wellRED podcast - Evening Skews: Week of September 8, 2020

Episode Date: September 15, 2020

Lotta good stuff this week (if you like horrible news and the world being on fire anyhoo). We go further in on Trump hatin' the troops, as well as fire hatin' California and cops hatin' the world. On Thursday's show we have a little fun on the subject of a loose tiger back home in Knoxville, and then break down all the different insane gifts Bob Woodward had for America last week. All that and whole bunch more. Love yuns.

And we thank them for sponsoring the show. Well, no, I'll just go ahead. I mean, look, I'm money dumb. Y'all know that. I've been money dumb ever, since ever, my whole life. And the modern world makes it even harder to not be money dumb, in my opinion. Because used to, you, like, had to write down everything you spent or you wouldn't know nothing. But now you got apps and stuff on your phone.

And it's just like you can just, it makes it easier to lose count of, well, your count, the count every month, how much you're spending. A lot of people don't even know how much they spend on a per month basis. I'm not going to lie, I can be one of those people. Like, let me ask you right now. Skewers out, whatnot, sorry, well-read people. People across the ske universe, I should say. Do you even know how many subscriptions that you actively pay for every month or every year? Do you even know?

Do you know how much you spend on takeout or delivery? Getting a paid chauffeur for your chicken low mane? Because that's a thing that we do in this society. Do you know how much you spend on that? It's probably more than you think. But now there's an app designed to help you manage your money better, and it's called Rocket Money. Rocket Money is a personal finance app

that helps find and cancel your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending, and helps lower your bills so you can grow your savings. Rocket Money shows all your expenses in one place, including subscriptions you already forgot about. If you see a subscription, you don't want anymore, Rocket Money will help you cancel it. Their dashboard lays out your whole financial picture,

including the due dates for all your bills and the pay days. In a way that's easier for you to digest, you can even automatically create, custom budgets based on your past spending. Rocket Money's 5 million members have saved a total of $500 million in canceled subscription with members saving up to $740 a year when they use all of the apps. Premium features. I used Rocket Money and realized that I had apparently been paying for two different

language learning services that I just wasn't using. So I was probably like, I should know Spanish. I'll learn Spanish. and I've just been paying to learn Spanish without practicing any Spanish for, you know, pertinent two years now or something like that. Also, a fun one, I'd said it before, but I got an app,

lovely little app where you could, you know, put your friend's faces onto funny reaction gifts and stuff like that. So obviously I got it so I could put Corey's face on those two, those two like twins from the Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland movies. You know, those weren't a little like the Q-ball-looking twin fellas. Yeah, so that was money. What was that a reply gift for?

Just when I did something stupid. Something fat, I think, and stupid. Something both fat and stupid. But anyway, that was money well spent at first, but then I quit using it and was still paying for it and forgotten. If it wasn't for Rocket Money, I never would have even figured it out. So shout out to them. They help.

If you're money dumb like me, Rocket Money can help. So cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster with Rocket Money. Go to RocketMoney. dot com slash well read today that's rocket money.com slash well r e d rocketmoney.com slash well read and we thank them for sponsoring this episode of the podcast. They're the. Well, hell. Welcome back, y'all.

I hope you had a nice holiday weekend. Unfortunately, it's over now because this here is Tuesday, September 8th. I'm Trey Crowder and that's Mark Aegee. What's up, Mark? What's up, Trey? Happy Tuesday, bud. Yeah, here we are. This is evening skews. As always, we begin with a dumbass report. And I mentioned it last week. I'm sorry we just keep circling back to Donald Trump for these daily dumbasses. But he really does make it so difficult to choose someone else. What we should do is actually it's not an accident. Like it's a bit like we're going to research the world for the world's biggest dumbass and just happens to be Trump. Like it's like it's on purpose as opposed to. You know, as opposed to we just can't come with anybody else dumber.

Yeah, so here's what's happened now. If you watch last Thursday's episode of the skews, you know that me and Mark briefly discussed a brand new at the time article in the Atlantic that dealt with Trump's apparent lack of respect for the U.S. military, let's say. And like I said, on Thursday night, it had just come out, you know. And we actually, a lot of what we were saying is I don't know how they're able to keep ignoring stuff like this, but they kind of didn't because it ended up blowing

smooth up over the weekend and became just a whole thing. Which they should have just ignored it. Like they ignore so much other stuff. I don't understand why this, they decided to dig in on it making a bunch bigger story by issuing denial after denial after denial that are easily disproven. But I'm no politics

genius. I'm just a guy on the internet. Yeah, well, because you got to support the troops, Mark, that's the thing. And they're out here saying Trump's not supporting the troops. So he had to respond. right and in typical trump fashion he ultimately responded to the allegations that he is prone to insulting the military by uh insulting the military so here's the clip i'd say the military is in love with me to sold yourself the top people in the pentagon probably are because they want to

do nothing but fight war so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy So I don't know. There's a lot of shades to this one, in my opinion. But yeah, why don't you start us off, though, Mark? How you feel about this? One, he's not wrong. Right.

But he is full of shit. Right. Because he's been the biggest bitch of the DOD as president ever. They get to drop, like, they get to drop. The drone programs have gone off the rails since, I mean, Obama, you know, ramp them up, but they've gone more civilian casualties, more bombs, more dronings. There was an early in his presidency dropped that Moab. The mother-valled bombs had never been actually dropped before.

They dropped this like huge Megaton bomb to kill like 16 dudes. And then Trump had this little global office appearance. We showed it on a monitor and was really impressed, thought it was super cool. And they asked him about it. And he was like, oh, no, if he approved the, the bomb? And he goes, no, they just told me about it afterwards. So they'd given operational control of huge bombings to the military. The DoD was launching its own wars.

And so he did this in 2016. He attacked Hillary from the left in a bunch of stuff. I mean, there was a famous column of Maureen Dowd in the New York Times during the campaign called Hillary the Hawk, Donald the Dove. And I'm pretty opposed to Hillary's foreign policy views as well. But it was obviously his patently false he was ever going to like, we're still in Syria. We're still in Iraq. we're still in Afghanistan.

He campaigned by any of those wars. Maybe he's tried. I haven't seen me. But it's like, so yes, he's right. The DOD is a money-making operation. It is a jobs program for billionaire defense companies. Also, he's not doing anything to stop it. Well, because that's the thing.

Like, to me, I know obviously the top brass. They've got a lot of influence where, you know, war and foreign policy and all that is concerned. Of course they do. But, you know, it's the politician. too that like drive the bus like when we got into iraq with all the weapons of mass destruction and all that it wasn't generals standing on you know on on stage on tv every night telling people that iraq had weapons of mass destruction it was the politicians like the and again i know a lot they have

a lot of influence i'm not saying they don't but like they follow orders you know like they they fired the um it was kind of the only the outside of colin powell like Bush fired the head of the army, the general in charge of the army because he testified in front of Congress. They'd need like three or four thousand troops to stabilize Iraq after the invasion. And they wanted to try to get by out way less than that. So they fired him for being honest. So like in that instance, the generals were like, this is a bad idea. We shouldn't be doing this.

If we're going to do it, we need way more dudes than you're saying we need because this is going to be a big deal. And they were like, no, we got it. We got into control. Yeah. Yeah. And he, you know, he also like, he, like he does with so many things, he very much talks out of both sides of his mouth where all this is concerned, because he was campaigning on and still talks about like, we're not going to be in these useless wars anymore. We're going to get out there because that shit is stupid. And like, you know, that would be great.

I would be great for us not to be engaged in these useless wars. But then he turns right around and he brags about how they have, according to him, eliminated 100% of ISIS, has been eliminated. eliminated because of his actions. So, like, you know, he's just saying all of the things at once, which is pretty par- Did he tell ISIS? Because we're doing fine, it seems like. He said, this is the actual quote related to what I was just saying. He said, but we're getting out of the endless wars.

You know how we're doing. We've defeated 100% of the ISIS Caliphate. When I came in, it was a mess. It was all over. They had it in a certain color on the map, apparently. all of ISIS. A year later, I said, where is it?

And they said, it's all gone, sir, because of you, it's all gone. He's playing a game of risk over there. He got the right role of the die and took over ISIS. Yeah, but he's like, it's funny, even when he's like bragging about the way he describes

it is like, all the map again and it's like, what happened to all that orange? Where's all the orange at? Like, you saved the world from the orange, Mr. President. Good job. I actually, like, I don't, if he was actually pulling out, I wouldn't mind him. This is what Bush should have done in Iraq is, like, declare victory and leave, right?

But don't declare victory and then stay because you've done nothing. It's just like, you know, whatever. Right. But again, though, yeah, like, like you said, it is a money-making operation. Of course, this shit, like you said, he's not entirely wrong about what he's saying. Like, a lot of these current conflicts we've been in have been profit motivated and whatnot. A lot of people have gotten very rich off of them. Obviously, Dick Cheney and all his bullshit, very well documented.

So it's like, that does happen. But, yeah, like you said, like he, you're the president, dude. Like, you're the commander in chief. But also, a couple of the things about this story. Sarah Sanders got caught in a pretty big lie trying to cover up for Trump where all this is concerned because she gave this heartfelt plea saying she has sat in the room when the president had to make the most difficult calls of any presidency when he had to let a parent know that their son had been killed in the line of duty and that's a call no president wants to make in those moments I saw the president's

true heart and I saw his commitment to the men and women of our great military but that's not a thing that happens, right? No, you don't find out your husband got killed in Fallujah from the president, cold call in your house. They did, the army sends a person to your door to tell you in person with a chaplain, right? We've seen the movies where that happens. Like, it's not like, I don't know, but anyway,

so this wasn't some ad lib. She wrote this video out and delivered it as a statement, a Twitter video, probably in conjunction with promoting her new book. So then a reporter followed up. It's like, you know, but that's not how people are informed about the deaths of their family members. First of all, they'd be really bad for any president to take time out of his day to be to be the first. I mean, people they do do consolation calls sometimes depending on the dynamic, but they don't, they're not the first call.

That would be horrific. You set a call from the president after you've exploded into tears for a day or two, and then the president calls and says, thank you for your service, you know, whatever. But this president isn't capable of consoling anyone. You imagine they let him just, yep, yep, Jimmy's dead. Sorry, later. You know. Yeah.

The Sarah Sanders, the book she's promoting has a whole thing in it where apparently Kim Jong-un thought she was winked at her and told her to thought she was cute. So Trump made her talk about she'd have to go over and take one for the team. He was trying to pimp her out to Kim Jong-un. She wrote that down and put it in her book. And then she's still defending the guy who tried to get her to have sex with Kim Jong-un. Yeah, I see Kim Jong-un. Yeah, I see your style, your taste. He's a man of immaculate taste that Kim Jong-un.

Now, I know, as always, everything about it is just so ridiculous. A lot of people are tweeting about Trump saying this, just baldly accusing, you know, the upper military brass of inciting conflict for profit motives. And they were calling it an unprecedented situation for president to be doing that. And then in return, a lot of people pointed out, to Dwight Eisenhower had a very famous address where he warned about the potential dangers of the military industrial complex in 1961. But that's related to a thing I wanted to bring up, which is that a lot of times, like, Dwight Eisenhower was a general. He was a soldier. He knew his shit. You know what I mean? And that's how it works with a lot of these guys. Not all of them. Some of them are hardcore hawks.

But a lot of them are the ones who, you know, try to keep us out of wars and whatnot because they understand. what it actually entails more so than, you know, a senator from Kentucky or whoever. I mean, I mean, in that speech, Eisenhower has a whole chunk that I forget the exact quote, but it's something like every dollar used to buy a gun or a bullet or a bomb

is money that can't buy, you know, a school book or bread for the hungry, right? That's how this absolutely should be thought about, but we don't think about it in terms of tradeoffs for whatever reason. But, Eisenhower also,

I mean, this is coming off the heels of a campaign where, uh, JFK hit him from the right for, we had a nuclear, JFK kept saying we had a nuclear missile deficit with USSR. And it wasn't true because once JFK got in and saw the actual intel, we had way more nukes than they did.

And he wrote, he wrote Eisenhower a letter for apology. But that was coming off a campaign where both sides were, were, um, commie red baiting to such a degree that Eisenhower was like, this is a guy who approved the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1950. was like this is getting a little too.

We've got to pull back a little bit. But we haven't pulled out of it. It's been ramped up every sense. We just, we're campaigning now to spend, do better and better and better on defense. It's like we're already the most powerful military in the history of the world by a factor of 30. I don't know how much bigger and better we can get. Right. So we should probably say, obviously, this article inside of a lot of controversy and debate.

And, you know, the Trump White House has emphatically denied all of it. and other people have pointed out, like, all of the sources in it are anonymous sources. And then it got, like, confirmed by other outlets based on, like, other anonymous sources. And the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic in an interview, I think, with Fox News, one of the big news outlets said that one of the main stories in it, which was about Trump canceling a visit to an American military cemetery in France from World War I. He canceled it because it was raining, and he was worried about how. his hair would look. And the editor-in-chief was asked about that and, like, basically conceded

that maybe that wasn't true, that maybe it was, you know, it was genuine weather concerns and didn't have anything to do with his hair or whatnot. So there's, like, a lot of shit swirling around this story. And I'm not going to lie, I mean, I'll just say at point-blank. Like, I just immediately believed

all of it because it just seems like shit he would think, say, and do. There's a bunch of famous incidents of him doing stuff that's pretty callous and cold to veterans and gold star families. I mean, like, sitting all over the Gold Star family and spoke with the DNC in 2016. Colin McCain, a loser for getting shot down, a bunch of time. There was the Navy, the first military operation he approved like five days into his presidency

where those four seals got killed in Africa. And he called the wife and made her cry because he couldn't remember the guy's name and said, well, he knew what he signed up for. And then there was the other Gold Star family we called and they, to console them and they were complaining about how hard it was for them to get survivor benefits. And he promised to write them a $25,000 check out of his pocket and then never did. And then reporters asked about it like six months later.

He finally gave him $25,000, which is just very weird. And anyway, so like the study jives with what's already in the public record that no one is in the pocket. Right. That he did on camera a bunch. So one of the reasons I was surprised It became a big story is like I don't know anybody who's mind that's going to change Like if you think he's a scumbag

Like we do you're like obviously he's a scumbag in private as much as he's in public And if you think he's a big hero you're not going to pay attention to it So the fact it's been I mean the Biden campaign is the good job I'm making hay out of it I guess is what's happened Right and that's kind of that's part of what we said about it last Thursday When it had just come out and it was I just very much assumed that it wouldn't really amount to anything Because nothing ever amounts to anything with him But I was also saying, like, this particular subject matter, I don't know how that's possible, given how much weight they give to supporting the troops, you know, which again, you should support the troops.

But, like, it just seems like all the most hardcore Republicans I know shouldn't be able to stand for someone outright disrespecting the troops in this way. But they did, you know, that's the thing. Like, one of the first things it did is what they always do, which is just call it fake news, you know, right out the gate. They just said, no, this ain't real. And like, that's the, you know, no pun intended, that's the Trump card that they have for literally everything. Like, it doesn't matter how damning something is or whatnot, because with their base, they just, they play the fake news card and just say it's not true. And then everybody on the other side of it is like, oh, okay, I figured it probably wasn't true. And then that's just the end of that.

Yeah, I mean, yeah. But, you know, anyway, I can't believe. But it's just like, it doesn't, I mean, in 2016, this stuff worked, like the, the, I'm the president who's going to stop, reign of the DOD. Like, I mean, Bush campaigned on streamlining the Defense Department too because, you know, the whole peace dividend thing and the Cole Warren in it. And that was one of the reasons they could, they fired the army guy for saying we need to way more guys in Iraq is because they were, they were trying to like make the defense department like move smaller and lighter and spend less and with less guys, right? So there was some sort of honest effort. It resulted in a lot of death and destruction because if you're going to, if you're going to have a smaller military, you should go to less wars, right?

You shouldn't go to more wars with a smaller military. That seems like a bad idea of two ways. Right. Another thing about this, and it's like this is one of those things that's like obvious, but I have to sort of step back from everything every now and then and remind myself just how insane everything is, especially where Trump is concerned. Because like how many just people, just regular as? people your fuck-up buddy you went to high school with its own pills you know whatever your

fucking ma-mall anybody just regular people how many of them do you know who when presented with a veteran amputee would have the genuine response of gross nobody wants to see that like it's out loud nobody right I know that's what I'm saying almost nobody Everybody knows some serious dirt bags, right? We all do. And very, very few of them for anyone would just outright say that, let alone the president of the United States. Like, it's crazy because it works in the exact opposite direction that it should work in. You know what I mean?

Like the standard of behavior, it should be the exact opposite for the president. It should be above everyone else. but he's like just a degree to which he has lowered the bar, man. It's like it's easy to sort of not forget it, but like just get jaded to it or whatever because of, you know, four years of this shit. But it's fucking crazy. Like it's not that hard, you know,

like it's not that hard to not do that to not be openly, explicitly disgusted by an amputee who lost his limbs in a fucking war. Like, that shouldn't be a deal. difficult concept for anybody. But also it rings, because like the dude came out of marketing and we're talking about the military parade, right? He won the amputees in the military parade. So this is a guy who chose his wife, chooses wives by how many magazine covers they got.

And you know, who, you know, even when he, when he hires guys for jobs, he talks about how they're straight about central casting. He like, look matters to him for stuff. So it doesn't like, it rings true to me whether, and I don't, I have no idea where they're happen or not, obviously. Right. All right. Well, okay.

Moving on. You talked about Sarah Sanders got a book coming out. Who don't got a book coming out? You know, like everybody putting out books, especially where Trump is concerned. And a lot of them say all the same things. Like every one of them makes him look like just the worst person on earth because, I mean, he is. But they're all like just sort of treated as expected, I guess.

And the next one, the next hot book on the docket now is Michael Cohen's book called Disloyal. And he outlines and confirms in the pages of the book a lot of the things that people think about Trump with racism and whatnot. He's got him in there quoting Trump in there saying the only reason that Barack Obama was elected was a fucking affirmative action. And all kinds of shit like that. But Cohen does go out of his way, though, to deny the Steele dossier. And because, you know, he was included in that dossier over and over again. assume. And also that the Trump campaign was heavily involved with the

the fucking over the election by the by the Russians in 2016. But other than that, it's all the same shit. He just confirms all the same shit everybody thinks about Trump already, basically. Yeah. And that like I'm so first of all, fuck Michael Cohen. Do not buy his book. Do you don't give him a single dollar. But because like there's no point. This stuff doesn't do anything now. You should have told us this in 2015, right? And also, I'm sick of these people, and reporters keep doing it, too.

There's, like, important information the public needs to know, and they save it for their goddamn book release. And, you know, there's nothing new in his book. Like, he does third Jerry Falwell under the bus, which I very much enjoy it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I'm glad you brought that up. That part is, God, I'm trying to find that.

The part about, in the story, I read, they said it was a Routers journalist who called Jerry Falwell to comment on it. So he said that, okay, so Cohen said Moore's wife's going on the background to hang up the goddamn boat. Jerry's drunk and whiling out against, right? Right.

But yeah, in the book he says that Falwell's endorsement of Donald Trump, who's a philanderer and all that, but his endorsement of him as the Lord's candidate, according to Cohen was a result of basically blackmail on Falwell with like illicit photos and stuff involved.

him and his wife and whatnot. And that came out. He just sort of inverted it. Right. Yeah. I mean, yeah. It's been pretty good timing as far as that goes, since that shit's been all over the news lately with Falwell.

Real stand-up guy. But he, in, so Routers, a Routers journalist called Fallwell Jr. about that part of the book specifically. And apparently, in the middle of the call while Falwell is like denying it or whatnot,

you can hear his wife. across the room like yelling at him to get off the damn phone and stop talking to that guy and all this like what do you do it Jerry hang the damn phone up and Jerry was like the reporter is like yeah so I took some pictures in my wife they were topless

I didn't care who cares why did you get a lawyer involved like you went and found Michael Cohen because all the news reporting says like Cohen had connections in Miami where you could try to get these photos back since then one of those there are two guys involved one of them was the pool boy that says

they were all having sex in the same room and the other one changed his name and went to hiding after Cohen got involved so what Jerry like why did you go to Cohen to get to get these photos back if it was just your wife topless and no one cared I don't think anybody would cared about a guy taking topless photos of his wife if it's just the two of them and like you know whatever it's their business even if you run a Christian college you know and see there's no the Bible doesn't say you can't take photos your wife naked and keep him for your own personally use now it's one of the only things the Bible doesn't say. They hadn't thought of cameras yet.

They probably would have wrote something down about it, but no iPhones. No iPhones in 200 BC. So, yeah, I'm with you, fuck Michael Cohen, fuck his book. So moving on, the next thing, Kamala Harris was in an interview and was asked about the potential of an upcoming COVID vaccine, the possibility of it coming out right before the election, which is the thing that there's been rumblings of for a while. vaccine may drop on November 1st. And when asked about it, Harris said,

I will say that I would not trust Donald Trump, and it would have to be a credible source of information that talks about the efficacy and the reliability of whatever he's talking about. I will not take his word for it. Yeah. And then the media, working with the Trump campaign, trying to turn this into an anti-vax thing,

which became really funny because they, use the anti-vax framing up for it because basically one of the big anti-vaxers arguments if you go like well you should take a vaccine is like oh so you trust big pharma and you trust the FDA who they kind of they they they kind of control and run because they have the robbing door regulator thing and you got to be like no no i trust peer reviewed science right but so now the trump's an open anti-vactor if you guys don't know like he he thinks vaccines cause autism he's tweeted he tweeted a bunch of times and so what they're basically saying is like Oh, so you don't, so you don't absolutely take a word of big pharma and an FDA?

No, no. Sam, what Kamala said, I will trust peer-reviewed science. I will not trust Big Pham's word for it. I will trust multiple studies, double blinds, and people who have competing motives to tattle each other because it doesn't work. That's what I trust. Right. And yeah, this got brought up in one of the Q&A part of one of our recent episodes. People were asking about the vaccine and everything.

And yeah, I agree with you. Like trust the actual scientist. I mean, I agree with what she said, which is like, I'm going to have to hear it from somebody besides Donald Trump. It's going to be a credible source of information. It's like, yeah, absolutely, it should be. But I just don't like, I don't know. And of course, it was always going to happen in this country and this year especially, but the politicizing of COVID. We'll figure it out.

Yeah, something like that. We'll get it off, Mike. But anyway, making the, making the pandemic. and the virus in the vaccine, a, like, political talking point is just so fucking unfortunate because it's like, it should be the opposite. Like, whenever a vaccine comes out and peer-reviewed scientists say, like, this is it, it's safe, you can do this. The last thing we need is people on either side or both sides fucking throwing shit at the

wall and refusing to get it because of dumb shit politics. But that's probably exactly what's going to happen, I think. Look, the, what I always say whenever anybody, any one of my friends who has a new kid and new parents are always, you know, scared, especially when it's their first kid, I don't have kids. You probably know, you know more about it than I do, obviously. But like, you'll be like, well, I've been doing some research and that's always a big red flag because like, you know, you're not, shouldn't be, you should not be doing your own medical research at your house on YouTube. But my thing is like, they've been thinking about it's like, okay, well, just ask your doctor. Ask your doctor if they vaccinated their kids. That's it. The first people are going to take this vaccine are going to be frontline health care workers. And they're the ones who read the medical journals constantly. If all the doctors at Cedar Sinai are taking it, I'm going to take it. Yeah. If you're talking about, I mean, if we're talking about just like vaccines in general,

anti-vaxters are one of the things that piss me off the most, one of the like conspiracy or whatever you want to call them, one of the fringes of society that piss me off the most because it's just so, it's so dumb to me. because, like, I don't know. They just, they take it for granted completely that we don't all have polio and smallpox and shit. You know what I mean? Like, everybody used to die.

People were dying all the goddamn time back in the day. Like, disease is a major problem in these, like, revolutionary breakthroughs that allowed us to conquer them. The idea that people are like, oh, no, it's all just a bunch of bullshit because they want to turn your kids autistic. or whatever. It's like, well, what happened to polio then? And if you're saying that like they do work, like, they are

effective, but also they'll make some of your kids autistic or whatnot. Like, for what? Why? Like, what are they doing with all those autistic kids that they're creating in a lab while they're also eradicating polio?

Like, how is that supposed to work? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. It's never made sense to me. It's also, it's also tremendously selfish because you're like, well, my kid's healthy. They don't need a vaccine. Okay. But the reason you need to get your kid vaccinated is because they might be fine, they might be fine. They might be fine. It's fine. That's the part that's really, like, it's, okay. But there's a bunch of kids who can't get the vaccine because then, you know, compromise. What you're saying is you're fine with your kid being a Lincoln and Shane that gives it to a kid, it kills. And that's, and that's, that's the part that's really like, it's, it's, man, you think about like how far. we've slid in this country. Like, there was no, polio vaccine came out. It was paid for the other government, and everybody got it.

Nobody questioned it. It was not a big deal. And everybody had access. My mom still has the circle scar on her arm. That was the downside of you. You got a, MMR vaccine gave them a circular scar. She still got it.

She's 67 when she was a kid. Her parents did not fight the government to get a religious exemption for whatever weird wellness cult she was in, which she wasn't. She was a Baptist. But to, you know, it's not to get the vaccine.

Yeah, well, it's like you say, I mean, it's just, it's like the whole thing with mask, too, you know. It's like you said, it's like, it's very selfish because it endangers others because of your bullshit. And it's the same thing with not wearing a mask. It's just a whole like the, the scourge of anti-intellectualism and anti-science and all that that persists in this country. It's just drives me up the fucking wall. It's a confluence of a couple different things. one, the internet gives us all information at our fingertips

and allows people communicating theorize, right? But the thing is, information is not expertise. Information combined with experience is expertise. You don't have any experience. You don't know enough what you're talking about to actually evaluate it. I say as myself, I just read what other people, experts say, and try to incorporate it.

I'm not trying to draw my own theories about shit I don't fucking know about. Same thing with the, there's that, and there's also people have so much free time. You look at where the mumps and measles outbreaks have happened. It's all like rich communities in Beverly Hills and Marin County, California, in the Bay Area. It's all like, it's like these pockets of people that have 20 hours a day to fuck off and do nothing and treat their kids like projects to perfect and just like to do their own research and come up with your own theories about stuff and spend all their time on these wellness message boards where they radicalize each other. And it's just like just ask your doctor and do what your doctor says, man, they went to school for a long time.

you know think less like you said it's all peer reviewed and everything it's not any of this shit it's not it's not just one scientist

you know saying this is what you should do and you know and obviously he's an expert and you're not you better have a damn good reason for not believing what even that one guy says

but it's not one guy it's the entire community of experts they have to like agree on shit that's how it works and I just don't understand the thought process of a person who has no training in any, you know, any of these fields, thinking that they've got it all figured out and they know what's best over the entire community

of people who spent their entire, smart fucking people who spent their entire lives, um, wrapping their arms around that subject. Like, just the fucking audacity of that. Yeah. I don't know. Imagine you bought a new car and you're, and your mechanic's like you need to put oil in it.

You're like, nah, I'm going to go with a chicken grease. Right. I read, I found one mechanic on the internet. I don't know him, but he has a YouTube channel. And he says, like, you use chicken grease instead of motor oil. So this is only very tangentially related, but you just made the story. You got a chicken grease in the car story? I want to hear it.

No, no. But it's like sort of in the same ballpark. You should remind me to this. It's an example of me kind of doing that, although it ain't the same. Anyway, here's what happened. A couple years ago, we went to get my son's hamsters, and we went to Petco, and we got these two little hamsters. They were brothers. They were from the same litter, and they were in the same little terrarium or whatever at Petco together, all cuddled up and looking cute and shit.

And we bring it up there to the front, and we've also got the cage for them and whatnot. And the lady at Petco was like, is this the only cage you're getting? And we're like, yeah, well, you know, we thought we thought they'd live together. I mean, look at them, you know. And she was like, oh, no, no, no, you're going to need another cage. I was like, why? And she goes, well, because they're both males and they will, they'll probably start to have some hostility towards one another. They might get aggressive towards one another if they're in the same cage.

And in my head, you know, a pet co-representative is not the same as an entire community of scientists, but still, in my head, I was like, she's just trying to sell me another cage. That's what's happening here. She's trying to call me out of another $12. I know what's going on. She's trying to get that extra cage money. That's what this is about. You know she gets a cut?

The sales girl at Petco? She's working off commission. Right. Yeah, it gets 90 cents of that extra $12. I spent on a cage or whatever. But I was like, I was like, I think we're okay. You know, whatever. And, dude, we brought those goddamn hamsters on.

and like four hours later that very night I had to drive my ass back to Petco and drive another cage because they were trying to rip each other to pieces in the one we had in the house just fucking each other up and you know made me sort of step back and evaluate myself a little bit like what did I think why did I think

that I had it figured out you know but that's how this is how people treat the you know their children's immune system and shit. Yeah. I mean, I mean, didn't you make the same mistake

with a cat in the cone? No, no, no, no, no, I didn't. We probably can't tell that story because it's really gross,

but a, it's a lot. We'll tell, even if you're dark one night, we'll tell the story about, no, that was the exact opposite. That time,

I trusted, we adopted a cat from a shelter, and she was a kitten, and she'd just been spayed, and we asked the question, and were told explicitly by the person at the shelter that she did not need a cone because she was like no cats won't cast won't do whatever that that won't happen no worry about it and and so it that's the opposite because we just believed her we took her at her word we

figured she knew what she was talking about and anyway my cat disembowed itself that night and it was like a goddamn Oliver Stone movie on the fucking pillow on the couch the next morning but but she lived and she's in there and she's just been fat and sassy and she's doing great But yeah, no, that was the opposite thing. So speaking of listening to scientists, the world's on fire. Everything's burning. Climate change is real. There's too many different environmental catastrophes happening in America right now to even keep track of.

Obviously, California is on fire again. This time, at least one of them, I think, caused by a gender reveal party. So that's fun. This is the second huge wildfire started by the end reveal in the last three years. There was a guy, I don't know if they caught the dude, the public details that come out about this one yet. But the fire is not contained yet. So far, it's burned like 10,000 acres or some shit. A couple years ago in Arizona, this guy shot an explosive device with blue powder in it to show, to reveal that he was having a boy.

They filmed it. The footage went viral, obviously. Sparked a huge wildfire. Burred 47,000 acres cost $8,000 million to, to contain. This asshole got probation. and is still employed as a border patrol agent. Obviously, that's the job he has because he's a psychopath. He did have to pay a huge fine, which I guess was like $500 a month for the next 20 years or something,

which $100,000 up front. So it ended up being like $240,000 or something. So that's the penalty he paid, which was like 5% of the damage he caused. So anyway, California, it looks like it's about to rain here all day, right? That's just smoke from clouds, from fires of surrounding us. The Bay Area is on rotating blackouts because it was so goddamn auto weekend. Meanwhile, people need air conditioning for medical reasons right now because the air quality is so hot. Iowa was underwater.

Lake Charles, Louisiana was wiped out by a hurricane. They've had no electricity for a week. Colorado had huge wildfires yesterday, and today it's snowing. It dropped 50 degrees in a day. So this is our new current reality, and no one wants to do anything about it, apparently. Yeah, but you know, Mark, you failed to mention that out here in California, if you look at the smoke emanating from these catastrophic wildfires, it's blue. It's a boy. Yeah, how about that?

No, it's all a fucking nightmare. And yeah, everybody does just keep sort of, I don't know, putting their heads in the sand and pretending it's not real. So who knows what the hell's going to happen with that? Obviously, AOC hasn't yet the Green New Deal, which is revived. by so many other of her fellow congresspeople, but that's just

how that goes. Well, Biden has adopted it as a larger chunk of his platform, so that's good. We'll see if it's just like jerking off the left

or whether it's actually going to mean it when he takes office. If, if when, because at least he's pretending to want to try. That's better than the opposite.

I guess. Right. Yeah, no, whenever the, like, the, you know,

the establishment party's platform gets, like, forcibly drug to the left a little more. That's always, a good thing in my book. Yeah.

But, you know, who the hell knows? It's like, it just keeps, it feels like it just keeps getting wilder every year with, as far as like climate change and the weather goes, like just, you know,

crazy shit all the time. This is anecdotal as hell, but like mosquitoes are a huge problem in Los Angeles right now. I grew up in Southern Virginia where gnats and ticks and mosquitoes, like, will ruin your whole summer. Like, it's just,

but one of the upsides of L.A. is like, bugs aren't really a thing here. If you got cockroaches, if you live in a shitty, department but for the both part it's just like you got no real insect problems few flies here there because it's a desert mosquitoes are eat you up right now and I don't know why that is it's warmer and muggy here and the humidity has been higher and there's a lot more standing water because of construction but like it

it's you see people was talking about people online today it's just I've lived here 11 years and I it doesn't make any sense well look I don't know I don't know shit either but I thought like I thought generally speaking it was like the problem was moving in the opposite direction, meaning just as far as like bugs in general dying off. Like it just waves.

Because no, I mean, I know the bees. Everybody talks about the bees, but not just the bees, like just the insect population in general I've read before is like going off a fucking cliff and obviously that's indicative of something. But it

wouldn't make sense that the only species to move in the opposite direction It would be the goddamn mosquito, so that'll be fun. I mean, like, they, I mean, they, they, they went from calling global warming to climate change to try to help people understand that, like, like, it's not so much, I mean, the earth is warming in general, but your specific location, it's more of like shit's moving around to places it shouldn't be, right? Like, Colorado gets snow, but it shouldn't be getting snow on September 8th. Right. Well, no, that was a good move, in my opinion, changing it from global warming to climate change. Because, like, I remember one, like, I went to college in Cookville, Cookville, Tennessee, major metropolitan area, a bastion of enlightenment, Cookville, Tennessee. And I remember once, inconvenient truth hadn't been out very long. And it was like March, which in Tennessee, in March, you don't normally see snow.

And there happened to be this big cold snap and a big winter weather system moved through. and it snowed like four inches or something in early March, which again is abnormal in Tennessee. But in that like three days that that snow was there, some motherfucker put up a billboard on the main dragon Cookville that had a picture of

Al Gore with a toboggan on and like his breath coming out like you could see his breath like he looks really cold. He's got like icicles hanging off his shit and whatever and it just said global what now? Because it got cold. It got

cold so that how can global warming be real because it's cold right now so get the fuck out of here can we talk for a minute about how successful this cultural war propaganda campaign has been because like what is this one dumb motherfucker in tennessee with a little bit of billboard money what is his vested interest in keeping fossil fuels super supremely profitable like if you if you if you're an exon you know in the exon c suite i get why you would want to buy that billboard why you're but but people like every everyday average people get really mad at algor for being like hey global warming sucks it's very weird i don't like people they the whole rolling coal thing but anyway look any any weather person will tell you that warmer temperatures

will meet it will snow more because when it does get cold there's more moisture in the air they never told you would never get below freezing again but global warming means when it does get below freezing there's now a ton of rain clouds because the ocean's evaporating. So, yeah. So, well, apparently you guys, like, what's that guy? What's in it for that guy? He's just, like, you know, he's just a fundamentalist zealot with all that type of shit.

Because he does that, he does that in Cookville all the time. Like, my sister actually just texted me a couple days ago. He's got a billboard up right now in Cookville that says practice socialist distancing. So it's like, you know, social distancing is obviously commie bullshit. and he's telling all the college kids there not to buy into it. But this guy stays doing that shit. Communists wear a surgical mask. The American soldiers on mash, they were communists when they were doing surgery.

The, like the propaganda campaign, these people have connected fossil fuels with Americana to agree that Exxon doesn't have to do their own propaganda anymore. This guy with Billboard money and Salon of Tennessee is doing it for them on his own. It's crazy. It's like, I don't have any, I don't make any money off. fossil fuels. Even if I believe liberal warming was bullshit, I'm not going out and like put up a billboard. Would I give a fuck? Well, it's also like, well, you know, like when Michelle Obama had her whole thing going on when she was the first lady, it became vegetables. Vegetables. Exactly. It became

un-American to like vegetables, like, which is just so on the nose from the rest of the world's perspective. You know what I mean? Like we're getting like diabetes for Jesus over here, just getting as fat as we can to be as free as we can or what? the fuck it's all so ridiculous oh speaking of it's also ridiculous the cops are still at it um shocker there a couple of stories in the category of the cops be wild uh apparently cop some cops in utah shot a 13 year old autistic kid multiple times after his mother called them to assist because he was having uh an anxiety an anxiety episode so they responded of that by shooting a 13-year-old over it.

Four times, okay. He's alive, though. He's alive. But, yeah, shot him four times. That's not the only... Can we just say, like, a good test to be a police officer should be, can you defeat a 13-year-old kid in hand-to-hand combat? Without shooting.

You've got to go work to the post office. Yeah, man. I know. And that's not the only headline out there right now related to cops. Well, actually, I don't know if they shot this guy, but cops going all copy on someone having a mental episode. There's a big story in Rochester, New York right now. It actually goes back to March.

There was a... This was pre-George Floyd, though, but he goes to him in George Floyd way. Daniel Prude, 41-year-old black man in Rochester. His brother called the cops because the guy was mentally unwell and was having, again, some kind of breakdown or a mental episode. He was out in the street, butt-naked, clearly not in a good way. and he, unlike the kid in Utah, did not survive his encounter with the Rochester police. They apparently covered his head with a spit sock and held him on the ground in a prone position before he stopped breathing.

And he was declared brain dead and died a week later. I know you pull up to a scene and you got a full-grown naked man standing in the street. It's like, that's a high-stress situation. like why does every high stress situation involving american law enforcement seem to end with just some form of well brutality like there's no better way to handle either of these situations especially the 13 year old kid it's just like it's crazy i wonder when i'm going to start coming out with the articles about this 13 year old kid like being a bully at school and having a pocket knife or whatever you know retroactively demonizing him or whatnot like they always did. He posted some pro-antifa stuff on his, on his TikTok. That'll be the line.

It's like, I don't understand. I mean, obviously, they feel the real need to control the scene, right? Which is like, sometimes like a dude's being naked. Like I live in LA that's a pretty big homeless population. I'll see people naked yelling sometimes. You know what I do? It's like they're naked yelling over there. It's fine.

It's not a big deal. So like I understand they're supposed to come deal with the situation, but like let him be naked. Yel it gets tired. His brother talks him down. He'd be like, okay, whatever. If he comes at you, like trying to fight you, tase him. So it got to be another solution besides like putting a bag over his head and pressing him face down on the asphalt until he's brain dead. I know.

Yeah, that's the thing. That's what it always comes down to for me with every one of these stories. It's like they'll always, you know, try to justify it every which way they can. But like, there just, there has to be. middle ground. Yeah. Between like just letting him run wild and do his naked crazy thing and, you know, killing him with a spit sock or whatever.

Like there's got to be a range of other actions that could be taken. And what the reason is the news today is because the entire police command staff resigned today. And pretty much not in disgrace, but because this thing happened in March. Right. And they lied about it. They said he died of a drug overdose. Then the Amuse report.

came out and said, no, he died of a succession. Then they got the body cam footage. Then they know about the spitsock and him being, you know, knee in the back, until he, till he couldn't, well, he couldn't breathe. So they had, there'd been a cover-up. They designed to neither was a cover, even though it was covered up. And then the police chief and they basically were like double guns out the door. You guys don't respect this.

So we're really bad at our jobs and we lied around about this. Yeah, well, that, no, that's the thing. You said they resigned, but not really in disgrace. No, it was more like in defiance. Like, they resigned in defiance of like, you know what? you don't appreciate us in the job we do then fuck you see how you do without us kind of thing which is not the first time that's

happened was it buffalo right also upstate New York there they were the SWAT team after the after they kicked after they knocked over the old dude and they gave them they knocked that old guy's head open they also like walked out on the job in protest they didn't resign

from the department they resigned from the SWAT team so they basically gave up their extra duty a little bit of overtime as a middle finger to the public for criticizing their conduct But the, so anyway, like, this guy's double really responsible because he could have, like, set it in motion a, like, not to be fuck up the Daniel Prude case. And he either fucked it up or lied about it. One of the two of them is true. Seven officers have since been suspended since the report came out.

So after the body cam footage released, they did act. But then, so then he, now he was leaving no replacement plan or a lot of succession plan. He just resigns in the middle of citywide protest based on his own misbehavior. leaving nothing in place to try to quell the civil unrest, which I understand he's in a bind there, but like you could have, like if you're going to resign, offering some contrition, some healing to the public and be like, I was wrong. Right. Would be, you're supposed to be serving the community here, right?

That's the whole point. The protecting serve is literally written on the side of your goddamn cars. Right. But, I mean, don't you think, that's the whole thing here, right? I mean, you know, obviously, this is kind of speculative, but don't you feel like that's, like, sort of part of the whole thing for him? meaning like, you know, resigning right now. Like I said, like, oh, you know, you think you don't need me?

Well, let's see, you know. Yeah. I, you can't fire me. I quit. Have fun dealing with this shit without me. Like, it's got that air about it. You could have given a public apology in a way that would have quelled the, you would have offered a release file to the public.

If you're going to, you could have lied down on the altar of public theory. Instead, you lied down on the altar of your own self-regul. large. You know what I'm saying? Like you you you had to go out in a worth way possible. It's just like I don't know, he probably gets full pensions. He's retiring his chiefs. It's probably 250 grand a year. He'll get for the rest of the way. All right. Well, let's see what you're talking about over here. Um, okay. I don't know, I admit I don't know what this is about Mark. You tell him if you do. Jim

Gray says Trump is firing up people in North Carolina, uh, bragging about his cancellation of the 1619 project and refusing and then of course the comment is gone now into the age let me try to find out here we go cancelation of the 1619 project refusing federal aid to schools who insist on teaching about slavery yeah the 1619 projects this a big thing the new york times came out last year basically it's this like series of like historical essays and like uh uh op-ed pieces about like the real founding of america chases 1619 is when slavery became race-based and institutionalized And makes the case that a lot of legacy of slavery is a foundation of modern society.

Now, you can, historians are quibble with little parts of it, but the general narrative is we do, we are taught a lot of bullshit about, you know, the history of the South and slavery and America's founding. And it seems to rectify that. And some schools have taken some parts of the district to make curricula, curriculums. And Trump is, in the theme of its race-based white power candidacy is saying he's going to remove federal funding from schools. that teach the 1619 project, which he doesn't have the authority to do. And I don't know, he would be huge lawsuits. I mean, I thought Republicans were about local control for school districts, you know. Right.

Becky Gurley says, I have a son who has mental health issues, but I won't call if he needs help after this. And I mean, now that's the thing. I mean, that's how, you know, black people have had that, like, internal conflict going on for forever as far as, like, you know, the idea of calling the cops or having to have the talk with your kids or whatever because of just the realities of the situation and yeah i mean it's a goddamn shame that that it needs to be that way with you know the people that are supposed to protect and serve or whatnot but you know why would you comfortable calling him after something like that it's fucking ridiculous yeah i would um i've called the police once in my life and i felt bad about it because they arrested a dude or did

not be arrested. He was just too drunk trying to knock on the wrong door. And yeah, it's always one of those things where I don't think I would ever call them unless I needed a report for insurance and it wasn't actually human being involved or if I felt really really fell in a dire situation. I had no other recourse. Right. Yeah, a lot of people talking about the 16-19 thing and, you know, like why would they teach actual history you know it's like I don't I don't understand the

I mean yeah I grew up in the rural south I definitely got I didn't get only that version of it I really didn't I had some teachers that were worth a damn but I definitely got a lot of that like war of northern aggression states rights type of shit you know

so I mean it's very much a real thing uh Corey Forrester the Buttercream Dream friend of the show y'all know Corey but he grew up in a civil war town called Chickamauga, Georgia. We're a big, the bloodiest two-day battle of the Civil War, I believe that's great, the Battle of Chickamauga. So it's like very ingrained culturally there. And to hear him tell stories of how they taught it, it's fucking unreal, man.

Just like straight up propaganda bullshit the whole time and don't acknowledge any of the other side of it. So, I mean, that's definitely a real thing that goes on. Yeah, and it's fucking ridiculous. Let's see here. We had actual... Becca Mabry says, we had actual history people might better understand

why people are marching now. And yeah, you're 100% correct. I mean, that's what happened. When you get taught that bullshit, you don't, you, like, automatically lack any kind of appreciation for the fucked up reality of the history of race relations

and everything in this country. Oh, hey, Mark, here's a fun one. Stephanie Satan. Did y'all see Travis Tritz Twitter meltdown over him looking like an old woman? Yeah, we did. Mark actually is the one who told me about it because he sent me a text

showing the picture. So I'm going to try to pull this up, Mark. He does look. So Travis is pretty Botoxed. But also someone facetuned it and it made him real mad. So he just took his actual headshot and ran through face tuned.

face two, not even one time probably. And it's just like made him look like a lady. And he started blocking everybody who was tweeted at him, including he was talking about here's what the radical left will do to win. There's propaganda trying to make me look like this is my, it's like, and somebody cut by a friend of mine and commented

here's a quarter and he got blocked, I guess she got blocked for it, which really really made me laugh. So here's a picture of it. Here's a tweet from the man himself. Just for clarification, more proof of the dishonesty of the left. Here's the original photo of me next to the doctored version that's being circulated by the left in an attempt

to try to humiliate me. Exposing these frauds for the liars they are is so easy. But like, I don't know who did that to the picture on the right, but they are hilarious. Like that, like, who decided to go after Travis Tritt in that particular way? Like, that's the internet at its best and probably worse right there, but that's so goddamn funny. Yeah, I mean, Jason Isbel, this is the old,

somebody dug it up, was an old comment, was basically asked him about Travis Stritt's politics and how artists shouldn't talk about politics, even though he's talking about politics by saying artists shouldn't talk about politics. But Isabel was like,

well, Travis Tritt, you know, was just a singer, he never wrote anything, so you don't have to listen to any of his ideas because he never had any. Right.

Well, okay, on that note, I can't, we might have talked about this a little bit before, but you said, like, talking about politics in the act of even bringing this up. But that's the part that I've never

understood about that argument, the whole shut up and dribble argument of just like, you know, stay in your lane, don't talk about politics, just do your, you know, make your movies or play your basketball or do whatever you do, but don't talk about politics. But every person who's ever said that, you know, whether they're an accountant

or a truck driver or whatever, they're being political on the internet. You know what I mean? Like, they don't have a platform or whatnot, but they'd go on there and just be political as fuck, but you're not allowed to if you actually have people following you for whatever other reason. Like, yeah, I mean, we've talked about before, but what does and doesn't get designed to find as politics in America is weird. Like, if you teach that, uh, George Washington never told a lie, that's apolitical, but if you teach this George Washington owned slaves and made, uh, indentures out of their teeth,

uh, then that's like, that's being political, right? That's, that's history. But if you, uh, If you kneel during the anthem, that's political. So you must stand in salute this jet flyover, you know, during this military recruitment head. So it's very, very, very weird what gets defined as, I mean, basically, right wing is mainstream in America. So Travis Trick can say, I respect the president, and I love him, make America great again. And that's apolitical. But if Jason Isbell does a fundraiser for Doug Jones or whatever, that's our just getting involved in politics. Right.

So, Bloggington Blakely says, why pay cops more when they aren't doing the job now? I guess people bring it up paying cops more over here. And like, this is something we've talked about on previous episodes. And like I said before, you kind of actually were the first person to sort of make me realize that, generally speaking, cops are not really as underpaid as they are made out to be a lot of times. Um, obviously, you know, like cops in my hometown, I'm sure they ain't making shit, but nobody in my hometown's making shit. But like cops in LA or big metropolitan centers can get paid very well. So yeah, I don't know about the argument of, you know, we need to pay them more.

We just need a different recruitment process and higher standards. And we need accountability more than anything else. Accountability would be that's the hard part. That's the easiest fix and seems like the most obvious one and the hardest one to achieve because of, you know, police unions. Right. Like it seems straightforward if you, I mean, look, honestly, there, we've seen enough body cam footage. There are very few situations where killing is straightforwardly justified. If you kill someone in the line of duty, you should be on the verge of getting fired to have to prove affirmatively that you didn't, that you had to justify use of force, right?

You should, that should be a pretty bright line. A situation went bad and you did a bad job handling it unless it's a straight up shootout, you know? So right. Well, yeah, we talked about this before too, but the idea of like licenses and that type of thing like, you know, being a doctor is an extremely high stress job or being a surgeon. And sometimes like people are going to die because you fucked up. But, you know, if you were genuinely trying your best and, you know, shit happens when you're a doctor. It's very high stakes, very high pressure. And we all kind of just understand that. But if you are fucking around and people die. because of it, then there's a word for that. It's called medical malpractice and your ass don't get to be a doctor anymore. And I feel like if you're a cop and you know, you kill somebody and you don't have an airtight, you know, case for why you had no other choice, then there should be some actual repercussions. Yeah, you're doing a simple repercussions.

Like it's not even the same equivalent of a medical malpractice lawsuit because qualified immunity means you can't sue a cop or killing you. All right. So, all right, let's end on a fun note. but I'm so glad somebody brought this up because you were also texting me about this over the weekend and I very much want to hear you go in on this. Nobody died to make fun of this.

Hefzavah Tolentino-Ochoa said, did y'all talk about the fucked up at, I'm going to say the fucked uppedness at the Trump boat parade where several boats sank. No, we didn't talk about it, but I'm so glad you brought it up. So, Mark, go in on the boat parade.

So I lived in Texas for a long time. I actually saw on Facebook, I loosely knew someone who was at the don't float flotilla. The, he's got a boost to book comedy shows around Austin. So Lake Travis and Austin is a damned up river, but it's kind of a narrow lake, right? So there's a bunch of no wake zones. But Trumpers are like, you know, they put the pedal to the metal and do some donuts and shit. So they're going too fast and no wake zones, big boats, swamp, little boats and sank a bunch of drunk old fat people.

Another one died. The fire department was able to rescue them. I think it was five boats. Three boats sank and five others had to be towed or something. One burned. It was a big mess. Pretty embarrassing. It was a good laugh.

There's some great photos of it. And I guess I guess it's too funny because the lake got polluted. Somebody's going to dig those boats up. But if you don't know how to use a boat, you don't know how to use an AR. Like I like, right a bunch of suburban people have gotten into redneck shit they don't know how to use there's a real problem here yeah no i was actually i was about to say i grew up in a lake town salina

tennessee where i'm from the only real thing we got going for us is we got a big man-made lake called delholla lake home of the world record small mouth bass but uh it's uh you know whatever salina absolutely has its problems but the lake is unassailable as far as i'm concerned it's heaven on earth beautiful lake and people go there all the time in the summer and do their boating and whatnot, but it's pretty much a redneck town, and that's where I grew up. So, like, I've been a part of multiple redneck yacht clubs. I have been out on that, like, on multiple boats, tied together with some of the drunkest, dumbest motherfuckers you will ever meet in your life, and no shit like this ever went on. Like, it just, the concept of fucking this up,

this badly, is so goddamn funny to me, and also just, so kind of typical of his entire aura and his and his bass's aura you know it's just it's chef's kiss especially like this as nobody died fucking yeah they got their feet wet and they lost their

coolest full of beer and they're over a million dollar boats rich people stop doing they just like when you see it like a giant shiny F250 they being driven by a dentist a parked all fucked up at the Allogarden you know what I'm saying? It's like

if you don't know how to operate it, good thing you know to work. Yeah. Right? I'm sure, though. It's like the, the McCloskey's in St. Louis when it came,

when they, when they, that chubby, a fucking, uh, personal injury attorney came out of his AR-15. And so right-handed AR-15, he was holding a left-handed point

and straight at his wife. This is the boat version of that. Right. Yes. Yes, it is. And with that, we're out of time,

but we'll be back in a mere 48 hours for Thursday's edition of a edition of evening, skews. Thank you all for joining us. See you later. Howdy y'all? Welcome back. Today's Thursday, September 10th. I'm Trey Crowder and that's Mark Aegee. What's up, Mark? What's that, Trey? This is Eden skews. Now listen, all the Bob Woodward stuff, we of course have countless examples of Donald Trump's dumbassery to discuss at length tonight, but for the official dumbass report up top, I wanted to try to switch it up. I myself have maligned recently. Donald Trump always being dumb ass.

So I wanted to come other dumbass story we could find in America for tonight's show. And as it turns out, I had to search no further than my old stomping grounds in East Tennessee. The SEC football season hasn't even started yet, but already my beloved Knoxville is under siege from Tigers.

And not the Tigers at LSU or Auburn University, but real life, honest to goodness, Carol Baskin's ass, tigers. Well, to be fair, one Tiger, singular, is currently on the look. in Knoxville.

And so it is just one tiger, but look, if somebody lived there for seven years, I could tell you, in Knoxville, one tiger is a shitload of tigers. We don't have the infrastructure for that. It's like how two inches of snow is a lot of snow there, you know? Like, we're not prepared to deal with that amount of this crisis.

There's probably people lined up at grocery stores buying milk and eggs right now, because the news is calling for tigers this weekend. It's going to be bedlam. I don't know what's going to happen. You're saying it's like tigers in East Tennessee. It's like when some like invasive speech He sees a frog opted into Australia, something like that. Yeah, pretty much.

How cats have decimated New Zealand's bird population. That's what East Tennessee is about to just, a bunch of kids about to disappear feed tigers. Be overrun with tigers. Here's the thing, Mark, so far, unless I've missed the latest updates on it. So far, they don't know exactly whereabouts this tiger came from. They can't figure that out. The Knoxville Zoo has officially confirmed that all of their tigers are present and accounted for.

and there is, of course, a big cat sanctuary. Isn't that what you said? Isn't that what you would say if you were a zoo who'd fucked up and lost a tiger? Yes, 100%. But I feel like that applies more to the next possible conspirator here. There is, of course, a big cat sanctuary in East Tennessee. And I say, of course, now, because I feel like a few months ago, before Tiger King ever came out on Netflix, people would be like, what?

There's a big cat sanctuary in East Tennessee. but ever since that, they're like, yeah, well, they got hillbillies and meth, so of course they got a big cat sanctuary. But there is one, and it's called Tiger Haven, and they are also denying any responsibility or ownership of this wayward feline. And I'm 100% with you where they are concerned. I feel like that's a little bit dubious because, I mean, this tiger had to, there is some hillbilly somewhere in a sense that knows he lost a tiger. He's trying to find his tiger, and somebody needs to get to the body. I love it. The whole thing with Tiger King was as soon as they got too old for people to hold for pictures,

they had to put them down, right? So that was why Carol was the good one, right? Because she was the one who was keeping tigers in the old age in theory. But the, so you took a tiger out to, you know, to woods to put it down. And you reach back for your beer, look up, tigers gone. Holy shit, you got a problem on your hands. But do we have a police confirm? Is any sort of authority confirmed this tiger sighting or does somebody get high and see a tiger?

Well, that's also a little up and there, it sounds like, because there's people saying like there have been, I guess, somehow confirmed sightings of some kind of big cat. And some other people are saying like, well, it's maybe not necessarily a tiger. But it seems to be a tiger. And I said somebody needs to get to the bottom of it and don't worry. Somebody's going to, Mark. Tell me this isn't a basic cable made for TV movie from the 90s in the making right here

because this tiger is loose in Knox County. and so who you know who's going to be the man for the job the mayor right every every cable TV movie the mayor shows up do you all know who the mayor of knox county is oh man cane i'll do this guy it is this guy Glenn cane Jacobs we've got a mute demon from the underworld slash mayor going squaring off against a loose tiger in a in a cage match or however it plays out. But that's what's going on back in my old comedy hometown of Knoxville. Go vows, everybody.

But I believe in Mayor Kane. Yeah, the night that the tiger at loose in Knox County does sound a great title for that. Yeah. For 80s movies, either as any comedy or a horror movie, I'm not sure which. But it's like, it's like tremors. You've got to get Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward team up with a couple of rifles to go hunt some tigers. Absolutely. I know I know a wayward tiger sightings

how they can tear a community apart because one of the things that happened when Tiger King came out, it settled some old beefs from high school kids where I'm from because like Doc Antle lived in my hometown for a while, Buckingham County, Virginia, because he lived in this yoga,

let's call it retreat, this yoga retreat and where he kept his tigers and stuff. when Tiger King talked about him being a yoga bill, like 20 years ago, a bunch of kids riding a school bus, the school saw some monkeys and tigers. They swore for years, they saw monkeys and tigers at the side of the bus window. But nobody believed them, and they got roasted to death. So when Tiger King came out, and it proved that there were tigers in Buckingham County in the

mid to late 80s and early 90s, people got full of themselves on Facebook, tagging all their friends in basically the middle finger emojis. So it was a, yeah. Yeah. Tiger King, it's fun. Tiger King made me also realize something about where I grew up, that it's like, it was so obvious. Like as soon as I first talked about it to somebody in the context of Tiger King,

I was like, oh yeah, that's, that was always weird. But like, no one ever thought it was weird at the time. But we had like a Dollar General Joe Exotic in Salina where I grew up. And I know it's like, isn't Joe Exotic, the Dollar General Joe Exotic? But that's just a red ass. Yeah. Yeah. It was a millionaire of the Hunter Tigers.

Yeah, you're right. He had a whole operation. But in my hometown, there was this guy who was a prominent businessman in town who was a also openly homosexual and would, and again, I didn't even, somehow didn't even understand how wild this was at the time. He would bring like multiple, like 21-year-old male prostitutes to high school ball games and stuff, like one on each arm, just like flossing or whatnot. And he had a little zoo.

And I don't think he had tigers, but he had like, you know, off-brand tigers. He had like mountain lines or pumas or something back there. But he had kangaroos and he had llamas and camels and zebras and all this type of shit. And he also had a monkey named Carlos. So he lost custody of earlier this year. And that's been a heart-wrenching story on Salina Facebook, him trying to get custody of his monkey back, which I believe he finally did. So him and Carlos have been reunited. So there's some happy endings in 2020.

So was the monkey being fostered in the meantime? Yes, I believe so, yeah. You know, I don't want to give away to any personal details here, Mark. It's a very, it's a very, you know, sensitive subject around town. But now, I don't know exactly what happened with the monkey, but he got Carlos back. But anyway, like, I never thought twice about that guy's existence or anything about any of that growing up there or until, like, Tiger King made me reflect upon it later. And I was like, what is up with our people and exotic animals? And it's a, I don't know.

It's a very weird subculture. Yeah, I mean, you never think about like what's weird about your hometown, too. You have some, like, distance from it. But I guess it's not if every town has some sort of tiger sanctuary or yoga or a tiger sex cult. Is it really weird or is it just like a franchise thing where everybody gets me? It's like an art. Yeah. But so, you know,

keep Knoxville and your thoughts and prayers y'all with this tiger crisis we've got ongoing there but moving on yeah good luck mayor cane moving on to the the actual news such that it is so um i said a couple weeks ago we were talking about we had a clip of trump as a daily dumb ass talking to somebody and he said some dumb shit and i said something about how like why do they keep letting him do interviews like it seems like he should stop doing these interviews. And little did I know. That shit was just the tip of the iceberg because apparently over the past year or so, going back to late 2019, Trump has sat for 18 hours' worth of interviews with legendary journalist Bob Woodward for Woodward's new book. And a lot of the revelations from said book and conversations have just come out like yesterday.

And there's a lot of shit in here, Mark. trade there's so much shit that uh the most horrifying part to me was that the secretary of defense was sleeping in his clothes a lot of nights because we were on those nuclear war and that's an anecdote everybody fucking forgot about um so uh yeah yeah um no go ahead go ahead no i guess we'll come back to that because again it is apparently the third or fourth most important thing in this book um well i'll you know, I said, like, I mentioned that, you know, so the idea, why does he even keep doing these interviews, you know, like what it seems ill-advised. There's a clip where he directly answers the question of why he did these particular interviews with Bob Woodward. And I actually want to show it because I think, I mean, it's part for the course for Trump, but it still is something else.

So let's get her up there. and as always Mark, if you can't hear it, tell me. But this is why Donald Trump says he agreed to sit for these interviews with Woodward. And I did it out of curiosity because I do have respect and I want to see, I wonder whether or not somebody like that can write good. I don't think he can, but let's see what happens. He does his finger at up, like, I hate the media analysis part of this, where it's like, like, everything's covered from a 30,000 foot view.

Like, we're all, we're all so wise and that we don't care about the actual information. We're more covering the theater of it. It's like, hey, the report should not be asking the president, why do you let this information get out? It should be like, hey, what the fuck about this information? And, and, and, and, that's true. I don't know why anybody would even ask that question. The president should be doing, should be honest with more people, not less of them. And you're right.

Honestly, dude, honestly, as, As fucked up as everything is with him and his administration and all that. Like, I'm not going to lie. That didn't even occur to me what you just said until right now. But you're right. The very question even needing to be asked in the first place of the president, why were you okay with sitting down with this legendary American journalist is fucking insane? But I just took it for granted because the first thing I thought when I found out about all this was,

why did he even do that? But I just thought it was funny that in speaking about Bob Woodward specifically that Trump's rationale was, I was curious, I wanted to see, can somebody like this write good? And I didn't think he could, but we'll see what happens. But it is like it is, but you're right. It sort of encapsulates where we're at this point where an actual reporter. And the White House press score is asking, sir, do you think being honest with Bob Woodward was a bad strategy? And it's like, right.

Like that I don't care about strategy part of this, man. Let's not, let's not be pundits for a second. Let's ask about like the act 190,000 dead people. Right. So, okay. So on that note, that was, I think, like probably the headline of this woodward avalanche of bombshells that come out during these conversations is in them. Trump straight up admits to purposefully downplaying COVID and knowing that it was much worse than it was. going out in public and saying,

oh, it's one person coming from China. Oh, it's going to be fine. We'll have it knocked out in X number of weeks or whatever. As he was saying all that outwardly, he was telling Bob Woodward publicly, yeah, this shit's like, this is really bad. You're not even going to believe it. It's not just old people either.

As young people, it turns out, it's like, this is really serious. And so that seems pretty damning. Yeah, it seems like it would be, but like we're, it also shows, to me it also shows that Trump is smarter than we think, because like the whole thing has been like, he's, dude, that, that was the number one, like, overarching takeaway that I had from this whole thing.

And I don't, I don't know how to feel about that. Because I agree with you completely. A lot of these clips and excerpts and stuff, they may seem like he's actually smarter than he seems to be. And, like, Tray, he's provided, he's presided over a plague failure with 200,000 dead people. and the economic depression almost, a bunch of near wars, and he's pulling within the margin of an electoral college victory.

So maybe his politically, you know, like what we expect of a public servant to actually try to save the constituents. Obviously, he's a huge asshole and should die in prison, if we live in a just society. But from the idea of, I'm going to do what I need to win an election,

apparently lying all the way through to keep your cult bubble intact as well. It's fairly effective. Okay, but that, I mean, I know you say, look, I'm not calling anything a done deal even remotely at all. But like, it would have to be some kind of political, like, this is just like his persona or something. And that's what, like, no, this is what my people want to hear. But like, he's in trouble right now. Oh, yeah. You know what I mean?

It doesn't feel like sound strategy to me either, even. knowing what we know about Trump's hardcore base and whatnot. I don't know. It's just, it's, I don't know what to make of it. It's weird. Mondale lost 49 states and he didn't kill anybody. So it's feel like it should be,

and it should be further apart. But part of what I'm saying was like it's more than he think is like, the whole thing has been like, is he so stupid, he doesn't understand coronavirus and that's why the response has been so inept. And that's not the case. He absolutely understood the nature of it from the beginning.

He is, his public, that's what I thought what, what's weird about this scandal, it's not the Trump that called lying. He's always caught lying. Right. Usually his supporters like it when he lies because he's honest with them, but lies to reporters to sugar the lips, right?

This is him being honest with the Washington establishment and then going out and lying to them. And so this should be ballgame, but I don't know. I know. Yeah. You're right. Because he also, at various points, these interviews, just admits that systemic racism is a thing, is a problem in America.

I mean, he balks at some of it, but at one point he straight up says, like, yeah, it's a problem and it's unfortunate. And, like, you know, he would never do that publicly. The whole thing is just weird because, again, he knows, he knew who he was talking to. He knows it's for a purpose. I just, I mean, I don't know. I mean, I can't, I just can't make sense of the whole goddamn thing. It's like, because I still want just. I can't make any of it makes sense from his perspective.

And so it makes me still want to point to, oh, yeah, he's dumb, but it's just, it's so weird that a lot of the, like, big bombshell revelations that have come out from it, paint him as being more aware and knowledgeable about various subjects than he's ever seemed to be. Like, I would never have called that. I'm not going to lie.

Like, if you told me something like this was coming out and how do you think he's going to come across in it, that is not what I would have said. But it also, it still is very bad. It's like you said, it should be game over. So it's not like a sound play politically or anything. Well, they're, I don't know. It's weird.

They're running the same playbook they did last week about, like, Jeffrey Goldberg's Atlantic article where they're basically treating the president on the record to Bob Woodward as if he's an anonymous source that Bob Woodward can't back up as if there's not audio tapes of him saying it. They're just out there. being like, oh, he's out to get the president. Yeah, I mean, Bob Woodward, he says, I think he's the wrong man for the job. Even though Washington centrist's voice, like, commander-in-chief or whatever.

He's like, yeah, he doesn't think Trump's a good president. Trump, he probably told Trump that to his face if Trump had asked. So I just being, somebody being out to get you doesn't mean they're not right, you know. Yeah, right. Okay, so let's go over some of the other things that came out from it. He also admitted to saving Mohammed bin Salman. Salman. Saman.

MBS. Crown Prince of Saudi. Yeah, MBS. The Saudi Crown Prince over the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. Is that right? Is that right? Shoggi. I think it's like Koshoggi.

Right. Yeah. For Americans, we can. It's close enough. Right. Who was, you know, the journalist who was writing for the Washington Post and went to, went back to Saudi Arabia to get a marriage license and he went to Turkey, I think. He went to Turkey, he was Saudi to be in Turkey to get some documents so he could get, he was trying to get married. He could get married.

Yeah. And he and never returned because he was brutally murdered and it was a huge story of time. Rightfully so. and there were, you know, countless denials from the Saudi crown and everything of any responsibility for it, but it's since been, like, basically confirmed by various intelligence agencies and whatnot that they were responsible for it. And in these interviews with Woodward Trump said, here's the quote, he said, about the crown prince, I saved his ass. I was able to get Congress to leave him alone.

able to get them to stop. So he basically just confirms what actually happened and then also brags about getting that guy off the hook for it. Which again, just what makes that a good idea? To try to time to travel back a couple of years, everybody remembers exactly what happened here. How dirty this is going to get after the full truth came out? Like, MBS bragged that Jared was sharing top secret American intelligence with him, right?

And so we don't know how much they knew beforehand. Like, this was a pretty big to kill an American resident, having just remembered in a way that, like, and then Turkish intelligence leaked it to the book for a reason. They knew it happened. And they're like, they're trying to flex in Saudi Arabia to like, to ingrati themselves with us. So we probably abandoned the Kurds, what we did. It's like, this is all like such like real politic by a bunch of people. bubbling morons. NBS is like the Saudi equivalent of Jared, pampered fail son, who doesn't know how to do anything, who's just lashing out and killing

anyone who remotely opposes them. And Koshoggi's family, they go way back, they're Saudi elites too. And he was writing scathing anti-MBS stuff. And so MBS had him killed and was apparently surprised that people were mad about it. I think his quote to Jared was like, what's with all the hypocrisy? which is right. We kill, I mean, like, well, I mean, the Iranian general earlier this year. Yeah. I mean, he's at least a military actor on a battlefield. No, yeah, I'm not drawing up, but I'm saying we have a long and storied history

of just like killing who we want to another country. I mean, American police are shooting reporters in the face with rubber bullets right now on our own streets. Right. I'm just saying, like, we've lost a lot of moral authority in the last couple years. Not that we, not that I'm saying, I'm saying, I'm saying, like, it's so out in the open now that. You're not good. Yeah, and right after Khashoggi's death, Trump bypassed Congress to sell $8 billion worth of missiles and high-tech weapons to Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

He vetoed multiple resolutions from Congress, rebuking him for that. He blocked a War Powers Act resolution to end military support for the UAE and Saudi and the Saudi-led. war in Yemen. So he, like, just really laying all the cards out there. And then, and then, of course, out after the Atlantic accused of disrespect in the military, his whole response to that

was, well, you know, it's not soldiers. It's the top brass who all they care about is making money for these big military contractors and all that shit. Like, that was two days ago. His first major trip abroad, his president was the Saudi. It was when he touched that orb, like

glowing orb, remember? And all that, that was to celebrate selling them weapons. And like usually the president's first big trip abroad is like a big, it shows your foreign policy priorities, right? That's what your agenda is going to be. And his was selling weapons. So yeah. Yeah.

See, they also, some of the conversations centered around his relationship with Kim Jong-un, and I just think this one's funny. In describing his chemistry with Mr. Kim, Donald Trump said, quote, you meet a woman. In one second, you know, whether or not it's going to happen. And that's how he describes just how much him and Kim Jong-un apparently hit it off.

You know, there's just two peas in a pod, those guys. I mean, he sparks flying, Mark. He talks about romance and sex with Kim Jong-un a lot. This isn't like the only time. It's pretty, I mean, like, I don't go for it, man. If it brings world peace and makes you happy, I don't know. We avoid that nuclear world. By the way, side note, like, and this has been brought up before on previous episodes,

but what is the latest as far as any of us know in this country about Kim Jong-un? Because, like, that was an insane story, too, that, again, there's just been so much insanity this year. It's hard to even keep up with. I feel like people forget, but, like, he was missing, maybe dead at one point and still hasn't been seen in public. Two points. Two separate occasions. He was presumed dead. and Trump this morning tweeted he just talked to Kim Mujun and John Moon and he's in good health.

Can't keep a good man down or something like that. Checking in with buddy. So he is a lot. Has he been seen in public since? Like is he like other than what Trump said? Like is it still up in the air kind of what is up with him? Or do we know that he's alive? I mean, there were rumors a couple weeks ago that he was like on his death bad to call him.

my sister was a take over. This is a guy who, uh, we were joking another day on, on text or talk, it found this article about how much he eats and drinks. The man, the man can party.

Uh, he apparently, uh, if he's apparently drunk when he had, uh, his uncle blown up by artillery guns and, uh, and forgot that he was blacked out and frat that he'd ordered it.

He woke up the next day. Kim Jong-un contracted gout at the age of 30. Uh, people aren't that familiar with it. Gout is like, generally a much older person's disease that is brought upon and exacerbated by basically hard living like a lot of wine drinking a lot of red meat eating stuff like that that's how you get gout so to get it at 30 is pretty noteworthy but here's the thing friend of the show and everybody's favorite uh the butter

cream dream corey forester he contracted gout at 28 so he's got kim jong un beat on that beat on that one. And I'm putting him on blast, but you know, he knows I'll do it. I do it all the time. But yeah, he had to cut. It's so funny because, like, to get his gout in line, he had to just stop eating steak multiple times a day, basically. Corey did.

And that managed to get it. And no more IPAs. Cut out IPAs, cut out steak for breakfast, and now his gout's under control. That's how he lives. Anyway, so. Preemptive, rest in peace, the buttercream during it. Yeah.

So obviously there's been like all kinds of, there's been a firestorm of coverage over this Woodward stuff. And I wanted to talk about Jim Mattis again for a second. Because like we talked about a little bit of how the media is failing or a little bit earlier, the White House press score asking about punitary as opposed to actual information in people's lives. Jim Mattis was apparently why he was sleeping in closed because a verge of nuclear war

was telling everyone how irresponsible Trump was and how unhinged he was and was going to the Washington Cathedral to pray for the survival of our country once a day and took no steps to solve any sort of problem.

And I just like, the degree to which everyone is like completely collapsing on the pressure this moment. If you really believe that as a cabinet secretary, you have avenues available to you, wonder in the impeachment inquiry, could have come public and told the Senate Republicans, they probably wouldn't have done anything.

But give it a shot, man, I'm talking about the survival of 300 million people in nuclear hellfire. You have the 25th Amendment if you can rally enough cabaret secretaries. You probably couldn't again, but no one's asking you to win. We're asking you to try.

Yeah. So, all right. That's actually related to what I was about to get into, which is what Trump has said about how basically all this is Woodward's fault, really? because Trump's whole thing is like, look, if it's so bad, if it's as bad as everything you guys are saying, why didn't he report it to somebody? The president said about an interview.

Why didn't he go to the authorities with this information? And obviously, it sounds stupid. It seems like an ill-advised thing to say. But, like, I mean, legitimately, though, because we're talking about the beginning of this global crisis, the COVID pandemic in America, and I mean, Woodward seemed to know that the president had a greater understanding of the severity of it

than he was letting on. So, I mean, you know, how valid of a thing is that to bring up of, like, why didn't he say or do something about it? Should he have? Like, I mean, I think, the counter argument, I'll say it up front before saying I disagree with it.

Is it like he, he says two things. One, he made, like, people understood that he gets this kind of access because he's writing big picture takeaways that come in book form and not doing, you know, gotcha quote-bongering kind of stuff. So he's going to fit it into a larger narrative that's going to try to be fair to all the people who are doing history in real time, right? And he also said that he also said that he didn't come out with it

because he didn't know if he wanted to try to confirm whether Trump was lying to him about COVID being airborne, which the reality of that seems not like, like it's not your responsibility to do the president favors by, I guess he thought maybe Trump was lying to him, but was being honest in public, so you wanted to have, I don't know, six months more of science to know what was happening. I don't really understand the thought process.

I think it's all pretty dumb. I mean, everyone's acting like, Bob Woodward's acting like he's gonna have the opportunity to read another book about Joe Biden's presidency in two years, right? No, everyone's, I think a football coach down by four touchdowns in the fourth quarter

start running the ball. And I don't know why we're going through the motions of doing things the way we always have done them. We're in like several dire emergencies. I mean like the sun never came out here today because all California's on fire. Right. And it seems like we should be acting

a more urgency about a lot of stuff, especially on the verge of nuclear war three years ago. Right. So on that note, I was going to say just like benefit of the doubt, just because I know from talking to one of my best friends was a Marine for years. And I've talked to him about Mattis and how revered he is by the Marine Corps and everything and how respected and all that.

And so just at first you were talking about that, I was thinking like, well, maybe there's an argument to be made that while he's in the midst of it, his thought process could be like, if I try to go public with any of this or do anything about it, I'm 100% going to be fired and be gone. and I feel better being in the room and having some kind of say and trying to keep that shit, keep what I'm worried about happening from happening than to be cast out on the street. But he's been gone for a long time now. And like still hasn't that I'm aware of. I mean, he has chastised Trump publicly over, you know, the way he's handled protests and stuff like that

and deploying the military in him. But he hasn't come out and said the shit that is in these interviews apparently about. you know, I thought we were all gonna die. And yeah, that's a kind of a bad look, in my opinion. Yeah, I mean, it's like we're still doing politics by Marquis of Queensberry Rules while the world burns around us. You know, I don't understand it. It's very, very weird. It's like, there aren't, like, it's like John Kelly was like, well, as a four-star general, it's not my role to get involved in politics.

Like, motherfucker, you were a cabinet secretary and then White House Chief of Staff. Like, you're in politics now. You can't retreat back behind that veil. And by the way, if survival of the republic depends on this stuff, like the norms don't really matter anymore. And also, like, this stuff is based on less than 200 years of like, like, 50 some elections or whatever. Like, there's no, like, this isn't a large sample size stuff. We're making this stuff up as to go along. So just do what you think is right.

And don't stop worried about like what a guy even years ago so much. Yeah. Well, so, all right, moving on because you, uh, You brought it up a minute ago. The wildfires out here in California continue to rage on. It's crazy. It's been like half-ass dark all day today. Like it's like super cloudy.

Like there's about to be a thunderstorm or something, but there's not. It's just smoke because the state is on fire again as it is every year at this time. And, um, no, wildfire season has actually started yet, right? That's thing. Wildfire season's still coming. This is like the, we got the biggest wallfire. in California history as far as we know, and it's not even time yet. And, you know, it doesn't seem to give much of a fuck about it at all, as has been the case in previous years, too, is the president.

Seems to not be too overly enthused about the federal government helping out a state like California, specifically, when it's going through something like this, because basically, California don't like him. I mean, he's probably, he's pretty much said that before. Like if they, you know, they don't support me, so fuck them, basically. Which, again, is just, that's such an insane thing to say that people kind of just take for granted now because of how he has been. But that's crazy for the American president to say that about one of the biggest, most populated states in the union, essentially, I fuck them. They can figure it out themselves. They're not going to vote for me anyway, or they don't support me anyway. Like, that's what he's.

he does. And somebody made this point, I thought it was a good one actually, because I think the electoral college sucks. I think you're not on the same page about that. But another way in which it sucks is like, California has 55 million people. 40% of them still vote for him. It's just not enough to give him any electoral votes. So if he had to actually compete for popular votes here, he might be worried about that 40%. I mean, honestly, like the countryside's burning. It's in, in northern California. It's like where his voters are in the state. central and northern California, the rural areas. So I just don't, it's a completely, the incentives are not aligned.

If you like, we didn't realize how much we were relying on our presence being decent people until now. I mean, even George W. would have a set the National Guard or something. Because like, here's the beauty of it. We usually rely on prison population to fight wildfires. We can't send the prisoners out to fight the wildfires right now because they all have COVID. But so just a series of calamitous cluster fucks. Yeah, but you know, like the thing about it is like, like I said, he pretty much does just come out and say like I'm not, I'm not inclined to help out states that don't support me, right?

Which is again, super fucked up. But that kind of implies that he's, you know, focusing all his efforts on helping out the states that do support him. you know what I mean? And like, I'm not seeing the results of that shit either. I mean, I know that like when there's tragedies and whatnot, AIDS provided and that type of thing. But all I'm saying is like I don't feel like my home state of Tennessee is just absolutely thriving overall as a result of Trump's presidency. You know what I'm saying? So it's not like he's just propping them all up to the detriment of all the blue states, which would of course be inexcusable and very fucked up.

but like it's just shitty for everybody it seems to me like yeah for sure but also um microtargeting not state by state but like like district by district like poor people live in floodplains you know so uh if if nobody in lake charles can vote uh because they're all underwater and there's no electricity that's probably good for him even though they're already going to win louisiana you know um same thing

with like a flooding on the Mississippi River or like in Iowa or whatever. I mean it might he's going to win Iowa about so much it probably doesn't matter but I think they actually did send some resources to Iowa but it's just a ton of damage. Yeah but it's like relative to like two I know two thirds of the American population lives east to the Mississippi but like I wonder what it would look like

with media coverage of because the entire West Coast is on fire it's not just California, it's Oregon and it's Washington. Right. A city of 85,000 people was evacuated yesterday in Washington. That's a lot of people. That's a lot of property burning. A lot of houses, a lot of homes,

a lot of livelihoods, and doesn't seem to rate much in the national conversation. Yeah, yeah. I'm trying to find right now, because you just made me think of it when you brought that up. This is,

if I can get the actual picture pulled up, but like you're talking about the fires in Oregon. You've seen like pictures and whatnot from Oregon. it's fucking insane. Like you talk about a hellscape. Like the sky is literally red. And it's just,

it's fucking wild. The air in the Bay area is unbreatable right now. Like an entire huge metropolitan area, nobody's nobody's got air. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the air, dude, the air's weird here right now. You know, I mean, it's like I said,

it's been like smoky all day. Smells like you're in a bonfire. the entire outdoors. Very weird. I got my patio is covered in Nash. There's not even a wallfire near here. It's just, this closest one's probably 200 miles.

Right. Yeah, that's what it looks like in Oregon. I'm not going to know about right now, but I saw that picture yesterday at UPS truck sitting out in somebody's driveway, and it's like from a fucking doom game or something. It's insane out here. And I know you're probably like, well, that's probably dusk.

No, it's probably like 2 p.m. Right. Yeah. But yeah, no, I, like, you know, I've had a lot of people, you know, my people back in Tennessee called me a lot and wondering if we're, like, if we're okay, if we're going to have to run from these fires, which I understand because, like, I didn't, I remember the first year we lived out here and I came home to Burbank and I saw, I saw the fucking mountains in the distance just on fire. They were just literally on fire. We could stand on our front porch and watch the mountains burn. And there was ash falling in our front yard. and what not and I was I was texting the people I did know out here that lived out here for a while and I was like Should we run like what like like Should we get the fuck out of you know because I don't I don't know how to deal with fucking wildfires at all It's not we had horrible wildfires in East Tennessee a few years ago, but that was an anomaly normally doesn't happen

But um But yeah they're like it's why it's a freaky it's a freaky fucking thing man it's weird if you're not you're not Even if you are used to it. And I don't mean to sound like I'm making fun of the idea of should we run. Because sometimes you've got to fucking run. Like some of these people have barely any real warning and they got to get the fuck out of there because it happens fast. And it's the shit is scary. The fires move real fast.

Like we're talking like 10, 15, 20 miles an hour depending on the winds. And they'll jump like a jump a whole interstate. So jump like 300 yards of fire. I'll just go carry it. It's fairly routineier to be driving down the interstate and both sides of the bridge will be on fire, the sides of the hills. I didn't know this before I moved here. It's hard to describe, but LA is more, it's built over top of canyons and stuff.

So there's a lot of hills that are covered in brush. So it's not full on metropolis, kind of. It's more like a giant stretching, winding suburb covered in trees and bushes. So it's, but beauty of it is if you're working class or broke or live in the city like we do, it has to burn through all the rich people's properties and the outlying. They have the ranches and stuff to get here first. So it's like it's like it's like, like when you see on the news, like they're evacuating horses. It's like because like the the ranches or they keep the horses they use in Westerns.

Those are those are outline areas and stuff before it gets, you know, long time before it gets here. Yeah, I always always tell Ma Ma Ma Ma'am whenever she invariably ask. Like if we get to a point where we have to leave, like it will have already been a massive story because it would have burned through like Walt Dism studios yeah or Warner Brothers or whatever like it will be a massive catastrophe if it gets to where we are in like yeah neighborhood at Burbank here where I live is mostly concrete so it's on the burner so um now I wanted to try I want to lighten the mood a little bit with some more and I mean it's still like I think this stuff is funny about it you stop talking about end times for a minute yeah well I

mean it's the thing is like this I find some of this like kind of funny, but it also is still maddening because it has to do with fucking Trump, of course. So, he engaged, you know, he's known to engage in one of my favorite pastimes of Republican politicians, which is

not giving a single fuck about the lyrics of the songs they use on the campaign trail. You know, Bruce Springsteen has talked a lot about it about born USA being used for these like super patriotic rallies and shit, not at all the point of the show. And this is

Or the song, not at all the point of the song. John Mellencamp, Pink Houses, same thing. Like, Reagan thought that was like, it's definitely an Americana song.

It's not a pro-American song. So this is Donald Trump arriving in Wisconsin, right? We're at here. I think so. Yeah. Fortune son, baby.

It's, but, Fortune Son is basically about Donald Trump and not in a good way. Right. But they think it's patriotic because he says some people are born made to wave the flag. And it's like, oh, the flag. Well, and also because, just because, like, they've seen some badass scenes in movies about the 70s or, like, you know, Vietnam movies and shit set to that song. And so they're just like, yeah, this is a badass American song here.

But you're right. Like, he's literally, he's literally what that song is about, and he's the antagonist of it. He's the villain of it. So just the lack of self-awareness is stepping off the plane to fortunate son. Like, you name me. You name me! He's like, no, it is 100% absolutely you, buddy. It's a, yeah, it's about, it's about, the song's about the poor kids not being able to get out of going to Vietnam.

Right. Exactly. It's like, yeah. And now, look, I don't think, like, he, like, I'm certain he probably doesn't pick the songs he walks off the plane to, but still it applies to the administration at large

it's still a lack of self-awareness for the entity as a whole regardless of who's personally involved with it. It's just so silly. Here's another thing, another example of what I was talking about. Like I said, I find it funny, but I know

it's also maddening because this is the goddamn president of the United States we're talking about here. This is this is Donald Trump's. This is how Donald Trump keeps informed. But if they say half as much as I already know, just from seeing it, you know, you have people watch

some of the shows. I watch Liz McDonald's, she's fantastic. I watched Fox Business. I watched Lou Dobbs last night, Sean Hannity last night, Tucker last night, Laura. I watched

Fox and Friends in the morning. You watch these shows, you don't have to go too far into the details. They cover things that are, it's really an amazing thing. All right. So what is that, Mark? Seven hours of Fox News, the president's apparently watching instead of like reading his intelligence briefs or whatnot. Fox and Friends runs three hours to somebody to do the map. It's nine hours. It's when he just talked about watching. Nine hours. It's like if you, you know, people that have like an older parent or something who has gotten into a place in their life where they just like sit on the couch and watch Fox News all day and you're really worried about them because it seems to be like poisoning their

mind and whatnot. That's literally Donald Trump. Like he is that person. Like he has he has some of the best you know intelligence and information and data and statistics and subject matter experts and all of that available to any person on planet Earth and he watches Fox News for nine hours a day. apparently like and and is tweeting all day too like he just he literally can't be doing genuinely presidential stuff for much of the day even with just those two pieces of information or three you know he has to sleep at least a little bit you know how much he's on twitter and this is how much he says he watches fox news every single day so like what is left man yeah yeah it was a point earlier today where he tweeted 30 times in 30 minutes.

But the idea, how do I put this? Like, first of all, he was all in handy last night. So he went on it and then watched it back. And he's the protagonist of these shows. So it's like the equivalent of spending nine hours a day listening to podcasts you were a guest on. Like he likes it just because he's a center of the universe, which is like thinking about how boring this is relative to,

like you talked about the information he has access to. He can literally read like, President Xi of China's like text messages to a side check. Like you can have access to all that stuff. He can read about whether they're aliens. Yeah, he's got the area 51 notes and shit. He's got all that stuff. Somebody come brief from over what happened,

if and when we went to the moon. He could know all that stuff. He can know all of it. And instead, he'd rather watch Lauren Ingraham talk about himself. It's crazy. Yeah, goddamn. Fuck it.

that's a narcissist for you but that's fucking you're right just I don't know I just I don't know how you even handle that

like if you so like how much like how much of what goes on inside that White House you think is the people around him

you know what I mean as far as like puppet masters and shit like Dick Cheney and that sort of shit like how much how much agency do you think think he like really has with all this.

And that's not, I'm not trying to let him off the hook with that. I'm just saying, like, do you think all that people, other people are mostly driving the bus? Yeah, I mean,

all the cabinet secretaries seem to be running there. Like, you either have, like, guys of Wilbur Ross and Steve Mnuchin who were just running scams, or you have, like, Betsy DeVos,

who's like an ideologue who actually is trying to tear down public education is doing it. But there's, like, unified theory of government. He just gave positions to people, and he only gets pissed

when he sees what they're doing on the news. He's the educational concern. It's like the 1619 project, so he could call Betsy DeVos and be like, we got to do something on 1619, and he hangs up the phone and just watches what happens on television. I don't think, like, the government's been an autopilot for four years, outside of his pet scams,

which is like installing loyalist people in places, and then they get to run their little petty scams, like giving themselves contracts to make ventilators or whatever. So it's like, it's just, it's a government of nothing. for nothing. Yeah. Run by nothing. All right.

So let's go to the comments here, see what's going on. Here's one. I'm going to be honest right up top. I'm not sure exactly about what the, but Michelle Minich Spencer says, can y'all please give your thoughts on the possibility of senators, Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, and Josh Hawley being nominated to the Supreme Court. We know about that, Mark. I mean, obviously it'd be a disaster.

You're right. Yeah. Those are all three lead-dad guys. I don't think Tom Cotton was. would accept because he wants to be president. I think Holly does too. Ted Cruz might have learned his lesson, but he's an idiot. Like, I think you probably learned that Americans don't think he has charisma or

likeability. But you never know. He does consider, he does worship that like the Federalist Society debate club kind of bullshit. So he might enjoy being on Supreme Court. But it was fairly transparent. They dropped that the same day that Woodward stuff came out, which is just sort of like, guys in this thing about abandoning me,

not only would you be given Supreme Court in general, but for three of you, you might have a shot of being on it. You know, lifetime appointment. You get to make it illegal for, you know, women to read or whatever. It's just such a silly little, seem like a really weird scam to be running. I mean, obviously, Republicans always run on judges,

which I wish the left would do that, by the way, would actually pay attention to the courts. So you mentioned Betsy DeVos. I'm going to go, Ellen Clark says, Betsy DeVos wants everyone in religious schools. She wants to basically privatize all education as far as I'm aware of what she would like to see happen. And I don't like, again, you know, talked a lot about how one of the biggest chunks of Trump's base is supposed to be, like, rural Americans. And as somebody who grew up in an extremely rural area, like, I don't understand how that's even supposed to work, like, even in their minds.

The idea of, like, privatizing all education. Like, if you get rid of public schools, I don't know where. rural kids are going to go to school anymore. I'm sure there's plenty of places where they can figure something out. But like where I grew up, you'd have to go an hour each way at least to have any kind of option if it wasn't for a public school. Yeah, I mean, it's a really bad idea,

but also a good example of a thing I like to think about a lot. Like one reason we shouldn't let go of this is because we're not going to be able to reestablish them is watching with the post office right now, public schools and stuff, libraries, If you try to establish things that people thought were in the public good 200 years ago, you get called a communist. Like, imagine if police didn't exist, right? And Obama had proposed them in 2014. The freak out, Barack Hussein Obama wants to put an armed agent of the state on every corner, right?

The people would have lost their goddamn minds. The same thing with public schools. They would take your tax dollars to program them about socialist thinking. or whatever. We're not going to get this back. We're really far about the bend with any sort of idea of common good. And I don't, I don't get it. Yeah, rural areas, inner city areas, places that large tax where people don't have money. We're literally the only way you can have a school is everyone chipping in, even if you don't have kids or only have grandkids or whatever. It's the only way you can educate people. And even then, we had like fifth generation textbooks that still

said dinosaurs were around 300 years ago or whatever. So, yeah. T.S. Ferguson says, isn't Tom Cotton some weird racist Disney character we're supposed to pretend doesn't exist? Yeah, Tom Cotton's from Song of the South. Disney's trying to bury him, but he's back. His name is a little bit on the nose. Yes. Navarious 08 says, hell, let's throw in the pillow guy for the Supreme Court. And, yeah, I'm with you. He would be, honestly, he'd be less destructive than Ted Cruz because he'd be eclectic.

never know where he's going to come on stuff, you know. The guy likes crack too, so he might relapse and he knows he knows he covers a crack addict. So if he relapses, they can't clear up really quick. Linda St. John Heiliman says, what about Trump leaking national secrets about a super secret weapon? What do you think, Mark? Well, no one, so in Woodward's book, he bragged to Woodward about, like, a new secret nuclear weapon nuclear systems that no one knew about and now i'll say two things about this one he probably shouldn't be talking about that i don't there's no role the

everything declassified the president wants it to be so it's like he can say whatever he wants there's no like no law against he can't be prosecuted for for dropping top secrets so it's just funny but um if he's talking like our nuclear weapon systems if you read anything about it it's pretty scary how old they're all they still on the ms doss and like hard lines and shit so they could like A rat could buy a cable and launch a missile, so somebody should be upgrading those. If he's doing that, that's awesome. Someone theorized that we're talking about supersonic nuclear missiles, which I'm assuming any competent state intelligence agency knows we already have those if we, if we have them,

but probably still should be talking about them in a newspaper. Anyway, it was just another one of his long line of fuckups in this book. Yeah. There's been a few different comments. saying some version of like, you know, yeah, this is all making headlines right now with Woodward's book and everything, but like none of this shit is really that surprising and probably also won't matter. And I saw an opinion piece on Fox News about it basically arguing the exact same thing. It was so fun, like coming from the conservative perspective and still being like,

like, look, what are you going to do? What are you going to do? What are you going to do? about it. Who gives a shit? A different, his whole thing was like, a different tell-all book comes out every week, villainizing and demonizing the president. How, is this one really going to be any different? No, wait and see. And I just, like, that argument is so hilarious to me because the idea of, like, justifying the latest horrific look for the president by saying,

do you realize how many horrific looks this guy's had? in the public sphere over the past little bit. But they do, we have a trace of irony or self-awareness at all. And also, like, I mean, as far as that goes, I think they're right. As far as, like,

I don't think, I don't think anyone who we need to really care about it will really care about it. It's like you said earlier, Mark, like it should be, you know, curtain call, but it won't.

And I agree with you, it won't. I mean, obviously, I'm still hoping that he loses, but yeah, it won't, it's not going to,

you can. can't change their minds as far as I can tell. I mean, like, elections are decided on the margins, right? So if half a percent of people flip for any reason because of this, it'll make a big difference in the final low tally. But obviously, this hasn't been cut up in the campaign ads and started running during football game yet. So where people can't avoid it if they can online or whatever. So I don't know what it's going to do.

But also, I just like I wish we would all get away from that kind of analysis. Like we were talking about earlier where the reporters asking a question about political strategy as opposed to the actual revelations. It's like we're all pundits now, right? We're all like we're all trying to anticipate a hypothetical vote on the electorate instead of just being like, this is fucked up that he did this. And I hate him to be like, well, how do you? Random voters on CNN will get asked, how will this scandal play? So now ask what do you think about it, right? How is it going to affect your life?

Have you lost someone because of COVID? How do you feel about losing the? last six months of your life in your house and not be able to hook your grandkids. How do you feel about that those are the real questions. I mean, I mean, we're here to talk about politics with a little bit of a remove, but I just wish in general the coverage would be more like about how are you affected by this, you know, like as opposed to how is this going to affect your neighbor, your neighbors vote. So Maggie Whitcomb says, did you all see?

Ted Cruz has a bacon cooking show with machine guns. A, I have not seen. but B, I'm already upset by that because just that logline description of it makes Ted Cruz sound like way more badass than anyone would believe Ted Cruz actually is. Like, that can't be. I don't like that. I don't like Tech.

You put Ted Cruz with a bacon show with machine guns on it? No. I've seen a viral clip of him wrapping barrel around the, around like I think it was an AR, and then shooting an old, auto which cooks the bacon and he eats it and goes hmm freedom which is like yeah freedom in its entirety is able to shoot a guy I'm sorry I didn't know what we were talking about it we're saying he cooks the bacon with machine guns is what we're saying here yeah right

you're wrapping around the barrel I thought it was just like oh it's a cooking show where they eat bacon and also shoot machine guns but I didn't we're talking about again see there again somebody came up with that for him that's too that's too stupid and funny in a good way to be a Ted Cruz idea. Like, I don't. I cannot believe like this performative redneck shit. People fell for it with George W. Bush, who's from New England and went to school in Andover.

He could fake West Texas accent and started wearing cowboy boots and bought a ranch where pretending to clear brush on his off days. People like, all he's a working man of the people. Ted Cruz went to private high school, Princeton, Harvard. He went by Raphael until he decided he didn't want to sound Hispanic anymore. So he was sort of going by Ted, because his little name's Edward or Edward or whatever. And it's like, this

is all incredibly performative. And I can't believe anyone buys that Ted Cruz Right. It goes out and shoots guns and his flat front shirt tucked into his woven belt or whatever. It's like when a fucking

Roy Moore almost fell off that horse that time. He didn't know how to ride. Yeah. Yeah, right. Yeah, like that type of shit. I know. but I don't know. They just want to, I mean, like, I mean, Trump's the biggest example of that that's ever been, except, like, he doesn't even mostly do that type of shit,

but what I mean is, like, finding, they'll find a way to make their guy fit into that framework. You know what I'm saying? So if you go out of your way to do it yourself, to cook bacon with an assault rifle, or be stupid on a horse or whatever, they're going to fall right in line with that. Because they're already trying to do that, you know, those mental gymnastics anyway, to convince themselves that the guy who's telling them the shit they want to hear is one of them, you know, so.

Yeah. I don't know. I can't get my mind there. You know? No, I know. Yeah, yeah, let's see what we got over here. first of all I want to say I'm looking through some of these last comments here there's been a lot of people asking about the quality meaning like the quality of the stream and whatnot and I'm thinking and very very much hoping that it's a byproduct of the shit we were talking about with the fires and everything that's going on out here I don't know I'm computer dumb as hell I don't know how it all works but I'm assuming that's got something to do with it as far as the stream being kind of shitty and whatnot.

And obviously we apologize for it, but also like, you know, we want to do it live and just doing what we can. So hopefully it won't be as bad next Tuesday, but I don't know what else to say about it. It annoys me too for sure. But it's also like, I don't know, I can't, we can't, I can't really tell what it looks like to you guys, you know. like what I see is not what a lot of y'all see I think and it's hard for me to tell when things are going fucky or not I see people say it's not issue I don't know because sometimes like you'll be herky jerky you'll be bad on my you come and do my screen but when I go click on the playback to see how it looks fine on the stream so I don't know it's very weird but

Mark what's this I know this is a woodward related quote I can't remember the context right now I read so many of the different things today Frank right peppy said it's a quote says you really drank the Kool-Aid didn't you isn't that that uh Woodward said that or I'm sorry Trump said that to Woodward didn't he about um was it about racism do you know what that's from I was just totally banking on you know it's no I don't know what it's about I'm gonna try to find it real quick Trump did oh white privilege that's what it is oh Oh, that's right.

What we're in framing a question says, like, look, let's be honest, you and I, we're both white, privileged. And he asked about racism in Trump's response. He says, wow, you really drank the Kool-Aid, huh? Meaning he doesn't believe he's white or privileged. Or, I mean, he knows he's white. But you know what I mean? That's all bullshit to him. He earned all of this.

He wasn't born on second base or third base at all. He hit a grand slam. And all that's just excuses other people make for. being as successful as he is. Yeah, I do think they got a white privilege is a bad, I fully believe in the concept. It's a bad term.

It needs a rebrand. But yeah, for a guy like Trump to be like it doesn't exist when literally he should have, like I mean, the guy, banks could have sent him to jail for fraud in the 90s they chose not to. Because they had that the better play

was trying to get to recoup some of their money back by letting him to their bankruptcy and extracting some of it. So he bought his way, Like he bought Don Jr. Navanka out of jail three years ago when they had the New York DA, Sy Vance, who sucks, by the way. He let that, they give a campaign contribution to get the charges dropped on them. We all know about the $400 million inheritance.

It's like for him not to think that privilege exists is like fucking. Mark, no. It ain't me. It ain't me. I ain't no fortunate son. Not Donald Trump. It doesn't apply to him. All right.

We're out of time. Thank you. guys we'll see you next tuesday on evening skews so you love you bye bye guys have a good