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Nov. 10, 2020 - I Don't Speak German

01:46:20

71: Trump Loses

Recorded 8/9 Nov 2020. What the hell do you *think* we're talking about? Content Warning North Carolina Gerrymandering article: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/27/us/north-carolina-congressional-districts.html IDSG makes it to the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/29/us/fbi-arrests-the-base-michigan.html

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	This is I Don't Speak German.
	I'm Jack Graham, he him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel he him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he him, about what he learned from years of listening to today's Nazis, white nationalists, white supremacists, and what they say to white nationalists, white supremacists, and what
	Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
	Content warnings always apply.
	And it's episode 71 of I Don't Speak German.
	I hear the sound of an abundance of rain.
	I hear the sound of victory.
	Daniel, we're saved!
	Everything's alright again by the Democratic Party.
	Isn't it wonderful?
	Democratic Party's coming in.
	The Antifa president is going to take hold.
	Full communism.
	Within the next, probably no more than three or four months.
	Indeed, yeah.
	First item on the agenda, begin the establishment of full communism for Comrade Biden.
	From above, by Joe Biden.
	Comrade Biden and Comrade Harris.
	Open the prisons, fill them all with Republicans.
	Yeah, all the Republicans.
	Yeah, let all the murderers out and arrest Ben Shapiro and people like that.
	And put them all in there instead.
	It's gonna be fucking great!
	Did you see that AOC posted a tweet that was subject to the effect of, you know, we need to not forget the people who went along with this administration, etc.
	And we need to make sure to archive articles and archive tweets so that we have receipts for this down the line.
	And the entire right wing is now going like, she's gonna put 70 million Trump voters in jail!
	And it's like, yes, that's clearly, that's clearly what she was saying.
	Yeah, yeah, of course, yeah.
	And that like, all the elected officials who went along with this and who are now going to pretend that they never heard of that guy, Donald Trump, who, what?
	Ronald McDonald, that guy?
	No, never heard of him.
	No.
	You know the thing that happened to George W. Bush?
	The thing that's actively still happening to George W. Bush?
	That thing is going to happen to Trump.
	In fact, it's already starting to happen for Donald Trump.
	As they're just sort of like writing like, well, he wasn't that bad, right?
	I mean, he didn't drop that many bombs.
	Come on, isn't that isn't that really the key?
	Yeah, that's right.
	Yeah, even depressingly from some people on the left, you get that take, you know, oh, he didn't start any wars.
	Yeah, Glenn Greenwald wrote this very self-piteous piece in which he was on his sub stack, where he doesn't have an editor any longer, which is clearly the key.
	Heaven for Glenn, yeah.
	You know, Donald Trump is not an aberration.
	Donald Trump was a continuation of, like, existing policies that kind of go back.
	But doing so in this kind of, like, sniveling, like, self-serving way, and kind of pretending that, like, the Bush-Obama years are, like, one thing, and then Trump is another thing, as if, like, there aren't discontinuities there as well.
	Like, you know, it is just this kind of, like, where you can kind of sit and nod along to most of it.
	I kind of agree.
	As a leftist, I agree with much of the piece.
	But at the same time, it does everything possible to whitewash the Trump years and then smear Obama with everything that Bush did.
	And what Obama did was pretty bad on his own, but I don't think it's fair to pretend like that was all one thing.
	And that's kind of my perspective on that.
	Yeah, no, that's the experience of reading Glenn Greenwald.
	You know, you're reading it and you're sort of going, yeah, yeah, mm-hmm, yeah, okay, with you so far, and then suddenly he'll get to, you know, whoa!
	And then he'll go on Tucker Carlson, and it's like, great, well done.
	He's gonna be like the token lefty on Tucker Carlson once Tucker Carlson joins One American News with Sean Hannity and Donald Trump.
	I'm sure that's the future that we're lined up for now.
	Well, the future is one of those little topics we could talk about.
	But yeah, here we are.
	For me, it's just turned the 9th of November, which is 9-11, interestingly enough, where I am.
	And for you, I suppose it's still the 8th of November, isn't it?
	Yeah.
	It's about 7 o'clock, a little after 7 o'clock on November 8th.
	And it is weird that we have to timestamp exactly when we're recording this.
	Because circumstances will change by the time this episode is released.
	Indeed, yes.
	But we're past the point where America's week-long election has started to wind down and enter its next phase, I suppose we should say.
	But we're recording this after it's been generally agreed by the media, which is of course what really matters, that Joe Biden has won.
	But, of course, we haven't had any concession from Donald Trump.
	He's been golfing, he's been tweeting, he's just been behaving as normal, essentially.
	And, yeah, it's all very interesting.
	I mean, look, I'm pleased, I suppose.
	I mean, I am pleased that Donald Trump lost.
	Let's not be in any doubt about that being a good thing.
	I would say.
	But it's like, you know, you instantly go from, well, hey, Donald Trump lost to, and that means Joe Biden won.
	Don't you?
	Really?
	Right, right.
	And already Joe Biden is making noises about like, oh, we're going to put John Kasich in the cabinet.
	We're going to, you know, like all those, you know, there was there was this thing like the Lincoln Project, like is soon like the second, like almost to the moment that the networks declared for Biden.
	About like 12 30 Eastern Time on Saturday like 10 minutes later They start to like put out things of like we need to embrace the centrist Democrats and Democrats need to you know make a common cause with the centrist Republicans who are anti Trump and we need to definitely make sure we don't do things like pass Medicare for all and the Green New Deal and those like loony lefty ideas like protecting the planet and making sure that poor people get to go to a doctor and
	Yeah, those loony lefty ideas that heavy majorities of the American people agree with and want.
	But there you go, that's the Democratic Party for you.
	The minute they scrape a victory, I mean, the question of how big their victory is, is interesting.
	You can look at it, you can see it in different ways from different viewpoints.
	But, you know, I think from a basic electoral numbers point of view, this was a very, very thin victory.
	They just squeaked it in.
	And, you know, that itself is an indictment of, I think, their uninspiring platform, their deeply uninspiring candidate.
	And it's far more about Trump and Covid, I think, than anything else.
	And instantly, they scrape that victory.
	It's, well, we need to start...
	Making common cause with centrist Republicans who were all anti-Trump, which again, not true.
	You know, this is precisely why people like AOC are talking about we need an accounting on this, we mustn't forget, because everybody's instantly rewriting history.
	Like, you know, after the war there suddenly turns out there were no Nazis in Germany.
	It's going to very soon turn out.
	There were no Trump allies, there were no Trump supporters, certainly in the Republican Party anyway.
	The media have started doing it as well.
	It's been fascinating to watch this tone of contempt and disregard for Trump just instantly switch on in the media.
	This ability they've suddenly discovered after four plus years of dealing with the man, to be able to say, no, that's not true, that's a lie.
	Which, you know, where was that four years ago?
	Four and a half years ago?
	Because there's blood in the water, you know?
	So they're not afraid anymore.
	As long as they're still making the money, right?
	They don't have a reason to do anything else.
	And I really think that, you know, we should back up slightly.
	I mean, I think you and I have been kind of litigating this a bit in the back channel.
	I think I've gotten no more than four hours of sleep at a stretch for about the last week and a half.
	Um, just kind of like fretting about various things and following the news.
	But, um, yeah, I think, um, you know, I really expected there to be, and we may still see it, but I really expected to see like a very serious legal onslaught, like legal challenges to the balloting and to, you know, like kind of, kind of various things that, um, essentially the Republicans were going to force this into the Supreme Court and then like hand, I think that was absolutely the plan.
	Trump the presidency on some, you know, trumped up, ha ha, legal rigmarole, right?
	I think that was absolutely the plan.
	Yeah.
	I mean, he more or less said it.
	Yeah.
	I mean, they were signaling this for, I mean, months.
	I mean, even, I mean, they literally said, we have to confirm Amy Coney Barrett so that she can be on the Supreme Court and give Trump the victory, essentially.
	You know, they almost said it in that many words, right?
	And I think that the, and we were seeing court cases even, you know, kind of minor, you know, smaller scales court cases about, like, kind of how ballots could be countered and all that sort of thing go to the Supreme Court.
	That looked like they were really kind of pointing towards this.
	And then once the vote started to come in, I think it just kind of became pretty clear that, you know, the legal challenges were going to be more difficult than they planned.
	Like, it really did just kind of look like, yeah, okay, well, I mean, if it was super close, if it was like Florida in 2000, where there's like one case where you can just sort of like flip it, And you had like the ability to sort of control the process because your brother was the governor of the state.
	Then I think there was a real chance they would they were going to do something like that.
	But at this point, I mean, I think really what we're seeing is.
	The clown car that is like the Trump sycophants are trying to run this kind of thing of challenging the votes and the courts are just not having it because ultimately they're not very competent.
	So he's sort of lost the support of the mainstream Republican Party.
	He's just lost like they never really liked him.
	They never really get along with him.
	They liked him as long as he was going to give them tax cuts and as long as he was going to give them Supreme Court justices and lower court justices, lower court judges.
	Um, and he did all that, and now he's outlived its usefulness, and they've decided that like, oh, if we're going to keep the Senate, then, uh, which it looks, I mean, there, there are going to be some runoff elections.
	So we, the Democrats may actually win the Senate.
	That seems really unlikely that you're going to win two runoff elections in Georgia, but I mean, it's possible.
	But if the, if Mitch McConnell gets to stick around in the Senate, they can block absolutely anything that the Biden administration is going to put down for at least the next couple of years.
	And so, they've got three Supreme Court judges, they've got like a quarter of the federal judiciary, and they win.
	I mean, it's just, it's done.
	I mean, the reality of the American political system is, it's actually better not to be in charge.
	Oh yeah, absolutely.
	Because you can get, you can just kind of like blame the other side for any failures to your base.
	Well, we weren't in charge at that time, so we didn't have any ability to do anything.
	You just collect money from the people and from your donors, and you give them regulation where they want it, and you do the thing.
	But ultimately, you don't actually have to govern, you don't actually have to do anything, and they just switch sides.
	So there are advantages to being in power, but ultimately, if you're not, you can just kind of go, eh, we'll get them in four years, it's fine.
	And you know, it's just...
	I think you're exactly right.
	I think that's exactly what's happening and I think the two parties are, at the moment, they are edging around the process of getting this new status quo that works for everybody into position and the big stumbling block is Trump.
	I mean, as you say, the Republicans were perfectly ready as a party, as an organisation, to contest the election and get it back from Biden, you know, by cheating, if they could.
	But although it was a very close election, it's still not close enough.
	You know, as you said, it's not close like 2000 was.
	2000 really did rest on a knife edge in Florida by, you know, a tiny, a minuscule number of votes.
	And people also forget that what happened in Florida is that what the Supreme Court did was they stopped recounts.
	They said, right, that's enough recounts.
	And that's something, you know, the Supreme Court can't just, well, I mean, they could probably, I don't know the details of it, but it would be very, I would think, politically difficult for the Supreme Court to actually stop, like, the first counts in a series of states.
	Like that.
	It's not the same.
	It's not politically the same.
	And you also have, I mean, the Democrat victory is, it is small, but it's big enough that, you know, Biden's got a large enough electoral college lead.
	He's got a large enough popular vote lead for it to be politically extremely difficult for them to do that.
	So you have like this core, this gaggle of Trump gangster family people like Giuliani and his weird family and stuff like that.
	Trump's weird family, not Giuliani's weird family.
	And I imagine Giuliani's family is weird.
	I'm sure he is.
	I'm sure he also has a weird family.
	Yeah.
	But that lot, they're trying it on.
	As you say, they're definitely trying it on.
	It's getting thrown out by judges because it's just ludicrous.
	They've got nothing.
	Because in addition to being completely unprincipled gangster fascists, these people are a bunch of fucking idiots.
	It's nothing like the efficiency with which like Jeb Bush and Catherine Harris and people like that rigged Florida 2000.
	Chucking black people off the voter rolls and stuff like that.
	They're nowhere near as efficient.
	They don't know what they're doing.
	So it's a very different situation.
	And I don't think it's going to work.
	And I think like the Republican Party, what it looks like to me is a lot of them look like they've already ditched him.
	And a lot of them are just sort of hanging back and watching the situation to see what happens.
	And I think it's going to become apparent to them all sooner or later that, yeah, what we do is we just say, you know, this guy's outlived his usefulness, we've got what we could out of him.
	There's going to be no drawback for them from Trump, right?
	There's been years of media chatter about the loss of civility and division and Oh, all our norms are being thrown in the gutter and post-truth and isn't it terrible?
	All this sort of liberal centrist handbag clutching on the media.
	Republicans don't give a shit about that.
	They're going to come out of it with, as you say, the stacked Supreme Court and the stacked lower court.
	Trump's really packed the courts.
	And their massive tax cuts, etc., etc.
	And precisely because of McConnell.
	And they're going to be able to rewrite history.
	They're going to be able to walk away from it saying, no, I didn't support Trump.
	I mean, I worked with him, but I didn't support.
	And that's going to work.
	The media is going to let him get away with it.
	So what?
	Why should they worry?
	And then on the other side, you've got the Democrats.
	They're in almost the perfect position because they've got the presidency, but they're probably not going to end up with the Senate.
	And that's a built in excuse for doing fuck all.
	So Biden and Harris can be there making all these lovely inspirational noises about change and bringing people together and everything like that.
	And then when they get absolutely nothing done, which of course they don't want to do anything substantive, they could just say, well, it's the Republicans blocking us in the Senate.
	It's a perfect position for both parties.
	And that's how you know where it's going to resolve itself, because both parties are going to find this niche where everything's to their advantage again.
	And they're just waiting for it to settle until this all locks into place.
	No, absolutely, and just about the lower courts.
	I mean, you know, the point there, which you may not have been aware of, or I'm not sure how much you've followed it, but… Oh, I talk with a lot more confidence than I denied warrant, given how little I know.
	Sure, no, it's fine.
	The deal there was that McConnell had, like, held up judge appointments.
	under the last year or two of the Obama administration and just kind of just refused to meet on it because he just he could just control that and go yeah we're not we're not going to do that and then the Obama administration refused to do they did have some like they could have done recess appointments but those are kind of like temporary subject to recall the second that they do the thing I'm not sure exactly kind of how the rules of that work out but McConnell drug his feet and Obama really didn't do anything
	and you talk to any centrist Democrat and they'll give you a list of 20 reasons why Obama just couldn't have possibly done anything about this and the Democrats were had their hands tied on this there was no reason they could have done anything except they didn't try They didn't try.
	And then the Merrick Garland thing, and it's just like, well, Hillary will be in in 10 months and we'll just do it then.
	And it's just like, you know, like, um, yeah, they just, they just, they just didn't, I mean, you know, and it is like, it really, really has just kind of become like, uh, You know, the Democrats have to you know, I'm judging them based on what they do.
	Yeah.
	And yeah, you can you can tell what their priorities are based on what they do and what they pass and what they don't.
	And that's just sort of that's just sort of the thing.
	And if you're not going to pass legislation, that's actually good.
	I will vote against the worst people in the world, which are, broadly speaking, the Republican Party up and down the line.
	But, you know, you're not getting anything more out of me.
	And that's, that's just, I mean, I'm just, I'm done.
	I mean, they've literally, there was an article that came out this morning, an extended interview with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who like is certainly not like, you know, revolutionary socialist.
	I mean, she's a moderate social Democrat, right?
	But like the voice of the progressive wing, the kind of the voice of the new, the younger voice of the party, someone who has legitimate political talent, who's out there like trying to do things and trying to push people in the right direction.
	And she's been an officer for two years and she's saying, I mean, she said in an interview that, like, yeah, based on the hostility and the smears and the anger and the just not being listened to and the just complete disregard that every, like, Democrat out there treats me with, I'm, it's kind of 50-50 as to whether I'm going to keep seeking re-election or just go and have a house and a family somewhere.
	And it's like, I can't blame her, you know?
	Yeah.
	I mean, it's disgusting.
	I mean, again, not to – but imagine like a bright young Republican 29-year-old, like ex-military guy, unseats this kind of milquetoast nobody person in the House of Representatives and just kind of goes out there and is just like doing what AOC did, but on the right wing, right?
	And really kind of galvanizing the base, like Sarah Palin With a brain or something, you know, like that kind of character, the Republicans would embrace this guy, like, no questions asked, you know, and that's the difference.
	That's I mean, that really is the difference.
	And again, I'm not trying to get stuck in like this kind of party politics thing.
	I'm not trying to get stuck on electoralism.
	But this is the point at which we get to talk about electoralism because we just had this massive... We just ended this two-year fucking campaign and we ended up with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris!
	And you were talking about knowing what people's priorities are from what they do.
	I mean, we only have to look at the records of those two people, you know?
	Biden, a career-long servile corporate serf, as Alexander Coburn called him.
	Totally.
	in a colossal...
	Botten paid for by the credit card industry.
	I mean, he's...
	Totally, yeah.
	He's out of Delaware.
	The one thing I really like about him is he's a big fan of public transit.
	Maybe we get some public transit infrastructure out of a Biden administration.
	That would be really nice, but...
	That would be nice, yeah.
	And Harris, of course, you know, infamously a cop marler, as they call her.
	Harris, you know, very aggressive, authoritarian district attorney.
	Transphobic as fuck.
	Just an awful, awful person.
	Awful pick.
	Both of them.
	Dreadful.
	Absolutely.
	You know, as Coburn says about Biden, you know, just absolutely an embodiment of everything that's wrong with the corporate money-soaked American political system.
	Just fucking dreadful.
	And that's the Democratic Party, which is precisely why they don't want anything to do with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
	They'll take the victories, you know, but they don't want any of her ideas.
	Which, as you say, you know, from our point of view, is pretty moderate social democracy.
	That's not their job.
	That's not the Democrats' job.
	The Democrats' job is to, you know, occasionally take over the management of the American empire and American capitalism to, you know, preserve it from its absolute worst instincts, of course embodied in the Republican Party.
	For a brief period so that it can retain its tolerances.
	They're not the slightest bit interested in anything like actually providing any semblance of functioning social democracy, like a socialized medicine system like every other fucking developed country in the world has in some form or another.
	No, no, no.
	And even though, as I say, these sorts of policies, Medicare for All and A Green New Deal of some description.
	People are vague on this and a lot of these proposals are not strong enough really for what we need, but the public want this.
	The American public, this is a fascinating thing, Fox did a number of polls, Fox News, and it was hilarious.
	They had the results of these polls up on Fox News and it's like issue after issue.
	Roe v. Wade.
	Climate change, justice for Palestinians, all this stuff.
	The public are vastly to the left of the American political parties.
	Vastly.
	Even Republicans.
	They don't know.
	They don't know how right-wing the party they vote for actually is.
	They assume the people they vote for are more or less on their side on these issues.
	The public are vastly more liberal and progressive and even left-wing on all these issues.
	But these parties, including the Democratic Party, it's just another way of keeping that sort of thing out of the system, because that's just not what they're for.
	So of course, you know, they win an election absolutely vitally with the help of people on the ground, activists, organisers, loads of them, very left-wing, people fighting for progressive policies and stuff like that, mobilising voters on the back of progressive policies.
	They wouldn't have won that election if it wasn't for people like that.
	And they're instantly smearing them.
	People on the ground in Georgia, like all these African American activists doing get out the vote campaigns.
	Yeah.
	suddenly Georgia flips by I was looking at it, I think it's like 10,000 votes, although that's not final because we're still waiting on overseas and absentee ballots, etc.
	But right now Biden is 10,000 votes ahead in Georgia.
	And that's because We should never forget that that's about 200,000 people purged from the voter rolls in Georgia.
	Mostly black people, of course.
	Yeah, I mean, we can't overstate also the voter suppression that the Republicans had gone through.
	I think we should transition slightly into some other issues here.
	But, I mean, it is just this, like, complete I mean, all the frustration.
	I was very mad in March at the way the primaries, the Democratic primaries ended.
	And again, not that Bernie Sanders was the ideal candidate, not that he didn't have problems, particularly with the African-American community, particularly with more conservative African-American Democrats in the South, but he was very clearly the choice of like the younger members of the party.
	And had there been an attempt to, you know, Biden is our choice as the party, but we're going to throw you a bone.
	He's going to throw full-throated support behind the Green New Deal or behind Medicare for All.
	Like 90% of that animosity from the more left-wing members of the party would have immediately, we would have swallowed our fucking tongues and done the work, right?
	And it would have been a totally different experience.
	But instead, they decided they didn't need anybody on the left.
	They didn't need the progressives that they were, and they would rather reach out to Republicans in the suburbs.
	And that didn't work out for them.
	That isn't like... Biden won, but that's not why.
	Biden won because of, you know, largely because of COVID, I think, and because of a massive mobilization of people on the ground, as I say, organizers and activists.
	And I think also, I mean you can't understate, I mean people talk about like, oh we lost so many votes lower down the ticket because of defund the police and all this stuff, all this far left stuff that cost us votes.
	The protests, the Black Lives Matter protests, they got loads of people activated, they got loads of people registered.
	A lot of people registered as a Democrat right around the time that the Black Lives Matter protests started.
	Fast spike!
	That's just a fact.
	That's just a fact.
	And they weren't, they weren't like, they weren't registering to be Democrats so that they could vote against the protests.
	No.
	I, you know, ultimately anytime we're like looking at data and anytime that we're, this is all very preliminary and we're just sort of like hashing out like what kind of what's happening in The Twitter discourse right now.
	But I mean, I really think that there is there.
	I mean, immediately as soon as Biden was kind of like the winner, there was like a day when everybody celebrated and was like, okay, we're not going to have Trump in anymore, most likely.
	And then immediately it was like, you know, and then let's just Punch the hippies.
	That's literally what they did.
	So yeah, yeah I do think that there is something that we're kind of like that should be addressed and in terms of like the size of the victory because One of the things that I'm seeing in the post-mortems is that everybody wants to seize what they want to see in these results, right?
	Like the everything is ambiguous enough that you can just kind of see whatever your priors want you to see and You know You can view what it looks like if the leads hold the way they look like they're going to.
	Biden's going to win Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, but he won't get North Carolina in addition to the things that are already called.
	And if he wins that, he gets 306 electoral votes, and he needs 270 to win, so he's 36 ahead.
	Which is, in terms of recent, in terms of since Reagan, that's a pretty substantial win in the Electoral College.
	Yeah.
	But that's also by razor-thin margins in several states.
	This is it.
	It is by 10,000 votes in Georgia, and without Georgia, that's down 16.
	That is by, Pennsylvania looks to be 40,000 or something like that.
	Sorry, I could pull it up.
	I could do the thing, but like there really is like you in 2016 you could flip 80,000 or 100,000 votes in three particular states and you could like switch the electoral college.
	You could go the other way.
	And it really is kind of that way again.
	It's a larger lead this time than it was in 2016, but not substantially larger.
	And so the idea that like This is some like resounding win, or that like all the stuff has been defeated is kind of nonsense.
	And I think the other thing that I would like for all of the people celebrating at the defeat of Trump and the defeat of Trumpism, which are two different things, we're going to get to that in a second, is that Donald Trump won 8 million more votes this time than he won in 2016, which means 8 million people who didn't vote for him then voted for him now.
	In fact, people are crowing about, like, Joe Biden has the largest popular vote total of any president in history.
	He is beaten by a handy margin.
	Barack Obama's total in 2008, which was previously the largest single number of votes cast for any candidate in a presidential election, This is not normalized for populations, so they do tend to go up.
	But, like, nobody had succeeded that in since 2008.
	Well, Joe Biden has now done that.
	The flip side of that is that Donald Trump 2020 also beat Barack Obama's total in 2008.
	So, we have not defeated—we and by people nominally on the left.
	The Democrats have defeated Donald Trump, it appears.
	Largely because the Republican establishment has completely cut him loose.
	But there are still 70 million people out there who voted for that man.
	More than voted for him the first time.
	Yeah.
	And they voted for him because of all the things that he is.
	Also, the other thing that I think we really should be highlighting here, and this kind of gets into, like, kind of our purview and the topics that we discuss, we are going to treat this lightly and kind of do just kind of a casual election chat, because that's all that I've had in my brain for the last week anyway.
	Yeah, yeah.
	The, you know, Donald Trump didn't, wasn't rejected at the polls because of children in cages.
	He wasn't rejected at the polls because of immigration restriction.
	He wasn't rejected at the polls because of the actual sort of like fascistic or proto-fascistic, however you want to define it.
	I'm not going to sit here and argue with anybody about that.
	You know, I think it's pretty clear he has fascistic tendencies, but he was a narcissist and a kleptocrat as opposed to, you know, someone who was going to engage in these things competently.
	And he had a whole bunch of fascists in his administration, including Stephen Miller, and who knows what Stephen Miller is going to do in the next two months.
	I mean, you know, like, whatever.
	And he activated a fascist base in this country and gave them, like, someone to rally behind.
	But none of that is the reason that Donald Trump lost this election, because while some of the messaging from the Democrats and from Biden is were around this kind of the idea that he kind of activated fascists in Charlottesville and at Unite the Right and those sorts of issues.
	Biden didn't really hit home on that.
	The thing that really got Trump defeated was Donald Trump's personal failings.
	His corruption, his coronavirus response, which was abysmal.
	It's hard to imagine.
	If he had literally started mailing out aerosol sprays of coronavirus to Americans, he could hardly have done worse at actually dealing with the coronavirus crisis.
	his narcissism, his just kind of personal thoughts, his just inability to construct a sentence.
	It's all those personal things that people just didn't like about him.
	Those are the reasons that I think, those are the reasons that people were done with him.
	That's the reason is that he just was, all of his kind of obvious character flaws, as opposed to the actual dark thing that was at the heart of his 2016 campaign, and at the heart of his administration, that he was just unable to actively use effectively that he was just unable to actively use effectively in the ways that in 2016 we all kind of feared he was.
	So the whole, like, Trumpism, you know, kind of proto-American fascism thing This combination of white nationalism and conspiracy mongering, all that stuff, the QAnon stuff, the Boogaloo Boys, the Proud Boys, all that stuff is still there.
	It's not going anywhere.
	It will fragment, it will fracture, the same way that the Patriot movement did when George W. Bush was elected for complicated historical reasons, but it's still there.
	Those people aren't going away, and they will probably be even further radicalized by the further right-wing shift of the media sources.
	Like, when Fox News is sort of the rational center of this world, Yeah, One American News is going to look like the Rational Center in four years, I think.
	It's just going to keep getting more and more aggressive, more and more extreme, and we still have our work cut out for us.
	If the resistance libs want to go back to brunch, just stay out of our way.
	That's the only request I have.
	There's, yeah, there's no doubt about that, that you're right.
	You know, the people that think, oh great, everything's back to normal.
	I mean, what was so fucking great about normal?
	Normal was the crisis.
	Normal was what gave us Trump in the first place.
	So, you know, if you want to just go back to brunch and say, oh well, that's alright, then fuck you, you're the problem as well.
	I agree with you about that.
	I absolutely agree with you that there's the white nationalism, the Nazi movement, and Trumpism generally, which it's not exactly the same thing.
	Obviously there's tensions, there's differences, they don't overlap completely, but it's part of a broad far-right authoritarian movement, very large in the United States, not going anywhere.
	Absolutely right.
	And yet I keep coming back to those polls, you know, of the American people's attitudes on things like, you know, climate change and abortion and issue after issue.
	The American public poll, sometimes by narrow margins, but they poll in majorities, they poll on the, you know, broadly speaking, the right side of these arguments.
	The public are significantly to the left of the politicians, right and left, so to speak.
	And I think maybe I'm a little bit more optimistic than you.
	I mean, regarding the turnouts, right?
	What you said about numbers, absolutely right.
	Trump increased his vote.
	Trump's vote in 2016 is basically sort of a normal Republican vote, isn't it?
	I think he polled.
	He actually managed sort of slightly less than Romney or something in 2012, I think it was.
	Something like that, anyway.
	And so there was never, you know, back then anyway, at the start of this thing, there was no groundswell of extra support for Trump.
	That was something that you heard a lot, you know, and it wasn't really true.
	Whereas this time around, yeah, we've got that.
	We've got like an extra surge of support for Trump, not only of the same people, broadly speaking, the same people voted for him last time, voted for him again, even after four years of all this.
	But we've also got millions more people voting for him.
	And I think absolutely right.
	At the very least, that's them voting for him despite the fact that very well-publicised, savage policies towards migrants coming across the border, stuff like this, on issue after issue.
	And there's no doubting there is a very, very sizeable right-wing authoritarian chunk in the United States.
	Huge, in fact.
	People who are at least prepared to go along with that.
	Or, again, at the very least, they are prepared to vote for that in a state of disorientation, not really understanding what they're voting for.
	You know, I think there are some people like that.
	That's still, I mean, that's kind of a distinction without a difference.
	If they're voting for it, they're in that camp.
	So yeah, that's still a huge problem.
	And it's growing, absolutely, again.
	And yet at the same time, you do have a massively increased turnout for Joe Biden.
	Joe Biden has in fact scored a larger electoral vote than any other candidate in history.
	And I don't think you can divorce that from the situation.
	You can't divorce it from the situation of crisis.
	You can't divorce it from the situation of having been, you know, ruled by Trump and Trumpism for four years.
	And I don't think you can divorce it either from the fact that we've got protest movements on the rise and also on the back of that you've got lots of people getting activated, getting into community organizing, organizing on the ground, stuff like that.
	I think there's no doubt we haven't seen a massive swing away from Trump and Trumpism.
	But what we have seen, I think, I hope, is, well no, this isn't the bit where I say this is what I hope, what we've seen I think is a deepening of the division, you know, digging in of heels on both sides, but part of that is that the people who were always there as a sort of latent force of resistance against that and everything it represents, they're now getting activated.
	They're getting into it, and they are edging out the right-wing authoritarian trend in the country.
	You know, essentially, there's more of us than there are of them, whether we're all conscious of it yet, or still we have like the basic attitudes, if we're polled on things, we'll say on the right side of the argument.
	And yet we await to be activated.
	There's still a broad mass of support against this stuff from people, many of whom are getting now activated.
	So I absolutely agree with the need to carry on fighting and the fact that the far-right movement isn't going anywhere and Trumpism certainly isn't going anywhere and maybe we'll talk a bit later on about where Trump and Trumpism are going in the future.
	And I absolutely agree that there's massive work still to be done, and I agree also that going back to normal isn't a solution, because normal is the source of the problem in the first place.
	Normal is the crisis.
	But at the same time, I do see legitimate grounds for hope here.
	I do see a reaction against it.
	Yeah, it's weird when you're the optimistic one.
	No, I don't.
	I don't know.
	Maybe I'm being a little bit too pessimistic.
	I mean, I agree with you.
	I think that a lot of the... Well, let me agree and disagree, maybe.
	I think a lot of the turnout thing, and I'm interested to see when people actually get the chance to dig into these numbers and political scientists actually study this.
	I think a lot of the enhanced turnout is just a matter of...
	Vastly enhanced vote by mail, early voting, etc.
	due to the COVID crisis.
	And enhanced turnout has always been a thing that was thought to just kind of universally help Democrats over Republicans.
	Just like enhanced turnout just automatically makes Democrats win.
	The fact that turnout was up Both among Democrats and Republicans means that there's probably a ceiling to that, that there is, like, there is a, you know, depending on exactly when and how the suppression is going on and exactly how that's working, how exactly that works, because clearly there are a lot of, like, elderly Republican voters who would have a tough time getting to the polls.
	Uh, who were helped by mail-in voting, so I'm interested to see kind of how those numbers work.
	But I do agree that, like, what we're seeing, um, in terms of, like, actual, like, activist movements, actual kind of left-wing activism, um, even, you know, even sort of the, the silly podcasting and the bread tube stuff, like, kind of activating people and getting people more interested in more left-wing politics, if that also does lead them into doing some kind of organizing, some kind of resistance work, some kind of something somewhere, With the mutual aid organizations etc.
	Yeah, I do think that that is having like a significant effect and the fact that a lot of those groups despite kind of holding their nose to electoralism do seem to have like Activated and worked in this regard does does speak well to to their impact on on this result.
	And so, yeah, I do agree.
	I do agree with that.
	I do.
	You know, I really like writing in March and April.
	I think there was a whole lot of, you know, Never Biden, you'll burn your bust kind of stuff from that more kind of left-wing of the party.
	But I think people did what I did.
	I mean, I always said I live in a swing state.
	I'm going to go vote for whatever shitty Democrat they give us.
	And I voted for the shitty Democrat they gave us because that's what you have to do.
	But I think a lot of people did kind of make that calculation in the end.
	And I don't blame the people who couldn't for whatever reason.
	I get it, you know, but… Yeah, totally, yeah.
	Biden and Harris are so odious, I can't condemn anybody that can't bring themselves to vote for those people.
	I've got to tell you, this was also an election.
	I mean, I've been, you know, kind of, like, I was like a kid following, like, the 1992 presidential election, you know?
	Like, I was kind of born into this world in a certain way as someone who was kind of always interested in this kind of, like, electoral politics, like, thing.
	I have followed very closely every election since I was old enough.
	I voted in my first presidential election in the year 2000.
	The Bush Gore election, which is a great place to start.
	I'm looking forward to hearing in like 10 years the people for whom 2016 was their first, or 2020 was their first, and see what they have to say about that experience, because I'm sure we will be able to compare some notes at that point.
	But 2020 really was, like, after the primaries were over, I just kind of completely checked out to a large degree.
	It was just kind of like, you know, I just could not muster up the energy to care one way or the other.
	Um, and honestly, I kind of like I did want Biden to win just so that Trump would no longer be in, but my feeling was kind of like, I hope he wins.
	I hope he really ekes it out.
	And I think, you know, like on election night and then like the next day as we were kind of watching things, I think I was in the, uh, you and I are in a group chat together.
	I was kind of sitting there going like, oh yeah, he should get Arizona and Nevada, get to exactly 270, and then Trump should take the rest.
	That should be the result.
	270 to 268 proves the fucking point, as well as anything could, right?
	And so I realize that is a silly and vindictive way to feel, but it was definitely, that was kind of where my emotions landed on that.
	It's like, yes, let Biden win.
	We will do four years of Biden, but don't give them anything that they don't absolutely have to have to do that.
	Yeah, no, speaking as somebody who would, you know, I have very little faith in Bernie Sanders or the sort of social democratic reformist politics that he represents.
	But, you know, having said all that, you know, I would have much rather seen him get the nomination just on the basis of his personal popularity, really.
	But, you know, yeah, it's very tempting to want that sort of Schadenfreude poor result for the Democrats.
	It really is, because, you know, they got the guy they wanted, and the guy they wanted is fucking awful.
	And, you know, I think you have to, you know, kind of with rage and frustration at the fact that this is the situation people are constantly put in, You kind of have to say, okay, you know, you saw that it's just the fucking Democrats being the Democrats.
	It's just this deeply uninspiring mainstream establishment candidate, total corporate fucking whore.
	I shouldn't use whore as an insult because whores actually give you what you pay for, whereas Biden doesn't.
	A whore is a respectable professional person performing a service that is greatly needed by society.
	Yeah, Senator ought to be the insult, not whore.
	But yeah, they just gave you Biden, and Biden's a fucking piss-poor candidate, and Harris is fucking horrible, but you, you know, the people, you know, like, again, you know, it's the black working class in Georgia that pull the
	Pulled everybody's nuts out of the fire again, you know, and they came out and they did it because they recognized the danger of Trump, they recognized the danger of this fascistic movement, the imminent fucking danger, and they came out and they, you know, it's kind of incredibly frustrating that this always happens over and over again, but at the same time you have to say...
	You know, they put defeating Trump above everything else, and they shouldn't have had to be put in that situation.
	They should have had something worthwhile to vote for.
	You know, Bernie Sanders is more along that road than Biden.
	He's nowhere near it.
	But yeah, there it is again.
	But at the same time, yeah, it's very hard not to have a certain desire to gloat over the Democrats.
	Because, you know, I, for a long time, I expected them to lose this election because they would field a totally uninspiring, you know, establishment centrist, which means right winger, obviously, like Biden.
	And they did.
	And I expected them to lose.
	And I think they would have done if it hadn't been for Covid.
	But what Covid did, as you correctly said, was it made the mail-in phenomenon, it really activated the mail-in vote phenomenon, and that was better for the Democrats.
	I mean, you know, Trump actually told his people not to do mail-in voting, and now he's trying to stop the mail-in votes being counted, because he knows who the vast majority of those votes are from.
	Yeah, I mean, we'll transition to that here in a second, I think.
	I think you're, I mean, yeah, I think we're kind of circling the same points here.
	Yeah, let's just, let's just kind of move on and kind of talk about, like, kind of more, kind of in our wheelhouse, kind of what's going on in terms of the way that The kind of far right are seeing this election and these results.
	Yeah, let's be a bit more on brand.
	And I think we have to, in order to frame this properly, I think we do have to kind of look back to actually all the way back to 1992.
	And that is – that's the year that Bill Clinton was elected when he ousted the first Bush.
	That was Perot's big kind of time to shine when he got 20 percent of the popular vote and zero electoral college votes, which is the way you really want – when you really know a system is working well.
	It's when 20 percent of the popular vote, zero actual electoral college votes.
	Yeah, that's working well.
	Well, you know – As several people have said this time around, it really shows you the quality of a democratic system that, you know, Biden is already winning the popular vote by 4 million votes and we're still waiting to find out if he's actually won the election!
	Well, I mean, there was no question as to who was going to win the popular vote.
	There was no person anywhere.
	I remember, again, one of my guilty pleasures is watching the news coverage on the night when the election results come in, and every other year they'll put up the graphics.
	It'll be Al Gore and then George W. Bush, and it'll have the electoral votes, and then underneath that it has the running
	Popular vote total and this year there was none of that like it is like on the New York Times website and Like very tiny numbers like underneath their names like above the map, but it's not like trumpeted at all It's not really because it was completely obvious who was gonna win the popular vote like like I mean it really like in the last eight election cycles presidential election cycles The Democrats have won seven times.
	The only time a Republican won the popular vote was George W. Bush in 2004.
	That's literally the only time in the last eight cycles that a Republican has won the popular vote, which is absurd.
	Because, you know, it's a majority.
	It's a bare majority in places, but it is a majority of the American people who are not actually completely insane right-wing authoritarians, and they've basically got nowhere else to go.
	Well, so very quickly in terms of the history here.
	So in 92, Bill Clinton kind of upsets.
	He kind of comes out of nowhere and wins the Democratic primary.
	You should read and or watch the movie or the book Primary Colors for a kind of slightly fictionalized account of that.
	But he wins the 1992 primary, and then he wins the presidential election.
	And it's really, and it's on his, you know, he comes, and it's easy to forget this now, but he came out with this very kind of progressive kind of working class message in his 92 election he completely gave up on that the second he was in office um but like they were coming out like um hillary clinton was promoting what was then called hillary care um a universal health care package which was significantly to the left of what ended up being passed uh 16 years later in the affordable care act um not Not quite as far as... Oh, you mean Romneycare?
	Romneycare, right, which is even... that's an oversimplification.
	But, you know, like the whole thing there is, you know, Bill Clinton kind of comes in from nowhere.
	He has a progressive, you know, working class message.
	He was very popular with the African American population.
	But he was hated by Republicans.
	He was hated by Republicans, and particularly by Republican legislators and particularly Republican politicians.
	And again, a book which has deep, deep problems because it was written by Joe Connison, who was a, you know, He's a Clinton loyalist from way back in the day, but he wrote a very good book, which I haven't read in a number of years, but he wrote a very good book called The Hunting of the President in the late 90s.
	I've read it.
	Again, deep problems.
	It is not a full recommend, but he lays out the fact that there was a right-wing conspiracy by very well-paid, highly-placed actors to essentially smear the Clintons from the second they got into office, and even before.
	The whole thing was just smear them, Throw everything you can at them, whether it's true or not, and they built this whole right-wing ecosystem around that.
	And you can say, oh, that's a Clinton loyalist kind of doing the thing, but then, like, a few years later, this guy David Brock comes out with a book called Blinded by the Right, which he was one of the guys who actually was doing that shit in the 90s, and he saw the light and then becomes a Democratic Party hack.
	So, you know, Saw part of the light anyway, yeah.
	Saw a chink of light.
	It's not a wash, but you know, okay, maybe you could set your sights slightly higher than that, but okay, it's fine.
	David Brocks, basically, it just seems to be basic in his character to be a completely unscrupulous hack, you know, hatchet man.
	It's just that now he does it for the Democrats instead of right-wing conspirators.
	Right, but if he's not gonna do it for the Republicans at least you can give him a like at least that that degree of thing so, you know and over the years this has been like essentially like Universally confirmed that yeah, I know that we were after the Clintons.
	It was yeah, yeah, yeah, right and so Ever since then there really has been this and part of the Part of the result of that was that there was always this kind of air of illegitimacy over the Clintons, and over the fact that the Clintons were in office at all.
	And that's partly because of this kind of Republican smear machine, and partly because they kind of got the better of the Democrats in the Democratic primaries, and the Democratic establishment didn't much like them either, until they just sort of took over the Democratic establishment.
	Like, the DNC was a new idea in 1992.
	So, I say this because, like, this idea that, like, Democratic presidents are just sort of, like, inherently illegitimate kind of has its origins there in 1992.
	And it becomes even more aggressive when, in 2008, after the disastrous George W. Bush presidency, which everyone seems to have just completely forgotten, It's for you and me and a few other people.
	Barack Obama comes in, and they're calling him the Kenyan usurper and all that sort of thing, despite the fact that he was massively popular and completely crushed McCain and Palin.
	But even then, there was this kind of sense of illegitimacy that just kind of dogs him the entire time.
	And you also see... And that air of illegitimacy, you know, it takes its most crude form in birtherism, which is where Donald Trump gets his political start.
	Absolutely, absolutely.
	And you know, you also start to see in kind of that era, certainly, I think in 2004, you saw some of this as well.
	This this kind of idea of like, they're busing in votes that they're like illegitimate votes.
	Essentially, they're like black people crossing lines and any kind of like, voting irregularity was just kind of this kind of like old democratic party machine going back to the kennedy stuff in ballot boxes and that sort of thing you know like i actually i i feel like um the sort of the open secret among many people that basically the republicans stole florida in 2000 you know openly stole it um i think that's part of it i think that's part of it i think that's part of
	I think that's fed into a kind of backlash where the ideology machine has had to react to that in a way, and its way of reacting to it is to just go, no, we didn't, you did it, to the Democrats.
	Right.
	Well, and then, as part of the result of the 2000 election, you get the, like, oh, we're going to have these, like, instead of having these, like, butterfly ballots that people can misinterpret and, like, overvote or undervote, we're going to have these machines.
	And they're going to be these kind of perfect, incorruptible machines.
	They're going to be—Dbold is going to be the big company that we go through.
	And, oh, it just happens to be run by a Republican Party hack.
	And so, oh, well, you know, but you can't—you got to trust the machines.
	And so, wow, the Republicans— Yeah, trust the machines.
	Yeah, great.
	It's as if science fiction never existed.
	Did Terry Nation die for nothing?
	Inside joke.
	While the Republicans are spreading this idea that actually legitimate democratic votes are illegitimate because they're not the right kind of people voting, they're actually engaging in forms of overt voter suppression in terms of voter ID laws and poll taxes, etc.
	And also actively, this is never really proven, it's just kind of always this thing that's existing underneath the surface.
	But who knows what was going on in those deep old machines, man.
	And like, I try not to be like the conspiracy guy, but there's no like paper trail.
	There's no nothing that would ever actually demonstrate.
	That the numbers coming in are the same as the numbers going out.
	And so it's just kind of, you know, like, and we just kind of, again, we just sort of forget that these days.
	We just kind of forget that, oh, that was a thing that was part of our political system.
	And, you know, maybe we maybe we should find another way to vote.
	So.
	Well, yeah, nobody looks into it because nobody really wants to know because the consequences of knowing are too awful.
	Right.
	Well, and, like, Democrats used to make a lot of noise about that.
	Like, it used to be kind of this thing that you'd see in kind of progressive and even in kind of elected official circles.
	But ultimately, one of the things, again, it's kind of another aside, one of the things with voting in the United States is that it's, like, aggressively hyper-local.
	And this is sort of, like, this is actually built into the Constitution in which, like, the states were seen as, like, The organs that we're going to manage voting for the state and then it just kind of all like essentially I'm an original like you weren't even really like voting Like senators were appointed by state legislators and that's like like in that there's a constitutional amendment I forget the exact number but there's a constitutional amendment.
	I think it's the I don't remember which one but there's an amendment that literally says no we're going to select senators by popular vote as opposed to by Appointment by the state legislatures.
	And so state legislatures were originally supposed to have a kind of much stronger influence in terms of kind of what the federal governing body looked like, right?
	And so the idea was, well, we'll let the states just kind of do whatever they want to do in terms of voting.
	And this was also as a way of kind of like staving off the needs of slaveholders versus not.
	You know, those kinds of issues.
	So, like, it's all kind of run by the states.
	And then most states tend to kind of put the... they design a kind of overall state system, but then it's administered at, like, these kind of hyper-local precinct and county levels across, and it varies state by state because some states have, like, kind of vast wilderness and some states have... are kind of more tightly compacted.
	So, Depending on where you're voting in the United States, you might be using a lever, you might be using a... you might be marking in an oval, which is what I do in the state of Michigan.
	You might have one of these machines.
	I mean, it varies all over the place, right?
	But it's, like, aggressively hyper-local.
	And so, like, the voting rolls are kind of held by the state and they're held by the local offices.
	All this stuff is kind of done in this very, very local fashion.
	And because it's done in this kind of piecemeal local faction where the laws vary from place to place, etc., It's very easy for there to be mistakes by you know, some local county board registrar does something and either side that is kind of affected by that can always say Hey, you're doing that as a way of disadvantaging our voters, right?
	And so And it also becomes a way of when that stuff actually is happening, you know when there are kind of top-down Authoritarian controls being put on the way that the voter rolls are being handled, for instance, in terms of like, you know, cutting out people with, you know, hyphens in their last names and with, you know, till days, which seems to be a particular way of kind of getting like Hispanic people to be purged from the voter rolls in certain places.
	Because Hispanic people vote overwhelmingly for, you know, it is like these kind of little piecemeal things that Republicans have been doing for decades now to just like suppress the vote.
	And again, in interviews, I mean, this isn't like some secret thing.
	They will literally just tell you that.
	They will literally go to court.
	There are court cases.
	So like, for instance, voter suppression by race is illegal.
	So if you can prove that's happening, then you've conducted an illegal election.
	The consequences of that are difficult because then the way you do that is you put in something in place and they strut their feet and they don't actually do anything and then you know ten years later maybe you finally get a sanction against them and by each time they've moved to some other strategy so you know whatever but so voter suppression by race is illegal but voter suppression along partisan lines is completely 100% legal and has been declared so by the Supreme Court over and over and over and over again, right?
	So What they'll say is the Republicans will get control of a state legislature They will draw the map so that they can like they will draw like a 18 districts so that like 11 of them are Republican despite the fact that they get a less of the majority vote in those but they but they managed to like just draw the districts in a way so that they so they will win more districts and then when Asked by a judge.
	Why did you draw it with 11?
	Republican seats and seven Democratic seats will say, well, we didn't think we could make a map where we would get 12.
	This is an actual court case.
	I mean, this is this is a thing, right?
	So yeah, this is Republicans openly admit to that this is this is not a secret thing that I'm making up here This is not some like weird lefty propaganda.
	This is not DNC talking points.
	This is Legitimately a thing that has happened and that it's openly admitted to by people who are actually following these issues anyway, so while the Republicans are doing all of that bullshit and That's a way of deflecting from that.
	They're saying, no, no, no, all that stuff.
	I mean, come on, we're just putting in place like reasonable protections for to make sure that our voter integrity is going to be solid and realistic.
	And really what you need to be looking at is these cases of this in-person voter fraud in which people are going and voting all over the place.
	And you know what those kinds of people are like.
	And it's overwhelmingly like they're looking at these overwhelmingly African-American districts that vote in like 95% for Democrats.
	And they go, no, we need to start looking there.
	We need to start really putting poll watchers in all those places.
	And we need to make sure that none of those people are voting.
	And in the scuzzier portions of the internet, you'll find like in like Newsmax and shit like that, you would find like these like horror stories of, you know, there was this bus full of black people that showed up.
	And they just all got out and they all went and voted.
	And then they left.
	And they went and they were going towards another polling place.
	I know where the next one is.
	It's just a couple miles that way.
	They're just going from polling place to polling place and voting.
	And they're just running up the totals.
	And it's clearly a thing that's happening because I saw a bus and it had black people on it.
	And, you know, that's just how it goes.
	And these sorts of things, these kinds of fever dream conspiracies around this issue, Which have, you know, there's there like this kind of more respectable versions that, you know, the kind of talking heads on Fox News and the kind of Republican senators will use.
	And then there's the kind of like more like the swampy versions that are kind of down at the bottom have become absolutely pervasive in this kind of right wing media ecosystem over the course of the last, you know, 30 years or so since since Bill Clinton was elected.
	And so increasingly, there is a sense that if a Democrat wins an election, a national level election, outside of a major city, it's just fundamentally illegitimate.
	They just don't accept it.
	They're just programmed to just not accept it.
	And so all of that is premised to what I was originally going to do when we were going to do this episode was I was going to – I figured there would be a whole lot of various takes about kind of where the election was going.
	In this right-wing ecosystem in terms of like where they would kind of disagree with each other and we could kind of talk about the different ways of the different interpretations meant for the different types of people that we were talking about.
	I'm sensing a twist coming.
	But they're all on the same fucking page.
	I spent like 10 hours listening to these people in the last two days.
	Harmony and Discord in the right-wing Chudder-sphere.
	It's literally like the whole, the whole thing is, uh, Trump was winning up until, up until the end of Tuesday night, which he wasn't really winning at the end of Tuesday night.
	Like I was watching it and I mean, Biden was pretty clearly, you know, neck and neck.
	I mean, he was, he was, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't, it didn't look like a clear Trump victory unless you had like very clear assumptions about the way that certain things were going to go.
	Um, it looked like Biden was going to get to 270 on, uh, on that night it was tight it was it was a nail biter but um it did look like biden is going to pull it out um barely um on tuesday night but then they'll say and then we went to bed on tuesday night and it looks like trump kind of had it in the bag and then we got up the next morning and all these like mail-in votes were happening and like why do they get to do that why we should you should have to vote on the day why these are these are clearly illegitimate there's just somebody
	there's just a election official in the back just printing these off and like project veritas put out this like absolutely absurd video of like this guy going like well i was just given a load of ballots and i was just told to fill them out for joe biden and they just went off and got voted and i thought that was not a thing that we're supposed to be doing and i have not seen a full debunk on that but um i you know normally with the project like if project veritas is saying something is bullshit it's just it's just bullshit yeah it's always bullshit um
	And it's always this kind of manipulated thing, but Project Veritas is seen as this kind of like truth-telling, you know, secret, you know, underground news source by your kind of mainline Republican voter because it tells them what they want to know, which is, this was fundamentally illegitimate, all these people who shouldn't be voting are voting, and we agree that every legal vote and every legitimate vote should be cast.
	But, look at all these late voters.
	They're just waiting to see how many they have to print in order to win the election, and then they just kind of slowly roll them out until they win.
	And so, look, they won by 10,000 votes in Georgia.
	Why weren't they coming out that way in the beginning?
	And that's going to be the thing.
	While mail-in voting has done, I think it's a much more equitable system.
	I think that I would much rather see us have this become the new normal in the United States in terms of us having a wider ability to vote.
	I think it's a much more fair way to do this.
	I suspect that given that it looks very much like Donald Trump will have gotten like crushed by By early voting and by mail-in voting.
	I suspect that you're going to see Republicans really go in hard against it, and I suspect this will be the last time that we see easy access to early and mail-in voting in this country.
	Because they're just going to tell themselves, like the entire Republican base now believes that this was all just stolen from them by those people who shouldn't be voting, voting.
	And like, the one difference that you see is like among the more kind of like mainstream, like the Tim Pools of the world, you see kind of that more look, you see that look more like, well, the Democrats are just kind of like stealing it because they're just printing them off ahead of time.
	In the kind of more like the Daily Show aside, It looks a lot more like, well, those people just shouldn't be voting.
	Why do we have this in the first place?
	If you can't show up to a vote on the day, in this kind of time frame, we don't want you to vote anyway because you're not the right kind of person who should be voting.
	You're not a person of ability and character and agency, etc, etc.
	And so therefore, you shouldn't get to decide in the first place, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	And that is always buried underneath the other kinds of critiques, and that is, well, why couldn't you get to a polling place on the first Tuesday in November, you asshole?
	I mean, that's kind of the angle, so go ahead.
	What's the slightest bit difficult about, you know, on a day where there's no national holiday, where Loads of you have to work, you know, to take hours off to stand in a queue of 80 people for hours and yeah, what's the slightest bit difficult?
	What's the slightest bit difficult about that?
	What's the slightest bit difficult about getting and paying for childcare while you wait in line for etc, etc?
	You know, what's the slightest bit difficult about doing it in the middle of a fucking pandemic?
	And in plenty of places, particularly in major cities, I mean, you know, they do have like, there's like, again, in Texas, the State Board of Elections got to just like decide how many polling places are going to be open in any individual place.
	And so they said, Oh, yeah, we're going to have one per county.
	And therefore, And, like, the county that has Houston, Texas in it has one polling place, and counties that have 400 residents have one polling place, and guess who gets majorly disadvantaged by that system?
	I can't imagine.
	It really is that simple, basically.
	The Nazis are just doing their version of the same thing everybody else is doing.
	It's just the same thing sung in different ways, isn't it?
	It's the same theme sung in different ways.
	It's just, you know, Trump says, oh yeah, massive fraud, and the the temples of this world and so on make all these noises about, oh, where are all these extra votes?
	Charlie Kirk saying, what?
	Suddenly 100,000 Biden votes materialize out of nowhere, etc.
	And Tucker Carlson had a wonderful bit where he said about how, oh, in Detroit, you know, the most mismanaged place in the Western Hemisphere, They're deciding who's going to be your president, you know, reminding white America of the scandal of the fact that black working-class people are still allowed to vote, you know.
	But the Nazis, it sounds like what they're doing is just the same thing couched in different terms, basically.
	They're just being slightly more honest about it, if anything.
	Yeah, no, I mean, it's definitely, it's definitely, that is pretty much, pretty much the way it goes.
	And, uh, you know, it was interesting, I mean, the one kind of interesting thing is that the, uh, a lot of the, particularly kind of the TRS-adjacent crew, um, are, uh, so black-pilled on the whole idea of, um, the voting system about, like, kind of media and politics.
	Like, they've increasingly gone down the rabbit hole of just, it's all fake.
	It's all, like, That like there is a person named Joe Biden and there is a person named Donald Trump, but like ultimately.
	What we see in our media and what we see in our government, what we see is ultimately like being controlled by, you know, the secret puppet masters with three parentheses around their names.
	And then it's all just sort of like, there's no like kind of like battle.
	There's no like battle for power kind of going on at all.
	That it's all just sort of like built for show as a way of delegitimizing the electoral process itself.
	And I mean, they really do get on this like completely abstract, like, What kind of narrative are they trying to sell with this kind of election?
	How is this meant to crush the white race?
	Because it's a given that that's what it's for.
	Right, it's a given because they've just gotten that far up their own asses on this stuff.
	Yes, I actually agree with you that ultimately so much of what goes on in American and world politics, but I know American politics much better, That a lot of what goes on in American politics is ultimately a kind of a show meant to appease people, while members of both parties just want to appease their wealthy donors and, you know, engage in a global war.
	I mean, you know, which again is just kind of appeasing the capitalist class, etc.
	You know, like, Yes, I agree.
	But like, that's not, it's not like the Jews controlling everything.
	It's not all scripted.
	And it's not like, or some like performance art, this kind of like improvisation.
	And it's not like, it's just, it's like, yes, I agree.
	There's a whole lot of stuff that's, you know, you don't have to follow American politics very long before you realize that like so much of, like so many campaign stops are just You know, it's built for the news media to take their pictures and write their stories and cover it, and they are like trying to tell a narrative.
	But beneath that, there is a like real thing that's actually happening.
	And that actually is, like, affecting real people's lives.
	And that's why it's important, right?
	You know?
	Yeah.
	So they've basically never got past the, uh, it's all fake man stage.
	It's just that they've added, you know, sort of sinister Jewish conspirators to the story.
	Well, I think that they got so invested in 2016 into the Trump story and they really thought Trump was gonna be, like, he was gonna come in and be, Just straight up, like, deport, like, train cars full of, you know, undocumented immigrants.
	Oh yeah, yeah.
	That's really what they thought he was gonna do.
	And so the absolutely draconian and awful immigration stuff that has actually happened to Trump is just like, oh, that's just a cuck.
	He's just cucking for Israel.
	He's just doing what Israel wants.
	He's just doing that for show.
	It's complete nonsense.
	It doesn't mean anything.
	You know, and so the actual real material effects on real people's lives have no meaning for them because they didn't get the, like, literal, you know, like, game show where, you know, undocumented immigrants have to, like, bob for apples or get shot or something.
	I don't know exactly kind of what their fantasy of that was, but some of that stuff got pretty dark in that kind of early 2017 time, you know, some of the things that they were talking about.
	Um yeah like that's yeah as a but yeah no they've all just kind of they've all just kind of gotten on this uh you know it's all it's all fake it's all it's all it's all not real it's all um you know the the all these mail-in votes they're all They're all just, they're all just manufactured just so that Biden can get a win.
	And the more kind of like plugged into reality, and this is the weird that I can say plugged into reality side of it, believe that it was a Democratic plot that the people in the media, which includes Fox News now, like Fox News is basically just run by the Democrats, by the way.
	So that the entire media is declaring the thing for Biden, and the entire media is going to cover up all the real truth that Project Veritas is putting out there about the truth about ballot stuffing and ballot harvesting, and how this election was stolen for the Democrats to crush Donald Trump and the Republicans.
	That's kind of the more like plugged-in version, whereas the... That's the more reality-based version.
	That's the more reality-based version, whereas the less reality-based version goes something like, you know, it's all a thing, like the Democrats and Republicans are all kind of ganging up on Trump personally, and that Trump personally was going to come and be our savior, but then, like, they had to kind of make sure he was out, because ultimately he was going to, you know, Embrace populism in the next term or something.
	Yeah, so that's what's going on with those guys.
	That's illuminating.
	It's lovely to see unanimity and as Joe Biden says, you know, let's put an end to division.
	And so it's lovely to see them.
	The Nazi podcast is leading the way.
	Let's reach out to those guys and really try to find a reasonable middle ground.
	But I think what's important to note here is that I haven't watched a ton of Fox News in the last couple of days.
	At least outside of like kind of clips of Tucker and Hannity So I haven't like tuned into the news broadcast.
	They're they're they're mostly kind of accepting They're kind of like they're planning for like a Republican Party past Trump and like this kind of what we were getting at earlier Is that it does feel like you know all these kind of Republican institutions including Fox News have just kind of cut Trump loose They're done with him.
	He's outlived his usefulness.
	They're done with him.
	They're ready to kind of move on to the next thing.
	It's a really interesting question as to what happens in a couple of years when they want to start to field a presidential candidate again.
	Like, who kind of comes forward and what form does that take, right?
	You know, does Trumpism kind of go away?
	Now, I think this kind of Trumpist, like this quote-unquote populist, this kind of far-right nationalism um that that trump kind of represented and that trump sort of was a catalyst to activating here i don't think that's going away anytime soon in fact um just i think we can expect there to be um acts of violence between now and inauguration day i think we're gonna see some mass shootings i think that's pretty much inevitable um we already saw uh an attempt to the
	There was somebody hanging very close to people counting ballots in Philadelphia.
	There was one particular ballot counter had to go into hiding or something, wasn't there?
	And then there's people turning up at counting stations with guns mounted onto trucks or something like that.
	Yeah, we've seen like miniguns on the backs of, you know, like pickup trucks and that sort of thing.
	I mean, there's all kinds of I think we are going to see some kind of act of mass terror, whether it's a shooting or a bombing or some attempted bombings.
	Who knows what form that's going to take, but I suspect it's going to be... Where it will come from.
	QAnon is a definite possible source.
	The QAnon type, the Boogaloo types, and I do actually suspect that once Trump isn't in office, I wonder if the Boogaloo crowd might...
	align itself a little bit more around being like kind of overtly pro-Trump.
	I think that's kind of a possibility that once he's sort of the underdog again that like that kind of Frame will sort of like accept him more as like kind of the kind of a de facto You know like symbol at least well We've kind of jumped over.
	I'm sorry to sort of derail you But we've kind of jumped over what what we think is going to happen in the immediate future Because he's currently in the White House refusing to concede, I know he doesn't need to concede, and pretty much the entire establishment is now just proceeding as normal.
	Ignoring Trump in the corner.
	I mean the Republican Party is doing this thing where some of them are sort of watching Trump and his court cases to see what happens but Trump's long-planned and indeed announced coup, you know, it was always pretty shambolic and it's pretty much fizzled immediately and it's gonna rumble on and drag on but I don't think there's much chance of it getting anywhere.
	So, I mean, I don't actually see Trump kind of camping in the White House and refusing to leave.
	I don't think he's going to do that.
	I think sooner or later.
	And I have difficulty imagining him running again.
	I really do.
	Like, lots of people saying, oh, he'll run again in 2024.
	Well, for 2024.
	It'll be less time than that, obviously, when they start choosing their next nominee.
	I don't see that because I think by then he'll have settled into his new career as a TV host or TV station mogul or maybe even, you know, I mean there are legitimate legal problems and financial problems which are definitely dogging Trump's future.
	So, I mean, if he can, I think he'll try to go into right-wing media.
	Because what he likes to do is campaign, so he's going to spend the rest of his life monetizing, being the ex-president who was deposed in a left-wing coup, and giving speeches and shit like that.
	Maybe he'll go give speeches next to the Weinstein brothers.
	And Jordan Peterson, he'll be like an IDW type figure.
	Yeah, well, he's very intellectual.
	He'll show up on that circuit.
	I have very serious doubts about him sort of refusing to leave the White House.
	I've joked on Twitter about, you know, 2021 will be the year of two presidents.
	You'll have a president and an anti-president and stuff like that.
	A schism, you know, it's lovely to think of, but I doubt it'll happen.
	I think he'll... because he's a coward to his fucking core.
	He's a coward and he'll chicken out and he'll leave and he'll give up and then he'll spend the rest of his life whinging and monetising his whinging.
	I think that's what he's going to do.
	So I don't actually really see... and even if he did try to get the nomination again for 2024, I don't think the Republican Party would go for it.
	I mean, the majority of them didn't want him as candidate last time and now he's the worst thing of all, isn't he?
	He's a loser.
	So... Yeah, they tend not to like...
	To like losers and really either party and I think that's, you know, that kind of, well, lots of things to unpack there.
	I think in the, I agree with you that in the immediate sense, I don't think he's actually gonna have to be kind of like drug out kicking and screaming as much as I think we would all like to see that at this point.
	It would be nice.
	You know, when we all saw that tweet, it's like, They should pay-per-view that.
	I would pay a hefty fee for a live stream of that that I could re-watch at my leisure.
	I think one thing that is important to note is that, again, the Republican establishment is not backing him.
	And I think that one thing that we haven't mentioned here is that I think he's still sick.
	If you remember, he got COVID.
	announced he tested positive for covid he goes to walter reed they put him on a ton of um uh they put him on a tons of drugs including what was it dexamethadone or something like that and a bunch of steroids um and this is an unhealthy elderly man to start with and he doesn't he doesn't look healthy he sounds drugged he sounds exhausted
	well he's and and he went on that like two-day tweeting spree like at the end of that and it was just like all caps super high and like tweeting like 18 hours a day from the hospital bed apparently and it was very much like yes this is donald trump just in complete unhinged mode right yeah Yeah.
	And then he comes back, and he's, like, you know, he's kind of breathing heavily, and he's got the, he's got the, he takes off the mask, and then he's kind of standing there, and he's, like, gasping, but, you know, he's holding strong, because that's what he does.
	And then from then on, like, nobody really talked about, like, COVID anymore.
	Like, oh yeah, I was just so good, I beat it in two days.
	And sure, he's got, like, top-notch, he's got the best medicine in the world, right?
	You know, so, you know, that...
	I think any thought that he was going to die from this was wishful thinking, allegedly, amongst people.
	I'm not going to, you know, it's kind of difficult to talk too openly about those sorts of things into a microphone.
	The FBI is going to listen to this.
	I wish Trump a long and happy life.
	Indeed, from inside a cell, yes.
	Or pelted with rotting garbage, that would be also acceptable.
	No, I think it's pretty clear that he's been kind of heavily medicated for the last month or so.
	I think that explains a lot of the even more erratic behavior and sort of like being out of the limelight except for when he's literally on stage doing a doing a rally because if you looked at his the the speech that he gave on I think Thursday night where he kind of comes out and he gives this very even more rambling than usual
	Very low energy, very tired, just very like, the news media is out to get me, and I'm ultimately the fake news, and we won so many votes, and we want to vote every, we want to count every legal vote.
	But it's this very kind of tired, kind of low affect kind of thing.
	Yes, he's tired, but I think, you know, again, I try not to lean into the conspiracy stuff.
	I think he's been sick the whole time, and I think they've just kind of had him on enough drugs to where he's, you know, just kind of doing the thing, and... I think that'll emerge, yeah.
	It's entirely possible.
	It is entirely possible.
	If he's that sick and he's pushed himself that hard that he just doesn't have the energy to keep fighting this, right?
	Yeah, he's just done.
	Yeah.
	Um, but also like is it totally possible he doesn't live to January, right?
	Despite having like the best medicine known to man like, you know, and it is kind of one of those like it's kind of hard to predict past that but I think that just the the fact that he's been cut loose and the fact that he does appear to be a very ill man.
	kind of tells me that I don't think we're going to see kind of the aggressive posturing that we might have seen.
	Whereas if he was very close, if it really was kind of like 270 and they thought they could flip a few thousand votes and they thought they could challenge the mail-in ballots on some major systematic way.
	I mean, there are rumors that Bill Barr, who is the attorney general, was going to try some legal shikanery.
	We might see something like that.
	But so far, it's all been kind of like the Trump sycophants, and they're just not very good at this.
	And they're not getting that kind of support.
	So it would surprise me if we see anything really more systematic than that.
	Can you imagine the level of conspiracy theory frenzy if he, you know, he never concedes and he disputes it and then he suddenly dies in office?
	Yeah, well, imagine what the QAnon is going to do.
	I saw somebody tweet out, it was like, you know, what Biden should really do is kind of come out and do like a speech where it's like,
	The storm is oncoming people don't you understand like and just like very heavily signal that he was cute the whole time Which yeah, just slip away when we go all in the divot in the unity talk wonderful It would be a very it would be a very terrible thing But it would also like it would be darkly hilarious if that was if you if they if it's just it's a funny thought But should not ever actually happen.
	That is not what what should go on but um But yeah, no, I think the future for Trump is like he really is just going to kind of enter this kind of media environment.
	I think probably, I mean, even before the 2016 election, he was talking about, oh, I'll kind of get out and then we'll do like Trump TV and he'll have like his own TV channel.
	And I think One American News is kind of like position itself is going to kind of be that.
	They've kind of like got the seat warm for him already And so I think Trump will just kind of transition into that instead of trying to make his own new thing And I suspect that the kind of the more Trump loyalists I mean it does I think Hannity and Tucker might decide to move kind of in that direction as well depending on if they can get kind of a sweetheart deal and then that becomes sort of the The central hub for this kind of like further right wing, like kind of Trumpist style of media.
	Yeah.
	And then Fox News kind of becomes the more kind of establishment Republican, you know, sort of like Trump News Network, which that's a terrifying thought, right?
	The other thing is that this kind of like nationalist, populist, kind of like traditionalist Christian, vaguely racist, kind of anti-Semitic, but in slightly falsifiable ways, but like heavily pro-Trump, is exactly the thing that little Nicky Fuentes has been kind of positioning himself for for the last couple of years.
	And he's already got kind of connections into that InfoWars sphere.
	He's already got, he's already got like Michelle Malkin kind of in his corner who has connections into this kind of like Chodosphere and kind of to the right of Fox News sort of thing.
	So it's entirely possible that if this thing happens that like little Nikki Fuentes is, you know, like the new rising star like Ben Shapiro was 20 years ago of, of that.
	And you know, that would be, that would be deeply unfortunate.
	Yes, that would be deeply unpleasant.
	So yeah, I mean, you were saying before, you know, Trumpism isn't going anywhere.
	I think maybe I'd want to nuance that by saying Trumpism itself, in the sense of that kind of reactionary, you know, The congealing of, as you say, nationalism and populism, etc, etc.
	I think it's going to die out in the form of Trumpism.
	I think Trump is destined to become a relatively minor figure.
	I don't think he's going to be leading a fascist movement from exile, from the presidency, or anything like that.
	Right.
	It'll be the next one.
	The next one will be kind of the scary one.
	Yeah, yeah.
	The same thing in its next guise.
	And of course, one of the quintessential traits of fascism is its syncretism.
	It can stick bits of other ideas onto itself and sort of change form and stuff like that.
	So I think that's what's going to happen next.
	It's going to be interesting and terrifying to see these developments.
	But I do think it's just like Fox News is kind of the reasonable center for a lot of these.
	Yeah.
	And I think that's what I was trying to get at by kind of going back to 1992 and kind of describe the longer stretch of like kind of where these ideas come from, because that came from.
	Like, establishment Republican figures with, like, well-paid jobs, right?
	Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	This wasn't, like, something that kind of came out of the fever swamps of, you know, the zine culture in 1992.
	This was, like, well-placed.
	And then when the Internet happens, like, the Drudge Report and, like, Newsmax and World Net Daily and these kinds of places really kind of gave that a place to kind of really fester and really kind of gave, like, a center to that.
	And then, like, a few years down the line, social media happens, and then suddenly they can kind of infect the rest of the world with that.
	And the Facebook groups are all kind of being the, you know, these terrible places of, you know, these vile swamps of infamy.
	But, yeah, I mean, it is interesting that, like, Facebook is kind of starting to come down on some of these groups in a lot more heavy-handed fashion.
	Twitter has announced that, like, the special protections that were on Donald Trump's account will be no longer in place as of January 20th, 2021, which kind of adds to, like, hold on, there were special protections put on Donald Trump's account, which I think all of us knew, but the fact that they just kind of, like, hold on, so you've been protecting him and not saying anything for the last four or five years.
	Yeah.
	Great.
	Nice to know that now.
	Thanks.
	But the fact that they're now, like, they banned David Duke, like, today.
	It's like, why did they ban David Duke today?
	Well, maybe they've finally done the thing.
	I mean, it's, like, fascinating that they've always had the ability.
	And this is, like, the tech platforms have, like, they've always kind of washed their hands of going, like, well, how can we possibly No, who's a real Nazi and who's just somebody joking around?
	How can we, you know, we're just, we just have to kind of let freedom of expression fly.
	And yet they absolutely can ban the Nazis in Germany where they are required by law to do so.
	And these tech platforms, if you put like adult content or any kind of content that they actually don't like, they have very clear draconian ways of like cutting down on that.
	Ditto.
	Suddenly, uh, the like NPR and the New York Times are calling Trump a liar.
	They're just doing it now.
	Yeah.
	Oh no, that speech was filled with falsehoods.
	It's complete nonsense.
	There's no reason you should have listened to it at all.
	The Republican Party is now kind of rejecting this guy because like, oh yeah, well, you know, he, you know, people on the inside of the administration are speaking out to the press and kind of going, we're really recommending he not do this.
	We're really recommending he just accept this and kind of think about his legacy.
	All of these people could have done this in 2015 and 2016 and we would not have had this disaster.
	And I want us to remember that.
	Absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	The second that it became advantageous for them to cut him off, they all cut him off.
	Yeah.
	Which means they could have done it five years ago and saved us all a whole lot of heartache and saved a whole lot of lives.
	Yeah, and give them a very short period of time and all these fuckers in the political system and in the media that have enabled him and pandered to him and cringed before him in every stage, they will be presenting themselves as heroes of the resistance.
	Without any shame whatsoever.
	And they'll be lining up to enable and cringe before the next one as well.
	Well, and all of these reporters, like Maggie Haberman and some of the other reporters covering this administration for the last five years, they all know who their underground sources have been during this time, their unnamed sources.
	And so all of these unnamed sources are now going to come out and be like, well, I was the one informing about all these things.
	These New York Times reporters and I was the one resisting from the inside and they're all gonna write books and then they're all gonna get like these comfy sinecures and CNN and MSNBC because I was the principled conservative and I was just trying to do the best I could from the inside and now I'm refined.
	I see the error of my ways.
	And because there's nothing that a liberal loves more than a reformed conservative.
	Oh yeah.
	No, I heard about one the other day.
	God, I can't remember the guy's name.
	It's something like Padmore or something like that.
	He was Trump's campaign manager for a long time.
	Parscale?
	Parscale.
	Parscale, that's right.
	Very, very close to him.
	And he had some sort of nervous breakdown or something.
	It's not something to laugh about.
	But yeah, now he's selling his book.
	He's got his book sold already.
	Yeah, they're all going to do it.
	They're all going to, it's going to be, we're going to, we get to the next four years.
	I mean, you know, we're kind of dancing around like what's going to happen in the future.
	Prediction.
	The Democrats are not going to take the Senate.
	I think it's, I see, I think that's unlikely.
	If the Democrats don't take the Senate, McConnell's still in charge.
	He's still going to block absolutely everything, no matter how charming Joe Biden is and no matter how many Backs he slaps and how many hands he shakes.
	The Republicans are going to not let him get any goddamn thing done except for cut taxes and spend more on the F-35.
	Those are going to be the two things that we get to see for the foreseeable future.
	And so all those people who asked back in the primaries, like, how can you possibly get Medicare for all passed?
	I'm not going to say you're not going to get your 10% reduction in the increase of health care premiums either, because McConnell's not going to let that go through either.
	So you might as well have pushed for something that was actually decent.
	Sorry, I'm very angry.
	Anyway, continue.
	No, I don't blame you.
	And the, you know, the tax hike is coming, because... Oh, austerity programs!
	Remember all that money we spent?
	All that money we spent to really help the American people when Donald Trump, the poor man, was in charge?
	We've got to pay that back now.
	So Joe Biden, you need to really start cutting all those social programs, and we've got to pay back that deficit.
	They're all going to be deficit hogs again.
	But the tax hike that was built into the Republican tax cut that Trump got through, that's coming due.
	So, you know, people say, oh, your taxes are going to go down.
	It's been a couple of years, they're going to go up again.
	And that's going to be laid at the door of the Democrats, despite the fact that it's built into the Republican tax cut on, you know, everybody, but secretly just the rich.
	You know, that's coming.
	And, you know, the Democrats, they're not going to take the Senate.
	They haven't got rid of Mitch McConnell.
	They fielded an uninspiring, fucking useless, right-wing, centrist Democrat against McConnell at the cost of enormous, insane amounts of money that shouldn't have been spent.
	A pro-Trump Democrat, someone who literally ran on, Mitch McConnell is not pro-Trump enough.
	Yeah, I can help Trump better than Mitch.
	So of course they lose.
	So Mitch McConnell, the gravedigger of democracy in America, is still fucking there.
	Oh God, the fucking Democrats, honestly.
	And that'll be the next four years.
	So, you know, ultimately it's work for reform where we can, especially on local issues and local races.
	Like, I'm not saying, like, please, you know, it's better to do what we can than not.
	I'm not telling anyone who wants to organize electorally not to organize electorally.
	But we've got to do other things as well.
	And we've got to stop thinking that the Democrats are going to do anything in particular.
	And they're going to blame Mitch McConnell.
	They're going to say Mitch McConnell won't let us do X.
	And I'll just say I will judge them by what they actually accomplish.
	And so maybe, OK, look, Joe Biden and the Biden administration proved me wrong.
	We keep hearing he might be this FDR level like reformer who really kind of brings in because he's Joe Biden has these magical Joe Biden powers.
	He's going to get the Republicans to pass legislation they never would have under a more under under someone who was not like friendly with them for as long as he's been friendly with them.
	And so if that's if that's if that is going to happen, then let's make it happen.
	But I have my doubts.
	It might be a bit like FDR in that he does a few things that help people, but not black people.
	And it doesn't really stop the recession.
	Yeah, that's a that's a more, that's a more complicated thing.
	I mean, absolutely.
	I agree.
	I agree.
	Absolutely.
	But that, that gets us into another little rabbit hole, which we've already kind of gone on for an hour and a half talking about.
	Yeah.
	Electoralism and just kind of vaguely gestured towards the Nazis.
	But I think this was worthwhile.
	I think this is a worthwhile episode.
	I'm very happy that we did this.
	If nothing else calls, we needed to talk about it.
	I enjoyed this.
	I also think it was worthwhile defeating Trump.
	I think that's a victory.
	I think we should take a victory when we get one.
	We cut the legs out from under Trumpist reaction, at least in its current form.
	And to a large extent, it was ordinary people organizing and getting active.
	And to a huge extent, it was the working class of color, black working class that pulled the world back from the brink again, as I never tire of saying.
	And, you know, it was built on, for whatever reason, people coming out and saying, look, this has to stop.
	We need to get rid of this guy.
	Is their political consciousness perfect?
	No, of course not.
	Are they, you know, are loads of them under, you know, what I would call, you know, bad ideas or illusions?
	Yes, I think they are.
	But nevertheless, huge numbers of people came out and they said, we've got to get rid of this motherfucker.
	And they did.
	And that's a victory.
	And it doesn't mean that, you know, what Trump represents goes away.
	Absolutely not.
	It's still there.
	There's still this vast swathe of right-wing authoritarianism in America.
	And the best way to combat that is still not electoralism.
	By all means, you know, organize electorally, as you just said.
	But the best way to combat that is on the ground with, you know, community organizations and things like protest and Black Lives Matter and Antifa.
	All the stuff that's being smeared.
	That's what's going to do it.
	That's what's going to crush these people, because it always is.
	It always is what crushes them.
	I mean, friend of the show, former guest Emily Gorsinsky had a really wonderful thread today.
	Oh yeah, I saw that.
	You know, Joe Biden, whether we believe this or not, you know, but like Joe Biden's like his announcement of his campaign when he announced he was running for president.
	He explicitly said, I saw those tiki torches in Charlottesville on August the 12th, 2017, and I knew that I had to act and I had to do something to combat this thing that was happening to this country and bring this country back.
	And there's a whole lot wrong with that, right?
	But that's what he says.
	And if we're going to believe him, Then it was those 20 activists, some of whom I know personally, who stood in the middle of that square and who went toe to toe with those fucking tiki torch wielding Nazis.
	Yep.
	Who actually inspired the new President of the United States to run for election.
	And so anybody who's like cheering for this, and people have every right to cheer for the ouster of Donald Trump.
	And if you think Joe Biden's going to do great things and more power to you, but every single person who is cheering in the streets right now, and there are a lot of them, and I don't have any problem with that.
	Think about all the people who sacrificed so much to get us to this point, to where we are in this place.
	And it didn't come from Joe Biden and Joe Biden's donors, the credit card industry.
	It didn't come from any, it came from the people on the ground doing the real work.
	Totally, yeah.
	You know, in the aftermath, I was watching the news and I was seeing the people pour out into the streets and the Sky News, for fuck's sake, was interviewing, like, black women on the streets of, I think it was Philadelphia, it might have been a different city.
	It might have been Harrisburg.
	It might have been Harrisburg in Pennsylvania.
	And they're talking to this woman.
	She's wearing the logo.
	She's there with her kid.
	She's wearing the logo on her t-shirt and on her mask, her face mask, of her community organizing group.
	I can't remember what it was called.
	And she's got a sign and it says, in the name of humanity, we refuse to accept a fascist America.
	And, you know, it brought tears to my eyes.
	And it's bringing tears to my eyes again now thinking about it.
	And it's people like that.
	It's people like that woman and people like people that we've had on this show.
	People who, you know, I cannot express My admiration for these people.
	They're the ones doing it and people doing things like that.
	That's what's going to fucking stop it.
	Every anonymous person who sent me information about like, you know, hey, you should check this out.
	There's this guy doing some organizing.
	Can you help?
	Can you do something?
	Every person who messaged me and told me about like, there's this episode.
	Can you make sure this gets archived somewhere?
	Can you make sure?
	Have you got your eye on this group?
	Have you done this thing?
	I'm not putting myself at the center of this at all, but I'm saying I talk to people who are on the ground doing this work who will never get a millionth of the attention that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are getting, but who have done so much more than they have to actually combat the structural problems that have led to this.
	And they're going to continue to do so.
	And I said this on Twitter.
	I mean, I guess, you know, like, look, we're going to get Joe Biden.
	He's going to be fine, I guess.
	We'll criticize him.
	We're going to keep criticizing him.
	We're going to accept him as better than Trump.
	I absolutely agree.
	He's better than Trump.
	But the Nazi menace isn't going away.
	These far right figure, they're not going away.
	They're not going to stop.
	And neither am I.
	And that's kind of the end of the road for me.
	That's it, yeah.
	But of course all of that is by no means the most important news story.
	No, no.
	Because I think there's a far more important in the New York Times recently.
	Yeah, recent New York Times article.
	This podcast was mentioned, my little podcast, the title, my silly title that I came up with that you don't like, was mentioned in the New York fucking Times!
	Are you saying I don't like the title or that the audience doesn't like the title?
	Nobody likes the title except me.
	I'm the only one.
	I like the title.
	It's fine.
	But yes, we were mentioned in the New York Times because it turned out that little thing of, you know, the Nazi intimidation of the, not even the wrong Daniel Harper, but the family that bought a house from the wrong Daniel Harper.
	That those couple of base members who showed up on that wonderful young couple's door that night ended up getting arrested by the FBI for those threats.
	And then we got mentioned in the New York Times.
	It's funny, that story, the press release dropped, the indictment dropped, and I hope she doesn't mind if I mention Megan Squire sent me a DM 20 minutes later and was like, Oh, look what just dropped.
	I'm like, oh wow, that's really cool.
	These guys have been arrested, and so I'm at work and I'm trying to browse it while I'm doing my job, and then suddenly my phone blows up and I get 20 or 30 requests for comment.
	It was a weird day, let's just put it that way.
	Yeah.
	Nobody called me for comment.
	I assumed they'd be calling to ask me about my wonderful podcast title, but it didn't happen.
	They should have.
	That should be a whole other thing.
	I hope so.
	So yeah, no, I guess we'll throw a link to that.
	I don't know if we have any real links here.
	This is all just kind of big commentary.
	And the whole thing with any of these issues.
	Oh no, I'm going to put links to news stories about the election so people can find out about it if they don't know.
	Yeah, if they don't know.
	Just in case.
	What's this election they're talking about?
	Are there any links in the show notes?
	It is funny that I do try to typically plan for these to be relevant a year from now or something, but this episode probably won't be relevant by the time the episode drops even, so that's always kind of the issue, but we do what we can.
	We do, yeah.
	Not much, but it's our best.
	OK, well, that was Episode 71.
	Thanks for listening, everybody.
	And we'll be back soon with Episode 72, I believe.
	Unconventional, I know, but that's the plan.
	That's how numbers work.
	That's how numbers work.
	It's a rare skill, numbers, as I think any random glance at the television at the moment will tell you.
	I think I'm actually better at them than most people, strangely enough.
	Yeah, I think it's funny that Steve Kornacki has this huge TikTok thirst crowd because he can add and subtract five-digit numbers in his head.
	Yeah, it's a bit like Carol Vorderman here in England.
	You won't get that joke.
	Actually, I think it's more to do with her enormous tits.
	Who was it who was on the game show?
	God.
	It's Carol Vorderman.
	Probably.
	I think there was somebody before her who left, but then she ended up being a right-wing shitbag?
	Or is that the same person?
	You've got it the wrong way around.
	Carol Vorderman was on Countdown first.
	She was the lady that used to do the letters and numbers first, and then she left.
	I don't really know her politics.
	And she was replaced eventually by somebody called Rachel Riley, who is one of... Rachel Riley is the one I know.
	Rachel Riley is the one I know.
	She's the obsessive Corbyn hater who goes on and on and on about him being an anti-Semite.
	Oh.
	Yeah, no, that was... I had misremembered half of that.
	But no, Rachel Riley, once you said her name, that's the one I... Because I found her through... There were like YouTube compilations of her doing actually impressive mathematics.
	in her head, you know, like she's a better contestant than any of the contestants, which is always fun.
	But Steve Krenacki just being able to subtract five digit numbers is like that impressive for an American audience.
	So I find that, I think that's an interesting dynamic.
	Yeah, it's an interesting comment on not only the difference between British people and American people, but also between men and women, isn't it?
	Yeah, sure.
	Yeah, okay.
	All right, brief countdown aside.
	Completely justified and relevant countdown digression.
	It's been a long week.
	It's been a long week.
	uh Oh god, I'm so totally putting the countdown clock sound effect on this.
	Yeah, that's the end of the episode, everybody.
	He's gone!
	Trump's gone!
	Well, in two months he'll be gone, and we'll see what they get up to in the next two months.
	As friend of the show Tim Poole tweeted, you know, man, this lame-duck presidency period is gonna be lit.
	And so he's just imagining the fascist jackboots that a leaving Donald Trump is going to lay.
	It's going to be great, yeah.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Look forward to that.
	Yeah.
	It's going to be fine.
	Not least, Baldy McDickface's own commentary on events.
	Yeah.
	He did a four-hour live stream.
	I watched about half of it.
	It was... yeah, anyway.
	We've got to wrap this up.
	We've got to wrap this up.
	Yeah, we do.
	Yeah, that's it.
	It's over.
	The end.
	Fuck off.
	It's over.
	Cheers.
	Bye.
	That was I Don't Speak German.
	Thanks for listening.
	If you enjoyed the show or found it useful, please spread the word.
	If you want to contact me, I'm at underscore Jack underscore Graham underscore, Daniel is at Daniel E Harper, and the show's Twitter is at IDSGpod.
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	I Don't Speak German is hosted at idonspeakgerman.libsyn.com, and we're also on Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, Spotify, Stitcher, and we show up in all podcast apps.
	This show is associated with Eruditorum Press, where you can find more details about it.

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