This week Henry and Bob from the Talking Simpsons podcast join us to discuss the pilot episode of everyone's favorite libertarian kids' show: The Tuttle Twins A libertarian think tank's response to the Magic School Bus, a time-traveling anti-communist abuela takes her grandkids on epic trips across history to teach them about how socialism is when you have two cows and the government gives one to your neighbor. Listen to Talking Simpsons at https://talkingsimpsons.libsyn.com/ or wherever you get podcasts Support the show for $3.11/mo at http://patreon.com/miniondeathcult and get a bonus episode every week, as well as instant access to the entire catelogue of bonus episodes, directly in your podcast app. Music: The Swirlies - Sunn
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I'm Alexander Edward.
And I'm Tony Boswell.
And we are Minion Death Cult.
The world is ending.
Your rascal scooter running out of children's knowledge juice is responsible.
We're documenting it.
Hello everybody, welcome to the show this week.
Very excited to introduce our guests who are Henry Gilbert and Bob Mackey of the Talking Simpsons podcast.
Basically the entire talking empire.
How you boys doing?
Thanks for the invite.
The sun never sets on our empire.
I'm Henry Gilbert and I like to think that we run our Talking Simpsons empire like a lemonade stand, you know?
Just like that.
Yeah, really just kitchen table politics.
If they're good enough for Joe Sixpack, they're good enough for the fat cats at the top of the pyramid.
A big fan of your guys' show.
I think I started listening last year, maybe a little under a year ago, and yeah, love the Talking Simpsons podcast.
Friendly faces have appeared on this show.
People from We Hate Movies, people from Chopo, so some friends of ours.
Oh, Street Fight as well.
We were listening to the episode with Brian Quimby on Praise Land while we made dinner the other night.
Oh, awesome.
I'll take that one out.
Yeah, he made a very dull episode a lot of fun to record.
Yeah, it's kind of a weak, like, episode where they're trying to fix how they murdered Maud Flanders in Cold Blood in the show, and they're like, what if we made fun of, like, a Christian theme park?
And they had, like, half an idea in there.
But yeah, Brian made that.
Even a weaker Simpsons episode in, like, season 12 can still be a whole lot of fun on our podcast, I like to think, anyway.
He brought that holy boy's expertise to it, you know?
Yeah, I like getting Brian to talk about like Christianity, like his view of Christianity.
I remember one time we got on the subject and he was talking about how when he was little he would pray to be able to find his shoes when he was like trying to leave the house or whatever and like because he couldn't find his shoes that's kind of when he suspected there was no God.
That's a good test.
I think it was the first... I only briefly believed in God as a kid, and that was like, I prayed... I think I was told, like, pray if you hear an ambulance or something, and I realized, like, oh, that person still probably died.
I don't know if this God thing's so real.
I wasn't praying for shoes, I was praying for certain Game Boy games I wanted, and it didn't really come through for me either.
I always did the test of like, oh, if you make this, you know, jump shot or if you make this over the back shot, you know, then there is a God.
And, you know, unfortunately I was very good at basketball, so I was still a member of the church until my mid to late teens.
I was living kind of like a heathen lifestyle until this morning at the coffee shop When I saw a gentleman walk up looking so goddamn good in like the cleanest bread Jordans like the cleanest fit Talking into a front-facing camera talking about God is good ripping his vape and had a shirt that said long story short God saved my life and I was like He's way more stoked than I am right now.
I'm pretty pumped right now, but he's real pumped.
So yeah, basically I'm gonna start a church soon.
So look forward to that.
I'm gonna become a pastor.
And yeah, I'm gonna get really into it.
That's what I look for in, like, somebody who's evangelizing, is somebody who just says, long story short, God's good.
He's cool.
All the time.
I would go to that church, I think, just to cover my bases, you know, five minutes a week or so.
I thought I liked podcasting, but I'm never wearing a shirt that invites people to talk about podcasting with me.
That's so true.
Could you imagine?
My shirts are mainly conversation starters about pro wrestling and pro wrestling related topics.
Like this one right here with Jim Ross on it.
Hell yeah.
That's an awesome illustration.
Yeah, for 4th of July.
Speaking of conversation starter shirts, the one I'm wearing right now, it was 4th of July and I had just moved into a suburban neighborhood.
I had just become a homeowner for the first time and I was like, well, I need to celebrate 4th of July.
This is our holiday as homeowners.
And I was like, but I don't have any patriotic shirts.
And then I remembered my shirt of Bart Simpson pissing on the Confederate flag.
I was like, this is about as close to a patriotic shirt as I think I have.
Well, if you look at it, it's actually the same pose that Mel Gibson takes in The Patriot when he's pissing on a confederate flag.
I know it's not the right timeline, but that's what happens in the movie.
Oh my god, can I share?
Can I share?
I mean, okay, we need to get into the episode, but we have the Simpsons guys here.
I need to share a conspiracy theory I have that's like a perfect intersection between these two shows.
Have you both seen the movie The Patriot with Mel Gibson?
Have you seen it?
Oh, a good while ago.
I've only seen a parody of it 22 years ago I guess it's been, so a long time ago.
So there's a scene where Mel Gibson lowers an American flag on a pole to like spear a horse that's riding him down with a British soldier on top of it.
Now, if you look at the dates, I'm pretty sure The Patriot came out after the episode of The Simpsons, where they redo Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and Mr. Smith, played by Mel Gibson, impales, I think, a U.S.
Senator with an American flag.
That's right.
I think he ripped off that action sequence.
I think so too.
I also think the cultural commentary around that movie was people talking about how violent the movie was.
People just being blown apart with cannonballs.
You don't associate that level of Saving Private Ryan violence with oldie timey wars.
I, uh, we've, we've thought about covering that movie on, on the show, but it's like, it's kind of not too bad.
Like the most, the, the best thing to talk about is when he melts down his dead son's 10 soldiers into musket balls that he then kills British troops with, which is an extremely Facebook guy fantasy.
That's uh man he destroyed his his kids toys finally to get back at the hater.
I mean also it's like can Americans can't get that angry at the British over stuff like it wasn't a good enough scapegoat that's why I like there's not a lot of like reactionary revolutionary war movies about like the Brits because I feel like people can't get as mad about the Brits in in a conservative blood and soil kind of way.
Yeah it's like those Russian soldiers uh invading Ukraine and being like oh this was kind of hard to do because they look like us a little bit.
Yeah.
It's hard to just kill them in cold blood for land.
Okay, anyway, so today we brought you guys, the cartoon experts, onto Minion Death Cult to talk about something that I've been wanting to cover for a while.
I've been watching the lead-up to the release of this brand new cartoon show and We're just going to dive right into the first episode of the Tuttle Twins animated series, which is based on a series of children's books.
I think they're illustrated books, but I'm not quite sure, that are written, I believe, by a member of a libertarian think tank.
What's the name of that libertarian think tank again, Henry?
Oh yeah, I couldn't resist looking up this guy, Connor Boyack is his name, the author of it, though not the illustrator of it.
This Connor guy, guess what, he runs a libertarian think tank, a free market think tank in Utah, and he is Mormon.
Can you believe that?
He's a Mormon guy too.
That makes no sense.
It's called Libertas Institute.
That's the name of it.
Yeah.
And he is very much into homeschooling as well.
That's a big thing for him, which I was waiting to see like, okay, are the kids in this cartoon going to go to school?
And what do they have to say about public education?
But I didn't see any public education, good or bad, in this first episode.
Well, based on what I've seen of the book covers, the books are not as freaking epic as the cartoon is.
Yeah, the book seems to very much be informed.
It is, I mean, sorry, the TV series seems like an even more epic amazeballs slash libertarian Rick and Morty.
Yeah.
Oh, absolutely.
It reminds me of a lot of kids and adult shows where there's a crazy grandpa and little kids on adventures like Rick and Morty and Gravity Falls and the new DuckTales.
There's a ton of shows that are somewhat recent that this really reminds me of.
Yeah, the note, the description I have here is it's a magical school bus type kids show, but the school bus is privatized and the lesson plan is funded entirely by PragerU.
And the bus driver, or rascal scooter driver in this case, is a former Contras member smuggled into the U.S.
in like an Operation Paperclip style attempt to seed the U.S.
with experts in child torture.
I really wanted Dave Rubin to play Derek the Raccoon.
Yeah, missed opportunity there.
He's probably too busy.
I would think these guys are just below the level he'll return calls for.
Let's get into the plot here.
Okay, so we get a cold open on Grandma in a rascal scooter flying her two children through a wormhole while the granddaughter, who we will learn is Emily Tuttle of the Tuttle twins, the granddaughter exclaims, I have a weakness for science-y things!
And this is kind of your first indication that this is essentially like, I fucking love science, but for libertarians.
Yeah.
I wrote that down.
She is in the I fucking love science Facebook group and posting constantly.
Banned several times are some of her beliefs.
No, I, you know, I think of this, I really think that Connor dude who wrote these original books, like, he should be kind of mad at how this, I think he's friends with the people who made it, it's not like they stole it from him, like, but he, like, you look at those covers, like, they are like pristine white children, like, it very much is like a very white thing.
And I think he let, you know, he, for a guy who complains about wokeness, he let them change the show into having like, you know, non-white leads in it.
And also having the girl be the smart one and the boy be the stupid one like that.
That's totally giving into what the socialists want to destroy our, our family constitution.
The use of diversity throughout this was like amazing.
Cause they do exactly what they accuse, you know, everybody who people do do the whole thing of, you know, representation on.
For you know for bad means wherever but they do it here so beautifully like the kids are like mixed they're like I don't know they feel like maybe they're like a Republican Cubans, you know, like that's what the grandma is and like that's why that she has like, you know a nice accent And like, the kids are still very white, but the grandma gets to be brown, and like, the use of like, throughout the entire thing, later on we'll meet a black sheriff, and it's like, oh, they did it so well.
It's nice to see, you know, it warms the heart.
I thought it was a clear indicator of this television show's white genocide messaging when they had the one white child be a fat stupid slob.
Yeah.
And the other one, what was the other one?
The other one was a real Karen.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah yeah but but yeah this that first shot of it you're right is so like Rick and Morty I mean it's Rick and Morty like teleporting through a thing to go to a new place and and have a silly adventure like it I I think this the you know the actual people who made this and not the book writer I think at least understood like look if we want to rip this shit off then we got to do this you know like at least in a slightly like
Let's take the fun things and not just have it read a book report to you, which is pretty much what the original books sound like to me.
Much like Rick and Morty, there's no actual science in here that I could tell.
It's all magic, right?
She has a time machine rascal scooter that is literally powered by children's brain juice, which we'll get into later.
I mean, it's adrenochrome, I assume.
It's gotta be adrenochrome.
It's the positive version.
It's not produced by fear, it's produced by knowledge.
It's like Monsters, Inc.
It's the whole plot.
So, we get our first fourth wall-breaking meta joke about 25 seconds in.
When after this cold open of the time tunnel that they're traveling through, oh there's a title card that says 12 hours earlier and then it cuts back to like nothing happening and then oh it's like oops 11 hours earlier.
So that's our first indication that this is like you know this television program or this animated show isn't playing by the usual set of rules.
It's Sort of experimenting with the format here.
Then we actually see what was going on 11 hours ago.
The Tuttle Twins are selling lemonade in their front yard.
Emily, who I think her name isn't actually given until like halfway through the episode, maybe I just missed it, but Emily says, I'm just $22 away from science camp.
So they're, in this libertarian television show, your protagonists are selling lemonade so that they can, yeah, get education, get more education, go to science camp.
And then the boy, he wants to buy a giant gummy bear.
Four foot gummy bear.
His main characteristic seems to be that he enjoys food.
He enjoys gummy bears.
If that's how he wants to spend his money, that's his right, and people can't take that from him.
That's what I learned.
Well, also that she's earning money for, like, clearly a privately funded, you know, not this public school thing full of the lies that the socialists want to tell in the school.
And it's not about art or literature.
She's a STEM freak, completely.
Yeah.
And I mean, she would... Yeah, go ahead.
This surprised me, though, because we were talking about how some of this is informed by, you know, Facebook posts and chain letters, and I assume the first thing they were going to do is have the cops pull up and say, you're not zoned for a lemonade stand, or an FDA guy comes by, let me sample that.
Yeah.
Yeah, somebody's gonna call Immigration and get them deported, and that's just what happens in real life.
In real life, actually, yeah.
Yeah, I also kept waiting for the cops or something.
This also tries to be neutral on the cops, which I feel like is pulling back.
They should at least be acting like they live in a police state instead of being like, oh no, we'd love the cops if they were to enforce the correct laws.
I think in Connor's original book, I think he's much more clear on like, actually, there are bad laws you shouldn't listen to, kids.
I don't think the cartoon wanted to go as far with that.
They did a really good job, though, of this whole thing being about laws without ever really talking about it.
Like, laws are bad, but then there is a protagonist who is a cop.
So they do a good job balancing that, you know?
Well, he's not just a cop, Tony.
He's a sheriff.
It's a totally different breed of law enforcement, and I think we'll get into that.
So yeah, they're trying to sell this lemonade stand so that they can buy a private education to succeed in life.
It's like, what could possibly go wrong?
This seems like a great way to do things, a great system we have here.
Except when a government official in the form of a Karen Who is the president of the local kids club shows up to inform them that based on the law that they all, not they all, but that is agreed to, she doesn't have to pay for lemonade.
She gets free lemonade.
And then they say, no, no fair, that's stealing.
And she says, ah, it's not stealing if it's a law.
And we voted on it.
It was unanimous.
And then we get a smash cut to Karen, who, you know, her real name is Corinne, she says.
But that's a joke for the parents.
Smash cut to Corrine holding the vote with a single scared black girl who's terrified into voting for the resolution giving Corrine free lemonade.
And this was, this one struck me, you know we're talking about the cynical use of identity politics, this one struck me a lot because it's like
Isn't the reactionary argument against the Voting Rights Act that there is no voter suppression, there is nothing that is put in the way or makes it harder for black people to vote, and yet here we have somebody scaring a black person into voting against their own interests?
Well, but that is also the Democrats, right?
Like, so it's a little obvious like that.
And also there was only one, there was only one black girl, one person there at all.
And so there was, they were not able to vote.
So it was both.
Yeah, I see Corrine as a Hillary Clinton type and they view her as she used scaring black people to get what she wanted, which was to steal property from hard-working job creators like Emily and Ethan.
That's totally.
I really don't want to punch up their script to make it more convincing to people who want to buy into this, but I feel like instead of doing voter suppression, Karen could have just paid kids from another school, in scare quotes, to vote for her.
Uh, you know, illegal voting, you know, voting fraud, all that stuff.
They could have easily snuck that in.
This propaganda could be really improved.
Yes.
Yeah, she could have gone through, like, the list of child deaths in the last year and used those names for the voter rolls.
exactly yeah or get every kid's every kid's uh pet to vote you know like i i also like the korean as the like arch villain of the show like like everything like she's red like everything about her is red just to let you know that like she represents communism and big government absolutely just the the extreme redness of her and also just she loves like she has the cops on speed dial again which i like they that's a very good
uh i think it's a clever use of like the police state through this character which i bet she does not exist in the books i don't think i would bet that this seems also too clever for the books Yeah, but that's the straw man that they want to burn at the stake, essentially, in this episode is that, oh, it's not stealing if it's the law.
Yeah.
This is the law.
And so now Grandma has to teach the kids that, hey, some laws can actually be nullified.
This is where we introduce Grandma Gabby, who is coming to live with the Tuttle family because the retirement community she's from doesn't allow illegal pets.
And then in Grandma Gabby's own words, she says, HOAs are full of communists, which is our first overt dig at communists.
You know, communists, huge supporters of HOAs.
They're all about HOAs.
I think one of the most important causes I think about is lawns.
I'm very passionate about lawns and the grooming of lawns.
Also, loud music.
No thank you.
So a homeowners association that is all about private property like when she complains about HOA is that these are people with private property who are talking about their private property rights like I don't wouldn't I the way this entirely talks about the law later on.
You would think that they'd be on the side of homeowners.
I don't understand that.
I mean, it's a joke.
I get that it's a joke that she's crazy.
But I guess also, where do they want to play the line with Grandma Gabby?
Because it's like, okay, is she insane or is she smarter than everybody?
She knows how the real world works with her aged wisdom.
I think it's revealing I think this is like you know there's several times where the mask slips off of Grandma Gabby and we get to see like what's going on and like the inner life of Grandma Gabby and I think yeah HOAs are full of communists is like her genuine sentiment in that like anybody who disagrees with me is a communist like that's that's like the lesson we're we're teaching with this you know any
Because, I mean, you know, HOAs are absolutely not, like, leftist organizations or anything like that, but theoretically, if you're part of a homeowner's association and you, you know, you don't rent or whatever, you actually own the home, you would have, like, I think a democratic say in, like, what happens in your community, right?
So, like, you could argue that maybe there's some form of democracy at play there, which absolutely ruffles Grandma Gabby's feathers.
She does not appreciate that.
I was going to say this raccoon character here I think it represents like it's I think again it's as a way of getting ideology in there it's clever because like it's a wacky raccoon character but it really represents like why can't I own a bazooka or why can't I Ask certain questions about age and what age is appropriate for things.
It's all of the libertarian canards, but it represents itself through this raccoon of like, hey, I have this raccoon, it's not hurting anybody and I should be able to have it.
I feel like that raccoon most certainly is hurting people because Gabby says it spreads disease and isn't tame.
So that is infringing on other people's health and rights.
There's that line where they say, um, I didn't know you could have a raccoon.
And then she goes, I didn't know you could either.
Yeah, I didn't know you could tame a raccoon.
And she says, you can?
And then it like freaks out.
Yeah, you can.
Yeah, that's what it is.
Yeah.
That's like, that's one of the funnier jokes in the show.
In the background of this, this scene, Corinne is having the entire lemonade stand carted off, which, yeah, is supposed to be an allegory for like seizing private wealth or, you know, maybe grandma's sugar cane plantation.
That sort of thing.
The kids say, the club laws say she's allowed to take it, so it must be right, dot dot, right?
And it's like, if you're starting off with this level of stupidity in your grandchildren, I would just go back to the HOA Association.
Yeah, it's to get that time machine and get new grandkids.
That's the... No, I mean, too, like, again, the ideology coming through of like, oh, she just wanted one glass of lemonade and now she's stolen the entire stand and all the lemons.
Like, that's...
It's this government overreach it never pulls back like I I do you know I I had read up on one other titled book that I wish they'd have made this I know why they I'm pretty sure I know why they made this the first episode because I think they view the law the the book of the law as like the core belief of their libertarian viewpoints but they did one that was like a ripoff of
Atlas Shrugged that sounded really good that I wish they'd that sounded like 10 times worse than even the terrible book Atlas Shrugged.
Yeah, I think we're still, they're still releasing the first season.
So maybe, maybe that one gets made.
I don't know.
I'm looking forward to it myself.
From what I've read, it swaps positions that the Atlas, there's none of the John Galt stuff, it's just Atlas is the strongman in a carnival and all the clowns at the carnival want to be paid equal to the strongman, even though Atlas does all the work.
And he even feeds all the animals too, so he should be paid more.
And they're just jealous, these clowns, in the carnival.
Why don't the clowns just all join together and kick his ass?
That seems like the obvious thing to do.
Because clowns are just cowardly whiners who don't get anything done, that's why.
Yeah, we're in clown world right now, of course.
So yeah, Ethan says, wow, sounds like a stupid law.
And then Grandma Gabby says, I think I should teach them a lesson about laws or whatever.
And then zooms off screen.
Okay.
And so that night, the children, they're lying in their bunk beds, lamenting that their dreams of science camp and a large gummy bear have been dashed by big government.
Which is, again, fairly funny.
It's like, wow, I could have gone to this private science camp if not for big government getting in the way of me paying a fee to go here, right?
I think there should be a scene where Emily turns down a scholarship.
She'd be like, that's a handout.
I am not entitled to a scholarship.
I earned my way in there.
She should not want a STEM scholarship.
I'm surprised they didn't have the parents lamenting her not taking their money.
We wanted to buy her the trip there.
We said we'd do it.
Why did she turn it down?
So proud of my girl.
So proud of her.
She also says she's only $22 away from going to science camp.
Where did you get the other $5,000?
Well, you don't know how long the lemonade... She had the lemonade stand planned, too.
If she did sell out, that's exactly what she needed to hit.
But unfortunately, some bitch came and drank $22 worth of lemonade for free.
Because the law said she could.
Dissolve the Kids Club.
It's unnecessary.
Just go into business as the brother and sister.
I don't know why we need Corinne in this operation.
It's true.
Yeah, they don't ever justify the Kids Club.
The Kids Club is just there to be a menace to them.
It's just there to fuck things up.
The only other time we see the Kids Club is at the end of the episode when they revoke the law.
When they all vote the law down again.
What is the point of the Kids Club in general?
But what's the point of government, man, other than to take our stuff?
I think they just wanted to work that Ralph Wiggum character in, and that was the only way to do it, to form a club.
Yeah.
So as they're laying in bed, you know, sad about this turn of events, they hear explosions coming from grandma's bedroom.
They investigate and she reveals her very Rick and Morty rascal scooter time machine, which is literally powered by knowledge juice.
There's like a little tank in the back that fills up with green goop that's, yeah, from her grandchildren's brains.
Um, and we get, uh, yeah, we get them finally traveling through time again, like in the cold open.
Uh, more meta commentary where, uh, meta jokes where the grandma says, we're not gonna make it!
And the Emily says, why don't you think we're not gonna, why don't you think we're gonna make it?
Which is a weird question to ask, right?
It sounds like a bad setup for something.
And then grandma says, I do, that was just to provide suspense.
I appreciate the concept of that joke, but the execution was just terrible.
There's more clever stuff than I would expect in this show, but the execution is very bad for the most part.
I would love to hate on this more, but my kid's eight years old and watches some fucking garbage.
And so this was actually, like, not bad.
Like, I'm thinking about just, like, editing it a little bit.
That's more of, like, a statement on what you're letting her watch than it is on the show.
It's just, it's just, there's a lot of bad stuff on like Netflix and like Disney Plus.
It's just like deep in there that she just finds.
I'm like, this is, how do you watch, this is bad.
How do you watch this?
Almost like we already have the libertarian private education utopia that they're arguing for.
But yeah, but these shows have offered nothing.
They're just like, they're the most empty, like, this at least has a bad message, but it's like, the jokes are bad, but they're at least jokes.
I was like, this is not the worst thing I've watched this week.
The meta shit, sorry, real quick, the meta shit was just like super annoying to me.
It felt like half-baked Looney Tunes rehash jokes from like 1941, you know?
These kids haven't seen Looney Tunes, this is new to them.
Well, I think they know what Nickelodeon cartoons are like now.
They can have these, like, lines that sound like jokes that are just like, well, that's oddly specific, but yes, I do have a digital clock.
It's a little, like, Whedon-y commenting on what the other character just said for a wider audience.
Yeah, it's very annoying.
and it's it's very like modular like you can just put it in like it's it's been perfected to a science you just go like well then a character says this and then they say that back and like there's not extra i i mean it once i'm surprised it takes them like 10 minutes to have a bacon joke in this oh yeah i figured i figured they do that like in minute five or something Well, you said that the dialogue is modular.
There's not enough of a difference between the boy and the girl character.
Except one has different goals, but they both catch on to the same ideas at the same time.
And they're not that different in personality.
So, I don't know.
If they're going to rip things off like Gravity Falls, make only one of the children epic.
The boy should be stupider.
Yes, I agree.
He's kind of stupid, but they don't want to make him dumb enough.
I saw clips from a later one where he's the guy who... Emily should be the only one who gives the speeches at the end.
I watched one where he's just like, you know, the invisible hand of the market is what creates a pencil and no one person can make a pencil.
I didn't know that was a libertarian ideology as well about how no one person makes a pencil.
The usual argument against making your male character stupid or whatever is that it's emasculating, or it's the demasculization of the western man.
These heroes that we were raised with, like Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin, it turns out that those guys are actually not that smart and not meant to be emulated and it's all like a dastardly plan to make us not know how to pronounce nuclear, that sort of thing.
Yeah, I think they just made the boy... They don't have to worry about that in this case because they can make the boy as stupid as they want because he's voiced by a grown man.
Like nobody will think that he's being emasculated.
I think they just made him random instead of making him stupid.
And then that switches off when he needs to tell the audience the moral of the story.
So they arrive at the end of their time tunnel, and one of the kids, one of the interchangeable kids says, where are we?
And then grandma says, can't you read the superimposed text?
Right?
It's France, 1848.
Again, that's an interesting concept for a joke, but the Muppets did that 50 years ago.
And Looney Tunes did that much earlier.
It's a very easy joke to just steal and have an epic grandma do.
For all we've said about it trying to misuse identity politics in an evil way, they still have a white guy.
Well, I haven't seen a picture of William Lucas, the voice of the grandmother.
I think it might be a white guy doing the voice of this abuela.
He slips into maybe a little more, let's just say, American accent when he's listing off all the industries that are subsidized by the American government.
Yeah, so this is the French Revolution that they've arrived at.
And then the grandma, she gives her reasoning for visiting France during this time is, you know, oh, I have to give this bidet back to my friend.
Bidet is French for salad bowl.
And the daughter says, no, that's not.
Grandma, you're eating shit.
You're eating feces with your leafy greens.
And she said, well, that's how I like it.
She's eating salad out of a philosopher's piss bucket.
And this is the woman who's meant to teach us.
You know, that also terrible and Weedon-y dialogue filled Cowboy Bebop live action had almost the same joke about bidets and a person, an uncultured person, not knowing what a bidet is.
And I'm just kind of, I get it.
We know it's a funny thing that you wash your ass with.
It's so funny, but I can't.
I'm just, I think, I think she is supposed to be, like, a libertarian diogenes.
Like, she's supposed to be, like, the garbage, like, earthy, of-the-person, vagrant, miscreant philosopher whose, like, words are deeper than you would initially assume, but it's from a libertarian point of view, so it's like, oh, in the house of the poor, in the house of the poor person, the only place to spit is their face.
That's like the libertarian version of that, right?
So they're visiting Frédéric Bastiat, author of The Law, which is, yeah, some book that he was writing at the turn of the French Revolution.
The explanation that he gives, he says, you know, the people are revolting, and then Grandma Gabby, in one of her numerous mask-slipping moments, says, I agree, people are very revolting.
Yeah it's just yeah profoundly anti-social woman and uh also violent as we'll get to in a minute here.
So I really feel for the animators on this because they were the the poor I'm certain underpaid and intern level animators they're like this the script is
You know it could be and this could be anywhere but they have to be like no it's it's in the middle of a giant riot in a city like a big violent riot like how do you yeah that's impossible to animate on this budget like I though I an overall note I have on the the budget or quality of the animation it's like it's not good but it's also I feel like
I just watched the finale of the Arthur cartoon and I didn't realize how digital it had gone and it's very flashy and I was like well this this kind of flash style pop in and out that's not like hand animated doesn't look that different from a PBS kids show which is obviously an evil one because it's made by public funding and the government pays for it and so that's that's a bad thing.
Yeah this looks much better than I was expecting really.
Yeah, it doesn't look that bad at all, especially for like a Season 1, you know?
What was I going to say here?
don't quite oh yeah yeah they they do the revolution scene right but it is like that simpsons thing you know from listening to the uh the commentaries where it's like the writers would just be like oh yeah we draw we draw uh we'd write a crowd into this scene for like basically no reason and the animators would be like wishing death threats on the writers for doing that and so there aren't like real crowd scenes in this i don't think but there are like yeah bombs flying and you know
So we get Bastiat explaining what laws are and what fundamental rights people have that need to be protected by the law.
He says the people are revolting because their rights are not being protected.
The first one is, of course, the right to life.
Grandma Gabby says, that's right, even if people don't want me to live.
And then they all kind of look at her like, what?
She says, I've upset a lot of Soviets.
And you're like, yeah, during the 40s, I'm guessing, late 30s, early 40s, you were on the other side of the Soviets for some reason, weren't you, Grandma?
Yeah, yeah, totally.
Did she go back in time to TP the statue of Stalin?
Or is there one just standing somewhere?
She's definitely visited the time of Stalin to toilet paper his statue instead of, I don't know, maybe doing something about the Holocaust.
It's funny because you're kind of thinking the grandma, maybe she was like a spy.
Maybe she pissed off the Soviets because she was doing something super cool.
And the super cool thing was just that.
It wasn't even like, you know, assassinating a Soviet.
It was like just toilet papering with a really cool toilet paper machine.
You know, I think with this Bastiat guy, who I've not heard of before, I'm not sounding like a very learned person, but it's just like, but the way he's talked about here, it definitely seems like a guy that, if somebody is very worshipful of a guy you've never heard of, it feels like they're in a cult.
And of course, we all know the book The Law by Frederick Bastiat.
It's like, sure, yeah.
I know that he is a coward who smells bad.
Yeah, yeah.
It's really weird because they, I think they wanted to just be worshipful as this guy is like this super genius who came up with all these like, you know, uh, ideals of, of American libertarianism, but they also want to not be too nice to a French guy.
They're like, you know, I know this French guy, he stinks.
He's a quitter.
He's a big loser and was like, uh, they, I wonder if that was like a late addition to not seem too praising of a Frenchman, even a mega libertarian Frenchman.
They're like.
Can't be too nice to this guy.
We gotta let you know he smells bad and quits and gives up.
I can't wait until they visit Von Mises in the time machine and he tells Grandma Gabby about her right to sell her grandchildren his property.
Really looking forward to that episode.
I also like, as he just says, why this revolution is happening.
It's like, because people's rights aren't being... There's nothing about income inequality or a monarchy or anything like that.
I was reading up on this guy and his big thing that I pulled out from the law is that property is a natural law.
We didn't have to define the concept of property.
It's inherent in nature, which is crazy.
Yeah, that's one of the three that he gives.
The second one is right to liberty, which means we can do stuff without people stopping us, as long as we don't take away anyone else's rights or hurt them, and then cut to Grandma and Ethan both looking disappointed that they can't hurt anyone.
Grandma is like, what do you call it, like playing with a baseball bat?
You know, like smacking a bat against her other hand like she wants to, yeah, again, like kill some revolutionaries.
Yeah, I think their want for violence, and same with the raccoon, is like, that's troubling.
That is very troubling.
Yeah, how do we change these laws, Grandma?
Actually, write to property, which means no one can take your stuff.
And Ethan says, like, my gummy bears.
And Emily says, yeah, and my notebook planner.
And then Grandma Gabby says, or my parking tickets.
Yeah.
And this is definitely an instance of her being, yeah, supposed to be utterly insane, right?
Like, why does she want her parking tickets, you know?
And then it goes further.
She starts shredding them in a paper shredder that's attached to her wheelchair.
And she says, oops, there goes my property, which makes me think this isn't an absurdist joke.
It's just she was actually shredding wire transfer records or something.
Yeah.
The dog is eating him too and then she makes a comment about him being expired?
Was that about like... parking tickets don't like...
There's no, they don't disappear necessarily, right?
Does she mean like, is this gonna make the dog sick?
That's the pun, I think, is he takes that to mean, oh, they've gone bad, so then he gags, but it's like his whole, the raccoon's whole persona is eating trash.
He drinks out of a spittoon later in the episode.
Yeah, it's a top-to-bottom, three jokes in a row that make no sense.
I had assumed the ticket stuff was beyond just random, was that it's just her again, not wanting to give money to the government in this case.
She's like, I should park, my car can go wherever I want it to.
I don't need to pay your parking tickets and you're just trying to steal from me with these parking tickets anyway.
Again, I want to see a scene of her like shredding her social security checks and not cashing those.
That grandma should be doing if she is so against this government intervention and everything.
She's got a large stipend from the U.S.
government that is outside any sort of social security system, I believe.
It'll come up later with the Old West thing, but when you're talking about the concept of personal property with children, it muddies the water a bit because I don't know what the property rights of children are, but it's like, well, your parents take care of you.
They buy all your food.
They pay for all your schooling.
They have to, uh, the government makes them take care of you.
That might infringe upon their right to happiness, but guess what?
The government is holding a gun to your parents' head saying you must raise this child, they cannot die under your care.
So, it's weird to have, like, kids talk about how important property is to them when they can't really legally own property.
Well, that's, I mean, that's the fault of the U.S.
government.
I mean, we do need to talk about what children are able to consent to, and how the government gets in the way of that sort of thing.
They should be able to work and have an income by the age of 8.
Yeah!
Send it how they want to.
And if they wanted to smoke or drink something too, that's their choice.
Well, I think too with the kids, they have to see some messed up stuff.
I am shocked they show the kids watching murders in the streets off camera for them.
I was like, wow.
How heavy do you... When that happened, I figured... It's so stupid.
Yeah.
When that happened, I figured then at the end with the shootout, I was like, is somebody gonna get just shot in the face in this shootout?
Like, well, where is the violence line in this cartoon as well?
Yeah, after they finish the, you know, list of rights that we have, including the right to property, which is like, oh yeah, you know, nobody can take your stickers or your garment factory, you know?
After they have that, yeah, the kids like stoically stare out the window at presumably like carnage unfolding in the street and the show slows down and there's like sentimental music playing and they're all sad about it.
It's like, Interesting note to take for this cartoon, but then yeah, Grandma Breaks the Ice, you know, whatever, alleviates the situation by saying, well, whatever, let's go, right?
Yeah, she says, it is what it is, which isn't a joke.
It's a phrase you could just drop into anything to end a scene, really.
Gotta thank Yogi Berra for that one.
It was a, well, that happened kind of quip.
So they leave France to go back forward through time, but get stuck in the Wild West because they run out of the knowledge juice, which we then, I think at this point, learn that she has to fill their minds with more knowledge in order to repower the scooter itself, right?
And then we get another joke, another meta joke, about the cartoon going into syndication.
Hopefully.
LOL.
No way.
Yeah, I was thinking, you wish.
You wish a network would carry this.
It made me think, if the kid's imagination juice powers this wheelchair, how was she getting around before hooking up with these grandkids?
Yeah, she's got other kids and used them up, as is her right.
There's just dry, dry child husks under her bed at the nursing home.
No, she built it in the beginning of the episode.
Remember she built it?
She put, like, the kitchen on it and the little, like, vortex on the dimension and this other, like, jet thing.
And then a bar for the kids to hang on to when it travels.
But she already had it, because how did she get the French bidet salad bowl without traveling through time?
Oh, that's true.
She also knows the sheriff that we're about to meet from the Wild West, and he actually says hi to her as Deputy Gabby.
So that building seems completely stupid.
She's already been part of an extra-legal posse, tracking someone down, right?
It's so funny too they like this is so the magic school bus and just ripping off that conceptually as well uh even having like the one kid everybody hates is a redhead which like you know that's mean to redheads but the but this it's so the inverse though because that is about like the public education system teaching you stuff and the the super teacher who is probably spreading socialist messaging underneath it all.
And then now instead they replace it with this grandmother who hates any, views any collectivism as the devil, as demonic.
And just hates people in general.
That's who should be teaching our children is like a deeply cynical privateer.
A deeply cynical profiteer.
Who's got a lot of blood on her hands as well, I think.
Yeah.
So yeah, we meet the sheriff, right?
And he introduces the town that they're in, which is the town of Quiet Valley, cut to a comical, loud female scream.
Sort of an ironic breaking of the quiet in this town.
Hilarious.
Hilarious.
Very funny moment.
The person who delivers that scream turns out to be a farmer who shows up to report that the bandits are stealing her cows!
Sorry, Henry, go ahead.
I was going to say, could women own property at this point in time?
Yeah, yeah.
And of course, the Old West is famous for the number of black sheriffs it had.
They were just like, every town had a black sheriff.
There wasn't an entire movie about how that wouldn't happen and how everyone would reject that.
He's Danny Glover.
This is the Danny Glover character.
Oh, you know, he looks like the Fox News sheriff guy, that nutcase.
Man, now I forget his name.
Yeah, I know who you're talking about.
Yeah, who starved people to death in his prisons.
Yeah, no, but I mean, again, this is such a simple, like, this is how- Joe Clark?
No.
Yeah, that's it, that's it.
Now, but this is how, like, the easiest way to explain libertarian ideology is you have to make up, like, well, yeah, it's just like, you know, it's like your lemonade stand, or it's like the Old West, where it's all simple, because it cannot, the simple answers of libertarianism do not work in anything more complicated after, like, 1910, really, I'd say.
Anything with paved roads and, like, plumbing.
Anything with a group larger than one family.
That's like libertarianism's optimal mode of action.
It's just a quote, natural hierarchy that already exists.
Yep, yep.
The bandits get away with the cows because the sheriff is too busy giving a speech about how important his job is at protecting the people from the bandits.
And it's funny because he's not supposed to be like, you know, a representation of government inefficiency.
He's just like, that's just his character trait is he's like a blowhard, kind of.
But he's still a good guy.
It's really letting kids know the government's function is to point guns at people who you don't like.
And that's all he's doing in this.
Yeah, because he does pull out a gun and point it at them and tell them to stop and then he gives a little speech about the law and his role in upholding it or whatever in a very like...
You know, I'm just a bill type, you know, without the music, of course, but, um, so, uh, one of the bandits, after they've let the bandits get away, uh, one of the bandits comes back, uh, except he's dressed differently.
Uh, I'm not, how should I describe, uh, how he looks in general?
Uh, he's a tall, slender black man with somewhat exaggerated ears.
He looks like the bad guy from The Frog Princess.
Prince and Frog?
Yeah, I immediately wrote that down when I saw him.
Yeah, that's what he looks like.
Well, he looks like an Obama-esque figure.
Yeah, yeah, I can see that.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, totally does.
He looks like Obama, but the thing is, is he's wearing, when he comes back in a different role as the newly appointed tax collector, tax collector parentheses race hustler, right?
He's like, He's wearing a top hat and he's got a cane and he's like He is talking like a sort of I'm not sure the dialect.
Maybe it is like New Orleans smooth con man Very odd character to see in a modern cartoon And that's where the the granny has again that fourth wall break of like what's the difference?
Like what's the difference between a tax man and a thief?
like yeah, I I but this is a kid's thing so I get why that they're just zipping through this stuff but like who elected this guy where how was the government created like if they they have to just have a tax collector come in not say like well the mayor comes in and takes this like no no it's a it's just that the criminal calls himself a tax collector and has a book called laws that Uh, people didn't vote on at some point.
Yeah.
And he just takes the thing.
I, but the, I mean, also though, like, uh, the tax collectors, one thing, and I thought that's where it was just going to stop, but that they had to be like also charities bullshit too.
Like they had to, they couldn't just stop with taxation and stuff.
They also had to take aim at charity.
It's kind of like the siren song of libertarianism when you're younger, where you're like, well, yeah, my taxes shouldn't subsidize big corporations.
And then you find out, well, they come to the wrong conclusions, where it's like, well, you know what?
Also, charity is really bad, too.
Let's talk about that for a second.
They do this thing where they, like, it's the common thing where they talk about charity, and they say, you know, they tell me they're going to do good things with it, but I'm going to do good things anyways.
I'm going to give to the poor.
And they don't ask, like, why are they poor to give to?
They don't ask that question.
They're just like, I was going to do it anyways and now you're making me do it twice?
And I don't even get to control what organization it goes to?
They do that a couple times here and it's a classic.
Well, you see, if there aren't poor to serve as a negative example of what happens when you don't follow the ironclad law of your boss, things wouldn't be so nice for us, right?
True, true, true.
With the whole, yeah, tax collector thing, he says, yeah, I'm a newly appointed tax collector.
And yeah, so it's a bandit who just put on a top hat and says, I'm the tax collector now.
And it is like, where did he come from?
How did he get this law passed?
that sort of thing and it's funny because people who actually like steal cows like cattle rustlers or whatever like they would just be hung you know if you're talking about like people who would actually make it into government it is like i don't know people who own one of the largest ranches in the state you know this sort of criminal that this probably a landowner yeah this sort of criminal that like they would be a criminal but they wouldn't be a criminal that
you know a libertarian think tank would ever care to prosecute and it's like well if you're talking about corruption in government or how you know they're trying to move money around or whatever and then you say well so isn't the problem that there's money involved in government that's not the problem to them of course and it's like well you have a system of capitalism that incentivize that that helps powerful people accumulate more power and more wealth and it's like you just trust
That those people will use it in the best interest of everybody.
The the ranch owner here would have known the tax collector like she would know the tax collector she or her husband would have been elected as the state senator for the area you know it's like I mean uh William Randolph Hearst was well he was like a senator for California for years years and years like that's that's what the rich people did back then not not be like oh the tax man is taking my money I didn't know this was happening
Uh, back to the fate of horse thieves.
I wasn't expecting this to be gory or shocking, but I was expecting it to show me the sheriff shooting the horse thieves and telling the kids, you see kids, if somebody's taking your property away, you can kill them.
It's within your rights.
Yeah.
And that's why they can't get too realistic because yeah, the ranch owner would have shot these people dead and probably shot her own cows as well in the process.
But the point would have been made.
Yeah, and like at some point the sheriff would have called the rancho to say, Hey, the tax collector's coming to your house.
Can you make this easy?
Can you not make this a big deal?
Like, I don't want to have to come down there and shoot you for the tax money too, you know?
That's not what happened at all is all.
The second bandit also appears, and yeah, he is the charity collector.
He's here for a charity, so he takes her other cow.
He says, uh, and I'll need to take another cow for this charity I'm running.
This will help the poor folk.
And then Carla the farmer says, quote, I already give cows to the poor on my own.
Yeah.
That's a literal quote.
I give cows to the poor on my own.
Not because the government makes me.
I want to see a record of that.
Yeah.
I mean, that is the perfect, you know, libertarian stance, too.
Just like that.
I would so give to charity and do all the time if the government didn't take it from taxes.
And I'd spend it better than the government, too.
Like this.
This is why, like the Bill and Melinda Gates.
Well, I guess it's just the Bill Gates Foundation now.
I don't know what happens with that.
But yeah, that's the same belief as that.
Just that, oh, well, I give to charity anyway.
I definitely do.
You don't have to check my records or anything.
Or do any math, because the public generally doesn't have a great grasp of how much wealth I actually have, so please don't use any sort of proportional measurements to describe how much charity I give.
Not only that, but the cows that we donate are diseased cows because it's cheaper to donate those diseased cows to charity than it is to dispose of them.
And this rancher is a small business person, and like any of them, I'm sure she considers hiring people to be charity.
Like, I give people jobs, and the government makes me pay them this much.
I can't pay them any less.
You're right.
It definitely is anti-charity.
You know, that reminded me of a little thing I learned, too, about how this was run.
It's like a rip-off version of Kickstarter, how they earn money for it.
It's a thing called Angel.
And it seems like they position themselves as like, no, no, no, we're not asking for a handout like Kickstarter.
This is investment.
You're investing in us.
You're an angel investor.
This is volunteerism.
They say they have 5,950 backers and that got them $2,609,000.
They have 5,950 backers, and that got them $2,609,000.
Holy shit.
And that would average out to $438 a person, which is impossible to me.
I have to think that if any of those numbers are true, then it's like 2,500,000 was given by a PragerU-style or a Cope Brothers-style rich guy, and then the rest is like a dollar from another person.
But I still, I don't even believe they got almost 6,000 people to give them a dollar.
Like, no way.
I really want to know if their NFTs are selling.
Because they are turning this into NFTs.
God, just the level of artistic work on display throughout the whole NFT spectrum is magnificent.
You got your beautiful apes, your beautiful flash animations.
These are described as quote-unquote golden moments from the show.
Yeah, when I looked at the Libertas Institute Twitter account, the things they complain about are homeschooling, a couple things about medicinal cannabis, and crypto, and that crypto is being, you know, now it's the government's coming in and they're starting to restrict on crypto too much too, just as the government always does.
That's my lane.
I like smoke weed, my kids homeschooled, and I'll take Bitcoin if you want to give me some.
You should sign up to be a fellow at this Libertas.
You probably have to move to Utah, I would guess, to work there, though.
I could check out some nice diversity boxes for them.
uh what was i gonna say here yeah so this when i found out that this farmer like she had her cows stolen right but at the end of the episode she gets she so she gets both cows stolen and has zero cows I was like, so this is literally the, a farmer owns two cows Facebook meme, which it's probably predates Facebook.
Like this is something I think our parents, possibly even grandparents learned as kids.
Uh, I'm going to read here.
I found a copy of, of the, you have two cows sort of infographic.
Is that where you punched into the search bar?
Yeah, I typed in two cows and communism, and that's how I found this one.
Okay, so this is a PDF, and it's got a .us address, and so I was like, wait, what am I clicking on?
This is from a Texas high school.
So this is what Texas high school students are learning.
You have two cows and then it lists all the different forms of government and what they're going to do to you and your two cows.
Feudalism.
You have two cows.
Your lord takes some of the milk.
Socialism.
You have two cows.
The government takes one and gives it to your neighbor.
Communism.
You have two cows.
The government takes both and gives you the milk it thinks you need.
Fascism.
You have two cows.
The government takes both and sells you the milk.
Nazism.
You have two cows.
The government takes both and kills you.
I feel like there's probably some Texas families who are like, they wouldn't kill me.
Yeah, yeah.
Can I donate my cows to them?
I'd help them get other cows and kill them from some... kill other people and take their cows.
Do they take goats?
I have goats.
Oh, sorry.
I'm looking at this and I don't want to steal your fire, but there's some fun jokes in here, I noticed.
They're having fun with this.
Uh, I like the New Dealism one, which is not one I had seen before.
So this is under the New Deal.
You have two cows.
The government takes both, shoots one, milks the other, and throws the milk away.
Wow, really coming hard for FDR.
Wow.
You have to be like 95 to complain about New Dealism.
That's older than even the usual old person on Facebook.
Yeah, it's literally like my grandma's dad hated the New Deal, like hated FDR.
That's how old you have to be.
And it's funny, it's like, yeah, before FDR, you know, everybody had two cows, and then FDR came along and took all of them away.
That's exactly what I remember about that volatile period in American history, especially economically speaking.
Yeah, yeah.
Which ones were your favorites, Bob?
Which one did you like in here?
The pacifism one is just basically, fuck you, pussy.
Because it says, you have two cows, they stampede you to death.
It's not like an economic system at all.
They're just like, yeah, guess what, pussy?
You're dead.
You weren't prepared to kill your own cows to protect yourself.
You got cucked by your cows.
It should just be vegetarianism or something.
It needs to be more pointed, I think.
I like the political correctness-ism, and that's how you can tell that this is maybe slightly updated.
This is at least from the 90s, probably the 2000s or 2010s.
You are associated, quote, you are associated with, parentheses, the concept of, quote, ownership is a symbol of the phallocentric, warmongering, intolerant past.
Two differently aged, parentheses, but no less valuable to society, bovines of non-specified gender.
Wow.
This is trying too hard.
They should just say you have two cows, one is named they and one is named them.
You're punching up jokes left and right here, Bob.
These libertarians aren't funny.
I've read the Babylon Bee.
Yeah, so that's basically what this episode is.
It takes the two cows meme and it's like, yeah, Obama-ism is when the government takes both your cows.
Just simplifies the whole process.
Doesn't even give her milk back.
I appreciate you giving me the background on this two cows thing because it's like when I'm watching a superhero movie with Bob and I can say like, oh, that one-off character in the background, you wouldn't know that because you didn't read 800 comic books, but this is a reference to that.
This is the Libertarian version of like Superman, like a Bizarro, no, Crypto the Dog, let's say.
This is like, oh, you don't know Crypto the Dog, but this is his whole background.
Yeah, we have our lived experiences to fall back on here.
here obamaism is that you have two cows and you kill one of them and you get in trouble even though the cows have been killing each other the whole time uh so he he uh they the two bandits justify what they're doing um by saying it's it's right here in the law we're allowed to do it And then Ethan says, a law that takes money from someone and gives it to someone else's business?
That's lame.
And then Emily says, our government at home doesn't make us help other people's businesses.
R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R Uh, and then Grandma's like, ah, well, actually... And then, yeah, she lists, like, Big Ag, the pharmaceutical industry, you know, she even says, like, the military-industrial complex, I believe, and then she's, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
That was a shocking, you know, at the end of it, that she actually said military-industrial complex.
I was like, oh, okay, that's like... I think that's... that's a Mormon thing.
I think that's because it's a Mormon thing.
Well, it's a libertarian isolationist thing, you know, in theory.
Libertarians, it's just a better brand than Republicans.
So a lot of Republicans just call themselves libertarians, but still hate abortion.
You know, abortion's their number one issue or, you know, fighting.
Really hate immigrants.
Yeah, exactly.
Love cops as long as cops leave alone their personal pot supply, like all the usuals.
I mean, I was glad to be asked to do this because I think Bob and me really bonded over a distaste for punk libertarians.
Absolutely.
Of our millennial youth.
We're just like, oh, you think I'm a Republican?
Well, you know, I actually smoke pot and I actually think sex work should be legalized.
Like, I just blow your mind.
Yeah, when Pennywise said, fuck authority, they were talking about your physician, your general practitioner.
When the grandma gives her list of things, I was like, well, this is pretty agreeable.
I was expecting to see things like, oh, school lunch programs and libraries, your tax dollars go to.
Education is in there, but yeah, it's like, well, and then...
Again, yeah.
Crack pipes, yeah.
I wanted to like pause for a second and be like, okay, let's talk about the military-industrial complex gives all that money.
Can we talk about that?
Like, no, no.
It's more just about the theft.
It's not about where it goes to or investigating who gets that or the private property.
Because, though, again, like the private property thing, when I see professional sports in there, it's like, Well that's the, don't they have private property over that baseball team or whatever?
They can do whatever they want with it and if they want to get government handouts isn't that private property?
I don't see what exactly the problem is when they want to be mad at a big business.
They're more mad at government than the businesses who take the money.
I don't understand that.
Yeah well it's this comes down to like that excuse of crony capitalism right like if you had to like interrogate these this seeming contradiction in their beliefs uh it would come their excuse would be it's crony capitalism the reason that these you know private entities are given special treatment by the government is because they're like
uh friends right they're like this apolitical they have this apolitical relationship as friends and it's like no the actual relationship is that they're all in the same class of people they're all the capitalist class and they all have that meet that interest uh you know in common with each other it's like when you have a system that's based on yeah rewarding those with wealth this is like the only situation this is the only end point That can happen.
So you have to say like, oh, it's government's problem or it's crony capitalism's problem.
But of course, these people aren't hurting, so they're not actually looking to like solve any real problems like that.
They just, you know, want to make sure they're never on the back foot, so to speak.
Yeah.
The sports thing is really smart too because the person who's watching this, when they hear the sports thing, they're not thinking about SoFi Stadium getting all kinds of money to be built and displacing tons of people in Inglewood.
They're thinking about LeBron James not being a self-hating person and getting paid millions of dollars.
That's what they're thinking of.
And so it's pretty smart.
They do a lot of little clever things in here that it shows that even though they miss a lot of marks, they're still the ones who are the indoctriners, you know?
Yeah, and that's a broader point that we haven't really touched on, which is that this these programs of like oh let's do a non-indoctrination education of your children there's like all of these cartoons and children's books have been popping up on the right that are like explicitly anti-trans or explicitly like anti-critical race theory or whatever uh once again they're like
Bemoaning a problem that isn't actually there just in order to stay, like, stay on the offensive, essentially, is how I look at it, at least.
And it's like, all of this stuff, I mean, the only way you could argue that it's not meant to indoctrinate children is that it's actually only meant for adults.
Like, that's the only leg you would have to stand on to be like, oh, this isn't meant to indoctrinate children, it's meant to, like, make your cousin laugh out loud on Facebook.
But other than that, it's like very obviously pointed propaganda to children, teaching them that somebody stealing your lemonade stand is exactly like having public assistance from the government.
They would know this is for adults because the scooter would have a cow catcher on the front of it.
It's super didactic because at the end they're like, well, here's our PowerPoint of what we taught you.
Like, they go over all the points at the end, which I'm sure happens at the end of every episode.
I feel like this is the formula the episodes follow.
Yeah, we're almost at the end of this episode.
Go ahead.
Oh, no, it was, yeah, this big, I mean, the big shootout, like, well, so that they, okay, so they need, like, a populist movement to change the laws, which it, I love how the girl says, like, oh, well, if people knew about these things like that, it seems to be this stance of, like, well, if people knew about the smaller government belief and had it really explained to them, then it would always win at the, democratically.
It's like, well, I feel like history shows that's not true, but.
It's hard.
I mean, it's kind of difficult to hate libertarians that much because they are extremely naive and I kind of pity them for that where it's like, well, if we just all got together, we could change things.
Yeah, totally.
The lead up to that, honestly, like that, that was one of the biggest disappointments in the episode for me because so we have the rancher who both of her cows are gone thanks to the government sanctioned banditry, right?
She's back to square one.
Ethan literally says stupid laws and kicks the ground.
Which is, yeah, I think probably the mission statement or the sentence topic, the topic sentence for this episode.
I would say now, like, so you're poor, you're bereft of cows, you know, you're cow poor, why not appeal to this government that's, you know, reallocating these cows to poor people?
Wouldn't you qualify at this point?
But Carla, the rancher, and grandma have a better idea, which is to enlist the local sheriff to round up a posse and negate this unconstitutional law via posse comitatus.
It literally has the Tuttle Twins talking the town sheriff into nullifying the bad law.
Like, Emily literally says, hey, you're the sheriff and this law is unconstitutional.
Yep.
Can't you do something about this?
And he's like stroking his gun and he's like, as a matter of fact, I can.
And then it turns into, we got to, we got to do a get out the vote campaign.
And it's like, this is not how politics works.
I feel, I feel very undertaught here.
they make a joke of it of having a thing on screen like this move uncharacteristically quickly but also that that stops them from having to draw like a crowd of people or like design anybody else in the old west town they just have to have the four characters the two bandits the sheriff and the ranch owner that's all they need yeah they call a vote to remove a law from their Town charter or something like that.
I don't know how these funny laws work in these small towns, but they're all happy.
You know, vote unanimously because yeah, everybody who's informed and they all surely they would all behave sensibly and they would all have the same material interests as one another.
Those people would really care about her cows not being taken.
Not that they would say like, oh, get rid of this charity that would help me, a person who doesn't own cows.
This person should still have her cows.
Yeah, uh, so yeah.
The really important part is that they got the sheriff in the beginning.
That is how you do, like, rally a vote, is you get the sheriff to help you.
You get the sheriff to tap his gun and help you.
Yeah, we probably, if we had seen the meeting, it was him pointing a gun at all of them and saying, like, so, is it unanimous?
Yeah.
Okay, good.
We're just gonna do a verbal count here.
Yeah.
So she gets her cows back, the whole town is in the saloon, they're all happy, and Carla says, drinks on me.
And right when she said that I was like, oh god, Carla's so generous, you know, I can just tell, you know, it's just amazing.
But then they literally hammer it home by grandma saying, see, Carla is generous even when the government doesn't force her to be.
And it's like, oh sick, you gave a quarter's worth of root beer to the people who saved your entire farm and livelihood, theoretically.
That's generosity.
That is like a good representation of capitalist, you know, privateer generosity, charity.
Here's a quarter for the millions in wealth I have.
And it's also like, hey, I know that I was struggling because I lost my cows, but I also operate a small business bar on the side.
And that is the people who are like, things are getting tight.
I can't support the boutique anymore.
Thanks for giving me back my, like, million dollars of cows.
Here's two bucks.
Here you go.
Yeah, it's like the office you work for who lays off 30% of the staff every quarter having a pizza party twice a month for you.
Yeah, but instead of Bart Simpson who's like, uh, I worked all week for 50 cents, you know, I'm never, I will never say thank you.
These kids are like, wow, geez, the system works.
I love you, Carla.
Thank you for the root beer.
The kids put in hours of labor that apparently is worth nothing.
So the bandits return, you know, this time they're just bandits again and they're going to take it by force and there's an actual shootout.
And the only interesting thing that happened, because none of them actually get shot, you know, there's gunfire back and forth, but the kids just want to escape.
They want to like get out of this situation in the time machine, but they can't.
because the grandma's rascal scooter is out of knowledge juice which is odd because we saw it refill during the wild west scene when the kids were like convincing the sheriff that it was an unconstitutional law which means this grandma is doing something with this knowledge juice she's just like injecting it between her toes she's not using it for the time machine that's all she did use she did use the crazy blaster cannons
During the shootout so I don't know how much energy that takes but not that much you can't there's no way there's no way You're right something's going on.
I think she was taking trips back in time when we don't see her to burn down soup kitchens So the I don't know I I don't really remember how they go forward in time and they call an emergency vote.
Oh, well then when they captured the guys, I, this was one of my favorite lines.
It really shows like they're the viewpoint of it because they, they tie up the, the thieves and they say, but she has more cows than us and we really want
It's just like oh see it's they're just jealous they're just jealous whiners who can't get their own cows and they have to try to steal it however they want like that that's the only reason they if somebody would not like a business owner like Carla because they're jealous and then they get silenced with mouth covers and say like the free market rules I heart capitalism which yeah
Yeah, they're literally gagged so they can't use free speech anymore.
And everybody applauds.
Which is what the granny... I think the grandma is much more realistic of Libertarianism.
The kids are like, no, no, let's take this off their mouths.
Grandma's like, let's tie up these poor people and make sure they can't talk.
I mean, they're gonna get hanged, too.
Oh, absolutely.
They're condemned.
Yeah, so that was the first episode of the Tuttle Twins TV show.
Do you think you guys are going to do a Talking Tuttle Twins?
The alliteration is there.
You know, the three Ts is pretty good, but I Yeah I mean I would if they do the Atlas Shrugged one maybe I'll give that one a watch because that's especially like the the amazing from what I read of the book version the amazing leap to take to turn John Galt into the strong man in the circus like is insanity to me but no I think this uh yeah I this is so ridiculous I think to the my last big thought on it is
Is that I think the libertarian ideology of the free market means this shouldn't exist.
This exists as make work.
The free market does not want this.
There is no demand for it.
It only exists out of charity, but the charity of a rich person, meaning good charity, given to a think tank to just make some bullshit you hand to a kid who will never fucking watch it or read it.
This was just a ditch that was dug, basically.
Yeah on our patreon we have a tier that lets people you know choose which thing that we cover on our on our Podcast what a cartoon and I think if they chose this we would tell them the free market does not want this I've looked at the views on the YouTube video.
Honestly, $30,000 for the first episode, $10,000 for the rest.
You guys just rope it in.
It's over.
All that for $2 million?
They say they've sold millions of books.
Where are those kids, the seemingly millions of children who have read these books?
Why didn't they show up for this cartoon?
I hate their brag at the end where they're like, you know what, this wasn't paid for by Hollywood subsidies like every other thing.
It's like, yeah, I'm sure it wasn't.
And also, you would turn down if somebody from Paramount Plus or Peacock showed up and said, hey, do you want to be on this thing?
They would be like, yes, please, yes, yes, right now.
Absolutely.
Yeah, this wasn't paid for by Hollywood elites.
This was paid for by the blood-drinking ghouls that you haven't even heard of.
Yeah absolutely.
They sold millions of books but those books are just like filling multiple basements right now and storage and like storage garages and that's it like that they've been sold but all the four people.
I think those books are fairly popular like I mean they're doing a good job of promoting them at least because I get ads for them on Facebook and People seem to know what they actually are, which is weird.
Yeah, I wish this were more popular just so that I could have had a better comment section to peruse on YouTube, because the only good comment was like, I am literally crying with joy.
I have tears of joy by how great this cartoon is.
It's like, wow.
Wow.
It's fucked up, man.
You know it's smart to make the lead a grandma in this because I would even like you said the Facebook ads like that must be the only like honest sales they make of this are from elderly people on Facebook who are like this will be a good thing to show my kids that they need to see instead of all the the thing that's turning them into transgender socialists.
I could see my dickhead grandma buying my kid this.
I love her but she could buy she'd buy my kid this.
Well, Talking Simpsons, thank you so much for talking Tuttle Twins with us today.
Why don't you go ahead and tell people where they can listen to and support your shows?
Sure, you can find Talking Simpsons on any podcast platform you might be subscribed to.
We're on everything, basically.
We also have a Patreon.
That's at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons.
And on the Patreon, we have a lot of bonus content.
We've done miniseries for a lot of other animated series.
Including some ongoing ones we're doing right now.
We have monthly episodes of Talking Futurama, our Futurama podcast, and Talking of the Hill, our King of the Hill podcast.
Those run monthly and we've done like a ton of those over the past five years.
There's over 100 episodes of bonus stuff outside of the Talking Simpsons podcast.
Love that Talking of the Hill.
Oh, thank you!
No, it's been a lot of fun to dig into.
Bob was just reminding me we have a rather libertarian episode of King of the Hill coming up soon.
Which one is it?
It's called Junkie Business and it's about how the Americans with Disabilities Act destroy businesses because you have to make accommodations for drug addicts.
Yeah, that's a good one.
That's the one where Hank quits so that Buck Strickland has the amount of employees that exempts him from the Americans with Disabilities Act so that they can fire the drug addict.
Yeah.
Mike Judge is the opposite of Broken Clock.
He's only broken one hour a day.
Yeah.
That's a good way to describe it.
But yeah, Talking Simpsons podcast, wherever you find them and patreon.com slash talking simpsons.
And yeah, I'm H-E-N-E-R-E-Y-G on Twitter.
And follow me.
I'm Bob Servo on Twitter, B-O-B-S-E-R-V-O.
Great.
Yeah, thanks so much for coming on and doing this episode.
It was very fun.
Super fun.
Thank you so much.
I hate that I had to watch this, guys, but thank you.
It was a ton of fun to do the podcast about.
Yeah, we appreciate it.
Now I can annoy everyone with my Tuttle Twins knowledge and I can't wait.
Yeah, if you want to support our show and get a bonus episode every single week, as well as instant access to our previous bonus episode catalog, we've only been doing the Patreon for like two and a half years now, so there's only a couple hundred episodes there, but it's Steal at $3.11 a month, you get instant access to all that bonus content as well as, yeah, a bonus episode every single week right in your podcast app like you listen to any other podcast.
$5 a month gets you access to Tony's bonus podcast, Last Responders, about the woke first responders, body horror, body positive television show.
9-1-1 and 9-1-1 Lone Star.
It's a very insane show.
I highly recommend subscribing to that podcast even if you don't watch it because it's crazy.
Yeah, yeah.
Apologize for the nightmares from the Creepy AF episode.
We try to let you know.
Sorry about that one.
Follow the show at MinionDeathCult on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
I am at fleildy, F-L-I-E-L-D-Y.
Tony is at wordisbond, and we'll talk to you again soon.
