- Bourgie, bourgie, bourgie.
America, you and me have seen some shit this last year.
And, you know what,
I mean that both figuratively and literally.
Back in May you ate too much at Chili's one time
and you looked in the bowl afterwards,
and there's never been an election like this.
There's never been a reason to think
there would ever be an election like this.
Is this an election, or is this dancer?
Or is this an elaborate simulation that none of us opted
into and have no way of getting out of?
Is this the Matrix?
Is this Tron?
Is this Sword Art Online,
but without the weird incesty stuff?
Oh, wait, there's weird incesty stuff, sorry.
I forgot.
Why is it the time that everybody understands
that establishment in politics are the mechanism by which
the status quo, which is not beneficial for anyone
but the richest of the rich, is perpetuated,
is the election where we're presented
with a significantly worse alternative?
You know what?
All these Transformers movies have sucked.
I'm not gonna go see another one.
This is the last straw.
Well, what movie do you wanna go see, man?
You know what, imaginary Tommy Chong,
let's go see Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Four minutes into the film.
Fuck!
So, here we are, Teenage Mutant Ninja,
I mean, the worst election ever.
Now, I'm not gonna tell you you have a moral obligation
to do the same thing that I'm doing, because you don't,
but I'm also the one who gets to be very
smug when everything goes to hell,
which, by the way, will be of very little consolation.
Anyhoo.
In this corner, we have the challenger.
Donald
Justice
Trump!
(gagging)
And, in this corner, we have the defending champion
by virtue of being an incumbent political party,
Hillary
Dennis Rodman
Clinton!
(gagging)
Don't blame me for this, I voted for Bernie Sanders.
He had a fucking bird land on him.
Also, he talked about policy all
the time and had good ideas.
But he had a bird land on him.
Oh well, I guess hindsight is 2020.
(intense rock music)
But that's anti-establishment with both a brain and a heart.
We aren't dealing with that.
We are dealing, however, with Donald J. Trump.
He started his campaign at the top of an escalator,
rode it down in perhaps the worst executed symbolism
of all time, and said that Mexicans need to be walled out
of the country because they're rapists.
That was essentially the main takeaway
of his announcement speech.
Over the following year, he managed to say something
bad about pretty much every group,
except for straight, white cis men.
Donald Trump has done and said so many shitty
things over the last year that I'm not even
worried about trying to list them.
I'm more worried about trying to even remember all of them.
It's a fool's errand and that was part of the strategy.
Be a dizzying force of shittiness.
But in all honesty, those things are symptomatic
of what Donald Trump actually is.
Donald Trump is totalitarian.
He's riding around on his big boy dictator
bicycle with training wheels on it.
Did you just say fascism?
Well, no, but I'm definitely gonna.
So there's an absolute load of people who support
fascism that also support Donald Trump.
And I didn't just say load to be obscene.
I actually meant there's just a lot of people.
But you have a dirty mind and you thought it anyway.
I actually meant it that way.
Whether they're KKK leaders who believe that it should
be legal to discriminate against some citizens,
denying them rights, and indeed not treating them
like people, to actual out fascists and dictators
from convicted neo-Nazi terrorist Don Black
to Russian fascist Aleksandr Dugin
to even North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un
whom, contrary to popular belief,
Seth Rogen has not actually killed.
There's a swath of actual fascists and dictators
that endorse Donald Trump, but those are endorsements.
What about Trump himself?
Does he endorse Donald Trump?
(laughs)
I'm sorry, I couldn't resist that one.
Well, he's not only praised Saddam Hussein
who was in charge of gassing hundreds of thousands
of his own citizens, he likes to retweet quotes
from Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini,
he picked a neo-Nazi white supremacist leader as a delegate,
he said the following on torture.
- We're gonna have to get much tougher as a country.
We're gonna have to be a lot sharper
and we're gonna have to do things that are unthinkable.
- And I quote, "Even if it doesn't work,
"they probably deserved it anyway," end quote.
He thinks the Geneva Convention is a problem
and needs to be changed, and hell,
let's just go all the way back to 1989,
back when Donald Trump bought full page ads
in all the most prominent New York newspapers
in an attempt to get four Black kids,
age 13 to 16 sentenced to the death penalty
because he watched the tapes of police coercing them
into confessions and just thought, uh,
I can take this at face value,
in fact, I'm gonna take this at face value
despite the fact that DNA evidence came
out and exonerated all of them.
All of them.
The actual rapist was caught, but as recently
as a few weeks ago, Donald Trump implied he still
thinks these people are guilty and should have
been sentenced the death penalty.
That's not on evidence.
That's just on suspicion.
If you watch the tapes of these kids quote unquote
confessing to these crimes, and to be very clear,
I have, they were clearly coerced.
But you know what?
They're Black kids.
And not, like, middle class Black kids.
They had tough lives.
They didn't have the ability to fight back
either monetarily or quote unquote social capital-wise.
And although he had no stake in the situation,
Donald Trump saw an opportunity to look tough on crime.
For a real estate developer who needs a reputation
to be constantly allowed to build and build and build
and have officials look the other way as he exploits
undocumented immigrants for labor, well, it helps.
Look at this upstanding member of the community.
Look how little he tolerates rape.
It's terrible when our white women get raped.
Did I say white women?
I just meant women.
(laughs) There's no racial element here.
Stop implying there is.
Well, I'm so sorry white ass bourgie,
but racism and fascism go hand in hand.
And so does yelling about keeping
people safe with law and order.
Hmm, Donald Trump would take legal action against
people that he thinks did something that he doesn't like.
It doesn't matter if there's evidence that exonerates them,
he deems them guilty and he is the arbiter of justice.
Tell me that's not fascist.
Go ahead.
And while Donald Trump exploits the white ass bourgie,
Hillary Clinton is the white ass bourgie.
♫ Bourgie, bourgie, bourgie can't you see
♫ You white assholes elect Hillary
Yeah, I know that's a little confrontational
and I am actually white myself.
But it wasn't wrong, was it?
Neoliberal capitalism is the application of the free
market, not only to economic constructs,
but social constructs as well.
I did an entire very important documentary
on the marketplace of ideas and how it's very literally
applying neoliberal capitalism to how we societally agree
on what ideas are valid and what aren't.
Here's the problem with that.
We don't live in a situation where everybody is represented
equally, and in order for a marketplace of ideas
to reach consensus that actually represents all viewpoints,
that would have to be the case.
Framing the determination of validity of concepts
and ideology through a free market metaphor makes us look
at it as a monetary transaction that dehumanizes
and gamifies social interaction and it creates a currency.
That currency is not validity.
It's attention.
We pay attention and we gotta stop.
But let's put aside the fact that lopsided representation
means whatever gets most attention is considered
valid and assume that it actually works
the way it purports itself to.
Even a legitimately reached consensus is not the most
efficient means of social or economic progress.
Just because we all agreed it was time
to finally give gay people rights doesn't mean
that was the right time to give them rights.
I'm thinking maybe it should have happened before.
You know, because gay people, like other humans
who have human rights, are human.
Other humans that had to fight for their rights,
Black people who were awarded personhood,
which, yeah, that's not absurd, giving people personhood,
and then for another century had
to fight for their own human rights.
Despite a supposed conclusion to that,
they are still required to fight for their rights
because consensus hasn't been reached.
If we societally decide this shit via a marketplace
of ideas, consensus is always the deciding factor
whether it's reached in some sort of magical
fairway, or the way we actually reach it,
which is whoever gets the most attention.
There's no process, there's no methodology.
Just a big ol' aggregate of all opinions.
When the middle finally aligns with, hey, you know,
these people ought to have rights,
gee golly gosh, then they have rights.
And there is no more powerful politician
at the moment who more deeply believes
in these ideals right now than Hillary Clinton.
To bring up gay rights once again,
Hillary Clinton waited until 2013 to support gay marriage,
long after consensus had been reached.
In 2011, a consensus believed that marriage equality
should be the law of the land, and that majority has been
maintained in every single year following.
She had to make sure that consensus was gonna stick.
And that's probably one of the easiest ones to point out,
but there's more than a few others.
There's the Trans-Pacific Partnership,
the Keystone XL Pipeline,
whether or not the Simpsons should be renewed again.
OK, that's not up to her.
Various environment issues,
yada yada, goes on and on.
The specifics don't matter as much as the ideology,
which is that framing everything monetarily,
despite the fact that it shouldn't be, is fine.
In fact, it's not just fine.
It's how everything is and should never change.
I'm not going to tread on anything that could be construed
as even vaguely conspiratorial about Hillary Clinton.
I'm just going to say that on a deep philosophical level,
I completely disagree with Hillary Clinton's ideology.
It may reach some of the same conclusions that I would.
For instance, I believe that reproductive rights
are massively important and women
should always have the right to choose.
And if I said that around Hillary Clinton,
I would not get in an argument.
And I'm not going to question that ideological conviction.
I am going to say that a large portion of the time
these conclusions are reached because it's mutually
beneficial for people as well as corporations,
or at least non-controversial to corporate donors.
Now, we could get into pinkwashing and probably talk
about abortion for a very long time,
but Hillary Clinton has been pretty
consistent on that issue at very least.
And while her conclusion on reproductive rights
has remained pretty steadfast throughout the years,
the conclusions that she's come to on various other topics,
from healthcare to fracking to marriage equality,
maybe you get where I'm going with this,
but they don't always stick.
See the originally had a public option Obamacare.
And if your convictions depend on a marketplace of ideas
which does not discount anybody's opinion,
it just enters it into an aggregate,
which is done if working as stated,
averaged out to create a societal consensus,
well, then the worst parts of that enable people
like Donald Trump who know how to exploit a system
that is based entirely on who gets attention.
Who gets attention better than Donald Trump?
No one.
My center belief that gives me so much beef with
neoliberal capitalism is that I don't think money should
be what drives society and I don't think you do either.
So obviously the solution is to vote third-party, right?
Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, they're both against that stuff.
Wait, Gary Johnson wants to defund public schools
and completely disband all entitlement programs
entirely dissolving even the idea of a social safety net.
If you have no money, fuck you.
It's your fault.
Go die in an alley.
But Jill Stein's a progressive, right?
She wouldn't do that.
Oh, right, the way she says that vaccines are good
is in the vaguest possible way as to leave the door open
for anti-vaccers, which most likely make up the majority
of the California voters that put the Green Party
on school boards in California,
which by the way are the vast majority of the hundred
offices that the Green Party holds nationwide.
School boards in California.
At least you know there would be a Congress completely
filled with Green Party electees that would be.
Oh wait, no wait, actually, all the electees
would just be in California on school boards.
It'd just be Republicans and Democrats in Congress
who would likely determine as their best interest
to undermine any third-party president.
Not that I want anybody who is even vaguely vague
on vaccinations in the oval office.
But hey man, a vote for the third-party's
a vote against the system.
♫ Dee do dee do dee dee do dee do dee dee
♫ Dee do dee do do do dee do do dee do
♫ Do do do do do do
Well,
no.
Third-party votes are not votes against the system.
They are votes that the system is designed to devalue.
To get a presidency, a candidate has to get 270
votes in the electoral college.
In a two-way split, that's essentially getting
the majority of votes, except you can't really have
a two-way split in a three party race.
The first time a third-party reaches a majority of votes
in the United States is going to be a three-way split.
And the second time and the third time
and the fourth time and probably as many times
as it takes to realize that simply having the popular vote
doesn't mean getting the third-party in.
But in a three-way split, most likely nobody
will get to 270 electoral votes.
The only way that could happen is if the third-party
gets more votes than the other two combined
and that's not going to happen.
There are way too may registered GOP and DNC voters.
And since nobody's getting to 270,
our Constitution says that the House of Representatives
votes on who becomes president.
And do you think the Republican controlled house
is going to vote for Jill Stein or Gary Johnson?
Oh yeah, I'm sure they're gonna shake up
the political binary they both benefit from.
The fact of the matter is they have been given the right
not to elect those people by our founding fathers.
Do you want to know what I think needs to happen
in order for a third-party vote not to be a waste?
Well, I'm saying it anyway.
We need to abolish the Electoral College
and there's numerous organizations
out there dedicated specifically to this.
But I don't think an organization is the answer.
I think a progressive political party with a main agenda
of abolishing the electoral college and implementing
a new voting system, like instant-runoff voting
or ranked voting, both of which have been proven
to create more democratic results, needs to run
and be elected to congressional seats in large numbers.
Large enough to start pushing Electoral College
abolition amendments to the Constitution,
which doesn't necessarily mean a majority,
just enough people to create a mandate that members
of the other political parties also have to follow.
To just ram somebody into the Oval Office
would essentially require a large,
impossible majority of people to give up
the way things have been done their entire lives
and if you went with the current third-parties,
either vote for a party that wants to slip
the social safety net out from under you,
or a party of ant-vacs parents in California.
No, I kind of think we need a new third-party,
and let's face it, that's not gonna
happen before November 8th.
In fact, this binary is going to be valid
for at least this presidential election.
And if you're watching this after the election,
hey, wasn't I right?
Didn't we elect one of them?
Look, if you're that emotionally attached to
the Electoral College, I might still have an idea.
But it still involves amending the Constitution,
so you're not getting out of that.
But we could index the total number of necessary votes
based on how many candidates are viable.
Like, just say there's three candidates
and they're all within striking distance
of each other in the polls consistently.
There's 538 total electoral votes.
And in a binary, you need 270 to win.
What if we set that majority at 185?
I mean, it'd have to be based on scientific polling
that consistently put us in a situation
where this was a likely popular vote.
But I'd accept that.
Certainly it's not perfect, but still it's something.
I haven't really heard a whole lot of ideas
as to how to do this if I'm gonna be completely honest.
Whenever anybody says we need a third-party in,
all they do is just tell people to vote for a third-party.
It's been designed not to work like that, OK?
We literally can't have a third-party president
until we amend the Constitution to make a system
that accommodates a third-party candidate.
That's what I want to do, OK?
So just to be crystal clear
I'm not advocating against third-party candidates.
I'm actually advocating that we do that.
But let me say something that isn't nice.
It's a hard truth and it sucks.
We're not going to be able to do that
before the 2016 presidential election.
No, our choice, if we could really call it a choice,
is between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
People have been telling me to vote
my conscience since early 2015.
And in 2016, I did.
I voted for Bernie Sanders because
I think he was the best candidate.
I think he gave a shit about regular people.
And when I say regular people,
I don't mean straight, white, cis dudes.
There's one major party candidate that in 2016
is associated with the nation's first major party
transgender candidate for the U.S. Senate,
and it's not Hillary Clinton.
And we know it's not Donald Trump.
But Bernie Sanders' post-campaign organization
called Our Revolution is spending time and money
to get Misty K. Snow elected in Utah of all states.
No, at this point I'm not going to vote my conscience.
I'm voting pragmatically.
Sorry.
Between an orange fascist in training
and the literal symbol for the economic and social system
that hasn't just destroyed this country's economy,
but also our trust in people.
It's not that it's made folks greedy or selfish or awful.
It's not that we chose to make every
conversation we have into a job interview.
It's that if you don't act that way, you can't get anywhere.
And I hate that.
But I still picked the neoliberal capitalist.
And it's not because I think she's gonna do a great job.
It's not because I think she's going to pull a Pope Francis
and end up being a stealth progressive
like Michael Moore seems to think that she might.
I don't entertain that.
I'm voting for Hillary Clinton for the same reason
scammers want old people to continue using Windows 95.
Because the status quo is exploitable.
Donald Trump proved that.
Progressives need to realize that
neoliberal capitalism is Windows 95.
And where Trump was the scammer,
progressives could be the kid that comes in and says,
"Grandma, holy shit, we really need to upgrade this.
"This is not safe.
"Like, how is this still running?
"Seriously, I'm looking at this.
"How is this running?
"Nothing should be working.
"This is terrible.
"No, don't worry, I got some time.
"I'll upgrade it for you."
But what Donald Trump will become if he
is given power is not exploitable.
You don't Donald Trump totalitarianism.
Whoever's in power already did.
I'm not gonna tell you how to vote.
I'm tired of being told how to vote myself.
But I am gonna say that this system
compensates for any action that isn't
for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.
No matter what you do, you're helping one of them.
But what this system is not set up to compensate for,
I believe, is the kind of person that Donald Trump is.
I don't think checks and balances
are going to work with him.
He's too good at getting people
to do what he wants them to do.
And Hillary Clinton is not.
If you think Hillary Clinton's ideology or methodology
are dangerous or destructive or just not correct,
wouldn't you rather have the person who had trouble
beating Donald Trump, ineffectively trying
to apply that ideology and methodology?
If you're a progressive, wouldn't you rather have an in
because you won't have an in with Donald Trump.
Instead, you'll get the best wall,
a huge wall, an amazing wall,
a luxurious wall.
I mean, I hope you like walls.
He does.
(rhythmic hip hop music)