Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 746: The Atlantic Warns of the Consequences If Trump Wins a Second Term

Episode Date: February 8, 2024

This episode of Cognitive Dissonance is brought to you by our patrons. You fucking rock. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. We're recording live from Glory Hole Studios in Chicago and beyond. This is Cognitive Dissonance. Every episode we blast anyone who gets in our way. We bring critical thinking, skepticism, and irreverence to any topic that makes the news, makes it big, or makes us mad. It's skeptical. It's political.

And there is no welcome mat. Today is Thursday, February the 8 8th except for that it's not it's actually the first but you're hearing this on the 8th so if anything happened between the first and the 8th we should know about we don't know about it yet so don't hold it against us well yeah yeah or if the atlantic shut down right. They rename it the Pacific. You know, we didn't know. All right. So today is our long form. Although, Tom, I will point this out.

I will point this out. One of the articles that I posted on our notes recently was, I had posted it and we went there today. And when you clicked on it, it was gone. And that's because the entire news site failed. The entire news site failed. The news site is no longer there. It doesn't exist anymore.

I got the story from a place called The Messenger and it's literally gone now. And I only got it because it had a link to a Fox News article. And I didn't want to have to scan all the way down to the Fox News article. I wanted to get their headlines so that I could click on the Fox News article and I didn't want to have to scan all the way down to the Fox News article. I wanted to get their headlines so that I could click on the Fox News article and read the piece, but instead it's just fucking gone.

Right, yeah. And like, I will say, when I did the notes, I tried to find, even if I found a story on Fox, I would find it somewhere else because I don't want to put, as often as I can avoid it,

I don't want to put a Fox link in our show notes. Exactly. So, yeah. Oh, that's crazy. Well, I think... it, I don't want to put a Fox link in our show notes. Exactly. So, yeah. Oh, that's crazy. Well, I think... Yeah, just fucking fold it. I think the Atlantic will be around.

I feel comfortable. Maybe it'll still be there. I hope. I don't know. I'm a subscriber. I'm doing my part. Like, they've got our dollars. So the January, February issue of the Atlantic

is a, you know, it's a two-month issue, and it is, What Happens If Trump Wins? And it is a series-month issue, and it is, what happens if Trump wins? And it is a series of about a dozen or so articles that really, point by point, illustrates in very practical terms, I think, generally, what's going to happen. Like, what would be the effect of this? And the evidence broadly that these articles use

is, A, historical, right? What happened last time? And B, what has he fucking said he'll do? Yeah. And what has he written down? What plans does he have? So, and I bring that up at the start because I think it's an important starting point to begin our conversation that this is not pure speculation, right? This is not just like, ah, you know, you can't really know. Well, I mean, I think you could have bought that in 2016, but in 2024, you can't sell that to me anymore. And it's also not hyperbole, right? Like, like there are going to be some things that I think when I read these,

they didn't feel like they were hyperbolic, but some people may take it as such. And I think all you have to do is read where they're citing, right? What are they citing? What are they talking about? When they talk about, you know, the things that he's planning on doing and you think, well, that doesn't seem right. You just look at what he did already. And most of the stuff they cite,

especially the stuff in these articles, he's already done. Or at the end of his presidency, that's where he was. Yep, exactly, exactly. So let's start with this article. Loyalists, lapdogs, and cronies. In a second Trump term,

there would be no adults in the room. So even that headline, adults in the room, the adults in the room. So even that headline, adults in the room, the adults in the room phrase is a phrase that comes from former Trump administration officials who lamented the lack of adults in the room. And they said basically that there had to be an adult in the room to restrain Donald Trump from the crazy shit he was trying to do from 2016 to 2020. So there were always these restraining forces in the prior administration. Yeah. And they talk very specifically of the people he was very excited to get.

They hand wave away the Steve Bannons and the Michael Flins, and they say those people are not, you know, they're not the best and the brightest anyway. They were sycophants, right? But the people that he was excited to get on his staff, Mathis, he was excited to get Rex Tillerson. You know, when these people came onto his staff and they became part of his cabinet, he was excited to

get him because they had impressive provenance, right? They came to him from a place where other people had looked up to them. Some of them were in industry, titans of industry, you know, other people had, you know, clearly Mathis was a four-star general. So like, that's an important guy who he wanted to make sure was his secretary of defense. So these people are important to him as a showpiece, right? This is his beautiful car that he's able to get. This is, everything is about him, right? Who can I get in this position?

And how does it reflect on me? Because everything is about him. It's not about making the nation the best nation it can be, getting the best and the brightest or the most advanced in that particular portion of government or somebody who has really interesting ideas who hasn't had a shot yet. No, instead it's just like, how does this reflect on me? And you could see that in his hires, who he hired. Those people, for the most part, were gone and washed out within two or three years because most of those people were not sycophants.

They weren't just taking what Trump was giving. They would push back and say, no, I don't want to do that. Or they would argue with him or whatever. And he would eventually fire them or they would eventually resign. And what you were left with in the last year of his presidency was a clown car full of sycophants. That's what it was for the most part. There was one or two people in there that weren't. But for the most part, it was a clown car full of sycophants. And this article is saying, expect that again. You're not going to get any good hires this time. All those people

jump ship. You know, I was just listening the other day to a breakdown of his book, The Art of the Deal. And there's something in it that struck me, and I thought it was apropos to this conversation. And that is that like previously when he was a developer, a real estate developer, Trump's sort of like unwritten motto was to manage by hiring the best people and to let those people, if you hired the best people and the people that were the best experts, that they would naturally produce the best result. Now, if you're managing something, that's not actually the world's worst way to manage, right? So if I'm managing a company and my ethos is, look, I'm not actually going to be the decision maker, but what I'm going to do

is hire the best, brightest people, and I'm going to turn over decision-making to those people. There are worse ways to run a company. That's actually not too much different. I'll raise my hand. That's not too much different than the way that I manage the business that I work for in my day-to-day life, right? So I try to, I'm not the guy who knows how to do anything there. I'm just a guy who helps make sure that the right people know how to do the right things. And I'm good at that piece of it. But that's not what being a fucking president is, right? There is a huge fucking difference here. And his judgment on best people is clearly lacking. He is not good at picking the best people. He is also very willing to throw those good and best people under the bus when they don't embrace his vision.

And that's the other important thing that like is a distinctive point here is that, you know, if you are a manager or a leader who manages by hiring the best people, you are still responsible for creating the vision, right? You are creating the roadmap that all of those people point their efforts toward. The problem is like all of his efforts are pointed toward shitty, evil, short-sighted, ill-thought-out policy positions. Sure. Like 40 of the 44 cabinet secretaries from his 2016 to 2020 presidential administration,

only four of them, one in 11, less than 10% have endorsed him for his new presidential bid. Fully 40 out of 44 are like, hey, I worked there. That guy sucks. When like all of your fucking former close advisors are just like, not that dude. That dude fucking sucks. That's damning. That's absolutely damning. You know, some of those people,

they just stopped seeing eye to eye to him while they were still working there and left. Right? So some of those people, they didn't, they were never going to be one of these people who endorsed him. But some of those people guaranteed

finished his administration out. They rolled out till the end with him. And if you can only get four of those people on board and these, I mean, Tom, he still had a mostly full administration. Now don't get me wrong. A couple of those jobs were in interim people because they left because of January 6th, but there was still people that were working for him. Oh yeah. They still had, you know, the only four of them. Yeah. That's your, of all the things that we should be paying attention to. That's one that you should be looking at and being like, well, why is that? Why did they do that?

Why won't they endorse him? They know behind closed doors. This guy's an absolute schmuck and he doesn't know what he's doing. He's literally he's just watching Fox News and throwing ketchup against the wall. And like, let's talk about some of the people that Trump is floating or are being floated potentially for high level positions in a new administration, because it will give you a flavor of the genuine incompetence of these folks. Right. So Stephen Miller. Yeah. Stephen Miller is one of the worst people that's ever crawled around on two legs. He is a piece of fucking primordial ooze presenting himself as a man in a suit. Stephen Miller is a monster.

And he's done more for anti-immigration causes than 100 years of presidents. He's the architect of Title 42. than a hundred years of, of presidents. He's the architect of title 42. Like he's the one who found, I mean, title 42 is like this weird loophole. They found that they can then just keep people out of the country.

All they have to do is just, just blame COVID. And then they can create these really draconian laws and, and, and use this particular piece of legislation that's on the books to then force people away, you know, legitimate asylum seekers. And it's not made for that, but they went out of their way to do it. And then they did a bunch of shit. Like I've been paying attention to immigration stuff. I did this other podcast,

Lawful Assembly with a friend of mine, Craig, and Craig was a law professor at the university I was working at. And he and I used to talk about this stuff on a previous show that we were doing for the university. And I knew about this Title 42 stuff, you know, a couple years ago. And what they would do is they would have these moments where the government has to tell you when they're going to be changing some of these rules. They let people sort of weigh in. They say, we're going to be making some changes to the rules. Now's your opportunity to comment on these rules. And so lawyers across the country, if they're plugged in, can get an opportunity to comment on these rules. And so lawyers across

the country, if they're plugged in, can get an opportunity to comment on these things, but so can the public. And you would have no idea that these comments were open unless you were plugged into these immigration networks. No, you never heard about it on television. You never heard about it anywhere else. The only way I ever heard about it was Craig. The only reason I ever knew that stuff was ever happening was because Craig. And they, it's like they're opening the gate to just be like, shh, don't say anything. We're going to just open it just for a second. And then we're just going to close it as quickly. And that's what they did. They did a, they, they did a ton of stuff under the radar without letting anyone know. And then they were changing these laws, taking all the comments in and then just changing the laws.

This guy literally is the worst thing to happen to immigration in a long time. He's an awful person. And like he is the champion of the family separation policy. Absolutely. Family separation policy where like it was the policy of the prior administration to literally rip families apart as a way to cause a maximum amount of suffering as a disincentive to other people to not come over and seek asylum through the asylum process. They were just like literally creating this guy, by the way, is being floated in a new administration. So just to give a flavor of who this guy is, in a second Trump term, he is likely to get significant influence, perhaps be named head of Immigrations and Custom

Enforcement, possibly Secretary of Homeland Security or Chief of Staff. The other thing, too, that I want to point out, Tom, I know, I think you and I know that they were doing that to cause harm, right? They're doing that very specific thing, separating people to cause harm. And the reason why you and I know that is because Jeff Sessions literally said that out loud. Yeah, right. Like he said that in a press conference.

He said, we are separating families as a deterrent. Like he said that out loud. So they are, these are people who crossed the desert looking like these are people who crossed the desert looking like these are people who crossed an entire country, maybe several countries looking for a way to get away from the horrible situation they're in looking for asylum. And what we did was we said, cool. Yeah.

I'm just going to take your baby. Yeah. It's this. And this guy who created that was the champion for that, who stood up for that guy's going to be the fucking white house chief of staff,. That guy's going to be the fucking White House chief of staff? Or that guy's going to be the head of immigration? Or that guy's going to be Homeland Security or Homeland Secretary? Richard Grenell, ambassador to Germany in 2018.

He's a fucking Twitter troll. That's who he is. He's a fucking Twitter troll. Well, Trump appointed a fucking blogger to fucking federal judgeship. So why wouldn't he appoint a Twitter troll to fucking some other thing? This is a guy who is very likely to become attorney general. He's a fucking Twitter troll, man. That's what he is. He's a guy the Germans were basically like, we don't want to work with this guy anymore. This guy is incompetent. Yeah. Like Germany like that is a key european ally for the

united states he became diplomat in 2018 and germany was like we like they're throwing up their hands like we can't fucking work with that guy this motherfucker is going to be the attorney general man no they're saying that he would be uh he wouldn't be the attorney general the attorney general ones that they were suggesting were different people. They were saying Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Josh Hawley. They also suggested Jeffrey Clark. I think for him, they were saying that he might be somebody who is involved in as an ambassador in Europe. Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah. Let me double check. You're right. I was misreading my scan as I scanned back through it. Secretary of State. Secretary of State. Holy shit, that's worse than I thought.

It's Secretary of State. It's worse than you thought. That's worse than I thought. It's worse than you thought. Yeah. Yeah. So he was an ambassador before. He might be Secretary of State now.

But the other, like I said, the other, like think of how awful it would be to have Attorney General who's Ted Cruz. Dude, I know. He has to ooze up to the podium each day. We're separating people at the border. I'm going to Cancun.

But then Jeffrey Clark's another one that I'm just like, are you fucking kidding me? That guy's fucking he's going to be on trial in Georgia soon. These are criminals. This is a list of people who've been fucking indicted to like the, the attorney general shortlist includes Ted Cruz, Mike Lee,

and Josh Holly, along with Jeffrey Clark. Holy shit. That is like, yeah, that is a list of evil villains like that. Like they all live together in bunk beds in a fucking volcano lair.

Are you kidding me? Yeah, man. Yeah. Somebody gets to lay on Ted because he can form into anything. So he can just form into the mattress. He just turns into them and they just lay on Ted together.

That Ramaswamy guy is going to get a fucking high level position. I was going to mention Ramaswamy. Yeah, Ramaswamy. There's a possibility he could. I love this too. He could be the ambassador for the United Nation reasoning that he's a good talker. I read that.

I love when Trump is like, he's a good talker. He's good at the words. That guy's a good talker. He's got the talking going on. Oh, yeah. Good talking. He's got them talking. Talking goods.

Genuinely a horror of all the people because of all the things we mentioned. Do not, do not mistake that what will happen is, is he's going to get

a pile of sycophants who are incompetents to run this nation. And they're either going to run it badly in an evil way or incompetently. That's your choice.

I mean, this is where we sit. We sit in a place where either they're going to be actively being evil or they're going to be completely incompetent. And that's why I wanted to start with this story as the lead-in. Because what I think this story, and we'll go through the next three stories,

what I think this story lays the groundwork for is that unlike in the prior 2016 administration, there are no restraining forces on the worst. The governor's off the engines. Yep. Governors off.

Governors are off. That's exactly right. Yep. You can just, you can just fucking, it's going to be all gas, no brakes straight off a fucking cliff. If he gets.

So, so the, the idea that I think a lot of people had in 2016 was, you know, Oh, I mean, he says this, but he won't really do mean, he says this, but he won't really do it. He says this, but they won't let him do

it. You know, oh, cooler heads will prevail. And to some degree, in 2016 through 2020, there were times when very clearly that was the truth. And those people got fucking fired in large part for

putting the governors out. Or they left and they're not coming back. So what's going to happen next is the worst people, a bunch of sycophantic yes people, a bunch of people who are architects of misery,

they are going to be the leaders of the free world. They're going to have... So let's launch into our next story about what happens if Trump wins. This is a story called Trump will abandon NATO. And I love that they pull no punches. It doesn't say might.

If Trump wins, Trump will abandon NATO. He's definitely going to do it. He doesn't find any value in it. There's been obvious links to him. I mean, when we talk about a link to him and Putin, just look at how he acquiesces to him, right? I'm not talking about, just forget all other stuff, right? Forget about everything else.

Forget about anything that has maybe a possible connection between the two or that, you know, he was getting Russian money from somewhere or whatever. Don't think about any of that stuff. Just think about how he defers to him even in public. Remember when he came out, when Putin was, and him had that conversation, he said, well, he did say he didn't do that. I'm sure I can trust a KGB guy. I mean, he said he didn't say it. So he must not have said it. He must not have done it. I looked into his eyes and I saw a very honorable man. This guy, this fucking art of the deal fucking huckster

has no idea that he's being manipulated by Putin. And it happens every single time. And he does not want to piss Putin off. He's shown time and time again, he won't stand up to him. So what would happen if he was in office right now? Well, there certainly wouldn't be any Ukraine aid. I mean, there wouldn't be any of that. So we would be in a position right now where putin would have his choice at what he wants to go after next because

this would already be his so we're in a position if he gets in there he's do you think he cares at all about he doesn't care about nato he give a fuck he doesn't care at all in fact what he was complaining about was how much money we have to spend. That's exactly right. Trump's big fucking talking point, which is a bullshit talking point, was that European countries weren't paying their freight on NATO and the United States was paying a disproportionate share of NATO. So it's a bad deal and we should just get the fuck out of NATO. NATO was founded in 1949 after the second world war. So we could say, all right, look, there is now a rising threat coming from the Soviet union. We don't ever want to have a land war in fucking Europe again. We've got to, we've got to bind ourselves together.

It is a 75 year long or thereabouts military alliance founded on the principle that an attack on one NATO nation is an attack on all NATO nations. And that restraining force has in large part kept the peace between Eastern and Western Europe, even during high tension moments like the fall of the Soviet Union and the establishment of the Russian state. As the Russian state has sought expressly and out loud to rebuild the Soviet Union, what they want is to, and I'm saying this because it's what they fucking said, right? So this isn't speculation.

This isn't that Tom Curry thinks this might be what's true. This is what was fucking said by Putin, right? He wants to reestablish the dominance of the former Soviet Union by recapturing former Soviet territories. He will not stop at Ukraine and make no mistake. Like if NATO falls, Ukraine immediately falls and Belarus gets sucked up in there, too. And why the fuck not invade Poland while we're at it? What is Poland going to do to stop, right? The imperialistic designs of Russia are out there. They're out loud.

They are not a matter of speculation. They're a matter of current and active warfare. I don't, the idea that we could pull out of fucking NATO would be a humanitarian and economic tragedy. There would, it's a fucking world war, man. It's a fucking world war. You pull out of that. He has, it's, it's lit.

You pull out the red carpet goes down. That's right. I mean, it is literally an invitation for him to do whatever he wants. This would be, again, we're talking about interior United States policy in the previous story, right? Because a lot of those jobs happen to be interior jobs. But think about not just what he's going to, what he's going to do with NATO in this situation. Think about the people he'd hire that would then push this, this anti, you know, NATO policy throughout all the ambassadorships that he has. Think of all the different relationships that

he can ruin if he doesn't have qualified good people in those positions, he kicks people out and puts up sycophants who want to fucking start fights with other nations we've had long traditions of being friendly with. I mean, he could ruin so much of our foreign policy in four years. He could literally just burn it all. Yeah. And from this article, I just want to read this from this article because I think this is worth saying. During Trump's time in office, the withdrawal from NATO never happened. That was because somebody was always there to talk him out of it. This is why I want to read that first article first. Bolton, John Bolton, says he did.

Jim Mattis, John Kelly, Rex Tillerson, Mike Pompeo, and even Mike Pence are thought to have also done so. So it never changed his mind. They basically all were like, you can't do it now. You can't do it now. You can't do it now. You can't do it now. There's no one. He is not going to hire people who tell him honest things in the second administration. He is not going to hire people who in any way do not support his fucking worldview. We know this because he said so, right? Again, not speculation.

So he's going to fucking pull out of NATO, man. He's going to pull out of NATO. And then all of the European forces are going to say, well, fuck, without the United States, who's the big swinging dick, we all have to take our forces and bring them home to protect our own borders. They know Europe no longer than has the luxury of uniting together to support one another

because they're all fractioned now or, you know what I mean? They're all, they're all smaller because they don't have the big gun behind them. Yeah. This also has implications in the East with China and Taiwan. You know, again, China and Taiwan and Taiwan, Taiwan is not a part of NATO. I understand that. But again, there is a sense, a global and international sense, that the United States has military allyships that it can call upon in times of crisis and build these coalitions. If we damage those relationships,

we cannot build up on those ally ships. We can't build coalitions. So it's not like it's just a problem in Eastern Western Europe. This would also be a problem in the East with China because China's expressly said they want to take back Taiwan and we're just like hanging out with fucking battleships

and fucking aircraft carriers providing a restraining force. But like, if we stop doing that shit. Yeah. Trump leads, Trump pulls them all out. Those guys out of there. And like, China's going to take over fucking Taiwan. Like it's almost a guarantee.

Like there would be without NATO and the United States is attachment with NATO. There is a strong likelihood of fraction and chaos and international war and economic crisis. This guy isn't just a force of chaos here in the States. He's a force of chaos for the entire fucking world, man. He is genuinely the fucking, he's the fly in the ointment for the whole thing. He throws the whole thing off of of the stability of the entire globe. And not just, we're going to talk about

a couple stories later. We're going to talk about a climate change story. The entire globe hinges on this next election. This isn't just us. This is the whole globe hinges on it. There's like a hundred ways. Let's talk about that next article because there is now, there are like a hundred ways why genuinely the 2024 election is existential. That is not an exaggeration. start pulling data and collecting data that they knew that Trump was going to try to hide or try to pull down as soon as he took office. That leads people to believe that it has evidence of climate change. And he did. He very much, as soon as he took office, he not only gutted the EPA, he not only changed, pulled us out of the Paris Accords, but did a whole bunch of other things in policy to try to gut any kind of environmental anything.

Pushed away from green energy. Tried to fight California when they wanted to go with more fuel efficient cars. Tried to spend his whole fucking goddamn presidency arguing about fucking low flow toilets and shower heads. And then, and then he very much pulled every fucking bit of data off the fucking website because he immediately on the, on the website for the EPA and for, for the white house, he fucking scrubbed it about environmental concerns immediately. As soon as he took office,

because he, that is his absolutely, you will never get a, a, a, a piece of him or a piece of his administration to push anywhere that is conservationist in any way. That's not going to happen.

So if he goes in, again, it's all gas, no brakes. And can the world take an all gas, no brakes for more years of Trump when it comes to this sort of thing? Yeah, and like from this article, I think this is a great point. I want to read this direct. Pulling out of the Paris agreements might be a largely symbolic move, but it could have a domino effect. India, Indonesia, Brazil, if they see that the U.S. is not acting, it will be easy for conservative politicians in those countries to say

those big rich guys aren't doing anything. Why should we? That's super fucking true. Those big rich guys aren't doing anything. Why should we? That's super fucking true. What we do, the world has a tendency to follow or feel pressured by. And in each of those countries named India, Indonesia, Brazil, you have really fucking conservative governments, man. And we have real issues across the globe that need to be addressed in terms of climate change. It's not just the United States pulling out of the Paris agreement. It would essentially

collapse the whole agreement, right? So it's not just like, oh, we're not doing this. The whole agreement would basically fucking fall apart. If we don't act on climate change in the next four years, what we're going to then we're going to do. Oh, we will promise we'll do it in four more. And then we'll promise we'll do it in four more. Like, we're just not going to fucking do it. We're just not going to do it. And if we don't do it, we're fucked.

We're seriously, absolutely fucked. You know, the only thing so far on climate change that the science has gotten wrong is they have underestimated the speed and the effect. The speed. That's it. The speed of it. They've underestimated the speed and the effect. They've not gotten it wrong in terms of like, what's going to happen? Just like, geez, we thought we'd have longer. And then we keep finding out like, nope, we don't have longer. We have less time than we said. We thought we'd have a hundred years. We don't have a hundred years. We don't have even close to a hundred years. And a 100 years is a fucking blink of an eye. If you've got like, you know, I think about this with my kids.

And like, I tell my kids flat out, don't have fucking kids, man. Because the math doesn't make sense. Because like my son who's born in 2006, if he lives to 80 years, he dies in 2086. If he has kids when he's 30, like I did, and that kid's lived, he'll have a kid at 30, and that kid lives, let's say, 80 years. His kid's going to live till 2116. And I'm supposed to look out at the world and say, I think the world is going to be a great place for you to live in 2086, or I think it's going to be a great place for you to live in 2086, where I think it's going to be a great place for you to bring kids into the world, and they're going to be a part of the world

beginning in 2036. They'll come of age in, what, 2054? They'll come of age at 18. They'll go through college, let's say, at 2058. And I think I'm going to be able to look those kids in the eye and say, yeah, I think the world will be worth living in. I think it's going to be hard, man.

I think if you're not fucking just rich, it's going to be hard, really hard. I was watching a video by, they were interviewing Brian Cox. I don't know if you know who that is, but he's a physicist and really smart guy. And he's talking about all kinds of like different things. And the existential threat that we pose to ourself, it's one of the pieces of the Drake equation, right? So one of the pieces is what happens when we, when these societies that the Drake equation is trying to find extraterrestrial life

and several pieces of that equation have to do with why is it so hard to see that? Why is it so hard to find life in the universe? And what happens is there's a possibility that you get to a certain point and you wipe yourself out, right? Like you get to a point where there's a possibility of a pathogen that you create or you don't pay attention to. There's a possibility of nuclear annihilation. There's a possibility of a war or a man-made climate change that we basically create an environment

that we can no longer live in. And he's talking about it. And one of the things he said was, I wish every single leader in the world could go up into space and see the world from space and just look at the world and then look out at that blackness. And then hopefully that they realize that, you know, we could be the only intelligent life in this galaxy. That's a possibility, right? And we're going to wipe ourselves out. Like your decision making needs to be more broad and it needs to take more things into consideration when you're in the, in this position of power. And we've, we've, we're so short-sighted as a species that we keep doing these bad things

because we just don't, we can't look ahead. We can't, when you talk about climate change and you talk about stuff that's going to happen in 20 years, literally no one will listen to you. Nobody cares. Nobody's, nobody gives a shit. And we need to change how we think about that. We're not, we don't have a plan on how to change how we think about it. We have a bunch of ideas on things that we can do that can maybe change the world. But now you've got to get a lot of the people, the older people who are in charge on board with them and none of them are. And let me tell you, Trump sure is fucking— Trump is not. And I want to read again directly from the article.

So there are very, very influential fossil fuel-led groups, such as the Heritage Foundation and the American First Policy Institute. And they are right now building a battle plan to block electricity grid updates that would allow for solar and wind expansion. They are building a plan to make sure that our grids do not get updated to allow for clean energy sources to be funneled into the fucking grid because they are owned by fossil fuel companies. We are at this intensely frustrating point where we might technologically be approaching the ability to beat this thing.

If we would just treat this like what it is, if we would just say, hey, why don't we all get together and decide that we shouldn't fucking ruin the only earth that we have, the only home that we have to live on. Instead, it's like we're getting together and we're saying, why don't we commit slow motion suicide and jerk off to money while we do it? Why don't we wrap our fucking dicks in dollar bills and then kill ourselves? Well, by drinking a fucking gallon of kerosene, like there are things that we can do and we're aggressively, that's what I mean. Like we are blocking electrical grid updates so that we can't fix the problem.

We are getting in the way of California passing their own car pollution standards because their car pollution standards would greatly influence all the vehicles made and manufactured here in the States, which would damage, again, the fossil fuel industry. So we are actually infringing upon states' rights in order to make sure that that state doesn't do something that doesn't fucking enrich BP Amoco, or doesn't enrich Shell Oil, or doesn't enrich, you know, whatever, these other motherfuckers, right? None of those guys have our best interests at heart. They have concentrated PR campaigns to lie to us to make this slow motion suicide seem

like something that's in our best interest. It's objectively not. It is objectively not. We are going to gut the clean power divisions of the Department of Energy. We are going to gut the EPA. divisions of the Department of Energy. We are going to gut the EPA. This is what's going to happen. We are going to set ourselves, in four years, we'll set ourselves back 20 years. We really will. Because it's so easy to break things, man. We let people make decisions that they will not have to live to see the consequences of.

That's fucking right. that they will not have to live to see the consequences of. That's fucking right. Man, what we need is an influx of younger people in government who will live to see the consequences of their actions on these things. You know, because Trump's going to be dead in 15 years. You know, he's not going to be around in 15 years. You know, the people that are in government, Mitch McConnell's going to live another 15 years?

No, Mitch McConnell's not going to live another 15 years. These fucking septuagenarians don't give a shit, they'll be dead. And I'll tell you, you know,

fucking Chuck Grassley's not going to live another 10 years. No, right. Like these people are, Joe Biden probably won't live another 10 years. These are the people

who are in charge of what's happening right now. They're not going to live past 10 years. So it doesn't matter, like, like put somebody in charge who's in their 40s, who's got to look out at another possible 40 years of life

and be like, okay, I need to think about how I'm making these decisions for 40 years in the future because nobody's making those decisions like that now. Yeah, man. Let's talk about this next article, the last one that we're going to talk about today. The specter of family separation. Donald Trump and his allies have promised

to restore their draconian zero-tolerance immigration policy. Cecil, I know you and Craig talk a lot about immigration on your show, Lawful Assembly, and it's an issue that's near and dear to your heart. The Trump administration's immigration policies would be based entirely in cruelty. This is bad policy. Even if your goal is to reduce the flow of migrant asylum seekers, this does not accomplish that goal.

The only thing this accomplishes is it accomplishes cruelty for photo ops to appeal to bigots. That's exactly it. I want to read a piece of this. It says, if given another chance to realize his goal, Stephen Miller, who we talked about earlier,

that evil hobgoblin, has essentially boasted in recent interviews that he would move even faster and more forcefully. And Trump, who's been campaigning on the promise to finish the job he started on immigration policy, would fairly assume if he's reelected that harsh restrictions in that arena are precisely what the American people want. Quote, following the Eisenhower model, we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history, end quote. He declared in a speech in Iowa in September,

referring to 1954's offensively titled Operation Wetback, under which hundreds of thousands of people with Mexican ancestry were deported, including some who were American citizens. Here's the thing that people don't understand. This happens all the time. We start creating these shitty rules, these shitty policies, these essentially stop and frisk for migrants. And what you do is you wind up hurting not just that vulnerable population, but you also hurt American citizens. Very often, American citizens are the people who are attacked by this. And they're the ones, like, look at this. They're fucking deported actual American citizens.

This is our country's heritage. It has happened before. What we need to do is step away from that and never let it happen again. But Trump is like, you know what? We're going to make America great again from back before segregation. For real. What is astonishing to me is that- During segregation, not back before.

Yeah, very much during segregation. I got you, buddy. You know what I meant. I am astonished, Cecil, that there is a growing contingent of Latin American voters backing Trump. Yeah, man.

When Trump's immigration policy mimics the 1954 policy called Operation Wetback. Yep. He is just an out andand-out racist, man. They're looking for people who look foreign. They're looking for people who just look foreign. That's not a criteria, man.

In a multicultural nation, what the fuck does look foreign even fucking mean? It means nothing. It means racism will be ensconced as policy, as policy. They're talking about, and this is just straight up from the talking points from Trump and other key fixtures in his office. They are going to reinstate family separation. They are going to mobilize the DEA, the FBI, and the National Guard, along with ICE agents, to make arrests. They are, and you mentioned this before, they are going to reimpose the pandemic-related

expulsion policy known as Title 42. They are going to expand the use of military-style camps to house people who are caught up in these enforcement dragnets. Again, these are largely asylum seekers. These are not criminals. They are going to screen people, screen potential immigrants for Marxist views before allowing them entry. They are going to use the Alien and Sedition Act in service of deportations. They are going to invoke the Insurrection Act to allow them to deploy

the U.S. military on the border. They're going to use a naval blockade between the United States and Latin America to fight the drug trade as if that has fucking anything at all to do with immigration. Spoiler, it fucking doesn't.

That is a fucking red herring. The whole drug trade shit. That's where that shit comes. Comes through ports of entry. 90% of the drugs comes through ports of entry. It's just a stupid thing to think. And if you don't think he's going to mobilize the Border Patrol, I will remind you of a time during the George Floyd protests

where he mobilized the Border Patrol and black vans to abduct people in Portland. Yeah. So I don't know if you remember that. I remember that. He had mobilized the fucking border patrol, which is America's largest police force to become his essential, essentially his jackbooted thugs to drive around wherever he wanted and abduct people off the street. So if you don't think that's going to happen in the last year of his presidency, he already did that. He's just going to be doing it to a group of people

that his constituency wants to see hurt. That's it. That's the entirety of Trump's draw to them. The entirety of Trump's draw is if you can hurt the people I don't like, then I will like you. He's going to trigger the libs. He's going to go after the immigrants and that's going to make me happy. It's not going to make me anything else. He's going to burn the world down around me.

He's going to surround himself in sycophants. The world's going to fall to shit because we're going to pull out of all of our obligations throughout the world. But guess what? He made those people mad and that's enough for me. That's it. If we have a troll in chief, we will get troll results. And that is a thousand percent. To wrap up this episode, I want to read the title and the blurb for the articles we didn't get to, because this is not a fraction of the damage that would be done by a 2024 presidential election win by Donald Trump. Again, it's fucking existential. It is genuinely existential.

So there's an article called How Trump Gets Away With It. I've read this whole issue. If elected, if reelected rather, he would use the powers of the presidency to invade justice and punish his enemies. Again, we know that because he fucking said it. He said that out loud, right? Four more years of unchecked misogyny. In a second Trump term, women would once again be targets. Again, he targets women as a matter of course. Trump has attacked women from the moment he's opened his mouth on the political stage, and he has never stopped doing it.

51% of the population he has no fucking respect for and doesn't see as people. President Xi, the Chinese president, wants Trump to win. A second Trump term will allow China to cement its grip on the developing world 100%. Yes, that is true. Corruption unbound. Donald Trump and his cronies left his first administration with a playbook for self-enrichment in his second term. He enriched himself to the tunes of tens of millions of dollars through his administration.

Trump's polarization of science is bad for everyone. This article, a re-elected Donald Trump Would continue to attack studies that stand in the way of his agenda And to make support for scientific inquiry a tribal belief We saw that during the pandemic We saw the erosion of the public trust in science and medicine As a stated institutionalized goal of the Trump administration in 2020. Is journalism ready?

The press has repeatedly fallen into Donald Trump's traps. A second term could render journalism irrelevant. Very, very true. A MAGA judiciary. In a second term, Donald Trump would appoint more judges who do not care about and follow the law. The Proud Boys love a winner. A second Trump term would validate the violent ideologies of far-right extremists and allow them to escape legal jeopardy. He said he is going to pardon

these white nationalist racists. A plan to outlaw abortion everywhere. You and I talked about this earlier before the show. Trump has a plan to outlaw abortion by enforcement of the Comstock Act, which would get rid of abortion in Illinois and California and Massachusetts and all the blue enclaves. We are not safe. The truth won't matter if reelected Donald Trump

will once again turn out absurdity and outrage with factory efficiency, civil rights undone, how Trump could unwind generations of civil rights progress. A war on blue America in a second term, Trump would punish the cities and states that don't support him. Again, he said this out loud. Yep. Donald Trump versus American history. He has promised to impose his harmful, erroneous claims on school curricula in a second term. Trump's plan to police gender. His campaign is promising a more repressive and dangerous America. He will build a military loyal to Trump. In 2020, the armed forces were a bulwark against Trump's anti-democratic designs.

Changing that would be a priority of his second term. What will happen to the American psyche if Trump is reelected? Our bodies are not designed to handle this kind of chronic stress. There's two more. I just, look, guys, this is, go out and buy the issue of The Atlantic and read it.

We just covered a piece of it, a chunk of it, a small piece of it. This is not hyperbole. I think this is the most urgent. This is why I get crazy about really talking about this election as a pragmatic issue where we can't afford to be like, well, I don't like Biden. Look, I don't like everything Biden does either. I don't care. The choice is between Trump and Biden. I don't care if you dislike Biden. You can't both sides this shit.

Not this time. Yeah, the problem is that at a certain point, when it is existential, you have to release some of your grip on idealism. And, you know, you and I were talking ahead of time when you were saying, you know, if you don't vote for Biden, some people think that you're somehow punishing Biden, that that is a punishment. Biden's going to go home and just be rich and die. That's, if he doesn't win, you are the one who loses. Nobody, like

everybody loses, right? It's not just Biden. And it's not just punishing Biden because you're not punishing him really directly. He just lost the presidential thing. You're the one who's hurting yourself. You're shooting yourself in the foot. This one is so, like, I'm an idealist at heart. And I sympathize with idealism.

I really do. But I recognize too, there's sometimes you've got to push that in the back and say, no, this is a crisis that needs to be handled now. Let's handle it. And then we can start working on our idealism. Let's work on idealism grassroots.

Let's work on idealism midsize. Let's work on idealism in state. And let's work on getting rid of this guy forever. And then let's start to shift that idealism up to the, up to the white house. But if you don't do that and you think, well, I just want to not participate, man, we're in for a real, real rude awakening when he gets, I mean, there's, there is no, there is no four years after this. I don't even know. I don't either. And like, there's an idea that like, if like if the Democrats lose to Trump, that the Democrats

will go home and they will self-reflect and they'll see the things they did wrong and they'll realize that a more progressive agenda is really what America wants. And then four years later, they'll show up with a more progressive America. And I understand that like broad strategic concept as far as proving using your vote and hurting their chances and making them do that self-reflection, just not this time. If you don't know Trump is different, you're not paying attention. He showed you for four years in 2016, do we not remember the chaos of the summer of 2020? Do we not remember the chaos and the violence and the fear

and the incompetency and the corruption and the near destruction of the American democratic state? Like, is that something that like you think maybe won't happen for something, something reasons this time?

Yeah, like I get the idea to say like, fuck those guys. Let's put the right people in charge. Let's send them packing so they can lick their wounds and come back to us better. I get that. I do. Not this time though. Not this time. Not with Trump. He's different. He's different. Read this. Read this. You don't want another pandemic, right? Even if nothing else happens, you don't want another pandemic to happen while that guy's in office

because he fucking couldn't find his ass with two hands during a crisis. Any single crisis, that man will fold like a fucking chair. He will just fold. He was so bad during that entire process. You just have to think back to how terrible he was. This is a guy telling people

we need to put disinfectant in their bodies. Yeah, man. That's how he handled a fucking pandemic. So, and that's just one aspect of his presence. And it was a pandemic set on easy mode. Yeah, just one. It was just one. So genuinely, this is an existential crisis.

All right, that's going to wrap it up for this week. We're going to be back on Monday. Be sure to tune in. We're going to leave you now, though, like we always do with the Skeptic's Creed. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter, mommy issue, hypno-Babylon bullshit. Couched in scientician, double bubble, toil and trouble, pseudo-quasi-alternative, acupunctuating,

pressurized, stereogram, pyramidal, free energy, healing, water, downward spiral, brain dead, pan, sales pitch, late night night info docutainment. Leo Pisces. Cancer cures. Detox. Reflex. Foot massage. Death in towers.

Tarot cards. Psychic healing. Crystal balls. Bigfoot. Yeti. Aliens. Churches. Mosques and synagogues.

Temples. Dragons. Giant worms. Atlantis. Dolphins. Truthers. Birthers. Witches.

Wizards. Vaccine nuts. Shaman healers. Evangelists. Conspiracy. worms, Atlantis, dolphins, truthers, birthers, witches, wizards, vaccine nuts, shaman healers, evangelists, conspiracy, doublespeak, stigmata, nonsense. Expose your sides. Thrust your hands. Bloody, evidential, conclusive. Doubt even this. All opinions are solely that of Glory Hole Studios, LLC. Cognitive dissonance makes no representations as to accuracy, completeness, currentness, suitability, or validity of any information and will not be liable for any errors, damages, or butthurt arising from consumption. All information is provided on an as-is basis.

No refunds. Produced in association with the local dairy council and viewers like you