Truth Unrestricted dissects political compromise amid U.S. chaos, from Ukraine’s rejected $6B mineral-for-military deal to Mitch McConnell’s 83-year-old exit and Democrats’ inconsistent resistance—like Dick Durbin’s (80) alleged flip-flops. Far-left factions, once hostile to "liberals," now face internal fractures over fascism, while conspiracy theories (election fraud, BS assassination claims) spread across both extremes. Compromise stalls when extremists demand more while offering less, mirroring Trump’s grip on Republicans or leftist purity tests. The episode warns: without shared trust and preemptive concessions, even alliances risk collapse, leaving only ideological gridlock—no solutions in sight. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that is building language for the disinformation age.
And video.
And building video.
And cats.
Kittens.
Kittens for the disinformation age, David.
That is use of kittens.
That is just an obvious way to lure in more viewers.
Oh, yeah.
Well, you know, you play to your strengths, David.
Play your strengths.
I mean, two kittens?
Two kittens?
Come on.
I mean, it's almost like saying we're not cute enough on our own to draw people in.
Who could resist two kittens?
I don't get a hair all over my shirt now.
Yeah, maybe grabbing white kittens, wearing a black shirt wasn't the best idea.
What are you, my wife?
Get this enough around here.
You can compromise and wear a white shirt like me.
I could compromise.
If I had any white shirts, I would have to be prepared for that conventuality.
Okay, so we should get to this topic, podcast.
It's not a podcast about kittens.
It's not.
But, you know, if they come back, they'll be on camera again, I guarantee it.
So we want to talk today about political compromise.
And we are at a very particular moment in history, has been on everyone's mind.
Everyone's wondering about the future and where this thing goes.
And I think there's a moment after this moment, and that is the future.
That's the only description that matters.
It's time still marches on, whether or not anyone's here to record it.
But to some of us, yeah, it's a real, it's, you know, less flippant about that because they, yeah, far more worried about this.
Yes.
So as you can see in preparation, I have traveled.
I am stationed outside the White House.
No, that's good.
Our U.S. White House correspondent, this daily show fashion.
Soon to be your capital also.
Okay.
That's all right.
Well, because we'll compromise and just make you the 51st state.
Well, I mean, you didn't enjoy hockey that much, so you should just give up that sport and let us play it, right?
I mean, you can have the sport.
Your national team will not have people from the current area of the United States in it, if this is the case.
It'll be ours.
Yeah, like I've always said, I've always said that the U.S. could have Canada and could have it cheap.
The whole thing for cheap.
It would be the U.S., it would be the U.S., the rules, it would be the Constitution, it would be all that stuff, all the things that you claim that you love, including all the gun laws and all that stuff.
It would be, well, it would be yours.
If the price of the business.
All of this land, it would be cheap.
Okay.
It would only cost you three little things, and they're all cheap.
Okay.
Guess what they are, David?
You'd have to change the flag, the name, and the national anthem only.
And since you're changing them, we have some suggestions.
There's four things.
We'd have to add U's to all our words.
No, we would spell them according to your spelling.
Half of us do already.
But if you agreed to change, the capital would stay in Washington, all that stuff.
But if you agreed to change them to the nation would be called Canada, the national anthem would be O Canada, and the flag would be the maple leaf with the red bars, you could have it.
You could have it all.
Shouldn't it be A, Canada?
Not O Canada.
We would even stop saying A. Serious.
You could have the whole thing.
But you won't do it, David.
You won't do it.
Even Trump won't pay such a cheap price.
I see.
These three little things.
Someone pointed that out.
You know, maybe Canada can absorb all of us.
And I said that would that would take care of my issue.
You know, I wouldn't at all mind becoming part of Canada except for the whole I don't like cold weather thing.
The weather wouldn't be any different.
I know.
That's what I'm saying.
This would solve the problem.
Right.
But I mean, that's even different because that would require a change of rules.
Look at us compromising.
Oh, yeah.
Well, yeah.
That would you, you, in that scenario that you're describing, you would get free health care.
And so would all the states that agreed to join.
I mean, in that scenario, that's what other people are discussing, you know, how serious or whatever.
But in my scenario, we would lose free health care, but you could still have it.
You could still have it all.
But you won't pay even that minuscule price.
It would cost so little.
But we're talking like a million dollars tops.
And you could have the whole thing.
I don't have to make the decision.
Let me go back there and talk to you.
No, well, write this down and bring it to them.
Leave it on the doorstep.
Back away slowly so that they know you don't have anything in your hands.
We don't want anything to happen to you, David.
But yeah, that's my pitch.
But the U.S. won't do it because they're much more interested in image than in anything else.
And that's a lot of where we are now with this is that it's more about image than anything else.
The U.S. president has notably Trump.
Trump is the president.
Musk isn't even the ambassador.
Musk won't even be coming to Canada to address anyone.
I don't think Trump can because he's a felon, but I don't know.
I'm waiting to find out if they enforce that.
They'll give him some kind of diplomatic immunity or whatever.
I don't know.
Or he'll just say, you know, there's no good golf courses in Canada.
I didn't want to go anyway.
But the U.S. president has decided to, in true gangster fashion, submit a bill to President Zelensky for all the military hardware at whatever price he's determined in the form of precious minerals that are available in Ukraine.
The deal was turned down, not only because it was expensive, but because it contained no future securities.
If Russia decided again to increase aggression, Ukraine would still be on their own as long as Russia didn't, presumably as long as Russia didn't try to take over those same minerals that the U.S. wanted.
And of course, the U.S. gets to decide after the fact what these arms are worth.
In many cases, they were older arms.
In some cases, they weren't.
Some of the newer systems were newer systems, but a lot of them were outdated equipment that they weren't using anyway.
So what they were worth when they first made them is not the same as what they're worth now.
That's usually the game is played when you work out these values, you work out the highest possible potential value, and so and that's what's essentially been done.
Right.
Also, Mitch McConnell has decided to not run for Senate again.
I mean, there's only so many stairs he can fall down.
Yeah, there's only so many strokes he can handle on camera while he's talking before he has to admit that he can't do this anymore.
83 now.
He'll be 84 before he's 84 at least, maybe 85 before he's done being a senator.
But you're losing all the old guard, all the old Republican, all the old Republicans.
You still have a lot of old Democrats.
So we should get into our actual topic, though.
I'm way off topic here.
I'm distracted by all the actual news.
Well, maybe some of the new people will be interested in compromise.
Actually, they won't be.
Yeah, well, I don't know.
We will find out, I'm sure.
But because I don't want to merely chronicle what has happened and talk about what might happen, we want to talk about political compromise.
And I had a very specific sort of question in that as people become more desperate to obtain some kind of political victory or prevent some further political loss, for example, they will inevitably tend to erode what were previously like their standards of who they will and won't work with, what things they will and won't give up.
And this moves the line for what they will compromise on.
So already we have a situation where Democrats, largely the Democratic Party, almost all of them, have appeared to be just working with the Republicans on whatever the Republicans want to do across the board in Congress, Senate, and working with the White House to do things.
And they've taken a lot of heat for that.
I'm going to have to stop you early.
Okay.
Because I don't know what you mean.
I don't know what you think they've worked on that whatever they want to do.
So I think that's the thing.
But they've given very little pushback on any of the appointments.
There was some talk.
There was, I mean, among people who talk about these things, like us talking heads, there were some people who were sort of Democrat Party apologists, I would want to say, I guess, who would look at the fact that Pete Hegseth gets in and then, what's her name, who is from a cult director of national intelligence now.
Oh, yeah, Tulsi.
Tulsi Gabbard.
Yeah, that's right.
There was some thought among them that they were trading horses in that they were allowing and working with Republicans to get those in in exchange for Republican help in blocking an RFK Jr. nomination.
That was one of the big ones that's going to lead to a lot of problems.
But that hasn't happened.
There's been no substantial amount of way to stop any of this stuff.
Well, but that's exactly it.
You said there's no way to stop it.
I mean, they're in the minority.
Okay, but.
So how do they stop it?
They can.
Now, don't get me wrong.
I'm about to say something and then say something else.
But they could vote against these people all they want.
And in many cases, though not all, they have.
But if a couple of Republicans won't flip, it doesn't matter.
Now, have they, and this is the second part, have they always stood strong and voted against?
No.
I just sent a message to my own senator who's in his 80s, Dick Durbin, who I have supported for a very long time.
And he is really pissing me the hell off.
Because while he stands out there and says we will not let them move forward with the agenda, he's voting in favor of like Vance's old army buddies to lead the military.
It's like, no.
Okay, I know you, like 18 Democrats voted in favor of it.
Yeah.
I know all 18 could have voted against it and it wouldn't have mattered.
But do it anyway.
Yeah.
Do it anyway.
Show us that you're standing with us, that you're standing against them.
That's right.
Don't just vote for them.
At least pretend that you can try to do something.
Yeah, because that influences other people's decisions as well.
Right.
If you're going to have any kind of groundswell political movement against anything, you're going to want to be able to say, yeah, I voted against it.
If you want to, I mean, they haven't been very loud.
There's been one who's been fairly loud about opposition to all of Trump's things, right?
I mean, there's been very loud.
They have started getting the message to get louder.
Okay, but one was loud out of the gate, right?
She's not always popular with people.
Right.
But there's been a number of them who have gotten the message.
Like even my own congresswoman started out.
She was putting messages on social media like, oh, look at this thing.
Oh, look at that thing.
Oh, you know, the price of food.
And a number of people, including me, just blasted her and said, what the hell are you doing?
Speak up.
And then all of a sudden, she was hosting a virtual town hall on the phone and she was hearing from people and she was speaking out a lot more.
Yes.
And the same thing has happened with some other Democratic politicians.
Not all.
I mean, is it a good look that the, I believe the Speaker of, not the Speaker of the House, the House Majority Leader is out on a book tour right now?
I think he's the one who's on there.
No, it does not look good.
Now, maybe he had contracts with the publishers that he had to do it.
Still doesn't look good.
Yeah, it's still not his job.
You know what I mean?
It is.
Part of it.
The book tour is part of his job.
He's getting paid for it.
He's probably getting paid more than he's not, you know.
Right, right, right.
Okay, that's a second job.
He's dying as a bicycle.
That's his job is this.
The reason the only reason anyone would buy his books is because he has this job.
Yes.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
So, but the thing is, when it all comes down to it, especially in the House, they can't do crap.
There's not even a filibuster in the House.
They could sit there and yell and scream all they want.
They can make great points.
They can, you know, they can't actually stop them if the Republicans stand strong together.
Okay.
Well, you know, you're right that they are outnumbered, but in the past, they've been outnumbered and still managed to do things that's unavailable to them now, I guess.
Some of it is.
Some of it is, and some of it is because Trump and Musk have all the Republicans on their knees.
Scurrying.
Scurrying.
Yes.
That's what they're doing.
They're busy scurrying and not doing what they're supposed to do.
Right.
Yeah, and they've got them frightened.
Uh, some of them are frightened because the richest man on earth has said, if you do something against me, I will primary you, I will dump billions of dollars against you.
Uh, some of them are scurrying, and they've admitted this, yeah.
Uh, that some of them are scurrying because they've gotten threats of violence from MAGAs, and that and you know, so much for we don't negotiate with terrorists, they're just like, Oh, someone threatened me, I'll vote for it.
Yeah, I better go along, yeah, yeah.
Uh, so so, you know, I know that we've immediately taken a turn here from what you started with, but I do think we're compromising on our topic today, yeah.
I do think that while I have certainly criticized Democrats for not taking a hard enough line at first, like there was one weekend where they just all voted in the Senate, like, yeah, okay, we'll go to cloture, we want to take the weekend off.
And it's like, no, keep them there, wreck their plans, yeah, uh, stop being so congenial.
Is this a difficult job?
Yeah, sorry, what um, but I do think many of them, perhaps most of them, have realized what the situation is.
There are still old guard, I think Dick Durbin is one of them.
I think he does, like I said, he's in his 80s.
I think that he does not recognize that this is not what it was 20, 30, however many years ago, you know, that you're not going to make some backroom deal with the guy that you're hanging out with at the bar while you fight with him in public.
You're not going to vote in favor of people just because, eh, you know, what's the difference?
Um, this is, you know, a fight is needed here, yeah, even if it's even if it's a fight, you know, you're going to lose.
Yeah, it's still worth fighting, right?
It's still worth showing that you tried.
Uh, I mean, I worry that senators like Dick Durbin, uh, you know, people like Bernie Sanders is not young, I'm not even sure how old he is, but he's in his age.
Yeah, yeah.
Um, I worry that they don't have well, I worry that they don't have the energy for this.
Uh, you know, maybe they have the energy if it were a more calm time to continue doing their jobs, but this is not that time for the good of the nation.
They should consider not continuing the way Mitch McConnell has decided to not continue.
Not that Mitch McConnell did it because of the good of the nation, he no, he's just if he wanted to do something for the good of the nation, he could have stopped that a few years ago, yeah, yeah, he could have impeached Trump, yeah, um, convicted, but yes, well, yeah, he would have been voting for conviction, but uh, that's how impeachment works.
Um, but but but anyway, my point to you was I don't think the Democrats are working with the Republicans.
Now, there was an act very early on, I think it was the first one, the Lake and Riley Act, I believe it was called, that uh, it said that if an immigrant is accused of a crime, not even convicted of a crime, accused, they can be deported immediately.
And my congresswoman voted for that.
I was very annoyed, yeah.
And a number of Democrats does the accusing, what measures, right?
What meets the bar of a of like a literal, you know, like charges filed criminal accusation?
Oh, okay.
Um, but still, still, an accusation is not a conviction, yeah.
Um, and so were they working with them then?
Yes, were they stupid to do so?
Yes.
Yeah.
I think they bill came up today instead of when it came up.
I just don't see them working together to the extent that was kind of in your thesis statement there.
Well, they don't seem to be.
Well, maybe it's unfair to say they're working together with Republicans that much, but here's my thought about fascism in general, which is that it pushes people to an absolute.
It says, you're either with me or you're against me.
And there is no middle road.
And so, you know, it forces people to do this.
If you're not pushing back against fascism, where are you, right?
Right.
Everyone who is pushing back against fascism has a right to ask that.
If you're not working hard enough to stop those fascist ideas, is it fair to say that you are okay with them, that you're working with the people putting them forward just by passively standing back, not fighting very hard to stop them from doing it?
Because maybe you just throw up your hands.
There's nothing we can do.
We shouldn't try anything.
We should just, as I think has been accused, the Democrats have been accused of, is just waiting for this to fail economically and then win in the midterms in 2026.
Well, and some of them, I mean, yeah, he's going to make for an awful two years, right?
Yeah.
I mean, because I think it was, I don't want to quote because I don't remember which senator it was, if it was Schumer or Schiff or one of them was like, well, he's going to screw up eventually and that's when we'll make our move.
Yeah.
And it's like, no.
Yeah, that's not the line to take here.
Yeah.
And then like a couple who should have been put out to pasture a long time ago said on the Sunday morning TV show, he was like, well, the Trump administration is going to fall apart in 30 days and we just have to be ready.
It's like.
Ready for what?
Yeah.
You don't even seem ready now.
Yeah.
Anyway, we've been complaining about the Democratic Party for a while now.
Let's shift this a little bit because I have a new cat.
I have a new cat.
Ah, see, you traded in for a black cat that matches your shirt.
Yeah.
Yeah, his fur won't show up as much.
That's fun.
So we have a situation where ordinarily there would be, let's say, politically, you know, the group of people who are politically on the left of center don't all necessarily work together.
They might have different goals.
They might have different extremes.
They might have different things that they're comfortable with or without doing.
I have my own, I consider myself probably slightly left of center.
Even from the Canadian perspective, so from the U.S. perspective, I'm a radical.
But what I have is I have people on the left whose goals and methods I don't approve of and I don't really want to work with.
But at some point along this, you know, the railroad tracks being built for fascism rail line, I might need to reconsider that.
And everyone else is going to as well.
They're going to have to reconsider who they will and won't work with.
What new level of distaste are they going to be willing to put up with just to band enough people together to push back against this effectively?
And everyone, I think, is going to have to ask themselves that over some time in the next two years.
Some people are already asking themselves that.
So what do you think about this?
Well, I think you've got a couple problems because some of those people on the left have already spent at least the last eight, 12 or more years showing that they don't want to work with the people they derisively call liberals.
You know, I didn't know that there was, you know, I thought only conservatives used liberals as an insult.
But, you know, I've had all over your shirt.
I've had leftists be like, don't call me a liberal.
Okay, sorry.
You know, I didn't know that I was.
I think this is only a thing in the States.
It doesn't have seen that in Canada.
But, you know, the point is there has been an internal war for years.
You know, the whole conspiracy that the Democrats had supposedly against Bernie Sanders, as if Bernie Sanders would have magically won instead of Hillary, which he wouldn't have.
Yeah, it turns out he wouldn't have.
You know.
And then all the other things more recently with some leftists refusing to vote for Harris.
You know, some of them pushed this idea that we shouldn't vote for Harris.
We should vote third party.
Some went so far as to vote for Trump.
That comes down to a lack of political compromise as well.
Right.
That's what I'm saying.
These are the people who we're talking about trying to compromise with now are the people who, in some cases, and I'm trying not to overgeneralize, but in some cases, refused to compromise to prevent Trump to begin with.
Well, those people are going to have to ask themselves the same question.
Well, some of them already have.
They asked themselves that at the moment of the election, and they said the answer will be to not.
But this is a continual process.
They will ask themselves that again.
Well, and some already have.
Some of them, I mean, especially, you know, in the Arab American or Muslim communities that thought that Harris was not doing enough in Israel.
And we're not going to comment one way or the other on that, just what they thought.
You know, Trump comes out and says we're going to level Gaza and kick all the Palestinians out.
And now some of the people who were in that movement are saying, oh, maybe it wasn't such a great idea to let Trump get in.
And we're sitting here on the sidelines going, what did you think was going to happen?
We told you this.
This was the man who enacted the Muslim ban.
We knew that it was going to be worse.
However bad you thought it was under Biden, however bad you believed it was going to be under Harris, Trump is 100 times worse and always was going to be.
Yeah.
And so, but it's hard, no matter who it is, whether it's them, whether it's, you know, there's been the same thing with some in the like the Venezuelan community.
They believed that they were based on history, that they were safe.
And so they said, yes, some of us want, you know, want to vote for Trump.
And now they're saying, oh, crap, that was a terrible idea.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, don't get me wrong.
The majority of the people who voted for Trump were white males.
You know, and obviously white women too.
But, you know, so I've seen some, frankly, on the left, some leftists saying, don't try to blame these other groups.
White people are the ones to blame.
Okay.
Granted.
You know, I obviously wasn't one of them.
But I understand what you're saying.
But the point is that these were the people who perhaps should have known better.
Whereas the you know, like it or not, white people are more likely to do better under Trump, you know, than minorities.
Not all white people, certainly, not white, you know, I mean, mostly rich white people are going to, you know, more likely to do better.
But, but, so yes, everybody should have known not to vote for Trump.
And everybody is suddenly surprised that the face-eating leopard is eating their face.
Yeah.
Somehow I think they thought that wasn't in the cards.
All of them did.
All of them thought that.
Yeah, they must not have heard the poem, right?
Well, they must.
I mean, the poem and everything else.
I mean, it's, it's, yeah, it's like you should have paid a little attention before voting.
Like, and now there's even a debate among those people to take a slight tangent from the original point I was going to make.
Should we be saying to those people, I told you so, what the hell were you thinking?
Or should we just say, come here, welcome into the resistance.
We welcome you with open arms.
Join us.
Frankly, I think it's a combination of both.
I don't think you get to make a horrible decision like they did and get off scot-free with a nice little pat on the head.
Well, okay.
All right.
Here's my pitch, David.
I think that they will pay for their decision like Trump will make them pay for the decision.
That's true, too.
That's what I think.
But some of them are complaining and still want to support Trump.
You know, like some of them, there have been public letters like, well, I work for the federal government.
And when you said you were going to get rid of waste, I didn't think it meant firing me.
You know, and then there was a well-known actor who supports Trump who came out and said the same thing and said, well, come on, you can't fire the people who voted for you.
So he doesn't care about the random nature, the idiotic way it was handled.
He's just like, well, don't fire the people who voted for you.
Yeah, right.
Well, that's also, I mean, that perspective is also really egregiously off.
You know what I mean?
Like, the idea that everyone, because inside that idea is the idea that all the people who didn't vote for you need to suffer for not having voted for you.
Right.
Well, in Trump's mind, they do.
Yeah.
Fire all the people who didn't vote for you.
I don't, you know, I don't.
Right.
It doesn't make any sense.
What are you going to ask the people?
They're just going to catch on right away and then say that they voted for Trump.
Like, there's no way to check.
But even aside from all that, how can we work with someone who was so easily fooled by the biggest liar on the planet?
I mean, that's an honest question.
You know, you should have known better.
Now you say you want to work with us.
How do we work with you?
You know, there's a lot of people who go back and forth about whether or not we should consider the group of people who support Trump to be in a cult.
And I don't want to get too deep into that swamp just now as to whether or not they aren't in a cult.
But I do think that regardless of that, some of the wisdom from people who have been in cults and have been through this should still be useful in either case.
Okay, that's a good point.
And so in thinking that, I think that when a person's in a cult, their reality is distorted such that they can't tell what's really happening.
And so it doesn't do any good.
It's not useful to try to pull someone out by telling them that they're stupid for not having seen it.
And that's generally where, I mean, there isn't a handbook, as much as some people have tried to write one, there isn't a real handbook for how you get someone out of a cult because no one method works every time for starters.
And the only way that seems to work is a lot of individual one-on-one time to do it.
I mean, it takes you probably 10 times as much effort to get a person out of a cult as it got to get him in the first place, roughly speaking.
And so the point I'm trying to make here is that I don't think we should, I'm not big on I Told You So's.
Personally, I'm not.
I'm willing to forgive as long as a person understands what happened.
Like if they, to me, forgiveness is about recognizing what you did wrong, apologizing for it if you need to, but mostly recognizing what you did wrong.
Give me some indication that it won't happen again.
At least some indication.
And that will reflect whatever level of forgiveness I'm willing to give in return.
I mean, I don't think personally that we need to be attempting to, you know, if we if we find a person, if we, some future date where we encounter maybe a group of people or an individual or something who used to be very enthusiastic about Trump and was on board with all the things.
And then it didn't turn out well for them or the country or the rest of the world.
And then they say, I don't, you know, and they shake their hand and go, I was wrong.
And they willingly say, I was wrong about that.
Yeah.
You know, like, I'm not saying we just give them the, you know, let them be the next president or anything.
But as far as that goes, some level of forgiveness and say, okay, all right, look, you were wrong.
Like that, that's useful for you to be able to admit to yourself and to the rest of us.
Like if you're beating yourself up for it, I don't see a reason to additionally pile on.
I say we get on with whatever we need to do because trying to turn the screw is what's going to try to, it's a thing that will keep people in that space, right?
If there's, if the road back from there is A road that's got slippery cobblestones and it's got barbed wire on each side.
It's very, very narrow.
They're unlikely to walk it, right?
But if we can make the road smooth and wide and lighted and, you know, I don't know, colorful, happy, they're much more likely to walk that road back to reality, you know what I mean?
And get to a place where we can be.
We're not talking a lot about compromise in this entire episode, though, David Williams.
Well, I think we are because it's a question of who you can compromise with, who you true with.
That's right.
And so that leads to the next group.
It leads nicely because this circles back around to the far left versus liberal center left, whatever you want to call it.
Because there has been a lot of discussion among those on the far left, blaming other Democrats and saying the party should have involved them more.
And at the same time, some of them attack to the point of viciousness in a way that makes it virtually impossible to even consider working with or compromising with them.
Yeah.
And a good example is the way some of them respond to, I have one particular guy in mind.
He's a fairly popular Democrat on Twitter and Blue Sky.
He's not even an elected official.
He ran for state office and far left people, not Republicans, far left people sent out political mailers attacking him and taking things he said online massively out of context.
Then when he started to get some more recent attention, as he was fighting against the Musk Trump administration, they began again online, blatantly quoting him out of context to send a hateful online mob against him.
Like they were riling people up.
And you could see he said this.
And even when he would respond and be like, funny how you cut out the very next line.
And he would show what the very next line was.
It didn't matter.
The hateful online mob was going after him.
And the problem is, I even saw some people who in other situations I have agreed with, but they were joining the mob.
And it's like, people, our goals overlap significantly.
Yeah.
But they spend so much time and energy attacking someone who is out front making concrete suggestions.
And they're doing it with such dishonesty.
How is it possible to compromise with them?
How is it possible to work with them?
How can we say, okay, you have these sets of ideas.
We'd like to incorporate a few of them.
No, they won't do that.
It's you either do everything we say or we're going to withhold our support.
This is the game theory trap, right?
The absolutist and oppositional defiance that happens in this political space.
You have the one worry that I have is that in pushing back effectively against this will lead to a leftist demagogue who is, you know, in order to defeat that monster, we need a monster of our own kind of thing.
And that will just lead to a different nightmare.
Especially with horseshoe theory, because you get to some of the in horseshoe theory, they look the same because at the end of the day, all they really want is power.
Right.
That's the reason why they look the same, because they just want power.
Yeah, and they don't really care.
You know, like Stalin didn't really care about any of the principles.
He only cared about whatever principles would get him power.
And Hitler didn't really care about most of the principles either.
He only really cared about the ones that would make him powerful.
So when we talk about horseshoe theory a lot, comparing Stalin to Hitler, they do look a lot alike in a lot of respects because they were just authoritarians who wanted power.
Yeah, but I'm just saying even non-authoritarians, or at least non-people seeking power, you know, when there were recent bouts, additional bouts of anti-Semitism, it didn't just come from the right.
It came from the far left, too.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, when you have those groups agreeing, and you and I have previously talked about on a podcast about the BS assassination attempt conspiracy beliefs.
Yeah.
Okay.
Those came from the left, but they looked like they could have come from the right.
And more recently, I have seen people spreading election conspiracies, the same damn election conspiracies that Trump and MAGA spent four years spreading.
Similar.
It's now being spread by leftists.
I was a little busy in the month of November and I didn't get a chance to go over them when they were kind of big.
But they're still going.
People, the bigger liberal, sorry, leftist accounts are posting these.
And I had the gall on threads to say, stop it.
And I got attacked.
I got attacked.
And when I tried, all I did was ask for evidence.
I got blocked.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's you know, because you can't ask for evidence in a non-reality space.
No, there was no evidence.
Their evidence was, we can't believe that it happened.
Therefore, I mean, that essentially was it.
And then when all you had to do was throw the same things at them that we've been saying to the MAGA for all these years, like, how did they control every local voting machine?
Yeah.
How did they, you know, they're not run by one person.
The answer is Starlink for reasons that no one will understand.
The answer is some technology that's behind a curtain that you can't see.
And because you can't see it, it might be working in a way that works against you.
And also because Trump, they're hanging their head on this thing that Trump said, like, oh, Elon, he knows those election machines.
And because the crazy man who says crazy stuff all the time, another crazy thing is that you're not going to be able to do that.
Those same people would say that he's too old to know what he's saying.
Right.
And also that he's a known liar.
But for some reason, in this one moment, he's absolutely clear-minded and telling the truth.
Yeah.
How do you fit these two things together in your head and still have a cohesive worldview?
I don't understand.
He's a known liar.
He's going to lie about all kinds of things.
It doesn't matter.
Stop going to him to try to understand how the election turned out.
He was probably just as surprised as everyone else.
Yeah.
I mean, he ran a crap campaign.
Yeah.
Let's be honest.
He's out there yelling, they're eating the dogs.
They're eating the cats.
Yeah.
You know, and I mentioned on a previous podcast that here, that as soon as Harris lost, there were many people proclaiming it was because of their pet issues.
And I don't mean that as a pun with what I just said about eating the dogs and eating the cats.
I said it will take time to truly and objectively analyze the real reasons.
But I was pretty sure it wasn't what they were conveniently claiming happened to align with their particular issues.
And I would still say enough time hasn't passed.
But I also wonder if such an analysis will ever truly be done, except for maybe someone's like PhD history project years from now.
There are just too many people who are too strongly connected to their own ideologies to make it happen right now.
Like everyone's answers are predetermined.
Yeah.
You're far enough to the left.
You didn't try to.
This would have worked if you had done the things that I recommended.
Yes.
And because not all the boxes were ticked on my fairly extreme collection of views, it was never going to work, which is very, very similar to, for example, people who try to sell miracle cures and this sort of thing online, who include an increasingly complex number of things you must additionally do with it.
And as soon as not all of them come out about, it must be that you did one of them wrong.
It's always you that did it.
It's always your fault.
Yes.
Right.
Yeah.
To circle this back to compromise, though, I think that we have to recognize, just as a nature of compromise, that you can't compromise with someone who is not willing to compromise back in your direction.
Exactly.
And that's why the extremists, you can never really compromise with them.
They will always just demand more and give less.
And that's a thing we're going to have to recognize among people who we might otherwise see as useful participants in a movement, right?
If they aren't making moves also in your direction, they're not compromising.
And they aren't useful to work with.
They are children who will steal your toys and keep them in their corner of the room.
And you can't work with them.
You can't play with them.
Right.
And the difference is, I think, between the Republicans and the Democrats right now, the Republicans aren't compromising either.
Well, no.
They're bowing down.
They've lost their spines.
They're bowing down and doing whatever Musk and Trump say.
They are.
So this is going to come into play.
This level of logic is going to come into play.
I have content about this coming later this year when the Canadian election is closer.
But they are, in essence, audience.
We're not going to get into that, David.
Audience captured by Trump.
So this is how it works.
People wonder why Trump still does rallies.
I mean, he can't become, you know, there is no third term for him.
He's already too old.
He thinks so.
Right.
He's already too old, really.
But here's why he does rallies.
Because he needs the Republican senators and congresspeople to understand that they can only keep themselves elected with his blessing, with his grace, with his say-so.
And this is a measure of his populist control over the party.
So yeah, he has to keep doing rallies because if a Republican Congressman X thinks that he can vote against RFK Jr., And then he realizes that if I do that, you know, most of my base of support in my, you know, district is Trump supporters.
I need all those Trump supporters.
I need to do whatever Trump needs of me in order to get that done.
So, you know, that's they are not only ideologically aligned, in some cases they're not.
You know, like once you get into a party that's, you know, as big as the Republican Party or even the Democratic Party, you will get people who oppose each other within the same party, who disagree on many things.
This is inevitable.
But once you get this, you know, populist thing where it's not only that those people voted for the president, they will vote for me because of my association with the president.
They're much less likely to ever deviate from that, to ever enact any of their own power to limit the presidential power like they're supposed to do.
And that's a big part of the problem right now.
That's a big part of the math involved in this is that the, you know, the Republicans feel like they owe their individual seats and success, to many of them anyway, to an association with and a support for Donald Trump.
I don't know that they feel they owe it.
I think they're more operating out of fear that they will lose it.
Well, okay.
Same difference.
Same right.
But what they need to recognize for all of them that are listening to this podcast.
Yeah, yeah.
If you know any, let them know so that they should listen to this.
Rallies don't mean shit.
Harris had amazing rallies.
Huge energy.
By the rally numbers, it should have been a landslide for him.
Right.
And I think that was one thing.
And we reported on this podcast.
We talked about the numbers.
They were going to smaller and smaller venues in the Trump campaign because the rallies were smaller.
Right.
But that wasn't a factor.
Right.
Because those are your super fans.
And so great.
But the majority of the people are not super fans, one way or the other.
They're not taking the day off to go to a rally.
Right.
And so what does matter is now some of these Republican congressmen are going home and hosting events and suddenly all the people that Musk has fired are showing up at them.
All the people that are losing their benefits are showing up at them.
And they are not happy.
And now these congressmen don't know what to do because they're like, well, I have to support Trump, but I've got all these people here yelling at me.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I hope those people, if those people are listening to this podcast, they keep going to those town hall meetings and they keep yelling.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But how else are you going to get it done?
Right.
And that, you know, yeah.
So we have gone far afield from compromise.
I know.
I mean, we've swung back into a couple of times.
Yeah.
You know what?
Well, we'll compromise on the topic of the podcast.
It's fine.
We had to get these things out, but we meandered back and forth across it a couple times.
Well, but that's what I wanted to get back to is how do we compromise?
I don't have an answer because if there are people who are unwilling to even come to agreement on what the situation is, how do you compromise with them?
If there are leftists saying the reason that Harris won is because she swung too far to the right, and therefore, again, you have to do everything that we say, how do you compromise?
You try to point out, look at all these things that have happened.
In my lifetime, this country has become more liberal.
I mean, let's forget about the last month, but until that point, has become much more liberal than I think most people ever would have expected.
If you look at it.
You know, I have.
Because you're following Canada's lead.
Well, maybe.
Change the flag, the name, and the national entry.
I'm telling you.
But there are some people for whom it is never enough until you do everything they want.
And I don't know how you compromise with them, whether it's in politics, whether it's in real life, whether it's whatever.
I mean, that's the type of person in real life.
You would just be like, I'm done with you.
I'm done with you.
You know, I have a tendency to bring things back to reality TV.
Well, on an international version of Survivor that's currently airing, literally today's episode, as we're recording this, that exact thing happened.
There were four people together.
They had been following the lead of one of them with the idea that eventually it would swing back and they would follow what the other two wanted to do.
And then when the other two wanted to finally kind of cash in their credits, the first two were like, you just won't compromise.
You won't be logical.
We're going to split from you.
We don't like you.
And it's like everybody watching it, as well as those two people, are like, they've literally done everything you've asked for the last two situations.
And it really is just a, you know, a smaller version of the country, of certain aspects of the country.
Like those four people are probably aligned on a lot of what they want to do, but because of this one issue, they're splitting apart.
And that's what we have here.
And, you know, kind of to circle back to where I started, there are some people coming out and saying, gosh, I was wrong.
We should not have done that to get Trump elected.
There are other people who still won't admit they were wrong to do it.
There are other people who say, don't blame us.
Harris should have come to us and gotten on her knees and begged us to vote for her and done whatever we wanted.
Doesn't matter that she would have lost even more votes from other people who didn't want what we wanted.
It was the other people who should have compromised and not us.
Yes.
Exactly.
I mean, I know this topic was political compromise.
I just don't know how to compromise with some of the people who are so stuck in their beliefs that they refuse to budge.
Well, and that's where I was at just a few minutes ago when I mentioned it, is that you can't compromise with people who won't return any of the movements.
Everyone has to give up something.
And that's the key.
If you're with a person that wants you to compromise first and they'll compromise later, that's a bad deal that never works out in reality TV or anywhere else.
You need to have a lot more trust than you're going to get from that.
And that trust has to be long established.
I could do that with friends that I've known for a very long time.
But I can't do that with people that are just associates or people I just met.
That's not a good deal.
And we need to be prepare ourselves.
I think the point I'm trying to make is that people need to be ready to compromise.
And, you know, like think about those decisions before you make them.
Because when it comes time to make them, you might not have a lot of time to make them.
Right.
So having thought about them in advance will give you some measure of preparation for how you want to make them, that you might have some hope of not making them in a hasty fashion that's going to lead to further disaster or just a different authoritarian leader with a different set of obscene goals than the one that's currently in charge.
People need to think about that.
People need to stop and think, what sort of thing would I give up?
Would I give up an afternoon to attend a political rally?
I don't know.
A lot of people would.
Would I give up money out of my pocket that I would donate to a political party?
Maybe fewer people would, right?
Less now that the economy is going to be not great as predicted, right?
So, by the way, that's in some ways a direct problem further for the Democrats because a greater portion of the donations come from individuals rather than from rich donors.
And, you know, tipping the scales for the rich donor class away from individuals is going to be reflected, likely, very easily seen in the amount of donations that are in each party's pocket.
Well, it also doesn't help.
But that's a thing people are going to have to think about.
Yeah, it also doesn't help that they were literally sending those out as Harris was losing.
Like Harris lost, and they're still, I'm still getting texts and emails like, give us money.
It's like, screw you.
Yeah, yeah, I know.
And I'm still.
I'm still prepared for 2026 or whatever.
Yeah, I'm still getting them from people I don't know.
It's like, I don't care if you're a Florida congressional candidate.
I don't know who you are.
Stop sending this crap to me.
Yeah, that's also not useful.
Yeah.
But I think, you know, people are going to have to think about that.
What else would they, what line would they draw?
Where would they give up?
What level of, I mean, if there's some demagogue that rises on the left to take on, you know, the problematic side that's forming on the right, would they cross that line and support that demagogue?
Or would they also say, no, we can't do it this way?
Like, what decision would they make?
And I'm not trying to tell anyone necessarily what to choose, but think about it in advance.
Talk about it amongst yourselves.
Write into the podcast and talk about it.
I don't care.
By the way, you can contact this podcast at truthunrestricted at gmail.com and send any feedback, including any feedback about this episode, there.
So we should wrap it up here, David.
I think I need to take a break and feed some kittens.
Otherwise, I'll be divorced.
Where can people find you?
People could find me.
The easiest way is linktree slash David Bloomberg with a dot before the EE in Linktree.
You know, more specifically, you can find me on Blue Sky at David Bloomberg.
And, you know, you can see my political and non-political discussions and sometimes arguments there.
That's where I, even though I mentioned threads earlier, I really just poked my head in, found a bunch of leftist idiots attacking me for daring to point out they were conspiracy nuts and, you know, kind of backed away slowly after that.
I haven't seen threads in weeks.
I don't know what's going on there.
I rarely post there.
And then, of course, you know, I had mentioned reality TV for completely non-political content on reality TV.
I'm at YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok is at David Bloomberg TV.
Great.
And we'll wrap this episode up.
We didn't find any consensus on this.
We don't know where the world's going to go.
We haven't solved all the problems.
But we want you to keep listening to this podcast anyway.
And watching it.
So where can people find us on YouTube?
You can find my account on YouTube is Spencer G. Watson.
That's the same as my handle on Twitter at Spencer G. Watson on Twitter as well.
And I'm still working out some of the kinks.
I had the podcast was set to auto feed to YouTube.
And then I'm also putting a video of it on there.
So right now, I think some episodes are going to be on twice.
I haven't worked out all the kinks.
They'll be called the same thing.
So you'll know they're the same.
It's not like you'll get different content and one or the other.
If you want to watch, if you want to listen, you can do both.
It's fine.
We're not going to judge you.
But I will judge you if you don't give me a five-star rating.