Nutpicking – FT#129

08 Aug Nutpicking – FT#129

Show Notes

Nutpicking is the practise of choosing an extreme view or fringe member of a group and representing it as typical of that group to support an argument or point of view.

Trump

We started out by discussing this Facebook ad from Trump:

Then we talked about this clip of Trump throwing a bit of anti-immigrant red meat to the crowd:

And we followed that up with this humor failure from Brad Parscale:

Here is the media’s and left’s position in a nutshell. It isn’t about America. https://t.co/uvbDXYgXuW

— Brad Parscale (@parscale) June 14, 2018

We closed out this section with some probable nutpicking by Jordan Klepper on the Daily Show:

Mark’s British Politics Corner

Mark talked about these examples of Diane Abbott and Priti Patel being not great with numbers:

And he followed that up with these clips of Nick Gibb continuing to claim that it’s Labour who can’t manage the economy:

Fallacy in the Wild

In the Fallacy in the Wild we looked at this clip from The Little Mermaid:

Then we discussed this clip from Tour of Duty:

And we finished by talking about this clip from Law and Order: Special Victims Unit:

 

Fake News

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

1. Look at this crowd. What an amazing – they won’t show this, the horrible, horrible fake news. They never show the support. You know, I think they’ve actually gotten worse. I used to think they were just bad people who were greedy and corrupt but I actually think it’s – I’m going to get in trouble for even saying this, but it’s almost like a conspiracy, where they’ll do whatever they can to stop me getting elected again.
2. Every poll, we’re kicking Biden’s ass and that’s the problem. That’s the problem. And if I wasn’t, if I wasn’t, we wouldn’t be under investigation by deranged Jack Smith. He’s a deranged human being. You take a look at that face, you say that guy is a sick man. There’s something wrong with him. I would – somebody said, why don’t you be nice to him? I said it wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t matter. This guy’s a maniac.
3. Mexico. They gave us 28,000 soldiers. Everybody said, oh, you didn’t get money for the wall. I said, yes I did. No, you didn’t get money. I said no, we built the wall, we built almost 500 miles. We got money. What do you mean we didn’t get money? They gave us 28,000 soldiers free of charge. 28,000! That’s more than giving us a couple of bucks for a wall. They guarded our border for a long time. 28,000.

Mark got it right this week, and is still on 47%

 

Indictments are still not a logical fallacy

We talked about both the superseding indictment in the Florida documents case, and the new indictment in the DC election interference case.

 

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

• Back when Trump got impeached for withholding military aid to Ukraine on the condition of his political opponent Joe Biden being investigated for random made up crimes, GOP Senator Susan Collins voted to acquit Trump and said she believed Trump had learned “a pretty big lesson”. I’ll bet Senator Collins is feeling pretty embarrassed now, after Trump last week called for Republicans in Congress to withhold all future military aid to Ukraine “until the FBI, DOJ and IRS hand over every scrap of evidence they have on the Biden Crime Family’s corrupt business dealings”, because Trump has never learned anything and dammit, he’s not about to start now. The congressional investigation into the Biden Crime Family has been a shitshow since it began in May, with no evidence presented of any wrongdoing whatsoever, and committee chairman James Comer initially claiming he had a very credible whistleblower, who then mysteriously went missing. It turned out he went missing because he had skipped bail after being arrested on weapons trafficking charges four months after his indictment for acting as an unregistered foreign agent of China. More recently, the committee has heard testimony from Hunter Biden’s former business partner Devon Archer, which had Republicans and right wing pundits shouting ‘gotcha’ for a few days because Archer’s testimony proved that Joe Biden talked to Hunter about business and was therefore completely going to be impeached, until Archer’s testimony was released and it turned out he explicitly said Joe never talked business with Hunter and that Archer had no knowledge of any wrongdoing at all. Various GOP voices have continued to claim that it’s extremely suspicious that Joe picks up the phone when Hunter calls, because none of them have ever experienced parental love before.
• Dammit and blast I knew we shouldn’t have laughed at MyPillow MyArse CEO Mike Lindell last episode having to auction off his manufacturing equipment cos no-one was stocking his actual manufactured product as he continues to push the notion of the election being stolen from Trump – BTW what are you doing it for Mikey? – Trump’s not gonna thank you or be affected financially by your loyalty, and Biden’s not dying from the poison you’re swallowing! We shouldn’t have just laughed, we should have gone online and secured a pallet of non-latex face masks for $8 or a complete electric-powered 35-foot belt conveyor or an even bigger 86-foot one for $6! And a desk to watch it from for $6, whilst sitting on a set of chairs that gained not a single bid. Okay admittedly for us there might have been quite pricey shipping costs, but it would’ve been so worth it, especially if he’d signed it – just to laugh every time his fatuous name flopped round every 86 feet! We could have used the remaining 85 feet and 11 inches to write out all the zeroes in the 1.3 billion Dominion are suing him for as well, making long Kenneth Williams-style “ooooooooohhhh!” sounds as they fly by!
• Go Woke, Go Broke is the oft-quoted refrain from people who can’t define woke any more than they can Critical Race Theory, and no, this is not a gloating story about Barbie, which has now made over a billion dollars at the box office and, more importantly, proved Ben Shapiro wrong. As if proof were needed. No, this story is about Texas A&M University, who back in June hired Kathleen McElroy in their Department of Communication and Journalism. McElroy is a black journalist who studied at Texas A&M herself, is a former editor of the New York Times, and oversaw the journalism school at the University of Texas in Austin. On top of those very clear qualifications, she has a reputation for promoting diversity in the workplace, which sounds like a plus, but this is Texas, so that’s the kind of thing that can get you shitcanned, especially this coming January when the state’s new law comes into effect which effectively bans the discussion of diversity, equity and inclusion on Texas campuses. As a result, some racist cowards who prefer to remain anonymous pushed back against McElroy’s new job, resulting in the University’s president resigning and A&M settling with McElroy to the tune of $1 million rather than hiring her anyway and telling the racists to fuck off.
• As well as missing our chance to buy old sleep goods manufacturing plant, the fact that just about anyone can create a federal political committee and generate an official, public organisational document that appears on the Federal Election Commission’s website, FEC.gov also passed us by this week at Fallacious Towers. Following the New York Times reporting on Sunday that Trump was creating a legal defence fund to cover the bills of witnesses and defendants, a person (or people) filed on Monday separate paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to create the “Donald Trump Legal Defense Fund”. Oh I now know why that passed us by – cos morals! Cos unless Donald Trump’s legal defence fund is being run out of an apartment in Wheaton, Illinois, and its email address carries the extension “opayq.com,” scammers are on the hunt to punk loyal supporters of the former president, and you just know Trump’s gonna hate that – cos that’s what he does! The FEC has send a letter to the Donald Trump Legal Defence Fund’s treasurer saying “Knowingly and willfully making any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation to a federal government agency, including the Federal Election Commission, is punishable under the provisions of (law),” But in true Trump supporter/scammer-styley they know that the system is always playing catchup cos it’ll take weeks to “administratively terminate” fraudulent committees that violate regulations in a kind of legal whack-a-mole fashion. Is it just me or do I smell a Jacob Wohl-sized scam! Large and ambitious but doomed to failure and a jail-term? Ooh I miss him!
• I would have guessed that, when you’re running for your party’s nomination for President, your main opponent being indicted on almost 80 felony charges in three states should tip things at least a little bit in your favor. But it turns out that when you’re an unpleasant, ineffectual, amateurish charisma-vacuum like Ron DeSantis, you still can’t manage to creep above 17% in the polls. Cutting a third of his campaign staff feels like it’s not going to help, even when one of them is the Nazi who created a video with a Nazi symbol for your campaign and then lied about it, but maybe money is getting tight because donors also seem to be fleeing the sinking ship. His largest donor by an order of magnitude, hotel entrepreneur Robert Bigelow, has already given $20 million to the pro-DeSantis PAC, Never Back Down, but has now decided to back down until Ron is able to raise more on his own. Perhaps he’ll be able to gin up some support following his appearance this month in the first Republican Primary debate where he’ll be the big fish on a small stage with a bunch of candidates who are struggling to poll above 3%. That is, of course, presuming Trump keeps his promise not to show up. As we all know, Trump shies away from publicity and is always keen for the spotlight to fall on others, so I’m sure he’ll do the smart thing and stay away.
• Republican presidential candidate and fly landing-strip hair-style-wearer Mike Pence weirdly seemed to attempt to court the favour of a dozen or so supporters of another, recently indicted, Republican candidate, his ex-running mate; one Donald J Trump. Having been faced with shouts of “Hang Mike Pence” early one January a few years ago, flags with “Pence is a traitor” and calls of “Why d’you let the people down?” by residents at a Londonderry New Hampshire Town Hall meeting seemed not to faze him. Instead he seemingly embraced the violent, subversive, mistaken, anti-democratic self- styled idiot patriots, who rampaged, pillaged and killed at Capitol Hill that January in 2020 by saying ​​“I’ll tell you there is a lot of passion out there, but I just, I reject your suggestion that that passion is translated into the violence and vandalism of that day,”. Rejecting the possibility of future violence whilst reminding the above idiots that he didn’t have the authority “that day” to overturn the democratically run fucking election just cos it didn’t go the way the check-shirted, gun-totin’, neck-beards wanted (and that’s just the women!) did seem to show that he’d neither the fortitude nor foresight to play the long constitutional-wrecking game the Republican party requires of their candidates. So yeah bye-bye Mikey ‘snot been nice knowing you. Now where’s that fly holding his next town hall.
• As of yet, Mike Pence hasn’t met the fundraising qualification to appear on the GOP Primary debate stage, and someone else who won’t be there to challenge DeSantis is Robert F Kennedy Jr because, you silly, he’s a Democrat. Yes, I know everything he’s ever done, every opinion he’s expressed, every interview he’s given, every person who has endorsed him, and everyone who is even prepared to be in a photo with him just screams Republican, but no, he’s definitely a Democrat and not a Steve Bannon backed chaos agent. Anyway, like all good Democratic candidates, RFK jr has a deep understanding of the constitution and that’s why he’s suing YouTube and Google for violating his First Amendment rights. I don’t think the suit actually accuses the private companies of doing cancel culture on him, but he did claim during nationally televised testimony to the Weaponization Subcommittee that he was being censored by big media, so should he decide to come out as Republican in the future his bona fides are in place. Of course, the censorship he’s talking about is the dangerous medical misinformation he just can’t help yelling conspiracy theories about in public which occasionally get a bit anti-Semitic as conspiracy theories are wont to do. You would think that, being a Harvard educated lawyer, Kennedy would understand that private companies can’t violate your First Amendment rights, but then it’s never stopped Ted Cruz from misrepresenting the law either, and it is fully on brand for a Republican Presidential candidate. Dammit! Democrat! I keep forgetting for some reason.
• On this septic isle Thérèse Coffey, the one woman chimney/distillery and  Environment Minister said the Tory party must show that it cared about the environment and insisted that “despite the noise over the last week” of people coughing while swimming in shit-strewn rivers not being cleaned by unheld-to-account private water companies, and Rishi saying we should max out the oil and gas fields in the North Sea to show just how green we are, the government was still committed to reaching net zero by 2050. Continuing the way they have, what with Rishi Sunak arguing with the radio about flying to Scotland to make that green announcement about granting more licences to fossil fuel companies and in the process using the nutpicking fallacy
  Interviewer: How are you getting up here to make this Green announcement today, private jet?Rishi Sunak: Uh, I’ll be flying as I normally would, and that is the most efficient use of my time. But again, I think actually that question brings to life a, uh, great debate here. If you or others think that the answer to climate change is getting people to ban everything that they’re doing to stop people flying, to stop people going on holiday, I think that’s absolutely the wrong approach.

   (and slippery slope and straw man) – Net Zero may just be about the number of Tories in power for the next 25 years. Meanwhile at a by-election in Scotland cos of the recall and removal of the member of the SNP Margaret Ferrier, after she broke Covid rules, Labour may be grabbing the chance, once again to fight amongst themselves – Labour’s candidate, Michael Shanks, has vowed to oppose his own party if it tries to keep the Tory policy of restricting child allowance to two children. Officials concede that many voters remain uninspired by Labour. The party’s main message in the byelection is likely to be that a Labour win will help force the Tories out of office in Westminster. More of Not-Progressive ordinary-worker-supporting Labour but rather simply Not-Tory. Though Labour’s Stephen Kinnock’s announcement that if they won in 2024 Labour would have to keep the Tories’ controversial offshore barges to house refugees, blurs the line between left and right even further. Sacré bleu! I’ve only been back in Blighty a day and I’m already working out how to sneak out with the Peloton when the UK leg of the Tour de France returns à Paris!!

 

That’s almost all for this week, but here’s something new. I’ve been playing with various AI-aided transcription tools for a while now, as I really want to offer transcripts of all our episodes, but they have been universally shit so far, and correcting the errors takes a LOT of time. I’ve finally found one that seems to do pretty well, but it’s definitely not fully accurate and the amount of error correcting I can’t help myself from doing is still very time consuming, so with the caveat that there will definitely be errors in the following, here is our first transcript. I’ll try to do this moving forward, but no promises!

Nutpicking – FT#129 Transcript

Jim: Hello, and welcome to Fallacious Trump, the podcast where we use the insane ramblings of a man who collects indictments like ex wives to explain logical fallacies. I’m your host, Jim.

Mark: And 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 the Nutpicking fallacy. I think it’s the first fallacy that uses outrageous pun.

Jim: Yeah, probably. And interestingly, apart from the ones that we made up/ identified ourselves, this is one of the only ones which we can point to exactly who came up with it and when. Like the day it was coined. Which was August 11, 2006. Which almost exactly 17 years ago. Yeah. It was a journalist called Kevin Drum, who’s written for Mother Jones, among others. He said that he wanted to come up with a way of describing that kind of annoying thing that people do where they trawl through comment threads to find a mad person as evidence that people who disagree with them are mad.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And so he had a little kind of competition, among his readers to come up with a name for this. And the winner was a person whose screen name was Blue Man. And he came up with Nutpicking.

Mark: Which is brilliant.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Brilliant.

Jim: It’s nitpicking. It’s also a, negative version of cherry picking. Because what you’re doing is choosing, out of all of the people who disagree with you, a nutter, you’re choosing an extreme example of your opposition or an extreme view that is probably not reasonably held by large numbers of the people who disagree with you. And then you are representing that as typical of those people.

Mark: Yeah. In order to characterize all of the people that disagree with you as nutters and nothing but. Yeah.

Jim: Look at the kinds of crazy things they say.

Mark: Yeah. And because they share that. Like Piers Corbyn, who did crazy shit and was brought up in the newspaper, mainly the Mail and the Telegraph, to say, look at the crazy shit this guy does. And he’s Jeremy Corbyn’s brother. So they’re all exactly like that. I think the last one he got, featured in the newspaper was going to the card only self checkout machine and demanding that he could use loose change, so that’s nasty behavior,

Jim: Completely pointless as well. Just to score a win over the minimum wage staff at an aldi.

Mark: And in the process, they pointed out the fact that he was a Corbyn and, that’s it job done. It’s that kind of the equivalent of the right wing press. Just going “George Soros”. Yeah.

Jim: Yeah. So our first example, is a Facebook ad from Trump, or the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, at least, which reads, “Democrats have finally admitted what they have truly wanted all along to repeal the Second Amendment. Tell Robert Francis O’Rourke and the Democrats, we will never let you confiscate our guns.” So that’s not true. Democrats as a whole have not talked seriously about repealing the Second Amendment. That is not to say that no people who identify as Democrats think that should happen. Beto O’Rourke, who they deliberately call Robert Francis O’Rourke to take away from the Hispanic cachet that Beto has in that running for Texas governor thing, where that slightly maybe helps him, but also saying that essentially he wants to appeal the Second Amendment. He doesn’t want to repeal the Second Amendment. He has said he wants to take away assault rifles, AR 15s, AK 47s. He says he doesn’t believe any civilian should own an AR 15 or an AK 47. He, goes into some detail on his website about the fact that he wants to repeal permitless carry and close, private sale background check loopholes that mean that people don’t have to get background checks if they buy it from someone who isn’t a gun dealer. Stronger domestic violence reporting laws, red flag laws, those kinds of things. He believes in quite strong but common sense gun safety measures, not at all repealing the Second Amendment.

Mark: And yet they a bit like Piers Corbyn. So they’re inventing the nuttiness and then saying, yeah, this is the example of what all Democrats are like.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So it’s a mixture of a straw man this and Nutpicking, because they’re claiming that Beto thinks this stuff in a way. I mean, they don’t specifically directly claim he says it, but it’s very much implied by the ad. I think. When they were asked about this by fact checkers, they pointed to a few state representatives. Not US. Congresspeople or senators who’ve suggested this, but local state representatives who are Democrats, like New Hampshire state Representative Catherine Rogers, who didn’t also call for repealing the Second Amendment, but said it’s time to revisit and look at our Constitution. After former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote a New York Times op ed that called for appealing the Second Amendment. So after that, she said, I think having this discussion is good. Maybe the op ed by Justice Stevens can lead to interesting discussion. It’s a thing we should be talking about, which is a very milque toast version of trying to repeal the Second Amendment, taking your guns away. It’s like, hmm, this is interesting things.

Mark: Its like in our opening titles, there’s Trump saying she wants, you know, to do away with the Second Amendment. Hillary never said that. She said, well, maybe it is time to have after the, umpteenth, multiple school killing that maybe it’s time we looked at this again a bit more in a more nuanced way to prevent this kind of thing happening. Whereas if the Democrats and I don’t know that they’ve said it was certainly not in print on the Facebook ad, if the Democrats said, vote, Republican and get mass murder, continue the school killings, yeah, that’s what you’ll get.

Jim: I wouldn’t be surprised if people have said things like that, especially immediately after school shootings, because that is what’s happening. A vote for Republicans is a vote for this kind of thing to keep happening. Yeah, I’m sure that kind of thing has been said, and not necessarily by nuts. Maybe

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: so our second example from Trump is a specific case of violence by an illegal immigrant. And this was something he brought up multiple times.

Trump: An illegal immigrant should have never, ever been here. Kate, as you remember, from San Francisco, shot viciously by somebody that was sent out of the country five times and will probably get off. I see the lawyer and they’re saying, oh, maybe it wasn’t him. And, it’s terrible. It’ll go on for years and years and years. What happened to Kate and so many others. So many others. And we’re going to have a country where we can be free to walk around and free to walk the streets and free to look at the beautiful Golden Gate Bridge with your father like Kate was doing, and then shot from nowhere. We’re going to have a country that’s going to be safe again.

Jim: So he is trying to use this one case, and there are others, there are other individual cases of violence perpetrated by immigrants to say immigrants are bad, illegal immigration is dangerous, and we’re all in danger if it continues. The only way we can be safe is to crack down on immigration, essentially. And obviously that’s mad. And when he said, this guy will probably get off, he didn’t exactly get off because he was found guilty for being a felon in possession of a firearm. Because, as he correctly said, the person who was responsible for this shooting or who was holding the gun at the time, at least Jose inez Garcia Zarate, it was a person who had been ejected from the US five times. He had had drug based prosecutions. so he’s a felon and he was found not guilty of first degree murder. Actually, the first degree murder charge was dropped. Second degree murder and involuntary manslaughter. Because it was an accident.

Mark: Yeah. Didn’t we covered this one before?

Jim: Yeah, he talked about it at one of his State of the Union addresses.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: When it came up there, we talked about it.

Mark: Yes, it was an accident. It was a ricochet.

Jim: That’s right. It ricocheted off concrete. and I know this isn’t important. But she wasn’t looking at the Golden Gate Bridge just because he can’t be accurate, even when he’s lying about other stuff. it was on Pier 14 in San Francisco, which is 5 miles away from The Golden Gate Bridge facing in the other direction. It’s not a thing, but yeah, the point is, this guy claimed that he found the gun wrapped in a T shirt or some cloth, and it went off. Both sides agreed, prosecution and defense, that he hadn’t shot her. It had ricocheted off concrete kind of quite close to him. She was something like 80 to 100ft away from him, and it ricocheted off the concrete within 15ft of him. so it was kind of just a freak accident, essentially.

Mark: He didn’t shoot her viciously.

Jim: No. Exactly.

Mark: No.

Jim: And again, that’s not to say that there aren’t instances where immigrants have killed people, deliberately murdered people. Yeah, that’s true. That can then not be translated into, immigrants are bad and violent and dangerous, and we need to be afraid of them, and we need to stop them from being here because we’re all going to die.

Mark: And what we need to do is build a wall. And rather than bring about some sort of gun control.

Jim: Crazy thought.

Mark: Because that way that’s chipping away at, the Constitution, second Amendment gone, what’s to stop them getting rid of all of them?

Jim: Yeah, but even if he’d managed to successfully pick a case where it was a nut, a bad, violent criminal that is not representative of that whole class of people.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So, third example is Trump’s former campaign manager and social media guy, Brad Pascal, who was talking about, Michelle Wolf. Michelle Wolf did the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, I think, the first year Trump was in office, and therefore became a hated person on the right.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: I think she made a remark about Sarah Huckabee Sanders eye makeup or something like that, and it was like, oh, how can they be so mean about women? she did a Netflix special in which she did some jokey audience polls. One of them. She asked her audience, are you sort of hoping we don’t get peace with North Korea so you won’t have to give Trump credit?

Mark: Pretty good.

Jim: That’s quite funny. And it’s clearly a joke. And her audience took it in the clearly a joke spirit and voted 71% in favor of yeah, kind of hoping.

Mark: We don’t get, to give him credit.

Jim: And so Brad Parscale took this and said, here is the media and left’s position. In a nutshell, it isn’t about America. So he was essentially saying, yeah, this is what Democrats want, is nuclear war.

Mark: In order to spite Trump.

Jim: Yeah. So he’s taking an extreme comic view, not even a realistic view that anyone actually holds, but a joke, taking it as a real view, and then suggesting it’s typical of Democrats suggesting that is what we want. This is the future Democrats want. Paul Joseph Watson, who goes by Prison Planet, who is an Infowars contributor, also picked this up. He relayed what had happened and then said, in other words, a significant majority of leftists would happily risk nuclear war so long as it meant Trump would look bad.

Mark: Wow. Wow. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. And it isn’t us Nutpicking to say that this is, one example of the right not doing funny.

Jim: No.

Mark: Just don’t get humor.

Jim: In fact, finally in this section, I have, I think, possibly for the first time, a Democrat example. An example of someone on the left doing this thing, kind of and it’s to make a point similar to what you just said, because this is an extract from one of Jordan Klepper’s videos. He was a contributor to The Daily Show, and he regularly goes to Trump rallies. He went to January 6 and various other things to talk to Trump supporters and find out what they think about things. And here’s one example.

Jordan Klepper: What don’t we know about 911?

Woman at Trump Rally: I think it was all planned. I think that it came down on their explosive.

Jordan Klepper: It was an inside job.

Woman at Trump Rally: Yes, I think so. But I think Bush knew it was happening.

Jordan Klepper: Really? Is Biden just wasting time there?

Woman at Trump Rally: Biden doesn’t know what he’s doing.

Jordan Klepper: He recently just killed the head of al Qaeda.

Woman at Trump Rally: I don’t believe it.

Jordan Klepper: Do you think that’s just a made up news story?

Woman at Trump Rally: Just like, Bin Laden with Obama.

Jordan Klepper: Clarify who’s still alive? Bin Laden…

Woman at Trump Rally: JFK Jr. is still alive

Jordan Klepper: JFK Jr is still alive?

Woman at Trump Rally: Yeah. I think JFK Jr. Is going to try and expose globalists because they killed his father.

Jordan Klepper: I thought he was a magazine magnate who lived in New York.

Woman at Trump Rally: Yeah, I don’t think so.

Jordan Klepper: What do you think of the state of education in America? Could we be doing better?

Woman at Trump Rally: We absolutely could be doing better.

Jordan Klepper: These kids could grow up and they could go on to believe crazy things.

Woman at Trump Rally: Yeah.

Mark: So brilliant. That sleight of hand right at the end is so good, isn’t it?

Jim: He is brilliant. And The Good Liars do a very similar thing. They go and talk to people and kind of try and use that way of asking them questions that are going to lead them down one route and then taking back on them in a very similar way. It’s obviously for entertainment, but it’s also exposing what these people really think. And the selective editing where they’re obviously going to pick the craziest, funniest ones is a form of nut picking. And the reason I wanted to play this particularly was because, first of all, it shows how this kind of tactic really feeds into your confirmation bias. Because it’s easy for us to think, well, that’s just what Trump supporters are like. They’re all fucking idiots who think mad things. and this supports that. Absolutely. Every time we see one of Jordan Klepper’s or the Good Liars videos. You know, anyone who interviews a Trump supporter pretty much ever feeds into that narrative and makes us think, well, yeah, I’m right about the fact that they’re all idiots. It also shows, I think, that it is very difficult to tell whether Nutpicking is going on when you think that a reasonable number of the people who it’s sampling from might be nuts. Because I’m pretty sure that when Jordan goes to these places and asks lots of people, he probably finds a lot of people who don’t say anything mad. I could be wrong, because you have to believe some mad things to still support Trump, I think. So maybe, this is representative, and it’s hard to tell because we don’t know what the sample is like. What we’re seeing is the end result, and it’s probably nutpicked.

Mark: Yeah, because I think it would be how would that be as a televisual experience? If he interviewed 30 people, I don’t know, 300 people out of you would have to know what the sample size is. And if all 300 of them came back with nutty stuff, that would actually be slightly too much. It would be a bit boring. Yeah, kind of, not good telly. So one or two of them is funny. But if you took the whole hour of the show to just play, I.

Jim: Reckon I could watch an hour of Jordan Klepper doing this. And it would be extremely entertaining. No, the difficulty is, of course, that where you are doing what the journalist who came up with this, Kevin Drum, talked about, looking through kind of comment sections. You are looking at nobodies, you are looking at people who, aren’t important in that world. Just like these Trump supporters. Trump doesn’t care who they are. They mean nothing. The problem is that in several cases, the kinds of things they say are also exactly what is being said by people like Marjorie Taylor Green, who is absolutely a nut. But she’s also the deputy leader of the house. And therefore isn’t an extreme example of the Republican Party at the moment, but Representative, of at least a significant and powerful group of that party, powerful enough to make sure whether Kevin McCarthy gets power or not. Essentially.

Mark: Exactly. And she got elected by so she is representative of a whole bunch of people who elected her on the nut job ticket.

Jim: And it’s very much not just MTG. It’s, you know, Lauren Boebert, Thomas Massey, Paul Gosar, Matt Gaetz. There’s a lot of them that are very nutty and express things that are exactly the kinds of things you hear from those Jordan Klepper videos, and the kinds of things that charitably we might think are feeding into our confirmation bias. But when you see them, I mean, look at Trump himself. He has said, well, no one’s really got to the bottom of 911, which is what kind of prompted Klepper to ask these ladies this question. So he is not only feeding their conspiracy theory thinking, but expressing it himself as the presumptive presidential nominee for their party. So I think Nutpicking is something which you should be careful of, but the care should not make you stop saying, look at these nuts and the things they say, because some of them are actually elected representatives.

Boris Johnson: And now is the time, I think, for Marx British Politics Corner.

Mark: I immediately went to somebody that has been typified as a nut job and therefore been very useful on the right to be able to dismiss the entirety of the left’s economic stewardship, thinking. And so, in a way, what we can witness this week is the creation of a nut picking going on. and so it starts in May 2017. and actually all the clips are from LBC radio this week. on LBC, there was an interview about paying for the labor policy was to, bring in new policemen. Unlike the Tory policy, which was to do away with 10,000 policemen. The then shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott was talking about this and how it would be funded. And she cocks it up big time.

Nick Ferrari: So how much would 10,000 police officers cost?

Diane Abbott: Well, if we recruit the 10,000 police, men and women over a four year period, we believe it’ll be about 300,000 pounds.

Nick Ferrari: 300,000 pounds? Sorry, 10,000 police officers. What are you paying them?

Diane Abbott: No, I mean, sorry,

Nick Ferrari: How much will they cost?

Diane Abbott: They will cost. They will it will cost, about 80 million pounds.

Nick Ferrari: About 80 million pounds. If you divide 80 million by 10,000, you get 8000. Is that what you’re going to pay these policemen and women?

Diane Abbott: No, we’re talking about, a process over four years.

Nick Ferrari: 80 million divided by 10,000 is 8000. So what are these police officers going to be paid?

Mark: You would be forgiven for thinking that she’s a bit of a nut, but insofar as she’s gone into an interview to talk about this new policy of, coming up with actually, they were going to divert money from capital gains tax. There was to be a capital gains tax break promoted by the Tory party, fundamentally to give rich people, a tax break. And they and, the Labour policy was to say, going to reverse that and use the money to fund 10,000 new policemen. There’s a shortage of 10,000 policemen. We’re going to use that in the same interview. Nick Ferrari. The interviewer points, out the fact that Labour had also said that they’re going to use the same money to pay for various other things. And the real figure they should have said is 300 million. It would cost 300 million.

Jim: I think what she was doing was very clever psychological anchoring technique, where having initially said it would cost 300,000, you see?

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Everyone was thinking that’s very reasonable to get 10,000 new policemen just cost 300,000. And potentially new policemen were thinking, I don’t think I’d do it for 30 quid. And then when she said, it is 80 million, all of those potential policemen were like, oh, 8000. That’s a lot more than 30 quid.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: that I might consider. She’s getting policeman cheap.

Mark: Yeah. very good. But I tell you, I don’t think she’d worked out any of those numbers until Nick Ferrari pointed out…

Jim: No, it was off the top of her head, and not even quickly off the top of her head, it took her a while to come up with a shit wrong number.

Mark: She’s hastily looking around at people.

Jim: If she’d just said a billion pounds, but quickly. That would have been somehow better.

Mark: Yes, quite a billion. Yeah, no, that sounds all right.

Jim: You clearly thought about it because you had that you were right there with the answer. Whereas previously, the thing you came up with, it took you a while. You’d clearly never considered the cost, even.

Mark: Thought about the cost of this.

Jim: Bag of sweets each.

Mark: Some of them could share.

Jim: we’ve got bunk beds anyway in the back. Sleep there be fine.

Mark: Yeah. so anyway, the Tories jumped on this nut job misspeaking as an indication of Labour’s entire alleged poor showing with the economy. The then Tory Home Secretary so her opposite number, Amber Rudd, tars the whole of Corbyn’s Labour Party with the same nut brush and said, Diane Abbot has laid bare the chaos that Britain would face if Jeremy Corbyn is voted into Downing Street. One of Corbyn’s closest allies has clearly shown that Labour’s sums don’t add up. They would weaken our defenses and their nonsensical promises aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. So they jumped on it and said, AHA, here’s somebody that’s cocked, up something or other, hasn’t read the brief, done it completely wrong, and they’ve extrapolated from that and spread it across the entire of the entirety of the Labour Party such that they would weaken our defenses and their nonsensical promises.

Jim: I’m pretty sure those promises hadn’t been written down anywhere, they just had been whispered to Diane on the way in.

Mark: Exactly. They clearly not been written down because either that, though they had been written on paper that wasn’t worth anything and it had fallen apart in her, hands. Yeah. by contrast, here is in April 2020, the then Home Secretary, Priti Patel, after Amber Rudd had resigned over the windrush scandal, home, Secretary Priti Patel cocks up the numbers of people tested for COVID.

Priti Patel: I can report through the government’s ongoing monitoring and testing program that as of 09:00 a.m.. M. Today, there have been 300,034 974,000 tests carried out across the UK, excluding Northern Ireland.

Ian Hislop: I mean, we did quite a lot of jokes about the shadow Home Secretary who wasn’t very good on numbers in terms of the police. But I mean, Priti Patel, she’s in a league of her own, you’ve got to give it to the Tories.

Mark: So that was Ian Hislop there at the end, noticing on Have I Got News For You at the time she was cocking up the numbers and yet there was no commensurate Nutpicking. Nobody in the press picked that nutty thing and then said, right, well, this is the entirety of the Tory Party COVID thing is unraveling.

Jim: I mean, at least the numbers that Diane Abbott came up with actually existed as real numbers.

Mark: Yes, exactly. Rather than 3034 974,000. Yeah. Even when you write it down, you think, well, it doesn’t even two separate numbers come out as millions or anything.

Jim: 300,034 974,000. No.

Mark: What, are you supposed to add them up or what? Or is it 300 million? Well, because it can’t be 300 billion.

Jim: It would be 300 billion if you put them all together.

Mark: Yeah. 300,000,034,970 no, 34,974,000, which is more than the population of the planet.

Jim: By some way.

Mark: Some way. Divided by 10,000. How much are you paying them? 30 quid. Yeah.

Jim: Each police officer gets a million COVID tests.

Mark: Exactly. So several people on then named Twitter, said any news in the papers about Priti Patel Galactically screwing up the numbers just the way that Diane Abbott was mercilessly pilloried by the press? No. And somebody said, of course not. This wasn’t any old lefty screw up, this was a conservative home style screw up and therefore to be brushed under the carpet as soon as possible. So our, second example in April 2023, again on LBC, there was a discussion show about Labour and Tory prospects for the 2024 election and Nick Gibb, Tory Minister of State for Schools, characterizes again, Labour’s, not to be trusted with the economy and listen out for the presenter of the show, Iain Dale, countering the fallacy.

Nick Gibb: I just think if the Labour Party lose election, they’ve got to look at how they manage economies because their history throughout the history of the Labour Party is the damage they do to the British….

Iain Dale: under the Blair government? The economy was well managed, the financial crash came along. Gordon Brown was seen by everybody outside this country as almost the savior of the world economy. It doesn’t really fit into the narrative.

Nick Gibb: There was the banking crash, of course, but also the way they had spent during that period meant that when we came into office in 2010, we had a budget deficit, an annual budget deficit of 156,000,000,000 pounds.

Iain Dale: What is it now?

Nick Gibb: It is… Uh uh uh

Iain Dale: A lot more?

Nick Gibb: We have been through the COVID cris and we’re trying to deal with that.

Mark: So there’s Nick Gibb using that same received nut job opinion that Diane Abbott didn’t do any favors for the Labour Party in generating and he’s applying it and saying you need to look at your ability to manage the economy. And if you look at the history of the economy, uh with the handover from Tory Party to the Labour Party. The Labour Party always receive a much larger deficit than the Tories receive after each administration change, and then they spend the time trying to fix it. When Iain Dale asked, what’s the deficit under the Tories right now? The UK general government gross deficit was 2,537 billion in the first quarter of 2023. So January to March. So at the time of this, it was 2530 7 billion. Compared with 156 billion, that he quotes as having inherited from Labour and then says, oh, yeah, but we’ve had COVID and also countless corrupt deals somewhere. Do you think? Anyway, in the next bit, Gibb, I think, does what Priti Patel did in that he becomes the nut. If they got any sense at all, then there ought to be nut picking going on right here at Gibb’s expense. when he tries to explain how good the Tories are at marshalling the economy, they’re much better. And he gives all these examples and yet gets shot down each turn.

Nick Gibb: We borrowed 450,000,000,000 pounds and the capital markets were confident enough to lend us 450,000,000,000 pounds. And they know they’re going to get it back.

Sarah Olney: They weren’t after trust’s budget in September, they weren’t.

Nick Gibb: I’m not saying that was a great triumph, but what I am saying is that Rishi Sunak is there, jeremy, Hunt is there. They’re stabilizing the economy. we did have the fastest growth in the G Seven in 2021.

Iain Dale: You don’t now.

Nick Gibb: 2022.

Iain Dale: We’ve got the lowest now.

Nick Gibb: No, but we will recover. All the hallmarks, all the fundamentals are there in place. Got low unemployment, got inflation coming down. we’ve got a competent government.

Iain Dale: Inflation went up last month.

Nick Gibb: Yes, but it’s forecast by the OBR to be 2.9% in the fourth quarter of this year.

Iain Dale: Do you seriously believe that’s going to happen?

Nick Gibb: I do, provided, of course, we don’t give in to pay settlements where people are demanding 35% pay increases. Of course, that would blow inflation apart.

Mark: No matter how much the Tories tank the economy their ongoing marketing campaign that one Labour nut, Corbyn or Abbott or just the nut of socialist tax and spend which sometimes gets translated to the magic money tree that that equals mismanagement and that Corbyn equals mismanagement or the Labour Party equals the mismanagement of the economy seems to be able to break through. Note that he also promotes the Tory mantra that wage rises would cause inflation. Tarring those nutters in education, rail, health, fire or police service who want to be paid will bust the economy.

Jim: Yeah, they’re just saying every time, yeah, okay, the economy is incredibly bad at the moment, but imagine how much worse it’d be if we paid people fairly.

Mark: Yes, exactly. Yeah. And Sunak did exactly the same thing only five days ago, talking about the fact that junior doctors have not accepted the pay offer, that other unions have. And it’s all the vilification that Mick Lynch that was levied at Mick Lynch, and like that other nut job, Mick Lynch. Corbyn disagrees.

Jeremy Corbyn: I wonder which planet you’re on at the moment, mate. I really do. Inflation well over 12%, food inflation much more. And you cannot say that wages have caused this inflation because wages have actually fallen over the last ten years. And if you actually got round the table with all the unions involved in the current disputes and paid them properly, you would actually have more money being spent in the economy, which would help investment anyway. And you would have a lot less poverty around and a lot less people claiming universal credit or top ups in order to get through.

Mark: Which is for the Tory who paint the whole of the Labour Party with the crazy nutness of Corbyn and Corbyn, who’s the kernel at the center of that nutness, quite a reasonable sounding bloke who know if you, if you paid more people, they would be able to spend more and the economy would grow m, wouldn’t it? But no, but that’s too outrageous.

FALLACY IN THE WILD SONG

Johnny Cash there with his classic from 1966, Everyone Loves a Nut.

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 The Little Mermaid.

Mark: AHA.

Jim: And this is the remake.

Mark: The non-heretical live action remake.

Jim: It’s fine, it’s just kind of unnecessary. I mean, as are all the Disney live action remakes. Really?

Mark: Yeah, it just gives you a chance to go, oh, yeah. How are they going to do that with CGI?

Jim: Oh, they’re going to make Flounder this weird horrifying thing like the early versions of Sonic the Hedgehog, that just makes you want to go, aaagh?

Mark: Yeah, and use the technology from, Aquaman. They’ll just use that. They need to make a remake of that and just CGI out Amber Heard. Yeah, that would be good.

Jim: But we, played a clip from The Little Mermaid few episodes ago, and this is obviously the different version, but kind of a little bit earlier on, leading into Triton, finding out about Ariel meeting a human.

Mala: Do these humans have any idea how much damage their shipwrecks do?

Ariel: I don’t think they intended to have a shipwreck.

Caspia: They are careless, Ariel. It will take thousands of years for this coral to grow back.

Indira: And they’ve killed nearly all of the sea ferns.

Karina: They’d kill us too, if they had a chance.

Ariel: No, no, they’re not all like that.

Perla: Oh, how would you know? You’ve never even seen one. You were just a child when Mother died and Father stopped us going to the surface.

Ariel: I just mean, we’re not all the same. So why should humans be?

Triton: What about humans?

Tamika: Look at what their shipwreck did.

Triton: They got what they deserved. They’re the most dangerous species of all.

Jim: So, as with the other version, triton’s not that bothered if humans die. and he has indoctrinated his children, in this view, because a human killed his wife. And that one human who was no doubt a little bit violent and anti mermaid, Ariel is arguing, should not be assumed to represent all humans.

Mark: Fair enough. Yeah.

Jim: And so her sisters have kind of listened to Triton and saying, these humans, they don’t care about having shipwrecks. They’re careless and they’re dangerous, and they’ll do bad things.

Mark: Has anybody pointed out in their family that despite the fact that they are all apparently from the same mother and father, that they are different colors, got different accents, obviously different completely different nationalities. Above the surface, they would be utterly different nationalities, and yet they’re all Triton’s kids.

Jim: Well, here’s the thing. Yes. That has come up.

Mark: Right.

Jim: In fact, my daughter, when she went to see this with her friends, was although her friends are, like, in their teens and generally very accepting of diversity and kind of applauding of that kind of stuff, said, this feels a bit forced.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: However, much like the people who argued that in science, mermaids wouldn’t have dark skin because they’re under the water, I’m going to I’m going to argue a real world basis for their different nationalities. It’s because the seven daughters of Triton represent the seven seas. They represent different, areas of the planet.

Mark: There you go. Yes.

Jim: I think I haven’t read a thing that says that that’s why they’re like that. But that is, I think, why they are different races in this.

Mark: One of them is clearly from the Irish Sea. I wasn’t aware that that was, um.

Jim: One of the seven seas.

Mark: Oceans.

Jim: There’s five oceans of the world. Seven seas. I don’t know quite how that works. Okay.

Mark: yeah.

Jim: Anyway, there we go.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Perfectly cromulent.

Mark: Nothing that Triton’s wife took issue with at any point.

Jim: So our second example comes from the excellent Vietnam drama Tour of Duty. And this is an episode where Michael Madsen guest stars as a sniper who is perhaps enjoying his work a little bit too much.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And the war correspondent, Alex, decides that she’s going to write a story about him.

Jennifer: Why do a story on snipers?

Alex: A sniper is a perfect example of the effect of this war on the individual.

Jennifer: Pretty extreme example.

Alex: Yeah. But it brings some crucial points out. I mean, for example, it’s tough enough for the average soldier to go back home and deal with everything that’s going on back in the States. Here’s a man who’s killed 39 people.

Jennifer: I know better than to suspect you of going to the sensational.

Alex: The truth is often sensational over here. I hear he’s taken a finger off of every one of his kills.

Jim: So Alex is making the argument that war is sensational, but even within that, this guy doesn’t represent soldiers. He doesn’t represent the effect that the war that Vietnam is having on American soldiers. He is a special case, an extreme case, and that plays out in the episode. But her deciding that this is a good angle to write an article about the effect of the war on Americans is a bit nut picky.

Mark: It feels a bit like that. That’s the Dennis Hopper she’s the Dennis Hopper journalist, kind of, who just sort of goes for the extreme stuff. And she’s going to get her head thrown into the lap of Martin Sheen. Uh where does he keep the fingers if he’s

Jim: He’s got a bag. That he has keeps on his belt. He’s got like a drawstring bag, right? Yeah.

Mark: With 39 fingers, apparently. Yeah. Colonel Kurtz will be proud, wouldn’t he? All those little fingers hacked off. Yeah. Because that’s a very typical American soldiers from Vietnam’s reaction. So yeah, I can see her point when she’s saying, yeah, she thinks that’s extreme,.

Jim: The other character was the kind of the medic, the psychiatrist of the show. so she was kind of maybe pushing back a little bit and know, is this a good idea? Who, incidentally, was played by Steven Soderbergh’s wife.

Mark: There you go.

Jim: Anyway, our, last example is from Law and Order Special Victims Unit, and this is a case where Benson and Stabler are after a group of rich kind of college kids who are accused of rape and murder.

Benson: Gotta come home sometime.

Stabler: Not if one of his friends tipped him off.

Benson: these are not the kind of guys that would go out on a limb for each other.

Stabler: You got a point. What do you think it is? The money?

Benson: Not all rich kids are like that.

Stabler: Yeah, but these are trust fund babies. Everything handed to them. No character, no conscience.

Benson: You’re either born with a conscience or you’re not.

Stabler: Oh, no. It’s all about how you’re raised.

Jim: So Stabler is kind of tarring all rich kids, all trust fund kids with the same brush as these ones, who are clearly violent and dangerous,

Mark: and sneaking in a nature versus nurture.

Jim: Olivia’s, having a go, at kind of all not all rich kids. Hashtag not all rich kids. And, the thing is, the way I look for examples or fallacies generally, is I kind of try and figure out some typical wording of how people express them. But for this, it was pretty difficult to do that, because the way that you express that a particular person is typical of a group when they’re not isn’t necessarily phrased in a common way. So I ended up looking for ways that people might answer that. And one of them is, well, not all of them are like that. Which made me think of the kind of not all men thing.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So there are times, I think, when pointing out that not all members of a group are, like the person is saying might be a good counter to this fallacy being expressed. There are other times, like with not all men, where you should just shut the fuck up.

Mark: And the kind of counters that we encountered in, the Nick Gibb thing is neatly done by all of the other panel members who just counter each and every example.

Jim: Yeah. If you have the facts that disagree with what the person is saying, that’s great if you have data. But it is reasonable, in some cases at least, to be able to say if someone is suggesting, look at this example, look at this extreme example, to say, well, that’s an extreme example, that’s not typical,

Mark: or just to say well, you know that’s not true, don’t you? Yeah.

Jim: If only that worked. Yeah. So, before we move on to Fake News this week, I, just want to talk a little bit about a new plan that we have that we haven’t done before, which is to redo a few of the earlier fallacies we visited way back kind of five years ago now, when we started. And the reasons are, many fold.

Mark: Among them in British politics, we’ve had 17 changes of leaders over the last five years. Yeah.

Jim: So there’s lots more examples around yeah.

Mark: Also, that’s the kind of terrifying thing is that not only are the examples now somewhat dated, because they involve people who were leaders of the Tory party several dozen leaders ago, but the other terrifying is that these policies are still being employed.

Jim: People are still doing this. So there’s more examples that come up. In the meantime, there’s also the fact that we’ve got better at doing this. I think the fact that you’re listening probably means you agree. But I’ve gone back and listened to one of our early ones, and it’s, yes, that’s not great. It’s not great. and possibly we have different views on some of the things that we talked about over that time, we’ve evolved and got better at evaluating this stuff. We’ve learned more about fallacies and how they’re used.

Mark: So it would be interesting to go back and see whether the examples that we used are kind of right. Because at the end of each episode, we say, if you think we’ve used a fallacy ourselves and some of these reviewing the old episodes, we kind of think maybe is that a great argument.

Jim: And also a couple more reasons. One is that obviously part, of our show is topical. We talk about news and what’s going on at the time. So anyone who is wanting to learn about some of our early ones, like the genetic fallacy, the straw man, slippery slope and so on. The topical stuff they’re getting is now five years out of date, so it’d be nice to have more up to date versions of that. And also, there’s the fact that some people I can’t imagine why haven’t some people who listen haven’t necessarily downloaded our entire back catalog and listened to all of them.

Mark: Why on Earth.

Jim: They’re crazy.

Mark: They are crazy. They are, but let’s hope they’re not representative of their entire listeners.

Jim: They’d be outliers definitely extreme examples of our listeners.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: But what, that means is they are missing out on some of the more common fallacies, because when we started out, we were doing some of the ones that come up a lot. So for that reason, every now and again, it’s probably going to be like every ten episodes or so, starting next episode, we’re going to go back and do, a new version of a, fallacy we’ve already talked about years ago. Hopefully that will still be interesting for you to listen to. So the next one will be the genetic fallacy, which was the first one we did. The reason we wanted to say it basically was so that when you see genetic fallacy come up in your feed next time, you don’t think, oh, I’ve listened to that episode, or they’ve done that one. That must be a replay. It’s not a replay. We’re having another go at it.

Mark: So perhaps we should put brackets redux.

Jim: Yeah, like Apocalypse Now.

Mark: Yeah, exactly.

Trump: So we’re going to play fake news, folks. I love the game. It’s a great game. I understand the game as well as anybody. As well as anybody.

Jim: Yes, it’s 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, what’s been happening is that the one time I didn’t get it right, that’s become the characterization of our entire listenership, who are all trying as individuals, to each do their very best to succeed in their own particular ways. And your sweeping judgment of their failure based on the one time I may have misspoken about the numbers, is grossly unfair, and frankly, it taints them all.

Jim: Fair enough.

Mark: Quite.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Bear that in mind.

Jim: So, our examples this week come from the, speech that Trump gave recently in South Carolina since he was arraigned for the third. I’m just I was just trying to figure out whether the time when he went in to plead not guilty to the charges in the superseding indictment counted as an arraignment. I don’t think it does. So it’s still only three arraignments, I think, right. yeah. Anyway, so, he talked to the crowd. He did a mixture of new stuff and old hits, and he said, look, at this crowd. What an amazing they won’t show this the horrible, horrible, fake news. They never showed the support. You know, I think they’ve actually gotten worse. I used to think they were just bad people who were greedy and corrupt, but I actually think it’s I’m going to get in trouble for even saying this, but it’s almost like a conspiracy where they’ll do whatever they can to stop me getting elected again. Statement number two.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Every poll, we’re kicking Biden’s ass. And that’s the problem. That’s the problem. And if I wasn’t, if I wasn’t, we wouldn’t be under investigation by deranged Jack Smith. He’s a deranged human being. You take a look at that face, you say, that guy is a sick man. There’s something wrong with would somebody said, Why don’t you be nice to him? I said it wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t matter. This guy’s a maniac.

Mark: I haven’t heard maniac for a long time. That’s excellent.

Jim: Okay, and statement number three. Mexico, they gave us 28,000 soldiers. Everybody said, oh, you didn’t get money for the wall? I said yes. I did. No, you didn’t get money. I said, no, we built the wall. We built almost 500 miles. We got money. What do you mean, we didn’t get money? They gave us 28,000 soldiers free of charge. 28,000. That’s more than giving us a couple of bucks for a wall. They guarded our border for a long time. 28,000.

Mark: Okay. Now, not to denigrate your creativity, but I just wonder whether sticking 28,000 in many times is that more Trump than Jim? yeah. Mhm I’m almost put off by Swerving, because I think it’s a lure to the bad people who are greedy and corrupt. Because that’s he talking about what he’s like. And I’m going to get in trouble for saying this conspiracy the bit of a lure going on there, kicking by his sick man. Something wrong with him. Deranged, deranged sick maniac. Is he going to save maniac? Okay, so on that basis, okay, I think number one is the one that you made up, okay?

Jim: And of the other two, which you more convinced by?

Mark: More convinced by the 28,000 soldiers.

Jim: Okay, so number three yeah, you wrote, is real

Trump: Mexico. They gave us 28,000 soldiers. Everybody said, oh, you didn’t get money for the wall. I said, yes I did. No, you didn’t get money. I said no, we built the wall, we built almost 500 miles. We got money. What do you mean we didn’t get money? They gave us 28,000 soldiers free of charge. 28,000! That’s more than giving us a couple of bucks for a wall. They guarded our border for a long time. 28,000.

Mark: But it’s just what is he saying there? Because you didn’t get money? I said, yes, we know he didn’t.

Jim: Use no, he didn’t get he didn’t get money. But he claimed that people are worth money.

Mark: They gave us the soldiers.

Jim: I mean they didn’t.

Mark: Is that true?

Jim: No.

Mark: It’s quite a good argument. If they had, they go, oh, yeah, he didn’t build 500 miles. Do any of that.

Jim: No.

Mark: Didn’t get the money. What do you mean? They gave us money. And then he says, they gave us soldiers. That’s more than giving us a couple of bucks for the wall. But they didn’t even get a couple of bucks.

Jim: No billions, The little bit of wall he did cost. And no, Mexico, apparently, in reply to his threats to, tariff the fuck out of their cars, essentially, they put, I think it was 11,000 troops near, the US. Mexico border to kind of discourage people crossing don’t know what effect it had. and around 6000 on their southern border to prevent people coming in from Guatemala. I mean, is that giving America 28,000 soldiers?

Mark: Soldiers?

Jim: Numerically? It definitely isn’t I don’t think it’s giving them soldiers. They had some additional security on on the border for a while.

Mark: So of that entire statement, Mexico is the only true word in there?

Jim: Yeah, it’s definitely Mexico.

Mark: Mexico. There is such a place called, uh he’s. That’s it. Mexico exists.

Jim: Yes.

Mark: So just saying. Made up some numbers, shoved them in several times, tried to use it as a reason to justify that as money. Tried to monetize that. What is he doing there even?

Jim: Yeah. For, some reason he’s countering people saying you didn’t get money for the wall when no one there is doing it.

Mark: No, because everybody there is utterly convinced. They were all convinced. Yeah. You built a wall across there. You could look down there, you can’t even see Mexico because the wall is so huge.

Jim: Don’t bring up the fact that you claimed Mexico would pay for it and then they didn’t.

Mark: Yeah. Because nobody’s exactly. Nobody’s saying, ah no. Nobody is even interested. They’re just thinking this guy is a criminal.

Jim: Okay. You also think number two is real?

Mark: Yes.

Jim: And number two yes. Is yes real?

Trump: Every poll, we’re kicking Biden’s ass and that’s the problem. That’s the problem. And if I wasn’t, if I wasn’t, we wouldn’t be under investigation by deranged Jack Smith. He’s a deranged human being. You take a look at that face, you say that guy is a sick man. There’s something wrong with him. I would – somebody said, why don’t you be nice to him? I said it wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t matter. This guy’s a maniac

Mark: So he actually does say maniac.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: That’s excellent. Wow. And he’s really angry about the if I wasn’t if I wasn’t if I wasn’t, we wouldn’t be under education. No, it’s because of all your also, we’re not previous multiple crimes. Yeah, it’s you, you’re criminal. Yeah. Yes. I was going to say that. Here he is. He’s doing a bit of nut picking there.

Jim: Everybody like all of us, we’re all under investigation.

Mark: All under investigation for horrible crimes against democracy and the united States and people’s rights. Yeah. All of us. Uh oh. It’s, a horrifying cheer, isn’t it? In every poll, we’re kicking Biden’s ass.

Jim: I mean, does it even lead saying that he’s absolutely not.

Mark: No.

Jim: Why would he be? He never polled above 50% while he was president.

Mark: Exactly. Yeah. Even when he was doing the job. Yes. People thought other people that weren’t doing the job were doing a better job.

Jim: Than, uh no, of course he mean. You can find, he can find polls. You can nutpick polls which show him potentially winning against kind of any generic Democrat candidate rather than specifically Biden. Probably ones that have him beating Biden. But no, the reliable polls where they actually ask humans, and a number of humans, a larger number, reasonable questions, they say, no, of course we don’t want Trump again. He’s mad.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: that means you’ve won this. We but we wouldn’t want to characterize this as typical, obviously. No, that would be unfair.

Mark: Yeah. No, we can’t nut pick this one because it’s a bit, uh we can’t typify Characterizer every single game as yeah, you’re on a winning streak. And everybody that agrees me are all winners. No, can’t do that because that’s far too kind.

Jim: Well, unfortunately, our listeners as a whole, as a collective, have all lost, uh.

Mark: This time, because, uh you see, I’m torn now. I’m torn now between going, oh, that’s really bad, and no, I don’t know why, that’s just evil and horrible.

Jim: It is a bit. I’m surprised at you.

Mark: yeah, so cut that bit.

Jim: Christine in the Facebook group thought it might be number two, but really wanted number three to be true. So got that wish.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And Stephen in Patreon, he thought, it might be number three, but acknowledged that this was a tough one.

Mark: Yeah, because I think the tell because we’ve watched Casino, Royale a lot recently, i, think the tell for me was greedy and corrupt and conspiracy.

Jim: Right.

Mark: It was kind of too much stuff. And actually the 28,000, because now you’re going to do it. Dick said every time. Every time. When I point out it’s like machine learning, isn’t? Uh yeah, well, let’s just hope we’ve drunk enough beer so you won’t remember.

Jim: Oh, that’ll probably be fine. Yeah. So just got a couple of last minute entries in as well, actually. Scott in the Facebook group says number two as well, and Invisible Unicorn in Patreon thinks number three. But says one and two are just so believable, which makes me think you made up one of them. But I’ll go with number three.

Mark: Yeah. I share your pain. Absolutely. Every bloody week. Yeah. So no, it was 28,000. It’s a very specific made up number. See, next time, next time we do it, there’ll be, a specific made up number peppered all over.

Jim: Not next time. When you least expect.

Mark: Course. God damn it.

Jim: So yeah, if you’d like to play along, in real time and potentially have your success or failure read out on the air, then make sure that you just have our patreon and our Facebook group open at all times in case we record.

Mark: It’s the only solution to do it. Yeah.

Jim: So it’s time for the part of the show that this week at least, is called indictments, are still not a logical fallacy because there’s been a couple more, I mean there’s been one more proper one, which was DC the grand jury, indictment. We waited because there was a target letter we talked about last time. And so this is the indictment that followed up on that. But as a surprise, like an extra little amuse bouche for that one, there was a superseding indictment in the Florida documents case that added a few new charges and also a new defendant in that case, Carlos de Oliveira. We talked about him before, but you.

Mark: Didn’t give his name.

Jim: Yes, he was the guy previously unnamed.

Mark: charged with yeah, that’s charged with moving the boxes around.

Jim: Yeah, he helped Walt Nauta move the boxes around. And he was also the one who they sent to ask the It guy all about the security footage and how long it’s kept and what you need to do if you want to delete.

Mark: Some, maybe hypothetically, would you get rid of that then?

Jim: Which based on some things I’ve read, might mean he was also the guy who flooded the server room by emptying the pool. But I don’t know if that yeah.

Mark: It’s the equivalent of an insurance fire, isn’t?

Jim: but the new charges essentially are for obstruction of justice, which was related to trying to delete the security footage. they didn’t succeed in doing that because an unnamed Trump employee called employee number four in the indictment, basically said first of all, I don’t have the authority to do that. Also, I’m not sure that’s allowed to do that. So they didn’t actually delete the footage. And the other charge is another wilful retention of National Defense information charge, which is specifically for that Iran military plans document that we heard Trump waving around and saying look at this, look at this secret, look at yeah, so they’re saying that’s clearly a classified document. He clearly had it. so we’re charging him with having a classified document and not getting it back. Because this was after the, it might have been the same day in fact, that they said to the archives that they’d given everything back already. So those were the ones in the superseding indictment. And that adds those charges to the Florida case.

Mark: So does it just make it more official, the superseding?

Jim: Well I mean he hadn’t in the previous indictment, been charged with the Iran document.

Mark: Okay? Yeah.

Jim: And they hadn’t charged the obstruction of justice for the video surveillance. there’d been other obstruction of justice that he’d done that they’d previously charged. It’s not clear exactly why these weren’t charged in the first indictment. the most plausible argument I’ve heard is that there was a witness that they were trying to flip, right, might have been Oliveira de Olivera himself, who they thought, okay, we’re talking to a person and trying to get evidence from them. And therefore, if either when those talks broke down or he decided to not cooperate or whatever, then they said, okay, well, we’re going to charge you for these things, then. Or it may be that they were working with a cooperating witness who gave them this information, which enabled them to charge these after their initial indictment that they handed down. So just adds a few more charges, and that extra defendant onto the case, really. But the newest indictment, the newest full indictment is the one in DC, which is the January 6 case. We talked essentially about all of the charges, when we talked about the target letter, because these are the ones about conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to corruptly, obstruct, and impede the, January 6 congressional proceeding. And that Ku Klux Klan charge, the conspiracy against the right to vote, stopping people from being able to exercise their right to vote and expect to have those votes counted fairly. And so those are the charges that have come up, the ones that people had said they had seen in the target letter. Essentially, the three main things that indictment then goes into detail on around those are, Trump’s efforts to convince Secretaries of State to essentially lie about what the election results are like his call with Raffensberger.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Trump’s efforts and his lawyers, efforts to get, slates of false electors in various states to claim that Trump won, and then submit those certified or signed claims that they were certified results to the archives and to Pence to get him to agree to do it. And that last one is trying to get Pence to reject the, official slates of electors and accept the false ones, or to send them back to the states and ask, essentially delay it past January 6. What a lot of the response to this has been from the right, because they need to desperately respond to it in some way, has been to say they are criminalizing people questioning the, saying it’s freedom of speech thing. Trump has the right to say whatever he wants, and they are trying to put him in prison for saying that the election was stolen.

Mark: Right.

Jim: No, it suggests that they haven’t read it.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Which doesn’t surprise me at all slightly, because paragraph three on page two says the defendant had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election, and even to claim falsely that there had been outcome determinative fraud during the election, and that. He had won. He was also entitled to formally challenge the results of the election through lawful and appropriate means, such as by seeking recounts or audits of the popular vote in states, or filing lawsuits challenging ballots and procedures. Indeed, in many cases, the defendant did pursue these methods of contesting the election results. His efforts to change the outcome in any state through recounts, audits or legal challenges were uniformly unsuccessful. So right at the very beginning of the indictment, jack Smith is saying he absolutely had the right to say it was rigged, I won, I should have all the votes. This is completely unfair. You’re being lied to. All of this stuff. Yes, he absolutely had the right to do all that stuff. Of course, where it became illegal was where he conspired with other people to try and actually change the outcome.

Mark: Yes. And obstruct the actual outcome from being announced or being ratified or whatever. Yes. You can say what you like, mate, and we’re not going to try and stop you doing that. And you can pursue that through the courts with a side note. All of those failed. But what you can’t do is do those things that are set out in law, which is to obstruct the actual result from being announced.

Jim: Or try to overturn it.

Mark: To overturn it, yes, absolutely.

Jim: So there are six co conspirators who are listed in a special section called the defendant’s co conspirators, and they have not as yet been charged. But there is some evidence to suggest that as further evidence is gathered, as more things come out, that perhaps some of them will be charged. Perhaps they are people who might be able to cooperate as witnesses, and if not, they might be charged or something like that. But at the moment, they’re just listed as co conspirators one through six. But they are described in such a way as to make five of them very easy to identify.

Mark: Yeah, we were saying before we came on air, that Jim can’t even remember who, the deputy prime minister in the UK is, but can identify all of the co conspirators just from their description.

Jim: Yeah, I mean, that’s not even the difficult bit. The thing that stood out to me when I was reading it was that all of the names basically pretty much all of the names are redacted and kind of used descriptions instead. and so when it’s talking about the call with Brad Raffensberger, they refer to his lawyer, the Secretary of State for Georgia’s, lawyer, as counsel of Secretary of State for Georgia. And in my head, I was like, oh yeah, Ryan Germany. Yeah, that’s weird that I know that.

Mark: Yeah, not like we haven’t studied this for five years. Yeah.

Jim: So, yeah, co conspirator one is described as an attorney who was willing to spread knowingly false claims and pursue strategies that the defendant’s 2020 reelection campaign attorneys would not. That’s Rudy Giuliani.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Co, conspirator Two is an attorney who …

Mark: An attorney?

Jim: Well, he’s been disbarred, but he was an attorney at the time when times happened. Yeah. Co conspirator Two is an attorney who devised and attempted to implement a strategy to leverage the vice president’s ceremonial role overseeing the certification proceeding to obstruct the certification of the presidential election. That’s John Eastman. He came up with the get Pence to stop doing it.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And was in a meeting which Pence apparently took contemporaneous notes of, and has given those notes to Smith. And, then Trump, one of Trump’s lawyers went on, I think one of the Sunday shows he went on all the Sunday shows this week, but one of the shows that he was on, he admitted to the stuff that is said in this on page 35 about that meeting between Trump Pence and an Eastman where Trump and Eastman are trying to get Pence to agree to not count the official slates of electors.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And the lawyer on telly described what Trump said about it and said that he was like, well, my preference is that we should just send them back to the states, and so you should do that. And that’s essentially what’s being alleged in the mean people who are representing people in an ongoing lawsuit or criminal case certainly typically don’t go on telly and admit to the things that have happened that have been alleged in the case. That’s generally seen as a negative.

Mark: Yeah. That’s kind of frowned upon. It’s discouraged.

Jim: Co conspiracy Three is described as an attorney whose unfounded claims of election fraud, the defendant privately acknowledged to others, sounded crazy. Nonetheless, the defendant embraced and publicly amplified co conspirator Three’s disinformation that’s, Sydney Powell.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Co conspirator Four is a Justice Department official who worked on civil matters and who, with the defendants, attempted to use the Justice Department, to open sham election crime investigations and influence state legislatures with knowingly false claims of election fraud. That’s Jeffrey Clark. And then Co conspirator Five is, an attorney who assisted in devising and attempting to implement a plan to submit fraudulent slates of presidential electors to obstruct the certification proceeding. That’s Ken Cheesebro, who we talked about before, when the fake elector scheme first came to light.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And Co conspirator Six is described as a political consultant who helped implement a plan to submit fraudulent slates of presidential electors to obstruct the certification proceeding. That we aren’t sure who that is, but it’s probably Boris Epshteyn. That fits. But, the others are clear.

Mark: They did that’s who they are.

Jim: All of the news that has come out has been, this is what these people did. So it’s clear that that’s who they’re talking about. And yeah. All those people are potentially I mean, they are unindicted co conspirators at this point. They are indictable. if it is shown that the things that they did, they took steps towards achieving the goals of the conspiracy.

Mark: Also, the kind of main thrust of which kind of gives me some, grounds for worry is that Jack Smith is leaning on that Trump knew that the election was lost and, deliberately sustained the falsehood that, it was won by him. And it was fortunately that my worry is based on the fact that Trump’s lawyers, the defendant’s lawyers, could make it difficult for Jack Smith’s.

Jim: Got to prove that Alina Habba has already claimed that it’s fine because Trump believed he had won the election. So everything he did was all right. But essentially that’s like saying, well, I genuinely believe that I have 100,000 pounds in my bank account. just because the bank says I don’t, I should be allowed to go into the bank with a gun and demand to withdraw that amount of money from my account because I genuinely believe I have that amount. No, absolutely not. I mean, yes, Jack Smith does. I wouldn’t say he relies on it, but he goes into some level of detail to show repeatedly that Trump did, know all this stuff was a lie and that’s the scienter, his knowledge, his legal knowledge that he was doing the wrong thing. Some of the charges could be influenced on whether he knew he was doing something wrong, but not all of them. And also, he clearly knew he was doing something wrong. There’s also a, thing called willful ignorance, which means that essentially, if everyone’s telling you it’s wrong and against the law, which again, Smith goes into some detail on saying, here’s lots of people doing at this point, these people told him this was a lie. At this point, these people told him this was a lie. And these are people who he trusts and know, agrees with them when they say other things, and they’re still all telling him it’s a lie. At all these various points with times and dates in some cases, if he is told by so many people that he should rely on, that he has relied on in the past for other stuff, that it’s a lie and he continues to claim to believe it, that doesn’t hold legal water, right? That’s him being wilfully ignorant, in order to get out of being held accountable.

Mark: When I studied philosophy at university, one of the things was about how do you know things? What’s the difference between knowledge and belief? And knowledge included belief. The definition of knowledge was it was justified, true belief. So there was some, objectiveness objectivity to the truth of it. It related to something that was existed in the world outside of your particular belief about the existence of something in the world. And that the truth of that was justified by the fact that it did exist outside the world. Plus it needed to include your belief of it. So there were three things. So just belief on its own isn’t knowledge. So you can’t maintain that you didn’t know.

Jim: Yeah. pages seven to nine. The indictment list a number of times when people that it says. people who relied on for candid advice on important matters and who were best positioned to know the facts told him the things he was relying on were liars. Including Mike Pence, the DOJ, the Director of National Intelligence, Department of Homeland Security, the White House senior Counsel, senior staffers on his campaign, state legislatures and officials, state and federal. Courts, the Georgia Secretary of State, the defendant’s acting Attorney General and Acting Deputy Attorney General, nevada Secretary of State, the Arizona, Secretary of State, the defendant’s own campaign manager, and on and on and on. Listing specific times when he said a thing that was false and they said, that’s not true, and explained to him at times in detail, why it wasn’t true and what the real facts were.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: Yeah. I don’t think a jury is going to find him just saying, well, I still believed it very credible.

Mark: Yeah. Yes. Because they’re going to think against all ODS, you still believe it, then you’re clearly deranged. You’re a maniac. By what criteria do you judge reality?

Jim: Well, I mean, that’s an excellent question for Trump in general, m the thing is that some of what’s already happened, because this case is in front of, a judge called Tanya Chutkan, who is not sympathetic to Trump. She is not an Aileen Cannon. She takes no shit.

Mark: Right.

Jim: And, has already started taking no shit because, after the arraignment, he put a thing on his truth social that said something like, anyone who comes after me, I’ll come after you, or something like that. And so the prosecution, Jack Smith and his team went to the court and said, look, I mean, apart from the fact this is a clear threat, we would like a protection order because we are about to give Trump and his team lots of discovery, lots of evidence. And what we don’t want we Don’t Want You m to use yeah, well, first Of All, that but also, we don’t Want to Use, him to use that Evidence to Figure Out Who People Are that Have Information. On him and then to attack. yeah, we have to have some kind of order on him of how he should so the judge gave Trump and his team until Monday morning. I think, the essentially right to reply on that, to say, argue with me why you shouldn’t have this protection order. In fact, I think what she said was that he should provide an edited version of the prosecution’s request for a protection order. So essentially, she’s kind of saying, I’m going to grant it, but if you want to water it down a bit, let’s see how that goes.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So they asked for an extension on that so that they could have more time. Partly, I think, because his lawyer was busy on all the Sunday shows defending him. M, and she said, no, do it by Monday. and he has today responded on Truth Social. He is in all caps, as usual, as he always seems to these days. He says there is no way I can get a fair trial with the judge, in quotes, assigned to the ridiculous freedom of speech, fair elections case. Everybody knows this, and so does she. We will be immediately asking for recusal of this judge on very powerful grounds. And likewise for venue change out of DC. Actually, it says out if DC. But I think he meant out of. So yeah, I mean, they’re going to ask for recusal based on the fact that she isn’t a Trump supporter. Yeah, that’s the very powerful grounds because he doesn’t have any other grounds to argue that she shouldn’t be.

Mark: Don’t you just get randomly assigned?

Jim: Yeah. You get randomly assigned to someone on that court, essentially in that district or whatever. So that’s how he got Eileen Cannon. He lucked out with her, but with this woman he did not. And yeah, it’s not going to go as much his way. I am absolutely not suggesting she will be in any way unfair to him.

Jim: From everything I’ve heard and people have spoken who have heard cases in front of her or have worked alongside her when she was a lawyer and said she is absolutely fair and honest and will be straight down the line, play everything by the know, there’s not going to be any fear or favor, in this case. And yeah, he doesn’t like that.

Mark: No.

Jim: He also doesn’t like that it’s in DC. Because DC is pretty liberal and is saying that there’s no way he can possibly get a fair trial. And his lawyer said they want to try and get a venue change to West Virginia, because it’s more diverse, which is an interesting way of describing West Virginia, which is 93% white compared to DC. Which is, if anything, very diverse, perhaps not politically, but certainly racially diverse.

Mark: Diversity of thought. It’s back to back diversity of thought, isn’t it? Yeah. Insofar as there are more possibly, you know, there are people that he thinks, going to support him.

Jim: I mean, they’ve got absolutely no chance of there being a venue change at all. There’s no reason for it. And it all happened in DC.

Mark: Well, yeah. So why wouldn’t it be tried there? Absolutely. But what amazes me is that actually what this, incredibly detailed indictment does is turn that, really engaging TV series that we watch into words and you kind of look at all this stuff and think, oh my god, it’s awful. And then it’s been noted down to the minute that people were asked by Trump to do stuff and there’s just no room for him. It’s like watching Boris in the, special Committee or the Select Committee trying to make finer and finer, definitions of the things that he said in between the words. And Trump’s trying to do that in a less trained, in the classics kind of way. But it’s ultimately there is no room for maneuver. He’s got no room for maneuver. It’s all bluster. All he can do is shout. Which is what ended up with Boris talking about kangaroo courts, blah, blah, blah. And that’s all Trump is doing. And it’s very gratifying to see that the system that both Boris and Trump played for so long has caught up with them.

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

Jim: Back when Trump got impeached for withholding military aid to Ukraine on the condition of his political opponent Joe Biden being investigated for random made up crimes, GOP Senator Susan Collins voted to acquit Trump and said she believed Trump had learned “a pretty big lesson”. I’ll bet Senator Collins is feeling pretty embarrassed now, after Trump last week called for Republicans in Congress to withhold all future military aid to Ukraine “until the FBI, DOJ and IRS hand over every scrap of evidence they have on the Biden Crime Family’s corrupt business dealings”, because Trump has never learned anything and dammit, he’s not about to start now. The congressional investigation into the Biden Crime Family has been a shitshow since it began in May, with no evidence presented of any wrongdoing whatsoever, and committee chairman James Comer initially claiming he had a very credible whistleblower, who then mysteriously went missing. It turned out he went missing because he had skipped bail after being arrested on weapons trafficking charges four months after his indictment for acting as an unregistered foreign agent of China. More recently, the committee has heard testimony from Hunter Biden’s former business partner Devon Archer, which had Republicans and right wing pundits shouting ‘gotcha’ for a few days because Archer’s testimony proved that Joe Biden talked to Hunter about business and was therefore completely going to be impeached, until Archer’s testimony was released and it turned out he explicitly said Joe never talked business with Hunter and that Archer had no knowledge of any wrongdoing at all. Various GOP voices have continued to claim that it’s extremely suspicious that Joe picks up the phone when Hunter calls, because none of them have ever experienced parental love before.

Mark: Dammit and blast I knew we shouldn’t have laughed at MyPillow MyArse CEO Mike Lindell last episode having to auction off his manufacturing equipment cos no-one was stocking his actual manufactured product as he continues to push the notion of the election being stolen from Trump – BTW what are you doing it for Mikey? – Trump’s not gonna thank you or be affected financially by your loyalty, and Biden’s not dying from the poison you’re swallowing! We shouldn’t have just laughed, we should have gone online and secured a pallet of non-latex face masks for $8 or a complete electric-powered 35-foot belt conveyor or an even bigger 86-foot one for $6! And a desk to watch it from for $6, whilst sitting on a set of chairs that gained not a single bid. Okay admittedly for us there might have been quite pricey shipping costs, but it would’ve been so worth it, especially if he’d signed it – just to laugh every time his fatuous name flopped round every 86 feet! We could have used the remaining 85 feet and 11 inches to write out all the zeroes in the 1.3 billion Dominion are suing him for as well, making long Kenneth Williams-style “ooooooooohhhh!” sounds as they fly by!

Jim: Go Woke, Go Broke is the oft-quoted refrain from people who can’t define woke any more than they can Critical Race Theory, and no, this is not a gloating story about Barbie, which has now made over a billion dollars at the box office and, more importantly, proved Ben Shapiro wrong. As if proof were needed. No, this story is about Texas A&M University, who back in June hired Kathleen McElroy in their Department of Communication and Journalism. McElroy is a black journalist who studied at Texas A&M herself, is a former editor of the New York Times, and oversaw the journalism school at the University of Texas in Austin. On top of those very clear qualifications, she has a reputation for promoting diversity in the workplace, which sounds like a plus, but this is Texas, so that’s the kind of thing that can get you shitcanned, especially this coming January when the state’s new law comes into effect which effectively bans the discussion of diversity, equity and inclusion on Texas campuses. As a result, some racist cowards who prefer to remain anonymous pushed back against McElroy’s new job, resulting in the University’s president resigning and A&M settling with McElroy to the tune of $1 million rather than hiring her anyway and telling the racists to fuck off.

Mark: As well as missing our chance to buy old sleep goods manufacturing plant, the fact that just about anyone can create a federal political committee and generate an official, public organisational document that appears on the Federal Election Commission’s website, FEC.gov also passed us by this week at Fallacious Towers. Following the New York Times reporting on Sunday that Trump was creating a legal defence fund to cover the bills of witnesses and defendants, a person (or people) filed on Monday separate paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to create the “Donald Trump Legal Defense Fund”. Oh I now know why that passed us by – cos morals! Cos unless Donald Trump’s legal defence fund is being run out of an apartment in Wheaton, Illinois, and its email address carries the extension “opayq.com,” scammers are on the hunt to punk loyal supporters of the former president, and you just know Trump’s gonna hate that – cos that’s what he does! The FEC has send a letter to the Donald Trump Legal Defence Fund’s treasurer saying “Knowingly and willfully making any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation to a federal government agency, including the Federal Election Commission, is punishable under the provisions of (law),” But in true Trump supporter/scammer-styley they know that the system is always playing catchup cos it’ll take weeks to “administratively terminate” fraudulent committees that violate regulations in a kind of legal whack-a-mole fashion. Is it just me or do I smell a Jacob Wohl-sized scam! Large and ambitious but doomed to failure and a jail-term? Ooh I miss him!

Jim: I would have guessed that, when you’re running for your party’s nomination for President, your main opponent being indicted on almost 80 felony charges in three states should tip things at least a little bit in your favor. But it turns out that when you’re an unpleasant, ineffectual, amateurish charisma-vacuum like Ron DeSantis, you still can’t manage to creep above 17% in the polls. Cutting a third of his campaign staff feels like it’s not going to help, even when one of them is the Nazi who created a video with a Nazi symbol for your campaign and then lied about it, but maybe money is getting tight because donors also seem to be fleeing the sinking ship. His largest donor by an order of magnitude, hotel entrepreneur Robert Bigelow, has already given $20 million to the pro-DeSantis PAC, Never Back Down, but has now decided to back down until Ron is able to raise more on his own. Perhaps he’ll be able to gin up some support following his appearance this month in the first Republican Primary debate where he’ll be the big fish on a small stage with a bunch of candidates who are struggling to poll above 3%. That is, of course, presuming Trump keeps his promise not to show up. As we all know, Trump shies away from publicity and is always keen for the spotlight to fall on others, so I’m sure he’ll do the smart thing and stay away.

Mark: Republican presidential candidate and fly landing-strip hair-style-wearer Mike Pence weirdly seemed to attempt to court the favour of a dozen or so supporters of another, recently indicted, Republican candidate, his ex-running mate; one Donald J Trump. Having been faced with shouts of “Hang Mike Pence” early one January a few years ago, flags with “Pence is a traitor” and calls of “Why d’you let the people down?” by residents at a Londonderry New Hampshire Town Hall meeting seemed not to faze him. Instead he seemingly embraced the violent, subversive, mistaken, anti-democratic self- styled idiot patriots, who rampaged, pillaged and killed at Capitol Hill that January in 2020 by saying ​​“I’ll tell you there is a lot of passion out there, but I just, I reject your suggestion that that passion is translated into the violence and vandalism of that day,”. Rejecting the possibility of future violence whilst reminding the above idiots that he didn’t have the authority “that day” to overturn the democratically run fucking election just cos it didn’t go the way the check-shirted, gun-totin’, neck-beards wanted (and that’s just the women!) did seem to show that he’d neither the fortitude nor foresight to play the long constitutional-wrecking game the Republican party requires of their candidates. So yeah bye-bye Mikey ‘snot been nice knowing you. Now where’s that fly holding his next town hall.

Jim: As of yet, Mike Pence hasn’t met the fundraising qualification to appear on the GOP Primary debate stage, and someone else who won’t be there to challenge DeSantis is Robert F Kennedy Jr because, you silly, he’s a Democrat. Yes, I know everything he’s ever done, every opinion he’s expressed, every interview he’s given, every person who has endorsed him, and everyone who is even prepared to be in a photo with him just screams Republican, but no, he’s definitely a Democrat and not a Steve Bannon backed chaos agent. Anyway, like all good Democratic candidates, RFK jr has a deep understanding of the constitution and that’s why he’s suing YouTube and Google for violating his First Amendment rights. I don’t think the suit actually accuses the private companies of doing cancel culture on him, but he did claim during nationally televised testimony to the Weaponization Subcommittee that he was being censored by big media, so should he decide to come out as Republican in the future his bona fides are in place. Of course, the censorship he’s talking about is the dangerous medical misinformation he just can’t help yelling conspiracy theories about in public which occasionally get a bit anti-semitic as conspiracy theories are wont to do. You would think that, being a Harvard educated lawyer, Kennedy would understand that private companies can’t violate your First Amendment rights, but then it’s never stopped Ted Cruz from misrepresenting the law either, and it is fully on brand for a Republican Presidential candidate. Dammit! Democrat! I keep forgetting for some reason.

Mark: On this septic isle Thérèse Coffey, the one woman chimney/distillery and Environment Minister said the Tory party must show that it cared about the environment and insisted that “despite the noise over the last week” of people coughing while swimming in shit-strewn rivers not being cleaned by unheld-to-account private water companies, and Rishi saying we should max out the oil and gas fields in the North Sea to show just how green we are, the government was still committed to reaching net zero by 2050. Continuing the way they have, what with Rishi Sunak arguing with the radio about flying to Scotland to make that green announcement about granting more licences to fossil fuel companies and in the process using the nutpicking fallacy

Interviewer: How are you getting up here to make this Green announcement today, private jet?

Rishi Sunak: I’ll be flying as I normally would, and that is the most efficient use of my time. But again, I think actually that question brings to life a, great debate here. If you or others think that the answer to climate change is getting people to ban everything that they’re doing to stop people flying, to stop people going on holiday, I think that’s absolutely the wrong approach.

Mark: (and slippery slope and straw man) – Net Zero may just be about the number of Tories in power for the next 25 years. Meanwhile at a by-election in Scotland cos of the recall and removal of the member of the SNP Margaret Ferrier, after she broke Covid rules, Labour may be grabbing the chance, once again to fight amongst themselves – Labour’s candidate, Michael Shanks, has vowed to oppose his own party if it tries to keep the Tory policy of restricting child allowance to two children. Officials concede that many voters remain uninspired by Labour. The party’s main message in the byelection is likely to be that a Labour win will help force the Tories out of office in Westminster. More of Not-Progressive ordinary-worker-supporting Labour but rather simply Not-Tory. Though Labour’s Stephen Kinnock’s announcement that if they won in 2024 Labour would have to keep the Tories’ controversial offshore barges to house refugees, blurs the line between left and right even further. Sacré bleu! I’ve only been back in Blighty a day and I’m already working out how to sneak out with the Peloton when the UK leg of the Tour de France returns à Paris!!

Jim: So, that’s all the bad arguments and faulty reasoning we have time for this week. You’ll find the show notes at https://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 a fallacy ourselves, let us know, and if you’ve had a good time please give us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts or simply tell one other person, in person, about how much they’d like our podcast. And you can support the show at patreon.com/ftrump, just like our Straw Man level Patrons, Laura Tomsick, Renee Z, Schmootz, Mark Rikey and Amber R. Buchanan (who told us when we met her at QED we can just call her Amber); and our True Scotsman level Patrons, Steven Bickel, Janet Yuetter, Kaz Toohey, Andrew Hauck, and our top Patron… Loren! Thank you so much for your continued support, everyone. It’s very much appreciated indeed.

Jim: You can connect with those awesome people, as well as us and other listeners in the facebook group at http://facebook.com/groups/fallacioustrump

Mark: All music is by The Outbursts and was used with permission. So until next time on Fallacious Trump we’ll leave the last word … to the Donald!

Trump: That’s right, go home to mommy. Bye.