Sarah Palin

So Corb Lund is

a Canadian Mormon country singer who did an album called Horse Soldier, Horse Soldier about cavalry.

Horse Soldier, Corb Soldier.

Yes, that's right.

Exactly.

And it's something that both Riley and I know about independently.

And every so often we will just drive each other insane by invoking the specter of Corblund, Canadian Mormon.

The song that I know Corblund via is, and we've mentioned this on TF before.

You keep saying the name.

Uh-huh.

Do you want to say, Maddie, do you want to say it?

Corblund?

Do you want to say the name?

Is it Corb?

Okay, you keep saying Corblund, but I want to say Cor Blund in my mind.

Uh-huh.

Maybe he's Lund.

We don't know.

Maybe he kept the Scandinavian affect, you know?

So my favorite core blund, core blund song is called Student Visas, and it's about how you get mental health as an operator helping the Contras.

My favorite core blund song.

An American operator, to be clear.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's like Warren's Even, except, you know, much more right-wing.

My favorite core blund song is about, I forget exactly which one it is and what it's called, but it's about like cavalry i think it might be called horse soldier and my favorite bit in it is that he tries well my second favorite bit is that he tries to both sides the civil war because they both had cavalry in them well he's right about that

and then my favorite bit

is at the end he's like oh there's there's no more there's no more cavalry anymore because of like tanks and planes and stuff but because and this dates the album he gives a shout out to the Northern Alliance and specifically Dost.

Like the special forces in Afghanistan are riding horses.

And he does rhyme special forces and Afghan horses.

Some of those who are in special forces are the ones who ride Afghan horses.

And so it's all good.

Now there's cavalry again.

And that's my favorite core blunt thing.

He's got a song just called Soder City.

And

to me, I think that's so beautiful.

Yeah, I think the song you're thinking of is just called I Want to Be in the Cavalry.

Well, he does.

That may well have been it.

Yeah, and he does.

He does.

He very, that's very clearly what he wants.

He wants to be in the cavalry.

Hello, and welcome to the first episode of No Gods No Mayors of 2025.

I am your mayor for this episode, November Kelly.

Joining me are my deputy mayors, Massey Lewchansky and Riley Quinn.

Sorry, it's pronounced Cor Blund.

You betcha.

And as it's my turn, I thought that I would sort of like pick maybe one of my favorite mayors, Sarah Palin, mayor of Wasilla, Alaska.

Not much Wasilla with you.

God damn it, Corb.

But

before we do all of that, before we figure out what the fuck Sarah Palin's problem is, we have a segment that we like to call municipal roundup.

Corp Lund.

The mayor's still running enough.

No, really?

Kindness in 2025.

Kindness.

Be kind.

Yes.

Because I know the battle he's fighting because they have a bunch of indictments.

So.

Indictments?

Indictments.

They did everything right and they indicted me.

That was Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen on CNN's New Year's coverage.

Yeah.

Sort of drunkenly thinking aloud about Eric Adams.

And

these wasted people on television.

I think that's beautiful.

I think that's a great tradition.

This whole segment just made me realize that drunk history as a concept is wasted on drunk history.

Shit face Shakespeare, wasted on shit face Shakespeare.

Drunk news is actually quite fun.

They need to normalize drinking on the job at work at CNN.

Is what you're saying?

I have a really vivid memory that I can never find the actual clip, but me and my partner mentioned it to each other all the time.

And we were watching TV.

And I think it was after the 2012 election here in the States.

And

the anchors had clearly been up all night, maybe drinking, maybe not, probably.

And I think it was, I want to say it was Hoda Kotbi on the television or a similar kind of personality who was like, had a bunch of grade school kids with her.

And she's like, I'm going to talk to these kids about the election, but she was really drunk.

And so she referred to them as teeny weeny citizens.

And see,

I just think about it.

It's been 12 years at least.

And I think about it so often.

Those kids are old enough to vote by now.

now.

They're normal citizens now.

Yeah, they're normal size citizens now.

But

I think this is the thing, right?

You've got to normalize drinking at work on TV, but only occasionally.

Because if they're drinking all the time, then you just get like a tolerance and you become like Don Draper.

You become like a very INTJ kind of like functioning alcoholic.

Whereas if you're, if you're like, like getting absolutely twisted once a year, I think that that has has the kind of like holiday, like misrule aspect to it that I really like.

They should spike the coffee of the anchors.

Let me take that and turn it one step, which is every time

a different news person is drinking.

So they don't, not every, not all of them are drunk every time.

They don't tell you.

You have to guess.

They don't tell the anchor.

You phone in.

They spike their drinks.

Yeah.

And only

my favorite part of that clip is Andy Cohen delivering kind of the mission statement for our whole podcast here.

The mayor's still running around.

Because he's true.

He's still running around.

He is.

And Eric Adams is still running around.

He is still battling indictments.

We will have

more Eric Adams news in the fullness of time.

Yeah.

There's been some, it's still developing, but there's been some shenanigans with his previous police chiefs now, where one got his house searched.

Fantastic.

Meanwhile, I'm in the mayoral lab trying to work out whether the president of South Korea counts as a mayor.

Yeah.

Does the Pope count as a mayor?

Yeah.

Given that he is also

battling indictments.

I love that way of saying indictments.

Like Trump has it.

Indictments.

Andy Cohen has it.

That's how I say it.

It's the New York way of saying indictments.

Indictments.

Indictments.

You know what?

It's like no other city in the world.

You go to the quarter store, you get everything you need, you get indicted like nowhere else.

they call it a bodega new yorkers are always getting indicted yeah anything can happen here from starting a business to getting indicted

just like shut the up about new york i know what an indictment is it's just like a regular arraignment except it happens in new york you know it's not special some guy in like iowa sending me a photo of a gas station saying it's the same thing and it's like it's not

so that's that's our first piece of news our second piece of news is all matting.

Oh, yeah, this is more of a

doxing my own location update.

But I was walking around.

I was walking around my neighborhood.

Let's all give an

address update.

Yeah, everyone look outside their house now.

And what would be useful information for a geo-guesser if you're looking outside your own home?

I live in a basement now.

So I don't know if that's useful information, but it's very hard for me to dox myself from a window.

Start tunneling around your location.

No, fuck.

So I know, I mean, it is a well, I've talked about this before.

I live in Astoria Queens.

It's a big neighborhood.

But I was walking around the neighborhood and I saw there's a new bar opening called Honey Fitz, which is

the name of the gentleman who

former guest James Muckle Curley took down by.

by doxing his relationship with a cigarette girl.

Can you, my question is, can you get the Ward 8 cocktail at Honey Fitz?

It's not open yet, but I will report back.

But

it seems like it's very close to opening.

They were painting the exterior when I walked by the other day.

So I think there's a gap in the market for a municipal-themed bar.

I think that's clear.

What's strange to me is that it's, yeah, it's JFK's grandfather, Honey Fitz.

But he is a Boston figure, and I live in Queens.

So I don't know what it's doing here.

And if it ends up being a Boston-themed bar, I'm going to do something actionable.

Literal Boston.

I just, I think, I think we could do it.

I think we could get in on like starting a bar and call it like City Hall or something.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Just like, can I get you started with perhaps the Alderman?

You know?

Just like all of our cocktails are delivered in like Atasha cases, you know, delivered furtively under this.

I mean, the thing is,

if I started a mayoral bar, it would very slowly just become Gavin Newsom's Matrix bar.

Like over, over, over a sort of long enough.

Just like, why do all of these tables spell sex?

And it's like, no, it's a reference to Gavin Newsom's bar.

It's in, it's all in quotes, all of this here.

What if every corner of the bar was a different theme of a different kind of mayoral bar?

So we had like the matrix bar,

like Gavin Newsom, like one, one side was like, um, yeah, like Eric Adams style, like zero bond ass place.

Well, one, one corner of it after this is going to have to be the Mugshot Tavern in Wasilla, Alaska.

Yeah, that's going to be an interesting thing.

Oh, one of them is just that basement in Canada that Rob Ford would always be getting wrecked in.

Oh, no, that's though.

Don't tell you what that is.

That's like the bit that Time Out writes about that you have to like go through a bookcase door to get to is the Rob Ford basement.

Sorry, it's it's just it's you go downstairs and it's just a car.

You get into the car.

The Rob Ford Memorial Alcoholism parking lot.

It's just in the basement, it's just the body of a car.

And you go, yeah.

Outside.

I mean, there is, there's a restaurant, there's an American-themed restaurant in Glasgow, right, that has

like a yellow New York taxicab and an NYPD car that they keep parked outside for like photo shoots and stuff.

It's the dumbest thing in the world.

But I'm just thinking about how if we got the Toronto car that Rob Ford half fell out of on TV and just parked that outside in loving memory i would love to try and start like a little canada in london it's like like the old like the old canadian neighborhood there where like yeah we have like uh

you want to go down to little toronto yeah we have little toronto

where like you can you can check out you know like uh the torano car that rob ford drove in that reality show

you could look in a bin that's full of like mcdonald's bags full of evidence

thrown away

I just, you give me control of this podcast and I repeat the thing that happens on Well, There's Your Problem, where everybody listening is now sitting, so kind of like internally screaming, like, get to the point of the episode.

So, yeah, tell us about Sarah Palin.

That has been Municipal Update.

First of all, Greetings and Happy New Year to our Alaskan fans.

Both of you are very dear to our hearts.

Your state railroad has a beautiful livery.

And I've kind of, yeah, you can look it up.

It's like blue and gold.

It's really nice.

What are you Stephen A.

Smith?

Like, what the hell?

I just, I just like to kind of butter them up a bit.

You know, I'm schmoozing here.

That's a tremendous livery.

No, this is good livery.

I'm ingratiating myself is what I'm doing because, you know, obviously Alaskans would be very proud of their like state railroad livery and like think about it a lot.

So yeah, I'm trying to like build rapport here is what I'm doing before I talk about probably the most famous Alaskan, something which I suspect any Alaskan listening to this will deeply resent.

Now, I mean, despite Riley, you're like geographically from closest to Alaska.

Matty, you're from the same country that Alaska is in.

Nonetheless, I have played all of the Alaska DLC for Train Simulator.

See, it is, it's related, right?

It ties together.

And my ex-husband used to have a poster for the Torrey Amos album, Scarlet's Walk, that had a bizarrely selective map of Alaska on it.

And when I couldn't sleep, I used to Google places on it and like read about them.

So

I'm the Alaska point woman for this one.

Yeah.

So Alaska is

like the state that hangs off of Canada.

It's the ponytail coming out of America's hat.

And it contains a town called Wasilla, which has a population of about 9,000, which makes it the fourth largest city in Alaska.

That's crazy.

Some are calling it the South Bend of Alaska, inasmuch as it's a small town that produces national political figures.

Yeah, well, it produced one, basically, right?

And Wasilla is a very strange place.

And I think I'm going to spend most of the episode talking about Wasilla because I became kind of fascinated by it much more than I did Sarah Payton.

So there's this

valley, the Matsu Valley.

I don't remember what it stands for, but it's like short for two names.

And it's kind of, there's a kind of a two-fort vibe going on where there's a town at each end of the valley.

One of them is Wasilla, the other one is Palmer, and they fucking hate each other.

And they're just kind of like staring daggers down this valley.

I love that.

I love a setup like a Dr.

Seuss novel.

Novel.

A Dr.

Seuss novel.

I call them novels because they're hard to read.

Just a really long, like Emuzola, kind of like 300 pages of digressions type Dr.

Seuss novel.

Yeah, about the two people on the other side of the valley that hate each other.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so Wasilla is at one end of this.

It's the end closer to Anchorage, which is like the big city in Alaska.

And so very slowly, it's becoming like a northern suburb of Anchorage.

And it, you know, it started out as a railroad town, which is why I bring in the railroad stuff.

It got lucky by being on the site of the Parks Highway, which goes all the way up the state.

I think the best way of explaining Wasilla's deal is, Riley, if I can deputize you to read my selection, my curated selection from the notable people page, which I've excluded all of the Palins and the guitar player from Portugal, the man from.

Okay.

Please read us

the people who are notable from Wasilla, Alaska.

So, Lisa Kelly, born 1980, of the history channel program Ice Road Truckers.

You know, history.

Vic.

I'm nodding.

Vic.

It's actually what it's called the story channel now.

I'm not kidding.

God.

Jesus.

Vic Coring, born 1958, state legislator implicated in the Alaska political corruption probe.

Tom Meckler, born 1956, former chairman of the Republican Party of Texas.

And Jeremy Moorlock.

What a name.

Jeremy Eloy.

Yeah, a U.S.

Army soldier who became notable for murdering three civilians in Afghanistan.

And that's all.

That sounds about right.

Jeremy Morlock sounds like a Marvel character that they forgot about.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Jeremy Warlock, Jeremy Morlock war criminal.

But it's like, it's the, well, you're going to get to like the most famous thing about Wasilla Alaska, which is the only thing I actually know about it, but I'll let you get to it.

Okay.

Okay.

So Wasilla is overlooked by, I shit you not, Mount P-O-W-M-I-A.

If you want to know what that whole thing is about, you can listen to the Kill James Bond episode we did on rambo first blood part two it was it was like 60s like boomer q and on this idea that there were like live pows being secretly held in vietnam they might as well have called it fucking mount ivermectin essentially yeah yeah and and they have a like a flag for all of these like alive you know guys who are still in tiger cages in vietnam in like 2025 or whatever um and they've got the stupid flag on the summit of mount pow-m-ia-a but the local jrotc kids only replace it annually.

So the photo that they have of it on Wikipedia, it's already all torn to shit by like Alaskan winds.

How is this?

How did they?

I can't believe that.

I was looking to see if the mountain had a previous name that they changed to something so stupid.

No.

Not as far as I know.

No.

No, it doesn't seem to be.

It's like if you, if you sort of like ask the native Athabascan people who lived there originally, it's just like there are like 15,000 mountains.

Why would you bother naming it?

Geographically, it was probably some shit like 0.1509 or whatever.

Yeah.

You can hike it in five hours.

It's who cares?

Yeah.

But yeah, Mount POWMIA.

I've also included, if you look at the document, a view, a beautiful view of downtown Wasilla,

which I have a quote here from New York magazine, which describes it as widely regarded as the ugliest stretch of road in the entire state.

And I just, I'm just drinking in these vibes.

But the thing, this is what I'm aware of.

And you correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this the meme that's used to like, isn't this the meme that's used by the walkable neighborhood people?

I was about to remark that it looks almost exactly like it.

It looks almost exactly like it, but it's a completely different picture of a different town.

Pennsylvania is where that is in a different state.

But I will say that that exact view as an American.

That exact view you can replicate in any number of places in America.

Like there are parts of Connecticut that look like that, you know?

yeah, just sort of what things look like here.

Part of the reason why it looks like that is the aforementioned parks highway, right?

Which is really kind of the making of the town.

And it means that the whole town is just like on this highway, this like four-lane highway, which is drives straight through the middle of it.

And as you see in this beautiful image, it's mostly like big box stores.

You can you can buy a mattress in Wasilla, you can go to Arby's.

Yeah, you can go to AutoZone in Wasilla.

Um, they got like a big Walmart, They have Tajer, things of this nature.

You could attend the Alaska Club, which is, I assume, is a bar of some sort.

Sounds delightful.

Yeah.

And so in the early 90s, the population of Wasilla was only like 4,000.

It's grown since then by virtue of these like big box stores and by becoming this kind of like northern suburb of Anchorage.

But we begin our story when the big city life is too much for you in Anchorage, Alaska.

Yeah, exactly.

With its 291,000 people.

I mean, Anchorage, as I understand it, is like different from Alaska in that it's like an American city, whereas the rest of Alaska is populated by like Alaskans, if you know what I mean.

There's a difference.

Yes.

Anchorage contains like normal American stuff in Alaska, and the rest of Alaska contains weird Alaskan stuff.

But so we begin our story in a step aerobics class.

On the Mongolian step aerobics.

Yeah, not S-T-E-P-P-E.

No,

no.

When I found this detail,

I knew I had cracked the narrative of this one because the vibes of 90s small town Alaska step aerobics class are already weird.

I just want you to like hold that like a precious crystal in your mind as i now tell you that the the people who are in this step aerobics class are kind of the like shadow government of wasilla sorry i just want to get this abundantly clear are you suggesting that the step aerobics class out that's like they do next to club alaska is to the politics of wasilla as skull and bones is to the politics of the united states i am suggesting exactly that to the point that Sarah Palin and her friend and her like girlfriends within that step aerobics club started calling themselves the elite six.

How good are they at step aerobics?

My least favorite prince side project.

Really good.

So weirdly, the mayor of Wasilla, a guy called John Stein, is in this class.

As is the chief of police, a guy named Earl Stanborough.

And Earl is spelled I-R-L,

which is is a detail I just, I just treasure.

That's where he exists.

Yeah, he's in

Meat Space Stanbore, chief of police.

The reason why John Stein became mayor of Wasilla in the first place is because the Alaska state troopers got sick of dealing with the like horrible crimes of poverty.

Like,

this was something that Wasilla got made fun of a lot of when Palin became a national figure, was like, you know, meth and domestic violence.

And because it has all of that, the state troopers were like, fuck this.

We don't want to do this.

We want to do state trooper shit.

You have to get a police department.

And so John Stein was the guy who started the campaign group to create the Wasilla Police Department.

They poached Earl Stanborough from Anchorage PD and they create this kind of like little nexus of local government in a town that basically didn't have any before.

I actually don't know what Sarah Palin is doing at this point.

She had like bounced around like three different colleges in Hawaii and Idaho and come home with a communications degree.

You know what, you know what you're describing, right?

What it seems you're describing is you're describing someone who just is bouncing around and would never, ever, ever steppe herself, is sort of bouncing around different things and would never have reached national prominence if she wasn't basically picked as a vehicle for someone else.

Yes.

Yeah.

I mean, she already had kids at this point.

She was going to have more.

She had already already been a, I think, like a sports reporter and like a beauty pageant winner at this point.

I think is what she was doing mostly.

She didn't win.

She, she came, well, she, she lost and then won miscongeniality and she lost to the first non-white winner of that contest, which is gonna

like really stick later on.

Like, that's, that's one of the things, if you want an origin story, and I know that's kind of cartoonish to be like, why is this person racist?

But, like, this is kind of one reason why.

Um, but so this guy, Stein, the mayor, is having to battle this entrenched Alaskan frontier libertarian tendency.

There's this group called Sage

standing against government excess.

Uh, and whenever they do like a city meeting or whatever, these guys will show up and start screaming at them about the Constitution

and how, you know, the state constitution and how George Washington wouldn't want you to have a fire department or whatever the fuck.

George Washington would say, What's Alaska?

Oh, yeah.

Seward,

Seward's never going to buy that off of Russia.

That would be folly.

Thank you.

I sometimes, though, like thinking about some of these elements from different shows, you ever just get an urge to want to remix them?

Like, let's get Sage in Montreal in 2010.

Let's see what they would do.

Yeah, just a bunch of Alaskan Alaskan libertarians screaming at

all these mobbed up Montreal guys.

I also love, I just, sorry, I just love the idea of these people being mad about government overreach in a town of 4,000 people that's mostly Burger Kings and no police department.

Like, the government is stepping on our necks by existing at all.

Yeah.

Like, what are they doing?

We will not suffer a Burger King.

in Wasilla.

We'll kind of get to this when she gets elected, but the answer is not much.

And at this point, even less.

Like, it's mostly like stormwater

stuff and like snowplowing.

Yeah.

But so Stein is trying to like stack the city council with cronies, right?

And the way in which Stein talks about her kind of makes my teeth itch a bit.

And this is something I'm going to come back to.

He says, what we were after was to get people on the council who could make sensible decisions about roads, water, sewer, and those kinds of things.

So Sarah came along.

She was bright, energetic, attractive.

She had all the attributes of a really excellent candidate.

And she is really young at this point.

She's like, like late 20s.

So it's him and this other, one of his other cronies, a guy called Nick Carney.

He and his wife were the ones to push her to run for city council.

In his words, because the council needed an average type mom, and says, it was a very casual casual process she wasn't even our first choice we had known her since she was a girl she went to school with our daughter it wasn't like she was the brightest thing on the horizon a rising star or anything like that so these are these are people who are just kind of trying to try to use her and not for the first time people underestimate sarah palin right and they kind of go okay well she's she's going to be like a hockey mom she's going to be on city council and she's going to rubber stamp everything we want to do it's like no one's ever going to identify that a that like the chosen every person

could just basically be picked to be a kind of cipher for more or less anybody and that would be quite valuable exactly um and what stein actually wants to do is to raise like a like a two percent sales tax on these big box stores in wasilla so like yeah exactly it's so it's i mean if you if you wanted to do a domino meme just like um

you know john stein wants to raise a two percent tax on like wasilla main street leads to

two percent on you going to wasilla to buy a mattress and it leads to the tea party

but so they they pass this two percent like mattress tax and then Sarah makes her move, right?

It has clearly rankled her to be underestimated by these guys.

It's the only time in reading this that I've kind of liked her.

Is she she just kind of instinctively grasps that these people take her for granted and they're not going to anticipate what she does, which is to absolutely fuck all of them over.

So Alaskan elections are non-partisan.

They're meant to be pretty like collegial affairs.

It's like old-timey country gibberish shit.

And she comes in like high planes drifter.

She runs for mayor against Stein and in against the guy whose main policy is 2% mattress tax, she goes, this guy is pro-abortion, he's anti-gun, and he's a Jew.

Okay.

And he's not.

Yeah, well,

Sarah read the Yiddish Policemen's Union, and she got scared of a future to come.

I read this terrifying book about what the future could hold if you allow this man

to become the mayor again.

The thing is, it's just she like looked at this guy's surname and went,

what is something I can use against him?

And she like tried a tactic last best seen in election results in like 30s Germany or 1910s Russia.

Or fuck it like

13th century Spain.

I mean, I will, you know, this tracks honestly because the sort of like, oh, like this, this one road with a couple of stores on it it is becoming a town, you know, very slowly.

You know, this is a story of the American West.

This is the old, she's like living in like, you know, Tombstone.

So that's the sort of place you could yell at my opponent is a Jew.

Like, that's pretty works.

This is like Al Swearing it.

This is not the first time I'm going to reference Tombstone on this, by the way.

Okay, good.

So, so, like, she, she describes herself as wanting to be the first Christian mayor of Wasilla, which is

insane because they've, they have all been ruled over Jews for too long.

This is like something that was last, most recently believed in the Polish-Lithuanian cop.

That's why I live here.

Sounds crazy, no, but here in our little town of Wessel.

A fiddler on the roof of the mattress phone.

So, so poor John Stein, who is expecting to be out, who is like, has the town sewn up through this fucking aerobics class?

The Alaskan pail of sediment

is just like,

you know, let's talk about better gas mileage.

And Sarah Palin comes in with the steel-folding chair of the culture wars.

Like, he remembers later on that there's like national anti-abortion organizations are like campaigning and like sending out cards and shit in Alaska for like this town of like 4,000 people.

And she puts together the funniest possible political coalition, right?

Because as people from Texas and Oklahoma moved up to Alaska for the oil boom,

the state started getting a lot more evangelical, right?

And so she's in with and goes to one of these like freak show evangelical churches, right?

Um, they're all teetotalers.

This, this will, you know, sort of not be important later because she's also in with all the bar owners, right?

Are you saying she goes to church with the men on Sundays and then goes to party with the boys at night?

I am absolutely saying that.

Uh, Wasillans call these guys the liquor cabinet, which is cute.

And it's real like small town shit.

There are like two bars, but Wasilla bars stay open until 5 a.m., which has made it.

Why even close?

This has made Wasilla Anchorage's premier destination for mattress shopping and drunk driving.

So Wasilla bars stay open until 5 a.m.

in the morning, but if you go, it's important to like queue up respectfully, right?

Try not to speak English.

We're all clad.

I don't understand why you just don't go to sleep on the mattress you buy at 4 a.m.

You know?

This police department that the state troopers made them get has eight cops.

And the year before Sarah Palin was elected, they made 206 DUI arrests.

It's 3,000 people, yes?

Yeah, yeah, give or take.

Yeah.

All right.

7% drunk driving rate.

That's one of the ones they stop.

And those were the worst.

So besides

taxing and and like expanding public services, Stein and Stanborough want to close the bars at 3 a.m.

and they want to

change it over kosher wine.

Yeah.

And they want to ban concealed firearms from them.

Okay.

Like Tombstone.

It is the American.

Yeah, this is Tombstone.

Yeah.

Oh my God.

Sarah Palin walking in with two red sashes being like, no, y'all killed two cowboys, don't you know?

You betcha.

So, so she welds together this coalition of like libertarians who love guns and driving drunk, evangelicals who hate abortions and Jews.

This is also why the first Christian thing comes in is like, yeah, all those other guys weren't really Christian because they weren't evangelical.

Yeah, there's that weird definition of like American, of like Christians, of American user words, which means like you are actively Christian.

Jesus is my friend that I walk around with all day.

Yeah.

And

like bar owners who love making money.

She, she she wins.

She gets like 616 votes, which is enough to like beat Stein's ass into the ground and he becomes mayor.

And I mean, I don't want to suggest that this wasn't kind of a corrupt like old boys network that she was up against here, but I mean, she really like poisoned the discourse here.

Like it's kind of a microcosm of a lot of the ways that national politics went in the US.

Like

fast forward 20 years, by the time her ex-husband's mom is running for mayor of Wasilla decades later, because she's pro-choice, people are like writing baby killer on her signs.

Sarah Palin was one of the first,

was one of the first people to, and again, this is something I think of, right?

I don't know whether she understands that conservative politics after like the 1990s has to be about immediate libidinal satisfaction of like being the I think she's one of the first people to understand that because she she's she like takes it to the the mayor's office of Wasilla, Alaska.

It's not even a partisan election.

She's not allowed to run as a Republican.

She just happens to get endorsed by every state of the United States.

My question is, I don't, and I don't know.

I don't think this even can be known, which is, did she understand this or did she feel it?

Right.

Did she, did, is this what was libidinally satisfying to her?

Yeah.

Is, is this coming from like logic or from like, you know, shippers?

My actual, my actual like analytical feeling here is that this is like, so that stuff really obviously came to a head in like tea party times and also through to now.

But the first echoes of it really were A.

Reagan, but then like specifically at this exact time, this is like 96.

This is like Newt Gingrich time.

So there is something in the air that like this kind of discourse is taking shape and it is satisfying to people and it is not necessarily like alien.

Yeah.

Because I think the question is, is Sarah Palin someone who understood that like Newt Gingrich?

Or is she someone who was whipped up by Newt Gingrich and then just happened to be in the right place at the right time to instead of being someone who Newt Gingrich and those types heard, is someone who is like, gets the shepherd's crook, but also is one of these like, you know, like libidinal satisfaction nodes.

I don't know.

Well, she seems, she seems really dumb.

I think she is really dumb, but I want to give her credit, though.

I think this is like an intellectually reasoned thing.

Yeah.

You know what, honestly, you know what this sounds like?

It sounds like the episode episode of The Simpsons where Homer runs for garbage commissioner.

Yeah.

But so kind of relatedly, right?

So like she wins and becomes the mayor of Wasilla, Alaska.

So if you are the mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, and you, what can you do with that?

And the answer is kind of nothing.

You've got like 53 employees.

You've got a budget of like $4 million.

You don't even really necessarily make a huge amount personally.

Most of the substantive governance happens at the borough, which is what Alaska calls county level.

She has a superior mayor.

The borough has a mayor who is a one-armed dentist stroke bush pilot called Kurt Menard.

Ooh.

Yeah, Alaska.

He lost the arm flagging a power line near his airstrip, apparently.

And he is like a...

This seems honestly kind of impressive.

Yeah, no.

He taught himself to do the dentistry with one arm.

That's cool.

Alaska feels like a place where that guy would have also been a surgeon, like maybe eight years ago.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

He's like a family friend of the Palins.

Years later, when journalists go to his office, he apparently keeps a photo of her as a young woman butchering a moose in a basement while wearing track shorts hanging up in his office.

So Alaska.

Now, what Sarah is in charge of is like a small city museum, a library, and eight cops.

Now, Stein has already passed this like 2% mattress tax.

The town is making a huge amount of money.

It's got like a massive surplus off of it.

In fact, it's actually expanding into this kind of like strip mall hellscape because of that.

And Palin kind of gets the credit for this.

Like, it's a very easy thing to manage, but she pulls the levers that she can pull.

And the first one of those is to close the museum and fire all the museum employees, even though you're running a budget surplus.

Just be like, fuck this museum.

So, museum, like over, no more museum.

And now the history of Wasilla is lost to us.

The secret history of Wasilla.

We can't do Mongols again.

We can't do it.

Step two, which is what the Mongols said when they expanded into the normal chapter.

This is a new step.

We're done with the Mongol step.

We're now at the Caucasian step.

Or as we call it.

Yeah, she was at that step aerobics class.

So the other, the other big thing is she goes to the library, sees a book called My Dad's Roommate intended to like teach kids about their gay parents.

And she kind of like loudly, like wonders aloud whether she has the power to ban it in an attempt to like intimidate the librarian.

This is apparently like a recurring culture war thing that like actually predates her like evangelicals or like returning books like censored and like having pages torn out to the library and stuff.

One of the most challenging, I remember this book.

It was one of the most like banned books of the 90s, I think.

And the librarian stands up to it.

She's like, No, you can't.

The mayor of Wasilla actually does not have the power to like violate the First Amendment and ban my dad's roommate from the like city library.

And so the book remains unbanned.

Next thing she wants to do, constructive dismissal of Chief Earl.

Chief Meatspace.

Yeah, Chief Meatspace.

So you begin with the classic first step of firing someone.

If anyone ever does this to you, just, you know, you should talk to your union representative, which is demanding weekly reports with a lot of numbers in them about

what he's doing, what's going on.

And because he runs like a small town police department, nothing is going on.

Like he does this without complaining, but the reports, some of which survive, are like, you know, we arrested like four juveniles for like drinking, 207,000 drunk driving arrests.

Entire town transferred to drug tank.

I mean, one of the lines here is just like, pleased to report that Officer Sonnerholm is able to return to full duty, even though he is still having some problems with his knee.

This fucking Skyrim.

He's the head of a fucking Skyrim City Guard.

And like, he even agrees to like let, you know, drop the thing about shortening the bar hours, but he does still try and push this thing about like

not letting you carry a concealed weapon in the bar at 5 a.m i don't see why i shouldn't be able to drive around at 5 a.m in my pickup truck firing a gun out the window um as i drive my mattress back to my other my home

yeah

the cops try to fire back and the mattress just stops all of it your partner being like please maddie please not another mattress i got another mattress

Just guy who is like a serious alcoholic, but is trying to cover it up by being like, I got to go and get a mattress.

Can that all-night mattress firm?

My like 30th consecutive mattress of the year because I keep going to whistle.

The living room isn't soft enough.

The walls are hard.

Do you want echo from the television?

I can still feel the pee when I go to sleep every night.

So I guess I'm going to have to go back from Wasilla and I'll be back early tomorrow.

Okay?

At 5

a.m.

5.40.

If that P is still there and I still feel it, I'm going to have to do it again.

Oh, oh, oh, Matty.

I'd like you to get off my ass about it.

Oh, Matty, why don't you just buy two mattresses at once in Wasilla?

Why do you have to make all of these trips to Wasilla?

I told you.

Called being free.

I don't want to waste money on mattresses.

You can't just return them when they're open.

Fuck.

God damn it.

Guy who has blown a state record breathalyzer running a kind of mattress laundering scheme.

Be like, oh, can I return this for store credit and then getting another mattress?

Yeah, just load it up.

I'll be in the bar.

Load it up, I'll be in the bar.

I'm trying to see if I can get triple digits on that thing.

So,

Palin Institutes a kind of purge, right?

She fires the librarian and she fires the police chief.

She also fires the city attorney because one of her donors is like getting her, is getting his extension blocked.

That's so Montreal.

Yeah, I mean, it's more, it's more direct, I guess.

I'm trying to find the

yeah, yeah, she fired the city attorney Richard Dusa after he issued a stop work order on a home being built by Don Showers, one of her campaign supporters.

If he was called Richard Douche, then they would have been bilingual.

So, like, O

goes to like train cops in Bosnia for the UN, possibly in step aerobics, but he also sues, which is how we know about any of this stuff.

Bosnia's not on a step.

And so, she has to back down off the librarian thing.

She has to rehire the librarian, and she like publicly says, like, all the stuff I was saying about censoring the books, that was like rhetorical.

By this point, she's like a year in.

People are talking about a recall election.

In particular, the like Valley newspaper, the Matsu Frontiersman, particularly hates her, which is really funny given that she used to work for them as a sports writer.

And basically, she just kind of bets that the whole thing will blow over.

And it does.

I mean, she gets re-elected.

She beats Stein again.

He was like, look, he won't pull down his pants.

Yeah, because

everyone's making that mattress money hand over fist.

So like, it doesn't, it's kind of like whatever.

She's pointing to his regular sideburns and calling them payas.

And he has no defense.

I have found precisely four things that she did in office as mayor of Wasilla, right?

List them now for us, please.

Besides all the firing nonsense.

Thing one, Wasilla has a highway maintenance budget, pays for the snowplowing, the potholes, all of this bullshit.

She takes $50,000 out of it to redecorate her office in red flocked wallpaper which another city council member tells the press looks like a bordello i love that so much and she's just like me for real uh as someone who has an llc that is basically a slush fund uh because my my my s corporation for my freelance uh work does have a clothing stipend Do I arrest agents listen to podcasts?

Is that allowed?

Can they do that?

No, my clothing stipend is totally normal.

I have to make appearances November.

Come on.

Yeah.

It's totally fine.

It's normal.

Unlike your thing, her thing is almost certainly illegal.

Yeah, yeah.

This is fun.

You'd be very hard-pressed to make a legal argument that the walls of a council chamber are similar enough to a highway, or that you could conceivably be saying, I like to drive my matchbox cars on.

Why does it say that that's not a car, Your Honor?

Sarcastically driving Hot Wheels car up wall of my office with two fingers in order to get the state police off my ass.

Yeah, or maybe, maybe,

I thought you'd seen this car right here.

Your Honor,

I was going to use the wallpaper on the town streets so we can say we were rolling out the red carpet for the citizens of Wasilla, but I guess you just wanted to ruin it for everybody.

Sorry, everybody.

I was going to do something awesome for the city, and then your honor over here ruined it for you.

So you can thank them.

The guy who confronted her about this, because she still has to work with all the guys who hate her, right?

It was Nick Carney, the guy who originally picked her for city council.

And until she comes in, by the way, I found photos.

Everybody's wearing double denim.

It looks like the fucking Dharma initiative.

It's like

time has not advanced since the 1970s and like 90s Alaska.

And then she comes in, becomes mayor.

And like the frontiersman accuses her of treating the like 600 votes that she got as like a kind of monarchist mandate.

And given that she does try to turn like a kind of a like a one-room civic center into Versailles,

I don't know that they're wrong.

It's like, you know what it is?

Is Sarah Palin is the

like she's Mrs.

Buyer's remorse basically, right?

Where like

the two like the two major people who gave her

gave her her first, like, political career and then gave her her first big job, like big job on the national stage were both like, oh, fuck, what did I do?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, so Carney like confronts her about her wallpaper.

And when he does, she hits him with maybe the best line I've ever heard in my life, which is, I'm the mayor.

I can do whatever I want until the courts tell me I can't.

I mean, that's a mission statement for the show again, really.

I can run around until I'm indicted.

Yeah, it's the mission statement.

It's like, I appreciate the deference to the rule of law after the fact, right?

It's to be like, I can do whatever I want unless I get caught.

And then I guess I can't, then I guess you got me.

But like, until then.

Until then, I'm actually allowed to kill you with this concealed weapon.

So that's that's the first thing is the red-flocked wallpaper.

The second thing is she makes the city by her a white GMC suburban that people apparently start calling the Mayomobile.

It's a town of 3,000 people.

This is such a small...

This is an extended stretch of highway in three suburbs.

And she's like, yeah, I need a palace and

I need a giant car.

So presumably so I could go to the drive-through.

She gets so regime-pilled.

She's running this shit like a Central Asian dictator.

She's bought Todd a gold-plated AK-47.

She's like wearing a Caracall hat.

She's like, the idea of driving my pristine white GMZ suburban across the four-lane highway that everybody else is drum driving on.

She's basically like, I'm going to make 3,000-person Ashkabat in Alaska.

Alashkabat.

I will say she probably needs a really big truck so that when everyone drives into her constantly, she's safe.

The mayor is constantly getting T-boned.

Can we just scroll up a bit to the picture of Wasilla again and look at all that beautiful dirt and mud and grime and then think about the hubris of making the town buy you a white SUV?

Yeah, it's basically like bumper cars all the time in Wasilla.

Yeah.

apparently, like, this is the thing about Sarah Palin, right?

Is the kind of like relative and local class position of the Palins, right?

Because when she became a national political figure, obviously there were a lot of like people sort of like looking down their nose at her and being like, oh, she's like white trash.

In Alaska, there's this like conception of like valley trash as well, which is very similar because like

Matsu Valley has a lot of like very poor, very deprived areas.

However, she's not that.

She's like gentry, right?

And the way you know that is that people in Wasilla remember her and her then-husband Todd flaunting having the first extended cab pickup truck in Wasilla.

Oh, yeah.

This is like this is so I know we've talked about or I've talked to and we've talked on the other show to Patrick Wyman about like the yes.

She is a Waimanian figure.

She is 100%

a gentry local elite for whom most of American politics.

and that's most of what American politics is for.

It's for her and every photocopy of her across the country.

Absolutely.

She would have been fine had she never been mayor, you know, for the rest of her life.

She would have lived in that gentry position.

So she likes her trucks.

And thus we get the mayor mobile sequel to the Yorse Mobile.

That's the second thing.

Third thing is Wasilla needs like a 9-1-1 like dispatch center.

Wasilla Wasilla needs a 9-11 so it can compete with New York.

Funnily enough, I do have the minutes for her city council meeting on 9-12, where the city of Wasilla extended its condolences for 9-11, approved a gift of $5,000 to charity in general, and then tried to secure bits of ground zero to put in a memorial garden.

So,

you know what?

I mean, American Catholics are Protestant, and American Protestants are Catholic, essentially.

Just, I want to say another bit of, I've talked about some Matty lore when I worked for the 9-11 Museum.

Another piece of that is

the haunted pit I was in.

But when I was working, we were in charge of, yeah, the artifacts.

And a lot of it was like little bits of metal and rock and whatever from the buildings and from the site.

And there was people at my company whose entire job, a lot of the days of the week, was just just responding to requests of pieces of 9-11 and mailing them out.

There are 9-11 memorials all over America that have little bits of ground zero metal.

That was mailed out by my friend.

And maybe Wasilla.

And maybe, and maybe Wasilla.

So, so, like, Wasilla needs like an emergency operations center to control the operations of their eight cops.

That's one reason why it doesn't need one, right?

It's just like, you can do that job with an office chair and like a button that says drunk driving call they can just have a party line for the cops yeah whoever picks it first needs to go do it but but the other reason is the other reason they don't need one is that wasilla shares the costs and management of one that already exists in palmer at the other end of the valley it and like that's that's fine like it's got like 20 000 people in the whole valley anchorage has 300 000 people and it only has one 911 center, right?

But but Sarah Palin was she was captain of her high school's women's basketball team and Palmer High School are Wasilla High School's basketball rivals.

So fuck Palmer.

Fuck the center we already spend money on.

We are going to build one specifically to fuck with them.

And we end up with like the the party line for the cops.

And she does this.

She does this.

It means you can now get, I guess, very swift response from your ape.

I guess, you know what?

This leads me to think, like, you know, wartime Keynesianism, right?

Like military Keynesianism.

Sarah Palin has accidentally invented spite Keynesianism, you know?

Buster.

Yeah, it's like, oh, we hate those guys.

They're our school basketball rivals.

No.

She basically does invent sports Keynesianism.

And that leads me directly to thing four, the fourth thing that she did, which is, so she already has kids when she gets into politics.

She isn't, she often describes herself as a hockey mom.

Apparently, she rarely stayed through a full game because her dipshit son, Track, like gets in fights and gets sent to the locker room.

I have to stop you right there.

I will not hear goon slander on this show.

That is an important thing.

Sorry.

You need a guy on your team.

Track is an enforcer.

I got you.

Track is doing.

So, November, you want the smaller, more skilled players on the team to just get beaten up by the other team's enforcers?

I mean,

is that what you want?

You want the center on the other team on Track's team?

I'm sorry for demeaning Track's service.

Not his war service, because we think that's bad, but like his

NHL service, not even NHL service,

his high school hockey goon service.

You should get a medal for being a goon on your high school hockey

So, so Sarah Gilm decides.

I've got the iron, it's an iron cross, but it's two crossed hockey sticks.

It's beautiful.

She decides that the thing that's going to put Wasilla on the map is a full NHL size hockey rink and sports center.

It's got like indoor basketball as well.

Yes.

This, this costs like $15 million.

This is like four years of mattress tax.

I was going to say that's one night of drunk driving fines.

And

the city ends up, because she fired the city attorney over a zoning dispute,

the city ends up building it on land that it doesn't own.

And so the guy who does own it sues them and they have to pay his costs and then buy the land, which costs them another like one and a half million dollars.

I mean, again, that's a great way to get money in the local economy because that guy's going to go out to the mattress stores and the bars and the Arby's and then they're going to be able to pay their employees more.

Yeah,

they built it on the land of a guy who's really sensitive and has a hard time sleeping.

It still exists.

The Curtis D.

Menard Memorial Sports Center, RIP one-armed dentist, ma'am,

is it is miles out of town.

Nobody uses it.

There's a good article in New York magazine by Mark Jacobson called Sarah Palin's Heaven that I used for a lot of this, where he goes and he sees a couple of like moose wandering through an empty parking lot.

Salon also went, which gives us the quote, on a recent drizzly afternoon, the cavernous building sat nearly empty.

Inside, two girls glided aimlessly around on the ice rink.

This is kind of like monument to hubris.

It also almost exactly does a joke from the office because apparently, per the two descriptions of it in Salon and New York magazine, it has a big mayor Sarah Palin plaque, and it also has an inspirational mural that says, You miss 100% of the shots you don't take, dash Wayne Gretzky.

And if one of those is above the other of those, then it has fully replicated a joke from a sitcom.

Oh my goodness.

And this is, this is all she does as this is all she can do as mayor.

Like, there's basically nothing that, like, education is like county level.

Uh, like, a lot of the budgetary stuff is county level.

So, all she could do is like build this like hockey rink, uh, this, like,

kind of Ozimandian sports center, fire the librarian, unfire the librarian, uh, and, and just kind of like continue to harvest like DUI.

If I was the librarian, I would make a point of always being near where Sarah Palin was, like, whatever mattress store or bar she's in at a given time in Wasilla, be there in front of her, read, ostentatiously reading, like my dad's roommate.

Yeah, you can't fight City Library, yeah.

And then she, uh, yeah, listen, who among us is not a stately pleasure dome decreed in our spare time,

a stately hockey dome.

I, I, I do, that's her whole mayoralty, but I, I do want to talk about her, her, like, gubernatorial career.

You could say

one more Kubla Khan thing: uh, for look on her with holy dread, for she on Arby's hath fed and

drank the light beer of paradise.

You betcha.

I want to talk about her time as governor, right?

Because she becomes governor.

She like runs for lieutenant governor, loses badly, but because she's the only person in Alaska politics under 65 at this point, she's running against this sclerotic, I don't want to talk about Central Asian dictatorships.

She's running against this like old boy network and she gets like this consolation prize of being in charge of the oil and gas commission.

And she turns whistleblower on two of these guys who are like lining their pockets.

They get indicted.

Indicted.

Indicted?

She's like Alaskan Serpico and she rides that all the way to the governor's mansion in Juneau.

But for the fact that she does not move to Juneau, she stays in Wasilla because Alaskan Serpico is wearing a hockey helmet instead of the.

but like she she likes her like she likes Wasilla I will give her credit she's one of the mayors we've we've talked about who seems to actually like the town she's mayor of albeit because it it's just like continuation high school for her and she's like queen forever yeah exactly so she just like commutes from wasilla and Everybody hates her.

She's like the anti-cronyism candidate, but she puts in her cronies to the point that people are trying to get copies of her high school yearbook to figure out who the new attorney is.

Basically, I mean, just like cronyism, but for my cronies, that just feels very like, you know, 19th century Boston, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

She's James Michael Curley.

She, I, I, I, I have a little list of her nepotism hires, and I really like this list, right?

So the new head of the state division of agriculture, high school classmate, former real estate agent, Francie Havermeister.

When they asked her why she was qualified to run the state division of agriculture, she talked about how she used to love cows when she was a kid.

Yep.

Like you wouldn't want a division of agriculture head who hates cows.

The new attorney general, a guy called Talis Colbert.

Oh, come on.

Come on.

He was a borough assemblyman in Matsu.

He went from a one-room building to supervising 600 people and was just openly like, yeah, I don't know what I'm doing.

Sorry, she didn't accuse the guy named Talis of being Jewish.

That's crazy.

Also, I do love like the openly admitting, yeah, I have no idea what I'm doing as though he's like, all of the people she's appointing have just been like Tom Hanks and bigged into like state government.

Yeah.

So her high school band classmate, John Bitney, becomes her legislative director until she fires him for having an affair with one of her friends.

And then when she writes her autobiography years later, she like gets some kicks in at him.

She describes him as a Blackberry games addict who couldn't seem to keep his lunch off his tie and describes him as having his fly undone during one of his meetings, which

is like such a petty like axe to grind that I really like.

You say like she never leaves high school, right?

This is this is all she's just a high school queen bee.

The Office of Economic Development is

suddenly headed by Steve Osterman, a high school classmate and a franchisee of mailboxes, etc., in Wasilla.

God, I know I keep coming in with this, but this is just

like when you're colonized by the British and they choose a minority that they're going to empower to run everything, but depend on them.

And then you get a situation where it's like, yeah, Latakia is actually, or like, is actually really nice, but it's full of like Wasilla.

It's full of like Wasilla people.

Are you suggesting Wasillans are like Alawites in Alaska?

So, like, the other big thing was the state owned this dairy

in the valley.

Um, and

the creamery board, which was apparently a state body, recommended closing this.

So, she fired the creamery board and installed her real estate agent as chairman of it.

Her other real estate agent or the first or Francie Havermeist?

Yeah,

a second one,

Kristen Cole, a woman with a lot of real estate agents.

I've been thinking about the creamery board for a hot minute.

It's like a cheese board, except it's all creams.

Like, can I get you showing some appetizers?

Can I bring you our creamery?

I'm going to very slowly and carefully carry you the creamery board.

Because if I stumble, these are all mixing together.

No, no, it's coming off all four sides of the board like

a chocolate fountain.

By the time I get to your table, it's just a wet board really

nothing on it you gotta gotta sop it up with a piece of bread comes out with huge fanfare like sparklers like at a nightclub

god someone ordered the cream table as fast as possible to make sure there's as much cream left as possible when i get there

anyway the real thing was something called troopergate right and this is again it's it's like profoundly high school right so like she fired the head of the alaska state troopers because the head of the Alaska State Troopers refused to fire a state trooper called Mike Wooten for divorcing her sister.

And she sent this like three-page email that's like, Mike Wooten tased his own stepson and illegally shot a moose and has an unpaid $5

fine for littering.

He disputed everything except for like,

he disputed that bit.

He didn't dispute the steps on Taysering or the moose shoes.

Well, because those are those are considered actually like positive qualities at Alaska.

They're actually

the smallest variety of moose in the world, so it's really not that big of a deal compared to Siberian mania.

So

the head of the state, the state police won't fire Mike Wooten for Wooten, so she fires the head of the state police.

This leads to this like huge scandal, and the inquiry is like, well, legally she can do it.

We don't think that she should have done, but like it turns out that that's not illegal to do in alaska our bad she probably should be um she she's genuinely like that because of me they have a rule governor like half the ethics things that they have in alaska now are because of her um she like used personal email for everything.

She made all of her like guys get blackberries so that they couldn't get subpoenaed.

There's one particular bit where like one of these like state politics bloggers says something mean about her and gets a phone call instantly from the governor's assistant, Ivy Fry, high school classmate, shouting at her, you should be ashamed.

Stop blogging.

Stop blogging right now.

Step the blog.

Why?

Step away from the blog immediately.

And amidst all of this, and Riley, I think you have the story about this, she becomes a cancer for vice president of the United States.

Well, again, it's like we talk about people with buyers' remorse, right?

Like this is, so it's Steve Schmidt working for John McCain at this point and is trying to find, you know, the VP.

And everyone's like, okay, well, I guess it'll probably be like, you know, Tim Palenti or something.

And so, you know, Steve Schmidt, again, has an insight, right?

Which is

we need, we need someone who you need, you need someone who with like charm who seems like they're alive unlike John McCain who has died 50 years ago and has just been like reflexively calling his wife a cunt every day since more than that is like I think if you looked at how she ran Wasilla and Alaska you would see this and if you had any insight into the American right

you would see that they very quickly needed an answer to Obama and what what which was we need someone who will be libidinally satisfying for right-wing people to support.

Now, again, whether he knew that or whether that was just something that she, that he kind of intuited or felt or whatever almost doesn't matter.

And then when he proposes it to John McCain,

this is again from, I think this is from his book.

McCain turns to his wife, Cindy, who said, and Cindy says, John, it's a gamble to get Palin.

This made McCain's face light up.

Well, I wish he hadn't said that, he said.

And McCain, an avid craps player, balled up his fist, blew on it, then shook it like he was about to roll a pair of dice.

Fuck it.

Let's do it.

And that's how that's how

that was how, basically,

Halen became...

Yeah.

That's the thing.

She was talent spotted well by another guy who came to regret it because the Republican Party that she like the power that she like again didn't create is as much a creation of Nixon Limbaugh, Reagan, right?

Yeah,

the thing that she became the symbol of didn't need Steve Schmidt anymore because he's cucked and soy.

And nobody understood that.

And again, it's like people keep underestimating what she is capable of, if not what she understood about what she was capable of.

Yeah, there is, there is like a whole, there's a whole book and movie about the sort of buyer's remorse of the 2008 campaign from McCain by alleged sex pest Mark Halperin.

But there's, you know, it is a well-covered, well-trod territory.

And maybe one day we'll talk about that because it is fascinating.

She, she, she like, she gets, she becomes a candidate.

She resigns as governor of Alaska before God knows what comes out.

I have I have the speech here where she says, let me go back quickly to a comfortable analogy for me, and that's sports basketball.

And I use it because if you are naive, if you don't see a full court press from the national level picking away right now, a good point guard, here's what she does.

She drives through a full court press ellipsis, teching the ball, keeping her head ellipsis up because she needs to keep her eye on the basket and she knows exactly when to pass the ball so that the team can win, gasp.

And that is what I'm doing, keeping our eye on the ball that represents sound priorities.

Remember, they include energy independence and smaller government, gasp, and national security and freedom.

And I know when it's time to pass the ball for victory.

So, as the, as the resident, like Hoops head of the podcast, she's not wrong.

She was a basketball player.

She's correct.

She's correct.

Her hoops are solid.

And so, like, obviously, obviously, the VP run was a disaster.

Maddie, have you discovered the fourth precept of no gods, no mayors, which is that Sarah Palin, despite being politically atrocious, has ups.

Great point, Gar.

She's got a solid basketball IQ.

Yeah.

Is what I would say.

Yeah, no question.

Putting Sarah Palin in NBA 2K25.

I'm grabbing the document, number four.

I can't remember the first two, but I know the third one was Frank Ney seemed fine as a mayor.

The fourth one is now, Sarah Palin seems to have good basketball IQ.

So I'm going to say,

number one, respect for the nation of Albania.

Number two, explode the SS, Richard Montgomery.

See what happens.

Number three, three prank nay was okay as far as we know number four sarah palin knows hoops

actually like

if you exclude mccain right and biden it was it was a kind of a hoops based campaign because obama like played basketball too like that was one thing they they could have they could have related to each other on that level but she was very racist anyway the vp run was was a disaster you know you can look up all of the shit that she said it was all very stupid they did a very good job of making her stupid it was easy because she is.

Um, Tina Faye kind of chalking a little Sarah Palin silhouette on the side of her fighter jet.

That's right.

Um, the like genuinely, like, half the shit that people think she said, like I can see Russia from my house, was Tina Faye as Sarah Palin.

Yeah, it's very funny to um, to that she did such a devastating impression of her, considering that Sarah Palin kind of ran Alaska like Jenna Maroney would.

Yeah,

and but like

the great hits, um, she said our North Korean allies.

She described Iraq as a squirmish.

I'm now imagining Jenna Maroney responding to like the wallpaper looks like a Bordello

accusation and just saying, well, that's what my one-armed dentist said, too.

And like, really, in many ways, she was like, she was.

kind of failed by the McCain campaign as well.

Like they kind of plucked her out of this governorship and were like, okay, now here's your foreign policy expertise on cue cards.

And of course she fucked it up.

Like, and then after the fact, after they lost, they really like hung her out to dry.

She tried being a celebrity for a bit.

That kind of petered out.

Recently, she ran against Lisa Murkowski, the kind of Isabel Bettancourt of Alaska for Senate and lost.

And like, at this point, even the MAGA guys up there hate her because she made Alaska look stupid.

And it is, but like, she made it look stupid.

And like, she sold out.

She, she like embarrassed them in front of the country.

Like, she doesn't go to the thing where they all go to the the woods and light off bowling balls filled with gunpowder anymore.

Yeah.

And so she's just kind of this like figure of

did they actually do that?

Yeah.

Yeah, they do.

I forget what it's called.

Do I still have the New York article?

No, I don't.

I have five articles called Placing Sarah Palin's Accent Open.

Because we were trying to play Sarah Palin's accent.

Yeah, it turns out the Matsu Valley had a huge Minnesotan influx, which is why she sounds like that, just in case you're curious.

I'm getting very specific voice training.

Does she sound like Sarah Palin.

I would take it honestly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, we forgot to, we forgot to forcibly transition Riley this episode.

I guess we'll do it next week.

That's fine.

Well, the thing is, for the podcast, we're going to podcast on Trash Ucha, Left Unread,

I'm going to make him read

Nevada.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Hell yeah.

So I think we'll see if that one still works.

That one works pretty good.

Yeah.

Anyways, just,

I don't know, Riley, your transition.

I don't know.

Just do it.

Okay.

Wait, hold on.

They call it the bowling ball bonfire.

Bowling balls are placed into sort-off oxygen tanks loaded with black powder and shot 100 feet in the air.

Then the suspense sets in because who knows where they'll come down.

By the way, if you want a sense of what Alaska is like, in that same article, he quotes a guy who's like...

He's like a resist lib, you know, out of contrarianism as much as anything and wears like an Obama hat.

And when he goes to work in a guy's house, the guy stabs him in the arm with a pencil.

So, like,

yeah,

one of, one of 50 completely normal states.

Sarah Palin, fascinating figure to me, a lot like Rudy Giuliani in a lot of ways, like someone who was able to like sense the contours of a movement and really try and like, you know, they were able to ride Shaihalud for a moment, but like ultimately, it's like this sort of like long fall off of it.

Yeah, they never really show them getting off of Shaihalud.

I mean, now, like, you know, she was hawking tummy tea with her daughter on Instagram.

Like she's promoting sort of, she's like promoting books.

But ultimately, what she's now done is she has, she has like kind of achieved what she, if you told her in like her step aerobics days that she would go on

to marry like one of the biggest NHL stars of the 80s, Ron Dugay, she probably would have said that's a dream outcome.

Oh,

right?

Yeah.

Surely you'd rather marry Ron Dustrait.

Stands to reason.

I was not aware that she had gotten divorced.

I missed that somehow.

Maybe because it happened in August of 2019 before I stopped making memories for many years.

But I saw that I was looking at their divorce

settlement and he and Todd cited, quote, incompatibility of temperament, which is just a very funny phrase to me.

The sole piece of

I have for us is a rumor that so like she he he like didn't win the iron dog sled dog race,

which usually yeah, it's not the idea.

It's like longer than the idea rod.

The idea rod used to start in Wasilla and now doesn't because of climate change.

There's not enough snow, uh, which is and because there's there's also too many strip malls.

There's too many drunk drivers running over the dogs.

Just this dog team running along like gravel outside of like uh an Arby's.

No, but like

he didn't win unexpectedly.

And she had this like public tantrum where she was like screaming at him and screaming at the guy who won.

And then I looked up the years that this could have been and this would have been the year where he was thrown from his dog sled and broke his arm and still finished fourth.

So

I don't want to do like critical support for Todd Palin, but I think that is probably not great if you like rock up to the thing with a broken arm having clinched fourth in the sled dog race and your wife is screaming at you, you know?

Sarah Palin.

Sarah Palin.

Sarah Palin.

And also with you.

I think it's a beautiful addition to our canon of mayors.

That's what they call it when they fire the bowling ball.

The canon of mayors.

Does anyone have anything we want to add?

Anything we want to leave

to end Sarah Palin on?

No, I just I think that she's another one that's like very um I need to figure out what the actual adjective is here but like synecdoche like of what what a bear is it's just like it's full-on cronyism for me not for the uh the person it's beautiful

it must have been so good to have been her high school classmate just high school never ends and now you're now your bestie is the governor no no i would actually hate it because then i got to call someone and be like stop blogging like all the time just because i sat next to this girl in the half class i don't know

Well, that is the Sarah Palin story.

Thank you for coming with me on this episode.

I loved it.

That was, that was so, I enjoyed hearing about Sarah Palin.

Yeah.

Come on, my pleasure.

Can I

do really quick?

Oh, yeah, of course, of course.

Sorry, I just want to plug something really quick.

If you think

that you love me so much and the sound of my voice and the things that I say and do, I'm going on a little comedy tour with my friends Calvin and Tuck this February and January.

Yeah, late January and February in D.C.,

San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle.

You go to genderpodcast.com slash live.

That's where all the tickets are.

And it would be cool to see you

there.

Perfect.

Yeah.

And as always, we have a Patreon, unless this is on the Patreon, in which case you already know that.

This is a free episode.

Oh, well, we have a Patreon.

You should go to no Godsnomares.com and subscribe to it, and you can get access to bonus episodes like the time you watched The Greatest Show.

Is that out yet?

That came out last week.

Nope.

Yes.

Yes.

That came out on.

That comes out next week.

Wait, from this, from this perspective, from the listener's perspective or from our perspective?

Goodbye, everyone.

If you are the listener, goodbye from the set of interstellar.

Bye, everyone.

It comes out next week for the listener.

Bye.

Goodbye.

Goodbye.