In fact, we kicked the corporatists off the dole before we did it to individuals. That helped show America we were serious. The liberals freaked out even as we paid back the traitors to free enterprise.
Trevor Gore (Stand-Up Comic)
We are in the green room of Atlantic City’s Boardwalk Giggle Works, a comedy club that is currently in the midst of one of the periodic stand-up comedy crazes that have been occurring on and off for nearly half a century. We can see snow falling outside the dirty window. On a stained couch, veteran comic Trevor Gore gestures wildly with a cigarette in his right hand and a glass of Jack Daniels in his left—listening to his staccato delivery, even in one-on-one conversation with him, you worry that you will be splashed or burned, or possibly both. “I’m related to Al Gore—remember him?” he shouts, although I’m two feet away “The guy who was into global warming? Remember that scam? It’s freaking six degrees outside!”
Gore is a pro who can fill a room with fans even on a weeknight, but then he has been doing his shtick for nearly 30 years. He had gone to Columbia to be a doctor, but instead of studying he spent his nights at the smoke-free comedy clubs of Michael Bloomberg’s New York City before quitting school entirely for life before the faux brick wall.
“I hated Bloomberg, that little fascist prick,” he says, “but then the city elects that socialist ass wipe de Blasio and it’s like Lord of the Flies. I mean, the whole place goes to hell. I thought I was a lefty, like all my friends, but I wasn’t blind. I didn’t buy that I had to get mugged so socialism could triumph. Count me out.”
Gore began turning his wit on the icons and shibboleths of the left largely out of sheer contrariness. “Everyone was afraid to make jokes about these tools. I wasn’t, and I caught all sorts of shit for it.”
He lost gigs in 2016 because he refused to hide the fact that he wouldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton. By 2018 his act was overtly political, and his explicitly conservative-oriented comedy album, Right Up Yours, broke him through to young people dispirited by a decade of progressive malaise. While he was merciless to politicians, he had a special enmity toward large businesses that collaborated with the progressives to milk the system.
“I did a long bit on that album about a visit to a Walmart I made when I was on tour in Atlanta in 2017. And I saw that the store was designed entirely to take money from the people the government had just given it to. No wonder these companies were funding progressives—the welfare money went right into their pockets after a few hours in the pockets of the welfare bums.” Performances like Gore’s, and other like-minded comedians, gave mass audiences permission to be angry at the takers in society—and at companies that enabled them.
Though his “My Visit to Walmart” bit became the climax of his live shows for several years, it got his album banned from Walmart’s shelves. “Of course,” he says, “Amazon was very happy to promote it!”
Now, I take 81 milligrams of baby aspirin every night because my doctor says it might keep my heart from exploding. So, I’m on a trip to Atlanta and I had forgotten my baby aspirin, right? So, I look around and the only place nearby is this enormous Walmart super-ultra-mega store. It’s literally a choice between dying of a heart attack and going into this Walmart on welfare check night, and I’m not sure I chose right.
I pull up into the parking lot and it’s clear everyone there is on some kind of welfare. How do I know? I’m from New York. I know what a loser looks like. These were not career-focused individuals, okay?
So, the parking lot is packed with cars. This disturbed me, because people who get government money should not have cars. Okay, they should sell their cars to buy the things that my tax money is buying them. Otherwise, that really means that I’m subsidizing their cars and as far as I am concerned, cars are for closers. No work-work, no vroom-vroom.
Of course, I would solve that problem of people using their government money on things I don’t approve of, like cars for losers, by ending all government programs. See, if it isn’t any of my money, then it isn’t any of my concern. But I digress.
Now, I want to be clear that I’m not somehow “better than Walmart” or the normal people who patronize it. There were a few normals that night. You could tell them because they were as scared as I was. But I am, however, significantly better than the loafing losers who descended on the welfare money magnet of a store that night.
You are also better than them. I don’t even know you and I’m very comfortable saying that.
So, I decide I’ve gotta get my aspirin. How bad can it be, right? I work my way through the throng to the main entrance. And it’s full of sketchy people. There should have been a sign reading “Welcome to Walmart. Please, no sudden moves.”
My clean clothes, my combed hair, my general air of self-sufficiency… these pegged me as a figure due awe and respect. The other shoppers gave me a wide berth, which was good since many of them were pretty damn wide themselves.
Do not get me going on how America is full of fat people on food stamps.
So, I’d never been in a Walmart before. I’m from New York. If a store’s bigger than my living room I start getting agoraphobia. Anyway, the interior was like an aircraft hangar filled with five supermarkets, and it’s illuminated with the glow of a hundred fluorescent lights way up on the ceiling. The sheer size and variety inside was amazing, and that was just the people.
The aisles were about twice as wide as those in any other store I’d ever been in. Like I said, in America obesity is a disease that correlates with being “poor.”
Of course “poor” is a relative term. When you talk about people overseas, “poor” would mean, roughly, “no money.” But these folks, that night, had money all right—my money and your money. So, in America, the term “poor” apparently refers not to the amount of money one has but, rather, whether or not one gets it from Uncle Sam in return for voting for liberal Democrats.
I noticed a bunch of “poor” people hustling their new big screens up to the front counter. They were happy to get the money that afternoon, and Walmart was happy to relieve them of it that evening.
Yeah, look for Walmart to be all in for entitlement cuts.
The customers that night were a United Nations of all races and ethnicities united by the promise of consumer spending subsidized by others who actually work for a living.
They seemed calmed by the crackling fluorescent lights and soothing colors of the displays. This was not just a place to shop for material goods but a kind of temple to Deadbeato, the wrathful god of entitlements.
It creeped me out.
I start walking toward where they sell the medicine, and then I realize that I have no idea where they sell the medicine. Could be in the next state, the place is so big.
I look for an employee. Nearby, there’s one Walmart guy surrounded by eight blaze-orange cones using a sheet of cardboard to fan a purple spill on the linoleum like it’s the pharaoh. He looks scared.
“Hey, where’s the medicine aisle?” I ask. He looks at me dead-eyed, but keeps on fanning. It’s fun to confuse people by speaking to them clearly in proper English, but I try it another way.
“Dude, medicine aisle? Hello?”
He stops fanning for a second, points a dirty finger vaguely off into the distance, and then goes back to fanning the puddle.