Timcast IRL - Tim Pool - Timcast IRL - Project Veritas PROVES Media Is LYING About Fraud Claims, THIS IS WILD

00:00:00.000 This night is kind of weird.

00:00:24.000 Apparently there's reports that Trump has fired top Pentagon leadership.

00:00:29.000 There's like weird polls coming out that I've not seen where they're like 80% of Americans

00:00:33.000 believe Joe Biden won the presidency.

00:00:35.000 And I'm like, why do you need that?

00:00:36.000 That's kind of weird.

00:00:38.000 And then the craziest thing is.

00:00:41.000 We've seen this USPS whistleblower from Project Veritas sworn affidavit saying that they, you know, I'll be very simple with it because, you know, we're just doing the intro, but allegations of voter fraud at a post office.

00:00:54.000 Then the Washington Post comes out with a story saying this man has recanted his claims.

00:00:57.000 It's not true.

00:00:57.000 He fabricated them.

00:00:58.000 And all of a sudden, mainstream media journalists, Democrats are posting it saying, aha, look, it was fake news the whole time.

00:01:05.000 Then Project Veritas drops a video of the guy saying, I never recanted anything.

00:01:09.000 Then Project Veritas drops a video of the guy in an interrogation where apparently some federal agents are saying, I'm not trying to scare you, but I am scaring you.

00:01:18.000 We're gonna clean your mind so that you can remember.

00:01:23.000 It's really, really weird.

00:01:25.000 Nah, I'll tell you what.

00:01:26.000 When I heard the results came in and Joe Biden got the electoral college, I was like, well, you know, it makes sense.

00:01:31.000 I think people don't like Trump.

00:01:32.000 And you got mail-in ballots, young people, you know, voting or whatever.

00:01:35.000 But now that these polls are coming out and these weird stories, I'm like, what is this?

00:01:38.000 This is wild.

00:01:39.000 I don't even know what's going on anymore.

00:01:40.000 Anyway, we have a special guest here, Michael Tracey, who's a journalist.

00:01:45.000 And I've actually, I've praised you quite a bit in a lot of the videos I've done.

00:01:48.000 Notably because- Praise me even more.

00:01:50.000 He did it upon me.

00:01:51.000 That's what he's here for.

00:01:52.000 I bask in it.

00:01:52.000 That's why I'm here.

00:01:53.000 That's why I wandered in here from off the internet.

00:01:54.000 Wonderful.

00:01:55.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:01:55.000 He came in here.

00:01:56.000 No, but it's because, like, during the riots you actually drove around and went to small towns where, like, riots had happened that wasn't getting news coverage.

00:02:03.000 Like, you did reporting.

00:02:04.000 It was crazy.

00:02:05.000 Well, I mean, after the peak of the riots in late May, early June, I pretty much knew with total certainty that I was never going to get the full story as to their scope, magnitude, damage inflicted, etc.

00:02:17.000 If I just relied upon these secondhand reports, given the direct personal and political stake that so many journalists had in portraying.

00:02:25.000 Yeah, defending.

00:02:26.000 Defending that they were deeply invested in it.

00:02:30.000 So, you know, with that dynamic so ever present, I knew I had to At least attempt to go see it for myself.

00:02:35.000 So I took a nationwide trip, which we can maybe get into any, especially in terms of how it relates to the election outcome, et cetera.

00:02:44.000 But you know, that's what I did.

00:02:45.000 And small towns, big cities, everywhere in between, I went, you know, across country twice.

00:02:49.000 Real journalism and just told it like it was.

00:02:52.000 So I think, I would hope so.

00:02:54.000 I think you do that quite a bit on Twitter, whether it's like you making Trump supporters angry or making the Democrats angry, you know, I think.

00:03:00.000 Yeah, I mean, and you probably know this, but you can never please everybody.

00:03:04.000 And if you try to please any particular demographic, that becomes sort of corrupting unto itself.

00:03:09.000 So I'm never going to get too worked up if leftists hate me on a given day or Trump supporters hate me on a given day.

00:03:15.000 It's just irrelevant.

00:03:16.000 And you need to like cognitively insulate yourself.

00:03:19.000 Yeah, I remember when journalists used to do that, they would just kind of be like, well, here's what happened.

00:03:23.000 You're going to get mad about it.

00:03:24.000 I can't do anything about that.

00:03:25.000 But anyway, okay, so we also got Ian.

00:03:27.000 Oh, hi, everyone.

00:03:27.000 Ian's wearing red, so hopefully the camera doesn't rip it off if it's too much.

00:03:31.000 If it turns you into a tomato.

00:03:32.000 Well, you're already a tomato because of the sweater, anyway.

00:03:34.000 And Lydia's producing, of course.

00:03:36.000 I am here.

00:03:36.000 I'm in the corner.

00:03:37.000 Hey, guys.

00:03:37.000 But we got to talk about this Veritas stuff, so if you haven't already, make sure you smash that like button.

00:03:41.000 Do that, please.

00:03:42.000 Subscribe.

00:03:42.000 The show is live Monday to Friday at 8 p.m.

00:03:44.000 And let's first take a look at the story from the Washington Post.

00:03:48.000 This is... Is it cutting out again? 0.98

00:03:50.000 This is ridiculous.

00:03:51.000 Sorry, I don't know what's going on. 0.94

00:03:52.000 Are you kidding me?

00:03:53.000 Our monitor keeps just...

00:03:55.000 Oh, I'm so excited.

00:03:55.000 I was like, it works now.

00:03:56.000 Okay, well, I can still read the story.

00:03:58.000 All right, we're gonna read it.

00:03:59.000 So, postal worker admits fabricating allegations of ballot tampering, officials say.

00:04:04.000 And they have this really, like, generic photo of a fake ballot box, I guess.

00:04:08.000 A Pennsylvania postal worker, whose claims have been cited by top Republicans as potential evidence of widespread voting irregularities, Admitted to U.S.

00:04:17.000 Postal Service investigators that he fabricated the allegations according to three officials briefed on the investigation in a statement from a House Congressional Committee.

00:04:25.000 Richard Hopkins claims that a postmaster in Erie, PA instructed postal workers to backdate ballots mailed after Election Day was cited by Senator Lindsey Graham in a letter to the Justice Department calling for a federal investigation.

00:04:37.000 Attorney General William P. Barr subsequently authorized federal prosecutors to open probes into credible allegations of voting irregularities.

00:04:45.000 and fraud, a reversal of longstanding Justice Department policy.

00:04:48.000 But on Monday, Hopkins, 32, told investigators from the U.S.

00:04:53.000 Postal Service Office of Inspector General that the allegations were not true, and he signed an affidavit recanting his claims according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing investigation.

00:05:06.000 Democrats on the House Oversight Committee tweeted late Tuesday that, quote, whistleblower completely recanted Hopkins did not respond to messages seeking comment.

00:05:16.000 And here's where it gets interesting.

00:05:17.000 According to Hopkins, he did.

00:05:19.000 He tried very much so to get a comment saying, this is not true.

00:05:24.000 And now we have this tweet from James O'Keefe.

00:05:25.000 In fact, we have two.

00:05:27.000 James O'Keefe says, recording federal agents coerce USPS whistleblower Hopkins to water down story.

00:05:34.000 Hopkins doubles down.

00:05:36.000 Agent Strasser, I am trying to twist you a little bit.

00:05:39.000 Quote, I am scaring you here.

00:05:41.000 We have senators involved, DOJ involved.

00:05:44.000 Reason they called me is to try to harness.

00:05:47.000 So I can play some of the audio here.

00:05:50.000 And I think it should work.

00:05:51.000 The Veritas video starts by them, you know, explaining who the whistleblower is, what he was saying.

00:05:57.000 And let me just play.

00:05:59.000 It's two minutes.

00:06:00.000 They were grilling the hell out of me.

00:06:02.000 How are you feeling right now?

00:06:04.000 I'm kind of pissed.

00:06:05.000 I feel like I just got played.

00:06:07.000 And I heard him say to the supervisor that they messed up yesterday.

00:06:13.000 And I was like, oh, what did they mess up on?

00:06:17.000 And he told the supervisor that they had postmarked one of the pallets for the fourth instead of the third, because they were supposed to put them for third.

00:06:32.000 So now it's giving us an explanation.

00:06:33.000 I'll jump forward.

00:06:34.000 Check this out.

00:06:36.000 And so let me make good on that promise right away, okay?

00:06:41.000 This storm is getting crazy, right?

00:06:43.000 And it's out of a lot of people's control.

00:06:47.000 And so the reason they called me in is to try to harness that storm.

00:06:52.000 Try to reel it back in.

00:06:53.000 Before it gets really crazy.

00:06:56.000 I understand.

00:06:56.000 Because we have senators involved.

00:06:58.000 We have the Department of Justice involved.

00:07:00.000 We have all... Trump's lawyer's team has gotten a hold of me.

00:07:05.000 I'm not... Well, I am actually.

00:07:08.000 I am trying to twist you a little bit.

00:07:10.000 Because in that, believe it or not, your mind will kick in.

00:07:13.000 Okay.

00:07:15.000 We like to control our mind.

00:07:16.000 And when we do that, we can convince ourselves of a memory.

00:07:20.000 But when you're under a little bit of stress, which is what I'm doing to you purposely, your mind can be a little bit clearer.

00:07:27.000 And we're going to do a different exercise, too, to make your mind a little bit clearer.

00:07:31.000 Good to go.

00:07:32.000 But this is all on purpose.

00:07:33.000 Roger.

00:07:34.000 I'm not scaring you, but I am scaring you.

00:07:38.000 It seems like they were trying to make me distrust y'all.

00:07:41.000 And at the same time, it kind of affected, but at the same time, I was like, nah, these guys have had my back since the get-go.

00:07:49.000 So that's why I continued.

00:07:51.000 Do you think these federal agents have your back?

00:07:53.000 At this point, no.

00:07:54.000 Do you think these federal agents are really interested in investigating fraud?

00:07:54.000 Hell no.

00:07:59.000 Honestly, I don't think they are.

00:08:01.000 And in fact, you heard Weisenberg tell a supervisor they were backdating the ballots to make it appear they'd been collected on November 3rd.

00:08:07.000 You still stand by that?

00:08:08.000 Yes.

00:08:08.000 Yeah.

00:08:11.000 So that's it.

00:08:12.000 Apologies for those who can't see it.

00:08:14.000 Our monitor broke.

00:08:15.000 Apparently I can't show it.

00:08:16.000 But that's just a bit of the audio they put out so far.

00:08:18.000 I imagine that James, he usually does longer form versions of this on his website.

00:08:23.000 I guess you can choose to trust James O'Keefe.

00:08:26.000 He's got a whistleblower.

00:08:27.000 He's got a signed, sworn affidavit.

00:08:29.000 We got video of the guy delivering the mail.

00:08:30.000 I don't know what else we need to go on to say, here's a guy saying they were backdating ballots.

00:08:35.000 But it's very, very weird It's very, very brazen to see the Washington Post be like, the story's fake, he recanted.

00:08:41.000 Then this guy to come back out and immediately be like, I never recanted.

00:08:45.000 So, we got this tweet from House Oversight Democrat saying, breaking news, eerie PA USPS whistleblower completely recanted his allegations of a supervisor tampering with mail-in ballots after being questioned by investigators, according to IG.

00:08:59.000 Richard Hopkins is a USPS employee in Erie, Pennsylvania, so that's not in dispute.

00:08:59.000 Here are the facts.

00:09:04.000 He signed a sworn affidavit with allegations of ballot tampering and fraud and went public through Project Veritas.

00:09:09.000 USPS IG began investigating last week.

00:09:12.000 IG investigators informed committee staff today that they interviewed Hopkins on Friday, but that Hopkins recanted his allegations yesterday and did not explain why he signed a false affidavit.

00:09:23.000 So now, not only do we have this video from James O'Keefe where they play the audio, but James actually put out a tweet of, uh, okay, I guess, I don't know where it is.

00:09:32.000 It's the guy, or at least I thought he had the tweet, maybe it's on Project Veritas.

00:09:36.000 He's actually sitting with the guy, I guess, in a hotel room, and the guy, like, is looking at the Washington Post story and says, this is not true.

00:09:43.000 I did not recant this.

00:09:45.000 So...

00:09:46.000 I don't know one thing that sticks out to me when I look at this Washington Post summary is that of course the relaying this claim that Hopkins recanted his allegations by way of this laundered anonymity.

00:10:01.000 Which always should raise a red flag.

00:10:02.000 I don't care what it pertains to.

00:10:04.000 I mean, this was done constantly over the course of Russiagate, where anonymous US officials were quoted as characterizing certain things.

00:10:12.000 Often, you didn't even get a direct quote from them.

00:10:14.000 And so...

00:10:16.000 Washington Post or any other media outlet should not be surprised when people look at a story like this, look at this summation that's totally nonspecific and view it askance, right?

00:10:27.000 So it's possible that Hopkins, as claimed in this story, did in fact sign an affidavit recanting his claims.

00:10:33.000 We don't know that.

00:10:34.000 The James O'Keefe stuff you just played doesn't necessarily dispute that.

00:10:37.000 It could provide countervailing evidence to maybe say that it was done under duress or something.

00:10:42.000 But the problem in terms of any outstanding apprehension about the veracity of the story stems from the wanton use of anonymity that is so ubiquitous across the media that it just inevitably is going to engender suspicion, and rightly so.

00:10:58.000 This is a common thing they do with anonymous sources.

00:11:02.000 How is this okay?

00:11:04.000 We talked to some anonymous person.

00:11:07.000 You don't know who it is.

00:11:07.000 Trust us.

00:11:08.000 The story's not true.

00:11:09.000 He didn't give us a comment.

00:11:10.000 Well, according to them, to Veritas, this guy's straight up saying it didn't happen.

00:11:15.000 My question is, you know... And anonymity can sometimes be justified.

00:11:19.000 Like, it's a valid device in journalistic practice.

00:11:22.000 But you have to be transparent about why you're doing it.

00:11:25.000 I mean, there's no clear reason, at least that's stated here, as to why this individual apparently associated with the U.S.

00:11:31.000 Postal Service Office of Inspector General ought to have been granted anonymity in the first place.

00:11:34.000 Like, if you have the affidavit, why not provide it?

00:11:37.000 I mean, you're saying it's an ongoing investigation.

00:11:39.000 What does that mean exactly?

00:11:40.000 It's so vague that the Washington Post is asking the reader to just instinctively trust their veracity.

00:11:48.000 And so often they've proved that they don't deserve that trust.

00:11:51.000 So what are we supposed to believe right now?

00:11:53.000 Well, I mean, I don't know that.

00:11:55.000 Let's say that the story that's put forward by Hopkins, as relayed by James O'Keefe, is entirely accurate.

00:12:02.000 I mean, I think I heard there, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Hopkins was referring to one ballot that was changed in Erie County.

00:12:09.000 Well, like they specifically said that one ballot was Received on the 4th and then was backdated to the 3rd, right?

00:12:17.000 Or did I hear that wrong?

00:12:18.000 You know, you heard it right.

00:12:19.000 But the full context is that he overheard them saying they were backdating ballots, and he was instructed to bring any ballots from after the election to them because they were backdating them.

00:12:29.000 OK, so I want to keep going.

00:12:31.000 So let's just assume that all that is true.

00:12:36.000 Whether that suggests some kind of systematic fraud, I think is far from established, particularly in Pennsylvania, where it probably wouldn't have made a difference in the outcome anyway.

00:12:47.000 I mean, when all the votes are counted, the margin could be as much as 100,000 votes for Biden.

00:12:55.000 So I think, you know, it would be expected.

00:12:57.000 In fact, I would be surprised if there weren't incidences of isolated fraudulent activity.

00:13:05.000 But I think feeding a narrative where all this is supposed to indicate that the entire election should be negated or something, I think we're going to need a whole lot more evidence than has been provided so far.

00:13:16.000 So I just wanted to make sure I double checked.

00:13:18.000 From Veritas, they say, the insider said, quote, we have to separate out the ballots and give them directly to the supervisors.

00:13:24.000 They're postmarking and they're at the office and taking them directly to the ballot box.

00:13:29.000 And it specifically says, all these ballots that were coming in today, tomorrow, yesterday, are all supposed to be postmarked the third.

00:13:37.000 So, that's the official claim.

00:13:40.000 It's interesting, I was watching The Five earlier, you know, on Fox, and Greg Gutfeld was saying, I think it was Greg and I think it was also Jesse, kind of both saying, Jesse Waters and Greg Gutfeld, that we don't, we're not right now at the point where we bring out big ol' stacks of evidence that something happened.

00:13:57.000 We're at the point where we're like, we have some sworn affidavits that should warrant an inquiry or an investigation.

00:14:03.000 and then you go and find evidence, assuming these accusations are correct.

00:14:07.000 We've got, I think, I don't know how many, three or four perhaps, maybe it's three,

00:14:13.000 poll watchers who have signed sworn affidavits saying that they've seen some kind of fraud.

00:14:17.000 I'm not saying widespread, I'm saying we have three affidavits.

00:14:20.000 Is it enough to change an election? I honestly...

00:14:22.000 Well, if you think about it, three affidavits in a country of 330 million

00:14:25.000 that has converted en masse to mail-in voting is really not that many.

00:14:30.000 Yeah, I guess, so the point being brought up on the five was,

00:14:34.000 we're talking about a few key swing districts and we're talking about a very, very narrow race

00:14:38.000 where if you witness someone doing something improper, then that needs to be investigated and then we could

00:14:45.000 potentially find more evidence of a larger scale impropriety.

00:14:48.000 Or overt fraud, I guess.

00:14:51.000 I guess the question I would have is like, what does larger scale impropriety mean?

00:14:55.000 If there's something systematic and fraudulent, then that would have to be coordinated in some way or would have to, I think, be more of a cohesive initiative to change the outcome of the election.

00:15:08.000 than has been anything close to established.

00:15:09.000 I mean, you can go back years and decades and find isolated incidences of fraud.

00:15:14.000 I mean, there was in 1960, JFK, it's thought, could have won the election over Richard Nixon because of straight up election fraud that happened in the Deep South.

00:15:27.000 So I think nobody who is aware of history should discount that out of hand.

00:15:33.000 What's the vote margin in PA right now?

00:15:35.000 Legit question.

00:15:36.000 The vote margin in Pennsylvania is Interesting.

00:15:38.000 It's like 45,000 votes or something, isn't it?

00:15:39.000 point eight percent.

00:15:40.000 And that's probably going to continue to go up.

00:15:43.000 So I mean, it's like forty five thousand votes or something, isn't

00:15:46.000 it?

00:15:47.000 Right now it's.

00:15:48.000 Yeah, it's a 60 70 thousand or so.

00:15:52.000 Yeah.

00:15:54.000 And it's probably going to inch up continuously to... $40,000?

00:15:54.000 $70,000?

00:15:54.000 $73,000.

00:15:58.000 In the $100,000 range.

00:15:59.000 So I mean, like, that's not a margin.

00:16:02.000 That's not Florida $2,000.

00:16:03.000 That's not anything close to a point where... It's even beyond the threshold where there would be an automatic recount in Pennsylvania.

00:16:10.000 Right, so AP has it around, I think, I'm looking at 47,700 or so.

00:16:17.000 That would require numerous post offices being in on... You're right, sorry, I misread that figure.

00:16:24.000 But to get that margin, because we're also talking about hundreds of thousands of votes that came in.

00:16:30.000 To get a margin where it's going to be able to actually overturn Pennsylvania.

00:16:34.000 That's what numerous post offices, a dozen plus, that are all telling their supervisors to bring in late ballots and then backdate them so that we can count them.

00:16:43.000 It seems like it's not going to have an impact.

00:16:45.000 You see what I'm saying?

00:16:47.000 I think it's going to have, if any, impact.

00:16:49.000 It's going to be extremely marginal.

00:16:51.000 And to really get traction in the courts here, you would have to do something which has not yet been done, which is at least give some indication.

00:17:00.000 And granted, you would need further investigation to uncover this.

00:17:03.000 I grant that.

00:17:04.000 But you need to give some indication that there's a widespread coordinated I disagree.

00:17:08.000 at undermining the legitimacy of the election with fraud.

00:17:13.000 That's what I think would need to be established, especially if you have it across multiple

00:17:17.000 states.

00:17:18.000 I mean, we're not just talking about Pennsylvania.

00:17:19.000 We're talking about Georgia, Arizona.

00:17:20.000 I don't know if you want to throw Wisconsin in there and Michigan.

00:17:22.000 Well, Trump would have to.

00:17:23.000 But it's not just one state here where you can devote all your resources to uncovering

00:17:28.000 every individual.

00:17:30.000 But I disagree.

00:17:32.000 I don't think it needs to be a widespread coordinated thing.

00:17:34.000 I think it could be what's referred to as a standalone complex.

00:17:37.000 You've got these individuals who are zealous, very ideologically motivated, and all it takes is individuals acting in such a way that it looks like there's some type of concerted effort.

00:17:50.000 It could just be one guy being like, man, I hate Trump, screw this, and then crumpling up a ballot, but you get a hundred people doing that every so often because they hate Trump, then you've got widespread impropriety that's not coordinated.

00:18:00.000 Yeah, I don't think it would necessarily... I should rephrase that.

00:18:03.000 I don't think it has to be widespread and coordinated in order to have some kind of...

00:18:09.000 Potency in terms of affecting outcome.

00:18:10.000 And you're right.

00:18:11.000 There probably are people with a lot of zeal who don't like Trump and maybe fudge some things.

00:18:15.000 I mean, that's plausible.

00:18:17.000 But for it to be replicated across so many states, I think it's going to be it's a it's it's a it's a huge stretch to think that anything is going to be overturned.

00:18:28.000 The way I put it is like and in Georgia, for example, where I just was, I mean, I spent the election in Georgia with a week leading up to it or so.

00:18:37.000 And, you know, when Trump, I think it was the day it was the day after the election when he gave some remarks.

00:18:43.000 First of all, he misstated that the secretary of state of Georgia was a Democrat.

00:18:47.000 He's not. So one reason why I find a lot of these claims implausible that I'm being inundated with on Twitter, which

00:18:52.000 I'm sure you probably are as well, is that, you know, it would have to encompass a huge amount of Republicans as

00:18:57.000 well.

00:18:58.000 But that's what people, I think, tend to miss about election administration.

00:19:01.000 It really is baked into the cake that it has to be bipartisan in a lot of ways.

00:19:05.000 Now, maybe it's not always abided by with 100 percent perfection.

00:19:08.000 But in Georgia, for example, you have the secretary of state, the governor, the lieutenant governor.

00:19:11.000 Both chambers of the state legislature are held by Republicans.

00:19:15.000 I was there in Atlanta in the State Farm Arena where the Atlantic Hawks used to play where they were tabulating votes and there were Republican observers everywhere the Republican observers in the Fulton County warehouse where there was other tabulation taking place so I mean and it was open to the public so this I think it really at least should be emphasized to people who don't have familiarity

00:19:34.000 with this process, that it's not like secretive and closed off for the most

00:19:38.000 part. Could you find isolated incidents in a country

00:19:41.000 of 330 million?

00:19:42.000 I'm sure you can.

00:19:43.000 But like I just freely went in.

00:19:44.000 I didn't flash any media credential.

00:19:46.000 Anybody could go in and observe.

00:19:47.000 I mean, I watched Republicans and Democratic Republican Democratic

00:19:50.000 observers jointly looking at ballots that were improperly processed so

00:19:54.000 they could adjudicate whether they were valid.

00:19:55.000 Yeah. And, you know, so, you know, I'm not I'm far from an American

00:19:59.000 exceptionalist in most cases. But there is something I think

00:20:03.000 at least laudable about the transparency that elections tend

00:20:08.000 to be conducted within.

00:20:12.000 And.

00:20:15.000 I thought I put my phone on airplane mode.

00:20:15.000 Sorry about that.

00:20:20.000 But.

00:20:22.000 And, you know, I don't think we're going to be exporting our election models around the world by force because, I mean, really, it's over a week now and we still don't have calls in Arizona and Georgia.

00:20:31.000 I mean, it's ridiculous.

00:20:32.000 North Carolina, I saw, was just called at least by Decision Desk HQ.

00:20:36.000 But the point is that, yeah, I sort of lost my train of thought, but you saw where I was going there.

00:20:43.000 Yeah, I think fraud isn't necessarily the important conversation, though.

00:20:48.000 And I wonder if that's a distraction.

00:20:50.000 It's not!

00:20:51.000 That's what I'm being berated with constantly for not countenancing.

00:20:57.000 It's the wrong conversation, but I do wonder if it's on purpose.

00:21:00.000 Meaning what?

00:21:03.000 As Democrats keep screaming, there's no fraud, there's no fraud, and chasing after this fraud narrative, like now the Washington Post, Trump is going after process.

00:21:11.000 So there's the potential of challenging votes.

00:21:17.000 Right now, the ACLU is going to be filing a countersuit to stop Trump from disqualifying hundreds of thousands of votes in Pennsylvania under what they're saying is a violation of the Bush v. Gore ruling, or the 14th Amendment, more specifically.

00:21:28.000 that mail-in ballots create a parallel and separate track for voting,

00:21:32.000 which is a violation of the 14th Amendment.

00:21:34.000 They're arguing that...

00:21:36.000 Which seems completely absurd to me.

00:21:39.000 I disagree.

00:21:40.000 If that was your view of the constitutionality of mail-in balloting,

00:21:44.000 why didn't you introduce such a suit before the election?

00:21:48.000 Because it's lawfare. Because they want to win.

00:21:50.000 Well, exactly. So it's not logical.

00:21:52.000 It's just throwing the kitchen sink at a problem when you're all but certain to be defeated.

00:21:58.000 I don't know if that...

00:22:01.000 In other words, the notion that mail-in balloting versus in-person balloting creates this separate track

00:22:06.000 that it's a violation of the Equal Protection Clause, that...

00:22:10.000 Could have been asserted without any election results in.

00:22:12.000 And they didn't do it.

00:22:14.000 Why didn't they do it?

00:22:15.000 Because if they had won Pennsylvania, then that rationale wouldn't have been operative.

00:22:20.000 Absolutely.

00:22:20.000 If they won Pennsylvania, Trump would be like, we did it, we won, we're the best.

00:22:23.000 Right, exactly.

00:22:23.000 Mail-in ballots are fine.

00:22:25.000 But that doesn't change the fact, there was a Supreme Court ruling earlier, and they said, we can't rule on it until it happens.

00:22:31.000 And so they said, kick it back, segregate the votes.

00:22:34.000 And then we'll have a ruling later.

00:22:36.000 So now here comes the later ruling.

00:22:38.000 But the argument about mail-in voting isn't just mail-in votes are different from in-person votes.

00:22:42.000 There's a bunch of nuance here.

00:22:43.000 Notably, they're arguing that in Democrat districts, the election individuals, I guess, were allowing voters in these districts to cure their ballots if they had errors on them.

00:22:55.000 And they weren't allowing that in other districts.

00:22:57.000 Thus, Trump's team is saying, if you have one district that says, you can check your ballot, we bring it to you.

00:23:04.000 We go to your house and say, hey, you forgot to sign it, sign it.

00:23:06.000 Okay, your ballot's valid now.

00:23:08.000 And then in Republican districts, they didn't do that, creating a higher margin of failure.

00:23:12.000 You've created a two-track where you're slanting things for Democrats.

00:23:16.000 That's another- Well, ballots can be cured per state law.

00:23:22.000 And it takes a large volunteer effort, as far as I understand, Two, retrieve the person whose ballot needs to be cured.

00:23:32.000 It's not just done by election officials across the board, meaning public employees.

00:23:38.000 So if Republicans are not getting their ballots cured, I would think that's probably a function more of them not having as many voters that need to have their ballots cured, right?

00:23:51.000 I don't know the exact specifics of that, but Sure, sure.

00:23:55.000 Not fraud, though.

00:23:55.000 I mean, even in Georgia where I just, again, just was, they have a ballot curing process

00:23:58.000 that was all enacted by a Republican state legislature.

00:24:02.000 So I mean, the point is, I think if you're just saying this is democratic fraud, Georgia

00:24:06.000 to me is a glaring example or whatever malfeasance, impropriety, however you want to call it.

00:24:13.000 I mean, how do you account for Georgia?

00:24:16.000 I mean, that's that's a big one.

00:24:17.000 Pennsylvania, obviously, is where the election at least was called by the media over the weekend.

00:24:20.000 But again, Georgia, to me, stands out as something that the Republicans and the Trump supporters who are going with this narrative have not even attempted to reckon with.

00:24:30.000 And you even have the two Republican senators.

00:24:34.000 I prefer when stuff is logic-based.

00:24:34.000 nation with the Republican Secretary of State just because they didn't like how

00:24:38.000 the election was being run. They didn't even offer any specifics. That's why I

00:24:40.000 keep going back. They're just throwing the kitchen sink at a problem. 0.91

00:24:43.000 I'm not arguing that the way they're going at it is like this very slow

00:24:49.000 methodical logic based, you know, solution. I prefer when stuff is logic based. I

00:24:54.000 don't know about you. No, no, I agree.

00:24:56.000 What I'm saying is they're not going, okay, let's take a look at Washington state and go through the list.

00:25:00.000 Now let's take a look at Wyoming and go through the list.

00:25:02.000 What they're saying is here are the states we got to win.

00:25:04.000 Fire the lawyers.

00:25:05.000 Like, I mean, like fire the missiles, not get rid of the lawyers. 0.84

00:25:08.000 So obviously they're going after Pennsylvania.

00:25:10.000 Why?

00:25:11.000 Trump needs Pennsylvania for any kind of victory.

00:25:14.000 So of course he's going to go after that through every legal mean possible.

00:25:18.000 And then they'll, they're also filing lawsuits in Nevada.

00:25:21.000 I think they've got a ton of lawsuits going out across the board in a bunch of different states.

00:25:25.000 But I think there may be some, uh... I think some of the arguments make sense.

00:25:33.000 Notably, one of the biggest problems we have right now, and I have no idea what the solution is, there was a court order in Pennsylvania that in Philadelphia and Allegheny County, they must allow observers within a certain distance to observe.

00:25:46.000 And they defied the court order.

00:25:48.000 So, they counted, according to Trump's campaign, about 450,000 ballots in violation of a court order.

00:25:55.000 Now, Giuliani's taken the extreme approach, saying, they're all spoiled, because the secrecy envelopes were destroyed already.

00:26:00.000 Therefore, we don't know where these ballots came from, we have no addresses, we don't know who they are, we don't know if they were signed, and they didn't allow observers in violation of court order, disqualify them.

00:26:09.000 This is why the ACLU jumped in, saying, we have to sue back to stop Trump from winning this fight.

00:26:16.000 If they disqualify 450,000 votes, it'll include Trump votes, but I think that'll definitely flip it for Trump.

00:26:23.000 You could just as easily call that disenfranchisement, though.

00:26:25.000 I mean, the voters who cast those ballots had nothing to do with what distance observers were required to stand at.

00:26:31.000 So why should their vote be negated?

00:26:33.000 Because we need election security.

00:26:35.000 Because we don't know who those votes are, where they're from, who signed them.

00:26:38.000 The secrecy ballots were destroyed.

00:26:40.000 So we could do a re-election.

00:26:43.000 You know, no.

00:26:44.000 Right.

00:26:44.000 Exactly.

00:26:45.000 So this creates a very serious problem.

00:26:47.000 We can't create a system where we say straight up, you can violate a court order and count hundreds of thousands of ballots in violation of a court ruling.

00:26:55.000 I think I think there's some dispute over whether that order was violated and precisely the way.

00:27:00.000 Well, so.

00:27:01.000 So.

00:27:01.000 But like, I mean, OK, so a difference of three feet in terms of.

00:27:05.000 No, no, no, no.

00:27:05.000 It was dozens of feet.

00:27:07.000 It was like I read that it was a lesser distance and at least certain.

00:27:12.000 Well, there's videos of people like 50 feet away with binoculars.

00:27:17.000 And so you've got, according to Giuliani, 50 to 70 witnesses.

00:27:22.000 I'm not saying you got to trust the guy.

00:27:23.000 I'm just saying this is their argument.

00:27:25.000 They've got 50 to 70 people who have signed on to swear under oath.

00:27:29.000 They were, they were pushed out in violation of the court order, allowing them to be within six feet.

00:27:34.000 What do we do with these ballots?

00:27:35.000 Well, I mean, again, my understanding is that At least some of the time in Philadelphia, which is now in dispute.

00:27:45.000 The people who came in through the public entrance to observe.

00:27:50.000 Didn't register properly, and there were, in fact, bipartisan observers on hand.

00:27:55.000 Maybe not 100% of the time.

00:27:57.000 I don't know.

00:27:57.000 It's a messy process.

00:27:59.000 This is what we're getting from the media.

00:28:02.000 Mainstream news outlets are saying there were Democrat and Republican observers on site.

00:28:08.000 Republicans never disputed they weren't on site.

00:28:10.000 They're saying Republicans weren't allowed within the court order distance.

00:28:14.000 Meaningful access is what they argued.

00:28:16.000 So of course the media is pushing its narrative, the Trump campaign and, you know, Trump-supporting media is pushing its narrative.

00:28:22.000 But I gotta admit, I mean, how do you deal with the situation in that regard?

00:28:28.000 Like, do we just say, this time it's okay?

00:28:32.000 We don't, you know, we've got a legal dispute over these ballots?

00:28:35.000 And I'll tell you this, man, at first I was like, look, I tweeted this morning, Trump is not going to prison.

00:28:41.000 These people on the left who are like, Trump's going to jail!

00:28:43.000 It's not going to happen.

00:28:44.000 And Trump's not going to overturn this election with lawsuits.

00:28:48.000 But then things started getting weird.

00:28:50.000 These states are Republican legislatures.

00:28:53.000 Are they just going to roll over and be like, we're going to certify the electors for Joe Biden while this dispute is going on?

00:29:00.000 Or are they going to be like, no, we're not doing it.

00:29:03.000 In which case, nobody gets 270.

00:29:05.000 Well, if they do that, then they'll have done something which is 100% unprecedented in all of American history.

00:29:12.000 And whether they want to do that, I think is You know, a little bit doubtful.

00:29:18.000 On the other hand, there was an effort by frantic liberals in 2016 to lobby electors to do something which at that point would have also been with a president in U.S.

00:29:29.000 history, which is that on the basis of Russian interference, they were saying that they should not seat electors for Trump in states like Pennsylvania.

00:29:38.000 It wasn't just a marginal fringe movement.

00:29:40.000 I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

00:29:42.000 I mentioned this today on Twitter, which is the state capital.

00:29:45.000 When the Electoral College met, which is usually just a formality that nobody even knows is happening, but I went on in December of 2016 to watch it happen.

00:29:55.000 And you had a mass, it wasn't, it was a protest that had been organized at the State House to badger electors to not cast their votes in accordance with what the popular vote outcome in the state of Pennsylvania was.

00:30:09.000 It would have been just a mind-blowing departure from everything that's happened ever before in U.S.

00:30:17.000 history.

00:30:18.000 And they were in the chamber, in the legislative chamber, they were screaming.

00:30:21.000 And at the moment that the votes were certified, the electoral votes were certified, the woman right in front of me in this balcony screamed loud enough so that everybody could undoubtedly hear it. 0.77

00:30:31.000 She screamed. 0.67

00:30:31.000 You just gave us Hitler! 0.67

00:30:33.000 So, I mean, when I see Democrats and liberals sort of scorning Republicans and Trump supporters now for maybe having some histrionic interpretations of what this fraud matter consists of, I think, I mean, did you just sleep through the past four and a half years?

00:30:50.000 If anything, you made it inevitable that there was going to be this backlash where however specious The claims are in terms of voter fraud or whatever else about the doubting the legitimacy of the election.

00:31:03.000 You should have had no doubt whatsoever that those were going to flood into the public consciousness for no reason other than as retribution for what was done last time.

00:31:15.000 Hillary Clinton did technically concede the day after the election and Trump hasn't yet.

00:31:20.000 So it's not 100% analogous.

00:31:23.000 But, I mean, there were plenty of extremely influential liberals.

00:31:27.000 Lawrence, Lessig, Robert Reich.

00:31:29.000 Go down the list.

00:31:30.000 Jennifer Palmieri, who was on the Clinton campaign.

00:31:32.000 I collected this at the time, so I have the quote receipts, who were advocating for the delegitimization of the Electoral College.

00:31:41.000 And, you know, people don't forget about that.

00:31:44.000 And that, I think, is a really under emphasized component of all this.

00:31:50.000 It's just as it's almost like a vengeance type thing for 2016.

00:31:54.000 We just had historical polling failure.

00:31:57.000 The worst ever.

00:31:59.000 7% was the failure rate.

00:32:01.000 And now you've got people tweeting things like, you're projecting Joe Biden won before certification, and you're also the ones who got the entire polling wrong.

00:32:10.000 Of course, they're lumping the media together, of course.

00:32:13.000 The various polling institutions all were polling ridiculous numbers against Trump.

00:32:18.000 The race is extremely close and the media runs full speed.

00:32:22.000 Like Wikipedia has already put up on the president elect page, a picture of Joe Biden, which is like, wait, wait, wait.

00:32:29.000 President elect as a concept doesn't need a picture of anybody.

00:32:32.000 Well, I mean, let's be clear about something.

00:32:34.000 When Trump won in 2016, the media called it for him within a few hours.

00:32:41.000 Is it around 3 AM?

00:32:42.000 I think the following day.

00:32:43.000 So, I mean, this is not.

00:32:44.000 Really that different and there were still a lot of uncertainty at least among despondent liberals as to the

00:32:50.000 legitimacy of the election There are people demanding recounts in Wisconsin,

00:32:54.000 Pennsylvania, Michigan Some of which did happen at the behest of Jill Stein, which 0.65

00:32:58.000 was hilarious because she made millions and millions of dollars 1.00

00:33:01.000 mostly from Hillary Clinton supporters because I don't think that

00:33:06.000 Most Green Party supporters should they said that they even exist or that deep-pocketed?

00:33:11.000 So, I mean, there's nothing unusual when you're, like, when the people now say the media called the election.

00:33:16.000 I mean, that happens every election.

00:33:17.000 That happened when Trump won.

00:33:18.000 The votes weren't certified, the states didn't certify the results in 2016 until weeks after.

00:33:24.000 I'm not, I'm not, I'm not claiming that Trump is, or let me put it this way, Yeah, when the media said Trump wins, Trump was like, I won.

00:33:32.000 And now the media's like, Joe Biden's win, he's like, no, he didn't.

00:33:35.000 But it's a formality.

00:33:35.000 That's why I keep going to, let's at least strive to have some logical consistency in how we see the world.

00:33:40.000 I mean, that's one of my baseline desires in life.

00:33:44.000 But the issue is the media calling it, it's a formality.

00:33:50.000 The formality is when the states certify the results.

00:33:54.000 No, no, no.

00:33:56.000 You can't be saying that the media decides who the president is.

00:33:59.000 Well, you said the media calling it is a formality.

00:34:01.000 It's like an informality.

00:34:02.000 It's when they're able to make a projection, they call it.

00:34:04.000 And it's not formalized until the states certify the results weeks later.

00:34:08.000 What I mean is, to clarify, when the media calls it, it's just more of a tradition.

00:34:13.000 That the media says, we've projected the numbers, here's our winner.

00:34:16.000 And then typically you have results where it's like, alright, alright, alright, I'm out.

00:34:20.000 And the campaigns look at their numbers.

00:34:21.000 They look at, you know, Edison Research or AP and say, we see what the numbers are.

00:34:25.000 This one was an extremely close race.

00:34:27.000 And I will say the difference between Hillary Clinton conceding within a couple of days is that we didn't have the results. 1.00

00:34:31.000 She conceded the next day.

00:34:32.000 But we didn't have the results until Saturday.

00:34:34.000 So Trump was up.

00:34:36.000 He couldn't concede.

00:34:37.000 No, that's right.

00:34:37.000 You know what I mean?

00:34:38.000 No, I think it would have been ridiculous.

00:34:39.000 I mean, I think nobody would have expected him to concede.

00:34:41.000 Biden would have had to concede it at that point.

00:34:43.000 Yeah, until at least, you know, it was, quote, called.

00:34:49.000 It is a little bit of a rewriting of history, though, to say that it's just the media calling it.

00:34:53.000 I know that conservatives are really upset with Fox News, but they all did it simultaneously.

00:34:59.000 You know, so, you know, unless you're saying that... Fox was last, I think.

00:35:02.000 But RealClearPolitics hasn't called it.

00:35:05.000 Well, I mean, does RealClearPolitics have its own... Tracking system, it does.

00:35:08.000 ...proprietary vote counting mechanism, like the Associated Press or Fox?

00:35:13.000 I know that they have, just like, I think most of these outlets use the AP or whatever, right?

00:35:13.000 I don't know about that.

00:35:18.000 So they're not making calls, they're just tracking AP's numbers.

00:35:22.000 But RCP has their map.

00:35:24.000 Not all of them.

00:35:24.000 I mean, the reason that Fox called Arizona, Fox called Arizona first, and AP did it a few hours later, so they're using different systems.

00:35:35.000 And they all did it pretty much simultaneously on Saturday morning, because that's when a certain batch of Philadelphia votes came in that rendered it, they say, impossible for Trump to make up the margin, at least, you know, leaving aside any kind of fraud allegations.

00:35:49.000 So there was an article from July written by the co-founder of MSNBC that many people called, they called it anti-Trump resistance porn. 0.58

00:35:57.000 Like, it was one of these articles that were like, Trump is a dictator!

00:36:01.000 And they said, it was called, How Trump Can Lose the Election and Still Win the Presidency.

00:36:06.000 And they said, what would happen is, there's four states, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania, that have Republican legislatures.

00:36:14.000 They're swing states.

00:36:15.000 The argument was, they'll go for Biden, but Trump will make some accusation about national security or fraud, thus locking up the certification process until the deadline, when the Supreme Court will then say, if we don't have the Electoral College certified by the 14th, then it goes to House delegations.

00:36:35.000 And the House delegations are Republican, they would re-elect Donald Trump.

00:36:38.000 That's what this guy was warning of.

00:36:41.000 Now, I think all of these arguments, Trump invalidating votes or whatever, House delegation, are long shots.

00:36:49.000 But I'm looking at, you know, Trump getting rid, so Trump's getting rid of the Pentagon, you know, leadership.

00:36:53.000 Maybe he's just, on the way out, he's just saying, I'm going to get rid of all these people, whatever, he's mad.

00:36:58.000 Or we heard that he instructed the federal agencies to produce their budgets for February as if he wasn't leaving.

00:37:05.000 Then we had Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State, saying there will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.

00:37:10.000 And then I think he chuckled, which people were saying that that meant he wasn't meant to be 100% serious.

00:37:14.000 But then again, who knows?

00:37:15.000 But then it was announced that Trump is telling federal agencies, keep the budgets, like, don't change anything you're doing.

00:37:22.000 So...

00:37:23.000 Yeah.

00:37:24.000 Again, like I mentioned before, Georgia is also a Republican state legislature, so that would be a similar scenario, potentially.

00:37:31.000 You know, I think it was interesting what was said yesterday by Bill Barr, when he put out a memo authorizing certain investigations into substantive fraud.

00:37:44.000 That's unprecedented, right?

00:37:47.000 I believe so.

00:37:48.000 But the way that he worded it was very interesting because Bill Barr, if nothing else, is very astute at knowing how to almost manage Trump because so much of what Trump has demanded vis-a-vis the Durham investigation into the origins of Russiagate or various other Justice Department initiatives Bill Barr really hasn't delivered fully on, and there were even reports about how annoyed Trump apparently was with Barr in the past few weeks.

00:38:20.000 And I think there's sort of a continuation of that theme here, because if you actually read the memo that Barr put out that was reported, he said that it is equally, notwithstanding that he authorized these preliminary investigations, He said it is equally imperative that department personnel exercise appropriate caution and maintain.

00:38:38.000 Oh, sorry, not that.

00:38:39.000 He said that while serious allegations should be handled with great care, specious, speculative, fanciful or far-fetched claims should not be a basis for initiating federal inquiries.

00:38:48.000 So why would he even include that proviso, if not as a kind of quasi-rebuttal of allegations that he apparently believes don't have merit?

00:38:57.000 You know, so he's like treading a line here where I think he's just trying to, to some extent, placate Trump and but also maintain some mooring in the reality as he sees the election going in terms of the final outcome.

00:39:13.000 When they called the results on Saturday, I'm just thinking it's going to be another boring, you know, Trump's finally

00:39:21.000 going to be like, all right, all right, you know, he's going to throw a fit in some capacity.

00:39:25.000 And then I thought we'd move on, but he's not.

00:39:27.000 And then for a while, I thought, you know, at least for a couple of days or a day or two, because it's only what

00:39:32.000 Tuesday I was like, okay, Trump's probably just going to, you know, drag it out.

00:39:36.000 We're seeing reports that he's, like, selling his helicopter.

00:39:38.000 Oh, is he?

00:39:39.000 I don't know if that's true, though, because it's hard to know what to trust anymore when you see these stories that come out, you know?

00:39:44.000 And this is, like, normally I trust for the most part these organizations.

00:39:49.000 I fact-check them.

00:39:50.000 But I can't fact-check these claims that Trump's selling his helicopter.

00:39:52.000 I can't go to a website and look up the sale of a helicopter.

00:39:55.000 So I don't know if he's actually selling this stuff, but then we saw a story from CBS that Trump's fundraising for election recount, 60% first goes to paying off campaign debt.

00:40:04.000 Right.

00:40:04.000 I heard Keith Olbermann say that.

00:40:05.000 I went to his fundraising site, it wasn't there.

00:40:08.000 I mean, I get those solicitations.

00:40:10.000 Did you see them?

00:40:10.000 And if you look at the if you look at the small text, there is something that references that.

00:40:17.000 So what I saw, it said 60 percent will go to Save America.

00:40:20.000 I don't know if it was 60 percent, but there but there is there is a provision in there that which says that some of this could be used to retire campaign debt.

00:40:26.000 I mean, I think that I don't and I felt this across the board for the Democratic campaigns and Republican campaigns.

00:40:32.000 Don't bother giving them money at this point.

00:40:35.000 I mean, the consultants Orders drowning in cash at this point. 0.87

00:40:39.000 It's ridiculous.

00:40:40.000 Jamie Harrison, the Senate Democratic candidate in South Carolina, raised the most money for any Senate race ever. 0.87

00:40:49.000 And lost.

00:40:50.000 And lost.

00:40:50.000 And it was in South Carolina, which is like not a big media market.

00:40:53.000 And it lost double digits.

00:40:53.000 It's like Charleston.

00:40:54.000 It's not like he had to run in California.

00:40:57.000 Yeah.

00:40:57.000 Right.

00:40:58.000 So all you're doing when you Go to your ActBlue donation page, which is how so many of these Democratic candidates get their contributions, is you're lining the pockets of consultants who don't have to even deliver on any of their promises in order to make the money that they're going to make.

00:41:12.000 I mean, they probably are all buying Teslas now because you thought Jamie Harrison had a legitimate chance of beating Lindsey Graham in South Carolina.

00:41:21.000 And Graham won by double digits, didn't he?

00:41:23.000 Yeah, I think it was the 13 points or something.

00:41:24.000 Totally crushed him.

00:41:25.000 And like, likewise, I mean, look, if you're a diehard Trump supporter and you want to pull out all the stops, do everything possible legally to certify to prevent the certification of the votes before we're 100% sure that it's complete.

00:41:37.000 OK, fine.

00:41:38.000 But like, just know that you're paying the salaries of lawyers.

00:41:42.000 consultants if you're clicking on the solicitations and giving money and they

00:41:47.000 don't even need your money at this point they have plenty of money yeah they're

00:41:51.000 just doing it because they can because they want because they have those email

00:41:54.000 lists that are these you know boondoggles that you know they could

00:41:58.000 squeeze every last drop out of so well here's what I'm saying I I'm

00:42:03.000 I'm sitting here thinking Trump's gonna milk it for all it's worth.

00:42:07.000 He's gonna figure out what his legal options are.

00:42:09.000 He's gonna go to war.

00:42:10.000 I can't imagine him giving up.

00:42:11.000 But now I'm kind of like, is Trump gonna push it for a lawfare victory?

00:42:16.000 Where he can jam up several states so there's no certification and then try and win?

00:42:19.000 Or is that just so far-fetched?

00:42:22.000 I'm like, think about what year it is, you know, mass pandemic lockdown,

00:42:25.000 riots sweeping the country, peaking in June, all this weird, crazy stuff happening.

00:42:31.000 And everyone's saying it's 2020. And I'm like, it doesn't really mean anything. It's

00:42:33.000 like superstitious. But Friday the 13th is coming up. Oh, is it?

00:42:38.000 It sure is.

00:42:38.000 Well, that changes everything.

00:42:40.000 It changes everything!

00:42:41.000 Forget everything I said in this conversation.

00:42:42.000 All bets are off, man.

00:42:43.000 I think he's gonna push it, man.

00:42:45.000 I think he's going the distance because the amount of secret votes.

00:42:48.000 I think so.

00:42:48.000 Basically, how many votes got counted in secret?

00:42:51.000 Well, they're claiming 450,000 were counted without meaningful access.

00:42:54.000 And this is just in one place.

00:42:55.000 But hold on.

00:42:56.000 There's also a sworn affidavit that ballots were coming in in the middle of the night.

00:43:00.000 We have a Georgia GOP guy who said at like 4 a.m.

00:43:05.000 they said, we're not counting anymore.

00:43:06.000 So everyone needs to leave.

00:43:07.000 And then once they left, they started counting again.

00:43:09.000 So there's a bunch of these claims.

00:43:12.000 And this is on top of computer programs.

00:43:14.000 Testimony, Florida testimony, congressional testimony of a guy saying he built a program that flips a vote, 51-49.

00:43:21.000 You can look it up on YouTube.

00:43:22.000 That was a long time ago.

00:43:23.000 Yeah, it was like 2001 or something.

00:43:25.000 This is like 20-year-old technology.

00:43:27.000 And then this comes out, this Air Force General starts telling us about this program called Scorecard with this computer.

00:43:33.000 I don't know about that.

00:43:34.000 Hold on, hold on, hold on.

00:43:35.000 Wait, hold on, hold on.

00:43:35.000 I know I don't know either but like this is a big deal.

00:43:38.000 Hold on before you say that we gotta know Who's this guy? He's a he's an Air Force general and I

00:43:43.000 would know his name offhand But he was on Steve Bannon's war room explaining the score

00:43:48.000 the hammer supercomputer and the scorecard software

00:43:52.000 See, I don't know anything about this I don't know how to you know, I actually did listen to a press conference yesterday from the Secretary of State or at least it was an election administrative official who was a Republican in Georgia who addressed Rumors about whatever that is that you're talking about.

00:44:09.000 Sorry.

00:44:09.000 I don't know the full details, but He said it was a hoax and this is a Republican and I don't know maybe he's a He's incorrect, or he's in on it, or he's a deep state operator.

00:44:22.000 I don't know.

00:44:23.000 But I would have to look for a little bit further into what you're just talking about.

00:44:27.000 Isn't it weird, though, that they published a poll from Reuters?

00:44:30.000 It says nearly 80% of Americans say Biden won White House, ignoring Trump's refusal to concede.

00:44:36.000 I'm like, when did we ever need a poll to tell people Americans think Joe Biden won?

00:44:43.000 It's so much manipulation right now.

00:44:45.000 I don't know.

00:44:46.000 Is this just me?

00:44:46.000 A multilevels of manipulation too.

00:44:49.000 I agree.

00:44:50.000 I think that is interesting.

00:44:52.000 You know, I mentioned before we started.

00:44:53.000 I'm curious now if in 2000 there were polls run in this like interregnum period before.

00:45:00.000 It seems like there would be.

00:45:01.000 Curious.

00:45:01.000 winner about just asking people who they think won the election as

00:45:04.000 opposed to like who they favor just who do you think won because then it

00:45:07.000 wouldn't be totally unprecedented but I mean it is I mean the impetus for

00:45:11.000 polling like that is that Trump hasn't continued the election so right I mean

00:45:14.000 it makes some sense why they would run those polls but it is sort of curious

00:45:19.000 yes a little bit weird a little bit I'm saying but like I but it's 2020 so I'm

00:45:24.000 not surprised if they if the results came in they said we're calling it for

00:45:27.000 Biden and then they just shut up.

00:45:30.000 Like, I would be like, yeah, that's it.

00:45:32.000 I got this guy's name.

00:45:33.000 Lieutenant General Thomas McKierney.

00:45:36.000 How do you spell it?

00:45:37.000 Uh, Thomas, MICK, M-C-I-N-E-R-N-E-Y.

00:45:42.000 Lieutenant General of the Air Force, I believe.

00:45:45.000 I can't spell that.

00:45:45.000 What did you say?

00:45:46.000 Uh, M-C-I-N-E-R. 1.00

00:45:48.000 Oh, McKierney.

00:45:48.000 Yep.

00:45:49.000 McKierney.

00:45:50.000 Yeah, this guy's legit.

00:45:51.000 McKierney?

00:45:52.000 Yeah.

00:45:53.000 He's, he's big time.

00:45:54.000 83 years old, this is the guy?

00:45:55.000 Yeah.

00:45:56.000 Former Air Force fighter pilot?

00:45:59.000 Retired in 94?

00:45:59.000 Vietnam War?

00:46:00.000 Oh wow.

00:46:01.000 So this guy went on Bannon's show and claimed that they had the ability to manipulate elections?

00:46:05.000 Basically, they've been using this software as a spying tool against terrorist organizations and now they've turned it, according to him, they've turned it on people to use it for voter fraud.

00:46:14.000 I'll tell you, there's a... Media Matters is calling Hammer the new conspiracy theory.

00:46:19.000 See, this is the thing, I don't care for this stuff.

00:46:21.000 You know why?

00:46:21.000 We don't need it.

00:46:22.000 It is a conspiracy.

00:46:24.000 Who conspired?

00:46:25.000 Was it the American government against ISIS?

00:46:27.000 No, no, no.

00:46:29.000 We don't need these accusations or stories.

00:46:32.000 It doesn't have anything to do and it's a distraction.

00:46:34.000 It's calling the entire thing into question for me.

00:46:36.000 And it creates a discussion where regular people say you're insane and I don't want to hear it anymore.

00:46:41.000 Well, I think the real discussion is that paper ballots are malfunctioned.

00:46:44.000 Paper ballots are what provide some degree of security in the authenticity of elections, I would think.

00:46:47.000 Not, you know, if it goes 100 percent.

00:46:48.000 database. Otherwise, you're going to be counting votes in back rooms for ages

00:46:51.000 to come. And you're going to be relying on people's trust.

00:46:54.000 Paper ballots are what provides some degree of security in

00:46:57.000 the authenticity of elections, I would think. Not, you know, if it

00:47:01.000 goes 100 percent.

00:47:02.000 I mean, that that was the move after 2016 and

00:47:06.000 kind of shed light on some of the Democratic inconsistency because

00:47:09.000 people when they were hearing all these allegations from Democrats

00:47:12.000 that, oh, Russia must have hacked Wisconsin or something.

00:47:15.000 They're saying, OK, if you want a legislative fix to that, let's institute nationwide paper ballots so that we can go and verify after the election and nothing happened on it.

00:47:23.000 You have hard documents.

00:47:25.000 If we go digital, someone could just draft a bunch of fake ballots and there's nothing to look at.

00:47:29.000 But the thing is, you don't have the hard ballots.

00:47:32.000 You don't know who does.

00:47:33.000 No, you don't.

00:47:34.000 We don't.

00:47:35.000 I saw them in a warehouse in Georgia.

00:47:38.000 They do have them.

00:47:39.000 Did you though?

00:47:40.000 Did you look in each one?

00:47:41.000 Were you able to?

00:47:42.000 The required statute totally to keep them for... Who's they?

00:47:45.000 And where do they keep them?

00:47:46.000 And how do you know what they are?

00:47:47.000 Just because you don't know doesn't mean there's a conspiracy.

00:47:50.000 And I'm not allowed to know.

00:47:51.000 No, that's not true.

00:47:53.000 You could walk in and you could talk to the county election official who will explain it to you.

00:47:57.000 And you have to rely on him telling you the truth.

00:48:00.000 Sure, but you can stand there while they bring the ballots in, watch them pull the ballot out, look at the ballot, watch them open it, see who was voted for, you can watch all that.

00:48:07.000 The problem is, Donald Trump's lawsuit is stating they blocked that.

00:48:11.000 That's the issue.

00:48:12.000 That's one level of an issue, yeah.

00:48:13.000 In that capacity, you are correct.

00:48:15.000 So Trump is creating a legal challenge to 450,000 ballots because they blocked meaningful access like they were actually supposed to.

00:48:22.000 This hammer scorecard thing is another level completely I'm talking about.

00:48:26.000 This Trump thing is good.

00:48:27.000 When you come out to regular people and say there's a top secret military program called hammer scorecard.

00:48:32.000 Well there's PRISM.

00:48:33.000 I mean Edward Snowden dropped that bomb.

00:48:34.000 Yes, of course. 0.63

00:48:35.000 And I'm saying when you go to regular people and you say that they tell you you're insane.

00:48:38.000 No one's told me I'm insane. 0.81

00:48:40.000 Dude.

00:48:40.000 I'm just quoting an Air Force general.

00:48:43.000 You live in a world where regular, working-class people don't. 0.98

00:48:46.000 And if you go knock on someone's door right now and say, they stole the election with hammer... I'm not forcing it down someone's throat, I'm just bringing it up, man.

00:48:52.000 And they're gonna be like, this guy's crazy. 0.93

00:48:54.000 Well, you're allowed to say that. 0.57

00:48:55.000 But I advise you to investigate on your own.

00:48:59.000 Do you want a legal challenge?

00:49:00.000 I think it's just.

00:49:02.000 So what you need is a sound legal argument that is within the realm of basic understanding.

00:49:08.000 This stuff's conspiracy.

00:49:08.000 There's no proving any of it.

00:49:09.000 That's the problem.

00:49:10.000 Exactly.

00:49:10.000 It's just insanity.

00:49:11.000 So what we can see is there's anomalies.

00:49:13.000 Like, did you see that some of the jurisdictions violated Benford's law of numbers?

00:49:19.000 That I don't know.

00:49:20.000 So Benford's Law of Numbers is that.

00:49:21.000 Just to respond to you really quickly though before I forget is I think you're right on some level and I'm not even sure that if you did not go knock on the door of some regular working class person who's not overly attuned to Politics that they wouldn't be receptive to some argument.

00:49:36.000 Okay, what a general said this, you know, because a lot of people don't have a lot of instinctive faith in the veracity of our institutions, including the media, including the government.

00:49:45.000 So, like, I don't know that that would be too much of a stretch in order to convince somebody.

00:49:48.000 But the point is, you have to if you want to actually establish what it is that you're positing beyond just Vague assumptions about the corruption of stuff.

00:50:00.000 You have to go a little further than a, you know, there was something said in 2001 about some program, you know, there's there should be evidence that's attainable that would substantiate what you're what you're saying.

00:50:12.000 I would love it if there was we could somehow get our hands on a CIA.

00:50:15.000 But then again, like, why wouldn't this have been the case in 2016?

00:50:19.000 For all we know, it was.

00:50:20.000 I mean, it's crazy.

00:50:21.000 So that they put no way to they put Trump in and then they took him out.

00:50:24.000 We actually were going crazy with conspiracies earlier, just kind of having fun, and that was one of them. 0.92

00:50:28.000 Yeah, well, but this was just silly.

00:50:29.000 Yeah, and then, like, your harp is gonna make volcanoes explode. 1.00

00:50:32.000 That was you, not me!

00:50:33.000 That was me.

00:50:34.000 We were saying a whole lot of, like, what-ifs.

00:50:36.000 Like, what if, like, the Russians really did hack into... So, but we were being silly, but...

00:50:40.000 So what if Trump was like the ultimate deep state agent all along?

00:50:44.000 Hold on, hold on.

00:50:44.000 This is a real conspiracy theory.

00:50:46.000 It started during the election that Hillary Clinton and Trump were actually friends.

00:50:50.000 Which they were at one time.

00:50:51.000 And I have a photo from- Hillary attended his wedding and everything.

00:50:55.000 I was at Fort Lauderdale and there were protesters outside of a Trump rally holding a picture of the Clintons and Trump together.

00:51:01.000 And they were saying they're friends.

00:51:02.000 They're in on it.

00:51:03.000 It's all rigged.

00:51:04.000 And that's why Hillary Clinton didn't challenge the election. 1.00

00:51:07.000 She went, oh, I wasn't supposed to lose because that was the intent.

00:51:11.000 I'm not saying it's true.

00:51:12.000 I'm saying that's what people think.

00:51:13.000 I think if it were remotely possible for Hillary Clinton to have ascended to the presidency, she would have pursued that vigorously. 0.93

00:51:19.000 I don't care how friendly they were or if she attended his wedding in Mar-a-Lago.

00:51:23.000 So back to Benford's Law.

00:51:24.000 This is something that people keep bringing up over and over again.

00:51:27.000 I'm not a mathematician.

00:51:28.000 I can't tell you if this is true.

00:51:28.000 This is one of the things that we're seeing pop up on the internet.

00:51:31.000 And Benford's Law is that if you were to go throughout your day writing down numbers, you would see more 1s than 2s, more 2s than 3s, more 3s than 4s.

00:51:41.000 So quite literally, you're walking down the street, you see a mailbox.

00:51:43.000 Interesting.

00:51:43.000 And then you're like, I'm gonna write down the mailbox.

00:51:45.000 It's sick, four, three, one, seven.

00:51:47.000 And you keep doing that.

00:51:48.000 Then you tabulate how many fours you found.

00:51:51.000 You will have more threes than fours and it creates a sliding scale.

00:51:54.000 So a bunch of people are posting various jurisdictions that voted where Biden's vote totals violate Benford's law.

00:52:02.000 Meaning there's wild numbers.

00:52:04.000 This is important because we've actually, international auditors have used Benford's law

00:52:08.000 as justification for, or probable cause of voter fraud.

00:52:11.000 And that's why people are now bringing it up.

00:52:14.000 The other thing I'll mention is I got a tweet right here.

00:52:16.000 I said, BBC is going to have to retract this old article titled, quote,

00:52:20.000 "'Vote Rigging, How to Spot the Telltale Signs'".

00:52:24.000 Because two of the things they point to that show voter fraud is a delay in announcing results.

00:52:29.000 Which.

00:52:31.000 We had, and we still do, a serious delay with several states and also voter turnout numbers that exceed 98 or 99 percent.

00:52:41.000 They go on to mention in this article from the BBC from 2016 when they're auditing elections in say Africa, the reason why getting voter turnout above 90 or 95 percent is typically impossible is because people move and people die.

00:52:53.000 Thus, in places like Australia, where you can vote by mail and online, and it's compulsory, they still only get around 90-95% voter turnout.

00:53:02.000 Yet, I have a tweet.

00:53:04.000 UCF tweeted, Since 2017, our campus has been recognized as a voter-friendly campus.

00:53:09.000 Today, UCF's voting precinct, precinct 538, topped the 100% voter turnout in the 2020 election at 107.56%.

00:53:18.000 My response was that BBC is going to have to retract this article because

00:53:22.000 certainly it's not fraud or impropriety in our country.

00:53:26.000 Well, what's so hilarious is that, and this is sort of tangentially related, but in October or November of last year, there was a presidential election in Bolivia.

00:53:38.000 And Evo Morales ended up being ousted in a coup because we were told there were too many election irregularities for it to have been legitimate.

00:53:48.000 And a lot of it stemmed from the fact that rural precincts, which were more pro Morales, the votes were tabulated later on because it took a while due to the infrastructure or whatever.

00:53:56.000 Really, it didn't take that long compared to the United States.

00:53:59.000 Again, we're still sitting around here.

00:54:01.000 A week later, we don't have calls in Georgia.

00:54:04.000 What's going on in Alaska?

00:54:05.000 Arizona or even Alaska.

00:54:06.000 They're carrying the bag of belts from Barrow, Alaska to Anchorage on foot.

00:54:12.000 Even in New York, I checked as of last night.

00:54:15.000 If you look at the number of precincts reporting and the number of the vote reporting in Manhattan or Queens or Westchester, it's like 50 or 60 percent.

00:54:24.000 So if New York actually was critical in terms of determining the outcome, there would be even a bigger uproar because who knows what's happening there administratively.

00:54:36.000 But you know, the US never applies the same standards that it uses to berate and lecture other countries, which are supposedly less exceptional to us.

00:54:45.000 Um, as it applies to itself.

00:54:47.000 I mean, you know, I thought this was, wasn't this a country that like imposed democracy on Iraq and Afghanistan?

00:54:55.000 Well, you know, we still can't do that.

00:54:57.000 Yeah.

00:54:57.000 But, but, but we can't even like get results from Arizona a week later.

00:55:01.000 It's so crazy.

00:55:02.000 It's taken this long.

00:55:03.000 There's never been anything in like a 10th of this bizarreness lengthwise.

00:55:07.000 Well, has there?

00:55:08.000 Has it ever stretched out more than two days after the election day?

00:55:11.000 Yes.

00:55:12.000 I mean, yes.

00:55:13.000 So in Florida, 2000 stretched a month and a half or a month and a half.

00:55:17.000 No, no, not 37 days.

00:55:19.000 37 days.

00:55:19.000 Yeah.

00:55:20.000 37 or 38.

00:55:21.000 Well, and then they never even like I mean, the Supreme Court intervened to prevent them from finishing the recount in Florida.

00:55:28.000 So that wasn't even completed.

00:55:30.000 We've had an election where there was a tie and a council was created of Democrats, Republicans, lawyers, and judges who then decided the outcome of the election.

00:55:41.000 Like, totally outside of the Constitution.

00:55:43.000 I think it was 1876.

00:55:44.000 When Al Franken was first elected to the Senate in Minnesota in 2008, it was so close against Norm Coleman that it wasn't decided until the following July.

00:55:53.000 If I'm not mistaken.

00:55:54.000 So July 09.

00:55:55.000 Wow.

00:55:56.000 So it can take forever, especially when the margins are so close.

00:55:59.000 But, you know, this is the most powerful country in world history.

00:56:02.000 We have so much financial, economic, cultural, social power that we can't get together to have efficient election administration.

00:56:11.000 In regards to Florida and the 2008 one, who did you say it was?

00:56:16.000 I don't know.

00:56:16.000 I have to double check on that.

00:56:18.000 Al Franken, yeah.

00:56:19.000 Were the votes tallied the day of, but then there was just, they had to do recounts?

00:56:23.000 They had to do recounts.

00:56:24.000 So it's never been this case where the votes haven't even been tallied yet a week later?

00:56:29.000 I don't know.

00:56:30.000 I have to double check on that.

00:56:31.000 I mean, I think I did take...

00:56:32.000 Well, hold on, hold on.

00:56:35.000 Think about it this way.

00:56:36.000 Certification happens on December... I'm sorry, Electoral College certification is the 14th of December.

00:56:43.000 Well, first states have to certify, and then electors are appointed, and then they formally meet at the Electoral College in mid-December.

00:56:54.000 That's what it was in 2016.

00:56:57.000 Tim's finding the source.

00:56:59.000 I thought we could look at it.

00:57:00.000 I thought we could look at it.

00:57:02.000 Good because I'm seething.

00:57:04.000 So anyway, the point is, back in the day, we didn't have the internet.

00:57:08.000 You'd be like, you'd walk to the swimming hole where there's like, you know,

00:57:13.000 Billy Jenkins would be like, I got your ballot right here, son.

00:57:15.000 And you'd be like, fill it out, and you'd give it to him and just cross your fingers, I guess.

00:57:19.000 And then he puts on the post, the guy rides the horse to the Capitol,

00:57:23.000 and then you're just like, well, I voted.

00:57:26.000 And then you just, that's it.

00:57:27.000 You never know what happened to it.

00:57:29.000 Today, it takes like two weeks before they'll even tell you to confirm your vote.

00:57:33.000 But I mean, like the idea that we're getting the night result, like we turn the TV on and they're like, here's the president.

00:57:39.000 That's like, we didn't have that back then, you know, before TV and radio, 1800s.

00:57:44.000 You'd be like, I wonder who the president is.

00:57:46.000 Oh, so they'd always be counting the votes for, the votes would be coming in from Oh, probably that too, because they didn't have the transport technology.

00:57:53.000 So it would be like votes would be coming in randomly over a certain span of time.

00:57:57.000 But with the internet, you would think that we would have gotten better at counting our votes.

00:58:01.000 You'd think so.

00:58:02.000 Well, I mean, Florida, for example, has gotten a lot better.

00:58:04.000 They learned their lesson.

00:58:05.000 I mean, they actually instituted legislative reforms after 2000 that very much made their system more efficient.

00:58:05.000 They did.

00:58:13.000 And I think we're probably going to see something like that in some of these other states, especially given this conversion to mail-in voting.

00:58:19.000 But I mean, another complication is that in Florida, they were permitted to count their mail-in voting before Election Day, whereas in, you know, begin the counting so they could announce, so the winner would be apparent on election night.

00:58:32.000 But in Pennsylvania, they weren't permitted to do that by state law.

00:58:34.000 So I've got the numbers pulled up, and NBC just goes by the key states that matter, and they say in Arizona, they have until November 23rd to finalize their local results.

00:58:45.000 The Secretary of State certifies statewide results on the 30th.

00:58:48.000 In Pennsylvania, they have until November 10th for unofficial vote tallies.

00:58:52.000 to be provided to the Secretary of the Commonwealth.

00:58:54.000 November 23rd is the last day for local officials to submit certified election results.

00:58:58.000 If there's a difference of 0.5% or less, then the Secretary must order a recount by November 12th.

00:59:05.000 If at least three voters in each county allege errors or discrepancies in the count, a recount could also be triggered.

00:59:11.000 Any recount must be completed by November 24th, and local election officials must submit certified recount results to the Secretary by the 25th.

00:59:19.000 In Michigan, November 17th, For their, uh, local election officials must complete counting by the 17th, provide the results by the 23rd for certification.

00:59:29.000 Any petitions for recount must be submitted by the 25th.

00:59:32.000 Wisconsin, they say, is the 17th, and then, you know, there's special rules.

00:59:36.000 13th for Georgia, followed by the 20th to certify unofficial results on the 13th.

00:59:41.000 North Carolina, okay.

00:59:43.000 We go to December 8th, last day for states to resolve election disputes.

00:59:47.000 States must certify election outcomes at least six days before the Electoral College meets, known as the Safe Harbor Deadline, if they want to avoid Congress getting involved in resolving potential disputes.

00:59:56.000 That means any court challenges to state election results must be settled by December 8th, 2020.

01:00:01.000 If states certify election outcomes by this deadline, Congress must accept the results as valid.

01:00:06.000 December 14th, electors cast their ballots.

01:00:09.000 They meet in their respective states to cast their ballots for president and vice president on the second Monday after the second Wednesday in December.

01:00:16.000 In every state except Nebraska and Maine, electors vote on winner-takes-all basis.

01:00:20.000 This we understand, and then some are split.

01:00:23.000 December 23rd, President of the Senate receives electoral vote certificates.

01:00:27.000 By January 6th, Congress counts electoral votes.

01:00:30.000 And on January 20th, they inaugurate the new president.

01:00:33.000 So if there's a pending court case by December 8th, and the state is unable to deliver votes, what happens then?

01:00:42.000 My understanding is that it's rejected.

01:00:46.000 There's no count.

01:00:47.000 So the state has just gone, whoa.

01:00:47.000 There's no votes.

01:00:50.000 And so this is what, and look, I'm not a legal expert, I'm not a constitutionalist.

01:00:53.000 I don't know that that's exactly true.

01:00:55.000 But you know, it would have to be, I don't know that it's even been litigated before,

01:00:59.000 so we wouldn't, it's hard to have a firm answer one way or another.

01:01:03.000 On the, what was it, the Bedford's Law?

01:01:07.000 Ben Fred's Law.

01:01:08.000 Ben Fred's Law point you made.

01:01:10.000 It is interesting because... Well, to clarify, it's not a point I'm trying to make.

01:01:14.000 Or that you referenced that people are talking about.

01:01:15.000 It's like people are posting these viral Twitter threads and not knowing anything about it.

01:01:18.000 People are posting these threads.

01:01:20.000 One thing that is definitely the case with this election, which is somewhat unusual, is that turnout nationwide went up across the board, across partisan lines.

01:01:29.000 So we still have millions of votes to count, ridiculously at this point.

01:01:34.000 But even up until now, something like 12% more total votes were cast in 2020 compared to 2016.

01:01:41.000 And they weren't cast in a direction that's easy to delineate along partisan lines.

01:01:48.000 So if you look at the map of the country, There are some places that skewed heavily Democratic, some places that skewed heavily Republican.

01:01:57.000 And in 2016, the skew was almost universally toward the Republican, except in a few cases like, you know, northern Virginia, some affluent suburban areas.

01:02:11.000 And you could like kind of extrapolate what the reason for that partisan skew was.

01:02:15.000 So it made sense that Montgomery County, Pennsylvania and Arlington skewed Democratic in 2016, whereas the other counties skewed Republican.

01:02:23.000 But this year, it's harder to make any of those kinds of inferences.

01:02:28.000 And there are these regional anomalies that are a little bit odd.

01:02:33.000 And I'm not.

01:02:35.000 Positing any conspiracy by any means.

01:02:37.000 I'm just saying that if it's some of this stuff strikes you as odd, it's because even the people who are not in conspiracy land whatsoever are finding them odd and don't know exactly how to interpret them.

01:02:47.000 So, like, for example, one thing that I wouldn't have expected is that in Minnesota, which the Trump campaign, I think, at least initially thought was possibly competitive, you see a pretty stark pro-democratic skew.

01:03:03.000 Right, but but in Iowa, which parts of which are culturally and politically very similar to Minnesota, you see the opposite skewed toward the Republican toward Trump and.

01:03:18.000 That's a little odd.

01:03:20.000 Like, I don't know exactly how to interpret that.

01:03:22.000 And there are a bunch of other examples.

01:03:24.000 Like, if you had told me two weeks ago that Trump would win the second congressional district in Maine by the margin he did, which is like seven points, I would have found it Yeah, that's weird.

01:03:37.000 are that that would have been the case.

01:03:38.000 And yet he also loses New Hampshire by something like seven or eight

01:03:42.000 points. Like, because usually there are there. Usually there are these

01:03:44.000 inner regional correlations.

01:03:46.000 Right. That was definitely the case in 2016.

01:03:48.000 The Midwest and the Great Plains swung hard to Trump.

01:03:52.000 Right. But this year in the Midwest and the Great Plains, you see these

01:03:55.000 like patches of different partisan skews that.

01:03:58.000 You know, are going to take a little bit more examination to understand

01:04:02.000 the.

01:04:03.000 People have noticed that in the the partisan swing charts where

01:04:08.000 it shows like which areas they keep posting photos saying,

01:04:11.000 look at the state lines because they don't make sense.

01:04:15.000 Like, the border of Ohio and Michigan, I think.

01:04:18.000 Is Ohio bordering Michigan?

01:04:19.000 I'm thinking Indiana.

01:04:21.000 No, it doesn't, does it?

01:04:23.000 It's like, you see Michigan is all going Democrat, and then the states bordering it to the south are all going Republican, and it's like, what?

01:04:30.000 It's like...

01:04:31.000 I guess it could happen with the Internet.

01:04:33.000 The fracturing of mentality is, you know, you're maybe more like someone across the country than you are to your neighbor.

01:04:39.000 Now that you're able to connect via the Internet, that's one way.

01:04:42.000 But in 2016, there was a definitely observable regional correlation pretty much everywhere.

01:04:47.000 And if there wasn't a regional correlation, you can infer that it was due to like socioeconomic status, median household income.

01:04:54.000 There were like some metrics that you could use to make these results explicable, whereas in 20 20 is much less explicable.

01:05:03.000 I mean, there are certain things that you can pretty easily infer from, like, so for example, the reason why Biden is ahead in Georgia is because of this transformation of the Atlanta area and the suburbs, namely the affluent suburbs.

01:05:18.000 And there are other examples of that you can find around the country, but others where it's not like that correlation doesn't hold.

01:05:25.000 But, you know, just to focus on Georgia, just because I happen to be there for like a week or so prior to the election.

01:05:32.000 One thing I think is worth underscoring about these results is that the Democratic Party's cultural and power and financial base is now indisputably in these affluent suburbs.

01:05:44.000 They're the party of Wall Street, the managerial elites.

01:05:47.000 Well, I mean, Wall Street was very much satisfied with this result.

01:05:49.000 I mean, the Dow went up and so on and so forth.

01:05:53.000 But because it's places like Cobb County, Georgia, Gwinnett County, Georgia, which are these affluent, growing population centers around metro areas, the Democrats are increasingly going to govern with their

01:06:06.000 sensibilities in mind.

01:06:08.000 Right. And if you think that translates into like economic populism, I think you're dreaming.

01:06:15.000 It could there could be a big factor here in that COVID moved people around.

01:06:19.000 People who lived in cities all of a sudden found themselves back in the suburbs with their family.

01:06:25.000 And this was always going to be a factor, so when you look at why there are these patches that we don't understand, it could very easily be that.

01:06:31.000 That earlier in the year, COVID hit, people probably were like, I'm going to get out of the city.

01:06:35.000 Then when the riots hit, people got out of cities.

01:06:37.000 We knew they were.

01:06:38.000 500,000 people from New York.

01:06:40.000 So you got a bunch of wealthy New York people moving all across.

01:06:44.000 Maybe that explains why Maine, you know, swung for Trump in a certain way that New Hampshire didn't, because people moved very rapidly and it was the individuals, not the exchange of ideas.

01:06:53.000 You know what I mean?

01:06:54.000 Not relatable.

01:06:54.000 Interesting.

01:06:55.000 And different states have different regimens in terms of whether they sent out a universal mail-in ballot.

01:07:02.000 That's true.

01:07:03.000 Whether you had to apply for one.

01:07:04.000 Like in Georgia, you actually had to apply for an absentee ballot.

01:07:07.000 Whereas like in New Jersey, where I live, It was automatic, which I know was controversial.

01:07:12.000 But, like, a lot of this stuff really is bizarre.

01:07:14.000 Like, Los Angeles County, I can't get over.

01:07:17.000 As of yesterday, when I checked, and it's probably more now, there were 200,000 more votes for Trump in Los Angeles County than there were in 2016.

01:07:24.000 Wow.

01:07:25.000 And Los Angeles County is actually trending Republican.

01:07:28.000 Oh, that's amazing.

01:07:30.000 No.

01:07:30.000 Well, it's because the rich people all leave.

01:07:33.000 And the poor people are like, I'm going to vote Republican. 1.00

01:07:35.000 Uh, maybe there's something to that, but like, I mean, I would have, you would have not had, I would have not predicted that one.

01:07:43.000 You see Zapata County in Texas.

01:07:45.000 Oh yeah.

01:07:45.000 I mean, Hillary Clinton won it two to one and then Trump flipped it.

01:07:49.000 Hispanic, Hispanic, uh, uh, county.

01:07:52.000 And then you also saw in Miami, I think it was, what was it?

01:07:55.000 The 20th or 27th district.

01:07:57.000 Blue, safe blue, congressional seats turned red.

01:08:01.000 A woman started crying on the phone because she lost.

01:08:03.000 It's evidence for why direct democracy is so dangerous, because of the way people can flip on a dime and completely alter.

01:08:11.000 If we didn't have a republic and everyone was just like, you just needed a bunch of people to change their mind one day, like a populist candidate could just completely destroy the governance.

01:08:20.000 Oh, look at like mask wearing.

01:08:21.000 Like, early on with COVID, you had all these Republicans being like, I'm gonna wear a mask.

01:08:25.000 And it was Fauci saying, no, no.

01:08:28.000 And then it flipped for some reason.

01:08:32.000 I'm agreeing with you in that you could use a tribal issue to make people 180 their opinions in a short time span.

01:08:39.000 You know, another thing about this election is that it doesn't lend itself to easily reductionist tribal explanations.

01:08:48.000 Yeah.

01:08:48.000 For the right or the left.

01:08:50.000 I mean, I've been examining the Georgia results in detail because I wrote a piece that's going to be coming out this week.

01:08:55.000 But, you know, I'll just pull up this data because it's hilarious.

01:08:59.000 Oh, sorry.

01:09:01.000 So Trump would have won this election if he had just maintained the level of white support that he had in 2016.

01:09:06.000 Yeah.

01:09:08.000 And if your thesis for U.S.

01:09:14.000 politics is this all encompassing, you know, white supremacy, determinist belief system that is so prevalent in the media, then how do you explain that one?

01:09:26.000 And one of the most stark examples is to me in in in Georgia, where you have the county with the highest proportion of black voters.

01:09:35.000 In that county, Trump received 38 percent more total votes than he did in 2016, whereas Biden received more than Hillary, but just 10 percent more.

01:09:45.000 So the skew there was for Trump.

01:09:47.000 But then if you look at the whitest county in Georgia, and these are rural, relatively small counties, so you could see big shifts year to year.

01:09:47.000 Yeah.

01:09:47.000 Right.

01:09:53.000 But nonetheless, in the whitest county in Georgia, Biden's vote total increased 34 percent compared to Hillary and Trump's increased by a lesser percentage is 26.

01:10:05.000 So what does that tell you?

01:10:07.000 That tells you if you are so mired in this kind of elite mentality where everything is black and white per the dictates of this ideology that they're so obsessed with, Then you're missing just a huge amount of the political dynamics in the country around you.

01:10:27.000 And you would think that if you're in the media and you're somebody who wants to be as attuned as possible to those dynamics, then you would do, I don't know, a rethink.

01:10:36.000 But I can't imagine that they're actually going to do it.

01:10:38.000 They're way too tethered to their ideological presuppositions.

01:10:41.000 They're trying to claim now.

01:10:42.000 I'm seeing all the all the memes from the from the left that, you know, AOC was right.

01:10:47.000 The districts that she helped, that were for Medicare for All, actually won.

01:10:52.000 And the Democrats who didn't support and went moderate all ended up losing.

01:10:56.000 And maybe there's an argument where if I'm going to vote for someone who's moderate, I'll go the safe route and not vote for the guy who wants to impeach the president and not get anything done.

01:11:04.000 You vote for a Republican, maybe they'll actually do their job.

01:11:06.000 Maybe that's the mentality.

01:11:08.000 In New Jersey, Jeff Van Drew, he won.

01:11:11.000 He won.

01:11:12.000 He just said, you know, I don't want to impeach Trump.

01:11:12.000 Yeah.

01:11:14.000 I'm going to switch parties.

01:11:15.000 Boom, boom, boom, boom.

01:11:17.000 And then now he's reelected.

01:11:18.000 He gets.

01:11:18.000 Yep.

01:11:18.000 That's huge.

01:11:20.000 Yeah.

01:11:21.000 You know, it's interesting because the the there were the.

01:11:27.000 One of the Democratic congressmen who did not vote to impeach Trump, there were only three I think, was in Minnesota in one of these more rural districts that had been like a legacy Democratic district that the Republicans rightly thought that they could win, Colin Peterson.

01:11:39.000 And his not voting for impeachment didn't matter, he still lost anyway.

01:11:43.000 So there are certain congressional districts that are going to be subject to nationwide trends, regardless of whether, like, you support Medicare for All or you voted to impeach Trump.

01:11:52.000 It's almost, like, ineluctable, you know?

01:11:55.000 And I think you see that when there's certain big shifts.

01:11:58.000 But then again, it's sort of complicated because you have these patches of partisan trends that are kind of, like, in conflict with one another that don't make a ton of sense.

01:12:05.000 So I mean, this is going to take a lot of time to, quote, unpack.

01:12:08.000 I think COVID played a big role in it, I do.

01:12:10.000 I think, and the riots, moved people around in ways we don't yet understand.

01:12:14.000 And a lot of these places had same-day registration.

01:12:17.000 So you could've literally moved a week before.

01:12:20.000 Well, not literally, because they probably have some law, like you gotta be there at least 27 days or something, some states.

01:12:24.000 Now they're all gonna go to Georgia.

01:12:26.000 Like, for real.

01:12:26.000 You hearing this?

01:12:28.000 They're gonna move to Georgia.

01:12:29.000 So the big thing now, apparently, is that Georgia has lax residency laws, and because the runoff will dictate control of the Senate, And if Republicans lose control of the Senate, it's going to be Democrat in every branch.

01:12:29.000 They are.

01:12:41.000 Except for the, I should say, not the Supreme Court, but it's going to be House, Senate, and Presidency, and they're going to start passing everything and just steamrolling through.

01:12:49.000 So, now we're hearing, what was it, Andrew Yang said, I'm moving to Georgia!

01:12:53.000 It's like, really, dude?

01:12:55.000 I mean, even if the Democrats do gain control of the Senate, I wouldn't think I wouldn't overestimate how simple it is for them to just get through whatever it is they want to get through.

01:13:04.000 I mean, Trump and the Republicans had unified control for the first two years of his tenure.

01:13:09.000 They couldn't get health care repeal, Obamacare repeal passed.

01:13:13.000 I mean, they got a tax reform bill.

01:13:16.000 But it's it's less it's it's not as simple as you think.

01:13:19.000 And there are always these kind of like anomalous senators within the coalition who need to be placated.

01:13:24.000 I mean, Trump had Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski and stuff like, by the way, Susan Collins winning was one of the most hilarious.

01:13:30.000 Yeah.

01:13:31.000 Certain senators are getting I keep saying bribed, getting lobbied to vote a certain way.

01:13:36.000 And if they're Republican or Democrat, the lobbyists don't care.

01:13:38.000 They're just going to lobby enough people, whether Well, I mean, if you're Joe Manchin, who's the Democratic senator from West Virginia, clearly you have you're operating under a wholly different set of political incentives than if you're a Democratic senator from California.

01:13:53.000 Right.

01:13:54.000 So, I mean, he is within an incentive structure that is going to put him off course with what the majority of the caucus wants.

01:14:05.000 And so it's never going to be a given that Joe Manchin is going to support any particular legislative initiative.

01:14:11.000 I mean, Joe Manchin voted for Kavanaugh and Gorsuch.

01:14:17.000 So a Democratic senator from a certain state might be more conservative than a Republican senator from a certain state.

01:14:22.000 But we're losing that.

01:14:23.000 We're losing that.

01:14:24.000 And that used to always be the case.

01:14:26.000 I mean, there was nothing surprising or novel about that for most of U.S.

01:14:29.000 But we have seen polarization where it's almost like the parties act as parliamentary parties where they vote in almost complete unison most of the time, whereas there used to be these regional disparities where it didn't really matter if you were a Democrat or a Republican if you were representing in the Senate from Alabama or something.

01:14:29.000 history.

01:14:49.000 Alabama just flipped Republican though, didn't it?

01:14:51.000 The Alabama Senator was Democrat, I think?

01:14:57.000 Yes, yes.

01:14:58.000 Doug Jones lost.

01:15:00.000 That did flip.

01:15:01.000 He lost to Tommy Tuberville, who was like the football coach.

01:15:03.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:15:04.000 Tuberville.

01:15:04.000 Yeah.

01:15:05.000 So, and Colin Peterson, too.

01:15:07.000 So Colin Peterson was one of the two Democrats who didn't vote for impeachment.

01:15:12.000 Or actually, I think Tulsi abstained.

01:15:14.000 Did she?

01:15:15.000 She did.

01:15:16.000 She voted present.

01:15:16.000 She voted present on both orders.

01:15:18.000 Do you guys think there would be any value to regulating our government and saying you have to have a certain amount of parties in the government?

01:15:25.000 You can't have more than like X amount of people per party?

01:15:28.000 No, because they'd just form coalitions.

01:15:30.000 They would?

01:15:30.000 Yeah.

01:15:31.000 And but well, I mean, you have lots of parties in different parliamentary systems, like in Europe, like look at look at Belgium.

01:15:39.000 They have to have these wide coalitions and such.

01:15:42.000 And I think it's arguable whether these systems are more efficient.

01:15:46.000 But, you know, one thing I think probably is valid is ranked choice voting, which is now being adopted.

01:15:51.000 But Maine has it.

01:15:52.000 Yeah, Maine has it.

01:15:54.000 And people were saying, oh, people were actually confident that Susan Collins might lose in Maine because the Green Party votes would go to the Democrats.

01:16:00.000 It just didn't matter at all.

01:16:01.000 Third parties were completely irrelevant.

01:16:03.000 So, I mean, these polarization trends that are evident in the country might render it so that it's just naturally not the case that there's a desire for more than Two parties.

01:16:12.000 But ranked choice is legit.

01:16:14.000 Ranked choice sounds pretty good in my opinion.

01:16:15.000 Yeah.

01:16:16.000 So it's like, yeah.

01:16:17.000 Especially in a primary, it makes a lot of sense.

01:16:20.000 You could have more than one candidate you favor, you know.

01:16:22.000 I actually watched a video where they did an algorithmic simulation of various voting methods.

01:16:30.000 The method we have is called first past the post.

01:16:32.000 And I think this is archaic.

01:16:34.000 And I think it is held onto by people who just want to manipulate one person, one vote.

01:16:40.000 That's fair.

01:16:40.000 And it's like, There's other ways to determine, like rank choice makes a lot of sense, but it's also not perfect.

01:16:46.000 For those that aren't familiar, rank choice would be like, you have a list of candidates and you say, here's my first, second, third, fourth, you rank them based on what you think you want.

01:16:54.000 That way, if you're like, I really want Jill Stein, I vote for her. 0.98

01:16:58.000 But if Jill Stein loses, then your vote passes down to the next person, which would be, you know, Joe Biden or whatever.

01:17:04.000 And so that would create a better representation of who the people actually want.

01:17:04.000 Right.

01:17:08.000 But this is gonna be surprising, because I didn't realize this.

01:17:12.000 They did a simulation where they showed the same problem emerges.

01:17:15.000 You can look at many countries where they have ranked choice voting.

01:17:18.000 I think they mentioned Australia, I could be wrong.

01:17:20.000 And they're like still two party dominance.

01:17:22.000 Because people get worried.

01:17:24.000 I forgot why it happens, but it's a similar thing where it's like

01:17:27.000 you run the risk of someone else getting more votes because your first choice is not like,

01:17:33.000 it's still a ranking system where someone might get more votes if you rank them

01:17:37.000 at number two or something like that.

01:17:39.000 And so, I forgot how it worked.

01:17:40.000 But anyway, the point was, they did one called approval voting, where you literally vote for anybody and everybody.

01:17:46.000 You can vote as many times as you want.

01:17:48.000 And they said that was actually the best system.

01:17:50.000 So if there's ten candidates, you can say, I vote for all of them, and you can walk away.

01:17:53.000 Oh! 0.60

01:17:54.000 Yep.

01:17:54.000 Interesting.

01:17:55.000 Alaska actually had a ranked choice party run primary this year.

01:18:01.000 So when they were four or five, you know, you could choose, you know, number one, Bernie Sanders, number two, Elizabeth Warren, whatever.

01:18:08.000 And, you know, there's no reason why that couldn't be replicated across the country, especially in primaries, which tend to be more a function of internal party processes.

01:18:19.000 You know, if there's one election reform that I would love to be instituted nationwide, because it best reflects my own beliefs, it's that it's take the option that's on the ballot, to my knowledge, only in Nevada, which is on the ballot in Nevada for any election, you can vote for quote, none of these candidates.

01:18:36.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:18:37.000 So it's just a wholesale rejection of everything, the whole system.

01:18:40.000 I love it.

01:18:41.000 And that's my preferred reform.

01:18:44.000 I would love to vote for that.

01:18:45.000 The approval voting system was interesting because the idea was if there are, say, ten candidates, you can say, I vote for this, this, this, this, and this, and everyone else can go away.

01:18:54.000 And then basically it's just whoever gets the most votes wins.

01:18:59.000 And apparently they did a simulation where they found that it is the most likely system to accurately represent what people actually want.

01:19:06.000 Yeah, I think with ranked choice, the problem is your vote's gonna end up being only going to whoever is the top two of everything.

01:19:14.000 So if you vote for, like, a Democrat is number one and a Republican is number two, but the Republican doesn't make it into the final top two, your number two won't be your second choice.

01:19:25.000 It'll defer to your third choice.

01:19:26.000 So you want to put your Republican as your first choice.

01:19:30.000 It was something like...

01:19:32.000 If you've got 100 people and 60 of them vote for someone you like, and you vote for that person as your second choice or something, then... It was something like people start betting against each other because they're worried about, you know, someone bad getting in, so they pick their first choice, but then put their bet as their second choice, and then it creates two-party dominance with some minor choices here and there.

01:19:54.000 And what's this other one called?

01:19:55.000 Approval.

01:19:56.000 Approval.

01:19:56.000 Where it's just vote for as many times as you want.

01:19:58.000 So you're kind of voting for who you don't want, Exactly.

01:20:01.000 Yep.

01:20:02.000 And so it ends up with everyone just you count the votes and how many you could vote for one person one time but you can vote for any everybody.

01:20:09.000 So I'm not going to pretend to have all the answers.

01:20:10.000 I'm not saying it's a perfect system.

01:20:11.000 It was just a really interesting thing where they did a mathematical equation and then calculated like The thing is, like, people speculate about the need for different facets of election reform every cycle, and almost nothing ever happens of note, at least on a national scale, right?

01:20:29.000 Sometimes you do have state-based reforms.

01:20:31.000 Yeah, I did.

01:20:31.000 That's a terrible idea, I think.

01:20:33.000 this right choice voting. But I remember in 2016 there was people pledging with you know from the bottom of their

01:20:38.000 heart that if we do anything in the next year to half it's going

01:20:41.000 to be we're going to abolish the Electoral College. It was

01:20:43.000 like OK. Yeah. That's a terrible idea. I think you should be

01:20:46.000 always. Yeah. What are your thoughts on that. The Electoral College. Yeah. You know I don't even think it's worth

01:20:54.000 having an argument as to whether it's good or bad.

01:20:57.000 It just is.

01:20:57.000 It's foundational to the country's founding principles.

01:21:01.000 And we've done it for 200 plus years, 250 years.

01:21:04.000 So, like, why have this recurring endless debate about whether it should or shouldn't be?

01:21:10.000 There's pretty much zero chance ever that it will be changed.

01:21:14.000 And if it was going to be changed, it would have been done while all the momentum was behind changing it in 2016 when you had all these exercised Liberals saying that, oh my god, this horrible fascist backed by Russia has been foisted upon us because of the Electoral College.

01:21:31.000 If that was the opportunity to reform it, that would have been when it was done and it wasn't done.

01:21:36.000 Things can't just stay the same forever though, you know?

01:21:39.000 That's why I'm like, we have an optimism bias.

01:21:42.000 We think everything's gonna just be the way it is, the way we remember.

01:21:45.000 We're used to these elections, where it's always like, the night of, at three in the morning, they're like, the final polls are in, and Barack Obama has won, and you know, McCain is like, you ran a good campaign, Barack, and I concede.

01:21:57.000 And that's like, we just, we grew up with that, and that's normal to us, and now we assume nothing could change.

01:22:02.000 It would be too weird!

01:22:04.000 And if we don't change it incrementally, it tends to happen all at once, which can be very dangerous.

01:22:06.000 and the bad stuff can't happen.

01:22:08.000 But certainly it will at some point.

01:22:09.000 We can't just be stuck in this system.

01:22:12.000 And if we don't change it incrementally, it tends to happen all at once, which can

01:22:15.000 be very dangerous.

01:22:16.000 Well, now you've got the the progressive left.

01:22:19.000 You've got the I don't know if you saw that New York mag story about the New York

01:22:22.000 Times. Yes, I did.

01:22:23.000 The the staff of The New York Times saying we're standing at the barricades of like

01:22:28.000 historic change or something.

01:22:29.000 Which side are you on?

01:22:31.000 Like, like it feels like there's a dam holding back a massive wave of a new what?

01:22:39.000 I don't know what you called it. The neo fascism is that sure.

01:22:43.000 Sure.

01:22:44.000 Did I call it something?

01:22:45.000 Yeah, the dogma of the ideological left, I forgot you called it.

01:22:49.000 I don't want to put words in your mouth.

01:22:52.000 Yeah, I think there is an animated segment of the elite opinion-making class, which is incredibly Racist.

01:23:02.000 I didn't say that.

01:23:03.000 I did.

01:23:04.000 Yeah, you said it.

01:23:05.000 Not me.

01:23:05.000 Although maybe I secretly believe it, but I won't admit it here.

01:23:09.000 Which is just beyond exercise over these past four years, I think has been radicalized.

01:23:16.000 Definitely.

01:23:16.000 I think social media is a huge factor in that because you constantly have to be performing in terms of how committed you are to various ideals and the principle of journalism becomes subordinate to that.

01:23:30.000 Not that journalism is ever some kind of pure principle that could be aspired to by everybody equally under all circumstances.

01:23:38.000 But if you read that New York Magazine piece, it was clear that what was animating most of the people involved, at least who were quoted, in the enterprise of, you know, furnishing the New York Times, they weren't motivated by principally journalism.

01:23:54.000 It was a straightforwardly political objective, which is that We need to... I don't know exactly.

01:24:00.000 Overthrow the white, cis, heteronormative patriarchy? 0.82

01:24:02.000 Yeah, we need to defeat Trump. 0.98

01:24:04.000 We need to... Totally change.

01:24:06.000 ...upend these systems of oppression.

01:24:09.000 And, look, journalists always have personal points of view.

01:24:13.000 I mean, you can't be 100% neutral ever, and even aspiring to be is almost a fallacy.

01:24:19.000 But it used to be, at least from my vantage point, that journalists could, like, weigh different competing considerations in the interest of at least projecting impartiality and rationality.

01:24:33.000 Now they don't even care to pretend to do that.

01:24:36.000 They're on an ideologically zealous mission, and they're proud of it, and they try to ostracize anybody who expresses apprehension about the need to see that as the driving impetus for what you're doing.

01:24:50.000 They're growing.

01:24:51.000 That was part of the reason why I went on my nationwide trip to cover the aftermath of the riots, because even if they weren't lying, there was I don't know how many of them actively lie.

01:25:02.000 That probably does happen.

01:25:04.000 Actually, it certainly does happen.

01:25:06.000 They do a lot.

01:25:06.000 But the bigger problem in terms of why I was motivated to do that was because they were omitting.

01:25:12.000 It was a lie by omission.

01:25:14.000 These were the biggest, most pervasive, most widespread, most damaging riots since at least the 1960s.

01:25:21.000 For those that aren't familiar, Uh, Michael, you went on this trip around the country to all these different big cities, small towns to actually learn about what the riots had done, why, you know, why they were happening, how people felt about them.

01:25:21.000 Let's set this up real quick.

01:25:33.000 You took photos from all these different places.

01:25:35.000 Yeah, I took photos, videos.

01:25:37.000 It was very simple, straightforward stuff, which if I was A full time staffer at a major journalism journalism institution, some of which are very well resourced, like the New York Times has a record number of subscriptions.

01:25:49.000 They're in great financial shape.

01:25:50.000 CNN, all these other outlets, they're, you know, riding the Trump bubble for all it's worth, which is why I think that they're like probably are secretly depressed that it could, you know, that that that the gravy train might be running out relatively soon.

01:26:04.000 But what I had, what I did, There's zero reason why it couldn't have been done on a much wider scale with people who have full crews, which have, you know, full resources behind them.

01:26:16.000 All I did was get in my dumpy car, drive around, you know, go to Chicago, go to Minneapolis, where I spent the bulk of the time, Seattle, Portland.

01:26:26.000 But you went to these really small towns.

01:26:28.000 And smaller places, you know, like Fort Wayne, Indiana.

01:26:29.000 People had no idea that there were even riots there.

01:26:31.000 I didn't know.

01:26:32.000 I'm a pretty avid consumer of news, for better or worse, sometimes worse.

01:26:35.000 But I would have thought I would have heard that there were the biggest riots in memory in Fort Wayne, Indiana, if it had just been kind of, I don't know, normally reported.

01:26:44.000 And it wasn't.

01:26:44.000 You had to dig deeply underneath the narrative to figure out that that had happened.

01:26:50.000 I only knew it happened because I happened to be passing through Fort Wayne, Indiana.

01:26:54.000 I looked it up and I went and saw for myself and spoke to people.

01:26:57.000 And there were just so many other examples of that.

01:27:01.000 And It was bewildering as somebody who had this journalistic motivation.

01:27:08.000 Not that it's a virtue necessarily to have a journalistic motivation, but that tends to be what drives me to do stuff.

01:27:14.000 Like go to Georgia for the election, go to these random places after riots.

01:27:18.000 Just so I can get a relatively robust understanding of what's happening, then convey it as fairly as possible, while also at times, you know, co-mingling my personal views.

01:27:28.000 There's nothing wrong with that, necessarily.

01:27:31.000 But I was talking to people at these places, particularly in Minneapolis.

01:27:37.000 This is like a month or so after the peak of the riots, and it was like all anybody wanted to talk about.

01:27:42.000 You walk down certain blocks, I need some of the some of the photos.

01:27:46.000 It was like rubble.

01:27:48.000 It was as though it was, you know, Serbia in the late 90s or something.

01:27:52.000 The boarded up windows, the begging on the windows, you know, on the buildings.

01:27:57.000 Yeah.

01:27:58.000 You know, minority businesses that had to be shuttered, never to return. 1.00

01:28:03.000 And it was just like, OK, so there's so much material here that we had a media which was interested in conveying the story.

01:28:12.000 It would have been trivially easy to do.

01:28:14.000 You could have found the bodega owner, who is an Iranian, whose store that I went to that was totally boarded up, wrecked, entire inventory stolen.

01:28:24.000 You could have tracked down that guy, done a 60-minute style interview where he reflects on what this means about, like, what the meaning of this is for the American dream or something.

01:28:32.000 However gauzy you want to make it, you could have done it.

01:28:35.000 And it wasn't done because The media was so ensconced in a certain ideological perspective where

01:28:44.000 Doing this, they viewed we would either be in opposition to the tenets of the protest movement and or help Trump.

01:28:52.000 And both of those were lines that no moral person could have ever crossed in their view.

01:28:57.000 I don't even think that the latter rationale made sense.

01:29:02.000 I don't think it necessarily did help Trump.

01:29:05.000 Look at the results in Minnesota.

01:29:06.000 One thing that I was always fighting about with my right wing followers, who I appreciate to some extent because, you know, I like to have a variety of perspectives in terms of people giving me feedback.

01:29:15.000 One thing that I always got into fights with them about was they were saying, oh, the riots mean that Trump is going to win whatever states the riots take place.

01:29:21.000 And I was just like, no, that's not the sense I'm getting when I'm talking to people actually experienced the riots.

01:29:27.000 I don't think that they viewed Trump as.

01:29:31.000 A remedy to the riots.

01:29:34.000 I mean, Trump lost Minnesota by a much greater margin than he did in 2016.

01:29:39.000 You would think it would have been the opposite if the prophecies of a Trump resurgence in those areas came to fruition, which it didn't.

01:29:48.000 I think maybe if Trump were a little bit more politically adroit, that was possible.

01:29:51.000 But it just didn't happen.

01:29:53.000 People who fled probably voted for Trump.

01:29:56.000 I get messages from tons of people who say they used to live in Minnesota and they had to leave because the riots were so bad.

01:30:01.000 So they left the state entirely?

01:30:02.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:30:03.000 Yep.

01:30:04.000 Well, why not move to a different part of Minnesota?

01:30:07.000 I've probably got five emails where they were like, hey, just want to let you know, I lived on the outskirts of Minneapolis.

01:30:12.000 We left, we went to my family's place, things like that.

01:30:14.000 I mean, I've gotten some of those emails too, but like five is not that much.

01:30:16.000 I mean, the point is that most people can't leave.

01:30:18.000 They don't have the resources that they can just up and leave whenever.

01:30:21.000 So you should see something.

01:30:22.000 So you should see something if what was being argued to me constantly online about Trump's benefiting from these riots came to pass, which it didn't.

01:30:30.000 Now, I mean, there is again, we talk about this regional variability.

01:30:33.000 There is some a little bit of a mixed bag there, because if you look at Kenosha, Kenosha County, Wisconsin, that did trend slightly Republican this year, but it didn't in Minnesota.

01:30:45.000 So it's hard to make a firm.

01:30:50.000 All inclusive extrapolation there as to what happened.

01:30:52.000 But just going back to the riots.

01:30:55.000 Hey, look, I almost feel that's already gotten completely memory hold.

01:31:00.000 I mean, this was a historic event.

01:31:02.000 It was a nationwide convulsion.

01:31:05.000 It clearly had some impact on the election results.

01:31:07.000 It's hard to say with certitude in what direction, but all anybody could talk about was that there were the response times for 9-1-1 had gone down in Minneapolis.

01:31:18.000 I was talking to Somalis who had to fend off white rioters coming up to their apartment building and threatening to burn it down while there were children inside.

01:31:28.000 And so, you know, if you if you go through something like that, clearly it has to have some influence on your political perspective.

01:31:34.000 I don't mean I don't think that it necessarily means you're going to vote for Trump, but clearly that has to have some indelible impact.

01:31:41.000 And it just hasn't been explored to anywhere near the extent that you would expect if the media was just motivated by sheer Information gathering.

01:31:50.000 If there was a public service that they were guided by.

01:31:52.000 I was actually talking to Tim earlier about, I think journalism kind of has at least two facets.

01:31:57.000 And one is investigation and one is reporting.

01:32:00.000 And these modern media giants have just taken on the reporting facet.

01:32:04.000 They barely investigate anything.

01:32:06.000 It's analysis and opinion.

01:32:07.000 Well, that's more the divide.

01:32:09.000 The investigation is missing.

01:32:10.000 For sure.

01:32:11.000 You get people like James O'Keefe and I think Scanner, you know, they're focused on investigation.

01:32:18.000 But CNN is just, they just report what they've heard.

01:32:21.000 I don't even know.

01:32:22.000 Analysis.

01:32:23.000 It's analysis.

01:32:23.000 Okay.

01:32:24.000 Well, I don't even think that analysis and reporting are incompatible.

01:32:28.000 Like I do a lot of reporting and then I analyze it.

01:32:30.000 Yeah. But I try to be honest.

01:32:31.000 I try to be transparent.

01:32:32.000 I not try to just be totally in hock to some kind of

01:32:36.000 partisan agenda, whether it's promoting a

01:32:39.000 BLM Antifa protest or whatever or promoting Trump. 0.85

01:32:43.000 Like, I mean, I want to actually to the best of my ability and still

01:32:47.000 confidence that what I'm saying is truthful.

01:32:51.000 And I think that that's just not something that so many people in the media are interested in.

01:32:56.000 If foundationally what they're guided by is due to their immersion in these social milieus, Where if they stray from the consensus as to the virtue of something like the protest movement or something like the world historic danger of fascist authoritarian blah blah blah Trump, then...

01:33:18.000 They can incur serious professional or social consequences.

01:33:23.000 And that is such a corrupting dynamic.

01:33:24.000 And I think that's why we need some kind of new media culture to sprout out of the ruins of what we've gone through the past four years.

01:33:32.000 I don't think so.

01:33:32.000 I think there are people who own who they they want confirmation bias.

01:33:37.000 I think there are people who are totally aware of like let's say I have someone on the show and we get a leftist.

01:33:45.000 We'll get a certain percentage of people who are angry.

01:33:48.000 And I think many of these people... Angry that you even bothered to have them on the show?

01:33:51.000 Yeah, like, how dare you bring this, you know, this leftist guy?

01:33:54.000 Is anybody angry about me so far?

01:33:55.000 Can we check that?

01:33:55.000 Oh, I mean, probably.

01:33:56.000 Screw you. 0.99

01:33:57.000 That's the spirit. 0.98

01:33:59.000 But anyway, the point is, I think some of these people know the issue isn't that we disagree with this person necessarily.

01:34:05.000 It's that their ability to speak will influence people.

01:34:10.000 And by giving them airtime in any capacity, you are... Platforming them.

01:34:14.000 We don't de-platform.

01:34:14.000 And so we've gotten that argument like we've platformed people before and I'm like dude I plow platform people

01:34:20.000 It's like the stupidest thing ever Like to argue like I shouldn't have a conversation with 0.91

01:34:24.000 somebody because I would like to have conversations to somebody even if that wasn't cameras 0.99

01:34:27.000 On us, you know, like the conversation we're having now would be great. Even if we weren't filming it, but I do my

01:34:32.000 best to Ignore any kind of pressure from somebody who's gonna get

01:34:37.000 mad at me because I might tell them the truth So what ends up happening is, certainly I have my bias on my YouTube channel.

01:34:44.000 I clearly don't like Democrats.

01:34:46.000 And people will watch that and say, Tim's lying on purpose to throw red meat to a follower.

01:34:50.000 It's like, no, no, no, you don't understand.

01:34:52.000 I just make videos where I talk about what I feel is important, and then people come to me, I'm like, I'm standing on a soapbox and I'm yelling, and they're walking up around me to hear what I'm saying and I have my biases.

01:35:02.000 The difference with these news organizations is the editor says, don't write that, you're gonna offend our audience.

01:35:08.000 And then they choose to avoid certain stories because they're worried about losing percentages.

01:35:12.000 You have an active business decision to do this.

01:35:15.000 Do you take any active steps to kind of, and I mentioned this at the very beginning, but sort of like to insulate yourself from the temptation of cognitive capture where the audience, even if it's subliminal, even if you're not actively conscious of it, Does have an influence on you in terms of what?

01:35:32.000 Analysis you put forward or what you choose to do in terms of topics

01:35:37.000 I mean, there's a whole because I don't I find myself wondering if I'm captive to that

01:35:42.000 I don't think it's I don't think it's possible to necessarily

01:35:44.000 Like I don't think it's possible right so So an explanation would be... It's not possible to be fully immune to that, but I think if you're cognizant of its potential to hamper your ability to be impartial or objective, not that anybody has to be totally objective on anything, but you should at least be aware that there are these pressures coming onto you and... Well, so... You know, counteract them if at all possible.

01:36:12.000 So, uh, I think it's about mental fortitude.

01:36:15.000 I think it's about your assuredness and your confidence in yourself.

01:36:20.000 My political opinions, um, have changed very little, or I should say they change very little over the years, right?

01:36:26.000 I think the one position I've changed on heavily is guns.

01:36:29.000 In January, I straight-up said to the people when we were at our house in New Jersey, I was like, I don't want any guns in my house, period.

01:36:35.000 No, you can't bring a gun in my house.

01:36:36.000 I don't want guns.

01:36:37.000 And then the riots happened.

01:36:39.000 And then I was like, well, I'm gonna go buy some guns now.

01:36:40.000 And then I did.

01:36:41.000 And now I don't want anyone taking them from me.

01:36:44.000 So I'm looking at these policies and my position on guns have has dramatically changed.

01:36:48.000 Because they want to defund the police.

01:36:51.000 Then the riots are made it to they were they were very, very close to our suburbs in the South in the South Philly area or in South Jersey area, Philly suburbs.

01:36:59.000 And so I'm like, okay, I better have the ability to defend myself.

01:37:01.000 Not only that, but death threats and someone tried breaking into my house, my opinion changed.

01:37:05.000 But in terms of, like, my positions that I've always held, I've never been the strongest, like, political zealot, but all still fairly independent, left-leaning positions, progressive taxes, pro-choice, all that stuff.

01:37:18.000 Social justice in certain capacities and pretty much stays where it is.

01:37:23.000 I give my opinions on what I think, and then probably based on what I learn, there will be some changes.

01:37:29.000 But core principles tend to be very, you know, obstinate, as it were.

01:37:34.000 But there are a lot of people on social media who don't have that, who just read the comments and then go for it because they're like, ooh, now I'm getting attention.

01:37:41.000 For the most part, what I see is... I'll use David Pakman as an example.

01:37:45.000 Do you know David Pakman?

01:37:47.000 Yeah.

01:37:47.000 He did a video where he said, here are things that I can't talk about.

01:37:50.000 And I tremendously respect him for doing this video.

01:37:52.000 He said, whenever I talk about these things, I get attacked for bringing it up.

01:37:55.000 And then he went through all of the things where his audience was like, how dare you bring this up?

01:37:59.000 And like, how dare you talk about these things?

01:38:01.000 And he just said it all.

01:38:02.000 And I'm like, there it is, man.

01:38:03.000 That's great.

01:38:05.000 News organizations, I think this is the difference.

01:38:07.000 What people need to realize about, say, YouTube, is that, like, when I make a video, I'm like, here's what I think.

01:38:13.000 I'm one guy.

01:38:14.000 I'm choosing to talk about how I feel.

01:38:16.000 And I've always done that.

01:38:17.000 And then over time, I get, like, more confident in how I talk and present myself.

01:38:22.000 Because, like, my earlier videos, I'm, like, really quiet and, like, low energy.

01:38:25.000 And I just slowly got better and more comfortable at just talking.

01:38:28.000 But my ideas are based upon the news that I'm reading as it develops.

01:38:31.000 When I worked for Fusion, which was ABC News Univision, they straight up said, like, lie to the audience.

01:38:38.000 They didn't say verbatim, they said, side with the audience.

01:38:42.000 You know, and I asked, if there's news stories that would make our audience upset, we wouldn't report it?

01:38:46.000 And they said, yeah, I think that's fair.

01:38:48.000 So when you have an editorial board or a president or a, you know, financial department or whatever, and they're going to the reporter and saying, ooh, yeah, that one, don't, don't report that because we're going to lose our audience.

01:38:58.000 Then you're looking at people actively deciding to create a partisan space to make money.

01:39:04.000 Versus YouTube, which is a bunch of random people who have thoughts and opinions who post them on the internet.

01:39:08.000 You know what I mean?

01:39:09.000 Not that they're... Yeah, but you know, the danger in the YouTube freewheeling culture is that so often I see People who are untethered to any kind of standard of factual confirmation or veracity, and they just kind of riff.

01:39:24.000 And I could riff if I really wanted to, and sometimes I do.

01:39:27.000 But, you know, okay, so I worked for the Young Turks for like a year and a half, and there are people affiliated with the Young Turks, so you could go and look at what they said like a year prior in terms of making a prediction on something.

01:39:38.000 And it just doesn't come to pass, and then they just pay no price for it.

01:39:41.000 I mean, they just keep plugging along.

01:39:42.000 I feel that would diminish my credibility if I did that.

01:39:46.000 So when I would talk about the election this year, I would always try to be pretty qualified.

01:39:52.000 I always thought that Biden stood a strong chance of winning, more so than Trump, and I said that publicly many times.

01:39:59.000 But I was never going to say that Biden is going to win or Trump can't win because I don't have a crystal ball.

01:40:06.000 And you know what?

01:40:07.000 If I said something like that and it turned out to be false, then that should detract from my credibility.

01:40:12.000 I don't necessarily agree.

01:40:13.000 I don't necessarily agree.

01:40:14.000 And it's probably because I'm biased in favor of myself.

01:40:17.000 So you don't think that if you say that something has no chance of happening and then it happens, that should detract from your credibility?

01:40:23.000 I agree with you.

01:40:24.000 I'm not saying you specifically.

01:40:25.000 I'm saying anybody with a platform.

01:40:27.000 Well, I'll tell you, Michael, I do have a crystal ball.

01:40:29.000 Oh, wow.

01:40:30.000 He literally does.

01:40:31.000 I figured something out while you were talking.

01:40:34.000 That is the most stunning plot twist of the evening.

01:40:37.000 Okay, so if the Young Turks are reading an article and they're going over some news story where it's like, you know, Donald Trump backflipped off the White House and it was perfect, stunning, everyone and brave.

01:40:48.000 And then they're like, I think, you know, here's what's going to happen next.

01:40:51.000 I have no problem with that.

01:40:52.000 If like if they're making predictions based on the news they're reading right then some people are like I want to

01:40:57.000 hear what you think maybe you're going to be wrong. Sure.

01:41:00.000 You know, but if you're if you're reading news and then speculating, it's just people giving their thoughts and

01:41:04.000 opinions.

01:41:05.000 Well, I mean, don't go to them.

01:41:06.000 Like, don't go to the pollsters and think they're going to be right every time if they're wrong all the time.

01:41:09.000 You know, you know that that that most like I think there's you can do analysis where you have forward looking, you

01:41:17.000 know, projections about what they are made not happen.

01:41:21.000 But then it veers into this like, you know, tarot card.

01:41:24.000 I'm not I'm not saying I have this unique insight into the nature of the universe where I can tell you that, you know,

01:41:30.000 Joe Biden couldn't possibly win the presidency.

01:41:34.000 Like how the hell?

01:41:35.000 What is that based upon?

01:41:36.000 That does describe the Young Turks. 0.96

01:41:38.000 I'm just saying like that.

01:41:40.000 So there are people who try and take clips from me.

01:41:42.000 And I'm not even singling out the Young Turks.

01:41:44.000 I'm just most familiar with them because I happen to work at.

01:41:46.000 This is what this is what the grifters do.

01:41:49.000 So they put up a video where it's me saying I think Trump is going to

01:41:53.000 win in a landslide and various various clips like that.

01:41:55.000 Going back to like October of last year when Moody's Analytics said

01:41:59.000 Trump was going to win because the economy was great. 1.00

01:42:01.000 They then take that from a context at a time when the economy was great, Trump was doing well, put it up today saying, look how stupid and wrong he was. 1.00

01:42:09.000 And then people say, wow, what a moron. 0.99

01:42:11.000 But if they actually watched my videos, they would've seen in the past month or two months, I was saying, polls are saying Joe Biden's gonna win, and I don't know if I should trust the polls because they were wrong to a tiny degree in, you know, 2016. 0.98

01:42:23.000 They're not that wrong.

01:42:25.000 People overestimate how wrong they were.

01:42:27.000 The national polls weren't that wrong.

01:42:28.000 There was a lot of state-based error, which was more consequential for the Electoral College, obviously.

01:42:32.000 And so it was like a two-point error among, like, non-college-educated whites.

01:42:35.000 And my position was, I don't know what's gonna happen, but I think the polls are gonna be wrong.

01:42:38.000 I don't think you can count Trump out.

01:42:40.000 And so that was my official position based on the information presented in the context of the election as it stands right now.

01:42:45.000 They go back and pull clips from when we had mass rioting and, you know, Trump saying, law and order, and me saying, I think people are going to recoil against this because I'm getting phone calls.

01:42:54.000 And they're saying, you know, I'm voting for Trump.

01:42:56.000 I know a ton of people in Chicago, diehard, lifelong liberal, Democrat, total Republicans now.

01:43:02.000 But see, that's where I would have strove to be aware of my confirmation bias, because I could have I mean, I could easily come to a similar conclusion based on the feedback I was getting when I was traveling around the country.

01:43:13.000 But I wouldn't have known that that was not statistically representative necessarily of voting outcomes.

01:43:19.000 So, you know, I just feel that if somebody pulled, regardless of what the circumstances were, because there are riots, regardless it was pre-COVID, if somebody could Find a clip of me saying that I know Trump is going to win and then he doesn't win, then I think that probably wouldn't detract from my credibility and should.

01:43:19.000 Right.

01:43:36.000 And, you know, maybe for sure.

01:43:38.000 Certain people are of a different mindset.

01:43:40.000 I feel like I'm a little bit more journalistic by nature than than others.

01:43:43.000 Again, I'm not saying you or anybody in particular, but that that's an issue that I have when I look on YouTube and people can just BS constantly, and then they pay no reputational consequences if their BSing has just proved 100% devastatingly wrong, because they have the audience where they could just keep going indefinitely.

01:44:03.000 Because people want the comforting lies.

01:44:05.000 They don't want the truth.

01:44:05.000 I think you're definitely more of an investigator, an investigative journalist, than most of the journalists in modern culture.

01:44:12.000 And a lot of times, analysis journalism Well, the fact that you drove across the country and didn't know what you were going to find and were willing to accept the results, like CNN doesn't want them to investigate, doesn't want their reporters, because if they find things that defy the narrative and we'll lose the money.

01:44:25.000 I mean, I have done what you might call investigative reporting, but it's not like my singular focus where I'm not like getting national security documents leaked to me or something, right?

01:44:33.000 I just try to be as consistent and logical as I possibly can, not to toot my own horn.

01:44:38.000 I don't think I have a horn to toot necessarily, but I try to apply that analytically So that I'm filtering my reportage in a way that is best reflective of the truth.

01:44:49.000 It doesn't even actually have to entail investigative reporting.

01:44:52.000 I mean, if you want to call just driving around the country and talking to people and looking at the fallout places and doing interviews and stuff investigative, I guess it maybe is in a way.

01:45:00.000 But really, it's it's it's pretty straightforward.

01:45:03.000 And so, you know, when I I think there's a lot of problems with legacy media.

01:45:07.000 I mean, that New York Times that New York Mag article on New York Times was so it was so embarrassing a woke.

01:45:14.000 Yeah.

01:45:14.000 And by the way, which campus Barry Weiss got totally destroyed by her colleagues.

01:45:22.000 For making the exact same observations as were in that New York New York magazine article.

01:45:28.000 She was proven exactly right.

01:45:29.000 Whether or not you agree with everything Barry White says I don't.

01:45:32.000 But clearly her analysis of the institutional dynamics of the New York Times were on target.

01:45:36.000 But again the people who attacked her are never going to pay any reputational price.

01:45:39.000 I mean a constant recurring problem in the media.

01:45:42.000 And this I think applies to both legacy media and the alt media YouTube media whatever.

01:45:47.000 It's not about predictions.

01:45:48.000 price that needs to be paid when people get stuff so flamboyantly

01:45:51.000 you'll get hilariously wrong.

01:45:53.000 I mean, I was fighting with leftists in March who were saying

01:45:56.000 there is no chance that Biden could win.

01:45:59.000 I'm like, what?

01:46:00.000 Right. How do you know that?

01:46:01.000 How are you so certain of that?

01:46:03.000 It's not about predictions about facts, in my opinion.

01:46:05.000 It's it's it's about analytical extrapolations that have no

01:46:11.000 bearing on reality.

01:46:12.000 The way it doesn't matter because it lets you the engagement that you want.

01:46:15.000 Then you could parlay that into a bigger audience.

01:46:17.000 The bigger issue I have the issue I have that I think is more pressing is when you have New York Times writers who constantly put out bunk garbage and they have no reputational penance or whatever.

01:46:29.000 And they get ad revenue.

01:46:31.000 I mean they they were the absolute.

01:46:31.000 Russia.

01:46:34.000 The New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize.

01:46:36.000 Did they win more than one?

01:46:37.000 For their Russia reporting.

01:46:38.000 It was all fake!

01:46:40.000 In 2017.

01:46:41.000 And I wouldn't say it was fake in that, like, what they were reporting on was just fabricated.

01:46:47.000 But the premise, the premise upon which the reporting was based was entirely erroneous.

01:46:54.000 Why would you have a... Shouldn't you... So what I recommended when those Pulitzer Prizes came out was either throw them in the dumpster, give them back, or abolish the Pulitzer Prize writ large because it's meaningless now.

01:47:05.000 The way I describe it is people were like, well, the reporting was sound.

01:47:08.000 And I'm like, listen, if I hire like a land, like a groundskeeper or whatever from my house, like someone that, you know, lawn care guys, and they come over and I say, I need you to mow my lawn and say, you got it.

01:47:17.000 And then an hour later, I come outside and my neighbor's lawn is mowed perfectly.

01:47:21.000 And they like, they did the wrong lawn.

01:47:23.000 I'm not, you want to give them an award for that?

01:47:25.000 It's like, great.

01:47:26.000 They did the work.

01:47:26.000 I get it.

01:47:27.000 But that's not what they were supposed to be doing.

01:47:29.000 That's not the work that needed to be done.

01:47:31.000 If what you're reporting on isn't literally fabricated, but nonetheless it's so directionally off course that what you're doing in effect is misleading the reader, then you're doing it wrong.

01:47:44.000 Look at it this way.

01:47:45.000 It's like a race, a marathon starts, and one guy runs 26 miles the other direction.

01:47:50.000 And they're like, well, let's give him an award anyway.

01:47:52.000 He did run.

01:47:53.000 And it's even worse because they're getting paid.

01:47:56.000 They'll make an article that's erroneous and they'll get massive ad revenue because it's a shock article.

01:48:00.000 And then they'll print a retraction and get ad revenue for the retraction.

01:48:03.000 So there's something severely wrong with that function.

01:48:07.000 Maybe that you would sue, that they would actually, it would put them out of business.

01:48:11.000 That's the problem is they'd be afraid to even report on anything because if they get it wrong, they lose.

01:48:15.000 No, the advertiser is looking for eyeballs.

01:48:17.000 So these news organizations are, like, not super worried.

01:48:19.000 That's fascist.

01:48:20.000 I mean, I think that's when corporations start to implement, like, institute our government.

01:48:26.000 When you can go in and write political articles that are not bound in fact.

01:48:30.000 When you can write that somewhere there may be a video of Donald Trump on an elevator.

01:48:35.000 What he's doing, we don't know.

01:48:36.000 Who he's with, we're not sure.

01:48:37.000 Does the video exist?

01:48:38.000 We don't know either, but some say it might.

01:48:40.000 The Huffington Post wrote that article.

01:48:42.000 And they got clicks.

01:48:43.000 They made money off that.

01:48:44.000 Could you imagine, you wake up one day and your editor's like, I need a story about Donald Trump.

01:48:48.000 And you're like, nothing happened.

01:48:49.000 Just make it up.

01:48:51.000 Donald Trump may have been in an elevator, I guess.

01:48:53.000 No one knows if he was or why.

01:48:55.000 When you've been on the receiving end of journalists just straight up making stuff up about you on the internet.

01:49:00.000 Oh, yes.

01:49:01.000 You have no recourse.

01:49:02.000 I don't know if you've experienced this or not.

01:49:04.000 Definitely.

01:49:04.000 But I haven't.

01:49:06.000 Like, I'm not even that big of a target necessarily.

01:49:08.000 I mean, I guess some people are vaguely aware of me.

01:49:13.000 If they could do that to me, then who's to say who they could do it to?

01:49:16.000 And I think, obviously, social media so exacerbates these dynamics, it's absurd.

01:49:20.000 You can't even compare it to a past era.

01:49:22.000 You know, but one reason for pessimism about this election, and I didn't vote for Trump.

01:49:26.000 I didn't vote for Biden.

01:49:27.000 I just left my ballot blank and voted for marijuana cessation in New Jersey, which did pass, thankfully.

01:49:33.000 As somebody who had to sneak into the woods as a teenager to indulge in that, I kind of felt like it was my cosmic obligation to vote in favor of legalizing finally in New Jersey.

01:49:43.000 But anyway, one reason to be pessimistic about the election outcome is, and this isn't an argument for Trump per se, but it is a recognition that all the tactics that were used to undermine Trump are now going to be viewed as vindicated.

01:50:02.000 Yeah. And they're going to be more kind of enshrined in the fabric of American

01:50:08.000 political and cultural life such that.

01:50:10.000 You know, we have this precedent now that somebody like Trump is not going to be

01:50:16.000 allowed to happen again because, you know, we have the security state

01:50:20.000 machinations.

01:50:21.000 You could have the total discarding by the media of the principles that they had previously worked on the basis of before.

01:50:29.000 But then when you have somebody who's viewed as such this such a mortal existential threat that goes out the window, you have just this constant resistance where the election in 2016

01:50:44.000 was.

01:50:44.000 They did try to delegitimize it by automatically launching the quote

01:50:49.000 resistance with the hashtag and seeing that through until it culminated in

01:50:54.000 Trump's impeachment.

01:50:55.000 So all those tactics, I think, were done for the singular purpose, primarily undermining, hobbling and ultimately defeating Trump.

01:51:03.000 And if that's proven to have worked, that's really ominous sign for the nature of American democracy.

01:51:11.000 I'm not saying that Trump has been a perfect emblem of democracy and all that he's done.

01:51:15.000 But, you know, I think that the media is so blinkered in their inability to recognize that the oppositional tactics employed to degrade Trump have really damning long term implications in their own right.

01:51:29.000 Well, that's an excellent place to leave things off and jump over to Super Chats.

01:51:33.000 And we'll take some user comments.

01:51:36.000 Hey, do I get a cut of those Super Chats?

01:51:37.000 None.

01:51:38.000 None at all.

01:51:41.000 Make sure you smash the like button and subscribe to the show Monday through Friday live at 8 p.m.

01:51:45.000 But let's read some of these Super Chats. 0.92

01:51:47.000 Let's see, DipDopDupity says, what is your opinion of Philip DeFranco?

01:51:53.000 Fairly neutral, he's alright.

01:51:54.000 Do you guys know Philip DeFranco?

01:51:55.000 I know Phil, I know him personally actually.

01:51:56.000 We were video bloggers in like 2006, 7, 8 when he was SexyPhil, S-X-E-Phil was his first name.

01:52:03.000 Straight edge.

01:52:04.000 Yeah, all black and white and he was chilling in his room talking and he was so cool, like such a nice guy.

01:52:09.000 And we went to like YouTube Live in 2007, hung out a little bit, talked about Zelda.

01:52:15.000 So what do you think about him now?

01:52:17.000 He's taken and forged an empire around his personality.

01:52:20.000 It's awesome.

01:52:21.000 I haven't talked to him in like a decade.

01:52:22.000 I know nothing about him except I've seen clips of him like doing videos where he's talking at the camera like this and it seems okay.

01:52:27.000 It's really interesting and I'm not trying to be disrespectful or anything.

01:52:30.000 His show is very large.

01:52:32.000 He's got millions of subscribers.

01:52:33.000 But it doesn't seem particularly culturally relevant in the political landscape.

01:52:37.000 And it's not interesting.

01:52:38.000 It's kind of like Stephen Colbert.

01:52:40.000 That's arguably a good thing for him, though.

01:52:42.000 I mean, news isn't supposed to be shock-rage-bait content.

01:52:44.000 He's doing a regular, you know, general news opinion show.

01:52:47.000 It's like the Colbert Report.

01:52:48.000 It's like a fake version of himself.

01:52:50.000 I don't know.

01:52:52.000 He's not quite like the Colbert Report.

01:52:53.000 Not relevant enough for me to have an informed opinion about him.

01:52:57.000 There you go.

01:52:58.000 That's an issue.

01:52:59.000 Gotta fix it.

01:52:59.000 Alright, let's see.

01:53:00.000 I want to talk to him again.

01:53:02.000 Get him on the show or something.

01:53:03.000 That'd be cool.

01:53:04.000 That'd be great.

01:53:04.000 I'd love to have him.

01:53:06.000 All right, let's see, where are we at?

01:53:07.000 YouTube's making me jump around with these ones.

01:53:09.000 The new GM says pick one.

01:53:11.000 Trump keeps the president after exposing mass fraud triggering a civil war or Biden takes president and we lose any chance at 230 reform for at least four years.

01:53:22.000 I don't want a civil war.

01:53:23.000 I don't either.

01:53:26.000 We have to wait four years before we can reform Section 230?

01:53:28.000 I'll wait.

01:53:29.000 Geez.

01:53:29.000 Seems pretty obvious.

01:53:31.000 Yeah, I mean, I think the whole civil war prognosticating was mostly just elites projecting their own neuroses onto the general populace, which doesn't want a civil war, because why would you?

01:53:44.000 It's mass misery and death.

01:53:46.000 I disagree, though.

01:53:48.000 War is always of the elites. 0.96

01:53:50.000 The regular people don't want to be involved.

01:53:51.000 They want to mind their own business and watch TV and raise their kids.

01:53:54.000 That's why I'm saying that this notion that a civil war was possible was a product of elite neuroses that then they kind of tried to transpose onto the ordinary public who were obviously not willing to fight a war over Joe Biden.

01:54:08.000 I don't think it's about Joe Biden.

01:54:10.000 I disagree.

01:54:11.000 Do you think there is an appetite to wage a civil war?

01:54:13.000 Yes, absolutely.

01:54:15.000 I don't know how widespread it is, but like... I don't think so.

01:54:18.000 I think that's a scintillating storyline to kind of present to kind of get clicks and algorithms and ratings and stuff, but I just don't see it.

01:54:28.000 Have you like looked into civil wars of like the past hundred years and like what they look like?

01:54:33.000 Uh, I mean, sure.

01:54:35.000 Whenever I talk to people about this, they take this presumption that a civil war is like two competing factions.

01:54:41.000 You had Bill Maher where it's, uh, I should clarify that.

01:54:44.000 Two competing factions along a dividing line.

01:54:46.000 Bill Maher does his show, he's like, we couldn't even have a civil war because the Mason Dixon line would go through the middle of your living room, you know, with Nana or whatever.

01:54:53.000 Because the narrative is always about the American civil war and not how civil wars came about in other places, notably like the Spanish civil war.

01:55:00.000 Yeah, so it could be like an armed insurgency or something, not like a full-fledged civil war where there's two definable sides.

01:55:06.000 But there was no, there were no two definable sides in Syria.

01:55:09.000 There was like, there was 16 or so different factions.

01:55:12.000 No, that's right.

01:55:12.000 And the shelling got out of control.

01:55:14.000 And then the city was, was because nobody wants to back down.

01:55:17.000 So I never believed, I never thought there was evidence to believe that the conditions in the contemporary United States were remotely analogous to Syria.

01:55:17.000 Right.

01:55:30.000 That's why the Civil War prophecy struck me as incredibly overblown.

01:55:33.000 I mean, where are they?

01:55:34.000 It's a week after the election.

01:55:36.000 Trump says that it's been stolen, that it was a fraudulent or whatever.

01:55:39.000 I was in Atlanta.

01:55:40.000 I mean, there were like a couple dozen Trump supporters just standing on a road waving signs and chanting.

01:55:44.000 Okay, that's something, but that's like so far removed from what a civil war would entail.

01:55:50.000 That's an optimism bias.

01:55:52.000 The assumption that... I think it's a... I mean... So what happens... But couldn't you say it's a pessimism bias to suggest that civil war is possibly imminent?

01:56:00.000 Absolutely.

01:56:01.000 So you need to like find a happy medium.

01:56:03.000 So here's what I'm thinking.

01:56:03.000 Right, right, right.

01:56:05.000 First of all, there's fourth and fifth generational warfare. 0.62

01:56:08.000 So the assumption that a civil war is going to be people putting on armbands and waving flags and running through the streets is like you're, you're, you're, you know, basing modern reality off of your assumption of what things are like a long time ago or what we've witnessed instead of taking a look at what's currently happening and wondering if we're going to see a different generation and how war is fought.

01:56:08.000 Right.

01:56:29.000 We're in the first civil cyber war.

01:56:30.000 We're in the midst of it.

01:56:31.000 We didn't even realize.

01:56:32.000 That's crazy.

01:56:32.000 It's a theater of war, man.

01:56:33.000 We're absolutely in a propaganda war.

01:56:34.000 It's crazy.

01:56:36.000 We've got elite censorship, the shutting down of certain ideas.

01:56:39.000 It's a theater of war, man.

01:56:40.000 Cyber.

01:56:41.000 So you have to ask yourself, what's the goal of a war?

01:56:43.000 And sometimes there's aggression, rage, anger, hatred, whatever, but typically it's about

01:56:47.000 controlling resources, gaining ground.

01:56:50.000 So Syria, for instance, our involvement there had a lot to do, depending on who you ask,

01:56:55.000 with the Qatar-Turkey pipeline.

01:56:56.000 We wanted to offset the natural gas monopoly that was going into Europe through Ukraine and all that stuff.

01:57:00.000 It's all weird and tied together.

01:57:02.000 But if I don't have to send in the troops, and I can manipulate a country into giving me what I want, then you would do that.

01:57:10.000 And so we're entering a new generation of warfare where it's all about cyber attacks, manipulation, infiltration, exfiltration.

01:57:17.000 Knowing things can get you anything.

01:57:19.000 Compromising individuals, blackmailing individuals, or generally just funding certain types of media to create ideas is more effective.

01:57:27.000 So perhaps when people hear civil war they think hot civil war.

01:57:30.000 Like, you know, Proud Boys and Antifa are marching through the streets and they have a leader on a horseback or something.

01:57:35.000 Doesn't look like that.

01:57:35.000 That's an archaic understanding of what civil war would look like.

01:57:38.000 But I think when you have Hillary Clinton telling Joe Biden not to concede under any circumstances, and they run war games where they suggest several states should secede from the Union should they lose, we're like dangerously close to the elites saying, we want or else.

01:57:51.000 And it always is the regular people saying, we don't want to be involved.

01:57:54.000 So the election right now, I view it as some kind of cold civil war in a sense.

01:58:02.000 Sorry to interrupt, but I think there's something to what you're saying in the sense of that the kind of cultural consensus which has undergirded America's sense of itself Has been eroded somewhat since 2016 in that nobody ever fathomed that somebody like Trump could ever be in the White House.

01:58:23.000 Right.

01:58:23.000 It's just so contradictory to what we had all been trained to believe was possible.

01:58:30.000 And so, you know, the horizons of what's additionally possible to me have expanded, whether they've expanded to the point where there's some kind of Viability to the concept of a civil war even if you're saying it's like fifth generation warfare or something that's different from these more traditional conceptions we have that is

01:58:51.000 Very much a stretch, but I think there is this erosion of, like, American hegemonic prowess that, you know, due to the ascendance of China, due to the other factors, that is going to happen over time and is going to manifest as kind of degradations of the social order.

01:59:12.000 I just don't think it's going to manifest, at least in the short to medium term, as anything that could even be conceivably called a civil war.

01:59:20.000 So we had, it's all an issue of where the escalation takes us.

01:59:24.000 We had a guy stalk some Trump supporters in Portland and put two bolts in his chest.

01:59:30.000 A lot of people were like, we crossed a line when that happened.

01:59:34.000 Will it keep escalating?

01:59:35.000 I guess the issue for me is that since 2017, when we started seeing the rise of the street violence, The expectation has been every time we see it, it gets worse.

01:59:45.000 And then it ultimately just keeps getting worse.

01:59:47.000 Even now, three years later, it ends with this guy in Seattle walking up, yelling at the guy. 0.91

01:59:52.000 He turns around, he puts two bullets in his chest.

01:59:54.000 Will that lend itself to, you know, like how we would envision a hot civil war between factions?

02:00:00.000 I'm not entirely sure.

02:00:01.000 But I will say, When Trump is like talking about staying in the White House beyond, you know, maybe we're in this, this lull period where the media saying everything's okay, Joe Biden is president, but you got 71 million people who voted for Trump and the people they're following are all saying this election was not legitimate.

02:00:20.000 I can't imagine these people are just gonna... When you come from 2016, which was unprecedented, like, even you're mentioning it, they're saying they're yelling at the electors to, like, not do this.

02:00:29.000 That didn't happen in 2012 or 2008.

02:00:30.000 Sure, we had a literal civil war back in the 1800s.

02:00:34.000 It was very, very different times back then.

02:00:35.000 We've grown to become this very, like, solid foundation of a nation with hard expectations and, you know, our own optimism bias about how everything is gonna function properly.

02:00:44.000 Obama wins, they say congratulations.

02:00:46.000 Obama wins re-election, congratulations.

02:00:48.000 Hillary loses, and it was screaming psychosis for four years. 1.00

02:00:53.000 Russia and conspiracies, the media has gone insane, and I tell you this man, since the election, There's no shared reality anymore.

02:01:01.000 Like, I spend my time reading the news, and there's always, like, these two disparate realities.

02:01:06.000 Even CNN says it.

02:01:07.000 Like, everyone understands that there's, like, the Orange Man bad universe and the Trump not-that-bad universe, and you've got regular people, and there was an overlap.

02:01:14.000 We recognize that some things did happen, but we disagree on what they meant or what was going to happen.

02:01:19.000 Now I'm reading the news and it's like, you turn on one outlet and it's like, clearly this election was fraudulent and the deep state and all that stuff.

02:01:26.000 Then you turn on NBC and they're like, President-elect's office has announced this, that, and this.

02:01:30.000 Yeah, I think you're right that there is something that has gone completely haywire in terms of our collective epistemology.

02:01:38.000 Well, so what happens when you have 71 million people on one side and 74 on the other?

02:01:43.000 Obviously not all of them are radical, but you need only a small percentage to create the troubles.

02:01:48.000 You give them like something to rally around, like a music or art, something that they can create a shared vision of.

02:01:55.000 No, that's what that's what people need.

02:01:57.000 I just think you'd need an extra ingredient to make it seem plausible to me.

02:02:01.000 It could manifest as something like The Troubles, something like a prolonged army insurgency, something in the realm of civil war like activity.

02:02:09.000 Just because, you know, for despite COVID, despite all the craziness around national politics, Most people tend to live in relative tranquility, right?

02:02:24.000 Which you couldn't have said for Syria, at least in the areas where there was significant fighting, right?

02:02:30.000 Before the Civil War they did.

02:02:33.000 That's right.

02:02:34.000 Yeah.

02:02:34.000 If you look at the Revolutionary War in the United States, the largest faction was Leave Me Alone, followed by the

02:02:45.000 next largest faction was Revolution, and then the smallest of the three was No Revolution.

02:02:49.000 But most people didn't want to be involved in any capacity.

02:02:54.000 They're just like, leave me alone.

02:02:56.000 It always is the elites who are fighting with each other.

02:02:58.000 So I'm not saying I think it's a guarantee.

02:03:00.000 I definitely think there are a lot of people who recognize the culture war, as it's been called, or the cultural civil war, it's been called for a long time.

02:03:07.000 I don't see how this is... I don't see how it... You know, maybe there's a path towards some kind of reconciliation.

02:03:15.000 You know, the left is calling for, now that Joe Biden won, truth and reconciliation commissions or something, whatever that means.

02:03:20.000 Right, like with South Africa or something.

02:03:22.000 Yeah, make them testify or whatever, and be scolded by a panel of some sort.

02:03:26.000 But, you've got people whose worldviews are entirely fra- like, in my opinion, fractured and nonsensical.

02:03:32.000 Like, the 1619 Project, Rewriting of History, and these weird ideas of cis-heteronormative patriarchy controlling everything.

02:03:38.000 These people live in a strange reality, and they're violent.

02:03:41.000 And so, if these keep getting bigger, and I don't see why they wouldn't, like, after Trump- after Trump leaves, assuming that's what happens, the media isn't gonna just stop writing about this stuff.

02:03:52.000 They're already writing stories saying it's time to go after Trumpism.

02:03:55.000 They're already saying it's time for truth and reconciliation.

02:03:58.000 I mean, what I do think is that because of the precedent that has now been put into place by the anti-Trump tactics being vindicated, It's very much possible that liberals who gain power are going to have a greater authoritarian retributive edge to what it is that they want to do.

02:04:20.000 Like if they feel now that their imperative is to extirpate Trumpism so that it's nothing like Trump ever has the possibility of ever happening again.

02:04:29.000 Then, you know, you could very much envision how that could take on very overbearing qualities even beyond what we've seen so far.

02:04:42.000 The complication there is I'm not sure that Biden himself is predisposed to go along with those kinds of I don't think he would.

02:04:52.000 vengeance endeavors.

02:04:54.000 Like, I don't know that you'd see him calling for a truth and

02:04:55.000 reconciliation commission.

02:04:57.000 I don't think he would.

02:04:58.000 For example, but like, but, but I think people who might be empowered just by

02:05:02.000 dint of Trump leaving elected office, they're going to probably be advocating

02:05:07.000 for that and whether like Biden has the personal wherewithal to resist those

02:05:10.000 calls is an open question.

02:05:12.000 Well, I got to read the super chat because we got to fact check this one.

02:05:14.000 What?

02:05:15.000 Okay, I'll check.

02:05:15.000 Sidious says I know you're not a believer in Trump playing 40 chess

02:05:18.000 But do you know who was on George Bush's legal team in 2000 John Roberts Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett?

02:05:24.000 What okay, I I I perhaps true that is true. Yeah. Well, I mean they were they were involved in different

02:05:30.000 Well, no, they were very young weren't they?

02:05:33.000 I think no I mean they were they were clerks

02:05:37.000 In the Supreme Court in the 90s and so they would have been like just out of their clerkships

02:05:41.000 I mean me Barry doesn't she like in her late 40s Um, yeah, so she would've been 28.

02:05:46.000 We're going to do a little bit of a test run.

02:05:48.000 Right.

02:05:48.000 So.

02:05:49.000 Yeah.

02:05:49.000 So she would have been a clerk in the 90s.

02:05:51.000 I mean, so.

02:05:51.000 Yeah.

02:05:51.000 Yep.

02:05:52.000 And this was 2000.

02:05:53.000 So.

02:05:53.000 Is that.

02:05:54.000 That is true.

02:05:55.000 They were they were working on.

02:05:57.000 It is true.

02:05:58.000 Wow.

02:05:59.000 Do you see the meme where it's.

02:06:00.000 You can go find a clip of Kavanaugh that was uncovered when he was up for his nomination of him, like giving CNN an update as to what was going on with the Florida Supreme Court case.

02:06:10.000 You see the meme where it's Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh and their eyes are glowing and they're looking at Kamala Harris and Joe Biden.

02:06:16.000 Oh.

02:06:17.000 No, but I can kind of connect the dots there.

02:06:20.000 So for those unfamiliar, Joe Biden was grilling Clarence Thomas about accusations in the 90s and Donald Harris did the same.

02:06:27.000 And then the meme is Clarence saying, I've waited 30 years for this day or something.

02:06:31.000 You know what, man?

02:06:32.000 Look, I think it's really annoying when you see these trust the plan memes.

02:06:36.000 I'm like, dude, I don't trust any of these plans.

02:06:40.000 If you trust the plan, then why did they end up in front of the total landscaping building?

02:06:43.000 You know what I mean?

02:06:44.000 That was really weird.

02:06:45.000 What's the plan?

02:06:46.000 It's just it's just like this whenever something bad happens.

02:06:49.000 It's always like there's 895 dimensional chess being played.

02:06:54.000 It keeps going up like as Trump's term goes up.

02:06:58.000 You need to be on like psychedelic drugs to understand chess schemes.

02:07:01.000 Well basically what happens is they say like something bad happens and they're like oh no what's happening I thought you know Hillary was gonna get arrested they go trust the plan.

02:07:09.000 That's like have faith in God.

02:07:11.000 Exactly.

02:07:11.000 That's exactly what it's like.

02:07:13.000 And that's like that informs a lot of the Q mentality. 0.95

02:07:16.000 Right.

02:07:16.000 Like there's always a purpose behind everything.

02:07:18.000 And you know I even saw like I think that anti-Trump media makes a mountain out of a molehole with the Q to some extent.

02:07:27.000 But like it is true that when you go to Trump gatherings like I was at in Atlanta where they had to stop the steel rally.

02:07:32.000 I mean there are guys like just with Q Oh my gosh.

02:07:35.000 Right, right, right.

02:07:36.000 Gosh.

02:07:36.000 stuff and like yes they're they're the trust the quintessential

02:07:39.000 trust the plan people I mean they think that like it was intentional

02:07:41.000 that Trump found himself behind in Georgia or something right right

02:07:45.000 right like Robert Robert Mueller and John F. Kennedy Jr.

02:07:48.000 are going to come in like I don't know flip the votes and they were

02:07:51.000 saying that that Trump triggered the special investigation on purpose

02:07:54.000 because Mueller was actually investigating the Clinton's like

02:07:56.000 never.

02:07:57.000 I don't think so.

02:07:58.000 What a plan.

02:07:58.000 I'm curious.

02:07:58.000 that we had got a plan is interesting uh... ted says some people in the

02:07:59.000 Oh.

02:08:03.000 donald dot win allegedly managed to get their hands on the dominion code it's

02:08:07.000 the top post on their page the numbers are really scary man i look at it

02:08:10.000 that's the software for uh... that the voting machines that were used as it's

02:08:14.000 it's the software that was used in like thirty something states

02:08:17.000 old was it that's true i mean you know i think i think it's a almost a inevitability of u.s.

02:08:23.000 politics that there are going to be theories that developed as to why a certain candidate loses.

02:08:29.000 I mean, we saw this obviously in on turbocharged in turbocharged in 2016 as to Russian interference.

02:08:35.000 I remember seeing like supposed statistical analyses from computer scientists that were showing that like you could correlate different counties and show it was it was like statistically impossible for Hillary to have lost by the margin she did.

02:08:49.000 You know, Wisconsin and Michigan or something.

02:08:50.000 And of course, it was total nonsense.

02:08:53.000 But even like going back to 2004, I remember there was this whole cottage industry that developed around Diebold voting machines in Ohio and how Bush conspired with the Republican Secretary of State to, you know, rig it.

02:09:09.000 And, you know, those theories were never really entertained seriously by John Kerry, who you think would probably Look into it if it costs in the presidency.

02:09:17.000 But I just think, you know, that is now going to be just continuous in terms of the assumed legitimacy of elections is no longer operative in the eyes of so many people.

02:09:29.000 And clearly that's now going to increase almost exponentially if Trump himself is rejecting the legitimacy of the election.

02:09:35.000 I mean, it was so it was almost humorous the night of the election at like three thirty when he first came out, where he was he simultaneously declared victory.

02:09:43.000 It also declared the entire thing a fraud.

02:09:45.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:09:46.000 So, I mean, that's a new one.

02:09:47.000 So, Royal Raptor says, Tim, for months you have told us the left would, quote, by any means necessary try and get Trump out.

02:09:53.000 Now when the big show hits and the scams, errors, and straight-up fraud just happens to all help Democrats, you call it human or clerical error.

02:10:00.000 I think that's an overstatement of what I said.

02:10:02.000 I've said there's numerous, uh, there's a, there's a ton of evidence of fraud.

02:10:05.000 There's numerous affidavits of people discovering fraud.

02:10:08.000 We literally opened this show by showing the media was, was that Washington Post was putting out some kind of weird, anonymously sourced story that was immediately debunked.

02:10:15.000 I wrote up Hammond's scorecard.

02:10:17.000 Yep.

02:10:17.000 Well, I'm gonna keep bringing it up and I've also said we should investigate each and every one of these things

02:10:22.000 I don't I don't know like, you know, what?

02:10:24.000 It's really annoying is that it's almost like it's it's like some kind of weird counting heads phase

02:10:29.000 You must come out and bend the knee to what we say chill dude

02:10:34.000 Look, it's clear that there you've got people on the left who are lying

02:10:37.000 Accept the results.

02:10:38.000 Submit.

02:10:39.000 And you've got people on the right saying it was clearly fraud.

02:10:41.000 You must agree with everything.

02:10:42.000 No, I'll tell you what.

02:10:43.000 We investigate these things.

02:10:44.000 We're calm and collected about it.

02:10:46.000 We point out there's affidavits, then there's impropriety, and there's a legal argument being made, and we let the process happen.

02:10:51.000 And above all, aim for a voting system that we can trust.

02:10:55.000 Or that we don't need to trust because of functions.

02:10:57.000 If we don't have our, if we can't have faith in our votes, man, what do we have with the democracy?

02:11:01.000 That's why we need to investigate everything.

02:11:03.000 But I think your instinct, I mean, you know, I don't know if you've characterized everything as clerical errors in the way the Super Chess person said.

02:11:10.000 Oh, I certainly didn't.

02:11:10.000 But like, I think it is worth starting from the premise that a lot of stuff which may be intentional fraud could theoretically be a clerical error of some kind.

02:11:22.000 So keeping open that possibility is totally warranted.

02:11:25.000 And then you ascertain evidence to give you some kind of indication one way or another.

02:11:32.000 There's nothing wrong with that.

02:11:33.000 Because, you know, a lot of what is assumed to be conspiratorial, often involves people who just don't have the competence to carry out any kind of coordinated conspiracy.

02:11:45.000 Yeah.

02:11:46.000 Good point.

02:11:47.000 I see it all the time.

02:11:47.000 IBN Yahud says, the implications of 71 million Americans being suspect of the results either way has dangerous implications.

02:11:54.000 Maybe state legislatures should audit to remove illegal ballots better than the strife of distrust and suspicion.

02:11:54.000 Yeah.

02:12:00.000 That's absolutely my position.

02:12:01.000 Good point, yeah.

02:12:02.000 If we can go through and say, look, we found some impropriety because there's always going to be some kind of error.

02:12:08.000 There's always going to be some malfeasance.

02:12:10.000 The question is, does it make a difference?

02:12:12.000 Find it, lay it all out, and make sure everyone is comfortable that we've done everything in our power to do so.

02:12:17.000 Now the left is saying, they'll never accept the results anyway, so it's pointless.

02:12:21.000 That's not an argument.

02:12:22.000 Because you gotta try everything.

02:12:24.000 You know, there was this psychological assessment question where they said, if it was true that you couldn't rehabilitate certain criminals, would you try?

02:12:31.000 Or something.

02:12:32.000 And the argument was, if you had a criminal that was presumed to be beyond, you know, rehabilitation, would you just give up on them?

02:12:39.000 My answer is no.

02:12:40.000 Like, we don't want to just give up on people.

02:12:43.000 And so, if you think that the best solution to this is to ignore the complaints of 71 million people, you would be incorrect.

02:12:50.000 Because that will certainly just guarantee we rapidly approach some kind of critical mass instead of slowly letting things play out, letting people calm down, showing them and finding it.

02:12:59.000 And maybe they're right.

02:13:00.000 Maybe they're not.

02:13:01.000 Just play it out.

02:13:02.000 The problem is that the Trump campaign kind of haphazard legal strategy here is, as we know, we acknowledged earlier on this discussion, it really is just throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks in the individual swing state.

02:13:12.000 So that, I think, causes people to doubt the good faith of a lot of what's being That's true, but it doesn't matter.

02:13:17.000 more targeted substantive allegations that were logically consistent then I

02:13:23.000 think you'd have an easier time convincing people to entertain it and

02:13:26.000 rebut it or not in kind of a rational way. I think they have had a...

02:13:33.000 I think they're trying to win.

02:13:34.000 I think they're... I mean, Trump did say ahead of time that, you know, hey, listen, they go to the Supreme Court and I want that.

02:13:42.000 And they pushed through Amy Coney Barrett at the 11th hour.

02:13:45.000 I wonder why that was.

02:13:45.000 Exactly.

02:13:47.000 And the Democrats even brought it up.

02:13:48.000 So I think it's certainly a possibility.

02:13:50.000 I think Amy Coney Barrett is a kind of harbinger of how I suspect this could possibly go.

02:13:55.000 Notice I'm not making definitive proclamation because I don't do that.

02:13:58.000 I think I'll be delegitimized rightly if I when I say it doesn't come to fruition.

02:14:02.000 But I have the sense that one of the reasons why Mitch McConnell and the Republican Senate was so desperate to get Amy Coney Barrett confirmed as quickly as possible, even though it was like a week or so before the election, was because Look, they were never supporting Trump on the basis of him being some kind of committed, principled conservative.

02:14:22.000 Trump is not that.

02:14:24.000 But they used him as a vehicle to achieve conservative ends.

02:14:27.000 Right.

02:14:27.000 One of which is changing the composition of the Supreme Court.

02:14:30.000 So I think a lot of the more elite Republicans are eventually going to Be content with what Trump provided them such that it's not worth getting into this protracted battle over the presidency after kind of the emotions settle down and we're only a couple of days after it was called.

02:14:51.000 And so I can envision that happening.

02:14:53.000 I don't know.

02:14:53.000 I may be totally wrong but that's sort of my intuition.

02:14:57.000 Val Kudrin says, love your channel, keep up the good work.

02:14:59.000 Please do a segment sharing your thoughts on Dr. Shiva's analysis of the Michigan votes or talk to him on your show.

02:15:05.000 I will take a look into it.

02:15:07.000 Kevin Kennison, and I will always take an opportunity to read a super chat that talks about my music video, says, Will of the People has become one of my new favorite songs as a moderate pacifist.

02:15:16.000 I love the care you put into the song.

02:15:17.000 Thank you for making a song that really feels like it means something.

02:15:19.000 For those that aren't familiar, I have a music video and song original called Will of the People.

02:15:24.000 You'll definitely want to watch it because it's about politics and the cycle of revolution.

02:15:27.000 It's going to be on Spotify and iTunes soon.

02:15:29.000 There's a certification process, so it takes some time.

02:15:32.000 I don't have a music video or song, which I think is probably for the best.

02:15:34.000 Travis says, never done a super chat.

02:15:36.000 You are worth more than $4.99.

02:15:36.000 Insert facepalm here.

02:15:37.000 You sent $49.

02:15:37.000 I think this person, Tiffany, I think you meant to send $5, you sent $50.

02:15:39.000 guitar. Never done a super chat. You are worth more than $4.99.

02:15:42.000 Insert face palm here. You sent $49. I think this person, Tiffany, I think you sent

02:15:47.000 this meant to send $5. You sent $50. Oh, oh gosh. I'm sorry. DC says check out

02:15:52.000 Microsoft's election guard for a cryptographically backed voter integrity solution.

02:15:57.000 Problem is getting buy-in from each of the 50 states.

02:16:00.000 Overcomes the privacy concerns involved with a blockchain-based solution.

02:16:03.000 Interesting.

02:16:05.000 Right.

02:16:06.000 So, Gergsy says, your left is far right to the modern leftist.

02:16:11.000 That's true.

02:16:13.000 Yeah.

02:16:13.000 Right.

02:16:14.000 I think, don't they call you far right?

02:16:16.000 Oh man, I've been called every name in the park.

02:16:20.000 I'm an alt-left grifter. 0.72

02:16:22.000 I'm a right-wing sycophant.

02:16:23.000 I'm a secret Trump voter.

02:16:26.000 There are just journalists who will just assert that they know I voted for Trump, like they are somehow I don't know, surveilling my apartment or something, and they just know that I voted for Trump when I just, I've said that, you know, I did not vote for Trump.

02:16:38.000 That you simultaneously hold both far-left and far-right positions?

02:16:41.000 Like, you go home and you... Yeah, one, you know, one thing I'm definitely accused of being is that I'm, like, a red-brownist.

02:16:48.000 Do you know that whole theory?

02:16:49.000 Yes, yes.

02:16:50.000 It's like, it's like an offshoot of the horseshoe theory, where, like, the extreme-left and the extreme-right are supposedly, you know, converging to... That's the Taurus.

02:16:58.000 Yeah, and, um... That's the shape.

02:17:00.000 You know, people can call me whatever they like.

02:17:01.000 Oh, some news- some news dropped on Handy, I guess.

02:17:03.000 Um... That's what I was trying to find.

02:17:04.000 Yeah, but we'll- I can't find anything for the 9 o'clock.

02:17:06.000 I'm sorry.

02:17:07.000 They're, like, laying out their case, I guess?

02:17:08.000 Is that what it was?

02:17:09.000 Oh, okay.

02:17:09.000 Yeah, I think so.

02:17:10.000 Something like that.

02:17:10.000 We'll look into it later.

02:17:11.000 Uh, let's see.

02:17:13.000 The Insomniatic says, you say another factor is needed for a civil war.

02:17:16.000 What about a food- what about food shortages?

02:17:18.000 China may be facing massive shortages this year, and if defund the police goes forward, shipping could stop.

02:17:23.000 I'll actually, I'll say, hold on.

02:17:26.000 Joe Biden said dark winter is coming.

02:17:28.000 That the vaccine is not going to be enough.

02:17:30.000 It's not gonna be ready till spring.

02:17:31.000 And that lockdowns are on the table.

02:17:33.000 If we get another hard lockdown, and there's a shipping, you know, disruption, then people might snap again.

02:17:40.000 Yeah, I was thinking earlier, the U.S.

02:17:42.000 government's basically said there's five theaters of war, and that's land, sea, airspace, cyber war, and the human mind.

02:17:49.000 Psychological.

02:17:51.000 The heart, the human heart.

02:17:53.000 I would be surprised if there was another hard lockdown on a national scale.

02:17:58.000 I mean, I think you'll maybe see like targeted mitigation is what they call it.

02:18:01.000 Like I just saw in Utah.

02:18:02.000 You see what's going on in Europe?

02:18:04.000 They have legit lockdowns.

02:18:06.000 You gotta have your papers to go outside in France.

02:18:08.000 Well, yeah, I mean, well, that was the case in Italy, you know, when they first locked down.

02:18:08.000 No joke.

02:18:13.000 It's all the same.

02:18:14.000 England just contracted Palantir to do contact tracing software.

02:18:14.000 It's all back.

02:18:19.000 Is it really all right?

02:18:20.000 Well, yeah, I mean, actually, that's right.

02:18:21.000 I think they did.

02:18:22.000 And there's been riots in the UK.

02:18:22.000 Yeah.

02:18:25.000 We never had a shutdown.

02:18:25.000 I just don't think there's a there's the we've never had a lockdown.

02:18:28.000 We've only had shutdowns.

02:18:29.000 I just know we've had I just doubt there's going to be the political tolerance for the same kind of thing in the U.S.

02:18:34.000 But I could be wrong.

02:18:35.000 And, you know, I think it's not as though Biden can personally institute a nationwide lockdown.

02:18:40.000 Yeah, he could.

02:18:42.000 But it's constitutionally dubious.

02:18:43.000 No, it's it's sheriff.

02:18:44.000 So you've got.

02:18:49.000 I mean, Trump didn't himself.

02:18:51.000 I mean, when the when the lockdowns did occurred, did occur, like he had Trump had like a bunch of different positions on whether lockdowns are desirable.

02:18:59.000 He ended up bragging that he saved millions of lives by locking down the economy, which Trump actually, I'm pretty sure Trump Trump has also said on many, many occasions that they just shut up.

02:19:08.000 He said in one of the debates.

02:19:09.000 I would say they didn't lock it down.

02:19:11.000 Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like New Zealand got locked down.

02:19:14.000 You couldn't cross the border.

02:19:15.000 Our states were open, but they shut stuff down.

02:19:18.000 Whatever it was.

02:19:19.000 Our borders were closed.

02:19:20.000 Not interstate borders, were they?

02:19:22.000 Yeah, but that's just jurisdictional inter-country lines.

02:19:28.000 A lot of the claimed shutdown measures, even in terms of interstate travel, were never enforceable.

02:19:33.000 During the height of lockdown, I went from New Jersey to Delaware just because Delaware had this system set up where supposedly they were going to be, the police were going to be pulling you over if you had an out-of-state license plate.

02:19:45.000 That was the most extreme draconian measure that was taken anywhere in the country at the time.

02:19:48.000 And like, I had an out-of-state license plate.

02:19:50.000 I was there for like four or five days.

02:19:51.000 Nobody gave me a hard time.

02:19:53.000 It's just, it's just not enforceable.

02:19:55.000 What do you think about COVID in general?

02:19:58.000 In what regard?

02:20:00.000 How dangerous do you think it is?

02:20:03.000 Um, I mean, I don't perceive a huge danger to me personally, were I to contract it, but I am mindful that I have the possibility of spreading it to somebody who might have More vulnerabilities.

02:20:18.000 Pretty vague question.

02:20:19.000 Yeah.

02:20:19.000 I mean, I'm not in favor of COVID.

02:20:22.000 Oh, OK.

02:20:22.000 OK.

02:20:23.000 Well, there you go.

02:20:23.000 That's the important thing.

02:20:25.000 So I was going to do one more super chat and then we've got we've got quite a bit over.

02:20:28.000 But Joshua Brogues says I could go another two and a half hours if you really want.

02:20:33.000 Oh, man.

02:20:33.000 Voter.

02:20:34.000 Joshua says voter ID laws.

02:20:36.000 Voter ID laws could go a long way towards raising confidence in our elections.

02:20:40.000 I'm inclined to agree.

02:20:40.000 Yeah, I do, too.

02:20:42.000 Some sort of ID, I would think.

02:20:43.000 Some sort of security measures for our elections.

02:20:46.000 Not the opposite.

02:20:47.000 The Democrats are talking about reducing election integrity.

02:20:50.000 That, to me, makes no sense.

02:20:52.000 Paper ballot backups, I think, to me, should be a no-brainer.

02:20:52.000 So weird to me.

02:20:57.000 You see, this is what happens.

02:20:58.000 See the categories with me.

02:20:59.000 Well, no, it's that we're 20 minutes over and he knows.

02:21:02.000 He wants cookies.

02:21:02.000 Come on up, Marco.

02:21:04.000 Now he knows what we're talking about.

02:21:05.000 I do want to mention one thing.

02:21:06.000 I don't know if you realize, but there's a photo every time we show you of Joe Biden eating a small child.

02:21:11.000 Oh, yeah.

02:21:13.000 It's right behind you.

02:21:14.000 That's right.

02:21:17.000 Well, I resent being associated with that.

02:21:21.000 I had nothing to do with it.

02:21:22.000 Have you seen the art on the walls?

02:21:24.000 You know, I've glanced at it.

02:21:26.000 A lot of it.

02:21:27.000 It's amazing.

02:21:27.000 It's a lot to process.

02:21:29.000 I know it's a lot.

02:21:30.000 It's just Joe Biden looking like the Crypt Keeper.

02:21:33.000 Yeah, that's what he looks like.

02:21:35.000 George Alexopolis.

02:21:38.000 He's the artist.

02:21:39.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:21:39.000 All right.

02:21:39.000 Well, anyway, man, hey, thanks.

02:21:41.000 Good conversation.

02:21:42.000 Yeah, I enjoyed it.

02:21:43.000 Do you want to mention your social media or anything?

02:21:45.000 Yeah, mtracey on Twitter, M-T-R-A-C-E-Y.

02:21:48.000 I do have my own YouTube channel.

02:21:51.000 It's not a major focus of mine like yours where you have this very impressive setup.

02:21:55.000 You know, I do, you know, just some side commentaries, chat with people.

02:22:00.000 So that's easy to find.

02:22:01.000 It's just mtracey on YouTube.

02:22:02.000 Right on.

02:22:02.000 I feel like you've written a book.

02:22:04.000 on and PayPal and all that set up and look forward to.

02:22:07.000 You know, I mentioned earlier what I see to be a need for

02:22:11.000 new media ventures out of the ashes of the disaster.

02:22:15.000 I feel like you've written a book.

02:22:17.000 Well, what I was going to say is that you'll be on the

02:22:22.000 lookout for new media ventures that are aware of

02:22:25.000 many of the problems that we've I don't want to give any further details on that at the moment, but things are in the works.

02:22:34.000 Cool.

02:22:34.000 And smash that like button.

02:22:36.000 Yes, do it.

02:22:36.000 You can follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Parler at Timcast.

02:22:39.000 Don't forget to check out my other YouTube channels, YouTube.com slash Timcast and YouTube.com slash Timcast News.

02:22:44.000 We're live Monday to Friday at 8 p.m.

02:22:46.000 So we'll be back with more stuff.

02:22:48.000 Don't forget to follow Ian.

02:22:49.000 Yes, at Ian Crossland, you can follow me anywhere and everywhere.

02:22:52.000 And you can follow at Sour Patch Lids.

02:22:54.000 Sour Patch Lids, L-Y-D-S.

02:22:56.000 And smash the like button on your way out.

02:22:57.000 We will be back tomorrow.

02:22:59.000 What's tomorrow, Wednesday?

02:23:00.000 Yeah, tomorrow's Wednesday.

02:23:01.000 We'll be back tomorrow.

02:23:02.000 We have, we're gonna have, stay tuned for Thursday.

02:23:05.000 Thursday is going to be the big, big crazy day.

02:23:08.000 So just say, we're not, we're not, we're not.

02:23:10.000 Do pushups in the morning.

02:23:11.000 Yeah, do.

02:23:11.000 Yeah.

02:23:12.000 Yeah.

02:23:12.000 Okay.

02:23:12.000 Thanks for hanging out.

02:23:13.000 We'll see you all next time.

02:23:14.000 Bye guys.

Timcast IRL - Tim Pool - November 11, 2020

Timcast IRL - Project Veritas PROVES Media Is LYING About Fraud Claims, THIS IS WILD

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