Episode 176: The Assassination of President James A. Garfield

Maybe it is.

Okay, so it is recording, but it said failed to start recording, but it is recording.

It is recording.

Sometimes Dencaster just wants attention.

It's very relatable to me.

I think so.

I hear that.

We're just going to go under the assumption that it's working.

All right.

That's probably wise.

And we've got a local recording, so it's literally fine.

It should be fine, unless it isn't.

But hopefully it is.

Fuck you.

Listen, if we have another lost episode, then that's fine.

We simply deal with it like adults and deploy our many

our many like emotional reasoning skills that we definitely have

to sort of like contextualize it and work through it.

You know, I'm a literal social worker.

I'm not worried.

I'm not worried about us.

I'm worried about the audience.

Fuck them.

They're going to come after us.

Yeah, those guys don't have a lot of like

emotional dollars about it.

I hope they do.

Please, please do i was saying earlier before we started that like this is remedial podcasting right we don't even if we get a good grade in podcasting because of the release schedule no we don't and we know that we're aware of that yeah we look i you know i got through college turning in every third or fourth homework assignment so jesus christ yeah you did

i uh i i do love that i i tweeted uh just to just to cause trouble today uh we know and i had seen the Greek rail report, but I just left it open-ended.

And then somebody got mad.

Not madness.

I was like, well, did something happen or not?

And I'm just like, yeah, man.

Like, have you seen the fucking shit out the window?

Yeah, every day, every day of our lives, something happens.

I looked at that tweet and was very confused and started making it around.

Yeah, I also thought that like a 9-11 had happened.

It could have been.

So you got both of us.

Yeah.

Woo!

9-12, baby.

9-11,

This time, oh, Muhammad Adaboy.

Nothing.

All right, let's go.

Hello, and welcome to Walair's Your Problem.

It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides.

I'm Justin Rozniak.

I'm the person who's talking right now.

My pronouns are he and him.

Okay, go.

I'm November Kelly.

I'm the person who's talking now.

My pronouns are she and her.

Yay, Liam.

Yay, Liam.

Hi, I'm Liam McAnderson.

I'm the person talking right now.

My pronouns are he and and him.

And we have not one, but two guests.

Please introduce yourselves.

Anders Jay-Lee here.

Happy to be on the show.

Honored, frankly.

I am a co-host of Pottam America, as well as The Vanquished, which is about failed presidential candidates.

So super pumped to be talking about a not quite failed, but close to, he failed in a sense.

Yeah.

And former purveyor of Russian disinformatsia.

That's correct.

Yes.

Yes, I was a Russian asset.

I can actually say that.

For two and a half years, I was on RT America Network.

And after the Ukraine war, all of the content I made has been scrubbed from the internet.

Wow.

Hi, I'm Freddie G.

Yeah, the other host of the Vanquish podcast about presidential losers.

Yeah, super happy to be here.

You guys were on our pod for the

Prohibition episode.

It's my favorite episode we've done.

That was a lot of fun, yeah.

The Prohibition Party, notably, had nothing to do with enacting Prohibition.

But they are the oldest third party in American history still going and have finally rebranded, as we discussed with Roz.

They're now not for Prohibition, but confusingly have not changed the name.

I think that the time is right for some entryism.

Maybe prohibition is more generic now.

They're just in favor of banning things in general.

Oh, so they're like British liberals.

Yeah, exactly.

You point at the albatross and you say banned.

God damn nanny.

They're just like, oh, cigarettes probably shouldn't be advertised.

That's their big thing now.

Oh, I don't know.

Yeah, okay, I guess.

Yeah, I, I, so my most, I don't know, what would you say?

Uh

conservative, maybe political.

Progressive, authoritarian, blue stocking, statistic,

oppressive, suppressive.

That's not my most status opinion.

My most statist opinion

would make you throw up.

Mine is just ban sports gambling unless you are physically within a casino.

What about an off-track betting parlor?

Known by the state, full of cigarette smoke.

Actually, that's what that's

a lot of blob.

Yeah.

We did that.

Operation!

Operation Underworld.

That's a thing we did.

I was going to say nationalize the numbers game, but that's just a lottery.

Like, again, they did that.

They did this.

I used to live near an OTB and it's the most depressing place ever.

Oh, yeah, there's one in South Philly where you're just like, oh, I could feel the desperation from here.

Is this?

Are you describing a betting shop?

The thing that is on every British high street times a billion as like a unique locus of despair?

But this is off-track betting.

It's specifically for horse races.

Oh, yeah.

So betting shop.

Right.

Okay.

So, like, yeah, those are every third business still in like commercial areas of the EU.

Well,

buddy, tell me about it.

We have this wonderful new thing called Skill Games, which is like it's a slot machine.

But

it's not technically gambling because after you pull the lever for the slots, you have the option to do like a word search puzzle and then it gives you your money back.

But it's hard.

So you need.

Yeah.

So, you know, I...

Yeah, I.

Cool.

Yeah, exactly.

So.

Why are we are we looking at Jim Davis's iconic

sort of lasagna-loving Mondays hating feline Garfield?

What we see on the screen here is an orange cat with a pipe.

His name is Garfield.

It's not supposed to look like that because

cats cannot be president and should not smoke pipes.

Toby probably thinks he can be.

Yeah, that's true.

What we're actually going to talk about today

is the assassination and subsequent treatment of President James A.

Garfield.

Oh, I see.

Yes.

For the record, I looked this up a couple years ago.

Garfield, the president, was shot on a Monday.

One word on the lasagna connection.

I don't know if we have, I don't know if there was enough Italians in the U.S.

yet to make that a dish here.

Yeah, they had to wait for Giuseppe Zangaro to shoot FDR before there was an Italian presidential

breaking barriers, you know.

He probably did not like Italians.

Garfield?

He was probably anti-immigrant.

This is around the time of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Yeah, he was probably like, oh, they shouldn't come here.

No hyphenated Americans, only American dishes.

Ah, yeah.

Who can say no to lasagna?

Oh, they're

not.

The spice of an average lasagna would kill this kind of of white boy.

Do you think they had lasagna back then, or is lasagna like another one of those traditional Italian foods that was invented in a hotel in Rome in 1960?

By an American.

Yeah.

Looking at you, Tiramasu.

Yeah.

It traces it all the way back to ancient Rome.

I'm so they say, but they say that about 500.

What do you want me to do about it?

I'm just reading the woman.

Romans were eating like dormice and like fucking

like

plants that no longer exist because they over like

over-harvested them.

And Garum.

Lots of Garum.

Yeah.

They would have had ketchup, but they didn't have tomatoes.

This Garfield that we have on the screen here, I actually prefer this to the sort of mutated version that Jim Davis, I believe.

Kind of chibi Garfield.

Yeah, he's wholesome, is big, and it's almost like, he's so big, it's almost graphic.

And I feel like the uh, maybe some of the publishers were like, Jim, you got to scale Garfield back.

He's too fat.

It's like offensive to some of our readers, and he can

this is it's a lot more realistic.

This is a realistically like ugly cat.

It's the same, the same thing that they did where they changed the Simpsons.

They hadn't like, you know, dialed in on the kind of art style that they wanted yet in the first couple of seasons of that show.

They look all like fucked up and sketchy.

Yeah, same kind of vibe.

Yeah, but it kind of looks like Garfield's dad, like the dad who's on the show, of the cat is on the show.

Yeah, this is Garfield's like racist dad.

Garfield's a racist,

like, no, no, no, I'm not gonna see my dad in the hospital.

I don't care how sick he is.

He's gonna say that shit about lasagna and Italians again.

Well, so my dad,

okay.

I, I, yeah, my dad.

Well, so, okay, so my great uncle was killed in the Battle of Anzio for a little context.

And therefore, my grandmother,

his sister, uh, hated Italians no matter how many times my dad put it out there, but that by that point, the Italians had switched sides.

And it would have been Germans defending Anzio.

She, she was just like, nope, hate Italians.

And he's like, okay, I guess we hate Italians now.

I love a kind of familial beef like that.

It's not racism so much as it is just beef with one country, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, there's a ton of people like my um, uh, my granddad used to like never ever drive in a German car because of because of the war, right?

Like, understandable.

I wish I would have done the same thing, but I bought a GTI.

Yeah,

well,

before we hate other countries, we have to start by hating

our own country and ourselves by doing the goddamn news.

So

pilots, pilots are not woke now.

And as a result, every single American has been killed.

Donald Trump has saved us from DEI and as a result, the planes are dropping out of the sky.

You may know that,

you know, right after we released our

two episodes ago, it was Air Florida Flight 90 that crashed going out of

Washington National Airport.

A flight that very same day or the day after crashed into a helicopter on approach to Washington National Airport.

So, you know,

I hope that something similar doesn't happen as a result of this episode.

Oh, it would be terrible.

That would be really bad.

If we had the kind of like lathe ability, you know, I think we would be forced to use that very responsibly.

Yeah, exactly.

You know, this is one of those incidents.

This was

American Airlines Flight 5342.

I think it was operated by American Eagle, which is like, because they have an agreement with

no.

No.

My ass does look good in those jeans, I'll tell you that.

I forget what the smaller airline is.

They operate some of those guys.

American Eagle, yeah.

You know, maybe, maybe that's why it crashed is because they put a bunch of jeans guys in charge of it.

This was a CR Fashion episode.

That's why they call it Jet Blue.

If you've lived around the Washington, D.C.

area, you know about the goddamn helicopters everywhere.

It is kind of, I mean, obviously, the investigation is not out yet.

It is not so surprising that something like this happened.

Well, for a while, they didn't release, the family didn't release the name of the pilot of the National Guard Blackhawk that was in this collision because they thought that because she was a woman and because she was like queer,

the like MAGA chuds would be all over them, which, of course, they were.

They were.

Yeah, anyway.

Yeah, there's no way to stop that now.

Everything is because they put someone other than a white man in charge of any given thing.

Have you met Ros and I?

We are the most incompetent two sons of bitches on the planet.

I was about to say, yeah.

And then, as if to make your point, every other plane in the U.S.

has crashed.

So, yeah.

Yeah.

I was going to say they have done some kind of mitigation here.

I believe the particular route that the helicopter used to sort of dart in front of the plane, they don't use that anymore.

This was, I think, a CRJ900, which, you know, there's so many CRJ 900s that fly in and out of national.

It's incredible.

I had to actually, the first thing I did when I heard about this was I had to go look up my old rowing coach because

he flew a CRJ 900 in and out of national.

I was like, damn, I hope it's not him.

No, he has a podcast now called

Passive Income Pilots and

is now

a financial independence influencer as well as owns a bunch of self-storage units.

Hell yeah.

Shout out Ryan Gibson because you're a public figure.

I suppose I can name you.

Anyway,

did not die in this accident.

The highest praise you can offer any pilot.

Did not die in an accident.

Yeah, exactly.

The other thing, you know, there's one angle of this crash.

I mean, okay, there were no survivors.

This happened very recently, but this is this podcast, so I am going to make a joke about it.

There was one angle where you could see the whole thing, and it looked exactly like when Randy Johnson hit the bird.

Oh,

Jesus Christ.

Oh, my God.

They do use feathers.

Da Vinci's designs were accurate in a sense.

Apparently, yeah.

crucial national guard flight full of like feather pillows for the white house

stained with cheeto dust of course

i always wondered thick orange bud like sesame straight i do have a question that uh i feel like someone here may be able to answer because i've always wondered this about flying because they always say Way safer to fly on a plane than it is to drive a car.

But how are those statistics, how do they reach them?

Because, you know, do they factor in the fact that there's like a tremendous amount more cars driving at any given time than planes in the sky?

I think the way you look at it is this, right?

If you hit a Black Cork helicopter at like, you know, 700 feet above the Potomac and then fall directly into the Potomac, for that, it's way safer to be in a plane than it is to be in a car.

Yeah,

those statistics are always, they're going to be based on either distance or like hours or like, you know, and they're going to be per capita and it's going to be all this stuff now factually before this accident there had not been a commercial airline accident in the united states for i think 16 years i think 16 years or something like that much like the measles outbreak that we'll talk about in the next slide

um you know so it was perfectly safe um for

basically perfect record for a long time as opposed to car crashes where people you know just mutilate each other a hundred times every day um

the the only thing more dangerous than driving per mile, I believe, is bicycling.

Really?

I'm screwed then.

Yeah, because yeah, bicycles just get fucked.

You get hit by a car, you die.

Um, you know, you know, what is dangerous is, uh, well, relatively dangerous is general aviation, right?

Like, commercial aviation is very, very safe.

But if you decide you want to fly the Cessna, you want to, you know, get in the machine that kills doctors,

then it's, it's, it's not as safe.

And so a bunch of the news stories that have made people very very like aware of this idea that there's a like a kind of statistical cluster of shit going wrong with planes a lot of that's been general aviation and a lot of that just kind of happens dead to death to successnas yeah uh speaking of speaking of general aviation i mean okay

this one felt this one felt like it was a little close to home a few days later oh yeah the the one that uh the large crash crashed onto cotton avenue yeah um

this was this was the medevac flight as well which really adds like insult to injury, you know, like because it was a kid as well, which is really like God's fucking sense of humor.

Just to be like,

oh, don't worry, little girl, you'll be fine.

We've got a new organ and everything.

Yeah, it just crashed immediately.

I think they had just finished long-term treatment at

Children's Hospital of Pennsylvania.

Or is it Children's Hospital of Philadelphia?

I forget what.

Philadelphia, bud.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

Took off from Northeast Philly Airport.

They were heading towards Tijuana.

With a refueling stop in Springfield, I think.

Yes, yes.

And then lost control somehow.

I don't think we know exactly what happened yet.

2023 Philly season, but

plunged directly into Codman Avenue right by Roosevelt Mall, put a big crater in a pavement, set a bunch of row houses on fire.

I think killed at least one person on the ground.

Yeah, this one's pretty, pretty bad.

I mean, that happened in a pretty populated area.

So, again, I guess the DEI was keeping the plane in the air.

Then, just a couple days ago, we had a near miss at Chicago Midway Airport.

Oh, yeah, I saw this.

Where

another

Learjet

crossed one more runway than it should have.

Yeah.

Jesus Christ.

Causing.

A Southwest Airlines flight to nearly land, but luckily the pilots spotted it and they managed to go around before they engaged the speed brakes and the thrust reversers and crap.

God bless those woke Southwest pilots.

I was about to say, I was about to say.

So there's apparently also unwoke Southwest pilots, though, because there was that guy singing, God bless America on the PA on a Southwest flight.

That's probably the worst

mission.

You're a fucking idiot to do that.

You'll kill all of us, you know.

You gotta get the woke quotient back up there.

You gotta get the flight attendants doing gay shit with each other.

Like, I'm so excited.

Otherwise, you will land the plane upside down.

Another thing that happened.

Oh, I forgot to put that one in.

Yeah, that happened in Toronto.

Do we know if that was an American's fault?

I just assume so.

I assume everything is.

We don't know exactly what happened on that one either.

Yeah.

You can assume yes, though.

There's so much stuff that happened.

I mean, everyone survived that one, which is, you know, pretty miraculous.

They offered them a $30,000 settlement each, to which, if that's you, if you're listening to this and you get offered a $30,000 settlement, I want you to put a neck brace on, keep it on for the next like four years, and also laugh them out of court.

Yeah.

Every offer.

Like, wait until you get into like seven figures.

There was a cutter airways flight.

I was watching the news yesterday where passengers alleged that they were forced to sit next to a dead body for four hours.

Oh, yeah, I saw that.

That's not even uncommon.

I sympathize with that.

You die, they got to put you somewhere.

That was exactly what I said.

But my wife pointed out like, oh, I'm just like, I fly for free now.

Like, that's my fucking settlement.

I fly for free now.

And I'm like, yeah, how often are you going to cut her?

It just doesn't matter.

Doesn't matter.

I want to have you.

One of the couple who was sat next to the dead body was like,

you know, nobody even asked me if I wanted like a seat change, even though there were empty seats.

It's like, get up and move.

What are they going to do?

Yeah.

You're sitting next to like a dead body.

Like, why don't you take some initiative here, you know, because it's not going to.

Look, what you got to do is you got to descend to 10,000 feet, kick open one of the doors,

burial at sea.

Make sure, make sure the sea shall give up.

It's dead.

Yeah, make sure it's the rear door and not the front doors, burial and engine.

Yeah, one of the things our new transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, said over a tweet was,

you know, pilots

who do not follow air traffic control instructions will have their pilot's license revoked.

And it's like, dude.

It already will be.

Like, you can listen to the air traffic control of them giving him the number to call.

But that's also not how this is supposed to work.

There's supposed to be an investigation, and you're supposed to be able to not be threatened so you can cooperate for with this investigation so that these accidents can be prevented in the future.

So if the Secretary of Transportation is issuing threats like this, this is going to ruin the entire process of investigation that surrounds airplane incidents, which is what has made them so safe for so long.

Because this is not focused on punishment.

This is focused on fixing the problem.

It doesn't matter, though, because they've fired half the FAA.

So, like, you know, it's going to be one janitor left to investigate all of this stuff by themselves.

They're going to get the one guy who's running Britain to be the one guy who runs all of America as well.

Yeah, it's good to see.

I still blame Reagan.

It's good to see.

Oh, yeah.

I still blame Reagan for.

Oh, sorry.

Hold on.

You go first.

Oh, yeah, thank you.

Sorry.

I still blame Reagan for firing the air traffic controllers in the 80s when they went on strike.

Yes.

Yes, you should.

Absolutely.

You You know, Patco strike, the outcome of that was completely insane.

I guess Sean Duffy has, you know, decided to, you know, run the airlines with the same philosophy as the railroads, which is, you know, if there's an accident,

NTSB investigates it, gives some recommendations, and they're like, nah, I don't give a shit.

Fire the engineer, move on.

Or if the engineer's dead, problem solved.

Great.

Yeah.

So,

yeah.

Air travel, folks.

It's safer than ever.

We found out what Pete Boutigej was doing as Secretary of Transportation.

Yeah, yeah.

Sort of juggling every plane constantly.

He's personally doing air traffic control.

Hey, it's fair.

Having kind of a difficult landing, I got to call the Secretary of Transportation on the radio.

He had to use it

in like airplane.

Yeah,

he had to use all the skills that he refined stealing the election in Iowa.

That's right.

He knows how to merge.

Yeah, exactly.

I wasn't expecting like shooting dogs in Afghanistan to be like a sort of transferable skill that literally did like stop all the planes from landing upside down, but apparently.

Yeah.

I am concerned.

I keep getting job recruitment texts now and I ignore them, but I assume it's for all of the people displaced by the anti-DEI hysteria.

They're looking for Anders-Lees to fill these jobs.

So I might be a pilot at some point, which I'm going to be doing.

Oh, yeah, me too.

You start Tuesday, but

we're not all competent.

It's a stereotype.

You got drafted into United Airlines.

It's one of those positive stereotypes.

White guys are competent, like black guys are good at basketball.

Yeah, we're not competent, Roz.

Yeah.

I don't know know if you know this about us, but we're not competent.

You and I have to be pilot and co-pilot tomorrow.

So we got to

stop practicing at Chuck Yeager.

I watched a lot of mentor pilot videos, so I think I.

All right, we're good.

We're gold.

We are not going to DB Cooper this thing.

Let's go.

All right.

Well, that was one piece of a lot of news, but let's look at the other news.

Yeah, we just kind of put all of the stuff that's happening on this one.

Yeah, I'm calling this the bad news fire hose because I refuse to do it.

Yeah, I refuse to do another oops all news episode so close to the last one.

Just picture like a like a fire engine, like a pump, uh, like rolling up to the scene and then hooking that hose directly to the sewage.

Yeah, um, and then they're just gonna like hose down the entire house in liquid shit.

Yeah, like a like a European farmer.

Yeah.

Okay.

What do we got?

Department of Government Efficiency, the Doge.

They cut up.

Fuck everyone.

Fuck up.

I wasn't expecting it to take only three months for the federal government to be just like wound up as a going concern.

You know what?

How mad it can I?

We had a run.

I wouldn't say good, but we had a run.

They got everyone who's a probationary employee in the federal government, which is, you know, someone who's still in training or someone who's still

promoted.

Yeah, got promoted.

You know, so anyone who is moving up, anyone who was, you know, maybe replacing an old guy, no, they cut those guys.

So, you know, that's not happening.

I think one of the worst ones I saw, I mean, this just seemed like a small human thing, was like, oh, yeah, I was the trainee locksmith at Yosemite National Park because it's so big they need a dedicated locksmith for the whole park.

And they were like,

he finished his training and he was about to replace the old old guy.

And there's like, nope, you're fired.

You're at, you're done.

Yeah, there's, there's, there's a whole bunch of uh, like lawsuits about this, as you might imagine.

I mean, my feeling is, right, obviously, I'm not going to mourn the kind of the federal government in a lot of ways, but for the fact that it affects a lot of my friends live in the U.S.

And also, it turns out the U.S.

government does do a bunch of important stuff, mostly in USAID, which is now dead.

Yeah, that's gone now,

which is sinful I think is the word you want yeah yeah they also fired a bunch of people from Department of Energy which you know I think people who are safeguarding the nukes are just gone now they haven't quite had the Rick Perry realization where he gets appointed to Department of Energy and he's like oh oh this department handles

yeah they give him the briefing that's like you kind of have more power than like most heads of state right now um yeah no because they haven't done that trump just did the first cabinet meeting which had Musk at it fucking hanging out like green a worm tongue.

So they don't know what they're doing other than like getting in charge of the agency, doing control F trans and then firing anyone and like removing any program that comes up, which is

you know short-sighted, let's say.

Yes.

Do you see today they are cutting the hundreds of people from NOAA, the oceanic inspectors?

Oh, yeah,

they're gonna have to shut down a weather channel.

I've had a bunch of friends who work for the federal government and are trans get fired off of that combination.

There's this kind of like,

they're scrubbing all the like trans and queer people out of the intelligence community, which means you can't even get the like, you know,

the sort of

you know, the trans women who are willing to make the kind of like waterboarding architecture work anymore.

I was about to say, there's the, like, there's, there's got to be, you know, it's, it's also also all the people with Doge are going into all these old systems that are run on like Copable and Fortran and stuff like that.

And it's like, you know, the only people who really know how those systems work at this point and can program those languages are either

75 and past retirement or, you know, they own five Blages.

And both of them are fired.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

What else do we got?

There's a measles outbreak in Texas.

Which is still the kids.

It's stupid.

So fucking stupid the child was unvexed.

The date

vaccinate your kids while you still can.

Yeah.

Oh, they need to redact it, RFK Jr.

Like yesterday.

I think he might have told him.

Shocking acts himself.

Have you heard him?

The worm is progressing.

It's real in there, yeah.

Shocking that would happen in Texas.

It was like Texas Mennonites, apparently.

Yeah, you can get religious exemptions and parental exemptions in Texas very easily.

I will confess I was unvaxed for a little while, longer than I should have been as a kid.

Certain people in my family drew a connection between vaccines and autism.

And RFK's group, the Children's Defense Fund, had a bill in the Minnesota state legislature at the time.

And I got to be one of the quote-unquote autistic kids that they put in the front row to like take the marosol out of vaccines stop keep going but uh the recording just crashed oh god okay i thought that was just something on my end okay yeah me too yeah nope just keep going we're doing it with locals we'll do it with locals yeah okay okay sure um

yes uh autism i mean as i i mean i got 100 vaccinated 100 autism uh no regrets uh trans as well so you know really i think that's the success

I think it's just there's something else in the air causing the autism.

Possibly.

Maybe it's the microplastics.

Maybe I don't know what it is, but whatever it is, I've got it working for me.

So I feel pretty good about it.

I think it's worked out pretty well for all of us.

You know, I don't.

I mean, more and more people are going to become autistic because they keep changing the definition.

So eventually we will reach 100% and we'll start all these things.

And we'll start oppressing the neurotypicals.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Meanwhile, like, I feel like whether you have

a good federal job, like you want to make sure the kids are educated or vaccinated or housed or whatever, or you have like an evil government job, it doesn't even matter.

Like, the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike, you know, and it's

right now it's just so self-sabotaging in terms of not just like human suffering, but like the things that even Trump guys profess to want.

And it doesn't matter because they're just out for like raw sales.

They're often not right.

Yeah.

What else is happening here?

They are moving trans women to men's prisons and trans men to women's prisons.

Fuck yeah.

Presumably to suffer just horrific abuse.

You know, that's going to be real, real bad.

You know, U.S.

prisons are pretty bad to start out with.

But, you know, some of the practices there are, oof.

You know, I...

heinously unjust.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

And I don't think we can even, you know,

very bad.

We'll do an episode on the U.S.

prison system eventually, which I think will just be us screaming for five hours.

USAID has been essentially eliminated.

I know a lot of it's CIA bullshit.

But a lot of it's also good.

Well, that's the way in which it's effective CIA bullshit is because you're like,

you know, it's genuinely very effective to get people to like the United States bike, right?

Doing things that help them and that they like, right?

All this stuff's going to come back to bite us as well.

You know, it's like, okay, well, we're not, we're not like preventing Ebola or AIDS in Africa.

That shit's just going to spread and get us eventually.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think so.

We're steering directly into the iceberg.

I will say, I made a joke to my doctor a couple of years ago when I was first seeing her.

And she was like, oh, we had the flu vaccine.

And I was like, oh, I'm religiously opposed to vaccines.

And she stared at me for like a good 15 to 20 seconds and goes, are you?

Like, no.

And I was like, no, no, no, no, ma'am.

Light me up, baby.

I'm very afraid.

Light me up.

Oh, hold on.

This is a technical thing.

If Andrew stopped the recording briefly, we should do a second sink point.

We didn't do the first

one.

Oh no, we did those moronical shit.

Devin's going to kill us.

Yeah.

Sorry, Dev.

Hi, Devin.

Hi, Dev.

We love you.

Yeah.

All right.

All right.

We're going to do a 3-2-1 mark.

Okay.

3, 2, 1.

Just clap when you hear Mark.

Yeah, Mark.

Good enough.

Okay.

All right.

All right.

We did it.

My God.

We're so good at podcasting.

We're so fucking stupid.

This is why they're sending us to remedial podcasts.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, so, so the good news is in only three years' time, there's going to be uh House and Senate elections, which I assume will happen and be, you know, you'll be able to like vote freely in those

for

you know your sort of like blue wave of Democrats who are going to get in and absolutely wield power.

Yeah, uh-huh.

Wow, you sound confident there, Nova.

The Democrats strategy.

You're never going to get to fucking vote again in your life.

I think it may be on like a ballot proposition, you know, to like for exactly where the concentration camps will be located.

I did have something cool happen to me at work today where we had someone from a local church, Lutheran church that gives us money come in.

And the woman noticed

from the church, she noticed that we have all gender restrooms.

And she goes, She points to the sign and goes, that's fucking right.

And I was like, thank you.

But like, you're 80 years old.

Like, you you should not be cursing like this that passionately.

I am a little offended by your choice of words.

You gotta, she's right, though.

You gotta try and like cling to whatever little signs of wokeness you can.

Oh, yeah, I'm doing it.

I'm doing it.

I'm a social worker, baby.

I'm as woke as it gets.

So, yeah, the explicits, the explicit strategy of the Democrats right now seems to be to do nothing

all over the world.

See if you can wait it out, see if the administration implodes on its own.

I mean, I think it will implode, but I think the essential functions of government implode first and we wind up in a sort of Mad Max situation.

And like, I don't have enough, you know, SM gear to live in that world.

I don't

like that you said that.

I do, but that leads us to our next item, which is

I have to enter the blasted wastelands of the former United States for the tour that's coming up, right?

I gotta do that.

And

fucking little Marco, Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, in a drive to try and ban trans athletes from the Olympics, has instituted this provision.

May I have instituted the language is unclear.

No, yeah.

It may just apply to like all visas at all.

That if you apply for one and you're trans and you're like socially transitioned in any way, that's fraud and you're banned from the united states forever thus

the tour into a cocked hat i was about to say that's which is extremely odd brand

i'm i'm talking to the to our immigration lawyers about it now uh for all the good that'll do because i'm not sure that they even have a like direct answer either knows what the hell is going on yeah i mean i no no and i it may well be that you know i i get to pay or the podcast gets to pay the federal government literally like about $6,000 in fees that's going to go to like Elon Musk's fucking groiper children or whatever.

Jesus Christ.

Yeah, like we pay them the fees.

I go to like a sort of like a consular like interview in London or in Edinburgh where they go trans and I get banned from the entire country.

It may well be that I get to the airport and they just fucking like arrest me and deport me.

I don't know.

We have to have

the lawyers,

which would be the funniest.

Yeah, we have the money.

We have the lawyers.

We have the money.

We don't have the third thing.

Yeah,

the two parts of the Warren Daven triad.

Yeah, exactly.

But

I don't want to resort to the third part of the triad yet.

But I will.

It is crazy that Elon only has male children.

He hates diversity so much, all his children have to be the same gender.

And even that didn't work.

That's the end goal of these guys is that

you're going going to wind up with everyone becoming Elon, and then they're all going to have male children.

Then the whole generation is going to grow up, and they're going to be like, oh, fuck,

what did our parents do?

Shit.

It's a drop in the bucket.

And then there's not another generation.

It's a drop in the bucket, but if all the kids are male, then we're going to lower the birth rate.

Yes.

To zero.

It didn't even work, though.

He's got a trans dorset that he's estranged from.

So

this fucking idiot.

Is there a way you can use Kerr Seer?

Sorry, Sir Cure to maybe negotiate some kind of settlement for your

guy loves British trans women.

Yeah, I think he's an ally.

You're an entrepreneur traveling, you know, engaging in trades with the U.S.

the way it's supposed to be.

Yeah.

Yeah, the special relationship, you know.

We shall see.

You're not in the EU, the hated EU.

What else?

They're trying to do a Bitcoin reserve.

I don't understand how this works.

How?

What?

Yeah.

They want to exchange a bunch of gold certificates for Bitcoin.

I read an article by what's his name who was just on Trash Future who explained how this worked, and my brain imploded.

I just couldn't understand what was going on.

I know a lines basically finance, but not that much.

It's basically just a bribe for like Bitcoin guys guys, is all it is.

They're going to replace the gold in Fort Knox with Bitcoin.

Yes.

Well, they're going to Fort Knox to see if Warwick Goldfinger has stolen all of it.

Oh, it's all irradiated.

Maybe they'll just, you know, get radiation poisoning in there.

One hopes, maybe.

What else?

They're doing some kind of thing right now where they're ordering all government agencies to do a reduction in force to the point where they would be operating as if there was a government shutdown.

So they want to do

a permanent government shutdown.

Federal judge just blocked the mass firings, what that's worth.

Wow, that's good.

That's good.

Steve Bannon did a Nazi salute at some conference.

CPAC, I think.

CPAC.

Yeah, all of them are like open Nazis now because they don't feel like they have to hide it.

Which means we were right.

That vindicates us and anybody who was in the comments being like, oh, I don't know.

I think the rhetoric might be a little strong.

No, no, no.

They're all Nazis.

They're literally all Nazis.

You're a fucking idiot.

And eventually we all get to the point where they, God willing, follow their leader.

They're inviting the January 6th prison choir to the Kennedy Center.

That's not real, is it?

No, that's completely real.

What?

Yeah.

What were they learning in there?

Of music.

Where the circle be unbroken 400 times.

Great fucking song.

Just not by those guys.

The United States has pressured Romania to release Andrew Tate.

What?

Between this and the prison stuff, it's a pro-rape administration.

Pro-rape rapists.

They love raping.

Well, it's to be a social worker working with survivors of domestic violence in this political climate.

It feels great.

Yeah.

Rape, murder, arson, and rape.

I like arson and murder.

I don't like the other tale.

I really still don't get the...

I mean, yeah, I've, you know, stopped trying to make sense of the Trump administration, but I really don't see the angle for giving amnesty and safe passage to Andrew Tate.

Like, well, like Andrew Tate said, it's literally like said something nice about Trump one time.

Yeah.

That's all it is.

It's just like personal loyalty.

And now he's going to be like the Secretary of State in Florida.

Yeah.

Well, he's way less transphobic than anyone in this administration.

That's the funny thing.

Yeah.

I mean, have you seen the Hulk Hogan, Megan Fox video?

Jesus Christ, no.

I have not seen these.

Andrew Tate is saying to his followers, he's like, Would you have sex with, this is his words, Hulk Hogan with a pussy or Megan Fox with a cock?

I remember this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, yeah, I like to support like moderate liberalizing influences within the Trump administration, like Andrew Tate.

The Trump administration is going after congestion pricing in New York City.

Oh, they're not going to have it.

They're not going to have it.

Just to like trigger the libs.

Exactly.

I don't think that the New York State is currently arguing that, well, you know,

if they want to end congestion pricing, they have to do another National Environmental Policy Act study, which will take

another decade.

So

let's see if that works.

I like that.

I do really like that.

Just like, yeah, we're just going to run the clock on this one, boys.

Yeah.

They're also trying to fuck with California high-speed rail and don't seem to have done it very well.

In sort of the normal, the normal sort of awful news that has continued to happening, I think Union Pacific derailed two freight trains at pretty high speeds in Nebraska on the same day.

Again, that's normal.

I'm shocked by that.

And Trump is using the CNO desk.

What?

Because Elon Musk's kid wiped a booger on the Resolute desk.

He swapped it out for the CNO desk.

I discussed this on a recent episode of Worst of All Possible Worlds.

If you want more details and learn about the Van Swearingen brothers and why this is the incest desk.

Interesting.

Yes.

What does CNO stand for?

Chesapeake and Ohio.

Ohio.

Oh, okay.

This was owned by the

desk was built when the Van Swearengens, who were the brothers who built Cleveland, owned the Chesapeake and Ohio.

And they had a few desks built and through a series of owners they wound up in the White House.

This was the favorite desk of George H.W.

Bush.

And the other thing about the Van Swearengens was they lived together in one room in a 55-room mansion their entire lives.

They were never seen in public individually, always together.

They shared a bed,

and they're buried together in the same cemetery under one headstone that just reads, Brothers.

Unknown.

Family is weird, man.

Oh, and their names were Oris Paxton Van Swearengen and Mantis James Van Swearengen.

The things that desk seen.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Well, from the way it's constructed, it's

like.

No, I think they were a little bit apart in age.

I think.

Just Trump hitting his little Diet Coke button, which is back, by the way.

I'm looking at a photo

a couple of days ago from him in the Oval Office, and the Diet Coke button is back.

Him pushing the Diet Coke button is resting on a surface that has seen the unseemly love between brother and brother.

So.

Yeah,

that's all I got for the bad news fire hose.

Let's look at some good news.

The birds won.

Finally, a reason to live.

Yeah, exactly.

I watched this live at like three in the morning.

I had a great time.

And

yeah, it was perfect.

Everything about it was perfect, apart from the fact that the Chiefs put points on the board.

But aside from that, like, you know, Kendrick Lamar was there.

He did the song about how Drake is a pedophile.

Other than that,

there was some football.

It went very well.

Yeah.

Great.

Fantastic.

All city came out.

Never kill yourself.

What'd you say?

I think

Steve Spagnola, the chief's defensive coordinator, did such a bad job that Italians are now no longer going to be considered white again.

Have I got news for you?

He's going to be, yeah, lumped in in the anti-woke backlash.

Hiring Italians is DEI now.

Diversity, equality, and Italians.

The Eagles refuse to go to the White House, so they are woke.

Maybe.

Yeah, that's still up in the air.

Well, I mean, listen, like,

of the Eagles, say, offensive line, right, it's like four MAGA guys minimum.

But that's just, that's just what it is.

That's

the reverse of the Phillies.

The more racist your O-line is, the better they're going to protect their black cornerback.

We all know this.

Don't get mad at me in the comments.

I want to.

Don't make a guy that shape who isn't racist.

I don't mean to do like phrenology about it, but they just could do phrenology on Lane Johnson.

It's fine.

He'll understand.

I bet they're going to, it's just going to be Cooper DeGene who shows up.

Yeah.

And maybe Peter DeGene.

I mean, if you think about it, Cooper DeGene's having a fantastic few weeks because, like, okay, yeah, obviously, like, PickSex win the Super Bowl on your birthday, sure.

But also, all the Trump stuff, right?

Like, so not only is he winning personally, he's also winning politically.

That's a good point, yeah.

Although, a lot of these Trump guys, um, they, they, well, he's probably not paying attention to the news.

He's just seeing the libs being triggered.

So, yeah, I don't know.

You know, I don't I know that like a lot of business guys are starting to get a little bit antsy about Trump, you know, it's like, oh, shit, what did we do?

All right, do do the business plot, but wokely.

Yeah.

The woke business plot.

Woke business pledge.

We got to find the U.S.

Marine Corps' wokest general.

Yeah.

Yeah, that would be Smedley Butler.

Take him up, boys.

Take him up, boys.

Die in Philadelphia.

Take him up.

Still top of the leaderboard for wokest Marine.

I was going to say

they don't want things to collapse until they get their tax cut.

Although I feel like you could get your tax cut under anyone, and it wouldn't be as weird as this.

That's true.

That's true.

I don't think they're going to cut taxes.

Jamie Vance in the conference room from Network is like, listen,

you cut taxes, or we'll do to you what we did to Trump.

Well, with all these tariffs, they won't need taxes is the working theory anyway.

If they can ever get them implemented, they keep delaying them again and again.

It's like, come on, come on, coward.

Hit me.

Come on.

Real, real trade war has never been tried.

Yeah.

And in more somber news.

Jarring shift in tone.

Jarring shift in tone.

Unfortunately, our fourth and most beloved host, Milkshake the Cat, has passed away.

He managed to make it until sort of just after the Eagles parade.

And, well, all his organs fell apart like the Blues Brothers car.

Yeah, that's true.

I mean, it was really sudden.

I was, you know, very sad.

I mean, obviously, you know, his,

you know, we see his state funeral here.

But, yeah, I mean, he was a very good cat.

Everyone, you know, loved him.

He loved everyone.

You know, I learned a whole bunch of stuff about him.

You know, I had no idea he was a foster reject for so long because I guess people just didn't like his face.

Oh, I loved his little face.

Yeah.

Well, if you look at the one photo where he looks really mean, that's what most, mostly he looks like all the time.

But yeah, he is unfortunately no longer with us.

Sorry for your loss, Roz.

Yeah, it's

likewise, condolences.

But,

you know, his spirit lives on in the podcast, and he is beloved by thousands across the world.

And also eating Roz's shirts.

And sometimes his beard.

Yeah, that's true.

He would eat.

He did like to do that too.

He would go right up to my dad, who is the only person in the family who doesn't like cats and just sit on him.

It's great.

Yeah, how's that feel, Dan?

Yeah, so this is an unfortunate thing

which has happened.

But that is what it is, I suppose.

And loving memory, we'll flash up some like some sad music, do it like an academy in memorial.

Arms of the angels, scratching at

the wings,

feathers

off,

yowling and screeching.

Oh, it's haunting.

I liked that.

Yeah.

All right.

That was The Goddamn News.

I apologize to our guests.

You do know the podcast is usually pretty long, right?

Yes.

Okay.

Totally.

I may need to

make sure my disc has enough space.

So we may need to stop at some point, but it shouldn't take long.

Okay.

I mean,

hopefully, we'll only be here for another hour or so.

I'm going to see how fast we can get through this.

It's not too many slides on this one.

Our next one, our next thing, we have to do announcements for the announcements, announcements, announcements, the Northeast Corridor.

As we mentioned before, hopefully we don't get dinged by the Visa stuff.

We have all the paperwork and the money in, so that is proceeding.

We have seats available still at the First New York show

and at the Fillmore in Philly.

Everything else is sold out.

Everything else is sold out.

So links to that will be in the description.

I'm going to be so fucking pissed if Marco fucking Rubio stops me from coming to these.

Oh, pissed.

We're going to wind up in a Supreme Court amicus.

We're going to be brave movie if that's United States versus, well, there's your problem.

Exactly.

Oh, exactly.

My parents are retired lawyers.

Let's do this.

Not that kind of law.

Don't care.

Let's go.

You're going to go and go and go and fight Justice Roberts.

My dad could win, dude.

Old man Anderson versus Justice Roberts.

Old Van Anderson clears in a landslide.

All right.

Those are the announcements.

Let's finally get into the subject.

All right.

We are an hour in.

Let's do this.

Jesus.

That's the fire hose right there.

It's been a lot of news.

All right.

All right.

Some background here.

Let's talk about the Republican Party and Reconstruction.

Okay, so right now, it's the Republican Party that's the bad guys and the Democratic Party that are also the bad guys, but a little bit better.

Like

half a percent, maybe.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It used to be the Republicans were the good guys and the Democrats were the bad guys.

If you don't know that, there used to be a real gotcha for the dumbest Republican pundits like a couple of years ago to be like, it's interesting because here I found this quote from this 19th century Democrat that's pro-slavery.

Wow.

Yeah.

It's like, it's like, you know, how, oh, well, the Democrat, you know, Republicans flee to say it's the same thing as pointing out the Yankees have 26 champ championships.

Yeah.

Oh, thank you.

And if you want to go back to Lincoln-style Republicanism, that would be great.

You want to go back to the Republican president corresponding with Marks, although today those would be some weird letters.

But by all means, adopt radicals.

Carol Marx,

I yearn for your spirit.

Signed Donald J.

Trump.

All right, this great guy.

He's got a rich friend.

His name is Marx.

His friend is Engels.

Photoscience, folks.

Engels, can you send me more money?

Stop.

Okay, we did this thing.

It was called the Civil War.

It was over slavery, right?

We won it.

We had to rub it in the South's faces to maintain power.

We did a thing called Reconstruction, right?

This is supposed to be a pretty wide-ranging thing.

We bring the Jubilee, you dickheads.

You know,

you've wrecked the South.

Now you do military occupation.

Theoretically, you do land redistribution.

You disenfranchise the most powerful people.

It's a good idea.

You sit in the occupied South with a military governor and you make sure they don't try any shit.

You don't take any guff from these swine.

And, you know, you do really strict supervision of elections and so on and so forth.

And, you know, hey, you're the occupying military power who won.

You know, it better be your guy who wins the election.

That's all I'm saying.

It's going to be like this again after Civil War II.

and this time we're not going to fuck it up.

It's as simple as that.

Ah, now

they're going to put fucking Hillary Clinton in this military gunpowder.

Oh,

she's electable if you vote for her at gunpoint.

Oh, yeah.

You got to do the opposite of ending slavery hilldog.

Yeah.

So, you know.

Someone in the comments is going to get real mad at me for that joke, and I don't care.

A man man shot Abraham Lincoln

at a theater.

I'm booing John Wilkes Lincoln.

He shot Lincoln with the most hated gun in America.

Yes.

And the next guy, Andrew Johnson, he walks back

to the stuff that was supposed to happen to finally strangle and put down the slave power, right?

Nevertheless, there is still enough reconstruction happening for there to be the sort of vibrant Southern Republican Party that was, you know, this biracial coalition aligned against.

It's crazy how if you look at like, you know,

say,

you know, congressman from Tennessee, right, how it's like, oh, they had the first black one in like 1870 and then again in like 2020.

Exactly.

You know, this, they're aligned against the planter elite, which still exists, unfortunately.

You know, there's still military occupation to prevent some fuckery.

It works pretty good while it lasted.

It was not as aggressive as it should have been.

You know, they should have, like, I don't know, hanged Nathan Bedford Forrest, for example.

Yeah.

Yes.

Oh, yeah.

The penalty for treason.

The penalty for treason is death, no north, no south, the union forever.

And then also we hang Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Jeb Stewart, Jupiter earlier, just all those motherfuckers.

Yeah.

They should have swung from ropes.

You know I'm right.

I don't know if I can say that.

I mean, they're dead.

I think we can.

I think we can say.

Listen, they should have executed every Confederate officer above the ranks of captains.

And then if any of the others opened their mouths about anything, they should have executed them too.

Yeah, it probably would have been better off.

We will talk about maybe the one exception later, but

in aggregate, though.

One good thing is Jeb Stewart died during the war.

And I know this because when you drive around Virginia or wherever, you see like, oh, Jeb Stewart death site site or whatever and then i looked it up yes then it's like uh i used to when i was in high school we uh we'd row occasionally uh against jeb stewart high school i hope that place burns to the ground with everybody in it man i think they renamed it okay maybe never mind but but now but now it it they might rename it back because we're done with woke

like a military basis yeah we live in the dumbest fucking timeline Part of why the South lost in Gettysburg is Jeb Stewart showed up late and Lee didn't know what the hell to do.

Literally, yeah.

Jeb Stewart's conduct north of the Mason is

fashionably late.

Sorry, sorry.

I've been trying to mute myself while I've been coughing.

Yeah, he shows up to, was it Hip or Jubal earlier?

Yeah, Stewart's ride in the Gettysburg campaign.

I was thinking you bull.

Never mind.

It's fine.

All these guys fucking suck shit as generals, by the way.

All of them jerk each other off after the end of the war about not just the lost cause, but their own fucking general shit.

Oh, absolutely.

Yeah.

You know, you have people are still like, well, you need to go read Mosby's memoirs.

You know, they're so good.

No, I don't.

And it's like, I don't think so.

So, yeah, Reconstruction worked pretty good while it lasted.

Sometimes Southern Democrats still won elections in the South.

Unfortunately, they also had urban northern counterparts who helped them out in Congress, right?

which leads to sort of a steady gain in power for Southern Democrats over a long period of time.

So, you know, let's jump forward to a few presidents too.

The corrupt bargain and Rutherford Hayes.

And not even the first corrupt bargain.

The election of 1824.

Yeah.

Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams.

So in 1876, it was widely expected that Ulysses S.

Grant would run for a third term.

America's most powerful never-need.

Yeah.

My favorite thing about Grant is his election slogan was vote as you shot.

Hell yeah.

Which like what are you supposed to do with that, right?

So Grant actually, you know, he declined to run again.

This leads to sort of a power vacuum within the party.

There's two factions in the Republicans.

You have the radicals and you have the moderates, right?

Ooh, I think I know who my favorites are.

The radicals wanted Reconstruction to continue and, in fact, to be more thorough, you know, you know, to right the historical wrongs, so on and so forth.

I mean, there was a range of political beliefs within there.

Some of them were like straight up socialists.

Some of them are like more like, okay, I'm a business guy, but I fucking hate the South.

Right.

And then you have then you have, you know, moderates who were cowards.

Hey, you know, those.

Important to note that the whole like, you know, Unity and Brotherhood, draw a line under it thing is like, at this point, hooey, right?

It's like a line being pushed by the people who are like, just let us go back to rigging the elections the way we want.

Exactly.

I'm really upset seeing black people at the polls.

I'm very upset.

Yeah.

1880, Susan Collins is very concerned.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So at this point, Grant would have been like the preferred candidate of the radicals, but, you know, the whole party probably would have coalesced around him.

So, at the convention, since he declined to run,

Ohio Governor Rutherford Hayes was elected as a candidate, right?

He was a moderate, but he did explicitly support suffrage for black men so long as he didn't have to do anything to make it happen.

Sounds familiar.

Yeah.

So the election came down to Hayes and New York governor and Democrat Samuel J.

Tilden, right?

And Hayes pulled off something that has since been a tradition in the GOP, right?

He lost the popular vote, but won the Electoral College.

They love fucking doing it, man.

Yeah.

And I wonder if they, because it's always been a Republican.

Like, what if it was the more conservative candidate who...

lost the popular vote or the more liberal one who lost the popular vote for what won the election.

I wonder if that would be what it takes to actually switch it.

That's what I've been rooting for in every election that I've been alive, like for Mitt Romney to win the popular vote, but lose Electoral College.

But it never happens at that point.

It never seems to happen that way.

It's like the only way we're going to get rid of it.

The Republicans seem to be better at electioneering.

Yeah.

We needed John Kerry to win Ohio, and then it could have happened.

But in this election, there's a number of disputed ballots, 20 total in Florida, Louisiana, Electoral College ballots, I mean, in Florida, Louisiana, Oregon, and South Carolina.

These would throw the election to Tilden if even one of them came up Democratic.

And the Congress is in disarray.

They try all kinds of chicanery to throw the election one way or another.

And the inauguration deadline starts, you know, rapidly approaching with no winner declared, right?

So the real power in the United States steps in to mediate.

It's down here.

Thomas Scott of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

The real president,

the fourth and most important branch of government?

The Pennsylvania Railroad, yeah.

At this point, I believe the railroad had a larger budget than the United States government.

Wow.

Yeah.

So There is, and some historians dispute that this happened, but supposedly there was was a secret meeting at James Wormley's Hotel, which was the first black-owned upscale hotel in the United States.

It's up here.

It was in Washington, D.C.

I believe there's a the first Union Trust building is here now.

I don't remember the street address.

You know, and,

you know, a deal was brokered with Southern Democrats and moderate Republicans and

dozens of business leaders in the North and South.

So you're going to, number one, you're going to end Reconstruction and withdraw all Union troops from the South.

Number two, you're going to appoint at least one Southern Democrat to Hayes' cabinet.

Number three, the government's going to approve the extension and subsequent land grants for Tom Scott's Texas and Pacific Railroad as far as San Diego.

Number four, you're going to pass legislation to aid industrialization in the South.

Number five, the South gets to be racist again.

So much for woke business.

Jesus Christ.

Yeah.

So

now

most of this happened, but the construction of the TNP Pacific Extension did not.

They did not really work on industrialization either.

But on March the 2nd, Southern Democrats relented and Rutherford Hayes was declared the winner and was inaugurated only three days later.

They really ran out of clocks on this.

It's a beautiful piece of like liberal decision sort of bargaining, right?

It's like you get everything you want in exchange.

My dumbest and like least backboned guy gets to be president.

Exactly.

You know, I was thinking about so like around this time, all of these Civil War generals, they all have beards, and photography is still a fairly new innovation.

So they aren't getting photographed that often.

They're not in that many, you know, not that many eyeballs on these different pictures of these guys.

You could easily just swap them out for each other.

Oh, yeah.

This is the present.

That Futurama bit.

It's my competitor, Jack Johnson, and me, John Jackson, right?

Don't let their identical appearances fool you.

Yeah, there's a number of these guys that look very, very similar.

Roz kind of looks like Ruthford B.

Hayes, but more handsome.

Well, my beard's not that long at the moment.

No, I like you with a long beard.

I think you're very handsome.

That was the Democrats' mistake.

They keep running guys without beards.

They got it.

Run me.

Run me.

I'll be 35 in a couple of years.

Let's go, baby.

Liam for president.

How bad could it be 2032, baby?

Hold on.

The next Democratic grim part is if they shoot Trump with the counter gun, J.D.

Vance is going to be the first beard.

I'm going to say those words to me in that

since Rutherford B.

Hayes.

It's a Benjamin Harrison.

Yeah.

Fuck.

Sorry.

I think

Robert Cleveland is like one of the first presidents without a beard,

at least in a long time at this point.

So the Tash.

Yeah.

So

anyway, you know, Hayes is inaugurated.

He winds down Reconstruction, but pretty slowly.

He does slow walk it a bit.

You know, but that does kill support for Republicans in the South.

The South becomes, you know, the solid South.

It's all Southern Democrats.

Right.

And it explodes the radical factions to the Republicans because they were a lot less relevant.

You know,

the project had been canceled.

The South was rising again, right?

You know, this is his political legacy is mostly ending Reconstruction and then some boring stuff

like opposing bimetallism, meritocratic civil service reform.

He ran a dry White House.

He was the first.

He was the first president to visit California.

And of course, he crushed the railroad strike of 1877 with federal troops.

He did not run for a second term.

Again,

worth trading it all for.

Yeah, exactly.

For this pillar of strength, this tower that was the guy who opposed bimetallism.

Yeah.

That was, that was, no, no, civil service reform.

Come on.

That's...

Oh, God.

The elites loved the bimetallism.

Civil service jobs gave us the novel Moby Dick.

Okay.

Yeah.

The elites loved the gold standard.

Even J.P.

Morgan's going to bail America out under Cleveland to keep the gold standard.

Yeah, it just worked really well for them, kept their debts as valuable as they were.

Yeah, it's,

you know, I

there were no men for this moment, I think, is a big issue.

So let's talk about this Garfield fellow.

See, this would have been a good, a good bit to just throw in Garfield the cat, like superimposed on Garfield's face.

So he was born November 19th, 1831, in Moreland Hills, Ohio.

He was educated at Harem College, which was then called the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute.

What a name.

Same place that educated Wes Anderson.

Then later he went to Williams College, which is where he learned about abolitionism and began considering a career in politics.

Now, they don't teach you that good things can be good at the fucking eclectic institute, do they?

No, they just teach you a lot of random crap.

Yeah.

You're going to learn juggling and multiverian calculus, dickhead.

He was, I just learned today, Garfield's father was an amateur wrestler at the time, which seems very eclectic in a sense for the 19th century.

I'm back from eclectic school.

I've just seen my dad suplex my neighbor.

Lincoln did that too.

So he's truly a Lincoln Republican.

Yeah.

Garfield was very highly educated.

He actually

devised an original proof for the Pythagorean theorem.

Wow.

Wow.

I've never heard it pronounced that way.

That's, uh, I like it.

But yeah, big math brain.

Yeah.

He has a big brain in general.

Can I give a little anecdote from his college?

Uh, so he was poor.

He had to be janitor at first, uh, and then he works his way all the way up where he's president of an even better college.

So he started as janitor.

He did a math proof.

He really is goodwill hunting as far as presidents go.

Oh, yeah.

He is salt of the earth.

You know, he is

came from literally nothing, dirt farmers.

You know, he's,

you know, he is, he's the American dream right here.

Goodwill Hunting, except Goodwill Hunting's dad is busy like arm barring people.

Yeah, so he went back to Ohio and yeah, he did the whole janitor thing.

He started, eventually became, you know, president of Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, which I think at some point became Harem University.

I don't know exactly when.

He was admitted to the bar.

You know, he did not practice as a lawyer for very long because he was elected to the state senate in 1861.

So definitely one of these like young, like a young turk.

Like people are looking at this guy like this is going to be the guy.

He's like on the way up.

We elected our town's best professor to the state senate.

He's the smartest guy.

Why would we want anyone else?

Exactly.

Exactly.

He knows how many sides a triangle has.

And could prove it originally.

Yeah, exactly.

he didn't actually develop that proof until he was in congress i think we're gonna send him to congress to figure out how many sides a triangle has

yeah

so the thing is the war intervened right by august of 1861 after rapidly consuming all the knowledge he could about war he was commissioned as a colonel in the 42nd Ohio infantry.

In fairness, you could consume all the knowledge there was about war in about an afternoon.

Yes.

Just kind of like read a couple of pretty thick books.

It took you longer to find the books.

You just say Napoleon a lot.

If he talks about Napoleon and concentrating your forces, people thought you knew what you were doing.

Yeah, exactly.

So the 42nd, the problem with the 42nd Ohio Infantry is that it didn't exist, right?

He had to create it from scratch, right?

And he did so by recruiting essentially all of Harem College and the surrounding town of Harem.

The 42nd was tasked by Brigadier General Don Carlos Buell.

Oh, yeah.

What a name.

Yeah.

To go kick the Confederates out of eastern Kentucky, right?

He did so very effectively, winning the Battle of Middle Creek by deceiving the Confederates into thinking the Union outnumbered them and forcing a retreat, and was subsequently promoted to Brigadier General.

Damn.

Okay.

It must have been good to be a bachelor in Harem, Ohio, I imagine.

This guy invented thinking, as far as all these guys are concerned.

So, like.

He's like Ohioan Socrates.

Yeah, he is the most educated man

outside of, I don't know, Cincinnati or Columbus or Cleveland.

He's invented several soda syrups.

Yeah.

So in the Union Army, there's two predominant philosophies about what the war was about.

Was this a struggle to hold the country together in which there would be compromises made

to keep everyone working together?

Or is this a holy war to end slavery?

Holy war, baby.

Yes.

Yeah, Garfield believed the latter.

Yeah,

yeah.

He was after.

Yeah, young Garfield was quite based.

He thought Lincoln was too weak.

He was not ballsy enough on abolishing slavery.

Yeah,

it was definitely like this guy is pretty radical in his youth, right?

One of the things he did is after we drove most of the Confederate forces out of eastern Kentucky, he came to this realization, you know, okay, you know, we forced out most of the people.

Some people are still holding out.

None of the people here own slaves.

It's eastern Kentucky.

There's no big cotton plantation possible in like Whitesburg, right?

You know, which is roughly where this campaign is happening.

So, you know, he issues this sort of general amnesty to any Confederate soldier who just went the fuck home, which actually worked really good.

Yeah.

Go home and don't take arms up against the Union.

Don't kill yourself.

The master guy in Ohio is here to ask you,

what are you doing?

Why are you here?

Just go home.

Go home.

it would be like

holy shit i hate this yeah

it was like carl winslow would yell go home go home go home at urkel it was kind of that uh that kind of defense

yeah

uh the the few people who did not heed this uh this warning were dealt with at a brief skirmish at pound gap which is adjacent to the town of pound

uh i've heard of Mind the Gap.

No, it's Pound the Gap.

Pound Gap, yeah.

There's a real pincer movement between go home and if you don't, we'll kill you.

We'll kill you.

Which is

you'll go to Poundtown.

Poundtown at the end of a musket is not a place you want to be.

Hey, federal pound me in the gap battle.

Hey, I've been to Pound Gap.

So is Liam.

Yeah, buddy, we have.

That's when we went to go visit the Trillbillies.

So, having liberated eastern Kentucky, the 42nd joined up with the 20th Brigade, the 20th Brigade of the Army of the Ohio, which wound up stuck at Battle of Shiloh, where the Confederates shot at Garfield all day and missed every time.

He shamed hurts.

Yeah.

And those bullets.

I guess he's hard to hit.

Yeah.

I mean, maybe some got stuck in his beard, but the wind

in those days.

Yeah, I would think those ball bearings were flying all over the place.

No, not so easy when you don't have like an industrial capacity, is it, fellas?

So

after the battle, James Garfield got sick with jaundice, right?

Gets like shot at and missed 20 times and then hit with jaundice instead.

And he wounds up, he winds up bedridden, and then after that, he works a lot of desk jobs,

you know, and plans his return to politics.

He won a seat in Congress from Ohio in 1862 while he was still serving in the Army.

And as a radical Republican, he was unsure of whether to continue to serve in the Army or take his seat until President Lincoln told him, look, we got too many generals and not enough congressmen.

Does he still think Lincoln's a pussy at this point?

Because that's really funny if he does.

He actually does continue to criticize Lincoln in Congress.

I will let you change the course of my life, bitch.

In Congress, during the war, he supported confiscation of Confederate lands, stripping Confederates of rights, abolition, reconstruction, and most controversially, abolishing the system of commutation where draftees could pay to get out of service.

Right?

No, you're all going to pound gap with me.

Yeah, we're all going to pound town.

So, you know, this is during the war, you know, and one of the reasons why the anti-commutation bill never gets passed is that, you know, Blinken just figures out how to end the war.

You know, so Sherman figures out how to end the war.

Sherman, yeah, that's true.

That's true.

And then after the war ends, he begins this unfortunate, long, slow decline into moderation.

Many, many such cases never meet your heroes.

Exactly.

Eventually, he falls so low as to oppose the Enforcement Act of 1871, which was intended to curb the power of the Ku Klux Klan, right?

Come on, dickhead.

Yeah, exactly.

He supported Hayes in 1876.

Pointy hoods.

He's just a very pro-triangle man.

Well,

he was concerned about executive overreach.

No, he wasn't.

Shut up.

He supported Rutherford Hayes in 1876.

He wanted to retire from politics and practice law, but he stayed on for another term because he was popular in his seat.

He thought he could galvanize the presidential vote in Ohio.

He was elected to the Senate in 1880 and had yet to take office when,

you know, there was a presidential election happening at the same time, right?

I really did like putting a bunch of flags on stuff.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

They had...

I mean, you think they're doing flag code violations now.

I think half of these things don't even have the right number of stars.

I'm enjoying the ones kind of like wrapped around the bust delay in Washington or some shit like that.

Hadn't lost the novelty yet

at the time, I guess.

It was harder back then because they would change the number of states so often.

Real quick, is it okay if we take like a five-minute break?

I just have to...

My

space is running running out of my disc.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

20 minutes later.

Folks, we are back from a brief break.

We may have lost Andrews.

We may not have.

Let's stop.

No, no.

Nobody left.

I am here.

Okay, I just hadn't heard in a while.

I was trying to be rude.

Anyway,

we left on a cliffhanger.

We're going to talk about

the election of 1880.

So

the Republican Party was divided on Hayes' performance, but had devolved into two much more more boring factions, right?

They weren't the radicals and the moderates.

They were now the Stalwarts and the Half-Breeds.

Fucking shadow of Mordora.

Yeah.

The Stalwarts largely derived from the ranks of the former Radicals.

While the half-breeds consisted mainly of former moderates, there was still some crossover.

Ostensibly, the question of civil rights for African Americans in the South was still on the table, but the real split here was the question of

civil service reform.

Oh, yes.

Fuck me up.

Right.

Never reform the civil service.

Patronage jobs only for African people.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This isn't the kind of thing you'd kill anybody over, though.

Oh,

I'm blind you ass.

Feeling like I could be ambassador to France if I sit in this waiting room long enough.

Thank you.

Thank you, Freddy, foreshadowing.

Oh, yes, I forgot to use the joke.

So

cronies and henchmen are important in a political system that capital G gets things done, right?

Sure.

Which is why the stalwarts wanted to return to the spoils system.

The half-breeds wanted a government that couldn't do anything and thus supported expanding civil service reform.

Yeah, they wanted meritocracy apart from in the racism department.

Exactly, yeah.

In the 1880 convention, the stalwarts supported nominating former president Ulysses S.

Grant for what would be his third term.

I sent Grant like 900 years old at this point and dying of like throat cancer.

He was also on a European tour, but he did cut it short to come back and campaign.

Oh, my God.

The half-breeds were divided divided between John Sherman, who was a senator from Ohio, and James G.

Blaine, who will be a recurring character.

He was a senator from Maine.

Blaine Blaine, James G.

Blaine, Continental Liar from the state of Maine.

Yes.

He was involved in

what?

Teapot.

No, Credit Moblier.

Credit Mobilier.

Yeah.

If anyone remembers that from your history class, because I don't remember.

Garfield was involved in that a little bit, too.

Yeah, it is a big problem.

If you're going to be from Maine, not a very good state to win from in the corner of the country, you don't want to also have your name rhyme with Maine.

That's a real bad sign.

No,

that's going to be an issue later on.

So this convention is a fucking mess, right?

No one candidate had anything close to the amount of votes required to secure the nomination.

Grant came the closest at 304 out of 379.

Blaine trailed pretty closely.

There was was one ballot.

There was a second ballot.

There was a third ballot.

After day one, they had done 18 votes and made no progress, right?

Day two went

similarly until seemingly out of nowhere,

votes began to shift to this new guy named James Garfield.

Same thing that happens with like papal conclaves where everybody just wants to go home and is bored, so they just kind of pick somebody.

It's like, oh,

skip.

As of recording, as of this moment, Pope Francis is still alive.

But I do hope that if he shuffles from this mortal coil, they pick the cool Filipino guy.

Oh, yeah.

They keep trying to, whatchamacallit, say Pope Francis is going to die imminently.

And it's like, oh, he's got kidney failure.

Well, you know, it's easy to replace those.

And he is just a father.

He's old.

There's a ton of stuff that, you know, that sounds alarming, but it's just like normal old guy in hospital stuff.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

He's going to live another like 15 years.

Yeah, listen, I made my deal with God so the Eagles win the Super Bowl.

I'm now making my second deal with God so that we get ran a long time.

Yeah.

So there were some background deals.

On vote 36, the representative from Ohio and senator-elect from Ohio, James Garfield.

JD Vance.

Yeah.

Was nominated as the candidate with 399 votes.

The human equivalent of throwing the Xbox controller.

Yeah.

I really like that one.

Fuck.

Fuck.

I like this guy.

All right.

Your mom's a whore.

All right.

Let's do this.

It's a load of slurs coming over Xbox Live.

Garfield didn't even want to do it either.

At first, they try to nominate him, and he's like, Well, can you nominate me without my consent?

And they're like, You're out of order.

We're doing what we want.

We do what we want.

He didn't have a speech planned.

He didn't have anything.

Just like, yeah, give it to this guy.

He seems pretty good.

Apparently, he just went back to his hotel room and cried.

Relaceable.

That's relaceable.

That is.

Yeah.

Chester A.

Arthur, who was a firm stalwart, was nominated to the vice presidency.

This winds up being, you know, a balance ticket.

Everyone's happy, or at least no one's especially mad at it, right?

In the general election, it is pretty obvious that Hayes's policies have completely thrown the South to the Democrats.

You know, he's thoroughly abandoned black voters, and it goes, you know, the South goes solid Democrat, but the North is solid Republican.

And in the popular vote, it's about 50.01%

to 49.99%

for the Republicans.

I think the difference is 2,000 votes out of 9 million.

So in a landslide, Garfield wins the Electoral College with 214 to Winfield Scott Hancock's 155 votes.

Let's fucking go.

I love democracy.

One thing is that it was a little bit closer, just that New York state is the swing state, and it's only 21,000 votes there.

And it is helpful that Garfield is working with the New York machine, who's on board with him and willing to do little shenanigans.

You said New York Machine, I assume you're talking about Tammany Hall, right?

Oh, yeah, I'm just absolutely Tammy Hall.

I'm just being a swing state.

Yeah,

you don't have to imagine for too much longer.

Oh, yes, exactly.

This is this is a good one.

It's time to look at a photograph of a normal man together.

The world's most normal man.

Oh my God.

Oh, no.

Awarded most normal-looking boy four years

in like sequence.

He was in like a free love sex commune, and no one would have sex with him.

Yeah, they used to call him Charles J.

Get Out.

Yeah.

Man who literally could not get laid in a cult.

It's Charles Jay Gatteau.

And I'm doing the hand flourish.

Charles Julius Gateau was born September 8th, 1941.

That's a free of Senate.

Illinois.

Highly recommend two sources about Charles J.

Gatteau, Sarah Val's book, Assassination Vacation, and the sometime musical Assassins, in which he has one of my favorite songs.

So our boy, Charles Gateau, inherited a sum of money from, I believe, his uncle, and he wanted to use it to attend the University of Michigan to become a lawyer.

And he failed the entrance exam.

Oh, yeah.

Well, who amongst us?

That's gone poorly.

So he moved to Inida, New York to join the weird utopian sex cult.

Oh, those guys are freaks.

Yeah.

The Inida community rejected him, calling him Charles Get Out.

Right.

A bunch of the women thought that he had really creepy vibes.

For some reason, not entirely clear.

Look at him.

He wants a world's most normal boy.

This guy appears in your room and is just like creepily breathing at you.

Look, I'm a part of a sex cult, but I have stanford.

He moved to Hoboken, New Jersey to start a newspaper based on the UNIDA community's principles, right?

Um, which failed instantly, right?

Takes them doing to have a newspaper fail instantly as well.

He moved back to Oneida.

He was rejected again by everyone in the community.

And he sued their leader, John Humphrey Noyas, for unpaid work he did while as a member of the cult.

It's a cult.

Of course you're going to.

Yeah, all right.

That lawsuit was unsuccessful.

And I believe his dad wrote a personal letter to John Humphrey Noyas saying, sorry, my son's an idiot.

I apologize.

Jeez.

Oh, you never want to.

Dad, you're embarrassing me in front of the coals.

This is a man.

Oh, sorry.

Yeah, they do say like the dad's like, oh, yeah, I would institutionalize him, but I can't afford to.

So some universal health care.

Yeah.

If they had universal health care, this whole thing might have been prevented.

Yeah, exactly.

This is a man with a reverse Midas touch, right?

Everything he touched turned to shit.

He moved to Chicago.

He got a clerkship, right?

He was admitted to the bar.

He argued one case.

His client was.

It's a big break, Guiteau.

This is it.

You just got to lock in.

You just got to lock in.

A cousin Vinny type situation, except he argued one case.

His client was convicted.

He failed.

So he started doing bill collecting, but while he was collecting the bills for his clients, he forgot to pay the clients afterwards the money that he had collected.

So he fled his creditors and debt collectors for New York City.

Because you could just sue that back then.

Right.

And he decided to get into politics as a Democrat.

This repulsively unlovable, deeply weird specimen decided to like escape from his army of creditors through the Democrats and Passy.

I mean, I'm sure that's never going to be recognized.

Don't worry about that.

Now, nevertheless, owing to the political climate, he wound up supporting Republicans.

All the Republicans he supported were losers, like Horace Greeley, right?

The newspaper guy?

I think so.

He then loses to Grant in Grant's second run, and he dies before the Electoral College.

So they don't really know what to do with his electors.

Shoot him.

He also begins to become delusional, right?

After delivering one speech.

Of course, he does.

He's a Democrat.

Yeah.

He became.

He started uttering

strange visions of madness, like Hillary Whips and Nene.

She's a hashtag go, gone wild.

And everyone looking at him is like, what the fuck does this do?

For the dread Abuela.

Photoshopping face.

the rocking back and forth, just like gotta have high, high hopes for a living.

Yeah, it has a bunch of posters with the candidate's face photoshopped onto

Game of Thrones lady.

What did you call it?

The dragon sex show?

Yeah, that's yeah, I think something like that.

I forgot what I just call it the dragon show.

You're amazing, man.

Yeah.

Like the gorilla channel.

Yeah, exactly.

Which is regal, by the way.

So anyway,

Guito,

after delivering one speech, he became convinced that he would be appointed ambassador to Chile.

I mean,

you kind of could be in the sense that like...

These were all patronage jobs, and ambassador wasn't nearly as important as it used to be, particularly to like a small country.

It was kind of just like like honorary consulships.

You can kind of like, it's like the guy who's in like most

like sensical American who lives in Chile.

That's the ambassador now, actually.

Yes.

Yeah, you see, he's the one man.

He wrote and published a religious book called The Truth, which was largely plagiarized from John Humphrey Noyes.

And he started wandering.

Plagiarize your cult idea.

He started wandering from town to town preaching.

By 1880, he was in Boston, where he was involved in the collision of the SS Stonington and the SS Narragansett.

What do you mean he was involved?

Are you going to elaborate on that?

He was on the Stonington.

Oh, all right.

I thought he just piloted it directly, like 9-11, but with boats.

No, he doesn't have enough skill to pilot a boat, let alone into a moving target.

I like that you're just dunking on this dead guy.

The Narragansett caught fire and sank with a large loss of life.

Gateau was on the Stonington and believed his life was spared for some higher divine purpose.

Become ambassador to Chile.

Yeah.

So he returned to politics.

He wrote a speech supporting Grant for the 1880 convention, which he delivered twice, apparently very badly.

It was then printed and circulated among the delegates.

But by the time it was printed and circulated, Garfield had secured the nomination.

So the printed copies had Grant scratched out and Garfield inserted instead.

Oh,

that's tough, bad.

Now,

he was a delusional crank, obviously, but he also identified as a stalwart, right?

He was on the side of the angels.

He was our delusional crank, exactly.

This guy in your DSA chapter.

Yeah.

He believed he had secured Garfield's win in the 1880 general election and thus lined up for his well-deserved patronage job.

To his horror, civil service reform had occurred.

He was clearly unqualified for the position he knew in his heart was his to have.

The consulship to Vienna.

Or maybe Paris.

Sure.

So he traveled to Washington, D.C.

Oh, boy.

To plead his case

and just starts tailing the president and also Secretary of State James G.

Blaine.

Don't, don't, don't.

don't, don't.

Well, of course, I can just go to his house because everyone knows where he is.

It's like the White House.

Well, the location and daily agenda of the president were printed in several local newspapers.

Oh, you could just

assassination daily.

Yeah.

So he starts to begin showing up unannounced at official events.

He started sending the president and the secretary of state letters on hotel stationery because by this time he can't afford anything.

He's penniless.

He's in boarding houses, running between boarding houses because he can't pay for boarding.

He would try and just happen to run into them on the street and ask, hey, can I get that consulship yet?

Trying to do a meet cute with James G.

Blaine.

How's this going for you?

Until eventually Blaine finally snapped at him, never talk about the consulship to me again.

Fuck you.

He didn't say fuck you.

They didn't swear back then.

Oh, they just a lot of slurs.

Slurs we can't even dream up.

We've lost the technology.

It's true.

It's true because

we swear so much more now.

Lost the impact.

Yeah, everyone's on boats more, so they start swearing more.

If you commit to never swearing in your life, then it's going to hit so much harder when you just haul off and call a guy an Irishman.

Yeah, that's a good point.

That's a good point.

So now he's mad.

And he has a gun.

You have angered the normalist boy.

Yeah.

Normalist boy status.

Angered.

Right.

So James Garfield, he's kind of a compromise candidate.

As such.

You try to stop putting flags on things, you maniacs.

I want to see booths like this come back

for inaugurations.

You know,

let me get the big shield.

Let me get whatever the hell this is.

Big Eagle.

Like flower antennas.

Oh, it looks like Bioshock Infinite in this bitch.

Yeah.

Someone spent, you know, 400 hours carving this.

They're going to use it for 20 minutes.

Bioshock Infinite was such a fucking missed opportunity.

Sorry, sorry.

Go ahead.

Garfield's a compromise candidate.

As such, the administration got off to kind of a rocky start, right?

The leader of the stalwarts was Roscoe Conkling, right?

Don't make a name like that anymore.

Fantastic.

And he feuded with Garfield over cabinet appointments, specifically the half-breed James Blaine as Secretary of State.

Oh, good.

If it's like the name of his political faction, but that's so insulting.

Appointments below the cabinet were a mix of the sort of meritocratic, civil service type guys and straight-up old-fashioned old-fashioned patronage, right?

And

so Garfield doesn't accomplish very much in his first four months, right?

He does some more civil service reform, but it's kind of minor.

He nominates Stanley Matthews to the Supreme Court.

He made some moves to break the solid South by trying to entangle the Republicans' Party's patronage network with the new new Readjuster Party in Virginia that was run by a Confederate general turned rainbow coalition leader Billy Mahone, who we've talked about previously on this podcast.

The only Confederate general who kind of made amends afterwards.

All right, we'll take it.

Yeah.

Take it what we can get here, folks.

Yeah, and then, well,

the Readjuster Party did a lot more than pretty much any faction of the Republicans at this point in time.

And he did some boring stuff with the Navy and preparing to build the Panama Canal and stuff like that.

I think, you know,

if you're trying to make inroads with the Readjuster Party, you know, maybe something really great could have happened with a few more years, but circumstances intervened here.

In the form of the normalist boy.

Yeah.

Yes.

So

here we go.

Washington, D.C.

is disgusting in the summer.

It's a great place to do a live show in May.

Yeah.

It'll be fine in May.

Early May, you'll be good.

Yeah, otherwise, you're sweating through everything.

Oh, yeah.

If we were doing it in the summer, I would say you got to get some kind of portable air conditioner.

Yeah.

You know, for the.

Well, the venue is pretty far from the metro.

Oh, God.

Book it.

Actually, I did literally book it.

Maybe, maybe little Marco Rubio is saving my life here.

Before air conditioning, everyone who could leave in the summer left.

Yeah, it used to be a thing, still is in Paris, actually.

Just like summer, everybody leaves the capital because it's gross.

Yes.

James Garfield, the president of the United States, was no exception.

Please tell me the U.S.

has a summer capital.

Yeah, it's called Mar-a-Lago.

No.

Boom, tomato, tomato.

So he planned to travel north to Williams College in

Massachusetts, right, to deliver a speech and then take a well-deserved summer vacation.

Now, in Washington, D.C., at the time, there were two train stations.

If you're going north or going south, you went to the Baltimore and Potomac station at 6th Street.

And if you were going west, you went to the Baltimore and Ohio station at New Jersey Avenue.

President's going north, so he heads for the Baltimore and Potomac station to catch whatever the Baltimore and Potomac's equivalent of the Acelo was.

The Acela.

Well, yeah, no, it's the same tracks.

The tunnel through Baltimore is the same tunnel.

So, yeah, I guess so.

The proto-Acela.

The proto-Acela, yeah.

Well, I think he's going to New Jersey to change trains, and he's going to get a ferry across New York Harbor, and he's going to get on the New York, New Haven, and Hartford, and he's going to have to take that up to Plus.

That's such a pain in the ass.

You're thinking about that journey, and you're like, Jesus Christ, someone shoot me in the back, please.

This is way, way.

Well, the BNP tunnel had just opened, and they had just finished the bridge over the Susquehanna.

So this was, they had actually just recently shaved two days off this journey.

So

much like the train that never ends, ends, it's the podcast that never ends.

Yes.

How you doing there, Nova?

I'm surviving.

I'm good.

I'm going to have to write the next No Gods No Mares in about

10 hours, but other than that, it's all good.

Now, Guiteau has seen the schedule in the newspaper.

Of course, he's been plotting, right?

He's been selected.

Selected by Providence, divinely inspired, to shoot the president and raise stalwart Chester A.

Arthur to the the presidency, you know, who could blame him?

I get it.

Yeah.

And bring back the adored spoils system.

Yeah, and then once they let me out of jail for this whole shooting the president misunderstanding, they're going to make me ambassador to France.

Yes.

He borrowed money from a relative.

He bought a fancy revolver.

It's like a British.

He specifically looks for a revolver with nicer grips because he thought it would look nicer at a museum.

Oh, yes.

And it's not on public display.

So another L for James, for Charles Gateau.

Brutal.

He wrote cryptic letters to Garfield

warning him

to

change his policies, and Garfield ignored them.

He wrote to William Cumseha Sherman,

begging for protection from the angry mob that would surely arrive after he shot the president, which was also ignored.

Yeah.

He went to the Washington, D.C.

jail to ask for a tour of the facility so he could get to know it before he was in prison.

They told him to come back later,

which he did.

He spent a full month tailing the president everywhere he went, almost worked up the gull to shoot him once.

Kill this guy, dude.

Well, Garfield's wife, Lucretia, was there, and he didn't want to upset her.

No, just two of them.

Two things.

Thing one: how do you think she's going to feel if you shoot her, if you shoot him when she's not there?

Probably fucking great.

Thing two, Lucretia, insane name on like an angry.

Incredible name, yeah.

Nobody, nobody says gender is moving like that.

I've never met a Lucretia before.

And then you call her like Crete as a nickname, and that's not that sweet of a nickname.

Like, like the island?

I did think of that, yeah.

Yeah, cool.

It's almost like calling her creep, though.

If you've never met a woman named Lucretia before, there will be a she, they at one of the live shows, I promise you.

Yeah,

we had a cat named Lucretia Borgia.

Yes, named after the Duchess.

Oh, yeah.

And she hid under the bed, except when it was time to eat, and then she would stick a paw out and sort of bat the food towards her.

She was amazing.

I just that cat.

What should I name my

19th century daughter?

How about after this famous poisoner?

yeah it goes it goes they don't name like they used to a lucretia mott portrait on wikipedia is not flattering lucretia garfish lucretia mott my fault okay okay

this haunted the sausage god damn

on july 2nd in the morning garfield and secretary of state blain arrived at the baltimore and potomac station

kitcho arrived too and he told his cab driver I don't need a ride back because I'm going to be arrested and going to jail instead.

Cab driver visibly not giving a shit, just like I'm not giving it a man, pulling out a bottle of like what I can only describe as corn liquor.

Yeah.

You know, the president's in there, right?

Oh, guess what I'm going to do?

Garfield and Blaine entered the station through the ladies' waiting room, which I was very confused about, but apparently the B Street entrance, which is the main entrance to the station, just goes through the ladies'

waiting room.

B Street would be Constitution Avenue now.

This station was

where the

National Gallery of Art is now.

So they start, they're walking towards the main waiting room.

Guiteau.

No security or nothing.

Just like

these two guys.

There's just some attendance in the ladies' waiting room.

I think Gateau was like concealed behind a curtain or something

he came out behind the curtain he walked towards the president

and shot him and missed

you fucking crazy

the president this guy is how do you like come on man i get it's like 1880 and like the pistols aren't that good but like come on dude you've had just run up and stab him in the back just run up and just I know it looks like I'm drinking off, but I'm not.

I'm trying to stab the president.

He had considered stabbing the president.

What?

Yeah, but yeah, you stabbed the president.

Very Julius Caesar was able to pull off this assassination with a box of scraps, allegedly.

He admired the president enough that he thought, given the president's stature, if he stabbed the president, the president would immediately whip around and punch him in the face so hard he would die instantly.

Okay, my God.

He's a freaking, like, normal-style old man.

He's not like like doing craft magazine.

Like what do you

It's like no no no if I if I step I'm not he's specialized in like melee fighting.

He's gonna like whip around.

He's gonna do penchuck salat combos on all my fucking load-bearing joints.

He's gonna do a mortal combat fatality on me.

Mortal combat!

Yes.

But do you think I'm stupid?

Of course I know that a president can't be killed with like a mortal blade.

That's why it's never happened still.

You gotta shoot him.

They're not like...

They've got a damage resistant.

The president was startled and turned slightly, and Guiteau shot him again.

This time, he hit the president square in the back.

The president fell down and exclaimed, my God, what is this?

Not a great line, all things considered.

Should have done the penchux a lot.

You know, but what can you do?

Lane was in shock.

They're in the same room with Secretary of War Robert Todd Lincoln, who was completely flabbergasted.

My God, it's happened again.

Oh, come on, man.

He would also go on to be present at the McKinley assassination.

Just real bad luck around, Robert Todd Lincoln.

He started refusing invitations to presidential events.

events.

If he accepts it, it means he doesn't like you.

So after all the assassinations, he retires and he becomes a railroad CEO.

He takes over the Pullman Company.

Hi, it's Justin.

So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to.

People are annoyed by these, so let me get to the point.

We have this thing called Patreon, right?

The deal is you you give us two bucks a month and we give you an extra episode once a month.

Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks.

You get what you pay for.

It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes so you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them.

The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one.

Anyway, that's something something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month.

Uh, join at patreon.com forward slash WTYP pod.

Do it if you want, or don't.

It's your decision, and we respect that.

Back to the show,

somehow,

three,

two,

one, mark.

Good enough.

All right, let me bring you up to speed.

We've just assassinated the president of the.

The president has just been shot.

Yeah.

The president has just shot Anderson.

I don't like that.

Penny channel.

He is, I think, my favorite president, I will say, Garfield.

For a while, it was Roosevelt, like a lot of people.

And then I switched to Harrison, William Henry Harrison, not because I like him, but because I thought he maybe did the least damage because he was only present for like a month.

And then I found out about Garfield, and he's a great president

because he died, you know, a little after Harrison did, but he leaves a lot of

improbable counterfactuals for like, this is the guy who would have restarted Reconstruction, which is probably not true.

But it is something to like tell myself.

We talked

a bit about the president.

we talked a bit about,

you know,

contact, getting in contact with Billy Mahone and seeing if we could, you know, readjust or use the Readjuster Party as part of the Republican spoil system, which that coalition is sort of, you know, the one you would want if you were like, okay, we're going to, we're going to kick Reconstruction back into gear.

But yeah, his

time was cut short, unfortunately.

Yeah.

So anyway, you know, Gitteau expected to be arrested immediately, but he still panics.

And he's like, obviously, the Secret Service is going to tackle me.

What do you mean by that?

That's for counterfeiting.

And he still panics.

He runs away for the cab, and he runs right into a police officer.

And he was immediately arrested.

Just one baffled cop versus, again, Earth's weirdest boy.

I was about to say, he just assassinated the president next to the other guy who recognized him.

So I don't know if...

He's also been writing letters to him following.

Exactly.

I guess between this and Kennedy, it is crazy how if you're a beat cop, run into the guy who just assassinated the president is on the list of things that can happen to you.

Yeah.

And they said Kearney, he forgot to take the gun away.

He was so shocked.

Yes.

It's like, you're under arrest.

You keep this for a second and I'll go and get back.

Hold on one second.

And Gateau was like, no, you need this.

You're going to have to put it in a museum for me.

So anyway, unlikely he would have gotten away clean.

We'll talk more about what happened to him later.

So, all right.

The president has been shot.

We got to call a doctor.

We do.

Yeah.

I see this cool engraving here.

Oh, my God.

They blinded this child.

Colonel Sanders is there.

Yep.

Yep.

All right.

So the station attendants immediately assisted the stricken president, right?

Blaine called for a mattress to be brought.

The president was hauled upstairs to a bed on the second floor of the BNB station.

There are things you want to do with a gunshot wound, right?

You want to move that person as much as possible in the least coordinated way you can.

Yes, exactly.

To,

I assume it's like

the station master's apartment in there.

That's why there's a bed up there.

Just throw the president anywhere.

Yeah, exactly.

After the arrival of the surgeons, they all decided the president could be moved back to the White House and the real treatment could begin.

It's hard to know exactly how severe the wound was.

You know, it's a large bullet, but a small hole, and the doctors are about to do a lot of stuff.

It's a 442 revolver, like a 442 Webley, which is

yauch.

Yeah.

You know, big bullet.

Why was the hole so small?

Is just his skin was that tough and dexterous?

It's small compared to how big it's going to be.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

Gotcha.

So it's funny how, I mean, sorry, like Lincoln gets assassinated 20 years or so earlier, and they just figure, eh, that's never going to happen again.

president doesn't need security it was it was it was that one specific like civil war beef after who would want to kill a guy as inoffensive as as as uh andrew garfield look i mean you know this this continues for a long time i mean nixon goes and hangs out with the protesters you know uh bill clinton goes out on jogs and just randomly changes his route and pisses off the secret service if you're president you can just go places they can't stop you um it's just the few that choose to do so.

Yeah, they said it would be like trying to prevent a lightning strike.

Yeah.

I sort of like it better.

I like the idea that it's just a regular person and it's not this weird entity who lives in this fortress.

It's just a regular guy, you know, who walks around town and sometimes you see him.

You know, that sounds like a lot better.

At least, you know, if you live in the city,

people have like come perilously close to killing Trump just by showing up where they know he's going to be with a rifle.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's so amazing to me that Barack Obama is not that true.

Like the quality of assassins in the U.S.

was just slacking in the 2010s.

Like what was going on?

You had, you know, probably thousands, if not a million people who wanted to kill him.

They just couldn't get their shit together.

Yeah, I mean, you have to be in the right place at the right time.

I mean, two, uh, both a president and vice president have visited the block my house is on.

So I, I mean, you know, they're not that thorough.

I didn't get like interviewed by the Secret Service, but

not yet, bud.

Yeah, it's weird because they had them a little

first time printing out an entire podcast.

You imagine a judge reading this transcript.

That'd be bad.

I'm not.

Luckily, it's a transcript, it's already banned from entering the U.S.

Oh my god.

We'll see.

So we have to talk about Dr.

Dr.

Willard Bliss.

Oh, yes.

Dr.

Bliss, it's quite a name for such an incompetent name.

His first name was Doctor, and he wasn't.

Donative determinism.

He studied at Cleveland Medical College.

He moved to Washington, D.C.

He was expelled from the D.C.

Medical Society in 1853 for hawking a bunch of bullshit herbal remedies.

I mean, for them them to say it was bullshit in 1853, they had to really be bullshit.

It was like mostly arsenic.

His reputation was restored due to his medical work during the war, and he became superintendent of the Armory Square Hospital.

He was readmitted to the Medical Society, then got into homeopathy.

Seems like a

real lesson that.

Never give somebody a second chance.

Yeah.

Well, worse still.

Okay.

And what really pissed off the medical society is that he wanted to desegregate the medical society.

All right.

So it's not all bad.

Yeah.

He's like, listen,

I believe in like a rational, scientific young career, and I think people of any race can practice homeopathy.

Yes.

Well, he was very forward-thinking.

You know, he thought he understood race as a construct, but he, to a fault, because he also thought germs were not real in a construct.

To be fair, to homeopaths, though, the guy who, one of his critics who ended up being right, which we'll get to, also had trained in homeopathy.

So it was like more of an

accepted.

Thinking that germs are a social construct is, to be honest, that one friend who's too woke.

Yeah, that's.

Sometimes you got to do political science, you know?

I mean, let's look at like Lysenkoism, you know?

Yeah.

So this idea,

right?

Oh, hold on.

Nevertheless, Nevertheless,

the good Dr.

Doctor and Garfield had been acquaintances their entire lives.

So when the call went out for doctors, and he's two doctors, you got to remember, and surgeons, he managed to be one of the first on the scene and quickly got himself put in charge, right?

This idea of antiseptic medicine, right?

Sterilization of an equipment to reduce infections, so on and so forth.

This was around at the time.

In fact, I think at this point it was widely practiced in Europe.

But Dr.

Doctor, having been burned by the Society for Homeopathy, wanted nothing to do with it.

Plus, there were more pressing matters at hand.

They got to get that bullet out, right?

So he went to work with his bare, unwashed hands, probing around the wound.

That's the best.

Stick out of it.

Finger fuck the president.

God, man.

I wonder if how clean his daily routine was.

I'm hoping he just like lived in a bathtub full of soap bubbles and didn't do anything now.

He was walking around on horseshit-infested streets.

Yes.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

It's a miracle that he lived as long as he did with this spread.

It is cool that the guy's wearing a lab coat.

I don't know why he's got a red handkerchief hanging out of the left pocket, but you know.

So he got pretty aggressive with searching for the bullet, right?

While the fully conscious president, he was, they gave him a lot of morphine.

He's still moaning in pain.

Dr.

Dr.

Bliss was convinced if he could just dig a little deeper, he could find the damn thing.

He was clear enough.

I was moaning too.

There was a doctor three knuckles deep in my fucking back.

Yeah, that too.

Had a different, differing conception of back shots.

It's a new

version of blowing your back out.

It was clear enough to the other physicians that this is not producing results, but only one person spoke up.

That was Dr.

Charles Purvis, who was the only black doctor in attendance.

He was like, What the fuck are you doing, man?

And yeah, his complaints were ignored.

How dare you speak up?

It's cool that the guy ignoring him and killing the president is not racist.

Yeah.

No, I'm not ignoring you because of that.

I'm ignoring you because I'm bad as hell at my job.

I'm not racist.

I'm just an asshole.

So they return him to the White House.

Against all odds, the president starts recovering fairly quickly, right?

He's able to sit up.

He's in good spirits, right?

You know, this doesn't stop Dr.

Doctor from coming in, reopening the wound.

searching for the bullet every day

for sucking in this somewhere.

So I guess we got to get it out.

I mean, it's clearly at some point it's going to do something bad.

I don't understand this.

There's something about like blood poisoning or something.

Oh, boy.

Well,

I have read that there are many occasions when it's actually the smarter move to just leave the bullet in there.

Yes.

And like treat the wound, let it hang out, become a part of your fucking biology.

You know, you can say you have steel in your blood.

And yeah, if you just treat the wound, you can like it, it taking it out can actually cause damage.

One of the worries at this point is the idea that it's gonna like carry clothing and stuff into the body, and that's gonna like cause infection.

But

apparently, that's really like hit and miss.

The other thing about this is that, because like

expanding bullets, like, you know, like hollow point bullets, aren't really a thing yet.

So it's just in one piece, pretty much.

It's like one piece of metal that's just hanging out.

It's just a hunk of just a hunk of metal, yeah.

It also seems like an old-timey treatment from that era to just like shoot a ball of steel into somebody's pelvis, and that is also going to cure like lymphoma or something, is what they thought.

So, anyway, he's still probing for the bullet each day, making the president miserable.

He kicked out all the other doctors, including, I believe, the president's personal physician, keeps doing all these surgeries alone with only the assistance of the cabinet members' wives as nurses.

No training.

Just like qualifications, woman.

Woman.

You're a woman.

You can be a nurse.

Why not?

Florence Nightingale did it all.

Is this what Trump has been undoing?

The

mass DEI nominate, you know, deterministic female nurses.

Cheryl Hines is going to have to perform surgery soon.

It's going to be an issue in the first Trump administration when

you get Elaine Chow in.

So on the scene in just a few days, as a stroke of luck, was one Alexander Graham Bell,

who had recently devised a contraption known as a metal detector, which had proven effective on several patients for just this purpose, locating the bullet, right?

Right.

He was admitted to see the president, but dr dr bliss was very adamant about the location of the bullet

so we only allowed alexander graham bell to use the device in the location where he thought the bullet was

so which it was it was not there of course

the machine did not detect the bullet in the place where the bullet was not

but turns out there's eight other bullets just in your body.

A bunch of ones.

Recreationally shot.

Like a bunch of times they thought they'd missed him in Shiloh.

Yeah, exactly.

Actually tanking everyone.

Like, whatever, man.

Just a flesh wound.

When the machine was recalibrated, it made a weird, inconclusive sound where Dr.

Dr.

Bliss thought the bullet was.

And he was even more convinced.

We got to keep looking over there.

He tanked all the Confederate bullets because he did it.

It was the first time he was shot by someone who wasn't racist.

That was the only time he deemed to pay

any attention.

All the other times, like, I respond to that.

That's beneath me.

Sorry, blocked and reported.

So he reopened the wound, he dug deeper into the president.

His condition.

This man's wound channels alone.

His condition began began to worsen.

He started to be unable to keep food down, even liquids.

Which leads us to

feeding per rectum, as illustrated in the case of the late President Garfield and others.

And others.

When I said he was flagging fisting top, I was joking.

Yeah.

I don't like any of those words.

That order, any order.

I don't like fisting top.

I just, no, that's not for Leo.

This is an actual paper published by, you will see here, the man himself.

Beef extract.

What?

Oh, Jesus.

Yeah, let me.

Oh, no.

I'm just going to read from this for a bit here.

Dr.

Dr.

Bliss, right, he loved shoving things up people's butts.

And here was the most powerful man in the country under his care.

So it was time to shove things up his butt.

Right?

Which, to be fair, when I first read about this case, I was led to believe I was given the impression that he was putting these things up his butt, steak, fudge, et cetera, for the richness, just like the food itself would just help.

What?

Yeah, it would just help you heal just

the concentration of.

So he's just like, oh, but we eat with our butts, not with our mouths.

Also, I'm not racist.

Yeah.

I mean, to be fair to him, though, it was, though, because Garfield couldn't keep food down.

So that was like how they

had to do it.

I thought it was just, they were sticking it up.

Yeah, I thought they were just doing it for like crossing their fingers that that was going to work.

No, I mean, listen, if it comes to it, you know what?

No, I'm not going to say what I was going to say.

It's too parasocial already.

Case six, the late President Garfield was some of the time, entirely and all of the time, very largely sustained by rectal feeding from the 14th of August until his death on September 19th, 1881.

35 days of butt feeding is is too much butt feeding.

The value of this method of supplying a vast in grave disease has never been more strikingly shown

than in this instance.

He was, in all probability,

oh, in waste.

Excuse me.

I copied this from the PDF.

Never patient more closely observed by his medical attendants because the quantity and quality of the rectal diet were most carefully regulated both as to mode and time of administration.

During the progressive stage of inflammation of the pariet gland, eight days, this mode of sustenance was entirely relied upon.

He being unable to take any food by the mouth and stomach and only very small quantities of cracked ice and water, which were frequently rejected.

Something I remember hearing about really about this was that this was all very, very widely publicized at the time.

People were like,

following this at home, like in the newspaper.

Oh yeah, hey honey,

the president just got like eight ounces of beef juice shot up his asshole this morning.

What might call it the super battle, actually?

The accompanying formula for the preparation of beef extract will be substituted for receipts 9 and 14 on diet for hospital, so on and so forth.

Beef extract directions: infuse a third of a pound of fresh beef, finely minced, in 14 ounces of cold, soft water, to which a few drops of muriatic acid and a little salt, from 10 to 18 grains, have been added.

After dieting, digesting from an hour to an hour and a quarter, strain it through a sieve and wash the residue with five ounces of cold water.

Oh, so we can wash this shit.

Yeah.

Pressing it to remove all soluble matter.

The mixed liquid will contain the whole of the soluble constituents of the meat.

Oh my god.

And it may be drank cold or slightly warm.

The temperature

drank by your butt.

Temperature should not be raised above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, as at the temperature of 118 degrees Fahrenheit, a considerable portion of the albumin, a very important constituent, will be coagulated.

And it is acidos.

All right.

Yeah, roll-tide.

You can mix in some booze.

At least get me drunk while you do it.

Hold on a second.

Two ounces of beef extract.

I'm butt chugging.

Let's do this, baby.

Two drams of beef peptinoids and five drams of whiskey were given with scrupulous regularity every four hours, day and night.

No, we're not doing this four hours.

You are waking him up every four hours to be like, it's time for you guys to disinjection.

Beef and whiskey injection.

In your ass.

Which, like, all right, I can almost kind of deal with the whiskey in my ass, but like, beef, what do you even call that?

Beef tartar, we'll say, like, that's not, I don't want that in my butt, please.

Right, you're, you're, at least add some, throw some CBD gummies in there to, like, loose some things up and chill out a bit.

Danny's before poppers were invented.

Yeah.

Oh, God.

He went to the surgeons.

He went to the Lord with a lot of things, but one of them was a dilated asshole.

Well, for the first five or six days, the yolk of an egg was added to the injections, but to the judgment of the surgeons, this was the cause of annoying and offensive flatulence.

Yeah,

you're showing an egg up its ass.

What are you?

Yeah, this symptom was promptly relieved by discontinuing the egg and temporarily adding a dram of willow charcoal to the enema.

Charcoal temperature.

I'm noting also that they gave opium in order to,

like,

partly

as an additional nerve stimulant and anodyne, so painkiller, but also to secure retention.

So, like,

they shoot the beef into him and then they give him some opium to like tighten the whole thing there.

You're pulling one of those

book bags, you know, one of those

dignity of death comes to us all, man.

I, you know,

I am convinced

just by the insane cruelty of this man's death, he must have been destined to save us because this country deserves nothing but pain and misery.

Yeah.

Yeah, I was going to say, yeah, he's finally successful.

He was just some congressman, hadn't hadn't been doing, really going anywhere.

He becomes president.

He kind of defeats Conkling with the patronage stuff.

And then basically, God is like, you cannot be successful very much like George Costanza.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Most of beef asshole upon you.

Not only do you have to die, it has to be miserable and humiliating the whole time.

Oh, and by the way, all of your co-workers' wives are nursing you.

So

they're also witness to you getting the like

fucking weirbass shot up your ass.

Beef rocket.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, yeah,

that's like your secretary of state's wife helping you there.

So, you know, just really enjoy enjoy that feeling.

Fucking marinate in that.

Literally.

Much like the people are shoving up your ass.

I like that as a gun

loudly to your work colleague's wife.

Yeah, we had to take the egg yolk out of there because he was fasting too bad.

I'm a doctor, by the way.

I'm two doctor.

Shot racist.

Not racist.

It's like, oh, thank God that nice not racist doctor told me about the president's fonts.

Hold on.

Not racist to doctors.

I love that as we've gone on as a podcast, we've gone from like engineering to disasters.

Because someone sent me an email once.

I was like, you guys don't really cover like disasters in the traditional sense anymore.

And I was like, no, we do societal ones and stuff like that.

Sometimes we just do 25 minutes about butt injections.

Not injections.

I guess just,

we do what we want is the thing.

And this is...

I don't know if I can say that this is what I want, but I can't say.

I can't fucking funny.

I don't want the beef up my ass, please.

Just let me go with dignity, man.

Let's avoid this.

I mean,

if this happened again, and

I'm not saying I want this to happen, but if the president will be able to do that.

Trump with the cloak up his ass?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, you would think in the modern era that wouldn't happen, but look at his fucking head of health and human services there.

This would allow you to get a bunch of people.

Putting the Diet Coke Edima up that man.

For

putting the

funless Big Mac is going in there in one piece.

Oh, my God.

It's just a special sauce.

He's going to be dead animal.

Pumping him full of Thousand Island dressing.

Literally dead animal.

Why is President Trump in hospital with like an IV drip of like Sriracha?

sriracha yeah in our fp would be like getting roadkill do you think do you think he's ever had sriracha no kill him outright like one drop of sriracha would kill his ass he's more of a you know i know he likes the the the the filet afish a lot so maybe it'd be tartar sauce

tartar sauce and diet coke soup up this man's ass oh my god

There was a strong desire to slap a not say for work on this one.

Yeah.

There was a strong desire on the part of the physicians to discontinue the use of the stimulants, but on each occasion when the attempt was made, the pulse became more frequent and feeble, so that we were forced to resume their use.

Later in history, the case after the removal of the.

The physician is doing a lot of work here, by the way.

The other physicians were like, stop butt feeding him, man.

And he was like, no,

I'm drinking.

I have to do this.

I'm the only one here who's two doctors, and I'm the one mincing up this beef.

I'm sorry.

I'm two doctors and you're only three doctors.

We don't even have Warren here.

Hook up the butt pipe.

I would love to know what my wife thinks of me screaming, hook up the butt pipe.

This is up there with the fucking

Japan Airlines for me.

I think the phrase hook up the butt pipe is going to enter my Electricon.

I wonder whose job that was.

Oh, like probably like the Secretary of War's wife.

Yeah, he has to place the pipe in his

Robert Todd Lincoln just like, man, I'm feeling pretty traumatized by this assassination.

And then his wife comes home and is like, buddy, you're telling me

I'm having to like map this man's arms pipes.

Please, please stop hooking up the butt pipe.

We'll talk about this in the next slide, but I will point out this paragraph here.

The quantities carefully measured were prepared at the dispensary of the Surgeon General of the United States of America by assistant

apothecary W.F.

Cruiser, you know, in accordance with the following formula.

After the removal of the president to Elberon, Mrs.

Garfield herself prepared it.

Oh, come on.

That's a real stage of intimacy to be broaching with your wife in your like dying days to be like, hey, you think we can try and butt stuff?

And it's like...

We're going out like kings, man.

We're going out like dead ass fucking kings, baby.

Poor Lucretia.

Poor Creese.

Pour it off a crease.

Yeah, yeah.

Poor

a real drink, not the solution.

She's like,

how did this normal style man die?

Well, he was getting a lot of stuff shot up his ass by a woman named Lucretia.

Well, no, Dr.

Doctor still did the actual shooting up the ass.

I bet he did.

He seemed to like it.

Yeah.

Okay.

So it's still really fucking hot in Washington, D.C., right?

Oh, no.

It's hot beef and whiskey up my ass?

Yes.

In summer.

In summer in D.C., there's this sort of the

a bunch of military engineers actually managed to improvise a sort of shitty late Victorian air conditioner, which was like, all right,

I assume a steam-powered fan that blew air over a block of ice.

Jesus.

Yeah.

So the heat in DC in August, the fucking pea soup month, it really exposes the class structure of the region because

the rich go to Maine, the middle class goes to Delaware, and then anyone who's below that just finds a meat.

Yeah, it's

where the butt meat is.

It's where the butt meat is kept.

One time I was cleaning the kitchen with Rods,

and I said, Do we have bleach?

And he handed me a bottle of bleach and then a bottle of pneumonia.

And I said, I keep them next to each other in case we need a quick way out.

And I think at some point

I would rather just drink the butt bleach and have it be over with.

Yeah.

The president was still ailing.

Dr.

Doctor was still fumbling around in his back to find the bullet in a place where the bullet wasn't.

By July 23rd, he had this massive abscess, which was oozing pus.

They drained it.

Surely at some point,

you run out of back in that area and you look elsewhere.

Like,

I mean, you're fisting a crater at this point.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it was.

It was a very large wound at this point.

Oh, my God.

It was much larger than when it had started.

Oh, my God.

Now,

when they drained the abscess, he started to improve, right?

The president even took a brief cabinet meeting, but he continued to grow more and more feeble, right?

He had 104-degree fever.

His weight had gone from 210 pounds to 130.

Jesus, he only made it this long because of the like vogue for fat guys that they had.

Like, they were kind of right when they were like, oh, this president's strong as an ox.

He only eats beef and he's like 250 pounds.

You know, that's my president.

I wonder wonder who's running the show at this point because Chester Arthur, I mean, vice presidents at this point are pretty inconsequential anyway, but he's really not, you know, he didn't want to have the job.

So like, who's, who's running the country?

He's only taking one cabinet meeting.

I mean, I guess President's.

Dr.

Dr.

Budston.

Yeah.

So yeah, they would take the summers off.

They also had a thing in the whole 1800s, the Congress really didn't meet the president's first year.

So they would basically have a year of just doing not much.

At one point, like Andrew Jackson, they just get involved in a petty

thing called the Petticoat Affair.

And they're just fighting about the cabinet's wives.

Yeah.

So, like, they really, it's not that important of a time, luckily.

But yeah, they don't solve it.

And then later, Woodrow Wilson's wife is going to have to run the country when he's sick.

And it was traditional for a long time until the 1950s.

You just didn't do government in the summer.

There was no government in the summer.

It's too hot.

Yeah, exactly.

America was only like a sort of four-year-round nation with air conditioning.

There There is an old saying in the D.C.

area that, you know, America started to decline when they air conditioned the Capitol.

One of the things I love about you is you'll just pull out random facts about D.C.

I guess you're from there, but it just makes me so happy.

Yeah.

I lived in, well, I lived in Northern Virginia, but I was frequently in a horrible helicopter city.

Yeah.

It's, I lived in, yeah, Arlingtron, as I call it, till I was 12.

And

you get used to just yelling at the

presidential helicopter.

It's like six or seven times a day.

It's different fucking naval.

Oh, the motorcades.

I used to live, I've said this, next to a hospital with a helipad that wasn't medevac, and I just dreamed ever since I was a little boy of having a fucking Stinger missile that I could just shoot down the fucking medevac.

Like three in the morning, it's like, come on, man.

You can, like, they're dead.

All right, just let it go.

All right.

What's next for President Butt stuff?

What's President Butt stuff?

Sorry.

What had started as a three-inch bullet hole was now a monstrous 20-inch gash.

What?

Oh, my God.

Clearly infected.

The president was bedridden.

He was septic.

He was all kinds of crap.

Right?

By September, the heat still hadn't given out.

They decided, all right, we got to move the president north.

To Maine, I hope.

To Long Branch, New Jersey.

What a cruel place to die.

Yeah.

A special railroad car was repaired to move him to Long Branch, New Jersey, technically the unincorporated community of Elberon.

That's where the really, really expensive houses are up there.

To a place called Franklin Cottage.

And that's Franklin spelled in the worst way I've seen.

P-H-L.

Spelled like Mormon eldest daughter.

Franklin, but.

F-R-A-N-C-K-L-Y-N Franklin.

This was a mansion by the sea owned by industrialist Charles Gilbert Franklin, who earned his money the old-fashioned way by

inheriting it from his grandfather, Samuel Cunard.

I mean, that is pretty old-fashioned.

Hard to argue with.

They chartered a special train, and they even built a temporary branch line to to the mansion to drop the president off at the door.

That's cool.

Yeah, at the door.

So now when he suffered horrible invasive medical procedures,

this is fetish stuff, man.

Yeah.

Yeah, you would think most doctors would look at, you know, we have a bullet hole.

And it's becoming a gash.

Maybe we should rethink because the object is to make the hole smaller and have it heal and not just have it be your entire body as just one gaping wound.

They call it internal medicine because it's supposed to stay inside of you.

Yes.

Acting president butt stuff, not your friend.

He's doing butt stuff and back stuff.

Oh, I don't like butt and back stuff.

Yeah, but stuff.

One or the other, man.

At this point, the president can't even sit up.

He's still being fed rectally.

So indignant.

He begins to suffer from pneumonia and hypertension.

Just shoot him.

He's got sepsis.

That solves the problem.

On September 18th, he complained of a great pain in his chest, and he couldn't even lift a glass of water.

At 10.15 that evening, he asked his chief of staff, General David Swame, for a glass of water.

Then he had another enormous attack of pain in his chest.

He cried out, Oh, Swame, can't you stop this?

And he fell unconscious.

Swame immediately called for Dr.

Doctor.

Why?

Bringing the crash car, which is just a big stew pot and a long hose.

Yeah.

And presumably, yeah, after some more rectal feeding attempts, Krug unable to revive the president.

They're shooting up stuff.

They don't even know what it is.

They've got some Zabalion in there.

It's wild.

He was pronounced dead at 10.30 that evening.

Thank God.

Chester A.

Arthur took the oath of office the following day.

Dude, if you kept me alive, 45 days would be texted.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

You mean this crazy person who is going to functionally kill me with like beef animas?

Yeah.

And he is going to split my back apart with his bare hands.

I don't over the course of several months.

I don't like that one of our presidents died.

It does always trust me that they are known for having illegible handwriting, and that's just like an accepted thing.

Where doctors' notes are very important, we should be demanding that they get better penmanship, even if it's not printing your letters.

Are you writing some shit about how you want to fist fuck my back, you sick freak?

I got to tell you.

President died for butt-chucking.

Butt chugging is such an indignant way to go.

Yeah.

He could have been a great president.

Alas.

I remember I tweeted once because I was doing, I was writing Katrina.

I promise it's coming.

And I was just like talking about the indignity of death from the book One Dead in the Attic.

Go read it.

And the OnlyFans botch showed up, and I was just like, come on, man, let this poor, poor guy who died alone in his attic have a little peace in the afterlife.

Yeah.

Wow.

You know who else had a very public death?

Yes.

Well,

a guy who thought he might have been Jesus.

Yes.

What happens to get out?

He is going to the Lordy.

She is so glad.

After his arrest, he was taken to the jail by one Lieutenant Ekloff.

And only once he was at the police station did they remember to disarm him.

Right.

Fucking idiot.

Meanwhile, his assassination is working in slow motion.

A man named Mr.

McElfrish asked what political party he belonged to, and the reply was, I am the stalwart of the stalwarts.

I have shot Garfield to make Arthur.

I have short Garfield.

Oh, that's not good.

That's not good.

Damn.

Got poop.

This feces, it seeps into our brains and our brains.

Goalfields.

I have shot Garfield to make Arthur president.

What are you?

He's like a grind set guy now.

Guys got to be getting these patriot jobs.

You have to be capping the president and be completely public and transparent about it, too.

That's going to make sense.

It's got to be money mindset.

I bet this guy's not even ambassador to shit.

Yeah, exactly.

Now,

Guicho is informed,

you know, I'm a detective.

And Guicho said, all right, give me a room in the third story, and I will arrange with General Sherman to make you chief of police.

How's this cow for him?

Listen, you've got to start working on the patronage stuff from day one.

Exactly, exactly.

And this was sort of generally what he thought was going to happen.

It's like, damn, I'm going to get all those patronage jobs now.

I'm going to be able to distribute them, right?

We brought it back the spoil system, boys.

It's good to have dreams, boys.

Is it kind of the logic of like when you go to prison, you beat up the biggest guy?

Yeah, the biggest guy in the United States.

The president of the United States.

He took prison planet very literally.

But since Gouteau hadn't immediately killed the president, they charged him with attempted murder, but he was finally indicted on regular murder October 14th, right?

Yeah, he finally got over the line.

Yeah.

And really, he doesn't deserve the credit.

That was all Dr.

Downey.

Which is Dr.

Butcher.

and that is a defense Gouteau made in court.

I think a pretty good thing.

He was made to do it.

Because there were people saying to Bliss, like, stop, like, do, you know, wash things.

Don't do it this way.

And he was.

Yeah.

And he was a very stubborn man, as was Garfield.

He was, he felt a loyalty to Dr.

Buttchug for whatever reason, and they dug their own grave.

I think when you're like, you're up to the elbow and the president kind of like puppeteering like Sesame Street.

Oh, yeah.

That's like a new intervening act.

That's telling the president of the United States, I'm going to make you a slutty little curve.

It's not how you want to go out.

That's sunk cost fallacy in the sense that the doctor's fist is sunk into your back.

I think Bliss had done, like, been in charge of something in the Civil War, like taking care of soldiers.

But like famously in the Civil War, two-thirds of the soldiers died of disease.

so they weren't doing a great job back then either.

Yeah, I mean, this guy was in charge of a whole hospital, and presumably he was doing the same treatment on like thousands.

19-year-olds,

the limiting factor would be like he's only got two arms.

Yeah, that's the point.

And there's only 24 hours in a day, so assuming that they call me 48 Fisker, baby.

Oh, shit, this guy is straddling two beds,

an arm in each patient.

Don't let that guy heal naturally.

Stick your fist in there right now.

Fuck me.

Thank God he wasn't good at delegating.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, he was really good because he was the only one who didn't really do anything at the hospital.

He could only operate on a couple of patients.

It's hard when you're trying to make human ventriloquist dummies, you know?

We have the highest survival rate in the entire north because we don't really do anything.

We try not to backfist our patients, yes.

So here we are.

We're at the trial of the century, right?

He pleads not guilty by reason of temporary insanity.

That's fair.

That's fair.

Well, when the expert witnesses were brought in by the defense, this was amended to permanent insanity.

Good enough.

You know,

this was clearly a very mentally disturbed man, but the court wasn't hacking it.

I think he deserves his own designation, like Gateau.

You've heard of sickle mode.

Now get ready for assassinating the president with some help from Backfist Doctor.

Yeah.

There's lots of antics at this trial, right?

Gateau, you know, he swore and insulted at the judge.

He testified in the form of epic poems.

He traded notes asking for legal advice from the audience.

Oh, you get your money's worth in the public gallery for this.

You're sitting in the front row.

You get handed a note by the defense, Charles Gatteau, that just says, Do you like

it?

It's like, oh, I'm so fucked.

What do I do?

As we mentioned, probably the best argument was that he hadn't killed Garfield that his doctors did, which is, again, true, but beside the point, in a case of first-degree murder, throughout all of it, he was sure he would be exonerated, right?

He started making plans for a lecture tour and then a presidential run himself.

He had no idea how unpopular he was.

Everyone hated him.

People were like spitting at him when he was being brought up and down the street in, you know, the police carriage.

You know, he was, people were screaming at him.

People were giving him, you know, rude gestures, so on and so forth.

He thought he was doing great.

And,

you know, he, it turns out there's only so much self-affirmation can do because he was found guilty on January 25th, 1882, and sentenced to hang.

So the power of positive thinking only gets you that far.

Yeah, exactly.

He had written his own autobiography from jail, and he included in it that he wanted to find a young Christian lady under 30.

So he was ready.

Yes.

It's good to have dreams, my guy.

I think

worse than writing it, he dictated it to a New York Herald.

Can you imagine being that tore son of a bitch having to listen to that shit be dictated?

Also, two people in the public almost shot at him.

Like, attempted to shoot him.

Yes.

And the whole time, bullets are bouncing off the patty wagon.

He's like, I'm winning them over.

I think I've got him.

Oh, you son of a bitch.

I think we've got this.

Wow, they're throwing rice like it's a wedding.

They're just really big grains.

He was still throwing tantrums all the way to the gallows.

He started demanding a pardon from Chester A.

Arthur because.

Watch out.

He might shoot him.

Listen, I've increased your salary.

Come on.

And he was writing more terrible poetry.

Oh, God.

I used to do that in high school.

That scrub for the earth, that guy.

He was hanged on June 30th, 1882.

Finally.

Danced up the steps.

He waves at the beach

stage in the Songtime musical Assassins.

There's not really good video of it, but you can see somebody snuck in a like...

um sort of like camcorder to the like original broadway uh sort of like cast with uh Neil Patrick Harris.

And yeah, it's really, really good.

He shakes the hand of the executioner and he takes a moment to read to the crown of the crowd the last of his truly awful poems, I am going to the lordy.

I am going to the lordy.

I am so glad.

He believes he's finally unified the Republican Party and saved the country.

Sure.

And he dies thinking that.

That's good to have,

man.

He was played by Dennis O'Hare in the Broadway version.

It was really good.

He had asked to have an orchestra there so he could sing the poem.

They do agree to.

They let him, as he finishes the poem, and he drops the paper, and that's when they hang him.

So they let him kind of stage manage his own hanging, which is kind of fun.

It's kind of fun.

Live and die, a theater kid.

I don't know.

You know, based on his performance at The Sex Cult, I mean, mean, theater kids, you know, they get laid a little bit more than that.

Come on.

More than poets.

What was his roses are red?

Violets are blue.

You get shot in the pelvis.

And what do you do?

You eat where you poo.

Yeah.

Also butt fisting.

Yes.

Chester A.

Arthur, ironically, finally does away with the beloved spoil system.

He kills it entirely.

It's gone.

You can still get a sort of like ambassadorship or a consulship based on just like donating a lot to the presidential candidate who wins.

So

that was really the ingredient he was missing.

Yeah,

I think after this, everyone has to look at the spoil system and say,

if it's going to get one of these guys going crazy, we may have to.

We may have to dump this one, guys.

I don't think we can do this anymore.

Because Arthur was a stalwart.

He was very in favor of the spoil system.

And he's like,

yeah,

yeah, we're going to have to get rid of this.

It is funny to me that he, in a way, Gateau was somewhat ideologically driven, but for the spoils system, like kind of the opposite of Luigi.

Instead of like trying to do away with this.

flawed corrupt system it's like no it needs to work on my behalf and this is a good for humanity

there was thought that there was a there was a thought that Arthur and Conkling, they were just going to like rob the entire country, basically that they were going to be what Musk and Trump are now.

And people were worried, but then Arthur finds a conscience.

Yes.

But I mean, the thing here is, it's like the assassination sort of, it weakens the Republican Party.

I mean, Garfield is highly respected for the remainder of the term and then sort of forgotten about.

Chester A.

Arthur's health starts failing him towards the end of the term.

He's like, I'm not doing so great.

My

presidency has not been super popular.

He tries to sort of continue some of James Garfield's policies, notably trying to distribute patronage in Virginia through the Readjust Your Party, but he just doesn't have it in him to like really follow through here.

You know, he does not seek the nomination for second term.

He has not unified the party because he's still, you know, he's got that stalwart on him and a lot of the party has moved a different way.

So they put up James G.

Blaine in 1884.

And Blaine loses to Grover Cleveland, who proceeds to destroy what little remained of Southern Republicanism and the fledgling Readjuster Party in Virginia.

And all of a sudden, we got...

Bearded presidents.

And from then on, you know, after that, the deluge.

Exactly.

Well, that's when we get poll taxes and literary test, literacy tests and segregation.

All this stuff comes in really quickly.

That was like the final, the end

of Reconstruction was

because of one mustachio.

One weird guy.

Yeah.

Could have had something great, and we didn't.

That's gone very poorly.

It's gone poorly.

I really enjoyed this one.

Let's do more presidential assassinations.

As a a subject for the podcast to discuss.

Go get myself

in the middle of saying it.

It's funny.

They are disasters if they either succeed or they fail, and both are disasters in a sense.

Yeah.

Is this three-thirds of your time, Nova?

Yes, it is.

What have we learned?

Get a real doctor, maybe.

Yeah,

I would say

if your friend is a doctor who's not very good,

get another doctor.

A general rule with professional services, don't hire your good friend.

No, because then you're going to be put in a situation where

you know they're fucking it up.

They're like fist deep in your back, and you've got to be like, no, this is...

Great, probably.

I mean, I'm not a doctor.

You're a doctor.

So, like, I'm just going to just let you do whatever.

Yeah.

I do think this probably helped medicine in the long run.

Like, they learned from this.

This did help germ theory become more accepted because it was kind of a fringe thing at first.

Yeah.

I mean, it had been widely accepted in Europe at this point, but in America, no, not

really.

You know, it's, it's very...

This is one of the worst ways I think anyone has died ever this this is like up there with like the the the guy who got stuck upside down in the cave i mean you know

it's it's one of the worst ways someone with like every other physical comfort could die like he died with a lot of like money and resources and like a lot of fucking really nice pillows i assume yeah but also in agony and getting like um kind of like beef wellington shoved directly into his duodenum So more of a liquidy Salisbury steak.

We have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third.

If anyone wants to go through it today, I don't know.

It's a little late.

All right.

We'll skip it and we'll do this next episode.

Our next episode will be Odd Chernobyl.

Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

Yes.

I am at Anders Lee here on social media.

Also on the Pod Damn America podcast is the name of the podcast that I'm on with Jake Flores.

Check that out.

We just moved to YouTube.

We're also doing regular podcast feed, Patreon, and The Vanquished, which I do with Fred.

You can find that on YouTube as well.

We record everything

with video.

Some of it is in person.

We've got a lot of great ups there about with yourselves on the Prohibition Party, Marco Rubio, Michael Dekakis, Jesse Jackson, a whole lot of folks.

So check that out.

It's called The Vanquished.

Exciting.

I like the Vanquished podcast.

It's a good one.

Again, Liam and I have been on there.

I have to plug the worst of all possible worlds.

I was on there just recently.

I went up to New York City and everything to go record with them.

By the way, I love going up to New York City to record podcasts.

None of you people come to Philadelphia, so I have to go up there.

So, you know,

we recorded an episode on the film Falling Down.

It's a film about being an engineer who's pissed off.

It's great.

And then you walk home in a straight line.

Go listen to that one.

Nova, any commercials?

No.

Well, no gods, no mayors.com.

It's a podcast about mayors.

It's a good time.

10,000 losses.

All right, we're done.

What is the president, if not a mayor of the United States of America?

Basically, the mayor of Five Five.

Everybody hits stop on your recordings.