Dave Smith and Robbie Bernstein dissect the contested 2021 election, analyzing a leaked Trump-Raffensperger call where the former president demanded an investigation into 12,000 votes without threatening illegal acts. They label the Republican Senate's legal challenge a "convoluted scam" while praising Justin Amash despite his impeachment stance and criticizing Tulsi Gabbard for supporting a "war on terror." Looking ahead, they predict public frustration over lockdowns and vaccine skepticism will drive a shift toward natural herd immunity as Joe Biden prepares to assume the presidency. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Gas Digital Network Intro00:03:26
Fill her up.
You are listening to the Gas Digital Network.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
Here's your host, Dave Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem kicking off 2021.
I got to say, so far, feels a lot like 2020.
But this is our first episode with the Dynamic Duo.
Of course, I'm Dave Smith.
He is the king of the Cox, Robbie the Fire, Bernstein.
What's up, my brother?
How's your 2021 going so far?
Oh, man, it's so good.
I'm doing part of the problem.
Wearing my nicest shirt.
Got a haircut.
It's a whole new year.
Yeah, there you go.
Well, there, I like that you're coming in with a real positive attitude.
It was an interesting New Year's.
Did you do anything?
No.
Look, I am.
Yeah, me neither.
I just hung out with the family, but I quite happy to do that for New Year's.
I will say, watching, like, I never watch network television anymore.
I don't know.
Do you ever watch like net?
Yeah, right.
Who does?
Who watches network television?
So this is on New Year's.
Me and my wife, just kind of out of almost a feeling of obligation, you're like, let's turn on like, you know, Dick Clark's rocking New Year's Eve or whatever it is they're doing, even though I think Dick Clark died a while ago.
But it's so bizarre.
First off, you just see like, I don't know, I'm completely removed from like network commercials.
You know, it's like a weird feeling where they're like, this season coming up on ABC or NBC.
And you're like, I don't know any of these shows.
I don't know what's going on in the world.
I don't know any of the performers on these things.
And God, it's all so awful.
Just so bad.
I'm sitting there like just feeling old.
Like, was it always this bad?
Or has it gotten worse?
Or was I just an idiot?
And now I recognize bad things.
Anyway, being in Times Square as the ball drops has always just seemed like a nightmare.
Like I would just, oh my God, this just seems horrible, just being in the cold and stuck there for hours.
But I will say, it felt really weird to see Times Square on New Year's Eve with no people there.
There's just something about it was really bizarre.
I didn't even watch the ball drops.
I don't know what the scene looked like.
I didn't even look at the footage afterwards.
You told me just empty?
It's like completely empty.
And they had like maybe like a couple dozen people who are like, you know, I don't know, frontline medical workers were allowed to come in and everybody's in masks.
Just looks horrible.
I don't know.
It was awful.
And then just like god-awful musical performances that are like talent, untalented and just cringy and inappropriate for like what you would think would be like something that family would watch.
What does the culture become?
I remember when Elvis was out there.
Yeah.
No, I am, I am really that guy.
I'm even offended by Elvis.
Why is he gyrating his hips like that?
Trump's Dominion Strategy00:13:35
We all know the implication.
But anyway, it was weird.
It was weird to watch.
And there's this really strange thing that they all seem to be embracing, which was like, you know, screw you, 2020.
What an awful year.
Thank God it's over.
But of course, you're celebrating the ball dropping with no one in Times Square, which is like the most, you know, it's like pretty obviously this isn't just changing, you know, at midnight.
And, but it was, I don't know, it was just bizarre.
It was very bizarre to see.
It was hard to keep it on for very long.
But then, you know, the next day, Cobra Kai came out and everything was back to normal.
I'm good.
By the way, Cobra Kai, fucking incredible.
I love it.
And they're keeping your interest three seasons in.
Oh, my God.
Just phenomenal.
Just I, there, I really am just opening up 2021 by showing my age, but I loved the karate kids like as a little kid.
And it's just so fun and silly and absurd to have this thing out, but I love it.
I fucking, I, I loved it.
Okay.
Um, so 2021, as we said, kind of starting a lot like 2020 so far, or at least the last whatever, nine months of 2020.
Um, and it's uh, you know, hysteria about COVID, hysteria about Donald Trump.
So the big story that is, that is dominating the news right now is this phone call with Donald Trump that leaked.
It's a phone call between Donald Trump and the Secretary of State of Georgia and a couple other people were on this call.
Not exactly clear how it leaked, but the Washington Post, I guess, got their hands on it.
And then CNN and NBC News and all of this.
So it was first reported in the Washington Post.
So here's, I don't know, Rob, did you listen to this?
I listened to the whole phone call.
Actually, I only found three minutes of it.
Was there longer than three minutes?
Oh, yeah.
No, they put out the NBC News, I know on their YouTube channel, put out the full phone call.
It's like an hour long.
I got to say, this felt to me the same as the Ukraine thing, where Trump's language is too slick to go, hey, I got you.
My takeaway from this phone call is Trump truly believes that he won.
He truly believes that there was fraud.
And his statement here is essentially, listen, I know that there was fraud, but if we put the Dominion thing to the side, I just need you to go find me 12.
In other words, he's saying, I don't need a perfect investigation.
I don't need you to find every instance of fraud.
I don't need you to prove this whole thing to unwind it, but I know that it was fraudulent.
So go figure out how you can at least get me these 12.
It's not that bad.
Yeah, it's, it's, I think that's a good comparison.
I hadn't thought of that, but it does remind you a little bit of the Ukraine phone call, where there is, it's really interesting, but not at all for the reasons that the corporate press is telling you.
You know what I mean?
Like what they're so just here, let me just read a little bit to give you a little taste of what the corporate press's takeaway from this was, right?
So here is, this is Stephen Collins over at CNN.
This is their hard, you know, hard news.
Okay.
So astonishing new evidence of a desperate president Donald Trump caught on tape trying to steal the election, exposes the depth of corruption and makes his Republican Capitol Hill allies complicit in his bid to thwart the will of the voters.
There's their opening paragraph.
Hard news, not an editorial, hard news from CNN.
That's just objectively what happened.
That's the who, what, when, where, and why.
Okay.
In a fresh abuse of power, Trump tried to bully top Georgia GOP official into finding votes to overturn President-elect Joe Biden's win in the state.
The staggering telephone call, audio of which was obtained by CNN, first reported by the Washington Post, amounts to the most serious threat yet posed by his authoritarian instincts to American democracy.
So this does remind me a lot of the Ukraine phone call coverage.
I'm glad you made that comparison, which, as I said, I hadn't thought of.
But really, when you go listen to the tape, none of that is really an accurate description.
It's not Donald Trump.
Now, it's the funny thing because it is really like the Ukrainian thing, right?
Like they're like, oh my God, if you listen to CNN's take, it's like, look, he's trying to frame Joe Biden for crimes he didn't commit.
But if you actually read the transcript of the telephone call, he's going, hey, I want you to investigate the Bidens.
Now, at no point in there does he say, investigate them.
And even if you don't come up with something, plant it on them.
It seems more like he thinks they committed some crimes and he's asking for it to be investigated.
So feel however you feel about that.
That's a very important distinction.
There's a very big difference between me saying, hey, I think Rob Bernstein committed some crimes and going to like the cops and saying, hey, I think you should look into this.
I think he's a criminal.
And me like saying, I want to plant evidence on Rob to make him look like a criminal.
Very, very different things, like profoundly different.
One being, you know, like, however you might feel about it, you know, at least ostensibly like a search for the truth, and the other one being like straight up corrupt activity.
So there's no point in this phone call where Donald Trump is talking about anything authoritarian.
He's talking about investigating.
And yeah, it's just, this is silly and this isn't at all what's on the tape.
But what is on the tape is something really interesting.
And it's, you know, like I was saying, I just did this three-part legacy of Donald Trump series with Scott Horton.
And one of the things that I mentioned in it, which I still think is one of the most fascinating things about Donald Trump and the Trump years, is that Donald Trump, for whatever, he is this thing.
And everybody else projects their own thing onto him, which does not resemble reality at all.
So, you know, as a left looks at Donald Trump and they're like, he's literally Hitler.
He's this, you know, fascist, the rise of this authoritarian, whatever, all of this other stuff.
The right wing who supports Donald Trump looks at him as their savior, their hero, the guy who's bringing jobs back, who actually cares about them, who's getting immigration under control.
None of these things are true.
None of them.
It's all just projection.
And at the end of the day, what Trump is, is just what you see.
What you see is what you get.
He's that guy.
He is the guy who just wants to brag about his crowd sizes and his wife and his kids and his business and how he's tremendous and he builds the biggest buildings and, you know, whatever, all of this stuff.
And to me, as I listened to this hour-long phone call, that's what I saw.
It's just Trump.
It's like I'm actually shocked by how much it's just Trump.
There was nothing, there was almost no separation between what Trump would have said publicly about this and what he was saying on the phone call to the point that even someone like me who's making this very point, I expected a little bit something different, like a little bit of like, well, behind closed doors, he's really focused on this thing and this thing.
He's got a little bit of a strategy.
But no, it's just Trump.
The phone call opens up with about 10 minutes, maybe between 10 and 15 minutes of Trump just going off.
And you would think he's got, so he's on the phone here with the guy's name is Brad Raffensperger.
Raffensperger?
Sounds like a German, but a Jew at the same time.
Yeah, which was not a good combination at one point in time.
It was a pretty rough spot to be in, but he's doing just fine.
He is the Secretary of State for Georgia.
So he's talking to him and a couple other Republican Georgia officials.
And you would think, I would imagine, right, that right now, okay, we're pretty late in the game.
It is, what is it?
It's the fucking, it's January 4th.
You got, you got 16 days.
We still haven't unleashed the crack and we get so many ways to win again.
Yeah, it's, but so my, my thought would be that now with basically two weeks to go until Joe Biden is not president-elect, he's the president of the United States.
You know, you got two weeks.
The court cases have failed.
The Supreme Court bid has failed.
You know, you're really down to it.
You would think Donald Trump would be like laser focused on, look, here's these three things.
This is what I think our last.
I want you to check these ballot dumps, this, that, and this, that.
And I need you to get this done.
What's it going to take for us to get this done?
But there's none of this.
Donald Trump opens off with like a 10 to 15 minute rant that is just, it could have been at his campaign rally.
It's stream of conscious.
Donald Trump just kind of, he's completely unfocused.
He's talking about everything.
You know, like he opens up with a comment about how his crowd sizes were so much bigger than anything Joe Biden could have.
Like he can't even help himself.
Even in this situation, he can't even help himself from just talking about, and he's talking about other states.
And he goes, you know, and it's really tremendous.
And all the polls were wrong.
The polls said we were going to lose big, but we won big.
And lots and lots of states had this problem.
And it's just all this kind of wasted time and things that are completely irrelevant and aren't at all taking him from point A to point B, but he just can't help himself.
And this is just how his mind works.
It's that scattered and all over the place and like and narcissistic.
And it just was so clear right away.
There's like no plan, no plan here whatsoever.
And to me, that was just really interesting to see.
That it's actually, I think in many ways, Donald Trump is a really authentic person.
And as much as you might like, that's not a compliment or an insult.
It's just an observation that he is that guy on the phone call.
He's just the same guy.
It could have been right out of one of his speeches.
Just all over the place.
My crowd sizes were the biggest.
I was totally screwed.
I didn't lose this election.
If you look at the state legislators, we won them all.
So this doesn't make any sense and blah, blah.
And the guy is just shooting down everything Trump says.
And he does get more and more frustrated with him over the course of the call, but it's not like threats or anything like that.
It's just kind of weak arguments.
Like he's like, well, no, this went to court.
There was no evidence for this.
There aren't dead people who voted.
He goes, you said there's 4,000 dead people who voted.
There were two.
None of this is right.
No, I don't know.
I really don't know who's right in the situation and who's wrong.
But Donald Trump does get more and more frustrated over the course of it.
And he's basically just insisting that he won by hundreds of thousands of votes.
And the guy's like, no, like this, this just didn't happen.
There are certain points where he asks things that the guy just doesn't even respond to.
I think he's like, I don't even know what to tell this guy.
But yeah, I don't know.
What I thought was fascinating about the call was just Trump being Trump with absolutely no difference.
Like you would expect, just like any person, right?
Like you would expect even, I don't know, if me and you were having a phone call about the show and it leaked, you'd expect almost a little bit different of a like, well, this is how we are when the show is being taped and this is us planning the show.
Like there's just no difference.
I talk like a professor during the breaks.
This is all just a character you've been working for a long time.
Yeah, I wanted to be the everyman.
I figured I would, you know, just drink a lot of beer and eat pizza.
Don't like my true knowledge.
Uh, so so I mean, Donald Trump does say at you know, the quote that they're trying to pull is the thing where he said, I just need to find uh 11,780 votes.
Um, in context, it wasn't bad.
It really wasn't the statement beforehand, because I only listened to the three minutes that they were trying to say was the most flagrant.
Firstly, I didn't hear a direct threat, they were reporting on a threat.
I didn't hear him say, You're either going to help me with this or something's going to happen to you.
So, maybe you heard that in your 15-minute call, but I didn't hear it.
Then, what I heard was him say, It doesn't matter what Dominion did.
Implication being, I know that Dominion me here.
It doesn't matter.
I only need to find 12,000.
The point being, I don't care about the massive fraud.
I don't need to prove the whole thing.
You're in charge here.
You got to unwind the fact that there was fraud against me and figure out, well, how do we prove 12,000?
We don't need to prove a million.
We don't need to prove 100,000.
We got to prove 12,000.
And then the other guy does his job and he goes, Listen, there's no evidence to support what you're saying.
I don't think either of them were out of line.
No, and the idea of like it being some scandal that Trump was like, This is how many votes we needed.
It's like, well, obviously, he's trying to win the state.
I mean, like, what?
The 12,000 Fraud Claim00:02:17
There was nothing strange about that at all.
It was like, yes, is it was it unclear to you that his goal is to win?
So, yes, that's how many votes he lost by, and that's how many he's trying to find.
And it's the same thing as the Ukraine.
He's not saying, I need you to go find 12 that weren't for me.
He's saying there was widespread fraud.
Go figure out how you can prove that 12,000 of them were fraudulent.
Yeah.
All right, guys, let's take a quick second.
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Hunter Biden Interference00:15:27
The thing that really was that stuck out to me was just how like incompetent Donald Trump seemed on this phone call.
It's like all this, like, there's no plan here.
There's no, there's no 4D chest.
There's nothing like that.
He's, he's got nothing.
He keeps saying the same thing, like about how, like, and it's all going to be exposed very soon.
It's like, all right, well, we're two weeks away at this point.
So I don't really, you know, I'm not really trusting the plan right now.
It just seemed like so unfocused and scattered.
And he is, you know, Donald Trump, whether he's right or wrong, he is living in the reality that he won this election by a landslide.
And I like, okay, like I've like we've said from the very beginning, I'm open to it.
I don't put anything past these guys.
I mean, look, if they would try to frame him for treason for three years, if they would try a coup, you know, like, sure, maybe they'd try to cheat him.
I don't know.
I mean, you know, the DNC certainly fucking was very happy to try to cheat Bernie Sanders out of the nomination.
So I'm not putting anything past them.
And as I mentioned on the Scott Horton episode on the last one, if you want to go by the Democrats standard, which let me be clear on this, I don't.
I think their standard is bullshit.
But if they're going to put out the standard that Russia buying some Facebook ads is election interference, then absolutely there was interference in this election, you know?
Like if you want to go by that standard, then there's been interference for Trump's entire presidency.
So it's not like if we are all going to play by the same standards that the corporate press and the Democrats play by, then absolutely, listen, you have a completely legitimate argument that not only did the deep state and the press interfere in Trump's first three years, they absolutely interfered in the midterm elections with keeping the Mueller investigation open and Mueller never coming out and saying at some point, hey, just so you guys know, like before the midterm elections, we so far have nothing.
And he absolutely could have done this.
He could have come out because he did come out later, right?
Right before the investigation wrapped up, he came out and said that BuzzFeed story was bullshit when they implied that Michael Cohen had directed, had been directed by Donald Trump to lie.
And Mueller sent one of his people out to be like, we have no evidence of that.
This is not true.
So he easily could have come out when all of these people were reporting that Trump was a Russian asset and said, listen, we have no evidence in that direction.
We're going to continue to investigate.
But just so you know, there is absolutely no evidence that the sitting president of the United States is guilty of treason.
They could have easily done that, but he didn't and allowed that to be out there in the ether.
And this helped the Democrats take control of the House.
That's far more flagrant election interference than anything Russia did in 2016.
And again, in 2020, you know, no question, the big tech companies silencing the New York Post and silencing all the stories about Hunter Biden.
There's no question that the corporate press being completely in the tank for Biden.
By their own standards, all of these things are election interference.
But the truth is, as Scott said, this is kind of all fair and love and politics.
This isn't some secret conspiracy.
This is just all right out in front of us.
So there is, I'm just making the point that there is an argument that Trump voters can have.
And then on top of that, there is definitely a lot of like there's a lot of sworn affidavits of poll watchers who weren't allowed in and stuff like this.
I don't know about the voting dumps and stuff, but there is some stuff that's hard to explain for sure.
But there's just no plan here.
That's what I took away from the phone call.
It's because Trump is so confident this whole time.
You don't understand.
I'm going to make a couple of phone calls.
Once I call these guys, once they talk to me personally, we'll undo the, he's such a, he just thinks like, oh, well, yeah, there was a whole process, but I didn't actually call the guy.
Yeah.
Well, and by the way, Trump does start going into the most thing.
Like, I didn't think there was any part of the phone call where he was threatening or abusing power or being authoritarian at all.
In a way, to be honest, I'm almost shocked there wasn't more of that.
It's almost shocking that the guy who is the sitting president of the United States of America, who seems to be completely in belief that he was robbed, and they're like, you know, if you believe what Donald Trump does, which it seems like he does from the phone call, then he believes basically a coup is coming and unseating the rightful president.
So if you believe that, you'd think he'd be using every power under the sun to fucking threaten people.
Well, this is what I'm going to do to you.
This is what's going to happen.
Imagine if it was Nixon.
Imagine if it was Nixon on that phone call.
I said, well, that's what I mean.
This is the most faggoty election I've ever seen in my life.
But right, so there's none of that.
But he does start doing the Trump thing where he's talking to this guy and he's like, he's like, you know, I don't know why you agreed to that agreement, you know, talking about when they looked into the voter fraud.
And he goes, you got completely outsmarted.
I don't know how you got outsmarted by these people who really aren't very smart to begin with.
You know, like he's insulting the guy.
He just like, it's like he just thinks he can trump his way into it's the same way as he kind of thought he could just shit talk voting by mail into winning the election.
Like he just kind of thought he's like, oh, this whole thing's right for fraud.
So I'll just shit on it the whole time.
And then I'll, I'll win somehow.
So it's, it's, there's a lot of that.
Um, oh, by the way, one fucking little thing that he said that I was really surprised didn't get more media attention.
I didn't see anyone mention this anywhere.
And you have to listen to the whole fucking hour.
I don't remember where it is exactly, but he does say at one point to this Brad Raffensperger guy that he goes, like, he's insulting him.
And then at one point, he goes, you, he goes, you might be a good lawyer.
I mean, I could imagine you're a good lawyer.
You got a last name for it.
And I was almost like, oh, oh shit.
That was, but I mean, you know, like, I don't know.
I didn't really take it like as anything shitty.
I thought it was just kind of, but it did seem to me to be like a Jew lawyer joke, which I was almost surprised when I heard that.
Like it got the reaction out of me of like, ooh, like, look at that.
That's a spicy meatball.
But I haven't seen anything on the press jump on that.
But, you know, again, not that I thought there was anything.
You're a lady.
It figures you'd be emotional about this.
Yeah, it was kind of like that.
But, but, but it really, it's funny because we're all we're looking at the same thing.
But my, my takeaway from it is almost the opposite of what the corporate press has taken away from it, which I guess isn't that surprising given how I see things and how they see things.
But like, I'm almost like, oh, wow, I can't believe there isn't more authoritarianism.
I can't believe he's not threatening people with something, you know, like that.
That's almost what my guess would have been.
That's kind of what my guess would be about all of these secret conversations with presidents, that there's some type of like wink-wink threat here.
You do what I want you to do, or we can make life very unpleasant for you.
There really wasn't.
It was just, you're stupid, and this is obviously a fraud.
And why haven't you gotten to the bottom of this fraud?
And the guy's just kind of like, you know, I'm not seeing it.
He basically called him up to go, nobody likes Joe Biden.
Quit telling me that people voted for him.
I know no one likes him.
Do you like Joe Biden?
No one likes him.
Well, but there's this point where he's like, you know, Again, it's like what comes through in this is that Trump really, you know, shockingly doesn't really seem to have a very fine grasp on the details.
He's just convinced he was robbed.
So there's one point in the phone call where he's like, um, he's he's saying, he's like, look, you had all these absentee ballots that are military people, and they're coming in all for Joe Biden.
And everybody knows I dominate the military.
The military comes all in for me.
And the guy's like, well, the absentee ballots aren't just military.
They're also American citizens who live abroad.
And then there's just like a weird pause.
And it's like, oh, okay.
Yeah.
And then they kind of like move on to another thing.
And it's like, I don't know.
It's just Donald Trump doesn't, what Donald Trump doesn't have in him is the kind of like, okay, there are these three areas that I want to focus on.
And I have really researched them all.
And I have a mastery of exactly why each one of these things are fraudulent.
And I need you to focus on these.
Instead, it's just talk about crowd sizes and other states and the whole nation and how the polls were wrong and all these things.
And then when it comes to the details, like always, Donald Trump doesn't really know the details because that's just not, that's not Donald Trump's style.
Like he's not really concerned with that shit.
So I don't know.
I was just kind of, it was really interesting.
I think it's worth listening to.
I'd recommend people out there.
If you got an hour to kill, it's kind of a fascinating into how Trump is behind the scenes and how much he's just Trump.
But that was my takeaway from it.
It certainly wasn't.
You know, it's just the idea of, what did he fucking say that I just read?
That Stephen Collison says, in a fresh abuse of power, Trump tried to bully a top Georgia GOP official into finding votes to overturn President-elect Joe Biden's win, the staggering telephone call, audio of which was obtained by the Washington Post, amounted to the most serious threat yet posed by his authoritarian instincts to American democracy.
I don't know.
Just seems like a guy who is saying, you know, I think the vote was unfair and I think there was fraud and I want you to look into it.
Again, it's not in the same way with the Ukrainian phone, with the Ukraine phone call.
It's not, you can't spin this into being the opposite of what it clearly is.
If Donald Trump is saying, I believe there was voter fraud and I want you to look into that, you can't call that an attack on democracy.
It's more logical to call that a support of democracy.
He's looking, he's telling you to look into it.
Now, if he was telling you to plant votes or to do something illegal or something like that, you could call that an attack on democracy.
But I promise you, listen to this hour-long phone call.
There's nothing that even hints at that.
The whole time, if there is one thing that is crystal clear in this phone call, is that Donald Trump believes the election was stolen from him, that it was illegitimate.
And he wants you to find the evidence of that.
That is, that's pro-democracy, not anti-democracy.
You're 100% right.
And this just goes back to the Ukraine example.
Maybe he doesn't believe it, but then he's slick enough that he's framing his entire conversation like under the guise of, hey, I think something happened illegally here.
So I need to investigate it.
You know, so it's the same move.
Maybe he's slick enough that he's actually doesn't believe it, but he knows, hey, this might be on tape.
So I better have the conversation in this way.
Yeah, look, it's certainly possible, but it's one of those situations where you're faced with two possibilities, and one of them seems much easier and much more likely than the other.
So yes, it is possible that Trump doesn't really believe the votes were fraudulent.
And this is just his angle to try to get people to keep like, but what's much more likely, what's much more likely is that he just is what you see.
He just believes this.
He doesn't believe it's possible that fucking Joe Biden beat him in this thing.
And you also got to understand, man, that people get, and this is true for all of us.
We all exist in our own bubbles to some degree, right?
Like we are not around.
everybody equally.
We're around some people more than others.
And Donald Trump has been for basically his entire adult life in mansions and penthouses, you know, dating models around people who adore him.
He's the, you know, became president of the United States.
I mean, after being like the number one TV show and having this huge book and all these casinos and businesses, he becomes the president of the United States.
He's around people kissing his ass all the time.
He goes to his rallies.
He's drawing huge numbers, tens of thousands of people who are chanting, we love you.
And he's looking at this and just going, no fucking way.
There's no way that Biden won and I lost to him.
And that just seems like the far more obvious answer.
And likewise with the Ukraine thing, it seems like the most likely answer is that he thought something stunk about Hunter Biden's business in Ukraine.
And he thought this should be investigated.
Now, of course, obviously both of these things, he's not a disinterested party.
He's got his very clear self-interest.
Like, obviously, he wants a second term.
He wants to win this election.
And obviously in the fucking the Ukraine call, he wanted dirt on Hunter Biden and Joe Biden.
I mean, there's no question about either of these two things, but that in itself is not really a scandal.
That is just obvious.
Obviously, you know?
So like, obviously, he wants to win the election.
But if there was legitimate voter fraud and that was uncovered, then that would be completely legitimate for him to want to uncover that and then win the election.
And likewise with Ukraine, if there were crimes committed and he wanted to uncover it and that benefited him, then that's completely legitimate.
So the most obvious, most likely answer is that this is just what he believes and that he believed there might be some criminal activity with Joe and Hunter Biden, which really isn't that crazy, particularly considering the fact that Hunter Biden is under federal criminal investigation.
It's just not, it seems like there's it's most likely that it just is, as always with Donald Trump, what you see is what you get and that that really is just him.
Anyway, I thought it was interesting.
It was interesting to see the phone call and it's interesting how it's being spun.
And of course, with these things, as always, which is the corporate press tactic, they'll take an hour phone call, find the most controversial parts, not really put it fully in context, and then just put that out there.
So you see the clip that you saw, which is them trying to say like, oh, he said he needs this many votes or whatever.
And, you know, but it's, to me, it's just a weak argument.
Engagement Ring Sponsorship00:02:13
It's, it's weakness all around.
It's a weak take by the corporate press and it's a weak strategy by Donald Trump almost to the point that you can't believe it.
Like you can't believe that this is his big ace in the hole and this is the big thing he's got.
But he still is saying, at least with a lot of confidence, that it's coming.
We're going to get to the bottom of this.
Pretty hard for me to believe two weeks out.
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Tulsi Gabbard War Stance00:15:34
I guess the only other thing now that seems to be the last hope for Trump is this thing with senators saying that they're going to contest the election.
So I know you were reading a bit about that.
What's the latest on that front?
All right.
I'll give you my take on this is that our elections are essentially a convoluted scam.
And the way it works is someone essentially wins what is clear, enough states to win.
So the other person just concedes.
Everyone moves on with their life.
But if someone doesn't really want to lose or wants to contest it, there isn't actually a working framework for how this thing works.
And so no one really knows what the hell to do.
So the latest example of that is that Ted Cruz and this, I forget the other, maybe Holly, pretty boy.
I bet I'll come around for the next election cycle.
But when the electoral college votes come in from each state, you can contest any individual one.
Usually the procedure takes about 20 minutes.
If someone in the both House and Senate contest, I think it's each individual state, they got to go meet for like two hours, and then I'm not sure what happens from there.
And then at some point, it can come down to the vice president.
The whole point, no one actually understands these laws because they don't really, they don't really ever get enforced or they never come into play because they haven't really thought through the election.
They don't have a working system.
And the point is someone's going to concede.
In this case, what will happen is they'll probably go behind closed doors.
The Republicans will make a big thing out of it.
Your best case scenario is maybe they actually do an investigation and prove that there was voter fraud two or three years from now because they actually make a push about that.
But no matter what, the Supreme Court or someone's going to get involved and go, hey, listen, Joe Biden won.
That's just my guess here.
But there is this last-ditch effort that they procedurally, just to recap, they're allowed to contest the electoral college representative from any given state.
And so a bunch of Republican senators and enough people in the House are coming forward to do that.
And I don't know where it goes from there, but it is some sort of a procedural problem here.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, that sounds about right to me.
I guess it's just like so hard for me to believe that this would actually work.
And this is not said from the perspective of being like an expert in this, in the procedural, the procedure, but it just seems so impossible to me that this could be changed at this point.
Just like what the cultural impact of that would be.
But we'll see.
What I think they're going against courts too, because essentially they're still just putting forward that same argument that these states weren't allowed to expand the voting and it was against their own constitution, but that was already thrown out of the Supreme Court.
It was thrown out of the Pennsylvania courts.
So they're still not really coming for, I don't know, this thing's a convoluted mess.
And they're not, the best you can hope for is that they assign and investigate like some sort of a council to actually investigate it.
But the odds once Biden's in power that they're going to come forward two, three years from now and go, hey, they fucked you is unlikely.
Yeah.
What I think this is, is that, you know, look, in politics, everything is political.
And that's, that's how, you know, that's a, that's a pretty basic rule of thumb.
And so what I, what I see this as, and this is what I've been saying for, for basically since the election, um, the dynamic you have in the country now, which is really interesting, particularly on the Republican side, is that Trump is probably done.
Um, but Trumpism is alive and well, maybe stronger than it's ever been.
Uh, Donald Trump did not get less votes in 2020 than he got in 2016.
He got millions more, maybe 10 million more, something like that, maybe a little more even.
Um, just he expanded his base.
He didn't lose supporters, and you know, which is very different than, say, Obama, who got substantially less votes in 2012 than he did in 2008.
So Donald Trump is enormously popular with his base, enormously popular within the Republican, you know, not within the Republican Party, but amongst Republican voters.
And the truth is that the ideas that Donald Trump represents are much more popular.
I mean, if you take like, you know, say like the neoconservative point of view, which is more or less like, hey, we should be in every free trade agreement.
We should be in NAFTA and obviously GATT and stuff like that.
And we should, you know, enter into the TPP and like all this other stuff.
They would certainly, maybe they wouldn't share it, but they'd be happy to enter like a Paris climate accord or something like that, you know, some environmental agreement or something like that.
They think we should fight every single war in the Middle East that we can possibly get our hands on.
And they basically think we should be lax with border restrictions.
If you take those positions versus Trump saying like free trade has led to fucking, you know, manufacturing jobs leaving the country, we should have protectionism, bring our jobs back.
We should close the borders or at least get really serious on border control and we should stop fighting all these stupid wars.
I mean, it's not even close.
The latter position is far more popular amongst Republican voters than the neocon position.
Trumpism, it still owns the base, and yet Trump is leaving.
Now, on top of that, you have Trump himself saying this was illegitimate.
This was stolen from me.
This is a huge fraud.
And the vast, vast, vast majority of his supporters believe him on that.
They absolutely believe that.
And so now, if you are a Republican who wants to have a political future, you're in a bit of a pickle because now you're like, okay, this guy Trump is leaving.
He is going to be gone, but I need to be seen as the guy who's fighting for him and fighting for his ideas because his ideas are more popular amongst the Republican base.
He's more popular and they view him as being as essentially a coup has just taken place.
They're saying this is a conspiracy from the highest levels down to the lowest levels.
And this is, and so if you don't fight against that, you're never going to be able to win these people over in the future.
So I think that Ted Cruz, who certainly has ambitions of being president, has already run for president once.
I think he's realizing that he has to be seen as the guy who is fighting for Donald Trump, fighting against this, you know, the stolen election.
So I think that's his political calculation.
We'll see.
We'll see how it works out.
You know, Donald Trump, I think Ted Cruz would like the memory of him being the guy who was Trump's challenger in 2016 and didn't even support him at the convention and all of that.
I think he'd like that memory to fade away and be remembered as the guy who fought for him in the aftermath of the 2020 election.
We'll see.
We'll see how it all works out.
All right, moving over from the Senate to the House of Representatives, kind of a little bit of a bummer because there's so few good congressmen.
And we lost two of the more interesting and decent members of Congress.
So Justin Amash is out and Tulsi Gabbard is out, which is just, you know, neither of them are perfect, but they were both a lot better than just about anyone else around.
And it just sucks that they're not there anymore.
We pretty much, I think Thomas Massey is like the only fucking decent member of the House who's left.
And I do think Thomas Massey is the best than I have for a while.
But, you know, a couple of things, I guess.
So Justin Amash, he was the only Libertarian who was in Congress, although he wasn't ever elected as a Libertarian.
He left the Republicans and then joined the Libertarian Party after being elected a few times as a Republican.
But he's gone.
He look, I'll say this.
I know I've criticized Justin Amash here and there.
I do think that he got, unfortunately, he took his big stand and got the issue wrong.
And he came out and, you know, was basically like said Donald Trump should be impeached after the Mueller report, which I just, I just don't understand why he took that stand.
He should have known better.
He was a guy who was against the NSA spying and the government spying apparatus for so long.
And he was supposedly really good friends with Massey and Mike Lee and Rand Paul.
And I just don't understand why he couldn't have just listened to his friends for a little bit because they would have set him straight on this issue.
And in fact, I've actually talked to one of those people who I just mentioned who said the same thing.
He's like, I don't know why Massey won't just listen to us.
He's against this stuff and he's getting it all wrong.
But he made a big, a big stand about that.
And I thought didn't handle that situation well.
But look, nobody's perfect.
And he will go down as one of the greatest congressmen who's ever lived.
It's not that long of a list.
It's not that tough of an accomplishment, but he's up there as one of the best.
So I congratulate him for that.
And he, you know, he, if, if we had, you know, a Congress full of Justin Amash's, we'd be in a much better country.
That's for sure.
So anyway, be interested to see what he does next in his life, but he's out of Congress.
Tulsi, you know, is far from perfect.
And I've had some critical things to say of her over the years, but man, is she better than every other goddamn Democrat who's in politics and just about every Democrat, better than just about every Democrat, you know.
And I really do think that just the fact that she ran for president and made her number one issue, the central issue to her campaign, the issue of war, and then was pretty good on that issue.
That to me is like, you know, that's like hero status.
I think that makes her pretty much a hero.
I wish she would just take it one step further and be perfect on the issue of war and peace rather than just really good.
The problem Tulsi Gabbard has is that she's like, Tulsi Gabbard is completely against fighting wars on behalf of terrorists.
And that's great, you know, like she, what Tulsi Gabbard has, right, is that she's actually a fucking, like served in the military and real deal service in the military.
Like she was in a medical unit in Iraq.
This wasn't just like, you know, she wasn't like stationed in fucking Germany somewhere, like drinking beers and protecting some fucking flower crop.
She was fucking in a medical unit every day watching the actual cost in blood of the war in Iraq.
And Tulsi Gabbard knows her shit.
So she knows, you know, as Scott Horton always says, she can, she knows who the shirts and skins are.
You can't like fool her into this like kind of, you know, like what Karl Rove tries to fool Fox News viewers into thinking that like, you know, I think Iran, you know, Iran is funding terrorists.
And then you kind of think to yourself, like, oh, so you mean like, you know, I think Al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, when you say terrorists, she's like, she knows enough to be like, no, no, no, they're mortal enemies.
You're talking Shiites and Sunnis.
They don't get along.
They really hate each other.
So that's not happening.
So she knows the deal.
And she knows that in Syria and in Yemen and in Libya, we fought wars on behalf of the terrorists.
And she's like, that is bullshit.
We should not do that.
These she not only does like the fucking al-Qaeda in Iraq, right?
They were leading the insurgency in Iraq where they were fucking killing her brothers and sisters.
So she's like, I'm not fucking, are you kidding me?
We're fighting a war on behalf of them in Syria, in Yemen.
We're supporting Saudi Arabia, who's basically like funding all this shit.
Fuck that.
And she's really, really good on that issue.
And okay, that's great.
That makes her a lot better than just about anyone else.
The problem is that she's still this day.
I just heard her like recently in a speech say, she's still okay with the war on terror.
She's just not okay with the war for terror, which is still better, still makes her better than just about everyone else.
But she's still like, look, we need to defeat all these terrorists militarily.
And the problem with that, as Scott Horton has pointed out, is that this is what he says, which I love, is he goes, that is a hole big enough for Dick Cheney to drive 10 wars through.
So, okay, we just need to fight the war against the real terrorists.
Well, the real terrorists will be, you know, that means any Sunni with a fucking rifle, basically.
You know, this is how they say al-Qaeda or Al-Qaeda-linked groups or similar groups or whatever, you know, and it just becomes like, okay, so we, and the truth is that all of these wars started with the war on terror.
That's how we got involved in all of these fucking quagmires.
So she just needs to be a little bit better on that.
But I do think that she's, I think both Tulsi and Justin Amash have more political aspirations.
And I think that's good.
I think it'll be great to see those guys still being active and some way contributing to whatever.
I don't know what they're going to run for next or if they're just going to try to be like thought leaders or things like that.
But either way, they are a million light years better than most politicians.
So I think that, you know, I hope to see more from them.
And yeah, we'll see.
We'll see what happens going forward.
I just hope Nancy Pelosi drinks more baby blood and lives forever.
Yeah.
Yeah, we all do.
We all do.
She needs that baby blood.
Guys, if you have any babies that you're not using, send them on over to Nancy Pelosi.
She needs those babies.
Did you see her and Mitch's houses got graffitied?
Oh, no, I heard something about this, but I didn't, I didn't read anything about it.
What happened?
They both got just, you know, like, give me my money.
Where's my money?
Dumb slut whores.
You were supposed to get us money.
But do you think that startles them at all?
Hey, people know where I live.
It's almost surprising that you can get to their front door and write shit on it.
Yeah, that is a little surprising.
I don't know.
Unless they did it to themselves.
I would be, if I were to try to put myself in the position of being like an oligarch in today's society, and not even an oligarch's probably, that's not even the term I'm looking for because I'm not talking about like one of the shadowy figures behind the scenes.
Vaccine Rollout Concerns00:03:55
But if you were like the front man, you know, if you were like Nancy Pelosi or Mitch McConnell or something like that, I'd be really, really concerned.
I'd be like really concerned.
Like, I'd be like, we are like a little bit close to like the point where people are going to want to drag us into the streets.
Well, maybe if people come in, then they'll show their actual vampire powers.
They don't, you know, what are they concerned about?
Maybe that's it.
Maybe if you're really in touch with Lucifer every day, you don't have to worry that much about people dragging you through the streets.
They're like, please come into this house.
I dare you.
Come on.
It's like, I'll, I will use my fucking voodoo powers against you.
Maybe that's what's going on.
I don't know.
All right.
Anything else that you got that you wanted to talk about today, Robbie?
I think we covered it, dude.
Well, ins and outs.
The ins and outs 2021.
What a, you know, looking forward at this year.
It's that, you know, it's going to be what I think is going to be interesting is that a lot of people, whether even Democratic voters and even left-leaning people, and then like the huge portion of Americans who are just not that politically, you know, conscious or active, a lot of people, and this is what I saw at the New Year's thing that I touched on at the beginning, were really like had this feeling at New Year's, like, goodbye 2020.
Man, what a shit fuck year, you know?
And it's almost easy to just like go, man, that was a nightmare.
Let's get back to life.
Let's move forward.
And as people start to realize that nothing has changed, that we are still essentially in 2020.
I'm interested to see what people's reactions are.
And I'm really, it's, I think the big question, the million-dollar question, is how much more of this people will put up with.
And I think that my guess is people are going to put up with it through the winter.
I think that it's just easier.
But, you know, this happened in the first round of lockdowns, which started in March, and it was still fucking cold outside, at least in the East Coast.
I'm sure there's places, you know, in the West Coast and down south where it's nice outside, but down south, they don't really have the fucking lockdowns.
But I think as we come out into March, April, May, when the weather starts getting warmer, I think people in a lot of these cities that are still shut down just aren't going to take it anymore.
And they'll find one excuse or another.
But that's kind of my guess.
The other thing I'm really keeping my eye on for 2021 is the rollout of the vaccine, the fact that they're all saying that even when the vaccine comes, that's still not going to change anything.
You still got to mask up and social distance.
And the fact that there's this new strain, and for whatever reason, I just have a feeling that what's going to come out is that it's going to be like, oh, this vaccine doesn't actually protect you against mutated strains.
And so, oh, you know, maybe it'll be like the flu vaccine where, oh, we need to find a new vaccine every single year or something like that.
And it seems like there's a possibility that the evidence is just pointing so overwhelmingly to the idea that we just have to accept that COVID is part of life now and we just have to get back to life as normal.
And probably we'll just achieve herd immunity that way.
And that'll be that.
And some, you know, some people get sick, some people die, but we can't give up life because of that.
So that's kind of what I'm interested to see going forward in 2021.
Viva la resistance.
Joe Biden will probably be the president of the United States in a couple of weeks, but I guess it's not a certainty yet.
So we'll be here.
We're here for it.
And thank you guys for listening all year long in 2020.