All Episodes
Previous Next
Sept. 10, 2020 - I Don't Speak German
01:18:34
64: Politics and Street Violence, with Ed Burmila

This week, Daniel is joined by a special guest Ed Burmila who blogs at Gin and Tacos and hosts the Mass for Shut-Ins podcast.  A free-form chat about the way things are and the way they're going.  Fun despite the depressing subject matter. Content Warnings, as ever. Ed's Twitter: @edburmila Gin and Tacos blog: http://www.ginandtacos.com/ Mass for Shut-Ins: https://massforshutins.libsyn.com/  

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
This is I Don't Speak German.
I'm Jack Graham, he him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel he him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he him, about what he learned from years of listening to today's Nazis, white nationalists, white supremacists, and what they say to white nationalists, white supremacists, and what
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
Content warnings always apply.
Alright, and welcome to episode 64 of I Don't Speak German, the podcast in which I talk to people that I know about terrible people that I don't know.
Since you're hearing my voice for the first time, or since you're hearing my voice first, and I'm Daniel, you know that Jack will not be joining us today, unfortunately.
He wanted to be here, but I do have a guest, and this is a first-time guest to this podcast, someone that I've been reading for a long, long time, since George W. Bush was president.
At the very least.
And that is Ed Bermella, formerly, or I guess currently, of the Gin and Tacos blog, and who does the podcast Mass for Shut-ins, which is a highly recommended both read and listen.
Ed, thanks for joining me.
Yeah, I'm happy to be here.
I'm a big fan of I Don't Speak German myself, and I don't speak German, although I guess you should edit that out, because that's the joke everyone makes at the beginning, right?
But yeah, I'm happy to join you.
That's kind of the one requirement, is that no one is allowed to speak German, you know, on this podcast.
Yeah, we did have one kind of vague German speaker, although she laughed at the fact that anyone would claim that she spoke German, but...
Yeah, so today we are going to do a little bit of a kind of, not a grab baggy episode, but it was just sort of more of a like, let's do something a little bit goofy to begin with.
We are going to continue briefly our coverage of the Weinstein saga, and talk about the bullshit that is the Unity 2020 campaign.
And I do this mostly because Ed actually has a PhD in political science, And I just thought it would be fun to get his opinion on exactly where this is or is not going to go.
And then we will transition away from that into discussing violence in the street and what that might imply for the future of this country, the United States.
And apparently we're going to be talking to some degree about Yugoslavia and possibly Ireland, and those are both comparisons that fill me with great optimism.
We can also talk about the Yugo if you want, the car, but I'm not aware of any Irish-made car.
Well, the DeLorean was made in Northern Ireland, I think, right?
So that might be appropriate.
Yeah.
We can also do that.
One thing that the audience who may not know your work, Ed, as opposed to being a political scientist and a commentator, also likes to tell stories on his podcast, and so many of them involve either Cold War geo-strategy or bat guano, or both.
Ideally both.
So yeah, let's start off and let's talk a little bit about the Unity 2020 thing.
And I don't want to spend a ton of time on this, but they did pick a final six candidates.
And I don't know, I guess the way that they did this was they were drafting Candidates and the idea is they're not even going to they didn't even put this to the candidates first They were just drafting candidates from their like audience base, and then they sort of like had discussions with them online They've been doing these like fireside chats on Brett's Weinstein on Brett's YouTube channel, and they picked their final six I think is abusing that I think four of the six have military experience and
And I think three of those were former Navy SEALs.
And so the final six were Tulsi Gabbard, Jesse Ventura, Andrew Yang, Dan Crenshaw, William McRaven, and John Jocko Willink.
Host of the Jocko Podcast, creatively named.
Yes.
Which apparently is just sort of this right-wing podcaster kind of fitness guru guy.
I've never heard of him.
No, he's written a lot of books about leadership, apparently.
You already know that we were speaking just before we started doing this.
He was the only person on this list that neither you nor I had any idea who he is.
So the other names kind of jump off if you're familiar with politics.
I don't think any of those five want anything to do with this.
Andrew Yang appeared at the Democratic Convention, right?
Gabbard has already endorsed Biden, as has Yang.
Crenshaw, I don't think, wants anything to do with any party except the one he's in.
And, you know, McRaven, I'd be shocked if he even knows he's on this list.
I only know McRaven from his, like, commencement address, I think at West Point that he did, that gets played at, like, corporate events of, you know, like, training seminars of, like, learn how to make your bed and you, too, can grow revenue by 6% next quarter.
Right.
And by make your own bed, we mean learn how to fire everyone and outsource this to, I don't know, let's say Indonesia and, you know, that's how you can grow your revenue.
But yeah, it's very amusing to me, the amount of attention.
You know, Weinstein and his brother Eric, I don't know how familiar you are with Eric, but I mean, they're both I've spent the last about six weeks delving into these people in excruciating detail.
And when I say excruciating, I mean excruciating.
Yeah, I mean, I was aware of Eric vaguely in the past because he, prior to Brett becoming, you know, a political figure, I guess we could say, when all that stuff went down at Evergreen State.
Which, by the way, the racket of being a right-wing academic is a great racket to get involved in.
You know, I consider dabbling in it, you know, just for profit, not for love or anything like that.
You know, these people... You were gonna pull a Dave Rubin, were you?
Yeah, you know, every university has one or two where they just, all they do is grind this axe about how hard it is to be a right-winger in academia and, well, you know, look at the amount of attention and, I assume, money that Brett Weinstein is made off of this.
I don't know if his last name is generally Weinstein or Weinstein.
I don't mean any disrespect either way.
It's Weinstein.
I did have to look that up when I was younger, but yeah.
The last three episodes before the most recent were all about the Weinstein Brothers and Peter Thiel, as it happens.
Yeah, Eric manages one of Peter Thiel's financial entities, but You know, I first became aware of Eric when he was in his physics, hard science, huckster phase.
And this was a very brief, minor sort of story back in, I don't know, 2010, 2012, like the mid-Obama years, you know.
It just seems like both of these guys are P.T.
Barnum, you know?
Whatever they were going to do with their careers, ultimately what they were going to do is create these... You know, I don't even know what Eric Weinstein's theory or whatever was.
All I know is that other physicists generally considered it ridiculous that it has something to do with there being like 30 dimensions or whatever.
And it's like, this is just carnival shit!
You know?
And now you look at what Brett has done since his, you know, email to his colleagues went viral or whatever.
It's just carnival shit, you know?
There's nothing substantial to it and it's so profitable.
That's the thing that drives me crazy about it is, you know, these guys just laugh themselves to sleep every night thinking about how easy it is To, you know, fall into this gravy train that the intellectual dark web has become.
You know, the idea that these people consider themselves outcasts or whatever, they have this enormous audience, you know?
Joe Rogan has what?
I think I've seen numbers like 40 or 50 million listeners worldwide.
I mean, Jesus Christ.
Could be that high, yeah.
I mean, he's like the number one podcast in the world, and both Weinsteins have been on several times.
They're definitely in his universe, and regular listeners to his show, which I am not one, would certainly know who they are, you know?
So, these are the kind of people that You know, Brett in particular has really made a lot of hay out of this idea of himself being sort of oppressed or a silenced voice or whatever, and you know, if you subject that idea to any scrutiny, it's just idiotic, but... Right.
Yeah, Unity 2020 is... Yeah, the final two, because they then, like, narrowed down the field to the final two, So the idea is they pick one candidate on the center left and one candidate on the center right.
Right.
Noted center leftist Tulsi Gabbard.
Right, and noted center rightist Dan Crenshaw as well.
Dan Crenshaw, yeah.
Tulsi is the center left candidate and Dan Crenshaw is the center right candidate.
And the idea is that we are getting rid of all the extreme leftists, the authoritarian left and the authoritarian right.
Meaning people who want poor people to get healthcare on the left.
And like the most overt of the overt neo-Nazis on the right.
Like those are the two extremes.
Everyone else is within the balance of conversation.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Like it's so like it's just such – the reason I kind of mentioned it to you is like again as someone who has like an academic background in political science.
I just look at this as sort of an outsider or someone who's just kind of followed politics as an amateur for 20 years.
And just go like, well, this is deeply stupid.
Like this doesn't match the way – this doesn't match the way people vote.
This doesn't match anything.
Like there's no sense in which, you know, like – A giant bulk of, like, Biden and Trump supporters are going to discover this in the months before the election and run some kind of, like, write-in campaign?
Apparently, like, he released his, like, idea about how they're gonna get ballot access.
Because he didn't even bring this up until, like, August, right?
Yeah, way too late.
Right.
The way he's doing ballot access is he's hoping that the Libertarian and Green Party tickets will just adopt his candidates.
Yeah.
You know, if you're a third party, the presidential election is not the place to start.
You know, if third party candidates can be successful, which is very hard for them to do, you have to go down to the local level before you find where they can win some offices.
You know, you go to the Libertarian Party's website and try to find where their success stories are, if they're elected officials or whatever, you've got to go really down the political pecking order before you find a couple.
That's because at the presidential level especially, people are just locked into the idea that here are the two candidates that are going to, or you know, who are going to win, and I have to pick which one of them I prefer.
And I understand the logic of What the problems with the two-party system are, but third-party candidates running in a presidential race and pouring their resources into that is really not the place to start to build a party.
And this isn't even that.
This is like something It literally is what you would expect if a year ago we tried to brainstorm what a publicity-hounding YouTube personality's idea of like a presidential campaign ticket would be.
I mean, this is just ridiculous.
Right.
That's the kind of thing that, you know, Brett excels at.
We're talking about it.
It's gotten a tiny bit of attention or whatever.
Obviously, it's something that comes up a lot in that media universe that we're not a part of, either as consumers or participants.
Maybe viewers of Tucker Carlson take this seriously or whatever.
I don't know.
I try not to.
I don't even think viewers of Tucker Carlson take it seriously.
Like Tucker, because he announced the plan on Tucker Carlson's show.
Which is kind of a giveaway.
Which is definitely a giveaway, right.
He considers Tucker Carlson to be, I don't agree with everything he says, but he's got some really reasonable points about the middle class in America and how they're being screwed by these elite.
Are you listening to yourself?
I can't keep complaining about Brett Weinstein.
I've been doing it for a month and a half.
I understand.
One of my least favorite things is when people on The weird sort of Glenn Greenwald left.
Make that commentary about Tucker Carlson.
The guy's show, at least in the last couple years, you know, your listeners probably know, his career has undergone an evolution constantly.
He used to be a George Will wannabe, you know, look at my little fucking bowtie.
And But for the last couple of years, we have to admit, if you're paying any attention at all to it, his show is just a white nationalist propaganda forum.
And when you get people like Taibi or, you know, Glenn Greenwald, whatever, who pull this, well, actually, he's more respectful and open to my ideas than the mainstream media is.
Which, first of all, who gives a shit?
What does that prove?
And second of all, he has you on a show for A reason.
It's to serve his purposes and his talking points, you know?
So to sit there and be like, oh, I want to thank Tucker for giving me a chance to air my views between his segments entitled Immigrant Crime Wave and, you know, whatever the fuck came after.
Immigrant Crime Wave and Antifa Antics.
Those are the two.
And in between, it's like talking about, like, why Biden is bad.
Like, that's it.
You don't think that you're a part of that structure, right?
We don't talk about Joe Biden.
We don't talk about Joe Biden.
Joe Biden is bad.
I'm not disagreeing with that.
But, like, there's a time and a place, right?
And all this fits into a context.
And if all you're looking at when you view someone like Tucker Carlson is the Quote-unquote economic populism.
I disagree with the characterization of that, but like that's sort of the way it gets framed, right?
And you're missing the fact that he's also demonizing immigrants and he's demonizing, you know, like leftists and, you know, anyone who, you know, it's suddenly it's like, no, no, this is this is what we used to call third positionism back in the day and what we still kind of call third positionism.
It's overt Nazi shit.
It's just he's not talking about the Jews, so nobody seems to recognize that except, you know, us.
So it's a great feeling.
This is one of the things that fascism is so good at.
This is part of the strategy, is to identify wherever your audience is, whoever you're talking to, find the one thing you have that will appeal to them.
You can go to an audience that's receptive to Glenn Greenwald or somebody like that and you can make it sound like you're sympathetic by focusing on the one aspect of Tucker Carlson's worldview or ideology That he has in common with them, right?
As long as you ignore all the other shit, then you come away from it thinking, you know, he's good at it.
This is how they do it.
They try to make their viewpoint sound reasonable, and they try to emphasize that there are already some parts of it that you're going to be sympathetic to, you know, and that's what Tucker Carlson's show is all about.
It's the soft, Opening, you know, the Fisher Price My First Fascism Kit for viewers who don't want to think of themselves as, like, fascists, but, you know, they might not be, but they've definitely taken the application and filled it out, you know?
They haven't submitted it yet, but they're at least thinking about it, you know?
Well, it's also defined by its enemies, right?
Like, the whole thing, you know, I mean, again, I've been kind of following Rhett still, and like, every episode he spends, you know, enormous amounts of time complaining about, like, protesters and rioters, and quote-unquote, and like, sort of violent BLM critical race theorists in the street, you know, trying to burn down civilization, and something has to be done about these people, and like, ultimately, you know, what you're doing is you're allying yourself with the, you know, with the establishment structure, with the powers that be, who are looking to crush
You know, leftists, for lack of a better structure.
And again, where did we see this historically?
And where have we seen this historically?
And maybe this is a place to sort of get into our darker topic.
So we start off talking about Tucker Carlson's adjacency to overt fascism, and then we get darker.
That's our strategy on the show.
Nice.
We hook you, just like Tucker does, and now we hit you with the hard shit.
One of my favorite things about Gin and Tacos is that it has long had the heading, Dopamine's Only Natural Predator, and we try to take that to heart here, and I don't speak German as well.
I don't know, I just got used to writing so many things that people would get to the end and be like, wow, that was great, and I hated it.
Like, I'm just so depressed now.
I don't know, maybe that's my one gift is pointing this kind of shit out.
But, you know, watching what's been unfolding over the past couple of months, which, um, You know, you're gonna get different viewpoints on this depending on who you ask, but for me, it's the reason why I went so vocally and so hard for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
It's not because I like Hillary Clinton, believe me.
I felt very strongly that this Trump thing needed not to happen because I had a very clear sort of Idea that this is gonna be where it was, you know, leading, and that by the time this guy was done, whenever that is, and in whatever form he leaves the office that he holds, there's not gonna be anything left standing behind him.
It will all be on fire, you know?
And that seems to be what he wants, and here we are.
And so I'm assuming that you have some historical precedents that you would use for that, that you would like to discuss here.
You know, I think a lot of us saw that, and I was very kind of pro-Hillary, and I think in a similar sense of like, look, we have to, we have to, don't play around in 2016, you know, like, seriously, vote for Hillary.
It's necessary.
I will take the neoliberal over the fascist.
It seemed like people didn't take that.
I live in Michigan, and that one really hurt.
Her campaign was not well run.
I see a lot of the same strategies, and I use that term in air quotes, being used in 2020, and it makes me real nervous.
There's a book coming out that a friend of mine named Seth Maskett wrote, a political scientist at University of Denver.
It's called Learning from Loss, and the only quibble I have with the book, after having read the advanced copy of it, is it pretty clearly demonstrates the Democrats didn't learn anything from 2016.
It's a good description of what they've done since 2016, but learning from it is nowhere in the narrative, you know?
But the I feel like we're at a point where people have been habituated to, or you know, sort of the frog in the slowly boiling water, we've gotten to the point where we're accepting a certain level of violence, right?
And I don't mean that as a criticism of protesters, I mean the idea of people walking around Armed, having declared themselves some sort of force for maintaining law and order, is now just a thing that happens.
And that's a really dangerous point for any society to get to, you know?
We've always had in the United States these people who think of themselves as a militia, but now we have the police kind of tacitly condoning them by the refusal to police them.
And in some cases, like in Portland, we have, you know, like Proud Boy, like High Up members of the Proud Boys, who are, you know, literally, cops would advise them to leave an area so they weren't forced to arrest them on, like, outstanding warrants for violent action and that sort of thing.
Like, you know, we have not just, like, implicit, but explicit collaboration between members of the You know, Portland Police Bureau and the Proud Boys, who act effectively as sort of a Trump street enforcement squad.
Right.
He would certainly like to think of them that way.
And it looks like, you know, they're taking up the offer that Trump is kind of explicitly extending to them.
But historical tidbit I keep bringing up, you know what the police did to Emmett Till when they arrested him?
Nothing.
They called a bunch of people they knew who were Klansmen and released the boy, and he was a boy, he was 14 years old, from their custody and handed him over to their brother Buford and their cousin so-and-so or whatever, and they meted out the violence, you know?
And that's something that You know, I really can't emphasize strongly enough when people talk about this, is states since World War II are not only smarter about how they violently oppress parts of their own population, but they've realized they don't need to do it directly.
You find the other part of the population that wants to, you know, the half of the working class that wants to kill the other half of the working class, and you set them against each other and you just turn a blind eye to the activities of whichever side you want to endorse.
You know, that's how lynching happened.
Everybody knew who did it.
Everybody knew it was against the law.
There was just this state decision to condone it and not enforce the law and wink and laugh and everybody could talk about it at the bar.
Because they knew they weren't going to be prosecuted.
And I really have a strong fear that we're starting to head in that direction with these people who describe themselves as militias and grant themselves law enforcement power, you know?
That kid in Wisconsin, 17 years old... Kyle Rittenhouse.
Kyle Rittenhouse.
Yes, and they let him leave the state?
You know?
I mean, just the very idea of that, that the police took no interest in this person after he shot and killed two people with, you know, the same ammunition that gets issued in the military, it's really... it's creating in me a lot of anxiety that we're starting to get in this direction where the police are
You know, fundamentally out of control and making political decisions to simply not arrest and prosecute people who align with their view of the world, this pro-power, pro-authoritarian sort of view of the world.
And that's what Trumpism has been to me.
It's people being more comfortable doing these sorts of things because they have this Wink and nudge understanding that they're not going to be prosecuted, that the force, you know, law enforcement is not going to act against them.
And that's disturbing to me.
It's disturbing on a level that most political stuff, you know, kind of rolls off my back.
I don't get this worked up about net neutrality, you know.
But a couple of the things that when we started talking about doing this episode that I threw out there was, you know, what's going on right now at these protests has a very Northern Ireland kind of feel to it, you know?
Sure.
The Ulster Protestants dressing up in their orange and having a parade through Catholic neighborhoods, you know?
What was the purpose of that other than to, A, start a fight so that you could say, oh, look, these violent animal Catholics You know, they need to be suppressed with all the force we can muster against them, but also to just sort of assert this cultural dominance.
We can do this because the police and the state, etc.
are on our side.
You know, that's what things like that say.
Showing up and having, you know, these patriot prayer and all these other affiliated kind of groups, or whether they're not organized in any way, you know, showing up and having these rallies has the sole purpose of trying to start fights, you know?
Right.
Dress up like a soldier, you wear this quasi-paramilitary gear, you bring your rifle, and you go there looking to start a fight, so that when the fight starts, then you can just say, oh, well, you know, we tried, but this is what the vermin people we want to exterminate have chosen, and now we need to just unleash as much violence against them as we can.
You know, that has a lot of precedent.
The United States is not inventing anything new right now in politics.
This is how you do it.
You identify the group you want to oppress, you antagonize them, and you make it clear that they are disenfranchised and law enforcement and everybody's simply not listening to them, and then you tell another part of the population that is hostile toward them, hey, have at it, you know?
Fortunately for the people in Northern Ireland in that conflict, most of it was in the form of fists and sticks and things like that.
But you know, a lot of people died up there as well in citizen on citizen violence.
And I feel like if we go much farther down this road of the police policing one side of these protests, we're going to start to have We're going to fundamentally have to confront some things that we're not used to dealing with in American politics.
It makes me nervous, that's all I can say.
Absolutely.
So, you know, just to kind of back up slightly, I mean, I definitely agree with that, and patron prayers have been put on this since right after the election.
I mean, you know, Joey Gibson kind of founds it either in late 2016, early 2017, I don't have the full history out in front of me.
But it was always kind of designed to be something that was, that absolutely has, you know, kind of overtly white nationalist elements in it.
But it mostly sort of divorces itself from those kind of overt symbols, and it mostly, you know, disavows members who kind of express that sort of thing too openly.
I mean, in that way, it has kind of similar, in terms of other valences, other spaces, it has similar kind of meaning to, you know, something like Identity Europa, who would, like, avoid being, like, straight-up Nazis, but then, like, you'd kind of find their Discord chats, and they'd be sharing Hitler memes all over the place, and that sort of thing.
Right.
a sort of better optics than that.
And certainly since Unite the Right, they have been very circumspect about like letting anything out there that isn't like pretty, you know, kind of generically pro-Trump.
And in that sense, they were, they're able to sort of camouflage themselves as like a, just a, you know, a pro-Trump group, a Trump supporter, you know, we're just ordinary Trump supporters, which A, is already really bad, but B, you know, like we're ordinary Trump supporters terrorizing citizens on the streets of Portland. like we're ordinary Trump supporters terrorizing citizens on the streets So it's fine, you know, like. - They have definitely learned a great deal.
I went to grad school in Bloomington, Indiana, and I don't know how much you know, but some shit has gone down there with white supremacists, whatever you want to call them, neo-Nazis.
They are so good now at playing this Who Me card, you know, where they present themselves as, you know, look, it happened in the New York Times this past week.
They allowed Patriot Prayer to self-describe, you know.
Any group that goes in there, you know, we have this image in our head that if they don't have a toothbrush mustache and a swastika, they're not Nazis, you know, that people can only be that kind of extremist if they, you know, look a certain way and everything.
If they're not walking around in a white Klan robe, they're not actually, you know, the racists or they're not actually dangerous to anybody.
And it just drives me crazy when media outlets that are supposed to know better fall for that kind of framing.
You know, a group like Patriot Prayer, you know, oh, no, we're just concerned citizens, you know, everybody just going to describe themselves that way when what their real plan and motivation is, is to enforce an extreme worldview and do violence to other people who don't fit into that worldview.
Right.
And it's so infuriating to see that normalized, but I feel like, again, the last four years have really amped up what people consider to be a normal level of political discourse.
You know, we're not surprised by it anymore, you know?
Right.
We're not surprised by the president retweeting white supremacist stuff because he's done it so many times that now when it happens, you just go, oh, I thought he already did that.
You know, it's just become another normal part.
And, you know, we're getting to that point very quickly about hearing about violence at these protests and stuff like that.
A couple of different Instances now over the past six months, since if we use George Floyd as roughly a starting point for the timeline, several people have died at these protests.
Several people have tried to drive a car through these protests.
Just happened again this week.
You know, the fact that it was comically bad and didn't succeed in killing anybody, or hopefully I think really even hurting anybody, doesn't mean it didn't happen.
Yeah, no, they're happening, I mean, for a while, it was almost every night you would see, you would see these sorts of things.
And I know there are, like, journalists who have, like, put together, like, 150 different, like, cars driving down people incidents, some of which involved literal police officers running down civilians.
A handful seemed to be, you know, sort of anti-cop protesters or sort of leftist protesters.
I mean, it's not that it's universally on one side or the other, but it's overwhelmingly against the Black Lives Matter, anti-fascist, anti-cop, leftist organizers.
And there's an increasing rhetoric online in the spaces that I follow, in these extreme far-right spaces.
And this rhetoric shifts over into the more mainstream sources as to, "No, it's my right as a driver, as someone driving on the road.
I've got to get to work.
I've got to get where I've got to go.
If you're a pedestrian, you're in my way, and it's my right to run you over.
And they're literally just kind of pushing that.
We've seen at least attempts at legislation to sort of just make it legal for Republican lawmakers.
And the one thing that sort of got in the way of that was James Alex Fields, You know, in Charlottesville, in Unite the Right, you know, murdering Heather Heyer and injuring, I think, 24 other people, I think, was the final number.
But now we're seeing a James Alex Fields every weekend, practically.
You know, sometimes, many times a weekend.
So, I mean, this is the degree to which this stuff is normalized, right?
I mean, I remember Unite the Right.
I mean, you know, a lot of people in my orbit were kind of following it online, you know, as it was happening.
And I think that was the reason, one of the reasons that became such a huge incident was because it was planned far enough in advance, and there was enough kind of media attention that, like, CNN had cameras right there, and Vice News is producing that documentary, and there's all this sort of, you know, like, real media attention that's happening.
At the same time, those events, that kind of footage of people brawling in the streets has now become so normalized.
We're just so used to seeing that.
We're so used to seeing even police teargassing Portland, police teargassing cities.
We just see it so often now.
It has just become part of our background radiation in which, you know, suddenly, you know, people are literally getting killed from some 17-year-old dipshit who Really who decided he couldn't wait another six months to turn 18 and become a real cop and he had to go like kill some people ahead of time, right and Liberal commentators people.
I mean I was kind of watching like some destiny streams this afternoon and he's literally sitting there like parsing the Situation we know he clearly this is self-defense and he's arguing over the these details I was like you're missing the bigger picture and of course, what do we know about liberals?
They will always side with the fascist over the over the communist every time so Well, when it comes down to it, historically, that is the tendency.
I think one of the things they've done here is they have made the key mistake of accepting Trump's framing of this, right?
Because they want to condemn both sides.
You know, they want to condemn the protesters too, or, you know, the people who are doing property damage or whatever, as if that's important here.
But as soon as you start having that conversation, you've lost.
You know, you have already seeded... We saw this back in, you know, in a superficial example back in 2004 during the Bush years, which you already indicated you're one of the few people who hasn't completely forgotten everything that happened.
You know, he paints pictures now!
Great.
Look at him being goofy with Ellen.
Come on, he's just America's grandpa now.
Let's forget the million Iraqi dead, why don't we?
Yeah, he gave Michelle Obama a mint, great.
The fact that that man, the fact that that resistance blue wave Twitter decided to humanize that man and accept him as one of their own, And all those neocon shills, like Rick Wilson and Bill Kristol and Jonah Goldberg, who were the hated opposition, rightly so, for decades, for like a decade and a half, there's just something in the brain, right?
It's such that Trump is seen as this existential threat on his own, as opposed to a result of a process, and a result of a party, and a result of Things that we're all doing wrong.
Sorry, that's off the beaten path there, but it is...
It's the focus on Trump as an individual and not as the logical end result of something that's been happening for 30, 40, 50 years, you know.
I can draw you a straight line from Father Coughlin through the John Birch Society to where we are today.
The only thing that's happened is these people have been mainstreamed by the Republican Party.
They've always been there, you know, in small numbers, maybe in larger numbers than we realize.
Who knows?
But I have a plan for one day to do an episode about Richard Vigery, and we'll see.
Oh my god.
I don't even want to participate.
I just want to sit there and listen to it.
Let me know when you're done with it.
The Bush years were where the Republicans really mastered this technique of setting the agenda, then getting the Democrats to accept it, but to disagree in some way, which just doesn't work fundamentally.
The real small example I like to come back to is the flag lapel pins.
The first time some Republican He said a Democrat didn't support the troops or was unpatriotic or hated America or whatever because they weren't wearing a flag pin.
And then the Democrats' response is to start wearing the flag pins rather than saying, who the fuck are you that you've given yourself this authority to judge what superficial symbols people need to be wearing?
To prove that they love their country or whatever.
You know, go fuck yourself is the right response, but instead their response is, oh yeah, well we need to start doing that.
That way they can't criticize us for it anymore.
They're just going to move on and find something else to criticize.
I mean, 2004 is such a microcosm of this.
I think you tweeted something like, 2004 has never ended a couple of days ago or something like that.
I'm getting real 2004 vibes.
Obviously, coronavirus affects all of that in a very real way.
I don't know, we can talk about what we anticipate for this at the end here, but the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, right?
And so, because the whole thing was John Kerry had gotten three Purple Hearts, I believe, During his service in Vietnam and gotten to go home.
And then the whole thing was, well, he wasn't courageous enough because his wounds weren't valid.
Because, you know, he was, he got shot in the ass or something.
I mean, it was all this very, you know, like wounds that he, but he wasn't like literally like, like stomping down Viet Cong and like he lost an arm or something.
And so therefore his service wasn't valid.
As opposed to George W. Bush.
Go ahead.
You know, Max Cleland, who was running for Senate in Georgia, had lost all of his limbs, and that wasn't good enough either, right?
So once you accept the framing, you've just given up.
And I feel like with what's going on right now, Biden's natural instinct is to try to both sides it.
Which he immediately did, and you've given up.
You've admitted, yes, the president's attempt to frame this as violent civil disorder over, you know, you see people post stuff on Twitter, you know, our cities are on fire, and you know, you're talking about, they're not.
You know, there are protests going on in a few places at any given moment.
My sister and her three small kids live in Portland, and I asked them how things are going in Portland, and they're like, why?
What's going on?
You know?
If you're not immediately upon the six square block area where all these things have been happening in Portland, It's pretty effectively isolated from a lot of people's lives.
So we have this impression that's created through the media that everything is violence and burning buildings and all this stuff.
It's actually remarkably localized, and for the most part, You know, if you don't go seek it out, it's not poking its nose into people's lives, which is, you know, is good and bad in a lot of ways, but... Right, and if anything, you know, you see posts where people will talk about how, like, you know, they do live close enough to downtown that what's really affecting them is the clouds of tear gas that are being, you know, wafted down their street every day, you know?
Right.
I have small children who don't want to breathe tear gas.
Right, right.
I feel like this is another thing that you really see in this sort of like, kind of like, rational centrist, you know, kind of infrastructure.
I've been kind of tracking Tim Pool for a while, and obviously the Weinstein brothers, particularly Brett.
Talk about, like, these violent protesters.
They talk about, like, you know, kids out there and, like, you know, wanting to burn the system down, etc., etc., and not talk at all about the violence of the police force that is actually, like, you know, working against them.
And we recorded a whole episode on this back when the protests first started, so there's no need to kind of get in deep with that.
But I think what's, and I think this is something you pointed out to me that I'm sort of processing a little bit more fully here, is that, you know, now we're almost seeing, we're seeing this sort of shift from, you know, the police aren't even really doing this job for themselves, they're now sort of like pushing these militia groups and these kind of like self-appointed actors, and they're giving them the license to go and do these activities.
There was an incident in Portland where This guy who was known to be a trainer of police, who had this sense of background, who had a military background, was tossing pipe bombs at protesters.
And whatever happened to that story?
That seems like something we should look into.
That seems like a really more significant thing than some gutter punks shooting bottle rockets at a brick building, to me.
When everybody I understand why people focused on it because it's so shocking on a lot of levels But when Trump was I'm gonna send in federal law enforcement And we're just gonna snatch people in vans and then release them a few minutes later To me the most disturbing part of that was not the civil rights aspect of it.
It's the reinforcement of Who is gonna get policed in this situation?
They're not pulling in these people walking around armed and saying what are you doing here with you know?
A pipe bomb and 500 rounds and body armor you bought off eBay that somebody stole from the military, probably, you know?
Why are they, again, policing only one side of this, I guess, conflict, if you want to call it?
That sends a message, you know?
You people over here who, if you want to beat up some hippies, you know, they're still reliving 1960s in their mind.
If you want to crack a few hippies over the skull, we'll look the other way.
We won't do anything.
And that messaging, the more consistent it gets, they keep ratcheting up the violence.
We have so much historical precedent for that.
And you finally get the message, hey, nobody's ever going to punish us for doing this.
Kyle Rittenhouse is going to have a trial.
I already lose sleep thinking about what the outcome of the trial is going to be and what's going to happen.
Right.
You know, we all know what's going to happen when that goes to trial.
And, you know, it just continues to reinforce the message.
Hey, you know, if you want to kick and punch a few of them, that's fine.
Oh, you want to throw a pipe bomb at them?
Maybe that's fine, too.
Oh, you want to shoot at them?
Yeah, we can handle you shooting at them.
That's fine.
And the more these people get the message that They're not going to have any kind of sanction for whatever they do, the more they're going to keep doing this sort of thing.
And that's so obvious to a lot of us, and for some reason, you know, the people I'm mad at here are not the Republicans, because I expect it from them.
It's when the Democrats buy into the framing.
You know, you need to be the party that's trying to do something about this, and instead you're both sides-ing and talking about Well, yeah, you know, burning down a Wendy's is bad, too.
Like, okay, maybe.
But, you know, we're talking about two things that are not equal.
I mean, granted, the Baconator is great.
I mean, we're not arguing against that.
The Baconator is a fine product made by... I don't think I've eaten...
I don't think I've eaten at a Wendy's since about 1988, when they used to have the Super Bar, you know, which I don't know if you remember that miracle of the 1980s, but...
What was it, $3.99 all-you-could-eat buffet of just leftover Wendy's burgers, like ground into taco meat or something?
I don't think I remember that, but that sounds like a moment in the 80s for sure.
It really was extraordinarily 80s when we didn't think about food safety, we didn't think about getting sick, we just knew America was number one and it kicked ass and I was eight years old and I loved it.
I'm sure.
Nothing wrong with that.
I'll send you a link on the Wendy's Superbar.
Maybe it's ringing bells with some of your older listeners.
Yeah, we'll stick it in the show notes for sure.
Yeah, no.
That'll be our one link.
That'll be our one link is to the Superbar.
And that'll be the only thing anybody ends up interested in.
So tell me about this bar.
Hold on, Wendy's used to have a bar?
I mean, you know, and God, we could go on and on about like, you know, what coronavirus is doing, like Taco Bell, like all these fast food places are They're ultra simplifying their menu now, and so, you know, Taco Bell's dropping, like, all their, like, complicated products, and it's just gonna be your, like, base standard Taco Bell fare, and apparently they're remodeling everything to be, like, wholly drive-thru.
It's kind of a, I don't know, what, there is a part of me that's really interested in what coronavirus, what another year of lockdowns is gonna do to, you know, the fast food service industry.
I think it's just, there's gonna be before and after, ultimately.
I agree with you a hundred percent, and something I bring up with my friends a lot when we just talk about, you know, check-in, make sure everybody's doing okay with everything that's going on, I feel like America is particularly poorly suited to have everybody Kind of confined to their home, only interacting with the world through social media and Zoom meetings and stuff like that.
And just the idea of how fucking crazy everybody is going to be after about another year of people mostly being told to stay home and mostly interacting with the world through Facebook and Zoom meetings, which is...
Just a bizarre sort of way to interact with anybody.
We're going to be 100% nuts if this goes on much longer, and I think it's pretty clear that we're not done with it yet, and we have to keep extending these sorts of things and not giving people the opportunity to get out of their house.
I understand and I support all of the restrictions that have been placed and why they're there.
I'm just worried about what the long-term consequences are going to be while I'm supporting the restrictions.
You know, we can't pretend like this isn't slowly gonna drive another 5-10% of the population nuts to just be at home all the time.
Yeah, and you know, they could have actually just nipped this in the bud by giving us all a little bit more money to stay home.
We could have stayed home for two or three months and basically been over with it by now, you know?
What the rest of the world has done, largely, you know?
You look at countries where the United States thinks of itself as being vastly superior to Slovakia or whatever, but no, they actually did this a lot better than we did, and as a result, they're They're done with it.
We decided we were going to push ahead for the economy, and it didn't help the economy anyway.
You know, we're in the same recession all these other countries are in, and the only thing we have to show for what we did is a much higher death toll.
And Jeff Bezos' wealth has just skyrocketed.
A handful of very, very wealthy men have become even more extraordinarily wealthy.
That's really all we've gained.
Amazon doubling in size.
That's just about it.
That was the total that we got.
Everything is fine.
Everything is fine.
You are correct, though, about there being a before and after.
There's going to be a lot of inflection points, and I know you're partially kidding when you talk about how Taco Bell's going to be different, but Taco Bell is going to be different.
A lot of other things are going to be different in a way that's not going to go back to what we remember before all of this started.
I mean, I live in a place that has a lot of local restaurants, there's a lot of local ethnic food, a lot of great Chinese places and everything kind of in my area.
They're all obviously super locally owned.
And the one thing for me is...
You know, how many of those places are going to even survive through another?
Like, I'm surprised how many of them have made it this far, right?
And so, a whole lot of those places, a lot of them have already had to shut their doors, you know?
Like, places that have been institutions here for three or four decades are now like, you know, well, it's just over, you know?
And so, basically, it's just going to increase the Applebee's, the Applebee's What's the adjective form of Applebee's?
Applebeesian?
I don't know.
The Applebee's-ing of America.
It's just going to enforce that whole thing.
And one of the things that we sort of hear, if you listen to Nazis for long enough, they talk about sort of this, you know, atomification of Americans, and this sort of idea that you're You're no longer able to kind of be part of a cohesive whole and a cohesive society.
And what they mean is something akin to our communities aren't all white anymore, you know.
Right.
But they also sort of imply like the strip malls and all that sort of thing are kind of part of that whole process.
And they sort of see it all as, you know, the Jews have done all this.
We talk about this a fair amount.
I haven't like put it together in this way.
And so ultimately there is like the fact that like my dad's hardware store had to shut down because, you know, he had to go work at the Home Depot to stock shelves overnight because of coronavirus.
And the person that caused all this stuff was not, you know, the virus itself, but because like these stupid lockdowns.
And, you know, you're seeing that a lot if you follow, kind of, like, Patriot groups and some of these, kind of, like, you know, pro-Trump groups, etc., etc.
Yeah.
It's a lot of, like, the virus is fake.
It's all, you know, sort of, like, the big government coming to control your life, etc.
Yeah, this whole thing has just accelerated a lot of these kind of phenomenon that we've already been seeing, and I guess, you know, we've been going on for about an hour here, and I, you know, I think you and I could, we could talk about Taco Bell all night, but I think that, like, to kind of bring it back home and to sort of talk a little bit about what we're, I mean, what do you expect just from your kind of, like, knowledge of the way these things have happened, and
I don't like to talk about electoralism here, but obviously it matters who wins in November and what happens based on who wins and how he wins in November.
It's all very up in the air, but what's your feeling here?
What do you think we're looking forward to?
A lot of people ask me why I'm so, you know, angry all the time about what's going on in the Democratic Party and not talking about the Republican Party.
I think Democrats have convinced themselves that Trump is the problem and Trump will be gone someday and that will be the victory.
Then we can get things back to normal.
And I absolutely promise you if Joe Biden wins this election, and first of all, I think we could talk about what's going to happen in this upcoming election for an hour.
It's going to be like nothing we've ever had to deal with, including 2000 in Florida.
But If Joe Biden manages to get himself into the White House and then the plan is to sit there with your thumb up your ass and not do anything or to turn to deficit reduction, you know, let's punish people more and go on an austerity diet or whatever.
I guarantee you Trump, or whatever logically follows Trump, will be back in two years, or four years, or whatever.
So the reason I'm not excited about the electoral aspects of what's happening right now is, as soon as they settled on Biden, and as soon as they settled on telling people, hey, it's better than Trump, and Joe will just kind of sit there and not do anything for a couple years, and won't that be nice?
All I have in my head is- We won't have to follow the news anymore.
That'll be the- Right.
That's the big promise of the Biden campaign.
You won't have to think about what the president is doing anymore.
And I understand why that's appealing.
But part of me looks ahead and thinks, okay, so we'll get a reprieve for two years where nothing much happens.
And as long as you don't need anything from your government, you'll be able to coast out the next couple of years.
And then this will all be back, except it'll be worse.
Right, because they'll have two or four years or whatever of a Biden administration to demonize, you know, big government and all this, you know, amp up the rhetoric again, take us back to the Tea Party era, you know, except we've, we've, you know, made it even more cancerous and more dangerous since then.
If Biden wins, I think in 2022 or 2024, all these things that Trump represents, even if Trump himself never comes back in politics, all these things that he represents will be back.
That's why I can't get myself as excited about this as I'd like to.
I hope Trump loses.
I think if Trump loses and then is followed by a do-nothing administration or a let's-all-heal-our-wounds administration, let's appoint some Republicans.
No, the lesson we should have gotten from this is that these people never deserve to be anywhere near the levers of power.
We should keep them as far away from any role where they have power or authority as possible.
And instead, they're sifting through the Republican Party and looking for like, oh, where are the good ones?
You know, there are no good ones.
They all contributed to this happening.
And like half the Democratic Party as well, just to be just to be clear.
Yeah.
No, absolutely.
And, you know, you know, turning Mitt Romney into a hero or whatever, everything.
Everybody in the Republican Party for the last 30 years has been playing footsie with the far right.
They've been hoarding their votes without openly saying they're doing it.
And they used to keep it a little bit at a distance, and Trump simply merged right-wing talk radio and far-right internet culture and White nationalism and everything.
He just brought it into the mainstream and stopped pretending like it's not part of what the Republican Party does.
That's what he did and that's why Rick Wilson hates him, you know?
Right.
Rick Wilson wanted all these fuckers to vote for John McCain in 2008.
He just didn't want to be so obvious about it, you know?
Yeah, no, I mean, you know, imagine if it had been, I mean, if it had been, like, Ted Cruz in 2016, you know, or Marco Rubio, I think, you know, the more overt sort of, like, fashy tendencies, the sort of, like, the, you know, hand-waving to the To the overt white nationalists would have been less.
I mean, I often describe Trump as, like, the catalyst that made the alt-right into the thing that it became in 2016.
And the reality is that, like, a lot of, like, the really far-right people that I follow are not having a huge effect on the rhetoric at this point.
The people who are really affecting the rhetoric right now are these sort of, like, Weinstein Brothers, IDW types, the, like, James Lindsay grievance studies.
This thing where, you know, we're going to cancel critical race theory from being taught.
And, you know, we're going to, like, and this is right up, like, Viktor Orban in, I think, 2017, you know, put a ban on universities teaching gender studies classes.
And that's exactly what these guys want to do next.
They're just using, you know, critical race theory and this idea of, like, you know, this crazy idea that systemic structures have long-term effects along racial lines.
Absolutely absurd idea, and they're using that, they're banning that as a way of getting to even more mainstream, you know, they're gonna punch at trans people, they're gonna punch at gay rights, they're gonna punch at everything they can.
They won't do it through the lens of an overt white nationalism.
It won't be standing there and blaming the Jews.
They'll blame the cultural Marxists.
They'll blame this and they'll blame that.
And the people that I follow, the people that I study, exist as the sort of, the people that they point to and go, well, we're not far right.
You know, Richard Spencer is far right, you know.
Right.
As long as they're not holding up a swastika, they think they're not the far right.
But they're all feeding into the same movement goals, they're all trying to do the same thing.
The only difference now with Trump is that the Republican Party can no longer plausibly deny the relationship.
You know, Ted Cruz would have relied on or hoped for all these same people voting for him.
They might not have done it because he has the charisma of the last shit I took, but, you know, Trump has managed to bring these people out of the woodwork in a way that...
I think whoever follows him is going to struggle to do.
And the more I've been thinking and talking about this stuff lately, you know, initially I thought Josh Hawley or somebody like that was going to be the next Trump or whatever.
These people, they have no wow factor.
They have no charisma.
Tom Cotton is one of those boring people on the planet.
Ideologically, he's a successor to Trump.
I'm starting to think the follow-up to Trump is going to be one of these QAnon people or something.
I think it's Tucker Carlson.
Yeah, something like that.
Somebody like that.
They have to be able to give these people the entertainment value With the white nationalism and with the ideology, you can't just stand up there and repeat it like Tom Cotton does.
Yeah, he gets all the notes right, but there's nothing exciting about him.
I'm starting to think we could very well be seeing a transition, the Republican Party just becoming the right-wing media.
Yeah, which is kind of been, I mean, that's kind of Rupert Murdoch's goal, kind of, from the Nixon administration.
I've got my copy of The Loudest Voice in the Room over there somewhere.
Yeah, Gabriel Sherman's book, which, you know, basically tells, you know, how, you know, Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes, sorry, Roger Ailes, just sort of Built Fox News as as this thing that was you know It started out as the media arm of the next campaign and you know, you can see very clear parallels I mean, they're not perfect but very clear parallels between Nixon 68 and sort of Trump 2016 and sort of like a lot of the rhetoric is very similar and this kind of message of the Silent Majority and all this sort of thing.
So I'm not lecturing you I'm just kind of talking for the audience here.
I get it.
Um, you know and so Yeah, no, it's just it's just kind of one of those You know, the long-term goal of Trump and what he represents is to undermine the legitimacy of everything to the point where everybody just thinks it's a joke.
Politics and governing.
You know, this is what happened in Russia.
For as obsessed as liberals are with Putin in Russia, they've learned all the wrong lessons from it.
They've gotten to the point where they convince people The political process is not legitimate.
Our participation doesn't matter.
This is all a complete joke.
So if we elect, you know, some idiot podcast host right winger and make him president, why not?
It doesn't matter.
It's all a joke.
It's, you know, these ludicrous things might as well happen.
Yeah, you know, absolutely.
We might as well make Joe Rogan the next president, which, as little as I like Joe Rogan, would actually be an improvement, you know, but I'm just using him as an example.
That's the long-term goal of all of it.
Once everything is a joke, then people in power can do whatever they want.
There's no accountability once people say, well, you know, voting and elections, this whole process doesn't matter.
There's no difference between the parties in baseline fundamental ways.
Then they just give up.
You know, the goal, the problem Putin has now with elections is that they can't get enough people to vote in them to make them quasi legitimate.
Because everybody in Russia and I have Russian friends.
I'm not, you know, a Russian citizen or anything.
I can't speak firsthand.
But the dominant impression is people just they they've written off.
They've written off the political processes.
It doesn't matter.
It's not a thing that participating in has any purpose.
There's nothing you accomplish by it.
It's a total joke.
You have these cabal of a hundred rich people surrounding the dictator and they control the country.
And so why go vote?
And that's ultimately what I think Trump You know, and a lot of other people who have the position in our sort of oligarchy of an economy, I think they think that way.
I think they think, let's just cut the voting and the democracy bullshit out of this, you know?
Let's stop pretending like we care what people think and just run things.
And the easiest way to do that is not to come out with a stick and say, you people can't vote anymore.
It's to just convince people to stop doing it because it doesn't matter and they don't care.
Right.
That's much more effective.
And also, like, political activism outside of voting just kind of becomes, you know, delegitimized even further than it already is.
And I think, you know, this is not a, this is not a, you know, not a heavily voting audience for this podcast, if you can understand that, right?
You know, and so, you know, although I think if you live in a swing state, I think you owe it to yourself to vote for Biden, if you can bear to stomach it, you know.
Yeah, you know, that's, I live in North Carolina now.
When I moved here, it kind of sealed the discussion for me, okay, it's a swing state, I'm gonna vote for whichever shithead they nominate.
But, you know, I understand exactly why people feel like, why even bother anymore, because Biden hasn't even made it to the election yet without signaling what's gonna happen.
It's gonna be all the parts that everybody hated and were terrible about the Obama administration, except, like, Lower energy.
And none of the even remotely like positive or even like slight at the end of the tunnel stuff.
It's just going to be all the grinding terrible parts of the Obama years.
Yeah.
Let's just cut straight to what everyone really... It's just going to be taking your medicine and hating it.
And I understand why people feel the way they do about it, even when I tell them at the end, yeah, you should probably go vote for it anyway, but Yeah, I can cast an anti-fascism vote and leave it at that.
Voting is not something I rely upon as a pillar of my self-identity.
I don't need to do it to make myself feel good.
I do it as a functional thing.
So, for me, it's a little bit easier, but I totally respect when people make the argument to me about why they don't want to.
I just go, yeah, that makes sense.
You know, I can't fight back too much anymore.
The first question I always have whenever I see this kind of shit online is, like, what state do you live in?
Because if it's, like, Colorado or Miss—or, pardon me, California or Mississippi, it's like, okay, just do what—I don't—I'm not—don't even have that conversation anymore.
It doesn't matter.
If you don't live in, like, one of five or ten swing states, literally—just save your breath on this, alright?
And depending with what happens in this election, you know, if it ends up being the fiasco I think it's going to be, and a lot of mail-in ballots end up getting not counted for whatever reason, or rejected on technical procedural grounds, or explicitly political grounds.
Florida's DeSantis, the right-wing governor, just decides for some arbitrary reason they're not going to count a bunch of mail-in votes.
This will be the last election where anyone who has the kind of attitude you're talking about perceives any legitimacy in the process.
It'll be easy moving forward to just say, I don't want to vote, because they'll literally be able to point and say, look, it doesn't matter.
They're not even counting these things.
I mean, I'll tell you that, you know, I've been a voter since I was old enough to vote and not to re-litigate the 2020 primary, but, you know, The way that that ended definitely sort of like turned me to, oh, so it really, no, it really doesn't matter anymore.
I know people will argue with that, but you know, like, oh yeah, Barack Obama made a few phone calls and it was done.
That's what happened.
Yeah.
That's exactly how party politics works, you know, that really is it.
That eyes wide shut party where everyone's sitting there getting blown and then making decisions about how the world is going to work, there's a reason that's a persistent myth.
One of the reasons is that people like the world to be more interesting than it really is, but there also are people who wield that kind of power.
You know, the fact that Democrats can sit there with a straight face and be like, oh, Joe Biden was finishing fifth in these early primaries, then all the other candidates just decided to drop out on the same day and, like, cede the field to him.
Like, that just happened, you know?
I was born at night, but I wasn't born last night, you know?
To fall for something like that.
But people want to believe that, you know, there's legitimacy and popular will behind all of this stuff, and I think we're about to learn Some rather unpleasant lessons about how little that is the case when we see these votes start to get counted.
This is going to be ugly and it's going to take forever and 2020 wouldn't have it any other way, you know?
I think, just to sort of wrap up here, I think there's a very real possibility that if Joe Biden is to take office in January, through whatever mechanism that happens, and whatever's going to happen between now and then, that Joe Biden will absolutely be forced to, by whatever circumstance, to really crack down on whatever protesting is still going on at that point.
A much more aggressive move against anti-fascists and Black Lives Matter and protesters in the streets under an early Biden administration than you're seeing under Trump right now.
And that Trump is sort of like, he's a fascist, but he's so narcissistic and incompetent and only interested in his own, like, sort of like, penny-ante drifting schemes from the U.S.
government.
One of the things that fascinates me about Trump is, like, you literally control the most powerful country in the world.
And you're forcing the Secret Service to stay at your hotels and rent golf carts from you, and that's how you're drifting money from the government?
It's the cheapest kind of scamming.
It's literally skimming the tiniest little bit off the top.
And that's the bit that just sort of convinces me that that's who this man is.
It really doesn't matter to him.
That's all that he cares about.
That's the limit of his imagination on this.
But no, I think Biden and Harris will absolutely go after this.
Oh yeah, and they'll get no credit for it.
That's the thing.
I'm writing a book about the repeated mistakes the Democratic Party makes, how they don't learn lessons from this.
Bill Clinton talking about cutting the deficit and then not getting rewarded for it.
Barack Obama talking about, in 2014, doing his immigration crackdown.
Look how tough we can be on the border, too.
And just setting the stage for Trump.
Just setting the stage.
Exactly.
But they don't even get credit for it.
You know, Biden will, uh, well, if I crack down then they can't say we're the party of disorder and rioting anymore.
Yeah, they will.
They will use the exact same message.
They'll accuse you of being a Marxist and a, you know, Antifa member and everything.
And then in 2022 or 2024, you'll get your ass kicked, the Democrat Party will get its ass kicked, and they'll have that hurt little look on their face.
We cracked down on all the protests and you didn't even reward us for it.
We punched the hippies even harder than you did.
Come on, what happened here?
We were supposed to get this huge wave of Republicans voting for us now.
And it never happens.
And it never happens.
But you already know that.
I actually enjoyed this.
I could go on talking with you about this stuff for a long time, so hopefully if you're happy with how this turns out, have me back sometime.
No, no, you're welcome back whenever.
I think this is definitely more electorally focused than we normally like to go, but I think it's worthwhile doing this from time to time, and I definitely want to Definitely do it again, at least after the election.
We'll kind of do something, you know, kind of a wrap-up on that.
But yeah, no, this is great.
Thank you so much for coming on.
Happy to do it.
One of the things that we get on this podcast is, like, we don't have, like, solutions for people, right?
We never have an answer, right?
And so I did just want to ask you, do you have anything beyond, like, go vote for Joe Biden if you happen to live in a swing state?
I wish I did.
It's like asking people if they have the cure for cancer.
If I had the answer to that question, I absolutely would be not only sharing it with the world, but using it to my advantage.
Look, I solved this problem.
If I could tell you that, I would be happy to.
You know, until we are willing to act collectively as a society, the government and people in power are not going to be responsive to these things.
When we look at problems like income inequality, climate change, it's all the same thing.
People who have power will not address these problems until they're directly physically threatened by it.
Right.
They respond to their own personal safety.
So, until climate change makes it to the point where, you know, people who are in positions of power are threatened by it directly, when they fly off to their summer mansion somewhere and it's on fire, then maybe they'll start taking it seriously, you know?
I don't even think them.
They'll just have higher stilts.
That's why we can't get the problem addressed, you know?
Because they just figure, I've got 15 houses, I'll just go to a different one, you know?
There are a lot of people... Income inequality and things like that until somebody is I'm not hopeful in terms of solutions in my lifetime.
In the long term, these things have got to work out differently than they are right now.
to address that either.
So I'm not hopeful in terms of solutions in my lifetime.
In the long term, these things have got to work out differently than they are right now.
This is just going to be too many people.
And I'm not anti-population.
Don't lump me in with those people.
I absolutely don't get into that Malthusian stuff, but I think there's going to be a critical mass of people that cannot be fooled by the kinds of stories people are fooled by right now.
Yeah, I know.
Once we've automated away a few million more jobs, or outsourced away a few million more jobs, and the only professions in America are cop, prison guard, and oligarch, you know, and there's literally nothing else.
You can be, you know, a gig economy worker, and eventually they'll do away with those too, right?
You know, they'll get their driverless cars in 15 or 20 years or whatever, and then you won't be able to support yourself driving an Uber either, and what's going to be left for people?
There will literally be no employment and then the ability to scream at people, well, just go get a job and everything will work out for you.
And this is the whole thing that like UBI advocates, like, you know, when I first kind of heard UBI as sort of an idea, I was, you know, in my teens and I was kind of more on that sort of social credit concept, you know, sort of like more of a Georgist reform and in this kind of like weird social crediting way.
As opposed to, yeah, we're just going to give you the beer pittance and like cut all other social services for you, you know, which is sort of the libertarian idea.
That's the part they never mention.
That's the part that they, well, that's the part that they talk about.
And then like, I mean, you know, like Charles Murray kind of comes on Sam Harris's podcast talking about, you know, like, oh no, this, it's a way of like forcing people to like behave more ethically by, because everybody knows you're giving this money so you can't be a layabout anymore.
But literally what they're, what, you know, if you listen to Eric Weinstein, if you listen to, Andrew Yang, listen to, you know, Megan McArdle.
I bet that's a name you haven't heard in a while.
Yeah, they're literally suggesting... It's cheap.
We're just... It's cheaper.
It's player piano.
We're gonna... It's fun against player piano.
Exactly.
You know, we're gonna... The second time in, I think, three episodes I've mentioned that book.
I really need to re-listen to it.
I used to assign that in a senior seminar, and it always kind of broke the students' brains, you know.
I tell them, just imagine some hypothetical piece of technology that can do any job, and in 50 years, it'll probably not be hypothetical.
You know, it'll happen at some point.
We're going to have to move beyond telling people you're responsible to go out there and get a job because eventually there's going to be 500 billion Americans and not enough economic, viable economic opportunity for all of them.
You know, the only thing keeping it afloat right now is enough people with a house in the suburbs or in a small town that think, I have a stake in this system.
And eventually, that number is not going to be large enough for them to maintain politics the way they do.
It'll either have to be back to straight tribalism, or we're going to fundamentally have to reimagine what the government does.
A lot of people in my orbit talk about, you know, like we tend to think in terms of like what, you know, sort of fascist states look like in Europe in the 20th century as like a future for America, but a more accurate look seems to be, you know, what was happening in like South America and Central America over the course of the last few decades.
And so if you want to know what a future fascist America looks like, don't look at Nazi Germany per se, although I think there are clear parallels, look to Venezuela, or look to, or not Venezuela, but look to Brazil, look to Colombia, look to Guatemala, and that's, you know, we're literally looking at fabulous.
That's sort of where our future lies.
On that happy note.
Yeah, we're going to have to wrap it up here.
Ed, I loved having you here.
Please, you're welcome back any time you have.
You just want to sit and chat for a while.
Hopefully the audience liked it as well.
Please tell us where we can find you on the internet.
Well, my podcast is Mass for Shut-ins.
It's available where all podcasts are sold.
Other than that, my original non-using-my-name identity is ginandtacos, ginandtacos.com, which, because blogging is a dead art, I don't update as much as I used to, but find me on Facebook, Twitter, all that stuff.
I'm Ed Bermilla on Twitter, 1L, B-U-R-M-I-L-A, and I'd be happy to interact with any of your listeners who want to talk about this stuff more.
Thanks for having me.
Oh no, great.
It's a pleasure.
So yeah, and on that note, we will see you in the next episode, which I have a couple of ideas what it's going to be, but I'm not going to announce it until it might be another guest, or we might talk about a brand new political party that just was founded called the National Justice Party.
That's the guys from the Daily Show.
They started their own political party.
Look forward to never hearing of that again.
Yeah, well, we have lots to say about that, and it's causing some infighting, and those are always the most fun, I don't speak German, is the infighting among the fascists.
Thanks again, Ed, and until next time, we'll see you when we see you.
All right, thank you.
That was I Don't Speak German.
Thanks for listening.
If you enjoyed the show or found it useful, please spread the word.
If you want to contact me, I'm at underscore Jack underscore Graham underscore, Daniel is at Daniel E Harper, and the show's Twitter is at IDSGpod.
If you want to help us make the show and stay 100% editorially independent, we both have Patreons.
I Don't Speak German is hosted at idonspeakgerman.libsyn.com, and we're also on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify, Stitcher, and we show up in all podcast apps.
This show is associated with Eruditorum Press, where you can find more details about it.
▲
Export Selection