Normally Podcast: How Will We Ever Escape the Bathrooms at Yosemite?

Summary

Summary of "Normally Podcast: How Will We Ever Escape the Bathrooms at Yosemite?"

The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show, hosted by Premiere Networks, released an insightful and engaging episode titled "Normally Podcast: How Will We Ever Escape the Bathrooms at Yosemite?" on February 25, 2025. Hosted by Mary Kathryn Ham and Carol Markowitz, the episode delves into pressing issues surrounding federal services, management inefficiencies, high-profile appointments, and shifts in pop culture phenomenon. Below is a detailed summary capturing all key discussions, insights, and conclusions from the episode.

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1. Yosemite Bathrooms Crisis

Overview of the Issue Mary Kathryn Ham opened the discussion by highlighting a significant controversy at Yosemite National Park. She explained that the National Park Service (NPS) had recently fired the sole employee responsible for managing bathroom access at Yosemite. This decision sparked outrage among park workers, leading to a large-scale protest.

Protests by National Park Service Workers Carol Markowitz further elaborated on the workers' response, noting that they staged a protest by displaying an upside-down American flag atop El Capitan, Yosemite’s iconic sheer face. This act symbolized their distress over the layoffs and the inefficiency introduced by eliminating essential roles.

Historical Context: Park Management During COVID-19 Mary Kathryn provided historical context by reviewing how the NPS operated during the COVID-19 pandemic. She emphasized that the park faced severe restrictions, including limited campsite availability, suspension of tours, and stringent health protocols. This period saw significant budget increases, which contrasts with current cuts, leading to confusion and frustration among both workers and visitors.

Discussions on Expectations and Budget The hosts debated the unrealistic expectations placed on the NPS post-pandemic. Mary Kathryn pointed out that during COVID-19, services were drastically reduced, setting a low baseline for operations. Carol added, “If your baseline service is that two of 13 campsites were open for two years and you had to wait in giant lines, then your expectations now when people start cutting are like, I don't know, I didn't feel like I was getting that good service to begin with.” This underscored the disconnect between budget allocations and service quality.

Notable Quote:

"This is to me like the idea that that's your argument says to me, like out loud, you have been doing things in a very stupid way." – Mary Kathryn Ham [06:16]

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2. Elon Musk and CPAC Engagements

Elon Musk's CPAC Appearance Mary Kathryn shifted the conversation to Elon Musk’s recent appearances at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). She mentioned Musk’s meeting with Javier Milei, the Argentinean government head known for his far-left policies, where Milei presented Musk with a chainsaw—a symbolic gesture reflecting Dogecoin’s disruptive intentions.

Legal Battles Surrounding Musk’s Doge Operations Carol highlighted ongoing legal disputes concerning Musk’s management of Dogecoin (Doge). She noted conflicting federal court rulings determining Musk's authority over Doge's operations and personnel decisions. This legal uncertainty contributes to the broader debate about corporate governance and federal oversight.

Notable Quote:

"Elon has requested that everybody send an email with five things that they did last week at their jobs. Not crazy, maybe a little bit infantile." – Carol Markowitz [09:44]

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3. FBI Leadership Changes and Public Reaction

Appointment of Cash Patel and Dan Bongino The hosts discussed the recent confirmation of Cash Patel as the head of the FBI and the appointment of Dan Bongino as his deputy. Mary Kathryn praised Bongino’s extensive law enforcement background, including his tenure with the NYPD and Secret Service, despite his more recent role as a commentator.

Public Overreaction and Political Implications Carol critiqued the public's negative reaction to Bongino's appointment, arguing that much of the backlash stems from perceptions of political loyalty over expertise. She expressed surprise at the minimal resistance faced during the appointments, stating, “I thought he was going to hit a wall with this. So I'm pleasantly surprised.”

Operational Changes Under New Leadership Mary Kathryn touched on Patel’s immediate actions to restructure the FBI, including relocating numerous jobs to Alabama and reducing headquarters staff. She argued that these moves signal a shift towards a more efficient and less politically entangled FBI.

Notable Quote:

"The reaction to this has been nothing but hysteria. People are losing their minds because they have to say what they did at their job." – Carol Markowitz [10:14]

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4. Pop Culture: The Bachelor and Bachelorette Hiatus

Declining Ratings and Host Controversy Mary Kathryn and Carol examined the recent hiatus of the long-running The Bachelor and The Bachelorette franchises. They attributed the decline in ratings to controversies surrounding the host, Chris Harrison, who was let go after defending Rachel Kirkconnell—a contestant criticized for wearing an antebellum-themed outfit during her college years.

Impact on the Franchise The hosts discussed how Harrison’s removal disrupted the show's dynamic and alienated loyal fans. Mary Kathryn suggested that the emotional connection viewers had with Harrison was a critical factor in the show's initial success. “The job is actually hard to do TV in this weird, emotive way and connect with all these people and be someone people want to watch,” she remarked.

Broader Implications for Reality TV Carol compared the situation to other reality shows like Survivor, noting that while some shows can endure controversies by maintaining a consistent host, The Bachelor franchise struggled to replace Harrison effectively. This shift led to a noticeable decline in audience engagement and altered the show’s cultural significance.

Notable Quote:

"They take away part of the brand that was very important and essentially went woke and broke." – Mary Kathryn Ham [31:22]

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5. Concluding Insights

Mary Kathryn and Carol wrapped up the episode by reflecting on the broader themes of organizational inefficiency, political interference, and the challenges of maintaining cultural staples in a rapidly changing societal landscape. They emphasized the importance of accountability and effective management in federal services and expressed hope that recent leadership changes would lead to meaningful improvements.

Closing Quote:

"When things get weird, act normally." – Carol Markowitz [34:27]

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This episode of the Normally Podcast provided listeners with a comprehensive analysis of current federal and cultural issues, blending insightful commentary with relevant anecdotes. Mary Kathryn Ham and Carol Markowitz effectively navigated complex topics, offering both critique and hope for future developments.

Transcript

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[Mary Kathryn Ham]

Hey guys. Welcome to Normally the show with normalish takes for when the news gets weird. I am Mary Kathryn Ham.

[Carol Markowitz]

And I'm Carol Markowitz. Hi Mary Kathryn. How's it going?

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

It's going okay. I'm excited to come see you later this week on a little trip to sunny Florida. Which means I feel like I should get a tan or something to make myself presentable.

[Carol Markowitz]

Yes, I won't get.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

No, that's not going to happen.

[Carol Markowitz]

No, no, we're going to definitely lay out in the sun. I mean sunscreen, you know, for anybody listening, we're very safe. But no, we're going to be in the sunshine. It's going to be great and supposed to be A really nice week. I mean, there's some chilly morning, so bring a sweatshirt. It's going to be like in the low 60s.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

I think I'll be okay.

[Carol Markowitz]

Careful with that. But, yes, it's going to be great. We also got some good news last week about our podcast numbers, and we had almost 1.1 million downloads in our very first quarter of exist. So it's been very exciting and we're very happy. You know, we've been obviously getting the numbers all along, but to see them all put together, because I was told there'd be no math, it was good.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

Yeah. We don't do spreadsheets. We just wait for someone to send us an email. But we appreciate all of our listeners. We know that the normies are legion and that they tune in to hear things that are normal. So we love it.

[Carol Markowitz]

We love you guys. Thank you for listening. Well, what do we have for the Normies this week?

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

Well, as you know, the news is weird. It always is.

[Carol Markowitz]

Yeah.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

Elon Musk, still running the Doge operations, showed up at CPAC with his, which is the, like, annual gathering of all stripes of conservative groups and activists. He met up with Javier Milei, the famously cutting government head of Argentina, who gifted him a chainsaw to cut through. Love it. Literally, not metaphorically, all the things that Doge is cutting through. Elon, of course, very theatrical about this. Meanwhile, the legal fight continues behind the scenes about what Elon Musk or Doge can and cannot do. As I mentioned, a federal judge said, yeah, they can actually go ahead with having access to things. And another federal judge was like, yeah, I think they can also do personnel decisions.

[Carol Markowitz]

Right. Which you'd think was the standard until the Republican gets elected, obviously.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

Well, yes, there is a part of this where the executive branch is in charge of the executive branch. The executive is the head of that. Right, right.

[Carol Markowitz]

Not controversial, that statement.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

No. And I will say along the way, as we keep saying, there can be a price to moving fast and breaking stuff, or as the tech people often say, fail fast. And some of that has happened. There were some people let go at Energy who were important, and Chris Wright brought them back immediately. In the National Park Service, there were cuts that would not allow for seasonal workers, which they really need for summer. And so they added back some of those. There have been probationary employees or people marked as probationary who weren't, who lost jobs, who were then reinstated. However, a lot of this, like when people say, you can't get rid of probationary federal employees, that's the definition of probation.

[Carol Markowitz]

Why not?

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

Right. So a lot of these arguments, again, sort of run cold for me because regular workers in regular jobs deal with these things frequently.

[Carol Markowitz]

Right.

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Well, go ahead.

[Carol Markowitz]

I was going to say, what about the guy that has the keys to the bathroom at Yosemite? Mary Catherine, Tell us about him.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

So this was the big story last week, and Yosemite workers have since staged a giant protest where they put an upside down American flag signaling their distress at the top of El Capitan, which is the big sheer face at Yosemite National Park. So one of the stories, I believe it was Washington Post who dug this one up, was, you know, they fired the only guy at Yosemite who can get people out of the bathrooms there if they're locked in because they have.

[Carol Markowitz]

Only one set of keys. Mary Catherine, what are they supposed to do?

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

This is to me like the idea that that's your argument says to me, like out loud, you have been doing things in a very stupid way, and we have now revealed that you're doing things in a very stupid way. How many tourists are getting stuck in bathrooms at Yosemite to begin with? I don't understand. And then they do this elaborate protest because 1000 National Park Service workers were laid off and some of them came from Yosemite. I did some looking just to see what the National Park Service in Yosemite were like during COVID during which time no one put up a fight about anything being important. Reservations were required, of course, everything was closed for three to four months completely, even though it was outdoors. Reservations were required after that point and they were very limited, sometimes putting people in lines for like camping at 3am to try and get in. There were no shuttles, there was no public transportation. There was no indoor dining in 2020. And sometimes into 2021, there were no tours anywhere in the park. There were no visitor centers. Everything was masked even in 2021. And indoors, there were 613 rooms open in 2020 for visitors, 1,000 in 2021 with no housekeeping. So when they tell you that they need to keep all the things clean. Yeah, they didn't in 2020 and 2021.

[Carol Markowitz]

Right.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

And then there's a bunch of other activities in the parks that were completely shut down. 2021, 2022. So when they tell you we can't possibly do this, you're obstructing all of these important services. No one cared about that for two years. And you want to take a guess, Carol, whether their budget went up in real and inflation Adjusted dollars or down.

[Carol Markowitz]

Hmm. I'm gonna go with up.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

It went up. Yeah, it went up, Carol. So I just. Again, this is the baseline problem. If people's experience with national parks, which they genuinely love. I love them. They're the. My favorite part of the federal government. Yeah, but if your baseline service is that two of 13 campsites were open for two years and you had to wait in giant lines, then your expectations now when people start cutting are like, I don't know, I didn't feel like I was getting that good service to begin with.

[Carol Markowitz]

That's right. Yeah. That's the whole thing. And where was the bathroom guy then? Did the guy have to get a lot of people stuck in bathrooms during COVID or were they all okay? All of this, obviously, is not playing that great to the American people. They see that it's just basically a boondoggle. So many of our services make no sense and are so expensive and the prices keep going up, and what do Americans get for it? One of my favorite X accounts, Jarvis Best posted. When I first heard about Elon, what have you accomplished? Email. I was like, whatever, that's dumb. But the screaming, crying, cursing, shaking, throwing up, leaping from the top story of the federal building onto the pavement. Reaction to it has totally changed my mind. And we're actually going to get into the. The Elon email.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

The Elon email, yes.

[Carol Markowitz]

Yeah. So Elon has requested that everybody send an email with five things that they did last week at their jobs. Not crazy, maybe a little bit infantile. I could see where people might not enjoy having to do that, but the reaction to this has been nothing but hysteria. People are losing their minds because they have to say what they did at their job last week.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

Well, so a couple things. A, it is a little crazy that went out on a Saturday night. It's like, God, hit me up. Like, hit me up on Monday morning or whatever. I know that Elon works all the hours, but not necessarily other people do. The ask is fairly simple. Right. And there's some question as to whether he's smoking out people who do not check their emails, who are allegedly government employees. On the other hand, can I say about this one? You just confirmed a bunch of agency heads who you trust.

[Carol Markowitz]

Right, Right.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

Have them talk to their people about this.

[Carol Markowitz]

Right. Well, they're already facing this where Kash Patel sent a memo to the FBI employees saying, like, only report to me, and I will report to the federal government. So there's already some pushback here, and I don't know. I get it. Though what do you do all day? Is not a crazy question to ask our federal employees. I think they should have to answ it, whether through their superior or directly. I don't think there's a. It's a big deal. I've had to do it at various jobs in my past where I had to say what I've been working on. And, you know, often it's like, how could we coordinate better? How could we help each other? How could our work be complementary? All of that is okay. And I think that the reaction is just so hysterical that the American people are going to continue to push for Elon to do this sort of thing in the future. It's going to backfire on the hysterics.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

Well, there's an American Federation of Government Employees, which is a public employee union which bargains effectively against all of us to use our money for various things. Tweeted. It is cruel and disrespectful for federal employees to be forced to justify their job duties to this out of touch, privileged, unelected billionaire who has never performed one single hour of honest public service in his life. Okay, I guess he hasn't worked for the government before, but he does work very, very hard. That's one of the things about Elon Musk you can say is like, even when his asks are unreasonable, he's actually doing the thing. So it's harder to be mad at him. Because a manager who is sleeping on a cot and doing the work all the time is a kind of person that you kind of have to play up to meet his expectations. It is worlds different from a federal government expectation.

[Carol Markowitz]

It is. Yeah.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

But the idea that just like saying what you do or being asked questions about what you do or someone investigating what different departments do or what different grants go to is inherently bad. No, no, I reject that.

[Carol Markowitz]

Yeah, I reject that. I have to admit that I'm surprised at how this is all going. I thought they would run into a lot more roadblocks than they have. I thought that the federal government was just impossible to cut. I really did. I thought it was so entrenched that it was just never going to happen. I mean, you hear this all the time from career kind of bureaucrats where even if they want to change something, it's impossible, not possible, can't do it. A change takes years. And even then, then the head person changes and nothing ever gets done. So I thought he was going to hit a wall with this. So I'm pleasantly surprised. And I know there's possibility for good People to get fired. And I really hope that that doesn't happen. And if it does happen, I hope they fix it very quickly and all of that. But this has been eye opening to me how much waste there is, how much possibility there is to fix things. I'm impressed.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

Well, and I think again, this is the fail fast mantra, which is like, yeah, you do kind of blow through this process and then you learn as you go. That is a very different way of doing business and it does have effects on people's lives. But here was the tell. And I hate to be just always go back to Covid. It was such a tell that the government can't do changes. They changed everything.

[Carol Markowitz]

Yep.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

They changed the way they did everything in a space of two months because someone decided to be just authoritarian enough, right, to be like, y'all can't go to restaurants.

[Carol Markowitz]

But you know what the difference is? Federal employees continue to get paid. Yeah, that's the difference. The difference is it was private enterprise that suffered. It was people who worked outside the federal government that suffered. And who cares about those people, Mary Catherine? Well, I know not them.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

Just as the press doesn't care about regular people's free, free speech, but deeply cares about their own. It's similar, similar setup. But no, I do think, look, it's as I said, they're going to test the limits of what they can do with the civil service. But as, again, the baseline problem is the idea that the career officials were not political is incorrect. And also the idea that you can't get rid of politicals is just a nonsense story. Right. Political appointees go in and out and should go in and out every single time. By the way, I saw a Washington Post report that I think it was Washington Post seemed very breathless about the fact that Pete Hegseth over at Secretary of Defense wanted to pick a new assistant, which seems like, how dare you? His prerogative.

[Carol Markowitz]

Yeah, right. But it's all like this, right? It's all this insane reaction and overreaction. I just, I can't see it working. Not this time.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

Yeah, I mean, it does feel like a new era. And also, like, you know, be a little careful, guys, with what's. Especially the important people over at Energy. That seemed like a. That was a misfire for sure.

[Carol Markowitz]

We'll be right back on normally.

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[Carol Markowitz]

Cash Patel was confirmed as head of the FBI and over the weekend and now over the weekend, Dan Bongino is going to be Cash's deputy. And that doesn't require confirmation. The overreaction to Dan Bongino over the last two days has been really something to watch. I know Dan, he is a fantastic person. He was previously nypd, he was previously Secret Service. He's been just, just a stellar person in these fields. He did really fantastic work. He's been considered for other positions in the past. I get that he doesn't have specifically FBI experience, but he has a lot of other law enforcement experience that I think lends itself to this role. The overreaction to him has been a bit much.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

Well, yeah, I mean, I think it's because the read on him, well, on Cash too. But Cash came from, excuse me, I should say FBI Director Patel, that Cash Patel came from within the ranks. He was an investigator. He has a lot of experience doing the thing that these guys do. Bongino is certainly in his later years more of a commentator, not a guy who's doing law enforcement. But he was Secret Service, as you said, nypd. I'm surprised he didn't end up at Secret Service. But Trump picked his like detail guy to go over there. Someone who he trusts very deeply. I think for a lot of people the lineup of, well, his personal detail guy going to Secret Service, Kash Patel ending up at FBI with Bongino behind him is more. They see it as loyalty over skills. But like you said, Bongino has part of these skills and I think like part of this is openly the reality TV presidency and commentators are going to end up in these positions. Granted this is like the deputy, it's not the head of the FBI. So he's definitely someone who has plenty of paper trail about things he's said about the FBI and how he would deal with it.

[Carol Markowitz]

Yes, yes, that's.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

And he doesn't require confirmation, as you note.

[Carol Markowitz]

Right, yeah. You know the other thing. And look, this definitely is part of my immigranty kind of background, but I don't get why people pass on their multi million dollar amazing careers to go into public service. Such a mystery to me. Like danfengino is wildly successful. He does not need this in his life and yet he's doing it. It's really, it's amazing and impressive and kind of surprising to me. Like who does that?

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

And I think, I think he. They're truly signaling over and over again by the way, this is another Overton window move where like, oh, you thought you were worried about Cash Patel. Here's Dan Bongino. Now. I do think, again, I want Elon and Trump to trust the people they've put in charge and to not undercut them and, like, let Cash Patel go and do his job. Right. I think that's probably the best way to do things. And Patel got right to work telling headquarters that they were moving like a thousand jobs, maybe 500 jobs to Alabama because there's another FBI facility in Alabama eliminating a lot of those headquarters jobs. Headquarters, by the way, as opposed to field agents, is where a lot of the politicization comes from.

[Carol Markowitz]

Right.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

And a lot of the headquarters folks are in town temporarily. Their lodging is paid for, their per diems are paid for. We are spending a lot of money on having people work at headquarters. So they were just like, no, we're going to lop some of that off. And I think a lot of that was probably the right move.

[Carol Markowitz]

Yeah.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

They are signaling very hard. It's going to be a very different FBI.

[Carol Markowitz]

It is going to be a very different FBI, which is not a bad thing.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

Oh, and by the way, some of the people that has moved from headquarters moved to places that, like, have high crime.

[Carol Markowitz]

Right.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

Like parts of the country and offices where they need to be solving crimes.

[Carol Markowitz]

Yes. Imagine.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

As opposed to doing whatever it was. Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were doing a nice callback.

[Carol Markowitz]

Yes.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

Yeah. By the way, just like something that sticks in my craw. Those two got a payout.

[Carol Markowitz]

Yeah.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

For their texts being revealed, for violating their privacy on their work phones that we pay for.

[Carol Markowitz]

Oh, God. Yeah. I mean, this is it. This is the federal government. Lifelong job, you know, at work. And this is what I think Americans see and say. I don't understand why this exists. And I don't feel sorry for you when you lose your job in this manner. So.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

Well, and I again, the. The juxtaposition of victims, particularly in western North Carolina, but other places as well, not getting coverage.

[Carol Markowitz]

Yeah.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

And then every journalist being on top of every. Every single lost job in the federal government, I think is just a very bad look and not a good argument for people who have gone through a lot over the past five years.

[Carol Markowitz]

That's right. It's galling, actually. Yeah. The journalists being all over this and not on any other story that affects everyday Americans is really inappropriate. We're going to take a short break and come right back with Normale.

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[Mary Kathryn Ham]

All right, on the pop culture front, we have a little bit of a controversy. The Bachelor and Bachelorette franchise, which is 20 plus years old and has been a mainstay of Reality television and American pop culture for years has hit a bump in the road.

[Carol Markowitz]

Yeah.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

It is on hiatus now. The Bachelor just, like, churns out several seasons per year of the Bachelor and the Bachelorette. And they all, like. They're all Instagram influencers at this point.

[Carol Markowitz]

Right.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

They have their own little family, and they get together and have parties. Perhaps no more, at least in the interim. And there's a bunch of rumors flying about why this is the case. The Bachelorette and the Bachelor Universe accounts for 700 episodes of TV since 2002. In this latest ep. Excuse me. Latest season ratings were way down, but they've been going way down for quite some time.

[Carol Markowitz]

Right.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

And I want to revisit when they started going down.

[Carol Markowitz]

Okay, let's do it.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

Chris Harrison. Because my theory is there's another reason why the Bachelor and Bachelorette are failing.

[Carol Markowitz]

Yeah.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

Chris Harrison was the host of the Bachelor and Bachelorette franchise for years. And in June 2021, when we were.

[Carol Markowitz]

All crazy, everybody was crazy. When everyone was crazy, crazy time mistakes were made.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

20 and 20 21, they had a season that had an African American Bachelor on, and then he had his bevy of ladies from which he could choose. One of the ladies, Rachel Kirkconnell, had been pictured in a hoop skirt at. In, like, a sorority event when she was 17 or 18 years old. I think she was 18 years old, like, her freshman year of college at a Southern college where they had done some themed barbecue. And when everyone got as mad as possible.

[Carol Markowitz]

Is that the whole scandal?

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

That. That's the scandal.

[Carol Markowitz]

Wait, I thought it was gonna be, like, on a plantation as she reenacted, like, slavery.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

I mean, it's.

[Carol Markowitz]

No, she wore a hoop skirt.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

That's.

[Carol Markowitz]

That's the scandal.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

That was the scandal. I am confirming the scandal. She was in a. An antebellum outfit at some cap at some fraternities event, Kappa Alpha event that was criticized as racist because of these costumes. And it was in Georgia. Right. This is clearly a throwback to an antebellum time. Like, okay, there's baggage here, but that was the extent of it. She wasn't, like, holding a racist sign. She wasn't on video saying racist things. She wasn't wearing blackface. There was. At any rate, it became a very huge deal. And then Chris Harrison had an interview with a former Bachelorette, also African American woman. And in that interview, he said, maybe we shouldn't cancel Rachel. So, so hard for this thing that happened when she was 18 and she's in the picture. Chris Harrison was let Go from the Bachelor.

[Carol Markowitz]

Yes.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

For suggesting that you should not cancel Rachel. So, so hard for this thing that she did when she was 18.

[Carol Markowitz]

Right.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

And that, like, Rachel's one thing.

[Carol Markowitz]

Right. That's the thing about that whole crazy time period. It's like, it was bad enough that people were being canceled for dumb shit. It was like people who defended them would also get canceled. This was a secondary association. Yeah.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

This is a secondary cancellation of Chris Harrison because he refused to say that she should burn in hell for having done this. He just. It was like, maybe we should just, like, not.

[Carol Markowitz]

Right.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

And so he got let go from this show. He's like, living in a mansion with a swimming pool full of cash. Like, it's not a problem for Chris Harrison. I think it was a problem for the Bachelor.

[Carol Markowitz]

Yeah.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

They've tried several times to replace him as host. As much as, like, we want to be like, the Bachelor's dumb and how hard is this job? The job is actually hard to do TV in this weird, emotive way and connect with all these people and be someone people want to watch. And I think there was some pent up annoyance that he was let go. Now nobody wanted to be canceled by defending him.

[Carol Markowitz]

Of course you can have. You can't defend the guy who got canceled for defending the first person. An idiot would do that.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

It's a domino theory. Right. You don't want to be part of that. But I think there's annoyance. I think that they took away part of the brand that was very important and essentially went woke and broke. Because I know in my friend circles, I had at least two or three girl groups who would get together regularly and watch the Bachelor or Bachelorette, text about the Bachelorette, have little themed parties. None of that happens anymore.

[Carol Markowitz]

Right.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

I didn't even know there was a season, like two weeks ago, sometime recently.

[Carol Markowitz]

Yeah.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

And I just think that has to be it.

[Carol Markowitz]

Yeah, that really has to be it. It has to be that people are not connecting with the host since then. And it's interesting because. So, like, another show that has been popular for a long time, Survivor, we stopped. Our family stopped watching it because it did get very woke one season. The host pulled people. Key line was, come on in, guys. And he said was like, is guys making anybody uncomfortable? And a trans person in the cast was like, no, I'm totally fine with that. And then somebody else two days later said, no, no, I. I can't. I don't like. I don't like guys. And so they stopped using guys. But the host stayed the Same. The ratings kind of stayed high despite the wokeness because people still connected to the show. They nothing had changed. But making a change in host, that kind of thing could really affect a show because people do watch it for the and familiarity and the whole cast revolves.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

Right. So the guy you knew was Chris Harrison and now he's gone. And like the interim hosts have not been terrible. I believe Jesse Palmer is the most recent one. They're fine. But I think some of the magic was lost and it was lost because he declined to cancel Rachel hard enough. By the way, Rachel and the Bachelor ended up dating for a long period of time. So I don't know how problematic it was. He was.

[Carol Markowitz]

He was fine with the racist. I see.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

Well, like and also just one little annoying part about this. He sold her out on live TV at the after the rose ceremony that season and was like, well, you know. Because he couldn't get canceled by not canceling her.

[Carol Markowitz]

Of course. Yeah.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

But it turns out he liked her.

[Carol Markowitz]

Right.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

I think she might have gotten canceled and found out after she was pretty far into the process. So.

[Carol Markowitz]

Yeah. Yeah. Well I hope that they pick up that it's a new era. Maybe they bring back Chris Harrison.

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

And I mean Chris Harrison would probably be like, nah, I'm good, man.

[Carol Markowitz]

Right. Maybe pay him a lot. Now you want me to save you money?

[Mary Kathryn Ham]

Yeah.

[Carol Markowitz]

Well, thank you for joining us on Normally. Normally airs Tuesdays and Thursdays and you can subscribe anywhere you get your podcasts. Get in touch with us at Normally the podcast gmail.com. thanks for listening. And when things get weird, act normally.

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