What’s the Harm – FT#137

28 Nov What’s the Harm – FT#137

Show Notes

The What’s the Harm Fallacy occurs when someone suggests trying something be rhetorically asking what’s the harm, thereby implying that there is none.

Trump

We started out by discussing this clip of Trump being fractally wrong about vaccines:

And then we looked at this clip of Trump giving African Americans bad reasons to vote for him:

Mark’s British Politics Corner

Mark talked about Nigel Farage defending Dominic Cummings breaking lockdown rules.

And he followed that up by talking about this clip of pub landlady Benice Ryley talking about police removing the racist Golliwog dolls from her pub after complaints:

Fallacy in the Wild

In the Fallacy in the Wild we looked at this clip from the excellent podcast Be Reasonable (full episode below):

We followed that with this clip from Back to the Future II:

Then we discussed this clip from The Good Place:

And we finished by talking about this clip from Seinfeld:

 

Fake News

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

1. In my opinion, you have a thing called weather, and you go up and you go down. If you look into the 1920s they were talking about global freezing, okay? In other words, the globe was going to freeze, and then they go ‘global warming’, then they couldn’t use that because the temperatures were actually quite cool, and many different things so that now they just talk about climate change. The climate has always been changing.
2. This wind is really, it’s stronger than anyone’s seen in a very long time. I was talking to someone – the head of a major country – and he said they don’t have winds like this, because the problem is, it’s the tropics. It’s so wet there, and the water makes the storms worse and stronger and faster and then they come here and that’s where we have a problem.
3. With regard to the forest, when trees fall down, after a short period of time – about 18 months – they’ve become very dry. They become really like a matchstick and they get up… you know, there’s no more water pouring through and they become very… very, uh, they just explode. They can explode. Also, leaves. When you have years of leaves, dried leaves on the ground, it just sets it up. It’s really a fuel for a fire
   
    

   Statement 2 is Fake News. Mark chose number 2

Mark got it right AGAIN this week (that’s nine in a row!), and is on 50%

 

Proffer videos are not a logical fallacy

We talked about the leaked videos of Trump’s Georgia co-defendants cooperating with the prosecutors.

 

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

• A Colorado judge ruled last week that Trump can stay on the State’s Republican Primary ballot and, unusually, the decision is being appealed by both the winning and losing sides. The Trump team liked the fact that he can still run, but weren’t so keen on Judge Sarah Wallace’s ruling that Trump did in fact incite an insurrection. Given section 3 of the 14th Amendment’s prohibition on anyone who engaged in insurrection holding any office under the United States, you might be wondering “What the fuck?” and I don’t blame you. The hair-splitting in the judge’s 102 page decision hinges on whether the President is an officer of the United States. She, along with, to be fair, some legal scholars who aren’t even crazy, says no. You see, the 14th Amendment specifies people who, as an office holder, took an oath to support the Constitution of the United States. Whereas the Presidential Oath OF OFFICE doesn’t include ‘support’ while promising to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. Because clearly, those clever folk who amended the Constitution in the wake of the Civil War decided it was crucial to prevent the Inspector General of the Railroad Retirement Board from serving another term after trying to overthrow the Democratically elected Government, but if the President does it that’s AO-fucking-Kay. That’s the one and only Federal Government job that we want to make absolutely sure is always open to traitors. I don’t know about you, but I’m not convinced. 
• The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions last Tuesday weirdly began to look like one of those ritualistic weigh-ins where the two opponents ostensibly are being weighed to check that they are equally matched before the bout takes place, and actually turns into a pre-match match where, for the benefit of the cameras, the two adversaries take part in the running of the mouths to amp up the hype for the upcoming bout. Weird cos in the Red corner was Markwayne Mullin, an actual U.S. republican senator from Oklahoma who read out a tweet where he thought Blue corner occupant Labor leader of the Teamsters Union Sean O’Brien had insulted him with “Quit the tough guy act in these Senate hearings. You know where to find me. Any place, anytime, cowboy.” Mullins responded with decorum and restraint as befits an elected lawmaker: “this is a time, this is a place. If you want to run your mouth, we can be two consenting adults. We can finish it here. ”O’Brien, a seasoned negotiator and an actual grown man, responded with “Okay, that’s fine, perfect,”  Mullin, a former MMA fighter, continued with “You want to do it now?” and O’Brien responded ‘“love” to’, at which point Mullin instructed, “Well stand your butt up, then.” O’Brien, a former playground child, came back with  “You stand your butt up, big guy,”. It took the adult in the room/on playground duty Bernie Sanders, who is so reasonable and calm that he’s labeled an extremist these days, to point out to Mullin “Sit down, sit down, you’re a United States senator.” Meanwhile in the Red corner elsewhere Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) brushed past Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) and allegedly “shoved” him, according to the NPR correspondent who witnessed the scuffle. “Why’d you elbow me in the back, Kevin?! Hey, Kevin, you got any guts!?” Burchett yelled and then ran after McCarthy adding “What kind of chicken move is that? You’re pathetic, man. You are so pathetic.” McCarthy later denied to the Associated Press that the altercation had happened on the grounds that: “If I hit somebody, they would know it, if I kidney-punched someone, they would be on the ground.” And around the same time that was happening, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) was using his time in a House Oversight Committee hearing to angrily tell Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.), “You look like a Smurf!” Whilst technically Jared is Blue it doesn’t bode well as an indicator of the behavior of people who are supposed to be in control of the administration when they can’t even control themselves! As the Washington Post pointed out, notwithstanding Sanders’ efforts at cleaning up the place, the stains are just becoming part of the couch.  
• Trump never met a national holiday he couldn’t make all about him and his petty grievances, and found two opportunities this month to attack his enemies in lieu of a unifying message to the nation. On Thanksgiving he started his Truth Social post with Happy Thanksgiving to ALL, including the Racist & Incompetent Attorney General of New York State, Letitia “Peekaboo” James,“ and went on to attack Judge Arthur Engoron, his law clerk, Joe Biden, and “all of the other Radical Left Lunatics, Communists, Fascists, Marxists, Democrats, & RINOS, who are seriously looking to DESTROY OUR COUNTRY.” But this was nothing compared to his Veterans Day speech, where he went full Godwin, saying “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections.” Many commentators pointed out the parallels between this and that Hitler bloke, but Trump Spokesman Steven Cheung cleverly defused the situation, saying “those who try to make that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.” Yeah, I always find the best way to detract from accusations of totalitarianism is a promise to crush your accusers’ entire existence. Obviously conscious that his message could be misinterpreted, Cheung later clarified that he didn’t mean to say their “entire existence.” What he meant, and I wish I was making this up for comedy purposes, was their “sad, miserable existence” instead.
• If there’s one person you’d invite to the Homeland Security Committee to talk about cop stuff at the Jan 6th riotous insurrection it’d be the Director of the FBI right? Sure enough FBI Director Christopher Wray duly gave his testimony along the lines of “If you are asking whether the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 was part of some operation orchestrated by FBI sources and, or, agents, the answer is emphatically no.” Which was not good enough for Republican batshit conspiracy theorist and Louisiana Representative Clay Higgins who asked, as if it was leading to a gotcha, “Do you know what a ghost vehicle is? The Director of the FBI certainly should. You know what a ghost bus is?“. So when the Director of the FBI says incredulously “A Ghost Bus? I’m not sure I’ve heard that term before” you’d kind of take that as gospel. However Higgins knew better “Okay, Pretty common in law enforcement. It’s a vehicle that’s used for secret purposes. It’s painted over.” He’s been playing too much of that Simpsons Hit n Run driving game on the XBox with those jokey blacked-out window Surveillance vans which are known colloquially as ‘definitely not law-enforcement vehicles’. He proceeded to think he was going to checkmate Wray by showing him a photo – straight out of the school of the Four Seasons Landscaping evidence division – of a fairly nondescript bus depot with yeah guess what, fairly nondescript buses the two buses in the middle of which apparently “were the first to arrive at Union Station on January 6th,” Higgins said. “These buses are nefarious in nature and were filled with FBI informants dressed as Trump supporters, deployed onto our Capitol on January 6th.” adding to a somewhat befuddled FBI Director “Your day is coming Mr. Wray.” Higgins, of course, cos the right don’t do funny, neglected to also add, in reference to the Ghost Buses; Who you gonna call? But I guess you can’t have everything! 
• This week, George Santos might actually become only the sixth member of Congress in history to be expelled, with a vote due any day. This follows the release of a House Ethics Committee Report which detailed even more of Santos’s malfeasance including stealing money from donors by charging their credit cards without permission. When it was revealed that the conman – sorry, Congressman spent this and other campaign money on designer clothes, luxury travel, OnlyFans subscriptions, and over $3000 worth of Botox, Santos had neither the decency nor the facial flexibility to look embarrassed. Instead, he went on a three hour rant on Twitter Spaces where he called the chair of the Ethics Committee a pussy, and claimed that the reason he won’t be running for re-election is that he doesn’t want to work with a bunch of hypocrites any more, saying “I have colleagues who are more worried about getting drunk every night with the next lobbyists that they’re going to screw and pretend like none of us know what’s going on, and sell off the American people, not show up to vote because they’re too hungover or whatever the reason is, or not show up to vote at all and just give their card out like fucking candy for someone else to vote for them.” Now I’m conflicted, because everything Santos has said since well before he got elected was a lie, but my confirmation bias tells me this might be the first true thing he’s said. It does, after all, line up with reports from other reliable sources like Madison Cawthorn, so let’s give him the benefit of the doubt this one time. Meanwhile, George really should start using all his newfound free time to prepare for the 23 count federal trial currently set for next September.
• If you’re trying to distract the voting public from the fact that the right keeps banging on about how old Biden is and yet Trump is only 4 years younger, why not tell everyone how very healthy you are, and how your mental acuity is enough to run for another 4 terms in office if need be. Of course you can’t just Truth it on Truth Social that’d look a bit self-aggrandising even for Trump, no far better to wheel out another ‘personal physician’ to tell everyone how healthy and well and shiny and tall and fit and handsome he is. So  out-on-bail 91-times indicted Republican frontrunner for President, Donald Trump who’s lied about pretty much everything he’s done, said, agreed to, bought, sold, or had valued is telling us things this time we’re supposed to believe. This latest letter is apparently ‘written’ by Dr. Bruce Aronwald personal physician since 2021 and says that he is in “excellent” health and that his cognitive exams “were exceptional.” The letter, however, does not include information about the types of tests that Trump took or what the results were. It doesn’t include even basic information that Trump’s physicians have shared in the past, such as his height and weight, cholesterol level or blood pressure. Do you think the cognitive exams might possibly include pictures of  Person, Woman, Man, Camera, TV? Could be! Whilst this is a different doctor from the one who in 2015 stated “His physical strength and stamina are extraordinary, if elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” cos nobody believed someone else could have the same way of speaking as Trump – yeah turned out the letter was dictated! Is it anymore believable by the doubters it’s aimed at? The devout Trump acolytes will of course swallow it whole, and perhaps they’re the ones it’s for, cos constantly being reminded that he’s old, fat, unhealthy and stupid just isn’t enough for some voters! 
• In one of those good news/bad news type things, Chicago’s Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability has approved a new policy banning Chicago cops from active participation in right wing extremist groups and hate groups. That is good, sure, but why the fuck was that OK up to now? And why only ‘active participation’? How about ‘no participation at all’ in racist, anti-semitic, anti-LGBTQ type groups of any kind. I really don’t feel like that’s too much to ask of the people with guns and notoriously unreliable body-cameras. On the plus side, this new policy is designed both to remove cops who are active in hate groups and also to prevent members of those groups becoming cops in the first place. On the negative side, there doesn’t seem to be any system for removing cops who step away from participating in hate groups following this policy, but still fully support and agree with those hate groups’ hatred. So in conclusion, it fucking sucks that this policy is needed; it’s good that it exists; and it won’t solve the problem. At least they’ve noticed there’s a problem, I guess? Woo hoo.
• So we were glad to see the back of Suella Braverman who was indeed sacked by Rishi last Monday week, sufficiently good news for my neighbour in France to come by to tell me. For a few brief hours all was great until one David Cameron reappeared as the new Foreign Secretary after everyone was shuffled around to fill the gap left by Braverman and Therese Coffey and various other ministers who’s job title seemed to be completely at odds with their abilities. Cameron is an odd choice not least cos he is not even an MP – he has not been elected to any position for 7 years since his “side” lost the EU referendum and he resigned in 2016. He has been wandering in the wilderness ever since; failing to make any inroads on the bestseller list with his autobiography or gain any support from the government for his dodgy lobbying on behalf of a capital investment firm during the pandemic. To be a secretary of state Rishi had to hastily make Cameron a member of the house of lords by just conferring a peerage on him, He was made Lord Chipping of Norton or something in a single day, much to Nadine Dorries’ eternal chagrin who was denied a peerage in Boris Johnson’s resignation honours list and took 3 months to resign with immediate effect in a huff. His appointment has at least brought the country and the Tory party together in being utterly dismayed by it, the right-wing Brexiteers are incensed that Cameron, a remainer, is saying there should be stronger ties with the EU, remainers are incensed cos he’s the clown that caused Brexit in the first place, cos he couldn’t tell the right wing of the party at the time to shut up but rather appeased them with the promise of a referendum. Rishi is appeasing the right wing of the party by appointing a GB News presenter Esther McVey who will be minister without portfolio but the tsar in charge of tackling wokery – whatever that is. I think that’s all the things to do with equality and fraternité and education around gender and allowing protests from pro palestinian groups as well as pro israeli groups – you know all the things that normal people kinda say yeah fair enough, and the kind of things that Braverman wanted to shoot down deport and send to Rwanda even if it meant withdrawing from the European Human rights accord to do so. So having got rid of Braverman cos she don’t like woke he’s now got an unelected person to be in charge of not liking woke and another unelected bloke to be in charge of all the things that he destroyed with the referendum. Still cos Rishi’s the 2nd prime minister not to actually be elected by any of the voting public, I don’t suppose he gives a fuck! Oh yeah that’s right he doesn’t d’uh!

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:

What’s the Harm – FT#137 Transcript

Jim: Hello, and welcome to Fallacious Trump, the podcast where we use the insane ramblings of a frog in a sock to explain logical fallacies. I’m your host, Jim.

Mark: Hello, I’m your other host, Mark. A logical fallacy is an error in reasoning that results in bad or invalid arguments. And the logical fallacy we’re looking at this week is the what’s the harm Fallacy. A frog in a sock?

Jim: Our Australian listeners are loving that, right. Because it is a very specifically Australian phrase. My youngest and I have been watching the Australian version of the traitors.

Mark: Okay. Yeah. Ah.

Jim: Because I like the traitors. It’s great for logical fallacies and terrible reasoning. And this is a phrase which has come up a few times both in this series and the first series of the Australian traitors. And also I noticed it on the Australian taskmaster, right. And what it means, basically, is someone who is kind of manic and all over the place, out of control, just like a frog in a sock.

Donald Trump: Brilliant.

Mark: Yeah. It’s a very cartoonish image, isn’t it?

Jim: First time we heard it, we just thought that person had said a weird thing, that they’d, like, come up with their own analogy. But then it kept coming up. We were like, okay, I’ve got to look into this. This must be a thing.

Mark: Sure enough, it’s a thing. How brilliant.

Jim: Uh huh. So what’s the harm fallacy. It’s when someone asks rhetorically, usually, what’s the harm? When they’re suggesting doing something and they’re saying, look, why not just try it? What’s the big deal? What’s the harm? What can it hurt? And in doing so, they’re suggesting that there isn’t any harm in trying it.

Mark: Is it the case that they’re saying it when there is lots of harm going on or the possibility of a lot of harm? So they’re kind of covering it up by saying, yeah, what’s the harm?

Jim: Sometimes they’re denying the harm, sometimes they just haven’t really thought about it. We talked two episodes ago about one side of the cost benefit analysis when we were looking at the worst case scenario fallacy. And how when people are saying, well, we can’t do this because everything’s going to be terrible, it’s all going to be the worst possible situation. And they’re only looking at what is the cost side of that cost benefit analysis. They’re looking at what the worst possible thing that could happen without looking at what you get out of doing the thing. This is, in a way, the opposite. It’s saying, well, let’s do the thing. Don’t worry about the cost. It’s probably fine. There probably isn’t any. Let’s just do the thing. Look, all the benefits we’ll get from doing the thing, no dangers, no harms.

Mark: It’s fine. Yes. Don’t even think about it. Whereas the other one is all health and safety.

Jim: Yeah. It’s all bad things.

Mark: So let’s not try none of that. Let’s just do it. What’s, the harm?

Jim: in doing it?

Mark: Absolutely, yeah. Okay. So it’s kind of ignorance in the best possible sense of the term. It’s either willful ignorance or otherwise, or actual ignorance.

Jim: Speaking of actual ignorance yeah. our first example comes from Trump talking on Hugh Hewitt’s show about vaccines.

Donald Trump: I am a total believer in getting the shots and having it done. And I am a total believer, 100%. Nobody a bigger believer. What I don’t like seeing is a 20 pound little baby going in and having one massive inoculation with all of these things combined. I’d like it spread over it, because, look, our autism rate is at a level that it’s never been. Nobody’s ever in the old days, you didn’t even hear about autism. And now it’s at a level that’s so high, especially in boys, but so high that nobody can even believe it. What I’m saying is 100% I want to see it happen. I want everybody. But it should be spread over smaller doses over a longer period of time. So spread it out over a year. There’s no harm in that. And I believe autism will go way down.

Mark: So much wrong in there before. In the olden days, nobody even heard of it, and now you can’t move without hearing about it. Is that not to do with the fact that it was only kind of identified and then discovered and then defined?

Jim: It’s been a while since we’ve done one that is fractally wrong, where all of the things he says are m a different level of wrong. But, yeah, there’s no evidence of a link between vaccines and autism in the first place. That came from the Wakefield study of, like, eight kids, which was highly flawed. And lots of conflicts of interest there was eventually withdrawn, and he got what’s the doctor equivalent of disbarred? Struck off. Defrocked struck off. That’s the one. There’s no link between autism and vaccines. And the suggestion that, oh, you never used to hear about autism. Yeah, it was identified and in those days was called Kanner Syndrome around when Trump was born, 1943. Oh, wow. So, yeah, in his childhood, you didn’t hear a lot about it, and it became called autism, but still wasn’t what we now know as autism. It’s kind of now, generally, Kanner Syndrome is what’s thought of as classic autism, which until the DSM Five in 2013.

Mark: Till they changed the flavor.

Jim: Yeah, that was kind of largely what people meant when they were talking about autism. And there was about, they reckoned about 28 million, I think cases somewhere in the region of one in 300 people.

Mark: Wow. Yeah.

Jim: The DSM Five and subsequent diagnostic manuals and similar things in different countries broadened the definition of autism to take in the spectrum disorder. And also people got a lot better at diagnosing it. And so, yeah, now there’s a lot more people who have autism spectrum disorder, who identify as being on the autism spectrum because they are better at diagnosing it. The description is much broader. The symptoms are better understood. Now, Trump is correct in saying that it is more commonly diagnosed, although he didn’t say this. He said, you see it in boys. It’s much more commonly diagnosed in boys than girls to kind of four to one ish ratio. There’s some argument that that’s a genuine dimorphism, essentially, of genders. But there’s quite a lot of evidence that it’s just that girls present differently. And so right. Doctors are much worse at diagnosing autism in girls.

Mark: Yeah. And of course, if they live in a world where the consensus is boys get it more, then they will dismiss it that much or it will be harder for them to diagnose in girls.

Jim: Typically, girls are diagnosed around two to three years older than boys when it is seen. So either it takes that much longer for someone to identify it, or doctors are that much worse at diagnosing it. But the current frequency of autism diagnoses is around one in 100 people. Wow. Some experts think that’s still under diagnosed to some significant extent.

Mark: The diagnosis has increased yeah.

Jim: In the last kind of decade and a half by a factor of three. In terms of how prevalent we are aware of it being, the chances that’s actually changed, like how many people experience those symptoms, is very unlikely. It’s likely that that was always the case. We spot it better now, we’re better at looking for it and knowing the.

Mark: Usual Trump thing, pointing a bunch of numbers over there and then saying, and that’s caused by some issue that creates popular voting in my favor over here. So the other part of the fractal wrongdoing is to say it’s to do with the vaccines, but furthermore, it’s to do with all the vaccines being mixed up altogether.

Jim: More to the point, he says it’s about a 20 pound baby being given all of them vaccines in one massive dose. Like he’s picturing a kind of horse syringe with full of lots of different vaccines and it’s all just pumped into the child.

Mark: Exactly. They’re just inflated in a cartoon back to the Tex Avery…

Jim: And he suggests instead of doing that, we should spread them out every year. Where’s the harm in that? However, if you look at what actually happens with vaccines, they’re spread out over more than a year. There’s a vaccine schedule, as parents of young children will know. You don’t just go in once and have a massive vaccine full of stuff. There’s things that they vaccinate at birth at one month, at two months, at four months, at six months, at nine months, at twelve months. And at 15 months, there are vaccine appointments. You don’t necessarily have an injection at each one of those times, but for example, hooping, cough, diphtheria, and tetanus, you have three doses of that, possibly four booster dose when you’re kind of 15 months. The polio vaccine, again in multiple doses, the measle, mumps and rubella you don’t tend to have until you’re one. That’s the first dose. Then there might be another one when you’re between four and six. It’s a kind of animation myth that you get a giant needle with all of the vaccines in at one point when you’re a baby, which instantly doubles.

Mark: Your weight of the baby.

Jim: What he’s advocating for is in fact, what happens. It’s multiple vaccinations spread out over time. And it’s not because giving them all in one go would make you autistic or would do bad things for you. The reason is because they are given at times when your baby is most likely to be exposed to particular diseases and when those vaccinations will be most effective at preventing those things. But it’s important to have those vaccines on that schedule. They’ve worked this out carefully to be the best way of protecting people. Yeah, they aren’t giving you lots and lots of vaccines. They all in one go for fun or because it’s because they don’t want you to keep coming back or anything like that. They’re doing it in multiple doses and.

Mark: They’re not applying the what’s the harm? Fallacy. They’re not going, let’s just bang them all in the baby now. I mean, what could possibly go wrong? Let’s just whack them in now and that will sort them out for life. Forget when they go to kindergarten, forget when they first start school, let’s just bang them all in now. And they might wear off, they might not.

Jim: What’s the harm? Trying well, over a long period of time, as we’ll explore in this episode, there do tend to be harms to the ones we’re talking about. And the harm in this case is that when you talk about stuff like this and advocate this kind of thinking, aberrant behavior yeah. There are many parents who listen to that and think, oh yeah, okay, I can spread out my child’s vaccinations further than the vaccination schedule suggests, and that’ll be better for them and it won’t hurt there’s no harm. But that means that they are vulnerable to getting those diseases because they have their first dose and they don’t have their second dose when it’s needed to boost that immunity. So they are then vulnerable to getting.

Mark: That is less effective.

Jim: Yes. And then some of those diseases are fatal. So that’s pretty fucking hard.

Mark: And also, if you don’t kind of join in with the schedule, then there must be a point where or there might be a point where your child is infected and carrying the thing beyond the point at which people are or prior to the point at which they’re vaccinated because you’re not belonging to the schedule. So you could be infecting all sorts of other people. Absolutely. Before they’re protected by the next dose in the schedule. Yeah.

Jim: Because kids mix at kindergarten and so on, with kids who aren’t all exactly the same age as them.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Our second example from Trump, he’s talking at a rally in 2020 about a thing he was very proud of saying prior to being elected. It was his pitch to the African American community.

Donald Trump: I said it to our great African American community. I said, what do you have to lose? You have the most crime, you have the worst education, you have the lowest homeownership. you have all these horrible statistics I’m reading. And then I said, what do you have to lose? Now, the African American community has the lowest unemployment numbers in the history of our country. They have the best employment numbers in the history of our country. They have their best poverty numbers in the history of our country in the positive sense.

Jim: So he snuck in really a nice little inconsistent comparison there, because he starts off by talking about how African Americans have lower employment rates of housing ownership, education and higher crime rates than other ethnicities. And then he says, now, in 2020, they have lower unemployment than they’ve ever had, which isn’t the same thing they still had at that point, and still do have the lowest employment. That didn’t change at all. And in fact, at the time when he said they have the highest unemployment of all the ethnicities, it was still lower than it had ever been, and it had been trending downwards since pretty much the beginning of the Obama government. Right. That was the same with African American poverty and homeownership. Poverty was trending downwards, homeownership was trending upwards. The trend basically continued under Trump. He didn’t do anything, he didn’t affect it in any way. He didn’t fuck it up, I guess, like, until COVID that really super fucked it all up. But he didn’t do anything that made a difference. And even if he was right in saying, like, your life’s shit, what have you got to lose? Voting for me? Give it a go. And the thing is, the reason that those things had previously been trending in a positive direction was the previous Democratic administration. So voting is like, clearly voting for Democrats isn’t working. Try something different, essentially. First of all, even if we ignore the harms that came with voting for Trump, the very, very many and very clear harms, I think we’ve elucidated quite dramatically over the course of this entire podcast. even if we ignore all of those, that’s still only one side of that cost benefit analysis. The point surely is. What benefit do you also get from doing that thing? Yeah, he shouldn’t be so proud that his best argument to the African American community is, how bad could it be?

Mark: Yeah, it’s pretty bad for you. Now. Why not just vote for me? Might get better. Yeah.

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

Mark: Actually, somehow that may put me in mind off the Brexit argument. How much worse could it possibly be? Just vote for me, it’ll be fine. And also, given that we’re currently learning Curse of the Current COVID Inquiry, yet more about how completely incompetent, ill prepared, under skilled and utterly incapable of deciding, leading and caring about anyone other than themselves this government truly was. We’re going to take a quick trip back to Barnard Castle in the spring of 2020. And here’s Nigel Farage telling us at the time how we could have just forgotten all about it if only Dominic’s explanation had been a little less see through.

Nigel Farage: And, yes, we did go out for a drive. We did walk through a wood, we did sit by a river. We didn’t come into contact or breach social distancing rules. It was a minor breach and we’re sorry. Do you know what? If he’d said that, I reckon most of us would have said, well, do you know what? We might have just pushed the rules a little bit here and there. And, hey, where’s the harm in a situation like this? Had we had a little bit of honesty from Dominic Cummings, I think public opinion would have said, yeah, all right, fair enough, let’s just move on.

Jim: I don’t think he would.

Mark: No. again, there’s so many layers of fractal wrongness that it’s kind of apart from the annoying thing we said, do you know what? I think people would have said, do you know what? And then he gets really angry that public opinion would have moved on. Well, except which public is that? And kind of, yeah, what’s the harm in bending the rules? If he’d have said, okay, I bent the rules, we would have all said yeah, we all did. That where’s the harm? The thing was, he bent the rules. He made up some ridiculous fucking excuse for doing what he did, which the police then didn’t investigate, or they saw no reason to investigate, and Boris saw no reason to fire him as a result. So even if he’d been a bit more honest from Cummings, are we going to get that? Um and where’s the harm in bending the rules? Well, the harm in the bending the rules was people were going to die. So if you’re pitching one guy’s breach of the rules and then to say, yeah, I broke the rules, but we’ve all broken the rules, so where’s the harm in that? But that’s the point.

Jim: The fact that he made up an absurd excuse wasn’t the big deal that made it more newsworthy and more fun to talk about, and meant he made it onto more comedy news shows. But that wasn’t what everyone was complaining about. No, everyone wasn’t going, oh can’t believe he told us that. It was an eye test can’t believe that he went off on a jolly with his family when he was supposed to be locked down. That was the problem.

Mark: He was the architect of the Lockdown idea. He was the advisor. He was the unelected Machiavellian advisor. Farage is yes, precisely. Missing the point. Deliberately. And I think he’s employing the fallacy of the what’s the harm? Where’s the harm? There’s no harm in it is it makes you dismiss what’s gone on. And he’s compared his indiscretion with other people’s indiscretions. So to say, we’ve all done it, we all bent the rules. Well, no, we didn’t, because some people didn’t go and visit dead and dying relatives because of the rules. And there’s Dominic Cummings, and to get him to say, oh, I just bent the rules, but I didn’t meet anybody. But we stayed socially distanced from other businesses to this tourist spot in Durham. It’s a victimless crime.

Jim: Speaking of the kind of victimless crimes thing, I couldn’t quite find a good example of it, but yeah, in the court case that Trump is currently underway in New York, each of the family have repeatedly said that the banks got all the money back. No one was complaining, essentially. It’s not quite the same as what’s the harm? But they were know the banks, the banks gave us the loans, they got paid back. Nothing bad has happened, essentially. So why are you prosecuting us for just breaking the law in a way that nobody has complained about up to now?

Mark: Yeah, we’ve all overvalued our properties by billions of dollars in order to get a loan. We’ve all done that. Let’s just move on.

Jim: What does it matter?

Mark: Let’s get past this. What does it matter? yeah, well, the rules are there because they apply to everybody. That’s the deal, isn’t it? That’s the thing. So the second example, when I was looking at this up I misremembered a comedic website publishing a story as being the truth. And it was Suella Braverman, and I was kind of thinking, hang on, I’ve heard Suella Braverman say, yeah, where’s the harm? Turns out it was a complete spoof news story, but it was based on the story in early 2023, where following a complaint on the 24 February, police acted against a suspected hate crime in the White Heart pub in Grays in Essex. Big vote Leave community. Former landlady Benice Ryley talks about the police removing dozens of golly dolls.

Benice Ryley: And we’ve got good people in here and they are upset that the gollies were taken and I am upset that my gollies were taken. They were doing no harm, right? If people don’t like it, they didn’t have to come through my door, right? they were doing no harm on a shelf. I didn’t have them in the windows. I had them on my shelf. So you’d have to come through my pub to see them, right? And many, many people liked them. Loved them. In fact, honestly, I can’t understand why.

Mark: She’s straight out of central casting, right? That kind of voice on display in her pub were dozens of golly dolls. And she can’t see that. Where’s the harm? They weren’t doing anyone any harm. You didn’t have to come in if you didn’t like it.

Jim: Loads of my regulars are racists. It’s fine. They don’t mind them at all.

Mark: They love them. They love them. They bloody love them. Yeah. So the political bit is that you probably won’t be surprised to hear that Suella Braverman, because she was the Home Secretary at the time, wasted no time in seasonal opportunities to stir the culture wars, woke pot, and hold the police to task. A Home Office source told Sky News that Suella Braverman regards this raid as a waste of police resources. And the quote then was the Home Secretary’s views have now been made very plain to Essex police. So they’re under no illusions. Police forces should not be getting involved in this kind of nonsense. They said it’s about tackling antisocial behavior, stopping violence against women and girls, attending burglaries and catching criminals, not seizing dolls. But the thing is that it’s the kind of stuff that is antisocial behavior if you’re in a community and you’re displaying these things, which are the kind of thing that if it were broadcast on the BBC as part of their kind of archive series, it would come with an on screen warning that says this broadcast reflects the mores of the times. Absolutely. Some of things are now deeply offensive and are defined as hate crimes. Yeah.

Jim: For anyone who doesn’t know what a golly doll is, essentially, they are minstrel characters. They’re rag dolls that are made up in blackface, essentially. And they were popular dolls in the kind of 40s and 50s there’s one in the original Noddy series, the Enid Blyton book. Yes. The reason this is weird as a culture war in 2023 is because this was a thing that would have been a culture war if culture wars had existed back in the 80s. It was then that there used to be a character on Robinson’s Jam was a golly.

Mark: You could save up the labels and send off send them off a button badge.

Jim: But that was taken off the jars in the 80s because people were like, actually, this isn’t cool. This is stereotypical. It’s racist. It makes people uncomfortable. we should just get rid of it. Everyone kind of basically agreed at the time. Now people have had enough. the fact that this woman had golly dolls on the shelves of her pub for the next 40 years after that yeah, is fucking insane.

Mark: See, I’ve got a horrible feeling that the Robinson’s gollies off their jams didn’t disappear until the early 2000s.

Jim: No way.

Mark: I think so, yeah. I read it not long ago that it was and I was astonished it was like 2002 or something where they decided to get rid of them. I’m hastily tried to find it.

Jim: Well, we’re back listeners from our little excursion onto the Internet to find out what was going on with the Gollies. And it turns out that Greater London Council boycotted Robinson’s jam in 1983 over the Gollies on their packaging, but they survived that. The Gollies disappeared from TV advertising, in fact, adverts in general, like print and TV in 1988, but stayed on the jars. And they were still, in fact, giving out kind of pin badges that you could send away from until 2001. I know. And that was really too late, because clearly it had been a thing in popular culture. We’d been talking about it for nearly 20 years by that point. At that point, even they were like, yeah, okay, fair enough. This character that we’ve had on as our brand for 80 years at that point, yeah, we’re going to get rid of it. Still, 20 years later than that. This pub landlady is like, what’s the problem?

Mark: And Suella Braverman is using it as an excuse to bash the police by just saying you should be catching criminals and dealing with antisocial behavior, not seizing dolls. Okay, well, yeah, but it is fundamentally antisocial behavior. It makes it unsafe in that area to be anything other than white and racist and brexiteer. and to straw man it by saying you’re just seizing dolls. the political machination of Suella Braverman, no. No bounds. Because the Home Office source said this and that story ran in all of the right wing press, and after ah, it did. Senior officials from the Home Office communications unit, according to sources not sure if it’s the same source that told us what the Home Secretary’s views were, contacted the Essex counterparts in the police and to apologize. And the Essex police said, the Home Office have apologized to us. We’ve had an acknowledgement from the Home Office that there hasn’t been any reprimand. You think, what the fuck is going on? That’s Suella Braverman’s personal leadership bid to say, yes, I’d all to allow the right wing press to run a story that says a source from the Home Office said, I’m very unhappy with this. They should just be doing this. Stirring the anti police culture wars and the anti woke culture wars. Yeah.

Jim: It was just her being able to get a quote in the paper without actually doing anything at all.

Mark: Yeah. And then the Home Office, the very sources that released that said, no, she didn’t do that.

Jim: She said it, but she didn’t do any there was no reprimand to the police. Although it’s her job to essentially tell the police what to do. She wasn’t in saying they did it wrong, telling them they’d done it wrong. She was just having the benefit of saying that in public. Yeah.

MARK’S FALLACY IN THE WILD STING

Mark: that cheerful band hate breed there with a stroke of red with the brilliant chorus there’s no harm done unless the harm is done to me.

Jim: in the fallacy in the world. We like to talk about the fallacies of the week from a non political perspective. And our first example this week comes from the brilliant podcast Be Reasonable, from our good friend Marsh yeah. Who every episode interviews a nutter, or, as he puts it, someone with beliefs outside of the mainstream.

Mark: Nice. Yeah. Which I think is an anagram for a nutter, isn’t it?

Jim: And he asks them genuine questions, and here’s why they think why they believe what they believe.

Mark: And what he does is he pays out enough rope.

Jim: Absolutely. Hoists himself, very non confrontational. It’s an excellent podcast. And this particular episode, he was talking to a lady who does Tarot readings, and she also does astrological Tarot readings, which somehow incorporate two bunches of bullshit stars. Yeah. And so he was talking to her about horoscopes, and she was saying, well, Horoscopes are really just a bit of fun. They don’t mean anything.

Mark: Whereas tarot.

Jim: Exactly. And I think everyone understands that, and that’s fine. And he made this point. I think people will start at a low level acceptance of Horoscopes because of its being so fused throughout the culture. and then will use that to when they want to get something that they think is actually really accurate, will start to move towards the more full readings and then move away from the general readings as a result. But they may never have ever gone to those full readings had they not been constantly exposed to horoscopes that people don’t take seriously.

Nia True: So newspaper horoscopes are gateway drug.

Marsh: Absolutely.

Nia True: I mean, I can see an argument for that. I can see an argument for that. it’s not something I’m overly concerned about, but I can see why, coming from your perspective, that feels like more of a thing. But me, I think that there probably aren’t that many people doing that and that I don’t necessarily have a problem with people believing what they yeah. I feel okay. And if it’s helpful to them, that’s the other thing that I guess I think that if these things are genuinely helpful and beneficial, then what’s the problem?

Mark: Where’s the Harm? Well, that’s. The problem, I think if they are genuinely helpful and beneficial, how do you Measure the genuine.

Jim: that’s a good question.

Mark: Helpful and beneficial.

Jim: And this is the thing that comes up in terms of alternative medicine as well, when people say, well, okay, so maybe homeopathy doesn’t actually work, but if someone gets some benefit, if someone feels like their pain has gone away a bit. Whether it’s what people want to call the placebo effect or whatever, or just regression to the mean, their pain goes away. And they associate that with homeopathy and feel it’s beneficial to them. What’s the problem? Why is it an issue? And part of the reason it’s an issue for something like homeopathy is that they then believe a thing which isn’t true about an alternative medicine, and then are more likely to believe other alternative medicines are also beneficial to them in some way.

Mark: And also believe that mainstream medicine isn’t.

Jim: Absolutely. And so maybe over the course of everyone who believes this, there are going to be some people who get something serious and use stuff which definitely won’t help them to do it instead of proper medicine, and they will be harmed by it. Or they will encourage other people to use alternative medicine who will be harmed by it. And in the same way, with Horoscopes tarot readings, I mean, I think Marsh pretty much said it at the beginning of that. He was saying people will see Horoscopes, and even if they see it as something silly and don’t take it seriously, they are reading it and kind of a bit believing it to the extent that when they then see astrological tarot, they think, oh, yeah, I know my star sign, I pay a bit of attention to that. This seems like just a bit of an extension of that. And then full tarot readings and then seeing a medium, seeing psychics and so on, it leads you down the path of believing untrue things, which gets to a point of you being exploited, gets to a point of you potentially leading others into being exploited about things that aren’t true.

Mark: Of course, the tarot reader is saying, well, yeah, where’s the harm in that? Because that’s how she makes a living.

Jim: Absolutely. So our second example is from Back to the Future II. And this is where Marty has picked up in the future the Sports Almanac.

Doc Emmett Brown: What’s this?

Marty McFly: It’s a souvenir.

Doc Emmett Brown: 50 years of sports statistics. Hardly recreational reading material, Marty.

Marty McFly: hey, doc, and what’s the Harm m in bringing back a little info on the future? Maybe we could place a couple bets.

Doc Emmett Brown: Marty I didn’t invent the time machine for financial gain. The intent here is to gain a clear perception of humanity. Where we’ve been, where we’re going, the Pitfalls and the possibilities, the perils and the promise. Perhaps even an answer to that universal question, why?

Marty McFly Hey, doc, I’m all for that. What’s wrong with making a few bucks on the side.

Mark: And we all know what absolutely.

Jim: Where that led to was Biff getting hold of it.

Mark: And, yeah, that’s Marty’s dad getting killed. All bad things getting a boob job.

Jim: Arguably, those things happened because Doc wouldn’t let Marty take the almanac back to the past, and therefore Biff got hold of it through his older self. They could have had a narrative where he did take it back and then it got into Biff’s hands anyway because that really was the issue. Even older Biff, who is not the smartest, could predict that there was a danger of it falling into the wrong hands. And so when he traveled back to 1955 and gave it to young him, he was all kind of don’t let it out your sight. Make sure put it in a safe, lock it up. Because he recognized its value and recognized if someone else got it, they could exploit it. So the harm in that case was arguably very predictable, and Doc Brown was against taking that risk. In some cases, the harm may not be quite as predictable, but still exist, such as in our next example, which is from the Good Place.

Uzo: 30 minutes. Chidi. We’ve been trying to pick a bar for 30 minutes. It is literally impossible to be your friend. You’re incapable of making a single decision.

Chidi: Look, I know I can be indecisive. But what’s the harm in taking a few extra minutes to find the perfect…

Uzo: Chidi?

Jim: So that is the point at which an air conditioner falls out of a high window and lands on Chidi.

Mark: Yeah. Having taken a few extra minutes.

Jim: So the harm of standing outside his apartment trying to figure out which bar is the best one to go to for half an hour it’s not necessarily predictable what the harm in that will be, but it’s also not a good idea to assume there isn’t any. And arguing what’s the harm suggesting that there isn’t any harm in it is shown in that case to be not true. So our last example in this section is from Seinfeld. And this is one where Jerry is confused about why his date wouldn’t share a pie with him.

George Costanza: Maybe you said something that offended her.

Jerry Seinfeld: The only thing I could think of is I told her we should have those moving walkways all over the city.

George Costanza: Like at the airport.

Jerry Seinfeld: Yeah

George Costanza: That’s a great idea.

Jerry Seinfeld: Tell me about it.

George Costanza: We could be zipping all over the place.

Jerry Seinfeld: They could at least

George Costanza: They try never try anything.

Jerry Seinfeld: What’s the harm?

George Costanza: No harm!

Jim: Yeah, what’s the harm in at least trying?

Mark: At least trying to have moving walkways absolutely.

Jim: All over the city. So the harm in this case, arguably, is a financial one. rather than any real harm, there’s arguably unforeseen harms in people traveling faster. But equally, the cost of trying it would be enormous.

Mark: I’m thinking of stuff getting trapped down.

Jim: There’s lots of potential harms. but the reason for not trying it, the other side of that cost benefit analysis, even if it would beneficial, is the actual cost of doing it. So that’s why they don’t just try stuff. They never try things.

Mark: What’s the harm? Just try it, just try it.

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.

Jim: Yes, t’s time for fake news. The game where I read out three Trump quotes, two of which are real and one I made up, and Mark has to figure out which one is fake news.

Mark: You see, I think what we should do when we play this game is just forget all the rules, right? Just do away with the structure of the game and just let me win. I mean, what could possibly go wrong? Where’s the harm in just ignoring the structure and the rules around a game and gameplay? Just give me the win.

Jim: Yeah, I mean, the harm, arguably, would be that our lovely listeners would not get to experience your agony in trying to decide, which I know they enjoy.

Mark: Yeah, I think that would be harmful. But then I wouldn’t have to suffer the agony. You could just go, yeah, whatever it is you say. Yeah. You just won. Yeah, let’s assume that you’ve won.

Jim: Let’s see how that goes.

Mark: The trouble is, we don’t try things. We worry too much about the consequences. Let’s just leap before we look.

Jim: So our theme this week is times when Trump went into some detail sometimes about weather and climate and expressed his deep understanding of why these things are issues. Right. Statement number one:

In my opinion, you have a thing called weather, and you go up and you go down. If you look into the 1920s, they were talking about global freezing. In other words, the globe was going to freeze, and then they go global warming. Then they couldn’t use that because the temperatures were actually quite cool and many different things. So that now they just talk about climate change. The climate has always been changing

Mark: and many different things. In my opinion. You have a thing called, like yeah. Has anyone ever noticed that us spells us? In my opinion, I think what okay. All right.

Jim: Statement number two:

This wind is really it’s stronger than anyone’s seen in a very long time. I was talking to someone, the head of a major country, and he said they don’t have winds like this. Because the problem is it’s the tropics. It’s so wet there, and the water makes the storms worse and stronger and faster, and then they come here. And that’s where we have a problem.

Mark: Okay. Yeah. If only you knew to call it El Nino. Yeah, it’s the tropics. Problem is the tropics and over there. Yeah. okay.

Jim: statement number three:

With regard to the forest, when trees fall down after a short period of time, about 18 months, they’ve become very dry. They become really like a matchstick. And they get up. There’s no more water pouring through, and they become very, very uh they just explode. They can explode. Also, leaves. When you have years of leaves, dried leaves on the ground, it just sets it up. It’s really a fuel for a fire.

Mark: It’s just all that also leaves. This is how much knowledge I have. Leaves the whole root and branch thing. What the hell? Okay. Oh my god. just to clarify, I’ve got to choose one that isn’t Trump batshit, but is made up to okay. Right. Uh god. 1920s global freezing. Um well, that kind of chimes with I read that there was a series of magazines that my dad collected in the 60s called Understanding Science. And there was um, one that was particularly fascinating, where they predicted that winter would move because of the way that the earth rotated. And so that to me, chimes with that. So does that make it real, or is that just some cognitive bias? Oh yeah. No, I know about yeah. In the same way that Trump knows about that, um m. Okay, so I quite like the trees fall down. Also leaves. Okay. All right. So the tropics is so wet. All right? So I think then that the wind is triggered. Number two is the one you made up.

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

Mark: More convinced by regard to the forest, trees fall down 18 months.

Jim: And number three yeah, it’s real.

Donald Trump: With regard to the forest, when trees fall down after a short period of time, about 18 months, they become very dry. They become really like a matchstick. And they get up, there’s no more water pouring through, and they become very, very uh they just explode. They can explode. Also leaves. When you have years of leaves, dried leaves on the ground, it just sets it up. It’s really a fuel for a fire.

Mark: Where does this come from? After a short period of time, he just speaks. He’s so convinced by his own knowledge, isn’t he? Yeah. And where does that come from? But it’s because he comes we know, because reading Mary Trump’s book, it’s just come from has he been bullshitting for so long, knowingly bullshitting for so long, that now that he has internalized the hype, so that the bullshit is just his brain just presents this stuff and he doesn’t question it.

Jim: I think you’re being very unfair in assuming he doesn’t have a deep understanding of the mechanism of a forest fire. Yeah, he studied this studying absolutely. Talked to experts about it.

Mark: doesn’t need to, because he’s a lead world’s leading expert.

Jim: Also leaves.

Mark: Also leaves! The whole notion of osmosis, which he’s distilled ha down to there’s no more water pouring through and they become very they just explode. Floating trees all over, like a matchstick. I think in his cartoon head, he’s gone, oh yeah, it’s like a matchstick. So one end is that big sulfurous red blob, which would just explode if you walk past it with a particularly abrasive jacket. Also leaves. He takes himself by surprise.

Jim: So you also think number one is real?

Mark: Yeah. You can go up, you can go down, just like the weather.

Jim: Uh huh. And number one is real.

Donald Trump: in my opinion you have a thing called weather and you go up and you go down. If you look into the 1920s, they were talking about global freezing. Okay. In other words, the globe was going to freeze. And then they go global warming. Then they couldn’t use that because the temperatures were actually quite cool and many different things. So now they just talk about climate change. The climate’s always been changing

Mark: and many different things. They couldn’t use that, because temperatures calling and many different things. He was the man in charge of the free world and all he could think of was oh yeah. And some other stuff. Many different things. So what’s the basis of um, this theory about climate change, Donald? Is it based on a lot of scientific research? No, it said, yeah, they came up with stuff and lots of other things. Many different things. What is it true about the 1920s?

Jim: No, not really. Talking about global freezing, no. the temperatures, global temperatures fell from about 1940 to 1980. So it wasn’t until the seventies scientists started talking about global cooling, not freezing. Okay. But yeah, the kind of speculative papers of is there going to be a new ice age type of thing came out of the NASA scientist called Stephen Schneider wrote a paper in 1971. And so some stuff came out of there. But even within the 70s, Schneider was saying, all we know is things are changing. We see effects from CO2 we don’t know. In 1977, he said, we just don’t know at this stage whether we’re in for warming or cooling or when. And a 1975 report from the US National Academy of Sciences said we need more research on what’s going on. Basically, that was the level of consensus that there was among the scientific community. Even up to the 70s. Was stuff’s changing. We don’t fully understand it, we need. More information in order to

Mark: but also there was the anthropocene. The effects of the human race on the global climate were being explored then with the greenhouse gases and CFCs. Yeah.

Jim: They were all in agreement that we were changing stuff. What they weren’t yet agreeing on is how those changes would manifest.

Mark: Right.

Jim: This was pre even the ozone layer hole and things like that. They weren’t clear about what the effects of increased CO2 or other greenhouse gases were yet by the was already changing. And people were saying, okay, what we’re seeing actually is the starts of rise in sea temperatures and melting of ice caps, potentially down the road and that kind of stuff. And it hasn’t changed since then. there hasn’t been disagreement within the scientific community since the kind of about what is happening. Even if he was right, that in the 20s they said it was cooling. If they had that, they would have been right because the temperatures did drop. It was the temperatures did drop from the but it wasn’t freezing.

Mark: Scientific opinion changes as a result of research. And absolutely things that are happening in the world is how science works. And you can’t dismiss it by saying, oh, yeah, because before humans were around, there was an ice age, and at some time in the distant future, the sun will explode and we’ll all burn to a crisp. So it’s climate change nonsense.

Jim: He’s confused weather and climate before.

Mark: I think you got me with just he’s confused. I’m on board there whether he has doesn’t he? Yeah. Weather isn’t climate, in my opinion. You have a thing called weather. Yes. Which you can go up and down. What the fuck? yes, there is a thing called weather. It’s not your opinion, it’s fact. But I’m entitled to my opinion.

Jim: Well, your opinion in this case, your opinion was correct in that number two was fake news. As far as I know. He hadn’t attempted to explain tropical storms like that.

Mark: It won’t be long now.

Jim: The people on Facebook and Patreon have done a pretty good job, as you did this, of identifying it, although professing on what basis that it’s hard. Right. But guessing for number two in many cases. So on patreon, we’ve got Kaz Toohey saying, holy crap. He has the potential to have spouted all of these deranged opinions, but three is madness. So I truly have no idea. Going for two, pure guess.

Mark: Oh okay. Three is madness.

Jim: You’re right. Renee says going for two is fake news. Calling climate weather and mentioning exploding trees seems yeah. Nick says one’s tempting because I don’t think Trump has ever had an opinion. Nothing but opinion. I’m going to go with two because this sounds too much like he’s agreeing that there is climate change.

Mark: Right, okay.

Jim: Yeah. Hugh said he got it so spectacularly and confidently wrong last time. He’s wary to opine, but he will in the certain knowledge this is a safe space. I think number two is fake news. I’m sure that I remember saying DT saying one and three back in the day. So there you go. Head of the major country. Seems like a thing Jim might make up to sound like Donald Trump.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Colleen says I’m guessing two is fake news because I think it’s impossible for him to discuss wind without ranting about windmills.

Mark: Yeah, fair enough.

Jim: Yeah. His head would explode like the dry trees. Invisible unicorn went for one. Being fake seems most coherent. Stephen Bickle says, I’m going for number two this time. Doesn’t seem to support anything he would be interested in. Anders said, Number three is fake, and I’m about as clueless about this being fake or real as DJ Trump would be about a climate debate. And Will said, honestly, can’t tell. Christ wept. That man is an idiot. Absolute word salad every time he opens his gaping orange anus of a mouth.

Mark: Excellent.

Jim: And on Facebook, Andrew says, I hope he wouldn’t say trees explode, but he probably did one. Sounds like the usual anti climate change argument, so I’m going with two. Okay. Fennec says, you’ve really outdone yourself this time. They’re all wonderfully horrible. I can hear his stupid voice as I read each choice. Brilliant. I reckon three is fake news because it’s too close to what I recall him saying about raking the floors of the forest. Mike agrees three is fake. Sounds a little too intelligent for him talking about exploding trees. And Ben says, I really wanted to hear him say number three, though it does sound fake. Number two is the one you yeah. So there we go. Quite a good record from social contestants.

Mark: Mainly my reasoning, I just want to hear him say it. I just kind of like, choose those.

Jim: That means that you have won again. Ahead of the curve now. Yeah, definitely. You’re above 50%, right? I think it’s eight in a row.

Mark: I could be wrong. is it the Gambler’s fallacy? I’m going to go, well, yeah, we’re just on a roll. Let’s just keep going. Yeah.

Jim: Good God.

Mark: There you go. Look at that.

Jim: And it’s time for the part of the show that this week at least, is called proffer videos are not a logical Fallacy, because basically when the various Trump co defendants pled guilty they all had to do a proffer session with the DA to talk about what kind of information they could give to the prosecutors to kind of make it worth their while accepting a plea, basically, rather than taking them to trial. And those proffer sessions were recorded and that material formed part of the discovery in the cases of their codefendants. And so those videos were given to the lawyers of all of the various codefendants in the this is the Georgia case, the Fani Willis election interference et cetera, case with how many codefendants? Like 20 or something. It’s ridiculous. Number of code offenses. Yeah. Those videos were then released to either the Washington Post or ABC. They both reported about it on the same day. And at the time it wasn’t clear how they’d got hold of them, but they got them, they released them. And it later turned out that it was the lawyer of Misty Hampton, one of the co defendants who admitted in court to having given those videos to one media organization. They didn’t say, who. Wow. So they gave those out. The prosecutors since put a request into the judge to prevent any further release of discovery material.

Mark: Right?

Jim: And the judge said, yeah, yes, there is a kind of public interest in this. And some of this information is information that is definitely of interest to the public and is stuff that the press has a right to report.

Mark: On, but.

Jim: Some Discovery material won’t necessarily make it to trial. It will be excluded in evidence. And so there is an argument that some material could end up being reported on and in the public domain, and potential jurors could see it when actually it’s material that would get excluded in the course of the trial. And in course of deciding on what evidence is relevant and what evidence is, in fact, just allowed to be part of the decision making process of the jury. So, because of that, the judge, Scott McAfee, has said, yeah, no more releasing any discovery at all, anyone. So this is what we know. We’ve got these, these are out already, but we’re not going to get any more of this kind of stuff, right? At least unless people decide to, uh.

Mark: And I guess also break the rules. It’s the basis of their plea bargains, and as such, might not end up being in the trial itself because it’s just stuff that allows the judge to say, okay, yes you’ve given me sufficient information for you to get a deal. We’ll work out a deal. Yeah, there might be some of them where they just went, well, no, you’ve not given me any information that isn’t just garbled nonsense. No, I mean, not useful at all.

Jim: They’ve all been given their know, they had their, like, for example, Sydney Powell had her charges knocked down to misdemeanors and no jail time and things like that. So they’ve all had some benefit from giving this information to prosecutors. and the information is able to be used certainly in terms of asking them when they testify, because they’ve all agreed to testify against their codefendants as part of their deals. So this session, this proffer session will have been something so that they can then ask those questions when they’re on the stand and expect to get those answers. And if they get different answers, then they potentially could be accused of perjury, et cetera. So the fact that these proffer sessions are videoed means that the prosecutors know what these people are likely to say when they ask them questions in courts, but kind of like a deposition in advance where they are not going to be hostile and not trying to hide anything because they want to get the best deal. So they’re giving up the information that they have.

Mark: Right.

Jim: So what we had was videos of Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell, Scott Hall and Ken Chesebro, and the ones that I think were reported on the most were Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell because they were the first to come out. Right. And the main thing that I saw, at least of Jenna Ellis’s one is of a conversation that she had with Dan Scavino, Trump’s deputy chief of staff. This is in December, I think, when he was saying what was going to happen basically that they were going to stay in power.

Mark: Right.

Jim: And she said, well, you know that’s not how it works, don’t you? And he know, we’re just not so.

Mark: This is a conversation she’s having with yeah. About what Trump is going to do. So it’s kind of like the plan. Yeah.

Jim: Scavino is saying essentially the boss, Trump is not going to leave the White House. Right.

Mark: Under any circumstances.

Jim: Yeah. And Jenna Ellis said, well that’s not how it works.

Mark: It like you get voted out, man.

Jim: You’ve got to says, and he said to know in kind of an excited tone, well, we don’t care and we’re not going to leave.

Mark: Whoa.

Jim: So this is evidence that there was a plan in the Trump team that they were going to subvert the process, even though they either believed they’d won or recognize that they’d lost. But they knew that there was a process by which Biden would take power and they were prepared and expecting to.

Mark: Subvert that process because they don’t care. Because they’re not.

Jim: Going to know.

Mark: It’s not great. That’s the stuff of, well, I don’t know, we’ve seen that in the history of communist leaders. We’ve seen it in sort of the bits in the middle of Africa which call themselves Democratic and Republic. And either that is bits in South America that are a bit like that. No, it’s not right. That’s the stuff. And maybe in the Far East it’s the stuff of death spots. Yeah. So to see it where they just go, yeah. And they go, yeah, it doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter because we’re just going to stay here, we’re not going to leave, and then we’re going to make up things. But it’s kind of OD that whilst they decided they’re just not going to leave, he’s going to stay there forever, they’re still trying to work out ways within the system to subvert the system in a kind of recognizable, systematic way. Why would they even bother? Why wouldn’t they just say, yeah, what we’re going to do is just put up a big fence and we’ll have lots of guns, and then we’ll go, yeah. You won’t take me alive, copper.

Jim: I think at that point, the Secret Service might have been on Biden’s side and arguably the National Guard and Gerard Butler from the Olympus Has Fallen films. He’d also be doing.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: But they did have various tactics right. One of which was the fake elector scheme, which yes. john Eastman wrote the memo on in fact, Ken Chesebro was instrumental in kind of setting that up. But John Eastman, I think, wrote the main memo. He has just recently been begging for money because he is complaining that his legal bills are depleting his wife’s retirement fund.

Mark: Fucking asshole. Yeah. I hope his wife has got it. hello? And she tried desperately to close down their joint account.

Jim: Yeah, well, you know, you can always plead guilty then. you have a lot less legal bills.

Mark: Yeah, exactly. He hasn’t touched his funds.

Jim: No. Dipping directly into his wife’s account.

Mark: She’s going to have nothing to live on if we go on like this. Me, I’ll be fine.

Jim: Oh, yeah.

Mark: I’m fine.

Jim: Live on a golf course. But yeah. Cheese Bro is one of the keys to linking that scheme to Trump. Because one of Trump’s defenses is that this was all done behind the scenes. I didn’t know anything about the fake electors, et cetera. That was all John Eastman and Ken Chesebro. But Chesebro, in his proffer video, talks about briefing Trump on the whole scheme, essentially. okay.

Mark: Yeah. This is what we could do.

Jim: Yeah. So that kind of links Trump to that scheme in a very real way. And in a similar way, although he doesn’t link Trump to it. Scott hall talks about the Coffee County thing where they were trying to infiltrate the voting machines. he claimed according to the Washington Post, this is hall claimed that his role in the alleged breach of election equipment in Coffee County was simply that of a political tourist, and he spent $10,000 of his own money to fly there on January 7, 2021, purely for shits and giggles.

Mark: Yeah. But then complained that he wasn’t reimbursed. Yeah, a political tourist is no such thing. I’ll just go yeah, whatever. I’ll just go and have a look for a laugh. Yeah. 10,000. The real scam is from the airline. Why is it so expensive to fly into Georgia from Washington? Yeah. I don’t know. Is there a premium for voting week?

Jim: But he did also thousand dollars.

Mark: He’d been trying to claim $10,000. So he’s been upholding he’s been maintaining that it’s cost $10,000. You’re having a laugh on you doesn’t cost that aero record virgin Atlantic or whatever, $635. Where’d you get the 10,000 from?

Jim: Yeah. But he did also implicate Robert Cheely, who is one of the other co defendants who had not previously directly been linked to the harassment of the election workers Seamus and Ruby Freeman before. I think it was mostly Harrison Floyd who had been involved in that and one other co defendant whose name I forget at the moment. But hall said that he had been engaged by Cheely to help locate Ruby Freeman because he’s a probably because Scott Hall is a bail bondsman and therefore kind of has some experience of tracking people down, locating people. So before that, I don’t think at least there’s not been any public. Information that linked Cheely directly to that scheme.

Mark: Yeah. Crikey so there’s a bit of bus.

Jim: Underthrowing absolutely going on.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Well, I mean that’s kind of the point of the proffer sessions because if they’re not getting any information which is going to help them to prosecute people who are still defendants, there’s no benefit to them.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: If you’re just admitting to all the stuff you did, that’s good. It’s good that you admit to it. And they don’t have to but it’s not benefiting them and so they don’t really have to give you a lower sentence beyond the fact that that is your incitement to tell them what you know.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: The fact that you know stuff about other people is really what gets you the jail.

Mark: Uh uh it kind of feels a little bit uncomfortable having lived we now live in a world where McCarthy existed so it feels a yeah, we know you’re a communist, but can you name four or five other people and then we’ll be less harsh on you. But the thing is feels a little.

Jim: Bit the thing is these Are criminals. They aren’t being because they are gay or have political leanings in the so these are people who are being prosecuted because they committed, because they’ve broken the law. The fact that they are then saving the taxpayer money by avoiding trials, accepting convictions on certain counts, which in some cases, at least not necessarily in all cases, will result in their disbarment and inability to continue to practice law doesn’t necessarily follow. Many will probably.

Mark: Yeah. that means if they broke the law in the pursuance of their career as a lawyer, then you ought to.

Jim: Kind of go yeah, you would hope that would be a given. But yeah. no, it’s not automatic. Apparently they then have to have hearings about whether to remove their law.

Mark: Really?

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: But yeah, the fact that they are giving up other criminals I think, does separate it out and they’re not trying to avoid being drummed out of public society by doxing ah, or outing other.

Mark: Communists or gay people. So just to name other criminals. Yeah. Um such a bad thing. Tail as old as time, I’m reassured. I shouldn’t feel quite so creepy about it. I’m glad it’s happening.

Jim: It’s the reason there is a plea deal system. It’s the reason not everyone goes to trial, basically.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: It’s because you can use people who were involved in less serious crimes to talk about people that were involved in more serious more serious criminals.

Mark: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I’m all for it.

Jim: I’ve changed my mind completely. So basically from these we’ve got more information about what happened. We’ve got Sidney Powell talking about how much Trump absolutely knew. Well, she said his instinct was that he had won, but that a lot of people around him were telling him that he had lost, that he was being told repeatedly by people that worked for him and supposedly trusted that he had lost. And when she was asked why he kept following people like her and Giuliani, she said essentially that it was because they were the only people that was.

Mark: Telling him what he wanted to is. I’m sort of troubled by Powell because she looks ostensibly she looks like a sensible older woman that’s kind of an.

Jim: Experienced politician, like my old granny.

Mark: Okay. Yeah. But she was an out and out racist.

Jim: Oh, she was yeah.

Mark: Awful racist. Yeah.

Jim: She reflected the more I didn’t know.

Mark: You knew of you look at Powell and you think, yeah, because I’ve watched too much West Wing, that’s what it is. Older women politicians, you’d kind of yep. They would have experienced all of this stuff and they would kind of look at it with a slightly cynical eye with a bit of a tongue in cheek and they go, yeah, we know what you’re doing, I’ve been through this, Robert, but she seems to be completely pro Trump. Oh, she’s utterly bad. Yeah. The big tinfoil hat kind of wearer and I don’t know what it is that I found it particularly shocking that he was perhaps it’s because she reminded me of your grandmother. So I’m surprised that such a venerable person will be saying such outrageous things.

Jim: M even within in the session where she is admitting to all the crimes, she is still saying that she believes that there was machine fraud, that stuff was dodgy about the voting machines and that stuff like that. And even then not admitting to her role in the Coffee County infiltration into the machine, she wasn’t prepared to talk about that bit which I found a bit surprising that that bit of her prosecution they were still like, yeah, fine, we’ll let you just yeah.

Mark: They just let her not talk about that. Yeah.

Jim: I don’t know to be fair, I know she pled guilty to six misdemeanors, but I don’t know what those misdemeanors specifically were based on, what she was originally charged. But my understanding is that you can’t plead guilty to something, you can’t enter a guilty plea without genuinely saying to the prosecutors, yes, I did this, I accept responsibility for it.

Mark: Right.

Jim: If you say yes, all right, I’ll plead guilty, but I didn’t do it. Governor, that’s not allowed, the court won’t accept it. No, you are accepting your guilt. And so I’m guessing that one of the things she pled guilty to, wasn’t that? Because otherwise I don’t see how they’d be able to accept a guilty plea if in the proper session she’s saying.

Mark: That she wasn’t involved. The problem with the Powell thing is that at some point the defense counsel will surely seize on the fact that she says he was convinced his gut instinct was that he won. So rather than being able to light upon the fact that he knew that he had lost and that ah, chesebro’s account of yeah. So we’re going to do all of these things to make sure that it appears that he’s won. the fact not the fact powell’s opinion that Trump thought that he had won, somehow they’ll seize upon that and say, well, so he was ignorant of was he thought he had won. So he’s not deliberately perverting the course of justice by making people do these things to prove otherwise.

Jim: Yeah, but the thing is, there’s a few issues with that. First of all is that they have an enormous amount of evidence that shows that he was told multiple times that he didn’t win. And so there’s a certain amount of willful ignorance that you’re not allowed. Basically, if everything points to you being wrong about something and you still say, well, I still believe it, there’s a point at which the judge and jury are like, yeah, I don’t think you really did believe it. And also, even if you fully believe something, you still can’t necessarily commit a crime based on that, on the Cleanup on Aisle 45 podcast, they talk about a bank robber. If you believe that the money in the bank is yours, doesn’t matter how much m you believe it, you still can’t hold it up at gunpoint and demand the money.

Mark: Yeah, just give me my money.

Jim: Doesn’t matter if you absolutely, really, truly, genuinely, in your heart and mind believe it, that’s still a crime. And in the same way, it doesn’t matter at all how much Trump believed he was robbed of this election and.

Mark: That it was yeah. Yeah.

Jim: He still wasn’t allowed to do the stuff he did. That’s still against the law. There are processes if you believe it and you do it by a legal process and he went through those processes and he lost 61 times out of 62 in court.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And the one he won was that people in Philadelphia were allowed to stand a bit nearer and sneeze on people who are counting ballots.

Mark: Yes.

Jim: All of the attempts in an actual legal process in court to say these things were not done correctly and should have been done differently. The courts said, no, that’s not all done fine, you’re doing this wrong. in questioning it it doesn’t mean you then get to just commit a crime because you feel hard.

Mark: Done by other. Also, my other worry is that the Ellis testimony is about a conversation that she had with So Scavino’s enthusiasm, saying, yeah, it doesn’t matter what’s going on because we’re just not going to leave. is it dismissible because it’s hearsay?

Jim: I would argue it probably is hearsay, yeah. There’s a lot of exceptions to hearsay right. So it’s not automatically dismissible, but I don’t think it probably falls into any of the exceptions. Yeah. It’s reported speech by her of a conversation that she wouldn’t, if it was being introduced, to offer proof of the fact that Trump was not prepared to leave the Oval Office, I don’t think it would get through. And that is an example, arguably, of the kind of material that therefore has been put out to the public, could potentially influence a potential juror, but wouldn’t necessarily make it into the trial if yeah that’s the kind of thing that Judge McCaffrey was talking about.

Mark: And also would lead to the court process. Calling Scavino to come and say that.

Jim: Would be an opportunity for them.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Ah, that’s how they would deal with that. Because one of the things about hearsay is the reason that it’s not allowed is because it isn’t the best kind of evidence. if you have a person saying what another person said, that isn’t as good as hearing it from the person who said, yeah, the fact that it’s in her proffer video would give the prosecution reason to then call Scavino to the stand and ask him, did you have this conversation? What did you say? Why did you think that Trump didn’t want to leave the office? And did he say anything to you about it? And so on, which would then arguably be cross examined and be an opportunity to ask Trump that question if he was called to the stand. So there’s ways to introduce that evidence that aren’t getting Jenna Ellis to describe a conversation she had with someone about a thing that Trump thought.

Mark: Yeah. So, in a way that we were giving these naked, raw, proper video footage is an insight into how the system works, rather than giving us a view of the evidence that’s been provided. So, whilst the stuff won’t stand up in a court of law, it actually reveals the process that’s going on behind the scenes in order to make sure that the stuff that’s presented to a jury is robust and would stand up in a court of law. So, in a way, we’re granted the privilege to see this stuff, but we shouldn’t gain too much fear or too much excitement at the same time from watching them. Other than that, it’s hilarious to watch. And also yeah. And finally, some things we really don’t have time to talk about.

Jim: A Colorado judge ruled last week that Trump can stay on the State’s Republican Primary ballot and, unusually, the decision is being appealed by both the winning and losing sides. The Trump team liked the fact that he can still run, but weren’t so keen on Judge Sarah Wallace’s ruling that Trump did in fact incite an insurrection. Given section 3 of the 14th Amendment’s prohibition on anyone who engaged in insurrection holding any office under the United States, you might be wondering “What the fuck?” and I don’t blame you. The hair-splitting in the judge’s 102 page decision hinges on whether the President is an officer of the United States. She, along with, to be fair, some legal scholars who aren’t even crazy, says no. You see, the 14th Amendment specifies people who, as an office holder, took an oath to support the Constitution of the United States. Whereas the Presidential Oath OF OFFICE doesn’t include ‘support’ while promising to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. Because clearly, those clever folk who amended the Constitution in the wake of the Civil War decided it was crucial to prevent the Inspector General of the Railroad Retirement Board from serving another term after trying to overthrow the Democratically elected Government, but if the President does it that’s AO-fucking-Kay. That’s the one and only Federal Government job that we want to make absolutely sure is always open to traitors. I don’t know about you, but I’m not convinced.

Mark: The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions last Tuesday weirdly began to look like one of those ritualistic weigh-ins where the two opponents ostensibly are being weighed to check that they are equally matched before the bout takes place, and actually turns into a pre-match match where, for the benefit of the cameras, the two adversaries take part in the running of the mouths to amp up the hype for the upcoming bout. Weird cos in the Red corner was Markwayne Mullin, an actual U.S. republican senator from Oklahoma who read out a tweet where he thought Blue corner occupant Labor leader of the Teamsters Union Sean O’Brien had insulted him with “Quit the tough guy act in these Senate hearings. You know where to find me. Any place, anytime, cowboy.” Mullins responded with decorum and restraint as befits an elected lawmaker: “this is a time, this is a place. If you want to run your mouth, we can be two consenting adults. We can finish it here. ”O’Brien, a seasoned negotiator and an actual grown man, responded with “Okay, that’s fine, perfect,”  Mullin, a former MMA fighter, continued with “You want to do it now?” and O’Brien responded ‘“love” to’, at which point Mullin instructed, “Well stand your butt up, then.” O’Brien, a former playground child, came back with  “You stand your butt up, big guy,”. It took the adult in the room/on playground duty Bernie Sanders, who is so reasonable and calm that he’s labeled an extremist these days, to point out to Mullin “Sit down, sit down, you’re a United States senator.” Meanwhile in the Red corner elsewhere Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) brushed past Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) and allegedly “shoved” him, according to the NPR correspondent who witnessed the scuffle. “Why’d you elbow me in the back, Kevin?! Hey, Kevin, you got any guts!?” Burchett yelled and then ran after McCarthy adding “What kind of chicken move is that? You’re pathetic, man. You are so pathetic.” McCarthy later denied to the Associated Press that the altercation had happened on the grounds that: “If I hit somebody, they would know it, if I kidney-punched someone, they would be on the ground.” And around the same time that was happening, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) was using his time in a House Oversight Committee hearing to angrily tell Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.), “You look like a Smurf!” Whilst technically Jared is Blue it doesn’t bode well as an indicator of the behavior of people who are supposed to be in control of the administration when they can’t even control themselves! As the Washington Post pointed out, notwithstanding Sanders’ efforts at cleaning up the place, the stains are just becoming part of the couch.

Jim: Trump never met a national holiday he couldn’t make all about him and his petty grievances, and found two opportunities this month to attack his enemies in lieu of a unifying message to the nation. On Thanksgiving he started his Truth Social post with Happy Thanksgiving to ALL, including the Racist & Incompetent Attorney General of New York State, Letitia “Peekaboo” James,“ and went on to attack Judge Arthur Engoron, his law clerk, Joe Biden, and “all of the other Radical Left Lunatics, Communists, Fascists, Marxists, Democrats, & RINOS, who are seriously looking to DESTROY OUR COUNTRY.” But this was nothing compared to his Veterans Day speech, where he went full Godwin, saying “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections.” Many commentators pointed out the parallels between this and that Hitler bloke, but Trump Spokesman Steven Cheung cleverly defused the situation, saying “those who try to make that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.” Yeah, I always find the best way to detract from accusations of totalitarianism is a promise to crush your accusers’ entire existence. Obviously conscious that his message could be misinterpreted, Cheung later clarified that he didn’t mean to say their “entire existence.” What he meant, and I wish I was making this up for comedy purposes, was their “sad, miserable existence” instead.

Mark: Brilliant. Yeah. That’ll convince people. Yes. Nice. If there’s one person you’d invite to the Homeland Security Committee to talk about cop stuff at the Jan 6th riotous insurrection it’d be the Director of the FBI right? Sure enough FBI Director Christopher Wray duly gave his testimony along the lines of “If you are asking whether the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 was part of some operation orchestrated by FBI sources and, or, agents, the answer is emphatically no.” Which was not good enough for Republican batshit conspiracy theorist and Louisiana Representative Clay Higgins who asked, as if it was leading to a gotcha, “Do you know what a ghost vehicle is? The Director of the FBI certainly should. You know what a ghost bus is?”. So when the Director of the FBI says incredulously “A Ghost Bus? I’m not sure I’ve heard that term before” you’d kind of take that as gospel. However Higgins knew better “Okay, Pretty common in law enforcement. It’s a vehicle that’s used for secret purposes. It’s painted over.” He’s been playing too much of that Simpsons Hit n Run driving game on the XBox with those jokey blacked-out window Surveillance vans which are known colloquially as ‘definitely not law-enforcement vehicles’. He proceeded to think he was going to checkmate Wray by showing him a photo – straight out of the school of the Four Seasons Landscaping evidence division – of a fairly nondescript bus depot with yeah guess what, fairly nondescript buses the two buses in the middle of which apparently “were the first to arrive at Union Station on January 6th,” Higgins said. “These buses are nefarious in nature and were filled with FBI informants dressed as Trump supporters, deployed onto our Capitol on January 6th.” adding to a somewhat befuddled FBI Director “Your day is coming Mr. Wray.” Higgins, of course, cos the right don’t do funny, neglected to also add, in reference to the Ghost Buses; Who you gonna call? But I guess you can’t have everything!

Jim: This week, George Santos might actually become only the sixth member of Congress in history to be expelled, with a vote due any day. This follows the release of a House Ethics Committee Report which detailed even more of Santos’s malfeasance including stealing money from donors by charging their credit cards without permission. When it was revealed that the conman – sorry, Congressman spent this and other campaign money on designer clothes, luxury travel, OnlyFans subscriptions, and over $3000 worth of Botox, Santos had neither the decency nor the facial flexibility to look embarrassed. Instead, he went on a three hour rant on Twitter Spaces where he called the chair of the Ethics Committee a pussy, and claimed that the reason he won’t be running for re-election is that he doesn’t want to work with a bunch of hypocrites any more, saying “I have colleagues who are more worried about getting drunk every night with the next lobbyists that they’re going to screw and pretend like none of us know what’s going on, and sell off the American people, not show up to vote because they’re too hungover or whatever the reason is, or not show up to vote at all and just give their card out like fucking candy for someone else to vote for them.” Now I’m conflicted, because everything Santos has said since well before he got elected was a lie, but my confirmation bias tells me this might be the first true thing he’s said. It does, after all, line up with reports from other reliable sources like Madison Cawthorn, so let’s give him the benefit of the doubt this one time. Meanwhile, George really should start using all his newfound free time to prepare for the 23 count federal trial currently set for next September.

Mark: It’s a proper rant, and it has all the hallmarks of kind of being one of those true things that you would rather say, unless you wait, you’re angry, and then you go, oh, yeah. No don’t quote me on that. Yeah. Oh, no. What have said, yeah. If you’re trying to distract the voting public from the fact that the right keeps banging on about how old Biden is and yet Trump is only 4 years younger, why not tell everyone how very healthy you are, and how your mental acuity is enough to run for another 4 terms in office if need be. Of course you can’t just Truth it on Truth Social that’d look a bit self-aggrandising even for Trump, no far better to wheel out another ‘personal physician’ to tell everyone how healthy and well and shiny and tall and fit and handsome he is. So  out-on-bail 91-times indicted Republican frontrunner for President, Donald Trump who’s lied about pretty much everything he’s done, said, agreed to, bought, sold, or had valued is telling us things this time we’re supposed to believe. This latest letter is apparently ‘written’ by Dr. Bruce Aronwald personal physician since 2021 and says that he is in “excellent” health and that his cognitive exams “were exceptional.” The letter, however, does not include information about the types of tests that Trump took or what the results were. It doesn’t include even basic information that Trump’s physicians have shared in the past, such as his height and weight, cholesterol level or blood pressure. Do you think the cognitive exams might possibly include pictures of  Person, Woman, Man, Camera, TV? Could be! Whilst this is a different doctor from the one who in 2015 stated “His physical strength and stamina are extraordinary, if elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” cos nobody believed someone else could have the same way of speaking as Trump – yeah turned out the letter was dictated! Is it anymore believable by the doubters it’s aimed at? The devout Trump acolytes will of course swallow it whole, and perhaps they’re the ones it’s for, cos constantly being reminded that he’s old, fat, unhealthy and stupid just isn’t enough for some voters!

Jim: In one of those good news/bad news type things, Chicago’s Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability has approved a new policy banning Chicago cops from active participation in right wing extremist groups and hate groups. That is good, sure, but why the fuck was that OK up to now? And why only ‘active participation’? How about ‘no participation at all’ in racist, anti-semitic, anti-LGBTQ type groups of any kind. I really don’t feel like that’s too much to ask of the people with guns and notoriously unreliable body-cameras. On the plus side, this new policy is designed both to remove cops who are active in hate groups and also to prevent members of those groups becoming cops in the first place. On the negative side, there doesn’t seem to be any system for removing cops who step away from participating in hate groups following this policy, but still fully support and agree with those hate groups’ hatred. So in conclusion, it fucking sucks that this policy is needed; it’s good that it exists; and it won’t solve the problem. At least they’ve noticed there’s a problem, I guess? Woo hoo.

Mark: So we were glad to see the back of Suella Braverman who was indeed sacked by Rishi last Monday week, sufficiently good news for my neighbour in France to come by to tell me. For a few brief hours all was great until one David Cameron reappeared as the new Foreign Secretary after everyone was shuffled around to fill the gap left by Braverman and Therese Coffey and various other ministers who’s job title seemed to be completely at odds with their abilities. Cameron is an odd choice not least cos he is not even an MP – he has not been elected to any position for 7 years since his “side” lost the EU referendum and he resigned in 2016. He has been wandering in the wilderness ever since; failing to make any inroads on the bestseller list with his autobiography or gain any support from the government for his dodgy lobbying on behalf of a capital investment firm during the pandemic. To be a secretary of state Rishi had to hastily make Cameron a member of the house of lords by just conferring a peerage on him, He was made Lord Chipping of Norton or something in a single day, much to Nadine Dorries’ eternal chagrin who was denied a peerage in Boris Johnson’s resignation honours list and took 3 months to resign with immediate effect in a huff. His appointment has at least brought the country and the Tory party together in being utterly dismayed by it, the right-wing Brexiteers are incensed that Cameron, a remainer, is saying there should be stronger ties with the EU, remainers are incensed cos he’s the clown that caused Brexit in the first place, cos he couldn’t tell the right wing of the party at the time to shut up but rather appeased them with the promise of a referendum. Rishi is appeasing the right wing of the party by appointing a GB News presenter Esther McVey who will be minister without portfolio but the tsar in charge of tackling wokery – whatever that is. I think that’s all the things to do with equality and fraternité and education around gender and allowing protests from pro palestinian groups as well as pro israeli groups – you know all the things that normal people kinda say yeah fair enough, and the kind of things that Braverman wanted to shoot down deport and send to Rwanda even if it meant withdrawing from the European Human rights accord to do so. So having got rid of Braverman cos she don’t like woke he’s now got an unelected person to be in charge of not liking woke and another unelected bloke to be in charge of all the things that he destroyed with the referendum. Still cos Rishi’s the 2nd prime minister not to actually be elected by any of the voting public, I don’t suppose he gives a fuck! Oh yeah that’s right he doesn’t d’uh!

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 your podcasts. Or simply tell one other person in person about how much they’d like our podcast and you can support the show patreon.com/ftrump just like our newest patron, Scott. Our straw man level patrons. Laura Tomsik, 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 recognised her at QED this year because we kept 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 and welcome to our new patrons. Your support is 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