It’s Wednesday, November 11, 2020, and welcome back to The McSpencer Group—an unrehearsed, hastily assembled discussion about meta-politics. Joining me is Edward Dutton. Main topic: Somehow Everyone LostThis past week’s presidential election went exactly as expected. . . it was a complete s**t show. Liberals went to bed on Tuesday, crying and screaming, thinking that Trump had somehow won again, and their country, was, indeed, racist. But as mail-in ballots arrived, their gloating began. Conservatives, on the other hand, declared victory early, and danced on the graves of pollsters. But as the final tallies materialized, they were the ones whining and denying reality like a bunch of blue-haired SJWs. Put simply, Americans hate each other, and it’s impossible to imagine any election not being heinous as this one. Ed and I discuss the real problems with mail-in ballots, and Donald Trump’s electoral woes with the people that got him elected in the first place. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe
It's Wednesday, November 11th, 2020, and welcome back to The McSpencer Group, an unrehearsed, hastily assembled discussion about metapolitics.
Joining me today is Edward Dutton.
Main topic, somehow everyone lost.
This past week's presidential election went exactly as expected.
It was a complete shitshow.
Liberals went to bed on Tuesday, crying and screaming, thinking that Trump had somehow won again, and their country was, indeed, racist.
But as mail-in ballots arrived, their gloating began.
Conservatives, on the other hand, declared victory early and danced on the graves of pollsters.
But as the final tallies materialized, they were the ones whining and denying reality like a bunch of SJWs.
Put simply, Americans hate each other, and it's impossible to imagine any election not being as heinous as this one.
Ed and I discussed the real problems with mail-in ballots and Donald Trump's electoral woes with the people that got him elected in the first place.
Ed, how are you doing?
You look very cheerful.
I'm not a particularly jolly heretic at the moment, it has to be said.
Well, you said the world might be ending.
I'm not sure it's going to be that bad.
Well, I mean, if the QAnon conspiracy theory is correct, then the Savior has not manifested.
The Savior has not manifested to take down the bad hombres that are running the world.
Isn't this the storm that was promised to us?
This is the storm.
You've just misread prophecy, as usual.
So he is going, oh yeah, well that's the thing, the prophecies were quite vague and often seemed to be wrong.
But on this occasion, Trump's ultimately going to triumph in some way that is unclear.
It's like with God answering prayers.
He doesn't answer them in exactly the way you ask him to, but he does answer them.
He moves in mysterious ways, yeah.
That reassures me.
Okay, fine.
Good.
Everything's fine.
Now that you've been relieved, we can now talk about I have to say, I do feel a little bit better knowing what happened.
I have had a really serious Twitter addiction over the last week.
I can usually keep my Twitter usage under control, but I've been totally addicted.
And I actually wrote myself a little note.
Dear Richard, get off Twitter.
You know you have more important work to do.
There are bigger things in the world.
So I will be doing that.
I'm going to be lightly using social media.
I know.
You're even, quote, tweeting me and disagreeing with me.
Oh, I dared to criticize.
It's true.
I always disagree with you very respectfully because I know that you're actually going to make a real argument.
But that has been my impression.
I think everyone was a bit catatonic over the past few days.
We wanted closure for a long time.
We didn't get it.
But you seem to have taken this a little bit harder than I have.
I mean, I voted for the winner.
So I tried to get a mental framing of like, see, I've won.
That wasn't all of it, but that was part of it.
No, I'm...
I just don't...
As you know, I like to make sense of things.
I like structure and order and things like that.
And this is a period of disorder and that makes me unhappy.
I like to know what's going on.
I like to know exactly what's going on to be able to sort of work out what's happening.
I really can't be sure precisely.
What's going to occur.
But I think the really interesting thing for me was the consequences of the postal vote.
Because we had this in Britain, and it worked a charm.
And they had it in America for different reasons, and it worked a charm.
So in Britain in 2004, I think it might have been, the Labour Party were concerned, for the good of their morale and whatever, that they were going to do badly in the European elections.
The European elections, of course, Britain's not in Europe anymore, and they weren't really very important, and they were by proportional representation rather than by first-past-the-post.
And so this meant that unusual parties could do well, and this could give vent to extremism and give a platform to extremism.
Well, Nick Griffin was in the European Parliament.
Exactly.
Well, this is what they were trying to stop.
So what they were concerned about was the rise of the UK Independence Party, which was, of course, regarded as a far right party, and of the BNP, which was regarded as a British National Party, which was regarded as an even more far right party.
And particularly them, they didn't like because that very substantially took votes away from the Labour Party.
And so concerned that they were going to win seats in the 2004 European election, they brought in...
One of them was the North West, the other was the North East, whatever.
And the North West was the one where that party had support and councillors.
And so they brought in compulsory voting by post.
Everyone voted by post.
That was what they brought in.
They claimed it was an experiment.
It's an experiment with voting by post.
You used to have to give an excuse to have a postal ballot, a good excuse that you were disabled or something like that.
But you didn't have to have an excuse and you couldn't even vote in person.
Everything was by postal ballot.
The result of that was two interesting things.
One, yes, it substantially elevated the turnout.
So normally people don't bother to vote in European elections because they're not considered particularly important.
They don't have real power.
Who cares?
So it massively elevated the turnout because all of these lazy people who in the past, I can't bother to go and vote.
I've got to go in person to the polling station.
I'm not going to do that.
They can just go to the local postbox at the end of the road or even just send their wife to the postbox at the end of the road.
So they vote.
And those people will tend not to be particularly interested, not particularly politically engaged, not particularly fervent.
And so they vote for rather centrist parties, like the Labour Party, let's say, or Conservative Party.
Whereas the parties of the extreme...
Those people really are into it, they really want to vote, and so they will always vote.
And so therefore it artificially elevates the turnout and suppresses the results of these parties that have more fervent supporters.
That's exactly what it did.
And that seems to have been what has happened with the American election, with the elevated turnout, which is all of these people who wouldn't otherwise bother to vote because they're lazy and don't care.
It's much easier for them to vote, so they do vote, and they vote for the Democrats.
So I think that's a big thing.
I think if COVID hadn't been there and there hadn't been this easy access to postal voting, then the result might have been different.
I agree with that, actually.
And let me also jump in.
I am against this vote-by-mail thing.
And so I'll give a little bit of a pass to them in terms of COVID, because we know what COVID was back in May.
Or something like this when these things were first being floated.
But now we do know what COVID is.
And all these people who support mail-in voting and so on are blissfully tweeting about these big rallies of liberals celebrating Joe Biden.
They're dancing.
They're kissing each other.
They're not wearing masks.
They're clearly super spreading a highly contagious disease.
And these people don't care, much like they didn't care when Black Lives Matter went out.
So, I...
I don't take them seriously, to be honest.
And the other thing is, this is almost philosophical.
I don't like the idea of mail-in voting.
I think it should be available if you're in the military or if you're a businessman who happens to be overseas or you're disabled.
Okay, fine.
It's like 5% of the population at most votes by mail.
Or the voting population votes by mail.
That's okay.
But I think the election needs to be an event.
It's not a poll.
It's not an ongoing poll where someone's voting in August and someone's voting in September and they kind of change their mind.
There's a lot of, there's like major Google searches of can I change my vote.
I think it, I actually will fully agree with conservatives here.
It should be an event.
And you need to jump through some hoops if you want to vote by mail.
And you should go.
It captures a moment in time.
It is like a sports game.
You don't get to delay the match or the game if your quarterback is hurt.
You don't just say, oh, let's play next week or let's play the week before.
Yeah, it has to be on a day.
Exactly.
You play on Sunday at noon.
The assumption in a democracy is that you're voting for the best.
You're not only voting for the policies of the party, but you're voting also, particularly with the presidency, you're voting for the best possible candidate, and therefore you need to be equipped with all possible information about that candidate, and you can only be equipped with all possible information about that candidate if you vote at the last possible moment.
That's why campaigning is suspended on election day.
So there's no further campaigning on Election Day itself.
You campaign up to Election Day and then you stop and on Election Day the decision is made.
So I agree that it's bad for that reason.
It's bad also because I think it's just a further nail in the coffin of community life.
Robert Putnam's holding a loan.
It's a further nail in community.
And community and trust are so important to sustaining democracy.
And it's a ritual and doing things together.
It's a further thing that you're not doing together.
I agree.
So that's a further problem for democracy itself.
A further problem with it is that some of these, I don't know about your ones, but some of the ones in Britain are quite complicated to fill in.
My erstwhile colleague, Dr James Thompson, calculated that you'd have to have at least average IQ to be able to correctly follow.
A postal ballot.
You put it in this envelope and then sign this and put that in that envelope.
I remember when I voted by post once in Britain, because you had to, it was very complicated to work out what was going on.
And so I think that's bad.
But also it is clearly open to fraud.
And there was an investigation in Britain after the 2004 election where the judge concluded that the standards of...
Of the 2004 election in North West England, where it was an all-postal ballot, he said it would have disgraced the banana republic.
Interesting.
And you had many, many cases of these votes going missing, of ballots being harvested by particular political parties and filled in, of pressure being able to put on people because you can go around people's houses and say, OK, you've got a postal ballot.
We know you've got one.
We'll take it in for you, you know?
And so it ceases to be a secret ballot.
Pressure can be exerted on people.
The ballots can be interfered with and changed.
They can't be observed in the same way that, nor because there's so many of them coming in at once.
You've got these complicated system envelopes and whatever.
And so it's impossible to have observers there all the time, every stage of the process, observing everything.
Whereas with normal ballots, you can have observers at every stage if you want to.
And he showed many cases of this, of it being corrupt.
And it results in cases of counselling.
I remember being overturned on the basis that the level of corruption was demonstrated.
And so it means that the stench of corruption in a tight race said, OK, he won the popular vote, but it's very tight, Biden, I mean, but it's very tight in Pennsylvania.
It's tight in the places that delivered him the Electoral College vote.
The stench of corruption hangs over it.
Now, unfortunately, that's not really a good enough argument.
I don't know that they'll be able to go to the courts and say, okay, well, therefore rerun it.
They won't.
They have to be able to prove that it would materially affect the result.
Yeah, that it would have affected the race as well, for them to get a hearing in the Supreme Court.
Otherwise, it's not going to go anywhere.
I mean, look, a couple of things.
First off, I agree with the mail-in.
I also think that it clearly affected the election.
And without mail-in voting at this scale, Trump might very well have won.
I mentioned in my forecast that Trump got a 30% increase of votes in the Republican primary in New Hampshire in winter.
When was that?
February, March?
I can't remember.
So basically, in an election that clearly didn't matter.
130,000 New Hampshireites walked through the snow to vote for him.
And I was actually kind of, I didn't say this online, but I was kind of personally having doubts about my prediction of a Biden victory and a comfortable victory, which I predicted, which obviously the comfortable ass, the comfort was missing from the outcome.
Because I felt like I had underestimated just the religious fervor of Trump voters.
It just meant more to them than it did Biden voters.
Trump voters love Trump.
Biden voters simply hate Trump.
And I guess hate triumphed over love.
Hate wins, once again.
But they had this major fervor.
And the other thing I'd point out is that there were people who were...
Predicting this.
And there was a meme that was put out called the Red Mirage.
And I remember reading about it and kind of discounting it because I was saying, well, everyone makes predictions about elections, and then the day of the election, they're all out the window and something weird happens.
But in fact, the Red Mirage occurred.
So in these states, some states, Michigan being one, Pennsylvania being another, Where early votes, mail-in votes, were counted after the day of votes.
You had this weird situation where Trump had big leads.
And you can at least excuse him a little bit for saying that I won.
Look at this.
I was up by 15 points and there was 70% of the vote in.
And so on.
But those have to do with...
America itself, which has a Tenth Amendment, which means that anything that's not just explicitly stated in the Constitution is given to the states.
Therefore, these kind of semi-sovereign entities, maybe that's saying a little bit much, but kind of sovereign entities called the states, determine the election.
I mean, there is an electoral college, everyone knows about that, but also they run the voting system and voting systems are simply different in each state.
We knew about Florida early.
The polls in Florida were very close, but Trump actually won it.
By a fairly sizable amount.
And then we still don't know what's happening in Arizona and Michigan and elsewhere.
And the red mirage occurred.
Trump was up in these places.
And then this slow recount of mail-in votes comes in.
And it goes down.
So I think that the fundamental cause of the level of angst and MAGA coping is something else.
I don't think it's the election itself.
But I can at least...
Give them the benefit of the doubt to some level in the sense that this is weird and messy in the words of Joe Biden.
And I agree.
There is a kind of taint of corruption that will always be there.
Now, I think the cause of that is actually deeper.
I think you probably agree.
The cause of that is this radical polarization that is occurring to the point that I don't think either side is going to accept.
The other side winning.
Even if we could just definitively, scientifically prove that there was like, you know, fraud was at a level of 0.001% or something, and it's okay.
Even then, we would be focusing on it.
It's like the Heisenberg principle.
Even if it was erstwhile Trump's people that we would expect to be sympathetic to Trump, like whatever they see as alt-right, then they would still, they would turn around and say, oh, well, Richard Spencer proved that, and he must be a Fed.
Yeah, exactly.
So, yeah, I mean, for example, one of the things that they said was there were some areas, I forget where, some districts, some, what do you call them, precincts, where the turnout black areas was very, very high, like 85%, 90%, and they were almost all for Biden.
Well, you shouldn't be surprised by that, actually, because they're overwhelmingly going to vote for Biden anyway, and you put them in a situation where voting is incredibly easy.
It's really, really easy in the way that it didn't used to be.
You've just got to go to the end of the street.
Have you even got to do that?
Someone will help you out with it.
Someone will help you out.
There'll be people you can ring up and they'll do it for you.
So it's not actually as shocking as it seems when you take that into account.
It's the postal votes.
America always talks about, oh, it's terrible that you have a low turnout.
Well, what having a low turnout means is that only the people that are really politically engaged and care bother to vote.
And the other half of the country don't vote.
And when you get an elevated vote, it's either because someone like Trump, some populist, or Brexit or whatever, has inspired people that don't normally vote to vote.
Or if you bring in postal voting, you just get people that lack of basic and don't really care.
They don't care.
They don't care.
It's just, oh, whatever, I'll do it.
So that's what happened, I'm afraid.
The impression I get is that...
If I was in their position, you would presumably hold your cards quite close to your chest.
You wouldn't publicly...
They keep saying in the news, though, without any evidence, but you would surely wait in presenting your evidence until you were in front of the courts, which supposedly is going to be happening next week.
But I would be interested to see what they're going to try and say, because they would have to demonstrate industrial-scale electoral fraud in hundreds of thousands of invalidated votes.
Yes.
I think a lot of, I mean, there have been at least plausible explanations for some of these things.
There's, you know, the line, the Biden snake, where he jumps up 138,000 votes.
There have at least been plausible explanations for this.
I mean, look, I'll just admit, yes, there is some level of fraud in any election system, particularly in big cities.
I mean, my mother grew up in Louisiana.
I mean, she's less cynical now, but she said growing up, her level of cynicism about democratic elections was just off the chart.
They said, they're all corrupt.
They all stuffed the ballot box.
But the point is, we kind of like this one.
It was just like a base level of cynicism.
Chicago is world famous.
There were major election fraud, actually in the election of 1960, that might very well have flipped it towards Kennedy as opposed to Nixon in 1960.
And that's just clear.
I mean, that is real.
So there is a level of fraud there.
But again, the level that we have now, I think, you know, we can look into it, sure.
But I think it's coming from this radical polarization of not accepting the other side.
I mean, the other side is evil.
In a world of radical polarization, the other side wants to round you up and throw you into a gulag.
It literally does, though.
It's not paranoid.
You've got people like this AOC woman.
Yeah.
We've actually said, OK, we want to make a list of anyone that's ever worked with or cooperated with the Trump administration in any way.
And in short, when someone responds to that tweet, yeah, we've got this list and we're going to make sure they can never get a faculty position, that they can never get a job doing, that they've basically never worked for the state, never worked for the government in any capacity ever again.
So it's not actually that paranoid that they would...
I agree.
There is a lot of vindictiveness.
I mean, look, I have faced this...
You know, a hundredfold.
I mean, it's real, yes.
But it's not necessarily real for your average Trump fan living in Ohio, and he seems to believe that too.
Like, he's not going to be rounded up and put into a gulag, yet he believes that.
And the left believes it.
I mean, Marianne Williamson was tweeting before the election, like, if Trump wins, you know, I was telling my daughter she might have to come visit me in a cell and all this kind of stuff.
I mean, it's just, I mean, it is nonsensical.
And Trump, clearly, he's not a good fascist in this regard.
He wouldn't actually do these things.
They just say he's going to do them.
But regardless.
Just polarization is so intense, and QAnon is a kind of tip of the spear.
It is an intense expression of the level of paranoia and hatred and religious fervor that both sides actually have.
And so I don't think any election would work this way.
We were still polarized to a large degree in 2000.
I mean, a lot of this is reminding me of the 2000 election.
And I just recently this morning was watching Al Gore's concession speech.
And he said, I mean, he got some jabs in.
I mean, he said, I strongly disagree with the Supreme Court's ruling.
Just as a reminder, at that point, Florida was extremely tight.
It's been tight for 20 years.
It never changes.
It was extremely close.
You actually had a very similar situation with the Cuban vote going for the Republicans on the basis of this, I think it was Ilya, who was it?
There was this Cuban refugee who was sent back to Cuba.
And that actually, the Republicans kind of were in favor of him staying.
I mean, it's kind of weird.
When you think about immigration, there was a huge wave of a Cuban vote in favor of Republicans.
The vote was extremely tight, although it appears statewide that Al Gore might have had the edge, although it's slight.
But anyway, the Supreme Court argued this will do irreparable harm to the country.
The people descending said that this was a violation of Equal Protection Clause.
Whatever.
It's, you know, legalese.
But Trump, the recount was stopped and George W. Bush was given Florida.
That it was stopped.
That it will do harm to the country.
So what?
They want to know who won Florida.
And I thought it was amazing.
Because you're disagreeing with Antonin Scalia.
It was amazingly gallant and magnanimous of Al Gore and sort of southern gentleman type.
It was.
To, as it were, put the unity of the country before the...
I think he did.
It was extremely tight, though.
But he said, he got some jabs in.
He said, I totally disagree with this.
But he also was a Southern gentleman, and he said things like, we are one people with a common history and a common destiny.
And he was making these, we're all American-like arguments.
And Biden was making a lot of these as well in his speech.
He was saying, you know, we're all Americans, we need to lower the temperature and so on.
And that's all fine and good.
I mean, on a basic level, I agree with him.
I don't want just intense hatred all the time and silliness and coping.
But it just ain't gonna happen.
We are in a different place now.
He's up against a candidate.
Yes, 20 years later, it's 20 years more of coming apart.
He's up against a candidate who is certainly not a southern gentleman and who is not going to take this.
And if there is the slightest possibility that he can overturn or even just undermine confidence in the result, then he's clearly going to do so.
And I find it amazing that somebody can be that powerful and get into positions of influence like that, and this is just a childish act of pique.
I can only assume he must have people seriously advising him, saying, you know, look, this is the strategy we're going to take, and this is what we're going to try and achieve, and it might be, yeah, we have to accept that you've lost, but this is our strategy, and this is what we're going to do, and we expect it to have these outcomes.
And so, go and play golf.
You know, I don't think it's just, I can't believe it's just him stomping around.
There must be people that he seriously takes the advice of that know what they're doing.
Well, reportedly, so take it with a grain of salt, Jared Kushner is telling him to concede.
Now, also, and I don't want to get too, you know, what on this, but...
I thought it was quite telling that Bibi Netanyahu recognized Joe Biden as the president.
That actually was a kind of serious act.
It is amazing that even the big Trump fans kind of assume that those two people are in it.
So that either Trump's friends with Netanyahu and Netanyahu is controlling him or something like that.
Netanyahu has acknowledged Joe Biden's victory.
Trump did a tremendous amount for him.
But, I mean, understandably, Netanyahu's not going to die on this hill.
And so that was a major thing.
And I...
I think looking at his character, I think he's going to try to play it both ways, which is what he'll always do.
So he's going to undermine his rabid fans by conceding in the next few days.
This is just my sense.
I might be wrong.
I've been wrong before.
He's going to undermine his most rabid fans by...
But he's also going to leave it ambiguous so that they will still support him and there'll be this stench in the air.
You know, a different type of president or a different type of candidate would have been like, no, the voting's fine.
We're all in this together.
We're one America.
We're going forward.
And he would be applauded for his patriotism.
Trump's obviously not going to do that.
So he's going to concede but leave this stench in the air, much like Hillary Clinton did.
Hillary Clinton conceded, but she didn't exactly dampen Russian conspiracy fears.
She was likely behind the scenes pushing these, and these ultimately, through a lot of twists and turns, led to the impeachment of Donald Trump.
I think Donald Trump is going to concede, but keep that in the air.
The MAGA diehards are going to die hard.
They are not going to let this go.
They will not treat Do you think MAGA will be going in 2024?
Me?
No.
No.
I'd be surprised if he ran again.
I mean, it's a thing that he did.
It was a thing of its time.
It was a thing of 2016.
And it worked and whatever.
And I'd be very surprised if he ran again.
Although he won't want to remove himself from the scene.
Once someone has been intoxicated with power, they can never easily abandon it.
Yes.
And that was true of Margaret Thatcher, and it's going to be true of him.
And so he'll have to find...
And one of the things he's always saying is, I got the most votes ever of any presidential, you know, well, losing candidate, basically.
He wouldn't say that.
No, he did.
He got the most votes ever.
Except any other one.
So I think that he...
There must be some...
I think we can expect some skullduggery.
Whether he'll concede, it would be so out of character for him to accept weakness.
I suppose he did it when there was the scandal over the grabbing by the pussy thing.
Then he publicly apologised.
That was kind of a public confession of weakness there.
He was young, immature, 59-year-old.
Just out of college.
Yeah, made some inappropriate remarks that he wouldn't make powers a 70-year-old or a 69-year-old.
So he's been mature since then.
But I'm very interested to know what's going to happen.
And I was quite pleased that I stayed.
I sort of got up early in the morning on the day.
I watched, thinking it wasn't.
I was there watching when they finally declared that Biden had won.
Yeah.
And I think...
I just think it's impossible to predict what's going to happen, but what he'll do.
Could they drag him kicking and screaming from the White House?
Could he refuse to do that?
Well, that was a meme that was out there.
That was a reported meme.
They're going to have to drive me kicking and screaming.
And you and I, when we went on a kind of like hastily went on a podcast with Keith Woods at the last minute, I was kind of suggested that great schism type thing where Trump...
It just remains the shadow president, and he's not in control of the bureaucracy or the military, but he just kind of doesn't ever concede.
And the polarization becomes so intense, it doesn't quite lead to actual civil war, but it leads to just parallel states of mind where...
Trump is still tweeting as if he's the president.
He visits some foreign countries, like Bolsonaro or in Eastern Europe, and they accept him as the president.
He acts kind of like the president.
It's just this bizarre realm where polarization is so intense, we've just separated into two mental states.
We don't communicate with each other.
I can see that.
I mean, possible.
I don't think it's going to happen, but very possible.
The media, that's just propaganda, of course, is now making out that, okay, everyone's accepted it and everyone's happy and we can stop social distancing.
Men can kick each other in the street to show how happy we are about this and all this.
And it's all a happy world and, you know, Biden is going to reunite the nation and whatever.
And suddenly it's completely forgotten that he's senile, he's pre-senile, he's got serious problems and whatever.
So there must be things behind the scene, what the media are presenting to me, what's happening, which is now, look...
America's pleased.
It's obviously not true.
And there must be...
Think of how they suppressed the Hunter Biden story.
Think of how they have done all these other things.
So there must be something going on behind the scenes that I'm not perceiving by watching Sky News or whatever.
It would be more noticeable in America or would be more noticeable on the ground.
But I just would be...
It would be satisfying that he would not give up.
It would be in his character to not give up and I want him even though to just go out in a blaze of...
I think Enoch Powell said, all political careers end unhappily.
You know, you live long enough to become the villain, so to speak.
I mean, it is kind of a thing that happens.
And we have this nostalgia for past presidents.
Even George W. Bush, who was very unpopular in his second term and was, by at least my standards, was a disaster as a president.
There's even been a renewed nostalgia for him.
There's certainly a nostalgia for Obama, even though he lived in an age of polarization.
I think we're kind of past a point of no return or past a singularity or something with Trump.
I don't know if that will ever...
You know, all these other, as I pointed out in my forecast, all these other presidents achieved very high approval ratings during a crisis.
You know, George W. Bush got up to 90% or 91, I think, even approval rating right in the midst of 9-11.
And then it started to go down just gradually, slowly, but surely to very low approval ratings in the second term.
LBJ won in a monumental landslide in 1964.
George W. Bush's father got up to 90 during the Gulf War.
Clinton survived impeachment and went out with a buzzing economy and a stock market going through the roof and all this kind of stuff.
Trump has never existed outside of polarization, and the idea that he'll be looked back on wages, it's almost impossible.
But one of the ways you can unite a country is by going to war.
And that's what all of them did.
All of his predecessors, to some extent, I don't know about Obama, but otherwise they all...
Not Obama, actually.
Obama was kind of like empire in decline.
He did these small wars, which I absolutely opposed, and which were stupid, like in Libya and so on.
But in 2014, he didn't really have the guts to go into Syria and punt it, and it was just kind of like a declining U.S. empire that wasn't...
And Trump is like that, too.
Trump is very similar to Obama in his foreign policy in a kind of weird way.
So that at least leads me to believe that hot wars are on the decline, at least in the foreseeable future.
But yeah, I mean, is the possibility out there that in the next month or so, we get into a fight with Iran?
Maybe, I mean, it would create a lot of rancor, but might secure a certain base.
That's in the cards.
I mean, I could see that.
I'm not predicting that, but that's very possible.
What I like as well is the way that they try and portray Kamala Harris as the first, you know, part African-American.
Someone said she's the first biracial president or vice president.
Maybe they said the first biracial vice president.
Okay.
So Obama was black?
What's interesting though is they've never had an African American.
They've never had an African American.
No, they haven't.
Because they haven't.
Because a barber wasn't half African-American, half Kenyan.
Half Kenyan upper class.
Intelligence correlates with migration.
Upper class correlates with migration.
He was the defendant of slave traders.
And then she, half Jamaican middle class.
Again, intelligence correlates with migration.
So it's nothing to do with being African-American.
There has never been an African-American in such a senior position, and I doubt it.
No.
No, it's just, yeah, it's really bizarre.
But, okay, so let's look at what happened and the dynamics of the vote.
So I, as you know, have a hobby horse called...
Wexit.
And I see a little more people using this term.
You don't have to use the term.
It's not a big deal.
But it is basically a trend that is in the near term, granted, but is significant.
And this is that whites particularly, but not all, Middle to upper middle class suburban whites are leaving the Republicans and going to the Democratic Party.
So this is a long-term trend.
And you could see it in even voting patterns over the past 10 years.
So in 2010, with the so-called Tea Party election, Republicans got around 65% of the share of whites.
And they took back the House.
Parade, etc., etc.
And they did extremely well.
One would think, being the age that we are, around 40, that all upper-class suburban whites would be Republican.
That's their natural party.
It's the party of wealth and privilege and the status quo and personal ambition and all that kind of stuff.
At least it has been for decades.
But they are leaving.
So Mitt Romney won basically fewer whites and a lower percentage of whites.
Excuse me, let me go back.
Donald Trump won fewer whites and a lower percentage of whites than Mitt Romney did in 2016.
So all of this talk of Donald Trump as the white nationalist candidate, I get why they say that, but it's kind of empirically incorrect.
So Mitt Romney won 59% of the white vote and still was not able to defeat Barack Obama.
Donald Trump won 58% of the white vote.
The key issue is that he won different whites.
So whites who were either apathetic, i.e.
didn't vote, or voted for Obama in 2008 and or 2012.
Millions of them came over to Donald Trump and he won a miraculous election in 2016 by winning different white people.
And there's also a long term trend of whites, what we could call blue collar.
I think that actually is a very good measure because sometimes your actual income or wealth doesn't describe your class.
Class is something, particularly now, it is something a little bit separate from wealth.
Not making a lot of money and working in an internship, but has a degree from Yale and is a woke leftist.
They are kind of of a different class than someone who's making $70,000 a year while working as a plumber.
So it just is what it is.
But whites without college degrees used to vote, 70% of them used to vote for Democrats.
Democrats is the good old boy party.
It's the party of Southern segregation.
It's the party of Midwestern unionists.
It's that party.
By 2016, that had flipped totally, where 70% of those whites were voting for Donald Trump.
So that was a long-term trend.
There's also this long-term trend of upper middle class whites, or a short-term trend of upper middle class whites leaving the Republican Party and going to the Democrats.
And what did we see?
I'll share my screen.
This is a good analysis by the Brookings Institute.
By William Fry is, I believe, his name.
So we can just look right here.
This is figure one.
There is a 5%.
I've been promoting the 5% meme, so have others.
It's real.
So this is Democratic minus Republican vote margins by racial category.
There is just a 5% change in voting patterns among whites in general, and particularly white men.
So mail-in ballots might have actually helped Donald Trump a little bit because he did really well among black women.
He doubled his support among black ladies.
Remarkable.
We should tell AOC this, because I actually read an interview she did with the New York Times this morning in which she was saying she's really concerned about the white vote.
Apparently, whites are still voting for Donald Trump.
Well, actually, a lot fewer whites are voting for Donald Trump in 2020, and you need to talk to black ladies, because they are supporting white supremacy, apparently, according to your own terms, AOC.
So there is a major change in the white vote.
And if we scroll down...
It's actually pretty dramatic when you look at men with no college.
So here we go.
Men with college grads in 2016.
So again, this is figure two.
This is Democratic minus Republican votes.
So basically, men who were college grads were going to the Democrats by 14% over going to the Republicans.
This is really changing now.
In 2020.
So basically, you had men, no college, blue-collar college whites, went down for the Democrats, according to exit polls, these are CNN exit polls, by 11%.
So that is a major shift.
Huge.
Because the Republican Party, everyone's talking about this, Tucker, Josh Hawley.
This is 2016.
2016 versus 2020.
It's bad now for the Democrats.
A lot significantly less bad, yes.
So they are actually, whites are now plus two, white men with college degrees are now plus two voting for Democrats.
And previously they were minus 14. And that's not, I mean, again, if we use a stereotype.
Charles Murray's book coming apart of course he looks at this way in which you've had this split that's occurred among the well among all classes but certainly among the middle whatever what we call it in America it's funny these terms they use let's say the upper middle class or the upper class whatever you would use whereby it was traditionally that the working class and the upper class all have pretty much the same kind of way of seeing the Yeah.
fundamental values in a lot of ways but it was just that the work the the rich the poor and the people in the middle whereas what you've had since the 60s is this divergence whereby you've had this wokeness this wokification of the middle class particularly so that they don't any longer do the same things that the that the working class do they don't have the same values have some of the more Republican types, the more traditional types, the more religious types probably.
But then you have those which deviate from it increasingly.
And that's what we're seeing, the splitting apart, this coming apart.
And what you might also expect would be that social climbers who were working class might begin to imitate what was perceived as the winning team.
Right.
Or also Biden himself.
I mean, look, Biden was associated with BLM and the riots, and that clearly did not help him.
But at the same time, Biden is a old white guy.
His senility, as I've told you, is a feature, not a bug.
And he just seems normal and guileless and fun.
And he doesn't look like he hates you.
So I think Biden himself.
Personally, might have affected this.
But again, this show's coming together kind of ironically.
But then I'll go back to major states down here.
So also Gen X shifted pretty.
I mean, if we assume that this is vaguely Gen X, Gen X basically changed the election.
Go Gen X. My generation.
Black leather jackets.
Depression.
Conspiracy theories.
Negativity.
That's who we are.
We listen to you, too.
Okay.
Democrat minus...
Now, this is, again, this way that he's calculating it, which I think is good, which is Democrat minus Republican vote margins.
So this is figure four.
This had a huge effect in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
So over here on these two columns right here, so the gray column is 2016, the orange column is 2020.
This one to the far right here is white men, no college.
Again, in Michigan, you see a 14% shift.
So that among white men without a college degree, blue collar if you want to call them, 14% shift towards the Democrats.
Now, they're still voting for the Republicans on margin.
But the other thing to think about is, does that mean they're changing their mind, or does that mean they've just got lazy chaps who are blue-collar workers who wouldn't normally vote, and now it's a cinch to vote, so they vote?
That's a fair point.
I mean, I don't know exactly.
We meditate against the hypothesis of polarization.
It's just that this is uniquely an election in which it's been incredibly easy to vote.
And so people that really couldn't care less, and who are perhaps not very bright either, because intelligence predicts voting, who aren't very bright, and therefore might even think, oh, well, I'm working class, I should vote Democrat.
Like that behind the times.
Yes.
That they would do so.
I mean, even Ira, 20 years ago, the full change, this idea that you're a Southerner and therefore you must never vote Republican.
Ever.
Ever.
That still holds with some people.
Some particularly traditional people, they still take that view.
My grandpappy said Republicans are the worst people ever, even though it's diametrically opposed to everything they believe in.
You might have things like that going on.
I fully admit that mail-in voting affected this election tremendously.
And the other thing, once you get something going, it's hard to end it.
So you've created a new trend.
Using the excuse, justifiable somewhat, of COVID.
And now you create new behavior among people.
So now they say, oh yeah, I voted by mail last time.
I'm going to do it again.
It was so much easier.
You created a new behavior and that might also really fundamentally change elections.
I agree.
But I don't want to discount a couple of things.
The first one being that I personally decided the fate of the world.
By my voting for Joe Biden.
Just kidding.
Joke.
But it is real.
Like, at the end of his campaign, Trump offered a platinum plan for African Americans.
He promised some other American dream plan or something to Hispanics.
The wall is kind of, sort of taking shape.
No real immigration reform has been done.
He didn't offer stimulus checks en masse.
He did once.
There was one for a thousand bucks or whatever.
He didn't really take care of people.
He didn't talk about a lot of these populist issues at his rallies.
He bragged about lowest black unemployment.
I mean, at some point, he did not deliver.
And no, I don't think it's all a bunch of Richard Spencerites who changed the election.
I was joking.
But there actually are some of those people.
And we shouldn't just dismiss that.
There's a significant amount of people who made the exact same calculation that I did.
That Trump is a fake politician.
It's fake populism.
And I've had enough of it.
He lies.
He's a con man.
It's bullshit.
That actually is...
There are a number of people like that.
Trump won Michigan by 10,000 votes last time.
10,000 people might very well think like this.
I do not dismiss that.
I also don't dismiss macro trends that you were talking about.
But the fact is, through mail-in election, Trump gained among every single group, including white women.
He did not gain among white men.
There is a 5% gap in terms of percentages.
It just is what it is.
And I'm sorry I'm kind of getting on my high horse here, but all of these Trump fans who just want to just slam, oh no, that doesn't matter.
It doesn't mean anything.
It is what it is.
It is real.
Stop denying the fact that white men determined this election.
We did.
And take exit polls with a grain of salt.
Fair enough.
But, like, the trends are pointing in one direction.
White men...
What would be consistent with that?
It would be two things, then.
One would be that men are less likely to vote than women.
Right.
White men, therefore, you've got an elevated, working class people are less likely to vote for the middle class people, so you end up with more white people voting, or white men voting, and those people are likely to be less furlent, and therefore they're more likely to vote for a status quo Democrat candidate.
And the other possibility, or related possibility, is that these kinds of white men see that Joe is a bit like them.
Yeah.
Uncle Joe is not seemingly...
I'm sure he's very intelligent, but seemingly not particularly intelligent.
Doggy old bugger with the embarrassing son.
Reminds them of their own family.
Reminds them of their own family.
Whereas Trump is just this wealthy, conceited man.
And he's conning them.
He didn't...
Trump...
Said that coal mining was going to come back.
Trump told people at rallies, don't sell your house.
Don't get a new profession.
We're bringing it all back.
Trump made promises in Wisconsin about a new Foxconn facility that was going to, we're going to just reinvent manufacturing.
That was a joke.
They built a bunch of stuff.
They poured millions into it.
It's not doing anything.
Maybe it's too much to ask for Trump just to revolutionize everything in three and a half years or whatever, but still, he just didn't deliver on any of this stuff.
And at some point, you just view him as a bad joke and you just want to move on.
And he's just like the other Republicans who wanted Detroit to go bankrupt and I would lose my job.
He's just like Mitt Romney, basically.
And they just go back to the fold.
And this is what happened.
I mean, the states, the key states, at least now, the key states that Biden flipped are Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
We'll see about Arizona.
And Georgia is also just a huge state, even if Trump does win, which is possible.
The fact that that is a swing state in the Deep South and so on demonstrates tremendous demographic shift, i.e.
whites moving to Democrats.
Yeah.
All I can say is the end of the world has been prognosticated and I'm waiting for it to occur.
It doesn't seem to be occurring.
But what he could have done, the things he could have done, like reacted to the big tech problems and all this kind of stuff, he didn't do.
It was a wasted opportunity.
And he's now just getting owned.
Every other tweet is said, this is a false claim about the election.
They're just owning him now.
This is maybe a discussion for another day.
It's funny when he owns journalists, because yes, journalists are all a bunch of liberals.
I mean, of course they are.
But at some point, they're going to own you back.
You can't just endlessly try to delegitimize them and get your followers to just say they're all fake news.
They're absolute liars.
They're tricking you.
They're horrible people.
If you do that enough, they're going to punch back.
It's just kind of like you either need to find a solution...
It was a humiliating punchback, though, wasn't it?
For a sitting president to come out and do a speech and for them to cut him off.
For a number of channels to just cut him off.
Oh, who cares?
Yeah, exactly.
It's absolutely humiliating.
But it's like, you asked for this fight!
And there are ways, I mean, I don't want to go back on my deplatforming hobbyhorse, but there are ways that this issue can be solved.
And just yammering about Section 230 and threatening that you're just going to get sued by all these people, and saying that they're all fake news and they're horrible, just doing that over and over has consequences.
You pick a fight, you've got...
You've got to be willing to throw punches back.
You've got to be willing to do something.
And sometimes not picking that fight is maybe a good idea.
And just kind of slowly moving of saying things like, well, we all want fair media.
Social media is now mainstream.
Social media is no longer the kind of Wild West that it was in 2015 to 2016.
We kind of need everyone to have a voice and we need to kind of work this out.
He could have helped the alternative media quite a bit, but he didn't.
I mean, Matt Drudge, you know, again, this is like a discussion for another day, but Matt, I saw this very interesting article that was sent to me.
In 2017, Matt Drudge said that Donald Trump saved mass media, that these companies actually were failing.
Vanity Fair might have been going out of business.
Washington Post had to be bought by Bezos.
New York Times wasn't profiting.
They benefited from the Trump effect by him giving them interviews all the time, by them just broadcasting his speeches.
And then they benefited from the Trump effect after he got in office by just all this liberal outrage and the resistance and so on.
He kind of saved them.
And then he didn't do anything for alternative media.
He just threatened and...
Fumed, but he didn't do something about deplatforming, and that is the lifeblood of alternative media.
I mean, look, let's just be honest.
This is going to be broadcast as a podcast and on BitChute.
That is not where I want to be on YouTube, but I have to deal with the situation as it is.
But Trump could have tried something.
I know it's hard, but he could have done something, and he just simply...
Didn't.
And, you know, I don't know.
It's the end of the world.
Look, this guy, you know, he needed to have done something, so I have no sympathy for him.
None.
I mean, I'm maybe harsher than you are, but I just don't.
I have sympathy for his, like, I have sympathy for, like, the broad, white...
