James Smith and Robbie the Fire Bernstein dissect a Time magazine article alleging a shadow campaign saved the 2020 election, citing $300 million in private donations and coordinated efforts to suppress protests. They critique the piece for labeling voting access expansion as "voter suppression" and social media moderation as censorship while assuming Donald Trump is autocratically inclined without evidence. By contrasting this with selective transparency in the Mueller investigation, they argue these actions constitute a conspiracy to remove Trump rather than protect democracy, exposing double standards in dismissing right-wing theories while accepting liberal narratives about election interference. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Woke Commercials vs. Reality00:15:33
All right, let's start today's show.
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, James Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
We got Robbie the Fire Bernstein back.
It's been a couple episodes of guests, and I've missed staring into those beautiful eyes.
Hope everybody enjoyed the Super Bowl.
What's up, King of the Cox?
How you living?
Nothing much, man.
How are you?
How do you enjoy your Super Bowl?
You do it big with them Jersey people?
I actually didn't do it very big at all.
Just watched with my wife.
We were supposed to have a few people over, but it ended up falling through at the end.
How about you?
What'd you do?
My sister did a little something.
So I went over there.
I ate all their chicken poppers and went home to take a shit.
Didn't even launch the game.
I just watched the game.
Ate the chicken poppers and bounced.
That was it.
Well, Brady won.
Just so you know, I figured you'd probably find out eventually.
Might as well find out here.
It, yeah, it wasn't a very competitive game, but, you know, it's weird things like the Super Bowl.
I mean, I guess they had a decent attendance there, right?
But it wasn't filled.
And it just things like the Super Bowl particularly is all about the spectacle.
And it's a little bit different when it's not the same spectacle.
Well, it's not even a spectacle anymore.
It's like going to church and getting lectured by every commercial about how we're moving towards equality and everyone cares about the civil workers and every brand wants to make a testimony.
It's like you're in the church of wokeness.
Yeah, for sure.
It's interesting, I think, from the perspective of people who are our age, because when, you know, being our, how old are you now, Rob?
30-something.
30-something.
There you go.
But you're a few years younger than me, but we're in the same, you know, kind of generation.
Aging way better.
Just look at my pretty hairline.
You are, well, listen, it's done.
It's had a good year.
But so when me and you were kids, there was really no other game in town besides television.
Television was the entertainment.
That was it.
We didn't have the internet.
I mean, whatever the internet was wasn't something you were really going to get a lot of entertainment out of.
We didn't have phones.
We didn't, you know, it was like you watched TV and everybody knew like that was kind of a thing that kept us as one culture.
You know, like whatever might be different between like rural Alabama and downtown Brooklyn, we all watched NBC and CBS and Fox, you know, like that was an ABC.
That was what we all watched.
I mean, when I was a little kid, we didn't have cable and all of my friends didn't have cable.
It wasn't until I was like around eight or nine, excuse me, that that became like a thing.
Like there was like, oh, he has cable and he has cable.
And then I think I was like 10 before we got it in my house.
But it was like, oh, there's a few networks and this is what everybody watches.
If this was the show that's on, everybody watches it.
Everyone watched, you know, the Cosby show or whatever it was.
Great show, by the way.
Really great people on and off camera.
But they, you know, that was it.
And now, when you're our age, I mean, for, you know, you have a career, you have possibly a family.
Okay, Rob, you have neither of those things, but you could, you know, theoretically, you could get one one of these days.
But, you know, you're just not watching as much television.
And now you have like the internet and all this other stuff.
So it's just not really, you can kind of get what you want to watch without going to the television.
So, I mean, me personally, I watch no network television.
I mean, maybe occasionally there'll be a thing that I put on, but almost never do I just sit down and watch something on ABC or NBC or CBS or whatever.
But for something like the Super Bowl, okay, I throw on CBS.
So it's almost like this thing where you're so removed from that world.
And then when you go back to it, you're like, wow, this whole thing changed so much since the last time I was there.
Now, I'm sure the Super Bowl is not exactly just an average representation because these are the most expensive commercials and these are like the big moments.
But even just seeing the shows that are on, it's like, I know none of these.
Seeing the whole, the whole temperature is just different.
And oh my God, if you like, we talk about how steeped in wokeism the culture is.
But then when you turn on something like the Super Bowl, you realize that it's like, man, this message is just pounded down people's throats.
And it's, I just find it very bizarre, very, very strange.
It's like the constant message is like that equality is good and racism is bad.
And it's so, there's so much of it that you'd almost think at some point there'd be someone on the other side of this issue, but there isn't.
It's not like there's any other channel you could turn on that would be like, racism's really great.
We're all for racism.
And they're like, they have to combat this message.
It's just this side of the story.
And you would, I mean, you would think, I don't know, you would think we were like living in the deep south during segregation, the way they talk about society, as if this, it's this dominant problem of racism that we must combat.
Except the problem is, like I said, no one's on the other side of this issue.
No one is pro-racism, which is also part of the reason why I find it so goofy when, like, you know, libertarian party types are always like, you know, happy to tweet, we condemn racism.
Like, who, who are you talking to?
Who is this?
For this is what everyone says.
Like, yeah, okay.
So, and then what?
Like, what, who's on the other side of this issue?
It's just so strange.
But I, it was hard not to, at least for me, it was hard not to kind of be taken back by that.
Like every commercial, the message just being pounded down your throat.
It was almost, it got to the point where you were like relieved when there was one commercial that just had nothing to do with that.
Like, oh, okay, it's just George Costanza's face on a sweater.
Nice.
All right.
Wasn't even that good of a commercial, but it's just like, okay, at least this is, it's not a political message.
And I'm somebody who's kind of into political messages, but geez, I mean, I don't understand how average people are just putting up with this.
Like, don't, aren't you just fatigued of the message already?
No, if I'm going to watch football on a Sunday and stuff my face with some poppers, I want to be lectured to.
Yeah, right.
I want a little dose of lecturing by every company in all of America.
And there's something very strange.
Of course, we talk about it a lot, but it's crazy to me that it doesn't ring more alarms that there are just like this very, at least on the surface, kind of left-wing messaging coming out of the biggest corporations in the world.
Like the people, what were the prices for the Super Bowl?
It was like $10 million for a commercial or something like that.
And it's like, and all of the commercials are geared toward this woke stuff.
It's just like just on its face right there.
Wouldn't your average left-winger be like, huh, why are all these big corporations sucking up to us?
Seems strange.
And I know, you know, I've talked about this for a while now, but I think it's something that's really, really important.
And I know that there are, I don't know, maybe the more like kind of woke libertarian crowd or the left libertarians or the kind of beltway libertarian types who see who want to go like, well, this is just the market.
I mean, there's nothing more to it than that.
It's just that these companies are catering to the message that people want to hear, which is this woke shit.
But the problem with that, of course, is that, well, first off, like half the country doesn't want to hear this.
And amongst the other half, it's only a small percentage of them who actually are really into this.
And then we see no evidence that this is actually an organic bottom-up desire.
Like we really just want thousands of commercials lecturing us about the evils of racism.
I don't see any evidence of that, but it does seem like there's a very concerted effort from big corporations, from the government to really push the woke shit.
And to me, it seems like an important question to ask.
Why is that?
Why would they want to push this stuff on people?
And my hypothesis is that it is a great distraction from issues that are important that the left might care about.
And it's a great way to pit people against each other.
It's a great way to silence dissent.
It's, you know, there's if I were in the ruling elite and I was coming off a year where I had robbed the American people blind and destroyed the economy and locked them all in their homes and all this stuff, I'd really want to talk about, you know, the real problem is that some people have hate in their heart.
That's the real issue of the day, you know, that's what's really screwing people over.
It's that somebody out there might have a politically incorrect feeling about another group of people.
Now, of course, like there were times in human history where you could really say that that was what was holding down a group of people.
And that's that's true around the world today, too.
Where you say it really is, you know, like racism, prejudice is really what's fucking over large groups of people.
But that doesn't seem to be the case in America in 2021 at all.
So why are we so obsessed with it?
And why is it like if every commercial was telling you here at Procter Gamble, we're against polio.
And that's why, you know, and like if every commercial was talking about how every company's against polio, you'd be like, man, there must be a big polio problem here.
Yeah, right.
Point me, show me exactly where the problem is.
And, you know, it's like, you might wonder, it's like, why is it?
Why is it that so many big corporations want to push wokeism?
Why is it that the entire federal government is obsessed with pushing wokeism?
You know, why is it that all of academia is pushing wokeism?
Like, what, what's going on here?
What is this?
Seems very convenient.
And the effect, of course, is obvious.
Did you happen to catch the one that I thought was really interesting?
There was this one commercial that was the Bruce Springsteen commercial.
So Bruce Springsteen, he's like, he's like going.
He's not cool.
Was never old enough.
He never liked his music.
That's, yeah.
Okay.
He's like all other classic rock, but he's just not.
Well, I like some of some Bruce, but he is old and he's not very cool at this point.
But he's thrown on like a cowboy hat and he's going to a church.
And then the thing at the end was like, it was like reunite the or the reunited states of America or something like that, which was, by the way, the message wasn't like obnoxious or anything.
It was fairly, I mean, you know, it wasn't like too left-wingy.
There was a church in there.
It's like, they were talking about reuniting the country.
But I just, there was something about it that I thought was interesting where it was like everybody, no matter what side you're on, you kind of can't pretend that we're not an incredibly divided country right now.
And I think that this is something that is going to be with us for a while here in this country.
And it's something that anybody who's talking about politics has to address and grapple with.
And that's the culture war.
And we've been talking about this, you know, all year, really for the last few years, but particularly all year this year.
And I think I would humbly suggest that libertarians really should focus a lot on the culture war and focusing on the fact that we, I believe, and this is, I think, one of the things that's really special that we have that nobody else really seems to have is that we really have an understanding and an answer to the culture war of essentially how we cannot fight it.
Because as we know, we've flirted with at many times over the last, you know, 12 months or so.
We've flirted with getting into a hot civil war.
I mean, it's not fair to call anything in America today a civil war, but When you've got, you know, hostile militias facing off in like Portland or Seattle, when you've got, you know, these huge riots, you know, from Black Lives Matter the whole summer, when you've got Trump supporters storming the Capitol building, all of these things, you go,
we're certainly flirting with a civil war.
And I think any sane person, no matter which side of this you're on, no matter how much you hate the left or how much you hate the right, should know that life will be materially significantly worse for you if we fight a civil war, that you don't want to see that.
And to live, I think there's got to be a lot of people in America who are really going to get sick of the culture war.
In the same way that we have war fatigue from all of the foreign wars and they're much less popular today than they were when we first started fighting them.
I think people are going to get culture war fatigue, particularly because it's much more present in their lives.
And I think that libertarians are really the only ones who can give an answer, an explanation for why we're here fighting this culture war and what the only solution would be to not fight it, to not have to fight it.
And basically, the answer is that the government just got way too big and way too powerful.
And this is why we have to fight a culture war.
And it's not like a bug.
It's a feature, you know?
Like if you, we've always had different cultures in this country.
There's probably not just two.
There's probably like 12, but there's really clearly different ones.
Like the, you know, I don't know, rural Texas and downtown Brooklyn are two completely different cultures.
The Culture War Explained00:03:17
But that's okay.
We can have, they can live the way they live.
They can live the way they live.
And that's not a big problem.
But when you have the federal government getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and then every four years, one side is going to get control of the government and rule over the other side, then you have to fight a culture war over who gets control of this thing.
That's just going to be the outcome.
And that's why this culture war really, you know, spikes up every four years, because one side's going to win and the other side is going to be ruled over.
And all of this stuff, and of course, with government getting bigger and bigger and bigger, well, there's more and more corruption because that's the nature of it.
It's an organization that's stealing money from people and giving it off to their cronies.
So the bigger it gets, the more corruption it is.
And then there's more and more of an incentive for the ruling elite to make sure you keep fighting the culture war because that's what throws you off the scent of everybody fighting a war against the top.
So they're now incentivized to keep this culture war going.
So you have all of this shit, like I just said, this whole plague of wokeism, which is just designed to pull the wool over the left's eyes and get the right mad as hell at the left instead of mad at what they should be mad at.
Because truthfully speaking, the proper response to wokeism from the left should be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we don't care about all this divide us up strategy.
You're not fooling us with that.
We care about the fact that bankers are getting bailed out and wars are being fought and police are locking people up for bullshit.
That would be like, if the left was at their best, that would be their response to the wokeism.
And if the right was at their best, their response to the wokeism would be to laugh at the left for how much these people have been able to pull the wool over their eyes and be like, ah, you look at you, dummies.
You fell for it.
No, that's not our enemy.
Here's our enemy.
Okay.
But the whole wokeism is essentially a government program.
I mean, it's being pushed by the government.
It's being pushed by the corporations that are in bed with the government.
And it's being pushed by academia, which is basically a government program.
I mean, come on.
Do you think there's any way in a free market that all the 18-year-olds would just decide to, what, spend themselves into debt learning about gender studies for four years, for four of their most productive young years?
That's not a free market.
That's because the government gets involved and gives everybody all these loans and builds all these colleges and all the rest of it.
So the libertarian answer to come in here and go is like the only cure for the culture war.
I mean, there's basically two options.
You can fight it and see which side wins, in which case, half the country is beaten into submission, which is pretty tough.
It's going to be bloody and rough.
And it's a toss-up that your side's going to win.
And, you know, like really for both sides, it's a toss-up that you're going to win.
I mean, the left can feel confident because they have all these institutions, but you know, the right has guns and they're tough.
Tom Brady's Tough Journey00:03:27
So good luck imposing your will on them.
It's going to be kind of tough.
And for the right, it's like, yeah, you got guns, but they have every single institution.
So that's going to be tough to overcome.
So it's a toss-up whether or not you'll win.
It's going to be very hard to keep the other side down.
It's only going to radicalize them further.
So that, you know, that's one option is to fight it, which is going to be rough.
Or you can decentralize power.
That's the other option.
You can try to scale back the power of the federal government, try to wind back some of these programs and say, you know what?
Here's the compromise.
Alabama, you can live like Alabama.
Portland, you can live like Portland.
And that's that.
And when you want to come together, you can come together.
And when you don't, you don't have to.
But I think more and more, it's going to be really important to see for libertarians to insert into the conversation that we actually understand what's driving the culture war and we actually have an answer to this because you can't, it's gotten so hot that you can't even turn on the Super Bowl without realizing we're in a culture war.
And it's just, I don't know, there's something about that.
Anyway, that's what I was thinking because it wasn't a very good game.
And so I just let my head wander off in those directions.
All right, guys, let's take a quick second.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
So those poppers were pretty good, huh?
Yeah.
At this point, do you root for or against Tom Brady?
I found myself rooting for Tom Brady yesterday, even though I've never been a Tom Brady fan and I'm a Jets fan and I've never liked the Patriots and for a lot of reasons.
Rooting for the Underdog00:02:10
The whole, you know, Bill Belichick was supposed to be the Jets coach and the whole thing, like, you know, kind of fucked over the Jets.
And Tom Brady's easy to hate, you know.
But there was something about like he was going for history last night.
And there's something about that that gets me swept up in the movie.
Yeah, I think he's turned the wheel where I'm a Giants fan.
He's fun to root against.
And it's like, fuck pretty people.
This guy's got everything made for him.
Just fuck him, you know?
Just like you want to see him get cancer just to see something bad happen to this perfect human being.
But now he's like gone the Jordan route where he's so excellent.
It's it's fun to see one guy who's that good.
Even though I didn't watch the game, I say that without watching the game.
Sure, sure.
But he also did something.
This is why I say he really went after history.
He did something that has never been done before.
There's never been one of these great quarterbacks who then went to another team and won them a Super Bowl.
I know who was it?
Who's been close?
So Joe Montana went to the Chiefs and got them into the playoffs.
And I think they won a game in the playoffs, but that was about it.
No one ever went to a team.
And for him to go to a team that's been, you know, I mean, they were a very talented team that he joined, but they've been a really shitty franchise.
And so for him to go there and kind of turn it around was, you know, you're like, okay, that puts him down.
That makes it a really tough argument to argue that he's not the best ever.
Isn't it great that one human being can make a whole city feel like winners?
Like all of Tampa feels like they're awesome.
Like, no, it's just one star player.
Tampa's got it all now.
They got fucking, you know, they're free.
They're an open state and they won the Super Bowl.
So look at that.
Good for them.
All right.
Enough Super Bowl talk.
Let's, I've been.
So the last couple episodes, I've had interviews.
And so I haven't been talking that much about what's in the news, but there's been a couple things that I think are worth discussing.
Mueller Report Insights Revealed00:11:29
And the first thing that was on both of our radars was this Time magazine piece, which was really, really interesting.
It wasn't just interesting in the information that was laid out.
It was just interesting that it was being written, you know?
With pride.
Yes.
Written with pride, not even five seconds after, in the midst of lecturing Trump supporters about how stupid they are to have ever questioned, you know, the integrity of the election or anything like that.
And one of the things that was interesting to me about it is: if people aren't familiar, the title of the article is The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.
This was in Time magazine, and it was written by Molly Ball, who is a biographer of Nancy Pelosi.
And so one of the things that was really interesting about the article was that it really went hand in hand with some of the stuff we've been talking about on the show.
Aside from any of the accusations of fraud in the election, because to be completely honest.
We really don't know, you know, and that's kind of been my position from the very beginning.
Like, I don't know.
You're telling me a government election is legitimate or illegitimate?
I don't know.
It requires a whole bunch of trust in government to believe in elections.
And I don't have any of that.
So I'm always open to the idea that these elections are bullshit.
And there's been some things that were like, you know, fair red flags that were raised that you're like, oh, that's a little shady.
That seems a little bit weird.
But truthfully speaking, the stuff that, you know, was presented at one point where it was like, you know, whatever Trump lawyer, Trump's lawyers, you know, were saying like, this is all going to be blown open in a week and everyone will know for 100% certainty that Trump won by millions of votes.
Like, well, none of that was ever presented.
And so that was, it seems pretty clear now in hindsight that they were bluffing.
They still haven't released the Kraken.
It's coming.
Right.
They told me a Kraken.
They told me they were building a wall and they were releasing a Kraken.
You know, I'm still waiting.
But you still have confidence.
You still have to.
Yeah, right.
So clearly the Trump lawyers were bluffing to some degree.
And there is absolutely, I think, a fair argument to be made that assuming they were bluffing, right?
Because they really made it sound like they had all this evidence that they were about to release.
And assuming that they didn't, which seems like the logical assumption at this point, you can really make an argument that that was a really shitty thing to do for the country.
It doesn't even make sense.
Like you bluff and poker, you might win the hand.
The other side had no reason to fold.
They weren't going to go, oh, they got claims.
So we better just say that.
Yeah.
So it was, and, and you could certainly say that on some moral level, not on a legal level, but on some moral level, that you now have some responsibility for the people who hear that and act in crazy ways.
You know, like, I, you know, if I, if I were to try to really convince my audience that the government is going to come kill you and your family within the next week, you know, even though I don't know it at all that that's true, I'm just convincing people of that.
And then one of my listeners goes out and does something crazy and violent.
I do hold some responsibility for that.
Now, again, not legal responsibility.
I didn't like tell someone to go do that, but it's a pretty irresponsible thing to just put out there.
Look, Richard Nixon.
If you do it, take off your part of the problem shirt and just put on a Black Lives Matter shirt.
That's all we're asking.
We don't ask for much from you.
But, you know, when Richard Nixon lost the election in 1960 to Jack Kennedy, there was all types of fraud in the system.
A lot of his people wanted him to challenge the fact.
They really stole it from him.
And he refused.
And he was like, this will tear the country apart.
And the country is more important than me.
And blah, blah, blah, and walked away.
Now, just saying, I'm not saying that was the right thing to do.
I don't know.
But Trump had none of that in him.
You know, Trump was like, screw the country.
I'm the greatest.
I'm a winner, not a loser, not a loser.
Okay.
So that, you know, you can have whatever feelings you want to about that.
And then there's arguments to be made on both sides on that.
But what we've said on this show a lot is like, forget even the fraud of the election.
What is undeniably, you know, by the standard that the corporate press set of what campaign interference is, remember?
Like Russia placing Facebook ads was interference in the election.
Okay.
By that standard, which is not a completely fair standard, but if you want to use it, it's got to be applied to both sides.
By that standard, this thing was absolutely rigged against Trump from the very beginning.
And starting from the fact that, you know, the corporate press and the deep state and the Democrats and a lot of Republicans all conspired to frame the guy for treason for three years.
Okay.
So there's that.
Then there's the fact that let's just say the lockdowns and the riots and the coverage of the riots and the coverage of the lockdowns were not completely absent of political motivations.
Let's just say that to put it lightly.
And then, of course, there's the fact that the way the corporate press covered the campaign, the way that they censored materials that was damaging to the Biden campaign, and the way that social media injected themselves like never before in a campaign was absolutely all designed to rig it for Joe Biden.
I mean, like the way this campaign was covered was just, I mean, look, like you get to decide in many ways what you prioritize and what you don't, what you make the story of the campaign.
And the story of the campaign easily could have been like 12 different things that would have really helped Donald Trump.
And they made sure to not make that the narrative of the campaign.
Like just for one, just, you know, to throw one out there, the narrative of the campaign could very easily have been that Joe Biden was not participating in the campaign.
Like, do you think if Donald Trump just didn't campaign for the job, that wouldn't have been pointed out over and over again, every single day by the corporate press?
Do you think they would have been like, Donald Trump's hiding in his basement?
What questions does this raise?
Why is he afraid to face the media?
What, you know, is he up to the job?
All of this stuff.
They basically just let that slide.
And there's, you know, a million more examples of this.
But, you know, Trump getting COVID was more of a story than Joe Biden not campaigning.
I mean, it was really pretty nuts.
Okay.
That's something I really hadn't thought about.
And it's a really good point that if you just look at the scope and scale of what took place on Facebook that they claim to be Russian interference, which is essentially every candidate advertised on Facebook, right?
Trump just kind of won that election because he did a better job with his social media campaign.
That's it.
And yet they didn't look at what Hillary Clinton was doing on social media or what kind of like information this already four years or whatever it was.
I don't remember it that well, but whatever happened to say, hey, there was interference by the Russians probably is not even similar in scope to what was laid out in this time article, which was very clearly collusion between big money donors.
That's what they're saying openly.
I mean, look, we'll get to the article.
It's not as if she's suggesting this.
It's like, no, this is a fact.
We know this.
But again, yeah.
And just to make this point again, which I know is one we've made before on the show, but you know, it's like one of the most important stories in American history.
And it happened right as this show was kind of coming into its own and when our audience got really big.
So we spent a lot of time covering it, referring, of course, to the Mueller investigation and Donald Trump being framed, the president of the United States being framed for treason.
It's a pretty big story.
But just to be clear, Mueller, this is the example that I love using, right?
If as you recall, Rob, because we talked about this a lot, about a couple months maybe before the Mueller report was released, BuzzFeed came out with a story.
They said that they had been, if you remember, the two authors claimed they had been shown, or at least one of them claimed they had been shown the evidence.
So they weren't just speculating.
They knew this to be the case, that Mueller had uncovered that Donald Trump had instructed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress, which of course is a crime.
It's obstruction of justice, as well as tampering with a witness.
It's several different crimes.
So they had him not only on other stuff, but clearly on criminal activity and that this was going to come down and that Mueller was going to present this all in his report.
Donald Trump instructs his personal lawyer to lie under oath.
Huge groundbreaking story that really kind of would be a nail in Donald Trump's political coffin.
And Mueller sent one of his people out to the media to tell them this is not true.
This is not true.
We don't have this.
Just so you know, because everyone was getting their expectations so high up right before this thing was going to come out.
And he wanted to let them know, like, lower your expectations because none of this is true.
We have no evidence that Donald Trump instructed Michael Cohen to lie.
Okay.
So Robert Mueller was not above coming out and saying the speculating in the media about what we have in our findings is wrong.
There was no law preventing him from doing that.
There was no statute.
And there was no personal belief of what the role, his position entailed that would stop him from doing that.
However, in the 2018 midterm elections, while everybody in the corporate press is freaking out that Donald Trump is in bed with the Russians, Donald Trump is compromised by the Russians.
Donald Trump is doing Vladimir Putin's bidding.
There were even stories that he has been a Russian agent going back to the 80s.
Mueller never once came out and said, oh, hey, guys, none of this is true.
We found no evidence to back all of this up.
He easily could have done it.
He did it with the BuzzFeed story later.
He stayed tight-mouthed through that whole midterm election.
And this was a major factor for why the Democrats took back the House.
So, I mean, if that's not campaign election interference, don't tell me anything about what Russia's ever done as election interference.
They intentionally allowed it to be out there in the ether, the idea that, well, we may or may not have a compromised president.
There may be a president guilty of treason in the White House.
We're not exactly sure.
Quip Gum Dispenser Launch00:02:02
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But they came out to stop them about the Michael Cohen story, which was, while significant, far less significant than is Donald Trump a Russian asset or even a Russian agent, as some claimed.
All right, guys, let's take a quick second.
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Let's get into this article one more time.
Voter Suppression Conspiracy Claims00:15:56
The title is The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.
And I should say that obviously, this is, you know, there's this piece is heavily influenced by opinion.
But despite that, it's really only one level underneath what's right there blatantly being said.
So she sees this as the election being saved.
Obviously, if you're a Trump supporter, you probably don't feel that way.
So let's read a little from the article.
A weird thing happened right after the November 3rd election.
Nothing.
The nation was braced for chaos.
Liberal groups had vowed to take to the streets, planning hundreds of protests across the country.
Right-wing militias were gritting for battle.
In a poll before election day, 75% of Americans voiced concern about violence.
Instead, an eerie quiet descended.
As President Trump refused to concede, the response was not mass action, but crickets.
When media organizations called the race for Joe Biden on November 7th, jubilation broke out instead, as people thrown cities across the U.S. to celebrate the democratic process that resulted in Trump's ouster.
Okay, a little bit one-sided.
It's not exactly what happened, but whatever.
The second odd thing happened amid Trump's attempt to reverse the results.
Corporate America turned on him.
Hundreds of major business leaders, many of whom had backed Trump's candidacy and supported his policies, called on him to concede.
To the president, something felt amiss.
Quote, it was all very, very strange, Trump said on December 2nd.
Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner, even while many key states were still being counted.
In a way, Trump was right.
There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs.
Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans.
The PAC was formalized in a terse, little noticed joint statement from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day.
Both sides would come to see it as sort of an implicit bargain inspired by the summer's massive, sometimes destructive, racial justice protests, in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump's assault on democracy.
That is, to me, one of the most interesting paragraphs I've ever read in corporate journalism.
It's just everything that's been laid out there.
She starts by saying there was a conspiracy unfolding.
Now, the thing that's interesting is that she is so blinded by just believing that this is self-evidently just that she almost seems willing to put this out there without so much as a critical eye to go, hmm, what does this look like from a different perspective?
Maybe the idea of a conspiracy between, you know, CEOs of major corporations, the Chamber of Commerce, the political class, the rioting protesting class.
Maybe that's not really the spirit of democracy.
Maybe something here kind of stinks, but she's just putting it out right there.
Like, yes, Trump was right.
There is this conspiracy.
I just, I was blown away by that.
When you've got rot as bad as Trump in there, even if 72 million people in the country want him or whatever voted for him, and how much was it?
74.
74 million people voted for him.
You know, we got to make sure to undo the voting will of the public because that's how terrible Trump is.
And we get to make that decision.
There's really no reason to vote whatsoever.
There's no reason to leave it to the public because it's up to us to decide if something's so horrible that we, you know, that we got to undo it.
And I love the that.
So she also says that this was, in her words, both sides would see it as sort of an implicit bargain inspired by the summer's massive, sometimes destructive racial justice protests.
Isn't it interesting just the way they're able, this is like, you know, real brilliant trickery, but just the way you're able to cover something and you could cover, so if you cover the rioting over the summer, you could cover it as destructive, violent, barbaric, you know, rioting causing billions of dollars in damage,
you know, killing dozens of people, terrorizing innocent Americans, all of this.
Or you could say massive, sometimes destructive racial justice protests.
Isn't that like really unbelievable?
Not yes, Brian, not terrorism, right?
Not domestic terrorism, but sometimes destructive protests for a noble reason.
Now, of course, nobody would cover, nobody at Time magazine would cover January 6th that way.
Nobody would say the kind of like noble, sometimes destructive protest for election integrity, right?
Because from those people's perspective, that is what they were marching for, right?
They were marching against a stolen election, right?
But of course, we would never just give them that benefit.
Anyway, let's continue to read a little bit.
The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast cross-partisan campaign to protect the election, an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote, but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted.
For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America's institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined president.
Though much of this activity took place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and crossed ideological lines with crucial contributions by nonpartisan and conservative actors.
The scenario, the scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not a Trump victory.
It was an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all.
A failure of the central act of democratic self-governance that has been a hallmark of America since its founding.
Now, if you leave out, I mean, if you leave out all of the kind of opinions that this was good, right?
Like that this was self-evidently good.
Obviously, this was a noble attempt.
We were just trying to protect the great institutions of America.
We were just trying to stop this autocratically inclined leader in Donald Trump.
And so this was good.
If you just remove that from it, right?
Remove that from it.
What she is saying here is that there was a conspiracy against Donald Trump.
That's it.
Now, if you don't take it as a given that Donald Trump is the bad guy, or as she put it, autocratically, let me see, autocratically inclined, okay?
If you don't take that as a given, then the rest of this kind of just looks like she's saying there was a conspiracy between, as she puts it, crucial nonpartisan and conservative actors also working with the left.
Now, the funny thing about this, right, is that if it wasn't coming from this woman writing at Time magazine, who's clearly laying it out there that Donald Trump's awful and it's great that he lost, this would be stuff that would be dismissed as conspiracy if some pro-Trump right winger brought it up.
Like, I remember, and as critical as I was of the Black Lives Matter stuff this summer, I never got into saying this, but there would be, you know, like conservative pundits who would be like, they are foot soldiers for Joe Biden.
Like, this is all about getting Democrats elected.
And I never quite went that far because I was like, well, I don't know.
I don't know if that's true.
You know, I don't know if the, I think there's a lot of people there who are just swept up in the moment and protesting, and a lot of them get violent.
I don't think the people getting violent have a political axe to grind.
I think they just see a pair of Jordans and want to jump in and grab them, you know?
But that's what she's saying here.
She's saying that this was all a conspiracy.
Let's read a little bit more.
Their work touched every aspect of the election.
They got states to change voting system and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding.
They fended off voter suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers, and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time.
They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and use data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.
Can we just pause for one second?
Sure.
I got to point out that calling anything disinformation is editorializing, as is the word voter suppression.
So what she's really describing is mass resources going into censorship on social media because they have certain things that they would say are false or should not be allowed to get out there.
And then they always, in expanding voting, will claim it was against voter suppression.
Now, whether or not that's true, these are both what she's describing is a massive effort to do these things that she's editorializing as being good, but that's an editorialization.
Is that the right word?
Editorialization?
Yeah, well, but what's interesting about this whole article is it seems like it never dawns on her to even consider looking at this from the Trump supporters' perspective.
And I'm not a Trump supporter, but I'm just saying it's like what's obviously staring you in the face as you read this is that, but what about if you are a Trump supporter?
Well, then what are you saying here?
Well, then there was a conspiracy to remove your guy blatantly.
And it came from the highest levels of business, the highest levels of government down to the lowest levels of street organizers.
That's what she's saying.
It's like when they call for reasonable gun control.
So, the reasonable is that's you throwing in your opinion.
Yes, exactly.
So, but this is the exact same thing when they say to stand against voter suppression, like they're not really talking about voter suppression, they're talking about expanding the voting role, which might have been illegitimate.
And when they're talking about removing information from Facebook, because I don't know what you said there, but I'm sure it was false information, it's things that they want to be categorized as false.
That doesn't mean that it's false.
What every propagandist will tell you is that they want to remove false information, but that's you know, that's then you've made yourself the arbiter of truth and lies, which is you know, problematic, uh, to say the least.
Um, so yeah, here, let me just read this next uh sentence here.
They executed national public awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days and weeks, preventing Trump's conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction.
After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result.
So, again, this relies on assuming that Donald Trump is lying and that he's right.
Like, if we're suppressing his message, then the assumption built in there is we're doing it because he's he's lying.
Again, all you have to do is just entertain the possibility that he's right.
Like, if you just entertain the possibility from the Trump supporters' perspective, Trump's the good guy.
So, then what does this look like?
And, of course, and this happens all the time, right?
But, of course, what she's already been saying throughout the article is that we weren't trying to ensure that Biden won.
That's not what this whole conspiracy was doing.
The whole conspiracy was just to protect America's institutions and to make sure it was a free and fair election, right?
But when you've got this whole conspiracy that she's basically saying is all organized around the idea that Trump is an autocrat, right?
And that Trump is lying and that Trump is evil.
Do you really believe that that whole conspiracy also didn't want them to lose?
Well, why wouldn't you?
Obviously, everything that the conspiracy, as she puts it, all of the conspirators are doing everything that would hurt Donald Trump, right?
Like, you can say that just trying to get out the vote in blue areas is preventing voter suppression.
But if you look at it just slightly more cynically, you're trying to cause Trump to lose, right?
I mean, were they going into like really red areas where Donald Trump's going to dominate and try to get out the vote?
No.
All right.
Quote: The untold story of the election is the thousands of people of both parties who accomplished the triumph of American democracy at its very foundation, says Norm Eisen, a prominent lawyer and former Obama administration official who recruited Republicans and Democrats to board the voter protection programs.
So, just a completely neutral, you know, Obama administration official.
For Trump and his allies were running their own campaign to spoil the election.
The president spent months insisting that the mail ballots were a Democratic plot and the election would be rigged.
But of course, as she's demonstrating here, it wasn't just a Democratic plot, was it?
So she might be right about that.
Trump really got it wrong.
It was a lot more than a Democratic plot.
His henchmen at the state level sought to block their use while his lawyers brought dozens of spurious suits to make it more difficult to vote.
An intensification of the GOP's legacy of suppressive tactics.
Before the election, Trump plotted to block a legitimate vote count, and he spent the months following November 3rd trying to steal the election he'd lost with lawsuits and conspiracy theories, pressure on the state and local officials, and finally summoning his army of supporters to the January 6th rally that ended in deadly violence at the Capitol.
Okay.
So I don't know, the obvious editorializing, you know, aside, but right.
Okay.
That's how she feels.
Let's just continue and read a little bit more.
We won't finish this whole thing, but I just wanted to talk about a little bit of it.
And I recommend you guys, if you haven't already, go read it.
The democracy campaigners watched with alarm.
Every week, we felt like they were in a struggle to try to pull off this election without the country going through a real dangerous moment of unraveling, says former GOP representative Zach Womp, a Trump supporter who helped coordinate a bipartisan election protection council.
We can't look back and say this thing went pretty well, but it was not all clear in September.
Excuse me.
We can look back and say that this thing went pretty well, but it was not at all clear in September and October that that was going to be the case.
Arguing Over Election Conspiracies00:06:01
This is the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the group's inner workings, never before seen documents and interviews with dozens of those involved from across the political spectrum.
In this story of an unprecedented, creative, and determined campaign whose success also replaced disaster.
Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated, says Ian Basson, co-founder of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan rule of law advocacy group.
But it's massively important for the country to understand that it didn't happen accidentally.
The system didn't work magically.
Democracy is not self-executing.
So the article goes on like this.
And just saying, this is what her argument is, is that this was a conspiracy to get the result that we had in the election.
That is her central thesis to this.
Now, of course, she is arguing in a very Carol Quigley-like fashion that the conspiracy is noble and therefore there's no need to keep this secret.
But she's arguing that it was a conspiracy.
Now, she can editorialize, as you said, all of these noble things onto the conspiracy.
Why, it's a righteous conspiracy.
Why it's a noble conspiracy.
It's a conspiracy that just wanted to protect all that is good and stand against all that is bad.
Okay.
But that's not what's interesting here.
What's interesting here is the objective information that it was a conspiracy.
And then it should be on the American people to decide whether or not they think this conspiracy is so great, you know?
But that is the argument that she's laying out here.
So, okay, like to me, I look at it like this.
Like, you can have it one of two ways, but you can't have both.
You can say this was an organized conspiracy, but then you don't get to laugh at every single right-winger who says this was an organized conspiracy.
It seems to me that consistency would demand that.
And it doesn't sound like democracy.
Yeah.
Well, they would argue that it was a conspiracy to uphold democracy.
Yeah, that's just not the way it works.
Right.
But the conspiracy, or at least all of the conspirators, all happen to hate Donald Trump and to think that he stands for everything bad and anti-democratic, and that Joe Biden, who's just kind of absent in this whole picture, Implicitly doesn't stand against all of these things because it can be assumed that if he did too, that would be mentioned.
But so the conspirators all think Donald Trump is wrong and stands for everything bad and everything they did happens to help Joe Biden.
But it's not like a conspiracy to, you know, send it one way or the other.
It's just to uphold democracy.
Yeah, I think one of the shadiest things in there was I think it they said $300 million went to like polling sites.
I wouldn't think private money could, I just would have thought if the government's running the election, I would think that they couldn't take donations or that private money could influence, you know, exactly the polling sites.
You know what I mean?
I would think that that would have to be a government function with government money.
I wouldn't think you could spend three, firstly, $300 million.
That's like starting a massive corporation money.
That's not, that's not chump change.
Where the fuck did that money go?
Why is it being used?
Why is it accepted?
That just struck me as one of the shadiest things in the article.
And it's just kind of mentioned, like we, they were able to fundraise $300 million.
I don't know if the word was polling stations, but it was something along those lines.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The other thing that really struck me, and I recommend people go read the article, is that she talked about how a lot of the organizers from the Black Lives Matter movement this summer were really funneled into getting out the vote stuff.
And that to me, I thought was like really interesting because it's like, you guys are basically confirming what Sean Hannity and Laura Ingram said all summer long, that this was all about it being election year, that this was all about getting Joe Biden elected, something that I was very skeptical to believe.
But that's what she's basically arguing: that Black Lives Matter was in fact, at least many of the participants and the organizers involved were a Democrat, you know, were a Democratic organization.
They were the foot soldiers of the Democratic Party.
Good thing the Libertarian Party did so much outreach to Black Lives Matter.
Good thing the LP made sure that everyone knew they were on the side of Black Lives Matter.
I haven't seen any articles about how they were organizing for Joe Jorgensen, but I might have missed those.
All right, I highly recommend that people go read this piece.
If you read it with even just a slightly critical eye, there's some really interesting information in there.
It's a long piece with a lot of good stuff in it.
So I recommend you go check it out.
It's up at time.com.
Again, the piece is titled The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.
All right, on Wednesday's episode, we got the great Scott Horton coming on to discuss his brand new book, Enough Already.
Highly recommend people go get that if you haven't already.
And then on Friday, we'll be back with Robbie the Fire talking more of that, talking more of that Liberty smack.
Oh, and then next week, Spike Cohen is on the show.
So I believe next Monday.
I got him coming in.
I got to check my calendar.
But yeah, so Spike Cohen will be on the show next week.
Scott Horton on the show tomorrow and more with Robbie the Fire on Friday.