Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 755: 464 Million Dollar Bloodbath, Declining Support for LGBTQA+

Episode Date: March 25, 2024

      FactCheck.org          

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It's skeptical, it's political, and there is no welcome mat. Today is Thursday, March the 21st Cecil. I have a favor to ask you today. What's up? Can I borrow $464 million? Please. I've checked my under my couch cushions.

Can I sell it to you? Yes. Could you imagine getting the guy who checks the Zell at Chase or whatever or Bank of America looks at it? What the fuck is happening? Immediately flag your account. Did you mean to send for it? Yeah, I meant to say I got in trouble. It was a whole thing.

Did you see that initially Trump had tried to crowdfund this? That he tried to get a crowdfund for this particular- Did he go fucking fund me? Yeah, there was like a go fund me. It did get, it fell like, it was like they were looking for 355 million and they fell 354 million short. So it's like when they say million mom march, and it And it's not, it's not, it's not. It's like six and a half moms. But you know, the one thing there is a part of me that's a little

giddy, right? Because this is the consequence back. You thought was going to happen. How long ago, right? You know, when Trump took office, he was doing things that were unscrupulous. Right? Oh, absolutely. And from the very beginning, we saw, you know, there's a list of controversies while he was in office. And I remember it was even, I think it was maybe even year two. I was reading some off and you had forgotten that there was so many. There's so many I can't, and there was like a lot of financial ones that like I have to remind myself to think about Reminding myself of like when he you know flew dignitaries in and like put everybody up in his own hotels Like he absolutely just because they were gonna use the emolments clause

To to basically like get him in trouble, right? You remember that shit because he just kept enriching himself like at the, like from like foreign dignitaries and like you can't enrich yourself as president and other presidents put all their properties into trusts. And he was just like, yeah, stay at my hotel. I don't run the hotel every day anymore. I still 100% financially benefit from it. And my stupid fucking dickhead son is in charge. I still get Zell payments. Right.

But one of the things that I was hoping for from the very beginning was some sort of comeuppance. And I think a lot of people that watch Trump enrich himself and do bad things while he was in office, try to hurt people he didn't like, give aid to only red states during COVID, you know, bad, awful, terrible things. I wanted to see some something happen to him. The problem with this $464 million dollar judgment that he can't come up with the money for, that's the backdrop of what we're talking about here, is he just can't come up with the money. And in that particular state, you have to come up with the money before you go to appeals. You can't go to an appeal court unless you have the money in some sort of escrow or bond

account so that people know the money's there. We're going to go to appeals and then we're going to have our conversation. And then afterwards, if you lose, the money just goes to the person. So there's protections against appealing. You can't just appeal and appeal and appeal and appeal when you're in the wrong. And never face the music. When you're in the wrong, the music when you're in the wrong Right and you've been proven to be in the wrong

So there's a part of me that's really excited about comeuppance, but then there's the other part of me that knows He's like that wasp you find and you think you killed it when you You hit it as hard as you could with a shoe and then it falls off and you're like and you look around you think well Fuck it's still moving and then you put a table and then you burn your house down. And then the wasp comes out a few minutes later. That's what it's like, man. I know, I know, man. I, I am enjoying, I feel the same way.

Like I am enjoying the sort of temporary tragedy of his life at the moment because he's a fucking awful person and he deserves to have this happen to him. He did post the bond for like the 90 some million dollar bond from his other civil judgment. Eugene Carroll. Yes. Thank you. So he posted that bond and this bond, he has to post something like 500 million. He's supposed to post the bond plus interest and pedal. So it's more than the actual face amount. What I love is that not that long ago, he was bragging that he had 800 plus million liquid. Now he's got to come up with half that or a little more than half that.

And he suddenly doesn't have like, Hey motherfucker, I thought you said he had 800 million liquid. He was bragging about how he's worth 4 billion. He's got 800 million. He can lick. And now all of a sudden it's like, well, all right, look, I said I had. And what I love about this is that his whole case here is predicated on his financial lies. So he's lying about his finances, gets in trouble for it, gets a judgment, and then gets caught basically in another lie, finding out about his finances. Well, at what point are we just going to look around and be like, this guy's not trustworthy.

He just, what does he have to do? He literally said at one point, I could kill somebody on Fifth Avenue and you dumb assholes would still vote for me. And like he's still, he's out there killing people on Fifth Avenue. The bodies are piling up all around him and there's people like punching his fucking ticket all day. You know what he is Tom? He's a Russian nesting doll of empty piggy banks. So you break one open and inside is a smaller Donald Trump that has no money and then you

break it open and then there's nothing inside. It's just a continuing You know, it just he is fucking he is he has Constantly lied about his finances and and the reason why he got sued for all this month is because of the The that is essentially fraud when you're getting money for when you're lending on that's essentially fraud. It is fraud It's not a hundred essentially fraud. It is fraud. It's not essentially fraud. It is fraud. So it being fraud is why he's be why he initially got sued. And now they're looking, I don't know if you saw they are looking to like gobble up his properties immediately.

Seize his assets man. Immediately and they're looking at golf courses and Trump Tower and all these places. They're just going to walk in and they're gonna wave the papers they have and then they're just gonna start either evicting or collecting rent from everybody there and say, well, this is ours now. Yep, it's not his. Like they won't be able to evict people that have a lease

because they have a legal right to be there through their lease, but he won't be the owner of that property. They could sell it, I think. They could auction it out from underneath him maybe. Oh, they can. Yeah. But if you've got like, if you just as a point, like if you have a lease on a piece of property,

and let's say like you're the landlord and then the bank takes the property back, the bank can't just like kick me out. So they have to keep me there to the term. And then they can sell it. But like, yeah, it's this is exactly what needs to happen. I have a quarter case question. Oh, yeah. It's probably not really relevant.

I want to ask it anyway What happens if I'm running a property from you and you know the banks gonna come seize it and you make an unreasonable? Lease with me like a 99 year like a 99 year lease and it's a hundred dollars a month Can they can they act on that lease after they would have to go to court? I okay. Yeah, they would have to go to court and be like, yeah This was and they would probably have to prove it'd be tough. It would probably have to prove that the tenant knowingly signed a lease that was fraudulent. So like the tenant would be like, why are you giving me this for a hundred dollars a month for a hundred years? They would probably have to adjudicate it. It would be,

the rules as they stand are very tenant friendly. They're very tenant friendly. They're very tenant friendly. They're very tight. Yeah Yeah, so less so for commercial property. Yeah, but he owns a mix of residential and commercial property That's true. So it makes it much more complicated. I want to see them auction his gold toilet or whatever That's in his in his penthouse up there. He's and there's it's not just penthouses. It's golf courses He owns big 200 plus acre golf courses with giant mansions and golf clubs on them and stuff.

And so he can, they can take that and just eat it like a club sandwich. Fucking great downs. I love it. And I do want to just because there are, I've seen, I've talked to other people just in my real life who have kind of expressed the what's the big deal and these banks weren't harmed. So I just have like an analogy that might make it

a little easier for people. If I apply for a home loan and I tell the bank, I make $300,000 a year, the bank is very likely gonna give me the most favorable loan terms possible for that loan. And then they're gonna give me some amount of their money and they have a Finite tranche of money to lend and they're gonna lend me that money that finite tranche of money at a very favorable rate And I'm gonna say great. Thank you. I make a lot of money. I'm a high-income person

I'm a low risk for you my my income basically guarantees that when you underwrite this loan that I am a low-risk Loan, right if I show up to that same bank and I say hey, that I am a low risk loan, right? If I show up to that same bank and I say, Hey, I want to borrow the same amount of money. I make $55,000 a year. If they even make me that loan, they are much more likely to view that loan as a much higher risk proposition, right? And I'm so oversimplifying how underwriting works, but they're going to look at that as a much higher risk proposition and they're going to give me less favorable loan terms

or they might even deny me the loan altogether. Right. So what Trump did was essentially that he said, Hey, I have all these assets which act in the background as collateral. Please give me an unbelievably sweetheart loan. And the bank says, great, those assets act as collateral. We're going to give you an unbelievably sweetheart loan. And in the meantime, they're tying up money that they could have lent to somebody

else. They don't have unlimited lending money. So presumably there may be somebody who did not get a loan that otherwise would have qualified for one. And they're lending it at a rate that they could have, if they lent him that same money, they could have gotten 8% instead of 6%. So when he says like, nobody got harmed, yeah, the bank got harmed. The bank got harmed even though he paid it back in full because that loan should have been lent at, let's say 8% instead of 4%. So he fucking lied.

And it's like fucking sandpaper on my teeth when he's like, ah, I paid the bank back every penny. They didn't get hurt. Yeah, they did. And they, he said to, they loved me for it. They came by and they gave me all this stuff and they wanted, they wanted my money. They wanted to give me more loans. They wanted to do this.

And they did that all under false pretenses. Right. So you saying they wanted to give me all this money, that's bullshit because you lied about how much money you had and what your assets were worth. And one more thing I want to add on that is if he defaults on those assets, one of the things that people forget is that we all pay for that. Because if I bank with that bank, they have to get that loss from somewhere. So they're going to raise maybe rates or they're going to do something else to try to recapture.

They're not just going to eat a loss. They're not going to eat the loss. They're going to pass that on to try to recapture. They're not just going to eat a loss. They're not going to eat the loss. Yeah. They're going to pass that on to other people, other consumers, other people. And sometimes they even pass that on to the American people. I don't know if you remember, there was a little thing called the housing crisis where they passed that shit ton of fucking debt onto the American people where we had to pay it.

So that happens, that happens, you know, and people think nobody's harmed except for the banks and it's, and you got to say, no, it's also the consumer who works with that bank too. Yeah. And you know, to your point like, oh, they love me for it. They love me for it. It's like, yeah, you know, if, if every day I wake up and I'm sweet to my wife and I give her a nice kiss and I go off and I fuck somebody else behind her back, like she's going to be sweet to me because she doesn't know I'm cheating, right? Like if I'm behaving badly in secret, of course the people that you're betraying don't treat you badly. Like, it's such a stupid fucking thing to say.

It's like, well, I lied and cheated you, but you didn't know it. And during the time you didn't know it, you were nice to me. Yeah, right. Okay. Yeah. And don't worry, Haley, it's an Italian beef sandwich. It's not a person. He's cheating on you with an Italian beef sandwich.

With Jardinieri. Okay, I'm the only one in this room who's professional enough that I know of and care because it's not for him. I'm the only one. No more, is everybody all right? Yeah. I'm going to go get some water. I'm going to go get some water.

I'm going to go get some water. I'm going to go get some water. I'm going to go get some water. I'm going to go get some water. I'm going to go get some water. I'm going to go get some water. I'm going to go get some water. I'm going to go get some water.

I'm going to go get some water. I'm going to go get some water. I'm going to go get some water. I'm going to go get some water. I'm going to go get some water. I'm going to go get some water. This story comes from MSNBC. Trump's RNC officially kills the GOP's mail-in voter effort. There's part of this that I want to read because they're shooting themselves in their own foot. Somewhat, but they're also poisoning the well. So there's a column A, column B here. Right. Ever since the election,

Trump has continued to spread conspiracy theories that mail-in voter fraud cost him the race. In reality, there is ample evidence that allowing people to vote by mail doesn't have a partisan effect. And if it does, data shows the impact to favor Republicans. That's the part about shooting yourself in the foot. That's the part about.

So, but, but this is part of a broader, this is being stolen narrative, a broader election integrity, which I hate that phrase. Like it's just disgusting to turn it on its head like that. But this is a part of that broader election integrity narrative. That's just full of disinformation and misinformation and ultimately disenfranchisement of minority populations. Yeah. And I think, you know, we say election integrity and I think what we mean is every time you

keep chipping away, there's less and less integrity because they keep chipping away at the very nature of elections, right? All of their misinformation is aimed at doing this. It's aimed at putting a seed of doubt in everyone's mind. I recall getting Facebook messaged by someone who listened to the show during the big election stuff that was going on in November of 2019.

I was fielding six, seven messages a day from someone on Facebook Messenger who believed the election lies that Trump's camp was throwing out into the world. And so I remember counteracting them with fact check, Snopes, all these different places that was doing a pretty good job of finding out there was also NPR and NBC and a bunch of other places had to step up and do the same work because they found out there was also NPR and NBC and a bunch of other places had to step up and do the same work because they found that there was just this deluge of misinformation being put out, making up lies about the elections and saying that they were not secure. And so what you have is this is them trying to chip away, chop down as quick as they can, as much as they can,

our faith in elections. And the one way they can do it is if they and it worked very well in the other one is if they have physical ballots that were actually delivered to the place and you can throw away and say none of these mail-in ballots matter. And to your point, you're saying, well, they're actually going to get more, more votes from these mail-in ballots because it's shown that Republicans do more mail-in voting. That's actually, it's actually a good thing if they decided to do it. It doesn't matter to them because they don't want the election result at all. What they want is to overthrow the election in a way and let

Congress and other people in government seal the election for them, which is what they had planned. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. If they can subvert the whole election process and create some other procedural mechanism to continue to ensconce themselves in these positions of power and authority, then they've destroyed democracy. Of course, they've just literally destroyed democracy, but it's really the only last gasp of the Republicans to this cheating is the last gasp of the Republicans to have relevance. This misinformation and disinformation feels to me like artillery. It doesn't have to be accurate as long as it's voluminous, right?

It's just keep lobbing shells. Some of them will hit. Yeah. Most of them don't do shit, but some of them will hit and there's going to be a lot of collateral damage and we don't care. Just keep lobbing this misinformation sort of like artillery barrage. And it's like never ending. And with Trump, it was preemptive.

He started his artillery barrage of misinformation and disinformation around the election before the election started And it occurs to me too that this whole thing is part of like a three-pronged effort by the Republican Party to destroy the American faith in government itself in the press and in elections. And if they can destroy our faith in government, press, and elections, then what's left for us to put our institutional faith in? And then they just raise their hand and say, me personally, me personally. Don't trust these institutions of power.

Trust me personally. That's how we get to dictatorship. That's literally the road to autocracy. and we're watching the game plan play out. We're watching them just, you know, put a big fucking X over, oh, no faith in government. It's all, it's all a swamp. It's all, uh, you know, what's the secret operative bullshit that they talk about all the time, deep state nonsense, you know, and then the same thing with press. Like everything that you hear that I don't like is mainstream press.

Everything you hear that you do like is somehow alternative or better press, even if it has higher numbers numerically and is more mainstream. And the same is true of elections. If they can, if they can erode our faith in all those institutionally, they can put themselves personally in that place. It's terrifying. So two articles today, one from factcheck.org and they're both referencing the bloodbath comment. So I want to read the full text of the bloodbath.

Read the actual quote, because I think it's important to read the entire quote in its entirety as it is spoken. Same. Okay. So here is what Trump said. He said this on March the 16th. He said China is now building a couple of massive plants where they're going to build the cars in Mexico and think they think that they're going to sell those cars into the United States

with no tax at the border. Let me tell you something to China. If you're listening president Xi and you are, and I, and you and I are friends, but he understands the way I deal. Those big monster car manufacturing plants that you're building in Mexico right now. And you think you're going to get that you're going to not hire Americans and you're going to sell the cars to us. It's so hard to read him. I know Cecil. I'm just going to pause. I am an excellent reader.

I am. I don't have all the skills in the world. That's a skill I have. Reading Trump is like having a stroke in real time. I swear to God, I read half a set. I have a thing. I sell a burnt toast. Yeah, it's terrible. I would rather read, I read half a set, I have the thing. I still burnt toast. It's terrible. I would rather read an Eli script. Yeah. I can translate Eli. Yeah. Okay. I'll

continue. And you're going to sell those cars to us. No, we're going to put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line. And you're not going to be able to sell those cars if I get elected. Now, if I don't get elected, it's going to be a bloodbath for the whole, that's going to be the least of it. It's going to be a bloodbath for the country. That'll be the least of it, but they're not going to sell those cars. So the Republicans all claim that he's talking about the bloodbath being about the electric cars, right?

bloodbath being about the electric cars. Right. But... It feels like an aside when he's saying it. It does feel like an aside that he's saying, there's gonna be a bloodbath. Oh, and about the cars too. That's what it sounds like to me. That it's gonna be a bloodbath,

and the cars will be a bloodbath, but it's gonna be a bloodbath. That's what it sounds like when you read it. It sounds like he's saying something like that. But the other thing is, is that he's always constantly diverting himself mentally when he talks and speaks extemporaneously. He's constantly veering, not finishing sentences, stops in the middle of a sentence to talk about something he talked about before. That happens all the time. So it's not a big stretch to think that he's talking about January 6th, which is what he

was talking about in the beginning of his speech. You know, that's a backdrop that people need to understand is that the beginning of the speech he was talking about January 6th and he did a salute to the January 6th in prison people, et cetera. So it's not a stretch to think that he's talking about it there. And he's talking about a bloodbath in a sense that it's gonna be an actual battle of some kind. But you can't put your finger on it and say he absolutely did. I think there's enough doubt there that it's still murky.

But again, this feels like nothing out of the ordinary. Yeah, and it's not out of the ordinary because violent apocalyptic rhetoric is par for the course. And I think it's really intentional. I think his style is mannerism. His choice of words is full of these sort of clippable, violent, apocalyptic sentences that can be interpreted out of context. So I do think in this, like I would give him the benefit of the doubt and say, like, I think he is talking about the auto manufacturing and it's going to be a blood bath, meaning we're going to defeat the Chinese, you know,

auto plant in Mexico thing. Right. But again, choosing language that has this kind of inherently violent overtone is a constant for Trump. It's a constant. And I feel like it's really intentional. I feel like all of his insane language is full of these sort of apocalyptic, violent, civil unrest related dog whistles that he can, that he knows can be used and heard and

interpreted. And we've talked about this before. It's, it's his like tabula rasa violence way of speaking that he does where like everybody gets to interpret his bullshit exactly how they want to hear it. It's why he never cites anything. I got a guy, you know, very good guy, a big guy. He had a study, all the studies are great studies. There's no specificity. I feel like the violence and the rhetoric around his violence works the same way. It enables whoever listens to it, you know.

Also, if you have a history of either inciting violence or being violent, and you say something that is violent related, there's a possibility somebody hears that and thinks you're speaking about actual violence. Yeah. Right. Yeah. You're not saying that's a metaphor. You're saying that's a real thing that happened in the past. There was a blood bath. People died. People were hurt. That is a real thing that happened. There was violence. So when you say something that's violent and then you say, well, I wasn't trying to be violent, I look at your past and think, well, prove me wrong.

Yeah. Well, even if it like, again, the thing with Trump is that even if you give him the benefit of the doubt, it's still terrible because even if I give him that benefit of the doubt, it is at the very least exactly the opposite of the kind of presidential language that we should expect from a world leader, from one of the most important leaders in the world. They should be much more careful with their choice of words. And the fact that he could even be this sloppy leads you to wonder, fuck, what is he going

to say when he's in delicate negotiations around like peace in the mid east or like talking to Putin, you know, about the fate of Ukraine or, you know, having conversations with Xi around Taiwan. You know, there are real conversations that need to be had where this kind of language is a fucking nightmare. So even with the benefit of the doubt, I actually feel a little more afraid because that tells me he doesn't know what the fuck he's saying. It's like either he knows what he's saying and it's terrible or he doesn't. Kind of that's worse.

Yeah, I agree, man. I agree. It's a, it's a, it's a nightmare. He was an absolute nightmare as a diplomat, an absolute nightmare, the worst person for the job. There was no worst person as a diplomat than Donald Trump. There is nobody he and that's because I think, you know, it's easy to it's easy to point this out that businesses are just run differently than than governments.

It's just true. They're just 1000% just run differently. There's no there's no comparison in these two things. Businesses are mostly dictatorships. Countries are not mostly, at least the ones that we belong to are not yet just dictatorships. Who knows? Who knows, Sam? Oh man, I'm about looking forward to November.

In any case, that is one of those things that he was so bad at anyway. So to have him come on a world stage and have a conversation with somebody, and then say something as blatantly stupid as, will 100% tariff tax it or whatever. You're basically banning their car. There's no, I mean, that's a dumb thing to do to encourage global trade in a place where, you know, people here can make money from those cars as well as people there can make money from those cars.

You're basically cutting off an income source for a group of people. And the other thing that I learned was that some of these things that he's complaining about are being built here, too. Well, yeah, and China, for the car manufacturing plants they're putting in Mexico, China's like, I don't know what you're talking about. We're selling them to in Mexico Yeah, we're not even trying we're we're putting them here to sell them here. You know, there are other countries. Don't you stupid asshole? You stupid asshole is the best if you're in business

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No frustrating chatbots are sitting on hold for hours. Check out pair.com today to learn more. That's P-A-I-R dot com. I today to learn more. That's P a I R.com. I will make your day. Do not pass go. I'm under age. You know, this story is from USA today and it's funny. Supreme court says Trump white house official, Peter Navarro must begin his prison sentence. I hope the lady who followed Navarro around with a big sign in the whistle, followed him down there when he was getting thrown into the prison and just whistled and screamed liar at him the whole time.

We watched it on a livestream. Go back on YouTube and find the livestream. Tom and I were just crying with laughter with this woman who was just... She's just yelling liar. And at a certain point, Navarro looks at her and she goes, you can continue. I just got this loud ass whistle every time he tries to speak. And at a certain point in the viral turns looks looks at her and she goes you can continue I just got this loud ass whistle every time he tries to speak for his impromptu press conference So just hoots are fucking whistling dude is so good

it's such a good disruptive thing to a bad person a person who was very much in charge during kovat of a lot of COVID relief and a lot of things and mismanaged and did terrible stuff, followed Trump's rules with, you know, making bad decisions on who gets that sort of thing. But really genuinely, the reason why he's going to prison is because he failed to go to a, there was a subpoena and he failed to appear. And this was in front of Congress. And I'm glad. Do this more often, please. There was a bunch of people who got subpoenaed and they all refused during when the Democrats and Trump was in office, but the Democrats had the power to subpoena people, which is

what is happening now in the Congress. And I do want to point out that the January 6th commission was not just a democratically led commission. The January 6th commission was a bipartisan commission with at least two sitting Republicans, Adam Kinzinger, or Kinzinger, I may be mispronouncing it. Kinzinger, I think it is. Kinzinger. And then Cheney. Cheney. So that was a bipartisan commission that was tasked with and legally was responsible for looking into January 6th, the only coup attempt in American history. I think it's something we should probably have looked into. I'm glad that we did. I wish more came of it. I'm glad these fucking guys, go to jail. Go directly to jail. Do not pass go. No free parking.

Go to fucking jail, man. I don't know. Just stay there. Just go and stay there until you cooperate. That's what the rule should be for contempt with this shit. You can go to jail. I'll tell you what, it's an indefinite sentence when you decide to quiet. It could be one hour. You can knock up. Here's your buzzer. You get a fucking buzzer. It works just like the Olive Garden. Actually, it's like an opposite dunk tanker. Like he's got the little thing like at the hostess station and he gives me the little like fucking, you my table's ready thing. You get a text. Right.

Yeah. Oh, Peter Navarro's table is ready. Oh look at that. He wants to talk. He doesn't like going to prison. He's sick of unlimited breadsticks. He wants out of the Olive Garden. He ate the pasta for Jule.

He's all full. He wants out of here. But I want to see more of this happen because other people sitting members of Congress refused Yeah, right. I want to see this happen with them. Did Mark Meadows refuse? I think so and I also think That they Trump refused. Yeah. Yeah, so they asked everybody they asked a bunch of people and a bunch of people refused I'd like to see this happen with other people Senator to send them prison send it to prison like you say until you're ready to come because everybody's still waiting for you Yeah, it's like putting a kid in timeout, right?

It's like, all right, you're in timeout until you want to clean your you gotta clean your room. You can sit in timeout. You only have to be in timeout until you're ready to clean your room. Are you ready to clean your room? No. All right. Well, enjoy timeout. Hey Peter Navarro. Are you ready to cooperate? No. All right. Well, enjoy jail. Enjoy the prison yard. Yeah, I don't know what to tell you man. Get buff. Yeah I'll punch the biggest guy No, I one thing that does screw up your idea though is that? Congress changes. Yeah, Cheney's not in there anymore

Kensinger is not in there anymore. Right? So what happens is is if it's if he happens to wait it out He can get a way more favorable if it's, if, if he happens to wait it out, he can get a way more favorable grilling from a deposition or something. Very true. You know, but, but in my thought is I'm just happy to see you go to jail. Just go to jail. Just go to jail. And part of the reason I'm happy to see it is I know the cowardice that lives in the

souls of these fucking grifters, right? Like you think really Rudy Giuliani is really thinking he's going to spend a day in jail. I don't think he thinks he's going to spend a fucking day in jail, but I think we start throwing these guys in actual prison and they actually start going to jail. I think some of these guys look around like, cause I know I would, I don't want to go to jail, man. Tom doesn't want to go to jail. I like, if there's a possibility of going to jail, like, no, who do I throw into the bus? I don't want to go to jail. Literally anything you can do.

Yeah. Whatever. Like cut off my left arm or go to jail. I'll be like, give me the hacksaw. I'm done. I'm not going. I wouldn't even visit people in jail. That's how much I don't want to go to jail.

I want to say though, I think you're absolutely right when it comes to, and I think the people in Georgia very much recognize the people who flipped. I think those people very much recognized they were big, they were small enough fish to go to jail. And so they were just, they just looked at what was up against them and said, I will write an apology. I'll write a hundred times on the board that I'm really sorry. They'll do it instantly. And a bunch of them did. And now you're doing this to us. So this is a hate hate crime crime. Your hate hate crime, criming us.

This is a hate hate crime crime because you hate hate crimes and this is a crime. This story comes in the Washington Post and states with laws targeting LGBTQ issues, school hate crimes quadrupled. That is quadrupled, man. And I think it's easy to see that this is the case. Yeah. You know, one of the things that I talk about with I do another podcast, the lawful assembly podcast with a friend of mine, Craig Moosen, who's a lawyer.

And we talk a lot about immigration issues. And one of the tactics that people use during immigration when talk about immigration is they dehumanize people. They do their best to dehumanize them. This happens with unhomed people too. They dehumanize the people and it's easier to ignore them. It's easier to make it so they're less than a person. It's easier to not have to worry about taking care of anyone

if they're unhomed, right? You can easily unhoused, I don't know what the word is, I'm not sure which one it is, maybe it's both, I'm not sure. I don't know, I think it's unhoused, but either one is perfectly fine. So in any case, I think it's easy to dehumanize that person, think of them as less, and then just do less for them, right? And the same thing happens here,

is you dehumanize people who are LGBT and you do it through stripping all kinds of programs out of school that show that they're people too, pull away all the books and literature that celebrates them or talks about them in any way, right? Yep. You do the very best you can to make sure that you insert anti-LGBTQ stuff through church programs and, you know, there's plenty of churches out there in the world that are very

anti-LGBTQ. And then what happens is, is they suddenly start getting bullied. Yeah. They suddenly start getting injured. They start wanting to leave school. They're talking about people who are doing self harm in this.

There was a big, big upwards rates in self harm as well. These are, this is terrible. And what we're doing is we're showing it's okay to hurt this person in this state, right? It's okay to hurt this because we don't care about them. Yeah. Well, you know, we've talked about this in the story on the show before, but I believe this as a core tenant of my, my being that like stories matter stories that we tell ourselves about who we are matter.

And a lot of what the political narrative has been working to do over the last several years is to begin recasting who our heroes and villains are with respect to LGBTQ issues. If we, if we recast as villains, LGBTQ people, we automatically create a scenario where it is okay to your point to otherize them. It is okay to vilify them. It is okay to, you know, beat them up. It is okay to treat them as, as less than people because the story that we're telling ourselves about the world that we live in and who our heroes are and who our villains are and who's good and who's bad. These things matter and laws and policies all make up part of the zeitgeist of that

story. So when states create laws and policies that target these people, they're putting a target and saying, I'm targeting for a reason. And the reason that I'm targeting these people is because they're bad or they're smaller or they're less than, or they need to be hurt in some way. And then that gets, that sort of, that sort of all gets kind of mushed together by the youth who says, all right, well, I am living in this soup, this cultural soup that these policies and this TV programming and this fucking AM radio that all helps to create.

We're telling stories now and creating villains out of just fucking people who just wanna wake up and be themselves. Yeah, yeah, that's very true. The other thing that they do to dehumanize them is that they trivialize their problems and they trivialize their struggle. And they do it by making up words like woke, right? So they make up a word and say, oh, it's, you know,

and woke isn't woke is appropriated right so woke was originally uh used by black and brown communities and then it was appropriated as a slur right so it's essentially used by black and brown and then they then they take it and say well it's a bad thing and so what they'll do is they'll trivialize now it's a trivial thing right when you talk about oh they just want about, oh, they just want this woke stuff. Oh, they just want this woke stuff. They're trivializing human beings lives, right? They're trivializing their lives by saying, oh, they just want to feed you all this woke stuff. No, what they want to do is just exist. And what you want to do is oppress them. That's the real key here. Yeah. Well, and like when you do it, it's a great point

because when we use words like that to categorize a system of ideas, we don't have to contend with the idea. We just now have to go, what we do rhetorically is we shift to just contending with the word as a category that includes whatever. So if you come with a very legitimate worry or concern or data point or whatever, or a fucking story of a human being. If I can just slap a label called woke on that and then dismiss it, then I never have to contend with that shit.

So another story too that ties very closely into this time is that us support for LGBTQ plus rights is declining after decades of support. And one of the things you can watch this is a PBS five minute video, really interesting interview where they talked to several, a couple of people. And one of the people says that basically if you look at young conservative males and you look at their thoughts about LGBTQ plus in 2020, and then you look at their thoughts about acceptance of LGBTQ plus in 2023. It dropped by like 15%. It was 44% down to almost 30% or something.

I mean, it was a time, I mean, it was, I'm misremembering the exact image and what they were saying, but it was, it was a time, I mean, it was, I'm misremembering the exact image and what they were saying, but it was a huge drop. It was a huge drop of how accepting they are to LGBTQ plus. And she says, the person who they're interviewing says people thought that just because there's more LGBTQ plus people out there now, more people out of the closet, that the younger people who are witnessing and seeing these people and growing up around them will be more accepting and they're finding that that might not be true

Well, I think also that Putting this on the young people They are swimming like I mentioned before they're swimming in this sort of soup of these stories And what I think is happening is it's working. We're poisoning them. The disinformation campaign, the misinformation campaign, the hate speech campaigns, the people in the manosphere, the people who are, you know, these pushers of the white nationalist agenda, who are very much

part of the power broker structure in America today, they're winning the war of information, they're're winning the war of information. They're actively winning that war. So this is our, it's just kind of not surprising. When I go to, I don't use Twitter. Like I just am not a person who uses Twitter, but I have logged onto Twitter. I think I mentioned this before. I logged on to my old Twitter account, which I had like seven tweets on, you know, from like years and years ago, like 2015 or something.

And it shows me like in front page and I haven't been on it. And I've eight years, all the content is straight racist content. It's either racist or anti-trans or something. Like, yeah, it's, I mean, it's bad. It's really bad. So this kind of messaging that's been going out, this kind of amplification of these that's been going out, this kind of amplification of these really aggressively, like discriminatory messages seems to just be increasing. The wavelength and the amplitude seems to just be increasing.

I think that messaging is working. I think the Republicans are trying to rebuild their base. And part of the way that they're doing that is trying to sort of motivate and galvanize young men through hate, through hate speech. I think you hit on something there that's really important. And it's not just that it's the Republicans, it's the manosphere that are trying to otherize people, right? You're trying to otherize human beings to make them less than to make them the objects

of your attack. And so they are not people or less than people or half people, whatever you're saying, and you're dehumanizing them. And the same thing with Republicans and how they're trying to strip rights away in all these states across our country, all these states, you look at a lot of red states and they're trying to pull as much back that the LGBTQ plus community has won in the past 20 years. Sure. I mean, you know, there's been Supreme Court decisions and other things that have come

down that have really bolstered that community, at least its ability to be out in the open. And they're trying to say, get back in the closet, shove them back in the closet. And it's not just them. It's like you say, it's the Manosphere. It's all these conservative, like right wing ideologues. They wanna go out of their way to make sure that they oppress this group of people specifically. They're the easiest target right now.

And if they can keep removing voices, they get louder. So if they pull voices, if they get rid of these voices and they start getting rid of women's voices and they start getting rid of liberal voices, then they get louder and louder and louder. And they're the only voice in the room. Yeah. I mean, look at what people like Nick Fuentes want somebody like Nick Fuentes. I just don't think somebody like Nick Fuentes would have the kind of popularity

and the kind of, uh, you kind of voice and following 10 years ago. I don't. I think he would have been a marginalized minor figure and somebody like Nick Fuentes has had lunch with the goddamn president. Nick Fuentes has appeared at speaking engagements that members of Congress have also appeared at. Their influence is growing exponentially. I also think Dobbs, the Dobbs decision, absolutely galvanized haters and discriminators and racists and bigots. Because what it, what it said to them, if they were listening and they were is, yeah, sure, the Supreme court granted these hard won civil rights to a number of groups, but

you know, we learned today we can take those rights back. It would have to be some visual to poke through this fake news. This story comes from the New York times, how Trump's allies are winning the war over disinformation. Their claims of censorship have successfully stymied the effort to filter election lies online. And that really is like, is a long form article. Like first of all, let's say if you guys get a chance to read it, there's a long

form New York times article, it's a pretty lengthy article, but really the nuts and bolts is like, there was, we were kind of approaching for a little while, a moment where, all right, there was going to be some responsibility in terms of like misinformation and disinformation, online spaces like Facebook were, you know, taking, kicking people off that were spreading misinformation. There really seemed like we had a moment there where we were going to start to head in the right direction. And that has been systematically dismantled. That entire process and procedure. And we're slipping back. We're slipping back into a world where misinformation will reign.

And it will reign with legal precedent. And that's a world that is frightening. Genuinely frightening. Because when it's like a matter of a specific company's policies, that's kind of nothing. Yeah. But then when it has the weight of legal opinion behind it, that's a whole different ballgame. What happened was so, you know, so this is all disheartening, but what was heartening

was right when all that election misinformation was popping itself up. They took Trump off Twitter right after January 6. I thought there really was going to be a turnaround in misinformation super spreaders and how they attack the information ecosystem, ruin it, pollute it, and make it so that no one knows anything. And we saw what happened after Trump was taken off. Immediately there was a drop in misinformation online. Yeah, because studies came out right away. Because Trump is a he's genuinely like a super spreader of that stuff. What happened was is that people

started hiding behind free speech and that free speech thing. You know, free speech has always been curtailed. And thing that they, the example they've always used is you can't yell fire in a crowded theater. And I think it's really apt to use that when you talk about disinformation because when you talk about yelling fire in a crowded theater, what are they trying to do? They're trying to give you information that is false to make you act on it, right? That's what yelling fire in a crowded theater does. That's the nuts and bolts of what it does to people. But that's exactly what on it, right? That's what yelling fire in a crowded theater does. That's the nuts and bolts of what it does to people.

But that's exactly what misinformation does, right? They give you information that's not true so that you act on it, so that you don't get a COVID vaccine. And oftentimes in ways that hurt people. In ways that hurt people too. That's a great addition. That's exactly how it works, right?

And that's a great analogy. You shouldn't fucking hurt people by lying to them. That's what the simple analogy is. And that's what the reality is when you look at misinformation online. And the fact that they hide behind free speech all the time and somehow we can't do the one, but you can do the other is appalling. But look at what happened with Elon Musk. Look at how Elon Musk has hidden and used the free speech,

you know, the bastion of free speech that is old Twitter X as a way to create his own fucking Monster Island. If you're not familiar with that, by the way, go check out the episode we did where we talked to Aaron Rab his own fucking Monster Island. If you're not familiar with that, by the way, go check out the episode we did where we talked to Aaron Rabinowitz about Monster Island. Yeah, they basically had the most worst worthless, awful Twitter trolls, whatever, in a community group.

And it was the worst thing that's ever happened on the Internet. Go listen to that episode. It's in the back catalogs. But seriously, that's what Elon Musk has done. He's created his own Monster island and he's hidden behind free speech. Yeah, and Like there's a weird I don't know man like free the idea of free speech is supposed to protect the public and and public institutions from

Interference by the federal government or by state governments from infringing upon our free speech. Right. So I should be allowed to say or, you know, any crazy crackpot bullshit or criticize any governor or criticize any, you know, legislator or judicial body or whatever, without fear of recrimination from my government. Right. That's really the heart of free speech. But that concept has been expanded and expanded and expanded to where free speech is no longer a freedom of speech to not be curtailed by government forces, but a freedom of speech to say whatever I want wherever I want, even including private spaces.

And I think it should be noted that in my strong view, and I could be wrong about this. I grant that I could be convinced otherwise, but Facebook's still a private company. Yeah. Twitter's still a private company. These are still private space. We haven't, we have not brought these into the fold of the public sphere. These are private spaces. They should be able to make, unless we want to take them over, right?

Unless we want to turn them into semi-public spaces by bringing them into the sort of fold of the American people. We're not doing that. So we're trying to have our like freedom of the speech cake and eat it too, where we have these very public or privately held corporations that, you know, are privately held for their money. They're privately held for their business practices. They're privately held for who they hire and who they fire. And then we want to say, oh, but it's, it's the new town square and it's everybody should

have a right to this bullhorn. And I don't buy it. I don't bullhorn. And I don't buy it. I don't buy it personally. I don't buy it. It's like we are, we are giving up accuracy in order to satisfy free speech fetishists who want access to an infinite bullhorn in a privately owned space that they have no right to. You have no right to that space. That's just true, right? I could get zucked right out of Facebook and never be allowed back in.

And there's no recourse for me, right? There's no, I can't say, well, but I want to come back in. You're being a big meanie pants to me. Like it's not how any of that works unless it involves somehow this free speech stuff. And I don't understand that because we don't actually have a right to free speech in an unfettered way in private spaces. And you also, you know, you're talking about corporations, Tom, you also saw in this article, they talk about it very specifically that both YouTube and Facebook took their foot off the gas. Yeah. So they initially were down with Facebook took their foot off the gas. So they initially were down with censoring and removing and trying to stop some of this speech from getting out there. But I think, you know, I can't prove it. But my first thought is, well, they saw a drop in revenue. They saw

a drop in revenue and they saw that people weren't reacting as much with the content that they were. Were they returning their phones off faster? You know, they weren't spending as much time on that platform as they were, where they were turning their phones off faster, you know, they weren't spending as much time on that platform as they were. And they weren't because the algorithm wasn't pushing them towards stuff that was dangerous. The algorithm wasn't trying to light their fuse. What the algorithm was doing was a little bit

namby-pamby for them, and so they had to go back and say, no, sorry, we gotta put our foot back on the gas or we're gonna lose market share. And so we've gotta go out of our way to make sure that people are put in situations where the algorithm is teeing them up and hitting them like a fucking golf ball, as hard as they can into the worst spaces on the internet.

And I don't think that that's an inaccurate way to think about how they approach this business. It's so interesting to be right now off YouTube because of a thing that's at the end of our show that has been on 700 episodes of our show that is clearly anti, it's not anti-vax, it's pro-vax, right? It's gonna say anti-anti-vax, but that's a double negative.

So it's a pro-vax. And it's so clear if a human being listens to it and YouTube threw us off for three months and gave us a strike because they were they said no, sorry We looked at it very careful. Yeah, we got that and and we're the ones who got thrown off But I mean I guarantee you can go on there and I bet you could listen to the fucking Brett Weinstein Yeah, I'm sure you can listen to him talk about stuff all day and all night. Yeah. You know, I want to be clear that these platforms have made billions of dollars monetizing our

reactivity. That is what they have done. They have no appetite for their own self-regulation. They didn't want to do it in 2020, right? They didn't want to do it in 2020, right? They didn't want to do it. I think they felt an intense political pressure after January 6th to not lose advertisers. That's the reason I think that's exactly it. I think they'd never had any appetite to it. I think that what they saw and I'm just saying shit,

but like I think that what they saw was that, you know, if they're going to monetize reactivity, what they realize is we need to make people reactive and taking these super spreaders of misinformation out of the system makes people less reactive and they spend less time to your point and these systems. They never wanted to regulate themselves, taking Trump off, taking these other people off. This was pure politics for them. This is antithetical to their business model. They want, they want the crazies out here, man. They want the screamers.

They want the, you know, howler monkeys. They want all that stuff. That's better for the business. Better every day. They don't want a good, safe, decent space full of good information. That's not what any of them are working for. And that's not conspiratorial. I mean, article after article after article comes out where you see in the background,

there's an article, it's tangentially related. There were articles that came out two weeks ago that Meta via Instagram is actively promoting children's pictures to child sex predators. They're actively promoting it. And like, they don't give a shit. They don't give a shit. They actively don't care. They're not trying to make safe spaces. They're not trying to make places where information is good and high quality.

What they're trying to do is get people to click on shit and look at their fucking ads. And they're going to pretend it's about panda videos. But it's not about fucking panda videos. That's not what they want you to watch.'s about Panda videos, but it's not about fucking Panda videos. That's not what they want you to watch. They want you to watch like these reactive misinformation artists. That's where the dollars are. So I think kicking these guys out was they were just like waiting for them to bring back

to be brought back in. Sure. I think they want them back in as soon as possible. Nobody's going to continue on down a rabbit hole for cat videos. They're going to continue on down a rabbit hole for Nazi shit or anti-trans shit. And that's where they're going to keep going. And you're going to see, you know, I say that, although I have gone down rabbit holes for cat videos. I've done that before. I have discovered my true passion in social media life is Panda videos. I fucking love them. Panda videos are

amazing. I just send all I do on Instagram is send my wife Panda videos and I don't ever like them or react to them. I just send them. And now my whole feed wife Panda videos and I don't ever like them or react to them. I just send them. And now my whole feed is Panda videos. It's the best feed. It's better than what you're getting before where there's people getting their heads pulled off or you're getting, there's a bunch of fistfights.

Yeah. My whole Instagram feed is just Panda videos. Now it's all I care about. Yeah. I go on Instagram Panda videos. All my, all my, so they post those, those things on, uh, the reels and they'll have a space for reels on Facebook. So if I scroll past it, you'll see the reels and sometimes I'll, I'll spin through

the reels to see what's there, but you got to actually click on them to see them. Cause they used to do where you could just watch the reel without clicking on it. And now you actually have to click on it. But if there's anybody who's using a router or building something, I'm such a sucker. I almost always click on it or power washing something. I'll watch it. They're using epoxy, I'll probably watch it.

But yeah, those are much better than if I see somebody get stabbed or something. Oftentimes I'll stop there. And then the rest of the day my feet is the worst feet in the history of mankind. It's the worst thing. My Reels feed on Facebook is all Jim bro shit. Because I'm kind of a sucker for it. So like I'll be scrolling and somebody will be like, somebody's deadlifting a thousand

pounds raw. And I'm just like, I'll watch it. I don't know why it's not actually interesting. It's like, well, that went up in the air briefly. There's nothing to see here. But I'm gonna set it down. I set it down, set it down. You know, that's how it worked.

But it's funny because you watch the Jimbrow shit and it like, it brings, and then if you scroll in, it's like all kinds of other weird toxic shit. Cause it's like, oh, like he's probably a Jimbrow He's one of this type. And he has on the back of his car, he has Calvin peeing on something, whatever it is, there is Calvin peeing on something. Calvin peeing on the meta symbol or Calvin peeing on a Biden hat or something. Probably could be, you know? So yeah, but yeah, this, this article, not good news. No, it's not good news. No. And it's, and it's hiding behind, you know, cornerstones of our government,

yeah. The cornerstone of our government where it's like you said, and like you pointed out, it's the cornerstone of our government, not taking that right away from us. It's not the cornerstone of the government that I can't stop you from saying stuff in my own house. Right. That's not how it works. Right. But that can't stop you from saying stuff in my own house. Right. That's not how it works. Right. But that's the way it's treated. And it's, and it's the core.

And they're, they're using it. They've been misusing that word, that phrase for forever. Freedom of speech has been misused forever and they're hiding behind it now. Yeah. I worry that it's been expanded now so much by law that like the idea of our freedom of speech will necessitate these private bullhorn companies to absolutely be unable to not platform weirdos and like vicious monstrous bigots. Like I worry that they won't be able to de-platform white nationalists if they want to. There used to be this threat that they used to go after the social media companies with

that we're going to make you regulate your space because you'll be responsible for what happens on your space. And they kept saying that there's like a law in the internet that allows you to get away with this, but we can edit this. Section 230. Yeah, we can we can f*** with this Section 230. We can change this thing around. If anybody's listening, that's going to change things.

That's going to really change things. Now, it might not change things for the better. I'm not going to say it's going to be for the better. I won't say that that's for the better. But I will say if you start holding these places responsible for the creation of school shooters, for the creation of grocery store shooters, for the creation of giant anti-trans and Nazi groups. Yeah. Suddenly I think they start moderating themselves a lot more differently. I don't know, I don't have enough prescience or intelligence or depth of

knowledge to know whether that would be a good thing, but I know it would change stuff. would be a good thing, but I know it would change stuff. All right, that's going to wrap it up for this week. If you're a patron, you're going to get a special patron only show this Thursday. If you're not a patron, you can come catch us next Monday and then there'll be a funny show the following Thursday. But we today are going to leave you like we always do with the skeptic screen. 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

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