Knowledge Fight - Spiritual Correction

Episode Date: May 17, 2017

Today, Dan tells Jordan about something that he kind of got wrong on the last episode regarding campaign donors in the 2016 election. It wasn't incorrect information, as much as it was a situation where the way things were presented wasn't entirely fair, and Dan felt it was necessary to provide this clarification.

Andy and Kansas, you're on the air. Thanks for holding. Hello, Alex. I'm a first-time caller. I'm a huge fan. I love your work. I love you. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Knowledge Freedom, Dan. I'm Jordan. We're here really quick just to drop in with what I'm going to call a spiritual correction. On the last episode, we talked about campaign donations. Right.

That Trump had gotten and Hillary Clinton had gotten, and we were not inaccurate, but I found information later that, after we'd recorded the episode, that I feel like I would be remiss if I didn't point out and call myself out on. One of those things that's most important is that Renaissance Technologies, the company that is owned by Robert Mercer, gave Trump $15 million in the campaign, $15.5 million. But I later found out he also gave Hillary $14 million. So he's hedging his bets, which is what literally every billionaire did. Absolutely.

Like everybody at Goldman Sachs gave Hillary a shit ton of money and also Trump a shit ton of money. And they would have wound up in the cabinet either direction. Actually, that's kind of interesting. That's the other correction that I needed to make. We weren't specific enough about the Goldman Sachs stuff with Trump. The reality is that Goldman Sachs banned all their partners for making donations to Trump and Pence. And the reason is that they had made a policy change about supporting candidates running for state or local offices, as well as giving money to people who are sitting state or local

officials running for federal office. And a quote from a memo that was distributed to Goldman Sachs employees, this policy change is meant to prevent inadvertently violating pay to play rules, particularly the look back provision when partners transition into rules covered by these rules. The policy change is also meant to minimize potential reputational damage caused by any false perception that the firm is attempting to circumvent pay to play rules, particularly even partners seniority and visibility. Says the company with all of its fucking former members in the goddamn cabinet. Right, right. But here's the issue. It has to do with state and local representatives.

Right. Because those are the people who can make rules that more directly fuck with the offices. So the situation is the bank's compliance team pointed to the Trump-Pence campaign as a donation no go because Pence is the governor of Indiana giving him influence over state pensions. Right. So that was a situation where they couldn't give to him because he was a state official. Meanwhile, the new rules at Goldman Sachs don't restrict contributions to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton because she currently doesn't hold office.

Her vice presidential candidate, Tim Kaine is a U.S. senator, so wouldn't be subject to the rules either because he's not a state or local official. So Goldman Sachs employees were unallowed to give money to the Trump campaign, but it wasn't because they hated Trump. It was because of state and local. So this particular thing, this particular rule that they implemented somehow wound up happening to the Trump campaign. It was not purposeful. It was just kind of coincidental. If Tim Kaine had been a governor, it would have been exactly the same. It would have been exactly the same.

He would have been banned from giving money to Hillary Clinton. But it's fine. It's fine that they gave Hillary Clinton money and they would have given Trump money if they could have. Yeah, for sure. And the other thing is, I just, you know, while I'm calling myself out, there were people who gave tens of millions of dollars to Hillary too. And I feel like when I listened back to it, I was misrepresenting things by these million dollar donations. And then we said Mercer gave 15 million to Trump. It gave the appearance that she didn't have large scale donors. And that was kind of unfair of me. It was unintentional. But even then, the larger point is billionaires don't give a fuck and they're just going to

give millions to anybody because if they become president, fuck it. We already gave you millions. But also the other point is that a lot of those high donations on Hillary's side were from unions and stuff like that. Okay. So there were like teachers unions and stuff like that. Right, right, right. They're, they're political action committees. No, one of the, one of the larger, like in the pantheon of donors, there's billionaires and then there's unions that are not equivalent, but they still give a shit ton of money. No. So anyway, this has been a tiny drop in. Please enjoy the longer episode today, but I just wanted to do this because, you know, it's about being above board. And I felt like

when I listened back to that episode, it was slightly unfair. So something that Alex Jones has never done. Probably not. Anyway, thank you all for listening. We do appreciate it. We'll talk to you real soon. But until then, Rapaport, he still lives. Does he still live? He still lives. Andy and Kansas, you're on the air. Thanks for holding. Hello, Alex. I'm a first time caller. I'm a huge fan. I love your work. I love you.