May 6, 2020 • 52 mins
Today we continue covering hell and revisit the election and quarantine protests across America.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Worst Year Ever, a production of I Heart
Radio Together Everything So Don't don't do well. Hello, and
(00:22):
welcome back to the Worst Year Ever. My name is
Katie Stole. Hi, Katie Stole. I'm Katie Johnston's up, and
I am a third person and my name is Roberts.
And this is not the best year I've ever experienced.
We were expecting it. Yeah, yeah, it's a shame that
(00:44):
we named this podcast the best year I've ever experienced.
That was really bad call. We shouldn't have named it
by flipping a coin. Yeah yeah, by flipping a coin.
Yeah exactly, that was a bad call. So today we
have a very special episode about our very shitty, bad
(01:08):
election that isn't good. Um well, it's mostly not about that.
It's about it. It's like, that's not actually what the
episodes about. It's about the fact that I I spent
my weekend at what is essentially a fascist pro virus
rally in Salem, Oregon, where I got to talk to
a bunch of people holding rifles and just really itching
(01:29):
for the chance to shoot me in the face. Um.
So that was fun. But I think we we wanted
to kind of lead in here by talking about a
couple of election related things. First, because for some reason
that continues to happen. It's like the election refuses to
take the motherfucking hint. Yeah, we haven't wanted to do
this for a long time, but they just kept going
(01:50):
and going and going, and there's nothing you can seem
to do about it. I mean, we did talk about
the election last week, but yes, it does keep going
and going and going. Yeah, it's amazing. We were talking
a little bit earlier about this, about like the collapse
of the oil and gas industry and how like that
feels like such a two weeks ago story, Like oh yeah,
we're already over the underpinning of the global economy falling
(02:12):
through the floor, except that nobody took time to actually
process what that was or what it means. We're all like, oh, ship,
don't have room for that in my brain. Yeah no, fucket.
Now we're going to talk about how the woman accusing
Joe Biden of rape might have taken money from an
animal charity or some ship. Like now that's the number
one story. I feel like I heard that headline about
(02:34):
the oil and then like literally nobody has ever talked
about it since. Yeah. Fuck it. But hey, this this one,
this one, let's not start now. Yeah. From the Krasin Steins,
seems like, oh yeah, tell us about that. You're gonna
lead us in with that cody. The fact that the
Crass and Stein's are back in. Oh they are back
(02:58):
in Steen. Um. Yeah, so these are the brothers. I'm
sure people listeners are aware of their UH and like,
I don't throw this word around, Uh, we use it.
Their utter grifters, their frauds. Um, they're liars. They've been
like investigated by the FBI for like Ponzi schemes, they
(03:18):
got banned from Twitter for running a bunch of sock
puppet accounts and just like being generally frauds who lie. Yeah,
and but they're back. I like you saying, we don't
throw this word around. We use it. We use it,
but there's so many grifters. There's so many grifters, it's hard.
We reserve it for the people who it applies to,
(03:41):
and unfortunately there are many of them. All right, please
tell us about this article? Um yeah, so like well,
so the Crescent scenes in general have been sharing quite
a few articles on medium um about UH and they
just like, yeah, they got kicked off of all the
other social media for like blatantly fraudulent behavior, um, like
(04:04):
creating sock puppet accounts and stuff. But Medium has never
kicked anyone off for any reason. Um, because that's a
good way to run a business. M hm m m mmmm.
Well they have that that uh disclaimer at the top says,
by the way, we don't endorse whatever this fucking person says.
By the way, this could be anything written by anyone. Gone. Uh, yeah,
(04:31):
it's amazing. Um. So they're back. Also, I believe on
Twitter they are still tweeting um under one of their
wives accounts Mrs Krassenstein. Yeah. Yeah, they have their wives
account that they used to tweet their articles. They're they're
one collective wife, um, Ryan and Eddie. Um. Yeah, so
(04:52):
they've been. They popped up quite a bit recently, uh
specifically about terror. They didn't that's the article you're mentioning. Yeah,
so they didn't post anything for three months, three months,
and then suddenly every five days there's something about uh
terror read and Biden um. And these articles have been
(05:15):
uncritically shared quite a bit from a lot of I
guess resistance people you might hope would be reasonable. Um,
but maybe they're not actually UM. And one of the
recent ones that's being shared quite a bit is about
the headline is Biden accuser terror read allegedly stole from
(05:37):
nonprofit organization. Now, before we really dive into this, I
we've talked about this a lot on the show actually,
and just sort of the types of arguments and defenses
we've heard from people echoing quite a bit the things
you hear a lot about sexual assault allegations, a lot
of what we heard in Kavanagh trying to discredit people. UM.
(05:59):
And I don't want to alarm anybody, but even criminals
can be sexually assaulted. And yeah, I was wild, right
I It's just like I thought I had suddenly and
it turns out I'm pretty sure it's true. UM. And
so what what this is trying to do is sort of,
(06:22):
you know, create this story like this, UM, you know
established like, oh, she's just always a dishonest, like lying person. Uh,
that she has this history of being deceitful and manipulative.
But again, like if we're if we're looking at patterns,
this doesn't establish a pattern of lying about sexual assault. UM.
And if we're looking at if we are looking at patterns.
(06:43):
Joe Biden has a pattern of touching women's faces inappropriately
in public. Um, So I don't know, um, why we're
doing this. Like, it's such a bizarre idea to me
to be like, look at this thing and like Biden
doesn't have a history of this at all. Well, it
kind of does, doesn't He didn't we talk about a year.
(07:05):
That's always what's alarming to me, people saying, yeah, there's
no other examples of Joe Biden being inappropriate with women.
What are you talking about? What have we been talking
about for years? What is it that we've been worried
about this whole time? Even before we had a credible
sexual assault accusation, one of the big worries that we
(07:25):
all had was, oh, great, we're going to be debating
which person who touches women inappropriately is worse. And that's
not news to anybody. I said this on even More
News last week. It's wild to me that we are
so quick to dismiss this again saying there's no, he
(07:47):
doesn't have a history of this, when it's like, clearly
he has a history at the best of completely misunderstanding
social cues and kind of infantilizing women. You know, touching
them tenderly and weird ways, and and and making them uncomfortable.
At the very best, he has no awareness of of
(08:09):
of appropriate social interactions with women, even still recently. Uh.
And that's the most charitable view of it. Yes, seriously, Yeah,
it's um, it's very Uh. It's just upsetting and frustrating
to watch and very recently Lucy Flores talking about how
uncomfortable it is to have a man walk up to you,
(08:31):
smell your hair and tenderly, slowly kiss you on the
back of the head. People call him uncle Joe. I
don't want my uncle behaving like that. Nope, it's just
so frustrating. Again, I'm going to come back to this
because I feel morally obligated to. I'm still grappling with
all of it and with what I want to do
(08:53):
with my vote. I'm swinging between voting for Jesse the body,
well now Jesse the mind, Ventura and uh and Vermin Supreme.
But I also have the privilege of, you know, living
in a state where the the actual outcome of the
states electoral votes is not really it's just I understand
(09:15):
I understand people's difficulty in this decision. I think that
it's going to have to come down to a personal
choice for everybody. I don't want to sit here and
advocate for people who have been traumatized by sexual assault
to try to reopen that wound. But I do want
people to be smart about their votes and to understand
(09:36):
the stakes here. Uh. And I don't feel good saying
that I don't, but I it's it's two bad choices.
And I do not want to contribute to Donald Trump's reelection.
But also us taking the time in the space to
discuss this is not contributing to Donald Trump's re election.
It's doing the important work I think all of us
(09:58):
need to be doing u to acknowledge these issues and
to not ignore them. Yeah, this is this is a
real problem. Like the fact that the choice left to
us right now is like, Okay, do I do I
potentially enable an authoritarian who's who's gleefully accepting the deaths
of tens of thousands of Americans as a worthwhile crossover
(10:19):
for the health of the stock market, or do we
go with the rapist who would be at best ten
percent better at this stage of the pandemic um And
that is a sign that we live in a profoundly
broken state. Like, we live in a failed state. Uh.
And this is part which doesn't mean that in the
same vein that Like, I have some friends who got
(10:40):
into heroin when I was younger, and the fact that
they started shooting up heroin was was bad. It was
a bad call on their part. It's bad that they
wound up in a place in their life where they
were doing heroin, But it's good that they took certain
steps to reduce the danger of of doing that heroin,
(11:01):
like right harm harm reduction, like the fact that they
took basic safety precautions and none of them actually o deed,
even though all of them suffered negative health effects as
a result of shooting the heroin. Um, Joe Biden is
the heroine of voting. Is kind of what I'm I'm
building towards here. And I want to say something slightly
positive because yes, I think that this is a perfect
(11:23):
ilust about heroin. It's a fun ride. I've never done it.
Don't listen to me right now. Um, heroin has terrible
and uh, but we are living in a failed state.
I do think that we are further along than we
ever have been. I do think that there is an
(11:43):
opportunity for real change in the future. I do think
that what we're living through right now will fundamentally shake
the core of this country. And I don't know how
it will shake out, but I don't want us to
be disillusioned right now when it's more important than ever
that we continue the momentum that we've built. Um. And
(12:07):
that might just sound like kind this guy's stuff, but
it's what I believe, and I as we have these conversations,
I want to keep coming back to that because I
think that's a really important thing to focus on as
we navigate there. We don't want to dip into nihilism.
And just like Spare, we've got we we got to
get up every day. You do. Well, that's why people
(12:28):
love us, because we're all sorts of viewpoints about it too,
Like there's obviously a calculation everyone is going to make.
But to completely ignore this and to be to be
to like here that like we're living in a failed
state and hear the reasons and go, actually, now it's fine,
this is like we're gonna it's I don't know, it's
childish to ignore it. Um, yeah, is her responsible to
(12:50):
ignore it? Be able to point out like this is
actually a really bad situation that they knowingly put us in.
But the important thing is that the krasen Stein's are
back in our lives. Um. Yeah, that is finally some
good news. Finally, the best year Ever continues as another
great thing happens, which is that the krasin Scenes are back. Um.
(13:13):
We don't need to talk to this article too much.
I do think it's interesting that if you even just
skim it, you will find so many instances of the
words manipulation and deceit just throughout it. Um. It is
transparent how what they're trying to do. Um. And even
(13:33):
according to Hummer's account, it didn't take long for Read
to begin manipulating her. Whether it was Read trying to
convince Hummer to allow her to hide her vehicle on
the ranch in order to avoid repossession, or reads repeated
requests for money, Hummer began to see a pattern forming.
So the whole thing is just like, yeah, she asked
for favors, and she was struggling with money and tried
to get money and stuff. Um. A lot of the
(13:54):
examples are that like her, like, can I park my
car here so it doesn't get repossess? Best? Um? But
when you get down to it, Um, she convinced this, Uh,
it's like a horse sanctuary too. Uh, waive the adoption
fees so she could adopt a horse. Um. And so
(14:17):
they did that. No, no, no, so because I would
consider that a serious crime. Anyone who anyone who sides
with the horses and our current our current human horse
conflict is an enemy of mine. But I'm glad to
hear that she hasn't completely given up her own species exactly. Um.
And uh so there's but like so ultimately, so she
(14:39):
got this these it's just like this favor, waive the
adoption fees from the organization she was volunteering four volunteering
four and uh apparently, um, she needed to take the
horse to the vet. She needs like a vet visit.
And so it seems like she took it to a
VET that was out of like the network, out of town.
(15:00):
Um because like a lot of the vets had a
relationship with the organization, so they knew like, Okay, we're
gonna charge you or we're not going to charge you.
And so she had the vet charged the organization for
her vet bill and then didn't pay him back or
something like that. It's just like, yeah, it's just it's
(15:22):
like I'm not saying like, oh, it's really good that
she did this, but like who cares? What Like the
most damning thing in this article? Honestly is it Terrory
was a horse girl? Like that's it. But again it's
it's like, Okay, so she did this, she's asking for money,
she tried to do this. Um, she built the organization
for something that she shouldn't have for four dollars, And
(15:45):
that means that she's lying about being sexually assaulted by
Joe the hair sniffer, the face toucher. He grabs. He
grabs women's faces by the chin as they pull away
from him. So yeah, it's just a weird article, um
about this thing that happened that doesn't seem relevant um
(16:06):
and doesn't establish a pattern of lying about sexual assault. Uh.
It's like she asked some favors and then build the
vet and uh it, Yeah, it doesn't do anything. Um
about Joe Biden, the guy that we see on camera
just grabbing people's faces inappropriately only women, doesn't do it
to men. I don't know. Thanks Krasenstein's for stopping by.
(16:29):
You've been great. It's almost time for us to take
a real quick break. Uh, and then we're gonna come
back and we'll talk to Robert about his experiences at
some protests over this weekend. But before we move on,
I just want to say that we are going to
continue to try to balance doing election coverage as well
(16:50):
as coronavirus coverage. I want to start focusing in earnest
on covering Senate candidates and all the their elections that
we should be focusing on and putting some of our
energy into, especially if you're feeling disillusioned about our presidential candidate.
So we will be getting more into that as the
(17:10):
weeks go on. But first a word from these sponsors
together everything, Boy, howdy, we're back from some ads. Yeah,
(17:32):
wousel proposal is right, And now it's time to talk
about this terrible thing I did this weekend. So, as
you're probably aware, there were a shipload of protests on
May one and on May two, um, and I think
the people who held those protests would call them anti
lockdown protests. I prefer calling them pro coronavirus protests. But
(17:54):
either way, there were a bunch of them all over
the country. A lot of them were organized by a
group called America Revolution two point oh. That was a
lot of them may first ones, um, But there were
a number of different groups, and there are a mix
of you know, people are calling them astro turft and
that is certainly a lot of it. That DeVos family
was involved in a number of those, particularly the most
famous ones in Michigan. UM. And there's evidence of some
(18:17):
other um like the Door Brothers, who are these kind
of like right wing grifter brothers trying to build a
big database of emails. But there's there were there's also
a huge amount of um, like legitimate enthusiasm among right
wing activists for these events. So it's it would be
a mistake to pretend that like, um, I'm hearing people
(18:37):
like accused them all of like being paid activists and stuff,
and I don't I really don't think that's the kind
of Now I'm looking on Twitter at a scene outside
the Massachusetts State House and there's just hundreds of people
without masks. Yeah, yeah, that was the So I show
up at Salem, which is the capital of Oregon, UM too.
(18:58):
And it's not the Witch City by the way, everybody
gets that wrong. That was in Massachusetts. It's just another
Salem that happens to be the capital of Oregon because
we have a law in the entire West coast that
none of our state capitals can be in the cities
that they should logically be, which is why Sacramento exists.
And we're not original, which is why all cities in
(19:18):
all states have multiple names. Yeah. Well, so anyway, I
go to this thing. Um. I I met up with
like a car pool of right wing activists in Portland,
and I followed them all the way to Salem, and um,
there was probably somewhere around fire people who showed up
in the whole day. Kind of hard to estimate because
(19:39):
there were hundreds of people on the ground actually like
waving signs and and and guns and stuff like that.
But then there was like this constant stream of cars
that would because so like there's like a road that
runs in front of the capital House, and there was
just like this constant circular stream of cars driving past
it and honking. It was a big honk protest. I
I have in my time as a journalist been around
(20:02):
some frustrating things, and I can honestly say this is
the most obnoxious day of my like the most obnoxious
thing I've experienced in my entire life. I never thought
I'd be like, I miss the sound cannons the police
deploy at big actions, But those are so much less
painful than the So at one point in the car protest,
(20:23):
and like, by the way, the car protest, it seemed
like it was a much larger group than it is,
I think, to a lot of people on the ground.
But if you paid attention as I was, the same
cars ran through multiple times, sometimes times because it was
really not a big loop. Um. But there were still,
you know, quite a few cars. UM. And one guy
brought the king of the protest, I would call him
(20:44):
rolled up in a round eleven thirty or so in
a dump truck. UM, in a very nice dump truck.
Clearly had spent I would I would say, just based
on the fact that I have priced dump trucks before
for a variety of complex reasons. UM, easily a six
figure dump ruck. UM. You know, very very expensive, very new,
very clean. UM. So he rolls up and he just
(21:06):
starts honking like like like just laying on his horn
straight as he lifts the bed of his dump truck
up in the air. And the crowd loves this ship.
They are so happy that a big truck has arrived,
and a guy is is like making his his the
dump bed of his big truck go up and down
like that. I cannot describe for you the level of
(21:30):
of joy and the crowd at seeing a big truck.
And then the guy gets out of his big truck
and he's like, you know, we gotta stand up for liberty.
I want to be able to go out and have
a beer, you know, I'm ready to go back to work.
And like, uh, some people come up because they love
his they love his little rant. I've got it, you know, Daniel.
I'll send you the We'll put in a clip of
his little rant here because I recorded some of the audio.
(21:51):
So right here you should you should here for you listening.
Is what this sounded like? Hello the country place. Yeah,
(22:36):
it was unbearably obnoxious, and um, they fucking loved this guy.
And so people started crowding up around his dump truck.
And this dude, the dump truck driver had to have
been in his fifties, right, maybe maybe even sixties, couldn't
really tell, but he was definitely an older gentleman. Um
like a a R p aged And so this crowd
like swarms in around him, and he's like, hey, social
(22:59):
distancing in a way that's clearly a joke, And then
he just starts hugging all of the strangers in the crowd. Um,
it was just so frustrating. So he gets back in
his huge, fucking dump truck and then lays his hand
on the horn for another five minutes or so and
lifts the bed up and down again, and then drives
(23:19):
off and then keeps coming through the line and eventually
drives up onto the steps of the state House and
gets out to hug more people and try to give
a bullhorn rant that no one could hear because none
of them knew how to work a bullhorn, and too
loud and the honking was too loud. It was just
I hated it so much. And that's the part of it.
I hated the least um because everything else was so
(23:42):
much grosser. So as as has become the case in
a number of these you know, I'm pretty plugged into
the the counter protesting, you know, anti fascist activist scene
in in Oregon in general. Um, and none of those
well I won't say none, but none of none of
those people showed up to counter protests this event. There
were some people there who are just sort of taking
(24:03):
pictures of militia crews and proud boys and stuff, because
they part of what they do is document where these
folks show up and who they run with. UM. But
there was no like protesting presence of this um from
like Antifa kind of groups, because for one thing, all
of those groups that I'm aware of an Oregon are
currently doing ship like making hand sanitizer and masks. UM.
(24:24):
But yeah, yeah, so there's not Those Kennor protesters didn't
show it. But a bunch of doctors and nurses did
show up wearing their scrubs and their ppe and they
stood in a line at the courthouse. And I found
myself at one point standing right behind this line of
nurses as a bunch of right wing demonstrators crowded around them.
(24:44):
And there's a guy in like a gas mask with
a Kakistan flag which is basically like patterned off of
a Nazi flag but for nerds like standing next to them,
staring at them, and like this group of a mix
of like militia's kids or militia guys and like Maga
hat crew um all screaming at these doctors, calling them
diaper face because they were wearing masks, um, and just
(25:08):
like yeah, yeah, just heckling these medical professionals. And like
the most heartbreaking thing I saw the whole day was
this this young doctor in full ppe standing out with
a sign that just said please, we just don't want
you to get sick, um, and they were just harassing
these people, aggressively screaming at them. I'll play another here,
(25:31):
Daniel will throw in the clip of the audio here.
(25:56):
So yeah, it was really frustrating. And like at the
end of this day, UM, I'm like getting ready to
head back, and I see that the local k o
I N, one of the local Oregan news channels, has
arrived and is like interviewing UM. And they're the people
they're talking to are just like, you know, ladies in
their thirties with maga hats who are talking about freedom
(26:16):
and how they just think it's time to open the
state back up. And I'm like, oh, so you're just
going to like air the audio of these people trying
to seem reasonable and you missed, like the fact that
they were all cursing doctors a little bit ago for
fucking taking care of people. So I gave an interview,
and I gave them my footage and stuff, so thankfully
some of that made it up. But like, as soon
as I start talking to these people, we get surrounded
(26:38):
by like this mix of militiamen and pro HIMP activists
who also are Quean activists. Yeah, it's it's intersectionality among
the conspiracy set is quite a thing. So they all
start like calling us fake news and ship and it's
one of the things that was really disturbing was the
(26:58):
number of x blissit like outright neo Nazis. There were
a lot of like proud boy types and and kind
of further right types wearing anti Antifa action flags uh,
wearing boogaloo patches, um, wearing all sorts of different like
patches and stuff like that are are kind of like
pepes and stuff that are these sort of coated um
(27:21):
far right signifiers, and also carrying guns um and waving
guns around very recklessly, constantly accidentally sweeping other members of
the crowds and their friends with the barrels of their
fucking rifles. And I, because I'm a gun guy, I
wound up engaging some of these people in conversations and they,
like some of them got pretty candid, and I'm sitting there,
I'm talking to this guy who's not to be weight shaming,
(27:42):
but is not fit enough to run thirty yards in
the hundred and ten pounds of gear that he had on,
which is something that I find frustrating. When he first
walked in, his air fifteen had a thirty round magazine,
but midway through the protest, he switched in a sixty
round drum magazine and he was bragging with his friend
about how he had three D and ten bullets on
him in case he needed to lay down enough fire,
(28:02):
and his friend had switched in a forty round drum
and was like, you know, yeah, I can put out
a lot. He had like his mag's in his pockets.
They were all talking about the fact that they had
between them five six D rounds of AMMO and could
really like shoot a lot of bullets if they needed
to today. And then the heavy set fellow who also
had a ten inch long booie knife up backwards on
his his his plate carrier, his armored vest like a
(28:24):
fucking like a fucking Spec Ops guy he's seen in
a video game, not like yeah anyway, So he is like,
you know, if I run out of AMMO. I could
gut them with my knife, and I'm like, who's them?
Who are you? Nobody is here, Like there's not even there.
Weren't even cops like there were there was one police
car parked off in the distance. There was no police presence,
(28:44):
there were no counter protesters. Who are you going to
fucking shoot? Like? What what do you like is happening here?
And if you are like, first of all, yeah, who
are you talking about? What do you what's the plan?
And what do you think their plan is? Like that's
the situation that you're dealing with in your mind. But
also if you're like using these guns, um, chances are
(29:07):
you're using them against other people with guns, right, because
that is not what they were what they were anticipating.
They were just like, in case we have to like
murder people. Yeah, I think that's really the attitude I got,
because it's yeah, I mean sure, yeah, I know. Yeah.
It was very frustrating and it was very The thing
(29:30):
that was most unsettling to me was the large number
of normies of like kids and kind of like normal
conservative middle class parents. They're intermixed with these fringe people
talking about the militia movement, like shouting on a bullhorn
about how we need to form a militia and we
need to throw the governor out of office, and like
some guy talking standing next to his like family of
four talking about who he wants to see the governor's
bloody body on the steps of the Capitol building. Um,
(29:54):
and and that that's that is really bad. That's not
a silly thing, that's not a thing you can just
the fact that these kind of normal people like my
fucking parents are hanging out at this rally with people
carrying guns and explicitly urging the murder of their political opponents,
and that they're all hanging out together now for hours.
That's a problem. That is a significant escalation of the
(30:17):
political situation in this country. That is a bad, dangerous,
scary place for things to be right now. And I
have I go I've been to a lot of protests
in my life, starting um, and I guess two thousand
eleven or twelve, oh no, no, two thousand, um, yeah
eleven with them fucking occupy and going up to the
(30:38):
present day. I have never been so fucking piste off
and scared at the end of one of these things. Um,
it was everything I could do to not go pick
up another rifle. But I already have more rifles than
I can fit in my house and more AMMO than
I can fit in my house. So yeah, I don't know, uh,
part of the no I've been about rounds. Yeah, it's
(31:01):
all very alarming. This mixture, this cocktail of you know,
this division that's been growing and growing for a long time,
the Second Amendment rights stuff, people hating the government, and
right now just the increased emotions around what's currently happening.
It's a really bad cocktail. Did you see signs. I've
(31:24):
seen post posters of sign got that. I've seen pictures
online of people with post posters that say, like, you know,
the federal government can't regulate my body and stuff like
that from all these wing protesters. And I just want
to be like, let's talk about abortion, that tons of it.
There were, there were my body, my choice proteins. Believe
(31:47):
they weren't. There was no I I got no hint
from the people I talked to that there was an
understanding of like they at least it was just you
fucking assholes I hate so much. H Um, that's not
a productive thing for me to say or feel. But
(32:08):
I fucking do I mean being like embedded in that. Yeah,
just looking at photos and little bits. I'm it's so
frustrating to watch. I can't imagine actually being there and
talking to these people. Yeah, it was, it was fun.
They always when I would engage these gun guys about
their guns and their equipment to they would always explain
(32:29):
it to me like I was a fucking nine year old.
I'm like, motherfucker, I've got two guns on me right now,
like you. And it's like and you don't actually know
what you're fucking talking about with your fucking knockoff EO
tech like bullshit. I I fucking hate these people for
so many reasons. Um, but like the man he'd got
he'd got people with his knife, He'd got people with
his fucking knife. Like, that's not how you like. It
(32:52):
was upside down, it was going to fall out of
his fucking God damn. I hate these people. None of
them know how to their fucking plate carriers, any of
None of them are are actually set up to be
able to like run and take cover, which is like
the number one thing in any combat situation is taking cover.
And like if you can't run without all of the
(33:12):
ship falling out of your stupid fucking rig. I it's
and the problem is it still won't matter, Like if
the shooting actually starts, yes, a lot of them will
die first, but the fact that they have been organized
and going out and that they have this equipment will
allow them to replace their casualties. And there's nothing comparable
on the left in terms of a paramilitary organization. And
(33:33):
it's already been shown very very strongly that local law
enforcement is fundamentally sympathetic with these people, Like the Feds
will be against them, but like that they the Feds
don't have that many fucking guns. Um, it's very frustrating.
You know what. I like to talk about product? Yeah, products,
(33:55):
you know, we all talk about guns, but in some
ways the best guns are capitalism together. So we're back. UM.
(34:16):
I wanted to go over some things outside of my
very frustrating experiences in Salem that I think of maybe
even undercovered just because there's so much happening right now.
So again, on the on the first and the second,
there were a number of protests all around the country. UM,
and that included Denver, which is part of the United States.
Still um, although hopefully not for long. I'm a big
Denver secessionist guy. But um. Anyway, so they there's this
(34:40):
big open carry protest that was being planned and it
kind of got derailed by the fact that like three
of the attendees got arrested in a giant sting from
the FBI. One of them, a fifty three year old
man who had been like posting violent rhetoric on Facebook
and attracted the attention to the FEDS, was caught with
upon of pipe bombs. UM, and like a fucking twenty
(35:03):
two year old kid who was going to be going
there with him was arrested because he had been like
he posted this live stream right ahead of the arrest
because he sees this. Um. He sees that there's like
police cars all cheering up around his house, so he
like calls for his militia buddies to all show up
to protect him. UM, and his mom's yelling at him
and like telling him to like stop doing this ship
(35:25):
and like take off his armor and guns and stop
being a fucking uh an idiot. And he's like yelling
at his mom and he's like these people will these
like the police will kill me. Mom if you call
the cops and me they're gonna fucking kill me because
he's got an illegal rifle in his house, which he
admits on Facebook Live and like the reason he felt
comfortable admitting all of this, like right, and he was
(35:47):
thankfully arrested peacefully. But he thought that he was going
to be able to get twenty or thirty of his
militia guys to show up at his mom's house and
defend him from the FBI, and that they would have
their own Bundy kind of standoff. Um, and I I
found like that seems silly, But I've been following what
all of this. So this guy got released, by the
(36:08):
way from custody. He's out now, and I've been following
he and his friends on Facebook and the things that
they're saying, and none of them are scared back into
the ground. Um. They're all talking about how they need
to do things differently next time so that they don't
get arrested. Um. So like there's one guy saying, I'm
glad he's okay. You know, we need to get a
good game plan together and a good number of people together,
(36:28):
like for the next time this happens. Yeah, how they
need to like contact Gun Owners of America because they
have funds to help with legal cases like this. Like
there's all these these conversations about like what needs to
happen next time, um, and it it including them being
like what needs to happen is the next time we
organize a protest like this, we need to have everybody
(36:50):
show up at the organizer's house the night before and
like sleep there overnight to protect him so that if
the FBI comes, we can actually easily um organize a
resistance against them and we won't get like caught with
only with us all isolated like happened this time. UM.
So that that's really concerning to me for a number
of reasons. Chief among them is the fact that these
(37:13):
people aren't backing down, Like these arrests haven't convinced them
at all that that's necessary. Um. They're just going to
try and continue to proke, provoke, um, direct confrontations with
federal law enforcement and then just encourage them too. Yeah. Yeah,
that's what they want unev. Yeah, that's exactly what they want.
(37:36):
And I think they're going to get it sooner rather
than later. And I don't think it's going to end
well for federal law enforcement. Because um, there's a whole
there's a whole conservative media ecosystem that exists to to
whitewash these guys and UM uh make them seem like patriots,
(37:56):
and they know it exists, and they know that if
there's actually an armed confrontation, the FEDS will probably wind
up being forced to back down. It's really frustrating and scary.
Do you hear that? Yeah? Yeah, they I mean, these
guys are are pretty anti cop like. One of the
So one of the things that's really interesting to me
(38:17):
because I like track memes that spread between these groups
is one of the guys connected to UM, the kid
who was arrested outside of his mom's house UM for
going along with his pipe bomb guy. One of his
friends posted a meme on Facebook like at in the
discussion about UM everything that was happening that's like, uh,
it's a picture of like a black guy firing a
(38:37):
handgun into a parked police car and it's captioned with
when this starts to happen, you'll know why. UM and
I I found the same thing. So there's a website
that's UM connected to this American Revolution two point oh
group that organized a bunch of these rallies called Well
(38:58):
Regulated Militia dot com UM, and uh, that website is
this weird mix of like sovereign citizen beliefs, like these
people who are convinced that there's all these different weird
um legal bits of basically magic that like saying the
right words is like magic to cops and because you
understand these secret laws, like they can't do things to you.
It's like a mix of that and like outright exhortations
(39:20):
to murder police officers and elected leaders. UM. And I
found the same meme posted there on like the same day,
and it's kind of evidence that you've got this and
at this. At the same time, about thirty hours ago
or so, UM, the Oath Keepers, which is like the
largest pan national militia group, posted a thing saying that
like American police are gonna need to choose which side
(39:40):
they're on, um because right now, like they're coming down
as an enemy of the people. Uh. So you've got this.
You've got this in a way that hasn't You know,
the last time the militia movement was this blatantly, violently
and openly anti cop was the Oklahoma City bombing. Right
like that the day is leading up to that and
(40:01):
we're back again, but this time mainstream conservative media is
pushing these guys. So like the leader of American Revolution
two point oh was on Info Wars Alex Jones show,
and he was talking with Sean Hannity. It seems like, um,
and there's there's other ship like that, like all of
these different groups, Um, are you know? The the Bikers
(40:24):
for Trump and stuff have been like official security at
Trump rallies, and they're connected to the oath Keepers who
have also like been invited guests to Trump rallies and
stuff like there's Yeah, these groups are mainstream now. It's terrifying.
It's terrifying to legitimizing that's happening of them. Uh, it's
(40:46):
terrifying that there's so much going on that it's hard
to track. I would say for people right now, it's
hard to keep this in the forefront of your mind
when everything else is happening. I don't I don't trust it.
I don't trust what's happening right now. And it's like
it's sort of background radiation that's always like they're yeah,
(41:06):
and it's gotten so much, it's gotten so much more
main like, yeah, it's it's the main streaming of it.
Keep coming back to that, but it's it's that's the
thing that's really scary here. And I think there's still
this this heavy intention on not like the far left,
but in like the liberal chunks of the left to
like write these guys off and make fun of And
(41:27):
I know, I was just ranting about like they're silly
setups and how how ridiculous some of them look, but
to like write them off for that and be like,
but it doesn't matter, like how silly they are, and
it doesn't matter if their dreams about how this would
work was is unrealistic. What matters is that they have
a shipload of guns, they're getting increasingly organized, and they
want to kill all the people who disagree with them.
Like that's that's important. And the fact that that that
(41:50):
belief is becoming more mainstreamed among the right is important. Um.
And that's the thing, Like I don't know, the I
part of I had hoped that when we started seeing
some crackdowns against these guys, we would see uh them
start to to to head back underground, but they're they're
(42:13):
not doing that, um. And so there needs to be
an organized response to this from the from the left,
and like, we're not going to get it from the
actual government itself. So there needs to be an organized
political response to that, and I'm honestly not sure what
it needs to be. I don't know how you reach
(42:33):
out to these people at this point. Um, Like an
easy way to do it would have been to make
sure that like, um, you know, there was an actual
fundamentally reasonable response to the government to the coronavirus, that
people were taken care of, and that none of these
the folks who were like honestly worried about like going
broke right now weren't worried about that. Um. But I
(42:54):
only think that would really have cut twenty or thirty
percent of this off, right because a lot of the
people are are comfortable right now. Um, they just are
taking this opportunity to push their their uh their politics forward. UM.
I don't know what do you guys think. I mean, yeah, well, yeah,
(43:17):
not just the insidious hijacking of of these kinds of things,
and um, it's just very unsettling. Uh. And people are
so primed to they're everyone's so angry and scared. Um,
Like there's that story about the the security guard got
shot in the head, the person to wear a mask, Um,
(43:40):
she's spit in his face, left, came back wearing a
mask with her dad shot him in the head. Yeah.
And it's just that kind of thing where it's like, yeah,
people they some people just crave it, um and Yeah,
and their leathers are some somehow making them crave it
(44:02):
even more. Yep. And like the the the there's this
town in Oklahoma that pushed like a town ordinance requiring
masks indoors and they were flooded with so many death
threats that they had to reverse it. Um, death threats
towards employees of those companies. That's one of the things
that's most fucked up about it to me is that
(44:23):
these people are like there is this strong strain in
like conservative America particularly of just absolutely hating service industry workers. Um,
and this is being used as an opportunity to do that.
Like it's super gross. Yep. Yeah, really bumps me out. Um,
(44:44):
it's just horrifying. It's horrifying. It just feels like like
they're capitalizing on civil unrest, you know and social unrest
right now and then also amplifying it like Okay, this
is a reason, this is a way that we can, yeah,
become more mainstream. Um and yeah, it's just terrifying implications
(45:05):
of this and what's going to happen now. And yes,
you talk about then the government has to capitulate, uh
and make some concessions here were there or whatever it is.
It depends on the state, but it's it's terrifying, especially
when today we're looking at now the projections are much
more dire, looking on what the death toll is and
what the fallout will be. Um. Yeah, and this just
(45:29):
amplifies that. Yep, yep, yep. I don't know what do
you guys? Do you want to take bets on how
high how bad we think it's going to get, like
how many people are going to die? Yeah? Sure, why not?
Why not go totally ghoulish with it? Do not? I know?
Female just what they ordered, like a hundred thousand body bags.
(45:50):
That's good. I think we'll hit one deaths. Yeah, I
think that's pretty reasonable. Did you guys see the model
that got leaked by the drum administration that came out
today that whole Yeah, that's what that's what I mean.
It was like it was it was higher than one twenty. Yeah,
I'm being conservative here. It's so daunting. But you know,
(46:11):
at the beginning, the very first projection that spooked everybody
was over a hundred thousand would be a goal. And
then we talked about if we enact social distancing measures,
we can be able to curb that, we'll be able
to keep it much smaller. And we certainly have curbed
it in some places, but the rest of the country
has not complied, and we are well on our way. Yeah,
(46:35):
there was a headline I saw yesterday or something that
was like opening up, um, like relaxing quarantine now could
cost us two d and thirty three thousand lives by July,
but save millions of jobs. And you know, one of
the things that's a real bummer is like I was
having a conversation with a friend of mine recently is
(46:57):
not a very political person, but it's a pretty reasonable person.
We were just talking about the virus and she was like, yeah,
I was the death toll had just hit sixty um.
And she was like it's fucked up, but like I
don't even notice the death toll anymore, um, And yeah,
like that is what happened. Was just thinking that, yeah,
(47:18):
like that that's how this works. It's just the way
our brains work. Well, it's just so ghoulish and and
scary and sad. It's hard. You know. When this started,
at least for even more news, I was kind of
doing updates, you know on confirmed cases and what the
death toll and where it stood. And now you know, yeah,
(47:43):
we're you know, I'll give a general update every so often,
but it's just too overwhelming. Yeah, like today, Like yesterday
the news hit that we had lost an entire nine
eleven worth of Americans in one day, And today the
top trends Twitter, um are all related to Star Wars. Yeah,
(48:04):
just literally just the names of Star Wars films. I
don't know, Twilight, also Twilight and Joe Exotic because Nick
Cage is going to be playing Joe Exotic. Yeah, I didn't.
That's terrible. That's deeply upsetting. Yeah, that should all be felonies. Um,
(48:26):
I don't even know what kind of felony. We'll figure
that as an adit. Yeah, I am not. I don't know,
Like I don't want to just be like, you know,
what the positive is is that, um, Jesse the body
Ventura tore the hell out of that waters motherfucker from
(48:46):
Fox News Jesse Waters during a live interview. Um, so
that everybody, yeah about topics I'm I'm waiting for like
actually he believes this batshit thing, um, but no, far
right about quite a few things. I I was, Yeah,
(49:09):
I was going back recently and like looking at an
old appearance of him on the view where he's like
very cogently stating like, no, I was waterboarded during my
military training. It is absolutely torture, and for some reason,
we only do it to Muslims. Yeah. Yeah. And it
was this this realization of like two of the guys
(49:29):
from the Predator movie, um, who were who became famous
for their big muscles, Um, are two of the more
sober minded and responsible American political thinkers in quite something.
Quite something, It's quite quite something. Uh. He also made
me realized that, uh, the y M c A, at
(49:50):
least at a certain point, was a front for the
C I A the CEE. That's pretty good. Um yeah,
I'll share a positive piece of quarantine content I saw
to try to end this. Uh. I'm not sure if
you guys have seen this circulating, but it was made
(50:12):
with Juilliard and uh they've got yo yo maa, they've
got all these you know, classical musicians playing this piece
of music that you all recognize I don't know the
name of, and the dancers performing different pieces. You've got
Laura Linney in there, and you know, different people making appearances.
But it's really beautiful. It's really sad and funny and
(50:33):
hopeful and uplifting. It's ten minutes long. You guys should
google it and find it and give yourself a moment
of watching something beautiful that was probably very hard to coordinate.
It looks daunting to me, but I really appreciated it.
It made my day this weekend. That sounds amazing. Unrelated
(50:53):
to everything we've discussed today, I liked the ending on
on on something positive. Yeah, let's do you want to do?
You want to try to ruin it? And again and again.
I encourage you guys to get invested in your local races,
especially for Senate and the House. We got to keep
(51:15):
the House. We gotta we gotta make some headways in
the Senate. And that is a positive thing that you
can put your energy into. And on that note, mm hmm.
And on that note, you can check us out online.
You can't. Isn't that fun? To your pod? On Twitter
(51:35):
and on Instagram. Please please and thank you everything everything again.
I Tried. Worst Year Ever is a production of I
heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit
(51:57):
the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Worst Year Ever, a production of I Heart
Radio Together Everything So Don't don't do well. Hello, and
(00:22):
welcome back to the Worst Year Ever. My name is
Katie Stole. Hi, Katie Stole. I'm Katie Johnston's up, and
I am a third person and my name is Roberts.
And this is not the best year I've ever experienced.
We were expecting it. Yeah, yeah, it's a shame that
(00:44):
we named this podcast the best year I've ever experienced.
That was really bad call. We shouldn't have named it
by flipping a coin. Yeah yeah, by flipping a coin.
Yeah exactly, that was a bad call. So today we
have a very special episode about our very shitty, bad
(01:08):
election that isn't good. Um well, it's mostly not about that.
It's about it. It's like, that's not actually what the
episodes about. It's about the fact that I I spent
my weekend at what is essentially a fascist pro virus
rally in Salem, Oregon, where I got to talk to
a bunch of people holding rifles and just really itching
(01:29):
for the chance to shoot me in the face. Um.
So that was fun. But I think we we wanted
to kind of lead in here by talking about a
couple of election related things. First, because for some reason
that continues to happen. It's like the election refuses to
take the motherfucking hint. Yeah, we haven't wanted to do
this for a long time, but they just kept going
(01:50):
and going and going, and there's nothing you can seem
to do about it. I mean, we did talk about
the election last week, but yes, it does keep going
and going and going. Yeah, it's amazing. We were talking
a little bit earlier about this, about like the collapse
of the oil and gas industry and how like that
feels like such a two weeks ago story, Like oh yeah,
we're already over the underpinning of the global economy falling
(02:12):
through the floor, except that nobody took time to actually
process what that was or what it means. We're all like, oh, ship,
don't have room for that in my brain. Yeah no, fucket.
Now we're going to talk about how the woman accusing
Joe Biden of rape might have taken money from an
animal charity or some ship. Like now that's the number
one story. I feel like I heard that headline about
(02:34):
the oil and then like literally nobody has ever talked
about it since. Yeah. Fuck it. But hey, this this one,
this one, let's not start now. Yeah. From the Krasin Steins,
seems like, oh yeah, tell us about that. You're gonna
lead us in with that cody. The fact that the
Crass and Stein's are back in. Oh they are back
(02:58):
in Steen. Um. Yeah, so these are the brothers. I'm
sure people listeners are aware of their UH and like,
I don't throw this word around, Uh, we use it.
Their utter grifters, their frauds. Um, they're liars. They've been
like investigated by the FBI for like Ponzi schemes, they
(03:18):
got banned from Twitter for running a bunch of sock
puppet accounts and just like being generally frauds who lie. Yeah,
and but they're back. I like you saying, we don't
throw this word around. We use it. We use it,
but there's so many grifters. There's so many grifters, it's hard.
We reserve it for the people who it applies to,
(03:41):
and unfortunately there are many of them. All right, please
tell us about this article? Um yeah, so like well,
so the Crescent scenes in general have been sharing quite
a few articles on medium um about UH and they
just like, yeah, they got kicked off of all the
other social media for like blatantly fraudulent behavior, um, like
(04:04):
creating sock puppet accounts and stuff. But Medium has never
kicked anyone off for any reason. Um, because that's a
good way to run a business. M hm m m mmmm.
Well they have that that uh disclaimer at the top says,
by the way, we don't endorse whatever this fucking person says.
By the way, this could be anything written by anyone. Gone. Uh, yeah,
(04:31):
it's amazing. Um. So they're back. Also, I believe on
Twitter they are still tweeting um under one of their
wives accounts Mrs Krassenstein. Yeah. Yeah, they have their wives
account that they used to tweet their articles. They're they're
one collective wife, um, Ryan and Eddie. Um. Yeah, so
(04:52):
they've been. They popped up quite a bit recently, uh
specifically about terror. They didn't that's the article you're mentioning. Yeah,
so they didn't post anything for three months, three months,
and then suddenly every five days there's something about uh
terror read and Biden um. And these articles have been
(05:15):
uncritically shared quite a bit from a lot of I
guess resistance people you might hope would be reasonable. Um,
but maybe they're not actually UM. And one of the
recent ones that's being shared quite a bit is about
the headline is Biden accuser terror read allegedly stole from
(05:37):
nonprofit organization. Now, before we really dive into this, I
we've talked about this a lot on the show actually,
and just sort of the types of arguments and defenses
we've heard from people echoing quite a bit the things
you hear a lot about sexual assault allegations, a lot
of what we heard in Kavanagh trying to discredit people. UM.
(05:59):
And I don't want to alarm anybody, but even criminals
can be sexually assaulted. And yeah, I was wild, right
I It's just like I thought I had suddenly and
it turns out I'm pretty sure it's true. UM. And
so what what this is trying to do is sort of,
(06:22):
you know, create this story like this, UM, you know
established like, oh, she's just always a dishonest, like lying person. Uh,
that she has this history of being deceitful and manipulative.
But again, like if we're if we're looking at patterns,
this doesn't establish a pattern of lying about sexual assault. UM.
And if we're looking at if we are looking at patterns.
(06:43):
Joe Biden has a pattern of touching women's faces inappropriately
in public. Um, So I don't know, um, why we're
doing this. Like, it's such a bizarre idea to me
to be like, look at this thing and like Biden
doesn't have a history of this at all. Well, it
kind of does, doesn't He didn't we talk about a year.
(07:05):
That's always what's alarming to me, people saying, yeah, there's
no other examples of Joe Biden being inappropriate with women.
What are you talking about? What have we been talking
about for years? What is it that we've been worried
about this whole time? Even before we had a credible
sexual assault accusation, one of the big worries that we
(07:25):
all had was, oh, great, we're going to be debating
which person who touches women inappropriately is worse. And that's
not news to anybody. I said this on even More
News last week. It's wild to me that we are
so quick to dismiss this again saying there's no, he
(07:47):
doesn't have a history of this, when it's like, clearly
he has a history at the best of completely misunderstanding
social cues and kind of infantilizing women. You know, touching
them tenderly and weird ways, and and and making them uncomfortable.
At the very best, he has no awareness of of
(08:09):
of appropriate social interactions with women, even still recently. Uh.
And that's the most charitable view of it. Yes, seriously, Yeah,
it's um, it's very Uh. It's just upsetting and frustrating
to watch and very recently Lucy Flores talking about how
uncomfortable it is to have a man walk up to you,
(08:31):
smell your hair and tenderly, slowly kiss you on the
back of the head. People call him uncle Joe. I
don't want my uncle behaving like that. Nope, it's just
so frustrating. Again, I'm going to come back to this
because I feel morally obligated to. I'm still grappling with
all of it and with what I want to do
(08:53):
with my vote. I'm swinging between voting for Jesse the body,
well now Jesse the mind, Ventura and uh and Vermin Supreme.
But I also have the privilege of, you know, living
in a state where the the actual outcome of the
states electoral votes is not really it's just I understand
(09:15):
I understand people's difficulty in this decision. I think that
it's going to have to come down to a personal
choice for everybody. I don't want to sit here and
advocate for people who have been traumatized by sexual assault
to try to reopen that wound. But I do want
people to be smart about their votes and to understand
(09:36):
the stakes here. Uh. And I don't feel good saying
that I don't, but I it's it's two bad choices.
And I do not want to contribute to Donald Trump's reelection.
But also us taking the time in the space to
discuss this is not contributing to Donald Trump's re election.
It's doing the important work I think all of us
(09:58):
need to be doing u to acknowledge these issues and
to not ignore them. Yeah, this is this is a
real problem. Like the fact that the choice left to
us right now is like, Okay, do I do I
potentially enable an authoritarian who's who's gleefully accepting the deaths
of tens of thousands of Americans as a worthwhile crossover
(10:19):
for the health of the stock market, or do we
go with the rapist who would be at best ten
percent better at this stage of the pandemic um And
that is a sign that we live in a profoundly
broken state. Like, we live in a failed state. Uh.
And this is part which doesn't mean that in the
same vein that Like, I have some friends who got
(10:40):
into heroin when I was younger, and the fact that
they started shooting up heroin was was bad. It was
a bad call on their part. It's bad that they
wound up in a place in their life where they
were doing heroin, But it's good that they took certain
steps to reduce the danger of of doing that heroin,
(11:01):
like right harm harm reduction, like the fact that they
took basic safety precautions and none of them actually o deed,
even though all of them suffered negative health effects as
a result of shooting the heroin. Um, Joe Biden is
the heroine of voting. Is kind of what I'm I'm
building towards here. And I want to say something slightly
positive because yes, I think that this is a perfect
(11:23):
ilust about heroin. It's a fun ride. I've never done it.
Don't listen to me right now. Um, heroin has terrible
and uh, but we are living in a failed state.
I do think that we are further along than we
ever have been. I do think that there is an
(11:43):
opportunity for real change in the future. I do think
that what we're living through right now will fundamentally shake
the core of this country. And I don't know how
it will shake out, but I don't want us to
be disillusioned right now when it's more important than ever
that we continue the momentum that we've built. Um. And
(12:07):
that might just sound like kind this guy's stuff, but
it's what I believe, and I as we have these conversations,
I want to keep coming back to that because I
think that's a really important thing to focus on as
we navigate there. We don't want to dip into nihilism.
And just like Spare, we've got we we got to
get up every day. You do. Well, that's why people
(12:28):
love us, because we're all sorts of viewpoints about it too,
Like there's obviously a calculation everyone is going to make.
But to completely ignore this and to be to be
to like here that like we're living in a failed
state and hear the reasons and go, actually, now it's fine,
this is like we're gonna it's I don't know, it's
childish to ignore it. Um, yeah, is her responsible to
(12:50):
ignore it? Be able to point out like this is
actually a really bad situation that they knowingly put us in.
But the important thing is that the krasen Stein's are
back in our lives. Um. Yeah, that is finally some
good news. Finally, the best year Ever continues as another
great thing happens, which is that the krasin Scenes are back. Um.
(13:13):
We don't need to talk to this article too much.
I do think it's interesting that if you even just
skim it, you will find so many instances of the
words manipulation and deceit just throughout it. Um. It is
transparent how what they're trying to do. Um. And even
(13:33):
according to Hummer's account, it didn't take long for Read
to begin manipulating her. Whether it was Read trying to
convince Hummer to allow her to hide her vehicle on
the ranch in order to avoid repossession, or reads repeated
requests for money, Hummer began to see a pattern forming.
So the whole thing is just like, yeah, she asked
for favors, and she was struggling with money and tried
to get money and stuff. Um. A lot of the
(13:54):
examples are that like her, like, can I park my
car here so it doesn't get repossess? Best? Um? But
when you get down to it, Um, she convinced this, Uh,
it's like a horse sanctuary too. Uh, waive the adoption
fees so she could adopt a horse. Um. And so
(14:17):
they did that. No, no, no, so because I would
consider that a serious crime. Anyone who anyone who sides
with the horses and our current our current human horse
conflict is an enemy of mine. But I'm glad to
hear that she hasn't completely given up her own species exactly. Um.
And uh so there's but like so ultimately, so she
(14:39):
got this these it's just like this favor, waive the
adoption fees from the organization she was volunteering four volunteering
four and uh apparently, um, she needed to take the
horse to the vet. She needs like a vet visit.
And so it seems like she took it to a
VET that was out of like the network, out of town.
(15:00):
Um because like a lot of the vets had a
relationship with the organization, so they knew like, Okay, we're
gonna charge you or we're not going to charge you.
And so she had the vet charged the organization for
her vet bill and then didn't pay him back or
something like that. It's just like, yeah, it's just it's
(15:22):
like I'm not saying like, oh, it's really good that
she did this, but like who cares? What Like the
most damning thing in this article? Honestly is it Terrory
was a horse girl? Like that's it. But again it's
it's like, Okay, so she did this, she's asking for money,
she tried to do this. Um, she built the organization
for something that she shouldn't have for four dollars, And
(15:45):
that means that she's lying about being sexually assaulted by
Joe the hair sniffer, the face toucher. He grabs. He
grabs women's faces by the chin as they pull away
from him. So yeah, it's just a weird article, um
about this thing that happened that doesn't seem relevant um
(16:06):
and doesn't establish a pattern of lying about sexual assault. Uh.
It's like she asked some favors and then build the
vet and uh it, Yeah, it doesn't do anything. Um
about Joe Biden, the guy that we see on camera
just grabbing people's faces inappropriately only women, doesn't do it
to men. I don't know. Thanks Krasenstein's for stopping by.
(16:29):
You've been great. It's almost time for us to take
a real quick break. Uh, and then we're gonna come
back and we'll talk to Robert about his experiences at
some protests over this weekend. But before we move on,
I just want to say that we are going to
continue to try to balance doing election coverage as well
(16:50):
as coronavirus coverage. I want to start focusing in earnest
on covering Senate candidates and all the their elections that
we should be focusing on and putting some of our
energy into, especially if you're feeling disillusioned about our presidential candidate.
So we will be getting more into that as the
(17:10):
weeks go on. But first a word from these sponsors
together everything, Boy, howdy, we're back from some ads. Yeah,
(17:32):
wousel proposal is right, And now it's time to talk
about this terrible thing I did this weekend. So, as
you're probably aware, there were a shipload of protests on
May one and on May two, um, and I think
the people who held those protests would call them anti
lockdown protests. I prefer calling them pro coronavirus protests. But
(17:54):
either way, there were a bunch of them all over
the country. A lot of them were organized by a
group called America Revolution two point oh. That was a
lot of them may first ones, um, But there were
a number of different groups, and there are a mix
of you know, people are calling them astro turft and
that is certainly a lot of it. That DeVos family
was involved in a number of those, particularly the most
famous ones in Michigan. UM. And there's evidence of some
(18:17):
other um like the Door Brothers, who are these kind
of like right wing grifter brothers trying to build a
big database of emails. But there's there were there's also
a huge amount of um, like legitimate enthusiasm among right
wing activists for these events. So it's it would be
a mistake to pretend that like, um, I'm hearing people
(18:37):
like accused them all of like being paid activists and stuff,
and I don't I really don't think that's the kind
of Now I'm looking on Twitter at a scene outside
the Massachusetts State House and there's just hundreds of people
without masks. Yeah, yeah, that was the So I show
up at Salem, which is the capital of Oregon, UM too.
(18:58):
And it's not the Witch City by the way, everybody
gets that wrong. That was in Massachusetts. It's just another
Salem that happens to be the capital of Oregon because
we have a law in the entire West coast that
none of our state capitals can be in the cities
that they should logically be, which is why Sacramento exists.
And we're not original, which is why all cities in
(19:18):
all states have multiple names. Yeah. Well, so anyway, I
go to this thing. Um. I I met up with
like a car pool of right wing activists in Portland,
and I followed them all the way to Salem, and um,
there was probably somewhere around fire people who showed up
in the whole day. Kind of hard to estimate because
(19:39):
there were hundreds of people on the ground actually like
waving signs and and and guns and stuff like that.
But then there was like this constant stream of cars
that would because so like there's like a road that
runs in front of the capital House, and there was
just like this constant circular stream of cars driving past
it and honking. It was a big honk protest. I
I have in my time as a journalist been around
(20:02):
some frustrating things, and I can honestly say this is
the most obnoxious day of my like the most obnoxious
thing I've experienced in my entire life. I never thought
I'd be like, I miss the sound cannons the police
deploy at big actions, But those are so much less
painful than the So at one point in the car protest,
(20:23):
and like, by the way, the car protest, it seemed
like it was a much larger group than it is,
I think, to a lot of people on the ground.
But if you paid attention as I was, the same
cars ran through multiple times, sometimes times because it was
really not a big loop. Um. But there were still,
you know, quite a few cars. UM. And one guy
brought the king of the protest, I would call him
(20:44):
rolled up in a round eleven thirty or so in
a dump truck. UM, in a very nice dump truck.
Clearly had spent I would I would say, just based
on the fact that I have priced dump trucks before
for a variety of complex reasons. UM, easily a six
figure dump ruck. UM. You know, very very expensive, very new,
very clean. UM. So he rolls up and he just
(21:06):
starts honking like like like just laying on his horn
straight as he lifts the bed of his dump truck
up in the air. And the crowd loves this ship.
They are so happy that a big truck has arrived,
and a guy is is like making his his the
dump bed of his big truck go up and down
like that. I cannot describe for you the level of
(21:30):
of joy and the crowd at seeing a big truck.
And then the guy gets out of his big truck
and he's like, you know, we gotta stand up for liberty.
I want to be able to go out and have
a beer, you know, I'm ready to go back to work.
And like, uh, some people come up because they love
his they love his little rant. I've got it, you know, Daniel.
I'll send you the We'll put in a clip of
his little rant here because I recorded some of the audio.
(21:51):
So right here you should you should here for you listening.
Is what this sounded like? Hello the country place. Yeah,
(22:36):
it was unbearably obnoxious, and um, they fucking loved this guy.
And so people started crowding up around his dump truck.
And this dude, the dump truck driver had to have
been in his fifties, right, maybe maybe even sixties, couldn't
really tell, but he was definitely an older gentleman. Um
like a a R p aged And so this crowd
like swarms in around him, and he's like, hey, social
(22:59):
distancing in a way that's clearly a joke, And then
he just starts hugging all of the strangers in the crowd. Um,
it was just so frustrating. So he gets back in
his huge, fucking dump truck and then lays his hand
on the horn for another five minutes or so and
lifts the bed up and down again, and then drives
(23:19):
off and then keeps coming through the line and eventually
drives up onto the steps of the state House and
gets out to hug more people and try to give
a bullhorn rant that no one could hear because none
of them knew how to work a bullhorn, and too
loud and the honking was too loud. It was just
I hated it so much. And that's the part of it.
I hated the least um because everything else was so
(23:42):
much grosser. So as as has become the case in
a number of these you know, I'm pretty plugged into
the the counter protesting, you know, anti fascist activist scene
in in Oregon in general. Um, and none of those
well I won't say none, but none of none of
those people showed up to counter protests this event. There
were some people there who are just sort of taking
(24:03):
pictures of militia crews and proud boys and stuff, because
they part of what they do is document where these
folks show up and who they run with. UM. But
there was no like protesting presence of this um from
like Antifa kind of groups, because for one thing, all
of those groups that I'm aware of an Oregon are
currently doing ship like making hand sanitizer and masks. UM.
(24:24):
But yeah, yeah, so there's not Those Kennor protesters didn't
show it. But a bunch of doctors and nurses did
show up wearing their scrubs and their ppe and they
stood in a line at the courthouse. And I found
myself at one point standing right behind this line of
nurses as a bunch of right wing demonstrators crowded around them.
(24:44):
And there's a guy in like a gas mask with
a Kakistan flag which is basically like patterned off of
a Nazi flag but for nerds like standing next to them,
staring at them, and like this group of a mix
of like militia's kids or militia guys and like Maga
hat crew um all screaming at these doctors, calling them
diaper face because they were wearing masks, um, and just
(25:08):
like yeah, yeah, just heckling these medical professionals. And like
the most heartbreaking thing I saw the whole day was
this this young doctor in full ppe standing out with
a sign that just said please, we just don't want
you to get sick, um, and they were just harassing
these people, aggressively screaming at them. I'll play another here,
(25:31):
Daniel will throw in the clip of the audio here.
(25:56):
So yeah, it was really frustrating. And like at the
end of this day, UM, I'm like getting ready to
head back, and I see that the local k o
I N, one of the local Oregan news channels, has
arrived and is like interviewing UM. And they're the people
they're talking to are just like, you know, ladies in
their thirties with maga hats who are talking about freedom
(26:16):
and how they just think it's time to open the
state back up. And I'm like, oh, so you're just
going to like air the audio of these people trying
to seem reasonable and you missed, like the fact that
they were all cursing doctors a little bit ago for
fucking taking care of people. So I gave an interview,
and I gave them my footage and stuff, so thankfully
some of that made it up. But like, as soon
as I start talking to these people, we get surrounded
(26:38):
by like this mix of militiamen and pro HIMP activists
who also are Quean activists. Yeah, it's it's intersectionality among
the conspiracy set is quite a thing. So they all
start like calling us fake news and ship and it's
one of the things that was really disturbing was the
(26:58):
number of x blissit like outright neo Nazis. There were
a lot of like proud boy types and and kind
of further right types wearing anti Antifa action flags uh,
wearing boogaloo patches, um, wearing all sorts of different like
patches and stuff like that are are kind of like
pepes and stuff that are these sort of coated um
(27:21):
far right signifiers, and also carrying guns um and waving
guns around very recklessly, constantly accidentally sweeping other members of
the crowds and their friends with the barrels of their
fucking rifles. And I, because I'm a gun guy, I
wound up engaging some of these people in conversations and they,
like some of them got pretty candid, and I'm sitting there,
I'm talking to this guy who's not to be weight shaming,
(27:42):
but is not fit enough to run thirty yards in
the hundred and ten pounds of gear that he had on,
which is something that I find frustrating. When he first
walked in, his air fifteen had a thirty round magazine,
but midway through the protest, he switched in a sixty
round drum magazine and he was bragging with his friend
about how he had three D and ten bullets on
him in case he needed to lay down enough fire,
(28:02):
and his friend had switched in a forty round drum
and was like, you know, yeah, I can put out
a lot. He had like his mag's in his pockets.
They were all talking about the fact that they had
between them five six D rounds of AMMO and could
really like shoot a lot of bullets if they needed
to today. And then the heavy set fellow who also
had a ten inch long booie knife up backwards on
his his his plate carrier, his armored vest like a
(28:24):
fucking like a fucking Spec Ops guy he's seen in
a video game, not like yeah anyway, So he is like,
you know, if I run out of AMMO. I could
gut them with my knife, and I'm like, who's them?
Who are you? Nobody is here, Like there's not even there.
Weren't even cops like there were there was one police
car parked off in the distance. There was no police presence,
(28:44):
there were no counter protesters. Who are you going to
fucking shoot? Like? What what do you like is happening here?
And if you are like, first of all, yeah, who
are you talking about? What do you what's the plan?
And what do you think their plan is? Like that's
the situation that you're dealing with in your mind. But
also if you're like using these guns, um, chances are
(29:07):
you're using them against other people with guns, right, because
that is not what they were what they were anticipating.
They were just like, in case we have to like
murder people. Yeah, I think that's really the attitude I got,
because it's yeah, I mean sure, yeah, I know. Yeah.
It was very frustrating and it was very The thing
(29:30):
that was most unsettling to me was the large number
of normies of like kids and kind of like normal
conservative middle class parents. They're intermixed with these fringe people
talking about the militia movement, like shouting on a bullhorn
about how we need to form a militia and we
need to throw the governor out of office, and like
some guy talking standing next to his like family of
four talking about who he wants to see the governor's
bloody body on the steps of the Capitol building. Um,
(29:54):
and and that that's that is really bad. That's not
a silly thing, that's not a thing you can just
the fact that these kind of normal people like my
fucking parents are hanging out at this rally with people
carrying guns and explicitly urging the murder of their political opponents,
and that they're all hanging out together now for hours.
That's a problem. That is a significant escalation of the
(30:17):
political situation in this country. That is a bad, dangerous,
scary place for things to be right now. And I
have I go I've been to a lot of protests
in my life, starting um, and I guess two thousand
eleven or twelve, oh no, no, two thousand, um, yeah
eleven with them fucking occupy and going up to the
(30:38):
present day. I have never been so fucking piste off
and scared at the end of one of these things. Um,
it was everything I could do to not go pick
up another rifle. But I already have more rifles than
I can fit in my house and more AMMO than
I can fit in my house. So yeah, I don't know, uh,
part of the no I've been about rounds. Yeah, it's
(31:01):
all very alarming. This mixture, this cocktail of you know,
this division that's been growing and growing for a long time,
the Second Amendment rights stuff, people hating the government, and
right now just the increased emotions around what's currently happening.
It's a really bad cocktail. Did you see signs. I've
(31:24):
seen post posters of sign got that. I've seen pictures
online of people with post posters that say, like, you know,
the federal government can't regulate my body and stuff like
that from all these wing protesters. And I just want
to be like, let's talk about abortion, that tons of it.
There were, there were my body, my choice proteins. Believe
(31:47):
they weren't. There was no I I got no hint
from the people I talked to that there was an
understanding of like they at least it was just you
fucking assholes I hate so much. H Um, that's not
a productive thing for me to say or feel. But
(32:08):
I fucking do I mean being like embedded in that. Yeah,
just looking at photos and little bits. I'm it's so
frustrating to watch. I can't imagine actually being there and
talking to these people. Yeah, it was, it was fun.
They always when I would engage these gun guys about
their guns and their equipment to they would always explain
(32:29):
it to me like I was a fucking nine year old.
I'm like, motherfucker, I've got two guns on me right now,
like you. And it's like and you don't actually know
what you're fucking talking about with your fucking knockoff EO
tech like bullshit. I I fucking hate these people for
so many reasons. Um, but like the man he'd got
he'd got people with his knife, He'd got people with
his fucking knife. Like, that's not how you like. It
(32:52):
was upside down, it was going to fall out of
his fucking God damn. I hate these people. None of
them know how to their fucking plate carriers, any of
None of them are are actually set up to be
able to like run and take cover, which is like
the number one thing in any combat situation is taking cover.
And like if you can't run without all of the
(33:12):
ship falling out of your stupid fucking rig. I it's
and the problem is it still won't matter, Like if
the shooting actually starts, yes, a lot of them will
die first, but the fact that they have been organized
and going out and that they have this equipment will
allow them to replace their casualties. And there's nothing comparable
on the left in terms of a paramilitary organization. And
(33:33):
it's already been shown very very strongly that local law
enforcement is fundamentally sympathetic with these people, Like the Feds
will be against them, but like that they the Feds
don't have that many fucking guns. Um, it's very frustrating.
You know what. I like to talk about product? Yeah, products,
(33:55):
you know, we all talk about guns, but in some
ways the best guns are capitalism together. So we're back. UM.
(34:16):
I wanted to go over some things outside of my
very frustrating experiences in Salem that I think of maybe
even undercovered just because there's so much happening right now.
So again, on the on the first and the second,
there were a number of protests all around the country. UM,
and that included Denver, which is part of the United States.
Still um, although hopefully not for long. I'm a big
Denver secessionist guy. But um. Anyway, so they there's this
(34:40):
big open carry protest that was being planned and it
kind of got derailed by the fact that like three
of the attendees got arrested in a giant sting from
the FBI. One of them, a fifty three year old
man who had been like posting violent rhetoric on Facebook
and attracted the attention to the FEDS, was caught with
upon of pipe bombs. UM, and like a fucking twenty
(35:03):
two year old kid who was going to be going
there with him was arrested because he had been like
he posted this live stream right ahead of the arrest
because he sees this. Um. He sees that there's like
police cars all cheering up around his house, so he
like calls for his militia buddies to all show up
to protect him. UM, and his mom's yelling at him
and like telling him to like stop doing this ship
(35:25):
and like take off his armor and guns and stop
being a fucking uh an idiot. And he's like yelling
at his mom and he's like these people will these
like the police will kill me. Mom if you call
the cops and me they're gonna fucking kill me because
he's got an illegal rifle in his house, which he
admits on Facebook Live and like the reason he felt
comfortable admitting all of this, like right, and he was
(35:47):
thankfully arrested peacefully. But he thought that he was going
to be able to get twenty or thirty of his
militia guys to show up at his mom's house and
defend him from the FBI, and that they would have
their own Bundy kind of standoff. Um, and I I
found like that seems silly, But I've been following what
all of this. So this guy got released, by the
(36:08):
way from custody. He's out now, and I've been following
he and his friends on Facebook and the things that
they're saying, and none of them are scared back into
the ground. Um. They're all talking about how they need
to do things differently next time so that they don't
get arrested. Um. So like there's one guy saying, I'm
glad he's okay. You know, we need to get a
good game plan together and a good number of people together,
(36:28):
like for the next time this happens. Yeah, how they
need to like contact Gun Owners of America because they
have funds to help with legal cases like this. Like
there's all these these conversations about like what needs to
happen next time, um, and it it including them being
like what needs to happen is the next time we
organize a protest like this, we need to have everybody
(36:50):
show up at the organizer's house the night before and
like sleep there overnight to protect him so that if
the FBI comes, we can actually easily um organize a
resistance against them and we won't get like caught with
only with us all isolated like happened this time. UM.
So that that's really concerning to me for a number
of reasons. Chief among them is the fact that these
(37:13):
people aren't backing down, Like these arrests haven't convinced them
at all that that's necessary. Um. They're just going to
try and continue to proke, provoke, um, direct confrontations with
federal law enforcement and then just encourage them too. Yeah. Yeah,
that's what they want unev. Yeah, that's exactly what they want.
(37:36):
And I think they're going to get it sooner rather
than later. And I don't think it's going to end
well for federal law enforcement. Because um, there's a whole
there's a whole conservative media ecosystem that exists to to
whitewash these guys and UM uh make them seem like patriots,
(37:56):
and they know it exists, and they know that if
there's actually an armed confrontation, the FEDS will probably wind
up being forced to back down. It's really frustrating and scary.
Do you hear that? Yeah? Yeah, they I mean, these
guys are are pretty anti cop like. One of the
So one of the things that's really interesting to me
(38:17):
because I like track memes that spread between these groups
is one of the guys connected to UM, the kid
who was arrested outside of his mom's house UM for
going along with his pipe bomb guy. One of his
friends posted a meme on Facebook like at in the
discussion about UM everything that was happening that's like, uh,
it's a picture of like a black guy firing a
(38:37):
handgun into a parked police car and it's captioned with
when this starts to happen, you'll know why. UM and
I I found the same thing. So there's a website
that's UM connected to this American Revolution two point oh
group that organized a bunch of these rallies called Well
(38:58):
Regulated Militia dot com UM, and uh, that website is
this weird mix of like sovereign citizen beliefs, like these
people who are convinced that there's all these different weird
um legal bits of basically magic that like saying the
right words is like magic to cops and because you
understand these secret laws, like they can't do things to you.
It's like a mix of that and like outright exhortations
(39:20):
to murder police officers and elected leaders. UM. And I
found the same meme posted there on like the same day,
and it's kind of evidence that you've got this and
at this. At the same time, about thirty hours ago
or so, UM, the Oath Keepers, which is like the
largest pan national militia group, posted a thing saying that
like American police are gonna need to choose which side
(39:40):
they're on, um because right now, like they're coming down
as an enemy of the people. Uh. So you've got this.
You've got this in a way that hasn't You know,
the last time the militia movement was this blatantly, violently
and openly anti cop was the Oklahoma City bombing. Right
like that the day is leading up to that and
(40:01):
we're back again, but this time mainstream conservative media is
pushing these guys. So like the leader of American Revolution
two point oh was on Info Wars Alex Jones show,
and he was talking with Sean Hannity. It seems like, um,
and there's there's other ship like that, like all of
these different groups, Um, are you know? The the Bikers
(40:24):
for Trump and stuff have been like official security at
Trump rallies, and they're connected to the oath Keepers who
have also like been invited guests to Trump rallies and
stuff like there's Yeah, these groups are mainstream now. It's terrifying.
It's terrifying to legitimizing that's happening of them. Uh, it's
(40:46):
terrifying that there's so much going on that it's hard
to track. I would say for people right now, it's
hard to keep this in the forefront of your mind
when everything else is happening. I don't I don't trust it.
I don't trust what's happening right now. And it's like
it's sort of background radiation that's always like they're yeah,
(41:06):
and it's gotten so much, it's gotten so much more
main like, yeah, it's it's the main streaming of it.
Keep coming back to that, but it's it's that's the
thing that's really scary here. And I think there's still
this this heavy intention on not like the far left,
but in like the liberal chunks of the left to
like write these guys off and make fun of And
(41:27):
I know, I was just ranting about like they're silly
setups and how how ridiculous some of them look, but
to like write them off for that and be like,
but it doesn't matter, like how silly they are, and
it doesn't matter if their dreams about how this would
work was is unrealistic. What matters is that they have
a shipload of guns, they're getting increasingly organized, and they
want to kill all the people who disagree with them.
Like that's that's important. And the fact that that that
(41:50):
belief is becoming more mainstreamed among the right is important. Um.
And that's the thing, Like I don't know, the I
part of I had hoped that when we started seeing
some crackdowns against these guys, we would see uh them
start to to to head back underground, but they're they're
(42:13):
not doing that, um. And so there needs to be
an organized response to this from the from the left,
and like, we're not going to get it from the
actual government itself. So there needs to be an organized
political response to that, and I'm honestly not sure what
it needs to be. I don't know how you reach
(42:33):
out to these people at this point. Um, Like an
easy way to do it would have been to make
sure that like, um, you know, there was an actual
fundamentally reasonable response to the government to the coronavirus, that
people were taken care of, and that none of these
the folks who were like honestly worried about like going
broke right now weren't worried about that. Um. But I
(42:54):
only think that would really have cut twenty or thirty
percent of this off, right because a lot of the
people are are comfortable right now. Um, they just are
taking this opportunity to push their their uh their politics forward. UM.
I don't know what do you guys think. I mean, yeah, well, yeah,
(43:17):
not just the insidious hijacking of of these kinds of things,
and um, it's just very unsettling. Uh. And people are
so primed to they're everyone's so angry and scared. Um,
Like there's that story about the the security guard got
shot in the head, the person to wear a mask, Um,
(43:40):
she's spit in his face, left, came back wearing a
mask with her dad shot him in the head. Yeah.
And it's just that kind of thing where it's like, yeah,
people they some people just crave it, um and Yeah,
and their leathers are some somehow making them crave it
(44:02):
even more. Yep. And like the the the there's this
town in Oklahoma that pushed like a town ordinance requiring
masks indoors and they were flooded with so many death
threats that they had to reverse it. Um, death threats
towards employees of those companies. That's one of the things
that's most fucked up about it to me is that
(44:23):
these people are like there is this strong strain in
like conservative America particularly of just absolutely hating service industry workers. Um,
and this is being used as an opportunity to do that.
Like it's super gross. Yep. Yeah, really bumps me out. Um,
(44:44):
it's just horrifying. It's horrifying. It just feels like like
they're capitalizing on civil unrest, you know and social unrest
right now and then also amplifying it like Okay, this
is a reason, this is a way that we can, yeah,
become more mainstream. Um and yeah, it's just terrifying implications
(45:05):
of this and what's going to happen now. And yes,
you talk about then the government has to capitulate, uh
and make some concessions here were there or whatever it is.
It depends on the state, but it's it's terrifying, especially
when today we're looking at now the projections are much
more dire, looking on what the death toll is and
what the fallout will be. Um. Yeah, and this just
(45:29):
amplifies that. Yep, yep, yep. I don't know what do
you guys? Do you want to take bets on how
high how bad we think it's going to get, like
how many people are going to die? Yeah? Sure, why not?
Why not go totally ghoulish with it? Do not? I know?
Female just what they ordered, like a hundred thousand body bags.
(45:50):
That's good. I think we'll hit one deaths. Yeah, I
think that's pretty reasonable. Did you guys see the model
that got leaked by the drum administration that came out
today that whole Yeah, that's what that's what I mean.
It was like it was it was higher than one twenty. Yeah,
I'm being conservative here. It's so daunting. But you know,
(46:11):
at the beginning, the very first projection that spooked everybody
was over a hundred thousand would be a goal. And
then we talked about if we enact social distancing measures,
we can be able to curb that, we'll be able
to keep it much smaller. And we certainly have curbed
it in some places, but the rest of the country
has not complied, and we are well on our way. Yeah,
(46:35):
there was a headline I saw yesterday or something that
was like opening up, um, like relaxing quarantine now could
cost us two d and thirty three thousand lives by July,
but save millions of jobs. And you know, one of
the things that's a real bummer is like I was
having a conversation with a friend of mine recently is
(46:57):
not a very political person, but it's a pretty reasonable person.
We were just talking about the virus and she was like, yeah,
I was the death toll had just hit sixty um.
And she was like it's fucked up, but like I
don't even notice the death toll anymore, um, And yeah,
like that is what happened. Was just thinking that, yeah,
(47:18):
like that that's how this works. It's just the way
our brains work. Well, it's just so ghoulish and and
scary and sad. It's hard. You know. When this started,
at least for even more news, I was kind of
doing updates, you know on confirmed cases and what the
death toll and where it stood. And now you know, yeah,
(47:43):
we're you know, I'll give a general update every so often,
but it's just too overwhelming. Yeah, like today, Like yesterday
the news hit that we had lost an entire nine
eleven worth of Americans in one day, And today the
top trends Twitter, um are all related to Star Wars. Yeah,
(48:04):
just literally just the names of Star Wars films. I
don't know, Twilight, also Twilight and Joe Exotic because Nick
Cage is going to be playing Joe Exotic. Yeah, I didn't.
That's terrible. That's deeply upsetting. Yeah, that should all be felonies. Um,
(48:26):
I don't even know what kind of felony. We'll figure
that as an adit. Yeah, I am not. I don't know,
Like I don't want to just be like, you know,
what the positive is is that, um, Jesse the body
Ventura tore the hell out of that waters motherfucker from
(48:46):
Fox News Jesse Waters during a live interview. Um, so
that everybody, yeah about topics I'm I'm waiting for like
actually he believes this batshit thing, um, but no, far
right about quite a few things. I I was, Yeah,
(49:09):
I was going back recently and like looking at an
old appearance of him on the view where he's like
very cogently stating like, no, I was waterboarded during my
military training. It is absolutely torture, and for some reason,
we only do it to Muslims. Yeah. Yeah. And it
was this this realization of like two of the guys
(49:29):
from the Predator movie, um, who were who became famous
for their big muscles, Um, are two of the more
sober minded and responsible American political thinkers in quite something.
Quite something, It's quite quite something. Uh. He also made
me realized that, uh, the y M c A, at
(49:50):
least at a certain point, was a front for the
C I A the CEE. That's pretty good. Um yeah,
I'll share a positive piece of quarantine content I saw
to try to end this. Uh. I'm not sure if
you guys have seen this circulating, but it was made
(50:12):
with Juilliard and uh they've got yo yo maa, they've
got all these you know, classical musicians playing this piece
of music that you all recognize I don't know the
name of, and the dancers performing different pieces. You've got
Laura Linney in there, and you know, different people making appearances.
But it's really beautiful. It's really sad and funny and
(50:33):
hopeful and uplifting. It's ten minutes long. You guys should
google it and find it and give yourself a moment
of watching something beautiful that was probably very hard to coordinate.
It looks daunting to me, but I really appreciated it.
It made my day this weekend. That sounds amazing. Unrelated
(50:53):
to everything we've discussed today, I liked the ending on
on on something positive. Yeah, let's do you want to do?
You want to try to ruin it? And again and again.
I encourage you guys to get invested in your local races,
especially for Senate and the House. We got to keep
(51:15):
the House. We gotta we gotta make some headways in
the Senate. And that is a positive thing that you
can put your energy into. And on that note, mm hmm.
And on that note, you can check us out online.
You can't. Isn't that fun? To your pod? On Twitter
(51:35):
and on Instagram. Please please and thank you everything everything again.
I Tried. Worst Year Ever is a production of I
heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit
(51:57):
the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
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