Calling Cards – FT#158

01 Oct Calling Cards – FT#158

Show Notes

The Calling Cards Fallacy occurs when someone dismisses a valid point by accusing their opponent of playing a rhetorical card.

Trump

We started out by discussing this clip of Trump following the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett

And then we looked at this clip of Trump accusing Hillary of playing the woman card

Finally, we talked about this Truth Social post

Mark’s British Politics Corner

Mark talked about Lee Anderson MP acusing London Mayor Sadiq Khan of selling out London to “his Islamist mates” and then when Khan complained, wrote “Sadly, Sadiq Khan has resorted to playing the race card and accused me of stoking up division.”

He followed that up by talking about this clip of Baroness Fox

Fallacy in the Wild

In the Fallacy in the Wild we looked at this clip from Brooklyn Nine-Nine:

Then we discussed this clip from Harry’s Law:

And we finished up with this clip from Wonder Woman:

 

Fake News

Here are the statements from this week’s Fake News game:

1.  The police aren’t allowed to do their job. They’re told if you do anything, you’re going to lose your pension, you’re going to lose your family, your house, your car. The police want to do it. The border patrol wants to do it. Border patrol – they’re incredible – they want to do it. They’re not allowed to do it, because the liberal left won’t let them do it. The liberal left wants to destroy them and they want to destroy our country. You know, if you had one day… like one real rough, nasty day with the drugstores as an example.
2. You know, she created something in San Francisco. $950 you’re allowed to steal. Anything above that, you will be prosecuted. Well it works out that the 950 is a misnomer because you can steal whatever you want, you can go way above. But you’d see originally you saw kids walk in with calculators. They were calculating. They didn’t want to go over the $950. They’re standing with calculators, adding it up. You know these are smart smart people. They’re not so stupid, but they have to be taught. Now if you had one really violent day…
3. But right now the migrants are getting away with everything, they walk into a store and just empty the shelves and walk out. They put – they take washing machines and dishwashers on their backs and walk right out of the store and nobody can do anything about it. Stores are having to close because they’re losing everything. I think all we need is one day, maybe one hour, when the police are allowed to just be extraordinarily rough, and everyone would get the message. It wouldn’t happen any more after that, believe me.

Mark got it wrong this week, and is on 52%!

 

Voter fraud is not a logical fallacy

We talked about a poll that supposedly proves one in five mail-in voters cheated in the 2020 election.

 

The stories we really didn’t have time to talk about

• You probably don’t remember now, but as I was finishing up recording the last episode, reports were coming through of a second assassination attempt on Trump. The reason you might not remember is that it’s hardly been in the news since. Is this evidence of the deep state and the mainstream media colluding to normalise political violence against Republicans? No, it’s because it didn’t really count. I’m not making some conspiracy theory argument that it was staged, I’m saying that dumb and ineffective plots like this get foiled by the Secret Service all the time, and we never hear anything about it. In this instance, the guy, who I won’t name because fame is a motivator for some of these people, hid out next to Trump’s golf course with a rifle for 12 hours. Early reports of gunfire in Trump’s vicinity appear to have actually been Secret Service agents firing on the guy, who immediately ran away, and was quickly captured. It seems that he didn’t fire, and was never within sight of Trump himself. Of course, Trump tried to fundraise off this and his supporters claim that not being shot by virtue of not being anywhere near the bad guy and the government doing its job is somehow evidence of his strength. But this is actually just one of many incidents involving idiots being bad at attacking Presidents. In both 2017 and 2020, the Secret Service intercepted two separate letters laced with ricin and intended for Trump, just as they had done for Obama in April and May 2013. In 2017, a guy in an oil refinery in north Dakota stole a forklift and crashed it, and nobody would even have known it was an assassination attempt if he hadn’t laid out his plan to police afterwards. Apparently, he was intending to use the forklift to flip the presidential limousine like Lock-Jaw from BattleBots (or Chaos2 from Robot Wars for our British listeners). In all, the Secret Service uncovered and foiled at least 11 assassination plots against Obama, including a guy in 2011 who fired a semi-automatic rifle at the White House and a pipe bomb that was sent to Obama’s home in 2018. Two people tried to shoot Gerald Ford within three weeks in 1975. There’s a long and storied history of these attempts, some of which resulted in even more serious injuries than a slight scratch on the ear, but it takes a cult to turn them into proof of invincibility. Incidentally, the latest guy’s case has been randomly assigned to Trump-loving Florida Judge Aileen Cannon, so I expect the outcome will be a public execution and Trump gets to keep all the guys’ stuff.
• Mark Robinson sounds just in name only to be such a wholesome guy – you know a swiss family robinson paternal values, building a tree house looking out for his family to ensure they survive the wilderness and isolation, yet he immediately disappoints, causes a cultural jolt not just as we learned last timer that he practically owned all the shares in Blockbuster video cos of his penchant for VHS porn rentals, but cos he once equivalent-of-tweeted on a pron chat forum – yes they existed apparently – one-handed typing obvs!  – “i am a black Nazi” and advocated the reinstatement of slavery with a turkeys-for-christmas-kinda vibe n’est-ce pas? Saying “Slavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it (slavery) back. I would certainly buy a few,” Many of Robinson’s comments were gratuitously sexual and lewd in nature. They were made between 2008 and 2012 on “Nude Africa,” a pornographic website that includes a message board. Latterly his Swiss Family Robinson persona encompassed some twisted Man Friday sentiments “If you’re a man on Friday night, and all the sudden Saturday, you feel like a woman, and you want to go in the women’s bathroom in the mall, you will be arrested, or whatever we gotta do to you,” Robinson said at a campaign rally in February 2024. “We’re going to protect our women.” Cos he knew all about that on Nude Africa having posted “I came to a spot that was a dead end but had two big vent covers over it! It just so happened it overlooked the showers! I sat there for about an hour and watched as several girls came in and showered,” And as well as using the terms “Hebe”, “rag–heads” and “fags” he’s currently Republican nominee for governor of North Carolina! Should be a shoe-in then – if you’re going to be subject to racist abuse by your ignorant electorate for just being black then why not out-prejudice them and confuse their allegiances – that way Trump will be sure to continue to support you even if no other human being would!
• While Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are campaigning like crazy, Trump remains merely crazy, and isn’t devoting quite as much of his time to making public appearances. Sure part of the reason is that he’s really old and tired, and rallies are expensive when they expect you to pay for everything up front because you never pay your bills, but it’s also because spending all his time doing rallies would leave him with less time to grift the rubes out of every last penny they have, and that’s really his first love. Just this month, while watching the value of his Trump Media shares get smaller and smaller, he’s launched several new products, all of which are as high quality and desirable as classic brands like Trump Steaks and Trump Urine Tests. First off, it’s Trump Coins – a limited edition coin  made from an ounce of almost pure silver, and selling for $100 a piece. OK, sure, the current price of silver is $30 an ounce, but these have Trump’s face on them, and they come with a certificate of authenticity, so they’re probably worth loads more than that. In case coins aren’t your thing, how about a watch? You can get a gold plated watch with “Fight, fight, fight” engraved on the back for $799, or a solid gold, diamond studded tourbillon watch for the bargain price of $100,000 – but don’t hesitate, there are only 147 of those available. In case you were thinking it might make a good investment, the website warns you that “Trump Watches are intended as collectible items for individual enjoyment only, not for investment purposes.” Think about that – even the kinds of lawyers Trump still employs were smart enough to realise they needed a disclaimer in case anyone thought the watches might be worth something. To go with your “fight, fight, fight” watch, how about some “fight, fight, fight” cologne, which is available for $129 exclusively from the website gettrumpsneakers.com, and features on the box an AI image of Trump with his fist in the air because they were too cheap to pay the royalties for the actual photo. It doesn’t ship until November, so there’s no word on what the scent is yet, but I’m guessing it smells like a cheap suit soaked in scared piss. Finally, since Trump had such success with NFTs, he’s branched out into another technology he definitely doesn’t understand – crypto. Announcing his family’s new crypto business on a Twitter livestream, he said “Crypto is one of those things we have to do, whether we like it or not, I have to do it.” He really doesn’t have to, but given the number of crypto bros who seem to get in trouble with the SEC, I think maybe we do like it.
• If someone says “And everyone still thinks I’m crazy” as some kind of justification for saying crazy shit it’s gonna give you pause for thought non? For one, why the use of still? Have people thought you crazy up til this point? Do you think you ought to be checking in with someone objective you trust – say John Goodman for instance – to see which side of batshit you’ve been hiitherto? Also just the “crazy” bit which is inevitably followed by “but it’s true!  Is a bit triggering surely?! I say John Goodman cos this is none other than out-of-work reinvented-as-a-right-wing-mouthpiece Rosanne Barr – and not just squawking on that hall phone with the huge curly lead that stretched into the lounge but on a Tucker Carlson stage show where she expanded on the eating-the-pets lie to include eating babies and flesh and humans and ghosts and fuck knows what else – blood, placenta, human flesh, oh christ what the fuck does it matter these people are just desperate! Look we all know the Q thing was made up by a wanna-be kung-fu opera singer called Ron who failed to become famous cos of his need for anonymity in playing a worldwide LARP game, what we are witnessing is the sound of awful wanna-be-famous-agains being scraped from the barrel of forgotten and flung into the seat on an obsequious fascist-enabler income-generator and lawfully-designated fiction generator Tucker Carlson show. Now if these people were say Noam Chomski or Naomi Klein – you know proper American critiques we might have to be worried – but I think we just need to be worried that we’re not sufficiently up  on the plot of Idiocracy to be able to survive!!  
• Mike Lindell, the answer to the question “What if Dr. Phil got in a teleporter accident with a leaf blower?”, has claimed that when he chose the totally normal sale price of $14.88 for one of his lumpy pillows, he had no idea that 1488 was a Nazi dog-whistle. For the gloriously uninitiated, the 14 refers to a well known white supremacist slogan which is 14 words long, while the 88 is a sneaky way of saying Heil Hitler, because H is the 8th letter of the alphabet. Once alerted to the fact that he was using a common neo-Nazi calling card he immediately apologised for any offense and changed the price. No he didn’t, he claimed it was an attack on him by liberal media, specifically citing the Daily Mail, because he wants hand-counted paper ballots in the election, and promptly changed the sale prices for multiple other products on his online store to end in 88. You know, to prove it was unintentional and he’s definitely not a Nazi.  
• In a world where JD Vance won’t stop banging on about childless cat-ladies (Taylor Swift I see you’ve put your hand up to your umpteen million followers in that disregard – thank you for your service to sanity) how do you promote your support for the marvel of the curbing of women’s right to have dominion over their own selves and choices and yeah just fuck off men with your belief you know better etc etc  when you yourself are a childless dog-dude republican candidate like Derrick Anderson, a candidate running in an open race for Virginia’s seventh congressional district? Simples you borrow someone else’s wife and kids and pose in front of a house in the suburbs with apparently consenting adults and teens who are quite happy to be seen with an incel dog-lover – these questions should be asked – thank you Tucker Carlson! Something about it doesn’t surprise me – there’s an implicit acceptance of the weird supposed normal suburban lifestyle David Lynch so creepily parodied in his films by the right that makes it okay to hijack other people’s families to promote draconian controls over women but not okay to be a single guy with a dog promoting draconian controls over women – put like that I don’t really know which is worse! Eeeek!??? 
• Jesus, what is it with Republicans and dog killing? Actually, it’s worse than that. What is it with Republicans and openly boasting about the dogs they’ve killed as if other people are going to think they’re awesome? With the memory barely faded of Kirsti Noem shooting a puppy in the face, this time it’s Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts. You might also know him as the man behind Project 2025, and if you’ve seen him defend the hate-filled manifesto on TV, you were probably wondering if the platonic ideal of evil can actually get any worse. Well, strap in. When he was a history professor at New Mexico State University in 2004, he started up a fun conversation in the hallway with his department chair Kenneth Hammond, who told the Guardian “My recollection of his account was that he was discussing in the hallway with various members of the faculty, including me, that a neighbour’s dog had been barking pretty relentlessly and was, you know, keeping the baby and probably the parents awake and that he kind of lost it and took a shovel and killed the dog. End of problem,” Kevin Roberts denies this, which I guess is a start, but lest you think this is a he-said, he-said scenario, it’s more of a he-said, he and he and she and also they said kind of thing, because another professor and her husband said Roberts regaled them with the story over dinner at his home, and three other professors recall being told about it at the time by his horrified colleagues. The one who had dinner with him also recalled that he said the neighbor in question also had puppies, and he had considered killing them too. So, if the prospect of firing government employees disloyal to Trump, banning abortions, rolling back LGBTQ+ civil rights, getting rid of the Department of education, criminalising pornography, and instituting a Christian theocracy aren’t enough to make you vote against Republicans, won’t somebody think of the puppies!
• In Britpol this last two weeks – the right wing media pr as we call it the media – have been determined to smear some freebies that Keir Starmer has received as major sleaze when he has received donations over the last five years or so to the value of less than Boris was given to redecorate number ten in what was called wallpaper-gate – you remember that it was the 78th in the list of over a thousand scandals that Boris was not really held accountable for by the same press! At the labour party conference Keir called for the release of the sausages held by the Palestinians – and somehow the same right-wing press or as we call them here in the Uk – the press managed to make that mean that Starmer was anti-semitic. The same right-wing press or as we call it : the press made a great deal of an MP who left the Labour Party cos it was focussed on greed and self-aggrandisement at the same time as letting pensioners down and threatening the livelihoods of people so rich that they hold their tax liabilities offshore so they don’t pay UK tax. The chancellor Rachel Reeves is after those people and apparently that will be worse for Britain cos they will take their beneficence elsewhere! Meanwhile the Tory party conference grinds on and the fact that Boris has written a new work of fiction, sorry his memoirs, was more exciting than anything that happened there – and his memoirs are not at all exciting!

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That’s almost all for this week, but here’s our AI-aided and minimally hand-edited transcript which is at least quite accurate, but not totally:

Calling Cards Fallacy- FT#158 Transcript

Jim: Hello and welcome to Fallacious Trump, the podcast where we use the insane ramblings of the smallest man who ever lived to explain logical fallacies. I’m your host, Jim.

Mark: I’m your other host, Mark. A logical fallacy is an error in reasoning that results in bad or invalid arguments. And the logical fallacy we’re looking at this week is calling cards. The smallest man who ever lived. Sounds like I got a Danny Kaye character, doesn’t it? The fact that it’s in, it’s in all caps. Yeah.

Jim: Well, it’s, it’s a, it’s a Taylor Swift reference.

Mark: There you go.

Jim: Because.

Mark: Right. Yeah.

Jim: Her, endorsement of Kamala and Trump’s subsequent meltdown. And the Harris campaign put out a brilliant press release about Trump’s response to Taylor’s endorsement that had so many references to Taylor lyrics.

Mark: Nice.

Jim: There’s bad blood between them and this. He should just shake it off. All that kind of stuff.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And the smallest man who ever lived was used against him in that context. So I thought that’s a nice one. So calling cards or m. Possibly calling cards. Because it’s not about calling cards, which is things that people in Victorian era used to leave to show that they’d been somewhere. It’s about calling out other people for using cards.

Mark: For playing a card. Yeah.

Jim: So you’re calling cards against them. And what it is is when you dismiss a valid argument by simply accusing your opponent of using a rhetorical card. Playing a card.

Mark: Right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jim: So our first example is from Trump.

Jim: And this was when Amy Coney Barrett was going through the process. Wasn’t really a process because publicans were in charge. The nominal process of being approved for the Supreme Court.

Reporter: You’ve talked about possible bias against Judge Barrett’s religion. Only two Catholic bishops have come out. To say the same thing. You have. Is any effort being made by any. Of you to say, get the US. Conference of Catholic Bishops? I think that, at least other. leaders within the church.

Donald Trump: We’re in the process of doing that. I think it’s horrible what they’re doing. I mean, they’re playing the religious card. And it’s, frankly, you’re talking about Catholics. That’s a very major religion in our country.

Jim: The valid objection that people had to Amy Coney Barrett, in terms of her religion wasn’t about Catholicism at all, because six of the nine Supreme Court justices are Catholic. There was not and had never been any significant issue with any of that. It’s that Amy Coney Barrett specific branch of Catholicism was a cult. It was a thing called the People of Praise, and. Wow. It’s a very specific charismatic group.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: One of the charismatic groups within the Catholic Church that rose up after the Second Vatican Council in the 60s. And it’s extremely hierarchical. It’s very focused on obedience to, if you’re a woman, your husband or the head of your household.

Mark: Right.

Jim: And also to the leaders of the church.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: There was a, I think, quite reasonable question, at least, being raised over if you are so ensconced in this religion, this part of this religion.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And. And she was a female leader within the group, which were known as handmaids, literally.

Mark: Oh, my God. Yeah. Yeah.

Jim: So if you’re. If you’re a significant part of this religion and. And the religion requires obedience to male members of the church.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: As a Supreme Court judge, if you are called upon to rule on something which might go against their teachings, how, you know, how are you going to rule?

Mark: How would you respond to that? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jim: now, that doesn’t automatically mean that being a member of that church is disqualifying for Supreme Court justice, but it’s completely reasonable to ask the question.

Mark: Yeah. If this is your belief system, if you’ve got something that runs contrary to your belief system, how would you respond?

Jim: So that isn’t playing the religious card. When you’re saying, well, she’s. She’s this particular branch of Catholicism, is that, okay or not? Is a, conversation that needed to be had at that time. Again, not that it wouldn’t made any difference because the Republicans were in charge. So.

Mark: Yeah. But. Yeah. And what he’s kind of doing is dismissing any kind of bringing up of the question. He’s dismissing it in two ways. He’s saying this is an objection, and it’s

00:05:00

Mark: an unreasonable objection, because what you’re doing is playing the religion card, when actually it’s just a perfectly legitimate question to say, well, if you’ve got these kind of fairly extreme, extreme and rigid beliefs, how are you going to apply. How does that make you able to apply the rule of law to people that a. Don’t subscribe to a religion, and B, even if they do subscribe to your religion, don’t subscribe to it in a way that you think is the correct way.

Jim: Yeah, yeah.

Mark: Perfectly reasonable. Yeah.

Jim: And I mean, one of the other aspects of groups like the People of Praise is that they are quite secretive compared to Catholicism as a whole, where for the most part, people who look into it are able to find out quite a lot about the beliefs of.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Even specific branches of Catholicism. Individual groups like these. And these communities in some cases, and in the case of People of Praise, are quite secretive about their hierarchy and about. For example, although it’s known that they take vows of obedience, it isn’t clear who that. Who those vows are to who someone like Amy Coney Barrett is expected to be obedient to, for example.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So things like that, again, mean that the question is reasonable.

Mark: Yeah, it’s like. It’s like if you were appointing Tom Cruise to the Supreme Court, I don’t.

Jim: Think there will be.

Mark: No, there’d be a lot of running involved.

Jim: I know he played a lawyer in the firm, but that’s, not.

Mark: Yeah, you kind of go, yeah. This made up religion that you’re fanatical about, do you not think that might get in the way of you judging people in an objective manner?

Jim: so our, second trump example comes from when he was discussing Hillary Clinton

Matt Lauer: Tuesday night. You said Hillary Clinton is playing the. Women card or the woman card, and. That if she were a man, she. Would only have 5% of the vote. 70% of women in this country say. They have a negative view of you. Do you even care?

Donald Trump: Of course I care. nobody respects women more than I do. And I wasn’t playing the woman’s card. It’s true. I mean, she is playing the woman’s card. She said everything she says is about the woman’s card. And frankly, all I’m doing is bringing out the obvious. And without the woman’s card, Hillary would not even be a viable person to be.

Matt Lauer: But are you saying that women in this country vote based simply on gender?

Donald Trump: Well, I don’t think they vote on gender. No. I think they vote for security. I think they vote for jobs. And that’s why I’m doing so well. That’s why I’m leading the Republicans by a lot. And that’s why in all of the elections that I won on Tuesday night, which is five states, and then I won, of course, New York the week before, in all of those, exit polls, I led with women and I led with women by tremendous margins over all other candidates.

Savannah Guthrie: But, Mr. Trump, I mean, for you to say that if she were not a woman, she would be getting 5% suggests the only thing she has going for her is that she’s a woman, not that she was a former senator, a former secretary of state, and a lawyer. Do you understand why some people find that to be kind of a demeaning comment?

Donald Trump: No, I find it to be a true comment. I think the only thing she’s got going is the fact that she’s a woman, so.

Jim: Yeah. What.

Mark: Apart from the fact that everything about the rest of the statement is all about Trump. So he’s. He’s great because he’s getting all the women’s vote, but he’s not a woman, and that she’s getting a really tiny vote because she is a woman.

Jim: Yeah. So this was during the 2016 primaries.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And at this point, this was the day after he’d won five primaries in, the Northeast. And, he is correct in saying that the woman’s vote within the Republican Party favored him, as did basically everyone, because he was, at this point, only running against Ted Cruz and John Kasich. So, Yeah, I mean, he was. It’s not much competition.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So he had more than 50% of the total Republican vote anyway, and naturally had a higher proportion of the female Republican vote than the other two candidates. But those are female Republicans, not women in general.

Mark: Not just women. Yeah.

Jim: And he’s saying that, she’s playing the woman’s card, essentially by being a woman. And, that’s all she has. And as the reporter pointed out, you know.

Mark: Yeah. She.

Jim: She. She’s also Secretary of State and a senator and other stuff.

Mark: yeah, an actual qualified person, unlike you. You,

Jim: Yeah. Not to mention has policies that would actually help people, like fighting for equality and all that kind of stuff.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Jim: And protecting people’s civil rights.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: But no, she’s just played. She’s a woman, so therefore she’s playing the woman’s card. If she wasn’t a woman, she’d be getting 5% of the vote. The only reason she’s getting anything else is because she’s a woman. But she’s the

00:10:00

Jim: one playing the woman card. I mean, that is m. It sounds.

Mark: For all the world like he’s playing the woman card.

Jim: He’s playing a card.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Jim: He’s playing a misogyny card, I think.

Mark: Yeah, There you go. Yeah. Nobody’s pointed that out to him. Yeah.

Jim: Yeah. And I mean, that is the Thing with this fallacy is that it’s one of those where you have to also look at what the other person is doing. Because people do play rhetorical cards sometimes. Classic comedy example is Ali G, who used to whenever, confronted about anything, say, is it because I was black? Even though he wasn’t black.

Mark: He plainly wasn’t. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jim: And, and so even when the, what the person was talking about had absolutely nothing to do with race or anything, he would bring that up as a kind, as a defense to dismiss what they were trying to do and say. And that is absolutely playing the race card. And he was doing it for comedy purposes.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And if someone is doing it, it is legitimate to call them out on it.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: That’s not fallacious. But when the argument that someone is pushing is valid, when in Hillary Clinton’s case she is a reasonable and valid candidate for office, dismissing that by accusing people of playing a card is where this comes in.

Mark: Yep.

Jim: So our final example from Trump is a truth that he posted in 2022. He said, well, the crazed I’m leading in all the polls, Democrats are coming at me on all fronts. Even after years of beating them back on their lame brained and fully debunked schemes of Russia, Russia, Russia, two fake impeachments, the no collusion Muller report, and to top it all, illegally spying on my campaign and me, including while I was in the Oval Office. They are now playing the ridiculous Insurrection card. This was a reference to the various prosecutions against him, one of which was about his part in January 6th. And he is trying to dismiss all of that, all of the evidence against him, all of the valid prosecution that is still pending against him, all of the stuff he did that incited that mob to attack the Capitol on January 6th as the ridiculous Insurrection card. They’re just playing the insurrection card.

Mark: Yeah. Which is if you’ve got a uno, that’s like, is the third one in is always Insurrection cards. Yeah, yeah. Never mind the reverse.

Jim: Absolutely.

Mark: Yeah, yeah. Like insurrection. Yeah. And now is the time, I think.

Jim: For Marx British politics corner.

Mark: Of course, this fallacy recalls for us the delightful nature of the institutional racism in the Tory party with such fine examples as Oliver Letwin, who in 1987 stood as the Tory candidate in Hackney against Diane Abbott for the general election. I think I was living in Hackney then, having said in 1985 that the Broadwater farm riots happened not because of endemic police racism and poverty, but because of individual bad moral attitudes. And, that this was the reason black People were apparently more likely to write than white people. Therefore, these areas should not be invested in, as this would subsidize Rastafarian arts and crafts workshops and black entrepreneurs were set up in the disco and drug trade.

Jim: Wow. The 80s were a different time, weren’t they?

Mark: They were different time, but only just, sadly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. During the general election in 1987, he described Abba as a revolutionary with no genuine allegiance to British parliamentary democracy. And Abbott retorted that he was simply playing the race card. But after all. She shrugged. In a place like this, what other cards does an old Etonian merchant banker have? Needless to say, Diane Abbott won.

Jim: I think he pretty much was playing the race card, though. I think that’s the reason we’re going to call out. Yeah.

Mark: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Jim: No, so she wasn’t being fallacious in that?

Mark: No, no, he was actually playing the race card. Yeah. If. Let’s fast forward to the 21st century. February 2024. The then Tory MP, Lee Anderson, which we talked about, stated that Sadiq Khan had sold out London to his Islamist mates and was under the control of Islamists. And when Khan rightly complained, Lee Anderson wrote in the Daily Express, sadly, Sadiq Khan has resorted to playing the race card and accused me of stoking up division. So, so Lee Lee Anderson there, he accused Sadiq Khan of selling out London to the Islamists. Yeah, was a little bit of racist.

Jim: Calling him racist for being very racist is playing the race card.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yes, yeah,

00:15:00

Mark: yeah. Sticking your head up and going, yeah, I object and go, oh, you’re just playing the race card. In March 2024, in an article for the Guardian that Diane Abbott wrote following her attempt to ask a question of the then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, about Tory donor Frank Hester, who once said, it’s like trying not to be racist. But you see Diane Abbott on the TV and you’re just like, you just want to hate all black women because she’s there. And I don’t hate all black women, but I think she should be shot. And she stood up during Prime Minister’s questions over 42 times during the debate about her and racism and the Tories and the donor and Lindsay Hoyle refused to recognize her and allow her question in the article she wrote Subsequent to that, she notes that as the election draws nearer and labour stays 20 points ahead in the polls, the Tories are desperate. Their political trump card has always been low taxes and sound management of the economy. But Liz Truss blew that out of the Water and taxation is now at the highest sustained level on record. So the only card the tourists have left to play is the race card and they’re going to play it ruthlessly. Oh, how things have changed since 1987.

Jim: Yeah, again I think what you’ve got there is a mixture of valid uses of accusing people of playing the race card and, and the fallacy with Lee Anderson definitely using, trying to use it against Sadiq Khan. But yeah, Diane Abbott’s twice used it accurately to describe exactly what the Tories are doing. That’s not a fallacious use, that’s not calling cards. It’s just she’s pointing out that they’re being racist. If they accused her of being of playing the race card for pointing out their racism, likely Anderson did to city.

Mark: Then that would be a fallacy. Yeah, they kind of often they, but I couldn’t find any examples. Often they accused, they everyone other than left wing, progressive right thinking people often accuse Abbott of playing the victim card to go, oh yeah, here she goes.

Jim: Again after victimizing her.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, they go, here she goes again talking about the fact that she’s been victimized. So that, that whole kind of victim card thing. So my, this is this is an interesting one because here’s my other example, the Online Safety act which we talked about recently in relation to the riots in the summer, this summer, you know, the online safety might get passed into law in 2025. Here are people talking about it in 2021. The day they were talking about it was the fifth anniversary of the death of Joe Cox, who was a Labor candidate during the Corbyn election, who was murdered by ah, an online racist Nazi follower, who believed that individuals are liberal left wing political viewpoints and the mainstream media were the cause of the world’s problems. So you think, has he been looking at conspiracy online perhaps? Yeah, he’s certainly done his research online. So here’s Baroness Fox of Buckley, who was Claire Fox, who was a former writer, activist, broadcaster and at ah, some times member of the revolutionary Communist Party and the Brexit Party.

Jim: Wow, she spread herself around, didn’t she?

Mark: I know. And as she’s got older she’s certainly moved towards the right and during her life consequently knows a lot about online abuse. So she was saying this about cards.

Baroness Fox: My Lords, can I declare an interest. As someone whose receipt of online abuse is somewhat off the scale, but feel. Uncomfortable with public figures playing the victim. Card on this, I feel even more. Uncomfortable with the implicit conflation of a brutal Murder with a Twitter pylon. would the Minister agree there’s a danger in principle of confusing physical harassment, such as horribly meted out the BBC journalist Nick Watts? An online trolling, however unpleasant. And would the Minister note free speech. Activists concern that online abuse is being. Used to justify censoring lawful content? My fears about the online safety bill outweigh any fears of harassment.

Mark: So I think there’s somewhere in there she’s being denigratory about people going, oh, I, really suffered at the hands of online trolling, you know.

Jim: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Mark: Death of Joe Cox and Nick Watts during lockdown. There was an anti masking demo that he was reporting on and he got kind of chased around the corner by nutters and his

00:20:00

Mark: life was threatened. She’s accusing people of playing the victim card when actually they’re really at risk of physical harm.

Jim: Yeah, yeah, she’s, she’s pretending there is no link between hateful, abusive online rhetoric and real world violence.

Mark: Because she ignores her own. Yeah, because she, she ignores her own online trolling. And God knows I’ve trolled her enough. No, no, I haven’t. But you think she’s a, she’s one of those kind of characters that, the fact that she’s moved from the revolutionary Communist party from the extreme left to the extreme right, you would want to go. So go, what the fuck are you doing? Yeah, so you would, you would want. Perhaps it’s just me, you would want to troll her, online.

Jim: The thing is, I think that the level of trolling and I mean it’s entirely possible that this, this is my cognitive bias kicking in. I feel like the level of trolling that occurs on both sides is a bit different because. Yeah, what you, you certainly read about an enormous number of racist and misogynist attacks, death threats, rape threats, etc, being aimed at people on the left. Whereas for the public figures on the right, I feel that the majority of what they get is probably people calling them racists and bigots, which is accurate and. Yeah, ah, yeah, but they object to it and call it offensive and abusive.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Jim: I’m sure there’s some stuff that goes on that is on a par with the stuff that people on the left get, but it’s, it doesn’t feel like the same volume from what I’ve seen accusing public figures of playing the victim card just because they’re getting horrific online abuse, in many cases and as I say, death threats or worse. Yeah, that is something which people should be allowed to complain about and say Is not okay. And that.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And recognize the fact that sometimes it does lead to real world incidents.

Mark: Yep. Vis a viscox.

Jim: That’s why stochastic terrorism is a thing.

Mark: Yes. Yes. And that’s what the Online Safety act is trying to deal with. The riots in the summer. This summer. Where irresponsible politicians pursuing their own personal gains were retweeting and perpetuating conspiracy theories about the origins of the guy that murdered people out of kids afternoon dance class. And then they’ll go, oh, you’re curtailing our abilities to say this stuff. And in objecting to our blatant racism, you are playing the race card. So when Lee Anderson is outrageously racist and Sadiq Khan puts it down and says, you are being outrageously racist, Lee Anderson says to Sadiq Khan, oh, there he is playing the race card. No, what he’s doing is playing the perfectly normal hate crime card.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: And just going, oh, yeah, you played a hate crime.

Mark: Motorhead, of course there, with the card playing ace of spades.

Jim: So in the fallacy in the wild, we like to talk about the fallacy of the week from a non political perspective. And our first example this week comes from Brooklyn. Nine. Nine. And it is one of the brilliant Halloween episodes where they always do a heist competition.

Jake Peralta: Some of you have asked me what got me through prison. Was it my family? Don’t be stupid. Was it knowing that my friends would eventually get me out? Of course not. I never believed in any of you. No. The only thing that kept me sane was planning for the Halloween heist. Those many years doing hard time.

Terry Jeffords: It was eight

Rosa Diaz: weeks I also went

00:25:00

Rosa Diaz: to prison. Dog,

Jake Peralta: we’re getting off track here.

Captain Raymond Holt: No, we’re not, dog. Peralta’s just trying to play the sympathy card so we all go easy on him. I’d rather send you back to prison than see you win.

Jim: So the Halloween heist always gets super competitive. And to be honest, probably Peralta is kind of playing the sympathy card here because there’s no really reason for him to be bringing up his time in prison. In introducing.

Mark: It was eight weeks, dude.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Ah, yeah, yeah.

Jim: But, yeah, I had to use that anyway because it was lovely.

Mark: I love that he just calls it out because he’s just playing the seven. Yeah.

Jim: And, yeah, the sympathy card is another one of these. Basically, if someone is playing up how bad things have been for them in the hope that you will believe their side of an argument instead of the one that’s being actually validly backed up with evidence, then they are genuinely playing the sympathy card. If they’re not doing it, but someone accuses them of it, then it’s this fallacy.

Mark: Yeah. But it’s kind of the driver for the entire Yorkshireman sketch. It’s a sympathy card. Yeah. Oh, but we had it. And they’re trying to outdo each other. It becomes like a card game.

Jim: Yeah. Playing the trump card.

Mark: I see your. We lived in a shoebox in middle of road. They go, cardboard box. All right. Luxury.

Donald Trump: Yeah.

Mark: We’re in a paper bag. It’s out trumping each other with the cards. You can visualize it entirely as a card game.

Jim: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the second example is from, Harry’s Law, the much underappreciated, I think, David E. Kelly legal drama. David E. Kelly was the brain behind the, practice and Ally McBeal and things like that.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And Harry’s Law was Kathy Bates as Harriet.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: Who in this scene is debating with another lawyer in court. This is something absolutely would have been objected to. The law in all of his programs was terrible.

Mark: Right.

Jim: But it was entertaining. She is defending a black teenager, against a drugs charge. And she brings up that actually maybe drugs should be legalized anyway. And so they have this exchange.

Josh Peyton: If we were to legalize drugs, we.

Harriet Korn: Could neutralize the gangs, take the drug business out of the shadows.

Josh Peyton: And do what? Celebrate it.

Harriet Korn: How about Regulate it tax it

Josh Peyton: Yes. And then every liberal in America could just light up and say, hallelujah, legalize drugs.

Harriet Korn: The idea was first raised by conservative Republicans.

Josh Peyton: Oh, please. When?

Harriet Korn: When the party had thinkers before it was hijacked by the likes of Rush Limbaugh.

Josh Peyton: Here we go.

Harriet Korn: A drug addict himself.

Josh Peyton: Ancient history.

Harriet Korn: Who somehow fared much better in our justice system. I wonder why.

Josh Peyton: The race card. There it is.

Harriet Korn: If I wanted to play the race card, I talk about the disparity in sentencing.

Josh Peyton: Objection.

Jim: So, yeah, she’s making some reasonable, valid points. And he attempts to dismiss it. Before he gets to the point of objecting to this whole thing, he Tries to dismiss it as her playing the race card. M So m. Our final example is from Wonder Woman. And this is not from the films or from the Lynda Carter TV show, but the animated feature, wow.

Mark: Which I was completely unaware of and delighted by the discovery of Nathan.

Jim: Fillion plays Steve Trevor. So.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: And in this scene, Steve has just rescued Diana from their interaction with Aries. She was trying to take down Aries, as is the. The thing in the first Wonder Woman. And in this one. And he gave up the fight so that he could get her out of the danger. And she’s not that happy about it.

Diana Prince: Did you stop Ares?

Steve Trevor: No, I didn’t. I couldn’t.

Diana Prince: What? Why not?

Steve Trevor: I had to save you.

Diana Prince: Ow. I didn’t need you to save me. I needed you to stop Ares.

Steve Trevor: Hey, if it weren’t for me, You wouldn’t be here right now.

Diana Prince: I’m an Amazon, Steve. We’re prepared from birth to give our lives in battle. I knew what the consequences were going into this mission. I bet you would have acted differently if I were a man.

Steve Trevor: Oh, playing the sex card again, are you? You know what? I’ve had just about enough of listening to you go on about how terrible men are.

Diana Prince: Does the truth hurt, Steve?

Jim: Yeah, again, she’s making some pretty valid points. Yeah, she’s a warrior. She went into battle with a literal God to try and defeat them, in a vitally important battle. And she was prepared for the fact that there might be consequences to that. And the most important thing to her in that was that Ares was defeated. So it’s reasonable for her to be annoyed rather than grateful in this instance, at least at first, that Steve prioritized her over the mission.

Mark: Right.

Jim: Also reasonable, I think, for her to say that he would have done it. He would have done differently. I mean, he’s a military guy. He wouldn’t, like, save one of his members of his platoon or whatever if that meant jeopardizing a super important mission that could turn tide of the war, for example, or something like that.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Jim: So she’s probably reasonable in saying that he would have treated it differently if she was a man. And he is like, oh, playing the sex card dismisses it.

Mark: It’s kind of like Ken in Barbie film where he goes, I’ve understood what patriarchy is.

Jim: Yeah.

Donald Trump: So we’re gonna. We’re gonna play fake news, folks. I love the game.

00:30:00

Donald Trump: It’s a great game. I understand the game as well as anybody. As well as anybody.

Jim: Yes. It’s time for Fake news. The game where I read out three Trump quotes, two of which are real and one I made up, and Mark has to figure out which one is fake news.

Mark: You see, the problem with this game is it doesn’t take into account the fact that I’ve had a really tough time of it and for the entirety of 158 episodes, and you’re simply not acknowledging the fact that it’s weighed against me. And I’ve been saying this all this time and nobody’s listening. And it’s just, it’s just unfair. It’s unfair through if I’m, sure you’ll agree. But you’re. What you’re going to say next is that I’m, I’m, just pl. You’re going to misinterpret what I’m saying and you’re just going to characterize this in a particular way that I’m. That and it’s. And it’s unfair. You’re just going to dismiss all of the trials of tribulation I’ve gone through for158. Seven episodes as you just go to characterize it in one particular way, and I’m not having it. I’m, just not. It’s. It’s simply unfair. See, that’s all I’ve got to say on the matter.

Jim: Interesting, because that’s essentially what you’re doing is poisoning the. Well, about the fact that, you expect me to accuse you of playing the victim card when you’re clearly playing the victim card.

Mark: Well, if one thing I’ve learned over all this time is if you can mix up the fallacies, you stand a better chance of getting away with it. Yeah.

Jim: So in fake news this week, I actually already had a whole fake news ready to go. And I had the clips.

Mark: Right.

Jim: And I’d written mine. And then yesterday, Trump was in Pennsylvania, something else happened, and he said a thing and I was like, I mean, I’ve got to do that. I’ve got to do that now. So I abandoned my initial idea.

Mark: Okay, we’ll save that for another time. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jim: And yeah. So Trump is essentially advocating for the purge, or arguably just police having the ability to violently attack oh specific group of people. So, yeah, kind of across between the purge and Kristallnacht.

Mark: Okay. Yeah.

Jim: His argument is that basically crime is really bad and if, if we just let the police violently attack people, it wouldn’t be an issue.

Jim: So yeah. Yeah. Just for a bit though.

Mark: Where’s.

Jim: Not all the time.

Mark: No, no one Day a year?

Jim: Yeah, yeah, yeah, something like that. So yeah, here, ah, is things he said about that.

Mark: Okay.

Jim: Statement number one.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: The police aren’t allowed to do their job. They’re told if you do anything, you’re going to lose your pension, you’re going to lose your family, your house, your car. The police want to do it, the border patrol want to do it. Border patrol, they’re incredible. They want to do it. They’re not allowed to do it because the liberal left won’t let them do it. The liberal left wants to destroy them and they want to destroy our country. You know, if you had one day like one real rough, nasty day with the drugstores, for example.

Mark: Okay, okay.

Jim: He continues.

Mark: Right, yeah.

Jim: You know, she created something in San Francisco. $950. You’re allowed to steal anything above that, you’ll be prosecuted. Well, it works out. The 950 is a misnomer because you can steal whatever you want. You can go way above. But you’d see, originally you saw kids walking in with calculators. They were calculating, they didn’t want to go over the $950. They’re standing with calculators, adding it up. You know, these are smart, smart people. They’re not so stupid, but they have to be taught. Now if you had one really violent day.

Mark: No kid stands with a calculator. You know, our generation, my generation, when calculators arrive.

Jim: Hang on. Your generation. Slide rule.

Mark: Yeah. Abacus, abacus, abacus. We had, we had little things with.

Jim: Strings, with those little books of log tables.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Reciprocals. Yeah, you could take those into exams. It was a joy. You could write all sorts of things in those. Wow. Wow. They’ve like kids, will walk in with calculators and do that. But if you had really one really violent day.

Jim: Statement number three.

Mark: Okay. Yeah.

Jim: But right now the migrants are getting away with everything. They walk into a store and just empty the shelves and walk out. They put, they take washing machines and dishwashers on their backs and walk right out of the store and nobody can do anything about it. Stores are having to close because they’re losing everything. I think all we need is one day, maybe one hour when the police are allowed to just be extraordinarily

00:35:00

Jim: rough and everyone would get the message. It wouldn’t happen anymore after that, believe me.

Mark: Wow. Wow. It’s kind of RoboCop too as well, isn’t it? Oh my God. That confused thing between protectors, and everything else. Wow. Oh my God. The fact that only one of these is made up is really scary.

Jim: Ah.

Mark: man. Okay. Right. okay. Everyone was. All the police are aching to just open fire on innocent shoplifters. Okay. Okay. But that the first one where it goes nasty day, drugstores kind of tails off the. The tell for me. In the second one is the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now, if you had one really violent day, m losing everything whole kind of. Kind of bunch of unsubstantiated lies with accelerating truths. Okay. So on that basis, I think number two is the one you made up.

Jim: Okay. And of the others, which you more convinced by?

Mark: I’ve more convinced by migrants walking in with taking stuff and stores closing down. Number three.

Jim: Okay.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And number three.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: It’s fake news.

Mark: No. Oh, wow. Bloody hell. That’s excellent then.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: There are aspects that I tweaked rather than made up. He talked about, people stealing air conditioners and fridges on their backs, like taking them out on their backs.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Jim: and he did use the phrase extraordinarily rough and, and questioned about whether maybe it could just be an hour or, or a full day, but essentially.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: That, that.

Mark: Oh, that one was very good.

Jim: Was an addition to this, to the stuff.

Mark: Because number number two is kind of way out there. That whole thing of. No, we just go, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah dot. Now, if you had just run really violent day.

Jim: Absolutely.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And I don’t. In. In. In admitting to having made up number three, I don’t want to take anything away from the fact that this was absolutely. The point that Trump was making was that what we need is one day where the police are, basically given free rein to violently attack people.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow.

Jim: What the.

Mark: Wow. I know. Yeah. I guess part of me is thinking now that’s just too outlandish for it to be true. Wow.

Jim: So, yep, number one, God was indeed real.

Donald Trump: The police aren’t allowed to do their job. They’re told, if you do anything, you’re going to lose your pension, you’re going to lose your family, your house, your car. The police want to do it. The border patrol wants to do it. Border patrol. They’re incredible. They want to do it. They’re not allowed to do it because the liberal left won’t let do it. The liberal left wants to destroy them and they want to destroy our country. You know, if you had one day, like one real rough, nasty day with the drugstores as an example, it’s not.

Mark: Just the liberal left won’t allow them to do it. It’s like the law, international law. Yeah. Against indiscriminate murder. Yeah. The police want to do their jobs.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: But their jobs don’t involve walking up here. That’s why the guy that killed George Floyd was prosecuted.

Jim: Absolutely.

Mark: It doesn’t just allow you to just go indiscriminately shoot people and saying, I’m a policeman. Oh, okay. That’s fine then.

Jim: Yeah. I mean, you. You would. I mean, we wish that it didn’t, but unfortunately, in some cases, it still does. But, yeah. He also blamed Kamala for the situation in San Francisco.

Mark: Oh, yeah, of course.

Donald Trump: You know, she created something in San Francisco. $950. You’re allowed to steal anything above that, you will be prosecuted. Well, it works out that the 950 is a misnomer. M. Because you can steal whatever you want. You can go way above. But you’d see, originally, you saw kids walk with calculators. They were calculating. They didn’t want to go over the $950. They’re standing with calculators, adding it up. You know, these are smart, smart people. They’re not so stupid, but they have to be taught. Now, if you had one really violent.

Mark: Day,

00:40:00

Mark: where has he seen this?

Jim: I mean, he’s, in his head.

Mark: Purely in his head.

Jim: This is nothing. This is absolute. What he’s talking about, to the extent that any of it is based in reality, on.

Mark: In reality at all. Yeah.

Jim: Is that it was absolutely nothing to do with Kamala Harris when she was attorney general Arnold Schwarzenegger, as governor of California.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Signed into law a bill which raised the felony limit for shoplifting from 400 to 950. So shoplifting anything under 950. Still against the law, still gets prosecuted. Yeah, but it’s a misdemeanor. not a felony. And there was always a limit. It was just lower before Schwarzenegger raised it to 950. Then a few years later, they had a referendum in California where the public voted to keep it at that level, the 950s, rather than lower it or raise it. And at the same time was a new law against shoplifting, as opposed to other kinds of theft was specifically, created. Kamala Harris was attorney general at the time, but had absolutely no input into this whatsoever. She didn’t advocate for either side of the referendum. She didn’t get to control it. So.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: It wasn’t to do with her. It isn’t legal to steal anything under $950. And kids weren’t ever walking into shops with calculators and then walking out with a fridge freezer on their back, deciding.

Mark: Which one was the most worthwhile to. To do it on their back.

Jim: All complete.

Mark: He’s obviously watched. There was a. An Oscar short about a guy who delivered stuff in the slums in Brazil. In the barrio, basically. And people would order a refrigerator and he’d carry it on his back.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Up the steps to where they. Wherever they were. It’s an amazing. Yeah, absolutely. Made a bloody fortune. 950 a pop, but. Yeah. Wow. Wow.

Jim: So we have a few social contestants.

Mark: Yeah. I hope I’m not alone in choosing the wrong one. Yeah.

Jim: Well, on Facebook, Chris got it right. He said three for no reason other than just to help others realize which one it isn’t, given how bad I am at this. But actually. Well done, Chris. Good.

Mark: I think that’s probably my, Yeah. Yeah. But I failed. Nice. Yeah.

Jim: Anders says, what do you get if you play a country song backwards? You get your job back, your family back, your dog back, and the list goes on. Number one is fake. That’s not Donald Trump speaking. That’s a country song in the m making. So Kaz says, no mention of crowd sizes, no one calling him sir, and no big men breaking down in tears. Unbelievable. I think I’ve heard in word vomit something about calculators and white goods. So my complete guess is number one is fake, but who the hell knows?

Mark: Wow, that’s a bit of a get out there. That’s a bit of an ignorance fallacy. Yeah. Yeah. Isn’t it? Yeah, yeah.

Jim: Renee says I’m choosing number two as fake news. I think I recall hearing about a thousand dollar floor for felony shoplifting. But Trump calling the kids with calculators. Smart, smart people. Seems unlikely. I can picture Trump holding an invisible calculator and poking at the keys. Boop, boop, boop. Pretending to be the kids in the store.

Mark: No. Yeah, yeah.

Jim: Stephen says, I’m going with number two. I’m sure just thinking about someone doing math gives the orange Julius Caesar a headache.

Mark: Yeah. Particularly because it’ll be Roman numerals. Yeah, yeah.

Jim: Syndra says 950 is a meme going around, but I’m sure Trump wouldn’t be able to remember any specific number and then. And then doesn’t make a judgment on which one is the fake one.

Mark: So we don’t know, but that’s it. Just tailed off. Yeah. That’s all you need to. That’s all you need to say about Trump.

Jim: And finally, Nick says, you know what? Disturbs me most about these. It’s all sounds calm and reasonable for one of the two people running to be President of the United States to say. But only one of them.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: I’m going with three being fake news. The mental image of someone just hoisting a washer dryer on their back and trundling out the front door of Curries, nodding to the staff as they go, brings me all of the mirth.

Mark: Nice. Yeah. Oh, Man.

Jim: So.

Mark: Yep.

Jim: Sadly, that means you did not.

Mark: Oh, no.

Jim: This one is now 76 out, of 147.

Mark: Oh.

Jim: Which. Which, given that we’ve played so many, remains around 52% each one.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Either way doesn’t make that much of a difference. Don’t know why we bother, really.

Mark: Don’t patronize. Yeah. Stop playing. Stop playing the acquiescence card. You’ll be fine. Yeah. Appeasement, my ass.

Jim: And it’s time for the part of the show that this week, at least, is called Voter Fraud Is Not a Logical Fallacy because.

00:45:00

Jim: Wow. It turns out I didn’t need to waste so much time writing a book debunking the widespread voter fraud that was claimed by 2000 mules because the Heartland Institute did a survey right. In December, actually, it turns out, of last year. Although it’s getting more traction recently because Trump talked about it.

Mark: It’s latching onto it.

Jim: Of course, he talked about it with Tucker Carlson, and Tucker Carlson talked about how this is, you know, obvious proof.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And this survey proves, actually, that.

Mark: Voting for Shadow of Doubt widespread.

Jim: One in five people who used absentee ballots, mail in voting committed at least one during the 2020 election. So, I take back everything I ever said about everything. About all of the mules and Dinesh.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Everything. It turns out I was wrong, and this survey just blows it out the water and.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: yeah. So I thought, you know, we should be honest intellectually.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Upfront. And. And admit it and say.

Mark: And just go, fine, let’s look at the. What you should talk to. Say.

Jim: Yeah, we should talk about their findings with, an open mind and.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah.

Jim: Say. Fair enough.

Mark: Yeah, Good point. Yeah.

Jim: Okay.

Mark: Okay. Fair enough. Yeah. Yeah. And we’re quite willing to wash our mouths out with soap, if not our brains.

Jim: Absolutely. If, assuming, obviously, this. This stands up to the slightest scrutiny. we will.

Mark: Which obviously is going to. Yeah. I mean, otherwise, why would they publish it?

Jim: Crazy. That would be mad. M. So, yeah. No. Yeah. The Heartland Institute did this poll in December 2023 with Rasmussen Reports.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: I don’t know if you know much about Rasmussen, but they are a, garbage polling group.

Mark: They are, I was gonna say just slightly suspect and not, not, not well regarded.

Jim: They tend to be the ones that Trump points to as proof. Yeah, he’s doing brilliant.

Mark: They’re the ones that everybody else points to. It says other leading brands. Yeah.

Jim: They have a tendency to favor outcomes that are complementary.

Donald Trump: Ah.

Jim: Of Trump and Republicans in general.

Mark: Oh, really? Okay.

Jim: And the Heartland Institute is, according to media bias fact check, an extreme right wing, low quality source.

Mark: A little bit. Right.

Jim: Upset. They’re not right. Or a bit biased. They say, we rate. Overall, we rate the Heartland Institute. Right. Biased and questionable based on promoting anti science propaganda, lack of transparency with funding, more than five failed fact checks by IFCN fact checkers.

Mark: Fair enough. Yeah.

Jim: They are a group that the Union of Concerned Scientists said Heartland has a long history of intentionally trying to confuse the public on, behalf of corporate sponsors.

Mark: Right.

Jim: They have received funding in the past from the Koch Foundation. They’re climate change deniers, election deniers. They are anti science and all of that stuff that goes along with that. So.

Mark: And pro income. Yes, probably anti science, pro income.

Jim: But, that said, you know, that doesn’t necessarily mean that.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: The poll isn’t accurate. It’s a, it’s an indication that it.

Mark: Should be taken just based on that. Yeah, yeah.

Jim: With a critical eye.

Mark: Right.

Jim: But they asked people and people gave answers. So there you go. We have to listen to the answers that the people gave.

Mark: Quite. Yes.

Jim: They asked 1083 likely voters. Huge sample, size.

Mark: Massive, Enormous sample size. Yeah, enormous. Yeah. And very representative of the outcome of the entirety of the U.S. okay. Yeah.

Jim: That was the group they started off with.

Mark: Right.

Jim: And the headlines that they came out with were 17% of mail in voters admit M. That in 2020 they voted in a state where they’re no longer a permanent resident.

Mark: Right. Can I also ask, what was the political persuasion of the 2.3 people that they asked?

Jim: Well, 1083 people were split.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: By who they voted for in. Or let’s say by who they claimed they voted for in the 2020 election. They were split 45%. Donald Trump, 46%, Joe Biden, 4%, some other candidate, 3% didn’t vote and 1% weren’t sure.

Mark: Oh, even though they voted.

Jim: Yeah. Well, they. Maybe they’re not sure whether they voted.

Mark: Or who they voted or not. Yeah. And if they did. Four.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So they answered none of the above.

Mark: Four or so when it says 17% of people cheated the fuck out of the system. We’re not quite sure, what their political persuasion was.

Jim: 17% admitted that they voted

00:50:00

Jim: in that particular way, they treated in that way. But there were other ways that you could cheat. You see, they voted. 17% of mail in voters admit in 2020 they voted in a state where they’re no longer a permanent resident. 21% of mail in voters admitted that they filled out a ballot for a friend or family member. 17% of mail in voters said they signed a ballot for a friend or family member with or without his or her permission.

Mark: What?

Jim: 8% of likely voters say they were offered pay or a reward for voting in 2020.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: So Heartland says based on this, that, yeah, if you can tally all those together, what you get is 1 in 5 voters of the ones who voted by mail admit one or more ways that they cheated or they broke the law. Basically, they committed voter fraud during 2020. Justin Haskins, director of the Heartland Institute, says the results of this survey, are nothing short of stunning. For the past three years, Americans have, repeatedly been told that the 2020 election was the most secure in history. But if this poll’s findings are reflective of reality, the exact opposite is true. This conclusion isn’t based on conspiracy theories or suspect evidence, but rather from the responses made directly by the voters themselves. A democratic Republic cannot survive if election laws allow voters to commit fraud easily. And that’s exactly what occurred during the 2020 election, he says. Wow, I was curious about this.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Because it seemed a little high for some of the estimates that you get elsewhere. And so I reached out to Justin Haskins, director of the Right Institute, and said, by any chance, do you have the raw data available that I could look at?

Mark: Yeah, yeah. Anyway, of course we are.

Jim: And he pointed me towards the page on Rasmussen’s site where they have. Okay, the details, which is interesting because conclusions they’ve drawn. Well, while some of, I mean, the, the raw numbers that they’re quoting are backed up by the data on Rasmussen’s site. Yeah, I, I would say that the, the people who said that they voted absentee or with a mail in ballot in the 2020 election was 30% of the total number. So that brings it down to about 320 people who actually are split up in their other versions. So when they’re talking about 17%, it’s 17% of about 320, which is what, about 60 people? Something like that. So that’s the number of people we’re talking about some of the questions that they asked.

Jim: Don’t necessarily point to voter fraud having taken place. For example, during the 2020 election, did you sign a ballot or ballot envelope on behalf of a friend or family member with or without his or her permission?

Mark: I said even with their permission.

Jim: Well, even with their permission, you can’t forge someone’s signature on a ballot.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Jim: But they’re assuming in saying that that proves voter fraud that the only people who sign a ballot or a ballot envelope are the voter. But that’s absolutely not true. In many areas. For example, Wisconsin, when you put your ballot in a ballot envelope, a witness has to sign it. They sign the envelope to say that you have voted. So those people would answer, yes, I have signed a friend or family member’s ballot envelope with their permission. Yeah, that is completely allowed. That’s the only fraud.

Mark: And that’s the only response that’s available. And you just go, yeah, did do that. It’s more examples of the cherry picking of the argument.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: To kind of skew it so it sounds a lot worse than it is. Which then justify. And it’s only the right that do this. It then justifies the right, justifies the rights. Curtailing of voter abilities afterwards. They just kind of go, well, yeah, because we’ve got all of these things which are obviously cheating. So what we’re going to do is restrict the hours that you can go to the public Dropbox. We’re going to require increased identification. We’re going to deal with things like the fact you, if you lose your place in the queue because you need to go get a glass of water. Which, that’s it, you can’t do it. All of those things are about using this nefarious justification of voter fraud to suppress the votes. It’s, it’s, it, it’s as transparent as they say. The voter fraud is transparent. Even even though it’s not. They’ve just go, what they’re doing is cherry picking. This is what goes on and we’re going to spin it. And everybody goes, oh God, that’s awful. Bloody hell. Yeah, yeah, that’s. We can’t have that. because

00:55:00

Mark: they know it’s the same in the UK is that they know that if you have progressive left wing people voting and you didn’t restrict the voting access then they would just win forever. Because the right wing thing is a thing of the past and it’s a thing about the past. They’re about bringing up the past that didn’t exist.

Jim: So the, yeah. The fact that Some people said that they voted in a state, where they were no longer a permanent resident. Some of those people could be students who are registered to vote where they.

Mark: Are studying, for example.

Jim: That might be part of that. The people who said that they filled out a ballot in part or in full on behalf of a friend or family member. Some of those again could be helping disabled or elderly people fill out ballots which they are unable to do themselves, which again is completely legal.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And you don’t need very many people to have done that to the end to answer this question to get these results because it is in each case about 60 people who are saying yes to these questions. Depending on how this poll was administered, there is always the possibility, as with a lot of polls, which people fill in for money or for some other benefit for doing the poll, that they are just filling it in as quickly as they can and saying yes, yes, yes to everything.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jim: To get the 5 cents that they get for filling in a poll. I don’t, it’s, it isn’t clear voucher at Walmart how this poll was administered. So we don’t know if it was one of those. But YouGov polls and things like that do that. We know that that happens. There was a polling company that asked people if they were qualified to pilot a nuclear submarine, which got like a 20% yes rate too, because.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And what they were doing was testing how, how much are people just going to say yes to everything?

Mark: Like, what’s the first thing we’re reading the thing. Yeah. How many of you have been in space? So have you been in space in the last 18 months?

Jim: so of all of these answers that they said, well, this is obvious proof of voter fraud for many of them. There are legitimate reasons why people might have said yes to this without actually committing voter frame fraud. There are poll based reasons why people might have said yes without actually meaning yes because they didn’t bother to read it or they made a mistake or whatever. There are. There’s the possibility that people who understand what this is asking, put themselves in as a Democrat and said yes to having committed voter fraud because they’re Republicans who are convinced Democrats commit voter fraud.

Mark: Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Jim: Because there’s nothing to stop them doing that.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: But above all of that, one of the questions you asked pretty early on was how does this break down in terms of Democrats and Republicans?

Mark: Right.

Jim: Because obviously the point that the Heartland Institute is making is Democrats committed voter fraud. They stole the election from Trump.

Mark: Right.

Jim: But when you look at the raw figures that are on Rasmussen’s site, As I said, 45% of the respondents claimed that they voted for Trump, 46% claimed they voted for Biden. But it’s, it separated out about 33% each for Democrats, Republicans and Independents in the same way as the, the US Is pretty much is in terms of population. It’s pretty much the third. A, third each. And that’s it. They have at least made some attempt to separate this out in, in that way, but they have also collected the data of what political party people affiliate themselves with. And when you look at it, when it says, did you fill out a ballot in part or in full on behalf of a friend or family member?

Jim: Of the people who voted absentee, 21% of Democrats said, yes, they did fill out a ballot in part or in full on behalf of a family member or friend.

Mark: Somebody else.

Jim: 22% of Republicans.

Mark: Oh, wow. Oh.

Jim: So almost identical. So. Yeah.

Mark: So given that they’re accusing people of saying this is why the vote is.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Is not to be trusted.

Jim: Yeah. They did pretty much almost exactly the same for. Did you sign a ballot or ballot envelope on behalf of a friend or family member with or without his permission? 16% of Democrats who voted absentee did or said they did.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: 19% of Republicans. Whoa. Claimed they voted absentee. Said that. Yes, they did do that.

Mark: Whoa. I think it’s that without people’s permission thing that they kind of went with. Yeah. Whoa. Bloody hell.

Jim: Do you know a friend or family member, co worker or other acquaintance, for example, who has admitted to you that she filled out a ballot on behalf of another person? So they also asked that, like, do you know someone

01:00:00

Jim: else who did it?

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: 11% of Democrats said they did, 10% of Republicans said they did. So basically in each case.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Jim: It is split pretty evenly. If not there’s one, the one which was, did a friend, a family member or an organization such as the political party offer to pay or reward you for voting? That was 11% of Democrats said yes, 7% of Republicans. So that skews, slightly more Democrat signing a ballot envelope. Excuse. More Republican. But pretty much when you tell me.

Mark: I wonder whether the, kind of paying thing is that Democrats go, yeah, lots of people ask me. Whereas Republicans kind of went, yeah, fewer people ask me. They just knew I would. I mean, they didn’t have to. They’re like new customers.

Jim: Yeah. We don’t know, you know, ah, what that could mean. There are many ways to interpret that. It’s, it’s that’s lower than all the other things that they’re claiming were ways that people could cheat. You know, that was, 11 and 10%, 12% for independence. And that’s, like, harder to justify in that there’s no legal reason to reward someone for voting. Although people might have said, let’s go vote together. If you come with me, I’ll. I’ll get your beer, or something like that, you know.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, there you go. Could qualify, essentially, but let’s get a tattoo. Yeah.

Jim: yeah, so, yeah, we’re not, it’s not clear, but it’s also not, clarified in any way. They didn’t make any attempt to ask examples, or if they did, they didn’t print them. But what is happening is when you look at the figures, there is no clear party preference. It is, it is pretty much all the way down the middle for both Democrat, Republican and independents. And yet when they printed these results, Heartland Institute, in their press releases and in the details on the website and in the stuff that Trump has been talking about and Tucker Carlson has been talking about in relation to this, all points to this as evidence of the kind of fraud that Trump has been talking about where Democrats stole the election in 2020. Evidence that Trump was right all along when he said the Democrats are cheating. But, but they, Heartland knows. Heartland has seen the numbers. They know if there was any fraud, if any of this relates to real fraud, it was happening just as much among Republicans as Democrats. But what they’re saying, and this is why they have such an incredibly low rating by media bias. Fact check, they’re saying this is evidence of Democrats stealing the election because they’re just not giving all the data. And Rasmussen, as terrible a polling company as they are, at least print all of the raw figures on their website.

Mark: And finally, some things we really don’t have time to talk about.

Jim: You probably don’t remember now, but as I was finishing up recording the last episode, reports were coming through of a second assassination attempt on Trump. The reason you might not remember is it’s hardly been in the news since. Is this evidence of the deep state and the mainstream media colluding to normalize political violence against Republicans? No.

Mark: Yes.

Jim: It’s because it didn’t really count. I’m not making some conspiracy theory argument that it was staged. I’m saying that dumb and ineffective plots like this get foiled by the Secret Service all the time and we never hear anything about it. In this instance, the guy who I won’t name because fame is A motivator for some of these people hid out next to Trump’s golf course with a rifle for 12 hours. Early reports of gunfire in Trump’s vicinity appear to have actually been Secret Service agents firing on the guy, who immediately ran away way and was quickly captured. It seems that he didn’t get a shot off and was never within sight of Trump himself. Of course Trump tried to fundraise off this and his supporters claim that not being shot by virtue of not being anywhere near the bad guy and the government actually doing its job is somehow evidence of his strength. But this is actually just one of many incidents involving idiots being bad at attacking presidents. In both 2017 and 2020, the Secret Service intercepted two separate letters laced with ricin and intended for Trump, just as they had done for Obama in April and May 2013. In 2017 a guy in an oil refinery in North Dakota stole a forklift and crashed it and nobody would have even known it was assassination attempt if he hadn’t laid out his plan to police afterwards. Apparently he was intending to use the forklift to flip the presidential limousine. Like lockjaw from BattleBots or Chaos 2 from Robot wars for our British listeners. In all, the Secret Service uncovered and foiled at least 11 assassination plots against Obama, including a guy in 2011 who fired a semi automatic rifle at the White House and a pipe bomb that was sent to Obama’s home in 2018. Two people tried to shoot Gerald Ford within three weeks in 1975. There’s a long and storied history of these attempts, some of which resulted in even more serious injuries than a slight scratch on the ear, but it takes a cult to turn them into proof of invincibility. Incidentally, the latest guy’s

01:05:00

Jim: case has been randomly assigned to Trump loving Florida Judge Eileen Cannon, so I expect the outcome will be a public execution and Trump gets to keep all the guys stuff.

Mark: Mark Robinson Sounds just in name only to be such a wholesome guy. You know, a Swiss family Robinson, parental values, building a tree house, looking out for his family to ensure they survive the wilderness and isolation. Yet he immediately disappoints causes a cultural jolt. Not just as we learned last time, that he practically owned all the shares in Blockbuster Video because of his pawn shop for VHS porn rentals, but because he once equivalent of tweeted on a porn chat forum. Yes they existed apparently one handed typing Obviously I am a black Nazi and advocated the reinstatement of slavery with a turkeys for Christmas kind of vibe saying slavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it back. I would certainly buy a few. Many of Robinson’s comments were gratuitously sexual and lewd in nature. They were made between 2008 and 2012 on Nude Africa, a pornographic website that included a message board. Latterly, his Swiss Family Robinson Persona encompassed some twisted Man Friday sentiments. If you’re a man on Friday night and all of a sudden Saturday you feel like a woman and you want to go to the women’s b bathroom in the mall, you’ll be arrested or whatever we gotta do to you, robinson said at a campaign rally in 2024. We’re going to protect our women because he knew all about that. On, Nude Africa. Having posted, I came to a spot that was a dead end, but I had two big vent covers over it. It just so happened it overlooked the showers. I sat there for about an hour and watched as several girls came in and showered. And he’s currently the Republican nominee for the governor of North Carolina. Should be a shoo Ian then. If you’re going to be subject to racist abuse by your ignorant electorate for just being black, then why not out prejudice them and confuse their allegiances? That way Trump will be sure to continue to support you even if no other human being would.

Jim: While Kamala Harris and Tim Waltz are campaigning like crazy, Trump remains merely crazy and isn’t devoting quite as much of his time to making public appearances. Sure, part of the reason is that he’s really old and tired and rallies are expensive when they expect you to pay for everything upfront because you never pay your bills. But it’s also because spending all his time doing rallies would leave him with less time to grift the rubes out of every last penny they have. And that’s really his first love. Just this month, while watching the value of his Trump Media shares get smaller and smaller, he’s launched several new products, all of which are as high quality and desirable as classic brands like Trump Steaks and Trump Urine tests. First off, it’s Trump Coins, a limited edition coin made from an ounce of almost pure silver and selling for $100 apiece. OK, sure, the current price of silver is $30 an ounce, but these have Trump’s face on them and they come with a certificate of authenticity, so they’re probably worth loads more than that. In case coins aren’t your thing, how about a watch? You can get a gold plated watch with Fight Fight Fight engraved on the back for $799, or a solid gold diamond studded tourbillon watch for the bargain price of $100,000. But don’t hesitate. There are only 147 of those available. In case you were thinking it might make a good investment, the website warns you that Trump watches are intended as collectible items for individual enjoyment only, not for investment purposes. Think about that. Even the kinds of lawyers Trump still employs were smart enough to realize they needed a disclaimer in case anyone thought the watches might be worth something. Individual enjoyment to go with your Fight Fight Fight watch. How about some Fight Fight Fight cologne, which is available for $129 exclusively from the website gettrumpsneakers.com and features on the box an AI image of Trump with his fist in the air because they were too cheap to pay the royalties for the actual photo. It doesn’t ship until November, so there’s no word yet on what the scent is, but I’m guessing it smells like a cheap suit soaked in Scared Piss. Finally, since Trump had such success with NFTs, he’s branched out into another technology he definitely doesn’t understand. Crypto. Announcing his family’s new crypto business on a Twitter live stream, he said, crypto is one of those things we have to do whether we like it or not. I have to do it. He really doesn’t have to. But given the number of crypto bros who seem to get in trouble with the sec, I think maybe we do like it.

Mark: Yeah, Scared piss. If someone says and everyone still thinks I’m crazy as some

01:10:00

Mark: kind of justification for saying crazy shit, it’s going to give you a pause for thought. No, for one, why the use of still have, people thought you crazy up till this point? Do you think you ought to be checking in with someone objective you trust, say, John Goodman, for instance, to see which side of batshit you’ve been hitherto? Also, the just the crazy bit, which is inevitably followed by but it’s true is a bit of a triggering, surely. I say John Goodman because this is none other than out of work, reinvented as a right wing mouthpiece Roseanne Barr. And not just squawking on that whole phone with the huge curly lead that stretched into the lounge, but on a Tucker Carlson stage show where she expanded on the eating the pets lie to include eating babies and flesh and humans and ghosts and fuck knows what else. Blood, placenta, human flesh. Oh Christ, what the fuck does it matter? These people are just desperate. Look, we all know that the Q thing was made up by a, wannabe kung fu opera singer called Ron who failed to become famous because of his need for anonymity in playing a worldwide LARP game fame and what we are witnessing is the sound of awful wannabe famous agains being scraped from the barrel of forgotten and flung into the seat of an obsequious fascist enabler income generator and lawfully designated fiction generator Tucker Carlson Show. Now if these people were, say, Noam Chomsky or Naomi Klein, you know, proper American critiques, we might be worried, but I think we just need to be worried that they’re not sufficiently up on the plot of Idiocracy to be able to survive.

Jim: Mike Lindell, the answer to the question what if Dr. Phil got in a teleporter accident with a leaf blower, has claimed that when he chose the totally normal sale price of $14.88 for one of his lumpy pillows, he had no idea that 1488 was a Nazi dog whistle. For the gloriously uninitiated, the 14 refers to a well known white supremacist slogan which is 14 words long, while the 88 is a sneaky way of saying Heil Hitler because H is the eighth letter of the Alphabet. Once alerted to the fact that he was using a common neo Nazi calling card, he immediately apologised for any offence and changed the price. No he didn’t. He claimed it was an attack on him by liberal media, specifically citing the Daily Mail because he wants hand counted paper ballots in the election and promptly changed the sale prices for multiple other products on his online store to end in 88. You know, to prove it was unintentional. And he’s definitely not a Nazi.

Mark: What? There’s some sort of twisted playing the racist card in there, isn’t there? Wow. In a world where J.D. vance won’t stop banging on about childless cat ladies Taylor Swift, I see you put your hand up to your umpteen million followers in that disregard. Thank you for your service to sanity. How do you promote your support for the marvel of the curbing of women’s rights to have dominion over their own selves and choices? And yeah, just off men with your belief that you know better, etc. Etc. When you yourself are a childish dog dude. Republican candidate like say, Derek Anderson, a candidate running in an open race for Virginia’s 7th congressional district, well, symbols. What you do is you borrow someone else’s wife and kids and pose in front of a house in the suburbs with apparently consenting adults and teens who are quite happy to be seen with an incel dog lover These questions should be asked. Thank you, Tucker Carson. Something about it doesn’t surprise me. There’s an implicit acceptance of the weird, supposed normal suburban lifestyle that David lynch so creepily parodied in his films by the right. That makes it okay to hijack other people’s families to promote draconian controls over women, but not okay to be a single guy with a dog promoting draconian controls over women. Put like that, I don’t know which is worse.

Jim: M Jesus, what is it with Republicans and dog killing? Actually, it’s worse than that. What is it with Republicans and openly boasting about the dogs they’ve killed as if other people are going to think they’re awesome? With the memory barely faded of Christie Noem shooting a puppy in the face, this time it’s Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts. You might also know him as the man behind Project 2025. And if you’ve seen him defend the hate filled manifesto on tv, you are probably wondering if the platonic ideal of evil can actually get any worse. Well, strap in. When he was a history professor at New Mexico State University in 2004, he started up a fun conversation in the hallway with his department, department chair Kenneth Hammond, who told the Guardian, my recollection of his account was that he was discussing in

01:15:00

Jim: the hallway with various members of the faculty, including me, that a neighbor’s dog had been barking pretty relentlessly and was, you know, keeping the baby and probably the parents awake, and that he kind of lost it and took a shovel and killed the dog. End of problem. Kevin Roberts denies this, which I guess is a start. But lest you think this is a he said, he said scenario, it’s more of a he said he and he and she and also they said kind of thing because another professor and her husband said Roberts regaled them with the story over dinner at his home, and three other professors recall being told about it at the time by his horrified colleagues. The one who had dinner with him also recalled that he said the neighbour in question also had puppies and he’d considered killing them too.

Mark: no.

Jim: So if the prospect of firing government employees disloyal to Trump, banning abortions, rolling back LGBTQ civil rights, getting rid of the Department of Education, criminalizing pornography and instituting a Christian theocracy aren’t enough to make you vote against Republicans, won’t somebody think of the puppies?

Mark: Think of the puppies. Okay. In Brit poll these last two weeks, the right wing media, or as we call it, the media, have been determined to smear some freebies that Keir Starmer has received as major sleaze. When he has received donations over the last five years or so to the value of less than Boris was given to redecorate number 10 in what was called Wallpaper Gate. You remember that it was the 78th in the list of over a thousand scandals that Boris was not really held accountable for by the same press. At, ah, the Labour Party conference, Kia called for the release of the sausages held by the Palestinians. And somehow the same right wing press, or as we call them here in the uk the press, managed to make that mean that Starmer was antisemitic. The same right wing press, or as we call it, the press, made a great deal of an MP who left the Labour Party because it was focused on greed and self aggrandizement at the same time as letting pensioners down and threatening the livelihoods of people so rich that they hold their tax liabilities offshore so they don’t pay UK tax. The Chancellor, Rachel Rees, is after those people and apparently that will be worse for Britain because they will take their beneficence elsewhere. Meanwhile, the Tory party conference grinds on and the fact that Boris has written a new work, of fiction, sorry, his memoirs was more exciting than anything that happened there. And his memoirs are not all that exciting.

Jim: So the sausage thing. Thanks to a, weird homophobic slur about Keir Starmer trending on Twitter. I saw lots of memes about sausages.

Mark: Wow, a homophobic slur rather than anti Semitic slurp. Just one of the.

Jim: Twitter is a fucking hellscape. I am moving away from Twitter to threads as quickly as I can. Okay, so. So come and join us on threads at Fallacious Trump. Yeah, Anyway, so yeah, I saw some memes involving sausages in relation to the homophobia, but I. What’s the sausages thing about? Why is he demanding Palestinians release sausages? What if they have they taken sausages hostage again?

Mark: Well, actually it was, it was a, male propism for hostages.

Jim: Oh, he said sausages instead of hostages.

Mark: Yeah, hostages breakfast instead of Brexit.

Jim: That makes more sense than I expected.

Mark: So that’s all it was. Yeah, yeah. And then the, the right wing press had kind of somehow made the fact that he’s calling upon the Palestinians in a.

Jim: right, they’re not Hamas, but the Palestinians to release them sausages.

Mark: Well, yeah, he’s probably Hamas. Right, the Palestinians to release the sausages, release the hostages.

Jim: Right.

Mark: And then Netanyahu won’t, but will be stopped from calling out all out war in the Middle east, which, you know. Yeah, let’s not go there. Everybody knew that Starmer meant hostages. He had said sausages.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: So they were, they were. He was just hungry.

Jim: This stuff happens.

Mark: It makes m. Breakfast. It was early.

Jim: It’s a Freudian slip. Like when you mean to say one thing but you accidentally say your mother the other.

Mark: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you kind of. Breakfast means breakfast. Yeah, as. As absolutely said a lot of the time, so.

Jim: No, that’s fine.

Mark: Brexit means breakfast in Brazil. In Brussels with croissant. Proper breakfast. croissant. You know, a bit of jam.

Jim: Well, that’s all the bad arguments and faulty reasoning we have time for this week. So you’ll find the show notes@fallacioustrump.com and if you hear Trump say something stupid and want to ask if it’s a fallacy, our contact details are on the contact page.

Mark: If you think we’ve used the fallacy ourselves. Well, yeah, let us know. And if you had a good time, please give us a review on, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts

01:20:00

Mark: or simply tell one other person in person about how much they like our podcast and you can support the show@patreon.com f Trump. Just like our, ah, strawman level patrons. Lt Colleen L. Richard, Hunter Hopkins, Will M. Scott, Ozzie on Bank, Laura Thompsic, Schmutz, Mark Reiki and Hamburger who told us when we met her at qed we can just call her Amber though another listener recognized her at QED last year because she keep using her full name all the time. And our true Scotsman level patrons, Sharon Robinson, Rene’s Melissa Citek, Stephen Bickle, Janet Ueza, Andrew Hauck and our top patron, Kaz Tui. Thank you so much for being our patrons. It’s really very much appreciated. Thank you.

Jim: You can connect with those awesome people as well as us and other listeners in the facebook group@facebook.com groups Fellacious Trump.

Mark: All music is by the outburst and was used with permission. So until next time on Felicia’s Trump will leave the last word to the, Donald. That’s right.

Donald Trump: Go home to mommy.

Mark: Bye bye. But not okay to be a single guy with a dog. Promoting. Promoting draconian controls over, it’s all gone horrible. There’s a two. That’s two things. Yes.

Jim: There you go.

Mark: Thank you for correcting that. Thank you.

Jim: Be fine now. Definitely get it this time.

Mark: Oh my God. That will make all the difference. Okay. There’s an implicit reception.

Jim: We’re going all the way back there again?

Mark: Because why not?

01:21:38