310: The Bait & Switch Complex

Summary

Conspirituality Podcast - Episode 310: "The Bait & Switch Complex"
Released: May 28, 2026
Hosts: Derek Barris, Matthew Remski, Julian Walker

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the modern incarnation of the "bait and switch" tactic—where public promises of freedom, health, or reform mask manipulative, harmful, or deeply cynical policies and behaviors. The hosts examine three interwoven case studies:

1. Social media free speech grifters who traffic in racism and monetize outrage.
2. The gutting of U.S. SNAP (food assistance) benefits under the guise of nutrition reform.
3. The political maneuvers of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, whose centrist reputation cloaks aggressive neoliberal and reactionary policy shifts.

The discussion weaves through media manipulation, algorithmic incentives, ideological bait-and-switches, and the ongoing dissolution of nuanced, pro-social spirituality in the age of meme-fueled paranoia.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Social Media "Free Speech" Bait-and-Switch: The Rise and Fall of "Chud the Builder"

(Starts at 03:06)

• Case Study: Dalton Etherly, aka "Chud the Builder"

  • 28-year-old from Tennessee, arrested for attempted murder after a series of live-streamed racist provocations (03:06).
  • Gained notoriety with extreme "free speech patriot" content—explicitly seeking confrontations with Black people, brandishing firearms, and using slurs.
  • Julian Walker (03:10):
    “He doubled down on the racism and started live streaming on the kick platform. As a free speech patriot, he gained notoriety for rage bait content...”
  • Algorithmic Incentives: Viral clips propelled his income (about $2,000 a month from Kick), and after being banned, he escalated by launching a ‘Chud’ meme coin on a crypto streaming app—growing his harassment and profiting from a new digital ecosystem (05:49).
  • Escalation to Violence:
    • On May 13, Etherly shot a disabled Black veteran during a livestreamed courthouse confrontation, severely injuring the victim and himself.
    • His meme coin saw a post-shooting spike in value, but he was swiftly barred from trading, while his GiveSendGo fundraiser garnered $270,000—funds ruled ineligible for bail (09:21).
  • Matthew Remski (09:03):
    "It's incredible that Fox survived that because ... I thought he was absolutely going to die, but I'm glad that he's recovering."
  • The hosts dissect how these grifters exploit free speech rhetoric, become far-right martyrs, and bypass consequence via crypto and online fundraising. All enabled and amplified by social platforms and content “clippers.”

• Memorable Quote:

  • Julian Walker (04:46):
    "As his Kick subscriptions grew, Eitherly found he was actually being financially rewarded for his racist behavior."

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The SNAP Benefits Bait-and-Switch: "Nutrition Reform" as Social Service Erosion

(Starts at 12:10)

• USDA SNAP Policy Rollback

  • Under Secretary Brooke Rollins, co-starring RFK Jr. (now HHS), the USDA has massively tightened requirements for grocery stores to be SNAP-eligible—claiming this will improve nutrition and curb fraud (12:10–14:51).
  • Julian Walker (12:52):
    “Retailers... must now carry seven varieties of items across four categories... more than doubles the requirement of available foods, emphasizes more whole foods...”
  • The actual policy removes flexibility for small and convenience stores—disqualifying many that serve food deserts.
  • The supposed logic is to cut “benefits trafficking” and curb junk food, while in practice, it withdraws food access from the most vulnerable (15:22–16:54).
  • Matthew Remski (14:51):
    "Oh, my God."
  • The hosts dissect how governors (including unexpected Democrats) joined the “healthy eating” PR blitz, though actual infrastructure or food access improvements never materialized (16:54–19:20).
  • Derek Barris (19:26):
    “Most of these stores already operate at slim margins... a lot of stores are likely to either forego SNAP or shut down completely because they rely on SNAP.”

• Impact Analysis

  • Studies predict $1.6 billion in initial costs, and $760 million annual—costs impossible for small businesses (24:41–27:25).
  • The new code requirements for beverages and food are unwieldy, leading to public humiliation for SNAP recipients and logistical chaos (27:25–28:39).
  • Derek Barris (28:39):
    "And then lastly, it's just fucking human dignity. Like, imagine having to do that. You're already like struggling to feed your family and you gotta sit there with the clerk and figure out what you can actually purchase."
  • Medical and hunger experts agree this move does not address real health drivers—it's a policy designed for political optics and cruelty-by-design (29:16).

• Memorable Quote:

  • Julian Walker (22:38):
    “It's the eternal question that we face, right? Like, where does incompetence meet cruelty? And like a sort of overt war on poor people.”

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Mark Carney & the Canadian Neoliberal Bait-and-Switch

(Starts at 33:14)

• The Mythology

  • Remski explores how Canada’s self-image (peacekeeping, multiculturalism, universal healthcare, stewardship) is a “bait” masking neoliberal privatization, militarization, and colonial extraction (33:43–37:55).

• Carney’s Ascendance

  • The new Liberal PM and ex–Bank of England governor is hailed as a centrist, but in practice:
    • Expands privatization and insurance influence in healthcare, failing to uphold the Canada Health Act (37:15).
    • Maintains arms exports and pipeline construction on Indigenous land (petrostate reality).
    • Wields reactionary executive power—cancelling progressive tax hikes, gutting Indigenous and housing funding, expanding surveillance, restricting protest, and approving massive military budgets (43:15–62:21).

• Bait and Switch Mechanics

  • Carney leverages “Canadiana” (maple syrup, hockey, "friendly beavers") as PR, while enacting deep austerity and strengthening ties to US military-industrial interests.
  • His government’s green rhetoric veils the cancellation of key emissions caps and a pivot to weapons finance (the “Toronto defense bank” initiative).
  • Trudeau—while centrist—at least trialed COVID aid like CERB, but Carney rapidly unwinds even that legacy.
  • Matthew Remski (54:07):
    “CERB accidentally exposed... that things like UBI might be a good thing or that the minimum wage was already beneath some subsistence, so they actually set it too high for the capitalist class, I'd say.”
  • Despite obvious policy contradictions, Carney remains popular in polls—raising the question of media complicity, public political illiteracy, and the effectiveness of mythmaking.

• Memorable Quotes:

  • Matthew Remski (37:55):
    “Conspirituality for me is what happens when correct alienation gets routed through metaphysics instead of... political economy.”
  • On Carney’s leadership:
    "He is as skilled at Canadiana slop as he is at moving fast and breaking things... performing on the national stage as a kind of soft nationalist." (52:26)
  • Julian Walker (22:06): “This is what happens when deeply unserious people come in and say, oh, I've got an idea for how to enforce a set of changes that will... revolutionize the way that the government handles these issues. Right. They don't know that. Like... cruelty is the point because they really don't care about the people who most need the help.”

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Notable Quotes by Timestamp

• On ragebait livestreamers (Julian, 03:10):
  "He gained notoriety for rage bait content in which he basically walked around in public looking for trouble, calling Black people the N word and chimps, and trying to provoke a response while sometimes letting... their streaming audience... see that he was strapped up with a firearm."

• On SNAP’s bureaucratic cruelty (Derek, 28:39):
  "And then lastly, it's just fucking human dignity. Like, imagine having to do that. You're already like struggling to feed your family and you gotta sit there with the clerk and figure out what you can actually purchase."

• On Carney’s soft nationalism (Matthew, 52:26):
  “He is as skilled at Canadiana slop as he is at moving fast and breaking things.”

• On the enduring interplay of incompetence and cruelty (Julian, 22:38):
  "It's the eternal question that we face, right? Like, where does incompetence meet cruelty? And like a sort of overt war on poor people."

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Timeline of Major Segments

| Timestamp | Segment/Theme | |-------------|--------------------------------------------------------| | 01:54 | Episode Theme & Structure | | 03:06 | Dalton Etherly/"Chud the Builder" social media grift | | 12:10 | SNAP benefits reform – "nutrition" as social assault | | 33:14 | Mark Carney and Canadian neoliberalism | | 43:15 | Canadian media landscape & polling interpretation | | 54:07 | Trudeau's CERB, UBI trial balloon, and political fallout| | 62:21 | Carney’s policies: climate, sovereignty, extraction |

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Analysis & Takeaways

• Algorithmic & Economic Incentives:
  Modern bait and switches are powered and accelerated by social media and digital currencies—transforming hate speech, outrage, and cruelty into viral, profitable content.
• Political Illusionism:
  Both in the U.S. and Canada, the machinery of government uses surface-level rhetoric ("nutrition fights obesity," "supply chain innovation," "defense of sovereignty") to obscure policies that entrench poverty, privatize public service, and serve entrenched power.
• The Spiritual Stakes:
  The bait-and-switch paradigm is not just about policy, but about the psychic and spiritual energy of the public—anger and longing for justice get hijacked or derailed into conspiratorial paranoia, culture war scapegoating, or the election of smiley technocrats with hidden agendas.
• Conspirituality's Role:
  The podcast frames itself as a necessary counterweight, providing clear analysis and emotional honesty to help listeners dissect and resist manipulative narratives—whether they come cloaked in hippie wellness speak, libertarian rage, or quietly “responsible” neoliberalism.

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Final Reflection

"Bait and switch" isn't just a consumer scam—it's the core operating logic of contemporary political and social life, from grifting live streamers to global health and defense policy. The episode asks listeners to become ever more vigilant: to distinguish between rhetoric and impact, between spiritual hunger and paranoia, between intentions and consequences.

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For those who want to navigate a polarized, bait-filled information landscape with clarity: this episode delivers a sharp, provocative, and sometimes bleakly funny guide.

Transcript

[Julian Walker]

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[Derek Barris]

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[Matthew Remsky]

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[Derek Barris]

aspect of our lives.

[Julian Walker]

From WHYY and prx, this is Sports in America. Each week we go deep with athletes, coaches and fans. We'll take you into the triumphs, the heartbreaks and the relationships that define athletes

[Matthew Remsky]

careers and create the moments we remember. Join me, David Green on Sports in America. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.

[Derek Barris]

Hey everyone. Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience and authoritarian extremism. I'm Derek Barris.

[Matthew Remsky]

I'm Matthew Remsky.

[Julian Walker]

I'm Julian Walker.

[Derek Barris]

You can find us on Instagram and threads conspiritualitypod as well as individually on bluesky. You can access all of our episodes ad free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on [e-mail] conspirituality. You can also grab our Monday bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions. As independent media creators, we really appreciate your support.

[Julian Walker]

Conspirituality 310 the bait and switch complex in the early 20th century, some retailers would advertise a product at an attractively low price to lure customers into the store, claim the item was out of stock or of poor quality, and then pressure customers to buy a more expensive alternative. The practice became known in the public vernacular as bait and switch in the 1920s. This week we look at three modern bait and switches pertinent to our beat. First, I'll look at free speech, Patriot chud the builder's slimy social media tactics. Then Derek investigates RFK Jr's SNAP benefits. Now you see them, now you don't. Finally, Matthew looks at how Mark Carney is bait and switching the Canadian political body. All right, everyone, I apologize, but we have to talk about someone named Dalton Etherly, who goes by the online handle Chud the Builder.

[Matthew Remsky]

Now that's not what he's been called That's. He's chosen that.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah, he's chosen that name.

[Matthew Remsky]

Okay. All right.

[Julian Walker]

He's a 28 year old white man from Tennessee who's currently being held at the Montgomery County Jail on attempted murder charges after a shooting incident outside their courthouse. How did he get there, you may ask? Well, it all started with a viral video of a road rage incident around late 2024, early 2025, somewhere in there. In this video, Eitherly was caught using a racial slur directed toward the black occupants of another car. And as a result of this video going out going viral, local outrage about his actions led to him losing his construction job. And so then he started his own construction company and. And that failed as well. Undaunted, he doubled down on the racism and started live streaming on the kick platform. As a free speech patriot, he gained notoriety for rage bait content in which he basically walked around in public looking for trouble, calling black people the N word and chimps, and trying to provoke a response while sometimes letting either the streaming audience or the victim themselves see that he was strapped up with a firearm. Meanwhile, the bait and switch was to claim his free speech rights were being violated by slanderous activists who'd cost him and his family his business.

[Matthew Remsky]

So this was his unemployment plan? Like he was just gonna go to kik, he was gonna stream racism?

[Julian Walker]

Exactly.

[Matthew Remsky]

Okay.

[Derek Barris]

I mean, it's such an ideal story of understanding that free speech, quote unquote, has consequences. And anytime I've seen the consequences of what him or now his duplicates, his replicates have been doing, they completely deserve what they've been getting.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah. So of course, this activity led to some notoriety in far right circles, people cheering him on, but it also led to a November 2025 arrest in Clarksville for harassment. Clips of his behavior nonetheless went viral on YouTube and TikTok. And as his Kick subscriptions grew, eitherly found he was actually being financially rewarded for his racist behavior. So before being banned by that platform this past April, people who know how their relationships work to subscriptions and inc. Say he's estimated to have been making over $2,000 a month.

[Matthew Remsky]

Yeah, I guess it's a living.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah, it's. It's not a lot of money, but, you know, to be paid that amount for going around harassing people and insulting them racially.

[Derek Barris]

Yeah, and that's not the type of consequences I was talking about, but it is. It is actually a consequence of being a complete douchebag like that and just putting your life into your own hands. If you're going to Go do that in public and it's, it's, it's one of the unfortunate consequences, let's say that.

[Julian Walker]

Well, stay tuned everyone because you'll be glad and dismayed to hear in equal measure that as we've seen with other free speech martyrs, it's the ban that leads to the real money. Eitherly moved his operation from Kik, where he was banned over to a crypto based streaming app of course called Pump Fun. And he launched the Chud Meme coin which is represented by his face and characteristic shoulder length hair and thick mustache. He kind of looks like a, a good old boy from a 70s TV show or movie. And his aggressively racist on stream harassment continued to escalate. CHUD's next viral clip showed him using some kind of chemical spray on a victim. He was taunting and insulting. And after that he was interviewed by Proud boy founder Gavin McInnes on Alex Jones's Infowars show.

[Matthew Remsky]

What an incredible blast from the past. Is McGinnis like a correspondent for Infowars? But Infowars is not Alex Jones's anymore. Is this book before the sale went through or something like that.

[Julian Walker]

It's all very fluid. And into that fluid maelstrom comes all the shit.

[Matthew Remsky]

Poor Gavin.

[Julian Walker]

On May 7, Chud the Builder posted on X saying series finale is dead, chimp on the pavement and you monkeys rioting when I walk free. Stay tuned. Pretty soon thereafter he harassed blackstaff at a Nashville restaurant and then showed up again for a meal the following day after which he refused to pay the over $370 bill because he was told not to live stream. And this led to his second arrest. This is on May 9th. He attempted to resist arrest and after being released on bond, he claimed to his live stream that he was interviewed while under arrest by the FBI over alleged links to a neo Nazi group called the Goyim Defense League. All the while the CHUD Meme coin kept trading and growing in value and the ecosystem of clippers who find and distrib the most sensationalist moments of what can otherwise be very long and boring live streams where viewers are waiting for something to happen. Those clippers kept cashing in via video clipping marketplaces who pay for short form content that can go viral on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. Thus algorithmic incentives. As we've already seen, this is a new wrinkle in this story. Drive, rage, bait. Content that turns criminal behavior into an entrepreneurial career choice. The only catch is that you have have to keep escalating so case In Point on May 13, this is all just over the course of a few days after the restaurant incident, Eitherly had a scheduled court appearance over an unpaid debt and he got into a provocation with a disabled black veteran named Joshua Fox and then Eitherly pulled his handgun and fired multiple shots. Fox was struck twice, some reports say in the shoulder and also the abdomen, and he had to be rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery. He's currently stable and recovering. Etherly also accidentally shot himself in the arm.

[Matthew Remsky]

It's incredible that Fox survived that because for anybody who saw the clip, I mean it just was pretty much point blank and his entire body just was jolted by the two blasts. And yeah, I thought he was absolutely going to die, but I'm glad that he's recovering.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah. So of course in the sick world we live in, all of this was livestreamed as were chud the builder's interactions with first responders before he was actually arrested. And in those conversations he claimed that he had acted in self defense. I guess this is part of the series finale grand plan. The script that he had prepared the Meme Coin temporarily jumped to a ridiculous $4.4 million valuation in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. Prior to his arrest, analysts say that he only appears to have cashed out around $4,000 at that point from that Meme Coin situation. But afterwards he was barred from any further trading activity. But don't feel too bad for him. A fresh wave of approving donations flooded into his pre existing campaign on the right wing Give Send Go site, which has now raised over $270,000. But the judge in his case has ruled he cannot put that toward his $1 million bail bond. Now on that fundraising page, eitherly claims he's been victimized by Black Lives Matter activists over some jokes and opinions that he had shared online. I'm broke, he said. The slander has crushed my business's income and I'm struggling to keep food on the table to pay our bills and protect my family from this onslaught. I need your help to bridge this gap and rebuild. If you're a fan of Conspirituality podcast, you're going to love Magical Overthinkers, a show for thought spiralers exploring the subjects we can't stop overthinking about every other week. Amanda Montel, New York Times best selling author and host of the Sounds Like a Cult podcast, interviews a brilliant expert guest about a buzzy, confounding subject from the Zeitgeist. From Nostalgia to Imposter Syndrome. You gotta check out her first episod episode titled Overthinking About Narcissism, featuring The brilliant psychologist Dr. Romani. From extreme celebrity worship to people with master's degrees basing their real life choices on Mercury's whereabouts, there seems to be a lot of Delulu out there these days, complete with open hearted personal stories, thought provoking conversations, and actionable takeaways for how chronically online listeners can get out of their own heads. This podcast is here to make some sense of the senseless, to help quiet the cacophony in our minds for a while, or even hear a melody in it. Magical Overthinkers airs every other Wednesday, wherever you get your podcasts.

[Derek Barris]

On May 7, the USDA followed through on a long standing threat to remove grocery stores from the SNAP benefits list if they didn't carry more quote unquote real food. USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins has been riding shotgun to Kennedy's MAH since the two were installed in the Trump administration, appearing often with Kennedy at events where they smoothie up fruits and hop on exercise bikes for no apparent reason. Just like their counterparts in Doge, they promise to reduce fraud and abuse, which is the Republican way of saying let's get as many poor people off social benefits as possible. Here's an overview of the legislation from the press release.

[Julian Walker]

Retailers authorized to accept SNAP benefits must now carry seven varieties of items across four categories of staple foods protein, grain, dairy, and fruits and vegetables. This change more than doubles the requirement of available foods, emphasizes more whole foods, increases the perishable food requirements, and eliminates loopholes that for too long have allowed retailers to count certain snack foods toward their staple food requirements.

[Derek Barris]

And here's their supposed these changes will

[Matthew Remsky]

not only ensure vulnerable families in need have more nutritious options wherever they shop, but demand more accountability from retailers who not only have stocked the bare minimum, but have seen the most program violations, including benefit tracking and other fraudulent behavior. I wonder about that.

[Julian Walker]

Hold on. You said benefit tracking instead of trafficking, and I think that phrase is important in terms of the ludicrous nature of what they're claiming.

[Derek Barris]

Oh, you're right. Yeah, it's benefit trafficking. That's actually from the release.

[Matthew Remsky]

Oh, okay. Well, wait a minute. Let's, let's, let's keep this because, yeah, I mean, it's a mistake. But, but what is trafficking? I imagine that. I thought, I thought that they were accusing the retailers of not tracking the benefits properly.

[Derek Barris]

No, what they're saying is that they are, they are trafficking the benefits. They are, they are illegally using the benefits to make More money off of these foods.

[Matthew Remsky]

Oh, okay.

[Derek Barris]

That's the fraud part. So basically there's. There. They claim that people are going and they're. They're using more than they're supposed to or getting more of the quote unquote shitty food. The soda, candy, whatever. They're, they're gaming the system. They don't actually need SNAP benefits. These are people who can afford food and we're giving them. The state is giving them all of this free. Yeah, that's. So that's benefit trafficking.

[Matthew Remsky]

Oh, my God.

[Derek Barris]

Yeah. I thought Matthew was going to reply, but he just looked with, with his trademark face, which is like, what the.

[Matthew Remsky]

Yeah, I mean, I mean. Ok, okay, so. But so it's a double claim. They didn't need it at all. It's not that. It's not just that poor people are misspending their SNAP benefits. It's. There's a whole category of people who don't need SNAP at all and they just want candy.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah.

[Derek Barris]

Yes. You got it.

[Julian Walker]

There's a black market. There's a, there's an illicit market in SNAP benefits to get sugar.

[Derek Barris]

All right, let's backtrack to, like, look at the bait and switch element of this though. Because from the beginning of his tenure, Kennedy made restricting what SNAP recipients could purchase a centerpiece of his MAHA agenda, even though SNAP is technically administered by the usda. And that's why he keeps appearing with Brooke Rollins. No problem. This administration follows no actual rules. And in this sense, Kennedy is a useful lackey in disassembling social services that aren't even under his purview. On March 28, 2025, Kennedy joined West Virginia Governor Patrick Morrissey at an elementary school so that the governor could announce he was requesting that the USDA stop allowing residents to purchase soda. Snap. Remember when the right was up in arms, when Michael Bloomberg suggested a soda tax in New York some 15 years ago for similar health reasons? No outcry at all this time. But again, just be clear here. Kennedy went on tour using taxpayer dollars state by state to restrict SNAP benefits when it's under the purview of Brooke Rollins. So I want to be super clear on that. She was at some of them, but not all of them. It was really. Kennedy's tour was a MAHA tour and this was the beginning of his tour around those red states, working with those governors to roll back SNAP benefits under the guise of health. And there's a reason for this, because attacking benefits on a state level makes sense for them because it requires no federal mandate. Which requires pesky things like congressional approval.

[Matthew Remsky]

Right.

[Derek Barris]

Instead, use the states to prove out your gutting of social services. Rollins is on board, announcing on her first day of office a Laboratories of innovation initiative to encourage governors to put forth state driven solutions to strengthen federal nutrition programmers and programs and protect taxpayer dollars. You know those taxpayer dollars being protected by being funneled into Trump's $1.8 billion slush fund and his billion dollar, or who knows how much it's going to cost.

[Julian Walker]

Ballroom, this is fiscal responsibility, right?

[Matthew Remsky]

The whole account. I mean, we know about the slush fund, we know about the ballroom, but then you realize that like on every single level, there's all of this garbage going on and this numbers playing. Like even you just saying, Derek, that he should be touring with Rollins or it should be through the usda. But somehow, like, is HHS paying for that tour? How are they going to put that into the books? Like, everything has got to be so incredibly crooked. They must have like these teams and teams of. Well, it's probably just done by AI, right? Like you just tap into ChatGPT, like, figure out how to make this look okay in my ledger book. Right.

[Derek Barris]

I don't even know if they're that sophisticated. They probably just pull the money out and don't even track it. Yeah, I would imagine that's what they're doing.

[Matthew Remsky]

It's just like ATMs, wherever you go, just. You get a White House ATM.

[Derek Barris]

Yep, yep. Governors quickly got on board. So you had Indiana's Mike Braun, Texas Greg Abbott, Louisiana's Jeff Landry, and Colorado' Jared Polis, who's a Democrat, and they all got on the MAHA train. By the end of 2025, 18 state agency requests to implement a SNAP food restriction waiver were made. More have followed since, and as of 2026, all have been approved. The bait and switch happened early in the process, usually as governors were standing beside Kennedy at the press conferences. Polis claim that because local grocers making stocking decisions based in part on SNAP eligibility, he was qu confident that this waiver will also help reduce food deserts in Colorado by reducing shelf space for soda and increasing it for other nutritional food products eligible for snap.

[Matthew Remsky]

So tell me that you've never worked in retail or in the grocery business without telling me any of those things. And there you have it.

[Derek Barris]

Yeah, we're getting to the switch part. Tennessee's Bill Lee gave a nod to distribution and supply chain upgrades, void of any specific infrastructure pledges. Indiana's Mike Braun said, quote, we're focused on root Causes, term transparent information and real results. Yet his administration failed to announce specific infrastructure investments for areas where healthy food alternatives are already limited. And Louisiana state health department told residents in food deserts to consider utilizing programs like farmers markets that accept SNAP as they're not part of the forthcoming USDA restrictions. And just, you know, an aside, the argument for that is that farmers markets are often specialized because farms produce different things, whereas stores have more infrastructure to provide the requesting range of options. But do they actually. And that's, that's where the bait and switch happens. The rollout has been a complete show. Critics, critics expect a lot more of it once the federal government tries to remove entire stores from the SNAP program. The USDA's Food and Nutrition Service, or FNS, works with more than a quarter million U. S retailers authorized to accept SNAP benefits, ranging from local grocers to large supermarket chains. And that's the key part of the bait and switch. Roughly 71% of SNAP authorized retailers are small stores with 118,000 convenience stores participating in the program. And that makes up 45% of the network. Small stores and food deserts that can't meet the new stocking requirements will get dropped from the program, which is going to reduce access for the very communities the policy is supposedly designed to help.

[Matthew Remsky]

That is so incredibly cruel. Cruel, incredible.

[Derek Barris]

The whole thing, the cruelty, you know, we've said for a decade, I mean we meaning like people who are cognizant of what Trump is doing. The cruelty is the point. And Kennedy just slides right into that ethos. So there it is. Launch an initiative under the guise of healthy eating that reduces what SNAP recipients can buy. Claim you're going to fix long standing food, long standing infrastructure and supply chain problems that played a big role in creating food deserts in the first place. Wait for the public to forget about those problems, promises. Then publish a federal mandate that all stores not complying with your invented policy will be dropped without making any substantial fixes to the system.

[Julian Walker]

Right. Now this, this is how they're going to simultaneously prevent fraud, waste and abuse, but also solve the obesity epidemic, right?

[Derek Barris]

Yep.

[Julian Walker]

Everyone having diabetes is where. This is what happens when people, when deeply unserious people come in and say, oh, I've got an idea for how to enforce a set of changes that will complet revolutionize the way that the government handles these issues. Right. They don't know that. Like, like sure, cruelty is the point because they, they really don't care about the people who most need the help. But it's also incompetence and, and false confidence and being able to parade around saying, look at these bold moves that we're making that are just completely destructive.

[Matthew Remsky]

It's the eternal question that we face, right? Like, where does incompetence meet cruelty? And like a sort of overt war on poor people. Because, I mean, if, if, if these were people that were cared for by the society at large, if, if, you know, the, the Maga movement, the Maha movement actually was committed to people who were vulnerable, none of this, none of this shit would happen. Like, none of these games would be played, right? Like, you wouldn't figure out some abstruse way of pretending to do something so that you could, that you could blame somebody else for failing at doing it and then, you know, sort of call it a day.

[Julian Walker]

But you can imagine the conversation that says, well, you know, I've seen these statistics that say, you know, really poor people tend to have these, these health problems more than, more than the rest of the population. What do you think the answer is? Well, we, we need to stop subsidizing their junk food habits and then maybe they will, they will reform themselves. Right?

[Matthew Remsky]

Right.

[Derek Barris]

You need to stop all the benefits trafficking. That's, that's the real issue here. And most of the, not most of, but the majority, a small majority of health problems and SNAP benefits go to people in red states. Like it's, it's endemic across every state. But there are more in red states. I would imagine a lot of Trump supporters are going to find out this fall when they can't use their benefits where they usually go. They're just, they're going to be blindsided by this. Like, what the fuck is happening? Just like people have been with, with gas prices recently.

[Matthew Remsky]

And then the sort of fascism question is, is who are they going to blame? Or is the diversion sort of pattern of, okay, well, you know, what culture war issue are we going to throw at them then? Like, do you reach the bottom of that? Do you reach the bottom of substitute sort of decoy scapegoats at a certain point? And at a certain point, you know, the red state community realizes, no, actually we, we're, we're being abused.

[Derek Barris]

That could be why the, the, you know, the Christian nationalist paper last week that we reviewed focused so heavily on the LGBTQ plus and trans rooms, you know, ethos. They're just, they're just trying to keep people focused on those things instead of what they're doing politically. And it can only go so far. Right, so let's look at a few other criticisms about these new Regulations because it's, it, it's infrastructure, but it's more. There was an impact analysis by the National Grocers association, fmi, the Food Industry association and the national association of Convenience Stores. And they found that upfront costs to implement these new changes were projected at $305.1 million for supermarkets, a billion dollars for convenience stores. You know, notably there they have huge margins at convenience stores, right? 11.8 million for small format groceries and 215.5 million for super centers. That all totals $1.6 billion. To implement these changes just to supposedly get, get better food into your stores.

[Matthew Remsky]

Right?

[Derek Barris]

Ongoing costs, ongoing annual costs total 760 million annually, mostly from point of service technology upgrades, compliance monitoring, reduced checkout productivity and lost sales. Most of these stores already operate at slim margins. I was obviously being sarcastic, right? So a lot of stores are likely to either forego Snap or shut down completely because they rely on Snap. The state level rollout has been a shit show, as I said, with stores being given mere days to comply. And that's, that's just what's been happening in the state. So this is the federal mandate. It's going to throw a lot of companies off. Now there is a bit of time, but it's still a herculean task for stores that have a business to run. And convenience stores are often family operated. Right. The one closest to me is, is an Indian family. And I know how strained they are when it gets busy in there. The bureaucratic strain is going to be a nightmare. An average of 20,000 new food and beverage products are launched every year. And there are thousands of universal product codes that exist for varying sizes, brands and beverages. The mandate declares that beverages with one fruit to artificially sweetened ratio is acceptable, but not another. So the whole coding system is fucked. Because if you have, have an orange drink that has 51% fruit and 49% artificially sweetened, that is okay in terms of Snap. But if it's 49% fruit and 51% artificially sweetened, it's no good. So. And, but there's only one code for that beverage.

[Matthew Remsky]

But Derek, So there's only one.

[Derek Barris]

How are you even going to track that?

[Matthew Remsky]

Sorry, there's, there's going to be one code for, for both of those versions of that beverage. Those are two different products. And who's assigning the codes? It's not the store, is it?

[Derek Barris]

No, it's. Oh, I don't, I don't actually know who signs the codes, but when you talk about the trackers there's probably an association that does that. So if you have something that's a 16 ounce orange juice or orange drink, there's a code for that. There's another one for a 24 ounce orange juice or orange drink. And so now because there's such minutia around the content of the beverages, which has never existed before, they either have to change the coding system, which I would imagine is on the federal government and they're not going to do it, or, or what's been happening, which is that people have been having to stand there with the clerks and look at item per item to figure out what's acceptable. That is actually already going on.

[Matthew Remsky]

God damn it.

[Derek Barris]

And then the last one. Iowa's restrictions are tied to the state's sales tax code. Any taxable food item is officially restricted, which means SNAP participants and retail workers also have to interpret every piece of food at the register.

[Matthew Remsky]

Incredible.

[Derek Barris]

And then lastly, it's just fucking human dignity. Like, imagine having to do that. You're already like struggling to feed your family and you gotta sit there with the clerk and figure out what you can actually purchase. SNAP benefits average out to roughly $6 per person per day. Anti hunger advocates argue that providing nutrition education and supporting policies that encourage the purchase of fruits, vegetables and other healthy options are far more effective in improving health health than limiting choice. Medical experts have said that removing soda and candidy from, from SNAP is unlikely to do much to combat chronic disease, which is the supposed goal of the mandate. Tackling the actual, I'm going to use the term root causes of health issues which are rooted in the social determinants of health could actually make an impact. But that's not why Kennedy was installed. As they teach us Secretary, he's actually doing his job really well, which is gutting social services so the government can spend our tax money on ballrooms, defense tech and slush funds, which is great for the health of American billionaires. But as for the rest of us, we were never part of their concern to begin with.

[Matthew Remsky]

Derek, I just have to say you are the perfect guy to do a segment like this. Not only because of your great medical journalism, but because also I can hear the white hot fury of the guy who does our accounting. You know, like, you keep track of like every single dime that we spend. It's in a spreadsheet. It's perfectly worked out. It's like you, you have the taxes under control. You've got them done like six months early. And like, yeah. And you're watching these guys just completely Mess everything up. And so I know. I know how motivated you are.

[Derek Barris]

Thank you. Fun fact. I originally went to college for accounting. True story.

[Matthew Remsky]

Did you?

[Derek Barris]

Yeah. Yeah. I was surprised. I was my high school accountant for our school business, which was thing. But we actually. We actually had the best results of any class since before us.

[Matthew Remsky]

I bet you did.

[Derek Barris]

Of profit margins. And I just. I love. I love spreadsheets. It's weird. Like, I love that whole thing. But then I found psychedelics and then it was all over. I was like, accounting.

[Julian Walker]

That's what I was gonna say.

[Matthew Remsky]

No, no, but you kept on with a. You kept the love going because it saved our ass. Because neither Julian or I know what's going on. So that's absolutely.

[Julian Walker]

I was going to say accounting in the front, psychedelics and poetry in the back, but this is. I mean, this thing that we've just been talking about is classic in terms of everything we cover. Right. It's like, you know, something is too good to be true. Whether it's pseudoscience or an invitation to a cult or a conspiracy theory. If it claims to solve a really complex problem that people have struggled over for a very long time who are experts, who dedicate their lives to understanding it. If it claims to solve it, in some respects, really oversimplified way.

[Matthew Remsky]

Yeah.

[Derek Barris]

Yeah. I mean, if I. I've said it before, but if I was a medical professional, I. I would just be losing my brain all the time watching what's happening.

[Matthew Remsky]

Okay, guys, I have to start by asking, have you heard of Sugar on Snow? Derek? Maybe. Julian? Probably not.

[Julian Walker]

Definitely not.

[Derek Barris]

It sounds like some cocaine reference.

[Matthew Remsky]

No, no, no. It's. But it's the opposite. If you go to northern Ontario, you go to the eastern townships of Quebec in around February, when the SAP starts running in the maple bush, you can do it in Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine. There's a point where the sugar houses will have this public event where once they boil down, syrup is 40 to 1. You get 1 gallon of syrup out of 40 gallons of SAP. But then if you reduce the syrup down, it turns into this taffy. And if you take the taffy out of the. Out of the hot plate at the right time, exactly the right time, before it burns on and, like, messes everything up. You can actually pour it out onto this sheet of ice, and then it becomes this really sticky, gummy treat. And the kids gather around and they roll it up and. And it's a great. You know, it's a great time. Right?

[Derek Barris]

Yeah. Jersey is not known for our maple syrup. We have good strawberries and tomatoes, but we don't do maple syrup.

[Matthew Remsky]

You have some corn syrup, like colored.

[Derek Barris]

We have a lot of corn.

[Matthew Remsky]

There's a lot of corn.

[Derek Barris]

Jersey. We are the Garden State.

[Matthew Remsky]

Okay? So I bring it up because I have an image for our international audience that I think demonstrates the type of bait and switch final boss that I think is embodied in Mark Carney.

[Derek Barris]

Hold on a second. Hold on a second. I just gotta warn you, Matthew, you don't say someone's a final boss because there's always another boss that's gonna.

[Matthew Remsky]

There's always another boss, right? Well, okay.

[Julian Walker]

The reigning world champion, right?

[Matthew Remsky]

Carney is the guy who will sell you a ticket to a syrup on snow afternoon in the Eastern Townships. And as the Sugarman pours out the hot maple taffy onto a sheet of hardened snow and the kids swarm around with popsicle sticks, you can hear the chainsaws and the mill saws whining, and you realize the whole maple bush will be gone in a few years. So just a preamble first to set up some context. When I look back on what we've covered here on conspirituality, a lot of it for me revolves around the reactionary responses people have within a pandemic of disenchantment, right? Like if there's a summary mantra I could pull out of the general din of beliefs that we have encountered and covered, it would be we have been lied to all of our lives. And on the micro level, it crystallizes into acrimony at the medical industrial complex, so called, that monitors and exploits people while neglecting them. It, you know, cashes out in supposed lies about vaccines and cancer, fears of wokeness as a kind of ideological contagion that has scrambled the layers of self perception. Like what does it mean to be white, Christian, and either a man or a woman. But then at macro levels, the deception is like institution. So, you know, our subjects are saying the mainstream media and the intelligentsia are machines of mass hypnosis and they're puppeted from above by the cabal. And so for years, I feel like I've been studying a demographic of maverick bait and switch analysts who contrast what the dominant culture says about itself against what it offers. But they do it through the absence of a kind of materialist framework. They do it with bad epistemology, they take the real bait of disenchantment, but then they get it hooked into useless conflicts that set culture war bullshit above their own interests. So they feel betrayed, and then they create a fantastical Theory of the betrayer. So I think conspirituality for me is what happens when correct alienation gets routed through metaphysics instead of like reality or political economy. And you know, I think it took for me studying Naomi Klein's doppelganger to clarify that they've got the effective themes, the feelings right, but the mechanism's wrong. But I think for me, her deeper finding was that their disenchantment ignited passions that could have been directed towards pro social demands and that made the liberal center appear to be asleep at the wheel. Right, and this is where my personal arc comes in, because I'm realizing that I haven't just been attracted to this project because of outrage, because of how could people believe in this anti vax bullshit? Or could people believe in QAnon? How could they be so blind to the bigotry or the anti Semitism? Like, that's all there, it's real. I want to take that apart. But I also realize that the passion of conspirituality was something I wanted to be close to, to figure out, because it resonated with something inside me. And the recent world event that has made this most clear has been the rise of my country's Prime Minister, Mark Carney, who every day is looking to me like some, you know, master of bait and switch, neoliberal. And day by day, I tell you, he's making me feel more and more like an anon.

[Derek Barris]

You have final boss in the transcript. I'm glad you updated.

[Matthew Remsky]

Yeah, I overrode it. So for as long as I can remember, I've lived with a version of that same creeping suspicion of I've been lied to my whole life, but the feeling has been more vague, covered over by a kind of quilted blanket of what I'm gonna call Canadiana bullshit, that we're friendly beavers up here in our rough and tumble, untouched Narnia wilderness. We're snacking on donuts and maple flavored coffee. We're confident that the Mounties will help push our trucks out of the snow banks so we can get to hockey practice on time. And that's the stuff of childhood. But then there's a grown up version that revolves around about five different deceptions that I'll scan generally. But I want to zoom in on how Carney really expands on them. First of all, the bait of the mythology of peacekeeping, that Canada is the world's honest broker and kind of blue helmet humanitarian. The switch is that our NATO really sort of obedience to us geopolitics and aiding and abetting of foreign wars from Korea on up. Our arms exports to conflict zones are all part of that story as well. And all of this is accelerating under Carney. So this notion that Canada is this sort of like peacekeeping nation, I think is really, it's fictional, it's thin. The second is the bait of multiculturalism, which is really taught to everyone in grade school, minus the switch, which is there's this enormous, largely unstudied and certainly unreconciled colonial history. And then third, there's this sense of our healthcare exceptions where universal public medicine is a defining national value and it is a marker of a kind of moral superiority to the US like the, the border is really sort of carved along this line of, well, at least we take care of each other here. Now the switch is that there is an ongoing and active privatization of services in Canada. Canada, most, you know, recently actualized through Bill 11 in Alberta, which is really kind of brought into our system by a whole corporate consulting class that is now grasped political power through the figure of Danielle Smith. But it's aided by Carney's refusal so far to enforce the Canada Health act, which is the law that legally guarantees equal health care for everyone regardless of the ability to pay. And of course this is facilitated by the insurance industry's access to him and his cabinet. Like he's got insurance minister or insurance executives on tour with him as he goes and does his trade deals in Qatar or India and nobody can really say why. Like why are these people on the plane? The fourth thing is a wilderness fetish, that there's a vast clean moral geography of environmental stewardship. But the switch is that we're a petro state with the third largest oil reserves and the oil sands are one of the most carbon intensive extraction operations on Earth. There's ongoing pipeline construction on non consenting indigenous territories. There's current gutting of environmental enforcement under nation building exemptions, all of which are sort of justified through a kind of of nationalistic response to Trump. And then last, there's the Davos speech on the image of the steady and polite middle power governance that's managed by a politically stable nation that respects the rule of law and human rights. The current switch is the politeness doctrine obscures a raft of reactionary bills. I did an episode on my other podcast that I can link to in the episode that covers all of these. But the bills are recently C12, which grants the immigration minister unilateral power to mass cancel documents. And this can be applied retroactively to post 2,020 refugees in violation of international law. C9 criminalizes protest speech under discretionary police judgment. So in other words, like at a protest, the cops themselves can actually decide what is hate speech and what isn't. CFIN 15 allows the cabinet or allows cabinet members to exempt any corporation from virtually any federal law sort of unilaterally. So there's been a huge gathering of executive power. And then we have bills C8 and C22 that expand state surveillance of private communications and transactions. So Derek sent me this poll in Slack that said, wow, you know, look, it looks like his approval ratings are really high. And, and it's true, right? So it brings up this question of do my fellow Canadians care? He sits at 58 to 65% approval, depending upon which pollster you look at. The Liberals are leading the conservatives by 10 to 14 points across the country. And there are majority improvement numbers even in conservative strongholds like Alberta and Saskatchewan, which should tell you something about the sort of coherence between conservative liberal policies. Now he's slipping a bit since the Davos speech peak, especially as this tiny sliver of left wing media breaks through the haze on some of these issues, especially as he cozies up with Danielle Smith, who's really the premier of Canada's Texas Alberta.

[Julian Walker]

So Matthew, just because I'm not familiar enough, would you characterize media in Canada as centre right generally?

[Matthew Remsky]

It's tough. I think that, that I think the lodestar is in many ways the cbc, which is constantly, if you can imagine a national broadcaster like NPR that is not just a mixture of federal and state and then donor funding. There's no donor funding for the cbc, but if you can imagine a national broadcaster that, that is continually being pressured from the right and with every sort of successive, you know, new right wing government is being encouraged to, you know, find cost savings or to drop certain you know, sort of sectors of new news programs, then that lodestar of national broadcast casting has slid generally to, to the right over my lifetime for sure. Then we have, you know, basically, basically centrist national newspapers like the Toronto Star, the Globe and my Globe and Mail. You know, trends, right? A little bit. But no, there's, there's no prominent, I would say, progressive or left leaning media in Canada.

[Derek Barris]

I sent you that poll because. More, because it's something I grapple with for myself here in America, which is the fact that more people voted for Donald Trump twice than our Democratic candidate. And I mentioned pluralism because it's trying to figure out how to live in a Democratic society, where you want, you want. You would hope that the rules of democracy last and they are strong enough to hold. Because as I've expressed, I don't think any sort of authoritarian government, no matter what they call themselves, is good for people. I do appreciate the concept of democracy, but I know, like Julian, I. I know much less about Canadian politics. That's that curiosity. I sent it to you. But this question, the question is constantly brewing in my head. So just to bring up one recent example, the Democratic autopsy report comes out recently. They don't mention Gaza. Yeah, I think that's fucking horrible. I also remember when we were talking about this issue a while back, for polling in most Americans, the issue wasn't in the top five or top 10 in terms of what they were concerned about. And so I'm looking at one sense. I'm like, I think it's crazy that you didn't bring up this issue because it obviously made some impact in the election and how do you ignore it? But as my feed is mostly center left to left to very left in terms of what I consume on social media, it would be presented as if it's the biggest issue, which for American voters, it was not. And so I think polling is useful as a heuristic to just understand the temperature of the culture and try to make sense of it while while also expressing what you personally believe in and trying to make sense of that.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah. And the polling also shows you what's going on outside of your bubble. Of course, it's an imperfect reflection, but it does say, oh, okay, let's contextualize my particular values and my wish list for what I think should happen politically within what the electorate, actually the general center of gravity of the electorate.

[Derek Barris]

When you sent me when we were working on that healthcare episode a while back, and I was. Was like, most people are not happy with their healthcare. And you found polling that said actually they are. I was like, oh, fuck, that's right. I had to change it because I'm like, I got caught in my own socialized medicine bubble.

[Julian Walker]

Yes.

[Derek Barris]

And then I was like, okay, let me figure out how to keep advocating for socialized medicine, but also understand that within the broader context, it's actually more of an uphill battle than I thought.

[Julian Walker]

Yes. And just to be clear, I found that polling. I still think those people are wrong, but that's what they think.

[Matthew Remsky]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that they're wrong, but that's what they think. And we want to give people the, you know, the agency to say what they Think in response to a poll for sure. I just, I don't understand how. I just don't understand how it works. I mean, I know that. I know that it's a science. I know that. I know that people pay a lot of attention to how to do it and how to try to eliminate, you know, noise, but it, it, I mean, it, it so often seems that it's, it's. I mean. Well, my question for you, Derek, is, well, why weren't you aware of that polling? Because you were in a bubble. I mean, you, you have such.

[Derek Barris]

That's what I just said. I was in my. I am such. I am so focused on. Out of all the causes, quote unquote, like socialized medicine, universal health care is the one I care deeply about and the one I spend the most, most time reading about understanding. Like I'm aware of so many other political issues, but it's the health and science issues that really, you know, light a fire under me that I want to know more about. So I did not search for, specifically for what Julian was able to find. That's, that's why. And that was my oversight for not thinking of that.

[Matthew Remsky]

Right. So, and then, and then the poll that you found, Julian, was, it was a national poll. It, it gave some generalized information about, about. Was it, was it limited by a red state or blue state poll? How did, did it differentiate all that stuff?

[Julian Walker]

It was, it was a long time ago and I don't remember all the details right now.

[Derek Barris]

It was KFF, which is like the gold standard here in the U.S. they're one of the best polling slash health organizations that exist in U.S. nonpartisan. They've been around for a long time. I take their data as seriously as I do Pew.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah. And so that they were. They're essentially asking a set of questions which included how satisfied are you do with your, your healthcare plan? And you know, we know the facts about how much people get screwed over and how terrible it is and what a vision would be that was much more humane and sustainable. But a lot of people don't know that. And so that's their opinion. Now I'm, I'm not, I'm not like advocating for them or saying, you know, we should try to, you know, be accepting of what they're saying or anything. It's just like that's the center of gravity of, of the group of people that were to. Trying, trying to persuade.

[Derek Barris]

Yeah. So sorry, I didn't mean to derail, Matthew, but just kind of expressing like what I was thinking of as you were working on this segment and I saw that poem and I'm like, huh? I know your activism very well. I generally agree with most things. We do have our conflicts. But, like, in terms of being progressive, I'm all on board, but I don't know Canadian politics that well. So when I see that most of the Canadian public is into Carney, just like, to me, I'm like, well, how you do we square that?

[Matthew Remsky]

Well, I think it comes down to a question of whether I'm implying or I think that my fellow citizens are stupid or that they're misinformed or that they can't make their own decisions or that. Or that somehow, like, they're being abandoned to a democratic process they're not sophisticated enough for. Right. Like, because I think that's the concern. Right.

[Julian Walker]

Not from me. Not for me at all.

[Matthew Remsky]

No. But if I take, if my, if somehow my reporting, if my reporting out the, this story.

[Derek Barris]

Yeah.

[Matthew Remsky]

Kind of like excludes the, the positive polling.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah.

[Matthew Remsky]

Then, then what's the, the consequence of that is what?

[Derek Barris]

Derek, to look at that from a big picture perspective, it's, it's missing potential issues that are important to people that change the voting demographic. Graphics that, you know, like, do you want someone who represents as closely as possible what you believe to get in office? And so one of the big misses that's being discussed right now on my feeds, which I'm not partaking in because I just, like I said, I focus on health and science, but is the level of Israel and Gaza that had to do with the election and what that means moving forward. And it's going to be this next election. Besides, whatever Trump's going to do that is going to come up again and you're going to see a lot of discord within people who generally agree on a whole raft of issues, but that it gets focused into this one and that could help the Republican Party in some way. So I'm speaking in American terms, but that would be my concern overall, is a micro focus on issues that misses the forest for the truth.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah. And I would just. Sorry to, Sorry to jump in here, too. I would say I don't care about whether you're being condescending to the average voter. Like, I do think the average voter is typically not that well informed. And, you know, we know what the data about IQ says. So it's like, I don't have a problem with that. Obviously, I don't want to be offensive to anyone, but for me, it's more a matter of putting things in context. Thoughtfully, as part of strategizing around elections and communication and figuring out how to get impact so you can really do the things you want to do.

[Matthew Remsky]

I think with Carney, what I find is that he is as skilled at Canadiana slop as he is at moving fast and breaking things. So I would attribute his high approval rating to his magnificent ability to perform on the national stage as a kind of soft nationalist. He's also also benefiting from running under the COVID of the liberal brand, which isn't associated in the public perception with cruel austerity, although in the 90s it was not. Now, though, it's not associated with indifference to First Nations. All of what he is doing is happening in the wake of Trudeau, who at least nominally kept up with climate and decolonization goals. So Trudeau held a kind of leftish center during the height of the pandemic. And even though he doesn't have a socialist bone in his body, no, he's not Castro's love child. He took a step during COVID that provoked a very influential MAGA style backlash that we're still grappling with, because at the center of Trudeau's Covid aid was something called the Canada Emergency response benefit, the CERB. It was $2,000 per month for everyone who had made at least 5,000 bucks in the year prior and who wasn't present making $1,000 a month. But CERB, yeah, and it was a really great benefit. I collected it for maybe six. The same six months that there was also a provision whereby we could pause our mortgage payments.

[Julian Walker]

Wow.

[Matthew Remsky]

Yeah. So CERB accidentally exposed, however, the fact that things like UBI might be a good thing or that the minimum wage was already beneath some subsistence, so they actually set it too high for the capitalist class, I'd say. And so the Conservative lobby within Trudeau's own party denounced it, and they actually started clawing back some of the payments from people they categorized as ineligible, who had spent it, of course, on groceries and rent during lockdown times. There's all kinds of stories of people who became unhoused after the pandemic being because the cra, the Revenue Agency, came after them and clawed back their benefits.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah.

[Matthew Remsky]

Incredible stuff, right?

[Julian Walker]

And just to be clear, when you say pause your mortgage payments, did that mean you had a big mountain of debt that you had to deal with once the. Once it was resumed?

[Matthew Remsky]

It was prorated over the rest of the term. So our payments went up. You know, we weren't smacked with, you know, the six months of payments. No.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah.

[Matthew Remsky]

Yeah, yeah. So they averaged that out. Okay, so in other words, the CERB was one of these pandemic moments in which a kind of socialist trial balloon that looked close to UBI became so popular and provided some relief that the hammer had to come down. Right. The real backlash came from the Conservative Party proper. So Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the Conservative Party, used CERB to coin the hashtag justinflation, blaming price increases that were primarily driven by global supply chain issues and the Ukraine war on Trudeau's supposed socialism. So basically, Trudeau terminated Serb too quickly under capital pressure. This added to a cost of living crisis, and Poiliev stepped in to exploit the situation with a kind of maple MAGA bs, a substantial part of which parroted the talking points about the medical authoritarianism of the masking and vaccine regime that we're familiar with. So he turned the reactionary populist trick of FRAM social relief as oppressive to the same working class that it benefited most. Now, to the credit of most Canadians, Poilievre's clear links to the MAGA movement and even QAnon influencers, which I wrote about in a bunch of places, freaked enough people out that when Trudeau ran out of social capital and legislative confidence, a majority voted for what they saw as a Trudeau replacement and legacy holder. But the score switch is that that's not who they got at all. It's the same party, it's the same PM's chair in Parliament, same residents at Rideau hall traveling around on the same Royal Canadian Air Force planes. But whereas Trudeau facilitated capital in a kind of constrained manner associated with the center, Carney is a hard right swinging banker. And so now he's out there on the daily, weaving this Canadian mythology of sovereignty from the US he cut a fireside chat video in which he bungled a bunch of 1812 war history to make it seem like the British were huge pals with a Shawnee. He's throwing polite shade at Trump while starting to echo Trump's immigration and austerity goals. He's out there doing hockey skate arounds while promoting AI. So he's got this goose down parka and it covers over the banker suit. And I really think he seized a unique moment in U.S. canadian relations in which a contrived nationalism can both appear to distinguish us from US capital while mimicking its functions.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah, and it also can maybe try to ride some of the momentum that populist nationalism was having. Anyway, post Covid, right?

[Matthew Remsky]

Yeah, yeah. Everywhere else. Right. So I'll Just wrap this bait and switch sketch here with six contradictions. So on the climate, you know, he wrote this book called Values in which he cites Pope Francis. On the environment, he served on the. He's a very devout Catholic. He doesn't talk about it in public, but this is a core part of his life. He served on the Vatican's Council for Inclusive Capitalism. He was the governor of bank of England who gave high profile speeches about market fundamentalism and its risks. But then he's got this budget Canada strong, which freezes environmental program funding. He's canceled the oil and gas emissions cap and the capital gains tax hike that would have generated revenue for the green transition. He's basically undone. This is what all the analysts are saying this week. A lot of the news is still pouring in, but about 50 years or so of climate progress in Canada, like all at once, like in a couple of weeks. On sovereignty, he ran on resistance to Trump and a kind of defensive Canadian sovereignty. But then his own government defeated a bill called 233 which would have closed this U.S. exemption on Canadian arms being exported through the U.S. a lot of those arms and parts going to Israel and reaching Congress conflict zones, including Gaza, but also showing up in places like Minneapolis during ICE raids because these are parts that get rooted through American companies. So the Canadian and American military systems are just completely, utterly integrated. They cannot be separated. There's no sense in talking about Canadian military sovereignty. As we ramp up the budget by like three or four times, we're buying about 88 F35 jets. Some of them are on hold, but a lot of them are going through. But we can't even operate them or repair them without US Software support. Have you heard of these jets, guys? Like, they are like iPhones, right?

[Julian Walker]

Yeah, totally.

[Matthew Remsky]

Yeah. So there's no part of the ballooning military budget that's about territorial integrity. Like, there's no, there's no protection, there's no border that anybody's going to defend. There's nothing like that whatsoever. I think the most cynical view on this is that Canada is maintaining its pecking order position in the broader America, American sort of foreign empire. And it will use mostly US Sourced hardware to participate in US Foreign policy. Carney's other big initiative here is to host a new global defense bank that none of the European countries want. Like the UK Said, no, we don't want to do that. The Germans said, we don't want a global defense bank. But it's likely going to be here in Toronto, which is going to make Canada just A hub for weapons financing. Right. He's a banker.

[Julian Walker]

Matthew, how much of this was opportunistic, do you think, in terms of. Of Trump's. When he, When Trump first came in, a lot of the noises he was making, like about Greenland and, you know, like this idea that now Europe needed to be concerned, you know, that, that, that, that Carney was going to take a strong stance and say, you know, we won't put up with this and we're going to differentiate ourselves. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, actually, as you're saying, ramping up all of this, all of these, you know, symbiotic military and economic.

[Matthew Remsky]

I don't have a firm grasp of the reasoning or morality. I think he's a banker. I think he's a banker who sees where capital can grow, and in that sense, he's opportunistic. I do not have any clear sense that he wants to be a weapons warmonger. I don't have any sense that he wants particularly for the country to become basically a petrostate. I don't. That's not the sense that I get from him. I think he believes in the power of numbers and bank rates and ways of moving funds around.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah. So he believes in all of that. And then he's playing fireside chat, kind of statesman who's taking a principled stance against American aggression or something. Right.

[Matthew Remsky]

As if the Canadiana is kind of his. I don't know, his, like his health regime or something like that. Like it's his sort of presentation of wholesomeness.

[Julian Walker]

Yes.

[Matthew Remsky]

That's the way he's going to express the morality of what he's doing. Not through what he's actually doing, but by being this character that, you know, kind of belongs on, you know, I don't know, like an old National Film Board document documentary or something. So three more things. On housing, he campaigned on all kinds of building because, of course, there's a housing crisis here. And then he cut the federal housing program by 56% in his first budget. There's a progressive taxation pitch within his candidacy where he really kind of leaned into language that sounded like something Catholic social teaching about the common good. But then he canceled a capital gains tax hike as one of his first acts in power. And then on Indigenous rights, he ran on standard liberal reconciliation language. But then he's slashed Indigenous affairs spending and sped up approval processes for pipeline construction on unceded territory. I was just at an event here in Toronto on Saturday where one of the speakers from Manitoba, first nations guy was saying that, like it's all about the port. Churchill, northern port, actually. To be able to transport the resources across the melting Arctic Sea. And really, he's doing whatever he can to facilitate that. And everything that's built up as kind of like the social and moral fabric of the country is falling by the wayside. So as you can tell, I've got a corkboard here in my. My basement. It's pretty tangled. I don't think I've arrived at a kind of paralyzed awe in fear of some kind of cabal, because all of these bait and switch, you know, sort of events, all of the sleight of hand, none of it seems mysterious or satanic. It's just like the normal everyday mystifications of, you know, a really smart and very affable Catholic banker.

[Julian Walker]

And Doug, there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual, even if

[Matthew Remsky]

it means sitting front row at a comedy show. Hey, everyone.

[Derek Barris]

Check out this guy and his bird.

[Julian Walker]

What is this, your first date? Oh, no. We help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together. We're married.

[Matthew Remsky]

Me to a human, him to a bird.

[Derek Barris]

Yeah, the bird looks out of your league.

[Julian Walker]

Anyways, get a [e-mail] or with your local agent. Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Liberty.