Intro

In this video, we delve into President Trump's regulatory freeze and his administration's battles against the entrenched bureaucratic system known as the deep state. The discussion touches on various instances of bureaucratic resistance during Trump's first term, as narrated in HR McMaster's book 'At War with Ourselves,' and other sources. Key points include withholding information, producing unacceptable work, delays and misalignment costing taxpayer money, and leaks to the press. We also discuss Trump's new strategy in his second term, including the implementation of Schedule F to make federal workers at-will employees and the extensive use of AI. A personal anecdote about navigating bureaucratic challenges in both government and private sectors provides further context. Tags: #Trump #DeepState #Bureaucracy #HRMcMaster #ScheduleF #RegulatoryFreeze #FederalGovernment #AIinGovernment #PoliticalResistance.

Speaker 3: [00:00:00] President Trump is a regulatory freeze, preventing bureaucrats from issuing any more regulations until we have full control of this, uh, the government and this administration.

Speaker 4: Thank you, sir.

Speaker 2: Are you not entertained? Are you not entertained? Is this not why you are here?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Malcolm. I'm so excited to be speaking with you today. Today, we're talking about the deep state, because for a long time, actually, well before Trump was elected, I've been thinking, oh my god, is the deep state real?

One. First. I think most normal people are [00:01:00] like, nah, not really. And then I read the book at war with ourselves by HR McMaster, oh, hold on. It's the fertility clinic. Hello. This is Simone.

It is. Yes.

Oh my god! When you first said hi, Simone, you sounded kind of sad, and I was so worried. No, no, no, it's not like you have to like call people with a smile on your face. I was just so worried. Wow, this is great news.

Simone Collins: The pregnancy test came back positive, but very faint. Which is exactly what happened the last time we lost a pregnancy,

so.

So I guess we'll see. And in

this book, HR McMaster talks broadly about how much he respects the office and how much he respected the president and really tried to do a good job. But at the same time, he mentioned stuff that made me really think twice. Like at one [00:02:00] point president Trump wanted. H. R. McMaster to send off a letter that he'd written to Vladimir Putin.

And rather than follow his request, he just sat on it for like two weeks. Hoping that the president would change his mind or something. And he did eventually tell president Trump that he hadn't sent it. But one, like if your boss tells you to do a thing, you do a thing. You know, unless it's illegal and two.

If the President of the United States tells you to do a thing, you do the thing. Like, that really surprised me. Especially that someone would so openly write about it in a book, and be kind of like, be proud about it. And he really was proud he did this

repeatedly throughout the book.

He does, he does this multiple times, and it just It made me think, okay, maybe there's something to this whole narrative.

So then when Cremieux put up a sub stack essay talking about civil [00:03:00] service members and political appointees I got really intrigued because Cremieux is really good at. Sharing very quantified, very sort of evidence backed information. One of the top things that he linked to was an article from 2021 sort of at the tail end of Trump's reign, his first administration talking about just how awful it was.

It's called tales from the swamp, how federal bureaucrats resisted president Trump by James Shirk. And it is insane. So I thought it might be fun to go through it. Contrast that with how the Trump administration is apparently dealing with things a little bit differently this time around because they've learned from all this.

In terms of things done, one, there are sort of general themes of How the deep state resists an administration. One is through withholding information. So at the National Labor Relations Board, career staff provided legal analysis that only cited [00:04:00] precedents supporting their preferred outcomes while omitting contrary cases.

This forced political appointees to conduct their own research to evaluate both sides of legal arguments. Which is just so insidious. Can you imagine? You've been appointed. You're in office. You have this mandate to do something. And you don't even realize that you're being like given this completely skewed understanding of reality.

I guess a lot of people are going to say, well, that's not a big deal because this has been how the media has presented everything since like, I guess, 2016. Well, in the

Trump administration, the first one, nobody understood how truly insidious the system was against them.

Yeah. Like maybe the mainstream media does that.

Like government workers whose job it is to help me, like, navigate an issue that's, this is insane. The whole

thing needs to be burned down. And Trump is burning it down, as we'll talk about in another episode. You know, he has offered six months, it looks like, paid leave to anyone who quits right now. He has moved on this More than that.

Basically now through September.

Yeah, this schedule [00:05:00] seven program, which recategorizes jobs so he can fire them. And he is just torching department after department. So I love he has both given this. Okay. You can get out with this good nest egg if you leave right now. And also when they said in the same email, we can't promise your job will still be here by then,

right?

Speaking of departments that are on the chopping block, at least, you know, according to campaign promises the department of education during trump's first administration saw career staff concealing internal documents related to allegations against for profit colleges Claiming they just claimed the data was It's unavailable.

And the documents were later revealed during litigation showing weak evidence for the department's actions under the Obama administration. So you know, they kind of had it coming, you know, but Trump gave them a chance. Clearly he was being stonewalled from within the department of education. It's got to go.

But also,

you know, I heard the only reason he didn't get rid of it in the first administration was because Betsy DeVos wanted a job there and her husband was CEO of BlackRock.[00:06:00]

So F Betsy DeVos, okay. She did, like, very little actual, like, she was, like, the worst person in the world to be running that organization.

I mean, you know, also the, the environmental. The reason

I say that is because she ran one of the largest private colleges in the United States. Which one was it?

I don't know. DeVry, I want to say, or something.

Betsy DeVos ran

DeVry. Yeah, something like that. And the goal, if any Trump run private, you know, should be to not just get rid of colleges, but to first get rid of the private colleges because they are scams that are run on our military mostly is what they are.

Yeah. Yeah. That basically extract. Military subsidized college education. Yeah, it's it's bad without getting people jobs. So career attorneys at the Environmental Protection Agency also failed to inform political appointees about significant litigation or legal positions.

So the appointees literally literally had to monitor public court filings themselves. [00:07:00] Like these, there were people there being paid who were actively not doing their jobs and appointees were based like circumventing them and just going on to public records to try to get the information they need to just do their job.

So, I mean, wow, that just withholding information, that's, I would say It's just

shocking that you can't fire them for doing that. Like, this is what Deep State is. It's rot.

Yeah, it's bad. I would, I would still put this withholding of information kind of under the lesser infractions section because it gets worse.

So, career officials at the food and drug administration falsely claimed the agency had authority over laboratory developed COVID 19 tests, delaying expanded testing capacity. And subsequent analysis revealed the FDA lacked such authority. So basically we could have had COVID 19 tests a lot earlier.

During the pandemic, if the FDA hadn't lied about its it's [00:08:00] authority

and I, and I will note here that it appears very clear. Like if you look at a lot of Democrats, a lot of Republicans forget this, but a lot of democratic politicians were saying that they wouldn't get the the vaccine if it was, when it was looked like it was going to come out under Trump,

And it appears that the FDA specifically held up its release so that it would come out under a Biden administration.

However, that turned out for Biden and the Democrats up to you, but the point being is it was intentionally delayed as bad as the Democrats say that we needed this vaccine.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And

hard evidence of this now. It's like undeniable.

Yeah. It seems like some of this was out of spite. Some of this was just like, we don't want the Trump administration to make progress.

And we, we want. Progress. A good example of this actually is with the Department of Labor. So career employees at the Department of Labor asserted to appointees that direct final rules, DFRs could not be issued. What happens after Biden enters office? Oh, there's all these [00:09:00] direct. These direct final rules being issued.

Huh. So, I bet they didn't

expect Trump to come back into office, did they?

I mean, like seriously, I, I just can't imagine. And I think we've all kind of been in positions where you, you go to like a really mean click at school or you're in a new department at work, you know, and, and someone's being really unfriendly.

And you're just trying to get something done. And they're like, oh, you can't, you can't file that paper that way. Are you, you're not allowed to do that. And then you later understand or learn that you can, and they were just lying to you to make your life hard. Just like there's this level of catty behavior taking place in the federal government is unreal.

And also the, there were some career staff at the national labor relations board, which of course we should expect to see

doing

silly things, but they provided incorrect dates. for reopening union contract negotiations so that [00:10:00] they could lock political appointees into unfavorable terms, which is so screwed up.

But also I would expect absolutely nothing more from labor relations. So, yeah. Why is there even a labor relations

department? Like that shouldn't,

well, yeah. Why, why are there federal why are there unions in the federal government? You know, that's another great question.

Wait, can Trump make the federal government anti union?

Is that possible? Can you just say like No, Trump was a pro union

candidate, wasn't he? I mean, he's, he supports Oh

yeah, I mean, you, you stick with the private sector unions, but I'm talking about federal government unions. Yeah, that doesn't seem right. Like when it's taxpayer dollars. Well, you're not negotiating against another party, you're negotiating against yourself.

Like, it makes no sense. You're, you are, when, I, I actually am very supportive of unions when the unions are fighting against a private party, like a company, or even like a board of company, you know, like a Disney or something, right? Yeah. But when there's like a teacher's union, who are [00:11:00] you negotiating against?

You're negotiating against people that you are electing. Right? Like if you think you deserve a higher salary, then you take that to the citizens. It's not some big mega bucks guy behind a desk.

Yeah. But anyway, yeah. National Labor Relations Board a******s. They also some of the lawyers at the National Labor Relations Board refused to draft decisions overturning administrative precedents that they supported.

They basically were like, I dare you to dismiss these to anyone who was appointed. They just refused. And that's, that's another really common theme. So like another theme of what was being done by the deep state during Trump's first administration is just refusing to do work that was considered ideologically disagreeable.

So another example of this is. The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice had some staff refusing to work on cases involving racial discrimination against Asian Americans at Yale University for enforcing conscious conscience protections for nurses objecting to participating in [00:12:00] abortions.

They just weren't willing to work on those cases. So political appointees had to handle those cases themselves, which probably is for the best. I bet the appointees are very capable people and did a great job. But just like outright refusing. Wait, didn't they win that Yale case? I think they did. So, yeah, I guess, I guess it's for the best.

Oh. Maybe you should have taken that one, cronies. Yeah, I mean, the worst thing to do, and what I think has happened to us a couple of times is when people say, Oh yeah, I'll do that. And then they just don't. And, and here's some examples of that happening basically. Well, hold

on, before we go, I love this, this entire deep state is basically the Bergens, but like actively malicious or not the bird, what are they called again?

The ones from a hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. Yeah.

The, the, the bureaucrats.

Speaker 5: Oh, kidnapping the president? Oh no, she's not eligible for release at this time. Okay, right, look, this, this is the president. Oh. Okay, see, there? Hmm? He says now the whole kidnapping [00:13:00] business was just a horrible misunderstanding. Oh yeah. She didn't mean anything by it, he's ordering you to let her go. But this isn't a presidential release of prisoner form.

Speaker 8: Those are blue. Oh, I'll stay here.

Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah, but it's basically, it is basically then so yeah, the worst case of that, of course, is when they just say, yeah, sure, I'll do it. And they don't. And that happened in the DOL, the Department of Labor Regulatory Unit, where a team of 10 to 15 staff delayed drafting a priority regulation for over a year, producing work at a pace equaling one line of text per day.

So really just like they were not, they were not doing it. And then the political appointees in that unit ultimately wrote the regulation themselves in weeks. They just, you know, they just did it themselves, but a ton of time was lost because they sat there thinking, Oh, these guys are, these guys are on it.

We asked them, like, they probably had a bunch of check ins where they're like, Hey, you know, what's going on? I'm like, Oh, well, you know, it's a [00:14:00] very complicated, you and I have had this happen to us. Like when we get scammed, it's, it was, well, especially when we were younger. And earlier in our careers, we were given the impression, and this was a big meme at Stanford's business school, where like, Oh, if you throw money at a problem, you'll fix it.

You know, just hire the best of the best. Hire

the consultant, hire the, you know, yeah.

And trust them, you know, trust the expert, let the expert work, don't get in their way. Let them fix the problem and we hired a couple people to do really important projects on those fronts in accounting In in compliance and some other things and you know, we check in and be like, hey, you know I thought this would be done by now.

What's what's going on? Oh, well, you know this whole this whole regular

Yeah, experts are f*****g retarded

Well, we were just being actively lied to in a couple of instances, people just actively lied to us. They were not working. They were charging us tons of money. They were not doing anything at all. And this is exactly what happened in the department of labor regulatory unit.

Also this happened at the U S department of [00:15:00] agriculture career staff took over two years to rescind an environmental rule affecting Alaska, despite having issued similar rules quickly under prior administration. So they basically just decided to not do it. And then, I mean, similarly, another theme here is producing unacceptable work products with the, like, Title IX regulations, career staff produced drafts that either diverged from policy priorities or were legally indefensible.

So, again, the appointees had to do all the work, which, again, is. For the best, probably. And then under USDA NEPA rulemaking, despite expertise, career staff produced unusable drafts for an environmental regulatory reform requiring political appointees to rewrite it. This is where I want to sort of point out how this is going to backfire.

So fricking bad. Because one in Trump's first administration, plenty of appointees found out that it was just easier to do everything themselves. And they did [00:16:00] now, like, as of this week, open AI released a government iteration of its AI tools that allow for government workers, even with security clearances to use offline in an Azure environment versions.

Of OpenAI's best, best resources right now, I think, you know, and this is something that we're also, you know, what happened to us when we discovered that we've been lied to so many times by people that we'd hired in to like solve problems and handle really important strategic issues. We just learned never forget no more.

We're not going to hire lawyers. We're not going to hire like accounting consultants. We're not going to hire RFP consultants like no, we're just not going to do it because every time we do we get disappointed at best. They're just not very efficient. At worst, they're actively negligent, not doing anything and overcharging us and then producing terrible work.

So what's going to happen is, and I think it's already starting, [00:17:00] those, those jobs just won't exist anymore. Those departments just won't exist anymore. If you are going to be a hostile deep state. You're going to be eliminated. Well, I mean, this time they're going in

with flame through earth. And I think that they'll actually, at first I didn't, I thought the deep state would be able to fight back, but what I've learned is this strategy that Trump is doing this administration, which is just an everything at once, as, as aggressively as you can strategy the forces arrayed against Trump just.

didn't like, they don't know what the to do. Like they, at first it was like, okay, rakes broke. We ran away. We reformed and now it's like, now they're coming back with the flamethrower

and they're like, I learned, I learned, and we're going to burn it all down. Yeah. You know, they started with drain the swamp and they were like, totally willing to like keep the riparian environment, you know, let's try to preserve some of this.

Let's not. Let's not nuke it now. No,

no, no, no. Everything will be no. There

will be [00:18:00] nothing left.

And it shouldn't be. It should be. This should all be done by appointees only now. Like if I took over a department, because it is hard to fire people. So the way I probably handle it is I just go to everyone in the department and be like, I've got great news.

You all can well, I mean, obviously anyone working from home would be fired, but I will immediately fire if you, if you go work from home and we don't need you to do any work anymore and they'd be like, what do you mean no work anymore? And we'd be like, I'm handling all of it. I got a little team of, you know, guys here.

You guys just don't need to do anything at all anymore and then wait, because that will give you all the, everything you need to fire them. You're like, why are we still, still have this entire department when without them I'm able to do my, the entire department's job? And I can guarantee you, one competent, like, small team like you and me could easily handle one of these department's jobs.

Well and in many ways it's just a lot easier because you don't have these layers of morass. I mean, one of the things that H. R. McMaster described [00:19:00] a little bit in his book was kind of all these like different things that had to be done with every piece of presidential communication and every little this and that, and I'm sure that with the original presidents, I mean, obviously, none of this existed, and then over time, there's just been this bureaucratic creep of like, oh, well, with every letter written, we have to You know, make five copies of it, and then run it by these three people, and like, they don't technically do anything, but they way slow things down, and I'm just wondering, like, how much of this can just fully be evaporated, eliminated entirely because it just, it just seems so, so damaging and wrong, and I, it's, but what's so encouraging is it coming into this new administration, I feel like we're seeing The lessons learned.

Another really common theme in H. R. McMaster's book, he never described doing it himself, obviously. But he talked about it happening all the time, which was leaks. Just like, Everything that he was doing privately within the administration just seemed to be getting leaked. I think he thought Steve [00:20:00] Bannon, if memory serves, was like doing a ton of the leaking, just like, but a bunch of people clearly were.

And basically nothing was airtight within the administration. And the same thing happened for example, at the General Services Administration. There was one career lawyer who leaked a draft executive order on federal building architecture, which created a huge media controversy that hindered its implementation.

Similar with the DOJ Civil Rights Division, internal emails mischaracterizing political directives were leaked to the press to generate opposition. And I, I don't think, you can't even count the number of times things were maliciously linked during the Trump administration. So.

Well, I think everyone is seeing, and anybody who is looking at this and is like, oh, this is like nor, this is not normal.

This is, this is the same as stealing an election. This is the same as. It's worse. I

mean. I don't know, like, okay, maybe it's not worse, but it's pretty damn bad. No, it is

really, really bad. You, you cannot like. This is the same as [00:21:00] ignoring democratic processes. This is the same as believing that you have a right to, and keep in mind, all of this is happening in the face of, you know, Blinken, when Trump was elected president throughout different federal offices, they were giving psychology counseling to people because these people couldn't handle that a, a, a, Election, the democratic process that the will of the people was being served, not their will, but the people's will, but their chosen candidate

didn't didn't get elected.

I mean, I recall there used to be some kind of journalistic rule, or at least standard. whereby if you were a journalist, you wouldn't vote because like you wanted to show that you respected your career and your office enough to not have that kind of bias and to not let it steep into your work.

You know, that's failed. If literally counseling is needed, if someone's preferred candidate isn't being elected in the government. If journalists have the decency to not vote. It seems almost irregard that anyone working for the federal government should not be allowed to [00:22:00] vote while holding their position.

So, this is what I'm really worried about now as we're on hiring freezes, for example. So, in Trump's second administration, one of the first things he did was implement a hiring freeze, with, of course, some, like, notable exceptions around, like, Emergency, like national security, medical care, things like that.

So during his first administration, there was a there was a hiring freeze and HHS hiring freeze and yet career staff circumvented that. By backdating start dates on hiring. They worked in pre inauguration dates. They just sharpied out. They get, wait, how are they not arrested for that? That seems extremely illegal.

It does seem extremely illegal. But again, who's going to arrest them? You know, when, when everyone kind of agrees on these things. Yeah. They just don't get prosecuted anymore. I mean, even real legit crimes that everyone can agree are bad. Like that we've, you know, had committed against our company. Don't get prosecuted anymore.

And it hasn't been because of the [00:23:00] Biden administration.

Yep. And then even in the again, back to the, the Dickish national labor relations regional, like the, in this case, regional staff on the national labor relations board manipulated case tracking systems to hide cases from political appointees or ignored directives on union election protocols until explicitly ordered otherwise.

So they were basically just like actively. Actively stonewalling. But I am really concerned, you know, considering that hiring freezes were circumvented in the past. One thing that the Trump administration did this week was put a freeze on grant spending to make sure that the, the grant programs receiving money weren't involved in.

You know, gender ideology or a bunch of other things that the Trump administration says, you know, we have no place spending federal tax dollars on, which I agree with. What I'm concerned about is a similar kind of behavior is like, even if, for example, it is. Full, you know, just seeped with gender ideology, whoever's reporting is going to just [00:24:00] fill out some form or write a cover letter and be like, no, there is no gender.

Yeah, but well, how are they going to get

around that? I mean, like, well, this time, I think we need to, we need to rely a lot on. inside whistleblowers. So people let it, you're sick of this s**t, like letting people know. And I think, you know, all this needs to be taken into context within like the AOC speech recently of like, this is a nation of laws.

Speaker: That remains, that is the law, that is the constitution. And and he just tried to sign a piece of paper saying, trying to say no, we don't have to listen to him. It's illegal. We don't have to treat this seriously. It's a joke. And that's not to say that what they're trying to do isn't serious. It is serious.

Simone Collins: And it's like the laws never apply when it's your side. You don't, it's, it's laws when you can use them to subjugate. People who you disagree with or dehumanize, but the laws are irrelevant when you are in power. And I think that we need to remember, always remember, that that's the way that they [00:25:00] treat the concept of the nation of laws, is that the laws don't apply to them.

And so long as that's the case, And we try to play by their rules of laws and everything like that, then, then it's just never going to work out. You, you have to be as aggressive as possible as what you're talking about. We've already seen it. We've already seen people trying to recategorize what DEI is.

We've seen people try to just change the names of departments, change the names of people's positions. And I think that you know, there's an army of YouTubers out there. There's an army of

Really pissed off citizens and they need to have some sort of like a department where we can drop this information for them and then maybe AI vet it or something to get this so that it can't easily be flooded.

And then you could also have a system where people who have repeatedly dropped good tips, their account gets flagged. So their tips go to the top to make it more

trustworthy.

Well, no, it makes it very hard for the left to just you know, flood it [00:26:00] with bad information.

Yeah.

And if you do that, then you've got a system pretty quickly where it's like, oh yeah, just get this to like the Libs of TikTok account and it will immediately head to the federal government.

That's the way I would handle this.

I could see that. Yeah. Yeah. No, this is, this is really important. And it's not just about The Trump administration's agenda being stymied or slowed down. What Cremieux points out in his Substack article, after also summarizing some of the points made in the swamp article is that it literally costs all taxpayers more when a government is misaligned, he actually points out how misaligned civil servants increased procurement costs by about 1 percent of initial contract value.

Contributing 6 percent of the average total cost overruns. He, he points out how there's a correlation between misalignment and delays in contract completion. And how the legal and operational misdirection also costs a lot of money. I mean, [00:27:00] even just thinking about the people who were paid to write legislation, who wrote like about one line a week you know, like this is just, it's a ton of wasted money.

And he also points out that misalignment agencies like the SEC results in politically motivated investigations and penalties against firms that are. With the administration. So just like everyone hurts, you know, this is, this is a really big problem and what we need to keep an eye on, I guess, as all of this goes forward, at least according to Crimea, when he, when he wrote this article is schedule F.

So. There was an executive order issued by Donald Trump in 2020 in October, which is

reissued,

by the way, yeah, yes, yes, because it was rescinded by the Biden administration, which creates a new category of federal civil servant. Position known as schedule F which basically redefines federal workers as at will employees, which is the norm in the United [00:28:00] States at will.

Basically means you can be fired at any point for any reason, just immediately. You know, I, I could call. Anyone who's a net will employee and be like, you're fired and they're gone. And this would do the same to federal workers who cannot do that, which is also insane to me. The, the frustrating thing about the first iteration of schedule F was that no employees were officially moved into the schedule before president Biden revoked the order on January 22nd in

2021.

So it's going to be implemented this time.

Yeah. Now I was coming in on top of this. And so we'll see

These guys are getting super psyched on Trump this time. Last time they got untransformed, they don't know what's gonna hit them, and I'm excited for this. Yeah, I mean, they clearly

didn't expect Trump to win again.

So, I would say, one, whether or not you even like Trump's agenda, you should care about this because it costs you more, it causes damage, it's a huge waste. And also, you know, when your person [00:29:00] is in office someday you don't want them to necessarily have their mandate. Completely stymied by Sorry, Democrats never have a problem with

this, Simone.

As we've seen. This is 100 percent a Republican thing because the D. C. is Democratic. Well,

yeah, except I think a lot of people who identify as Democrats probably also don't love the idea of Asians being discriminated against as college applicants.

The deep state is Democrat in the same way the Democratic Party now is a party of the cult.

There are people who identify, if you identify as like a normal Democrat, you're a Republican now. You're just stupid. I'm just saying like, you're just stupid. You're unaware of like what's actually happening. You're unaware of like actual policies. I think a lot of people

are. I wasn't aware of where the Democrat Party had gone when I first met you and I was still a Democrat.

I just had no idea.

Yeah, well, yeah, and it depends on where you're getting your news and stuff like that. Like, if your head's in the sand, you're just not gonna know that, like Yeah, because you just assume Oh, I'm gay. You've grown up thinking like

Yeah. Like, well, I believe [00:30:00] in, you know, human dignity and flourishing.

So obviously I'm a Democrat. Like that's, that is what I grew up with, Malcolm. I had no idea. Like,

what the f**k way is Trump's administration anti gay? And you're like, well, the I'm sure there's something here, here. I I've got a book. I'm, I'm sure that they'll tell me. And it's like, no, no, I'm asking you not for you to ask other people to tell you, because most of those are lies you know, and I think with a lot of this, it's just that people believe the lies, you know?

Yeah. But yeah, so between schedule F and also just not hiring people as they leave the government, making the government increasingly uncomfortable for them and using AI to fill in the gaps where already competent humans couldn't necessarily completely handle everything. I think could get us through this and make the government a lot more efficient, a lot more effective and a lot less subject to political bias either way, because I believe, I think most voters do, that if a politician gets voted into office with a mandate, he should or she [00:31:00] should be able to execute on that.

So yeah, we'll see. I love you too.

Malcolm Collins: I have to explain to the audience why we got a call from the school today.

Our son, Octavian, is making too many mistakes. And also

finger guns. So finger guns, they got mad at him for finger guns, for finger, not even children, objects were up in the air. Well, I don't know.

Maybe he's aiming it at fellow students.

They would have told you if he was. They want to make this seem as bad as possible.

They also got mad at him for militarized phraseology, which it turns out was the term fire in the hole.

They are, and then they said he tells poop jokes, as a five year old. I'm like, what kind of child abuse is this, where a five year old cannot tell poop jokes? What kind of child abuse is this, where a five year old can't [00:32:00] make finger guns?

I think every,

every human Has to learn how to behave with a certain level of decorum in certain environments. And that is what separates people who are worthy of respect and high office from people who can't stay out of jail. Hold on,

I'll let you in on something.

He's being five. Well, I know, but I'll also like as I was saying that I was thinking about how Congress changed its dress code.

So that yeah, for betterment, right? What do you even wear? Hoodies and shorts into

and I'd also point out in regards to all of this, that if the teacher had called me. So terrified she might have, I would have been like, oh, I see where the confusion is. Let me explain to you how a gun works and why finger guns are not dangerous.

Oh my God, Malcolm, he wanted to go. He wanted to go to mainstream school and kindergarten. He needs to learn how to play by those [00:33:00] rules. And he will get kicked out if we can't teach him how to play the rules.

He'd say like, oh he's making poop jokes. I mean, what kind of jokes should a five year old be making, ma'am?

Do you, are you going to teach him the finer etiquette of like advanced jokeology? Yeah, let's, let's teach him dirty limericks. That's

far more.

He's not even making like anti women jokes or cootie jokes or something. It's poop jokes. They're like, so inoffensive.

I don't know what to say. Okay.

Well, I do. And it's that you guys are a bunch of disgusting hippies.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe