3695 Greg Gianforte Elected After "Bodyslam" Scandal | True News
Montana Republican Greg Gianforte was elected to the U.S. House of Representative over Democrat country music singer Rob Quist - less than 24 hours after allegations that he "bodyslammed" Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs. What does the election of Gianforte and the response to these allegations mean for the future political climate in the United States of America? Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
So here is a challenging and delicate story.
A lot of people feeling pretty ambivalent about what transpired recently between Greg Gianforte and Ben Jacobs.
So within 24 hours of being charged with a misdemeanor assault for this alleged attack or assault on a reporter in his Boseman campaign office, the Republican Greg Gianforte defeated his Democrat opponent, Rob Quist, the Republican Greg Gianforte defeated his Democrat opponent, Rob Quist, to win the special election for the U.S. House seat in Montana.
Montana, of course, pretty rural.
No real cities, larger than 200,000 people.
Common sense people, low crime rate, not a lot of security, and this may have had something to do with it.
Nobody knows exactly what happened.
There's audio, there's no video, there's contradictory eyewitness statements, some that have been self-contradicted after the fact.
But what happened was Guardian reporter, Guardian is a British newspaper, Ben Jacobs.
He described that he was body slammed by the GOP candidate.
Now, the account from Greg Gianforte's press aide, Shane Scanlon, goes like this.
Tonight, as Greg was giving a separate interview in a private office, the Guardian's Ben Jacobs entered the office without permission, aggressively shoved a recorder in Greg's face and began asking badgering questions.
Jacob was asked to leave.
After asking Jacobs to lower the recorder, Jacobs declined.
Greg then attempted to grab the phone that was pushed in his face.
Jacobs grabbed Greg's wrist and spun away from Greg, pushing them both to the ground.
It's unfortunate that this aggressive behavior from a liberal journalist created this scene at our campaign volunteer barbecue.
And you can listen to the recording.
We'll put a link below.
Gianforte is calm.
You know, let's talk about this later.
Please go and talk to so-and-so until something happens.
Now, again, I'm no lawyer, but my understanding is that whoever grabs who first is at fault and that it may be self-defense.
So if you tried to push a phone away and then the reporter grabbed his wrist, well...
I think to some degree, to some degree at least, all bets are off after that.
But we don't know for sure.
There may not be video at all.
Now, I wasn't there, of course, so most of this is just theorizing, but I think that there are some logical steps to take here.
I find it hard to believe the body slam narrative.
I mean, I did some wrestling in my youth, and as an adult, but mostly with my conscience, but with other sweaty males in my youth.
Body slamming, it's pretty intense.
And Gina Forte is a pretty big guy.
Ben Jacobs does not appear to be quite so robustly endowed.
And if a big guy body slams you, That's going to leave a mark.
That's going to hurt.
You're going to wind it.
You can't breathe.
And Ben Jacobs is kind of saying, hey man, you broke my glasses.
Hey man, you know, I got to call the police.
He does not appear to be winded or wounded or in pain, which again, I'm just pointing this out as something that leads me to have a series of questions.
You know, you don't usually get right back up after being the recipient of a larger guy body slam.
Now, the charge in Montana is misdemeanor assault.
What that means is no serious injuries and obviously no weapon.
If you have a serious injury or weapons were used, then it's a felony.
So no serious injuries.
Now, eyewitnesses to this altercation have contradicted what Jacobs has said.
And...
And Fox News has put out one report and someone has replied and said, did not happen.
I was there.
There was a disagreement because the reporter was being extremely aggressive.
There was no body slab.
None.
Period.
And that's from Christy at Alexa Underbore Bella.
That's from May 25th, 2017.
Now, Gianforte talked about the interaction, and then the audio came out.
There seemed to be some inconsistencies.
Audio's been edited before...
I'm looking at Zimmerman, so we don't know.
Again, this is all very early days, but there's a lot of context that needs to be in here.
And this is what I want to sort of unpack so people can resist the rush to judgment.
Now, you can hear in the audio that Jacobs is being repeatedly asked to leave and didn't.
Now, if he was in a private area where he wasn't invited and so on, that's also a challenge as well.
Let's talk about Ben Jacobs.
Neutral?
Do you think, oh, neutral British reporter, how involved is he in American politics?
Well, as it turns out, Quite a lot.
According to gotnews.com, Jacobs, Ben Jacobs, is a long-standing Democratic operative.
The website Got News says that Jacobs worked for the Democratic Party in Iowa.
Now, conflict of interest is very, very important.
You know, like if you're reporting on a stock and you're a significant holder off that stock, then you need to tell people.
Now, The Guardian, the British newspaper, has a very stringent ethics policy.
Which requires that Jacobs declare his past involvement with the Democratic Party whenever he writes or comments on politics.
Has that occurred?
Has he consistently talked about that?
Well, you know, I used to work for the Democratic Party in Iowa, so when I talk about politics, remember that I have this history and so on.
Has that been talked about?
And what are the repercussions of failing to adhere to the politics?
I guess, ethics policy of a British newspaper boy.
I'm not sure I would say too often in my life, but there we are.
Now, another piece of backstory Ben Jacobs of The Guardian, of course, wrote, and this was just republished, in April of 2017.
He had an article entitled, GOP candidate Greg Gianforte has financial ties to U.S. sanctioned Russian companies, right?
Pushing the Russia narrative, you know, the one that reportedly was Hatched within 24 hours of Hillary losing the election to explain away what the elites considered impossible because, well, they don't mingle with ordinary folk who use their hands for a living.
So, this was the...
Title and ooh, sounds dire, right?
But, you know, Gianforte is a, I guess you could say, a pretty successful guy.
A software entrepreneur and executive sold his company.
The guy's worth is estimated between $65 million and $315 million US. Now, out of that vast, potentially multi-hundred million dollar fortune, he owns a little under $250,000 in shares.
This is in two index funds.
In the Russian economy, right?
So very wealthy guy, tiny portion of his money is invested in a fund that also invests in Russia.
Now, the reason that you invest in a fund is you're not going to manage it yourself directly.
He's not sitting there phoning the fund saying, oh, buy this Russian company.
Why would you pay the overhead for a fund?
You pay the overhead for a fund so that they manage stuff.
And you may mix and match and all that, but you're very unlikely to have anything to do with the fund's purchase decisions or even know that much about it and certainly not scan for any sanctioned companies.
And Scanlon, again, the spokesman for Gianforte, told The Guardian that Gianforte doesn't oversee his portfolio on this day-to-day basis.
And if elected, of course, as usual, and of course he was elected, which we'll get to the very, very important part, he was elected, Gianforte would put all of his assets in a blind trust.
This is fairly typical, right, to make sure that you don't have any conflict of interest And also, Aegean Forte had released 10 years of tax returns.
So, this is a pretty tenuous link, even by my Russia narrative Democrat standards.
Multi-hundred billionaire, potentially, has a tiny bit of money invested in a fund that has some money in Russian companies.
Ooh!
He's compromised!
And when you have sanctions, this is important from a sort of regulatory review standpoint, when you have sanctions, they don't generally apply to aggregate financial instruments like trusts and so on, right?
The reason for that is that it's such a small part of of what is going on for you financially that it's not really part of what could be captured within a sanction environment.
So that's, I think, really, really important to understand.
There's no particular problem with any of that.
They're excluded from considerations from the sanctions, right?
The ownership stake per person is ridiculously tiny.
Now, That's some of the backstory.
Let's talk about what it means right now.
So, a politician reportedly, allegedly roughed up a reporter.
And what happened?
Well, Gianforte got $100,000 in the 24 hours after it happened and handily, easily won the election in Montana.
Man, if that's not a shot across the bows to the mainstream media in the West, because this is a British newspaper and an American election, this should really scare the crap out of leftist reporters.
They have, as I've talked about for a long time on this channel, been regularly burning their credibility, like overnight in furnaces, burning their credibility in an attempt, well, previously in the attempt to get Hillary Clinton elected, now in an attempt to delegitimize or cast shadows and aspersions on the Trump presidency.
And it's not working, really.
I mean, obviously it's harassing his agenda and it's slowing down his progress, which is kind of what they want to do as a...
The least of what they want to do, I assume.
But the majority of Americans think that the mainstream media in America regularly pumps out fake news.
The credibility issue is very serious and very important.
So, of course, they decided to go full bore.
Behind Hillary, burned up all of their pretenses of objectivity in an attempt to get Hillary elected.
When Hillary failed to get elected, they then turn on the candidate supported by a significant electoral college majority.
And...
Continue to insult and frustrate and alienate the Americans, a significant proportion of Americans who voted for Trump.
So it's not working, and this stuff is bubbling and boiling over.
Now, it's interesting, too, because when you think about this leftist narrative, right, think of how the left describes Trump.
Criminality in a ghetto.
Or the criminality of a woman who kills her abusive husband or hits her abusive husband.
So take the latter example.
There's some woman, she's been verbally abused for years.
And then she punches her husband.
And then maybe it goes to trial, maybe it doesn't, but...
The defense called, I was a victim, I've been verbally abused, therefore I can punch someone, is not viewed unsympathetically by some people in the press.
You know the argument that, well, crime in a ghetto is because of poverty, is because of lack of opportunity, it's not, it's due to disadvantage and frustration and alienation and so on.
So that argument regarding criminality, that it has environmental causes and it is a reaction to negative experiences, well, People on the right are abused by the media extraordinarily.
And also, people who physically abuse people on the right are Trump supporters and people who want to talk about free speech and so on.
Well, the leftist media regularly suppresses information about the causes of the violence against Trump supporters.
They say, ooh, there was just some mysterious altercation between two various groups of protesters.
Who knows what happened?
No.
Trump supporters came out and were attacked by leftists.
It's covered up regularly.
So there's a narrative that a criminal action, and again, I don't know if this is criminal or not, we'll find out, the charges have been laid, we'll find out as time goes forward.
But the argument that you can justify a criminal response, a violent response to verbal abuse and so on, only works on one side, only works on the people the left likes.
If you're not one of the groups that the left likes, then you're 150% responsible, and past histories of lies and verbal abuse and so on, doesn't matter.
And oh man!
It's so astounding to people who've got, you know, more than a half a hamster's worth of memory between the old hedgehogs.
Boy, it is just astounding to see the left so concerned about violence.
So concerned about violence.
You know, the way they were when Hillary and Obama dismantled and destroyed countries in the Middle East and helped to train and arm ISIS and so.
So concerned about violence.
I mean...
Just look at what's happened in America recently.
And by recently, I mean over the last sort of 18 to 24 months.
We've had people on this very show.
A woman called in, had an interview with her.
Her husband ended up in the hospital, beaten because he was a Trump supporter, beaten because he was into free speech.
We had a woman come in who'd been pepper sprayed.
Just astonishing amounts of violence against Trump supporters.
Where was the media?
Where was their horror?
Oh, we cannot allow this.
We cannot allow...
For people to use violence in the pursuit of their political aims.
It's called terrorism.
Where was the media when Mike Cernovich's deplorable had threats against it of acid attacks?
Where?
Richard Spencer got punched!
But he's a Nazi!
He's not a Nazi!
And everyone's like, well, you know, punching a Nazi, that sounds pretty good.
I'm going to go find me some Nazis to punch.
Okay, so...
The demon is out of the bottle.
The genie is out of the lamp.
The genie of violence.
It's okay to punch people.
It's okay to use violence against people you disagree with politically.
You oppose politically.
And so many of us who aren't on the left, so many of us were warning for months and months and months, don't do this, don't do this, don't do this.
Oppose political violence wherever it shows up.
But the left only seems to develop a transitory conscience when one of theirs is attacked, when it's one of the enemies.
There are these ragged cheers and smoke bombs of linguistic cover-ups.
Ben Jacobs, appalled, you see, at the very notion that violence might enter into politics.
Absolutely appalled.
Ben Jacobs, Never reported on any violence against Trump supporters.
Not once.
Ben Jacobs wrote a tweet about Donald Trump.
He quoted Trump as saying, we are going to deliver justice the way it used to be in this country.
Which, of course, sounds like, I don't know, lynch mobs, right?
But did not finish what Trump actually said.
Did not tweet the complete statement.
Trump said, we're going to deliver the way it used to be in this country.
Trump actually said, at the ballot box on November 8th.
But you see, Ben Jacobs did not put that last little bit in there, did he?
Of course he didn't.
Because he wants to make Trump look crazy, make Trump look bad.
Ben Jacobs also tweeted, Left, right and center, straight news and opinion.
Journalists at CPAC have one thing in common.
The overwhelming urge to punch Benji Backer.
He wrote that in 2014.
Benji Backer's a teenager.
He's a kid.
So...
Everyone has an overwhelming urge to punch a child who disagrees with me politically.
Oh, Ben.
As ye so...
That's how the saying goes, right?
Don't agree with that.
But actions have consequences.
So the media now is finally starting to care about these assaults.
After watching Magda hat-wearing Trumpers getting chased, beaten, have rocks thrown at them, be threatened for over a year and a half now.
Because how does the mainstream media report these clashes?
Well, clashes between Trump supporters and Antifa.
No sense of who started it.
No sense of who's paid to be there.
Violent Trump supporters!
My God.
This, I mean, it's horrifying stuff.
It's horrifying stuff.
This equation that's being pushed forward, this sequence of domino thoughts that's being pushed forward.
By elements in the mainstream media.
Trump is Hitler.
The election is illegitimate.
You can punch Nazis.
Trump, literally Hitler.
Trump is Hitler as a fascist.
The election is illegitimate.
It was hacked by the Russians.
You can punch Nazis.
You see how that works?
And then they're just so delicately and fraily shocked and appalled, shocked and appalled, that there could be violence in politics.
You know, there are people out there, some reporters, putting out these ideas, you know, talking about Trump.
Someone has to do something!
They got a window shot of Steve Bannon and put over an overlay of a sniper rifle sight.
What is that?
Isn't that a call to shoot someone?
I mean, it seems that way to me.
Chomsky, no, Chomsky.
He says, well, we don't want things to devolve to violence because the right's better at it than we are.
Good moral stand there, Nomi.
Also says Trump is the most dangerous.
Oh, remember CNN? Remember the guy who rushed up on Trump?
CNN portrayed him extraordinarily positively.
I think Trump is a bully.
I'm standing up to bullies.
The left doesn't have much to say about former domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, foundational to the start of Obama's campaign.
And this hypocrisy, this call for violence against your enemies, and then taking what at the moment stands as an ambiguous situation.
We don't know.
We don't know.
We have a lot of cross-information.
We have a recording that doesn't tell us who started what.
we don't know the way that the world works I think we all know this you're protected by the goodwill of the people and if you erode the goodwill of the people regarding a particular group that exposes them to danger That exposes them to violence.
When you call people, you know, racist, sexist, deplorable...
Homophobic.
When you create these vast, horrifying negative labels where people throw everyone in this giant bucket of immorality, you are wearing down the goodwill of the people that protects all of us.
You are creating a group that can be targeted.
White males know this.
I'm not telling you anything you don't know, and other people should learn it, really, if you don't know it directly.
This is why they call people Nazis.
This is why they call people deplorable.
This is why they call people racist and sexist and homophobic and whatever, right?
Because they want to wear down the goodwill of the people that protects us all.
Now, they have eroded the goodwill of the people against people who aren't on the left.
And that is a very, very dangerous situation for democracy to be in.
They are pushing a narrative in the media, not all the media, but a lot of the media.
They're pushing this narrative that's very vague but takes root, which is Russia hacked the election.
Russia changed the election.
Russia did something to the election to the point where almost 60% of Democrats think that Russia directly changed votes in the election to get Donald Trump elected.
They genuinely believe that Russia changed votes to get Donald Trump elected.
It's an illegitimate presidency.
Trump is Hitler.
The presidency is illegitimate.
You can punch Nazis.
You know, if you study history, there's one thing you learn very, very quickly, my friends, and that is this.
I mean, yelling and whatever, that's fine, but no, cold cock people with chairs because they disagree with you.
That is a very, very thin veneer of a society.
We've seen this happen before.
You see this happen all the time throughout history.
Something, some tentacle, some spear, some savage sharpness cuts through the veil of civility and outcome.
All the devils.
All the devils.
The French Revolution, Russian Revolution, Chinese Revolution.
Astonishing how quickly it can change.
Look at Cambodia.
Pre and post Khmer Rouge.
Our commitment to civility is civilization itself.
Our commitment to negotiate, to debate, is civilization itself.
If Gianforte attacked Ben Jacobs for asking him a question, absolutely wrong.
Absolutely immoral.
Totally wrong.
We'll find out.
Absolutely wrong.
But this selective outrage and this selective enforcement of the non-aggression principle from the mainstream media is actually wearing down.
These spider restraints to the great fists of mankind that keep us talking rather than fighting.
So there are those of us who are standing against the mob saying stop.
Stop.
We must de-escalate the rhetoric.
Social violence is presaged by intellectual escalating rhetoric, particularly moral rhetoric.
If people suspect a particular group Is using moral language to further their political aims and claiming universality while only applying it to their own in-group.
Political violence is bad, but Trump supporters had it coming.
Initiating the use of force is terrible!
But that guy's a Nazi.
You can hit him!
If you attempt to take universal morality and twist it to serve your own political agenda...
Morality cannot stand.
It cannot survive that manipulation.
If you take universality and attempt to torture it into serving your own political agenda, morality breaks.
Morality cracks and falls away, and we are left staring at each other over a potential foaming canyon of blood.
