It’s Friday, December 14, 2020, and welcome back to The McSpencer Group ... an unrehearsed, hastily assembled program about meta-politics. Joining me is Brad Griffin—a man so Southern, his diet is composed solely of fried ochre and pecan pie. Main topic: Libtards Victorious The Kracken has been released . . . but instead of resembling a mythological beast from the age of titans, it amounted to a series of frivolous lawsuits, based on absurd argumentation and easily refutable statistical analysis, all but one of which were swiftly tossed out of Court. The final blow came on Friday, when the Supreme Court heard a case by the Texas Attorney General, and gave it short shrift. Will this, finally, be the end of Trump? And what will happen to the millions of Trumptards, who still believe their hero won? 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 Monday, December 14th, 2020, and welcome back to The McSpencer Group, an unrehearsed, hastily assembled program about metapolitics.
Joining me is Brad Griffin, a man so Southern his diet is composed solely of fried okra and pecan pie.
Main topic, libtards, victorious.
The Kraken has been released.
But instead of resembling a mythological beast from the Age of Titans, it amounted to a series of frivolous lawsuits based on absurd argumentation and easily refutable statistical analysis, all but one of which were swiftly tossed out of court.
The final blow came on Friday, when the Supreme Court heard a case by the Texas Attorney General and gave it short shrift.
Will this finally be the end of Trump?
And what will happen to the millions of Trump-tards who still believe their hero won?
Well, this election just never ends, basically.
I don't know when it's going to end.
We seem to cross these Rubicons, you could say, and then we just cross another.
And last night in...
In remarkably short order, the Supreme Court shot down a Texas lawsuit, which was joined by a number of other states.
And they claim to have standing because a federal election affects them all, basically, as states, which is actually a kind of reasonable statement.
But I'm not sure if it's necessarily a legal one.
But it was shot down by the Supreme Court and even some of the conservative justices basically said that they were willing to hear it, but they don't buy it.
And I have to say, some of the argumentation is just a bit ridiculous.
And I don't really think there's any other word for it.
I mean, it's kind of like the argumentation is really done without evidence.
And evidence in a court of law is something different than like some interesting meme you come up with or like a statistical anomaly or just some kind of weird fact that you created through your little model.
And I mean, what they are saying...
I mean, the brunt of it, and you've heard this quadrillion number, which came out from Kayleigh McEnany, about for it to happen in one state is one quadrillion to one.
For it to happen to four is a quadrillion to the fourth power.
We don't even have a name for that number.
It's like 50 zeros.
I mean, it's just this type of stuff.
And it's just like, if you're playing a football game and...
Each team scores a safety.
And so in the third quarter, you have some really bizarre score like 2-2.
Now, you could look at that and be like, 2-2?
What is this, baseball?
This is impossible.
What are the odds of this?
A million to one?
Well, it might be a million to one, but actually there have been games that are like that.
I looked this up before going on, just so my analogy would be...
As powerful as possible.
There's actually some games where three safeties have been scored in one single football game.
What are the odds of that?
Well, is that proof of fraud?
That's proof that the refs are getting paid off by the mob or both teams are in on it together?
No, it's not proof of anything.
It just isn't.
And it's interesting.
You can look into it, but it's just you cannot use that.
For a lawsuit, you just can't.
And in terms of all of these states where, oh, Trump was ahead by this much, and what are the odds that Biden would catch up to him as the night went on, which is basically their case?
Well, okay, on one level, you could say, yeah, that is statistically weird.
And what are the odds of that?
It's so strange.
But on another level, there's actually a...
Perfectly reasonable explanation for why that happened.
It's that Donald Trump spent six months talking down mail-in voting, telling his supporters not to do it.
And remember, his supporters aren't listening to the mainstream media.
They're even less or less frequently listening to Fox News.
They're listening to him and the kind of sycophantic alternative media around him.
You know, a total sham, or it was impossible, or you shouldn't do it, or whatever.
And they didn't do it.
And the Biden supporters were listening to the mainstream media, or they were listening to the alternative media that's in line with the mainstream media.
And so they engaged in a ton of mail-in balloting.
There's just a really simple explanation for why the election, or not the election itself, but election night was a bit odd.
And the fact that they just can't get over, it's like they're just obsessing about this leaf on a tree and they can't see the forest.
That the election, widespread election fraud or decisive election fraud that would have changed the outcome is just pretty speculative, to put it charitably.
But anyway, I got the conversation started.
What are your thoughts on all this stuff?
Well, I mean, we saw what the Supreme Court thinks of this nonsense last night when I believe the ruling was 7-2 to hear the case or something.
And they denied that Trump had standing.
If I'm not mistaken, the two who objected were like, they shouldn't even have brought this in the first place.
I think that was Thomas.
I believe it's Alito and Thomas.
I can go check.
This is ridiculous.
They shouldn't even have brought this in the first place.
We would hear it or something.
No one who looks at this, no one who's really looking at this election who doesn't got a vast personal stake in Donald Trump believes that it was voter fraud.
Let's just be honest here.
It wasn't even close, right?
He lost by what?
I think it's like 4.2 points now.
Yeah, he lost by like 7 to 8 million votes.
That's quite a lot of votes.
7 to 8 million votes, about 4.2 in the popular vote, by smaller margins in...
Most of the swing states.
That's consistent with him winning by 4.2 points.
You look at it and everywhere it's the same story.
It's the suburbs in Philadelphia, the suburbs in Atlanta, the suburbs in Phoenix, suburbs in Detroit and Grand Rapids, suburbs in Wisconsin, around Milwaukee.
That's where he lost the election.
There was no massive rigging in any of these big cities against Trump like we talked about before.
The opposite was true.
In most of these big cities, he performed better than he did last time.
His campaign strategy was to improve with the black vote and the Hispanic vote, and he did.
Well, I don't...
That was mission accomplished.
Yeah, I know.
I don't discount what you say.
I'm just curious what exactly happened, because he did really well in these big metropolitan areas, New York City being an excellent example.
He obviously lost that state by a lot, but he did really well in New York City.
It might be due to, like, the diversity outreach to the Platinum Plan.
And maybe.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are some...
Kind of like middle-of-the-road people living in those cities who were just freaked out by the riots and were just like, yeah, I mean, they kind of took the bait that he was putting forward, which is like, this is Joe Biden's America.
This is liberals, the blue states, the writing, you know, this kind of stuff.
And they didn't actually blame him for it.
They weirdly gave him credit for the disorder.
I don't know exactly what happened.
And there are weird things.
I mean, like, Texas is an excellent example because Texas had some of, has all, for a long time, but during 2020 as well, has some of the most strict election laws.
I mean, if you look at your own state, you would probably say, well, this might be actually tough for him to win.
Like, things are, we're headed.
Towards blue.
And this happened despite the fact that you had these, like, weird Hispanic anomalies, you know, where all these Hispanics were breaking for Trump in surprising, genuinely surprising ways.
And, you know, again, was it all fraud or whatever?
I mean, it's like, no.
You know, yeah, there might be some weird things around the edges, like...
Fine.
I'm not going to claim there's no fraud or whatever or no mistakes.
But there's clearly just more immediate, direct explanations for what happened.
Yeah, I mean, you can.
Go ahead.
Look at all the suburbs.
I mean, you can look at all the suburbs anywhere.
I mean, it wasn't just the swing states.
He lost by...
His decline in his margin was bigger in places like Kentucky and Kansas than it was in Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
I want to say he got crushed in the suburbs of Nashville.
He really got crushed in the suburbs of Kansas City.
We brought up Texas, and in Texas it was white suburbanites in the Fort Worth area, which you should be familiar with, Dallas and Fort Worth.
Those are the people who turn against them.
Everywhere you look, it's the same story.
Moderate voters, independent voters, white voters, living in the suburbs, turned against Trump.
In the states where it's a swing state, where it's close, that was enough to Tip it over the edge like it did in Wisconsin, like it did in Michigan, like it did in Pennsylvania, Georgia especially.
When we saw what happened, Georgia just got killed in the Atlanta suburbs.
There's no doubt what happened.
If there was fraud anyway, this is the argument.
It was just this massive fraud.
The massive fraud must have been in these college-educated, upscale, Well, not just upscale, but basically in the suburbs, where white people live in the suburbs.
That's where he clearly lost the election.
Yeah.
And no one, even the most of the- That I've been talking about for well over the year.
Yeah.
And even lots of other people have been talking about it as well.
Like, this is the major trend.
The major demographic trend that's occurring is middle-class white suburban professionals, SWIFTS.
Voting Democrat, and these are a seemingly natural constituency for the Republican Party, and they're flipping.
Yeah, I mean, no one who, the vast majority, I would say, of the people who are going along with the fraud narrative are doing so for political reasons or financial reasons.
They don't really believe that there is fraud, but the Republican base believes there is fraud because Trump is saying it.
So they have to, you know, kind of like, they have to make it look like, like the Supreme Court case, they have to make it look like they're fighting, right?
We're fighting for you, even though that, you know, privately they'll say, you know, he just lost.
That's all there is.
And they don't want to deal with his wrath like the governor of Georgia, who's, you know, been crushed by Trump because he lost Georgia.
Kind of like what happened with Jeff Sessions.
It's not his fault that Trump lost Georgia.
It's Trump's fault.
The idea that there was massive fraud in majority of black cities is just not the case.
Hispanics turned towards Trump.
Trump even, I want to say, Hawaii was one of the states that swung towards Trump because Asian voters there.
Interesting.
Yeah, Hawaii was one of the states that swung towards Trump.
Yeah, these weird things.
Everywhere is the same.
It's just white voters.
I mean, come on.
That's the problem.
They just weren't buying.
From where I looked at it, in some of the stuff that's come out since, they overwhelmingly say that amongst the voters who voted for Joe Biden and then split their tickets and voted for Republicans, they all say that COVID-19 was the major issue.
I mean, how many deaths are there now?
It just crossed 300,000 in the death toll?
Yeah, I've seen excessive deaths are upwards of 300,000.
So that's a brute number that all deaths basically of any cause.
So they're 300,000 above what you would expect.
So it is, yeah.
And so that would actually include a lot of those things that conservatives talking about, like, you know, deaths of despair due to the lockdowns or whatever.
I mean, we're not really locked down, but that would actually include those externalities.
And yeah, it is very serious and a just obvious unforced error on Trump's part.
I mean, there's no other way of describing it.
There's just nothing – there's just nothing to – there's nothing of really substance to the voter fraud narrative.
I mean, what is the case here with Dominion voting machines?
I hadn't even looked at it.
I don't even think like a lot of the states he lost, the swing states even had Dominion voting machines.
And they're not saying like the places that he – that did have these machines where he won, there was any fraud there.
The fraud narrative only means that – Trump lost a state instead of won a state.
So you don't really hear many accusations of fraud in North Carolina or Florida or Texas or Ohio.
He lost.
I mean, that's the complaint.
Yeah.
So this is what I see happening, and this is rather remarkable because – so for the last – Few years.
You might have been the first to be, you know, Trump critical.
I was Trump critical quite early.
And I was also kind of Trump skeptical quite early.
Even in late 2016, I was kind of saying, listen, there is a real tight window to do this.
And you have to make priorities and get those right.
And if those aren't...
Right from the beginning, this, you know, four years goes by pretty quickly, and you're into midterm elections, then you're into the 2020 election cycle really early.
So you have to set priorities.
And again, the things that he accomplished in terms of priorities were, you know, incoherent medical policy and tax cuts.
And some things that were just, you know, symbolically hardcore right-wing, but were just not serious, like the so-called Muslim ban and so on.
I agree that achieving the agenda that we're dreaming of in 2016 would have been very difficult, but it certainly would have been possible.
But he just really had his priorities out of whack at the beginning because I think he...
Fundamentally lacked vision.
But anyway, so people like you and myself were accused of being, you know, crazed, black-pilling, wignat lunatics who wanted to destroy the GOP, and we just, you know, don't know a good thing.
We look a gif morse in the mouth, and we just don't know how hard it is, and all this kind of stuff, which is fundamentally incorrect.
But now you have this...
You know, Wignat, so to speak, rhetoric occurring among not just the American nationalist types, but among normies as well.
And in fact, the normies go further.
So I saw some things last night, I think you were retweeting them, of, you know, Milo, a blast from the past, Milo is declaring that he will destroy the GOP.
It was trending.
It was trending on Twitter.
Yeah, it was.
And I think I clicked on the trending and almost everything was just laughing at it, actually.
I mean, whatever, maybe that was Twitter's algorithm.
But yeah, it was just this type of rhetoric, which, you know, said from one perspective can be powerful, but said from these perspectives of people who just voted for the GOP.
Told everyone they must vote for the GOP.
Told everyone that the GOP was headed in the right direction.
And indeed, like three weeks ago, told everyone that Brian Kemp was, you know, a badass.
He was, you know, based.
And it's just, there's just a kind of silliness to it where you just don't take it seriously.
And then the norm...
Normies are actually outpacing the American nationalist, and the Normies are declaring secession is in the offing.
Rush Limbaugh actually talked about this on his program, and that was widely circulated.
And then he had this retraction of sorts, which was just total cowardly nonsense.
Like, well, I don't support secession, but people are talking about it.
You know, this kind of...
You know, it's like, I don't think that aliens abducted Princess Diana, but people are talking about it.
You know, it's like, you know, stick up, stick to your position.
Don't put it off on vague other people talking.
But anyway, so you have that.
Texas...
I think it's like Allen West, another blast from the past, this kind of based African-American conservative from the Tea Party era was like saying that the law-abiding states must, you know, get together in a political union.
And I guess my perspective on this is twofold.
First off, this demonstrates just how extreme polarization is getting, where you are just totally dehumanizing the other.
And this whole political community can't really last.
The other aspect of this is that I've heard this before, and so have you.
During 2009, during the kind of beginnings of the Tea Party era, and it was this combination of things.
It was a stock market crash and major unemployment.
Plus, Obama as a new president.
And it was, it ginned up this kind of extreme rhetoric, which you would hear at the Tea Party.
So if you listened to a lot of Tea Party speakers, it became, you know, anarcho-capitalism, basically.
It was like a Ron Paul type thing.
And there were, you know, Rick, who was the governor of Texas before Abbott?
Rick Perry.
Openly talked about secession in his way during a Tea Party rally.
Like, well, we might want to think about leaving this old union and supporting the Constitution and a new confederacy, so to speak.
This kind of bullshit.
I've heard this before.
We've heard this 10 years ago.
Nothing happened.
And it all just kind of flowed into...
Republican electioneering in a year and a half.
And then the other thing I would say, and, you know, we don't need to dwell on this, but, I mean, I am someone who takes this stuff seriously, and maybe autistically, but they're just not going to let you go.
You know, like, America is a global financial empire.
They don't just let you leave because you want to or you're voting to do so.
If you are going to actually secede, if you actually take your word seriously and you're not just bullshitting or LARPing.
Then you are going, you're going to probably have to fight for this and you are going to likely be killed for this.
So just saying, I don't think any of these people are actually serious.
I think they're just bullshitting in the only way that they know how.
But at the same time, you know, when you use this language, you need to back it up.
I don't talk about secession because I'm not...
I'm not going to lie to someone and I'm not going to urge someone to engage in an action that will, in all likelihood, lead to their destruction.
I mean, a major empire, this is not like the Czech Republic and Slovakia, you know, a major empire is not going to reduce its...
About the secession issue, like I was saying, me and you have more experience.
So we clearly remember how after Mitt Romney lost for two months there before Obama was re-inaugurated for a second term.
There was a huge temper tantrum amongst conservatives who said they were going to secede from the union.
Remember they did all the secession petitions?
And hundreds of thousands of them signed secession petitions saying they were going to secede from the union.
And then they just said no.
And it faded and went away.
So that's kind of how I'm approaching this.
I mean, the last time Romney lost, we saw the exact same thing.
Oh, we're going to secede from the union.
And that's probably just, in my view, it's probably just anger.
It's probably just lashing out.
There's probably nothing really to it.
I would love to be surprised, given my opinion on the subject.
But after four years of Trump, I'm like the most cynical—I'm Mr. Blackfield, so I'm the most cynical Blackfield person you'll meet on the Internet.
So I just don't think—I mean, this whole secession thing—and the funny thing is, a lot of this is coming from the American nationalists.
They're out there coon-marching.
They're for seceding from the Union now.
They're for destroying the Republican Party.
Where have you been for the last four years?
I was called a cringe black-pilled wignet for saying all these things years ago.
The difference is that you were criticizing Trump.
So you were basically saying you...
Trump has to have responsibility to this.
These people are basically saying if only the pope knew about the wickedness of his bishops, if only the emperor knew about the wickedness of his feudal lords.
They're basically playing this game where Trump is somehow innocent and the GOP isn't fighting hard enough for him and the GOP isn't doing this.
So we're going to secede on the basis of Trump.
That's the difference, basically.
Do you remember the whole optics thing?
The whole optics thing was, in hindsight, we can look back on this three years later, and the whole optics thing was totally about them wanting to support Trump.
That is all it was about.
They came up with the slur, Wignat, which we adopted, some of us adopted ironically, because it's funny, some of the people who are closest to those people begged Alaska.
We were just laughing at yesterday, how he was going around Phoenix, flashing a copy of Mein Kampf.
This guy is a menace to society.
He's going around macing people.
He has two mentally ill, schizophrenic girlfriends, one of whom, if I understand it, is on the way to D.C. to stop the steal from Arizona.
And he's exploiting these young women for clicks on his thing.
He's going around, and he's maced like six or seven people for clicks on his live streams in the last few months.
And the guy's just spun out of control.
And, you know, it's funny, like, it occurred to me, and I was thinking about this, it's like, this is where they came up with the slur wig that.
Because here's a guy who is a failed rap artist who has a mullet.
He engages in the trashiest behavior.
An actual wigger, yeah.
A literal actual wigger, right?
And he has been good.
He has been at all the stop and still rallies.
I think he was just with Nick Fuentes and his crowd last weekend in Pennsylvania when they all went up there and they had their...
So, like, this whole optics thing was totally about, like, Trump, remember, I mean, they said for years people were bad optics because, you know, they didn't believe that Trump was going to save America and they were against America.
Now they're all screaming, we're going to secede.
And then, you know, for years, if you held any kind of rally, that meant that you were a federal agent.
But now that Trump has lost the election and Joe Biden is about to be inaugurated, they're out there saying, we need to actually be out there in the streets fighting with Antifa like they were doing last night.
Right.
Although Antifa was totally absent last night.
Yeah.
Again, I'm taking care of the kids at the moment, but I was kind of paying attention somewhat passively.
But there were weirdly...
The Proud Boys were out in force in D.C., and there were weirdly very little skirmishes with Antifa.
I wonder if Antifa almost has moved on in a way.
Yeah, I would assume so.
I mean, the fascist threat is, I mean, the real action came from the Supreme Court who completely destroyed any hope that Trump was going to swing the election.
So all the stuff that we were bombarded with for years about optics was just totally, totally pro-Trump crap.
There was nothing of substance ever to it.
All it was was people who wanted to hover – how did you say it?
Hold his beer, blend in like the wallpaper.
Traveling his exhaust for three years to this dead end.
And remember, we always said it was going to be a dead end.
And now we're finally at the dead end.
And what do they have to show for it?
Look at all the chaos they caused.
They didn't reform the GOP.
The GOP used them and chewed them up and spit them out.
Now they're like, we're going to destroy the GOP after voting for it twice.
In the last two years.
Three, I'm sorry, three times.
If anything, if Georgia, if the Georgia Senate races do go Democrat, and they might very well, because I mean, in most all cases, the incumbents have like a huge advantage and a runoff because people aren't paying attention and the voting levels descend.
But not this year.
I mean, this is like, I mean, the liberals are saying like the future of the republic is at stake.
And so, I mean, polling is indicating that it's either going to be close or the Democrats are going to pull it off.
So we'll see.
I'm, I don't know.
I'm skeptical.
I think it will be close.
We'll see what happens.
I might make a prediction, but I'll have to look at some more.
But if those do flip to the Democrats, and they, so it's now, that would make it a 50-50 Senate, and then Kamala Harris would have the deciding vote.
All the Republicans are going to do is blame those people.
Like, you know, like the Red Elephants guy or Fuentes or whatever, they're the ones saying, and people bigger than those guys, like Lin Wood, Sidney Powell, all these people are going to be thrown under the bus.
In short order.
Like, they'll be used when they're useful, and the GOP can kind of, like, go on Twitter and be like, we ain't backing down.
Like, you know, the Kraken will be released, whatever.
Like, you know, we support our people out in the streets, our streets.
You know, the GOP, literal GOP official Twitter can do that.
But the second, it's, like, bad optics, so to speak, or it's harming their chances in the Senate.
Is just the second that all of those people are cast aside.
And for kind of good reason as well.
Like, you're not helping anymore, guys.
And, like, this is not what we want.
I mean, oh, what is it?
Rona, whatever her name is.
Mitt Romney's daughter-in-law or whoever she is.
Rona, I can't remember her name.
Yeah, Rona McDaniel.
Rona McDaniel.
Like, they were getting this thing from her.
And so she was, out of one side of her mouth, she'd be like...
This election was stolen.
Trump won by a landslide.
And then people will ask her, like, well, should we not vote then?
Because no one wants to take part in the fraud again.
And she's like, no.
Good vote.
She was the one.
I found the video clip, and I've put it on my website.
She was the one who said that ethnocentric whites had absolutely no place in the Republican Party, were racist, and that they absolutely did not want our votes.
And to not vote for them because if we voted for them, that Republican Party leaders would denounce us.
And a lot of us got the message and said, okay, well, we won't then.
We'll just stay home and watch this catastrophe.
And now they're like, now because we didn't show up to vote for them, they're screaming, it's fraud!
It's fraud!
It's fraud!
And so anyway, one thing we skipped over or I was getting to before I got dropped on the last call is that… Early on, by December 2016, we knew what the agenda was.
It was announced in December 2016 that the agenda that Trump was going to work, when he came in, with all the wind behind him, he announced that what him and the Republicans were going to do were health care and tax cuts.
There was an article that came out by Julius Krein, that guy who runs the American Affairs Journal.
Did you know that those were the two most unpopular policy initiatives of the last 25 years?
Like number one and number two, the two most unpopular ideas that were put forth before Congress were repealing – the Obamacare repeal and the tax cuts.
And so yeah, that's what he announced.
He was spending his – and a lot of these animators were like, I'm old enough to remember when Obama was president, and Obama got in there, and he did the stimulus.
I think, you know, the Wall Street stuff.
And he did health care.
And they sunk into that health care black hole, and it lasted for years.
And after that point, like Obama got nothing else done except by executive order like DACA.
But because Congress and things are so polarized, when you come in, you might have a shot.
And this is assuming you even have Congress behind you.
You might get one thing done, right, through budget reconciliation.
That's how they got Obamacare passed and the tax cuts was through the budget reconciliation process.
So you might have a shot at one major thing coming in, and that's assuming you have the Senate and the House behind you.
And I always knew that if immigration wasn't at the top of the agenda, then it wasn't going to get done.
And so, sure enough, I mean, I called this early 2017, and by early 2018, the first two months of 2018, I think when he – was there a government shutdown, you want to say?
That was early 2019, wasn't it?
I'm not sure.
It was either early 2018 or 2019.
Yeah, I think it was early 2019.
Yeah, you're right.
You're right.
It was early 2019 because they had just done the – or they were trying to build – Trump was going to build the wall, and he was going to get it out of Congress.
And he shut the government down.
I mean this was after they lost Roy Moore in the Senate, the Alabama Senate race.
So they lost that crucial one vote, which gave the true cons in the Senate even more leverage.
Once that was over, I knew like, okay, for the rest of the Trump administration, it's just we're just waiting this out.
Three years.
And that's pretty much what happened.
Well, except for criminal justice reform.
They got that done.
But, yeah, if you don't do that in the beginning, go ahead.
You know, highly outside-the-box proposal, and I also recognize that this would also be a difficult thread to needle.
Needle to thread or whatever the right metaphor is.
But, okay, so Trump, in 2015, Trump was asked in a Republican primary debate, do you promise to support whichever Republican candidate you support, who wins the nomination?
Trump said no in his usual way with his facial expressions.
I don't know.
We'll see what happens.
If it's me, I'll support it.
The typical Trump bluster.
Trump announced very early on, and in contradiction to everyone else on stage, including Rand, Paul, and others, that he wasn't a Republican, in fact.
He's Trump.
He's running for the Republican nomination, but he might go third party.
He might...
Become a Democrat.
Who knows?
He is a wild card, and you just can't tell which way he'll jump.
And that, if he had gone in in 2017 and basically said, I am going to work with Chuck and Nancy and Republicans in the Midwest who have always been kind of centrist and so on, and Democrats like Joe Manchin in the Senate, all of this type.
I'm going to create a new center.
And I have political capital right now.
Now, maybe that political capital is a little botched because he didn't win the popular vote fair.
But he has political capital.
He has a real movement.
He is what everyone is talking about.
And we're going to pursue a national agenda on infrastructure.
And that will include environmental protection.
That will include a new train system, metro system.
That will include the wall on the southern border as part of it, and that will include, or maybe this would have to be done separately, but this will be done accompanied by immigration reform to protect American businesses and workers and all that jazz.
And that would have been a better approach.
And I grant you that that would have been difficult and were so hotly polarized that maybe it's impossible.
Fair enough.
But we tried the GOP approach.
And the GOP approach with Paul Ryan as Speaker of the House was incoherently gutting Obamacare and tax cuts.
That led to 2018.
That led to lower approval ratings.
That led to just hatred.
That led to kind of...
Cutting off the kind of more intelligent, serious, and independent aspect of the Trump coalition, which included people like you and me.
And that's what you got.
That can't win.
And attempting to transcend polarization, as difficult as that is, maybe seemingly impossible.
This is, you know, politics is the art of the possible.
Maybe you need to, maybe you kind of need to try the impossible at one point.
That would have been a better strategy.
And it could have actually been maintained regardless of what happened in 2018.
And he wouldn't have been basically just doing the bidding of Paul Ryan and company.
He would have been kind of like changing people's opinions, bringing people into the coalition, maybe kicking and streaming, but bringing them in and kind of reducing the extreme polarization that led to...
One, his impeachment, which I absolutely never supported and always thought, despite my distaste for Trump, I always thought.
Me too.
Bullshit.
But it led to that.
It led to a loss in 2020.
It led to where we are now.
Why not try something else?
Other things are possible.
Yeah, go ahead.
You're getting here like, you know, I was...
Wanting to talk to you about this, but we need to talk about the American right and what it is, what precisely it is, and our relationship to it.
And when you just got on there, it was right on target.
There's that faction of the GOP, which we talked about in the topology surveys.
It's always been that same 13% of Americans, 20% of people engaged in politics, the core conservatives, The true cons, the business conservatives, the Paul Ryan, you know, the whole GOP, the Heritage Foundation, all that.
All of that, those people, right, are the anchor around the right.
Because their views are absolutely, on economics especially, and foreign policy, are absolutely just out of touch with not only their own voters.
But with the public at large, look at the health care thing, right?
Yet the reason the GOP has this disastrous position on health care that's so politically unpopular, which was the reason they lost the 2018 midterms, by the way, is because of that faction of the Republican Party.
It's also that faction of the Republican Party, which thinks a tax cut is the solution to everything.
Whereas no one else in the country and even in the Republican Party thinks that way.
Or also on immigration specifically, they will – the overwhelming majority of Republicans want to restrict immigration.
But that part of the GOP, which controls the rest of the GOP, wants the chief labor, like we saw with – when Mike Lee rolled out that bill the other day, and not a single senator.
Objected to it.
You got this one faction of the Republican Party, this one faction of the American right.
These people, you know, the people, I mean, what they basically believe in is Israel, number one.
Number two is free market capitalism.
And number three is classical liberalism.
That's what they believe in.
I mean, I've seen, I've been putting it on Twitter, this political science research.
A question was posed to these people.
Do you think being European is important to being truly American?
Two percent of the free marketers in the survey said that it was important to be European, to be an American.
On all these identity questions, they don't have anything resembling a traditional American ethnic identity.
They're just people who believe in capitalism.
That's what they are.
And because of that, if Trump had come in there in 2017 and had – If he had stiffed that wing of the party and moved the center of gravity towards our wing, more towards the center, then he would have solved a lot of his problems because we're the people who are actually moderate on these issues.
Before I came up there with you, I just posted your thing about student loan debt, right?
60% of the public supports getting rid of $50,000 of this student loan debt.
30% of Republicans support it.
68% oppose it.
And if you look at it by age, of people under the age of 50 years old, two-thirds of the public, two-thirds of everyone under the age of 50 years old says, you know, let's get rid of this problem.
It's the same thing with the stimulus check, right?
Why in six months have they been able to send out that second stimulus check?
And they're haggling – currently right now they're haggling over whether it should be $600 or $1,200 like it was last time.
And it's because of that wing of the – it's because of that, you know, the Uncle Scrooge wing of the – Scrooge wing of the conservatives.
They're the problem.
Even if you look, and this is one of the amazing things I was looking at.
If you look at more moderate, centrist Democrats, working-class Democrats, the reason Hispanics and blacks don't vote for the Republican Party is a lot less to do with these identity politics issues than it just is.
They realize that these people don't want to give us health care.
They want this extreme free market economics.
That's why they don't vote for the Republican Party.
In fact, if you look at their views on foreign policy, like their views on foreign policy, for example, and trade policy are really no different than our own.
We're not the group that repulses all these people in the middle.
It's these people on the actual far right, which is the whole Paul Ryan crowd.
What do you think about that?
Yeah, I think that.
Almost no disagreement for it.
And I would emphasize the fact that that is, to a large degree, the donor wings, both Israel and free markets.
And so you can say that more people are talking about immigration.
I remember at CPAC, not too long ago, it might have been 2018 or so, you would sometimes get people talking about immigration more than they otherwise would.
Although there are some counterexamples to that.
I can remember that in Jim McCain era.
But anyway.
But yeah, you can talk about that just like you can talk about prayer in school and in Roe v.
Wade.
And you can talk about it till the cows come home.
Like, it's not happening.
And these are the decisive factors in that coalition.
And that just isn't changing.
The other thing that I would add is that...
The Tea Party wing, which is increasingly the MAGA wing, and it's the Proud Boys wing.
It is a largely white group.
I think it's actually a lot less white than it was 10 years ago during the Tea Party era.
And I think that it is much more openly Zionist and openly gay and trans in a weird way than it was...
It's certainly under Mitt Romney.
There's no Lady Romney or Lady Romney waving an Israel flag.
That does not exist in this world.
There is a Lady Maga or Lady Trump.
And you do see waving of an Israeli flag at these gatherings in a way that you just did not see that.
Now, granted, the party was always pro-Israel.
We get that.
But just this wearing it on your sleeve actually is new.
And so that thing, right-wing populism, maybe we should come up with another name for it, like just goofy-ism.
It's an implicitly white thing, but it's actually beyond that.
This goofiness is also something that is a huge turnoff, and it doesn't really have an ideology.
Sometimes it will be...
Quasi-protectionist.
Sometimes it will be free market.
Sometimes it will be ANCAP.
It has no brain.
It has a heart, but no brain, maybe.
Or it has a stomach, but no brain.
It's basically theatrical.
It's a performance.
And it's a lifestyle choice.
You buy clothes, literally, to be a part of it.
And it's that.
Fantasy ideology is what it's called.
Yeah, that's a huge turnoff.
You know, like, we kind of liked it maybe a few, four years ago when we were kind of like, all right, these are good people and it's moving in the right direction.
Okay, well, overlook silliness.
But if all it is is silliness, that too is really, it's a huge turnoff to major voting blocks.
Including a turnoff to whites.
It's probably mostly a turnoff to whites.
You're not helping yourself.
It's a short-term fix and it makes you feel good, but there is a hard ceiling on that stuff.
Sarah Palin is one of the originators of this thing.
It's fun for a weekend in Washington where you dress up.
Yeah, like Glenn Beck, yeah, you dress up like a colonial soldier and hold up weird signs.
Like, it's fun, but it's like, it's cosplay, and it's a huge turnoff to most people.
Well, yeah, let's give a bit of history here, because, I mean, this is kind of important.
We remember this throughout the entire Obama administration, when they had all this, you know, we had Glenn Beck and everyone dressing up like the Tea Party.
They had all the gas and flags, and of course you had Alex Jones out there screaming about Sandy Hook and Jade Helm.
I don't know about you, but I really wasn't paying that much close attention to Alex Jones and the whole right-wing populist thing.
During this whole period, we were far distant from those people, and they just came across as ridiculous.
I remember when Obama...
Won the 2012 election.
And was it Paul Joseph Watson who said on Infowars that Obama had used the HAARP weather array to create Hurricane Sandy and to fling it into New York City in order to boost Obama?
I'm not sure if it was Paul Joseph Watson, but it was one of these people.
So before 2016, 2015, we had nothing to do with them.
And what happened was when Trump came on, Trump was like, okay, I'm going to build a wall.
I'm going to deport all the illegal aliens.
I'm really going to restrict your illegal immigration.
I'm against DREAMers.
He was going to renegotiate our trade agreements.
We actually thought that meant that we were actually going to have a more protectionist economic policy that would create jobs at home.
He was going to have this huge trillion dollar infrastructure plan.
He was going to all these all these foreign wars.
Bush dynasty sucks.
Yeah, and he was also, and this was a huge thing for me, that he was independent.
This is a huge thing for me, that he was independent of the donor class and was self-financing his own campaign to be free of those people because Jeb Bush and Lion Ted and...
Little Marco and all the rest were their puppets, and he was against mainstream conservatism.
That was another big thing for us.
He was against mainstream conservatism, and we saw that, and somehow we ended up aligned with people like Alex Jones and Milo and Nick Fuentes and Andrew Anglin and people like that.
And then, of course, over the first two years of the Trump administration, we got disillusioned with it.
And they've stuck to it.
And now you tune in, you go to their websites, and they're all talking about COVID-19 is a massive global conspiracy involving every coroner, every doctor in the United States, every hospital, everyone who's supposedly been infected by the virus, every county health department, every state and local health department in the country is all in on the conspiracy.
Not to mention the entire world.
Bill Gates is coming to vaccinate people and to eject them with a microchip.
It's all part of the NWO's plan for – what's it called?
What's the latest conspiracy theory?
Oh, the Great Reset or something?
The Great Reset, yeah.
It's all part of the Great Reset.
And then, of course, there was massive voter fraud against Trump, and millions of people – and according to Andrew Anglin, millions of people are going to starve to death from the lockdowns.
It's gone back completely to how it was before Trump came along.
It's all this performative theatrical nuttiness.
Nick Fuentes is in D.C. doing another one of these performative rallies today.
I'm sure he's out there ranting and raving.
So this goes back to what I was wanting to ask you as well as I want to talk about today.
Why are you so dissatisfied, so disaffected, so disillusioned with the American right?
Living through the entire George W. Bush presidency, living through the time they nominated John McCain and then Mitt Romney, and then four years of Donald Trump.
It seems like that 20 years is – I keep asking myself, why am I so – I can't ever remember ever being happy or satisfied with the American right, ever.
So the problem must be me.
Well, this is the way that I would make a distinction.
Okay, so it's being pro or anti-system.
And let me go on this for a little bit.
Because, okay, you can claim that Paul Joseph Watson is nutty.
But you could also, somewhat plausibly, claim that Richard Spencer is nutty.
Richard Spencer, he's reading Nietzsche, and he wants some pan-European Roman Empire ethnostate, and this is just nuts.
You know, this will never happen.
I mean, what's gotten into him?
You could, and that's not, I mean, obviously I disagree, but that's not like a totally incredible statement, you know, that I'm a little nutty or a dreamer or whatever.
I'm engaging in dream politics and not real politics.
Fair enough.
But the distinction really is that if I'm going to engage in this, I'm not just in this for a horse race or whatever.
I actually want to change the world.
I think that we need to change ourselves from the inside out, and I think we need to change ourselves from the outside in.
I want to change the world, and that's why I get up in the morning and still do this.
Otherwise, if it's just endless disappointment, then I probably would go up and take up a...
We saw Trump, real quick, we saw Trump as changing this.
So Trump was this chaotic force who was...
Pushing us towards something.
We're not quite sure what it is, but he's pushing us towards something different that's anti-system, that's a dramatic change, and we're just going to take a flyer in this.
We're going to put it all on red.
Our life savings on red.
Spin the wheel.
Let's see what happens.
That is the mindset of where I was, and that's where most people were.
The thing about...
The people who are in this right now, it's not just that we're black-pilled.
My other favorite insult to me is, you're irrelevant.
They've been saying that to me for like three years.
They're just talking about me.
Spencer said this.
He's irrelevant now.
What would you do without me?
What would you do without me?
You little dorks.
Anyway, again, I digress.
But the main thing is that those people...
They have a different dynamic.
It's not a dream politics dynamic of pushing towards something else.
And despite our disagreements, I think we're kind of on the same page in that sense.
You want something different.
You are anti-system.
The true con is, functionally speaking, pro-system.
Because the true con is there to resist.
Any kind of change, whatever it is, whether it's coming from Spencer, whether it's coming from Kamala Harris, whether it's coming from Julius Evola, whether it's coming from Bill Gates, whether it's coming from Barack Obama, it's a conservative force that just resists any form of change.
The fact that they're claiming things like there's this great reset coming and I apparently don't know the definition of the word reset because that means reversion to where you were, but no, no, no.
The great reset's coming and everything's going to change and it's going to be all these horrible things that are hypotheticals that they imagine.
And what they are functionally doing is defending the status quo.
If you are that afraid of change, then you are ultimately going to bat for no change at all.
You are defending the status quo functionally.
And all of those true cons, as wild and wacky as they can get, you know, Sandy Hook, vaccinations, you know, HAARP, weather program, you know, all this stuff, they're still ultimately Republicans.
Like, that weird, wacky, wild version of the right.
It can be fit into the Republican coalition.
And we can't.
Because we don't believe in any of that stuff.
And our actual policies are fairly sensible.
You know, like when it comes to just immediate policies like student loans, change the university system, that's an achievable reform.
Give me a break.
This is what we're about, but we can't fit in because we ultimately are anti-system.
We ultimately want a new world.
And that doesn't work in the coalition.
And we've had it for a moment, but we lost it.
And that's the dynamic.
Go ahead.
Yes.
So my theory of the case here is, looking back on the last 20 years, neither of us have ever been like American conservatives.
In the traditional sense, we're actually moderates.
We have some socially conservative views.
That means we disagree with the far left on any number of issues, which goes without even saying all their crazy nuttiness about gender and sexuality and all that hatred, that anti-white hatred and stuff on the far left.
And we also, you know, equally disagree with the – see, the system is polarized between all these crazy people on the far left.
They show up in one of these studies that I'm looking at.
They're called like Democrat Independent Liberal Elites.
It's like 13%, 14% of the population that's upper middle class white professionals who live in the suburbs who – Yeah, but they also have their own conspiracy theories about climate change and ecological catastrophe, ecological apocalypse.
Systemic racism and systematic white supremacy.
They're just as nutty, right?
So we're not those people.
And on the other side, where it's polarized, you've got the Charlie Kirk.
Ben Shapiro, the true cons crowd.
If you look at where we're at in the electorate, we're actually right in the middle.
To the left of all the conservatives, but to the right of all the crazy liberals.
If you look at people in that part of the electorate, everyone in that part of the electorate is actually more racially conscious.
Did you know that?
Black Hispanics.
Black Hispanics.
Asians and whites who are kind of in the middle are all more identitarian in their own way.
That's fascinating, actually.
The type of people who voted for Joe Biden or the type of Hispanic who voted for Donald Trump but also voted for a minimum wage increase.
That type of weird voter that you can't quite codify, they are more racially conscious than Then, you know, like the far right, quote unquote, you know, Paul Ryan type stuff.
And also like the far left that has this weird version of racial consciousness where it's, you know, anti-white conspiracy theory, white supremacist conspiracy theory, basically.
The absolutely repulsive people who are out there, you know, praying about white supremacy and doing all that weird, all that bizarre, like post-Protestant.
You know, religious rituals after the George Floyd thing.
You know, a lot of Blacks and Hispanics just looked at that and were just utterly, utterly repulsed.
But, like, if you look at our positions across a whole range of issues, okay, tax cuts on corporations, right, raise taxes, on free trade, for example, on immigration, on a whole range of social issues, which, you know, conservatives are more invested in than we are.
COVID is a great example of that.
A lot of people on the right just absolutely lost their damn minds and descended into this cranky libertarian thing.
Look at all those people wearing their muzzles going to Walmart.
Yeah, across a whole range of issues are student loan debt.
Our positions are actually fairly popular, pretty much in the mainstream.
Most people are actually not really radical on these issues.
And look at a stimulus check.
Something like 75%, we agree with that.
Send out a second stimulus check.
But, like, the true cons, you know, will have some kind of complex ideological nonsense reason to oppose stuff like this.
So, like, my position is we've never, like, fit into either the right or the left because we're actually more in the middle.
We're actually moderates, not conservatives.
That's where we're at.
And, you know, occasionally, like Trump, like, you know, once in a blue moon, someone will come on and we'll get, like, really excited.
About voting for a Republican, and then we vote for him, and then quickly we're disillusioned by once that candidate is dragged into the grips of Turning Point USA and CPAC and all the idiots who gather there.
When you're in the middle, you get attacked by both sides.
It's amazing because we should be like...
When we identify as being right-wing, it's completely not in the sense...
You know this as well as others.
It's not in the same sense at all as these people who compose the American right.
They're right-wing in the sense they believe in classical liberalism and free market capitalism.
Socialism sucks.
Israel's the greatest thing ever.
That's what they call the American right, whereas our beliefs, especially on identity, is that's what's right-wing about us.
I could sit here and talk for six hours on Southern identity, Southern American history.
We talked at length about – look at the huge podcast we did about modernism.
That's totally – that's our kind of right wing, but it's not the same kind of right wing that these people are.
And this misalignment is a source of much frustration.
We just never fit in with these people.
They don't have a sense of identity like we do.
Like I said, 2% of them – 2% of the true crimes believe that being European is important to being American.
They are completely modernists, unfortunately, in that question.
Yeah.
All right, let me do this, because I've got to go back to the kiddos.
Some exit questions here.
So, is this it?
Is this actually the final straw in Trump's attempt to stay in office?
Or is this, as he tweeted, only the beginning?
Is this just going to go on?
We're going to hit December 15th, or what is it, 13th or 15th?
14th.
14th, okay.
Tuesday, I think.
Tuesday, okay.
This has to end pretty soon.
It's going to be certified pretty soon.
They are running out of time, but is this it?
It's over.
By Tuesday, it's over.
He can do some performance art.
From Tuesday until the inauguration, he can still do this.
Performance art where he – there's still a chance.
There's still a pathway to victory, and this will become less and less plausible, especially after Joe Biden has already been elected by the Electoral College.
I'll just say this.
Yeah, I'll just say this.
As the Supreme Court nuclear option is no longer on the table, I'm just going to say it, and I'm not predicting it.
I'm just going to say it.
Maybe a literal nuclear option is in the sense of he still is president and he sees this thing going down and maybe this is the time to do all that Iran stuff while people are looking the other way and while time is limited and so on.
I mean, I don't think that's going to happen, but I think it's now kind of weirdly more possible.
And it went from like less than 1% to maybe like 2%.
I mean, so obviously I think 98% of chance it's not going to happen.
But I'm just saying that we're going to see who he really is and what he's really about in the next few weeks.
And I think it's possible that we'll see.
Like, the very, very worst aspects of what Trump was ultimately about.
Yeah.
Assuming he doesn't want to run again in 2024 and is deterred by that.
Right.
Or assuming he does want to run again in 2024.
Yeah, that might be restraining.
Yeah, this fantasy of taking revenge and beating Joe Biden and coming back in 2024 might prevent him from...
You know, just going full mega and attacking Iran.
Yeah, well, what we learned, I mean, and this is a mainstream media meme from four years ago, but I wonder if it was actually true.
And that is that Trump went to the, what is the press gala, the White House Reporters Gala, or whatever it's called, in 2012.
And Barack Obama read out some jokes against Trump.
Basically anti-birther birth certificate jokes.
And that just really got his goat.
And from then on, it was like, alright.
There was a whole article about that.
I don't know.
It might be a catalyst and not a cause, but I don't think we should underestimate it.
And so this personal revenge, I must defeat.
Joe Biden, we're both pushing 80, but mano a mano in the ring.
This might be what motivates him to continue.
Again, maybe that will lead to terrible things.
Maybe it will lead to not so bad things.
Maybe this will lead to him being semi-generous and leaving.
What do you think about the possibility of Ivanka running for Senate against...
Marco Rubio and Laura Trump voting, running for Senate in North Carolina.
I've heard both possibilities floated.
Yeah, I mean, I can see it.
I think Ivanka probably imagines herself as this weird center that she's not.
And I think she imagines herself occupying a center which she doesn't because she's the...
Non-vulgar racist Trump.
And she looks like the kind of person you would invite to your cocktail party or who you would see at your country club.
But that just is not going to fly.
But we'll see about that.
I could see that.
Laura Trump is a little bit different because she's more...
She kind of reads more like a...
Or is it Laura Trump or Laura?
I forgot.
Laura.
Is it Eric's wife?
I think it's Eric's wife.
Yeah.
And she kind of reads more as like a suburban mom.
And so I think she's...
More conservative.
Yeah.
And so I think that might actually be a different case.
I think Ivanka is just utterly toxic and...
Fantasy.
No base.
I think the best way to say it is she thinks she occupies a middle that she does not occupy.
And when you don't understand yourself, you can...
I got a good question.
Now that it's all over, the fat lady sings on Tuesday, and Biden is elected by the Electoral College, are we finally going to see Hawley 2024 launch?
We speculated about this.
Holly, Cotton, Tucker.
That is basically the, I am Trumpism.
I've supported Trump, but there's not going to be a grabber-by-the-pussy leaked audio tape on me.
Although a little bit less so with Tucker, because there's some leaked audio of Tucker, you know, mid-2000s, shock-jocking, basically, and saying, you know...
The Iraqis are barbarian savages or whatever.
So you have that.
But yeah, there are going to be some people who are going to try to occupy that.
And I think they can occupy that because my assessment is that Trumpism is actually longer lasting than Trump himself.
I could see Trump fading, but like the Tea Party, MAGA, Sarah Palin.
Goofy right.
Like, that is a long-standing thing of multiple decades, and it's not ending.
