Weekly Skews - S6 Ep47: Weekly Skews – Brazilian Wacks

Episode Date: October 7, 2026

Campaign desperation is leading to bizarre ex-wife testimonials and the dropping of large children, so that’s fun. Then we get into America’s attempt to rig the Brazilian presidential election for a weird pervert so our D-list movie stars can have jobs and we can have their diseased hamburger. It’s a story about how our foreign coups also hurt American industries, consumers, and food supply. Trae is being Hollywood on a movie set, so returning champ Travis Irvine is joining Mark for this one.This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. BetterHelp makes it easy to get matched online with a qualified therapist. Sign up and get 10% at  https://www.betterhelp.com/skews This episode is sponsored by ZBiotics. Go to https://www.zbiotics.com/SKEW now. You'll get 15% off your first order when you use SKEW at checkout

Good evening and welcome to weekly skews. I'm your host, Mark Agee. It is, let me say who it is. It's currently, you're listening to this or watching it on October 6th, Tuesday, 2026. We're recording this at 5 p.m. on the West Coast, Monday, October 5th. I'm joined this right now by Travis Irvine because Trey is being Hollywood on a movie set. I'm not sure how much I can say, but he'll be back next week. But Travis, welcome, my good friend. How are you doing? Hello, Mark, good to be with you. Longtime caller, first time listener. Travis has opened for Trail on the road. You might as see him then. He's also, besides being a community, he's also a filmmaker. He's got a new documentary coming out called American Mayor, and he hosts a show called The Foreign Report on the Last Podcast Network.

Those are all the things you're famous for, right, Travis. Is that correct? Those are the good things I'm famous for, yes. So we'll just leave it at that. All right. So today we're talking about, some, the election in Brazil over the weekend and American electric catering that and why it's connected to your kid maybe getting diarrhea from his happy meal from hamburger malfeasance.

But before we get to that, we haven't talked about electioneering stuff on this show in a while because I find like polls and horse race stuff a little boring. That's just on me. I must be alone. Polling is really goofy, I think, because like, like, first of all, no one answers their phone lines anymore, right? I know that they have ways to account for that. But also you've got to figure you call up a guy and say,

what's your number one issue? And he's like, well, I saw a video on YouTube about this race of giants live in Afghanistan. I want the military to go in and kill them. And the pollster's got to be like, well, I guess that counts for Trump, but unlikely to vote, right? Sure. Yeah. So what is your favorite, like, reading tea leaves sign that the polling is like weird or awful for Republicans right now? because I have a few.

Yeah, I think my favorite right now is how much Trump is freaking out. This is a thing that I hadn't realized before, but he's got his telltale signs of when he knows that he's losing and it's a lot of lashing out at other Republicans, for starters, because, of course, Trump can never be wrong, right? It's always someone else's problem. But I've noticed, especially he did a rally in Ohio

that I think we're going to get to here shortly as well. that during the rally, he basically said, look, the Republicans here in Ohio, they may not be great. You may not like Vivek. You may not think John Houston's very smart, but you got him for him anyway, or else I'll be in beach. And that's like basically for me, tells me that he knows things are about to go bottom up for him and his party in November. Now, what are they going to do about it? That's where I don't know. I don't know.

I'm not optimistic, unfortunately, that he would. won't declare martial law over some crazy event that may or may not happen. But hopefully, we just get to see, like we did in 2006, the Democrats win in a landslide, and we finally get to see some changes happen in Washington. Yeah, I think the biggest sign of desperation he's done is, like, Brow being, threatening the G7 with a diesel export ban that forced them to empty out their strategic petroleum reserves. So now, like, England and Germany or whatever, don't have any extra gasoline because Trump's

trying to keep prices down. Everything they're doing is just trying to keep the lid on through November. Then after then, it's whatever the fuck. Nothing mattered. But like, so reading tea leaves here, the Republican Senate campaign committees pulled funding out of Georgia and North Carolina to funnel it into Kansas and Texas. Byron Donald's, who's running for governor of Florida, is basically saying his race is neck and neck, which seems weird to me.

And speaking of Kansas, Roger Marshall, the senator from Rub Open Senate for Kansas, put out a statement criticizing ICE. so that's fucking weird that would never happen if things are going smoothly for him speaking of Texas like the amount of money that the Republicans are spending

trying to keep Ken Paxton afloat is astounding to me it's like a hundred million dollars so far which is like more than it took for them to get George W. Bush the Georgia W. Bush campaign

to get him elected president and through the primary and the general combined and if you're watching this is really thirsty to me but if you're watching football yesterday you might I'd have seen this national ad that Republicans ran just just, it's Ken Paxton's wife, Angie,

talking to Camry, if you got this, Matt. I'm Texas Senator Angela Paxton. People have asked my thoughts about this election and turns out I have some. Let's talk about the elephant in the room. In a general election, it's not as much about the individual players on the team. It's about getting the whole team across the finish line. Either we hold every Republican seat or we hand the future of Texas to the other team. that's why I'm voting for the Republican ticket on November 3rd

let's hold the line to get. So if you didn't know the backstory of Ken Paxton, you might just think, why is this weird lady talking to me? And it's like, for reasons I don't understand. But like, basically as you saying, you don't vote for the man, you vote your values, which you can do this fall by voting for my ex-husband who has no fucking values, which is why I left him.

Right? Like it's like his cheating ass. Like it's like I kicked his cheating ass to the curb for doing campaign finance violations to cover up his affair with some brawity he had on the side who I found out was cheating on me in the newspaper. But please vote for him because our finances are still entangled. I still profit off all of his various crimes. It's a hell of a sales pitch. I'll tell you that much, right? I mean, and you're absolutely right, Mark.

I saw this ad. I was watching Houston. played Dallas, NFL football, and there it was this poor woman. And she didn't even, like, her husband's name, Ken Paxson, isn't even on the ad. It's just her saying vote Republican, right? Just the blanket term R. They want to make sure they're voting the R next to the name. So yes, they had a very public messy divorce in Texas that everyone seems to know about. And it is insane to me, to your point, that the Republicans are having to pull out money from swing states, like Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, and having to dump it into reliably red states like Texas and Kansas.

That's how good things are going for the Republicans right now. So the, like, also, some of the context you know here is like Angela Pax is not primarily a wronged woman. Like she says she's a state senator, which is the case. She was like an enthusiastic participant in most of kin scams. Just not the ones where he used like campaign cutouts to pay for his affairs in the sad, right? So like the best way to think of her is like megachurch. Kermela Soprano, right? And I want to say here, like, you want to just bring up Ohio?

Like, to me, a sign of desperation here. First of all, Trump, like, Ohio is supposed to be, like, heavily read by, like, 20 points. So Trump having to do rallies in Ohio is also weird. But, like, Vivek Ramoswamy, if you get ready to play this video, Matt, is trying to impress voters now with, like, a feats of strength thing where he tried to lift a large child, I will say, and this is how it went.

There you go. Big guy. All right. As a former fat child, that is very horrifying. Like, just humiliating for everyone. And the, so Vivek, like, so example, there's a, like, there's a weird, like, right-wing thing. Like, not my fight's, I stay out of it, but the anti-Indian racism that's bubbled up on the right, especially out of Texas recently, is, like, really been, like, the slurs against Vivek and his family and this campaign have been really, really weird. And it's also, like, because, like, his, one.

One of his, what's name of the guy? The guy who's the Indian political commentator is very concerned. He used to date Laura, Laura Ingramham. Why can't I think of his name? Rameh. It doesn't matter. He was, like, complaining because, like, he was, like, complaining about, like, how people are being unfair from Vivek's physical weakness.

I was saying, oh, the child was resisting. The child was resisting. That's why he got dropped. I'm like, oh, my God, dude. Just like, you can. I was telling my friends that Vivek is the epitome of a billionaire soy boy. I mean, this is it in real time. Basically, not only could he not pick up this child a few weeks ago,

people in Ohio got to see briefly a video that Vivek did in a batting cage in Upper Arlington, Ohio, his hometown. And, man, he had the softest swings on this baseball. I mean, and it wasn't even a hard pitch. This is like, this is almost soft pitch. And everyone on the internet was roasting him for his. his batting swing, his baseball technique. And that was weeks ago.

It was so bad, Mark, that Vivek's campaign had to pull it down. Thankfully, the internet's forever. So that's, you know, everyone's still got the evidence. And then again, he tries to show his strength, his male strength by picking up a fat child and it did not go well. This is Vivek. This is what's happening. It's literally Vivek, the more you see him, the less you like him.

And that's why he's tanking in Ohio. Yeah, so if you don't know, not familiar with the Vake's whole thing, like the way he got rich, the way he became a billionaire was running a pump and dump scam with a fake Alzheimer's drug that didn't work. And he, the bad engaged thing was really funny because I saw a video from a guy who was there when they filmed it, and he was like, because the bit for the video was like, he would say something, they cut to him hitting a pitch,

and say something cut to him hitting a pitch. And the guy was like, they had to film for an hour for him to hit five pitches. And the guy's like, I'm not political, but this was embarrassing as shit, and I will not be voting for this guy. Right. Yeah. So you were from Ohio,

and your movie American mayor, your documentary is about running for mayor of your hometown. Do you have any, I know you wanted to tell me some more of your takes about this rally, if you got them. I'll let you cook. Yeah. I mean, like I mentioned earlier,

I mean, it's just so astounding that Trump had to be flown into Ohio in the first place. I mean, Ohio has not been a swing state in actuality. probably for like 20 years. I mean, Sherrod Brown managed to kind of get through a few elections there during the Trump years. But, you know, then he got ousted in 2024 by a car salesman from Cleveland named Bernie Moreno. And so now it's interesting to see Ohio in play, but it's just because the Republicans have done such a bad job. And they're in charge of everything. And everyone's so unhappy in Ohio. I'm sure you guys have covered it on your show. It's not just, you know, your independence in the suburbs, it's rural Republican voters out in their farms,

who their tariffs are driving up fertilizer prices, the wars, driving up gasoline prices, and also the tariffs, and I think we're going to get into it with some Brazil talk here later, but now Ohio farmers and rural farmers all over America don't have places to sell their crops, right? Because all the trade markets have completely been screwed up by this administration. And again, it's the Republicans running everything. I have read, and I'm encouraged, again, cautiously, that I have read so many op-eds by farmers, by rule people who say, I usually vote Republican or I'm in an independent, but what John Hustead, what Donald Trump are doing in Washington, D.C., it's not working anymore. And so I think you're going to see a massive blue wave, not just in Ohio, but even like you were talking earlier, places like Kansas and Texas. I mean, it's absolutely bonkers where the Republicans have chosen to do with their power.

and I don't think Americans are going to forgive them in November. Yeah, and like on the ground to Ohio, there's been a lot of, like, we don't have time to get into it, but a lot of, like, corruption scandals involving the power companies and so forth, right? So, like, that's part of the background for the backlash. It's like, like, 30 years of one-party rule does not tend to go well for anyone. That's why you have competitive elections in theory, right? So let's get to it. With that, that being said, let's get to it.

We'll save the plugs till the end. Matt, Daly Dumbass, Graphic, please. Tonight's daily dumbass is other aspiring dictators who should know that if they want America to back them in a coup, their swimsuits now need to be at least this small. This is the electly soon to be president of Brazil, Flavio Bolzano. All right. So you can cut it, Matt. So if you guys don't speak Portuguese, which I don't either. I'm just barring from a translation. Like, this is a scandalous video that leaked a couple weeks ago. That's Flavio Bolzano, whose father is Jair Bolzano,

and a Speedo in his backyard and a cocaine and pool orgy. To explain to his boys, his strategy for picking up women, he just goes up to them and says, quote, I'm the president's son, want to give it to me? Which, you know, probably works. So he's a, if you, like, Brazilian politics is crazy right now. We're going to talk about why all this stuff America's doing to make sure this guy gets elected, but they had the first round of the election yesterday,

and Flavio came out ahead. You've got to, like, you have to be, if you don't get a majority of the top two go to a runoff, so it'll be him, the incumbent president, Lula de Silva, facing off in the general in a few weeks. Flavio is a candidate, like, of evangelical holy rollers. Now, in Brazil, it's like Pentecostals and Jehovah's Witnesses make up the evangelical movement, but, like, to give you some context here about how much this mirrors our politics and religion here at home, a bolzer. aristo candidate named Daniel Santos

was elected with a majority on the family values ticket as the governor of Parra after a video leaked of him answering a call from his wife while another woman was giving him a rim job Wow

this is the Christian right candidate Christian right candidate in Brazil and like I just want to say like America invented this kind of like evangelical like megachurch prosperity gospel like religion, but like Brazil might have perfected it. They speed ran it to get there.

So if you're not super familiar, Flavio, he's the self-style moderate of the Bolzano dynasty. He calls himself the vaccinated Bolzanoero. By the way, Jair ranks his sons like Dion Sanders does his, and Flavio is number one. Eduardo is number two, I believe. Flavio once passed out during a TV debate for the mayor of Rio, and his dad, prevented medical attention and yelled at him to just do push-ups while calling him a chicken. Oh, my God. Wow. Yeah. So, yeah, that's the Bolzano family for you.

Flavio's main rival for the party nomination was his stepmother, who is a year younger than him and refuses to campaign for him. His big campaign issue is that we must burn down the rainforest, but he's running basically to free his father who's under house arrest for trying to over the government back in 2022. Travis, at the political party convention, they used an AI, Jayaeribals, and Arrow to give a speech. And Flavio cried when his artificial intelligence dad said he was proud of it. Oh, that is so sweet.

This is so adorable. They needed to bring in big-time technology to make the kid realize his dad actually loved it. I love it. What a family. These people are giving them the Trumps to run for their money. Yeah, yeah. A lot of dysfunction here. Let me read up from a quote here from a Brazilian public intellectual name Selso Rocha de Beros.

Flavio is a stand-in for various sinister interests. The gambling lobby, banking fraudsters, Imperial Miami, organized crime and Social Security scammers. His program mostly consists of law and order rants about chemical castration for rapists, slightly complicated by the fact that his running mate has been accused of raping a child. So yeah, all this feels very familiar. Lula, now Lula's been president for four years, but he has like an oppositional Congress hasn't been to accomplish much, which you can expect. But like, so his big campaign platform this time around is running on expanding the weekend from one day to two. So having a two-day weekend instead of one was his big campaign issue.

And Flavio is like, we're going to castrate the child rapist to one of whom is my running mate. And this is very much a cake or death campaign. and the Brazilian people have chosen death, basically. If you want to see what the vibe is like, here's a video of a kid celebrating the election result, the first round election result, in a city called Parnamiram, which is on the coast. You can leave out, you can play it some silent.

Matt, there's techno music play if this kid's dancing too, but, yeah, so kids dancing waving a handgun, right? He's dancing the hood of a car, right? And then an adult talks to him, and the kid leans down and whispers the adult, And you make anything, you're going to put down the gun. But nope, the kid adult gives him an assault rifle to dance also with him the hood of this car. This is the Bolshevon-Risto movement in Brazil.

Wow. All right. The first level of American corruption we're going to get through here is like, like, so Flavio was facing a, was before being elected president tentatively, was facing a corruption probe in the last few weeks. because he got him and his brother solicited a bunch of money from a guy named Daniel Vicaro, who's disgraced banker behind a class bank called Banko Master. It was a Ponzi scheme that stole a bunch of people's money. And some of the money might have ended up defunding an American-made movie that's a biopic of Jair, his dad. You want to guess who's playing his dad, Travis, if you don't know.

Do you have any idea? Have you read about this? Well, I see it in the outline you said me. but I'm going to guess just for fun, Mel Gibson. Let's try that one. A little too old, but no, they went with the guy who Mel Gibson directed in the Passion of the Christ, who now well-known Lunan Tech Jim Caviesel. The movie is called Dark Horse, and if you got this picture,

I want to show this picture of Jim Caviesel and a wig to play gyar balls and arrow. That's Jim on the left. Incredible. No, no, no, it's great job, costume design. Nailed it. Yeah. And if you're not, I wonder what the arc of this movie is. If you're not familiar with Jair's life story, he was kicked out of the military,

the Brazilian army for being mentally ill after he tried to plant bombs in his own army buildings. So naturally, he was later elected to Congress and then the presidency. And by the way, Jim is too stupid to learn Portuguese. So everyone else in the movie speaks Portuguese, and Jim speaks English with the attempted Portuguese accent and they subtitle it in Portuguese. Incredible. Incredible. This sounds like a must-see picture.

We've got to see this thing. Oh, I will be sat. I will be sat on the front row when this comes out. We should have a watch party. So I want to move on to the part that involves us directly, a boss me in the United States, the part where us slash America, which means Trump, J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio,

the CIA, Wall Street, an American agribusiness psychos, specifically the meat processors, are mixed up in squaying, trying to rig this. So late last week, the Brazilian federal police and intelligence agencies warned that the U.S. government closed its embassies, right? And they warned that that was part of a SIOP campaign, that they said into American intelligence

agencies are calling Operation Brother Sam 2. Brother Sam was what we called it when we overthrew the government in 1964, we basically threatened them with invasion if they didn't install their preferred candidate. But they're saying our version this time is specifically, hybrid war coup, which is all siops and money. I want to list here a few things the Trump administration is doing to try and weaken the incumbent Lula to Silva or we're doing in the past week, besides shutting down the embassy and consulence because of fake terror threats.

By the way, all the other five-house countries did the same thing. Canada, Brazilian, Brazil, I'm sorry, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand, which are the CIA's homies in the Five Eyes network. So they're joining this attempt to coup. What we did, we designated Brazilian crime groups as terrorist organizations, partially under the justification of combating, quote, narcotic terrorism, but it includes with it the implied threat of strikes on Brazilian soil, moved an aircraft carrier and drones off their coast,

which, you know, could always be threatened Cuba also, or more boat strikes to kill alleged drug dealers, but Brazil definitely noticed and it caused a panic in Brazil. Also, last week, a Space Force satellite caused GPS problems that almost crass some passenger airliners in Brazil, which we blamed on an accidental glitch, but the Brazilian people noticed it and it did look like shit. We tried to send State Department officials to Brazil to help to aid their elections, meaning we don't trust their election system.

We threatened new sanctions on the Supreme Court. We impose additional tariffs on Brazilian imports, and we tax their popular payment transfer system with cyber tax, which they used to bypass credit card company fees. and the U.S. consulate in San Paulo had a private roundtable of pro-Prols-Naro media influences to tell them how to coordinate their campaign to help Flavio get arrested,

to get elected. So we paid for a lot of this by repurposing $175 million of the State Department's money, which is supposed to be used to fund human rights campaigns. So we're trying to help a Coke head who likes orgies in his backyard pool

elected by using human rights money that's that's what we're doing here um so Brazil basically we talked to try and I talked about this little bit on a bonus episode over the weekend but

Brazil and Mexico are kind of the last man standing and governments that aren't directly controlled by Marco Rubio uh so yeah now so now that now that Flavio is going to be the president uh Claudia Steinberg in

Mexico is the only Latin American leader who does not like work as an underling to Generalissimo Marco Rubio. Do you feel safer now in the world that we're doing this, that everyone in the world fucking hates them for trying to overthrow their elections? No, no, I do not, Mark.

Believe it or not, hot take. I do not feel safer for this. I mean, but you did make a good point about Marco Rubio on the Trump administration. this has been their M.O. since Trump's second term started, right? They've got their installed Lackey in El Salvador. They've got their candidate elected in Chile and Honduras. You know, this whole make the America's great again movement that I think they even moved Christy Nome onto this American Shield, I think is what they're calling it. This is really part of their

strategy, right, to keep us safe from drugs that apparently their candidate, love. But this is like part of, and again, Venezuela also, by the way, a completely part of that entire thing. They're trying to oust any leftist or progressive or even democratically elected leader in all of these South American and Central American countries to the behest of Marco Rubio and the Trump administration because they want, again, a lock and step, not just administration, but just leaders from U.S. all the way down to the tip of our country. Argentina. And by the way, Argentina is another one, the chainsaw guy. They've got him installed there. So, yeah, it seems like Flavio is just another piece of the American Shield puzzle.

Yeah, for sure. Shoot of the Americas, I think, is the correct. Not to correct you, I'm just saying in case everyone wants to Google it to read more about it, a steel to the Americas. So if you're wondering, there are a few reasons we do this. One of the big ones is that Brazil holds the world's second largest rare earth mineral reserve, and Washington, Beijing has spent the last year competing for them. And Luma's a problem because he said he'd follow the law, which prevents the Brazil's constitution prevents the exportation of unprocessed mineral war. And American companies just started buying binds there anyway,

and the fingers crossed hopes that something changed. And they've been financially backed by the Pentagon's, the Pentagon has an investment fund, which is cool. And just like, J.D. Vance has a campaign financing. group called the Rockbridge Network that he found in 2019 that apparently some representatives of Rockbridge Network meant to went to Brazil a few months ago for a meeting with Flavio, balls and arrow. And a pitch deck got leaked from Brazil pitching the Rock Bridge Network on their financial support where Flavio basically promised to give J.D. Vance's people and all

their corporate contacts control over Brazil's rare earth minerals if they helped him get elected president if you're wondering what all this is about. And right now is we've got to take a quick ad break. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. I've been talking about BetterHelp on this show for a while now, but I don't know we've ever actually talked about how much people love this service once they use it. You can check it out for yourself at BetterHelp.com slash reviews.

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is a block called the three bees, the Bible, the Evangelicals, beef, agribusiness, and bullets, which is the military and police lobbies, which is a standing in for the drug cartels. So a Bible beef and bullets. And this is where we've got to talk about beef import. So if you've been following American domestic news recently, besides the fact that I think doing coups is evil,

so we're going to leave the morality and like international politics stuff and the blowback stuff from this. Like if Brazil collapsed into a civil war, they're right across the Caribbean from us. We'll be impacted by it, but whatever. Let's just talk about ourselves, but for a minute and be selfish.

Besides it, making the world less safe, more violent, more poor, more warlike. This is also going to result in giving Americans who eat hamburgers a case of mud butt and put a bunch of U.S. ranchers out of business. And I'll explain what this means. Let's play this clip from CBS News if you got this, Matt.

Just quote, listen carefully, small chunks of frozen meat that could have been kept in cold storage overseas for years. They are the quintessence of generic industrial meat imported here to be subsequently processed in massive grinders that combined pieces of tens of thousands of cattle from multiple countries. Yum, yum. Eric. So that's as much editorializing as you're going to get on mainstream news, but say yum, yum, we're obviously grossed out by as much as major gear can manage there. So, yeah, Trump announced a plan to try to get hamburger prices down by importing 660 million pounds of beef from somewhere. It would not say where.

Do you want to guess where this beef might be coming from, Travis? I'm probably like, this is like what we call a leading question. Obviously, the answer is somewhat Brazil. Right, yeah. Well, I know it's not coming from Ohio because, I mean, like I mentioned earlier, the Ohio cattle farmers, the beef farmers in Ohio are absolutely getting screwed by this entire deal because you're absolutely right. This is economics 101. You would thank Mark for our geniuses in the Trump administration. But obviously, when you import a bunch of a product from somewhere and have that price be cheaper, more people are going to buy that instead of the more expensive local product that's made right here in America.

So, and also, I just want to say, God bless Major Garrett. He's got to deal with this, the yum, yum, this story. And he also had, like, Netanyahu talking to him about how he, Netanyahu could hack Major Garrett's phone. So Major Garrett's doing a lot of heavy lifting this week with international news. So shout out to Major Garrett. Yeah, all these coups, by the way, are also supported by Israel in South America for whatever reason. So I, so I, so I, there's a part where we're kind of, like, everything I've told you is true right now,

but I don't know why. I only have theories about why this is happening. Like, I can't tell you whether the handout to Brazil's beef industry is to empower Flavio's political allies and business in Congress or whether Trump's doing the coup to get a hold of hamburger

because he's fucked up the U.S. economy so bad. Right? Because, like, maybe both at the same time. Or this could be a whole separate thing adjacent to the coup, which is certainly possible where he just wants to make hamburger less expensive before the midterm elections.

All these things are possible. but like domestically while we talk about this, I want to give you some important context here. Right now in America today, four large meatpacking companies control about 85% of the market for beef in the United States. Two of those companies, JBS and National Beef are Brazilian-owned. So ranchers and producers have been complaining about this plan to import beef because the branches have been losing money. Now the prices have gone up, this is the chance for them to make their nut, right? And now they're not going to be able to, like the losses have taken the last few years and not going to be able to break even for it. because prices are going to remain low because of all this like years old beef that's been at the

bottom of a freezer they're bringing into the country. Some out of context here, in the early 1970s, I mentioned that 85% of the market is controlled by four companies. In the early 1970s, before the administration of Ronald Reagan gutted antitrust enforcement, the top four beef companies only had 21% of the U.S. market. When that market was competitive, Americans ate more beef than they did today. The nation had more than twice as many cattle ranchers, and foreign corporations didn't control the most valuable sector of American agriculture.

So that's back when we had capitalism. Now, I'm not even saying we should go like pivot to Democratic. So I'm not even making the argument for Democratic socialism at this moment. I'm just saying that like we should at least do capitalism with some competition, right? Like, can we try that? Yeah, yeah. No, that's what's so crazy, Mark, that if you're making a great point here, Trump and the Republicans are running this year in the midterms about keeping socialism out of Congress, right?

And yet what is this? This is government money being funded into an industry, into political campaigns. Sounds a lot like socialism to me. Yeah, we're using $175 billion of taxpayer money at a minimum, not counting whatever the military spending and whatever cover of blackouts is being spent to try to get Flavio elected as part of a coordinated campaign

to fuck ranchers out of money so hamburger prices stay cheaper. So kids like, it's okay. Do you remember a couple weeks ago, So when all this was happening, at the same time, he announced this importation of, like, disease beef. He signed executive order that was going to allow ranchers to do their own meat processing. Because, like, historically, we try to keep those, like, antitrust enforcement tries to keep industries separate, right? So you can't have vertical integration, so rancher can also be a meat processor. So he tried to loosen that regulation.

The ranchers were like, that's not what we want. We do not want to also be meat processors because I don't want to be also be butchering meat on my farm on my ranch. but they're also complaining that this creates a race to the bottom, right? Because if JBS is able to put cheap beef into their beef supply, they're still going to be able to sell cheaper hamburger, so it creates a race to the bottom. What the ranchers are saying, it's like it's not a good solution to say,

we will let you sell your own mystery chunks of beef from random places that are also diseased. You know what I'm saying? Yes. Yeah, this is a nightmare. No one wants this. The ranchers don't want it. Yeah.

So what the beef actually is is, quote, lean beef trimmings that will be added to fatier American cuts to make ground beefs. They're going to mix these beef chunks with fat we already have to make beef patties. It'll be thrown into the big grinders with a bunch of cattle from multiple countries with mostly fast food and restaurant hamburgers. A JBS supplies McDonald's in Cisco, for example.

And when I say Cisco, if you ever worked in a restaurant industry, that's every fucking restaurant, right? You've worked in food service, Travis? was uh i was when you're when you see the loading box oh i was going to say i was fired from oh the oh the ohio state fair i worked in the poultry division though um and that's because um uh i was i was super high all the time and people would complain about the pink meat and uh they and i'd have to tell them it's like hey man it's because we smoke the meat and they're like we don't know what you're smoking but it ain't meat so i didn't last very long If you're wondering why I'm so certain this beef isn't of the highest quality.

So it's coming from various countries in South America. Brazilians among them, we'll get to that in a second. But it's coming from Argentina and a few other, like in Uruguay. So just in the last year, China rejected two shipping containers of beef from Uruguay after finding residue of an antiparacetic drug in the meat that was illegal. And it rejected beef from Argentina reportedly because it tested positive for a banned antibiotic that can cause serious blood disorders. So you might be thinking, well, we're probably, and someone's inspecting this meat, right? This is America. We probably have somebody looking at it to make sure it's not poison.

And this is the part we're after to remind you that during the Doge co-backs last year, the USDA, which is responsible for inspecting meat, lost 23,000 people, which including most of their meat inspectors. At a certain points last year, the USDA had to suspend food safety checks altogether because they declare a moratorium because they did not have the bodies to physically go look at the meat. So I'm assuming what we've replaced this with is spot checks at containers on the ship. So if we pick a random shipping container that has good meat in it, it's all going to come through. Right. Right. Regarding the Brazilian beef industry, it's an extremely dirty industry. And I don't mean that like they literally murder people.

We talk about the, we talk about the Amazon being deforested. What happens here is because no one's policing it. People like business interests go in and light the forest on fire and burn it down. And then they seed it with grass and come in with these illegal like ranching operations where cattle just graze roaming free and they get shipped into the ainit. Then it gets like the beef gets processed later. So when I say dirty, it's not just the beef is disease. They're just killing indigenous people in the Amazon to clear the land as well.

One of the worst food safety scandals in world history occurred in Brazil. back in 2017, when the federal police rated nearly 200 meat packing plants after allegations that the government inspectors and politicians were being bribed to allow the sale of contaminated beef. This was rotten meat. There was rotten meat that was treated with acerbic acid to make sure it didn't turn

brown. It was sold to hospitals and schools in Brazil and also a lot of it was exported. They tried to sneak it into China and they brab some officials in China to let it in and the officials got caught and China fucking shot them to death. That's some anti-corporate some anti-corruption, like, policing I can fucking get behind. So, a month ago, the European Union suspended imports of beef from Brazil because of concerns

of antibiotic misuse. And so EU suspended Brazilian beef imports because their meat was tainted. And Trump's Proclamation of facilitating beef imports from Brazil took effect the same week. The same week Europe was like, we're not defeating their people as shit. Trump's like bringing it in. We're fucking putting it into their hamburgs. Oh, my God. This is the ultimate cult leader.

I'm going to kill everyone in my cult with this taintive beef because he knows everyone whose MAGA loves beef. I like, I got two pounds of beef in my freezer right now. I guess I should have stocked up for fucking, because I like making a football, chilly on football Sundays. So you might wonder, so did Trump get this idea to import this beef on his own to help out Flavio?

So, if it'll be a clue or he might gotten the idea And Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan's latest book, regime change. There was a White House meeting last November between President Trump and a guy named Josie Batista, whose family owns JBS, the meatpacking company that owns one of the four companies that owns the whole American market. So, yeah, Josley was like, that's where Megahaberman says Trump got the idea to import this beef. Jolie who spent time in jail for among other things, paying $186 million in bribes to almost 2,000 politicians, which included three former Brazilian presidents to obtain state financing for his family's company.

Back in 2019, it used to be, like, we talked about Brazilian corruption here. Josie was friends with Lula, the current president. Lula was one of the three presidents who was accused of and kind of railroaded for another time to get into Brazilian lawfare, but like, Lula did go to prison in connection with this scheme. But he was friends with Joseley-Batista.

He was one of the people that Jolie supposedly bribed. But back when Josie was considered a ally of corrupt left-wing politicians, Marco Rubio argued on the floor of the Senate that allowing JBS to own U.S. companies could endanger America's food supply national security. But now the Jolie is a right-wing ally. See what I'm saying? Yeah, this is how quickly these guys flip and change. It's almost like J.D. Vance said about the Democratic candidates that, they seem to flip-flop and change with the wind as they need to stay relevant.

And Marco Rubio, I mean, what happened? What happened to Marco? What happened to Little Marco? This is absolutely insane. Well, he saw his chance to become viceroy of all of Latin America. And, like, it's kind of weird how, like, a bunch of Cubans fled here to, like, get away from Castro. It wasn't because of loyalty to Batista regime. It's like they want to be fucking warlords who were in organized crime.

then the minute I guess I'm saying here is something about now I guess I'm about to make a racist joke about Cubans here but anyway Marco Rubio should not be allowed

to have power regardless of his ancestry but so country origin labeling a beef used to be mandatory in the United States you know your t-shirts they made in the USA

right? Yeah yeah your meat our meat also used to say that but that changed in 2015 when when Congress was controlled

by Republicans led by speakers the house, John Boehner, they passed the law ending that requirement. Just over a year later, after Boehner retired, he was appointed to the Board of JBS Foods International. Oh, my gosh.

Oh, my gosh. This is, you know, Trey and I, when we do our annual run of shows in Ohio, we do a show in Butler County, and I'm told that John Boehner lives just down the street from the comedy club that we do there. And if I see John Boehner

this time in Butler County, Walking around, I'm going to take this up with him. I'm going to throw a pound of dirty beef of that man, and he will probably try to smoke it. Apparently, he's a chain smoker. Now he's in a weed, too. Yeah, because we got legalized in another corrupt scheme where three or four guys own the whole supply,

so now he's fully on board with weed too, right? Anyway, we should at least go back to doing capitalism. I would support that over whatever we're doing now. So anyway, so yeah, when we're talking about JBS corruption, so JBS grabbed a bunch of people in Brazil. They apparently have bought off John Banner to allow the importation of their beef with no labeling by giving him a board seat. And Josley also gave $5 million to Trump's inauguration. And now JBS is finally listed on the New York Stock Exchange, which he had wanted for years and years and years, Trump made it happen. And we're also eating his poison diarrhea burgers.

We didn't just do the coup for beef related and rare earth mineral-related interests and why Wall Street's interested in this. So unlike the United States, where most household debt is driven by mortgages, in Brazil, debt is fueled by credit cards, payroll loans, and retail store installment plans, which carries on the highest interest rates in the world, talking about layaway-like campaigns. For context here, and I didn't know this until I was reading up on this, A lot of Brazilians got their first bank accounts during COVID when a lot of commerce went online. Before that, and still currently, a lot of people made their living on all, like, off-the-books cash jobs,

like getting paid cash deliver food or working construction job or whatever. Was like that's how the Brazilian economy largely functioned. And since then, they've all gotten bank accounts where the credit cards that come with it. And a lot of the credit card rates top 400% per year. It jumps to 400% if you fail to make one interest payment. this yeah over 82 to 84 million brazilians which is more than half the adult population are behind on their credit card payments so visa and mastercard which owned the bulk of this debt took a bunch of people had no experience of credit cards and got them to sign paperwork to green to pay 400% interest rates that they cannot escape

and so the american bank industry is supporting a coup to overthrow lula because be it the left-wing candidate, he's more likely to do something like a debt jubilee or pass a law, sign a law that caps interest rates. So his people won't die in debt. We can't have that. What is... So when I was in college, you went to, I'm about to put you on the spot here. You went to college, right, Travis? Yes, sir, proud graduate of Ohio University and I got my master's of course at Columbia University School of Journalism, which I am still paying for thanks to Visa and MasterCard. So you're way more educated than I am.

So you might have been too smart to fall for this. But when I was a college freshman with all these like credit card companies set up booze on campus walk and give out free t-shirts and exchange for us filling out credit card applications. Now the idea here being that 18-year-olds are stupid and think credit cards is free money. what if an entire country of 170 million people was this naive and stupid about credit card interest rates? Yeah, wow. Imagine that. Imagine that. I remember they gave us, they were giving out Jimmy John sandwiches. So we, you know, it was and sometimes, by the way, they were out there after the bars closed. So people were signing up in droves. And you're absolutely right. I had a friend. She just paid off some like $30,000 in credit card debt that she accrued. just during undergrad, just in four years.

So they seem to prey on those types of vulnerable people, which is disgusting, but I guess if you're a capitalist, it's pretty smart. Right. So another thing that Lula's done, that was a hypothetical thing Lula could do, is cap interstruct rates to do a Jed Jubilee. But one thing you did do was he declared a ban on online gambling to be an executive order.

This is after lower-income households in Brazil gambled on average of 196, percent of their monthly income during the World Cup. 196% of their monthly income. I was going to point out here that I was looking out and trying to find, like, these companies, online gambling companies are largely headquartered in companies like Kurosciau, right, with hard to follow like, like no one knows exactly who owns them. I'm betting like Russian oligarchs and fucking weird bankers and whatever, but like the one who I could fund ownership of, it's a British company.

that you're not going to believe this, but this gambling company is owned by LLC called Ladbrooks. Wow. They named their company broke people. Yeah. And talking about,

like, we talked about, like, the Christian rights surge in Brazil. And like, like, so crime was more reportedly one of the number one

concerns in Brazil, but street crime is down in Brazil. One of the third people, there was like, there was like, Manler Street interview with a bunch of, Brazilian voters and they were asking what kind of crimes he wanted the government to crack down on

and the guy said women and gays posting on the internet so that tells you but it tells me what that guy's algorithm is yeah yeah so so like like I said violent violent street crime is down but one of the kind of crams that is up is rampant phone threats and extraordinarily high levels of online scamming, which is, when people talk about being afraid of daily crime, they're all getting like tricked into buying stuff online that never shows up or getting their banking details stolen or yada, yada, yada, yada. So this is where I bring you to the point where I let you know that Mark Zuckerberg apparently took it upon himself to help out with this coup. Matter refused to, they took money from Lula and a bunch of left-wing candidates for ads because Facebook is

how a lot of people get their news, like not just in Brazil, but around. on the world and then just canceled their accounts and never let anyone see the ads. They hit them with temporary bans for reasons they didn't tell anybody what they were. Oh my gosh. This is insane. I didn't know. I mean, I knew Facebook was, you know, the ads were tricking people here in America 10 years ago.

But I guess they just took that model and expanded it to around the world. But except if someone, a candidate that they don't like buys ads, then they, Just don't run them? Is that what's happening here? Yeah. So if you haven't followed this, like Elon Musk is going to beef with like the Supreme Court of Brazil over content moderation rules. And like, so tech businesses, social media platforms, like every other business does not,

do not like spending money complying with government regulations, right? So what they've decided to do is declare that they have no interest in any sort of content moderation. and they're saying it's because of free speech, which is complete bullshit because they're doing content moderation. It's just not about stuff like rape and death threats and disinformation. They still will take down your videos if you say stuff they don't like. They'll take down your videos if you, you know, abuse animals or abuse children.

People commit suicide on Facebook live all the time when videos that never make it to Facebook because they take those down. They pay people overseas and fucking content farms. watch Facebook live all day so they see the suicides and they get emotionally traumatized by it for a dollar an hour so the users don't actually see it. So this is why I don't trust them when they talk about free speech because they're not free speech purists. They know you don't know the stuff they're taking down before you see it, right?

So anyway, my point is it sucks a lot and bad enough when the president of the United States tries to pick a South American government. But Facebook has taken it upon themselves to do it for Trump so they can just bring Lula's head on a pike like a cat bringing you a dead bird they found. You know what I'm saying? Yes. I'm very familiar with

the cats bringing you what they caught and they're very proud of it. Yeah, that's very, and also can they just point out, I mean, right, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon, Jeff Bezos, I mean, they're all sitting with Trump at his inauguration. I mean, these are the types of backroom deals that the MAGA voters

voted for. And Elon, by the way, let's not forget, he bought Twitter so it could be free speech again. And then he's the one who, anytime someone talks bad about him, he goes and deletes their tweets and deletes their account and blocks them. It's so insane to hypocrisy. Yeah, I think I mentioned a show recently, but X is refusing to air ad. They take ad money to push an ad for the new documentary Musk.

It's about Elon Musk. And in solidarity, all the other tech platforms, including social media, also will not air ads for the movie. This is the free speech companies. But do you remember when... Yeah, go ahead. No, that's crazy. I'm actually going to see it in Burbank if you want to join me.

The filmmakers are going to be there so we can actually see the Musk documentary with the filmmakers in attendance and asking questions because you're absolutely right. Elon is begging all the big tech pros to not allow... And he's even going to start paying off the big studios, which, as you know, are slowly being taken over by big tech families as well. So, yeah, the Musk documentary must be good. because Elon Musk doesn't want us to see it. Do you, well, it's probably being pissed off with these motherfuckers.

Do you remember when Mark Zuckerberg went on Joe Rogan after the election and talked about all the censorship that he was mad about Joe Biden doing? Because Biden administration officials would call him and lecture him about not doing enough to take down vaccine misinformation during the pandemic. Yep. No lawfare, nothing, just nagging. Just, yeah. Just nagging him about it. and now they're trying to overthrow a government on behalf of the Trump they're censoring speech in Brazil on behalf of the fucking government

like this this is like much worse than any fucking free speech shit they were giving a shit about in the American context and they're gladly doing it I'm just like I know we're past the point of anyone caring about hypocrisy in the United States in 2026 but he just said it did the gall of it Travis the gall well don't get me sorry with goal they should honestly they should start importing gall from Brazil and putting that in their burgers and I would rather eat that. Yeah. Some crow.

Let's eat some crow, Travis. Oh, I love it. It's probably in the hamburgers, it will. Yeah. Yeah, it's making its way in there. Yeah. So anyway, because Brazil was going to do,

was considering more tech regulation. They already did it in a form of like banning online gambling to try to save the, stop all their people from becoming homeless. So that's generate tensions with tech giants. and their benefactor Donald Trump who keeps criticizing countries or governments to do things to protect their people from rapacious tech platforms

who emmiserate them and ruin their lives. And because the Brazilian government was going to try to create rules to prevent digital crime, Mark Zuckerberg and the tech elites have tried to crush Lula to Silva. It's not because they care about preventing scams one way or the other.

He just doesn't want to invest in stopping the scams. and neither does Donald Trump, because Donald Trump is objectively pro-scaned because he might want to get in on it in the future. And with that, do you have anything you want to plug for we get out of here, Travis? Yeah, well, first of all, thank you for this incredibly educational show. I am terrified of all food now. This must be what RFK Jr. was talking about, right?

When you wanted to make America healthy again? Is this the road we were going down where it's just like, you know, fire all the food inspectors. You just, I mean, your lettuce will give you diarrhea. Your beef will give you diarrhea. This is how we make these fat kids lose weight so Vivek can start picking them up again. I think there is a plan here. Don't worry.

But either way, I always appreciate you guys having me on. In L.A., I'll be doing a show this Friday. If anyone's in L.A., October 9th, 7.30 at the Lyric Hyperion, the legendary Lyric Hyperion. I love this venue. I'm so excited to do not just comedy with some of my friends, James Adomian, Nick Baderot, And we're also going to be showing American mayor my documentary there. So again, we're just trying to inspire normal people to run for local office so you can work your way up. And I guess eventually get bought out by the billionaire tech bros as well.

Or you stand up to them and you don't take any of their guff. And either way, Mark, I look forward to seeing you at your house for your chili on football Sundays. I'll be eating your chili because you have old beef. don't eat my chili because I don't know what's in it. All right, thanks for coming on, buddy. So I'll close real quick. I go to Troy Crowder.com for his upcoming tour dates. If you like this show, well, more of it, you can go to weekly skews.

com slash more to sign it for a Patreon. I think it's $5 a month. I forget. Don't hold me to that. I forget. Don't get mad of me. Thank you for Matt for helping out, a producer. And I'm sure I'll listen to Good Skews.

Matt's audio-only show, what's same feed where you get this show where you interviews people who actually trying to help. like Travis out there running for office on Successionably, I'm assuming, because he still lives in L.A. and not back home in Ohio. But don't spoil the documentary for me, Travis. I will watch it. So thank you guys for tuning.

We appreciate you guys, and we'll see you next week. Scoo!