Behind the Bastards - Part Two: How Conservatism Won
Episode Date: April 4, 2024Robert and Dave conclude our episode about think tanks.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
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Call zone media.
Ah, what's...
Probably, I feel like saying something about
what happened in Baltimore, but there's really no respectful way to do that.
It's pretty fucked up though, right?
It seems that way. People, you see that Twitter's already blaming DEI.
DEI, yeah, that would have stopped the boat from shorting out.
From, yeah, having a fucking blackout.
These clowns.
They're obsessed, it also shows that none of them understand how fucking
container ships work, because they're all like, look, because the they have like a DEI captain aboard this Maersk vessel, Maersk
has a DEI program.
No one from Maersk was piloting the ship.
They're never allowed to in a harbors.
It's never a pilot who works for the company.
Anyway, whatever.
I still think it's bad shit that like for hours and hours after this happened that like national news
Wasn't covering it at all. They had like yeah, they had like $2
Trump fired every journal a commemorative commercials going on they had
Just like the stupidest interviews like why why did we need one-on-one with Al Franken in the
middle of this?
And like, that's why we still use fucking Twitter.
You know, Dave, I think you bad too.
It's bad too.
Yeah, it is.
It's all bad.
I do think you could get a job doing that, Dave, but you've got to lay in on the DEI
stuff, you know, be like, are like, do you have any Dave's?
You know, Dave, equity and inclusion.
You got to put some Dave's on the team.
Yeah.
Dave, equity and inclusion.
Yeah, I'm going to push that now.
I'm going to put that on my resume
that I definitely have.
This is behind the bastards.
I don't think I introduced the podcast that this is.
But you just did.
And David Bell's here again And David Bell's here again.
David Bell's here again.
Hi.
Yeah.
Dave.
Yeah, that's me.
Speaking of this, you, in your writing for Some More News, you also helped on a podcast
network called Gamefully Unemployed.
This is true.
Where you do a lot of great stuff, including Chronicle, Fox Molders, baffling career decisions
in the X-Files.
But a big part of what you do for some more news is research the increasing rightward
veer of our society and the growth of conspiracy culture, which relates to this whole boat
problem in Baltimore, as people have blamed it on DEI.
And it relates to kind of everything that's wrong with our country this like
fracturing of consensus reality that has kind of made it impossible to like
Fix anything the fact that everything I I would argue and I know that
Conservatives would say the literally the exact same thing about the the left
But I would argue that conservatives have politicized pretty much everything in
the country at this point.
I am literally looking at a picture of a car with a Honda,
with Texas plates that has a dozen different bumper stickers that say
variations of Helen Keller is a fraud. Helen Keller was not deaf. Um, it's,
well, that's just facts.
What was she, what did she have to gain?
I have a subreddit.
I'll link it to you.
He's got a Helen Keller denier bumper sticker.
How is that a thing?
Incredible.
I mean, yeah.
I'm not surprised.
We got to a point where the CDC,
where a fucking pandemic happened,
and it was like, let's take some basic precautions.
And that became political.
It's real bad. It's real bad right now.
Yeah. It's shocking how bad some stuff has gotten. And that relates to what we're talking
about today. Cause we ended our last episode talking about the Powell memorandum, right?
Which was this document that was written for the Chamber of Commerce that a lawyer who is going to
become a Supreme Court justice by the name of Lewis Powell, whose previous work had been
fighting against desegregation and cheering on the bombing of Dresden, wrote this thing
where he's like, we need to attack liberalism everywhere it exists, and we need to, in a comprehensive method, destroy it.
Part of that was destroying people like Ralph Nader, who at this time had basically done
a lot to force the auto industry to add basic safety features to cars.
A chunk of this is we need to be able to destroy people who want to make extremely modest changes
that cost corporations money and save countless lives.
I'm going to guarantee you a significant percentage
of the people listening to this podcast,
including probably me, would be dead if not for seat belts.
Oh yeah.
That's not a minor chunk of us.
I've raced on the highway multiple times.
It's just funny because this is that point
where let's go after liberalism. Liberalism
is now defined as any effort to make things marginally better in a very practical way.
Like we talked, I think in the last episode about how like, like I was talking about how
I don't even know the definitions of things anymore. And that's because things like this,
where I'm like, yeah, is that liberal? Like, is it liberal to wanna take safety precautions
to, I guess it is if it costs companies money.
If you were to go back in time to even to Richard Nixon
and tell him what modern conservative media people
call liberalism, Nixon would be like,
what in the fuck are you talking about?
What do you mean they won't take vaccines?
It's like the term wokeness, you know?
It's that same shit.
Yeah, the vaccine stuff is always like,
yeah, you know how these hippie liberals love vaccines?
It's like, no, they don't.
No, it was the opposite.
They were so long.
They were the first to not like vaccines.
What is happening?
That was what my mom, Arch Reagan, conservative,
one of the things she hated about the left
is their anti-vac shit.
Cause she was like, why wouldn't you wanna take vaccines?
Right.
It's wild how much that shit is like, but yeah,
it's this, this pal memorandum is, it's not just,
he's talking about like,
we need to cultivate political power,
wealthy people and corporations need to be donating
a percentage, like a significant percent
of their advertising budgets to funding think tanks and efforts to basically to flood the zone with shit that can act as like a
defense against any attempt to, for example, add seat belts to cars or anything like that.
But beyond that, that's not the only thing the Palme Miranda orchestrates.
He is also the first guy in a real concerted form
to say, the future for the right, because of how demographics do not favor us, the future
for the right is in taking over the courts.
If you're looking at what has happened to the Supreme Court in the last eight years,
Powell is the guy who starts that process, who is laying out the strategy that is adopted
by the entire conservative movement, at least everyone with money in the conservative movement.
His specific goal in having conservatives take over the courts is to establish an oligarchy.
In one section of the memorandum, he uses the title for neglected opportunity in the
courts, and he suggests a strategy for, quote, exploiting judicial action to turn back progressive
and liberal victories in government and culture.
Quote, under our constitutional system,
especially with an activist minded Supreme Court,
the judiciary may be the most important instrument
for social, economic, and political change.
And he is responding to this raft of Supreme Court decisions
that happened during the civil rights era and after that are responsible for
really
Ending the Jim Crow in segregation, right? Like that's a big part of what the Supreme Court's doing in this period
Yeah, and he's like we have to take these back so that we can reverse these trends. It's wild
How mad they were about?
Desegregation yeah And about because I'm actually, we're going to do a video on how the
right high-checked Christianity. And that's kind of that moment
that it starts happening is desegregated schools caused a
bunch of racists to go to private religious schools. And
then they start using this religious schools. And then they started
using this religious liberty. Yeah. And so it's just, it's just, that is, it's, it's
wild how that's like the moment, you know, it's like, it's like the, it's like the, the
dance in back to the future. Like that was the, that day is like, yeah, everywhere, everything
went down. It's the same with this.
And that is what's, we've done a two-parter ourselves
on how Christianity got co-opted from Christianity
as a political force is more tied to progressivism
in the 19-teens and 20s, right?
It's like the labor movement and stuff.
Right.
And that all starts to change in the post-war period,
but it's during the same period
where the pal memorandum hits in the 70s
that the religious right becomes a thing.
And a lot of the same money that the guys
that Powell is speaking to are going to pump
into think tanks, they're also pumping money
into like what becomes the religious right.
This is all happening at the same time.
This is kind of the other side of that story.
And this is one of those things,
the success that Powell sees, the fact that this memorandum
is followed and becomes, it's considered a foundational document of neoliberalism, right?
That is a big part of the privatization of everything, right?
That's why you want to take over these think tanks, to make the case for cutting government
services, for cutting the idea that there should be any kind of shared social responsibility in our society and turning everything into a profit
driven machine.
Right?
That's part of what he's suggesting.
But also the end of Roe v. Wade, you can tie it directly to this memorandum because he's
talking about if we're going to turn back these victories the left and liberals have
had, we have to do it through the courts.
And I really think, I talk a lot about Osama Bin Laden on this show and how I think historians,
when historians are writing about this from a point where none of them are angry about
9-11, because it's too distant, right?
The way that people aren't angry about the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand today,
right?
We could just sort of like talk about it.
Yeah, I mean, I'm a little angrier still, but yeah.
I think you should, I think they should have killed him twice, but that's my opinion
No, it's the farther we get away from 9-eleven. It's gonna become this weird abstract and yes kind of fascinating to me
My and my opinion tends to be that when we get enough distance
Historians will generally agree that Osama bin Laden was one of the best strategic minds of the 21st century.
He had a plan.
He had a plan for what would happen in the long term as the result of that attack, how
it would damage American power.
And it worked the way he thought it would.
And I think Powell is probably a similar mind for the 20th century in terms of like political
strategy.
He lays out what the right is going to do from the 1970s to today.
And it's worked very well for them with a significant demographic disadvantage. They have,
in fact, captured the courts and over time turned this country to the right in a way that people in
the seventies would not have really thought possible. So yeah, that's cool. Yeah. It's frog
on a hot plate stuff. Yeah.
Where it's like, we talked about this last episode
of how like, when people try to say like, you know,
Trump is gonna spell the end for democracy,
that doesn't necessarily mean
it's gonna happen right away, right?
It's like these things just have lasting harm
that is gonna be really hard to reverse.
Yeah, it doesn't even mean he'll necessarily win again.
And I don't take that as a given the way some people do.
I certainly think it's at least a 50-50 shot.
But even if Biden wins reelection, like the idea has been normalized
that you can just try to take over the capital with a bunch of angry goons.
And that's really bad for the future of democracy.
It's pretty bad.
Yeah.
It's pretty bad.
It's not great.
So, Powell's memo is at first circulated mostly among the Chamber of Commerce, which is again,
all these wealthy business owners and CEOs, right?
That's where they interface with the government is the Chamber of Commerce.
So, this is a private memo and he's basically using a government agency to send this memo
about how to capture the courts for the right to all of these guys and asking for their
money.
David Harvey, who's a Marxist anthropologist, cites this as kind of the foundational document
in the birth of neoliberalism.
It's like the neoliberal declaration of independence, right?
That's how some people tend to see this.
Its influence though is much larger than just that, and it's much larger than I'm going
to cite today.
But one of the things it absolutely did was supercharge donations and the establishment
of right-wing think tanks.
Wealthy conservatives realized the power of having organizations that were like Rand,
but were geared entirely towards a spousing and ideology.
And the ideology they wanted these organizations to espouse was that taxes should be low,
workers should know their place, and schools should probably be segregated.
Also, they should be allowed to jail anti-war protesters, right?
Sure.
Sure, why not?
Yeah, fuck it.
I mean, if we're throwing it all on there, might as well put some bonuses.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
And the opportunity to do that came when the economy shit the bed in the 1970s.
Quote, a core of politically active conservative intellectuals, most prominently Irving Kristol,
began to argue in publications like the Public Interest and the Wall Street Journal that
if business wanted market logic to regain the initiative, it would have to create a
new class of its own, scholars whose career prospects depended on private enterprise,
not government or the universities.
You get what you pay for, Kristol in effect argued, and if businessmen wanted intellectual
horsepower, they would have to open their pocketbooks.
Traditionally, corporate philanthropy had been directed either towards charity or towards
independent organizations like the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie Foundations.
Pressured by the media and by academics to make gestures of broad-mindedness, businessmen
seemed to feel that they could gain social approval only by sharing their proceeds with
credentialed intermediaries who would use the money to fund attacks on capitalism.
Paying to have oneself attacked was a kind of corporate ablution."
So that's what a big thing Crystal is saying, and Crystal is kind of the most influential
of this first wave of like think tank guys is you're spending all of this money on foundations
that do actual charity, and that partly funds the work of people who are critical of you.
Why not give your money to someone who's going to say you should have even more power and
money and work to make that real, you know?
And obviously that's a good deal for your if you're
A rich psychopath. Yeah, if you're gonna pay people you might as well pay people to say you're great. Yeah
Yeah, that's that's why we hired Garrison. It didn't work actually worked with terrible disaster there. There's
Very mean to me your place. Yeah
Correct that. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I tried but they just moved to Atlanta. Mm-hmm.
Man, damn him.
Mm-hmm.
You gotta get him.
Get him back.
Gotta get him back.
Gotta work on that.
We'll fish him out of there, yeah.
Fish him out.
Send a party.
Now, the work of Men Like Crystal was like a refreshing cool breeze on the faces of rich
fail sons whose daddies had been disappointed by the side the US took in World War II.
Some of these guys are literally the business plot guys, right?
The guys were telling Smedley Butler, what if you tried to become a dictator?
And Smedley's like, sure, let me just talk to Congress real fast.
Henry Ford II resigned from the board of the Ford Foundation around this time in the 70s,
furious because it was putting out work he viewed as anti-capitalist.
Other men like Joseph Coors, you know, the beer guy,
and the inheritors of the Olin Chemical
and Smith Richardson Pharmaceutical Foundations
started looking for places they could pour money
to generate opinions that coincided
with their endless need for more money.
This is a big part of why the pharmaceutical industry
is the way that it is, right?
Is that these guys start putting money into think tanks that say, hey, you know what would be great
for everybody's health if these guys were allowed to jack up the price of fucking insulin,
you know, to the umpteenth degree? What if we, what if we really fucking deregulate healthcare
as an industry? Wouldn't that make everybody healthier?
And what we're learning now is that it's way harder to reverse these things.
Yes, yes, yes.
Once you get this stuff,
and that's one of the things they know is,
once you get this stuff established,
it's like the war on drugs, right?
Once you have the war on drugs,
anything you do to try to fix it,
people, there will still be drug epidemics, right?
Like no, like fentanyl gets into the country
and suddenly everybody who's been working very hard to try and
Reform things has to deal with the fact that people are dying of this new substance
And there's this built-in infrastructure to say just to have more cops man. We just got to lock people up
That's what's gonna fix it, you know
right because it's also it reminds me of when we built our highways because we consulted with car companies for that and
so it's that thing where they get together, they decide
to do this thing that's kind of irreversible. That's like a foundational idea.
And then by the time we realize that it doesn't work, it's already there firmly
there. You know, we only realize these things over time of going like, wait,
this strategy was bad. It's resulting in bad things.
And at that point it's like, well, what are we gonna do?
Uproot everything?
Start over?
And this can work on the good side.
A positive example of this would be Obamacare,
which is deeply flawed, but like we saw,
the Republicans tried to kill it
and realized in the Trump administration,
we really fucking can't.
Yeah, like social security, right?
Yeah, social security.
Libraries, you would never get libraries
to be a thing today.
If it was a new concept,
people would be willing,
conservatives would be willing to kill and die
to stop libraries from existing.
But they're just a thing now, you know?
Still under attack, but they're a thing.
Yeah.
Yeah, you ever try to like,
harass a librarian? Like they can handle themselves and
they have all those library ghosts on their side too. And I, you know,
I very is haunted.
I believe strongly Dave in like ending firing everybody in the department of
Homeland security, but we take all of their guns,
all of their weapon and we give it to the librarians. No training.
We don't tell them how to use any of this that's up to them
Whatever they want to do with all those tanks and machine guns is their their choice, you know
What's not gonna happen anymore? No one's gonna be turning in books late. I'll tell you that much
I'll tell you your cat Tim right there fucking no knock raids for over two books
So one step in the process of building this like think tank network, like one of the things
they knew they had to do because there weren't a lot of really prominent popular right wing
media figures, right?
Who were influential in public policy.
That wasn't nearly as common as people who would have considered themselves liberals,
right?
You know, in reality, like you would say, centrist or whatever.
So a big part of what they had to do here was find people who were liberals and even
some leftists who were influential in academia and public policy and turn them, right?
Now we see this happen today.
You're seeing all of these like formerly liberal lefty,
you see some of the shit that like the young Turks guy
has been saying about like crime in cities and stuff.
This like weird right wing turn that a lot of guys,
was Jimmy Dore, that guy who used to be kind of lefty
and then the pandemic hits and he goes hard, right?
Because he's an anti-vax weirdo.
Right.
Yeah, this is like a thing we see today.
Oh, for sure.
And this is really the first time it happens in an organized way.
And what they would do is they would go to these guys who are like influential liberal
academics and they would say, and this is an actual example I've read, hey, we're starting
this think tank.
We would like to hire you on as like an expert, right?
We'll basically pay you to do whatever research
you wanna do.
And occasionally you just have to put out some papers
that are in line with the stuff that we want put out.
And in return, and this is like in the 70s, 80s,
you'll get a $200,000 a year salary for life,
whether or not anything gets done.
We just need to be able to use your name, you know?
That's like, yeah, that's like a billion dollars
in the 70s. That's so much money back then, right?
You know, you'll have to occasionally rubber stamp
some specific ideas.
And that's what, for some of these guys,
it literally is, I'm just like throwing my name on some shit
so I can get a paycheck.
Others really take to the idea of being more influential
than they'd ever been, of having,
I'm not just being people that got listened to sometimes,
but people who have this massive hundreds of millions
of dollars in funding effort behind them, right?
And they can be the mouthpieces of it.
And some of these people, these are folks like Jean Kirkpatrick, Michael Novak, Ben
Wattenberg, these are all people who switched sides politically because of the amount of
money and clout that they saw building in the think tank industrial complex.
The founder of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Ernest Lefebvre, had even been a conscientious
objector in World War II.
Michael Horowitz, one of the most influential conservative theorists of this period, had
been a civil rights lawyer in Mississippi in the 1960s.
And Horowitz kind of pioneers the tactic of being a liberal, intellectual, and political
guy and then pivoting right and suddenly getting very rich.
You know, he's one of like the architects of that switch.
I mean, conservatism pays very well.
Oh yeah.
We're not over here.
Like, look at the daily wire.
I would love to get some fracking billionaire money,
but sadly they won't give it to me.
I will take $50 million.
Yeah, I'll endorse some fucked up shit for $50 million.
Right, yeah.
Yeah, I take bribes.
I've said it before, I'll say it again.
Listen, fracking billionaires, you've got me and Dave,
we can sell people on fracking.
Oh, Dave, you love it when the ground lights on fire,
don't you?
Oh, God, yeah.
Water is better when it's murky.
I love me a nice glass of murky water
Look the the popularity of LaCroix has proven we all like our water with a little something extra, you know true
Yeah, gasoline makes our cars go gasoline in our water probably makes us more efficient. Makes us go. Yeah
No, that's some science. I think that's science, what you just said.
This is what you could have, fricking billionaires.
Come on, hit us up.
I'll take 200,000.
I don't give a shit.
So two years after Goldwater's failed candidacy, an aging movie star named Ronald Wilson Reagan
decided to run for governor of California.
Now his initial rise to power is against an incumbent Democrat who's fairly well liked
and reasonably popular prior to the election, a guy named Pat Brown.
This is an uphill battle, at least on paper.
It doesn't wind up working out that way.
And a huge part of the strategy that hands Reagan a victory, he bases a massive chunk,
like kind of the centerpiece of his campaign is
attacking Berkeley University
Right higher education in general, but specifically going to war with Berkeley. We're gonna talk about Berkeley
Oh, they fucking hate it and that's what we're gonna talk about. But you know who loves
Berkeley hmm. No one really but our sponsors don't hate it that I'm aware of.
Yeah.
I believe you on that.
That sounded convincing.
Yeah, unless it's the Washington State Highway Patrol again.
Bring a little optimism into your life with The Bright Side, a new kind of daily podcast
from Hello Sunshine, hosted by me, Danielle Robay.
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about culture, the latest trends,
inspiration, and so much more.
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I'm here to tell you about the new podcast I've been undercover investigating for the
last year and a half.
It's called To Die For.
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Ah, we're back.
So we're talking about Ronnie Reagan,
husband of the throat goat herself,
and how he wins election.
Sophie just had a look when I said that.
I did not enjoy that description.
That's what people, look, this is documented.
We're not slandering, that's not even slander.
This is history, yeah.
Yeah, that's just history.
It'd be slandered if we called Ronald the throat goat,
right, like, but that's not what we're doing.
That man would have been terrible at sucking dick.
I just wanna give a shout out to Joanie
as we reference the Reagans.
Yeah.
Who really made all the decisions for that family.
Yes, they're astrologer.
So the fact that Reagan is going to make the centerpiece of his campaign hating on Berkeley
goes over really well with the kind of rich fail son demographic that is funding this
like new conservative movement.
These guys believe that they had lost to the New Deal Democrats for a mix of
reasons. One of those was that Christianity was overwhelmingly aligned with progressive
pro-labor and social welfare values at the start of the century. And the religious right,
which is coming together in the same period, it's going to the first time the religious
right is really influential in US politics, it gets Reagan elected, right? That's coming
together at this point in time. The other thing that they saw as losing the day was that all of those New Deal policies
had enjoyed the support of professors and subject matter experts with fancy titles and
actual expertise.
And one of the things that was happening in that period, a lot of those experts came from
kind of the first generation of college graduates that weren't all super rich guys, right?
It was still mostly people who were better off, but it was starting to become democratized.
And by the 70s, college was extremely democratized, right?
Some of that's as a result of like, you know, kind of some of the changes that come in as
a result of the GI Bill.
But like in general, a lot more, particularly women and black people are graduating from
college in this period.
And they're seeing this as like, this will inevitably destroy us unless we destroy the
ability of these people to get college degrees. Right? Right. They had their own little club,
right? That was the whole thing. They love having their own little clubs.
Yeah. And they could do or say whatever they wanted in these little clubs.
Yeah. And what the think tank boom is, is a war on expertise.
And the other half of the war on expertise
is destroying higher education, right?
Because that will stop poor people
from being able to exercise agency in politics.
That's what they see, right?
Yeah.
I mean, considering that this is still happening today,
it's one of those, like like such an obvious red flag where
it's like if you're going after education, I don't know. That seems very sus, right?
Like that's weird. Yeah. And the easiest way to get middle class and poor conservatives
on board with this crusade was to attack universities as hotbeds of anti-war radicalism. Reagan
understood this instinctively, and that's why he goes to war with Berkeley University
during his candidacy.
At that point, the school was basically free for Californians.
If you are a state resident, you basically don't pay to go to Berkeley.
This had led to a dangerous number of poor people, particularly black people and women,
getting educations at a respected university, which is a big part of why Berkeley is a nexus of organizing for protests against the Vietnam War.
One of the things that Reagan is going to be furious at is that the president of Berkeley,
a guy named Clark Kerr, refused to expel student organizers.
You know, the conservatives are yelling at this guy like, you need to kick kids out for
organizing against the Vietnam War.
And Clark is like, why the fuck shouldn't students be allowed to protest?
Right, isn't that like, you know.
There's like an amendment about that, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Is this whole freedom to speak?
I don't know.
One Berkeley professor would later summarize, as a matter of Reagan's honest convictions,
but also as a matter of politics, Reagan launched an assault on the university.
Now on the campaign trail, Reagan promised to clean up the mess at Berkeley.
He attained the approval of John McCone, head of the CIA, and J. Edgar Hoover, head of the
FBI, who held an unprecedented joint meeting to discuss communist influence at universities,
which McCone wrote definitely required some corrective action.
Hoover himself reached out to Kerr to tell him to crack down on student activities
And Kerr you got to respect this guy says no to the director of the FBI and when Kerr says no
Hoover and McCone reach out to Ronald Reagan and I want it
I want to really hammer in how unprecedented this is for one thing
I know these are both evil fed agencies the CIA and the FBI hate each other like traditionally
They are fighting it constantly like cats and dogs
They're like yeah exact or just two cats that don't know each other in a small apartment
Yeah, the small apartment is like the US budget for shady shit. Oh, yeah, you ever have an FBI agent in your house
They'll knock shit off your desk. Hopefully not Dave. They will knock shit off your desks though.
They will. They love knocking shit off of desks. They'll be like, can I come in? And you open
the door and then they kind of wander away. And then you're like, what are you coming in?
You're not coming in. What's going on? I would like to replace the FBI with cats.
And just like if one of the, if one of all cats cats are the FBI And so if a cat just walks into your house, you can't you can't make it leave
You got to feed it you got to pet it, you know, give it whatever one badges
Yeah, little badges just just cats wandering around airports check and shit. Yeah, I
Think it's a good idea. I several countries already work that way if you've ever been to
Istanbul that's more or less how the city functions. I love that. They just yeah have yeah cats everywhere then
so
This is so the FBI and the CIA are basically like yeah
We Ronald you are our guy because you are going to fire this fucking dude and crack down on this school that we see
As a major threat to the United States
Yeah, it's cool.
It's, it's, I just can't help but to think about good old meatball Ron of today, Ronald
DeSantis. Yes. And where like people very rightfully pointed out when he was like, I
don't like Disney's politics. Therefore I am going to just bully them with the government.
And I'm not, you know, I'm not on Disney side.
Well, I guess in this case I am, but I'm not a huge fan of corporations. My point being that like, aren't they the guys who don't want the government doing this stuff, getting involved
in everybody's business. I can't help, but to feel like this is the same situation where they're
like, yes, let's get really involved in people's business because we don't like
what they're doing, even though that's against
everything we claim that we're for.
It makes it clear that when they're talking about,
we're doing this because the communists
wanna take away freedom, they're not,
and I'm not an apologist for the Soviet Union,
I would not have wanted to live under that regime either,
but they're not talking about freedom
because they wanna take away people's freedom
to protest a war that's killing millions.
What they mean by freedom is rich people
being able to be rich people.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's the threat.
There's no like extremely good sides here.
It's just that, yeah, it's very.
The students who are trying to stop the Vietnam War are,
but like, yeah, not.
I mean, even they were probably insufferable people, but yes. Oh, well like yeah, I mean even they were probably in sufferable people
But yeah, well sure I mean they're at Berkeley right so you know
I wouldn't have wanted to have lunch with them, but right there on the right side of this
It's so easy to go after colleges because if you see all you have to do is step on a college campus
And you're like man. I hate it here. Yeah
Yeah, we're doing a Reagan Dave. We're doing it
I need to everybody go watch PCU when you finish this, you know
That's John Favreau with John Favreau and with Jeremy Piven playing a playing a man
Who's supposed to be a college senior and clearly in his mid 40s? Yeah 45 year old
Beautiful beautiful stuff.
So Reagan becomes the FBI's preferred candidate.
One of Hoover's memos at the time describes him as dedicated to the destruction of student
activism.
The assistant chancellor of Berkeley at the time described Reagan's tactics this way.
Reagan took aim at the university for being irresponsible with failing to punish these
dissident students.
He said, get them out of here, throw them out.
They are spoiled and they don't deserve the education they're getting.
They don't have a right to take advantage of our system of education.
In a 2004 article for UC Berkeley News, Jeffrey Kahn argued that there were two main themes
of Reagan's first campaign for the governorship.
Quote, to send the welfare bums back to work and to clean up the mess at Berkeley.
The latter became a Reagan mantra.
So that again, I can't overemphasize this isn't just a side issue he's hitting sometimes.
This is like one of the two pillars of his campaign for governor, which is why he becomes
president ultimately is attacking Berkeley.
It's so dumb because it's also like just from a practical sense, like, I don't know,
like he's running on the campaign of really focusing on a single school in
America. And it's like, boy, I feel like there are other problems to focus on
here. Yeah. During the Vietnam War, maybe, maybe there's a lot of other things
you could be doing one or two. It's it's such a weird
It's such a weird policy to run on and then succeed with yeah
It's a bummer. Yeah a little bit when he Reagan wins spoiler alert for the past and Reagan immediately
He leans on he can't fire cur directly, but he's able to lean on the university administration
And Reagan immediately, he leans on, he can't fire Kerr directly, but he's able to lean on the university administration basically threatening to take even more money from the
school and they eventually fire Kerr.
And this was a tacit acknowledgement that attacking the school had been a linchpin of
his electoral strategy.
Earl Chite, Dean Emeritus of the School of Business at Berkeley later said, one of his
great skills was to understand popular feeling.
He really tapped into the discontent people felt about what was happening on the campus.
I have no doubt that this was a big factor in his election as governor.
One of Reagan's first acts as governor is to cut funding for all California public colleges.
He starts going after Berkeley, but he cuts, and he tries to do it by like 10% across the
board.
The legislature doesn't agree to go quite that hard, but he does cut funding to every
California public college.
He frames this as a necessity, not a political attack.
He says, we're doing this because of a budget shortfall.
John Schwarz, formerly of The Intercept, describes how Reagan made his case.
To cover the funding shortfall, Reagan suggested that California public colleges could charge
residents' tuition for the first time.
This he complained, resulted in the almost hysterical charge that this would deny educational
opportunities to those of the most moderate means.
This is obviously untrue.
We made it plain that tuition must be accompanied by adequate loans to be paid back after graduation.
And this is where student loans come from.
Yeah, of course. Ronald Reagan. Yeah, Ronald fucking Reagan. after graduation and this is where student loans come from yeah yeah Ronald
fucking Reagan I mean it all comes back to Reagan it always has it always fucking
does he was really really bad for the country yeah what that's what we're now
in right we this is the era of this it's the find out to the fuck around right
yeah well we've all been now hurting because of this. It's the find out to the fuck around, right? Yeah.
Well, we've all been now hurting because of this shit that
they let Reagan do.
How did he sell this to the public?
Like I like I get selling this to rich people,
but like it's always so weird when they like,
how do you go great news?
We're now making your schools worse. Yeah, I mean, because he doesn't frame it that way. First off, he frames it as like, how do you go, great news, we're now making your schools worse.
Yeah, I mean, because he doesn't frame it that way.
First off, he frames it as like,
look, we've got a budget shortfall,
things are contracting,
everybody's got to tighten their belt,
and hey, these kids were caught,
and again, the anti-war movement is not as popular
as people remember it being, right?
Right.
So there's a huge amount of people who are like,
yeah, why are we paying for these communist kids to go to school, right? Right. So there's a huge amount of people who are like, yeah, why are we paying for these, these, these communist kids to go to school? Right. And he's like, they're
going to pay their own way. It's personal responsibility. You know, they're going to
pull themselves up by their bootstraps, right? Right. Cause like, what does that even equate
to in terms of taxes? You know, like how much of a difference is this going to make in your
taxes to do this? Taxes are even higher now, by the way.
Yeah, it's just so silly because it's like,
why would we like vote and be concerned
about like government budget stuff?
It's like, we pay you to figure this out,
go figure it out, you know?
We wanna have the free schools,
keep the free damn schools.
Yes, this is why, you know,
France has a lot of problems of its own
But their strategy of whenever they try to take away a public entitlement burning down Paris has worked several times
Yes, it doesn't always work, but it has some types no, but I like how they roll
You know, I like it where if a government person so much is like farts in the wrong direction
Yeah, they're like well time to chop off some heads
I guess we burn down this city. Yeah
So Reagan also proposed that Berkeley starts selling off the rare books in its library
So rich people could put them in their private collections the legislature. That's just such a cartoon villain thing to do
Legislature doesn't approve this or the full extent of the cuts he wanted to the UC
system, but they do a lot and he would soon have his chance to try these ideas out on
the national stage with a compliant Congress.
The success of Reagan's attacks on California public schools inspired conservative politicians
across the US.
Nixon decried campus revolt.
Spiro Agnew, his vice president, proclaimed that thanks to open
admissions policies, unqualified students are being swept into college on the wave of
the new socialism. That's all, sorry, that was all a Schwarz quote from John's article
in the intercept.
Right.
So reform of higher education becomes a major cause for public conservative intellectuals.
This is again the think tank set.
And they start putting out papers arguing that what Reagan wants to do will benefit
that it'll cut down the amount of money that the public has to spend.
It'll be able to lower taxes.
It'll be better for students.
All this jazz, right?
And they frame this as not just cost cutting and making the budget make more sense, but
also it'll help these students.
Because a lot of young people are getting these useless degrees in the liberal arts
They're getting weighed down by these education. They don't really need and if they have to pay for it
They'll be more discriminating and they'll get more useful degrees that will benefit the economy more in the long run
That's what they're saying in public in private
They're a lot more open about the real reason they're doing this Schwarz continues quote
the real reason they're doing this. Schwartz continues, quote, one worried that free education may be producing a positively
dangerous class situation by raising the expectations of working class students.
Another referred to college students as a parasite feeding on the rest of society who
exhibited a failure to understand and to appreciate the crucial role played by the reward punishment
structure of the market.
The answer was to close off the parasitic option.
These are all think tank guys saying that this is giving poor people an unreasonable
expectation of progress that they might be able to live good lives.
They don't understand how the market works because we're not making them destroy their
financial futures to get a college degree.
We have to add debt to this situation
and that'll stop them from being parasites.
Right, they're kind of kicking down the ladder
after they already got up there.
It's ridiculous because it fundamentally misunderstands
what the idea of school is for,
like why a society has school,
which is to train people to exist in the society that's
been built. Right. Yeah. And it's just very silly that you would look at like people in
school and go, those are parasites. Like, don't get me wrong. There is, you know, the
academic world isn't perfect. There are people who can sort of drift through school. I have, I know a couple of people who have done that. Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. But like that's,
that's like, that's not a justification for this. And then also like that's years of also
like to schools changing over the years.
A certain percentage of people who get into the academic system, especially if it's basically
free, will just spend their whole lives being students in various things.
That might wind up being bad for that person, but as a societal problem, it does not compare
to the scale of the problem of an entire generation burdened by student loan debt they can never
repay.
They will wind up paying many times the principal and like basically be garnishing their wages
for the rest of their lives.
Like unable to buy a home, unable to like the sheer amount of damage it does.
Like one is worse than the other.
Yeah.
This is the whole thing.
Like this is why it's that idea of like, well, we shouldn't give to homeless people because
what if one of them's a liar and it's like, who cares?
Yeah. Who gives a shit? Yeah. Like, yeah, that's most of them won't be.
We have a lot of data on how just giving homeless people cash works. Right. Most of them use it to
get houses. Well, you know, apartments or whatever, but yeah, why are we using this fear of this small
percentage as a reason not to do something that's broadly good. And this feels like the same thing, which is like,
well, some of them will be leeches.
And it's like, let them, let them be leeches.
Isn't this what a good society is,
is something that takes care of their people unconditionally?
It's so, like, you know,
you don't use this logic anywhere else.
Nobody says, if you're like,
I should exercise to get into better shape.
No one is like, oh, but you know what?
It's theoretical that I might get hurt exercising. So I'm never going to move my body right like yeah
Like you would say well, that's irrational, right?
Right is the same like a hospital where it's like well, some of them might be faking their
Symptoms and it's like yeah
I mean that doesn't mean we get rid of the hospital Some number of doctors will be bad at it and kill their patients.
So we shouldn't have any medical professionals.
Yeah. Let nature take its course.
Yeah, we don't make this argument for anything else.
But when it comes to like talking about poor people getting things.
Look, one percent of people are allergic to antibiotics.
So let's just let everyone die of preventable infections.
Yeah, it's frustrating.
So it's silly.
The National Review, a conservative journal of opinion and news that largely served as
a vehicle for distributing the work of these think tanks, suggested that the solution to
the problem of parasitic college students was to cut public funding for colleges, which would be made up by charging more or anything at all in some cases for
tuition. They recommended, quote,
a system of full tuition charges supplant supplemented by loans,
which students must pay out of their future income.
And this is all coming together in this period. In May of 1969,
things came to a head.
Student activists had created a people's park on a vacant plot of land in Berkeley.
Jeffrey Kahn writes, students and activists had begun an attempt to transform a vacant
plot of university property into people's park.
Attempting to head off the activists, the university engaged a fencing company accompanied
by 250 police to erect a chain link fence around the land at 4 a.m. on May 15, 1969.
Five hours later, a rally was called on Spruill Placid to protest the action.
Resource, a current UC Berkeley reference guide for new students, relates the story
of how Reagan intervened, sending in a National Guard.
The rally, which drew 3,000 people, soon turned into a riot as the crowd moved down Telegraph
Avenue towards the park.
That day, known as Bloody Thursday, three students suffered punctured lungs,
another a shattered leg.
13 people were hospitalized with shotgun wounds
and one police officer was stabbed.
James Rector, who was watching the riot from a rooftop,
was shot by police gunfire.
He died four days later.
Damn.
Yeah.
Thanks, Ronnie.
Yeah.
And by the way, this just happened again.
They just cracked down violently on People's Park, which they were like homeless people were like basically it had been turned into effectively a place where they could like camp and exist.
And the police just shut it down. A bunch of protesters came up. They beat the shit out of everybody. Same same story. Twenty twenty four. Yeah, I mean, you love to see it.
Cops love a good beating of college protesters.
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
They're too young to fully know their rights.
Like you'll probably get away with it a lot of the time.
You can shoot them. Sure. Yeah.
And apparently blindly rooftop.
Yeah. The guy that was shooting at roots.
I'm like, I don't want to trivialize this death,
but I'm imagining that guy being like, I'm nice and safe up here. Yeah. Like, oh, yeah, don't want to trivialize this death, but I'm imagining that guy being like I'm nice and safe up here
Yeah, like don't worry about me. I'm on the roof
My goodness. Yeah
So the riot was great PR for Reagan because the media pretty much cited with him and putting the blame for it on the protesters
He got to do the strongman act and call in
2200 National Guard troops to deal with a state of emergency
in Berkeley.
This created an absurd situation where guardsmen who were Berkeley students were activated
to police the campus.
Kahn cites at least one man who was shot at and injured by cops during the riot and then
got home to a notice telling him to report for duty.
More than a thousand people were ultimately arrested.
Reagan's war with Berkeley was a blueprint for other conservative politicians
and the coalition of right-wing policy wonks
and campaigners that coalesced around him
began to plot grander schemes.
And we're gonna talk about those schemes,
but first, you know who's got the grandest scheme, Dave?
Me.
Oh, well, yes, you do have a plot.
I'm always plotting.
Always scheming.
And part of Dave's plot is that you
buy some of these products.
Absolutely.
Tsk, tsk, tsk.
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We're back! So So 1970, Dave.
Reagan runs for reelection.
He had become known as a charismatic speaker, the great communicator of conservative thought
to the masses.
And there was no issue that served him better than attacking those damn Marxists in academia
and the shiftless college students ruining America's good time in Southeast Asia.
In May of that year, he shut down all 28 UC campuses over protests against the bombing
of Cambodia.
A few months later, in October, his education advisor Roger Freeman gave a press conference.
And I'm going to quote here from an article in The Intercept.
Freeman's remarks were reported the next day in the San Francisco Chronicle under the headline
Professor C's Peril in Education.
According to the Chronicle article, Freeman said, we are in danger of producing an educated
proletariat.
That's dynamite.
We have to be selective on who we allow to go to college.
If not, Freeman continued, we will have a large number of highly trained and unemployed
people.
Freeman also said, taking a highly idiosyncratic perspective
on the cause of fascism. That's what happened in Germany. I saw it happen.
It's incredible because it's the big, you step back from this and it's like, okay, so we're
bombing people. We're doing terrible things in a war and it's always kind of pretty terrible.
And then our young people who we've taught, you know, you know, I
presumably even the seventies, we taught them, you know, compassion and basic morals as a kid.
And then they're in school and they're learning about the world. And they're saying like, you know,
we don't like that you're doing this. And you step back and you look at that and you're like,
we better shut down these colleges. That's the problem.
It's just so funny how that's, that's the conclusion that they drew from where it's
like, Hey, stop doing this terrible thing.
And it's like, you're right.
We should find a way to silence you from saying that you're so right.
And then it's so dystopian that it comes down to like these riots of them
just
It's just mmm a bit part of Freeman is a guy who like comes out from this this culture again
He's born in a monarchy and his attitude and this is the attitude of basically all of the landed
aristocracy in the United States and in Europe is that
Like noblesse oblige, right?
This idea that like, well, you have an obligation as part of the upper crust to run society
and to take care of it.
And you have within sort of your noble cast, you have your progressives and your conservatives
and your progressives who are advocating for the little people, but they always understand
because they come out of the aristocracy that their first duty is to their class and to
maintaining the wealth and power of their class, of course.
And these, these poor proletarians getting an education that can't be allowed to happen
because they don't have any loyalty to the same class that we're in.
They might just want to make things better for the poor.
Yeah, it really comes down to that, doesn't it?
Yeah, it's pretty hideous.
It goes back, it goes to the whole civility thing where it's like, how dare you protest
that way?
How dare you do like, you know, like acting like the protests are worse than the actual
enemy or the actual people that they're harming.
And then of course, linking it to like, they must all be socialists or they all must be
communist because they're protesting
this thing that we're doing against these people.
It's just so it's such, I don't know.
It's, it's incredible.
Like, I don't know, trickery.
It's very funny to me that he's like, this is what happened in Germany.
Cause like, no, it's not.
It is true.
There were a lot of highly trained and unemployed people and that
contributed to the Nazis.
They weren't highly trained college students.
They were veteran soldiers.
They were trench fighters with head injuries who were really good at killing people and
back the Nazis because the Nazis said, you know what the best thing is?
Killing people, right?
That's not all of it.
But like the Nazis did not, not that they had no college graduates, like Hitler wasn't
an educated college graduate.
That's not why Hitler was powerful, you know?
I mean, we sure love, we sure love pretending the Nazis
were a lot of things that they weren't, right?
Like there's just so much in like,
well, that's what the Nazis did.
And it's always just like very vague, broad strokes of it.
There's certainly a chunk of the Nazis
who were well educated and whatnot.
But like that was not the center of their power, right?
Their early power, the street fighters who built the movement were like vets
and hooligans, you know.
It's very funny to be like the Nazis were educated.
That's why it was college.
They didn't see. Yeah.
It's like the Nazis drink water.
Yeah. For we shouldn't drink water. Hitler was a vegetarian.
Yeah. Yeah. It's it's yeah. It's ridiculous.
Yeah. So this guy, Roger Friedman, who is who is saying all of this really hideous shit
is again, he's an Austrian born in 1904.
He'd fled after Hitler annexed Austria and wound up serving under Eisenhower and Nixon.
He was also a fellow at the Hoover Institute, which was Stanford's think tank, right?
And it was a pretty conservative think tank, right?
This is kind of contrary to the Republican frenzy of our Marxist academics, but like
the Hoover Institute is pretty right wing.
And that's where this guy who was in a lot of ways the architect of the student loan
system, this is one of Reagan's education advisors, comes out of.
He is a think tank guy, right?
University, he believed, was something only the wealthy should have access to because
they had an understanding of their obligation to maintain the status quo.
Reagan becomes the center then of a plot to co-opt the energy and the enthusiasm of the
new right in order
to help the old right remake the economy in their image and destroy anything that hints
at being of public benefit.
He is the first candidate that benefits from both the newly forged religious right, which
at this point has two major causes, keeping black kids out of private schools and turning
back women's rights.
And he's also the first think tank president, right?
Some of this stuff had started creeping in
during Nixon's administration, but it's really Reagan
that is the first, you know, all this shit
in the Powell memorandum and the religious rights stuff.
Reagan is the first president to really benefit
from all of it, you know?
Yeah. I mean, there's, I know that Jimmy Carter
of all people was like the first like Christian president, right?
That like really? Yes. And so it's like he was like the practice run where they're like,
okay, well that can work. I mean, not him, but like, you know, a guy like him, or maybe
even not even a guy like him. Cause I'm pretty sure Reagan was not very religious. Oh God,
no, no, no, no.
I mean, he's a godless Hollywood,
Hollywood actor.
So, yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. So as kind of this this think tank,
so Reagan has his reelection in 1970, 1980, obviously,
is going to be his presidential campaign.
In that period in between, you have both the religious right
growing in power and you have these think tanks really start to get moving.
This is really when you're having a bunch of them founded in quick succession.
In 1973, two congressional aides quit the Hill and start the Heritage Foundation.
In 1976, a former Brookings guy starts the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
In 1977, we get the Cato Institute named after a pretty insufferable Roman by some
equally insufferable Americans. And this all contributes to in 1980, Ronald Reagan winning
his election. And you know, one of the things that had been a through line in his presidential
campaign had been these constant series of attacks on this growing class of administrators
and thinkers, kind of liberal academics and think tank people
who had crusted together at the upper levels of government.
And Reagan basically says,
these guys are burdening the doers.
We have too many thinkers in there
and not enough men of action.
But as soon as he takes office,
he's going to fill the White House
with nothing but think tank guys.
Despite like these complaints they'd had about how all of these people were gumming up the
works of government.
And I'm going to quote from an article in the Atlantic here about that process.
When Plum position started going to them, conservatives discovered that the new class
wasn't so bad after all.
Norman Ture, one of the original supply siders, supported himself through the late 1970s by
taking donations for his Institute for Research on the Economics of Taxation.
While Ronald Reagan was composing his first cabinet,
Turr wrote a paper for the Heritage Foundation advocating, in the best new class style,
the creation of a new government post that of Treasury Department undersecretary for tax policy,
and, after some assiduous circulating of the paper with resume attached, landed the job for himself.
Following the change of administrations in 1980, some conservatives found think tanks
useful vehicles for advancing their ideas and their careers.
Colin Gray, a nuclear hardliner known for a foreign policy article titled Victory as
Possible, failed to land a top position at defense through the National Security Council,
so he started the National Institute for Public Policy, which produces studies on beam weapons and other Star Wars components.
So this works. You can it can be as directly as in the case with Tures, you start a think tank, you write papers about how the
government needs to have the specific position, making sure that taxes get cut. And then you get that fucking job for yourself
because you sent that paper around Reagan people with your resume attached.
That's such a good gr drift. I love it's a great grift
I I kind of want to steal that one for myself it all kind of I don't know we talked about the value of a good
Font. Yeah, it's that thing where like I get why
Is kind of weird I get why flat earthers exist
yeah, I get why weird like conspiracy people or like because
I get why weird like conspiracy people or like, because to regular people, it's all just like books, right? It's all like most people, no one gets to see the world from
space. We, no one gets to experience history. We all just, it's just, we grew up at schools
giving us books and going like, trust me, this is what it is. We we've passed this down.
And so like, it seems really easy to be able to hijack that and go like see we have a study you love studies
We have experts and here's a piece of paper
Here's a book a pamphlet that says this thing very officially that says that I should get this job
That is the stated goal is like when we're having arguments about what should we do with taxes?
Should we have this public benefit? You know should should college be free and you know liberals trot out these papers by the Brookings
We want to have twice as many papers from our institutes because that's all a lot of people care about is like well
That's a thicker stack of papers. They must have more evidence. It's ridiculous
We have on the internet more than ever like studies,
the concept of a study where it's like,
there's so many studies and they say different things.
And then you actually dig into the study
and you're like, this barely says this thing.
Yeah.
But we love, it doesn't matter.
It's just how many studies.
How many studies you got.
Proving this thing.
Yeah.
So by the time the Reagan administration gets underway, U.S. conservatives have exhibited
their remarkable talent for flexibility by deciding the professional thinker class is
good actually, and ought to be employed telling the rest of us what to do.
Every major shift in economic policy and defense policy under Reagan was supported by an ocean
of think tank publications.
Beyond the Powell
memo, a major intellectual touchstone of this movement was Wealth and Poverty, a book by
George Gilder. Gilder was a New York child whose father died flying for the army in the
big dub dub dose. He grew up on a farm in Massachusetts and was raised in part by the
Rockefeller family, which should give you an idea of his economic state, right?
David Rockefeller is his godfather.
He is as blue a blood as it's possible to be.
He's doing all right.
He's doing fine.
And wealth and poverty espouses a supply-side economics philosophy that is amenable to the
people who already had fortunes, like his godfather.
This basically becomes the Bible of the Reagan administration's economic policy.
Gilder argues for tax cuts, but he does so in a way that is utterly novel.
This is the foundation of trickle-down economics, right?
You need to cut taxes because it'll improve the economy for everybody.
And I'm going to quote from the Atlantic again here.
Adam Smith, he said, had it wrong.
Capitalism isn't a voodoo through which many selfish acts inexplicably
advance the whole. It's a magnanimous organism in which everybody wants the best for everybody
else since after all, one person cannot prosper selling his product unless many others are
prosperous enough to buy. Big tax cuts, Gilder said, will trigger an outburst of altruism.
It's so funny.
Now, we know that's not true. All they do is park the money offshore
Trillions and trillions of dollars of it enough money to solve a significant chunk of the problems we face health care homelessness to be goddamn certain
We all of its parked in there again. This is what the Panama Papers. That's why they've
Journalists char they know it's a lie. No, it's true. Yeah. I mean, when was the Christmas Carol written?
Like, we've always known it's not true.
It's so weird that they got away with saying like, yeah, just help out the rich people
and they'll help everybody else out.
I think what you're getting at, Dave, because I don't think it's capitalism to like going
and being able to buy stuff at the mall.
That's like a market.
And markets are nice.
We like markets.
That's why every city in history is founded around a market. It's nice to go pick up fresh food.
It's nice to get a nice thing to wear or whatever. Like it's not nice to have your entire society
structured around the fact that there's a couple of thousand dudes who own every company
because they have shares of a thing in the stock market and everyone else's
life and comfort and survival is secondary to them always getting a return on their investment.
Right. I mean, that's the thing. This is this is anti what they claim to be anti free market.
A lot of this stuff too, where it's like they're just we're in a situation where there's certain
companies that it's like there's no competition anymore for them like they've just demolished
Everything no one has an issue with the idea that Steve Wozniak inventor of the personal computer
Might have a nice beach house in a fancy car, right? Yeah. Nobody has an issue with the fact that Danny DeVito
Probably has a nice vacation home. We're all happy for Danny DeVito. Yeah, I hope he has an eye
Yeah, I hope he has his own little Danny DeVito. Yeah, I hope he has an island. I hope he has his own little Danny DeVito island.
I'm not thrilled with Mark Zuckerberg hollowing out
the center of a major Hawaiian island
to build an apocalypse bunker where
he can recreate civilization.
I don't like that.
It's getting silly.
It's getting real silly.
People don't need that much stuff anymore.
No.
No.
Or that much control of anyway, we're all, we're preaching to the choir here and we're
certainly not preaching to Gilder because Gilder's attitude is if we just let these
people get as rich as possible and leave everything up to them by gutting our social programs,
they'll take care of it one way or the other. It'll
trickle down and it'll, we'll all get richer.
This is also based on the assumption that rich people are smart and good. Yes. And it's
just very funny because this is all about them being like, we need to make colleges
exclusive for them and make the world pave the way for them and give them all this stuff.
And they'll be smart enough to know what to do with it. And it's like, really? Cause it sounds like you putting everything on a platter
for them and they have all this generational wealth and you're ensuring a bunch of dipshits
with a lot of money and no idea how to actually do any shirt does seem like that.
And Gilder, the guy who is, who puts together, you know, this argument that becomes the center
of Reagan's economic policy is a career think tank guy. He was this argument that becomes the center of Reagan's economic policy
is a career think tank guy.
He was a program director for the Manhattan Institute.
He was chairman of the economic portion of the Lehrman Institute.
So again, he comes entirely out of this project by these rich guys to fund the creation of
an intellectual class that says what they want being said. And by framing the incredibly selfish economic policies
that the elite support as altruistic,
he is able to preside over a sea change
in how conservatives talk to the country.
In the 1970s, Gene Kirkpatrick had criticized Republicans
for being able to, quote,
conceive of no greater good than a balanced budget.
Starting with Reagan,
balanced budgets
are no longer a priority,
and the deficit simply wasn't worth talking about
unless a Democrat happened to be president.
Greg Easterbrook notes in his history
of conservative think tanks
that the Heritage Foundation didn't even use the word debt
in its mandate for leadership until page 219.
In the mid 1980s, the Ethics and Policy Center,
another think tank, started holding conferences
on how market mechanisms could benefit the poor.
Quote, not once were welfare queens or ghetto Cadillacs the sort of small-minded crochets
that would have dominated a similar conservative conference a decade ago even mentioned.
Conservatism by acquiring a positive vision, had become warmer. A huge amount of this strategy, the linchpin of it working, hinges on journalists, and
particularly the way lazy journalists meet their deadlines.
The way legacy publications tend to work is that when you're discussing a debate over
public policy, you want to be able to present quotes from both sides of the debate.
This is called being unbiased.
Powell and his fellow ideologues knew that since most journalists are lazy, if you made
it very easy for them to get quotes from you by sending them piles of information whenever
they asked for a question, they would reward you by giving your ideas more sympathy in
their coverage.
The Brookings Institute, which tended to do rigorous work, charged journalists who wanted
to access their studies. None of these
right-wing think tanks charge. They also write in a way that's more accessible to the layman,
since they're not actually saying anything with any evidence. They're able to throw in
entertaining prose by guys like William F. Buckley, right? This is a big part of why this works.
Have you read the Da Vinci Code, Robert?
No.
The book, The Da Vinci Code, Robert? No, the book, the Da Vinci code is practically
written in screenplay format. And it's just reminding me of that where they're making
it there. Basically like you read the Da Vinci code and you're like, he wanted this to be
a movie. Yeah. And he made it as easy as possible for it to be a movie. And that's what you're
describing here, which is like science papers and studies. They are difficult.
They are very having worked on some more news and going through them. It's like, sometimes
they feel like they're purposefully worded to be hard to understand. Yeah. And it's almost
like a gatekeeping. It's like when you do your taxes, you realize it's kind of a gatekeeping
process. So yeah, it makes sense that this would be a really important step because like you said, journalism's journalists are lazy. They're
also expected. I think the nicer way to put it is they're expected to cover everything.
Yeah. And that means they are expected to be like kind of experts and everything to
understand everything. And so they will glom on if you go like here.
Yeah.
I gave you- Make it easy for you.
Here's a really easy way to explain this thing.
Mm-hmm.
There you go. Or here's a column
by one of our fellows on this issue.
You know, you can just publish this
and you'll have something to put in your little newspaper.
Yeah.
The American Enterprise Institute or AEI
was perhaps the most successful of the bunch.
It was founded in 1943 by Lewis Brown, a wealthy industrial magnate.
He had been the bag man for the president of Montgomery Ward, T.F.
Mercell.
During the end of the 1920s, a firm called John's Manville discovered the profit-making
potential of an incredible fire retardant substance called asbestos, and they hired
T.F. to be their chairman.
He brought Brown, the founder of the AEI
and then he dropped dead suddenly, almost immediately
which made Brown president of the asbestos company
at age 35.
He becomes the S, the guy who founds
like the most influential think tank of the Reagan era
was previously the asbestos king of the United States.
He did.
He's got the whole world in his problems.
He sure does.
And he's given it all cancer.
All the asbestos he needs.
He is the president of the asbestos Institute,
which is a sort of think tank that you dedicated to asbestos.
That is such a great institute.
It's so fucking great.
Yeah, you love to see it.
And again-
I'm out there sitting around just sniffing piles of asbestos.
These people are all such ghouls.
Cause he's the, the AEI founder is the asbestos guy.
The author of the Powell memorandum,
which lays out the strategy for all this,
is the fucking tobacco Institute lawyer.
Like these people are such monsters.
They should make, they should get some asbestos,
roll it up in a cigarette.
They used to.
Sit around and smoke it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's the good stuff, you know?
And I bet it hit like, oh man, I would take one.
I would try an asbestos cigarette day.
Oh, you got it, right?
If someone handed it.
It's like human meat.
You'd be like, you're like, well, I wouldn't seek it out,
but if it's handed to me, I'm gonna have to try it,
obviously. Yeah.
I ate what was basically a fish stuffed with human meat,
and it was pretty tasty, Dave. Yeah, that sounds tasty was basically a fish stuffed with human meat, and it was pretty tasty,
Dave.
Yeah, that sounds tasty.
I gotta admit.
I don't like fish, but I'd just pick off the fish.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, just eat the man.
Yeah, of course.
So while he ran the company, the asbestos company, it became obvious that asbestos was
causing asbestosis among workers who made it.
This is inflammation and scarring of the lungs due to inhaling asbestos fibers
And it leads to fund things like mesothelioma and lung cancer it became this motherfucker Brown's crusade to pump out
Disinformation about asbestosis to maximize the amount of time that they could put asbestos in everything before they got stopped from doing that
And his goal for this was basically was the same thing same thing that people, the tobacco industry would later do.
It's the same thing the oil and gas industry
is done with climate change,
confuse the issue until everyone's dead, right?
So you can keep making money off of it.
I don't believe in hell,
but if this guy showed up in hell,
I feel like he wouldn't have to ask.
Like he wouldn't be like, what the hell?
What did I do?
He'd be like, yeah.
This can't. Yeah, this is about right. Yeah
So when one of the his company's contractors who is actually like doing the manufacturing of the asbestos from this company called unarco
They started this company like starts
Identifying employees who are like tested getting medical tests through their company health care and showing signs of asbestosis
getting medical tests through their company healthcare and showing signs of asbestosis, Unarco sends them letters saying, hey, you've got the disease asbestos gives you. Brown is
livid about this. He basically tries to get them to stop telling employees that they have asbestosis
when they get sick. One Unarco employee would later testify in a federal investigation.
I'll never forget, I turned to Mr. Brown. One of the Browns made this crack
that anarcho managers were a bunch of fools
for notifying employees who had asbestosis.
And I said, Mr. Brown, do you mean to tell me
that you would let them work until they dropped?
He said, yes, we save a lot of money that way.
Yeah, again, it's looking at the problem being like,
okay, so the problem is what we're making is killing all our employees and we have to tell them and then someone being like, you know
What we should do just don't tell them just not problem solved
Yeah, it's like a fucking it's like something they do it always sunny like it's it's it's just a dirtbag bit
Yeah through and through it's incredible. It's the dirt bag bit through and through. It's incredible. It's so good.
Now, despite being a wealthy ghoul with a body count to rival most warlords, Brown was
unfulfilled.
He saw what his fellow rich guy, Robert Brookings, had done with the Brookings Institute, which
had become an intellectual powerhouse that was widely respected.
Brown wanted that kind of respect for himself, and that's why he founds the AEI in 1943, and that's where we get
the American Enterprise Institute. Now, it was stymied at first by the fact that Brown didn't
believe in anything beyond having more money, and was really incapable of analyzing the world in a
lens beyond this. So it wasn't until 1954, when a guy named William Beruti took over, that the AEI
turned into something worth talking about. Beruti's
parents were Lebanese immigrants and he was a Greek Catholic who'd served in the Navy during
World War II and then worked for the Chamber of Commerce. He was Barry Goldwater's main advisor
in 1964 and a close friend to Dick Nixon, a man who did not have any close friends. He restructured
the American Enterprise Institute to copy Brookings and started hiring fellows
to put out work that would make the case for supply side conservative economic policies.
Beruti's goal was to reach the mainstream and as a result, they started hiring famous
people and popular writers, people like Gene Kirkpatrick, Gerald Ford and Philip Habib.
It strove to entertain as well as to inform, and its fellows wrote articles with titles
like Curse of the Mummy's Tomb, and Dictators, and Double Standards.
That last one by Jean Kirkpatrick mocked Jimmy Carter for failing to support the Shah of
Iran and Anastasio Somoza, the dictator of Nicaragua.
Kirkpatrick argued that basically, obviously communist regimes are bad, but traditional
autocrats are okay, right?
Because they stop the communists from getting into power.
Quote, traditional autocrats do not disturb the habitual rhythms of work and leisure,
habitual places of residence, habitual patterns of family and personal relations.
Because the miseries of traditional life are familiar, they are bearable to ordinary people
who growing up in the society learn to cope.
Revolutionary communist regimes claim jurisdiction over the whole life of society and make demands
for change that so violate internalized values and habits that inhabitants flee by the tens
of thousands."
And what Kirkpatrick is saying here is that, well, communists might cause a problem that
makes people flee the country, but normal
dictators are miserable in a way that people feel like they can't escape. So that's what
we, the United States, should encourage, right?
Yeah. I mean, I guess he's not wrong. It's, it's hard. It's hard. It's hard to push for
like change for fundamental change. We were talking about this before with the infrastructure, with the things that how they
are like, people are going to resist anything where you're like, we have to, we have to
change these things in a really meaningful or deep way that's going to affect you.
So yeah, I guess he's not wrong.
He isn't that these dictatorships are going to cause huge numbers of people to flee the
country because they kill lots of people.
Well, yeah, to fear for their lives.
Yeah, that's going to be a problem.
This is part of why this article, the thing it's arguing is that the US should encourage
democracy but only slow, gradual democracy. And if a dictatorship faces an uprising,
or if a democracy elects a left-wing leader,
we should murder them, right?
Like, because that's dangerous, right?
That's too likely to make people flee the country.
So we have to, you know, dictatorships we can work with,
but anyone who tries to improve the country
in a progressive direction
The United States has kind of a responsibility to kill. Yeah, I mean how dare they yeah
Ronald Reagan loves this fucking article
He thinks that Jean makes a brilliant argument and he directly this article is directly credited with her getting appointed to be US
Ambassador to the UN and her broader argument helps create the Reagan administration's policy in Latin America,
which is why we start sending weapons to the Contras.
This is like why the Reagan administration so assiduously embraces the policy of sending
arms to any dictator who promises to use them on leftists, right?
Like this is kind of a direct result of this think tank, you know, ecosystem.
It really helps. Maybe they would have done it without that. Right. Because that's what
these kinds of people always want to do. But Kirkpatrick's article kind of provides the
intellectual scaffolding that makes it kind of respectable. Right. Right. They're enabling
them. Yes. That's what we talked about. Like the idea of a friend who's like, yeah, you
can have one more drink. It's fine. It's that they're, they're looking for people to say, like, what you're doing is actually
very good. Yeah. The thing you are going to do anyway that benefits you directly. Oh yeah.
That turns out to be the right. It's actually good for everybody. Yeah. And it is, it's
maddening to admit, but pretty undeniable, that AEI is what makes conservatism, quote, intellectually respectable,
as one Reagan White House official told the Atlantic's
Greg Easterbrook, quote,
"'Without AEI, Reagan never would have been elected.'"
Again, that's a member of the Reagan White House, right?
This think tank created by the asbestos baron.
That's so bleak that they themselves are admitting this.
Yeah, yeah.
That the asbestos think tank arguing dictatorships are fine is a linchpin of Reagan getting into
power.
It's basically them sort of saying like, we know that we don't have everybody's best
interest in mind.
Yeah.
We really, we know that we don't care about the poor, even like middle class.
We see them as nothing.
But this is making it seem like we have a viable like thing to offer everybody.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, another major thing that the think tank industrial complex is able to do for the Reagan
administration is help launder his ideas about spaced base
anti-nuclear laser weapons, right?
This is the so-called Star Wars program.
Now experts not being paid by think tanks was like,
yeah, maybe someday this will be a thing,
but like, we just can't do it right now.
It's insanely expensive and likely it might,
a lot of this might just be impossible, right?
But a strong counter argument emerged backed by a variety of right wing defense focused think tanks.
The goal of this Reagan program officially known as the strategic
defense initiative or SDI was to in Reagan's words, render nuclear
weapons impotent and obsolete.
Now this was considered a dangerous goal because nuclear deterrence is
largely what
stopped the US and the USSR from like directly throwing hands too much.
Ballistic missile defenses eventually started costing the US more than $4 billion a year,
which made them the most expensive weapons program in the Pentagon budget.
As the Institute for Policy Studies, ironically itself a think tank, eventually acknowledged
in 1999,
the overall program has been described as high risk and a rush to failure by a number
of respected missile defense experts.
The Pentagon's director of operational testing and evaluation released his annual report
in February 2000 and pointed out that the aggressive schedule established for the NMD
program presents a major challenge.
The NMD program will have to compress the work of 10 to 12 years in eight or less years.
This pattern has historically resulted in a negative effect on virtually every troubled
DoD development program.
A panel headed by the former chief of staff of the Air Force, General Larry Welch, released
a report last November harshly critical of the program.
The Welch report argued that the failures of the program were not the result of random
malfunctions, but an indication of systemic flaws in design, planning, and management,
stating that instead of unusual clarity, there is unusual fragmentation and confusion about
authority and responsibility.
And that's because this was never a plan to actually build an effective missile defense
system.
It was like, number one, a way to shovel a lot of money into defense contractors and number two a
Thing for Reagan to promise that would make people feel safer, right?
We're gonna have these laser defenses that will render us immune to nukes, you know, it's like you duck and cover
It's like yeah, don't worry. It'll be fine. Yeah, we'll get it. We'll get a lockdown. We'll get a lockdown
Don't I mean, yeah once they learn it doesn't work. What are they gonna do complain? They'll be they'll be ash
Thing about nuclear defenses if they fail not your problem exactly. Yeah, it's win-win
Mm-hmm. Now I find it personally fascinating how few actually different sounding names there are for these think tanks
I just quoted the Institute for Policy Studies
different sounding names there are for these think tanks. I just quoted the Institute for Policy Studies and the think tank that largely backed the
strategic defense initiative was the National Institute for Public Policy.
What was said and the actual rigor behind the conclusions in the papers didn't matter.
Volume was what mattered.
This is something you were getting at a bit ago, right?
You just have to have more paper than the other guy.
You have to, yeah, you feel it more official, yeah. And this really simple, shallow metric is what causes conservatism to advance by leaps
and bounds from the 80s up to the early 2000s.
And there are some, some of these think tank guys will even admit this.
Michael Horowitz of the Heritage Foundation told a reporter, quote, historically conservatives
in the United States have come across as racists and know nothings.
It was essential to create a moral and intellectual basis for conservative beliefs that had its
own vision and wasn't just a reaction against liberalism.
And I do, that's fucked up that it worked.
I am a little hopeful that like, they've gone back to just being a reaction that might suggest
that they're
kind of out of ideas. And I wonder if that's part of why the demographics are turning so starkly
against them. I guess we'll see in the next 10 years.
We sure will. Yeah, it's, it's just interesting because they're there.
I think there is a pattern that I've seen now of them sort of wanting to do back
the things that the left quote unquote, like does
to them this idea of like when Biden is in power, they're like, well, we'll do an impeachment.
And it's like, it's like a kid who learns new words and then uses them improperly against
their parents where it's like, yeah, but we, you know, the Trump was being impeached for
a reason.
He tried to overthrow the country. Right. Now they're like, well, you get an impeachment or like, I remember Tim pool using
started learning, learning the French death cult. And it's like, no, we were saying death
cult because you guys were like, because the right was acting like a death cult around
the face mass and pandemic. Like it was in this context and what you're, what you're
sort of indicating here
is that idea of like, well, the liberals,
they had all this fancy education stuff and studies.
We need our own.
Yeah.
It doesn't matter if it's real.
I mean, it's like if for example,
the daily wire started making content,
started making fictional content.
And movies. Yeah.
And being like, well, we need ours,
but it's so hollow because it comes from a reactionary place.
Exactly.
They are reactionaries.
And that's fundamentally what that means.
There's nothing inside these people, right?
I'm not talking about regular voting,
people who are just more concerned
or get trapped by this ideology.
I'm talking about the ideologues, right?
Right.
All they really have is a desire to be rich and powerful.
Everything they're doing is just trying to figure out how to further that end
But they don't believe in things beyond that right and the idea to politicize everything where a lot of this comes from like
Well, the left have their studies and it's like no they aren't the left studies. They're just studies
Yeah, you don't like the world have our own and it's like it's that framing of like oh
It's left versus right and it's like no it's you versus reality
Yeah, it really is for at least a lot of this that is to say that people on the left
Don't also have their problems and and now get but and will over politicize things
But when it comes to these studies and stuff where it's like, oh, yeah, we need a counter thing about the asbestos
Yeah, and this is why I mean they eventually just land on like let's like, oh, we need a counter thing about the asbestos. Yeah. And this is why I mean, they eventually just land on like, let's just break reality,
right? Like that's the, that's where they go.
And I think the, again, the problem with this grift, um, not for them, the problem for us,
the people being grifted is that like asbestos is a good example where it's like, well, time
you need time. And by the time you figure out this thing is wrong, the damage was done. You led pipes or, or,
or trickle down economics by the time we figure out like, Hey, this was dumb for a lot of
this stuff. Like lead pipes is a good analogy for it. Cause it's like, you look at that
and you go, well, we have to tear out all these goddamn pipes. That's going to take
so much time. And it's sort of the same with the you go, well, we have to tear out all these goddamn pipes. That's gonna take so much time.
And it's sort of the same with the stuff
that they're planting here.
It's like, we can't just undo this stuff.
It's embedded deep.
It's the center, yeah.
Yeah.
Cool stuff.
Cool stuff.
Yeah, yeah, it's good stuff.
You can put sunglasses on it, it's so cool.
We've been talking about like Jean Kirkpatrick,
Michael Horowitz, you know, Crystal,
like these big names in think tank writing.
You know, and these guys, these are people
who are like popular enough that their bylines
in the period of time when magazines sold
could sell magazines, right?
And that's a big part of like getting some
of these famous thinkers, getting Gerald Ford
writing columns and stuff, is a thing that a thing that can help launder your ideas because
people are already famous, it'll get eyeballs, right? For the less famous, grunts at the
think tanks, actually putting together a lot of these papers, doing the background work.
The ultimate goal of a career working in these think tanks is to earn yourself a coveted
presidential appointment. Lawrence Korb, a DOD employee turned think tanker, turned Raytheon executive, described
the focus on presidential employment among think tank employees as obsessive, because
that's how you get rich, right?
Think tankers also made attractive options for new administrations because the logistical
burdens involved in bringing them on were basically non-existent.
All you have to do to move from AEI to the administration is walk across the street,
he says.
You don't have to move your family to DC because you're already there.
You don't have to give up a good job you might not get back because the think tank
will always take you back.
You don't have to put your assets into some kind of complicated trust.
If your background is academics, you don't have any assets.
And a businessman or lawyer coming into government usually has to make a financial sacrifice.
To someone from academia, on the other hand, $60,000, the typical pay for a high level
appointee is a raise.
So what he's saying there is like, and again, this is a guy who starts out working for think
tanks, gets a presidential appointment, becomes a Raytheon executive, right?
Live in the dream.
You can, if you're an academic, if you agree to go to the dark side, you can make an okay living
at a think tank, make a decent living in politics, and then when you're out of politics, you
get to be an executive for Raytheon, where you get rich.
It's a path to wealth for people who otherwise wouldn't have had it, and that's part of
the promise.
If you make the argument that we can't change anything that would lead to a reduction or
end to our landed wealthy aristocracy,
to this oligarch class,
then you'll get to become a little bitty petty oligarch.
That's the promise the think tank makes
the people who work there.
During the height of its influence,
more than half of AEI's funding came directly
from donations from corporations
who defrayed their own tax burden by paying people
who influenced the government
to lower their taxes even further.
Sometimes this hurt their bottom line.
Easterbrook noted in 1986 that, quote, an advocate of relaxed antitrust laws, AEI notes
in its current annual report that the wave of corporate mergers led to a reduction of
more than $100,000 in its support last year because several friendly companies were gobbled
out of existence.
But, you know, the wealthy men who spend their money and the money of their corporations on in its support last year, because several friendly companies were gobbled out of existence.
But, you know, the wealthy men who spend their money
and the money of their corporations on these think tanks
always remember in the end to keep them topped off, right?
At least as long as they need them.
We'll see if they finally win.
I don't think these think tanks will keep getting funded
to the extent that they have been,
but they were for quite some time,
really up through the Bush years.
This system kind of dominated a lot of the ideological
Conversation in this country. It was kind of dethroned in the Trump years
Not totally these they still have a decent amount of influence, but I guess I can see Trump
I mean, maybe you'll tell you're probably gonna say yeah
I can see Trump is the kind of jerk who does not listen to think tank now and honestly, that's probably
One of the good things one of the few good things he could do.
Yeah.
Well, and it's also that Trump is kind of new right.
We use different terms for it now, but in the late 1980s, they were talking about the
people that we've come to just call fascists as the new right. And these are these very reactionary,
very aggressive, not traditional polite, respectable conservatives. And these people,
from the beginning of their time on the political stage, have not liked the think tank set, right?
In part because these think tanks make a big deal of how influential they are. And they're not, you know, this evangelical,
this kind of alliance of evangelical right-wingers,
Christian nationalists, culture warriors, right?
They're important, but they kind of represent a threat
to the new right type guys.
And so, you know, it's possible their hour
has started to pass.
We'll see if things shift back in the other direction,
but they did their bit, right? They shifted the culture successfully. They got us to the point that
we're at.
They'll always be people like them because I think when it comes down to what these think
takes are, they're middle management.
Yeah, ideological middle management.
They are. When Trump talked about the concept of a deep state, he was wrong about what it was, but I don't think he's wrong that there is a form of that.
And that is people whose entire careers are maintaining their careers where like they
just, they, they just, you know, it's like, I was reading about like we did, we did a
video about like how elections are their own
economies. There are people whose entire jobs or a better example is taxes, right? H and
R block. These companies that only exist for this system that we've created that to keep
them around and they lobby specifically to keep taxes the way they are so they can continue
to exist. And I can see someone like Trump sort of looking at people like that
and seeing like, oh, these are these are people we can cut or or rejecting them.
I don't think he's doing it.
Out of the goodness of his heart, but I can see him doing it for sure.
Yeah, I think it might weaken them in the long run strategically in the same way that like trump
He's done a lot of damage. He's also like right now spending all of the rnc's money on his legal bills, right?
Which might hurt them, you know, not just in the presidential election, but across the board, you know
I guess we'll see it's this kind of like
The risk of letting a single dude get that much power is he can really just these,
these well laid plans, this 20, 30 year plan
to take over the judiciary 50 years,
all this kind of shit.
You know, it's-
He's a threat to the establishment,
just not the way he advertises.
Yeah.
He's a threat to the establishment,
the way letting a drunk bear into a Walmart
is a threat to the establishment where it's like,
yeah, you're just an, you're just an asshole. Like you're just a liability for them, right? Like
you'll just, they can't tell him anything as he'll just say it out loud or he'll fuck it up. Like
that's how he's actually a threat to them, which is like their their little slow playing that they're doing. They don't like it.
Yeah. Well.
Well, Dave, that's it.
Where where do you where do you go?
Where do you live?
Oh, I live right here.
We're doing this over Zoom.
So, you know, I don't have I don't have anywhere to go.
I'm just going to I'm just going to take off my pants when this is done.
You know, are you talking about plugs or like? Yeah, yeah, your plug.
It's like all that good stuff. Oh, yeah. I mean, you mentioned it gamefully unemployed.
Go to patreon.com slash gamefully unemployed or better yet, just Google gamefully unemployed.
G A M E F U L O Y unemployed. I it's a podcast network. I do it Tom
Ryan and Ryman where we mostly talk about movies, not politics,
you know, movies, X files. And then I am the head writer for
some more news. And just, you know, Google some more news. If
you like more politics. That's you can get you can get that
it's right there in the name. Some more news.
Hell yeah. Check that out.
Yeah, well, check that out.
Check out Some More News.
Check out Gamefully Unemployed and check out-
Check out the new Roadhouse.
Check out that new Roadhouse.
Yeah, check out the new Roadhouse.
Or if you don't wanna see the new Roadhouse,
just kick the shit out of somebody.
Just find a stranger and just really start
kicking the son of a bitch, you know?
Get into fights. Get into fights. Get into fights. It's always good to get into, Just find a stranger and just really start kicking the son of a bitch. Yeah fights
It's always good to get into there's no consequences to getting into a fight Yeah fight animals fight animals. Yeah sure. Yeah fight yourself fight. I'm watching yourself
You know like that fight club guy in that movie do a fight club
Let's do a fight Dave and I are gonna go do a fight club.
The rest of you, you know.
You mean Bob Credit Card Companies, right? That's what we're talking about?
We're gonna have to bleep that.
We're just joking, Credit Card Companies. You can let us into your building.
Okay.
It's over.
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