Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 832: Measles, Vitamin A ,and RFK

Episode Date: April 3, 2025

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 Thursday, April the second when you're hearing this.

Yeah. But it is not Thursday, April the second we're recording it. Recording it a tad earlier, we released our long form. We did a little switch route. So we're going to cover a bunch of stories and I wonder Cecil, how many fresh hells will have occurred? I know, right? It's always the danger.

But the thing is, is that, is that when we record on Thursday, normally it's either a funny show or a long form, it doesn't have to be time sensitive. So what's funny is recording time sensitive stuff for next Thursday. I know it feels really amusing and maybe not the best call, but we wanted to get that thing out because it's just so difficult to talk about anything else. But but if this stuff feels like it was last week, because it's from last week. You know, there was a time when we were doing this show where I thought like,

man, are we going to run out of like stuff every seven days? This seems a little seems like I don't want to get. I don't want to like it. I remember being like, I don't want to get bogged in that 24 news, 24 hour news cycle, like fucking spin machine bullshit. There's not that much stuff that's really important that happens all that often is what I thought when I was an idiot. And now it's like, I could check the news three times a day and there would be like, oh yeah, well the United States decided it

no longer needs babies, children, puppies, and the elderly. And your money. Yeah, right. Yeah. The US government decided to fire everybody. It did decide it needed your money. It needed more of it. All right.

So speaking of asinine, this is from New York Times. Remedies supported by Kennedy leave some measles patients more ill after the health secretary promoted vitamin A as a cure parents in West Texas being giving their children high doses sometimes to prevent infection. I want to be charitable here. What he said about vitamin A specifically, the cod liver oil was that it was miraculously curing people. Literally, that's what he said.

Cures that were miraculous. So if you're a person who has a tremendous amount of distrust of the sort of medical system and vaccination, and then you hear the quack in chief here, which is who Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is, say there are miracle cures. And then you get to throw the word vitamin in there, which people don't really understand.

They think vitamins are like somehow more natural than other chemical structures. They're not, they're just other chemical structures. They're not just other chemical structures. They flock to this vitamin A. Vitamin A is not something you should take just as much as you want without any supervision. Vitamin A is a fat soluble vitamin. Most vitamins are not. There are a handful of vitamins that are fat soluble. Fat soluble vitamins dissolve in fat, just like the name would suggest, but then they are also stored in fat. So unlike water soluble vitamins, which are solvent in water,

they water soluble vitamins, if you take too much, more than your body needs rather, you just pee it out. Doesn't really matter. Doesn't hang onto it. Fat soluble vitamins, just chill out, man. They're just like, thanks. Cool. We're locked in. We are slogging waters.

Here we are. We're in this thing. You can get hyper vitaminosis. You get hyper vitaminosis. What does that do? What does that do to you Tom? Well, funny you should ask. Listeners to Citation Needed may remember a little story we told some time ago about

the Antarctic expedition by the Mawson expedition where an Antarctic Explorer got law, had problems, all kinds of shit goes wrong. It's a funny story. Listen to it. Starts eating. It's hilarious. He starts eating his dogs. So he starts eating the sled dogs. Hilariously. Like comically. And they specifically eat the dog livers. Well, livers store a lot of vitamin A. He got hyper vitaminosis A because he's just a fucking Antarctic explorer and a geologist.

He was not a biologist or anything. So he gives himself hyper vitaminosis A and the skin starts to slough off of his body. The skin sloughs off of his feet. His feet skin peels off like a shoe. The skin sloughs off of his ears, his balls and his penis. Wow. Hyper vitamin host is bad, man. It's not a cure for measles.

It was all the places he was touching. It's. But it, what it is a credit that's to their credit. It is something that they give people who may have already contracted measles to try to replenish some of these things because your body is deficient in them, it might help fight and slow down the infection once you get it, but it's not a preventative. And that's the difference, right? And it's also highly monitored in these hospitals when they give it to somebody who happens

to have the measles and they give it to them, they pay attention to how big they are and how much they can handle and they, because they know the dangers of this. Because they're medical professionals. That is something that RFK is not, a medical professional. But he is in charge of all the medical professionals. Man, we've got, it's like, you remember when Rick Perry, who had a degree in animal husbandry from like the fucking University of Texas? Yeah, like from the TV channel, The U.

Like when he was like in charge of the Department of Energy, like we just got to stop putting people in charge of things they don't know literally anything about just because they're loud about it. It would be like if I was in charge of anything, I'm loud. That's not a qualification. That's a volume problem. That's all it is. It's just like, it's my lack of personal self-control. That's all that is. RFK juniors just loud and raspy at you. That is his only qualification. This is a guy who drove around with a fucking whale head on his car, dripping whale juices down the windows.

There's a guy who put a fucking bear in Central Park who thinks that he had brain worms. And there are people who are like, his advice is better than my doctor's advice. You hit the nail on the head when you said that these are people who are looking for an answer from a very specific subset. And the thing that they're looking for an answer from

is from an alternative medicine standpoint. They don't wanna hear if they cared about traditional medicine, they would have already vaccinated their kids. So none of these people would have gotten, been in this issue if they would have cared about traditional medicine, but they didn't and they thought it was harmful.

And so what they decided to do instead was to look wherever they could for something alternative. This is a man who's offering that to other people, except he's not qualified and he's hurting people more than he ever could just by, even if he were to just follow the regulations of what a normal doctor would say, let's say he's not a regular doctor.

That would be a million percent better than him grandstanding on a soapbox to tell people what he thinks. An unqualified person thinks about what to do. That's exactly right. We should not have these people in these positions of authority. Also real quick, these people are often taking their vitamin A in the form of cod liver oil.

And I just want to point out again for listeners that the supplements industry, so you'd be getting your cod liver oil as a nutritional supplement. The supplements industry is an essentially unregulated industry. It is not impossible, but it is difficult to know enough to do the homework to make sure that when you buy supplements, that those supplements are safe, that they are efficacious, that they contain the amounts that they say they will contain. I'll give you a, I remember maybe a year and a half, two years ago, there was a big story that broke about melatonin. Melatonin is a very common sleep aid that people very often will take in the form of a gummy. And there was a story where they tested a bunch of these gummies and they were all supposed to be, I'm going to get the numbers wrong, but they

don't matter. They're all supposed to be like, let's say a three milligram worth of melatonin gummy. And they found some of them had none. some of them had 30 or 40 milligrams. They were just wildly out of step. Some of them tenfold more. Some of them virtually no detectable amounts. Nobody gets in trouble for that shit because it's an unregulated industry. There's fucking little labels on the bottle

that basically say, this is basically food, eat it or don't, we don't give a shit. It's really tough to get, even if you wanted to supplement vitamin A, which is not something that like you should do without your doctor's supervision, but it is also difficult very often to make sure that you're getting what you think you're getting.

So who knows if these kids that are taking the cod liver oil and it says maybe they're getting a thousand units, maybe they're getting 5,000 units maybe they're getting five thousand units. You don't, you probably don't know. God, get them off of me! Now who's the dipshit you jock douchebag? This story's from Talking Points Memo. IRS predicts Doge lost half a trillion dollars for the USA.

Crazily, Cecil, now hear me out. Okay. If you dismantle and destroy the agency responsible for collecting money, Mm-hmm. you will collect less money. Oh, that's crazy. I know, man. Nuts. Insanity.

What? You'd think somebody with such a big brain would know that. What's crazy to me is that they don't, like, because you control who they go after, right? Trump can easily go in there and, you know, basically say, look, we're gonna focus ourselves on smaller returns. Yeah. And they could just focus on smaller returns.

He won't do that because it'd be terrible press for him because someone would leak that to somebody if that came down from on high. So what Biden did was the smart thing, which was why don't we go after big people and let's do that. And they hired a bunch of people to do that. Well, they fired all of those people.

And so now all the people that were going after the big guy who was gonna cheat on his taxes because they were gonna have a lot of money and that's easy for them to cheat on their taxes. They do because we somehow allow people to like do it themselves. I'm like the fucking like it's like it's like the fucking honest honor system when you like leave a penny take it's crazy to me that that's how you take a tax. It's crazy.

That's how we handle it. You know, it's funny because the way like other countries handle it is so much more convenient for everybody. Like if you're not in this country, we have to sit down and like do a really complex math problem every year where we have to figure out how many apples we're going on a train for a certain amount of time. For like, and it's a lot of work. You have to go through all this stuff and figure it all out. Often you have to have a professional. If it's complicated, it's almost impossible. It's way too Byzantine for a regular person to do.

You would have to, you would have to have somebody. Now, when I was younger, it was a lot easier because I only had one source of income. And they were just like, yeah, do you have one source of income? Just fill out this form. And yeah, that's a real simple math problem. It's just addition and subtraction.

But once you start adding in things that you can deduct from your taxes, because some stuff is supposed to be deductible, tax deductible, so I don't pay taxes when I buy this thing, or I get rebates for certain stuff, et cetera, there's all these weird tax laws. Hire a professional, they know all that stuff. And we had a bunch of professionals

that were like essentially forensic accountants who were paying, who were checking up on all the people who other people have to hire, who these rich people have to hire to get through these sort of systems to get as much as possible. And then they took them away. And now you're going to lose because Biden was, they were making so much money off these salaries because these salaries from these people was small, but the amount of money that they were pulling in was intense from all these people because they were finding all these mistakes and all these like obfuscations on their taxes.

And they were going after these people for massive amounts of money. And they would have gotten that money back and they would have paid for themselves like with pennies on the dollar, but instead they fired all these people. And now all those people are gonna to get away with, you know, running rough shot on our tax system and they're not going to

pay their fair share. Plus they're going to get away with extra stuff that they shouldn't have to pay for or that they should have had to pay for. And we're all going to soak that up and whatever's left, he's going to split up and give to the billionaires. Just so I understand what you're saying, are you suggesting Cecil that when the government is run

by the billionaire oligarchs, they're intentionally not taxing the billionaire oligarchs? That they're dismantling the check the billionaires tax records stuff? I mean, you know, a lot of people would claim that that's who the Democrats are run by billionaire oligarchs too. And I'm like, well, that's fine and all, but like at least they didn't hire one to come in and fire people. Yeah, I'm like, you know, if you're going to say they're both run by billionaire oligarchs, one, I would point you to how many billionaire oligarchs give their money to the Republican Party over the Democratic Party. I would point you to that first. So check that out and see if those numbers look even remotely the same. But I would also point out and be like, well, at least Joe Biden didn't bring in fucking

Warren Buffett to do like the Doge stuff. Yeah. I mean, Joe Biden intentionally was like, look, we will squeeze, we can squeeze more blood from less rocks if we stop letting rich people with complex tax returns not pay their fair share. So let's go after those guys. So like to some degree too, if it matters who the billionaires are and it matters what their motivations are and what they're trying to accomplish, the literal opposite is happening right now. It's, it's just the literal opposite.

Did you see that they want to like try to, I don't think we have a story for it because it happened a little bit before this news cycle might have happened like try to, I don't think we have a story for it because it happened a little bit before this news cycle might have happened like last week, but they were trying to like charge people criminally in like terrorist ways for attacking Tesla. Yeah, they're calling it an act of domestic terrorism. Domestic terrorism. But like that's crazy to me that the, that, that, that's where they're going with this. Like they're, they're so willing to like, kiss the feet of you.

That they're willing to like turn his own personal business into it's against our, we think it's a terrorist act. A terrorist act to destroy a car. The, the president Trump came out and said that the left is illegally boycotting. He's calling the boycott of Tesla by those of us who now would never buy a came out and said that the left is illegally boycotting. He's calling the boycott of Tesla by those of us who now would never buy a Tesla. I would never buy a Tesla.

I wouldn't buy a used Tesla. I wouldn't buy a new Tesla. I wouldn't get, if somebody gave me a free Tesla, I wouldn't take it. Zero, like, and I used to want one. I would like my next car will be an electric car. I will be in the market for a new car relatively soon. and there is a 0% chance that I would buy a Tesla You're gonna have to buy an American one because they're going up 25%. I know I just saw that it's fucking ridiculous

You're gonna pay 25% more for your car because there's gonna be a 25% tariff on it I'll pay 25% more all day and twice on Sunday to not get a fucking Tesla I I'll just I mean like I don't know which other options are American electric cars. But- I don't remember. I think GM might have one or two. Yeah. I think GM has a couple.

Yeah, they might have a couple. But in a lot of ways, it's such a shitty thing to punish the American consumer with these tariffs. Oh, it's horrible. And then to keep saying it over and over that it's not a tax thing to punish the American consumer with these tariffs. Oh, it's horrible. And then to keep saying it over and over that it's not a tax and to gaslight people into thinking it's not a tax. But every single economist, every single person who's like is knowledgeable about this is like, no, you're taxing the American people when you do this.

Yeah. Well, all of a sudden, shit costs more. We're actually headed toward, and this doesn't make me very nervous, we're headed toward a period of not just inflation, but potentially stagflation. And that is a much harder thing to get under control. That would be a stagnant economy with rising prices. So, you know, before we had a robust and growing economy with a healthy GDP,

a lot of other stuff that was very good economically, but we had a robust and growing economy with a healthy GDP, a lot of other stuff that was very good economically, but we had an inflation problem. The Fed raises rates, they put the brakes on some stuff, the inflation starts to get more under control, supply chains even out, whole bunch of other things. Inflation comes way down, getting very close to target. All of this crazy bullshit that Trump is doing right now is really threatening to throw the economy, not just into a recession,

but into a period of stagflation. And stagflation is way harder to get out of. It is much more difficult to control. It tends to last longer and be more painful. It's been three months. It's been three months, guys. It's been three months guys. Gosh, yeah. And it's pretty obvious the things that he's doing,

he doesn't know what he's doing. He's just throwing spaghetti against the wall. And he, you know, this is a guy who probably could have gone to like 20 different people if he were to play hardball with one of them in the past. As a businessman, you know, he plays hardball with one of his suppliers, he can go to 20 different suppliers.

Canada isn't the guy you play hardball with because if that's your supplier, that's all the suppliers in Canada. It's a big difference than what you were used to before. The things he was doing before might work on a small scale, but on a macro scale, it's terrible. It's a terrible way to do things, but he's so stupid and so boneheaded and he doesn't have anybody qualified around him to stop him.

And now you're in a real problem because I think there was people before in his previous administration that when he tried to do shit like this, they were like, come on, knock it off. That's stupid. And I've seen a couple of people talking about this, even like left leaning people were like, his previous term, he didn't have a bad economy. It wasn't a bad economy when Trump was in office before. It was a fucking mess when it came to everything else because he's terrible and he's a fucking a complete idiot. But like at least he had people around him who could do things that made it

so it wasn't the worst economy. It was an okay economy, it was fine. It was fine. The thing is, it was fine when he inherited it, and he didn't screw it up. It was fine. It was fine, the economy coming out was fine. And then it fell apart in the pandemic,

but it was gonna hunder whoever. But at the same time, he did nothing to try to stem any of that stuff. He did a lot of stuff that was bad at the end and he made it worse. And that's a real problem because he didn't know what he was doing. So if you had somebody in there

who understood what was happening, they would have been much better with the economy and it wouldn't have had such a sharp off drop, I think, if they had somebody in there who was smarter, but he's just a dummy and he doesn't know what he's doing. And now it's even worse. Now there's nobody there. There's nobody with their hand on the run.

There's nobody. Yeah. He's a guy who thinks he knows better than the economist, which is a problem. And he's also just to be frank about it, he's a piece of shit old man who is trying to rebuild an America of yore that we cannot go back to. He is a guy who keeps saying the same thing.

So we should believe him believes that he can reinvent an industrial manufacturing base in America. You can't do that. That the point of the tariffs is to move that manufacturing base back into America. That will take 10 years or longer. Yeah, take a long time. He's only in charge for the next three and a half years,

three years, nine months. Like it's not gonna happen. It's too slow. There's no real appetite for it. It doesn't make long-term sense for anyone to do this. It's just not, the world's moved on. We're not an industrial manufacturing nation anymore. So all of this pain will be for nothing. It's not like we're gonna endure all this pain and then in three months

there's gonna be steel factories popping up. Like how long do you think it takes to build these things? Yeah. It takes a really long time. And how do you staff them? Like that's the other thing too is like the reason why those jobs don't exist here anymore is because Americans wanted too much money to do them. And our appetite was not to pay for the amount of stuff, they were not going to get the type of profits they wanted. So they moved other places in the world where they could. You're not going to get anybody here

who's going to start that company. Because I don't care how high you rise those tariffs, it'll still never be as cheap as getting it from somewhere else. So somewhere else is going to supply that thing to you and you're just gonna buy it because it's gonna be 10% cheaper than the one, the one with the tariff will be 10% cheaper than anything you could buy here if it was created here. So even if you can recreate it,

you're still gonna create an overpriced good that nobody's gonna want. That nobody's gonna want. And it is always, like once we've moved into a global manufacturing base and a global economy, like just the realities of the the differing values of currency Mean that you can never make something cheap enough to be competitive with the American dollar as the as

The Philippines always gonna be cheaper. It's going to be cheaper in Vietnam to make clothing than, you know, Pittsburgh. It's just not a little cheaper, like wildly cheaper. You know, Thailand is going to be able to produce much, much cheaper, you know, a variety of goods, you know, furniture and other things than they're going to be able to do in, you know, Poughkeepsie. It's just not possible. That's just the reality of like exchange rates. Something you have said before, and something I have said, and maybe something that we have both said every time we've ever said anything,

is that for far too long, the top 1% of the top 10% of the top 1% of the top 10 percent of the come on. You gotta get wrong. All right. What is it? The top one percent, the top one percent. That's what I top 10 percent of the top 10 percent of the top 8 percent of the top 8 percent. You're throwing it in. You gotta follow the new statistics that come out every month. This story is from the New Republic. Bernie Sanders and AOC rallies are pissing off Elon Musk. The two Democrats are drawing huge crowds on the fight oligarchy tour and it's making

Republicans nervous. This is good. They said that they got about 30,000 people in Denver, but then Elon Musk said that he looked at somehow found GPS data that said that there was no way that there was that many people there, et cetera. Sure, GPS tells you how many people are. He's saying through cell phone data and GPS or whatever, you can like find out somehow,

I don't know how he would have access to any of that stuff. That's a good question. Why would he have access to that? But that's what he said. But in any case, he's mad about them traveling around and doing this sort of thing. And I like this. I mean, I think like, if there's anything to learn

from Trump, it's do these rallies now and don't stop. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I don't care who runs next, get people fired up and worried about this stuff and thinking about this stuff all the time and continue to do these rallies. We're seeing across the nation, tons of these protests popping up, tons of people going to that,

being involved in their own local person who's actually doing a town hall and they're filling the room up with people with town halls. Can you imagine how desolate and boring town halls were 15, 20 years ago? It'd be nobody. It would be nobody. It'd be like a podcast meetup.

There'd be nobody there. Instead, there's like, there's, you can't even see, there's people standing. You can't even get in these rooms now. People are engaged now more than ever before. Get out there and go talk to them. I saw, you remember that Swalwell guy? Yeah. Uh huh.

He's traveling across the country just doing town halls. He's like, other people won't come here. Your congressperson will come here. I'll answer your questions. What are your questions? That's awesome. I, they're not answering. Mike walls doing the same thing. Yeah. Or is that his name? Tim walls, Tim walls. Mike walls, a different Mike walls, a little bit of trouble right now. Tim walls doing the same thing. He's, he's out traveling around the country doing these things. Don't get me wrong. I think a lot of these people have their eye on the presidency. Good. You have your eye on the presidency. Good. Go do it. Awesome. Awesome. Go do it. I think it's great. I also saw

that, and I don't know if this is an older one or not, but you know that show I was telling you about, about those one person sitting in people, Pete Buttigieg did one. Oh my God. It had to be amazing. And he was really good. Of course. He's really good. Maybe I'll send you the link and you can take a look at it, but it's, it's like a full hour debate and these people just come and they sit and they talk to him and then he has, and I think it's pretty recent because he's talking about DEI. So, and I think that that's been one of those hot issues that only came up after the presidency. It doesn't feel like it really came up before then.

They've been making a big deal out of it. But I think, you know, like, I'm seeing these people on the scene that were sort of involved in the, when Biden was, you know, when Biden finally came out of the pack before, there's a bunch of these other people involved. The one thing that's, that's, I guess, refreshing about this is that most of them are pretty young. Most of them aren't really, you know, I don't, I don't foresee Bernie Sanders running in the next time. I don't think he's going to do that. I think whoever he's standing with, with AOC might be the person who he's going

to try to push to do it. And then you're gonna see like, you know, Buttigieg is a younger fella, Swalwell is a younger guy. You know, you're seeing these people start to come out and do these town hall type things and travel around the United States. Do it now, get your name out there now. Do it as soon as you can because there's,

you can't waste this capital that you have, this political capital. I'd ask you to make sure you're fully inside the free speech zone before the beginning of your protest. Free speech zone? This is where we're protesting? This isn't right, where are the cameras? They're in the free press zone,

and if you could save your comments and you're completely loaded into the cage. Well, at least a procession will come through here. They'll see us protest. Actually, they're using their right to cut through the lemon grove. Okay, have fun. Enjoy your right to free speech.

The armed forces welcomes your dissent. From Newsweek, Trump touts prison in El Salvador for Tesla attackers. We talked about this earlier, that Tesla attackers would get issued. There'd be some sort of problem with them. Like with a terrorist, they'd get terrorists, they would get charged with terrorism.

And now he's saying, well, what we do to terrorists is we ship them off to other countries. That's what we were doing with terrorists during Bush. So might as well continue doing it. Well, I think what he's alluding to here, cause he says, this is really disgusting, because what he says is he makes a joke about the horrific conditions in El Salvadoran prisons.

And remember that this is where Venezuelan migrants were deported to. I look forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20 year jail sentences for what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla. Perhaps they could serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions. What a genuinely horrible thing to say because what he's doing is gloating about the misery that he has created for migrants that he has deported out of America, not back to their homeland, but into a prison in an entirely different country, a prison that he is laughing about the horrible conditions

that they're living in. Everything is, this is so bad, Cecil. This is straight up fascism. I mean, that's straight up fascism. There's no other, there's no other name for that other than the fascist. Like that's what that is. And they're gloating in it.

I mean, today in front of all those people, the secretary of state, Christie, I'm not secretary of state, the secretary of homeland defense, uh, Christine, no lady who shot her dog, dog shooter. Yeah. Uh, she was standing in front of a bunch of these guys down there issuing a threat to anybody who comes into our country, uh country illegally, what she called illegally. It's not technically illegal. Right. It's a civil crime.

It's not actually like an actual crime. An actual crime, yeah. It's like, they say illegal, but it's not illegal. It's not necessary. It's undocumented. There's a difference, but they don't, they of course use the more sensationalist term because it gets the people on their side.

Yeah. But she's down there issuing threats to anybody who wants to come to our country. Well, and they're also right now arresting people who have legitimate visas, like student visas and other visas, because they were protesters. They were exercising a right that, like, while they are not citizens, when they're here on a visa, it is well understood that they have the same right to protest. And now those people who are here on,

with a legitimate active visa, Homeland security is rounding these people up and arresting them. Yeah, I mean, what they're saying, I saw Marco Rubio speak about it because they asked him about it. And he was like, no, you're not allowed to be here. If you're on a campus and you're causing problems, et cetera, and you're,

you know, you're in buildings, locking buildings down, you're, you're causing these issues. We're, you know, we're going to ship you out. You can't do that here. And I'm thinking that's a campus issue. What's happening there. Like nobody was, nobody's dying on these campuses, right? Nobody's this isn't like, like, like a bloody war that's happening. It's students rebelling and acting up. Like that's the worst that happens is there might be something in it that like, like there might be a little bit of vandalism that happens.

So what, so what? That idea that, and also there's no proof that they did any of that. They were just involved in these protests. Just because you're involved in those protests doesn't mean anything. They are throwing people out, stripping them of rights that they're supposed to have.

This is a country that again, is just, they're deciding that they don't like immigrants now. And they are shipping every single one of them out. And when they take their rights away, guess who else rights they can take away whenever they want. Yours. They can take away yours.

Like keep in mind too, to your point, the federal government is not showing up and arresting a bunch of like rich white kids that were at these protests. They are specifically targeting people that look a certain way that were protesting in an ideological way that that, that the, this administration frowns on, you know, like in also remember this too,

that if they can arrest somebody and deport them without due process, they can arrest you without due process. Absolutely. There's no, like if there's no due process, then like there's no opportunity to prove your citizenship. You've not had a due process. Yeah. If you don't have due process, you might be a citizen and still get arrested and deported.

And I don't even want to use the word deported anymore if they're not being sent back to a country of origin. Yeah. Imprisoned. country of origin. Yeah, imprisoned. If you are, yeah, if I'm sent to a prison in a third location, I've not been deported. That's not the right term. I've been kidnapped. I've been kidnapped.

That's what's happened to me. Because deporting would mean I went back to my country of origin. I was put on a plane, put on a train, put on a bus, whatever the fuck, and I was sent back to my country of origin. If I am sent to some third fucking location to just be in jails for who knows how long, that's just kidnapping.

That's state-sponsored kidnapping. And your tax dollars are paying for that. That's right. So like, let's not forget that if we were to just deport people and send them back to their country of origin, then we would be off the hook for the money. Right. We wouldn't have to pay for them. We might have to, you know, there's been, there's been times in the past that some of that USAID money would help reintegrate people into their, uh, into back into their lives or back into new lives where they were sent back home too. But now there but now you would have to pay nothing.

You would basically just send these people home and they'd be like, all right, well, now they're yours. Instead, in order to be more cruel, your tax dollars are going to be more cruel so we could send them to another country and kidnap them. So we're paying extra for that. Fucking appalling, appalling. So you wanna build a guillotine, but you're just not sure if it's a good investment.

Now anyone who's been following my channel will know this is not a guillotine. It's just a very guillotine shaped lemonade stand. From the New Republic, Republican representatives defensive defensive Elon Musk, drowned out by booze. Representative Harriet Hagman sneeringly called her own constituents obsessed with federal government during a town hall. All right, so we're going to listen to her say that. Here we go. She just waved them. Doe is not dismantling social security. And even with reconciliation, we are not allowed to touch social security. The work that I have specifically been doing, I am on the Judiciary Committee and the Natural Resources Committee. I worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture helping Wyoming family farmers deal with drought

until I was fired a month ago in the mass firings and despite only having the highest marks in my performance review. In a state where so many farmers rely on government programs for drought and disaster relief, Trump's plans to cut these programs and the people who administer them, coupled with the tariffs, will decimate Wyoming farms and rural communities. What are you doing about that? I disagree. What kind of an answer even is that? I'm well aware of what kind of programs are out there.

It's so bizarre to me how obsessed you are with federal government. But here's the thing. Calm down. Calm down. Oh, that's gonna help. People love being told to calm down. All the talk she is doing is, you guys are gonna have a heart attack if you don't calm down. I'm sorry, your hysteria is whispering you over the top.

That's something else, I know. She is just laughing at those people. Like as a constituency, as somebody who is supposed to represent a constituency, her condescension. Yeah, the sneering, the sort of sneering about it is like really. Yeah, these are not people that have ever given a shit.

They never cared about any of this stuff. They never cared about you. They never cared about your problems. All they wanted was the power that was out there. And now you get an opportunity to see these people when they finally have to sort of stand in front of the people who they are supposed to represent. This is the group that they're supposed to represent.

And when that group has a massive disapproval for the things they're doing, look at how they sneer at them. Look at how they look down their nose and be like, oh, come on, get out of here. Why do you care about this stuff? Like, this is a person who needs to not make it next time. I wanna watch the race for this person next time.

We should make a note of it. We should. We should make a note of it. We should. I want to start looking at all these people because you know, you got to keep this anger up for the next, what is it? 15 months? No, it's longer than that. God. 18 months. So it's like a while. But I think like if you can, keep this, keep this anger up. Keep this sort of like, you know, the way these people are treating you, remember it. Play it back on all these primaries.

Get, you know, money across the country to send out these messages to every one of these places. And it doesn't matter if it's deep red. Yeah, it doesn't. It doesn't. Like when government works, government is for most people fairly invisible. And that's part of the problem.

But when people's social security checks stop coming in or are delayed, or when there is an emergency or a disaster or a flood or a drought, and the things that we think of, and these things will happen over the next 18 months because it's a big country and that's how time works. So as they continue to dismantle the parts of the government that we don't even think of, that we rely on every day,

and farmers experience, like to the point from the video, farmers experience drought, farmers experience natural disasters, those farmers eat shit. Well, guess what? When farmers eat shit, what do I eat? I eat shit too. Higher prices, less available foodstuffs, less available resources in my grocery store. Everybody, it's a domino effect because, and I don't know why the Republicans refuse to

acknowledge this, we live in a society. We're interconnected. I can't succeed if you fail. You can't succeed if you fail. You can't succeed if I fail. In mass. There can be, there are always outliers and stragglers, but there is no ability to have everybody lose and only a small handful of people win for very long. When that happens, guillotines come out, man. I want my $2.

Oh my God. $2. Bangor Daily News. Trump official ended program for Maine newborns to get back at Janet Mills. So this was something that sparked, this was months ago. He had a bunch of governors come out to the, Trump did, had them come out to the Oval Office and he said a bunch of stuff about this and that. And he said, we're going to make sure we, you know, handle this sort of DEI. I don't know if he was talking about trans people

or DEI or something. And he said, and where's Maine, where's Maine at? And Maine governor stood up and he said, we're gonna make sure you fall in line. And she's like, well, I'm not gonna do that. And he said something back and she said, well, I'll see you in court. And then she sat down.

Well, one of Trump's, one of the person who was in charge of social security for the acting head saw this was so aggrieved that someone had said, we'll see you in court to Trump. They decided to shut off a automatic system that allowed your newborn to get enrolled in social security. So instead of enrolling your newborn in social security when they're born, you have to then take your, you know, the birth certificate to a location. And there's only like six or seven of these locations across Maine.

So you would have to travel with a newborn or get somebody to watch it or whatever for a while. And then you'd have to go in with your birth certificate and go through all this hassle when it's literally connected via computer. There's no way to, you could just, the baby's born, boom, there's your social security card this hassle when it's literally connected via computer. There's no way to, you could just, the baby's born, boom, there's your social security card, boom, it's all fine.

Everybody knows that something happened, the end. But they turned it off out of spite. They turned it off out of spite because they were aggrieved for Trump. There is a mechanism of retaliation, which was promised in the campaign. And delivered. And here we are. And none of us should be surprised. None of us should be surprised.

I love that this stuff is happening to some degree because the pain hits everybody. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like it's not good. I don't like it. It's horrible. But what I mean is like,

the pain has to get, at some point everybody is gonna be affected by this bullshit, right? So if they do this in Maine, then all the people who are conservatives are going to have babies. And they're going to be like, well, this is fucking horrible. How did this happen? They're going to find out. And then, you know, somebody's not going to get their social security check on time. And somebody else is going to, you know know not get their drought aid on time. Like at some point chicken will come home in your roost. Everybody will have a chicken in their roost at some point. You know they'll know somebody who got fired you know from one of these like mass layoffs will have an interruption of vital services will have a hurricane and FEMA will not be there to provide disaster relief in a robust way. You can't dismantle the government. It doesn't like we will all eat that shit.

And I the only way I think for people to see that this emperor has no clothes is for them to hurt. Yeah. And that super sucks because what we were staying at the beginning was like nobody has to hurt. Just vote against this asshole and nobody has to hurt, just vote against this asshole and nobody has to hurt whether you believe in it with us ideologically or not. But this kind of retaliation, like it doesn't just get back at Janet Mills personally. It's punishes the entire state.

It's so stupid. It's such a silly thing to do. And the reason why they're doing it. And now I remember from the article, it's because of trans students wanting to participate in sports. And so somebody went through in this article to figure out, well, what's that look like?

Look, what's the numbers behind that? And they did the number crunching and it's two students. Two. For the entire state, it's two students. Two. Two. It's nothing. Two students. Not even a conversation's two students. Two. Two. That's nothing. Two students.

Not even a conversation. Two students. And you would think that those students and their families and their school districts and those places where they participate all had conversations that could handle and hash that out without this federal government getting involved. Without the office of the presidency getting involved in that. You would think that those communities could handle that. I mean, don't we want smaller government?

Isn't that the lie that they've been telling us for years? Don't send me your messages and say they were never for small government. I know they were never for small government. Okay, you don't have to remind me every time we say it. I say it because I know that they have been lying about it for years. They are, of course, and have always been about government as big as possible for the

things that they very much want to see happening. But they lied to people for so long to say that they are the party of small government. I haven't heard them say that in a while. I haven't either. I think they've moved away from that line. I think they moved away from that line because they saw how effective being big government to people they hate is.

And so this is very specifically overreaching of the federal government of the office of the presidency. You know, fighting for the aggrieved office of the presidency by the Social Security Board for what amounts to two people where it handled it in the community and it never needed anybody else outside of it to handle it. That's fucking wild. Two, two people. It's just, this is like getting beat up for a contemptive cop.

Yep. Life, it never die. Women are my favorite guy. Sex, I'm one thing more. Tell the world, stop the war. Okay. I normally wouldn't put anything like, Tom, I normally would just skip this. I normally would skip this, but I think there's an underlying point here that I have to point out. Okay. But I genuinely, I would normally skip this as just some blather that fell out of Trump's mouth and it doesn't matter. It's just some garbage.

But this, I think there's something deeper here that we absolutely need to touch on. So I'm gonna play this. This is Donald Trump talking to Laura Ingraham in an interview with him. And so I wanna play this little piece that's about his son, Barron. But is Barron's aptitude in your view,

business or politics? Maybe technology. He can look at a computer. I try turning off his, turn it off. I turn off his laptop. I said, oh, good. And I go back five minutes later, he's got his laptop. I said, how'd you do that?

None of your business, dad. No, he's got an unbelievable aptitude in technology. What do you do when you can't sleep? What a follow-up question, huh? First off, normally it's just such a stupid comment. Trump made a really stupid comment. You're like, okay, Trump made a stupid comment. But this is a guy who's going to make rules

about AI. He's going to make rules about, you know, he, he already cut off like a big deal with computer chips that we were going to have made here in the United States chips act semiconductors. Yeah. So there's other things that he's done too. This is a guy who, you know, you know, he doesn't ever have anybody around him who really knows what they're doing. The only people he's put around him so far are sycophants.

So it's not like he can rely on a technology director to direct him in this that would possibly be good at it because it's probably the Fox and Friends weekend host. Right. Yeah, I know. It's the tech guy. It's not even the tech guy. It's like the guy, it's like's probably the Fox and Friends weekend host. Right, yeah, I know. It's the tech guy, it's not even the tech guy. It's like the guy, it's like one of the Fox and Friends. It's not even a guy who has any qualifications. It's just one of those people.

So you can't rely that he has somebody behind the scenes that's doing it. So he's going to be making decisions about technology, and he doesn't even know how easy it is to turn a computer on. That should tell you, I think, everything you need to know And he doesn't even know how easy it is to turn a computer on. That should tell you, I think everything you need to know about how incompetent not only he is, but how bad we're going to have it when it comes to a myriad of things he has no idea about. And that's why I wanted to mention it.

This feels like in his first administration, this feels similar to when he was talking about like, Oh, you got to get an ID to vote You need an ID to buy groceries and it's like you Don't know how the world works. Yeah, you should not make rules about the world Sure, because you're not in it. Yeah, you know like you live outside you live extra world Like you live in a different space. You should a gold toilet or whatever man Like you are not you're not one of us. You don't know anything about any of the things you're making rules about.

So just go over there and grandpa land and fucking swing your golf clubs. That's the only thing you're here for. Like maybe like import another Eastern European to impregnate. I don't know, like you've got the world's your oyster, but like you can't make rules about technology when you're blown away that somebody turned on their laptop.

You know, and I would also bet a thousand dollars right now that when he turned off Baron's laptop, he shut the case. He closed it. He closed it. I can't believe he got it turned back on. He fucking reopened it, man. It just turns the screen off. You stupid asshole. Yeah. It's it. What it is, is it shows me just like how incompetent he is at so many different things. And like you suggest, it's life. It's just life. Life. Yeah.

What am I, a shit magnet? Is from the Daily Beast. Trump claims he didn't sign deportation order that he definitely signed. Other people handled it. The president said on Friday, even though the proclamation bears his signature. Do you remember? I think it was Mike Johnson when they were trying to paint Biden as someone who is, you know, has dementia or whatever.

They were saying he signed stuff. He didn't know he signed, et cetera. This in particular is a deportation order. We can't be sure that a he doesn't remember signing it because he might not. He might not even know the things he's sure that's a possibility. But it's also possible that he's just lying because he wants to have that order exist and he doesn't want to take the blame for it. Like we were talking about in the last podcast. Well, there's a third option. Oh, what's the third option? The third option,

which, cause like if you take, if you take him on his face and you were to say this is true, then somebody in his administration is literally forging the president's signature on orders. Yeah. Now that's absurd. It's his assistant auto pen. Well, that's absurd. It's his assistant auto pen. There is no, once he says this, you're like, all right, man, you're forgetful, you're lying or there's corruption. None of those answers are good. Not a single one of those answers are good.

Just own it. Yeah. Just own the things you do. Just own all the things you do. Own the good things and the bad things and everything in between. If you're proud of the work you're doing as president, then you should be like, 100% that was me. And if you're not proud of it, say that was a mistake and here's what we're doing to fix it. It's easy. That stuff is easy. Like what's crazy to me is how hard it is for all these people. How does he find, I'm blown away by this.

How does he find every single person who works for him to be as gaslighty and as bad at their job and as willing to push blame off on anyone else other than himself. How does he find these people? Every, is it like a magnet? Do they just turn the magnet on

and they just all like fly their way to Washington DC and they're stuck to the Capitol fucking roof because that's where the magnet is and they can't get off of it until he undoes it and then they all fall down and he's like, you three, I'll take these three fine fellows, come with me. It's probably like some kind of like weird hate mothlight that he turns on, you three, you, I'll take these three fine fellows, come with me. It's probably like some kind of like weird hate mothlight that he turns on, you know?

Like turns it on and like moths to a hate flame, and flittering over. All you gotta do is wear a MAGA hat for that. Fair enough, easy, easy. I'm blown away by this though, but like this is one of those things that he signs a deportation order, and this is something

that people wanted to question him about, right? They wanna question him, question his motives, question why he's doing it, and then he immediately passes it off as I didn't sign that, I didn't do it. And again, it could just be gaslighting because he's so good at that. Because we talked about this earlier in the show,

what he says is other people handled that. I don't know anything about it, other people handled it. And that would not be an acceptable answer in any other management role. I don't know anything about other people handled it. And that would not be an acceptable answer in any other management role. I don't know anything about what happens in my own organization. You mean people could actually stay down there for a hundred years? It would not be difficult, my dear nuclear reactors could. I'm sorry, Mr. President. Daily Beast. Trump attempts to use 18th century law to allow feds to enter homes without a warrant.

This is the alien enemies act of 1798. You talked about this a couple of weeks ago. And this is one of those things that he's he's keeps on trying to find these these corner case rules that someone else did and then using them in executive orders. So the executive orders aren't as easily called into court and repealed, et cetera, or judge puts a thing against it because he's trying to say there's precedent for the things that I'm suggesting that we do

to try to avoid some of these really sort of quick judgments that will come out because he knows what he's doing is a horror. Yeah, and he is, this is in direct violation of the fourth amendment. And again, I know we talked about it when I brought this up a few weeks ago, but I really do believe that there are a handful

of amendments which have a sacred status. The first amendment and the fourth amendment. The idea, let me see, cops knock on your door. Let me see the warrant. This is my space. The idea of having space which is Inviolable to the federal government to the local police to authorities that there must be rules before my space Can be violated that concept is intrinsic to our notion of Liberty here in America

I don't know if it is elsewhere, but I know that it is here That idea of my home is my castle, my space is my own. That's a big deal. That's a really big deal. And it's something that I grew up, like I have a very high desire for privacy. My view personally is that without privacy, you cannot have liberty.

I do not believe that you can be free without having privacy. Privacy is a big deal to me. If we do not have the right to shut doors and require a significant amount of due process before they be kicked open, we do not have liberty. We don't fundamentally without physical liberty, we cannot have any other type. It's a big deal. This is a huge, big deal.

Yeah. This is also, again, when we were talking about earlier, this is something a fascist would put out. Like this is somebody who's like saying, look, feds can enter homes without warrants and they wanna do it now under the guise of immigration. That's what they wanted to. But if they can take away their rights,

they can take away your rights. And they're going to take away your rights because they're going to take away your rights because they're going to be basically You know some of these houses that they're going to go in they're not going to be an immigrant's house They're going to be somebody else's house and then the immigrant may live there and it might be a citizen who lives there and they Don't care. They this is something that they are going to be doing Increasingly right they're gonna keep increasing this. And we're seeing that there are judges out there

that are willing to stand up and do this sort of thing and definitely make sure that they're not, because they're gonna stand up against what is happening. But I think like, you know, every step of the way has to be an absolute battle for them. Because the quicker and faster that we allow them to do this, the worse off we are because they're just gonna do the next thing.

And so you've gotta stop them as quick as you can and as much as you can. And that's why I think, you know, we talked about that thing that happened on Monday. We talked about the signal leak. That's why that's gotta be a big deal and it's gotta stay in the news for a while. And you've gotta keep them thinking about it

and never ask them other questions about other stuff and get them so that they have to do something about and get Congress so they're spending their time on that. Make sure it's a big deal. Because if you can make it a big deal, then you slow the wheels of all the awful shit that they're trying to do. You know, I wonder about something,

just to wonder out loud, Cecil, because you bring that up and I thought to myself, like, I wonder if part of the reason that we don't keep after things and bulldog things, we let things go too easily, too early, scandal doesn't sort of take root the way that it used to, I wonder if the fact that we've all gotten used to consuming a 24 hour news cycle creates a pressure

to create a 24 hour news cycle. Like if I, you know what, so like if I may, and that's odd, but like if I'm in Congress, it's like, well, like we don't want it, that's old news. We have an idea I think that's in the back of our head now that like, well, like we don't want it. That's old news. We have an idea I think that's in the back of our head now that like, well, that's old news. It's like, well, it's still relevant. It's relevant until it's resolved.

The idea of relevant until resolved seems antiquated. It seems out of keeping with these sort of like super fast paced news environment. That's how we consume news. So I wonder if we don't also expect everything to blow over. So we just sort of let it go. You know what I mean? Like, we're just like, yeah, it's a resolved is like it's old. You come after me and you will lose. This story is from NPR. Trump pulls Stefanik nomination for UN ambassador because of thin GOP house majority.

Oh, it's so sad. There was a possibility, you know, you get enough people riled up in that area. It could be that a couple of these seats get flipped. And we were, you know, we talked about this recently. We said, you know, that there was seats in these other places, you know, for sure Gates's seat is still up. And then a couple others that were up for special election that were coming up and she was one of them

because of very specifically they were gonna appoint her. And then they would have to do like another thing to try to get somebody else in there. And it could be that her seat got flipped. And instead he's gonna tell her to stay until after so that her seat doesn't disappear, so they don't lose this tiny, slim majority that they have. So somebody clearly, what's funny is,

most of the time Trump wouldn't do something like this, I think, without any kind of somebody there to talk to him about it and to really coach him on this. And I think somebody there is smart enough to recognize, and they got through his hubris because that's a tough thing to do. It is, yeah. And he probably was set in his ways

about who he wanted to have where he wanted them. And they had to convince him not to do it. But what a blow, it was a hope that there was gonna be some sort of shift in Congress and it doesn't look like that's gonna happen as easily now. I know a couple other people had said, like those happen as easily now. I know a couple other people had said like those are deep red districts. I know they're deep red districts, but I'm seeing in deep red districts, people are upset. I'm not saying that they're going to flip,

but I'm saying like, let's just like you don't, you don't comply in advance with fascists. Don't lose the election in advance. Yeah, right. Right. Yeah. Just because, you know, just because they've won by X amount of points, we've seen across the board and some other places, state run stuff, people have, there was like 20 point deep Trump districts and these 20 point deep Trump districts are losing to the Democrat.

Yeah. So just because, you know, there's a good chance that they'll lose, don't give up. Yeah. You know, like, absolutely go out there and make sure that like, you know, there's a good chance that they'll lose. Don't give up, you know, like, absolutely go out there and make sure that like, you know, if people are calling, call more. If people are donating, donate more, you know, make sure that all this stuff happens

so that it's a possibility. Make it as hard as possible for them to do this stuff. Don't comply in advance. You know, you've also got to recognize too what this tells us about the fragility of that, of really all the seats coming up, not just in special elections, but midterms, because you got to figure that when, when Trump nominated Stefanik, they figured, all right, her seat, they would already have done this math ahead of time. They did that math ahead of time.

So now that they're redoing this math, what they're implicitly recognizing is that, man, over the last three months, people are more upset, our lead is smaller, our advantage is less, we are in more trouble. Yeah, they recognize that. So just keep prying, keep doing it. All the things that are happening that are positive,

that are getting people out to these town halls, that are getting people out to these big events that are, you know, left events, all these people that are, you know, losing elections because of that, keep the pressure on. Absolutely. All right, that's going to wrap it up for this special weird Thursday episode, but we'll be back on Monday with a full episode and we're going to leave it like we always do with the skeptics creed.

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