Being a fan of Adam Carolla’s podcast (great interviews!), I was probably riding the bus or doing dishes when I heard his show from October 11. It was unusually arresting. It began with a riff on a car show that Carolla had just been to, where he marveled over how good every company had become. That was because of competition, he said. And that reminded him of why he hated the Occupy Wall Street movement so much. What followed was nine minutes of anger that’s been clipped and strewn across different audio and video accounts.
Some choice clips:
- I think it was something like the top 1 percent of taxpayers paid 50 percent of the taxes here in California. One percent paying for 50 percent, not good enough?
- There’s something in this country which didn’t use to exist, which is envy.
- Self-entitled pricks who think the world owes them a living. Now we’re getting the first wave of these douchebags… you get out into the real world, you realize, “I’m a fucking loser….” instead of finding a fucking mirror, and finding a reason why no one’s buying your car, you just want to run around and yell at everyone else who’s selling cars, and now you just want to throw shit. You want to find some guy who’s got more than you, and go “Hey man, what do you need all that shit for?”
- Just the same shit, where we can’t have a Christmas celebration, we have to have a holiday celebration, because of the one kid whose parents are litigious.
- You took guys who built something, and you said “there’s a guy who accomplished something.” You didn’t say, “that guy didn’t pay his fair share.” That guy paid millions of dollars last year, and you paid shit… this is basically what the terrorists did to us.
Carolla has hit on a lot of this before. You can probably read the title of his last book and figure out what he thinks of the self esteem culture. He’s applied that frame and that outrage to Occupiers, who most often make news now when they scrap with city officials about their rights to stay in parks. Behold: The return of hippie-punching.
