Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 283: Baghdad Bob The Builder

Episode Date: March 24, 2023

This week we discuss (yet again) Silicon Valley Bank, Bret Stephens's reflections on the Iraq War, and a man named Johnny Shield's views on conservatism in higher education. Support us on Patreon: www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

I like this setup I just sit here I gotta be careful not to get too rowdy I guess yeah cause you're gonna not bump into it yeah that's what I'll be doing I'll be gesticulating with my hands and shit and knocking the mic

like yeah oh shit oh man the future Oh shit son Oh man The future A deafening silence Surrounds the future Of Lamar Jackson One of the best

Young NFL quarterbacks Discuss Now Both of you Discuss Lamar Jackson What are they saying About Lamar now

Who is Lamar Jackson Baltimore's quarterback He's a quarterback He was at Baltimore What are they saying about Lamar now? Who is Lamar Jackson? Baltimore's quarterback. He's a quarterback. He was at Baltimore. Dude, I... Okay. I'm not like the biggest basketball watcher. I love basketball, but I don't watch it as much as I should.

But the other night we had the women's's w ncaa tournament on women's march madness dude i'm not just saying this to like sound like an ally like an ally i genuinely enjoyed watching it more than i want enjoyed watching men's march march madness oh you're a good feminist i'm saying this like purely, Terrence. I'm saying this, like, purely. Like, the pace of the game was more fun. The crowd was more fun. The, like, the kinds of, I'll say this. It was more aggressive.

Like, I don't mean that in any kind of. Wow. Okay, so women are aggressive. Women are aggressive now. I don't mean that. Women are aggressive now i don't mean that they're abusive i don't wow black women too mostly black women mostly exactly tom thank you that's a real ally right there dog you see i no i mean it i'm i swear to god i'm not trying to be i'm not trying to be an ally but let me ask you a question though they can ask you a question all right

I'm not trying to be an ally. But let me ask you a question, though. They can ask you a question. All right. Because I totally believe that because, like, women's soccer, for example, right? Like, U.S. soccer is so much more interesting and competitive, right? And I don't even watch soccer like that, but I just know that, right? Why do you think that is, man?

Because, I mean, obviously, like, the standards are, like, you know, artificially lowered because women or femme people are not seen as competitive or strong or whatever. All of these, like, kind of harmful, like, biases and whatnot. But why do you think that is, though? That's interesting. I think it's literally, I think it's 100% because of the crowd. The crowd gets way more into it than they do with men's basketball. With, like, the men's in March Mad people are like but with the women's they were like fucking killer hell yeah i'm serious like i think i think that's it i think there's a like there's a kind of energy that everybody's feeding off of that just isn't there yeah yeah everybody i guess

is like i don't know man maybe uh all the men's teams people like i've seen this shit already you know these guys are not even in their heart is not even in it anymore you know yeah maybe maybe they feel like they don't have anything to prove anymore and so it's just kind of like well i mean it's just i guess what i'm saying is like man i don't know i don't know how to like phrase it because like I said, I'm not a basketball expert. I'm not an avid basketball watcher. But it just felt like the pace of the game, it felt like there was a lot more pick and roll.

It felt like there was a lot more, I don't know. Maybe they do one-on-man-to-man defense more than they do zone in women's i have no idea you know what i feel like wow wow gender defenses now gender defenses now you know what else i feel like it is too i feel like because like like i don't know and this might be the case in women's sports but i mean you know men's sports being, like, the multi-billion dollar industry that it is, you know. Like, I feel like, you know, like, team, what used to be team sports, like, I guess baseball, but maybe even basketball. Maybe, I don't know. Tom, you might know more about this. But I guess what I'm saying is, like, in basketball now, it feels like you have all these dudes that are, like, really, really good, right?

And, like, these singular dudes that are really good. I i guess like you know we know names like lebron i'm thinking of like redley for one of the first people right but like it feels like i don't know man maybe i'm not making a point but it feels like now like maybe back in the day even when you had michael jordan okay but now it's like all these guys are so good and so competitive and it doesn't really feel like a sport in which like you just stick with the player that you- It gets homogenized in a way. Yeah. I've been thinking about this a lot with my friends. I was like, man, why do I enjoy watching basketball, particularly the pro game?

Because that wasn't true for a while. Like there's a lot of people that were like for the longest time, like I like college more than pro. And I was like, well, I like college because I'm a nationalist. But- For UK? Yeah. For UK? Yeah. The UK? The United Kingdom?

Yeah, the United Kingdom. I got a nationalist for the United Kingdom. But now it is like the NBA game has lost something. I guess it's kind of the same way that overproduced music is not as interesting. You can make a million different comparisons but yeah well i just wanted to have a i like the concept of having an argument and then main in trying to maintain that you're not having it from a position of being an ally not i'm not i just i just want to say one more time i wasn't saying that's being out

oh brother let me tell you the reason the guy that is like is truly a sexist but loves women's sports more than men's well there was like i don't know there was like a tweet some right winger had tweeted that like wokeness and like diversity and stuff is out of control just because just because like sports center was focusing more on the women's march madness tournament like on monday night like there was no college i saw that you know what i'm sweet i was talking about tom oh yeah it's just like dude if you watch one game like it is i mean personally i i thought it was uh well let me ask you a question if if you watch it on a monday night like i feel like nobody's watching shit on a monday night you know i'm saying they've been watching men's sports like where when do you want people to see these games

then you know what i'm saying like what the hell the hell? Well, and also, like, Monday night, like, in dead season, like, before baseball season's really picked up, and NFL's done, like, the only sports on right now is basketball. So I was like, when else do you play? That's awesome. Somebody was like, somebody said, had a good response i was like yeah imagine that espn reporting on sports yeah that's woke now i guess well it's been so thoroughly hijacked that we're just going to have like an ever-expanding definition of like it's of things that are going

to slip in there become woke what's the most ridiculous thing that you can imagine will be called woke in the coming years? Well, dude, they called Silicon, there were people genuinely saying that Silicon Valley Bank collapsed because it was too woke. You know the craziest shit I heard? I wish I could find the tweet, man. It was on my last account, but like,

because I had bookmarked, because it was the most insane shit I've seen. was like at Davros you know like that summit of billionaires and man I really forgot like what it was that this presenter was talking about but you know the whole like kind of veneer of liberal like capitalism and liberal racialism even infects the upper echelons of the ruling class especially right especially these freaks at davos you know who want to make it sound as if like oh we're some we're on some multicultural crusade to save the environment and to like you know all this bullshit and somebody was like some right winger was like oh look at the communists at davos and it was like dude look at the woke communists i'm like yeah yeah man the woke capitalists at uh yeah, yeah, man. The woke capitalists at Davos. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's like Davos is like, you know, would be the Bilderberg group if they like, if it was a little more shadowy, basically. You know what I mean? Well, it's, at this point, it's gotten to the point where you've got Trump proposing, like, what was it, like freedom cities? It's like they, it's gotten to the point where

they're like so dystopia cities are too woke so you have to make non-woke cities and it's like it's an incredible statement to make when you've got like every major american city has a police with a budget greater than the fucking military budget of like china and many countries yeah any country like lapd probably could probably take on like france maybe uh-huh you know oh yeah the nypd could totally invade estonia and take that shit over if they oh yeah no question about it yeah romania like all of those yeah former soviet satellites yo of course but yo ter Terrence, you said something before. I remember you said this one episode. You're like, yo, what if like, it's already kind of like this where regions of the country are carved out like geographically.

Like there's almost like this psychogeography based on politics, you know? Like what signs and what neighborhoods like have a Black Lives Matter sign versus what signs have a trump sign or you know not that these are like perfectly delineated but it would be really funny though to like not even due to climate change and like where motherfuckers got to build seawalls you know i'm saying but motherfuckers actually carve out instead like sanctuaries you know like well like freedom cities man yeah that's a well i like that woke cities well that's the thing it the Freedom Cities. Trump's plan shared in advance with Politico calls for holding a contest. Okay. I love it. They're doing a contest. That's so perfectly Trump, you know.

It's a fucking. It's always like, go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. It's the same shit that like Amazon and those companies do when they're like dangling a new factory or whatever in front of a city because you remember like they were doing that city like mine yeah like they were doing that with like new york city a few years ago like you guys can have an amazon facility uh but you have to you have to want it my city was gonna rename itself amazon yo i'm so like literally the city that i'm just living the city the small little town that a city that i live in asian fucking georgia was gonna i'm so happy to get that's happened before the move that's

happened before it's like there's like a town in north texas i think dude the towns in texas there's a there's like the towns in texas fall under like three rubrics they're either named for like new deal programs one two they have the most insanely racist names you've ever heard like white settlement texas there is no blacksville there is literally a town called white settlement texas and then three it's like the it's like the name of a corporation like like the Purdue Wonder Chicken Town or something like that. Or a Spanish word. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, that's right. That's also true. Okay. Holding a contest to design and create up to 10 new freedom cities built from the ground up on federal land. It proposes an investment in the development of vertical takeoff and landing vehicles, the creation of quote-unquote hives of industry sparked by cutting off imports from China, and a population surge sparked by quote-unquote baby bonuses

to encourage would-be parents to get on with procreation. The thing that, like, paying people to have babies, like, I think that's so fascinating because, like, if they were paying people to fuck, you might have some people supporting that. It's like, you have to be successful do you have to be successful you have to follow follow it through to the end to its logical conclusion no yeah they they stand in the room and they watch you bust and if you don't bust you don't get your $10 yeah there's a guy that's gonna sit there and be like that that's not going to get it done.

So wait, this is like the Chud Neom. This is like that city that Saudi Arabia built in the middle of the desert. This is like for Chuds, though. This was Trump's statement. Past generations of Americans pursued big dreams and daring projects that once seemed absolutely impossible. They pushed across an unsettled continent and built new cities in the wild frontier they transformed american life with the internet interstate highway system magnificent it was and they launched a vast network of satellites into orbit all around the earth but today our country has lost its boldness

under my leadership we will get we'll get it back in a very big way they're building a city for cops and yeah you got what you already got what you want yo yeah you already got what you're preaching for man yo this is so crazy to me dog because like like i've always been interested in the way that trump speaks about like the future you know because he says make america great again but it is some kind of like you know like a reupholstered like kind of past right but the idea that like yo he's talking about not only in uh in invoking manifest destiny but also said like yo we're going to take that to its logical conclusion and build these like purely like you know what i'm saying like these white cities that truly express like the american dream and what that you know what that expresses exemplifies you know what i mean that's insane he said on federal land on federal land that's

the thing that gets me on a small portion of federal land to quote reopen the frontier um oh that's not good yeah that they see no there's a critical component of that that he's leaving out of the history that there were people on that frontier what happened to them they just decided to live somewhere else well i mean that's the thing like in this context you'd be reopening public lands and so you ostensibly the people you would be displacing are like patagonia wearing, hikers from the city. So, like, you're going to have, like, settler colonial militias, like, forcing, like, a family of... Forcing out gentrifiers?

Well, not even gentrifiers, necessarily. Yeah. Sort of, like, forcibly removing them. Oh, that's so crazy, man. This guy is so forward-thinking, man thinking man the thing is is trump also said that his freedom cities would have flying cars and amazing it's like the jetsons dog yeah he's like he watched either blade runner or the jetsons or star wars and he was like we gotta do it no reason we can't do that folks oh man dude yeah yeah he is the guy to kind of do this man

because he like i don't know he's just like his whole like 80s retro like he's still he's so he seems like he's stuck in the 80s to me perpetually right like i don't know when i just think of trump i guess like just who he was in the 80s that's how he's been like i mean up until he did that show the apprentice and ran for president right so like, just who he was in the 80s, that's how he's been, like, I mean, up until he did that show, The Apprentice, and ran for president, right? So, like, I could imagine he has this retro-futuristic vision of, like, what America should look like, like, with flying cars

and all that shit, but, like, also, like, you know, there's a wall around it, you know? Yeah. But the thing is, is, like, fucking you can fly over a wall, dipshit. You can fucking... Exactly. Exactly. No, we gotta build we gotta build the wall higher higher we gotta put a roof we gotta put a roof on the wall now to build into the upper atmosphere that's what he said he wants air he wants america i i already lost the exact

quote but the quote was something to the effect of like america led the way in the automotive revolution now it's gonna lead the way in the air mobility revolution it's like you can fly over walls dumbass yo that's so funny too because like flying cars seem so impractical to me like that's what everybody thought in the future we'd have flying cars but like okay why not just an electric car you know or we're just not like a train you know but's still good. What happened to flying backpacks? Little rocket packs. Yeah. Remember that movie Rocket Man?

Oh, yeah. Was that what it was called? I'm thinking of Rocket Man. Rocketeer. The last action hero. The Rocketeer. I want a fucking rocket pack. If they make...

What is Rocket Man's Elton John biopic? Yeah, there's no judgment. They should do that with basketball. I mean, if they want basketball to get back to its former glory, give every player a Rocket Pack. A Rocket Pack. They can be loud, though. I saw people making one online and shit,

or like the ones that have been prototypes, and they're like hella noisy. You just go and expect a basketball game, and it's like 10 guys with like leaf blowers, and you're just like, I have to go. Just put an exhaust all over the crowd and shit. Children are coughing. Yeah, everybody dies of like carbon monoxide.

Unknown cancers. Yeah, everybody's like it's a raucous crowd then gradually everybody gets sleepier and sleepier till they all die he is like jetpack basketball not a good idea bad idea gotta do it outdoors folks Outdoors, folks. Oh, shit. Oh, man. That's amazing, man. I'm delighted to hear about Trump's plans for future America. Freedom cities. Well, at least somebody's got some vision, you know? Yeah, that's what I'm saying, dawg. Somebody's got some.

That's right in my alley, man. I mean, nobody else is coming up with any ideas so you know might as well do uh anti-woke cities with jetpacks and flying cars exactly Thank you. um okay this week i got a few or i mean i've been on the road so i've kind of been out of the loop in terms of news i saw that trump said he might get arrested. And so, yeah, I mean, nothing to really say about that unless you guys know something I don't. Do you know something I don't on that story? I know it has to do with Stormy Daniels.

Still on cuff and stuff watch for Donnie. I had information that a Led to the arrest. Yeah, I was the guy that did it, man. I was the guy that did it man I was the one that called it in You're welcome You're welcome American people You're welcome Yeah so You know I got it like

Just you know I've sort of like I said Sort of been out of the loop Opened up the New York times opinion section this morning with my brand new plug-in that allows me around the play wall the paywall i don't have to fucking pay for this shit anymore hell yeah um and so it's off to the races for me uh i had three articles that i selected uh we don't have to read all of them there There's one I want to read in full. There's two we might just want to cover briefly. The first is in the New York Times.

This was getting passed around yesterday. Is working from home really working? This was written by a guy named Stephen Ratner. He was a counselor to the Treasury Secretary in the Obama administration. There's really nothing about this article that hasn't already been said. It's just that, you know. Can I just say, I bet that guy does a lot of hard work. But he's done a lot of hard work in his past, man.

Sure, he's the perfect guy to talk about what qualifies hard work. Working from home, is it hard work? Running this fucking, this corporation of a country? You know, yeah. Is that hard work. Running this fucking corporation of a country. Is that hard work? I don't know. You're right, Aaron. He's probably never known calluses. If he's ever had a callus on his hand,

he probably rushed to the doctor thinking it was a tumor or cancer. Probably beat his meat too much, bro. You got to calm down on that. Chill out, bro. Probably beat his meat too much, bro. You gotta calm down on that. Chill out, bro. Gotta use some lube, dog. There's nothing, there's really nothing in the article that hasn't already, you haven't already seen before. You know what I mean? It's just kind of like whining about, you know, people spending too much time out of the office and working from home and how the pandemic made us soft.

That kind of shit. But it does have an interesting aside in it he basically attributes the collapse of the silicon valley bank to too many workers working from home and you know i gotta i gotta give it to him because of all the takes i've seen about silicon valley bank like the way that it collapsed and why like either it was too woke uh had it over invested in worthless securities interest rates too high i've not seen anyone said and so this is this is new it's like a pioneering take not seen anyone say that it collapsed because there were too many people phoning it in on zoom calls and i gotta hand that to him you know i like this genre a lot um he this is a new sub genre of what we've seen the past two years of people uh blaming workers uh during a pandemic right but he found a way to throw in something that's topical and recent

and really like an actual problem with you know vulture capitalists he found out a way to like be like you know actually not in a way that they were even doing with the SBB story, but a new dimension to it. I respect it, man. I do, too. You know, it's... Conniving, devious motherfucker. You know, it's like, people gotta have their own, like, niche, you know, cottage industry take on it. And, like I said, I've not seen anyone say that the building had too much black mold.

That could be one explanation for why it collapsed. People were getting confused and sniffly. That could be one reason why. There was something in the water. Literally something in the water. Maybe. Prions. Or they had too many prions in their brain, like brain amoebas.

Maybe they were possessed by demons Maybe Can't rule out demonic possession You can't do it My latest for the Christian science monitor So The next one I wanted to read from Was our old pal Brett Stevens In the New York Times

We are coming up on the 20th anniversary Next one I wanted to read from was our old pal Brett Stevens in the New York Times. We are coming up on the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Predictably, it has produced some very fascinating takes, some very fascinating evasions and, you know, elisions. People kind of saying like, no, dude, you got me mixed up with someone else. No got me got me you got me fucked up bro you got me fucked i just believe that he had two barrels of leaky mustard gas and i pointed out as much uh you see this picture right here that picture that person's not me that guy's wearing a different shirt i'm wearing a red shirt he's wearing a blue shirt not the same wearing a red shirt. He's wearing a blue shirt. Not the same guy. It's like, okay, motherfucker. Okay.

Yeah, no. So Brett obviously has his own take. This is in the New York Times. 20 years on, I don't regret supporting the Iraq War. I felt like somebody else wrote something similar like this. Didn't David Brooks write some shit like this? David Frum wrote something kind of similar. David Frum.

Like once a year, man. one of these ghouls i wonder what's the tone of brett's hair is is he going more for like who could have known or is he more of like nah hell i still i still stand by my decision to genocide a people. Yeah. Regardless of what we actually knew at the time. Kind of a mix of those two. Okay. The photo on it is predictable. The photo on it is the famous toppling of the Saddam Hussein

statue. You know what I'm saying? Where they tied the rope around his neck and pulled it down. I remember watching that in social studies class in like 11th grade. I watched that on TV too on Fox News in the Westbury Fire Department. They made you feel like it was a victory for like the American people. Well, we thought a dictator had been toppled. That's what we thought.

Which is funny because like we were the ones that pulled. Okay, I wasn't in 11th grade. I was in 9th grade. But it's funny like we were the ones that pulled okay i wasn't in 11th grade i was in ninth grade but it's funny that we are the ones that i was yeah tom was i was too old to be believing in fairy tales i still was like yeah i think i was we got him we got him i think i was just like this is fucked up but don't know what's going on you know pokemon came out. The new Pokemon. The new Pokemon came out. Well, let me just read from Brett here. It's not a very long one.

It's pretty short, as all of Brett's usually are. My man has really pioneered the technique of busting early in op-ed writing he's got to be like the shortest he really has to be have the shortest stamina of any op-ed writer yeah yeah brad i feel i got the i know the problem bro i got a problem with word lake too man i feel you we should talk about i think david brooks is pretty long-winded my man man goes and goes. And just repeats himself over and over and just doing laps around and around and around. Like, okay. Okay, of those who supported the U.S. invasion in Iraq

20 years ago, not just warmongering neocons like yours truly, but also plenty of liberals. Wait, did he really say yours by yours truly? Yeah, he did. Brett's not pulling any punches, man. He's freaking crazy. He's punk now.

The neocons are punk now. They're like, we don't feel bad for killing millions of people. Maybe that's his tone. Maybe he's like, oh, everybody thinks I'm a warmonger neocon, but I'm actually the voice of reason on the ride. Well, you really can't underestimate how big of an impact that thomas friedman speech on charlie rose was when he said suck on this remember that yeah it was like it was like in the lead-up to the war when they were trying to get the

media to circle the wagons he went on charlie yeah yeah yeah yeah and he was like oh he basically did it like if my homies weren't holding me back right now man i'll be fucking you up but he said suck on this which is such a bizarre like chest puffing statement to me i mean i i guess that's what you get when like these guys like they're like i don't know man these guys, they're taking on this almost punk, anti-aesthetic, fuck you sort of aesthetic, but it's like, yo, you are in service to, you know what I mean? None of this is like, you know, none of this is- On the other side of that, on the other side of that, Marshall Mathers was telling us to mosh against the evil American empire.

Exactly, exactly. I did my part exactly i did my dialectical spectrum i moshed against the empire so i don't know about you guys i moshed and i'll tell you another thing i did i voted or died i i'm still here he's still here so he must have voted i must have have voted. I did. I punched one in for Ralph Nader. Hell yeah. I was still too young to vote during that election. Yeah, me too. But, no, I think when tanks get rolling, when war gets started, the biggest, like the loud, the most loud-mouthed, like the bravest, like, oh, man, I'm going to fuck you up.

Those guys are op-ed writers. They're opinion columnists. Yeah, because they never have to know the horrors of war. Yeah. They're the hype men. Yeah. They're the hype men for war. And they're even doing it retroactively. So, Bret Stephens, obviously, calling himself a warmondering neocon.

You know what attitude this is like? This is like, I can't think of any examples, but this is like someone trying to take back like an unpopular or kind of cult popularity band or some shit like that or a movie, you know? And they're really trying to be like, no, actually no actually like not even be contrarian about it right but it's like sincere it's like dude like i think like you know after 20 years the consensus even at the time you know but to be fair like a lot of people got kind of like roped into it but 20 years later man you're not a you're not being contrarian for that that does remind me

we will see op-eds in 20 years about everything everywhere all at once we'll see like op-ed we'll see we'll see the whole wide spectrum of people being like no i didn't support it at the time i knew i knew it wasn't good but then we'll have or people or people that are like approach it critically and be like did it really contain everything everywhere all at once? I didn't think so. I didn't think so. That's a quantum question. I was skeptical, but I still went along with it.

I was skeptical then, and I'm skeptical now. But then you will have Bret Stephens types who will be like, I still support it. I think it still has everything everywhere. All it wants. The few of the arguments for doing so are strong. Others I think are wrong. And one is dangerous in ways that misshape our foreign policy debates today.

Among the strong arguments, one is especially compelling to me. If nearly every U.S. government bureaucracy is slow, wasteful, and infrequently incompetent in america how much more so would it be in a country as distant and complex as iraq the problem i have one question i have one question for him before brett gets into the problem with iraq this is the same guy that told us just a couple weeks ago that he supported obama yeah whole campaign was i'm gonna get us out of these wars right like that was like the centerpiece of all of it so like if you still supported it why did you support barack h obama exactly that's a good point you think that like

john mccain would be his perfect candidate oh you know why i'm saying like the iraq war was sort of the the subtext of that whole campaign you know why he didn't vote for m Oh, you know why? The Iraq War was sort of the subtext of that whole campaign. You know why he didn't vote for McCain? You know why he voted for Obama? Sarah Palin was on the ticket. And he had to be like, no, I'm a conservative of principle. Yeah, she's nasty, folks. He couldn't support a wild card like Palin

because she represents all the worst impulses of our teaming reactionary masses. Did Sarah Palin set the tone for Donald Trump in a way? For sure. Didn't she? Yeah. I think so. She was kind of the first foray

dipping our toes into just the bizarro world that was the Trump campaigns. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of people say Reagan, but, I mean, I think that, like, yeah, I think, like, in more recently, but really more in that vein, yeah, I think Palin was the person, right? Because, I mean, I think of her, I think of Trump, but I also think, like, Marjorie Taylor Greene and shit, especially, too. Yeah. I think Lauren Boebert. The I think of Trump, but also think, like, Marjorie Taylor Greene and shit, especially, too. Yeah, well, I think... Lauren Boebert.

The thing is... Yeah, exactly, yeah. The thing is, is, like, there's a distinction in their mind between, like, a respectable politician and, like, a grifter. You know what I'm saying? And to them, people like Sarah Palin and Trump are despicable because they haven't played by the rules. despicable because they haven't played by the rules they haven't like achieved their sort of merits in the meritocratic uh structure of american politics and and by you know by virtue

of that they are disingenuous and inauthentic so they need authentic people like george bush killing people rather than inauthentic people like right like reagan was probably a dollar but he had these rhetorical gifts right like that they don't have whereas like their rhetorical gifts like trump has rhetorical gifts but he has rhetorical gifts for like a game show host or like you know uh a comedian or whatever like their sort of rhetorical style sort of betrays their intelligence level a little bit or rather you know highlights their lack of it you know in a way that like reagan's was kind of obscured by his like rhetorical style so i think it's just like yeah ultimately they were like sarah palin signaled the rise of the vulgarians and how that's exactly right

exactly okay the problem in Iraq wasn't simply a matter of faulty decisions of which as in every war there were many it was a faulty systems don't really know what that means around the 10th anniversary of the invasion the special

can I offer something real quick is this the conservative end of when liberals talk about systemic like this systemic that this is like there was systemic racism he's like it's systemic racism that's what it was uh it was yeah around the 10th anniversary of the invasion the special inspector general for iraq construction Special Inspector General for Iraq Construction. Just the fact that that is even a position. You got Bob the Builder in Iraq, dog. That shit is fucked up, bro. That shit is evil as fuck, bro. Bob the Builder.

Baghdad Bob and Bob the Builder. Yeah, Baghdad Bob. Baghdad Bob. That's a good episode title. That is absurd. just that job title a rock construction painted a devastating picture of our efforts billions of dollars were wasted on projects that were rarely if ever completed uncle sam oh yeah hmm i wonder why that is i mean it's is. It's almost as if the mission wasn't really to give them a quote-unquote democracy. No, not at all.

Uncle Sam, whose cruise missiles could destroy Iraqi targets with astounding precision, couldn't keep the lights on in Baghdad. Bottom line, nation-building may have been something Washington could do in 1945 in places like Japan under leaders like Douglas MacArthur. A core lesson of the Iraq War is that we shouldn't trust ourselves to try it again. We do better as a cop than as a savior. Jesus fucking Christ, man. I mean, that's...

Dude, it's like we dropped two nuclear weapons on Japan. Yeah, what happened? I mean, these are the people that, you know, not only argued for war, but bombing, like, the Middle East generally back into the Stone Age, right? Those are the arguments about the aftermath of the war. What about its conception? The strongest case against invasion, other than the inevitable and tragic toll on lives, is that it would merely empower Iran.

That was the private view of several Israeli policymakers I spoke with at the time when I was editor at Jerusalem Post, but the case looks shaky on closer inspection. Nobody on either side of the debate over the invasion was seriously in favor of strengthening Saddam Hussein as a counterweight to Tehran, as some were

in the 1980s. Some? Brett, you mean the entire United States government? Some, you know. On the contrary, many opponents of the invasion wanted to continue to weaken him through sanctions in the hopes that his regime would eventually collapse. That, too, would ultimately have benefited Tehran. If anything, the invasion of Iraq power doesn't really chart there. liberation achievement of the war you could say a lot of things about iran but fear of american power doesn't really chart there no i mean it's more likely that they just have never like

developed a weapon like that that they intend to use for any nefarious purpose rather than they're trembling and the the mighty pers ain't gonna let me back down from anybody. I can tell you that right now. I think you're right. It's probably more a question of capacity and infrastructure and technological ability than his any kind of like... That is quaking in their boots an hour. Yeah.

He says then there are... Especially now with Soleimani, youony you know right he says then there are the weak arguments one is that in failing to adequately anticipate the insurgency that followed the invasion the u.s bears the brunt of moral blame for the misery iraqis endured he says this is a weak argument by the way in fact iraqis suffered horrifically under Hussein and suffered horrifically under the insurgency. Jesus Christ, dog. It's like McKenzie brain. It's like he.

It's like a numbers thing to him. It's like. How did you get those things, Brett? To him, it's two wrongs. How did you get the insurgency? Who created the conditions for these things? Yeah. Even if you believe that, which horse shit anyway but yeah well and also

the suffered horrifically under hussein who fucking who put them under sanctions that starved hundreds of thousands of people i mean yeah i mean i mean like you said tom that episode and you were just saying terence the mckinsey brand like human bodies are just like reified as numbers on a ledger you know yeah or in a balance sheet to just be transferred from one column to the next one, you know? Dead alive, dead alive, you know? Yeah. Or displaced, you know? In his formulation, like two wrongs make a right.

Both of those wrongs were caused by America, though. You know what he's trying to do, dog? He's trying to make the argument where people will say well um well look what happened to cuba under castro where it's like well look what happened like under batista right but he's like trying to make that argument you know what i'm saying like it's the real equivalency it's like dog you can't do that babe what are you talking about fucking conservative intelligentsia is the is this just one it's a conflict in terms and i don't mean that just in hood republicans are fucking dumb aren't they i mean it in the sense that like you gotta have some perverted respect for somebody like george hw bush who goes even when america's wrong we're right fuck y'all we're just gonna do

what we want to do instead of doing all these like well actually these you know what i mean it's like no there's no intellectual tradition there man i'm sorry yeah it's worth a fuck there's no yeah there's no intellectual tradition to like barbarity and savagery you know what i'm saying just like no it's just the exercise of power is all it is and the justification for it right um yeah in fact iraqi suffered horrifically under hussein and under the insurgency and the force that destroyed both was the u.s military uh okay with okay with tremendous sacrifices by iraqi security forces american troops help iraqis do so against isis to this day that is an incredible like fucking just like elision just like okay like yeah of course we beat the insurgency oh by, by the way, here's something called ISIS.

No, yeah, it's funny. It's like, you know what? If we would have done this, they wouldn't have defeated ISIS today. But it's like, if we would have done that, they might not have had ISIS. There would be no fucking ISIS. What does that tell you about that? Fucking goddamn idiot. Yeah, it's like, oh, just how the ball coach drew it up.

We knew there was going to be this future bad outfit that was going to come along, and we were just getting them ready for that. Yeah. But if there was one indisputably real WMD, this is an incredible fucking sentence. He says, if there was one indisputably real Wmd in iraq it was saddam hussein himself wow so now who says saddam hussein just got reified as the act actually like you know what we weren't talking about we weren't talking about chemical weapons we weren't talking about like other armaments we were talking about a man we were talking about one man yeah he was a weapon

of mass destruction he was superman he was doctor van hagen bro you're yeah yeah your weapon of mass destruction is like a middle-aged arid man probably on statins and blood thinners and it's like oh that's your that's your that's your that's your weapon of mass destruction there that fucking 32 bmi like tonyano. He's like running like a mid-sized mob outfit, basically. Yeah. Yeah. That's so dangerous, dog. Then there was the argument that we could have contained Hussein

indefinitely through sanctions and other means. Blah, blah, blah. Ultimately, the choice for the U.S. and our allies in early 2003 wasn't invasion or containment. It was invasion or over time the quasi rehabilitation of hussein's iraq this was a hussein that as the dwell for report what the fuck the dwell for that's not real he just made that up that's the narnia shit um the dwell for report says that i'm a dwell for him from the planet Dweller. It's not real. It noted in 2004, Iraq wanted to recreate Iraq's WMD capability, which was essentially destroyed after 1991, after sanctions were removed and Iraq's economy stabilized.

Finally, there is the argument that George Bush and his administration lied about the intelligence. I think they sincerely believe the misjudgments of the CIA. I mean, it doesn't matter if they believed it i mean like like i sincerely believe now what are you talking about that's like saying that's like saying uh uh if you just get your dick sucked you're not cheating on your wife you know what i mean hey man i like suck a dick but i'm not you know you don't you don't get bonus points for just you know you're right brett loves citing reports um which as the bipartisan rob silberman report concluded sincerely sincerely believed in wmd itself um let's see critics go ahead it just says you know how that's

bullshit too i'm thinking about man like even in the criminal justice system right like you know if you break a law you can't just say to the police and say to the judge i didn't know i was breaking the law you know what i mean like you can't kind of give this like moral like you know what i mean like like excuse like just, in hindsight, they thought they were doing the right thing. Like, what are you talking about, man? Dude, by the, I hate to be, like, a by your logic guy, but, like, by that logic, you can just say that, like, with the right, with the right suspended credibility and sources and with the right, set of circumstances and beliefs like hitler was justified in doing what he did i mean we're talking about millions of dead people here you can just make up any excuse exactly you can just make it's like listen argument to be fair

to the fuhrer he did believe that uh yeah there was a global conspiracy there was a global conspiracy like he believed that in earnest and he was trying to quell that he truly believed in the final solution like jesus yeah this is why i love rity brad like he's such a fucking he's a nonce uh no less damaging was the never-ending bush lied to charge that 10 years later... Oh, wait, I got to read the first sentence of that paragraph. Critics of the war now make the point that the intelligence fiasco wrecked America's credibility. It's true, but no less damaging was the never-ending Bush-Lied charge that 10 years later morphed into the Obama-Lied charge when it came to Bashar al-Assad's use of chemical weapons in Syria,

or the suggestion that President Biden is lying about last year's sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline. One conspiracy theory tends to be getting... What if all those things are true? What if all those things are true? It just shows you that as much as Brett tries to differentiate himself from the pack in terms

of conservatives, that ultimately at the end of the day, he's carrying water for their like talking points du jour that's like the same shit he just said in this fucking high tone new york times piece is the same shit i hear ignorant fucking swamp scum on 630 wlap talk about every fucking day yeah and they all have that i was like you said they all have like um there is an acceptable like established dogma on all this shit like you saw this week fucking de santis had to walk back all of his comments on putin like he had uh you know he's what had he said do what what'd he say well he he had been saying up until this point that like uh putin was basically i

don't know if he ever bad news i don't know if he ever explicitly said that putin was justified in invading ukraine but you know how like the war had gotten put into this like culture war thing where like the liberals supported ukraine and the conservatives supported russia but like when it comes to foreign policy there is the there's just a consensus the blob yeah and they all agree conservative liberal alike that putin is the aggressor and we have to support ukraine but desantis was trying to do the trump thing where he was trying to sort of explode the establishment line on this yeah and kind of obfuscate that dynamic. And basically they fucking made him, I mean, they basically made him.

They made him kiss the ring? Yeah, they did. Like this week he had to come out and say that like Putin was, yeah, like a bad guy and all this stuff. Well, I mean, it's even like today, man, with the TikTok hearings or whatever, you know, I was seeing that. And I heard one anchor say that this is a rare effort of bipartisanship and i'm like yeah dog you know because like whether it's like republicans or democrats like that's one thing they could all agree on right

it's like imperialist war isn't fucking you know economic terrorism yes well and it's in reverse it it's why the liberals supported the invasion in 2003. You cannot break out of that. There are a few rogues here and there, like Robert Byrd in 2003 and shit, but that's, you know. He was a different kind of rogue just 40 years before that. It is just funny how Brett puts himself as this contrarian right like you were saying tom but he's just at the end of the day just telling the line man his contrarianism is telling you that like you're right and any suspicions you have of the establishment are actually wrongheaded

but in a subconscious way you know yeah well here's the last art paragraph readers will want to know whether knowing what i know now i would still have supported the decision to invade not for the reasons given at the time not in the way we did it but on the baseline question of whether iraq the middle east and the world are better off for having gotten rid of a dangerous tyrant my answer remains yes this is like how else would you have done? There is only one way to invade a fucking country, dumbass. Oh my god,

dude. Yo, these are so ghoulish. Fucking... Oh my god. Stupid. Man, you're stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Dumb.

You're stupid so on the okay i had one more thing i wanted to read this one's a little longer i hope you guys don't mind we're going a little over but um this this is on this is it all ties together because this is on the topic of conservative intellectuals okay it's written by john mccorr oh this is john a shields okay uh johnny shields i don't know why i thought john mccorder wrote this i think he did write something in the New York Times recently as well. What did he write? I hope it wasn't something else. I hope I didn't get my shit all fucked up. Damn, you got your Johns fucked up, bro. I got my Johns fucked up.

Oh, no. I'll do that with Gary Busey and Nick Nolte. No, okay. This is the right one. This was written by a guy named John A. Shields, who is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. And dumbass.

Dumbass. PhD dumbass. Completely moronical. This is in the New York Times. Liberal professors can rescue the GOP. Yo, bro, I hate this shit already because I fucking hate that title, man. Yeah, I hate. We're not starting off on good footing here, but I'll humor him.

Keep going. When conservative undergrads look around for mentors these days who do they find not conservative professors at least not very often our ranks have been slowly vanishing since the 1980s instead those students find organizers from the magaverse who teach them how to own the libs no right off the bat he gives the game up right like all that they care about is god damn it man it's not about anything else nope it's just all about all the libs and being able to say slurs and those two things are not mutually well dude it kind of it's the fucking classic dichotomy of the conservative movement going back to the 60s.

When you had like William F. Buckley in the respectable debate club conservative reactionaries and the John Bircher, Goldwater populist reactionaries. You know what I'm saying? Wasn't it that debate or whatever with Vidal, with Gore Vidal, where Buckley basically cracked and just like basically called him a bunch of slurs and shit like that? Yeah, goddamn. Yeah, exactly, exactly. That's who, and also it's just funny that like John A. Shields, like he fucking hates that what conservatives, the way they're engaging with conservative thought now is owning the libs.

Like, that's the main practices. He hates that that's their practice, that they're not reading Edmund Burke and shit, that they're wanting to own the libs. That's right. They're not reading Buckley and shit. Yeah, if they were, like, just staying grounded in their intellectual tradition and engaging in all the sort of before agreed upon rules of debate and all that stuff, they would have no problem with these people. Well, and also.

They weren't Bulgarians essentially. Yeah, dude. Yeah. And I also feel though that like conservatism has always been about owning the libs. Edmund Burke. Yep.

You know, I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure that Edmund Burke kind of like made a name for himself by writing it against the french revolution i mean that's always been their thing like upholding the status quo well i mean that's that that's and also but but doing it in a way that's like meant to piss people off yes like meant to be ostentatious and meant to be like provocative purposefully exactly purposefully so provocative like what he wants what he wants to happen is like basically i guess like i don't know like what the libs do you know i don't know like logic and reason and shit like that and the power of rhetoric it's like no motherfucker yeah yeah um yeah that's who is

instructing the next generation of Republican leaders, modeling how to act and think like good conservatives. It's a squalid education, one that deepens their alienation from the university and guarantees that the next generation of elected officials will make Ron DeSantis' war against higher education look tame. Liberal professors... Go ahead. It's like, I understand the need to be like

captain save a hoe a little bit you know what i mean like reaching out to these little bitches and trying to like you know but like if what you're saying is that we should continue to foster their worldview that suggests that some people shouldn't be able to live or prosper i don't know maybe they deserve to be ostracized from the academy no yeah maybe they're fucking and everywhere else for that matter well it's the thing like the very foundational tenets of conservatism we're only ever gonna end in a place where we were talking about destroying all education, all free access to education, free thought, and

free inquiry. That's the whole fucking point. It was only ever going to end up here. Yeah, it was logical in conclusion. Liberal professors have the power to help solve this problem. They can show their conservative students how to become thoughtful and

knowledgeable partisans by exposing them to a rich conservative intellectual tradition that stretches back to enlightenment thinkers like edmund burke david hume why the fuck would they do that why the fuck would they do that bro first of all not to even say that liberals are like i mean because i feel like liberal professors like i've had professors that i guess were liberal but i guess like you know now i'm an anti-capitalist right so that's that's also its own breath but regardless of these labels like why the fuck would they want to do that you know like why would they want to give their ideological enemies like not to say that they want to give these kids a poor education

but like that's not i'm thinking that like if you're calling them liberal professors there are things that they're just not going to teach. You know what I'm saying? Or things they're not going to say or agree with, you know? Well, also, I don't know what fucking college is he's talking about. Granted, it's been a decade since I've been in college, but I had to read about Edmund Burke, David Hume, and Adam Smith in college. Like, are they just not dude i read ayn rand from high school up until college when i was in when i was taking a literature literary course we were reading ayn rand and not in an ironic way like okay this is like how this no it was like oh no this is like the anthem it's one of the most widely read books in the country i have to read it yeah um they could have they could mentor their conservative students set up reading

groups help vet speakers and create courses on the conservative intellectual tradition okay i'm fine with that as long as you put hitler mein kampf in the conservative intellectual tradition because it is that's as long as you have pictures you're honest about the canon listen you have to have pictures of like not like not like lynchings but i want to see those pictures of all those seeds of white people smiling right yes you know what i'm saying after religion you have to have birth of a nation right the one by by wdw griffin you have to show that in the background playing silently um this is easier said than done of course one challenge is that there are not many I have to show that in the background playing silently. This is easier said than done, of course.

One challenge is that there are not many incentives to teach undergrad teaching and mentoring seriously, or to take undergrad teaching and mentoring seriously, at least not at research universities, which instead dole out promotions based on research and publication. Bigger obstacle, though, is that very few professors know much at all about the

conservative intellectual tradition many assume there's little value in it to the uninformed and skeptical alike i recommend reading jerry z moeller's introductory chapter in his conservatism an anthology of social political thought from david hume to the press okay there's your fucking first problem i fell asleep halfway reading through that reading that title exactly dog i'm not reading that shit um yeah hard pass i'll just take i'll just take your word for it i'll just read the dust jacket yeah i'll just give me the cliff notes on that one uh here he goes here here are his cliff notes among other insights jerry z moeller stresses the need to preserve customs and institutions that direct wayward human beings these systems of social control are complex easy to dismantle and difficult to rebuild for these reasons

conservatives are leery of campaigns that promise to liberate us from a host of norms and institutions Wait, wait, hold up. So what he's doing is that he's actually saying that it's the left and liberal institutions that are enslaving you. And conservatism isn't even about conserving it's about liberation from the woke people it's so funny he's like talking about intellectual conservatism he's just making the same fucking arguments yo it's they all do that's so let me tell you something the academy is in such shabby shape right now that no doubt you have a lot of people that have just decided to do a mass exodus from the fucking whatever liberalism that they've been waiting in for 10 15 20 years whatever it's been to cash in on the anti-woke thing uh-huh like there's so many people that you see it'll be see this with like the one guy that we

did a few weeks ago that was like what was that fuck what was his name the guy at villanova oh was it the one about it was it the was it the one about the decline of english majors in university or was it a different i think so yeah but yeah but there's like a genre of this it's like you see more and more op-eds and like all these kind of things written by once liberal professors that are making the case for anti-wokeness or whatever oh that's like that was in that was in uh that compact mag i remember yeah okay yeah yeah yeah you all are supposed to be in charge of molding this next generation and you were just like grasping at stress and i get it to some degree because it's like you know it's like you're like it's hard to get tenure and all these things everything's so fucking shabby but like it's i don't know man

it's just so disheartening to see them like bite on like what's basically a marketing term. Yeah. Yeah. You know what I mean? That means that means that just something I don't like, you know, basically, but with like these racial undertones, exactly.

Racial undertones, sexist undertones. Well, you know, gender identity, all of this shit, man. Basically it's like woke is not only like what I don't like,

but who I don't like and who I don't think, you know, what person don't don't think you have like a life that's worth of integrity. You know what I'm saying? And decency, you know? Yeah, this is this article actually does kind of do an interesting job of delineating what some of these terms mean unintentionally. It's not trying to do that, but because like read this part. unintentionally it's not trying to do that but because like read this part every year i ask my students most of whom are quite liberal to read books in this conservative tradition all of which are paired with books by progressive authors books like the case for marriage the case against the sexual revolution and why liberalism failed open students to the possibility that our ancestors were not merely fools or bigots. Instead, they built social institutions that, however flawed,

also repressed some of our more self-destructive impulses and encouraged some of our better angels. Like letting black people be free? Like letting black people marry white people? Like letting people be gay? Like, what are you talking about bro this is like listen read this next paragraph this is this is fundamental take marriage members of the upper middle class still largely get and stay married even without the old social pressures that once

made marriage all but mandatory most of my liberal students know as much but what they are rarely forced to confront is the idea that this kind of traditionalism builds wealth, softens men and creates an ideal environment for privileged children to flourish. While for most everyone else, the expansion of sexual and romantic freedom has undermined family life, deepening inequality in its wake.

It's like, I can't take you seriously about like entertaining conservative thought when you're literally saying that queer people can't experience love and build family in the same i mean like i know that's not true their relationship their relationships are also detrimental it's not capitalism that has destroyed the fucking family dog everything that they love about this country especially capitalism and the fucking free market and shit free enterprise system like all of the things that they hate, you know what I mean?

Like the destruction of the family unit. It's like, dude, if that's what you fucking care about. And not that the family unit isn't even like the social unit of capitalism itself and social reproduction. But even saying that it's like, dog,

it's capitalism that has alienated families from one another. But they don't, but queer people, they don't really care about the family though or anything like that. What they're trying to do is seize the hype the high ground on america's and the world's by extensions unimpeachable institutions that's why they go with the church family all that stuff they go and grab the high ground there that way that they're hard to debate with because everybody needs like a source of eternal hope and a familial unit of some consequence to like help you with the storms of life and so forth.

So if you can like sort of stake out that high position and say we're the arbiters of what family and faith and all these things mean, then like you have like a pretty strong position. Whereas if you don't do that that nobody like this shit is so flimsy yeah exactly exactly yeah it's just and also there is no i mean there's no such thing as you're exactly right both of you there is no such thing as family anymore i mean there is and we all tried to reach for it and grasp for it and build it in our own ways with our own limited resources which become more and more whittled down by the fucking day like no one can own a house anymore no one everyone is saddled with fucking tons of medical debt that they don't want to like give up to their partner that's an interesting point it's it's like

there are a few fundamental things about family building that there's like some intangibles, and it's like you've got to have a roof over your head. You've got to be able to feed your family. You've got to be able to take care of their medical needs, clothe them, all these things. And it's like you're sitting here promoting the family, the family, the family, but all that means to you is attacking people that you don't like to look at

in public or you want to scapegoat or whatever. And I don't mean to sound like one of those people that you don't like to look at in public or you want to scapegoat or whatever. When like, and I don't mean to sound like one of those people, it's like, well, conservatives are pro-life until like after the baby gets here, you know, or whatever.

But it is kind of a fair point where it's like, you say you're pro-family, but you're attacking every sort of like institution, physical and immaterial that comprises that. And, and, and furthermoremore there is no intellectual value in that like i'll quote okay i'll teach those ideas in the context that they

should be rooted out and anybody who holds those ideas should be busting fucking rocks in a prison camp somewhere the rest of their fucking life until they have until they have the right ideas that's and i think that's totally fair i said that to a friend from high school one time like i think it should be illegal to be conservative like no you can have those ideas it'd be illegal to be a republican yeah you can you can have those ideas sure but you can't participate in society like that you know you can't have a political party yeah you can't have a political party or political life or advance your political no that's all that is outlawed because the whole fucking point

is to keep other people like me down it's like it's that's just not gonna work i'm sorry and i'm not gonna fucking entertain that or talk or debate it dude you know you know too it's like when you rule all of this out and you understand that there are no intellectual arguments right there's no there's no oh we care about the family we care about children like i don't know it really is like a ideology of like a death drive, yo. Like, you know what I mean? It's like a mass death drive. Like these people are omnicidal, man.

All of the things that they say that they care about, they are like leading to the destruction of that. You know what I mean? Especially when given the fucking environment, right? If you talk about environmentalism, the fact that these people do not fucking believe in climate change. I mean, it's just fucking insane, dude. The thing is, is like, you can have this guy lay out his case, and I think he does a pretty good job in terms of structuring it and leading you up to his conclusion,

but the conclusion is, what did he say here? They are rarely forced to confront the idea that the kind of traditionalism such as the family builds wealth, blah, blah, blah, forced to confront the idea that the kind of traditionalism such as the family builds wealth, blah blah blah, while for most everyone else the expansion of sexual and romantic freedom has undermined family life. It's like, how the fuck

do you come to that conclusion? Is this the guy that was in the cut chair a few weeks ago with the wife that left him for the 21 year old? This is not this is not that guy amazing he's like you know sexual freedom has undermined my family so i think it's like everybody else's day usually that's what it is yo usually it's either that or their wife has sex with a black guy right right

usually one of those it's like we don't we don't really talk about that like primal fear of white men enough of that of like yeah the you know and i don't want to get that primal fear of white men enough. Yes. And I don't want to get into it because it could lead to some weird things. But there are a lot of guys that hold some very strange positions because they are terrified of the idea of their wife or daughter fucking a black guy. No, absolutely, dog. A hundred fucking percent. I mean, this is like going back to Birth of a Nation, man. This is like a common stereotypical trope in fear, man.

A paranoia. Hey, you shouldn't be policing your daughter's sexuality. That's a conversation you have to have with your wife on the other end of that. I think what he's getting at, more than just like the 60s, quote unquote, sexual revolution, I mean, he's talking about LGBTQ people. I mean, these are people we're talking about here and again it's like that's why you have to put mind conf in the conservative canon it's because at the end of it if you're talking it's like that fucking interminable tedious debate two weeks ago about the guy that said he didn't um suggest eradicating

transgender people at cpac he suggested eradicating transgender it's just like yeah yeah i don't know man it's so fucking i mean it's it's omnicidal man i really have to say that like like it doesn't matter what arguments they try to make it's like you know at the end of the day they want to persecute people that they just don't like you know that's it they can wrap it up in whatever kind of flowery language you want you could hearken back to edmund burke or like but i mean these people are all the same fucking people with the same sociopathic omnicidal vein right destroy all life on earth that they do not fucking agree with to go back to terence's point about

conservatism should be should have been outlawed it's like it's true like everybody like on every side of the spectrum always like tries to sort of uh like uh you know they go after the the like the far ends of the spectrum right it's like well nazism's bad and communism's bad but we don't talk enough about how their antecedents you know that being liberalism and conservatism are really you know are like just as pernicious you know in some way in like in some subtle ways in some insidious ways you know not to say communism's insidious or pernicious or anything like that but i'm saying like you know we don't key on like the less radical parts

of those spectrums as being bad intellectual traditions too that create a lot of ugly things. It's an interesting article because it shows you plain as day that what conservatism is is that you have a crisis within the social order caused by capitalism and its contradictions that the only way people know how to either make sense of it or solve it quote unquote is to eradicate other human beings i mean

that's it and that's that's like you're talking about churching that basic thought and idea up in intellectual dressage and language i mean it's like you you know you just made me think of man i read a i read this story uh last night called the space traders by derrick bell wrote in 1992 he's the guy credited with the development of critical race theory and there's a story these aliens come to earth and they say that we have gold we have renewable technology right that'll clean your earth and like you know provide you unlimited energy but we want one thing we want all the 20 million black americans men women and child that you have and we're going to take them back to our home planet and nobody

knows why they want them they're just like we just want them right and of course like it goes through at the end of the story it goes through the the inevitability, the Afro pessimism. Right. Right. And it's kind of argument is like, yo, at the end of the day. Right. And I think you could say this about conservatism. Right. So this is the guy that just broke all the conservatives brains now. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And, you know, actually, they brought this up in 2012 because Obama was seen taking a picture with Derrick Bell and people went back to the story and and there are some things in the story that people think are problematic but it's an amazing story because it's like i think it also says to conservatism like what lengths would these people be willing

to go to eradicate and get rid of a problem that they see not just as social but existential and it might be just shipping all the niggas to mars or anybody else that they do not like you know i like i like yeah when i like he anticipates this he says these arguments can be jarring because they provide a window into conservatism at its best highlighting the wisdom it still has to offer us in an age in which the gop has descended into madness. Because they're conservatives, dog. They really have to stop doing this stuff, man. On occasion, students are shaken by reading them.

As one student told me after reading a book on marriage, I think I need to rethink my life. Jesus fucking Christ. far more often i just the thing is the thing about marriage i don't understand this i have plenty of both queer and not queer friends cis and trans friends etc all of them uh it seems like are pretty pro-marriage i have very few friends that's true it's like that was such a weird thing for him to say is that like the left and liberals want to tear it tend to want to tear down marriage it's like no i think everybody like most people okay and i'm not talking about like poly folks or any other kinds of folks like just like folks just you're running the mill people regardless of gender identity or anything

typically are pro like marriage and building a family well yeah he's not it's not it's like one thing to make i'm not gonna make that argument because i'm not smart enough for that shit but it's like you know it's one thing to be like go abolish the family under like you know advanced commodity production but he's not even making that argument right right i think even most people that could make that argument and might be amenable to making that argument even on the left might be like no i think that like like yeah people should be able to get married yo right it's a very weird position it is far more often though students simply discover that there is a tradition of

conservative thought that is worth contemplating well those students are fucking idiots you know what you know what i got a book i got a book for conservative thought bro i got a book uh there's a book that i forgot it's a photography book i forgot who did it who edited it but it shows you all of the uh it's a terrifying book that shows you all the horrible massacres and terrorist terrorist crimes that have been committed against black people in the United States throughout the 20th century. Yeah. I wish I could remember the name of that book. But actually, they should read it.

If they want to get a cliff notes on conservatism, a visual cliff notes, they should get that book. I feared, though, that such experiences are becoming rare. As late as the mid-1980s about one-third of american professors were still right of center but by 1999 one survey found that republicans accounted for just two percent of english professors zero percent of sociologists four percent of historians and eight percent of political sciences given these numbers dick motherfuckers are doing these surveys man i'm just like who do these surveys who the fuck cares well brett stevens does obviously um the people brett stevens whoever this is this is john a shields john a

johnny shields that's what it is son of a bitch son of a bitch the people now teaching them to think and act like conservatives mostly belong to trumpist outfits like turning point usa which recruits and trains young conservatives to be campus activists. Turning Point has taken to hosting deliberate provocations like affirmative action bake sales in which students are charged different prices depending on their race. The point of these stunts isn't just to provoke liberal outrage on campus. It's to alienate conservative kids from their surroundings. Turning Point's bombastic-

Wow, I thought the conservatives would like that, though. they would like i thought that like for coloreds only i thought that this is the tradition that this guy wants to bring back bro like why are you fucking complaining dude it really is an interesting thing like i know it kind of seems like maybe we're just rehashing all the same old themes and arguments from past episodes in the past seven years. But it is an interesting thing. Like, why are these, like,

why are these, they're guys like this who belong to an intellectual tradition that does support segregation and apartheid and that kind of stuff. But I mean, are they just too cowardly to say that in polite society and they have to like pretend like there are intellectual reasons for it right you know what i mean like yeah yeah i mean i mean they also do what what yeah you're so right too because again and i know i keep referencing but it's like yeah if you're talking about conservative tradition you can't be talking about what recent conservative tradition are you talking about you're talking about like the neocons

you know i'm saying yeah like the articleocons? You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Like the article that we just read. Right. Yeah. That's such a good point, Aaron. Right. It's like, I'll tell you, here's an exercise you could do.

Don't even go back to Edmund Burke and all these people and all these like weird like 18th century English jurists that said you can't rape your wife if she's decided to be married to you. Let's set all those guys aside for a second. In the last 50 years, point to a conservative movement that yielded any good fruit. Yeah. Yeah, no, seriously. That led to more comfortable living standards for people.

more comfortable living standards for people that led to more um peaceful households that weren't completely destroyed by like poverty and debt and domestic violence and everything else that didn't lead to like structural structural problems like racism and mass incarceration i mean you're just you're exactly right there's not a single fucking one you can point to it is it is rot no good on the world and i know it's like i mean it's like we're debating an obvious point on this program but it's like at the same time like okay we'll have it on your principles then we'll okay we'll have that fucking conversation point to one you can't point to one also like just like just like speaking about like what like conservatism is too i think it's a is it is

a robin kelly has this book where he talks about conservatism and reaction and what it actually is i think and like essentially like you just see this reaction at movements when progressive i'm gonna even say socialist man we're just talking about progressive social movements like the civil rights act when things like that get passage right then you start to see reaction form so it's like it really is about owning the libs like you can literally distill it today just want to hold the fucking libs man what thousand percent i'm just like damn these niggas getting rights that's impossible what the fuck now that can't happen like okay dude no exactly like look at what happened after the civil war it's's just like, okay, they got, the conservatives and reactionaries

basically got what they wanted, and look at what it fucking wrought. I mean, it's just like, that's why they... This is America where when you lose, you win. Winners lose. Like, we're obsessed with winners, but truly, losers win in this country, and that's why it drives you insane.

It's because you see the corny motherfuckers flourishing and that is bad for the soul ultimately and that's why conservatism has to be completely outlawed yo you you so you so right time to america obsessed with losers the confederacy i mean not even obsessed with but i'm talking about in a way where it like adopts right i mean like or like nazi germany you know what i mean i mean the fact that like we talked about this before but the fact that like you know you got air bases and shit like that and like you know uh statues and shit named after confederate generals you know yeah it's like dude you got middle schools you got middle schools where children

go and play basketball and learn and grow and eat and they're called like you know uh nathan bedford forest middle school jesus christ you know it would be like if you went to like uh you know uh fucking uh berlin and you sent your kids to the uh uh herman gerbils uh magnet school you know what i mean it's the same thing it's the school. You know what I mean? It's the same fucking thing. It blows my mind. Nobody can see that. And I hate to be that guy that just always has to go back to the Nazis and be hyperbolic like that.

I'm not. But it is. It's just insane. It is. But the thing is, when you're talking about conservatives, it's like you have no other recourse. You have no other choice but to go to that because i mean look i mean dude like look at all right man like i don't want to give any i don't want to be giving

credence to like liberalism actually i'm not going to do that but like conservatism i mean you have people like what these people i guess think of as like intellectual conservatives or what some people think is like um rational conservatives i'm thinking of john bone banner or whatever his name was like somebody like that right or even like a reagan guy and then you got people that are like straight up like crypto fascists you know like what what logical leap do you think that i'm gonna make when you talk about like you start using language that eventually evolves into the eradication of these people you know right like come on, man. Well, also, if you look at it, like, kind of just reverse-engineer it a little bit.

If you look at modern conservatism and you say, like, oh, this is like, like, you know, some of these things they're saying and advocating for are eerily reminiscent of Nazism. Now, try to do that with liberalism and say like stalinism or something like that and i'm not using this as like i'm not talking about stalin or making a judgment call but you would just look ridiculous if you said that joe biden had anything in common with joseph stahl if that was your if i'm saying if that was your boogeyman you know what i mean well that's why that's why i think like it you know and i could be wrong about this but i think that i mean i think it does fall flat with with i don't want to say the majority of conservatives

at all but i would say the american public when you when they when conservatives try to call the democrats socialist right or a communist right anything they don't like communist i think most people are just like yeah that's bullshit you know like people laugh at that that's ridiculous like these people are kooks right yeah but But, like, if I was to be like, yeah, man, like, this guy's a, this guy, Ron DeSantis, is a cripple fascist.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's more, that's a little bit more true to, Yeah, that's, it doesn't feel quite as ridiculous. No, like, they're fascists. They literally are fascists, man. Um,

well, you know, just closing up here, um, it's just a few more paragraphs he says conservative students might start saying anything but trump if they learn about a more enlightened alternative to make those awakenings never go happen to make those awakenings commonplace there must be a national campaign to broaden our curriculums every american university should offer a course on what is best in conservatism that means teaching conservative intellectuals not just i don't know why i cannot fucking wrap my brain around that you have the preamble to the confederacy you have the preamble to the confederacy where they justify the fact

that no this is definitely about slaves that should be that should be in the syllabus no seriously what are you talking about the best conservatives? I'm seriously asking, what fucking evidence do you have? I think Mussolini wrote a book, too. Yeah, that means teaching conservative intellectuals not just the history of the GOP or right-wing populism. Perhaps this campaign

could be led by a group like Heterodox Academy or the American Political Science Association, either of which could partner with a politically diverse network of scholars blah blah blah blah a national campaign could do more than just improve the next generation of republican leaders it might also restore some semblance of lost faith in higher education as a whole yeah yeah not not gonna do that good luck also too is it is it what someone like rod desantis doing in florida like you know what i'm saying with like these school bills isn't that like i guess what you want right i mean that's

that not not the curriculum but essentially if that shit was taught in schools and input and like implemented politically right and socially i mean that's what you would get right that's what he's complaining about though that's what he says get, right? What are you complaining about, though? That's what he says here. He says a substantial majority of Republicans now believe that universities have a negative influence on the country, that distrust will only encourage more DeSantis-style attacks on these institutions, especially the public ones. If professors want to defend the legitimacy of universities against the charge that they are simply leftist indoctrination sinners, they should relentlessly broadcast the new efforts they're making to mentor their conservative students. Of course, none of this would fully inoculate the next generation from embracing a reckless populism. Senator Josh Hawley was close to his thesis advisor, David M. Kennedy, a prominent historian and visiting fellow at the center-right Hoover Institution. Dr. Kennedy even

helped Mr. Hawley turn his thesis on Teddy Roosevelt into a book. That didn't stop Mr. Hawley from going all in on January 6th, blah, blah. But this seems just as true. It's hard to imagine how the next— Okay, okay, okay. You're trying to point to an anecdotal example, and then once you write it out, you're like, oh, yeah, that did go south, didn't it? Yeah, it did go south.

Anywho, this motherfucker is raising up the fist to the J-Race. Because that is, as we've been saying, that is the logical conclusion to your world view, dog. It's being a strass right motherfucker. What are you talking about? Now listen, this is all ridiculous.

Like, take Josh Hawley, for example. Him and his the guy from the Hoover Institute were extremely close, and that worked. Well, okay. Maybe it got a little too into January 6th, but anyway. Nevertheless. Nevertheless, I still have confidence this approach will work.

Irregardless. I would seriously, if I was working in the academy i would be fucking embarrassed to write something like this i'm serious i'm serious whatever intelligence apparatus could not strap me to a fucking table and get me to put dreck like this out oh shit the one example you point to is a man that lost like a million dollar book

deal because because he was yeah dog whistling the QAnon shaman he was hanging out with the QAnon shaman. I fucking love it because it's the perfect example of what he's talking about. It's like, okay, Josh Hawley did what Thomas Jefferson, your fucking esteemed conservative intellectual, said.

You could see them getting worked up over it too, like Rand Paul and Josh Hawley. Like, it's time to water the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants and they were like fist bumping and then when it looked like they might be fucking like the heat might be coming down on them for a minute they were like oh uh but those people they they we weren't a part of that they didn't work what we're talking about did you did you see that video that was like security footage of josh holly running running through the halls of congress scared his butt like a bitch yeah bro these people are so amazing because like it's just like yeah man i don't know i don't keep rehashing it but like yeah the one example

that you could use man oh god and it's like the irony is not lost it's lost upon you completely just went right over your head man yeah he says this seems just as true it's hard to imagine how the next generation of republican leaders will become thoughtful conservatives if all they've ever been tutored in is its trump style expressions professors have the power to make sure that doesn't happen it's time they use it i love that you know what written from the perspective of like there's no one has this perspective it's amazing literally no one you're right tom like no until intelligence apparatus would get this out of me because it's written from the perspective of like like a dying breed there's no one out there who fucking thinks that, like, the only way to stop DeSantis is to, like, teach more conservative things in universities.

Because, honestly, that's fucking what DeSantis and him think, too. That's what they're doing. So you have to thwart the threat that they pose by giving them exactly what they want. Well, dude, you know what? that they pose by giving them exactly what they want. No, it's just like, nobody can just see things as just like straightforward anymore. There's gotta be some sort of Machiavellian seven,

you know, dimensional chess thing. Yeah, yeah, three dimensional, four dimensional chess shit. Dude, it reminds me about how during like the slaveocracy and during like the Third Reich, again, I hate to use these two examples, but I mean, they're useful examples when you're talking about like where conservatism leads it's like in both of these examples you had the people like the leaders kind of like uh you know ginning up populist anger and um rage against a group of people to keep a certain sort of like mode of production in place

and a certain status quo in place. And then you had intellectuals who were kind of uncomfortable with that. And so they worked to sort of reverse engineer to justify all of it. So like in a slavocracy case, you had people like saying that the Bible justified slavery and that there were plenty of examples like ancient Greece and all this other shit. And then the third right, you had people like saying that the bible justified slavery that there were

plenty of examples like ancient greece and all this other shit and then the third right you had yeah yeah and then in the third right you had fucking nazi scientists going to like the himalayas and trying to like dig up aryan fossils and you know what i'm saying it's like you're doing the same shit man it's just like you you're just too fucking cowardly and embarrassed to be out there. Just admit it. You know what, too bad, actually. I'll say that we should, I'll be the contrarian here and say that let this shit happen, man. If this guy

is too fucking dumb to realize that owning the libs and the Trumpian style of politics is the only recourse left and that's always been available truly in this logical conclusion to the right. If he doesn't want to win, if he just doesn't want to see team redwood and he wants to see a bunch of

lip, dick, mother bow tie, weird motherfuckers in school, get beat up and get wedges and shit like that at the age of 22 or some shit. Yo, by all means,

dog, do it, do it, dog. Please. Please. Please. I agree. They should teach more classes like that at the university because –

Nobody would go to them. No one would go to those classes, and the guys that do would get bullied relentlessly, and that's good. That would be better for society. It's really nice. I don't know, man. It is interesting like some yeah i don't know man uh that's that's that's amazing article man john a shields there you have it folks johnny shields man it's such a fantasy y'all like we get called we get called a lot on the left of being uh you

know we want puppies and rainbows and you know all that shit you know pine the sky stuff but uh what this guy is saying is a fucking uh it is straight up you're like jr token shit bro no you're right it's a fucking but that fucking whole world in a wardrobe bro it's not a fucking b great ass porn star name johnny shit johnny shit oh man yeah fucking loser um well i think we thoroughly did it up for today an hour and a half boys are at it again that's right it's true fucking tardy boys hour god damn

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or final thoughts before we depart for this week my friends just a just a happy Ramadan to all our friends that observe. Indeed, happy Ramadan. Indeed, indeed.

Exactly. All right, gang. Well, thanks for listening this week, everybody. We'll see you at the Patreon on Sunday. Adios. Bye.