We know who the loser sucker is..........Agent Orange!!!!! w/ Nate Bethea
This week Nate Bethea of the What a Hell of a Way to Die and Trash Future podcasts joins us to discuss the Atlantic bombshell that Trump doesn't respect the troops, whether this will influence republican voters, and how this political tack is bringing out the worst in the Democratic party Also, Trump boats sink, possibly because of terrorism?? Support the show, get a bonus episode every week and audio from our youtube livestreams at http://patreon.com/miniondeathcult This week Alexander will be doing a live read of My Antifa Lover: A Riot of the Heart at http://youtube.com/miniondeathcult Wednesday, at 7:30pm PST Music: Despise You - Fear's Song
The liberals are destroying California, and conservative humor gone awry... Conservative humor gone awry is going to fascistphonia today, so stay tuned.
We're going to take a few pictures of the desert and how their policies are actually messing it up.
It's not beautiful when you go across that border.
Stay tuned guys, we'll show you exactly what it looks like when people are going to get you.
Oh, they're in Bartholstein.
Stay tuned.
I'm Alexander Edward.
And I'm Tony Boswell.
And we are Minion Death Cult.
The world is ending.
Gender reveal parties are responsible.
We're documenting it.
What's up, everybody?
Thank you so much for joining the show.
Thank you, as always, for listening.
And a special thank you to the people who heeded the call of the iTunes reviews.
And I do want to give an update.
I was able to get the negative review removed from iTunes, the one that referenced Hitler while describing our podcast.
So take that as a note.
Any podcasters out there, if somebody's talking shit to you in the review section and they say anything remotely problematic, you can usually get it removed and it's pretty fun.
I do want to thank, where are they here?
Vic212 who says, podcast slaps, five stars.
At first I'm like, sus, but then I'm like, bus.
And then Caleb the Printer says, better than 9-11, five stars.
Only a little though.
Wow, wow, that's like, that's huge.
Yeah, thank you.
Yeah, thank you.
Are we?
I mean, we're both pretty tall.
Yeah, the only thing that could be better than 9-11 is if somebody took us down.
Then it would be better than 9-11.
Okay, so before we get to the show proper, we have a little bit of news from Tony's neck of the woods, which is that Southern California, particularly an area about two towns over from Tony, is currently on fire.
And we learned last night that it was due to a The munitions from a gender reveal party.
Yes.
There was somebody in Oak Glen who was so keen on their neighbors knowing that their baby had a pussy that they lit Southern California on fire.
I mean, we've always had, you know, we've always found Jenner reveals obnoxious.
We've been kind of making this joke for a very long time.
Um, and then to have, I mean, this fire is, is down the street from me.
It's like, you don't have, you can take a left out of my driveway and not turn one more time and you're going to run into the fire.
I mean, it's been dense smoke and ash for the last two days, and I was just so mad.
It's devastating and it's awful in the first place, right?
And then I got that news right away.
Multiple people at the same time messaged me about it, which is really funny.
And I just went from being like, oh man, this sucks, to just being furious and also laughing.
But it's awful.
It sucks so bad.
It's just great.
It's so good because like, you know, one thing we've been talking about on the show for a long time now is how, you know, California deserves to burn because of our wanton homosexuality and, you know, debauchery in general.
And the people who are setting it on fire are literally just weird, straight people obsessed with baby genitals.
Yep, absolutely.
So that's really cool.
I'm gonna be chuckling to myself heartily as I burn to death when I visit my family.
Yeah.
So joining us today, we got Nate from Hell of a Way to Die, What a Hell of a Way to Die, and the Trash Future podcast.
Nate, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you very much for having me and being able to accommodate our jet-set lifestyle that involves different countries' time zones.
Yeah, absolutely.
Nate, What Hell of a Way to Die is, of course, a lefty veteran podcast, and we brought you on the show because we have one topic in particular that, you know, you might be able to, I don't know, shed some light on for us.
But when it comes to gender reveal parties, you know, what we're seeing, like, I imagine, due to your training, you probably can do all sorts of wild, harmful shit at these gender reveal parties.
Like, Do you have any sort of, like, unexploded ordinances you could use for one of these?
Or maybe, like, you know, your knowledge of IEDs, you could, like, blow off a neighbor's hand or something in service of, you know, babies' genitals?
I mean, in the grand scheme of things, I figure that it would only make sense as a military-related gender reveal if the intention was for it to be safe and cost-effective, and it sets everything on fire.
So, I think for that, uh, yeah.
I think, yeah, a little thermite grenade would be nice.
Honestly, though, what really blows my mind about all of these is that, I mean, hasn't there been a ton of fire warnings and already other fires in Southern California?
So, like, folks, you imagine, would know, hey, like, things that can catch on fire may not be a good idea right now, but they did it anyway.
It was that important to them that the baby's gender was revealed through an explosion, that they said, fuck it, I'm gonna risk setting this portion of the state on fire.
It's like so far from a secret.
If you live in Southern California for one summer, you know how serious fire warnings are.
And you know that it's not a matter of like if it's when and how big the fire is going to be.
And so to do anything like that is so stupid.
We've already had wildfires caused by gender reveal parties in the past in California.
Yes.
Not just, it's not just wildfire season anymore.
It's gender reveal wildfire season.
Yeah, and it's because they're pregnant because they were stuck at home because of the air air conditions from the last fire.
So now they're pregnant and now they have to do another gender reveal.
It's cyclical.
It's going to go on forever.
Okay, so to get into our first topic today, we're talking about that Atlantic report about how Trump hates the troops.
And the actual headline is, I'm reading from the URL here, forgive me if it's off by a word or two, but it's Trump says Americans who died at war are losers and suckers.
And it's such a funny phrasing because it's not just like US soldiers or veterans or casualties of war, it's specifically Americans who died at war.
The Atlantic is really going for that patriotic, jingoistic, lib angle, which I appreciate.
It's funny to me reading that paragraph, that second paragraph in the Atlantic piece, because Donald Trump has managed to achieve brain synchronicity with a grumpy 14-year-old who doesn't want to do a battlefield tour with his really overexcited dad.
The paragraph reads, Trump rejected the idea of the visit.
This is to the Anmar American Cemetery near Paris, where I think World War I or World War II veterans are buried or casualties are buried.
Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain and because he did not believe it was important to honor American war dead, according to four people with first-hand knowledge.
In a conversation with senior staff members in the morning to schedule a visit, Trump said, Why should I go to that cemetery?
It's filled with losers.
Wow.
God damn, I can't even read that fucking shit out loud without laughing.
I'm sorry.
No, it's all extremely funny.
Like, so much about this is hilarious.
But I love what you struck on.
It is very, like, 14-year-old not wanting to do some boring-ass shit.
Like, it is like me being like, you know, having to take off my Castro hat at 14 when we were on vacation in Hawaii going inside to eat at the Buca di Peppo's over there or something.
I was thinking, my parents, we drove, because I lived in California as a kid, and then my dad, my dad was in the army, he went up getting a temporary assignment in Rhode Island, and we drove across the country.
And we, I guess for some reason, they wanted to see the site of the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
And it's like, I was four.
You can imagine a four-year-old being like, look at this historic field with some stones in it.
Yeah.
A lot of dead people here, but yeah.
That's why I'm only going to take my kids to see the historical site of the Battle of the Bulge.
Because even if you're 14 and you're not, you know, into military engagements, at least you can laugh at the name.
Exactly.
After this is over today, actually, me and my kid are going to drive up to Crestline and look at the Battle of Crestorner later.
It's like a few miles down the road.
Dorner's last stand.
Yeah.
They say the left doesn't respect veterans, and yet there is one veteran that all leftists in America respect.
Absolutely.
So your dad was in the Army?
Nate?
Yeah, yeah, my mom and dad were both in the Army.
Yeah, that's how they met.
Is that how you were able to get into the Army?
I mean, able to get in implies that it was a challenge.
But yeah, my mom and dad met.
My mom and dad were both army officers, and that's how they met each other.
Growing up, it was more like it's just a normal career thing, and anything that's going on is going to be over in six months anyway.
So I got offered an ROTC scholarship when I was 18, and I accepted it.
Lo and behold, my opinions changed over some time.
But yeah, the way I got in was basically a recruiter said, you can do this and get your college paid for.
And I was like, okay, sounds good to me.
Nothing bad has ever happened to someone who joined the army to get their college paid for.
And yeah, so I was in, I was, I signed up and I, in fact, I was dumb enough to sign an extended contract.
So I was, I was on the hook for seven years when I graduated and I was in for like seven years and a week and then got out.
But yeah.
Back in those days, it was really, really hard to get out.
Like, there were folks who, if you wanted to get out early, I mean, they would kick you out for, like, criminal shit, but then you'd also, there were, it was challenging, you know, to, like, even have them go so far as to prosecute stuff, so they would take people, like, if they were kicking you out, I'm not joking, if they were gonna kick you out for criminal shit, like, you pissed hot on a drug test or something, they'd be like, yeah, but we're gonna hold onto you for this whole next deployment, and then when you get back, we're gonna kick you out.
Wow, imagine doing a tour and coming home to no job, knowing you're coming home to nothing.
To nothing, yeah.
No, 100% they did that.
I mean, I remember having soldiers where that happened to them, where it was like, well, he pissed off for weed twice, so he's getting chaptered, but we're going to chapter him after deployment.
That's great.
Maybe die, and then when you get back, you're not going to get veteran benefits.
I don't know if folks know that story, but it has changed recently, but especially when I was in, you know, I was in 07 to 14.
If you got kicked out for say drugs or bad conduct or something along those lines, you couldn't get care from the VA.
They wouldn't let you in because even if you'd served in combat, it doesn't matter.
You aren't entitled to veteran benefits if they kick you out of the military.
So yeah, man, it's... My eyes were open to a lot of shit that I just... And growing up in an army family, it was just sort of like, oh no, it's a normal job.
It's the family vocation, you know?
And yeah, it definitely... I know, I mean, I can kind of relate to that.
Like, my parents didn't meet in the military, but they met at an Oingo Boingo concert.
So I had, you know, for like seven years of my life, too, I was like forced to listen to a lot of horns.
I had to see my dad pogo one time.
My dad showed me what pogoing was.
I had to see that.
So I can relate, I feel, a little bit.
Yeah, and like my whole family, I'm like the only cousin that's not active duty.
Or at least, you know, retires and like that.
But I did just buy a PS4.
So, am I getting closer to being a troop?
We all take our own routes to the destination.
Play enough Modern Warfare, you'll be hotter on, like, the cool new military lingo than I am, because I tried to kind of leave that shit behind as best as possible.
I mean, I do a podcast about it, but we mostly talk about, well, stories like this.
If I weren't on this show, I'd probably be recording one with Francis talking about A, the dumb lib freakout, and B, how funny the stuff Trump said is.
And I mean, like, I know you've got a whole episode scheduled for it, but I just feel like the appeal to this being some kind of, like, line that must not be crossed, it's like, he already crossed it in 2016 with the Muslim-American guy who made fun of his parents, like, he died in combat, but no one cared then, they aren't going to care now.
Who is this hall monitor that you're appealing to?
Like, I don't get it.
All right, let me read more from this article.
In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, why should I go to that cemetery?
It's filled with losers.
In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 Marines who lost their lives at Bellow Wood as, quote, suckers for getting killed.
Bellow Wood is a consequential battle in American history, and the ground on which it was fought is venerated by the Marine Corps.
America and its allies stopped the German advance towards Paris there in the spring of 1918, but Trump on that same trip asked aides, who were the good guys in this war?
He also said that he didn't understand why the United States would intervene on the side of the allies.
Trump's understanding of concepts such as patriotism, service, and sacrifice has interested me since he expressed contempt for the war record of the late Senator John McCain, who spent more than five years as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese.
"He's not a war hero," Trump said in 2015 while running for the Republican nomination for president.
I like people who weren't captured.
So, alluding to what you said, Nate, does anybody remember what happened after 2015?
It says here Trump was running for the Republican nomination in 2015 when he said all this shit.
So, I mean, if we looked to, I don't know, the fallout of that statement, perhaps we could be given a glimpse into our own future here.
I was tempted to send this to my grandma for that exact reason, but then I remembered him talking about John McCain, and if she doesn't want to stand by John McCain, then I know we're fucked for just some grave sites.
Yeah, I was thinking about this too.
Not just the Hahn family and what happened with them, and Trump making fun of them, and the Democrats using them, having them speak at the convention.
That didn't really, that didn't apparently achieve the goal they wanted.
But I look back too, I mean, obviously I would prefer Trump not win a second term, so I mean I'm kind of knocking on wood here, but I think back to 2004 with Kerry, I mean like, at the Republican convention, a big running joke was people would draw fake purple hearts on Band-Aids and put them on their face to be like, God, he's a pussy, he didn't actually get wounded in combat!
And the idea that the military is sacrosanct, I mean, is a rule that's definitely applied to Democrats but not to Republicans, and you'd think that after nearly 20 years of this, the Democrats would have figured out, like, this is gonna maybe get 10 retired army officers who are leaning Republican and live in the suburbs to vote for you.
Most people don't care.
It's almost as if it's about ideology and goals and your specific, like, what you like in your platform and not about how you talk or not about, like, which norms you obey.
It's almost like, hey, a lot of people on the right see that he's doing things that they like so they're gonna keep voting for him even if he makes the same jokes about the troops that the troops make about themselves.
Like I see, like a lot of this wording I see in like self-deprecating humor from like military pages, even far-right military pages.
I kind of like to think of it maybe, maybe some people are justifying it by saying maybe he's like just an army guy and this is an anti-marines thing.
I mean, the thing that gets me, too, is I 100% agree with you, and I think that there's an extent to which people, like, there's this idealized version of the military that Democrats, I mean, Republicans appeal to it, too, but I think that Democrats, particularly since Obama, and I felt like there was absolutely this push to kind of out-venerate the troops on the part of the Democrats under Obama,
Some of that I think you saw specifically with regard to when the Department of Defense repealed Don't Ask, Don't Tell.
The acronym literally was LGB because they did not make any kind of like accommodations for trans people at the time, but lesbian, gay, and bisexual people could serve openly.
And there was a sort of like, I'm not trying to pin it on Rachel Maddow because I don't say she's the face of this, but there was a kind of like Maddow-esque sort of like, you know, we're gonna love the troops harder.
And I mean, I understand where that comes from, but that's very much like, I don't know, the kind of people who write for the Atlantic kind of mentality, as opposed to what I would venture.
I mean, I'm from central Indiana, what people back home think, and also what people in the military think from my experience.
I mean, I think that, yeah, some people might be offended by the lack of deference, but I mean, I don't know.
A lot of that stuff, like, for the people you see this scrolling through Facebook, all the people who are sold on Trump are going to be sold on Trump no matter what.
It doesn't matter what he does.
And for folks in the military, I mean, like, I just don't think this is going to be— this isn't going to make a difference.
So the idea that—I don't know, that you've crossed some threshold here, I think it's the same sort of Republican primary derangement syndrome from 2015 continued on.
You want to believe there's a ceiling.
You want to believe that there's a moment at which people are going to wholesale abandon him.
And it's like, I don't know, something like 30 or 40 percent of Republicans supported Nixon even after he had to resign because of Watergate.
This is not going to happen.
Yeah, I think there might be a greater game afoot here that I'll flesh out later on in this segment.
This is written by, we should say, Jeffrey Goldberg, who is probably most famous for being a very pro-Iraq war voice in the media in around 2002.
He said some very clearly wrong things and incorrect things about, you know, Saddam Hussein and Iraq in general, and made some pretty bold claims about, like, what we should do.
And then he chalks it up, that mistake, to saying, well, I didn't know that Bush would be so incompetent.
Bush just didn't do the war competently, and that's why it was so bad.
And so a lot of people are taking that as an excuse to say, like, why are we reporting this?
Why are we dunking on Trump when it's being pushed from anonymous sources by, you know, a known liar or at least a known, like, rube or a known ideologue who's used shady intel to further his own goals before.
And my answer to that is, uh, I don't care.
It's just funny.
It's like, I think it was like both Michael Tracy and Glenn Greenwald were like, you guys are falling for it again!
Everybody's falling for the same thing that happened in the Iraq war, leading up to the Iraq war.
And it's like, what are we going to, are we going to go to war against Trump?
Are we going to deploy the troops against Trump for saying bad things?
Like what the fuck are you dumbasses talking about?
It's just funny.
I mean, especially considering, if I remember correctly, the profound contempt that John Kelly had for reporters in Washington, D.C.
You know, when he would have press conferences and he would be like, I'm only gonna let you ask me a question if you know somebody who was killed in combat.
He was just doing weird Praetorian shit, and the idea that that same guy Trump tried to make Donald Trump, or was involved in some way with Trump visiting his own son's grave, because his son was a Marine Lieutenant and died in Afghanistan, and Trump just looked at her and was like, why the fuck would anyone join the military?
The fact that Kelly, that just sneering fucking gargoyle, got dunked on by Trump.
The whole situation that either of them is in any position to have influence, God forbid even being the President, is bad.
But that's funny.
That's genuinely funny to me.
It's all we can do with this monstrous, venal person at the top of American empire and power.
This is the only solace you can take from it.
One, that he's incompetent.
Two, that he's pretty stupid.
And three, that his interpersonal skills are just non-existent.
So, he just, he looks at a dead man's, at a man's dead son's corpse and he's like, what an idiot.
What a dumb, why would you do that shit?
Dumbass.
Well, it's funny because I think the bigger story that's like this is the fact that he has not like, I forget what they, how they say it, but he has not received any of the people coming back, any of the bodies coming back in like two years or something like that.
He did it like twice.
You know, you go to the airport and you basically receive the bodies and like, you know, give your presidential blessing.
And he hasn't done that in a very long time, I guess.
He's only done it like four times in two years.
Seems like a bummer.
I wouldn't want to do that either.
Well, yeah, it seems like a super bummer, but you're like supposed to do it.
Yeah.
You know, you're supposed to do it.
It's an easy thing to do.
But he's even he's like, not like I kind of got made fun of there.
And like, that's not cool for me.
I hate that.
Also, the bodies are known carriers of germs and contaminants.
Yes.
Well, he always has these bizarre fixations on things, you know.
I remember reading somewhere that he believes that humans are born with a finite amount of energy, and so if you work out, then, like, you're depleting your finite reserve.
And so I can only imagine that he would also believe that, you know, that dead bodies exude loser energy if you come near them.
And so, like, why would I want to be in a place that's only built to receive losers?
They're, like, radioactive, but with, like, loser-ness.
Yeah, so this is Jeffrey Goldberg like trying to own Trump on patriotism or whatever.
He continues here, Trump finds the notion of military service difficult to understand and the idea of volunteering to serve especially incomprehensible.
Parentheses, the president did not serve in the military.
He received a medical deferment from the draft during the Vietnam War because of the alleged presence of bone spurs in his feet.
In the 1990s, Trump said his efforts to avoid contracting sexually transmitted diseases constituted his quote personal Vietnam.
Which is funny, that's like, he's literally saying, yeah, I didn't go to war because it sounds like a bad idea, sounds like, hey, like, you could almost, you could swap this statement with, like, any hepcat from the 60s.
They're like, yeah, I'd rather be dodging STDs than landmines, brother.
Like, it's so funny.
Like, it's borderline cool.
Like, I don't really think Trump was fucking enough to be worried about sexually transmitted diseases.
Just imagining a great joke there of somebody being like, man, I'm not slinging lead at no VC.
I'm here trying to not get hit by VD.
Exactly.
That was a sticker.
That was probably a sticker you could purchase.
Or like on a lighter or something, like a Zippo with a stamp thing on it, yeah.
Change like one or two words in this and it becomes, why would I go die to fight a rich man's war?
Yeah, totally.
And the thing with Trump is that, I mean, I absolutely support people who did not go to Vietnam, who found a way out of going to Vietnam.
I have a lot more respect for people who, like, I guess the way I would phrase it is, the people who went to the length they had to go to no matter what versus people who were born so rich that it was never even a question they would go in the first place.
Like, I mean, I guess in a way, it's hard to say, okay, like, I respect these guys, because you look at people like Ted Nugent, for example, who, same thing, he, if I remember correctly, he, uh, he took a bunch of speed and shit himself during his draft physical.
Uh, he didn't get, he didn't get drafted, but then he became, like, a right-wing shithead year, you know, decades later, and is pro-war.
I wouldn't call it, like, respectable.
That's maybe not the word I would use.
I would just use, like, sensible.
I would, I would use the word, it's like neutral.
It's like value neutral.
It's more just like a sensible thing to not go and die for somebody else's cause.
Yeah.
And I always made this point to you in hell of a way that I think that that was actually a pretty like common consensus point.
I mean, the reason why you have all of these quotes to get tried, they try to wield against people like Dick Cheney or Donald Trump or there's other ones like is that back in those days?
And that was kind of what people just said.
They're like, fuck it, Vietnam was stupid.
I wasn't going to die in that shit.
But then once Clinton became president and Clinton was the draft dodger, then all of a sudden they had to get really fucking sanctimonious about draft dodging, even though all of them had done it too.
And in a way, like, you have to respect the masterstroke.
A bunch of guys who probably did worse in that regard, as far as just being shameless, rich fucks who could buy their way out of whatever they wanted, managed to weaponize that against the Democrats.
And it worked.
Yep.
Because Democrats are the ones who care about this shit, and that's why it works.
And it doesn't work the other way.
More here, another explanation, so he's trying to get into the psychology of Trump about why he finds the notion of military service difficult to understand.
Another explanation is more quotidian and aligns with a broader understanding of Trump's material-focused worldview.
The president believes that nothing is worth doing without the promise of monetary payback and that talented people who don't pursue riches are, quote, losers.
According to eyewitnesses, after a White House briefing given by the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joe Dunford, Trump turned to aides and said, that guy's smart.
Why'd he join the military?
I love that!
Which is a joke that I've seen at least 12 times on right-wing military Facebook grunt pages or whatever.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean... Yeah, I mean, I remember we had a soldier when I was a platoon leader who was, um... He had dropped out of, like, a pre-law program in his third year to enlist.
And that was the question everyone asked him, like, what the fuck are you doing here?
Like, why?
It was like, please tell me you didn't watch Band of Brothers and you're like, fuck it, I gotta do this for real.
Which you gotta do this, yeah.
Which is what happened.
So yeah, this is, I don't know why, man.
But yeah, I'm not saying that the expectation is that everybody is, you know, like beyond the pale, just like not functional in any of their career field.
But there's definitely an acceptance, like an awareness that it sucks.
And there's questions like, why would you, you don't really hold it against somebody to not want to suck like that.
You know what I mean?
And so, I get that mentality, it's just, but once again, when you take that and the president says it, and a bunch of people who work in think tanks are, you know, the god-king concern troll of American media himself, Jeffrey Goldberg, hears it, then it becomes this, yeah, just nightmare thing that they want to make hay out of.
It is very weird, like, a white person doing, like, pro-black identity politics kind of thing.
Like, it is like a white person speaking for all the offended black people out there, you know?
When you see those, like, sanctimonious Twitter threads or whatever, and it's like, well, you're white.
Like, what are you talking about?
It is like that, but for pundits versus the troops, you know?
We have, like, an ultimate, like, pundit getting offended on behalf of the troops.
Um, oh yeah, no, I was remembering, uh, when I went to work at Subway, uh, one of the guys who I knew from high school was already working there, and I was like 18 or 17.
I was, yeah, 17, so I was still in high school, I think.
Uh, he was like, I was like, oh, what's up, Jordan?
He was like, oh yeah, it's me.
He's like, I bet you're thinking, hey, that guy's too smart to work at Subway.
I was like, no, I wasn't thinking that.
First of all, second of all, I work here now, so I don't know what you're trying to say here, but it's also just, you know, a high school job.
Yeah.
Like, I think a law degree is a bit out of reach right now.
Yeah, just a little bit.
And from what I understand, from what you've told me, you know, Subway's an excellent first job to have.
It's a fantastic first job to have, where you can, you know, steal the cheese and have some good times.
It was my second job, but I did get to have a lot of sex there.
So, that was cool.
Man, see, there I was.
There I was working at the meat counter at O'Malley's Grocery in Carmel, Indiana, and there was no sex to be had.
So, I could have worked at Subway.
I don't know why I didn't do that.
Subway's cool because it's got, like, locks on the doors and stuff like that.
And $5 footlongs.
Alright, two questions I have that we've already kind of addressed, but, I mean, mainly looking at this story, looking at the outrage, does anyone, A, does anyone doubt that this happened, that Trump said these things, and B, does anyone think that this will matter?
Uh, no to both.
Yeah.
I would say the same.
I don't doubt it, and I, yeah, don't think it's gonna make any difference at all.
No, of course not.
I think, yeah, we just piggyback on that and say that if anything was gonna make a difference, it's the stuff that he's already done, and that didn't make a difference, so I just cannot, for the life of me, believe that anyone cares.
And Biden is already trying to capitalize on this.
He's got an ad out right now.
I think they like dropped the same day or the day after this Atlantic article.
And it's the parents of dead soldiers saying into the camera, my dead son is not a loser, Trump.
I know you meant my son Alex Pereira when you called the dead troops losers, but my son is not a loser.
My daughter's not a loser.
And it's like, that's brutal.
That's like so brutal for those families.
That's gnarly.
What did you think when Trump called your dead kid a loser?
And it's just like, Trump is just joking, guys, chill out.
Also, I mean, I gotta say that one of the things that really bothers me about the framing in that is that it's the Democrats, it's neoliberals, it's gonna be this way no matter what, but I think that this is just a particularly gross example that the problem here is being treated that these people's children who died in probably one of two completely unjustified wars
Certainly fucking unjustified at this point, and the problem is that there wasn't enough veneration and respect displayed to them, not that they were, you know, treated as expendable and got expended.
And that's the thing, like, okay, does that make for great back and forth riffing?
Not as much.
But it's the thing that kind of springs to mind is that the way in which this sort of professionalized kind of, like, embrace of the military and trying to, like, Uh, convince people of, like, Democrats being more pro-military.
It treats all these things as given, and that- I don't know, like, when I was- I was deployed once for 13 months, uh, we had seven people die in my battalion, two of them were close friends of mine.
It fucking sucked, but the thing about it is, like, I think about one of my- my friends.
He died because they wanted to do a convoy to bring a bunch of gravel down to build an, uh, like, a landing zone for helicopters because it kept causing dust- dust storms when they would, um, try to land it was unsafe so they were going to bring down a bunch of dump trucks full of gravel and some like goo to spray on it to like hold it in place so they could land helicopters and uh civilian vehicle hit an id he went down to help stepped on a secondary id and got blown to pieces and it's like the base they were building the helicopter pad for has been closed down for like nine years now you know so it's like i think of that i'm like okay
i mean he was doing his job but it's just sort of like what the fuck was that for like Like, why do you need people to get exploded into pieces so that you can do this thing that has not yielded any success more than a decade later?
And, you know, If that's just a given, that like, oh yeah, a certain percent of people are gonna join the military and get smoked, or be, you know, damaged irreparably, or are gonna have all the other, you know, fucking follow-on problems that people have, that's fine, that's normal, that's good, that's cost of doing business, but you can't be too informal about, you know, graves that you're visiting as the president.
Like... Yeah.
It just, it strikes me as like saying, okay, this thing is...
This is intolerable, but the rest of it's tolerable.
The situation is tolerable, except for his bad behavior.
And that just seems like another example of Trump being, he's just too vulgar, but the underlying sentiments, people are basically fine with.
What it does is it just changes the conversation completely.
It shifts it away from the, like you said, what's sort of taken for granted, which is that we are at war constantly.
And shifts it away to, are we respecting the troops enough?
Are we loving the troops enough?
And for some reason, that conversation, which is being had right now, which was being had when the first, or I guess the second, technically, war with Iraq was happening while I was in high school, very sharp, you know, very reminiscent of that era.
When that's the conversation, are we loving the troops enough, the solution is never, we should love the troops by bringing them home, we should love the troops by stopping risking their lives for bullshit.
It becomes, oh, we need to keep them safe when they're over there, which means sending more support over there, which means sending more troops over there, which means spreading ourselves out even farther so that we can secure more locations to make everything safer over there.
And I mean, I feel like if I want to get a little conspiratorial about this, The point of articles like this or the point of sentiments like this, Trump isn't tough enough on Russia or Trump isn't like yada yada, he doesn't support the troops enough.
It's not to persuade Republican voters who are overwhelmingly supportive of Trump and enjoy his venality and enjoy his like, you know, forked tongue.
It's to drag the Democratic Party further right.
It's to jump ship to the Democratic Party and convince Democrats that, oh, we're the party of the people who really care about the troops.
We're the party who really care about fiscal responsibility.
We're the party who actually care about, you know, putting sanctions on Russia because of drumpf and everything.
I feel like that's more of the aim of these articles.
I mean, the Lincoln Project, I think, is a good example of that.
I feel like that's really what's at stake here, which is just, and I mean, it is sort of an offshoot of the fact that Trump is president because he is this figure, you know, you can sort of gloss over the actual Like, conflicts between the right and the left, and just point to the overbearing disgust that pours out of, you know, the Oval Office.
So, again, this is like one of the worst features of the Trump presidency, is that it allows the conversation to be about things like this.
Yeah, it really lowers the bar.
It makes it so that like during this campaign, Biden can be like, listen, I'm going to send out twice as many troops, but also everybody's going to come with twice as many flags to distribute amongst the family.
And the people are like, man, he loves, he loves it.
He loves our, our, our guys, you know?
And yeah, this is going to lower the bar.
You said just pulling it slowly, pushing it right.
And one thing that I saw that I think really just hammers this home completely.
I saw this on my Facebook feed.
In the Joe Biden for President Facebook group, Bob Took posts, There I am as a quote, loser and sucker in Vietnam in 1971 with one of our Vietnamese orphans who ran ammo for us.
No, we fought for America, not some bone spurred coward.
And then it's a photo of, I'm assuming, Bob Took holding a rifle in one hand and a Vietnamese orphan in his other.
He's got his arm wrapped around a young Vietnamese child who looks, you know, to be about 9 or 11, somewhere in there, who was running ammo for the U.S.
troops.
And Trump wouldn't know anything about that because Trump was too cowardly to ever Go to a foreign nation and commit a war crime against orphans that he probably created.
Yeah, yeah.
What's incredible about this too is, like, the picture would have been effective by itself.
It's that caption.
It's the part where you say, Vietnamese orphan who ran the ammo for us.
Like, you didn't have to say that.
To me, that's the weirdest part about this.
It's breathtakingly evil.
It's wild, yeah.
You think a loser would use this?
That's the thing that gets me, I think, is that the extent to which this is the kind of sentiment that they're trying to stoke among people.
Years ago, I used to teach at a creative writing thing for veterans in New York City, and most people who have enough time who are veterans to go to a creative writing class are older.
So most people that would come in would be Vietnam vets and some of them would be, like, Korean War vets even.
And some of the Vietnam vets told me that, like, in a way it was weird, like, they sort of appreciated it, but they felt like a lot of their peers really got on the, like, hell yeah, troop respecting bandwagon because it was so much more pronounced after 9-11 than it was, you know, during and after the Vietnam War.
And that's not to say, like, I don't want to give credence to a lot of, like, the Republican sort of origin myths about, you know, the brutal hippies beating up our brave boys when they come back on planes, etc., you know, spitting on them, etc.
But more to say that, like, I think people, the level of this kind of, like, patriotic display and, like, we love all troops, we love all veterans.
Reverence.
Yeah, yeah.
this is the, exactly, reverence is a great way of describing it, didn't exist.
And so a lot of the folks they knew who they were still in contact with, like got into it really hard, like sort of in like their later years.
And that's what this kind of strikes me as is here's somebody who's, you know, a Democratic voter, but who's really into, I don't know, it's sort of like a retroactive justification for what they saw and did.
And like, I don't know.
I mean, if I posted a photo of me in Afghanistan on Twitter, Like I'm sure some folks could look at that and be like, why are you proud of this?
What the fuck are you doing there?
It's not really anything I can say of like, hey, I'm not going to turn around and be like, this was good.
But I mean, obviously it's, you know, it was a time in my life and like, I, you know, have a lot of strong memories from it.
But the idea of looking at something like that and saying, I'm mad at Donald Trump, so I'm going to tell you all about this fucked up thing that I did, that, you know, we were in a situation where we had literal children, orphans running ammo for us.
Uh, that just strikes me as a very, I don't know, like, This is going to sound shitty, but like, the guy kind of feels guilty about it, and this is an opportunity to be like, hey, praise me for this.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, and it's weird.
It's really weird.
And I mean, one of the reasons why I don't really talk, I mean, I talk about veteran stuff on Hell of a Way, but I don't like post about it as much anymore is because a lot of these conversations, it just seems like people are, they're trying to, if not exercise demons, then they're trying to at least Find a way to be absolved.
That make sense?
Yeah.
And it really weirds me out, because I don't think anybody can absolve you for that shit.
You have to make peace for the fact that you participated in something really fucked up and wrong.
I mean, I was in Afghanistan for the 2009 presidential election, the Afghan presidential election, and we worked our asses off to make sure the logistics worked so that mass voter fraud got committed and Omicars I won again.
We weren't intentionally rigging shit, but us Us basically supplying all the logistics to it caused that to happen, so like, in a way, we helped make it worse.
And then we pat ourselves on the back for working really hard.
Like, you can't turn around and be like, I deserve accolades for that.
Here I am, a quote, loser and a sucker, in Abu Ghraib, posing with a pyramid of detainees we were taking care of.
You think a loser and a sucker could do this?
See, a loser would have just left the prisoners alone and wouldn't have stacked them this way.
Well, see, that's the thing, right?
We can accomplish things.
You wouldn't be able to do these deep squats to lift these bodies up to make a human sex pyramid if you had bone spurs, okay?
That's right.
Exactly.
Yeah, and again, no, we fought for America, not some bone spurred coward.
And so, like, maybe I'm a little less hardline on this on the left, you know, of course, we have you on the show here.
I feel like, you know, military service can be a pretty radicalizing thing.
It can be a dehumanizing thing.
Even if you're, you know, on the side of U.S.
imperialism, it can cause you to see the way things really work, perhaps.
And people coming away from that with more sympathy towards oppressed peoples, I think, is the right move.
That's a good, like...
That's a good, uh, that's progress.
I feel like that's legitimate progress.
But this dude went to Vietnam, had a fucking child soldier run- one of their orphans.
One of our Vietnam orphans.
So they had like a whole stable of Vietnamese orphans doing shit for him.
Still thinks that that was in service of America somehow.
No, we fought for America, not some bone-spurred coward.
So, I'm sorry dude, but you are kind of a sucker.
If you obliterated your soul, Using a child soldier and did not even, like, learn anything from it.
Yeah.
I'm sorry, man.
We're not on the same team, first of all, but yeah.
Second of all, you deserve a lot of derision for that.
I mean I remember reading um I was just Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie when I was in the army when I'd come back from Afghanistan and just being like kind of crestfalling because I was like this is this literally you just change out Vietnam for Afghanistan it's the exact same problem and like not only did we not learn we literally did it again and in a way you realize like there are a lot of people that I think are potentially
Reachable in that regard, but I have found that there's an extent to which some of these some of the folks of that age Particularly are so they're so hardline on certain things That like even ironic memes about communism will make them go completely fucking bananas We used to run ads for hell of a way on Facebook, and we would target them You know people who were like interested in veterans interested in Bernie Sanders And then like exclude anybody who was conservative, and you know we'd get some people that liked it But I can't tell you how many times I'd get like
Not quite personal death threats, but to the extent of threatening violence, from basically left-leaning older male vets, but the mention of communism, even like, hey, we've secured Spencer Rippon, the commie cadet's approval of this show, jokes like that, they would be like, I'm gonna fucking shoot you, I wanna kill you, you deserve to die, and just like...
And then you go on their page and it's like them sharing more or less anti-Trump, like pro-Democrat stuff.
And you're like, what the hell?
But that really is ingrained in some, especially people of that age, I think.
Sponsoring posts on Facebook's pretty hard.
I don't do it anymore.
My first podcast was like a bad music podcast where we would make fun of music we used to like, you know, like, you know, nu metal or pop punk or like boy bands, you know, depending on who the guest was.
And I would sponsor posts for like episodes and I would also, yeah, get death threats.
How dare you?
How dare you make fun of Fred Durst, sir?
Yeah.
Hey, rockers, hip hoppers, I don't think you really mean that, bud.
Why don't you tell me where you're at?
Yeah, didn't you see my comment on the YouTube page where I said this changed my life and I watch it every single day?
One comment that I loved on this, this post went extremely viral.
It had like nine, it had over a thousand likes and like thousands of shares.
Most of the shares were not ironic shares.
I went through them and I only Found one ironic shared it was by a friend.
I think who's in our Facebook group where this was shared where I shared this But Karen Smith commented.
We know who the loser sucker is dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot agent orange Incredible.
Incredible comment.
Incredible.
Amazing comment.
I thought when I first read that in your notes, I didn't make the connection that Donald Trump is being referred to as Asian Orange here.
I thought she was making a joke about this guy getting exposed to Asian Orange.
Dark, but hey, I mean maybe fair.
I'm going to make, I'm gonna own Trump by calling him the like chemical weapon we irreparably fucked up millions of people with in the war that I think was good.
Mm-hmm.
How is it an insult to Donald Trump if you think that's like a Good thing to deploy and it's amazed like I don't know it's this is like It's like horseshoe theory, but for one person Like it's like I don't understand it Like it's pretty beautiful our troops did such a good job in Vietnam.
I can't wait for them to take on the Viet Don That's incredible.
Yeah, and then finally, Louis Luhan says, My father fought in Vietnam.
He passed away in 2012.
I can still hear him say, Louis, I would do it all over again if I had to, dot dot dot, so that you won't have to.
These men and women, dot dot dot, all of them, dot dot dot, are heroes.
Because of them, comma, we have the luxury of sitting here and being able to tweet and comment.
Yeah, why didn't you use that loophole?
I mean, like, your parents served.
Like, you didn't have to serve.
That's the whole point.
Like, you get to pass now.
You get to say no thank you.
Like, Louis' dad.
There have been times when people have tried to flex on me, on Twitter specifically, because their dad was in the Army or in the Marines or something.
And I don't have, you know, my officer record brief or any stuff in my bio, so folks aren't gonna necessarily know that I was in the Army.
And it is weird, yeah, like sort of claiming veteran as an inherited status.
Very, very weird tendency that I don't think I... I mean, I'm almost 36.
I'm too young to be able to like, oh, this is what it was like in the 80s and 90s or something.
I couldn't really tell you.
But it just seems weird that the extent to which the veneration of vets is such that people are like, well, I didn't, I wasn't in the military.
Like, okay, no worries there.
But, um, I'm gonna, I'm gonna basically use my parents' service as sort of like a calling card that I know what I'm talking about here.
And it's like, I know what matters to real Americans, because my dad jerked off in a port-a-potty in Okinawa four times in an hour one time to win 10 bucks and not have to pull night watch.
Like, You know, it's just such a strange thing that people really get hung up on.
There's a photo of, I think it's Bikers for Trump, when they're like shaking hands with Trump at the White House or whatever.
You can see a patch on one of their vests that looks like a military badge.
But when you, or a patch or whatever they're called, you know, like an insignia and you look closer and it says Vietnam vet supporter.
That's incredible.
I love that.
But it's in the shape and style of like an actual military, you know, insignia.
Like a ribbon.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like those, like the, yeah.
I know what you mean.
Yeah.
I mean, I fucking get it though.
Cause I mean like all these people on the internet are like, you know, using their parents status to like talk about things, you know, like race and stuff.
So why can't you talk about, you know, veteran status?
No, that's true.
I mean, like, the thing that's so fucked up, though, is the argument, you know, when I read that screenshot, was him saying, like, you know, my dad said, I did it so you wouldn't have to.
You know, weirdly, my grandfather actually was in Vietnam, and when I was in Afghanistan, we had morale phones, which were like, it was like a voiceover IP phone.
You could call, and you could call back to the U.S.
that way.
And you were allotted, like, a certain number of minutes per week.
I can't remember what it was.
And I remember I called my grandfather once and just talk.
I hadn't talked to him in a while.
It was like almost his birthday.
I mean, he's passed away since, but this was a while ago.
And when I described sort of what like our day to day was like, he was like, you're not going to like this, but it kind of sounds like we fought in the same war.
And I was like, yeah, you're right.
I didn't want to hear that.
Because it kind of solidified in my mind a lot of the stuff that I was perceiving, you know, sort of the hopelessness and the futility and the fact that the higher up you went, the more detached from reality the reporting went.
You know, the folks were like, we've turned the corner.
It's like, well, we've apparently turned the corner so many times that we are either drawing at like, you know, a dodecahedron in the sand or shit is not fucking going well.
Or you're back around a bit.
The beginning, like it's literally square one.
I mean, this comment is amazing to me because it's like, yeah, I, you know, people fought in Vietnam.
People were drafted.
Like, I wouldn't necessarily disparage everybody who fought in Vietnam.
But the phrasing here is just like, I can hear him say, my father fought in Vietnam.
I can still hear him say, Louis, I would do it all over again if I had to so that you won't.
And it's just like, it's internalized.
What you're describing is already internalized within the American psyche.
It's just, no, we have to keep fighting these wars so that we don't have to.
I'm in the same boat as you.
It makes like zero sense and it's just this like, I don't know, logical loop that America itself is stuck in.
It's also that idea of like what what does he think what do you think your dad prevented or like from happening so that you didn't have to because I mean not no shots but like your dad your dad fighting in Vietnam didn't stop 9-11 so you still gotta like you still got to go you know defend your freedom under that same those same guides.
Maybe it did stop whatever terror attack would have killed Jack from Twitter when he was born.
And it prevented that so that, therefore, we're able to tweet about it.
Thanks to Louis' dad.
Yeah, I've thought about this a bunch.
I mean, I agree with your position there that, like, I don't... It would be pretty embarrassing for me to come into a situation and be like, all troops are bad and you should hate all of them except me because I'm good.
But I would say that, like, obviously if people open their mouths and they say some reductive or reactionary shit, then, like, yeah, it's fair game in my opinion.
Because I feel like that's one of the things that...
What he's saying and what a lot of these people are saying in comments is just sort of repetition of the stuff they've heard that are sort of the, you know, in the same vein that if you get somebody like that talking they'll tell you that we would have won Vietnam except the media and the damn libs lost the war for us and stuff like that and I feel like those kinds of, that kind of comforting saying tends to be really counterproductive because it winds up becoming like folk wisdom to justify the next war and that shit weirds me out but
I guess the thing for me looking at this is just like, if you feel personally attacked by what Donald Trump, a complete idiot, said, why?
What is it about this comment that makes you feel personally attacked?
If you're a vet, if you've got a family member who's a vet, what makes you feel personally attacked?
And if you're doing it because you saw the headlines and you feel like you ought to, well, that's kind of weird.
And if you do feel personally attacked, it's like, well, surely you shouldn't care what someone as cartoonishly stupid as Donald Trump thinks.
Yes, he's the president, but like, He didn't become president yesterday.
We've had plenty of opportunities to see him be the way we knew he was going to be forever.
So why is this so offensive?
As much as he supposedly made fun of the troops, which he hasn't done in public except like offhand remarks about, you know, McCain or his other political enemies.
It's like those are his political enemies.
That's like why these people like him is because he dunks on his political enemies.
And yeah, he plays fast and loose with his words, and maybe he says shit that would get him a 30-day ban on Facebook or whatever, but who hasn't been there?
Who hasn't done the same exact thing?
And to bring it to an apt analogy, it's like friendly fire.
We're not going to stop beefing up the military just because it kills itself occasionally.
Like, it still does the thing we like, which is, you know, kills other people and performs conquests of other peoples.
Yeah, some of our own are gonna get caught in the crossfire.
That shit happens.
Whatever.
It doesn't negate the overall good, which is mostly just like Trump making fun of, you know, black women on Twitter.
I mean, you think about evangelicals, like how much they've had to go against the shit they notionally structure their lives around, but they're fine with it because ultimately they believe Trump's going to give them what they want.
If they make peace with it, despite the glaring inconsistencies, what makes you think some chud in fucking, I don't know, Michigan or Pennsylvania, who you want to vote Democrat, is going to change his mind?
Right.
Go ahead, Tony, and then we've got to shift topics.
Well, it's just like you said earlier about white people talking on behalf of black people.
The people who are supposed to be offended here are the troops and they don't really give a shit because it's locker room talk or trench talk or something like that.
Or the ones who do give a shit have always given a shit.
Exactly, yeah.
It's kind of productive.
We have this video of a comrade being arrested by the police in a pretty brutal fashion, and in the process, somebody in the crowd calls one of the cops, who's a black cop, calls the cop a coon.
So all these fucking libs, all these libs and people, reported the video for hate speech and got it taken down.
Oh my god.
Even though the whole video is only making the cops look bad, but because of that particular turn of phrase, all these white people were in there reporting it, saying this is hate speech.
But that's the bad word though, you know?
I don't think anybody should be able to say it, personally.
And the funny thing about it is that the person who did say it was not black, and we did have a conversation, and that was great.
But also, Shut the fuck up.
If we were upset about that, we wouldn't have posted the video in the first place.
That's not the point.
You're getting so caught up in the most petty shit ever.
Because of that word now, people aren't able to monetize the video.
Advertisers are going to want to have nothing to do with it.
It's true, yeah.
You gotta think about these things, Tony.
Alright, so moving on to the second topic of our episode today.
A little lighter fare, or should I say, heavier fare.
Less buoyant fare, perhaps.
Yes.
We have, from CBSNews.com, Trump boat parade boats sink.
The Sheriff's Department in Austin, Texas said five boats sank during a boat parade in support of President Trump on Lake Travis on Saturday afternoon.
The Travis County Sheriff's Office said they responded to a total of 15 distress calls which varied and included boats taking on water, stalled engines, capsized boats, and boats sinking.
That's like the worst thing a boat can do, right?
Sink?
CBS Austin affiliate KEYE Reports that boats began sinking almost immediately as the parade started, according to Travis County Sheriff's Office.
That's just so funny to me.
Like somebody fucking blew an air horn signaling the start of the parade and just five boats sank immediately.
Just immediately.
That's so great.
So part of me wonders is this like all the people who decided to take their boats out for Trump like those boats have been on trailers for forever like they just don't use them that often and they just haven't done maintenance on them.
That that's one plausible explanation but a funnier explanation to me would be what if they went out there but then like the huge ass boats just like caused gigantic wakes that caused all the small boats to capsize.
That's literally what it is.
No that is that is what it is.
According to the Sheriff's Department, the wake in the water was caused by, quote, many, many boats on the water.
It's so, because that's the way that Trump would say it.
That's like the exact wording, this fucking sheriff, just like channeled Trump.
Oh yeah, there were beautiful, many, many beautiful boats on the water, which caused the massive waves to swamp the other boats, which then sank.
This was literally caused by, A, too many boats being in the lake at one point.
And see none of them observing, like, the actual boating regulations that you're supposed to observe for safe boating.
Like, you're supposed to stay a certain distance away from other boats.
You're supposed to maintain a certain speed, especially when you're around other boats.
You're not supposed to keep awake, you know?
It's basically like there's a no-wake zone around other boats, basically.
And it was just, no.
Like, we are the boaters for Trump.
We are gonna show off.
We're gonna flex.
And they ended up just sinking each other.
And it's such a good metaphor for so many things.
People have made this metaphor about... The worst metaphor I've seen is, oh, this is just a metaphor for the Trump presidency.
Your presidency is sinking, buddy.
Yeah.
Need a little work, maybe.
Another dynamic to that one.
The second one is, oh, this is like the coronavirus.
It's a bunch of people who don't need rules to tell them what to do and don't need to observe that because they're, you know, they're their own kings in their castles and oh, they just all got too close to each other and sunk each other's castles.
Which is a better metaphor.
The metaphor that I like is just that We got together and made things worse.
We got together to flex and strut our stuff and just made things worse for everyone, but especially, like you said, Nate, the people in the smaller, quote, boats.
This is, I think, a good metaphor for, I don't know, global warming.
We are going to run our engines until the world dies, until we are all swamped with water.
Yeah, I mean, um... I absolutely... You love to see it, you also hate to see it, you know?
It's one of those things where the metaphor is just too great, but also... I know you're gonna cover this.
The fact that so many people found out about this and then decided there's no way this could have been accidental or incidental.
It's pretty funny.
This had to be a plan.
This had to be Antifa.
Fuckin'...
Putting old-timey WWI mines that look like big orbs with little plugs sticking out of them in Lake Travis to just sink the Trump flotilla.
Yeah, this is the tweet you're referencing here.
Shoutout to Rob Moyer who shared a screenshot of this tweet into the Minion Death Commandos Facebook group.
Because it was pretty shortly thereafter deleted by the author.
We have Carmine Sabia who tweets, the likelihood of all these boats sinking at the Trump boat parade by accident is microscopic.
We are dealing with terrorists and once again it's just like yeah there it isn't it isn't possible that a bunch of like wealthy privileged dumbasses who have no consideration for others uh did exactly everything you're not supposed to do when boating and therefore caused uh other people around them to suffer like it's microscopic microscopic chance of that to happen it had to be terrorists
And, I mean, this tweet itself is a great metaphor, because it's like, oh, everything in the world is so fucked up right now.
You know, in the Middle East, it's super fucked up.
The border between the U.S.
and Mexico is fucked up, and it's because of terrorism.
We need to make sure to go over there and make things better, because terrorism fucked everything up.
And, oh, when we go over there, more terrorism happened, and that's why it's still bad.
Well, what I will say though, and I don't like to do that thing where people confuse correlation to causation, but what I will say is that there were no boats sinking or capsizing before we covered the boat parades the first time.
That's true.
So, you know...
Good job, y'all.
I do have a follow-up from our voters episode we did like two weeks ago.
Carlos Valdivia, I think that's his name, who was like the starter of, like one of the originators of the voters for Trump, I just saw was arrested for a hate crime.
Whoa!
Operation Flag Drop, Carlos?
Yeah, he doesn't run that page, but he's in that group.
Yeah.
But he's friends with the guy who runs the page, or the group.
He, like, got mad at a former friend or something in public and called him a filthy Jew.
Like, screamed out, filthy Jew, at him.
And then texted him that the Jewish guy had fucked with the wrong person, and you don't know what I'm capable of, and that sort of thing.
Then he got arrested for death threats and hate speech.
It's kind of fucked up though because they didn't know that all Carlos was going to do was litter his lawn with Trump flags.
That's what he was capable of.
He has access to all the flags.
I like that Carmine Sabia, I had a screenshot here of his Twitter profile.
His bio is like he's his own like news guy, you know, he's got his own like little news service or whatever.
Christian Conservative, editor-at-large the Sabia Report.
I would hope so.
I would hope you're an editor-at-large at least of the publication named after you.
Yankees fan, NRA member, Israel supporter.
and if you click on his actual profile pic he's like he's got like a shaved head and a very like camped beard and he's also got a dangly cross pendant earring And it's like he's trying to look like fuckin' Ceremony L-Shaped Man era kinda guy.
Like a post-punk beefcake.
That's so funny.
I love that.
But he's probably really going for, like, Major League Baseball player and just missing it.
Oh, maybe.
He's looking at, like, you know, just some badass, like, you know, with an earring.
Like the wild thing.
The good beard.
Exactly.
Yeah, that baseball player I know.
Here's some, so the event page for this Travis, this Travis County Boat Parade, Lake Travis Boat Parade got just swamped by, you know, libs and lefties alike making fun of a very specific post that was like, hey does anybody have any drone footage from the event?
Like a well-meaning conservative guy who just didn't hear about what happened.
That's a great comment.
And it just had like 300 comments of people laughing and posting like boomer memes and shit.
And some of these libs had very interesting dunks about the voters for Trump who sank.
Steven J. Sirret says, I hope they didn't get their opiates wet.
Get it?
Do you get it?
And then he comments again, uh, hope they didn't get this Sudafed wet.
Just to clarify, like, maybe someone was like, hey, opiates is kind of classist.
And he's like, you know, it's not Sudafed.
That's actually better.
Sudafed's a better one to go for here.
I think Sudafed is even more classist considering it's like what you use to make crank.
True.
This is just, it's so funny, the mind of the liberal.
The mind of the liberal is just magnificent.
Like, you are so focused on the redneck, trailer trash, Trump supporter meme that you're looking at people who literally own yachts and, like, leisure boats sinking and saying, yeah, wow, I bet you wish you would have taken off your Daisy Dukes before that happened.
Like, the picture of the boat sinking has a cool grand of flags.
Like, an easy grand worth of flags flying above it.
You know, these people are not broke.
These are not poor people.
Very obviously.
This is Trump's base.
This is like literally Trump's base.
And it's just that you're seeing this and your mind, because you have no class analysis as a liberal, your mind cannot comprehend what you're seeing.
So you're just like, you see all those flags and you picture that that's like the junk on top of the Beverly Hillbillies station wagon.
Meanwhile, like, these people probably own jet ski dealerships, like, on top of actually owning boats.
We can surmise that they, you know, own businesses that make money.
We can definitely know for a fact that they apparently had their own boat and enough free time to go out and fucking sail for Trump in Texas.
They're gonna directly profit from the misfortune of the other boaters.
They're gonna be selling even more boats now.
And like, you know, Libs are so stupid too that they don't see it because in their mind they're thinking, I've been on a boat.
I have a friend that has a boat.
So like they said, there's no class analysis here.
These are just regular folks.
The boat part's not even a factor for them.
They don't even think about that cost.
Yeah, maybe next time you go out boating, why don't you take a little bit less of the moonshine with you?
Yeah.
Last comment here on this shit.
Lisa Hoffman says, Wow, what a bunch of pieces of shits on here.
No one values human lives anymore.
And we're talking about Trump voters, so I'm not sure where human lives comes into play.
No wonder the country has gone to shit.
It has nothing to do with Trump or politics.
It is the lack of empathy, compassion, and morals.
Maybe you all do need Medicare for All so you can get your brains examined because you obviously have something psychologically wrong.
I mean, I would love to have free psych care in America.
That'd be amazing.
I will make a promise, Lisa.
I will continue to make fun of voters for Trump until you ensure the passage of Medicare for All.
Yeah, I love that angle.
That is the only thing that's gonna make me stop making fun of these people.
I wish that was like the conservative, like, you know, approach.
You know, in order to get Medicare for All done, we really gotta talk about, you know, psychology and therapy and things like that.
That's what's gonna push it.
Yeah, no, I mean, these twisted liberals need to get their heads examined and we can't trust them to make enough money to do it on their own because they all don't have jobs and they live in mom's basement and stuff.
We need some sort of, like, nationwide system to get these freaks checked out, you know?
If only these people had the care they needed they wouldn't make fun of me online and my comments wouldn't get downvoted so you know in the grand scheme of things I now see personal interest in my neighbor's health and welfare.
It's like those it's it's like those tweets that are like yeah I bet if Antifa was able if they were able to get a well-paying job and like had benefits they wouldn't be out on the street rioting right now.
It's like, yeah!
Exactly, you're getting it!
Thank you.
Well, we joked about that on Hell of a Way recently where, you know, it was sort of like people saying aloud the kind of stuff that would have been made into an accidentally left-wing post where they're talking about some of the shit with regard to, it was something with just like a lieutenant in the army who basically it was something with just like a lieutenant in the army who basically made a really not funny, lame Holocaust joke on his TikTok, but he's a lieutenant with 3 million And, of course, he got, you know, blown up for that because, like, you know, he got in trouble and everything.
Folks lost their minds.
But someone was like, one of the comments defending him was like, what if we're not allowed to make jokes like this, how do we expect these boys to go overseas and, you know, do the kind of combat we need them to do?
I'm like, wait.
So you're saying you've got to brutally dehumanize people to be a, ah, now you're getting it.
What really caught me off guard when you guys were talking about that was I kind of missed the actual joke itself somehow and then later on you casually mentioned that it's like a Pokemon - He tried to make a Pokemon joke.
He basically said, he was being an asshole, he was trying to say, oh, Jewish people's favorite Pokemon is Ash.
And it's like, well, Ash isn't a Pokemon. - And that would be their least favorite one anyway. - Like, it doesn't make sense on its face, much less like, why did you try to shoe in and shoe worn in on a Holocaust joke? - He's just only heard the, how do you fit a dozen Jews in a car joke.
That's like the only joke he's heard about the Holocaust.
So he's just like, oh, all Holocaust or Jew jokes have the word ash in them.
When you were talking about it, I thought it was, you know, I mean, it's a terrible joke, obviously.
Yeah.
But I thought it was like, you know, something even way... So when you casually mentioned, like, yeah, you know, Pokemon, I was like, what the fuck?
Like, what are you talking about?
And I was like, just really, man, these people are such fucking dorks.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
And that's, that's sort of the thing.
It's like, happened upon the conclusion that apparently you have to be a complete idiot and also willing to dehumanize people to be good at the job.
And it's like, Yep.
Yeah.
Okay, so what's the favorite Pokemon of our reptilian Semitic overlords?
Charizard.
Okay.
Oh, got it, got it.
Yeah, okay.
All right, I think that's a perfect way to end the episode.
I think going out on that very bright note that I just did, it's a good thing to leave everybody with.
Thank you so much, Nate, for joining us, partaking in the fun of both of these topics.
I think they're pretty fun stuff to talk about.
Why don't you go ahead and tell people about your podcasts and where they can hear them.
All right, so I am the co-host of What a Hell of a Way to Die, which is a podcast specifically about leftist takes on military and veteran news and affairs, if you will.
I also am the co-host of the Trash Future podcast, which is UK politics and bad technology startups.
And to some extent, yeah, just like British weirdness in general, because I live in the UK now.
Both those shows are available on Spotify, iTunes, wherever you find podcasts.
And yeah, if anything I say on this show is of interest, you definitely check out Hell of a Way, because that's all me and Francis talk about.
And thank you very much for having me on.
It's been a lot of fun.
I greatly appreciate your willingness to trawl the utter fucking hell world of Facebook comments for content.
No problem.
I get paid to do what I love now.
So, what I've been doing on our YouTube page, which incredibly has 600 subscribers now, youtube.com slash MinionDeathCult, it's very amazing to me that after not putting out content for a year, We were up to 600 subscribers there.
We have indeed been putting out content on a weekly basis for two weeks in a row, at the very least, where I'm doing like one-off live streams about a specific topic.
The first episode I did a live stream on was deeper readings into McBee's autobiography, Gents, We Need to Talk About Feminist.
Gents, let's talk about Feminist, rather.
And thanks to friend of the show, Ani, I now have a hard copy of that book.
No way!
Awesome.
It's amazing.
You get to see the stretched out photos of Rachel Maddow in real life now.
Black and white, real life.
Beautiful.
The second episode I did was a deep dive into what QAnon has discovered about the evil Disney Corporation and how, oh my god, did you know that sometimes the backgrounds of these animations will say things like sex or duty?
And what are they trying to teach our children?
These episodes, these live streams that I'm doing, I am also putting their audio, the audio from them into the Patreon feed.
So that's another perk now that you get by subscribing to our Patreon, is you get an audio version of these YouTube live streams.
If you're like me and you don't watch YouTube all that much, you can still listen to them.
I've done the work of ripping the audio.
And putting them into that feed and people seem to be enjoying them.
This week, this Wednesday at 7.30 p.m.
Pacific Standard Time, I'm going to be doing another reading series on an Amazon published book called My Antifa Lover.
Yes.
It is about a young idealistic congresswoman who becomes wrapped with infatuation with a young Seattle protester, a masked Seattle protester.
And I don't want to give anything away, but It could be based on a real life experience between a certain Minneapolis congresswoman and a certain co-host of a podcast.
You will have to listen to that to find out.
YouTube.com slash MinionDeathCult.
Thanks so much for everybody who's been joining in.
