Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 777: Supreme Court Rules Presidents Are Kings

Episode Date: July 8, 2024

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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. 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 at today is Wednesday, July the third. We're recording one day early because tomorrow Cec, is America's last birthday. Oh, hey. Tomorrow is when America goes into hospice.

Oh, hey, it's real bad, guys. Hey, let's light off some fireworks. That's our last hurrah. I'm just gonna put my face over the mortar. That's actually, that's not a, like I'm just gonna put my face right over. The Supreme Court's already holding our face over. Lord are you kidding me?

Holy shit. It's been a week, bro. It's been a week. I don't think there's been a week this bad in a long, long, long time. I mean, we were talking over dinner. You would have to go back to either the release of the Dobbs decision. Yeah. Or something like that to have a week that's this bad. It's a monumentally, like here's the thing.

This is a, an historically bad week. And I mean that literally, this is a week that has such historical significance and is so tragic that when they write about the downfall of the American democracy, this will be like step two. This is it. It's like we had the insurrection and now we have the protection of the insurrection. We have the really-

What we have is- Enshrining the insurrection. We have a great big approved stamp by our judiciary. Like we are pro-insurrection now. We're talking of course about the grotesque and sweeping court decision by the Supreme Court, six to three, granting presidents fiefdom over the kingdom. So they are, they are essentially, immune. They have a level of immunity that we all wish we had from COVID. And STDs. Immune from official acts. So official acts are just immune. Then there's presumptive

immunity for other things that they do that aren't official that are still like in the office or whatever. They're in the sort of like, what do they say? Like the periphery of official acts? Like what does that even like, what does this language even mean? And then the big kicker though, the one that's the real gut punch is the third part of that decision, which talks about how evidence while they're in office and there's a lot of things that you can't take as evidence because it's protected because they're technically immune. So even things that they do wrong, you can't like prosecute them for

and the possibility of his case in New York maybe going, get in a mistrial, they had to push the sentencing off. So just by the way, if you're gonna join me for the sentencing on the 11th, that is not happening now because the sentencing has been moved off to September. Plus side, if it happens in September, I'll be there. And plus side, if it happens in September, I'll be there. And plus side, if it happens in September,

maybe he'll be in jail during the election. But yeah, it's a genuinely terrible decision by the Supreme Court all around, totally on ideological lines. The three liberal justices all dissented, but the other six, except for Amy Coney Barrett, I think she joined the three on the evidence part, but it doesn't matter because they still lost. And literally every single one of those people, when they were going and getting their Senate

confirmation hearings, they all said that no person is above the law. So they lied during those hearings. So I don't know if that's a impeachable offense for lying while you're getting that, but nothing matters. Here's the thing. It's impossible for there to be. What we've basically have done is we've created a system now which is enshrined and codified that basically says there are no repercussions. Nothing matters. That's it. That's the place that we're in now. The dissent, one of the dissents, I don't remember who wrote it, essentially said from one of the Supreme Court justices,

essentially said, like we are, I'm paraphrasing, but she uses the word king in her dissent. Yeah, so that is not like, those aren't my words, I'm not clever, like those are her words talking about creating a king. This is a grotesquery and the logic and the way that the justices wrote this decision, they wrote it as if they were writing

to protect a sort of like abstract posterity of power, this sort of like platonic ideal of a presidency, rather than addressing the reality of the case in front of them, the reality of the situation, the truth of January 6th, the honesty of a president who is trying everything in his power, including plenty of illegal shit and underhanded shit to stay in power and subvert our very democracy.

They wrote this opinion like, you know, well, we're really, I think it was Kavanaugh said something like, we're writing a, an opinion here for history, for the ages. It's Roberts who wrote it. It was, it was Robert who said that. So it was just like, no, we're settling a question about an insurrection and about a guy who right now, like fucking essentially next week may be president again. And if you build a system and we just did and there's no getting around it, there's

no takesies backsies, there's no appeal process. This is just locked in now for however long. Until you get enough people to come back and do what they did with Dobbs. Take precedent that they've made and change it. That's what has to happen. We're looking at like probably a generation or more. I don't think that's wrong. I think it'll be a generation. I want to say too, I cover this on the other show I do, that Lawful Assembly show I do with Craig. Craig read the whole

opinion and he and I talked about it at length. I actually released it today. So if you're hearing this, you can go check it out. Pretty easy to find. It's the, you know, the presidential immunity podcast that are released this morning on Wednesday. But I want to say, you know, one of the things that that I think is so it's just so terrible about this is that they went out of their way these the justices specifically Roberts when he wrote their way, these, the justices, specifically Roberts, when he wrote this opinion, he said, you know, we want to make sure that the president, he's got, he's agile, he's able to move quickly,

he's able to move powerfully, we don't want to hamstring him. And they didn't bother to look at 240 some years of history where the president has never been hindered by his office. Not a single time. Instead they went to, well, we don't want it to happen in the future. While kind of winking at you and saying,

we already know what happened when a president stepped outside the lines. And that's the real issue. The presidency doesn't have to be powerful, more powerful than it was before. The executive branch doesn't need to hold more power. It was already very powerful, and it was already very nimble,

and it could already act with aggression if it needed to. What they did was they enshrined even more power into the executive branch, because this is something that the Federal Society loves That's what they want and they've been pushing for this for a very long time and like make no mistake the Accumulation of power upward into a single branch and not just a branch That's actually the wrong way to think about it into a single person Yeah, is the accumulation of power by an autocrat it that's why the word king by Sotomayor is so important.

What this does is this effectively erases those boundaries. Trump pushed the boundaries, now they're gone. They're officially gone. They're officially gone. If you're Trump, I mean, they even ask the question in the arguments because it actually was a, even as hyperbolic as it was, it's a good question. What about if a president orders SEAL Team Six

to assassinate a political rival? Would that be, and like every analysis I read said, that is an official act. That would be an official act. That would be unpunishable. We're at a place where, whether or not somebody uses that power or not, the use of

violence by autocrats against their political rivals, murder and violence, is a tool of banana republics all around the world. We've just codified a system that says, and if you do it, there's nobody to hold you accountable. So maybe it'll happen. Maybe it won't happen. If it doesn't happen, it's good luck. That we need a system that isn't just, we hope everybody behaves nice.

I think what we saw with January 6th and the events that surrounded January 6th is that for 240 some years, we had a system that functioned because everybody agreed to play nice in the sandbox because we all did actually love the country. Even if we had differing ideas about who should be in the country,

about how it should function, about what we should do with money, about what power meant, even if we had really fundamental differences, I think that at the top, people had an idea that like, this wasn't about them personally, this was about something greater. The problem with autocrats

is it's about them fucking personally. We know that about Trump because he fucking says it. greater. The problem with autocrats is it's about them fucking personally. We know that about Trump because he fucking says it. He doesn't listen to the words he uses, man. And now he is very likely to win in November. I know it's not a luck, but I think it's there's a strong chance he wins in November and walks into a White House where nothing he does has any personal consequences. Don't write to me about impeachment. Just don't even write to me about that shit. And the thing he was impeached for, where he's talking about getting that sort of quid

pro quo for from Ukraine, that stuff wouldn't even be able to be, you know, if he's, if he's not criminally liable for it, then what's the high crime and misdemeanor? Where does it come from? Yeah, and I don't know because I know that there's a difference between what a high crime and misdemeanor is defined as for impeachment versus like a high crime and misdemeanor in terms like a criminal statute. So I know that there's a difference there. But the thing is that like impeachment is not a personal consequence.

And it's also so fucking hard to do anyway. It's a slow motion firing. That's all it is. It's not you have no personal consequence except for like you lost your job today. That's nothing. That's not a civil penalty. That's not a criminal penalty. Everybody in this country faces the possibility of losing their job. We just don't have the luxury of having it done in slow motion by a committee of sycophants trying to help keep it for us. And it's also just genuinely, it's so impossible with our very divided, very closely divided system to even expect that an impeachment would even happen.

It's effectively a 0% possibility. It's like, yeah, 0%. The other thing I've been seeing a lot of, and I don't know if it's just joking or not, but a lot of people talking about what Biden should do now that he has this power. And I wanna caution people. I know that there, I'm sure there's a lot of jokes out there.

And I get that people wanna make a joke about this cause it helps ease the blow. Yes, it does. For sure. So I don't disagree that we shouldn't be making jokes. And I don't want to shit on people's jokes about this either, right? But I also want to say that for anybody who's seriously considering that Biden should do something

like lock Trump up until after the election because he or lock or cancel the election until we try him for his actual crimes or all these things that I'm seeing now. Having a dictator and an autocrat is a bad thing. Yes. Period. It's just a bad thing, period. We should never be okay with that.

I don't care if it's uncle Joe, who's the dictator. I don't want him to be a dictator. No. I don't want him to be a dictator. I don't want him to be an autocrat. You shouldn't want that either. I don't care that my side, the side that I'm supporting, it's not even my side, it's the side that I'm supporting happens to be in power right now. That is irrelevant.

We don't want that period. We shouldn't want that at all for anybody in office. And it shouldn't, we shouldn't take advantage of it while it's our guy. Yeah, man. I couldn't agree more. The solution to not wanting the system to collapse is not to collapse the system first. That's a crazy solution, right? If you're like, Hey, one of the things that scares me about Trump is that he'll behave like an autocrat. And one of the ways we can solve that is by behaving like an autocrat before he gets around to it. That's not a thing.

Like, that's not a thing. I also, and I know this is very unpopular on the left. I get this, but like, I don't think we should pack the court. I really don't. I think that is a never ending chain of escalating problems. I don't see honestly, strategically what that solves. We pack the court, then they pack the court. Then we pack the court, then they pack.

That can't be the solution. Structurally, it can't work. I just don't think it can work. Like we would roll things back, then they would roll things back. And then like we'd have 73 people on the court, you know, overnight. It just, it doesn't really make sense to me. And maybe I could be convinced. Maybe there's some long-term strategy that I haven't thought of or read about where we pack the court and then the court is stabilized

in some sort of way in which to be like, it's like you're standing on glue or whatever, and you say, nope, you can't touch me now because I'm on glue and you can't, like I did it first. Yeah, right. I pantsed you, but now I'm on glue. And so you can't pants me. How do you write like you're running out of time? Hey!

Write day and night like you're running out of time? Hey! Every day you fight like you're running out of time, like you're running out of time, are you running out of time? All right, so two stories, two slightly different messages, a lot to talk about. New York Times, Biden tells allies he knows he has only

days to salvage candidacy. The president's conversations are the first indication he is seriously considering whether he can recover after a devastating performance on the debate station Atlanta. The White House said the report was false. Also a story from the Hill. Joe Biden campaign official says he's not dropping out. So, and like I wanna point out,

cause I think it's important. The story from the Hill is dated 628. The story from the Times is dated today. Like we just clicked on it today. And these headlines seem to be changing from the time I was reading the news this morning to the time I got to the studio this afternoon. So I think this is by the time you hear this, who knows what may have happened?

I don't know. I can't tell you what's going to happen. I will say this. The debate, if you didn't see it last week, the debate was a kind of a nightmare. It was bad. Biden felt like he was trailing off. It felt like he was sluggish. It felt like he was sluggish. It felt like he was, he was hoarse.

His voice was soft. The people who are, I think that what people want to see in that situation is a show of power. And he did not come off as powerful at all. And I think the difficulty is, is that we need to recognize, I think we should recognize that the president's job is not debating. The president doesn't do this very often.

This isn't something that like they spend their day like honing their wit, sitting around the agora like Socrates and arguing about some fucking philosophical concept. These are rare occasions where he has to flex this sort of debate muscle, right? But, and so it really doesn't reflect, I think, his ability in office per se, but I think it reflects a, it reflects his state. And I think that that is big enough where people see that.

And someone like Tom, someone like myself, someone like probably who's listening to this show, who's not, who 100% doesn't want Trump in. It doesn't matter what it is. Trump is the worst thing that could happen to this country in a long time if it gets reelected. It doesn't matter. You know, like you could,

you could weekend at Bernie's fucking by- For real. And it wouldn't matter. Absolutely true. We're gonna vote for anything that's not Trump. But the people that you're trying to convince, the people in the middle, and those people are mostly comfortable,

mostly middle class, mostly not affected by a lot of this stuff, and you gotta convince them. And the convincing wasn't with Trump lying, because Trump lied the entire debate. There's an entire article that I found that went through each part of the debate. And the places where Joe Biden supposedly lied,

he was off by like two things, like two numbers or something where he had said, oh, it was 136 and like, actually it was 134 or whatever. Instead. But Trump is saying that they have kids and they kill them. They birth babies and they murder them right there and that's an abortion or whatever. I mean, he's lying through his teeth

through most of this debate. So I don't wanna downplay all the stuff that Trump did, of course, because Trump was terrible for that. I mean, he's a terrible choice. But if you're not fact checking him in the moment and you're not paying attention to that stuff in the moment, that's a really big swing. And Biden came out and he lost this debate, even though Trump lied the entire time. It doesn't matter. You know, here's, there's a couple of

things that I think are that I've been thinking about. And the one is that when you have a performance like Trump's, which was genuinely terrible, and then you still lose against that performance. That sucks. Yeah, that absolutely sucks. That is scary. Like that's scary. It's not like Biden was a little off and Trump was just killing it all night. Trump was like by all accounts, if you just read, it's actually hard to find. I had to look for this. It's hard to find evaluations of Trump's performance on the debate stage that don't talk about Biden. Sure. Everything is talking about Biden. It doesn't matter how left leaning the news is or right leaning the news is or supposedly

center the news is everything is talking about Biden. But if you try to find something about, like you were saying about Trump and like whether or not he's being factual, he did a bad job at this debate. He did a really bad job. I think that almost anybody halfway competent could have mopped the floor with him that night.

And the fact that like Biden lost so badly and not just lost, but really like he came out and he made so many people, myself included, really question his fitness, his fitness for office, his cognitive fitness for office. I think, and I think I've read really credible reporting that suggests that for some time, Biden's been fading, that he is less and less sort of present, importantly present in meetings and whatnot.

All of that matters, like all of that matters a great deal. It doesn't mean you don't vote for him because the other alternative is Trump, right? So like a vote for Biden is a vote against Donald Trump. It is a vote against the 2025 project. It is a vote against like the ending of Roe v. Wade and the Dobbs decision. It is a vote like for the women, the minorities,

the people of color in your life, you know, the LGBT community is a vote for all of those things. It's a vote to make sure that the next person in his office doesn't utilize what the Supreme Court just gave him. Yes, exactly. So we still have the same no good choice, right? Like I get that like right now, I can't get excited about Biden, but I am less afraid even of an enfeebled Biden than I am of an emboldened Trump.

Sure. Are you fucking kidding me? Absolutely, yeah. That said, I do think that we have a short opportunity here, temporally, to make good of this and for Biden to choose to step down. I think America, from everything that I've read, everybody that you read says the same thing. I hate these two candidates. I am not excited about either choice. This is not the election

America wants. Anybody, nobody's excited about this. I don't even understand how this is happening. We are so unexcited about these two people as our candidates. I think we have a golden opportunity on the, as Democrats, like as people on the left to say, well, let's get somebody young and dynamic and exciting who can come in and just fucking mop the floor with them. And just like take all the ammunition right out of Trump's belt and get some energy into the system. Let's get a Governor Whitmer, like we were talking about before the show, in there. Let's get like Harris to run. Any of those people I think could really bring an enormous amount of much needed excitement and energy and all the people that are like,

fuck, I'm holding my nose or I'm not gonna bother to show up or this is a fight about two idiots in their golf game and I don't wanna, like all of that's wrongheaded, but that's how a lot of people think. We, if we need to get people a reason to be excited, this is our one moment to still maybe bring some excitement and drive some votes because every, all that matters is Trump doesn't win. That's my real view here.

All that matters is Trump doesn't win. We'll figure the rest out in payroll. You know, we'll work that out. I think I've got a couple of things to say about this. One of them is addressing your point, like how we got here. And we got here because a lot of people who were older voted for Biden. They saw what was happening in the United States.

They saw Trump as a polarizing figure. And they saw Biden as a uniter. That's what everybody was talking about when Biden was running in the primary. Right? But was there a primary? Was there a Democratic primary this year where we really got to vote?

No, I'm talking about in 2019. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, yeah, yeah. So in 2019, Biden's running. I was gonna say, I didn't miss the primary. And so are a bunch of other people, young, energetic people. But primaries don't get people to turn out for the vote. So this is a great opportunity to remind people, if you want young, if you want exciting,

if you want somebody else, if you don't just want the default guy that everybody's been voting for for years, get out in the primary. There's an opportunity to make sure, look at the primary numbers compared to the general election numbers. Look at the primary numbers by age group, right?

I'm seeing a ton of people who are younger than me complaining about this. Man, you had every opportunity to make sure this didn't happen. You had every opportunity before this to make sure this didn't happen. I was hoping he was gonna be a one-term president. He said he was going to be. I thought he was gonna be a one-term president. I was hoping he was gonna be a one-term president. He said he was going to be.

I thought he was gonna be a one-term president. I was hoping he was gonna be a one-term president. When they came around and they're saying, no, he's gonna run again, at that point, there's nothing you can do. The Democratic party's locked in. They're locked in. They're stuck with this person.

It's on them that they didn't let people know that he's fading. If that's a real thing, it's on them. That's terrible. I will say this. If you're gonna get somebody in there, somebody else, I'm thinking Gavin Newsom, who just did a absolutely amazing debate with DeSantis

and destroyed him, like literally destroyed him, ate his soul, like held him over and cracked him open and then drank him like a Cadbury egg. There's nothing Trump could possibly do to Newsom. Nothing whatsoever. There's nothing he could possibly say that could trip up Kamala Harris or Pete Buttigieg or Cory Booker or any of those people you mentioned, Whitmer, it doesn't matter. Any of those people who are younger, they're more fit, they're going to excite a group

of voters that Biden cannot excite. I will say this, if he steps down though and says, I'm not gonna run, I want him to step down from the presidency right now. I don't want him to finish out his term. If he can't run and he doesn't feel like he can win this race, I do not think he is fit for the presidency. And he needs to send not just this message that he's gonna step down. He needs to send a message that he's gonna step down as the Democratic nominee, but also send a message that I'm done, period.

Kamala is now the person who's in charge. I don't disagree with that. I am genuinely concerned. You know, like, there is a truth that we have to, as a nation, like every other nation, our leadership has to project strength and authority across the world. And our leadership right now is in absolute chaos

and turmoil and the world sees chaos and turmoil. And there is a responsibility of our leadership to project something stable into the world. If there is doubt about Joe Biden's fitness for office and there is doubt about it, right? Whether it's fair or not, you can't read anything even in the most left-leaning, most like... Yeah, sure. It's been on MSNBC all week.

Doesn't matter like how sympathetic your news source is. It is absolutely filling the text. It's filling the airwaves. It's everywhere. So it's not like the rest of the world doesn't see that. This is destabilizing. Our democracy right now does not look stable. The American economy is the largest economy in the world. The whole world rests on the American economy. It is important to the world for security reasons, for economic reasons, that we appear strong and stable as a nation.

Our leadership is a part of that appearance. Appearances are sometimes messages in and of themselves This is not good for America. It's not good for the world. It's not good for our allies It is a gift actually to the enemies of democracy across the world sure it just is We owe it to the world and to our allies to do better to be better and to like recognize, okay, my time is over. That's it. I think there's no way you can look at Joe Biden right now and say, in four years, he'll be just fine.

No, I don't think you can do that. I don't think you can look at him like that. I think if he was, the thing that I would tell him, if I were the person who was running his PR, was the night after the debate, I would tell him, I've the person who was running his PR was the night after the debate, I would tell him I've booked you for six talk shows today. You're gonna go out there and you're gonna be strong and you're gonna say I had a bad night,

but you're gonna be in front of every single American's eyeballs this morning and you're gonna be on everything. You're gonna be on every single station I can get you on this morning and you're gonna do it for the rest of the week, and you're gonna show every single American that you just had a bad night and that you're not a bad candidate. They didn't do that.

He fucking sequestered himself after all this. Well, did he do a rally? He had one rally in North Carolina. Where he's reading off a teleprompter, though. Like, a rally is not the same thing. No, it's not, no. A rally is not even close to an interview with a reporter. Right. And he's not been doing interviews now for a long time. And even a softball interview

with a reporter, right, with a very left leaning softball one would be way harder hitting than him doing a rally afterwards. So I would have put him out in front of people immediately. Cause if he was, like he said, you know, ready to fight all that stuff, then yeah. But I see it. You're right. There's an appearance of weakness. Do I think Joe Biden is incompetent? I don't fucking know. I don't know either. I don't know. Right. I have no idea. But what I do know is, is that the signs don't look good. Right. And we can't afford this. The signs mean something, right? Whether or not the signs are true, the signs show something to other people.

And that's an important message that's being sent. But you know, you watch that debate and Joe Biden had his mouth open. He was looking sideways. He kind of looked a little lost. The things that he had to say, don't get me wrong, some of the stuff he had to say, I think was a knock out of the park.

Right, same. But it was delivered in a way that projected to people that he looked weak. And that's the time that he can't do that. Yeah, and if you can't project strength and authority and competence, that's a key part of your job. It is. That is a key, that is like,

it's written into the job description. It's not just what you say, it's not. It's how you say it, that is like it's written into the job description. It's not just what you say. It's not it's how you say it That is important one of the exercises that you're supposed to figure out what you would want to do if PC load letter the fuck does that mean? This is also from the debate this from the hill black Americans demand to know what black jobs are after Trump debate comment So here's what he said. I want to read the quote from Trump. He said, the fact is his big kill on the black people is the millions of people that he's allowed to come in through the border. They're

taking black jobs now. It could be 18, it could be 19, even 20 million people. They're taking black jobs and they're taking Hispanic jobs. And you haven't seen it yet, but you're going to see something that's going to be the worst in our history. So can we just pause on the last part? The last part, you haven't seen it yet, but you're going to see something and it's going to be the worst in our history. The worst what man? I don't know what it is, but when you, when it gets there, you're not going to like it. Well, what's it going to be so bad? And when this so bad happens, I'll say, I told you so you didn't tell me anything. That's another one of his didn't say anything, but still gets to claim victory.

It's such like, if you're stupid, this is clever phrasing. And that's really important. I think I will talk about the black thing. It's the most important part, but like this is just another example of where he will be able to take credit for something he never fucking said. The last part of that sentence is nothing. I like this tweet that came out afterwards from Black Pack.

Well, now that the debate's over, time for all of us to get ready for bed so we can be on time to our black jobs tomorrow. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. I thought there was another funny tweet Get ready for bed so we can be on time to our black jobs tomorrow. I thought there was another funny tweet that came out this day during that time where they were talking about their golf game and some black person said the caucasity of this is amazing. There's a very small selection of people who play golf. Yeah.

Right? It's not most of America that plays golf. No. It's a small, very specific selection of America that plays golf. You are alienating so many people when you spend that much time talking about your golf hand. That was embarrassing. It's embarrassing.

It was embarrassing. It's embarrassing. Like what he is saying here, and like we should all hear it. This is him saying Black jobs are low wage unskilled jobs because black people are deserving of or have Low wage unskilled work. That is what he is saying. It's implied. That's why and it's like that's you somehow Cecil somehow Trump support within the black community continues to grow, not shrink. Same with the Hispanic community.

I'm floored by this. That is somebody saying, you deserve a lesser job. You should like it, but I'm here to protect your lesser job. I'm here to protect your scraps. Even though he's not though. Like that's the other thing too. He's not, a hundred percent not, but that's, that's what he's going to protect your scraps. Even though he's not though. That's the other thing too. He's not. No. 100% not.

But that's what he's going to sell to people. So you're right. And that shouldn't be a win. That's not a win. That's not a win, man. That's not a win, but. Holy shit. This is a guy, I mean, just in case anyone was confused about his issues regarding race,

believes that there were very fine people on both sides in Charlottesville. There's a young, five young men he put in an op-ed in New York Times. That's right. So how they need to get killed. Yeah, he's a fucking monster. He's a fucking bigot. Could someone who's not a misogynist pass the Splenda? Hello?

Thank you, Stephanie. The story's from NBC. Three female GOP state senators who filibustered the South Carolina abortion ban lost their primaries. They were defeated by three male Republican candidates. As soon as they left, the lepers just ate the shit out of their faces right after where they was. I think that this is just another of a thousand thousand examples of the way in which Republicans continue to tell us that women are expendable. That it is okay for women and women's lives to be destroyed and disregarded if they step out of line with patriarchal ideas.

Sure. That's just what happened here. I mean, they got replaced by dudes. Sure. They didn't get replaced by other women who were even ideologically in step with the rest of the Republican party. It was just like, all right, well, we, you know, sit down little miss, let the men be in charge.

We gave you an opportunity to agree with us when we told you to agree with us. Now you didn't do that and you're gone. You go back to your fucking kitchen, go get pregnant. We're not gonna make that mistake again. No, yeah, right. We won't let that mistake happen again. That's right. And I wonder too, because if these people were elected

from their districts, right, I am curious where their district is gonna land if it put women in already, and it put women in who were ideologically against all abortion already, where is that district going to go? Because that was just a primary to get them out of it. That's not somebody who got replaced. Right. True. They have to run. So now they got primaried. But now in the election, we'll see if those seats actually go to those guys or not. Yeah. you know, if this was North Carolina,

I would say that there's a better fighting chance that they would lose. Sure. South Carolina seems to be a little more south of the Carolinas. The thing that I think they need to do, the Democratic party needs to do, is show that this will change.

Yeah. That this is gonna change our laws if you don't put the right people in. I think that, like, we have, here's what makes me crazy is that there's, right now, if we, if the Democrats lose to Republicans after the Dobbs decision, my God, my God, we have been given a opportunity to advocate for women if we don't seize on it and take control of the reins of power on the back and the immediacy of this decision, we will have lost that moment. We will have lost the momentum of that moment and our ability to make gains back will be diminished greatly.

This should actually be kind of a cakewalk for Democrats. Like abortion is so, polls so incredibly well. It's not actually, it's genuinely not a numerically controversial topic. It's not controversial at all. Yeah. Most people want it. Most people want access to it.

Most people and the people who are affected by it most vote more. Yeah, this it's crazy that we are in a place I really thought going into this election after Dobbs I was like well you fucked yourselves there dumbasses and I thought all right well that sucks terribly but maybe we'll be able to fix some of this because certainly you will have fucked your own face so hard that we'll be able to regain control of the House, the Senate, the presidency. Maybe we can get something done. Maybe we can make some kind of a federal law which supersedes these horrible state law.

Maybe we can accomplish something here. Maybe we can put this on more referendums. If we don't seize on abortion as the motivating primary driver of this election. What a fucking lost political opportunity. I hate to talk about women's lives this way. It's not what I mean. I mean it's a lost political opportunity because we will not only lose this election on all three levels and in many states, but we will have lost like this short-term. Like the longer things stay one way, the more people start to accept

that that's the way things are. Yeah, I think one thing that this particular Supreme Court decision that came out this week might do is galvanize voters. There is a possibility. God, I hope so. Just like Dobbs, right? Just like when Dobbs came out,

how immediately that galvanized a ton of people and it changed a bunch of people's minds and it moved people over politically. I think this Supreme Court decision needs to be publicized just the same way to talk about how bad it is for America if you have the wrong people in, because if you have the wrong people in government with Dobbs, the wrong people in in government with jobs, suddenly places that are safe to get abortion across the country start to wink out. And suddenly if you have enough people in government

that don't like abortion, you don't get abortion at all. So the same thing's true with this other decision, that if you don't have the right people in office, things can get really bad really quickly. You gotta keep them separated. This story is from NBC News. Oklahoma schools had Ryan Walters.

Teachers who won't teach the Bible could lose their license. In an interview with NBC News, Walters discussed his new Bible instruction mandate and the consequences for those who don't comply. The consequences are you gotta teach the fucking Bible or you could not just be fired, but you could lose your state teaching license. They could take it away from you. They could take your license away. This is a grotesquerie.

This is terrible. This is nonsense. This is an affront to our constitution and our rights. There's supposed to be a separation of church and state, see, so that's just going away now. And he, I want to like quote from the article here because I think it's really important because he does reference,

hey, now we've got the Supreme Court right where we want them. So this is the kind of shit we can do. He basically says that. Yeah. Walter says he feels confident his order will survive legal challenges because of the justices then President Donald Trump appointed to the Supreme Court. Here's his quote, he's helped provide a path for us to be able to do this as states.

It will help us move the ball forward even more than this if Trump wins a second term in November. What he's talking about is move the ball forward with establishing a theocracy of Christian states. That's exactly what he's referring to. Yeah, I mean, you're gonna see more and more of this. There's gonna be a constant testing of the water. And what people don't understand

when there's a testing of the water of legal, of sort of legal decisions, is that while that water is being tested, people suffer. So they pass a really shitty law that's outrageous, right? A law like this, outrageous. How on earth could you possibly think that this is okay? All those people who live there are now forcing their kids to go to a school where they're gonna have

to learn the Bible, even if they don't want it, right? They could be Muslim, they could be Hindu, they could be atheists, whatever. They're gonna be forced to learn the Bible, even if they don't want it, right? They could be Muslim, they could be Hindu, they could be atheists, whatever, they're gonna be forced to learn the Bible. They're gonna force all these teachers to do the same thing. The same thing's happening in Louisiana, where they're gonna have to teach the 10 commandments, because the 10 commandments are on the wall.

So all these people are suffering while this is happening, and they're gonna continue to suffer until it makes its way all the way up until the Supreme Court, until some judge, and it might be a judge closer to them, locks it down, those people get to do that thing. They get to be forced to do that thing. And that happens over and over and over again. And it's not gonna be just one thing.

It's gonna be a multitude of things that they think they can push the envelope on. So they're gonna be doing shit with guns. They're gonna be doing things with abortion. They're gonna be doing things, they're already trying to do it. Think of all those people that had to suffer until that judge in Idaho or Wyoming

passed that rule that said, no, you do have to actually perform emergency abortions here. Think of all those people that had to suffer until someone stepped in to actually do it, right? How many people had to deal with this shitty law that's on the books until our system corrects itself? And the worst part is, is that with the Supreme Court, the way it is, you have no idea if it's actually going to correct itself. Yeah.

And it may not. Like there may not be a correction in our lifetimes for some of this stuff, right? Like I'm a 46 year old guy. I don't know for sure that we're ever gonna get our rights back. I'm not convinced that I will live long enough to see the whole country get their rights back.

That's a really distressing idea. That's a really fucking distressing idea. But like I'm 46, how old is Brett Kavanaugh? You know, these guys are also- Is this 50s? Early 50s? Yeah. Like, what did, like-

Amy Coney Barrett's younger than you, I think. If I make it another 30, 40 years and they make it another 30, 40 years? Yeah. That's like, the only possible solution here, we said it before, like, we have got to get democratic presidents because we gotta wait for Thomas to die and Alito to die

and start replacing these fuckers. God forbid that these guys get replaced again by another 35 year old or 40 year old right wing fucking nut job who will live fucking forever in a job that they can't get fired from and they can evidently take bribes and shit Well, you're gonna get now it's codified. They actually made it so that you know that bribery. That's right Yeah, bribery is now legal in America This is so you have a system that puts people in

Generationally and they can easily change these two justices out that are older now Recharge them get you get rechargeable batteries in there and throw them back in there. Is that? I had a thought about this week about the 10 commandments thing. I was curious what you think. And I know that like the administration might not fly,

but if you were in a classroom and you were allowed to decorate your classroom however you wanted, which I don't know how often that's the case, but you had to display the 10 commandments. I was thinking like, I would display them because I don't want to get in trouble. I don't want to often that's the case, but you had to display the 10 commandments. I was thinking like, I would display them because I don't want to get in trouble, I don't want to lose my job, you know? But I would display like Hammurabi's Code Next,

I would just display it, cover the wall in different, like similar texts, you know, different like, different ideals, different, so it just, it gets lost visually and doesn't appear sacred, right? Like I think part of the intention here is to put it on the wall and make it sacred. And I was thinking like,

wouldn't it be great to sort of ruin the sacredness still abide by the letter of the law just by plastering a wall with 100 posters. This story comes from scientificamerican.com, the Pentagon's anti-vaccine propaganda endangered public health and tarnished US credibility. Amid the pandemic, the Pentagon ran a conspiracy campaign to discredit vaccines just to score points against China.

The revelation is a worst case scenario for global public health, Cecil. This was a hell of an article, man. This is one of those things that, you know, when you read something like this, you like to think that the people who are in power won't abuse their power in such a way that could not just damage, you know, Americans,

but it damaged other people around the world. We see it happen every single administration. I mean, this administration is standing by and watching what's happening in the Gaza Strip. So, we know that it happens every time, but this seems like it's so easy not to fuck up. You fucked this up a long time ago with the CIA pretending to be polio vaccine distributors, you know, go into Afghanistan, they fuck it up, they go there and they find out that these are actually CIA members.

And then they wind up killing people who are actually, people who are just going to actually vaccinate other, you know, the people in Afghanistan. So you poison the well there, and then they poison the well, Trump poisons the well here when he creates, he doesn't want China to get a win for their vaccine. So he goes out of his way to poison the well

and spread this disinformation. And disinformation is dangerous because there's no way to keep that disinformation in those places where you're trying to get that disinformation. The other thing is these are innocent people. These aren't people who are involved in us versus China. These are just everyday people who are living in a country that might be helped by China,

but instead of letting them get a win, you lie about the vaccine and bring down numbers of people who voluntarily want to get that vaccine through misinformation. This is a terrible thing the United States did. Terrible, they stopped it. As soon as like a little while after Biden took office, they stopped it, but they were doing it

while the pandemic was raging. Which is like, this is so unconscionable and egregious. Like what we've seen since the pandemic, what we've seen since the pandemic, what we've seen since the early days of the pandemic is a nation which has, in many ways, lost its faith in medical institutions, in the technology of vaccination itself. We've seen a rise in diseases

which have been under control in America and in other parts of the world. We've seen a rise in polio, polio back on American shores. We've seen a rise in measles all over the world. We've seen a reduction in vaccination rates, not just for COVID, but for all kinds of other diseases. We should have, here what really galls me Cecil is like we had this beautiful,

genuinely beautiful technological moment where a new vaccination technology was put into play for the first time in the real world in practice, the mRNA technology was put into play for the first time. This is a technology of a type which stands to potentially revolutionize medicine itself. And rather than embrace this, which would have been the sane and rational thing to do as the life-saving revolution in medicine that it fucking is, instead we poisoned our own well. We poisoned our own well, not just the well

in the Philippines where this like information war was battling, we poisoned our own well. Disinformation is borderless. It leaks everywhere. So now we are living in a world that's less safe, that's gonna invest less money in these lifesaving technologies. More people will get sick with more things for longer than we ever had to. We had an opportunity which was golden to shit money

into something which would be a benefit for all of humankind. And we fucking ruined it, man. And not only do we not get the great things that are next, but we're damaging the things that are 70 years old. That like, we should take for granted because these are technologies and solution sets that like have been in place for generations. We're turning our backs on progress because of this shit.

What is really galling is the person who was in charge that did this particular thing to spread misinformation and to spread misinformation here and not actually, instead of publicizing and lauding the vaccine, he took a bunch of jabs at the vaccine and masking Donald Trump. This is a man who cultivated a group of people who have a room temperature IQ.

And so he had to please that group of people or he wasn't going to get re-elected. So if he were to embrace science, the smart thing to do, right? Embrace science, save more people, embrace mask mandates, embrace vaccination for all. If he would have done all that, he would have saved a lot of people. He would have been able to combat the pandemic in ways that he wasn't able to do. And he would have been able to slow its spread and been able to make it so fewer people died. It would have been a much better place to live in the United States. He could have done a much better job.

Somebody's grandma would be alive right now. Somebody's grandma would be alive. Somebody's grandpa would be alive. We would have more vaccination rates in our country. Fewer people would be getting sick right now from the surge that's happening with COVID, right? If there was more push for more vaccines and more people to take boosters and things like that.

But instead he cultivated the exact opposite thing. The misinformation, took jabs at his own, literally his own vaccination project. Which was insane. But he had to do it because he made a group of people that he had to appease. And this is an example of why he's the worst person you need to have in office at all times.

The idea that we had a pandemic under Trump doesn't mean that that's the last one we ever have. No, yeah. There's a possibility another one could easily pop up and it could be literally the exact same sickness. Yeah. It could be just a variant of the exact same sickness could happen and devastate our country

again. And if you have somebody who in there who is a vaccine denier in chief, you're gonna lose a lot more people than you would have somebody who's embracing science. 100%. Reading this story should make everybody absolutely furious. The fact that we had to find this story at Scientific American and not as a top line story

at one of these major news publications shocked me. Yeah. I read this, this should be a scandal on the order of like Iran-Contra or you know, I really should this is this should be the scandal of a lifetime. We're just in a place where there's so many scandals of a lifetime. You can't keep track of them. There's just too many of them. You can't keep track of them all. Where are the armed men who come in to take the protesters away?

Where are they? This kind of behavior is never tolerated in Boracua. You shout like that, they put you in jail right away. No trial, no nothing. Journalists, we have a special jail for journalists. You're stealing, right to jail. You're playing music too loud, right to jail, right away. You're driving too fast, jail.

Slow, jail. You're charging too fast, jail. Slow, jail. You're charging too high prices for sweaters, glasses. You right to jail. You undercook fish, believe it or not, jail. You overcook chicken, also jail. Undercook, overcook. You make an appointment with a dentist and you don't show up, believe it or not, jail, right away.

We have the best patients in the world because of jail. Good news, raw story. Let's end with good news today. Traffic, we got to. We got to. Is there a puppy that gets saved by a kitten or something? I can find one. Like a koala bear firefighter or something?

There's a fucking donkey that lives this life for the rest of its life with a bunch of elk and they love him for it. Stories from the raw story. Traffic, tailspin, far right websites, see as much as a 95% decline in visitors in four years. Um, this is very much what this sounds like a host of really prominent right wing nut job websites, Breitbart, um, the Washington examiner. Yeah. Yeah. Even, even like Facebook pages with podcasts like Dan Bogino, those people also, and I

don't know if I'm pronouncing it right, it could be a Bogino, I don't know. That doesn't matter. I only know what he looks like. But the good thing is that this is an example of what could happen if someone at Facebook cares about what is true and what's not true. of what could happen if someone at Facebook cares about what is true and what's not true. And it's not diverting people from a lot of the left-leaning stuff

because the left-leaning stuff isn't lying. It's because this stuff is violently untrue that they are not sending people and not putting it in your feed. I have noticed very much on my feed, I am not getting nearly the vitriol stuff I was getting for a long time. I am getting mostly people's pictures of the,

I know a lot of medieval recreationists, so I'm seeing a bunch of pictures of their, stuff that they're making, the time that they went to an event and they had gear on and stuff like that. So I'm seeing that, and I'm seeing like what people cooked, all that stuff that I hadn't seen for a long time that was polluting my feed, that was all,

I hate this person and here's an article that makes me mad. None of that stuff is, I mean, I'm seeing a little bit of it, but it's pretty rare. Yeah, the Facebook changed its algorithm to prioritize stuff from family and friends and to deprioritize this kind of bullshit. Like just, that's all it takes. That's it.

That's it. Just, you know, Facebook and these other social media platforms, their algorithms are intensely powerful. This is like how a lot of people come to information in the world right now. So if we just feed them less awful, monstrous shit, they'll spend less time on Monster Island. They just will.

Well, and this article goes out of its way to say, they have been. So fewer people are logging into Facebook recently, and then that number's been dropping. And it's dropped a lot since recently. So it looks like in the last couple months, we're seeing a drop off in people utilizing certain social medias, which is a good thing.

It's a great thing. It's a great thing. So a loss for Breitbart is a gain for everybody else. Exactly. Everybody else. Happy birthday America. Yeah. All right. Let's get wrapping up for this week. We're going to be back this upcoming Thursday, we're gonna do a show on life coaching and how life

coaching is exploiting some people because it's not a regulated industry. And so you're gonna check this show out. It's coming on Thursday. Tom read three full articles for patrons. So patrons that subscribe, that patrons that are of two dollars or more got to listen to Tom Reed, three full articles, over 40 minutes of tape. So if you wanna join in on Patreon, we would love to have you as a patron. Yet you help pay three salaries.

You pay my salary, you pay Sarah's salary, and you pay Ian's salary. So you can go to dissonancepod.com or patreon.com slash dissonancepod and you become a patron on a per episode basis. We would love it if you would join us. You get tons of early stuff and tons of free stuff. So come join us.

We're gonna leave you until next week, and we're gonna leave it like we always do with the Skeptics Creed. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter, mommy issue, hypno Babylon bullshit. Couched in Scientist and double bubble toil and trouble pseudo quasi alternative acupuncturating pressurized

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