RFK Jr. weaponizes white supremacist dog whistles—like 14/88 codes and Aryan nationalist imagery—while softening his environmental platform, ditching past regulatory advocacy for market-based rhetoric. DeSantis and Haley mirror Trump’s "MAGA" tactics: border theatrics and Civil War revisionism to siphon his base. Ramaswamy pivots from anti-establishment posturing to QAnon defenses, proving independence is a facade. The pattern reveals politics as audience capture, not principle-driven reform, with Trump’s cult-like influence shielding deeper systemic corruption. Legal accountability, not just votes, may be the only antidote. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm Spencer, your host, and I'm back again today with David Bloomberg.
How are you doing, David?
Good.
How are you?
Oh, really good.
Survived the season.
Yeah, barely, but yeah, both of us did.
Yeah, well, that's good.
We're back out of this.
If I'd had my way, really, this episode would have been done before Christmas, but it was just too busy and there were other things going on.
Never good.
But we have a direct reference to what we're talking about today with Christmas.
And that's one of the tie-ins here.
But maybe I should introduce the topic and it'll make a lot more sense to people.
I want to talk about audience capture today.
Now, that's where we run out and we grab podcast listeners and we tie them up and we hold on to them.
Right.
Well, I don't know how you do it on your other podcast, David, but that's not usually a thing we do, at least in Canada.
Oh, so it's not literal audience capture.
No, no, it's more metaphorical capture.
Oh, I have some people to release when we're done then.
Yeah, okay.
Well, you know, I mean, depending on the rules in your state, you might just have a misdemeanor.
It's hard to say.
Yeah.
I don't understand all the rules down there, which is why I talk to you when I talk about this topic, because we're definitely going to get into some of the shenanigans south of the border today.
South of your border.
Well, I guess somewhat south of my border, too.
Well, yeah, there's borders involved.
There's definitely multiple borders.
So anyway, audience capture as a concept is the act of taking an existing audience and diverting it towards a new source.
When we think about TV and movies, you might hear about people talking about a certain TV show wasn't made because there was already too many of that kind of TV show made and it was already saturated, or they might hear about someone making a particular show, like say a fantasy show or a vampire show or something, because of the success of a different show.
And they want to, you know, get some of that audience.
This is audience capture.
This is exactly what we're talking about here.
Yeah.
Normally we don't talk about this specific term in relation to what is done in TV and movies.
I think those guys probably have their own nomenclature for this.
There's probably multiple different things that they use to talk about marketing.
I believe it's just called, I believe it's just called copycat.
Well, yeah, I'm sure that comes up.
Yeah.
Normally we talk about audience capture in reference to like an online media personality that is attempting to do this with other parts of what's happening in the world.
So very often we talk about things like there's a lot of right-wing grifters who have successfully performed audience capture on other previous right-wing grifters that came before them.
Alex Jones is a copycat of people like David Ike and Bill Cooper.
Is it Ike?
I always thought it was Icky.
Well, I've heard it pronounced Ike.
I've never met the man to ask him, but it also describes his views.
So that's why I would associate it that way.
Sure.
Yeah.
It's a good way to remember it.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't want to suggest that we're only limiting it to those particular types of people because I do think it's done everywhere.
Yeah.
Even on this podcast.
Okay.
Are you calling me out, David?
No, no, no.
Every time a podcast has a guest, It's not done just to bring their perspective, but also their audience.
And, you know, you may bring them mainly for their perspective, but also, you know, they're going to go out and say, Hey, I was on this podcast.
And their social media followers are going to say, Oh, well, maybe I should check out that podcast.
Right.
And I remember years ago being annoyed that so many skeptical podcasts kept having other skeptical podcasters as guests.
And at the time, I primarily listened to skeptical podcasts.
So I was already listening to all these podcasts.
And I was like, why are you bringing this person on here?
I already know this person.
I already listened to this person.
And, you know, of course, now I realize that the answer was to benefit both of them.
The guest could get their audience to listen to this other podcast they might not have known about.
And then the guest would also become more well-known and gain new listeners if the audience of the podcast they appeared on didn't already all know about them.
And so, you know, I became less picky about that.
I also think they stopped doing it as much.
But I became less annoyed by it.
And it's interesting because you might think, well, obviously the one with the larger following is going to benefit less.
And maybe as a whole numbers thing, that's true.
But what's interesting is: so I, you know, podcast about Survivor and Big Brother on a major reality TV network.
And I started doing podcasts on a small podcast.
I started being a guest there.
And I found out later from a participant in one of the shows we were talking about that she had never heard of the major podcast network that I was on, but she was specifically interested in the show that I was podcasting about on this smaller podcast.
And so she listened to that and from there started following me on the major network.
And so I just never thought that it would work in that direction.
I'm, you know, I'm in enough of a bubble when it comes to that sort of thing that I presumed everybody already knew about the major network and didn't necessarily know about the minor one, but it does work in both ways.
Right.
I would put an asterisk next to your note there.
I think definitely in this situation, you the two that you examples you've provided, that's happening.
But very specifically, when one personality is doing audience capture, they do have to sufficiently mimic the properties of the other charismatic personality that they're trying to supplant in the in whether you think of it that way or not to subvert or to gain audience from.
In the case of you and me, for example, your audience has almost nothing to do with the things I talk about, misinformation, everything else.
So in this case, you know, just to point out an example, I have you on because I know that you talk about a lot of political stuff and it's close to your heart and you're very informed on the topic.
And but in this case, I mean, I wouldn't say that I haven't done it for other people, that I've hoped that I get some portion of their audience.
In the case of yours, perhaps I do, but not because of your audience is particularly listening to you for this kind of content.
And in the one occasion when I was on a podcast that you invited me on, we were careful to mention that is that this podcast isn't really about all the things that they went to that podcast to listen to.
And that's a particular point is that they have to sort of mimic, there has to be some level of mimicry.
So in the case of, say, the skeptics who are on each other's podcasts, already they're notably in this market of skepticism and wanting to talk about the nature of skepticism and how to do it properly.
I guess I don't know what I don't listen to a lot of skeptic podcasts.
Weirdly, I don't.
I've listened to the big one, of course, is skeptoid.
I have heard some of those, but most of them I haven't.
I haven't been deep in the skeptic community.
But you know what I mean, right?
That they have to be mimicking in some way.
They have to, it has to occur in some way, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I would say some overlap.
Yeah.
I mean, I guess, you know, the word audience capture, you're literally trying to, well, not literally.
We went over that earlier.
You know, trying to, you know, capture the audience.
You know, I can see it that way.
I do think, I don't know, maybe there's a slightly different term for, you know, what I'm thinking about.
And we could debate that.
But I think that they're at least related.
Now, when it comes to these, you know, right-wingers who are trying to build their own audiences, it seems like in that case, in particular, each one is trying to one-up the next one.
Yeah.
You know, by being more extreme, more conspiratorial.
That's because being extreme and more conspiratorial is part of that subculture that they're attracting.
Right.
Specifically.
You and I couldn't get more audience by being more extreme or conspiratorial.
Not at all.
We probably could.
It would just be a different audience.
We would lose the audience.
It wouldn't be their audience.
Right.
You would lose the audience you currently have and move to a different one, which some of these people have done.
Over the years, some talk show hosts have done it.
Some radio, TV, all of those hosts, some of them started out more or less normal and just went down one rabbit hole or another.
Trying to be a shinier bulb on the tree, I guess, right?
Yeah.
I mean, you can see one who's doing it currently is Dr. Drew.
Yeah.
You know, he used to be a fairly reasonable source of information.
And once COVID hit, he became, I mean, essentially an anti-vaxxer.
Yeah.
That's been very well documented by Dan Wilson on Debunk the Funk, right?
Right.
And, you know, I saw it happening in real time as well, in part because he went on a reality show at the same time.
He blocked me.
So of all the things that people say bad about Dr. Drew, I said I was rooting against him on the show and he blocked me.
Oh, wow.
Maybe he's also petty.
I believe so.
And so, yeah, I mean, we've seen that before.
And we even see it with the right-wing, quote-unquote, news networks as well.
You know, as Fox News occasionally dared to criticize Trump a tiny bit or not buy every single lie he told, the One America news network or OANN stepped in as an even more extreme Trump propaganda outlet.
And, you know, some people started moving to them until that lost eaten when the main satellite and cable outlooks outlets booted them.
So, you know, they obviously aren't doing so hot now.
But, you know, it depends, I guess, you know, I think they expected to profit from being even more extreme than the extremists.
And whether it backfired or whether they were, they, you know, everybody who dropped them claimed it was financial in reasoning, except I think YouTube demonetized them for spreading conspiracy theories, conspiracy beliefs, claims, flames.
I hate to call them theories.
But whatever the reason, they have taken a nosedive and people are back at the regular old extremists at Fox News.
I would be remiss if I didn't try to circle back and remind everyone that much of the subject matter here, when we're directly talking about audience capture, we are referencing another episode that you and I did about meta-thinking, right?
The idea that when we talked about meta-thinking, it was mostly in-person, like person-to-person interactions.
But this is sort of meta-thinking taken from another view, a planned, inauthentic exchange such that the audience is meant to, you know, you know, something about what the audience is meant to want, and then you're trying to give the audience specifically that.
I don't know if you know about a right-wing grifter by the name of Stew Peters.
He has a show that's a name.
That's it's a mix.
It's like what would happen if Alex Jones and Max Headroom had a love child.
Sorry, I saw you were sipping your coffee right there, and I couldn't stop the joke.
It had to happen.
Could have been the end of the podcast right there.
Spit all over the.
It's exactly what I think of whenever I see a clip from Stew Peters.
He's a glossier version of Alex Jones, and he's made up in such a way that he just looks like he's not even a real person anymore, like Max Headroom.
Like, that's what I think of when I see him.
And I mean, to be fair, anybody would be a glossier version of Alex Jones.
I mean, he looks like, you know, the drunk guy being kicked out of the bar at closing time, usually.
Right.
Yeah.
It's cheap suits and everything else.
But maybe I'll try to find a good clip of Stew Peters to put in the links and something that's not too egregious.
Yeah.
Good luck.
People can see what I'm talking about.
But he goes way over the top and he's very purposefully attempting to give the audience what he saw the audience wanted based on what Alex Jones has been giving them, right?
I mean, this is why this works this way.
Well, and Alex Jones himself in other venues has claimed that's what he does.
Right.
You know, when he was in, I believe it was when he was in a child custody hearing and the truth comes out there, right?
Yeah, his ex-wife was saying, no, you shouldn't have the kids because you believe all these things.
He's like, it's all a show.
Yeah.
Right.
Right.
And so, you know, which do we believe?
Do we believe what he's telling the court or do we believe what he's telling his audience?
I do think for him, it is mostly a show.
I think he is essentially, you know, I am not a doctor.
I am not a psychiatrist, but I think he's essentially a sociopath.
He puts these things out there and doesn't care what happens, doesn't care who gets hurt as long as he is successful.
Well, ish, he's purposefully lying with a goal in mind.
And the goal isn't only his own increase in wealth, right?
It's also a set of right-wing ideas that he'd like to see occur in the world.
And this is where it gets complicated, right?
Like it's, it's, he's not just the zealot who would sell his own life to have the thing go the way he wants.
He's a zealot who's also personally interested, wants to sell his extra products and make his extra money and be whatever level of rich he manages to get to.
I don't know, after right now, he's completely bankrupt.
So, sure.
Thanks to lawsuits.
They all claim that, though.
Oh, no, he really is.
I mean, he until you get the accountant in there that sees everything.
Who knows, right?
Yeah.
I heard on a different podcast, I can't remember where that he had been trying to set up new corporations to hide his money.
Yeah.
And it was so transparent that, you know, it was like, really?
You expect the court not to see through this here?
Like they've never seen this kind of activity before.
Yeah.
I can't imagine.
Do you say that he was trying to hide his wealth?
Who would try that?
I know, especially when they owe, what was it, a billion dollars in the lawsuit or something?
I mean, I honestly don't know.
And, you know, we would need to be mind readers.
So that's never going to happen.
If he cares about the right-wing beliefs or if he only cares about his own wealth and saw that that was the easiest way to go about it, he may truly not care about anything but himself.
I mean, I've seen politicians like that.
You know, Rod Blogojevich, the former governor of my state, my former boss, because I worked for the state.
He, you know, was a Democrat because it suited him.
You know, I had, I remember having a debate with the guy who was at the time the chief legal counsel.
And so he was appointed, you know, in part by Blagojevich.
And he was, he was a friend of mine.
And he said, no, you know, this was before all the bad about Rod came out.
He was like, no, he really does care about this and this and this.
And I'm like, no, he doesn't.
And then, of course, as more and more came out, he cared about one thing, himself.
That was it.
And for anyone who might be very young or might not be familiar with Illinois politics, you know, eventually he tried to sell a Senate seat.
A Senate seat came open when Obama was elected president.
And he tried to sell the seat to the highest bidder because the governor appoints the replacement.
And he knew he was under investigation by the FBI for various things.
And he didn't care.
He was so egotistical, so drunk with his own power that he had conversations on an open phone line about it.
And so he ended up in jail after first he was on the apprentice, the celebrity apprentice, after he had been thrown out of office by a Democratic legislature.
And so then he went on the celebrity apprentice.
Then he went to jail.
Then Trump pardoned him when he was president.
And now I believe he's a right-wing radio host in Chicago.
And he will actually pontificate.
I will see quotes from him.
He will pontificate about crooked government behavior.
It's like, what?
What?
I mean, I guess if you're an expert, but he makes it sound like it's all the other people.
Yeah.
I mean, the reason why the FBI was able to rely on Frank Abignale Jr.'s help in catching other people who were kiting checks is because he admitted to what he did and was repentant and followed all their rules.
He was an expert on the thing, and then he also then helped other law enforcement agencies make the system better.
But this is not the same case with a person like what you're describing here, Rod Lagojevich.
And my point in telling that long story was just, you know, that's the type of person who is probably a sociopath and is just doing it for the money, doing it for the fame, the money, the power, whatever he can get.
And it's another, it does actually circle back to audience capture because, like I said, he went from a left-wing Democrat, allegedly, to now a right-wing commentator.
Yeah.
In the case of a person like Alex Jones, I think you could look at a person's wants and you could put them on a priority list.
And undoubtedly, himself and his well-being and everything else is at the very top of that list.
And he would never sacrifice himself or his well-being for any cause or anyone else.
That's definitely, I think, true.
Although, again, we have to really read someone's mind.
But I think I've seen enough of him to think that that's really true.
But he does seem to have a secondary level of things that he would like once he has his own safety, security, profit secured.
After that, what he wants tells something about him.
And I think it's clear that what he wants is something extremely right-wing, extremely conservative.
It probably includes a lot of guns.
It very likely, I mean, I'm sort of trying to be not too specific about him, but he would only turn against that set of ideas if his own wealth and security and everything else were in danger.
Right.
And in that case, it would come first, obviously.
Yeah.
And that's it.
I just, as we were talking, I just looked up Rod's radio show, at least when it was on.
I don't know that it's still on, but at least what I looked up was Lightning Rod was the name of it.
And he was a self-described Trumpocrat, whatever the heck that means.
And some of the topics of Trump.
I don't know.
Yeah.
You know, some of the topics were, you know, skyrocketing property taxes in Chicago.
So, of course, he's attacking the Democrats in Chicago.
The Afghan, and this is obviously a few years ago, the Afghan evacuation debacle.
Well, he's obviously not criticizing Trump for setting up that debacle.
He's criticizing Biden.
Following to the trap that was set by Trump.
Yeah.
Yes.
Yeah.
All the criticism there is very confused.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it just goes on, you know, like that.
And again, I don't know whether he still has that radio show or I do know that, you know, as recently as the past few months, I've seen him referred to in interviews as an expert in government corruption, which, yeah, he was.
I will grant you that, but not the way he's being portrayed.
Yeah.
He might also be an expert at cleaning latrines in the prison, but not something he should brag about.
Yeah.
So he, Again, he will do whatever gets him money.
And so he moved into that audience.
He, you know, to take us back to this, he tried to capture that audience.
Yeah.
And I think that's a good segue into the second half of what I want to really focus on in regards to audience capture, which is that what I've noticed from my perch atop the U.S. and being continually distracted by the neon glare to the south of me is that, I mean, there is a campaign.
There are several campaigns for president.
There's a Republican Party that has prospective nominees, and there have been already several debates, which Trump has shown up for none of them because he is ostensibly, and I think he's declared himself already the nominee without having to go through all the rigmarole.
That's very Trumpian.
And there are a number of other nominees, and they have had debates.
They have spoken with each other.
I think right now the frontrunner in those is Nikki Haley, but others who are changes by the day.
Oh, sure.
Yeah.
They're not that far ahead from each other.
Yeah.
So, like I say, already there is, I mean, Ron DeSantis has been a name mentioned in that circle for a very long time for almost a year now.
I dread a day where I have to watch the U.S. choose between Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis.
He's an interesting case in this.
If I were to circle this down to just one example, I would only use Ron DeSantis as an example of a politician that is currently real time in front of us attempting to mimic another politician to capture their audience.
And this is, I mean, he's doing it in a number of different ways that are all really interesting, I think.
If you can get past his other awkward moments in front of a camera where he seems to be practicing smiling and from the point of he's had several bits of rhetoric that have to do with what one would do at the border specifically.
And one might note that he is in a state that has a fairly large amount of migrants, but they don't show up at a border.
He is the governor of Florida, not of any other state that has an actual land border.
He did pay to have 50 Venezuelan migrants shipped from San Antonio, Texas to Massachusetts in September.
He has, he's done other things that were not related strictly to border security and the supposed migrant problem, however much you want to talk about that.
I think there's a lot of people already talking about the fact and fiction of the border issue in the U.S.
So it doesn't need to be done to death here.
But he's clearly attempting to mimic the individual properties of Trump in order to get Trump's audience to turn toward him.
So I'll turn the mic over to you and see what's your first thoughts on this Ron DeSantis and the idea of audience capture here.
I mean, he tried and failed.
You know, everybody was worried.
Oh, my gosh, he's going to come in here.
He's going to be, you know, just as bad or worse than Trump.
And then he is just so anti-charismatic.
I mean, you may think Trump is bad, and he is.
Well, but there's something about Trump that draws people, certain people.
And I'll have more to say about that later.
But DeSantis, I don't know how he ever got elected dog catcher.
I mean, he is just so uncomfortable with other human beings.
Yeah, that's a real good way to put it.
Uncomfortable with other human beings.
And I'm uncomfortable sometimes around other human beings, but they don't notice.
Right.
I mean, I don't know how anyone doesn't notice with Ron DeSantis.
It's not.
It's like he's an alien trying to mimic human beings and failing, you know?
So, yeah, I mean, when he started to, you know, I mean, he has dropped precipitously in the polls from the time he started.
Well, he was kind of the first, so he was kind of the first kid at the he should have had a good lead, you know, and instead it just went haywire.
I mean, part of it was just the choices he made, like attacking Disney, you know, and stuff like that.
But I mean, I know you only mentioned, you know, him, but of course, there's all the others.
And I don't know if you were going to.
They are all the others.
There are other examples of exactly this Republican nominee doing this exact thing where they're attempting to steal the platform of Trump, essentially.
I worry about this already that the way I'm framing this appears to be a defense of Trump.
And it gives me a cold feeling down my back.
Yeah.
It's so unfair to Trump that they steal his platform.
Yeah.
Okay.
They're stealing his platform.
It's a shoddy platform.
It's not worth stealing, but they're still trying.
Yeah.
And I think that they are trying because he has the MAGA base.
And I've said for a long time that there are two reasons for someone to run as a Republican right now, run for president as a Republican.
And either of them is because they think they're going to win as it currently stands.
One is to become the vice president.
And two is the hope that Trump gets thrown in jail or, you know, something happens to him health-wise because the man is not healthy, let's face it.
And they inherit kind of the MAGA, the maggots.
And so, because I think you would be a fool to spend all your time and effort running on the same platform while everyone trails him by a huge margin.
You want to come in there with a different platform like Chris Christie, go for it.
You're going to lose under the current Republican regime, you know, but go for it.
But for everybody to come in and adopt the same platform, it's just everybody fighting over who is more Trumpian, which leads to strange situations like non-white candidates appealing to racists who are never going to vote for them.
Yeah, that's Nikki Haley is Hale's, I think her mother was from Asia, her mother and father from Asia.
Well, let's just say Nikki sure isn't her first name.
She Americanized it.
Right.
Yeah.
That's true.
Yeah.
And but she passes for white, right?
This is colorism as a concept that she's, she's not quote unquote genetically white, I guess you'd say, but she, she's her skin complexion is white enough that you wouldn't know right away upon looking at her that she's from, you know, ancestry from Asia.
Well, then I expect some of her opponents to start doing what Obama's opponents used to do and start using his middle name, you know, you know, Barack Hussein Obama.
That'll come.
If the thing goes on longer, that'll come.
Yeah, and I think it will.
I think that she will, you know, because her, I think they will start trying to point that out.
Yes.
They'll try to point out the way in which she's different, which is just great schooly tactics, right?
That's all it is.
Right.
Because her first name is actually, I don't know if I'm pronouncing it right, Nimarata.
Right.
Yeah.
And her maiden name is Randhawa.
And again, I may be mispronouncing these.
I'm reading them.
I'm not sure.
Right.
And, you know, she, you know, was Indian American, or at least partially.
Yeah.
And so, yes, does she, like you said, does she, can she pass for white if people are uninformed about her, if they care about such things?
Yes, but you better believe some of the other, some of the others are going to point it out.
Now, she also passes for white racist when she does things like refusing to say that slavery was the cause of the Civil War.
Yeah.
I mean, even DeSantis attacked her for that one, you know.
And meanwhile, earlier in December, when Trump made some racist comments, DeSantis said it was a tactical mistake.
Yeah.
So interesting the way he goes after two or he describes the two different people.
Yeah, it's been pointed out.
I think Vivek Ramaswamy attempted to draw a distance between him and the other people on the stage last month when he was attempted to declare that all of them were just licking Trump's boots, right?
And he was the only genuine, attempting to frame himself as the only genuine candidate.
And of course, that was obviously not true.
As soon as he started speaking about anything other than that exact thing, you could hear exactly Trump's same messages coming from Vivek Ramaswamy, right?
He was that entire night, it was all QAnon messaging specifically and as specifically as he could possibly get away with and make it seem like it wasn't.
But it was to anyone who's read the Q drops, it was very obviously, no, this guy is trying to be as pilled as possible.
And yeah.
And he also defended Trump after Maine removed him from the ballot.
And he also, along, I mean, along with the others, also, you know, said he would pardon Trump if elected to the White House.
Yeah.
He and Nikki and all, I think pretty much all the other ones said it too.
And it's just interesting in particular to have Nikki and Vivek trying to appeal to racists.
Like very specifically.
Do you, do you not understand?
Do you really think they are ever going to vote for you?
No, they're not.
Well, maybe to get the thing they think they want, which it's still a mystery as to what they think that's going to be.
Well, they want Trump.
The end of the mouth.
Yeah, sure.
RFK Jr. did an interesting thing a few months back that I just love to point out the ways in which this guy does things that are, you know, I've had an episode where I talked about him doing the anti-vax thing because it needed to be said.
But that's not the only way in which he has attempted to audience capture parts of this and specifically some of Trump's audience.
The shirtless weightlifting videos have been interesting.
But what most people don't realize goes along with that was part and parcel of that that happened right around the same time as he started those shirtless weightlifting videos was he did a very peculiar tweet that had some very peculiar wording in it that said he was talking about how he said he was saying he did not have secret service protection,
that his dad was, he reminded everyone that his father was assassinated when running for president and that he needed secret service protection.
And then he said, typical turnaround time for pro forma protection requests from presidential candidates is 14 days.
And then he said, after 88 days of no response and after several, and then he had a, I didn't care about the rest of it.
I didn't even copy it.
But what's noted by most people is that that's a very odd thing that he mentioned that there was 14 days and then there was 88 days.
Now, for most ordinary people, this means nothing.
But to a very specific subculture of people in the U.S., this has a very specific meaning.
And to them, all of the alarm bells go off when they see this.
And this is the 14 and 88.
And he didn't write out 14 and he didn't write out 88.
He put them as numbers.
And this rings out to a very specific subculture of white supremacists that feels very strongly about these numbers together in reference to protecting the white race and having a reverence for Hitler specifically.
And this is, you know, people can say, as was pointed out at the time, people said, well, maybe it's just a coincidence.
He says it did happen to be 88 days and it's just something he's happens to be angry about right now.
And okay, but it's not great, especially when you realize that working out in what looks not much different than a prison yard, an outdoor fitness place, doing bench presses and everything else, shirtless, also appeals to a white supremacist Aryan nation audience, very specifically.
And this situation isn't great.
It's really not great that we have U.S. presidential candidates that are polling in double digit numbers as RFK Jr. is.
It's not large numbers, but it's more than just minuscule and something that can be brushed aside, actually dog whistling to actual white supremacists.
And he's, you know, he's audience capture, right?
He's trying to get this audience to vote for him, to wink and a nod, say, yes, you know, absolutely, we will go with you when the time comes.
Like, what's, what do you think about this as a, as a, as a member of this nation to the south of me, where this is happening, David, please.
I mean, see, when you started, I was thinking, well, no, RFK has been this way a long time.
He's not trying to audience capture.
Other people are trying to capture his audience.
But with the white supremacist stuff, I see what you're talking about.
Because as far as I know, he hasn't specifically kind of reached out to them.
I do find it ironic if he does that and runs as an independent, because people close to Trump were trying to get him to run to weaken Biden.
And now he's kind of like out on his own being like, no, I'm just going to run my way.
And he's, you know, could steal votes from Trump if, you know, more likely than from Biden at this point, I think.
I don't think anyone's confusing RFK Jr. with Biden.
Yeah.
The only way in which RFK Jr.'s platform is the least bit left-leaning is the environmental aspect, as far as I can tell.
But even that, he's abandoned a lot of the environmental principles.
You know, he's, I don't have the specifics in front of me, but, you know, when it comes to climate change, he's abandoned a lot of those principles and made comments contrary to what someone who is truly concerned about the environment would say.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And he's, he's definitely whenever it comes up from him that I hear, and I don't listen to a lot of his content at this point.
We'll see how that goes.
And I hope his presidential campaign just sort of dies quietly and we move on.
My personal hope, I don't think I'll get it, but I'm allowed to dream.
When I hear him speak on the, on the topic, it's almost always about the things he used to do, right?
He was an environmental lawyer.
He did help to do these things.
He has a history of doing this stuff.
He doesn't seem to highlight what he's currently working on in regards to it or what he would do in the future.
It's mostly just winking a nod.
Trust me, bro.
I'll do the right thing when the time comes.
You know me because I did these things.
Yeah, except now.
So I remembered now and quickly looked it up, but it reminded me.
He doesn't think government regulation should be used to address climate change.
He think it should just be through market forces.
Individuals.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, which as someone who worked in air pollution control for over three decades, I could tell you market forces are not going to do crap.
Okay.
If they were, they already would.
You need government regulations and you need specific government regulations because otherwise they'll find a loophole in it.
And so, I mean, there are a few companies out there who are, you know, who are thinking, you know, properly in an environmental way.
But market forces by themselves are not going to solve climate change or else they already would have.
True.
Instead, you have companies fighting against environmental regulations, lobbying hard against them.
So, no, the idea that market forces are going to is idiotic.
And he should be smart enough to know that.
Oh, I think he is smart enough to know that.
He's just hoping that his audience isn't.
Right.
Yeah.
So I think we've introduced this well enough.
We've, as with most things, we don't come to any conclusions around here.
We just sort of, you know, talk about them a little bit.
We hope other people have other conversations that are related to it, maybe, or think about it some.
And then it's too big to do in one episode.
Well, here we are.
I mean, I have one, you might call it prediction, conclusion, whatever.
Sure.
And that is, you know, as all these other candidates fight for Trump's audience share, the audience itself is never going to go away, even once he eventually does, one way or another.
Hopefully he goes away, like, you know, go away to the clink, you know.
But I think a lot of what we're seeing is a cult of personality and it's specifically Trump's personality.
You know, I compared him to DeSantis earlier.
And I mean, I can't say I understand it because his personality sucks, but you just look at the way people who worship him behave.
You've seen them online.
They create images of him with like bulging muscles, like he's some sort of superhero.
Right.
And then you look at his actual picture and there's only one thing bulging and it's not his muscles.
Yeah.
And it's not what you also would think of as bulging.
So, you know, let me clarify there.
It's his baseline.
And they hang on his every word, even when those words literally don't make any sense.
It is a true cult, which is why the others are trying to be like him, to take it over.
I just, but nobody's been able to make a dent in it.
Now, sometimes cults can succeed when their leader is gone.
But I personally think when he is gone one way or another, MAGA is going to fracture as each other politician tries to grab a share of the audience.
This is the disillusion of Alexander's empire, right?
It couldn't stay together.
It got divided up into different regions based on who had influence in which area.
And so that's your prediction.
That's it would be, I think that's the best we can hope for.
Yeah.
But I'm a little more pessimistic myself.
I think that, I mean, it's the reason why I haven't focused on Trump hardly.
His name definitely comes up on this podcast, but I haven't had him as any kind of focus, even though politics and misinformation are, he's at the center of a lot of that.
Because getting rid of Trump, I think, won't solve the real problem.
The real problem right now is Trump's audience.
Yeah.
And if you got rid of Trump, you would just have some other person that jumps into the car and grabs the wheel and steers in whatever direction they want.
What I call dictator by another name.
It's just, you know, you would get rid of the guy, but if you're in a system that allowed that guy, then you're going to be stuck with the system even after you get rid of that guy.
And that's what you have in the states right now.
You have a situation where it might still be possible that Trump gets elected unless all the things happen that should happen and stop him.
You have a system that might allow him to do the things he's done and still become president a second time.
And that's why, I mean, that I've had this, I've seen this conversation happen lately online where people say, well, why do you bother to try to stop Trump legally?
Just stop him at the polls.
Just stop him at the voter box.
And the reason is because you need to know, everyone needs to know, not just Trump and not just his audience, but every other politician that's ever going to exist in the United States needs to be told that you're not allowed to do the things that he's tried to do.
You're not allowed to try to replace the electors from states and bring them in and subvert, do a vote inversion and just swap who they were voting for.
That's not allowed.
That's taking away the vote of people.
And you're not allowed to take fake documents or fake documents.
You're not allowed to take the documents once you leave the White House, take them with you and store them and use them as tokens in a political game.
You're not allowed to do that.
And if they ask for it back, because you might have forgot that you had them, you have to bring them back.
And they did ask for them back.
And you can't do all the other things he's done.
And that's the reason why you should stop him legally before he ever gets back to potentially becoming president.
Right.
And that's the, you know, because everyone needs to know this and the audience needs to be told this, that there is still a system in place that grinds against the people who will do this.
And it's not the deep state.
It's just justice.
And that's all.
Yeah.
So I think that's a good point to wrap up.
Is there anything you want to plug on this podcast where you do other content that's not any related to this stuff?
Well, right now it's kind of the offseason, although that will only last for one more day as we're recording this, at least for one of the podcasts.
But since, like you said, those podcasts are very different topics.
They are for reality television.
For some reality fans out there.
Well, there are.
And they can also listen to politics like you.
Yeah.
And they can find that mix on my social media.
Yeah.
Well, at least my text-based social media, like Twitter and Blue Sky, where I'm at David Bloomberg, and on Threads, where I'm at David Bloomberg TV.
And mostly active on Twitter, at least for now.
And, you know, just, yeah, that's where you can come in and join the audience capture there as the combination of politics, science, skepticism, and reality TV, not necessarily in that order.
Great.
And anyone who has any comments, complaints, concerns, anyone want to tell us how we got something wrong, we missed something critical, whatever, can send that email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
You can find me arguing with people that don't understand how reality works on Twitter.