Iowa Caucus Podcasts
Andy's Podcaster Podcasting Podcast episode #19
Intro Music
TIME CHECK
It’s ten thirty am
ANDY
Siri, what’s a caucus? Can you explain it to me?
SIRI
I found this…
ANDY
Can you read it for me?
SIRI
A Caucus is a word from the Untied States of America for a meeting at which local members of a political party register their preference among candidates running for office.
ANDY
That’s sounds a little basic…
SIRI
I’m Sorry…
ANDY
Interesting. Siri… I don’t know, just lately it seems like she’s getting dumber, maybe cultural osmosis is taking place and wearing her down. She seemed way sharper when I asked her to explain the patriarchy and how we might overcome it in episode eight… Right?
SFX - a caucus race
ANDY
The Democratic Primaries are underway… We got here! The eyes of the world have descended on Iowa once more in this our 4th year of pain under the Treacherous Imposter King - Donald Trump… It’s such a Big moment. So many people are stressed out by this administration, the blatant graft, the epic world of corruption and actual prison convictions that surround him - you know it… Utterly depressing. But then - if you still think we live in a democracy - and lalalalalalala we all so want it to still be true, despite all the evidence to the contrary - But if we still do have a democracy - Then OMG IOWA… was here and it was so important… it’s the beginning of the nations chance to correct what happened in 2016. I know it was a few weeks ago now. But with Andy’s Podcaster Podcasting Podcast I’m trying to review every podcast in the world and there are a lot of political podcasts to get through I think going deep to try and check out what the podcast world looked like covering the Iowa caucuses is a good way for me to compare a load of shows on one singular topic. Also - with the attention span of the news cycle being totally fucked and pretty appalling, basically quick takes boiled down to a series of ranty opinion pieces from PUNDIT CLOWNS, outright fascists on the right and co-opted handmaidens of Mark Fishers Vampire Castle on the left - mostly pro-war, rich status quo shills who for the most part have the substance and depth of a lingering fart in an airport corridor. But in Podcasting, the great equalizer, we get a plurality of voices and a potential for depth that can be reached without the time constraints of the money drunk news cycle. That’s why Serial exploded how it did. That’s why a 3 hour conversation on Joe Rogan or Marc Maron scratching below the surface are incredibly popular. Because there is a need for a deeper and more intelligent truth that can not be found on your sponsored quick takes on NPR, MSNBC or Fox News. So how was IOWA covered and what is this IOWA place anyway? This supposed American heartland, when I think even just describing it in these terms is lazy fucking nonsense. I mean it’s wrapped up in so many myths, democracy myths, farmer myths, Norman Rockwell nostalgia myths. There really is so much there to really unpack and figure out. First up - It’s a reliably conservative place, A Traditional Republican territory. Trump Country… but wait minute in 2018 - three of the four congressional districts went to Democrats with two of them flipping from Republican incumbents. A Big slap in the face to Trump from the supposed ‘heartland’. But then again - that other district, that didn’t flip the 4th is the most republican. The biggest section of the farmer land - they bucked the trend and re-elected White Supremacist bad boy Steve King for an 8th term! Confederate flag on his desk even though Iowa was with the union in the great Slave War. Steve King - Who has somehow successfully pedaled a message of racial hatred and White Originality on a land stolen from the Indians through endless broken treaties and massacres. It’s a constituency that hasn’t attempted a serious political action since the Farmers Holiday strike in 1932 but yet has seen family farming slowly and steadily crushed to the point that individual farmers are now imprisoned in a bewildering tangle of production credits, loan repayments, seed patent laws and emergency federal appropriations. You know, growing food shouldn’t be so hard, the stone age people who came before the weird zealots who wrote the Bible figured it all out pretty much but then again they didn’t have to deal with the tendency toward crippling corporate monopoly of late stage Capitalism. So these people, the farmers of Steve King’s district, just like many populations in the South, exist in a manufactured place of cognitive dissonance, on the one hand hard working freedom loving independent God fearing farmers and yet in reality only actually maintained on the land by gigantic Billion Dollar Socialist hand-outs from the Government! And they are immune from knowledge of the irony, because like Stockholm syndrome captives their existence and identity is caught up in this devious Republican money trap. But they are also the first to believe that the Government they are told is the enemy - radicalized in ignorance by a constant stream of talk radio and fox news effectively reducing and literally shouting every argument down to - Black and Brown people are the problem and Abortion at any stage is murder. And much like Like District Eleven in the Hunger Games most of people in District 4 Iowa are blissfully ignorant of a world outside their church bbq. I’m not being rude. Links will be in the transcript to reporting on Steve King’s constituency so you can read about them in their own words at your leisure. So how do you conceptualize this Iowa, a people who exist on socialist agriculture subsidies but are somehow kept in line, pushing the button for Trump and McConnell, chained like dogs to their supper bowls - barking at any brown people or immigrants they see in direct contradiction to the gospels they pretend to fucking follow. So that’s part of the Iowa political landscape but then you also have the caucuses themselves and the history of shady incompetence.
2016 between Bernie and Hilary was a total shit show. A Very close race. Which had Bizzaro stuff like the lone solitary caucus goer in Woodburry County Number 43 who voted for Sanders but they counted it wrong. And Knoxville district 3 another small one - hundred or so people - documented as 58 Bernie and 52 Clinton but the official state delegates gave 5 to Hilary and none to Sanders. Then the Des Moines Register and The Atlantic Magazine - reported Hilary won a statically unlikely six perfect coin tosses on tied districts but then they pulled the story and sat on it for a couple of days then came out when the attention had moved came out to say the exact opposite was true, but also like all inconsistent liars who can’t get the story straight - when further pressed resorted to ‘oh just trust us - there were actually a lot of coin tosses and we promise you that Bernie won more than his fair share’. So after 2016, you know, The DNC and IDC really needed to really get their shit together. A Presidential election was hacked, the FBI intervened during the election in a way that directly supported the madman screaming ‘lock her up’ about a woman who was ultimately proven innocent while he is at the center of a epic constellation of criminality that has seen what is it ? Eight close associates now - serving actual jail time. And we’ve spent four years in hell, and a constant refrain, in the Liberal world is that ‘Hilary Won the Popular Vote’ and that the DNC are the good guys. So of course, things would be better and different this time right… They had to be. They couldn’t be any worse. And they have to be. They can’t give Trump anymore wins. IOWA… you’ve got this one. We need your PITCHFORKS IOWA. Let’s do democracy in the greatest nation on earth this isn’t some backwater dictatorship… right!
SFX - Chaos from IDAHO news clips… Fox, CNN, MSNBC
Music - Rise of the Black Centipede - Mario Rom’s Interzone
ANDY
It’s… Review… Time…. MMMMWAHAHAHAHAHA!
ANDY
Reviewing Eleven shows today… political news shows that have had something to say about the 2020 Iowa Caucuses. 9 new shows and a quick return to look at Pod Save America and Chapo Trap House from my buddy Klaxton which we covered in episode 6. SO first up is Caucus Land from Iowa Public Radio. This show is hosted by Clay Masters and Kate Payne and they live and work in the region so they should have the local knowledge and contacts to produce the inside scoop on what happened… There is 20 episodes of this pod - starting back in July 2019 and focusing on the build up to this much anticipated vote… there’s interesting episodes on Gun Policy and the Caucuses on how candidates Cultivated the Farm Caucus and a the whole run with a recap of the fiasco of the 2016 Caucus. It’s good solid work from a National Public Radio subsidiary on the ground. Like you would expect from NPR, they take and swallow the guff from Politicians and the DNC and politely amplify a message that ruffles no feathers. Proud liberals in the Vampire Castle. They sound solid and earnest and in their final show - called Caucus Meltdown’, I could be crazy but it sounds like they are little annoyed with the answers they have to report for why the Des Moines Register and CNN pulled the usually highly credible and important final Poll from usually reliable J.Ann Selzer… Because this was the first fuck up of a damning series of incredible fuck ups… that was to consume the political world for the next week. It seems there was one pollster in the team who may have not had Pete Buttigeig on the polling questions for one house. So the Mayor from Bend, former employee of Mckinsy and Company, a candidate that really should have had zero chance in such a star studded political field somehow now has the political muscle to get CNN to ditch hours of programing and the Des Moines register to throw it’s hands up with their big and expensive marquee poll. On the eve of the caucuses. Weird. All the other polls had Sanders out front and Warren and Biden trailing close behind. It feels like you can almost hear a little incredulity as they repeat the establishment line, that ‘Oh well’ it was a mistake, as if the suspicious series of shambles breaking around them is rocking their journalistic programing as pretty much outlined in Chomsky and Herman’s seminal Manufacturing Consent. So Caucus Land - a Public radio review of Iowa in the build up to the 2020 caucuses that ends in a big sort of confused shrug. Two stars, a magic cow.
Next up is Useful Idiots from Rolling Stone - it’s a political weekly review show from Matt Taibbi and Katie Halper. Matt is a journalist and author, very much in the Hunter S Thompson mould - quite literally it sounds sometimes in a warts and all kind of way with bumbling stoner in-eloquence that does belies moments of brilliant cogent political analysis you’ll never find on NPR or MSNBC. Katie is a journalist and film maker from the Upper East Side, a wonderful, witty secular Jew who has gone on Fox News - to defend Ilhan Omar from smears from the increasing fascist AIPAC. Yeah, she’s great. And she has her own show on WBAI - The Katie Halper Show I’m looking forward to checking out. The Useful Idiots Podcast does a great round up of the weekly news, trying to find the funny in a Daily Show kind of way but with deeper takes and possibly turning the irreverence dial up a couple of notches and certainly wrapping the humor into a more solid political world view. They also do a good job of republishing or summarizing main events and highlights from the Twittersphere - so if your not on Twitter, you’ll certainly benefit from hearing developments on that frontier of our digital void. And they also occasionally aggregate content from other places - like the this from the Daily Show…
SFX - AMY KLOBUCHAR JOKE MONTAGE CLIP
Sometimes it’s good to use humor… When I was giving a press conference in a snow storm and Donald Trump tweeted me calling me Snow Queen I tweeted back to him… It would be good to see what happens to your hair in a Blizzard! I tweeted back to him… It would be good to see what happens to your hair in a Blizzard! AND I TWEETED BACK TO HIM….
Andy
Which is brilliant and I would have missed. There Iowa coverage was particularly good on the failed APP from Acronym Shadow company and they had Lee Fang on the show from the intercept who’s really led the reporting on the background and development of this app that is tied to all the major centrist Clinton Democrats who continue to fail upwards in the party. At the moment, as you’ll hear were being spoiled for good alternative political content outside of the Plutocratic mainstream and I’m certainly going to be checking back in every week to see what they’re up to. Useful Idiots gets - 5 stars, two thumbs up and a DUDE.
Next we have Pantsuit Politics from Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers two former lawyers and moms from Kentucky. Their show’s tagline is: ‘Let’s Disagree - With Grace’ … so I’m thinking they are using grace in it’s meaning as courteous goodwill rather than some egotistical Christian interpretation of manifesting divinity. The show started in 2015 and became an attempt to remind people how to be kind while talking politics in the era of the Republican parties final lurch into overt White Supremacist authoritarianism after decades of creeping there. So their thing is that Sarah is on the Left and Beth is on the right but they manage to conversant find more in common than is usually possible under the reductive barrage of political propaganda that seeks to enflame, divide us and narrow our discourse into dead ends of hate where we are encouraged to beat stick men to death while donating to our favorite brand of the Plutocracy. So I suppose one of the big things about this show is that Beth stopped being a Republican and has become a registered Democrat, her never Trump red line being the evil separation of families at the border. She’s a true ‘Love Thy neighbor’ Christian which is refreshing for a Atheist like myself to see because the mainstream of Evangelical power in this country is anything but nice, to say the very least. I like this show a lot and I’m so happy that it’s popular. It’s wonderfully pro-woman - working to increase female participation in politics, both on a personal level with conversation and inspiration to take part and in What really strikes me in many shows is their shared horror of the current administration and the daily gas-lighting of America. They are almost on the brink of tears, dealing with the stress, lies and jarring unpleasantness of the moment. Maybe this is something we have to be thankful for Trump for, he’s unmasked the evil behind the GOP. He’s shown regular Americans a dark side of poverty and inequality that existed for millions when Obama was in power. And as the tagline goes, they step nimbly and kindly upon political issues and tread gently wherever they go. SO with their Iowa show, they traveled to the caucuses, in person. They spoke to Iowans and found that there was a lot of stress on the good people of Iowa who really wanted to do right by America. They were enamored of the Caucus process but didn’t get very deep into considering how undemocratic it is - since it takes a long time and is too much for poor working people with kids to attend, and since it’s in public the community of a small town silences divergent voices in hundreds of small ways. I mean, I’m guessing as a woman in the patriarchy, you’re not going to want to go in a room with a powerful man who you’ve had run in with before to wrangle for a candidate he or the community doesn’t like for, for example someone trying to legalize pot or break up the unnecessary medical insurance scam. So they did present a sort of Norman Rockwell take on the whole thing. But very good in its own way, if sort of lacking depth of history, class awareness and intersectionality. There other regular shows, more studio based are much deeper researched and a lot better with a lot more substance - and I urge you to check them out. They regularly pick apart bullshit from both sides of the political bullshit factory and it refreshing, for example calling out the red scare nonsense equating Social Democrat with 1930 communist dictator. SO Pantsuit Politics - Get 5 stars - 2 thumbs up and shattering of the glass ceiling and a Rhinoceros from Eugene Ionesco’s play. Since they are definitely, sat in their sweet Kentucky homes, suddenly aware of the appearance of a lot of rhinos….
Next up is a show called The Daily Circus… this is two guys called Red and Zed - doing a Pantsuit Politics sort of thing, two friends across the political divide coming together to share their takes on our troubled times while trying to have a laugh together and still be friends. OK so these guys are definitely going for laughs more than the pantsuit ladies but I neither laughed nor felt at all enlightened by their conversation. Zed on the left sounds sort of depressed and exhausted and he sort of just sits back letting his Republican friend babble out received opinion from Fox and Limbaugh without much examination. So Socialism is defined as a ridiculous scare mongering forced equality - literally suggesting that a socialist is someone who would take a coat and rip it to pieces to give everyone a piece of a non-working coat. It’s utterly tedious and annoying to hear Zed held hostage to friend’s ignorance. Socialism isn’t going to destroy your coat or make you all live in the same box houses and eat the same shitty food from McDonalds and Walmart. That’s advanced stage capitalism. Socialism is Capitalism Plus - it’s taking the system as it’s word and using the vast surpluses of Capital to increase the underlying quality of life for everyone. It’s building roads. Feeding kids and making sure everyone has the basics of healthcare. It’s England and Canada and Denmark and Sweden and Germany and Holland and Korea and Australia. The Gulag is in your fucking head dude and it’s put their by Fox and Limbaugh and the GOP who you know have been bought big the corporations and lobbies and sit on Golden Thrones you will never be able to even see, let alone touch. So yeah, Red and Zed and Daily Circus - not as good as Pantsuit. Maybe they have some funny shows, I think that’s there main motivation. 3 stars and a clown nose.
Next up is The Ben Shapiro Show… ughhhhh. OK I have avoided this guy. He’s a rightwing writer and commentator and you have to limit yourself to expose to these clowns or it just feels like your trapped in a maze of hatred and lies. Basically a sneaky apologist and propagandist for the status quo that ignores and actively covers up facts like Child Poverty cost more than one Trillion dollars per year in lost economic productivity, health and crime costs or that the public assistance programs that cost 153 Billion a year as a direct result of scandalous Government supported poor wages. Links to all my claims and numbers in the transcript as usual. But anyway - Ben Shapiro - I’ve read a bunch of articles on him, that flatter him as this a major right leaning intellect, a male Ayn Rand for the Millennial age. And the common theme among his booster is that he does make some good points, it’s usually white guys who say this and you look at their comment threads on Facebook and Twitter and Reddit and you don’t have to look long to see a posting history than slides quickly down the MAGA, confederate flag waving rat hole to QANON bullshit or White Christian Supremacy of our American Evangelical Taliban. SO I’ve listened to his Iowa show, and a delved back into the catalog for a few hours and it’s pretty fucking hilarious. This Great Intellect. Funny. He’s the male Tomi Lehren from Fox, people just aren’t so quick to dismiss him because he’s a man. It’s just classic Regan era conservatism, Bill O’Reilly in younger flesh. He has a few stock voices - to mimic left commentators. And every five minutes in his show he’s selling something! - Buy these Pearls, I love this Pearl Merchant, I got a great deal for you on Suspenders! What a huckster. He’s a lot like the Podsave guys, in these moments, yeah he sounds a lot like the Pod save guys who are always selling shit. I think they are two sides of the same coin that we should be returning unto Cesar. and he was naturally really happy with the Iowa Fiasco - but his big point was - THESE PEOPLE WANT TO MANAGE UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE - THEY CAN”T EVEN MANAGE AN ELECTION! - Yawn. What a bunch of nonsense - yeah because They’re Going to Put Troy Price - the leader of the Iowa Democrats in charge of fucking anything again…. Wait a minute, he might be on to something, Troy Price has resigned but I’ve got a sneaking suspicion he’s going to be one of these constantly inept centrist democrats that miraculously manage to fail up into the glorious orbit of David Plouffe. The DNC is taking money from the medical insurance lobby! They don’t actually want to back a popular medicare for all program… so Ben Shapiro - Bill O’Reilly’s mini me. He reads out articles from Nate Silver’s 538 polling blog, so the bar of intellectual honesty is set so fucking low on the right by Fox News and that racist scum Rush Limbaugh that just reading a polling article from Nate Silver makes him sound like a fucking genius. And of course Nate Silver points out that the real person to benefit from the Iowa Fiasco is Joe Biden the centrist the DNC can control and want want to coronate so he can run against Trump so that whoever wins the Corporations and the lobbies and the Billionaires stashing all their ill-gotten gains in tax havens while they rest of us struggle pay check to pay check CAN KEEP THEIR MONEY Anyway, The Ben Shapiro Podcast… gets 1 star and a powerful roaring lion of intellect…
Next up is The Potentium Podcast - this is fun, it’s weekly review show that does a shouty left leaning take on all the news. He’s like a radio shock jock, I don’t want to compare him to Rush Limbaugh or Alex Jones - because those guys are sub human scum. But he does reach height of wonderful incandescent sweary and fabulous rage! Which can be and is very cathartic. Here he is…
SFX Clip of Potentium Podcast
ANDY
He’s got into this hilarious feud with another comedy podcast called Damage Goods and his take-down of their show is an absolute treat. He just rips these guys apart, their appalling basic repetitive jock humor… and for me as a reviewer of Podcasts I’m in awe of his ability to really let himself cut loose on these guys. His take on IOWA included a laser beam focused, quick take on Pete Buttigeig - while all the bland talking heads of NPR and mainstream are bumbling around - ‘Who is this mayor from bend - how did he get here - who are these McKinsey people and what happened in the wine cave - were waiting to here from the money if we are going to be favorable he was for medicaid for all but hmmm now he’s not, oh we don’t talk about that errr so maybe we’ll give him a chance…’ NO this guy on Potentium cut refreshingly to the chase - clearly and eloquently pointing that the country is no where near evolved enough to elect a gay man. The Southern Churches - Black and White - going to go with a gay guy? No way. I live in Maryland. 9 miles from the white house. We put up a rainbow flag when Pence got in power and we had fucking hate mail through our door within a week! Liberal - socialist leaning Maryland. No fucking way he’s got a chance in Church Land. So yeah - give the Potentium Podcast a listen to if you want more laughs and more bite than Joe Rogan. 5 Stars, 2 thumbs up and some energy….
ANDY
What’s left - OK The Young Turks - is kind of a big deal the podcast is an audio version of their hit and huge Youtube TV political show, which now airs on some TV Chanels now. It’s progressive left take on all the news, hosted by Cenk Uugur, John Iadarola and Ana Kasparian. So yeah another brilliant female journalist commentator with Ana here - another absolute force who’s a joy to listen to. It covers a lot of the same ground as Chapo Trap House and Useful Idiots but with it being a live TV show it has more of a straight edge newsroom kind of feel. Their Iowa coverage certainly highlighted in real time all the many inconsistencies in the vote totals as they were happening. And noted how it seemed to favor the establishment and hide the fact of Bernie winning the popular vote. The real prize of Iowa is the ability to gain publicity and a momentum boost from the victory. It’s not a huge number of delegates but it kicks the whole thing off. So it was interesting seeing the mainstream media downplay Bernies victory, ignore it in many cases, play along with the Buttigeig campaign and not really question how it was that the State delegate equivalents - the strange funky math that somehow translate to the person not winning the popular vote can claim a victory - all of the ones coming for Pete from Steve King’s rural third Reich zone were the only ones curiously appearing in the drip drip vote totals that kept coming out to dominate the news cycle and steal a publicity bump for the popular senator from Vermont. And when you compare it against the mainstream coverage - that the big story was Buttigeig and then who the real winners of New Hampshire were the second third and fourth place finishers and then OMG after Nevada IT BECAME FULL ON RED SCARE MODE it’s vital and refreshing… Good work - give it a listen The Young Turks - 5 stars two thumbs up and some Champagne - the good stuff.
What’s left… ok we’ve got Left, Right an Centre from NPR and KCRW in Southern California. It’s a shit tonne better than most NPR political coverage who seem to be constantly falling over themselves to normalize Trump 24/7 and keep people off the streets. But that’s not saying much. It’s very centrist, almost every viewpoint is palatable to the rich think tank centrists. In fact it should really be called Centrist centrist centrist, the name in itself makes you think you’re going to hear a plurality of viewpoints but you know what - They’re not getting Richard Spencer or Steve King or Rush Limbaugh on the right. They are not countering it with an actual leftist. It’s like Podsave America - rich people talking to each other in a rich bubble, ever failing upwards, preaching to the choir from gilded pulpits that we don’t really want Socialism, that real change can never be achieved - that everything is fundamentally cool and just nothing can be done about wealth inequality and climate change. It’s hypnotic. For the Iowa show they did bring in author Richard Hansen, a professor from UC Irvine who’s just got a book out called Election Meltdown which I haven’t read yet but I’ve got it on order at my Library - that socialist library program we all enjoy - which from hearing him talk certainly seems to be pointing to America being fully on the threshold of being a Plutocracy if in fact we are not already there. So while they had people like Richard Hansen on - it’s sort intellectualized and dismembered from the state of politics, like ‘You can’t really want your gardener or any to actually vote for their interests do you?’ Which is the Democrats in a nutshell, paying lip service to Democracy while addicted to the cash of the Plutocracy and ultimately happy to lose elections because the money keeps coming either way. The people who lost to Trump in 2016 - it’s same fuckers now trying to work their wizardry to elect Biden. So yeah that’s Left Right and Centre and it pretty much goes for Reliable Sources podcast which is the CNN TV show cut for podcast form. With Brian Stelter the chief media correspondent for CNN who looks uncannily like George Costanza pushing the centrists money drunk line on everything, I think their Iowa show had on it a writer for Nate Silver’s 538 blog Clare Malone who’d been on the ground in Iowa and New Hampshire - and they made polite sheepish predictions about the future of Iowa after the screw up and incapable of accepting the truth that nobody trusts a fucking word they say or more accurately refuse to say in so many words, that they are operating from a place of privilege for a white upper middle class audience. At one point he actually rails against how negative the mood is everywhere on both sides, how they were hoping Biden would inspire people while utterly ignoring the fact that there is a movement and positive energy forming around Medicare for All. In fact the only way they talk about him is in terms of ‘Divisive and Bernie Bro’ smears. You could basically illustrate any sentence from Manufacturing Consent with any clip of his smug sneering tone. So these two pods - Centre Centre Centre and Brian Stelter’s Reliable Sources get one star and a Vampire castle. Because they are Vampires in the Vampires castle, as identified in Mark Fishers brilliant essay - ‘Exiting the Vampire Castle’ they are Neo-liberal commentators who think they are of the left or moral social center because they do not like Trump but equally hate anyone who would raise class consciousness to the point of actually getting gardeners, nannies, the working poor to actually vote to bring about meaningful change. Link to that essay in the transcript.
SFX - ANDY’S PHONE - VOICEMAIL MESSAGE
KLAXTON
One thing that makes me happy about the whole Iowa Fiasco is how it has exposed the media’s efforts to downplay Bernie in both Iowa and New Hampshire. In Iowa with very slim margins they were happy to call the win for Buttigeig although he lost in terms of votes and in terms of delegates its still not clear. But they ran days of news cycles as though it was a clear victory for Buttigieg, to dampen the real enthusiasm people have for the issue of medicare for all and the Green New Deal. Their whole game was to deny Bernie the chance to claim victory. And in New Hampshire you see the ridiculous stories of Buttigeig out performs or even that the real winner was Amy Klobuchar in third place. All in the way to discredit Bernie’s significance. I think the media might have overplayed their hand to the point that it might actually be beneficial to Sanders because I think viewers are noticing this. If at the end of the day, after this whole mess, Iowa is no longer a player, I think that would be great. This countries corn subsidies are ridiculous and they are in place to appease and pacify this manufactured voting block as a tool of the Plutocracy. Regarding the Podsave folks… they are part of that system. When we reviewed them on Episode 6, one thing we talk about was how networked they were within that world with all their connections to the failed Iowa vote recording app. And this is just the proof of it.
SFX - VOICEMAIL FULL BEEP.
SFX - classic music. Jen setting down cup of tea on Andy’s desk.
Jen
Hey… cup of tea…
ANDY
Oh thanks love!
Jen
Any more results in?
ANDY
Ugh. A few more. Drips and drabs…
JEN
Anything like… what was it… Woodbury County?
Andy
The county from 2016 in which one person voted and they counted it wrong…
JEN
Yeah.
ANDY
Err yeah, quite a bit actually. A precinct captain called Chris Schwartz released pictures on Twitter of his caucus results that didn’t match what party Head quarters had recorded… the 21 state delegates won by Bernie in Black Hawk County were given to Deval Patrick…
JEN
Who?
ANDY
Yeah Exactly.
JEN
Don’t they realize how stressed and fucked the country is right now? Why can’t they just do it properly. Count the vote. Whoever get more votes - that’s the person who won…
ANDY
I don’t know. I guess it’s a case of the devil being in the detail.
JEN
Is it fixed?
ANDY
Well. Given all the Must Stop Bernie meetings at the DNC has had as reported in the NY Times and other places and then Hilary just appearing out of the ether to go on Ellen and Howard Stern for no good reason right before the election… and the drip drip drip of results that just seem to be adding state delegates from Steve King’s Klan District which just happen to be weighted to get more delegates than young urban areas or latino majority areas… Look, they are saying it’s just incompetence but if you were climbing a ladder and someone kept pushing you off or extending the ladder or cutting its legs off or moving it… you’d have to be pretty stupid to think there was no underlying sabotage. And if all the accidents seemed to somehow benefit the status quo… who have gone on record through endless wealthy surrogates to say they do not want to give everyone health care or fight climate change because well they have been bought by the medical insurance and fossil fuel lobbies… then yeah… it’s bit obviously fixed.
JEN
Damn. So what does it mean?
ANDY
I don’t know. I’ve just written to our Senator and Congressman. Put them on notice that we see what the party is doing. Installing a billionaire Republican from Epstein’s black book on the ballot at the last second… it’s a joke. But we’ll see what happens in New Hampshire.
Sfx - radio static - Find the fish, Terry Jones
ANDY
R.I.P. Terry Jones!
Sfx - radio static - strange hold music
PlUTOCRACY
Plutocracy Hotline, how can I help you, this is Brad speaking…
McConell
Oh my, oh my, The Brown people are voting… The Brown people are voting… we can’t lock them all up! We’ve made it as hard as possible but they are voting anyway!
PLUTOCRACY
Calm down. It’s going to be OK… we’re deploying The Bloomberg… he’s got so much money he’s unsinkable…
SFX - Submarine Deployment Alert Noise, - radio static - porcupine romance island…
ANDY
And now it’s time to check back in on the denizens of Porcupine Romance Island!
BRITANY
OPEN THIS FUCKING DOOR. I WANT TO SEE THE PRODUCER NOW. I’m so PISSED OFF. I got a text from my mum saying how she’s disowned me for having sex with an animal. I DIDN’T. Are you kidding me? I’D NEVER DO THAT? Yes we were in bed and I was drinking. But nothing happened. It’s a fucking porcupine. It crawled under the covers. If they’ve cut it to make it look like I did anything I’ll go MENTAL.
Radio static - Bernie - Misconceptions and motto from South Carolina debate.
Bernie
Misconception is that the ideas I’m running on are radical. They’re not. In one form or another they exist in countries all over the world. Healthcare is a human right. We have the necessity, the moral imperative to address the existential threat of climate change, other countries are doing it… We don’t need more people in jail, disproportionately African American that any other country on earth. Not a radical idea. The motto, the saying that moves me the most are from Nelson Mandela. Mandela said - ‘Everything is impossible until it isn’t…’
Radio Static
ANDY
Super Tuesday is almost here. If you are lucky enough to be able to vote, I hope you do so. The level of fear-mongering and propaganda against someone trying to allow people to have access to healthcare - and we are the only advanced Western Nation that does not do this - is pretty amazing…
Music - everything is permitted - Mario rom’s interzone
ANDY
So that’s a wrap. Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show. Please spread the word. Tell one person. And if you you want to help out, buy me a coffee by clicking the link in the show notes and on the webpage…. The Jazz is from Mario Rom’s Interzone. I don’t know who’s providing your jazz but I think you switch to these cats. Heading down to Orlando next week for the Podfest so the next episode may be even more delayed than usual… Stay healthy and mind the gap! BBBBBBBye.