AUGMENTED UNREALITY

Psssssst.  Can we interest you in a playful yet intellectually stimulating study of Republican lying from 2003 to 2026?  We know the relentless news cycle serves  your daily dose of Republican lies, albeit against your will. But kick back, relax and allow us to demystify right wing truthiness. Honestly. 

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YWC Episode 4 Season 5 

Augmented Unreality 

Lisa: This is the Yes We Canada Podcast, the progressives guide to getting the fuck out, this episode? Augmented Unreality.  And now please welcome, your host, medium rock star, public intellectual …wait Pi, 

Lisa: When did he start getting billing in the opening?
 
 

Pi: He just renegotiated his contract.

Lisa: I thought this was an independent podcast.  Who’d he negotiate his contract with?

Pi: Himself. He gave himself billing… from himself.

Lisa: Ok, whatever – can you pick me up at medium rock star?

Pi: Sure thing, just read it all …. I’ll edit it later.

Lisa: And now… please welcome, your host, medium rock star, public intellectual 

Matt Zimbel

MZ: Why thank you Lisa, wow…love the new billing – where did that come from?  Very classy …ok let’s do this 

 …President George W. Bush junior had nick names for everyone in his oval circle.  You know how it rolls right, the scions of the old money coastal elite don’t have to do the dishes or clean their rooms so they have lots of time on their hands for pranks, hijinks and, well bestowing nicknames…what a hoot! 

Tickety-boo!

Bush’s principal presidential advisor and deputy chief of staff, Karl Rove was nicknamed… um, Turd Blossom. 

I’ll let that um sink in.

Turd blossom. 

A Texas flower so durable that it grows in cow shit.  Pi, want to have a crack at that one?

MZ: Shitty work my friend. Shitty work.

Bush called Rove Turd Blossom because Rove was apparently brilliant at taking a troubling ie:  shitty situation and turning it around.  

Allowing the president to relax and take time to um, smell the… blossoms. 

Bush:  ah Karen, honey, get Turd Blossom on the line, will ya?

Now here’s why this is important. These are dark times and leftist podcasters such as myself have been pummeled for repeatedly asking this question (whines) “how did we get here?” 

How did we get to the place where science no longer matters, where the constitution is optional where congressional subpoenas now come with an RSVP. 

 All this …while your government is telling you that what you are seeing on TV… is not what you are seeing on TV. 

How did we get here?

Bare with me, because I’m going to go full  “quasi-intellectual” on you here, but just for a hot minute. 

In 2004 the American journalist Ron Suskind reported that an unnamed senior White House aide told him that the liberal media was living in what the Bush Administration called the, quote “reality-based community” - end quote …a community made up of people who, quote, “believe that solutions emerge from judicious study of discernible reality. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' the aide continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you journalists are studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'. End quote.

And may I just say, WDM… WTF.

That quote, on deep background, reportedly came directly from the mouth of Turd Blossom. 

MZ: Pi, no, we’re good we don’t need to hear that again.

So, lets’ fast forward from 2004 to 2017.

It’s a warm January day in Washington and Kelly Ann Conway, the first woman to ever chair a winning presidential campaign has just been installed as a senior counsellor to President Trump. Kelly Ann is  doing a double ender on NBC’s show Meet The Press from the south lawn of the White House.  In the background the trees are bare, but the grass is green and the white columns of the people’s house look majestic as the wind blows gently through Conway’s bleached blond power do. She’s sporting a short sleeved décolleté black top adorned with a presidential gold seal the size of a mason jar lid.  Too big to be a brooch, too small to be a badge – it must be the newly minted presidential brodge. 

Let me set the table.

Pi: Sorry, I think you just set the table…we’re at the White House, it’s a warm January day, Kelly Ann’s doing a media hit, how much more table do we need set… honestly, I think you’re good.

MZ. Good point Pi.

It’s just two days into the first Trump administration as Kelly Ann glares defiantly at the camera why?  Because she’s here to clean up a mess…

Thank you Pi.

You see, just the day before, the very first day of the new administration - the newly appointed Press Secretary, Shawn Spicer declared in his first statement issued to the press pool, that Trump’s inauguration “had been the most watched presidential inauguration in history”. 

Come on Kelly you can spin this – you’re a pro…whip out your talking points girl, walk back some shit! you can do this! come on girl ...you got this!

Oh, Kelly, so close sweetie – You too can create your own augmented unreality. 

Now let’s “fact” forward again from 2017 to 2026. 

Same lawn, different Trump Counsellor. 

That’s Stephen Miller, a nice Jewish boy from a liberal family in southern California, who hates  immigrants. And I’ll explain why his immigrant hating is kind of adorable …in a sec – but first let’s let the man spew a little augmented unreality for his American exceptionalism audience, shall we?  

Oh my God, there is nothing like the bracing feeling of full-throated American eminence with a hardy glug of exceptionalism to make you feel alive! Baby!

I’m pretty sure that in diplomat university they don’t teach you the phrase:

 Miller ‘damn straight” 

 Stevie, I think the diplomatic language is more like, “I couldn’t agree more” or perhaps “indeed” or “precisely”. People!  can I get a “precisely?”

But exceptionalism aside, heehee… you don’t have to be a public intellectual to see the direct line from Karl Rove’s:  

MZ: 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. We're history's actors...and all of you, will be left to just study what we do'

To Stephen Miller’s:  

We live in the real world, a world that is governed by strength -to – that is governed by power. 

Yep, it’s a short ride in a clown car between those two points.

Pssstt…Do you want to hear some Canadian exceptionalism? Of course, you do!  But first a warning, it’s a kinder, gentler kind of exceptionalism 

What were you expecting? – we’re Canadians…we’re a middle power, we don’t do exceptionalism, our jam is politeness, inclusive modesty and speaking quietly while carrying a …”middle” sized stick.

That’s curling, and the middle sized stick is a broom and that’s about as excited as a Canadian gets in international circles. 

Sweeping the ICE, just like Minneapolis did. Respect from the north y’all!

Ok I promised you guys we’d circle back to Stephen Miller.

Guys, I read about scum bags, so you don’t have to…a little respect please. 

Thank you.

As an amateur, freelance pundit, it is my esteemed view that right now there are two white men working for an orange man who are wielding more power in America than any cabinet secretary, congressperson or judge.  In fact, while MOTUS, Moron of the United States, is focused on building a ballroom, sticking gold doohickies all over the oval and bumming 400 million dollar jets off the Qataris for his personal use, these two angry white nationalist men are overseeing the ICE shootings of American citizens in the streets and the evisceration of the constitution. 

The first is Russell Vought – he’s been called the shadow president, he’s also been called a white Christian nationalist and he’s the head of the Office of Budget and Management.  Sexy! He’s one of the chief architects of the Heritage Foundation’s fascist Blueprint for Trumps second term called Project 2025. 

Now I’m sure you know this already, but Project 2025 was a plan put forward by the far right Heritage Foundation written while Trump was in Mara Loco for 4 years, stuffing top secret Pentagon Invasion plans into carboard boxes to be safely stored next to toilets in guest rooms.

Strip away the Project 2025’s fascist pleasantries and the message was; “Trump you fucking unfocused moron, you wasted your first term with palace infighting and by being bossed around by the deep state, in an failed effort to make you look presidential.  Fuck that shit, for the second term, here’s our agenda and the play book on how to get rid of the deep state and rule like a real right wing white Christian nationalist autocrat. And if you’re a good boy we’ll let you attack Venezuela and Iran. 

Boom done.

Now, we might study Russell Vought a little later if I don’t get bored by all this talk about angry white men …but right now we’re going to pivot to Stephen Miller – deputy chief of staff for policy and senior counsellor to MOTUS.  Immigration is his jam and he is highly skilled at separating brown families from their children, deporting immigrants including a few American citizens to foreign jails in countries that are not their birthlands, and 

Shooting Americans citizens while exercising their constitutional first amendment rights who protest these activities, Shooting them …dead in the streets. 

Well Stevie’s a 41year old, nice Jewish boy as we mentioned, he was raised in a liberal family in southern California. His mother’s father, his grandpa, was a Jewish Russian immigrant who arrived in the US in 1903 with $8 dollars in his pockets after fleeing the Russian Pogroms.

Pi: eight dollars??????  In 1903?  In today’s money that’s $300 bucks, American, – the man was a mogul! 

Ok “fact forward” to today:  Permit me to speak directly to Stevie Miller – under your immigration laws, your maternal grandfather would not have been allowed in the US today. And if he had remained in his village of Antopol, in what is now Belarus, he would have very likely been killed by the Nazis a few years later because only 7 of the 2000 Jews in Antopol survived WW2. 

Now, I’m no geneticist but…no grandpa, no mama, no Stevie!

And just to bust a mighty hole in your anti- immigrant balloon, your grandpa, came to America with nothing, 

Pi: s’cuse me $300 dollars ain’t nothing when you work on this show!

He sold rags on the street, then got a cart and sold rags from the cart then got a store and upgraded the rags to clothes and sold clothes from the store and then got a bunch of stores and eventually employed over 1000 Americans.  Americans who bought homes, fed their families and paid taxes. 

Thanks to your immigrant grandpa your ma had the resources to go to Columbia and become a social worker to help Americans in her community to live better lives… How am I doing Stevie, anything resonating with you here?  No? Ok.

Stevie you might ask how we came to know so much about your family history…well, it’s cuz your Uncle told me. Yep, I’m sure you’d call it Trump Derangement Syndrome, but your uncle, David Glosser, a clinical neuroscientist living in Pennsylvania, wrote a hit piece in Politico during the first Trump administration calling you out for separating immigrant children from their families and ignoring your own genetic path towards being born a free American. 

23 and Me, Stevie, 23 and you!

Ok my Yes We Canadians – I need to you stop and think about this for a second…let’s make this Uncle writes hit piece personal…Let’s say you are so pissed at your nephew, the son of your sister!  that you write a hatchet job and publish it nationally and then do a wack of interviews on TV to promote the article. Oh, man that has to fuck up Thanksgiving dinner.

But this is not a one and done…it seems that Trump Derangement Syndrome is so prevalent amongst family members associated with this administration that it has become a publishing cottage industry. Mary Trump, Donald’s niece, a PhD psychologist, wrote a book about her uncle Donny called “Too Much and Never Enough”. The Trump family tried to get a restraining order to stop the book’s publication, but they were denied and on its first week of release it sold one million 350 thousand copies… going directly from the warehouse to the top of the New York Times best sellers list, where it stayed for weeks!    Now, that has got to fuck up family Xmas dinner

Oh man, that’s nothing, I got one here that will fuck up Thanksgiving dinner, Xmas dinner and Easter brunch.  Fearing that the Trump family could harm her, Mary Trump and once again she’s Donald’s older brother’s daughter ie:  Donald’s niece, (family trees are a lot to manage), surreptitiously recorded 15 hours of conversations she had with her aunt Mary Anne Trump Barry, that’s ah Donald’s eldest sister, now late sister. Now, Mary Ann Trump Barry was not just any old sister – she was a federal judge on the 3rd Circuit court of Appeals and it can be said, without using an ounce of augmented reality that she was not a huge fan of her younger brother, your current president…

"All he wants to do is appeal to his base. He has no principles. None. His goddamned tweeting and lying... oh my god. I'm talking too freely, but you know. The change of stories. The lack of preparation. 

MZ: oh that one has to sting – the lack of preparation – you just called your brother unprofessional. Ouch!

SFX Mary Anne Trump Barry:  The lying. Holy shit. [...] It's the phoniness of it all. It's the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel."[8] 

MZ: She added that he did not read books and had someone take the college entrance exam in his place.[8] In the recordings, Barry also criticized the first Trump administration's controversial family separation policy for deported migrants, and the bankruptcies of her brother's businesses, adding that "you can't trust him" 

MZ:  um, tighter than a ducks ass?   Pi, I don’t suppose you’d like to take a crack at the… tighter than a duck’s ass would ya?

Pi:  It would be my pleasure.

MZ: Beautiful Pi, I think that’s the cue we will submit to secure you, once and for all, the nomination for best podcast audio engineer of the year. Or who knows, maybe the Nobel Peace Prize.  I’m on it.

Trump Clip: “No one should get the Nobel more than me”.

MZ; Shut up Motus. 

Ok, so as you can hear, this podcast which began just moments ago, as an elegant morsel of journalism has descended into tabloid gutter trash detailing the family feuds of the rich and powerful as well as the G-force of mallards sphincter muscles.  I hope you’re not driving while listening because when it’s over you’re gonna need a shower. 

Please note, it’s not that I set out to soil you…I’m just a reporter, a fair and unbalanced reporter. 

And may I just quickly point out that the President of the United States is married to an immigrant. And the Vice President of the United States is married to a (beat) vegetarian.

But how did we get here…

Shut up…That’s not a reporter, that’s a millennial podcaster. 

Here’s how we got here… here’s the moment at a glamourous Washington DC White House Correspondents Banquet dinner in 2015 that Donald J. Trump said, “fuck it, I’m running for president”. 

Obama Clip:  White House Correspondents Dinner

Yeah, thanks Obama!  

The point of the pod is this …you see now how much easier it was for George W. Bush to be a cruel, right wing conservative exceptionalist, willing to kill a half million innocent Iraqi citizens, because he created the augmented unreality that weapons of mass destruction were a threat to the United States. 

You see how much fun it is to create your own augmented unreality when your inauguration attendance numbers fall far short of Obama’s?  

Sorry Donny, the black dude with the birth certificate and the actual Nobel Peace Prize, the guy who teased you at the White House Correspondents dinner had the most watched presidential inauguration in the history of the world.  And that hasta hurt.

You see how thrilling it is to send 3000 camo clad goons into Minneapolis to shoot and kill American Citizens in the street based on the augmented reality you created by falsely claiming that immigrants are murders, rapists and pet eating mental cases. 

And Republicans, my lap dogs, just a word to you spineless besuited morons, you made a choice, you could have created a pathway to citizenship… instead you bought into a mentally deranged orange man’s augmented unreality…

The same augmented unreality that shipped off a US Naval carrier group to the middle east, when your  son in law and real estate buddy from New Yawk, couldn’t conclude a deal with Iran, because you ripped up the Iran Nuclear arms treaty agreement that the black guy signed 2015.

You could have kept negotiating with Iran and 175 young girls going to school in Minab, Iran would still be alive today…MOTUS I believe you have two daughters, and four granddaughters …am I right about that?

No need for science, no need for data, no need for truth, no need for the principals set out by the founding fathers in the constitution, no need for the rules based international order and Stevie? no need for 23 and me. 

Republicans have created their very own, fact free, augmented unreality… and all of us?  We’re just are living in it.

And for this… we can thank… the father of augmented unreality …a political consultant from Texas, Karl Rove, also known as Turd Blossom. 

Theme

Thanks for listening to Yes We Canada, our sound designer, engineer and barnyard audiologist is Pi Salin Cutler. Our theme was written by Doug Wilde and Matt Zimbel and performed by Manteca from the recording Monday Night at the Mensa Disco. My name is Lisa Evans and I’m your announcer.

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Thanks for listening… until next time!