Episode 60 - Smoothgroins, Smoothbrains

[Music] Attention, ladies, gentlemen and non-binary friends of all persuasions. This episode features a late title drop. I repeat a late title drop. Please do not be alarmed and do not adjust your podcast players. Thank you. [Music] Who is Normal Mentech, our lady? That's a good question. Any name we give, they're going to be offended. Pikachu? Yeah, probably. We do need a lawyer for the sort of thing. Yeah, I mean, she's a lawyer, no nonsense. Yeah, that's a game of fate of her. She knows Weber. She's terrifying. Yeah. A healthy dose of misandry in there. I mean, it's great. It's perfect. It's true. Yeah, if we were going to go the non-lawyer route, like maybe catmaning, because she'll yell at Ed and I all day. That's true. She did today over video games, if I'm correct in my understanding. Yes, she did. My opinion was correct, but I retreated in the face of overwhelming firepower. And yet you fell to the unstopped power of the HR lady. So, no, you're not wrong. That's right. She got your ass. But she got low-tax more and that's the important thing. She did get me more. I do not want that smoke. I am Charles Barkley with Beyonce's mom. Ripon on Galveston. So, if you're not terminally online, like the rest of us, the thing we're referring to here is congratulations. Yeah, congratulations. Let's keep it that way. And that's why you listen to this podcast. So, you don't have to be terminally online. It's perfect. Everyone wins. The thing we're referring to here vis-a-vis HR ladies is an outgrowth of the ongoing end of civilization election in Maine. I don't know why you're asking me. I have no ties to the state of Maine that you can prove. Yeah, okay. If I dangle a bottle of Moxie in front of you, you're going to start purring, but yeah, no ties to the name. I'm not the one who bought Moxie on purpose in the last calendar year. That would be a certain other person on this podcast who shall remain nameless. It was a gift and I appreciate it. You've been all disgusting. Okay. All right. No, actually, I thought he met me because I actually did buy a bottle of Moxie. I was trying to throw low tax under the bus, but thank you for volunteering, proper. Look, what the public's offers, the public's shopper must enjoy. And I just, this is how it works. No, this was not public. I went down to the fresh market, which is like, boozyer publics. We've got one of those. They had Moxie at fresh market? Yeah. That's extremely odd. It's fresh. It's not. It's pretty much the opposite of whatever fresh is. Yeah. So, yeah, the Platner candidacy in Maine, we're not going to talk at length about Platner specifically on this episode because Ed, you know, Ed has-- I deserve nice things. Yeah. We like being nice to Ed sometimes. Yeah, I wouldn't go as far as to say, deserves nice things. But he deserves a little break now and that is a treat. Ed deserves a chance. It's the sanity, the rest of us enjoy. And we're going to give that to him tonight by talking about Platner as little as possible. What we can say about Platner is that he has spawned a series of really impressively bad takes about masculinity from people that really have no business talking about masculinity in my humble opinion. And so we're going to talk about that because, you know, it's kind of our result that, like, if we're not going to talk about masculinity, what are we here for? So, Proctor, do you want to be the explainer guy on who dropped the takes and why, you know, the basics of what was being argued here? Sure, I'll take a stab at this. Correct me if I get the details wrong on this because I'm definitely going to conflate Matt Stoller and Zay Jolianani's comments on this one. Oh, that would be a third one. So we've got Stoller, Jolian-- I don't even-- Zay, something with the J, and then clinked Jolianani, I think. Zay Jolianani. Okay, thank you. Yes. Okay, so three idiots go. Okay, so I thought Zay was the HR-80 comment, but maybe I'm conflating that. I think they both made the HR-Lady comment. Correct. So, this is now just language they use. Yeah, the the overwhelming thrust of the commentary here is that the reason to object to Graham Platner as a candidate for the Democratic Party for the Office of Senate in the state of May is one that is scolding by HR-Lady specifically of the Democratic Party that you should not object to someone who has had a-- let's go with complicated past, is that fair to say? That might offend several large groups of the coalition. Just to be clear here, this is not our opinion. We are relaying the opinions of others in order to make fun of them. That is a very generous and soft discretion of what we're dealing with here. And that really the kind of things that Platner has both allegedly and extremely demonstrably said and done validate him as an every man candidate and make him more real in a lot of ways, then the sort of drones that the Democratic Party likes to run for office who, you know, haven't done things like assault women or gets Nazi tattoos or the various other things that Graham Platner has done. What was it? What was it? One of them said, I think it was Clippenstein who said that the Democrats always run asexual robots from the drones. Yes, smooth grind asexual robots from Harvard, which like obviously he means Buttigieg there, right? Yeah, I think that's straightforwardly just homophobic. I don't think that's anything other than that. Yeah. Yeah, which seems especially unterrible for a guy who from all accounts sort of wrestled with this sexuality in a lot of ways before coming to terms with that. That's anyway. Good, whatever the topography of the growing there is, it's not it's not smooth. So topography of the growing that's I think it's worth I think it's worth I, you know, taking the Clippenstein argument or again, I'm going to lose track of who said what stupid thing here. But taking these at face value just for a second and sort of going through some very obvious counter examples of what they're claiming is the only kind of person that the Democrats nominate. I like look, I am not a fan of the senior senator from Pennsylvania, but Federman does not fit that mold. Ruben Gallego from Arizona does not fit that mold in any way, shape or form. Mark Kelly, I'm sorry, this man was an astronaut. Like are you are you serious? Neither of the senators from Georgia fit this mold, right? I mean, I'm just going through a list of very successful Senate campaigns from the past two cycles, right? That, you know, and again, Federman hasn't gone off the since gone off the rails, but still, right? This guy was by a wide margin, the Senate candidate nominated by the Democratic voters of Pennsylvania and where we've, it's it's it's things have gone badly. But the idea that you can only get nominated as a Democrat as some sort of like I get whatever smooth growing this is just obviously stupid brain dead, tiny ass hat. And also also very memorably, we whiffed on a major Senate pickup opportunity in North Carolina a few years ago because Calcutting Hams growing is unsmoo. Okay, I will defend Calcutting Hams growing. Go and say it. I don't think that had anything to do with why he lost for the record. Okay, I I I mean, look, the voters in the state are a weird bunch, but you know, I just don't think he was I just don't think he was going to get across the line. But again, yes, another good example. I mean Roy Cooper, who's going to put up a sod margins here in the fall. Like, yeah, he's a mild mannered southern man, but this is very clearly like an XY's chromosome type, right? Yeah, there's no there's no. Come on. What are you talking about here? I was going to say, can you imagine? Can you imagine Roy Cooper getting a Nazi tattoo and beating his girlfriend? No, I literally can't. I live or or our side. I pray it hard on this. (laughs) I, this is a completely, this is a take that is completely out of sync with reality. Even before we get into all the other myriad and sundry ways in which it doesn't make sense on its own terms, like it's not accurate about the candidates the Democrats have been running lately. It's just straightforwardly wrong. It's not, I mean, it's not accurate about the Democrats in office either. Like, I think through the Senate caucus and, you know, sometimes a lot of Tory, sometimes derogatory, but like these are not ungendered people of either gender. I mean, we literally have a guy named Dick. (laughs) He's one of my least favorite senators and I can't stand the man, but like, come on! Right. So, like, yeah, there's a lot of gender happening here. There's a lot of, it seems maybe a little bit weird that we're inserting misogyny into this race that maybe doesn't need it. Like, I feel like we could have centered the objections to Platner on the Nazi tattoo, rather than going into gender relations. Women weren't necessarily-- But they don't care about that. It is worth pointing out that the reason that we have now centered gender to this degree is because of our Republican operatives. So, like, that should probably tell you some stuff that is going on here, or at least that was a major catalyst for it this week, maybe not the exclusive reason. I think, were her, was her story pre- or post-the-clip and syn article? They were within a couple days of each other. I thought it was pre- I think so. So, I mean, to give background, if you haven't seen this, the New York Times dropped an article on Grand Platner last week that detailed a set of allegations made against him by several women, but particularly one ex-girlfriend that he dated for approximately two years in DC, who professionally is Republican. Not only is she professionally, she's Republican, she was specifically the person who organized the campaign to discredit Christine Blasey Ford during the Kavanaugh hearings. Like, she's pretty offensively, professionally Republican. She had a podcast with Bethany Mandel. Like, you know, that's rough. That's raw like sushi. So, Bethany-- No, no, no, no, no, things proper. That is Bethany, I want your grandma to die from COVID, Mandel. That is the one, yeah. I think it was Bethany, I'm willing for my grandma to die from COVID, Mandel. Oh, I don't remember if she said it about her grandma. Anyway, so, like, this is somebody who I think it's fair that the identity is setting off alarm bells for people, but that said, the story she's telling is in places undisputed and in places credible in a way that makes it not dismissable. There are three central allegations that she makes, two of which I think are essentially self-affirming, and one of which is extremely plausible, but boils down to basically her word against, against Platners. The first allegation is that Platner has been lying about whether or not he knew about that his Nazi tattoo was a Nazi tattoo. She says that he referred to it as, as Mind Thutonkopf, and she put that in a text prior to the discussion of that last summer when Platner says is when he became aware that it was a Nazi tattoo. So the only way she's lying about that is if she was aware that it was a Nazi tattoo, but somehow, "Grand Platner wasn't aware that it was a Nazi tattoo." I don't think that's credible. I think we have to kind of take it as granted what's been obvious for some time, which is that Platner is lying about not knowing that that was not seeing. We can get into the ramifications of that and what it means for whether or not he's a Nazi later, but that's allegation number one. Allegation number two, this was the one that's probably going to stick most in my brain despite not being the most serious of the allegations, is that Platner used to comment, her description was that he said this a lot, that if someone broke into the apartment, he would rape them. Not in a gay way. It was important that Grand Platner specify that this would not be in a gay way, but it would be as a display of dominance. Oh, totally rape you, no homo. I mean. I'm not even going to touch that. This is not a normal way to talk about. This is not a normal way to talk about burglary. This is not a normal way to talk about dominance. It's not a normal way to talk about it. It's finding this abnormal. This is just a deep weird and disturbed thing to say. I think it is where we self-guaranteen in terms of the thing, because Grand Platner has in other contexts repeatedly used similar verbiage to talk about war crimes. He's talked about pissing on corpses of defeated enemies as a dominance display. He's talked about burning corpses as a dominance display. That particular phrasing stuck in my brain when I saw him use it for these other things, which he's been doing for the last 20 years. These are quotes going back in newspapers to when he came back from his first tour in Iraq. If it's a lie, it's a very good lie. Especially given that we know that Platner is lying about the Nazi tattoo, I think we have to take that as true. The third and final allegation, and this is probably the most explosive, is that he says that Platner was physical with her on a number of occasions. That he twisted her arm behind her back, that he threw her into a room and held the door closed until she eventually passed out on the bed. She was specific that he never hit her. So points for that, Graham. But these are allegations of domestic violence. Let's not beat around the bush there. These are things that you cannot physically do to somebody. These are descriptions of assault. For that, there is no external validation. Yeah, and this is. Show of hands, who's surprised? This is exactly the guy you thought he was. Okay, I'm going to be honest. I will rape a burglar, surprise. I did not have that on my dingo card. You knew he had a reddit account. I mean. All right, granted. Does the fact that this guy who has had takes around good wars? Generally, he's had some real fun comments about women in the past. Maybe not the magnitude, but I'm not really surprised at the direction. I don't think anyone else can be either. There's a reason that domestic violence is kind of cliche for PTSD. This is a real danger. PTSD commits TV, but that there is an elevated risk after you have been in a war zone surrounded by violence, committing violence yourself, having violence, enacted on you, that violence comes home with you. That's real bad. You can wait that however you want to wait that. This is. This Grimp Ladder is not the first person in this situation to have problems along those lines. That was not surprising to me. No, and frankly, it's. That is absolutely a thing. But he also just acts like the guy who has terrible relationships with humans. And I'm sure you can't discount service-related stuff absolutely. But everything that we dredge up about his history is just he's an unsuitable person to be in a position of leadership or control over any people. And I think that's a really important point, Ed, because having issues from PTSD, especially from PTSD, from service, even if that verges to DV, right? I don't think that. That in and of itself, at some point in his past, is instantly disqualifying. That's the end of the conversation we're done here. How he has responded to things he has done in the past or things that are a consequence of what happened to him when he was serving in the military and thereafter is a completely different story. And there is no sign whatsoever of repentance or seeking grace is what we've talked about in the past with this guy. There's just no sign of that. Like there's none at all. This is not somebody who made mistakes and hurt people and tried to make amends and tried to take responsibility for that. If anything, it looks very much the opposite. And, you know, I pointed out earlier before the very detailed and very well done proctor, the background around the allegations and who this person is. Just because you're a Republican operative doesn't mean that it's not a completely legitimate allegation. It is a completely legitimate allegation. It's happening on Republicans timing and in a way that benefits them, but I have no reason to doubt really much of what this woman has come forward with. - Yeah. - And even if she's wearing the wrong color jersey, right? - Right. - If you have an ethical system that centers the experiences of survivors of all sorts of different bad stuff, then it doesn't matter what color they're jersey is and hers is the wrong color, but doesn't mean she's lying. And I see no reason to believe she is. So, you know, if this had been a thing where, you know, at some point in his past, he had had this sort of stuff happen in a relationship and then he had gone to therapy and made amends with the person in question and sought accountability and yadda, yadda, yadda. There's a bunch of different ways this could have played out. That would be a really different conversation, but I don't think anyone would even begin to argue that is what happened in this particular situation, right? - There's also this kind of, like, there's this kind of double trap surrounding this person in question who has said some extreme we racist things again. Like, like, I'm not a fan of the woman who's making these allegations on a number of levels, but it's not disputed that she and Platon are dated for like two years. And it doesn't speak super well of Platon, that he dated an extremely racist Republican operative for two years. So, - Well, clearly we just have the next James Carville here, Proctor. - Yeah, I mean, like, so, I do think she's credible. - That's not a good thing. You know, I think we should probably talk a little bit about what it means to believe women in context like this because that gets trotted out as either a laugh line or a talisman. Every time we have allegations that ultimately turn on the assessment of credibility, that doesn't mean believe that women are incapable of telling lies and they have identity memories. That means try to compensate for the discount that you were giving women's stories because as a society, we discount women's stories when they're alleging abuse. - Yep, yep, yep. - You know, it's not like women, it's not like it's impossible for women to lie about sexual assault or abuse, but it happens less often than we think it happens. The tendency is to say, okay, well, she's probably lying or exaggerating or something to excuse the behavior. And you shouldn't do that. So, in this case, we have somebody who's a decent test case for that. Somebody who again has been involved in attacking the credibility of another woman who has claimed to put a ben, sexually assaulted, who I think again is a, is a pretty unsympathetic figure from a number of perspectives, but also like when you look at her story, parts of it are definitely true and parts of it are overwhelmingly plausible. So, I think you really have to be, motivated to go out of your way to dismiss her as a liar because of who she is. One of the things we've seen that has been interesting as many of the people who are circling the lagans around Platner on this are not dismissing her as a liar. They're just pointing to who she is and saying she's awful, which seems to me to be kind of accepting the charges. - Right, and like there's a lot going on here and it's all coming back to the permission structures to be a piece of shit, right? That's what they're here for. And like that's why it's these particular people and we will get into those particular people and their moral failures insulting people as why I'm here. But like this is entirely so they can get to be transgressive pieces of shit like Republicans normally are. Like this is them attempting to adopt right wing coded behaviors but leftishly, right? Like and when you say right wing, a specific part of the right wing, right? Because like fascists, right. But like a part of the right wing where the thing that you're adopting is just straightforward misogyny, just straightforward in egalitarian views around the roles and the rights and responsibilities of men, vis-a-vis women and women, vis-a-vis men in society. And that's it. Like that's straightforwardly it, right? It's not talking about tax policy or religion or foreign policy. It is straightforwardly, I want to be a part of a society where I can do what I want to women and they have no recourse. - I would perhaps go further and say it is not only women though women are a common target. It is people in general, right? Like this is like a really fucked up set of behaviors around like just how you interact with human beings, right? Like, you see a lot of this from this particular set of the right wing when it comes to black people, right? Like it's not just women. It's anyone who they feel like, is insufficiently grateful. Let's put it that way. Is insufficiently willing to provide opportunities to folks like, let's be honest, Matt Stoller, who is kind of a failure of a policy wonk, right? Like this dude is a dead end or Gen X, he's almost 50 and he's out here complaining about democratic HR ladies, right? Like this is him trying to find a way to lash out at somebody else and using Graham Platner to do it. - By the way, also if you're listening and you have never seen a photo of Matt Stoller who is claiming to be carrying the flag for manliness, go look up a photo of Matt Stoller. - I think the one commonality on this that we should maybe dive into a little bit more. Let me preface this by talking very briefly about the other two women in the NYT article, who's allegations, who both alleged that Platner was a very bad boyfriend of a kind that is familiar, that he was beyond inconsiderate. One of them alleged that he came to our house drunk despite her telling him not to come and stood outside and yelled for a while that I think the commonality of this and this kind of goes back to me too and group cancellation and all of that is that there is this incredulousness that there can be repercussions for treating people badly that expand beyond the parameters of the relative power relationship you had with them at the time. That part of the outrage here is that you are being punished for something that you thought was over, that you thought was done within the confines of that relationship you had to that other person at that time where they were comparatively powerless, the blast radius is limited. And it turns out the blast radius isn't limited because later on people find out that you were acting like an asshole and they might make judgments based on that. That's part of the power of kind of cancellation or of kind of group social sanction is that you might be treated in a negative way because of something you did to somebody who you thought was powerless, not because they have power. They didn't acquire more power later. It's not like they're directly taking revenge on you but because other people later were in what you did and sympathize with this person that you thought was powerless. It's a fundamental rejection of both reciprocity as a concept for ethical behavior and also a rejection of the fundamental ability of your social environment to place restraints on you. If you believe that you should treat other people the way that you want to be treated, then this argument that is being put forward, that these acts should never face consequences down the road is ludicrous. It's completely ludicrous. These men wouldn't want to be treated this way. But they wouldn't accept being treated this way as. Just what should happen and no consequences for it? Ridiculous to expect that. And they also believe that those same social connections that they want to use for advancement of their career, their material circumstances, their politics, shouldn't bind them in any way. And that ain't how it is, fellas. I just can't believe that nominating the pod John's Coke dealer from Capitol Hill didn't pat out. You know, it's an open question whether or not he's still got a decent chance to win the race. Technically, the primary hasn't happened yet. I don't think there's any way he loses at this point. No, probably not. There has been a negative inflection in the polling, probably coming out of the sexting allegations from a couple weeks back. There were sexting allegations of a couple weeks back. I don't think we have polling that demonstrates what the NYT story has done as yet. But the most recent polling we have released by the Platinum Campaign showed him in a statistical tie with Collins at this point, which it's not drawing dead, but it's not necessarily where he was a couple weeks ago. And it's definitely not where you want to be. And like you know that this is the next the the next trench, right? Like they are going to fall back to, oh, he would have won if not for people taking this shit so seriously, right? But it is serious. And like you can't have people like this. I'm going to say something that's going to sound painfully naive gentlemen. You can't have people like this running the fucking country. Come on, man. You can't. Look at what happens. They start they start tearing down the White House. For what it's worth, prediction markets still have and this is not an endorsement as prediction markets being correct. This far out they are pure vibes, pure conventional wisdom. They do not have any real insight. I will die on the hill that prediction markets are extremely useful on election night when votes are getting dropped and basically just conventional wisdom up to that point. He is still the favorite in prediction markets. Democrats winning the Senate seat in Maine. There may be some tiny you know outcome price where he gets replaced somehow or loses the primary or something. But you know basically 5842 is what prediction markets have for Maine in terms of Democrats being favorite, which you know I do think regardless of what the polling says right now, I do think that the hill for Collins to climb is enormous. Could Platner blow it based on everything we've been talking about, etc, etc? Sure, he could, but it would really have to be a screw up. I think given how all the sub demographics are looking given the specific circumstances of our last few wins and really how impressive they were versus the broader national vote at the time, there is good reason to believe she is a very, very deep in the whole incumbent at this point. And that doesn't mean that he's going to win necessarily locked in. But I think prediction markets are right to have him favorite still even though all of this, which is I mean this week bad. It's it's going to be a hell of a gut check for the DSCC. In a couple of weeks because people like people like specifically Kristen Gillibrand who runs the DSCC who you may have recently who you may remember was one was was the senator who spearheaded the final push that got Al Franken to resign over allegations of groping people. I say allegations he was definitely groping people. I don't mean to cast out on that. Good note. But Kristen Gillibrand runs the DSCC and she's going to have some some I think very difficult decisions to make about how much money to steer towards Maine in light of this stuff. This is the kind of thing that could have blowback outside of Maine. Maine was headed for being a very expensive Senate race this year. It's still going to be a very expensive Senate race this year. Grand Platon was a good fundraiser. So even if the outside money doesn't play like this is still going to be easily a hundred million dollar probably a two hundred million dollar Senate race. That's offensive. There's like one point six million people in the state. I mean that's like six hundred percent of Maine GDP. 20 20 20 was a two hundred million dollar Senate race in Maine. So like that's gross. This one's going to be costly. But you know the big organs of outside money for the Dems and protect your are going to have to decide whether and how they're going to support that if they're going to do it through kind of the upfront channels if they're going to do it exclusively with the left hand. And they're going to have to start making those decisions fairly soon. There are lots of other places for the money to go that are not as likely a pickup as Maine. But you can make the argument that my state and Maine should stand and fight on their own because there are plays where the places where the Democrats can play offense. I actually also happen to think a little bit this way about Texas. Texas is a little bit different. But just because Texas is such a big media market moving the needle there is so expensive that maybe you don't spend as much there as you otherwise might. Whereas Alaska, Iowa, even Ohio is our places where you really can see high impact dollars for pickups in those in those races. $200 million buys a lot of salmon. The issue is less the buying of the salmon and more that there aren't enough. You know what? Never mind. Forget it. Although have you all ever heard of a salmon cannon? I don't want to. Is this really cool? Is this the thing they used to get salmon's up over dams? Yeah, there's the column. That's right. So basically if you've got this dam river system and this isn't as big of a deal in Alaska because they haven't like building a dam in Alaska is really expensive and like, you know, whatever. But huge deal in the Columbia river system and a few other west coast river systems where salmon used to swim all the way up straight. I mean you can look at a map of the Columbia river. Salmon used to swim to Cootney Lake, which is like I grew up on and even further up into the aerolakes up north where my cada'mas now. I mean this is thousands and thousands of miles swimming up through mountain passes basically. Through over waterfalls, through rapids, just swimming, swimming, swimming to spawn in these creeks, right? In these mountain creeks that are deep inside the continent through across several mountain ranges from the Pacific Ocean where these salmon spend their adult lives. And one of the solutions that has been experienced with it, you actually quite a bit of success in getting salmon back towards these streams over these dams that were erected in the middle of the 20th century and really messed up the whole spawning situation. Right. Because like salmon ladders suck. They're really exhausting for the fish that have to go up. Well, I mean also a certain at a certain dam size like a salmon ladders. It's not going to work anymore. The salmon ladders do work for some implementations. But basically this solution is you create this pneumatic cannon that literally fires the salmon up over the dam in a giant parabolic arc. And it doesn't actually hurt the fish. There's been studies done where if they use the salmon cannon thing, they can still go and spawn. Everything's fine. Coming downstream is usually not as big of an issue from the dam for the dams. There are turbines involved. And so you do have some nutrition there. But generally there are ways to get the fish around the dams quite easily going downstream. But upstream you need the salmon cannon. So yeah. Going downstream. Going downstream. They're much smaller, which helps. Yes. Yes. The other great thing about the salmon cannon. So salmon on their way back to spawn. They kind of zombify over the course of the process. Salmon going back to spawn. Do not give a. They are in it to get to their spawning. They will do it even if there are bits falling off of them. Like they are on a mission at that point. Who among us fell as? Who among us? Right. I mean, that's right. They're no longer eating. They are just exclusively, you know, heading, heading back home to for one last hurrah. And what that means is that I think George is broadly corrected that the salmon cannon doesn't hurt the salmon. But as long as it doesn't kill the salmon, it doesn't really matter if it hurts the salmon a little bit as long as they're still capable of proceeding. They are they are sexual berserkers at that point. So that is that is good to know. So scientists, you can hurt the salmon a little bit as a tree. Concuss salmon. Speaking of sexual berserkers back to Grand Planner. No, no, no, we're cutting that one. John Federman salmon. But like that, I would like to stop talking about Grand Planner. I'm going to be honest because like the thing that is like sure, he's he's going to get the nomination. Who's going to who's going to replace him Batman, right? Like so like I'm sorry, man, you have to vote for him. But like the way that these tools are trying to turn this into a media thing is interesting parentheses. pejorative, right? Because like the fight they're trying to pick is one with with women they've invented in their heads for the most part. Matt Stuller has not had a real job probably in a year that begins with it too. But like I excuse me just a correction here. Matt Stuller was a writer in the 2010s. I said a job on brand X with Russell Brand. All right. I said a job and not a cursive sentence from which one cannot recover. You guys know how he got hooked up with Russell Brand, right? I heard this but I don't want to. Isn't it his brother? Yeah, it's his brother who's a director. His brother directed Russell Brand and in forgetting Sarah Marshall and get him to the Greek. Oh, anyway. But like like he's he is literally just acting out his his juvenile deviance at people who do actual work. This is record shit. This is Red Brown. You know, welcome to the horseshoe shit. I think this is something that the Democratic coalition has gotten a lot worse at in recent years, which is that sometimes you have to ask some of your some parts of your coalition to each shed on something. In recent years, it's been you know, we've asked we've asked Arabs to eat shit on Palestine. We've asked we've asked Jews to eat shit on Israel. We've asked Jews to eat shit on Nazi tattoos. And with Platinum, we're asking women, particularly women who have been the subject of intimate violence to eat a keeping platter of shit in the context of the VRA being gutted. We're already asking black people in our coalition to eat a steaming terrain of shit. And our hold on though, I think that's a little different. Isn't it? I mean, it is. Yeah. Well, it's it's a democratic party. No one in the Democratic party wanted the VRA to go away. Like that's not and that and that's something that we're going to run on. Like that's not. But some of the corresponding moves to that are going to involve weakening black districts in blue states. So we are going to take districts that have been veered that have been packed VRA districts that are that are like 70% black. And we are going to turn those into still still very blue districts. But for the sake of creating extra extra seats in places like New York, we are going to turn those into districts that are not necessarily still black districts. But also like black people are about to lose something on the order of a fifth of their representation in Congress as we're all to this. Are we going to are we going to work to keep black people out of primaries in those districts or you know, I mean, I mean, I mean, wrong. I think I think that's directly we're not. But I think it's worth thinking through the implications of VRA and what it means in a real politics sense. But I think it's qualitatively different from the planner stuff. Okay, fair enough. That's true. But that's not saying that it's not, you know, take one for the team. The similarity is that this is something where a portion of our coalition is suffering injury, not necessarily because it's injury we ask them to suffer, but they are suffering injury. And we need to as good coalition mates try to make it better, try to do some kind of healing some kind of give back. It's still our problem, even if it's not our doing. And so and that's my point, right? Like with the VRA stuff and New York being a really good example, there are there is no reason that if you crack a bunch of 70% black district into a more efficient alignment that you don't then say behind the scenes however you want to do this, look, you're still going to get a black candidate representing you. We're going to make that happen. There are ways around this in a way that there is no way around the Democratic Party getting fully behind Grand Planner. And I that may not happen. I don't as you said with the DSCC, you know, we'll see, but there is no way to tell a woman who's been a victim of Democrat, excuse you not Democrat, domestic violence. That one, that one will go. They are not being told to eat a pile of shit when the whole party is behind Planner. And again, maybe the whole party is behind Planner etc. I think the other two examples, you know, Arab Americans and Palestine and a certain segment of Jewish voters because a lot of Jewish voters I think are perfectly on board with cutting Israel off. I think that's that they're a lot of pulling in this. But you know, for that segment that are pro-Israel, like your Chuck Schumer's of the world, right? Like yes, they are you're right. They are absolutely being asked to eat a pile of shit. I just don't think that's as true with the VRA stuff. And I think it's worth thinking about that. Yes, I agree with you that they're different situations. They're both situations in which a little bit of TLC would go a long way in terms of maintaining good, good, good, co-illitional relations. Yeah. You know, part of this is trying to acknowledge other people's pain. You know, if you feel you're being asked to eat shit, even if you're maybe being a little bit unreasonable about it or it's not entirely my fault that you're being asked to eat shit, it's still nice to have the direct acknowledgement. Which is like you're taking it. It's like being part of a coalition, which is what these tools are not doing, right? Like this is just act grinding because a woman said something mean to them once, right? And like we're seeing a lot of this from the quote unquote thinkers of the marginal left, right? I guess Stolar, I don't know if you could say is that far left, he's really just like he doesn't like monopolies and will pretty much see anything else that somebody says when they're when they're being nice to them. But like it's really troubling that this stuff kind of goes without too much question, right? Like say, Jolani is, I'm, let's use the word credible, right? And this will not make him not credible. Like this stuff should make these people person an on grata, it won't, but it should. And like I think there's a question to be asked about that, right? Like clen, clen, Ken Clippenstein is like one, people take this guy seriously for reasons I cannot comprehend. But like they do and they're not going to take him less seriously because he's going on about smooth grinds. And I apologize for making you hear that term again. Listeners, not you guys. But like how this is, this is a technical term, but I think this is bad for us. Yeah. Well, there should be punishment for it and there won't be. I mean, the good thing is I don't know what Matt Stoller actually does. You know, Clippenstein has, I assume Clippenstein is a substack guy. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know where Zaheel Jalani works. Is he also a substack guy? I assume so. Maybe he's Grey Zone. I don't know. These are all these are all ex intercept guys. Like that's the commonality. Oh, I mean, like we haven't touched on that. But you know, well, Stoller's not an intercept guy. No, Stoller's not an intercept guy. He's sort of adjacent spaces, but but he's not intercepted. I'm not fighting with Stoller for 25 fucking years. So he had his own separate newsletter. But like it feels as though, I mean, the intercept. Who else has come out of there? Hello, Glenn Greenwald, right? Like it's a piece of shit factory. Yeah. It always has been our man Ryan Grimm. Oh, I've got about that. Oh, so like the most legendary bull cut on the internet. Yeah. I mean, like Clippenstein has historically been maybe the least problematic of the intercept cinematic universe characters. True. Definitely. Yeah. He's he's over there. He's over there. He's a perfect specter society. Yeah. Like I posted about this a little bit. Actually, no, many, many of songs. Okay. But like, but he got out really. Oh, that's true. He got out early. And like people say nice things about Pierre O'Mediar, who's the billionaire who funded the intercepts. And I kind of believe them. He doesn't seem like a terrible guy. I mean, so I haven't seen any buylines. Yeah. So I don't I don't know. I don't really understand the whole deal there and full. I posted a little bit a little bit about this the other week, but like they're kind of two major camps fighting for the soul of the American left in my view that camp number one is sort of the sewer socialism mom down it. The sewer socialism refers to a specific moment in time. Not socialists who are living in the sewer. It refers to socialists who are trying to fix the sewers who are trying to do good good particularly good local governance. And you know, thereby thereby through good works promote socialism as a good functional system of government. I think that that is one of the two strains that's fighting for the soul of the American left. The other one is kind of the DSA. I see that they're the dirt bag left. I'm glad you added the I see there because DSA. DSA sewer socialism. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I see is not. Yes. Yes. Yes. No, there right there. their trapeze. Yeah, like, like, that's that's the weird thing. I haven't listened to chapeau in a long time. But like, if you if I had to imagine what 2017 chapeau would have said about this current debate, like, I don't think they're getting on board with the guy that has Nazi tattoos who's being promoted by former Obama staffers. Like, I am, I'm, I'm, again, I have no idea what chapeau has said about this guy. No, no, I'm sorry. They would have seen, they would have seen the pod johns go in on platinum. And they'd have been like, nope, we're done. Yes. He's probably a CIA plant or something. Yep. That's exactly right. I hate, and again, please sound off in the comments with how actually they're huge platinum fans. I have no idea. Yeah, I'm totally in the dark on this one. I agree with that from like 2017 for sure. But like, this is the same sort of transgressive shit on people stuff that like, they really got into their crowning achievement, their their contribution to the discourse going forward is that they made relatively normy guys who go to work wearing a suit think that it's fun to post the stuff on Twitter. Right. Like Matt Stuller carrying that flag of masculinity must be very difficult with a concave chest. But like, like, like, does he think he's one of them? Does he think he's cool? Yeah, he does. No, I know. I know. I understand. But like, does he think he's David J. Roth? God, that's a depressing thought. Yeah. I would just like to say open invite to anyone we've mentioned derisively on this podcast. If you would like to come and hang out on my squat rack, you are more than welcome. And then you can start talking about masculinity after that. I'm not sure right now. I'm doing I'm in marathon training. So like, you know, you'll have a leg up. You're still I was worried you were going to extend an invite because honestly, this podcast can hold me in any one of the I will simply just curse. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. They're not welcome on the podcast. They can come to my garage and we can throw some plates up and we can see how masculine they are. Let's do that. All right, are we done with gender for the night? I don't think we're ever done with gender. Just one just just two more things really quick. Thing one, I'm sorry, man. I played college football. I have worked in the finance industry my whole life. I'm a father. Like you cannot I drive a pickup truck. I like beer. I like it's an electric though. It's faster than whatever I do. I think they're terrifying. Yes. Anyhow, you cannot come and tell me I'm not masculine enough because I think there is a role for HR in a corporation or any large organization or any large management organization, right? I'm sorry. I don't want to hear from you. Like I'm serious. Come to my squat rack and tell me that. Like it's so frustrated to hear from these just pathetic dudes that that is what's holding the back. No, it's because you're not actually anything. The thing is how the hell do they have this much experience with an HR lady? I think I've got to answer that question. My HR lady like once when they onboarded me and I had to pick my health care plan. The second thing I was quickly know to close this out. Whenever anyone talks about gender and especially men and especially me, given the little rantages went on, but also all these other dudes who suddenly have opinions about smooth groins. Every time someone's publicly talking about gender, they are performing gender. It is they're accepting themselves, right? Is recursive. It is projection. That is so important to keep in mind. We are all performing our gender because gender is a social construction and it is really important to remember that anytime you see someone hold forth about what defines masculinity and why they are more masculine or what what thing is holding back men or whatever crap, right? Including again, including me, right? Just count me on this too, please. I just want to make one correction. I'm not performing masculinity. I'm performing woodworking. Okay, should we talk Mormons? Let's talk Mormons. Oh, yeah. The Mormons are angry. Right. Blue Taw. I will say, Proctor, I think when did you have the blue taw take? It was mid-2024, I want to say. Oh, no, I've been being that drunk for years. Okay, maybe this is the first time I saw it. It's been a long time. Proctor has been on the blue taw Mormons are going to realign to the Dems train for a long time. We got a story this week that I think at least partially indicates his foresight. I don't know how it helps to move the needle. So what happened here is that the Pentagon paired down the list of classified religions for the United States Armed Services that they have previously they had like 800 classified religions that like, okay, these are all these are all things that we're going to treat as different specified things with their own rules for how we treat you because we respect these things and so on and so forth. And they reworked the West. And when they reworked the West, they have a subsection of Christian religions, right? Of which there are, I don't know, maybe 15 different denominations listed. They've got Christian Catholics, they've got Christian Episcopalians, they've got Christian Lutherans, and then they have notably not Christian, Church of Jesus Christ, and the Latter-day Saints. The Mormons do not love this. Yeah, even though, even though, headsets might have a point. They don't think so and that's what wins. No, they don't think so and that's what wins. Right. But like, I love this idea of reclassifying all of these because when we take back the White House in 2029 and we appoint friend of the podcast Mike Black to be Secretary of Defense, we're also, we're also going to do that. I am personally going to get Mike to assign all of the religions to Protestantism because all Americans are Protestant. So I think that they chat GPT this or something because because one of the other things that they did if you look into the subsections on this is like, they got Christian Orthodox and then they list a number of different Orthodox sects, one of which is Orthodox Jews. I'm going to go to bat for the fine people at OpenAI. I'm pretty sure they wouldn't make that mistake. They also did that with reformed Christianity and reformed Jews, which, you know, yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of Orthodox and a lot of reform out there. But in so far as there's a common ancestor, it's further back than that. I mean, if you listen to the Orthodox talk about the reform, you know, it's kind of like the Catholics and the Jesuits, you know. No, no, not right analogy. Yeah. Are Christian reformed like hardcore? Am I off on my theology here? I don't even know what Christian reform means. All right, we'll have to get a freestyle. No, I'll just take it Orthodox, how Orthodox Jews view reformed Jews. Oh, yeah, that's contentious. Yeah. Yeah. And how some of the weirder Catholics view the Jesuits. Yeah. Yeah, right. I forgot about that. There's the lore. I may be agnostic, but I know my shit people. Man. But yeah, and like, like, it's interesting because like one of the things a lot of people do not know is that there is a very large like Mormon contingent intact. There's a running joke that like if it's written in PHP, you know, check Utah. More to the point have been fortunate to work with a lot of a lot of folks, right? Like very, everyone I know for the most part is very done with the Republicans shit, right? Like I wouldn't presume to speak for them, but like I don't some have been done with their shit since, you know, 2021. This is this is a long time coming. But at and like, it's a fairly educated population, right? Like it's a super educated population. Yeah. Yeah. Now Mormons, if you look at Mormons just through like a demographic lens in terms of income, in terms of in terms of in terms of education, likelihood to hold a passport. Like we had to hold a passport like like likelihood of actually having traveled abroad. They're basically Rocky Mountain Jews except that they don't look like we're differently. But like, but but but like in terms of in terms of subsets of people who tend to go to who tend to have collegiate degrees, Mormons are educated at a super high rate, both men and women, which which surprised me a little bit the last time I looked at because that's something that they've they've pushed in recent years. Like LDS has really moved very far and very fast on a lot of things. That's not to say that they're without problems like that's still a faith tradition that is kind of finding its way and reforming through a lot of changes. But they have been moving from a very very red starting point. They have been moving blue. for a while and that movement has accelerated in recent years. So there's also something fundamentally communitarian about Mormons that just doesn't fit in the modern Republican party. Like, and you're right to talk about the trend of reformation within the LDS church. I mean, the LDS church did a lot of work to expel some of its worst impulses a long time ago. And actually where I grew up in British Columbia, there was a sect that was not welcome in the LDS church that sat down to do polygamy and a bunch of other stuff. And that was like a sort of thing in the background when I was growing up. My friend, close his friend from kindergarten to middle school was a Mormon kid. And so I did a whole bunch of family home evenings and trips with his church to go hike and stuff. Like, there is a fundamental view within that community of how they want to treat other people and how people want people to treat them that just doesn't fit in the Republican worldview. It's just like it's fundamentally like, these are people who want to be good neighbors. They want to make the community there and be better. And yeah, they want to evangelize their beliefs. But they are very happy to be told, no, thank you. Don't want to talk about that. Like, you are the Mormon missionaries get this trope of being annoying and showing up on your doorstep. But if you ever have, I have never heard of an experience where someone says to a Mormon missionary, like, listen, I don't want to talk about this with you. Can you please leave me alone? And the Mormon missionary is saying something other than, okay, bye. Like, you know, and that's their worst attribute in the community that they're a part of. You know, like, and again, that doesn't excuse some of the dynamics within the LDS church that they're working on. Or some of the historical stuff, you know, gay marriage in California being probably the best example in national politics. But you're right. I mean, this is really, these people don't fit. They're not Republicans. Like, they, it doesn't exist. The other thing is like, does Pete Heggseth not know that like all of our spies and FBI are abriduces or Morments? Right. No, so he doesn't. So the story on that a little bit is that we've had very restrictive policies about security clearance for a long time, right? It's harder to get a security clearance if you've done drugs, particularly marijuana. Well, guess who hasn't done any marijuana? So, someone famously, no marijuana. Yeah. And you also get this kind of, you know, inucleation effect where you get some members of any minority into a place and that creates a ladder for other people to get in. But yeah, the intelligent services are very heavily Mormon. The one other thing that I want to say about LDS riffing off of what George said a minute ago about the Pugamy splinter sex is that whether or not you or I think that Mormons experience discrimination by the government, LDS is extremely concerned about discrimination against Mormons by the government in part because of their experience with government regulation of Pugamy. And these kind of, this sort of faith memory of this set of crackdowns on what was then an established Mormon cultural practice of Pugamy that almost tore the church apart on a number of, in a number of respects and caused a lot of disruption to Mormon lives. Now, I mean, I think it's good that we no longer have Pugamy and I think that LDS also thinks it's good that we no longer have Pugamy. But that wasn't that long ago as these things go, right? Like, I mean, you're talking about, you're talking about a religion that's, they're what, 150 years old, 170 years old, something like that. Give it like in the 1930s. Yeah. I mean, the family experience of their religion was getting pogroms literally across the continent. Right. Yeah. And from Utah with, like, one of the problems to crack it down on something like Pugamy, right, is like, you have these family relationships. Like, like, you can't just stop having wives. That's not a thing that's easy to do. So what that meant is you had lots and lots of families who were fleeing to go, fleeing to Mexico or fleeing to Canada because that was how they could stay a family. That's why, for instance, Mitt Romney's dad was born in Mexico because the Romney's fled to Mexico because, is a grand, happy Romney had more than one wife. Now again, a very, very good thing that Pugamy's in, in the rear view. I am in no way arguing for Pugamy here, but these are not very many generations back where you're talking about these memories of government crackdown in a way that was again, really painful to families. So you have a set of people who are hyper attenuated to government persecution of religion in a way that I think is sincere. And that maybe results in overreach in some ways, but this is a more recent and more immediate ancestral memory than many faith groups in the United States have of what it's like to have your way of life crack down on by the government. And like I will never feel sympathy for Mike Lee. It's not possible, but like he is definitely on the finding outside of like, oh, we're in the club of people who get to shit on people. No, you're not. No, you're not. No, no, no, fascists, fascists eat from the bottom up and a lot of people are much lower on that than they think they are. And it's going to go bad if folks don't realize. Welcome Mormons into the fold. Those dirty sodas are not coming with them. I'm going to speak up. I'm going to speak up for the dirty sodas because I'm sorry we can't be offering. We can have dirty sodas. We can have dirty sodas, but they got they got to get rid of crumble. I'm sorry. Crumbles? I mean, crumbles weird because like, okay, no, you do not eat a calorie cookie. Who is eating it? Yeah, that's the thing. You do not need to cook yourself. You just have a bite of a crumble cookie. If you just have a bite, it's fine. I mean, it's not great. It's mids, but it's a cookie. Yeah, whatever cookies don't taste bad. Whatever. We're not endorsing crumbles on this podcast. I'm not endorsing. I'm not. I think you're endorsing. I am just saying the dirty soda is a bigger war crime than the crumble cookie. That's all I'm saying. I don't know. Those cookies are basically cakes. They're delicious. They're delicious. What are you talking about? Sure, but that's not a cookie. I mean, there's a dirty soda. I never had rules. There's not dirty soda, just a soda with some like fruit syrup and cream in it. Yeah, pretty much. The cream, the cream's the key part. The half and half is the issue here. To be clear. Yeah. For what it's worth, I tried. I mean, have you ever creamed high sea from McDonald's and it was all right. Have you ever had a root cure? I had a root cure. A root cure. That's different in you. A root cure. It's got different textures in it because it's ice cream. It's not cream. It's not just pouring cream into your Coca-Cola. Well, not Coca-Cola because the caffeine, but they're still doing the no-coco because caffeine thing, right? Yeah. No, the more minutes. Oh, the more minutes. The more minutes are. The brits do that milk coke thing. The Birmingham people. Yeah, you pour, you put like, you pour yourself a glass of coke like halfway up and then you put in a teaspoon of sugar and then fill the rest up with milk and mix it together and drink that. Adding sugar to coke? Yeah. Apparently, it's very big in Birmingham. This is like, they just kind of treat it like tea. Is that what's happening here? Yeah, kind of. And for what it's worth, George, Bourbon's don't drink coffee. They do drink soft drinks. Contentious. Contentious. But like generally. Soft drinks. No, because when I was, no, no, no, because some more than half of the entire. That's true. But like it's not a pro entry and all the much school years in. No caffeine of any kind. None. I'm sure something. I'm sure something. Yeah. But my understanding is that it is not a complete prohibition as opposed to coffee alcohol tobacco products. Got it. It's a weird prohibition. Yeah. So like, I think that the textual prohibition is on hot drinks. Yes. But that's been interpreted a couple of different ways in the latter day and also like. I'm just looking forward to our coalition having to engage with the concept of soaking. Oh, we're done. That's it. Yeah, we're not explaining that. Don't Google it. We're done. We're done. Wackelit. Wackelit. Listening to our ramblings for the week. And yeah, that's it. For normal men in Charlotte, I'm George. In DC, I'm proud to. And out of Florida, I'm low-tech speed run enjoyer. And embusted a bit. Stay normal, y'all. This is normal men, a podcast from four men who are cleaning desperately to normalcy in an era when that's asking a bit too much. I'm George in Charlotte. In DC, I'm proud to. And I'm Ed. In Boston. (upbeat music) Look, I warned you about the late title card. You knew this was gonna happen. Why are you still listening? Come with me.