Chapo Trap House - Seeking a Fren Ep 6 Teaser - Stop The Steal

Episode Date: January 15, 2025

Felix recounts Trump’s efforts to discredit the 2020 election as part of the long history of election denial on the right in this clip from Episode 6 of his series “Seeking a Fren for the End of the World.” The full episode and rest of the series are available for subscribers at patreon.com/chapotraphouse.

Trump's efforts to spin any loss in a general election as a win that had been stolen from him had begun long before those midnight drops in Milwaukee and Atlanta. For as much as the established media would cast election denial as something entirely alien to the American tradition, it really was anything but. Even if you ignore the obvious precedents, like McCain's warning that Acorn would steal the 2008 elections or the entirety of the birther movement, you still have countless examples of the right-crank fraud when it didn't get its way, and some of the times when it did get its way.

Even after Trump won and became president in 2016, he still spent a significant amount of time after the election claiming that illegal immigrants had cost him the popular vote and a win in the state of New Hampshire. If you want to go really far back, you could point to the widespread belief that the Kennedys rigged the 1960 election as having first laid the groundwork for this. Or how Gerald Ford diehards and Lyndon fucking LaRoche alleged that Jimmy Carter had stolen the presidency in 1976. The point here is that Trump's effort to remain in power indefinitely didn't come out of nowhere. Even the phrase stop the steal itself wasn't new.

Roger Stone had actually formed a group with that exact same name back in 2016, in anticipation of Hillary's seemingly impending victory. And for as much as Trump's efforts to steal his second term were cast as the doing of a ragtag cast of unknown sycophants, many of those who did the heaviest lifting for this effort had been right-wing power players for decades. Two days after the election was called for Biden, Jimmy Thomas, wife of Clarence himself, sent emails to dozens of Arizona state legislators demanding that they overturn the results in the state and give its 11 electors to Trump.

Samuel Alito's wife hung a flag at his home in support of the movement. And over the following months, one of the lawyers working overtime to help Trump's plans was Michael Faris himself, who had replaced Alan Sears as the lead of the Alliance Defending Freedom. Still, not everyone in the GOP was so in the tank as to think that they could overturn a clear victory for Biden through sheer power of will, or that doing so would even be advisable. On Capitol Hill, most Senate Republicans fell in line behind Biden as the rightful president-elect, whether it be out of principle or out of a frantic desire to save the

party's chances in the upcoming chamber deciding elections in Georgia. And in the real right-wing halls of power, Leonard Leo had stopped returning Trump's phone calls ever since election day. Not even the Supreme Court would bite, despite some obvious sympathy towards Trump held by some of the body's members. That wouldn't stop Trump from goning his followers into attacking the Capitol, which ended up resulting in nothing other than a few cops killing themselves after the fact, a bunch of old people wandering around Mark Pocan's office like an empty doom level,

and the hanging of another electoral albatross around the Republican Party's neck. Yes, we think J6 was good. You could quote any one of us on that anywhere you want. I was personally there, and I told Ashleigh Babbitt that Ryan O'Neill's soul had been freed from that dagger, and that she was able to rewind time like Prince of Persia, and that bullets would do nothing to stop her. Problem? In the end, all that Trump's post-election adventures would give him was his lowest personal

favorability ratings in years, dual losses in Georgia that handed Democrats the Senate majority, and a real mandate for the newly installed Brandon regime. But instead of reveling in this triumph, as one might expect for a party that had just won the second largest presidential election victory of the 21st century, the mood among Democratic higher-ups around this time was quite peculiar. In contrast to the right, which had just spent four years treating the most blatant fluke win of all time as a generational mandate, liberal elites viewed their 2020 victory with something bordering on embarrassment. Hyped up by busted polling that led them to believe that they were on track to win over

400 electoral votes in 55 Senate seats, they were left completely bereft when the race once again came down to the wire in just a few states, and their bare Senate majority was commandeered by a mansion cinema regime. In their minds, it was hard for them to conceive of an opponent weaker than Trump, circumstances better than 2020,

or a Democratic nominee better than Joe Biden. Yes, seriously. The fact that this didn't correspond with a historic landslide was proof positive to them that something about American liberalism was deeply, deeply wrong. But those searching for a culprit wouldn't have to wait long.

As quickly as they diagnosed this problem, these liberals had already found the root cause for this supposed disease and a new enemy to be defeated, the progressive left. During the opening stages of the Biden administration, these innovative thinkers would work together to craft a new long-term strategy for liberalism. Matthew Iglesias, a 40-year-old blogger mostly known for his Iraq War advocacy and courageous moral stand against workplace safety laws in underdeveloped countries, provided foresight and intellectual rigor.

David Chouwer, a young hot-chat scoop Jackson Democrat who loved to attend wonk raves and then brag about the plur therein to college sophomores in his group DMs, provided the urbane cool factor in street smart practicality. From these two fathers, popularism, as it was called, was thrust into this world feet first and with its umbilical cord wrapped tightly around its neck. Their thesis was as simple as it was utterly hysterical. As they told it, due to well-educated progressives insisting that Democrats support any policies

to the left of reforming zoning laws and shoveling money to Israel, middle America was being driven into the arms of the far right to such a degree that the Republican Party was on track to achieve uncontested power within the span of only a few years. To prevent such an outcome, they said, the Democrats had no other choice but to embrace the left-punching, me-too politics of the Clintons, who the popularists would eventually come to fetishize

as unfairly maligned political geniuses. Yes, also seriously. Such declarations are easy to mock after years of witnessing right-wing media figures freaking out voters at an exponentially higher rate than even the most annoying former Liz lads. But it was truthfully really, really influential at the time, and a theory of politics worth a series of its own, sometime in the future perhaps. But with a disempowered left providing no holistic theory of politics of its own to

counter these figures, their belief settled into something of a consensus among liberal thinkers just by default, especially as Biden's once-high personal popularity rating fell into the abyss over the course of his first year in power. And so, when the right launched their attack, the Democratic Party was left playing defense and generally being scared shitless about future cycles. The racially conscious politics of 2020 would be smeared as critical race theory, DEI, or wokeism. Transgender rights would now be cast as grooming, once a term that referred to a specific type

of child abuse, specifically the kind that Roy Moore was credibly accused of. That was a term for anyone who didn't call CPS on any kid with a perm. Fear-mongering about immigrant caravans would continue and escalate even as the Democrats swung to the hard right on the issue. And although playing so hard to the base in the aftermath of a losing national effort was an undeniably risky move in theory, the people pushing this new direction were hardly lacking in confidence. Part of this was, of course, the simple fact that they sincerely believed that they had

never lost that election in the first place. But many of their arguments also came directly from the work of popularist liberals, whose thesis fit their theory of politics like a glove. As they battled against the last remaining moderate forces in the Republican Party for full control over messaging, hardcore social conservatives would extensively cite Democratic strategists to argue that their path forward was the most electorally viable one. Helping them massively in this was that David Schor and his allies, as pseudo-intellectuals often do, had been laying out their theory in the most dramatic and grandiose

terms possible. Instead of simply making messaging recommendations, they were pushing forward a new universal field theory of politics, one that declared the very nature of progressive politics to be inexorably alienating to working class voters of all races, who were said to be naturally predisposed to cultural conservatism. In this telling, the GOP didn't need to change anything at all to be on track to long-term dominance. All they had to do was continue to be themselves, avoid making voters once again perceive them as Romney-style elitists, and let Democrats continue to alienate everyone who wasn't part of a polycule. Shor himself would quickly become a favorite of the American Principles Project, who included

a full page's worth of quotes from him in their mid-2021 document, MAGA After 2020, How the GOP Can Win Again and Save America. After laying out his theory in his own words, they declared in their own words, Trump actually broadened the Republican base by tying Democrats to their most unpopular positions, wokeism and its related issues. And should Republicans continue to successfully deploy this strategy, there would be ample room to expand the party's coalition even further in the elections to come. While the entire con ink machine would mobilize in the APP's direction, there are two forces primarily worth focusing

on. The first is the Alliance Defending Freedom. The ADF received hundreds of millions of dollars from Ziklag. The static goal is to take down the education system as we know it." Ziklag's vision of the country is Seven Mountains Dominionism, a Maoist sounding term it."