Weekly Skews - Weekly Skews - 5/4/21 - Recount Mirage In Arizona Desert

Episode Date: May 5, 2021

 On tonight's episode Smart Mark cuts loose on the lunatic conspiracy theorists currently running the ballot audit in Arizona (who are also ninjas! Cyber ninjas! For Jesus! Cyber Jesus Desert Ninjas!). Also we welcome journalist Esther Honig for a conversation on immigration and America's food supply in the COVID era. Join us!Support the show

howdy y'all thanks for joining us and may the fourth be with you that's right today is tuesday the fourth of may twenty twenty one i'm track router and that's mark a what's up mark hey are you uh i know you're a happily married man but i assume are you working on your your dating tape to send to bill gates yet i like i you skip straight skip the room Melinda was I mean no no no we got no shot in Melinda yeah I mean like about dating like one of his 80s video they're just like hi I'm Mark a little bit about me I fucking hate Steve Jobs say he's the worst

I love graphic interfaces and Excel spreadsheets and those are my favorite activities yeah it's like I mean like what he's like in his like what 60s right so he probably almost would have sex like once a year I can get down with that you can handle that sure yeah Yeah, hey, you got to go for it. We all got to shoot our shots, right, in this moment. You don't get many opportunities to have billions of, like, my thing is, like, why the

fuck do you get divorced when you could be on adjacent islands and never see each other? Like, you have so much money. Why, like, my least favorite thing in the world is filling out paperwork. And they can buy their way out of that. Just, just, you live. Right, yeah, they could just stay married and just keep being, you know, mega billionaires on their separate islands and stuff. Like you say, yeah. You don't have to go through the whole process.

I mean, those differences must be pretty irreconcilable, I guess. But, hey, you know, we'll help you work through it, Bill, if you want us to. Me and Mark, we're here for you, Bill. Yeah. Divorce used to just be the exclusive providence of rich people. Then us white trash really took it and ran with it as far as being poor and getting divorced. Sure did. And then now it's back to being a rich people's thing again.

I don't know. The real white trash move, I'm going to put my mama on blast here as I've done countless times before and she always loves it. The real white trash move is to just, like, get divorced but without ever actually doing it. Do you know what I mean? Would you just, like, split up, but not ever to go through all that paperwork and stuff? Like, I'm pretty sure she's still legally married to my stepdad from 25 years ago or whatever. But, you know, it's like, hey.

Why lose the, yeah, why lose the tax break? Plus, if he forgets to cancel his life insurance, Paul, so you'll collect some free money when he kills her. Hey, he's not a big insurance guy. Anyway, with this as always, producer Matt out there producing, this is weekly skews tonight. The big Arizona ballot recount that every red-blooded Trump supporting American idiot is hinging their delusions on at present. Also, the cyber ninjas for Jesus who are in charge of said recount, in case you were wondering, it is somehow even dumber than it sounds. We also will talk about the Biden administration raising the refugee cap as part of a larger conversation about immigration in this country in the time of COVID and what it means for America's food supply. For that, we will be joined by our guest tonight, journalist Esther Honig.

We're looking forward to it. We hope you're looking forward to it as well. All that and more on tonight's weekly skews. But first, as always, we begin with the Daily Dumbass. Matt, graphic, please. Tonight's dumbass, these Santa Monica anti-mask protesters for committing the age-old dumbassery of telling teenagers what to do. Matt, play the clip. So, we don't need masks.

So, in case you know, in case you're asking. you're only listening and you had trouble hearing that what that was was a 13 year old with blue hair telling an idiot to kill himself or in the words of john melanchamp ain't that america i think it was the one with pink hair and she's one turned around anyway but either way it's like the one with pink hair i'm sorry it is funny because he he immediately turns the person with him to try to save his dignity and goes like see this is just like in nazi germany they're so used to following orders it's like no no she did the opposite of following orders he's told you to go fuck herself when you told her to do something.

Dude. Yeah. Yeah, I'm just, I'm happy to say that, uh, that middle schoolers still got it, you know? Like, I feel like the narrative, I feel like that, because, you know, for the longest time, the conventional wisdom about like 13 year olds, it's like, these are some of the most brutal human beings on planet earth. Like, they will rip you apart verbally. But I feel like the narrative about, you know, these kids today, they're all soft and too

woke and too sensitive or whatever. But now, some of them are still out. they're swinging baby and i appreciate it it's a lot of narratives about kids are always people projecting their own securities onto their kids right because like uh one as far as like all the things our parents are worried about us doing like doing drugs and sex and stuff statistically today's kids are fairly drug and sex free and though they're lowly less teen pregnancies and STDs and all that shit so they're except for the blue hair and stuff they're basically the biblical teens that our 80s parents wanted us to be right but uh

also about them being soft and stuff. Like, because of the internet, they're bulletproof. They, like, words cannot sting them. Like, like, I remember the Parkland teens. The Parkland teens almost got murdered. Immediately had the entire internet descend on them calling them liars. It came out of it, like, like, as activists, not cowed. But, like, it's, like, it's kind of a, I really don't think you can, but boomers hate

being made fun on the internet. So do millennials and, like, immoriation stuff. So we're like, oh, these kids must be so. miserable. It's like, they're like, they just yell, kill yourselves and fucking keep it trucking. Yeah. All right. Yeah, no, they're the, they're the natural pinnacle of the sticks and stones philosophy, you know? Yeah. We merely adopted the internet. They, uh, they were molded by it. They were born into it, molded by it. That's right. So these same kids, so as Aunt Big was supposed to be a big anti-mass protest at a school in, in Santa Monica,

around where me and Mark are at. Um, these same kids, counter protested with some pretty serious and and Biden commentary here. Matt, won't you play the clip if you've got it? Concession.

Valley parking is a crush it. But where is Christi Craig? At the bottom of the ocean. The crab is a metaphor for society. Suss? Suss? Suss? Sallet parking.

Sully. Sourkeye parking. Nallet parking. Go ahead. They said the Krusty Krab is a metaphor for society, and the Krusty Krab is a symbol of oppression. They're sitting there wearing Squidward mask talking about the evils of the Krusty Krab's fascist policies. Krusty Krabb is a horrific oppressor. He doesn't pay a fair wage.

He treats SpongeBob like shit. And he's, of course, voiced by one of cinema's great villains, the guy who played the bad guy at the first Highlander movie. I can't think of his name right now. But he's, like, huge and very mean-looking. But a very nice guy, it seems like me, he does cartoon voices. But one of those signs also said, I hate signs, which is a really cool protest sign to do with no anti-maskers. I like the anti-masker guy. He tries to engage with him about what they're there to do.

making it. It was like, that's what he said. The Krusty crab is a metaphor versus that. Yeah. I love when kids annoy other people. It's great. So they're out there. I mean, yes, they did scream, kill yourself. But they're also out there with their counter protest talking about fucking sponge bob

shit and whatnot. And the anti-mass protesters were very alarmed and upset by this. Matt, if you have that screen grab of the message that one of them sent to the protest, Facebook page says,

Hi, everyone, we did a rally today regarding mask at a middle school in Santa Monica. What a ridiculous thing to have even done. But anyway, thank you for your support and showing up. I wanted to comment on it. I have expected some of the kids to join us or at least listen to what we had to say. However, I was very creeped out by what I saw. These kids were only 12 to 13 years old, but a lot of them were dressed like they were grooming to become Antifa. Some had blue or green hair.

They gave us middle fingers and told us how they love wearing masks. They had zombie looks in their eyes. It was quite scary the amount of brainwashing that these kids were under. Okay, blue hair, zombie eyes, middle fingers. Like, again, just sounds like 13-year-olds to me, man. They're just out there doing their 13-year-old thing. They have zombie eyes because we make kids. go to school at 7 a.m.

And they're walking past you in a hurry because they're late to class and they want to stop and talk to some corny and crazy adults. And also, like, we didn't show the video, but one video in that thread, this guy is walking being like, hey, why are you trying to talk to my kids? Why are you talking to strange kids? It's objectively weird behavior. And these people, like, don't have any answers. And realize how creepy they are because, again, this is an offshoot.

Q and on this whole movement revolved around trying to stop pedophiles and here they are trying to hit up to chat up strange little girls it's fucking insane dude absolutely i mean my sons are eight and nine so that's even more extreme but i feel like if they were 12 and 13 and there were weirdos standing out there trying to talk to them about how the virus is a hoax or whatever and they shouldn't be wearing mask or whatnot yeah i'd be very upset by that um That's not cool, generally speaking, to approach, as you said, strange children. All children who aren't your own are strange. And you shouldn't approach strange children with some bullshit.

Even if I wasn't afraid of like the white pedal van scenario, like even if I agree with the person's politics, don't fucking talk to my kid about politics. They're 12. Leave them alone, man. I don't know what to. It's, yeah. All right. So moving on to our honorable mentions for Daily Dumbass tonight, we've got some good ones. for you. The first one is

anybody who thought that the good people of the state of Utah, the good and very white people of the state of Utah, wouldn't figure out that Mitt Romney is a communist. Well, we got news for you. Play the clip. This is Romney

in front of his people. So what do you think about President Biden's first hundred days? Now, you know me, a person who uh who says what he thinks and i don't have the fact that i wasn't a fan of our last president's character issues and i'm also no fan you're not they're not no they're not no that Yeah, that would require shame. They are famously and utterly shameless people.

But, like, being serious about that for a second, though, I saw another article that was going around today that said Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney are finding out that the Republican Party is basically done with them, meaning like there's no room in the party anymore for someone like them. You know, someone who has some measure of reason left about. anything. Yeah, I know, I know. I'm not trying to give, I'm not trying to give either one of them too much credit. But I'm saying that's how extreme it is. It's like, even they are like persona's non grata in the, in the current day Republican Party just for being like, listen, I think he was a little out of line or whatnot. I mean, it's scary, but. Yeah. I mean, that's in Utah. That's essentially the same as like that that that's the equivalent of january 6th in utah which has happened there that was a that was a deranged mob uh that's as wild as they get

you know since they stopped yeah being a he's not being a militia in the 1800s um but yeah i mean that's like they i love them calling midromney a communist the guy who ran bane capital is a communist now like it like just words have no meaning anymore i don't even know how to parse it he's literally only problem with trump he's a sex criminal he loves everything else about Trump. Yeah. So, all right, our next hour we'll mention, I've said multiple times that I'm thrilled to be back to the era of frivolous scandals, you know, where it's like, like when Trump was in office, it was a legitimate insane scandal every other day. And before that, it was Obama and it was tan suits and mustard stains and all this type of stuff.

And we're back to that era now. And the latest one involves Joe Biden's flower picking policy. You'll never believe the audacity of President Joe Biden when it comes to picking flowers. What am I talking about? I barely know, but let's play the clip and let One American Network or Newsmax, one of the two, explain it to you. I think it's Newsmax, there. All right, folks, I want you to take a look at this. Joe Biden today, getting on Marine One, and he stops and picks up, I think it's a dandelion,

but it's a dandelion that hasn't even blossomed into a flower yet. Like, it gives everybody asthma. So you blow it, it goes everywhere, and then everybody starts sneezing. Well, he picks up the weed and gives it to Jill as what I guess is supposed to be some kind of a sweet gesture. He's getting dandelions all over the place. I say it was a planted dandelion there. Who knows? The ploward was planted.

This dastardly son of a bitch, Mark, giving his wife a dandelion, and also giving asthma to all of his crew members by the usage of this planted. Yes, the dandelion that obviously was planted. What did that part even, like, he spent the whole time talking about how like,

who picks a dandelion gives it to their wife? What a fucking lunatic. But then ends it with, it was clearly planted. What was that supposed to even mean? Just everything's a conspiracy now? Everything's got to be that. And I am open to the idea that a lot of stuff we see that looks like spontaneous videos

or, you know, stage social media events, you know, like, you know, kiss cam gags at sporting events or a lot of them seem to use the paid extras and stuff, which is fine, who cares, whatever. But like the first half, like two thirds of the video is like, fellows, is it gay to give your wife a flower? And then the, then it privates to like, you know what? I think this is a goddamn sigh up. right yeah exactly that's what i'm saying it's like they got to shove that in to any given narrative they have at some point they got to shove siop in there like nothing is real it's all the deep state regardless of what the thing they're actually talking about has to do with up to and including

picking dandelions can i escape the info wars tray we're we've all we've all been drafted into the info wars it's 24 7 you can't like somebody picking a flower is up to something, can't, can't just want to give his wife a flower. Yeah, producer Matt points out that Trump exposed the Marine One crew to COVID. Sure, sure, but not asthma from a flower, Matt. So, whatever. I don't hear that. Fuck you, Matt.

All right. Our last honorable mention is the, uh, the city code people in a small Minnesota town who ever thought they could get a, uh, a small business owner from that area to concede in a giant flag war. What am I talking about? A small business owner, owner of a construction business in Buffalo, Minnesota, I believe it was, was flying a gigantic, gigantic Trump 2020 flag that apparently was against the code for their local ordinances or whatever. But he said he'd rather go to jail than give in to that code.

So what he did was he put up an even bigger and dumber Trump flag, 3,600 square feet. And it reads Trump JFK Jr. Where we go one, we go all. Now, if you're wondering, where did all that come from? Well, let's just take it straight from the dipshit horse's mouth. Matt, play the clip, please. Hudson joins us now. Jay, great to have you back.

Thanks for coming on. Thank you. So it's a bigger flag, slightly different than the last one. It has the names Trump and JFK Jr. on it. Is that right? With the slogan, where we go one, we go all. I mean, how do you bring JFK into this? Explain that a little bit to me.

Well, JFK and Donald Trump were friends. And I don't know if you know this, but Donald Trump was president. and Donald Trump needs a vice president. So when the time was right, I bring him out. And he's your new vice president. There you go. All right. Well, there you have it.

There you have it, Mark. If you guys don't know, well, two layers to this. One, the first half of it I'm a big fan of. Any sort of homeowners association dispute or city code dispute where someone does something stupid, and then the city tells them they can't do it, and then they triple down and make it way worse. Like when somebody paints their house, like, pink to, like, piss off their HOA or whatever.

Big fan of that kind of shit. It always makes me laugh. But the second thing is the JFK Jr stuff is Q&N. I don't know if we've explained this before, but one of the big Q&O conspiracy theories that JFK Jr. faked his death in the 90s, the plane crash, to help Donald Trump at that point start fighting the deep state in 2-2 and the pedal fall ring. Again, this was the 1990s, when Donald Trump was bankrupt and a loser. And so there's actually a guy who runs in Q&N Circle 2, everyone thinks is JFK Jr. And he shows up to rallies and everyone, like, lods him and high-fires him and shit, which is crazy because he knows he's not JFK Jr.

He fucking knows he's not JFK Jr. There's been lots of weird stuff. Like, I remember the famous viral video of Trump with the guy in the Easter Bunny suit looking weird about by Trump? Q and I thought that was JFK Jr. in the Easter buddy suit, and that was his big being introduced to the public. So, yeah. Well, listen, Mark, don't make fun. Don't make fun this guy too much, okay?

Because this guy's due for a big win, okay? And it's on the horizon as we move in to our actual stories tonight because this guy's obviously a massive member of the MAGA world. And the MAGA world is convinced that the ongoing Arizona ballot. audit will pave the way to a reversal of the outcome of the 2020 election. Trump's victory is right around the corner, Mark, because of Arizona and cyber ninjas. Go ahead. Yeah.

So Arizona is in the middle of doing a Senate has commissioned this audit of a bunch of ballots, not all the ballots, just ballots from democratic precincts in just the presidential election. So it's not clear what they're doing because they've hired, they've hidden. all their methods in what their goals are. They don't tell anybody if it's trucked all the ballots to this like convention center and or fuck it around with them. And nobody knows the thing.

It's a ridiculous cluster fuck of poilessness. And a case in point, the guy they hired to run it, one of the people involved to do this cyber part of it, is this guy from Florida who runs a company called Cyber Ninja. Now, he's a huge election fraud conspiracy theorist and a lunatic and his company has no special expertise in election fraud or election systems and oh this is a different this is a different guy there's another guy helping run the bow rather run the uh the recount was actually at

january 6th so that's fucking great um one of the things you're doing okay so let's show the video of cyber ninja because no one even knows who's funding this or how much money cyber ninja's making and here's how he responded to questions about that if you but who is funding this audit we know cyber Ninjas is running the operation. The AZ Senate put up $150,000 for this audit, but the rest comes from private funding. Doug Logan cannot tell us how much his company received in full, nor who the backers are, saying he didn't know. We also heard from Democratic Arizona State Senator, Marn K Zada, via Zoom, about privacy concerns with this audit. But here's Logan first. There's a lot of Americans here, myself included, that really bothered the way our country is

being ripped apart right now. We want a transparent audit be in place so the people can trust that the results so we can get everyone on the same page. If we go through here and we don't find any fraud, I'm going to be ecstatic. Okay? I'm going to love that. And I want to be able to tell people that. If we go through here and we find fraud, I want to fix it so that a country and democracy works. I know you guys want to paste me as like some bad guy in here. I'm involved in this and putting everything on the line with my company if I care about our country. What is the most Trump?

So a couple of the, he almost sounds sane there, right? And this is kind of an okey-dokey entire Republican party's doing because that sounds like I just want to prove to my fellow Republicans there was no fraud so we can all accept Joe Biden as president and move on, right? That's kind of what he's saying,

except he doesn't mean a word of it. Because one, these ballots were marked with blue and black pens. If you remember that big fight over using different pens or whatever, where some people thought they were told to use blue pens and those weren't red, so their votes didn't count. That was like one of the Trump's conspiracy theories back in November. So these machines are read blue and black ink.

You're supposed to mark up the ballots if you're marking stuff that's suspicious with red ink. They're caught using blue and black ink for the audience. That's exactly how you would change votes if you wanted to fucking do that. A judge had to ban blue and black pens from the goddamn building, even from fucking around. They've been leaving doors unlocked, reporters been sneaking in the back. And a little bit of insanity if we're at the UV-like stuff. Play the, if you got it, the Antifa Disaster Prep video, Matt. The apparent target, the state fairgrounds, home right now to the Crazy Town Carnival.

And the Senate Republicans election audit inside Veterans Memorial Coliseum. This excerpt is from an extreme threat scenario for the audit. It expects an attack to start at the chemical storage area across a busy, intersection from the fairgrounds. The attackers, labeled as Antifa, would use a fire in the storage area as a diversion to breach the fairground walls surrounding the Coliseum. Far-right conspiracy theorists have long believed the audit is a top. Yeah, so they basically imagined a horrific attack from Antifa, describe it in vivid detail, and put it out as a plan they're fighting back against. They asked the Governor Ducey for National Guard

to surround the Coliseum, which I love the little detail that it's next to like this weird carnival. That's like Yeah. That was 100% on purpose. Home to the crazy town carnival and also this thing. It's totally related. Governor Ducey is by the way, he was a huge

Trump as Trump's turn on him for not helping him over to the election, but like he asked for National Guard, they tell him to fuck off. You're fine, you're safe. There's no Antifa threat. to kill you in a chemical weapons attack for trying to find, you know, watermarks on balance, which brings us to the UV lights.

So talking about the okey doke, and that Newsmax guy interviewing the JFK Jr. Flag guy, I think it's sort of an interesting, like, tangent to this, because the news media is not equipped to ask questions about this stuff, because it seems like a funny little side show, right? Because they don't know what they're actually talking about.

Like, this story right here, where it says, what could they be looking for? It's like 30 paragraphs in before we get to Q&O. Except the whole reason they're doing this is QAnon. They're not saying it's Q&O because they know it sounds crazy to roughly 80% of regular people. But there's a huge Q&O conspiracy theory that Donald Trump lost the election on purpose. And he did that to he put a bunch of watermarks on ballots. So he could, so you'd know the fraudulent ballots, they wouldn't have the watermarks.

And these watermarks only show, basically he entrapped a Democratic Party into doing a bunch of voter fraud. So they're looking for watermarks. these UV lights and not finding jack shit because they had found watermarks issued by Donald Trump proving the petal pile of the ball is real and he'd trap them in electoral fraud. You would have fucking heard about it by now.

Yeah, essentially, literally the only explanation for why they would be doing this UV light thing is some Q and on conspiracy bullshit. Like when you talk to any kind of election official with any credibility about what is the methodology behind the UV light stuff, they're all like, I have literally no idea

what on earth the UV light could possibly prove. The only explanation for it is the Q&N thing. Yeah. There's like, someone would be like, are they looking for fingerprints? And it's like, but there'd be like,

uh, there'd be like a bunch of fingerprints in the ballot because you'd have the person who voted. You'd have, you know, any one of the relatives who'd be, if they, if they'd fill it out at home,

you'd have, uh, whoever they handed to at the ballot place. You'd have like any of the chain of people involved in the counting of it. It doesn't prove, anything to find fingerprints unless you found Hillary Clinton's fingerprint a bunch of ballots in, you know,

in Arizona, which I guess would be suspicious. But those are just 666s in a pentagram, so I guess you'd know them immediately. This is all is like absolutely insane, and you can't trust any of it. And even the people to pretend to learn their lessons. For example,

another one of the guys run this recount is a former secretary of statement, Ken Bennett, in Arizona, whose claim to fame prior to this was in 2012, was part of a group of guys who were investigating Obama being born in not being born in Hawaii, be born in Kenya. And he literally tried to go to court to keep Obama off the ballot in Arizona because he wasn't born in America. And he later apologized for that and said he'd learned from it and felt bad about getting caught up in the birtherism stuff.

And part of him being busted for that was a bunch of emails he sent. Again, this is in print. The reporter's got a hold of two authorities in Hawaii trying to prove Obama wasn't born in America. He was caught doing this. And someone asked him about it the other day, and here's a video of that exchange where he fucking lies. There's a lot of talk about trust. You know, part of your history is you launched an investigation

into a conspiracy theory. No, I did not. I did not launch an investigation, so I'm not going to even address it. He apparently is hanging at like, I did not launch an investigation on, like, maybe he didn't do anything official, other than send a bunch of emails investigating. So I don't know what some hyper-technical version of investigation. He's a, I guess, denial on.

But he didn't learn shit. No, this is in good faith. And those people ever become better people or want to actually participate in American democracy. They suck, full stop. Yes. And because I've mentioned multiple times calling them Cyber Ninjas for Jesus, just so you all know, Doug Logan, the CEO of Cyber Ninjas on their website, has a bunch of Jesusy stuff about how. how they perform cybersecurity in the name of the Lord, and they're out to stop evil hackers in the way that the Bible prescribes and whatever.

They do. His company ostensibly does. What they did before they became election fraud experts was they do ethical hacking, which is like you try to find security loopholes. You can tell companies about it. It's kind of like you've ever seen sneakers. It's kind of like that, but not as cool because Robert Redford was in that. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. So moving into our next segment and getting towards getting our guest out here, another thing happened this week and the ongoing controversy over America's so-called border crisis and the constant arguments over the state of immigration in this country. The Biden administration, after receiving a lot of blowback

for not doing this previously, officially announced they were raising the refugee camp to 62,500. Initially, it's going to be left at a 15,000 refugee limit, which is what the Trump administration set, which is insanely low. 60,500 is still low, but they responded to the sort of

blowback they got for it by announcing they were going to raise it. What were you going to say, Mark? I was going to say, you said refugee camp at first. It's cap. I meant cap. I'm sorry, refugee cap is what I meant. Just because those are, just because they're, they're like, I know what you managed. No, you. No, I appreciate

that. I meant refugee cap. Yeah. There are camps of the board, obviously, just I'm not making some specific, it's feeling what we're talking about. So the thing about So I was going to stay at the old Trump limit Which sucked And so they harassed him to get up to 62-5 Which is about half with his campaign promise

So I'll get that up to 125 next year But those are still incredibly low We've been taking a fewer and fewer refugees Constantly since the 80s The refugee cap in 1980 Was about 240,000 So there's absolutely no reason that we are doing this I hate

Like I hate even talking about this because, not because it's not important, but because, like, it's not my business where there's somebody wants to live in Arizona, Arizona over Oaxaca or whatever. Like, it's not like, they're not hurt. If you want to come here and not hurt people and pay taxes and live and have a better life, it's none of my goddamn business. I don't, you're not taking anything for me. So I just hate the way we talk about this stuff.

Like, why are we all collectively deciding the humanity of others at our border? It frustrates me a little bit. It's like when we talk about gay rights or trans rights, It's like, it's none of my business. Like, why am I, why am I arguing about whether someone else should have rights for stuff? For sure. I completely agree. Also, the fact that this is a country literally built by and for immigrants, as, you know, we all know, but half of us consistently ignore.

But anyway, before we continue this conversation, let's get our guest out here because she has a lot to say about it, I believe. Our guest tonight has built her career working as a reporter for public radio stations across the Midwest. Now an independent journalist, she spends time reporting internationally from Mexico. and from her home in Colorado, where she works to tell stories about agriculture, U.S. immigration policy, climate change, and rural issues. She is a 2021 fellow for the UC Berkeley 11th Hour Food and Farming Journalism Fellowship, and you can see her latest piece, which was produced in collaboration with the Food and Environment Reporting Network, covering the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on migrant farm workers who worked to put food on our tables

in the May 17th print issue of the nation. Ladies gentlemen, please welcome our guests tonight. Esther Honeg. Esther, hey. Hi, thanks for having me. Yeah, no, thanks for being here. Yeah, sorry took us a minute to find our way there, but we're glad you're here. I actually wanted to start, Esther.

I hope this is okay with doing a little bit of an update from our previous episode. Last week, last week we talked about the great hamburglary. Yeah. narrative that Fox News was putting out there about how Democrats were coming for America's hamburgers. You've been covering America's food system and how it all works for years. So can you shed some light on the facts of the matter where the hamburger are concerned? You know, I, all I can grasp from that was that it was a very ridiculous and false narrative from Fox News. But, you know, I did think it was quite ironic just looking back at this past

year, Fox News didn't seem as concerned when workers were dying by the, you know, scores of workers were dying in these meatpacking plants from COVID-19 outbreaks to, you know, supposedly ensure that we wouldn't see a shortage of burgers in our marketplaces and in our restaurants. And it didn't seem to be an issue then. So it's just funny to think that there's not, that they value burgers very highly, maybe more so than they do. human lives and in this instance perhaps um well you know i won't go into that too much i honestly but how they've spun this being a a ban from the biden administration on burgers is is just ridiculous but um you don't want to get between america and their burgers uh it just seems like

it's one of those issues like you just you do not touch um whether it's human lives or whether it's our planet there's no um there's no sacrifice too great for burgers so I didn't make that connection, but that's, but that's like, like, there was a time last year whenever, there was an official, a very big concern that we'd see disruptions in a lot of food chains, including meat supply chains. And people stocked up on that, they told the paper. And I guess what we did was just had to throw humans out of the meat grinders along with the burgers and then they kept the, keep the food going. But yeah, it's like we just generally don't think about where a food comes from enough, you know, which is like, I grew up on a farms. It's always been a thing to me. People are so disconnected from their food.

They don't even know what animal hamburgers come from, you know? And these days our meat system is so consolidated, and there are just a handful of incredibly powerful corporations that control, you know, something like upwards of, I want to say over half, close to 70%. These are just numbers off the top of my head. I don't have the statistics in front of me, but what we do have is four very powerful corporations that control the majority of our meat processing in this country. They're names that you don't even hear of, things like Smithfield and JBS, but these are the people that produce our meat, and they have a lot to do with, you know, you don't really know where your meat comes from. It's a system that is massive, and they're not really concerned with how much you know as a consumer. I think that's part of their setup. If you don't know what JBS is, they're a Brazilian-based.

meat company who is almost single-handedly toppled several Brazilian governments and got banned for exporting meat into America, beef into America, because they were brabbing inspectors in China and Europe to accept diseased meat. And they're still getting formed from the U.S. government. Yeah, for importing tainted meat, for paying off the inspectors and bringing, you know, potentially hazardous product into the United States. They have been. prosecuted in Brazil as, you know, they've bribing thousands of government officials to do their work. And it's a, it is a company that does not have a great reputation. And so when it came to this last year with COVID-19 outbreaks, a lot of people who have been watched

them closely, including myself, knew that when you have vulnerable people working for them in this sort of a situation, they were likely not going to take the measures that they should to put their workers ahead of their bottom line. That's what they did. They put profits first. So like you were mentioning, there was a lot of rhetoric over there being possible shortages that we needed to keep these plants open. Otherwise, we weren't going to have food in our grocery stores.

That, you know, rhetoric was repeated by state governors. It was repeated by the companies. Our president at the time signed an executive order to basically encourage these plants to stay open. Everything was done to make sure that they did on a close. And at the end of the day, you saw a lot of this meat, for example, from Smithfield being exported to China. I wasn't even going onto U.S. shelves, all under this notion of, you know, avoiding food shortages in the U.S. You know, like these are our heroes. These guys are feeding Americans. And it was really just to feed their bottom line at the end of the day. Wow. So kind of on that note, you've spent a lot of time

over the last year covering the impact of COVID-19 on food and farm workers. And you kind of just, you touched on the sort of false narrative. It's like, we got to keep these people working at any cost because it's food on our tables when that, that's not entirely what was happening. It was going elsewhere and just feeding their bottom lines. But can you talk a little bit more about what you saw from the Trump administration or just in recent months when it came to the resources needed to fight COVID-19 and these agricultural facilities and meatpacking facilities and the reality of that?

You know, I think COVID-19 really kind of blew wide open the conditions that people have been working under for decades in these industries. So meatpacking, working in the fields, whatever sector of agriculture that may be, people who are excluded from things like overtime or the right to organize, which means like if you get together with your coworkers to demand better conditions that you have the right not to be fired. So these are, you know, really basic rights that a lot of us rely on, and a lot of agricultural workers are exempt from these. Or they are, you know, in just such vulnerable positions that they fear going to their bosses to ask for better conditions, better PPE, sick time off because they were exposed to someone with COVID-19.

All of these things really highlighted the circumstances they already live in. And under the Trump administration, we really just saw a lot of cheering to keep these plans. open. Even the executive order that he signed, there was some people were perhaps thinking that this would mean that companies would not be legally liable if workers came after them in the courts to sue over these conditions over people who had died or for just neglect of keeping workers safe. And we've seen the first case coming out of Iowa where a federal judge ruled that basically that executive order was not enough. But the company cannot cite that executive order as being grounds for keeping their plant open and acting in complete negligence to their

workers' health. So that's really interesting. So these companies, which are already facing a number of lawsuits for things like tampering with prices in the market when it comes to the price of a boiler chicken or a pig or a hog, they're facing possibly even more legal consequences now as workers potentially start to come after them. But that is all to say now looking at the Biden administration, we've seen a new piece of legislation. He is behind called the Farm Work Modernization Act, and that's a pretty significant piece of legislation that would give a lot of all of the farm workers, an estimated, over a million estimated farm workers who are undocumented, and that would give them basically a sort of certificate or, if you will, or something that

it's a work permit in agriculture that they can remain in the country and they don't have to fear deportation. And then there's a number of years tacked on to that. They'd have to continue to work in agriculture to then get legal status. This bill provides a lot of other protections for farm workers at the federal level. It's very, in my mind, very significant. It's probably the biggest legislation for farm workers since Reagan in the 1980s when he granted millions of farm workers amnesty, who were here undocumented. Your last piece in the nation was wonderful, by the way.

Besides of the information that you're a great writer and it's very readable and you have great eye for detail. And like there's so much for those that didn't know, and you know the stats better than me, but like a huge chunk of American produce over the winter months is grown in Arizona. Like, I think it was like 90% of greens or something like that. Yeah. And a lot of the workers who work in those fields commute back. I don't think people don't live in border states, don't think of it this way, but people commute across the border. It's not just a thing people sneak across.

People go back and forth to work and go through official channels and they have, you know, guest features and certificates and stuff. And, like, the hurdles they have to go through. And the contrast where, like, they have no, there's no, they have no social distancing and there's very little mask use enforced among the workers. They're crowded around to get through the gate, but they're processed more slowly because customs and border patrol are observing social distancing and aren't allowed in many people in the building so they don't get COVID. It's like, it was like, it was so stark that it's like, oh, here's exactly what we care about and how it works. And it's just, it's frustrating. That's a great observation. I hadn't actually thought about it in those specific terms, but that's a great line that you just drew.

You know, I think a lot of it really does come back to the notion that America still just does not want to or has not recognized that our farm workers are foreign born, the majority of them, and that grows every year as we bring in more and more foreign guest workers to do the jobs that we cannot get basically people with better options to do. This is very hard labor. You have to be conditioned in it from a young age to be able to sustain the heat and stoop labor. And the people who are doing this work are, like you said, coming across the border. And even at a, you know, at a border checkpoint where it's ironic, the building itself is built in a design that emulates the fields of Arizona. It was what the designers said when I read up about it. And even then, you still, the, you know, security at this border, there's just not, there's the recognition that this port is shouldering Arizona's agricultural economy, but yet there's a disconnect somewhere there. But we're just like you said, like we're going to take social distancing measures for our agents, but these workers are not going to be given some sort of priority to get through to get to work.

I always think about this. I remember, and I'm just pulling this from my memory right now off the top of my head, but I know this happened. It was years ago now, but it sort of illustrates this disconnect between the hardcore anti-immigrants in any fashion policy of a lot of the people on the right and the reality of like you were just saying, what our farm workers, you know, what the demographics are in this country. I'm from Tennessee, and I remember years ago now there was this big, this big new sweeping anti-immigration policy in Alabama, our neighbor to the south, and they put it into

effect and passed it, and Republicans were super happy and everything. And in that year, the economy took a major hit because of the massive losses that came from the harvest that year because they didn't have, they couldn't, they didn't have the labor for it because they had forced them all out with their, you know, xenophobic policies. or whatever, and sort of what you, having worked in this kind of area for a long time as a journalist, how do you see that sort of, that kind of, that disconnect or how that line is drawn between sort of the reality and the philosophy, if you want to call it that, that so many people have?

Well, you know, I think there's, you know, you were just mentioning this earlier, there's so much of a disconnect of where our food even comes from. I think it's fairly easy for people to make these sweeping arguments that, we don't need this community of workers or we don't need these foreigners coming into our country without understanding, you know, because no one really knows what that looks like. How many people can say that they've gone out onto a lettuce field to talk with those workers to hear about what their lives are like and to speak with them and know who they are. I mean, even just to see a workforce of, you know, field workers is not common.

These things are off in rural parts of the country where a lot of us don't see that happening. So I think it's very easy to make those sorts of statements. that can be very false, and also I think it's just one of these great American hypocrisies that we can, you know, neglect to acknowledge the fact that we wouldn't, our food system would collapse. At the start of this pandemic in March, it's a very busy time of year when foreign guest workers come in on H2A visas. And the first thing that our State Department and did was closed down U.S. embassies to stop processing visas. Only emergency visas were to be processed. And these are, you know, people of very high power and importance, meaning, you know,

the normal day-to-day tourism visas, anything people have been waiting months and years for visas. All of that was to come to a screeching halt, including the H-2A visas. And farm workers and their associations, their national groups, which are very powerful, we're just up in arms and they repeat it over and over again. If you don't give us our guest workers, our food system will crumble. You know, these are, we reply on these people to keep our food system going. And I think it's only in moments like this last year that we can attest to that, that we can see that in daylight.

There was a, I mean, like less than a month ago, Republicans tried to make it a big talking point that Joe Biden was importing COVID into the country by having slightly looser immigration restrictions or whatever. And then you contrast that with this official policy that does nothing to keep these workers from getting COVID. It's like you don't actually have any problem of COVID coming in from Mexico. You just want it to spread immigrant hate. It's very, it's very weird. Yeah. It's a very easy scapegoat is what it is. It always has been. And, um, Yeah, it's, sorry. I did enjoy it.

It's like to think about the actual cost of food because I don't think Americans think about the actual cost of stuff enough where whether it clothes it come in and come in with from like other countries with made for child labor or whether it's like a head of lettuce costs me like $0.50 at the store. But you have an anecdote in your story about this guy who after getting four hours of sleep, he takes a taxi to the border at 1 a.m. to get in line. So he's far enough ahead and lying to actually get through before work starts. Like, his workday starts at 1 a.m. Even though he doesn't start getting paid until 6 a.m. or whatever. And he does it a seven-hour commute. Yeah. Yeah.

He does it six days a week so he can have pizza with his kid on Sundays. It's like, it was just like a wildest anecdote. And if you divide that time, you know, his hourly salary, his daily salary of, if you add the hours he takes to commute, his hourly wage drops from around, you know, 12 to $13 to something like $4. You know, when you look at, that's just the math off the top of my head, or the math that I've looked at, but do not have in front of me for all of you who are maybe keeping track of that. But, yeah, it's, we have a free market and that predicts the, or that determines the price of food. And it's not just the farm workers who are hurting with low wages, it's also farmers, family farmers who have to meet these competitive prices. and if there may perhaps were policy that recognized what our food actually costs to grow and distribute, perhaps there could be more investment into the health and safety of our

workforce. But you also hear from farm workers, and it's not a lie that the cost of labor is the most significant cost for food production right now. And it has grown extensively in the last few years or the last decade or so because there is an increasing labor shortage because we have fewer people willing to do these jobs. And so we bring in people on H.J.A visas, which is an incredibly expensive process. And so it is really, it's pinning our domestic food supply in a corner. And it is also forcing human beings to live in less than ideal conditions.

So this has been wonderfully informative and we very much appreciate you coming on here, Esther. But before we go, I wanted to give you a lot. opportunity to a let people know how they could follow your stuff and read and read because you are a very good writer and as mark said very much have your finger on the pulse of these issues and kind of uh you know convey them in a way that's very easily digestible so people should look you up but also let people know how they can find you and if there's anything that we kind of didn't if we didn't get to anything Any major takeaway you have for everybody right now or one thing you wish people understood better, like just parting thoughts, basically, that we didn't kind of get to or allow you to put out there. Please hit us with that right now before we go. Oh, okay. Oh, gosh.

All right. Okay, well, you can follow me. I know, I don't want to put too much pressure on you. Sorry. It's a big moment. Whatever you got. You can follow me. I'm on Twitter.

It's at Esther Honig. That last name is H-O-N-I-G. And, you know, I think this last year has really like, it has for so many sectors of our economy and aspects of our society really blown up in the inequalities that exist. And I think the important thing is that people really are starting to talk about farm workers and meatpacking and things that maybe they didn't before. This is the first time.

I think this might be the only time in my lifetime that I will see meatpacking on national headlines. Of course, it also was a few years earlier when it came to immigration raids, right? I just think it's an important time that people can really grasp some of these issues to realize how important they are and become informed about them because they really are at the heart of so much of what keeps our country going. There's some research that I'm doing right now looks at some of the states that are passing policies to better protect farm workers because in this day and age, it's incredible to realize that farm workers were excluded from the National

Labor Rights Act. And so they are not protected when it comes to organizing and they cannot be guaranteed the minimum wage, and they and domestic workers are the only two laborers in that category that are excluded from rights that we supposedly very much cherish in this country. And the basis of that is racism, and it comes from a history of slavery. So I guess I'll leave you with that. No, very poignant note to end on. Thank you very much, Esther. We appreciate it.

Thank you for coming on the show. Esther, Elnick, everybody. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, I mean, I'll admit, I mean, I care about all the things we were just talking about, and I'm on Esther's side with all of that. But, like, I don't, you know, I'm a fat American like the rest of us, meaning I don't think about, I don't think about where this actually comes from when I'm about to eat a cheeseburger that I made for myself, you know.

I don't ever think about it. It just, yeah, I came from the store. down the street that's where i went and got it you know yeah i mean like part of this is like one thing uh america does is it foists all responsibility for making ethical choices onto individual people uh which is a hustle it's not like if you we literally the idea of representative government is you outsource big picture thinking to other people over over over the global issues for other people to do for you like it shouldn't be my job as a person buying groceries to think about why it is the government subsidizes corn so much when that's easily

like reached by by giant machines and no people work there whereas the price points for like lettuce and stuff are so low that people can get paid jack shit like let's flip it like corn be on its own for a while subsidize lettuce that those people get $20 an hour it's a it's a it's a it shouldn't be I don't know well I don't even what a solution is if I go to less buying strike Does that help, like, if organized one, does it help drive up prices or that would be the opposite? The flights would collapse, you know? Yeah. I don't know.

No, Esther's great. You all should all follow her, Esther Honig. That piece in the nation, you shall read it. It's called The Story Behind Your Salad, Farm Workers COVID-19, and a dangerous commute. Yeah, there you go, right there. Yeah. So let's get at least a few questions and or comments up here. I said in the video I posted earlier, we're going to talk about what you guys think.

The weirdest thing they're going to find on Rudy Giuliani's phone is. Mark says dick pics from Borat. I like that. That's a good one. But yeah, hit us with whatever else you got. But also I wanted to ask Mark, because you're about to go to Florida. How are you feeling about that, Mark? About going to Florida.

You're excited? Florida. You know, you're going into the swamp, baby. You're heading back down there. That's where your in-laws are from, right? So, my wife's from a suburb of Orlando called a pop And so we're going to Opaka. I'm excited.

Well, for context, I'm more than two weeks out for my second vaccine dose as a Friday. So I am immortal, baby. I'm a little excited to go to a place where no one's going to be wearing a mask and will judge me if I walk around. No mask. Feel a little bit normal for a little bit? I don't know. Can I?

So, you know, you're smart, Mark, so I want to ask you, because I don't, I'm in between doses right now. I get my second vaccine dose next week, and I'm thrilled about it. But I'm a little confused on what the rules are after you get a vacate. Because, like, to me, I'm white trash and a dumb ass, right? And I admit that. To me, it's like, once you get a vaccine, like, you're good, right? But apparently not, like, what are the goddamn rules, Mark? Because I don't know.

well all the people we're going to see have been double vexed like our parents and stuff yeah uh so i i'm assuming we're staying in their house like we cancel christmas because we didn't want to like sit in their house in a mask because that would have been miserable um now it's seen i don't know man like i had john oliver did a good piece this week trying to explain like what the cdc is actually saying about people are confused it's very confusing i'm very confused and to me it's not very motivational to be like Get your double vacs. It doesn't change anything. I know.

No, exactly. That's what I'm saying. It's like if we, if it doesn't, then what are we, you know. But Adamar Corn Blute says Disney World is the safest place in the state. Also the most magical. I added that. Yeah, I don't know. I've heard the horror stories about all the people that died Disney World and Disneyland.

Yeah, no. Yeah. Natalie Anderson says, I like wearing a mask. It hides my double chin. Be safe. Wear a mask. Look. I'm not I'm not I if you want it like like I'm not one of those people who's like fuck you for wearing a mask these people outside of school I don't like like if you're not vaccinated or if you're just even even if you just like it because it helps your allergies I don't give a shit you do what you do I don't like so okay for on that note like I'm I also I'm actually a bit of an introvert in my day to day life and everything I'm socially awkward I also like having my face covered up because I'm.

I feel like my face looks dumb when I walk around all the time, and I like people not being able to see it. That's fine. They're too famous. The fans mob you. Yeah, that's not at all what I mean. That's not a problem I have at all. But I also wear glasses every day.

And I don't know if I'm just a shitty mask wear or whatever, but it causes problems. Fogs my glasses up. It's a whole thing. I can't stand wearing a mask. But I'll gladly keep doing it as long as I need to. I really will. But I don't like it.

But the other thing, I just want to know, like, when I'm double fax, can I go to a bar and watch a playoff game? That's what I want to know, want to do. Megan Flanagan says, like, I haven't had a dude tell me to smile in over a year. Totally worth it. I, I sincerely understand people who are like, I like this mass thing. I get it. But, yeah. We probably, we live, like, one public transpose stop away from the gym.

So I take the, I take the metro a lot in normal times. And I'll probably wear it. the people were in the mask probably in full and flu season on the bus? Like, why, why would I not? It's a, it's not a big imposition, which is the thing, like, we spent a year arguing about it. It's like, I don't like that it fogs on my glasses. Yeah, that's not fun. You got to get the ones.

Yeah, but again, I'll, I'll gladly keep wearing that. Yeah, I know. We're in the same face. We're in the same thing. I'm not, I'm not all admonishing you, but. But I do want to know what, once we get vaccinated, what can we then do? I'm trying to go back out there and do shows again. I want, like, I want the goddamn world to come back, man.

Yes. When the fuck is that going to happen? And why do we even have scenes if it ain't in the cards? Because of dumb asses who won't get it or what? Like, You want to watch the Raiders draft a punter to play wide receiver in a bar on a Sunday, like a normal person? Yeah.

And be filled with rage by it. I want to go to Neeland Stadium in Knoxville and watch my Vowls get embarrassed. Again, I miss. just doing that. Yeah. No, I think we're all on the same page. I think my clearest understanding of what the CDC is saying is like, it's still a pandemic. And we're, we, because we didn't do the research yet on how easily you spread it even after the vaccine. We know you don't get it, the disease. We don't know if you still carry the virus. Even though we're pretty sure you don't, we can't 100% tell you you don't. So to protect immunocompromise people, if you're going to see your

grandma she can't get the vaccine because she has like a blood cancer or whatever wear your fucking mask i get it that that makes sense to me also we had two straight days in la county was zero deaths and i feel good about that yeah clifford nickerson says i haven't had a cold since the pandemic started that's actually another really good point that i didn't i saw a tweet a few weeks ago whatever it's like crazy how i haven't been sick this past year when i've been taking all these measures to keep from getting sick and i was like holy shit they're right like because I also haven't I haven't been sick either and it's like weird how that works when you wash your hands and wear a mask and do all that shit and you don't get sick that's crazy my conspiracy theorist neighbor was like you know my neighbor that works the pharmacy told me no almost nobody got the flu last year isn't that it's like well he's trying to say this because they just put all the I'm like, well, nobody's kissing strangers or riding the bus or getting on airplanes

and going on. Everybody's wearing a mask and washing their hands. Plus, we have far more immunity built into the flu. So COVID-constraining mechanisms or like efforts would do triple well against the flu because you're going to get the flu less anyway. So I think you solved your own riddle there, buddy. I don't know what to tell you. Yeah, it's funny. It's funny how often they do that, solve their own riddle without realizing it. You know what I mean? It's like, Why is it only Republican posts to get flagged as being misleading? What's that about? You know, that type of thing.

Adam R. Cornblot says, thank you for pronouncing my last name correctly. You're one of a few people much props. We read this only just because it's one of the very few occasions in which I actually pronounce the name correctly. So thank you for letting me know that I did so. All right. Well, that's it for this week's episode of Weekly Skews. We'll be back next week on the eve of my second vaccine. dosage and who knows what else will have happened oh we may or may not have smart mark because

he's going to florida we'll see what happens but if we don't we'll have somebody who also maybe cori'll be here and say some more dumb shit we'll see next week on weekly skews thank you very much so you love you bye