Discourse Pollution
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
170.84561
Summary
In this episode of the podcast, we discuss the rise and fall of Donald Trump's campaign manager, Donald J. Trump Jr. and his ties to organized crime. We talk about how he got into politics, his connections with organized crime, and why the FBI is investigating him.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
so yeah i mean there is a certain sense in which like bannon wanted to be the rasputin but didn't
00:00:06.020
like really have the chops like i remember in july of 2016 he wanted to be introduced to trump he
00:00:12.100
didn't know trump right and there was a sort of like pact that was made with kellyanne conway
00:00:18.540
she who was you know the daughter of actual italian mobsters in philadelphia and she she
00:00:25.500
who was a pollster and kind of a flim flam woman in her own right and she was basically propped up by
00:00:32.600
rebecca mercer and there was a sort of deal cut that bannon would come in and be the campaign
00:00:37.100
you know manager um after paul manafort went down yeah and it more or less uh came came to pass
00:00:46.000
obviously where trump won but bannon was always trying to like larp himself and make himself into
00:00:51.560
this like world historic figure and candidly like he wasn't really all that involved in the
00:00:56.680
transition he basically used it as an opportunity to grift to meet all these like wealthy and
00:01:01.460
famous people um you know because and he put himself on the cover of time magazine you know he he tried
00:01:09.060
to basically make himself into this figure which he really had no claim like he had no books he has no
00:01:15.100
like real political thought and and of course like he's also just terribly stupid because if you wanted
00:01:20.660
to deconstruct the administrative state you wouldn't say that right like right off the bat because you
00:01:27.480
would basically call down ordinance on your position because every every bureaucrat in you know in the
00:01:33.320
administrative state is going to just hunt you for sport now because you're literally messing with
00:01:38.780
their very existence so um i think look i think a lot of this comes out of the claremont school
00:01:45.900
the sort of like you know the sort of like jj rj pastrito school that that basically argues that
00:01:52.600
progressivism was bad because it essentially was anti-mob right um that it was trying to like
00:02:00.300
actually reform and make government institutions work and that we should have just let the constitution
00:02:04.700
be captured by organized crime and i think that that's really what people want to go back to like
00:02:11.040
there are lots of us who like the epa that like the fda that like a lot of these government
00:02:15.400
institutions and and to the extent that they don't work well want them to work better right and want to
00:02:21.140
like figure out ways to fix them but bannon had no real solutions other than like rip up the iran deal
00:02:28.180
and you know deconstruct the administrative state and get everyone fired up and going crazy and that
00:02:35.100
was sort of his that was sort of his raison d'etre and if you look at his connections i mean you know
00:02:40.760
the war for eternity book mentions all the weird occult stuff he's into it mentions all the weird stuff
00:02:46.720
he was into in hong kong he was of course removed from the navy it's unclear if he was court-martialed
00:02:52.460
or what happened there um there's sort of like a counterintelligence investigation going on against
00:02:57.660
bannon um i myself was called by the fbi to see if bannon was leaking material to me and to others
00:03:03.940
and i said he may have been leaking it to cernovich but he sure as hell wasn't leaking it to me because
00:03:08.060
you know he he and i sort of had a falling out right after trump got elected
00:03:12.080
um he claimed you know all kinds of crazy things during the election which of course he wasn't
00:03:18.760
really doing so you know it's basically a basic bitch con man behavior on the part of of bannon and
00:03:26.180
you know you look at his family connections there's a lot of like weird ties to uh there's a lot of
00:03:32.120
weird ties to sort of the irish mob in virginia that's sort of where his family comes out of
00:03:37.000
and um and yes so he's he's basically a con man and you know there can only be one con man in the
00:03:44.560
oval office at any given time and he wasn't he was never going to really defeat or or remove um
00:03:50.900
you know remove trump and i think it's interesting to think that bannon was an investor in seinfeld
00:03:57.100
you know a show about nothing right because that's very revealing of like his politics there's
00:04:02.700
really nothing there other than just like anger and and and all that sort of thing now i'm told
00:04:08.840
that he may be extradited to brazil over like plotting a coup in brazil through his war room that's
00:04:15.620
sort of like what a lot of my friends here tell me um i can't get a hold of the ex-ambassador to
00:04:21.300
uh under bolsonaro's government the guy nelson nestor forster he and i were quite friendly he
00:04:26.660
was sort of very devout catholic but um but so i'm still trying to figure out what exactly was going
00:04:32.360
on in brazil and it's hard to make real sense of it but like you do have to wonder like what is matt
00:04:37.300
tierman's doing down in brazil like what are these people like what is jason miller doing in brazil
00:04:44.460
and there's a certain sense in which this like you know kind of global criminal syndicate um is like
00:04:51.360
very destructive to the world order and we need to just sort of like remove it and it's unclear how
00:04:57.000
to do that in you know in a way that kind of like respects civil liberties but i suspect what will happen
00:05:03.280
is it will be done like whether it's done you know in an elegant way or a violent way it will they
00:05:09.580
will be removed from the discourse i i hope so because all they do is pollute discourse and um
00:05:16.900
you know as we mentioned the other week i mean the j6 committee lots of interesting stuff going on
00:05:24.900
there but but ultimately it was this you know trump is uniquely bad and look at all these innocent
00:05:31.560
republicans who were you know corrupted by trump and it's like that's not what happened you know and
00:05:39.260
you're liz cheney is doing that for obviously self-serving reasons and yeah i agree it's it's
00:05:47.580
like the the state it it doesn't have the capacity to defend itself i mean there's this uh line from
00:05:55.280
that's usually attributed to call carl popper it's actually you can even look at it with schmidt but
00:06:01.680
it's the the the paradox of tolerance where you want to create a tolerant society and let's just
00:06:10.020
put instead of saying that using the loaded word tolerant let's just say you know functional organized
00:06:16.400
safe society but that means that you actually have to be intolerant you know you you have to
00:06:23.940
make yourself the exception exception to do that and i do feel like the government is not all it's it's
00:06:33.240
almost like not capable or not like ruthless enough to do it like you don't have a right to spread
00:06:39.400
russian propaganda on twitter i'm sorry you don't have there's no right that you you are guaranteed to
00:06:48.040
do that under the first amendment you know and yes this can get out of hand it could be heavy-handed
00:06:54.420
i get it but like you need the state needs to defend itself at some point against these people who are
00:07:02.320
inherently bad actors they don't just disagree with you they want to inspire like crazy nonsense that
00:07:10.620
serves their masters in some weird way and that's not cool you know if you invite someone to a party
00:07:18.780
and they bring a bottle of whiskey and pass it around hey cool you contributed to the party if they
00:07:26.640
come in and they bring poison gas to your party it's like fuck off you're not gonna release toxic fumes
00:07:35.400
in my house you don't have the right to do that you're not contributing anything and i i've just
00:07:41.500
gotten again i probably wouldn't emphasize these kinds of things four or five years ago at this point
00:07:47.920
in my life i'm just like the state has a right to defend itself against these people no and in many
00:07:55.260
respects if it doesn't defend itself it's in real trouble because there are lots of people who will who
00:08:01.060
will see it as weak and not want to protect it right just out of simple self-preservation right
00:08:07.100
it sort of has an obligation to go after these people with the full force of law and even if it's
00:08:13.520
heavy-handed even if it's cruel like which i think some of the the january 6 detainees you know have
00:08:19.720
suffered pretty abhorrent conditions like no doubt about it um but that may well be necessary you know
00:08:26.360
right like i mean it's just this is the nature of like this is a serious game right we're not going
00:08:34.340
to see the united states of america descendant just mob rule and you know sort of like caudillo style
00:08:41.400
latin american dictatorship um that's just not going to be permitted here i think it will basically lead
00:08:48.440
to the the total change of the republican party because the republican party doesn't really want to
00:08:54.600
contend with a lot of this issue i mean you look at liz cheney as a as a sort of paramount you know
00:09:01.520
kind of kind of thing here where she's celebrated everybody loves her right but of course nobody talks
00:09:06.620
about like her father is the one who like got us into iraq who of course like got all these single
00:09:14.560
source contracts for halliburton right um who of course halliburton stock was later purchased by the
00:09:21.540
chinese to kind of keep us forever trapped in iraq and afghanistan and there's a certain sense here
00:09:28.020
where like we have to pretend that liz cheney is a good actor here and again you know you see matt gates
00:09:35.980
went by himself to wyoming to give an anti-liz cheney speech far before far before it was popular
00:09:43.500
right and his argument against liz cheney was on all these endless war grounds that basically we were
00:09:50.520
engaged in like dumb geopolitical fights and to the extent that gates and i by the way have a huge
00:09:57.300
difference of opinion i actually think the ukraine war is in some sense necessary and actually a um
00:10:03.940
a sort of like important departure from these endless wars in libya you know afghanistan and uh
00:10:11.440
and iraq and that actually it's it's a sign of how serious america is becoming that we're actually
00:10:17.960
taking nato and we're taking the european union and we're taking the sort of like russian invasion
00:10:23.220
seriously so i i'm obviously totally we've we've come to a lot of similar conclusions from different
00:10:29.300
perspectives it's interesting yeah i mean it is interesting like i do see some of the stuff that
00:10:33.480
you've said like over the bit but but you know i basically have spent a lot of the last few years
00:10:39.240
just sort of like reading and thinking and not talking and i think that um you know the the thing
00:10:48.500
about the january 6th thing that was most disturbing to me was that i knew a number of people who were
00:10:53.440
both in the crowd and also who like broke into the buildings and of course didn't end up getting in any
00:10:59.100
real trouble because many of them were just sort of boomers that were swept up in it
00:11:02.780
but i i always i never thought of you know basically i never thought that that kind of
00:11:10.100
thing could happen to people that i knew right that i was one degree removed from i mean i had i've
00:11:15.880
had conversations with baked alaska he actually stayed in my home one christmas eve i think like
00:11:20.700
six or seven years ago uh because he had nowhere else to go for the holidays so i let him come crash
00:11:25.420
the thing well that makes two of us oh did you did you take him in too of course yes back in the uh
00:11:33.840
in the 2017 era yes yes i mean he was sort of like he was sort of helpless and like not really a man not
00:11:42.220
really a child you know it was like it was a very strange kind of thing and like his parents had
00:11:48.380
adopted all these people from russia it was like just very strange right his whole like situation
00:11:53.740
and of course like those are the kind of people that always get like taken advantage of that always
00:11:59.700
get kind of like turned into like jokes or into like um you know they're what is it the patsies or
00:12:10.400
the the uh the village idiot or the useless idiot or useful idiot or whatever the term is um you know
00:12:18.040
and and of course like how naive am i not to think that that would happen you know
00:12:22.460
let's do this um we uh we have a fairly big crowd here 35 um do you guys want to jump in
00:12:31.940
and uh ask some questions or bring up a topic yes um richard you brought up like free speech and
00:12:39.700
stuff uh i i know you watched the majority report sam cedar uh because they had like uh um a few days
00:12:48.560
ago or if it was last week they interviewed some professor or something and they talked about
00:12:52.220
uh the spionage spionage act in world war one now that limited speech um did you saw that
00:12:58.920
i didn't see that one yeah they talked about the sedition act and they talked about the spionage act
00:13:05.180
uh i need to go watch that would it yeah do you want me to go i'll just reproduce this real quick
00:13:12.040
so we've had multiple sedition acts in u.s history including immediately after the founding of the
00:13:20.380
constitution but there was a sedition act before world war one and um that line that everyone knows
00:13:28.200
you can't yell fire in a crowded theater when there is no fire uh was written by oliver wendell holmes
00:13:35.780
in affirmation of the sedition act uh a year later two years later i can't remember in a in another
00:13:44.300
case yes they bring that up in that uh where they talk about how he changed his mind during
00:13:50.660
right and so yeah that's remarkable he isn't he is an intellectual who can change his mind and there's
00:13:57.580
i i admire him for that but i don't admire the logic i mean it is this libertarian logic of
00:14:04.280
you know the state doesn't have a right to defend itself because in america we're this experiment and
00:14:10.700
who knows maybe anarcho-bolshevism is the right way forward who who can say you know we've got to test it
00:14:18.580
in the laboratory of ideas i mean just this really horrible notion to be honest that like unilaterally
00:14:26.100
disarms you to foreign actors who were being prosecuted by this act these are these are
00:14:34.020
pro-bol they happen to be jewish but they're they're pro-bolshevik actors who were pamphleteering
00:14:39.880
against the united states and encouraging people not to do their duty and register for the draft
00:14:46.200
right right which is of course i think another another aspect of this too that is often not
00:14:51.520
always acknowledged i mean that's actually quite an interesting um thing you brought up because
00:14:56.320
americans don't have positive uh their constitution don't really have uh uh it doesn't say anything of
00:15:03.300
the duties to the state um which like the sort which ironically is like a soviet invention
00:15:08.340
uh so that's kind of like an interesting paradox you think about it