David Bloomberg and the host dissect August’s U.S. election chaos, from Tim Walz’s National Guard service (criticized only for retiring months pre-Iraq deployment) to Trump’s 34 felony convictions and 78-year-old rally fatigue—now pivoting to online interviews like TikTok with Aiden Ross (23) and a crashed Twitter Spaces with Elon Musk. Georgia’s election board shifts, allowing delays in certification, risk undermining trust even without fraud, as Trump falsely claims wins like New York. JD Vance’s fringe "couch rumors" and RFK Jr.’s ballot removal (New York dropped him post-false address claim) expose vulnerabilities, while Trump blames staff, mirroring QAnon’s reality-warping. Defeating Trumpism demands voting for Harris everywhere—his base’s blind loyalty may not survive his inevitable losses. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that is chronicling the long and slow process of how we're eventually going to get where we end up.
If that makes any sense to anyone, have at it.
So, continuing with our minimumist approach, I have no theme music.
We're getting right into it.
Before I start, if anyone has any questions, comments, complaints, concerns about anything we go over on this podcast, you want to tell us how we got it wrong, how you like that we got it right, anything like that, you send that email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
And I'm here today again with all these election updates with our U.S. correspondent, David Bloomberg.
Man on the scene.
I've never had such an official title before.
Really?
Oh, well, there you go.
Yeah.
Podcasting title, official U.S. correspondent, man on the scene.
I'm told he's directly in the middle of the Midwest, which makes him in the middle of the entire U.S., right?
That's right.
It's not Kansas.
No, we're not in Kansas anymore.
No, it's Illinois.
Yes.
Direct center of the country.
Yes, Illinois, where I can look at people who are wearing Trump gear and say, ha, your vote doesn't matter.
Well, we'll find out.
So a lot to go over today.
We don't have, there's a DNC coming up soon, but we didn't want to wait for that because there's just too much to go over.
So top of the order, starting with the Democrats this time.
So the Democrats now have a vice presidential candidate, Tim Walz, is Minnesota governor now, maybe potentially vice president of the U.S. in November.
He ticks all the boxes.
He's got what everyone refers to as Midwest charm, you know, offering everyone sweets and over talking at, you know, saying goodbye at doorways and all those things that I hear about in TikTok videos.
It's, and I've made a joke online, it's very Canadian.
And I've also said even before this, that Minnesota is culturally Canadian.
Like if a Canadian snuck across the border, they would fit in perfectly in Minnesota.
Most Minnesotans would never notice any real difference between themselves and the Canadian.
We could walk among you and you'd never know.
And if the U.S. ever falls apart, we're claiming Minnesota first.
Did you feel that way when they elected Jesse Ventura as their governor?
Yeah, back.
Still would have.
Yeah, still would have.
Still culturally, you know, their love of hockey and the way the lakes freeze over in the winter and all those things.
It's very Manitoba and Saskatchewan adjacent.
It's, I mean, there's no place in the U.S. that's more like Canada than Minnesota.
Yeah.
And, you know, to be fair, Jesse Ventura has endorsed Harris.
So, you know, there is that.
Yeah.
My experience with Minnesotans usually came through work.
Yeah.
And I found them highly annoying.
Not because Minnesotans are annoying, but because they were, we had a Midwest organization.
As, you know, you'll recall, I used to work in air pollution prevention.
And there was a Midwest organization of states that would work together on these things.
And Minnesota kind of got shoved into it because they were in the same region as us, but they did not have the same issues as us.
You know, like we focused on ozone smog mostly.
And they don't have that because they don't have big cities like Chicago and, you know, and they have cooler temperatures, which also helps.
And so we'd be over here trying to focus our efforts on one thing, and they'd be over in the corner being like, hey, hey, we get a say too, and we want to talk about this.
We're like, no, we don't want to talk about that.
Stop being annoying.
So, yeah, that was that was my experience at work with Minnesotans.
You realize that this just makes them more like Canada, right?
Yes, yes.
In all the ways we are originally next to the U.S.
And whenever we're in any kind of discussions about anything, our, you know, the things that affect us are much, much different than the things that affect them, both with environment and temperature and smog and all those things.
And yeah, we just makes us want them even more.
Minnesota, come home.
Come home.
No, we need them right now.
Yeah, well, the U.S. needs them.
Oh, sure.
You need them right now.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, next election cycle.
Minnesota, Minnesota.
We'll just redraw the border around this thing.
You'll never be missed.
They don't even like you.
How about you take Texas?
You want Texas?
It's too far away.
I mean, really?
We've got Alaska, and you're saying Texas is too far away.
We would take Alaska second pick after Minnesota because of the cultural communication there.
Yeah.
I was always surprised that it wasn't that I think the British just messed that up.
I think the Russians were just angry at the British probably and they said, no, screw you.
We're going to sell this for pennies on the dollar to this brand new country that's going to be not important.
Likely what the Brussians were thinking back when they sold Alaska.
But anyway, we're way off topic here, Dave.
I was just going to say, how did we get here?
Wow.
Okay.
People are like, right.
We too.
We were barely started and we're already derailed.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Reminiscing about the states that Canada will eventually rule over.
So great Canadian empire.
We will conquer the world through diplomacy and our niceness.
So Tim Walz is formerly a National Guardsman.
This is one of the five branches of the military or something.
No, that's not one of the branches, is it?
No, it's just under one of the other wings.
But it is considered full military service for a lot of respects.
It's why a lot of famous politicians of this age who from the U.S. who wanted to avoid going to Vietnam were in the National Guard because that counted as military service.
I mean, I wouldn't, not of his age, of Trump's age.
Well, yeah, right.
Well, we've seen them through our age, we've seen a lot of politicians like this.
George W. Bush famously was in the National Guard and failed to show up for almost all of the things he was supposed to be there for.
Yeah.
Whatever you want to think of that.
That's a thing that happened.
So we're not here to talk about him so much, but a thing that happened near him was a thing called Swift Boating, which was in which during the turn back the clock recall 2004 campaign, 20 years ago, John Kerry ran against George W. Bush.
And John Kerry was an actual veteran versus George W. Bush, who was not an actual veteran of anything except marching a couple of times in a sweaty yard.
And John Kerry, after he got past that service, attempted to speak out against U.S. involvement in Vietnam, which is a soldier's right to do.
Not every soldier is required to be enthusiastic about the political decisions that led them to go to a conflict.
Much to everyone's surprise, I don't know why anyone's surprised that a soldier might disagree with the political decisions that they have just as much right to political opinions as anyone else.
But we're not talking about John Kerry here.
Just the fact that he got a thing called Swift Boating and that named for John Kerry because he ran a Swift boat and he got a couple purple hearts, and which they said called him decorated.
And then they said, Well, his service record wasn't that good.
And there was all kinds of people who were with him in the military that didn't like him.
And they spoke out against him and they just kind of trashed his military service.
And they're attempting to do the same thing with Tim Walz, although there's a couple of things that are different here.
First of all, Tim Walz hasn't spoken out against his own service in the way that John Kerry did.
He has done, in every instance that anyone's reported that I've seen, he's done nothing but give glowing regards for all the people he served in the National Guard with and all the work he did there.
The closest they can come to any kind of real criticism is that a few months before his unit was set to go to Iraq, he had already left the service.
He'd already put in his resignation.
Retirement.
Yeah.
So they're trying to conflate these two things as though he retired so that he didn't have to go to Iraq.
But he couldn't have known that his unit was going to get shipped to Iraq when he put in his retirement papers.
So it's just sort of a juxtaposition of trying to push these two things as close together as possible to make them seem like they're related.
Yeah, never let the facts get in the way of good swift voting.
Yeah.
Well, you know, in the case of John Kerry, you know, I also at the time thought that it was a little ridiculous what was happening to him, but he did speak out against his military service.
And to veterans, that's a big deal, I guess.
It's less of a thing that happens in Canada.
So that's one of the things about the U.S. that we kind of look at and go, okay, I guess if that's important to you, then I'm at it.
But in the case of this isn't a thing that's directly sort of comparable with Tim Walz.
And so a lot of people point out that this just is not likely to work, at least not nearly to the same extent as it did with John Kerry.
And the fact that they go back to previous tactics in this way kind of says something about the fact that they were unprepared for this and don't really have their own unique set of tactics for what to do with Tim Walz.
Well, and also, really, you've got Bonespurs Trump at your head of your ticket.
Yep.
And you're going to criticize Walls for his 24 years of service.
You know, I mean, I've seen some people criticizing Vance too and saying all he did was sit and, you know, at a keyboard.
He was a true keyboard warrior.
He was in the military.
But he was in the military.
Whatever.
That was the Marines.
Right?
Like, even the journalists' division in the Marines that he was in needed to do all the physical stuff to qualify for all the stuff in case they needed to presumably.
Yeah, I don't know well enough.
I feel certain that the Marines wouldn't swim on that just for that.
I mean, they're pretty serious about this thing of who gets to be called a Marine and you don't get to be called a Marine unless you did all the same things.
That's really part of the package, right?
Yeah.
So whether you like him or not, he did those things.
That's right.
Yeah, but you've got Trump at the head of the ticket.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Also saying Tim Walz doesn't matter.
Yeah.
By the way, or Tim Walz, JD Vance doesn't matter.
Being the guy that didn't serve, went to the National Guard and then didn't even serve in the National Guard because of bone spurs or whatever.
Well, because, As I understand it, his one of his father's tenants, who was a doctor, wrote the note saying, Well, yeah, there's all kinds of reasons to think that it wasn't even bone spurs.
There's all kinds of rights.
Yes, plus, he's the candidate who has everything else be just generally an outer veneer of like fakeness about everything, which is a big reason we're in the unreality problem we're in.
Yes.
So, uh, you told me before this that we had to mention something about a DUI or something that Tim Alt had.
Now, I hadn't heard of this before, so I'm going to let you take the wheel here.
Yeah, I mean, I just saw the story come up this morning.
I saw it on CNN that apparently he had a DUI many years ago, and then he got it, you know, a plea bargain down to reckless driving.
And in 2006, I believe, his campaign manager at the time lied about it, lied about what happened.
And now they're bringing this up.
And apparently, you know, I did not do a deep dive into it.
Like I said, it just happened this morning that it came out.
Apparently, he has previously acknowledged that, yes, the campaign manager lied about it and that was wrong and everything else.
And he said at the time he, you know, he was a teacher.
He had resigned from all extracurricular oversight.
He offered to resign from his teaching position, but his principal said no.
And so he used it.
He wanted to use it as a, you know, an example of what not to do.
And so obviously, DUI, terrible.
Don't do it.
Don't do it.
Obviously, having a campaign manager lie about something that is so easily found out.
Yeah.
Don't do it.
That's a rookie mistake.
Yeah.
It was 20 years ago.
Technically 18 that the campaign manager lied about it.
And another, I don't know, 10 or more, you know, since it actually happened.
Trump was convicted of 34 felonies this year.
Yeah, this year.
About that he was trying to decide in order to get elected in 2016.
Yeah.
Not to mention all of his entire life story of crimes and misdemeanors and, you know, being an adjudicated sex offender, as well as having many other allegations of such.
Yeah, Walsh shouldn't have done it.
I don't know that it should wreck his career for 30 years.
I don't know that it shouldn't.
He's obviously a changed man in many ways since then.
And the entire ticket still a way better choice than Trump and JD Vance.
So personally, I generally think always I'm very, very cynical about this.
And maybe someday after this election, we can go through before the next Canadian election and pick apart why I'm so damn cynical about all politicians.
But I generally think they're all lying to me in some regard, that they're all fake in some regard.
They're all, but, and they're all not ideal.
Like the ideal person would be, I don't know, I don't know what exactly they'd be, but they, they usually aren't what we get.
But that also means that you should want the least worst option.
Yeah.
and the at least first option here should be pretty obvious i think even still uh yeah you know you want to tell me that a uh a a politician campaign manager lied during a campaign uh look at my shocked face i'm just oh wow i uh you know what what was the lie exactly that matters yeah you know it not every lie is the exact same Right.
And in the same way that media distortions are not all exact same, because media that reports a story and maybe leaves a couple little bits out is not the same as media that, you know, as I point out in places like Russia, for example, media that tries to say, magical, magical sounds, you know, those bombs didn't drop in the town next door to you.
That town didn't burn to the ground.
That town's actually never existed.
It's, you know, like the level of distortion happening is often compared and conflated as though the sorts of lies told in Russia are equivalent to the sorts of lies told in Western society.
And it's just not the same.
It's just not the same.
Even Fox News doesn't go to the full level of unreality that you'll find in places like China and Russia, where they'll just say, you know, I just saw a video yesterday of a Chinese official being asked by Mehdi Hassan where specific individuals that were part of the Russian or pardon me, part of the Chinese administration went.
They just disappeared.
This person disappeared.
This person disappeared.
Where are they?
And the Chinese guy is just like, you'll never see them again.
And it's like, that's not comforting.
You know, but that's not happening here.
It's not happening here.
So, you know, although these things often complain as though they're equal, but yeah.
If Fox News thought they could get away with it, they would.
Well, Tucker Carlson did his level best with January 6th.
Yes.
Really.
And but the side-by-side videos of the edited footage versus the actual footage really did a lot to skewer the view that what he was trying to show there of not that big a deal.
But if it had been up to him, he would have just shown it was a it was a tourist visit.
We don't know what those same conversations he would regularly tell people, you can't trust any other source.
You can only trust us.
And if you only trusted him, you would think that January 6th was just a tourist outing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They got shown around the building and then escorted out and they left willingly.
Right.
So anyway, we're talking about the election right now.
Yes.
So Harrison Walls are the ticket for the Democrats.
They're doing rallies.
These rallies are packed, like jammed to the rafters.
People are trying to spin a narrative that they're not as packed as they really are.
So I'm seeing pictures from rallies where, you know, they'll take a picture of part of the crowd, you know, in the hour or so before the event starts.
And someone will claim it wasn't really full.
And then someone else posts the actual picture of this is when they were actually talking and shows like a video showing the sound of the talking and everything else and the cheering.
And they're full in the same stands.
It's like, okay, well, people are trying to puncture this and show a different reality than the one that's really there.
And that's really what I like to talk about here.
I mean, another thing that's come up is should be a familiar refrain from people on the right.
They didn't use a phrase though, but the phrase that they want to use is fake news, but that's kind of played out now, right?
But they are claiming that the crowds at these events are completely generated by AI.
And how we get past the ability for AI to generate fake images is going to get more difficult in the future.
I don't want to spend a lot of time on it here, except to mention that people should start thinking about how we do that.
What do we do for that?
How we're going to get past this, how we show that any images that we ever see online aren't real in any respect, because AI is only going to get better at this.
So what are your thoughts, David?
I mean, it's, I don't know that I have many more thoughts other than, of course, Elon Musk was even, you know, doing his usual thing of quote tweeting people who said that with his like, interesting, if true, trying to boost this idea.
Right, right.
While it violated, like he did this with a fake, an actual fake Harris AI generated, you know, thing about Harris, and which violated the rules of his own platform because it wasn't labeled as AI generated.
Yeah.
And rules are for thee and not for me, according to him.
Right.
Yeah.
And then, you know, just Trump got on board and said this, but then someone must have said something to Trump from his own group because when a reporter challenged him on it, he changed his tune to, oh, well, I don't know.
You know, I'm seeing this and I'm seeing that and I wasn't there.
And so he's kind of trying to do the old two-step, you know, that we've discussed before of, well, I'm not going to say it is or it isn't.
So let his believers go with one thing.
And, you know, that is a thing Trump does, but it's also a thing that a lot of politicians do.
The sudden not being sure and I'll get back to you and, you know, move on to a different thing.
What about this instead?
Or I mean, this is a sort of a like a political rhetorical device that's often used to dodge questions.
It's not new to Trump, but it is a frustrating part of anyone that really wants to know what's really, what a person really thinks of these things or what's really going on.
But let's move on to polls.
I'm going to talk about polls a little bit specifically because people are attempting to reinterpret the nature of polls to service their own biases and beliefs.
So while Biden was in the race against Trump and Biden was trailing Trump by still the margin of error, but a few percentage points across the board in national polls, mind you, not looking at individual states, but in national polls, there was a lot of Democrats who were saying that polls don't really matter.
The only poll that really matters is Election Day and that cope is standard when you're behind.
And then now that they've swapped and Harris is a candidate and Harris is currently climbing in the polls, I don't know how much we want to discuss as to exactly why there is more energy in her campaign.
She just had the DNC.
She appears to be at least getting the DNC bump that Trump did not get with the RNC.
Or no, sorry.
She hadn't had the DNC.
Feels like it has because of all the rallies that they've been having and the fact that they usually wait till the, the Dnc, to have the vp pick.
But she's having all these rallies, she's picked a vp, which is kind of the the big deal of the convention, and she's climbing the polls and she's leading Trump by it around the same margin as Biden was trailing Trump by before the swap happened.
And so now the same people who used to say that uh uh, you know, the only poll that matters is election day, are pointing to those same polls and saying, look at all the polls, the polls are so good, I really like all these polls.
And now it's the Trump people who are saying the only poll that matters is election day.
And this is a factor that's not great for our reality.
If, if you feel like you can pick and choose whether or not you like polls at all or whether or not you trust polls at all, then like, just pick a lane.
Like, don't have this shift over time.
If you think that polls can be shifty, then just say that.
And and then also don't believe them when they're showing your, your candidate, your chosen candidate, to be ahead.
Like yeah, exactly I.
I mean, polls are difficult.
We know that.
Yeah okay it's, it's hard to do a poll, but most of the organizations that do them try to be scientific.
I say most because, like Rasmussen has gone totally off the edge into Maga territory and are completely unreliable at this point and there are some like that, but they used to, at least in theory, be reliable.
Um, but others, you know, they do their best and they take these polls and when you've got a number of different polls showing similar things, you should be thinking huh well, I bet there's something to that.
We need to figure that out instead of just saying ignore the polls, ignore the polls, and posting things like i've never been polled, have you or uh it.
The polls are wrong because young people don't answer their phones.
The polls are wrong because they didn't ask everyone in the country what they wanted.
Yeah um, now the phone thing is interesting because I will tell you yeah, I have been getting a ton of calls that are labeled as spam possible spam and a couple that are labeled as political, and I have answered none of them.
Are any of those polls?
Probably, probably some of those are polls, I don't know uh, but okay.
So yes, they're eliminating one person who who uh, you know?
Or all the people like me who have anti-spam uh apps on their phones.
I don't know how they get around that.
I really don't uh, but you know they're doing.
You know most of them are doing their best and yes, the annoying part is that some of the people who I know we're saying ignore the polls, ignore the polls are now tweeting things like, it's funny how the polls are only fake when they're behind.
Now yeah, that could be an evergreen quote, an evergreen green tweet from someone who is on either side.
Yeah, this could be the same on both sides.
In this case, in this case, it is from a, you know, liberal Democrat poster who I follow um, but there are others who yeah, took the exact attitude, like you said um who no, polls don't matter until suddenly polls do matter.
Yeah, the take that I like the best was uh, an account called angry staffer, And because he posted and said, look, the polls are saying what they're saying.
That doesn't mean we've won.
It's months away.
Yeah.
Keep pushing.
Hillary was ahead in the polls too.
Yeah.
You know, I remember very clearly in 2016, at one point, talking to a co-worker, friend of mine, and Nate Silver.
who has also himself gone off the deep end.
A little bit.
Nate Silver had percentage chances for the Cubs winning the World Series and Trump winning the presidency at the same.
And it was about, I don't remember, let's call it 25%.
I think it may have been even less than that.
And then the Cubs won the World Series.
Yeah.
And I was like, well, obviously, you know, you can't have two low percentage chance things happening in the same thing, you know, or at least I was trying to tell myself that.
Yeah.
Those two things aren't correlated.
Right, exactly.
It's like flipping a coin twice.
Mathematically, they're independent events.
Right.
And so whatever the percentages are, and right now they're crowing because, you know, the current, I think they're betting, you know, bookies that have it.
And Nate himself himself.
And the markets have definitely shifted towards, you know, a Harris win.
Yeah.
But it's by, it's not anywhere near what it was in 2016.
And Trump came back from that.
It's not a sure thing in either direction.
Right.
It's this thing has still has several months to go.
Yeah.
I don't know what to tell people on that.
But really, if you're going to not trust polls, just don't trust them all the time.
Be consistent.
That's all I really ask.
I don't really trust them all that much.
I give some credence, but with a wider margin of error than they give themselves.
And that's what I give it.
It's an indication.
It's not everything.
So moving on to another thing that's dear to both of our hearts here.
So it was almost four weeks ago that Biden dropped out of the race.
And in the weeks before Biden dropped out of the race, there was a lot of talk as to whether Biden should or shouldn't drop out of the race.
We had an episode of this podcast where we discussed it.
We had reasons for the reasons why we thought it should go a certain way or shouldn't.
We generally said that they should stick with Biden, mostly because we feared how badly it could get screwed up by division in the Democratic Party that has a long history of not just lining up behind a candidate.
And I'm glad to say that we were wrong about that.
And yeah, and to reiterate, we were wrong because Biden and Harris saw it coming and they did it to avoid that exact situation.
They must have, yeah, they must have had some system in place here.
And there must have been some people behind the scenes lining people up in advance because it's telling that only the wild outsiders were sort of putting up their hand to run as the Democratic candidate and not like some of the prominent insiders who more likely would have if it had been an open primary.
But and as I say, I'm glad we were wrong about that, that there was that they showed that much unity and just got behind Harris as a candidate.
That's great.
However, I think we are in some cases still seeing some people who are still sort of in a divided mindset.
So, this is what I'm talking about: is that even now, almost four weeks after Biden has dropped out, I'm still seeing people on Twitter who are saying things like, we'll remember all you people who said Biden should drop out, or we'll remember all you people who said Biden shouldn't drop out.
And again, this is two different sides, and the language is nearly identical between them.
And this is like a passive-aggressive division among people on the left, and they're temporarily setting aside what they feel about this issue until their quote-unquote common enemy is defeated, is more or less the impression that's given here.
And this is not good.
This is not good at all.
Revenge in politics is never useful.
You have a history in talking about survivor.
How often does taking revenge and survivor work out for the person that want to take revenge?
I don't have nearly the experience at it watching it as you do, but in my experience of watching it, almost never does holding a grudge after a person's voted out ever work out for the person that held the grudge.
Yeah.
And same in regular politics.
Promising some kind of retribution upon people that decided a way that you didn't want them to decide is not useful.
It's not healthy.
We need to try to find a way to get past this.
It happened the way it happened.
And it is what it is now.
So, you know, let's try to move on.
It's true, but then you have people like Nancy Pelosi who are out there making unnecessary comments.
Like, oh, President Biden still hasn't talked to me since then.
And people are like, Yeah, why would he want to talk to you?
Yeah.
What business does he have with you that he should after you?
Yeah, after in his mind, you stabbed him in the back.
Why would he want to?
And then not the speaker of the house.
Right.
Like, yeah, like, I don't know.
And, you know, she was one of the people who had, you know, mentioned, if not pushed, the open primary idea.
And it's, it's also a fact that his political career is almost over.
Yeah.
We're talking like five months away from four months away from him or five of him being no longer a president and being done, handing it off to whoever wins and then living out the rest of his days from 81 to wherever he makes it to, just as a private citizen.
Like he has a couple more things he's going to try to get done here and then he's gone.
Like, why does he feel the need to placate anyone in the Democratic Party?
Why does he feel the need to have any kind of other thing?
He's washing his hands of everything that he's done and he's going to walk out the door and leave the keys behind when he does.
Like, so for people like Nancy Pelosi to be, I don't know, weirdly passive aggressively, I'll say it again, bitter about, you know, whatever he does, she should also move on.
Like she got something that she wanted.
She didn't get everything she wanted, whatever.
But she's got to know she's been in politics long enough.
She grew up in politics and she's, you know, it's been her whole life.
She should know that that's just how this works.
Like, why should she make comments like this?
So moving on to whatever going on with the Republicans.
All right.
So starting with Trump, Trump has had very few live events of late.
He's had a couple of rallies since doing the RNC, but not that many.
Certainly much, much fewer than he was doing before the RNC.
And it's been noted by many, many people as to what's going on.
And as always, with the internet, when you have a big question and no answers, all you get is speculation.
And people latch onto the speculation all the time as to it's definitely this.
It has to be this.
And it's like, it doesn't have to be that.
And hopefully you can be skeptical enough to realize that you might think it is, but also realize that it might also not be.
And so try to work that into, you know, like your level of confidence about what you think it might be.
But here are some of the things that they speculate about.
And these things aren't out of the outside the realm of possibility.
There's a possibility that he has some form of PTSD from being shot at.
You know, it nicked his ear.
It wasn't nearly as big a gaping wound as some people made it out to be.
But I personally believe it did nick his ear.
And, you know, it stung.
It wasn't a lot of pain, but he had to know that he turned his head just before, and that saved his life.
And it was just random chance.
And to try to face that for a guy who, as other people have pointed out in some of the spaces, this is a guy who's very, very likely never been punched in the nose.
And to think about that, it puts a lot of things in perspective.
For every man in the world who's about my age, I don't know anyone, very few of them, who've never been punched in the nose at some point in life.
Because things happen, you, you know, you're in a bar, things drunk, things you're at a party, whatever, things happen, you get punched in the nose.
And this guy very likely has never had that experience, has never had a person violently, you know, threaten him to that extent.
And this is a much greater extent than getting punched in the nose.
So it's possible that he's contemplating all sorts of things about mortality and, you know, its closeness and the fact that he's 78 years old.
That's maybe even the whole story.
We don't, but we don't know.
Right.
Well, if I had to put my vote in, I would say no.
I do not think that he contemplates such things because I do not think his brain works that way.
I don't think he contemplates, period.
I think he maybe.
He's not a deep thinker.
Let's face it.
Well, no, but the things that affect him personally are front of mind.
He, if it had been another person shot at and another person's ear was nicked, he would have given it no extra thought except for how it could be used for himself politically.
I think the fact that it was his own ear that was hit with a bullet and his own head that just barely got moved out of the path that bullet just before it happened, you know, for a severe narcissist like himself, I think he is the only important entity in his world.
And that entity nearly ceased to exist.
I think personally, I, you know, I'm no psychologist.
I've tried to ask some psychologists, but they are too busy to respond to me.
But to me, that makes sense that he's very, very attached to his own existence only.
And the fact that that existence could stop starts to be a thing that he thinks about.
But I want to move on to some of the other possibilities here because another strong possibility in my mind is that it's an energy thing.
He's 78 years old.
Keeping this pace up has got to be exhausting.
It would be exhausting for me or you.
And we're much younger.
78, I can't even imagine.
I mean, you know, he was 70 years old when he was going against Hillary and he was doing all those rallies.
I was still impressed by the number of rallies he did.
And, you know, he's 78 now.
It's a lot easier when you have good old Dr. Rodney helping you out there.
Well, I, whatever help he got, it's still impressive, I think.
I don't know if I would have the energy to do that at 70.
I don't know.
Maybe, but I'm not sure.
But at 78, it's even less likely, right?
And the fact that he runs out of steam and a thing we've mentioned on this podcast before when we're doing these election updates is that he is being actively indicted to at some level in like four jurisdictions other than five different sets of criminal indictments.
And he has multiple what's the name for it when you get sued?
It's not it's uh yeah, multiple lawsuits going on against him in multiple areas, some from which he has already lost and some which are ongoing and moving forward.
That alone, trying to keep up with all of those and stave off all those wolves must be exhausting.
Um, it wouldn't surprise me at all if this was energy-related or PTSC or both, like they're not mutually exclusive.
But at any rate, he seems to have moved himself to more online interviews, uh, things in closed spaces with limited people, uh, no live crowds, that sort of thing.
Um, most most uh uh notably, there's been two, one with a TikTok influencer named Aiden Ross.
Uh, this guy is uh a real, I don't even know how, I don't know how to describe him without being impolite.
Let's just put it that way.
He's a known fan of a lot of distasteful people, including like Andrew Tate.
Uh, who, by the way, there's a video of him interviewing Andrew Tate when Andrew Tate got up to use the washroom or get a drink or whatever he did.
This guy got down and sniffed the chair that Andrew Tate was sitting in.
I don't know why, I don't, I'm sure there's some other context, but I don't know the context that would explain this to make him look normal.
So, take that for whatever you want.
I saw the video myself.
It's what the man did.
He's like 23 years old.
He knows almost nothing about the world.
Even when he tries to talk about it, he gets all the words wrong because he doesn't even know what they are.
I think he probably has like a thing that prevents him from reading very well, like dyslexia or something, which shouldn't be held against him, except that if you don't know anything about these things, your opinion shouldn't be taken seriously.
And that's that's just how it is.
Um, get get it read to you in an audio book, then I don't care.
Uh, listen to podcasts on the topic, whatever you got to do.
Um, and the other notable one happened just a couple of nights ago.
Um, Elon Musk interviewed Donald Trump on Twitter, interviewed in big, big air quotes.
Well, it was supposed to be a showcase of the ability for of Twitter to invite a large number of people in to do this.
And this didn't work out the way Elon Musk planned.
Uh, all of Twitter tried to get in, all of Twitter, except for maybe me and you, I think, tried to get online to listen to this live and get their own little snippet of recording of it so they could understand it or be the first influencer to you know put it on their podcast or whatever.
And uh, it crashed for many, many people.
Uh, I, there was a lot of people who listened, I think it was uh over a million that were listening live, which is a phenomenal number.
Uh, and there were several million more who were trying to get in and couldn't because the platform just couldn't handle that much.
And Elon Musk, of course, characteristically blamed it on anything except for his own platform.
He said that uh, there was a distributed denial of service attack, which is what it would look like if nearly everyone on your platform tries to get in the same space all at once.
It's that's indistinguishable from a DDoS attack.
Yeah, I can tell you that, um, well, first of all, I will take issue with the almost everyone on your platform.
I know you were exactly you're right.
And you're not calling me on it.
We wouldn't exaggerate, but uh, so um, I mean, there were a lot of people, but even a million, yeah, you know, how many people tuned into the debate?
There were millions and millions, yeah, you know, how many people tune into a you know, a radio show on Sirius or a, you know, just a regular TV show.
Um, so despite his claims about there being, you know, uh a billion people who were talking about it, also, he exaggerated massively.
Yes, his words can't be taken for.
Uh, but yes, I do have experience running a website where I published an article, and this was a number of years ago, that ended up at the top of Google News.
And because it was a hot topic, it ended up at the top of Google News, the website crashed.
And I got a call from my web server company saying there's a DDoS attack going on.
Oh, yeah, there wasn't again exactly like you said, it looked like it because there were so many people trying to read this article that everybody came at once.
And I said, No, it's not a DDoS attack.
I'm at the top of Google News.
I did not foresee ever getting this kind of level of traffic.
I mean, I brought down not just my server, but like multiple servers that they hosted me, they hosted Pepsi, they hosted like I brought down a number of different servers.
They just weren't ready for something like that, which for a website the size that I had, totally understandable.
Yeah, if you're the richest man in the world and you own Twitter, you should have been able to handle it if you hadn't fired all your tech people.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, he's he's playing the Wizard of Oz right now, right?
He's trying to disguise what's behind the curtain and make it seem like it's magic when it's really just a couple of levers.
And I mean, it's also hilarious for Elon Musk to complain about this as a DDoS.
He should be going the other way and saying, Look at all the people that want to listen to this and want to do this.
But he doesn't want to, his problem is that he wants to pretend like the platform can handle that much traffic all at once in one single Twitter space.
And he can't do that while also bragging about all the people that couldn't get in.
Yeah, it's so yeah, he's stuck dealing with his own limitations, the technological limitations of his platform and his unwillingness to admit them.
Yeah, which I mean, we're seeing, we're seeing a person who's diving into unreality when he does that.
It's amazing.
I want to thank the people who dig up his old tweets because as recently as 2018, he was talking about how like Tesla is very pro LGBTQ plus and anyone who doesn't like that can shove off and buy a different car.
And he talked about how important it is to fight against climate change and all these other things.
And we're six years later and he is a completely different person, completely different.
He has gone so deep into the MAGA, practically QAnon rabbit hole.
Yeah.
That, I mean, it's, it is truly, truly amazing that you have a man whose other one of his other jobs, you know, is the head of an electric vehicle company says, eh, we don't need to worry about climate change that much.
And then you see the stock dropping and going, well, gee, I wonder why.
Yeah.
I, this, I mean, I, when I did an early episode of this podcast called Currently Benevolent Overlords, uh, his name was prominent.
It with a thing that prompted us to do that episode at that time was his, at the time, was a pending merch, uh, pending purchase of Twitter.
And I did that episode with Jeff, and Jeff made the point that he doesn't like Elon, thinks he's terrible, all that stuff.
And I said, Well, I don't think it should matter if you like him or you don't.
You should be wary of this regardless of which side you think he's on.
Like, even if you cheer the things he's doing, this shouldn't be something that should be good for anyone other than Elon Musk.
Even if he's good and righteous and pure, all that power concentrated in one spot is going to get handed off to someone else.
And that person is now going to be the person whose conscience you have to appeal to in order for it to be good.
And so no one should have that much power.
No one at all.
This is the reason why we should limit the power of very powerful people.
And anyone who has a project of not limiting it is a person that I try to question in every regard, really.
That's limiting the power of the very powerful should be a project we're all behind.
And when we're not, I don't know where we're going.
Right.
Right.
I did find it very interesting and amusing.
You know, a lot of people were like, this isn't an interview.
It is an unpaid ad.
He should get hit for campaign contributions.
I heard of some people trying to do a complaint with the FCC about that.
And all this.
And then it turned out to be such a shit show that he couldn't even keep Trump on topic.
Nope.
He, you know, Trump just gave his usual lies.
Elon Musk was not a professional interviewer.
And he also doesn't really have much natural charisma.
No.
Like, why did any, why did he think this is going to, well, he probably thought he was going to be good at it because he thought he's going to be good at everything.
But exactly.
He has a very, an extremely high opinion of himself.
Yes.
But he also, you know, then you had the whole Trump issue of that he was slurring all his words, which he later blamed on technology.
I'm sorry, technology does not make you sound like that unless you're speaking through like a slur filter.
So was Elon Musk screwing with him, right?
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
Was he tired?
Was he on medication?
Yeah, on medication.
Was it dentures slipping as some have suggested, which he would never admit because that would show age?
And who knows what it was?
But, you know, he just kept doing that.
And instead, what you had was a situation so similar to everything that goes on on Twitter, which is the Trump lovers proclaimed it a massive success.
The Elon lovers proclaimed it a massive success.
There's a, I think that Venn diagram is pretty much a circle.
And the, you know, Trump dislikers said what we're saying now.
It was a huge failure.
And what really matters is five or 10% in the middle.
They're going to decide this whole election.
Yep.
You know, and they're the ones that matter.
And the question is, did they even pay attention to it?
Are they even on Twitter?
No, are they?
Let me just say, are they on political Twitter?
Definitely not.
They're on Cat Meme Twitter, which, by the way, is amazing.
I have a couple of cat accounts that I follow.
They are awesome.
And a dog account, it's the best.
It's so good.
If anyone doesn't like regular Twitter and just wants the cat stuff, come to me.
I'll tell you where the good stuff is.
You can just follow those accounts.
You can just go on there a couple of times a day, get all your cat videos in.
It's awesome.
And so, yeah, there's, I don't know that it accomplished anything either way.
Yeah.
But, you know, you talked about the other things Trump is doing, and maybe we were about to get to this.
He's also doing these quote-unquote press conferences.
And because he announces them as press conferences, it seems like the media feels they need to cover them.
And he doesn't give out anything new with them.
Right.
He tries to use them as rally moments, but the press doesn't say much about them when they happen.
They're just and they ask him a few questions.
They don't push back.
They, you know, right.
But meanwhile, you've got Harrison Walls doing these sold-out arenas, and the press is barely covering those because they aren't calling them press conferences.
And I think it's an issue with the way things are labeled and also the way the media reacts to things.
Yeah, the media, they still see Trump as giving them more engagement, more eyeballs.
He's going to say more crazy things, right?
Yeah.
And that's going to be a better story than boring Tim Walz, you know, making another couch joke.
Well, no, because he made a couch joke.
And oh, that set, what's his name?
The moderator from the first debate.
Jake Tapper.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, that set him off.
It's like, screw you, Jake Tapper.
You know, and someone could take that out of context and play it all over because I already said it on Twitter.
Really?
Really?
You're going to get off.
That's awesome.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, he made one comment that was a joke.
And you're going to worry about that, but you're not going to worry about all the fire hose of lies that Trump told in his debate.
That they're trying to say isn't a thing, but they are absolutely making a thing.
I mean, they're hiring right now a huge number of people.
We see videos of training videos of training people to do all the things in Project 2025 because they need an army of very little people in administrative places all throughout all the states in order to enact all the things they want to do in Project 2025.
It's a whole thing.
I should link to people.
I'm not going to, I don't have time to go through Project 25, but there's other, there are other podcasts that are doing it.
I should link to some of those.
I think Conspirituality's coverage on that is the most in-depth if you have time for it.
And I think there's a couple others that are less in-depth, but still very good.
Yeah, it's not great.
As an administrative thing under which you might want to live, I wouldn't want to live under it.
And I don't want the U.S. to do it because we'll have to accept a huge number of refugees.
We're going to have to plant more vegetables.
It's beating all those extra miles is going to be tough.
That's an age-old Canadian joke, by the way, that if there was ever a war between Canada and U.S., we would have to concede because we would never be able to feed all of the prisoners we take.
I mean, yeah, It just, you know, that bugged me.
And then, just as of today, CNN, you know, I saw a CNN article that talked about the Elon Musk Trump conversation.
And I'm reading through it.
I'm like, oh, this is actually a pretty good article.
And then it said something like, you know, it complained about rightfully so, but it complained about Trump telling 20 flat out lies that Musk never pushed back on.
No, probably agreed with him.
Yeah.
But this was CNN.
Yeah.
I know.
Complaining that in an interview or in a conversation, people just two months ago, they hosted the debate between Trump and Biden, in which they just let Trump say anything he wanted and never pushed back on any of the things he said.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I really, between what Jake Tapper said and everything else, I think some of these media people are really getting high on their own supply.
They are seeing how they can mold what's happening and they're getting too big for their britches.
And they, you know, they need to go back to reporting the news.
Be journalistic.
Report what happened.
Try to put it in context.
Let other people come to their own conclusions.
Really?
Don't try to skew the context to push one way or the other.
Like at some point, maybe we'll get that again.
I don't know.
But for now, I think we just need to not have Trump.
Yeah.
So next topic in the effort to not have Trump is a new thing that I'm pushing.
And I think, as far as I can tell, I'm one of the only people that's mentioning this very loudly.
I haven't mentioned it very loudly till today, but we want to put a pin in the idea that we might have a TikTok problem, David.
My only TikTok problem is I just post too many videos there.
Well, you have your own TikTok problem then.
But if you have ever been in conversation with anyone or listen to a conversation between people who are trying to be influencers on TikTok, and you've ever heard them describe anyone who's sort of very, very popular, they do it with a sort of a reverence.
And it's not anything to do with the content of the people that are more popular.
It's always directly and only related to how popular they are, what level of engagement they have.
And that is the single most important property to the people who are trying to be influencers on TikTok: is how many eyeballs you get on your individual video and how many people are following you and what the potential to have people look at your video is all that stuff.
That's the single most important and Trump's Trumps.
It's much more important than any of the others, any of the other properties.
You don't have to tell me.
That's my life every day trying to get more viewers to my videos.
Right.
But when you're in a, when you listen to young people do it, I think it's different because it's like, it's like they have a level of reverence just for that.
Like they, they didn't grow up in a world that didn't have it.
And so they weren't grounded by other things outside of TikTok, really.
And so it, it just has a much greater importance to all of their lives, it seems, aside from just what their TikTok life is.
And if you've ever heard them talk about Trump, it's chilling.
Like, because they get this kind of quavering thing in their voice, oh, yeah.
Do you know how many people he got to follow him in the first day of his TikTok account?
Oh, how many?
Because I thought I heard 3 million in one day.
Yeah, but I heard that Harris blew him out of the water.
Well, I haven't compared.
Like I said, I haven't compared.
I haven't.
You're going to make me pull up my whole.
I have my algorithm, so it doesn't show me politics on TikTok.
You don't have a second account just for other stuff.
No, I don't.
I don't.
Well, that's that's a rookie move, man.
I, yeah, I don't know how to, if I ever have the time to go back to TikTok again, I'm going to make it my goal to confuse the algorithm as much as possible by just looking up as many different types of things as possible.
She has 4.5 million followers.
Right.
But did she get them in the single first single day she had?
I think she did, or very quickly, anyway.
Wait, yeah.
Because I, I, yeah, I don't think that she, you know, uh, I think she created it very recently.
Uh, let me see what Donald has here: real Donald Trump.
Oh, he has 10 million followers.
Yeah, and it was 3 million in the first 24 hours was the number I remember looking at at the time.
And this was the thing that I had overheard, like in my real life, overheard TikTok influencers talking about was this quavering in their voice, this impressive, how impressive it was.
And this was the only property that mattered to them.
And I was like, well, you might want to take into a couple of consideration a couple other things about Donald Trump before, you know, like there's a couple of things that matter there that aren't just related to how much influence he has.
And it's pretty sad he has that much influence.
But yeah, you might want to think about that.
I don't, you know, but so he has only posted 11 videos since June 1.
Yeah, that makes sense.
He probably wouldn't.
Whereas she just created it July 25th.
Yeah.
And already has more than that.
Looks like about, let's see here.
Almost double, not quite, but almost double.
Almost as many likes.
He has like 33 million.
She has 27 million likes.
Her team would likely be much more in tune with all of the things.
And he is much less likely to delegate those things to anyone else and just do them himself.
And therefore, you know, I mean, fatigue, man.
He's 78 years old.
I don't know what to tell you.
Yeah.
Right.
But to the people who are in that generation, the level of reverence they give to a person based solely on popularity.
If you were only basing it on popularity, you would just make it more popular.
I mean, that's an endless cycle, right?
Yeah, I just make sure that things into account, but sometimes I think they don't.
Yeah.
Well, I just want to mention I have 7,754 followers.
So, you know, I'm well on my way.
Well on my way.
Yeah.
And, you know, I do have one video that, you know, hit in the millions of views.
So, you know, that's more than some of their videos.
So I think that I could, you know, run for president and, you know, just, you know, compete on par with either of them if I wanted to.
Several election cycles left if the age curve continues the way it does.
Oh, God.
Yes.
I'm a kid by the standard.
You could start now and still get there.
Yeah.
For sure.
So, yeah, I just worry that, I mean, people talk about how much of Gen Z and whatever we're calling the generation that comes after Gen Z.
I don't even know.
I think it's Alpha.
I think they're gen alpha.
Starting again with, but with names instead of, I think that's what they're doing.
I'm not 100%.
It's because they didn't think of how far ahead this is going to go and they named it Gen X, right?
Yeah, I mean, but then they went with millennials and then right.
They call them millennials because of the turn of the century, but that's gen Y and that's why it's X to Y to Z.
But they didn't think about this when they just called it Gen X.
They were like, oh, yeah, well, what are we going to call the one after boomers?
I'm just surprised you're calling it Gen Z instead of Gen Z.
It's the influence I get from all the Twitter accounts.
It's the American influence, David.
We're more removed from British than we are.
Well, I'm proud of you.
Yeah.
Okay.
Good.
But we're still getting Minnesota first.
Probably add a U and call it Minnesota.
Minnesota.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah.
Well, we'll Britishize it.
Minnesota.
So there are a lot more Gen Z voters who are registering to vote.
This has been noted.
People like Taylor Swift have had get out the vote campaigns.
I don't know if hers was much of a campaign as much as she mentioned it once on Twitter.
And, you know, suddenly there was a sudden drive and everyone went, this is her power when she says this one time.
Right.
But people need, you know, a lot of people say, oh, look, Gen Z is going to come in like a wave and like wash this away.
And I'm like, you know, you got to consider the possibility that some portion of them, an uncomfortably large potential portion of them, might not vote the way you like.
And this, this isn't necessarily a thing that's going to make it go the way you want.
You imagining that is a thing trying to cope with a specter of a bad Trump second presidency, right?
I agree with you, but I do think as a whole, younger people in any generation tend to be more liberal.
You know, they're not going to care about the things that Donald Trump and JD Vance think about.
You know, like JD Vance is literally out there giving interviews saying, oh, I don't think suburban women care about reproductive rights.
I think they care about normal things.
And it's like, no, I'm pretty sure that not only do suburban women care about that, but a lot of younger women, men, whatever you want to, you know, say, all, you know, care about those things.
I think that the younger people have seen their classmates, sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively, you know, get gunned down in school.
I think they care about that.
Yeah, there's a lot of influencers who are younger who are pushing that.
But just before we leave this topic, I will leave you with another number since we got into numbers of followers and all this stuff.
Is that we mentioned earlier that one of the interviews that Trump did online was by a TikTok influencer called Aiden Ross.
I just looked it up here.
Aiden Ross, young TikTok influencer of what would be Alpha generation, I think it would be 6.4 million followers.
And he's not like when you look at Trump, you probably imagine that there's probably a reasonable number of the 10 million followers he has that are following because they oppose him and want to know what he's up to.
That's unlikely to be happening with Aiden Ross, much less likely anyway.
It's probably more fervent followers, young people.
That's the generation he's in.
That's who he's influencing.
And this is the guy who just did the interview with Donald Trump.
I didn't see it.
I don't have any real opinions on it.
I don't know.
I imagine it was fairly empty.
Almost no one noted it because it probably wasn't that important, except that it probably reached somewhere close to 6 million people and they were all very, very young.
And they probably had just as much less pushback even than Elon Musk would ever do because Aiden Ross knows much less about the world than Elon Musk, remarkably.
And yeah, that's just food for thought for people who, you know, what you point out about younger people and some of the things they're more interested in, including climate change and all the rest of it, that's true.
But they're just as susceptible, if not even more so, to a lot of the misinformation that's available online because they have less wisdom.
They have less context, wider world context to deal with.
And so I just want to put a pin in this and say we shouldn't just, you know, call this is definitely going one way.
That those, those votes could go either way or split or just a much uncomfortably larger number going the other way than we'd like, right?
Like that's something we need to think about.
Yeah, no, I agree.
I mean, it's, it's, I agree that there are certainly some, some portion who will go that way.
Um, I saw a interview and it's one of those typical uh liberal media person, liberal comedian interviewing people at a Trump rally type thing.
Right.
And then they put it on and they interviewed one, you know, gen, I still think in their 20s, they're still Gen Z, but sure.
I could be wrong about that.
For our purposes, we can call them that.
They're on the far side of Gen Z. That's still Gen Z.
Yeah.
You know, that they interviewed this young woman, we'll say, and she said that she's for President Trump because she cares about women's rights issues and so does he.
And it's like, in what world?
Yeah.
In what possible world?
Yeah.
Could you believe that that is the case?
And I don't know.
I don't know how you can be that completely misinformed.
It's as simple as someone told her that and she believed that person.
Yeah, probably.
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't know.
I will say there are other accounts out there that people follow.
You know, like there's one account I follow, the real Slim Sherry.
And she's just a Gen Xer who's out there making Gen X jokes.
And she has over a million followers.
Yeah.
You know, and so I don't know that we can determine necessarily from the number of followers exactly what you're right.
We can't, you know, but it's just food for thought, right?
Yes.
This isn't like a lot of people are using the number of Gen Z registrations to vote as a cope, as like, oh, definitely that hasn't been factored into all these polls and whatnot that we've been complaining about.
And so this is just going to be a blue wave that washes over everything.
Temper your expectations is all I'm saying here.
It's not necessarily going to just wash over the world and make it right again.
Yeah.
So moving on to Trump was shot at on July 13th.
Did you hear about it?
No, I had a big pad over my ear.
So I did.
Very difficult to hear where the big pad is.
Yeah, yeah, right.
Okay, good.
I like the way you pivot there.
That was excellent.
So there are a lot of conspiracy beliefs that have continued to be pushed from a lot of spaces, right-leaning and left-leaning, and people who are considering themselves to be neither about this event.
It's not great.
We're going to do a deep dive on this.
Yes.
You and me, maybe you and me and someone else, we'll see how that goes, how that comes together, but we're going to do a deeper dive on this.
And we're not just going to go through, like, I do want to hit a lot of the facts, but I also want to point out while we do it, how people have interpreted those facts and where they've gone wrong in their thinking that has led to that.
And that's a much more important thing to me to go through, right?
How you get the thing wrong is, and understanding that is how you get the next one right.
So, yeah, like we just want to put a pin in this.
We're not going to spend a lot of time on it here because we're going to do a deeper dive.
But yeah, we have noticed there's been a lot of left-leaning accounts, especially that makes us very, very sad about people who think that this thing is fake somehow.
Yeah.
And this is what really bugs me: I do not follow any of these accounts, except for one, maybe who's just someone who retweets a lot.
And that's where I'm seeing them mostly as retweets.
Is like people who are still what I'm seeing, they're not full out saying it was a conspiracy, but they're making little snide comments.
Like, oh, sure.
No, more like, more like, oh, maybe Trump is doing this because he couldn't afford another fake assassination attempt.
Yeah.
You know, something like that.
So it's kind of a side comment, right?
You know, okay, right.
And it's like, oh, stop it.
We've been over this already.
And you are just making yourselves look like idiots whenever you say this.
And it just pisses me off.
Yeah.
You're the Alec Joneses of the world now.
Stop it.
Stop it.
Yeah, that's right.
And really, when we see these unreal notions, we should point them out because we don't get the comfort of unreality, even if what is being said there would give us, be closer to giving us our desired political outcome.
That's not where we should go with that.
We should, you know, use reality, actual objective reality as a guiding star in all things, even if it's not great.
We should still go toward the light, that objectively real light.
I don't know how we're going to get there, but we need to work at it, keep rowing that boat, right?
So we're going to do a deeper dive on that.
Note that, just know that we have noticed.
Yes.
So among the many different things that have been speculated about the smaller number of Trump's appearances is a lot of conspiracist talk about how maybe he doesn't feel the need to try as hard to sway the electorate because he's already planning to cheat in November.
This is a thing we need to talk about a little bit.
Yeah.
So just saying that he's going to cheat without ever pointing to how you think he's going to cheat, those are conspiracist notions.
Those are just things you try to wave into reality based on something that you think might be true.
Really, we need to use objectively real things in order to direct us.
It's okay to like when detectives interview someone and the person acts kind of shifty and they think that person may have, I don't know, murdered their wife or whatever they think, that can't be used as evidence that they did the crime.
It can only be used as a direction to look for evidence of a thing.
So if you think it's true, look for the evidence of the thing.
So, there are reasons to think this might, there might be some decanery about to occur.
So, we're going to go over a couple of these real quick.
At a Trump rally on August 3rd in Atlanta, Georgia, Donald Trump mentioned by name two people who were recently put on the state election board for Georgia, who have themselves been noted as people who believe that the 2020 election was fixed for Biden.
And they have used that set of thoughts to try to push things on the Georgia, Georgia state of election, state election board decisions to try to do whatever they think, whatever they think they need to do to, in their mind, make the playing field level.
But in the minds of a lot of other people is to tip the board towards Trump's side.
So, one thing specifically that they have done recently is they have given the ability for county election boards to directly second guess results and stall the certification of results.
So, on its face, you know, this doesn't seem all that bad, except that it does set up for a lot of bad outcomes that we can easily predict.
Yes.
So, first of all, you know, on what basis are they going to second guess results?
You know, like that alone is a big, big question.
Well, on the basis that Harris wins.
Well, that's the basis on which they should second guess the results should be known in advance now.
And it can't be, you know, based on what the number of votes for a particular candidate were.
Oh, pish-posh.
Oh, you can't tell us now.
Stuck on all the details here.
Yeah.
I know.
So another thing, like, even if they're not going to just throw their county back to recount endlessly till they get the result they want, you know, systematically remove Harris votes till they get the Trump what they want or whatever they they think they're going to do.
Even if they're not going to do that, they can still stall the certification for a potentially very long time because all the counties have to report in before the state can certify.
And if the state isn't certifying any votes in the interim between when the vote happens on November 5th, when the polls close at the end of the day on November 5th, and when the thing finally gets certified, which in this scenario, it's unknown how long it will be.
It already, like in actuality, it already takes a week or two to certify the results.
But they more or less know how it's going to turn out because most states aren't squeakingly close.
But and in some cases, you know, news agencies, people on TV make predictions about who's going to, which way it's going to go.
And sometimes they get those predictions wrong.
And then some people say, you know, I went to bed with Trump being ahead and I woke up with Biden being ahead in 2020.
And that's definitely a sign that it was fixed, which is not true.
It just means that the guy on TV told you the wrong thing, hold him responsible, not the people counting the votes responsible.
I mean, it's, yeah, it goes back to their stop the count.
Yeah, stop the count in some places and count all the votes in others.
Yeah.
And, you know, stop the ones where Biden's ahead and continue counting where Biden's behind.
And you're right.
So it's, it's vice versa, but yes.
Right.
It's, it's selective based on who they want.
And that's not the way elections are supposed to go.
And but just having a great delay in certification can lead to all kinds of other things, especially when you have a candidate who has a known history of not being encumbered by the need to adhere to objective reality and can just claim things are going one way or the other based on whatever would work for him at the time.
Yeah, I mean, he still claims, I mean, he is getting out there making speeches, claiming he won New York, claiming he won.
With him close to New York.
Yeah.
Right.
I mean, he just, he just says these things when, because he could say them, and if anyone calls him on them, which they usually don't bother, but if they do, he's just like the level of lies normalized now, which is also terrible.
Right.
But then he just says, well, we actually won.
They cheated.
Yeah, right.
They cheated.
They win by cheating, which is how he's going to win now by cheating.
Right.
Which I don't know how much effect this is going to have.
But here's one thing I know for sure is that more votes for Harris makes it more difficult to cheat in favor of Trump.
Exactly.
I want to say that again for anyone in the back.
If you're in a state, like you said, Trump voters, votes don't matter in Illinois, maybe, I don't know.
But if you're in a state like, I don't know, Texas that has been going red forever on the presidential level, making your vote closer will still matter.
Yes.
Going out, you know, declaring that you don't need to that day because you had a difficult day at work and you blah, blah, blah, and you're tired and your mom would also need to ride if she's going to vote and she's old or whatever.
You know what?
Just still go, still vote.
Even in places like Texas that are all deep red states, still don't.
Some people are suggesting Texas can be flipped.
I don't know if I believe them, but maybe you can.
And there's only one way to find out.
You're right.
There's only one way to find out.
And it's to show up, to still vote.
Don't get discouraged by anything.
And if you're in a blue state that always goes blue, like, I don't know, Illinois, still go, still show up.
Oh, yes.
Make that difference greater.
Make, you know, like the wider the margin, the better the result in general.
Because even if this thing isn't over, even if Harris wins, there's a huge number of sycophants and people who are zealots, who fervently believe in all the set of ideas that are almost about to be coming into place when Trump, they think, wins, who are still going to want all those things to happen.
They need to be told that that set of ideas is a losing set of ideas.
And the best way to do that is to just show them at the poll, at the voting booth.
Like that's the most important poll that everyone, that's the one thing everyone agrees on.
The only poll that really matters is voting day.
So show up, vote against this guy.
Do what you got to do.
Show him with every vote, even in this, even in the places where the delegates will still go the other way.
Still make that thing screamingly close, as close as you possibly can.
Drive everyone else to the voting booth.
Get them there.
Ask your neighbors if they've registered.
Encourage them to also vote.
Like everyone you can.
This is so important.
I don't know how to tell you more than that.
Yeah.
No, I mean, we don't just need to defeat Trump.
We need to defeat Trumpism.
Yes.
The ideas that are being driven.
Yeah.
Because, yeah, you know, the Republican Party needs to overthrow Trump more than just the man.
Yeah.
You know, the people elevated, you know, need to, you know, they need to get rid of the MTGs, the Boeberts, the, you know, all those people and just, you know, get back to some semblance of normality.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Maybe, maybe someday we'll live in the normal world again, David.
Yeah, maybe.
Yeah, maybe go back to just making TikTok videos about survivor or whatever.
Go back to it.
I do that every day.
Well, you know, I mean, that being your only job.
Yes, yes, yes.
Yeah.
So moving on, we should make a quick stop here at JD Vance.
He's still the vice presidential candidate.
Some people have said that maybe he would get fired because he's unpopular.
That didn't bother Trump at all.
He just said JD Vance doesn't matter, which is fun, I guess, which to Trump's mind probably is true.
JD Vance doesn't matter.
Tim Pence didn't matter that much to Trump.
So why should JD Vance matter that much?
Well, yeah, it doesn't matter to Trump because the only time Vance would matter to Trump is if Trump, you know, didn't survive through the term.
And then Trump's gone, so he doesn't care.
You know, but the rest of us are like, oh, God, we've got this guy.
Which, I mean, we'd already be like, oh, God, we've got this guy from Trump.
But yeah, to have Vance, you know, one heartbeat, or as some people like to call it, one Big Mac away from the presidency.
It's, you know, I don't know how he made it to this point.
I mean, I do, or I know what some people have said and have written about, that it was because of not Elon Musk himself, but people like Elon Musk who promoted Vance, you know, these promoted Vance.
And they clearly didn't do some background on him because now pictures of him dressing as a woman with a wig have come out.
Pictures of him with women at urinals pretending to use them have come out.
Now, under normal circumstances, people would be like, eh, he was a kid.
He was having fun, whatever.
Except that his whole platform is that is against all those things.
Yeah.
Right.
So I don't think that's going to bother the base on the right at all.
No, it won't.
No.
They're sufficiently inured to reality that they can just wash that past with all the grabbing by the pussy stuff and all that other stuff that's just zip past and try to ignore.
They've gotten very good at it.
That's a problem for future society to try to get reality to penetrate that side.
But yeah, the one thing I want to say, and we might disagree on a little bit here, but I would say that, you know, like there are rumors, we referenced them earlier about rumors that JD Vance previously had relations with a couch.
I wouldn't call them rumors.
I would call them jokes.
Sure.
Well, okay.
Jokes, right.
But people had to debunk them.
So that gives them the flavor of rumors.
I almost wonder if the debunking just made the Streisen effect worse because it made it look like they were confused and actually thought it was true and it was just a joke.
So whatever we make of that.
But I think that giving more steam to these other than a passing joke, you know, if this lasts too much longer, in other words, I think this is damaging myself.
Really, and my argument is pretty simple.
If you made up a thing about JD Vance and going to pretend that it's true, then that gives steam to the idea that the other side can just dismiss anything else you ever say about JD Vance as also being similarly untrue because you make things up about it.
That logic stands for any random thing, whether it's a couch or anything else.
Like if we find that the, you know, somehow we find that some images of him in a dress or something are made by AI, then we should also say that, you know, all of us say that, well, yeah, those are fake and we're not going to use them with which to decide how we're going to do this.
Because to me, if you want reality to be a force in your world, then you need to not undermine it in any other context, right?
Yes, but.
Okay, sure.
First of all, I think that it's telling, and I'm not the first person to say this by any means, that JD Vance is the type of person to whom these couch jokes could stick.
You know, like you just look at him and you think, yeah, yeah, okay, I could see him doing that.
Sure.
And I guess, but this, this leads to judging by bias.
Like, what if a person was racist and they looked at Kamala and they said, that's the kind of person who, you know, does something that, you know, we think racially and stereotypically black people do.
And therefore this, I mean, that's essentially the same.
I wouldn't say it's the same because one, this is based on JD Vance specifically, his personality or lack thereof.
Yeah.
Subsection of the population.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
You wouldn't say every white guy with a beard does this, you know, but you might say JD Vance.
But the other thing is, no matter what people say about Vance and Trump, they dismiss it anyway.
So sure, they're going to keep dismissing.
I don't think the couch thing has anything to do with it.
If nothing else, it pissed off Jake Tapper.
So there is always a plus side.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So we're not going to do a full recap of all of Trump's many legal troubles as we have done in most of these other election updates.
Most of them have had nothing of note except for one, which is the one that has had a verdict.
This is the hush money case, the hush money trial.
Quick recap, Trump paid money to Stormy Daniels and a few others to silence them about affairs that might damage his electoral chances in 2016.
He was convicted on 34 felony counts in New York.
His sentencing has already been delayed once already from early July to September 18th.
So Trump has requested that the verdicts be overturned and that that decision is expected to come on September 16th.
Well, Trump must already be thinking that they will not be overturned because he has additionally asked the judge to delay sentencing, which is again for September 18th, two days after the decision about whether it would be overturned.
So the grounds upon which he has asked the judge to delay sentencing is that he says that sentencing now would amount to election interference.
So I have a little thing to say about this.
There is sort of an exaggeration game that occurs in our online rhetoric and in our political rhetoric, where we take words and we conflate them to mean other things that are more serious.
I plan to have a full episode about just this concept eventually, but in this case, the word affect is being exaggerated to mean interfere.
So not everything that can affect the election should be seen as interfering with the election.
For example, if the wind comes by and blows Trump's wig off his head, makes him look bad, is that election interference?
If bad traffic in a city prevents Trump from showing up at a rally on time, is that election interference?
Okay, I need to stop you about the wig thing.
Sure, yeah.
Because, you know, you said we should not say things about the couch.
I don't think Trump has a wig.
I think he just has really bad hair.
Okay.
If the wind makes his hair look bad.
Yes, which it has on many occasions.
Then is that election interference?
If a news outlet publishes a story about an Egyptian intelligence service withdrawing $10 million in US dollars in cash just before the end of the 2016 election, and that in that same timeframe, Trump decided to put $10 million of his own money into his campaign, and that maybe this is the same money.
If they produce this story, should that be considered election interference?
It could certainly affect the election, but should it be seen to interfere with the election?
I mean, some real things.
Yeah, from Trump's perspective, everything is election interference.
Everything that works against him is interpreted as election interference.
Everything that works for him is just fine.
Well, that's how Trump works.
Yeah.
So, yes, of course, they're going to make this case, this claim.
I think Judge Merchan should tell him to screw off and, you know, just go away and stop that.
And I believe that's what will happen in kinder words.
And I also have to say, and having listened to some other podcasts, you know, I don't think prison is a likely outcome.
I don't think it is either.
I think fines and probation are likely outcomes.
And, you know, I think that people are going to be pissed off at the judge for that, but being pissed off about that is based on their bias that they want Trump to be in jail.
Right.
And some would argue if you do, if you are guilty of 34 felony counts, including interference with an election, yeah, you should go to jail.
Yeah.
You know, but it's, it just doesn't seem to work that way.
The guy who steals the cigarettes from the local store is more likely to go to jail than the guy who steals millions of dollars from old people.
Yeah.
Just in general.
Yeah.
It's an unfair world and we should work to make it right.
But we need to, I think the systemic problems need to be solved systemically, not individually.
That would make them endless.
Yeah, I don't know what Judge Murchan is going to do, whether he's going to accept that he doesn't want the heat of putting out a sentence before the election is completed or not.
But that's the argument they're making.
I personally don't think that he should delay sentencing because it's his job to move the court along, to move the cases off the desk, to and not to do so just to move the cases off the desk, but to not delay them, right?
Not let them sit for too long.
I mean, other people in his court wouldn't have the privilege of saying, well, I'm a special person, so you should treat me special.
And so Trump shouldn't either.
I mean, if you want the law to have this meaning where everyone is subject to it, which a large number of people who are fans of Trump don't want the law to apply to him, they need to think about that a little harder, but they don't.
You know, he should just get sentenced because he was convicted.
Unless you're going to try to, unless you really think that there's other problems with whatever happened, but the verdict is there.
Right.
I don't know what to tell you.
Yeah.
I mean, maybe he'll get appealed, but most people who get convicted with felonies get to file their appeal from prison.
They don't get to wait to go to prison until they filed the appeal.
That's not something that most people get to do.
So why should Trump get to do it?
Right.
Right.
Get sentenced because that's on the docket.
Yeah.
So that's all of the meaningful stuff.
Maybe just a quick note to RFK Jr., who's definitely listening to this podcast, that the only note I have about RFK Jr. in this campaign is that he's not a serious candidate.
That's it.
That's all there is.
Yeah.
I have one more note.
I would say we have debated for a while who he hurts the most.
Yeah.
I think I'm coming down on the side that he hurts Trump the most.
Maybe not.
Because, I mean, we discussed last time, I think, that Trump actually had a conversation with him about dropping out, you know, and throwing his support.
He did.
RFK Jr. made the same offer to Harris's campaign and hasn't gotten a response.
Yep.
I saw that this morning.
You know, which I think either she should continue not to respond or they should send him a picture of, you know, a middle finger.
A bear holding up a middle finger.
Yes.
Yes.
It's defective.
But it is interesting because I think, okay, this is one that I just saw the headline.
I have to admit.
In New York, I saw that a court ruled against him for getting on the ballot.
So I don't know if that's the final word, if he's going to get on the ballot in New York.
Yeah.
Apparently, there was some problems with the address that he claimed.
He claimed to have an address in New York state, but it turned out that he was actually living in LA or California at least.
And this means that he was lying on his applications for things in New York.
And I don't, the whole thing, I don't know why he felt the need to lie about it.
He doesn't need to live in New York in order to be on the ballot in New York because the other candidates also don't live in New York.
Right.
So why, you know, and they're on the ballot.
I don't, you know, this just seems to be some level of incompetence, really.
And I don't think we should expect anything more from RFK Jr.
And I think he's becoming less of a factor all the time.
I noted that he could swing to one side or the other when it was Biden at 44.
Trump at 46 and RFK Jr. at about 8%.
And then there's a, you know, 2% for the two other marginal candidates and maybe some undecided or whatever, which almost no one seems to be undecided in any of the polls these days, because that's enough of a percentage to put either of the main candidates over 50.
Right.
But, and even a portion of that could sway the election one way or the other, because it not the case that he would back a candidate and all nine of his percent would go one way.
But his percentage has dropped since then.
And the other candidates have sort of picked up what I, from what I can tell, the majority of that from the polls as much as you can trust them.
And so this already puts him at less of a factor, less of an ability.
If his numbers had increased from nine to any number, any increase at all, I mean, even at nine, my alarm bells were kind of tingling like, you know, this is, you know, if Biden were 54 and RFK Jr. were nine and Trump were whatever that comes out to 30 something percent, then I would say have Adder.
Like, there's no problem with this guy.
Have him do whatever he wants.
He'll, you know, drop bears off in the park and frame a cyclist for it.
And whatever he's going to do, however many other weird stories are ever going to come out about RFK Jr., I'm not going to be the least bit surprised from now on.
Maybe he was a zodiac killer.
Who knows?
You really don't know at this point.
He even said that.
People reporters asked him what other stories are there that might come out.
And he's like, I don't know.
Yeah, that's not a comforting answer.
Yeah.
Like, the answer should be, that's the only crazy thing I've ever done.
Right.
I promise.
Yeah.
I don't know.
It means that, yeah, there's definitely things to find out.
Like, oh, God.
Okay.
Well, I mean, it's almost like, you know, his numbers dropping are almost like the more people find out about him, the less they want to vote for him.
Yes.
I mean, I do think there's also people saying, oh, we, you know, emphasizing we have to vote for, you know, the one of the primary two candidates I overheard at a pickleball game, a guy whose entire wardrobe consists of anti-Joe Biden t-shirts was talking to someone and saying, these people who say we can vote for, you know, one of the third parties, they just don't understand.
It's, you know, you got to vote for one or the other.
And I'm like, wow, we found the one thing that we agree on.
Yeah.
And I did not approach him.
But yeah, it's, it's, you know, he's becoming less of a factor.
But then with the way Trump has sunk in the face of Harris's popularity, you have people like Rogan saying, I support the candidate of our candidacy of RFK Jr. to the point that he had to come out later and say, I'm not saying I endorse him.
I'm just saying I support his ideas.
Yeah.
And you have.
Which also just makes Joe Rogan not a serious commentator on politics.
Well, no, but as a number of popular liberal Twitter accounts were saying, yes, I support Joe Rogan in this.
Sure.
I want Joe Rogan to get out there and say everybody should vote for RFK Jr. because it means the conspiracy nuts that were going to vote for Trump, if they listen to him, they will waste their votes.
So good.
Yes, listen to Joe Rogan on this point and this point only.
I think it's Nick Fuentes, the white supremacist.
Yeah.
Even he has said, I don't know if we can support Trump because he's going to.
He's going to make us look bad when he loses.
Nick Fuentes has called not Trump into question, but the value of the people working on Trump's campaign.
He, from all of his rhetoric recently, would appear to appreciate a shakeup as Trump did several times in 2016.
Well, I believe there was one today.
I think it may be going on right now as we're recording this from what I've seen.
But I mean, Trump had four separate campaign managers through the 2016 campaign and fired a bunch of other people as well.
And while he was president, fired a lot of people and replaced them with a lot of other people.
And yeah, chief of staff replaced a couple different times, like, you know, head of the NSA or the Secretary of State was replaced.
I mean, there was just repeatedly.
I don't know if anyone who was a major person there made it all the way through.
No, I don't think so.
And I don't think that's a least bit exaggerating.
I'm fairly certain each one of them was replaced at least once.
Yeah.
Right.
And, you know, when I say I think it's happening now, I mean, I haven't, you know, checked Twitter in the two hours that we've been talking here.
It's the sort of thing that might happen.
Well, I saw rumors of it.
And then I thought just before we got on, I saw something that's saying it was happening.
But of course, that could have been a parody.
That could have, you know.
So if by the time the podcast comes out, it hasn't happened yet.
Sorry.
But, you know, I have seen stuff about it.
But the interesting thing about all this is I've seen people pointing out that, you know, over the last eight plus years, it's always people blaming Trump's staff.
Yeah.
Oh, Trump's staff did this wrong.
Trump's staff did that wrong.
They didn't adequately prepare him.
They didn't glue his dentures in so he didn't slur.
They didn't, you know.
Yeah.
And his staff keeps turning over and turning over.
And they never want to blame the one consistent through line.
Yeah.
It's always reinterpreted so that Trump is still a good guy, which is the nature of their unreality.
It has one thing that they need to be real at all costs.
And that's, that's, I mean, that's the QAnon narrative right there.
Right.
That's the central point of everything in QAnon is that everything in the world needs to be reinterpreted such that Trump is doing the right thing and is working for you and is a really good guy and is winning ultimately.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, but I encourage more, I mean, you know, more of these people to pull, you know, their support from Trump.
They don't want to be associated with a loser.
You know, Joe Rogan keep talking about RFK.
Nikki Haley has now come back and, you know, she's still kissing the ring, but maybe she's kissing it a little more lightly.
Yeah.
You know, so mowing in the sun by not sticking to her guns, right?
Yes.
Yeah.
Poor Nikki Haley.
It would have been good to have two ladies of with South Asian genetic heritage to be facing off against each other in the U.S. election.
Wouldn't that have been something?
It would have, except, you know, there are a lot of The MAGA people who can't stand the fact that Vance is married to one such person.
Well, let alone actually having one as a presidential candidate.
Perish the thought.
Well, that's when we'd have to take the Taylor Swift advice, right?
Shake it off, right?
Haters are going to hate.
So, what are you going to do?
I'm not going to sing it.
I'm not going to sing it.
No, dumb thing.
You don't want to get the podcast in trouble by violating any copyrights or anything.
No.
So I think that's it.
That's all there is.
It was just an hour and a half, two hours worth of stuff to talk about.
So, yes, as usual, I think it's funny that, you know, when we were talking and you were like, hey, when do you want to record?
I'm like, well, there's a few things to talk about for the election stuff.
You're like, oh, yeah, we could do a quick election update.
Yeah, yeah.
Just a quick one.
Yeah.
Quick one.
Okay.
So closing out, where can people find you, David?
Well, as I mentioned, I am on TikTok and trying to build my following to that.
You know, I'm trying to get to 10 million.
Yeah, let's get him up to Aiden Ross's number, 6 million.
Yeah, I am not quite there yet.
But I am on TikTok and YouTube and Instagram is at David Bloomberg TV.
I do not do any political talking there.
It is all reality TV.
So if you're looking for a place to follow me for political related stuff, science-related, reality-related, not reality TV related, I do a lot more of that on Twitter, Blue Sky, and Threads.
Mostly Twitter.
I am at David Bloomberg there.
And yes, you will also be inundated with reality TV stuff, but you could just mute those hashtags because, like, you don't want to hear about Big Brother, just mute the hashtag BB26.
And then you'll just get the tweets related to politics and science and objectivity and things like that.
I know there are people who do that.
I'm perfectly fine with it.
So, yeah, you can find me at those various locations.
Yeah.
And I gave the email at the top of the podcast.
But if anyone's interested in the Twitter goings-on, I do have at least a couple of trolls.
They're interesting, if nothing else.
You can follow me at Spencer G. Watson on Twitter.
I'm also on Threads and Blue Sky, but almost never there, actually.