them back. You can get all this shit for like $5. So everybody's just ripped out of their mind. And the idea that you just didn't do opiates that you were straight edge is always obscene to me. So I mean, I'll tell you a quick thing about this.

And this is one of the big differences with the United Kingdom and the US. Britain does have a problem with heroin, but it's nowhere near as bad as America's. And America's problem with heroin was actually is a relatively recent thing. There was a huge problem with heroin in cities in the 60s and 70s. But you know, basically one of the sort of guiding principles of the war on drugs was you couldn't and I'm not making this up like this was literally stuff that was said by Nixon's advisors where you couldn't make it illegal to be black and you couldn't make it illegal to be a hippie. But if people associated heroin with black people and people associated

weed with hippies, then a war on drugs basically targeted all the people that, you know, middle American, conservative America hated. It shows a real lack of imagination from an American politician, much less a right-wing American politician to say you couldn't make it illegal to be black. I mean, there is such a rich history of that, which they're clearly so ignorant of. But the point I'm making here though is that heroin was always associated with like basically inner city teenage white runaways and black junkies, like to make it as plain as possible. But what happened in the 90s was that pharmaceutical companies basically exerted a

ton of pressure on doctors and said that they had created this ability to use pain management drugs that were opiates, synthetic opiates that were, you wouldn't get addicted to them because they had time release stuff on them that stopped you from getting it. Now, this is Joe's making a face because it's fucking stupid. For one, that means nothing. You immediately learned how to defeat the time delay device. You fucking crush them up and you snort them or you shoot them. Or like, like there's, you can, I'm pretty sure you can even like dissolve the lining in water and stuff. But like you absolutely, like there's plenty of ways around it.

And so they're like, they're like the shreddies of opium, like keeps your opium cravings the whole octop till lunch. Yeah. Well, that's the whole point, right? Is that they said it's literally, hey, we'll push this out to doctors and like strong arm them to fucking prescribe this because, you know, these things don't have a potential for addiction. And of course, they funded research to prove that point, which was completely made up. And so it like what Joe was describing, like pill factories or pill mills basically all across the Midwest, all across the south, the upper south, the industrial parts of the south,

and in other Rust Belt places like Pennsylvania, New York, etc. These clinics popped up where literally like you could go when they even accepted Medicaid and like whatever your condition was, they'd be like, oh, yep, here's a, here's a subscription to help you with your chronic pain. And it was a prescription for like three or four renewals of 30 pills each of, you know, Oxycontin or Percocet. And I mean, like that shit, if you take as prescribed for four refills worth, you will become dependent on it, not severely, but you will become dependent on it. And if you do this over the course of years, you will absolutely become a junkie.

And the thing about it is, is that, well, this was happening in places like in Indiana, where you had lots of people who had lost their jobs, who had been, who had lost their pensions to who had worked in manufacturing. Indiana was a huge center of car parts. It had cars and stuff in like car manufacturing in the 50s and 60s. But by the 70s and 80s, it was like car replacement parts, some, some like international brands of cars and stuff like consumer electronics like TVs, radios, VCRs, that stuff, that all shut down. We've scarcely made a round barn in years.

They also lost, these people lost their pensions. These countries, these companies would typically, they would in buyouts or in mergers or bankruptcies would basically invalidate their pension requirements or contributions. And so, you know, people didn't have healthcare. And so people, all the people had chronic injuries from industrial jobs. And you could get basically legal heroin. The thing about it is, is that once they started to clamp down on that, or when, you know, doctors, when it got harder to get those pills after like the mid 2000s, well, if you can't get prescribed OxyContin or Percocet, what you can get is heroin or fentanyl. And that's led to where we are today. Like, I mean, I don't have anybody in my family who

died from opiates, but my wife's cousin died from it. And I'm sure you've got friends, Joe. I have friends who died from it. I had former soldiers who died from it. I'm sure Francis knows people who have died from it too. This is such a common thing. And the places that are like that originally were like the epicenter of this problem weren't New York or Los Angeles or even like big cities. They were in places like Indiana, Michigan, Kentucky, Missouri, Ohio, Illinois, places that used to be industrialized and places that, you know, all that shit had gone away or places that had in a lot of places, you know, like heavy agricultural stuff. And um, yeah, so that's not, that's like the not so funny backstory. But the truth of it is, is that

growing up, when Milo, when you and Tom talked about how easy it was to get stuff like MDMA or Coke in the United Kingdom. Yeah, that's fucking right. It's just called a proper night out. Joe made this joke and this is, or maybe Francis made this joke. And it was, it was absolutely true that like growing up in the Midwest is not ever knowing anyone who's ever seen cocaine with their own eyes until you're 25. But like from 13 onward, you're like, I know how to get heroin. Like yeah. Yeah. In Britain, it's the complete opposite. I've never met anyone who's done heroin and like all of my friends do drugs. And where we grew up at like Coke is the rich guy drug. But like everyone does, everyone does fucking like Coke pills, MDMA. That was weird that you

brought up Whippets because Whippets are like the official drug of British teenagers now. Like no one, no one was doing Whippets when I was a teenager. But now literally, if you go in any city or like suburban street in the UK, there are fucking empty Whippet canisters everywhere because like teenagers just do them on the street corners. Whippets so much, man. Yeah, maybe that's why we're all podcasters now. Well, that's like whenever I see like nimbies and shit complaining about like Portland, because like, oh, I found a needle on the side of the road. Like you're about 20 years late, sweetheart. Yeah. I played rugby in high school and we would find needles in our field.

Jesus Christ. Because like there was no security cameras or anything. That's rugby league, I believe, when there are needles in the field. And if there was never any security cameras, they turned the lights off to like save money because my high school was like piss broke. So like you could go comfortably over there and shoot up and we didn't have full time like the so-called resource officer cops to like sit on our school. So like you could go there and unlike pretty much any other part of the city, the cops aren't going to hassle you. And being hassled by the cops in Detroit like is, I mean, obviously it's like that everywhere, depending on what you look like. But Detroit,

they're more egalitarian in their brutal state violence. Like I've been beaten up by the cops like twice for literally just walking home. But to be fair, you've also done things that probably should have warranted a police meeting. So maybe. Yeah, but I got away from them those times. It's just like, why are you beating me? It's like, have you done something that you didn't get beaten for? Yes, okay. You fucking know why. That's the concept of Detroit guilt. It's like, they know that all of you motherfuckers got away with something one. So we're beating you up for that. The Detroit police department Catholic town. Parts of it are. I mean, it's depending on what quarter of the city you're in. Like I grew up in the Kaldian neighborhood. So mostly, you know,

Kaldian. But you know, there's a huge Polish population in their very Catholic. But yeah, like just to underline how incredibly insanely violent the cops are, like they get away with a lot because it's Detroit, it's not LA or, you know, New York, where everybody has eyes on them, or you know, the entire state of Minnesota. But like at one point in the 70s and 80s, they literally ran a burglary death squad where they would, I swear to fucking God. That sounds like another rap group. So they would dress up in like chains, nice watches, and then like go to like neighborhoods they thought were rough. And the second someone tried to rob them, they'd immediately shoot them dead. Jesus Christ. They killed so many,

and that, and you know, everybody knows about Kwame Kilpatrick, but he also ran his personal protection detail, which I think was state troopers, but also Detroit PD as like a drug death squad. So like it's in your best interest for your safety to run from the police because you don't know which one you're getting. It's just funny to me because yeah, like Detroit always had this reputation as one of like the roughest, if not the roughest city in the Midwest. Like Cleveland's pretty bad, certainly was. Chicago has really bad parts because Chicago like stayed aggressively segregated by force of like official corruption and their cops being insane. But yeah, Detroit like has this reputation of being just like the worst city in the Midwest.

And that like just, yeah, I mean, I know so much of it is probably hype. And obviously, like Indiana has Gary, which I had a higher murder rate per capita than Detroit for many years, but Detroit, Gary's a whole, Gary is like a microcosm of what we're talking about in the Midwest because like it was a company town for like one of the, if not the biggest, then the second biggest steel mill in the world. I think the biggest was Magneto Gorsk in Russia and the second biggest was US Works in Gary. When that plant both closed, like it basically downsized its workforce by about 70 or 80%. Yeah, just Gary went to complete shit. I love to live in the Russian town of Magnet Mountain. Like some guys showed up and they were like, what is here? Magnets on mountain? I have no idea.

How does work? How do they work? How do they work? That's where the insane clown posse's ancestors are from. But that's the thing, right? I think it sounds way more bad ass to live on Magnet Mountain than to live in a town called Gary. It's my uncle's name and I have to agree. Yeah, I mean, like the girl that I went to junior prom with and hilariously, we know this girl that I went to and hilariously, we freak dance together at the dance to the song. Excuse me, what is a freak dance? You know what freak dance? In Detroit, they call it Gary dancing. Yeah, we dance to Purple Pills by D12 at the junior prom. That was the song we were freaking to.

I still don't know what a freak dance is. Basically, it's just like grind dancing. It's like when you're dancing like really close together, like girls rubbing her ass on you and stuff like that. It's a butt being rubbed on your dick. Okay, Mr. Gettin' Pussy over here. All right. I didn't realize I was in the presence of fucking pussy. What I realized now in the aftermath of this was that she absolutely wanted to have sex that night and I am so bad at picking up signs that I just did not fucking, just did not dawn on me at all. She kept putting her butt on my dick. I wonder what that means. He's just like, yo, Magnets, how do they work? But here's the thing, right? Here's the thing, right? Like maybe a year later,

I hung out at her house with some friends and she fucking overdosed on pills. I had to run away because we were drinking vodka. She's like this 100-pound fucking Chinese American girl and she literally takes fucking Percocet after like seven shots of vodka and then just fucking goes comatose. They had to get her an ambulance and shit. So of course, we all had to scatter like fucking cockroaches because when the cops come and there's drugs involved, bad things are going to happen. But yeah, it's absolutely ubiquitous and it really is like you said, Milo. It's like the mere image in a way of England that no one basically does pills or like opiate pills or heroin, but everyone knows people who can get Coke or MDMA. It's the exact opposite for us.

Now, I was just going to say, it really defines the culture in a lot of ways, I think, that like binge drinking and opiates and other stuff. Like you said, in the olden days, Ritalin nowadays, like Adderall or Vivance, stuff like Benzos, things like that. That's absolutely so hard-coded in that like, I mean, everyone, it's like, on one hand, it's like, oh yeah, hell yeah, like we have fun, we throw it out hard, but like everyone knows someone who like, I don't know. I know so many kids from my high school who went to prison for like DUIs that hurt or killed people or like have completely fucked their lives up and just have like so many fucking charges from drugs and stuff like that. Like it's really ubiquitous, but like it's not-

I don't mean to laugh at that, but it just reminded me of a fucking horrible story. I mean, like genuinely, I know a guy who served a four-year prison term because on his fifth DUI, he hit a family. I'm telling you, man, this is- I did not grow up in a big town. Like it was not a big city, we'll put it that way. I went on a date with a girl I was friends with for probably 10 years through middle and high school. Did she freak on you before this? What were the signs? Yes, but it was not the purple pills and we finally went on a date and she had already gotten two DUIs. So like in the state of Michigan that pretty much means you're never kidding a driver's license in your life, but like she had a card I didn't because I had wrecked mine

when I was high. Yo, I was not drunk. Let the record show. And I crashed it into a tree, just walked home. Oh my god, you know, Joe, I'm gonna interrupt your story for a second because I gotta tell you, one of my best friends from high school was from Flint and has the exact same accent as you. And you telling me that story just reminded me of once I'm him calling me and be like, yo, man, what's up? Like, can you give me a ride? I'm like, well, he's like, no, man, like, I'm fucking dropping acid and shit. And I just crashed my car to a tree. I'm just like, why are you driving on acid? He's like, well, my friend's mom came home. I had to fucking go. It was the same thing that happened to me except it was ecstasy. And I was at a different friend's house. And he's

like, I love the street. Bro, you gotta get the fuck out of here. My mom's gonna know I'm high. But while I drove here, I can't drive home. My mom's gonna know I'm high. Also, I have to drive through the center of the city through like 300 cop checkpoints and shit. And he's like, no, you got to go, man. So I went, I made it almost all the way home. I got onto my street, wrecked it into a tree or a telephone pole. I can't remember which one because, you know, the ecstasy. And I was like, oh, close enough. They just walked home. But like the funny part is like when you grow up in neighborhoods like that, like the cops simply don't come. Like if someone would have called the cops, like, hey, someone just crashed a car into a tree, they're like, yeah, whatever, deal

with it, click. So once again, you were raised in Britain in Britain, the cops don't come. This is the only, this is the only reason the British cops can ever be good is because they usually don't show up. They're like way lazier than the American cops. Like American cops love turning up firing guns. The British cops are like, nah, unless you're literally being murdered right now, we are not coming. Unless the British cops can start murdering people, they're not going to start showing up. We got to give the Brits. No, they just do that on their time off these days, right? Yeah. And they just taste literally everyone allegedly. Yeah, my, my, my driving way too stoned, uh, was at a buddy's house and I got so incredibly high and we started

watching Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and I had to leave because I couldn't deal with it. And they're like, like the next day, I, Whoa, this is a bit intense. It's time to go drive. Which like the next day when I, What the fuck is going on in America? The next day when I talked to my friends about it, they're like, you know, you didn't have to leave if you're too stoned to watch a movie. You were probably too stoned to drive. We could have turned it off and watched something else. I'm like, yeah, well, I was really high and nobody thought about that because you guys were really high too. So we see where we stand here with this. I, I managed to get home though, because I'm a very good stoned driver. So I got, I got to tell mine now because you,

you've dredged up so many memories. That same friend from Flint was with me at this one that we all have one. We're just telling the funniest ones right now. We had a friend and his mom was cool with, with, uh, his parents were divorced, of course, and his mom was totally cool with us smoking weed at the house. She just wouldn't be there. And so we went to like Trader Joe's and bought a bunch of shit like food and then went to his house and got high. And then we decided to smoke again. And like, it's not like nowadays, if I smoke weed, I'll literally like hit the bowl once or twice and that's good enough. Like, no, it's like, we're doing like a two bowl rotation for like 30 minutes, just, just, just getting blazed. So the second time happens, we get blazed

and then maybe 10 minutes after we've smoked, my friend who's hosting us, what's up, Jordan? Thanks for doing this, you dick. He was like, dude, this girl's coming over and like sex is on the table. You guys got to leave. And I'm like, but dude, we just, she freaked on me, man. You go to understand. No, no, no, I knew, I knew, I know, I know, but no, no, no, no, no, no, no, dude, sex is on the fucking table and she's not going to want to fuck me if she comes over and there's four other dudes here. You guys got to leave. And so I was like, shit, what do we do? We have nowhere to go. Like we can't go to the pussy magnet out of the house before this. Like we can't go to what we can't go to a diner. It's the middle of the day on a Saturday. Everyone's going to know

we're high and like the cop, we run into cops and we're fucked. So we're like, what are we going to do? And then my buddy, one friend was like, his girlfriend came and picked him up and he was like, there's this other guy's party on the other far side of town. He's having a pool party his house. We should just go. And I was like, all right, cool, we'll go. So I'm like, fuck it, guys. All right, we got to be like tactical and shit. Like let's just drive. And I'm blazed. We're all blazed out of our minds. Like we put on sunglasses. We start driving. And immediately, as we turn on to the fucking main street heading south, a cop car is behind us. And I'm like, oh, fuck, oh, fuck, oh, fuck. Because at this point, I'd already gotten an ROTC scholarship.

And I'm like, oh, fuck, shit, fuck. Like I have weed on me. We're all high. I'm going to lose my scholarship. Oh my God. Oh my fucking God. And my friends who like are my age are like, fuck, shit. My parents are going to find out. Oh my God, fuck, shit. We're so fucked. And our friend Brian, who's a little bit younger than us is just like, dude, I'm so high right now. I'm fucking flying. This is beautiful. And we're like going and we're going the speed limit. And it's like the speed limit. And you know how American cops, especially in the Midwest are, they're just like, oh, you're going the speed limit. I'm going to ram my car up your ass the entire way. Because like they want to speed, but you're like, no, speed limit, speed limit,

speed limit, speed limit the whole way. And so finally, finally, after no shit, like two miles of this asshole being being right on me, we turn going, going westbound and he keeps going south. And it's like, it's like those like a million times stronger than the strongest ice cream headache you've ever had, just like lifting. And all of a sudden it's just bliss. And I am not joking. This gives a little bit of a date. We put on filters, take a picture and all sang along. What a beautiful story. A sort of Proustian reverie. That is, that is the most white boy Midwest fucking story I've ever heard. And we could go, we could, I mean, we could talk about that. Yeah, we've been going a while and we could

go on longer. But I feel like as a concept, we've proven the utility of this and we'll just have to pick one topic to do a Midwestology on in the future if we reconvene. However, as friends of the show and Patreon subscribers all know, you can find more Britnology and other Trash Reader bonus content on the Trash Reader Patreon. But you also have, I'll let you, Joe, go first since he's on my screen right now. If you want to plug your show. Oh, yeah. I'm the host of the lines led by Donkey's podcast. We talk about dumb military decisions, war crimes, genocides and all the fun things that your school probably neglected to teach you about. Yeah, you might not know quite how stoned the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was when

he decided to go out for that little drive in Sarajevo. The thing about it was, is his friend was, there was sex on the table. He had to fucking throw him out of the hotel and be like, getting your fucking open top. You don't understand. This girl has freaked on my dick. And you all need to aussehen. He's also telling that to his wife. Get out of the car. And then also, Francis, you have stuff to plug too. Yeah. I mean, the other show that Nate is on, what a hell of a way to die, if you want to talk. If you want to hear more about military stuff that, from a leftist point of view, that isn't necessarily history, which is why we work so well with Joe, because he does the actual history and then we read news stories and

complain about the Archduke. Yeah, we read headlines and news stories from military.com and then read the comments in Marine Todd voice. Which one was a juggalo in a former life? The answer is all of them. It's also a show I've been on many times to do, both British and Russian commentary. So much for Trashutia fans to enjoy over there. Yeah. And otherwise, thank you very much for this inaugural pilot episode of Midwestology. And we will talk to you next time. Yeah. Crack open a monster energy, light a blunt for us, and go drive your car. Do not go drive your car after doing that. Do not drive your car. Well, hi.