Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 750: Trump Shoes, Book Bans Backfire

Episode Date: March 4, 2024

Show Notes

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 22nd. And Cecil, we are apart again. I mean, we're not doing video. Yeah, and we're doing a get-ahead, so you're going to hear this on the 4th. Yes, we are. We're making some plans, guys. We're going to take a

little hiatus that you won't even feel. A single night off. A single night off. And in order to earn that, we're doing extra work ahead of time. Yeah, we're doing a get ahead. And we had to record separately today. So there's no video for this. And it's a get ahead.

So we hope you enjoy it. We hope you enjoy it. We think you will. We know we're still evaluating, just so you guys know, we're still evaluating the YouTube issue. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whether or not enjoy it. We think you will. We know we're still evaluating, just so you guys know, we're still evaluating the YouTube issue, whether or not we decide to go back to that

fucking hole in the wall. I don't know. We got some people who came back and said, you know, look, we'd really like it if you'd come back. I watch you almost exclusively on YouTube. Those people were very few and far between. I will say that the video that we posted was an immense amount of comments on that video that we posted was an immense amount of comments

on that video that we posted that explained our situation. So thank you for commenting. And we made sure to read them all. So we're going to collate them and look through them and see what we do when May rolls around. Absolutely.

All right, Cecil. So this first story comes from our friends over at Ars Technica. And by the way, is it required for every measles-related story to use the same stock footage of the same fucking kid? That same kid? It's disguised. I think so.

It's the same fucking kid. Every time we do a measles stories, there's a picture of some fucking toe-headed kid with a million measles spots and blonde hair and a black bar across his eyes. It's the same picture. He's like's the same picture. Yeah, I know. Measles erupts in Florida school where 11% of kids are unvaccinated. Over a hundred children at the school are susceptible to the virus. Oof, that is huge, man. 10%. They normally try to keep it down below 5%.

That is so much, man. And what happens is when these kids are, there's not enough of them, you are saying how easy it is to get this sickness because the virus itself is hardy and stays in the room for a while. It's really easily transmissible. And it's just flowing right through this entire population. And you see all these parents, these parents, and these parents are parents who would be about our age or maybe a little younger, would have had their kids. And then they almost certainly were vaccinated themselves,

but somehow convinced that that is going to be a bad thing for their kids. And they decided not to do it. And now your kid's going to get the measles, which could kill them. Yeah, it could kill them. It could render them sterile. It can mark them for life. Measles is no joke. Measles really, really is no joke. The CDC recommends and health officials recommend a 95% vaccination coverage

or more to protect from measles. That's the recommendation rate. In this school in Florida, the coverage rate was 89.3%. That's a big difference. That really is a big difference. And I want to read right from this article. Health officials typically consider vaccination coverage at 95% or greater sufficient to protect from ongoing transmission. In the years since the COVID-19 pandemic began, vaccination rates among U.S. kindergartners have slipped to 93%. And vaccine exemptions reached an all-time high in the latest data from the 2022-2023 school year. There are now at least 10 states that have vaccination exception rates above 5%, meaning that even if every non-exempt child gets vaccinated, those states will not have enough coverage to reach that 95% target. That is across 10 different fucking states. In the year 2000, in the United States, the United States was declared measles free. The United States had

eliminated the measles 24 years ago. That's almost a full generation. A generation is what, 25 years? Yeah. So a generation ago, we had destroyed and eliminated the measles through a concentrated effort of vaccination. We could have globally eliminated the measles. This is a globally eliminatable disease. Nobody has to get this. So every time somebody gets this, it was preventable. Every time, Cecil. That's fucking crazy that we're not get this. So every time somebody gets this, it was preventable. Every time, Cecil.

That's fucking crazy that we're not doing this. And you can poke us right back in the eye of the motherfucking Republicans who sowed the seeds of doubt through the COVID-19 pandemic, because it's right there in the article. COVID-19 vaccine nuts are going to kill not just through COVID, but they are going to kill through these other transmissible diseases. Absolutely. And you're right. You can point to them. You can certainly point to Wakefield. I know that in the early 2000s, I was hearing about Wakefield. I wasn't a full skeptic at that point. And I heard from a couple different people how bad the MMR vaccine was. And I thought, wow, that's crazy. I never heard about that before. And then there was a bunch of stuff that came out about it. They did some studies.

He was eventually disgraced, but early on, that was a really powerful tool to get people to go after people to convince them that medicine itself is flawed. The hucksters at the time, the people who wanted to sell you supplements, the people who wanted to sell you juicing, the people who wanted to sell you their diet, their pills, whatever it was, their chiropractic, whatever it was, they used this as a wedge between you and regular medicine. And gullible people, and we found in the last several years that they were more prominent than we had hoped, really glommed onto this, had kids, and they just carried that over. And these kids now are not protected. And now they're, and those kids back then weren't protected.

Now they're not protected at all because they're probably having kids and not protecting them as well. So we're in a bad situation, something that we could have easily eliminated. And we did actually in 2000. But I think just like no child left behind, we left some things behind.

We did. i want to return to something you said which is like these guys have they're the motives are not pure for the disseminators of this horrible information right of these lies which is what they are andrew wakefield stood to make millions of dollars, up to $43 million a year, selling test kits for different fraudulent medical bullshit. He made $800,000 to publish his study, his bullshit study that he published through the Lancet as popularized and supported by Barr. These guys are in it to make dough. They're in it to make money. It comes from someplace. They are not just like-minded people who are trying to look out

for the best interests of kids. That's not where this originates. That might be where you heard it from. You might have heard it from a well-meaning mom next door or a well-meaning, you know, coworker. That might be how you get the information. But where it starts, when you look at the genesis of this, it comes from grift. Every single time. There are no exceptions. It comes from grift.

It comes from somebody saying, not that, but this, and give me a check. Not that, but this, and write me a check. Every fucking time. So like these guys- I'll crack your neck. Yeah. I that, but this, and write me a check. Every fucking time. So like these guys- I'll crack your neck. Yeah, I'll crack your neck, man. I'll crack your back. I'll do that.

I'll sell you my book. I'll sell you my fucking vitamins. I'll sell you my detox pills. I'll sell you my other bullshit. My fucking ultra juicer. They all have, they're all running a grift, but they can only run that grift if they sell you fear of something first.

And I think for a while, they felt like selling anti-vaccine stuff was kind of safe. Because if you didn't get the vaccine and you were living in a world where everybody else was vaccinated, you were unlikely to get sick, so nothing bad was really going to happen to you. And I could sell you a fucking juicer, man. I could sell you this stuff. So I think for a while, it seemed like a really good, low hurt grift, but that's not how this shit stays. It doesn't stay that way because that's not how disease fucking works. And I'm not also convinced that they ever gave a shit

about the downstream effects of that grift, right? I'm not trying to like give them that credit. I don't think they did either. I don't think they gave a shit. And I think that you're absolutely right. Vaccines are a victim of their own success. They're so successful that people thought, well, that's something that I can assail and nothing will happen to it. Officer, I got one question for you. What are those?

What are those? All right, this story comes from The Independent. Parkland's survivor trolls Trump's new sneaker venture by buying domain and directing visitors to gun safety site. This fucking guy's selling sneakers, man. Oh, yeah. Did you see the sneakers? Did you see them?

Cecil, genuinely the ugliest, tackiest things. They're exactly what you would expect from fucking Trump shoes. So there's a video I watched of him announcing them. And it's hard to tell because if you watch it from different cameras, you can hear the boos and you can't. And in one of them, there's a guy who's filming it from the audience and there's a bunch of people filming it from the audience and there's a bunch of people around him booing Trump because he's in Philadelphia at the time at Sneaker Con. Oh my God. And he's trying to have a perfect place for him selling a sneaker at a con. So he's there

trying to hawk these terrible shoes to somebody and people are booing him. But they're like, you know, several hundred dollars a pair. I also saw, did you see the Fox News thing where they had the person on Fox News? No. So I'm going to play this bit from Fox News. This is connecting with black America because they love sneakers. They're into sneakers. They love the, you know, this is a big deal, certainly in the inner city. No.

So when you have Trump roll out his sneaker line, they're like, wait a minute. This is cool. He's reaching them on a level that defies and is above politics. The culture always trumps politics. And Trump understands culture like no politician I've ever seen. Question for you on that point, though. Will the people that are excited about the sneakers and excited about Donald Trump, will that translate into them going out and voting for Donald Trump? Anybody willing to put 400 bucks down for a pair of sneakers. Yeah.

I think that's commitment and love. It's something, it's something, it's a. Holy shit. Holy shit. Segment you've ever heard in your entire life. Like genuinely requires no breakdown.

Cause there's nothing left to say that he didn't just say. I can't. Yeah. You can't say anything about it. You just play it and think, wow, somebody said that out loud. Holy shit. That's amazing to me. That's amazing to me. In any case, go ahead. Also, like I saw probably the greatest meme of my entire life about these Trump sneakers. And it was just a picture of like Al Bundy and Peg Bundy. And Peg Bundy is like,

Peg Bundy's like a bubble coming out. And she says, my husband is a broke shoe salesman. And then there's like next image, it's Melania. And she says, yeah, mine too. Yeah, me too. And I just thought it was,

it's the best fucking meme I've ever seen. These were released. That and the one where they just show the Trump shoe and it just says, me too. And I just thought it was the best fucking meme I've ever seen. These were released. That and the one where they just show the Trump shoe and it just says, yikes. That was another one that I liked quite a bit. These were debuted at fucking SneakerCon, as you mentioned. And so I did Google to see what the sneakerheads were saying. Like there is a culture around sneakers. There's a big culture around sneakers.

They're all black, Tom. Jesus Christ, Cecil. Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, Cecil. They're all black. Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. What, what are the, what are the, oh, I can't even, I can't even, I won't even go down that road. I don't, I don't, I want to be edited out. Like, there's no way to do it without folding it, like, without just putting, like, you are in a mirror putting blackface on, like, there's no, there's no turning back at that point. So, here's some, here's some comments from sneakerheads. So at SneakerCon,

SneakerCon should be ashamed for uploading this. No sneaker there, just the con. That's so good. That's so good. That's so good. That's so, so, so good. They were described as an early April fool's joke. Yeah.

Something else. Trump has nothing to do with sneakers and sneaker culture consists of people of color who would not feel safe around someone like Trump. The fact that SneakerCon turned out to be a Trump rally instead of a sneaker convention is wildly upsetting. I think they're tacky. They look spray painted with cheap gold color.

The front of the tee is so basic. It looks like a knockoff shoe produced by Timu. What's funny is the Timu shoes, they actually are like 20 bucks, and they look gold. They're basically the same shoe. These ones are running from $199 to $399. So that's what the con is.

But I want to talk about David Hogg here. His angle on this is that he registered the domain shoptrumpsneakers.com and then he has a really cool website that allows you to send

your local congressperson, if you type in your zip code, one of six audio stories of someone who has survived gun violence in schools. So someone who has survived, I think it's in schools. It might just be someone who survived gun violence. I'm not quite sure. I didn't listen to them all,

but I listened to a couple of them and one of them was a little kid. And you can send that audio story to your representative. And I think it's amazing. It's such an awesome site to use your voice as a citizen of the United States to say, hey, you know what? I want to send something like this to my congressperson and have them hear something. Now now they're probably never going to listen. They're going to have a staffer listen to it. But you get an opportunity to send this to them.

I think it's awesome. And I think this is a great way. I do too. They should do this all the time on all his garbage. Constantly. They should just swoop in. Yeah. And you know that you can because they're stupid, right?

They always do this. They never buy their domain names. They never buy the associated similar domain names. They never buy their domain names. They never buy the associated similar domain names. They never renew their domain names. This keeps happening. These fucking technologically illiterate fucking septuagenarian politicians do not know what they're doing. They're living in a world

they literally don't understand. Their aides and whatever are not helping them navigate it properly. And it's fucking delightful like this david hoke kid is a guy she's not a kid anymore he's a goddamn hero like that kid is a hero that person i'm sorry that person is a hero they have been working tirelessly after the parkland shooting to uh curb gun violence and to create restrictions and reasonable gun controls. And like,

they've been an anti-gun crusader that they've been remarkable and effective and consistent. I think this is terrific. I love this. And anything that gets people's attention away from these fucking hideous shoes, they're the ugliest goddamn shoes you ever saw. I did see.

So try to Google the shoes to see if I could like, even see the site where they're being sold. They're sold out immediately. Are they sold out immediately? Yeah, so they're sold out immediately, and now they're being resold for thousands of dollars. I swear to God, I guarantee you'll never see a pair of these in person. These are just going to be bought up by fucking maggots that are just gonna like own them and put them in a like weird shrine to their evil

fucking master or whatever they have like no one's gonna put one of his NFTs on it or something yeah it's gonna be covered in space cowboy shit or whatever Trump nonsense he likes to emblazon himself with let the heathen spill

this on the dusty ground blazing himself with. This story is from CNN, former FBI informant charged with lying about the Biden's role in Ukraine business, undercutting GOP impeachment inquiry. So this is the guy, Alexander Shmirnov. He is an FBI agent, a former FBI agent. And he's also an informant, rather. And he's also a giant fucking lying liar pants. And he's also a giant fucking lying liar pants who, you know, the GOP was really pinning a lot of their hopes for their impeachment inquiry, which I guess is still going on. And to be honest, I forgot about. Yeah, I literally forgot.

They can't get the votes. They can't get the votes to do it. And they're not going to get the votes before the election. And I mean, Tom, what a loser this would be if they kept trying. Because, you know, this is going to show the American people that even though, you know, they're out there banging the drum about immigration, they did nothing about it. And then you're going to go and bang the drum about this. And they're going to say, what are you doing in there? I have a feeling that this is just going to fall apart on them. And then you're seeing, you know, one of the things that happened today or not today, but a couple of days ago was that IVF ruling in Alabama.

Oh my God. And the embryos down there are now people, full on people. And so IVF clinics are shutting down. It's this insanity that's happening down there in Alabama. And you're just going to keep on getting more and more and more people disillusioned. And this Hunter Biden thing with Hunter Biden and Joe Biden, all this stuff is doing is you're just trying to smear the other side.

You're not doing anything. And then slowly rights are being stripped away from people. They just also released Tom this week. I thought I saw somebody said that Trump, they had leaked Trump's 14 week or 16 week abortion ban he was planning on pitching. So again, it's all about curtailing rights. It's not about helping people out and they're seeing this. And this is an absolute loser if they keep doing this. It totally, the American people are not interested in an impeachment inquiry, right? An impeachment inquiry is not an impeachment. They're just on a fishing expedition. That's

what this is. They've not come up with anything. So what they want to do is like, they want to open up an investigation to say, isn't there something? Can't we just find something? What if we just keep poking around and poking around and poking around? And even the impeachment inquiry is built on such specious grounds that they're basically their fucking star witness just got arrested for lying about his star witnessdom. And man, that fucking Alabama IVF shit, we knew Cecil. We talked about this right after Roe, man. We talked about the inevitability of this exact kind of shit right after the fall of

Roe, that they were going to declare every fertilized fucking embryo a goddamn person. The Alabama chief justice, in his opinion, he was like, yeah, well, we're all made in the image of God, so you can't destroy any of these embryos. This was his legal opinion. He can't destroy any of these embryos without effacing the name of God or the face of God or some bullshit. It was just a bunch of religious Southern fucking garbage nonsense. And now like, and a goddamn, like you, you're not going to get IVF. You're just not going to be able to get it in these States and other States will follow suit. Other States will follow suit. And it begs a whole bunch of other really weird questions. Like if you had IVF and you were storing a bunch of

fertilized eggs, let's say you see, so you were storing 10 fertilized eggs and you were storing a bunch of fertilized eggs, let's say you were storing 10 fertilized eggs and they were in storage, they were in cold storage, you have to pay a fee to keep them in cold storage. What if you don't pay that fee? Can the company destroy them or would they get in trouble now for murder? They get in trouble. Yeah. And if they would get in trouble for murder, why would you pay to keep them in storage

knowing that they can't murder these quote unquote legal children? Sure. That's a crazy scenario. If you had embryos, let's say you had those same 10 embryos, and then you got a divorce, could you be forced to pay child support? Those are children. They're legally children, Cecil. What if somebody, two people, are asylum seekers,

they run over to Alabama, and one of them gets pregnant, and they haven't had the kid yet. It's just inside them. Yeah. Is that kid an American citizen? Right. What's inside there?

Is that egg an American citizen? That fertilized egg an American citizen? Or would they fall back on the natural born? Can you deport that kid then? Right. Yeah. Because doesn't that child, because they're saying that this is a child. Doesn't that child have rights?

It's like an actualized human being. Right. Yeah. Can I declare all those embryos on my taxes? Sure. Let's say I had 10 embryos in storage. Can I declare them all on my taxes and write them all off? Sure. Like, there's so many insane questions that immediately come up when you think this through for even five seconds. And it's like, it's scientific nonsense. Like, we know that it's like, it's scientific nonsense.

Like we know that it's scientifically, this is nonsense. These are not children. And they're like, they're just obviously not children. Like in any like reasonable, colloquialized sense of that idea and that term, just common sense tells us like, no, these like microscopic dots, these are not children. Like that's not legally a child, but in Alabama,

they are. And I'll bet you that other states will follow suit. I really will. I bet you they will follow suit. And then the restrictive ones. Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. Why wouldn't they? Yeah. And I, the absurdity of the, um, you know, the next steps on that to follow is just going to be enormous. Like I said, why would you not be able to declare those legal children on your taxes? Wouldn't that cost the state of Alabama a fortune? I mean, you would think that it would.

This whole thing is so insane and so backwards and so upside down. And when the legal rationale is, well, God and Jesus, you just have to wonder what's fucking happened to the world that we're in now.

There was this sound like a garbage truck dropped off the Empire State Building. A story also from CNN, Cheney warns of Republican Party Putin wing. Or is it Putin? Putin, Putin. Putin? After Navalny's

death. GOP former representative Liz Cheney on Sunday warned of a Republican Party Putin wing after former President Donald Trump responded to the death of outspoken Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny without actually mentioning him or Russian President Vladimir Putin. We have to take seriously the extent to which we've now got a Putin wing of the Republican Party. I believe the issue this election cycle is making sure that the Putin wing of the Republican Party does not take over the West Wing of the White House, Cheney told CNN's Jake Tapper on State of the Union.

I think that's just a really great way to phrase that, the Putin wing of the Republican Party. That is very much true. Yeah, you can't get away from it now, especially when you see the people who have been the architects of dismantling Ukraine funding in the House, that we've seen that time and time again. There's clearly a group of people that are very anti-Ukraine they're spreading false rumors about Ukraine about how they're all Nazis and things like that

just an insane narrative that they're trying to spin and then you also get an opportunity to see you know President Trump former President Trump talking about Vladimir Putin there's tons of people who say that there's no way

that they would be in the Ukraine now because Trump was so strong. That was one of the spins that I was saying. In this very article, that's one of the spins that people are suggesting, which is absolute nonsense. He was so soft. He was so fucking soft.

He needed to see Alice. Let me tell you on fucking Russia. But this that Alexei Navalny guy Navalny guy he died in prison over there. They said he died going for a walk. He didn't go for a walk anywhere. Let me tell

you they had him in a prison. So his walk probably was walking around inside of somewhere and he got either died that way or died some other way or was poisoned. He had sudden death syndrome. We have no fucking idea.

They literally called it sudden death syndrome. Yeah, well. Sudden death syndrome? Oh, yeah. I had a bad case. I have a feeling don't you grow out of that

like as a when you're a baby? I had a bad case of no longer being alive. That's what did him in. You know what I mean? He had adult sins. Yeah.

Yeah. That's what he had. He literally, Russia said he had died of sudden death syndrome. Yeah. And we should, well, you know what?

They're not lying, right? I mean, don't we all die of sudden death syndrome? Well, I wonder too. I wonder too if they poisoned the shit out of them. And they're like, no, it was really sudden.

It didn't last for months. Suddenly, you ate a lot of poison. Awful, cancerous, terrible months and months of pain. No, it was very sudden. Sudden death is what I'll call it. Quickly died of a slow, painful death. That's what happened to him, you know? I'll tell you, man, that guy,

just think of how chilling that is to that, you know? I'll tell you, man, that guy, just think of how chilling that is to that country, right? You're a citizen of Russia and the opposing leader of the party is murdered by the state, essentially. Put in jail, thrown in jail by the state, and then murdered by the state. Yeah. And you've got to be living in, you're living in a state that is an autocratic nightmare. It's a dystopian nightmare. If you,

and we've seen how many videos too of anytime anybody shows up to protest, the cops just grab them, drag them, throw them in a van and they're never fucking seen again. This is- Later.

Yeah. This is a fucking garbage country. Like, so I'm sorry, but like Russia is a complete fucking garbage country because it's run by a psychopath, an absolute murderous psychopath. It's it's North Korea esque at this point. What is the functional difference there? You can't have any dissent whatsoever.

You can't protest. You can't launch a legitimate political party in opposition to the current leadership. This is, what is the fucking difference between this and North Korea other than the size and scope? I can't think of anything. Nothing? I literally can't think of

anything that makes it different. Maybe because he's white. Maybe that's part of the difference, too. Maybe the Republicans's like white. Maybe that's part of the difference too, you know, is maybe the Republicans feel a little more comfortable. I don't understand the Republicans being so in bed with Russia, but they just are.

Refusing to gift, refusing to give support to Ukraine is absolutely strategically a gift, an intentional gift to Russia. That's what that is. That's not like, it has less to do with like not wanting to support Ukraine and has more to do with trying to curry favor with their bosses in the Kremlin. Absolutely. I don't even know how to like feel any different way about that. Okay. I need more jokes, people. Ben is having his first day at work, so he cannot help me.

So I need you guys to pick up the slack. I have a joke for you. Okay. The government in this town is excellent and uses your tax dollars efficiently. That's not really a joke. I disagree. I find it hilarious. Sister, it comes from The Independent.

And this is a story about an Oklahoma trans student, a non-binary student, who went to school and got jumped, it sounds like, and beaten up in a school bathroom. And later after the fight, the police were called. The kid didn't have medical attention from the school. They were just, they were beaten up pretty bad. They were bloodied.

They were not called an ambulance. They weren't provided with medical attention. They were just, you know, knocked to shit. Their mom had to actually come get him

and take him to the fucking hospital. Yeah, the next day, the kid wakes up, doesn't feel well, and then at a certain point, collapses. Yeah. And child dies. They run an autopsy, and the state so far is saying

that the fight had nothing to do with it. Now, the person, this person, their name is Nex. Nex was jumped in the bathroom by three girls. So three girls, and it sounds like they jumped two kids, Nex and their friend, were jumped in the bathroom by these three girls. And they beat the ever-loving shit out of these two kids. And while there is right now up in the air, they're not sure whether or not the beating is the thing that caused the death. There's, we don't know yet. And I'm going to be real, real frank.

They're going to have themselves a independent autopsy done and I'll wait to see what happens there. But, you know, there's a lot of ways that this kid could have died, right? It could have been induced from this particular beating. Could also be that, you know, if a toxicology report comes back, maybe the kid, you know, took a bunch of stuff to harm themselves. That's always a possibility too. And, you know, it all stems from the bullying, right? There's this whole thing.

We could get caught up in whether or not this caused this or this caused this. What really we should be talking about is the fact that there is an absolute attack, a bullying attack on this child. And this is not uncommon. This is a common thing. We're putting kids in these positions where they're learning bad ideas from their parents, clearly, because if you just put a bunch of kids in a room, they don't give a shit about each other. They don't care what, you know, what one kid is and what they only get this idea stuff of, of a kid being bad, right. On something

that is the other from their parents. And so they're teaching their children that, you know, if you're trans, you're bad, you're trans, you're awful. And they kick the shit out of this kid. And they wind up damaging this child, bullying this child. And this is not an uncommon thing for trans kids to go through. And so the only reason to talk about this is to just say there needs to be more outreach towards that very, very marginalized group of people to help them get through a very difficult time, which is high school, which is the most bullied time in your life, right? There's no other time in your life where you will be pushed around and hate your life and also be emotionally volatile

because of your weird hormone mix than when you're in high school. There's no other time than that. Everybody always says it gets better. That's because a lot of things change after high school. Suddenly you're at a regular level of hormonal existence. There aren't people you're stuck with in a cage every single day. You have to see every day that don't like you. Those things change so much after you leave high school, but that is such a vulnerable time for these kids. And then to have three of them kick the other 11 shit out of you, no, this wasn't the first time

because they say it in the article that Next was bullied a bunch. It's something that, you know, we've given money to the Trevor Project before on this show. And it's one of those things that, you know, this community needs to be, have a ton of outreach to help them get through

that very difficult time in their life. Yeah, and from the article, this person is being bullied at school as early as the beginning of last year. Schools have a responsibility to nip this shit in the bud and make this impossible. They really do. They have that.

They have a moral and I think a legal responsibility to address bullying and to stamp that shit out before that shit gets out of control. And when it is allowed to fester and when bullying is allowed to become a sort of part of the cultural norm, the way that it was back in the 90s

when you and I grew up, like bullying in the 90s was terrible. And like, we've come a long way in bullying. Like we really have. Bullying has gotten so much better in many parts of the country, but not all, like very clearly not all. And in not all circumstances are all kids protected the same way by the adults who have a charge to protect them. And I think that that that oftentimes is the case with these kids who maybe it's like they get, you know, someone's looking the other way

and allowing this shit to happen. And it's not the fucking 90s anymore where bullying was a cultural norm. Bullying is no longer a cultural norm. And since Columbine, bullying has become a big major social issue across schools, across the whole country. And it's become these huge anti-bullying campaigns.

And a lot of education and resources have been put toward anti-bullying. And that shit is really effective. It really is. But I worry, Cecil, that if the kid's marginalized enough within a community, that even the adults in charge look the other way. Yeah. And like I said, those kids have to learn it somewhere too.

And you know, you're coming from a part in the middle of America where they might not be as friendly to definitely not as friendly to trans people there. And the way, you know, the other people who have to bear this burden are the politicians and the pundits on the right who have demonized trans people in this country for years at this point. And in a way that is sickening

and grotesque, they have basically accused them of being the worst type of person, someone who would prey on children, right? That is what they have equated trans people in this world as. And people hear that, right? We talk about how religious people demonize people to get their point across and to get you to hate the other side. They've done this with trans people in this country

and it's awful and it's grotesque. My mother must have gotten a Miss Shields. There could be no other explanation. Y'all shoot your eye out! Y'all shoot your eye out! No! This story comes from the New Republic. Ron DeSantis finally admits war on books

has been a total disaster. This is a great story. This is awesome. I kind of think I should just read most of this article. It's just great. Yeah, go ahead. The Florida governor is suddenly backtracking

after all those ridiculous book bans in schools. Governor Ron DeSantis on Thursday came out in support of a proposal to limit book bans in schools, the direct result of his own stupid policies. In a press conference, DeSantis tried to claim that accusations that he has enabled book bans

in the state of Florida are a fraud and a big hoax. He blamed activists on both the left and the right for hijacking the process of banning books and accusing them of submitting book challenges

solely to create a media narrative. And finally, he directed the Department of Education to take appropriate action to deal with some of the bad actors who are intentionally depriving students of rightful education by politicizing this process. And I have to pause and just say, as if there's any non-politicized book ban. I know, I know, right? What would a non-politicized book ban be? I'll tell you, we accidentally spilled poison on these books.

What the, it doesn't even make sense. Those are just words that someone said. Yeah. Even as DeSantis basically admitted he had made a huge mistake, he used a press release to link to a strange video he posted on Rumble with the warning, explicit content not suitable for children. The video showcases so-called non-age appropriate books that have rightly

been banned by libraries while defending classic books like the Diary of Anne Frank. At least one Florida school has removed an Anne Frank novel thanks to DeSantis. It is clear that DeSantis is trying to walk back these sweeping book bans and creating a distinction between justified and unjustified bans. Ban the books I don't like, that's fine. That's exactly it, dude. That's exactly it. And it's funny because he got caught because he allowed for people to suggest stuff. And he's now saying, well, people on both sides. And it's like, dude, you knew you had nuts on your side anyway.

And those people were going to suggest stuff. And then you knew you were going to get trolled by the other side who were going to suggest things like the Bible and suggest things like all these other things, because your language is not specific when you talk about why we should be banning stuff. And that causes a huge problem with, you know, there's another story we might not get to today, but there's, you know, there's a real problem in this country with librarians. And then there's a lot of legislation out there in different states. It's looking to make it so that those librarians are liable if they put something out there that you might find objectionable. And the wording behind these bills is so, the problem is, is that it's such weaselly language that it's so easy to just pick anyone in the room and accuse them of something you don't like because they happen to choose a book that upsets you as a person. And so you're just in this, it's just a, it's a terrible situation to put our educators in. It's a

terrible situation to put our librarians in. These's a terrible situation to put our librarians in. These, you know, as a parent, you should be able to control what your kid gets, how your kid gets it, but that's on you. It's not on the society to cater to you. It's on you to protect your child. That's how it should work. We shouldn't say, well, you know, Joe down the street,

he has a very strict outlook on life. So we all have to match how Joe looks at life. No, we don't. You fucking figure it out, man. And like all of these books, all of these book bands. So like this next paragraph I want to read because then I want to talk about the words that are used. He said, essentially, DeSantis is now trying to point fingers at anyone beside himself and his allies, calling the book bands theater and performative. But it's always been performative and it's always been theater.

I mean, like research continues to show that kids read less and less and less. Reading books is not like the thing the kids are doing. The book bands are not about keeping books out of the thing the kids are doing. The book bans are not about keeping books out of the hands of kids. They're about producing headlines in theater and performative political bullshit for the votes of other adults. This has like almost nothing to do with kids.

Kids have cell phones, man. They've got the whole internet. If I'm a kid and I want to read a fucking book about a subject i don't give a fuck what it is i can go online and find a pdf version of it faster than you can say hello like kids don't need your fucking books and you're like like we're we're trying to oh we gotta protect the kids from these harmful images here's a micro computer you put in your pocket with an unlimited amount of porn on it. Like, are you

fucking serious? Like, we're really trying to pretend that this is about anything other than, like, performance art for our political party to other people within our political party? This has nothing to do with keeping books out of the hands of kids. I really don't think

it does at all. It's Republican virtue signals. Yes. I really don't think it does at all. Yeah, it's Republican virtue signals. Yes. Right? That's all it is. That's all it is. That's all it ever was.

And I love that it came back to bite him because like his stupid stop woke act or whatever the nonsense he called it basically was like, yeah, any parent

can just challenge any book and then they have to pull it out of the thing. And like, of course you're going to troll that. If they passed that in Illinois, I would troll the fuck out of that.

I would just get bored one day and be like, I'm just going to have all these like beloved Republican books pulled out of the library. And I'm just going to do it for fun. Every C.S. Lewis book goes. Yeah.

Every fucking, every religious book goes. Yeah. All this, like all these fucking religious bullshit books. I'm just going to look up. Yeah.

You know, Aquinas, Augustine. Yeah. It all goes. It's all out of here. It's all out of here. Yeah, all these fucking religious bullshit books. I'm just going to look up. Linus, Augustine. Yeah, it all goes. It's all out of here. It's all out of here. I'm going to look up the most beloved books for the fucking Christian right, and I'm just going to have them pulled out just for giggles. Just for giggles.

Why not? Fuck them. If this was really about keeping books out of the hands of kids, to be very blunt, those same activist parents, if I was that worried, Cecil, if I was actually like, oh my God, clutching my pearls so hard I turned them to dust, I'd go to the library and steal those books. I would literally just steal them. And then they would have to find that I stole them and buy them and replace them, which

probably wouldn't happen. That's what you would do, right? If you really had this like, oh my God, what if somebody reads this? Like this could really hurt somebody and I need to protect people. I would just steal the book. That's all I would do. I would just be like, yeah, book went in my fucking briefcase and I walked out of the library. But it was never about that. It was never about making sure nobody could read that book because you could always just go in and steal it. It's a fucking library. It's not Fort Knox.

You know, like stealing from a library is like, yeah, I just took it and then I left. When did, when did like micromanaging this shit become small government? I know, man. You know, like they've been talking about small, we're a small government, we're the party of small government, but every single thing seems to be an overreach of government

that that's what they want to use it for. That's how they want to use government is to overreach into your bedroom. They want to overreach into what you read. They want to overreach into where your kids go to the bathroom. They want to overreach all these things that they keep harping on. And you think, why do you have to micromanage

who goes into what bathroom in a school? Yeah. Why is why do you have to micromanage who goes into what bathroom in a school? Why is that something you have to micromanage? Why do you have to micromanage how parents decide what their kids get to read? Why do you have to come into my house and then make a decision based on what's available in the public library? And you're pulling these things out of the public library. The public library is a resource for people who are not well off. That's what the public library is there for. It's there for people, I mean, it's there for a lot of different reasons. I'm not giving you one reason why it's there, but I am going to give you a single reason why it exists.

And it helps exist. It exists to help people who are on the margins have access to knowledge that they wouldn't have any other way. Tom, you can walk online and buy your kid literally any book they ever wanted, right? Except for, you might have to go into mortgage if they're getting like a math book in college. But other than that,

other than like the college books that these kids have to buy, they're two, three, $400 per class. Most things are pretty easy and simple to buy. But as somebody who doesn't have access to that, if I was on the margins, the library is a godsend to those people. Now, like I say, the library has a lot of other reasons to exist, but this is a godsend to those people who don't have the funds to give their kids stuff.

And who's mandating what goes in there? It's the rich people who are telling you what people on the margins aren't allowed to read. That's it. And then we're spending our tax dollars to pay them to make that decision. It's the fucking most asinine

thing in the world. It is. This is great, too. Some AP news. Conservative group tells judge it has no evidence to back its claims of Georgia ballot stuffing. They had to do it. And they had to play the soundtrack of Benny Hill while they were doing it. That yakety sax was playing in the background as they read that to the judge. Amazing.

It's fucking amazing. This is great. This is that fucking True the Vote idiots. This is a Texas-based group that has been going around and basically like filing lawsuits and getting in the way and saying, we've got all this evidence.

We've got all this evidence. A couple months ago, you read Trump's report. Yes. And you read it for patrons. And then we covered that report on our long form show where we talked about it. And I went through and looked up a lot of these footnotes

that were inside this report. And many of them were from this True the Vote group. Well, this True the Vote group, not only this time, but multiple times has been asked to produce evidence that they say they have, and they have never produced anything. And here they had to outright come out and say, yeah, we just don't have anything. Yeah. So True the Vote filed a complaint with the Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger. And they said that they had a detailed account of coordinated efforts

to collect and deposit ballots and drop boxes across metro atlanta and the judge finally was like great show it to me literally produce an anything at all and they were like uh what if we stall for a little while and then we could hem and also haw for uh and then the judge is like all right enough and they're like well there's there's some very important people we know lots of people like show us an evidence just one you're saying a thing you have to be you say you have this where the fuck just where the actual Niagara Falls I grabbed a boobie right my Canadian girlfriends got them yeah Yeah. All right. Listen,

true to the vote. Cool. Where is anything? And finally they were like, all right, so. Where is your Canadian girlfriend? Right. Where is she? Turns out they had nothing the whole time. They never had anything ever. It's all made up bullshit. And how much does this echo the rhetoric of Trump when he says the stuff like, I talked to a guy, a very important guy, the best guy, smart guy, one of the smartest guys. You wouldn't believe how smart the guy I talked to. I talked to a guy, he's one of the best guys. Anyway, he said this thing and you're like, all right, now he's going to tell me an anecdote from a guy he never fucking identified. So we can't follow up on it. And Trump does that shit all the time. Very important studies, all the studies, the big studies, they say these things in these studies.

The papers. All the papers. You can read it in the papers. It's in the papers. Look it up. Look it up. It's in the papers. It's in the papers. He does that shit all the time because it sounds like, well, he's got some evidence there. He's talked to a very important guy. If you're a complete dimwit, he has told you that he's done this work and research and he's somebody of credibility and authority if you happen to be stupid. This is the same thing.

There's no difference here. We knew in 2020, in late November, early December of 2020, that all of this stuff was fabricated, right? We started seeing all of this stuff was fabricated, right? We started seeing all of this stuff. Initially, there was skepticism. And I feel like there was some skepticism on all sides to be like, well, is there actual proof? I don't think anybody on the left really believed him because he had been banging the drum. Trump had been banging the drum about how there is going to be

voter fraud even before the votes even happened. And then when it finally happened, Trump said there was, and people looked into it, and then nothing came of it. Every single case that got sent to a court was shot down. Every single bit of evidence was fact-checked by different newspapers that said, no, that's not true. That's a different picture from a different year. They're talking about something that totally didn't happen. The lady was passing her mom a ginger mint. She certainly wasn't passing a fucking USB stick,

et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And we knew it was all garbage. And then years later, while Trump is running for office, he produces this dumb ass report with most of the citations leading toward this true the vote, who is the main culprit of all these lies. And he says, well, it's in the report.

All you got to do is look at the report. I produced this report. It's in the report. It's in the report. The report is a giant fucking lie. There's nothing in it. He's quoting from some random company that can't even produce anything that they've said.

And somehow, if you fucking poll people in this country and ask if there was voter fraud, there is going to be a quarter to 40% of those people will say yes. I know, man. They will say, yes, there was voter fraud. And this is week after week, we find out more and more bullshit has been spread. And it never yields anything, never amounts to anything. All this stuff, it's all bullshit. It's all lies. And somehow there's an entire group of people and not an insignificant group of people in this country

that believe it. Yeah, man. Well, because retractions are on page 10. Like it's so easy. It's like all this stuff has to just come out, come out, come out, come out, come out, come out, come out, come out, come out. And then it's like, wow, I heard it so many times. It must be true. And then like all the evidence that says that it's not true happens later. And so for a huge portion of the population that's primed to want to believe this, they're not hearing the retraction. They to want to believe this. They're not hearing the retraction. They're not doing the research. They're not looking at evidentiary sources. They're not looking at court cases to see what documentation was actually produced

when the rubber hits the road. They're not doing any of that. We tend to believe things when we hear them more often. The more we hear something, the more it just has that ring of authenticity and that ring of truth for us. So it's strategically, it makes all the sense in the world. It's why it's a joke to say like, like the jury will disregard what you just heard because it's impossible to disregard what you heard. It's why like putting the retraction on page 10 means you basically didn't make a retraction because like nobody fucking cares. means you basically didn't make a retraction. Because like nobody fucking cares. So like True the Vote accomplished everything they set out to accomplish.

The fact that they got called on it four years later. Like if you're True the Vote, you're like, I don't care. I never cared. Can we sue them? Can we sue them, Tom? I don't know, man.

Can we sue True the Vote for as citizens of the United States for spreading lies? Would that be possible? I don't know, man. Can we sue True the Vote for, as citizens of the United States, for spreading lies? Would that be possible? I don't know. Is there a law talker out there? If there's a law talking guy. I'm going to talk to a guy I know is a lawyer.

Yeah, talk to Craig about this. And I'm going to ask him. I'm going to talk to a guy I do a podcast with, Lawful Assembly, and I'm going to ask him if we can sue True the Vote for spreading this many lies. There's got to be, right? Because there's damage here, right?

Isn't there like damage? Isn't that what like most lawsuits are predicated on the idea of standing and damage? At least that's what I thought you had to have those two things, right? If there's no damage, there's no suit. If there's no standing, there's no suit. But I think we can point to damage by just saying look at how many people believe this but like i what i worry about cecil is like do i personally can i show damage yeah that's and that's where this insidious shit comes in right like that i'm gonna go through their report and get a paper cut tom yes and then yes and then I've got damages. You know what?

Here's the damage. Listen to me just yelling the hundreds of hours I've been yelling and tell me my mental health is the same. Yeah. And tell me the people

who listened aren't mad at us too. Right. I say no to drugs. I say no to gangs. I say no to unplanned pregnancy. I say no to meth. I say no to gangs. I say no to unplanned pregnancy. I say no to meth. I say no to Reaper.

I say yes to Roachie. This story is amazing. From Mashable, the majority of traffic from Elon Musk's Twitter may have been fake during the Super Bowl, report suggests. And it's not just a small majority. It's not even 51%. It's like 75.85% of the traffic from X or Twitter

to its advertising clients' websites during the Super Bowl was bullshit bot crap accounts. And they showed that the bots on other accounts, based on this, they looked at other accounts and the other different social medias that are out there, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok,

they have bots in the lower single digits. We're talking 2%. Right. 3% of their traffic is bots. This is 75. 75.85% of all that shit is just nothing. God. Imagine creating a fucking bunch of robots to blow you.

I mean, come on, man. Ridiculous. I love that this stupid ass piece of shit, fucking blood emerald, dip shit billionaire spent $44 billion to ruin Twitter. I love this so much. And actually he spent way more than that. If you look at the total costs that it cost him,

44 billion was the purchase price. But like when he did this, because of the way he had to fund it, he lost many, many more billions of dollars. But like, let's just call it 44 billion. And he ruined the site. Like Twitter is an unusable morass of just right-wing hate speech

and like bots and trash accounts and garbage and bum fights. Yeah. It's the worst. It's the worst. And I think one of the things that is happening more often than not, and I'm noticing this too on my Reddit account, is that I'll log in and it will suggest things to me that aren't actually things that I follow on in and it will suggest things to me that aren't actually things that I follow on Reddit, right? So you join on Reddit, let's say you join like 10 or 15 places that you want to go see. And so for me, it's like,

hey, I want to follow a couple of sports teams that I like. I'd like to follow the big sports ball league that I watch all the time. And I'd like to follow, you know, maybe this band, these two cooking subreddits, this, you know, fencing subreddit. And, you know, they mean like,

it's like five or six things that I'm interested in and I just follow them, right? Maybe a music one or something. And then now I'm starting to get stuff from reddits that are like incel based. Oh, Jesus. Where I just pop on and they'll be very clearly, they're creating content that people who are young,

disaffected males may really cling to. And I'm getting it in these Reddits and I'm thinking, why are you showing me this? And it's because one, I'm a guy and I probably like a this? And it's because it's not, it's because one, I'm a guy and I probably like a few Reddits that these other people like, but it's very similar to how Facebook's algorithm works. And the same thing happens when I log into Twitter, because again, on Twitter,

what I followed on Twitter was those types of things. And now all I'm getting is like these disaffected male. So it's either some girl who's just a pick me girl. Who's saying all the things the incels want to hear so she can get up dudes. Right. Right. So she's saying all the things that they want to hear, or it's some guy who's,

you know, dumping his girlfriend cause she cheated on him or some two dudes are getting into a fight or, you know what I mean? Like it's, it's all this sort of disaffected stuff that I'm seeing. And what's happening in the background is it's being overrun because there's no moderation on it. So not only is your algorithm fucked and it's, it's serving me up garbage. There's also no one there to curtail any of that

garbage because you fired them all. You let go 75% of those people. So now all those people are gone. And then I'm sure you let go of a bunch of people who could probably police whether or not there's bots on your system. And those bots are out of control now. You've basically turned Twitter into that monster island that fucking, that Aaron Rabinowitz mentioned. I mean, it's essentially the same thing. Yeah. I mean, there is no reason anymore, if there ever was.

And I know that for a long time, I know Twitter was really the place where journalists really preferred to go and have their work seen and read. But one of the first things that Twitter did was make it an inhospitable space for journalists. So journalists fucking fled and then big advertisers fled. And so like now it's full of like smaller, shittier advertisers for lower quality, more bullshit. Like you said, like right wing disaffected white male nonsense. Like it's become a toxic morass. And it's not profitable. Twitter's ability to maintain any kind of profitability continues

to decline precipitously because who is going there anymore? The right-wingers keep thinking that they will create these utopic financial spaces. We've seen it when they've tried to create right-wing dating sites, right? But they always fail. Every single time. The Arc Park has filed for bankruptcy. All of these right-wing only spaces are trash spaces that nobody actually wants to put money in and nobody wants to advertise on. And they financially just completely fall apart. And I got to tell you, it's fucking

delicious to watch because the nothing is better than the collapse of an oligarch. Nothing is better than the collapse. The only thing that's better than the collapse of an oligarch Cecil is the high speed collapse of an oligarch. That is it. And hopefully a collapse of an oligarch politician. That would be a little better. That would be the best. Yeah. Yeah. I want to say though, too, you know, the amount of money that could be generated by these bots might be something that someone looks into, too. So the way the bots behave online, and if they're behaving in such a way that they're giving Twitter ad revenue because those bots are clicking on things that that humans should be clicking on and going to places where humans should be going That's something that somebody's going to look into if that's the case. Oh, yeah

thousand percent Somebody is going to look into that and that could be A huge deal. Uh, you know, a huge deal. That's absolute fraud. And the companies that you're defrauding, they're not going to let you off the hook. No, no, no, no. And they're not only going to seek legal remedy, but they're also, all other advertisers are going to look at that and say, no, man. Yeah. I'm not going there.

I'm not writing big checks for bad reach. checks for bad reach. All right. Thank you for joining us. Like I said, tonight, the night that we would normally be recording, it would be a night that we're going to be going out and hanging out. Tom and I haven't been having an opportunity to just leave the show for

a little bit to go out because we're normally very busy recording the show. We record sometimes up to eight episodes a month. because we're normally very busy recording the show. We record sometimes up to eight episodes a month. So we're getting an opportunity to do that. So thank you to the patrons and thank you to the people who listen to make that possible. So thank you very much.

You can always become a patron at patreon.com slash dissonancepod or our website, dissonancepod.com. You can find a link to become a patron on a per episode basis. You help fund the show. You help pay three salaries. And it really does go a long way.

You becoming a patron really does go a long way to help paying our bills. So please, if you enjoy the content, if you like the content we ask, please become a patron on a per episode basis. All right. That's going to wrap it up for this week. We'll be back next week. But we're going to leave you 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 pitch, late 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, doublespeak stigmata, nonsense. Expose your sides. Thrust your hands. Bloody.

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