Nov. 11, 2020 - Timcast IRL - Tim Pool
02:23:15
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| This night is kind of weird. | ||
| Apparently there's reports that Trump has fired top Pentagon leadership. | ||
| There's like weird polls coming out that I've not seen where they're like 80% of Americans | ||
| believe Joe Biden won the presidency. | ||
| And I'm like, why do you need that? | ||
| That's kind of weird. | ||
| And then the craziest thing is. | ||
| We've seen this USPS whistleblower from Project Veritas sworn affidavit saying that they, you know, I'll be very simple with it because, you know, we're just doing the intro, but allegations of voter fraud at a post office. | ||
| Then the Washington Post comes out with a story saying this man has recanted his claims. | ||
| It's not true. | ||
| He fabricated them. | ||
| And all of a sudden, mainstream media journalists, Democrats are posting it saying, aha, look, it was fake news the whole time. | ||
| Then Project Veritas drops a video of the guy saying, I never recanted anything. | ||
| Then Project Veritas drops a video of the guy in an interrogation where apparently some federal agents are saying, I'm not trying to scare you, but I am scaring you. | ||
| We're gonna clean your mind so that you can remember. | ||
| It's really, really weird. | ||
| Nah, I'll tell you what. | ||
| When I heard the results came in and Joe Biden got the electoral college, I was like, well, you know, it makes sense. | ||
| I think people don't like Trump. | ||
| And you got mail-in ballots, young people, you know, voting or whatever. | ||
| But now that these polls are coming out and these weird stories, I'm like, what is this? | ||
| This is wild. | ||
| I don't even know what's going on anymore. | ||
| Anyway, we have a special guest here, Michael Tracey, who's a journalist. | ||
| And I've actually, I've praised you quite a bit in a lot of the videos I've done. | ||
| Notably because- Praise me even more. | ||
| He did it upon me. | ||
| That's what he's here for. | ||
| I bask in it. | ||
| That's why I'm here. | ||
| That's why I wandered in here from off the internet. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wonderful. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| He came in here. | ||
| No, but it's because, like, during the riots you actually drove around and went to small towns where, like, riots had happened that wasn't getting news coverage. | ||
| Like, you did reporting. | ||
| It was crazy. | ||
| Well, I mean, after the peak of the riots in late May, early June, I pretty much knew with total certainty that I was never going to get the full story as to their scope, magnitude, damage inflicted, etc. | ||
| If I just relied upon these secondhand reports, given the direct personal and political stake that so many journalists had in portraying. | ||
| Yeah, defending. | ||
| Defending that they were deeply invested in it. | ||
| So, you know, with that dynamic so ever present, I knew I had to At least attempt to go see it for myself. | ||
| So I took a nationwide trip, which we can maybe get into any, especially in terms of how it relates to the election outcome, et cetera. | ||
| But you know, that's what I did. | ||
| And small towns, big cities, everywhere in between, I went, you know, across country twice. | ||
| Real journalism and just told it like it was. | ||
| So I think, I would hope so. | ||
| I think you do that quite a bit on Twitter, whether it's like you making Trump supporters angry or making the Democrats angry, you know, I think. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, and you probably know this, but you can never please everybody. | ||
| And if you try to please any particular demographic, that becomes sort of corrupting unto itself. | ||
| So I'm never going to get too worked up if leftists hate me on a given day or Trump supporters hate me on a given day. | ||
| It's just irrelevant. | ||
| And you need to like cognitively insulate yourself. | ||
| Yeah, I remember when journalists used to do that, they would just kind of be like, well, here's what happened. | ||
| You're going to get mad about it. | ||
| I can't do anything about that. | ||
| But anyway, okay, so we also got Ian. | ||
| Oh, hi, everyone. | ||
| Ian's wearing red, so hopefully the camera doesn't rip it off if it's too much. | ||
| If it turns you into a tomato. | ||
| Well, you're already a tomato because of the sweater, anyway. | ||
| And Lydia's producing, of course. | ||
|
unidentified
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I am here. | |
| I'm in the corner. | ||
| Hey, guys. | ||
| But we got to talk about this Veritas stuff, so if you haven't already, make sure you smash that like button. | ||
|
unidentified
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Do that, please. | |
| Subscribe. | ||
| The show is live Monday to Friday at 8 p.m. | ||
| And let's first take a look at the story from the Washington Post. | ||
| This is... Is it cutting out again? | ||
|
unidentified
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This is ridiculous. | |
| Sorry, I don't know what's going on. | ||
| Are you kidding me? | ||
| Our monitor keeps just... | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, I'm so excited. | |
| I was like, it works now. | ||
| Okay, well, I can still read the story. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right, we're gonna read it. | |
| So, postal worker admits fabricating allegations of ballot tampering, officials say. | ||
| And they have this really, like, generic photo of a fake ballot box, I guess. | ||
| A Pennsylvania postal worker, whose claims have been cited by top Republicans as potential evidence of widespread voting irregularities, Admitted to U.S. | ||
| Postal Service investigators that he fabricated the allegations according to three officials briefed on the investigation in a statement from a House Congressional Committee. | ||
| Richard Hopkins claims that a postmaster in Erie, PA instructed postal workers to backdate ballots mailed after Election Day was cited by Senator Lindsey Graham in a letter to the Justice Department calling for a federal investigation. | ||
| Attorney General William P. Barr subsequently authorized federal prosecutors to open probes into credible allegations of voting irregularities. | ||
| and fraud, a reversal of longstanding Justice Department policy. | ||
| But on Monday, Hopkins, 32, told investigators from the U.S. | ||
| Postal Service Office of Inspector General that the allegations were not true, and he signed an affidavit recanting his claims according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing investigation. | ||
| Democrats on the House Oversight Committee tweeted late Tuesday that, quote, whistleblower completely recanted Hopkins did not respond to messages seeking comment. | ||
| And here's where it gets interesting. | ||
| According to Hopkins, he did. | ||
| He tried very much so to get a comment saying, this is not true. | ||
| And now we have this tweet from James O'Keefe. | ||
| In fact, we have two. | ||
| James O'Keefe says, recording federal agents coerce USPS whistleblower Hopkins to water down story. | ||
| Hopkins doubles down. | ||
| Agent Strasser, I am trying to twist you a little bit. | ||
| Quote, I am scaring you here. | ||
| We have senators involved, DOJ involved. | ||
| Reason they called me is to try to harness. | ||
| So I can play some of the audio here. | ||
| And I think it should work. | ||
| The Veritas video starts by them, you know, explaining who the whistleblower is, what he was saying. | ||
| And let me just play. | ||
| It's two minutes. | ||
|
unidentified
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They were grilling the hell out of me. | |
| How are you feeling right now? | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm kind of pissed. | |
| I feel like I just got played. | ||
| And I heard him say to the supervisor that they messed up yesterday. | ||
| And I was like, oh, what did they mess up on? | ||
| And he told the supervisor that they had postmarked one of the pallets for the fourth instead of the third, because they were supposed to put them for third. | ||
| So now it's giving us an explanation. | ||
| I'll jump forward. | ||
| Check this out. | ||
|
unidentified
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And so let me make good on that promise right away, okay? | |
| This storm is getting crazy, right? | ||
| And it's out of a lot of people's control. | ||
| And so the reason they called me in is to try to harness that storm. | ||
| Try to reel it back in. | ||
| Before it gets really crazy. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| Because we have senators involved. | ||
| We have the Department of Justice involved. | ||
| We have all... Trump's lawyer's team has gotten a hold of me. | ||
| I'm not... Well, I am actually. | ||
| I am trying to twist you a little bit. | ||
| Because in that, believe it or not, your mind will kick in. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| We like to control our mind. | ||
| And when we do that, we can convince ourselves of a memory. | ||
| But when you're under a little bit of stress, which is what I'm doing to you purposely, your mind can be a little bit clearer. | ||
| And we're going to do a different exercise, too, to make your mind a little bit clearer. | ||
| Good to go. | ||
| But this is all on purpose. | ||
| Roger. | ||
| I'm not scaring you, but I am scaring you. | ||
| It seems like they were trying to make me distrust y'all. | ||
| And at the same time, it kind of affected, but at the same time, I was like, nah, these guys have had my back since the get-go. | ||
| So that's why I continued. | ||
| Do you think these federal agents have your back? | ||
|
unidentified
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At this point, no. | |
| Hell no. | ||
| Do you think these federal agents are really interested in investigating fraud? | ||
|
unidentified
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Honestly, I don't think they are. | |
| And in fact, you heard Weisenberg tell a supervisor they were backdating the ballots to make it appear they'd been collected on November 3rd. | ||
| You still stand by that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yes. | ||
| So that's it. | ||
| Apologies for those who can't see it. | ||
| Our monitor broke. | ||
| Apparently I can't show it. | ||
| But that's just a bit of the audio they put out so far. | ||
| I imagine that James, he usually does longer form versions of this on his website. | ||
| I guess you can choose to trust James O'Keefe. | ||
| He's got a whistleblower. | ||
| He's got a signed, sworn affidavit. | ||
| We got video of the guy delivering the mail. | ||
| I don't know what else we need to go on to say, here's a guy saying they were backdating ballots. | ||
| But it's very, very weird It's very, very brazen to see the Washington Post be like, the story's fake, he recanted. | ||
| Then this guy to come back out and immediately be like, I never recanted. | ||
| So, we got this tweet from House Oversight Democrat saying, breaking news, eerie PA USPS whistleblower completely recanted his allegations of a supervisor tampering with mail-in ballots after being questioned by investigators, according to IG. | ||
| Here are the facts. | ||
| Richard Hopkins is a USPS employee in Erie, Pennsylvania, so that's not in dispute. | ||
| He signed a sworn affidavit with allegations of ballot tampering and fraud and went public through Project Veritas. | ||
| USPS IG began investigating last week. | ||
| IG investigators informed committee staff today that they interviewed Hopkins on Friday, but that Hopkins recanted his allegations yesterday and did not explain why he signed a false affidavit. | ||
| So now, not only do we have this video from James O'Keefe where they play the audio, but James actually put out a tweet of, uh, okay, I guess, I don't know where it is. | ||
| It's the guy, or at least I thought he had the tweet, maybe it's on Project Veritas. | ||
| He's actually sitting with the guy, I guess, in a hotel room, and the guy, like, is looking at the Washington Post story and says, this is not true. | ||
| I did not recant this. | ||
| So... | ||
| I don't know one thing that sticks out to me when I look at this Washington Post summary is that of course the relaying this claim that Hopkins recanted his allegations by way of this laundered anonymity. | ||
| Which always should raise a red flag. | ||
| I don't care what it pertains to. | ||
| I mean, this was done constantly over the course of Russiagate, where anonymous US officials were quoted as characterizing certain things. | ||
| Often, you didn't even get a direct quote from them. | ||
| And so... | ||
| Washington Post or any other media outlet should not be surprised when people look at a story like this, look at this summation that's totally nonspecific and view it askance, right? | ||
| So it's possible that Hopkins, as claimed in this story, did in fact sign an affidavit recanting his claims. | ||
| We don't know that. | ||
| The James O'Keefe stuff you just played doesn't necessarily dispute that. | ||
| It could provide countervailing evidence to maybe say that it was done under duress or something. | ||
| But the problem in terms of any outstanding apprehension about the veracity of the story stems from the wanton use of anonymity that is so ubiquitous across the media that it just inevitably is going to engender suspicion, and rightly so. | ||
| This is a common thing they do with anonymous sources. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How is this okay? | |
| We talked to some anonymous person. | ||
| You don't know who it is. | ||
| Trust us. | ||
| The story's not true. | ||
| He didn't give us a comment. | ||
| Well, according to them, to Veritas, this guy's straight up saying it didn't happen. | ||
| My question is, you know... And anonymity can sometimes be justified. | ||
| Like, it's a valid device in journalistic practice. | ||
| But you have to be transparent about why you're doing it. | ||
| I mean, there's no clear reason, at least that's stated here, as to why this individual apparently associated with the U.S. | ||
| Postal Service Office of Inspector General ought to have been granted anonymity in the first place. | ||
| Like, if you have the affidavit, why not provide it? | ||
| I mean, you're saying it's an ongoing investigation. | ||
| What does that mean exactly? | ||
| It's so vague that the Washington Post is asking the reader to just instinctively trust their veracity. | ||
| And so often they've proved that they don't deserve that trust. | ||
| So what are we supposed to believe right now? | ||
| Well, I mean, I don't know that. | ||
| Let's say that the story that's put forward by Hopkins, as relayed by James O'Keefe, is entirely accurate. | ||
| I mean, I think I heard there, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Hopkins was referring to one ballot that was changed in Erie County. | ||
| Well, like they specifically said that one ballot was Received on the 4th and then was backdated to the 3rd, right? | ||
| Or did I hear that wrong? | ||
| You know, you heard it right. | ||
| But the full context is that he overheard them saying they were backdating ballots, and he was instructed to bring any ballots from after the election to them because they were backdating them. | ||
| OK, so I want to keep going. | ||
| So let's just assume that all that is true. | ||
| Whether that suggests some kind of systematic fraud, I think is far from established, particularly in Pennsylvania, where it probably wouldn't have made a difference in the outcome anyway. | ||
| I mean, when all the votes are counted, the margin could be as much as 100,000 votes for Biden. | ||
| So I think, you know, it would be expected. | ||
| In fact, I would be surprised if there weren't incidences of isolated fraudulent activity. | ||
| But I think feeding a narrative where all this is supposed to indicate that the entire election should be negated or something, I think we're going to need a whole lot more evidence than has been provided so far. | ||
| So I just wanted to make sure I double checked. | ||
| From Veritas, they say, the insider said, quote, we have to separate out the ballots and give them directly to the supervisors. | ||
| They're postmarking and they're at the office and taking them directly to the ballot box. | ||
| And it specifically says, all these ballots that were coming in today, tomorrow, yesterday, are all supposed to be postmarked the third. | ||
| So, that's the official claim. | ||
| It's interesting, I was watching The Five earlier, you know, on Fox, and Greg Gutfeld was saying, I think it was Greg and I think it was also Jesse, kind of both saying, Jesse Waters and Greg Gutfeld, that we don't, we're not right now at the point where we bring out big ol' stacks of evidence that something happened. | ||
| We're at the point where we're like, we have some sworn affidavits that should warrant an inquiry or an investigation. | ||
| and then you go and find evidence, assuming these accusations are correct. | ||
| We've got, I think, I don't know how many, three or four perhaps, maybe it's three, | ||
| poll watchers who have signed sworn affidavits saying that they've seen some kind of fraud. | ||
| I'm not saying widespread, I'm saying we have three affidavits. | ||
| Is it enough to change an election? I honestly... | ||
| Well, if you think about it, three affidavits in a country of 330 million | ||
| that has converted en masse to mail-in voting is really not that many. | ||
| Yeah, I guess, so the point being brought up on the five was, | ||
| we're talking about a few key swing districts and we're talking about a very, very narrow race | ||
| where if you witness someone doing something improper, then that needs to be investigated and then we could | ||
| potentially find more evidence of a larger scale impropriety. | ||
| Or overt fraud, I guess. | ||
| I guess the question I would have is like, what does larger scale impropriety mean? | ||
| If there's something systematic and fraudulent, then that would have to be coordinated in some way or would have to, I think, be more of a cohesive initiative to change the outcome of the election. | ||
| than has been anything close to established. | ||
| I mean, you can go back years and decades and find isolated incidences of fraud. | ||
| I mean, there was in 1960, JFK, it's thought, could have won the election over Richard Nixon because of straight up election fraud that happened in the Deep South. | ||
| So I think nobody who is aware of history should discount that out of hand. | ||
| What's the vote margin in PA right now? | ||
| Legit question. | ||
| The vote margin in Pennsylvania is Interesting. | ||
| It's like 45,000 votes or something, isn't it? | ||
| point eight percent. | ||
| And that's probably going to continue to go up. | ||
| So I mean, it's like forty five thousand votes or something, isn't | ||
| it? | ||
| Right now it's. | ||
| Yeah, it's a 60 70 thousand or so. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| $70,000? | ||
| $73,000. | ||
| And it's probably going to inch up continuously to... $40,000? | ||
| In the $100,000 range. | ||
| So I mean, like, that's not a margin. | ||
| That's not Florida $2,000. | ||
| That's not anything close to a point where... It's even beyond the threshold where there would be an automatic recount in Pennsylvania. | ||
| Right, so AP has it around, I think, I'm looking at 47,700 or so. | ||
| That would require numerous post offices being in on... You're right, sorry, I misread that figure. | ||
| But to get that margin, because we're also talking about hundreds of thousands of votes that came in. | ||
| To get a margin where it's going to be able to actually overturn Pennsylvania. | ||
| That's what numerous post offices, a dozen plus, that are all telling their supervisors to bring in late ballots and then backdate them so that we can count them. | ||
| It seems like it's not going to have an impact. | ||
| You see what I'm saying? | ||
| I think it's going to have, if any, impact. | ||
| It's going to be extremely marginal. | ||
| And to really get traction in the courts here, you would have to do something which has not yet been done, which is at least give some indication. | ||
| And granted, you would need further investigation to uncover this. | ||
| I grant that. | ||
| But you need to give some indication that there's a widespread coordinated I disagree. | ||
| at undermining the legitimacy of the election with fraud. | ||
| That's what I think would need to be established, especially if you have it across multiple | ||
| states. | ||
| I mean, we're not just talking about Pennsylvania. | ||
| We're talking about Georgia, Arizona. | ||
| I don't know if you want to throw Wisconsin in there and Michigan. | ||
| Well, Trump would have to. | ||
| But it's not just one state here where you can devote all your resources to uncovering | ||
| every individual. | ||
| But I disagree. | ||
| I don't think it needs to be a widespread coordinated thing. | ||
| I think it could be what's referred to as a standalone complex. | ||
| You've got these individuals who are zealous, very ideologically motivated, and all it takes is individuals acting in such a way that it looks like there's some type of concerted effort. | ||
| It could just be one guy being like, man, I hate Trump, screw this, and then crumpling up a ballot, but you get a hundred people doing that every so often because they hate Trump, then you've got widespread impropriety that's not coordinated. | ||
| Yeah, I don't think it would necessarily... I should rephrase that. | ||
| I don't think it has to be widespread and coordinated in order to have some kind of... | ||
| Potency in terms of affecting outcome. | ||
| And you're right. | ||
| There probably are people with a lot of zeal who don't like Trump and maybe fudge some things. | ||
| I mean, that's plausible. | ||
| But for it to be replicated across so many states, I think it's going to be it's a it's it's a it's a huge stretch to think that anything is going to be overturned. | ||
| The way I put it is like and in Georgia, for example, where I just was, I mean, I spent the election in Georgia with a week leading up to it or so. | ||
| And, you know, when Trump, I think it was the day it was the day after the election when he gave some remarks. | ||
| First of all, he misstated that the secretary of state of Georgia was a Democrat. | ||
| He's not. So one reason why I find a lot of these claims implausible that I'm being inundated with on Twitter, which | ||
| I'm sure you probably are as well, is that, you know, it would have to encompass a huge amount of Republicans as | ||
| well. | ||
| But that's what people, I think, tend to miss about election administration. | ||
| It really is baked into the cake that it has to be bipartisan in a lot of ways. | ||
| Now, maybe it's not always abided by with 100 percent perfection. | ||
| But in Georgia, for example, you have the secretary of state, the governor, the lieutenant governor. | ||
| Both chambers of the state legislature are held by Republicans. | ||
| I was there in Atlanta in the State Farm Arena where the Atlantic Hawks used to play where they were tabulating votes and there were Republican observers everywhere the Republican observers in the Fulton County warehouse where there was other tabulation taking place so I mean and it was open to the public so this I think it really at least should be emphasized to people who don't have familiarity | ||
| with this process, that it's not like secretive and closed off for the most | ||
| part. Could you find isolated incidents in a country | ||
| of 330 million? | ||
| I'm sure you can. | ||
| But like I just freely went in. | ||
| I didn't flash any media credential. | ||
| Anybody could go in and observe. | ||
| I mean, I watched Republicans and Democratic Republican Democratic | ||
| observers jointly looking at ballots that were improperly processed so | ||
| they could adjudicate whether they were valid. | ||
| Yeah. And, you know, so, you know, I'm not I'm far from an American | ||
| exceptionalist in most cases. But there is something I think | ||
| at least laudable about the transparency that elections tend | ||
| to be conducted within. | ||
| And. | ||
| Sorry about that. | ||
|
unidentified
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I thought I put my phone on airplane mode. | |
| But. | ||
| And, you know, I don't think we're going to be exporting our election models around the world by force because, I mean, really, it's over a week now and we still don't have calls in Arizona and Georgia. | ||
| I mean, it's ridiculous. | ||
| North Carolina, I saw, was just called at least by Decision Desk HQ. | ||
| But the point is that, yeah, I sort of lost my train of thought, but you saw where I was going there. | ||
| Yeah, I think fraud isn't necessarily the important conversation, though. | ||
| And I wonder if that's a distraction. | ||
| It's not! | ||
| That's what I'm being berated with constantly for not countenancing. | ||
| It's the wrong conversation, but I do wonder if it's on purpose. | ||
| Meaning what? | ||
| As Democrats keep screaming, there's no fraud, there's no fraud, and chasing after this fraud narrative, like now the Washington Post, Trump is going after process. | ||
| So there's the potential of challenging votes. | ||
| Right now, the ACLU is going to be filing a countersuit to stop Trump from disqualifying hundreds of thousands of votes in Pennsylvania under what they're saying is a violation of the Bush v. Gore ruling, or the 14th Amendment, more specifically. | ||
| that mail-in ballots create a parallel and separate track for voting, | ||
| which is a violation of the 14th Amendment. | ||
| They're arguing that... | ||
| Which seems completely absurd to me. | ||
| I disagree. | ||
| If that was your view of the constitutionality of mail-in balloting, | ||
| why didn't you introduce such a suit before the election? | ||
| Because it's lawfare. Because they want to win. | ||
| Well, exactly. So it's not logical. | ||
| It's just throwing the kitchen sink at a problem when you're all but certain to be defeated. | ||
| I don't know if that... | ||
| In other words, the notion that mail-in balloting versus in-person balloting creates this separate track | ||
| that it's a violation of the Equal Protection Clause, that... | ||
| Could have been asserted without any election results in. | ||
| And they didn't do it. | ||
| Why didn't they do it? | ||
| Because if they had won Pennsylvania, then that rationale wouldn't have been operative. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| If they won Pennsylvania, Trump would be like, we did it, we won, we're the best. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| Mail-in ballots are fine. | ||
| But that doesn't change the fact, there was a Supreme Court ruling earlier, and they said, we can't rule on it until it happens. | ||
| And so they said, kick it back, segregate the votes. | ||
| And then we'll have a ruling later. | ||
| So now here comes the later ruling. | ||
| But the argument about mail-in voting isn't just mail-in votes are different from in-person votes. | ||
| There's a bunch of nuance here. | ||
| Notably, they're arguing that in Democrat districts, the election individuals, I guess, were allowing voters in these districts to cure their ballots if they had errors on them. | ||
| And they weren't allowing that in other districts. | ||
| Thus, Trump's team is saying, if you have one district that says, you can check your ballot, we bring it to you. | ||
| We go to your house and say, hey, you forgot to sign it, sign it. | ||
| Okay, your ballot's valid now. | ||
| And then in Republican districts, they didn't do that, creating a higher margin of failure. | ||
| You've created a two-track where you're slanting things for Democrats. | ||
| That's another- Well, ballots can be cured per state law. | ||
| And it takes a large volunteer effort, as far as I understand, Two, retrieve the person whose ballot needs to be cured. | ||
| It's not just done by election officials across the board, meaning public employees. | ||
| So if Republicans are not getting their ballots cured, I would think that's probably a function more of them not having as many voters that need to have their ballots cured, right? | ||
| I don't know the exact specifics of that, but Sure, sure. | ||
| Not fraud, though. | ||
| I mean, even in Georgia where I just, again, just was, they have a ballot curing process | ||
| that was all enacted by a Republican state legislature. | ||
| So I mean, the point is, I think if you're just saying this is democratic fraud, Georgia | ||
| to me is a glaring example or whatever malfeasance, impropriety, however you want to call it. | ||
| I mean, how do you account for Georgia? | ||
| I mean, that's that's a big one. | ||
| Pennsylvania, obviously, is where the election at least was called by the media over the weekend. | ||
| But again, Georgia, to me, stands out as something that the Republicans and the Trump supporters who are going with this narrative have not even attempted to reckon with. | ||
| And you even have the two Republican senators. | ||
| I prefer when stuff is logic-based. | ||
| nation with the Republican Secretary of State just because they didn't like how | ||
| the election was being run. They didn't even offer any specifics. That's why I | ||
| keep going back. They're just throwing the kitchen sink at a problem. | ||
| I'm not arguing that the way they're going at it is like this very slow | ||
| methodical logic based, you know, solution. I prefer when stuff is logic based. I | ||
| don't know about you. No, no, I agree. | ||
| What I'm saying is they're not going, okay, let's take a look at Washington state and go through the list. | ||
| Now let's take a look at Wyoming and go through the list. | ||
| What they're saying is here are the states we got to win. | ||
| Fire the lawyers. | ||
| Like, I mean, like fire the missiles, not get rid of the lawyers. | ||
| So obviously they're going after Pennsylvania. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Trump needs Pennsylvania for any kind of victory. | ||
| So of course he's going to go after that through every legal mean possible. | ||
| And then they'll, they're also filing lawsuits in Nevada. | ||
| I think they've got a ton of lawsuits going out across the board in a bunch of different states. | ||
| But I think there may be some, uh... I think some of the arguments make sense. | ||
| Notably, one of the biggest problems we have right now, and I have no idea what the solution is, there was a court order in Pennsylvania that in Philadelphia and Allegheny County, they must allow observers within a certain distance to observe. | ||
| And they defied the court order. | ||
| So, they counted, according to Trump's campaign, about 450,000 ballots in violation of a court order. | ||
| Now, Giuliani's taken the extreme approach, saying, they're all spoiled, because the secrecy envelopes were destroyed already. | ||
| Therefore, we don't know where these ballots came from, we have no addresses, we don't know who they are, we don't know if they were signed, and they didn't allow observers in violation of court order, disqualify them. | ||
| This is why the ACLU jumped in, saying, we have to sue back to stop Trump from winning this fight. | ||
| If they disqualify 450,000 votes, it'll include Trump votes, but I think that'll definitely flip it for Trump. | ||
| You could just as easily call that disenfranchisement, though. | ||
| I mean, the voters who cast those ballots had nothing to do with what distance observers were required to stand at. | ||
| So why should their vote be negated? | ||
| Because we need election security. | ||
| Because we don't know who those votes are, where they're from, who signed them. | ||
| The secrecy ballots were destroyed. | ||
| So we could do a re-election. | ||
| You know, no. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Exactly. | ||
| So this creates a very serious problem. | ||
| We can't create a system where we say straight up, you can violate a court order and count hundreds of thousands of ballots in violation of a court ruling. | ||
| I think I think there's some dispute over whether that order was violated and precisely the way. | ||
| Well, so. | ||
|
unidentified
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So. | |
| But like, I mean, OK, so a difference of three feet in terms of. | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| It was dozens of feet. | ||
| It was like I read that it was a lesser distance and at least certain. | ||
| Well, there's videos of people like 50 feet away with binoculars. | ||
| And so you've got, according to Giuliani, 50 to 70 witnesses. | ||
| I'm not saying you got to trust the guy. | ||
| I'm just saying this is their argument. | ||
| They've got 50 to 70 people who have signed on to swear under oath. | ||
| They were, they were pushed out in violation of the court order, allowing them to be within six feet. | ||
| What do we do with these ballots? | ||
| Well, I mean, again, my understanding is that At least some of the time in Philadelphia, which is now in dispute. | ||
| The people who came in through the public entrance to observe. | ||
| Didn't register properly, and there were, in fact, bipartisan observers on hand. | ||
| Maybe not 100% of the time. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's a messy process. | ||
| This is what we're getting from the media. | ||
| Mainstream news outlets are saying there were Democrat and Republican observers on site. | ||
| Republicans never disputed they weren't on site. | ||
| They're saying Republicans weren't allowed within the court order distance. | ||
| Meaningful access is what they argued. | ||
| So of course the media is pushing its narrative, the Trump campaign and, you know, Trump-supporting media is pushing its narrative. | ||
| But I gotta admit, I mean, how do you deal with the situation in that regard? | ||
| Like, do we just say, this time it's okay? | ||
| We don't, you know, we've got a legal dispute over these ballots? | ||
| And I'll tell you this, man, at first I was like, look, I tweeted this morning, Trump is not going to prison. | ||
| These people on the left who are like, Trump's going to jail! | ||
| It's not going to happen. | ||
| And Trump's not going to overturn this election with lawsuits. | ||
| But then things started getting weird. | ||
| These states are Republican legislatures. | ||
| Are they just going to roll over and be like, we're going to certify the electors for Joe Biden while this dispute is going on? | ||
| Or are they going to be like, no, we're not doing it. | ||
| In which case, nobody gets 270. | ||
| Well, if they do that, then they'll have done something which is 100% unprecedented in all of American history. | ||
| And whether they want to do that, I think is You know, a little bit doubtful. | ||
| On the other hand, there was an effort by frantic liberals in 2016 to lobby electors to do something which at that point would have also been with a president in U.S. | ||
| history, which is that on the basis of Russian interference, they were saying that they should not seat electors for Trump in states like Pennsylvania. | ||
| It wasn't just a marginal fringe movement. | ||
| I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. | ||
| I mentioned this today on Twitter, which is the state capital. | ||
| When the Electoral College met, which is usually just a formality that nobody even knows is happening, but I went on in December of 2016 to watch it happen. | ||
| And you had a mass, it wasn't, it was a protest that had been organized at the State House to badger electors to not cast their votes in accordance with what the popular vote outcome in the state of Pennsylvania was. | ||
| It would have been just a mind-blowing departure from everything that's happened ever before in U.S. | ||
| history. | ||
| And they were in the chamber, in the legislative chamber, they were screaming. | ||
| And at the moment that the votes were certified, the electoral votes were certified, the woman right in front of me in this balcony screamed loud enough so that everybody could undoubtedly hear it. | ||
| She screamed. | ||
| You just gave us Hitler! | ||
| So, I mean, when I see Democrats and liberals sort of scorning Republicans and Trump supporters now for maybe having some histrionic interpretations of what this fraud matter consists of, I think, I mean, did you just sleep through the past four and a half years? | ||
| If anything, you made it inevitable that there was going to be this backlash where however specious The claims are in terms of voter fraud or whatever else about the doubting the legitimacy of the election. | ||
| You should have had no doubt whatsoever that those were going to flood into the public consciousness for no reason other than as retribution for what was done last time. | ||
| Hillary Clinton did technically concede the day after the election and Trump hasn't yet. | ||
| So it's not 100% analogous. | ||
| But, I mean, there were plenty of extremely influential liberals. | ||
| Lawrence, Lessig, Robert Reich. | ||
| Go down the list. | ||
| Jennifer Palmieri, who was on the Clinton campaign. | ||
| I collected this at the time, so I have the quote receipts, who were advocating for the delegitimization of the Electoral College. | ||
| And, you know, people don't forget about that. | ||
| And that, I think, is a really under emphasized component of all this. | ||
| It's just as it's almost like a vengeance type thing for 2016. | ||
| We just had historical polling failure. | ||
| The worst ever. | ||
| 7% was the failure rate. | ||
| And now you've got people tweeting things like, you're projecting Joe Biden won before certification, and you're also the ones who got the entire polling wrong. | ||
| Of course, they're lumping the media together, of course. | ||
| The various polling institutions all were polling ridiculous numbers against Trump. | ||
| The race is extremely close and the media runs full speed. | ||
| Like Wikipedia has already put up on the president elect page, a picture of Joe Biden, which is like, wait, wait, wait. | ||
| President elect as a concept doesn't need a picture of anybody. | ||
| Well, I mean, let's be clear about something. | ||
| When Trump won in 2016, the media called it for him within a few hours. | ||
| Is it around 3 AM? | ||
| I think the following day. | ||
| So, I mean, this is not. | ||
| Really that different and there were still a lot of uncertainty at least among despondent liberals as to the | ||
| legitimacy of the election There are people demanding recounts in Wisconsin, | ||
| Pennsylvania, Michigan Some of which did happen at the behest of Jill Stein, which | ||
| was hilarious because she made millions and millions of dollars | ||
| mostly from Hillary Clinton supporters because I don't think that | ||
| Most Green Party supporters should they said that they even exist or that deep-pocketed? | ||
| So, I mean, there's nothing unusual when you're, like, when the people now say the media called the election. | ||
| I mean, that happens every election. | ||
| That happened when Trump won. | ||
| The votes weren't certified, the states didn't certify the results in 2016 until weeks after. | ||
| I'm not, I'm not, I'm not claiming that Trump is, or let me put it this way, Yeah, when the media said Trump wins, Trump was like, I won. | ||
| And now the media's like, Joe Biden's win, he's like, no, he didn't. | ||
| But it's a formality. | ||
| That's why I keep going to, let's at least strive to have some logical consistency in how we see the world. | ||
| I mean, that's one of my baseline desires in life. | ||
| But the issue is the media calling it, it's a formality. | ||
| The formality is when the states certify the results. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| You can't be saying that the media decides who the president is. | ||
| Well, you said the media calling it is a formality. | ||
| It's like an informality. | ||
| It's when they're able to make a projection, they call it. | ||
| And it's not formalized until the states certify the results weeks later. | ||
| What I mean is, to clarify, when the media calls it, it's just more of a tradition. | ||
| That the media says, we've projected the numbers, here's our winner. | ||
| And then typically you have results where it's like, alright, alright, alright, I'm out. | ||
| And the campaigns look at their numbers. | ||
| They look at, you know, Edison Research or AP and say, we see what the numbers are. | ||
| This one was an extremely close race. | ||
| And I will say the difference between Hillary Clinton conceding within a couple of days is that we didn't have the results. | ||
| She conceded the next day. | ||
| But we didn't have the results until Saturday. | ||
| So Trump was up. | ||
| He couldn't concede. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| No, that's right. | ||
| No, I think it would have been ridiculous. | ||
| I mean, I think nobody would have expected him to concede. | ||
| Biden would have had to concede it at that point. | ||
| Yeah, until at least, you know, it was, quote, called. | ||
| It is a little bit of a rewriting of history, though, to say that it's just the media calling it. | ||
| I know that conservatives are really upset with Fox News, but they all did it simultaneously. | ||
| You know, so, you know, unless you're saying that... Fox was last, I think. | ||
| But RealClearPolitics hasn't called it. | ||
| Well, I mean, does RealClearPolitics have its own... Tracking system, it does. | ||
| ...proprietary vote counting mechanism, like the Associated Press or Fox? | ||
| I don't know about that. | ||
| I know that they have, just like, I think most of these outlets use the AP or whatever, right? | ||
| So they're not making calls, they're just tracking AP's numbers. | ||
| But RCP has their map. | ||
| Not all of them. | ||
| I mean, the reason that Fox called Arizona, Fox called Arizona first, and AP did it a few hours later, so they're using different systems. | ||
| And they all did it pretty much simultaneously on Saturday morning, because that's when a certain batch of Philadelphia votes came in that rendered it, they say, impossible for Trump to make up the margin, at least, you know, leaving aside any kind of fraud allegations. | ||
| So there was an article from July written by the co-founder of MSNBC that many people called, they called it anti-Trump resistance porn. | ||
| Like, it was one of these articles that were like, Trump is a dictator! | ||
| And they said, it was called, How Trump Can Lose the Election and Still Win the Presidency. | ||
| And they said, what would happen is, there's four states, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania, that have Republican legislatures. | ||
| They're swing states. | ||
| The argument was, they'll go for Biden, but Trump will make some accusation about national security or fraud, thus locking up the certification process until the deadline, when the Supreme Court will then say, if we don't have the Electoral College certified by the 14th, then it goes to House delegations. | ||
| And the House delegations are Republican, they would re-elect Donald Trump. | ||
| That's what this guy was warning of. | ||
| Now, I think all of these arguments, Trump invalidating votes or whatever, House delegation, are long shots. | ||
| But I'm looking at, you know, Trump getting rid, so Trump's getting rid of the Pentagon, you know, leadership. | ||
| Maybe he's just, on the way out, he's just saying, I'm going to get rid of all these people, whatever, he's mad. | ||
| Or we heard that he instructed the federal agencies to produce their budgets for February as if he wasn't leaving. | ||
| Then we had Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State, saying there will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration. | ||
| And then I think he chuckled, which people were saying that that meant he wasn't meant to be 100% serious. | ||
| But then again, who knows? | ||
| But then it was announced that Trump is telling federal agencies, keep the budgets, like, don't change anything you're doing. | ||
| So... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Again, like I mentioned before, Georgia is also a Republican state legislature, so that would be a similar scenario, potentially. | ||
| You know, I think it was interesting what was said yesterday by Bill Barr, when he put out a memo authorizing certain investigations into substantive fraud. | ||
| That's unprecedented, right? | ||
| I believe so. | ||
| But the way that he worded it was very interesting because Bill Barr, if nothing else, is very astute at knowing how to almost manage Trump because so much of what Trump has demanded vis-a-vis the Durham investigation into the origins of Russiagate or various other Justice Department initiatives Bill Barr really hasn't delivered fully on, and there were even reports about how annoyed Trump apparently was with Barr in the past few weeks. | ||
| And I think there's sort of a continuation of that theme here, because if you actually read the memo that Barr put out that was reported, he said that it is equally, notwithstanding that he authorized these preliminary investigations, He said it is equally imperative that department personnel exercise appropriate caution and maintain. | ||
| Oh, sorry, not that. | ||
| He said that while serious allegations should be handled with great care, specious, speculative, fanciful or far-fetched claims should not be a basis for initiating federal inquiries. | ||
| So why would he even include that proviso, if not as a kind of quasi-rebuttal of allegations that he apparently believes don't have merit? | ||
| You know, so he's like treading a line here where I think he's just trying to, to some extent, placate Trump and but also maintain some mooring in the reality as he sees the election going in terms of the final outcome. | ||
| When they called the results on Saturday, I'm just thinking it's going to be another boring, you know, Trump's finally | ||
| going to be like, all right, all right, you know, he's going to throw a fit in some capacity. | ||
| And then I thought we'd move on, but he's not. | ||
| And then for a while, I thought, you know, at least for a couple of days or a day or two, because it's only what | ||
| Tuesday I was like, okay, Trump's probably just going to, you know, drag it out. | ||
| We're seeing reports that he's, like, selling his helicopter. | ||
| Oh, is he? | ||
| I don't know if that's true, though, because it's hard to know what to trust anymore when you see these stories that come out, you know? | ||
| And this is, like, normally I trust for the most part these organizations. | ||
| I fact-check them. | ||
| But I can't fact-check these claims that Trump's selling his helicopter. | ||
| I can't go to a website and look up the sale of a helicopter. | ||
| So I don't know if he's actually selling this stuff, but then we saw a story from CBS that Trump's fundraising for election recount, 60% first goes to paying off campaign debt. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I heard Keith Olbermann say that. | ||
| I went to his fundraising site, it wasn't there. | ||
| I mean, I get those solicitations. | ||
| Did you see them? | ||
| And if you look at the if you look at the small text, there is something that references that. | ||
| So what I saw, it said 60 percent will go to Save America. | ||
| I don't know if it was 60 percent, but there but there is there is a provision in there that which says that some of this could be used to retire campaign debt. | ||
| I mean, I think that I don't and I felt this across the board for the Democratic campaigns and Republican campaigns. | ||
| Don't bother giving them money at this point. | ||
| I mean, the consultants Orders drowning in cash at this point. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| Jamie Harrison, the Senate Democratic candidate in South Carolina, raised the most money for any Senate race ever. | ||
| And lost. | ||
| And lost. | ||
| And it was in South Carolina, which is like not a big media market. | ||
| And it lost double digits. | ||
| It's like Charleston. | ||
| It's not like he had to run in California. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Right. | ||
| So all you're doing when you Go to your ActBlue donation page, which is how so many of these Democratic candidates get their contributions, is you're lining the pockets of consultants who don't have to even deliver on any of their promises in order to make the money that they're going to make. | ||
| I mean, they probably are all buying Teslas now because you thought Jamie Harrison had a legitimate chance of beating Lindsey Graham in South Carolina. | ||
| And Graham won by double digits, didn't he? | ||
| Yeah, I think it was the 13 points or something. | ||
|
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Totally crushed him. | |
| And like, likewise, I mean, look, if you're a diehard Trump supporter and you want to pull out all the stops, do everything possible legally to certify to prevent the certification of the votes before we're 100% sure that it's complete. | ||
| OK, fine. | ||
| But like, just know that you're paying the salaries of lawyers. | ||
| consultants if you're clicking on the solicitations and giving money and they | ||
| don't even need your money at this point they have plenty of money yeah they're | ||
| just doing it because they can because they want because they have those email | ||
| lists that are these you know boondoggles that you know they could | ||
| squeeze every last drop out of so well here's what I'm saying I I'm | ||
| I'm sitting here thinking Trump's gonna milk it for all it's worth. | ||
| He's gonna figure out what his legal options are. | ||
| He's gonna go to war. | ||
| I can't imagine him giving up. | ||
| But now I'm kind of like, is Trump gonna push it for a lawfare victory? | ||
| Where he can jam up several states so there's no certification and then try and win? | ||
| Or is that just so far-fetched? | ||
| I'm like, think about what year it is, you know, mass pandemic lockdown, | ||
| riots sweeping the country, peaking in June, all this weird, crazy stuff happening. | ||
| And everyone's saying it's 2020. And I'm like, it doesn't really mean anything. It's | ||
| like superstitious. But Friday the 13th is coming up. Oh, is it? | ||
| It sure is. | ||
| Well, that changes everything. | ||
| It changes everything! | ||
| Forget everything I said in this conversation. | ||
|
unidentified
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All bets are off, man. | |
| I think he's gonna push it, man. | ||
| I think he's going the distance because the amount of secret votes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think so. | |
| Basically, how many votes got counted in secret? | ||
| Well, they're claiming 450,000 were counted without meaningful access. | ||
| And this is just in one place. | ||
| But hold on. | ||
| There's also a sworn affidavit that ballots were coming in in the middle of the night. | ||
| We have a Georgia GOP guy who said at like 4 a.m. | ||
| they said, we're not counting anymore. | ||
| So everyone needs to leave. | ||
| And then once they left, they started counting again. | ||
| So there's a bunch of these claims. | ||
| And this is on top of computer programs. | ||
| Testimony, Florida testimony, congressional testimony of a guy saying he built a program that flips a vote, 51-49. | ||
| You can look it up on YouTube. | ||
| That was a long time ago. | ||
| Yeah, it was like 2001 or something. | ||
| This is like 20-year-old technology. | ||
| And then this comes out, this Air Force General starts telling us about this program called Scorecard with this computer. | ||
| I don't know about that. | ||
| Hold on, hold on, hold on. | ||
| Wait, hold on, hold on. | ||
| I know I don't know either but like this is a big deal. | ||
| Hold on before you say that we gotta know Who's this guy? He's a he's an Air Force general and I | ||
| would know his name offhand But he was on Steve Bannon's war room explaining the score | ||
| the hammer supercomputer and the scorecard software | ||
| See, I don't know anything about this I don't know how to you know, I actually did listen to a press conference yesterday from the Secretary of State or at least it was an election administrative official who was a Republican in Georgia who addressed Rumors about whatever that is that you're talking about. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sorry. | |
| I don't know the full details, but He said it was a hoax and this is a Republican and I don't know maybe he's a He's incorrect, or he's in on it, or he's a deep state operator. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But I would have to look for a little bit further into what you're just talking about. | ||
| Isn't it weird, though, that they published a poll from Reuters? | ||
| It says nearly 80% of Americans say Biden won White House, ignoring Trump's refusal to concede. | ||
| I'm like, when did we ever need a poll to tell people Americans think Joe Biden won? | ||
| It's so much manipulation right now. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is this just me? | |
| A multilevels of manipulation too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I agree. | |
| I think that is interesting. | ||
| You know, I mentioned before we started. | ||
| I'm curious now if in 2000 there were polls run in this like interregnum period before. | ||
| It seems like there would be. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Curious. | |
| winner about just asking people who they think won the election as | ||
| Curious. | ||
| opposed to like who they favor just who do you think won because then it | ||
| wouldn't be totally unprecedented but I mean it is I mean the impetus for | ||
| polling like that is that Trump hasn't continued the election so right I mean | ||
| it makes some sense why they would run those polls but it is sort of curious | ||
| yes a little bit weird a little bit I'm saying but like I but it's 2020 so I'm | ||
| not surprised if they if the results came in they said we're calling it for | ||
| Biden and then they just shut up. | ||
| Like, I would be like, yeah, that's it. | ||
| I got this guy's name. | ||
| Lieutenant General Thomas McKierney. | ||
| How do you spell it? | ||
| Uh, Thomas, MICK, M-C-I-N-E-R-N-E-Y. | ||
| Lieutenant General of the Air Force, I believe. | ||
| I can't spell that. | ||
| What did you say? | ||
| Uh, M-C-I-N-E-R. | ||
| Oh, McKierney. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| McKierney. | ||
| Yeah, this guy's legit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
McKierney? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| He's, he's big time. | ||
| 83 years old, this is the guy? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Former Air Force fighter pilot? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Retired in 94? | |
| Vietnam War? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh wow. | |
| So this guy went on Bannon's show and claimed that they had the ability to manipulate elections? | ||
| Basically, they've been using this software as a spying tool against terrorist organizations and now they've turned it, according to him, they've turned it on people to use it for voter fraud. | ||
| I'll tell you, there's a... Media Matters is calling Hammer the new conspiracy theory. | ||
| See, this is the thing, I don't care for this stuff. | ||
| You know why? | ||
| We don't need it. | ||
| It is a conspiracy. | ||
| Who conspired? | ||
| Was it the American government against ISIS? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| We don't need these accusations or stories. | ||
| It doesn't have anything to do and it's a distraction. | ||
| It's calling the entire thing into question for me. | ||
| And it creates a discussion where regular people say you're insane and I don't want to hear it anymore. | ||
| Well, I think the real discussion is that paper ballots are malfunctioned. | ||
| Paper ballots are what provide some degree of security in the authenticity of elections, I would think. | ||
| Not, you know, if it goes 100 percent. | ||
| database. Otherwise, you're going to be counting votes in back rooms for ages | ||
| to come. And you're going to be relying on people's trust. | ||
| Paper ballots are what provides some degree of security in | ||
| the authenticity of elections, I would think. Not, you know, if it | ||
| goes 100 percent. | ||
| I mean, that that was the move after 2016 and | ||
| kind of shed light on some of the Democratic inconsistency because | ||
| people when they were hearing all these allegations from Democrats | ||
| that, oh, Russia must have hacked Wisconsin or something. | ||
| They're saying, OK, if you want a legislative fix to that, let's institute nationwide paper ballots so that we can go and verify after the election and nothing happened on it. | ||
| You have hard documents. | ||
| If we go digital, someone could just draft a bunch of fake ballots and there's nothing to look at. | ||
| But the thing is, you don't have the hard ballots. | ||
| You don't know who does. | ||
| No, you don't. | ||
| We don't. | ||
| I saw them in a warehouse in Georgia. | ||
| They do have them. | ||
| Did you though? | ||
| Did you look in each one? | ||
| Were you able to? | ||
| The required statute totally to keep them for... Who's they? | ||
| And where do they keep them? | ||
| And how do you know what they are? | ||
| Just because you don't know doesn't mean there's a conspiracy. | ||
| And I'm not allowed to know. | ||
| No, that's not true. | ||
| You could walk in and you could talk to the county election official who will explain it to you. | ||
| And you have to rely on him telling you the truth. | ||
| Sure, but you can stand there while they bring the ballots in, watch them pull the ballot out, look at the ballot, watch them open it, see who was voted for, you can watch all that. | ||
| The problem is, Donald Trump's lawsuit is stating they blocked that. | ||
| That's the issue. | ||
| That's one level of an issue, yeah. | ||
| In that capacity, you are correct. | ||
| So Trump is creating a legal challenge to 450,000 ballots because they blocked meaningful access like they were actually supposed to. | ||
| This hammer scorecard thing is another level completely I'm talking about. | ||
| This Trump thing is good. | ||
| When you come out to regular people and say there's a top secret military program called hammer scorecard. | ||
| Well there's PRISM. | ||
| I mean Edward Snowden dropped that bomb. | ||
| Yes, of course. | ||
| And I'm saying when you go to regular people and you say that they tell you you're insane. | ||
| No one's told me I'm insane. | ||
| Dude. | ||
| I'm just quoting an Air Force general. | ||
| You live in a world where regular, working-class people don't. | ||
| And if you go knock on someone's door right now and say, they stole the election with hammer... I'm not forcing it down someone's throat, I'm just bringing it up, man. | ||
| And they're gonna be like, this guy's crazy. | ||
| Well, you're allowed to say that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But I advise you to investigate on your own. | |
| Do you want a legal challenge? | ||
| I think it's just. | ||
| So what you need is a sound legal argument that is within the realm of basic understanding. | ||
| This stuff's conspiracy. | ||
| There's no proving any of it. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's just insanity. | ||
| So what we can see is there's anomalies. | ||
| Like, did you see that some of the jurisdictions violated Benford's law of numbers? | ||
| That I don't know. | ||
| So Benford's Law of Numbers is that. | ||
| Just to respond to you really quickly though before I forget is I think you're right on some level and I'm not even sure that if you did not go knock on the door of some regular working class person who's not overly attuned to Politics that they wouldn't be receptive to some argument. | ||
| Okay, what a general said this, you know, because a lot of people don't have a lot of instinctive faith in the veracity of our institutions, including the media, including the government. | ||
| So, like, I don't know that that would be too much of a stretch in order to convince somebody. | ||
| But the point is, you have to if you want to actually establish what it is that you're positing beyond just Vague assumptions about the corruption of stuff. | ||
| You have to go a little further than a, you know, there was something said in 2001 about some program, you know, there's there should be evidence that's attainable that would substantiate what you're what you're saying. | ||
| I would love it if there was we could somehow get our hands on a CIA. | ||
| But then again, like, why wouldn't this have been the case in 2016? | ||
| For all we know, it was. | ||
| I mean, it's crazy. | ||
| So that they put no way to they put Trump in and then they took him out. | ||
| We actually were going crazy with conspiracies earlier, just kind of having fun, and that was one of them. | ||
| Yeah, well, but this was just silly. | ||
| Yeah, and then, like, your harp is gonna make volcanoes explode. | ||
| That was you, not me! | ||
| That was me. | ||
| We were saying a whole lot of, like, what-ifs. | ||
| Like, what if, like, the Russians really did hack into... So, but we were being silly, but... | ||
| So what if Trump was like the ultimate deep state agent all along? | ||
| Hold on, hold on. | ||
| This is a real conspiracy theory. | ||
| It started during the election that Hillary Clinton and Trump were actually friends. | ||
| Which they were at one time. | ||
| And I have a photo from- Hillary attended his wedding and everything. | ||
| I was at Fort Lauderdale and there were protesters outside of a Trump rally holding a picture of the Clintons and Trump together. | ||
| And they were saying they're friends. | ||
| They're in on it. | ||
| It's all rigged. | ||
| And that's why Hillary Clinton didn't challenge the election. | ||
| She went, oh, I wasn't supposed to lose because that was the intent. | ||
| I'm not saying it's true. | ||
| I'm saying that's what people think. | ||
| I think if it were remotely possible for Hillary Clinton to have ascended to the presidency, she would have pursued that vigorously. | ||
| I don't care how friendly they were or if she attended his wedding in Mar-a-Lago. | ||
| So back to Benford's Law. | ||
| This is something that people keep bringing up over and over again. | ||
| I'm not a mathematician. | ||
| I can't tell you if this is true. | ||
| This is one of the things that we're seeing pop up on the internet. | ||
| And Benford's Law is that if you were to go throughout your day writing down numbers, you would see more 1s than 2s, more 2s than 3s, more 3s than 4s. | ||
| So quite literally, you're walking down the street, you see a mailbox. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Interesting. | |
| And then you're like, I'm gonna write down the mailbox. | ||
| It's sick, four, three, one, seven. | ||
| And you keep doing that. | ||
| Then you tabulate how many fours you found. | ||
| You will have more threes than fours and it creates a sliding scale. | ||
| So a bunch of people are posting various jurisdictions that voted where Biden's vote totals violate Benford's law. | ||
| Meaning there's wild numbers. | ||
| This is important because we've actually, international auditors have used Benford's law | ||
| as justification for, or probable cause of voter fraud. | ||
| And that's why people are now bringing it up. | ||
| The other thing I'll mention is I got a tweet right here. | ||
| I said, BBC is going to have to retract this old article titled, quote, | ||
| "'Vote Rigging, How to Spot the Telltale Signs'". | ||
| Because two of the things they point to that show voter fraud is a delay in announcing results. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Which. | |
| We had, and we still do, a serious delay with several states and also voter turnout numbers that exceed 98 or 99 percent. | ||
| They go on to mention in this article from the BBC from 2016 when they're auditing elections in say Africa, the reason why getting voter turnout above 90 or 95 percent is typically impossible is because people move and people die. | ||
| Thus, in places like Australia, where you can vote by mail and online, and it's compulsory, they still only get around 90-95% voter turnout. | ||
| Yet, I have a tweet. | ||
| UCF tweeted, Since 2017, our campus has been recognized as a voter-friendly campus. | ||
| Today, UCF's voting precinct, precinct 538, topped the 100% voter turnout in the 2020 election at 107.56%. | ||
| My response was that BBC is going to have to retract this article because | ||
| certainly it's not fraud or impropriety in our country. | ||
| Well, what's so hilarious is that, and this is sort of tangentially related, but in October or November of last year, there was a presidential election in Bolivia. | ||
| And Evo Morales ended up being ousted in a coup because we were told there were too many election irregularities for it to have been legitimate. | ||
| And a lot of it stemmed from the fact that rural precincts, which were more pro Morales, the votes were tabulated later on because it took a while due to the infrastructure or whatever. | ||
| Really, it didn't take that long compared to the United States. | ||
| Again, we're still sitting around here. | ||
| A week later, we don't have calls in Georgia. | ||
| What's going on in Alaska? | ||
| Arizona or even Alaska. | ||
| They're carrying the bag of belts from Barrow, Alaska to Anchorage on foot. | ||
| Even in New York, I checked as of last night. | ||
| If you look at the number of precincts reporting and the number of the vote reporting in Manhattan or Queens or Westchester, it's like 50 or 60 percent. | ||
| So if New York actually was critical in terms of determining the outcome, there would be even a bigger uproar because who knows what's happening there administratively. | ||
| But you know, the US never applies the same standards that it uses to berate and lecture other countries, which are supposedly less exceptional to us. | ||
| Um, as it applies to itself. | ||
| I mean, you know, I thought this was, wasn't this a country that like imposed democracy on Iraq and Afghanistan? | ||
| Well, you know, we still can't do that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, but, but we can't even like get results from Arizona a week later. | ||
| It's so crazy. | ||
| It's taken this long. | ||
| There's never been anything in like a 10th of this bizarreness lengthwise. | ||
| Well, has there? | ||
| Has it ever stretched out more than two days after the election day? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I mean, yes. | ||
| So in Florida, 2000 stretched a month and a half or a month and a half. | ||
| No, no, not 37 days. | ||
| 37 days. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 37 or 38. | ||
| Well, and then they never even like I mean, the Supreme Court intervened to prevent them from finishing the recount in Florida. | ||
| So that wasn't even completed. | ||
| We've had an election where there was a tie and a council was created of Democrats, Republicans, lawyers, and judges who then decided the outcome of the election. | ||
| Like, totally outside of the Constitution. | ||
| I think it was 1876. | ||
| When Al Franken was first elected to the Senate in Minnesota in 2008, it was so close against Norm Coleman that it wasn't decided until the following July. | ||
| If I'm not mistaken. | ||
| So July 09. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So it can take forever, especially when the margins are so close. | ||
| But, you know, this is the most powerful country in world history. | ||
| We have so much financial, economic, cultural, social power that we can't get together to have efficient election administration. | ||
| In regards to Florida and the 2008 one, who did you say it was? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I have to double check on that. | ||
| Al Franken, yeah. | ||
| Were the votes tallied the day of, but then there was just, they had to do recounts? | ||
| They had to do recounts. | ||
| So it's never been this case where the votes haven't even been tallied yet a week later? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I have to double check on that. | ||
| I mean, I think I did take... | ||
| Well, hold on, hold on. | ||
| Think about it this way. | ||
| Certification happens on December... I'm sorry, Electoral College certification is the 14th of December. | ||
| Well, first states have to certify, and then electors are appointed, and then they formally meet at the Electoral College in mid-December. | ||
| That's what it was in 2016. | ||
| Tim's finding the source. | ||
| I thought we could look at it. | ||
| I thought we could look at it. | ||
| Good because I'm seething. | ||
| So anyway, the point is, back in the day, we didn't have the internet. | ||
| You'd be like, you'd walk to the swimming hole where there's like, you know, | ||
| Billy Jenkins would be like, I got your ballot right here, son. | ||
| And you'd be like, fill it out, and you'd give it to him and just cross your fingers, I guess. | ||
| And then he puts on the post, the guy rides the horse to the Capitol, | ||
| and then you're just like, well, I voted. | ||
| And then you just, that's it. | ||
| You never know what happened to it. | ||
| Today, it takes like two weeks before they'll even tell you to confirm your vote. | ||
| But I mean, like the idea that we're getting the night result, like we turn the TV on and they're like, here's the president. | ||
| That's like, we didn't have that back then, you know, before TV and radio, 1800s. | ||
| You'd be like, I wonder who the president is. | ||
| Oh, so they'd always be counting the votes for, the votes would be coming in from Oh, probably that too, because they didn't have the transport technology. | ||
| So it would be like votes would be coming in randomly over a certain span of time. | ||
| But with the internet, you would think that we would have gotten better at counting our votes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You'd think so. | |
| Well, I mean, Florida, for example, has gotten a lot better. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They learned their lesson. | |
| They did. | ||
| I mean, they actually instituted legislative reforms after 2000 that very much made their system more efficient. | ||
| And I think we're probably going to see something like that in some of these other states, especially given this conversion to mail-in voting. | ||
| But I mean, another complication is that in Florida, they were permitted to count their mail-in voting before Election Day, whereas in, you know, begin the counting so they could announce, so the winner would be apparent on election night. | ||
| But in Pennsylvania, they weren't permitted to do that by state law. | ||
| So I've got the numbers pulled up, and NBC just goes by the key states that matter, and they say in Arizona, they have until November 23rd to finalize their local results. | ||
| The Secretary of State certifies statewide results on the 30th. | ||
| In Pennsylvania, they have until November 10th for unofficial vote tallies. | ||
| to be provided to the Secretary of the Commonwealth. | ||
| November 23rd is the last day for local officials to submit certified election results. | ||
| If there's a difference of 0.5% or less, then the Secretary must order a recount by November 12th. | ||
| If at least three voters in each county allege errors or discrepancies in the count, a recount could also be triggered. | ||
| Any recount must be completed by November 24th, and local election officials must submit certified recount results to the Secretary by the 25th. | ||
| In Michigan, November 17th, For their, uh, local election officials must complete counting by the 17th, provide the results by the 23rd for certification. | ||
| Any petitions for recount must be submitted by the 25th. | ||
| Wisconsin, they say, is the 17th, and then, you know, there's special rules. | ||
| 13th for Georgia, followed by the 20th to certify unofficial results on the 13th. | ||
| North Carolina, okay. | ||
| We go to December 8th, last day for states to resolve election disputes. | ||
| States must certify election outcomes at least six days before the Electoral College meets, known as the Safe Harbor Deadline, if they want to avoid Congress getting involved in resolving potential disputes. | ||
| That means any court challenges to state election results must be settled by December 8th, 2020. | ||
| If states certify election outcomes by this deadline, Congress must accept the results as valid. | ||
| December 14th, electors cast their ballots. | ||
| They meet in their respective states to cast their ballots for president and vice president on the second Monday after the second Wednesday in December. | ||
| In every state except Nebraska and Maine, electors vote on winner-takes-all basis. | ||
| This we understand, and then some are split. | ||
| December 23rd, President of the Senate receives electoral vote certificates. | ||
| By January 6th, Congress counts electoral votes. | ||
| And on January 20th, they inaugurate the new president. | ||
| So if there's a pending court case by December 8th, and the state is unable to deliver votes, what happens then? | ||
| My understanding is that it's rejected. | ||
| There's no count. | ||
| There's no votes. | ||
| So the state has just gone, whoa. | ||
| And so this is what, and look, I'm not a legal expert, I'm not a constitutionalist. | ||
| I don't know that that's exactly true. | ||
| But you know, it would have to be, I don't know that it's even been litigated before, | ||
| so we wouldn't, it's hard to have a firm answer one way or another. | ||
| On the, what was it, the Bedford's Law? | ||
| Ben Fred's Law. | ||
| Ben Fred's Law point you made. | ||
| It is interesting because... Well, to clarify, it's not a point I'm trying to make. | ||
| Or that you referenced that people are talking about. | ||
| It's like people are posting these viral Twitter threads and not knowing anything about it. | ||
| People are posting these threads. | ||
| One thing that is definitely the case with this election, which is somewhat unusual, is that turnout nationwide went up across the board, across partisan lines. | ||
| So we still have millions of votes to count, ridiculously at this point. | ||
| But even up until now, something like 12% more total votes were cast in 2020 compared to 2016. | ||
| And they weren't cast in a direction that's easy to delineate along partisan lines. | ||
| So if you look at the map of the country, There are some places that skewed heavily Democratic, some places that skewed heavily Republican. | ||
| And in 2016, the skew was almost universally toward the Republican, except in a few cases like, you know, northern Virginia, some affluent suburban areas. | ||
| And you could like kind of extrapolate what the reason for that partisan skew was. | ||
| So it made sense that Montgomery County, Pennsylvania and Arlington skewed Democratic in 2016, whereas the other counties skewed Republican. | ||
| But this year, it's harder to make any of those kinds of inferences. | ||
| And there are these regional anomalies that are a little bit odd. | ||
| And I'm not. | ||
| Positing any conspiracy by any means. | ||
| I'm just saying that if it's some of this stuff strikes you as odd, it's because even the people who are not in conspiracy land whatsoever are finding them odd and don't know exactly how to interpret them. | ||
| So, like, for example, one thing that I wouldn't have expected is that in Minnesota, which the Trump campaign, I think, at least initially thought was possibly competitive, you see a pretty stark pro-democratic skew. | ||
| Right, but but in Iowa, which parts of which are culturally and politically very similar to Minnesota, you see the opposite skewed toward the Republican toward Trump and. | ||
| That's a little odd. | ||
| Like, I don't know exactly how to interpret that. | ||
| And there are a bunch of other examples. | ||
| Like, if you had told me two weeks ago that Trump would win the second congressional district in Maine by the margin he did, which is like seven points, I would have found it Yeah, that's weird. | ||
| are that that would have been the case. | ||
| And yet he also loses New Hampshire by something like seven or eight | ||
| points. Like, because usually there are there. Usually there are these | ||
| inner regional correlations. | ||
| Right. That was definitely the case in 2016. | ||
| The Midwest and the Great Plains swung hard to Trump. | ||
| Right. But this year in the Midwest and the Great Plains, you see these | ||
| like patches of different partisan skews that. | ||
| You know, are going to take a little bit more examination to understand | ||
| the. | ||
| People have noticed that in the the partisan swing charts where | ||
| it shows like which areas they keep posting photos saying, | ||
| look at the state lines because they don't make sense. | ||
| Like, the border of Ohio and Michigan, I think. | ||
| Is Ohio bordering Michigan? | ||
| I'm thinking Indiana. | ||
| No, it doesn't, does it? | ||
| It's like, you see Michigan is all going Democrat, and then the states bordering it to the south are all going Republican, and it's like, what? | ||
| It's like... | ||
| I guess it could happen with the Internet. | ||
| The fracturing of mentality is, you know, you're maybe more like someone across the country than you are to your neighbor. | ||
| Now that you're able to connect via the Internet, that's one way. | ||
| But in 2016, there was a definitely observable regional correlation pretty much everywhere. | ||
| And if there wasn't a regional correlation, you can infer that it was due to like socioeconomic status, median household income. | ||
| There were like some metrics that you could use to make these results explicable, whereas in 20 20 is much less explicable. | ||
| I mean, there are certain things that you can pretty easily infer from, like, so for example, the reason why Biden is ahead in Georgia is because of this transformation of the Atlanta area and the suburbs, namely the affluent suburbs. | ||
| And there are other examples of that you can find around the country, but others where it's not like that correlation doesn't hold. | ||
| But, you know, just to focus on Georgia, just because I happen to be there for like a week or so prior to the election. | ||
| One thing I think is worth underscoring about these results is that the Democratic Party's cultural and power and financial base is now indisputably in these affluent suburbs. | ||
| They're the party of Wall Street, the managerial elites. | ||
| Well, I mean, Wall Street was very much satisfied with this result. | ||
| I mean, the Dow went up and so on and so forth. | ||
| But because it's places like Cobb County, Georgia, Gwinnett County, Georgia, which are these affluent, growing population centers around metro areas, the Democrats are increasingly going to govern with their | ||
| sensibilities in mind. | ||
| Right. And if you think that translates into like economic populism, I think you're dreaming. | ||
| It could there could be a big factor here in that COVID moved people around. | ||
| People who lived in cities all of a sudden found themselves back in the suburbs with their family. | ||
| And this was always going to be a factor, so when you look at why there are these patches that we don't understand, it could very easily be that. | ||
| That earlier in the year, COVID hit, people probably were like, I'm going to get out of the city. | ||
| Then when the riots hit, people got out of cities. | ||
| We knew they were. | ||
| 500,000 people from New York. | ||
| So you got a bunch of wealthy New York people moving all across. | ||
| Maybe that explains why Maine, you know, swung for Trump in a certain way that New Hampshire didn't, because people moved very rapidly and it was the individuals, not the exchange of ideas. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Interesting. | |
| Not relatable. | ||
| And different states have different regimens in terms of whether they sent out a universal mail-in ballot. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| Whether you had to apply for one. | ||
| Like in Georgia, you actually had to apply for an absentee ballot. | ||
| Whereas like in New Jersey, where I live, It was automatic, which I know was controversial. | ||
| But, like, a lot of this stuff really is bizarre. | ||
| Like, Los Angeles County, I can't get over. | ||
| As of yesterday, when I checked, and it's probably more now, there were 200,000 more votes for Trump in Los Angeles County than there were in 2016. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And Los Angeles County is actually trending Republican. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, that's amazing. | |
| No. | ||
| Well, it's because the rich people all leave. | ||
| And the poor people are like, I'm going to vote Republican. | ||
| Uh, maybe there's something to that, but like, I mean, I would have, you would have not had, I would have not predicted that one. | ||
| You see Zapata County in Texas. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| I mean, Hillary Clinton won it two to one and then Trump flipped it. | ||
| Hispanic, Hispanic, uh, uh, county. | ||
| And then you also saw in Miami, I think it was, what was it? | ||
| The 20th or 27th district. | ||
| Blue, safe blue, congressional seats turned red. | ||
| A woman started crying on the phone because she lost. | ||
| It's evidence for why direct democracy is so dangerous, because of the way people can flip on a dime and completely alter. | ||
| If we didn't have a republic and everyone was just like, you just needed a bunch of people to change their mind one day, like a populist candidate could just completely destroy the governance. | ||
| Oh, look at like mask wearing. | ||
| Like, early on with COVID, you had all these Republicans being like, I'm gonna wear a mask. | ||
| And it was Fauci saying, no, no. | ||
| And then it flipped for some reason. | ||
| I'm agreeing with you in that you could use a tribal issue to make people 180 their opinions in a short time span. | ||
| You know, another thing about this election is that it doesn't lend itself to easily reductionist tribal explanations. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| For the right or the left. | ||
| I mean, I've been examining the Georgia results in detail because I wrote a piece that's going to be coming out this week. | ||
| But, you know, I'll just pull up this data because it's hilarious. | ||
| Oh, sorry. | ||
| So Trump would have won this election if he had just maintained the level of white support that he had in 2016. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And if your thesis for U.S. | ||
| politics is this all encompassing, you know, white supremacy, determinist belief system that is so prevalent in the media, then how do you explain that one? | ||
| And one of the most stark examples is to me in in in Georgia, where you have the county with the highest proportion of black voters. | ||
| In that county, Trump received 38 percent more total votes than he did in 2016, whereas Biden received more than Hillary, but just 10 percent more. | ||
| So the skew there was for Trump. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Right. | ||
| But then if you look at the whitest county in Georgia, and these are rural, relatively small counties, so you could see big shifts year to year. | ||
| But nonetheless, in the whitest county in Georgia, Biden's vote total increased 34 percent compared to Hillary and Trump's increased by a lesser percentage is 26. | ||
| So what does that tell you? | ||
| That tells you if you are so mired in this kind of elite mentality where everything is black and white per the dictates of this ideology that they're so obsessed with, Then you're missing just a huge amount of the political dynamics in the country around you. | ||
| And you would think that if you're in the media and you're somebody who wants to be as attuned as possible to those dynamics, then you would do, I don't know, a rethink. | ||
| But I can't imagine that they're actually going to do it. | ||
| They're way too tethered to their ideological presuppositions. | ||
| They're trying to claim now. | ||
| I'm seeing all the all the memes from the from the left that, you know, AOC was right. | ||
| The districts that she helped, that were for Medicare for All, actually won. | ||
| And the Democrats who didn't support and went moderate all ended up losing. | ||
| And maybe there's an argument where if I'm going to vote for someone who's moderate, I'll go the safe route and not vote for the guy who wants to impeach the president and not get anything done. | ||
| You vote for a Republican, maybe they'll actually do their job. | ||
| Maybe that's the mentality. | ||
| In New Jersey, Jeff Van Drew, he won. | ||
| He won. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He just said, you know, I don't want to impeach Trump. | ||
| I'm going to switch parties. | ||
| Boom, boom, boom, boom. | ||
| And then now he's reelected. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| He gets. | ||
| That's huge. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, it's interesting because the the there were the. | ||
| One of the Democratic congressmen who did not vote to impeach Trump, there were only three I think, was in Minnesota in one of these more rural districts that had been like a legacy Democratic district that the Republicans rightly thought that they could win, Colin Peterson. | ||
| And his not voting for impeachment didn't matter, he still lost anyway. | ||
| So there are certain congressional districts that are going to be subject to nationwide trends, regardless of whether, like, you support Medicare for All or you voted to impeach Trump. | ||
| It's almost, like, ineluctable, you know? | ||
| And I think you see that when there's certain big shifts. | ||
| But then again, it's sort of complicated because you have these patches of partisan trends that are kind of, like, in conflict with one another that don't make a ton of sense. | ||
| So I mean, this is going to take a lot of time to, quote, unpack. | ||
| I think COVID played a big role in it, I do. | ||
| I think, and the riots, moved people around in ways we don't yet understand. | ||
| And a lot of these places had same-day registration. | ||
| So you could've literally moved a week before. | ||
| Well, not literally, because they probably have some law, like you gotta be there at least 27 days or something, some states. | ||
| Now they're all gonna go to Georgia. | ||
| You hearing this? | ||
| Like, for real. | ||
| They're gonna move to Georgia. | ||
| They are. | ||
| So the big thing now, apparently, is that Georgia has lax residency laws, and because the runoff will dictate control of the Senate, And if Republicans lose control of the Senate, it's going to be Democrat in every branch. | ||
| Except for the, I should say, not the Supreme Court, but it's going to be House, Senate, and Presidency, and they're going to start passing everything and just steamrolling through. | ||
| So, now we're hearing, what was it, Andrew Yang said, I'm moving to Georgia! | ||
| It's like, really, dude? | ||
| I mean, even if the Democrats do gain control of the Senate, I wouldn't think I wouldn't overestimate how simple it is for them to just get through whatever it is they want to get through. | ||
| I mean, Trump and the Republicans had unified control for the first two years of his tenure. | ||
| They couldn't get health care repeal, Obamacare repeal passed. | ||
| I mean, they got a tax reform bill. | ||
| But it's it's less it's it's not as simple as you think. | ||
| And there are always these kind of like anomalous senators within the coalition who need to be placated. | ||
| I mean, Trump had Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski and stuff like, by the way, Susan Collins winning was one of the most hilarious. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Certain senators are getting I keep saying bribed, getting lobbied to vote a certain way. | ||
| And if they're Republican or Democrat, the lobbyists don't care. | ||
| They're just going to lobby enough people, whether Well, I mean, if you're Joe Manchin, who's the Democratic senator from West Virginia, clearly you have you're operating under a wholly different set of political incentives than if you're a Democratic senator from California. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, I mean, he is within an incentive structure that is going to put him off course with what the majority of the caucus wants. | ||
| And so it's never going to be a given that Joe Manchin is going to support any particular legislative initiative. | ||
| I mean, Joe Manchin voted for Kavanaugh and Gorsuch. | ||
| So a Democratic senator from a certain state might be more conservative than a Republican senator from a certain state. | ||
| But we're losing that. | ||
| We're losing that. | ||
| And that used to always be the case. | ||
| I mean, there was nothing surprising or novel about that for most of U.S. | ||
| history. | ||
| But we have seen polarization where it's almost like the parties act as parliamentary parties where they vote in almost complete unison most of the time, whereas there used to be these regional disparities where it didn't really matter if you were a Democrat or a Republican if you were representing in the Senate from Alabama or something. | ||
| Alabama just flipped Republican though, didn't it? | ||
| The Alabama Senator was Democrat, I think? | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| Doug Jones lost. | ||
| That did flip. | ||
| He lost to Tommy Tuberville, who was like the football coach. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Tuberville. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, and Colin Peterson, too. | ||
| So Colin Peterson was one of the two Democrats who didn't vote for impeachment. | ||
| Or actually, I think Tulsi abstained. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Did she? | |
| She did. | ||
| She voted present. | ||
| She voted present on both orders. | ||
| Do you guys think there would be any value to regulating our government and saying you have to have a certain amount of parties in the government? | ||
| You can't have more than like X amount of people per party? | ||
| No, because they'd just form coalitions. | ||
| They would? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And but well, I mean, you have lots of parties in different parliamentary systems, like in Europe, like look at look at Belgium. | ||
| They have to have these wide coalitions and such. | ||
| And I think it's arguable whether these systems are more efficient. | ||
| But, you know, one thing I think probably is valid is ranked choice voting, which is now being adopted. | ||
| But Maine has it. | ||
| Yeah, Maine has it. | ||
| And people were saying, oh, people were actually confident that Susan Collins might lose in Maine because the Green Party votes would go to the Democrats. | ||
| It just didn't matter at all. | ||
| Third parties were completely irrelevant. | ||
| So, I mean, these polarization trends that are evident in the country might render it so that it's just naturally not the case that there's a desire for more than Two parties. | ||
| But ranked choice is legit. | ||
| Ranked choice sounds pretty good in my opinion. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's like, yeah. | ||
| Especially in a primary, it makes a lot of sense. | ||
| You could have more than one candidate you favor, you know. | ||
| I actually watched a video where they did an algorithmic simulation of various voting methods. | ||
| The method we have is called first past the post. | ||
| And I think this is archaic. | ||
| And I think it is held onto by people who just want to manipulate one person, one vote. | ||
| That's fair. | ||
| And it's like, There's other ways to determine, like rank choice makes a lot of sense, but it's also not perfect. | ||
| For those that aren't familiar, rank choice would be like, you have a list of candidates and you say, here's my first, second, third, fourth, you rank them based on what you think you want. | ||
| That way, if you're like, I really want Jill Stein, I vote for her. | ||
| But if Jill Stein loses, then your vote passes down to the next person, which would be, you know, Joe Biden or whatever. | ||
| And so that would create a better representation of who the people actually want. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But this is gonna be surprising, because I didn't realize this. | ||
| They did a simulation where they showed the same problem emerges. | ||
| You can look at many countries where they have ranked choice voting. | ||
| I think they mentioned Australia, I could be wrong. | ||
| And they're like still two party dominance. | ||
| Because people get worried. | ||
| I forgot why it happens, but it's a similar thing where it's like | ||
| you run the risk of someone else getting more votes because your first choice is not like, | ||
| it's still a ranking system where someone might get more votes if you rank them | ||
| at number two or something like that. | ||
| And so, I forgot how it worked. | ||
| But anyway, the point was, they did one called approval voting, where you literally vote for anybody and everybody. | ||
| You can vote as many times as you want. | ||
| And they said that was actually the best system. | ||
| So if there's ten candidates, you can say, I vote for all of them, and you can walk away. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh! | |
| Yep. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Interesting. | |
| Alaska actually had a ranked choice party run primary this year. | ||
| So when they were four or five, you know, you could choose, you know, number one, Bernie Sanders, number two, Elizabeth Warren, whatever. | ||
| And, you know, there's no reason why that couldn't be replicated across the country, especially in primaries, which tend to be more a function of internal party processes. | ||
| You know, if there's one election reform that I would love to be instituted nationwide, because it best reflects my own beliefs, it's that it's take the option that's on the ballot, to my knowledge, only in Nevada, which is on the ballot in Nevada for any election, you can vote for quote, none of these candidates. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So it's just a wholesale rejection of everything, the whole system. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I love it. | |
| And that's my preferred reform. | ||
| I would love to vote for that. | ||
| The approval voting system was interesting because the idea was if there are, say, ten candidates, you can say, I vote for this, this, this, this, and this, and everyone else can go away. | ||
| And then basically it's just whoever gets the most votes wins. | ||
| And apparently they did a simulation where they found that it is the most likely system to accurately represent what people actually want. | ||
| Yeah, I think with ranked choice, the problem is your vote's gonna end up being only going to whoever is the top two of everything. | ||
| So if you vote for, like, a Democrat is number one and a Republican is number two, but the Republican doesn't make it into the final top two, your number two won't be your second choice. | ||
| It'll defer to your third choice. | ||
| So you want to put your Republican as your first choice. | ||
| It was something like... | ||
| If you've got 100 people and 60 of them vote for someone you like, and you vote for that person as your second choice or something, then... It was something like people start betting against each other because they're worried about, you know, someone bad getting in, so they pick their first choice, but then put their bet as their second choice, and then it creates two-party dominance with some minor choices here and there. | ||
| And what's this other one called? | ||
| Approval. | ||
| Approval. | ||
| Where it's just vote for as many times as you want. | ||
| So you're kind of voting for who you don't want, Exactly. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And so it ends up with everyone just you count the votes and how many you could vote for one person one time but you can vote for any everybody. | ||
| So I'm not going to pretend to have all the answers. | ||
| I'm not saying it's a perfect system. | ||
| It was just a really interesting thing where they did a mathematical equation and then calculated like The thing is, like, people speculate about the need for different facets of election reform every cycle, and almost nothing ever happens of note, at least on a national scale, right? | ||
| Sometimes you do have state-based reforms. | ||
| Yeah, I did. | ||
| That's a terrible idea, I think. | ||
| this right choice voting. But I remember in 2016 there was people pledging with you know from the bottom of their | ||
| heart that if we do anything in the next year to half it's going | ||
| to be we're going to abolish the Electoral College. It was | ||
| like OK. Yeah. That's a terrible idea. I think you should be | ||
| always. Yeah. What are your thoughts on that. The Electoral College. Yeah. You know I don't even think it's worth | ||
| having an argument as to whether it's good or bad. | ||
| It just is. | ||
| It's foundational to the country's founding principles. | ||
| And we've done it for 200 plus years, 250 years. | ||
| So, like, why have this recurring endless debate about whether it should or shouldn't be? | ||
| There's pretty much zero chance ever that it will be changed. | ||
| And if it was going to be changed, it would have been done while all the momentum was behind changing it in 2016 when you had all these exercised Liberals saying that, oh my god, this horrible fascist backed by Russia has been foisted upon us because of the Electoral College. | ||
| If that was the opportunity to reform it, that would have been when it was done and it wasn't done. | ||
| Things can't just stay the same forever though, you know? | ||
| That's why I'm like, we have an optimism bias. | ||
| We think everything's gonna just be the way it is, the way we remember. | ||
| We're used to these elections, where it's always like, the night of, at three in the morning, they're like, the final polls are in, and Barack Obama has won, and you know, McCain is like, you ran a good campaign, Barack, and I concede. | ||
| And that's like, we just, we grew up with that, and that's normal to us, and now we assume nothing could change. | ||
| It would be too weird! | ||
| And if we don't change it incrementally, it tends to happen all at once, which can be very dangerous. | ||
| and the bad stuff can't happen. | ||
| But certainly it will at some point. | ||
| We can't just be stuck in this system. | ||
| And if we don't change it incrementally, it tends to happen all at once, which can | ||
| be very dangerous. | ||
| Well, now you've got the the progressive left. | ||
| You've got the I don't know if you saw that New York mag story about the New York | ||
| Times. Yes, I did. | ||
| The the staff of The New York Times saying we're standing at the barricades of like | ||
| historic change or something. | ||
| Which side are you on? | ||
| Like, like it feels like there's a dam holding back a massive wave of a new what? | ||
| I don't know what you called it. The neo fascism is that sure. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Did I call it something? | ||
| Yeah, the dogma of the ideological left, I forgot you called it. | ||
| I don't want to put words in your mouth. | ||
| Yeah, I think there is an animated segment of the elite opinion-making class, which is incredibly Racist. | ||
| I didn't say that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I did. | |
| Yeah, you said it. | ||
| Not me. | ||
| Although maybe I secretly believe it, but I won't admit it here. | ||
| Which is just beyond exercise over these past four years, I think has been radicalized. | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| I think social media is a huge factor in that because you constantly have to be performing in terms of how committed you are to various ideals and the principle of journalism becomes subordinate to that. | ||
| Not that journalism is ever some kind of pure principle that could be aspired to by everybody equally under all circumstances. | ||
| But if you read that New York Magazine piece, it was clear that what was animating most of the people involved, at least who were quoted, in the enterprise of, you know, furnishing the New York Times, they weren't motivated by principally journalism. | ||
| It was a straightforwardly political objective, which is that We need to... I don't know exactly. | ||
| Overthrow the white, cis, heteronormative patriarchy? | ||
| Yeah, we need to defeat Trump. | ||
| We need to... Totally change. | ||
| ...upend these systems of oppression. | ||
| And, look, journalists always have personal points of view. | ||
| I mean, you can't be 100% neutral ever, and even aspiring to be is almost a fallacy. | ||
| But it used to be, at least from my vantage point, that journalists could, like, weigh different competing considerations in the interest of at least projecting impartiality and rationality. | ||
| Now they don't even care to pretend to do that. | ||
| They're on an ideologically zealous mission, and they're proud of it, and they try to ostracize anybody who expresses apprehension about the need to see that as the driving impetus for what you're doing. | ||
| They're growing. | ||
| That was part of the reason why I went on my nationwide trip to cover the aftermath of the riots, because even if they weren't lying, there was I don't know how many of them actively lie. | ||
| That probably does happen. | ||
| Actually, it certainly does happen. | ||
| They do a lot. | ||
| But the bigger problem in terms of why I was motivated to do that was because they were omitting. | ||
| It was a lie by omission. | ||
| These were the biggest, most pervasive, most widespread, most damaging riots since at least the 1960s. | ||
| Let's set this up real quick. | ||
| For those that aren't familiar, Uh, Michael, you went on this trip around the country to all these different big cities, small towns to actually learn about what the riots had done, why, you know, why they were happening, how people felt about them. | ||
| You took photos from all these different places. | ||
| Yeah, I took photos, videos. | ||
| It was very simple, straightforward stuff, which if I was A full time staffer at a major journalism journalism institution, some of which are very well resourced, like the New York Times has a record number of subscriptions. | ||
| They're in great financial shape. | ||
| CNN, all these other outlets, they're, you know, riding the Trump bubble for all it's worth, which is why I think that they're like probably are secretly depressed that it could, you know, that that that the gravy train might be running out relatively soon. | ||
| But what I had, what I did, There's zero reason why it couldn't have been done on a much wider scale with people who have full crews, which have, you know, full resources behind them. | ||
| All I did was get in my dumpy car, drive around, you know, go to Chicago, go to Minneapolis, where I spent the bulk of the time, Seattle, Portland. | ||
| But you went to these really small towns. | ||
| And smaller places, you know, like Fort Wayne, Indiana. | ||
| People had no idea that there were even riots there. | ||
| I didn't know. | ||
| I'm a pretty avid consumer of news, for better or worse, sometimes worse. | ||
| But I would have thought I would have heard that there were the biggest riots in memory in Fort Wayne, Indiana, if it had just been kind of, I don't know, normally reported. | ||
| And it wasn't. | ||
| You had to dig deeply underneath the narrative to figure out that that had happened. | ||
| I only knew it happened because I happened to be passing through Fort Wayne, Indiana. | ||
| I looked it up and I went and saw for myself and spoke to people. | ||
| And there were just so many other examples of that. | ||
| And It was bewildering as somebody who had this journalistic motivation. | ||
| Not that it's a virtue necessarily to have a journalistic motivation, but that tends to be what drives me to do stuff. | ||
| Like go to Georgia for the election, go to these random places after riots. | ||
| Just so I can get a relatively robust understanding of what's happening, then convey it as fairly as possible, while also at times, you know, co-mingling my personal views. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with that, necessarily. | ||
| But I was talking to people at these places, particularly in Minneapolis. | ||
| This is like a month or so after the peak of the riots, and it was like all anybody wanted to talk about. | ||
| You walk down certain blocks, I need some of the some of the photos. | ||
| It was like rubble. | ||
| It was as though it was, you know, Serbia in the late 90s or something. | ||
| The boarded up windows, the begging on the windows, you know, on the buildings. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know, minority businesses that had to be shuttered, never to return. | ||
| And it was just like, OK, so there's so much material here that we had a media which was interested in conveying the story. | ||
| It would have been trivially easy to do. | ||
| You could have found the bodega owner, who is an Iranian, whose store that I went to that was totally boarded up, wrecked, entire inventory stolen. | ||
| You could have tracked down that guy, done a 60-minute style interview where he reflects on what this means about, like, what the meaning of this is for the American dream or something. | ||
| However gauzy you want to make it, you could have done it. | ||
| And it wasn't done because The media was so ensconced in a certain ideological perspective where | ||
| Doing this, they viewed we would either be in opposition to the tenets of the protest movement and or help Trump. | ||
| And both of those were lines that no moral person could have ever crossed in their view. | ||
| I don't even think that the latter rationale made sense. | ||
| I don't think it necessarily did help Trump. | ||
| Look at the results in Minnesota. | ||
| One thing that I was always fighting about with my right wing followers, who I appreciate to some extent because, you know, I like to have a variety of perspectives in terms of people giving me feedback. | ||
| One thing that I always got into fights with them about was they were saying, oh, the riots mean that Trump is going to win whatever states the riots take place. | ||
| And I was just like, no, that's not the sense I'm getting when I'm talking to people actually experienced the riots. | ||
| I don't think that they viewed Trump as. | ||
| A remedy to the riots. | ||
| I mean, Trump lost Minnesota by a much greater margin than he did in 2016. | ||
| You would think it would have been the opposite if the prophecies of a Trump resurgence in those areas came to fruition, which it didn't. | ||
| I think maybe if Trump were a little bit more politically adroit, that was possible. | ||
| But it just didn't happen. | ||
| People who fled probably voted for Trump. | ||
| I get messages from tons of people who say they used to live in Minnesota and they had to leave because the riots were so bad. | ||
| So they left the state entirely? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Well, why not move to a different part of Minnesota? | ||
| I've probably got five emails where they were like, hey, just want to let you know, I lived on the outskirts of Minneapolis. | ||
| We left, we went to my family's place, things like that. | ||
| I mean, I've gotten some of those emails too, but like five is not that much. | ||
| I mean, the point is that most people can't leave. | ||
| They don't have the resources that they can just up and leave whenever. | ||
| So you should see something. | ||
| So you should see something if what was being argued to me constantly online about Trump's benefiting from these riots came to pass, which it didn't. | ||
| Now, I mean, there is again, we talk about this regional variability. | ||
| There is some a little bit of a mixed bag there, because if you look at Kenosha, Kenosha County, Wisconsin, that did trend slightly Republican this year, but it didn't in Minnesota. | ||
| So it's hard to make a firm. | ||
| All inclusive extrapolation there as to what happened. | ||
| But just going back to the riots. | ||
| Hey, look, I almost feel that's already gotten completely memory hold. | ||
| I mean, this was a historic event. | ||
| It was a nationwide convulsion. | ||
| It clearly had some impact on the election results. | ||
| It's hard to say with certitude in what direction, but all anybody could talk about was that there were the response times for 9-1-1 had gone down in Minneapolis. | ||
| I was talking to Somalis who had to fend off white rioters coming up to their apartment building and threatening to burn it down while there were children inside. | ||
| And so, you know, if you if you go through something like that, clearly it has to have some influence on your political perspective. | ||
| I don't mean I don't think that it necessarily means you're going to vote for Trump, but clearly that has to have some indelible impact. | ||
| And it just hasn't been explored to anywhere near the extent that you would expect if the media was just motivated by sheer Information gathering. | ||
| If there was a public service that they were guided by. | ||
| I was actually talking to Tim earlier about, I think journalism kind of has at least two facets. | ||
| And one is investigation and one is reporting. | ||
| And these modern media giants have just taken on the reporting facet. | ||
| They barely investigate anything. | ||
| It's analysis and opinion. | ||
| Well, that's more the divide. | ||
| The investigation is missing. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| You get people like James O'Keefe and I think Scanner, you know, they're focused on investigation. | ||
| But CNN is just, they just report what they've heard. | ||
| I don't even know. | ||
| Analysis. | ||
| It's analysis. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, I don't even think that analysis and reporting are incompatible. | ||
| Like I do a lot of reporting and then I analyze it. | ||
| Yeah. But I try to be honest. | ||
| I try to be transparent. | ||
| I not try to just be totally in hock to some kind of | ||
| partisan agenda, whether it's promoting a | ||
| BLM Antifa protest or whatever or promoting Trump. | ||
| Like, I mean, I want to actually to the best of my ability and still | ||
| confidence that what I'm saying is truthful. | ||
| And I think that that's just not something that so many people in the media are interested in. | ||
| If foundationally what they're guided by is due to their immersion in these social milieus, Where if they stray from the consensus as to the virtue of something like the protest movement or something like the world historic danger of fascist authoritarian blah blah blah Trump, then... | ||
| They can incur serious professional or social consequences. | ||
| And that is such a corrupting dynamic. | ||
| And I think that's why we need some kind of new media culture to sprout out of the ruins of what we've gone through the past four years. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| I think there are people who own who they they want confirmation bias. | ||
| I think there are people who are totally aware of like let's say I have someone on the show and we get a leftist. | ||
| We'll get a certain percentage of people who are angry. | ||
| And I think many of these people... Angry that you even bothered to have them on the show? | ||
| Yeah, like, how dare you bring this, you know, this leftist guy? | ||
| Is anybody angry about me so far? | ||
| Can we check that? | ||
| Oh, I mean, probably. | ||
| Screw you. | ||
| That's the spirit. | ||
| But anyway, the point is, I think some of these people know the issue isn't that we disagree with this person necessarily. | ||
| It's that their ability to speak will influence people. | ||
| And by giving them airtime in any capacity, you are... Platforming them. | ||
| We don't de-platform. | ||
| And so we've gotten that argument like we've platformed people before and I'm like dude I plow platform people | ||
| It's like the stupidest thing ever Like to argue like I shouldn't have a conversation with | ||
| somebody because I would like to have conversations to somebody even if that wasn't cameras | ||
| On us, you know, like the conversation we're having now would be great. Even if we weren't filming it, but I do my | ||
| best to Ignore any kind of pressure from somebody who's gonna get | ||
| mad at me because I might tell them the truth So what ends up happening is, certainly I have my bias on my YouTube channel. | ||
| I clearly don't like Democrats. | ||
| And people will watch that and say, Tim's lying on purpose to throw red meat to a follower. | ||
| It's like, no, no, no, you don't understand. | ||
| I just make videos where I talk about what I feel is important, and then people come to me, I'm like, I'm standing on a soapbox and I'm yelling, and they're walking up around me to hear what I'm saying and I have my biases. | ||
| The difference with these news organizations is the editor says, don't write that, you're gonna offend our audience. | ||
| And then they choose to avoid certain stories because they're worried about losing percentages. | ||
| You have an active business decision to do this. | ||
| Do you take any active steps to kind of, and I mentioned this at the very beginning, but sort of like to insulate yourself from the temptation of cognitive capture where the audience, even if it's subliminal, even if you're not actively conscious of it, Does have an influence on you in terms of what? | ||
| Analysis you put forward or what you choose to do in terms of topics | ||
| I mean, there's a whole because I don't I find myself wondering if I'm captive to that | ||
| I don't think it's I don't think it's possible to necessarily | ||
| Like I don't think it's possible right so So an explanation would be... It's not possible to be fully immune to that, but I think if you're cognizant of its potential to hamper your ability to be impartial or objective, not that anybody has to be totally objective on anything, but you should at least be aware that there are these pressures coming onto you and... Well, so... You know, counteract them if at all possible. | ||
| So, uh, I think it's about mental fortitude. | ||
| I think it's about your assuredness and your confidence in yourself. | ||
| My political opinions, um, have changed very little, or I should say they change very little over the years, right? | ||
| I think the one position I've changed on heavily is guns. | ||
| In January, I straight-up said to the people when we were at our house in New Jersey, I was like, I don't want any guns in my house, period. | ||
| No, you can't bring a gun in my house. | ||
| I don't want guns. | ||
| And then the riots happened. | ||
| And then I was like, well, I'm gonna go buy some guns now. | ||
| And then I did. | ||
| And now I don't want anyone taking them from me. | ||
| So I'm looking at these policies and my position on guns have has dramatically changed. | ||
| Because they want to defund the police. | ||
| Then the riots are made it to they were they were very, very close to our suburbs in the South in the South Philly area or in South Jersey area, Philly suburbs. | ||
| And so I'm like, okay, I better have the ability to defend myself. | ||
| Not only that, but death threats and someone tried breaking into my house, my opinion changed. | ||
| But in terms of, like, my positions that I've always held, I've never been the strongest, like, political zealot, but all still fairly independent, left-leaning positions, progressive taxes, pro-choice, all that stuff. | ||
| Social justice in certain capacities and pretty much stays where it is. | ||
| I give my opinions on what I think, and then probably based on what I learn, there will be some changes. | ||
| But core principles tend to be very, you know, obstinate, as it were. | ||
| But there are a lot of people on social media who don't have that, who just read the comments and then go for it because they're like, ooh, now I'm getting attention. | ||
| For the most part, what I see is... I'll use David Pakman as an example. | ||
| Do you know David Pakman? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He did a video where he said, here are things that I can't talk about. | ||
| And I tremendously respect him for doing this video. | ||
| He said, whenever I talk about these things, I get attacked for bringing it up. | ||
| And then he went through all of the things where his audience was like, how dare you bring this up? | ||
| And like, how dare you talk about these things? | ||
| And he just said it all. | ||
| And I'm like, there it is, man. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| News organizations, I think this is the difference. | ||
| What people need to realize about, say, YouTube, is that, like, when I make a video, I'm like, here's what I think. | ||
| I'm one guy. | ||
| I'm choosing to talk about how I feel. | ||
| And I've always done that. | ||
| And then over time, I get, like, more confident in how I talk and present myself. | ||
| Because, like, my earlier videos, I'm, like, really quiet and, like, low energy. | ||
| And I just slowly got better and more comfortable at just talking. | ||
| But my ideas are based upon the news that I'm reading as it develops. | ||
| When I worked for Fusion, which was ABC News Univision, they straight up said, like, lie to the audience. | ||
| They didn't say verbatim, they said, side with the audience. | ||
| You know, and I asked, if there's news stories that would make our audience upset, we wouldn't report it? | ||
| And they said, yeah, I think that's fair. | ||
| So when you have an editorial board or a president or a, you know, financial department or whatever, and they're going to the reporter and saying, ooh, yeah, that one, don't, don't report that because we're going to lose our audience. | ||
| Then you're looking at people actively deciding to create a partisan space to make money. | ||
| Versus YouTube, which is a bunch of random people who have thoughts and opinions who post them on the internet. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Not that they're... Yeah, but you know, the danger in the YouTube freewheeling culture is that so often I see People who are untethered to any kind of standard of factual confirmation or veracity, and they just kind of riff. | ||
| And I could riff if I really wanted to, and sometimes I do. | ||
| But, you know, okay, so I worked for the Young Turks for like a year and a half, and there are people affiliated with the Young Turks, so you could go and look at what they said like a year prior in terms of making a prediction on something. | ||
| And it just doesn't come to pass, and then they just pay no price for it. | ||
| I mean, they just keep plugging along. | ||
| I feel that would diminish my credibility if I did that. | ||
| So when I would talk about the election this year, I would always try to be pretty qualified. | ||
| I always thought that Biden stood a strong chance of winning, more so than Trump, and I said that publicly many times. | ||
| But I was never going to say that Biden is going to win or Trump can't win because I don't have a crystal ball. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| If I said something like that and it turned out to be false, then that should detract from my credibility. | ||
| I don't necessarily agree. | ||
| I don't necessarily agree. | ||
| And it's probably because I'm biased in favor of myself. | ||
| So you don't think that if you say that something has no chance of happening and then it happens, that should detract from your credibility? | ||
| I agree with you. | ||
| I'm not saying you specifically. | ||
| I'm saying anybody with a platform. | ||
| Well, I'll tell you, Michael, I do have a crystal ball. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, wow. | |
| He literally does. | ||
| I figured something out while you were talking. | ||
| That is the most stunning plot twist of the evening. | ||
| Okay, so if the Young Turks are reading an article and they're going over some news story where it's like, you know, Donald Trump backflipped off the White House and it was perfect, stunning, everyone and brave. | ||
| And then they're like, I think, you know, here's what's going to happen next. | ||
| I have no problem with that. | ||
| If like if they're making predictions based on the news they're reading right then some people are like I want to | ||
| hear what you think maybe you're going to be wrong. Sure. | ||
| You know, but if you're if you're reading news and then speculating, it's just people giving their thoughts and | ||
| opinions. | ||
| Well, I mean, don't go to them. | ||
| Like, don't go to the pollsters and think they're going to be right every time if they're wrong all the time. | ||
| You know, you know that that that most like I think there's you can do analysis where you have forward looking, you | ||
| know, projections about what they are made not happen. | ||
| But then it veers into this like, you know, tarot card. | ||
| I'm not I'm not saying I have this unique insight into the nature of the universe where I can tell you that, you know, | ||
| Joe Biden couldn't possibly win the presidency. | ||
| Like how the hell? | ||
| What is that based upon? | ||
| That does describe the Young Turks. | ||
| I'm just saying like that. | ||
| So there are people who try and take clips from me. | ||
| And I'm not even singling out the Young Turks. | ||
| I'm just most familiar with them because I happen to work at. | ||
| This is what this is what the grifters do. | ||
| So they put up a video where it's me saying I think Trump is going to | ||
| win in a landslide and various various clips like that. | ||
| Going back to like October of last year when Moody's Analytics said | ||
| Trump was going to win because the economy was great. | ||
| They then take that from a context at a time when the economy was great, Trump was doing well, put it up today saying, look how stupid and wrong he was. | ||
| And then people say, wow, what a moron. | ||
| But if they actually watched my videos, they would've seen in the past month or two months, I was saying, polls are saying Joe Biden's gonna win, and I don't know if I should trust the polls because they were wrong to a tiny degree in, you know, 2016. | ||
| They're not that wrong. | ||
| People overestimate how wrong they were. | ||
| The national polls weren't that wrong. | ||
| There was a lot of state-based error, which was more consequential for the Electoral College, obviously. | ||
| And so it was like a two-point error among, like, non-college-educated whites. | ||
| And my position was, I don't know what's gonna happen, but I think the polls are gonna be wrong. | ||
| I don't think you can count Trump out. | ||
| And so that was my official position based on the information presented in the context of the election as it stands right now. | ||
| They go back and pull clips from when we had mass rioting and, you know, Trump saying, law and order, and me saying, I think people are going to recoil against this because I'm getting phone calls. | ||
| And they're saying, you know, I'm voting for Trump. | ||
| I know a ton of people in Chicago, diehard, lifelong liberal, Democrat, total Republicans now. | ||
| But see, that's where I would have strove to be aware of my confirmation bias, because I could have I mean, I could easily come to a similar conclusion based on the feedback I was getting when I was traveling around the country. | ||
| But I wouldn't have known that that was not statistically representative necessarily of voting outcomes. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, you know, I just feel that if somebody pulled, regardless of what the circumstances were, because there are riots, regardless it was pre-COVID, if somebody could Find a clip of me saying that I know Trump is going to win and then he doesn't win, then I think that probably wouldn't detract from my credibility and should. | ||
| And, you know, maybe for sure. | ||
| Certain people are of a different mindset. | ||
| I feel like I'm a little bit more journalistic by nature than than others. | ||
| Again, I'm not saying you or anybody in particular, but that that's an issue that I have when I look on YouTube and people can just BS constantly, and then they pay no reputational consequences if their BSing has just proved 100% devastatingly wrong, because they have the audience where they could just keep going indefinitely. | ||
| Because people want the comforting lies. | ||
| They don't want the truth. | ||
| I think you're definitely more of an investigator, an investigative journalist, than most of the journalists in modern culture. | ||
| And a lot of times, analysis journalism Well, the fact that you drove across the country and didn't know what you were going to find and were willing to accept the results, like CNN doesn't want them to investigate, doesn't want their reporters, because if they find things that defy the narrative and we'll lose the money. | ||
| I mean, I have done what you might call investigative reporting, but it's not like my singular focus where I'm not like getting national security documents leaked to me or something, right? | ||
| I just try to be as consistent and logical as I possibly can, not to toot my own horn. | ||
| I don't think I have a horn to toot necessarily, but I try to apply that analytically So that I'm filtering my reportage in a way that is best reflective of the truth. | ||
| It doesn't even actually have to entail investigative reporting. | ||
| I mean, if you want to call just driving around the country and talking to people and looking at the fallout places and doing interviews and stuff investigative, I guess it maybe is in a way. | ||
| But really, it's it's it's pretty straightforward. | ||
| And so, you know, when I I think there's a lot of problems with legacy media. | ||
| I mean, that New York Times that New York Mag article on New York Times was so it was so embarrassing a woke. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And by the way, which campus Barry Weiss got totally destroyed by her colleagues. | ||
| For making the exact same observations as were in that New York New York magazine article. | ||
| She was proven exactly right. | ||
| Whether or not you agree with everything Barry White says I don't. | ||
| But clearly her analysis of the institutional dynamics of the New York Times were on target. | ||
| But again the people who attacked her are never going to pay any reputational price. | ||
| I mean a constant recurring problem in the media. | ||
| And this I think applies to both legacy media and the alt media YouTube media whatever. | ||
| It's not about predictions. | ||
| price that needs to be paid when people get stuff so flamboyantly | ||
| you'll get hilariously wrong. | ||
| I mean, I was fighting with leftists in March who were saying | ||
| there is no chance that Biden could win. | ||
| I'm like, what? | ||
| Right. How do you know that? | ||
| How are you so certain of that? | ||
| It's not about predictions about facts, in my opinion. | ||
| It's it's it's about analytical extrapolations that have no | ||
| bearing on reality. | ||
| The way it doesn't matter because it lets you the engagement that you want. | ||
| Then you could parlay that into a bigger audience. | ||
| The bigger issue I have the issue I have that I think is more pressing is when you have New York Times writers who constantly put out bunk garbage and they have no reputational penance or whatever. | ||
| And they get ad revenue. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Russia. | |
| I mean they they were the absolute. | ||
| The New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize. | ||
| Did they win more than one? | ||
| For their Russia reporting. | ||
| It was all fake! | ||
| In 2017. | ||
| And I wouldn't say it was fake in that, like, what they were reporting on was just fabricated. | ||
| But the premise, the premise upon which the reporting was based was entirely erroneous. | ||
| Why would you have a... Shouldn't you... So what I recommended when those Pulitzer Prizes came out was either throw them in the dumpster, give them back, or abolish the Pulitzer Prize writ large because it's meaningless now. | ||
| The way I describe it is people were like, well, the reporting was sound. | ||
| And I'm like, listen, if I hire like a land, like a groundskeeper or whatever from my house, like someone that, you know, lawn care guys, and they come over and I say, I need you to mow my lawn and say, you got it. | ||
| And then an hour later, I come outside and my neighbor's lawn is mowed perfectly. | ||
| And they like, they did the wrong lawn. | ||
| I'm not, you want to give them an award for that? | ||
| It's like, great. | ||
| They did the work. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| But that's not what they were supposed to be doing. | ||
| That's not the work that needed to be done. | ||
| If what you're reporting on isn't literally fabricated, but nonetheless it's so directionally off course that what you're doing in effect is misleading the reader, then you're doing it wrong. | ||
| Look at it this way. | ||
| It's like a race, a marathon starts, and one guy runs 26 miles the other direction. | ||
| And they're like, well, let's give him an award anyway. | ||
| He did run. | ||
| And it's even worse because they're getting paid. | ||
| They'll make an article that's erroneous and they'll get massive ad revenue because it's a shock article. | ||
| And then they'll print a retraction and get ad revenue for the retraction. | ||
| So there's something severely wrong with that function. | ||
| Maybe that you would sue, that they would actually, it would put them out of business. | ||
| That's the problem is they'd be afraid to even report on anything because if they get it wrong, they lose. | ||
| No, the advertiser is looking for eyeballs. | ||
| So these news organizations are, like, not super worried. | ||
| That's fascist. | ||
| I mean, I think that's when corporations start to implement, like, institute our government. | ||
| When you can go in and write political articles that are not bound in fact. | ||
| When you can write that somewhere there may be a video of Donald Trump on an elevator. | ||
| What he's doing, we don't know. | ||
| Who he's with, we're not sure. | ||
| Does the video exist? | ||
| We don't know either, but some say it might. | ||
| The Huffington Post wrote that article. | ||
| And they got clicks. | ||
| They made money off that. | ||
| Could you imagine, you wake up one day and your editor's like, I need a story about Donald Trump. | ||
| And you're like, nothing happened. | ||
| Just make it up. | ||
| Donald Trump may have been in an elevator, I guess. | ||
| No one knows if he was or why. | ||
| When you've been on the receiving end of journalists just straight up making stuff up about you on the internet. | ||
| Oh, yes. | ||
| You have no recourse. | ||
| I don't know if you've experienced this or not. | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| But I haven't. | ||
| Like, I'm not even that big of a target necessarily. | ||
| I mean, I guess some people are vaguely aware of me. | ||
| If they could do that to me, then who's to say who they could do it to? | ||
| And I think, obviously, social media so exacerbates these dynamics, it's absurd. | ||
| You can't even compare it to a past era. | ||
| You know, but one reason for pessimism about this election, and I didn't vote for Trump. | ||
| I didn't vote for Biden. | ||
| I just left my ballot blank and voted for marijuana cessation in New Jersey, which did pass, thankfully. | ||
| As somebody who had to sneak into the woods as a teenager to indulge in that, I kind of felt like it was my cosmic obligation to vote in favor of legalizing finally in New Jersey. | ||
| But anyway, one reason to be pessimistic about the election outcome is, and this isn't an argument for Trump per se, but it is a recognition that all the tactics that were used to undermine Trump are now going to be viewed as vindicated. | ||
| Yeah. And they're going to be more kind of enshrined in the fabric of American | ||
| political and cultural life such that. | ||
| You know, we have this precedent now that somebody like Trump is not going to be | ||
| allowed to happen again because, you know, we have the security state | ||
| machinations. | ||
| You could have the total discarding by the media of the principles that they had previously worked on the basis of before. | ||
| But then when you have somebody who's viewed as such this such a mortal existential threat that goes out the window, you have just this constant resistance where the election in 2016 | ||
| was. | ||
| They did try to delegitimize it by automatically launching the quote | ||
| resistance with the hashtag and seeing that through until it culminated in | ||
| Trump's impeachment. | ||
| So all those tactics, I think, were done for the singular purpose, primarily undermining, hobbling and ultimately defeating Trump. | ||
| And if that's proven to have worked, that's really ominous sign for the nature of American democracy. | ||
| I'm not saying that Trump has been a perfect emblem of democracy and all that he's done. | ||
| But, you know, I think that the media is so blinkered in their inability to recognize that the oppositional tactics employed to degrade Trump have really damning long term implications in their own right. | ||
| Well, that's an excellent place to leave things off and jump over to Super Chats. | ||
| And we'll take some user comments. | ||
| Hey, do I get a cut of those Super Chats? | ||
| None. | ||
|
unidentified
|
None at all. | |
| Make sure you smash the like button and subscribe to the show Monday through Friday live at 8 p.m. | ||
| But let's read some of these Super Chats. | ||
| Let's see, DipDopDupity says, what is your opinion of Philip DeFranco? | ||
| Fairly neutral, he's alright. | ||
| Do you guys know Philip DeFranco? | ||
| I know Phil, I know him personally actually. | ||
| We were video bloggers in like 2006, 7, 8 when he was SexyPhil, S-X-E-Phil was his first name. | ||
| Straight edge. | ||
| Yeah, all black and white and he was chilling in his room talking and he was so cool, like such a nice guy. | ||
| And we went to like YouTube Live in 2007, hung out a little bit, talked about Zelda. | ||
| So what do you think about him now? | ||
| He's taken and forged an empire around his personality. | ||
| It's awesome. | ||
| I haven't talked to him in like a decade. | ||
| I know nothing about him except I've seen clips of him like doing videos where he's talking at the camera like this and it seems okay. | ||
| It's really interesting and I'm not trying to be disrespectful or anything. | ||
| His show is very large. | ||
| He's got millions of subscribers. | ||
| But it doesn't seem particularly culturally relevant in the political landscape. | ||
|
unidentified
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And it's not interesting. | |
| It's kind of like Stephen Colbert. | ||
| That's arguably a good thing for him, though. | ||
| I mean, news isn't supposed to be shock-rage-bait content. | ||
| He's doing a regular, you know, general news opinion show. | ||
| It's like the Colbert Report. | ||
| It's like a fake version of himself. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| He's not quite like the Colbert Report. | ||
| Not relevant enough for me to have an informed opinion about him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There you go. | |
| That's an issue. | ||
| Gotta fix it. | ||
| Alright, let's see. | ||
| I want to talk to him again. | ||
| Get him on the show or something. | ||
| That'd be cool. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That'd be great. | |
| I'd love to have him. | ||
| All right, let's see, where are we at? | ||
| YouTube's making me jump around with these ones. | ||
| The new GM says pick one. | ||
| Trump keeps the president after exposing mass fraud triggering a civil war or Biden takes president and we lose any chance at 230 reform for at least four years. | ||
| I don't want a civil war. | ||
| I don't either. | ||
| We have to wait four years before we can reform Section 230? | ||
| I'll wait. | ||
|
unidentified
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Geez. | |
| Seems pretty obvious. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think the whole civil war prognosticating was mostly just elites projecting their own neuroses onto the general populace, which doesn't want a civil war, because why would you? | ||
| It's mass misery and death. | ||
| I disagree, though. | ||
| War is always of the elites. | ||
| The regular people don't want to be involved. | ||
| They want to mind their own business and watch TV and raise their kids. | ||
| That's why I'm saying that this notion that a civil war was possible was a product of elite neuroses that then they kind of tried to transpose onto the ordinary public who were obviously not willing to fight a war over Joe Biden. | ||
| I don't think it's about Joe Biden. | ||
| I disagree. | ||
| I disagree. | ||
| Do you think there is an appetite to wage a civil war? | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| I don't know how widespread it is, but like... I don't think so. | ||
| I think that's a scintillating storyline to kind of present to kind of get clicks and algorithms and ratings and stuff, but I just don't see it. | ||
| Have you like looked into civil wars of like the past hundred years and like what they look like? | ||
| Uh, I mean, sure. | ||
| Whenever I talk to people about this, they take this presumption that a civil war is like two competing factions. | ||
| You had Bill Maher where it's, uh, I should clarify that. | ||
| Two competing factions along a dividing line. | ||
| Bill Maher does his show, he's like, we couldn't even have a civil war because the Mason Dixon line would go through the middle of your living room, you know, with Nana or whatever. | ||
| Because the narrative is always about the American civil war and not how civil wars came about in other places, notably like the Spanish civil war. | ||
| Yeah, so it could be like an armed insurgency or something, not like a full-fledged civil war where there's two definable sides. | ||
| But there was no, there were no two definable sides in Syria. | ||
| There was like, there was 16 or so different factions. | ||
| No, that's right. | ||
| And the shelling got out of control. | ||
| And then the city was, was because nobody wants to back down. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I never believed, I never thought there was evidence to believe that the conditions in the contemporary United States were remotely analogous to Syria. | ||
| That's why the Civil War prophecy struck me as incredibly overblown. | ||
| I mean, where are they? | ||
| It's a week after the election. | ||
| Trump says that it's been stolen, that it was a fraudulent or whatever. | ||
| I was in Atlanta. | ||
| I mean, there were like a couple dozen Trump supporters just standing on a road waving signs and chanting. | ||
| Okay, that's something, but that's like so far removed from what a civil war would entail. | ||
| That's an optimism bias. | ||
| The assumption that... I think it's a... I mean... So what happens... But couldn't you say it's a pessimism bias to suggest that civil war is possibly imminent? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So you need to like find a happy medium. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| So here's what I'm thinking. | ||
| First of all, there's fourth and fifth generational warfare. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So the assumption that a civil war is going to be people putting on armbands and waving flags and running through the streets is like you're, you're, you're, you know, basing modern reality off of your assumption of what things are like a long time ago or what we've witnessed instead of taking a look at what's currently happening and wondering if we're going to see a different generation and how war is fought. | ||
| We're in the first civil cyber war. | ||
| We're in the midst of it. | ||
|
unidentified
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We didn't even realize. | |
| That's crazy. | ||
| It's a theater of war, man. | ||
| We're absolutely in a propaganda war. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| We've got elite censorship, the shutting down of certain ideas. | ||
| It's a theater of war, man. | ||
| Cyber. | ||
| So you have to ask yourself, what's the goal of a war? | ||
| And sometimes there's aggression, rage, anger, hatred, whatever, but typically it's about | ||
| controlling resources, gaining ground. | ||
| So Syria, for instance, our involvement there had a lot to do, depending on who you ask, | ||
| with the Qatar-Turkey pipeline. | ||
| We wanted to offset the natural gas monopoly that was going into Europe through Ukraine and all that stuff. | ||
| It's all weird and tied together. | ||
| But if I don't have to send in the troops, and I can manipulate a country into giving me what I want, then you would do that. | ||
| And so we're entering a new generation of warfare where it's all about cyber attacks, manipulation, infiltration, exfiltration. | ||
| Knowing things can get you anything. | ||
| Compromising individuals, blackmailing individuals, or generally just funding certain types of media to create ideas is more effective. | ||
| So perhaps when people hear civil war they think hot civil war. | ||
| Like, you know, Proud Boys and Antifa are marching through the streets and they have a leader on a horseback or something. | ||
| Doesn't look like that. | ||
| That's an archaic understanding of what civil war would look like. | ||
| But I think when you have Hillary Clinton telling Joe Biden not to concede under any circumstances, and they run war games where they suggest several states should secede from the Union should they lose, we're like dangerously close to the elites saying, we want or else. | ||
| And it always is the regular people saying, we don't want to be involved. | ||
| So the election right now, I view it as some kind of cold civil war in a sense. | ||
| Sorry to interrupt, but I think there's something to what you're saying in the sense of that the kind of cultural consensus which has undergirded America's sense of itself Has been eroded somewhat since 2016 in that nobody ever fathomed that somebody like Trump could ever be in the White House. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's just so contradictory to what we had all been trained to believe was possible. | ||
| And so, you know, the horizons of what's additionally possible to me have expanded, whether they've expanded to the point where there's some kind of Viability to the concept of a civil war even if you're saying it's like fifth generation warfare or something that's different from these more traditional conceptions we have that is | ||
| Very much a stretch, but I think there is this erosion of, like, American hegemonic prowess that, you know, due to the ascendance of China, due to the other factors, that is going to happen over time and is going to manifest as kind of degradations of the social order. | ||
| I just don't think it's going to manifest, at least in the short to medium term, as anything that could even be conceivably called a civil war. | ||
| So we had, it's all an issue of where the escalation takes us. | ||
| We had a guy stalk some Trump supporters in Portland and put two bolts in his chest. | ||
| A lot of people were like, we crossed a line when that happened. | ||
| Will it keep escalating? | ||
| I guess the issue for me is that since 2017, when we started seeing the rise of the street violence, The expectation has been every time we see it, it gets worse. | ||
| And then it ultimately just keeps getting worse. | ||
| Even now, three years later, it ends with this guy in Seattle walking up, yelling at the guy. | ||
| He turns around, he puts two bullets in his chest. | ||
| Will that lend itself to, you know, like how we would envision a hot civil war between factions? | ||
| I'm not entirely sure. | ||
| But I will say, When Trump is like talking about staying in the White House beyond, you know, maybe we're in this, this lull period where the media saying everything's okay, Joe Biden is president, but you got 71 million people who voted for Trump and the people they're following are all saying this election was not legitimate. | ||
| I can't imagine these people are just gonna... When you come from 2016, which was unprecedented, like, even you're mentioning it, they're saying they're yelling at the electors to, like, not do this. | ||
| That didn't happen in 2012 or 2008. | ||
| Sure, we had a literal civil war back in the 1800s. | ||
| It was very, very different times back then. | ||
| We've grown to become this very, like, solid foundation of a nation with hard expectations and, you know, our own optimism bias about how everything is gonna function properly. | ||
| Obama wins, they say congratulations. | ||
| Obama wins re-election, congratulations. | ||
| Hillary loses, and it was screaming psychosis for four years. | ||
| Russia and conspiracies, the media has gone insane, and I tell you this man, since the election, There's no shared reality anymore. | ||
| Like, I spend my time reading the news, and there's always, like, these two disparate realities. | ||
| Even CNN says it. | ||
| Like, everyone understands that there's, like, the Orange Man bad universe and the Trump not-that-bad universe, and you've got regular people, and there was an overlap. | ||
| We recognize that some things did happen, but we disagree on what they meant or what was going to happen. | ||
| Now I'm reading the news and it's like, you turn on one outlet and it's like, clearly this election was fraudulent and the deep state and all that stuff. | ||
| Then you turn on NBC and they're like, President-elect's office has announced this, that, and this. | ||
| Yeah, I think you're right that there is something that has gone completely haywire in terms of our collective epistemology. | ||
| Well, so what happens when you have 71 million people on one side and 74 on the other? | ||
| Obviously not all of them are radical, but you need only a small percentage to create the troubles. | ||
| You give them like something to rally around, like a music or art, something that they can create a shared vision of. | ||
| No, that's what that's what people need. | ||
| I just think you'd need an extra ingredient to make it seem plausible to me. | ||
| It could manifest as something like The Troubles, something like a prolonged army insurgency, something in the realm of civil war like activity. | ||
| Just because, you know, for despite COVID, despite all the craziness around national politics, Most people tend to live in relative tranquility, right? | ||
| Which you couldn't have said for Syria, at least in the areas where there was significant fighting, right? | ||
| Before the Civil War they did. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If you look at the Revolutionary War in the United States, the largest faction was Leave Me Alone, followed by the | ||
| next largest faction was Revolution, and then the smallest of the three was No Revolution. | ||
| But most people didn't want to be involved in any capacity. | ||
| They're just like, leave me alone. | ||
| It always is the elites who are fighting with each other. | ||
| So I'm not saying I think it's a guarantee. | ||
| I definitely think there are a lot of people who recognize the culture war, as it's been called, or the cultural civil war, it's been called for a long time. | ||
| I don't see how this is... I don't see how it... You know, maybe there's a path towards some kind of reconciliation. | ||
| You know, the left is calling for, now that Joe Biden won, truth and reconciliation commissions or something, whatever that means. | ||
| Right, like with South Africa or something. | ||
| Yeah, make them testify or whatever, and be scolded by a panel of some sort. | ||
| But, you've got people whose worldviews are entirely fra- like, in my opinion, fractured and nonsensical. | ||
| Like, the 1619 Project, Rewriting of History, and these weird ideas of cis-heteronormative patriarchy controlling everything. | ||
| These people live in a strange reality, and they're violent. | ||
| And so, if these keep getting bigger, and I don't see why they wouldn't, like, after Trump- after Trump leaves, assuming that's what happens, the media isn't gonna just stop writing about this stuff. | ||
| They're already writing stories saying it's time to go after Trumpism. | ||
| They're already saying it's time for truth and reconciliation. | ||
| I mean, what I do think is that because of the precedent that has now been put into place by the anti-Trump tactics being vindicated, It's very much possible that liberals who gain power are going to have a greater authoritarian retributive edge to what it is that they want to do. | ||
| Like if they feel now that their imperative is to extirpate Trumpism so that it's nothing like Trump ever has the possibility of ever happening again. | ||
| Then, you know, you could very much envision how that could take on very overbearing qualities even beyond what we've seen so far. | ||
| The complication there is I'm not sure that Biden himself is predisposed to go along with those kinds of I don't think he would. | ||
| vengeance endeavors. | ||
| Like, I don't know that you'd see him calling for a truth and | ||
| reconciliation commission. | ||
| I don't think he would. | ||
| For example, but like, but, but I think people who might be empowered just by | ||
| dint of Trump leaving elected office, they're going to probably be advocating | ||
| for that and whether like Biden has the personal wherewithal to resist those | ||
| calls is an open question. | ||
| Well, I got to read the super chat because we got to fact check this one. | ||
|
unidentified
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What? | |
| Okay, I'll check. | ||
| Sidious says I know you're not a believer in Trump playing 40 chess | ||
| But do you know who was on George Bush's legal team in 2000 John Roberts Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What okay, I I I perhaps true that is true. Yeah. Well, I mean they were they were involved in different | |
| Well, no, they were very young weren't they? | ||
| I think no I mean they were they were clerks | ||
| In the Supreme Court in the 90s and so they would have been like just out of their clerkships | ||
| I mean me Barry doesn't she like in her late 40s Um, yeah, so she would've been 28. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We're going to do a little bit of a test run. | |
| Right. | ||
| So. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So she would have been a clerk in the 90s. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| I mean, so. | ||
| And this was 2000. | ||
| So. | ||
| Is that. | ||
| That is true. | ||
| They were they were working on. | ||
| It is true. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Do you see the meme where it's. | ||
| You can go find a clip of Kavanaugh that was uncovered when he was up for his nomination of him, like giving CNN an update as to what was going on with the Florida Supreme Court case. | ||
| You see the meme where it's Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh and their eyes are glowing and they're looking at Kamala Harris and Joe Biden. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| No, but I can kind of connect the dots there. | ||
| So for those unfamiliar, Joe Biden was grilling Clarence Thomas about accusations in the 90s and Donald Harris did the same. | ||
| And then the meme is Clarence saying, I've waited 30 years for this day or something. | ||
| You know what, man? | ||
| Look, I think it's really annoying when you see these trust the plan memes. | ||
| I'm like, dude, I don't trust any of these plans. | ||
| If you trust the plan, then why did they end up in front of the total landscaping building? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know what I mean? | |
| That was really weird. | ||
| What's the plan? | ||
| It's just it's just like this whenever something bad happens. | ||
| It's always like there's 895 dimensional chess being played. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It keeps going up like as Trump's term goes up. | |
| You need to be on like psychedelic drugs to understand chess schemes. | ||
| Well basically what happens is they say like something bad happens and they're like oh no what's happening I thought you know Hillary was gonna get arrested they go trust the plan. | ||
| That's like have faith in God. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| That's exactly what it's like. | ||
| And that's like that informs a lot of the Q mentality. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like there's always a purpose behind everything. | ||
| And you know I even saw like I think that anti-Trump media makes a mountain out of a molehole with the Q to some extent. | ||
| But like it is true that when you go to Trump gatherings like I was at in Atlanta where they had to stop the steel rally. | ||
| I mean there are guys like just with Q Oh my gosh. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| stuff and like yes they're they're the trust the quintessential | ||
| Gosh. | ||
| trust the plan people I mean they think that like it was intentional | ||
| that Trump found himself behind in Georgia or something right right | ||
| right like Robert Robert Mueller and John F. Kennedy Jr. | ||
| are going to come in like I don't know flip the votes and they were | ||
| saying that that Trump triggered the special investigation on purpose | ||
| because Mueller was actually investigating the Clinton's like | ||
| never. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| What a plan. | ||
| I'm curious. | ||
| that we had got a plan is interesting uh... ted says some people in the | ||
| Oh. | ||
| donald dot win allegedly managed to get their hands on the dominion code it's | ||
| the top post on their page the numbers are really scary man i look at it | ||
| that's the software for uh... that the voting machines that were used as it's | ||
| it's the software that was used in like thirty something states | ||
| old was it that's true i mean you know i think i think it's a almost a inevitability of u.s. | ||
| politics that there are going to be theories that developed as to why a certain candidate loses. | ||
| I mean, we saw this obviously in on turbocharged in turbocharged in 2016 as to Russian interference. | ||
| I remember seeing like supposed statistical analyses from computer scientists that were showing that like you could correlate different counties and show it was it was like statistically impossible for Hillary to have lost by the margin she did. | ||
| You know, Wisconsin and Michigan or something. | ||
| And of course, it was total nonsense. | ||
| But even like going back to 2004, I remember there was this whole cottage industry that developed around Diebold voting machines in Ohio and how Bush conspired with the Republican Secretary of State to, you know, rig it. | ||
| And, you know, those theories were never really entertained seriously by John Kerry, who you think would probably Look into it if it costs in the presidency. | ||
| But I just think, you know, that is now going to be just continuous in terms of the assumed legitimacy of elections is no longer operative in the eyes of so many people. | ||
| And clearly that's now going to increase almost exponentially if Trump himself is rejecting the legitimacy of the election. | ||
| I mean, it was so it was almost humorous the night of the election at like three thirty when he first came out, where he was he simultaneously declared victory. | ||
| It also declared the entire thing a fraud. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So, I mean, that's a new one. | ||
| So, Royal Raptor says, Tim, for months you have told us the left would, quote, by any means necessary try and get Trump out. | ||
| Now when the big show hits and the scams, errors, and straight-up fraud just happens to all help Democrats, you call it human or clerical error. | ||
| I think that's an overstatement of what I said. | ||
| I've said there's numerous, uh, there's a, there's a ton of evidence of fraud. | ||
| There's numerous affidavits of people discovering fraud. | ||
| We literally opened this show by showing the media was, was that Washington Post was putting out some kind of weird, anonymously sourced story that was immediately debunked. | ||
| I wrote up Hammond's scorecard. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Well, I'm gonna keep bringing it up and I've also said we should investigate each and every one of these things | ||
| I don't I don't know like, you know, what? | ||
| It's really annoying is that it's almost like it's it's like some kind of weird counting heads phase | ||
| You must come out and bend the knee to what we say chill dude | ||
| Look, it's clear that there you've got people on the left who are lying | ||
| Accept the results. | ||
| Submit. | ||
| And you've got people on the right saying it was clearly fraud. | ||
| You must agree with everything. | ||
| No, I'll tell you what. | ||
| We investigate these things. | ||
| We're calm and collected about it. | ||
| We point out there's affidavits, then there's impropriety, and there's a legal argument being made, and we let the process happen. | ||
| And above all, aim for a voting system that we can trust. | ||
| Or that we don't need to trust because of functions. | ||
| If we don't have our, if we can't have faith in our votes, man, what do we have with the democracy? | ||
| That's why we need to investigate everything. | ||
| But I think your instinct, I mean, you know, I don't know if you've characterized everything as clerical errors in the way the Super Chess person said. | ||
| Oh, I certainly didn't. | ||
| But like, I think it is worth starting from the premise that a lot of stuff which may be intentional fraud could theoretically be a clerical error of some kind. | ||
| So keeping open that possibility is totally warranted. | ||
| And then you ascertain evidence to give you some kind of indication one way or another. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with that. | ||
| Because, you know, a lot of what is assumed to be conspiratorial, often involves people who just don't have the competence to carry out any kind of coordinated conspiracy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good point. | |
| I see it all the time. | ||
| IBN Yahud says, the implications of 71 million Americans being suspect of the results either way has dangerous implications. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Maybe state legislatures should audit to remove illegal ballots better than the strife of distrust and suspicion. | ||
| That's absolutely my position. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good point, yeah. | |
| If we can go through and say, look, we found some impropriety because there's always going to be some kind of error. | ||
| There's always going to be some malfeasance. | ||
| The question is, does it make a difference? | ||
| Find it, lay it all out, and make sure everyone is comfortable that we've done everything in our power to do so. | ||
| Now the left is saying, they'll never accept the results anyway, so it's pointless. | ||
| That's not an argument. | ||
| Because you gotta try everything. | ||
| You know, there was this psychological assessment question where they said, if it was true that you couldn't rehabilitate certain criminals, would you try? | ||
| Or something. | ||
| And the argument was, if you had a criminal that was presumed to be beyond, you know, rehabilitation, would you just give up on them? | ||
| My answer is no. | ||
| Like, we don't want to just give up on people. | ||
| And so, if you think that the best solution to this is to ignore the complaints of 71 million people, you would be incorrect. | ||
| Because that will certainly just guarantee we rapidly approach some kind of critical mass instead of slowly letting things play out, letting people calm down, showing them and finding it. | ||
| And maybe they're right. | ||
| Maybe they're not. | ||
| Just play it out. | ||
| The problem is that the Trump campaign kind of haphazard legal strategy here is, as we know, we acknowledged earlier on this discussion, it really is just throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks in the individual swing state. | ||
| So that, I think, causes people to doubt the good faith of a lot of what's being That's true, but it doesn't matter. | ||
| more targeted substantive allegations that were logically consistent then I | ||
| think you'd have an easier time convincing people to entertain it and | ||
| rebut it or not in kind of a rational way. I think they have had a... | ||
| I think they're trying to win. | ||
| I think they're... I mean, Trump did say ahead of time that, you know, hey, listen, they go to the Supreme Court and I want that. | ||
| And they pushed through Amy Coney Barrett at the 11th hour. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I wonder why that was. | ||
| And the Democrats even brought it up. | ||
| So I think it's certainly a possibility. | ||
| I think Amy Coney Barrett is a kind of harbinger of how I suspect this could possibly go. | ||
| Notice I'm not making definitive proclamation because I don't do that. | ||
| I think I'll be delegitimized rightly if I when I say it doesn't come to fruition. | ||
| But I have the sense that one of the reasons why Mitch McConnell and the Republican Senate was so desperate to get Amy Coney Barrett confirmed as quickly as possible, even though it was like a week or so before the election, was because Look, they were never supporting Trump on the basis of him being some kind of committed, principled conservative. | ||
| Trump is not that. | ||
| But they used him as a vehicle to achieve conservative ends. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| One of which is changing the composition of the Supreme Court. | ||
| So I think a lot of the more elite Republicans are eventually going to Be content with what Trump provided them such that it's not worth getting into this protracted battle over the presidency after kind of the emotions settle down and we're only a couple of days after it was called. | ||
| And so I can envision that happening. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I may be totally wrong but that's sort of my intuition. | ||
| Val Kudrin says, love your channel, keep up the good work. | ||
| Please do a segment sharing your thoughts on Dr. Shiva's analysis of the Michigan votes or talk to him on your show. | ||
| I will take a look into it. | ||
| Kevin Kennison, and I will always take an opportunity to read a super chat that talks about my music video, says, Will of the People has become one of my new favorite songs as a moderate pacifist. | ||
| I love the care you put into the song. | ||
| Thank you for making a song that really feels like it means something. | ||
| For those that aren't familiar, I have a music video and song original called Will of the People. | ||
| You'll definitely want to watch it because it's about politics and the cycle of revolution. | ||
| It's going to be on Spotify and iTunes soon. | ||
| There's a certification process, so it takes some time. | ||
| I don't have a music video or song, which I think is probably for the best. | ||
| Travis says, never done a super chat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You are worth more than $4.99. | |
| Insert facepalm here. | ||
| You sent $49. | ||
| I think this person, Tiffany, I think you meant to send $5, you sent $50. | ||
| guitar. Never done a super chat. You are worth more than $4.99. | ||
| Insert face palm here. You sent $49. I think this person, Tiffany, I think you sent | ||
| this meant to send $5. You sent $50. Oh, oh gosh. I'm sorry. DC says check out | ||
| Microsoft's election guard for a cryptographically backed voter integrity solution. | ||
| Problem is getting buy-in from each of the 50 states. | ||
| Overcomes the privacy concerns involved with a blockchain-based solution. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So, Gergsy says, your left is far right to the modern leftist. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I think, don't they call you far right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh man, I've been called every name in the park. | |
| I'm an alt-left grifter. | ||
| I'm a right-wing sycophant. | ||
| I'm a secret Trump voter. | ||
| There are just journalists who will just assert that they know I voted for Trump, like they are somehow I don't know, surveilling my apartment or something, and they just know that I voted for Trump when I just, I've said that, you know, I did not vote for Trump. | ||
| That you simultaneously hold both far-left and far-right positions? | ||
| Like, you go home and you... Yeah, one, you know, one thing I'm definitely accused of being is that I'm, like, a red-brownist. | ||
| Do you know that whole theory? | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| It's like, it's like an offshoot of the horseshoe theory, where, like, the extreme-left and the extreme-right are supposedly, you know, converging to... That's the Taurus. | ||
| Yeah, and, um... That's the shape. | ||
| You know, people can call me whatever they like. | ||
| Oh, some news- some news dropped on Handy, I guess. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Um... That's what I was trying to find. | |
| Yeah, but we'll- I can't find anything for the 9 o'clock. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| They're, like, laying out their case, I guess? | ||
| Is that what it was? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, okay. | |
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| We'll look into it later. | ||
| Uh, let's see. | ||
| The Insomniatic says, you say another factor is needed for a civil war. | ||
| What about a food- what about food shortages? | ||
| China may be facing massive shortages this year, and if defund the police goes forward, shipping could stop. | ||
| I'll actually, I'll say, hold on. | ||
| Joe Biden said dark winter is coming. | ||
| That the vaccine is not going to be enough. | ||
| It's not gonna be ready till spring. | ||
| And that lockdowns are on the table. | ||
| If we get another hard lockdown, and there's a shipping, you know, disruption, then people might snap again. | ||
| Yeah, I was thinking earlier, the U.S. | ||
| government's basically said there's five theaters of war, and that's land, sea, airspace, cyber war, and the human mind. | ||
| Psychological. | ||
| The heart, the human heart. | ||
| I would be surprised if there was another hard lockdown on a national scale. | ||
| I mean, I think you'll maybe see like targeted mitigation is what they call it. | ||
| Like I just saw in Utah. | ||
| You see what's going on in Europe? | ||
| They have legit lockdowns. | ||
| You gotta have your papers to go outside in France. | ||
| No joke. | ||
| Well, yeah, I mean, well, that was the case in Italy, you know, when they first locked down. | ||
| It's all the same. | ||
| It's all back. | ||
| England just contracted Palantir to do contact tracing software. | ||
| Is it really all right? | ||
| Well, yeah, I mean, actually, that's right. | ||
| I think they did. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And there's been riots in the UK. | ||
| We never had a shutdown. | ||
| I just don't think there's a there's the we've never had a lockdown. | ||
| We've only had shutdowns. | ||
| I just know we've had I just doubt there's going to be the political tolerance for the same kind of thing in the U.S. | ||
| But I could be wrong. | ||
| And, you know, I think it's not as though Biden can personally institute a nationwide lockdown. | ||
| Yeah, he could. | ||
| But it's constitutionally dubious. | ||
| No, it's it's sheriff. | ||
| So you've got. | ||
| I mean, Trump didn't himself. | ||
| I mean, when the when the lockdowns did occurred, did occur, like he had Trump had like a bunch of different positions on whether lockdowns are desirable. | ||
| He ended up bragging that he saved millions of lives by locking down the economy, which Trump actually, I'm pretty sure Trump Trump has also said on many, many occasions that they just shut up. | ||
| He said in one of the debates. | ||
| I would say they didn't lock it down. | ||
| Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like New Zealand got locked down. | ||
| You couldn't cross the border. | ||
| Our states were open, but they shut stuff down. | ||
| Whatever it was. | ||
| Our borders were closed. | ||
| Not interstate borders, were they? | ||
| Yeah, but that's just jurisdictional inter-country lines. | ||
| A lot of the claimed shutdown measures, even in terms of interstate travel, were never enforceable. | ||
| During the height of lockdown, I went from New Jersey to Delaware just because Delaware had this system set up where supposedly they were going to be, the police were going to be pulling you over if you had an out-of-state license plate. | ||
| That was the most extreme draconian measure that was taken anywhere in the country at the time. | ||
| And like, I had an out-of-state license plate. | ||
| I was there for like four or five days. | ||
| Nobody gave me a hard time. | ||
| It's just, it's just not enforceable. | ||
| What do you think about COVID in general? | ||
| In what regard? | ||
| How dangerous do you think it is? | ||
| Um, I mean, I don't perceive a huge danger to me personally, were I to contract it, but I am mindful that I have the possibility of spreading it to somebody who might have More vulnerabilities. | ||
| Pretty vague question. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, I'm not in favor of COVID. | ||
| Oh, OK. | ||
|
unidentified
|
OK. | |
| Well, there you go. | ||
| That's the important thing. | ||
| So I was going to do one more super chat and then we've got we've got quite a bit over. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But Joshua Brogues says I could go another two and a half hours if you really want. | |
| Oh, man. | ||
| Voter. | ||
| Joshua says voter ID laws. | ||
| Voter ID laws could go a long way towards raising confidence in our elections. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm inclined to agree. | |
| Yeah, I do, too. | ||
| Some sort of ID, I would think. | ||
| Some sort of security measures for our elections. | ||
| Not the opposite. | ||
| The Democrats are talking about reducing election integrity. | ||
| That, to me, makes no sense. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So weird to me. | |
| Paper ballot backups, I think, to me, should be a no-brainer. | ||
| You see, this is what happens. | ||
| See the categories with me. | ||
| Well, no, it's that we're 20 minutes over and he knows. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He wants cookies. | |
| Come on up, Marco. | ||
| Now he knows what we're talking about. | ||
| I do want to mention one thing. | ||
| I don't know if you realize, but there's a photo every time we show you of Joe Biden eating a small child. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| It's right behind you. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Well, I resent being associated with that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I had nothing to do with it. | |
| Have you seen the art on the walls? | ||
| You know, I've glanced at it. | ||
| A lot of it. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| It's a lot to process. | ||
| I know it's a lot. | ||
| It's just Joe Biden looking like the Crypt Keeper. | ||
| Yeah, that's what he looks like. | ||
| George Alexopolis. | ||
| He's the artist. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| All right. | ||
| Well, anyway, man, hey, thanks. | ||
| Good conversation. | ||
| Yeah, I enjoyed it. | ||
| Do you want to mention your social media or anything? | ||
| Yeah, mtracey on Twitter, M-T-R-A-C-E-Y. | ||
| I do have my own YouTube channel. | ||
| It's not a major focus of mine like yours where you have this very impressive setup. | ||
| You know, I do, you know, just some side commentaries, chat with people. | ||
| So that's easy to find. | ||
| It's just mtracey on YouTube. | ||
| Right on. | ||
| I feel like you've written a book. | ||
| on and PayPal and all that set up and look forward to. | ||
| You know, I mentioned earlier what I see to be a need for | ||
| new media ventures out of the ashes of the disaster. | ||
| I feel like you've written a book. | ||
| Well, what I was going to say is that you'll be on the | ||
| lookout for new media ventures that are aware of | ||
| many of the problems that we've I don't want to give any further details on that at the moment, but things are in the works. | ||
| Cool. | ||
| And smash that like button. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, do it. | |
| You can follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Parler at Timcast. | ||
| Don't forget to check out my other YouTube channels, YouTube.com slash Timcast and YouTube.com slash Timcast News. | ||
| We're live Monday to Friday at 8 p.m. | ||
| So we'll be back with more stuff. | ||
| Don't forget to follow Ian. | ||
| Yes, at Ian Crossland, you can follow me anywhere and everywhere. | ||
| And you can follow at Sour Patch Lids. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sour Patch Lids, L-Y-D-S. | |
| And smash the like button on your way out. | ||
| We will be back tomorrow. | ||
| What's tomorrow, Wednesday? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, tomorrow's Wednesday. | |
| We'll be back tomorrow. | ||
| We have, we're gonna have, stay tuned for Thursday. | ||
| Thursday is going to be the big, big crazy day. | ||
| So just say, we're not, we're not, we're not. | ||
| Do pushups in the morning. | ||
| Yeah, do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Thanks for hanging out. | ||
| We'll see you all next time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bye guys. |
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