Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Do Not Speak Ill of Lindsey Graham's Butthole (and other advice for America)

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Do Not Speak Ill of Lindsey Graham's Butthole (and other advice for America) · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:03
  I'm Graham Plattner-like in the sense that I'm not really working class. I'm outside doing it. It's a performance where I'm listening to Evelyn Waugh's sort of Honor Trilogy on audiobook. If this is while someone is giving you a Nazi tattoo, you're getting a Nazi tattoo at the same time. I thought you were going to say handjob, but Nazi tattoo, yes. Yes.
• 0:22
  Yeah, I had a conversation we do on the film call and we do for our subscribers, we do the second Sunday where we do a live thing and they ask questions. And we discussed this last night because I wasn't on the show last week, I was traveling and shooting in LA. And one of the things I said I wanted their help with was a collection of the great headlines throughout the Platner campaign in which the headlines downplayed the Nazi tattoo with the hyphen, it was always like a Nazi-like, something similar. It's like, no, no, it's literally
• 0:52
  It's Nazi adjacent. Nazi adjacent. No, it's the Nazi symbol. That's it. Prior to the Nazis, no one had ever drawn it that way. That's it. What is the symbol? I've never even seen the tattoo. It's a Totenkopf. Okay, I'm going to look up a Totenkopf. Totenkopf. Totenkopf. Totenkopf. Kumpf. Totenkopf. A Totenkopf is a... Oh, it's a skull. Oh.
• 1:20
  Yes, with crossbones and the SS used at a particular unit of the SS were concentration camp guards. So, you know, I mean, he's shouting out the best of them. I empathize with Graham Platinum because on my back is a huge Hindu symbol, which is a swastika. But I'm regarded as being a Hindu symbol of peace and love.
• 1:43
  I have an enormous tattoo on my back of Josef Goebbels, but it was from his earlier work in the 20s. Early days. Yeah, when he was writing plays. He was so much better. On the sub-stack, Michael, Brendan says, could you grow a badass beard like Graham Plattner?
• 2:00
  No, because he has that kind of walrus-like mustache, which, that's the testosterone. This is the conversation we had last night, or that I had at our listeners, which was, he is a great example of what, like, Upper West Side kind of elites believe a working-class person is. Yes.
• 2:21
  Because that's like, I look at him and I'm like, no, he went to Hotchkiss, this elite private school. You know, his dad gave him the down payment for his house. His grandfather is a very, very famous architect who has his own Wikipedia page and has some pretty, was pretty talented. That's not like the typical working class person. It's so interesting, actually. You know, this is the criticism that I've always made of people, poor people who like Donald Trump, which is, I think it was, I don't think I'm original in saying this, but Donald Trump is a poor person's idea of what a rich person is.
• 2:49
  And Graham Plattner is a bougie, lefty, chardonnay, swilling, latte-sipping leftist's idea of what a working-class person is. So we're basically just living in a hall of mirrors of caricatures. It's a hall of mirrors, yeah. It's its own version of Versailles, which is resonant with Graham Plattner because he has a Nazi tattoo. But the funny thing about this was someone sent us an email...
• 3:14
  A fifth column listener sent an email and said, hey, I live in Maine. And I think a guy had like a PhD or something, but he worked construction and or I think electrical or construction. And he's like, I just work with working class people all the time. And not one of them had heard of Graham Plattner.
• 3:31
  It was resonating with people like us who pay attention to this sort of thing and people on MSNBC. The average Mainer that this guy was working with was like, has no idea. Because, you know, the most important thing, Josh Sepp's in American politics, is we must get Susan Collins. Yes.
• 3:50
  the least offensive of, you know, a whole array of offensive Republicans. That's that's the one. But this is the this is the conundrum of electoral politics always, which is that the easiest people to take out are the ones you least want to take out from your opponent's camp, because by definition, they're in the more moderate electorates, which could conceivably vote for one of your guys. This happened in Australia when Prime Minister Scott Morrison, great at wearing a Bushman's hat.
• 4:18
  and wandering around bushfire-stricken areas, pointing at things. And there was one great moment when he tried to shake the hand of a local in a bushfire-ravaged town, and he was so unpopular that she refused to shake his hand. So instead of trying to understand where her antagonism came from, he grabbed her hand and forcibly shook it against her will. Yeah, Grant Platter did a lot of that, too.
• 4:43
  great but when he was women's hands when he lost power the problem was that all it was all of the moderates in his party who lost power and now the conservative party is like an ultra conservative rump of itself because the only people who left if you get rid of all the susan collinses then you only end up with alabama senator uh you know googie mc uh googie mcfarmer hand
• 5:07
  Yeah. Oh, he's great. I really like some of his. I love Gugu McFarland. He's great on housing policy. Yes. He actually has a swastika tattoo across his face and nobody cares because he's in Alabama. Yeah. And when they asked him why he got it, he said, because I like the Nazis. That's right. Yeah. He was like, oh, this is a Nazi tattoo? Excellent. I didn't realize. I'm a huge fan of those guys.
• 5:28
  That's right. Up until D-Day, they were great.
• 5:47
  and they get extra juicy premium episodes just like this one. You can become a member on YouTube to watch the full episode, or you can subscribe via our sub stack to get the entire back catalog of mind-expanding, bullshit-free, uncomfortable conversations. Back to the show. No, I mean, this is a question. I have a question for you because I was thinking this morning.
• 6:08
  Um, and, uh, it is Collins kind of related, but we had in America, you might remember, you might've seen the news that we had a, a, uh, a death in the family, right? Lindsey Graham died, uh, in the family, I mean, the family of Americans. God rest, God, God rest his wide, loose anus. Uh, may God bless, may God bless Lindsey Graham and all of his excellent work. I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I
• 6:37
  Yes, his excellent work in the wide stance in the bathroom at Minneapolis Airport with Larry Craig. That wasn't him, though. No, Larry Craig, that's right. No, he was in the next one. He just didn't get caught. He was out the window. No, but this is the thing about Graham.
• 6:54
  There's a guy you might be familiar with who was one of the founders of the Lincoln Project and a former Republican named Steve Schmidt. Yes. Who is, who I like to refer to as the excreble Steve Schmidt, who wrote a piece yesterday in Substack. And he's like, I don't mourn the death of this collaborator piece of shit, Lindsey Graham. First off, never say that about someone who died unless they truly deserved it. Even then. Like, you know. I mean.
• 7:20
  wait a few days even even after osama bin laden died i was not bad nothing him for a few days yeah i was like his dad had a great construction company we could give him that um but the thing about like you know if you're a guy that participated in the rwandan genocide but if you're lindsey graham it was this most like he's the fucking worst and then i was talking to some people about this and graham i've criticized a lot over the years because he was you know
• 7:48
  you know, uncompromising in his mean comments about Donald Trump in 2016, and then he cozied up to him. But there is the reality of politics, and this is with Susan Collins too, is that he was the one, let's try to give him credit. He was the one, he was just in Ukraine,
• 8:05
  And of course, that set off all his conspiracy theories. Maybe the Russians killed him. They like killing people. They like poisoning people. And they make it look like a heart attack. So a possibility? OK. They do that a lot. But he was in Ukraine, right? And he has been stalwart in his defense of Ukraine against Russian aggression and Russian imperialism. And he was trying, and it looks like he's been doing some good work in convincing Donald Trump that he should be on the right side of this issue.
• 8:33
  So there, yes, he sucked up to Trump. He said all sorts of nice things about him. But if you're doing that in the rough and tumble world of politics and the smoky back rooms and you achieve some good things, I mean, if you go out there and you shit on If Lindsey Graham was good at anything, it was rough and tumble in smoky rooms. He loved that man could get people. He loved sucking up in smoky rooms during rough and tumble periods. He was a man's man.
• 9:02
  He really was. I mean, sucking up to them in smoky rooms, most of the time it was Burgheim in Berlin, but, I mean, sometimes... Oh, look, Jono is bringing me a coffee. Look at that. See the kind of service that I get here in Uncomfortable Conversations HQ? Jono. By the way, that umlaut makes no sense on that coffee. The umlaut? Coffee. Oh, Bo House. It's the house of Bo. Bo.
• 9:31
  Yeah, that's the coffee place downstairs. Yeah, but why is there an umlaut on the UK? To Germanify it. No, because then it becomes hoist. Bauhaus. I mean, you can't see the other side of the coffee cup, which is a swastika and a Tudenkopf. Just to really get the German stick to lay it. Does it come with a peel-off yellow star that you wear while drinking it?
• 9:54
  Oh my goodness. You know what I've got? And I'll tell you this, Michael Moynihan, in my cupboard, I now have, thanks to my brother, who had it framed to museum quality, our grandmother's yellow star, which says juif on it, from when she had to parade around. Oh, she's French, yeah. Yeah, she was Polish, but she managed to get out of Poland just before the Nazis invaded, and she spent most of the war in Paris. And she said, we can really trust the French.
• 10:21
  It was like, you know what? You know where we'll be safe? Paris. Yeah. Smash cut to three seconds later and the Nazis are goose stepping down the Champs Elysees. Amazing that someone didn't tell her about the Dreyfus affair 30 years before. But okay. You know, but she made a good decision this next time, which was like, if France isn't far enough, you know where we'll be.
• 10:43
  Bloody Australia. They're not going to come to Australia. Is that even safe now? But who knows? Who knows? But your brother had a frame? Yes. So we didn't want it to decompose. Yeah. He got to keep my father's wedding ring, which he promptly lost in Sydney Harbor. And then so I was like, well, if you got the wedding ring, then I get the yellow star. So I'm going to put that up in the office. That's an amazing conversation. If you get the wedding ring, I get the yellow star.
• 11:12
  Yeah, and he was like, yes, but you have to wear it in public in the most Muslim neighborhoods in Sydney. No, they would all clap. They would clap and be like, you blonde, you look like you're blending in. Yeah, no, they'd be like, this is how the Jews are supposed to be treated. Exactly, yes. We need to be able to name and shame them. He's not that hook-nosed caricature. We need to identify this guy.
• 11:33
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• 11:58
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• 12:21
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• 12:45
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