On this week's episode of The TakeAway, host Alex Blumberg is joined by journalist Michael Tracey to discuss the latest in the ongoing saga of election fraud and fake news surrounding the 2016 election. Plus, a special guest joins the show to talk about his experience covering the aftermath of the riots in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri.
00:00:41.000We'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.
00:00:54.000Then the Washington Post comes out with a story saying this man has recanted his claims.
00:00:58.000And all of a sudden, mainstream media journalists, Democrats are posting it saying, aha, look, it was fake news the whole time.
00:01:05.000Then Project Veritas drops a video of the guy saying, I never recanted anything.
00:01:09.000Then 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.
00:01:18.000We're gonna clean your mind so that you can remember.
00:01:56.000No, 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.
00:02:05.000Well, 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.
00:02:17.000If I just relied upon these secondhand reports, given the direct personal and political stake that so many journalists had in portraying.
00:02:54.000I 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.
00:03:00.000Yeah, I mean, and you probably know this, but you can never please everybody.
00:03:04.000And if you try to please any particular demographic, that becomes sort of corrupting unto itself.
00:03:09.000So 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.
00:03:59.000So, postal worker admits fabricating allegations of ballot tampering, officials say.
00:04:04.000And they have this really, like, generic photo of a fake ballot box, I guess.
00:04:08.000A Pennsylvania postal worker, whose claims have been cited by top Republicans as potential evidence of widespread voting irregularities, Admitted to U.S.
00:04:17.000Postal Service investigators that he fabricated the allegations according to three officials briefed on the investigation in a statement from a House Congressional Committee.
00:04:25.000Richard 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.
00:04:37.000Attorney General William P. Barr subsequently authorized federal prosecutors to open probes into credible allegations of voting irregularities.
00:04:45.000and fraud, a reversal of longstanding Justice Department policy.
00:04:48.000But on Monday, Hopkins, 32, told investigators from the U.S.
00:04:53.000Postal 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.
00:05:06.000Democrats on the House Oversight Committee tweeted late Tuesday that, quote, whistleblower completely recanted Hopkins did not respond to messages seeking comment.
00:06:07.000And I heard him say to the supervisor that they messed up yesterday.
00:06:13.000And I was like, oh, what did they mess up on?
00:06:17.000And 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.
00:08:01.000And in fact, you heard Weisenberg tell a supervisor they were backdating the ballots to make it appear they'd been collected on November 3rd.
00:08:29.000We got video of the guy delivering the mail.
00:08:30.000I don't know what else we need to go on to say, here's a guy saying they were backdating ballots.
00:08:35.000But it's very, very weird It's very, very brazen to see the Washington Post be like, the story's fake, he recanted.
00:08:41.000Then this guy to come back out and immediately be like, I never recanted.
00:08:45.000So, 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.
00:08:59.000Richard Hopkins is a USPS employee in Erie, Pennsylvania, so that's not in dispute.
00:09:04.000He signed a sworn affidavit with allegations of ballot tampering and fraud and went public through Project Veritas.
00:09:09.000USPS IG began investigating last week.
00:09:12.000IG 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.
00:09:23.000So 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.
00:09:32.000It's the guy, or at least I thought he had the tweet, maybe it's on Project Veritas.
00:09:36.000He'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.
00:09:46.000I 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.
00:10:16.000Washington 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?
00:10:27.000So it's possible that Hopkins, as claimed in this story, did in fact sign an affidavit recanting his claims.
00:10:34.000The James O'Keefe stuff you just played doesn't necessarily dispute that.
00:10:37.000It could provide countervailing evidence to maybe say that it was done under duress or something.
00:10:42.000But 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.
00:10:58.000This is a common thing they do with anonymous sources.
00:12:19.000But 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.
00:12:31.000So let's just assume that all that is true.
00:12:36.000Whether 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.
00:12:47.000I mean, when all the votes are counted, the margin could be as much as 100,000 votes for Biden.
00:12:55.000So I think, you know, it would be expected.
00:12:57.000In fact, I would be surprised if there weren't incidences of isolated fraudulent activity.
00:13:05.000But 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.
00:13:16.000So I just wanted to make sure I double checked.
00:13:18.000From Veritas, they say, the insider said, quote, we have to separate out the ballots and give them directly to the supervisors.
00:13:24.000They're postmarking and they're at the office and taking them directly to the ballot box.
00:13:29.000And it specifically says, all these ballots that were coming in today, tomorrow, yesterday, are all supposed to be postmarked the third.
00:13:40.000It'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.
00:13:57.000We're at the point where we're like, we have some sworn affidavits that should warrant an inquiry or an investigation.
00:14:03.000and then you go and find evidence, assuming these accusations are correct.
00:14:07.000We've got, I think, I don't know how many, three or four perhaps, maybe it's three,
00:14:13.000poll watchers who have signed sworn affidavits saying that they've seen some kind of fraud.
00:14:17.000I'm not saying widespread, I'm saying we have three affidavits.
00:14:20.000Is it enough to change an election? I honestly...
00:14:22.000Well, if you think about it, three affidavits in a country of 330 million
00:14:25.000that has converted en masse to mail-in voting is really not that many.
00:14:30.000Yeah, I guess, so the point being brought up on the five was,
00:14:34.000we're talking about a few key swing districts and we're talking about a very, very narrow race
00:14:38.000where if you witness someone doing something improper, then that needs to be investigated and then we could
00:14:45.000potentially find more evidence of a larger scale impropriety.
00:14:51.000I guess the question I would have is like, what does larger scale impropriety mean?
00:14:55.000If 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.
00:15:08.000than has been anything close to established.
00:15:09.000I mean, you can go back years and decades and find isolated incidences of fraud.
00:15:14.000I 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.
00:15:27.000So I think nobody who is aware of history should discount that out of hand.
00:15:33.000What's the vote margin in PA right now?
00:16:03.000That's not anything close to a point where... It's even beyond the threshold where there would be an automatic recount in Pennsylvania.
00:16:10.000Right, so AP has it around, I think, I'm looking at 47,700 or so.
00:16:17.000That would require numerous post offices being in on... You're right, sorry, I misread that figure.
00:16:24.000But to get that margin, because we're also talking about hundreds of thousands of votes that came in.
00:16:30.000To get a margin where it's going to be able to actually overturn Pennsylvania.
00:16:34.000That'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.
00:16:43.000It seems like it's not going to have an impact.
00:16:51.000And 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.
00:17:00.000And granted, you would need further investigation to uncover this.
00:17:32.000I don't think it needs to be a widespread coordinated thing.
00:17:34.000I think it could be what's referred to as a standalone complex.
00:17:37.000You'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.
00:17:50.000It 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.
00:18:00.000Yeah, I don't think it would necessarily... I should rephrase that.
00:18:03.000I don't think it has to be widespread and coordinated in order to have some kind of...
00:18:09.000Potency in terms of affecting outcome.
00:18:17.000But 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.
00:18:28.000The 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.
00:18:37.000And, you know, when Trump, I think it was the day it was the day after the election when he gave some remarks.
00:18:43.000First of all, he misstated that the secretary of state of Georgia was a Democrat.
00:18:47.000He's not. So one reason why I find a lot of these claims implausible that I'm being inundated with on Twitter, which
00:18:52.000I'm sure you probably are as well, is that, you know, it would have to encompass a huge amount of Republicans as
00:18:58.000But that's what people, I think, tend to miss about election administration.
00:19:01.000It really is baked into the cake that it has to be bipartisan in a lot of ways.
00:19:05.000Now, maybe it's not always abided by with 100 percent perfection.
00:19:08.000But in Georgia, for example, you have the secretary of state, the governor, the lieutenant governor.
00:19:11.000Both chambers of the state legislature are held by Republicans.
00:19:15.000I 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
00:19:34.000with this process, that it's not like secretive and closed off for the most
00:19:38.000part. Could you find isolated incidents in a country
00:20:22.000And, 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.
00:21:03.000As 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.
00:21:11.000So there's the potential of challenging votes.
00:21:17.000Right 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.
00:21:28.000that mail-in ballots create a parallel and separate track for voting,
00:21:32.000which is a violation of the 14th Amendment.
00:22:43.000Notably, 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.
00:22:55.000And they weren't allowing that in other districts.
00:22:57.000Thus, Trump's team is saying, if you have one district that says, you can check your ballot, we bring it to you.
00:23:04.000We go to your house and say, hey, you forgot to sign it, sign it.
00:23:08.000And then in Republican districts, they didn't do that, creating a higher margin of failure.
00:23:12.000You've created a two-track where you're slanting things for Democrats.
00:23:16.000That's another- Well, ballots can be cured per state law.
00:23:22.000And it takes a large volunteer effort, as far as I understand, Two, retrieve the person whose ballot needs to be cured.
00:23:32.000It's not just done by election officials across the board, meaning public employees.
00:23:38.000So 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?
00:23:51.000I don't know the exact specifics of that, but Sure, sure.
00:24:17.000Pennsylvania, obviously, is where the election at least was called by the media over the weekend.
00:24:20.000But 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.
00:24:30.000And you even have the two Republican senators.
00:25:11.000Trump needs Pennsylvania for any kind of victory.
00:25:14.000So of course he's going to go after that through every legal mean possible.
00:25:18.000And then they'll, they're also filing lawsuits in Nevada.
00:25:21.000I think they've got a ton of lawsuits going out across the board in a bunch of different states.
00:25:25.000But I think there may be some, uh... I think some of the arguments make sense.
00:25:33.000Notably, 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.
00:25:48.000So, they counted, according to Trump's campaign, about 450,000 ballots in violation of a court order.
00:25:55.000Now, Giuliani's taken the extreme approach, saying, they're all spoiled, because the secrecy envelopes were destroyed already.
00:26:00.000Therefore, 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.
00:26:09.000This is why the ACLU jumped in, saying, we have to sue back to stop Trump from winning this fight.
00:26:16.000If they disqualify 450,000 votes, it'll include Trump votes, but I think that'll definitely flip it for Trump.
00:26:23.000You could just as easily call that disenfranchisement, though.
00:26:25.000I mean, the voters who cast those ballots had nothing to do with what distance observers were required to stand at.
00:26:45.000So this creates a very serious problem.
00:26:47.000We 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.
00:26:55.000I think I think there's some dispute over whether that order was violated and precisely the way.
00:29:05.000Well, if they do that, then they'll have done something which is 100% unprecedented in all of American history.
00:29:12.000And whether they want to do that, I think is You know, a little bit doubtful.
00:29:18.000On 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.
00:29:29.000history, which is that on the basis of Russian interference, they were saying that they should not seat electors for Trump in states like Pennsylvania.
00:29:38.000It wasn't just a marginal fringe movement.
00:29:42.000I mentioned this today on Twitter, which is the state capital.
00:29:45.000When 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.
00:29:55.000And 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.
00:30:09.000It would have been just a mind-blowing departure from everything that's happened ever before in U.S.
00:30:18.000And they were in the chamber, in the legislative chamber, they were screaming.
00:30:21.000And 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.
00:30:33.000So, 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?
00:30:50.000If 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.
00:31:03.000You 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.
00:31:15.000Hillary Clinton did technically concede the day after the election and Trump hasn't yet.
00:32:01.000And 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.
00:32:10.000Of course, they're lumping the media together, of course.
00:32:13.000The various polling institutions all were polling ridiculous numbers against Trump.
00:32:18.000The race is extremely close and the media runs full speed.
00:32:22.000Like Wikipedia has already put up on the president elect page, a picture of Joe Biden, which is like, wait, wait, wait.
00:32:29.000President elect as a concept doesn't need a picture of anybody.
00:32:32.000Well, I mean, let's be clear about something.
00:32:34.000When Trump won in 2016, the media called it for him within a few hours.
00:35:24.000I 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.
00:35:35.000And 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.
00:35:49.000So there was an article from July written by the co-founder of MSNBC that many people called, they called it anti-Trump resistance porn.
00:35:57.000Like, it was one of these articles that were like, Trump is a dictator!
00:36:01.000And they said, it was called, How Trump Can Lose the Election and Still Win the Presidency.
00:36:06.000And they said, what would happen is, there's four states, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania, that have Republican legislatures.
00:36:15.000The 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.
00:36:35.000And the House delegations are Republican, they would re-elect Donald Trump.
00:37:24.000Again, like I mentioned before, Georgia is also a Republican state legislature, so that would be a similar scenario, potentially.
00:37:31.000You 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.
00:37:48.000But 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.
00:38:20.000And 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.
00:38:39.000He 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.
00:38:48.000So 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?
00:38:57.000You 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.
00:39:13.000When they called the results on Saturday, I'm just thinking it's going to be another boring, you know, Trump's finally
00:39:21.000going to be like, all right, all right, you know, he's going to throw a fit in some capacity.
00:39:25.000And then I thought we'd move on, but he's not.
00:39:27.000And 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
00:39:32.000Tuesday I was like, okay, Trump's probably just going to, you know, drag it out.
00:39:36.000We're seeing reports that he's, like, selling his helicopter.
00:39:50.000But I can't fact-check these claims that Trump's selling his helicopter.
00:39:52.000I can't go to a website and look up the sale of a helicopter.
00:39:55.000So 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.
00:40:10.000And if you look at the if you look at the small text, there is something that references that.
00:40:17.000So what I saw, it said 60 percent will go to Save America.
00:40:20.000I 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.
00:40:26.000I mean, I think that I don't and I felt this across the board for the Democratic campaigns and Republican campaigns.
00:40:32.000Don't bother giving them money at this point.
00:40:35.000I mean, the consultants Orders drowning in cash at this point.
00:40:58.000So 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.
00:41:12.000I mean, they probably are all buying Teslas now because you thought Jamie Harrison had a legitimate chance of beating Lindsey Graham in South Carolina.
00:41:21.000And Graham won by double digits, didn't he?
00:41:23.000Yeah, I think it was the 13 points or something.
00:41:25.000And 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.
00:43:35.000I know I don't know either but like this is a big deal.
00:43:38.000Hold on before you say that we gotta know Who's this guy? He's a he's an Air Force general and I
00:43:43.000would know his name offhand But he was on Steve Bannon's war room explaining the score
00:43:48.000the hammer supercomputer and the scorecard software
00:43:52.000See, 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.
00:44:09.000I 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.
00:46:01.000So this guy went on Bannon's show and claimed that they had the ability to manipulate elections?
00:46:05.000Basically, 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.
00:46:14.000I'll tell you, there's a... Media Matters is calling Hammer the new conspiracy theory.
00:46:19.000See, this is the thing, I don't care for this stuff.
00:47:02.000I mean, that that was the move after 2016 and
00:47:06.000kind of shed light on some of the Democratic inconsistency because
00:47:09.000people when they were hearing all these allegations from Democrats
00:47:12.000that, oh, Russia must have hacked Wisconsin or something.
00:47:15.000They'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.
00:47:53.000You could walk in and you could talk to the county election official who will explain it to you.
00:47:57.000And you have to rely on him telling you the truth.
00:48:00.000Sure, 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.
00:48:07.000The problem is, Donald Trump's lawsuit is stating they blocked that.
00:48:40.000I'm just quoting an Air Force general.
00:48:43.000You live in a world where regular, working-class people don't.
00:48:46.000And 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.
00:48:52.000And they're gonna be like, this guy's crazy.
00:49:21.000Just 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.
00:49:36.000Okay, 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.
00:49:45.000So, like, I don't know that that would be too much of a stretch in order to convince somebody.
00:49:48.000But 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.
00:50:00.000You 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.
00:50:12.000I would love it if there was we could somehow get our hands on a CIA.
00:50:15.000But then again, like, why wouldn't this have been the case in 2016?
00:51:28.000This is one of the things that we're seeing pop up on the internet.
00:51:31.000And 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.
00:51:41.000So quite literally, you're walking down the street, you see a mailbox.
00:52:31.000We had, and we still do, a serious delay with several states and also voter turnout numbers that exceed 98 or 99 percent.
00:52:41.000They 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.
00:52:53.000Thus, 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.
00:53:04.000UCF tweeted, Since 2017, our campus has been recognized as a voter-friendly campus.
00:53:09.000Today, UCF's voting precinct, precinct 538, topped the 100% voter turnout in the 2020 election at 107.56%.
00:53:18.000My response was that BBC is going to have to retract this article because
00:53:22.000certainly it's not fraud or impropriety in our country.
00:53:26.000Well, 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.
00:53:38.000And 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.
00:53:48.000And 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.
00:53:56.000Really, it didn't take that long compared to the United States.
00:53:59.000Again, we're still sitting around here.
00:54:01.000A week later, we don't have calls in Georgia.
00:54:06.000They're carrying the bag of belts from Barrow, Alaska to Anchorage on foot.
00:54:12.000Even in New York, I checked as of last night.
00:54:15.000If 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.
00:54:24.000So 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.
00:54:36.000But 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.
00:55:30.000We'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.
00:55:41.000Like, totally outside of the Constitution.
00:55:44.000When 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.
00:57:29.000Today, it takes like two weeks before they'll even tell you to confirm your vote.
00:57:33.000But 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.
00:57:39.000That's like, we didn't have that back then, you know, before TV and radio, 1800s.
00:57:44.000You'd be like, I wonder who the president is.
00:57:46.000Oh, 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.
00:57:53.000So it would be like votes would be coming in randomly over a certain span of time.
00:57:57.000But with the internet, you would think that we would have gotten better at counting our votes.
00:58:13.000And 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.
00:58:19.000But 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.
00:58:32.000But in Pennsylvania, they weren't permitted to do that by state law.
00:58:34.000So 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.
00:58:45.000The Secretary of State certifies statewide results on the 30th.
00:58:48.000In Pennsylvania, they have until November 10th for unofficial vote tallies.
00:58:52.000to be provided to the Secretary of the Commonwealth.
00:58:54.000November 23rd is the last day for local officials to submit certified election results.
00:58:58.000If there's a difference of 0.5% or less, then the Secretary must order a recount by November 12th.
00:59:05.000If at least three voters in each county allege errors or discrepancies in the count, a recount could also be triggered.
00:59:11.000Any recount must be completed by November 24th, and local election officials must submit certified recount results to the Secretary by the 25th.
00:59:19.000In Michigan, November 17th, For their, uh, local election officials must complete counting by the 17th, provide the results by the 23rd for certification.
00:59:29.000Any petitions for recount must be submitted by the 25th.
00:59:32.000Wisconsin, they say, is the 17th, and then, you know, there's special rules.
00:59:36.00013th for Georgia, followed by the 20th to certify unofficial results on the 13th.
00:59:43.000We go to December 8th, last day for states to resolve election disputes.
00:59:47.000States 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.
00:59:56.000That means any court challenges to state election results must be settled by December 8th, 2020.
01:00:01.000If states certify election outcomes by this deadline, Congress must accept the results as valid.
01:00:06.000December 14th, electors cast their ballots.
01:00:09.000They meet in their respective states to cast their ballots for president and vice president on the second Monday after the second Wednesday in December.
01:00:16.000In every state except Nebraska and Maine, electors vote on winner-takes-all basis.
01:00:20.000This we understand, and then some are split.
01:00:23.000December 23rd, President of the Senate receives electoral vote certificates.
01:00:27.000By January 6th, Congress counts electoral votes.
01:00:30.000And on January 20th, they inaugurate the new president.
01:00:33.000So if there's a pending court case by December 8th, and the state is unable to deliver votes, what happens then?
01:00:42.000My understanding is that it's rejected.
01:01:20.000One 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.
01:01:29.000So we still have millions of votes to count, ridiculously at this point.
01:01:34.000But even up until now, something like 12% more total votes were cast in 2020 compared to 2016.
01:01:41.000And they weren't cast in a direction that's easy to delineate along partisan lines.
01:01:48.000So if you look at the map of the country, There are some places that skewed heavily Democratic, some places that skewed heavily Republican.
01:01:57.000And in 2016, the skew was almost universally toward the Republican, except in a few cases like, you know, northern Virginia, some affluent suburban areas.
01:02:11.000And you could like kind of extrapolate what the reason for that partisan skew was.
01:02:15.000So it made sense that Montgomery County, Pennsylvania and Arlington skewed Democratic in 2016, whereas the other counties skewed Republican.
01:02:23.000But this year, it's harder to make any of those kinds of inferences.
01:02:28.000And there are these regional anomalies that are a little bit odd.
01:02:37.000I'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.
01:02:47.000So, 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.
01:03:03.000Right, 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.
01:03:20.000Like, I don't know exactly how to interpret that.
01:03:22.000And there are a bunch of other examples.
01:03:24.000Like, 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.
01:03:37.000are that that would have been the case.
01:03:38.000And yet he also loses New Hampshire by something like seven or eight
01:03:42.000points. Like, because usually there are there. Usually there are these
01:04:23.000It'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?
01:04:31.000I guess it could happen with the Internet.
01:04:33.000The fracturing of mentality is, you know, you're maybe more like someone across the country than you are to your neighbor.
01:04:39.000Now that you're able to connect via the Internet, that's one way.
01:04:42.000But in 2016, there was a definitely observable regional correlation pretty much everywhere.
01:04:47.000And if there wasn't a regional correlation, you can infer that it was due to like socioeconomic status, median household income.
01:04:54.000There were like some metrics that you could use to make these results explicable, whereas in 20 20 is much less explicable.
01:05:03.000I 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.
01:05:18.000And there are other examples of that you can find around the country, but others where it's not like that correlation doesn't hold.
01:05:25.000But, you know, just to focus on Georgia, just because I happen to be there for like a week or so prior to the election.
01:05:32.000One 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.
01:05:44.000They're the party of Wall Street, the managerial elites.
01:05:47.000Well, I mean, Wall Street was very much satisfied with this result.
01:05:49.000I mean, the Dow went up and so on and so forth.
01:05:53.000But 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
01:06:08.000Right. And if you think that translates into like economic populism, I think you're dreaming.
01:06:15.000It could there could be a big factor here in that COVID moved people around.
01:06:19.000People who lived in cities all of a sudden found themselves back in the suburbs with their family.
01:06:25.000And 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.
01:06:31.000That earlier in the year, COVID hit, people probably were like, I'm going to get out of the city.
01:06:35.000Then when the riots hit, people got out of cities.
01:06:40.000So you got a bunch of wealthy New York people moving all across.
01:06:44.000Maybe 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.
01:07:04.000Like in Georgia, you actually had to apply for an absentee ballot.
01:07:07.000Whereas like in New Jersey, where I live, It was automatic, which I know was controversial.
01:07:12.000But, like, a lot of this stuff really is bizarre.
01:07:14.000Like, Los Angeles County, I can't get over.
01:07:17.000As 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.
01:08:01.000A woman started crying on the phone because she lost.
01:08:03.000It's evidence for why direct democracy is so dangerous, because of the way people can flip on a dime and completely alter.
01:08:11.000If 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.
01:09:14.000politics 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?
01:09:26.000And 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.
01:09:35.000In 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.
01:09:47.000But 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.
01:09:53.000But 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.
01:10:07.000That 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.
01:10:27.000And 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.
01:10:36.000But I can't imagine that they're actually going to do it.
01:10:38.000They're way too tethered to their ideological presuppositions.
01:10:42.000I'm seeing all the all the memes from the from the left that, you know, AOC was right.
01:10:47.000The districts that she helped, that were for Medicare for All, actually won.
01:10:52.000And the Democrats who didn't support and went moderate all ended up losing.
01:10:56.000And 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.
01:11:04.000You vote for a Republican, maybe they'll actually do their job.
01:11:21.000You know, it's interesting because the the there were the.
01:11:27.000One 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.
01:11:39.000And his not voting for impeachment didn't matter, he still lost anyway.
01:11:43.000So 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.
01:11:52.000It's almost, like, ineluctable, you know?
01:11:55.000And I think you see that when there's certain big shifts.
01:11:58.000But 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.
01:12:05.000So I mean, this is going to take a lot of time to, quote, unpack.
01:12:08.000I think COVID played a big role in it, I do.
01:12:10.000I think, and the riots, moved people around in ways we don't yet understand.
01:12:14.000And a lot of these places had same-day registration.
01:12:17.000So you could've literally moved a week before.
01:12:20.000Well, not literally, because they probably have some law, like you gotta be there at least 27 days or something, some states.
01:12:29.000So 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.
01:12:41.000Except 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.
01:12:49.000So, now we're hearing, what was it, Andrew Yang said, I'm moving to Georgia!
01:12:55.000I 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.
01:13:04.000I mean, Trump and the Republicans had unified control for the first two years of his tenure.
01:13:09.000They couldn't get health care repeal, Obamacare repeal passed.
01:13:31.000Certain senators are getting I keep saying bribed, getting lobbied to vote a certain way.
01:13:36.000And if they're Republican or Democrat, the lobbyists don't care.
01:13:38.000They'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.
01:14:26.000I mean, there was nothing surprising or novel about that for most of U.S.
01:14:29.000But 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.
01:15:18.000Do 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?
01:15:25.000You can't have more than like X amount of people per party?
01:15:28.000No, because they'd just form coalitions.
01:15:54.000And 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.
01:16:01.000Third parties were completely irrelevant.
01:16:03.000So, 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.
01:16:40.000And it's like, There's other ways to determine, like rank choice makes a lot of sense, but it's also not perfect.
01:16:46.000For 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.
01:16:54.000That way, if you're like, I really want Jill Stein, I vote for her.
01:16:58.000But if Jill Stein loses, then your vote passes down to the next person, which would be, you know, Joe Biden or whatever.
01:17:04.000And so that would create a better representation of who the people actually want.
01:17:55.000Alaska actually had a ranked choice party run primary this year.
01:18:01.000So when they were four or five, you know, you could choose, you know, number one, Bernie Sanders, number two, Elizabeth Warren, whatever.
01:18:08.000And, 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.
01:18:19.000You 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.
01:18:45.000The 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.
01:18:54.000And then basically it's just whoever gets the most votes wins.
01:18:59.000And apparently they did a simulation where they found that it is the most likely system to accurately represent what people actually want.
01:19:06.000Yeah, 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.
01:19:14.000So 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.
01:19:32.000If 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.
01:20:02.000And 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.
01:20:09.000So I'm not going to pretend to have all the answers.
01:20:11.000It 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?
01:20:29.000Sometimes you do have state-based reforms.
01:20:57.000It's foundational to the country's founding principles.
01:21:01.000And we've done it for 200 plus years, 250 years.
01:21:04.000So, like, why have this recurring endless debate about whether it should or shouldn't be?
01:21:10.000There's pretty much zero chance ever that it will be changed.
01:21:14.000And 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.
01:21:31.000If that was the opportunity to reform it, that would have been when it was done and it wasn't done.
01:21:36.000Things can't just stay the same forever though, you know?
01:21:39.000That's why I'm like, we have an optimism bias.
01:21:42.000We think everything's gonna just be the way it is, the way we remember.
01:21:45.000We'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.
01:21:57.000And that's like, we just, we grew up with that, and that's normal to us, and now we assume nothing could change.
01:23:16.000I 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.
01:23:30.000Not that journalism is ever some kind of pure principle that could be aspired to by everybody equally under all circumstances.
01:23:38.000But 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.
01:23:54.000It was a straightforwardly political objective, which is that We need to... I don't know exactly.
01:24:00.000Overthrow the white, cis, heteronormative patriarchy?
01:24:09.000And, look, journalists always have personal points of view.
01:24:13.000I mean, you can't be 100% neutral ever, and even aspiring to be is almost a fallacy.
01:24:19.000But 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.
01:24:33.000Now they don't even care to pretend to do that.
01:24:36.000They'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.
01:24:51.000That 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.
01:25:14.000These were the biggest, most pervasive, most widespread, most damaging riots since at least the 1960s.
01:25:21.000For 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.
01:25:37.000It 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.
01:25:50.000CNN, 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.
01:26:04.000But 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.
01:26:16.000All 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.
01:26:26.000But you went to these really small towns.
01:26:28.000And smaller places, you know, like Fort Wayne, Indiana.
01:26:29.000People had no idea that there were even riots there.
01:26:32.000I'm a pretty avid consumer of news, for better or worse, sometimes worse.
01:26:35.000But 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.
01:26:44.000You had to dig deeply underneath the narrative to figure out that that had happened.
01:26:50.000I only knew it happened because I happened to be passing through Fort Wayne, Indiana.
01:26:54.000I looked it up and I went and saw for myself and spoke to people.
01:26:57.000And there were just so many other examples of that.
01:27:01.000And It was bewildering as somebody who had this journalistic motivation.
01:27:08.000Not that it's a virtue necessarily to have a journalistic motivation, but that tends to be what drives me to do stuff.
01:27:14.000Like go to Georgia for the election, go to these random places after riots.
01:27:18.000Just 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.
01:27:28.000There's nothing wrong with that, necessarily.
01:27:31.000But I was talking to people at these places, particularly in Minneapolis.
01:27:37.000This is like a month or so after the peak of the riots, and it was like all anybody wanted to talk about.
01:27:42.000You walk down certain blocks, I need some of the some of the photos.
01:27:58.000You know, minority businesses that had to be shuttered, never to return.
01:28:03.000And it was just like, OK, so there's so much material here that we had a media which was interested in conveying the story.
01:28:12.000It would have been trivially easy to do.
01:28:14.000You 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.
01:28:24.000You 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.
01:28:32.000However gauzy you want to make it, you could have done it.
01:28:35.000And it wasn't done because The media was so ensconced in a certain ideological perspective where
01:28:44.000Doing this, they viewed we would either be in opposition to the tenets of the protest movement and or help Trump.
01:28:52.000And both of those were lines that no moral person could have ever crossed in their view.
01:28:57.000I don't even think that the latter rationale made sense.
01:29:02.000I don't think it necessarily did help Trump.
01:29:06.000One 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.
01:29:15.000One 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.
01:29:21.000And I was just like, no, that's not the sense I'm getting when I'm talking to people actually experienced the riots.
01:29:27.000I don't think that they viewed Trump as.
01:30:22.000So 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.
01:30:30.000Now, I mean, there is again, we talk about this regional variability.
01:30:33.000There 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.
01:31:05.000It clearly had some impact on the election results.
01:31:07.000It'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.
01:31:18.000I 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.
01:31:28.000And so, you know, if you if you go through something like that, clearly it has to have some influence on your political perspective.
01:31:34.000I 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.
01:31:41.000And 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.
01:31:50.000If there was a public service that they were guided by.
01:31:52.000I was actually talking to Tim earlier about, I think journalism kind of has at least two facets.
01:31:57.000And one is investigation and one is reporting.
01:32:00.000And these modern media giants have just taken on the reporting facet.
01:32:32.000I not try to just be totally in hock to some kind of
01:32:36.000partisan agenda, whether it's promoting a
01:32:39.000BLM Antifa protest or whatever or promoting Trump.
01:32:43.000Like, I mean, I want to actually to the best of my ability and still
01:32:47.000confidence that what I'm saying is truthful.
01:32:51.000And I think that that's just not something that so many people in the media are interested in.
01:32:56.000If 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...
01:33:18.000They can incur serious professional or social consequences.
01:33:23.000And that is such a corrupting dynamic.
01:33:24.000And 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.
01:34:46.000And people will watch that and say, Tim's lying on purpose to throw red meat to a follower.
01:34:50.000It's like, no, no, no, you don't understand.
01:34:52.000I 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.
01:35:02.000The difference with these news organizations is the editor says, don't write that, you're gonna offend our audience.
01:35:08.000And then they choose to avoid certain stories because they're worried about losing percentages.
01:35:12.000You have an active business decision to do this.
01:35:15.000Do 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?
01:35:32.000Analysis you put forward or what you choose to do in terms of topics
01:35:37.000I mean, there's a whole because I don't I find myself wondering if I'm captive to that
01:35:42.000I don't think it's I don't think it's possible to necessarily
01:35:44.000Like 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.
01:36:12.000So, uh, I think it's about mental fortitude.
01:36:15.000I think it's about your assuredness and your confidence in yourself.
01:36:20.000My political opinions, um, have changed very little, or I should say they change very little over the years, right?
01:36:26.000I think the one position I've changed on heavily is guns.
01:36:29.000In 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.
01:36:35.000No, you can't bring a gun in my house.
01:36:41.000And now I don't want anyone taking them from me.
01:36:44.000So I'm looking at these policies and my position on guns have has dramatically changed.
01:36:48.000Because they want to defund the police.
01:36:51.000Then 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.
01:36:59.000And so I'm like, okay, I better have the ability to defend myself.
01:37:01.000Not only that, but death threats and someone tried breaking into my house, my opinion changed.
01:37:05.000But 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.
01:37:18.000Social justice in certain capacities and pretty much stays where it is.
01:37:23.000I give my opinions on what I think, and then probably based on what I learn, there will be some changes.
01:37:29.000But core principles tend to be very, you know, obstinate, as it were.
01:37:34.000But 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.
01:37:41.000For the most part, what I see is... I'll use David Pakman as an example.
01:38:25.000And I just slowly got better and more comfortable at just talking.
01:38:28.000But my ideas are based upon the news that I'm reading as it develops.
01:38:31.000When I worked for Fusion, which was ABC News Univision, they straight up said, like, lie to the audience.
01:38:38.000They didn't say verbatim, they said, side with the audience.
01:38:42.000You know, and I asked, if there's news stories that would make our audience upset, we wouldn't report it?
01:38:46.000And they said, yeah, I think that's fair.
01:38:48.000So 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.
01:38:58.000Then you're looking at people actively deciding to create a partisan space to make money.
01:39:04.000Versus YouTube, which is a bunch of random people who have thoughts and opinions who post them on the internet.
01:39:09.000Not 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.
01:39:24.000And I could riff if I really wanted to, and sometimes I do.
01:39:27.000But, 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.
01:39:38.000And it just doesn't come to pass, and then they just pay no price for it.
01:39:41.000I mean, they just keep plugging along.
01:39:42.000I feel that would diminish my credibility if I did that.
01:39:46.000So when I would talk about the election this year, I would always try to be pretty qualified.
01:39:52.000I always thought that Biden stood a strong chance of winning, more so than Trump, and I said that publicly many times.
01:39:59.000But 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.
01:40:14.000And it's probably because I'm biased in favor of myself.
01:40:17.000So 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?
01:40:31.000I figured something out while you were talking.
01:40:34.000That is the most stunning plot twist of the evening.
01:40:37.000Okay, 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.
01:40:48.000And then they're like, I think, you know, here's what's going to happen next.
01:41:40.000So there are people who try and take clips from me.
01:41:42.000And I'm not even singling out the Young Turks.
01:41:44.000I'm just most familiar with them because I happen to work at.
01:41:46.000This is what this is what the grifters do.
01:41:49.000So they put up a video where it's me saying I think Trump is going to
01:41:53.000win in a landslide and various various clips like that.
01:41:55.000Going back to like October of last year when Moody's Analytics said
01:41:59.000Trump was going to win because the economy was great.
01:42:01.000They 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.
01:42:09.000And then people say, wow, what a moron.
01:42:11.000But 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.
01:42:25.000People overestimate how wrong they were.
01:42:27.000The national polls weren't that wrong.
01:42:28.000There was a lot of state-based error, which was more consequential for the Electoral College, obviously.
01:42:32.000And so it was like a two-point error among, like, non-college-educated whites.
01:42:35.000And my position was, I don't know what's gonna happen, but I think the polls are gonna be wrong.
01:42:38.000I don't think you can count Trump out.
01:42:40.000And so that was my official position based on the information presented in the context of the election as it stands right now.
01:42:45.000They 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.
01:42:54.000And they're saying, you know, I'm voting for Trump.
01:42:56.000I know a ton of people in Chicago, diehard, lifelong liberal, Democrat, total Republicans now.
01:43:02.000But 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.
01:43:13.000But I wouldn't have known that that was not statistically representative necessarily of voting outcomes.
01:43:19.000So, 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.
01:43:38.000Certain people are of a different mindset.
01:43:40.000I feel like I'm a little bit more journalistic by nature than than others.
01:43:43.000Again, 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.
01:44:03.000Because people want the comforting lies.
01:44:05.000I think you're definitely more of an investigator, an investigative journalist, than most of the journalists in modern culture.
01:44:12.000And 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.
01:44:25.000I 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?
01:44:33.000I just try to be as consistent and logical as I possibly can, not to toot my own horn.
01:44:38.000I 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.
01:44:49.000It doesn't even actually have to entail investigative reporting.
01:44:52.000I 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.
01:46:12.000The way it doesn't matter because it lets you the engagement that you want.
01:46:15.000Then you could parlay that into a bigger audience.
01:46:17.000The 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.
01:46:41.000And I wouldn't say it was fake in that, like, what they were reporting on was just fabricated.
01:46:47.000But the premise, the premise upon which the reporting was based was entirely erroneous.
01:46:54.000Why 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.
01:47:05.000The way I describe it is people were like, well, the reporting was sound.
01:47:08.000And 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.
01:47:17.000And then an hour later, I come outside and my neighbor's lawn is mowed perfectly.
01:47:21.000And they like, they did the wrong lawn.
01:47:23.000I'm not, you want to give them an award for that?
01:47:27.000But that's not what they were supposed to be doing.
01:47:29.000That's not the work that needed to be done.
01:47:31.000If 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.
01:49:27.000I just left my ballot blank and voted for marijuana cessation in New Jersey, which did pass, thankfully.
01:49:33.000As 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.
01:49:43.000But 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.
01:50:02.000Yeah. And they're going to be more kind of enshrined in the fabric of American
01:50:08.000political and cultural life such that.
01:50:10.000You know, we have this precedent now that somebody like Trump is not going to be
01:50:16.000allowed to happen again because, you know, we have the security state
01:50:21.000You could have the total discarding by the media of the principles that they had previously worked on the basis of before.
01:50:29.000But 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
01:50:55.000So all those tactics, I think, were done for the singular purpose, primarily undermining, hobbling and ultimately defeating Trump.
01:51:03.000And if that's proven to have worked, that's really ominous sign for the nature of American democracy.
01:51:11.000I'm not saying that Trump has been a perfect emblem of democracy and all that he's done.
01:51:15.000But, 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.
01:51:29.000Well, that's an excellent place to leave things off and jump over to Super Chats.
01:53:11.000Trump 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.
01:53:31.000Yeah, 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?
01:53:50.000The regular people don't want to be involved.
01:53:51.000They want to mind their own business and watch TV and raise their kids.
01:53:54.000That'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.
01:54:15.000I don't know how widespread it is, but like... I don't think so.
01:54:18.000I 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.
01:54:28.000Have you like looked into civil wars of like the past hundred years and like what they look like?
01:54:35.000Whenever I talk to people about this, they take this presumption that a civil war is like two competing factions.
01:54:41.000You had Bill Maher where it's, uh, I should clarify that.
01:54:44.000Two competing factions along a dividing line.
01:54:46.000Bill 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.
01:54:53.000Because 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.
01:55:00.000Yeah, so it could be like an armed insurgency or something, not like a full-fledged civil war where there's two definable sides.
01:55:06.000But there was no, there were no two definable sides in Syria.
01:55:09.000There was like, there was 16 or so different factions.
01:55:14.000And then the city was, was because nobody wants to back down.
01:55:17.000So I never believed, I never thought there was evidence to believe that the conditions in the contemporary United States were remotely analogous to Syria.
01:55:52.000The 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?
01:56:05.000First of all, there's fourth and fifth generational warfare.
01:56:08.000So 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.
01:57:35.000That's an archaic understanding of what civil war would look like.
01:57:38.000But 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.
01:57:51.000And it always is the regular people saying, we don't want to be involved.
01:57:54.000So the election right now, I view it as some kind of cold civil war in a sense.
01:58:02.000Sorry 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.
01:58:23.000It's just so contradictory to what we had all been trained to believe was possible.
01:58:30.000And 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
01:58:51.000Very 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.
01:59:12.000I 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.
01:59:20.000So we had, it's all an issue of where the escalation takes us.
01:59:24.000We had a guy stalk some Trump supporters in Portland and put two bolts in his chest.
01:59:30.000A lot of people were like, we crossed a line when that happened.
01:59:35.000I 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.
01:59:45.000And then it ultimately just keeps getting worse.
01:59:47.000Even now, three years later, it ends with this guy in Seattle walking up, yelling at the guy.
01:59:52.000He turns around, he puts two bullets in his chest.
01:59:54.000Will that lend itself to, you know, like how we would envision a hot civil war between factions?
02:00:01.000But 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.
02:00:20.000I 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.
02:00:30.000Sure, we had a literal civil war back in the 1800s.
02:00:34.000It was very, very different times back then.
02:00:35.000We'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.
02:01:07.000Like, 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.
02:01:14.000We recognize that some things did happen, but we disagree on what they meant or what was going to happen.
02:01:19.000Now 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.
02:01:26.000Then you turn on NBC and they're like, President-elect's office has announced this, that, and this.
02:01:30.000Yeah, I think you're right that there is something that has gone completely haywire in terms of our collective epistemology.
02:01:38.000Well, so what happens when you have 71 million people on one side and 74 on the other?
02:01:43.000Obviously not all of them are radical, but you need only a small percentage to create the troubles.
02:01:48.000You give them like something to rally around, like a music or art, something that they can create a shared vision of.
02:01:55.000No, that's what that's what people need.
02:01:57.000I just think you'd need an extra ingredient to make it seem plausible to me.
02:02:01.000It could manifest as something like The Troubles, something like a prolonged army insurgency, something in the realm of civil war like activity.
02:02:09.000Just because, you know, for despite COVID, despite all the craziness around national politics, Most people tend to live in relative tranquility, right?
02:02:24.000Which you couldn't have said for Syria, at least in the areas where there was significant fighting, right?
02:02:56.000It always is the elites who are fighting with each other.
02:02:58.000So I'm not saying I think it's a guarantee.
02:03:00.000I 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.
02:03:07.000I don't see how this is... I don't see how it... You know, maybe there's a path towards some kind of reconciliation.
02:03:15.000You know, the left is calling for, now that Joe Biden won, truth and reconciliation commissions or something, whatever that means.
02:03:20.000Right, like with South Africa or something.
02:03:22.000Yeah, make them testify or whatever, and be scolded by a panel of some sort.
02:03:26.000But, you've got people whose worldviews are entirely fra- like, in my opinion, fractured and nonsensical.
02:03:32.000Like, the 1619 Project, Rewriting of History, and these weird ideas of cis-heteronormative patriarchy controlling everything.
02:03:38.000These people live in a strange reality, and they're violent.
02:03:41.000And 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.
02:03:52.000They're already writing stories saying it's time to go after Trumpism.
02:03:55.000They're already saying it's time for truth and reconciliation.
02:03:58.000I 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.
02:04:20.000Like 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.
02:04:29.000Then, you know, you could very much envision how that could take on very overbearing qualities even beyond what we've seen so far.
02:04:42.000The 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.
02:06:00.000You 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.
02:06:10.000You 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.
02:06:46.000It's just it's just like this whenever something bad happens.
02:06:49.000It's always like there's 895 dimensional chess being played.
02:06:54.000It keeps going up like as Trump's term goes up.
02:06:58.000You need to be on like psychedelic drugs to understand chess schemes.
02:07:01.000Well 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.
02:08:03.000donald dot win allegedly managed to get their hands on the dominion code it's
02:08:07.000the top post on their page the numbers are really scary man i look at it
02:08:10.000that's the software for uh... that the voting machines that were used as it's
02:08:14.000it's the software that was used in like thirty something states
02:08:17.000old was it that's true i mean you know i think i think it's a almost a inevitability of u.s.
02:08:23.000politics that there are going to be theories that developed as to why a certain candidate loses.
02:08:29.000I mean, we saw this obviously in on turbocharged in turbocharged in 2016 as to Russian interference.
02:08:35.000I 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.
02:08:49.000You know, Wisconsin and Michigan or something.
02:08:53.000But 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.
02:09:09.000And, 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.
02:09:17.000But 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.
02:09:29.000And clearly that's now going to increase almost exponentially if Trump himself is rejecting the legitimacy of the election.
02:09:35.000I 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.
02:09:43.000It also declared the entire thing a fraud.
02:09:47.000So, Royal Raptor says, Tim, for months you have told us the left would, quote, by any means necessary try and get Trump out.
02:09:53.000Now 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.
02:10:00.000I think that's an overstatement of what I said.
02:10:02.000I've said there's numerous, uh, there's a, there's a ton of evidence of fraud.
02:10:05.000There's numerous affidavits of people discovering fraud.
02:10:08.000We 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.
02:10:46.000We point out there's affidavits, then there's impropriety, and there's a legal argument being made, and we let the process happen.
02:10:51.000And above all, aim for a voting system that we can trust.
02:10:55.000Or that we don't need to trust because of functions.
02:10:57.000If we don't have our, if we can't have faith in our votes, man, what do we have with the democracy?
02:11:01.000That's why we need to investigate everything.
02:11:03.000But 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.
02:11:10.000But 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.
02:11:22.000So keeping open that possibility is totally warranted.
02:11:25.000And then you ascertain evidence to give you some kind of indication one way or another.
02:11:33.000Because, 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.
02:12:24.000You know, there was this psychological assessment question where they said, if it was true that you couldn't rehabilitate certain criminals, would you try?
02:12:40.000Like, we don't want to just give up on people.
02:12:43.000And so, if you think that the best solution to this is to ignore the complaints of 71 million people, you would be incorrect.
02:12:50.000Because 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.
02:13:02.000The 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.
02:13:12.000So 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.
02:13:17.000more targeted substantive allegations that were logically consistent then I
02:13:23.000think you'd have an easier time convincing people to entertain it and
02:13:26.000rebut it or not in kind of a rational way. I think they have had a...
02:13:48.000So I think it's certainly a possibility.
02:13:50.000I think Amy Coney Barrett is a kind of harbinger of how I suspect this could possibly go.
02:13:55.000Notice I'm not making definitive proclamation because I don't do that.
02:13:58.000I think I'll be delegitimized rightly if I when I say it doesn't come to fruition.
02:14:02.000But 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.
02:14:27.000One of which is changing the composition of the Supreme Court.
02:14:30.000So 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.
02:15:07.000Kevin 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.
02:15:16.000I love the care you put into the song.
02:15:17.000Thank you for making a song that really feels like it means something.
02:15:19.000For those that aren't familiar, I have a music video and song original called Will of the People.
02:15:24.000You'll definitely want to watch it because it's about politics and the cycle of revolution.
02:15:27.000It's going to be on Spotify and iTunes soon.
02:15:29.000There's a certification process, so it takes some time.
02:15:32.000I don't have a music video or song, which I think is probably for the best.
02:16:26.000There 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.
02:16:38.000That you simultaneously hold both far-left and far-right positions?
02:16:41.000Like, 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.
02:16:50.000It'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.
02:18:51.000I 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.
02:18:59.000He 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.
02:19:22.000Yeah, but that's just jurisdictional inter-country lines.
02:19:28.000A lot of the claimed shutdown measures, even in terms of interstate travel, were never enforceable.
02:19:33.000During 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.
02:19:45.000That was the most extreme draconian measure that was taken anywhere in the country at the time.
02:19:48.000And like, I had an out-of-state license plate.
02:19:50.000I was there for like four or five days.
02:20:03.000Um, 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.