12 Oct Original Position Fallacy – FT#202
Show Notes
The Original Position Fallacy occurs when someone supports a potentially harmful policy because they assume they won’t be among the people harmed by it.
Trump
We started out by discussing these clips about Trump increasing the penalty for mishandling classified documents:
Then we talked about this clip of the DOD attacking JD Vance:
And finally we looked at this clip of a Trump voter changing his mind:
Mark’s British Politics Corner
Mark talked about Suella Braverman defending Reform’s racism:
He followed that with Farage defending Brexit:
Then he looked at Laila Cunningham defending deportations:
And he finished up with a Farage voter not giving a shit about anyone else:
Fallacy in the Wild (Sting: Johnny Cash – Wichita Lineman)
In the Fallacy in the Wild, we looked at this clip from The Handmaid’s Tale:
Then we discussed this clip from Dr Who:
We followed that with this clip from The West Wing:
And finally, we talked about this clip from Futurama:
Fake News
Here are the statements from this week’s Fake News game:
Mark got it right this week and is still on 48%!
The SAVE database is not a logical fallacy
We talked about the Trump admin’s successes and failures in court regarding using a federal database of citizens to suppress voting rights.
The stories we really didn’t have time to talk about
- Historians have spent years compiling checklists of the warning signs of a fascist government: the cult of the leader, the contempt for the press, the scapegoated minorities, the military worship, the persecution of political enemies. The second Trump administration has been working through that list like a Panini sticker album, and this week former Fox and Friends weekend host Pete Hegseth found the shiny one. None of those historians thought to include “livestreams public executions” on their checklists, because it never occurred to them that anyone would be insane enough to need warning. On Monday, the Pentagon announced that Trump had approved the firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist who killed 13 people and wounded 32 at Fort Hood in 2009. It will be the military’s first execution since 1961. On Thursday, Hegseth went on Real America’s Voice with Jack Posobiec and announced “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public.” He apparently didn’t run this past the Army first, because top brass were reportedly blindsided. The Pentagon later confirmed it means a livestream, on December 3rd at 1pm, with no platform named yet, though it usually posts on X and YouTube, so I assume there’ll be some ads to get through first. FCC chair Brendan Carr, whose agency once fined CBS half a million dollars for showing a nipple for nine-sixteenths of a second, says whether to show someone being shot to death on TV is up to Pete Hegseth. Hasan was shot during his attack and is permanently in a wheelchair. A source told CNN he’ll be “put up like a target.” The soldiers doing the shooting probably can’t opt out without disobeying a direct order, and some worry their identities could leak and they’ll face backlash. We’re against the death penalty on this show, but you don’t need to be to see how insane this is, and plenty of pro-life death penalty supporters have said so. Thom Tillis, a Republican who thinks Hasan should be executed, called the livestream “beyond disgusting” and compared it to what Iran and Afghanistan do. Chris Murphy asked whether Hegseth is “mimicking ISIS executions.” Ruben Gallego, a Marine veteran, called it a snuff film. Utah Republican John Curtis warned it would feed the appetite of extremists, and he has a point. Hasan claimed he was defending the “Islamic Empire”, and Hegseth is offering to produce the martyrdom footage free of charge. Laura Loomer, meanwhile, called Hegseth “amazing” and said she can’t wait to watch, so at least the Pentagon has found its target audience. Even JD Vance, who’ll defend anything, said he won’t be watching. On Friday, Trump said he “absolutely” approved the livestream. On Saturday, he said he hasn’t decided yet. Army regulations don’t allow livestreamed executions, so Hegseth would need an exemption, and Hasan could file a habeas petition that delays everything for years, so at the moment, our best hope for American decency is paperwork.
- In something of a throwback to the interpersonal behaviour advice issued to GIs stationed in Europe during World War II the FBI is warning ICE agents not to trust any woman willing to date them. An FBI memo suggested that ICE officers on dating apps should be wary of tradwives,, as well as any woman whose profile would “appeal” to them. The FBI issued a warning in February of this year that “as of late January 2026, a small group of women allegedly were creating fictitious online dating profiles with the purpose of attracting and then doxxing law enforcement participating in immigration enforcement”. If it’s not hard enough for far-right hitherto basement-dwelling teeth-gnashing, sock-bashing misogynist incels to find a date, now the very women that they might finally think they’d have a chance with when thumbing grooves in their phones swiping through Tinder, Grinder, Triggr, Insurgr, Patriotr, Etcterr are luring them out into the open to, the FBI claim “generate public embarrassment and deter immigration enforcement activity,” The origin of the warning may well be a thinly sourced January 2026 article by the New York Post, which cited two TikTok posts from women stating they were using dating apps to identify ICE agents, as well as a single post by another female user urging gay men on Grindr to do the same. Which we covered at the time.
The FBI did not provide any specifics on where or when it observed the supposed doxxing operation, and conceded all information in the memo was “not finally evaluated intelligence.” It feels more like the usual “make the law-enforcers/Trump’s personal army out to be the victims” tactic when it’s more likely a risk for undocumented individuals using dating apps cos of face recognition and commercial ad data. ICE officers can feed a photo of anyone into a facial recognition app called “Mobile Fortify”, monitor social media with apps like SocialNet, and look at vast troves of commercially available location data without a warrant. It is not a felony to identify an ICE agent using their online profile, despite what Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said at the time. Just, having successfully lured them out into the public eye, don’t escalate to releasing private information, encouraging third-party harassment, or physical stalking. Them’s the facts, just saying, no reason…. - Karoline Leavitt left her job as White House press secretary in August, and after nearly two months of speculation, Trump has finally announced her replacement. The new press secretary is Katie Zacharia, senior communications adviser for Truth Social, who’s also a regular on Fox and Newsmax. Trump praised her “unblemished record of support” and called her “a devoted fan and member of MAGA!” It’s fair to say that Trump has a type. Blonde millennial women. You know, like Natalie Harp. And Ivanka. Katie looks like someone recycled the last two press secretaries, Kayleigh and Karoline. They didn’t even need to change the monogrammed K scratched into the surface of the press room podium with a compass. Actually, now I look closer, it says KKK, which makes more sense. But this is Fallacious Trump, so of course we’re not suggesting that simply because Katie closely resembles everyone Trump has ever fantasized about, that she’s unqualified for the job, so let’s look at her CV. Zacharia has a law degree from Pepperdine, which is more than Karoline had. She also spent about two months as a spokesperson at the Department of Homeland Security, which barely counts as a job but does count as experience, and she’s done dozens of TV appearances. On paper she’s a lawyer who can talk on TV, and that’s more than several previous press secretaries managed. Her views, though, are where she really shines. Popular Info found that in 2022 she was posting “Pedo Podesta” and declaring that “radical left Hollywood elitists are sick pedo cannibals,” and she praised conspiracy theorist Robert David Steele for “exposing the pedo rings of the elite cabal.” That’s Pizzagate, the crackpot conspiracy theory that once sent a man into a pizza restaurant with a rifle demanding that they free the non-existent children they weren’t holding hostage in their non-existent basement. The Bulwark dug up some of her deleted tweets. She called for suspending habeas corpus, which you would hope a law school graduate understood would be a bad way to deal with immigration. She called Bill Gates “a eugenicist” who “was pushing for everyone to get a toxic jab,” reposted a completely bullshit claim that “8 in 10 women had a miscarriage after getting the COVID vaccine,” and blamed “leftist transgender assailants” for “at least a dozen” school shootings. She says the 2020 election was stolen, and she’s urged Trump to run for a third term, which again, undermines her whole law degree thing, since they probably covered the Constitution briefly at Pepperdine. As for that “unblemished record of support,” it’s easy to keep a record unblemished if you delete the blemishes. Only one of those tweets was ever on to something. Replying to Mike Cernovich, she warned the midterms would be a “bloodbath if [Republicans] don’t shift course now,” the single accurate prediction in the whole archive, and naturally she deleted it. A person familiar with the situation told CNN that as of a week ago, Katie was not even being considered for the role. It’s genuinely possible that that’s part of why she got it. On Kalshi, the prediction market, she was trading at 1% before the announcement. On Thursday night one trader bet $19 on her, which is expected to return almost $2000. Two more bets, worth roughly $74 and $80, were placed at around 1:41 p.m. Friday, less than 20 minutes before news organizations reported that Zacharia had been selected. Kalshi is investigating, just like they did when Gabriel Perez, the White House teleprompter operator, made over $100,000 betting on what Trump would say in speeches he’d already read. If one of these traders is a White House insider, the scandal is the stake. Nineteen dollars. Gabriel Perez at least had the courage of his corruption.
- Were coming up to the first anniversary of Trump announcing the Trumphal Arch the Arc de Trump – the monstrous 250-foot Nobel Prize Loser’s monument to his oversized ego. At the time Trump simply and candidly said the arch was being built to honor ….”me.” For some reason the administration felt it needed to temper that a tad and has since characterized it as a tribute to the United States’ 250th anniversary and a tourist attraction. “The Triumphal Arch in Memorial Circle is going to be one of the most iconic landmarks not only in Washington, D.C., but throughout the world,” the White House has repeatedly told NPR, as recently as Tuesday. Yeah it isn’t fellas! But now Trump is saying that the damn thing will double as a “top grade Military Complex” writing on Truth Social on Sunday that the 250-foot structure will “house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas,” in addition to storing ammunition. I mean call me cynical but isn’t the pentagon a mere drone’s throw away already anyway? As Harold Hongju Koh, a former State Department legal advisor who now teaches international law at Yale Law School, said “If there are dangers to which you need to have drones and snipers … Why don’t you just move them there now? Why do you need to build an arch?” Koh asked. “Secondly, if the arch is what’s creating the national security problem, so much that you need to have these mobile protections on board, then just don’t build the arch.” Does Trump think that adding military to the thing Trumps any normal, legal, or rational, opposition? Even the FAA who’d already looked at any problems with a fricking great 250 stone penis-replacement being in the flight path for DC airport and came back with its fine are now tearing it up and their hair out having to consider the safety aspects of drones taking off randomly from what was once going to be a tourist observation deck into commercial airspace! “It’s the lipstick he puts on every pig,” Koh said. “Immigration is for national security. Terrorists are for national security. Building a border wall is for national security. Building a ballroom is for national security.” I suspect the impetus is the imminent losses at the mid-terms in November and the likelihood that the Democrat controlled house are not going to be such a bunch of kow-towing trump-lickers and simply laugh the whole fucking egomaniacal enterprise into the nearest dumpster with the dripping lining from the reflecting pool and the USA’s limp sodden mouldy global garbage-pail reputation! “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare”
- Trump isn’t on the ballot this November, which hasn’t stopped him from running a campaign and sending you the invoice. Since September, viewers across America have been watching a run of pretty shitty ads starring the president, at least 13 of them, each ending with the words “Paid for by the U.S. government.” Because if they actually said “paid for by you, the taxpayer”, it seems worse. Democratic lawmakers say $20 million in Homeland Security money was redirected to fund them. The ads are campaign ads in everything but name. One has Trump vowing to “defeat communism, socialism and Marxism in America,” set to a song called “Love Me,” so at least one thing in it is honest. Another is a lightly trimmed 2024 campaign ad, with Trump striding down a hallway to announce a “final battle” to “demolish the deep state” and “expel the warmongers from our government,” now airing in the middle of the Iran war he started. They swapped the campaign tagline for the government disclaimer, presumably the only work anyone did on it. There’s also “King of the Jungle,” where Trump is intercut with lions and eagles, and one called “God Made Trump.” Federal law bars government funded publicity that’s purely partisan or self-aggrandizing, but laws don’t apply to Trump. Even John Thune, the Republican Senate leader, said he liked the message (because he’s a cowardly fuckstick) but the ads “shouldn’t be paid for with taxpayer dollars.” On Monday, Trump announced on Truth Social he’d “pay for them myself, and with money I raised for MAGA, Inc.” “Myself” here means a super PAC sitting on around $415 million of other people’s money. The White House then clarified this was only on new ads moving forward, and they wouldn’t be refunding money already spent, so the ads keep airing with their “Paid for by the U.S. government” disclaimer, now with extra irony. Trump insists the ads were “really good” and a “promotion for the country,” because he’s never managed to grasp the distinction between him personally and the USA. The DNC sued on Wednesday, accusing him of personally orchestrating the whole thing. Meanwhile, FCC chair Brendan Carr, who turns up in every Trump scandal like Forrest Gump with a lanyard, had already declared the ads “normal-course public service announcements” with nothing to “merit any sort of FCC review.” Asked whether they were propaganda, he laughed. When a reporter mentioned that one of them was literally a 2024 Trump campaign ad, he warned that groups on the left like to “weaponize” the FCC’s licensing process. Yes, those dastardly groups from the left who demanded Jimmy Kimmel’s firing for being mean to Trump. For a taste of what an honestly paid-for campaign ad looks like, try Arkansas, where Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s former press secretary before he switched exclusively to blonde millenials, released one promoting Welfare work requirements. Its villain is Brad, a young white guy who lives in his mother’s basement, plays video games and eats cheese balls instead of working. Right-wing assholes were pissed. Sure, the ad portrayed welfare recipients as lazy, able-bodied moochers instead of people in genuine need of support, so that’s great, but it wasn’t racist enough. Hairy incel Matt Walsh complained that “Republicans don’t have the balls to do this ad with ‘Shaniqua’ as the villain, even though that would actually be an accurate portrayal of the problem at hand.” Sean Davis, co-founder of the Federalist website, wrote that “our government has systematically discriminated against white men for decades now, and yet now has the audacity to dishonestly mock young white men as welfare queens.” About 60 percent of people on Arkansas’s Medicaid program are white and 18 percent are Black, so Brad is the statistically accurate villain but people like Matt Walsh don’t care what the data says. They want to know why the poor person they’re angry at doesn’t look like the poor person they were already angry at.
- Eric Deters who failed to win a primary for a house seat in 2024 has had to cancel his annual Patriot’s Day Freedom Fest in Kentucky this year – darn it! But he’s not bitter – not bitter about losing the primary, not bitter about having to cancel the festival that the posters scream is Free for the People Because they Deserve it! Yes, yes he is!! Cos we the people obviously don’t deserve it that much cos he’s not willing to “write that check like I’ve done in the past,” adding that calling off the event “saved me from picking up a pretty goddamn large tab that I was going to pick up that I didn’t want to freaking pick up. It’s a business call, plain and simple.” A shame really cos in the past he’s had one presidential candidate – Donald J Trump appearing in 2023 and in 2024 Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Candace Owens, and this year promised Kid Rock – of whom Deters is a biiiig fan – he has all his songs downloaded to his phone and categorised under Rap, Rock and Flow depending on the mood he’s in. Also this year FFS Dog the Bounty Hunter was going to appear as well as James Comer!! But OMG how ungrateful can all those people “that have money that I interact with, who I do favors for all day long, they ask me for something, I never say no. I never said no to these people,”be?! “When I put together Patriot State Freedom Fest, I put it together with the game plan and the idea that I could pay for it with the VIP sales of $1,000 from these hundred people that I interact with on a regular basis that have money,” But with barely a week to go only 6 VIP tickets promising Up Close and Personal Interaction Opportunities, Comfortable Lounge and a Premium Freedom Fest Experience had been sold. Chrissakes the freaking ingrates!! “I am never ever, ever, ever, ever doing this event again,” was Deters final word – well four, repeated words. We as representatives of the people i.e. those can’t afford a six-grand ticket are a bit miffed that the free freedom fest isn’t continuing to being freely given cos we deserve it but is entirely contingent on the whims of stinking rich individuals whose tastes and opinions determine whether we actually get to see Kid Rock or Dog The in the flesh. Of course it’s all the fault of the “woke freaking media” pointing out Deters’ selfish support of Comer’s-as-yet-unannounced-gubernatorial-run and MAGA-lovin’ altruism! Freaking Wokerati!
- Eric Deters’ money worries didn’t end with Freedom Fest. He says he paid Kimberly Guilfoyle $100,000 for each of three festival appearances, so at least now we know why the VIP tickets cost so much. Guilfoyle is Trump’s ambassador to Greece, a former Fox host, and the ex-fiancée of Don Jr. The money was only the start of Deters’s problems with her. According to texts the Wall Street Journal reviewed, days before her Senate confirmation hearing she asked him for another $100,000 to pay off her American Express card. “It won’t show up anywhere if you wire money to American Express,” she texted, followed by “Honey please, I need you to get this done for me today” and a praying hands emoji. In return, Deters would get plenty. She’d be his “Trump ride or die, forever and ever,” – surely worth the money on its own – but also host him in Greece as her “special guest,” and make sure the administration looked kindly on his tax and legal problems. He wanted help getting on Tucker Carlson’s podcast, an introduction to Kid Rock for a song he co-wrote called “Kentucky Outlaw,” and to push for the extradition of Abubakar Durrani, an Ohio spinal surgeon who fled to Pakistan after being charged with insurance fraud. He’d offered her $1 million when Durrani settled. Deters, a former lawyer, handled his side by writing memos. “As of this memo, I have not received one favor,” he wrote. “No results. No need for me to pay.” The missing favors weren’t what bothered Guilfoyle. “Eric, I really wish you would stop papering these things,” she replied, adding that it was “really dangerous” and he could “simply just call me on Signal.” He was also, she warned, going to “literally cost me my ambassadorship.” I don’t know what she was worried about. Bribery is not the kind of thing that gets you fired by Trump. Her lawyer says the texts aren’t authentic, and also that she was owed money for speaking at Deters’s patriotic events, a defence that works better when you just pick one of those. CBS reports White House officials were told the texts are real. Meanwhile, Kristi Noem, the puppy-murdering former Homeland Security Secretary, found her own way to be corrupt. The New York Times reports that on her last morning at the Department of Homeland Security, before she was fired in March, her department signed deals to buy five jets from a company called Daedalus Aviation. This is not part of the story, but what the fuck? The mythical figure of Daedalus is known for exactly one attempt at aviation, and it pretty famously went tits up. Anyway Kristi paid $108 million for a Boeing 737 converted into a private jet that Daedalus had picked up months earlier for under $90 million. $106 million for two Gulfstreams that cost Daedalus around $83 million. And $45 million apiece for two 17-year-old 737s, a price aviation experts told the New York Times was millions above market value. Why would Kristi pay so much over the odds to a single company on her way out of the office? Well, in 2024, Daedalus’s chairman, William Walters, had given $10,000 to a PAC set up exclusively to support her. That’s a huge return on investment! More than 4000% in two years! Can we get this guy running the economy please? Incidentally, Daedalus was also the company DHS paid to fly Kristi and her aides around on charters, so she bought the planes from her own taxi firm. Axios reported in February that the luxury 737 on her wish list seats 18 and has a bar and a bedroom, which seems excessive for a plane that was officially bought for deportation flights. Kristi called the New York Times story dishonest and demanded a retraction, but she didn’t dispute the prices or the timing. Both are in writing. Somebody should tell her to stop papering these things.
- Three more reform councillors resigned this week citing issues such as a “serious safeguarding issue” that was not addressed by the party, along with allegations of bullying and political chaos bringing the total since the local elections to 51. Meanwhile hooray Dan Jukes and James Orr the two dodgy geezers in Reform who were filmed brokering dodgy donor deals have been cleared of any wrongdoing – by Reform’s own internal investigation carried out by Adam Richardson, Reform’s barrister, and Tom Waterhouse, the party’s general secretary. What the report doesn’t tell you is that it carries no weight at all, unsurprisingly and that an actual investigation is still being carried out by the actual police. Reform also came 4th in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election that was triggered when Keir Starmer resigned as an MP. That could have been cos the Reform candidate only mentioned Reform once in his campaigning letter and misspelled it! Yep Refrom! It was hoped that this by-election would be the conduit through which the leader of the Green Party Zack Polanski could become an MP, but he lost out to Labour probably as a result of the resurgence of Labour under Andy Burnham following his Straight Outta Corbyn passionate socialist speech at the Labour Party Conference and also thanks to a vote by the Greens at their party conference to adopt policy that equates Zionism with racism and calling for a single Palestinian state. Zack unfortunately missed the vote whilst campaigning in the by-election and stands accused of a lack of leadership. A week is a long time in politics and as Burnham shows by co-opting Corbynism without any reference to or acknowledgement of Jezza; it’s so easy to quickly become yesterday’s man. Oh and in an attempt to appear current, contemporary, more pro than the Greens, and a viable opposition leader, Kemi Badenoch has been blethering on to LBC about an iron shield – not a dome – cos it’s portable – missile defence system like Israel have got, only cos she’s made it up on the spot she also made up the portable bit and how much it’d cost and when it’d be delivered despite the Tories having failed to deliver some train lines in 14 years! Still that bit is all explained in a booklet she’s written – a booklet… a booklet!? Who reads booklets? Called The Right Way, it’s a 95-page statement of Conservative principles modelled on the party’s 1976 document The Right Approach Ooh she’s so modern!
- We normally end with British politics news, but this week there’s one other story I had to get off my chest, and it’s not funny, and I didn’t feel like doing this and then going back to making jokes, so here we are. Last month the Trump administration finalized the repeal of Biden’s Title IX rule, which protected LGBTQ students from discrimination and tightened how colleges have to handle sexual assault complaints. Education Secretary Linda McMahon called the rollback “commonsense,” “clear,” a return to “commonsense protections.” What it actually does, apart from stripping trans kids of federal recognition because cruelty is the whole fucking point, is hand colleges back the discretion to run rape investigations however loosely they like, which they were already doing entirely too fucking loosely, and now they’ve got the White House’s blessing to do it worse. On the exact same day, prosecutors in Tompkins County, New York reopened the case against seven Cornell frat bros accused of drugging a fellow student with ketamine and raping her for most of the night. Their names are Matthew Ingalls, Johnathan Newell, Winston Lee, Gillio Lopes, Diego Sarabia, Scott Norris and Scott Kretzschmar, and I’m naming them because they’re already named in a public court filing, and because the second any story like this breaks, a specific type of rape apologist starts wringing their hands about how publishing an accused rapist’s name might “ruin his future.” Good. Fuck their futures. Fuck every last one of them. Not ruining the futures of young rapists is how you get older rapists. May they never know peace. That doesn’t, of course, extend to harassing anyone who happens to share a name with them. A former Marine and his family got death threats because he shares a name with a defendant, and that’s bullshit too. The district attorney says he never charged anyone in 2024 because nobody gave his office the group chat that has become the centerpiece of this story, where one of them messaged the fraternity’s Snapchat group that there was “free pussy” upstairs, and not one of the 57 members of the group did a fucking thing. Fifty-seven men. This is why it’s all men. It’s all men because you can’t tell which men until it’s too late, and the chances are pretty fucking high that it’s that one. And when some fragile cunt pipes up with “not all men,” it’s definitely that one. Cornell’s own police investigated. Cornell’s own Title IX office investigated. Two investigations by the university itself, and, according to the DA, not one of those people could be arsed to put that chat in front of a prosecutor. It only surfaced two years later because the survivor, now known as Jane Doe, who reported this to campus police within weeks, who sat through Cornell’s internal process, who watched nobody get arrested, went out and got a lawyer and sued everybody involved herself. That’s the only reason we know any of this. The institutions that were supposed to protect her did nothing, and she had to do their jobs for them. The group chat isn’t the only piece of missing evidence, as it turns out. When she reported it to Cornell police in November 2024, in a two-day interview, she told them, “I can say with 100% confidence I was raped.” Campus police then sent the Tompkins County District Attorney a six-page summary. Those words weren’t in it. And what did Cornell actually do to these men in the meantime? Offered them, according to her lawsuit, the chance to “mitigate their conduct by submitting essays.” Essays. For a gang rape. Cornell insists that’s not the whole story, that some were expelled, some suspended. But even on Cornell’s own telling, somebody at that university looked at an alleged gang rape and decided homework was a proportionate response and that an essay belonged anywhere near the word “consequences.” Governor Kathy Hochul has removed the Tompkins County DA from the case and appointed New York Attorney General Letitia James as special prosecutor. Cornell’s trustees hired Sally Yates, the former Deputy Attorney General, to review how the university handles sexual assault. Cornell’s president, Michael Kotlikoff, put out a video saying the university “must do better.” Yeah, no fucking shit, Michael. Two years it took, and a lawsuit and a national scandal, before you noticed. Students staged a seven-hour sit-in, vowed not to spend money on campus, and demanded that anyone involved be expelled or have their degrees revoked. I would add get rid of the entire college administration and frat houses, but one step at a time I guess. Trump, when asked about it, said he didn’t know much but “Cornell is a fine school” and he’s sure they’ll “do what’s right.” The next day, after Hochul appointed James, the attorney general who took him to court for fraud, he said, “I feel badly for whoever she’s looking at, because they won’t get a fair shake.” On Truth Social, he asked why Hochul would appoint a “Corrupt Prosecutor” to “the highly controversial Cornell University rape case.” Highly controversial. Which part, Donald? The rape? He had sympathy to spare for the men accused of raping her, though, and in none of the quotes I could find does he say he feels badly for Jane Doe. Her lawyer says that since she filed the suit, a mob of cowards online has doxxed her and called her a liar. She’s had death threats, including a phone call threatening to shoot her and her parents. Her parents. A fake tip sent police swarming her home. A judge had to seal court records and condemned “dangerous internet vigilantism.” She reported it. She cooperated. She sat through every step of the process. And this is her reward.
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