Today, Dan and Jordan enjoy a Wacky Wednesday adventure looking at one of Alex's guests, the enigmatic QAnon enthusiast, Lionel. The gents dig into a cornucopia of old hot takes from Lionel and discuss the path from humor hack to political hack.
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks for holding. | |
| Alex, I'm a first-time caller. | ||
| I'm a huge fan. | ||
| I love your work. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| Hey, everybody. | ||
| Welcome back to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| I'm Dan. | ||
| I'm Jordan. | ||
| This is a podcast where we sit down and drink. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| What just happened there? | ||
| 2019, starting off with... | ||
| I thought we were a couple of dudes. | ||
| We like to sit around and drink novelty beverages and talk about Alex Jones. | ||
| The reason I had that terrible hiccup is my instinct was to say Happy New Year to everybody right out the gate. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I tried to integrate that into the We're a Couple Dudes. | ||
| It was a disaster. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| I cannot get fancy. | ||
| That was... | ||
| Oh, boy! | ||
| Stick to the script. | ||
| Yeah, no kidding. | ||
| We've been opening the show the same way for two years now. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| Dan? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| Dan? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| What's your favorite New Year's? | ||
| What's my favorite New Year's? | ||
| Or what was your best New Year's? | ||
| What, my best New Year's? | ||
| Yeah, tell me about your best New Year's. | ||
| I don't think I've had a great New Year's, honestly. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Me neither. | ||
| I can't think of any that stick out in my head as being, like, super awesome. | ||
| I remember, I mean, they're all just, you know, various amounts of booze with friends. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Which is not, you know, it's usually a pretty good time. | ||
| But there's never been one that was like, you'd make a movie about or something like that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The glory of youth. | ||
| Right, right, right, right. | ||
| I got nothing on this, man. | ||
| No, I mean, most New Year's for me are, especially since I've been like over 21, have never been all that exciting. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not a big New Year's fan. | ||
| I think the only New Year's that I really remember with any fondness, because the rest of them have been an absolute disaster, was when I was like 19. My friends and I came up to Chicago. | ||
| One of my friends was at Columbia. | ||
| And we just actually went all over the place. | ||
| It was bananas. | ||
| At 4 o 'clock that morning... | ||
| One of my friends peed on the subway tracks. | ||
| Hell yeah. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Third rail? | ||
| Not yet. | ||
| But yeah, and I remember distinctly everyone being fine with it. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| It was 4 a.m. | ||
| On New Year's. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Everybody's there. | |
| What are you going to do? | ||
| Everybody's just like, hey man, that guy's, when you gotta go, you gotta go. | ||
| You gotta go. | ||
| That's the way it's gotta go. | ||
| See, that's a scene from a Glory Days of Youth kind of movie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| That's where it is. | ||
| I've got... | ||
| I think one year, the only thing that sticks out to me is there was like an open bar thing. | ||
| Back in Columbia at this dance club that me and my friends never would have gone to. | ||
| But it was an open bar for like 20 bucks or something like that. | ||
| Oh yeah, no shit! | ||
| Let's go crash this and see how weird it can get. | ||
| And I remember I left, I believe, a couple times to go down to the hot dog vendor outside. | ||
| A couple times to get some hot dogs. | ||
| That's how bored I was with the scene in there. | ||
| I think I got... | ||
| It might be a different night, but I'm pretty sure it was that night. | ||
| Then I got into a little altercation with the DJ. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because I don't like going to the clubs. | |
| Hey, could you play some Highwaymen for me? | ||
| It wasn't that. | ||
| It's my specialty. | ||
| The first thing was, I thought they were playing the music too loud. | ||
| And I let them know that. | ||
| It's too loud. | ||
| The second thing was... | ||
| Yeah, everyone agreed with you, Dan. | ||
| Everybody had elected you silently, the spokesman. | ||
| It was too loud, though. | ||
| Looking back, I know I'm like, you know, hey, cranky old man, shut up, but it was too loud. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And the second thing I had a little bit of a tiff with him about was, like, I thought the music... | ||
| He needed to get off your lawn as well? | ||
| He could have stood, too. | ||
| He was playing music that I thought was just real bad. | ||
| It was derivative and boring. | ||
| And so I went up to the booth and I was like, could you play something better? | ||
| Like, this is just a disaster. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And he's like, I got something that's going to blow your mind. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| The happy birthday song. | ||
| I'm playing it next. | ||
| I'm like, alright, cool. | ||
| So I go back and get another shot and I'm standing there and he's looking over at me as he puts on the next song. | ||
| Oh, no! | ||
| With a positive expression or was it like... | ||
| Oh, I'm gonna kill him with this song. | ||
| No, it was kind of like a wait till he sees this. | ||
| Check this shit out. | ||
| And then the next song was a dance remix of The Mamas and the Papas. | ||
| Did it blow your socks off? | ||
| No, it didn't. | ||
| And as he was looking at me, I made eye contact with him. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| I went like this. | ||
| Thumbs up. | ||
| No! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thumbs down. | |
| Did not get kicked out, but probably should have been. | ||
| Anyway, that might have been one of my New Year's. | ||
| Now that's from a movie right there. | ||
| That's a glory of old age movie right there. | ||
| I also might have been 23 at the time. | ||
| It's not like I was 16. Anyway, Jordan, this is a podcast where I know a lot about Alex Jones. | ||
| And I only know what you tell me about Alex Jones. | ||
| And it is a new year, and I've been getting some feedback from folks that maybe our show is too depressing. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| At times. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so what I wanted to do today is I wanted to mix things up and do an episode that I think is possibly... | ||
| I don't think anyone can be depressed by this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| I think this will be one of our softest... | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| All right. | ||
| Are you going to get the anti-Semitism out of the way up top? | ||
| Is that how this is going to go? | ||
| No, it's going to be a fancy, free, weird, wacky Wednesday episode, and I'm excited to talk about it. | ||
| But before we do, I've got to give a shout-out to a couple of new donors here in the Knowledge Fight fold. | ||
| First, I'd like to say thank you to Jeremy. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you very much, Jeremy. | ||
| Secondly, we're a little late on this based on the name, but I appreciate it all the same. | ||
| Thank you so much, The Christmas Fish. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you so much, Christmas Fish. | ||
| Who are you? | ||
| Mysterious, enigmatic Christmas Fish. | ||
| This next one, I at first thought this was a name that I don't want to talk about on the air. | ||
| I thought this was a goofy trolling prank. | ||
| But I'm going to go ahead and allow it. | ||
| The Hanukkah dog. | ||
| No. | ||
| It is. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I gambled on a fart and lost a memoir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a policy wonk. | |
| Thank you so much. | ||
| I gambled on a part and lost a memoir. | ||
| Very much, I gambled on a part and lost a memoir. | ||
| We appreciate it. | ||
| Next, and finally, I'd like to say thank you to somebody who donated on a little bit of an elevated level. | ||
| We appreciate it also very much. | ||
| So, Reid, you are now a technocrat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a policy wonk. | |
| Four stars. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go home to your mother and tell her you're brilliant. | |
| Someone sodomite sent me a bucket of poop. | ||
| Daddy Shark. | ||
| Jar Jar Binks has a Caribbean black accent. | ||
| He's a loser little titty baby. | ||
| I don't want to hate black people. | ||
| I renowned Jesus Christ! | ||
| Thank you so much, Reed. | ||
| Yes, thank you very much, Reed. | ||
| If you out there are listening and you're thinking, hey, I'd like to support this show, I like these gents and what they do, you can do that by going to our website, knowledgefight.com, clicking that button that says support the show. | ||
| We would appreciate it. | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| That's an interesting thought to have, like when you're driving at work and you're just like... | ||
| When you're driving at work. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| You might be driving at work. | ||
| You might be driving at work. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| If you're a long-haul trucker. | ||
| Or a chauffeur. | ||
| Could be a chauffeur. | ||
| Could be. | ||
| Could be an Uber driver. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Any of these things are possible. | ||
| Because an Uber driver playing our podcast while driving would be fantastic. | ||
| Five stars on the app. | ||
| What were you saying? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think it's a strange thought to have to just be like, hey. | |
| I want to support these guys. | ||
| But some people do, and it's a weird thought, and we appreciate it. | ||
| Thank you very much to all of you. | ||
| Speaking of that, I know that I said that the wiki would probably be posted on the first. | ||
| There's a little bit more work I need to do, and I realized how much better would it be if it came out on January 7th. | ||
| The formal anniversary of our show. | ||
| That's our formal... | ||
| That's right. | ||
| The second anniversary. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Holy cow. | |
| That will be the day that it goes live. | ||
| I'm sorry for the false start there, little hiccup, but it will be on knowledgefight.com on January 7th in celebration of our anniversary. | ||
| Perfect. | ||
| Now, Jordan, today, I told you this is going to be a little bit light. | ||
| It's positive. | ||
| I don't know if it's positive. | ||
| God damn it. | ||
| Nothing in this show is positive. | ||
| Yeah, well, fair enough. | ||
| But... | ||
| It can't be depressing. | ||
| Wacky Wednesday is a place where we fulfill time travel requests. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Talk about Project Camelot. | ||
| Jim Baker. | ||
| Coach Dobbin Meyer. | ||
| That motherfucker. | ||
| Any of these things. | ||
| But also, one of the things I like to do... | ||
| I like to highlight guests of Alex Jones' and dig in a little bit more about what they're into, what they're about. | ||
| Oh boy. | ||
| And today is one such episode where we'll be talking about someone who I know has delighted you every time he's been on. | ||
| But you haven't heard too much of him. | ||
| The soap guy! | ||
| I wish. | ||
| I wish it was all about Marty Schachter, who did a deep dive every limerick he's ever told. | ||
| No. | ||
| Today we're talking about Lionel. | ||
| See, you don't even remember who Lionel is. | ||
| Wait, Lionel the caller? | ||
| You love Lionel. | ||
| The guy who called in? | ||
| No, Lionel is a guy who hosts the fourth hour for Alex pretty regularly, and he's one of Alex's long-term guests. | ||
| He's been around since about 2011, late 2010, early 2011, and he's still there today. | ||
| He still hosts the fourth hour from time to time. | ||
| He's still a very regular guest on David Knight's show. | ||
| In particular. | ||
| Great. | ||
| And so I thought... | ||
| Which get well soon, David Knight. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| I take no pleasure in him having a heart attack. | ||
| Yeah, that's not how I want him to go. | ||
| So, Jordan, Lionel is a guy who, as soon as you hear his voice, you will remember who he is and remember how much you like him. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I didn't want to go find a ton of clips of Lionel on Alex's show. | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| Because the first one I found was good enough to give you a taste of the type of weirdo Lionel is. | ||
| So here is a clip of Lionel filling in for Alex Jones in the fourth hour of the Alex Jones show. | ||
| Alrighty, Lionel with you sitting in for Alex Jones. | ||
| So glad to be here. | ||
| I want to get down to business. | ||
| I've got so much to talk about. | ||
| I've been thinking, which is a dangerous thing, and one of the worst parts about this is what I want to talk about! | ||
| Do you remember who he is? | ||
| No, but I love him. | ||
| I love him. | ||
| He's the guy who talks like an auctioneer. | ||
| A little bit. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| There's 25 million things, so no particular order, no particular sense of what's important and what's not. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let me tell you what's really getting me charged up. | |
| Do you know what last night opened? | ||
| Let me try this in English. | ||
| Do you know what opened last night? | ||
| There we go on Broadway. | ||
| Do you know what it was? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That absolutely has taken Broadway by storm. | |
| Do you have any idea? | ||
| Harry Potter. | ||
| Harry Potter. | ||
| Now, I will tell you this much. | ||
| I'm not familiar with a lot of Harry Potter. | ||
| I know who he is. | ||
| I know what it is. | ||
| The story that is. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But what is it about? | ||
| I've got to give you a lot of advisors here. | ||
| I don't believe in black magic. | ||
| I don't believe in any of this stuff. | ||
| It sounds like you believe in black magic. | ||
| Point of complete disclosure, I'm irreligious. | ||
| I don't speak God and I don't speak French. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm not saying that French people don't exist just because I don't understand what they're saying. | |
| And I'm not saying there's no religion because I don't understand it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But I'm not into any of that stuff, no matter what. | |
| So I don't react in horror from that point of view. | ||
| But isn't it funny that right now... | ||
| As this world, this society of ours is being so contaminated. | ||
| I'm so excited to see where this is going. | ||
| The fetid, the feculate, the rancid world of sex trafficking, sex abuse, human trafficking, cults, and the like. | ||
| Here we go! | ||
| Pizza game, baby! | ||
| Come on! | ||
| Who believe in symbology and letting you know everything that they do with hand signals and Instagrams. | ||
| That's all pizza game, baby. | ||
| What is going on here? | ||
| Do you think that's interesting? | ||
| I think it is. | ||
| I just want to give you that. | ||
| Park it over there. | ||
| Just make you say, hmm. | ||
| For no particular reason and say, that's odd. | ||
| Now, I think it's terrific. | ||
| People can see whatever they want. | ||
| I don't care about it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But just think, wizards, warlocks. | |
| Magic spells, the occult, whatever. | ||
| Does that scare you? | ||
| Does that frighten you? | ||
| Maybe, maybe not. | ||
| But isn't that interesting? | ||
| Because you know, the more that I think we as humans elevate beyond that, the more I say, I see, that we've never really evolved, that we've been like this since we first crawled out of the ooze. | ||
| Okay, so it goes on for a while. | ||
| Humans first crawled out of the ooze. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Is this some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 shit? | ||
| I don't fucking know. | ||
| He's got some point to make about Harry Potter being on Broadway. | ||
| It has to do with weaving in like it's a distraction and it's a kid and there's magic and wizards and I don't fucking know. | ||
| Did it make you stop and go, hmm? | ||
| That whole clip did, yes, absolutely. | ||
| I struggle to find the meaning. | ||
| I struggle to find... | ||
| I'm glad to hear he's a-religious. | ||
| That's certainly nice. | ||
| So we don't need to get too into the weeds of what he's talking about there, because I think it's pretty obvious. | ||
| Like, if you just listen to that, it's nonsense. | ||
| But it's important because he's weaving in these, like, sort of Pizzagate narratives, the idea of the hand gestures that goes back to a misinterpreted... | ||
| Well, the Instagram thing is straight up Comet Ping Pong. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| James Elefantis. | ||
| The hand gestures is in reference to a picture of John Podesta that everyone has misrepresented. | ||
| It's very easy to understand what's going on in that picture with the hand gestures and what have you. | ||
| It's all hot nonsense. | ||
| But that should give you the sort of place where you need to be for this next clip to not be surprising at all. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let me make this, first of all, unequivocally clear. | |
| Limpid, pellucid, I want to add clarity, no ambiguity, listen and listen good. | ||
| I stand with Q. I stand with the Anons. | ||
| I stand with these brilliant decoders who are just breathtakingly, I'm saying the word too much, brilliant. | ||
| It's Bletchley Park. | ||
| It's our own Project Enigma. | ||
| It's our own... | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Cryptographers. | ||
| It's brilliant. | ||
| And I want to provide this because there are still folks coming around saying, what the hell are they talking about with this Q? | ||
| Who's Q? | ||
| Who's fighting? | ||
| It's Harry Potter! | ||
| It's probably Harry Potter. | ||
| So, look, I don't want to get too into this either because there's been a number of requests from people that we do an episode about QAnon. | ||
| And I'm not going to say that we won't do it. | ||
| But one of the reasons I've resisted doing it is that I think that there's a lot of other great resources out there of people who have been following it much more closely than I have that I feel like it almost would be a disservice. | ||
| The level of attention and insight that I could bring to it is not nearly on the level of a number of other people out there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But it may be something that we dive into at some point. | ||
| And when we do, we'll talk more about it. | ||
| For now, suffice it to say that Lionel is a huge QAnon guy. | ||
| He thinks they are breathtaking. | ||
| By the way, somebody burn his fucking thesaurus as soon as possible. | ||
| This guy thinks he's Dennis Miller over here. | ||
| What are we doing with every possible adjective? | ||
| Just a long series of synonyms. | ||
| The manufactured appearance of intelligence is what's going on here. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| He is irascible. | ||
| He is annoying. | ||
| He will never stop talking. | ||
| I find it necessary to point this out and make it clear. | ||
| I want to delineate exactly how silly he is from how silly he is not. | ||
| And it is all silly, my friend! | ||
| You need a thesaurus. | ||
| You said silly three times. | ||
| You need fucking Lionel's thesaurus. | ||
| I'll take it. | ||
| I don't mean to sit here and tell you that Lionel's an idiot or anything like that, because Lionel's real name is Michael LeBron, and he's technically a lawyer, having graduated from Stetson University College of Law. | ||
| Stetson's a small school with a current enrollment of 901 and a bar pass rate of 67.2%. | ||
| For some context, according to the 2017 data from the Internet Legal Resource Group, that would make Stetson the 169th best law school in the country, tied with University of Detroit Mercy. | ||
| Less than 50% of the 2017 graduates found work in law firms. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So it's not a great law school. | ||
| This is what I'm getting at. | ||
| It's not a good law school. | ||
| Not a high reputation coming from this law school. | ||
| 67.2 is not a good percent. | ||
| For bar passage. | ||
| I was just going to ask that. | ||
| That's a D. I would like to know more about University of Detroit Mercy, though. | ||
| That sounds great. | ||
| I would go there. | ||
| It's very similar to Stetson in terms of... | ||
| Anyway, Lionel was a trial lawyer for a bit, but according to his own bio, after O.J. Simpson got arrested, he decided to rebrand as Lionel. | ||
| I can't stress enough, that's in his own bio. | ||
| He wrote that. | ||
| The trial of O.J. Simpson made me change my whole life around and get a new name! | ||
| It made him decide to rebrand as Lionel and become a media personality on a local New York VHF station called PIX11. | ||
| In 1999, Lionel got his own show on Court TV called Snap Judgment, where he would provide an irreverent, satirical look at legal news. | ||
| It was cancelled before 2000 came along. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| Very short-lived core TV show. | ||
| Yeah, what are you going to do? | ||
| From then on, Lionel's career was largely radio-based. | ||
| Interestingly, in April 2007, Lionel's show replaced the majority report with Sam Cedar on Air America. | ||
| Cedar had been a fixture of the network literally since it launched, and this was a huge turnoff for the listener base. | ||
| According to many sources, replacing Sam's show with Lionel created a big backlash that lost the network a ton of subscribers and listeners. | ||
| The writing was on the wall when Air America was sold to the Green Brothers in early 2007, but many consider replacing Sam with Lionel was the point when Air America truly died. | ||
| Yeah, that was it. | ||
| That was the point where... | ||
| Everyone's like, well, alright. | ||
| Fuck this noise. | ||
| So when Air America went under, Lionel took a real serious hard turn to the right. | ||
| He began appearing on Alex Jones' show on a fairly regular basis. | ||
| He needed a gig. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But he also kept appearing on that VHF station, PIX11. | ||
| And let me tell you this, all of his reports are still online. | ||
| Hell yes! | ||
| Hell yes! | ||
| I want VHS! | ||
| Or VHF? | ||
| Hell yes! | ||
| Today's episode will be going over a number of Lionel's local New York TV news reports, seeing what kind of commentator he was in 2011 and onwards, and seeing if we can track a certain bit of change that happens in the course of his rhetoric and his worldview over the years. | ||
| I'm going to bring you back to one of the earliest videos that's still available. | ||
| This one is, you know... | ||
| He's a commentator. | ||
| He's got druthers. | ||
| He's got to complain about things. | ||
| Enjoy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I should have probably warned you. | |
| He has a theme song. | ||
| He has a theme. | ||
| He has a mariachi-inspired theme song. | ||
| That's just his name. | ||
| Over and over again. | ||
|
unidentified
|
light-o light-o we Heartland we Heartland To the casual observer, New York and this country must be the exercise capitals of the world. | |
| You'd swear that we were obsessed with fitness. | ||
| No, you're close. | ||
| Not fitness. | ||
| We're obsessed with fitness commercials and fads. | ||
| Some of my favorites. | ||
| First, the Russian kettlebell. | ||
| It's a recycled hit in gyms all over. | ||
| Notice two things. | ||
| First, as in the case of a perverted human behavior, when naming an exercise product, start off with the name of a place. | ||
| Russia suggests hardcore. | ||
| Cleveland denotes, well, you know. | ||
| Next. | ||
| Who is laughing? | ||
| You stop it. | ||
| Those are the anchors. | ||
| You stop it. | ||
| Those are the anchors. | ||
| You stop laughing right now. | ||
| And you will see how sporadic that laughter is. | ||
| Now look closely. | ||
| Make the movement seem uncomfortable, humiliating, suggestive, and threatening the human reproduction. | ||
| Next, if it looks stupid, they'll buy it. | ||
| Look at this thing. | ||
| It's seen everywhere. | ||
| I call it the exercise cyst. | ||
| Billions have been sold, and they come in different sizes and colors. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| It's popular. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| Next, hire an obnoxious pitchman who screams at you the whole time. | ||
| Like this guy. | ||
| You're jealous. | ||
| Make sure he's in great shape using methods you know never included the contraption he's using. | ||
| Never have fat people or out-of-shape people anywhere near the thing you're advertising. | ||
| Remember, you're selling dreams, not reminders. | ||
| I'm going to cut this one short because I think we get the point. | ||
| He's complaining about exercise equipment. | ||
| This is essentially the grind my gears from Family Guy. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| It's not far off. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm going to complain about exercise equipment. | |
| So what is his point? | ||
| Exercise equipment's stupid. | ||
| There's a hackiness to it. | ||
| There's a pointlessness to it. | ||
| I mean, it's one of those things. | ||
| I understand life's tough, but if you have a position where you're on television, you think you would make use of that time. | ||
| If you're someone who has a lot to say, don't waste your time talking about how exercise equipment's stupid. | ||
| That's well-traveled ground. | ||
| No, come on. | ||
| It leads me to believe that maybe you don't have a lot to say. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I might agree with you. | |
| Especially considering the fact that he uses a lot of words and essentially said, I don't like exercise equipment. | ||
| I think it's kind of a scam. | ||
| Which, I mean, fine. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Could have gotten that out. | ||
| Fine take. | ||
| Could have gotten that out in a sentence. | ||
| So, a little bit after this, maybe a week or two after this, probably, he comes in with another hot take. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| This one is going to burn. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| This one's going to burn your hand. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Why isn't that art? | ||
| The Supreme Court will decide whether the government can ban video games sold to minors. | ||
| Now, what will they decide? | ||
| Simple. | ||
| They can do anything they want for any reason whatsoever. | ||
| But the real issue is whether violent video games destroy minds of kids. | ||
| And the answer is yes! | ||
| Talk to any teen gamer. | ||
| A kid who plays nonstop for hours. | ||
| Look at him. | ||
| Does he have that blank and vapid stare? | ||
| Does he mumble? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mumble to the extent even Demosthenes would say, what? | |
| Look at that vacant and internalized world of gamers. | ||
| And you'll see that there's something very, very wrong there. | ||
| And it's not so much that the games are violent. | ||
| It's that they're repetitive and mind-numbing. | ||
| Gamers become catatonic after hours of this vacuous exercise. | ||
| There's no soul. | ||
| Conviviating? | ||
| They may have some other like-minded zombie who's logged onto the game from some corner of the world, but that ain't socialization. | ||
| You know, parents used to just worry about kids getting high or stoned on Mary Joanna. | ||
| And while I don't advocate its use, I sure as heck would prefer any activity that actually involved and encouraged social interaction as opposed to the video lobotomy. | ||
| And to call it a game is a riot. | ||
| If you took lifers in Supermax and subjected them to non-stop staring at a computer monitor where aliens are killed by way of a joystick for hours and hours at a clip, Amnesty International would be all over you. | ||
| I think he thinks that all video games are just space invaders or whatever. | ||
| He's stuck in that, not realizing that a lot of games have really compelling narrative structures to that. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Staring at a computer screen? | ||
| Dude. | ||
| Also, also, yeah. | ||
| You know the most social drug out there is weed. | ||
| You know how when you get high you don't just, you know, sit around and eat Chinese food? | ||
| You go out with a lot of friends and you get your jollies off. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| The drug that makes, like, I don't know, 20% of the people who smoke it incredibly scared of other people. | ||
| Yeah, exactly! | ||
| There was even a PSA. | ||
| Do you remember the PSA commercial where the kid smoked marijuana and then sunk into the chair and became flat? | ||
| That's the point. | ||
| Wait, are you quoting drug PSAs? | ||
| Exactly! | ||
| Whoa, meth. | ||
| Ooh, meth. | ||
| You might as well be quoting a Lionel report. | ||
| Anyway, he has more to say about video games. | ||
| Let me try to articulate my thoughts precisely. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let me try to explicate and limb thoroughly my objections. | |
| It's turning kids into cyborgs. | ||
| Anti-social duds. | ||
| Children who've lost the appreciation of mere eye contact. | ||
| Kids who will one day try to interview for a job and will be shocked when they're 86. A kid who, I'll bet, never shakes the interviewer's hand. | ||
| And if so, it's that creepy, squishy, non-committal... | ||
| Jell-O hand-squeeze thing. | ||
| He has no discernible handwriting or penmanship skills because he's never used a pen for most, if not all of his life. | ||
| And let's throw into the mix the teen Boo Radley of today, who enjoys a self-created sense of entitlement. | ||
| And God only knows the amount of medication that's been prescribed in more cases than you can imagine to dampen what's left of a gamer's paralyzed personality. | ||
| So pass all the laws you want. | ||
| That's what we need, right? | ||
| Parents, Look at me. | ||
| Games are fun. | ||
| Games make you happy. | ||
| These aren't games. | ||
| These aren't toys. | ||
| And this isn't funny. | ||
| Let me know what you think. | ||
| Contact me at the mind-numbing graphics. | ||
| Has he ever played a video game? | ||
| I don't fucking know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What is he describing? | |
| I don't know. | ||
| He's describing just being completely clueless about the topics he's covering. | ||
| Now, I think that you can already see that what we've got is a hot take machine on our hands. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Non-stop. | ||
| That's one issue. | ||
| But there is a fundamental problem with us doing this episode, and that is that Lionel is also trying to be funny. | ||
| I know. | ||
| It's not going well. | ||
| It's not going well. | ||
| There is a piece of this that is, unfortunately, we're going to have to drift into deconstruction of humor and stuff like that. | ||
| Because he's trying to be funny. | ||
| But behind that, there are points that he's trying to make. | ||
| And so we can still talk about the points he's trying to make, even though he's trying to make them in a humorous way. | ||
| I think he's against video games, pretty clearly. | ||
| I guess. | ||
| But he seems to also, if you hear the end of that, be against the idea of legislating against the video games. | ||
| Right, that's what we need. | ||
| He's just against everything. | ||
| He's a negative... | ||
| What is this, Connor Friedersdorf? | ||
| Come on now. | ||
| Get on out of here. | ||
| He's just manifesting a crank. | ||
| He's just a cranky old... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| ...shaking his fist at video games and the parents who allow their kids to become penless zombies. | ||
| Yeah, they don't have penmanship! | ||
| You play so many video games, you literally have a pen in your hand right now. | ||
| I know. | ||
| And I can't write with it. | ||
| It's unfortunate. | ||
| I have no discernible penmanship. | ||
| It's all just for show. | ||
| They have no penmanship. | ||
| So, exercise equipment sucks. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Video games turn you into a cyborg. | ||
| It's not about the violence of the video games. | ||
| I think that's my favorite part of the take, is that he's not even doing the regular take. | ||
| He's just like, hey, you think violent video games are bad? | ||
| All video games! | ||
| Yeah, Pac-Man will make you unemployable. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Great. | |
| How do you shake somebody's hand whenever it's so gnarled? | ||
| It's got so much arthritis from the joystick. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| So if that take was boiling, right? | ||
| Hot. | ||
| This next one is nuclear. | ||
|
unidentified
|
nuclear. | |
| I would like to take this opportunity to describe a subject of great annoyance to me. | ||
| I know what you're thinking. | ||
| With all the problems and unspeakable horrors that the world suffers, how bad can my annoyance possibly be? | ||
| Let me worry about that, okay? | ||
| And frankly, I don't need that attitude, Missy. | ||
| Now, where was I? | ||
| Oh, yes. | ||
| My annoyance. | ||
| Backpacks, big purses, satchels, bags, anything slung over the shoulder or affixed, attached to, or suspended from the back. | ||
| And it contains space like a subway car. | ||
| I loathe. | ||
| Yet again, one's desire for totability and portability outweighs any discomfort, inconvenience, or pain that having some bag or purse shoved into you by an inconsiderate, self-centered, egocentric, and selfish boor who believes she's the center of the universe. | ||
| A universe you are merely permitted to wallow in. | ||
| It's their world. | ||
| Maybe it's me. | ||
| Maybe I'm a... | ||
| Freak of nature. | ||
| Maybe I'm possessed with some superhuman sentience and sensitivity because I can tell when some Sherpa-like backpack that I might wear slams into some helpless strap hanger for two reasons. | ||
| One, keen tactile sensitivity, and two, the incessant screams of someone yelling, you're hurting me! | ||
| Look, Bloomberg, you want to pass a law that actually makes sense, that doesn't fascistically extinguish yet another civil liberty? | ||
| Past lineman makes one criminally liable for up to five years of hard labor for wearing a backpack or a satchel or bag looped over or suspended via a shoulder strap that touches, abuts, intrudes upon, or in any way brings pain to or inconveniences a subway passenger or anyone who must share close confines and whose incredibly horrible luck, through some sick draw of the human idiot lottery, positions them next to said idiot. | ||
| What we're seeing is the systematic disregard for the feelings and comfort of others. | ||
| Exhibit A, the devolution of our once-proud society. | ||
| Comment as you see fit. | ||
| What the fuck? | ||
| Alright, so if I understand correctly. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Tote bags. | ||
| Bad. | ||
| Shopping bags. | ||
| Bad. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Backpacks? | |
| Satchels? | ||
| I'm not even ready to get into backpacks yet. | ||
| Backpacks are way down the line. | ||
| That's pretty serious stuff. | ||
| I'm trying to figure out how to get there. | ||
| That's the crack of this conversation. | ||
| All of that is why our society is falling apart. | ||
| I know that that's part of the bad comedy. | ||
| That's him using hyperbole in the same way saying five years of hard labor. | ||
| I'm not going to respond to that in a serious way. | ||
| But I am going to respond to... | ||
| Why did you waste everyone's time with this hacky, washed-over bit? | ||
| Like, this is a bad bit. | ||
| Hey, people with backpacks on the tray, it sucked. | ||
| Go to any open mic, you'll hear that bit. | ||
| This is low-hanging fruit. | ||
| This requires no creativity, no point of view, no perspective whatsoever. | ||
| This is trash. | ||
| Like, this is legit trash. | ||
| I am struggling to remember why the 80s comedy boom ended, and I can't think of it. | ||
| He killed Air America and the 80s comedy boom. | ||
| It's possible. | ||
| The quality was just so high back then, Dan. | ||
| No fucking backpacks on the train. | ||
| Where would they go, then? | ||
| I know that part about hard labor and all that stuff is kind of... | ||
| It's a joke. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But if you even think about what he's saying, what would you do? | ||
| Would you want to make a rule in place where people can't have bags? | ||
| How draconian would that be? | ||
| What kind of a nightmare fascist nanny state would we be living in? | ||
| They're like, no backpacks in public. | ||
| So we have to have armed guards near every door. | ||
| Confiscate everyone's bags. | ||
| Put them in a cannon and shoot them in the direction of their house. | ||
| Fair. | ||
| So it'll land there and you can find, if you have things that might break. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's on you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| That's your fault. | ||
| You should have known about the cannon policy. | ||
| You know people are going to get around this by smuggling bags in. | ||
| You know they're going to get through the security guards, and you know how they're going to hide the bag in a bigger bag. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Look, I get it. | ||
| You'll never catch them. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| It's nice to be considerate to people. | ||
| But, like, let's say if you're taking the blue line to O 'Hare or something like that, or coming back from O 'Hare on the blue line. | ||
| Yeah, no luggage. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Like, you can never really be that upset by people with luggage on the train? | ||
| No, you can. | ||
| Because they're going somewhere. | ||
| I am. | ||
| I'm furious with them, and they need to do five years hard labor. | ||
| So ridiculous. | ||
| I'm glad you should never have taken the train to get to the trip. | ||
| I'm pissed off. | ||
| Also, you shouldn't have bags and planes! | ||
| Well, now what you're really critiquing, not the bags and planes thing, but, like, you shouldn't take the train to the airport. | ||
| What you're critiquing is them not being able to afford a cab. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Now you're getting into some real class punching down issues. | ||
| Oh, come on. | ||
| You know, you know, hack comedians never punch down? | ||
| That'd be crazy. | ||
| So, this, like... | ||
| There's no way to really put a finer point on this than to say this is terrible. | ||
| Yeah, he is not good at jokes. | ||
| This is very bad stuff from a comedic perspective and just from a being interesting perspective. | ||
| But I did find, I should say, I watched so many goddamn Lionel videos. | ||
| It sounds great. | ||
| Purely, purely for the theme song that he enters into. | ||
| It's interesting because in these early days, he... | ||
| Has a perspective that's kind of cranky old man hack. | ||
| Certainly. | ||
| We've seen that. | ||
| But he also comes in with a little bit of decent analysis every now and again that might surprise you. | ||
| I think this next clip... | ||
| It would absolutely surprise me. | ||
| I mean this completely non-facetiously. | ||
| This next clip is a little bit surprising. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| It is rare that I don't care about something. | ||
| I have opinions about everything. | ||
| And I mean everything. | ||
| So it's most odd that I can say the following. | ||
| As to Donald Trump's, I guess, birther claims, namely that either the president wasn't born in this country or that there's something fishy about his story or past, I can say unequivocally, I don't care. | ||
| And that's odd because if the allegations are true... | ||
| That a president's term and administration are invalidated and everything he's ordered or caused to happen heretofore are in fact a constitutional nullity. | ||
| But here we are halfway through his first term and we're talking about it. | ||
| Now, okay, Donnie, make your case. | ||
| And this is where it falls flat. | ||
| You see, maybe it's the prosecutor in me, but call me wacky. | ||
| I want this thing called proof. | ||
| Make your case and something fishy ain't exactly a cause of action. | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| No, maybe, for example, something like maybe a Kenyan birth certificate or somebody proving that his Hawaiian certificate of live birth is a forgery. | ||
| That might be nice. | ||
| That's something. | ||
| And the country, as per usual, couldn't care less about this or elections or the Constitution or anything. | ||
| They're not exactly rioting in the streets over the issue. | ||
| But I love the fact that he's driving MSNBC's Chris Matthews crazy. | ||
| And that's not a very long ride. | ||
| Thank you, Joe. | ||
| Anything that makes them turn beet red and yell and produce voluminous and prodigious pools of saliva makes me happy. | ||
| So, Danny, as far as being the Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor, and prosecutor of the claim, you're fired. | ||
| Your claim so far... | ||
| Oh, what's the word? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Suck. | |
| But you're driving Chris Matthews a batty. | ||
| And I love that, so keep it up. | ||
| And one more word about Mr. Drool Cup. | ||
| The hardball dude? | ||
| You know and I know that if he had any doubt about Sarah Palin's birth country, he'd be all over it. | ||
| You know it's true, Matthews. | ||
| You know it's true. | ||
| And finally, I personally hate people who think they're funny when they're not. | ||
| Next to leprosy, that tops my list of stuff I load. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| So, it's leprosy and people who think they're funny. | ||
| I'm going to leave that there for a second. | ||
| Let him finish the clip. | ||
| But that is a crazy one, too, of things you're mad about. | ||
| So I hereby announce and declare that all Donald Trump hair jokes have been used. | ||
| And from here on, the comedic subject matter is absolutely and thoroughly exhausted. | ||
| So stop. | ||
| There is nothing new, novel, or vaguely unique about anything of an end relating to or pertaining to that thing on his head. | ||
| So please, it's over. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Alright. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| I mean, here's my first thought. | ||
| With that blistering non-take, I guess? | ||
| I think for someone who ends up becoming a QAnon expert and a frequent Alex Jones devotee regular guest, I think the idea of him saying years back, Donald Trump, please shut up about this unless you can prove it. | ||
| As far as you being in charge of this birth certificate nonsense, you're fired. | ||
| I think that's a take. | ||
| It might not be in the general population, but in the population of Alex Jones' guests and stuff like that, that's shocking to hear. | ||
| I'm a big fan of the, I need proof, to, I think Q is great! | ||
| Yeah, it's a crazy transformation, and I can tell you why that happened. | ||
| Now, here's my question. | ||
| He clearly hates people who think they're funny when they're not. | ||
| He's said as much. | ||
| And he thinks he's funny and he's not. | ||
| So, that leads me to believe he also has leprosy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's the only way to explain why those are the two things. | ||
| Transitive property dictates that he must. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| But he's just another example of someone who's a failed humor kind of person who ends up supporting fascism. | ||
| No, come on. | ||
| Just yet another. | ||
| I can't. | ||
| So I think that that take is interesting in the world of his takes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I should say that there's a lot of ones we're not going to listen to at all, like things where he's against globalism or the Federal Reserve and stuff like that, because it's what you'd expect. | ||
| It's not an anomaly. | ||
| It's like, okay, yeah. | ||
| Should we waste our time confirming that this guy who loves Ron Paul and all that, even back then, believes the things that anybody who loves Ron Paul believes? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Not really. | ||
| It's not worth our time. | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| What is worth our time is this blistering surface of the sun level take that he's got about holidays. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, my God. | |
| According to a National Retail Federation report, seven in ten Americans will celebrate the most insidious and pathetic public spectacle known, Halloween. | ||
| This year, Americans are expected to spend an average of $72 each, with total outlays by consumers expected to reach $6.86 billion. | ||
| Is that a lot? | ||
| Does he think that $70 is a lot? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Or... | |
| Is that not enough? | ||
| I don't understand what... | ||
| He's just saying numbers. | ||
| And I don't think... | ||
| If you live in some sort of a neighborhood and, like, buying $70 worth of candy to give to the kids on Halloween... | ||
| That's a lot of candy. | ||
| It's a lot of candy, but I also don't see it as, like, woo! | ||
| Kind of numbers. | ||
| It's Halloween, Dan. | ||
| Of course it's woo! | ||
| I don't think that's a meaningful statistic in this context. | ||
| Also, like, oh, they're going to spend $6.5 billion! | ||
| So, you know, somebody's getting that money. | ||
| Like, I want this part of the economy shut down! | ||
| I agree there, but if he said, like, everybody on average is spending $380, I'd be like, we need to consider this. | ||
| $70 is within the realm of, like, that's just a lot of candy for a lot of kids. | ||
| Which is a crime! | ||
| Or there are those people who spend so much money on their crazy house decorations and bump the average of it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So there's also that to consider. | ||
| But who cares? | ||
| This guy's dumb. | ||
| For what? | ||
| A pagan ceremony and celebration that has been commandeered by a sick and demented group of psychologically twisted people, namely adults. | ||
| What, like Valentine's Day? | ||
| There is nothing more pathetic. | ||
| And to hear a grown adult man or woman talking Yammeron incessantly about the cool costume they'll buy or what they'll be. | ||
| Translation, I'm nothing, a zero, a human nullity. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But for this one night, I'll become something, anything but this miserable, empty vessel and vapid zero that I call me. | |
| It gives women the chance to strut about like trollops, slatterns and snakes all under the excuse of Halloween celebrations. | ||
| Translation? | ||
| I'm a zero. | ||
| A sexual empty set. | ||
| I'd be safe nude on a Greek galley ship or in a lumberjack camp. | ||
| Who are you talking to? | ||
| Tonight, I'm the sexy nurse. | ||
| A scantily clad beau peep. | ||
| The syphilitic French maid. | ||
| Halloween for me will always be that in my youth. | ||
| Where you got a costume in a box? | ||
| And it consisted of a mask whose eye holes didn't match up in a way to the orbital radius of a child, thus in effect blinding you. | ||
| And it was held on with the flimby piece of elastic that fastened with a T-bone metal fastener. | ||
| The cape or costume had the design of a hospital examination room and was made of a substance that made a bookie's flash paper look like asbestos. | ||
| They swore the costumes were safe. | ||
| Check out this Trey non-PC label. | ||
| Flame retarded. | ||
| Boo! | ||
| He thinks he's being super edgy there in terms of flame retardant. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Get it? | |
| Yeah, these PC people wouldn't be cool with that. | ||
| PC people wouldn't like that. | ||
| He thinks that's a great joke. | ||
| It's the same thing with Oriental. | ||
| You can call a rug Oriental. | ||
| You can call things... | ||
| The PC people wouldn't like that. | ||
| They don't mind. | ||
| It's totally fine to call an Oriental vase or something like that. | ||
| How dare you? | ||
| People are not. | ||
| In the same way that, like, flame retardant, or, you know, there's a retarder that you need to use for bread preparation. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Like that sort of thing, because retard means to delay, to slow down, that sort of thing. | ||
| So flame retardant is a delayer or slower down of flame. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's a term. | ||
| It's not okay to apply that term to people. | ||
| He's not being edgy at all, but he thinks he is. | ||
| I know. | ||
| He really thinks he's scoring a point. | ||
| He is... | ||
| He's making an accusation about these imaginary PC people that he's so against or worried about that isn't a point anyone would make. | ||
| No, that nobody would care about. | ||
| He's not quite dumb. | ||
| I think my favorite part of him, though, so far, is that he's not even like an old crank, where he's like, it was better back in my day. | ||
| I think he's just more like, I hate everything. | ||
| Kind of. | ||
| For no reason. | ||
| Except QAnon. | ||
| And Ron Paul back then. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Ouch! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because of the consistency of the polyester torch fabric, ventilation was non-existent and hyperthermia would set in within 10 minutes of your night time death stroll. | |
| You'd put on this thermal blanket that would go up like a torch where you'd get anywhere near an open flame, affix your mask and effectively act like a blindfold and you'd make your way into the night alone, knocking on strange neighbors. | ||
| That's our second Boo Radley. | ||
| Because hearing the stories of kids slipped the apple with the razor blade. | ||
| And the image has stuck with me to this day. | ||
| Now that was Halloween. | ||
| Not this tawdry, demented garbage today. | ||
| Trick or treat. | ||
| Comment as you see fit. | ||
| Comment as you see fit. | ||
| That's his sign-off? | ||
| It's become his good night and good luck as time goes on. | ||
| He incorporated it a little bit down the line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And he stuck to it. | ||
| I don't like the idea that he's talking about the idea of Razorblades being in apples as a positive thing that he remembers. | ||
| That was Halloween! | ||
| That was Halloween! | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| Constant fear! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And about the people laughing, the only explanation I can come up with, because I've watched so many of these, and most of it's pity laughter, but that was a big load of laughter. | ||
| And I think it's because it's a Halloween episode, and they're drunk. | ||
| I'm guessing they're drunk. | ||
| In studio, it gives a shit, it's a holiday. | ||
| We get to drink at work. | ||
| I think it would be funny to watch this. | ||
| If I was in a UHF station. | ||
| VHF. | ||
| VHF. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| I'm not doing great. | ||
| It's alright. | ||
| If I was there and I saw this happening live, I think I would find it hilarious, but not because of what he was saying. | ||
| No, in the same way, watching someone bomb at an open mic often will laugh. | ||
| Oh, it's my favorite thing. | ||
| It's that sort of thing. | ||
| It's like, wow. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Hecky bits about Halloween. | ||
| You got him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't want people to laugh at this. | ||
| I more want the people there just to be like pumping their fists in the air like, Yeah, man! | ||
| You take them down! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So as time goes on, Lionel starts to... | ||
| Have a slight transformation, I believe. | ||
| And I think you can trace it to around when the second term of Obama starts to come around. | ||
| When the re-election campaign starts getting going, you start to see a little bit more weird things being said. | ||
| Because up to this point, the stuff that we're not covering is the stuff you'd expect. | ||
| I wonder if he doesn't like hip-hop music. | ||
| No, although that would fit right in with this. | ||
| Like, what this is is, like, the real deal with Bill McNeil. | ||
| Yeah, 100%. | ||
| This is just, you know, basically. | ||
| The real deal even had its own theme song! | ||
|
unidentified
|
It did. | |
| It is exactly that. | ||
| Lionel is living a news radio bit, basically. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The real deal with Bill McDeal. | |
| Lionel, Lionel, Lionel, Lionel. | ||
| I'm intending to drive the audience crazy by playing that forever. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I love that. | |
| I want to hear that theme song. | ||
| Here's what I would prefer. | ||
| Don't worry. | ||
| You're going to hear it at least six or seven more times. | ||
| I want to hear it every single time. | ||
| I think what I would do if I was going to punch up his show. | ||
| Play the theme song and then do a lightning round of just him with any topic. | ||
| Just like, hey, how do you feel about paper? | ||
| Too big! | ||
| How do you feel about buh? | ||
| How do you feel about the? | ||
| Get it in and out within two minutes. | ||
| It'd be great. | ||
| I honestly don't think that would be great. | ||
| No, I'm going to go with editing. | ||
| Zero. | ||
| Zero. | ||
| If I were going to help bump this up, what I would do is a page one rewrite. | ||
| There's just the whole thing? | ||
| I'd recast it. | ||
| You'd recast it? | ||
| Come on! | ||
| I'd probably take it out of PIX11. | ||
| Seems like not a great environment for this sort of thing. | ||
| I would rewrite all the bits. | ||
| I would change the perspective of the show. | ||
| I would do everything differently. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, wait! | |
| I just wouldn't do it. | ||
| I'm going to be honest. | ||
| I do find his... | ||
| He's got a certain amount of... | ||
| Showmanship? | ||
| I mean, appeal. | ||
| I can see. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's got a certain amount of like, oh, I can see what you're doing. | |
| I can see why you got this job. | ||
| He presents as someone who's having fun, and there's a little bit of that that is infectious. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But beyond that, I can't say much for it. | ||
| No. | ||
| So, like I said, as the reelection starts to come around, you start to see a shifting. | ||
| And I can say this as someone who watched too many of these videos. | ||
| this clip really struck me as pretty weird. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, I know. | |
| You know, when I like something, I like it. | ||
| And I don't care what you think or what's popular, hip or in. | ||
| If I like it, I like it. | ||
| And if I don't like it, I don't. | ||
| In fact, the best way to kill my endorsement of anything is to tell me that everybody's digging it. | ||
| Take W. As in the Prez, POTUS, Bush 43. George Bush is making the rounds, pushing his book, Decision Points. | ||
| Now listen to me carefully, and look at me. | ||
| I like him. | ||
| Not as a president, him. | ||
| I don't know what happens to a president. | ||
| They leave office, and they let their guard down. | ||
| They change. | ||
| Remember Bob Dole? | ||
| Okay, he ran for president, but for years he was this stiff, a stick in the mud, and then he leaves office, and he became the poster child for Evie and Viagra. | ||
| By the way, you know what happens when a lawyer takes Viagra? | ||
| He gets taller. | ||
| And George Bush has qualities I like. | ||
| Okay, first, now here's a word you'll never hear anybody ever use on TV because A, they don't know it, and B, they think you're stupid. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| Bush was a cackle-epist. | ||
| A mispronouncer. | ||
| Nuclear. | ||
| Remember that one? | ||
| He was king of the malaprop. | ||
| He said parents wanted to put food on their family. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| I know, that scared me too. | ||
| I can only imagine him on the secure phone reading the nuclear codes backwards. | ||
| But I like his certitude. | ||
| Doggone it, make up your mind. | ||
| Fisher, get off the pot. | ||
| See, now he's got me doing it. | ||
| Now, he won't slam Obama. | ||
| He says now that he's always said about the war. | ||
| He said the same thing about the war in Saddam and WMD. | ||
| He's the decider and could not care less what you or I or Poles think. | ||
| I must admit, the bit with Barbara Bush and the miscarriage and the fetus in a jar... | ||
| Loved it. | ||
| Okay, a little different. | ||
| And I like his honesty about drinking. | ||
| You know, some have suggested that he's a dry drunk. | ||
| You know, he stopped drinking but didn't get sober. | ||
| Yeah, 24 years ago. | ||
| But that's admirable. | ||
| In a society with the Charlie Shanes and Lindsay Lohans spiraling out of control, he took control of himself. | ||
| He never chased women or compromised national security by opening himself up to blackmail, playing hide the panatella. | ||
| He's not the worst president. | ||
| That was Franklin Pierce, hands down. | ||
| As a president, meh. | ||
| But, and don't kid yourself, Obama is exactly the same. | ||
| But as a man, a human being, I like him. | ||
| Almost as much as the 22nd Amendment. | ||
| Comment as you see fit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So, that's weird. | |
| For someone who ended up as a QAnon conspiracy theorist who believes that the Bush family and the Clinton cabal and all that are intertwined and all that, I find this very strange. | ||
| I find this to be very weird. | ||
| Like, the idea of, like, even if he's saying, I'm not saying I like him as a president, but I like the guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's falling into the same sort of trap that dumb media people did with the idea of, like, now that W is out of office, isn't it interesting that he's a painter? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That sort of thing. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Instead of in The Hague. | ||
| Right, but that's what he would say now. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| As the QAnon conspiracy theorist, because he's made that pivot now. | ||
| Whereas before, he had every reason to hate Bush. | ||
| Bush's term was over. | ||
| All of the war crimes had been committed. | ||
| He has every reason at this point to be like, fuck that, I'm not giving him a pass. | ||
| I kind of like the guy. | ||
| That! | ||
| I kind of like the guy. | ||
| Hey! | ||
| Hey, he's being honest about drinking. | ||
| How about that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good. | |
| For a president! | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Oh, man! | ||
| Everyone hated that Obama was honest about cigarettes. | ||
| Oh, no, but that's because Obama's evil. | ||
| Definitely for, I mean, definitely for non-race-related reasons. | ||
| 100% for non-race. | ||
| Yeah, I wonder if that has anything to do with the, when I look at Obama, see George Bush, I like the guy. | ||
| It's strange. | ||
| Hey. | ||
| Obama, same president. | ||
| But as a person, I don't like him, and I can't put my finger on why. | ||
| But based on all of my shit opinions so far, I think you can guess. | ||
| Now might be a time to tell you about the overwhelming number of videos that Lionel has put out about how George Zimmerman is totally cool, didn't do anything wrong. | ||
| About how Donald Sterling is alright. | ||
| What? | ||
| The Westboro Baptist Church are crusaders for free speech. | ||
| Okay! | ||
| He doesn't like them, but they're crusaders for free speech. | ||
| Right, right, right, of course. | ||
| Ferguson was a disaster. | ||
| I thought it was a hoax. | ||
| You might believe that now, but back then it was just, you know, it was all nonsense. | ||
| He has a real trend of weirdly, exactly like Alex-y kind of race stuff. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| But it's a little bit more understated, and a lot of the time he's doing these... | ||
| Like reports that there's an attempt at humor in it. | ||
| But I should say he has probably like 40, 50. It's in the dozens of videos about Zimmerman. | ||
| It's pretty wild. | ||
| That's too many. | ||
| It's pretty wild. | ||
| How can there be dozens of videos about Zimmerman? | ||
| Because he's a trial lawyer. | ||
| So he has a legal take on it. | ||
| Although there are a lot of other legal cases that have come out that he could have spent that much time on, but it seems like this one was really important to him. | ||
| You know what's weird? | ||
| The more he talks, the more I feel like when he was nine he saw my cousin Vinny, he was like, that's what I'm going to be when I grow up. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| This is weird. | ||
| I don't think the ages match up. | ||
| For him to have been nine. | ||
| No, the moment he saw my cousin Vinny, he grew about 30, 40 years. | ||
| That's possible. | ||
| It could be a big situation. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| So, you know, he talked in that last clip about liking W. And that's kind of like, I just feel like that's a little hacky. | ||
| And, you know, if you're a serious commentator, you should probably be above that. | ||
| But then this next clip made me even more concerned that maybe this guy ain't cool. | ||
|
unidentified
|
*Music* | |
| Dick Cheney's book, In My Time, hits the bookstores and downloads today. | ||
| Not exactly a brilliant title, In My Time. | ||
| Isn't that understood? | ||
| What else would he call his biography? | ||
| After I'm dead? | ||
| Before I was born? | ||
| Where's the real shot? | ||
| The worst stuff that he and Bush pushed. | ||
| Had the most incredibly boring names, unitary executive, presidential signing statements, but trust me, they were so toxically unconstitutional, and the country... | ||
| Couldn't care less. | ||
| But Nancy Grace on Nancy with the Stars, well, that's news. | ||
| So real quick, we have at the beginning the presentation of a statement. | ||
| You know, it's very clear. | ||
| He's saying that what Bush and Cheney did, it's unconstitutional with boring names, but people weren't paying attention. | ||
| That was the trick. | ||
| Let's see where this goes. | ||
| Well, look, I didn't vote for him or Bush either time, and I thought he did irreparable harm to what's left of our country's international image. | ||
| That being said... | ||
| I miss him. | ||
| I miss his certitude and his decisiveness, that lip snarl thing. | ||
| The fact that he has no pulse. | ||
| I miss his refusal to equivocate. | ||
| When he and the decider made up their minds, that was it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was often wrong, but it was definite and unambiguous. | |
| This president doesn't have that. | ||
| And while Bush hemmed and hawed and stammered and stumbled, he spoke extemporaneously, poorly perhaps, but they were his words. | ||
| Poorly cobbled together, granted, and ineffectively delivered, but no prompter. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The whole nuclear business drove me nuts. | |
| Where was I? | ||
| Oh, Cheney. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Now look, you've got to give him one thing. | ||
| He scared the hell out of most people. | ||
| Mostly Americans, but there's something to be said for that. | ||
| Look, let me tell you. | ||
| Ordering the deaths of hundreds of millions of people should be terrified. | ||
| There's something to be said for a guy who looks like a cross between Mr. Potter and Cerberus, the three-headed hound that guards the gates of the underworld. | ||
| Shut up, Dennis Miller. | ||
| Believe me. | ||
| You know and I know that there are some nasty folks in the world. | ||
| And it comes in handy to be able to say, you know, I wouldn't do that if I were you. | ||
| I don't think Dick Cheney would appreciate that. | ||
| Because he's going to torture you. | ||
| I don't want to have to tell Joe Biden. | ||
| Or, watch it, fella. | ||
| Or President Obama's going to read you the riot act, as long as it's prompt or ready. | ||
| Dick Cheney also has an attitude that, doggone it, I love it! | ||
| It's that, I don't care what you think attitude. | ||
| Recently, when he was being interviewed about his book, some idiot thought she'd get him a, you know, with a tough question. | ||
| And before she could even get it out, he'd answer it like, of course, no big deal. | ||
| Vice President Cheney, you authorize torture, yes. | ||
| Well, I wasn't done. | ||
| Waterboarding, yes, of course. | ||
| Please, sir, let me finish. | ||
| Jumper cables on genitals, absolutely. | ||
| Please, let me finish. | ||
| Be honest. | ||
| Don't you kind of miss him a little bit? | ||
| Comment as you see fit. | ||
| I understand he's trying to be funny, and that's why I leave a tiny bit of room that this is all satire, but I don't think it is. | ||
| No. | ||
| Because the talking points about Obama and the teleprompter are consistent. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The idea that Biden and Obama are ineffectual is consistent. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| What he's expressing underneath a lot of that attempts at humor is something that I believe he's sincerely arguing that is, the world is afraid of Dick Cheney and that is a positive thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Which is not something anybody should argue if they're a serious thinker. | ||
| Like, that's not good analysis. | ||
| That is very, very bad. | ||
| Dan, don't you miss when stupid people used to just assume they were right and do things without any kind of pre-analysis whatsoever and just kind of really get shit done? | ||
| Now, admittedly, that shit was war crimes. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Death, torture, hundreds of millions of people killed. | ||
| Why should he be worried about, like, or praise efficiency if it's efficiency towards a goal he's against? | ||
| Like, what is the, like... | ||
| That makes zero sense. | ||
| Like, there's internal inconsistency through so many of these reports, because I think they're, like, an attempt to be interesting, an attempt to be funny, and an attempt to make points that are very poorly thought through. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that is exactly what you'd expect of someone who ends up becoming a QAnon guy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, just... | ||
| Well, of course, with that kind of dumb worldview, you look up to Trump and you're like, yeah, see, he's gonna just do it. | ||
| Like, it's kind of interesting that so many of these people, like, the nationalist movement that we're seeing right now globally is, of course, just a reaction to all of the neoliberalism bullshit, but there is a certain part of us that, you know, that goes both ways. | ||
| Like, when people elected Obama, there was a certain part of everybody going like, oh, now we have somebody who's just going to finally fix it. | ||
| Not we have to constantly be vigilant to avoid war crimes. | ||
| But because we finally got our guy who's just going to cut through all the bullshit, Dan. | ||
| We all want to cut through all the red tape. | ||
| What are you planning for? | ||
| What are you doing all of these statistics for? | ||
| Cut through it and get shit done, Dan. | ||
| That mental weakness does exist all over the place. | ||
| It feeds into each other from both sides, for sure. | ||
| I just think that what you see here is it was the order of the day. | ||
| Because at this point, the election had already happened. | ||
| Ron Paul's not going anywhere. | ||
| The Ron Paul revolution had deflated by 2012, so it's stupid to have some sort of an idea that Ron is going to be the guy. | ||
| He ends up retiring from Congress in 2013. | ||
| His whole sense as a savior, a potential savior, is gone. | ||
| So what you do when you're Lionel and you're a hack and you're basically just... | ||
| Libertarian-leaning establishment nonsense. | ||
| What you do is you hearken towards the strong man who was there. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Because you're so dissatisfied with Obama, it's the easiest, cheapest route to having a position that someone will err. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so that's what he does. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's the position that he weaves into. | ||
| Now, granted, there's still the... | ||
| The consistent, I am against globalism. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| And I will say, to his credit, there are a number of videos that he's put out about, like, defending gay rights and stuff like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| To his credit, he seems to be on the right side of that. | ||
| I'll tip my hat to that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He does seem to have a weird stance on, like, fat shaming and bullying, though. | ||
| He seems to think that those things are things that are totally cool. | ||
| Yeah, of course he does. | ||
| But the people who do it are bad. | ||
| Oh, of course he does. | ||
| That's like a... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Yeah, that makes perfect sense. | ||
| I couldn't get a handle on that. | ||
| In terms of where his position was. | ||
| I think his take on that, if I was going to guess without any knowledge of what he said, I assume there are plenty of synonyms. | ||
| A little bit of a vocabulary show-off session. | ||
| Maybe a Greek mythology reference. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Somebody is Boo Radley in this situation. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| That's going to come into play. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| The fat person who's being shamed is Boo Radley. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Who's made to be Boo Radley. | ||
| They can't shake anybody's hands. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| But it sounds to me more like he's doing that thing where he's like, Bullying and fat shaming made me stronger. | ||
| And I hate bullies and fat shamers. | ||
| It's possible. | ||
| So I want it around, but I think they should be killed. | ||
| It does feel like... | ||
| I mean, you've already pointed this out on an earlier clip. | ||
| It's like you're projecting a bit here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| These points are hacky and lame. | ||
| Comedy's bad. | ||
| The perspective is weak. | ||
| And you're talking about yourself. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now, I want to say he's made these hearkenings and overtures towards a romanticized past of Cheney. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And liking Bush and stuff like that. | ||
| And don't think for a second that even at that point he had forgotten where he came from. | ||
| he still is a man who knows his roots. | ||
| Mayor Bloomberg, I beg you to do something about an instance of incivility seen daily in the bowels of our subterranean locomotive system. | ||
| Are we doing bags again? | ||
| The subway. | ||
| And I beg, implore, besiege, and entreat you, dear leader, to unleash and untether the full faith and credit of your limitless power to strike down, apprehend, and if necessary, incarcerate these practitioners of untold and unimaginable savagery, those who insist upon wearing the bane of my existence, the backpack. | ||
| Not just a huge, oversized, sherpa-like, lawnmower-sized bundles that people strap to their backs in complete contravention of the rules of civility, but all backpacks! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mayor Bloomberg El Blomito, por favor! | |
| Stop the madness! | ||
| Stop the insanity and terror! | ||
| Oh, the horror! | ||
| The humanity! | ||
| Mayor Bloomberg, sir, please. | ||
| In a cramped train, as in life, every available inch counts and matters. | ||
| I understand that an elbow and knee may indeed intrude upon my space. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Was that a dick joke? | |
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm going to shut this off. | ||
| He did backpacks again, man. | ||
| He did backpacks again. | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| He's got to get back to it. | ||
| It's crazy to do it once. | ||
| Nobody. | ||
| Nobody is keeping it in the news, Dan. | ||
| It's got to stay in the news cycle. | ||
| You've got to harp on it. | ||
| You've got to hold Bloomberg's feet to the fire, Dan. | ||
| I've got to think. | ||
| He just ran out of time to get the report together and forgot he'd already covered backpacks on the train. | ||
| It's borderline... | ||
| What in the fuck? | ||
| It's borderline the same script, too. | ||
| It's very close. | ||
| It's super close. | ||
| A lot of different synonyms. | ||
| So, like I'm saying, he's still doing that. | ||
| Even at this point when he started to take this pretty harsh pivot towards, I mean, just conservative nonsense. | ||
| They just... | ||
| The train that he's not wearing a backpack on just keeps going that direction. | ||
| And you'll see in this next clip him say some stuff that is just... | ||
| Like, it's indefensible levels. | ||
| He's taking a turn now where it's not just, like, these weird... | ||
| Globalism and Ron Paul apologetic positions that are weird. | ||
| He's starting to say things that are like, I can't believe this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Light low, light low, light low, light low, light low, light low, light low, light low, light low. | |
| The Todd Akin case was a distraction. | ||
| A disgusting, despicable distraction. | ||
| Todd Akin's comments about legitimate rape have absolutely nothing to do with anything. | ||
| Let me repeat. | ||
| No, they do. | ||
| They're irrelevant. | ||
| And believe me, believe me when I tell you this, that Romney, Obama, and everyone charged with crafting policy or stewarding a presidential election could not be happier with this story. | ||
| Todd Akin is irrelevant. | ||
| Todd Akin's thoughts about anything, and I mean anything, Are irrelevant. | ||
| But what this did was to give the media something to talk about. | ||
| Because it was something they could grasp. | ||
| Especially Democratic and Obama re-election campaign operatives. | ||
| And specifically those that seen on their official network MSDNC. | ||
| He thinks you're too stupid to get that reference. | ||
| All discussion about everything and anything that will affect you and your family has been suspended. | ||
| And instead we parse and reverse engineer the mind of Todd Akin. | ||
| And his unique theories of how legitimate rates prevents contraception or something, I don't even understand. | ||
| And frankly, I don't care. | ||
| The issues like Bittons'tax returns, his offshore accounts, Ryan's abs, these subjects are easy to digest and comprehend. | ||
| Todd Akin means nothing. | ||
| Todd Akin is a red-hearinger. | ||
| This is a distraction. | ||
| You're doing it! | ||
| trying to conflate and associate this man's idiocy with Romney, Ryan, the GOP, RNZ, the right-wing Tea Party, evangelicals, name it. | ||
| American political discussion is a rehashed, refurbished, reconstituted left-right paradigm argument. | ||
| I can't believe it. | ||
| The level of sophistication when it comes to the issues is beyond simplistic. | ||
| Seriously. | ||
| Let me put it this way. | ||
| Imagine talking baseball with a pal and he turns to you and says, eh, you're a typical National League. | ||
| That's so National League. | ||
| I'm an American League. | ||
| True blue. | ||
| What does that have to do with anything? | ||
| Here's where the argument falls apart that he's using there. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| In one of the leagues, pitchers have to hit. | ||
| In the other one, they don't. | ||
| So there is a substantive difference between the national and American leagues. | ||
| Your attempt to minimize this into some reducto ad absurdum argument falls apart. | ||
| Dum-dum. | ||
| What kind of argument is that? | ||
| National League? | ||
| What about baseball, the game, the sport? | ||
| That's where we are today. | ||
| We've distilled and reduced the argument to personality, bumper sticker, playbook argument. | ||
| The world monetary systems are on the verge of absolute collapse. | ||
| We are on our way to endless wars in countries that have absolutely nothing to do with our country and freedom and way of life. | ||
| You said that was great. | ||
| Surveillance is out of control. | ||
| So while all of this is happening, today we're talking about Todd Ake. | ||
| Tomorrow, something equally as a name. | ||
| And the obfuscation will continue until November. | ||
| And yet, these Ted Baxter, sock puppet, media-barking seals con you into thinking that they're giving you the news. | ||
| Comic, as you see. | ||
| I will. | ||
| So what are you doing then? | ||
| That's a really important point. | ||
| Because he's covering it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The idea is, like, first of all, he's not taking into account the idea that a media can cover multiple stories simultaneously because it's not like the media has one employee. | ||
| Oh shit, all my time has been spent writing this Todd Akin article. | ||
| Can't get to the bigger things. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The examples that he's talking about here, like the endless wars, the economy collapsing and stuff like that, he is the one who is guilty of not covering those things in favor of talking about Todd Akin. | ||
| What? | ||
| But his angle on it is to dismiss this Todd Akin, you know, legitimate rape doesn't cause pregnancies nonsense that Todd Akin did. | ||
| Now, the bigger issue is that Todd Akin being conflated with, like, the Tea Party and stuff like that isn't... | ||
| Irresponsible because he's a member of the Tea Party. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| The other thing is that his statements weren't condemned by the people on the right. | ||
| Maybe a couple people did. | ||
| But generally speaking, people much like with the Nazi Steve King. | ||
| Just sort of like, let's not talk about this, hope this goes away. | ||
| That's sort of the thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And it did! | |
| He was a member of the House of Representatives. | ||
| Like, it is relevant. | ||
| No, it's irrelevant. | ||
| No, it's relevant. | ||
| He's got nothing to do with the world. | ||
| He's an elected official with a modicum of power. | ||
| Ignore him. | ||
| It is relevant what his views are when they're this inane and misogynistic about both the issues of abortion and rape. | ||
| It is very important. | ||
| He's got no... | ||
| There's no point in talking about him. | ||
| It's not like he has the power to... | ||
| Draft legislation. | ||
| He does. | ||
| Wait, what? | ||
| Yeah, I should tell you that. | ||
| Oh, shit! | ||
| Well, then he's an important person to talk about! | ||
| I got bad news about the House. | ||
| It's very relevant. | ||
| It's not a distraction. | ||
| This is a distraction. | ||
| This is distracting you from the idea of what Todd Akin highlights, what it illustrates. | ||
| It's not to say that every person who's against abortion is like him. | ||
| It's not to say that every conservative is like him. | ||
| But a fucking lot are! | ||
| It shines a light on somebody who probably up till that point didn't say anything like that, but appeared to be a normal run-of-the-mill conservative anti-abortion guy. | ||
| It gives you a chance when people misspeak to see, like, oh, there's probably at least a couple other people who had those same sort of views, and that's really fucked up to think about. | ||
| It's called saying the quiet part loud. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's also really fucked up how he apologized and then lost to Claire McCaskill and then later wrote a book where he was like, I shouldn't have apologized. | ||
| Definitely believe those things. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Did he? | |
| That's fucked up. | ||
| I didn't read that. | ||
| No, most people didn't. | ||
| I didn't read his book saying, Yeah! | ||
| Legitimate rape is right. | ||
| See? | ||
| I was right on the science. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I was right on the science. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| This is nuts, but this is the sort of behavior that you'd expect to see out of someone like this. | ||
| Going out of their way in order to run interference in some ways about conservatives who do things that are really horrible. | ||
| It's much like his comedy is hacky. | ||
| This is just political hackery. | ||
| It's like he... | ||
| And this is something that I think a lot of white people do as they get older. | ||
| Like, they ride the minor inconvenience train to out-and-out white supremacy. | ||
| Oh, you bet. | ||
| Where it's like, oh, I hate bags on these fucking trains. | ||
| It's terrible. | ||
| And sure, it's a lot of black people who do those bags. | ||
| But for right now, it's not going to be important. | ||
| It's just about the bags now. | ||
| Five years from then, it's like, and of course that's why whites need to break away from civilization. | ||
| Naturally. | ||
| It's the bags, Dan. | ||
| It's all about the bags. | ||
| It's always been about the bags. | ||
| Everything else is a distraction. | ||
| It's a distraction from the bags! | ||
| And I can't stress enough how, like, you clearly have editorial oversight of your own show. | ||
| You chose to talk about this, Lionel. | ||
| Nobody's assigning Lionel a thing to bitch about. | ||
| If I had any, like, Photoshop capability, I would take the Lionel theme song and just use the Zelda villain bad guy. | ||
| Ganondorf? | ||
| No, the Lionel. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Make a flash video of the Lionel dancing with a mariachi band. | ||
| Lionel, Lionel, Lionel. | ||
| That's all that goes through my head. | ||
| So the next clip we're going to play, think about that while the theme song plays. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Lionel, Lionel, Lionel, Lionel, Lionel, Lionel, Lionel. | |
| Would someone please explain to me the inordinate fascination all of a sudden with Chaz Bono? | ||
| I know, I know. | ||
| Pause it right there. | ||
| I am going to explain to him the inordinate fascination with Chaz Bono. | ||
| You know what's interesting, actually? | ||
| He asked me politely. | ||
| He said please. | ||
| You don't need to, because at the end of the clip, he will invalidate everything he said during the clip and make evident that he knows. | ||
| What the fascination with Chaz Bono is. | ||
| And he's just being an obsequious dick. | ||
| I'm using words like I'm liable. | ||
| Ooh, that's a great adjective, Dan. | ||
| He's just being intentionally obtuse here by pretending he doesn't understand why the media has an interest in covering Chaz Bono. | ||
| He's just being an asshole. | ||
| This young man, he went through female-to-male gender transition. | ||
| I will say, though, I do appreciate that he doesn't misgender, Chaz. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That is nice. | |
| I appreciate that, because anybody else of this ilk probably would. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| And is truly, in my book, a hero. | ||
| A hero to thousands of people, including teens who, through no fault of their own, are born with a sexual apparatus that does not comport with what they feel in their mind. | ||
| Sexuality and gender identity are located in the brain. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, that wasn't bad. | |
| In this world, that's as good as you're going to be. | ||
| So good for you, Chaz. | ||
| That being said, I'm starting to get sick of Chaz Bono. | ||
| Now, I know the problems with his mom sharing with Chaz. | ||
| You know how we all get sick of heroes. | ||
| She freaked out originally, but she's come around. | ||
| I understand all that. | ||
| And now the news is centered around Chaz appearing on Dancing with the Stars. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| But maybe it's me. | ||
| Maybe I get bored easily. | ||
| Maybe I'm so accepting of Chaz that it's no... | ||
| He gets bored easily. | ||
| He did over 30 videos about George Zimmerman being cool. | ||
| That's because he was so boring. | ||
| Big deal. | ||
| Maybe I'm the only person who actually couldn't care less about Dancing with the Stars. | ||
| I mean, I have that initial interest. | ||
| Second time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| And listen, this isn't one of those there are more important issues lectures. | ||
| I'm a fan of pop culture and intellectual fast food. | ||
| But the question that I'd like to ask Chaz that I know. | ||
| You want to ask, too. | ||
| Come on, face it. | ||
| You want to know. | ||
| And my friend Judy Gold in her new one-woman show says it best. | ||
| You're not friends. | ||
| Or I guess asks it best. | ||
| Why is Chaz so fat? | ||
| It's not the penile reconstruction, or I guess to be accurate, the construction that I wonder about. | ||
| That's pretty straightforward. | ||
| Wait, is that a pun? | ||
| Or is it that MSNBC motto that nobody understands? | ||
| Anywho, the enormity of Chaz's girth, a weight that is, is troubling. | ||
| To reiterate, the guts and courage part, I can't emphasize enough. | ||
| And let's be fair. | ||
| The fact that he's got a platform with famous parents certainly helps. | ||
| There are transgendered folks in small towns who literally risk their lives coming out, so to speak. | ||
| The whole boys don't cry Brandon Tina thing comes to mind. | ||
| And on a different note, if Jenny Craig, who's a genius, doesn't snatch Chaz up, she's crazy. | ||
| I think America's ready for him. | ||
| After all, if Carrie Fisher with her ECT electroshock every six weeks story is okay, which is fine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If she's good for business, so will Chaz. | |
| There. | ||
| I'm glad I got this off my chest. | ||
| Comment as you see fit. | ||
| So, isn't that interesting there at the end where he's talking about how, like... | ||
| You know, Chaz has a large platform as a celebrity, and there's a lot of transgender youths who are struggling. | ||
| I don't understand how he can end the clip with such an invalidation of what his premise was. | ||
| The idea that he's sick and tired of seeing Chaz Bono around, when at the end of the clip he makes very clear that he understands that this is very valuable for transgender youths who are struggling in small-town America, get to see somebody who is representative of... | ||
| Making them feel normal. | ||
| For him to pretend that he's like, I'm totally fine with trans people. | ||
| I'm not against that at all. | ||
| But fuck this representation thing. | ||
| I'm fucking annoyed by it. | ||
| And Jazz is fucking fat. | ||
| I'm pretty sure what he just said was, I don't like it because it doesn't affect me. | ||
| Sure, I get it. | ||
| Because for the people it does affect, it's actually very important. | ||
| But! | ||
| People being fat affects me. | ||
| I don't understand. | ||
| I really don't. | ||
| Like, if I were the segment producer on this show and he submitted this as a script, I would be like, there's internal problems here. | ||
| You contradict yourself. | ||
| Or, at very least, you make clear at the end here that you know exactly what the issue is and why you shouldn't be annoyed by this. | ||
| But the fact that you are still annoyed by this and aware of why Chaz is a valuable figure in pop culture and media indicates that maybe you aren't so into trans rights and acceptance as you're pretending to be. | ||
| Perhaps the end of this undercuts your point. | ||
| I would go to a page one rewrite, recast, do that whole thing. | ||
| That's probably why you're not a segment producer for a VHF station. | ||
| God damn. | ||
| That is just embarrassing. | ||
| From a comedy perspective, from a human perspective, from a point perspective, from a writing perspective, from a thought perspective, everything about that is just really bad. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| So that's interesting that we have Chaz Bono here, and this is his take on him, and that's great. | ||
| His take on him is, it's super awesome that a trans person is coming out. | ||
| I'm annoyed by it. | ||
| I can see why people find it inspirational, and... | ||
| The fact that he is out, and we are talking about him so much, also helps normalize trans people, and that helps normalize and make trans people feel comfortable in places where maybe they wouldn't be ever made to feel comfortable, because finally, this pop culture image is being transmitted to their parents, making them feel more comfortable with the idea of their children being trans. | ||
| But also, Jenny Craig needs to get too fat. | ||
| That goes back to the bullying and fat shaming thing that I brought up earlier. | ||
| I really can't understand where his heart lies on it because he does have a number of videos about how bullies are bad people. | ||
| They're committing a bad thing. | ||
| He defends the right to bullying and the idea that it's okay to do but the people who do it are bad. | ||
| But it would be not a difficult argument to make that what he's doing there is a bit bullying. | ||
| It's a little bit bullying. | ||
| Also, hey buddy, why do you think somebody who spent most of their life feeling uncomfortable in their own skin, afraid of coming out to his parents or his mom, afraid of doing so many things, why do you think that person might gain weight? | ||
| No idea. | ||
| So, yeah, it's just a mess. | ||
| It is a mess. | ||
| So that's how he talks about Chaz Bono. | ||
| And let's see how he talks about someone else in this next clip and see if there's differences. | ||
| I'm guessing RuPaul? | ||
| Have you noticed how immediately after the horror in Norway, the killer was said to be connected to right-wing groups? | ||
| That he was a right-winger, an extremist, anti-Muslim, anti-immigration. | ||
| Listen to me, this is dangerous. | ||
| Let me explain why. | ||
| The motivation for crime, though fascinating, is absolutely irrelevant. | ||
| And the focus on ideology is dangerous. | ||
| Why? | ||
| First, it allows for the expansion of a singular sick event into a bigger message, a theme. | ||
| That then seeks to include and brand all those people that are believed to fall under the dangerously vague title of right-wing whatever. | ||
| Yes, correct. | ||
| Insanity knows no ideology. | ||
| Giving evil a particular political label seeks to legitimize the terror by explaining its motivation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Inadvertently, we're giving credence to killers. | |
| When Charles Manson orchestrated the Tate LaBianca murders. | ||
| It was believed that this nut wanted to incite a race war through helter-skelter. | ||
| Because he said he did. | ||
| Now what would that make Manson? | ||
| A white supremacist or a fallen lefty hippie? | ||
| No, a white supremacist. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Who cares? | |
| Like hate crime laws, we needlessly complicate the issue by throwing in assailant's motivation and bias into the elements of proof, thus complicating matters. | ||
| Now prosecutors have to prove why a crime was committed in addition to a defendant's intent to commit the crime. | ||
| Have you noticed that in our country, domestic terror is different for Democratic and Republican administrations? | ||
| When Republicans are in power, domestic terrorism is foreign. | ||
| Islamofascism, an oxymoron. | ||
| Bin Laden, Al-Qaeda. | ||
| When Democrats are in power, domestic terrorism is homegrown. | ||
| Right wing. | ||
| Think Waco, Oklahoma City. | ||
| Counterpoint. | ||
| When was the first? | ||
| Who was in power during the first time Bin Laden attacked the World Trade Center? | ||
| I have no idea who you're talking about. | ||
| Militias. | ||
| In our current system, let me add constitutionalist, anti-tax, pro-second amendment, anti-big government types. | ||
| Sound like Alex. | ||
| Now here's where the danger really gets dangerous. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| The more that these discussions go from the Norway case at hand to his support of the English Defense League and its similarity to right-wing extremist groups here, and further similarity to our Tea Party and the likes of Ron Paul or Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachmann, the mutual conflation and expansion... | ||
| Then leads to some weird kind of transitive property application that connects the nut in Norway to our political and special interest groups here. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Labeled right-wing by the brain-dead media. | ||
| And look at me. | ||
| That's exactly what's happening here, you dig? | ||
| So listen to the talk of the Echo Chamber. | ||
| Be careful. | ||
| Centigraphic media connecting culpability and cause to the right-wing whatever. | ||
| Don't let the horror of the Norway Massacre be co-opted and exploited for political reasons here. | ||
| That's what you're doing. | ||
| As you see fit. | ||
| I will. | ||
| That's what you're doing. | ||
| That's what he's doing. | ||
| He won't even say Anders Breivik's name. | ||
| He won't even acknowledge that. | ||
| Like, he won't talk about this in any real way. | ||
| And if you want to hear more about why this is bullshit, we did a whole episode about Anders Breivik and his attack. | ||
| And one of the things I can tell you with categorical certainty is that Lionel has never read his manifesto. | ||
| Lionel has no interest in understanding exactly what motivated Anders Breivik to do the things he did. | ||
| Because they are so close to the same motivations that do inspire the militias and the right wing and the Tea Party. | ||
| Those sorts of anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim sentiments are so deeply embedded in what motivated his attack and all that. | ||
| I do understand what he's saying in terms of This guy isn't representative of all of us. | ||
| At a point well taken. | ||
| I do think that is a fair thing. | ||
| If you want to make the argument that insanity has no party, we can have that conversation. | ||
| No, and I respect that. | ||
| It's not to say that someone like Anders Breivik is indicative of the mainstream of conservatism, no matter the country. | ||
| But to say why somebody did something... | ||
| ...is irrelevant, is to say, I'm afraid of looking at why this person did that thing, because it will unveil and reveal how these lines of thinking, these anti-immigrant, these anti-Muslim lines of thinking... | ||
| Left to their own devices and taken to the logical conclusions end up in a place where, why don't we kill people? | ||
| That is the end result of this line of thinking. | ||
| It just is. | ||
| Hey, he's a crazy person. | ||
| He's a crazy person. | ||
| It's definitely not anything to do with his motivations. | ||
| That doesn't matter. | ||
| It's almost like, for white terrorists... | ||
| The motivation doesn't matter. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh-huh. | |
| Because they're crazy. | ||
| They're just nuts. | ||
| You can't paste their manifestos that say exactly the same shit that I say all the time as being indicative of the shit that I say all the time. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| But if it's a fucking Muslim terrorist, that's because all Islamic terrorists... | ||
| Because Islam is so horrible, like Sam Harris likes to tell us. | ||
| Or, conversely, with this world, because they don't even want to engage that far, it's just all fake. | ||
| Yeah, that's a fair point. | ||
| It's all false flagged by the globalists. | ||
| Or whatever. | ||
| So, like, when I hear something like this, and I hear, like, this clip is interesting to me because he's talking about Anders Breivik like this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| After he talked about Chaz Bono the way he did. | ||
| This is actually more akin to the Todd Akin clip. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Where it is, like, don't associate us with this. | ||
| But I will take no ownership of the idea that this is very close to what I believe. | ||
| I absolutely will not look. | ||
| At the logical conclusion of all of the stuff that I say and believe. | ||
| Because by doing that, I might see that it would inspire people to kill indiscriminately. | ||
| And we're on the left, and I'm totally fine to look at the motivations of eco-terrorists or animal rights terrorists. | ||
| It's kind of important to look at their motivations in order to understand what it is they're doing. | ||
| I have no fear of looking at those things and seeing, oh yeah, they are motivated by... | ||
| You know, sort of left principles or whatever taken to maybe too far of an extreme, willing to have that conversation. | ||
| This is just a shutting down of that conversation in any way because of the fear of what it could. | ||
| Like, you lift that mattress up, what's under there? | ||
| And I think it's sad. | ||
| I think it's a very cowardly, sad... | ||
| uh, type of place to live in. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that's what we see here. | |
| We see a sad hack more or less. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Which is why I wanted to cover this stuff as opposed to any QAnon nonsense. | |
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I think this is more important. | ||
| This is more like, this is the career that Lionel is living. | ||
| This is what he put into the world. | ||
| This is a large chunk of his creative output. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| I think this is more damning, quite frankly. | ||
| And at the same time, if you QAnon ding-dongs knew that this is the guy who you're now all super into, I think you should take a step back and think about who your intellectual heroes are. | ||
| Well, we all get very bored of our heroes, of course. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| People who become heroes. | ||
| It's so boring. | ||
| I love QAnon. | ||
| I believe there are tens of thousands of sealed indictments coming, and Hillary's going to prison, the Bushes are going to prison. | ||
| I'm kind of like Bush, and I'm sick and tired of exercise equipment ads. | ||
| Absolutely! | ||
| And if you fucking wear a satchel, I swear to God, you're worse than Anders Breivik. | ||
| So, oh yeah, certainly. | ||
| That is, actually... | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| elected, he went back to the well on Trump's birtherism. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Lilo, Lilo, Lilo, Lilo, Lilo, Lilo, Lilo, Lilo, Lilo, Lilo. | |
| Donald Trump is my new hero. | ||
| I've never really been a fan before. | ||
| I've never watched a Pico second of The Apprentice, and frankly, I may be the only person who really knows and cares little about him. | ||
| That being said... | ||
| Lately, he's driving folks nuts by daring, daring, I say, as an American citizen to question the eligibility of his president to serve as his president. | ||
| The nerve of anyone questioning King Obama. | ||
| Still without proof, by the way. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And this week, when I saw CNN's permanently comatose, the poster child of mind-numbing, the stultifying, catatonic, and resident crash test dummy, Wolf Blitzer, absolutely lose it over the subject of daring, daring. | ||
| He had already released his birth certificate. | ||
| something to this old birther business. | ||
| Because Wolf, who I swear died in 1978, but nobody told him, the Wolf man went quackers. | ||
| Now keep in mind... | ||
| I don't remember ever seeing anyone ever being shut down for asking any embarrassing questions of presidents in the past. | ||
| Think about it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, really? | |
| Remember during the Clinton years, they had old Bill and Hill accused of everything from whacking Vince Foster to rape to kidnapping Judge Clayton. | ||
| Oh, yeah, Larry Nichols shit. | ||
| And nobody said a word. | ||
| Ask away. | ||
| Nobody said a word? | ||
| Free country. | ||
| Did nobody say a word? | ||
| Even to those who thought Obama was a moron. | ||
| Pretty sure somebody said a word. | ||
| Obamination folks just blew it off and mumbled, oh, they're nuts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nope. | |
| And when you ask Obama acolytes or really... | ||
| Anyone in the media, why Trump's crazy or off-base in bringing up the issue of Article 2 eligibility, folks either say, well, look at his hair, or he's a racist, or whatever. | ||
| Remember, Sparky, Article 2, Section 1 prescribes absolutely mandatory eligibility requirements for office. | ||
| Look, presidential scholars might recall that there were questions along somewhat similar lines during Herbert Hoover's presidency. | ||
| Paul 31 had worked for a British mining company and prior to his election had spent some time abroad. | ||
| Did the 14-year residency requirement apply? | ||
| Did that mean 14 years that preceded the term? | ||
| Or 14 years cumulative? | ||
| It was a valid question. | ||
| There were even questions about John McCain, who was born at a naval air station in the Panama Canal Zone. | ||
| That's a pathetic deflection. | ||
| Admittedly, McDonald is not exactly the Michael Beschloss of our time and might not be the best guy to tackle arcane and historically recondite Article 2 parsing, but he's still an American citizen. | ||
| Bad hair or not? | ||
| Boy, old Donald Trump has hit a nerve, and I love nerve hitters. | ||
| Touché, Donnie boy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Touché. | |
| Comment as you see fit. | ||
| Not a lot of laughter in the studio on that one. | ||
| No, that starts to go away the longer he has a job there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think everyone kind of, the novelty has worn off. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a couple of really important points in there. | ||
| One, at the end of his last Donald Trump clip, he declared hair jokes dead. | ||
| He did two of them in that clip. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| So, hey, buddy, by your own rule about hating people who think they're funny, by your own rule of jokes that are dead, you have transgressed your own rule. | ||
| Now, second, nothing had really changed in terms of Donald Trump's birtherism stuff in the intervening year and a half, two years between these clips. | ||
| Nothing on the ground had changed. | ||
| And nothing really had changed in terms of his perspective. | ||
| In the first clip, he was like, Trump, you have no evidence. | ||
| You've got to stop this, although I'm thrilled you're making Chris Matthews mad. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What's motivating him to make this clip is that Wolf Blitzer is now mad about it. | ||
| There is no substantive difference except for something. | ||
| Something. | ||
| I don't know what it is. | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| But something changed. | ||
| That has led him to completely flip his position on something. | ||
| To a point where he's like, why are people mad that Trump is questioning the birth certificate? | ||
| You made a video being mad about Trump questioning the birth certificate. | ||
| You're condemning your past self without calling yourself out. | ||
| I was even thinking he was stupid to do this. | ||
| This is indicative of absolute... | ||
| Something behind the scenes changed. | ||
| I don't know what it is. | ||
| I swear to you. | ||
| And it could probably be explained by Ron Paul's retirement. | ||
| Oh, it could be. | ||
| That could be a huge piece of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, that alone could account for a great deal. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But it's something. | ||
| It's something and it's nefarious. | ||
| That's all I know. | ||
| I mean, I don't know. | ||
| Generally speaking, I kind of think I'm right that old white people take the minor inconvenience train to white supremacy. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Because it does kind of just sound like he's getting crankier and less fun. | ||
| Like, he's not having fun. | ||
| He doesn't seem like he's enjoying himself at all giving this pre-packaged shit rant. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| And if you listen to a bunch of his stuff, he doesn't have a lot of joie de vivre in him. | ||
| Although, I'm sorry, he doesn't speak French. | ||
| He said that earlier. | ||
| Oh, that's true. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| You should be rightly pilloried for your trying to be funny when you aren't. | ||
| So, there are tons and tons of these shit videos that you can find. | ||
| These are the ones that I thought told an interesting story over time of Lionel's career and work. | ||
| Now, it should be noted that in 2011 he started appearing on Alex Jones' show. | ||
| And here is a clip from their first interaction. | ||
| Oh, wait, wait, wait. | ||
| So his last clip that we just played for VHF is 2013-2014, around there. | ||
| 2013, I believe. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So now we're going two years prior to that. | ||
| So, two years prior to that. | ||
| The timeline isn't super important necessarily for this, this part of it. | ||
| But yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, this is before the re-election when he starts appearing on Alex Jones' show. | ||
| But it's pretty close to after when Air America folded. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Gotcha. | ||
| So, we're in that place. | ||
| And I think this should speak volumes about why Lionel is very dumb. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm Lionel. | |
| Great to have you on, my friend. | ||
| I know, Lionel. | ||
| And I've got to tell you something. | ||
| Damn it. | ||
| Every day I have listened to your show, and I've listened for I don't know how many years, my blood pressure goes up. | ||
| I actually physically, viscerally respond to this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I get sick every single day. | |
| You make me sick. | ||
| That's a good way. | ||
| And I'm serious. | ||
| There is not one show. | ||
| There is not one day that goes by. | ||
| I turn to my wife and say, what country are we living in? | ||
| Number one. | ||
| Two. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Where are the mainstream media? | |
| Where are these narcotized, zombified, sock puppets? | ||
| What are they talking about? | ||
| You know that today, the big story is in New York. | ||
| By the way, thank God you're not in New York for a variety of reasons. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The president's here, and Justin Bieber's here. | |
| That's it. | ||
| And if you walked around and listened to local media news, you'd swear, those are the only two things that are happening on the planet. | ||
| In front of everybody, in full view, those are the stories. | ||
| And I'm looking at your website and listen every day, and I swear to you, my blood pressure is going up. | ||
| My diastolic is through the roof. | ||
| I don't know if I can take this anymore. | ||
| And I don't know how you do it. | ||
| I've heard, and if anybody who's ever, you know, I study your show, Alex. | ||
| I love it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I've devoted a lot of time to it, and you've been a great inspiration for me and LionelMedia.com. | |
| He's sick about it, Dan. | ||
| He's ill about it. | ||
| He's convalescent, Dan. | ||
| He's got a disease. | ||
| He is infected with so many different biomes. | ||
| He's got thrombosis. | ||
| Yeah, no kidding. | ||
| Christ. | ||
| I think what you see here is someone who probably is just... | ||
| It's hard to say. | ||
| I actually have a very strong theory on this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| I think Lionel is a pathetic, stupid con man. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I think he is marginally talented in terms of expressing... | ||
| Usually hacky things, but a lot of people like hacky things. | ||
| There's a very large market for bad opinions. | ||
| Gavin McGinnis exists. | ||
| Well, I mean, even beyond him, if you just go to, like, road comics, you know, like, there's a lot of very terrible ones who make a very decent living because they're on the right circuits and middle-of-the-road stuff that's kind of boring to anyone who thinks about things. | ||
| You know, like, a lot of talk radio isn't very interesting. | ||
| What? | ||
| Unfortunately, I have bad news. | ||
| Dan! | ||
| A lot of it is full of really bad, bland opinions, but that is the wide net that can be cast. | ||
| Catch more fish that way. | ||
| The lowest common denominator, Dan. | ||
| A person at the bottom rung can enjoy it. | ||
| Somebody who's on the low part of the totem pole. | ||
| We're both culturally... | ||
| A troglodyte. | ||
| We're at risk of becoming Lionel with this sort of hacky opinion that talk radio is bland. | ||
| But I'm saying it in service of making the argument that I think that he fell into that scam after the OJ trial, I guess. | ||
| I guess! | ||
| Because he realized that, like, law is hot. | ||
| People are interested in hearing these legal opinions and stuff like that. | ||
| I have a law degree from a bad college. | ||
| I'm going to get into this game. | ||
| I am at least talented enough with the word that I can do this. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| You know, I can be charming enough. | ||
| And so he did that. | ||
| He got into that. | ||
| And as he got into it, he fell into this local access TV news spot where he does his hacky, washed-over, warmed-up comedy routines. | ||
| I wouldn't be surprised if there was an expose that turned out that he... | ||
| Moonlighted going to open mics in New York and just writing down premises. | ||
| Not surprising at all. | ||
| I would not be surprised at all based on the level of quality I'm seeing here. | ||
| So he does that for a bit, but it's not really doing all that well. | ||
| It's not working out all that great. | ||
| Gets involved with Air America. | ||
| He is maybe in some ways responsible for Air America falling apart because of them turning their back on Sam Seder and making him a Sunday-only show. | ||
| And when Air America falls apart, he's kind of left with, all right, I have a talk radio show, but it's not really that great. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Makes a pivot towards the right. | ||
| What he interprets as being the right at the time, that is anti-Obama and in some ways glorifying Bush and Cheney. | ||
| And absolutely anti-youth people. | ||
| True. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now he still, at that whole period of time, has the Ron Paul background. | ||
| He still was on board with all that stuff. | ||
| So it's a natural transition. | ||
| So he's already a racist. | ||
| Fair. | ||
| It's a natural transition, though, for him to start getting involved with Alex Jones. | ||
|
unidentified
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Absolutely. | |
| As he gets involved with Alex Jones, whether it's because he recognizes how good Alex's scam is or whatever, he becomes radicalized a little bit. | ||
| And he starts to go down a harder path with Alex. | ||
| His videos that he starts putting out on YouTube are more hardcore. | ||
| They're a bit more... | ||
| You know, it goes from him in a news studio doing this shit to him in his office. | ||
| At a webcam doing 30-minute videos that are a bit more extreme. | ||
| Oh, that's not good. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| So you see that track, but still none of it is that successful. | ||
| You still look at these numbers. | ||
| And the videos that he has that are posted of him doing these news things. | ||
| Hundreds of views. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's minuscule the number of views these ever got. | ||
| And when he started broadcasting and going with Alex and that sort of thing, when he started doing his videos on YouTube, it's still only like a thousand views for these videos that have been online for five years, six years. | ||
| As soon as he pivoted to Trump and as soon as he started doing QAnon stuff, it's now in the 50,000, 100,000 realm. | ||
| He took a massive jump. | ||
| And I think that that... | ||
| I think it's the path of the con man. | ||
| I think he's always been looking for the better con. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The better game. | ||
| And he found it. | ||
| So you think what's going on is this is a dude who has just always been looking for a gig. | ||
| And he keeps jumping from gig to gig trying to find the best. | ||
| It's like somebody working at a company trying to move their way up the corporate ladder. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And then eventually he becomes what he was pretending to be. | ||
| Yeah, but what's interesting about it is I think you're right in characterizing it as trying to get up the ladder or whatever. | ||
| But I think that what he didn't realize probably... | ||
| Is that the ladder leads to propaganda. | ||
| The ladder that he was on, I think he thought it was commentating and having a position. | ||
| But on the lower rungs of the ladder, it's not that hard. | ||
| And you can have poorly thought through hacky positions and maybe still coast through. | ||
| As you go higher up the ladder, it becomes malicious propaganda. | ||
| And that's what he grew into. | ||
| So, I don't know. | ||
| I don't know how to end this. | ||
| I don't know how to sum this up. | ||
| This was an attempt, I believe, wholeheartedly, not to make a point. | ||
| It was, I wanted to start the year on something that we could just laugh a bunch about and still have some conversation about. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| You're not just like, hey, this is all stupid. | ||
| And I think Lionel's early work is definitely laughable. | ||
| And so I think we achieved that. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| With a small point. | ||
| About how he has also been a rank hypocrite. | ||
| What I've always wanted to start the new year with, Dan, and what I feel like we missed last year, you know, with our secret of 2017. | ||
| I think I know what it is. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right. | |
| I could do that all day. | ||
| I thank you all for joining us here in the new year. | ||
| It's been a great... | ||
| Day of year so far. | ||
| So far. | ||
| Thank you all for listening. | ||
| We appreciate it. | ||
| We'll be back on Friday. | ||
| But until then, we do have a website. | ||
| We do. | ||
| That you can check out. | ||
|
unidentified
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It is Lionel, Lionel, Lionel, Lionel.com. | |
| We also are on Twitter. | ||
| It's knowledge underscore fight. | ||
| Indeed. | ||
| Slash Lionel. | ||
| You can go to our Facebook group. | ||
| Go home and tell Lionel you're brilliant. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| We're on iL Lionel. | ||
| Leave a review comment. | ||
| Download, leave a review that just says, Lino, Lino, Lino. | ||
| God, I could do that all day. | ||
| I fucking love it. | ||
| That is the worst theme song, and I love it so much. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's so bad, and it's so annoying, but it's so good. | |
| It's satisfying in a way that I did not know was possible. | ||
| It's so much like Icarus. | ||
| The humorous of that theme song is amazing. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| And I wish... | ||
| I'm going to show you, as soon as we finish recording this, the video, like the visual of it. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Because it's just Lionel fake yelling in a bullhorn. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Everyone look it up. | ||
| Totebag Crusher 1, I believe is what it was called. | ||
| Oh my god, so good. | ||
| We'll be back next time, but until then, get rid of your backpacks. | ||
| Indeed. | ||
| But, backpacks on the train, I don't think have ever killed anybody. | ||
| I don't know if that's true. | ||
| I think the chances are slim that backpacks on the train have ever killed anybody. | ||
|
unidentified
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Doubt it. | |
| But one guy has technically probably killed a guy, and that's Alex Jones. | ||
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thanks for holding. | |
| Hello, Alex. | ||
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
| I'm a huge fan. | ||
| I love your work. |