In the wake of the Donald Trump victory over Joe Biden in CNN's CNN primary debate, Nate Hockman joins me to discuss what went wrong with the media's handling of the debate, and why it may have been the most unfair debate to date.
00:01:22.120I feel like maybe they've never seen a presidential debate with Donald Trump in it before.
00:01:26.180I think for a moment, everyone was lulled into a certain amount of, you know, they thought maybe they might get something fair because they watched the Biden-Trump debate.
00:01:36.780And it's very clear at this point that the press was totally setting Biden up.
00:01:40.540You know what a debate with Biden could have looked like.
00:01:44.420It could have looked like all the moderators jumping in constantly every time Biden started stammering or every time he got stuck on a question to cover for him and fact check and all this stuff.
00:01:54.800But in reality, they were just hanging this guy out to dry.
00:01:57.580And now we saw what an actual debate with the mainstream media looks like again, right?
00:02:03.280I mean, I think the mainstream media has probably gotten more hysterical over the course of the last few years, even though their guys were in power just because they've worked themselves up into a lather over the prospect of Donald Trump ever being in power again.
00:02:16.080Maybe, maybe than they were during the Trump era.
00:02:18.580I did feel the same kind of thing that a lot of people felt, even though I know it's naive, where it was momentarily shocking after like one debate where there was at least a modicum of fairness to see, you know, the media doing exactly what the media has done for for decades, which is effectively wage a three on one war on Trump.
00:02:38.100And, you know, fact check him for objectively true things, claims he made like that, you know, there's abortion up through nine months that's legal in eight states, et cetera.
00:02:46.700Yeah. But it is true. I can't remember if this is you who is saying this or or somebody else on on X like the the moderators were pretty fair for the Biden debate.
00:02:57.620And people talk a lot about how in that kind of interim period where they're trying to push Biden out for once, the Biden White House was very briefly subjected to something akin to what it's like to be in the Trump White House in terms of the media treatment.
00:03:12.100And they were clearly totally bewildered for that kind of three week period about the fact that they were getting all of this scrutiny.
00:03:18.080But at the same time, the media actually went softer on Trump for that period of time, too.
00:03:23.200Like that's the inverse is they weren't just super critical of Biden.
00:03:27.020There was this like peace very briefly with Trump where, you know, the the conference happened, the RNC and, you know, the assassination attempt.
00:03:36.880I mean, you have to take it easy for a whole week or two. Yeah.
00:03:39.800Although I wouldn't necessarily put it past the media, like if that had happened in this environment to just, you know, do what they do and be totally egregious.
00:03:47.360But there was I remember we did a thread on this, like the headlines from the RNC from the media were like Trump makes majestic, fitting entrance, like dramatic.
00:03:56.800Like there are all the headlines about like a softer Trump. Maybe he's changed, et cetera.
00:04:01.380So they were going easier on Trump as well as going harder on Biden.
00:04:04.560And of course, that's over now. Right. It's over with vengeance. And we saw that last night.
00:04:08.100All right, guys, well, we're going to jump into the meat of the debate in just a second.
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00:05:48.340I think anyone who remembers, again, the way that the media handles these debates knows that ultimately the fact checkers are going to be involved in arguing on the Democrat side.
00:05:59.520Though I have to say, this did feel more egregious than it has been previously, and it was already egregious enough.
00:06:06.000At one point, it felt like the ABC moderators were the ones actually having the debate.
00:06:10.700And every once in a while, Kamala Harris would chime in with something.
00:06:14.760But for you, what were some of the biggest moments, the highlights from this debate?
00:06:22.540It felt – I understand that people disagree with me on this.
00:06:26.000Like if you logged into X and, you know, talked to people on our side of the aisle, people had mixed opinions on how Trump did.
00:06:32.640Some people thought that he did a sort of middling performance.
00:06:35.720Some people thought that Kamala, for the most part, exceeded expectations.
00:06:38.400My initial impression watching the debate was it was the funniest and most charismatic public performance I've seen from Trump in at least six months.
00:06:47.880And you had all of these kind of sparks of the 2016 Trump, right?
00:06:51.180So you had obviously the they're killing our dogs, you know, line in Springfield.
00:06:56.100And that absolutely hilarious, extremely like 2015-2016 Trump interchange with the moderators where they're like,
00:07:02.280sir, there's no public – there's no official reporting.
00:07:05.620And he's like, well, the people are saying at the town hall meeting they're killing my dogs.
00:07:09.700There was the I'm speaking thing with Kamala where he's like, remember that?
00:07:15.260Which was actually sort of brilliant because you just know that she had like huddled with her consultants for months beforehand
00:07:23.120and had planned out I'm speaking redux, you know, because everyone on kind of the lib left would have just lost their minds if we had gotten another I'm speaking moment.
00:07:31.940And he totally stole that from her and neutered it by doing that callback.
00:07:36.480And there were a bunch of other moments too.
00:07:38.100I actually thought his answer on abortion was about the best possible answer you could hope for from any Republican.
00:08:34.780And it threw Trump for a loop for a second.
00:08:37.220It felt like he kind of – but then, for better or for worse, however you feel about that, we got full Trump.
00:08:43.400Like, from there, it was – you know, Trump shifted into the next gear.
00:08:46.860He left the careful, you know, Biden debate Trump behind, and he shifted into full gear.
00:08:54.680And so we got some of the best, you know, outbursts, but also some of the more erratic ones as well.
00:09:00.240I think you're right that he did give an excellent answer when it came to Roe v. Wade, very measured – again, like you said, he's not going to get any credit from this from kind of the most hard line of pro-life organizations.
00:09:13.120But ultimately, I think that's the best you can navigate that issue.
00:09:17.120And to be fair, also in line with what every Republican and every pro-life organization had said up until about a year ago.
00:09:25.220So, you know, not exactly off the reservation.
00:09:28.080I think the fact that he was repeatedly interrupted to fact-check things that in many cases were actually true, you know, was very important.
00:09:39.700Like you said, the – you know, they're eating our cats and dogs.
00:09:42.360Okay, not exactly the cats and dogs, but animals for sure.
00:09:45.960We know – you know, and the fact that the media immediately called those lies means a lot more people are going to go looking for that information, right?
00:09:52.480And that's, you know, that's what I was saying on Twitter is that, you know, this is going to backfire.
00:09:56.400That fact-check is going to backfire on these people.
00:10:00.220Yeah, the city manager is saying one thing.
00:10:02.540Okay, but I've got, you know, a bunch of conservative reporters are descending on that town right now, and they all have footage of, you know, what's going on there.
00:10:19.560The media is not going to be able to wash that out entirely.
00:10:22.480And also just the number of things that Harris lied about repeatedly.
00:10:26.900You know, there's one two-minute clip where she basically lied – you know, she threw out the, you know, the fine people on both sides hoax, the bloodbath hoax, the terminating of the Constitution hoax.
00:10:46.920You know, she lied about her health care record.
00:10:48.660And at no point, you know, I think there was – you know, CNN did some kind of graphic where one lie – you know, Harris was caught in one lie.
00:10:58.460It's just so cartoonishly bad that even though Trump was fighting 3v1 and even though in the moment, you know, it does feel overwhelming because he's trying to – you know, in some moments he's blustering.
00:11:09.260In some moments he's pushing past that stuff.
00:11:11.540It did seem to resonate with voters that he was making progress because, you know, much to the media's shock, you know, a post-debate CNN poll found the majority of undecideds heading towards Trump after the debate.
00:11:25.660It's – a Reuters, you know, pop-up poll did this.
00:11:29.040Of course, all these are – you know, there's no rigor to these polls.
00:11:32.400They're just happening right after a debate.
00:11:33.740But even the information that the media was putting out was as low as the bar was for Kamala Harris, she didn't really move the needle at all.
00:11:43.360And so the big win that Kamala was hoping for obviously didn't materialize.
00:11:48.460I think maybe you could say the big win, like the kind of knockout punch that the Trump campaign was hoping for probably didn't materialize either.
00:11:55.460But I'm also kind of skeptical of, like, how much these debates matter.
00:11:58.480I mean, the truth is that especially in America in 2024, essentially a 50-50 country, maybe 50.1, 49.9 country, you know, the pool of undecided voters at this stage in the game is vanishingly small.
00:12:17.060And of that pool, there's this kind of fetishization of, like, undecided voters, late-breaking undecided voters, independent voters, et cetera, as if they're these enlightened centrists who are highly educated and rational and considering all of the facts and digging, you know, combing through each candidate's policy platform to see which one aligns with their ideological priors.
00:12:37.780It's, like, not really what undecided voters at this point are.
00:12:41.140Generally, they're low-information, low-propensity voters who make a gut call a few weeks before the election.
00:12:47.360The idea that those people are kind of stroking their chin and watching the debate and watching the candidates debate their tax plans or Trump's tariff plans and whether or not that's a tax on consumers and making up their mind that way, I'm skeptical.
00:13:00.240So the meta of all this is this debate, I think, is mostly catnip for political addicts.
00:13:08.080I do think where it matters is in every debate there's kind of a handful of viral moments.
00:13:14.580And those viral moments which circulate on social media and then the broader narrative that they generate do find a way to penetrate kind of deeper into the popular political conscience.
00:13:24.400And in that sense, like, I think Trump obviously had more viral moments that were to his benefit than Kamala.
00:13:32.140I mean, maybe she had one, but I think for the most part, like, it was all Trump.
00:13:38.340Yeah, it really is true that it's more about driving out your existing voters than convincing the last few, all three people who don't know if they prefer Donald Trump to Kamala Harris.
00:13:48.640And like you said, the ones that don't know already are not people who are absorbing every policy issue and just can't quite make the choice.
00:14:18.220You know, these are people who expect at most news to be delivered to them in 30 second to two minute soundbites.
00:14:24.180So they're not sifting through the policy papers and the minutiae on trade policy to figure out what's going to be more advantageous to them.
00:14:31.480You know, when people talk about the vibes election or whatever.
00:16:06.660I think the thing I remember most about Kamala Harrison, that debate is her trying to stand off to the side and do the weird little thing with her hand and the face, you know,
00:16:14.260some terrible theater kid, you know, pose that she's trying to mock Trump while looking on the other side.
00:16:20.020It's almost as bad as Biden kind of drooling slack jawed on the, on the side by side.
00:16:25.880You know, Trump is, Trump is always kind of, you know, a cartoon, but in the sense that he's like, looks very serious while he's, you know, he, he, he doesn't have that dismissive look anymore when he's doing these debates.
00:17:04.300No, that's so true about Kamala is something that I noticed about her that was particularly potent in the debate, but is characteristic of the way she talks and speaks and moves in all of her public appearances.
00:17:21.120Is she has clearly internalized like her series of girl boss viral moments, right?
00:17:28.280The ones that I'm speaking, you know, the, the variety of other dunks that go viral on like lib resistance Twitter and has structured her entire public presence and personality around trying to recreate those.
00:17:40.880So you could see that in the debate last night.
00:17:54.820She wasn't sweating, but she was clearly unsure of herself.
00:17:57.980There was this kind of veneer of lack of confidence behind her facial expressions.
00:18:01.780And she, you could watch her if you just watch her during some of the most kind of viral moments, she's like trying to scrunch up her face to make the correct facial expression, but it's kind of not totally sure exactly what expression to make or exactly what sort of body language to demonstrate.
00:18:22.140I think it might've been the, um, the, the cats and dogs Springfield line where she's like alternating manically between half laughing and half looking outrage.
00:18:32.220Cause she's not sure which one she's supposed to do.
00:18:34.660And it just looks absurd and ridiculous.
00:18:35.180Yeah, you can see the emotions just running through her face.
00:18:38.480And that, and, and that was like, there's clearly this sort of very conscious, very forced, um, awkward attempt to project something that is obviously disingenuous on her part.
00:18:48.680I mean, everyone watching your show knows she's disingenuous, but it was much more viscerally obvious.
00:18:53.740If you watched her facial expressions last night, then I think it usually is.
00:18:58.000I don't know how many people are actually watching that closely, or at least how many people whose votes matter are watching that closely, but it was, it was evident to anyone who was watching closely at all.
00:19:08.340Well, I think you're right about those practice moments.
00:19:10.360It was very clear where she had sat down with her team.
00:19:20.800This is where, you know, and so you could see her in, in some moments, even rushing too quickly, uh, into the, into those to, it feels very awkward.
00:19:28.420I will say probably her, her most, uh, cogent moment was on abortion.
00:19:33.480I think that, you know, that's not for you or me, but it is connecting with her audience.
00:19:41.760Uh, she, she probably landed that very well.
00:19:44.480Another one, again, I don't know that this one was a little more awkward, but when it came to the J six stuff, she definitely had the impassioned, like this is our sacred halls and people died, even though she's lying through teeth through so much of that.
00:19:56.480She also had the assistance of, you know, the, the, the moderator stepping in and just filling in her cadence every time it wavered.
00:20:04.080And so there, I think there are a couple of moments there where if you are looking for victories for Kamala Harris, you can find them.
00:20:10.060And that's, I'm sure what's happening on MSNBC night, I saw this, the morning, Joe, you know, clips are already spinning out.
00:20:29.500They, you know, they, they, they are vindicated in, you know, whatever 30% of the country is sitting around and wearing their, you know, coexist t-shirts while, while, while listening to that.
00:20:39.740But I do think that, you know, to be fair, there, there were a few moments where she did land that because she, she did, you could feel those practice moments, but also moments where that just felt disingenuous.
00:20:50.320And like, she was trying to rush into or awkwardly place herself into these hero moments that just weren't happening for her.
00:20:57.240Yeah, no, Kamala obviously had her moments.
00:21:00.460I think abortion was the most obvious one.
00:21:02.200It was one of those examples to your point, like that she had clearly rehearsed and for good reason.
00:21:07.940Cause that's like the, the only issue Dems have right now.
00:21:10.580Um, but for the most part, she pulled it off, right?
00:21:12.820She sounded empathetic to somebody who might not really know that much about her.
00:21:17.520Um, she had this kind of storytelling cadence, et cetera.
00:21:20.500It worked for her for the most part, I would say the strongest moments for Kamala were largely self, self-inflicted wounds on Trump's behalf, rather than any kind of skill on her part.
00:21:30.880But I will say what is notable about her performance is it's easy to forget after three or four years of, at least on the kind of right-wing internet sphere, the only Kamala we see is, is the gaffes, right?
00:21:44.060And in her public appearances, she's awkward and cringy and gaff prone, et cetera.
00:21:48.200But one thing I was a little nervous about going into the debate was she actually can be a pretty good debater.
00:21:53.980If you watch the 2020 democratic primary debates, I mean, it's, it's easy for us to sort of make fun of it and mock it because we know who Kamala Harris is, but she was quite good at periods of time in the, in the primary debates.
00:22:05.720Like when she was going after Biden, like she had this rhythm and this cadence that, that totally worked.
00:22:12.720And she eviscerated Biden multiple times.
00:22:14.580She eviscerated other people multiple times.
00:22:16.180So the best Kamala Harris public appearances I've ever seen were on the debate stage in 2020.
00:22:21.660And that was largely absent this time.
00:22:25.620I don't know if she was just nervous, if the pressure got to her, but the kind of stuff you saw from her on the 2020 debate stage, you only saw for brief seconds, maybe during the abortion question.
00:22:43.700I think people forget, but the last few years of Kamala Harris, when all the gaffes are coming and everything, uh, we're watching, how do we say this carefully, uh, deep into her cups, Kamala, you know, two to three edibles deep Kamala.
00:22:57.400Uh, when we're, when we're seeing her in a lot of those clips, you know, over the last few years, she got the vice presidency.
00:23:03.120It became clear that she wasn't very good at it.
00:23:05.160They kind of shoved her into the kid's table and she may or may not have medicated herself for most of her public appearances, uh, for the last few years.
00:23:13.020So this is probably the first time we've seen Kamala sober in the, I mean, if we're doing speculation, I mean, I don't know anything for sure, but you know, something tells me that that's the case.
00:23:24.000Either way, uh, like you said, she didn't, she wasn't completely back into the rhythm.
00:23:27.640She wasn't completely back into the saddle.
00:23:44.980Uh, and, and the AP, uh, laying the narrative, uh, groundwork for the next election fortification, along with more information with what's going on in Springfield, Ohio.
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00:25:21.280So right after this, after the kind of the pop polls started coming in and it was clear that perhaps Kamala had not secured the victory that the Democrats had hoped in her appearance,
00:25:34.360we started to get the news that Taylor Swift had announced her support for Kamala Harris.
00:25:41.440Obviously, a lot of people had been speculating that this was coming down, you know, the line for a while.
00:25:47.700It was very obviously, you know, staged come out after this, though.
00:25:51.280I'm sure as soon as the results weren't what they hoped, they realized they needed to push that to the forefront.
00:25:56.840Obviously, this is someone who has a lot of clout in a younger generation.
00:26:02.660Well, not even necessarily younger generation.
00:26:04.760Actually, I'd say she's very popular with a lot of millennial women, of course, which would would be prime voting for certain, you know, in certain situations.
00:26:14.060Do you think that this has a significant pull, a significant change?
00:26:18.020I feel like most of the women who are going to value this determination had already made their decision.
00:26:24.760But do you think that makes any big difference?
00:26:26.880Yeah, I don't know if it changes minds.
00:26:28.780But to your point about like this election is mostly just a turnout game.
00:26:32.000It could it could affect turnout amongst young people who are obviously notorious for not turning out to vote.
00:26:37.420In general, this election is in many ways a referendum on the sustained power of these very obvious ops.
00:26:47.740Right. Like it's a referendum on how powerful the media is.
00:26:50.780It's a referendum on how powerful these kind of like flown in celebrity endorsements are.
00:27:01.920I wouldn't want to live anywhere else.
00:27:02.900But my opinion of the kind of discernment of the average American voter is about as low as it's ever been in my my short adult life.
00:27:13.440I think like people do fall for this stuff and conservatives, a lot of conservatives don't really want to reckon with this.
00:27:19.200Right. Because it's much easier to kind of scoff at the Taylor Swift endorsement and go, who's you know, who's making their decisions based on a Taylor Swift endorsement?
00:27:25.900Some people probably are, you know, like some young girls, especially probably are making their decision.
00:27:31.620Maybe I don't think they would have voted for Trump anyways, but they might show up to vote because they love Taylor Swift and she's behind Kamala.
00:27:39.280You know, like the celebrity power stuff works, especially with young people in the tick tock generation who love Taylor Swift.
00:27:47.200So, you know, I don't think it's like a huge world historic seismic win for the Harris campaign.
00:27:52.540And nobody thought Taylor Swift was going to endorse Trump.
00:27:55.800But I do I do think that stuff like conservatives have to take it seriously because for better, for worse, like that's the electorate we're working with.
00:28:03.340Yeah, there there is a situation where you want to dismiss that.
00:28:07.140You want to pretend that people are more serious.
00:28:08.720But again, anyone paying attention to American democracy should know that.
00:28:13.400Well, I mean, we have Donald Trump and Kamala Harris on the stage in the first place.
00:28:18.620And, you know, Taylor Swift is somebody who regularly brings tens of millions of people into stadiums night after night.
00:28:27.260She's got a level of influence that that is real.
00:28:30.820So it's true that that's going to have some impact there.
00:28:35.120The other thing that came out right after this debate, which I thought was hilarious.
00:28:40.340Personally, AP started floating a story saying that all of these voter integrity groups were coming out to say that the mail-in votes were just unreliable.
00:28:50.340They're very worried about the USPS and its ability to reliably deliver ballots because, well, that's not what it's supposed to do.
00:28:58.240That's not how voting is designed to work.
00:29:00.520But in just one election cycle, we've already made this the standard by which we need to measure any election cycle.
00:29:07.840And they're saying, oh, well, ballots are coming in, you know, weeks after they're supposed to be counted.
00:29:12.400So, you know, this is going to lay the groundwork for a lot of these, you know, different precincts and different localities to extend their voting counts, to push back the dates.
00:29:24.480We're going to go from having an election in a week or in a day to having an election in a week to have an election a month to where it might be two, three months before we actually know when we can count all the ballots that may or may not have come in through the mail.
00:29:37.180Yeah. You know, it seems like it's weird. It's our elections take longer and longer to count every single year.
00:29:43.340It's you know, we had election day, election week. It's going to get to the point where, like, you start counting ballots a year before the presidential election, which is weird because there are first world countries that still managed to do their elections in one day.
00:29:56.120And we used to be able to do that. I don't fully understand what's changed.
00:29:59.940But like, you know, the problem is, and this is the concern everyone's talking about for understandable reasons, the kind of political horse race stuff.
00:30:09.020How did Trump answer this question? How did Kamala answer this question? You know, what is this constituency thinking? What are the polls showing, et cetera, to a certain extent, especially in election where it's not a persuasion game anymore.
00:30:19.840It's a turnout game. Like it's just an electioneering machine competition, especially in these states that are the obvious swing states where they haven't passed election integrity laws.
00:30:29.780They haven't banned ballot harvesting. They haven't banned these kind of fifth estate, NGO, industrial complex organizations that were responsible for rigging the election in 2020.
00:30:40.860You hear stuff about the RNC having done some to, you know, higher poll poll watchers or whatever. I don't think it's going to be enough. There's obviously going to be shenanigans.
00:30:50.700They did it in 2020 and there's no reason that they wouldn't try to do it again. Actually, there's probably a bunch of reasons that they would try harder to do it this time.
00:30:58.760So, you know, I think November 2024 is going to be crazy for a bunch of different reasons and there is going to be some kind of fallout. I hope it doesn't destroy the country forever, but there are going to be probably videos like we saw in 2020 and conflicts over them.
00:31:15.940And it is not clear to me the Republican Party is actually prepared to deal with that because the Republican voter base on this issue in particular, like 2020 took everyone by surprise.
00:31:27.540If they see this happening again, it's anyone's guess what's going to happen. But there's a lot of Republican voters who are just not going to stand, I think, for this happening again.
00:31:36.140A lot of them probably will be complacent, but there's going to be people if that stuff starts happening again, who's going to start who are going to show up to these poll places and try to, you know, take matters into their own hands.
00:31:46.240And that's that's not going to be a good deal for anyone, I think.
00:31:50.640Well, you have this scenario where it was very clear the Republican Party was not properly prepared for 2020 and the legal challenges that would follow it.
00:31:59.880But the people who did engage in the legal challenges went to jail like a lot of these people face charges or, you know, all of this stuff.
00:32:08.640And so the question is, if your elections are now a battle between lawyers, it's not actually about counting the votes.
00:32:16.500It's about questioning how the votes were counted and whoever can get the most lawyers on the ground and get enough challenges filed in court.
00:32:23.980And this is what matters, because that's clearly where we're going.
00:32:27.320It's all the everything is getting shifted into the procedural outcome because the nobody can trust the actual voting process.
00:32:35.240And if you have a scenario where one side is willing to decimate the legal bench of the other, you've basically wiped out all the ability to actually play this game.
00:32:45.300You have anyone who is interested in protecting the rights of Republican voters is going to go to jail.
00:32:53.620If that threat is already hanging out there over the head of anyone who might involve themselves in this kind of litigation, then you're really robbing the Republicans of resources that are critical.
00:33:05.080This is the same thing that has happened when it comes to the bureaucracy.
00:33:07.800You can't staff up a Trump bureaucracy because you don't have access to the same people and most of the people who are trained up in the bureaucracy are already left wing.
00:33:17.060But even the few that are on your side end up, you know, defending themselves against Russian collusion allegations and all this stuff.
00:33:24.360Increasingly, it's just illegal to be part of the opposition in any meaningful sense.
00:33:29.200And so, yeah, I guess the election happens, but in the Saddam Hussein sense, right?
00:33:34.160Mm hmm. Yeah. Well, and the other thing, all of that is obviously true.
00:33:38.400It also matters that the Democrats are in control of the federal government this time.
00:33:42.180I mean, during the Trump administration, you could argue the Democrats were still in control of the federal government in most meaningful senses.
00:33:48.040But there was a substantive difference in terms of who was at the head of these agencies.
00:33:53.620And when you have the same process that happened in 2020 in terms of the electioneering playing out again, but this time it's Biden and Kamala Harris in charge of the executive branch.
00:34:05.360You know, we did a thread on this, America 2100, the org I helped run.
00:34:08.820We did a thread on this a couple of days ago.
00:34:10.920The Biden-Harris administration is they signed an executive order in 2021 to turn every single federal agency into a voter registration and voter participation agency.
00:34:21.720So every single federal agency is, you know, the Obama administration was asked to do this in 2008.
00:34:29.160And the officials in the Obama administration said that would be improper.
00:34:32.740It would get in the way of our federal agencies actually doing their job.
00:34:35.920No such qualms this time for the Biden administration.
00:34:38.940So we were specifically talking about the VA, the Department of Veterans Affairs, because they have this insane $15 billion budget shortfall, largest budget shortfall ever.
00:34:47.720They have no money through serial mismanagement and incompetence.
00:34:52.060And starting in October, if something isn't done in the next like 48 hours, veterans are going to stop getting their benefits, which many military families depend on.
00:34:59.940So you're just you've got your our veterans.
00:35:27.280The VA is supposed to be about helping veterans.
00:35:30.420You know, maybe you could argue if you squint that voter registration is something that they should do to help veterans get involved.
00:35:37.160But, you know, Michigan has the fourth highest rate of voter participation in the country.
00:35:41.320Surely that's not the place where you would be focusing if you want to sort of affect voter participation turnout.
00:35:48.440But but that's where all their resources are going.
00:35:50.920It's the same with a lot of other agencies.
00:35:52.260They're only focusing their voter registration efforts in the swing districts of the swing states, which, you know, it doesn't take a political scientist to figure out what they're doing here.
00:36:01.500So that is the backdrop for all this stuff, right?
00:36:04.440Like not only do you have all the NGOs and the nonprofits and the local Democratic Party machines doing the same thing that they did in 2020 and probably 2022.
00:36:13.180You have the federal government, the full weight of the federal government with the active approval of the people at the very top of the executive branch now throwing their weight behind this effort, too.
00:36:22.540And the last thing is like the VA and all these other agencies, they've been directed by this executive order to partner with approved non-governmental organizations to do voter participation activities.
00:36:47.380So all of the organizations, I would bet my entire bank account that were involved in rigging it in 2020 are now actively working hand in glove with the federal agencies, not just the ones that should be formally dealing with voter issues, but all of the federal agencies in places like Michigan, in the swing districts that matter.
00:37:07.260Like that is an environment that is in some ways much more daunting than the one we face in 2020.
00:37:13.120You know, I had so many friends, guys who are very intelligent that I really respect, say after the 2020 election, well, yeah, but they can only do that once, right?
00:37:24.900Like you can only expend that much energy.
00:37:29.420You can only bend the rules that hard without breaking the machine that one time.
00:37:34.180And man, like, you know, I told them they were wrong then, but it just seems incredibly naive now.
00:37:40.360It's very clear, as you say, that the entire federal government has basically been turned into an arm of the Democratic Party in a very real sense.
00:37:50.080And so when people just say, well, you know, we're going to vote harder, you know, you got to well, those people voted for this kind of thing.
00:37:57.780Do you not understand what's happening here?
00:37:59.520Do you not understand the layers and layers and upon layers of the system that have been organized against you?
00:38:05.960And the answer is no, they don't like they're they're still under the impression like, yeah, maybe there's a couple of biased people pulling the levers at the top.
00:38:12.800But the vast majority of this machine is, you know, more or less running objectively and doing the job that it's supposed to do.
00:38:18.460It's like, no, literally every organization that you think you are funding with your tax dollars to take care of something inside the United States that matters is actually doing something on behalf of the Democratic Party.
00:38:31.500It's political power and the federal government extracts a lot of money and employs a lot of people.
00:38:37.280So the entire weight of that machine, whatever you think the fundraising difference is between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, you need to, you know, multiply that by 50 times because actually it's all that money plus the entire budget of the federal government that is leaning on the scales when it comes to the election.
00:38:56.920Yeah, no, exactly. Yeah. Fifty times is probably the best case scenario, right?
00:39:01.600Like you're going up against not only the NGO industrial complex, which has way more money than the Republican Party as it is, but the full weight of the largest Leviathan state in the history of humanity.
00:39:13.700You know, like that is what you're up against. Now, does that mean it's impossible for Trump to win?
00:39:19.120No, because I do think and, you know, some people might call me naive for this, but I do think that there are limits on what they can get away with. Right.
00:39:26.460I don't think I think they still have a sense of obligation to be to be inconspicuous about how they go about this.
00:39:37.120And they can't literally just like go out in the street and like start shredding Republican ballots and, you know, writing fake ballots in the name and like, you know, feeding them to think they can't quite do that yet, at least.
00:39:47.840Yeah. Yeah. You know, there might be a time sooner rather than later, depending on the outcome of this election where they can do that.
00:39:53.400But and I do think like the average Republican voter is more attuned to this now, which might change the calculus somewhat.
00:40:01.760The average Republican voter obviously doesn't have any real political or cultural power, but they can sign up to be a poll watcher.
00:40:07.120And a lot of them are pretty militant about this stuff now for for reasonable, legitimate reasons.
00:40:12.500So that in some ways imposes new constraints and maybe some of the stuff the RNC is doing with lawyers maybe might impose some new constraints.
00:40:21.060But the the machine they have now, you can maybe subtract some states like Georgia or Florida, which passed pretty aggressive election integrity laws where you can't ballot harvest for the most part now.
00:40:33.860But in Pennsylvania, in Michigan, like the machine, I have to imagine, is as powerful now as it's ever been.
00:40:40.880And it has the backing of the federal government.
00:40:44.040All right. So the last thing I wanted to talk about is really the story that I think has become a microcosm of this entire election.
00:40:52.500And it's the story of what's happening in Springfield, Ohio.
00:40:57.000Now, J.D. Vance actually mentioned this several times in speeches leading up to his nomination to the vice presidency.
00:41:10.840He mentioned this in his acceptance speech.
00:41:12.320He was talking about Springfield, Ohio and the displacement migration that was happening there.
00:41:17.360However, this really all kicked off when it started to become clear that not only were 20,000 Haitian migrants brought in what seems very much so by the government under temporary protected status to displace the population of this small town in Ohio.
00:41:36.560But along with all the other effects that mass immigration has on a community, several of the animals in the community may have disappeared.
00:41:47.720Now, there's been a lot of people questioning the veracity of, you know, some things have been posted about cats or, you know, this kind of thing, that kind of thing, what's being eaten.
00:41:55.160What's clear is we do have social media posts from people who live there.
00:42:00.160We have testimony from people who live there and we have audio from police arriving on the scene talking about how, you know, geese are being eaten, about how a pig head has been left.
00:42:11.380And so, you know, this really captivated the minds of a lot of people.
00:42:49.320But we have overwhelming evidence from many sources.
00:42:53.460It's not some isolated video somewhere, you know, several reporters on the ground, you know, collecting the testimony of people who live in the community, police phone calls, you know, guys speaking at the city council meeting talking about this.
00:43:07.600And so, you know, that fact check is getting blown out of the water.
00:43:10.800But the fact that, you know, a lot of people have died due to illegal immigrants.
00:43:16.300A lot of people have had sexual assaults on their daughters or their wives because of this.
00:43:35.540I mean, obviously, in a healthy country, illegals killing and raping people would be enough for people to say, OK, we have to do something about immigration.
00:43:44.000If you are charitable, you could say maybe it's because it is just so egregious.
00:43:49.360Like people kill and rape in America every day, right?
00:43:53.860Most Americans don't like steal cats and fillet them and eat them alive.
00:43:58.180So maybe it's that it's so alien and so egregious and outrageous and foreign in so many different ways that that caught people's attention.
00:44:12.420And I'm happy to be proven wrong is it is technically true that like the initial reports of the cats getting stolen and eaten might not have been true in that instance, right?
00:44:21.740Like the the that picture of the Haitian, like, you know, or the picture of the black guy with the with the with the goose.
01:01:37.680But they're not, you know, heritage Americans.
01:01:39.920So I don't exactly know where that qualifies.
01:01:43.080But look, if we're getting to a point where, if we're at the point where we're kind of parsing which, you know, whether or not like, you know, which European ethnicity or whatever.
01:01:51.080Yeah, while you kids figure out the one drop rule, I guess.
01:02:38.140Code 1015 subsection F allows illegals to avoid persecution.
01:02:42.600If they thought they were allowed to vote, this will be important soon.
01:02:46.140Yeah, I was aware of that provision in the code.
01:02:48.760I did not know the subsections, but yeah, I know that that is a lot of what the left is already using to say that, you know, illegal voter fraud doesn't really happen.
01:02:58.920It's not really there and will certainly be something that they'll be pushing when the election rolls around.
01:04:14.420Like the government can and has become tyrannical in the face of that.
01:04:18.700But what that does mean is that the government has to put on at least a certain level of kabuki theater to keep you from justifying any rash action.
01:04:28.980And so that means they have to hold on to certain, you know, certain noble lies.
01:04:33.340They have to hold on to a certain level of acting and going through the motions.
01:04:37.460And if they just rip all of the mask off all at once, they risk putting themselves into a position.
01:04:44.020You may recognize that J6 was not a real threat to the lives of the people in Congress.
01:05:16.420The only interesting point on that, and I don't actually, I haven't made up my mind if I buy this thesis, but it's convincing.
01:05:22.240I think it was Bennett's philodactory, our buddy, who made the point that he actually thinks the presence of guns and the pervasiveness of guns in America is a kind of, it's neutering the radicalization process.
01:05:36.560It's kind of a de-radicalization agent because if you compare what's happening in America to what's happening in the UK, he was posting this during the riots in the UK.
01:05:46.880He's like people don't take direct action with high risk of violence and in some cases descending into violence like they are in the UK in America on the right because of the presence of guns.
01:06:00.120Now, he defended it more articulately than that, but there might be something to that, right, that in some ways, and this isn't me arguing for, you know, taking away guns to radicalize the right or some 40-chest move like that.
01:06:11.360But it might be true just descriptively that actually the presence of guns is holding back a radicalization process, at least on one level, that is not true in places where they took the guns away a long time ago.
01:06:25.020But I think there is, like I said, you know, that's why I mentioned, I think there is a security blanket effect that does happen with a lot of the right.
01:06:33.040Oh, well, I still have this, so ultimately I haven't really lost my rights.
01:06:36.480Or like you said, the escalation is too severe if you're involved because of the presence of firearms, and so therefore people don't take action.
01:06:43.940I think those are fair arguments across the board.
01:06:46.060I think what that just means is basically, for better or worse, the presence of firearms avoids a certain amount of acceleration.
01:06:54.060And because they prevent acceleration, they prevent power moves like the one he was describing.
01:06:59.640Maybe that's a negative, maybe that's a positive, maybe that's just the facts on the ground, but I think that is the case.
01:07:05.980Cliff Jaded again says, they're eating the dogs, David.
01:07:09.020Trump 2024 is one of the more memorable moments.
01:07:13.020Eric, I don't understand how the lawfare and shenanigans stop without kinetics.
01:07:18.700Again, I hope that things get to the point where people understand that local action and state-level action are critical.
01:07:27.400I mean, to be really clear, GOP governors need to take meaningful legal action, legitimate action now.
01:07:36.780They need to, because that's the only thing that stops things from getting worse.
01:07:40.500Radical action in the legal realm by legally appointed officials is highly preferable to non-legal action taken later because things got out of control.
01:07:54.740And so it cannot, I really cannot emphasize this enough.
01:07:58.700Governors have to start taking action.
01:08:01.440If they do not, when things go sideways, they will have no one to blame for themselves.
01:08:06.520The reason things get bad in almost every situation is that those in power are unwilling or unable to actually do what is necessary.
01:08:15.780And so those who have some degree of power now, if they go ahead and just, you know, they demure, they decide to pass the buck, they decide to come, oh, it's the Harris' administration's fault.
01:08:53.080And when it isn't, everyone will really wish that someone had the courage to make something real happen that was, you know, that was not going to lead us to this point.
01:09:03.820The only thing I would say about that is, you know, we talk a lot about decline.
01:09:07.560It is self-evident that America is in decline.
01:09:10.420I think people on the right who have grown up in a country that, relatively speaking, is still so much better than the mean in most of the world for most of world history.
01:09:20.220We see, to a certain extent, we're sort of spoiled where we see decline in ways that are important but are relatively small in a historical sense.
01:09:29.200And we go, oh, you know, like walking through airports now is so bad, right?
01:09:33.780But there's a difference between your airport sucking or whatever and a complete collapse of both the state and civil society simultaneously, you know, armed militias, et cetera, et cetera.
01:09:47.220But we haven't seen anything yet in terms of how much worse they could get.
01:09:52.160So as much as I sympathize with a bunch of, you know, right-wing arguments in this regard, like the people who are just memeing like acceleration, pedal to the metal, it all has to collapse, et cetera.
01:10:02.440I don't think they understand exactly what they're talking about and what they're asking for.
01:10:06.820The people in the UK are learning that worse is actually worse.
01:10:10.620CB says, would it be beneficial for Trump at this point to say what everyone is thinking and state that immigration is happening because they hate white people?
01:10:26.600But I think there is a certain level of honesty that needs to occur there.
01:10:30.680You know, the left coalition has, you know, radically conservative traditional Muslims and radical feminists and transgenders that wants to destroy, you know, the very existence of women.
01:10:45.060The only thing that binds them together is one thing.
01:10:56.260And I think a certain level of honesty is probably helpful there.
01:11:01.260Again, it can't be your only thing there.
01:11:03.700Obviously, you know, you are in a situation.
01:11:05.920You're going to be building coalitions in the United States at this point.
01:11:10.500That's just how, you know, where it's at.
01:11:12.440But I think it should be clear to a lot of people that there is a group being targeted.
01:11:18.940And many people who are not part of that ethnicity still don't want to see those people targeted because they realize the injustice of that.
01:11:26.800They realize that this is still the core culture of the country that they came to, that they love, that they want to be a part of.
01:11:31.800So I don't think bringing that point up has to be something that is in any way excluding to other people who recognize what an attack on, you know, kind of the Anglo founding of the United States means for others in the United States.
01:11:48.080But, you know, that, again, that's something that ultimately the Trump campaign is going to have to parse for themselves.
01:11:54.000There are certainly people inside that circle who will make that very clear.
01:11:58.120And I don't think that I don't think that kind of language is going to be beyond the pale.
01:12:46.940OK, so if you've ever seen a boomer post on Facebook, you know what I'm talking about here.
01:12:52.260They will say things that you would never imagine posting in a million years and they will say it without hesitation.
01:12:58.840So, yes, there are a lot of people of an older generation who still hold on to a lot of kind of the rhetoric that exists inside, you know, kind of the Fox News, you know, talk radio sphere.
01:13:12.360But don't don't give up on these people.
01:13:24.040They just need to be given permission to believe a lot of things they already believe and have been told they can't believe because of the intellectual architecture that is laid out.
01:13:34.280But you you need to give people the space to agree with you.