Bad Bunny's Super Bowl Halftime Show, Warehouse Prisons & the El Paso Laser Fiasco (Half the Answer #65, with Jonathan Katz)

Trent and Caitlin boogie with a friend of the program, journalist Jonathan M. Katz of The Racket. They talk Super Bowl, Bad Bunny, the TPUSA halftime safe space show, and immigration detention.

Half the Answer can be heard on Spotify, on Apple, on YouTube, on Amazon, and elsewhere via its RSS feed.

Resources:

theracket.newshttps://bsky.app/profile/katz.theracket.news

https://www.tiktok.com/@katzonearth?lang=enSchools

Closed in Puerto Rico: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/12/magazine/puerto-rico-schools-hurricane-maria.html

Infrastructure in Puerto Rico: https://katz.substack.com/p/the-cluster-in-puerto-rico?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Gangsters of Capitalism: https://bookshop.org/p/books/gangsters-of-capitalism-smedley-butler-the-marines-and-the-making-and-breaking-of-america-s-empire-jonathan-m-katz/c1ca55fd36f1b6d4?ean=9781250135599&next=t

The Big Truck That Went By: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-big-truck-that-went-by-how-the-world-came-to-save-haiti-and-left-behind-a-disaster-jonathan-m-katz/b3ca7a131069f3ac?ean=9781137278975&next=t

Transcript

**Trent R. Nelson [00:00:30]**
Well, happy days are here again. Maybe we're working on it still, but some days are better than others. This is, of course -- well, this is Half the Answer, where you know that understanding a question is half of an answer, and we get into asking questions here all day long. My name is Trent R. Nelson. I am one of the hosts, but I'm not the only host. That's what that implies. There's Caitlin M. Green, and while I'm a writer, I love history, philosophy, editing, I talk on the camera all the time. Well, Caitlin, she talks on the camera too. She's a writer, she's an editor, she's a linguist, she's madre. She is just boogie and always. How are you today, my friend?

**Caitlin M. Green [00:01:02]**
I'm so great, I'm perpetuating the white race, as is my desire and responsibility as an American woman. So that Nick Fuentes doesn't put me in prison because he thinks that's where we belong if we're race traitors. But don't worry, I've done my replacement level. I'm good. Okay, let's leave me out of this. Yeah, it's almost a day of love. We're having a great time.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:01:40]**
Nick Fuentes.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:01:43]**
He thinks that Latino futurism is inevitable at this point. I don't know if you saw that. I sent it to you.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:01:49]**
Oh yeah, he got really bummed out, and that made me laugh. I'm -- anytime Nick Fuentes is sad, I'm happy. So it's a good day to be alive.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:01:57]**
It's a good day to be alive for a few reasons, Caitlin, and not only because Nick Fuentes is sad and he knows that the Latino futurism is inevitable, but because we've got another marvelous guest. He's a returner. His name is Jonathan Katz. You know him like we do. He's written many a wonderful book. He's even got one that he's working on. We'll probably ask him about that at some point today as well. You can find him at The Racket News. You can find him on Bluesky. You can find him yelling all over the place. You can find him here in just a hot second. Jonathan, how are you today, sir?

**Jonathan Katz [00:02:32]**
I'm good. It is -- you got to take good days where you have them. And I think news-wise, this is turning into, at least at the moment that we're recording this, a pretty decent day. So yeah.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:02:42]**
We get lucky sometimes. Don't we, Caitlin?

**Caitlin M. Green [00:02:42]**
Yep, yeah, it's not always like this. I mean, we are going to make ourselves sad later, but whatever, let's start with the good news.

**Jonathan Katz [00:02:53]**
Yeah, big picture, real bad, but the microcosm is nice for the moment.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:02:59]**
Yeah, we're gonna take it.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:03:00]**
The microcosm is nice. We're gonna get into some sad stuff that, like Caitlin alluded to, a little bit later. But we're gonna start off -- okay, we're gonna start off with the positive, good things that we all deserve in this life. We're gonna talk about the Bad Bunny halftime performance at the Super Bowl. You may have heard of it. There was a competing endeavor starring one Kid Rock, and well, we've got individuals here who somehow saw both -- not at the same time, but certainly Caitlin can talk about Kid Rock.

And well, most of the rest of us saw Bad Bunny. Some 125 million saw Bad Bunny, allegedly. Pretty amazing. Katz, what did you think of the performance, and why do you think everyone was so mad about it?

**Jonathan Katz [00:03:55]**
The performance, by the way, it was fantastic. It was awesome. And we've had two consecutive years of just incredible Supreme Court -- Supreme Court. What am I talking about? Super Bowl. Sorry, when the Supreme Court's great, we've won. We won. Yeah, sorry, wow. Okay, let's rewind that back. Yeah, so two --

**Caitlin M. Green [00:04:01]**
Top notch.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:04:09]**
Oh boy, yeah. Remember when the Supreme Court ruled that we had to all listen to Bad Bunny?

**Jonathan Katz [00:04:21]**
Two incredible years of Super Bowl performances, which was not the rule for most of our lives. The people who've been like, I think a politically divided Super Bowl halftime show is not the norm -- but the idea of turning off the Super Bowl halftime show to watch something else, that was the norm, like throughout much of my childhood. I mean, I would always switch over to the Beavis and Butthead Super Bowl halftime show and then come back. But you don't have to anymore, because Super Bowl halftime is great. I don't know what happened. I don't know who they've got coordinating these things, but they're geniuses. It was terrific. I've been a big fan of Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio for many years, and I was very excited to see what he was going to pull off. And he delivered. He over-delivered.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:05:21]**
Yeah, and as somebody who has watched the Super Bowl for my whole life as well, I mean, there's a special place in my heart for Prince. But as you noted, Katz, for much of my life it wasn't that the Super Bowl halftime show was bad, it's that you just did other things. You ate food, or you went to the restroom, or talked to friends. But what struck me about this -- I thought this was the greatest production that the Super Bowl has done at halftime. This was a whole thing. This was almost -- I mean, I called it to one friend "theater." This was actually something to see, and it had a real message. And it had little scenes, little skits, little different parts to explain different things.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:05:22]**
Yeah, yeah, they constructed a whole set up there.

**Jonathan Katz [00:06:08]**
Yeah. Cinematography, like, moving. I think it built on -- no shade to Kendrick Lamar last year, because that was also an incredible one. And I don't know exactly where I fall. It sort of depends on the minute that I'm thinking about it, like which was the better show. But I think that they learned a lot from the Kendrick show, and they used those things, because the Kendrick Lamar one -- I guess also they did this with Rihanna a little bit as well, another Caribbean who's not even from a United States colony, like she's just -- anyway, but people didn't get mad about that.

But anyway, they've learned, I think, year after year, how to incorporate a little more cinematography, a little more with transitions, and it's just getting better and better. And yeah, but the Bad Bunny one, it was fantastic. Why were people mad about it? I mean, because they're racist. Because I think it's even more than that, although it's obviously very closely related to that. People who got very mad about this felt very deeply insulted inside. And I saw noted plagiarist Denny Johnson saying that it's a National Football League, this is an American thing.

And obviously, without getting into the fact that Martinez is an American citizen, as all Puerto Ricans have been since the Jones Act of 1917 -- because then you have to get into whether he actually wants Puerto Rico to be part of the United States, the answer is probably not. But beyond that, it was the language. It was the racial politics. It was the fact that he was making a bunch of references that they didn't get, that even a lot of Spanish speakers don't get -- like, they're very specific Puerto Rican, urban Puerto Rican references.

And I think that it's really just, at core, that it wasn't about them. And these are people who just aren't comfortable with things that aren't about them. And I think that -- I'm not trying to be like, I'm a better person than them because of this, but I just grew up in a world where everything wasn't about me. Growing up, I think in some ways it was like a mild form of a superpower to grow up Jewish in Kentucky, which is where I spent almost my entire childhood. And I was just used to things not being about me. Like, everything was Christmas everywhere, that wasn't about me, and no one knew about my stuff. And that was fine.

And I think that's how a lot of people in the world go about their lives, but for people who are really, really tied to a single majoritarian culture -- and this isn't specific to the United States, you get this all over the world in different kinds of contexts -- but for a lot of people, they're just used to everything being about them. And if it isn't about them, if it's something that they're uncomfortable with, if it's something they don't understand, if you're speaking a language they don't speak, if you're making references they don't get, then they feel insulted. They feel less than. They feel confused. And it hurts, and they don't like that, and they don't like that feeling.

And then you have a permission structure and a narrative structure that allows them to demonize the person who's making them feel bad. Like, oh, it's not me -- I know that I'm ignorant here because I don't understand the language being spoken, but the problem isn't me, the problem is that you're speaking a language that I don't understand. And then this turned into people making just all kinds of wild claims that Bad Bunny burned an American flag during the halftime show -- which he didn't. Or that there wasn't an American flag during the halftime show -- which there was, like at the end, when he did the roll call of nations of the Organization of American States, an American flag was right behind him. And he said "United States" in English. And that's not enough for them, because it just needs to be all about them.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:10:22]**
Okay. So that in particular, I really think is so cool, that Bad Bunny was specifically saying the names of each country the way that people from that country would say it. And that is such an amazing effort to put in. And such a nice way to show respect to the people from all over the Americas. And yeah, actually, that's an attack? All of that? What?

**Jonathan Katz [00:11:11]**
Yeah, exactly. He even put a little extra sazon on the name of Haiti, which made it -- I had to listen to it a bunch of times to confirm that he said it, but I'm pretty sure he said -- and there was definitely a Haitian flag -- so "Ayiti," but he kind of did a little Puerto Ricanization of "Ayiti." But anyway, yeah, it was incredible. And it wasn't even just representational politics, although obviously that was a big part of it, especially at the end there.

Well, that's also a very common feature in Latin music. You often have songs that just sort of end with a list of countries, and then often a call and response, people saying "presente" or something like that. That's sort of a common trope. But there were so many moments in there. The way that they worked gentrification into "Nuevo Yol," and Tornicita, who is the owner of a beloved Puerto Rican bar in Williamsburg that has stood up against gentrification, refused offers to close and be replaced by apartments or whatever. And she was there pouring him a drink at the show.

Ricky Martin singing "Lo Que Paso en Hawaii" -- "What Happened to Hawaii?" -- that's a Bad Bunny song about not wanting Puerto Rico to go down the road of Hawaii and having its indigenous culture suppressed and its population forced out. It's also kind of an anti-statehood song, because he is very much in the anti-statehood movement, which he expressed by holding the version of the Puerto Rican flag, the original version, that has the colors from the Cuban flag, which indicates sympathy with the independentista movement in Puerto Rico, as opposed to the pro-statehood or pro-status-quo movements.

And then also having Ricky Martin sing that. And as I remember, he was in those typical white mass-produced chairs that you see all over Puerto Rico, that also were the cover of Bad Bunny's second-to-last album, "DeBi TiRAR MaS FOToS." And also having Ricky Martin, who is -- I mean, I don't want to get too over my skis here, but he became a big star because he was such an accessible, internationalizable and Americanizable form of Puerto Rican music that was able to sort of divorce itself from its Puerto Ricanness. And so to have him there singing this anti-colonial song, dressed all in white, in a Puerto Rican chair with literal plantain trees behind him -- in the Dominican Republic, at least, when something becomes very Dominicanized, they say you become "aplataonado," you become like plantain. And then to have him stand up and sing it in this really patriotic register, even more than Bad Bunny does on his album -- "agarra la bandera," hold on to the flag -- and then that song is cut off in the middle, and you have the explosion of the transformers.

Which happened to be arranged -- there's like three, and they kind of look a little bit like crucifixes on Golgotha. And then you have the linemen, not the football linemen, but the electrical linemen, falling down off of them, and then getting back up and then falling down again, which is a reference to electrical problems in Puerto Rico. But the big one is "el gran apagon," the big blackout that lasted for the better part of a year after hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017. I actually was there for that. I covered it. I spent a couple of weeks in the dark covering it to see what was happening, and it ended up being the core of a New York Times Magazine story that I put out a couple years after that about Puerto Rico.

But to have that, to sort of have this -- we don't want to go down the road of Hawaii, but we're still living in this subaltern colonial, bad infrastructure status. And one of the things that really marked that period -- this is during the first Trump administration -- was rampant corruption. I don't know if a lot of people remember this, but the reason that the blackout happened was Maria comes ashore, it's a Cat 4 -- it had been a Category 5, it had just weakened. And the electrical infrastructure in Puerto Rico is really, really antiquated. The big power station is on the south part of the island, near Ponce, but most of the population is on the north side of the island. San Juan, the capital, and the capital region are on the north side. And there's a huge mountain range in the middle, because the Caribbean -- these are all mountainous islands that have been pushed up from the sea floor.

And so in order to get power from the big power station to San Juan, to most of the island, it has to go over these mountains. And basically the hurricane blew over the mountains and knocked over the transformers. It's a pretty straightforward problem, but fixing it was going to be difficult because it was really antiquated equipment. You had to get way up in the mountains to fix it. You had to have people who really knew what they were doing.

So the Trump administration and the Republican Congress at the time were withholding about half of the aid that had been approved for hurricane reconstruction. And there was a lot of hemming and hawing -- who are we going to give this money to, who are we going to get to fix this infrastructure? And in the moment of this, the Puerto Rican government, which was -- as many Puerto Rican governments are -- kind of an accommodationist government, they sort of tried to kiss up to Washington. People who get into Puerto Rican government at that level tend to be wealthier, tend to be more conservative, tend to want statehood. So they're often trying to please the federal government in hopes that maybe this will be the year that statehood will be approved.

And they gave this contract, this $300 million contract, to this tiny company that no one had ever heard of called Whitefish Energy. Whitefish Energy comes from Whitefish, Montana -- not very close to Puerto Rico. The only discernible qualification that Whitefish Energy had is that Whitefish, Montana, this tiny little speck of a town, also happened to be the hometown of the Interior Secretary of the Trump administration at the time, Ryan Zinke. And this company had absolutely no idea what it was doing. They had no experience doing this kind of thing.

And like I said, this is a fairly straightforward problem, but it requires technical know-how. You had to figure out how to get the linemen up to the top of these mountains, how to get the equipment up to them. You would have basically an Eiffel Tower sort of thing bent over because of the storm, and they had to figure out, are we going to tear this down, are we going to replace it? You need to know what you're doing. And Whitefish Energy had no idea what they were doing, and the whole thing stunk to high heaven. So they ended up giving back the contract, although not until they had way overcharged, and they were subcontracting to companies that actually knew what they were doing, but in a really discoordinated way.

And then a year later, this other company -- a subsidiary of an oil company in Oklahoma. The subsidiary's name was Cobra Acquisitions. The parent company was called, I think, Mammoth Energy Services or something -- it was an oil field servicing company, again, nothing to do with stringing transmission lines over mountains in the Caribbean. And the way that they got like $1.8 billion in refundable contracts was through bribery, just outright bribery. And we know it was outright bribery because three people --

**Jonathan Katz [00:20:35]**
-- the president of Cobra Acquisitions, the FEMA Deputy Coordinator who was in charge of the electricity response, and I think her assistant all pleaded guilty to bribery in the years that followed this. And then basically, during the Biden administration, the privatization of Puerto Rico's energy sector continued. There wasn't, I don't think, the outright corruption that we saw during the first Trump administration -- it's hard to beat the Trump administration's plural for outright corruption -- but sort of in typical Democratic neoliberal style, they were like, well, we'll just hand this over to the private sector and they'll fix it. And the company that's running it now, I think it's called Luma, and the people in Puerto Rico who I talk to say that it sucks. It's not better, and the lights keep going out.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:21:15]**
Sure, sure.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:21:37]**
Yeah, I was gonna say, blackouts are still common.

**Jonathan Katz [00:21:40]**
Exactly. And really, "El Gran Apagon," the Bad Bunny song -- obviously it comes out of the experience of 2017, but the only -- if I'm remembering correctly, I think the only actual politician who's name-checked as somebody who's going to get a "bofeta," a slap in the face, was the governor of Puerto Rico, I think in like 2023, 2024. Bad Bunny is obviously a very political figure, especially in Puerto Rico, and he played a big role in the protests against Ricardo Rossello, who was the governor of Puerto Rico during the hurricane and was forced out of office in 2019 largely because of corruption, also because there were these phone calls recorded where he was mocking the deaths from the blackout -- or his staff were.

So anyway, Bad Bunny actually performed at some of those "Ricky Renuncia" protests -- some of those "Ricky out" protests. Anyway, all of that is embedded in this performance. And I don't think that you needed to necessarily -- one of the great things about really good art like this is that there's different levels that you can encounter it on. You can just dance to the music. It was just great music to dance to.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:22:42]**
Nice. Yeah, and they had these cool platforms. They were up high on the things, doing cool dances. Okay, well, so you have one opinion about why it's good that Bad Bunny was referring to the electrical grid. Okay, that's fine, but Laura Loomer had another opinion, and that's equally valid, okay? And I'm gonna read it now, because why not?

**Jonathan Katz [00:23:05]**
It's just amazing. I mean, Bad Bunny -- yeah, right.

**Jonathan Katz [00:23:23]**
She did, she did.

**Jonathan Katz [00:23:31]**
Proof, by the way, that growing up Jewish does not -- yeah, I was gonna say, it does not -- it's not protective.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:23:36]**
Doesn't protect you always from being a stone cold dumbass.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:23:46]**
So: "It's kind of ironic how Bad Bunny was dancing on an electrical post at the Super Bowl halftime show. Puerto Rico isn't exactly known for having reliable electricity. He could have highlighted the electrical grid crisis in PR and done some good with his platform, but he chose degeneracy." So there you go. I mean, literally, he put these poles up and he stood on them and he danced. And you're like, why didn't he call attention to the electrical grid problems? What more does he have to do?

**Trent R. Nelson [00:23:58]**
So the people that the President keeps around him --

**Jonathan Katz [00:24:07]**
You got her. Got her.

**Jonathan Katz [00:24:20]**
They exploded. They exploded multiple times. Do you think that's how an electrical pulse is supposed to work? It's like, when the electricity is working in your town, there's fireworks to celebrate?

**Caitlin M. Green [00:24:29]**
That's just concert pyrotechnics. It doesn't represent anything.

**Jonathan Katz [00:24:35]**
No. That was amazing. That was incredible. I had to check that one to make sure it was true. Because I was like, no one could possibly be this stupid. And I was like, she is. She is.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:24:41]**
Really?

**Caitlin M. Green [00:24:44]**
I saw it in the wild by accident. It was nuts.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:24:48]**
Top tier. Top tier people.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:24:51]**
So yeah, I mean, I agree with you, Katz. I feel like there were so many -- I mean, not being a Spanish speaker myself, only knowing a little bit -- it was just brilliant and beautiful and fun. And I laughed when he ran over to the little kids sleeping on the chair at the party. That made me actually audibly laugh, because children always do stuff like that, and you're always like, get up, get up, baby, come dance.

But again, all of it, right? And they had a real wedding at this thing, and the story behind that -- they invited him to their wedding. He was like, I can't, but do you want to be a part of this thing? I mean, just absolutely brilliant. I believe, as you wrote, Mr. Katz, it was one of the most American things that I've seen in my life. It was brilliant. It was rich and full of humanity. And I feel like, especially in this moment, people were longing for that. They were longing for a sense of, we're all in this together. And he gave that.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:25:17]**
It's so classic.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:25:23]**
I have pictures on my phone right now of my kids asleep at my brother-in-law's wedding rehearsal dinner. It's so cute. Very, very relatable.

**Jonathan Katz [00:26:13]**
Yeah, exactly. I mean, he hit all the notes. It opens with the kings -- the roots of Puerto Rico, roots of almost all Caribbean colonization and slavery and sugar cane. And then he leaves the cane fields and goes into the village, and then leaves the village and goes into the city. And then you've got the scene in New York, and Puerto Rican neighborhoods, and "nuyoricanness."

And then, oh, by the way, also, I learned yesterday that the proposal was also real. That was actually somebody -- I'm guessing that they both knew that they were going to, but apparently -- remember, at the beginning, he gets the ring from the pawn shop and then he gives it to the guy. And I thought maybe that was just sort of setting up the wedding, but no, apparently that was also a real proposal. Yeah, no, it was so good, and it was all -- it's joy and faith and struggle and longing, and patriotism and regionalism and solidarity. And it was just -- it was a party. It was an incredible party.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:26:57]**
Oh, so good.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:27:10]**
The wedding. Oh my god, so good.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:27:37]**
If those haters could get over themselves for a moment, they would have seen, rightly, our own American dream within that. I mean, they would have seen the mythos that so many of our ancestors claimed, just in Puerto Rico. And it was, again, special. It was something that especially, especially the end -- I mean, the roll call of nations, especially as our current administration is trying to distance itself from the international community. It was special.

**Jonathan Katz [00:28:09]**
And God bless America. He says, in English, "God bless America." Also, by the way -- people are also like, the whole thing was in Spanish. No. Lady Gaga sang "This Is What You Wanted," right? And then she sings in English and kind of dances salsa kind of awkwardly. So white culture was also represented.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:28:28]**
We got a white English speaker right here. Stop complaining. That's me. That's my culture. I've been to so many quinceaneras, I can't tell you.

**Jonathan Katz [00:28:41]**
Yeah, kind of like twitching a little bit to the music. That's my culture.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:28:44]**
Right? It is white culture. But you know what else is, sadly, white culture? Well, it is the alternate halftime show. Unfortunately, there's some other folks that look like us and they're masquerading, pretending that they've got something better than what we saw. Well, we don't necessarily agree with that at all, because I've seen the highlights, and I also know who played, and Kid Rock is terrible. And I hope somehow this clip gets to him, because he's not good, he's not wise. But Caitlin, you persevered. You put yourself through this because you are a real team player here. How did the TPUSA alternative halftime show play out?

**Caitlin M. Green [00:28:54]**
Don't put this on us, Trent.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:29:35]**
Okay, so to be fair, I sat through it because I have a problem, not because I'm a good, helpful person, okay? The right-watcher impulse is not a healthy impulse. I don't want to encourage it, but here I am. And what I have to say is: "Bawitdaba da bang da bang diggy diggy." Everybody can get on board with this message. This is a message for the people.

First of all, the halftime show -- totally coherent. I was like, I gotta look up the lyrics. Is there anything in here? No, there's no content. That song doesn't have content. I was like, maybe I missed something. Maybe there's something about, like, let's party or something. No. Well, there's "my name is Kid Rock," that's in there. So that's a real declarative statement.

The thing about the Turning Point USA halftime show is that it was too long to actually be something you could switch from the game over to and watch, and then when it was over -- because if you watch the whole thing, it's 40 minutes long. When it's done, you've missed some of the game. So that's already a fail to me, fundamentally. You can't --

**Jonathan Katz [00:30:59]**
A huge fail. That was the entire point. I was referencing earlier the alternative halftime shows of my youth. Beavis and Butthead, In Living Color, the MTV stuff. When they would do -- or the Puppy Bowl, right? When they would do -- you would turn it, there would be a little timer at the bottom so you knew, back in the day when you couldn't pause or rewind live TV, you knew when you could go back to the game. That was the one. You had one job. You had one job, TPUSA. One job.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:31:34]**
Completely failed. Yeah, okay, so the other problem is that all of these artists were just so samey. Like, every song, you were just like, okay, I guess this is another one of those complaining, overly saccharine country songs where it's like, we are the sort of last bastions of a bygone era of good men who do pure things that are good. And it's like, yeah, okay, got it. Thank you very much for that.

So we had Lee Bryce, who I had to look up, because I was like, who even is this? Because I don't follow country music, apologies to all the Americans. But he wrote this song called "Country Nowadays," which is the whiniest little Pee Pants McGee -- just grow up. Oh my god. Get a spine, live your life. But it's all about: "It ain't easy being" -- oh my god, I can't even say it. It's too annoying. "It ain't easy being country in this country nowadays" -- and you have to hear that a lot of times in this song. It's very repetitive.

And I was like, actually, it's quite easy being country in this country. I mean, I contend that in my current home city of Portland, Oregon, there are at least 100 dudes who are more country than Lee Bryce, but that's because we've got the Columbia River Gorge area where there's actual rural living happening, as opposed to whatever this guy's doing.

So: "It ain't easy being country in this country nowadays, the direction of fingers point when it all goes up in flames, saying I'm some right-wing devil because I was downside red-letter raised. It ain't easy being country in this country nowadays." Okay, we all feel that. "I just want to cut my grass, feed my dogs, wear my boots, not turn the TV on, sit and watch the evening news. Be told if I tell my own daughter that little boys ain't little girls, I'll be up a creek in hot water in this cancel-your-ass world."

So, nothing really -- up a creek and hot? Well, yep, I know. Listen, it's a boiling creek. Yeah, no, not because of global warming. Oh my God, that's not real.

**Jonathan Katz [00:34:06]**
"Up a creek in hot water" is not how that saying goes. That doesn't make any sense. The creek is too hot? Is that about global warming?

**Jonathan Katz [00:34:21]**
I am not country. I know that the problem is that you don't have a paddle when you're up the creek. That's the entire point of it. It's not that the creek is too hot. That's true. Yes, you could have a shit creek. You could be up shit -- that's right. Yes, no, no, hot creek -- the hot creek actually sounds really nice. It sounds like hot springs or something like that.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:34:22]**
Yeah, it sounds lovely. We need to find this area where he is.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:34:31]**
That's the whole point, right? And the creek could be shit also, that's allowed. You can have shit creek without a paddle, but you can't have a hot creek. So okay, honestly, yeah, it probably has rejuvenating minerals.

But to me, nothing says down-home, real-world, muddy-boots, work-hard country life like being super scared of cancel culture. That's the biggest real-world concern anybody has. It's like, buddy, you and David Brooks, my friend, what are you doing? You need to step back and think about how you sound more like a New York Times columnist than an actual cow person. So that was my takeaway from that.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:35:35]**
Yeah, right? Because there's mean tweets. There's weird tweets about me.

**Jonathan Katz [00:35:30]**
That's a really good point. I'm in the boiling creek and checking my phone, and I'm getting owned in my mentions, right?

**Trent R. Nelson [00:35:41]**
Okay, okay, okay. Poet. Didn't miss that. Jonathan Katz, poet over here. Yeah, I know it's "I'm up shit's creek, it's hot, I'm on my phone, people are bitching at me."

**Jonathan Katz [00:35:53]**
Because -- and why? He didn't even know what he told his own daughter.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:35:54]**
And all of that just skates over the "boys can't be a girl" thing. Yeah, why are you -- I mean, there's so much going on here, right? He's like, "If I tell my own daughter that little boys ain't little girls" -- first of all, you are free to do that. You're wrong, right? Trans kids exist, whatever. And it's weird that you're so obsessed with what other kids are doing. Just think about your daughter.

But also, that is its own issue outside of legally preventing schools from being nice to trans kids. That's not the same thing as talking to your own kid in your own house. But they don't -- that doesn't fit in the beautiful, poetic structure of this lovely piece, so I guess he just couldn't jam the syllables in.

**Jonathan Katz [00:36:43]**
Yeah, and also, the idea that there's this superstructure, this hegemonic force that's preventing him from cutting his grass and wearing his boots, when what he's actually trying to do is keep kids from going to the bathroom. He's trying to keep kids from playing on the soccer team. That's him. It's like, no, you can't --

**Caitlin M. Green [00:37:03]**
Yeah, well, right, like little Jenny is like, well, I just want to pee. Can I do that?

**Trent R. Nelson [00:37:13]**
And he doesn't have to turn on the news. He can cut his grass and wear his boots and do his dumb stuff. He can just put on the Discovery Channel. There's a whole bunch of options -- a movie.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:37:19]**
Right, why is he complaining to me that he doesn't want to watch the news? Don't watch the news. Keep your TV off.

**Jonathan Katz [00:37:28]**
Exactly. Well, I mean, the thing is that the real tell is that the statement of action that he is being "canceled" for is talking to his own child, which is, as we've all said here, a thing that absolutely no one is preventing him from doing. When what is actually happening -- the reason why people are actually mad at him is because the line would be more honest if he was like, "Just because I go to my school board and I tell them to kick these kids out of school. And now people are mad at me." Because that -- yeah, exactly.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:37:47]**
Right? Yeah, just because I went to the track meet at the middle school and stopped the whole proceedings to scream about how that one has short hair, like, "that girl runs too fast, I think it's a boy." Oh, suddenly I'm disturbing the peace and upsetting the other participants.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:38:22]**
Right? Very Randy Marsh. Incredibly Randy Marsh. Like, "Well, I'm sorry. I thought this is America." It is. You can't go around being a dumbass all the time, bro. Shut up.

**Jonathan Katz [00:38:29]**
That's right. That's right. Just because I want to look at this girl's genitals to make sure she's really a girl, and now they're telling me I can't put on my boots.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:38:44]**
Oh, that's right, because you're in jail for trying to look at a girl's genitals, so no boots. It was true. He was right.

Okay, so that was maybe the low light. I would say at least Kid Rock brought a little energy, even though it does feel a bit like he was lip syncing, and he's like, "No, I wasn't lip syncing. It was pre-recorded, which is different from lip syncing." I still haven't worked out the logic on that one. But anyway, he did his -- that's called lip syncing. It's called lip syncing, okay? So we are all in agreement. A crime was committed. This man does a song --

**Trent R. Nelson [00:39:26]**
A crime wasn't committed. He could just say that he lip-synced, because they needed it pre-recorded. I mean, again, a lot of these are like self-inflicted wounds.

**Jonathan Katz [00:39:35]**
Oh wait. He's saying -- sorry. He's saying that the segment was pre-recorded, or that his singing was pre-recorded and that he was performing it?

**Caitlin M. Green [00:39:40]**
I would love for what he said to have made sense. However, here's what he says --

**Trent R. Nelson [00:39:44]**
That he was pre-recorded.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:39:50]**
See, now, to me it seems like he's making the differentiation between lip syncing and what he did being that when you lip sync, you just mouth the words to your originally recorded song, whereas he's saying that because he recorded it again, he's allowed to mouth the words to the song.

**Jonathan Katz [00:40:12]**
Because if he's saying that he just wasn't there because he couldn't be bothered to show up at his own halftime show --

**Caitlin M. Green [00:40:21]**
He says, "My halftime performance was pre-recorded, but performed live, no lip syncing, like the haters and fake news are trying to report. When they synced the cameras to my performance on 'Bawitdaba,' it did not line up, as I explained." He posted video, which I'm not watching. I'm sorry, I like myself too much. But anyway, he's saying it was just that the camera and the audio were out of sync. It wasn't his fault. But this doesn't explain the fact that when he was tossing his microphone around, for some reason his voice still sounded clear as day. What's going on there? That sounds like lip syncing to me.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:41:04]**
Because he pre-recorded it, right? Yeah. Okay, well, we've solved that.

**Jonathan Katz [00:41:11]**
Kid Rock always sucked.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:41:11]**
Yeah. Anyway, he's always sucked.

**Jonathan Katz [00:41:12]**
Even when he was actually the age of somebody who called himself "Kid Rock," he was terrible back then. None of this is new. I didn't listen to him then, I'm not listening to him now.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:41:15]**
Yes. Kid Rock sucked when we were the youth. And also, shouldn't he just be Rock now?

**Jonathan Katz [00:41:30]**
Geriatric Rock. Man Rock.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:41:30]**
Man Rock. Senior Citizen Rock. Yeah. So the other thing that happened on this show is that, for some godforsaken reason, Kid Rock needed a costume change. Because one thing we all know about Kid Rock is his amazing costuming.

The thing is, he wanted to do this raucous, "I'm a troublemaker" Kid Rock thing, and then he wanted to do a really heartfelt cover of this beautiful song, "Till You Can't." And so he obviously needed a different costume. And in the middle part, while he was changing -- apparently he needed a lot of time to do this. I don't know, maybe his joints hurt or whatever, it's not easy. So he has a cello and a violin do a duet in between his two pieces, and it is the most repetitive duet I've ever heard in my life. Again, it's like they have no faith in our ability to -- I think they know, like, oh, everybody's going to get another beer right now, let's just put some elevator music on. And it was pretty, but it was very repetitive.

So anyway, it was just two random people doing some string instrumenting for reasons, and then he did "Till You Can't." So who was it for? Who was it for? It was for people who are so mad that other cultures exist and might be interesting and fun to learn about that they want to punish themselves for having considered that it might be a possibility. Like, I do think that this whole show was a form of self-harm, and I think we should check on anybody who earnestly watched it -- not -- I mean, honestly, you should check on me too. Why did I do this to myself? But them too. It just feels like a sort of MAGA self-flagellation exercise.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:41:51]**
No, he put on pants for Charlie Kirk. He put on pants for Charlie Kirk.

**Jonathan Katz [00:42:47]**
Who was this for?

**Trent R. Nelson [00:43:22]**
This was the first time that most of them have heard a cello. They never heard a cello before. Kid Rock broadened their culture. That much we can say.

**Jonathan Katz [00:43:33]**
Because I assumed it would be fun for them, like they would have songs that they love. I don't know what songs they like. Do they like anything? Do they have joy in their lives of any kind?

**Caitlin M. Green [00:43:41]**
I mean, it's okay to like a sad song, that's allowed. At least here's some education.

**Jonathan Katz [00:43:59]**
I'm just thinking, Super Bowl halftime show, violin and cello duet? No one -- even back in the battle days of the Disney "Up With People" halftime shows -- in Super Bowl I, they brought out a marching band. And then -- I actually had to look this up, I forget who the main band was -- but then they brought out Grambling State, because even though it was 1967 or whatever and four people were watching, they were like, we need to have some fun. Someone needs to enjoy this thing. But apparently, that's not their vibe.

**Jonathan Katz [00:44:44]**
Wow, so sad.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:44:44]**
I can envision a world in which some really heartfelt, sweet, sad country songs would be what I want to hear. This is a possible universe. And in fact, here's a hot take for you. I think "Till You Can't" is not the worst song I've ever heard, okay?

"Till You Can't" is essentially about taking the chances to connect with the people in your life before they're taken away from you. So it's like, oh, that ball is always gonna be there in the front room, and you can take it outside to the lawn and play with your kid, and you might just pass it by because it's always available, until suddenly your kid's moved away or whatever and you don't have it. You've got that old engine of the car that you're like, oh, I'm totally going to fix that up with my grandpa, we're going to have a great time. Not today, though, because other stuff has come up. Until you can't. That's the whole idea of that song. That's a human experience, that's a feeling people have all the time. I can live with that.

But the way that it was presented in this grinding, annoying, repetitive thing on this shiny, plain, black stage with a couple of laser lights, and you can't see or hear an audience, so you don't get that social feedback of, oh, we're all enjoying ourselves -- it just felt so crummy, and no fun, and just a slog.

And then also the fact that that song -- that's kind of a nice song, it's about sweet feelings -- Kid Rock was like, I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to make it about Charlie Kirk. I'm going to add in a verse about reading the Bible and getting right with Jesus. And it's going to become this whole new thing. And then you're like, okay, well, you lost me, bro. I'm out. All done. And that's how we end? No, that's right. In fact, they'll find something that might have a little bit to it and be like, what if we took some fun away from it?

**Jonathan Katz [00:46:43]**
These are not fun people. That's awful.

**Jonathan Katz [00:46:56]**
I mean, honestly, I don't know what I expected, but I feel bad for people for whom this is their idea of a good rousing time -- just martyrology and whining.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:47:15]**
I think anybody that tells you that was an awesome show is either lying or deeply disturbed, because it was not.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:47:22]**
Yeah, well, as Katz is sort of alluding to here, and you've alluded to in your horrifying description of what you had to witness, we appreciate your hard work.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:47:32]**
My harrowing story.

**Jonathan Katz [00:47:35]**
I mean, country music can be really fun. There's a very famous country song about being ready for some football, which -- I'm not saying they need to play that, but there are examples of really cool, fun country songs that aren't even outlaw country. They're mainstream country that they could have played for a "let's all get together and have a good time" vibe.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:47:57]**
Right? But again, what you're saying is the point of it. These people don't even understand American culture. What we watched from Bad Bunny was a pretty comprehensive understanding of American culture. It's like, we're all going to get together. It's football. Let's have some drinks, let's have some food. Let's dance. Everybody thinks they're hot. That's good. We all think we're hot, right? So it's all together. And we're a part of the whole thing, but we're America, and God bless America, but we're a part of the whole thing, and it's fun.

And like you said, people that have watched the Super Bowl -- the NFL is strategic. They know this is an exciting game, and in most instances it is. The Super Bowl that Bad Bunny did the halftime show for was not an exciting game. Bad Bunny's performance was the most exciting part. That was the best part. And the conservatives, as you guys noted, they look at it and they're like, oh, this is martyrdom time. No, this is drink-beer-and-laugh-with-your-friends time. This is let's-show-the-goodness-that-we-can-be-about time. And they just missed the mark.

And again, the numbers -- I suspect 6.1 million is even legitimate. I have my doubts. But 125 million in America -- in the United States, I should say -- that is definitely believable. And I believe the numbers from outside the United States make it even more massive.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:49:47]**
Yeah, now I do want to be fair to the Turning Point USA show. There were some upbeat songs. They were just very bland, and I didn't care about them, so I only really told you about the whiny ones. They happened, okay? There was another one about how much fun it is to drink a beer or whatever. But yeah, the biggest portion of this thing was not really distinguishable from the experience of going to one of those churches where they're like, "We have an electric guitar, so now it's a party." But it still continues to be a church service that's very boring.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:50:26]**
Those aren't their churches. That's why you didn't get any of that. That's not their churches. Their churches -- they got people that look like me going, long hair and lots of fun and dancing, and it's a good deal.

But again, we are talking about people who are simply projecting the horridness that is their social, domestic, and international policy. And while I love talking about the Super Bowl, and we could do it all day long, we also have to talk about some bad things. What would this show be without some bad things?

Well, Jonathan, we have ICE buying warehouses across the country, and they're not trying to store dry goods. They are trying to store human people -- our neighbors, our friends, our comrades, our humans. What can you tell us about that? And of course, John Fetterman -- he's fighting back. And yet, if you read his letter, it is not very wholesome, despite the fact that he's like, "I don't want these people in Pennsylvania." It doesn't really have a human tone to it. It has a sort of "this is going to be bad for business, and you're going to be inconveniencing the people in our infrastructure" tone. Like, at no point is he like, "You can't be storing people in warehouses, bro." I feel like that should be the first thing that everyone is saying. Why are we doing this -- millions, billions of dollars -- and we're storing people in warehouses? Jonathan, tell us.

**Jonathan Katz [00:52:17]**
No, what the hell happened to John Fetterman is going to be the -- I'm waiting for the Slate Slow Burn in 10 years about what the hell that was all about. But generally, yeah, no, it's bad.

**Jonathan Katz [00:52:35]**
It's real bad. They're buying property. There are already reports coming out of what's it called -- East Montana, the one next to El Paso. People are apparently dying. It's being underreported. I've been listening to these interviews with this Irish guy who called into an Irish radio station, or got an interview, and he was talking about his experience, and I mean -- they're concentration camps. That's what they are.

This is part of a long tradition of concentration camps that has been part of the American experience since we got into a war to fight against the original concentration camp. The war you're thinking of -- it was the Spanish-American War. It was the Spanish-American War because the Spanish invented the process of reconcentration in Cuba in 1896. We got into the war in 1898, but a lot of it was propaganda -- legitimate propaganda, although spun to promote a war caucus in 1898. And then the United States learned from that, implemented our own concentration camps in the Philippines. Notoriously, we also had concentration camps on American soil during World War II, some of which are being repurposed for this round.

Trump tried to do concentration camps in his first term. Obama, it should be noted, sort of started this procedure that people at the ACLU and survivors of the Japanese internment camps were clocking as concentration camps in like 2014. But it was very clear as we were coming into the 2024 election -- I mean, Stephen Miller was going all over the place talking about his plan to have giant warehouses and round up people and throw them into the warehouses, and then have fleets of planes to fly them out of the country.

Which is how even the most notorious concentration camps in Germany -- the most notorious ones were run by the Germans, but outside of Germany, those were originally to house political prisoners, to round people up, to deport some of them. And then people were deported to the extra-territorial concentration camps, many of which were definitional death camps. They were there to gas people or kill people in massive numbers. But people sometimes get lost in that, because just because something isn't Auschwitz doesn't mean it's not a concentration camp.

And we're seeing in Pennsylvania -- you were talking about Will Bunch, who's a columnist for The Philly Inquirer. He went to Tremont, Pennsylvania, and there's a warehouse that's going to house 7,500 people, and there are fewer than 2,000 people who live in that town in Tremont. And I don't know if that was the one specifically that Fetterman was speaking out against. It's horrific.

The good news is that, as we're talking today, Tom Homan -- the whatever he is, I don't even remember his official title -- the border czar, has announced that Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis is ending. People are leaving. And I mean, really at great cost -- it took the deaths of innocent people, not to mention the immeasurable harm to thousands and thousands of people. But they won. They got them out.

And these things have to go together -- you have to have the apparatus to round people up, and then you have to have the warehouses or the camps or whatever to put them in. And you have to have the court infrastructure, or have subverted enough of the legal infrastructure. And you also have to get the buy-in of the population. And they've got the warehouses, they're working on the detention infrastructure, the rounding-up infrastructure, but they don't have the buy-in of a lot of the people. And people are pushing back, and they're winning. And so even though obviously this is all horrific, I think that's a good thing to take away from at least this moment that we're having this conversation.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:56:02]**
Yeah, okay, and I know people on the ground are holding their celebration until they really see a difference, but we're really hoping that we see that. And you can also tell that the way that they have not gotten the buy-in of American citizens and people around them has really gotten to them, because in that same announcement, Homan was like, "And we're gonna have people around to deal with dissidents," or whatever. I think their focus is also a lot on trying to bring to heel American citizens and residents who are trying to protect our neighbors, and I think that actually says something about our effectiveness at this point.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:57:48]**
Yes, yes, the whistles work. I mean, you talk to people on the ground, you talk to people who cover it, you talk to people who live in these areas. And the whistles work. The mutuality works. They are -- just as fascism always does -- relying on our nature of wanting to maybe go inside of ourselves, maybe pull back from the rest of the world. But as we talked to Matt McManus about, Minnesota was the wrong place to try that. And one suspects that many of the places that they might try it in will end up being the wrong places, because Americans are not the cowed people that Tom Homan wants us to be. And it kills them.

**Jonathan Katz [00:58:12]**
Nice. Yeah, exactly. I mean, they have successfully, in their political precinct, managed to make whistles and Signal chats the new WMD of the 2020s. But I don't think it's gonna work for most people. I think most people understand -- like, "What are you talking about?" People are like, "these protesters are violent." "Oh? What violence?" They're like, "Well, they have whistles."

**Caitlin M. Green [00:58:51]**
Right, "violent weapons."

**Jonathan Katz [00:59:04]**
They're setting up checkpoints.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:59:05]**
Well, I'll tell you what. I'm in my local singing-resistance Signal chat, and it is a lot of people's grandmas in there. And they all learned how to use Signal this year. Pretty impressive.

**Jonathan Katz [00:59:07]**
There's like one person who looked at a car to see if there was ICE in it.

**Jonathan Katz [00:59:20]**
I mean, their argument that Signal is proof of some kind of international conspiracy -- it's a free app. It's a group chat.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:59:33]**
Calm down, it's literally a text messaging app. No, I think it's really impressive what the grandmas have done. Learning how to use Signal is no easy feat -- downloading it and putting your info in, amazing. And then, like me, a lifelong atheist, they've got me going to a church. I haven't set foot in a church in years, but here I am, bringing diapers and wipes over because that's what they said they need. And all of us are kind of stepping outside of our comfort zone and just getting things done because we know who America is, and we're interested in keeping them safe.

**Jonathan Katz [01:00:08]**
Oh yeah. I mean, America has been a lot of things, and there's good things and there's bad things, but I think a lot of people are leaning into the good things. And some of these things aren't even just America. Some of these are just -- people come together in times of crisis, and fascism requires atomizing them. That's the point of a concentration camp. The original concentration camps in Cuba were the Spanish trying to destroy the independence movement by separating -- they were trying to concentrate people, and they were trying to separate the fighters from the population so that the population couldn't help them, and so the population would feel angry and hungry and tired and not want to fight. But it didn't work. Cuba got its independence, and it was going to get its independence even if the United States hadn't gotten involved.

And it's what it's whatever -- it's what Gulag is, what everything is always about -- trying to take people out of it and make people afraid and make people stay. And you see that in the rhetoric of the MAGA people about Alex Pretti and Renee Good -- it's all like, "What if they had stayed home? They would have been safe." And it's like, but they didn't want to stay home because they saw the things that were happening in their community.

And the point of killing them was to try to drive home the idea that people should stay home. And people didn't stay home. People came out. And when Renee Good was murdered, there was a general strike for the first time in God knows how long in the United States, because people were like, I'm not staying home. And that's why they really had to kill Alex Pretti -- to try to be like, no, we're serious, we're going to kill you if you come out here. And they didn't stay home, and now they, at least, are making progress.

**Trent R. Nelson [01:01:34]**
And it is inspiring. Again, we've said it on many episodes of this program -- Minneapolis-St. Paul is showing us the best of that American story. As you noted, Katz, we've been many things. This country has gone through many turmoils, but our strength comes from our mutuality, our togetherness, our mutual coordination.

And seeing that -- DHS wanted to go into a city and really punch hard and really make the rest of the country say, well, I guess we're just gonna all have to roll over as well. But the first city you really punch like that punches back. And now who's gonna be afraid of the big bad wolf? I don't think anyone will, and this is a good thing.

Mr. Katz, we could spend all day talking here, but unfortunately you've got things to do as well. You mentioned El Paso just when we were going through detention center horrors and hells. The news just goes so fast that I suspect that some of our listeners don't even really know what happened in El Paso, why there was airspace shut down, that there was airspace shut down. Then, as you noted, some information came out regarding the horrendous treatment that individuals are suffering at one of the camps in East Montana. Can you go into that real quick before we let you go?

**Jonathan Katz [01:03:44]**
I woke up yesterday -- it's Thursday, the 12th of February. I woke up on Wednesday to a headline in the New York Times that airspace was shut down in El Paso for 10 days, and my heart sank, because I was like, is this it? Is the big roundup happening? Are we invading Mexico? What's going on? And I had been to El Paso a couple of times, but I went in 2019 with a congressional delegation, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez -- yes, sorry, I've got Martinez Ocasio and Ocasio-Cortez. AOC. And visited some of the concentration camps. So I was like, oh God, is this it?

And then they walk it back, like an hour later, two hours later -- or at least two hours after I read the headline. And we're like, what is it? What happened? And they're like, oh, it's drones. There was a drone. It's a cartel drone, a drone from the cartels. And then they were like, well, they're testing out an anti-drone super weapon. I was like, oh God, they have an anti-drone super weapon. It was a --

**Caitlin M. Green [01:05:13]**
It's like a Mylar balloon.

**Jonathan Katz [01:05:13]**
-- balloon, in either El Paso or Juarez or something, or New Mexico.

**Jonathan Katz [01:05:26]**
A CBP agent was given a laser, and they shot the laser, and they're like, well, we got to close the airspace because we're just shooting lasers all over the place. It wouldn't be safe to have planes flying.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:05:36]**
There's lasers.

**Jonathan Katz [01:05:40]**
Because they were trying to shoot down a balloon. And the DoD put out a -- I don't know if it's still out, but I think they put out a tweet or an Instagram post or something with a meme of an eagle, and there's a laser shooting birds or airplanes or something, and it says "defending the homeland." And it was a balloon.

I don't even know if they shot the balloon down. Somebody needs to find out. Actually, was the balloon shot down? Did the balloon -- is the balloon okay? These are the dumbest people. And that's the situation that we're in right now. They want to do concentration camps. They want to do ethnic cleansing. They have weapons. They have big weapons, they have small weapons. They're killing people. People are actually dying. But they're also really, really, really, really dumb. And it's unclear which of those tendencies is going to win out. Because at a certain point, if you give really dumb people big enough toys --

**Caitlin M. Green [01:06:47]**
Yeah, it's a real insult-to-injury situation.

**Trent R. Nelson [01:06:56]**
Party balloon. A party balloon was shot down, by the way. Sorry to interrupt, but yes, confirmation is --

**Jonathan Katz [01:07:00]**
Oh, it was? Okay. Thank you for confirming that.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:07:02]**
RIP to that balloon. Defending the homeland from children's birthday parties. Balloon down.

**Jonathan Katz [01:07:05]**
The balloon is down. The balloon is down. But that's the circle, right? That brings us right back, because it's like -- Bad Bunny has the point, and we have to mobilize all of our resources as Americans fighting against this, and then a day later, or two days later, they're shooting down children's balloons. It's just an offensive against joy. That's ultimately what fascism is. It is just an all-out attempt to mobilize society against joy, and joy is the defense.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:07:45]**
Yeah, it's a little on the nose, I'll be honest. It's a little too much.

**Trent R. Nelson [01:07:53]**
The joy. It's the joy offensive, and it is on the nose. And I think the writing -- it's too bold. We all see what imagery you're going for. We all see your points. The symbolism is not coy.

In any event, Mr. Katz. Jonathan Katz, The Racket. Author, "Gangsters of Capitalism." We appreciate you so much. And we'd love to have you back. We'll stay in your DMs to be sure. Before we let you go, will you remind our listeners and viewers where they can read more of your wonderful work and see what you're up to, and maybe try to become friends with you too?

**Jonathan Katz [01:08:38]**
Yeah, so TheRacket.news is my newsletter. That's the best place. I'm on TikTok at "Katz on Earth." Or you can just type my name, I think I come up that way as well. I'm on Bluesky: katz.theracket.news. And I've got "Gangsters of Capitalism" and "The Big Truck That Went By" -- those are my existing books. And I'm working on a book now about fascism and free speech, which will hopefully be coming out probably next year. So I'm racing forward on that. Well, one way or another -- listen from exile or something. But we'll see. But yeah, it's fun, because that's the way. That's the way.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:08:42]**
Yeah, if the fascists don't stop it, right? I'll ferry pages back and forth from the Gulag for you. That'll be fine.

**Trent R. Nelson [01:09:21]**
Yes, we'll Gramsci it for you, Katz. It'll be good.

**Trent R. Nelson [01:09:33]**
Jonathan Katz, friend of the program, friend of the world, you are the best. We appreciate you so much. Hey, Caitlin, do you know what this is? Caitlin, do you know what we're doing? What did we just do, Caitlin?

**Caitlin M. Green [01:09:49]**
This is Half the Answer, where understanding a question is half the answer. We have been your hosts, Caitlin and Trent. We love you. Bye.