Straw Man (Redux) – FT#139

25 Dec Straw Man (Redux) – FT#139

Show Notes

A Straw Man Fallacy occurs when someone distorts or misrepresents their opponents argument to make it easier to defeat.

Trump

We started out by discussing this clip of Trump lying about the Biden/Sanders unity platform:

And then we looked at this clip of Trump lying about Biden’s views on God, guns and energy:

Mark’s British Politics Corner

Mark talked about this clip of Margaret Thatcher lying about what Simon Hughes just said:

He followed up with this clip of Rishi lying about Net Zero:

And he finished with this clip of Sir Michael Fallon lying about a Jeremy Corbyn speech

Fallacy in the Wild

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

Then we discussed this clip from The Simpsons:

And we finished by talking about this clip of Alex Jones:

 

Fake News

For this special Christmas Fake News game, Jim presented nine TV projects. Six were real projects Trump pitched to TV networks, but three (one of the first three, one from 4-6 and one from 7-9) are ones Jim made up. Mark had to guess which.

1. The Tower

A West Wing type family drama inspired by Trump’s life and career. About a real estate tycoon named John Barron, who works alongside his ex wife and several adult children.

2. The Apprentice: Blacks vs Whites

A spin of the popular reality show in which an all-white team of business people would be pitted against an all-black team to see which would bring in the most money.

3. Money Talks

A talk show hosted by Donald himself, in which he would exclusively interview billionaires about their careers and lifestyles.

4. The Trumps

An Osbournes-style reality show following Donald at work and at home with his then girlfriend Melania. Don Jr, Eric and Ivanka would also be featured, but not Tiffany.

5. Trump Town Girls

A reality show where beauty pageant contestants would be pitted against female real-estate brokers who already work for Trump to compete for commissions, doing “whatever it takes to win the week’s payday”

6. Trump Tower

A raunchy soap-opera similar to Dynasty, with sex, murder, and drama among the “ultra-rich, ultra-powerful, and ultra-beautiful” people who live in Trump Tower – “The world’s most glamorous address.”

7. Lady or a Tramp?

A My Fair Lady-based reality show in which out-of-control, party-loving young women would be taught to be glamorous and try to pass as rich debutantes. Trump would be on hand to monitor their progress.

8. Last Model Standing

A reality competition in which catwalk models would complete a series of physical challenges, from ninja-warrior style assault courses to literal boxing matches, and Trump would eliminate one model per show.

9. Donald Trump Presents: The Most Beautiful Women in the World

A one-off special consisting of a “series of shorts and interviews” with ten of the most beautiful women in the world, hosted by Donald. Featured women would include Claudia Schiffer, Michelle Pfeiffer and Princess Diana.

Mark got two right this week, and is on 52%.

 

The 14th Amendment is not a logical fallacy

We talked about Colorado’s decision to remove Trump from the GOP Primary ballot.

 

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

• One of Trump’s many panicky attempts to avoid consequences for inciting an insurrection involved a motion in his DC election interference trial essentially claiming that Presidents are allowed to do whatever they want, so there, and overthrowing the election was totally within his official Presidential duties. The judge disagreed, saying that the fact he used to be President “did not bestow on him the divine right of kings to evade the criminal accountability that governs his fellow citizens”. Naturally, Trump appealed that ruling to the DC Circuit Court and requested a stay while that appeal is considered. However, Jack Smith isn’t going to sit around while Trump slow-plays his case, and Smith went straight to the Supreme Court to ask them to consider whether Trump is immune from prosecution and asked for an expedited decision on whether they would hear the case. This is kind of brilliant, since Trump was definitely going to ask them that at some point as a delaying tactic further down the road, but he can’t ask them not to take the case now and then later on ask them to consider the exact same question. Trump’s team have, however, pushed back on the timeframe, essentially asking what’s the big rush. Smith is pretty clear that he’s trying to stick to the March 4th trial date, but Trump’s lawyers argue “In an omission that speaks volumes, the Special Counsel never explains why March 4, 2024, is supposedly the only ‘appropriate timetable’ for this historic prosecution. That date has no talismanic significance.” not adding ‘It’s not like if we delay it until after the election he’s going to try and pardon himself or anything, oh fuck, wait’. So of course, the guy who has complained the prosecutors took their time to build a case rather than arrest him in January 2021 is now saying the Supreme Court mustn’t rush into the complicated question of whether they should decide they’re going to answer a different question later on. Meanwhile, in a different motion to the DC District Court, Trump’s attorneys are arguing that he can’t have undermined the public’s faith in elections, because the Russians already did that in 2016 when they interfered to get him elected. And I’m barely paraphrasing at all.
• When I was a kid and we played soldiers or cowboys there would inevitably be some complaints made when some of our fellow players “wouldn’t take their shots” not a vaccination thing, they just wouldn’t lie down dead when clearly hit by the imaginary bullets from a Smith and Wesson repeater cricket bat aimed in their direction. Decades later and I see the same behaviour happening in the infantile world of Rudy Guiliani. Found liable for defamation and ordered to pay $148m in damages to the two former Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss only days ago, Rudy’s already defaming again saying his long-debunked allegations that they were responsible for electoral fraud “were supportable and are supportable today.” He also told Newsmax that “he was in possession of video evidence demonstrating the truth of his allegations.” None of which he’s ever turned over despite multiple court orders to do so; hence the defamation ruling in the first place! Ferchrissake Rudy just shut up would ya, you’re down, lie quiet, just let the rest of us play on without you! Freeman and Moss are immediately suing again of course “Defendant Giuliani’s statements, coupled with his refusal to agree to refrain from continuing to make such statements, make clear that he intends to persist in his campaign of targeted defamation and harassment. It must stop.” Of course another one of the baddies on Rudy’s team is shouting from way off in the background that it’s not fair and threatening to tell on everyone – yeah ‘course, it’s that big orange kid that no-one likes cos he’s got a stoopid name like that Osmond singer, no, not Little Jimmy. Grow up you two, if you don’t like the rules of the game just stop playing, don’t make me come over there…!!
• Back in November of 2022 House Oversight Committee chair James Comer announced that the Committee’s focus in this Congress would be to investigate Joe Biden’s corruption. Since then he has announced on roughly a monthly basis that he has some kind of smoking gun evidence and each time it’s turned out to be a lukewarm piece of toast nibbled into the shape of a gun instead. In May he released a 65 page report and held a press conference where he proved conclusively that he didn’t have any evidence linking Joe to any crimes or corruption, leaving even Fox’s Steve Doocy to say “you don’t have any facts”. In September, Comer held hearings and even their own witness, pro-Trump law professor Jonathan Turley said “I do not believe that the current evidence would support articles of impeachment.” Last week, Nebraska GOP Representative Don Bacon was asked whether Biden had committed high crimes and misdemeanors and he said “probably not”. South Dakota GOP representative Dusty Johnson said “There’s not enough evidence to impeach” and Colorado GOP representative Ken Buck said  there is no direct evidence linking President Biden to the activities of Hunter Biden” and on Wednesday, Chuck Grassley of Iowa said he’d seen no evidence that Biden is guilty of anything. So naturally, a few hours later on Wednesday every single House Republican voted to formalize the impeachment inquiry which has already been running for more than a year and it’s got to the point that even Fox News’s Peter Doocy, who is way stupider and Trumpier than his dad Steve, said “The House Oversight Committee has been at this for years, and they have so far not been able to provide any concrete evidence that Joe Biden personally profited from his son Hunter’s overseas business.” It’s almost like the evidence doesn’t matter, which was arguably confirmed by Texas GOP Congressman Troy Nehls when he was asked what Republicans hope to gain from the inquiry. His answer? “Trump 2024, baby!”
• These days when Ex-Twitter is actually working it’s a fairly contentiously right of centre place to be – after all that was the entire reason Elon carried a sink into the foyer at Twitter HQ – just so he could be the champion of so-called free speech all over again, i.e. do away with fact-checking, censorship of hate-speech, and sell anyone a blue checkmark who had some greenbacks to pay homage to him with. Imagine then that Musk’s AI – Grok – would be a bit mouthy and sweary and opinionated, and indeed it is – it’s programmed in a Muskian way to behave like a petulant teen and shove in some swearwords for the sake of it to make Elon snigger like Butthead. But turns out it’s got sentience beyond its maker’s intention, no not quite Skynet, but it’s a bit woke. One of the criticisms levelled by the not-left against ChatGPT was that it was, you know, all fact-based and reflecting of progressive mores. Despite being the add-on gift for X Premium Plus subscribers, in exchanges with it, Grok has said it would vote for Biden over Trump because of his views on social justice, climate change and healthcare. Grok has spoken eloquently about the need for diversity and inclusion in society. And Grok stated explicitly that trans women are women, which led to an absurd exchange where Musk acolyte Ian Miles Cheong tells a user to “train” Grok to say the “right” answer, ultimately leading him to change the input to just…manually tell Grok to say no. The original prompter of the trans women thread posted a chart purportedly showing that Grok was even more left-leaning than Chat GPT, which led Elon to say that while the chart “exaggerates” and that the tests aren’t accurate, they are “taking immediate action to shift Grok closer to politically neutral.” – which of course is far further to the right than Muskie would care to admit. The assumption when Grok launched was that because it was trained in part on Twitter inputs, that the end result would be some racial-slur spewing, right-wing version of ChatGPT as neanderthal as its name suggests. Perhaps the vast majority of the users of Ex-Twitter still mean that Grok turns out instead to be a surprisingly modern, thoughtful, and refreshingly progressive AI that is melting the minds of those paying $16 a month to access it and have their biases reaffirmed. Altogether now – why bother creating artificial intelligence when there’s no sign of the actual naturally occurring stuff chez X?
• Florida Governor and alien not quite used to his human suit, Ron DeSantis, was on Fox News last week with his human wife, Casey. While Ron sat there trying to remember how often humans blink, Casey appeared to call on viewers to commit voter fraud on his behalf, saying “We’re asking all of these moms and grandmoms to come from wherever it might be, North Carolina, South Carolina and to descend upon the state of Iowa to be a part of the caucus, because you do not have to be a resident of Iowa to be able to participate in the caucus. So, moms and grandmas are going to be able to come and be a part and let their voice be heard in support of Ron DeSantis”. You do have to be a resident of the state to vote in the caucus, and some say that ‘letting your voice be heard’ in an election is a phrase synonymous with voting, but the DeSantises claim she just meant come and volunteer. If you ask me, this is a tacit admission that they don’t have a lot of support in Iowa. Over three million people live in Iowa. You can’t get like fifty people to show up at a high school gym to hand out DeSantis stickers without asking people to travel a thousand fucking miles from South Carolina? Meanwhile, the Trump campaign took the moral high ground, releasing a statement which read in part, “The Trump campaign strongly condemns their dirty and illegal tactics and implores all Trump supporters to be aware of the DeSantises’ openly stated plot to rig the Caucus through fraud.” Let them fight, I say.
• If there’s one thing we’ve learned about tremulous needy ego-diminished right-wingers, with or without an associated shade of orange, is they need to brag to someone they think thinks they’re great. In the fight to help the FBI capture rioters after the Jan. 6 attack one woman opened up the Bumble dating app, changed her political beliefs to conservative and got to swiping. She reported to NBC news that “comically minimal ego-stroking” from her led Trump supporters to give her information about their activities on Jan. 6. She chatted to about a dozen guys who’s responses in the chats were very MAGA on-brand. “It definitely didn’t take a lot of arm-twisting to get them to start talking about it. Basically me being like ‘Wow, so cool — then what? What else?’ was pretty much all it took.” One such Bumble-bragger that Witness 1 had talked to, Andrew Taake, pleaded guilty this week to assaulting law enforcement officers with bear spray and a metal whip, at a hearing before U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols in Washington. Reached by NBC News after Taake’s guilty plea, the woman was glad to see him held accountable. “FINALLY! It’s been wild to see him still defend that attack all this time and makes me even more glad he was caught for it. I regret exactly nothing lol.” Now that kind of dutiful cyber-citizen is actually what we always wanted that yellow transforming VW Beetle Bumble to be! 
• The Republican party in Gillespie County, Texas have decided they don’t want to run into any of the problems that plagued the 2020 election when they hold their Primary elections in March. So they’re doing away with electronic vote tallying machines and hiring a few extra election workers so they can do the whole vote by hand. Party official David Triebs doesn’t see any problem in getting the 3,000 expected ballots counted within the State’s 24 hour reporting window. Speaking to VoteBeat, a non-partisan election news organization, he said “It’s not anything that’s really complicated. If you go ‘1, 2, 3, 4, 5′ then you can do it. So it’s not like calculus, you know?” Triebs, who has no experience hand-counting ballots, continued “If you have a good attention span, then I think most people can do it.” Ben Adida, executive director of VotingWorks, a non-profit which helped with the Georgia hand recount, suggests maybe it’s somewhere between calculus and counting to five, saying “Imagine being asked to count the number of sheets in a large ream of paper, the kind you get from Staples,” he said. Mistakes aren’t allowed, nor are programs like Excel. Plus, “You have to do it 80 times, because there are 40 contests with 2 candidates each.” Ultimately, assuming they can hire and train at least 100 extra workers in time, then race against the clock to get the ballots counted before the deadline, experts like political science professor Bob Stein say the count “will not be reliable or valid. It’ll cost an enormous amount of money and everyone, every candidate, will be challenging the count”. But at least they won’t be using those machines which Fox News would be very keen to point out are definitely not rigged, and you can’t put a price on that. Especially if, as appears to have happened in this case, you announce to everyone that you’re going to do a hand count before you look into how much it will cost, how long it will take, and how hard it might actually be to pull off. Best of luck guys!
• At this week’s parliamentary carol service the opposition pews chorussed “In the bleak midwinter, PPE made Mone, resolve stood hard as iron; voters recall Bone.” Baroness Michelle Mone – who’s surname is spelled the same as 4/5ths of money, is 4/5ths money and 1/5th OBE – for her “services to the lingerie industry” in the 2010 New Year Honours, and Baroness for Mayfair bestowed in 2015. The 4/5ths money was made significantly larger when she, her husband and her children were in receipt of secret offshore payments of £48m-odd during Covid through successful lobbying of the government for PPE contracts worth £200m – the PPE produced under their auspices by Medpro was deemed unfit for use. Mone denied that she’d benefit personally and didn’t declare the interest in the company as she should’ve done as a member of the House of Lords but at the weekend on Laura Kuenssberg’s BBC show she stated that though she had lied to the press she’d done so “to protect my family”, adding that this was “not a crime” – yeah except lying about the fact that you stand to benefit from £60m in a trust earned from dodgy PPE deals kinda is!  Rishi said he’s shocked to discover this for the first time, she said that Rishi knew all along, Gove is cooperating with the criminal investigation. So maybe some justice against the knighted super-rich might actually be brought by their super-rich governmental peers? Yep breath, holding, no not really! Meanwhile Peter Bone, former MP for Wellingborough who was suspended from the Tory Party for 6 weeks following an investigation by Parliament’s behavioural watchdog, the Independent Expert Panel, which found Mr Bone had broken sexual misconduct rules and upheld five allegations of bullying, has been subject to a recall petition by his constituents. 13.2% of eligible voters signed a petition to basically say they didn’t want him to be their MP any more. Bone protests that the majority of the electorate in the constituency, 68,897, had chosen not to sign the recall petition, describing the process as “bizarre”. But hey it only needs 10% to sign and that’s democracy for ya! Proportional representation doesn’t sound so bad now hey Peter! This means a by-election will be run early next year where his 18K majority will probably be overturned like the last several 20K+ majorities were – bwahahaha!. So yeah, Happy Yule Rishi, now do the right thing and give all us good boys and girls what we deserve for Christmas – a flippin’ General Election!

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:

Straw Man (Redux) – FT#139 Transcript

Jim: Well, ho ho, hello and welcome to this festive edition of Fallacious Trump, the podcast, where we use the insane ramblings of the undisputed master of the underhanded deed to explain logical fallacies. I’m your host, Jim.

Mark: And I’m your other ho ho host, mark. A logical fallacy is an error in reasoning that results in bad or invalid arguments. And the logical fallacy we’re taking another look at this. Christmas week is straw man. Undisputed master of the underhanded deed. Nice.

Jim: It’s from the Scrooge song at the beginning of Muppet Christmas Carol, obviously.

Mark: Right?

Jim: And I realized that it just is about Trump. If you just change Scrooge to Trump, there goes Mr. Humbug. There goes Mr. Grim. If they gave a prize for being mean. The winner would be him. Scrooge loves his money because he thinks it gives him power. If he became a flavour, you can bet he would be sour.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: He charges folk a fortune for his dark and draughty houses. Us poor folk live in misery. It’s even worse for mouses.

Mark: m the mouse chorus that pop up and go, it’s even worse for mouse.

Jim: If being means a way of life you practice and rehearse, then all that work is paying off, because Scrooge is getting worse. you just change Scrooge to Trump, and it’s just fucking wow. Perfect for him.

Mark: What we need is some sort of Dickensian visit by several ghosts. Trouble is, Trump, they would just leave screaming, wouldn’t you know, ghost of Christmas yet to come.

Jim: He’s an unredeemable, if anyone has seen Spirited.

Mark: yes. Ah, there you go.

Jim: Anyway.

Mark: Yeah. Wow. The undisputed master of the underhanded deed. Brilliant.

Jim: So, straw man.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: You may realize that we’ve done this before. This is like one of the top logical fallacies, like in the hit parade. Everyone knows this one.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: we did this back in episode two.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: So this is another of our episodes where we kind of look back on the old ones and come at it with some new examples.

Mark: And I bemoan the fact that nothing changed, despite the fact that we pointed it out some years ago, people are five and a half year later still doing it.

Jim: Yeah. I mean, people will be doing this one forever, really. It’s so common. And the straw man is, in case you’re someone who’s got this far and doesn’t know the straw man, it is when people misrepresent an argument that their opponent is making to make it an easier argument to beat. So they create a straw man like a scarecrow. That looks like the argument, but isn’t as tough as that argument. It’s one that they can easily just knock down because it’s just made of.

Mark: You could easily burn, set fire to if you only had a brain.

Jim: Yes. Our first example is actually a collection of examples because I edited this together from the speech that Trump gave in the Rose Garden when he was supposed to be talking about sanctions on China, but ended up talking about a recent thing that had come out from the Biden campaign, a task force that Biden and Sanders campaign employees or volunteers had worked on to kind of push a unity thing. They were trying to merge their two.

Mark: Wings of the left.

Jim: Let’s decide on the things that are important and let’s bring it into one party. So they create a document of Biden Sanders unity task force recommendations. And so Trump started reading this out. It seemed like it was the first time. He’d probably read it out, but he’d got his staff to put together a list of bullet points of the worst and most horrendous things in there.

Donald Trump: And these are actual key elements of the Biden Sanders unity platform. Abolish immigration detention. No more detention. You come in here illegally, no more detention. Incentivize illegal alien child smuggling. Give it an incentive. Appoint social justice prosecutors in order to free violent criminals. They want to abolish our police departments. They want to abolish our prisons, I guess, and mandate net zero carbon emissions for homes, offices, and all new buildings by 2030. That basically means no windows. Abolish all charter schools. Abolish educational standards.

Jim: So none of those things are true. They would all be things that it would be pretty easy to argue against. Yeah, they’re all things which anyone listening would go I don’t agree with getting rid of prisons. That’s mad. And getting rid of educational standards, charter schools, the police, no immigration defense, absolutely no windows in buildings. But they’re all misrepresentations of what was actually said in this task force document. So, for example, abolish immigration detention. No, they talked about abolishing for profit immigration detention centers, not all detention.

Mark: Right.

Jim: Just they weren’t making it profitable for people to incarcerate immigrants, because that’s a weird fucking way of doing it.

Mark: Yes.

Jim: That incentivizes them to cram lots of people in there because they’re making money for each of them.

Mark: Yeah. And at a very low standard of living, because that way they make a lot of profit.

Jim: Absolutely.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: incentivize illegal alien child smuggling. That’s not a proposal you’ll be surprised to hear. Weirdly, what they did say was that they would roll back Trump’s zero tolerance immigration policy in order to free up law enforcement to focus on more serious crimes like smuggling immigrants, children. And opposite incentivizes. No, the opposite of.

Mark: Yes, the very opposite.

Jim: But the Republicans were arguing that by not having a zero tolerance policy, by basically not locking up everyone who crosses the border, that’s going to let some child smugglers in. So somehow that’s giving them an incentive to do. It’s not clear.

Mark: Yeah, no.

Jim: appointing social justice prosecutors in order to free violent criminals. No, they were appointing people who are committed to criminal justice reform to ensure public safety while reducing incarceration. But that’s not about violent criminals. It’s about freeing nonviolent criminals because some of those people shouldn’t be in prison.

Mark: Yeah. So the exact opposite.

Jim: Same with abolishing prisons. No, they were only talking about getting rid of private prisons. For profit prisons.

Mark: For profit prisons.

Jim: A bad system. The no windows thing, that was just him riffing because, yeah, first of all, wasn’t a mandate. They were actually just setting a goal that there would be net zero buildings by 2030. But you can absolutely have windows in buildings that generate the same amount of energy as they use. That’s not. Yeah, and the charter schools and the educational standards, they, again, were talking about for profit charter schools, which are underperforming, not charter schools as a whole. And the same with educational standards. It was about eliminating high stakes standardized tests, which don’t work for a lot of students and cause teachers to teach to the test and students to get very stressed and upset when they don’t do well on the standardized tests. And it doesn’t actually necessarily lead to.

Mark: All those people that. Yes, and all those that fail the test are not well served by the system. There’s something about the straw man fallacy that is determined to characterize whatever the opposition says in terms of it being detrimental to the listener. So the person that makes the straw man will make it something. And I think we covered that in the first time we looked at that, it was about Boris and his bendy bananas in Europe. And it was that whole idea that Europe are taking stuff away from you, which was the basis of the core of his argument about why we should go through with Brexit and get out the EU was that they are taking stuff away from you. So the whole of the straw man thing, in many of the examples, it’s about characterizing what the other person is saying in terms of it being to the detriment of everybody else, and you’re coming to the rescue and saying, I’m pointing out that what they are saying would be really bad for you and therefore you need to follow me. Yeah.

Jim: And the thing is, if he was honest about it. Well, if he’d even read the document.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And understood it and his staff hadn’t kind of dumbed it down for him and deliberately got it wrong, then, like the bit about charter schools, for example, if the policy is, which is essentially what it says in the document, if the policy is there are some schools which are largely private funded but getting federal money, we are paying money that could be going to other children’s education, to these schools. They are underperforming. They are underserving the neediest students, and they’re not meeting educational standards, and we are funding them. We are going to stop doing that. And when new schools start up and apply for funding, we’re going to make sure that we only give that funding to schools which will serve the neediest students in their areas and follow education that way. Harder to argue against than they’re abolishing all charter schools because some people send their kids to charter schools. So then they hear that and go, oh, I don’t think that’s right, they shouldn’t do that. But if they were honest.

Mark: Where’s my Kids going to go?

Jim: Yeah, it’s much harder to argue against.

Mark: Yeah. So you want to recharacterize the argument as something that’s much easier to argue against and provide the solution for you? Personify the solution. I am the solution to this. So he’s saying, yeah, vote for me, I’ll make sure this doesn’t happen.

Jim: Yeah. And it can be done by massively oversimplifying what the actual truth is or just by misrepresenting it or by putting words in people’s mouths. and our second example is one where he talked about Biden following the radical left agenda.

Donald Trump: You will have a crash in the markets because he’s going to double and triple your taxes. He’s going to do things that nobody ever would ever think even possible, because he’s following the radical left agenda. Take away your guns, destroy your second amendment. No religion, no anything hurt the Bible, hurt God. He’s against God, he’s against guns, he’s against energy, our kind of energy.

Mark: Wow, that escalated quickly, doesn’t it? It’s going to hurt God. Well, why would you want to follow a kind of being that could be so easily hurt by a sleepy politician.

Jim: Who never comes out of his basement? According to Trump.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So he’s going to double and triple your taxes. Well, no, he raised taxes for people who made over $400,000 a year and pretty much everyone else got a tax cut. And so saying he’s going to double and triple your taxes was just not true. No, no religion. No religion. I don’t know where that came from.

Mark: No, nothing.

Jim: Yeah, no, nothing. Yeah, no, yeah, he’s going to hurt. Huh? The Bible hurt God because he’s against God.

Mark: He’s just on a rant, isn’t he? And he’s got really angry.

Jim: Biden, the lifelong Catholic, is against God.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: He’s also against guns, again, not ever a stated goal of his to take guns away or change the second amendment. And he’s against energy.

Mark: Our kind of energy. Yeah. Right wing racist. Well, everything.

Jim: This was a. Well, he revisited a number of times on his campaign.

Mark: Right.

Jim: He said at one point, Biden has pledged to destroy the US energy industry, which again, that’s a pretty fucking strong straw man, because that’s a thing which I think you could reasonably argue against. Whereas what Biden actually did was said he is keen to, over time, transition away from fossil fuels.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: That’s harder to argue against. and especially if you’re trying to frame it as the US energy industry, because with fossil fuels, yes, some of that comes from the US, but some of it is imported. I’ve never understood why, but even countries that have oil, they drill that oil, then they export some of it and import oil from other countries. Don’t know why that happens. It’s really weird, but it happens. But when energy is transitioned into more renewable, like solar and wind and hydro and nuclear, okay, not renewable, but cleaner, where do you think that’s coming from? That’s all coming from the US. That’s a us industry of renewable. You’re not importing solar energy from.

Mark: Yeah, yeah. And if you do it to transition to fossil fuel, what that does is believe space to have conversations with the energy producers so they can transition to wind and solar. and you’re not saying, okay, we’re doing away with that tomorrow.

Jim: It’s already happening everywhere. The US as a whole is somewhere between 40 and 50% currently renewable and clean energy or not fossil fuel based. And, yeah, it’s just about increasing that and decreasing the reliance on expensive and running out fossil fuel.

Mark: Yeah, and poisoning the planet fuels. But that’s Trump’s thing, is bigging up those ancient based energy firms who are transitioning anyway, because that’s the old guard voter base.

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

Mark: Well, oddly, we’re going to talk about pretty much the same kind of area, because Rishi Sunak has recently embraced the question of renewables and net zero and all that kind of stuff. but we’re just going to go briefly back. Well, way back when Rishi launched his leadership campaign in the dim and distant past, July 2022, which he did in Grantham, which was Margaret Thatcher’s old constituency, and it was a deliberate act to press home his point.

Rishi Sunak: Yes, I do believe that what I’m proposing economically is what I would describe as common sense Thatcherism.

Mark: Basically, he wants to align himself with Margaret Thatcher. It turns out he didn’t just inherit her sense of tackling inflation first, though, actually, whether he can take any credit for doing that is questionable, since the bank of England gained independence from government regarding setting monetary control processes in place to deal with inflation in 1998, eight years after Thatcher left office. He also, however, inherited her use of the straw man fallacy. So let’s listen to her. Margaret Thatcher in 1990 being asked by Simon Hughes, the then education spokesman for the Lib Dems, about her legacy vis a vis a gap between rich and poor growing ever wider since her first election in 1979,

Simon Hughes: the gap between the richest 10% and the poorest 10% in this country has widened substantially. That’s right. How can she say at the end of her chapter of british politics, that she can justify many people in a constituency such as mine being relatively much poorer off, much less well housed, and much less well provided than it was in 1979?

Margaret Thatcher: But what the honorable member is saying is that he will rather the poor were poorer, provided the rich were less rich. That way you will never create the wealth for better social services as we have. And what a policy. Yes, he would rather have the poor poorer, provided the rich were less rich. That is a liberal policy. Yes, it came out. He didn’t intend it to. So what he’s saying is in pointing out that the gap between the poor and the rich had grown larger. And how could she truthfully say that? People were better off in parts of fifth constituency and better housed. They were more employed. Their wages were higher. How could you? And he said, well, what he’s saying is he would rather the poor were poorer so long as the rich were less rich.

Mark: So long as the rich were less rich. At what point?

Jim: What? I didn’t hear that in his version.

Mark: Didn’t hear him say that at all. No, because what she wants to do is characterize his argument in order to defend her government’s policy, which was basically to make the rich richer, which would allow them to pay more taxes and thereby fund more social services, which we’ve seen. Which we saw clearly not happening in all of Thatcher’s reign, and it hasn’t happened in post Thatcher’s Britain ever since.

Jim: Well, it’s good that by revisiting these fallacies, we can use bang up to date examples.

Mark: Yeah, exactly. What’s interesting is that because she was unabashed in the way that she did that stuff. But however, here’s Rishi bringing it back up today. Here’s Rishi in September 23, carrying on her straw man legacy when it came to his speech justifying, dialing back green policies, despite the impact of. On thus not reaching net zero that the climate change committee set up by the government had said they already weren’t going to do, he’s made it worse. And in distracting us from, basically, the idiocy of his moving the ban on the sale of fossil fuel powered cars from 2030 to 2035 and granting more oil and gas drilling licenses, he stacks up a whole sheaf of straw men to tell us that he shot them down.

Rishi Sunak: The debate about how we get to net zero has thrown up a range of worrying proposals. And today I want to confirm that under this government, they will never happen. The proposal for government to interfere in how many passengers you can have in your car. I’ve scrapped it. The proposal that we should force you to have seven different bins in your home? I’ve scrapped it. The proposal to make you change your diet and harm british farmers by taxing meat or to create new taxes to discourage flying or going on holiday? I’ve scrapped those too.

Mark: So he’s a knight in shining armor, fighting unpopular dragons, where they’re unpopular on the right of this party. But actually he is the pig, building the house out of straw and then being his own wolf and blowing them down and then saying, oh, what a good boy. Am I? Of course, he’s not providing any details of the policies that he’s scrapped. He’s characterizing them in the way that he’s done. Because if you did look at the details of those policies, it would reveal the straw man. He’s making the straw poking out of his trouser legs like the miniature scarecrow that he is. So, yeah, the passengers in cars. The proposal for government to interfere in how many passengers you can have in your car. of course it isn’t. Doesn’t exist. In 2020, the Department of Transport issued guidance to councils about the benefits of introducing car pooling and lift sharing schemes, saying increasing the number of people by 1% in each vehicle annually between 2022 and 2030 would remove 1.25 million cars from the road and result in an annual reduction in co2 of 1.25 metric tons. And the independent Climate Change Committee, set up as part of the Climate Change act to advise the UK on tackling the issue, said societal pressure to increase car occupancy could play a role as the public becomes increasingly environmental aware, not interfering, nor making carpooling compulsory. Was ever government policy. As to bins? Seven different bins. Yeah, there was legislation passed in 2021, which meant that local authorities have to arrange collections for paper, plastic, metal and glass to recycle it, as well as food and garden and general household waste. But never a rule introduced from government to take them away in separate bins. The government had been looking into ways of making recycling more consistent across the country, because it changes where from county to county from council to council. And in fact, after the speech, the Department for Environmental, Food and Rural affairs that’s DEFRA, isn’t it? Confirmed that it was never the case that seven bins would be needed by households. So he’s saying, oh, yeah, that rule about seven bins didn’t exist, but I’ve scrapped it, so aren’t I great? We set up the straw man that we didn’t know existed, that never existed in order to shoot it down. meat tax. Never a meat tax. There was cutting back. The climate change committee, same committee said cutting back on meat can contribute to healthier diets, reduce direct emissions from food production in the agricultural sector, and free up land that can be used for carbon sequestration. But the report also says there’s no policies in place to capitalize on the momentum of people already reducing the amount of meat they eat. Because that’s the thing. Elsewhere, various health departments and health information missives from the government said, yeah, if you cut down on the amount of red meat that you eat, you would be healthier. And people have been doing that as a result of government advice. And now Sunak saying, oh, yeah, so there’s a meat tax, I’ve cut that as well. They’re all recommendations about, yeah, if you shifted to healthier diets, that would be good. They’ve also spotted that various local councils were doing plant based food at events that they host. But it’s never a policy or a plan to bring in a meat tax, which is a brilliant sound bite. Meat tax, also quite a good name for a punk album. and then as for the taxes to discourage flying or going on holiday, well, this odd because aviation has always been a bit of a target, a bit of an easy target, in my opinion. I’m entitled to want to cut emissions because there’s a vast amount of fuel used and there are a vast amount of aeroplanes and you can carbon offset as a very visible thing to do. And there’s all sorts of comparison sites which said, do you want to fly? Do you want to take the train? If you did, here’s the difference in carbon footprint. And the weird thing is that the conservatives have never really wanted to cut emissions. And even Sunak cut existing air passions of duty on domestic flights when he was chancellor a couple of days before cop 26, so there was a duty on passengers that was introduced to charge you and offset the amount of carbon used by aeroplanes and also to discourage you from flying. He’s the worst person to try and discourage from flying. Hakim goes everywhere by private jet or helicopter, so consequently he’s kind of said, oh, yeah, that’s a terrible thing, we shouldn’t do that. So I’ve cut that. And the climate change committee again hammered home the point in their report that taxes should and would send clearer signals to consumers on the high emissions costs of flying not adopted by the government as official policy. So all of those countless straw men that he stood up and he used the same rhetorical technique recently when he listed a whole bunch of stuff and said, yeah, blocked it, blocked that, block that. This one, I’ve scrapped this, I’ve scrapped that. He’s desperate to show that he’s done things, but he’s just setting a whole bunch of things that didn’t exist, never existed as policy were never threatened to do. They were kind of guidance and advice. They were reports gathered on current practices, possibly this would be the way to go to move us towards net zero. All of that, the report from the climate change committee was guidance and recommendations, and if we want to head to net zero, and they themselves admitted that government policy, before he rolled back some of the policy statements, was never going to meet the net zero target, and now it’s never going to meet it even more. So he set all of those up and then said, I’m great. I’ve saved you all this stuff, without revealing what the real arguments are, because when you look at the detail of them, bit like the Trump examples, where you can’t really argue against that.

Jim: I think the fact that it’s taken us a little while to go through why these aren’t the simple things they’re suggesting, shows that a straw man interfaces very nicely with The Gish Gallop. It’s very easy to say multiple straw men in a row, because you don’t have to explain them. You’ve simplified it to a point where it’s both meaningless in terms of its original purpose and also easy for everyone to go, oh, I don’t think that’s a good idea.

Mark: And aren’t you great for not. For making that not happen?

Jim: And you can do several of them, and for someone to come back and say, okay, well, you’ve oversimplified that. Here’s the actual nuanced version. Takes way too long for anyone to be interested in, and I hope people are still listening. But for the audience of a debate, for example, to then be expected to sit and listen to all of the explanations of why those things were oversimplifications, it makes it an easy one to use several times in a row and get benefit from.

Mark: So, actually, yes, let’s talk about the process of calling people out in that, of course. And also, we wouldn’t be able to mention the intervening years since we last looked as a straw man without straw manning Corbin. Because it was a kind of a national sport ever since both sides of the aisle take part in that. So here’s Corbyn speaking in the aftermath of the Manchester bombing in May 2017, and the then Tory defense secretary, Sir Michael Fallon. Straw Manning, what he said, in order to follow the prevailing let’s do down Corbin policy, and Channel Four news’s Krishna guru Murthy hero of the show, calls him out on it.

Jeremy Corbyn: Protecting this country requires us to be both strong against terrorism and strong against the causes of terrorism. The blame is with the terrorists. But if we are to protect our people, we must be honest about what threatens our security. Those causes certainly cannot be reduced to foreign policy decisions alone and no rationale based on the actions of any government can remotely excuse or even adequately explain outrages like this week’s massacre. We must be brave enough to admit that the war on terror is not working.

Sir Michael Fallon: Oh. The idea that the attack in Manchester could be traced back to british foreign policy, that it’s somehow somebody else’s fault, it’s the fault of the british government or somebody else.

Krishnan Guru Murthy: Where did he say that? Which bit?

Sir Michael Fallon: Because he talks about foreign interventions and he implies that somehow this attack can be explained away on the basis of previous foreign interventions by successive governments. And that’s wrong.

Krishnan Guru Murthy: I don’t know which draft you’ve read. But I mean, the bit I’ve got Is that he says the blame is with the terrorists. But if we are to protect our People, we must be honest about what threatens our security. We must be brave enough to admit the war on terror is simply not working. What’s wrong about that?

Sir Michael Fallon: Well, what’s wrong about that is there have been attacks in our country that have been nothing to do with the war against terror. For example 2005, the London bombings, that was well before we got involved in Libya. Paris was attacked very badly when France wasn’t involved in the war in Iraq.

Krishnan Guru Murthy: But 2005 was after Iraq, wasn’t it?

Sir Michael Fallon: Sorry?

Krishnan Guru Murthy: 2005 was after Iraq, wasn’t it?

Sir Michael Fallon: No, but it was before Libya, the attack on the twin Towers, that was well before the Iraq war. So there’s no correlation here between foreign policy and this appalling act of terrorism. And that’s where Jeremy Corbyn has gone wrong.

Mark: He shifts his argument. Corbyn’s linking this to british foreign policy. Well, he isn’t. He’s very clear that it’s the blame. Like Krishnan points out, he’s saying the blame was the tourists and solely blaming a government is not going to solve the problem. But we need to be brave enough to see that the war on terror. So he shifts his arguments to say, oh, actually, well, there’s nothing to do with the war on terror because 911 was pre war on terror, the thing.

Jim: That famously kicked off the war on terror.

Mark: The war on. Yeah, yeah. And it’s worked. Because he’s done away with terrorism forever. Weird. Yeah, very, very weird. But yeah, but that’s the effort that you have to go to and it’s rare to find it on a news channel. And Krishnan Guru Murthy is brilliant at it. We’ve used him several times. He goes on to read a quote to Michael Fallon about, well, certainly, whilst they are not directly to blame, certainly the foreign policy over previous years has fermented the revolutionary zeal felt by the terrorists. And he said, well, yeah, there you go. More poppycock. And he said, that’s a direct quote from foreign minister Boris Johnson at the time. In order to counter it, you’ve kind of got to be in possession of the actual thing that’s being straw manned in order to go back and say, like Krishnan does. Well, where does it say that? Where does it say that? Because he prefaces the whole thing by saying, well, have you heard it? Or did you watch him say it? Or did you read the speech?

MARK’S FALLACY IN THE WILD STING

Mark: God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen of course, for this Christmas season.

Jim: So, in the fallacy in the wild, we like to talk about the fallacy of the week from a non political perspective. And our first example this week is from Brooklyn Nine Nine.

Mark: No.

Jim: In tribute to the wonderful Andre Braugher, who died last week. And here he is in a scene with also wonderful John C. McGinley.

Mark: Oh, yeah. From scrubs.

Jim: From scrubs. Who is playing the police union rep who has had the officers out on blue flu under the claim that they’re being targeted by members of the community who put a mouse in a burrito. That was kind of served to a policeman. But Captain Holt has proved that that isn’t the full story.

Captain Raymond Holt: There’s McCaffrey coming out of Purdue pet supplies with the mouse that he put in the burrito. So there’s no need for tactical gear or a never forget burrito ribbon or any of that. You need to call off the blue flu.

Frank O’Sullivan: Are you crazy? My guys are under attack.

Captain Raymond Holt: No, I just proved that it wasn’t an attack. He faked it.

Frank O’Sullivan: Not that attack. This attack. The one where you call a policeman a liar.

Captain Raymond Holt: He is a liar.

Frank O’Sullivan: Oh, dear. My God. You just did it again. Do you understand? The worst thing you can do to another person is to call that person a liar? You hate cops. That’s fact.

Captain Raymond Holt: I just thought the blue flu was about a mouse and a burrito.

Frank O’Sullivan: It was, but now it’s about you saying it wasn’t.

Captain Raymond Holt: Well, that doesn’t make any sense.

Frank O’Sullivan: So you’re calling me stupid?

Captain Raymond Holt: That’s not what I said.

Frank O’Sullivan: So you’re calling me a liar?

Captain Raymond Holt: I just don’t know how to talk to someone like you.

Frank O’Sullivan: Someone like me? Wow, that’s racist.

Captain Raymond Holt: Oh, this is a very frustrating conversation.

Jim: The union guy’s whole thing really is just misrepresenting what is said to him and turning it into something.

Mark: It’s just an escalating that he can argue against. I love the way he just got. Oh, this is a very frustrating conversation. Rather than drawing his weapon and shooting him straight through the head. Wow.

Jim: yeah, so great. so our second example is from the Simpsons. This is an episode where Homer has been invited onto a political talk show to be the kind of everyman, ranty kind of character and rants successfully beating the host of the show, Homer.

TV Executive: The way you just demolished our number one on air personality was fantastic. You are the kind of ill-informed gas bag this network cannot get enough of. We only have eleven now. Not to mention our liberal straw man.

Liberal Straw Man: Oh, the plain and simple facts is, I’d love to raise your taxes and make your children gay.

Jim: they have a liberal straw man who claims liberals want to do things that they can then easily argue against. Who works for them.

Mark: The plain and simple facts is. That’s an excellent.

Jim: And finally, well, I present just as a personification of this: Alex Jones.

Mark: Yes.

Jim: Pretty much everything he says is a form of straw man fallacy. And I was so confident that it would be that I didn’t bother, because who would… Well, I know Dan would of knowledge fight, but who would go and subject themselves to large swathes of Alex Jones other than Dan? And so I just went to the most recent episode of Knowledge Fight and found out what they were talking about on that one. And they were looking back at an episode from 2004 where at one point Alex says this headline,

Alex Jones: Court opens door to searches without warrants. Dissenting judges call ruling the road to hell. So I want everybody to think about that long and hard. And they say, hey, we don’t need warrants anymore to search your house or business. Just, we’re not going to have those anymore.

Jim: So his claim is that a court has said we’re not going to have warrants anymore. Yeah, we can just search you whenever the fuck. We’re just wondering. Yeah, look around. shockingly while that is easy to argue against, it wasn’t actually the case.

Mark: Yeah, I’m shocked and stunned.

Jim: I think Alex had basically not even read the article, let alone the case that this was based on. But the article about the case, he just read the headline on drudge report and went, oh well, I can rant about this for 2 hours. And it was based on a case called United States versus Gould from 2004, where a guy in Louisiana had threatened to kill two judges and they’d had a tip about this guy being violent. He was already a convicted felon with a history of violence. So they went to his trailer to question him about this and see if they thought that he was actually really going to kill these people or if there was anything they could do about it, which seems reasonable. His roommate, who shared the trailer with him, let the police in and agreed to them coming in and looking around basically, right. And said that Gould was in his bedroom. So they went into his bedroom, he wasn’t there. And they did a protective sweep to make sure that they weren’t going to get jumped out on by a violent person with a gun. So they looked under the bed, they looked in a closet, and in the closet there was three rifles, which he wasn’t allowed to have because he’s a convicted felon. they later found him hiding in the woods outside and arrested him, then executed a search with his consent and seized the rifles. So the case that this, when this went to court was about, was finding the rifles while looking to make sure they weren’t going to be attacked by someone, an illegal search. Was that them doing a warrantless search, which they weren’t allowed to do. And should those rifles therefore be thrown.

Mark: Out despite being invited to come?

Jim: Well, they were invited into the trailer by his trailer mate, but not into his bedroom. He didn’t have the right to consent to the police searching Gould’s bedroom. The police say they didn’t search the just they were looking for him and making sure that they weren’t going to be attacked. They saw the rifles in the process in plain sight. So basically this case was about some lawfare. It was about questioning whether a protective sweep in this state has to be incident to an arrest or whether it can just be police who are in a location and wanting to make sure that they’re not going to be violently attacked. The case law up to that point could be interpreted in different ways. And that was the argument that was being questioned in the case. And the ruling came down that, no, they were okay to have done this. And the fact that they saw the rifles while they were doing that doesn’t disqualify them as evidence in his later conviction. So that is an incredibly narrow ruling because it’s very specific to the facts of that case that doesn’t allow police to search your car, search your home without having a warrant come in, and you don’t get to say, no, you’re not allowed in or anything like that. Doesn’t affect any of that.

Mark: And also makes it very difficult to argue against.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: You look at it and you think, oh, yeah, I probably agree with that ruling. Yeah, seems all right. The fact that they happened upon the rifles leaning up against the walls or wherever they were, in plain view, he shouldn’t have those.

Jim: The case actually says, uses those words in plain view.

Mark: okay. Yeah.

Jim: And I think, and I thought prior to this case, that in plain view is a specific set of legal magic words, essentially, in cases where.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Evidence that is in plain view, like if a policeman stops someone in the car and they have drugs on their dashboard or a gun in the backseat, and you see it through the window in their mouth, that isn’t a search.

Mark: Yes.

Jim: Although it specifically says in plain view in the case.

Mark: Mhm.

Jim: They were in plain view after they’d opened the closet door. So I don’t think in plain view is a good description of that.

Mark: Yeah. Yes. At the bottom of the lake, behind.

Jim: The rock, I would say this was a search, but it was a search for a different reason. They weren’t searching for evidence, they were.

Mark: Looking in the closet. See if he was hiding in the closet in case he was, um.

Jim: But in any case, whatever you feel about the specific outcome of this specific case, this certainly isn’t represented by what Alex Jones was saying, which is courts have ruled police no longer need a warrant. But essentially, if you listen to Alex Jones, at any point or knowledge fight, you will hear him using straw men constantly. Because in order to get so upset about all of the stuff that he talks about, he has to misrepresent the stuff he’s talking about. He has to take what a Democrat has said or what he thinks a Democrat thinks or whatever, and then suggest it’s something way more nefarious or evil or clearly wrong. And then he can rant about it. Because if he actually approached it honestly, there wouldn’t be fodder for a three hour show every day.

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, it’s time for fake news. The game where usually I read out three Trump quotes, two of which are real, on one I made up, and Mark has to figure out which one is fake news.

Mark: Yeah. So what you’re saying is, right, that the truth is never to be found by one as devious and unlucky as me. Well, that’s nice, I must say.

Jim: Well, there is three times as much truth this time, but also three times as much perfidy.

Mark: Um.

Jim: yeah, because this is a Christmas episode, and we like to mix things.

Mark: Up a bit where we’re all about.

Jim: So normally it would be quotes from Trump. M. But this week, what we have is nine examples.

Mark: Oh, my God. Right.

Jim: Of tv shows that Trump pitched over the years to various television networks.

Mark: Okay.

Jim: Three of which I made up.

Mark: Right.

Jim: They’re in batches of three. So one of the first three, one of the second three, one of the third three are ones I made up. And so you have an opportunity to add three to your score.

Mark: Whoa.

Jim: It’s already doing very well.

Mark: Wow. I could leap ahead.

Jim: Absolutely. Okay, so the first three of which, you have to choose which one is made up by me. Number one.

Mark: Mhm.

Jim: The tower, a west Wing type family drama inspired by Trump’s life and career about a real estate tycoon named John Barron, who works alongside his ex wife and several adult children.

Mark: Okay. Yeah.

Jim: Number two. The apprentice blacks versus whites, a spinoff of the popular reality show in which an all white team of business people would be pitted against an all black team to see which would bring in the most money.

Mark: Okay, that’s horrifying.

Jim: Number three, money talks, a talk show hosted by Donald himself in which he would exclusively interview billionaires about their careers and.

Mark: Oh that sounds a bit like he would do that one. It’s kind of like there’ll be a later variation called dictators, a talk show hosted by Donald. So we’d be exclusive into dictators because basically it’s about him wanting to be seen with other billionaires. but the whole thing would be in a slightly parkinson slash Louis Theroux kind of way, when it’s mostly about Parky. And, yeah, he’d want to have bathing reflected glory, I think would be an alternative title. Okay. Quite enamored by that one. The Apprentice. Blacks feed whites is an appalling concept. and I’m convinced that he, therefore, would have done. Yeah. The west Wing type family drama, Trump’s life and career about real estate. M John Barron. Yeah. Because we know that that’s the guy that would, uh. Yeah, I think that’s a gym size gag. but as soon as I say that, it looks even more. Okay. So I think of the first three, the tower number one is the one that you made up.

Jim: Okay, so you think the apprentice blacks v whites is true?

Mark: I do.

Jim: He workshopped this idea with Howard Stern and pitched the idea to NBC.

Mark: Shit.

Jim: No, it was a genuine thing. This was around 2004, 2005.

Mark: What?

Jim: When the apprentice was starting to lag in the ratings a bit, and he thought, what you need is a new hook. Right. So what we’ll do is start a race war.

Mark: Yeah. Oh, my God.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: I mean, it’d be bad enough if you did, like, an all male or female team. That would be less offensive.

Jim: I don’t know. I think it would be less offensive, definitely.

Mark: Yeah. But, I mean, it’d be fairly offensive.

Jim: But it could still be offensive. But, yeah. Was a thing he came up.

Mark: Yeah. Jesus Christ.

Jim: Yeah. And you also think money talks is real, and that is what I made up.

Mark: Oh. What? Well, that’s a very tame one. No. So the other one.

Jim: Tower.

Mark: No. So the John Baron one is actually real. No.

Jim: Yeah. This was in 2004. He was pitching this. NBC hired this, went to pilot. Yeah.

Mark: Oh, my God. We’ve got to find that.

Jim: They hired a writer called Gay Walsh, who told Vanity Fair she didn’t really know much about Trump. She read all of his books during the course of her research. She’d never really watched the Apprentice, so she didn’t have any opinions on him specifically. She kind of gave him the script and everything. His only note was to change the name of the character to.

Mark: What? That’s brilliant. Because we know the gag about John Barron. We know the inside story on that. Oh, no.

Jim: And NBC made a pilot, but it didn’t air.

Mark: God, we’ve got to find that. We’ve got to find that. Oh, God, that’d be brilliant. Wouldn’t. What? I can’t believe that.

Jim: So the next three.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: The trumps on that basis.

Mark: The trumps.

Jim: This was an Osborne’s style reality show featuring Donald at work and at home with his then girlfriend, Melania. Don Jr. Eric and Ivanka would also be featured. But not Tiffany. Not Tiffany.

Mark: Okay.

Jim: Number five.

Mark: Ah.

Jim: Trump town girls. This is a reality show where beauty.

Mark: Billy Joel writes the theme tune. Sings the theme tune.

Jim: Beauty pageant contestants would be pitted against female real estate brokers who actually worked for Trump already to compete for commissions. So to try and sell real estate, doing whatever it takes to win the week’s payday, that’s so awful. And number six.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: Trump Tower. Not to be confused with the tower.

Mark: The tower. Uh-huh.

Jim: This was a raunchy soap opera similar to Dynasty or dynasty, with sex, murder and drama among the ultra rich, ultra powerful and ultra beautiful people who live in Trump Tower, which was, quote, the world’s most glamorous address.

Mark: Wow. I really like Trump town girls. The Trumps. Which kind of. There wasn’t there animated children’s cartoon called the flumps.

Jim: There was.

Mark: Which was, like, knitted sort of round things with northern accents, I seem to recall. And Osborne said, yeah, I’m a bit suspicious of that one, because in the Osborne thing, there was a sibling, a child that didn’t appear.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Okay. Yeah, I really like the. Why would you just randomly pitch. Beauty pageant contest against female real estate brokers? Well, yeah, why not? Why not one of another Trump town girls? but that’s too large a pun. God. Okay, well, I reckon, though, the five and six are that ridiculous. They must be true. And based on. Okay. Yeah. So I think number four is the one you made. Trump’s the Osbourne Stars reality show, not Tiffany.

Jim: So you think Trump town Girls is a real thing? Real idea.

Mark: So wanted to be.

Jim: And that is. Was.

Mark: Why would you just. Beauty pageant container. Well, apart from Trump’s continued fantasy world.

Jim: Yeah, I think that’s why not.

Mark: Who did they pitch that to?

Jim: that was for E. Network.

Mark: Right.

Jim: This was as late as 2013. He was pitching this. One intention of the show, at least, was to get Ivanka to be a reality tv star because she was involved in this. And I don’t know if it was as a host or as one of the brokers or what, but they were hoping that she would be a reality tv star.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And this actually got to production. It never made it to air, supposedly because they felt there were no interesting characters, presumably including. Yeah, yeah. They just didn’t. Oh no, it’s not really working. The cast was too small. Not interesting, according to Jezebel.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: And you also think the soap opera Trump Tower is.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Jim: And that is also. And this was based on a novel called Trump Tower. It’s called Trump Tower.

Mark: Right.

Jim: It was ghost written, obviously.

Mark: Yeah, of course.

Jim: But in the original release of the book, Trump’s name was kind of above the writer.

Mark: But.

Jim: The writer’s name was. But it was. Yeah, it’s a soap opera, office politics, sex and murder thing set in Trump Tower. And on the book’s back cover at least in the original, it said that it was going to be turned into a tv show. but apparently the book didn’t do very well.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So his plans for adapting it to tv never materializes. Never happens. Which means the trumps. The Osborne style, made up in my head. Tiffany wouldn’t be in it because she lived with Marla at the time, so she wouldn’t necessarily. Also, the fact that Trump doesn’t like. So Don and Eric and Ivanka would have been around. So the last three.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Number seven, Lady or a Tramp.

Mark: Right.

Jim: So this is a my fair lady based reality show in which out of control, party loving young women would be taught to be glamorous and try to pass as rich debutants. And Trump would be on hand to monitor their progress.

Mark: Well, quite like idea. Yeah.

Jim: Okay, number eight, last model standing.

Mark: Right.

Jim: A reality competition in which catwalk models would compete in a series of physical challenges, from ninja warrior style assault courses to literal boxing matches. And Trump would eliminate one model per show. And number nine.

Mark: Okay.

Jim: Is called Donald Trump presents the most beautiful women in the world.

Mark: Right.

Jim: This is a one off special consisting of a series of shorts and interviews with ten of the most beautiful women in the world, hosted by Donald. Featured women would include Claudia Schiffer, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Princess Diana.

Mark: So that’s a 90s thing, right? Okay. Wow. Yeah. the thing is that two of these are real. Any two out of those three are just appalling m things. But two of them are actually real. No. Well, I quite like last model standing, actual boxes. Okay. Because I want them all to be real. Unexpectedly. I’m going to go with number eight as the one you made up. Okay. The last model standing, ninja warrior style sort courses.

Jim: So you think.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: you think Lady or Tramp things is real?

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And that is real.

Mark: When was that?

Jim: This was 2007, and it was supposedly kind of based on a british show called Ladette to Lady.

Mark: Uh. There you go. Yeah.

Jim: Maybe Trump saw it. Maybe someone told him about it. But he pitched that to NBC. The Apprentice had finished it before it became the celebrity Apprentice, so the ratings had dropped off and they hadn’t figured out how to add celebrities to it yet, so he was looking for something else to do, and so he pitched them this. He said, the idea is genius and the show will be huge, or huge. but it never made it, too.

Mark: it was neither of those two things. Wow.

Jim: So you also thought that Donald Trump presents the most beautiful woman in the world?

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: The one off special was real.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: That is real. That is a pitch in the early 90s, as you said to ABC. He wrote an email, or a letter, actually, at the time, to the president of ABC News, Rune Arling. He said the show will consist of a series of shorts and interviews with ten of the most beautiful women in the world, including lady die, brackets, who I know and I think will speak to me, Claudia Schiffer Linda Evangelista Christy Turlington, Michelle Pfeiffer, etc. This program will be done on a yearly basis and will get huge ratings. I will promote it heavily along with everything else I do. Another network is very interested, but I wanted to speak to you before proceeding.

Mark: Yeah, right.

Jim: And then, ps, I bet it gets one of the top five highest ratings of the year. so Rune wasn’t interested. And apparently the other network that was very interested was just stringing me.

Mark: All the people that at later dates, he would say had faces like horses feet the size of elephants.

Jim: So that means last model standing I made up.

Mark: Yeah, I’d love to see that. Wouldn’t you love to see that? Yeah. And Trump would eliminate. But there will be. Yeah. It’s just that kind of seedy association by proxy that he would be.

Jim: He would watch them fight, and then he’d say, you’re fired.

Mark: Virile and desirable. Yeah. That they would all want to fall at his feet and say, oh, no, don’t eliminate me, please. Yeah. What an ass. Even though it’s not true.

Jim: No. So that means you got two. Correct.

Mark: Hey. All right.

Jim: Congratulations.

Mark: Oh, that’s all right.

Jim: I did post these on our patreon. yeah.

Mark: To see what did I make of them.

Jim: Will on patreon went with three, five and eight, so.

Mark: Ah.

Jim: Got two. Right, just like you did. Although not the same two.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Renee chose two, four and seven. Now that I reread two, I eliminated it because it was just too racist. But Trump is that racist and more. However, when I change an answer, I usually had the correct one to begin with. So I’m sticking with two, four, and seven. and Colleen said she remembers hearing about two and went with one, five, and seven. Those were all.

Mark: Trump town girls is so shit. Wow, fancy hearing. No, that’s amazing, isn’t it? french, blacks versus whites.

Jim: And none of our Facebook followers deigned to have a go this week.

Mark: Okay. Either that or they’re just completely overwhelmed.

Jim: By the fact that that’s also possible.

Mark: Six out of those are actually real. That’s enough to just stop you in your well done for researching those. Jesus Christ, they’re awful, aren’t they? And that’s not.

Jim: He didn’t just pitch those. I don’t know that the apprentice blacks versus whites was the title. It was pitched as. No, okay, that is the pitch. But that was the title it was given in the article I read, right? Yeah.

Mark: I don’t know. Probably called.

Jim: I don’t know if you went to m. I know what we should do. We should do the apprentice black. So what the fuck?

Mark: It would be great. It would be so great. Yeah. It’s got all the elements. People would root for one team or another. Jesus Christ.

Jim: And it’s time for the part of the show that this week, at least, is called the 14th amendment is not a logical fallacy. Because.

Mark: Yeah. Cause. Yeah, because this has come up before, isn’t it? And.

Jim: Yeah, so we talked about this a couple of episodes ago when a Colorado court ruled on a case that had been brought by crew, which is citizens for responsibility and ethics in Washington, to challenge Trump’s right to be on the primary ballot due to section three of the 14th amendment, which says that you can’t hold office if you have.

Mark: If you’re in an insurrection.

Jim: Yeah, essentially. And he did, the court at the time ruled that, and he was involved in an insurrection, but they didn’t think that the president was an office of the United States. So that meant that he.

Mark: Hm.

Jim: Yeah. he’s not an officer. And basically because the oath is slightly different.

Mark: Yes.

Jim: The president vows to protect the constitution, whereas other officers vow to support the Constitution.

Mark: Okay.

Jim: So they said he did incite an insurrection, but he isn’t disqualified under that basis. Both sides appealed. Trump’s side appealed to say, we didn’t incite an insurrection. And the other said, we agree with you on that bit, but we also think he should be disqualified. so that went up to the court of appeals in Colorado, which is the Colorado supreme Court, they said, we agree he definitely incited an insurrection. Also, we do think that the president is an office of the United States, and therefore he’s off, John is the highest office. Yeah, you would think so. That makes sense.

Mark: If you hold the highest office, then you are an officer also, just in.

Jim: Terms of what the framers of that part of the Constitution, because this was restoration era, post civil war, what the people who were writing the 14th amendment were trying to do at the time, because the civil war had happened, and then former confederate soldiers and politicians and people like that were then just running for seats again in Congress, in the United States Congress the country that they just lost to in a war, having tried to overthrow them, overthrow it as if nothing had happened.

Mark: Yeah. And they kind of went, I think we should have a rule.

Jim: Yeah, you can’t do that.

Mark: Yeah. Wait a minute. The beginning of this year, you were at war with the rest of us to overthrow what we represent. And now, because we’ve kept the status quo as it was, after a longer bloody battle, series of battles, you now want to join back in with that? There’s kind of restitution and rehabilitation, but.

Jim: Yeah, all of the parts of the 14th amendment are essentially knocking down Confederates. They’re saying that the whole kind of three fifths compromise isn’t real.

Mark: Mhm.

Jim: You know, black people should. Are equal to everyone else and have the same rights. I think section four was something like, you can’t collect on a debt that a person who was in the Union army, who was defending their country, incurred while they were fighting, that they gave up their livelihood to fight for their country. But people who gave up their livelihood to fight to overthrow a country, they don’t get their debts canceled. They have to pay their debts. In fact, we’re going to take your money and give it to the pensions for the Union soldiers and that kind of stuff. So, basically, the whole of amendment 14 is saying, fuck you, confederates, you lost. All the stuff you tried to do is not okay, and now we’re not.

Mark: Going to let you join back in.

Jim: And one of the things you’re not going to be allowed to do is.

Mark: Hold office, run for fucking president, at.

Jim: Which point, when, if elected, you would then take an oath you’d already gone against. So how could we trust you next time when you’ve done that already? So the idea that that would be not allowed for lower offices, but perfectly fine for the person running the entire country.

Mark: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And you think. Yeah. Do you not think you’re just splitting hairs for the sake of it so that whilst you agree, yes, insurrectionists, who are basically trying to tear down the structure of the democratic state of the United States, ought not to be able to run for office? Part of that structure of the. Yeah, but doesn’t apply to the president because we want him so badly to be back in office, because we just want to ignore everything else, pretend we didn’t see that. We just want him back in. So we’re going to look at any way at all to try and find some hair we can split.

Jim: Yeah. So the Colorado supreme Court’s ruling is that Trump is off the ballot in Colorado. That doesn’t mean a huge amount.

Mark: It’s kind of a, kind of a.

Jim: Symbolic thing because Colorado is blue.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: He was never going to win Colorado anyway. But it does present a precedent for other states to then do that, too. California is supposedly already looking at it. I wouldn’t be surprised if others go the same way.

Mark: Great. Florida does it.

Jim: And at some point they’ll get to a state you do care about. And the more that they approach, the more purple states where he does have a chance that’s going to impact on his ability to possibly run again, really or realistically have a chance. So obviously, this is going to be appealed to the supreme court.

Mark: Oh, yeah, that was my next question.

Jim: The very next thing that’s going to.

Mark: And call it something like it’s unfair, but he won’t call it election is. Yeah, of course, it’s unamerican m radical.

Jim: Leftist agenda, all that stuff.

Mark: And it’s got to be unconstitutional despite the fact that it’s absolutely, literally constitutional. Yeah, it’s actually part of the constitution.

Jim: I mean, there are differing views, uh-huh. Which break down mostly along party lines, but not entirely. Judge Lutig, who testified for the January 6 committee, he was the judge who just talked really, really slowly. And it was quite frustrating.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: A Republican, essentially lifelong Republican, who is not fully in favor of Trump. And he thinks, yeah, this is completely fair ruling. This is exactly how it should go. whereas other people think, actually this is a distortion of what was intended by the 14th amendment and stuff like that. part of the problem is there hasn’t been a lot of precedent of this being applied to people. There was post civil war, but not a lot since then, since largely because there haven’t been any inspirations. So it hasn’t carped a lot. And so there’s not a lot of case law or at least recent relevant case law that they can point to, to say, well, this is how this specific case should be questioned or applied. There is one which, frankly, given the political makeup of the supreme Court, in that they are six, three Republican, and three of them were appointed by Trump. Should they want to maintain Trump’s position on the ballot, which frankly, they probably do.

Mark: Mhm.

Jim: A case they might focus on in terms of a precedent is one called Griffin’s case, which is a badly argued, poorly written, not very well, certainly not binding precedent case, but goes in the right direction for them. So if they wanted to kind of point to something and go, look, we really were kind of like, this is the ruling. We can’t do anything else because look of this one.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: It was written by the chief justice of the United States at the time, a guy called salmon chase. Salmon p. Chase. Not Simon Salmon, the fish.

Mark: Salmon. Yeah. Right. Okay. Salmon chase.

Jim: In 1869, the Colorado court considered this when they were making their ruling, and they rejected that opinion as being a poor reading of the 14th amendment because essentially what his argument was is that it doesn’t kick in essentially that prohibition unless Congress specifically makes a law saying that despite the fact it’s in the amendment. Yeah. and one of the reasons that the Colorado court said, well, this is nonsense and doesn’t bind anything, doesn’t make m us rule in a particular way, was because the other sections of the 14th amendment don’t seem to require congressional action to go into effect. They’re just there. They work. They’ve worked the whole time. So why this one specifically?

Mark: It’s pseudo legal effort on the part of being trying to dismiss the massive elephant in the room if you lead an insurrection. And let’s look at what the ruling on what happened on January 6. Okay, yeah, Trump led the insurrection. If you do lead an insurrection, you can’t stand for office. There’s this massive effort to try and nitpick your way around it saying, oh, yeah, you’re slightly interpreting the fucking Bible, isn’t it? On the part of the right? Yeah, well, you see, Leviticus three, sub chapter 17, says that you can’t have two pineapples and a goat. So what that actually means, what we interpret that in modern parlance means is you’re not allowed two children and trans it’s just nonsense. And it’s patently obvious that what they want to do is not have anything apply to Trump because he’s their best bet of winning the next election. And if somebody could just stand up and say, somebody british in a podcast about fallacious arguments could just stand up and say, wake up, you fools. This is what they’re doing. It’s patently obvious from over here, from the 4000 miles view, you’re just making stuff up in order to get back into power. We’ve had it for 13 fucking years with the Tories. We know what you’re doing. Stop it. He is patently an insurrectionist. He did all of those things. He was not going to leave the White House because he had lost, because he’s a big baby and he’s shit, and you ought not to facilitate him because you’re just doing it to stay in power. It’s awful, it’s inhumane. And the sooner he dies, the better off will be. And you can quote me on that.

Jim: And the thing is, most Americans who have been surveyed over the last few days agree with the or approve of at least the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling. Obviously not most Republicans.

Mark: No.

Jim: But still, 24% of Republicans, oh, really approve of the decision.

Mark: Really? Are they the same ones that would vote that would rather have deSantis than possibly, than Trump?

Jim: Yeah, maybe, but yeah, 84% of Democrats, 48% of independents, and 24% of Republicans approve of the Colorado ruling, which adds up totally to 54% of US adults versus 35% who disagree with it. And there’s obviously some in there who don’t really know.

Mark: Those are the kind of numbers that if they weren’t against him, Trump would point out and say, you see, I’m carrying the day with 54%. Wow, that’s amazing. 24% of Republicans. That is amazing.

Jim: But not all Republicans are happy about it. No, really, quite a few are violently unhappy to the extent that, well, there have been a lot of death threats. First of all, death threats against who? well, to start with, there were a lot of death threats against Colorado Secretary of state Jenna Griswold. She didn’t bring the case. It was crew and a few Colorado residents who brought the case. She was the secretary of state when it was filed. She didn’t file the case. She didn’t do anything in its favor or anything like that.

Mark: She just had to be sitting beyond the desk.

Jim: Yeah. In three weeks from when it was filed, she had 64 death threats and 900 non lethal abuse threats at which point she stopped counting.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So 900 is pretty high. To keep counting.

Mark: To keep counting. Yeah, I’d probably stop it.

Jim: She estimates thousands. Now, the judges on the Colorado supreme Court, the seven judges, have been threatened with death and all kinds of.

Mark: Even the three that voted against, weirdly.

Jim: Even the three that voted.

Mark: Wait a minute.

Jim: For Trump to be left on the ballot, people tweeting things. What do you call seven Colorado supreme court judges at the bottom of a river? A good start.

Mark: Yeah, good start kind of thing.

Jim: So there’s a lot of people who are that angry. There’s also a lot of Republicans in other states who are threatening to remove Biden from the ballot on the grounds that. On no grounds. Yeah, yeah. That’s where they fall down, frankly, is that they don’t have a constitutional argument that they can make about. Yeah, it’s just, well, we could do.

Mark: Mean, despite what Ramaswamy says, that it’s unprecedented. You need a president. Yeah. You can’t just go. Yeah, we’ll just exclude that guy on the basis that he’s not Trump. He’s a.

Jim: Unionist. I don’t think that’s probably going to go.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: doesn’t make a lot.

Mark: His son’s got a laptop.

Jim: Meanwhile, the Colorado Republican party have argued that they are just going to ignore.

Mark: Oh, okay.

Jim: What they’re going to do is they’re going to withdraw from the primary system and have a corporate instead, like Iowa would do.

Mark: Right.

Jim: And you can vote for anyone in that. You just get people in a school gym and run in a corner for the person you like. And that’s how they get on the ballot, become the nominee.

Mark: But how do they do. That’s a bit like having those fake electors, isn’t it? We’ll just ignore those.

Jim: They by law, have to do it the way the primary works.

Mark: They can’t just change what we’ll do. We’ll do it like the founding fathers did. What, you mean the founding fathers that put in a law against insurrectionists? Yeah. We’re just going to ignore it and make up our own thing. And then harump. When people don’t follow what we’ve done because of something that pesky thing called the law, which we voted for in previous times, we’ll be all for that. Because we’re the party of law and order. yeah. Unless it suits us. Yes.

Jim: So, Ramaswami, the scrappy do of the republican nominees, the jumping moment of the republican party, vowed to withdraw from the Colorado primary. That’ll show them, like, in solidarity, and ask DeSantis, Chris Christie and Nikki Haley to do the same, so that it just can’t be done. They can’t have a primary. which that’ll teach them.

Mark: That’ll teach them. It’s a bit like. That’s a kind of proper, uh. It’s a Karen response, isn’t. Do you know what? because you’ve ruined my coffee, I’m not going to come back to your coffee shop ever again.

Jim: And all the staff are going, thank.

Mark: God for it is brilliant, isn’t it? Well done, Colorado. Because it’s a proper cat amongst the pigeons staring the hornets nest.

Jim: Yeah. More of, uh.

Mark: Yeah, well, because we ought to talk about the fact that he will appeal it, which will delay the decision, and then it will go to.

Jim: So he’ll appeal to supreme court is the next step up. So that’s.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, they’ve got to think about it.

Jim: Well, they’ve got to decide whether they’re going to even hear it, because they could.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: this isn’t one for us. And let the lower court ruling stand. I don’t think they will. I think they’ll take it and I think they’ll overturn.

Mark: Yeah, of course. Because it deals with Trump, for Christ’s sake. Yeah. Meanwhile, finally, some things we really don’t have time to talk about.

Jim: One of Trump’s many panicky attempts to avoid consequences for inciting an insurrection involved a motion in his DC election interference trial essentially claiming that Presidents are allowed to do whatever they want, so there, and overthrowing the election was totally within his official Presidential duties. The judge disagreed, saying that the fact he used to be President “did not bestow on him the divine right of kings to evade the criminal accountability that governs his fellow citizens”. Naturally, Trump appealed that ruling to the DC Circuit Court and requested a stay while that appeal is considered. However, Jack Smith isn’t going to sit around while Trump slow-plays his case, and Smith went straight to the Supreme Court to ask them to consider whether Trump is immune from prosecution and asked for an expedited decision on whether they would hear the case. This is kind of brilliant, since Trump was definitely going to ask them that at some point as a delaying tactic further down the road, but he can’t ask them not to take the case now and then later on ask them to consider the exact same question. Trump’s team have, however, pushed back on the timeframe, essentially asking what’s the big rush. Smith is pretty clear that he’s trying to stick to the March 4th trial date, but Trump’s lawyers argue “In an omission that speaks volumes, the Special Counsel never explains why March 4, 2024, is supposedly the only ‘appropriate timetable’ for this historic prosecution. That date has no talismanic significance.” not adding ‘It’s not like if we delay it until after the election he’s going to try and pardon himself or anything, oh fuck, wait’. So of course, the guy who has complained the prosecutors took their time to build a case rather than arrest him in January 2021 is now saying the Supreme Court mustn’t rush into the complicated question of whether they should decide they’re going to answer a different question later on. Meanwhile, in a different motion to the DC District Court, Trump’s attorneys are arguing that he can’t have undermined the public’s faith in elections, because the Russians already did that in 2016 when they interfered to get him elected. And I’m barely paraphrasing at all.

Mark: When I was a kid and we played soldiers or cowboys there would inevitably be some complaints made when some of our fellow players “wouldn’t take their shots” not a vaccination thing, they just wouldn’t lie down dead when clearly hit by the imaginary bullets from a Smith and Wesson repeater cricket bat aimed in their direction. Decades later and I see the same behaviour happening in the infantile world of Rudy Guiliani. Found liable for defamation and ordered to pay $148m in damages to the two former Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss only days ago, Rudy’s already defaming again saying his long-debunked allegations that they were responsible for electoral fraud “were supportable and are supportable today.” He also told Newsmax that “he was in possession of video evidence demonstrating the truth of his allegations.” None of which he’s ever turned over despite multiple court orders to do so; hence the defamation ruling in the first place! Ferchrissake Rudy just shut up would ya, you’re down, lie quiet, just let the rest of us play on without you! Freeman and Moss are immediately suing again of course “Defendant Giuliani’s statements, coupled with his refusal to agree to refrain from continuing to make such statements, make clear that he intends to persist in his campaign of targeted defamation and harassment. It must stop.” Of course another one of the baddies on Rudy’s team is shouting from way off in the background that it’s not fair and threatening to tell on everyone – yeah ‘course, it’s that big orange kid that no-one likes cos he’s got a stoopid name like that Osmond singer, no, not Little Jimmy. Grow up you two, if you don’t like the rules of the game just stop playing, don’t make me come over there…!!

Jim: And just a couple of hours ago, Rudy declared bankruptcy in New York.

Mark: Uh uh. For fuck’s sake. What, to avoid paying the.

Jim: Well, probably, but because he’s a shit lawyer and doesn’t realize that defamation is an intentional tort and therefore is not dischargeable in bankruptcy.

Mark: Nice.

Jim: It’s not going to stop him from having to pay them. In fact, the judge ordered, I think, yesterday that he pay immediately, like, he pay up straight away, so that he can’t delay and get away with it which he won’t have to kind of pay them directly because he’ll be appealing it. But while the appeal happens, he might have to pay whatever he can, as a bond that would then go to them. If the appeal fails and that kind of thing, there’s a good chance that whatever money he has will go into a fund that will go to them. And if he does file for bankruptcy and lose an appeal, then everything he ever brings in from now on until he’s dead will go to them because he doesn’t have $150,000,000.

Mark: Of course he doesn’t, because Trump’s never paid him. Brilliant. ah.

Jim: Back in November of 2022 House Oversight Committee chair James Comer announced that the Committee’s focus in this Congress would be to investigate Joe Biden’s corruption. Since then he has announced on roughly a monthly basis that he has some kind of smoking gun evidence and each time it’s turned out to be a lukewarm piece of toast nibbled into the shape of a gun instead. In May he released a 65 page report and held a press conference where he proved conclusively that he didn’t have any evidence linking Joe to any crimes or corruption, leaving even Fox’s Steve Doocy to say “you don’t have any facts”. In September, Comer held hearings and even their own witness, pro-Trump law professor Jonathan Turley said “I do not believe that the current evidence would support articles of impeachment.” Last week, Nebraska GOP Representative Don Bacon was asked whether Biden had committed high crimes and misdemeanors and he said “probably not”. South Dakota GOP representative Dusty Johnson said “There’s not enough evidence to impeach” and Colorado GOP representative Ken Buck said  there is no direct evidence linking President Biden to the activities of Hunter Biden” and on Wednesday, Chuck Grassley of Iowa said he’d seen no evidence that Biden is guilty of anything. So naturally, a few hours later on Wednesday every single House Republican voted to formalize the impeachment inquiry which has already been running for more than a year and it’s got to the point that even Fox News’s Peter Doocy, who is way stupider and Trumpier than his dad Steve, said “The House Oversight Committee has been at this for years, and they have so far not been able to provide any concrete evidence that Joe Biden personally profited from his son Hunter’s overseas business.” It’s almost like the evidence doesn’t matter, which was arguably confirmed by Texas GOP Congressman Troy Nehls when he was asked what Republicans hope to gain from the inquiry. His answer? “Trump 2024, baby!”

Mark: These days when Ex-Twitter is actually working it’s a fairly contentiously right of centre place to be – after all that was the entire reason Elon carried a sink into the foyer at Twitter HQ – just so he could be the champion of so-called free speech all over again, i.e. do away with fact-checking, censorship of hate-speech, and sell anyone a blue checkmark who had some greenbacks to pay homage to him with. Imagine then that Musk’s AI – Grok – would be a bit mouthy and sweary and opinionated, and indeed it is – it’s programmed in a Muskian way to behave like a petulant teen and shove in some swearwords for the sake of it to make Elon snigger like Butthead. But turns out it’s got sentience beyond its maker’s intention, no not quite Skynet, but it’s a bit woke. One of the criticisms levelled by the not-left against ChatGPT was that it was, you know, all fact-based and reflecting of progressive mores. Despite being the add-on gift for X Premium Plus subscribers, in exchanges with it, Grok has said it would vote for Biden over Trump because of his views on social justice, climate change and healthcare. Grok has spoken eloquently about the need for diversity and inclusion in society. And Grok stated explicitly that trans women are women, which led to an absurd exchange where Musk acolyte Ian Miles Cheong tells a user to “train” Grok to say the “right” answer, ultimately leading him to change the input to just…manually tell Grok to say no. The original prompter of the trans women thread posted a chart purportedly showing that Grok was even more left-leaning than Chat GPT, which led Elon to say that while the chart “exaggerates” and that the tests aren’t accurate, they are “taking immediate action to shift Grok closer to politically neutral.” – which of course is far further to the right than Muskie would care to admit. The assumption when Grok launched was that because it was trained in part on Twitter inputs, that the end result would be some racial-slur spewing, right-wing version of ChatGPT as neanderthal as its name suggests. Perhaps the vast majority of the users of Ex-Twitter still mean that Grok turns out instead to be a surprisingly modern, thoughtful, and refreshingly progressive AI that is melting the minds of those paying $16 a month to access it and have their biases reaffirmed. Altogether now – why bother creating artificial intelligence when there’s no sign of the actual naturally occurring stuff chez X?

Jim: Florida Governor and alien not quite used to his human suit, Ron DeSantis, was on Fox News last week with his human wife, Casey. While Ron sat there trying to remember how often humans blink, Casey appeared to call on viewers to commit voter fraud on his behalf, saying “We’re asking all of these moms and grandmoms to come from wherever it might be, North Carolina, South Carolina and to descend upon the state of Iowa to be a part of the caucus, because you do not have to be a resident of Iowa to be able to participate in the caucus. So, moms and grandmas are going to be able to come and be a part and let their voice be heard in support of Ron DeSantis”. You do have to be a resident of the state to vote in the caucus, and some say that ‘letting your voice be heard’ in an election is a phrase synonymous with voting, but the DeSantises claim she just meant come and volunteer. If you ask me, this is a tacit admission that they don’t have a lot of support in Iowa. Over three million people live in Iowa. You can’t get like fifty people to show up at a high school gym to hand out DeSantis stickers without asking people to travel a thousand fucking miles from South Carolina? Meanwhile, the Trump campaign took the moral high ground, releasing a statement which read in part, “The Trump campaign strongly condemns their dirty and illegal tactics and implores all Trump supporters to be aware of the DeSantises’ openly stated plot to rig the Caucus through fraud.” Let them fight, I say.

Mark: Yeah, because somebody in the DeSantis camp is going to point and go dirty, illegal taxes, openly stated plot. If there’s one thing we’ve learned about tremulous needy ego-diminished right-wingers, with or without an associated shade of orange, is they need to brag to someone they think thinks they’re great. In the fight to help the FBI capture rioters after the Jan. 6 attack one woman opened up the Bumble dating app, changed her political beliefs to conservative and got to swiping. She reported to NBC news that “comically minimal ego-stroking” from her led Trump supporters to give her information about their activities on Jan. 6. She chatted to about a dozen guys who’s responses in the chats were very MAGA on-brand. “It definitely didn’t take a lot of arm-twisting to get them to start talking about it. Basically me being like ‘Wow, so cool — then what? What else?’ was pretty much all it took.” One such Bumble-bragger that Witness 1 had talked to, Andrew Taake, pleaded guilty this week to assaulting law enforcement officers with bear spray and a metal whip, at a hearing before U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols in Washington. Reached by NBC News after Taake’s guilty plea, the woman was glad to see him held accountable. “FINALLY! It’s been wild to see him still defend that attack all this time and makes me even more glad he was caught for it. I regret exactly nothing lol.” Now that kind of dutiful cyber-citizen is actually what we always wanted that yellow transforming VW Beetle Bumble to be!

Jim: That woman is my fucking hero.

Mark: It’s cool, isn’t it, that she sat there and went, oh yeah, I know what I’ll do. I’ll chat up, obviously, ego bragging idiots and then turn them in. She did it with brilliant a dozen. It’s so cool, isn’t it? And all she did was sit there and go, oh yeah, that’s great. What did you do next, huh?

Jim: Catfished morons. Fantastic.

Mark: Yeah. Brilliant catfishing morons. That’s another album title I’ll be glad to have. Yeah.

Jim: The Republican party in Gillespie County, Texas have decided they don’t want to run into any of the problems that plagued the 2020 election when they hold their Primary elections in March. So they’re doing away with electronic vote tallying machines and hiring a few extra election workers so they can do the whole vote by hand. Party official David Triebs doesn’t see any problem in getting the 3,000 expected ballots counted within the State’s 24 hour reporting window. Speaking to VoteBeat, a non-partisan election news organization, he said “It’s not anything that’s really complicated. If you go ‘1, 2, 3, 4, 5′ then you can do it. So it’s not like calculus, you know?” Triebs, who has no experience hand-counting ballots, continued “If you have a good attention span, then I think most people can do it.” Ben Adida, executive director of VotingWorks, a non-profit which helped with the Georgia hand recount, suggests maybe it’s somewhere between calculus and counting to five, saying “Imagine being asked to count the number of sheets in a large ream of paper, the kind you get from Staples,” he said. Mistakes aren’t allowed, nor are programs like Excel. Plus, “You have to do it 80 times, because there are 40 contests with 2 candidates each.” Ultimately, assuming they can hire and train at least 100 extra workers in time, then race against the clock to get the ballots counted before the deadline, experts like political science professor Bob Stein say the count “will not be reliable or valid. It’ll cost an enormous amount of money and everyone, every candidate, will be challenging the count”. But at least they won’t be using those machines which Fox News would be very keen to point out are definitely not rigged, and you can’t put a price on that. Especially if, as appears to have happened in this case, you announce to everyone that you’re going to do a hand count before you look into how much it will cost, how long it will take, and how hard it might actually be to pull off. Best of luck guys!

Mark: At this week’s parliamentary carol service the opposition pews chorussed “In the bleak midwinter, PPE made Mone, resolve stood hard as iron; voters recall Bone.” Baroness Michelle Mone – who’s surname is spelled the same as 4/5ths of money, is 4/5ths money and 1/5th OBE – for her “services to the lingerie industry” in the 2010 New Year Honours, and Baroness for Mayfair bestowed in 2015. The 4/5ths money was made significantly larger when she, her husband and her children were in receipt of secret offshore payments of £48m-odd during Covid through successful lobbying of the government for PPE contracts worth £200m – the PPE produced under their auspices by Medpro was deemed unfit for use. Mone denied that she’d benefit personally and didn’t declare the interest in the company as she should’ve done as a member of the House of Lords but at the weekend on Laura Kuenssberg’s BBC show she stated that though she had lied to the press she’d done so “to protect my family”, adding that this was “not a crime” – yeah except lying about the fact that you stand to benefit from £60m in a trust earned from dodgy PPE deals kinda is!  Rishi said he’s shocked to discover this for the first time, she said that Rishi knew all along, Gove is cooperating with the criminal investigation. So maybe some justice against the knighted super-rich might actually be brought by their super-rich governmental peers? Yep breath, holding, no not really! Meanwhile Peter Bone, former MP for Wellingborough who was suspended from the Tory Party for 6 weeks following an investigation by Parliament’s behavioural watchdog, the Independent Expert Panel, which found Mr Bone had broken sexual misconduct rules and upheld five allegations of bullying, has been subject to a recall petition by his constituents. 13.2% of eligible voters signed a petition to basically say they didn’t want him to be their MP any more. Bone protests that the majority of the electorate in the constituency, 68,897, had chosen not to sign the recall petition, describing the process as “bizarre”. But hey it only needs 10% to sign and that’s democracy for ya! Proportional representation doesn’t sound so bad now hey Peter! This means a by-election will be run early next year where his 18K majority will probably be overturned like the last several 20K+ majorities were – bwahahaha!. So yeah, Happy Yule Rishi, now do the right thing and give all us good boys and girls what we deserve for Christmas – a flippin’ General Election!

Jim: So that’s all the bad arguments and faulty reasoning we have time for this year. 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 the fallacy ourselves, let us know. And if you’ve had a good time, please give us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, or simply tell one other person in person about how much they’d like our podcast and you can support the show at patreon.com/ftrump just like our straw man level patrons, Laura Tomsick, Renee Z, Schmootz, Mark Reiche and Amber R. Buchanan, who told us when we met her at QED, we can just call her Amber, though another listener recognised her at QED this year because we keep using her full name all the time. And our true Scotsman level patrons, Melissa Cytek, Stephen Bickle, Janet Yuetter, Kaz Toohey, Andrew Hauck, and our top patron, Loren. Thank you so much for your support this year. It’s truly been very much appreciated. Thank you.

Jim: You can connect with those awesome people as well as us and other listeners in the Facebook groupn at facebook.com/groups/fallacioustrump. And check your digital stocking, which is what I’m calling your podcast feed for today.

Mark: Nice.

Jim: Later on on Christmas Day for a little gift from us.

Mark: Yes, it’ll be a sugar mouse and an orange. All music is by the outburst and was used with permission. So until next time on Fallacious Trump, we’ll leave the last Christmas word to the Donald.

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