Weekly Skews - Weekly Skews – 2/25/25 – How to Lose a Food Fight Against Food

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

Welcome. This week even literal Nazis are saying there’s too many Nazi salutes. “Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2” is involved. Congresspeople are getting strung up like Mussolini at town halls (just metaphorically, so far). Then, the farmers have gone woke, and the only person trying to solve the eggpocalypse is one lady running “Uber for Yardbirds.” Plus Egg Cartels? Egg Cartels. Come hang.Support the show

All right, everybody, welcome back. Happy Skews Day to you, as you see this. You're saying this on February 25th, 2025. It is actually where we're doing this here in the past. It's Monday, February 24th at 303 p.m. on the left coast as we sit down to do this here. Episode of weekly skews for you. I'm Trey Crowder. I.G. Everything's, you know,

going great in the world, and we're here to talk about it. Nothing of a good, fun stuff the whole way through. Hey, Mark. Yeah, but when we're talking about Trump's war on America's food supply and trying to destroy the farms and the eggs and shit, so it'll be fun. I want to take a little bit of a step back

and talk about something big picture because getting lost into the fucking chaos of all this shit. Speaking of which, let's talk about a little bit of chaos. So, this absolutely floored me. Let me quote here. President Trump, furious about delay in delivering two new Air Force One jets has empowered Elon Musk to explore

drastic options to prod Boeing to move faster, including relaxing security clearance standards for people who work in the presidential planes. If you told at least it's nice to know they believe in their own, nothing matters bullshit. That is exactly the

takeaway that I had from this too. I was like, you know what, in a weird way, I'm the opposite of, reassured is not the right word, I'm the opposite of reassured, but I am strangely I guess comforted in some way by the fact that this tells you that they really do think that things work this way

like clearly because he wouldn't like jeopardize his own fucking life if he actually believed that you know regulations and strict protocols and stuff mattered and were helpful and he clearly he clearly does believe that it's just totally unnecessary inefficient bullshit so yeah at least that's something I guess Yeah, when you die out of plane crash

At least know that the President of the United States isn't far behind you I do look forward Did they not Google News searched Boeing recently Or like what the fuck is like Like I look forward to like something going wrong Elon blaming Boeing And them killing killing Elon as a whistleblower

Because that's kind of where we're in it Like It's gonna be extremely funny When Trump gets sucked out of the window of Air Force One And like he goes six splats In a cornfield in Nebraska And a bunch of mega people Or like trying to collect his bones

to sell for relics later that'll be great um another one uh another story i want to talk about uh doge staff are known as big balls reportedly the grand kid of a kgb spy so edward khorstein uh corstein uh i remember he's the one who's the member of that he was on the board that was also like uh the satanic neo nazi cult there was like blackmailing kids for child porn yeah so that was big balls was also the satanic not Exicult one. Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

So I guess we can call it since the grandson of a KGB spy, we can call him, I guess Big Balls is short for Bigamir Balski. It's what we'll call him, we'll go forward. So the, actually the takeaway from this, like, people like, ah, he's a Russian asset. But like, the spy, he was a grandson of, was actually an FBI asset. And his granddad, whose name was Valerie Martinov, was arrested by the KGB and executed for being an American asset. So, like, the real takeaway here is that big balls, the grandson, is more damaging to U.S. freedom and prosperity than an actual KGB agent.

Yeah. I mean, look, you know, my, I got, you know, my, my papals, may they rest in peace or obviously, you know, they weren't beacons of progressivism or anything like that. They didn't work for the Russian government, but you know what I mean? like uh they weren't like they weren't in the clan but you know they bandied some words about they were cavalier with their uh yeah with their racial uh stances on things so you know far being for me uh but yeah big balls it's just it's just one of those things it's like every new fact you learn about all of these people makes it you know more like lunacy and like comically yeah fucking upsetting

it's it's like a learning that like Elon and like last week we talked about Elon and Eric Adams having the same lawyer it's like the world's such a small place to all these rich powerful people it's like it inherently looks like conspiracy board because there's never to do more two steps removed from any powerful person doing fucked up shit right yeah I can't like I don't I don't see big balls is going to end up so dead so I think we're about to we're going to talk about the backlash to a lot of congress people in a dumb-ass segment, but I wanted to, they're just going so fast.

Like, if I was going to destroy the federal government, I'd probably take it one agency at a time. But, like, but like, so, going too fast politically, they went to a huge thing. Like, it was just a month ago when Elon did a Nazi salute at an inauguration event, everybody had to pretend it wasn't a Nazi salute.

Steve Bannon and another guy both did Nazi salutes at CPAC this weekend. CPEC's every weekend now, I guess. I know. That's what I always think, too. It's like a secret from it all the time. And it's like, is this not a, I thought things like that were supposed to be like, you know, an annual thing. But they just do them all the time. I mean, you know, I guess somebody's making money off of selling tickets to those or something.

Plus it's a good propaganda campaign. People are showing up. Why not do it, I guess? But it seems like a little. Yeah, charged $1,000 of tickets to be able to lobby the government. Who wouldn't, like, it's free money. So the second guy who, uh, uh, took the Nazi slu was a Mexican actor by the name of Eduardo Verast. we, sorry if I'm fuck that.

I'm no one fuck that up so much. I mean, I don't know. I looked at his name and you got me. That was an admirable effort. Sorry to any of our Latino viewers for how bad I fuck that up. But like so, uh, uh, he looked at his most notable role was he played Kevin James romantic rival in Paul Bort, Paul Bork, Malkopop 2. I'm like, how are we down to a sidekick in Paul, like a nemesis and Paul BART 2?

Why is he speaking at C-P? I know the answer is he was in the sound of freedom movie. the Cuban on movie but like who the what the fuck anyway style you go ahead

well they just I just I mean it's a running thing with them and not having you know they just don't have

the best roster I mean you can you know kid rock and Hulk Hogan are just they're not always free I mean

yeah yes they are yeah right but you know I guess I just want to switch it up a little bit

and it's like yeah it's a pretty short list they're working from so you get down to uh you know the fourth on the call sheet in paul blart mall cop too but you got he said the guy's mexican are we talking like because you know they do have white people in mexico he's a nazi right so is he

no he looks like he had actual pigment um that's that's so it is it is deeply funny they were like we're not racist we have mexican friends their mexican friend immediately does a nazi salute it's like really fucking funny right um but the nazis the nazi salutes didn't even go over well with the actual Nazis? Let me fucking quote. Like, when I say they're going too fast, this is what I'm talking about. Nick Fuentes from his podcast Thursday night and said, quote, Bannon gets up there and says, Trump's going to run

in 28. Then he throws up a straight up Roman salute. It's getting a little uncomfortable even for a guy like me. Even I'm starting to feel like the guy in that picture who wouldn't how Hitler. Like, they're getting thermostatic blowback from fucking Nazis. Yeah. He wasn't, he wasn't the only one.

Now, we've got to split this Richard Spencer quote in two because it's misleading at first, okay? Richard Spencer, another get the Nazi who got punched. He got punched at the inauguration in 2016. Quote, the Manson family had a more coherent ideology than MAGA. And the liberal criticism that American fascism is merely a personality cult around Trump seems justified. He added. But his criticism is when you think he's not saying that there's too much Nazism here.

He's saying they're fake in it, like they're posers. He's a quote, at least Elon, an atheist eugenicist obsessed with rockets seems to have really meant it. so he believes Elon's a real Nazi but not the guy from Paul Blark too well it feels to me like Fuentes and Spencer are kind of saying it's like two different types of criticism

like that Fuentes photo quote at least makes it sound like he's like look I'm one of the biggest Nazis around and Jesus Christ pump the brakes a little bit this is just pouring it on a little thick whereas it seems like Richard Spencer is like I don't buy it I don't I know real Nazis and I'm not sure I think these are

performative party Nazis. They're just, they're like you said, posers. Yeah. I know Nazis. I'm friends with Nazis. I'm a Nazi.

You, sir, are no Nazi. He doesn't insult. So, but like, like, Fuentes is basically what I want to take his criticism is like,

I have other interests too, guys. You know, I don't always walk around doing Nazi salutes. Also, like, play video games, talk about having girlfriends

are gay. Hate women, yes. Yeah. They're like, well, we hate women, too. And it's like,

yeah, I'm just saying, you know, just mix it up a little bit more uh yeah all right we got a fun show for you producer matt is with us he's actually coming to us from across the pond and that's that matter see all he's in a jolly old london eating eels and and stuff like that go into places and such of extreme uh deprivety historically speaking and other such japeries all right but he is doing his thing this is weekly skews

i'm if i sound even more like uh e orish than usual It's because I just came back from the Carolinas today. It just got off the plane about an hour and a half ago, and I'm doing this. So, you know, you're getting the absolute best version of me. But it's going to be a good show. Mark is on his game 100%. This is a weekly skews before we continue. I need a nap.

Before we continue, I've got a couple announcements, as always. First, if you like to see me do stand-up, comedy, live, and in-person, which is what I was doing this weekend. And it was awesome. Thanks to everybody who came to the Carolina shows. go to Trey Crowder.com and check out my upcoming tour dates. I got Florida coming up next, Fort Lauderdale and Tampa, and then Minneapolis, and then a big northeastern run.

And actually, Austin, Texas, we're adding that to the website now. I have a little mix up with that. If we've got any Austin people, I'm coming there at the end of the March, be on the lookout for those links and stuff, and then a ton of other places after that as well. Also, that's all at Treycrowder.com. Also, if you enjoy this program, I would like to show your support, you can do so by signing up on Patreon.

Go to weekly skews.com slash more or just go on Patreon and search for my name. Either way it works. $5 a month, get you access to two full-length bonus episodes. It's just we do episodes of this show. We just do more of them. So if you like this show, you'll like that. Sometimes we do skew and a's, which, by the way,

mark just so, you know, people are hankering for another one. So I think maybe we should do that soon. Either way, get some more skews in your life, support the show in the process. Now, as for this, iteration of weak excuse, as Mark alluded to up top. We're talking about our president and government's quest to starve us all to death for efficiency and freedom reasons or something. I'm not entirely sure on it, but it seems bad.

It seems bad to not have food. And farmers are starting to get upset about it all, I reckon. We've got a lot of things to get into. First, we begin with the Daily Dumbass. Mac, graphic, please. tonight's dd women who worry their pretty little heads over their government being destroyed and don't realize they're doing a january 6th to poor little congressman rich mccormick this from a town hall in roswell georgia yeah tyranny is rising in the white house and a man has declared himself our king so i would like to know rather the people would like to know what you congressman and your your fellow congressmen are going to do to reign in the megalomaniac in the white house

i'm not going to give you my best foghorn lankhorn response to that but what i was he can go ahead and sit down thank you the uh when you talk about tyranny when you talk about presidential power i remember having the same discussion with republicans when biden was elected The funny thing is, the funny thing is, the funny thing is, the funny thing is, the funny thing is, you're sitting here and you, a lot of you would probably say those January 6s who are yelling just as loud as you, who were upset just like you. Pyranny, it's, yeah, well, I'll tell you, that was, you know, I, I don't know exactly, I'm assuming some kind of coordinated effort to get people together to show up at this thing, but I was just a little hard. by the response to that. It's Roswell, Georgia. It's, you know, not like a Democratic stronghold.

This guy, this very white MAGA Republican dude is the elected congressman there. And, you know, they're giving him the business and pretty big response. Loud chorus of booze. People cheer in. She called him a megalomaniac. And that's, you know, that's something. He's the guy who we talked about a couple weeks ago. He talked about how children should have their food, the free lunch cup.

and they should all get jobs and he's the congressman who like skateboards around the capital and he went on american gladators that's the guy okay so rich mccormick let me go here rich mccormick staff quote seemed caught off guard by the massive crowd at his town hall and a district trump won by 22 points okay uh i looked to watch a couple videos from this it looked like all white people i didn't see anyone younger than 45 right and this is a district trump won by 22 but republicans typically win it by 30 plus in this district and he's getting fucking screamed at by people you got to remember man federal employees do not just live in Washington, D.C. They're spread out all over the country. And this isn't far from the headquarters of the CDC, which is based outside of Atlanta. Well, that's the thing. Like, yeah, I mean, I don't know that this is the, I mean, you just said it's near the headquarters of CDC, but I don't know the situation in this actual area. But, like, where I used to work at, like, an Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the whole, the, that

town's like a company town for the DOE and the lab. and that whole, like, everything kind of revolves around the DOE site there. So everybody's kind of, they got stakes in what happens with, like, if that all just gets shut down, like mothballed overnight or whatever, I mean, it would devastate that whole community and area for sure. Yeah, I mean, I got a buddy from high school who worked in, like, he's a tech for, like, the Naval Surface Warfare Intelligence Center. He's like a private employee of the federal government. And he's always like, I mean, he's like, doesn't we follow politics close?

I just basically usually vote Republican for defense spending purposes because it affects his own job. That logic's been flipped on its fucking head. I'm not sure what new politics is going to come out of this, but it's not going to make any sort of old sense. And like I imagine that people in the Department of Energy used to have kind of the same logic because if anybody was going to defund the nukes historically, it would have been like some super woke person, right? So like I was trying to figure out like we're about to talk about more incidents of stuff like this happening. Plus, people are, like, people protesting Tesla dealerships all over the country. Somebody shot up a Tesla dealership in Oregon after, it set a fire. I saw a Tesla, maybe we put that on the show.

Sorry if we did. I can't remember, but I know I saw a picture of seemingly employees at a Tesla dealership had, like, put a sign up in their window or something that said something like, we think he's a dick, too, just so, you know. Or something like, yeah, we're probably getting harassed or whatever. And they were like, yeah, no, listen, he sucks. I was wondering, like, because I don't typically watch, like, TV news. I wonder what Normies are seen and hearing about, and usually the stuff I observe isn't, like, well-delivered or bad. But I was like, okay, so yesterday I was watching basketball, and the game went off, and ABC local news came on. And they were, it was like stories about federal employees, like good-hearted federal employees who lost their job.

And then she goes, the newscast was like, today the president posted a SpongeBob mean about, Federal job cuts. People really start to figure out how fucking dumbness is. And I really think, like, news usually is a hard time covering these fucking budget fights because they're boring and kind of conflict diverse. And Democrats are not providing enough conflict. But these voters are. And I kind of think, as annoying as I find Elon and evil as I find Elon, he made a real

mistake here. And that's kind of being too interesting to the news. Okay. And people are like, I didn't see that. Trump's been president a month, dude. A month. And people are he screaming at town halls in Republican districts. So Cliff Benson in Oregon,

a Republican at a town hall. The crowd started chanting tax Elon, taxed the wealthy, tax the rich and taxed the billionaires. That's a district that Trump won by like 40 points. A Republican district in California, they had a town hall there where people did a no king's chant after a stupid congressman when he tried to push back on any of this shit. Weirdly.

I mean, Luigi's going to court. People have put up, like, free Luigi signs and stuff like that, St. Luigi billboards and things like that in cities and whatnot. Weird things happen in this country. I saw an interview with a Republican veteran, okay, who said essentially his criticism of Elon out of town hall where he said a bunch of racist shit about white South Africans. And I was like, is this the way out of this shit?

We give a new racist target And it's white South Africans What was this I mean you don't have to like what what What is the you know what's the angle there Like if you're like a pie ball or something about Go back to your country Yeah yeah yeah

So Representative Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma Let me read this exchange she had with with constituent All right constituent it was a dude Let's do the recording it's just a little bit dribble it's hard to make out So I'm a Republican registered Republican voter, retired active army officer. How can you tell me that doge with some college whiz kid from a computer terminal in

Washington, D.C., without even going and getting into the field after about a week or maybe two is determined that it's okay to cut veterans benefits, vice? I think a couple things. Let me give you an example. Did you know that the VA was in charge of payments for illegals for housing for base of the VA, and he erupted her and he goes, that's a false flag. He's fucking accusing her of a false flag attack against the United States. like the mainstream white ring loons do not like this shit okay uh

well because it's like because like with a lot of things with them over the years it's like it's starting the ones that we're hearing from and the all the ones that were mad including the farmers and stuff it's like it's affecting them you know what i mean like it's bad for them and it's like that's kind of how conservatives have sort of always been i feel like for sure but like he's hurting a lot of people so right you know you know Like, I'm sort of, like, look, a lot of people taking glee in these people's, like, they're doing the fuck around and find out thing. Like, a guy, this went viral yesterday. A guy called into a C-SPAN show from West Virginia.

And he was complaining about his insulin going up from $50 a month to $80-some a month. And a bunch of people were like, fuck around, find out, all this shit. Even though he didn't even say, he never said he supported Trump or voted for him. It sounded like to me he didn't, but because he had a southern accent, everyone's like, fucking thinks this guy should die of diabetes. Yeah, that sucks. And I think, like, like, you got to understand, man. Politics in America has gotten extremely abnormal, and people still vote like it's normal, because they don't really follow all this shit closely. Like, if you watch this show, you know that, again, big balls are posting on message boards with satanic Nazi child porn cult members, right?

But you can't say that on ABC News, right? So what the fuck are people supposed to take away from this shit? Like, like, the hardcore, the ones who are outwardly racist, fuck now. The ones who just, like, you know, think Republicans mean you get to, like, go. going to do? Like, what are we going to do? Like, we're going to, like, wait, we're going to wish misery on all them? I just can't do it anymore. No, I'm, no, I mean, I agree. I'm with you on that, too. I mean, I've known, you know, being from where I'm from, I've known a ton of people. Like, I've got very, very good friends who now are, you know, drunk voters

and shit. And it's just, you have to just, like, I don't know, compartmental, I, I still love those people. And it's like, I just, whatever. It's just something I don't get. They talk to them. They're nice people. They would not do anything personally to harm anyone. whatever. It's a weird moment in history. I'm like, I just prefer to complain about people with actual power. So like, uh, they didn't quote here. This is at a, uh, at a, at a town hall on a Republican plus 18 district from a, uh, at a business luncheon. And a GOP representative Troy Balderson, quote, described President Donald Trump's flurry of executive orders as getting out of control and express them pushback to the idea of sole decision making power align with

Trump, a billionaire advisor Elon Musk. Congress has to decide whether or not Department of Education goes away, Balderson, assertion. not the president, not Elon Musk. All right. So like, even if you live in a Republican district, call your fucking representative, man. These people are bent. These people will cave to pressure.

They do not want to get real jobs. So yeah, call your representatives and complain at them, yell at them in town hall events, until they pass the law to make it that terrorism, which they're definitely going to try to do at some point. And then to which point you'll get a robot dog sent to your house with a gun on its head to shoot you. So this is like, when I say they're going too fast,

like Trump's trying to do two different, two separate things at the same time, become authoritarian leader and implement a massively unpopular policy program. You can't do both those things at the same fucking time. Right. I think so, yeah. Right. So, like, you remember that old Obama quote?

Like, if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together, right? Trump's trying to go fast, go alone, go real far, and go alone. All right. Right. And, like, you got to remember all the project 2025 policies pull around the 20% range, which is why he lied. said it wasn't his platform so so i mean i feel like that's kind of been the question i said the whole time again we're a month in but like it the question has been you know we know

or at least we very much believe and project that all these things he's doing are they're going to be bad and it's going to make things bad and the question to me has always been like then what happens when that becomes evident and it's like you're already starting to see people who are pissed off, like Republican voters and shit, are becoming pissed off. And it's like, and that snowballs and it's undeniable. And everyone's super pissed off and worried and freaked out. Then, like, what Trump and Elon and all them, Project 2025, what, like, what do they do then? Just tell everybody, well, fuck you.

We got our, we're in power anyway, so we don't care what you think. They can do it for a while, but like, but like, assuming there are still elections in two years, is going to get wiped out then what right so like like over the weekend uh heggseth and trump fire the every black and female chairman of the joint steves chair members of the joint chiefs plus uh got rid of all their jagged lawyers who would tell them that war crimes are illegal and and i would i would assume that was part of the plan because they want to put like loyalists in place in case they have to give the order to deploy the military and shoot protesters right so but in their head i bet you imagine those protesters were like antifo or BLM or

you know, brown people are mad about immigration. Every clip I watched those town halls was a middle-aged white woman. Right. So I think their calculus is off, is what I'm saying. I don't know if they're going to pull the trigger to shoot middle-aged. White women, maybe they will. I don't fucking know. But like, the anger out there is so intense.

And I'm kind of tired of complaining about Democratic leadership being, like, out of step with how angry people are. but like if they don't find their footing they're going to face like a liberal tea party revolt like i expect some democrats doing in primaries next year because there's not being responsive to their own constituents yeah a tea like a liberal tea party and it's like what so uh i remember once seeing when the tea party was happening in oakridge i saw flyers that somebody put out and this caught uh this didn't this made zero progress but they were calling it the coffee party and it was basically just like progressive yeah like a progressive wing we need a we need like a left response to what the tea party is whatever and some enterprising some bitch in east tennessee all

those many moons ago was already trying to get the ball rolling on that but it does seem like a more realistic proposition in the near future because there's like a definite hunger and feeling for that i mean every you know on the left it's people are fractured hopeless and they have no faith in the establishment of Democrats. What are you supposed to an environment where I think I didn't confirm this but I saw the reports there was like

somebody set an ice truck on fire in Philly and people are like shooting up Tesla dealerships and protesting all over the country even though a lot of them aren't being covered. People are screaming at town hall meetings and Hakeem Jeffries is doing a fucking book tour where he got yelled at of course he got yelled at it. What do you expect to happen when you're doing a book tour in the middle of all this shit, dude? again, it's not all bad.

Like, Bernie's doing events in red districts, like, that are having to expand capacity because he's trying to pressure enough Republicans to peel off votes to, like, stop them from appealing Medicare. So it's at least something someone's doing. This is a... So Trump's goon in D.C. talking about Democrats are horrified, I actually trying. His U.S. attorney for D.C., which is going to, like, try to be the guy, I guess, going to try to prosecute Democratic Congress people or whatever. His name's Ed Martin.

He wrote a letter to Robert Garcia, who's a Democratic congressperson, a congressman from Southern California, who said, at this time, respectfully request you clarify your comments from February 12th during the live video you would CNN when asked how Democrats can stop Elon Musk. You spoke clearly, quote, but the American public wants us, wants us for us to bring an actual weapons to this bar fight, an actual fight for democracy. Now, he's trying to accuse him of like fomenting an insurrection for saying bringing weapons to a bar fight. Yeah, inciting violence or whatever. Right. This sounds like a threat to Mr. Musk and appointed representative of President Donald Trump, who you call a quote, dick. So do they not, have they not familiar with the stories end effect? Because, like, they basically got major newspapers to print that Elon Musk is a dick.

Anyway, good for Garcia. And if this guy had done this, I mean, you probably had heard the inciting incident of what Garcia did, but I only heard about it because of this right here. the coverage of the yeah i had not so i i found out about it because this guy wrote a letter yeah um so this happened today uh i was wondering if you would say this view specifically because of the whatever i yeah nature of it this this happened this morning in the department of housing urban development uh today is the first day of their mandatory return of the office a video played on a loop for five minutes on screens throughout the building per a per agency source this coordinated independent reporter named ERISA Kabas.

Building staff couldn't figure out how to turn it off, so they send people to every floor to unplug TVs. This is what was playing on the TVs, if you got this video about it. Yeah, trigger warning. Hope you didn't eat recently. All right. If you are listening, if you're only listening to the show,

it's like an AI generated short video clip of Donald Trump, sucking Elon Musk's toes. with the text long live the real king plastered over it yeah yeah um so so some context here if you can't see it in the picture Elon has two left feet okay if you wonder how AI is going so the Washington Post write up of this said to describe the video as quote possibly AI generated and I so the Washington Post do the conventions of journalism that we all find find so frustrating in the way they approach it is leaving up the possibility

that someone got a hold of a real video of the president sucking Elon Musk's toes in the Oval Office while and Elon has been revealed to have two left feet. Yeah. Well, dude, I mean, if it would, if this had happened during the Biden administration

and it was him, I don't know what fucking George Soros or whoever I think of fucking there would be people, I'm not saying, I'm not most people would realize that it was fake but there would definitely be people acting as though it was a real thing right and I don't mean watch your post I mean people on Twitter and stuff that it would be like yeah the right they lives a ticot would have ran with it uh all right let's let's talk about food uh we eat it most days right we're big fans uh yeah so I think this doge thing should the end of the quote run government like a business uh people like this is just like it's never made any sense and This is sort of the most comically stupid version of it. These Silicon Valley dipshits have heightened all the contradictions.

Like running the government, like it was General Motors was bad. Running it like it's Pets.com is Darwin award shit. All right. Just to say things that should be obvious to anybody's thought about this for like 14 seconds. The reason you can't run government like a business is to business people, redundancy looks like inefficiency. Right. It's like, I mean, the goals are not, they're fundamentally different. Right.

You know what I mean? Like every, like, every, yeah, it's not for profit, for one. Exactly. Which changes everything, you know, immediately. But even, like, how you think about, how do you think about budgeting and stuff? Like, like, especially these Silicon Valley businesses are built upon, like, aspirational optimism, like insane optimism. Like, you give me $10 million. In three years, I give you back $100 billion.

Right. Governments have redundancies, but the whole point is projecting against downside risk. You have to run a government like you're an incredibly pessimistic person. You've got a guard against. every fucking thing that could ever go wrong. That's why you put two or three guys in nuclear missile silo in case one dies as a heart attack falls asleep

or goes insane. The other two guys are necessary. 99.99.99% of the time. But what happens the other percent? Right. And like this is also so fucking simple. Like like

I can't believe it's never occurred to like the genius is going to save humanity by getting a blowjob from a robot on Mars. Like the far. example of this you follow the email the mass email Elon sent to every federal employee over the weekend yeah oh wait a new one i mean i know that again i got a good buddy that still works for the federal government he has sent me uh some of the emails they've been getting along the way um right they got an email Saturday night they got like justify their yeah existence or something send an email back with five bullet points telling us what you did to make a difference last week right yeah um and uh how do you prove that you prevented something just by existing. Right.

You know, like, say, like, wasn't the FDA inspector supposed to do, send back a JPEG of all the diarrhea that Americans didn't have because they were working? Yeah. A lot of this stuff is proving a negative. And their plan is to, like, run all these emails

through an AI to determine which people's jobs are, quote, mission critical. So some artificial intelligence is going to tell a college-age anime race science in-cell to fire every natural disaster response team because they didn't have much to do between the days of February 6th and 23rd of 2025. Right. You don't have those teams because they're busy all the time. Yeah.

You have those teams because of a nuclear reactor explodes. You need them. Yes. I just don't. It's crazy that I don't know. That anybody is on board. with like big balls and his ilk being in a position to do all of this in the first place because it's like it's almost like a trope like some hot shot kid or nepo baby or something

shows up and tries to tell you how to do your job or whatever when you've been doing it for 30 years because they've what you know they've they've run some analytics or whatever else but you don't understand he's going to one semester of college one semester college and it's like I just thought it's like universally accepted that that's like it's bad when that happens And we all know that the 30-year veteran is the one who is right in that scenario, you know. And the people are actually like back in this, though, you know. Because they think they're geniuses, I guess. Just because they're association with Elon or whatever, they're like Wunderkin.

So they're special for different types of things. It's because they can do computer stuff and Chuck Schumer does no computer stuff. That's it. Right. Yes. If you know computer stuff, you're a fucking genius. It's like, shut the fuck. Like, hey, right.

You know, I was thinking about how short-sighted everyone in power is being. When I saw this, it's a new story from Canada. Kansas about some Republican senator, Republican congressman, trying to save a U.S. aid program by moving it out of U.S.A. if you got this met. Kansas lawmakers are trying to save a program that helps local farmers while feeding the hungry around the world. Today, Representative Tracy Mann and Senator Jerry Moran introduced a bill to transfer the Food for Feast Program to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Now, the program sends surplus food from farms to areas of global conflict. It's currently under the U.S. Agency for International Development. The agency was shuttered by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk's doge, and its future is unclear. Mann says moving the program to the USDA is a win-win for Kansas farmers and U.S. policy. I've never met a farmer that doesn't care about feeding hungry mouths around the world. It's good for our policy nationally or internationally as we are leading. It also matters. This is the most cost-effective thing we can do because we've learned that radical Islamist terrorism

and other bad things happen when people are starving. All right, you cut back. So I find this funny that the Kansas senator is talking about it in terms of foreign aid in the way that, like, a liberal would talk about it in terms of, like, you feed people that joint terror groups. Because Democrats gave up on that fight because consultants told them that foreign aid was a bad fight. But what he's trying not to do is this sounds self-interest because this is good for the business of Kansas farmers. Right. Right. Because they grow some of this program.

The government was paying them for some of this food that they were sending to other places. Right. So they're, yeah, it's like losing a major customer for them or whatever. But it's like, you know, a program that helps local farmers while feeding hungry people around the world. And it's just the idea. Somebody would be like, boo! Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, we've already talked about it before. But so much of a fucking win-win that I can't believe anyway. Right. So I might end up dying on this hill as we collapse into fucking, like, a dark, really, a dark timeline. but like I in general I think most everyday people are pretty normal and caring the ones I know anyway and wouldn't want people in Africa to starve especially if it costs Kansas farmers their business but like let's ignore the whole caring about others part of this for a second and just talk about like how a government should think and why we need to keep farms viable okay um one of Kansas's biggest crops is sorghum all right which is used big fan it's mostly used for animal feed and poorer people eat it in porridge, okay? Yes. I feel like it's much more popular in old-timey days and westerns and stuff.

You know what I mean? Yeah, you got to run some big sacks of sorghum. You've got to float it down logs on a river and stuff before the railroad came through, that type of thing. But since Americans have voted with their mouths and decided they'd rather eat Doritos, okay? Sure. So, but you know what, you know, there are points in time when people don't really care. about preferences and those are hard times.

We can eat in a fucking pinch. I'm talking about like times of war, pandemic, Great Depression. Great Depression, yes. And it's worth noting that this program was established before U.S.Aid under Dwight Eisenhower, who a big bullet pointer's resume was winning a war war during a time of food deprivation. So it is bad for America's national interest to not be able to grow our own food. I know, right. It's like, why, how is that revelatory to anybody or like, yeah, how are you going out on a limb by positing that?

It seems pretty self-evident. But because we don't need it at this very moment, we don't need to eat sorghum, it looks like a marketing efficiency to a psychotic libertarian like Elon, okay? But if those forums go under, we don't have to be able to stand them up in time to keep people from starving to death. Like, I can't believe I have to say this shit out loud. And this is one of the, the reasons like occasionally whenever there's like you know any sort of big political fight in america

resorts to like the red state versus the blue state thing which to me it's always an overly simplistic way to think about things considering like all of america's pretty spread out and diverse and like you know it's just like yeah had because republicans win elections 53 to 47 doesn't mean that we should abandon other the 47% of people who we're more empathetic with yeah and plus every state is made up of it's kind of the same general dynamics and every state just with like slightly different numbers on whatever side of the ratio meaning like a lot of the six cities are blue, er, and then the big chunks of everywhere else are red, and that's true in California, too.

There's hardcore mega Trump country in California, and there's liberal strongholds in Tennessee, so they're like red state, blue state, framing it that way is always, because it's a lot of people talking, you know, I mean, not seriously, but like people on the internet have been like, this is what should happen. The whole west coast and the northeast should join Canada. We should leave and join Canada. And then the rest of the state, you know, the entire south and everything, they can just be, you know,

Trumpistan or whatever, if they want to be in that type of thing. And I'm like, that, you know, my whole family lives in Tennessee. I don't want to be banned from Trumpistan. Never see my nephew again.

You know, I find that upsetting. We're not going to be able to do a Vietnam airlift to get all the trans people out of Mississippi, so I don't think we should just do that in them. Right. So like, so basically like,

the frustrating part about this is like, I probably believe that we live in a society and I want even hardcore mega people to be able to go to the doctor, right? And I don't know how to, But there's always a discourse where like, you know, red states are welfare queens basically because the blue states like California and Massachusetts and New York pay the overwhelming majority of tax money to the federal to the federal government. They're yada, yada, yada. I'm not sure what the implication is that we should get more say.

But like you also got to think about the downstate implication of what you're saying is like basically what you're saying is that because potatoes are less profitable to grow the mortgage back securities are to paper up and sell like they do in Manhattan. that we should say fuck the potato farmer. And I'd just say personally, when the shit hits the fan, in my personal, in my commune, I'd rather have the potato farmer than the mortgage back securities guy. And his potatoes. Yeah. We're all in this together. Like, we need people to be able to grow food.

We actually do not need the mortgage back security guy. But there are, there are, like, functional jobs in cities. I live in a city. I like it. I'm just saying, like, you got, like, think, I wish people would think. through the stuff where they say it. But like, as a farm kid, and I say that, I was a fat kid who liked to read who occasionally was forced to do manual labor.

I'm not trying to steal some farm valor here. But like, but it has always bug me that Americans are bylaws very disconnected from their food supply. And it's not like that's the way we chose to do it. It's not a moral judgment to anybody. It's just like most people, I'm just saying most people eat meat have never actually killed anything other than a bug probably. Right.

I was thinking about like one time a girl was dating in college drove home with me on a Sunday for my mom my grandma's birthday dinner i think it was and we passed the cow pasture and because farmers use all their land for obvious reasons the fences right up to the you know the easement on the road and the cow cow are just standing there chewing cut or whatever and she just starts laughing out loud and like what are you laughing at and she's like they're cows i'm like yeah i mean they're cows and she goes they're they're right there and i'm like where the fuck did you expect them to be i don't understand like where are they supposed to be like i do it's funny that they were in her sight. She who ate hamburgers

just didn't expect to ever see a cow. Yeah, wait, sorry. Who is this person that this happened to? Or who said this? A girl is dating in college. Where was she from? So she's like a city girl or something? A suburb of Richmond. She wasn't from like Manhattan or something. It was like, she was like an hour

and a half away from me. Yeah, because that's just, you know, I'm from the middle of fucking nowhere. And it's like we, one thing that we literally used to do to pass the time, me and my boy Thompson was like we would go out across from one of these cow passengers or talking about I come drive to the road and we'd like park on the side of the road and like smoke some dirt weed and then like give the cow's voices and act out a little like a little radio player dialogue between the different cows which is they're looking at the cow and give this one a voice and that one the voice so like I just can't you know cows are such a

right such a big part a formative part of my growth as an entertainer cows huh also they grew up around around farm animals as part of the reasons I'm very enthusiastic for stuff like beef inspection and also like why I would never drink raw milk like being like only a psycho who's never been around a cow would want to drink wrong milk but whatever um so I'm thinking about all this stuff and about how like the spring thaw is about to happen and a bunch of farmers don't know if or when they should plant or what they should plant because they don't know what the government's going to fund or subsidize uh yeah so I was reading this story yesterday Republican lawmakers showed

No show as Western Wisconsin farmers complain of Trump's chaos and disruption. This is a story from the Washington Examiner. Let me quote here. Emmett Fisher, who runs a small dairy farm in Hager City, said during the town hall that he was struggling with the freeze that he's been put on federal spending, which affected grants he was set to receive to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The story also quoted crop farmers, worried about tariffs on fertilizer, putting them out of business. These are people whose communities are heavily reliant on Badger Care and Medicaid to get by. Grown men cried at this town hall. There were supposed to be eight politicians,

eight public servants, should put it that way, were invited. The four Democrat Congress people showed up. The four Republicans did not. I pose a question. One of Wisconsin's, I talked about potato farmers earlier.

It's one of Wisconsin's bigger crops. I pose this question to Mr. Trump and Mr. Elon. Who is going to grow potato? Who's going to milk cow for butter to melt on potato? I mean, it's a good question. because isn't part of their whole thing supposed to be, you know, they love tariffs so much, right? Which part of their justification for the idea of tariffs is so because it will

incentivize people to get shit from America instead. And, but if you're, you know, if you can't, you can't buy it because of tariffs, you can't buy it from elsewhere because of terrorists, you can't get it here because you're like stopping everyone from being able to produce it in the name of efficiency or whatever. Then, like, well, then what? We just don't have potatoes.

because that's not going to be popular. People really fucking love potatoes, myself included. While you're talking about tariffs, Trump was asked about the EU European Union might be, there might be slapping tariffs on American products, including produce and like meat. And this is how I responded to it, if you got this clip at. It was talking about banning food imports from the U.S. Kind of along the lines with the reciprocal tariffs. Why is that?

Why? They don't like... That's all right. I don't mind. Let them do it. Let them do it. They're just hurting themselves if they do that. I can't imagine it.

I cut it, Matt. He said, if they slap tariffs on our products, they're just hurting themselves. Right. Yeah. So what is it what we do? When we do it, you know, we do what they're talking about doing. Uh-huh. It's fine.

He's like, yeah, they're just hurting themselves. You know, all that's going to do is drive up costs for the people in their country. when they passed those tariffs. That's, you know, an idiot would do some shit like that. So let's talk about what Trump has done to American farmers so far. He's frozen their foreign aid program, leaving their food to rot. He's frozen legally owed reimbursements for their energy efficiency upgrades.

He's threatened to port half the workforce. He's suppressed research on bird flu. It has encouraged the European Union to ban their products. He's also fired a bunch of food inspectors. And now I can't quite say that for sure because he's also, rehired a bunch of them and then fired them and fired them. I'm not sure who works to the government right now. Um, but like this, firing food inspectors is a second assault on farmers potentially because like if the food's not getting inspected, we can document that

it's safe to eat. Other countries are not going to fucking import it. And forget making us sick for a second. The farmers are going to go under because they have less customers. Um, like we have to eat this shit, but other countries don't have to let it in. That's what I'm saying. Right. There was a, back in like 2017, I think it was, There was this big, I'm not sure how much of a noise that made in American news, but JBS, which is a Brazilian meat packer, basically, was shipping a bunch of rotten meat to China and the European Union, and China, EU caught them brabbing food inspectors and stopped import in JBS meat. JBS is like CEOs, got arrested in Brazil, connected to this somewhat. I mean, they were robbing people in Brazil. It's more what they got arrested for there.

but, like, EU and China the rest of the food inspectors in their country, I think China just fucking killed theirs. So, like, other countries don't play about this shit.

Right. So, I don't know why evil, like, country we consider evil like China. They take the health of their, the food, their people eat more safely than we take ours,

but you can think through, you can think through that way we're trying to go to sleep later. So, some of the egg shortage for a minute. The egg shortage is a government failure too just not in the just in the big picture sense not in like joe biden didn't push the more egg button in the role of office it's more like the bipartisan consensus that the public has

no further will for public health efforts and disease medication to have a bird flu and also like a not enough appetite for antitrust enforcement preventing mergers i know down so price gouging it's it's like after coven everything like you said the public just doesn't have they just won't they're you know there's like we ain't doing none of that ever again don't even say the word about we're not doing vaccines we're not doing none of that shit and it's like but what so we just let disease run rampant then and it's also like with bird you don't even have like we're not even talking about doing anything to people yet right we like vaccine so it's like i don't know if they should just fucking do it you got to tell people but i think the

Biden administration just didn't want to fuck with big agriculture leading up to an election year. I can't regularly figure it out. It's like, it's like, it's like, they could have like, like, farms were like basically refusing to do more testing because they did not want to find positives they had to call their herds. Right. It's like, well, yeah. Yeah. But the need to call your herd is why we need to test, man.

If we need to figure out a way to like do bailouts or reimburse you for the cattle or burge you kill, then fuck it, we'll do that. But like, the, letting bird flu fester is not a good idea. and then today's not about that. But anyway, so U.S. egg prices reached a 45-year high as bird flu intensifies. Some have seen some estimates are like $8 for a dozen eggs. And let's think about that. There's a saga of and following online about this one street parked cyber truck in Brooklyn

that all the neighbors take turns egging every day. Yeah, that's real commitment in this specific egg climate, you know, egging a douchebag cyber truck in this economy is a really strong statement. And I've seen other reports as like cyber truck forums of people that drivers complain about getting egged. And I'm like through my rough estimates, I bet at least a dollar the price for every dozen eggs is due to inflation caused by mass eggings of cyber trucks. So just to briefly touch on bird flu, I'm not trying to panic everybody, but it is progressed like mammals, like they found in like elephant seals in Argentina. bird to bird transitions picking up

and again I'm trying to panic everybody in the halting metaphor department let me read this headline Bald Eagle have found in northwest suburbs may have died from

bird flu expert says none to worry about seems like that can only be one type of omen yeah still no side of human to human transmission but if it gets there

we are absolutely fucked it's way worse than COVID So Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council was talking about Trump's avian flu plan over the weekend. Let me read this stupid-ass quote to you. Why they're asking the guy who's in charge of the National Economic Council

about how they're going to stop bird flu, he's not an expert on vaccines, animals. Birds, flu. Birds, flu. None of it. He's ostensibly an expert on money, but what I'm read about it, he's not even an expert on that, whatever.

So what we need to do is have better ways with biosecurity and medication and so on to make sure the perimeter doesn't have to kill the chickens. To have a better, smarter perimeter, they're killing chickens to stop the spread, but chickens don't really fly. So what he wants to do is to kill the geese and ducks, who I guess are flying over and coughing on the chickens. Motherfucker, the problem is not that the chickens are flying from coop to coop. It's one chicken gets it and gives it to all the other chickens in his coop, and it's fucking mutating while they're passing it back and forth. Right. And you won't, and people are, like, hiding the fact that their chickens have it or refusing to check for it in the first place. So these chickens are getting moved around transported like chickens always are.

And then, you know, it's pretty easy to see how that could spiral. Hey, it's talking about doing better biosecurity, like, meaning to checking what the chickens when they go in and out of the coops. But, like, they're, sorry, when they go, when they cross the borders and shit, state borders and international borders. But they're five, the Trump administration just fired all the biosecurity people who work at border stations. they just like here's a headline Trump administration is trying to rehire USDA bird flu officials it fired

this article man it says the birds are layoffs are part of a cost cutting mission stop fucking saying that the entire federal workforce their payroll makes up 4% of their federal budget this is nothing to do with cost cutting

and also the money's already been taxed it's in federal bank accounts right it's going to be spent on something they're just not spending on stuff that's going to like save our fucking lives her food supply. So they're like, stop, every reporter stop saying it's about cost cutting.

It's not fucking about that. So other stuff we're not fucking doing. Here's a question from this headline. Why isn't the U.S. using a bird flu vaccine in poultry? Because vaccines are gay and everybody knows it.

Because we can't make the Dono chicken nuggets autistic, Tray, I guess. So no one has really answered the question why we haven't been vaccinate the chickens, that's a possibility for the thing we could do. But then last week, thank God, the Agriculture Department gave a strong sign yet that the federal government could be shifting its strategy. The agency said it granted conditional license for an H5N2 bird flu vaccine designed to work against several variants. So we're going to heal the chickens of bird flu.

Well, RFK lets your kids, like measles run wild on your kids, and we're not going to be able to get a bird flu vaccine for people if it starts spreading. We're going to have universal chicken healthcare, Tray. Yeah. That's how we're going to solve health care than we do. Yeah. They're doing

just trying to solve this problem in all the stupidest ways. Like earlier this week, the United States recent agreement to buy 15,000 tons of liquid egg from Turkey to help with the shortage.

Yeah. I don't even know what the fuck liquid egg is, but I was about to ask you that. I've seen it before. I'm aware of its existence, but I always just kind of thought it was,

you know, like eggs that just been like sort of pre-cracket process. Is it the cartons like that? I mean, I think so, right? Like there are, yeah, like cartons you can get and you just pour out some egg juice. But I don't know what that actually is in there. So they really think people are like, everyone's like cemented this idea that what people

really, really mad about for the last two years was just egg prices. Right. As opposed to egg prices being a metaphor for something. And they're going to thwart the proletarian coup by spraying liquid eggs into our mouths at our version of the Coliseums while like migrants do mandingo fights for, or a gladiatorial games or something. Yeah, thanks for everybody. The rich will be bathing in liquid eggs,

drinking some champagne flutes. Maybe it's just me and I'm alone in this, but I would trade never eating another egg again to thwart a bird flu pandemic with a strain that has a 50% of fertility rate. Well, good Lord, let's hope it not, don't come to that, Mark. My God, getting a little extreme on here, never eat an egg.

I think you're underrating the culinary versatility and excellence of the incredible edible egg. Again, they do a lot. 50% fatality rate, Tray. 150 million Americans dead. But at what cost? And I just really, we don't ever, you know, have to lose eggs forever. I'm a big, I'm a big, I'm very appreciative of the mighty egg.

Well, I'm telling you, Trey, if this pops off a human, human transmission before we, after we fired all the scientists who work on vaccines and therapeutics, you're never eating another egg again anyway, buddy. I don't know what to tell you. So, just like, like this, so again, government has been. business, like, because the pandemic's not currently happening, we're not, we're firing everybody who would hypothetically work on it. And again, like, I started an interview with like a disease expert who says, like, okay, well, we got like a five to 10% chance of us getting into human

to human transmission, which is not great odds for the virus. I'm just asking you, how much would you risk on a five to 10% bet? And would you be willing to spend slightly more tax dollars to curb those yeah five to ten is way too fucking unacceptably high for that particular number i would have hoped it was more like you know but a point point two five percent type this type of thing is not that be i five to ten is very disconcertingly high yeah we cut to me talking about eggs like eggs aren't is like totally controlled as other agricultural interests but it's been trending that way, okay? It continued

to quote here, egg production continues to consolidate among a shrinking number of industrial overtly integrated or contracted farms. I'm quoting

from a blog called food power, but they linked their sources that were credible. Even the organic shit's getting bought up by private equity.

See if you buy your little kit. You're like, I'm going to do the cage free organic stuff from down the street. Not all that money

is going to somebody on Wall Street too. Egg production is concentrated reasonably with some 45% of production located in just four states, Iowa, Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania.

So Pennsylvania is a swing state, and if you want to be president, you've got to kiss Iowa's ass. I guess that's probably one reason nobody's fucking with their money. Today, just 59 companies comprise 87% of all egg production, and the four largest corporations claim 28% of egg sales. The main player here is a Mississippi-based company called Cal Main. Now, if you're talking about consolidation, why is a company based in Mississippi, called California, Maine. Yeah, but it's also not one of the four states you named when you're talking about the height of egg production. Right, but they control farms all over the country.

They also control 16% of sales and more than 40 million hens, okay? Okay, so this is big egg we're talking about. Big egg. They grew through takeovers acquiring over 20 companies since 1989, and it describes itself as a, quote, leader in industry, industry consolidation. Congratulations on that, buddy. I like when they put the reasons we should kill them down on paper. Cal Main's control of the market gives the power to do shit like this. Here's a story called suit alleges Costco, Trader Joe's, and others heighted egg prices during the pandemic.

Cal Maine was also named this lawsuit, followed by the state of Texas. It claimed that Cal Maine raised generic egg prices by 300% even though the pandemic had not disrupted its supply chains. No, surely not. That don't sound right. I can't see an American corporation doing something like that. Uh-huh. And a time of desperation for people. Yeah.

And Cal Main's been caught fixing prices before. They got sued and had to pay a settlement of $57 million, I believe, a couple years ago. The suit wasn't decided until 2024, but it was followed back in 2003. And you're like, wait, 20 years, that must have been expensive, which is, and the answer is yes. And that's why the plaintiffs were craft Nestle and General Mills, the industrial egg purchasers. You know, large companies could afford to fund a two-decade lawsuit to get. get the paid back for the money they were fucked out of. What I'm saying is we, the consumers, did not get our cut for getting fucked for

price gouging back in 2003, nor have I seen any result from that lawsuit followed after the pandemic when they were price gouging. And what do you know, in Milva's bird flu pan, this, this egg shortage that is ostensibly caused solely by a bird flu related supply shock. They just announced, fuck, they put, I hate when they put puns in their fucking evil press releases. Cal Maine Foods post exceptional growth despite avian flu influenza

challenges. Their shares have gone up 105% in the past year while they're supposedly suffering dealing with bird flu. Rich get richer, buddy. Yeah, man. If eggs are so expensive, let's eat the fucking rich.

There you go. Yeah, boy, finally somebody says it. You know, I'm down. Come up with a good rich person marinade or something. either way that's a rallying cry for the end of this episode thanks for watching yeah you've got smother a particularly tender rich person in bernay's sauce which you eat eggs to make though is the problem yeah see i'm telling you mark we need eggs uh thank you guys for watching again go to tray crowder

dot com check out on coming tour dates come see me on the road i promise we're having a good time out there and also consider supporting the show on patreon and getting bonus episodes in the process weekly skews dot com slash more or just got a patreon search for my name but either way you you keep watching these here skews d editions we'll keep making them and we'll see you in about a week love you bye skew