Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 898: Another Year, Another Superbowl Halftime Outrage Brigade

Episode Date: February 16, 2026

Missouri Republican suggests Bad Bunny performance merits FCC action The Next Democratic President Better Be Merciless Grand jury declines to indict Democratic lawmakers who urged service members to disobey illegal Trump orders | CNN Politics Trump says he didn't see full racist video before it was posted, says he won't apologize - ABC News Under-fire Trump commerce secretary confirms he visited Epstein's island Bondi Faces Anger From Lawmakers Over Handling of Epstein Files

This episode of Cognitive Dissinence 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 blasts 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. February the 12th, Cecil. And I know I texted this to you,

and I feel like a crazy person. This is not going to be one of the stories that we're going to cover. But I want to point out something because it's just been bothering me so much. I read and listen to a fair bit of news. I don't know how much everybody else listens to, I feel like it's a fair bit. And like, there is a situation brewing right now between the United States and Iran, which is getting like a wildly small amount of attention.

And it feels insane to me. Like the lack of attention being paid as we amass aircraft carriers and missile defense systems. And like last week, a drone got shot at one of our ships. And I sent you a message yesterday because there was an argument. article about it in the Wall Street Journal. It said Wall Street Journal exclusive as the Pentagon prepares a second aircraft carrier. And I thought, how is this information exclusive to one news source? If we are like in this run up to war, which you would only know that if you read one specific news source, that feels real weird. I don't remember that ever being the case before

in terms of like international politics, diplomacy, you know, potential military action, it feels super crazy to me to be in that space. I just want to bring it up here because like if you are just reading the New York Times and the Washington Post and CNN and looking around at these like other, you won't really know this is happening, Cecil. And it feels like a big deal. And I don't know why it's not a big deal. Do you know why it's not a big deal?

I have an inkling. I have an inkling. Yeah. Tell me what your thoughts are. And I think, one, I think that it's not good clickbait. So I think just saying we're readying a super carrier or whatever to send over there is not necessarily a clickbaiting enough headline. Pam Bondi explodes at congressional hearing is a way better headline for a lot of these places. Sells better.

sells way better. more people are going to click on that. Right. And are we on a click-based economy when it comes to news. They're going to want to listen to the thing. If I'm scrolling through my podcasts, will I stop at potential war with Iran on the daily? Or will I stop with, you know, Jeffrey Epstein, something salacious about Epstein and his connections on there? Which one would I load up to listen to?

Which one would be the thing that would lead me to the next piece of this? What's the breadcrumb that I'm? going to follow. Right. And part of me wonders if we've created such a monster around Trump because he fills the news with such trash all the time. Right. That there's constantly a seeking out to be the next clickbait. The other thing, too, is that that strikes me about the Wall Street Journal is that that's a paper that I think is more concerned with money than others. And this is one of those things that will affect our market more deeply than other things will. Sure. Yeah. And so they're going to be covering it more than other places. Those are my only two thoughts on why it would be there and not

other places, not as easily in other places. You just said something that articulated a thought or a worry that I've been having for a long time. That's that we're a click-based system now. And I, you know, we talked, I remember back in the 90s having like conversations with you and our friends and being worried about the 24-hour news cycle. The 24-hour news cycle was really like a creation based off of the cable news industry. And it hadn't existed before. And I think that one of the effects that people worried about with a 24-hour news cycle is that it necessarily created an incentive system

for there to be more content. You got to fill that news, right? So it's like, how do we get more content and tell that content, tell the story of that content in a way that feels compelling enough to make you tune in, not just for the 9 o'clock news, but at 2.30 in the afternoon? and to constantly feed more stuff regardless of relevance. So if it's not that relevant, we can make it more relevant by making it more salacious.

And I was thinking the other day that that's different now. It's still a, it's not a 24-hour news cycle anymore. It's something different. While it's 24-hour, it's also like bespoke. It's like a bespoke news cycle, right? Where like it's got to be interesting to my algorithmic choices. It's got to be something that I am going to click on in create and sort of tailor for myself, this bespoke worldview.

At least the 24-hour news cycle was still sort of created and managed by editors. And I think you hit on something. Now, it's like, well, I got to create a news product not for, not that's editorialized and decided on and streams 24 hours, but that can stream hundreds of things, thousands of times, and all of them perfectly unique in this sort of like tree, algorithmic tree. And I wonder if the set of incentives that that creates is going to give cover for us to start a war that's going to surprise a lot of people when it happens. It will surprise a lot of people. That's the piece is that that that's scary is that the reason why the press exists is so that we can watch what's happening.

Yeah. And then we can then contact our representatives or they can then know that this is happening and tell other people. Right now there's a ton of grandstanding that's going on in the Senate and in the House that is all. about, you know, questioning the current administration, but it's not questioning the Department of War guy. Yeah, right. Not that guy. Yeah, I think that's super interesting. I think you, I think that's exactly what I've been worried about. I hadn't know how to like phrase it. Because I'm like, yeah, it's still a 24-hour news cycle, but like, no, it's different now. It's different. Because whereas before, you might have a news story that was four or five minutes long,

and then they had another one, they had another one. Now you've got hundreds of selectable 10-second soundbites. and that's just a different animal altogether. Yeah. What flying experience have you had? I flew single-engine fighters in the Air Force, but this plane has four engines. It's an entirely different kind of flying altogether. It's an entirely different kind of flying.

So every year we've got to talk about the Super Bowl. Cecil, no surprise. We've got to talk about the Super Bowl. This story is from the Hill. Missouri Republicans suggest bad money performance merits FCC action. Is the action grinding? is that what is the action? What I love about this article so much.

Is it a quick salsa dance? Like a salsa move? I'm doing it. By the way, if you're watching, I'm doing a sexy salsa move. It's pretty compelling. I want to tell you, it's pretty compelling. I'm doing the hand thing. Without any, without any music or anything,

just going straight off what's in my back starting to warm up on the chair. So every year, people get upset about every single year. Every year. about the Super Bowl. And it's usually religious nuts. Yeah, yeah. Who are like, there was a shape. And if you, well, not really,

but like if you draw a line from this arbitrary point to that arbitrary point, everything's a pentagram, the devil, you know. Someone wore red. Yeah, right, yeah. There was a smoke and in hell there's smoke. And this is a simulation of hell. Lady Gaga is the devil because I want to fuck her.

It's always like weird, sexually repressed. Sure. fucking, you know, moral panic shit, you know? What I love about this thing is this Republican idiot is like, you know what? We got to translate it, but I'm a little worried. I didn't know what they were saying. I don't know what they were saying, but it might have been salacious.

I'm pretty sure it was sexy. Literally what he says, he's like, we're looking into it. My dude, it would take you literally one minute to face. It's not like nobody speaks Spanish to translate this for you. their fucking lyrics, bro. You have to go find the one person who says it. Somebody get bad buddy on the phone. I think he invented a language called Spanish.

It's like in those movies when they have to go find that one guy who speaks that dead language. Like you don't need a fucking wind talker. Are you fucking kidding me? It's not like he's like he's rapping in fucking Navajo, right? Where it's like, oh, that's actually pretty. No, it's fucking Spanish, man. Did you see it?

I did see it. Haley showed it to me. A couple of things that I thought were great about it. The first is that when we saw it, the day after the Super Bowl, 42 million people had also seen it. The crowd went fucking nuts.

120 million people tuned in for it. And I love how much that upsets the right-wing lunatics who cannot abide by the idea of something happening in Spanish. First and foremost, they're just like, Spanish, that's not America? Yeah. You're like, it super is, though.

It's super duper is. Yeah. Yeah, I thought it was great. I don't, I don't, I don't, I'm not super familiar with his work. I know a couple of songs that he's done that are like hip hop tracks and R&B tracks that are crossovers. So I've heard him before, but never listen to like any of his like, I've of course heard a couple of his songs, but not like listen to any of the deep tracks at all. But I will say great, a really amazing choreographer. And at a certain point, there's like two dudes that are like grinding on each other.

And I was like, good for you. I was like, way to God. I'm like, that made some people real uncomfortable. Oh, that made some people real. But it was all right. Like, I thought it was fine. I mean, I thought it was fun. I was entertained the whole time.

I watched the whole thing. I don't speak a lot of Spanish. I know like five words. Right. So I know when they talked about a table. I knew that one. So other than that, I don't know. When are they going to say bibliotheca?

I remember bibliotica. It's like, I know like seven words. So I'm good. But it was all right. That was fun. And I think there was a competing product. Talking point you were going to say had a competing product that was at the same time. And they had to inflate their numbers to make it seem like it was, you know, everybody was out watching it.

One of my favorite clips was a guy who was singing and he's doing a country song. And he's like, I just want to catch my fish. Drink my beer. And you're like, oh, God, it's so bad. But the way he says catch, it almost says it sounds like he's saying kiss. So he's like, I just want to catch my fish. And you like, he want to kiss your fish. What are you doing on the lake there, bro?

There's a meme that Haley sent me, which just made me laugh out loud, which was like, Kid Rock looks like if a pack of cigarettes wanted to be a real boy. And I just think that's the best joke. There's also, like, Ricky Martin was one of the guests in the Bad Bunny performance. Ricky Martin looks amazing. Oh yeah. Sounds terrific and hilariously is the same age as kid rock. And if you look, it's like, it's like you've got Kid Rock and he's the quintessential right wing,

Budweiser drinking, you know, chain smoking. You're like that dude. And then you've got Ricky Martin who's like, oh, that's a gay lefty. And you're like, yeah, man, let's take a look at how this is working out for the two of them. Right. Like Ricky Martin is on a big television show. He's on TV. He's got a ton of money.

he looks great. He's obviously very healthy. You got Kid Rock who looks like a pack of cigarettes wanted to be a real boy showing up for the TPUSA sound and production problems. Oh, a side show. He was lip syncing evidently and he was complaining because you say, well, I actually performed it live, but then I had to, it was the lip sync was off because of the camera or whatever. Sure. Try to say that.

But genuinely, when you see Kid Rock, you think he's the thing that they would put. put on the back of the cigarettes, not cigarettes, but like when you turn over the tanning bed and there's the warning, he's that image. He's the warning. He's that image. He's like, you will develop into a melanoma like Kid Rock. Like Kid Rock's entire body is a melanoma. You know how trolls live under bridges. Like Kid Rock clearly lives behind a dumpster behind a Circle K. Yeah. Right. Like, you know, that's his house, right? If you stumble past the dumpster behind a Circle K at night, Kid Rock will appear and ask you these questions. He has a house that's made out of old English bottles.

Absolutely. I love too that Kid Rock was like he was just nobody and the Trump administration was like, well, we need our own hero. And they dredged up from the bottom of a sewage lake. Fucking Kid Rock. God. You know like when they summon Batman, they put a bat. When you summon Kid Rock is just like a used condom.

It's like that's the image that they show. It's like a broken use condom. You can't use them more than three or four times. They kind of wears out. I wore it in the pool. I loved you, the bad buddies. Some of the symbolism, not terribly subtle. He's like walking around a neighborhood.

There's clearly a neighborhood. He's like going around singing through a neighborhood. It's multicultural. There's very clearly an element of like, hey, like these are people in your neighborhood. And like that is a direct reference, I think, to his like fuck ice comments, you know. And these are the people in our neighborhoods. We live with these folks.

You live with these people. They are the people in our lives that, you know, are at our markets and our cafeterias and our restaurants. These are people embedded in the life and culture of America. And the very last song that he sang, one of the lyrics. And I looked it up because actually you can just look it up. It's real easy. You should tell that to the guy. I should tell that to see if the FCC.

has figured that out yet. Translate. So there was a, there was a guy, he listed many, if not all of the nations in North America, Central America and South America and was like, it's all America. So the messaging is not subtle. Yeah. And it's effective. And that's why they want to get somebody involved to say, like, stop saying true things

when we don't like the way they sound. It makes us feel weird. They had the, the electrical poles portion of it. Very specifically a reflection of how we neglected Puerto Rico very specifically neglected them when a hurricane came. What we did was we sent Trump down to throw fucking paper towels at people. We did not have him come down with a group of people to roll in with fucking trucks and fix everything. And they showed that for months. It was years until they fixed that fucking the electricity that ran through that.

It was years, man. Could you imagine if at your house today you went home and you're like, oh, I haven't had electricity since 20, 23. Right. How would you feel? How wouldn't you feel neglected by the United States of America as part of a fucking United States of America? And they had that symbolism there. And it's like, that's fucking awesome. That's what you need to do is show it to them. And the thing is, I think that the problem is that it's lost on all those people. It's lost on everybody who's going to watch it. All those people out there that are, that are, if you fucking hate watch that thing, you missed it

because you're too stupid to know that that's what we did to them because you didn't follow any of the news. Well, I think that's exactly true. I know, too, that there are still areas in Puerto Rico without power. Still right now, there are areas of Puerto Rico without power that have not been fixed. Like, significant portions of Puerto Rico. That's important. And I think one of the things that for you and I might feel even more, like, I recognize that Puerto Rico is just part of America, like fully and totally part of America. I do think that for a lot of people on the right,

even if they know it's an American territory, they see it as a lesser than people and a lesser than community. They don't think of them as, I mean, listen to how many people mistook that as they're not American. Yeah. Megan Kelly's like, maybe it was Tommy Lerrin who was like,

well, that's not American. When somebody said, I think it's going to be an all-American show to her, she said, well, that's not American. She said, Puerto Rico's part of America. Like,

of us. Right. And they just don't get it. They don't understand. They can't put those two things together. Well, I think it was Laura Lumer, who also said something like paraphrased a little bit. She said something like, you know, a halftime show with not a single white person or any English in it. It's like Lady Gaga was there as a guest and sang in English.

They just say also, they just say untrue shit because they know it'll rile up the racist. That guy from, you don't. I don't see this series. He was in Game of Thrones and he was also, he's also the Mandalorian. So he's a really popular actor now. I forget his name. I don't know actors' names anyway. So I wouldn't know his fucking name anyway.

Literally it's a fucking, it's washed. If you said it to me, I'm just going to nod. It washes over me as a, I fucking never know actors' names. But he's the Mandalorian. People know who I'm talking about. He was in the background dancing. Oh, really? So like they had a couple of people, Cardi B was out there dancing.

There was a couple people that were like, like famous people are out there dancing behind them in this sort of scene. Like you said, it's like a neighborhood. They're out there dancing. And you're like, oh, cool. That's awesome, man. I thought was great. It was awesome.

I thought it was awesome. And the people who were buttered about it, they just need to pick up a Spanish to English dictionary. Yeah, it's not hard. Like, your phone has translate on that. Fucking joint dual lingo. It's free. And the owl will yell at you if you don't get it right.

You skip every other day. Look how beautiful I am is I climb. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, what's going on? Nothing. All right, this story comes from Esquire. The next Democratic president better be merciless. So this article is really referring specifically to two potential presidential candidates, Shapiro and Bashar, both of whom seem to be taking a kind of middle of the

road stance here. And this article is basically saying like, enough of that middle of the road, wishy-washy, bullshit. It did not work in the past. It will not work in the future. And made a good point that,

like, part of what people are loving right now about Gavin Newsom is that he's poking the bear. Yeah. I don't like Gavin Newsom at all. Yeah. I don't like Gavin Newsom at all. But I will say, I don't dislike his tactics. Right.

I think that we can separate out and say, Gavin Newsom, the person, not a great person. Gavin Newsom, the tactics of using Trump's literal style of how he posts his truths back at him? Amazing. Him calling people out, using actual, like, swear words at him? Awesome. Great.

I like that. I don't like him. I wish someone else was doing what he was doing. I wish it was another person. Because, and also, I don't like Bashir. I don't like Shapiro. I think both of their comments. they're like fucking someone said

fuck ice or whatever he's like oh that's reprehensible it's like get the fuck out of here get lost these people are I am when I saw this headline I was like this has got to be our message be fucking merciless when you get in there because if you don't we're just going to have maybe a small reprieve

and then just have to deal with the same shit in the future yeah and I think I think one of the things that one of the lessons we have to learn is that a politics based and rooted in a sort of civility and politeness is a politics that America is no longer responsive to. Yeah. If we learn any lesson from social media, right?

One of the lessons we should take from social media is that what keeps people engaged and what Facebook and all the rest of them learned and algorithmically built for us, outrage keeps people engaged. Trump figured out that as long as he produces outrage, he will get engagement. the left, the Democrats, myself included, I think very much raising my hand, was like, I don't want to stoop to that level. That's gross. I am not going to do that. But the reality is that tactically speaking, that's how the world works now.

And we might all say, we'd all get in a room and say, but it shouldn't. And then we can set that aside, lock it in a box and never look at that sentence again and do the things that practically speaking need to be done in order to get engagement. if you do not get people engaged with your message and enraged, you're not going to, that's the new political reality now. Look at all of the successful assholes on the right. They're messages, a message of complete shit. Style wins over substance. Engagement and rage bait. That is the new political reality of today. It shouldn't be. That's horrible. It's cancerous, but it's true. I wonder, you know, as you say this, I wonder if, What we're seeing is there's never really been a person on the left who's done any of the things or gone as far as people on the right.

So there's always a sense of losing. And there's always this sense of being on your back foot and never being able to push back. What happens if someone on the left takes over that push and is awful and shitty and mean and, you know, does all the things that they're doing? does that correct the behavior or does it spiral us further into the behavior? I don't I think we're already in the spiral

is what I think. I think there's no getting out of the spiral. You think this is it. This is the future. Yeah. I think that over the course of time we can look back and say that the way that we collectively choose to communicate has changed and I think this is the way that we've collectively chosen to communicate. We yell at each other.

I miss everything about the past, man. I don't like this at all. I don't like it at all. I don't like it at all either, Tom. I don't know what do you do. Like, I mean, I think, I don't know what to do in the sense that do I want a left Donald Trump? And I answer to me is absolutely not.

I do not. What I want is somebody who's really smart, who recognizes I'm going to use the methods of Donald Trump for a few months or whatever to show people how bad this is, and then we'll make rules to fix it so that there's never a Donald Trump again. That's what I want. I don't know that anybody's capable of doing that. I don't know that anybody is capable of doing that. And I honestly, because we've talked about this for the last few weeks, and I like your ideas very much,

I wonder if the systems will even allow them to occur. Yeah. You know? And like the big institutional systems that all kind of self-support, they're all these like rolling slinky or abhoris systems. You know what I mean? Like they eat their own tail and fall down their own stairs constantly. And that's like how these things work.

They work on a certain amount of like dick-sunking momentum. Yeah. And so like once they sort of like remove those ribs and get in there and start rolling down their own hill, like I don't, it's really hard to stop it. So like, would you say, like, do I want a left-wing Donald Trump? Part of me thinks, like, I think all we're going to get now is Donald Trump's. I don't want that to be the case. It's a horrible thing to say out loud.

But I wonder how that can't be true. If we are moving into a rhetorical space that kind of demands this outrage culture as the only way to get engagement. Wouldn't it mean, though, that we would have already seen something like that occur? Can you point on our side to somebody who's like that? No. I know. I think we're a little late to the party on finding success with that strategy. I think Gavin Newsom is the closest and it's kind of lukewarm.

I do worry that if we don't embrace that strategy, we will continue to, we will only win in a reactionary way. I don't think that we'll be able to win and hold our wins in a sort of long-term way. and I was listening this morning to some of the news podcasts about like climate change and how like the Trump administration has completely destroyed not just the climate change regulations but fundamentally the laws that underlie our ability to regulate climate change.

Wasn't that in Project 2025? It certainly was Cecil. Okay. So it's not a surprise. Okay, go ahead. It's almost like somebody fucking wrote it down. I just checking time. I just had to check real quick.

Yeah. So like the very law. that underpin and make it possible for the EPA to even regulate climate change and greenhouse gases, etc. Those have been stripped away now. So when I think about stuff like that, I think, you know, unless you have somebody on the left who is going to wield power in the same brutal, merciless, aggressive way. It's impasse because breaking is always easier

than building. Oh yeah. It's 100% easier. So it's almost like we have to go even further. And then there's that escalation that I don't know how it feels like a death spiral. And I know that. And I'm worried about that. But I'm also like,

is civility ever going to be the thing that wins the day again? What about? Sorry, man. Ranked choice voting. Would that change? It would fix everything. I think that would fix everything.

Fix everything overnight. I think that would fix things in a huge way. Yeah. All right. So we know what our next battle cry is then. Yeah.

Ranked choice voting. Yeah. Because that would change a lot of things, I think. Yeah. Like, one of the things... Because suddenly you have other parties. Now you'll have other parties. I think there's a moderating effect

to rank choice voting where like some of the crazy outliers just kind of get like, ah, two, you know? And that starts to matter. You know, I really do think... What's crazy to me is that I don't actually think that solutions to most of our problems

are both unknown or... difficult. I just think that they're not going to happen because I'm a cynic. I think rank choice voting fixes a lot. I think getting corporate money out of politics fixes an enormous amount. God, that fixes so much. And I think that term limits fixes an enormous amount, an enormous amount of our political problems. So I think if you were to just implement those three things, which none of which will happen. Three easy steps. Yeah, right. Yeah. That won't ever work. Yeah. Because it's like, it's like you're voting on setting your own house on fire. It's like when you tell people the way to lose weight is diet and exercise and they're like, but is there a pill?

Yes, right. Yeah. Yeah. And they're just like, but I don't want to do it. I don't want to do those. Those sound hard. I don't want to do those hard things. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to be sent to song. We're going to be chung, friends. Let us each love love bingia. This is good news CNN. Grand jury declines to indict Democratic lawmakers who urged service members to disobey illegal Trump words. How many missing or bad indictments is this for them? This is really embarrassing. Dude, a lot of, I feel like there's a good baseball metaphor somebody should make about swings and misses and batting averages and maybe ERA somehow.

I don't know what that means. But some kind of, if this was a baseball, game, they would not have had a touchdown here. I'm just saying they should punt before the next inning. Somebody threw it across the blue line. Sure. Is this icing? This might be icing. I saw this and thought

another one. Yet another one. And this one was an easy pick because these people were all former service people and they were all saying, hey, you know what they said to me in the past, which is true? You can't obey a bad order, a disobey.

it's okay to disobey an illegal order. And then they said, well, that's, Trump literally said sedition. Like, this is sedition. Execute them. And like, if you're a service member, it's in the oath. Yeah, it's the thing.

It's literally in an oath you swear. You have to hold your hand up and say those words. Yeah. Psycho. What I thought was, yeah. It's seditious to follow the oath we made you swear to. What? That can't, that literally can't be true.

Fucking Christ, man. But what I think is also encouraging about this is that it wasn't just thrown out by a judge, but a grand jury heard it and was like, no, man, that's nothing. Yeah, no. Because the Leticia James thing was thrown out on kind of technical grounds. Yeah. And so was the Comey piece. It was fairly technical issues.

It was this piece, I think, in this particular article where they even said, it's not super hard to get indictments. Like, you can pretty much get indictments. And for them not to get indictments in a lot of these cases is really, really telling. Yeah, yeah. And so a lot of this, like, weaponization of the Justice Department feels like it's failing. And that's great.

It should be failing at the point of the Justice Department, though. An independent Justice Department should be like, what? No. That's it. This, though, reeks of top-down someone manipulating and moving pieces in the Justice Department that's outside of the Justice Department or at least telling the head of the Justice Department how to move things around

without any real idea of how things actually work. That's what it reeks to me. It reeks to me of someone who is Donald Trump who doesn't know how things work, who's working his way through Pam Bondi to move those pieces around and being like, I want this done, I want to see this happen. It's almost like how we said it.

He's a mob boss. That's how mob bosses work. I wonder too, as a business person, Trump's MO, we've known for a long time, has been to sue people that have had less resources than him. Oh, yeah. So I wonder how much anybody cares if they're successful. Oh, good point. Good point.

Because it's like, well, I'll make it expensive. I'll make it difficult. I'll create a story from my base to seize onto that you've been indicted. It'll damage your reputation amongst a certain number of people. And, you know, it'll be a chilling effect. That's a good idea. That's a good point. Because I think, like, he's very specifically playing,

on that idea that they'll put it on the front page of the newspaper now, but then this piece won't be the front page news. Yeah. This isn't as big news as they were actually brought up or indicted. Yeah, I would be willing to bet that like if you went to like OAN or Fox or, you know, one of those

trash networks, that the indictment got a lot more air time than this did to your point. The announcement of it and then when it fails not as much. Right. Oh boy. Oh boy. Oh boy. Oh boy. Big boy. Oh boy.

Big news. I haven't heard. Big news. Oh boy. CNN is more. So Donald Trump. Oh boy. Oh man. Here's a video of a. So Donald. Big news. Donald Trump. Big news. Big news. Donald Trump. Oh boy. The DO.

Big news. Oh boy. So Donald Trump. Oh boy. So Donald Trump. Oh boy. So Donald Trump. Oh boy. ABC News. Trump says he didn't see full racist video before it was posted. says he won't apologize. Holy shit. Did you see this fucking thing? I actually didn't watch the video.

Okay, so the video itself is two minutes long. It's a full two minutes and it's very dramatic, Netflix-y, produced specifically to intrigue. It's produced like a true crime podcast almost talking about the 2020 election, how it was stolen, et cetera, et cetera. I have no idea how this made it in here. but literally in between two scenes when they would normally cut from a desk scene

where someone is talking to a talking head, there is a tiny splice in there of it, you hear the music for In the Jungle. Oh, God. Shows two orangutans, and they're both dancing, and they have the Obama's faces on them, and they dance for two seconds. In the jungle, the quiet,

and then it's over, and then they go back to the actual. And it feels a lot like, Remember fight club with Tyler Darden? Yeah. Dicks in the thing or whatever. That's what it felt like to me. It felt like someone has spliced in a very obvious, very racist thing in the middle of this,

maybe in hopes that Trump would send it out without ever looking at it. So many things to say about this, right? So I had read, so Cecil, I had read a couple of different competing things. So I'm glad you watched the video. I didn't get to see the video. So I had read something. that there was a video where a bunch of the members of, like the Democratic Party were portrayed as different animals.

That's what they said it was a clip of something else. Something else. So it spliced out of that. And like, if that's true, that's problematic enough, right? You don't get to build a contextual cover around your racism, right? It's very obvious that, like, there is a longstanding history of depicting black people as monkeys or apes or, lesser primate, you know, non-humans, there's a long history of that. And there's other animals in that thing that you could have used.

You chose very specifically to use that. No, yeah, exactly. Because like, no decision that gets made in this respect is an accident. Somebody did a choice. Editorial choice. Right. You made that choice. So this isn't a thing that's just like, you didn't find it under a rock, right?

A person made choices to make the thing. The other thing is, let's imagine, let's imagine that we're idiots. and we take Trump at his word that he didn't watch it. He's got the biggest megaphone in the world. And he is this careless with his megaphone? That is its own problem. Sure. I mean, think about it this way.

Let's change it from Trump and social media to something else. He didn't watch it all through the end. So that means you can't trust him with the platform that he has, right? If he doesn't watch out of the world. Imagine if you were to say to, you know, like you were to hand a hot bowl of soup to say you're three-year-old. Right. And you were to say, like, most people wouldn't do that. They would say, well, I'm not going to give you a thing that is really precarious. You're a child still. You don't have a lot of coordination. You might spill this hot bowl of ramen all over yourself. It's not something I'm going to do.

Or waste the ramen. So you wouldn't do that. Right. Right. So, but instead what we're saying is not only can this three-year-old not handle the soup, but this three-year-old, we've asked them to replace all the gas pipes leading to our, to our, to our, hot water here. Right. Because the duties of the presidency, the smallest duty of the presidency, is handling their social media. That's the tiniest, least important thing that the presidency does. The more important stuff requires a great attention to detail that watching an entire video would reveal you half. Yeah. Think too about the way that Trump, uses social media. He uses social media to make major policy announcements.

He uses social media to direct the Justice Department to do stuff. He uses social... It's not like social media is just like a place... It's not his golf course. It is a place that he uses for official business. And then all of a sudden,

I'm not as a citizen or as a person in the world, I am not supposed to trust that what goes out on his social media has even been vetted by him at all, that he gets a free pass if there's a reaction to it that isn't liked,

but he can just be like, well, I'm careless. I'm just careless. My excuse for this is that I'm careless, says the guy using what is probably the second most meaningful weapon

in this sort of information arsenal of the world. It's a great point. It's a great point. And I think we let this administration get away with these types of things, not just him when it comes to his choice on whether or not he's going to watch

an entire, like an entire, he doesn't even have that fucking attention for a two-minute video to watch the whole video. But I think we let Mike Johnson get away with it when somebody goes to ask him and say, hey, did you see that Trump posted something on his page? And they'll say, I didn't watch it.

I don't know it. I don't know. That's your fucking job. Yeah. Same thing here. It's your fucking job. If you're going to post this, it's your job. You need to know. what goes out there. Do you think that if I posted something as Cogdiss and it had a little

space in there that was like a fucking part of a snuff film or something? Don't you think people would immediately say, hey, what the fuck? Yeah. And then I would have to... And then I would be responsible. And if I were to say, oh, I didn't watch the whole thing, what does that say about me

as a content provider? Right. Imagine if Joe Biden, no. I think it back. Imagine if Barack Obama had tweeted out a video. And in that video was spliced in Mitch McConnell in clan robes. The right would be like, well, that's chill. That's a great point.

That's super chill. Why are we paying attention to this? Oh, he's fine. What? Yeah. No, we would be like, well, that's a wildly inappropriate thing to do. They did try to impeach him. Right.

I mean, if he did that while wearing a tan suit, Are you kidding me? But one of the things is, do you even remember this happening now? There's so much happening that no one remembers that last week he posted an obscenely racist thing to his social media feed and everyone has just moved right past it?

Dude, and won't apologize. He won't even say, oh my God, I'm so sorry. They even took it down. Yes. I mean, it's not like he's still standing on business here. Right. He 100% backed up as far as they could, but they just don't want you to pay attention.

of this. This is racism, man. It's like straight up racism. It's not like Trump doesn't have a long history of racism. Nope. Yeah. I think the, this is strategically, I think this is very on purpose. So I don't buy for a second that he didn't watch this. I believe fully that he watched it. And I think what the White House understands and everybody working for the White House understands is that this video was always going to go up and then go down. It never occurred to me that he watched the whole thing. Really? Not until the second. Never occurred to me. I strongly believe that this video for him is a net win. And it always was.

And so he gets to post the video, take it down, say he never watched it. Annalysis, by the way. And all the people who want that video to exist get to say, I'm glad that went up. And all the people who want to excuse that video in public now have a way to excuse the video. But still know, that's our guy. He's our guy. He's telling us who he is. Yeah.

You know, it's a dog whistle. sure. Right. I mean, straight up whistle. It's a whistle. Yeah, straight up like... Here dog. Like, it's blowing a dog whistle into a megaphone.

Yeah. Into the loudest speaker system in the world. So yeah, I think he absolutely did it on purpose. It, what went through my mind immediately and what I thought immediately was, there's no way he could sit still for two minutes. That's what went through in my mind the first time I saw it. Because I watched the whole thing. I put it on.

As soon as I saw it, I was like, okay, if he's showing a video, with this, that's insane to me. But then when you cut to it and it's clearly inserted, I thought, oh, well, somebody just tricked him because he's lazy. Right. That's the first thing. That's the first thing and only thing that stayed in my head was that somebody tricked him because he's lazy.

But you're right, although there's a big part of me, Tom, that thinks that there's no way that he strategically would ever think like that. Oh, yeah, maybe. You know what I mean? Like, there's no strategy in him that would do that. But yeah, maybe he did see it all. and doesn't care. Right.

And I think that where the chips fall where they may is not a big deal to him. He doesn't care. He knows he can get out of anything he does. I guess, like, the other thing that I wonder about is that I'm not sure that I believe that staffers run his social media? No, I don't either. I don't believe that either. Based on it's called vififes and his hamburgers.

I think he posts everything himself. I think he does. And I think he's trying to get out of it. He tried to get out of it two different ways. So the first time they announced early on in the day, she blamed the reporters. So Leavitt blamed the reporters. I can't believe you had the nerve to see that.

It essentially was, oh, come on. The American people don't care about this stuff. Let's talk about important shit, basically, was the gist of the message. And then it didn't go away. And then they blamed it on a staffer. And then they deleted it. And then he finally said, I didn't watch the whole thing.

So that's how it, it, it, there's like a whole gaslighting sequence that has to happen. And the sequence starts with, it's your fault. then it goes from it's your fault to it was someone else's fault then it goes from someone else's fault to well it was my fault but it didn't matter and I think I think that's intentional too because what that also does and we've seen this and the reason I think it's intentional Cecil's you've seen it happen so many times that now I have three explanations for it which gives the people that want to excuse it three different options

to choose which excuse best suits their personal narrative yeah it's a choose your own excuse it book yeah yeah yeah yeah you will never be japanese you will never find the love of your life in japan who looks like this and is a cutie pie japanese girl you will never be the protagonist in an anime you will never have superpowers to allow you to overcome your most greatest tribulations you'll always be a loser new york times bondie faces anger from lawmakers over the handling of epstein files her appearance came as the justice department's under scrutiny over the Epstein files, his, it's approached toward the shootings in Minneapolis and it's moved to prosecute six lawmakers. Let's see, let's see. Maybe there might be something here. Let's watch

it. Let's see if there's something. Do you swear or affirm under penalty of perjury that the testimony you're about to give is true and correct to the best of your knowledge, information, and believe so help you God? How many have you indicted? Excuse me. I'm going to answer the question. I answer my question. No, I'm going to answer the question the way. You're the The answer the question the way I asked it. The survivors of these heinous crimes deserve better from this Department of Justice. In particular, it is shocking that the department did not redact the names of Epstein's victims, but it did redact the names of their abusers.

It is about you taking responsibility for your Department of Justice and the harm that it has done to the survivors who are standing right behind you and are waiting for you to turn to them and apologize. Have you apologized to President Trump, all of you who participated in those impeachment hearings against Donald Trump? You all should be apologizing. Who's responsible? Are you able to track who in your organization made this massive failure and released the victim's names? Literally the worst thing you could do to the survivors, you did.

I'm a career prosecutor. And despite what the ranking member said, I have spent my entire career fighting for victims and I will continue to do so. So that was just a piece of this. There's other pieces out there that are more contentious, let's say, where they're just yelling at each other and just screaming. But really, she came in with a list of things that she was going to talk about and never really talked and answered a bunch of questions that they had asked her.

And she avoided the questions. At a certain point, she's talking about the Dow. Yeah. I mean, just out of nowhere, just like she brings up. should be thanking President Trump for the Dow. Sure. Yeah. That's the topic at hand. Everything is the same thing to these guys, right?

Like it's all distractions. It's all smoking mirrors. It's always worked for them. So why not have it work now? Yeah, no. Show up. Be fiery. Be angry in return. Try to like match the, you know, vibe with a bigger energy vibe.

It seems, again, like it seems that they've got an outrage playbook that they really understand how to pull out. I feel like, again, we've said this before, but now I'm agreeing with Tom Massey. I'm agreeing with Tom. Tom Massey, like, he put forward a bill last year to get rid of the Federal Reserve after reading a book about how great Bitcoin was. And I am in a place now where I'm like, you know, Tom Massey really makes a lot of sense on this one.

He can't miss with what he's talking about. You can't, though. I mean, really genuinely, you'd have to be such a subhuman to not agree with the things that he's saying here. What he's saying, what his whole art. argument was, was that there was an entire list of people that said, they very specifically said, please do not release this list of victims' names. And they released the victim's names. And they only redacted a name that wasn't part of the victims at all. Right. Somebody who was accused of these things.

So they very, he called them out. He said, you, you literally release the thing we said, please don't release. You didn't redact the thing we said you should redact. And it literally attacks victims. I think in a world that made sense that was like much of the world that you and I grew up in, when there was like incompetence and that incompetence created a scandal, the person who behaved incompetently would themselves be like, oh shit. Got to fall on your sword. Yeah, got to fall on your sword. And now there's no accountability for anybody.

They've, the right and the Trump administration has figured out that that's a bad policy. Like, that's a bad strategy because that is like, yeah, this guy was. was accountable and we did a bad thing. Never admit you're wrong. Never admit you're wrong. It's like, it's like the story we just covers. Like, I'm not going to apologize for my carelessness or my racism. Like, I'm just not even going to. What I won't do is apologize.

Yeah, those are things that are actually part of my character. Yeah, right. Yeah. That's what I'd put on a resume if I was going for a job. The stuff that's coming out about Epstein, I still want to caution people from taking things that are not actually that people weren't deposed when they were saying or things like that and presuming that all this stuff is true. I know a lot of people on our side, and we said this last week,

a lot of people on our side want to believe that these people are monsters and maybe they are and that's perfectly possible. But please don't create things or fall into that sort of blue anon stuff because it's real bad for us to just think that everything that is released in this millions and millions of pages or whatever is like a real thing that actually happened.

We have to vet all this information individually. You can't skip that step. That's a real important step. I was listening to a story about this the other day where some journalists were saying it's going to take years. There's three million pages of documents that have been released.

It is going to take years to go through all of this in an accurate and responsible way to connect to the dots that need to be, to discover who some of the redacted names are for the potential abusers to like source this stuff out. This is a years-long process now.

Imagine, I mean, think about how much three million pages is just from a volume standpoint. Like I'm reading a novel right now, Cecil, it's 884 pages. And that's a big book. That's a huge book. And that's nothing by comparison to three. million pages. And part of the problem is there's this pressure to release the documents and then review and interpret and analyze and report on three million pages as soon as they're released. The day those were released, we always started getting news stories about what's in them.

And like, yeah, of course we are. And here it's a big giant data dump. But there's so much work that has to be done now. This is the beginning, not the middle or the end. Do you remember the movie about the Pentagon Papers? There was a movie that they, did where they got these Pentagon papers and all these people stayed up all night and they passed them all out and they all read and they they were journalists so they're all sitting on a floor somewhere and they're all set out that was like a tiny amount of papers and it took what six journalists or something to go through them and the time frame that they needed to go through them in to try to actually put together a cohesive story to that they could then release to the public

and that was a small amount of documents in comparison to what we got here yeah this is This is a huge, it's a huge deal. We have better tools now that can parse things out for you, databases that you can enter. You said that New York Times created their own tool to try to go through some of these papers. So there's ways in which to do it. I just want to caution people not to believe everything just because it's in there. Just be careful because you want to, I know that a lot of people want to believe the things that are against these people. And I'm not saying that they aren't true, that there isn't people that, you know, that.

And I've never, I think that we've been pretty consistent throughout the whole, Epstein thing. We don't know if it's true. I'm not going to say it's true. I'm not going to be surprised if it is, but I'm not going to say it's true that there's some sort of ring of people that are doing this stuff. There was no evidence that we had access to that showed that that was true. What we had was a bunch of conjecture, right? And you can't lean on that and say that means it's true. Right. It might lead you to the truth eventually, and it might make you overturn the right rock. That's important. But at a certain point, we've got to follow what the evidence says and not just immediately presume that just because we've connected a few dots

back here like that guy on the fucking board. Right. Yeah, yeah. You can't, you can't be like, oh, well, yeah, that proves that everything is right here. Yeah. And I think, I think that's exactly true. I think also that there is plenty of room to look at the Epstein documents and look at like Lutnik, for example, and say that's a guy who very publicly has lied about his connection to Epstein. So many people have, you know, and that gets to matter. even if he didn't do anything personally, right? Because I do think that there is plenty of room to say, hey, anybody who knowingly engages with a pedophile

is a fucking creep. Anybody who did it after the 2006 or 5 or whatever it was when he got caught in Florida, anybody who associated with him after that, that person has questionable character. Yeah. 100% questionable. Because you should not be

associating with him after he's been convicted of raping kids because that's what he was doing. Right. None of this. What was the charge they got him on time? It was like a prostitution with an underage person? Yeah. That's not a real. It's not a rape.

It's just rape. I mean, it's just rape. They just wanted to make it sound nice. But it was rape. Yeah. And one of the things that came out this week during this big hearing that they showed this hearing with Bondi, she started saying, well, it was what happened with Mayor Garland. Why didn't Merrick Garland do this, et cetera, et cetera. And I've seen other people talk about this.

There was a popular clip that was going around a couple days ago where there's a lady who's a popular podcaster and Medi Hassan. They were having a conversation and they were both saying, well, it was on, you know, Merrick Garland didn't release any of this stuff and that's on him. That's disgusting. They should have released all these documents during when Biden was in there. I want to just say something that I think maybe those people are missing. And they're normally smart people. So it's important, I think, to point this out. Maybe they missed it. But really, think about how much disinformation was coming out during the Biden presidency. And what would happen if they were to sort of crack that egg during that presidential,

during Biden's presidency? Do you think, I think that there is some strategic bonus to Trump doing it over Biden doing it. it specifically because of how much they would have not believed what Biden did, right? They would think that Biden was creating this or he was the one who was orchestrating this. Because it's happening under Trump, under Trump's people, there is, you're pulling away one of their excuses for not believing it because they would have never believed it if Merrick Garland had done it. Oh, yeah, yeah, right. Do you know what I mean?

If Merrick Garland would have opened up, first off, most of the time that you're, you get brought into a job, you don't crack open the cold cases and start releasing documents. That's number one. Right. That was never a thing that Biden was ever talking about. They were never talking about this. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that Biden didn't know about it. And maybe even some of those high-level Democrats weren't covering up for people. I'm not saying that that's not the case. I'm not saying that's not the case. But what I am saying is to expect them to do it based on nothing and not running on it and not like at that point, if you roll your head back to when Biden was president, only people who were talking about Epstein

were people who were mostly conspiracy theorists. When did the second Epstein, forgive me for not remember, what year did the second Epstein arrest and suicide occur? So it was all during Trump's presidency. That's what I thought. Yeah, so it was during, Bar was the guy who was in charge and he died in 20, I think it was 2019, he killed himself. So.

And I'm going to do the, I don't know, what they said is that he killed himself. I don't know. Yeah. So that's, that is, that is, that, is worth saying out loud too, is that this happened on Trump's watch. The lack of transparency

began on Trump's watch. Sure. Right? Yeah. And it's not like on the second iteration of Trump's watch. Trump was an avid and immediate proponent of transparency. The only reason that these Epstein files were released is because of a massive bipartisan pressure campaign. Well, and a

bipartisan pressure campaign started by the right. Yes. Very specifically this is a thing that they were running on. He was asked about this by Joe Rogan when he came on the show. Yeah, yeah. So this is not a thing that just came up out of nowhere.

This is a thing that I think people on the right have been wanting to find out for a long time. And I think they've been wanting to find out because they were listening to people like fucking the, that four-fingered lady,

whatever her name is. Liz Croken. Liz Kroken. They're listening to like Liz. I forgot about Liz. They're thinking about Liz Kroken and all the things she's posting about all these terrible Democrats

who have fucking tunnels between their houses and cutting the faces off kids and wearing them around like fucking Dwight during the fucking CPR episode. So, so genuinely these people are like, they've been talking about this shit for decades. And all those people,

they've tuned enough people up on the right to think, this is where we're going to get our treasure trove. And that's why the left was hiding it. Not that the left didn't, that wasn't a thing that people were talking about on the left. It wasn't a thing that people believed on the left. Right. Because there wasn't any evidence to believe it.

So why would you, there was no evidence that we could have dug into because we didn't see any of it. So I think like they were the ones who overturned this. They dug it up. And now that it's up, they're like, oh, well, shit.

Looks bad for us. And I also think like this is also another opportunity to dunk on Biden for some reason. And you're like, dude, I fucking hate Merrick Garland. I think Merrick Garland is like, I mean, like he's like a weather vane made out of spaghetti. Like he's such a noodle,

but then he also flies. It was awful. But I don't think it's his fault for not releasing this stuff. I don't think anybody would have believed if he did release it. If he put all that stuff out there, they would say it's all manufactured.

There was a no-win situation if he would have done something like this. Yeah. Oh my God. What happened here? Yeah. We're all trying to find the guy who did this and give him a spanking.

It's obviously this guy, right? Yes. Related from the BBC, underfired Trump Commerce Secretary confirms he visited Epstein's Island. This is Howard Lutnik. That's that Lutnik's story that you're talking about. This is Howard Lutnik lied.

And like you said, just a few minutes ago, every single person who did, they should hold accountable. 100%. Like, you cannot have lunch with a pedophile and be a good person if you know that guy's a pedophile. It's not, there is no possibility that you, what he said was he's on, he's on record.

I think on a podcast or a radio program, something along the lines. he's on the record of saying like, hey, he moved in nearby, or I moved nearby Epstein. My wife and I went to his house, we took a tour, we were really creeped out by his house. We saw a massage table. My wife and I were like, we will never see him again socially, do business with him or engage with him in philanthropical endeavors ever. We'll never associate with that guy. Then he gets caught in these emails specifically arranging at his own request to meet with Epstein on his island.

for a lunch. And like, you're a fucking lying piece of shit. And this is post conviction, post the first conviction. So I guess there wasn't a second conviction. So post conviction.

So this is a guy who, that was just a story he was telling everybody because he knew that that played better. When in reality, this is a guy who knew and solicited the attention and time

of a pedophile. I don't understand why it came back in the first place. I have no idea. Especially because, you know you fucking did it. He probably figured he's always been untouchable and could wiggle his way out of everything before

and didn't really believe that anything bad would happen to him again. Probably thought Trump was in office and he could have, like, wooed bar, I guess. He probably thought he could massage his way out of it, you know? All right, that's going to rack up it up for our regular show this week, but our Thursday show is going to be about guns. About guns. We're going to do a show about guns. It's going to be a long-form show.

You're going to want to check it out on Thursday and we'll be back next Monday with a full show. We'll leave you like we always do. Skeptics Creed. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter, mommy issue, hypno-babelon bullshit. Couched in Scientician, double bubble, toil and trouble, pseudo-quazi alternative, acupunctuating,

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