Playing the Victim – FT#133

02 Oct Playing the Victim – FT#133

Show Notes

The Playing the Victim fallacy occurs when someone tries to deflect criticism by arguing the target of criticism is just being persecuted, without addressing the content of the accusation.

Trump

We started out by discussing this clip of Trump referring to multiple credible accusations of sexual assault he faced in 2016:

And the we looked at this clip of Trump referring to multiple credible accusations of fraud, election interference and keeping classified documents that he faces in 2023:

Finally, we talked about this statement he posted on Truth Social following the Partial Summary Judgement against him in the Civil Fraud case in NYC:

Mark’s British Politics Corner

Mark talked about this clip of Priti Patel invoking her own experiences of racism when the Tories are accused of not accepting the existence of structural inequality:

And he followed that up by talking about Dominic Raab acting as if he was treated unfairly when he was accused of bullying.

He finished by talking about Boris Johnson’s resignation letter, in which he mostly expressed how poorly treated he had been.

Fallacy in the Wild

In the Fallacy in the Wild we looked at this clip from Russell Brand’s video defending himself against sexual assault claims:

Then we discussed this clip from The Minute You Wake Up Dead:

And we finished by talking about this clip from Everybody Loves Raymond:

 

Fake News

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

1. The Biden Administration is right now trying to bludgeon the boating and maritime industry – we were just discussing it with a lot of boat companies back there that create a lot of jobs and are having a hard time – with a boat speed limit of less than 11 miles an hour. About 10 miles an hour. In other words, like a slow golf cart. It’s like a… think of it… along the entire Eastern part of our country. This is supposedly in the name of preventing whale strikes, but you have a better chance of being struck by lightning than hitting a whale with your boat.
2. There has only been – listen to this – one such whale killed off the coast of South Carolina in the last 50 years but on the other hand their windmills are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before. Nobody does anything about that. They’re washing up on shore – I saw it this weekend. Three of them came up. They wouldn’t… you wouldn’t see it once a year now they’re coming up on a weekly basis. The windmills are driving them crazy. They’re driving… they’re driving the whales, I think, a little batty.
3. So what happens is you get the whales washing up. They call it beaching. They beach. And it’s the sound from the windmills that’s doing it. Because whales are… they can hear things you can’t hear. It’s like sonar. Have you heard of sonar? The whales go off-course looking for the sound – where the sound is coming from, and they get stuck and then they die. And all of the people who are supposed to care about the whales, they won’t do anything about it. Instead they blame boats and people with boats, and they want to shut you down.

Mark got it right AGAIN this week (that’s five in a row!), and is on 49%

 

A Partial Summary Judgement is not a logical fallacy

We talked about the ruling out of NY that Trump, his adult sons, and the Trump Org are civilly liable for massive fraud and may lose the right to do business in New York.

 

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

• As everyone knows, the best thing to do if you want a good outcome in a court case is to piss off the judge. Judges love to see a little chutzpah from a defendant and are always inclined to give the most annoying people the benefit of the doubt. So it is that Trump went into his federal election interference case with what appears to be a plan to be as disruptive, disrespectful and irritating as possible – so just being himself really. He started off by calling pretty much everyone involved corrupt or deranged to the point where federal prosecutor Jack Smith requested that the judge order Trump to avoid making “extrajudicial statements that present a serious and substantial danger of materially prejudicing this case”, to which Trump responded “I’m campaigning for President against an incompetent person who has WEAPONIZED the DOJ & FBI to go after his Political Opponent, & I am not allowed to COMMENT?” Then Trump demanded that Judge Chutkan recuse herself based on comments she had made during the sentencing phase of some January 6 defendants’ trials. Those defendants claimed they should get a lighter sentence because it was all Trump’s fault and he hadn’t even been charged. In one case, she commented they “were there in fealty, in loyalty, to one man — not to the Constitution… It’s a blind loyalty to one person who, by the way, remains free to this day.” Trump basically said “That’s me! She’s talking about me! I’m the one they’re blindly loyal to” and argued that she was clearly prejudiced against him. This obviously didn’t work, since the sentencing phase specifically requires the judge to give their opinion on issues raised by the defendants – it’s not like she just started shouting that Trump should be in prison on her way into the courtroom. Anyway, Judge Chutkan rejected the recusal request, as everyone knew she would, but I’m actually going to give Trump and his lawyers a bit of credit here, because I think the only reason they asked her to recuse is so that when Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida inevitably puts her thumb on the scales and people call for her to recuse, Trump can claim unfair double standards are at play.
• On Wednesday, determined to turn the spotlight away from himself, Trump didn’t attend the second Republican candidate debate but rather went to Michigan to speak at an United Auto Workers campaign event – not their campaign of course – his! He spoke to people holding Autoworkers for Trump and Union Members for Trump signs at Drake Enterprises, a non-union factory. When asked by one of the 400 to 500 attendees (Drake only employs 150 btw) whether he supported the pay increase the workforce were striking for, as a long-standing recogniser of unions, well not so much – long-standing observer of how to work round that with his mob friends in the 80s –  he warned that the “current negotiations don’t mean as much as you think.” And then blamed electric cars for all the problems they were facing. ‘Cept they weren’t cos; the Autoworker sign-holder? – yeah not an autoworker, Union Members for Trump? Not in a Union! And Trump and his Claquers had been invited to speak by Drake management! Oh and the day before, and 50 miles away where workers were actually striking, the other guy; Joe Biden, had joined the picket line and responded that ‘yes’ the unions should get their 40% pay rise; after all “UAW, you saved the auto industry back in 2008 and before. You made a lot of sacrifices, you gave up a lot, and the companies were in trouble, and now they’re doing incredibly well, and you should be doing incredibly well too.” It should worry Trump that UAW President Shawn Fain also added “We know the president will do right by the working class”. Biden’s got a little bit Corbyn all of a sudden – I like it!
• The second GOP Primary debate happened, so we’re one step closer to it not mattering in any way because Trump will be the nominee even if he’s in jail. Maybe some of the candidates on stage are hoping for a VP spot or a cabinet position if Trump were to win, because they hate themselves and would like a job where they have to explain basic government to an idiot until they randomly get fired for not praising him enough like the kid in that Twilight Zone episode. Asa Hutchinson didn’t meet the criteria for this debate, but nobody noticed he was missing, just like nobody noticed Pence was there. Everyone noticed Vivek Ramaswamy because he was almost as much of an annoying little shit as he was last time. He’s basically the Scrappy Doo of the GOP debates. Nikki Haley told him at one point “Every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber from what you say.” Chris Christie’s big moment was a prepared bit he did to camera where he called Trump Donald Duck because he ducks the debates. He looked really proud of himself after that. Tim Scott told Ron DeSantis that slavery didn’t have any redeeming qualities and DeSantis claimed that the stories about Florida’s education system teaching that were just a hoax perpetrated by Kamala Harris, despite it being exactly what the Florida education system teaches. And finally DeSantis did a thing with his face which looked like he once read a book describing a human smile and thought he’d try it out, but the book was kind of woke so he stopped reading halfway through and burned it, so he never found out how smiles actually work.
• Not one to worry about stoopid stuff like officialness and “no-one’s above the law” when it comes to wielding a sharpie – after all Hurricane Dorian was definitely headed inland just look at my drawing er the NOAA’s map! Former Trump assistant Molly Michael aka Trump Employee #2 in the indictment concerning stealing and hiding highly classified government documents – revealed to federal investigators that during the time she worked for him between 2018 and 2022,Trump repeatedly sent her directives handwritten on notecards that contained classified markings. Now these are not those notepads that look like five dollar bills you get in the tourist stores, no, you see he wasn’t just content to cavalierly show people the contents of the folders he said he didn’t have, he also just scribbled to do lists on the stacks of paper to hand not caring one jot that “ah I’ve just thought of something I need Molly to buy me let me write it down whilst I’m on the John – oh that’ll do” and it’s a fucking classified folder! Idiot! Literally bringing the receipts!
• Weirdly, the Trump campaign can’t quite decide whether Trump bought a gun during his trip to South Carolina. That doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you would be unclear on, either he did or he didn’t. Certainly they seemed to think he did at first, with Trump spokesman Steven Cheung posting a video of Trump in a gun shop holding a Glock with his own face engraved in the handle. In the video, Trump says “I want to buy one”, and Cheung confirmed it with the caption “President Trump buys a @GLOCKInc in South Carolina!” Reporter Brian Glenn of Right Side Broadcasting Network seemed pretty sure too, when he said “I was behind him when he said it. And I said, Well, I think he said he wants to buy that gun so we can confirm that he got that gun today.” Strangely, a little later on Steven Cheung deleted his tweet and told CNN that Trump did not in fact buy the gun. Brian Glenn went even further, calling anyone who claimed Trump did buy a gun “fake press” in a Tweet which read “For the record, PRESIDENT TRUMP DID NOT BUY A FIREARM. I WAS THERE. MOVE ALONG FAKE PRESS”. It’s not clear if he’s including himself in that. So, why the change? Who knows? It could be anything. For example, it could be the fact that as soon as the news he had bought the gun started being reported, people started pointing out that it’s a felony for someone to buy or receive a gun if they are currently under felony indictment, which – little known fact – Trump is. The gun store backs up the story that Trump didn’t buy the gun, which is probably unconnected to the fact that they would also be facing charges had they sold him one.
• Lawrence Fox – the only one from the venerable acting Fox family who actually can’t and has therefore jumped on the insult-people-with-my-outrageously-genuine-and-not-ghost-written-shocking-opinions-for-money-once-a-week bandwagon was sacked from GBNews this week for being a cunt!. Imagine a deflated and stretched on a rack upper class privately-educated Dickensian-wretched emaciated Alex Jones, no not Rees-Mogg, close but no top hat, and you’d be about there. He mouthed some juvenile tirade as if he was god’s gift to women and the only reason the fairer sex exists, a kind of throwback to early late 90s early 2000s Russell Brand but without the self-destructive addictions – his tirade was aimed at woman journalist Ava Evans and dismissed her opinions voiced on his show based on his own opinion of how she looked. Moya Lothian-McLean, a contributing editor at Novara Media and another GB News contributor Connor Tomlinson were then invited to appear on Sky News to discuss how exhausting it was that sexist discriminatory behaviour and language was still being broadcast this far into the 21st century. Predictably Connor retorted ‘I’m sorry you’re so exhausted to be paid to go on air.’ At which point Moya realised that the man who was arguing society isn’t structurally unequal for women was getting paid to appear in a ‘debate’ about misogyny and she wasn’t. She later tweeted “Have confirmed my opposite on Sky was offered money to ask me stupid questions, so I’ve asked for the same fee and will be donating it to @Beyond_Equality, who run educational programmes educating young men on rejecting patriarchal culture in favour of a positive masculinity.” Let’s hope GBNews and Sky News both get forced to fucking attend!
• The GOP kicked off their impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden today, and shockingly, it didn’t go well for them. All their own witnesses said there isn’t enough evidence at this stage to impeach Biden – which, to be fair, is what you would expect at the beginning of the inquiry, but there is a significant difference between “not enough evidence” and “no evidence whatsoever of any wrongdoing”, which is what they have. Some members of their own party were somehow expecting more from the proceeding, which suggests they thought House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer might have been telling the truth when he claimed he had “uncovered a mountain of evidence revealing how Joe Biden abused his public office for his family’s financial gain,” but that he was just shy about revealing that evidence every time he was in front of a camera for the past three months. Spoiler: We didn’t get to see it today, either. One senior GOP staffer told CNN “You want witnesses that make your case. Picking witnesses that refute House Republicans arguments for impeachment is mind blowing. This is an unmitigated disaster.” He’s got a point.
• This week in British politics Rishi Sunak saved us all from the implementation of outrageous green-based policies that he had just made up in order to say that only he could stop them becoming law. Seven recycling bins, a meat tax, pesky bloody wind farms combatting the cost of living crisis by driving down energy prices to almost zero – what better than to open up new oil fields and ensure major party donors from the oil and gas industries continue to majorly donate. Even the car industry, who had been busily gearing up for petrol and diesel cars to be phased out by 2025, said he was crazy when he told them that deadline would no longer apply! Even the former chair of the Tory party’s own Climate Commission had reported that the Tory policies that said they would meet net-zero by 2050 demonstrated the exact opposite. So to hear Rishi say these spectacularly non net-zero things was even more contrary to the announced policies, which in themselves anyway would not achieve net-zero!! Does Rishi think that a) we haven’t read 1984 and its mention of doublespeak? and 2) that we are aware of the physical impossibility of some of Escher’s drawings of staircases?  Meanwhile snarling slavering wanna-be right-wing pin-up next-Tory-Leader Suella Braverman told a gathering in the US that she’s gonna tell the UN that they need to change the global rules regarding asylum seekers and refugees cos she can’t get the changes she wants to bring in, brought into the UK, cos the international agreement on Human Rights held sacred by the UN says the opposite of what she wants and it’s not fair! Just more Boris Johnson-style “if I can’t win I’m taking my ball in” bullshit. The UN will do nothing to accommodate Braverman or the UK, both increasingly insignificant players on the world stage, and nor will the US. I know that, cos when the cameras pulled back from the podium it revealed only 8 people in the room 6 of whom were sure they’d gone into the wrong seminar at an accountancy conference, the 7th and 8th were actually former Home Secretaries Theresa May and Priti Patel shaking their heads saying “will we never learn.”

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

Playing the Victim – FT#133 Transcript

Jim: Hello and welcome Fallacious Trump, the podcast where we use the insane ramblings of a man with a big claque 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 playing the victim.

Jim: Yeah. I should probably explain what a big claque is.

Mark: We encountered that in Mary Trump’s book. We did? Yeah. Yes.

Jim: I thought it’s such a great word and so appropriate for Trump because it means either a group of sycophantic followers or a group of people hired to applaud a public speaker perfect. Which is extremely topical and also appropriate for Trump. So yes, he has a big one.

Mark: Of those and a kind of an opposite of clique, I guess, in a way. Yeah.

Jim: I guess a clique is a small group, isn’t it?

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Of people who like each other for some specific reason, whereas these are just people who blindly follow yes.

Mark: And they like him for money.

Jim: For money.

Mark: To show that they do. no other reason.

Jim: The playing the victim fallacy. I mean, it’s a little bit surprising that it’s taken us this long to get around to this one. This isn’t really a fallacy for Trump. This is his entire personality.

Mark: Yes.

Jim: He has been playing the victim basically all his life. I read quite an interesting psychological analysis of this concept as basically some people, and I think Trump would probably fall into this category, do this because they feel where they would normally feel guilty for being horrible people or doing bad things.

Mark: Right.

Jim: By employing this strategy of framing yourself as the victim of everything, you’re taking that guilt away by essentially nothing is your fault. Everything is happening to you, and you’re the one who people should feel sorry for. So therefore, you get to continue being awful to other people without any of that pesky shame that normal people feel.

Mark: And everybody else is guilty of persecuting.

Jim: Yeah, absolutely.

Mark: So you can be justifiably pissed off with everybody because they’re persecuting you and not taking the blame.

Jim: Yeah. So where it’s used as a fallacy is a kind of red herring. It’s a distraction fallacy, a deflection.

Mark: Right.

Jim: So it’s when someone is accusing you of something or asking you questions about something, and what you do instead is express how victimized you are being by simply being asked those questions or accused of a thing and how unfair that is. And it shouldn’t happen. Uh, and by doing that, get to avoid actually addressing the issue at all.

Mark: Because you could just point out how hard you’ve been done by rather than answering any question.

Jim: Such as, for example, during the 2016 campaign for president, when multiple women came forward and accused Trump of sexual assault of various stripes. I think it was 18 women at one point during that campaign. So obviously, he went straight to being a victim instead of being someone who needs to answer to any of those claims.

Donald Trump: As you have seen, I am a victim of one of the great political smear campaigns in the history of our country. They are coming after me to try and destroy what is considered by even them, the greatest movement in the history of our country. There’s never been anything Bill O’Reilly and others have said it’s the single greatest political phenomena in his lifetime. And others have said the same thing. The political establishment is trying to stop us because they know we are a threat to their totally corrupt controls. True.

Jim: Yeah. So this comes with that kind of persecution complex of this is why they’re doing it is they’re coming after me because I’m on the right side and they want to stop me because they know that I’ll do something to them, I’ll make things harder for them or I’ll send them to jail or whatever. So they have to come after me. This is inevitable. Of course they’ll attack me and say bad things about me. It’s not because I did the bad things.

Mark: Yeah. No. It’s because there’s more afoot something else afoot it’s because I am party to something that will put them in a bad light.

Jim: Absolutely.

Mark: When he said this is the greatest political movement in his lifetime, does he not remember Martin Luther King?

Jim: Oh, yeah. First of all, he almost certainly didn’t say that. Secondly, it’s Bill O’Reilly. And I seriously doubt other people said it about Bill O’Reilly’s lifetime. That’d be weird.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Imagine if, like, someone on CNN went, you know, this is the biggest political movement in Bill O’Reilly’s lifetime. That’d be super strange.

Mark: It’s the thing it’s the length of period of time you measure everybody measures it by…

Jim: It’s like a double decker bus.

Mark: How long ago were dinosaurs? Several Bill O’Reilly tens of millions of Bill O’Reilly’s ago. Yeah.

Jim: One of those standard measures. Of course, he’s continued with this throughout I mean, throughout his life, really, but especially throughout the last four was it how long is it since 2016? Last seven years now when he was indicted for the second time. I mean, he’s done it every single time and many, many times. But this example comes from just after his second indictment, when he claimed that, again, it’s not the crimes that he did that are the reason he’s being indicted.

Donald Trump: The ridiculous and baseless indictment of me by the Biden administration’s weaponized Department of Injustice will go down as among the most horrific abuses of power in the history of our country. Many people have said that. Democrats have even said it. This vicious persecution is a travesty of justice. You’re watching Joe Biden. Joe Biden. Think of it. Biden is trying to jail his leading political opponent, an opponent that’s beating him by a lot in the polls, just like they do in Stalinist Russia or Communist China. No different.

Mark: Like they do in Stalinist Russia, just.

Jim: Like they still do in.

Mark: The history of uh, yeah, people will remember this, and even Democrats are talking about it. None of the above is true. And he even calls him Joe Bryden.

Jim: Joe Bryden, and then has to take it off on a tangent every time.

Mark: He does that because he can’t be wrong. He can’t be wrong.

Jim: No, it’s not him being wrong. He’s a victim of teleprompters messing up and all that stuff. Yeah.

Mark: Because they know if they just let me say what I wanted to say, whole amounts of truths would be revealed.

Jim: Speaking of truth, here’s a statement from Truth Social right from this week. Because he’s still doing it, obviously.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Uh, we’re going to talk more about the thing that led to this later on because this is his reaction to the partial summary judgment from a judge in New York. I’m not going to read the whole thing because it’s very long, but I will read the first couple of sentences. And this is the first sentence. Pretty long. He says, the widespread radical attack against me, my family, and my supporters has now devolved to new UN American depths at the hands of a deranged New York state judge doing the biding of a completely biased and corrupt prosecutor, Letitia James, who ran for office based on a get Trump platform before even knowing anything about me. That’s the first sentence. Today’s action is a refutation of my status as leading candidate for President of the United States, including with a substantial lead over Joe Biden. It is a terrible reminder that radical left Democrats will stop at nothing in trying to prevent me and the American people from winning the 2024 presidential election.

Mark: Yeah. Nothing to do with the crimes that he’s been found guilty of.

Jim: No. Over a great deal of time, multiple instances of fraud.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: No.

Mark: Which have nothing to do with his presidency, but all to do with his basic corrupt money handling practices, which we’ve known he and his dad have been doing since forever.

Jim: Absolutely.

Mark: And finally, it’s caught up with him. But of course, he’s saying, no, I’ve nothing to do with all those all the criming I’ve done. Um, this is just trying to prevent me from standing for president. That will stop at nothing to prevent me. And the American people don’t count me in this. Like he said the other day, didn’t he? I was indicted for you.

Jim: Oh, yeah. He does that all the time.

Mark: Wait a minute, you’re spreading the crime, this notion of criminality around the whole country.

Jim: I mean, he ends this long statement by saying, if they can do this to me, they can do it to you, which is technically true. If those people committed massive fraud, yeah.

Mark: They would indeed do that to you. But if you didn’t do that, then they wouldn’t be able to do that to you, because that’s not how the law works.

Jim: So what this does, basically, is it avoids addressing the content of the claims that people are making against him, but it goes slightly further than just denying them. Because if people make credible claims against you, and you just say, well, it’s not true, then some people will go, well, why are they saying it then? Yeah, why are they showing us all this evidence that it is true? And so what this addresses is that part.

Mark: yeah, you have to head it off.

Jim: Yes, they’re doing it because they want to attack me because I’m actually great, and they can’t cope with how great I am, and I’m going to take them down. So they need to stop me. This is a persecution and presidential harassment or whatever, and it feeds that side of people’s natural need to know kind of motivation behind stuff without at all addressing the actual content of the claim. And now is the time, I think, for Marx British Politics Corner.

Mark: So it’s a common phenomenon in UK politics as well. We’ve touched on one or two of the examples in passing in talking about the cast of characters that are going to pop up. Yes, you know, Boris is going to pop up. The first example is the obvious one, which she got kind of called out a lot about in 2021. The then Home Secretary, Priti Patel, described the Black Lives Matters demonstrations in the UK as thuggery. And in June 2022, Florence Eshalomi, who is the Labour MP of Vauxhall and is the Shadow Minister for Democracy of the United Kingdom, asked Patel about government action against racism and discrimination.

Florence Eshalomi: Does the Home Secretary recognize that there’s structural inequality, discrimination and racism in our country? Does the Home Secretary recognize that people want to see action from this government? Will the Home Secretary and this government act now? Black Lives Matter, and we need to see this government doing something about that.

Priti Patel: I’m really saddened that the Honorable Lady has effectively said that this government doesn’t understand racial inequality. Well, on that basis, Madam Deputy Speaker, it must have been a very different Home Secretary who, as a child, was frequently called a Paki in the playground. A very different Home Secretary who was racially abused in the streets, or even advised to drop her surname and use her husband’s in order to advance her career. Uh, a different Home Secretary recently characterized if Madam Deputy Speaker I can say so in The Guardian newspaper as a fat cow with a ring through its nose. Something that was not only racist, but offensive, both culturally and religiously. This is hardly an example of respect, equality, tolerance, or fairness. So when it comes to racism, sexism tolerance or social justice, I will not take lectures from the other side of the house.

Mark: So what she’s successfully done is employ the victim, playing the victim fallacy also straw man, because she says what you effectively said is no, I didn’t say that at all. I’ve said the system is at fault. And it is. It’s structurally racist. Even though they had a report that told themselves that they weren’t institutionally racist, even though we know that they are. Uh, the fact that she kind of escalates it up through this is my experience as a child on the end of racist abuse in the then goes to and then I was called something in the Guardian, so you can’t lecture me from over there. So that all of that kind of conflates into you want to talk about racism and discrimination? I’m not listening to lectures from you. And this question comes from Florence Eshalomi, who is from African heritage. She’s basically saying, how can I Priti Patel saying I can’t be racist because I’m a person of color, too.

Jim: Yeah, I mean, the thing is, all the stuff she’s saying just makes you think, well, if you’ve experienced all this stuff why aren’t you more sympathetic to minorities?

Mark: Exactly.

Jim: It makes it worse.

Mark: Yeah, well, she and Suella Braverman and Rishi Sunak are the Tory party’s answer to diversity. We once had that thing of Matt Hancock saying, but we’ve got diversity of thought, and now they’ve the party was filled with white, middle class assholes, now it’s filled with brown middle class assholes .

Jim: and lots of white. Don’t play down the fact there’s still plenty.

Mark: This same year that she was home Secretary oversaw the introduction of the Nationality and Borders Bill, which seeks to criminalize anyone involving in helping asylum seekers enter Britain without permission, including the asylum seekers themselves. She oversaw deportation flights, carrying of reported 14 Zimbabwe and nationals back to their country of origin. An immigration court ruled in 2021 that Patel was responsible for failing to ensure the alarming death rates in refugee detention centers were investigated properly. And despite being warned by the Home Office coroner about it, she also was accused of deliberately deporting potential witnesses, all of whom were non white. That her presence in one of the four great offices of state in the government, or the racism she has faced, shows that the UK is not structurally racist, and the Conservative Party understands the inequality of discrimination is at the very least, an intellectual holiness, devoid of any nuance, and at worse, sinister form of gaslighting. It’s a bit like saying, as someone tweeted at the time, how can world hunger exist? When I ate breakfast this morning?

Jim: Yeah, it’s like Ben Shapiro’s response to Barbie being women don’t have it so bad. Greta Gerwig directed this.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. There were women in yes. Yeah.

Jim: In fact, he literally said that apart from Ryan Gosling, almost all of them were women. Like, the fuck?

Mark: Uh, so our second example, another bully from the Tory Party, Dominic Raab, resigned in April 2023, having been found guilty of bullying.

Chris Mason: Dominic Raab. Is this a stitch up?

Dominic Raab: Look, I wouldn’t describe it that way. I resigned from Cabinet today because I said I would if there was any adverse finding from this inquiry. And I’m true to my word, politicians should be. But I do think it sets a very dangerous precedent. If you look at the Tolly report, it dismissed almost all of the claims against me. And what you’ve got is the risk here of very small minority of very activist civil servants, either because they’re overly unionized or just don’t agree with what we’re trying to pursue. We’ve seen a bit of that with Brexit. We’ve seen it with human rights reform. On human rights reform, the specific quote was that I’d said the department was being obstructive. I don’t think a lot of people would say whether I was right or wrong, that that’s bullying with the passive aggressive culture of the civil service who don’t like some of the reforms, whether it’s Brexit, whether it’s parole reform, whether it’s human rights reform, effectively trying to block government. That’s not on, that’s not democratic.

Mark: Also, at the time, he did say that the report, the Tolly report he mentioned, dangerously lowers the bar of what constitutes bullying. So I’ve got high level bullying, which kind of didn’t help his case, really. He appears to be hinting, as prefaced in the interviewer’s question, is this a stitch up? That is a stitch up. He’s been ousted over some jumped up claims for some over-unionized activist coalition of civil servants who are aiming to dismantle Brexit. It’s nothing new to me. There were many cases brought, many of which were dropped, and the ones that weren’t were because they’re over-unionized activist civil servants who disagree with the things that we’re putting in place, not how the civil service works. And it’s not how if you’re found guilty of bullying people, it isn’t because they were in disagreement with you, it’s because you bullied them, despite the fact that you go, well, the bar for bullying is high enough.

Jim: I should be allowed to do much more, much worse than that.

Mark: Yeah, see, I wouldn’t have called that bullying. But whether he was right or wrong, I wouldn’t have called it bullying.

Jim: Didn’t even push his head underwater.

Mark: Barely held him there for ten minutes. Uh, speaking of dismantling Brexit, of course we couldn’t not mention Boris, who having been found guilty of misleading Parliament, claims himself to be the victim of Partygate in his resignation letter in June 2023, which goes like this I’ve been an MP since 2001. I take my responsibilities seriously. I did not lie. And I believe that in their hearts, the committee knows it. In retrospect, it was naive and trusting of me to think that these proceedings could be remotely useful or fair. But I was determined to believe in the system and injustice and to vindicate what I knew to be the truth. Of course, it suits the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats and the SNPs to do whatever they can to remove me from Parliament. Sadly, as we saw in July last year, there are currently some Tory MPs who share that view. I am not alone in thinking that there is a witch hunt underway to take revenge for Brexit and ultimately to reverse the 2016 referendum result. My removal is the necessary first step. And I believe there has been a concerted attempt to bring it about. So apart from the fact that he did lie constantly and then wiggled, the nuances of the meanings of word that were fag paper thin, was found guilty of doing the fined legally found, and then the greater crime of misleading Parliament, he hated, so he did. And now he’s saying, well, actually, yes, nothing to do with the crime. It’s all to see my removal is a necessary first step to dismantle breakfast of revenge. Yeah.

Jim: That’s what it’s really all about.

Mark: Yeah. Uh, and he’s not the only one that thought this. There are nine MPs named in the June Privileges Report entitled matter referred on 21st April 2022. Coordinated Campaign of Interference in the Work of the Privilege Committee. Those MPs are now under investigation. For saying the same thing

MARK’S FALLACY IN THE WILD STING

Guns and Roses there, of course, with out To Get Me, featuring vocals from Axel de Pfeffel Rose.

Jim: So, in the Fallacy in the Wild, we’d like to talk about the fallacy of the week from a non political perspective. And the example that we’re starting with this week is the reason that we’re doing this one, as I said, could have done Trump examples anytime. Anytime since 1974, is Russell Brand, who, if you haven’t heard him, basically he’s a chimney sweep who says big words, that’s his thing. But he also is occasionally a bit of a sexual predator. And while some people say, yeah, this is a thing that was kind of well known or at least very strongly suspected, a dispatches and times, I think, investigation came up with several women who were prepared to talk on the record about things that he had done and more have come forward since. And there’s now police investigation. But of course, when these allegations came out, he put up a video defending himself. Kind of the thing about Russell Brand is, although he was an actor and stand up and TV presenter over the last few years, he’s been mostly a right wing conspiracy theorist, YouTuber. And his argument is that that’s why he’s now being accused of these things.

Russell Brand: To see that transparency metastasized into something criminal that I absolutely deny, makes me question, is there another agenda at play? Particularly when we’ve seen coordinated media attacks before, like with Joe Rogan, when he dared to take a medicine that the mainstream media didn’t approve of. And we saw a spate of headlines from media outlets across the world using the same language. I’m aware that you guys have been saying in the comments for a while, watch out, Russell, they’re coming for you. You’re getting too close to the truth. Russell Brand did not kill himself. I know that a year ago, there was a spate of articles Russell Brand’s a conspiracy theorist. Russell Brand’s right wing. I’m aware of news media making phone calls, sending letters to people I know for ages and ages. It’s been clear to me, or at least it feels to me, like there’s a serious and concerted agenda to control these kind of spaces and these kind of voices. And I mean my voice along with your voice.

Jim: So his argument, such as it is, is that the only reason that he is being targeted by mainstream media, which means several unconnected women who aren’t in the media have come forward with stories about attacks on them by him, is because he’s getting too close to the.

Mark: Truth about whatever yeah, whatever. Similar conspiracy.

Jim: And you can tell that because he’s already been attacked by people saying that he’s a conspiracy theorist and right wing, which he totally fucking is.

Mark: Yeah. And that’s the thing. He used to be on the mainstream media. He couldn’t be more mainstream than the mainstream. He was in fucking Hollywood in, like, three movies. Married Katy Perry for a bit in order to be completely mainstream and famous. And then he was on the TV with Big Brother and Christ I Was, and he had his own chat show in America. So he knows about mainstream media. He’s fallen out of popularity, so has done stuff on his own. We got sacked off the radio for being a sexual predator and then inhabited the media space, which isn’t mainstream, except it is, because it’s YouTube and Twitter and Instagram, which has a larger audience than certainly a larger audience in the UK than each of the TV shows.

Jim: He has certainly he has a lot more subscribers on his YouTube channel than most TV shows get viewers. So, yeah, arguably, he’s still very much mainstream.

Mark: And to say that they’re out to get me, you could tell they’re out to get me. And they’ve been out to get me before. Because the mainstream media shares stories about, like, Joe Rogan.

Jim: The Joe Rogan thing I did look into, and I’ve probably missed something. There probably is something out there that when Joe Rogan said he had Ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine, that people all said the same thing about him and that was somehow suspicious, according to them. I don’t know, I wasn’t able to find any evidence of that. And I did wonder whether he might be conflating something that might have happened with a thing that Joe Rogan talked about on his show back in 2017. I think it was 2018, when I don’t know if you remember a John Oliver episode where he talked about Sinclair Broadcasting, which is a huge media conglomerate that owns lots of local news, right? And they did a thing where they gave 200 or so local news stations a script to read as if they were saying it off top of the head, essentially, about how important integrity in news broadcasting was to them and so on. I think it was originally Deadspin put together a compilation of them, and then John Oliver talked about it, and he’d previously talked about Sinclair and the kind of dangerous pervasiveness of actually what you think. What viewers feel like is local news and, like, people that are in your community talking to you and giving you information which is actually behind the scenes. A huge media conglomerate. Joe Rogan, about two weeks after John Oliver had talked about it, he had that on his show and talked to Howie Mandel about it, and so was playing these clips that all said exactly the same thing in the same words.

Mark: Right.

Jim: That sounds very similar to what Russell Brand was talking about. And I don’t know if that’s just something know, he’s mixed up those memories or if I just wasn’t able to find the thing that he’s referring to. I’m not sure.

Mark: Even though it’s on mainstream media.

Jim: Yeah, so he says, either way, what he’s talking about is essentially, yeah, he’s being attacked, like to shut him up because he’s too close to the truth and people are scared of the things he has to say. And there have been claims, and they, to a certain extent, sound, they’re not really conspiracy theories because it’s just Brand. It’s not like lots of people involved in a kind of traditional conspiracy theory, but it is a slightly possibly far fetched thing. But there have been suggestions that perhaps Russell Brand, knowing that these stories are out there and having seen the Too movement growing up and things like that, and expecting at some point to be targeted by these kinds of stories has been moving more towards the more conspiratorial, more right wing, more woo, incel space, so that when it does come out, he can position himself in this way.

Mark: Right.

Jim: To say, oh, look, the mainstream media is attacking me, because he’s in that group of people who are absolutely ready to believe that the establishment is attacking someone they listen to because he’s saying the truth. And they don’t want the truth out there.

Mark: Trouble is, his truth is out there because it’s recognizable conspiracy hogwash. It’s the same old stuff. So it is out there. His truth is out the truth.

Jim: Oh, he’s not saying anything unique. It’s absolutely generic conspiracy shit.

Mark: Exactly. Because you can guarantee an audience that will in turn protect you and agree with him that yeah. Oh, yeah. They’re out to get you, Russ. Rather than seeing the writing on the wall like he has, probably. Which is, shit, they’re going to get me. So I’ve got a mount of defense. Yeah. Like you say, you’ve got to inhabit this space so that I can point people away from my crimes. And when they say, yeah, but why are all these people talking about this stuff? Is it not to do with your astonishing promiscuity in the early 2000s or the late 90s? Is it nothing to do with that? No. It’s all to do with the stuff that I’ve recently got hold of, because he only just jumped on that bandwagon recently. There was a time he was talking with sensible people like Jeremy about voting or not.

Jim: But even then it was about not voting, wasn’t it? He was pushing the don’t listen to what they want you to do narrative.

Mark: I think he swiftly changed his mind when Brexit happened. And he said, oh, yeah, fuck, he should have voted.

Jim: Did he? Was he on that? Anyway? Yeah. It has been more recent, the slide into madness. But I have absolutely no evidence in favor of this is why he’s moved in that direction. It’s a thing I heard. I don’t know. I would say probably more likely that he is just someone who has moved in that direction because there’s money in it.

Mark: Absolutely.

Jim: And this is coincidental.

Mark: Yes. And the truth is that the mainstream media, YouTube, has stopped monetizing his output as a result of the absolutely stuff. So is he going to turn on them? Is he going to say that’s down to the mainstream media? Are they mainstream media is YouTube.

Jim: They’re the establishment, aren’t?

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Yeah, definitely.

Mark: He’s going to start moaning about being canceled and gagged absolutely. On all of his he’ll show up.

Jim: On Rumble or some other platform that won’t cancel you. If he isn’t already there. He probably already is.

Mark: True Social must be on there. Yeah.

Jim: So our next example comes from a film that is so bad, it could have fitted into last episode’s collection of really bad films. It’s called The Minute You Wake Up Dead.

Mark: Nice.

Jim: It’s a kind of Southern thriller, right, about some murders in a laughably small southern town that are all very, very clearly connected to this one woman. And the local sheriff is investigating her.

 

Deputy Kane: You know what all four have in common? You.

Delaine: What are you saying?

Deputy Kane: Obviously, there’s your daddy. Russ Potter was your neighbor. you worked with Lucius McFalls, and Sheriff Fowler, He was investigating your daddy’s killing at the same time as his murder. Don’t they strike you as odd?

Delaine: Kane, your mind is perverted. I’m not going to sit here and take these slanderous attacks on my character.

Jim: Yeah. No attempt to offer evidence, refuting any of the things he’s kind of implying, at least just no, I refuse to sit here and be talked to my good name. It’s a good way to get out of a conversation where you’re being accused of something or something is being said that you are not happy about. You just go we’ll not sit here and listen to this.

Mark: Why are you saying these things?

Jim: How dare you, sir?

Mark: It’s just slander.

Jim: And finally, we have a clip from Everybody Loves Raymond. This is an episode where Robert has recently been gored in the ass by a bull for some reason. Didn’t see that episode.

Mark: Wasn’t running with the bulls in Pamplona.

Jim: I don’t think so.

Mark: Right.

Jim: And has since been even more of a dick to people than usual, mostly his family.

Mark: Right.

Jim: And is kind of essentially using it as an excuse for being dickish.

Mark: Right.

Jim: And Deborah calls him out on it.

Deborah: You know what I think? I think you love that bull. I think you are so happy he found you because he’s a two ton excuse for your life. That’s right. You were a victim before that bull. You’ve been a victim your whole life. Because there’s nothing easier than playing the victim, is there, Robert?

Robert: Why are you picking on me?

Mark: That’s brilliant, isn’t it? Perfect bit of writing. Is it? Because it’s that whole charade of yep, all of that’s true. How are you going to counter that? You’ve been a victim your whole life, haven’t you? Why are you picking on me? Uh, brilliant. That’s perfect.

Donald 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.

Mark: Yes.

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

Mark: Yeah, look, I can see it now. I’m being made to be the scapegoat here, the laughingstock, the fool, deliberately confused by opaque, impenetrable, pseudo Trumpism so that I’m distracted from helping people see the real truth of what’s going on. I’m being gagged mentally and metaphorically to prevent me from revealing how everything is read and not in my favor. And life as we know it would end if that should happen, and they know it.

Jim: And that’s why I think, if anything, I’m the underdog. Because you’ve won. Like, I think, four in a row now. So really, I am beginning to suspect some nefarious means that I am struggling to fight against in order to beat you.

Mark: And why is that happening, then?

Jim: Because I’m too powerful as the person in charge of this game. That’s the problem. People are trying to take away my power.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah.

Jim: So these quotes are from Trump’s recent rally in South Carolina, where he did all his usual shit and went on a very weird tangent about whales, like, not the country, the animals.

Mark: Right? Yep.

Jim: So he started by saying, The Biden Administration is right now trying to bludgeon the boating and maritime industry – we were just discussing it with a lot of boat companies back there that create a lot of jobs and are having a hard time – with a boat speed limit of less than 11 miles an hour. About 10 miles an hour. In other words, like a slow golf cart. It’s like a… think of it… along the entire Eastern part of our country. This is supposedly in the name of preventing whale strikes, but you have a better chance of being struck by lightning than hitting a whale with your boat.

Mark: Bludgeon the boating and maritime that’s lovely. He quite enjoyed that, isn’t he? Bludgeon the boating? Yeah. Speed limit less than 11 miles an hour. That’s about ten.

Jim: He continued: There has only been – listen to this – one such whale killed off the coast of South Carolina in the last 50 years but on the other hand their windmills are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before. Nobody does anything about that. They’re washing up on shore – I saw it this weekend. Three of them came up. They wouldn’t… you wouldn’t see it once a year now they’re coming up on a weekly basis. The windmills are driving them crazy. They’re driving… they’re driving the whales, I think, a little batty.

Mark: Yeah. Uh, you can’t go mixing up your mammals, the batty and whales. The windmills are driving the whales batty. Uh, that’s a T shirt right there. What? Okay.

Jim: He didn’t stop there. He kept going.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: He said: So what happens is you get the whales washing up. They call it beaching. They beach. And it’s the sound from the windmills that’s doing it. Because whales are… they can hear things you can’t hear. It’s like sonar. Have you heard of sonar? The whales go off-course looking for the sound – where the sound is coming from, and they get stuck and then they die. And all of the people who are supposed to care about the whales, they won’t do anything about it. Instead they blame boats and people with boats, and they want to shut you down.

Mark: Okay. It’s like sonar. Have you heard of sonar? Okay. Well, I started thinking that number one was fake because of the 11 10 bit. But then I’m beginning to think that he’s got caught in his own Trumpism, where he said, nobody does anything about it. They’re washing up on the shore. I saw it this weekend. Three of them came up. So suddenly he’s got to prove he saw three whales coming up on the windows are driving the whale. But I so want him to say that. So I think that I’m going to okay. They call it beaching. They beach almost too close to a Barbie gag. That the sound of the windmills. And it’s like sonar. Have you heard of sonar? No. Okay. So on that basis, I think I’m going to go with number three is the one that you made up.

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

Mark: Uh, weirdly. The windmills are driving the whales batty.

Jim: Number two. You think number two is real?

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And number two is real.

Donald Trump: There has only been – listen to this – one such whale killed off the coast of South Carolina in the last 50 years but on the other hand their windmills are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before. Nobody does anything about that. They’re washing up on shore – I saw it this weekend. Three of them came up. They wouldn’t… you wouldn’t see it once a year now they’re coming up on a weekly basis. The windmills are driving them crazy. They’re driving… they’re driving the whales, I think, a little batty.

Mark: Uh, you said it much better than I thought he would. Wow. That evening, he did do the whole thing when he just kind of went, okay, I’m just going to lie about how many whales I saw. And then I think he realized, shit, yeah. That’s their big so if I saw three of them washing up this weekend, I think that might be that’s not plausible deniability. That’s implausible deniability. Wow. Oh, my God.

Jim: Uh, you also think number one was real.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And number one yeah. Is real.

Donald Trump: The Biden Administration is right now trying to bludgeon the boating and maritime industry – we were just discussing it with a lot of boat companies back there that create a lot of jobs and are having a hard time – with a boat speed limit of less than 11 miles an hour. About 10 miles an hour. In other words, like a slow golf cart. It’s like a… think of it… along the entire Eastern part of our country. This is supposedly in the name of preventing whale strikes, but you have a better chance of being struck by lightning than hitting a whale with your boat.

Mark: It’s like when he talked about a whole bunch of water or something. What was that one? That big. Water.

Jim: Ocean water.

Mark: Ocean water. Okay. It’s not difficult. Donald, just like you’re talking about boats. So huh? That’s about ten along the entire eastern part of the country. Coast. Coast.

Jim: Eastern seaboard.

Mark: Eastern seaboard is the word you’re looking for. You’re talking about boats. You’re talking about the eastern part. What, New York? Yeah. That’s brilliant. Like a slow golf cart. Bloody hell. 10 miles an hour.

Jim: So when he says less than 11 miles an hour, about 10 miles an hour, it’s because it’s ten knots. Because they do that when you’re on water, which is about 11 miles an hour. So he’s kind of getting a bit confused, I think, between those two.

Mark: What the fuck is he talking about?

Jim: So the NOAA fisheries Department, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, July of 2022 recommended changing the, uh Speed regulations. Well, ten knots is already the speed limit in these certain areas for boats of above 65ft in length. They recommended expanding that to boats also between 35 and 65ft. So basically making more boats have to stick to that speed limit.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And the reason for that is specifically to help the whale population, and even more specifically, North Atlantic. Right. Whales who are a very endangered species. There are less than 350 left in the wild, less than 70 reproductively active females.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: So they’re endangered and stuff should be done to help them. One of the things that tends to kill them is being hit by boats. In fact, the research suggests that 40% of the dead whales that they have been able to recover, that have either ended up stranded on beaches or can be recovered, were killed by either strikes from boats or getting tangled up in fishing equipment. In the last ten years, they estimate that 10% of the entire Wright whale population has been killed by boat strikes.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: So this is a thing that they say, we’re running out of Wales. We should take it a bit more seriously. Not that big a deal. It’s already the speed limit for most boats. It’s just going to be the speed limit for more boats. For more boats. It’s only a proposal. It’s only recently got a hearing about whether it should be turned into an actual law, but it hasn’t yet. But obviously, Trump is against all kind of regulation. Anything that regulates things, especially if it’s for wildlife or anything like also, he’s.

Mark: All for being the person that rescues the country from having things taken away.

Jim: From them, like the ability to go.

Mark: Fast enough to kill a whale. In the whale area, the delicious homophones that are going on is because there’s an hour speed limit in Wales, in the UK, which is limited to 20 miles an hour that’s on the road.

Jim: And it’s nothing to do with saving giant mammals.

Mark: No, it’s just to do with and it’s in built up areas in order to wales is quite small and wiggly when it comes to towns. And it’s to cut the amount of road deaths, because mainly good percentage of road deaths are in towns, people being hit by cars. So if you’re going slower and you hit someone and you’re going a bit slower than you would have been going, they’re going to be injured less and be a lot less dead for a lot longer.

Jim: Which is exactly the situation with whales. At ten knots, they are 50% chance of dying if they’re hit by a boat at 20 knots, which is the current speed limit for those smaller boats, they’re basically going to die. So yeah that’s the point. It still won’t save all the whales. It’ll just make you half as likely to kill them if you hit them.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And as for how likely it is that you’re going to hit them, trump suggested that you’re more likely to be struck by lightning than you are to hit a whale in your boat. That’s a testable claim.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Across the world, around 2000 people a year are struck by lightning.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: Around 20,000 whales are killed by boat strikes per year around the world. So you’re literally a 10th as likely to be struck by lightning as you are to hit a whale in your boat.

Mark: But that’s not like Trump to say the exact opposite of what’s true. So what’s the thing about the windmills?

Jim: It’s a weird conspiracy thing that anti windmill people say, yes, he’s picked up on it, there’s no evidence for it whatsoever. All of the experts say no, it’s obviously not the windmills that’s mad. In the third paragraph, the third statement, I did attempt to construct some reasoning about it being the wind and the light low frequency harm or something like that.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: I made that up completely. There isn’t they haven’t even bothered to come up with a reason for it. So um, experts, basically marine experts, whale experts say this is bullshit, it’s nothing to do with the wind farms. Rob Deville from the Zoological Society of London’s Cetacean Strandings Investigation program, which is fucking brilliant name for a programme.

Mark: CSI.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Cetacean Stranding Investigation. That’s uh, been a deliberate choice of letters. There isn’t.

Jim: I work for CSI. He said to talk about wind farms being a problem. Takes away discussion around the very real threats that are a problem for those species.

Mark: Exactly, that’s exactly yes. There you go. That’s exactly this fallacy, isn’t it? Yeah. It distracts uh yeah well it’s all the bloody wind farms. If you want, you do good of fucking green people killing all the whales. They’re killing all the things they’re supposed to be whale huggers and they’re killing them with their uh, free electricity generating.

Jim: So that means you’ve won yet again. I don’t know what’s going on. It’s getting suspicious because I don’t think you’ve ever had a run like this. This is no unprecedented.

Mark: I’m not going to jinx it by saying, how long is it? How long is it?

Jim: I’d have to go back in several. But it’s at least several.

Mark: Yes.

Jim: That’s a minimum.

Mark: It’s almost a crowd, isn’t? Wow.

Jim: So we have had some entrants on our Facebook page and on Patreon at patreon.com/ftrump. If you fancy joining in. Anders says, I’ll go first with first. Number one.

Mark: Right.

Jim: Invisible Unicorn agrees. Says Bludgeon may be outside his vocab.

Mark: Nice. Yeah I can see where they did that. Yes. Nobody’s troubled by the 11 miles an hour. 10 miles an hour.

Jim: Well actually the first thing on Facebook, Scott said, I think number one is made up. It contains rudimentary math beyond Donald’s abilities.

Mark: Nice.

Jim: Ten is actually eleven, and it doesn’t mention the windmills. We know he hates windmills, even though it’s actually wind turbines.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Back on Patreon, Stephen Bickle says, I’m going to guess number two. I kind of hope it’s true because it’s so dumb, but something about it seems too agreed with you. He’s been using big words lately. Melania got him a word of the day calendar. And he’d totally compare any vehicle to a golf cart. And I think if he said three, he would have called it Bleaching and then referenced the did. When I was writing number three, I did think if I put they beach. Are you going to think that’s too Barbie? But I couldn’t not. Sorry.

Mark: No, the whole sonar thing. And just like sonar. Have you heard of sonar? It is one of his things that in his ignorance, he would say. But it’s also quite a good gag. Well, yay. So I’m up to 60 out of 123.

Jim: Yeah, you’re getting closer to 50%. Three more episodes, you could do it. And if you get the next three right, you’d be 63 out of 126. Yeah.

Mark: All right. Okay. There you go.

Jim: Something to aim for. Yeah.

Mark: And at that point, the world will end and the truth will be told.

Jim: So it’s time for the part of the show that this week at least, is called Partial Summary Judgments Are Not a Logical Fallacy.

Mark: Because.

Jim: You may remember that a while ago, Letitia James in New York requested a partial summary judgment in her case there against Trump, which is the civil fraud case where he and his adult children and the Trump organization as a whole repeatedly inflated the value of their properties on their financial statements when looking for bank loans, and said different numbers when they were paying taxes on.

Mark: Those much smaller numbers.

Jim: Much, much smaller numbers. Yes. That’s not allowed. That’s very naughty.

Mark: Weirdly. Yeah.

Jim: And two, three weeks ago, Letitia James went to the court and said, look, there’s a mountain of evidence that we’ve provided you with it’s, documentary evidence. There’s not, like, anything they can argue against it. You can ask them. Ask them for their take on it. But look, look at the numbers. We think we don’t need to wait until we actually kind of get to the trial stage before you make a ruling on whether they’ve committed the fraud that they’ve very, very clearly committed.

Mark: Yeah. There’s fraudulent behavior.

Jim: And so the judge has agreed, at least in part, with her request, and made a partial summary judgment for Letitia James for that civil fraud finding against Trump and the Trump Organization and Donald, Julia, and Eric.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: Which means that when the trial starts, which is next week that will be about finding the detail and about essentially working out what the fines will be and all of that kind of stuff that will essentially result from that. But he’s already found that they definitely committed fraud. Again, it’s a civil case. They haven’t been convicted of anything, but they have been found liable for various fraudulent transactions and paperwork and all of that kind of stuff.

Mark: Because the thing is that we know that this has been a thing that happened in the Trump Organization because we’ve been reading Mary Trump’s book, and this is exactly what Fred Trump would do absolutely. In the that’s how they got the money together for bloody Trump Tower, and that’s how they got the money together for loans for the Hyatt Hotel. Rebuild against the value of other things. And then when they went to sell it off, madly undervalued it, and the whole of Fred Trump’s legacy, they did these amazing things where they got people to value it. Uh, nothing at all. And then one of Trump’s defense in this case was to say, yeah, they are worth that much because people bought them for lots of money. They said, well, yeah, but you valued them really low in order to avoid the tax, and then to say, yes, but they are worth a lot more because we sold them. Yeah. Then you are committing fraud. That’s what you’re doing. Yeah.

Jim: I mean, he had a few arguments, if you want to kind of I’m being quite loose with the argument.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: In fact, when Letitia James put forward her summary judgment request for this ruling, essentially the Trump lawyers put forward a request as well. They asked for a summary judgment to throw out the case, obviously, on the basis that there was no evidence that the public was harmed by any of the stuff they did, which is not absolutely. And since this ruling has come forward, they’ve said things like, we didn’t miss any payments to the banks of the loans that they gave us. Everything was paid back, sometimes early. Uh, the banks were very happy. No one complained. You didn’t take their food either. That’s not a thing that’s being claimed.

Mark: Yeah. We didn’t punch them, didn’t deflate the tires, poke them in the eye.

Jim: The thing that’s being claimed is you lied about how much your stuff was worth yeah. In order to get lots of money in both directions.

Mark: Yes. And it’s like the opposite of victim. It’s kind of Sainthood rather victimhood saying, yeah, but we were really nice to them. We gave them that. We ironed all the banknotes that we paid them back. Uh huh. We took them chocolates, we knocked.

Jim: Also not a victim of crime in any way, because in paying a lot less tax, that takes money out of the treasury, essentially, that gives less money to the government and therefore less public services to the populace. So there are literally millions of victims.

Deborah: Yeah.

Jim: So Judge Engoran wrote multiple things in his ruling. He was not having any of this shit. He said in the defendant’s world, rent regulated apartments are worth the same as unregulated apartments. Restricted land is worth the same as unrestricted land restrictions can evaporate into thin air. A disclaimer by one party casting responsibility on another party, exonerates the other party’s lies. That is a fantasy world, not the real.

Mark: World.

Jim: Excellent. Yeah. Another one of Trump’s defenses in inverted commas was that ah, on the front page of the documents that they gave to the bank saying, here’s how much all our stuff is worth. There’s m a disclaimer that basically means you can’t take any of this seriously. It’s all bullshit. So they shouldn’t have trusted.

Mark: Me even though it said this is what it’s all worth. And that’s a defense. That’s their defense. In defending the crime, he’s admitting to the crime.

Jim: He’s admitted various other crimes in trying to defend against it. Because one of the things he said is when they have said your stuff isn’t worth nearly as much as you claimed when you went for loans, he has come out and said I had far more money than him within my financial statements. I’m like, no, that’s a crime too. Your financial statements are supposed to accurately represent your finances.

Mark: Yeah. Because otherwise when you send those books to the tax man, you’re going to pay less tax than you.

Jim: Uh, but the disclaimer thing excellent. There is a disclaimer on the front page which essentially is saying this shouldn’t be taken as gospel. It is the responsibility of the lender to make sure that this is accurate, which is a standard thing. It’s like the lender has the ability to go out and do valuations on things that they are lending against. That’s their right, and it should be their responsibility to do that. But where you’re giving them a financial statement to rely on, that doesn’t mean you can just lie on it and rely on the fact that they probably won’t check.

Mark: Yeah, we know that that was Trump Senior. That was Fred Trump’s entire way of doing stuff, particularly with his own. Yes, it did exactly that. That will just put in this ridiculous number, knowing that they’re not going to check. And then even if they do check, it will go up a little bit, but nowhere near as much as it’s worth. So we’ll have to pay hardly any tax at all.

Jim: But here is the funnest thing about this is that part of the result of this is not just that they’ll certainly lose this part of the case when it eventually is in court in a week’s time. There are other charges that will be looked at at that point as well. But one of the things that Engoran has already said is that he will be removing the Trump family, the Trump Organization’s business licenses in New York. Wow. Essentially, they’ve committed so much fraud, they’re not allowed to have a business in New York anymore, which is where a lot of their business is, which means, essentially, I m mean, they’ll appeal this, it’s not going to happen straight away, it’ll go to higher know stuff will happen. But if this ruling holds, the Trump Organization, it will be dissolved, which is fucking huge, because that’s a big part of their business empire, is Trump Org in New York, and it’s many, many subsidiaries. One of the most fun things about that is that Trump’s lawyers and his children’s lawyers are now asking, well, hang on, because all of our houses in New York are owned for tax purposes by the Trump Organization, can we keep our houses? And the judge is like, let’s.

Mark: See.

Jim: Uh, I’m not deciding on that just yet, but we’ll see how the trial goes.

Mark: Yeah, but also because the lawyers must be thinking, not only are they going to not ever get paid, because Trump never pays his lawyers if they fail, but then they’re going to lose the roof over the head. Yeah.

Jim: Because, I mean, they’ve got like twelve other houses they can go to, but still.

Mark: Yeah, but not in New York. No. That’s excellent, because it’s kind of OD to even visualize what the Trump business is, because it’s just the business of being fraudulent. As we know from the history of all the Trump development in the 80s that we’ve been reading about, it’s just all of it is absolutely fraudulent, big business stuff. And I kind of worry that there will be a bit like UK politics. There are high powered vested interests in whose vested interest it would be for this stuff to go away and for it to be appealed successfully because it might reveal all sorts of other dodgy dealings that are going on.

Jim: Yeah. And one of the things that has got probably the most traction in the media, certainly, has been the thing that the Trump family are shouting about the most is the valuation of Mar a Lago, which they valued at various times, different amounts at one point. And this is compared to a valuation by the Palm Beach County Assessor. So the local government said it’s worth somewhere, and this was a few years ago now, somewhere between 18 and $27 million, which is quite a lot of money. Yeah, they valued it a bit higher than that. They inflated its value on one financial statement, according to the judge, by 2300%. What, so that’s not wow. A little bit off. No, they didn’t just kind of round up to 30 million. That’s a fucking huge number.

Mark: Um, to get a loan against it. Yeah.

Jim: Right. Eric Trump tweeted, in an attempt to destroy my father and kick him out of New York, a judge just ruled that Mar a Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is only worth approximate $18 million. Mar a Lago is speculated to be worth well over a billion dollars. Yeah.

Mark: By Trump.

Jim: By you not by anyone. Who’s ever looked at it and has any ability to value properties.

Mark: Yeah. It’s a bit like when Trump says, I’ve heard people say, or people have said, yeah, it was you. I’ve seen it written. Yeah, people are writing down what you said.

Jim: Uh, but they’re all kind of blaming this judge for saying it’s worth 18 million. And that proves that he’s out to get them, essentially, because he’s valued it as low as 18 million. He’s literally just quoting the official Palm Beach assessors report.

Mark: Yeah. Does he think that nobody notices this stuff? All right. Simple as that. That’s it. Okay. Wow. Well, let’s just hope it all shuts down and blows up in their face.

Jim: Lovely. I also wanted to talk about QED, which, as you may remember I went to this weekend. And before I do, because I’m basically mostly just going to be saying how awesome it was. I feel like, just to be polite, I should ask, how was your weekend? Yeah, patronize me.

Mark: Good. Yeah, it was a great weekend. The weekend was about celebrating guitarists from the outbursts who do our theme tune. It was a big birthday for him. So we went up north. We played in what was an old theater. It’s called the Georgian theater. I don’t know that it was a Georgian. It might be, might have been. No. Uh, probably more Victorian. But big old theater filled with people. Uh, a couple of bands played. We stormed the joint and someone took loads of photos. And somebody that many people we’d never met before had were friends of our guitarist Neil’s, when they were at school. So he grew up in the northeast and then moved to London age 20. And they hadn’t seen him since he was like, 16 or whatever. So that was amazing. And they said, oh, my God, you guys are great. Yeah, that was brilliant. We only talked to the people that thought we were great, but it was also a bit like one of those celebrations that we used to go to as kids and run around and you’d.

Jim: See jelly ice cream is there.

Mark: Yeah. Uh, for the kids. And they’d all be running around and they were probably of the opinion, why is this place full of old people? We did when we were kids, you’d run around and go, oh, yeah, we’ll have to go to Uncle Len’s 140th birthday, or whatever. And you go, do we have to? Because it would just be full of old people. And now we are the old people. And I realized, oh, we feel exactly the same as we did when we were four, insofar as going, oh that’s brilliant, or, this is good, or, Is there any ice cream? And the best thing was when we all came over the last to leave, and we were sat on a wall with Neil whilst we waited for his taxi to arrive and take. Him away. He said, I don’t want to go. Yeah, I don’t want to go home. Yes, brilliant. Which felt very being a four year old. No, I don’t want it to end. Just five more minutes, please. I don’t want to go to bed. Why does it have to stop?

Jim: Which is great. Yeah, well, very similar experience in that respect, at least to QED as it was last time. Just the whole weekend. It was all brilliant. And all the time you were like it’s the end of the first day. There’s only like one more big day left. You get to the end and I’ve got to go home and start my life again. It was just great. Excellent. So, yeah, started on Friday at SkeptiCamp, which is a day of talks from people just in the skeptical community. People who go along to QED for fun, but also think, yeah, I’ve got ten minutes of interesting stuff I can talk about. Um, and it was filled with great talks. One that was really interesting about real life crisis actors in the sense that there are people who put on makeup and act like they’ve been in an accident or whatever to help train emergency responders.

Mark: Yes, of course they bust in.

Jim: They stage giant incidents, like they have a section of motorway that they kind of create enormous crashes on so that paramedics can come and figure out learn how to respond to it and how to respond to people who are like, yeah, my arm’s broken, or whatever. And they act as if that has happened to them. Fascinating stuff. Anyway, there’s loads of talks like that of just really interesting topics. Um, so I made it for the second session of the day for that because Manchester’s far away. I mean, we left pretty early, but I’d have to have left like half five in the morning to have got there for everything. I might have to do that next year because there we go.

Mark: Just go the night before.

Jim: Yeah, there’s that too. Thursday m might m have to go Thursday night. It’s getting longer and longer because last time we came back on the Sunday, and this time I was like, fuck that. I missed out on stuff on the Sunday night. I came back today.

Mark: Welcome to the world of going to a festival. Yeah, that’s what it’s like.

Jim: I was driving back today, listening to podcasts, as is my want in the car. And I kept having to rewind my podcasts because I was too busy thinking about how great the weekend was to pay attention to what was being said on the podcast. That.

Mark: Was brilliant. That’s so good. Yeah, it’s Glastonbury for the mind.

Jim: Uh, that’s where you so after the SkeptiCamp talks that I watched that. Then it was lunchtime and I went and had a bit of lunch and went to the bar fully intending to go back for the afternoon of SkeptiCamp. And watch the other talks. And I noticed across the bar Eli Bosnick from GAM and Scathing Atheist Skeptic citation needed dear old Dads and all of the podcasts, basically. And I thought, well, last time I left it till the Sunday night to go and talk to people that I really would like to go and talk to.

Mark: Yeah. Engage with the heroes.

Jim: Yeah. And when I did, they were lovely. And I felt, oh, I really should have done that earlier. But I was still kind of nervous. So I thought, I’m going to do it. So I kind of headed over to say hi. And I saw that he was sitting with his wife Anna, who’s also involved in most of the shows and is fucking awesome as and I said, you know, don’t want to bother you. I just wanted to say hi and shake your hand, whatever. And he went, you’re not bothering me. Come sit down. He moved his bag off a chair and was like, take this chair as yours now. Sit down. Um, and they, as it turns out, were chatting to Cara Santa Maria of Skeptics Guide to the Universe and Talk Nerdy. So I sat there and just had a fucking chat with Eli and Cara for most of the afternoon. Fantastic. They were lovely. And I didn’t want to go and leave that to hear what were probably amazing.

Mark: Talks.

Jim: That was pretty fucking cool.

Mark: Because the thing about other I suspect they are just as much fans of other podcasters. Yeah.

Jim: And just people just they want to talk to listeners in the same way as we experienced that last.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Because the people that’s the main thing. I haven’t even talked about the talks and all of the activities yet. But the whole weekend, the best thing about it, even though it’s filled with amazing talks and things, is the lovely, lovely, lovely people. They are so amazing and friendly and open and happy to talk and interesting. Yeah. A lot of them were people I hadn’t met before. There were some people that I’d met last year or I’ve seen kind of on kind of zoom calls for skeptics in the pub and things like that. There were some of our lovely listeners, including Amber and Hugh and Nick and Nick’s amazing daughter Scarlett, who was very cool. Igor and Mike and Serdar who are also both listeners on the Sunday night, which I previously would have missed. Dan and Jordan from Knowledge Fight podcast who had done a live podcast recording. And Dan had done a talk on the Sunday morning. They were just sat in the bar and the group I was sitting with were like, were big fans. And we were like, oh, there’s Dan and Jordan. They’re just sitting there by the should we go have a word? So we went over there, spent most of the rest of Sunday evening just chatting with Dan and Jordan from Knowledge Fight, which is fucking brilliant as well.

Mark: Yeah. My Glastonbury for the mind analogy, I think works because you go to Glastonbury, there’s nigh on 100,000 people there in a field in the southwest of England, and it’s about the people that you meet and you relish in the license to be able to just talk to people. It gives you the ability to just say hi, and what are you up to, and be interested in other people.

Jim: And frankly, if the listeners that I met this weekend are representative of all our listeners, we have the fucking Loveliest listeners. They’re the best people, and I’ve got no reason to assume that they’re not representative of them. Yeah, they probably are.

Mark: I don’t think we’ve got any MAGA people that are.

Jim: I’m pretty sure we don’t.

Mark: If we do, welcome to Maybe.

Jim: This is one of their first episodes. They’re like oh, I’ll just give this a try. No, it’s probably not for you, mate.

Mark: Uh, either that or this could be a damascene conversion.

Jim: Yeah. Just briefly, because the main thing is the people, the community. That is the awesome thing.

Mark: Yes, it is a community, isn’t?

Jim: Yes. Yeah. But there were also amazing talks, like Lucy Cook, who’s a TV presenter and biologist who was talking about female stereotypes within the world of biology and how females of many species are very different from how we think of them. There were workshops this year, which there weren’t last year. Uh, kind of interactive stuff about how to read a scientific paper, how to write skeptical articles. Uh, there was one with Professor Chris French on investigating the paranormal. That was fantastic. There were live podcast recordings from Incredulous and Skeptics with a K. And embrace the void and knowledge. Fight and talk, Nerdy. It’s just there’s so much stuff. Wow. That the worst thing about it, is it’s too good. Because, honestly, when the schedule comes out of the things that are happening over the weekend, you look at it and go, well, I need to be in four places at this time. This is not that. All those things are things I need to do.

Mark: You need that thing from Harry Potter. Yes, exactly. We could attend everything all at once.

Jim: Yeah. So sometimes it was really difficult to choose. The quality is so high that it doesn’t really matter what you choose, it’s going to be awesome. But you still do have this weird fear of missing out of all of.

Mark: The.

Jim: Other it was fantastic. And I very strongly recommend that if you are in the slightest interested in that kind of thing, that you keep a lookout on Qedcon.org for when they announce next year’s dates and tickets, which will be in a while. It won’t be straight away. They’ve got to relax a bit now. Yeah. It’s extremely awesome. And I had a great amount of fun and now I’m sad that I’m not.

Mark: There, which is the best endorsement of it ever. And now you know what it’s like the morning after you’ve played a gig. And finally, some things we really don’t have time to talk about.

Jim: As everyone knows, the best thing to do if you want a good outcome in a court case is to piss off the judge. Judges love to see a little chutzpah from a defendant and are always inclined to give the most annoying people the benefit of the doubt. So it is that Trump went into his federal election interference case with what appears to be a plan to be as disruptive, disrespectful and irritating as possible – so just being himself really. He started off by calling pretty much everyone involved corrupt or deranged to the point where federal prosecutor Jack Smith requested that the judge order Trump to avoid making “extrajudicial statements that present a serious and substantial danger of materially prejudicing this case”, to which Trump responded “I’m campaigning for President against an incompetent person who has WEAPONIZED the DOJ & FBI to go after his Political Opponent, & I am not allowed to COMMENT?” Then Trump demanded that Judge Chutkan recuse herself based on comments she had made during the sentencing phase of some January 6 defendants’ trials. Those defendants claimed they should get a lighter sentence because it was all Trump’s fault and he hadn’t even been charged. In one case, she commented they “were there in fealty, in loyalty, to one man — not to the Constitution… It’s a blind loyalty to one person who, by the way, remains free to this day.” Trump basically said “That’s me! She’s talking about me! I’m the one they’re blindly loyal to” and argued that she was clearly prejudiced against him. This obviously didn’t work, since the sentencing phase specifically requires the judge to give their opinion on issues raised by the defendants – it’s not like she just started shouting that Trump should be in prison on her way into the courtroom. Anyway, Judge Chutkan rejected the recusal request, as everyone knew she would, but I’m actually going to give Trump and his lawyers a bit of credit here, because I think the only reason they asked her to recuse is so that when Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida inevitably puts her thumb on the scales and people call for her to recuse, Trump can claim unfair double standards are at play.

Mark: On Wednesday, determined to turn the spotlight away from himself, Trump didn’t attend the second Republican candidate debate but rather went to Michigan to speak at an United Auto Workers campaign event – not their campaign of course – his! He spoke to people holding Autoworkers for Trump and Union Members for Trump signs at Drake Enterprises, a nonunion factory. When asked by one of the 400 to 500 attendees (Drake only employs 150 btw) whether he supported the pay increase the workforce were striking for, as a long-standing recogniser of unions, well not so much – long-standing observer of how to work round that with his mob friends in the 80s –  he warned that the “current negotiations don’t mean as much as you think.” And then blamed electric cars for all the problems they were facing. ‘Cept they weren’t cos; the Autoworker sign-holder? – yeah not an autoworker, Union Members for Trump? Not in a Union! And Trump and his Claquers had been invited to speak by Drake management! Oh and the day before, and 50 miles away where workers were actually striking, the other guy; Joe Biden, had joined the picket line and responded that ‘yes’ the unions should get their 40% pay rise; after all “UAW, you saved the auto industry back in 2008 and before. You made a lot of sacrifices, you gave up a lot, and the companies were in trouble, and now they’re doing incredibly well, and you should be doing incredibly well too.” It should worry Trump that UAW President Shawn Fain also added “We know the president will do right by the working class”. Biden’s got a little bit Corbyn all of a sudden – I like it.

Jim: The second GOP Primary debate happened, so we’re one step closer to it not mattering in any way because Trump will be the nominee even if he’s in jail. Maybe some of the candidates on stage are hoping for a VP spot or a cabinet position if Trump were to win, because they hate themselves and would like a job where they have to explain basic government to an idiot until they randomly get fired for not praising him enough like the kid in that Twilight Zone episode. Asa Hutchinson didn’t meet the criteria for this debate, but nobody noticed he was missing, just like nobody noticed Pence was there. Everyone noticed Vivek Ramaswamy because he was almost as much of an annoying little shit as he was last time. He’s basically the Scrappy Doo of the GOP debates. Nikki Haley told him at one point “Everytime I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber from what you say.” Chris Christie’s big moment was a prepared bit he did to camera where he called Trump Donald Duck because he ducks the debates. He looked really proud of himself after that. Tim Scott told Ron DeSantis that slavery didn’t have any redeeming qualities and DeSantis claimed that the stories about Florida’s education system teaching that were just a hoax perpetrated by Kamala Harris, despite it being exactly what the Florida education system teaches. And finally DeSantis did a thing with his face which looked like he once read a book describing a human smile and thought he’d try it out, but the book was kind of woke so he stopped reading halfway through and burned it, so he never found out how smiles actually work.

Mark: Not one to worry about stoopid stuff like officialness and “no-one’s above the law” when it comes to wielding a sharpie – after all Hurricane Dorian was definitely headed inland just look at my drawing er the NOAA’s map! Former Trump assistant Molly Michael aka Trump Employee #2 in the indictment concerning stealing and hiding highly classified government documents – revealed to federal investigators that during the time she worked for him between 2018 and 2022,Trump repeatedly sent her directives handwritten on notecards that contained classified markings. Now these are not those notepads that look like five dollar bills you get in the tourist stores, no, you see he wasn’t just content to cavalierly show people the contents of the folders he said he didn’t have, he also just scribbled todo lists on the stacks of paper to hand not caring one jot that “ah I’ve just thought of something I need Molly to buy me let me write it down whilst I’m on the John – oh that’ll do” and it’s a fucking classified folder! Idiot! Literally bringing the receipts!

Jim: Weirdly, the Trump campaign can’t quite decide whether Trump bought a gun during his trip to South Carolina. That doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you would be unclear on, either he did or he didn’t. Certainly they seemed to think he did at first, with Trump spokesman Steven Cheung posting a video of Trump in a gun shop holding a Glock with his own face engraved in the handle. In the video, Trump says “I want to buy one”, and Cheung confirmed it with the caption “President Trump buys a @GLOCKInc in South Carolina!” Reporter Brian Glenn of Right Side Broadcasting Network seemed pretty sure too, when he said “I was behind him when he said it. And I said, Well, I think he said he wants to buy that gun so we can confirm that he got that gun today.” Strangely, a little later on Steven Cheung deleted his tweet and told CNN that Trump did not in fact buy the gun. Brian Glenn went even further, calling anyone who claimed Trump did buy a gun “fake press” in a Tweet which read “For the record, PRESIDENT TRUMP DID NOT BUY A FIREARM. I WAS THERE. MOVE ALONG FAKE PRESS”. It’s not clear if he’s including himself in that. So, why the change? Who knows? It could be anything. For example, it could be the fact that as soon as the news he had bought the gun started being reported, people started pointing out that it’s a felony for someone to buy or receive a gun if they are currently under felony indictment, which – little known fact – Trump is. The gun store backs up the story that Trump didn’t buy the gun, which is probably unconnected to the fact that they would also be facing charges had they sold him one.

Mark: Lawrence Fox – the only one from the venerable acting Fox family who actually can’t and has therefore jumped on the insult-people-with-my-outrageously-genuine-and-not-ghost-written-shocking-opinions-for-money-once-a-week bandwagon was sacked from GBNews this week for being a cunt!. Imagine a deflated and stretched on a rack upper class privately-educated Dickensian-wretched emaciated Alex Jones, no not Rees-Mogg, close but no top hat, and you’d be about there. He mouthed some juvenile tirade as if he was god’s gift to women and the only reason the fairer sex exists, a kind of throwback to early late 90s early 2000s Russell Brand but without the self-destructive addictions – his tirade was aimed at woman journalist Ava Evans and dismissed her opinions voiced on his show based on his own opinion of how she looked. Moya Lothian-McLean, a contributing editor at Novara Media and another GB News contributor Connor Tomlinson were then invited to appear on Sky News to discuss how exhausting it was that sexist discriminatory behaviour and language was still being broadcast this far into the 21st century. Predictably Connor retorted ‘I’m sorry you’re so exhausted to be paid to go on air.’ At which point Moya realised that the man who was arguing society isn’t structurally unequal for women was getting paid to appear in a ‘debate’ about misogyny and she wasn’t. She later tweeted “Have confirmed my opposite on Sky was offered money to ask me stupid questions, so I’ve asked for the same fee and will be donating it to @Beyond_Equality, who run educational programmes educating young men on rejecting patriarchal culture in favour of a positive masculinity.” Let’s hope GBNews and Sky News both get forced to fucking attend!

Jim: The GOP kicked off their impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden today, and shockingly, it didn’t go well for them. All their own witnesses said there isn’t enough evidence at this stage to impeach Biden – which, to be fair, is what you would expect at the beginning of the inquiry, but there is a significant difference between “not enough evidence” and “no evidence whatsoever of any wrongdoing”, which is what they have. Some members of their own party were somehow expecting more from the proceeding, which suggests they thought House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer might have been telling the truth when he claimed he had “uncovered a mountain of evidence revealing how Joe Biden abused his public office for his family’s financial gain,” but that he was just shy about revealing that evidence every time he was in front of a camera for the past three months. Spoiler: We didn’t get to see it today, either. One senior GOP staffer told CNN “You want witnesses that make your case. Picking witnesses that refute House Republicans arguments for impeachment is mind blowing. This is an unmitigated disaster.” He’s got a point.

Mark: This week in British politics Rishi Sunak saved us all from the implementation of outrageous green-based policies that he had just made up in order to say that only he could stop them becoming law. Seven recycling bins, a meat tax, pesky bloody wind farms combatting the cost of living crisis by driving down energy prices to almost zero – what better than to open up new oil fields and ensure major party donors from the oil and gas industries continue to majorly donate. Even the car industry, who had been busily gearing up for petrol and diesel cars to be phased out by 2025, said he was crazy when he told them that deadline would no longer apply! Even the former chair of the Tory party’s own Climate Commission had reported that the Tory policies that said they would meet net-zero by 2050 demonstrated the exact opposite. So to hear Rishi say these spectacularly non net-zero things was even more contrary to the announced policies, which in themselves anyway would not achieve net-zero!! Does Rishi think that a) we haven’t read 1984 and its mention of doublespeak? and 2) that we are aware of the physical impossibility of some of Escher’s drawings of staircases? Meanwhile snarling slavering wanna-be right-wing pin-up next-Tory-Leader Suella Braverman told a gathering in the US that she’s gonna tell the UN that they need to change the global rules regarding asylum seekers and refugees cos she can’t get the changes she wants to bring in, brought into the UK, cos the international agreement on Human Rights held sacred by the UN says the opposite of what she wants and it’s not fair! Just more Boris Johnson-style “if I can’t win I’m taking my ball in” bullshit. The UN will do nothing to accommodate Braverman or the UK, both increasingly insignificant players on the world stage, and nor will the US. I know that, cos when the cameras pulled back from the podium it revealed only 8 people in the room 6 of whom were sure they’d gone into the wrong seminar at an accountancy conference, the 7th and 8th were actually former Home Secretaries Theresa May and Priti Patel shaking their heads saying “will we never learn.”

Jim: So that’s all the bad arguments and faulty reasoning we have time for this week. You’ll find the show notes at 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 the podcast. Or simply tell one other person in person about how much they’d like our podcast and you can support the show at slash ftrump. Just like our straw man level patrons Laura Tomsick, Renee Z Schmootz, Mark Reiche and Amber R Buchanan, who told us when we met her at QED we could just call her Amber, though another listener recognized her at QED this year because we keep using her full name all the time. And our true Scotsman level patrons, Melissa Sytek, Stephen Bickle, Janet Yuetter, Kaz Toohey, Andrew Hauck, and our top patron, Loren thank you so much for your continued support. It’s very, very much appreciated.

Jim: You can connect with those awesome people as well as us and other listeners in the Facebook group at 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.

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