Hello everyone, welcome to this week in Stupid for the 26th of February 2017.
I thought I'd do this in more of a podcast format in future because everyone seemed to like the last one and it was way more fun for me to make and way easier and I think the fact that it's easier and less time consuming to edit a video together makes means I can spend more time on the content itself which is probably beneficial for everyone.
So let's talk about Donald Trump because that's all that there is to talk about these days, unfortunately.
But the thing is, this isn't really about Donald Trump.
This is really about the media and how the media is reacting to him.
Trump is merely a vessel from which we can analyze how the media reacts in certain ways to certain things.
For example, last night in Sweden, Trump's remark baffles a nation.
Oh god, I love this story so much.
This is just the funniest fucking thing.
They say, well, we don't know what you're talking about, Donald.
Oh, don't you?
Okay, well, I mean, this is the New York Times, as you can see.
London, Swedes reacted with confusion, anger, and ridicule on Sunday to a vague remark by President Trump that suggested something terrible had occurred in the country.
Oh yeah, nothing bad has ever happened in Sweden, especially to do with migrant crises.
During a campaign-style rally in Florida.
Now, hang on, I'm just going to pause here because I want to talk about this.
Isn't it very interesting that Donald Trump is still holding these campaign-style rallies?
This is how he is talking to people.
He's using the rallies and he's using Twitter to just bypass the media and is working for him.
If you look at the opinion polls on what his executive orders are and the things he's done, people aren't sure whether to trust him or the media and about half of them trust him and a bit less trust the media.
And this is very interesting.
This is working for him.
This is going to be how populist politicians operate in future and we should get used to it.
And the thing is, I don't really see any reason why he should use the media, especially the way that they've treated him.
But anyway, we'll get into that shortly because I've got a lot to go through.
So he said, you look at what's happening.
We've got to keep our country safe.
You see what's happening in Germany.
You look at what happened last night in Sweden.
Sweden, who would believe this?
I love that.
They don't touch what's happening in Germany because we all know what's happening in Germany.
In fact, there's simply nothing to say about that.
It's just, it's a house of horrors.
As one of the leaked pedestrian emails shows, I mean, it's just horrific.
The German political class have caused it.
Merkel has caused it with her unilateral decisions.
Anyway, so apparently not the Swedes.
Nothing particularly nefarious happened in Sweden on Friday or Saturday for that matter.
Swedes were left baffled.
Oh my goodness.
What?
We don't know what you're on about, Donald.
What are you talking about?
There's nothing going on.
And I love this.
Contrary to Mr. Trump's allegations, nearly all the men involved in terrorist attacks on Paris on November the 15th or in Brussels on March 22nd last year in Inisa, France, were citizens of France or Belgium.
Oh, they must have been Frenchmen and Belgians.
They were there eating their chocolates and croissants and then they thought, you know what?
I need to have a suicide tack where I scream out a lawakba.
Unknown to any, I can't explain why, but that's what I'm going to have to do.
So obviously everyone was like, um, look, Trump, Trump may have just like misspoken there, but this is, this is out of control.
So this is from the spectator.
For a British boy to be killed by a grenade attack anywhere is appalling, but for it to happen in the suburb of Gothenburg should shatter a few illusions about Sweden.
Last week's murder of an eight-year-old Yusuf Wassam fits a pattern that Swedes have slowly come to recognise over the years.
He was from Birmingham, visiting relatives, and was caught up in what the Swedish police believe is a gang war within the Somali community.
Last year, a four-year-old girl was killed by a car bomb outside of Gothenburg, another apparent victim of gang violence.
But it didn't happen last night.
So conversation over.
Case closed.
We win, Trump.
You've got nothing.
For years, Sweden has regarded itself as a humanitarian superpower, making its mark on the world not by fighting wars, but by offering shelter to war victims.
Refugees have arrived here in extraordinary numbers.
Over the past 15 years, some 650,000 asylum seekers have made their way to Sweden.
Of the 160,000 who arrived last year, 32,000 were granted asylum.
Sweden only has about 8 or 9 million people in it.
This is a colossal percentage of the population.
I mean, since 2014, Germany's accepted around 2 million, but they have 85 million.
That's the difference.
It's just, I mean, it's such a staggering number.
And I can only imagine how much this is costing.
This pathological altruism is costing the Swedish taxpayer.
But it may be news to the rest of the world, but gang warfare has been a feature of our country for years now.
Stockholm has been witness to Dickensian scenes of young pickpockets and thieves playing a game of cat and mouths with the police who feel powerless.
Until fairly recently, Sweden was admired for its progressive social policies.
Today, one in seven voters supports the Sweden Democrats, a populist party until recently reviled in polite Swedish society.
Because it's getting to the point where there's simply no denying the problems.
Denying these problems is just you denying reality.
So the children that Sweden is taking in are every age and arrive from all kinds of countries.
Afghans and Somalis are the two big screws.
Then come Syrians, Ethiopians, Iraqis, Moroccans, Eritreans.
Some are fleeing war, many are fleeing poverty and misery.
It's interesting, and I mean there are a lot of people in this country who'd like to flee poverty.
Where can they go?
Can they go to Sweden?
Hello, yes, I'm a white working-class person from Yorkshire, and I would like asylum from poverty and misery, please, because I'm poor and miserable back in my country.
It's an untenable thing to do.
And I love this.
The cost of accommodating our child refugees is enormous.
£160 per child per day.
God damn, that is...
That is such a staggering amount of money for one kid for one day.
I mean, it doesn't cost £160 per day to have a child in Britain.
Just the average person.
It's lunacy.
I really like this one.
So the Huffington Post, I had to archive this, of course, I've archived all of this, but I had to archive this one in particular because if I go to the next, oh, you can see that this post from the Huffington Post platform is no longer available.
They removed it.
Probably because the author was saying, Trump's absolutely right about Sweden.
Sweden has a huge problem because of liberal immigration policy.
Many journalists around the world are eager to condemn Donald Trump no matter what.
When he tweeted about immigration in Sweden a few days ago, social media exploded.
Most of the opponents said that Trump had made the immigration problem made up the immigration problem the Swedes are having.
They are wrong.
Only hours later, there was a riot of violence and destruction by immigrants in the capital of Sweden, Stockholm.
The police were forced to shoot with ammunition to put an end to it.
In Malmo, another city south in Sweden, they have struggled with gang violence and lawlessness for years.
So when Trump talks that Sweden is having an immigration problem, he's actually spot on.
I mean, just saying, oh, it didn't happen last night.
No, that's when he watched a documentary about it on, like, Fox News or something.
And I hate to quote Fox News, but on this subject, they don't need to lie.
They don't need to make up any shit about this.
They don't need to spin it.
The reality of the situation is awful.
And the left and the press just total denial.
So what was that?
What was that, Washington Times?
New York Times, sorry?
Last night in Sweden, Trump's remark baffles a nation.
We just don't know what he's talking about.
I mean, there is just no basis in our reality for this.
And that's what it is.
It's your reality.
I mean, the reality of, say, the Swedish police is completely different.
Swedish policemen blames migrants for the majority of countries' rapes and shootings and turns accuses politicians of turning a blind eye.
And let's not forget, they do turn a fucking blind eye.
I mean, if it's not like actual politicians being raped in like Norway, Sweden and Germany, and then saying, well, I don't want to accuse my rapist because he was a migrant and he'll be sent back to Somalia or something.
And I feel guilty about that.
It's them actively covering up mass sexual assaults, for example, in Cologne on New Year's Eve, but not just Cologne, Hamburg, and I think there was one in London and stuff like this.
They happen really regularly.
And the thing is, it's not the media elites that normally have to deal with this.
It's regular people out doing regular things who have to deal with this.
And this is the disconnect between the media and the people.
And this is something, again, we'll touch on later because it's really important that people understand just the media is acting like its own class.
Like they are in the driving seat in control of the societal narrative.
The things that people think about come from the media.
And the media puts their spin on it.
And they've realized that they can control what large segments of the population think and believe if they just word things and phrase things and report on some things and not others.
And it's got to the point where they've done this to too many people.
There are too many people revolting against the sort of media hegemony on information.
So a Swedish detective who has triggered a row by blaming violent crime on migrants has gone a step further and accused politicians turning a blind eye to the problem because of political correctness.
Again, exactly the same thing happened here.
My friend V, the YouTuber, he couldn't believe that the Rotherham rape gangs were ignored and overlooked due to political correctness.
He just couldn't believe how much of a hold the word racist has on the minds of people.
And I was trying to explain to him, no, they literally will do this.
I mean, it's so Soviet in nature.
So Springar says, countries representing weekly crimes.
Half the suspects, we can't be sure because they don't have any valid papers, which in itself means they're usually lying about your nationality and identity.
Prosecutors launched an inquiry suggesting he had incited racial hatred, but later dropped the charges.
Probably because they looked at the data and was like, oh, fucking, alright.
Not even going there.
So yeah, it's something that the people on the ground know about.
But the media aren't on the ground.
I mean, one of the things, I, what was the name?
Tim Poole, a journalist.
He announced on Twitter that he was going to crowdfund his expedition to Sweden to go and find out what the case of this is.
Because nobody knows, because none of these fucking fucks are on the ground.
They don't go to these places.
They don't do investigative journalism.
They sit there and get things from Twitter.
They get poorly sourced reports from just people on Twitter.
They don't care.
It doesn't matter to them.
Checking this stuff, validating it, irrelevant.
It's not their job.
They don't need to, because most people aren't in that location.
And so most people won't know themselves.
Is there anything else in this?
No, right, okay.
So next one.
Donald Trump bars BBC, CNN, and New York Times from media briefing his White House press war escalates.
He also banned a bunch of others like BuzzFeed and whatnot.
But yeah, here we go.
BBC, CNN, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Politico, why haven't you mentioned?
Oh, yeah, alongside the Daily Mail and BuzzFeed, were refused entry into a scheduled briefing in Spicer's West Wing office.
This is something they call a gaggle, a press gaggle.
It's not an official press meeting.
It's not filmed.
It's not televised.
It's just an informal meeting in Spice's office, which is not that big.
But either way, leaving these outlets out of the meeting is a huge political statement.
As is what other things Donald Trump has done.
But this is the point.
I mean, it's not unfair to characterize this as a war against the press, because the press appear to have declared war on Trump.
When did they ever give him a fair hearing?
When did they ever do anything that was even vaguely to his benefit?
All it is is hit pieces from here on out.
And you'll never hear anything even remotely charitable from the media.
And it just means that I can't.
I find myself being unable to really do anything about the things I don't like about Donald Trump because there's just no point.
The media is so saturated with hit pieces against Donald Trump.
I may as well talk about the things that he's not doing badly.
Or in the cases like this, where the media is, not just this, but others, where the media is misrepresenting him and deliberately denigrating him.
I may as well talk about that because no one else is going to fucking talk about it.
It's just left to us and the alternative media.
So, okay, well, this is what we get then.
So, he bans these people, and nothing like this has ever happened in the White House drama during our long history of covering multiple administrations and different parties, said Dean Backe, the executive editor of the New York Times.
Well, that's not true, Dean, and I'll show you why that's not true.
But the thing is, I think it's because you don't consider these people on your team, and that's why you think that something like this has never happened.
We strongly protest the exclusion of the New York Times and other news organizations.
Free media access to a transparent government is obviously crucial national interest.
Look, I don't know whether you've noticed, but most journalism on Donald Trump is done via Donald Trump's Twitter feed.
They feature a tweet and then they talk about it and then they add some context and say, right, job done.
This took me.
I should have got the data actually.
I didn't think I was going to speak like this.
But I was speaking to Dr. Lehman the other day, and he sent me a bunch of information about how much time it takes to research for journalists.
It used to take about two and a half hours for a journalist to research an article.
It now takes in the realm of minutes for them to research an article.
That's how much work they're doing.
So, I mean, I don't have the evidence to hand, obviously.
I'm sure if you ask Lehman, he can give it to you.
But it just goes to show you what the media has become like.
It's just honestly.
Obviously, there's a big closing of ranks.
You had Time and oh, who is the other outlet?
I can't remember.
Oh, the Associated Press, in fact, right there in front of me.
Who chose not to attend the briefing, which is called a gaggle, and is less formal than a televised briefing in the White House press room.
And they're doing it in solidarity, of course.
The networks, ABC, and NBC, ABC, CBS, and Fox all attended.
So the reason that he's doing this, obviously, he says, I'm against people who make up stories and make up sources.
They shouldn't be allowed to use sources unless they use somebody's name.
Let their name be out there.
Let there be no more sources.
Well, anonymous sources, he means.
And you can see there, he tweeted out calling the press the enemy of the people.
And I've demonstrated what he's talking about when he says that in a previous video, called the enemy of the people.
It's not surprising to me that he would do this.
I can't believe the media is shocked that Donald Trump would treat the media with total contempt and disdain.
I can't imagine anyone in Trump's position who would be embracing the media at this point.
I mean, I'll give you some examples of what I mean, right?
Oh, before I do, Trump says he won't attend the White House correspondent's dinner amid testy relations with the media.
Yes, they seem to have declared war on him and he is not afraid of declaring war back.
And the thing is, as the president, he can do these things.
For example, you know, he says that he's not going to go to the White House Correspondents Association dinner.
Annual parade of celebrities, journalists, and politicians that in recent years has drawn five for being too opulent and self-indulgent.
Yes, it has.
they're horrible actually i hate watching like obama and bush's comedy routines at these sort of i don't know if it was exactly these ones but you've seen that they're big big organizations big Everyone's wearing incredibly fancy outfits.
And they sit there and make jokes about drone strikes and just the things that they do.
And it's like, yeah, I'm sure that's funny to you guys, but it's not funny to the people outside who are watching the things you do and think the things you do are terrible.
It just goes to show how insulated from consequences you are.
And as soon as you become divorced from the consequences of your actions, you're going to start taking actions that would otherwise you would never consider.
It just wouldn't be something that would cross your mind because you think, well, no, that's going to come back and bite me.
But as soon as it doesn't, things start to just matter a lot less.
But yeah, so, I mean, this is the sort of thing that you'll find around the internet.
Just, I mean, these are all from this week.
Just look at these headlines.
Saunders just shut down Trump with a brutal reality check.
How Trump's privilege makes him blind to bigotry.
That's really useful, Huffington Post and CNN.
Really, really important stuff.
I mean, breaking news.
Quick, stop the presses.
And, you know, USA Today, Trump circles favours men two to one.
Misogyny.
Trump too late on hate.
So critics say, fucking just.
Do we have anything about his policies?
I mean, you know, the public are generally in favor of his executive orders if Politico polls are anything to go by.
And since Politico have been one of the outlets that have been banned from Donald Trump's pressers, I would not be surprised if they had every, I mean, there's obviously a reason.
There's obviously a reason he has banned them.
And the reason is obviously they are an adversarial, but not just adversarial.
They put themselves in a state of war against the president.
It's like, okay, well, what do you want?
And their polls are finding that most people favor Trump's executive orders.
So, what now?
Are you going to sit there and go, well, okay, maybe it's us?
If the public are generally behind him, and everything he's doing is rather approved by his own constituents, then what now?
I mean, how far on the outside do you have to become until you realize that you are the problem?
So let's have some examples of why the media is full of shit and why Donald Trump isn't planning to engage with them very much.
Did Trump win because his name came first in key states?
That's important news, BBC.
That's a good question.
I'm glad you're asking the hard-hitting questions.
One of the world's leading political scientists believed that Donald Trump most likely won the US presidential election for a very simple reason.
His name came first on the ballots in some critical swing states.
Yeah, yeah, that's it.
Because people are children and they don't really know and they just go for the first one on the list because they feel this is an obligation, not a right.
John Krosnick spent 30 years studying how voters choose one candidate over another and says that at least two US presidents won their elections because their names were listed first on the ballot in states where the margin of victory was narrow.
Maybe.
Maybe.
I mean, who knows?
Who fucking knows?
I'm sure.
I don't even care.
I don't think you can ever really prove that.
Melania and Ivanka's plastic feminism covers up Trump's misogyny.
Oh, God.
Now it's attacking his family.
Of course.
Because they're just as culpable, basically.
How dare they be related to him?
She married him after all.
That was a choice.
And why does she choose to be his daughter?
That's awful.
Why not just go after them?
So, in his press conference last week in which Trump ranted and raved that he wasn't ranting and raving, which he wasn't ranting and raving.
I watched the fucking thing.
He was just standing there going, look, this is just what you reap what you sow, is basically what he was saying.
Fucking Helsian, and you're such liars.
And you lie about small, petty things.
This is not something that's going to change someone's opinion of Trump.
This is just going to make people think you're lying again, which you are.
So, I guess you reap what you sow.
I can't believe you got banned from his press conferences, CNO.
Anyway, he answered a question about his wife, Melania.
That's what I call a very nice question, he said.
Apparently, relieved to stop talking about his own policies.
What fucking policies?
He's been, all he does is attack the media.
And apparently, relieved, before saying the First Lady feels very strongly about women's issues and women's difficulties.
Trump didn't specify what these issues and difficulties might be.
One presumes that, despite phrasing, he probably meant things like equal pay and healthcare are not what old men usually mean when they cryptically speak about our difficulties.
Yep, we're done.
We're done.
Trump is bullying transgender kids because he thinks he can get away with it.
Fucking really?
Really?
Trump is now bullying tranny kids.
Right, okay.
I just, I can't even.
I can't even.
Maybe.
I mean, he probably does it on Twitter today.
He's probably searched through Twitter for some fucking Tumblr eye kitty and then he's just like, hey, 25 million fucking followers.
Look at this disgusting tranny, right?
Or was it that they shredded federal guidelines that instructed public schools how best to protect transgender students from discrimination?
Guidelines that were put in by the Obama administration.
I mean, you literally have it here.
They rescind Obama-era protections for transgender students.
No, no, they're just guidelines.
They're just guidelines.
I mean, this is like people saying that, um, oh, being restricted from this White House, informal White House presser, this gaggle, is an infringement of their First Amendment rights.
No, it's not.
The First Amendment, if I recall correctly, says that Congress will create no law abridging, you know, infringing on the freedom of the press or the people to print and say whatever they like.
And he's not doing that.
Just like the Muslim ban didn't actually ban Muslims, this is not an infringement of the First Amendment.
This is not a freedom of speech problem.
This is just Trump deciding to be partisan.
And you had no problem when Obama was being partisan, so I'm not interested in your complaints about Trump's being partisan.
This is something that's just completely normal in American politics.
Witches cast mass spell against Donald Trump.
This isn't BuzzFeed.
No.
This is the fucking BBC under their news section.
News!
I mean, you could have it as like entertainment or anything else.
Just, but no, the news section.
Witches cast mass spells.
No, they don't.
They don't cast a mass spell.
They cast mass bullshit, and for some reason, you are reporting on this.
Let's hear it.
I love this.
This is going to be great.
So, Michael Hughes, who describes himself as a magical thinker, as in bullshit artist, posted a version of the spell online, saying he'd seen multiple versions on private witchcraft groups.
In it, he suggests using a stubby orange candle, an unflattering picture of Mr. Trump, and a tower tarot card.
Why are you reporting this with not even taxpayer money?
This is a fucking separate thing.
We have to pay for the BBC.
Why are you using our money to report this bullshit?
This is not news.
This would be low for BuzzFeed.
would be a trashy buzzfeed article that nobody fucking reads and everybody says oh that's stupid because this is stupid
the words of the spell include a plea to the wicked deities to bind donald j trump so that his malignant works may fail utterly just kill yourselves physicists assure us that we are not living in an alternate reality where trump is president How does this exist?
I mean, this is obviously the real reality where Trump is president.
The alternate reality is where he's not president.
And presumably Clinton is president.
And I feel sorry for the people in that reality.
We got the best timeline.
There is a theory going around that's certain.
I watch conspiracy theory videos all the time.
I watch like the Bigfoot stuff, the UFO stuff, the real men in black stuff, the black-eyed kids.
I love conspiracy theories.
They're like the modern day equivalent of the X-Files.
It's all total horseshit, but maybe, just maybe, you'll see something that's real or true or something.
And I've seen a lot.
I used to work at the research councils in Swindon.
They used to give a lot of money to CERN.
I used to have to deal with a lot of people who worked at CERN or information about CERN and things like this.
And I can tell you that CERN is not, absolutely not, part of a giant conspiracy to destroy the universe or whatever it is.
They... I have to say it.
I have to say it.
It's bullshit.
These scientists are not malevolent people.
And I don't think they're organized enough for a conspiracy.
And that's the thing.
People seem to fail to understand.
Most scientists are not evil villains.
They're actually really well-meaning people who are a lot of the time really socially inept, kind of bungling, and often very messy and disorganized.
They're not like, they're not spooks from the CIA who are, you know, tight-lipped and razor-sharp and all that sort of thing.
They're not anything like that.
But I just can't even.
So why are they reporting conspiracy theories?
And they don't even call it a conspiracy theory.
They just say there's a theory going around.
No, a conspiracy theory going around that CERN experiments have caused the world to shift into an alternate reality where Donald Trump is president.
That sounds scientific.
As most people would agree, this clearly can be labeled fake news.
Why did you even report it?
Why did you even report it?
Michelle Castillo.
You should have said, no, look, this is bollocks.
I've got real journalism to be doing, you know?
Things that actually matter.
So, yeah, obviously the CERN spokesman says, no, this is bollocks.
Trump theorists, Trump theorists, like this is Trump's supporters theorizing this.
It's like the Mandela effect, a phenomenon that occurs when large groups of people believe in something that happened, even though evidence shows it isn't true.
Some think that more of these incidents have occurred since CERN was established, and suggest that its particle physics experiments are causing the world to shift into parallel universes.
And they also probably believe in the flat earth and ancient aliens and all this kind of absolute unproven, unscientific horseshit.
Why are you reporting on this?
This is an article from January when Trump first assumed the office and immediately outlets the spectator is actually a rather reliable outlet I actually trust.
Because they tend to maintain a relatively impartial view on things.
And so this isn't them agitating for this.
But this is really a commentary on how people reacted.
So the question is, will he be assassinated, ousted in a coup, or impeached?
My money's unassassinated.
I think that the, the liberal, no, sorry, the liberals.
Jeez, why would I even say that?
The hard left in America have tried twice, and a man is now dead because of a mistaken identity.
I don't think they're capable of doing it, though.
I think that it'll be an insider from the deep state.
There'll be some sort of conspiracy to oust him because he's.
Well, he's at war with everyone, isn't he?
But the interesting part comes at the very bottom.
He talks about how this is a common theme running through the political zeitgeist at the time.
And it still is.
Funnily enough, I heard something impeccably similar at an impeccably liberal cocktail party.
Sorry, something similar to what Alex Jones had said.
So he says, obviously, that Rosie O'Donnell, a liberal TV personality who feuded with Trump in the past, you heard this from me first, Jones says, ladies and gentlemen, they're nakedly saying they want to overturn the election.
They are prepping, saying that we need a national emergency to clear up if Trump is a Russian agent.
They are planning to put about 50 million Americans in re-education camps.
Presumably that's PewDiePie's subscriber base.
These people mean business.
Funnily enough, I heard something similar at an impeccably liberal cocktail party in Washington before the election.
The crowd were national security intellectuals.
If Trump is elected, said one of the guests, it will end in a military coup.
Tanks on the White House lawn.
He was the second person to tell me of that at the party.
Conversations in Washington have taken on a hallucinatory quality.
Impeachment, however far-fetched an idea, is not the most outlandish possibility being discussed in this town as the 45th president is sworn into office.
that's worrying isn't it?
I mean that's just something that they are that's on their minds.
And so, and so, again, The Washington Post.
How to remove Trump from office?
Do we need a big long article on how to get rid of a newly elected president?
Isn't that something that's necessary?
Is it responsible?
Richard Cohen?
Giving your opinion on how this could be done?
Is that a responsible thing for you to do?
Why are you doing this?
It's the fucking ice cream truck again.
Fucking hell.
Okay, it's stopped now, but it's probably going to be back.
Fucking...
I hate outside noise when I'm trying to record.
Anyway, I'm not going to bother going through it because it's really long and it's again from a month ago.
So you may recall the number of journalists who have called for the assassination of Donald Trump, which is a disturbing amount.
This is the Times columnist, Indian Night.
Sorry, what exactly did she say?
She said, This assassination is taking such a long time, back in January.
Yet another journalist calls for Trump's death.
Telegraph's train columnist Monisha Rajesh expressed a desire for Trump to be assassinated.
What did she say?
Can we see a larger version of this?
It's about time for a presidential assassination.
That's great, Monisha.
That's really responsible.
No wonder your accounts are your tweets are protected now.
Did you get a lot of backlash from Trump voters?
Who are like, we're going to vote him in.
He's going to do what he said.
And we don't want you, one of the media elites, to agitate for his death.
If that's too much.
That's too much to ask.
I mean, who knows?
Could Obama murder Trump and Pence, then pardon himself?
Asking for humanity.
Thanks, Rupert Myers.
Who's Rupert Myers?
Let's find out.
Oh, a political correspondent of British GQ and Telegraph.
That's responsible.
Nazis, I hate these guys.
Oh, that's some virtue signalling.
Because everyone loves the Nazis.
And if you don't tell people you hate the Nazis, people will be like, fuck, he's probably a Nazi sympathiser.
New York Times columnist tweets jokes about killing Trump.
Do you see the problem yet?
Do you see why you got fucking banned yet?
Why would he deal with you if you do this?
I wouldn't fucking deal with you.
Holy fuck would I not deal with you.
I would just...
And this is from this week.
They're still doing it.
What was the tweet?
Oh, come on.
Where's the tweet?
Right, he said, good news, guys.
I figured out how the Trump campaign ends, along with a clip from Little No Movie, The Dead Zone.
Now, I haven't seen that, so I don't know.
But, yeah, this is something continual.
And, obviously, when Trump was first elected, this is back in...
Oh, this is November 2016, before he was even elected.
Well, actually, this is after the election, but before he took office.
Who's going to assassinate Trump?
Twitter erupts with calls for the Donald to be killed after he wins the election.
I don't know why Donald Trump's banned the Daily Mail, because as far as I can tell, the Daily Mail, being a right-wing paper, is relative, and a really populist paper, is relatively sympathetic to him.
But who's going to assassinate Trump at his inauguration?
They need to assassinate Donald Trump, ASAP.
I just pray the first whatever who tries to assassinate Donald Trump doesn't miss.
Hmm, this is lovely.
This is wild.
Trump's only been president two days, and people already want to assassinate him.
Yeah, they wanted to beforehand.
This is something they have been talking about for quite some time.
If I were Donald Trump, this should be a legitimate concern I would hold in the back of my mind.
So, and this is something I particularly like.
John McCain, Donald Trump attacking the media is how dictators start.
A free press is vital.
Adding the first thing dictators do is shut it down.
John, I don't think that people in countries that have dictators or are likely to have dictators.
I don't think journalists in these countries are quite so confident to go on social media and call for the assassination of El Presidente.
I don't think they're that confident to go after the commander of the armed forces and just write hit piece after hit piece after hit piece after hit piece.
Just nothing but a continual slurry of insults and just pointless, baseless, defamatory shit that comes out of the fucking outlets, I was going to say the mouths, but obviously the keyboards of the media.
This is not something that happens in dictatorships because all these people would be rounded up and shot.
The fact that Donald Trump is obviously not going to round up and shoot the press means that he's not a dictator.
I mean, he's not a dictator in any way, shape, or form.
And I'm really fucking sick of people saying it.
Oh, he's a fascist.
Yeah, he's a fascist that is doing everything he can within the bounds of the law.
He has done nothing outside of the bounds of the law.
He has done nothing that Obama didn't already do.
And he has done nothing that is outside of his remit as president.
The things he's doing, he has been elected to do.
And it just, oh my God, I hate this kind of, I just hate this bullshit.
Just stop doing this.
You're whipping people up into a stupid fucking frenzy.
But so the US president continued his verbal assaults on fake news journalists, which, let's be honest, they are.
They're propagandists.
They talk shit.
They lie.
I mean, obviously, I've seen a CNN lie in this video.
In this video, and I've only covered like one or two of their articles.
Of course, I have already spotted one lie.
I mean, who knows how many others there are that I just don't know about?
But, you know, his verbal assaults on fake news journalists, saying in the tweet they're the enemy of the American people, which they are, he told a cheering crowd at Rally in Florida that he wanted to speak with you without the filter of the fake news.
And that's important.
Because that's what they'll do.
They will filter anything he says or does and make it into some kind of derogatory commentary on what he's doing, even when it's something relatively innocuous.
They've become a big part of the problem.
They are part of a corrupt system.
That's true.
I mean, is there anyone who doubts that?
Is there anyone who wants to contest that with me?
You'll find me on Twitter.
You'll find me in the comment sections.
You can say, you know what?
No, the media are doing a great job.
The media didn't do nothing wrong.
How could you attack the media?
What have they ever done to you?
And I love this.
McCain says the free press is vital and we must have it.
They are free.
They are free to talk as much bullshit as they want, Kane.
They're not being punished.
They're not being persecuted.
They are on the attack and they have been from the very beginning.
And Trump is fighting back, as he should, because I tell you what.
Trying to undermine the legitimacy of the sovereign of your nation is a dangerous game.
I mean, it sounds really archaic to hear Obama talking about the peaceful transition of power.
That's what we expect in liberal democracies.
It's so remedial almost.
Well, of course we want a peaceful transfer of power.
But if you oust Donald Trump and then you sit there and you, I mean, it's not like you guys are going to be like, yeah, okay, well, we're okay with Pence.
No, it's fine.
Pence is fine.
No, you're going to keep going.
Once you've done it once, you'll have crossed that Rubicon and you will keep going.
You will do everything you can.
I mean, there was, I should have got the articles.
Fuck.
There were articles about how, on CNN, no less, obviously, about how, you know, if there's a tremendous tragedy at Donald Trump's inauguration, it could be an Obama appointee who ends up being president.
It's like, well, rub those hands together because you never know.
You never know.
You need to stop this kind of crap.
Just deal with it.
Trump's the president.
You just have to understand it.
And yeah, this thing, right?
The peaceful transfer of power is an incredibly important thing.
Because A, it indicates the system is working in a healthy way.
But if you sit there and you somehow orchestrate a coup and you somehow unseat Donald Trump from the presidency illegitimately, because that's what you'll have to do, unless you've got some way of grounds for impeaching him, which I really don't think you do, then it means that you're going to be introducing deliberate chaos into your system.
And the American system, honestly, looks really fragile from the outside.
It looks really fucking fragile.
When you have, I mean, I don't want to just use the term the elites, but when you've got politicians, business magnates, and the press all in agreement that they hate Donald Trump and frankly, they'd like him dead.
It kind of looks like this is the sort of political, the sort of volatile situation that needs to be handled with care.
You shouldn't be trying to just try to upend your fucking republic because that's how republics end up ending.
You need to keep everything in line and how it should be.
Basically, you guys need to stand down.
Trump won.
You have to get over it.
You have to get over it.
You have to stop this trying to unseat him business and go, I mean, be adversarial, but don't be in a state of war with him.
I'm sure, I'm absolutely certain that you could deal with Donald Trump if you weren't being a bunch of total pricks.
That's my advice on this.
And this is an interesting thing, right?
So the Republicans work to thwart investigation of Donald Trump's Russia ties and conflicts of interest.
Now, Donald Trump may well have Russia ties.
He may well have conflicts of interests.
And it's going to be very hard to tell.
Because the Republicans are a faction, a political faction, and Donald Trump is heading them.
Even though many of them will hate Donald Trump, they still have to ensure that he is their man, whether they like him or not.
And unsurprisingly, a Republican-controlled House and Senate and presidency are going to go out of their way to ensure that there is no undue trouble.
This is what you get when you ramp it up to 11 and you force people to take positions they might otherwise not have wanted to do.
So the Republicans are planning to prevent an investigation into Trump's alleged conflicts of interest and his ties to Russia.
And I just want to say, it is all alleged.
I have seen nothing, no proof, not one shred of evidence that any of this is real.
I mean, I've seen plenty of hyperbole, plenty of speculation, plenty of things that are defamatory.
I mean, I've seen plenty of bullshit dossiers that most press outlets wouldn't even report on because it was so obviously bullshit, apart from CNN and BuzzFeed, obviously.
Unsurprisingly, two outlets that were banned from his pressers.
For fuck's sake, can you see why this is happening to you?
This isn't infringing of the press.
There are loads of other press outlets who are invited.
This is punishment for you being total bullshit merchants.
That's what this is.
So, Democratic Representative Jerry Nadler will send a proposal to investigate the president to the House Judiciary Committee, which is 14 days to act before Mr. Nadler can bypass them and take the proposal to the vote in the full House.
The resolution will most likely be killed by the Republican-led committee, preventing the bill from moving forward.
By avoiding a full House vote, it spares many Republicans from having to defend their vote not to investigate the president.
Many Republicans have been urged by Town Hall attendees to vote in favor of such an investigation.
Now, let's assume, let's assume for a minute that Donald Trump, that the Russians did steal, quote-unquote, the election for Donald Trump.
Why do we need to have that narrative?
What does that serve?
All this does is take the focus away from Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party's manifest failures.
I mean, it's not like we need a conspiracy theory to explain why Donald Trump won.
And again, he didn't win the popular vote because of the massive concentrations of people in the various coastal cities.
He didn't win those cities.
He didn't win those areas.
He won the heartlands of the United States, the Rust Belt, the sort of, I don't know, whatever they call the internal area.
He was massively popular there with regular working and middle-class people, people who have legitimate problems and are not like, they're not swamped by, you know, non-white people.
These are very white areas of the United States, but these are people.
So racism isn't their issue.
They don't have gangs running around causing trouble.
They don't have mass immigration to those areas because they're piss poor.
These people have problem with the fact that they're piss poor and that all of their jobs are leaving.
And that was one of the major platforms that Trump ran on.
He got an electoral college landslide because of this.
You don't need a conspiracy theory.
It's easy to see why people voted for Donald Trump.
It's just out of the bubble.
Sorry, you're in your bubble and they are outside of the bubble.
And so as far as you're concerned, they don't exist.
You know those elite Hollywood liberal cocktail parties that they're talking about a minute ago?
Yeah, those people don't go to those.
Those people can't afford to go to those.
And they wouldn't be invited because they're fucking hicks, as far as you're concerned.
You wouldn't want them there.
These people are lower class, is what I'm saying.
And the people who go to these parties are very upper class.
And this is how America's class system is manifested, even though America claims not to have a class system.
It's there.
You have to understand it.
I just want to stress, though, that if Donald Trump does have some sort of conflict of interest in Russia, that should be dealt with.
I mean, one of the first things that his administration said when taking office is that he is backing away from his business deals, and he should.
And if there is anything, then that should be dealt with.
And he should have his ties severed.
This is the sacrifice he makes running and becoming the president of the United States.
He may well have to lose some of these things.
And I'm totally in agreement with all of this.
But to try and unseat him over a conspiracy theory that is drastically lacking in evidence, I think is a really, really, really bad idea.
And I'm talking about for the health of the system itself.
You don't want to set this as a precedent.
Even if it's a president you really don't like, it means that eventually one day it will happen to you and you'll be like, well, you can't do this.
And then whoever's doing it to you will say, yeah, we can, because you did this to Trump.
So, I find this very interesting.
And this just goes to show the partisan nature of the United States.
So, most people, when it comes to Trump's conflicts of interests, according to a Pew Research Center poll on February the 12th, so relatively recently, so about 43% of people are not confident at all that Trump will keep his business interests separate from the decisions he makes as president.
And that's a reasonable fear.
Completely reasonable.
Most of those people are Democrats, as you can see from the graph below.
And the rest of the people, 24% are very confident, 16% somewhat confident, and 15% are not too confident.
So if we take that out, then about the same number of people are somewhat confident or very confident as not confident at all that he will keep his business interests separate.
And unsurprisingly, most of those are Republican compared to the Democrats.
So this is just a partisan issue.
Now, I mean, I don't know whether he will or won't.
Time will tell.
We'll see.
I'd be surprised if he did.
To be honest, I really would be surprised if he did.
But it's just...
How do you think Hillary Clinton became a multi-millionaire?
She didn't do it on her salary, did she?
It's totally normal for politicians to enrich themselves.
Now, you can say, well, I don't like that.
I disagree with the fact that they do that.
And I'm well with you.
Totally with you.
I would have quite draconian laws that politicians would have to follow when it came to stuff like where they get their financing from and the money that they're allowed to receive at all.
I mean, I would probably be really fucking draconian about it.
And so it would, I mean, I would have rules that were so harsh about politicians' earnings that it would dissuade anyone who was looking to make money.
I mean, I know that sounds, well, what do you mean?
Well, I mean, I literally would have politicians funded by taxpayers through various, you know, whatever the usual methods are.
And I would have massive restrictions on taking money from anywhere else.
Just, no, you're not allowed to take any other money than from the taxpayers.
And so this is where your interests lie.
And if you take any money from outside of that, then I'd have massive, fucking, massive criminal penalties for that.
because it's the only way to keep these fucking people in line.
I mean you have to understand these are, this system attracts corrupt people.
So it's not surprising that there are so many corrupt people in it.
It's the best place for them to be.
A republic that is massively wealthy and massively powerful is the best place for a corrupt person to go and be corrupt.
So did this anything else?
No, I don't think there's anything else in this.
But he's been accused of corruption as his real estate empire has not been liquidated and put into blind trust.
Instead, his two sons are running the business and he retains branding rights and royalties for existing businesses which he will return to after the presidency.
Now, I'm not sure exactly what the US legal system says on this, but I would have thought this would have been a key Achilles heel to actually go after.
Actually force him to sever all of his ties between all of his businesses.
Say, no, look, all of this is unacceptable.
We are now suddenly concerned with the rule of law and political corruption.
And so now, this is something you could legitimately hammer him on.
But nobody does.
Everyone talks about how he's a misogynist or a racist or a xenophobe or whatever.
And now going back to the whole, oh my goodness, Donald Trump's banning certain people from his press conferences.
Well, I mean, this is not unprecedented.
For example, back when Hillary Clinton spoke for the first time to the press for 260 days on the campaign trail, She spoke only to black and Latino journalists.
She was said to speak in front of the conference between the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists at the Washington Mario in Washington, D.C. Very interesting, isn't it?
I mean, why do those things even exist?
A National Association of Black Journalists?
What the fuck is the point of that?
Well, we just want a club for black people.
What about the Hispanic one?
Yeah, it's Club for Hispanic people.
Is there one for white people?
Of course there's not.
Are they going to agitate for one for white people?
Of course they end up will.
Of course they will in the end.
It just.
You are creating the dichotomy that it's acceptable to have these kind of racial divisions in your society.
And therefore, eventually white people who are being left out at every turn will turn around and say, hey, where's ours?
If you were just not, then you wouldn't have the white identitarian movement you see growing in the United States at the moment.
It just wouldn't exist because there would be no justification for it.
No one would be able to say, well, I'm the white person.
I feel left out of these things.
That wouldn't happen because white people wouldn't be left out.
I mean, you wouldn't have candidate, you shouldn't at least have candidates running for the chair of the DNC.
And that was a shit show.
I watched the whole eight-hour stream on that.
And I can't believe corporate McFucking bland fucking Hillary Clintonite won it.
I mean, there is a huge grassroots movement.
And in fact, there are loads of several, loads of different grassroots movements, all trying to oust the Clintonite factions from the DNC.
And it looks like they've failed.
But anyway, that's a different thing I'm not going on to.
But it's the Democratic Party, and I said this, I said this before, and I'm going to say it now again.
They're going to go the way of the Labour Party.
They're in the Britain.
They are going to have crushing defeat after crushing defeat because they do not understand what the electorate wants.
And they are playing to these tiny wedge-issue groups.
And these groups are simply not large enough to get you back into power.
It's not going to happen.
You can't guilt trip white people into acting against their own interests because these white people are piss poor and desperate.
But you don't care.
But anyway, Obama basically had to have the same thing.
And the same thing had also happened to Reagan as well, where it was essentially a war against the press.
But Trump's one is just so much greater in magnitude.
And the press is just not interested in backing down.
And unfortunately, they're going to have to.
They don't get to have this war.
I mean, like, Fox News had to back down.
And again, I'm not going to go through all these.
All the links will be in the description.
You should read them because they're really interesting.
But this is nothing new.
I guess it keeps going, doesn't it?
But there's an interesting one here.
So, what happened is, after months of taking incoming fire from the prime stars of Fox News, the Obama White House is firing back, charging that Fox News is different from all other news.
Fox News often operates almost either as the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party, said Anita Dunn, White House Communications Director.
If media is operating basically as talk radio format, then that's one thing.
If it's operating as a news outlet, then that's another.
That was what Obama said.
And the White House has gone beyond words.
Reporter CBS News senior report CBS News senior correspondent Jeff Greenfield.
The president went on every Sunday news show, except the Chris Wallace show on Fox.
And on Thursday, the Treasury Department tried to exclude Fox News from a pool coverage of interviews with a key official.
It backed down after strong protests from the press.
All the networks says, that's it.
You've crossed the line, said CBS News White House correspondent Jabreed.
Tension between the president and the press is as old as the Republic.
FDR was so incensed by the war reporting of one New York Daily News correspondent, he tried to present him with an Iron Cross from Nazi Germany.
John Kennedy tried to get New York Timesman David Halbert Stam pulled out of Vietnam and Vice President Spiro Agnew's assaults on the network press are legendary.
So this is nothing new, but the magnitude of it is worse.
And again, like excluding, excluding outlets is nothing new again.
Obama vs. Fox News, the White House strategy to delegitimise a news organization.
That's what Trump's doing.
And I mean, when he says here, Fox News operates as either the research arm of the communication arm of the Republican Party.
What do you fucking think that CNN and ABC and all the alphabet soup fucking news agencies?
Who do you think propaganda arm were they acting as?
They were acting as Russia today does to Putin.
They were acting as fucking Fox News does to the Republicans.
They were just doing it for the Democrats.
They are no better.
They're no worse.
They are exactly the same.
And Trump is treating them exactly as Obama treated Fox News, right?
So this was the thing.
Recently, the White House kept Fox News off conference calls dealing with the Benghazi attack, despite Fox News being the only outlet that was regularly reporting on it, and despite Fox having top-notch foreign policy reporters.
They left Chris Wallace's Fox News Sunday out of a round of interviews that included CNN, NBC, ABC, and CBS for not being part of a, quote, legitimate news network.
And I mean, I don't think Fox is a legitimate news network either, but this is exactly the same as the White House now saying we don't want these at these informal press conferences.
I mean, this isn't like a legal issue.
This is a partisan issue.
The White House senior advisor David Asterod said in ABC's News this week's that Fox News is not really a news station and that much of the programming is not really news.
And of course, this is where the press starts coming together.
Whether you are liberal or conservative, libertarian, moderate, or politically agnostic, everyone should be concerned when leaders of our government believe they can intentionally try to delegitimize a news organization they don't like.
In fact, if you're a liberal, as I am, you should be the most offended, as liberalism is founded on the idea of cherishing dissent and inviolable right to freedom of expression.
I agree.
That is something that we should be considered.
And this is obviously Fox News, so take it for what it's worth.
But this is something that the press, I mean, I'm sure they would have done, well, they are standing in solidarity now when Trump's doing it.
I don't know if anyone stood in solidarity with Fox News when they did it, but I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't.
You know, maybe I'm being unfair, because on January the 17th, Jake Tapper from CNN said he kind of weighed in on this kind of media war against Trump, saying that Obama went to war against Fox News.
And this is where you get to see them operating as a class.
They all have the same interests and goals.
And they all have the same means and motives, basically.
They are all large news outlets that get to influence the public and change public opinion depending on their reporting.
And they all have this kind of permissive relationship with the president.
So he says, Jake Tapper was on Seth Meyers' guest on, was Seth Meyers' guest on Monday's late night, where he talked about Trump's relationship with the press, more specifically last week's press conference, where Trump refused to call on CNN reporter Jim Acosta, calling his outlet fake news.
Myers tried to get Tapper to hype up the instance as unique to Trump's near presidency, but Tapper explained that Obama had done exactly the same thing.
While many networks have been hyper-ventilating about the freedom of the press after last week's incident, they conveniently seem to have forgotten that our current president has also refused, this is when Obama's president still obviously has also refused to call on certain media outlets during press conferences.
Tapper brought up this fact to Myers after Myers asked Tapper if the press was going to unite to pressure Trump to answer questions.
Because that's what they're expecting.
Seth Meyers.
And you know, there's this idea now, is the press going to have to sort of like work as one unit to combat what seems to be the strategy that the Trump administration is going to use with dealing with the press?
Is it feasible to think of the press and all their disparate ideas and all the different ways that they approach reporting on the news can actually work as one?
Or is that sort of fanciful?
Tapper replies, well, it is a little fanciful because we compete against each other.
But by the same token, if a reporter asks a legitimate question and doesn't get an answer, then the press secretary or president, whomever calls whomever, calls on someone else to try and change the subject, which happens all the time.
He says, I remember when there was a White House correspondent for ABC News and President Obama did that.
He didn't answer somebody's question.
He called on me.
And I said, well, I have a question, but can you answer Bennett's question first?
I'd love if you answered that.
And he's like, what are you?
The ombudsman of the press corps?
This is something that just happens.
And it's just political partisanship is bias.
It is not like an amendment of their First Amendment right, an abridgment of their First Amendment rights.
And to be honest with you, I'm sick of seeing news articles that are essentially, this is what the authorities say.
So many of them.
And if you go, obviously, I read a lot of news articles.
And if you go through them, you will find nowadays, mostly it's like, this is what Donald Trump has tweeted.
But it used to be, prior to Trump and prior to his Twitter conquest, it used to be they would just get a White House or a press report from somewhere and say, right, this is what they say and therefore, job done.
They would do no investigative journalism.
They wouldn't go out of their way to figure out, you know, to contact anyone, to actually do the legwork.
And maybe, if the presidency, the White House, decides to have a policy of basically non-interaction with some of these major outlets, that's not in any way restricting their right to speak, and it might encourage them to get off their fat asses and do some proper fucking work.
So he says that he carries on saying, the Obama White House went to war with Fox News and they tried to say the entire organization was illegitimate.
And it wasn't, you know, this anchor is a jerk or this story is a lie or whatever.
It was the entire organization, including hundreds of reporters and producers who are just doing honest work.
People I knew, Major Garrett, Brett Bayer, people who are good reporters.
When they were doing that, I challenged them for it.
So, see, there is solidarity among the people in the press, even with their opposition, because they understand that it's their position that is in danger of that too.
But nobody cares until Trump does it.
Nobody makes a big deal about it until Trump does it.
Unless you're a right-wing Fox news reader or viewer and whatnot, who probably made a big deal about it at the time.
But it's the complete inconsistency of the application of principles that is really annoying me here.
If you didn't give a shit when Obama did it, don't pretend like you give a shit now Trump's doing it, because I know that that's just out of partisan motives, because you didn't give a shit when Obama was doing it.
Just, it's hypocrisy, basically, and I don't want to hear you, I don't want to hear your opinion on it.
Oh, well, blah, blah, blah.
I don't care.
You don't care.
If you are now really, really shocked, shocked, shocked, and offended that one of the political enemies of yours is doing something terrible, you're doing it not because you care about that thing.
You're doing it because that person is someone you hate and this is a weapon you can use against them.
I really have a problem with that.
I don't like it.
And if I've done it in the past, and I'm not saying that I haven't, and if I've done it in the past, I fucking retract it.
I shouldn't have done it.
I was wrong.
You know, we're all wrong for doing this.
Nobody is refuting arguments anymore.
Nobody's even trying to refute arguments anymore.
Now, we are just on smear pieces all the way down from here on out, I'm afraid, until we turn it around and say, look, I don't even care.
I don't even care about the legitimacy of your smears.
I just don't want any smears anymore.
Just stop trying to denigrate someone's character as a way of delegitimizing them.
It's not something I'm bothered about anymore.
Just, I mean, I'm happy to assume that everyone on earth is a fucking Nazi because I read the papers.
So everyone's a Nazi, everyone's a fucking communist, everyone's evil.
So let's, okay, well, this is man as they are, not how we would like them to be, as Machiavelli would say.
This is, okay, this is reality.
Everyone's shit.
Right, let's just carry on because it was shit yesterday.
It was shit the day before, and it'll be shit tomorrow because that's life.
So let's just power through it, shall we?
Obama called on ABC most during the first time conferences.
Fox News comes in ninth, despite Fox News, I think, is actually the largest one of these ones.
So, you know, you can see the bias again.
It's just another article I collected from this because it's just endemic.
It's how your system works.
Don't sit there pearl clutching when Trump carries on in exactly the mold of how your system works.
So this is a very interesting one, the National Review.
And again, this is one of those outlets that I have more respect for than many others because I find them less biased.
And this is a good example of that.
Despite the hysteria, Trump is trending less authoritarian than Obama.
Though personnel and policy, through personnel and policy, President Trump is limiting the executive branch.
Lost in most of the coverage of Trump's decision to rescind the Obama administration's transgender mandates is a fundamental legal reality.
The Trump administration, look, I can't talk today, just relinquished federal authority over gender identity policy in the nation's federally funded schools and colleges.
That's important.
I mean, one of, I watch Dan Carlin a lot, and one of his complaints, and I've been watching him for years as well, and one of his consistent complaints over the years has been how the executive branch, beginning under Bush and his Patriot Act and all this sort of power grabbing after 9-11, and continued with Obama, how the presidency has been accruing undue amounts of power in the system, as in it shouldn't be able to do all of this.
And it's got to the point where it can effectively declare wars that aren't actually wars.
And that's something that is the purview of the Congress.
And it's important that that power stays separate.
Because the Congress is supposed to have a lot of power.
And it's been almost willingly ceding it, according to Dan Carlin, to the presidency.
And as far as I can tell, that seems to be true.
I mean, it's reflected in articles like this.
In other words, Trump was less authoritarian than Obama.
And that's not the only case.
this is interesting because this is exactly what the tea party and a lot of the republicans have been saying for years um honestly back then i found myself i mean i'm not gonna lie i was a lot more politically partisan I didn't give a shit what they had to say.
I had someone on Twitter the other day saying, oh my god, you're criticizing CNN or whatever.
Would you say the same thing about Fox?
Holy shit, dude.
If you think I have any respect for Fox News, you're a fucking moron.
Fox News is the benchmark by which I call things shit.
I say, oh, look, it's the Fox News of the left.
The implication obviously being that Fox News is fucking terrible.
The idea, like, people figured this out in 2008 that Fox News is full of shit.
Just come on.
Jesus.
Anyway, consider the following examples where his administration, through policy or personnel, appears to be signaling to the executive branch it intends to become less intrusive in American life and more accountable to internal and external critique.
Oh wow, that's a decent move in the right direction, isn't it?
Trump nominated Neil Gorsch to the Supreme Court, a man known not just for his intellect and integrity, but also his powerful legal argument against executive branch overreach.
Why would he appoint such a man?
Why would you choose that guy?
I mean, everyone focuses on what Trump says.
But did you not get taught as a child that actions speak louder than words?
I mean, I hear people going on all the time.
Well, Trump said he's going to torture.
But then he appoints Mattis, a man who's been implacably anti-torture, and has already stated, we're not torturing anyone, end of story.
And Trump's like, well, maybe I'll defer to Mattis on this one.
You know, Trump is, a lot of hot air comes out of Trump's mouth, but his actions tell a totally different story.
And his actions are remarkably consistent.
But anyway, based on his previous legal writings, if Gauss had his way, the federal bureaucracy could well face the most dramatic check in its authority since the early days of the New Deal.
By overturning judicial precedents that currently required that currently required judicial defense to agency legal interpretations, the court could put a stop to the current practice of presidents and bureaucrats steadily and vastly expanding their powers by constantly broadening their interpretations of existing legal statutes.
I won't give the examples, but you see what I mean.
Trump nominated H.R. McMaster to replace Michael Flynn as his national security advisor.
McMaster made his name as a warrior on the battlefields in the Gulf War and the Iraq War, but he made his name as a scholar by writing a book, Dereliction of Duty, that strongly condemned Vietnam-era generals for simply rolling over in the face of Johnson administration blunders and excesses.
In his view, military leaders owe their civilian commander-in-chief honest and courageous counsel, even when a president may not want to hear their words.
Why would he appoint him?
When the Ninth Circuit blocked Trump's immigration executive order, which was certainly an aggressive assertion of presidential power, although not an unprecedented one, he responded differently from the Obama administration when it faced similar judicial setbacks.
Rather than race to the Supreme Court in an attempt to expand the presidential authority, it backed up, yes, amid considerable presidential bluster, and told the Ninth Circuit that it intends to rewrite and rework the order in order to address the most serious judicial concerns and roll back its scope.
That's really interesting.
Instead of trying to go above their heads or trying to just apply pressure, they responded by accepting this as a defeat and coming back with something new on which they could win.
He's actually using the system as it's supposed to be used.
This is something people should be fucking thrilled about.
I mean, this is not what Obama did as he gives the examples constantly of what Obama did that was authoritarian and aggressive.
This is remarkable, and yet all people talk about is the hot air that comes out of Trump's mouth.
Someone, Trump should pay someone just to talk for him.
He should basically, you know, I'm going to go out and meet the press world job and say, right, come here.
I want you to say that I'm going to bigly do this.
Nobody loves it as much as I do.
Blah, blah, blah.
All those standard Trump talking points.
Then, whoever this person is, relatively intelligent, I presume, can go out and give a reasonable interpretation of what Trump is actually doing, and we can just save the hot air for his Twitter feed, which everyone could just unsubscribe to.
They carry on saying, indeed, if you pull back the layer of leftist critiques of Trump's early actions and early hires, they contain a surprising amount of alarmism over the rollback of government power.
Education activists are terrified that Bessie DeVos will take children out of government schools or roll back government mandates regarding campus sexual assault tribunals.
All things that may well need to be done, let's be honest.
Environmentalists are terrified of Scott Pruitt, that Scott Pruitt will make sorry about that.
So, environmentalists are terrified that Scott Pruitt will make the EPA less activist.
Civil rights lawyers are alarmed at the notion that Jeff Sessions will inject the federal government into fewer state and local disputes over everything from school bathrooms to police traffic stops.
I think that's very interesting.
They're not saying that these things can't and won't happen.
Like the protections that people are looking for, like the transgender bathroom thing.
I mean, in certain states, I imagine they won't have it, but in certain other states, I imagine they will.
Depending on the political prevailing winds in those areas, and I think that's a really great thing.
Why does it have to be everything the same everywhere?
What's wrong with this being the way it is?
I think that's actually really healthy.
And what's I found what's really interesting as well is that at no point is your like independent private activism going to be affected by this.
You know, the sort of these sort of people that I'm talking about, they are still completely capable of starting charities and organizations, NGOs, whatnot, that are concerned with climate change and that are concerned with transgender rights and all this sort of stuff.
They just don't have governmental power to do it, but that doesn't mean you can't change people's minds.
And it's the changing people's minds and where the real change comes.
You can't just simply do everything by government fiat.
By using the authority of the government to do things against people's will, you engender resentment.
What you want to do is be out there on grassroots activism.
That's what you want.
To give people the information that you have, if assume it's real, and to persuade them to believe the things that you believe, and that's how you get real change.
You don't do it from the top down, you do it from the bottom up.
That's how it lasts.
You have to learn this.
So they say a president is authoritarian, not when he's angry or impulsive or incompetent or tweets too much.
And I've said this myself.
He's authoritarian when he seeks to expand his own power beyond constitutional limits.
And in this regard, the Obama administration, though far more polite and restrained in most of its public comments, was truly one of our more authoritarian.
Obama exercised his so-called prosecutorial discretion, not just to waive compliance laws, compliance with laws passed by Congress.
Think of his numerous unilateral delays and waivers of Obamacare deadlines, but also to create entirely new immigration programs such as the DACA and DAPA.
He sought to roll back First Amendment protections for political speech through his relentless attacks on Citizen United.
He tried to force nuns to facilitate access to birth control, and he even tried to inject federal agencies like Equality, Employment and Opportunity Commission, which again it sounds something out of the Soviet Union, doesn't it really?
Into the past a selection process, a move blocked by a unanimous Supreme Court.
In foreign policy, he waged war without congressional approval and circumvented the Constitution's treaty provisions to strike a dreadful and consequential deal with Iran.
There's no doubt that Trump has expressed on occasion authoritarian desires or instincts.
In the campaign, he expressed his own hostility for the First Amendment, his own love of expansive government, eminent domain takings, even to benefit private corporations, endorsed and encouraged violent responses against protesters, and declared that he alone would fix our nation's most pressing problems.
But so far, not only has an authoritarian presidency not materialized, it's nowhere on the horizon.
I think that's a very interesting point.
And again, actions speak louder than words.
This is what historians will be looking at, right?
This is like a contemporary historical analysis.
When you're reading anything, like Tom Holland, Mary Beard, you know, any good historian, this is the sort of thing they look at.
They look at what actually was done because people say a lot of shit, but they do very, you know, certain things, and that's what's important.
And on this regard, in like 50 years' time, when all of the people who just hated Donald Trump on the basis that he was Donald Trump and said things they don't like are dead or you know forgotten, people are going to look back at Trump like he's fucking like the Republicans do, Reagan now.
What did he do?
He went in, he made the government smaller, he did all of these things.
He's going to be a fucking hero.
And the media are going to just continue to make themselves into villains.
And that's all they're doing.
I mean, they must understand that they have engendered so much ill will by this point.
PewDiePie is making just Wall Street Journal roasts now.
And the thing is, I suspect there might be another one on the horizon because a bloody funny thing came up with Ben Fricks the other day, the Wall Street Journal reporter who wrote the original, or has co-authored the original article, and I think was the impetus for it.
A bloody amusing thing came up, but I won't spoil it.
Anyway.
So, instead, he's facing a free press that has suddenly and somewhat cynically rediscovered its desire to speak truth to power, which it is amusing, isn't it?
I mean, they weren't doing it to Obama.
They didn't try it with Hillary.
Suddenly, though, an invigorated activist judiciary and a protest movement that's jamming congressional town halls from coast to coast.
That's true.
He's facing an awful lot of resentment over people who previously had the benefits of the authoritarian government that they have now lost.
Because this is what a lot of this has come down to, I really think.
The fact that the Democrats and the left wing have lost control, and that's what they're really angry about.
It's not that they're angry that Trump is doing things that they're authoritarian and fascist.
As we've seen, he's not doing anything that Obama didn't do, and he's a lot of times rolling back Obama's overreach.
So, I mean, they're just complaining about their loss of power.
Which I say, fucking crime your river.
It was just three weeks ago that David Frum published a much discussed essay in The Atlantic, outlining how Trump could allegedly build an American autocracy.
Over at Vox, Ezra Klein, the least trustworthy of them, wrote at length about how the founders' alleged failures laid the groundwork for a partyocracy.
And now, Trump's early struggles are leading pundits to ask, can Trump help Democrats take back the House?
No.
I think the Democrats are going to become a third party like Labour.
I really do.
They've got no interest in changing, and they have absolutely no self-awareness at all.
In the American system, accountability comes at you fast.
Liberals were blind to Obama's authoritarian tendencies in parts because they agreed with his goals, and in part because of their adherence to living constitution theories made the separations of power far more conditional and situational.
But authoritarianism is defined by how a president exercises power, not the rightness of his goals.
Thank you.
Fucking thank you.
David French, staff writer for the National Review, I applaud you.
Finally, someone fucking says it.
You know, just because you feel that you're on the right side of history doesn't mean that you can't become an authoritarian dictatorial nightmare in the process.
Jesus.
So this was a really good article.
I'm really impressed with that.
Finally, I'll go over this.
Chris Wallace, Trump is crossing the line by calling the media the enemy.
And I just want to give you an example of the rhetoric and how Fox News is obviously there.
I mean, they are part of the media.
They're just the unpopular kid who just happens, the impopular rich kid of the media is what Fox News is.
But listen to this intro.
We are not going to let the fake news tell us what to do, how to live, or what to believe.
We are free and independent people, and we will make our own choices.
Right.
Why would he say that?
Why would he say that to that crowd?
What are they hearing when they hear that?
They feel oppressed by the media.
Oppressed by the media's constant lies and spin and the filter that they put on everything to influence people who don't know anything about this, who are hearing about this for the first time, to give them a certain kind of first impression.
The media has become a controlling force in society.
And people are against that.
It's not the bias.
We're used to bias.
It's not the lies.
We're used to lies.
It's the fact that you are trying to control society.
They are trying to make it go in the direction that they, as an elite, want it to go.
And that's why they hate populist revolts.
That's why they hate fucking everything about the alternative media.
I mean, I should have...
I had an article from The Guardian, which I'll cover.
I'll cover a few extra things on my second channel in small short videos that I'll put up later or tomorrow or something.
Because I have a lot else that I want to talk about, but not enough to make a proper big video about.
And it was just a quick thing about attacking a teenage or like, you know, mid-early 20s vlogger who does beauty products and shit like that.
Because they're calling her, accusing her of like preventing the education of the youth.
I'm sat there like, holy shit.
It's the conservative Christians all over again.
this is what this is fucking something new quick It threatens us because people are interested in it and not us.
I think that's honestly what it is.
It's the lack of spotlight.
And you think, right, we can demonize this and we can get people backing us again.
And it's just things that aren't even political.
Like PewDiePie.
There is no fucking need to attack PewDiePie.
Like, there is no fucking need for the Guardian to attack some just beauty blogger.
But they're doing it anyway.
And they're seeing them as threats to their own position for some reason.
Otherwise, you wouldn't write a piece that says someone is an anti-Semite or someone is a fucking is making the youth illiterate.
That's a horrible charge.
How dare you?
She's just a blogger for Christ's sake.
She's just some YouTube.
mean she's got like millions of fans so she doesn't need me defending her but it's just why would you think that's an appropriate thing to have about just an individual who runs a YouTube channel They are.
Obviously, they don't have the power to make people illiterate in 10-minute videos they put up like twice a week.
You fucking morons!
Just fucking...
And obviously, you know, day after day, I get hit pieces written on me.
This is something I find very interesting.
Although, I have to admit, they are getting more fair to me.
They're not just calling me some sort of neo-Nazi alt-right white nationalist or something now.
Now, you know, and they're not even calling me like, oh, was it a blowhard?
A.
Oh, just all sorts of things.
And I'm just like, okay.
But at what point are you ever going to refute anything I'm saying?
Are you even interested in having the debate?
Because I am.
I'm really interested in it.
But I guess that's the case, isn't it?
You know, it's like Milo said, in fact, you know, on Bill Maher, if someone's going to cede the field of battle before even the battle begins, then that obviously means they know they've lost.
So you obviously don't have a counter-argument to what I'm saying, to anything that I'm saying.
And I say a lot of things, so you'd think there'd be something you could pick up on, but they obviously have nothing.
And I'm fine with that.
I'm fine with them having nothing because I think I have some answers, or at least some pertinent questions that need to be answered before we can actually make any progress on this.
And I'm not the only one saying these.
These aren't necessarily my ideas either.
But these are things that I am saying and a lot of other people are saying.
And much better ideas are coming from other people as well, but nobody wants to listen.
And so, okay, we'll just carry on doing what we're doing then.
We'll just carry on.
I don't even know what to say.
I mean, I think the future of media consumption in like 10-15 years' time when the baby boomers who are holding up Fox and CNN and whatnot start basically dying off.
I hate to say it.
I think it's going to end up being local news sources, and a lot of Twitter and social media being the source of news.
And I think that it'll be channels like mine who don't...
I don't have any production values.
I don't...
I don't have massive overhead costs.
I earn a nice living doing this, but that's because I don't have a lot to pay for.
It's just me.
And one of the things I really appreciate as well.
One of the things that I really think helped keeps me honest as well is the fact that I rely on you guys to send me things a lot.
I was thinking about this the other day.
I mean, it's not necessarily finding the information regarding the video, but it's about knowing that there's a problem initially.
Because I use news aggregators to find out what's going on, find things that interest me.
But then someone will send me something that I missed because there is just so much to cover.
And I'm just one man.
And I'm going to do a video on where you should get your media and how you should consume it.
And I'll explain that in another video, actually.
But it's important basically that I'm not your only source of news and that you do not implicitly trust me.
This is why I provide all of the sources to everything I said in the description.
And you should read them yourself to make sure that I'm interpreting them correctly.
And this is why I show as much as I can on the screen.
Whatnot is, you know, you should never take anyone's word for it.
Anyway, I'm getting off topic and I'm rambling now.
But do you see what I'm saying?
I'm talking about like large conceptual trends.
It's, you know, it's difficult to necessarily outline sometimes.
But this week has been a great week to explain and to show, look, this is, there is a zeitgeist, there is a larger political reality in play, and you absolutely have to get off the, you have to get out of the mud, which is what the media is in.
They are down in the mud and they are wrestling with the pigs.
And the pigs are loving it, but it's not really doing a lot of good for the rest of us.
Who are like, look, we'd like to talk about the important things that this would be really decent if the media could do, but they won't.
Anyway, let me know if you're cool with me doing it in this format.
Because I actually really enjoy this format.
It's nice to be able to just talk rather than have to heavily edit something.
I like doing like the, you know, the sort of, I don't know how to call them, like the video reports or something.
I don't know how I'd describe them.
But like, you know, the sort of 30-minute videos I do when I'm talking about a subject and I've got a lot of information.
I need to package it in really tightly so you can have all of this information explained in a logical and coherent way to try and explain exactly what's going on.
Because a lot of the time things are quite complicated.
That's really good for heavily editing video.
And that's worth it, you know, because it allows you to make a great video in and of itself.
But with something like this that I do weekly talking about things that are occurring, I'm preferring the podcast sort of format.
I'm preferring this format a lot.
And I heard from a lot of people last week that you guys were as well.
You liked the fact you just put it on and it's relaxing when you're playing video games or doing workouts or something like that.
And it helps keep you informed on what's going on.
So let me know which you prefer because I would much prefer it to do this way.
But I don't want you guys to feel cheated because like, you know, you thought the other format was better or something like that.
I'll go back to doing that if that's what you prefer.
Because I kind of feel like I'm being a lazy cunt.