949 - Big Beautiful Swill feat. Tim Faust (7/7/25)

All I wanna make is ill jumble.

All I wanna make is ill jumble.

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have pistols.

All I wanna

Hello, everybody.

It's Monday, July 7th, and this is your chop-up.

On today's episode, Felix and I are joined once again by our good friend, Tim Faust to talk about the Big Beautiful Bill and his area of expertise, Medicaid.

Tim, it's great to have you back on the show.

Tim Faust, the man who sold his soul to the devil for knowledge about public policy.

That's right.

That's what I'm all about.

You know, one of these days I'll come on the show when we're not in the the middle of a terrible crisis.

But until then, I'm happy to be here once again.

Well, yeah, like

this is sort of doubling down.

We had you on not too long ago to talk about Medicaid, but now it appears that all the bad things have indeed come to pass.

And it really does look like Medicaid, that's what's on the chopping block in this big, beautiful bill,

either through work requirements or cuts.

Tim, like just of what you've seen so far of the big beautiful bill and like from your perspective on what will this this do to not just Medicaid, but to the healthcare system overall in the United States?

Sure.

So as you mentioned, kind of the big centerpiece of the Medicaid cuts are the introduction of work requirements, which mean that if you are in the expansion population, you need to certify that you've done 80 hours of work or community engagement over the past month, which doesn't sound like that much, but the act of doing that is a huge pain in the ass, right?

Like there's a lot of infrastructure that has to be in place, a lot of paperwork.

They tried this in Arkansas and Georgia.

And in Arkansas, I think like 17,000 people lost Medicaid because the infrastructure to like input this was not in place.

In Georgia, like literally, like the mascot they used, like the guy they used as like their face of the program, lost his Medicaid three separate times because the like the database that they used was was not properly put together.

This will cause, it's estimated, I think, 16 million people total to lose their health care, 11 million losing Medicaid, and 5 million losing ACA coverage.

It's the biggest retrenchment of healthcare programs ever to exist in American history, following

the biggest passive retrenchment of healthcare benefits under the Medicaid unwinding post-COVID.

We don't even know what's going to happen.

All we know is that it's going to be bad.

A lot of this is going to be on the individual states to figure out how they want to implement.

their programs with less money.

But there's no way out of this that doesn't kill a lot of people.

I was looking at the work requirements and the takeaway I have from all of this is,

I mean, it's difficult to say this without sounding, I guess, alarmist, but this would be the time to be alarmist.

It does seem like they're trying to figure out the most accept, like, what is the most acceptable way to call people?

And the way that they have concluded is,

well, the fewest amount of people will object to single adults with no children, but the Senate chose to expand that to people with children who are older than 14.

That's a really good point, right?

Like, Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act kind of redefined the government role in healthcare, right?

Previous to that, Medicaid was like a welfare program that was attached to, you know, TANF or AFDC.

It was a disability and super poor and child program.

Under ACA expansion, under Medicaid expansion, there was an acknowledgement that like insurance as a consumer good is just totally unaffordable for a lot of different kinds of people so therefore the government has an obligation to to expand it which is a pretty sounds subtle but it's a pretty radical transformation of the government's conception of its involvement in providing healthcare for its own people and so the goals to undo as much of that as possible and you're right like they picked the uh They picked a couple of populations who they thought

they could really lean on.

One was the theoretical, able-bodied, lazy, non-working adult, the guy that plays video games instead of getting a job, which, for the record, nothing wrong with that.

Death Striding 2 just came out.

I'd much rather do that than work.

But

that's the imaginary person they're creating, as if somebody could get by

on the Medicaid salary required and not be working 30 hours a week or whatever.

And then the other one was the specter of undocumented immigrants who are taking away our Medicaid benefits.

That's one they really leaned on in the past month or so.

And I think that line of rhetoric became like the de facto cover that so many swing state Republicans began using.

Well, yeah, I mean, like along those lines, JD Vance this week posted of the Big Beautiful bill.

He says, the thing that will bankrupt this country more than any other policy is flooding the country with illegal immigration and then giving those migrants generous benefits.

The OBBB fixes this problem and therefore it must pass.

And then he says everything else, the CBO score, the proper baseline, and this quote is very telling.

The minutiae of Medicaid policy is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.

Like, Tim, what is the state?

I mean, like, there is, as you said, there is the specter of the 35-year-old man playing video games in his mother's basement who's on Medicaid.

But what about undocumented immigrants?

Are they a huge drain on Medicaid?

Are they collecting Medicaid?

So individual states, so Medicaid is a state-administered program.

Individual states can set their own rules about who gets to use Medicaid.

There's like a federal minimum, and then states can add on to that.

And so a couple of states, like Minnesota, previously, New York, went ahead and built in protections for undocumented people.

You know, like really nothing like pretty basic, you know, like if you go to the like the ER, you get insurance kind of stuff.

Nothing too lavish.

And states chose to expand that, which is great.

I think every state should.

And what the Big Beautiful bill does, this was originally in the House, they modified it in the Senate.

I don't know where exactly lands now, is that it adds extra punishment and extra costs for states that choose to do that.

I think the original language was that states that chose to expand Medicaid to undocumented people would get a 10% reduction in their federal funding.

Like, it's hard to get crueler than that.

Like, they're forcing states to pit undocumented people and people with disabilities against each other.

It's really dispensed.

and on top of that is the 80 billion dollars for ICE or whatever, right?

They're building the secret police and they're using the specter of immigration on all sides of the fucking ball here,

which I really is some of the worst shit to happen in recent memory.

Yeah, I mean, it's especially notable that they're doing this right amidst Trump, who sort of in a move similar to what Biden would do to Kamala, has sort of informally given JD the wonderful job of selling this piece of shit.

While Trump has kind of,

with Christian Not, made these public appearances where he's like, I know that we said that immigrants are bad because they,

you know, it's like wage competition that domestic workers cannot possibly compete with.

But we actually talk to agribusiness and hotel owners and people who own restaurants.

And it turns out that's the only way this economy works is if they can do that.

So we're not doing that enforcement,

but we are going to keep ruining people's lives.

Don't worry about that.

But

don't worry.

We're still, we're walking backwards into doing the same system that the past five or six presidents have realized you need to have if you're going to have this kind of a service economy.

But I am interested, though, in

I've seen a few examples examples of this of, you know, regional hospital systems just preemptively saying

we're not going to be able to cover the shortfall of people using emergency rooms, of,

you know, the greatly diminished receipts for just running these hospitals.

But could you

explain a little bit how Medicaid is kind of one of the last pillars keeping the American medical system in so much as it exists for the general public, functioning.

Yeah, Medicaid is like a

load-bearing pillar of society.

And that's not hyperbolic.

That's not an exaggeration.

So, Medicaid, among a bunch of other things, is one of the primary funders of healthcare in rural areas.

In rural areas, you've got a disproportionately high number of people who are in Medicaid.

So, Medicaid's the primary funder of small clinics and rural hospitals.

Some either directly paying for individual service acts or through providing like bulk payments to hospitals.

And that's the one thing.

You know, Medicaid doesn't pay that much.

Half of rural hospitals are like barely above water.

Medicaid was the one thing keeping those in place.

Yeah, Tim, to that point, this is just from NPR's coverage of it.

It says here, the GOP plan, the GOP's plan curtails a practice known as provider taxes that nearly every state has used for decades to increase Medicaid payments to hospitals, nursing homes, and other providers and to private managed care companies.

States often use the federal money generated through the taxes, the taxes, to pay the institutions more than Medicaid would otherwise pay.

Medicaid generally pays lower fees for care than Medicare, the program for people over 65 and some with disabilities, and private insurance.

But thanks to provider taxes, some hospitals are paid more under Medicaid than Medicare, according to the Commonwealth Fund, a health research nonprofit.

Hospitals and nursing homes say they use these extra Medicaid dollars to expand or add new services and improve care for patients.

Yeah, so there's a couple of things happening there.

And I'll take those on.

So the provider tax cut is, after work requirements, like the second biggest cut in the Big Beautiful bill.

Basically, the way it works to simplify it is that the federal government subsidizes, like if I spend a dollar

on Medicaid, the federal government pitches in, you know, a buck fifty or whatever, right?

It covers 60% of all Medicaid expenditures.

So provider tax is you're a hospital, I'm the state.

I say, give me a dollar in tax.

You say, okay.

And then I spend a dollar that I got from you, but the feds kick in a buck fifty.

So overall, we draw down more federal money, which like sure can sound a little shifty, but it's been regulated at the federal level before.

This is like a pretty accepted way that states pay for Medicaid because healthcare funding, healthcare payments are fundamentally not super affordable on a state level without massive federal subsidy.

So cutting those and even decreasing them over time, again, for expansion states, is like a fucking like stake through the heart of this thing that was shambling along, keeping healthcare functioning.

And yeah, like

there is a study

which indicates that some hospitals get paid more through Medicaid overall, through like these bonus payments than through Medicare.

But it is worth pointing out that hospital finances, like at large, are super opaque.

And so every hospital association will claim that every hospital's hospital's just like the brink of failure rural hospital, when you've actually got these massive hospital chains that, you know, are multi-billion dollar hospital systems that are nowhere near the level of impoverishment that the rural healthcare systems are.

So you've got a real mix there.

But rural healthcare systems are the ones that are really going to bear the brunt of these costs.

It's going to shut down a lot of clinics, a lot of hospitals in poor neighborhoods and in rural areas.

The thing that I, at least, that keeps sticking for me when I thought about like the just generalized red state program policies since about like 2021

and since Dobbs, especially, it has been like a suite of policies that broadly are like: okay, we need

five times as many children that no one wants.

We need a we need a comprehensive family abduction system.

We need

a palantir surveillance system.

But now, now like it's just, if you live in a red state and a lot of blue states, but red state specifically for this, you can be forced into motherhood at gunpoint.

And then

you, I guess, you will have to drive 700 miles to the nearest hospital to have the the baby.

And if you have a miscarriage or there's any difficulty in the pregnancy, during that point, you will go to prison.

I mean, you're absolutely right.

They're tightening the screws further and further on what's the bare minimum amount of dignity people are required to have to live in this country.

It's absolutely abominable.

And these Medicaid cuts are going to, I mean, we don't necessarily know how they're going to fuck people over because states need to figure out what to do with their reduced funding, but there's no way out of this that doesn't amiserate tens of millions of people across the country.

I think

it's poetic that J.D.

Vance sort of emerged into the national consciousness with a book called Hillbilly Elegy, because he's going to be authoring quite a few obituaries for poor white people in rural parts of the country with this bill.

And I just thought it was very telling when he said,

he spoke about like the minutia of Medicaid policy as something that was trivial compared to the project of ethnically cleansing the country with ice.

Yeah.

I mean,

so I live in Wisconsin, which is a purple state.

We've got a couple of swing districts.

And the one I've been focusing on most is in the far west side of the state.

We've got this guy, Derek Van Orden.

You might have heard of him.

He gets in the news a lot for getting really, really drunk and yelling at children.

That's not a joke.

That's like his,

he does that a good bit.

Well, I mean, he does represent the great state of Wisconsin.

That's true.

He's one of us.

What can I say?

So I was following him as kind of my thermometer or my barometer for where the argument was at.

And at the beginning of it, you know, he wanted to back away from saying there'd be any cut to Medicaid.

You know, anybody who deserves Medicaid will still have Medicaid.

The notion of deservingness, of course, being a

pretty nuance there.

And then over time, that shifted to, oh, no, it's all the, you know, the immigrants that are that are stealing our money, whatever.

That's where they all indexed on was was Medicaid isn't even an issue.

We just need to take care of, you know, fraud, waste, and abuse means undocumented immigrants taking our money.

That's just, that's, that's what they live with.

And I mean, you know, this is a bit beyond the scope of healthcare.

But I think that's a consequence of Democrats totally backing away from the immigrant argument at all over the past four years.

They opened the door for the...

They would have justified this regardless with any kind of, like, I don't think that Democrat weakness led to Medicaid cuts.

But this particular line of rhetoric, I think, is

a direct consequence of being no positive articulation of immigration during the Biden presidency.

You're

100% right.

I mean,

the Democratic response, and it was before the election of Trump, there was already some concessions because that was sort of the popularist thing that like this sort of like a

broadly defined but extremely harsh immigration regime at the federal level, like it pulled pretty well during the latter Biden years, at least according to some.

But just Democrats broadly concurring with the idea that, yeah, no, this is a central, this is a like central problem for everything,

just everything.

Well, yeah, if you just concur on that basis, it will get used for,

you know, the central parts of every GOP platform for the last 50, 60, 70 years, which is obliterating any part of the New Deal legacy or anything beyond that, obliterating any

part of the threadbear welfare state.

And I don't know how,

I mean, I think a lot of them just didn't think about it or they are pro-austerity themselves, but some could be short-sighted enough to actually be surprised that this is coming back and biting these threadbare programs that are the only thing that keep a lot of any facet of American health care or anything functioning.

You had some nominal dissenters over the past few months, right?

Think of Josh Howley, for example.

People that said, no, we can't cut Medicaid.

You know, my state depends upon this thing

to keep functioning.

We should talk about that in a second.

There's some really interesting popular victories there, but they all folded.

Everybody folded.

You know, Lisa Murkowski said, you know, I'm going to vote for this bill, but I hope it doesn't pass.

Like they all fucking folded once Trump came to the office.

You know, you had a couple of senators and a couple of guys in the House, most of whom were, you know, on the far right, who said they weren't going to vote for the bill.

And then Trump comes to their office and gives them a signed hat or whatever, and they all fucking fold.

Well, Tim, don't you think that that makes such an interesting

juxtaposition with how the Biden administration handled their signature domestic policy agenda, which the

build-back beautiful bill, the infrastructure bill?

Like, very clearly, Trump cornerbacked this bill and he wanted it passed and they weren't going to split the bill into two different things like biden did like the the the contrast here could not be more telling in my opinion between how these two parties approach

like i mean just the effort that trump will undertake to pass probably one of the most unpopular bills in american history versus biden just trying to fill potholes it just seems like uh for some reason that like when the democrats are in power they just can't do anything they can't get joe Manchin to fucking come on board with this bill.

There's no, there's no pressure that they can put on him.

I mean, by the way, this is the most unpopular major bill.

Yeah.

I mean, since we, since we have begun polling major bills, this is the single most unpopular one.

And need I remind people, one of Joe Biden's sales pitches was, hey, all these Bernie plans look great, but who do you want working the phones in Congress?

Yes.

I'm the the guy that can get it done.

So it's another thing that really bothers me about this is that, yes, this is an insanely unpopular bill, but nobody knows about it.

Like that's, that's the fucking thing.

Like 8% of people knew that Medicaid cuts were in this bill.

That's a total, like a good contrast is comparing why the ACA was not repealed in 2017 and why Medicaid was just hacked to pieces.

You know, the activists, the disability community was just as loud now as they were in 2017.

A lot of the professional organizing and activist class was just as loud now as it was in 2017.

And you can't, you know, I don't want to imply that this bill was passed with the consent of the Democrats.

That's not how this happens.

But the level of volume that the Hakeem Jeffries and James Carville wing of the party made for the Big Beautiful bill was was zero.

Nobody was fucking getting on TV.

Very few people

were pounding the pavement.

A total abdication of their responsibility to make noise and draw attention to the bill.

And as a result, fucking, this is going to be this, this is going to be a surprise and miseration for a lot of people.

And there is no clear articulation of who's causing the problem and why the problem is being caused and what the way out of it is.

It's just a total fucking failure from the Democratic wing of the party.

I mean,

when you say that, Tim, I mean, you say that there is nothing, that this is the most important thing that they should be focusing on.

You're forgetting that they spent all week fretting about the popular Democratic mayoral candidate who just won a primary.

You know what?

I forgot that

the fact that he checked off that he was African or whatever on his Columbia application is way more important than 17 million people losing medical kids.

I remember when

we were talking about that period from about like the last two months of 2024, when like Ruben Gallago and all those people,

Federman, especially, they were taking a very Federman-esque path of,

you know, going, okay, I guess this is the most popular thing now and there's no i i mean this is just how it's going to be from now until indefinite and there's no there's certainly no precedent of republican administrations um

becoming radioactively unpopular by instituting austerity that's just not going to happen and it even like It took until like the first like month of the legislative agenda of the Trump administration

for any Democrats to remember, Oh, right, we're ostensibly supposed to be against austerity, at least some of us.

Maybe even in that time, I would have thought that a bill this bad, literally the most unpopular bill of all time, that is an actual bill and not like

one of those weird stunt bills that like...

you know, the Blue Dog Caucus puts out where it's like, let's give all of our B2 bombers to Israel.

That like would not awaken the party, but that they could do like the bare minimum as they are want to do sometimes.

But no, this is just, I guess they tried in their own way, but it is, it's kind of like the it's kind of like the same idea of Biden going out there and trying to work the phones like LBJ or something.

I guess he could try to do that, but what result would you get?

Yeah.

Um, it's the same thing.

If, if, if Hakeem Jeffries was like doing a 50-state like tour in opposition to the bill, what outcome would you actually get?

It's not even that they're doing a bad job.

I mean, they are, but that even if they were doing everything that they were supposed to do, they would not be able to do it.

They would not be able to really make a dent, I don't think.

Well, I mean,

I think you have to question as well, like,

as far as the Democratic leadership of the party, like, I don't think that they really are, I don't think they really have a problem with cutting Medicaid because I think it gets to this idea.

And Tim, I want to talk about work requirements.

I think it cuts to the heart of this idea is that they don't like the idea of undeserving people getting something for free.

And I think that really bothers them.

And I know that they have to publicly say that we support it and these cuts are disastrous and terrible.

But

I think that's a little good cop, bad cop routine going on with the passage of this bill.

Because I think the Democratic Party, I think they are hostile to the idea of quote unquote entitlements and that someone could be not working and have health insurance.

Well, I think this, I agree in the sense that this is the extension of the great compulsion towards means testing, which has taken a stranglehold on the liberal approach to benefit programs for the past 60 years, right?

The idea that you must find like the absolute smallest number of deserving people and give them the benefit.

And really, you know, I talked to a guy in Kolkana, Wisconsin, who has one of those jobs where his monthly income is variable, right?

And I think

he was a cobbler and depending on how he like made prosthetic feet, which is cool.

But like based on the volume of work he did each month, his income would fluctuate.

So some months he had enough.

Some months he didn't make enough and he qualified for Medicaid.

And some months he would make, you know, one or two feet too many and get kicked off his insurance, right?

That's

stupid.

You know, it's feast or famine when it comes to foot accidents.

Sometimes there's a lot.

Sometimes, you know, it's

pretty sparse.

Completely fucking ridiculous.

And like, it is worth acknowledging that this is under the system of healthcare, health insurance allotment that Obama came up with, right?

Like, this is the ACA plan.

Again, like, we acknowledge quietly that healthcare as a consumer good is not affordable for regular people, right?

Nobody I know can afford to pay for all their health care costs out of pocket because people I know are, you know, generally not multi-billionaires.

So we have to do something to make sure they can afford that healthcare.

And because healthcare costs skyrocket every year and we're doing fucking nothing to bring them down, those premiums that get passed on through private insurance also aren't affordable.

So we're going to put together this hybrid model where people who are profitable get subsidies that we pay directly to private insurers.

And people who aren't, you know, the low-income, the sick, the poor, will just

nut up and pay for their health care directly, even though there is, you know, some private profit cutting in the middle of that there.

But yeah, I mean, like,

there was so much reluctance to expanding healthcare as a federal benefit program beyond even that minuscule 138%.

And I do think there is a schism in the party.

I believe there are the real freaks who want to drown Medicaid or make it as small as possible.

But I have seen a lot of people, you know, Mark Pocan from Madison, Gwen Moore from Milwaukee, who have come out and articulated a demand for things like Medicare for all, which I think is literally the only way out of this.

Even if we manage to undo four years from now, knock on wood, everything that this bill does, simply avoiding catastrophe is not promoting justice, right?

Medicaid was pretty fucked up to begin with.

Not enough people had it.

It didn't pay enough.

There were a lot of problems there.

And you can't just hope you can partially undo some of the disaster and get to a good place.

No, I really do think that the only way to even attempt to undo and build off of and improve the absolute catastrophe we're facing down is through a federal universal single-payer program.

And I can't predict the future.

You know, in 2015, I never would have told you that Medicare for all would be like the topic of conversation in the 2020 primaries.

So I don't want to say in either direction whether that's going to become a thing again, whether we'll have a fucking country, you know, or an election uh in a couple of years i don't want to predict that either but i i i think that's the only way forward i think that's the only conceivable way uh to articulate a vision of healthcare in this country that isn't such fucking stupid ping-pong back and forth with the nihilists i mean it is astounding if there was any other product where it is as you said it is impossible for most people to afford it without government subsidy if uh netflix was like that and also it sucked no one really no one really liked it like if you if you had to pay if you had to pay for netflix by a monthly subscription and then you had to pay again when you wanted to watch uh an episode of a tv show that would be the

if you want to watch like pain and gain and then it puts on like bridgerton on a bangladeshi dub

and then you have to then you have to set aside like the next three days to work through like a phone bank to talk to somebody and then they're like well we can offer you like a a coupon if you want to watch bosh because we have a coupon that allows you to use amazon streaming service for three days but only

if you make ten thousand dollars less this year like no one would allow that we're offering all americans a voucher to watch one sketch from i think you should leave every year yeah

but i feel the same way about predicting the future and but knowing that um we talked a little bit about about how, you know, Medicaid is kind of the pillar holding this entire thing up.

In your best estimate, what do you think this looks like after implementation?

Like in your worst case scenario where, yeah, it just

this just goes on unfettered.

It's very easy to think about Medicaid as affecting just Medicaid recipients, right?

You know, a thing I see a lot of the time is that we all kind of assume healthcare or health policy or Medicaid is a thing that happens to other people.

But the consequences of cutting Medicaid are way broader reaching than just the 80 million people that use Medicaid, right?

You've got medical workers at like a lot of facilities, again, like just the 80 million people.

Yeah, just 80 million people.

Just 40% of American people.

Right, it's killing.

You know, it's no problem.

It's just those guys.

But like, you know,

there's a...

Workers, this is a workers' rights issue as well, not just at,

you know, the clinics that need Medicaid to to stay afloat, but home health workers, long-term care workers, county health care programs.

I talked to a guy's mom, uses a county healthcare program.

He's nonverbal autism in the county healthcare program, gave him job training and picks him up in a bus and takes him to work.

That's all funded by Medicaid, you know?

So that bus driver, that county health care worker, that job training program, that bus, like all that shit goes away if Medicaid is cut.

You've also got entire parts of the country where Medicaid is the one thing propping the hospital up.

I was in Wild Rose, Wisconsin, which I think is like population 680, small fucking town, two gas stations.

One of them has a gigantic Israeli flag.

And I talked to a guy.

I talked to a guy,

nice guy, who was like, listen, I'm 72 or whatever.

I had a heart attack two years ago.

And the only reason I'm alive is because the local hospital, which, you know, was 15 minutes away, was able to save my life.

But this is an area where 40% of children are in Medicaid.

Like, what happens if Medicaid gets cut?

Will that hospital still be there?

And I gotta say, like, I don't know, man.

Like, it's very probable that it won't be.

You know, hospital systems don't keep individual hospitals open out of charity.

They are money-making, you know, they're profit-seeking organizations, even if they're not-for-profit.

And they will close facilities that serve, that this, like, that are the only things that serve like entire regions of the US, if they don't get those Medicaid dollars, people will get fucked over.

So you've got like massive constituencies here, well beyond that mere 80 million people that use Medicaid.

And

it's gonna be up to somebody to define that constituency, to say, listen, this shit affects all of us in so many ways, whether we're filling out the Medicaid application or not.

And not, of course, to mention friends and family and loved ones.

This is like

as

it's not universal, but it's as universal a healthcare issue as I can think of in America right now.

And people,

that thread needs to be drawn.

You got to make that argument.

I see little foundations of it here and there, but that's, I think, you know, the million-dollar question is some, can somebody really piece that together at the popular level?

Yeah, that, that is something we've talked about a lot with like, you know, homeless policy on a municipal and state level.

That it is, in effect, deputizing every person who lives

in any city with a housing problem that's that bad and automatically deputizing them as an unpaid volunteer police officer, social worker, or whatever else.

That is now your role if you live in a city where the problem is bad enough.

With Medicaid, like you're describing, it is suddenly this massive tax of

time, energy, of of life away from people.

I remember you describing that

the last time you were on.

The extra moments of life that just

even the bare minimum of care affords people.

Something I was thinking about with this is

one of the only vectors of like social mobility or even just treading water in America.

is for someone to get like a nursing degree or to work as a radiology tech when all these hospital hospital systems are just they have to preemptively shut down or are forced to shut down when um whatever type of healthcare facility per capita in a lot of these rural places where people are much poorer when they have to go away what does that do to employment you know you reminded me of a of a woman i talked to in uh in north milwaukee north milwaukee is the uh part of milwaukee that's been like totally was like the red line neighborhood total structural structural divestment, like a lot of very poor people, and it's a majority black neighborhood.

And I talked to a young woman, maybe 23 or 24, who is a home health worker for her mother.

So Medicaid pays for her mother's home health and therefore pays her salary.

And so she does home health for her mother eight hours a day and goes to class in the evenings.

And this will literally uproot every single part of her life.

Her mother will no longer get home health.

She won't have a job.

And her ability to pay for education will no longer be there.

And also worth noting now, they're capping student loan ceilings as well.

It's like just, this woman's just fucked.

I mean, there is like, this is like,

they're getting her from every fucking possible angle.

It's like

they don't want any opportunity for someone to like work or help anyone unless you're, I don't know, being a crypto trader or just gambling on sports.

Actually, actually, no, actually, the Big Beautiful Bill does tax gambling.

Wins and losses.

That's the one thing in it that I do approve of.

Yeah, I mean, the only way that you are a full American citizen is if you are a member of the Hillel chapter.

Yeah.

But Tim, to go back to this idea about like a tax on people's time and dignity, like I was talking about like, what is the reality of these, like the work requirements and not just like the tax on people's time and dignity that it imposes on people who like want to claim benefits, but also like, the tax on the time and resources of the government itself to follow up and like make check up on all the paperwork of everyone to see if they qualify or not.

Like how to like isn't isn't that a massive drain on the resources of the state that could be using that could be used to just provide care for people in terms of this like ridiculous system of having to check if someone's worked 80 hours a week or if they're doing community service or if their kids are young enough or what like what is the reality like how what does that look like in the lives of people who uh previously like would have qualified for medicaid but now we're faced with this like series of hurdles and hoops that they have to jump through.

You know, I was in Tennessee in 2019.

I think I was in outside of Nashville.

And I talked to a lawyer who was facing this exact circumstance, that he was representing a client who was trying to enroll in Medicaid and get a disability certification.

And literally the office he went to did not share a database environment with a different office the guy had moved from.

There was no fucking infrastructure whatsoever to like build this kind of thing in the state.

And you've hit exactly what's going to happen.

Like there is no funding.

Wait, there is no infrastructure there.

A lot of states will not hire the people they need to like enforce these programs or build the data resources or the technical infrastructure.

Yeah, it's just fucking going to be a lot of people.

But people will try to be in compliance with this new regime and find themselves unable to because the states themselves will not have the resources to confirm or check up if on their compliance.

The kind of the prototype we have is during Medicaid unwinding, which happened under Biden, though I'm not going to say it was Biden's fault, although he didn't advocate for it pretty hard.

70% of people who lost Medicaid following the COVID freeze lost it for procedural or paperwork reasons because

the computer system wasn't able to like process them in time or didn't have their eligibility records or something got fucked up or paperwork got misfiled.

Like, listen, like in my day job, I helped build software to help enroll people in Medicaid.

And it's really fucking hard.

It's hard, even if you have a person by your side walking you through the entire process.

The volume of paperwork you need to collect and put in an application and get processed and check up on,

that's literally a full-time job.

And if all of a sudden you're adding a whole new fucking dimension to it, because not only are they adding monthly work requirement attestations, they're also adding twice annual recertification.

You have to reapply toe-to-tip for Medicaid every six months.

There is no fucking universe in which any state has the infrastructure to support that right now.

And most states aren't going to find the money to do it

in the coming years.

Also, one thing I do want to call out is it's very easy to say, oh, this only affects, you know, the,

let's say, turning 37 in two weeks, your old guy who plays Death Stranding 2 all day long.

No, like, if you...

We got to build those roads.

We're not building roads in America, so we got to build them in Australia.

Got to have infrastructure somewhere, you know?

Yeah.

People with disabilities,

there's like an assumption that like they get a pass or an exemption, which is like correct if you can file the paperwork to prove that you're disabled, which is like a lot of fucking work.

If you talk to anybody with a chronic long-term disability, getting that certification from the state really, really sucks.

And they fucking check up on you every month to see if you're still disabled to qualify for SSDI.

Like, you are not spared work requirement paperwork if you have like a major disability.

It's got to fill out a different form instead.

Yeah, they're fucking drowning people.

Like what this is, is it's a statement that the time value of living, if you are poor or you are disabled, is not worth anything.

And so fuck you, fill this shit out and chase it down.

And if you can't, sorry, bitch, you don't get healthcare this month.

Well, Felix, this goes back to what you said about like this is sort of a strategy of sort of how many people can we literally just call who are net drains on society because they're disabled or poor like it is it too strong to describe like the thinking behind this as sort of a a kind of passive action t4

i mean it's it is eugenics you know at some point it's not hyperbolic to use that term uh which i use pretty sparingly because that has a similar connotation but this is this is this is social murder right the the angels phrase for when you put stuff to get like uh when you don't actively kill somebody but you just permit them to die through the existence of structures that make their lives worse whatever right if you don't take care of pollution and crowding and crap environments, people die as a result and you let that happen, that social murder, this is that.

This is a form of eugenic policy.

And I, you know, it's pretty open and shut.

This is a process by which people who are vulnerable, people who need help, who, again, worth remembering, could be literally any one of us in this call a month from now if shit breaks the wrong way.

It's a way of letting them die.

because it's a hassle to take care of them otherwise and because they don't inspire or engender the pity or sympathy sympathy at the social at a structural and social level.

I don't think it's hyperbolic to claim that this one big beautiful bill is a manifestation of eugenic healthcare policy.

Even if the states had funding to

unify their databases, to proceduralize these recertifications,

Just the idea of making someone like a fucking 30-year-old who just caught a shit break and they have ALS,

you know, 30 years before

it is even normal to have this extremely low percentage disease, making them go through this thing twice annually is fucking, that is indignity enough.

But in practice, think about at the federal level, where there is money for this, where you are supposed to do things right and have the resources to do that.

The implementation of things like the no-fly list.

Think think about the implementation of these ice roundups where they regularly take people who have identification or have their fucking birth certificate on them somehow oh no it doesn't count that doesn't look real like there is just no universe where

you don't boot millions of people who actually do qualify under these extremely fucking brutal standards where you just don't boot them off.

And yeah, that is, I completely agree.

That is the eugenics program.

You're absolutely right.

You know, people who, you know, even if you accept the frame of deservingness, which I don't, and neither do you guys, but like, if you accept the frame of eligibility or whatever, right?

People who are legally eligible for Medicaid are going to lose Medicaid.

That's kind of the point.

It is a sieving process.

And instead, we're blackbagging kindergartners.

You know, that's where we're allocating our funds.

It's a, shit has got kind of fucked up and bullshit.

Don't forget the Golden Dome

Missile Shield project.

Oh my gosh, with the technology that only exists in Metal Gear Solid One.

They say they're launching anti-ballistic.

The science isn't even out on how good anti-ballistic missiles are.

You know why?

Because there aren't a lot of instances of people firing a ton of ballistic missiles at North America.

But for the most part,

missile defense in a lot of cases is saying,

I think,

as easy as it is to shoot someone, just as easily, I can slice a bullet out of the sky with a katana.

I mean, in that sense, Hideo Kojimo's vision of Metagross Solid is a little bit aspirational because if

we had that cyborg ninja, things would be a little bit different around here, you know?

You're that ninja.

I've been waiting for you, snake.

Who are you?

Neither enemy nor friend.

I am back from a world where such words are meaningless.

I've removed all obstacles.

Now you and I will battle to the death.

What do you want?

I've waited a long time for this day.

Now I want to enjoy the moment.

What's with these guys?

It's like one of my Japanese animes.

I'm glad we brought up eugenics because I want to get to the next thing I want to talk about.

But Felix, before I do that,

I have a tweet that was selected specifically to make you mad.

And I'm just wondering if I could share it right now.

All right.

Is this the JD tweet?

No, no, this is Aaron Rupar, one of your favorites.

Let's go.

We don't like him, but he is the best

America.

Yeah.

So like, this is Aaron, like his heart's in the right place, but this is a tweet that is constructed specifically, I think, to make you mad.

Aaron Rupart posted the other day, the interesting thing about the Diddy verdict is that House Republicans are about to vote to take away health care from tens of millions of Americans.

What fucking point is he trying to make?

Well, he's saying that we shouldn't care about the Diddy verdict.

We should care about the tens of millions of people losing their health care, which I agree with, which I agree with.

I just, me and Andrew from E1 were talking about this recently, how there's like a shitty type of backpack rap where they say everything is a distraction.

Everything is like a distraction from lyricism.

You were focusing on Kendrick versus Drake, but not lyricism.

And it's like, oh, silly me.

How could I be so fooled?

And this is, I mean, I haven't really, this is a very like Trump one style of tweet where it would be like oh did you hear about sean mendez and it would be a link and it would be like a register to vote

i just i just um i'm gonna guess that got 70 000 retweets so distraction failed yeah so yeah that that was our new part but i but uh since we're talking about eugenics i i did want to talk about the uh

the really like the the perfect story that sums up the new york times as an institution because this story broke right after we got recording, got done recording on Thursday.

But like by now, you've probably heard about it or already forgotten about it.

Basically, like to give a rundown here, Columbia University was hacked sometime in 2024.

And like basically all the admissions data of like, you know, tons of students who applied to Columbia and their applications was hacked.

And basically,

Nazis decided to dig around into the data to determine whether Colombia was secretly doing affirmative action or something.

But basically,

in the applications was Zoran Mandani's application to Colombia.

And in it, he checked the boxes for ethnicity of both Asian and

African-American or slash black.

And then, like, I think he specified from Uganda because he thought that was the best representation of his, I don't know, ethnic background or makeup.

I don't like, but the point is that, like,

this data, like the broker, the middleman who gave the New York Times this data is

a big, I don't think I would be speaking out of turn to say he is a eugenicist neo-Nazi with gums like Mr.

Ed, whose name is Jordan Lasker.

But the New York Times described him as,

let's see here.

The data was shared with the Times by an intermediary who goes by the name Cremu on Substack and X.

He provided the data under condition of anonymity, although his identity has been made public elsewhere.

He is an academic who opposes affirmative action and often writes about IQ and race, which is a

very gentle way of putting what this guy's main area of concerns are.

He used to blog under the username Tranny Porneau on Reddit.

And some of his articles that he's written include The Myth of Nigerian Excellence, National IQs are valid, intermarriage in America post-loving v.

Virginia.

How many sexual misconduct allegations are false?

And food deserts are not real.

By the way, with this guy,

he is, to use the term coined by Brace, previous episode, a hebophile.

His sister,

by the way, making the only post worth recording ever on Blue Sky, posted a lot about Creamy Jordan.

What I remember mostly is Creamy Jordan is lying to his fiancé about being Jewish and having a bar mitzvah when really he converted.

And I have to say, like, I used to really not think about philiosemitism a lot.

I just, I think if I ever thought about it, you know, 10, 11, 12 years ago, I thought, oh, that's nice of them.

Now, I only think that about the Japanese one.

If you are a Westerner who's a filiosemite, you should start out in prison and have to earn your way out because all of it's all maniacs like this guy.

This guy, like, it's all fucking freaks all the way down.

No Den Fujitas.

Yeah, his sister writes, he eventually dropped out of Southern because he was destroying his body with steroids.

But before that, he joined a Jewish fraternity and changed his name to Hebrew on Facebook.

He isn't Jewish.

He made it up because he's obsessed with the racial concept of the Jew.

And apparently, like, he's also fabricated quite a lot of his academic background as well.

And it seems cliche, but, like, is there a single person who's obsessed with race and IQ and eugenics who isn't a thoroughly unremarkable and mediocre person in every regard, who needs a grand narrative about how their birthright is being denied them by immigrants or non-white people or something?

But like,

they seem like he just couldn't hack it in his own profession or corner of academia.

Again, among the things that his sister revealed, he told his family that he graduated, he defended his PhD thesis and he's a PhD.

Now he's a doctor.

But don't come out because it's not a big deal.

That's what like shitty sons do when they're like, I've actually been going to community college.

Like doing that with a PhD where you can look it up.

And they did.

They looked it up to see, is our son Creamy Jordan one of the new doctors?

No, he wasn't.

I mean, this like they should have written an expose,

you know, we disgusting man found

well the next guy that trump should kill

that should have been their article uh yeah i mean and he also did some light sex tourism blogging as well but like i i bring all this up because okay like he was the intermediary for you know uh private data that was hacked and then uh you know published in a the paper of record and i'm not making an argument here about whether the journalistic ethics of publishing hacked material.

Like, for instance, the New York Times did not publish the hacked material that, like, I don't know, Iranian hackers got about J.D.

Vance's, like, the APPA research file on him.

Maybe there was nothing worth publishing in there.

But I just like the circumstances of how this story came to get published and why they chose to give grant anonymity to and credibility to this particular source.

I mean, like, the Times public editor had to do like a 40-tweet thread trying to justify it.

And look, you can make an argument about how newsworthy you think Zoran Mamdani is application to Colombia, a school I should mention that he didn't even get into, despite the fact that his dad is a professor there.

So it's like, A, I don't really even know what I'm supposed to be mad at in this story, but like, the point I want to make is if Zoran Mamdani had lost the primary, or if his platform were merely just free buses and childcare, and that like they did not try to make this entire primary a referendum on his support or non-support for Israel, if he had lost,

this article would not have been published.

And if he was within the Zionist wheelhouse, they would not have used Jordan Creamy as the anonymous interlocutor to sort of mainstream this

private data that was hacked.

Like, I think this is like, this is another account.

They are not taking this lying down, and they're going to keep going with shit like this, no matter how badly it embarrasses them.

Yeah.

And also, no matter how much this exposes so much of the, I don't know, abundance on Linesphere as being hand in glove with these like IQ neo-Nazi eugenicists.

Well, yeah, he spoke at the same conference as David Shore, I believe.

Yep.

Interesting.

You know, popularism would mean one thing in 1936 Germany.

I'll tell you that.

But, you know,

to me,

it's not just Biden that will torch his whole thing for Israel.

It's even like liberal institutions who you would think would know better.

Everyone will do it.

I mean, look at what Bill Ackman did to his own life.

Well,

this was a guy with like $7 billion.

And now all he does is write essays that no one reads on X, the Everything site.

Like

if you're into Israel, you are in for it for the long haul.

It's kind of like how if you're a British person who discovers transphobia, it becomes literally the only thing you talk about for the subsequent 10 years.

That's American Zionism.

Oh my, Tim, you're right.

The two most important reactionary thinkers of the last 20 years, it's not fucking mold bug.

The two guys, Graham Linehan and Demonius X.

Those are the two guys.

Whenever I see Graham Lineham, it's always a fucking jump scare.

I keep forgetting he actually looks like that.

It's not a Photoshop.

But

I'm looking at a photo of Jordan Creamy, aka Tranny Porneau.

And I just like, I just have to come back to this idea.

Like,

is there any person who is obsessed with race and IQ and racial hierarchy who has any accomplishments in their own life worth being proud of?

Like,

the people who need to feel that

they are the beneficiary of some racial lineage that has been unfairly denied them.

It's like,

do you have anything in your own life to be proud of?

Do you have anyone around you who likes you?

or talks to you?

The guys who index on race and IQ seem to have as their primary accomplishments writing about race and IQ.

It's kind of a self-fulfilling process.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

The only guy I can think of, and I wouldn't say he's obsessed with race, and he's actually really against the concept of IQ.

And actually, Creamy Jordan

had a feud with him, but he's obsessed with genetics.

Oh, and that's the good doctor, Dr.

Tale.

Yeah, Dr.

Tale.

But he's like a guy.

He's anti-IQ.

Yeah.

Right.

He's anti-IQ, but he loves genetics.

Well, he loves the Phoenician scheme.

But that's like, you know, whatever.

You know, have fun.

Like, I don't.

Hey, I'm not Phoenician.

Anyway, this story has really not gotten the traction that they had hoped it would be.

Because, like, I don't know.

Like, once again, like, I don't know what I'm supposed to be mad at Zoran Mamdani doing.

Not getting into Colombia, checking the wrong box on his college application.

I mean, the guy was born in Uganda and lived in South Africa before he came to America.

Yeah, and like, by the way, wasn't the big cultural lesson we were supposed to do like, hey, if you made a mistake like this when you were, not even like this, something like actually like bad when you were 17,

that shouldn't follow you for the rest of your life, unless you criticize Israel

at any point in any of the 20, the rest of your life after that.

I'm like, but yeah, and this goes back to my original point.

Like, there's no way you can tell me the Times would have regarded this story or like this story as newsworthy or their source as credible had Zoro and Mamdani lost the primary or had he won the primary and been inside the Zionist tent?

They would probably be covering for him now if this was the case.

Even if you think that like he, this was some,

you know, like that this was a cynical attempt to gain the college admissions system, which is like, you know, fair enough if you want to believe that.

Like college is, and like, that's another thing.

People care too much about college.

I'm sorry, I'm so sick of anything that has to do with college.

And it's just like, once again, he didn't even get into Columbia.

If you wanted to make fun of him, you should make, the story should be he didn't get into Columbia despite having that kind of

immigrant background and his dad being a famous professor.

This makes me like him more.

This is fail son echelons.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, that means he tried to like do a webcomic for his essay or something.

I, you know, Will, you're completely right.

I've seen so many childless people

talking about how sad they are about the death of the SAT.

Like, what is wrong with with you, you maniac?

I remember the last.

I remember the last time I took the SAT.

And like, and this was after like all the, all the, all the, all the practice tests, like the, like, I took the SAT twice.

And the last time I took it, that was the last standardized test I ever took in my life.

And oh, wait, no, I took the GR release.

I didn't study for it, though.

And I remember leaving the classroom of where it was administered.

And I remember just feeling like this immense sense of relief watched over me because I was like, this is the last time in my life I will ever think about or care about standardized testing ever again.

And, like, for some people, it just never ends.

Yeah, I, you know, one of my

um, one of 8,000 things that specifically annoys me

is this obsession with theater kids.

Everyone has everyone thinks everyone that's annoying is a theater kid, which, by the way, middle school was 50 years ago for all of us.

The youngest Zoomer is 47.

Like, let's let it go with the theater kid stuff.

It's not,

you know,

it's not theater kids who are talking every day about advanced placement scores and the death of the SAT and how like how it's the admission standards for like Texas tech are unfair now.

It's

STEM people or failed STEM people.

that write these blogs called like, you know, the quantum of identity.

well yeah this i mean it's just like it's it's such a perfect new york times disaster because like i they just don't know what to do and and i think like this has to be understood in the context of like their long series of errors uh

about surrounding this mayoral race because remember like a while ago they were like we're not going to endorse local races anymore we want to be a national paper yeah and then and then they came up with like the council of wise it Learned New Yorkers to endorse.

And like, it was too varied.

And then they did the editorial saying Zoran's not fit to be mayor by a guy, written by a guy who lives in Washington, D.C., full-time, David Lindland.

And then that wasn't good enough.

Zoran won the primary easily.

And

let's be honest, is going to win in November.

I think there's almost no doubt of that because him losing depends on Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams and their supporters

engaging in some sort of coordinated action in which one of them will have to drop out.

And the question is, even if that were the case and they like consolidated support,

who is a stronger candidate, Andrew Cuomo or Eric Adams?

Well, Andrew Cuomo, you have to understand that this primary was unfair for him.

Can you think of a worse base of support for Andrew Cuomo than New York City registered Democrat?

So I think when they open it up.

Well, what kind of making a toss-up for me is if Cuomo and Adams come to an agreement where Cuomo runs for mayor, but Adams gets to like hang out the entire time, kind of like as a simple, like whenever a hookah bar opens, Eric Adams gets to chew off the entire.

That'd make it a little, I mean, I was planning on coming out to canvas for Zoron in September, but in Eric Adams' preminent nightlife mayor situation might make it a little harder to decide.

Well, I if it, you know, if it becomes a contest, let's just say I have done some in-house polling about my favorability with New York,

and I will be doing anti-canvassing for Toronto to

dissociate myself from him and attach myself to whoever the New York Times candidate is to bring them down by a good 12 points.

Yeah, so that's the controversy we didn't get to last week.

But if you've already forgotten about it, I don't blame you because

the whole thing is a complete shambles.

They got nothing.

they got nothing and they have still not really caught into the fact that they've tried to make this primary a referendum on israel and it failed and in fact by making it a referendum on israel they they increased zaran's chances of winning they it probably greatly increased his support that is one of the most insane choices that they could have like jesus because like everything like they still haven't gotten it because it's like it's been a week since it's been like two weeks since he won now i can't even remember and every time i see on tv they're like he supported Hamas in a rap song he did 15 years ago.

And I'm like, I already voted for him.

You don't need to sell it this hard.

Yeah.

By the way, it wasn't, he supported people who donated to a charity in Palestine that the federal government loves doing this.

We've decided that charity that, you know, your bank had no problem doing the transfer with because the Treasury Department okayed it.

That's Hamas now.

So you're going to prison for the rest of your life.

I mean, it is, I don't know what it is if they legitimately just are in denial that this is now like an 80-20 issue with the Democratic base.

They are in denial about it.

And like, that's why I think

they thought that this was a silver bullet because

this goes to the heart of like identity issues and like, and sort of like designed to just drive a wedge between Ziran and his supporters and like

and black people in this country that like he was sort of unjustly claiming their the racial identity of American to game the system.

But like I said, I think it's a pretty limp effort.

I don't think anyone really cares all that much.

But this is in lieu of the fact that they cannot deal with the fact that

he's not towing the line on Israel.

And that is no longer, not just no longer a liability, it's actually a benefit to you in the Democratic primary.

The Zionist lobby has totally overplayed its hand, especially in this election, remember, right?

You're right.

The issue has flipped, especially among young Democrats.

And I think a lot of what happens in two and four years comes down to whether or not the Democratic Party leaders can reckon with that, or if they, like the Columbia alumni group chat, go fucking apeshit about this and try to make it a bigger and bigger and bigger issue every single election.

You know,

we said we're out of the prediction racket, but I have one on, I have a pretty,

I have a pretty, a pretty solid prediction about which route they're going to go down on this.

But I think think it's funny because I think all the attacks on him is like, they keep presuming and keep wanting him to run an identity politics campaign, which he very strenuously did not do.

And that's why they're making everything now about his identity as a Muslim, as an Indian, as an African, because like he's not really doing that.

I mean, he'll mention it, but like he's mentioning it.

He never talks about himself and like his struggle.

He just talks about like, he always brings it back to the experiences of New Yorkers writ large.

And like, he like, he, he ran an affordability campaign.

He, and, like, he did not run the identity politics campaign.

And there, and I think the interesting is like the oppo, the attacks on him are all sort of like predicated on this idea that he did run an identity politics campaign that's all about being, you know, New York's first Muslim mayor or, you know, upholding immigrant voices and spaces and whatnot.

Yeah, I don't want to glaze the guy too hard because I do need to anti-cannabis just to make sure.

But

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that both zoron the guy and zoron's campaign are

a result of someone who actually learned all the lessons of the last 10 years of the american left all at least all all from all the public failures yeah and uh among those are yeah not not um

you know, saying I'll be New York City's first woke mayor.

If I can tie both half of the episodes together with something on that,

when I first came on a couple months ago, I was launching a series of talks across Wisconsin.

I think I did 16 or 18 talks across Wisconsin in the past few months.

And we don't have enough urban areas for us all to be urban.

So a lot of them are like in really rural or small or even conservative areas.

And I talked to a lot of people who don't see themselves represented in like the Democratic-Republican paradigm or whatever, right?

I think the idea that we live in a country of quiet socialists has not been proven true, especially in Wisconsin, Wisconsin, which is genuinely purple state.

But talking to people about these very real healthcare issues and how they shape their life and what this means for people like them and people they care about was an entry point for people who are otherwise completely chucked out of the political process.

And I,

you know, there is, I don't want to see Medicaid cuts in terms of electoral potential.

I think that's a little nasty.

But I mean, the person who goes out there and makes the argument, kind of what we saw with Bernie 2016 and 2020, like, listen, like

these things that shape your life, you deserve to have a good, you deserve to have a dignified life.

You deserve to be able to afford your health care or not have to pay for healthcare in the first place.

You deserve to live freely in your own body.

I think that is powerful.

I think that is activating in ways that fall outside of the clan affiliation of Democrat or Republican.

That's kind of, I think, the only way forward in a state like Wisconsin.

So I'm really hoping.

that we can drive that home over the next couple of years.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, is, it is a wide open lane for anyone who wants to take it.

Tim Faust, I think that's a good place to wrap up today's show.

Tim, once again, thanks so much for joining us.

And thanks for, you know, once again, for all the work you're doing in Wisconsin to just, I don't know, like help people

and, you know, and organize around the issue of healthcare in this country, which is, you know, as I've said many times, I think like the most glaring, the most glaring like chasm through to which this country is sliding into, but it would be theoretically the easiest to fix.

And Tim, I once again have to thank you and admire you for all the work you're doing on just helping people.

If I can shout out a Chappa listener who set up a town hall because she heard the podcast last time, her name is Elena.

She lives in rural Wisconsin.

In her town of 2,200 people, she brought out 75 people because she heard this podcast.

That's like her first time organizing anything like that.

So I was very grateful for the platform.

And I think people can do really interesting things when they put their mind to it.

Well, shout out.

Definitely.

Much love to Elena.

And if Elena, you want to hit the show email account, we'd love to send you some free merch or something.

Yeah, absolutely.

I am,

yeah, I just, every time

that I read about the state of American healthcare or see any

of the incoming austerity or any of the future designs of austerity,

I am very glad that you are out there, Kim.

So thank you so much.

The pleasure is mine.

All right, that does it for today's show, but not, we are not signing off yet until I plug one more time.

Pre-orders for year zero, the Chopo Comics Anthology, are live now at badegg.co.

So please check out

our upcoming comics anthology, which you can pre-order right now at www.badegg.co.

Link will be in the show description.

Once again, I would like to really stress how excited we are about this project.

If you haven't taken a look at it, like just like what the cover looks like and some of the art inside, uh, you'll be hearing more about like some of our individual stories in the coming weeks.

But once again, Year Zero: the Chapo Comics Anthology, our version of Tales from the Crypt, Master of the Mercab,

Tales to Shock and Scandalize and Scintillate are all available to pre-order now at badag.co.

Tim Faust, once again, thank you so much for your time.

That does it for today's show, everybody.

Bye-bye.