Weekly Skews - Weekly Skews 11/16/21 – Dog Whistles Abound

Episode Date: November 17, 2021

Tonight Mark returns to talk with Trae about everything from the Rittenhouse circus/trial to the hot new tactic sweeping the anti-vax scene (which involves...getting vaccinated?) to myriad other dumbasseries. Then, we are joined by Zachary Mueller of America’s Voice for a discussion on the absolute lunacy that is modern GOP campaign ad strategy.Support the show

Hi there, everybody. Welcome back and happy skews day to you. It's November 16th, 2021. I'm Trey Crowder and Nat there. He's back, everybody. Is Mark Aegee? What's up, Mark? What's up, Trey? Steve Bannon got indicted. Russia blew up a satellite that created debris fields, is causing international space station astronauts to shelter in lifeboats, including their own Russian astronauts. And the Kyle Rittenhouse jury is deliberating. It's a fucking big week, right? Yeah, big stuff going on here.

What are you, the Rittenhouse thing? What do you, what do you think? What's your expectation there? Because mine is not good, what depends on how you define good, I guess. But yeah, it ain't, I've not, I've been none too impressed with these proceedings so far. Me personally, the prosecutors, especially the judge. It's been a bit of a clown show in my estimation. and I don't, yeah.

Yeah. We'll get to the judge in a few minutes, but it's all depressing. It's all depressing because I expect him to get off. I don't imagine a world in which you ever would be convicted because of systemic racism, the way the law is written. And, of course, just maybe it's according to the law, correct? I don't fucking know. I mean, we all, I think everybody wants him.

Two people are dead. No verdict's going to bring them back. One guy lost his arm. That guy said on the stand, basically he deserved to get shot. And then, so it's just like, it's all a fucking nightmare. It's just like it's, to me, the bigger takeaway is like the laws are written poorly and our society is constructed to generate these court sort of situations. And it's sort of an example of how like everything is plug and played into the culture war. We get all our dumb asses basically from people trying to filter every single event that happens through some right wing.

thought meme or thought process no matter what the reality of the situation it could be vaccines or q-in-on or mandates or whatever it's like it's just what does my tribe think then figure out after that what I'm supposed to conclude as opposed to what actually happened and I think this is another one of those things where everyone wants a result that makes them feel good and I don't think anyone's going to get that and the nightmare comes afterwards when of course we get more protests and right yeah that's the thing to me is like the precedent it seems to set because it's like you know if it's okay, it's legal to open carrying assault rifle at a protest and also feel threatened at said protest. It's legal to shoot people over that, you know, depending on how it all plays out. And I just

don't really see a universe where this type of thing doesn't happen again, you know, like there's going to be, I mean, he's like a literal hero on their side now, you know, I mean, they're literally calling him a hero. And you got all these other mayonnaise boys out there across the country who are going to want to strap up and get some of that hero action. you know, I think. And they're going to be lining up to be the next Kyle Rittenhouse, I believe. And that's the biggest problem. Well, I don't know if it's the biggest problem, but that's one of the things that freaks me out the most about the whole deal.

Yeah, I mean, you got, you got a lot of different buckets of stuff happening. And you've got, like, his behavior morally, you got his behavior leading up to the, when the shooting started, you got when the shoot with the actual shootings, then you got everything he's done since then to show he's a remorseless asshole that doesn't even, like, even like, even if it is just offense. justified self-defense most people would still feel bad about killing someone he does not seem to be but none of that enters into the actual trial you know it's just like

to me everything he did all his worst behavior was everything before pulling a trigger you know like it didn't cause the most damage but like getting a gun illegally carrying open carrying underage going to a place you don't fucking need to be looking for trouble then finding it

and then afterwards celebrating with proud boys wearing a free-as-fuck t-shirts go-fundies you know it's like it's all gross man but like when you have to stand your ground laws and everyone's open carrying you're allowed to shoot anyone

it scares you right this is what the fuck happened I don't know I don't have okay corrals going down like I don't understand how like two guys open carrying AR-15s into the same Chipotle don't draw down on each other

yeah no I think it's miraculous that more people don't get shot in this type of fashion with the way the whole uh you know assault rifle culture that we have in this country but i you know i've i've harped on this a fair bit or i've talked about this whole written house thing a lot on my patreon if you're into that sort of thing but also i made a video about it and stuff but i was watching the trial last week and when uh written house is on the stand dude i know it's like a minor thing in the larger context of the trial but when the prosecutor started grilling written house

about call of duty i was like oh this is a fucking shit show. It's like, like, as soon as he brought, I was like, are you fucking kidding? What year is it? Is he about to ask him if he listens to Marilyn Manson after this? Like, we're talking about fucking violent video games. The dude literally said, he literally said, is it not true, Mr. Rittenhouse, that the entire point of Call of Duty is to shoot people who come at you? And it's like, what the fuck, man? If everybody who, uh, if every, you know, male who played Call of Duty then went and murdered people, society would look, like that fucking fx show where all the dudes are dead except that old boy and his monkey you know why the last man yeah yeah why the last man that's what society would look like if everybody who played call a duty went out and murdered people the shit is ridiculous those guys they're not it they suck and then the judge is just i mean a cartoon character dude i read article about the judge of the day and this is like he's definitely uh self-aggrandizing very confident, very cocky character, right?

And he may or may not have the thumb on the scale for Kyle Rittenhouse specifically. But one thing about that judge I was reading about is he's always really hard on prosecutors. And I just want to say this. Good. Every judge should be really hard on prosecutors. And they were interviewing defense attorneys around there. I said, yeah, he's the judge you pray for. He's the one you want to get because he's the only one that doesn't like suck the prosecutor's dick, you know, which is what happens too often in this country.

Don't you bring this nuance in here, Mark. I'm trying to... I'm trying to shit on this guy. Yeah, yes. I know. I know. This is the problem with it. You know, like, did the old thing lawyers say were bad cases make bad law, right?

We're like, anything other than, if you take away anything from this trial other than, like, the criminal justice system is rigged. Like, that the law's written poorly and people should we should have way less guns. And I don't know. Like, I just, I just. I don't know what to say. And like, I mean, the fact that today he let, I don't know if you saw, I guess the way it works in Wisconsin is you have 18 jurors to have to trial and to pick the 12 that are going to vote, they're drawn out of a hat, right? So you eliminate six extras off the bat. Usually the clerk does it.

The judge let Rittenhouse do it. Just like it was a fun little treat to draw the names of his own jurors. So that part is a little, yeah, they hit them. I don't know if you saw the part where, like, they called the first defense witness on Veterans Day, and he asked who here served, and he happened to be, the defense witness was a vet, so you had the jury clap for the defense witness. Yeah, I mean, his ringtone is red Greenwood, man. I mean, that's what I'm saying. It's like, if Aaron Sorkin wrote this judge as a character in a legal drama, people would be like, well, Sorkin's finally jumped a shark. This is entirely too over the top, this guy.

I would advise anyone, if you think that aren't these little feudal lord tyrants all over? the country in these little court in his courtroom. So we talked about that Tennessee judges that locks up half the kids that come in front of her, even if they're seven years old a couple weeks ago. Yeah. These, these, this is, this is not like, it's like every true crime documentary piss them off in the same way. It's like there's nothing special about this case.

Something special about this case is you were looking directly at it. You know what I'm saying? Right. Right. It's like you said, like the main takeaway for most people should be how fucked, how fucked up our justice system is in general and how many like incompetent and bad actors are heavily involved in it. and it's you know have massive implications and the way the laws are written and it's all just

like it's a fucking circus man and it's like you know it's what poor black people have been trying to screaming from the rooftops about this for forever but i mean yeah dude it's i don't i don't doubt for a second here the criminal justice system would have come down differently if it had been a left-wing protester won this fight with coleridenhouse because the government tweets left-ring protesters and right-wing protesters differently but um the problem with the self-defense or the other person dies is only one person is left to tell what happened. Right. If that one, the one guy who written house, one of the people written house killed was

supposedly reaching for Rittenhouse's gun, which is the same thing cops say whenever they kill somebody is he was reaching for my gun, right? Yeah. If, if that guy had gotten Rittenhouse's gun away and killed him after Rittenhouse and he killed another guy, he would have said, I had to kill that guy to save myself. And it would have been like, yeah, it sounds like whoever's left alive gets to claim self-defense. Yeah. Yeah.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, well, fuck, let's, you know, guess we'll see what happens, although it seems we both have the same expectation for that outcome. Yeah. But anyway, with us, as always, as producer, Matt, this is weekly skews. I want to remind you all, if you're vaccinated, want to see me live, you can go to well-read

comedy.com for tickets. We'll be in Charlotte, North Carolina this weekend, a lot of other places after that. Hope to see y'all out there. On the show this evening, we're going to be talking about the ever more maniacal state of GOP ag campaigns for that. We'll be joined by Zachary Mueller of gopadtracker.com. We're also going to tell you about the hot nude tactic that's sweeping the anti-vax community, step one of which is to get vaccinated.

All right. We'll say we've got some other good silliness for you as well, but let's begin at the top with the Daily Dumbass. Matt, graphic, please. Tonight's D.D. Washington State Senator Doug Erickson, who has fought Governor J. Inslee tooth and nail over vaccine mandates and any and all measures aimed at limiting the spread of COVID-19 in the state of Washington. So why is he a dumb ass other than the obvious I mean? Well, let's hear from this local news report. Play it, Matt. State Senator Doug Erickson has tested positive for COVID-19 during his trip to El Salvador.

Erickson spokesperson telling the Bellingham Herald that the senator has reached out to legislative colleagues for advice on how to receive monoclonal antibodies for treatment which are unavailable in El Salvador. It is unclear if Erickson had been vaccinated against COVID-19. Well, that's unfortunate. Yeah. So there's a lot of layers of this. One, so this guy is anti-vaccine, anti-mask, whatever.

He went to El Salvador, we'll get to Y in a second, because that's one of the dumbest fucking, I mean, it's evil dumbassery. But he's also, because he can't come back to the States because he's been diagnosed. host, he has been sending emails to his, you know, fellow caucus members in the Republican State Senate who are Republicans to asking them to please find some regeneron and put it on a plane to him. There's the email. He's just like sending a mass email asking for regeneron because he's scared shitless because they don't, the fascist dictatorship, aspiring fascist dictatorship of El Salvador does not have good

medical care. Who knew? so a little bit background about this guy well you won't be surprised that he's fucking crooked he's one of the biggest beneficiary of lobbyist expense accounts in Washington state legislatures he's a registered foreign agent to consult and lobby for an ex-comer Rouge official prime minister of Cambodia

if you're not with the Camer Rouge they're the evil communist dictatorship of Cambodia responsible for who would have murdered both you and I for our glasses among other things yeah yeah yeah yeah they are Being smart was a decent. Yeah, can you're rude not, you know, not super high on most people's list of, you know, in terms of benevolence or like, you know, friendliness or professionalism or just any kind of really human characteristics whatsoever. Yeah. But anytime you have the chance to make some extra bucks on your side business from your state legislator job working for an organization with a crimes against humanity subheading on their Wikipedia page. You just got to do it. We're talking 24,000 masks. genocide getting the way of a nice Christmas check, Mark. Come on now.

You can't let 24,000 mass graves discovered so far with about 1.3 million executed people and them like keep you from making a little walking around money. He took a trip to Cambodia in 2019 to state his belief that the Cambodian general election was free, just and nonviolent, which L.O.L. On that trip, he was joined by football coach Mike Leach, which is a little detail that hit for me. college football stays with Mike leach is a lunatic he loves he loves college football and pirates he just loves dressing up like a pirate if I'm not familiar with him yeah he's a dog cat yeah so why El Salvador so El Salvador elected this guy we made fun of him a couple months ago he's the

millennial dictator aspiring in South America he's like done stuff like dispatch the military to overthrow the legislature and to arrest judges who try to tell him he can't like he tried to the El Salvador constitution apparently keeps people from running for a second term. He just said, no, he's going to run. And the judges said no, so he had them arrested. So our buddy Doug went down there to, quote, observe election security. He wants to see how, he wants to see how good they are running elections in this country.

So we can bring it back up here and try to replicate it for our buddy Trump, I believe. Right. So, yeah, dude hits. Right. So, yeah. So in El Salvador, they're doing things like just. ignoring term limits and putting judges in jail who say you can't run and just generally not being entirely free and fair electione, right? Yeah. They're not super into free and fair nature of

elections down there, which is why he went to take notes and come back up here and, you know, maybe get another coup going or some such. All he wanted to do was do a little coup and then instead he's choking on a ventilator maybe in El Salvador, begging people to, you know, put some strap some regenerine to a carrier pigeon. This fucking guy. Yeah. Consequences of one's actions are rough. It don't hit for me.

Mine don't hit for me, Tray. I got to be honest. I never enjoy them. Okay. Well, so let's get into the hot new trend in the anti-vax world that I mentioned earlier. He put that screen grab up there, Matt. So there are people, vaccine holdouts are finally caving to mandates because they feel they have no choice. The mandates are working.

But then, not to be outdone, they turn around and scramble to undo the shots. That's right. Many pseudoscience practitioners on TikTok and the like are purporting to be able to detox the COVID vaccine through, you know, bath salts and candles and shit like that, just the usual suspects. And weirdly, Mark, it doesn't seem like there's much evidence for this working. Experts say that's like trying to unring a bell. So, yeah. But I think we should tell them that it is working personally. They should believe that it works.

So it's like, just get the vaccine so you can go wherever you want to go. And then later you could just take your fucking salt and clay bath and wash all the vaccine out of your blood and go back to being a lunatic. And then when that doesn't work, we all know that we've like duped them with the shot, which is what we need. They get the vaccine so we can all sleep at night. And then they think they don't, they got, they sucked it all out of their bloodstreams so they can sleep at night. It's fucking win-win, really. my favorite method they're using is a snake bite kits so have you ever seen an old western when somebody gets bit by a snake and somebody sucks the poison out to try it out yeah right yeah

so they're doing like they're doing that shit they're doing they're using cupping therapy um and then you talked about the baths it's not just clay and salt they're using they're putting borax uh you know yeah got to get rid of those toxins well the borax stuff the toxins the borax is for the liquid microcomputers then they're in the vaccine that's what that deactivate them i didn't think about that's right okay yeah the uh the clay and stuff is for the toxins the borax is for the liquid microcomputers and nanotechnologies uh is that kind of the 5g as well or do they have is there a different is there like a special type of crystal that gets rid of the 5g you got i think bacon soda will work for the 5g uh yeah bacon soda yeah borax i'm getting now

starting to make sense to me yeah then like frantically going back to the parking garage and trying to suck the like the poison out of each other's you know, vaccine wounds and like, you know, in the back of a Honda pilot or whatever is pretty funny to think about. Yeah, I mean, like, I don't know why stuck in the poison that works for snake bites, but I don't need to tell you guys that that getting a shot straight to your muscle, it's already just brod dispersed into your bloodstream. It's not going to do anything.

But at least they're getting it. In fact, if they think they can suck it out, it probably makes them more likely to get it. So. Right. Yeah. Right. That's what I'm saying. Yeah.

Let's just kind of let this one, let's just sort of roll with this one. Yeah. I mean, we're already sitting and shitting on them, but they ain't watching this show anyway. Just as a general rule, let's just let them kind of have this one, you know, because the ends justify the means in my opinion. I was talking to a couple of buddies ago we used to go and someone came up and they go like, I got the vaccine, but I'm against the vaccine. I was like, whatever, I don't care.

Whatever. Right. You can think whatever thoughts you want in your spare time. Yeah. I don't get it. I don't get a shit. Yeah, that's recreational at that point. I don't really get your shit.

So, honorable mention here, you got a Q update for us, don't you, Mark? Yeah, so a couple weeks ago we talked about how the Q people had invaded Dealey Plaza in Dallas to see JFK announce he was still alive and maybe JFK senior and Jackie O might, you know, be reincarnated to reveal if they had fake their deaths as well. There was that shit happening. And Robin Williams was going to show up and they saw it. prior there and just a just a zombie parade in Dallas that day so turns out as of last night two weeks later they're still camped out there really yeah they're still camped out in the grassy knoll they there was a video went viral of them last night they said they did the pledge allegiance said the lord's prayer and then saying we are the world it's a real mashup of stuff uh one person

actually turned on the guy running the guy the guy runs it i forget his name it doesn't matter he just called him some asshole so some asshole is one of this new numerologist guys. He goes to like old Talmudic texts and find numbers that relate to Q drops and started this branch off cult from Q. But anyway, he also tries to sell Iraqi Dinar as another foreign currency. So that's really the, I don't know if you guys know or not, but there's a conspiracy theory that some of the stuff the Trump administration was doing at Iraq was going to really inflate the value of the Iraqi Dinar. So a bunch of wingnots were stocking up on Dinar's and the international currency markets. Anyway, but what really turned this guy was he that is some dumb ass had told him that Prince, Princess Die was going to show up. And someone actually said that Princess Die was at the pier in a window. So they all rushed towards a window and almost trampled each other to see Princess

die. Oh, God. Wait. And then when that didn't happen, there was an actual backlash. Is that what you're saying? Yeah. From this one guy at least. Why not all of the other times that somebody said, you know, someone was going to rise from

the grave and then they didn't. They just kept rolling with that. But Princess Die was a zombie bridge too far. I don't understand. Yeah, we all got to pick our spots, Trey. You gotta get to pick a moment to make your stand. This was when Princess Died and show up. So do you know what their current, like, do they have a new date?

Is it, you know, like they keep moving the goalpost, obviously, but are they just going to stay there until they, I don't know, get institutionalized or hit by a bus? What are they going to do? Oh, here's the We Are the World, the video. I'm the message is using this B-roll. But yeah, there, there they are. There they are.

There's our people. Yeah. there's like got to be like a few hundred of them i was about saying that's that's too many people for this context man like yeah i don't really know why they're holding up the number four it must be one of the numerology things probably i just signaled them so we're going to get the going to get flooded yeah so yeah uh these people uh yeah a couple hundred of it there were a thousand two weeks ago so at least they dwindled sums that that part's good yep all right our next honorable mention the media for making a big deal

about some purported would-be voter fraud, which is something that Republicans would never do. Here, hear it from new Virginia governor, Glenn Youngkin in this video. It was just a, it was silliness, I think. There was real confusion on where a 17-year-old can vote or not. And so he had had a friend who suggested that he might be able to vote. He went up and asked. I know my son really was incredibly respectful young man, and he presented his ID, and when they said he couldn't vote, he said, okay, and he went schooled. So I am a little bit frustrated that it's become, you know, the media paid so much attention to it.

It's my 17-year-old son, and I really would like everybody to leave my family alone. Yeah, just a little light, attempted voter fraud, but they would not make a big deal out of if the kid wasn't a rich, young white Republican. I fucking hate these people, man. I don't know what else to do. Yeah, they would never blow out of proportion the actions of a candidate's son. You know what I mean? Yeah. That would never get a spotlight thrown on it for any reason if it was coming from their side, especially not with voter fraud.

They don't, you know. There was a famous case a couple years ago, a woman in Fort Worth, whose parole had ended, thought she was then allowed to vote. So she tried to vote. Same thing. They told her, no, you can't vote. She went to prison for five years. So I don't really understand why this is that different of a case. I don't think either one of these people should go to fucking prison

considering they didn't do any, what their actions did not affect anything. But I don't understand what Glenn Young can say is a confusion over where you can vote at 17 years old. Is there any way in America, anywhere in America can vote at 17 years old? Yeah, I've never heard that before. You know,

that's like one of the main things I feel like you know about turning 18. You know what I mean? Is that that's when you can vote. You can go to war, but you can't have a beer, God damn it. That's what you got, Like, that's the type of shit you hear about, you know, becoming of age always.

I don't think anybody thinks that you can vote at 17. And maybe that kid asked his buddy, and his buddy was like, yeah, you know, you're that guy's kid. You just do whatever fuck you want. Like, you don't, you ain't heard the news? Just go ahead. They'll let you do anything. Go for it. Your dad's the king of Virginia now.

You're going to do whatever the fuck you want, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Let's say, what do we got next for, uh, daily dumbass honorable mention all seventh graders for very for famously not knowing about but stuff what the hell am i talking about well the uh the fight to ban books rages on and it's taken some uh pretty humorous although upsetting turns along the way so matt put that up there so this is a quote from an article about it in

september a texas anti-mask activist named carabel read a passage from out of darkness at a school board meeting. The scene she chose was one in which a gang of racist white students sexually demeaned the Mexican heroin. Bell quoted the characters making a slang reference to anal sex, words that left her appalled. Quote, I do not want my children to learn about anal sex in middle school, she cried. I've never had anal sex. I don't want to have anal sex. I don't want my kids having anal sex. And, uh, you know, this all happens out in public. I can see her husband's face when she was going on this tirade. He's like,

yeah. Yeah. To quote the famous Twitter meme, like my, I do not want to have anal sex t-shirt is raising a lot of questions answered by my t-shirt. I don't want to tell parents this, man. Trey, you got young boys. If they're learning about butt sex in middle school, it's probably not in English class. For sure.

Oh. Dude, me and Katie, we're just talking about this just the other day. because, like, my oldest son's in fourth grade, and I asked Katie, I was like, do you remember, like, when you started, like, when you started, like, just cussing and being filthy and shit? And she was like, no, not really. And I said, well, I do. I remember exactly when it was.

It was fourth grade. And I know because that's when I met my buddy Dustin Thompson. And we, you know, just fucking went hauling ass down that highway to hell buddy in fourth grade, which seemed totally, it's wild to me now having a fourth grader. It's wild thinking about that. But, yeah, he's like, I think about. Dude, there's kids in his class saying wild shit. I'm dressing up in squid game outfits for Halloween and stuff.

You know what I mean? Like, they're fucking, like, dude, yeah, middle schoolers, they know about all that. Dude, we were fucking blasting Eminem when we were in middle school. You know what I mean? Like, of course they're going to know what intercourse is. By the time they hit fourth grade, they got the Discovery Channel, don't they? As to quote the legendary poet Slim Shady. But yeah, it's fucking ridiculous.

And like, just this degree of trying to shelter your kids from. from everything, anything and everything is, you know. My nephew's just turned 14, but he's, he has a cell phone for, you know, emergencies by the closely monitor his internet activities. He's not supposed to be on social media. My sister discovered he had a TikTok account with 35,000 followers. I took it away from him, of course. Yeah, he was apparently hitting on TikTok.

But like, yeah, I mean, you can't really, you can only control your kids so much. that's really the point of this is like it's sort of revelatory because like the point of this is is to protect the illusions of parents not to protect kids right kids are out there in these streets man they don't they don't they they're out there learning and they got they got internet access and they know how to get around porn blocks and like you be they're way ahead of us what technology wise so I don't know what I mean I don't know man sorry welcome to being being a welcome to earth I guess um I guess you want to protect them as long as possible some of this stuff is just fooling yourself. Like, I don't, like, people being like, I don't want my kids learning about

a race in second grade. Was anybody asked like a little minority kid when they learned about a race? Because it's way younger than that. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, they're all, all them kids are in for a rude awakening eventually. You know who else is in for a rude awakening? This, uh, this realtor lady who got called on January 6th and then later declared she would never go to the prison for it and who is now heading to prison. But she's preparing not to worry. For, for context, we talked about this lady before. January 6th. She was a not politically active real realtor in Dallas, Fort Worth, who got radical, didn't even vote in 2020, got radicalized after the election through YouTube, flew to DC on a private jet, got shit-faced drunk and said she was going to overthrow the government in her own Facebook feed. And then famously scream, I'm never going to jail because I'm white and I'm blonde. And this is what happened next. Yeah. Play that, Matt. I pled guilty to entering the Capitol for two minutes and eight seconds. Jenna Ryan is one of more than 600 people arrested for storming the Capitol on January 6.

Last week, she was sentenced to 60 days in prison beginning in January. It's all you can think about. I'm watching all the YouTube videos on how prison is, how to go to prison, what to do. Ryan flew with friends on a private plane to the stop-the-steel rally in D.C. Before going back to her hotel. But while watching news coverage, she decided to go back and posted a video saying she was going to storm the Capitol. So I was just like, we're storming the capital. And I meant we're storming with our words and our, we're going down there to tell them, you know.

And, you know, it's free speech. You know what? We are armed and dangerous. I love like the fact that the reporter throws in, she went back to her hotel, which is like a clue to us. Like, you know she got in that fucking mini bar. You can just tell she trashed that mini bar. She is sloppy drunk in that second in the later on videos. But also did her just go on.

on her watching prison tutorials on YouTube, how to go to prison. You know, I got everything out there nowadays, Mark. Like, I wonder if she's learning how to make the hooch and whatnot or at least where to get it from. Got to learn some butthole stuff

if you're going to go to prison, you know, if you want to... Yeah, maybe she could read that she could read that book that lady was trying to ban to learn that goodbye. Yeah, this lady rules, man. I don't know what to do. Like, it's just like, she's on the mostly harmless but fucking nuts camp.

I'm glad she's getting a little 60-day slap on the wrist. She has private jet rent friends, so she'll be okay when she gets out. Yeah, 100%. But, yeah, I mean, I'll say, I'll never go to jail for this because I'm white or whatever. I mean, dude, how can you not love it? Seeing somebody like that, be carty off to jail. Yeah. I bet she won't go away, though.

Before you know it, dude, she'll be out and running her mouth, I bet. Well, she was a, she was, she, at the Capitol, she was live streaming on her, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, she has started to promote her real estate business. But since then, she has started a politics, YouTube. So she might be in the tab. You look to the, if you look over the tab, if you're watching us on YouTube, she might be right there. But she's definitely trying to launch a second career as an influencer. So they're, they all do that. So, she'll have, she'll have, she'll have, she'll have, she'll have, she'll have, she'll have, she'll have. Okay. So, we've watched a lot of wild-ass GOP campaign ads recently on the show. Typically, they're blowing stuff up or jumping out of airplanes or whatever. And, of course, the big Yon-McColiffe race centered around critical race theory. And the ads about that, we watched the lady, was horrified that a 17-year-old, AP English little baby boy was being exposed to the works of Tony Morrison. So we talked about all that recently.

We're going to go in a little bit deeper on the current state of GOP ad campaign. campaign strategy. And for that, we're going to welcome our guest tonight. He is the digital communications manager for America's Voice. He also manages gopad tracker.com, a searchable database of racist and xenophobic dog whistle ads. He writes regularly about immigration and nativist politicians and organizations for America's voice. Prior to joining them, he was a union organizer and worked researching far-right politics. Everybody, welcome to the show. Zachary Mueller, Zach, what's up, man? Glad to be here.

Big fan of the show. Oh, thank you. Thanks for joining us. So I guess let's start with the Youngkin race in those ads. Like I'm sure you saw the one we were just talking about it, went kind of viral that lady. It was so upset about her little baby boy reading this filth. You know, he was a 17-year-old honors student.

To get sexualized for people that, if they didn't see the episode a couple weeks ago, there was a lady talking about her son having to read a Tony Morrison book. But her words were laid over B-roll. of Black Lives Matter protests and, you know, a few burning trash cans and cars and shit. So it was like it was, that lady complaint is stupid, but even if you believe she has a

complaint, the ad was totally fucking race baiting. It was like gross and sad and ridiculous. So, Zach, like, talk a little bit about sort of the origin of that strategy, I guess, how effective it was, how they landed on that. And then also I want to get into what the response could have or

should have been. How do you counter things like that? But yeah, just let's get started. Yeah, so, you know, the Yon campaign was like kind of fooling around trying to figure out what their, what their message was going to be throughout the election. I mean, this is basically just kind of like a guy that they kind of like pulled out to try to win this race. They tried to like craft, I mean, as a laboratory here. And, you know, he back in April started to kind of pick up on this, you know, Fox News generated some of this kind of activity that was happening on the ground around school boards, around critical race theory. So he started to pick this up. And he thought

he could run with this, you know, and kind of filter off the energy that was happening on the ground and kind of some of the local right-wing energy and take it into his campaign. So back in April, he started to really kind of pick this up to his base and kind of move it, talking about he that he was going to ban critical race theory, kind of picking up where some other Republican governors, would that be in Florida, like with DeSantis or in other Republican governors, or other Republican governors throughout the country that were kind of banning critical race theory as a way to kind of burnish their cred, and an ability to kind of pass off what is a racist dog whistle, meaning that they're not explicitly saying anything racist. And it allows them to have the

plausible deniability, both for themselves and for their viewers, to say, oh, no, no, no, no, we're not talking about anything racist here. Actually, you are the racist because you're the ones bringing up race here. We're actually trying to teach kids, you know, to love everybody, no matter the color of their skin. Meanwhile, being able to insert race into the conversation and stoke racial anxieties as a political tool to turn out voters. So that ends up becoming his strategy going all the way up

through the election to really kind of mobilize both, you know, any kind of Republican support across the board under this kind of race-based banner and really running a racist campaign. for people that don't familiar with like I'm sure if you guys don't know

who Lee Atwater is I would recommend Googling him I don't want to show the video there's audio of him you can listen to this on YouTube where he describes as a Southern strategy he was the guy who sort of formulated it from Nixon and Reagan

it was like basically like you in the 50s and 60s you go around screaming inward inward and he actually said the word and he goes but then you start talking about segregation you start about school choice and school rights. They start talking about income taxes and welfare queens. And by the time you get to that, you're still saying the inward, inward, inward stuff,

but you're so far away from it rhetorically that no one knows how to criticize it, right? So it's like this is even like, this is kind of going backwards 20 years from that. It's so weird how even more racialized this is than the normal welfare queen sort of bullshit the Republicans run on. Yeah, it's very much the same strategy. Yeah. Yeah. And what about the fact that, like, you know, critical race theory as an actual concept and everything isn't actually taught in any public schools in Virginia and whatnot?

Like this was, you know, one of their boogeyman that they come up with every so often that they seem to just fabricate out of thin air and just run with it. And, you know, why is that so effective? Is it just that it plays off these underlying just racist tendencies that are there already? but also like what do you do in the face of something like that? It's got to be frustrating because you can say to your blue in the face, this isn't real. It's just making this up, you know, but if it doesn't matter,

then where the hell do you go from there? Yeah, so very much so that there's kind of finding a new boogeyman each time around, right? So back in, you know, 2017 in Virginia in the governor's race, really the kind of made up idea that there was these sanctuary cities all over the state of Virginia. and that's what they were running on, really, anti-immigrant, kind of xenophobic dog whistles. Again, it's just kind of this made-up idea to fearmonger around, you know, non-white others. And again, right, it's critical race theory is an obscure legal theory about understanding how we think about how race pervades our society and how very much it still is affecting our politics, our law, and all the other institutions.

But they're able to kind of use this and then kind of mull it and move. it around. So it ends up becoming something like parents' rights or something else like that. So it becomes really obscure, like Mark was talking about, just about to be able to allow voters to be able and politicians to say, look, I'm not talking about race here, even though race is really the active ingredient moving people to the polls and then getting that kind of anxiety, whether it's conscious or unconscious from the voters themselves. But I think to answer your kind of like follow-up question is really how do you respond to this stuff? Because clearly, Terry McCullough's campaign, which was the Democrat who ran in Virginia, didn't do it very well. He tried. And clearly it was not

successful. It was a little bit, a little bit not enough and a little bit too late. So I think really the most important thing for, you know, folks to think about this is that if we're trying to combat, you know, GOPs like strategic racism, the racist dog whistles that they're using in August before an election, that's much too late. We're just kind of responding at that point. I think about this is really a way of trying to inoculate other folks around us. And I think Democrats could do this as well too, but also other folks as well, to understand and really name the Republican strategy, which is to strategically use race as a means to harm all working class people for their own benefit. Because that's really what's at stake here, right? It isn't that just, you know, Yonkin or some of these other Republicans or losing racism because, oh, that's a moral bad and racism is bad. Sure, it is. But it ends up in policies that really end up hurting not only people of color, but also working class white people as well. It's the reason why, you know, we can't have Medicaid expansion, you know, access to affordable college, higher wages, good union laws, like the GOP that ends up using these

kinds of strategic racism end up blocking the ability for working class people to benefit. And so I I think that's why it's really important for us to think about and understand, really name that game. And then I think also then pivot to back and tell a different story to say, look, you know, they want to talk about, you know, they want to say critical race theory. What that actually means is banning books in schools. It means, you know, not teaching our kids like our real history, you know, good and the bad. And, you know, we don't want politicians in there picking out the curriculum, right? And we don't want white supremacists, like, being able to ex-nay books out of our public schools, right? That's a, that's a majoritarian opinion.

I think the folks that kind of want that, right, are on a small, marginal that, you know, ain't really worth talking to either. Even then, like, the optics of it, like, the optics of burning and banning books are bad, but there's a school board in Sponsavania County, Virginia, which is the county outside of Fredericksburg where I went to college, where the school board was like, yeah, we're going to burn the literally said we're going to burn the books. It was like wild. I can't believe people are going to get away with this shit.

But it's nuts to me that this stuff so that this hustle still works. But it does seem to work. And do you want to watch some ads? We can see how cool this shit looks in reality because some of the ads are a pretty action movie style. There's some ads that Zach dug up in his research and his report he wrote for the organization it works for. Say the name of the organization again, Matt, because I'm blanketed right now. America's voice, right? I'm Jessica Taylor.

And I'm here to launch my campaign. for United States Senate. I'm a working mom of three and a small business owner who was raised in rural Alabama to love God, guns, family, fishing, and four-willing. But today, in Kamala's America, I fear everything we hold dear here in Alabama is under attack by socialist, big tech, and the radical liberals in D.C. The woke police and the fake news media are destroying our democracy, and y'all, I'm fit to be tied. It's long past time, serious conservatives like us, rise up and help finish Trump's mission of draining the swamp. The truth is, the left wants to keep lying.

If you can fast forward, Tom. Yeah, so the race parts there, obviously, Commonwealth's America, which is a weird way to phrase what's going on. Also, they showed a picture of an athlete at the Olympics, not turning away during the national anthem or whatever. And then, so she's got Alabama's a big NASA state, which is assuming is why she's using Iraq and Rock. iconography but uh she loaded she loaded a newspaper some woke books and a twitter avatar into into this rocket now watch what happens she puts on sunglasses say all the commie stuff is in the rocket see she put all the comedy stuff in the rocket and then she sends it to space i don't i don't know i don't understand the sunglasses it used

to be a bad thing right yeah yeah yeah but like i like the sunglasses the sunglasses the the utilization of the sunglasses there because it's like it was that just for maximum bad assery? Like she wasn't looking at the rocket. She puts them on, explodes the rocket behind her and then takes them back off once the rocket's out of frame. So, yeah, like you just had to have the sunglasses there for the sweet-ass rocket shot that they had. But what's up with this, Zach,

about like it's not. So they love things they love like xenophobia and racism and dog whistles and whatnot, but also silly action movie bullshit they're always blowing stuff up and jumping out of shit and shooting things and stuff like that like where did all that come from you think uh yeah i i don't know if i could give you the origin of what you know why they do silly shit um but i i think it's a bit right like they're they're doing this kind of thing that um you know i think i've heard you all talk about this before too right like to if you're in on the joke right trump is funny and i think like that's a little bit what's going on here too right like this action movie style like it's it's a bit

like if you like this shit if you like burning books which is like actually what's happening here she in one of the in one of the scenes she takes ibrax kennedy's how to be an anti-racist and loads it in the rocket and blows up the rocket um you know sets the rocket on fire so um but it's kind of like a wink in a nod like look we want to kind of be um funny it also i think is is trying to like be a little bit of a shock value um because they're trying to get noticed so she is running as a in a senate candidate and an alabama uh republican primary and a lot of these primary ads is where um between gop is we're going to see some of the worst and some of the craziest ads um it's because it's like gop people trying to out racist each other and out crazy each other to get

notice. It's time to take a sledgehammer. Just kind of one last thing. So she has released several other, like, different, like, shots and of videos to make sure that she could prove everybody that she actually did blow that rocket up. It's like the mainstay of her campaign is to prove she did light that rocket on fire and it did go up in the air. And it was actually a pretty big explosion.

She's very proud of that. She did an eighth grade science project. I'm very proud of her. Good for her. Yeah. This is Carrie Lake from the Arizona governor's race. Just the first few seconds, Matt, if you could watch the bad assery here. The mainstream media's lies and propaganda. There we go. The corporate media establishment flat out lies to people and no one is holding them accountable.

They exploit misinformation. They use it to manipulate the masses. They use fear mongering to create a scared and broken population. It's right out of a communist playbook. I know this because I used to work for the mainstream media. You could cut that. So this lady was the most frightening to me because later on that video, she does use the word

cabal, which you know is cue lingo. And she also uses the famous this is just how cynical it is. So there's a video that went viral. This guy, Timothy, blanking his last name, it tracks media

clips all over the all of the country uh used a bunch of clips from sinclair broadcasting which is a huge trump supporting uh you know trump media conglomerate uh that has must run segments where they talk straight to camera about how your country is being destroyed and whatever and she used those simultaneously clips to show that actually the liberal media is rigged and that is just chef's kiss i admire her moxie for that this lady is going places she's to evil totally yeah speaking of totally evil so another thing they like to do you know they are the ones who are actually being persecuted i've no no more persecuted group in this country than white christians i think we've all learned that by now you know um they are the ones who uh are having

their freedoms obstructed and all of that you know they're very they really think that they're being held down underneath the foot of the man and uh if you want a perfect example of this sort of bass acwards type of ideology look no further than nevada senate candidate adam laxalt i probably said that wrong but let's watch the first little bit of his ad which really highlights what i'm talking about my kids can't get enough of star wars we've watched all nine movies twice encounter they love it because it's a story about right and wrong good versus evil in our house and at our church we talk a lot about what's right and what's wrong and right now it seems like the wrong side is winning the radical left rich elites woke corporations academia Hollywood and the media they're taking over America yeah so uh jack my question to you is what the fuck yeah Yeah. I mean, yeah. So I mean, like, we've seen this like not just in this ad, but a lot of other Republicans use very similar tactics, right? So I think, you know, whether it be the Kerry Lake ad or this ad of wax salt ad, right? They're doing a sense of inoculation that I was talking about. I think that it's important, right? So they're inoculating their own base and their own viewers to say, look, you can't trust anybody out here besides us. Like don't trust, you know, don't trust the media. Don't trust anybody that says that we're using, you know, racism or anything else. Like, we are the ones that are incorrect.

And then they pivot and use this says, well, you know, it's actually we're the ones fighting against, you know, these rich elites, these corporations, you know, we're the ones, you know, really trying to, you know, have this beautiful, you know, anti-racist America, which is very much, very much lackable. But I think, like, for most folks that are not politically active, right, hear that, and you're like, okay, well, that sounds great. And so I think, you know, what they're tapping into, right, is the ability to do another kind of bit on their dog with. right so they they put this out and then they then they can say well look i'm not the racist one here like i we're fighting big corporations you know i'm the one that's really trying to get you know civility going on meanwhile people like adam laxalt and other republicans are the ones getting massive uh tax breaks to billionaires and corporations right not actually addressing real people's concerns right and so they are the empire yeah that's like 100 percent the empire they

think they're the like scrappy rebels whatever when they're like for uh for those listening to podcasts that we start talking about the empire um it was showing his little beautiful little white children play acting as rebels and then over over footage of uh Kamala and bLM protesters and whatever who obviously is supposed to be the imp so BLM protesters are the empire here and his rich little rich white children are the rebels now three funny things about this uh one he said we watched nine Star Wars movies. There's fucking 11 movies, dude. You got to count. Roadpointed so much. That's right.

Skid it. Secondly, I forget what the second one was, but the third one I was going to say is that George Lucas has been explicit in the allegory that is Star Wars. America is the Empire, and the Viet Cong were the rebels. Now,

I don't want to get fucking too deep into that analogy right now, but he obviously doesn't even know anything about the goddamn movies he supposedly worships. That part drove me a little nuts. Um, yeah, for sure. The whole thing is pass backwards. Zach, before we let you go, I wanted to make sure and ask you about one other aspect of this. And that's like the way that the media seems to cover it. I'm talking about the young can thing in particular and critical race theory. It was very much this thing and not just, I think we're pretty sure we talked about on the show too. It wasn't just like Fox News. It was on CNN and other outlets where like there was this whole narrative that's like, listen, this is a real thing. This is a real concern that real parents have. And to. act like otherwise is just, you know, disingenuous or whatever, which was always annoying to me because, yeah, these people are fired up about it, but it doesn't make it real. It doesn't mean it isn't some, you know, ginned up boogeyman or whatever just to serve the purpose of riling

them up. Like, you could talk about that instead of just acting like it deserves to be taken seriously because a bunch of fucking frothing at the mouth robs are upset about it. you know yeah no i think this was one of the main problems with um how the democrats in virginia and led by you know terry mccullough handled this right is that they've said hey this is a racist dog whistle and then they stepped back and then hoped that the media wouldn't take it like take it at face value and then they wouldn't cover it and they would say well this is you know just kind of like um made up racist garbage really to try to inflame you know uh racist anxieties right And they really thought that the media was going to go ahead and run with that and be fine.

We didn't have to deal with it as Democrats or as other people, which I think is actually, you know, something that's going to get us in trouble if we continue to believe that is the case. Because Republicans and their allies are very good. And they've been developing this strategy over over many years, which is to create this, you know, whatever kind of new outrage, new dog whistle, new boogeyman that they want to put forward. And then they and their kind of right-wing media sphere on Newsmax or O-A-N and then Fox News and they kind of drum it up over and over again. And then Republican politicians say, hey, hey, hey, hey, you know, the other media isn't covering this. You know, it's biased.

They're kind of working the rest of said, well, you know, CNN isn't covering this. Only Fox News is covering this. Only Fox News is covering this. And they kind of really blow it up and kind of beat up on, you know, mainstream reporters, you know, and say, you should cover this. you should cover this. And so mainstream reporters think, well, okay, well, I need to be objective and I'm really scared about this or seeing that I, you know, need to not be seen as like a, you know, a liberal here. And so I'm going to take these arguments that the Republicans are saying, and then I'm going to then use them and put them towards the candidate. So the Terry McAuliffe was

constantly, like you were saying, Trey was to say, you know, what do you say to parents about this critical race theory in schools, yada, yada, yada. And then Republicans will then take that when it shows up on CNN and then blow it up on their own channels to prove that they are right. To say, look, even CNN is calling it critical race theory is a problem. And which is a real problem because this wasn't ever about education at all. But I think if we hope that the media way it currently exists is going to call these things out, you know, we're really shooting ourselves in our foot. And we need to be, you know, as Democrats need to, you know, do their part to actually talk about this stuff, lean in, explain it to people. That's their job is to communicate

political issues to people. But I think also like other organizations, the great work that you all do here, right, continue to explain to folks that like calling out this kind of game for what it is because I don't think we can kind of really hope that the folks in the media, because they benefit from this kind of like horse race, you know, will they, won't they kind of thing. And Republicans have a strategy knowing that they're not going to call. Republicans racist. After four years of Donald Trump, that it took him four years to call Donald Trump a racist and a liar, like they are unwilling to do that work. And so I think if we rely on that, like we're going to be in a very bad position. And it's going to actually uninform and put a lot of

disinformation around, you know, friends and family and other community members who, you know, may not believe this stuff, but if that's all they're hearing, they think, oh, yeah, it's probably about education and kind of feed the racist dog whistle. Yeah. All right. Well, Listen, thank you for joining us, Zach. I want to give you an opportunity to, if there's anything you want people to check out, follow you somewhere or follow your work or anything like that, anything you think people should know about, then let us know. But we really appreciate you coming on.

Yeah, again, glad to be here, a big fan of here as a show. So I do a searchable database, so of all the different ads from like local school board on up to presidential, that anytime anybody's running like racist or xenophobic ads so that you guys can look at that, see, as a candidate in my area that's running these ads, You can kind of take a look at there. It's searchable by candidates, state, topics, stuff like that's at gopadwatch.com. And then on my Twitter handle at Zachary A. Mueller, every day I kind of do like an update on here's what the kind of crazy ads that are happening on Republicans, kind of the racist stuff that's happening. So if you're kind of looking for a more daily update to for whatever reason, if you want to look at this kind of racist garbage as much as I do, I kind of have that there to.

kind of keep you up to date on kind of like what's going on there to continue to call out and kind of shine a light on this stuff. Because I do think it's important to say, look, some Republicans are going to try to say, look, I'm a nice guy in a sweater vest. I'm not actually a racist. And I think if we can kind of point that out, I think that's really helpful. Okay. All right.

Well, yeah, check him out. GLPadwatch.com, Zachary A. Mueller on Twitter. Thank you once again for joining us, Zach. We'll see you next time. Thank you, Zach. All right. well you know we've only got a few minutes left here Matt if you see some comments you can throw them up there

as y'all know if you've watched the past couple of weeks you know that I've been having some technical problems I know imagine that so I'm on the I'm using the guest link which just means I do not have the power I've stripped myself of the power to put comments up there but I can read them though but Matt you can throw up anything you want before we uh I mean I have a before well bat's getting those up there I have a theory about why the critical race theory stuff resonates with parents so much. Besides racism, I think everyone hates sitting through HR seminars.

And the people who put those together have graduate degrees in social work. And they're annoying. And we anticipate our kids having to sit through that. And it makes people mad. I think that's it. Well, all right. There you go. Mark has cracked it.

See some other people reminding me, as always, to say, please like and subscribe. and all that good stuff. We really appreciate it. It does help us. And thank you all, as always, for reminding me to remind you to do that. So, yes, please do so. Also, I'll say right now, you can go to weekly skews.com to get a shirt if you want one. I've seen some people out there on the road wearing shirts.

It's always very cool. And Rebecca, and you can go to well-read comedy.com if you want tickets to see me live. Rebecca, from YouTube says, Trey, can we call ourselves skewers? Hell, yeah, you can. Sounds good to me. What do you think about it, Mark? Uh, like, like, uh, Beliebers or Swifties, we have skewers. Yeah, sure. I'll like that. I'll take it. Yeah, there's like millions of swifties and we'll have like a couple dozen skewers. I like it. I like it. I like skewers. Makes me think of like meat and vegetables on stick, you know, kebabs. I just go meat, but. Yeah. Yeah. Meat and peppers. It's hit for me right now. I don't see. I see. Um, I guess I'll address a thing that's come up pretty frequently. Bear Man prophecy on YouTube.

says trolls are good for views i know that we've getting we're getting more and more trolls sorry about that what are you going to do welcome to my world y'all fucking i mean y'all should see my dms sometime god damn but anyway yeah trolls just part you know sort of come with the territory what are you going to do you know what they say don't feed them that's the best thing to do just try to ignore them i know uh we use a multi-streaming platform to go out to all the different places at the same time which means it makes it hard for us to actually on any given platform regulator do anything about it so just try not to and you know also hey midment one free speech right yeah i'm not going to shut these dipshits up they can say whatever they want on my

channel i you know i die for their right to do so fucking idiots but if they're here just uh just you know ignore them and the rest of us have a good time um lou guy from youtube says does this show come on in a regular time each week it's live right now five p m pacific 8 p.m eastern for one hour. So five to six, eight to nine, every Tuesday night. It is live on my Facebook and YouTube and Twitter and all that. Then it stays up afterwards for the, you know, in perpetuity. So you don't have to watch it live, but it is live at the same time every week. Yes. Joe Yocum, Joe Yocom says, see you Saturday in Charlotte. All right, Joe, well, looking forward to it. We'll see you there. Let's see here. Coffee and Makeup with Sam on YouTube says I'm coming.

I'm going to see y'all in December and New Orleans. Yeah, I can't wait for that. Yeah, we're going to have some good shows. It's going to be a good time. I want you all to come see us. Let's see here. What else do we got? I got some love for Zach.

Robin Gothier says Zach Rocks. Thank you. So I hope you heard that, Zach. They like you. They like you, buddy. What else do we got over here? I believe there's a person saying that I suck. Is that a zucchini?

I suck zucchini. I don't know. understand. I mean, I like zucchini just fine, but what do you, like, are you saying that, oh, okay. Yeah, you got to do better troller, man. You want to go with the, with the, uh, uh, eggplant emoji. You got to go with the eggplant, buddy. Yeah, yeah. Justin Goldberg asked you all coming to Brooklyn, New York. Hopefully, we don't have anything right now, but I know we will be in the future. We've been to Brooklyn a number of times and won't be too long, surely, before we make it back. So, yeah. Spiritual home of rednecks out of place in New York, you got barbecue.

you got mason jar bars you got you got everybody dressed in flannel yeah mr morgan's got a whole bit about that exact thing hell we kind of made a sketch for comedy central about it but yeah we'll be back in brooklyn eventually okay mark you got a you got another call to get on right now and it's six o'clock so we're out of time thank you all very much we'll be back next week jennifer jury saw y'all in lexington it was a great show thank you jennifer we love y'all very much see you next time see you love you bye