Thanos Dusted Half the Universe and All We Got Was Jill Stein

This week on Bad Bets, we ask the question no one has bothered to Google: Where in the world is Jill Stein? (Spoiler: not organizing, not helping, yaddayaddayadda). We unpack the dangers of political apathy, Chris Pratt’s limp defense of RFK Jr., and why villains like Magneto, Killmonger, Daenerys, and even Thanos all have a point, until they really, really don’t.

Plus: baseball is secretly the most cinematic sport (walk-up songs = free character development), the lore of Doc Ellis pitching a no-hitter on acid, and how Tim Cook’s golden gift to Trump proves that corporate bootlicking is eternal. Also: South Park continues its perfect streak of roasting the Trump administration, and I crash out, winning another bet.

Transcript

Okay y'all, welcome back to Bad Bets. I have one thing to say to start the episode off this week. Where in the world is Jill fucking Stein?

I'll wait.

Crickets? I'm actually gonna cheat this episode and give myself a guaranteed win of a bet. She's not doing fucking anything. Stein is nowhere. For all I know, Jill Stein could be on fucking Mars. Jill Stein is with Carmen Sandiego, but less cool. She's in Hell's Kitchen with Daredevil, but the antithesis of helping. Is she organizing? Is she reaching out to independents?

to Democrats, to Republicans, is she, as I've seen many people on TikTok point out, coordinating legal aid for those affected by the ICE rates? Is she promoting Medicare for All?

Is she trying to go out and support other Green Party candidates in other elections? Is she literally doing anything of use? that's right. She's not. So see you in twenty twenty eight, bitch. my God. I know I'm on Wednesday, but I know people there are people in my inner friend circle that I know voted for Jill Stein.

And with what's happening in the White House and happening in DC and happening now, I just think. If you all motherfuckers couldn't have like purity tested your way out of helping us lose an election. Might be a different fucking story right now. I know it's not solely your fault, but the conversation is literally never like, yeah, oopsie. There's a viral clip going around on TikTok of Kamala Harris. warning everyone that Trump would use the military against American people. She was right about everything, just like Hillary Clinton was. you know, leftists think that Democrats are Yahtzees, so yeah, love those mental gymnastics. This came about because a lot of people are, of course, purity testing. Gavin Newsom online, leftists all over the internet are like, "He's a moderate, he himself is a Yahtzee, his policies are horrible, he's anti-homeless people, he's anti-LGBTQ people, he's just as bad as Trump, don't shove him down our throats." The irony of all of this is that Gavin Newsom's rise to sort of national prominence was entirely preventable. Like it wouldn't be happening right now if Kamala Harris was our president.

But you had to do the Trump genocide. You had to pick that party, because you just couldn't stomach Kamala, because she is equally evil in your eyes. There were 15 % of people who voted in 2020 and didn't in 2024. You don't like Gavin Newsom? Well, you should have showed up last year. He is the only one standing 10 toes down against authoritarian appetites of the Trump administration.

It's like we're dealing with the horseshoe theory is alive and well people. It's so, so real. We're dealing with leftists on that side, which literally no candidate that is viable right now is good enough. I will have a conversation with you about how the two party system and money and politics is corrupting. But we need to be adults and put in our big girl and big boy pants here and understand what we're facing down because we are the frog in the boiling pot of water.

Where is your hero, Jill Stein?

So we have the leftists on that one side that will literally never ever vote, make a reasonable vote. And they're the ones that are usually not organizing in their communities and doing anything to break free of the shackles of the two party system. They do a protest vote in the general and then they just go back to being apathetic and living their lives, which I really, really disrespect. And then on the other side, we have apologists.

A lot of like white men particularly who just don't subscribe to politics because they're like overwhelmed and it's cool to be a nihilist and keeping up with the news is hard except for when it's crypto, you know. And they are the ones that don't know enough about politics so they get sucked into the manosphere. My example of this is the worst fucking prat. You know who I'm talking about.

I was never impressed with him, even in his Andy Dwyer days. He somehow is related to RFK Jr. And he was talking about this on Bill Maher's podcast. He said, I don't know what to believe because it's not like I sit with Bobby and say, Hey, let's talk about this. Let's talk about that. They're just playing cards, playing mafia, quote unquote, having fun. He said, I'm not going to pick his brain and find out which one of the terrible things being said about him are true.

I just kind of assume that none of them are because it's just the association with Trump that's negative. For the most part, I wish him well. There are certain things he oversees that we support. Getting toxic stuff out of our kids' food. If you do that, that's amazing. I'd hate to be so mired and hatred for the president that any success from his administration is something I have to have an allergic reaction to. If that's not the most limp dick lukewarm IQ bullshit I've ever heard.

It's just so irresponsible at this day and age. It makes you understand and realize how authoritarians come to power. It's just this like laissez-faire thinking. If it's your family member, that's even more reason to fucking call them out. You have access in the way that being an offensive friend or an offensive stranger is not the same. This sort of reminds me, it's like a gut check, a reality check of like how wonkish I am and how many people in the political space feel this way because they don't really know what's going on with politics. Like they see a headline on Twitter or TikTok or this like weird AI Facebook group. And I think some of it was like just Wayne Creative had a perfect critique of this. This is like the average white American male answer. You're not seeking out political information. This is why I get so frustrated with my apathetic friends because you're not seeking it out. 

There's a vacuum. And then the thought process becomes I don't know, I don't really believe in politics, it's impossible to change, or I guess there's a lot of hate for this guy that seems extreme, and there things that they're talking about that I guess would be good if they can do it. So that's the insidious part. There's just enough information to oversimplify while remaining apathetic, while still presenting yourself as a good, no-k person. Sure, no one wants toxins in their kids' food. We want America to do well, right?

They refuse to be connected enough, active enough, or educated enough to understand what's actually happening in that RFK Jr., what he's doing has nothing to do with making anyone healthy. It's imposing his demented, insidious viewpoint that isn't backed by any empirical science that is super anti-vaxx and already killing children in Texas. So it's really fucking lazy and irresponsible. Apathy while oversimplifying politics to make it so you can just like... stay in the middle ground, it's how I know that some of my friends believed the anti-vax bullshit. Because it's just enough. There's just enough there to get you. And with this Trump administration, there is no middle ground. If you stand for nothing, Burr, what do you fall for? Right? OK. God damn. Speaking of Prats, I was thinking about the Marvel universe and the


Villains that Marvel creates and I saw this amazing meme that Marvel's villains versus DC's villains, which we know that that's not even a conversation about the quality of the films those two companies are making. But Marvel's villains are you center an alien and you give them ultimate power. The most powerful, powerful alien in all of existence. What do they do with that power? They become the villain. DC works in that they center a human. usually a man, and they take everything, take all of his power away. And that's his villain arc. And I was thinking about how there's really sort of a moment in every good movie that features a villain that's kind of all like tension and ideology and impeccable trench coats. When the villain says something that makes your spine straighten, it's not like a threat or necessarily a monologue. 

It's just sort of, a piece of truth that you don't want to agree with because what does that then make you? It's the, they will never accept us and I'm done asking. It's Magneto, right? Magneto stands in X-Men. And the problematic part is he's not wrong. That's what makes him so unsettling. If anyone isn't familiar with X-Men or it's been a hot second, Magneto was, I think he was a Holocaust survivor.

And his character arc as he turns into this very smart mutant revolutionary, he has seen what happens when difference is pathologized and then the government cracks down and those crackdowns are sold as safeguards. But then in that process, neighbors become enemies overnight. He understands power, who hoards it, who's punished for using it, for threatening it. And he's decided that protection of his mutant species requires preemption, preemptive force. If peace requires passivity, then peace is a lie because in his mind, that's not the way the world works. And in a lot of ways, he is right. Okay. I don't know if the internet coined this phrase, it probably did, or I did, I doubt it, but this is what I'm calling the Magneto Paradox.

I'm sure this is online somewhere. My brain doesn't really work like that. So it's named after Eric. He's like helmet trauma personified, right? The anti-hero. He survived the atrocities of World War II only to watch the world start building camps for new undesirable mutant populations. And so it's like ding, ding, ding. I've seen this play before. Within this paradox, a villain identifies a really sort of sincere and real injustice, often before anyone else is willing or ready to admit it. their analysis is sharp, their anger is righteous, but the method that they choose to address it with usually ends up corroding the very future that they claim to want or the vision that they're claiming to build. So for example, in X-Men,

Magneto is like the kind of villain who makes you squirm not because he's evil, because he's right, like at least partly. He believes that mutants as a marginalized and persecuted group have the right to defend themselves. That waiting for justice through institutions that like fear or hate you is a fucking fool's errand. And, you know, how do you get power through peace when your people are being subjugated? It's just well-dressed submission, right, within the confines of the law.

You either die a hero or, right? This is everywhere in like adventure, villain, filmmaking. Think, what's a good example? Killmonger in Black Panther. Imperialism sort of birthed his character and then he exists in this world of like terrifying pain of the way he's treated.

As a black man, he wants global liberation for his people, but then he tries to get it by himself becoming an imperialist. Right? It's like the the reasoning and logic is sound until the execution. The same thing happened with our girl, Danny Daenerys Stormbaby born Blondie Blondie baby moon and stars Targaryen in Game of Thrones.

She goes from essentially like liberator to war criminal. Am I your savior or your destroyer? Girl, you are everyone's intruder thought for better or for worse for a number of reasons, right? Same thing with Thanos, big purple guy from the Avengers. I think he really neatly falls into this category of the Magneto paradox as well. Not to be confused with magenta paradox, that's for gays and theys.

There are all these characters who diagnose the sickness of the world with like a very strange precision that makes us go, woof, woof. But the cure that they prescribe is like very bloody and insane. So Magneto is correct that mutants are hunted and oppressed. Daenerys is correct that Westeros runs on cruelty and this unfair inherited power and you must take it by force. Killmonger is correct that black people across the diaspora have been systematically denied liberation.

And you know, technically our big purple boy Thanos is correct that like unchecked consumption is probably destroying life itself on Earth. It's a kernel of truth that resonates with the audience. Sometimes uncomfortably so, unless you're like a racist piece of shit or just hate women in power. But their solutions turn into absolutism and brutality and genocide. And it's this paradox of the righteous villain. They make you nod along until suddenly you're confronted with who falls in between the line of like justice and annihilation and you realize that they have stepped over it with terrifying conviction. I would argue that a lot of right-wing racist politics actually works in this way as well, which is kind of insane. It's like debasing the better instincts of our nature.

And I think characters like these feel familiar in 2025 because they're written to have absorbed some like same sort of messaging that our general media diet delivers to us. They see how systems fail, how people suffer, how justice is often this like slow and selective myth. And the problem is they lose the plot on how to fix it. We see this paradox not just in comic books, but...broadly across our socio-political lives. Like the revolutionary who wants to liberate the people and becomes a tyrant. The whistleblower who loses faith in the system and decides to burn it down, taking innocence with it, right? The cynic who begins by criticizing corruption and ends by embracing it because well, at least I'm fucking honest about it. 

I have even experienced this myself with one of my former NFA classmates and a former roommate and friend. They have spiraled so far into the leftist deep that he moved to China. He's currently like cheerfully rooting for Hamas and the end of America as we know it. Innocence be damned because in his world we're all imperialist Nazis if we aren't like 100 % with him. Wild.

It's basically the narrative version of the horseshoe theory. Like you start far enough in the territory of righteous idealism. And if you refuse to compromise or temper it with humanity, you loop right back around to the same authoritarian brutality you claim to oppose just believing in like a different economic system, honestly. So you can see that Magneto wants liberation, but begins to mirror like the extermination logic of his oppressors.

Daenerys breaks chains, but she'll like smoke your ass. You fight colonization by becoming the colonizer. Even Thanos, the purple eco-fascist, insists on saving life by committing mass murder. It's a vision that bends so far beyond the pursuit of justice that it curves back into tyranny. So I'm just fascinated by this idea.

Everywhere I think right now and it's tempting to say that the magneto paradox is about like the ends not justifying the means but I am it's more than that. It's sort of like a slow erosion of Empathy, I think in the face of righteous fury like when you have fucking suffered deeply or watched your people suffer It's easy and makes sense to believe that the world only responds to force that kindness is weakness that like

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pieces alive that sold to those that are powerless. But then when the oppressed become the oppressors out of pain and fear and vengeance and all of these very valid emotions, they prove their point and destroy it in the same breath, right? So really, in my mind, the paradox is a mirror. It asks like, what do you do with your justified anger? And also that power corrupts absolutely, right?

I don't inherently trust anyone who thinks that they should become president of the United States because thinking that you could do that impossible job inherently means I think you're a bit narcissistic, that you think that you could fully understand and lead the world in that way. So do you let it sharpen your vision or poison your soul? And more importantly, how far are you willing to go before you become the thing that you swore to fight?

And in this way, think media literacy teaches us a lot. It isn't just about spotting the fake news that I was talking about before. It's about learning to be able to hold multiple truths at once when you are digesting and internalizing media that someone can be right about the problem and devastatingly wrong about the response. That like a good diagnosis doesn't guarantee a healthy cure and hurt people don't always help people. You can circle that back to the fucking RFK Jr. and his brain worm and that fucking roadkill bear.

Right? Okay. The irony being that Marvel makes these villains by centering aliens and then DC makes the villains by centering men and taking everything away. Think about that process when the situation is reversed in real life. We can't mistake the clarity of like the villain's wisdom and their vengeance for a vision. We must ask ourselves what future are these people building and who gets to live in it because

The villain arc is like seductive. It offers something pure, sense of control in a world that keeps making you feel unsafe and breaking its promises. But purity in this case is a myth. So a clean revolution is also a myth. The truth is messier and slower and less cinematic. I think that the real antidote to the Magneto paradox isn't pacifism. It's accepting.

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and embracing complexity and I guess I'm on my fucking high horse and this diatribe is all about how you shouldn't have fucking voted for Jill Star. No, it means that learning like holding the rage without letting it consume your vision is really what's needed and believe me fucking besties, I am working on this, okay.

Sophie DeWitt (20:49.741)
All right, all right. I'm done preaching, talking to myself. OK, the tiny treat big take for this week. My tiny treat is, oh, I got a hard shot of latte coming. I'm going to treat myself. Yeah, it's been like baby. Lots of liquids. Maybe I should change that to like a little trip, but that's not a tiny treat. Anyway, my tiny treat big take for this week is everybody should watch the American game, at least once a year, that being baseball. If you're already rolling your eyes, wait three minutes or just skip ahead. I don't give a fuck, but I will make the argument right now. And I promise that you're going to care 2 % more. And it's going to be surprising. 

A, if we don't really love sports, we can respect a magnificent feat, right? If you think about it hitting and, you know, in some ways pitching, but specifically hitting a major league fastball is one of the most insane things, most athletically talented things that you can do in all of sports. It's widely considered one of the most difficult things to do because you combine insane speed, really deceptive movement and like the shortest, shortest, shortest reaction time, even for elite professionals. Right.

I think the average MLB fastball is like what, 93 miles an hour. So you have probably less than half a second to react, process the pitch, decide to swing or not. And it's interesting that pitchers use sort of like the same initial release points when the ball leaves their fingers for most of their pitches. But then there is a slight delay in variation that can be enough to like trick the batter's brain into committing to a swing on the wrong pitch.

That's why you see the balls just like wave all over the box when you're watching it on TV, right? There's also some interesting lore in baseball. Baseball superstitions are like completely unhinged. These people make astrology girlies look tame. Like players won't wash socks during a hot streak. Some of them like eat fried chicken before every game or like refuse to step on the foul line. It's kind of fun to dig into that.

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There's also just a very entertaining minor league team that you can follow. And I want to just give myself a little fucking patty pat on the back. I have been following the Savannah Bananas for over six years. Perhaps to them, they're finally blowing up. I think they had a game featured on ESPN or something, which is whack. Well, not whack. I guess it's like very exciting for them. So obviously the problem in most major league sports is the majority of us will never make it to the majors, right? But you always need a feeding system and a come up system.

And it works a little bit differently than the best players in college football get drafted and then they get to play in the National Football League. There's minor league baseball that happens so these guys can keep their skills, keep the dream alive and very, very rarely they get selected and plucked from those minor league teams to go up to the majors. I don't know actually how rare it is but I assume that it's really rare. One of these minor league teams, really gamified and modernized what they were doing. They're called the Savannah Bananas from Georgia. They made their team a team for the digital age. They started doing insane dress up nights, choreographed dances, hilarious TikToks. And I think smartly what their marketing team did was they made it for the girlies too. Like they would, there's this iconic video of one of the hottest ones of them running across the field, ripping his shirt off. 

I think he's in a kilt or something miming to an Olivia Rodrigo song or like, and it's over and you drive and maybe it's Lizzie McAlpine. One that, you know, when we're going through breakups, every girl's like, my God. And so this blows up online and they make this their stick. And so they have endlessly entertaining, hilarious games with other minor league teams. If that's not a reason to watch a baseball game, what is? Also, you must know.

One of the most astonishing feats in sports history happened in professional baseball. It was June 12th, 1970, the Pittsburgh Pirates. They were playing the San Diego Padres in San Diego. The starting pitcher for the Pirates, Doc Ellis, mercurial, idiosyncratic, iconic Doc Ellis. The story goes, the lore goes, that he had forgotten that it was his day to pitch.

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And he'd taken a tab of acid, who knows if it was just one tab, at around noon. After he takes that tab, he found out, in fact, it was his starting day. So he fucking hustled. I think he got on a plane, he was in LA, and he got to the mound and started playing. That man pitched a fucking no-hitter on acid. A no-hitter is very iconic in baseball. means literally the other team gets no points off of you throughout an entire game.

It's one of the pitcher's most iconic and difficult things to do. Now imagine doing that on fucking acid. If that's not a good fucking story, I don't know what it is. We're probably never gonna be able to witness that again, but who knows? Maybe there's like a rascally wily little guy who just wants to see those trails and feels really good about his pitching game. All right, one of the last arguments I'm gonna make. I don't think there are any other examples in sports where literally every time you go up to play offense, you get a mini song played for you. I'm just going off of vibes here, right? People that are actual baseball fans are gonna be like, what the fuck? Your walk-up song. I'm not saying that you need to memorize baseball stats or understand like what a bunt is. I'm saying that baseball has something that most other sports don't, which is personalized theme music. Walk-up songs are like free character development in real time.

Every player basically curates a little three second autobiography that's blasted at full volume in the stadium when they're going up to hit. You immediately know if someone's into like butt rock, like Nickelback or Creed, or they're feeling vibey and confident they have some bad bunny, or they just want to be funny and play baby shark. It's like hinge prompts, but louder with nachos. All right. It's a great first date friend group conversation starter, like.

What would your walk up song be? It lets you sneak in a pop culture and music moment without leaving the sports lane. All right. I'm just saying, try a baseball game. It's going to be really fun, I promise. Or it'll just be a good story. You'll just be able to pick your walk up song. OK, I have finally some amazing news. I keep winning one of the first bets I made during this last podcast season.

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If you remember, if you were listening a couple episodes ago, which fucking thank you so much, I keep winning my bet that South Park is going to mention the Trump administration in every fucking episode this season. Let me tell you how fucking pleased I was last week's episode. If you hadn't if you're like not following the news and this part was really depressing. Tim Cook presented this is real. This is true. He presented Trump with a 24 karat gold and glass statue with the Apple logo on it. I did not know this before this episode. Tim Cook donated a million dollars to Trump's inauguration. Trump still threatened tariffs. Like the irony of all of this is, okay, so this in my mind and my understanding is about Apple not wanting the Trump tariffs and just wanting to be in Trump's pocket. 

This whole...presentation of the fucking gold, just like the thumb up Trump's ass, just bowing and sucking the dick of the dictator. Boo hoo, that's not a homophobic joke about Tim Cook, I promise. The irony of all of this is the investment in American manufacturing that this like blithering display of kissing the ring was about is actually mostly due to a Biden era act called the Chips and Science Act. It was signed in like August in 2022.

So that act, something that Biden did is actually largely responsible for catalyzing Apple's move toward US-based chip manufacturing, not actually Donald Trump. But of course, Tim Cook bent the knee to Trump, not from ideological affinity, but maybe, because he probably likes his money. All the daddies like their money, but as a strategic corporate maneuver to avoid punishing tariffs. He made the public show. He went to the White House, gift in hand and then he pledged like $600 billion in US investments over four years. Most of that was already planned or in progress because of the Chips Act. This public display is like corporate real politic. You're using the spectacle to shield Apple from tariffs and maintain I think some sort of semblance of supply chain stability I would imagine. The fucking thing that I am so frustrated with these tech giants who aren't standing up to him and even some of the colleges like Trump is a megalomaniac.

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A narcissist, a child, he throws tantrums and gets what he wants. So this could assuage him for a time, but he has no allegiance or follow through. So the next time he's pissed, what are they going to do? Give him 24 more carrots? God, I think it was Ryan. He had said that best. said, I will not take part in normalizing Donald Trump, a convicted felon, business fraud, sexual abuser and accused pedophile. Tim Cook, Apple and the Olympic Committee should be ashamed of how they're sucking up to Trump.

But I'm sure they lack the self-awareness to experience that emotion. So the reason why I opened this segment by saying that I had fucking won my bad bet again is because the episode of South Park last week featured Tim Cook's visit to the White House. It was described in Yahoo News as, quote, Mr. President, your ideas for the tech industry are so innovative and you definitely do not have a small penis. Please accept this gift on behalf of Apple.

CEO Tim Cook tells Trump before giving him a small gift, which the president turns into a sex toy with Satan. It's fucking perfect. It's so fucking perfect. All right. That's it for Bad Vets this week. Go tell your friends to not continue voting for Jill Stein and watch South Park. Read up about what JFK really thinks about vaccines and how it's destroying people's lives, especially in the South.

Thank you so much for listening, always, and feel free to write in and join us on Patreon. Okay, peace.