27 - Whit Owns the Libs (feat. Nate Bethea) [Whit's Endless Summer #11]

Is this a good time and place to mention that in the novels, Glossman goes to a bar and is racist *on purpose* and records the comments *himself* and sends it to the newspaper so that he has an excuse to step down from the city council and get out from under Blackgaard’s thumb before he re-emerges? Because we here at focus on the family would neeeeever write an *actually* racist character, he totally was just *pretending* to be racist to save himself from working for the devil! Anyway, how’s y’all’s day going?

One thing I'm curious about: Does anyone in this city die of natural causes? Lot of accidents, fires, getting got in one war or another. Whit's wife is the closest, but she dies young of a WEIRD complication. Is there a reason nobody dies in their sleep as an old person in Odyssey?!

A ""funny"" effect of European jews fleeing from Germany and Eastern Europe to the United States to escape nazis and anti-semtism is now Americans associate Germanic or slavic-sounding names with being Jewish. Like people accusing/implying Greta Thunberg of being Jewish/Jewish controlled because her last name ends with "berg". Which is Germanic/Scandinavian. Because the Jewish people who fled WERE EUROPEANS whose families had lived there for often hundreds and hundreds of years. They don't have those names because they're Jewish, they have them because they're European.

I love the Weakerthans reference Nate dropped that everyone else seemed to miss

The initial recycling movement was an intentional campaign by corporations to push the responsibility for plastic waste (& other forms of waste but primarily the rise of plastic containers) onto the consumer. By the 70s, Chemical & oil companies were aware that there was no real way to mitigate plastic waste, but knew that they would need to shift the narrative in order to avoid an increase in legislation, so they used the same tried and true tactics that glass and aluminium companies had used in the 50's with "Keep America Beautiful." It was a massive marketing campaign, and it sounds like One Bad Apple managed to tow that line perfectly.

Mr. Fuji moved from Japan to Georgia before finally opening a café in Hawaii.

Oh man, bringing up Timmy Riley... y'all *have* to talk about the episode Greater Love, where we *graphically* experience Timmy's drowning. It absolutely *traumatized* me as a kid, and I at least partially credit it with why I, to this day, have a severe phobia of open water. We had on it some kind of special promo tape that my parents picked up at the Free Will Baptist National Convention with "Greater Love" and "It Is Well" on Side A (another absolute crackerjack of emotional trauma, packed to the gills with child death and even more drowning), and then on side B was a SPINE-SHATTERING tonal shift to Count It All Joy and Hidden In My Heart, a montage of parody radio programs from Kid's Radio.

YES! More Nate, plz!