The Chaser Report - A Ron-Stoppable Campaign Launch

Episode Date: May 28, 2023

Ron DeSantis has launched his campaign for the US Presidency in what will go down in history as one of The moments of all time. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gatigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello, and welcome to The Chaser Report with Dom and Charles. Dom. Hello. Ron DeSantis. Hang on a sec. What?

I just thought, rather than doing this podcast, we'd do an innovative thing and have a Twitter space. Oh, okay. So I just... It's not working. Hold on. This is embarrassing. Oh, no. Sorry.

Okay. Well, I think it's just that it's so successful. It's, yeah. Oh, oh my God, Charles, we've broken the internet. Yeah. This is just too popular. Yes, it's too popular. Oh, no.

There we were being creative and innovative and everyone wants to see it. Like hundreds of thousands of people who are online. You know, Charles, I got on the end of Ronda Sanis's live stream. Should we explain much? Should we go back to the beginning, explain what we're talking? We're doing. We could, but instead we're going to do this first. Those rads, if you're a subscriber, you don't get those.

Four bucks a month, what a deal. Anyway, yeah, so Ron DeSantis is the governor of Florida, where woke goes to die. Charles? Yes. When woke's near the end of its life and feeling a little bit, a little bit unwell, goes out of Florida and gets put to sleep. He's the famous guy who did the don't say gay laws. Yes.

Which means you know about... Ah, you said it. Oh, hey! Not allowed to say that. or basically anything, I think, in Florida. In fact, I think maybe they're talking about not teaching evolution as well. You wouldn't want to say that word either. He's also the man currently fighting a war with Disney,

which he's losing quite comprehensively, by the way. So he's been considered for a long time to be the less insane version of Donald Trump. The same policies. I think the campaign is calling him Trump with brains. Trump with brains. And so the question is, if not Donald Trump, if all of the lawsuits and, you know, complete incompetence and coup somehow managed to make the Republican voters not want to support him, which hasn't happened yet, he's still very much

the frontrunner. Ron DeSanis is the guy to take him on. Or Ron DeSanctimonious, as Donald Trump calls him. Well, I think they're trying to trying out Little Ron. Little Ron. He loves a Lil. Because he's incredibly short. He's five foot six. Yes, and Trump's very tall. So the question was, will he, won't he, for a long time. It's taken him months longer than everyone. I think maybe even nine months longer than people thought he was going to take. He's been vacillating. Yes. But on Thursday of last week, he came out and launched his campaign.

And it's always a very important moment, isn't it, Charles, in American politics. When you launch your campaign, you've got to do something amazing. Well, exactly. I mean, I don't know whether you remember when Trump launched his campaign, he famously came down the escalators. The golden escalators at Trump Tower. Yes. And then made this incredible speech about. how Mexicans were coming across the border

and raping American women. I think that's where the whole thing of build the wall and make Mexico pay for it came from. And none of us were expecting this. We thought it was just going to be a sort of showbiz, sillyness, he's just basically doing an ego trip. No one expected this massive fascistic rant. Yes.

But that set the tone. It set a tone which he continues today. Yes. And famously, Obama made a soaring oratory when he launched his campaign back in about 2007. Didn't he go to the place where one of the, was it the, one of the, what's that thing called?

He went to some, I forgot where it was, but he went to us. They go to historically significant places, don't they? Yeah, that's right. Ron DeSantis, on the other hand. Lil Ron. Decided that he would launch his campaign on Twitter. On Twitter spaces,

which is a thing that Twitter invented to key. thing called Clubhouse, which they did, which is simultaneous live audio. Yeah. And it's basically like radio, but more complicated. It's kind of like a Zoom call for the whole world. And when I describe it like that, you can see that there would be problems. So Elon Musk. Well, why don't we listen to some of the gold of when this started?

The big moment for Rondisand, it's been working up to this for literally years. This is how his campaign sounded when he fired the start-ist pistol at last. I am running for President of the United States to lead our great... All right. Sorry about that. We've got so many people here that I think we are, we are kind of melting the servers. See, I think we're back online here. Great. All right. Well, it's certainly an incredible honor to have Governor Santis make this stark announcement. Look, a bit of teething issues. I mean, innovative, innovative to start with that sort of thing rather than just a big, exciting.

He got more news coverage, I think. with the problems, and he would have otherwise. Well, it's funny because somebody pointed out, if he'd just gone to like a stadium in Florida, like a football stadium and done it there, every TV network would have had really nice visuals of a packed stadium. There would have been a whole lot of people

who sort of made the emotional link between football that they love, that's their national sport. Yep. And Ron, ordinary guy. likes his football, and the broadcast networks would have had stuff to run. But unfortunately, Twitter Spaces is an audio-only thing. So I don't know whether you saw the news reports coming out of the US the day after, but they all just had this blank, black sort of square with Twitter Spaces on it

and then an audio wave as the visuals of this incredibly visual moment in history. history. I jumped on at the end. Oh, you got on? Yeah. There were about 300,000 people on at that point in time. Almost everyone whose name I could see in the Twitter spaces was a political journalist or someone who clearly wasn't a supporter. So I imagine most of those listening were just wanting to watch a car crash in real time. But it did work by the time I was there. Yes. And the bit that I was there for, I was there for about 10 minutes just before it ended. And during that time, Elon Musk, who was the host of the whole thing. So not only was it on Twitter, but it was a suck-up to Elon event, basically. Elon Musk was kind of co-em-seeing it with this other guy. And on multiple

occasions, Charles, at least three times, Elon Musk interjected in the middle of a conversation to mention Dogecoin. That was the sort of level of which the event was being pitched. It was bizarre. So it's sort of the 4chan takeover of American politics. Yeah, it really made me think that we have, at some point, someone did something weird with the time machine and we've gone onto one of those alternative timelines, like in Back to the Future too. Things are wrong in the world where this is a, where Elon Musk can buy and ruin Twitter, and then suddenly hijack a presidential campaign, talk about a fucking doge coin. One detail I liked was that fairly early on in the broadcast, like after they'd sort of got

through the audio issues. Which took 20 minutes or something. Yeah. Yeah. Elon Musk accidentally gave co-hosting authority to this random Twitter user called At Comet, right? Obviously thinking it was like part of... An actual comet. Yeah, or part of DeSantis's campaign.

It was a thing. And the guy who was just on their just casual observer thought it would be funny to stop the spaces to just end the whole session. Which admittedly... And afterwards, and it did, it did, they had to restart the whole thing. And afterwards he got online and he apologised. He said, look, I couldn't believe that I'd been made co-host. It was clearly an accident.

But I didn't think that pressing the end button would actually end it. It's like, you know, being on an aeroplane and, you know, you have your sort of light button and you have your air button and then next to his crash the plane button. That's it. That's Twitter nowadays. Every passenger has the button to destroy. There was a day in the early days when we were doing the Chast of Newspaper. We had these very old crappy desktop computers.

And for some reason, I still don't know why. I pressed the button on a computer that Julian was using. I thought it was the turbo button was off or something like that. And I turned the computer off and had to save this work. Just because it was a button. I was like, I want to press this to see what happened. So I completely sympathise. Losing part of the Chasing newspaper, obviously, a far worse outcome than ending this stream.

So it was a bizarre moment. And this is the guy who's got to try and get traction. I mean, I assume his only strategy is to basically be there when Trump implodes, if Trump implodes. Well, I think the thing is that he has looked at Donald Trump and he's gone, Trump was the Twitter president. Yes. Trump has now refused to go back onto Twitter. Because he's got his own one, Truth Social.

Truth Social. And so Ronda Sanders has gone, oh, this would be exactly the same as 2016. Whoever can win Twitter can win the presidency. Yep. And that's why he's sucking up to Elon Musk, and he hasn't realised that Twitter has turned from a trash can of mediocrity. Yes, but one that we all read. A hellscape into something that is growing increasingly irrelevant to political discourse.

But also that back when Trump was working, was on Twitter, he made news, every tweet made news, even if he just tweeted the word covefefe. The entire world just stopped and marveled at it. Whereas now that's not the case at all. It's just not part of the discourse. But also it just doesn't work. This is the thing. Elon came in, thought he could figure out how Twitter worked,

the algorithms and all that within about a day, sacked 80% of the engineers or something like that by some estimations. And guess what? It doesn't fucking work now. Yeah, the headcount at Twitter has gone from 8,000 employees to 1,500 employees. So things just don't work. And he was like, well, I'm getting my best Tesla engineer. is in here to fix it, which meant that it crashed like Tesla's too.

Kept on catching on fire. That's right. The Chaser Report, news a few days after it happens. What does this mean for the future of fascism in America? Well, I guess, you know what? It will be innovative for fascism to be audio only. I don't think that's been tried before. I mean, even Hitler understood the value of images of having Lenny Riffin-style or whatever.

making the movies in the Nuremberg rallies. We have those images. We won't have the images of Ron DeSantis because it's all being done online via audio. Ron DeSantis knows something that we don't. Like is there sort of a coming bandwit apocalypse, which means that the world will have to just go back to audio only. Either that or he's realized people can tell that he's small.

And once Donald Trump can't with... Because Trump really prides himself on these nicknones. He already used it all for Little Marco, Rubio, last time. Yeah. Tiny Ron. is a pretty good Is it tiny Ron? I think it's a little Ron.

Or is it little Ron? Maybe, well it's been a little before but I imagine he's downsides him even further. Yeah, Tiny Ron. The tiny Ron. I just love, Trump's first ad in the campaign extraordinarily was about how he made Ron DeSantis

and Ron DeSanis should be grateful. Had nothing to do with vote me for president. Here's my vision for the future. It was just like, that little shit, I made him. So that's where we are. Meanwhile, I don't know whether you saw what Biden did during that Twitter Spaces launch by Ron DeSanters. Oh, no, what did he do?

He tweeted out a tweet that just said, this link works. And it was a link to his website asking for donations for his presidential campaign. Very clever. Ron DeSantis has one day after his campaign launched, by the way, countenanced the idea of pardons for everyone involved in January 6th. There's quite a lot of people locked up. This past week, the guy who. broke into Nancy Pelosi's office, the former speaker, and put his feet up on the desk and did all this damage. He's been sentenced to four years jail. So the prospect is that if Trump

gets into office or DeSantis, that they'll just be let out. There'll be no consequences for the attack on the Capitol. They'll all be forgiven and pardoned. It's a pretty dark place America finds itself in. At this stage, probably the best chance for American democracy is that Elon Musk's creations continue to fail, right? If Ron DeSantis decides to get, I don't a Tesla as his official campaign vehicle, you might not make it through the campaign. Even the Secret Service can't save him from Tesla's tech, I'm presuming. Yeah.

It's a very dark place America's in where you've got basically a whole side of politics leaning into a coup and just going, yeah, these were patriots, we should pardon them. I mean, I find that extraordinary. Well, and I'm pretty sure there's certain places in America where it is now legal for the state legislatures to overturn the election result.

the presidential election, electoral college result, regardless of what happens. We need to check that. They certainly tried to pass those bills, but there was then a federal bill passed that may have stopped them, I'm not sure. Right, I think we need to check it out. No, but they certainly tried to do that. Federal, there is no power by the feds to affect state laws on voting. Well, let's get one of the, we'll get David Smith in next week to talk about it.

Because, meanwhile, it's a pretty extraordinary play. And for Joe Biden, of all people, the dullest president in living memory, who really should be putting his feet up and just polishing the transam and not running for another term. Even his biggest supporters would have to say at this stage, it's a bit of a stretch for him to...

He's the defender of democracy. He's the only hope that America has of not having a president who doesn't think it's a problem to storm the capital and pardons those who did. Mind you, I reckon, I think there are green...

Like, I think what's happening is it's a bit like that America is disuniting and things are happening at a state level. Like Florida has turned into a sort of proto-fascist sort of dystopic. I mean, if you read about the chilling effects of what DeSantis has done on education and you basically can't conduct academic research there anymore. Mind you, because a lot of huge numbers of books have been banned from schools. We're talking 600 or something. in the last year.

What that has led to, though, is an upsurge in bookstores selling these banned books. Like most bookstores in not just Florida, but like South Carolina, North Carolina, all around there in the South, now have shelves, which is these are our banned books. Wow. And kids who love to be naughty have started reading these books far more than if they had never been banned. Like there are sort of wonderful, like life doesn't just go in one direction. The other amazing thing, and I want to get an expert from Minnesota in next week to also talk about this, is Minnesota just passed a raft of progressive legislation, which has been dubbed the New New Deal, right, Minnesota's New Deal.

They've done amazing things. They've basically made Medicare free for all. They've made it so that school lunches are free for all. They've massively enhanced workers' rights. And they did it not just with the Democrats, but there's another party called the Farmers Workers Party. Yeah, I think that is the Democrats actually in Minnesota. Right.

Al Franken, when he was Senator, I remember following his campaign. And the little offshoot of the Dems is the Farmers Workers Party. The Farmers Workers' Workers Party. Yeah, and so the Farmers' Workers' Democratic Party might be called. And so it's an alliance between centrist Democrats and these sort of what you'd think of as the Greens in Australia. Yeah. And instead of going, oh, no, we can't do anything like we've had here federally, you've seen this massive upsurge in progressive politics right in the heartland of what is

considered a purple state. It's not even considered necessarily a Democrat state. They have one vote majority in their upper house. Yeah, right. And they've even apparently made it illegal to pretend to grope people while you're a senator for minicidal. Our Franken was so disappointing. He was looking so good. No, but it's true. The blue states, the democratic states, are moving further to the left.

I mean, you see, California's put some very progressive laws through in recent times. A lot of places have. And so it's just becoming more divisive where in some places you can't get an abortion after six weeks. In other places, you know, marijuana is legal and you can just smoke it on the streets. And they've started, people have started flying women who want to get abortions across state lines. There are all these little services to actually just put them in a plane. and take them to a sainer place.

It's becoming a real sort of two countries. Yes. Two countries, one system, wherever we heard that before. So there you go. Minnesota, the workers and farmers paradise, more to talk about on that front. Charles, let's continue the rest of the podcast back on Twitter.

And if we just adjust this, I think it's just too successful. Can you reconnect? Can we just get the connection live? This was supposed to work. Sack the engineers! Our gear is from Road. We're part of the Iconiclass Network.

Catch you next time.