Truth Unrestricted’s hosts and Canadian Democrat David Bloomberg argue replacing Biden after his debate struggles would backfire—primaries are locked, and no clear alternative exists. They blame Trump’s Gish Gallop tactic and CNN’s weak moderation for the chaos, not Biden’s fitness, citing his pre-debate sharpness. Democrats’ disarray stems from internal divisions (e.g., Israel-Gaza) and reliance on charisma over strategy, unlike Republicans who rally behind outcomes. Bloomberg warns that ditching debates entirely risks ignoring voter concerns, while infighting could cost the election—Trump’s lies thrive unchecked, but truth demands messy, principled resistance. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, a podcast that would sound less rushed if we weren't in the middle of a conversation that I just now decided we should just put on the podcast because I just, yeah, that's that's what kind of thinking I have today.
David and I are mid-conversation about something, you know, some we just have conversations before we do podcast episodes.
And I'm this conversation that we had, I felt that we had a really interesting take on it collectively and good conversation.
So I'm just, we're just going to recap, restart, recap right from the start.
We'll see how this goes.
If it fails, then sorry.
But we're talking about, as almost all the world is talking about right now, this moment, the debate, if that's what you want to call it, that happened just a few nights ago for us between Donald Trump and Joseph Biden, the first of two debates that have been agreed upon between the two.
And we feel like David made the mention.
I'm going to take his words from him.
He said that if we did this episode, we would be kind of the only two older white guys that had a take that didn't include you should absolutely replace Joe Biden right now.
And I essentially agree with that because agreed with it at the time just a few minutes ago and I agree with it now for this reason, because I think that you're not going to be able to replace him in a way that doesn't make it worse.
Yes.
Yeah.
Like you're going to be scrambled.
You're going to be rushed.
If you were going to have Joseph Biden not run, then the time to make that decision would have been before the primaries.
But all the primaries are done as far as I know.
I mean, I might check that.
There might be some late ones that come in there.
I mean, there's none that matter at this point.
It's locked in.
The states that come in late for those hate that.
Let me tell you, they do hate that.
But yeah, maybe it would have all been decided by now for sure.
But, you know, the time to do that would have been before.
And people can lay this at Joe Biden's feet, but probably more likely at the Democratic Party's feet in general.
You know, if they really thought this was the wrong decision, they should have put their foot down harder on Joe Biden and said, okay, well, at least you're going to run against other people and we're going to support a full field of candidates at that point.
But they didn't do that either.
So wherever that sits.
And as you mentioned, some people are saying that, oh, of course we could come to an agreement.
We could come to it right now.
We just have to agree that it's this guy or this, this pair of people.
But of course, everyone has a different answer for that.
So the idea that they could agree is already belied by the point that they haven't agreed already.
There is no obvious person to run for this.
Well, there is an obvious person to run for it.
Right.
But most of the people saying it are not bringing her up.
Yeah.
Kamala Harris is the vice president.
If you thought that Joe Biden is unfit for the office, then you should just pull him now.
I believe you have an amendment of the Constitution, the 25th one, if I recall, that is meant to replace a president with a vice president if the president is unable to do the duties.
Don't remember which amendment it is.
Well, okay, I'll research that point.
But yes, there is one.
I've been mentioning the last few days is all.
Right.
And I don't think I've seen other than maybe a few Republicans saying, oh, he's unfit now.
They're saying, well, he's trending towards not being able to really fight Donald Trump.
Yeah.
And whatever that means.
Right.
But the problem is they're basing this on one debate.
And literally, if you saw his speeches and his activities before the debate and immediately after the debate, he was fine.
Now, why was he so bad?
And let me start by that.
Sure, yeah.
Was he good in the debate?
No.
No.
So nobody listening to us should think, oh, these two guys are saying, yeah, we're ignoring reality.
I've seen people saying, oh, they're gaslighting up.
No.
Gonna pretend like I haven't said on this podcast that I hate having to cheer for the oldest horse in the race.
Right.
Like, I hate that.
Yeah.
He was not good in the debate.
I was cringing.
I was, I, I, there's a reason I don't normally watch debates.
And I literally only watched it because originally we were like, well, if something big happens, we'll talk about it on the podcast.
And then we cringed our way through the debate and said, we're not going to talk about it on the podcast.
And then here we are.
But so, no, it was not a good performance.
I don't know why.
I suspect it's because he was not properly prepared for a Gish Gallup, which is a term that many of us who have been fighting creationists for 30 plus years know because the Gish Gallup comes from Dwayne Gish.
He's a creationist.
He would try to tempt people, scientists, who I'm pretty sure we've talked about this on the podcast.
We have, yeah.
But he would challenge scientists to debates.
And then he would just spout a fire hose of lies.
And there's no way in a standard debate setting that you can deal with that.
And that is exactly what Trump did.
And now there's a bunch of political commentators who have suddenly learned this phrase and they're using it and they're being retweeted all over the place.
And I'm like, yeah, I posted that during the debate.
Where were you?
How can anyone consider themselves to be a serious political commentator when you don't even understand the tactics that are being used for this sort of weaving of unreality?
Right.
Yeah.
And then some people who are used to this sort of thing, like Dr. David Gorski has pointed out on Twitter, that it is hard to counter a Gish gallop.
And there are very few who can do it, but you need to be ready for it.
And the way to do it is not to get in the weeds.
And Biden tried to get in the weeds.
If you try to, or if you look at just the transcript, you don't look at what was actually, you know, the facial expressions or the hesitations or the raspiness of his voice, because obviously that matters for a president.
But, you know, if you just look at the actual transcript, he made good points.
And Trump stumbled over a couple.
Yes, he did.
He stumbled over them.
And part of that was because he's concerned about accuracy to the point that he was like self-correcting on what his golf handicap was.
Nobody cares.
He got pulled into that.
That was essentially a rhetorical trap that Trump set for him and he walked right into it.
Right.
But then to actually correct himself, like, oh, a six or an eight, nobody cares.
Stop it.
Yeah.
All of golf doesn't matter.
We're not deciding this over a game of gold.
Right.
But that's part of what happens in a Gish Gallup is you get focused on these small things.
Like all he should have done was mocked Trump for bragging about winning his own golf tournaments.
As far like we talked about Gish Gallup on the episode where we talked about grift tactics, right?
That's one of the grift tactics is a gish gallop.
And there's several varieties.
I almost think at some point we might just for fun go through, you know, a deep dive on gish gallop because there are many varieties, but one variety that can be very, oh, they can all be very effective.
But one is to, as you gallop across all these different points, try to get as many that are personal, that evoke an emotional response.
Right.
What you, what you want is for someone to snag on one of the one of the points and get in, you know, enmeshed in it and get involved in it.
And that's exactly what Biden did in that moment.
He took the golf thing oddly, whatever.
He took that one personally and focused on it.
And they wasted, you know, all the time in one of these very important events.
Yes.
That you don't talk about substantial stuff.
Is time wasted?
And that was just time wasted talking about golf.
And that's how that occurred.
I mean, we could kind of post-mortem talk about it: is that Trump trotted out several things.
And one of them was one that Biden took more personally than others.
I don't know if we want to zoom in on whether why he found this one more personal.
Maybe it was just the most recent one.
And sometimes that's it.
Of the eight points sometimes that a person trots out in this way, the last one sticks more because of it.
It was the last one was said.
And he got suckered into it.
He snagged on that line and then Trump just tied him up in it as much as he could.
And it's not about winning that.
It's just about wasting time with it.
Right.
Right.
And making while you're debunking his golf score, you're not talking about all the other things he said.
Right.
And I mean, Biden tried to show that he was a liar when he was like, I'm in great physical condition.
I passed these tests.
And he's, and Biden made some comment, which kind of led to the golf thing about how, oh, look at him.
He's, he's six foot three and 220 pounds.
He was basically trying to say the man lies about everything, including his weight and his fitness and his golf game and everything else.
But he did such a poor job of explaining it in that moment because he wasn't ready for it.
He was trying to be off the cuff about that.
Yeah.
And so anyway, we've kind of veered into the, well, we've gone into the weeds of the debate itself.
But the point is, sticky territory.
It's hard to stay out.
Yeah.
And that's what he did.
And he shouldn't have.
He should have done exactly what Trump did, except, you know, not the lying part, but like they would literally ask him a question.
Mr. Trump, what color is the sky?
And he'd be like, terrorists.
Terrorists are coming in as illegal immigrants.
Had nothing to do with the question at all.
And there was no, there was no condition of the debate.
There are no debate judges.
There are alleged moderators who simply recited questions and did nothing else.
And they, you know, at one point, they even said to him, he said something like, can I address this?
And the moderator said to Trump, Well, I have a question to ask you.
How you would answer it is up to you, or words to that effect.
So it basically gave him permission.
Don't bother answering the question.
Just say whatever you want.
And he did.
He did that repeatedly.
And, You know, Biden would try to stay within the boundaries of what was going on when he should have just kept saying, This man wants to control all the women's bodies and um, you know, harp on abortion, harp on contraception, harp on IVF, uh, harp on Project 2025.
Harp on the fact that he lied in every word he said.
That is all he should have done, right?
But, yeah, but there was no again, was it someone who failed to, or everyone who failed to adequately prepare him?
Was it that he had a cold and someone gave him some cold medicine so he wouldn't have a runny nose and a cough?
Did he need a drink of water?
You know, I don't know what that was.
What I do know is the man we saw on the debate stage is not the man we have been seeing at every other event, at the State of the Union address, at all those other places.
Yes, wasn't the man we saw shortly afterward when he got out of the room and made, you know, spoke a sort of a more prepared thing in front of a crowd.
I mean, that happened that same night.
Yeah.
He was going till like two in the morning or something like that.
And I, so again, this is why I say, you know, to bring it full circle to what we started talking about, this is why I say you can't base it on one performance.
It was a bad performance.
Okay.
Fetterman, the Pennsylvania senator, he came out and said, screw that.
If anyone knows about bad debate performances, it's me.
And look at me, I won.
Obama roundly was determined to have lost his first presidential debate.
He ended up fine.
You know, so you look at all these different things, and it's like we've had him as president for three and a half years.
We've seen all these other activities.
He had one bad night.
Not even a whole bad night.
One bad 90-minute segment.
And I know there are others out there saying, well, we've seen hints of this elsewhere.
We've seen hints of this.
The man has had a lifelong stutter.
Yeah.
And I posted something, I reposted something.
Someone had posted on threads because we're doing this kind of off the cuff.
I don't have it handy, but I reposted it to Twitter and it was from someone who is an expert and talked about the amount of brainpower you have to dedicate to putting your words in the right order and focusing on that.
And yes, sometimes you lose a word on the tip of your tongue.
Well, you know what?
So do I.
I don't have a stutter.
I've never had a stutter.
Yet, for my entire life, as far as I can remember, I sometimes have those moments of it's on the tip of my tongue.
There was a man who just recently, just this past Friday, there was a survivor player.
See, you knew I had to loop survivor into this somehow.
There was a survivor player who's like you're zealous about it, David.
Right.
Yes.
That was the other podcast.
He was a seven-time champion on survivor.
I'm not survivor.
Sorry.
See, there I said, oh my gosh, I said the wrong word.
Clearly, I must, you know, have a problem.
No, on Jeopardy.
And the final word, the final jeopardy, the answer was Helen Keller.
It was obviously Helen Keller.
Everyone knew it was Helen Keller.
As I was sitting there watching, I could not bring her name to my mind.
I knew who it was.
I could not bring, and he had the same problem.
He lost.
He got knocked out after having won seven times because he had the same issue because Jeopardy films a whole week in one day.
So this was his fifth competition.
It was the Friday episode.
So it was his fifth competition of the day, the final Jeopardy, and Helen Keller just would not come to his mind.
He is 23 years old.
It happens.
Yeah, I mean, nerves happen as well.
Just whatever that looks like.
And people get nervous about all kinds of things.
But I don't want to, I also don't want to get into a thing.
I'm looking for something on Twitter because it's relevant, but I don't think I'm going to find it.
So I'm going to stop doing that.
But I don't want to get into a thing where I'm, I'm, or we are stumping too much for Biden, really, because I think, I suspect that all the voices right now, if you put them all in a room, all the voices that are right now talking about, you know,
replacing Biden with another candidate before the Democratic National Convention in August.
I think all of them, if you were able to, you know, in a, in a parallel world where you're, you know, omnipotent, omniscient, you know, God being, you, you could individually interrogate them and have them answer honestly.
I think you would find the same thing with all of them in that they're all metagaming this situation, this scenario.
All of them are looking for the same thing and they think that they have a way.
And the thing that they want, in my opinion, is not Trump at the end of the day.
Yes.
And I'll, yeah, I'll fess up.
I'm doing the same thing.
Right.
Okay.
I mean, nobody could see this, but I was holding my hand up as if I were swearing.
Not holding my hand up.
Yeah.
Yes.
Not swearing that way.
But yes, you know, like giving an oath.
Yes.
I am as well.
And because honestly, it surprised me that Biden decided to run again.
I thought he'd be a one-term president of his own choosing.
But once he did, okay, well, then, you know, that is the best hope for, like you said, not Trump.
And for the people who are saying, oh, well, we should just, you know, come up with a suggested or determine who will run in his place.
That is going to cause more chaos than one bad debate performance ever could.
And already is, as a matter of fact.
Because as we're recording this, we're what, two days out from the debate?
Something like that.
Well, it happened Thursday.
This is Sunday, three days, two and a half.
Yeah.
The immediate polls that I saw were like, eh, not much change, if anything.
Maybe a few people undecided moved towards Biden.
Now, though, and this is exactly what I worried would happen, as soon as the Democrats started talking about, oh my God, this is a calamity.
And the reporters started talking about, oh my God, this is a calamity.
Well, guess what?
People who didn't even see the debate started thinking, oh, my God, this is a calamity.
And so now it has turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Yeah, they are spiraling in a way that makes them look disorganized, unsure.
And in contrast, and we've talked about this before about the people on the political right in the U.S., that they are nearly immune to the hypocrisy in their candidates.
They sort of have, they have sort of already metagamed these scenarios and they're okay.
It seems anyway.
I mean, this is what it looks like from an outside perspective looking in on the collection of things I've come to know about the U.S. electorate is that on the right, they're okay with any level of hypocrisy that comes from their candidates as long as they get what they want at the end of the day.
Right.
And so this is, you know, we have had this discussion.
I can't remember exactly which of the episodes we've done where we talked about it, but I do remember exactly talking about this in that they've already slid past any hypocrisy that comes from Trump.
And so this is why, this is part of the reason why we're in this situation we're in, because everyone in the, you know, we just, I just described an imaginary scenario where you take all the people who are saying maybe we should replace Biden and you put them all together and you interrogate them and you find out about this metagaming thing.
All of those people also, I think, all realize that trying to point out more hypocrisies about Trump isn't going to sway any of the people that are currently voting for Trump because they aren't swayable in this way.
They aren't reacting to the things he's saying as though they're real.
They're saying, I don't care what he says.
He's my guy because I'll get what I want from him.
And so what he's saying is just sort of a facade.
It's sort of a veneer in the front of all the things.
And it's like they've come to accept that.
So when he says things like he said that night, where he says absolutely horrific things like talking about post-birth abortions, as though, as though people, you know, give birth to a child, take a look at it and then decide they don't want it after the fact.
And then what, you know, terminate it after it's been born?
Murder it.
Yeah.
This is not happening.
And that's like, that's a thing that needs to be stomped on with both feet.
And in that night, this is the thing that really upsets me.
He was able to say that and the moderators didn't say anything about it.
You know, whatever level of preparation or nervousness or, you know, being an old man or whatever was going on with Biden, he didn't mention it.
No one on that stage or anything until after the bait was over said anything about the fact that this isn't just like wrong.
This isn't the sort of mistake where it's like, oh, is his Gulf score handicap really six or was it really eight?
Like, did he, you know, the kinds of things that were wrong were like, well, Biden said that the unemployment rate, or whatever, was like 15, and it was 15 in march of 2020, versus when Biden took office.
It was more like whatever nine percent or whatever.
Yeah that's, you know.
That's a whole different level of lie than post birth abortions.
That's a terribly egregious should cause people to bring out the pitchforks and march on the right like it really should like, like to use tragedies of.
I mean, the closest thing anyone can come to to you know, this situation is when a child is born that doesn't make it past the first couple days.
Right, and sadly, this does still happen.
We have well, it happens more now, especially in Texas because of their anti-abortion laws.
Right, we have ability to, you know, know things about children to see about about uh um pregnancies, to see if the fetus is viable and, you know, giving parents a humane option to terminate before it's born, before going through all the other stuff that might also endanger the woman's life.
By the way um, you know, this is an option that's become available by our technology and in some cases, some women choose to not go that route and give birth anyway in the hope that there might be some you know extra special roll of the dice that comes up.
You know box cars and they make it.
And yeah, probably there are some kids who are not felt that they'll make it very long and they make it longer than expected, but generally this is only a matter of weeks or months or something.
It's not that anyone just makes it to full life realistically, uh.
But there are sadly, children who are born and they make it a few days and then, despite all of our medical knowledge, they don't make it any further and you know we don't have no one.
I don't care how many children you did have.
You don't have the right to judge people who don't want to go through that heartbreak, who who want to maybe you know, avoid that by terminating earlier um, and I don't think you have the right.
I definitely don't think you have the right to take a situation where that occurs and to try to then say that they murdered their own child and use this as a way to say that abortions should all be avoided, because this scenario happens like.
This is a a twisting of objective reality.
To fit it inside a box it shouldn't fit in and repackaged as another thing that's also bad.
I mean, there's there's so much slime happening on so many levels with just this one three word phrase and I can't.
I'm getting emotional now and I work hard on not being emotional about this stuff, but that's difficult for me to avoid that because you, as a politician hopefully, should avoid getting yourself mixed up in these personal scenarios of people and try to use those, as you know, a political point.
But that's what they do.
I mean, that's what especially, and if you do, you should pay a price for that.
You should.
Yes yeah um, but but literally one of his potential vice presidential candidates was on the, you know, one of the morning shows again, we're recording this on sunday and the host read off a bunch of lies yeah, and one of the responses was, oh, that's nothing new.
He said that stuff before.
Yeah, like it, it's okay for them, you know oh, why are we even, why are we even talking about?
It's like people are numb.
It's like people are numb in the level of lies yeah yeah, and he wants not a reason to become numb to them right yeah, and so, yeah.
So the problem that I see is that you this started with a trickle and turned into, uh, you know, now you've got newspapers writing uh editorials like uh, Biden should step down like like, these people are experts in what's what his brain chemistry is yeah,
and but the thing it all goes back for me to the idea of, like you said, metagaming.
What will be better?
Yeah, it will not be better to suddenly have the party arguing over who should be the candidate after we've already gone through the primaries.
First of all, there's basically no way to force him to step down, so it would have to be his decision okay, but let's say for a moment that he does make a decision and he says, i'm stepping down.
Well, one thing that I heard was he should just release all his delegates to vote as they see fit.
Well, that's going to cause chaos and infighting, and there are still people who are mad about and think Bernie should have been the candidate in 2016.
Yeah okay, and you reviewed one of them for my podcast.
Yeah, yeah.
And you think that suddenly every, all the different factions of the Democratic Party are gonna suddenly come together?
Yeah, not to mention, hold hands and sing at the same time?
Yeah right, yeah.
Not to mention that the names that have been most floated, at least that i've seen most floated have been people like Gavin Newsom And Gretchen Whitmer.
And, you know, there's one thing about both those people.
Trying to put my finger on it that doesn't describe Vice President Harris.
Oh, yeah, they're white.
That's true.
And it's probably metagaming, isn't it, David?
Yeah.
And you're going to acknowledge that the U.S. electorate is not ready for not only a female president, but a black female president.
Yes.
Right.
And you're really sitting there proposing that the vice president should be skipped over for one of these governors.
Now, I mean, they may be both perfectly good candidates.
They may both run as well as Pritzker and who knows who else in four years.
If they really had enough swing in the Democratic Party to, you know, to have everyone line up behind them right in this moment, then why didn't they have enough swing to put their feet down and say, no, there should be real primaries and I should be one of those candidates in those primaries?
Like, why couldn't any of those candidates then say, you know, yeah, he wants to run again, but we should have real primaries so that we can do that?
I mean, because they're members of the party, right?
They're not conspiracists would tell you that they, they being the Democratic day that's never named.
Yeah, right.
Right.
Well, in this case, it's the Democratic Party.
The Democrat, the DNC determined that there wouldn't be real primaries.
And it's like, you know, because Marianne Williamson has already been tweeting that she was like, well, I guess there should have been primaries.
She would have been the first to tweet it, right?
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
And a number of us, including me, pointed out there were primaries.
You were in it.
You forgot already.
But they didn't have any debates for any of those primaries, but they did sort of have them.
Right.
Those guys didn't show up.
They're easy to do.
Yeah.
There is a historical advantage to running an incumbent.
And there was, again, since we didn't necessarily know we were doing this podcast, I don't have a handy, but there is an interview making the rounds right now of a political scientist who he has correctly predicted like nine out of the last 10 presidential winners.
And so I have that clip right here.
It's only a few moments.
We're going to play it.
All of these pundits and pollsters and analysts that you see on all the cable channels and all the networks have no track record in predicting elections.
And yet they come on and they claim they know how this debate is going to affect the outcome of elections.
They have no idea.
It's sports talk radio.
It may be entertaining, but it has no scientific basis.
So what is the impact, do you think?
Zero.
Debates are not predictive of outcomes.
Hillary Clinton won all three debates, still lost.
John Kerry won all the debates, still lost.
Barack Obama got trounced 72 to 20% in the poll, worse than Biden, and went on to win.
That's why we rely on the 13 keys which tap into the structure of how elections really work.
And they show that Democrats really only chance to win, contrary to everything you've heard, is with Biden running.
Look at the incumbency key.
So I'm just pausing here because I've seen this clip and I know that he doesn't list these, but I want to list them right now, verbally right now.
This is Lichtman's 13 criteria that he lists as keys.
You need at least seven of them.
So party mandate.
You have to have the party behind you.
Contest.
Incumbency, which he's going to say is a big one.
Third party has to be in your favor.
Short-term economy.
And then also as a separate point, long-term economy.
Policy change.
Now, I'm sure somewhere he gives a lot more detail on what each of these means, but the presence of social unrest.
Presence or absence of a scandal.
Presence or absence of foreign military failure.
And of course, foreign military success.
Incumbent charisma is the 12th one he lists.
And the 13th one he lists is challenger charisma.
So, you know, I don't know.
Do you want to just go through the rest of the clip or do you want to go list those as you like?
Or what do you want to do?
You can go through the rest of the clip.
Yeah, sure.
Let's hear it.
Biden checks that off.
The contest key.
He checks that off.
He was uncontested.
It takes six keys to count out the White House party.
Well, you know, six would have to fully finish.
If Biden doesn't run, they lose the contest key.
They lose the incumbency and only four more keys would have to fall.
I think that that's actually kind of what I was trying to get at here is that the problem right now is that the Democratic Party is considering replacing Biden, mostly because it's unclear whether or not he actually physically can carry out the rest of this campaign and put up a fight against his opponent.
So that seems like a fundamentally different thing than some of the items that you have in your rubric.
It's a huge mistake.
They're not doctors.
They don't know whether Biden is physically capable of carrying out a second term or not.
Remember, a lot of folks were saying the same thing about Ronald Reagan, who was, you know, 73 and age was very different then.
And they said, you know, he's not capable of carrying out another term.
He won 49 states.
So this is all foolhardy nonsense.
The same pundits and pollsters who led us down the primrose path in 2016 are giving the Democrats horrible advice.
This proves what I've been saying for years.
Republicans have no principles.
Democrats have no spine.
Republicans are sticking with a blatant liar who lied for every one minute and 20 seconds of that debate, Donald Trump put out a lie.
And by the way, lies stick.
Debate performances can be overcome.
And now the first sign of adversity, the spineless Democrats want to throw under the bus their own incumbent president.
My goodness.
So that's the rest of that.
Yeah, that sums it up at the end there.
My goodness.
I agree with him, you know, with Professor Lichtman there.
And yeah, they it's true, I think, about a lot of them having no spine that they just immediately panicked in that way.
And it's also true that, you know, basically I agree with everything that he said.
So I don't need to really go back and list through and say, that's true, that's true, that's true.
But he sounded old when he said it, though, David, isn't that?
Yeah, and he looked old.
For those of you not seeing the pictures, you know, he but yeah, his he is actually talking sense.
And the people who are saying we should upend everything and throw the Democratic Party into chaos, that is not going to help.
It is simply not.
That's going to be a worse outcome.
As much as I, you know, I saw that when I saw the debate, I was also had levels of uncertainty.
I mean, I think sometimes that the Democratic Party, I'm going to lay some cards out on the table here for you, David.
I'm Canadian.
I don't live under a U.S. president, though we do suffer the maneuverings of U.S. presidents all the time, but not directly, sort of indirectly.
But the Democratic Party isn't that good at politics.
I don't know how to say that any other way.
They're not that good at this.
They weren't that good at this when, I mean, Obama was a good candidate, but if it weren't for having such a strong candidate, they wouldn't have won.
And, you know, aside from Obama, they haven't had a lot of success in the last 20 years.
You know, they were against Trump twice now.
They're batting 50% on that.
And they thought that they didn't have to try that hard against Trump, that it was okay for any candidate to run against him because the real race would then be whoever they picked.
And that was certainly true with Hillary.
But maybe they were a little more cautious with Biden because then Trump had the incumbency.
But they, and they went with a safer choice in that case, right?
They didn't go with Mayor Pete.
They didn't go for a second crack at Bernie Sanders, who is also older than Biden.
Yeah.
But, you know, they're not that good at this.
They're just pretty good at it.
We can go back to Will Rogers.
I'm not a member of any organized political party.
I'm a Democrat.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And he also said Democrats never agree on anything.
That's why they're Democrats.
If they agreed with each other, they'd be Republicans.
Yeah.
And they're just from a Canadian perspective, they are like, we wonder how it is that you ended up with two political parties that one that's good at politics, but, you know, has in a lot of occasions, just a straight line to Christian fundamentalism.
Let's just call it what it is.
And the other that it just plain old isn't that good at it.
And I, I don't know, you know, the only thing that ever saves them is having an extremely charismatic candidate.
You can not like Bill Clinton all you like.
You can say that he's the devil and that he, you know, however many trips he made on by, you know, on the Epstein plane or whatever.
But he was a charismatic guy, very charismatic.
And that's the reason why he won.
Yeah.
And Obama was very charismatic.
That's the reason why he won.
He was a level above all the other candidates as far as this went.
And they didn't win by landslides.
Right.
Right.
The, you know, there was no way anyone, I don't think anyone was ever going to be, any Democrat was ever going to beat Ronald Reagan because Ronald Reagan had the level of charisma that, you know, that superstar level of charisma.
So he had the organization of the Republican Party and also that sort of superstar charisma where I describe it like even the people who hate you sort of like you.
We had a prime minister just like that.
His name was Brian Mulrooney, where even the people who hated Mulroney sort of liked him because he was just that charismatic.
And, you know, but well, I think the Democratic Party sucks at this.
Like they gotta find some way to get their shit together.
But here's the thing that I think it is.
The Democratic Party is mostly or in large part made up of people who I think want to do the right thing.
Now, are there power-hungry maniacs within?
Yes.
And of course, even if you start off wanting to do the right thing, you know, after years and years, you could end up that way.
But when you want to do the right thing and you believe you know what the right thing is, that causes arguments with other people who want to do the right thing and have a different opinion of what the right thing is.
This is why there is fighting between Democrats as to what to do about the Israel-Gaza situation because each of them have different opinions.
They want what's right.
They just don't agree on what's right.
Whereas Republicans, they will have their disagreements.
But as soon as a path is chosen, they all line up.
We talked about it on this podcast.
Everyone kneeling and kissing the ring of Trump, no matter what they have said about him in the past, no matter what he has said about them in the past, he insulted Ted Cruz's wife.
And Ted Cruz goes out there and mans the phones for him.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, he said terrible things about Chris Christie.
And Chris Christie was just set as a trophy behind him for most of his administration.
Yeah.
Like you just stand there, don't talk, just look pretty.
Yeah.
He, you know, Nikki Haley, he insulted her husband.
She turns around and says, well, I'm voting for him.
Yeah.
You know, and that doesn't happen.
Like I said, there are still Democrats upset about, you know, that Bernie didn't get the nod in 2016 because he didn't get the votes.
You know, sorry.
But this, they, they lie, and it reminds me of the battle between scientists and creationists because creationists have disagreements.
Some of them are young earth creationists.
Some of them are older creationists.
Some, you know, and they literally put out a document at one time that was found that said, we just have to agree.
We're not going to argue about that.
We need to get creationism into the schools.
And then once we wedge it in there, then we can have those other discussions.
Yeah.
But scientists, right?
Scientists, meanwhile, will write papers and say, well, this form of evolution is incorrect.
We want because it was punctuated equilibrium instead of gradual change.
Right.
And so they'll be using the scientific process to, you know, debate amongst themselves.
And creationists will be like, aha, see, those scientists can't even determine what it is.
It must be creationism.
And they'll because they haven't agreed on, all agreed on the exact same answer.
Right.
Their answers aren't close enough together for us.
Yeah, yeah.
Right.
And so that's what it reminds me of is just that, you know, Republicans care more in general.
And I know you can, anyone can point out counterexamples, but in general, they care more about power and however they get that power.
If it means Christian fundamentalism, that's fine.
You know, the billionaires who are funding the Republican Party, they don't care about Christian fundamentalism.
They care about reducing their taxes.
If it takes Christian fundamentalism to get them there, okay.
Not going to affect me.
I'm a billionaire.
I think you've hit on something that's got to be seen, I think, eventually.
Maybe it is now among the deep recesses of moral philosophy, but simply put, is that there's a truism about humans here and about logic in general, is that it's easier to come to consensus about what's not true than it is to come to consensus about what's actually true.
Right.
I think that's generally what we're looking at here, is that it's easier for everyone to agree that, you know, if we're all going to, you know, transport this to fictional scenario, I'm going to spoil a movie here that's very, very old.
Murder on the Orient Express.
Hercule Poirot, classic movie, great film.
Very, very long compared to its time.
Talks to everyone and everyone perfectly agrees on everything.
And he knows that something else is going on.
So he investigates further and investigates further and eventually finds out the truth, but can't crack them because everyone still agrees on the lie that no one murdered this person, that, you know, something else happened other than any one of us did it.
And, you know, the actual truth was much more complicated than that, which was that, you know, they all did it, you know, and that was, you know, he was able to articulate it, except that they were still able to agree on the lie.
And so he was like, well, I don't know.
I guess that's, that's what it is.
You can try to arrest them all, but, you know, they're sticking to their story.
So, you know, nothing, not much we can do about that.
Also, it helped in the context of the story that who they were murdering was an objectively terrible person.
And so no one really wanted to, you know, worry about him too much.
Yeah.
If he, if it had been a single mom that somehow 12 strangers that got together to try to murder, you know, would also not fit the plot, but maybe they would have, you know, tried to stop them.
But it's easier for all of us to get together to agree on our alibi that no one did it and have that be in perfect lockstep than it would be to just have everyone work out the truth, because even the truth would be messier than that as to how everything turns out for all the stuff.
And, you know, people who want the truth, who want their government to be truthful, who want who want to live in a world that is true, they're probably going to have to be okay with a level of complexity, with a level of disagreement, with a level of murkiness there.
And because the option is a very clear fabrication is really what you're looking at here.
Yeah.
And that's so, I mean, to the people in the U.S., those are your choices right now.
You're, you're, you have a very clear lie, a very simple lie, or you have a murky truth.
And I know that what you'd like is a very simple truth, but that's not where the world is headed.
That's not where you're ever going to be.
The world is never going to become less complex than it is now.
It's always going to be more complex.
And you're going to have to recognize the way in which truth sits.
It's not, it's not like the end of a detective novel where everything fits in and everyone goes, aha, this is the truth.
And it's so simple now that we have what now that we have the answer.
It's never quite that true.
And so I guess that's the point of this is that, yeah, the Democratic Party is disorganized.
And I think it's what you say is right, that they do lean more towards objective reality and towards a level of idealism about what is actually good for people.
And right now, especially, I don't think this has been true of the Democratic Party always, but especially true now.
The Democratic Party does not care.
Donald Trump does not care about anyone else or anyone else's.
He doesn't even really care about the other billionaires.
No, he cares about himself.
He's not even classist, except for one class, a class of one himself.
That's it.
Right.
I'm not sure.
I mean, I'm literally not sure if, you know, if one of his sons was caught red-handed doing something and he was doing it for Trump himself.
Yeah.
I think Trump would just wash his hands of it and say, huh, oh, well.
Yeah, it'd be worse for me if I gave you.
Yeah.
Like the whole bit about, you know, at his, you know, at his trial where he's like, I have to go see Barron's graduation.
You don't give a shit about Barron's graduation.
You just wanted to complain about something.
Yeah, he wants to say that the administration is against me.
Right.
The administrative state is trying to hold me back somehow.
Yeah, just like he said, oh, with this horrible trial, I can't go out and campaign.
And then on the days off that he did have, he'd be out playing golf.
Yeah.
And I can't, you know, if the Republicans want to complain about all the extra time their candidate had to spend in court or might have yet to spend in court or might be on house arrest or whatever's going to happen on July 11th when he's sentenced.
Right.
You know, that's on them because they knew that he was facing these charges, right?
Right.
It's not like these charges came up after they decided that they were going to get locked behind this guy.
That shouldn't be a surprise to anyone and that shouldn't be a mitigating factor in any of that stuff.
They could have chosen another candidate.
There's other Republican candidates they could have gone with.
And yeah, I and for better, for worse, really, I think at this point, the Democratic Party is going to have to get behind their guy.
Well, exactly.
And it, but my worry is that a lot of damage has already been done and we're seeing it.
Probably.
If they don't, we've already seen some, in particular, a very popular podcaster went out and was proclaiming that, oh, we should change.
And then I think he saw the backlash and started being like, oh, I'm pro-Biden.
Really, I am.
I'm pro-Biden.
So he already was backtracking.
And I think some of the others are too.
The problem is you've already riled up the media.
I mean, the media were already riling themselves up.
But when they could go to anonymous sources and even some who weren't so anonymous, you know, it made it a story.
Like I said, it was self-fulfilling.
The story created itself.
And now because the media is reporting on it, people are reacting to it.
People who never saw the debate, people who didn't care about the debate.
Like the professor said in that clip, debates are meaningless in the grand scheme of things.
But coverage following the debate could be something if it continues.
It's still, well, essentially July.
There's plenty of time to change it.
But it needs to just be done.
And continuing to argue about it, continuing to suggest that they should replace him, which will turn into a huge fight, which will end up being, you know, splitting the Democratic Party one way or another.
Especially if they, again, if they proposed not going with Harris.
Yeah.
I mean, you just split at least in two, if not in many more pieces.
Right.
Yeah.
You just, you can't, you can't do that.
And anyone who says you can, I have seen some people saying you can.
I'm like, you live in a fairy tale world.
It will not happen.
Yeah.
And so my take on the whole thing is Biden is still fine.
He is still the same man that we saw.
He had a bad performance.
And we have to stand by him until and unless he literally becomes unable to do the job, like you said.
I have not seen that.
If people thought this was going to get there, they should have had stronger voices in like January-ish.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
And you know what?
As other people have said, you, you don't just vote for a person.
You vote for an administration.
If you vote for the Trump administration, you're voting for a likely dictatorship and certainly.
Yeah, you're voting for bigotry.
You're voting for taking away rights.
You're voting for destroying the environment.
You're doing all those things.
If you vote for Biden, you're voting for his administration and what it stands for.
And anyone who thinks that it would be better, any of these people who are metagaming, that it would be better to replace him now are fools.
I'll just put it out there.
And I don't care how long they spent in politics.
They're fools.
And that's really my last word on it.
Yeah.
I mean, in survivor terms, this is like mid-tribal council trying to say that all of a sudden you want to change the plan.
Yeah.
It's, it's, uh, it could easily get, you know, you voted out.
Right.
Person who wants to change the plan.
Yeah.
Um, so to wrap this up, there is another clip from Twitter that I'd like to play.
This is a debate moderator from Colorado, who was moderating debates for Lauren Bobert.
And I get this right.
Share sound, yeah, share.
And he is, to me, I retweeted this.
This is the kind of guy that should be doing the job of debate moderation.
This is a cobbled together clip.
There's a video, but we'll just listen to the audio here.
Yeah, this is tremendous.
Have a listen.
In Colorado's 3rd District, we did have a very close election, but we also had 50,000 Republicans not show up to vote.
So just to be clear, Ms. Bobert, you blame Republican voters for the fact that you nearly lost a safe seat and not your own conduct.
Ms. Bobert, you're running an ad right now that says deport them all.
Describe in detail how you see mass deportation playing out in the cities and towns of the 4th Congressional District.
First of all, having over 10 million illegal aliens coming into our country in under four years, this is unprecedented.
I'll note that you didn't make any attempt to answer the actual question, which is who should be doing this?
You introduced articles of impeachment against the president for his handling of the border.
That move was blocked by Republican House leadership.
It was sent to committee.
It was not blocked.
It was blocked by sending it to committee, so you didn't get the full House vote that you wanted to do.
No, I was questioning it.
I was a little house vote, and it was a good question.
I apologize.
This is going to be a long evening if you speak over the facts, okay?
So a question for everybody up here.
A question on this for Mr. Sonnenberg.
You have also called for mass deportations, and let's talk about that economic impact.
Absolutely.
I would use the police.
I would use the National Guard.
Those people aren't the ones working.
Those people are the ones causing the crime to go up in Denver and the area around.
Imagine, if you will, do you have any evidence to support that?
Because law enforcement has not put that forward.
I'm just curious where you're getting that causation.
How would that work if the National Guard or the military were to come into Douglas County where you live and start rounding people up?
I think that it is time that we take it very seriously for what it is.
Would you like to answer the question, Kyle?
I will, because I don't.
Mr. Holtorf, you've been interrupting people constantly.
I would ask you to stop.
Ms. Flora, could you please answer the question?
Yes.
Bringing an out-of-state National Guardsman or the U.S. military in Douglas County, do you feel like that would work?
And we also, by the way, have to stop the president of the United States from suing people.
We're going to move on.
The question was about the actual work of rounding people up in Douglas County.
We took a couple tries at that.
Ms. Bobert, this session of Congress is on track to be one of the least productive in history in terms of the bills passed.
Your Republican House colleague Andy Biggs said we have nothing to go out there and campaign on.
Another House Republican, Chip Roy, said the Republican majority does not have one material, meaningful, significant accomplishment.
That's what the Republicans are saying.
I would give you one more opportunity if you would like to answer his question, which is the number of bills you've prime-sponsored that have been signed by the president.
So my Pueblo Jobs Act has been signed in a number, please.
That is one.
Got it.
Ms. Flora, you've called on all parents to pull their children out of public elementary and middle schools.
And last week, the Colorado Republican Party told parents to pull their children out of all public schools.
If parents were to take your advice seriously and pull all the kids out of public schools, what would America without a public education system look like?
That's a raising.
The situation, Kyle, is I'm very proud of the work that I've been doing on school choice.
I was hopeful for an answer about what would happen if folks followed your advice and pulled all the kids out of public schools, but we'll leave that for another conversation.
You resigned your position as House Minority Leader after your drunk driving arrest surface this year.
And my question is not about what you did while drunk, which for anybody who missed it was speeding up I-25 at 90 miles per hour so fast a trooper thought that you were trying to race him.
Then you reached for your gun during the traffic stop.
You asked the trooper to call the State Patrol's lobbyist, then you asked him to keep the arrest out of the media.
My question to you is about what you did while sober.
You did not disclose your drunk driving arrest to your Republican colleagues when they were considering you for leader and electing you.
No.
What does that tell voters about your judgment?
Well, thank you, Kyle, for that.
I mean, I should not have done it.
Was it a mistake not to tell your colleagues when they were considering you for leader, knowing that you had something so big and embarrassing in your recent past?
Yeah.
You told a statehouse colleague who had lost his son in the Aurora Theater shooting that he needed to let go of his son's murder.
You called a legislator of color buckwheat during a Florida debate.
You suggested that people with disabilities are like people who took the risk of running with the bulls in Pamplona.
And you suggested that Miss Boebert dresses like a prostitute.
Do you regret saying any of those things?
And why do you talk to people like that?
See, it's that last statement right there.
Why do you talk to people like that?
So I think we should note that the giggling that was going on and the other voices that you heard was not us.
I mean, I did chuckle a couple times, but I think it was Angry F in Politics was the TikTok account.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is an interesting thing that happens on TikTok where people take a video and then they add their own sort of side-by-side video commentary sort of with it.
And this person involved here is just sort of, I mean, he's very interesting to watch.
He's sort of like interested at some points and like shocked at others and making his expressions.
It's very funny.
But the overall impression of this moderator that's just not having it with these candidates and their kish gallop and not answering the question.
And the problem here, because I've seen a lot of criticism of the moderators, and it's warranted.
But the problem.
Warranted, that's a good word.
Yeah.
The problem is the agreed upon setting rules of the debate didn't allow them to fact check.
Yeah.
Because the Trump campaign, as I understand it, would not agree to real live fact-checking.
So you shouldn't have agreed to it in my mind.
Exactly.
Really?
Exactly.
I think the Biden's a bad idea.
It's better to not have a debate if you can't check candidates, especially a candidate that's known for telling all of the lies all at once.
And the, you know, one of the, I think it was Jake Tapper.
I could be wrong, but I think he was interviewed by another outlet and defended it and said, well, it's not the moderator's job to fact check.
It's the other candidate who should be fact-checking.
And to some extent, he's right.
But the format that was set up didn't allow for it because of the Gish Gallop.
You can always spout more lies faster than someone else can debunk those lies.
Just any time.
And so if you give them, you know, three minutes to answer and one minute to rebut, well, already you've given three minutes to lie and only one minute to counter the lies.
Yeah, right.
And you're not even going to get one lie countered in one minute, let alone three minutes worth.
And then, you know, add on that Trump used his one minute responses to throw on more lies.
And so it's a situation where should the moderators have done more?
Yes.
Were they somewhat hamstrung by the format?
Yes.
That they agreed to the whole thing.
Mind you.
Well, yes.
That it can't be not said.
It has to go with it.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
Was the whole thing a shit show?
Yes.
And that falls, you know, there, there's plenty of blame to go around for that, including the Biden people who should have seen something like this coming.
Don't agree.
Don't agree to a debate where there's no fact checking.
Just don't.
Yeah, that's going to have to be more standard.
And if they won't agree to it, nail them for it.
Let them know.
We were going to have a debate, but we couldn't get them to agree to fact checking.
We're just certain that they're just going to use that time to just lie, lie, lie.
And we don't want to put that in front of everyone.
So we would rather not have a debate.
But that would also require them to be more interested in the truth than in the engagement.
Who's they?
Whoever would put this on, right?
This situation is CNN.
Okay.
I wasn't sure if you were talking about CNN or the Biden administration.
That's why I asked.
Well, CNN gets the engagement.
Right.
But, you know, Biden administration, you know.
They should have known better.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
They should have.
I mean, that's what it comes down to in that.
But so yeah, there's, I mean, again, you know, I know we're wrapping up here, but I do want to reiterate there's blame.
There's blame within the Biden administration.
It's not great.
None of the situations are.
It's just that, again, we shouldn't make it worse.
You know, and if you're a person.
Even Biden came out and said, no, I didn't have a good performance.
I don't move as fast.
I don't, you know, debate as well.
But here I am.
And here's what I stand for.
Yeah.
And I, you know, I think that's what you're going to get.
That's, I mean, I'm also metagaming here too.
Don't get me wrong.
I accuse those other people of metagaming this scenario, but I'm also metagaming it.
I'm just coming down on the other side.
Right.
Yeah.
Yes.
Same.
You know, I think you're doing the same thing too.
And I think everyone is, not just the people who are saying that.
Everyone is.
I just think, like I said earlier, they're fools.
They're metagaming wrong and they are fools.
And I don't, some of them are smart in other ways.
And I don't understand how they are coming out and saying it would be better to do it this way.
You are ignoring history.
You are ignoring reality.
You live in a fairy tale land.
Yeah.
That's, I mean, if people want to, you know, you know, email the podcast, come to me on Twitter and explain to me how, no, everything will be perfect.
Great.
You come do that.
But I'm telling you, you're living in, you know, with unicorns and Pegasus's farting rainbows.
It's, yeah, it's not going to be, you know, people aren't going to play nice in this scenario.
It's going to be elbowing their way to the front.
Right.
Yeah.
So wrapping this up, David, where can people find you?
Well, if they want to come hopefully agree with me.
Bring the pain to you directly.
I am, as I mentioned, on Twitter and Blue Sky as at David Bloomberg on threads is at David Bloomberg TV.
You know, I discuss a wide variety of things.
I was thinking about this the other day.
You know, a lot of accounts you go to and they talk about science or they talk about TV or they talk about politics.
You will literally get from me a tweet about an old Survivor season I'm rewatching, a tweet about Biden and Trump, a tweet about some global warming, a tweet about the Supreme Court, a tweet about a current television show.
And these will just all come in succession.
So, you know, know what you're in for when you see my Twitter.
But for other things, and you can find me, all my different accounts on Linktree at linktree slash David Bloomberg with a dot before the EE in the URL.
And I'm at David Bloomberg TV, as I mentioned, on threads and on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.
But for those, it's you've got to stick to the one topic or else the algorithm punishes you.
So it's all reality TV all the time on the on the video sites.
Yeah.
And I'm at Spencer G. Watson on Twitter.
I'm also on a couple of those others, but are rare to go there.
So really, you want to catch me somewhere, catch me on Twitter.
But if you want to send something that's more than 280 characters, you can put your fingers together to type out that email.
Send it to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
And, you know, it's been a week and I put out an episode about Jordan Peterson that I was sure was going to get, you know, a lot of feedback.
That inbox is empty.
As of this morning, I got no angry emails from the Jordan Peterson stands standing up for him.
I got a couple of loud mouths on Twitter, and that's all.
I'm beginning to think this guy is just smoking mirrors that no one really likes him.
So, yeah, if you're a Jordan Peterson guy, stand up for your man, man.
Listen to that episode.
Tell me where I went wrong because no one else can.
I think they just find more trolls that fire off a tweet than you are who actually put together an email.
Oh, yeah.
They're definitely lazy.
Yeah.
There's no doubt about that.
Yeah.
Right.
So, but that's the reason why they'll lose the war of ideas, right?