Timcast IRL - Timcast IRL #163 - Project Veritas PROVES Media Is LYING About Fraud Claims, THIS IS WILD

Episode Date: November 11, 2020

Tim, Ian, and Lydia sit down with Michael Tracey (@MTracey on Twitter) to go over the results of the election and what all the implications may be around voting, and whether the US media has done a good job with their responsibilities around voting.  Support the show (http://Timcast.com/donate) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This night is kind of weird. Apparently, there's reports that Trump has fired top Pentagon leadership. There's like weird polls coming out that I've not seen where they're like 80% of Americans believe Joe Biden won the presidency. And I'm like, why do you need that? That's kind of weird. And then the craziest thing is we've seen this USPS whistleblower from Project Veritas sworn affidavit saying that they, you know, I'll be very simple with it because, you know, we're just doing the intro, but allegations of voter fraud at a post office. Then the Washington Post comes out with a story saying this man has recanted his claims. It's not true. He fabricated them. And all of a sudden, mainstream media journalists, Democrats are posting it saying, aha, look, it was fake news the whole time.

Then Project Veritas drops a video of the guy saying, I never recanted anything. Then Project Veritas drops a video of the guy in an interrogation where apparently some federal agents are saying, I'm not trying to scare you, but I am scaring you. We're going to clean your mind so that you can remember. It's really, really weird. Now, I'll tell you what. when i heard the results came in and joe biden got the electoral college i was like well you know it makes sense i think people don't like trump and you got mail-in ballots young people you know voting or whatever but now that these polls are coming out these weird stories i'm like what is this is wild i don't even know what's going on anymore anyway we have a a special guest here michael trace he was a journalist and i've

actually i've praised you quite a bit in a lot of the videos I've done. Notably because... Praise me even more. He put it upon me. That's what he's here for. I bask in it. That's why I'm here. That's why I wandered in here from off the internet. Wonderful. Yeah, he came in here. No, but it's because during the riots, you actually drove around and went to small towns where riots had happened

that wasn't getting news coverage. Like you did reporting. It was crazy. Well, I mean, after the peak of the riots in late May, early June, I pretty much knew with total certainty that I was never going to get the full story as to their scope, magnitude, damage inflicted, et cetera, if I just relied upon these secondhand reports, given the direct personal and political stake that so many journalists had in portraying, defending, that they were deeply invested in it um so you know with that dynamic so ever present i

knew i had to at least attempt to go see it for myself so i took a nationwide trip which we can maybe get into any especially especially in terms of how it relates to the election outcome etc but you know that's what i did and small towns big cities everywhere in between i went you know across country twice real journalism and just told it like it was so i think i would hope so i think you do that quite a bit on twitter whether it's like you making trump supporters angry or making the democrats angry you know i think yeah i mean and you probably know this but you can never please everybody and if you try to please any particular demographic that becomes sort of corrupting unto itself so i'm never going to get too worked up if

leftists hate me on a given day or trump supporters hate me on a given day it's just irrelevant and you need to like cognitively insulate yourself remember when journalists used to do that they would just kind of be like well here's what happened you're gonna get mad about i can't do anything about that but anyway anyway, okay. So we also got Ian. Oh, hi, everyone. Ian's wearing red. So hopefully the camera doesn't rip it off if it's too much. If it turns you into a tomato.

Well, you're already a tomato because of the sweater anyway. And Lydia's producing. I am here. I'm in the corner. Hey, guys. But we got to talk about this Veritas stuff. So if you haven't already, make sure you smash that like button. Do that, please.

The show is live Monday through Friday at 8 p.m. And let's first take a look at the story from The Washington Post. This is is it cutting out again? This is ridiculous. Are you kidding me? Our monitor keeps just breaking. I was like, it works now. OK, well, I can still read the story. All right. We're going to read it.

So postal worker admits fabricating allegations of ballot tampering, officials say. And they have this really like generic photo of a fake ballot box, I guess. A Pennsylvania postal worker, whose claims have been cited by top Republicans as potential evidence of widespread voting irregularities, admitted to U.S. Postal Service investigators that he fabricated the allegations, according to three officials briefed on the investigation in a statement from a House congressional committee. Richard Hopkins claims that a postmaster in Erie, PA, instructed postal workers to backdate ballots mailed after Election Day was cited by Senator Lindsey Graham in a letter to the

Justice Department calling for a federal investigation. Attorney General William P. Barr subsequently authorized federal prosecutors to open probes into credible allegations of voting irregularities and fraud, a reversal of long standing Justice Department policy. But on Monday, Hopkins, 32, told investigators from the United from the U.S. Postal Service officer, Office of Inspector General, that the allegations were not true. And he signed an affidavit recanting his claims, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing investigation.

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee tweeted late Tuesday that, quote, whistleblower completely recanted. Hopkins did not respond to messages seeking comment. And here's where it gets interesting. According to Hopkins, he did. He tried very much so to get a comment saying this is not true. And now we have this tweet from James O'Keefe. In fact, we have two.

James O'Keefe says, recording federal agents coerce USPS whistleblower Hopkins to water down story. Hopkins doubles down. Agent Strasser, I am trying to twist you a little bit. Quote, I am scaring you here. We have senators involved, DOJ involved. Reason they called me is to try to harness. So I can play some of the audio here, and I think it should work. We have senators involved, DOJ involved. Reason they called me is to try to harness. So I can play some of the audio here, and I think it should work.

The Veritas video starts by them explaining who the whistleblower is, what he was saying. And let me just play. It's two minutes. They were grilling the hell out of me. How are you feeling right now? I'm kind of pissed. I feel like I just got played. And I heard him say to the supervisor that they messed up yesterday.

So I was like, what did they mess up on? And he told the supervisor that they had postmarked one of the pallets for the fourth instead of the third because they were supposed to put them for third. So now it's giving us an explanation. I'll jump forward and check this out. And so let me make good on that promise right away. This storm is getting crazy, right? And it's out of a lot of people's control. And so the reason they called me in is to try to harness that storm.

Try to reel it back in before it gets really crazy. Because we have senators involved. We have the Department of Justice involved. We have all... Trump's lawyers team has gotten a hold of me. I'm not.

Well, I am, actually. I am trying to twist you a little bit because in that, believe it or not, your mind will kick in. We like to control our mind, and when we do that, we can convince ourselves of a memory. But when you're under a little bit of stress, which is what I'm doing to you purposely, your mind can be a little bit clearer. And we're going to do a different exercise to make your mind a little bit clearer. Okay? Good to go. So, but this is all on purpose.

Roger. I am not scaring you, but I am scaring you. It seems like they were trying to make me distrust y'all. And at the same time, it kind of affected, but at the same time, I was like, no, these guys have had my back since the get-go. So that's why I continued. Do you think these federal agents have your back? At this point, no. Do you think these federal agents are really interested in investigating fraud?

Honestly, I don't think they are. And in fact, you heard Weisenberg tell a supervisor they were backdating the ballots to make it appear they've been collected november 3rd you still stand by that yeah yes so that's it uh apologies for those who can't see it our monitor broke apparently i can't show it but that's just a bit of the audio they put out so far i imagine that james he usually does longer form versions of this on his website i guess you can choose to trust uh j'Keefe. He's got a whistleblower. He's got a signed sworn affidavit. We got video of the guy delivering the mail. I don't know what else we need to go on to say.

Here's a guy saying they were backdating ballots. But it's very, very weird. It's very, very brazen to see the Washington Post be like, the story's fake. He recanted. Then this guy to come back out immediately and be like, I never recanted. So we got this tweet from House Oversight Democrats saying, Breaking news. Erie PA USPS whistleblower completely recanted his allegations of a supervisor tampering with mail-in ballots after being questioned by investigators, according to IG.

Here are the facts. Richard Hopkins is a USPS employee in Erie, Pennsylvania. So that's not in dispute. He signed a sworn affidavit with allegations of ballot tampering and fraud and went public through Project Veritas. USPS IG began investigating last week. IG investigators informed committee staff today that they interviewed Hopkins

on Friday, but that Hopkins recanted his allegations yesterday and did not explain why he signed a false affidavit. So now, not only do we have this video from James O'Keefe where they play the audio but james actually put out a tweet of uh okay i guess i don't know where it is it's the guy or at least i thought he had the tweet maybe it's on project veritas he's actually sitting with with

the guy i guess in a hotel room and the guy like is looking at the washington post story and says this is not true i did not recant this. So I don't know. One thing that sticks out to me when I look at this Washington Post summary is that, of course, the relaying this claim that Hopkins recanted his allegations by way of this laundered anonymity, which always should raise a red flag. I don't care what it pertains to. I mean, this was done constantly over the course of russiagate where anonymous u.s officials were quoted as characterizing certain things often you didn't even get a direct quote from them and so the washington post or any other media outlet

should not be surprised when people look at a story like this look at this summation that's totally non-specific and view it askance, right? So it's possible that Hopkins, as claimed in this story, did in fact sign an affidavit recanting his claims. We don't know that. The James O'Keefe stuff you displayed doesn't necessarily dispute that. It could provide countervailing evidence to maybe say that it was done under duress or something.

But the problem in terms of any outstanding apprehension about the veracity of the story stems from the wanton use of anonymity that is so ubiquitous across the media that it just inevitably is going to engender suspicion. And rightly so. This is a common thing they do with anonymous sources. How is this okay? We talked to some anonymous person. you don't know who it is trust us the story is not true he didn't give us a comment well according to them he's like to veritas this guy's straight up saying it didn't happen my question is you know and anonymity can

sometimes be justified like it's a valid device in journalistic practice but you have to be transparent about why you're doing it i mean mean, there's no clear reason, at least that's stated here, as to why this individual apparently associated with the U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General ought to have been granted anonymity in the first place. Like, if you have the affidavit, why not provide it? I mean, you're saying it's an ongoing investigation. What does that mean exactly? It's so vague that the Washington Post is asking the reader to just instinctively trust their veracity,

and so often they've proved that they don't deserve that trust. So what are we supposed to believe right now? Well, I mean, I don't know. Let's say that the story that's put forward by Hopkins as relayed by James O'Keefe is entirely accurate. I mean, I think I heard there, correct me if I'm wrong, but I thinkkins was referring to one ballot that was changed in erie county well like they they specifically said that one count one ballot was receiving the fourth and then was backdated to the third right or did i hear that

wrong you did you know you heard it right but the full context is that he overheard them saying they were backdating ballots and he was instructed to bring any ballots from after the election to them because they were backdating them okay so i want to keep going so let's just assume that it's that all that is true whether that suggests some kind of systematic fraud i think is far from established particularly in pennsylvania where it probably wouldn't have made a difference in the outcome anyway. I mean, when all the votes are counted, the margin could be as much as 100,000 votes for Biden. So I think, you know, it would be expected. In fact, I would be surprised if there weren't incidences of isolated fraudulent activity um but i think feeding a narrative where all this is supposed to indicate the the entire election should be negated or something i think i mean we're going to need a

whole lot more evidence than has been provided so far so i uh so i just wanted to make sure i double checked from veritas they say the insider said quote we have to separate out the ballots and give them directly to the supervisors they'remarking and they're at the office and taking them directly to the ballot box. And it specifically says all these ballots that were coming in today, tomorrow, yesterday are all supposed to be postmarked the third. So that's the official claim. It's interesting. I was watching The Five earlier on Fox, and Greg Gutfeld was saying – I think it was Greg and I think it was also Jesse – kind of both saying – Jesse Fox and Greg Gutfeld was saying, I think it was Greg. And I think it was also Jesse kind of both saying, uh, Jesse Waters and Greg Gutfeld that we don't, we're not right

now at the point where we bring out big old stacks of evidence that something happened. We're at the point where we're like, we have some sworn affidavits that should warrant an inquiry or an investigation. And then you go and find evidence, assuming these accusations are correct. We've got, I think, I don't know how many, three or four, perhaps, maybe it's three poll watchers who have signed sworn affidavits saying that they've seen some kind of fraud. I'm not saying widespread. I'm saying we have three affidavits. Is it enough to change an election? I honestly... Well, if you think about three affidavits in a country of 330 million that has converted en masse to mail-in voting is really not that many. Yeah, I guess.

So the point being brought up on the five was we're talking about a few key swing districts and we're talking about a very, very narrow race where if you witness someone doing something improper, then that needs to be investigated. And then we could potentially find more evidence of a larger scale impropriety or overt fraud, I guess. I guess the question I would have is like, what does larger scale impropriety mean? If there's something systematic and fraudulent, then that would have to be coordinated in some way or would have to, I think, be more of a cohesive initiative to change the outcome of the election than has been anything close to established. I mean, you can go back years and decades and find isolated incidences of fraud. I mean, there was in 1960, JFK, it's thought, could have won the election over Richard Nixon because of straight up election fraud that happened in the deep south. So I think nobody who is aware of history should discount that out of hand.

What's the vote margin in PA right now? Legit question. The vote margin in Pennsylvania is Biden is ahead by 0.8%. And that's probably going to continue to go up. It's like 45,000 votes or something, isn't it? Right now it it's. Yeah. It's like 60, 70,000 or so.

Yeah. 70,000? 73,000. And it's probably going to inch up continuously to. 40, 40. In the 100,000 range. So, I mean, like, that's not a margin. I mean, that's not Florida 2000.

That's not anything close to a point where it's even beyond the threshold where there would be an automatic recount in Pennsylvania. Right. So AP has it around, I think I'm looking at 47,700 or so. That would require numerous post offices being in on. You're right. Sorry, I misread that. But to get that margin, because we're also talking about hundreds of thousands of votes that came in,

to get a margin where it's going to be able to actually overturn Pennsylvania, that's what numerous post offices, a dozen plus that are all telling their supervisors to bring in late ballots and then backdate them so that we can count them. Like, it seems like it's not going to have an impact. You see what I'm saying?

I think it's going to have, if any if any impact it's going to be extremely marginal and to really get traction in the courts here you would have to do something which has not yet been done which is at least give some indication and granted you would need further investigation to uncover this i grant that but you need to give some indication that there's a widespread coordinated effort at undermining the legitimacy of election with that's that's what i think would need to be established especially if you have it across multiple states i mean we're not just talking about pennsylvania talking about georgia arizona i don't know if you want to throw wisconsin in there and michigan well trump but it's not just one state here where you can devote all your resources to uncovering Well, Trump would have to. motivated and all it takes is uh individuals acting in such a way that it looks like there's some some type of concerted effort it could just be one guy being like man i hate trump screw this

and then crumpling up a ballot but you get a hundred people doing that every so often because they hate trump then you've got widespread impropriety that's not coordinated yeah i don't think it would necessarily i should have i should rephrase that i don't think it has to be widespread and coordinated in order to have some kind of potency in terms of affecting outcome. And you're right. There probably are people with a lot of zeal who don't like Trump and maybe fudge some things. I mean, that's plausible. But for it to be replicated across so many states, I think it's going to be a it's a huge stretch to think that anything is going to be

overturned the way i put it is like and in georgia for example where i just was i mean i spent the election in georgia with a week leading up to it or so and you know when trump i think was the day it was the day after the election when he gave some remarks first of all he misstated that the secretary of state of georgia was a democrat he's. So one reason why I find a lot of these claims implausible that I'm being inundated with on Twitter, which I'm sure you probably are as well, is that, you know, it would have to encompass a huge amount of Republicans as well. But that's what people, I think, tend to miss about election administration. It really is baked into the cake that it has to be bipartisan in a lot of ways. Now, maybe it's not always abided by with 100% perfection. But in Georgia, for example, you have the Secretary of State,

the governor, the lieutenant governor, both chambers of the state legislature are held by Republicans. I was there in Atlanta in the State Farm Arena where the Atlantic Hawks used to play, where they were tabulating votes and there were Republican observers everywhere, the Republican observers in the Fulton County warehouse where there was other copulation taking place. So I mean, and it was open to the public. So this, I think it really at least should be emphasized to people who don't have familiarity with this process, that it's not like secretive and closed off for the most part. Could you find isolated incidents in a country of 330 million? I'm sure you can. But like, I just freely went in,

I didn't flash any media credential, anybody could go in and observe i mean i watched republicans and democratic republican democratic observers jointly looking at ballots that weren't properly processed so they could adjudicate whether they were valid yeah and you know so you know i'm not a i'm far from an american exceptionalist in most cases but there is something i think at least laudable about the transparency that elections tend to be conducted within. And sorry about that. I thought I put my phone on airplane mode. But and, you know, I don't think we're going to be exporting our election models around the world by force because, I mean, really, it's over a week now. We still don't have calls in Arizona and Georgia.

I mean, it's ridiculous. North Carolina, I saw, was just called at least by Decision Desk HQ. I think. But the point is that, yeah, I sort of lost my train of thought. But you saw where I was going there. Yeah, I think fraud isn't necessarily the important conversation, though. And I wonder if that's a distraction. It's not.

I also wonder if – Well, that's what I'm being berated with constantly for not countenancing. It's the wrong conversation, but I do wonder if it's on purpose. Meaning what? As Democrats keep screaming, there's no fraud, there's no fraud, and chasing after this fraud narrative like now the Washington Post, Trump is going after process. So there's there's there's the potential of challenging votes right now. The ACLU is going to be filing a countersuit to stop Trump from disqualifying hundreds of thousands of votes in Pennsylvania under what they're saying is a violation of the Bush v. Gore ruling, or the 14th Amendment more specifically, that mail-in ballots create a parallel and separate track for voting, which is a violation of the 14th Amendment. They're arguing that they put

out this 100- Which seems completely absurd to me. I mean, if that was your view of the constitutionality of mail-in balloting, why didn't you introduce such a suit before the election because it's lawfare because they want to win well exactly so it's not logical it's just it's just throwing the kitchen sink at a problem when you're when you're all but certain to be defeated i don't know if that in other words the the the notion that mail-in balloting versus in-person balloting creates this separate track that it's a violation of the Equal Protection Clause, that could have been asserted without any election results in. And they didn't do it. Why didn't they do it?

Because if they had won Pennsylvania, then that rationale wouldn't have been operating. Absolutely. If they won Pennsylvania, Trump would be like, we did it. We won. We're the best. Mail-in ballots are fine. But that doesn't change the fact there was a Supreme Court ruling earlier and they said we can't rule on it until it happens. And so they said, kick it back, segregate the votes, and then we'll have a

ruling later. So now here comes the later ruling. But but the argument about mail in voting isn't just mail in votes are different from in-person votes. There's a bunch of nuance here. Notably, they're arguing that in Democrat districts, the election individuals, I guess, were allowing voters in these districts to cure their ballots if they had errors on them, and they weren't allowing that in other districts. Thus, Trump's team is saying, if you have one district that says you can check your ballot, we bring it to you. We go to your house and say, hey, you forgot it sign it okay your ballots valid now and then in republican districts they didn't do that creating a higher margin of failure you've created a two track where you're you're you're slanting things for democrats that's another well ballots can be ballots can be cured per state law and it takes

a large volunteer effort as far as i understand, to retrieve the person whose ballot needs to be cured. It's not just done by election officials across the board, meaning public employees. So if Republicans are not getting their ballots cured, I would think that's probably a function more of them just not them not having as many voters that need to have their ballots secured right well it's i don't know the exact specifics of that but like i said i mean even in georgia where i just again just was they have a ballot curing process that was all enacted by a republican state legislature so i mean the point is i think if you're just saying this is Democratic fraud, Georgia to me is a glaring example or whatever malfeasance. No, no, no, no, no. Impropriety, however you want to call it.

I mean, how do you account for Georgia? I mean, that's that's a big one. Pennsylvania, obviously, is where the election at least was called by the media over the weekend. But again, Georgia to me stands out as something that the Republicans and the Trump supporters who are going with this narrative have not even attempted to reckon with. And you even have the two Republican senators calling for the resignation of the Republican secretary of state just because they didn't like how the election was being run. They didn't even offer any specifics. That's why I keep going back. They're just throwing the kitchen sink at a problem.

Sure, sure. I'm not arguing that the way they're going at it is like this very slow methodical logic based you know solution i prefer when stuff is logic based i don't know about you no no i agree what i'm saying is they're not going okay let's take a look at washington state and go through the list now let's take a look at wyoming and go through the list what they're saying is here the states we got to win fire the lawyers like i mean like fire the missiles not yeah get rid of the lawyers so obviously they're going after pennsylvania why trump needs pennsylvania for any kind of victory so of course he's going to go after that through every legal mean possible and then they'll they're also filing lawsuits in

nevada i think they got a ton of lawsuits going out across the board in a bunch of different states but i think there may be some uh i think some of the arguments make sense notably one of the biggest problems we have right now and i have no idea what the solution is there was a court order in pennsylvania that in philadelphia and allegheny county they must allow observers within a certain distance to observe and they defied the court order. So they counted, according to Trump's campaign, about 450,000 ballots in violation of a court order. Now, Giuliani has taken the extreme approach saying they're all spoiled because the secrecy envelopes were destroyed already. Therefore, we don't know where these ballots came from.

We have no addresses. We don't know who they are. We don't know if they were signed. And they didn't allow observers in violation of court order disqualify them. This is why the ACLU jumped in saying we have to sue back to stop Trump from from winning this fight. If they if they disqualify 450,000 votes, it'll include Trump votes, but I think that'll definitely flip it for Trump. You could just as easily call that disenfranchisement, though. I mean, the voters who cast those ballots had nothing to do with what distance observers were required to stand at so

why should their vote be negated because we need election security because we don't know who those votes are where they're from who signed them the secrecy ballots were destroyed so we could um we could do a re-election you know no right exactly so this creates a very serious problem we can't create a system where we say straight up you can violate a court order and count hundreds of thousands of ballots in violation of a court ruling i think i think there's some dispute over whether that order was violated and precisely the way well so so but like i mean okay so a difference of three feet in terms of no no no no it was dozens of feet it was like i i read that it was a a lesser distance and at least certain well there's videos of people examples

like 50 feet away with binoculars right and so you've got according to giuliani 50 to 70 witnesses i'm not saying you gotta trust the guy i'm just saying this is their argument they've got 50 to 70 people who have signed on to swear under oath. They were they were pushed out in violation of the court order, allowing them to be within six feet. What do we do with these ballots? Some of the time in Philadelphia, which is now in dispute, the people who came in through the public entrance to observe didn't register properly. And there were, in fact, bipartisan observers on hand. Maybe not 100 percent of the time. I don't know.

It's a messy process. This is what we're getting from the media. Mainstream news outlets are saying there were Democrat and Republican observers on site. Republicans never disputed they weren't on site. They're saying Republicans weren't allowed within the court order distance. Meaningful access is what they argued. So, of course, the media is pushing its narrative. The Trump campaign and Trump supporting media is pushing its narrative.

But I got to admit, I mean, how do you deal with the situation in that regard? Like, do we just say this time it's OK? We don't you know, we've got a legal dispute over these ballots. And I'll tell you this, man. At first I was like, look, I tweeted this morning. Trump is not going to prison. You know, these people on the left who are like Trump's going to jail. It's not going to happen.

And Trump's not going to overturn this election with lawsuits. But then things started getting weird. You've got these states are Republican legislatures. Are they just going to roll over and be like, we're going to certify the electors for Joe Biden while this dispute is going on? Or are they going to be like, no, we're not doing it? In which case, nobody gets 270. Well, if they do that, then they'll have done something which is 100 percent unprecedented in all of American history. And whether they want to do that, I that point would have also been with a president you have in u.s history which is that on the basis of russian interference they were saying

that they should not seat electors for trump in states like pennsylvania it wasn't just a marginal fringe movement i was in harrisburg pennsylvania i mentioned this today on twitter which is the state capitol when the electoral college met, which is usually just a formality. Nobody even knows what's happening. But I went on in December of 2016 to watch it happen. And you had a mass. It wasn't it was a protest that had been organized at the statehouse to badger electors to not cast their votes in accordance with what the popular vote outcome in the state of Pennsylvania was. It would have been just a mind-blowing departure from everything that's happened ever before in U.S. history.

And they were in the chamber, in the legislative chamber. They were screaming. And at the moment that the votes were certified, the electoral votes were certified, the woman right in front of me in this balcony screamed loud enough so that everybody could undoubtedly hear it. She screamed, you just gave us Hitler. So, I mean, when I see Democrats and liberals sort of scorning Republicans and Trump supporters now for maybe having some histrionic interpretations of what this fraud matter consists of. A little bit. Yeah. I think. I mean, did you just sleep through the past four and a half years if anything you made

it inevitable that there was going to be this backlash yep where however specious the claims are in terms of voter fraud or whatever else about the doubting legitimacy the legitimacy of the election you should have had no doubt whatsoever that those were going to flood into the public consciousness if for no reason other than as retribution for what was done last time now Hillary Clinton did technically concede the day after the election and Trump hasn't yet so it's not a hundred percent analogous but I mean there were plenty of extremely influential liberals lawrence lessig robert reich go down the list jennifer palmieri who was on the clinton campaign i i collected this at the time so i have the quote receipts um who were advocating for the delegitimization of

the electoral college and you know people don't forget about that and that i think is a really under emphasized component of all this it's it's just as it's almost like a vengeance type thing for 2016 we just had historical polling failure the the the worst ever seven percent exactly was the the failure rate yeah and now you've got people tweeting things like you're projecting joe biden won before certification and you're also the ones who got the entire polling wrong. Of course, they're lumping the media together. Of course, the various polling institutions all were polling ridiculous numbers against Trump. The race is extremely close and the media runs full speed like Wikipedia has already put up on the president-elect page a picture of joe biden

which is like wait wait president-elect as a concept doesn't need a picture of anybody well i mean let's be clear about something when trump won in 2016 the media called it for him within a few hours is around 3 a.m i think the the following day so i mean this is not really that different and there was still a lot of uncertainty at least among despondent liberals as to the legitimacy of the election there were people demanding recounts in Wisconsin Pennsylvania Michigan some of which did happen at the behest of Jill Stein which was hilarious because she made millions and millions of dollars mostly from Hillary Clinton supporters because I don't think that most green party supporters

except that they even exist or that deep pocketed so i mean there's nothing unusual when you're like when the people now say the media called the election i mean that happens every election that happened when trump won right the votes weren't certified the the states didn't certify the results in 2016 until weeks after i'm not i'm not uh i'm not claiming that trump is or let me put it this way yeah when when when the media said trump wins trump was like i won and now the media is like joe biden's when he's like no he didn't right but it's a formality that's why i keep going to let's at least strive to have some logical consistency in how we see the world i mean that's one of my baseline desires but so but the issue is the media calling it it's a formality hillary well

that's that's an the formality is when the states certify the results i don't know no the the you can't you can't be saying that the media decides who the president is well you said the media calling it as a formality it's like an informality it's when they're able to make a projection they call it and it's not formalized until the states certify the results. What I mean is, to clarify, when the media calls it, it's just more of a tradition that the media says we've projected the numbers. Here's our winner. And then typically you have results where it's like, all right, all right, all right. I'm out.

And the campaigns look at their numbers. They look at Edison Research or AP and say, we see what the numbers are. This one was an extremely close race. And I will say the difference between Hillary Clinton conceding within a couple of days is that we didn't have the results. She conceded the next day. But we didn't have the results until Saturday. So Trump was up.

He couldn't concede. No, that's right. No, I think it would have been ridiculous. I mean, I think nobody would have expected him to concede. Biden would have had to concede it at that point. Yeah, until at least it was quote called um but it is a little bit of a rewriting of history though to say that it's just the media calling it i know that conservatives really upset with fox news but like they are you know they were

they were they they all did it simultaneously you know so you know unless you're saying that there's something last i think but real clear politics hasn't called it well i mean does real clear does real clear politics have its own tracking system it does proprietary vote counting mechanism like the associated press or fox i don't know about that i know that they have just like uh i think most of these outlets use the ap or whatever right so they're not making calls they're just tracking ap's numbers but rcp has their map like all of them. I mean, the reason that Fox called Arizona first and AP did it a few hours later. So they're using different systems. And they all did it pretty much simultaneously on Saturday morning because that's when a certain batch of Philadelphia votes came in that rendered it, they say, impossible for Trump to make up the margin at least you know leaving aside any kind of fraud allegations so there was an article from july written by the

co-founder of msnbc that many people called anti they called it anti-trump resistance porn like it was one of these articles that were like trump is a dictator and they said it was called how trump can lose the election and Still Win the Presidency. And they said what would happen is there's four states, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania that have Republican legislatures. They're swing states. The argument was they'll go for Biden, but Trump will make some accusation about national security or fraud, thus locking up the certification process until the deadline when the Supreme Court will then say, if we don't have the Electoral College certified by the 14th, then it goes to House delegations and the House delegations are Republican.

They would reelect Donald Trump. That's what this guy was warning of. Now, I think all of these arguments, Trump invalidating votes or whatever, House delegation are long shots. But I'm looking at, you know, Trump getting rid. So Trump's getting rid of the Pentagon, you know, leadership. Maybe he's just on the way out. He's just saying, I'm going to get rid of all these people, whatever. He's mad.

Or we heard that he instructed the federal agencies to produce their budgets for February as if he wasn't leaving. Then we had Mike Pompeo, secretary of state, saying there will be a smooth transition to a second trump administration and then i think he chuckled which people were saying that that meant it wasn't meant to be 100 serious but then again who knows but then but then it was announced that trump is telling federal agencies keep the budgets like don't change anything you're doing so yeah what was what and you know again like i mentioned mentioned before, Georgia is also a Republican state legislature. So that would be a similar scenario, potentially. You know, I think I think it was interesting what was said yesterday by Bill Barr.

He put out a memo authorizing certain investigations. And that's that's unprecedented, right? I believe so but maybe there was but the way that he worded it was very interesting because bill barr if nothing else is very astute at knowing how to like almost manage trump because yeah so much of what trump has demanded vis-a-vis like the durham investigation into the origins of Russiagate or various other Justice Department initiatives, Bill Barr really hasn't delivered fully on. And there were even reports about how annoyed Trump apparently was with Barr in the past

few weeks. And I think there's sort of a continuation of that theme here, because if you actually read the memo that Barr put out that was was reported he said that it is equally no notwithstanding that he authorized these preliminary investigations he said it is equally imperative that department personnel exercise appropriate caution and maintain oh sorry not that he said that while serious allegations should be handled with great care specious speculative fanciful or far-fetched claims should not be a basis for initiating federal inquiries. So why would he even include that proviso if not as a kind of quasi-rebuttal of allegations that he apparently believes don't have merit?

You know, so he's like treading a line here where I think he's just trying to, to some extent, placate Trump, but also maintain some boring in the reality as he sees the election going in terms of the final outcome. When they called the results on Saturday, I'm just thinking it's going to be another boring. Trump's finally going to be like, all right, all right. He's going to throw a fit in some capacity. And then I thought we'd move on but he's not and then for a while i thought you know at least for a couple days or like a day or two because it's only what tuesday i was like okay trump's probably just gonna you know drag it out we're seeing reports that he's like selling his helicopter the phone

is he i don't know if that's true though because it's hard it's hard to know what to trust anymore when you see these stories that come out you know and and this is like normally i i trust for the most part these organizations i fact check them but i can't fact check these claims that trump's on his helicopter i can't go to a website and look up the sale of a helicopter so i don't know if he's actually selling this stuff but then we saw a story from cbs that trump's fundraising for election recount 60 first goes to paying off campaign debt right i heard keith oberman say that I went to his fundraising site. It wasn't there.

I mean, I get those solicitations. Did you see them saying? If you look at the small text, there is something that references that. So what I saw it said, 60% will go to Save America. I don't know if it was 60%, but there is a provision in there which says that some of this could be used to retire campaign debt. I mean, I think that, and I felt this across the board for the Democratic campaigns and Republican campaigns. Don't bother giving them money. At this point, I mean, the consultants are just drowning in cash at this point.

It's ridiculous. Jamie Harrison, the Senate Democratic candidate in South Carolina, raised the most money for any Senate race ever. And lost. And lost. And it was in South Carolina, which is like not a big media market. And it lost in double digits. It's like Charleston. It's not like he had to run in California.

Yeah. Right? So all you're doing when you go to your ActBlue donation page, which is how so many of these Democratic candidates get their contributions, is you're lining the pockets of consultants who don't have to even deliver on any of their promises in order to make the money that they're going to make. I mean, they probably are all buying Teslas now because you thought Jamie Harrison had a legitimate chance of beating Lindsey Graham in South Carolina. And Graham won by double digits, didn't he? Yeah, I think it was the 13 points or something.

Totally crushed him. And likewise, I mean, look, if you're a diehard trump supporter and you want to pull out all the stops do everything possible legally to certify to prevent the certification of the votes before we're 100 sure that it's complete okay fine but like just know that you're paying the salaries of lawyers and consultants if you're clicking on the solicitations and giving money and they don't even need your money at this point they have plenty of money yeah they're just doing it because they can because they want because they have those email lists that are these you know boondoggles that you know they could squeeze every last drop out of so well here's what i'm saying uh i'm

sitting here thinking trump's gonna milk it for all it's worth. He's going to figure out what his legal options are. He's going to go to war. I can't imagine him giving up. But now I'm kind of like, is Trump going to push it for a lawfare victory where he can jam up several states so there's no certification and then try and win? Or is that just so far-fetched? However, I'm like, think about what year it is. You know, mass pandemic lockdown, riots sweeping the country, peaking in June, all this weird, crazy stuff happening.

And everyone's saying it's 2020. And I'm like, it doesn't really mean anything. It's like superstitious. But Friday the 13th is coming up. Oh, is it? Well, that changes everything. It changes everything. Forget everything I said in this conversation.

All bets are off, man. I think he's going to push it, man. I think he's going the distance because the amount of secret votes so basically how many votes got counted in secret of the four while they're claiming 450 000 were counted without meaningful access and this is just in one place but but hold on there's also a sworn affidavit that ballots were coming in in the middle of the night we have a we have a georgia gop guy who said in at like 4 a.m they said we're not counting anymore so everyone needs to leave. And then once they left, they started counting again.

So there's a bunch of these claims. And this is on top of computer programs. Testimony, Florida testimony, congressional testimony of a guy saying he built a program that flips a vote 51-49. You can look it up on YouTube. That was a long time ago. Yeah, it was like 2001 or something. This is like 20-year-old technology. And then this comes out, this Air Force general

starts telling us about this program called Scorecard with this computer and a hammer. I don't know about it. I know. I don't know either. But this is a big deal. Hold on. Before you say that, we gotta know, who's this guy? He's an Air Force general. And I don't know his name offhand, but he was on Steve

Bannon's War Room explaining the Hammer supercomputer and the scorecard software. See, I don't know anything about this. I actually did listen to a press conference yesterday from the Secretary of State. It was an election administrative official who was a Republican in Georgia who addressed rumors about whatever that is that you're talking about. Sorry, I don't know the full details, but he said it was a hoax and this is a Republican. And I don't know, maybe he's not correct or he's in on it or he's like, he's a deep state act operator. I don't know.

But I would have to look for a little bit further into what you're just talking about't it isn't it weird though that they like published a poll from reuters it says nearly 80 percent of americans say biden won white house ignoring trump's refusal to concede oh i'm like when did we ever need a poll to tell people americans think joe biden won it's so much manipulation right now this is i don't know. Is this just me? Multi-levels of manipulation too. I agree. I think that is interesting. I mentioned before we started. I'm curious now

if in 2000, there were polls run in this interregnum period before Bush was declared winner about just asking people who they think won the election as opposed to who they favor. Just who do you think won? Because then it wouldn't be totally unprecedented but i mean it is i mean the the impetus for polling like that is that trump hasn't continued the election so right i mean it makes some sense why they would run those polls but it is sort of curious yes a little bit weird

a little bit i'm saying but like but it's 2020 so i'm not surprised at the yeah if they if if the results came in they said we're calling it it for Biden and then they just shut up. Like I would be like, yeah, that's it. I got this guy's name. Lieutenant General Thomas McKinney. How do you spell it? Thomas McInner and E.R.N.E.Y. Lieutenant General of the Air Force, I believe.

I can't spell that. What did you say? M.C.I.N.E.R. McKinney. Yep. McKinney. Yeah, this guy's. lieutenant general of the air force i believe i can't spell that what did you say uh mc i n e r mckinney yep mckinney yeah this guy's mckinney yeah he's he's big time 83 years old this is the guy yeah former uh air force fighter pilot retired vietnam war oh wow so this guy went on bannon's show and claimed that they were they had the ability to manipulate elections basically they've been using this software as a spying tool against, like, terrorist

organizations, and now they've turned it, according to him, they've turned it on the people to use it for voter fraud. I'll tell you, there's a Media Matters is calling Hammer the new conspiracy theory. See, this is the thing. I don't care for this stuff. You know why? We don't need it. It is a conspiracy. No, no, no. Who conspired? Was it

the American government against ISIS, and now it's... No, no, no. Who cares? We don't need it. It is a conspiracy. No, no, no, no. Who conspired? Was it the American government against ISIS? And now it's – No, no, no, no. Who cares? We don't need these accusations or stories. It doesn't have anything to do, and it's a distraction. It's calling the entire thing into question for me. And it creates a discussion where regular people say you're insane and I don't want to hear it anymore.

Well, I think the real discussion is that paper ballots are malfunct and that we need to go online onto a blockchain or some sort of immutable database. Otherwise, you're going to be counting votes in back rooms for ages to come and you're going to be relying on people's trust. Paper ballots are what provide some degree of security in the authenticity of elections, I would think. If it goes

100%. I mean, that was the move after 2016 and kind of shed light on some of the Democratic inconsistency because people, when they were hearing all these allegations from Democrats that, oh, Russia must have hacked Wisconsin or something, they're saying, OK, if you want a legislative fix to that, let's institute nationwide paper ballots so that we can go and verify after the election. And nothing happened on it. You have hard documents. If we go digital digital someone could just draft a bunch of fake ballots and there's nothing to look at the thing is you don't have the hard ballots and you don't know who does no you don't we don't so i saw i saw i saw them in a warehouse

in georgia they do have yes did you though did you require one were you able to the required statutorily to keep them for who's they and where do they keep them and how do you know what they are just because you don't know doesn't mean there's a conspiracy and i'm not allowed to know no that's not true you could walk in and you could talk to the county election official who explained it to you and he'll and you have to rely on him telling you the truth sure but you can stand there while they bring the ballots in watch them pull the ballot out look at the ballot watch them open and see who was voted for you can watch all that the problem is donald trump's lawsuit is stating they blocked that that's the issue so in that one level of an issue yeah that's in that capacity you are correct so trump is creating a legal challenge to 450 000 ballots because they blocked meaningful access

like they were they were actually supposed to this hammer scorecard thing's another level completely i'm talking about we don't we don't this is this thing is good when you come out to regular people and say there's a top secret military program called hammer scorecard well there's prism i mean edward snowden dropped that of course and i'm saying when you go to regular people and you say that they tell you you're insane it is no one's told me i'm insane dude i'm just quoting an air force general you you you live in a world where regular working class people don't and if you go knock on someone's door right now and say they stole the election with hammer i'm not forcing it down someone's throat i'm just bringing it up man and they're gonna be like this guy's crazy well you're

allowed to say that dude and yes i advise you to investigate on your own challenge do you want a legal challenge do you want to make sure that i think it's just so so what you need is a sound legal argument that is in with right within the realm of basic understanding. This stuff's conspiracy. There's no proving any of it. That's the problem. Exactly. It's just insanity.

So what we can see is there's anomalies. Like, did you see that some of the jurisdictions violated Benford's Law of Numbers? That I don't know. So Benford's Law of Numbers is that— Just to respond to you really quickly, though, before I forget is, you know, I think you're right on some level. And I'm not even sure that if you didn't go knock on the door of some regular working class person who's not overly attuned to politics, that they wouldn't be receptive to some argument. OK, what a general said this, you know, because a lot of people don't have a lot of instinctive faith in the veracity of our institutions, including the media, including the government. So, like, I don't know that that would be too much of a stretch in order to convince somebody. But the point is, if you want to actually establish what it is that you're positing

beyond just vague assumptions about the corruption of stuff, you have to go a little further than a – there was something said in 2001 about some program you know like there's there should be evidence that's attainable that would substantiate what you're what you're saying i would love it if there was we could somehow get our hands on the cia but then again like why wouldn't this have been the case in 2016 for all we know it was i mean it's crazy so that they so they put so they put trump in and then they took him out we actually were going crazy with conspiracies earlier just kind of having fun and that was one of them yeah well well but this was just so in and then they took him out? We actually were going crazy with conspiracies earlier, just kind of having fun, and that was one of them. Yeah, well, but this was just silly.

And then their harp is going to make volcanoes explode. That was you, not me. We were saying a whole lot of like, what ifs. Like, what if the Russians really did hack? But we were being silly. So what if Trump was like the ultimate deep state agent all along? Hold on, hold on. This is a real conspiracy theory.

It started during the election that Hillary Clinton and Trump were actually friends. Which they were at one time. And I have a photo from... Hillary attended his wedding and everything. I was at Fort Lauderdale and there were protesters outside of a Trump rally holding a picture of the Clintons and Trump together. And they were saying they're

friends, they're in on it, it's all rigged. And that's why Hillary Clinton didn't challenge the election. She went, I wasn't supposed to lose because that was the intent i'm not saying it's true i'm saying i think if it were remotely possible for hillary clinton to have ascended to the presidency she would have pursued that right i agree i don't care how friendly they were if she attended his wedding in mar-a-lago so so so back to benford's law this is something that people keep bringing up over and over again i'm not a. I can't tell you if this is true. This is one of the things that we're seeing pop up on the internet. And Benford's Law is that if you were

to go throughout your day writing down numbers, you would see more ones than twos, more twos than threes, more threes than fours. So quite literally, you're walking down the street, you see a mailbox, and then you're like, I'm going to write down the mailbox. It's sick. Four, three, one, seven. And you keep doing that. Then you tabulate how many fours you found. You will have more threes than fours and it creates a sliding scale. So a bunch of people are posting various jurisdictions that voted where Biden's vote totals violate Benford's law, meaning there's wild numbers. This is important because we've actually uh international auditors have used benford's law as justification for or probable cause of voter fraud and that's why

people are now bringing it up the other thing i'll mention is i got a tweet right here i said bbc is going to have to retract this old article titled quote vote rigging how to spot the telltale signs because two of the things they they point to that show voter fraud is a delay in announcing results, which we had, and we still do, a serious delay with several states, and also voter turnout numbers that exceed 98 or 99 percent. They go on to mention in this article from the BBC from 2016, when they're auditing elections in, say, Africa, the reason why getting voter turnout above 90 or 95% is typically impossible is because people move and people die. Thus, in places like Australia, where you can vote by mail and online and it's

compulsory, they still only get around 90 to 95% voter turnout. Yet, I have a tweet. UCF tweeted, since 2017, our campus has been recognized as a voter-friendly campus campus today ucf's voting precinct precinct 538 topped the 100 voter turnout in the 2020 election at 107.56 my response was the bbc is going to have to retract this article because certainly it's not fraud or or impropriety in our country. Well, what's so hilarious is that, and this is sort of tangentially related, but in October or November of last year, there was a presidential election in Bolivia, and Evo Morales ended up being ousted in a coup because we were told there were too many election irregularities for it to have been legitimate. And a lot of it stemmed from the fact that rural precincts, which were more pro-moralist, the votes were tabulated later on because it took a while due to the infrastructure or whatever.

But really, it didn't take that long compared to the United States. Again, we're still sitting around here. A week later, we don't have calls in Georgia. What's going on in Alaska? Arizona or even Alaska. They're carrying the bag of belts from Barrow, Alaska to Anchorage. Apparently, on foot. Even in New York, I checked as of last night, if you look at the number of precincts reporting

and a number of the vote reporting in Manhattan or Queens or Westchester, it's like 50 or 60 percent. So if New York actually was critical in terms of determining the outcome, there would be even a bigger uproar because who knows what's happening there administratively. But the US never applies the same standards that it uses to berate and lecture other countries,

which are supposedly less exceptional than us, as it applies to itself i mean you know i thought this was wasn't this a country that like imposed democracy on iraq and afghanistan well you know we still can't even yeah but but but we can't even like get results from arizona a week later it's so crazy it's taken this long there's never been anything even like a tenth of this bizarreness lengthwise well has there has it ever stretched out more than two days after the the election day yes i mean yeah so uh florida 2000 stretched a month and a half or a month and a half no no not 37 days 37 days

yeah 37 or 38 um well and then they never even like i mean the supreme court intervened to prevent them from finishing the recount in Florida. So that wasn't even completed. We've had an election where there was a tie and a council was created of Democrats, Republicans, lawyers and judges who then decided the outcome of the election. Like totally outside of the Constitution. I think it was 1876. When Al Franken was first elected to the Senate in Minnesota in 2008, it was so close against Norm Coleman that it wasn't decided until the following July, if I'm not mistaken. So July 09. Wow.

So it can take forever, especially when the margins are so close. But, you know, this is the most powerful country in world history. We have so much financial, economic, cultural, social power. We can't get together to have efficient administration. In regards to Florida and the 2008 one, who did you say it was? It took until Al Franken's thing. Al Franken, yeah. Were the votes tallied the day of, but then there was just, they had to do recounts?

They had to do recounts. So it's never been this case where the votes haven't even been tallied yet a week later. I don't know. I have to double check on that. I mean, I think I did take. Well, hold on. Hold on. Think about this way.

Certification happens on December. I'm sorry. Electoral College certification is the 14th of December. Well, first states have to certify. Right. And then electors are appointed, and then they formally meet at the

Electoral College in mid-December. That's what it was in 2016. Okay. I'm trying to pull up the actual timeline of how the Electoral College... I thought we could look at it. Good, because I'm seething. So, anyway, the point is is back in the

day we didn't have the internet you'd be like you'd walk to the the the swimming hole where there's like you know billy jenkins back i got your ballot right here son and you'd be like fill it out and you'd give it to him and just cross your fingers i guess and then he puts on the post the guy rides the horse to to the capital and then you're just like well i voted and then you just that's it you never know what happened to it today it takes like two weeks before they'll even tell you to confirm your vote but i mean like the idea that we're getting night the night result like we turn the tv on and they're like here's the president that's on that's like we didn't have that back then you know before

tv and radio 1800s you'd be like i wonder president is. Oh, so they'd always be counting the votes for the votes to be coming in from. Oh, that probably that, too, because they didn't have the transport technology. So it'd be like votes would be coming in randomly over the certain span of time. But with the Internet, you would think that we would have gotten better at counting our votes. So, well, I mean, Florida, for example, has gotten a lot better. They learned their lesson. They did. I mean, they actually instituted legislative reforms after 2000 that very much made their system more efficient. And I think we're probably going to see something like that in some of these other states, especially given this conversion to voting. But I mean, another complication is that in Florida they were permitted to count their mail in voting before Election election day uh whereas in or begin you know

begin the counting so they could announce so the winner would be apparent on election night but in pennsylvania they weren't permitted to do that by state law so i i've got the uh the numbers pulled up and nbc just goes by the the key states that matter and they say in arizona they have until november 23rd to finalize their local results. The Secretary of State certifies statewide results on the 30th. In Pennsylvania, they have until November 10th for unofficial vote tallies to be provided to the Secretary of the Commonwealth. November 23rd is the last day for local officials to submit certified election results. If there's a difference of 0.5% or less, then the Secretary must order a recount by November 12th. If at least three voters in each county allege errors or discrepancies in the count, a recount could also be triggered.

Any recount must be completed by November 24th, and local election officials must submit certified recount results to the secretary by the 25th. In Michigan, November 17th, for their local election officials must complete counting by the 17th, provide the results by the 23rd for certification. Any petitions for recount must be submitted by the 25th. Wisconsin, they say, is the 17th, and then, you know, there's special rules. 13th for Georgia, followed by the 20th to certify unofficial results on the 13th. North Carolina, okay. We go to December 8th, last day for states to resolve election disputes. States must certify election outcomes at least six days before the Electoral College meets,

known as the safe harbor deadline. If they want to avoid Congress getting involved in resolving potential disputes, that means any court challenges to state election results must be settled by December 8th, 2020. If states certify election outcomes by this deadline, Congress must accept the results as valid. December 14th, electors cast their ballots. They meet in their respective states to cast their ballots for president and vice president on the second Monday after the second Wednesday in December.

In every state except Nebraska and Maine, electors vote on winner-takes-all basis. This we understand, and then some are split. December 23rd, president of the senate receives electoral vote certificates by january 6th congress counts electoral votes and on january 20th they inaugurate the new president so if if there's a pending court case by december 8th uh and the the state is unable to deliver votes what's what happens then my understanding is that it's it rejected there's there's no count there's no votes so the state is just gone whoa and so this is what and look i'm not i'm not a legal expert i'm not constitutionalist i don't know that that's exactly true um but you know it would have to be

it i don't know that it's even been litigated before so we wouldn't it's hard to have a firm answer one way or another yeah on the on the the um the was it the bedford's law ben benford's law yeah point you made it is interesting because well to clarify i'm it's not a point i'm trying to make you reference that people are talking about people are posting these viral twitter people are posting about people are posting these threads you know one thing that is definitely the case about this election which is somewhat, is that turnout nationwide went up across the board, across partisan lines. So we still have millions of votes to count ridiculously at this point. But even up until now, something like 12% more total votes were cast in 2020 compared to 2016.

And they weren't cast in a direction that's easy to delineate along partisan lines. So if you look at the map of the country, there are some places that skewed heavily Democratic, some places that skewed heavily Republican. And in 2016, the skew was almost universally toward the Republican, except in a few cases like, you know, Northern Virginia, some affluent suburban areas. And you could like kind of extrapolate what the reason for that partisan skew was. So it made sense that Montgomery County, Pennsylvania and Arlington skewed Democratic in 2016, whereas the other counties skewed Republican. But this year, it's harder to make any of those kinds of inferences. And there are these regional anomalies that are a little bit odd. And I'm not

positing any conspiracy by any means. I'm just saying that if some of this stuff strikes you as odd, it's because even the people who are not in conspiracy land whatsoever are finding them odd and don't know exactly how to interpret them. So for example one thing that i wouldn't have expected is that in minnesota which the trump campaign i think at least initially thought was possibly competitive you see a pretty stark um pro-democratic skew right but but in Iowa, which parts of which are culturally and politically very similar to Minnesota, you see the opposite skew toward the Republican, toward Trump. And that's a little odd. I don't know exactly how to interpret that. And there are a bunch of other examples. Like if you had told me two weeks

ago that trump would win the second congressional district in maine by the margin he did which is like seven points um i would have found it bizarre that that would have been the case and yet he also loses new hampshire by something like seven or eight points like because usually there are usually there are these inter-reg these inner regional correlations right that was definitely the case in 2016 the midwest and the great plains swung hard to trump right but but this year in the midwest and the great plains you see these like patches of different partisan skews that you know are going to take a little bit of more examination to understand the full meaning of people have noticed that in the uh the the partisan swing charts where it shows like yeah which areas they keep posting photos saying look at the state lines because

they don't make sense like the border of ohio and michigan i think is it was ohio boarding michigan i'm thinking indiana um no it doesn't yeah yeah michigan's north it's like you see michigan is all going democrat and then like the state's bordering it to the south are all going Republican. And it's like, well, it's like, I guess it could happen with the Internet. The fracturing of mentalities, you know, you're maybe more like someone across the country than you are to your neighbor. Now that you're able to connect via the Internet. That's one way. But in 2016, there was a definitely observable regional correlation pretty much everywhere.

And if there wasn't a regional correlation, you could infer that it was due to socioeconomic status, median household income. There were some metrics that you could use to make these results explicable, whereas in 2020, it's much less explicable. I mean, there are certain things that you can pretty easily infer from. Like, so, for example, the reason why Biden is ahead in Georgia is because of this transformation of the Atlanta area and the suburbs, namely the affluent suburbs. And there are other examples of that you can find around the country, but others where it's not like that correlation doesn't hold um but you know just to focus on georgia just because i happened to be there for like a week or so prior to the election one thing that i think is worth underscoring about these results is that the democratic party's cultural and power and financial base is now indisputably in these affluent suburbs they're the party of wall street the managerial elite well i mean the I mean, Wall Street was very much satisfied with this result. I mean, the Dow went up and so on and so forth.

But because it's places like Cobb County, Georgia, Gwinnett County, Georgia, which are these affluent, growing population centers around metro areas, the Democrats are increasingly going to govern with their sensibilities in mind right and if you think that translates into like economic populism i think you're dreaming it could there could be a big factor here in that uh covid moved people around people who lived in cities all of a sudden found themselves back in the suburbs with their family and this was always going to be a factor so when you look at why there are these patches that we don't understand, it could very easily be that,

that earlier in the year, COVID hit, people probably were like, I'm going to get out of the city. Then when the riots hit, people got out of cities. We, we,

we knew they were 500,000 people from New York. So you got a bunch of wealthy New York people moving all across. Maybe that explains why Maine, you know, swung for trump in a certain way that new hampshire didn't because people moved very rapidly and it was the individuals not the exchange of ideas you know what i mean just saying yeah and like in different states have different regimens in terms of whether they sent out a universal mail-in ballot uh that's true

whether you had to apply for one like in georgia you actually had to apply for an absentee ballot whereas like in new jersey where i live it was it was automatic which i know was controversial but like a lot of this stuff really is bizarre like los angeles county i can't get over as of yesterday when i checked and it's probably more now there were 200 more 200 000 more votes for trump in los angeles county than there were in 2016 wow and los angeles county is actually trending republican oh that's amazing now which is like because the rich people all leave and the poor people are like i'm gonna vote republican uh maybe there's something to that but like i mean i would have you would have not had you i would have not predicted that one you see zapata county in texas oh yeah i mean that's hill, that's Hillary Clinton won it two to one.

And then Trump flipped it. Hispanic, Hispanic County. And then you also in Miami, I think it was was the 20th or 27th district. Blue, safe, blue congressional seats turned red. It's also a woman. Women are crying on the phone because she lost. It's evidence for why direct democracy is so dangerous because of the way people can flip on a dime and completely alter if we didn't have a republic and it was just like you just needed a bunch of people to change their mind one day like a populist

candidate could just completely destroy the the governance oh look at look at like mask wearing like early on with covid you had all these republicans being like i'm gonna wear a mask and then it was fau saying, no, no. And then it flipped for some reason. Like that's – I'm agreeing with you in that you could use a tribal issue to make people 180 their opinions in a short time span. Another thing about this election is that it doesn't lend itself to easily reductionist explanations yeah for the right or the left i mean i've been examining the georgia results in in detail because i wrote a piece that's going to be coming out this week but you know i'll just pull up the this data here because it's hilarious

oh sorry um so trump would have won this election if he had just maintained the level of white support that he had in 2016. Yeah. And if your thesis for U.S. politics is this all-encompassing white supremacy determinist belief system that is so prevalent in the media, then how do you explain that one? And one of the most stark examples is to me in Georgia, where you have the county with the highest proportion of black voters in that county, Trump received 38% more total votes than he did in 2016. Whereas Biden received more than Hillary, but just 10% more. So the skew there was for trump yeah right but then if you look at the whitest county in georgia these are rural relatively

small counties so you could see big shifts year to year but nonetheless in the whitest county in georgia biden's vote total increased 34 compared to hillary and trump's increased by a lesser percentage, which is 26. So what does that tell you? That tells you if you are so mired in this kind of elite mentality where everything is black and white per the dictates of this ideology that they're so obsessed with, then you're missing just a huge amount of the political dynamics in the country around you and you would think that if you're in the media and you're somebody who wants to be as attuned as possible to those dynamics then you would do i don't know everything but i can't imagine they're actually going to do it they're way too tethered to their ideological presuppositions they're they're trying to claim now i'm seeing all the all the memes from the from the left that you know aoc was right the districts that she helped that were for medicare for all actually won and the democrats

who didn't support and went moderate all ended up losing and maybe maybe there's an argument where if i'm gonna vote for someone who's moderate i'll go the safe route and not vote for the guy who wants to impeach the president not get anything done you vote for a republican maybe they'll actually do their job maybe that's the mentality yeah you know in in new jersey jeff van drew he won he won yeah he just said you know i don't want to impeach trump i'm going to switch parties boom boom boom bada boom and then now he's elected yep he gets that's huge yeah you know it's interesting because the the they were uh the one of the Democratic congressmen who did not vote to impeach Trump, there were only three, I think, was in Minnesota in one of these more rural districts that had been like a legacy Democratic district that the Republicans rightly thought that they could win, Colin Peterson. Yeah.

And his not voting for impeachment didn't matter. He still lost anyway so there there are certain congressional districts that are going to be subject to nationwide trends regardless of whether like you support medicare for all or you vote to impeach trump it's almost like in the ineluctable you know and i think you see that when there's certain big shifts but then again it's sort of complicated because you have these patches of partisan trends that are kind of like in conflict with one another that don't make a ton of sense so it's kind of i mean this is going to take a lot of time to quote unpack i think i think gov had played a big role in it i do i think i think and the riots moved people around in ways we don't understand and a lot of these places had same day registration so you could have literally moved a week before

well not literally because they probably have some law like you got to be there at least 27 days or something some states now they're all going to go to georgia you're hearing this like they're real move to georgia they are so the big thing now apparently is that georgia has lax residency laws and because the runoff will dictate control of the senate and if republicans lose control of the senate it's going to be democrat in every branch except for the i should say not the supreme court but it's going to be house senate and presidency and they're going to start passing everything and just steamrolling through. So now we're hearing was it Andrew Yang said, I'm moving to Georgia. It's like, really, dude?

I mean, even if the Democrats do gain control of the Senate, I wouldn't think I wouldn't overestimate how simple it is for them to just get through whatever it is they want to get through. I mean, Trump and the Republicans had unified control for the first two years of his tenure. They couldn't get health care repeal, Obamacare repeal passed. I mean, they got a tax reform bill. But it's less – it's not as simple as you think. And there are always these kind of like anomalous senators within the coalition who need to be placated.

I mean, Trump had Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski and stuff by the way susan collins winning was one of the most hilarious is it because certain senators are getting i keep saying bribed getting uh lobbied to vote a certain way and if they're republican or democrat the lobbyists don't care they're just going to lobby enough people whether well i mean if you're joe mansion who's the senate democratic senator from west virginia clearly you have you're operating under a wholly different set of political incentives than if you're a Democratic senator from California, right? So, I mean, he is within an incentive structure that is going to put him off course with what the majority of the caucus wants. And so it's never going to be a given that joe manchin is going to support any one give any any particular legislative initiative i mean

joe manchin voted for um uh kavanaugh and gorsuch so a democratic senator from a certain state might be more conservative than a republican senator from a certain but we're losing that we're losing that i mean and that used to always be the case when there was nothing surprising or novel about that for most of u.s history but we have seen polarization where it's almost like the parties act as parliamentary parties where they vote in almost complete unison most of the time whereas there were there used to be these regional disparities where you you know it didn't really matter if you were a democrat or republican if you were representing uh in the senate from you know alabama and more than alabama just flipped republican though isn't it didn't it it was uh the alabama senator was uh was democrat i think

uh yes yes doug jones uh lost that did flip he lost to tommy tuberville who was like the football yeah yeah tuberville yeah so. And Colin Peterson, too. So Colin Peterson was one of the two Democrats who didn't vote for impeachment. Or actually, I think Tulsi abstained. Did she? She did. She voted present. She voted present.

Present, present, present. She voted present on both of them. Do you guys think there would be any value to regulating our government and saying you have to have a certain amount of parties in the government? You can't have more than like X amount of people per party. No, because they just form coalitions. They would. Yeah.

Well, I mean, you have lots of parties in different parliamentary systems, like in Europe. If you look at Belgium, they have to have these wide coalitions and such. And I think it's arguable whether these systems are more efficient. But one thing I think probably is valid is ranked choice voting, which is now being adopted. But Maine has it. Yeah, Maine has it. And people were saying, oh, people were actually confident that Susan Collins might lose in Maine because the Green Party votes would go to the Democrat.

It just didn't matter at all. Third parties were completely irrelevant so i mean these polarization trends that are evident in the country might render it so that it's just naturally not the case that there's a desire for more than two parties but rank choice is legit rank choice sounds pretty good in my opinion yeah so it's like yeah but uh especially in a primary it makes a lot of sense i actually i could have more than one candidate you favor you know i actually uh watched a video where they did an algorithmic simulation of various voting methods the method we have is called first past the post and i think this is archaic and i think it is held on to by people who just want to manipulate one person one vote that's fair and it's like there's other ways to determine like rank choice makes a lot of sense but it's

also not perfect for those that are familiar. Rank choice would be like, you have a list of candidates and you say, here's my first, second, third, fourth, you,

you rank them based on what you think you want. That way, if you're like, I really want Jill Stein, I vote for her. But if Jill Stein loses, then your vote passes down to the next person, which would be,

you know, Joe Biden or whatever. Right. And so that would create a better representation of who the people actually want but but this is gonna be surprising because i didn't realize this they did a simulation where they showed the same problem emerges you can look at many countries where they have ranked choice voting i think they mentioned australia could be wrong and they're like still two-party dominance because people get worried i forgot that why it happens but it's a similar thing

where it's like you run the risk of someone else getting more votes because your first choice is not like it's still a ranking system where someone might get more votes if you rank them at number two or something like that and so i forgot how it worked but anyway the point was they did one called approval voting where you literally vote for anybody and everybody. You can vote as many times as you want. And they said that was actually the best system. So if there's 10 candidates, you can say, I vote for all of them, and you can walk away. Oh. Yep.

Interesting. Alaska actually had a ranked choice party-run primary this year. Interesting. So when they were four or five, you could choose number one, Bernie Sanders, number two, Elizabeth Warren, whatever. And, you know, there's no reason why that couldn't be replicated across the country to my knowledge only in nevada which is on the ballot in nevada for any election you can vote for quote uh none of these candidates yeah yeah yeah yeah so it's just a wholesale rejection of everything the whole system i love it and that's my preferred reform i would love the approval voting system was interesting

because the idea was if there are say 10 candidates you can say i vote for this this this this and this and everyone else can go away and then basically it's just whoever gets the most votes to win vote most votes wins and apparently they did simulation where they found that it is the most likely system to accurately represent what people actually want yeah Yeah, I think with ranked choice, the problem is your vote's going to end up being only going to whoever is the top two of everything. So if you vote for like a Democrat is number one and a Republican is number two, but the Republican doesn't make it into the final top two, your number two won't be your second choice.

It'll defer to your third choice. So you want to put your Republican be your second choice it'll defer to your third choice so you want to put your your republican as your first choice i think it was it was something like if you've got 100 people and 60 of them vote for someone you like and you vote for that person but like as your second choice or something then it was something like people start betting against each other because they're worried about you know someone bad getting in so they pick their first choice but then put their bet as their second choice and then it creates two-party dominance with some minor choices here and there and what's

this other one called where you approval approval where it's just vote for as many times as you want so you're kind of voting for who you don't want exactly yep and so it ends up with everyone just you count the votes and how many you could vote for one person one time, but you can vote for everybody. So I'm not going to pretend to have all the answers. I'm not saying that's a perfect system. It was just a really interesting thing where they did a mathematical equation and then calculated like how many times until they found accurate representation. The thing is like people speculate about the need for different facets of election reform every cycle and almost nothing ever happens of note at least on a national scale right sometimes you do have state-based reforms as in maine where

they did adopt this rank choice voting but i remember in 2016 there was people pledging with you know from the bottom of their heart that if we do anything in the next year and a half it's going to be we're going to abolish the electoral college it was like oh okay yeah that's a terrible idea i think it used i think yeah what are your thoughts on that the electoral college yeah um you know i i don't even think it's worth having an argument as to whether it's good or bad it just is it's foundational to the country's founding principles and we've done it for 200 plus years 250 years so like why have this recurring endless debate about whether it should or shouldn't be there's pretty much zero chance ever that it will be changed and if it was going to be changed it would have been done while the momentum was behind changing it in 2016 when

you had all these exercised something liberals saying that oh my god the this thing you know horrible fascists backed by russia has been foisted upon us because of the electoral college if that was the opportunity to reform it it would have been that that would have been when it was done and it wasn't done i think things can't just stay the same forever though you know that's why i'm like we have an optimism bias we think everything is going to just be the way it is the way we remember we're used to these elections where it's always like the night of at three in the morning they're like the final polls are in and barack obama has won then you know mccain is like you ran a good campaign barack and i concede and that's like we just we grew up with that and that's normal to us and now we

assume nothing could change it would be too weird and that's an optimism bias it just everything's going to stay the same it's going to the bad stuff can't happen but certainly it will at some point we can't just be stuck in this system and if we don't change it incrementally it tends to happen all at once which can be very dangerous well now you've got the the the progressive left you've got the i don't know if you saw that new york mag story about the new york times yes i did the the the staff of the new york times saying we're standing at the barricades of like historic change or something which side are you on right like like it feels like there's a dam holding back a massive wave of a new what i don't know what you called it uh neo-fascism is that sure did i call it something yeah yeah yeah the the the dogma of the ideological left

i forgot you called it yeah i don't want to put words in your mouth yeah i think you know there there i think there is an animated segment of the elite opinion making class which is incredibly racist i didn't say that i did yeah you said, you said it. Not me. Although maybe I secretly believe it, but I won't. I've been here. Which is just beyond exercise over these past four years, I think has been radicalized. Definitely. I think social media is a huge factor in that because you constantly have to be performing in terms of how committed you are to various ideals. And the principle of journalism becomes subordinate to that.

Not that journalism is ever some kind of pure principle that could be aspired to by everybody equally under all circumstances. But if you read that New York Magazine piece, it was clear that what was animating most of the people involved, at least who were quoted, in the enterprise of you know furnishing the new york times they weren't motivated by principally journalism it was a right straightforwardly political objective which is that we need to i don't know exactly

overthrow the white cis heteronormative patriarchy yeah we need to defeat trump we need to totally change upend the systems of oppression and look journalists always have personal points of view i mean you can't be 100 neutral ever and even aspiring to be is almost a fallacy but it used to be at least from my vantage point that journalists could like weigh different competing considerations in the interest of at least projecting impartiality and rationality. Now they don't even care to pretend to do that. They're on an ideologically zealous mission and they're proud of it. And they try to ostracize anybody who expresses apprehension about the need to see that as like the driving impetus for what

you're doing. They're growing. That was part of the reason why I went on my nationwide trip to cover the aftermath of the riots because even if they weren't lying, there was I don't know how many of them actively lie. That probably does happen. Actually, it certainly does happen.

They do a lot but the bigger problem in terms of why i was motivated to do that was because they were omitting it was a lie by omission like these were the biggest most pervasive most widespread most damaging riots since at least 1960s let's set this up real quick so for those that aren't familiar uh michael you went on this trip around the country to all these different big cities, small towns to actually learn about what the riots had done, why they were happening, how people felt about them. You took photos from all these different places. Yeah, I took photos, videos. It was very simple, straightforward stuff, which if I was a full-time staffer at a major journalism institution, some of which are very well-resourced.

Like the New York Times has a record number number of subscriptions they're in great financial shape cnn all these other outlets they're you know riding the trump bubble for all it's worth which is why i think that they're like probably first secretly depressed that it could you know that that that the gravy train might be running out relatively soon um but what i had what i did there's zero reason why it couldn't have been done on a much wider scale with people who have full crews which have you know full uh all i did was get in my dumpy car drive around you know go to chicago uh go to minneapolis where i spent the bulk of the time seattle port Portland. But you went to these really small towns. And smaller places, you know, like Fort Wayne, Indiana.

People had no idea that there were even riots there. I didn't know. I'm a pretty avid consumer of news for better or worse, sometimes worse. But I would have thought I would have heard that there were the biggest riots in memory in Fort Wayne, Indiana if it had just been kind of, I don't know, normally reported. And it wasn't. You had to dig deeply underneath the narrative to figure out that that had happened. I only knew it happened because I happened to be passing through Fort Wayne, Indiana.

And I looked it up, and I went and saw for myself and spoke to people. And there were just so many other examples of that. And it was bewildering as somebody who had this journalistic motivation, not that it's a virtue necessarily to have a journalistic motivation, but that tends to be what drives me to do stuff. Like go to Georgia for the election, go to these random places after riots, just so I can get a relatively robust understanding of what's happening and then convey it as fairly as possible. While also at times, you know, commingling my personal views there's no nothing wrong with that necessarily but i was i was talking to people at these places like it's particularly in minneapolis this is like a month or so after the peak of the riots and it was like all anybody wanted to talk about it you walk down certain blocks and use some of the some of the photos it was like

rubble it was as though it was you know uh serbia in the late 90s or something the boarded up windows the begging on the wind on this with you know on the buildings yeah you know uh you know minority businesses that had to be shuttered never to return um and it was just like okay so there's so much material here that if we had a media which was interested in conveying the story, it would have been trivially easy to do. You could have found the bodega owner who was an Iranian whose store that I went to that was totally boarded up, wrecked, entire inventory stolen you could have tracked down that guy done a 60 minutes style interview where he reflects on what this means about like what the what the meaning of this is for the america dream or something however gauzy you want to make it you could have done it and it wasn't done because the media was so ensconced in a certain ideological perspective where

doing this they viewed we would either be in opposition to the tenets of the protest movement and or help Trump. And both of those were lines that no moral person could have ever crossed in their view. I don't even think that the latter rationale made sense. I don't think it necessarily did help Trump. Look at the results in Minnesota. One thing that I was always fighting about with my right wing followers, who I appreciate to some extent, because I like to have a variety of perspectives in terms of people giving me feedback. I was just like, no, that's not the sense I'm getting when I'm talking to people who actually experienced the riots. I don't think that they viewed Trump as a remedy to the riots. I mean, Trump lost Minnesota by a much greater margin than he did in 2016.

You would think it would have been the opposite if the prophecies of a Trump resurgence in those areas came to fruition, which it didn't. I think maybe if Trump were a little bit more politically adroit, that was possible. Well, it just didn't happen. People who, people who fled probably voted for Trump.

I get messages from tons of people who say they used to live in, in Minnesota and they had to leave because the riots were so bad. So they left the state entirely. Yeah, absolutely. Yep. Well, why not move to a different part of Minnesota?

These are, these are like, I've probably got five emails where they were like hey i want to let you know i lived near on the outskirts of minneapolis we left we went to my family's place things like that i mean i've gotten some of those emails too but like five is not that much i mean the point is that most people can't leave they don't have the resources that they can just up and leave whenever so you should see something so you should see something if what was being argued to me constantly online about trump's benefiting from these riots came to pass, which it didn't. Now, I mean, there is, again, we talk about this regional variability.

There is some, a little bit of a mixed bag there. Because if you look at Kenosha, Kenosha County, Wisconsin, that did trend slightly Republican this year. But it didn't in min in minnesota so it doesn't it's hard to make a firm all-inclusive extrapolation there as to what happened but the just going back to the the riots hey look i i just feel as that's already all gotten completely memory hold i mean this was a historic event it was a nationwide convulsion. It clearly had some impact on the election results. It's hard to say with certitude in what direction, but all anybody could talk about was that there were the response times for 9-1-1. It had gone down in Minneapolis. I was talking to Somalis who had

to fend off white rioters coming up to their apartment building and threatening to burn it down while there were children inside. And so, you know, if you go through something like that, clearly it has to have some influence on your political perspective. I don't mean, I don't think that it necessarily means you're going to vote for Trump. But clearly that has to have some indelible impact. And it just hasn't been explored to anywhere near that you said that you would expect if the media was just motivated by sheer information gathering, if there was a public service that they were guided by. I was actually talking to Tim earlier about I think journalism kind of has at least two facets. And one is investigation and one is reporting.

And these modern media giants have just taken on the reporting facet. They barely investigate anything. It's analysis and opinion. That's more of the divide. The investigation is missing. You get people like James O'Keefe and I think Scanner. They're focused on investigation.

But CNN is just, they just report what they've heard. I don't even know. Analysis. It's analysis. Okay. Well, I don't even think that analysis and reporting are incompatible. I do a lot of reporting and then I analyze it. But I try to be honest. I try to be transparent. I not try to just be totally in hock to some kind of partisan agenda,

whether it's promoting a BLM Antifa protest or whatever, or promoting Trump. I want to actually, to the best of my ability, instill confidence that what I'm saying is truthful. And I think that that's just not something that so many people in the media are interested in if foundationally what they're guided by is due to their immersion in these social milieus where if they stray from the consensus as to the virtue of something like the protest movement or something like the world historic danger of fascist authoritarian blah blah trump then they can incur serious professional or social consequences and that is such a corrupting dynamic and i think that's why we need some kind of new

media culture to sprout out of the ruins of what we've gone through for the past four years i don't think so i think there are people who own who they they want confirmation bias i think there are people who are totally aware of like let's say i have someone on the show and we get a leftist we'll get a certain percentage of people who are angry. And I think many of these people are. Angry that you even bothered to have them on the show? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, how dare you bring this, you know, this leftist guy.

Is anybody angry about me so far? Can we check that? Oh, I mean, probably. Screw you. That's the spirit. But anyway, the point is, I think some of these people know the issue isn't that we disagree with this person necessarily. It's that their ability to speak will influence people. And by giving them airtime in any capacity, you are hurting me. We don't de-platform.

And so we've gotten that argument. Like, we've platformed people before. And I'm like, dude, I'll platform people. It's like the stupidest thing ever. Like, to argue like I shouldn't have a conversation with somebody. Because I would like to have conversations with somebody even if there wasn't cameras on us you know like the conversation we're having now would be great even if we weren't filming it but uh I do my best to ignore any kind of pressure from somebody who's going to get mad at me because I might tell them the truth

and so what ends up happening is certainly I have my bias on my youtube channel like I clearly don't like democrats and people will watch that and say Tim's lying on purpose to throw red meat to a follower it's like no no no you don't understand i just make videos where i talk about what i feel is important and then people come to me i'm like i'm standing on a soapbox and i'm yelling and they're walking up around me to hear what i'm saying and i have my biases the difference with these news organizations is the editor says don't write that You're going to offend our audience. And then they choose to avoid certain stories because they're worried about losing percentages. You have an active business decision to do this. of cognitive capture where the audience even if it's subliminal even if you're not actively

conscious of it does have an influence on you in terms of what analysis you put forward or what you choose to do in terms of topics i mean there's a whole because i don't i i find myself wondering if i'm captive to that i don't think it's i don't think it's possible to necessarily uh like i don't think it's possible don't think it's possible to necessarily uh like i don't think it's possible right so an explanation would be possible to be fully immune to that but i think if you're cognizant of its potential to hamper your ability to be impartial or objective not that anybody has to be totally objective on anything but you should at least be aware that there are these um pressures coming on to you and counteract them if at all possible.

So I think it's about mental fortitude. I think it's about your assuredness and your confidence in yourself. My political opinions have changed very little. I should say they changed very little over the years, right? I think the one position I've changed on heavily is guns in january i straight up said to the people when we're at our house in new jersey i was like i don't want any guns in my house period no you can't bring gun in my house i don't want guns and then the riots happened and then i was like i'm gonna go buy some guns now and then i did and now i don't want anyone taking them from me so i

i'm looking at these policies and my position on guns have has dramatically changed because they want to defund the police then the riots are made it to they were they were very very close to our suburbs in the south in the south philly area or in south jersey area philly suburbs and so i'm like okay i better have the ability to defend myself not only that but death threats and someone tried breaking in my house my opinion changed but in terms of like my positions that i've held, I've never been the strongest political zealot, but all still fairly independent left-leaning positions, progressive taxes, pro-choice, all that stuff. Social justice in certain capacities and pretty much stays where it is. I give my opinions on what I think think and then probably based on what I learn there will be some changes.

But core principles tend to be very obstinate, as it were. But there are a lot of people on social media who don't have that, who just read the comments and then go for it because they're like, ooh, now I'm getting attention. For the most part, what I see is I'll use David Pakman as an example.

Do you know David Pakman? He did a video where he said, here are things that I can't talk about For the most part, what I see is, I'll use David Pakman as an example. Do you know David Pakman? Yeah. He did a video where he said, here are things that I can't talk about. And I tremendously respect him for doing this video. He said, whenever I talk about these things, I get attacked for bringing it up. And then he went through all of the things where his audience was like, how dare you bring this up? And like, how dare you talk about these things?

And he just said it all. And I'm like, there it is, man. That's what you, that's great. News organizations, I think this is the difference. What people need to realize about say YouTube is that like when I make a video, I'm like, here's what I think. I'm one guy. I'm choosing to talk about how I feel. And I've always done that. And then over time I get like more confident in how I talk and present myself. Cause like my earlier videos, I'm like really quiet and like low energy. And I just slowly got better and more comfortable at just talking but my ideas are based upon the news that

i'm reading as it develops when i worked for fusion which was abc news univision they straight up said like lie to the audience they didn't say verbatim they said side with the audience you know and i and i asked if there's news stories that would make our audience upset we wouldn't report it and they said yeah, yeah, I think that's fair. So when you have an editorial board or a president or, you know, financial department or whatever, and they're going to the reporter and saying, oh, yeah, that one don't don't report that because we're going to lose our audience. Then you're looking at people actively deciding to create a partisan space to make money versus YouTube, which is a bunch of random people who have thoughts and opinions who post them on the internet you know what i mean not that they're yeah but you know the the danger in in the youtube freewheeling culture is that so often i see people who are

untethered to any kind of standard of factual confirmation or veracity and they just kind of riff and i could riff if i really wanted to and sometimes i do but you know okay so i worked for the young turks for like a year and a half and there are people affiliated with the young turks so you could go and look at what they said like a year prior in terms of making a prediction on something and it just doesn't come to pass and then they just pay no price for it and they just keep plugging along and just you know i i feel that would if that would diminish my credibility if i did that so like when i was talking about the when i would talk about the election this year i would always try to be pretty qualified i mean i always thought that biden stood a strong chance

of winning more so than trump and i said that publicly many times but i was never going to say that biden is going to win or try right can't win because i don't have a crystal ball and you know what if i said something like that and it turned out to be false then that should detract from my credibility i i don't i don't necessarily agree i don't necessarily agree and it's probably because i'm biased in favor of myself but there's like so you don't think that if you say that something has no chance of happening and then it happens that should detract from your credibility i i agree with i'm not saying you specifically i'm saying anybody saying anybody with a platform. This guy.

Well, I'll tell you, Michael. I do have a crystal ball. Oh, wow. He literally does. I figured something out while you were talking. That is the most stunning plot twist of the evening. I love it. Okay, so if the Young Turks are reading an article and they're going over some news story where it's like, you know, Donald Trump backflipped off the White House and it was perfect, stunning, everyone, and brave.

And then they're like, I think here's what's going to happen next. I have no problem with that. If they're making predictions based on the news they're reading right then, some people are like, I want to hear what you think. Maybe you're going to be wrong. Sure. But if you're reading news and then speculating, it's just people giving their thoughts and opinions. Don't go to the pollsters and think they're going to be right every time if they're wrong all the time you know you know that that almost like i think there's you can do analysis

where you have forward looking you know projections about what they are and how it not happened but then it veers into this like uh you know tarot card i'm not i'm not saying i like i have this unique insight into the nature of the universe where i can tell you that you know joe biden couldn't possibly win the presidency it's just like how the hell that does like what is that based upon that does describe the young turks i'm just saying like that so there there are people who try and take clips from me and i'm not even singling out the young turks they're just the i'm just most familiar with them because i happen to work at this is what this is what the the grifters do so they put up a video where it's me saying i think trump is going to win in a landslide and various various clips

like that going back to like october of last year when moody's analytics said trump was going to win because the economy was great they then take that from a context at a time when the economy was great trump was doing well put it up today, look how stupid and wrong he was. And then people say, wow, what a moron. But if they actually watched my videos, they would have seen in the past month or two months I was saying polls are saying Joe Biden is going to win. And I don't know if I should trust the polls because they were wrong to a tiny degree in 2016. They're not that wrong. People overestimate how wrong they uh the national

polls weren't that wrong there was a lot of state-based error which was more consequential for the electoral college obviously and so it was like a two-point error among like non-college educated whites and my position was i don't know what's going to happen but i think the polls are going to be wrong i don't think you can count trump out and so that was my official position based on the information presented in the context of the election as it stands right now they go back and pull clips from when we had mass rioting and, you know, Trump saying law and order and me saying, I think people are going to recoil against this because I'm getting phone calls. And they're saying, you know, I'm voting for Trump. I know a ton of people in Chicago, diehard, lifelong liberal

Democrat, total Republicans now. But see, that's where I would have strove to be aware of my confirmation bias, because I could have, I mean, I could have come to a similar conclusion based on the feedback I was getting when I was traveling around the country. But I wouldn't have known that that was not statistically representative necessarily of voting outcomes, right? So, you know, I just feel that if somebody pulled, regardless of what the circumstances were, regardless of there were riots, regardless if it was pre COVID, if somebody could find a clip of me saying that I know Trump is going to win and then he doesn't win, then I think that probably wouldn't detract from my credibility and should. And, you know, maybe for sure. Certain people are of a different mindset.

I feel like I'm a little bit more journalistic by nature than than others again i'm not saying you i or or anybody in particular but that that's an issue that i have when i look on on youtube and you know people can just bs constantly and then they pay no reputational consequences if their bsing is just proved 100 devastatingly wrong because they have the audience or they could just keep going uh indefinitely people want the comforting lies they don't want the truth. I think you're definitely more of an investigator, an investigative journalist than most of the journalists in modern culture. And a lot of times analysis journalism. Well, the fact that you drove across the country and didn't know what you were going to find and were willing to accept the results. Like CNN doesn't want them to investigate, doesn't want their reporters because if they find things that defy the narrative and will lose the money i have done what you might call investigative reporting but it's not like my singular focus where i'm not

like getting national security documents leaked to me or something right i just tried to be as consistent and logical as i possibly can not to toot my own horn i don't think i have a horn to toot necessarily but i try to apply that analytically so that i'm filtering my reportage in a way that is best reflective of the truth. It doesn't mean I actually have to entail investigative reporting. I mean, if you want to call just driving around the country and talking to people and looking at the fallout of places and doing interviews and stuff, investigative, I guess it maybe

is in a way. But really, it's pretty straightforward. And so, you know, I think there's a lot of problems with legacy media I mean that New York Times that New York Mag article on New York Times was so embarrassing woke yeah and by the way I mean campus Barry Weiss got totally destroyed by her colleagues for making the exact same observations as were in that new york new york magazine article she was proven exactly right whether or not you agree with everything barry way says which i don't but clearly her analysis of the institutional dynamics of the new york times were on target but again the

people who attacked her are never going to pay any reputational price i mean a constant recurring problem in the media and this i think applies to both legacy media and the alt media youtube media whatever is that there's just never a price that needs to be paid when people get stuff so flagrantly hilariously wrong. I mean, I was fighting with leftists in March who were saying there is no chance that Biden could win. I was like, what? How do you know that? How are you so certain of that? It's not about predictions.

It's about facts, in my opinion. It's about analytical extrapolations that have no bearing on reality. It doesn't matter because it gets you the engagement that you want. Then you could parlay that into a bigger audience. The bigger issue I have, the issue I have that I think is more pressing is when you have New York Times writers who constantly put out bunk garbage and they have no reputational, you know, sure. Penance or whatever. And they get Russia. I mean, they were the absolute. The New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize.

Did they win more than one for their Russia reporting in 2017? And I wouldn't say it was fake in that, like what they were reporting on was just fabricated but the premise the premise upon which the reporting was based was entirely well erroneous here so like why would you have a get a shouldn't you so what what I recommended when those Pulitzer Prizes came out was either throw them in the dumpster give them back or abolish the Pulitzer Prize writ large because it's meaningless now the way I describe it is people were like, well, the reporting was sound. And I'm like, listen, if I hire like a groundskeeper or whatever from my house, like someone, you know, lawn care guys, and they come over and I say,

I need you to mow my lawn and say, you got it. And then an hour later, I come outside and my neighbor's lawn is mowed perfectly. And they like they did the wrong lawn. I'm not you want to give them an award for that. It's like, great. They did the work. I get it. But that's not what they were supposed to be doing. That's not the work lawn. I'm not. You want to give him an award for that. It's like, great. They did the work. I get it. But that's not what they were supposed to be doing.

That's not the work that needed to be done. If what you're reporting on isn't literally fabricated, but nonetheless, it's so directionally off course that what you're doing in effect is misleading the reader, then you're doing it wrong. Look at it this way. It's like a race a marathon starts and one guy runs 26 miles the other direction and they're like well let's give him an award anyway like he did run and it's even worse because they're getting paid don't like they'll make an article that's erroneous and they'll get ad massive ad revenue because it's a shock article and then they'll print a retraction and get ad revenue for the retraction so there's something severely wrong

with that function. Maybe that you would sue, that they would actually, it would put them out of business. That's the problem is they'd be afraid to even report on anything because if they get it wrong, they lose. No, the advertiser is looking for eyeballs. So these news organizations are like not super worried. That's fascist.

I mean, I think that's when corporations starts to implement, like institute our government. When you can go in and write political articles that are not bound in fact. When you can write that somewhere there may be a video of Donald Trump on an elevator. What he's doing, we don't know. Who he's with, we're not sure. Does the video exist? We don't know either, but some say it might.

Huffington Post wrote that article. And they got clicks. They made money off that. Could you imagine you wake up one day and your editor's like, I need a story about Donald Trump. And you're like, nothing happened. Just make it up. Donald Trump may have been in an elevator, I guess. No one knows if he was or why.

When you've been on the receiving end of journalists just straight up making stuff up about you on the Internet. Oh, yes. You have no recourse. I don't know if you've experienced this or not. But I haven't. Like, I'm not even that big of a target necessarily i mean i guess some people are vaguely aware of me but if they could do that to me then who's to say who they could do it to and i think obviously social media so exacerbates

these dynamics it's absurd you can't even compare it to a past era you know but one reason for pessimism about this election and i didn't vote vote for Trump, I didn't vote for Biden. I just left my ballot blank and voted for marijuana legalization in New Jersey, which did pass, thankfully. Cool. As somebody who had to, you know, sneak into the woods as a teenager to indulge in that. I kind of felt like it was my cosmic obligation to vote in favor of legalizing finally in New Jersey. But anyway, one reason to be pessimistic about this election outcome is, and this isn't an argument for Trump per se, but it is a recognition that all the tactics that were used to undermine

Trump are now going to be viewed as vindicated. Yeah. And they're going to be more kind of enshrined in the fabric of american political and cultural life such that you know we have this precedent now that somebody like trump is not going to be allowed to happen again because you know they have these security state machinations you could have the total discarding by the media of the principles that they had previously worked on the basis of before but then when you have somebody who's viewed as such this such a mortal existential threat

that goes out the window um you have just this constant resistance where the election in 2016 was they did try to delegitimize it yeah by automatically launching the quote resistance with the hashtag and seeing that through until it culminated in trump's impeachment so all those tactics i think were done for the singular purpose primarily of undermining hobbling and ultimately defeating trump and if that's proven to have worked, that's really ominous sign for the nature of American democracy. I'm not saying that Trump has been a perfect emblem of democracy

and all that he's done, but I think that the media is so blinkered in their inability to recognize that the oppositional tactics employed to degrade Trump have really damning long-term implications in their own right. Well, that's an excellent place to leave things off and jump over to Super Chats. Yes.

And we'll take some user comments. It's time. We're way late. Hey, do I get a cut of those Super Chats? None. None at all. No, damn. Make sure you smash the like button and subscribe to the show Monday through Friday live at 8 p.m. But let's read some of these Super Chats. Let's see.

Dip. Dop. Doopity says, what is your opinion of Philip DeFranco? Fairly neutral. He's all right. Do you guys know? I know Phil. I know him personally.

Actually, we were video bloggers in 2006, seven, eight when he was sexy. Phil SXE. Phil was a straight edge. Yeah. Yeah. All black and white. He was chilling in his room talking. He was so cool.

Like, such a nice guy. And we went to, like, YouTube Live in 2007. Hung out a little bit. Talked about Zelda. So what do you think about him now? He's taken and forged an empire around his personality. It's awesome. I haven't talked to him in, like, a decade.

I know nothing about him except I've seen clips of him, like, doing videos where he's talking at the camera like this. And it seems okay. You know, it's really interesting. And I'm not saying this. I'm seen clips of him doing videos where he's talking at the camera like this. And it seems okay. It's really interesting. And I'm not saying this. I'm not trying to be disrespectful or anything. His show is very large. He's got millions of subscribers.

But it doesn't seem particularly culturally relevant in the political landscape. And it's not interesting. It's kind of like Stephen Colbert. That's arguably a good thing for him, though. I mean, news isn't supposed to be shock, rage, bait content. He's doing a regular general news. It's like thebert report like it's like a a fake version of himself he's not quite like the colbert report not relevant enough for me to have an informed opinion about it there you go that's an issue gotta fix it all right let's see we gotta go i

want to talk to him again i'll get him on the show or something that'd be cool yeah it'd be great i love to have him all right let's see where are we at youtube's making me jump around with these ones the new gm says pick one trump keeps the president after exposing mass fraud triggering a civil war or biden takes president and we lose any chance at 230 reform for at least four years uh i don't want a civil war i don't either we't either. We have to wait four years before we can reform Section 230? I'll wait. Jeez. Seems pretty obvious.

Yeah. I mean, I think the whole civil war prognosticating was mostly just elites projecting their own neuroses onto the general populace, which doesn't want a civil war. Because why would you? It's mass misery and death. I disagree, though. And I never thought it was. The war is always of of the elites the regular people don't want to be involved they want to mind their own business and watch tv and you know raise their kids that's why i'm saying that this notion that a civil war was possible was a product of elite neuroses that then they kind of tried to transpose onto the ordinary

public who were obviously not willing to fight a war over Joe Biden. I don't think it's about Joe Biden. I disagree. I disagree. So you think there is an appetite to wage a civil war? Yes, absolutely. I don't know how widespread it is,

but like, I don't see, I don't think so there. So you gotta have, I think that's a scintillating storyline to kind of present, to kind of get clicks and algorithms and ratings and stuff. But I just don i just don't see have you have you like looked into civil wars of like the past hundred years and like what they look like uh i mean sure just see ever ever whenever i talk to people about this they take this uh presumption that a civil war is like two competing

factions you had bill maher where it's uh i should clarify that two competing factions along a dividing line bill maher does his show. He's like, we couldn't even have a civil war because the Mason-Dixon line would go through the middle of your living room, you know, with Nana or whatever. Because the narrative is always about the American civil war and not how civil wars came about in other places, notably like the Spanish civil war. Yeah. So it could be like an armed insurgency or something, not like a full-fledged civil war where there's two definable sides. But there were no two definable sides in syria there was like right there was 16 or so different factions no that's right and the shelling got out of control and then the city

was was because nobody wants to back down right so like i i just i never believed i never thought there was evidence to believe that the conditions in the contemporary united states were remotely analogous to to syria that's why the civil war prophecy struck me as incredibly overblown i mean where are they it's a week after the election trump you know says that it's been stolen that it was a fraudulent whatever i was in atlanta in there were like a couple dozen trump supporters just standing on a road waving signs and chanting. Okay, that's something, but that's like so far removed from what a civil war would entail. The assumption that... I think it's, I mean...

So what happens... But couldn't you say it's a pessimism bias to suggest that civil war is possibly a myth? Absolutely. Absolutely. So you need to like find a happy medium. Right, right, right. So here's what I'm thinking. First of all, there's fourth and fifth generational warfare, right?

So the assumption that a civil war is going to be people putting on armbands and waving flags and running through the streets is like you're basing modern reality off of your assumption of what things are like a long time ago or what we've witnessed instead of taking a look at what's currently happening and wondering if we're going to see a different generation and how war is fought we're in the first civil cyber war right so we're in the midst of it we didn't even realize we're absolutely in a propaganda war we're uh you know we're we've got elite censorship the shutting down of certain ideas it's a theater of war man so you have to you have to ask yourself what's the goal of a war and sometimes there's aggression rage anger, anger, hatred, whatever. But typically, it's about controlling resources, gaining ground. So, you know, Syria, for instance, our involvement there had a lot to do, depending on who you ask, with the Qatar-Turkey pipeline. We wanted to offset the natural gas monopoly that was going into Europe through Ukraine and all that stuff. It's all weird and tied together.

But if I don't have to send in the troops and I can manipulate a country into giving me what I want, then you would do that. And so we're entering a new generation of warfare where it's all about cyber attacks, manipulation, infiltration, exfiltration. Knowing things can get you anything, compromising individuals, blackmailing individuals, or generally just funding certain types of media to create ideas is more effective. So perhaps when people hear civil war, they think hot civil war, like, you know, Proud Boys Antifa are marching through the streets and they have a leader on a horseback or something because that's an archaic understanding of what civil war would look like. But I think when you have Hillary Clinton telling Joe Biden not to concede under any circumstances and they run war games where they suggest several states should secede from the union,

should they lose, we're like dangerously close to the elites saying we want or else and it always is the regular people saying we don't want to be involved so the election right now i view it as some kind of cold civil war in a sense we i think i sorry to interrupt, but I think there's something to what you're saying in the sense of that the kind of cultural consensus which has undergirded America's sense of itself has been eroded somewhat since 2016. I mean, nobody ever fathomed that somebody like Trump could ever be in the White House, right? It's just so contradictory to what we had all been trained to believe was possible. And so, you know, the horizons of what's additionally possible to me have expanded. Whether they've expanded to the point where there's some kind of viability to the concept of a civil war, even if you're saying it's like fifth generation warfare or something

that's different from these more traditional conceptions we have that is very much a stretch but i think there is this erosion of like american hegemonic prowess that you know due to the ascendance of china do the other other factors that is going to happen over time and is going to manifest as kind of degradations and degradations of the social order. I just don't think it's going to manifest, at least in the short to medium term, as anything that could even be conceivably called a civil war. So we had it's all it's all an issue of where the escalation takes us. We had a guy stalk some Trump supporters in Portland and put two bolts in his chest.

A lot of people were like, we crossed a line when that happened. Will it keep escalating? I guess the issue for me is that since 2017, when we started seeing the rise of the street violence, the expectation has been every time we see it, it gets worse. And then it ultimately just keeps getting worse. Even now, three years later, it ends with this guy in Seattle walking up, yelling at the guy. He turns around. He puts two bullets in his chest. Will that lend itself to, you know, like how we would envision a hot civil war between factions?

I'm not entirely sure. I will say when Trump is like talking about staying in the White House beyond, you know, maybe we're in this this lull period where the media is saying everything's OK. Joe Biden is president. But you get 71 million people who voted for Trump and the people they're following are all saying this election was not legitimate. I can't imagine these people are just going to when you come from 2016 which was unprecedented like even you're mentioning they're saying they're yelling at the electors to like not do this that didn't happen in 2012 or 2008 sure we had a literal civil war back in the 1800s it was very very different times back then we've grown to become this very like solid foundation of a nation with hard expectations and you know our own optimism bias about how everything is going to function properly

obama wins they say congratulations obama wins re-election congratulations hillary loses and it was screaming psychosis for four years russia and conspiracies the media has gone insane and i tell you this man since the election there's there's no shared reality anymore like i i i spend my time reading the news and there's always like these two disparate realities. Even CNN says it like everyone understands that there's like the orange man, bad universe and the Trump, not that bad universe. You've got regular people. And there was a, there was an overlap. We recognize that some things did happen, but we disagree on what they meant or what

was going to happen. Now I'm reading the news and it's like, you turn on one outlet and it's like, clearly this fraudulent, this election was fraudulent and the deep state and all that stuff. And you turn on NBC and they're like, presidentelect's office has announced this, that, and this. Yeah, I think you're right if there is something that has gone completely haywire in terms of our collective epistemology. Well, so what happens when you have 71 million people on one side and 74 on the other? Obviously, not all of them are radical, but you need only a small percentage to create the troubles you give them like something to rally around like a music or art something that they can create a shared vision of no that's what that's what people need i just

think you'd need an extra ingredient to make it seem plausible to me that it could manifest as something like the trouble something like a prolonged urban surgency something in the realm of civil war like have you ever activity just because you know for despite covid despite uh all the craziness around national politics most people tend to live in relative tranquility right which you couldn't have said for syria um at least in the areas where there was significant fighting right before the civil war they did and then the war started yeah so you if you look at uh the revolutionary war in the united states um most the largest faction was leave me alone followed by uh the next largest faction was revolution and then the next and then the smallest of the three was no revolution but most people didn't want to be involved in any

capacity they're just like leave me alone it always is the elites who are fighting with each other so i'm not saying i think it's a guarantee i definitely think there are a lot of people who recognize the culture war as it's been called or cultural civil war, it's been called for a long time. I don't see how this is – I don't see how it – maybe there's a path towards some kind of reconciliation. The left is calling for now that Joe Biden won truth and reconciliation commissions or something, whatever that means. Right, like South Africa or something. Yeah, make them testify or whatever and be scolded by a panel of some sort. But you've got people whose worldviews are entirely, like, in my opinion, fractured and nonsensical. Like the 1619 Project rewriting of history and these weird ideas of cis heteronormative patriarchy controlling everything. These people live in a strange reality and they're violent. And so if these keep getting bigger, and I don't see why they wouldn't, like after Trump leaves, assuming that's what happens, the media isn't going to just stop writing about this stuff.

They're already writing stories saying it's time to go after Trumpism. They're already saying it's very much possible that liberals who gain power are going to have a greater authoritarian retributive edge to what it is that they want to do. Like if they feel now that their imperative is to extirpate Trumpism so that it's nothing like Trump ever has the possibility of ever happening again. Then, you know, you could very much envision how that could take on very overbearing qualities, even beyond what we've seen so far. far the the the complication there is i'm not sure that like biden himself is predisposed to go along with those kinds of kind of vengeance endeavors like i don't know that you'd see him calling for

truth and reconciliation commission i don't think he would for example but like it but but i think people who might be empowered just by dint of trump leaving elected office they're going to probably be advocating for that and whether like biden has the personal wherewithal to resist those calls is an open question well i gotta read the super chat because we gotta fact check this one v city says i know you're not a believer in trump playing 4d chess but do you know who was on george bush's legal team in 2000 john roberts brett kavanaugh and amy coney Barrett. What? Okay. Perhaps. That is true. That is true?

Yep. Well, I mean, they were involved in different... Well, no, they were... They were very young, weren't they? Their 20s? I think... No, I mean, they were clerks in the Supreme Court in the 90s, and so they would have been just out of their clerkships.

Amy Coney Barrett, isn't she in her late 40s? Yeah, 48. Yeah, so she would have been 28. Right, so... Yeah, so she would have been 28. Right, so... Yeah, so she would have been a clerk in the 90s. That makes sense. Yep. I mean, so...

And this was 2000, so... Is it? That is true. That's crazy, dude. That's wild. It is true. Wow. Do you see the meme where it's...

I mean, you can even go find a clip of Kavanaugh that was uncovered when he was up for his nomination of him giving CNN an update as to what was going on with the florida supreme court case you see the meme where it's clarence thomas and brett kavanaugh and their eyes are glowing and they're looking at kamala harris and joe biden because no but i can kind of you know you can imagine dots there yeah yeah so for those unfamiliar joe biden was grilling clarence thomas about accusations in the 90s and kamala harris the same and then the meme is we've you know clarence saying about accusations in the 90s and Donald Harris did the same. And then the meme is Clarence saying, I've waited 30 years for this day or something.

You know what, man? Look, I think it's really annoying when you see these trust the plan memes. I'm like, dude, I don't trust any of these plans. There's no plan. If you trust the plan, then why did they end up in front of the total landscaping building? You know what I mean? That was really weird. What's the plan? It's just like this.

Whenever something bad happens. It's always like there's 895 dimensional chess being played. No plan, guys. Now we're at 895. Yeah. It keeps going up like as Trump's term was.

String theory chess. Exponential. Yeah. 11 dimensions. Yeah. You need to be on psychedelic drugs to understand these chess schemes.

Well, basically what happens is they say something bad happens and they're like, oh no, what's happening? I thought Hillary was going to get arrested. They go, trust the plan. That, like, something bad happens. And they're like, oh, no, what's happening? I thought, you know, Hillary was going to get arrested. They go, trust the plan. That's like have faith in God. Exactly.

That's exactly what it's like. And that's like that informs a lot of the Q mentality, right? Like there's always a purpose behind everything. And, you know, I even saw like I think that anti-Trump media makes a mountain out of a molehole with the Q to some extent. But like it is true that when you go to Trump gatherings like I was at in Atlanta where they have to stop the steel rally. I mean, there are guys like just with Q, you know, on their arm patch and stuff. And like, yes, they're they're the trust, the quintessential trust to plan people. I mean, they think that like it was intentional that Trump found himself behind in Georgia or something.

Right, right, right. Like Robert, Robert Mueller and John F. Kennedy Jr. are going to come and like, I don't know, flip the votes in Fulton County. Dude, they were saying that Trump triggered the special investigation on purpose because Mueller was actually investigating the Clintons. Like never. I don't think so. Anyway, we got some more.

What a plan. This is interesting. Ted says, some people in the Donald.win allegedly managed to get their hands on the Dominion code. It's the top post on their page. The numbers are really scary. You might managed to get their hands on the Dominion code. It's the top post on their page. The numbers are really scary. You might want to have a look at it.

That's the software for the voting machines that were used. It's the software that was used in like 30-something states. We'll see if that's true. I mean – Yeah, I think it's almost an inevitability of US politics that there are going to be theories that developed as to why a certain candidate loses. I mean, we saw this obviously on Turbocharged in 2016 as to Russian interference.

I remember seeing like supposed statistical analyses from computer scientists that were showing that like you could correlate different counties and show it was like statistically impossible for Hillary to have

lost by the margin she did in Wisconsin and Michigan or something. And of course, it was total nonsense. But even like going back to 2004, I remember there was this whole cottage industry that developed around die-bold voting machines in Ohio and how Bush conspired with the republican secretary of state to you know rig it and uh you know those theories were never really entertained seriously by john kerry who you think would probably look into it if it costs in the presidency but i just think you know that is now going to be just continuous in terms of the the the assumed legitimacy of elections is no longer operative in the eyes of so many people. And clearly that's now going to increase almost exponentially if Trump himself is

rejecting the legitimacy of the election. I mean, it was almost humorous the night of the election at like 3.30 when he first came out where he simultaneously declared victory and also declared the entire thing a fraud. So so i mean that that's a new one so royal raptor says tim for months you have told us the left would quote by any means necessary try and get trump out now when the big show hits and the scams errors and straight up fraud just happens to all help democrats you call it human or clerical error i think that's an overstatement of what i said i've said there's numerous uh there's a ton of evidence of fraud there's numerous affidavits of people discovering fraud we literally opened this show by showing the media was was

that washington post was putting out some kind of weird anonymously sourced story that was immediately debunked i wrote up hammer and scorecard and yeah and you bought it well i'm gonna keep bringing it up and i've also said we should investigate each and every one of these things absolutely i don't i don't know like you what? It's really annoying is that it's almost like it's like some kind of weird counting heads phase. You must come out and bend the knee to what we say. Chill, dude. Look, it's clear that you've got people on the left who are lying. Accept the results. Submit. And you've got people on the right saying it was clearly fraud. You must agree with everything. No, I'll tell you what. We investigate these things. We're calm and collected

about it. We point out there's affidavits then there's impropriety and there's a legal argument being made and we let the process happen and above all aim for a voting system that we can trust or that we don't need to trust because of functions we if we don't have our if we can't have faith in our votes man what do we have with the democracy that's why we need to investigate everything i think your instinct i mean i you, I don't know if you've characterized everything as clerical errors in the way the super-characters have said. Oh, I certainly didn't. I think it is worth starting from the premise

that a lot of stuff which may be intentional fraud could theoretically be a clerical error of some kind. So keeping open that possibility is totally warranted. And then you ascertain evidence to give you some kind of indication one way or another there's nothing wrong with that

because you know a lot of what is assumed to be conspiratorial often involves people who just don't have the competence to carry out any kind of coordinated conspiracy yeah uh ibm all the time yahud says the implications of 71 million americans being suspect of the results either way has dangerous implications yeah maybe state legislatures should audit to remove illegal ballots better that than the strife of distrust and suspicion that's absolutely my point yeah if we can go through and say look we found some impropriety because there's always going to be some kind of error there's always going to be some malfeasance the question is does it make a difference find it lay it all out and make sure everyone is comfortable that we've

done everything in our power to do so now the left is saying they'll never accept the results anyway so it's pointless that's not an argument because you got to try everything you know there was this like psychological assessment question where they said, if it was true that you couldn't rehabilitate certain criminals, would you try or something? And the argument was, if you had a criminal that was presumed to be beyond, you know, rehabilitation, would you just give up on them? My answer is no. Like, we don't want to just give up on people.

And so if you think that the best solution to this is to ignore the complaints of 71 million people, you would be incorrect. Because that will certainly just guarantee we rapidly approach some kind of critical mass, instead of slowly letting things play out, letting people calm down, showing them and finding it and maybe they're right, maybe they're not just play it out. The problem is that the Trump campaign kind of haphazard legal strategy here is as we know, we acknowledge earlier on this discussion, it really is just throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks in the individual swing state. So that, I think, causes people to doubt the good faith of a lot of what's being alleged. I mean, if there was more targeted substantive allegations that were logically consistent, then I think you'd have an easier time convincing people to entertain it and rebut it or not in kind of a rational way.

I think they have had – I think they're trying to win. I think they're – I mean Trump did say ahead of time that, you know, hey, this may go to the Supreme Court and I want that. And they pushed through Amy Coney Barrett the 11th hour. Exactly. I wonder why that was. And the Democrats even brought it up. So I think it's certainly a possibility.

I think Amy Coney Barrett is a kind of harbinger of how I suspect this could possibly go. Notice I'm not making a definitive proclamation because I don't do that. I think I would be diligent as rightly when even though it was like a week or so before the election, was because, look, they were never supporting Trump on the basis of him being some kind of committed, principled conservative. Trump is not that. But they used him as a vehicle to achieve conservative ends, one of which is changing the composition of the supreme court so i think a lot of the more elite republicans are eventually gonna be content with what trump provided them such that it's not worth getting into this protracted battle over the presidency um after kind of the emotions settled down. And we're only a couple of days after it was called.

And so I can envision that happening. I don't know. I may be totally wrong, but that's sort of my intuition. Val Kudrin says, love your channel. Keep up the good work. Please do a segment sharing your thoughts on Dr. Shiva's analysis of the Michigan votes or talk to him on your show. I will take a look into it.

Kevin Kennison. And I will always take an opportunity to read a super chat that talks about my music video says, Will of the People has become one of my new favorite songs as a moderate pacifist. I love the care you put into the song. Thank you for making a song that really feels like it means something. For those that aren't familiar, I have a music video and song original called Will of the People. You'll definitely want to watch it because it's about politics and the cycle of revolution. It's going to be on Spotify and iTunes soon. soon there's a certification process so it takes some time and then uh you know i don't have a music

video or song which i think is probably for the best you gotta you gotta just do it you gotta go for it tim's got it for you travis about my old acoustic guitar uh never done a super chat you are worth more than 4.99 insert facepalm here. You sent $49. I think this person, Tiffany, I think you meant to send $5. You sent $50. Oh, gosh. I'm sorry. DC says, check out Microsoft's election guard for a cryptographically backed voter integrity solution. Problem

is getting buy-in from each of the 50 states. Overcomes the privacy concerns involved with a blockchain-based solution. Interesting. You arrived. Right. Gertsy says, your left is far right to the modern leftist. with a blockchain-based solution. Interesting. Right. So, Gertzi says,

your left is far right to the modern leftist. That's true. Yeah. Right. I think, don't they call you far right? Oh, man. I've been called

every name in this book. Every leftist. Yeah. Right. I'm an alt-left grifter. Oh, nice. I'm a right-wing sycophant. I'm a secret Trump voter.

Wow. Wow. I mean, there are just journalists who will just assert that they know i voted for trump like they are somehow i don't know surveilling my apartment or something and they just know that i voted for trump when i just i've said that you simultaneously hold both far left and far right positions like you go home yeah one you know one one thing i'm definitely being is i'm like a red brownist do you know

that whole theory yes yes it's like it's like an offshoot of the horseshoe theory where like the extreme left and the stream extreme right are supposedly you know converging to taurus yeah and um that's the shape you know people can call me oh some news some news dropped on handy i guess um that's what i was trying to find yeah i can't find anything for the nine o'clock i'm sorry they're like laying out their case i guess is that what it was oh okay yeah i think so like that we'll look into it later uh let's see the insomniac says you say another factor is needed for civil war what about a food what about food shortages china may be facing massive shortages this year and if defund the police goes forward shipping could stop i'll actually i'll say hold on um joe biden said dark winter is coming that

the vaccine is not going to be enough it's not gonna be ready till spring and that lockdowns are on the table if we get another hard lockdown and there's a shipping you know disruption then people might snap again yeah i was thinking earlier um there's the u.s government's basically said there's five theaters of war and that's's land, sea, airspace, cyber war, and the human mind. Psychological warfare. The heart. The human heart. I would be surprised if there was another hard lockdown on a national scale.

I mean, I think you'll maybe see targeted mitigation is what they call it. Like I just saw in Utah. You see what's going on in Europe? They have legit lockdowns. You've got to have your papers to go outside in France. No joke. Well, yeah. I mean, well, that was the case in Italy when they first locked down.

It's all the same. It's all back. England just contracted Palantir to do contact tracing software. Is it really all? Right. Well, yeah. I mean, actually, that's right. It's back.

And there's been riots in the UK. But we never had a shutdown. I just don't think there's a... Or we've never had a lockdown. We've only had a shutdown. I just don't think there's a... Or we never had a lockdown. We've only had shutdowns. I just doubt there's going to be the political tolerance for the same kind of thing in the US. But I could be wrong.

And it's not as though Biden can personally institute a nationwide lockdown. Yeah, he could. But it would be up to the governors to enforce. It's constitutionally dubious. No, it's... The sheriffsious. No, it's sheriff's and stuff. So you've got... I mean, Trump didn't himself... I mean, when the lockdowns did occur,

Trump had a bunch of different positions on whether lockdowns are desirable. He ended up bragging that he saved millions of lives by locking down the economy, which a lot of Trump support... Well, that was Pence, actually, I'm pretty sure. Trump has also said it on many occasions. Technically, they said he said it one of the debates i would say they didn't lock it down maybe i'm wrong but it seems like like new zealand got locked down you couldn't

cross the border like our states were open no but they shut stuff down whatever it was our borders were closed not state interstate borders yeah but that's that's that's like that's just jurisdictional inter-country lines well actually you know they they a lot of the claimed shutdown measures, even in terms of interstate travel, were never enforceable during the height of lockdown. I went from New Jersey to Delaware just because Delaware had this system set up where supposedly they were going to be the police were going to be pulling you over if you had an out of state license plate. That was the most extreme draconian measure that was taken anywhere in the country at the time. And like I had an out-of-state license plate that was the most extreme draconian measure that was taken anywhere in the country at the time and like i had an out-of-state license plate i was there for like four or five days nobody gave me a hard time and it's just it's just not enforceable what do you think about covet in general in what regard do you how dangerous do you think it is

um i mean i don't perceive a huge danger to me personally where i had to contract it but i am mindful that i have the possibility of spreading it to somebody who might have more vulnerabilities pretty vague question yeah i mean i i'm not in favor of covid oh okay okay well there you go that's the important uh important thing so uh i'll just we're gonna do one more super chat and then we've gone we've gone quite a bit over but uh joshua brog says i can go another two and a half hours if you really want oh man voter joshua says voter id laws voter id laws could go a long way towards raising confidence in our elections i'm inclined to agree yeah i do too some sort of id i would think some sort of security measures for our elections not the opposite.

The Democrats are talking about reducing election integrity. That, to me, makes no sense. So weird to me. Paper ballot backups, I think, to me, should be a no-brainer. You see, this is what happens. See the categories with me. Well, no, it's that we're 20 minutes over, and he knows. He wants cookies.

Come on up, Marco. Yeah. And now he knows we're talking about it. I do want to mention one thing. I don't know if you realize, but there's a photo every time we show you of Joe Biden eating a small child. Oh, yeah. It's right behind you.

That's right. I can't really still see it. Yeah, I can still see him. Isn't that terrifying? Well, I resent being associated with that. I had nothing to do with it. Have you seen the art on the walls? You know, I've glanced at it.

A lot of it. It's amazing. It's a lot to process. I know. It's a lot. What's the art on the walls? You know, I've glanced at it. A lot of it. It's amazing. It's a lot to process. I know. It's a lot. What's the art? It's just Joe Biden looking like the Crypt Keeper. Yeah, that's what he looks like.

George Alexopoulos. He's the artist. Yeah, yeah. All right. Well, anyway, man. Hey, thanks. Good conversation. Yeah, I enjoyed it.

Appreciate it. Do you want to mention your social media or anything? Yeah. Mtracy on twitter mtr acey i do have my own youtube channel it's not a major focus of mine like yours where you have this very impressive setup you know i do you know just some side commentaries chat people uh so that's easy to find it's just m tracy on youtube uh you know i've've got Patreon and PayPal and all that set up and look forward to, you know, I mentioned earlier what I see

to be a need for new media ventures out of the ashes of the disaster of Trump. I feel like you've written a book. Well, what I was going to say is that, you know, be on the lookout for new media ventures that are aware of

many of the problems that we've discussed. I don't want to give any further details on that at the moment, but things are in the works. Cool. And smash that like button. Yes, do it. You can follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Parler, at TimCast. Don't forget to check out my other YouTube channels,

YouTube.com slash TimCast and YouTube.com slash TimCast News. We're live Monday through Friday at 8 p.m., so we'll be back with more stuff. Don't forget to follow Ian. Yes. At Ian Crosland, you can follow me anywhere and everywhere. And you can follow at Sour Patch Lids. Sour Patch Lids.

L-Y-D-S. And smash the like button on your way out. We will be back tomorrow. What's tomorrow? Wednesday? Yeah. Tomorrow's Wednesday. We'll be back tomorrow.

Another great day. Stay tuned for Thursday. Thursday is going to be the big crazy day. So just so you know, we're not... Do push to have... Stay tuned for Thursday. Thursday is going to be the big... Yes. The big crazy day. So just so you... I'm excited. We're not... Do push-ups in the morning.

Yeah, do... Yeah, yeah, okay. All right. Thanks for hanging out. Get amped up. We'll see you all next time. Bye, guys. So long. Thank you.