Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 801: 2000 Mules and One Big Lie, Eve of the Election
Episode Date: November 4, 2024...
Transcript
Discussion (0)
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Every episode we blast anyone who gets in our way, we bring critical thinking, skepticism
and irreverence to any topic that makes the news, makes it big or makes us mad. It's skeptical. It's
political and there is no welcome. Matt. Hey Cecil. Hey buddy. Hey, uh, it's, uh, it's
October the 30th. It's Wednesday. We're recording one day earlier. We're releasing the day before
the election. I don't know if we're the enemies from within or not, but I think we might find
out and I'm a little, I'm a little uncomfortable. My friend. Yeah. To be honest, you're, you're I don't know if we're the enemies from within or not, but I think we might find out.
Oh, man.
I'm a little, I'm a little uncomfortable, my friend.
Yeah.
To be honest, you're talking about, you're talking about a guy who is very much amped
up that rhetoric in the past month or so and has been very, very clear that there are enemies
within in the United States and they they're gonna root out those enemies.
So huge fingers crossed for tomorrow.
I wanna make sure that everybody who's listening,
you should have a plan to vote if you haven't.
If you know anyone, you should make sure
they have a plan to vote if they haven't already.
Yes, yes, yes.
All votes count.
All votes count.
And we really need to make sure
that as many people as possible vote and as many people
go out and express their, you know, their opinion about these two candidates because
it's a really important election.
Not only is the Supreme Court something that could be, you know, he could essentially change
out two 70 plus year olds justicesices one who's almost 80. I think
with
45 year olds
So that could be you know a total of
What is that five justices five?
Generational five generational justices appointed by one man if Trump gets in
If not and Kamala Harris wins, then those guys got to hold on for four years.
Yep. They're playing the RBG game.
And it might be a real difficult four years at 80 years old to try to work your way through,
especially if you're Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. Those are guys who are old and they're in
there at the end of their career. So not only is the Supreme Court in balance, you have at this point a very different view on how,
we have one guy who's gonna come in
and he has a list of people he's very upset with,
then a mindset that looks very fascist,
and then you have somebody else who's not that.
Yeah.
Look, if you are in a reliably blue state, it's reliably blue because people go out and vote.
Yes.
Your vote still matters.
Like if you're in a reliably red state, it's reliably red because people go out and vote.
Your vote does matter.
We like to say all the time, like I hear it all the time, oh I'm in a state, we're in a state
where it's very easy to say like, oh my vote doesn't matter, I'm in Illinois, it's going to be blue,
it's going to be blue. Statistically, there's no way it's not going to say like, oh, my vote doesn't matter. I'm in Illinois, it's gonna be blue. It's gonna be blue. Statistically, there's no way it's not gonna be blue.
But that's because people show up to the polls
and exercise their fucking civil right to vote.
It's only blue because enough people
show up to make it that way.
It's only red because enough people
show up to make it that way.
You can change things.
There are so many states, so many guys,
so many states that were not reliably blue that are now.
There are so many states that were not reliably red
that are now.
These things are not cast in stone.
These are not historical truths passed down from on high.
These things change over time.
There are many states that used to be in play
that are not in play.
There are states that are in play now that
we're not in play before. It's not like a lock. It's not a lock. Go out and vote.
You've got to do it. Go out and vote. I only am half joking about being the enemies from within.
I was thinking about that idea. And I know we're small potatoes. I do. Like I'm not trying to like pretend we're not.
But I was thinking about this, Cecil,
and I was thinking like, under a Trump regime,
will hosting services like Libsyn
be comfortable hosting shows like ours?
Yeah, yeah.
I don't know that that's necessarily a truth
we can take for granted going forward.
You've got organizations as large as the Washington Post
with an owner as rich as Jeff Bezos saying,
hey, you know what?
We're not going to endorse a candidate
because we're fucking cowards.
If you're Libsyn, who's our hosting service,
and there is a prosecution and persecution
of the fourth estate by the fascist regime of Donald Trump,
who will have at that point broken the American system
of checks and balances.
Would you host our show?
Will there be pressure on services like, you know,
Visa and MasterCard to not accept payments through Patreon?
Possibly.
For shows like our show.
Look, when we're talking about things
like an enemy from within, we are talking about a top-down control of voices of courage
and dissent. Yeah. And that includes us, man. Yeah. This could be, I, this is not even exaggerate.
Yeah, we're gonna catch a trickle effect from the big fish out there. Right, yeah. But we're
still gonna catch it. Sure. Yeah. And the thing is, the big fish, there's only a handful.
And after they catch those guys, why not go after the smaller fish?
And you could pass laws that make it very difficult and very unpalatable
for shows like ours to financially exist because we're on a razor's edge every month anyway.
And I also want to point out too, what else is at stake in this election?
Not only the enemy of winst stuff, but abortion in this country.
Oh my God, yeah.
In many states, because of the Dobbs decision,
because of what Trump did to the Supreme Court,
Trump and Mitch McConnell,
they changed the dynamics of that court
so that they uprooted 50 years of precedent.
And now you have an opportunity
in many places of this country to go to jail
if you help with an abortion or if you have an abortion.
So we have places in this country where women are dying
or near dying before they can actually get help.
They're refusing to help women at all,
if they don't want a pregnancy even very, very, very early on in a pregnancy,
they still in some places can't even get one.
Right.
So we're talking about,
that is very specifically on the ballot,
because what's gonna stop a Republican-led Congress
and House from changing that rule into something
that is permanent for everybody from now on?
There's nothing stopping it.
And I want to point out something I pointed out over a year ago that I do not think Trump
wins the White House and the two houses of government stay blue.
There's no way in the world that there is not a red wave if Trump doesn't win.
If Trump wins.
If Trump wins, yes.
Yeah, a hundred percent.
It's impossible to fathom somebody voting Trump
and then voting blue for their other representatives.
Nobody's gonna vote all red in Texas
and then vote for Trump.
That's not gonna happen.
It's not gonna happen.
It is, that is the, we are at the precipice.
We are 24 hours away when you hear this.
We are at the precipice of potentially,
and I don't want to, like, I genuinely do not mean this
to be exaggerated or hyperbolic.
I don't.
Like voting on the end of our own democracy.
Sure.
Ironically enough, we may actually vote
on Tuesday, November 5th, 2024 to end our own democracy. That is a
possibility that we are facing. That's not an exaggerative or hyperbolic. If we break the
systems of self-correction, they will not self-correct. They got to be corrected. You're
going to have to do the work to correct it. Yeah. And there's no guarantee it works. There's no
guarantee it works. So vote. It's important.
You gotta vote.
After you vote, come check us out.
We're gonna be live for a couple of hours,
either cheering or crying,
but either way, it'll be fun, right?
You can come hang out with us.
Yeah. Come hang out.
Heath Enright's gonna be joining us from The Scathing Atheists,
Skeptocrat, Godawful Movies, and Citation Needed.
So you can come check out all three of us, just chit chat chat and we'll be on the videos on YouTube, I think on Twitch, but you can come check us out.
We'll be looking at all the big news sites and we'll be checking it all out. So come hang out
with us. Also, I want to mention too, we get a guest at the end of the show. The guest is
Jim Cliff, the author of 2000 Mules and One Big Lie. He's also one of the co-hosts of the Felacious Trump podcast.
So he'll be joining us at the end of the show.
So stick around for that.
Great, a perfect in fact guest for the eve of the election. So stories from Newsweek, Kamala Harris's crowd size crushes previous record with ellipse
speech.
And there's, I don't know if there's any images, there's no images here, but you can look online
and you can find images of the 75,000 person crowd.
And it's impressive.
It's very impressive. It's impressive.
But one of the things that I saw,
and this was on a Twitter page,
someone had posted a Twitter page to Reddit.
And so they posted this image.
And the image, I'm gonna put it up on the big screen here.
This is from the 2016 election.
This is optimism from Hillary Clinton
and darkness from Donald Trump at campaigns.
And there's an image of her at a 40,000 person rally
in Pennsylvania on the eve of the election.
So I think what my message here to people is,
is while it feels like there's a lot of optimism
that is following Kamala Harris,
this is not the time to become complacent.
Because what essentially they're saying here
is optimism from Hillary Clinton
and darkness from Donald Trump.
We are seeing all the people in the media
are saying all the same things
like Donald Trump feels low energy, he's canceling things, he's not, he's doing these sort of
like he, it feels like he's quiet quitting all this stuff. He won in 2016.
Yeah. Hello darkness, my old friend.
Yeah. So we need, you need to be extra vigilant here because if not, we're going to be complacent
and we're going to see a repeat of 2016.
Yeah, a repeat with an angrier, more embittered,
more desperate, more delusional, less competent version.
So everything we didn't like in 2016,
everything that happened that was frightening
and was poorly managed, it's all of that,
it's worse and there's no, and there's no breaks.
There's no breaks.
Like Kamala Harris really, this is historic no matter what.
This is historic.
We have a choice to make it historic good
or we have a choice to make this historic tragic.
And it really will be tragic.
This will not be a moment where we're like,
well, everybody's the same. This
is not that. This is just not that we can maybe do that again sometime. I long for the
days where we get to be like, well, we sure disagree about tax policy. Like this, that's
not, that's not what's happening tomorrow.
What could it could be though, and you know, glass half full. It could be that if Kamala gets in,
this is the last you see of true MAGA politics.
It should break it.
This should be the thing that stops MAGA politics.
If Kamala wins, I think it will sort of resoundly say,
that's not a good thing to do.
America is done with that.
Yes, there are probably millions in the, you know,
tens of millions, dozens of millions
that still agree with you and will still vote for you.
Some of those people held their nose and did it
because they could not stand Kamala Harris.
But there's gonna be a large margin of people.
It will almost have to be a sort of landslide
in order for this to happen.
But I think if it does, it would snap people out of it
and be like, we're done with that.
That's enough of that.
Look, politicians are nothing if not craven opportunists.
Yeah, exactly.
Right?
So I think if Kamala Harris defeats Trump,
he will have been defeated in 2020.
He will have been effectively defeated by referendum in 2022 through the midterm.
And he lost to 2018 in the midterms too.
Lost to 2018 in the midterms, 2022 and 2024.
He will, they will abandon him as the sinking old man ship he is.
He doesn't have another go at this.
There's no other go after this. It's not, in 28, he's not doing it.
He's not a 45 year old guy.
Yeah.
You know, this is it.
This is the end of the road.
We get to decide how this period gets put
at the end of this sentence.
Yeah.
We get that, we get this one chance to do it.
Yeah.
We get one fucking chance to do it.
And if we make a mistake, this will have,
this will ripple for generations.
And I don't want to exaggerate because there will be
no movement on climate change.
There will be not, there will be,
there'll be backward movement on climate change.
We are at the precipice of being able to potentially
maybe do something about that or to continue
into looming disaster.
Like that is a hundred% going to happen.
We will see friends and loved ones and family
and people that you care about rounded up and deported.
We know it because he said he's gonna do it.
Mass deportations.
I mean they have signs that say mass deportation now.
Yeah, there will be camps full of people.
We will see American citizens silenced out of fear
or out of persecution and prosecution
from being able to speak their minds.
Think back to the June of 2020.
Think back to the jackbooted thugs
that beat the shit out of people
and arrested reporters who were trying to exercise
their First Amendment right to assemble and
to protest.
That was an intentional use of state power.
Yeah.
And that will continue.
That will be that will become law.
That will become the norm.
There's no reason to think it wouldn't be.
It's already been that way.
And he's saying it out loud.
We have an obligation to listen.
And there's nobody there who's going to be the person who would say this, this is going
to look bad.
Don't do this.
Yeah.
Because there's nobody there who cares how it looks and he doesn't care because he's
not trying to get elected again.
And he's got immunity.
Yeah.
And he's and he's got immunity.
And there's no reason to believe that he'd step down at the end of his press.
It's bad.
It's bad.
It's as bad as possible.
I, you know, I think that, you know that when I say motivate too, I want to say definitely motivate Gen Z.
The people who are young, they're going to flip this switch, I think.
They've got to be the ones who are active and go out there and flip the switch.
We put a lot of pressure on young people.
We put a lot of pressure on people of color.
We put a lot of pressure on women because our demographic
votes so bad.
So bad.
So bad.
Trash.
Our demographic is terrible at this.
Garbage.
They choose literally the worst thing for everyone every time.
Yeah.
Like it is the case that the Republicans do not stand a statistical chance in hell.
They don't. They do not stand a chance if people of color, if young people, if women stand up and exercise their right to vote.
There are more of you than there are of them. It's not even close.
And we're notoriously lazy. I mean, let's be real honest. Our demographic is notoriously lazy.
Like, there are so many more of you.
So many more.
It's not even, the 51% of the population is women.
Like, the largest demographic cohort by age are Millennials in Gen Z.
It's not even close.
You do not cede your power to the boomers.
Don't allow them to make laws.
They'll die before they see the result of.
Take your power back.
And Gen X, we're terrible too.
Gen X is garbage.
Gen X is terrible.
Fuck Gen X.
Stop drinking from the hoes, asshole.
Get out and vote.
Yeah, we're terrible.
We're not bad at voting.
We're bad at voting for Nazis.
Yeah, well, the thing is like, we're bad at both.
Gen X doesn't show up, and then when we do,
we do the wrong thing.
Yeah, we do the wrong thing. The fuck is wrong with us? Yeah, it's bad. It's real bad. It's because we're bad at both Gen X doesn't show up and then when we do we do the wrong thing Yeah, we do the wrong thing. The fuck is wrong with us. It's bad. It's real bad. It's because we listen to Pearl Jam
You know, what the fuck were we thinking?
If you're blue and you don't know where to go to why don't you go where fashion sits?
Putting on the ritz
If you're blue and you don't know where to go to, why don't you go where fashion sits?
Putting on the rips.
All right, from the Guardian, Elon Musk has been in regular contact with Putin for two
years, says report.
What?
Yeah, man.
I learned some shit about this recently.
So Elon Musk, I don't know, I just, maybe you knew this.
Elon Musk holds a top secret security clearance.
Did you know that?
I figured he probably had some sort of security clearance
because of the things that he has to send into space for us.
Yeah, I think we have to take a minute and say out loud
how phenomenally powerful we've allowed Elon Musk to become.
Elon Musk is the richest man in the world.
I think he's worth somewhere around $249 billion.
Probably more like 207 after Twitter, but anyway.
Yeah, okay.
I think that's what I read recently.
He's worth around $249 billion,
which is a sum of money so insane
that the calculator on your iPhone won't display it.
It's essentially an unlimited amount of money.
Yeah, it's the infinity money cheat on any video.
It is, right, yeah.
And you have to recognize that money is a form of power.
That's what money is.
Money is not a stand-in for power.
It is quite literally power, which makes him the most powerful man, arguably, in the world.
He alone, he alone controls, controlling shares in SpaceX, makes substantive decisions about
things like where Starlink is allowed to operate, which means that he, as a one single person,
can make a decision about whether Ukraine
is allowed to continue to fight
or not allowed to continue to fight.
He has expressly not allowed Starlink satellites
to work over the Crimea region, specifically.
He's talking to Putin.
He holds a top secret clearance.
He's the guy who is in charge of the company that launches our Department of Defense satellites,
our spy satellites, into the air, or into the sky, rather.
There's an immense, immense, immense amount of power, and he's fucking chit-chatting with
Putin, who is actively engaged in a war of propaganda and sabotage with America.
Yeah.
Well, do you feel crazy knowing these things?
I feel crazy knowing this.
What's insane to me is that we didn't have a plan B, right?
That there isn't, you know, for everything in the government, there should always just
be you're fired, we're done.
We're moving on to the next thing.
Yeah.
There should always be someone who says, oh, that isn't working out.
Well, then we're going to use this instead.
The problem is, is that his service is so unique that they can't choose something else
because there isn't a second company out there that doing the things that he's doing.
You know, there are companies that are trying, and I think there may be some eventually,
but as it stands right now,
he's in a very unique position to hold that kind of power.
And it's like when you have an employee at your work
who knows that if you fire them,
they will take the entire Rolodex of sales with them,
and you're fucked.
So guess what?
They're gonna go out for a martini lunch
for the rest of the day.
And you're gonna be angry
that they didn't finish their work
and that's what you get to be.
Yep. Angry. Angry.
And the same thing happens here.
He's gonna do whatever the fuck he wants,
whenever the fuck he wants,
which is why he's pushing boundaries in every single fuck he wants, whenever the fuck he wants, which is why he's pushing boundaries
in every single way he can, because he knows there's no repercussions for the guy who holds
the fucking ignition switch when they count down to zero.
And that's fucking exactly, perfectly true.
And he is on stage with Trump. And Trump has said he wants to give Elon Musk a place,
a home, a job, power within his administration.
If Trump wins, the very regulatory agencies which should,
to at least some small degree, hold Elon Musk at bay,
will be under the purview of fucking Elon Musk or an Elon Musk
sycophant. When there are two people on that stage right now, when
Donald Trump is on stage with Elon Musk, Elon Musk is more powerful. He's more
powerful than every robber baron in all of American history combined. It's
not even close. Nobody's had. I looked this up the other day
Nobody has had a level of wealth even remotely adjusted for inflation. It's never been close to this
This is not just the most powerful man in the world. This is the most wealthy person to have lived
That's fucking insane. That guy in India like like a long time ago, who had owned all of it or something,
didn't that guy have like a trillion dollars?
I don't know.
I didn't come up with that when I was reading about this.
Okay.
Okay.
All right.
So maybe, but I didn't read about it.
Maybe there's one person.
And there's been disputes, because I was going to do an essay on the person because they
were supposed to be the most religious person.
You might be right.
It just didn't come up in my reading.
But there was disputes on whether or not adjusted for inflation matters in certain cases.
So like, and also how they adjust for inflation sometimes changes like wildly.
And when I did that Dutch East India thing, because they're like, it's the richest corporation ever.
And other people are like, not really. If you think about it in this way.
Because there's like entire pages of people arguing over economics, over whether or not it's true or not.
But even still, even if you're not right,
even if you're not right,
he still is the richest person now,
and he's the richest person anyone alive has ever known.
Oh, absolutely.
So those two things are true.
I can pretty much guarantee
both of those two things are true.
So it's a huge deal.
And you know, the one thing you pointed out,
and I think it's important to point out the parallel, Elon Musk is going to be in charge of people
who can then, who are going to be, you know, he can basically say if they would be the
regulators behind him to decide what he would do with his companies, he's going to be in
charge of those people. The same thing is going to happen to Trump if he gets elected
with the Department of Justice. All those cases that are against him for all the fraud and all the bad things that he did,
suddenly the Justice Department can close two major investigations down.
Yeah.
One of them has already been sort of closed down by Aline Cannon,
who they're now talking about as possibly being attorney general.
That's fucking terrifying and it does not, by Alene Cannon, who they're now talking about as possibly being attorney general.
That's fucking terrifying.
And it does not, if that doesn't smack of like wildly corrupt quid pro quo shit.
I mean, like, has there ever been anything more blatantly on its face corrupt?
But here's the thing.
Trump is openly corrupt.
Yeah.
It's not like you have to hide it.
This isn't even like Watergate.
No one's got a fucking flashlight.
They're walking around with their dicks out.
Yeah.
You're not kidding.
It's crazy how corrupt shit is.
And we're just like, well, that's Trump, my god, bruh.
Well, he's immune.
So you literally can't do anything about it.
Like integrity always mattered.
But as soon as the Supreme Court came out and said, presidents are just immune forever. Yeah.
Now integrity is all that matters.
Because that's the bulwark, right?
The only finger in the dike is personal integrity.
Yep. Yep.
That's insane, but it's true.
Yeah, we have a country on a handshake agreement.
For real, man.
Yeah.
Oof.
Cool.
Tomorrow!
I don't know, man. It's hard.
It's hard.
It's hard.
Get out there and vote.
That's the key.
Get out there and vote.
So what if things go wrong?
What do we do?
So if things go wrong and Trump is in, I want to stress you can't give up.
No.
If you give up, then what do we got?
You got to keep fighting.
Right?
So my suggestion would be twofold.
Fourth estate should live as hard as you can.
Make sure you give money to good journalism.
That does not include the Washington Post.
In my opinion, I agree.
I would not give money to the Washington Post.
When Trump won in 2016,
and we did his hundred days and we talked about what to do and we mentioned for the state is
important and we talked about, I think we might even mention the Washington Post. I take that
back. I rescind that. Yeah. Not the Washington Post. Places like ProPublica are doing the most
amazing journalism work, uncovering things, huge scandals in our society
that we've decided not to act on.
But huge scandals of society
that require the American people to know about.
But genuinely ProPublica is something I would consider.
Also, don't stop giving to charities.
The government will stop.
And we talked about this with the 100 days.
We gotta give to charity now. Find charities you agree with, but very specifically the vulnerable groups. Those
vulnerable groups that are going to be even more vulnerable in a Trump presidency are going to be
women. So abortion access, huge, right? Domestic shelters, huge. When you're talking about
transgender people and LGBT, you know, Trevor Project,
other projects, other charities that help people
that are in the LGBTQ plus community,
those are gonna be super important.
I mean, I was down in Georgia this last week
and every other commercial was an anti-trans Trump commercial.
The tagline was, therefore they, them were for you.
That was the tagline.
It was awful.
It was horrible.
They're anti, they're bigoted anti-trans shitty commercials that he's showing down there.
He's showing his whole ass when it comes to the LGBTQ plus community.
They're going to come after those people.
So that is important.
Any other marginalized groups out there
that are gonna be marginalized
because of this Trump presidency,
a possible Trump presidency,
help fund those things if you can,
if you got the money to do it.
Yeah, 100%.
I think I've got two suggestions.
The one is become a local grassroots organizer.
Like if you can run for something, run for something.
If you can join your city council, join your city council.
If you like get in there and try at the local level,
things do bubble up.
So if we are going to preserve
anything approaching a democracy,
that if we lose tomorrow,
we have an obligation to join our government, to be part of the government,
to infiltrate at every local level with good, decent people,
people with integrity, people who care about democracy,
people who care about the rule of law.
You have gotta be on your school board.
You've gotta be on your city council.
You've gotta run for county board president.
You've gotta do all of that stuff. You've gotta join be on your city council. You've got to run for county board president. You've got to do all of that stuff.
You've got to join your homeowners association.
I mean, just be involved.
You've got to do it because it will get dark.
The other thing I would suggest, and this is dark,
and I'm going to be careful about how I say it,
if it is possible for you to do it
without breaking any laws,
stock up on things like Mifipristo.
Have that available to you and your family
if you can do that without causing yourself
any financial or any legal trouble, right?
So I'm not telling you to break the law,
I'm telling you not to break the law.
But what I'm saying is that we may come into a place
where drugs like that are a necessary
and lifesaving part of your family's future.
And if you have some of that in your cabinet ahead of time,
you have probably the, just, if we lose tomorrow,
the clock is ticking.
Yeah, there's definitely,
the clock is ticking.
There's definitely some, there's a possibility, like I say,
there's no way it's not gonna be a red wave
and there's definitely some push with them
to try to make sure that there's a national abortion ban.
100%.
So if you can find a way to stock up, stock up.
Yeah, it's definitely something to think about.
Well, who's feeling like we're doomed?
Anyone?
No? Well, that's because you we're doomed? Anyone? No?
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Vote glory. And also just vote. Okay. Thank you
We are joined by Jim Cliff, author of 2000 Mules in One Big Lie, a stubborn conspiracy theory and the cohost of the Fallacious Trump podcast.
Welcome to the show, Jim.
Thanks so much for joining us.
Thank you very much for having me.
Pleasure to be here.
All right.
So we're going to talk about your book, 2000 Mules in One Big Lie.
I've got to ask you though, before we start, because people might not know,
this book is about Dinesh D'Souza.
So I'm going to ask you to start out,
tell people if they don't know who Dinesh D'Souza is.
Okay.
So I mean, well done if you don't know who Dinesh D'Souza is.
If you dodged it till now, you're crushing it.
I will say before you start, I remember first hearing of Dinesh D'Souza when he had the
misfortune of being on the debate stage with like Christopher Hitchens and people that
were educated.
Like really good.
Yeah, that was rough for Dinesh D'Souza.
He often tries to punch above his weight.
Yeah.
Yes, very much so.
He is a right-wing pundit filmmaker. I'm going to put that in inverted commas.
And a podcaster, author who has written, he's made several documentaries that have done very well on the right. He made one about Hillary's America,
it was called, what it would be like if Hillary was elected. He made one about Obama. This one,
2000 Meals, was about how the Democrats stole the 2020 election from Trump. And since then,
he's even made two. He's made one called Police State and a recent one called V election from Trump. And since then he's even made two.
He's made one called police state and a recent one called vindicating Trump,
which they're all filled with scaremongering and misinformation because
that's what he's really good at.
How good at plagiarism is he though?
Like, is he really good or just sort of so, so good?
majorism is he though? Like is he really good or sort of so so good? He does tend to take bits and pieces from other people's work. Mostly right wing authors.
So you wouldn't know him.
Sure.
So no people were harmed.
Yeah. No, it's fine. And every now and again, he even credits them, but it's... Now you didn't mention that he's also a felon, I don't think, but he is a felon as well.
Yeah.
Yeah, I didn't want to poison the well too much.
Well, let's poison. I don't know if it's poisoning the well to say true things. You know, like,
if somebody said like, hey, Tom, you're short, I couldn't be like, no. I mean, like, I'm
fucking short. Like, Dinesh D'Souza is a be like, no, I mean, like I'm fucking short.
Like Dinesh Asuza is a felon.
Like that's a fact about who he is.
And he is also a plagiarist and that is a fact about who he is.
And I do think that while I'm not the biggest, like, you know, no person is
irredeemable, people can't make mistakes.
I mean, if we are, if we are going to, if we're going to look at something and
say, Hey, let's look at the credibility, then the credibility of the creator is if
you, if you have a history of being non-credible, like philoniously non-credible, I mean, I
think maybe we should pay a little bit of attention to that. Like I'm not running out
and buying Joan O'Lara's fucking documentary about Proust being a neuroscientist. Can you drop the Joan O'Leary stuff?
My heart will never stop breaking.
Jesus.
Yeah, no, I mean, he's not only a felon.
He's one who was pardoned by Trump.
Oh, well, there you go.
I remember your rights.
That's right.
A little bit of a relationship there.
Yeah.
So in this documentary that he makes about election fraud, it's very, it's kind of perfect
that we're doing this.
This show will release the eve of the election in the United States.
So it's perfect that we're recording this today to talk about this, but let's talk about
the election fraud he supposes happens
because we had an opportunity to look at some
of this election fraud.
It was presented to the American people,
I think last year in a pamphlet Donald Trump gave out
that had a bunch of footnotes that led to True the Vote,
which I know also plays a big part in the 2000 mules. So
tell us a little bit about the election fraud that he said happened.
Okay. So yeah, he's getting his information from an organization called True the Vote,
which is a right-wing organization that grew out of a tea party group. And they are,
supposedly, they kind of set up to look for any anomalies that they can
point to as voter fraud really.
And so they came up with an idea and then decided that they had a way to test it, that
people were harvesting ballots, collecting ballots from people that-
What like Prince Spaghetti Night?
Are we talking about?
Like what are you talking about?
Harvesting them from the ballot trees.
You go out to the ballot trees, Cecil, and you collect ballots.
Yeah.
They blossom only in certain areas.
They only grow though.
They only grow in swing states.
So in a lot of places it is legal to collect ballots from other people and deliver them to drop mail in drop boxes
through the regular mail or to election offices. Usually in most states there's some restrictions
on who's allowed to do that, how many are allowed to do, but some states there's no
restrictions at all. So their theory is that people are doing this on a kind of a giant scale,
collecting them, possibly messing with them somewhere along the way,
possibly forging some. It's really undefined. There's multiple competing and mutually exclusive
theories in the film about where these ballots actually came from. But what they're pretty
sure about is that they have a group of paid mules. They're calling them mules because
they're likening it
to drug trafficking and human trafficking.
They're trying to like connect it
with like cartel sleaziness, right?
And you have to take the ballot out of the condom
and you put it in the, I get it.
Okay, yeah.
You know, they got calves the size of cantaloupes
from carrying all those things.
You gotta store those ballots in your prison pocket.
Let me tell you, those ballots are huge.
Yeah, you can roll them into a tube, but it's only so good, so long.
And they had hundreds.
So, yeah.
Real quick. I voted. You voted, C.
I'm trying to think of how, if I handed my filled out ballot to you,
how you could even change that ballot in a way that doesn't render the ballot useless.
Yeah, that's a really good point.
You can't like you get it to be like, oopsie.
And then that's how it works.
You have to get it.
You spoil the ballot.
So if I get it just for just for people who may not have engaged the voting process or
maybe not in America, like if I have a ballot, I fill out the ballot.
And then if I fuck up the ballot, I have to go get a new one
You cannot be like whoopsie doodle and like initial it or something spoiled your ballot
You have to go to a place to get a ballot or go on Election Day and show them your other ballot
Like there's their systems in place to prevent so even if I gave you my ballot Cecil and you were like I want to change
Your vote you can't change my vote. All you can do is carry my vote for me. That's it.
Yeah, this theory relies on them getting hold of tens of thousands, probably hundreds of
thousands, depending on which bit of the film the maths is based on, of ballots that are pre-filled
in. Like they're the ones that before people have actually done their
voting on them or sealed them up or something like that. So they have to somehow get hold of
that number of ballots. No explanation of how that happens. A few weird theories. But then what
they're doing is they are storing them at various unnamed nonprofit organizations, all of which are
supposedly very left-wing. And then these paid mules are taking them from those and distributing them in
ballot drop boxes all around various cities, cities in swing states.
And that somehow meant that Biden won.
It's really not clear how one thing leads to another.
Here's what I got to do real quick, because I love when people, I love this kind of stuff, right? So I do some of this like basic sort of like, like the most world's basic, most basic data analysis for my job, right?
You start doing like some productivity stuff and you start looking at like the problem of big numbers.
And as soon as you said like hundreds of thousands, I thought to myself
immediately and I busted out my calculator, what if I took a hundred thousand? And I said, we're
going to spend 12 minutes in total fucking with every ballot. So that means just doing some amount
of work in order to get that ballot adjusted, cheated out, restuffed, whatever. Let me do, oh,
ballot, adjusted, cheated out, restuffed, whatever. Let me do, oh, that's 1,200,000 minutes.
That's 20,000 hours of labor that would have to be done
to fuck with 100,000 ballots.
Even if it took you less than 15 minutes per ballot
to do any amount of work or change or adjustment to it
It's an it's a you just do it. You just like oh like there's literally no possible way that that's gonna happen
Even if you had 2,000 mules, that's not possible. You have
20,000 hours of work right here just in one place
Yeah, his numbers don't work when he doesn't can can't, right? Yeah. No, at one point,
the way they reckon they showed this was true. One of the ways they think they proved it is with
cell phone data, geolocation data from cell phones. And so cell phones put out signals to the local towers, get signals back from local
towers and some of those signals have location data in them and your phone collects that
data and apps also on your phone collect that data and they're used for advertising purposes.
Some apps use them for like mapping stuff or letting Uber drivers know where you are, that kind of thing.
Many of the apps also sell that data to brokers and through the vote bought a lot of that data
for the election period. And so they think from that, that they can track those individuals,
those phone signals, the device signals, to figure out where they
were, where those people were at the different times during the election period.
Wait a minute.
How did they know whose phones to track?
They didn't, they started off just tracking everyone.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, that sounds time effective.
Sure.
So all of the data they could get, and these massive amounts of data that you get from
brokers really, really depends on which brokers you get it from and how well collated this
data is, how reliable it is.
Because there are some less than scrupulous data brokers who are prepared to sell you
stuff if you want to buy stuff.
Sure.
Yeah.
And so they started off with everyone. And then what they did was they
tried to see who went to the places where there are drop boxes. And they set themselves a
threshold of you had to go to 10 different drop boxes or 10 unique visits to a drop box.
And also you had to go to one of these non-profit organizations that they don't actually
name in the film. And so with that, they narrowed their kind of field of who they were looking at
down quite a lot. But what they did was they virtually geo-fenced the Dropboxes. So they
built a kind of... they worked out the latitude and
longitude of the drop boxes. They didn't, but that's what they say they did. If they did it,
they did it terribly because I've checked some of the locations. But what they reckon is that they
geo-fenced around those drop boxes. And then when those devices came into that geo-fenced area,
that counts as a visit to the drop box.
So they just got, but these drop boxes are very often in very public spaces that lots
of people have lots of reasons to go to, right?
I mean, I'm not crazy.
These Dropboxes are not on a hill, like, absent.
It's like, they don't just like construct a tower upon which is only the Dropbox.
It's not a monument.
Right, yeah.
It's like a fucking like Mayan tower.
You have to climb up like 139 fucking ceremonial steps to get to the top.
It's just like outside the post office or the fucking civic center or whatever.
That was limit the boomer vote though, if you had to do all those things.
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Another busy street corners, shopping centers, community centers, gyms,
colleges, libraries, often lots in libraries, that kind of thing. So yeah, they're in places
where people are going to go anyway. And that's the point that they're supposed to be convenient
for where you can drop off your ballot. And that is a big problem for their theory, because
it relies on the fact that there's no other reason to go to those places.
Why are all these people going to places of convenience?
I don't know.
Maybe it's fucking convenient.
Does it feel like they're starting in reverse?
Like, you know, it feels almost like intelligent design of voter fraud, right?
You have a conclusion you want to make, you decide there was voter fraud,
and then you cherry pick data that you've harvested from massive data dumps to then
say, see, it works this way because I found the data that supports my thing, even though
I have no proof whatsoever that the data I actually have supports it in any way.
Right. Very much so, yeah.
It really seems like they started with the idea
of how it would be done.
Well, what actually they say, not necessarily in the film,
but lots of other stuff that Katherine and Greg
of True The Vote have talked about in other interviews
and on their website, is that they wanted to figure out
what would be a way that it could have been stolen that they could prove, that they could track. And it just so happens that the way they go up
and came up with it.
I didn't do it, but if I did, here's how I would have done it. The O.J. Simpson voting
story.
And amazingly, they came up with the exact way it was apparently done based on the data
that they then gathered to prove the thing that they thought maybe had happened.
Yeah.
They did a reverse Ocean's 11.
That's what they did.
They did a reverse Ocean's 11.
This is great.
Ocean number two.
All right.
So they figured out that people were going to the library and the shopping mall and they
were like, well, clearly they're nefariously borrowing books and going to Talbot's. So like what
else?
So this was obviously a slam dunk in the Supreme Court. What happens after?
Well, this is why they overturn the election system because this evidence was so incontrovertibly
true.
The thing I found when we were looking at the, um, the film on our podcast and when
I was researching for the
book is there are so many different ways their theory is definitely wrong.
And one of the ways is the fact that all of the drop boxes are in convenient places.
But one of the other really important ways is that you can't use cell phone data to prove
the stuff they're trying to use it to prove because it's nowhere near accurate enough to tell you that someone went to a
drop box versus went to the Starbucks across the street.
It just it's not possible.
Like the absolute best possible case for how accurate and how precise cell phone data is
is around 16 feet. And that is when you have line of sight of four
different satellites, you are under open skies, no trees, no buildings around you. And you
have like a really convenient and reliable cell phone and the right data program and
that kind of stuff. Different cell phones, different models of different
cell phones have different reliability. And as soon as you put it in an urban environment,
buildings, trees, bridges, the signals are bouncing around. It is like a hundred feet
is kind of your pretty much average likelihood of knowing exactly where the person is.
How much can it be off?
I mean, it can be. There was a study done at the University
of Atlanta in Georgia, where they were looking at things that were nearly 400 feet out. Oh,
my gosh. In some cases. And I mean, again, it very much depends on the data that you collect. Because
if you if they we don't know who they bought the data from. If they bought the data from an unstrupulous broker, there's this thing called centroid data, where some apps will
not collect the exact location of the phone. They'll collect kind of what, what county it's in or
what city it's in, or even like what country it's in. And then it will, what it will return as its
location is the center point of that
location, that city or that county or country.
So now it strikes me that I am not stupid.
And if I were going to organize a massive nationwide or at least seven statewide,
uh, coordinated theft of an election, I would just tell people not, like all my conspirators
would not be allowed to bring their phones.
Like, I don't know if people know this, but like your phone is actually something you
don't have to carry.
You don't have to carry it with you every week.
It is possible.
I don't know.
It's crazy shit, but like you can actually not have a cell phone for a few hours and
your heart does not stop beating
Wouldn't you just like it seriously though if I were committing a major I go to jail forever
I'm committing essentially like
Treason here. I'm stealing an election. I'm gonna go to I'm gonna have multiple hundred thousand counts of a felony, right?
I would be so paranoid about my security protocol doing that
that I would gather up all my 2,000 mules
and I'd bring them all in like a big mule warehouse
and I would have a no cell phones meeting, right?
It'd be like, yeah.
It'll be like going to the fucking Bruno Mars concert
in Las Vegas.
Everybody has to put their fucking cell phone
in one of those like no cell phone bags.
Yeah.
And I'd be like, all right guys,
we're committing a major fraud. Everybody put your cell phone in the cell phone bag.
And then before we leave, everybody hand in the center.
Go fraud. Go fraud.
You've got to do a go fraud or it doesn't even count.
Yeah. How are you going to get people excited?
Yeah. You got to do the huddle.
See, so it's the huddle.
I mean, I, I, I, why would you even do that?
The other thing I wanted to add to is what if you, these companies that are collecting this data, I don't need 16 feet if I'm trying to sell you Levi's at a place
down the street, right? I need your general location. So they don't need this pinpoint
data. So they, that's why it doesn't really exist, right?
Yeah. That and the fact that it's just the limits
of the technology.
Yeah, the technology won't let you do it.
Because this is cell phone,
this is cell tower triangulation, this isn't GPS.
Right, so like,
it's actually more persistent.
Because when I was listening to you earlier,
I was thinking about like, I've got,
like I've got Life360 on my kids' phones, right?
So Life360, I can look and be like,
yeah, I can see actually what room in the house they're in.
It's pretty damn good, but it uses GPS, you know, and their phones are
actually grafted into their bodies.
So that's, that's, that's different.
It's there 14 and 17 and 18.
Their phones are grafted into their bodies, but like, yeah, I mean, like
probably this is cell phone.
It's likely a combination of different types of data cell phone.
A cell tower triangulation is definitely one of them.
GPS is probably included although most likely
It's a thing called assisted GPS a GPS because like I said to get a good signal GPS has to have line of sight to four
Satellites which is rare in a city
so most cell phones these days use a thing called a GPS which finds the signal quicker because
GPS also takes a little while to get to a signal and when you want when you open up an app that needs location services on your phone you don't want to wait two minutes to be
able to use it. So assisted GPS uses one or two satellites and it downloads data of where those
satellites were from the nearest cell tower quickly to kind of give you a better estimate
or a quicker estimate but it's not as accurate as GPS. There's also, arguably, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth
signals, although there's no reason to assume that any of these bits of data that True The Vote
gathered actually used Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, but just kind of for clarity, those can be better.
Wi-Fi can be better. Bluetooth is usually better, but it requires a Bluetooth beacon to be installed
at the site. So that's when you'll sometimes be like in a CVS
and it'll know what aisle you're in or something like that.
That's because they've got a Bluetooth beacon there.
Well, now that does bring up an interesting point though,
is that why don't we just,
because obviously if you're doing this documentary,
2000 Mules and you're true to vote,
they've clearly released all of the data that they used
in interest of transparency.
So we can just check their maths. I use the math because you're British.
They could check their maths and then we can like understand and so obviously they've done
that.
Right.
I mean, we just go back through and yeah, sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They, they said they would.
Yeah.
Like at the kind of virtual premiere of the movie back in in 2020, but 2022 should have
been earlier that it's come out.
We're still waiting at the moment.
They said that they would release everything.
The whole of the software and data, all of their conclusions.
They said they would release all of the video, the video surveillance of Dropboxes, which
they say proves that there were people who'd visited multiple drop boxes, dropped off ballots.
They claim to have footage of people at multiple drop boxes, but we haven't seen any of that.
But this is kind of exactly what you'd expect from these people. Because Greg Phillips,
one of the people in the film who is in True to Vote, he was the guy who promised that
there were three million non-citizen
voters in 2016.
That's that guy.
Three million non-citizen guy.
So that Trump could feel good about winning the popular vote too, right?
Yeah.
So every time Trump said, I won the popular vote if you deduct all of the people who voted
illegally, that's because of Greg Phillips data.
Data that he, in November 2016 promised
he would release and still has not today.
Wow.
So, and again, just, just to kind of walk this through for anyone who's not in the States,
to vote illegally is impossible. It's just impossible.
It's incredibly hard.
I mean, like, if I'm like, how would an illegal, how would somebody, I don't want to call somebody illegal,
how would an undocumented immigrant register themselves to vote?
They would be unable to register themselves to vote is the answer.
So when they showed up to the polls and they said, hi, I'm Tom, I'm here to vote, they would not be on the registration.
They would have to steal someone else's ballot or they'd have to give someone else's name
or something like that.
Right.
You'd have to do an identity fraud.
I don't know if the people understand that.
I think there's people that feel, that think erroneously that, you know, undocumented immigrants
can register to vote and show up as themselves to vote and have their votes
count. That's just not an act. That's not a possibility. To do it like they would have
to commit an identity fraud and to do that would be fantastically difficult as well.
Because you would have to know like, hi, I'm Tom Curry. And I have to know that the real
Tom Curry didn't already show up to vote or isn't going to show up in an hour to vote.
So like, that's one of the other ways this is pretty much impossible
to like on the scale that they're talking about.
And you'd have to do that.
It's just not possible.
Hundreds and thousands of times for it to be meaningful.
It's voter fraud is like phenomenally comically difficult
and the stakes for each individual doing it are super high.
Well, and each one sounds like it takes a very long time
to even do.
And then you start adding in, well, now I've got to get, let's even just be
charitable and say he needs 11,780.
Right.
That's still a lot of time for each individual fraud to take place.
So it's, it's really seems like it's not, it's not even possible.
Yeah.
Much less three million people doing this.
Three million!
Yeah, they talk in the film about a few kind of proven
cases of voter fraud that have really happened
and everyone on both sides agrees have happened.
And they are universally like between kind of 10
and a couple of thousand ballots that were involved.
And they were all caught, all those people.
And a good chunk of the ones that they talk about in the film were Republicans who were doing the fraud.
Okay, so we're talking about this data can't be the only thing they're doing.
They've got to have other... Is that it?
You would think, sure.
I mean, to back up the data, they have surveillance video,
because this is one of the other things you were saying that, you know, sure, you'd ask people to
leave their cell phones at home so they weren't tracked. Not only that, not only did the Democrats
who did this whole big fraud thing not ask the people to leave their phones at home, they required
them to take photos of
the ballots going into ballot boxes, supposedly according to True The Vote.
So they made an enormous amount of photographic evidence of all the crimes they were doing.
And also required them to go to drop boxes, which are pretty much all covered by surveillance videos, rather than
just putting those ballots in the regular US mail, where it's not weird to see someone
dropping off a bunch of mail all at once.
And they don't want to pay for those forever stamps.
You know, that shit adds up.
And that's, you know, I just want to point out, that's a really interesting point because
like you're not talking about early voting, right? Early voting happens at a place with a human being where you go in and you do a thing,
and then you, you hand them your ballot and then they, like, it's basically a polling place,
but it just happens to be probably a consolidation of many different polling places where you go and
you vote. This is mail-in voting with a drop-off box. So you have an option, which is a paid for
stamp by the government to just put it.
What I did with mine, I voted the first day I got it. I took it to the actual post office and
handed it to the guy and he stamped it and put it in the thing back there. So like you can actually
just go to the post office and the postal worker literally wouldn't care if you came in with 40,
be like, whatever man, that's my job to stamp these.
I'm done.
Yeah.
Or you can just put it in a regular US mailbox.
Which are not under CCTV.
CCTV.
Yeah.
Okay.
Alright.
Makes sense.
You could put them in your home mailbox.
How are they taken?
With the flag up.
Yeah.
I'm like, it's actually even dumber.
Like, if you're committing fraud, there's a hundred better ways to commit fraud.
This is the worst way to commit fraud.
Committing it from your home might not be the best way to do it.
Why not put it in your mailbox and put the flag up?
What are friends for?
Yeah, I mean, I'm not an asshole.
Makes sense, makes sense to us.
So how many dogs were involved in the making of this fraud? Because it's not
zero. Hard to tell because the main one we saw was blurred. So we're not sure. You guys,
you got to tell the blur dog thing because this kills me. So when regular filmmakers
make documentaries about crimes, they've usually done enough research and
they're pretty sure about what they're saying. So they're usually prepared to name the people
committing the crimes and show their faces. Dinesh is less confident, or at least his lawyers are,
that they've definitely. Jail him once shame on him.
And so consequently, apparently his lawyers asked him to blur all the faces of the people
who were dropping off ballots in the film.
And one of the people does have a so much better if they just did the black eyes.
Oh God.
Cross over the little black bar across the eye.
That would have been amazing.
There's like a little corgi with like a bunch of balance in its mouth, those stumpy little
fucking legs.
Walk it up.
It's got a black bar.
It's got a black bar over its fucking eyes.
That's immusal.
And then they interview the dog and they like pixelate it.
They mess with its voice like.
Did they hold a treat over the box to get the dog to put it in?
That's amazing.
Amazing.
Wow.
So other, the others, but we didn't really get into the CCTV footage because actually
that might be damning, right?
If you see somebody who keeps coming back over and over and over and over,
absolutely dropping off a bunch of ballots.
If they don't say work at like a nursing home and they're doing it for say a group
of elderly people or something, you might think, well, this might be fraud.
So did that lead to anything?
No, well, not that they wanted it to lead to, no.
It didn't lead to one guy suing them.
Oh, okay.
All right.
That's interesting.
Yeah, no, but the problems with the video are that if this was true, any of the stuff
that they're saying, there would be video evidence of people doing weird stuff, like
people visiting multiple drop boxes and
it's the same person and they're dropping off different ballots at different drop boxes.
That's that's a little bit suspicious.
If they were seen coming back to the same one lots of times or dropping off like loads
of ballots in one drop box, then there's things that could be suspicious.
But none of that is seen in the film.
They don't show a single person at more than one Dropbox or even coming back to the same
Dropbox more than once.
They don't show people dropping off any more than six ballots, which they only have video
for Georgia.
And in Georgia, any member of your family can drop off ballots for you.
So six is not an unusual number for them to someone to be dropping off.
Especially in the south.
So none of the stuff, none of the stuff that they showed
could reasonably be illegal.
It's just, none of it is even suspicious.
So what they did is they focused on any kind of anomaly
that they could point to and go,
oh, that's a bit interesting, isn't it?
That's a bit weird.
Wonder why they did that.
Like people dropping off more than one,
people taking photos,
which apparently they don't know social media exists
and they couldn't think of another reason
why people would take photos of the Dropbox.
And people wearing gloves,
because they claimed that that was to avoid fingerprints
on the ballots.
And obviously, you know, I think there was a thing in 2020.
It was the 2020 election, right?
Yeah. I feel like there was another reason people might have It was the 2020 election, right? Yeah.
I feel like there was another reason people weren't wearing gloves.
Yeah, there may have been.
Yeah.
A global fashion trend of gloves.
Yeah.
Well, like also if they had incontrovertible video evidence, wouldn't they have taken this
to the FBI and these people would have been arrested and we wouldn't have to worry about like putting the black bar
over the puppy dog's face because like they would have been arrested. Like if I'm
doing a thing that's illegal, like real big illegal, because this is big illegal,
and you've got me on tape doing it, and I if I have that tape I'd be like oh shit
hey 1-800-the-FBI or whatever your fucking phone number is, you should see this
video. But the fact that that doesn't happen and it gets turned into like a shoddily produced
Dinesh D'Souza fucking trash documentary, that also tells you that it's not fucking,
it's not a thing. It's just not a thing.
They did give the cell phone data to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, who looked
at it and said, yeah, this isn't anything.
This doesn't rise to the level that we're even going to bother investigating this trash,
basically.
Yeah.
We ran this through our computers.
They said beep bop boop, who gives a shit?
You sent us images of people taking ballot selfies and a very suspicious dog.
We're not going to do anything. Wow. So, so, so this, so this doesn't lead anywhere, right?
No, no, that guy who sued them, though, the Dinesh invoice over while that guy was voting for his,
him and his family, Dinesh said, this is what you're seeing is
a crime, these are fraudulent votes. And his face was blurred. But when they were promoting
the film, they went on like Charlie Kirk show and things like that. They did show that video
with his face unblurred.
Oh, that dumb asses.
Yeah. And so that was actually investigated by the Georgia Secretary of State because
another guy, David Cross in Georgia, who had given them some of the video, he had also
sent it to the Secretary of State to say, look, this is suspicious. And they'd investigated
that. They'd got his name and address off because his car was in shot, so they had his
license plate. So they figured out who it was. They went, they checked whether he and his family had voted. They'd voted on that day, you
know, ballots had been dropped off in that drop box on that day. And then they went and asked him
and said, you know, were you there? What were you doing? And they checked that he had five legal
voters in his household. And he said that that's who the votes were for.
So basically they checked it. They'd said, yeah, this isn't a crime. This is fine. He was just
voting. And that was like three days before the film came out in theatres in the US. So
the fact that they then said, yeah, this is a crime. What you're seeing is someone breaking
the law. That guy then sued them. And that resulted in Salem, the production company, the people who put up the money for
it, withdrawing the film from their platforms.
But it's not completely withdrawn because it wasn't only them who were distributing
it because Dinesh also has systems online to send it out there.
And is that lawsuit still pending?
It's still pending against Dinesh and True The Vote because they haven't backed down,
but Salem settled with the guy that made a public apology with True The Film from their
platforms and paid him an undisclosed but apparently quite large sum of money.
Oh, God.
I hope.
Oh, man.
All I want to see is like these dumb sons of bitches just get sued into oblivion.
Like it had like Giuliani got sued so hard. He's
like they're like taking his fucking shit out of his nightstand.
Someone grabbed him by his belt loops and his back and just threw him out of his condo
earlier this week.
For real, like just like I want all the like Fox News got laid off like a billion dollars
or damn near a billion dollars. Like these guys at some point you just have to make it
so that it's just financially
devastating. Devastating. Like they need to get sued to the place where they cannot recover and then somebody else needs to sue them after that.
They need to get sued as a series of like lawsuit dominoes. So as soon as one of them settles,
the other one pops up. Russian vesting suit.
Exactly. Just constant unending lawsuits until they're too afraid to pull this shit
It's I don't know any other way out of this this nonsense. I mean I guess
They blur the faces of all the puppies that are you know the kittens and all the other Giuliani with a black box
Well, yeah comes with his own black box just leaks slowly down his face
He's so you know, it's him because he's in front of Four Seasons Total landscape.
You know it's him.
So can you tell us a little bit about your podcast?
Yeah.
So we talk about logical fallacies, but using Trump mainly as examples because he does that
a lot.
Does he use like a smatter?
Does he pick one a lot or does he use like a whole
smorgasbord full of fallacies? Well, we just did episode 160. So yeah, we've done like a fifth of
the number of episodes you've done. And, but each one is a different logical fantasy. And yeah,
we use Trump examples. We do examples from British politics and then once from pop culture kind of
TV, film and TV, um, and, and we talk about critical thinking and politics basically.
Wow.
Those two things do not go together very often.
So that's a really interesting mix.
Why you really picked from two different baskets there.
So as, as obviously like, why are you so interested in American politics?
I mean, other than the fact that, like, it obviously does have ripple effects across
the pond, but why is American politics the focus of your book?
Well, a while ago, I mean, I've always been interested in kind of how people think.
I studied psychology at uni, my co-host Mark studied philosophy.
So we kind of come up how people think from slightly different perspectives.
And I wanted to write about logical fallacies a while ago, but it had kind of already been done.
Lots of people had done really quite good books about different logical fallacies.
And then when Trump came along, I thought, oh, this is interesting.
Because he was doing a lot and talking nonsense and doing and
like backing his claims up in ways that just don't support the claims in any way. And so I thought,
actually, that's, that's an interesting way to look at it. And I've always kind of been
America focused. I've always preferred American TV and films and books and things like that. So
it's just, it was a thing that already slightly interested me and it, and going,
putting those two things together made sense.
Yeah.
And he's a supernova of logical fallacies.
So there is probably a never ending font of logical fallacy.
You could probably get multiple ones in every single speech he's given.
You know, I'm sure like you could probably even just sample like five minutes and catch several.
I think Cecil asked this, but I didn't catch the answer.
Did, does he have a logical fallacy he returns to most often?
Every now and again, we'll do one and we'll say, I can't believe we
haven't already done this because he does this all the time.
Um, I think the first time we did that was probably ad hominem.
So like attacking people instead of attacking their ideas.
He did that like the first Republican primary debate
in 2016 where he was talking to about how Rand Paul looks
and Carly Fiorina and all of that kind of stuff.
And he, yeah, so attacking people rather than their ideas
is a really big one for him.
Non sequiturs is kind of also big.
I believe that's called the weave.
I believe.
Yeah, that's the kind of colloquial sense of non sequitur,
but the logical fallacy sense is just where
the conclusion does not follow from the premise.
And he does that a lot where he'll kind of set something up
and then go somewhere completely different with the ending.
What, what, what, what strikes me is argument from popularity is probably one that he does
all the time because people are saying it. Yeah. Exactly. Or he's constantly talking
about the size of his crowds and how that sort of validates the things that he's saying
and how, you know, how good he is for the things that he's doing.
And argument from authority. Like, oh, the best guys tell me it's this way.
The bad guy, all the...
Writes itself, it's such a genius idea.
His authority is often himself.
Such a genius idea for a show.
Yeah, that is really clever.
Gosh, I wish I had a clever idea for a show.
It's never stopped us before, Cecil.
It's never stopped us before. Yeah, never stopped us before. So people are going
to find your book and your podcast. Where would they look? The podcast is fallacioustrump.com.
That's the best place. And the book is just available on Amazon. So search for 2000 mills
and choose the one that wasn't written by Dinesh. It was great having you on the show.
I'm sure we're going to call you again to talk about Trump if he ever drops some big
logical fallacies.
It was such a blast to have you on.
Thanks so much.
Thanks, man.
Thank you very much.
So tomorrow, come join us.
We're going to be doing the election coverage, real time shocked Pikachu faces.
Come hang out with us and Heath and Wright.
It'll be a lot of fun.
This will be the last time before election.
Yeah.
We get to say this, but we're gonna leave you,
like we always do, with Skeptics Creed.
Credulity is not a virtue.
It's fortune cookie cutter, mommy issue,
hypno Babylon bullshit couched in
scientician double bubble toil and trouble pseudo quasi alternative
acupunctuating pressurized stereogram pyramidal free energy healing water
downward spiral brain dead pan sales pitch late night info docutainment Leo
Pisces cancer cures detox detox, reflex, foot massage
Death in Towers, tarot cards, psychic healing, crystal balls
Bigfoot, Yeti, aliens, churches, mosques and synagogues
Temples, dragons, giant worms
Atlantis, dolphins, truthers, birthers, witches, wizards
Yes! Big! Beautiful!
Nuts! witches, wizards, yes, big, beautiful, nuts, shaman healers, evangelists, conspiracy, double
speak stigmata, nonsense.
Expose your sides.
Thrust your hands.
Bloody, evidential, conclusive.
Doubt even this. all under the handle at DissonancePod. This show is CAN-credentialed,
which means you can report instances of harassment, abuse, or other harm
on their hotline at 617-249-4255
or on their website at creatoraccountabilitynetwork.org. I'm out.