Scapegoating – FT#141

23 Jan Scapegoating – FT#141

Posted at 02:01h in Fallacies by
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Show Notes

The Scapegoating fallacy occurs when someone unfairly blames a problem on an already unpopular person or group.

Trump

We started out by discussing this clip of Trump blaming China for COVID:

And then we looked at this clip of Trump blaming immigrants for crime:

Finally, we talked about this tweet from Elon Musk:

Mark’s British Politics Corner

Mark talked about James Daly MP blaming the parents for child poverty.

And he followed that up by talking about a clip of Robert Jenrick blaming a specific but unnamed lawyer for his inability to do his job, and claiming he named the person in this article. (he didn’t)

Fallacy in the Wild

In the Fallacy in the Wild we looked at this Little Caesar’s ad:

Matt Swanson – Little Caesars – “Scapegoat” (Director’s Cut) from Cindy & Lyle on Vimeo.

Then we discussed this clip from In Sickness and In Health:

And we finished by talking about this clip from Bob’s Burgers:

 

Fake News

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

  1. Everyone knows I gave the farmers billions of dollars, tens of billions actually, which I got from China. China. No other President in history could get anything from China, I beat them very easily. Very easily. It was one of the – but what people don’t realize is that I also got billions for the fishermen. They were dying before I got in – fishermen weren’t able to feed their families they had so many regulations and they weren’t allowed to fish, but I saved them – I opened up the oceans again for the beautiful New Hampshire fishermen.
  2. We’re also going to place strong protections to stop banks and regulators from trying to de-bank you from your… you know, your… your political beliefs. What they do. They want to de-bank you and we’re going to de-bank. Think of this – they want to take away your rights. They want to take away your country. The things they’re doing. All electric cars, give me a break. If you want an electric car good, but they don’t go far, they’re very expensive, they’re going to be made in China.
  3. We have more liquid gold and wealth under our feet than any other nation we have more liquid gold – oil and gas – more liquid gold. Well I just met non-liquid gold. You know where it was? Iowa. It’s called corn. They have… it’s non-liquid. That’s my take. You have more non-liquid gold. They said ‘what is that?’ I said ‘corn.’ They said ‘we love that idea.’ You know that’s a pretty cool thought, isn’t it? That’s a nickname in its own way but we came up with a new word for – new couple of words for corn.

Mark got it right AGAIN this week (that’s eleven games in a row!), and is on 52%!

 

Reed Galen is not a logical fallacy

Jim talked to our guest, political analyst, co-founder of the Lincoln Project, and host of the Lincoln Project podcast, Reed Galen.

 

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

  • It’s the most wonderful time of the year, the Trump trial season. It seems like it starts earlier and lasts longer every year, doesn’t it? We start with the immunity hearing in the DC District Court of Appeals. Trump’s lawyer D. John Sauer was making the ambitious claim that former Presidents can only be prosecuted if they’ve already been successfully impeached and convicted by the Senate. One of the three judge panel, Judge Florence Pan decided to test the logic of his argument. She asked if a President could order Seal Team 6 to assassinate his political rival. Sauer floundered a bit and started talking about what the founders intended, and Judge Pan said “I asked you a yes or no question. Could a president who ordered SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival, who was not impeached, would he be subject to criminal prosecution?” Sauer’s answer was yes, but only if he had been impeached and convicted first. Obviously Trump is going to lose this, and then it will be appealed, probably first for an en banc hearing and then to the Supreme Court. If at any point this argument is accepted by a court then Trump’s 2024 court schedule will get a lot lighter, but his running-from-SEAL-team-six schedule will fill right up. In Trump’s NY civil fraud trial, Trump himself wanted to give the closing arguments and at first, Judge Arthur Engoron was open to the idea, obviously understanding the entertainment potential, but asked Trump if he would stick to relevant matters and not make a campaign speech of personally attack the Judge, the DA or their staff. Naturally Trump didn’t accept those terms, so as is traditional, his lawyers gave the summation of the case. They then asked again if Trump could speak and the Judge asked again if he could limit himself to the case, at which point Trump just started talking and of course immediately ranted about the fact he’s being persecuted and attacked the DA and the Judge. Engoron allowed him to continue for another minute, then adjourned for lunch. Finally, in his defamation case against E Jean Carroll, Judge Kaplan threatened to have Trump removed from the courtroom because he wouldn’t stop loudly mumbling about how unfair it all was and calling the case a con job and a witch hunt within earshot of the jury. Given that said jury gets to decide how much he owes Ms Carroll, I’m not sure it’s a great idea to continue to defame her in front of the jury while on trial for defamation. But you do you, Donald.
  • Well as Lewis Carroll would have pointed out we had a caucus race in balmy Iowa this week- the minus 45 degree 10 minute frostbite warning didn’t deter the self-heating and furious voting population and, of course, without lifting a tiny finger ol’ I-don-t-get-out-of-a-court-room-to-rally-to-any-fewer-than-500-people Trump trumped home to win 54% of the vote. Annoyingly he won across most demographics; the college-educated and those without a degree; men and women; urban, suburban and rural voters; and evangelical Christians. He won 98 of Iowa’s 99 counties, losing Johnson County, the home of the University of Iowa, by a single vote to Nikki Haley – which he, as yet, is not complaining about, perhaps cos of his utter faith in the unimpeachable (har-har) security of the “write your preferred candidates name on a piece of paper in a crowded public bar and put it into a hat” method. The only demographic he didn’t scoop up, the moderates – who all (all? I’m surprised there are moderates – this was a race between candidates all on the same side – the GOP – after all!) voted for Haley, with voters ages 17 to 29, backing DeSantis. Haley and DeSantis took just enough of the vote to insist they were his main rival in New Hampshire, the next state to vote, ensuring the field will remain divided against him, so we’ll have to go through the same sorry fiasco all over again. One good thing tho – Vivek “rhymes with cake” but “he’s just scum” Ramaswamy dropped out of the race handing his voters over to Trump – I bet they’re thrilled! The weather did cut the voters down from 187,000 in 2016 to 100,000: and, a little perspective,  at only 100,000 that’s less than half the number who voted in last year’s Philadelphia mayoral primary and less than one-fifth of the number who voted in last year’s Chicago mayoral election. Though whilst we can try to dismiss it as an unimportant beating of butterfly wings on the other side of the world … we might wanna start saving up for one-way SpaceX tickets to Mars again!   
  • Minnesota’s Borat, Mike Lindell is claiming that he’s been cancelled by Fox News, with the network refusing to run ads for his lumpy pillows in retaliation for hiring former Fox host Lou Dobbs to anchor shows on conspiracy website FrankSpeech.com. But hiring Lou Dobbs is surely punishment enough in itself, and indeed, according to a person with knowledge of the situation who spoke to the Washington Post, his ads are just paused because he hasn’t paid them for months. The right wing is full of grifters like Dinesh D’Souza who have got very rich pretending that Trump won in 2020, but I think Lindell really believes it, and has spent millions of dollars trying to actually prove the baseless conspiracy theories instead of focusing on milking the rubes, and so Lindell’s been having money problems for a while, leading to him selling off all his factory equipment for twelve dollars and some magic beans a few months ago. He says “it should be almost illegal that you don’t accept money to buy ads when you’ve been doing it this long” because like all good Republicans he believes private businesses should be able to do what they like until it affects him personally. He added that he spends 1 to 2 million dollars a week on ads on Fox, and I think I’ve spotted another problem with his business model. 
  • In the absence of Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman we can always depend on Stan Laurel but gone to the Dark Side; Roger Stone to provide some light relief. In a recording published by Mediaite, Stone purportedly told a friend at a restaurant in Florida in the weeks before the 2020 election “Let’s go find Swalwell. It’s time to do it. Then we’ll see how brave the rest of them are. It’s time to do it. It’s either Swalwell or Nadler has to die before the election. They need to get the message. Let’s go find Swalwell and get this over with. I’m just not putting up with this shit anymore.” The US Capitol Police are investigating the remarks with the help of the FBI, remarks which in true Henry II “what do you mean you killed Thomas Becket all I said was…” fashion, Stone denies it all saying “I never spoke about assassinating anyone,” in an X post Thursday. “Fake Mediaite can’t produce the recording they claim to have.” Mediaite “has produced NO audio of me threatening 2 Dem Congressmen. Where is it? Post it !” And of course they went ahead and did so. The alleged remarks came after Reps. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) and Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) members of the House Judiciary Committee, had said in July 2020 that Trump had “infected our judicial system with partisanship and cronyism,” Swalwell commented “This is what Trump and his real-life thugs do: they try to intimidate opponents and will always choose violence over voting.” And there we were continuing to miss The Sopranos and wondering what to fill that hole in our lives with and it’s been staring us in the face all along! Ol’ Don Trump-e-lone inspiring dastardly deeds in the name of loyalty – that’s another fine mess he’s gotten you into Roger! Mmm-mmm!   
  • The House Oversight committee held a hearing on Wednesday about whether to hold Hunter Biden in contempt for ignoring a subpoena to testify behind closed doors. Hunter, who had offered to testify in a public hearing, showed up and sat in the front row, only to be yelled at by Nancy Mace who told him “You’re the epitome of white privilege. Coming into the Oversight Committee, spitting in our face, ignoring a congressional subpoena to be deposed. What are you afraid of? You have no balls to come up here today.” Jared Moskowitz pointed out that they could hear from Hunter right now if they wanted, but since that is absolutely not what they want, he was quickly shouted down by Mace and Committee Chairman James Comer. Texas Democrat Jasmine Crockett, who is a Black woman, objected to Nancy Mace, who is not, trying to invoke white privilege and then explained for the hard of thinking like Marjorie Taylor Greene why Hunter asked for a public hearing: “Let me tell you why nobody wants to talk to you behind closed doors — because y’all lie.” Moskowitz had another go, asking for a vote to see how many of the GOP committee members wanted to hear from Hunter right now, since he’s in the room, and only one hand went up, which I think was to ask a question. Finally, when the committee was getting ready to vote on recommending contempt charges, Moskowitz again took the floor and said he would vote to hold Hunter in contempt if his Republican colleagues would vote to do the same with people who had ignored subpoenas from the Jan 6 committee such as Scott Perry, Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, Mo Brooks, Andy Biggs and Kevin McCarthy. They didn’t seem to think this was a good idea.
  • According to a list obtained and published by the nonprofit PEN America, the Escambia County school district lists more than 1,600 books “banned pending investigation in December 2023.” Among titles on the list are: John T. Alexander’s “Catherine the Great: Life and Legend” and Anne Frank’s “Diary of a Young Girl.” Also on the list are “Merriam-Webster’s Elementary Dictionary,” “The Bible Book,” “The World Book Encyclopedia of People and Places,” “Guinness Book of World Records, 2000,” “Webster’s Dictionary and Thesaurus for Students,” and “The American Heritage Children’s Dictionary.” A spokesperson for the Escambia school district said oh they’re not banned, they’ve just been pulled for review under the HB 1069 bill  – the bill approved by Gov. Ron DeSantis last year which, along with requiring schools to teach that “reproductive roles are binary, stable and unchangeable” and limiting education regarding sexual health, also bans schools from having books that depict or describe “sexual conduct” or “is inappropriate for the grade level and age group for which the material is used.” Escambia Superintendent Keith Leonard told the Pensacola News Journal that the district was making “great strides” to adhere to HB 1069, but Stephana Ferrell, director of research and insight at the Florida Freedom to Read Project, told CBS News that within the last five months, fewer than 100 titles have been reviewed by the district. I’m guessing that with the red mist descending every 3 lines they’re finding it difficult to actually do any reading. Also, where do you go to look up the definitions of whether this is inappropriate or sexual conduct if the dictionaries and encyclopaedias have gone! Ah yes of course we just have to refer to our Florida lawgivers with their vast panoply of thought and experience. Meanwhile, Stephana Ferrell points out “Most of these books, though pulled temporarily as the district has stated, will never be accessible in the school library for most current secondary students.” Yep, keep ‘em ignorant and they won’t learn enough to not vote Republican – Margaret Attwood foresaw that long-game approach way back when and we were all blind to it – that’s if we could find a copy of course!
  • Oklahoma State Representative Justin Humphrey is the latest local GOP lawmaker to achieve national recognition for hearing that kids identify as animals and, rather than checking if that’s real, immediately trying to legislate against it. In House Bill 3084, students who “purport to be an imaginary animal or species” or who “engage in anthropomorphic behavior, commonly referred to as furries” will not be allowed to participate in class or school activities, and if their parents can’t come and pick them up – and I swear I’m not making this up – “animal control will be contacted to remove the student”. Sadly, as we’ve discussed before, this is a non-existent problem that Humphrey is trying to solve, because I would love to see the animal control guy turn up at a school and be pointed towards a 6th grader called Kevin wearing a unicorn costume. Honestly, if this bill passes, imagine the shenanigans. I for one would gladly have said I was a dolphin to get out of a 5 mile cross country run. Kids who didn’t study for the test or just don’t like math will be going for rides in the back of the animal control van instead. There’s probably puppies when you get to animal control, too. It’s win-win! In case you think Representative Humphrey was just having a bad day but is usually great, some of the other Bills he’s sponsored over the last few years were to get cockfighting reduced from a  felony to a misdemeanor, classify Hispanic gang members as terrorists, and require women to get written consent from the father of the fetus in order to get an abortion, on the grounds that women are just ‘hosts’. What a guy!
  • Britpol – Tory MPs have been acting against their party’s wishes to add amendments to the Rwanda Bill in order to make it easier to ignore International Human Rights Laws. This has meant that some of them had to resign from key positions; Lee Anderson and Brendan Clarke-Smith for example – no great loss really. Ultimately though they knew that their tabled amendments would lose, so was it just a gesture? (some say flipping the bird or flicking the vees are just gestures) a pointless and very visible gesture of party disunity and a snub to the PM in an election year without a care for how the public might view their petty fractured in-fighting? Of course the amendments failed to be adopted and those 60 odd rebel MPs that voted for those i.e against the bill as it stood, went on to stand firm in their resolve until the prospect of their actions bringing down the PM and thus the government and ushering in a general election before they could get anyone to fly to Rwanda and before they could cut inheritance tax in March to keep the three remaining eye-wateringly rich and teetering old to vote them in again – put them off – oh if only I had their moral fibre. Rishi’s latest, and only, criticism of The Labour Party is that they haven’t got a plan, and cos he’s got a plan then that’s what counts – Hmm the politician’s fallacy again right there – something must be done here’s something let’s do that. Aaaand yeah Rish me old mate, aaand Keir doesn’t have to have a plan cos he’s not in charge yah tiny fool! Meanwhile Labour MP Jess Phillips pointed out that in all this the Tory Home Office is spending about £169,000 per person to be deported to Rwanda and in the year since the establishment of the fund to support the 100,000 victims of child sexual abuse in 2023 the Home Office spent just £45 per victim. Priorities Rishi, priorities! And finally former environment minister Therese Coffey’s only line of attack was to accuse Yvette Cooper of not even getting the country right when speaking about the Kigali Government  “show some respect it’s Rwanda NOT Kigali” of course Kigali is the capital of Rwanda. Yeah she wasn’t ever minister for geography though, hmmmm!

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:

 Scapegoating – FT#141 Transcript

Jim: Hello, and welcome to Fallacious Trump, the podcast where we use the insane ramblings of an inveterate sparpler to explain logical fallacies. I’m your host, Jim.

Mark: And I’m your other host, Mark. A logical fallacy is an error in reasoning that results in bad or invalid arguments. And, ah, the logical fallacy we’re looking at this week, the right way round, is Scapegoating. When I read inveterate sparpler, I thought invertebrate – and a sparpler? Well, is that like something like a damp sparkler?

Jim: Sparple is a verb which means to deflect attention from one thing by making a big fuss of something else entirely.

Mark: Yeah, that’s a good word.

Jim: It’s a great word. It’s a 14th century English word. To sparple.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: So Scapegoating. Yeah, this is a fairly straightforward one in terms of understanding what it is. I think everyone knows what scapegoating is. It comes from a Bible story. It is about blaming someone else for your problems or another group, usually an already put upon group. Ideally, people who can’t fight back get all your problems kind of laid at their feet. The story is supposedly that in Israel, they would sacrifice one goat and put all of the sins of the people onto another goat and send it off into the wilderness. That goat escapes being sacrificed. The escape goat, essentially.

Mark: Right. It’s not a goat that wanders in the landscape.

Jim: No, it escapes being sacrificed. It goes into the wilderness, and that is where any judgment that is required to come on those sins would then reach.

Mark: I think goats get a bad deal, certainly in the Christian religion, because of their eyes, mainly.

Jim: Yeah, they are weird.

Mark: They’re kind of associated with. That’s goat headed demons.

Jim: Absolutely.

Mark: Quite a familiar thing, isn’t it? Exactly, yeah.

Jim: So, psychologically speaking, scapegoating, putting down minority groups, people who are unable to fight back, essentially, is theoretically a way for groups to stop a cycle of violence and attacks. Because historically, when blood feuds and things like that were a thing, one group would attack another group, the other group would be expected to attack back. So at some point, when someone says, oh, it wasn’t us, it was those people who can’t fight back. It was those people who everyone hates, that ends the cycle of violence.

Mark: Because those people aren’t going to fight back.

Jim: Exactly. Yeah.

Mark: Right. Yeah.

Jim: So for that reason, it tends to be someone who is an underdog, usually, who then gets scapegoated.

Mark: Right.

Jim: You don’t scapegoat powerful people.

Mark: It makes me think of, what’s the one where you have like in a pride of wolves? No, it’s not pride, is it? Bunch of wolves. Packet of wolves.

Jim: Packet of wolves.

Mark: Yeah, packet of wolves.

Jim: Five packs. Usually they come in, don’t they?

Mark: Yeah, exactly.

Jim: Unless you get one of those 20% extra free packs, you get six.

Mark: Oh, yeah. Where you might get six wolves for the price of five.. Well, then you’ve got one spare, which becomes the scapegoat or whatever. The wolf equivalent. No. Because I remember going to a forest somewhere. Uh, it was a wildlife park with wolves

Jim: This anecdote is getting very stretchy

Mark: and went and read one of the things, and it says, don’t worry about the wolf, that all of the wolves are beating on, because that’s what happens. They designate a scapegoat in the wolf pack, and that…

Jim: The runt of the litter – that kind of thing.

Mark: Well, kind of.

Jim: You went to a wild forest that might have been a wildlife park, and they put a sign up saying Don’t worry about the badly chewed wolf that the others are attacking, because that’s fine. It’s okay in the wolf species, it happens.

Mark: And if we took him out, if we took that one away, they’d just.

Jim: Pick on another one.

Mark: Then they would pick on another one. Yeah.

Jim: It’s like a broken biscuit at the top of the packet.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Can’t just leave out the top biscuit because then the other one will get broken.

Mark: Yeah. It’s like, I don’t like Mondays. So we’ll just not work on a Monday then. Because Tuesday will be the new Monday. Yeah.

Jim: No way around it. Wolves, biscuits days, they’re all the same.

Mark: Yeah. Scapegoats. And you said my anecdote was a bit stretched.

Jim: Well, so anyway, that was weird.

Mark: But there are scapegoats happen, apparently.

Jim: To wolves as well, even if you’re a wolf. In our first trump example, he called coronavirus the China virus, quite a lot. He doesn’t do it in this clip, I don’t think. But he does blame the Chinese for it as a whole.

Jonathan Karl: This is worse than the most deadlier, than the most strenuous flu.

Donald Trump: Okay.

Jonathan Karl:: And then you went out and said, it’s just like the flu.

Donald Trump: What I went out and said is very simple. Listen, what I went out and said is very simple. I want to show a level of confidence and I want to show strength as a leader and I want to show that our country is going to be fine one way or the other. Whether we lose one person, we shouldn’t lose any because this shouldn’t have happened. This is China’s fault. This is nobody’s fault but China. China should not have allowed it to happen.

Mark: We almost see the man behind the curtain there because what I wanted to do was just to show strength as a leader and convince everybody that we’d be fine one way or another. Whether we lose one…

Jim: Or as it turns out, hundreds of thousands.

Mark: Hundreds of thousands. Yeah, but in order to kind of diffuse and distract, he just kind of quickly heads east and yeah, we shouldn’t lose any, but it doesn’t actually make any difference. The fact that it’s come from China, it might have come from the moon, doesn’t make any difference about how you’re dealing with it locally and if you’re cocking it up.

Jim: Yeah, but by repeatedly reporter suggests calling it the China virus, talking about it coming from China and saying it’s their fault and they shouldn’t have let it come to the US and so on. He is trying to spread the blame around really away from him and onto them for the impact that it had. And the reality is that countries much, much closer to China with much closer links, like Vietnam, Thailand, had much less of an issue in terms of proportion of population, rate of growth and that kind of thing because they dealt with it differently.

Mark: Right.

Jim: What he’s trying to do is get you to ignore the fact that it was his policies that caused a lot of the problems, not least the fact that he was constantly telling people it wasn’t a big deal.

Mark: Yeah, quite. Which is what the reporter was saying. You’re just saying it was a bit of a flu. The reporter said something and he points at him and goes, listen. And he does that bully thing where if somebody’s going to interrupt him to correct him for being an idiot, he just gets. You’re stupid. Or. That’s a really nasty question. And it’s, uh.

Jim: That bully in the playground stuff, I think in this. This is Jonathan Karl from ABC who was asking the question and I think it was in this coronavirus briefing that he kind of had a go at Karl and said he’s a disgrace to ABC or ABC should be ashamed of him or something like.

Mark: Yeah. Asking questions of the president, holding leaders to account. How dare. Yeah.

Jim: So obviously, given that Trump never takes the blame for anything at. Yeah, there could be quite a lot of examples of this. Um, but one of the other main groups that he pushes the problems of America onto is immigrants.

Donald Trump: Republicans want strong borders and no crime. Very simple, not complex. Democrats want open borders and crime, crime, crime happens automatically when you have those open borders. The Democrats want to let the country be overrun. Just take a look at what’s going on. Everybody comes in, including the vile gang M s 13, which Nancy Pelosi has gone out and wants to protect.

Mark: It just goes on and on, doesn’t it? The little kind of bouncing ball of blame and tangent and other blame.

Jim: Yeah, absolutely. So it’s the Democrats fault for wanting open borders because open borders lead to crime, because immigrants and immigrants, basically the same as Ms 13, that gang, which again, then going back to Nancy Pelosi, it’s her fault because she wants to protect MS 13. So, yeah, it’s that group of. It’s shoving those people together and saying this crime. Because obviously, if Republicans got their way and had strong borders, there’d be no crime.

Mark: No, that’s right. Yeah, absolutely. And oddly, the Republicans were in power for four years under Trump and had the opportunity to. And what happens was the guy who was advocating no crime was the most criminally liable of them. Yeah. Because if you shut the doors, then only the people inside the doors will do the crime.

Jim: Yeah. And obviously, I mean, it shouldn’t need saying, but most of that is complete fabrication. Nancy Pelosi didn’t want to protect MS 13 or anything like that. When he called them animals. She said, I don’t think it’s right to call people animals.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: That was the extent to which she defended Ms 13. And that was using quite a broad interpretation of what Trump was saying at the time, which a lot of people interpreted to be calling immigrants in general animals. I think he was specifically talking about gangs, but it could be read to be immigrants. And I think that’s what Pelosi was responding to in that. But even if it was just MS 13, it’s still, I agree, not good to call people animals. It’s also very much not true to say that MS 13 would not be in the US if the borders were strong because it started in LA. Right. It’s a big gang inside the border. It’s a big gang that started in LA among largely people from El Salvador and places around that area. The reason that it spread throughout parts of south and Central America is because in 92 the government then deported a lot of those gang members back to El Salvador.

Mark: Right.

Jim: So that gang that was previously just an LA gang, built up in south and Central America as well, and spread into other areas, and it’s now still about half of the huge gang are in LA. And in general, the crime level among immigrants is way lower than the crime level among native born Americans. Maybe it’s not the immigrants. So our final example in this section is from Elon Musk.

Mark: Ah.

Jim: Who I think is sufficiently in Trump world to qualify for this. And this is from September of last year. He tweeted, our us advertising revenue is still down 60%, primarily due to pressure on advertisers by the antidefamation league. That’s what advertisers tell us in brackets. So they almost succeeded in killing mean. It’s possible that advertisers told them that, but it’s certainly not what advertisers have told everyone else. No, because all the advertisers who have said anything in public, or whose private correspondence has been leaked or released in public.

Mark: Mhm.

Jim: It’s all been about what a fucking fascist hellscape Twitter is becoming and how they don’t particularly like having their products being advertised next to white supremacist tweets. That’s a bad thing.

Mark: Fair enough.

Jim: Which is largely what the Anti Defamation league are arguing against. They’re saying, don’t be anti semitic, don’t be racist. Twitter is both those things. So if they have had any success in pressuring advertisers to leave, it’s only because those advertisers are like, I mean, that’s a good point. We should probably distance our product from.

Mark: This stuff from that. Yeah, might be good. Might not do our product much. Reputation wise. It is very Trump like to blame the failing app, Twitter being solely down to Elon Musk. Blame it on something else. Blame it on advertisers leaving because of the things that he’s done to it.

Jim: There’s a lot of things you can point to of the changes that he’s m made since buying it that are plausible reasons why it has not done very well since. Yeah, he’s made some really weird decisions and some outright racist statements, and now.

Mark: He’s blaming people for going, for leaving because the place is outrightly racist and awful. An advertiser going, yeah, I don’t really want to be on the same platform as white supremacists and Trump and all those people that were no longer on there.

Jim: Yeah, the people he’s allowing back on there and then monetizing their outrage, peddling.

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

Mark: So we could have simply talked again about the post office and the government and Fujitsu scapegoating post office employees on an industrial scale for the best part of three decades. But I thought, I’ll keep it light. We’re back in the news again. 30. Uh, P Lee Anderson blaming those who didn’t know how to budget or cook properly for the existence of food banks. Well, here’s a quick reminder of the loathsome patronizer of his local food bank in Ashfield, Nottinghamshire.

Lee Anderson There’s not this use, this massive use for food banks in this country. We’ve got generation after generation who cannot cook properly, they can’t cook a meal from scratch, they cannot budget. The challenge is there..

Mark: So basically he’s blaming the people that can’t cook and can’t budget for patronizing food banks and for the existence of food banks. And we talked about that in episode 100, I think. And he also went on to say the next day that he has cooked a meal for 30 p, which is where his moniker comes from, from scratch and where he’s probably got one of his own people to do it, because he’s been on a salary of 89,000 a year as an MP since 2019 and 100,000 a year from GB News for 8 hours work a week since March 23, in an echo of that on December 28 2023. So this is the real example, the MP for Berry North, James Daley, told i Newspaper, which is an online tabloid version of the Independent. “Most of the kids who struggle in Bury are the products of crap parents. And so what do we do to try that? Try to address that issue on the left? It will be. We just throw money at it and hope something sticks. Somebody like me thinks about this more fundamentally. And he added that politicians need to be brave enough to say such things. And obviously politicians also need to be schooled in Tory policy enough to scapegoat the very people who they are serving the least. Because the figures from the Department of Work and Pensions show that 22.8% of children in the Berry area were living in poverty for the year ending April 2022, up from 18.9% in 2014 to 15, when comparable records began. And the Tory MP had been in charge since 2010. SIGOMA, the special interest group of municipal authorities, found in May 23 that Berry council has had a 22% cut in their budget over the last 14 years, coincidentally, the length of time the Tories have been in power. Berry is part of the larger, Greater Manchester City Council, and in 2022, a Labour council said the scale of council cuts in Manchester since austerity, when that austerity was the period after 2008 where David Cameron’s government instigated, a public spending cutting exercise, which they then announced the end of austerity, and that there was lots of money to give tax cuts as a result of the fact that they not spent money on public spending. So central government funds local councils to enable them to spend and maintain public services to the populace. And since austerity, so since the Tories have been in power, they identified that the scale of the council cuts in Manchester would be enough to buy Manchester United Football Club, which was valued by Forbes at 4.8 billion pounds. And so buried council is facing a 23 million pound gap in funding for the next year, even after a planned rise of 5% on council tax bills, which is basically the subscription that each constituent pays for their council services. But less than a third of the budget comes from council tax payments from the central government. The rest is from central government. And if you’re in a poor area, the property is. So council tax is rated on the value of your property. If you’re in a poor area, your property is valued less, so you pay less council tax. So consequently, it’s a vicious circle, which means that the council has less money to spend. James Daley, who said all these scapegoaty things, won his seat in 2019 with the lowest majority nationally. 105 votes, beat James Frith from Labour as a result of. He was one of the ones that got in on Boris’s let’s get Brexit done, because Barry north voted 54% to 45% to leave the EU. And the whole of the Brexit campaign was to scapegoat the EU.

Jim: Absolutely.

Mark: For the failings of delivery of service by countless years of Tory government.

Jim: yeah, very much. Look around you at all of the stuff that we’re in charge of. Look how shit it all is. It’s Europe’s fault.

Mark: Yes, let’s blame it over there and then we don’t have to take the blame. And also, possibly as a result of the scapegoating of the EU in 2011 by former Berry MP David Nuttall, no relation to Paul Nuttall of the UKIPs, who handed Prime Minister David Cameron a petition of 100,000 signatures calling for an in out referendum on Britain’s membership thereof.

Jim: What is James Daly’s plan for solving the problem of crap parents, because he looks at this fundamentally.

Mark: It’s certainly not to throw money at them.

Jim: Definitely not to give them money. No, absolutely not. Don’t give crap parents money. Uh, because they’ll just do more crap with it. But he has a fundamental solution, surely. No, because he thinks about it fundamentally.

Mark: No, of course not. No. Ah, yes, you would think. But he’s brave enough to say.

Jim: Brave enough to blame the parents, whoever’s fault. It is definitely not the government.

Mark: Yeah. No, but it’s not the fact that they’ve suffered a 22% loss.

Jim: No, it’s not. Because we’re massively underfunding them and not investing in supporting their local areas or their schools or anything like that at all.

Mark: Or the out of school provision. Yes, quite all the campaigns to keep people off drugs.

Jim: Basically, it’s not anything that we’re going to do anything about m or that we could be expected to be held responsible for.

Mark: Yes, it’s Dickensian, isn’t. Know. If there were no poor people, then there would be no workhouses, ergo the workhouses and the latter day workhouses. The food banks only exist because poor people can’t budget well or can’t make a meal from scratch. Well, yeah, you still need money to buy things to make it from scratch. So, anyway, just to round off the irony blindness of James Daly, he also said about Nigel Farage, I know Nigel. I think Nigel is basically a right of center Conservative. He seems to share many of our values. Like investing in northern towns. Uh, exactly. So why not? Why shouldn’t he rejoin the Tory party? And he also says the challenge for Nigel to become a bit more mainstream would be to come away from being this person who can say what he wants. So, yeah, there’s James Daley saying what he wants and then he says, Nigel’s like us investing in northern towns. And my question for him is, can you actually hear yourself saying stuff when you talk? James Daly? Yeah. Anyway looping back round to 30 p. Lee, he’s back in the news because he’s resigned his position as deputy chair of the conservative party on Tuesday night in order to vote for an amendment to the Rwanda bill ahead of its third hearing in the Commons on Wednesday night, saying that the bill doesn’t go far enough to stop the votes of asylum seekers. The Rwanda bill is a multi-layered onion scapegoating. It’s the problem with people fleeing their situations and risking their lives to come to Britain or any other country that seemed to be safer than their own, isn’t just the traffickers scapegoated for selling them passage, nor the asylum seekers themselves, who are variously scapegoated as economic migrants and rapists and criminals. Nor indeed are immigrants to blame for anything they’re scapegoated for. At the core of the actual problem is something to do with the west complicity and supplying arms to wars in regions far from our shores and supporting conflict that leads people to flee for their own safety. The Rwanda bill is offered as a panacea to distract us from the lack of progress in addressing the problem beyond the immigrants. The boats are Rishi’s current scapegoat for the whole situation. And the Rwanda bill, which seeks to declare Rwanda as a safe country to deport asylum seekers to, is a way to smuggle through if 30 p. Lee and the rest of the far right and the Tories had their way, legislation that would enable the Tory government to ignore rulings from the European Court of Human Rights, or indeed the UN, whose UNHCR ruled that the Rwanda bill basically contravenes international law regarding the care of refugees. So, of course, anyone who doesn’t agree with the bill and gets involved in defending against the actual demonstrably illegal consequences of the bill also gets scapegoated as lefty activist lawyers. And the thing about scapegoating is that you should choose someone or a group or a thing that can’t necessarily defend itself. Lawyers, then perhaps not one’s first choice for a scapegoat. However, in the sun of 6 August 2023, Robert Jenrick, the then immigration minister, blames his inability to be an immigration minister on lawyers in general and a lawyer connected to Kier Starmer in particular. And thus the whole of the Labour party is complicit and thereby he scapegoats them all. Of course, to prevent any comeback from your scapegoat, what you have to be sure to do is not name them. They have to be an anonymous group that we can all agree are the kind of people who do that sort of thing and thus legitimize our not looking any further or questioning the scapegoater. Oddly, though Jenrick is adamant that he has named them in this article. And on LBC that same day, presenter Andrew Castle discovers it’s impossible to find it.

Robert Jenrick: The point I’m making here is that the Labour party’s approach is one whereby they support all of these efforts to prevent our efforts to stop the. You know, I think that people just have to be honest about that. That’s going to make life much more difficult.

Andrew Castle: Okay, well, perhaps they disagree with your policy, so they’re using all means to stop within the confines of the law. Sir Kier Starmer, you say in your op ed in the Sun today, page 14 faces serious questions about his links with charities and lawyers who’ve campaigned to thwart our work to stop the boats. Today we learned that a top lawyer who devised labour on anti-racism policies is at the forefront of efforts to stop people being deported to Rwanda. Where is the name here?

Robert Jenrick: Um, well, it’s in the article.

Andrew Castle: What is the name, please? What’s the name?

Robert Jenrick: Uh, well, it is in the article that’s published in the Sun.

Andrew Castle: But why don’t you want to name that person? When you say that that person’s name is in that piece and I can’t find it, why don’t you want to name that person?

Robert Jenrick: Um, well,

Andrew Castle: I’m sorry to be so stuck on it.

Robert Jenrick: No, I understand. But you’ll be able to find it online if you take a look.

Andrew Castle: Absolutely bizarre.

Mark: Absolutely bizarre. Needless to say, it isn’t in the article because I found it online and it isn’t there because all it is full of is incendiary phrases shoveling familiarly tasty morsels of scapegoat meat into the furious, spoon-fed maws of right wing tabloid readers. He doesn’t know how to do it. What you’re supposed to do. If you scapegoat people, you just generally say it’s all those lefty lawyers.

Jim: Lefty lawyers, absolutely. Yeah.

Mark: And they all because they’re on the left. The Labour party is complicit. That’s all you need to say. And the people that agree with you will just agree with you. But to then say, we have received information from an unnamed source, brackets, made it up from an unnamed source, that a lawyer close to Keir Starmer is one who’s thwarting our efforts to stop the boats and hold the will of the public. If you then say that and then somebody, okay, who is it then? And then to say it’s in the article and it isn’t. But if it’s in the article, why aren’t you saying, well, he’s not saying it because a, it’s not true and b, he’ll be sued for libel.

Jim: If you’re going to make checkable claims, you have to do it in a format where people aren’t ever going to check it. Like a Dinesh D’Souza film, for example.

Mark: Yeah, exactly. And if you’re going to scapegoat somebody, don’t do it in a checkable way, because you’ve not understood the rules of how to do that. So in trying to scapegoat the left and lawyers and Labour party and Keir Stamer and a friend of know, it’s guilt by association you’re trying to do. In trying to scapegoat people, he’s countered his own argument because he’s saying, oh, yeah? Well, the name’s in there. It isn’t there. And you shouldn’t name them because you’ve broken the rules of scapegoating, you idiot.

MARK’S FALLACY IN THE WILD STING

Mark: Scapegoat wax there, with Aisle 10 (Hello, Allison).

Jim: And 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 a little Caesar’s ad, where they really kind of leaned into this.

Little Caesar’s executive: The bacon wrapped deep, deep dish pizza is back at Little Caesar’s. But if you’re wondering who would take it away in the first place, it was Chet wallaby, little Caesar’s corporate scapegoat.

Chet Wallaby: I, Chet wallaby, acted alone to take away your eight, ah. Crispy, caramelized corners of pizza wrapped in over three and a half feet of bacon. I deeply regret this decision that I made entirely on my own.

Little Caesar’s executive: The truth feels good, doesn’t it, son?

VO: Pick up a bacon wrapped deep, deep dish pizza for just $12 only at Little Caesar.

Jim: And they set Chet Wallaby up with a Twitter account so that you could direct your blame directly at Chet Wallaby.

Mark: Fantastic. For the fact that it was gone. Yeah. Ah.

Jim: And then when they eventually removed the bacon wrapped wherever it was again, I think it’s 2016. It was announced on Chet Wallaby’s Twitter, and he was like I’m really sorry. Again, I’m doing it.

Mark: I’m going to have to take it away. Uh, when I watched the ad, all I could think about was, that’s such a brilliant idea. It’s basically, it’s a pizza that’s so deep, you could have a strip of bacon on all the way around the crust.

Jim: 3ft of bacon.

Mark: It talks about eight corners. And I guess because it’s that deep, you’ve got a corner at the top and a corner at the bottom. Yeah, man. And at that moment, I so wanted one of those. Uh, well, there’s no way it would be like that in the store, surely. We’ve worked in advertising for too long.

Jim: But people responded, at least from what I’ve seen on Twitter, people responded in a jokey way, as if he was really the person who was doing all of this stuff. And it gives little Caesars some goodwill in making what otherwise would get complaints in making those kinds of decisions. People are like, oh, Chet, you again. Yeah, which is a great.

Mark: So it kind of works as a positive scapegoat, doesn’t it? Yeah. Back to blaming all of the problems of the herd of wolves on the scapegoat. If you weren’t here, who would we have to blame for missing the full moon? And we all got ill from killing that goat that kind of wandered through.

Jim: This metaphor is as stretchy as the anecdote that spawned it. So our second example is from In Sickness and in Health. This is the sequel to ‘Till Death us do Part, which became All in the Family when the Americans did a remake. Ah, kind of. Technically, this is a version of Archie Bunker’s Place, because Archie Bunker’s Place was the sequel to All in the Family. But that actually came first. This isn’t a remake of Archie Bunker’s Place because he doesn’t own a bar or anything like that. So this is just the continuation of Alf Garnet, that character who became out Archie Bunker. And in this episode one of Alf’s nemeses, his wife, has left him for a lesbian. And so they have this long conversation in the pub about how you never used to get lesbians around here and that kind of stuff. And Alf has a theory on who’s to blame.

Alf Garnet: That’s your French, innit? Frogs. Your bloody French. They invented all them perversions, didn’t they? That’s why your tunnel’s not a good idea. I mean, they’ll be creeping through that, spreading more of your perversions.

Alf’s friend: You see, once above a time, it was just your sailors bought that thing in the country

Alf Garnet: Quarantine ‘em mate. Anyone coming in this country from abroad should have to spend six months in quarantine. If they take their dogs with them, that has to go into quarantine when it comes back. And he’s probably behaved himself a bloody side better than thry have.

Jim: So, yeah, there you go. As far as else, it’s the French to blame for the existence of lesbians.

Mark: Yes. Not that Greek island.

Jim: No, bloody French.

Mark: Bloody French. Coming over here. Because there is a link between that lefty because he’s no good son in law that married his daughter, Una Stubbs. Tony Booth, the actor…

Jim: who was Rob Reiner in America.

Mark: Oh, wow. Uh, but Tony Booth. Cherie Blair’s dad.

Jim: That’s right, yeah.

Mark: Bloody lefty activists. Yeah. And he keeps calling him a lefty wossname.

Jim: So our final example comes from Bob’s Burgers. It’s the fall play at their school, and the musical that’s being put on in the hall is Working Girl: The musical.

Mark: Right. Yeah.

Jim: But Gene wanted to do his own musical. He wanted to do Die Hard, The Musical, which he wrote. And so he has done a kind of guerrilla underground, literally musical, on the same night, and has got people to come along to his instead of the official school musical. And it’s caused some issues. And so the whole family gets called into Mr. Frond’s office, the guidance counsellor.

Mr Frond: So you fired the cast and made it Die Hard, The Musical a one man show.

Gene Belcher: Yes, starring me, Gene. Yeah.

Mr Frond: Okay, well, I’ve come to the part where I blame the parents. Bob, Linda.

Linda Belcher: Hi.

Mr Frond: I’m blaming you.

Linda Belcher: Oh

Bob Belcher: Yeah.

Mr Frond: Why didn’t you step in and do something here?

Linda Belcher: Hey, we don’t know all the crazy crap our kids are doing.

Bob Belcher: We don’t want to know.

Mark: Come to the part where I blame the parents.

Jim: Like, this is a standard section of all of the meetings.

Mark: Yeah, just work your way down the kind of subsection two. I so want to see Die Hard The Musical

Jim: It’s great.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Starts like. Nakatomi. Nakatomi, nakatomi.

Mark: Brilliant. And there’s got to be a whole kind of aria just before he’s flung off the roof, which kind of continues in a kind of trailing off long note. Yeah.

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 I read out three Trump quotes, two of which are real, and one I made up. And Mark has to figure out which one is fake news

Mark: because I’ve personally identified that the people at fault here. It’s not the makers of the faulty software which measures the final tally at the end of each episode, nor is it the people that paid a lot of money for it so that it must work. But in fact, it’s the poor sap that plays the game, me that’s to blame and that’s that.

Jim: Wow. There you go. Taking responsibility. I like to see that. So our examples this week come from a rally that Trump did. I think it might have just been yesterday. It’s very recent. And he was typically batshit.

Mark: Right.

Jim: Okay, statement number one:

Everyone knows I gave the farmers billions of dollars, tens of billions actually, which I got from China. China. No other President in history could get anything from China, I beat them very easily. Very easily. It was one of the – but what people don’t realize is that I also got billions for the fishermen. They were dying before I got in – fishermen weren’t able to feed their families they had so many regulations and they weren’t allowed to fish, but I saved them – I opened up the oceans again for the beautiful New Hampshire fishermen.

Mark: All right, that’s why he’s talking about it, because. Mhm.

Jim: Statement number two.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: We’re also going to place strong protections to stop banks and regulators from trying to de-bank you from your… you know, your… your political beliefs. What they do. They want to de-bank you and we’re going to de-bank. Think of this – they want to take away your rights. They want to take away your country. The things they’re doing. All electric cars, give me a break. If you want an electric car good, but they don’t go far, they’re very expensive, they’re going to be made in China.

Mark: Right? I thought he was all for American electric cars and all that stuff.

Jim: Statement number three.

Mark: Okay. Uh-huh. Mhm.

Jim: We have more liquid gold and wealth under our feet than any other nation we have more liquid gold – oil and gas – more liquid gold. Well I just met non-liquid gold. You know where it was? Iowa. It’s called corn. They have… it’s non-liquid. That’s my take. You have more non-liquid gold. They said ‘what is that?’ I said ‘corn.’ They said ‘we love that idea.’ You know that’s a pretty cool thought, isn’t it? That’s a nickname in its own way but we came up with a new word for – new couple of words for corn.

Mark: It’s corn. It’s corn, man. Uh, yeah, well, all of them are fake. All of them are also real. Because I started off thinking okay, the billions of dollars. China, China. And then there’s that hesitation where he’s realized he’s forgot what he was going to say, but then he does it and all the others. Okay. So is the endless repetition of non liquid gold one of his kind of revelations where he thinks he’s so stupid, he thinks that the things he’s just thought of are clever? Uh, and d bank, is that a gag on d bag? Want to take away. Lots of taking away things going on. So is he going to, is he going to lie about billions for the fish? Where did he get the. He didn’t give farmers billions. Okay. I think that. I think number one is the one. You made up the tens of billions.

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

Mark: Well more convinced by the banks, but I quite like the non liquid gold one. M so I think possibly number three. Yeah.

Jim: And number three.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Israel.

Mark: No.

Donald Trump: We have more liquid gold and wealth under our feet than any other nation. We have more liquid gold, oil and gas. More liquid gold. Well, I just met non liquid gold. You know where it was, Iowa. Uh, it’s called corn. It’s non liquid. That’s my thing. You have more non liquid gold? They said, what is that? I said corn. They said, we love that idea. That’s a pretty cool thought, isn’t it? That’s a nickname in its own way. But we came up with a new word for a new couple of words for corn.

Mark: They said, what is that? Uh, I said, I said corn, and they called me an idiot. You got non liquid gold. Non liquid gold. I just thought of that. Isn’t that great? Non liquid gold?

Jim: First of all, I don’t think corn needs a new nickname.

Mark: Second, it’s just corn.

Jim: I think non liquid gold, i.e. solid gold, is already a thing.

Mark: Exactly. Why would you kind of say, why would you call oil and gas liquid gold anyway? Because liquid gold is already a thing. Liquid gold. That’s what happens when you melt solid gold.

Jim: Yeah. Oil, I’ve heard. Black gold. Yes. That’s what they call it on the Beverly hillbillies.

Mark: Yes.

Jim: Famously not a liquid.

Mark: Not a liquid at all. Yeah. Well, except liquid propane gas. But as a gas, the clues in the name. It’s a gas. Yeah. What the fuck?

Jim: You also think number two is real?

Mark: Yeah, because of the debanking.

Jim: And number two is real.

Donald Trump: We’re also going to place strong protections to stop banks and regulators from trying to debank you from your political beliefs. What they do. They want to debank you, and we’re going to debank. Think of this they want to take away your rights. They want to take away your country. The things you’re doing, all electric cars. Give me a break. If you want an electric car, good, but they don’t go far. They’re very expensive. They’re going to be made in China.

Mark: Sounded like an edit, didn’t it? Yeah, the things they’re doing, all electric cars. Give me a break. You want to get. And he did only one breath. They’re going to deep bank you. Um, from, you know. Yeah, we all know from your political.

Jim: Beliefs, they’re going to debank you.

Mark: From your political beliefs, the banks and the regulators are going to debank you because that’s where I keep my political beliefs. In a bank.

Jim: Yeah. You’re going to get the debanked.

Mark: Yeah, you’re going to get debanked. And then he says, they want to debank you and we’re going to Debank.

Jim: Yes, he said that again.

Mark: The fuck? And then he realized he’s gone up a blind alley and then says, okay, think of this. They want to take your rights. Let’s just go back to, they want to take stuff away from you. They want to take your country. The things they’re doing. They want to take your country. And then he just hard edit into. And there’s another train of thought that he just crosses over to all electric cars, give me all electric cars, give me a rate.

Jim: I don’t think the banks are trying to do all electric cars.

Mark: Yeah, no, in the attempt to take away your rights.

Jim: I think what happened here is that he said d bank in the first line and realized immediately that’s not a word.

Mark: And the rest of it, unlike non liquid gold the rest of it.

Jim: Was like trying to get through the fact that the thing he said isn’t a thing. So he says it a couple more times just in case it is a thing, just to try it out to.

Mark: See if anything occurs to him in the process.

Jim: Yeah, but that feels like that’s the point at which he’s like then, because the thing that comes out about political beliefs. What? Yeah, because his brain is busy going Steve Bank. I don’t think that’s a word.

Mark: I don’t know. What is that? What is that? Try, keep it going, keep going, keep going up the front.

Jim: And they’re all running around in the back, whatever it is.

Mark: Two neurons of firing. One’s operating his mouth, the other one’s looking for something.

Jim: Yeah. And then he has to quickly run down a blind alley of communication with electric cars because he can talk about.

Mark: That, probably because that’s the only thing that comes back. And then the third neuron is just going, putting his hands up, going, I’m sorry, it’s all I could find. Best I could do.

Jim: Unbelievably, you’ve done it again. I think it might be coming up for, like, six months since I’ve won one of these. That includes the time.

Mark: No, really?

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: It’s crazy.

Jim: We have some social contestants who have given answers on Facebook. Andrew says going with two. No explanation, but fine, go for it.

Mark: Trump doesn’t explain anything, so, yeah, why not?

Jim: Christine Fletcher says, number one has got to be true. I can hear him saying it. It’s got everything. OTT exaggeration, huge self back patting, lost train of thought, big lies, sucking up to the crowd. So I think that must be the fake news.

Mark: I think that must be the fake news. Yeah.

Jim: On the other hand, number two sounds fake, so it must be true. Therefore, by a completely ass up process of elimination, three must be true. I mean, non liquid gold, that would be solid gold, right? Yeah.

Mark: So which one did they, uh.

Jim: They went through the process that it sounds true. And the others. And on Patreon, Stephen Beckle says, I’m going with two. One, I think I’ve heard. And three seems like Trump’s standard self congratulations for doing something trivial. Alice says two is all over Reddit, so I know that it’s embarrassingly true. I’m going to go with one news. Granted, he’s been unashamedly admitting how much he gets from China for.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Jim: Scott says, well, two and three both have rather Daft made up terms, or thingies, as I call them. I just made that up. Thingies. Um. So those sound Quite Trumpy. Number one, on the other hand, although rambly and dissembled, mentions feeding families, and I’m convinced that Donald doesn’t care one bit about feeding. Anyone’s.

Mark: Going to have to watch for that.

Jim: Invisible unicorn says, I chose two because, oh, hell, I don’t know. You’ve gotten very good at this. Hopefully three is real, just to hear the incoherent.

Mark: Well, yeah, that’s part of my raison often. Yeah, because it’s unbelievable and you just want to hear it.

Jim: And Renee Z says I’m with Alice and Scott. Number one is fake news. I heard about someone saying corn is not a liquid in response to some Trump idiocy. So number three must be real. Also, I heard him say something about de banking. I still haven’t figured out what that is, but he seems certain about it. So number two must be real. I listen to too much trump.

Mark: Yeah, but that’s cool. That number one got analyzed as, huh? The escalation, the sidetrack, sudden stop. But then when you read, all the others go, well, they’ve all got that as well. Ah, why did I choose those and not the one that you wrote?

Jim: Sometimes one of the problems I have is I will hear him say something like number three about liquid golden corn. And obviously, I have to include it. But I know, you know, I’m not smart enough to come up with something that insane. I couldn’t possibly have written that. That’s mad. So I know you’re not picking that one. That has to be trump.

Mark: Right.

Jim: But I have to include it.

Mark: Doing the. Doing the Boris one, it is. I mean, it’s a long, complicated thing. You shove them in, and then you think, okay, so I’ve got to write one that’s kind of like that, but it’s got an illusion that he could bring up but isn’t too obvious. But it’s also got to be sufficiently tied into reality, but also a little bit unhinged, because both of them are. Yeah, it’s a tight process. Yeah, it’s a process. Yeah. Wow.

Jim: Well done. I mean, you’re now 60 eight out of 130, which is somewhere in the region of 52%.

Mark: Well, there you go. That’s solidly a majority. That’s enough to leave the EU on, isn’t it?

Jim: Yeah. So it’s time for the part of the show that this week, at least, is called Reed Galen is not a logical fallacy, because I’m joined this week by Reed Galen, who is an independent political strategist, co founder of the Lincoln project, and host of the Lincoln Project podcast. Welcome, Reed.

Reed Galen: Thanks for having me.

Jim: So, why not start off by just telling us what is the Lincoln project and how did it all get started?

Reed Galen: Sure. And again, thanks for having me. Uh, the Lincoln project started, hard to believe now, more than four years ago, December of 2019, and it was a collection of. Most of us are now former Republicans who said, look, we spent our career. I literally grew up in the Republican Party. This is a guy who most of us opposed in 2016. I think all of us actually opposed in 2016 and watched with increasing horror over the course of his presidency and said, if this is a guy who is reelected, who knows what will happen? And remember that when we started this, again, this was pre Covid, the economy was good. He hadn’t yet gone to his first impeachment trial. And on the democratic side of the aisle, we went into this thinking that either Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders was going to be the democratic nominee. So we didn’t know what would happen. So all of this got started, really in a vacuum. And the first few months of when we were in existence, right up until about May of 2020, we were doing some interesting stuff, raising a little bit of money. And then we made an ad called Morning in America, which was sort of a remake of a Ronald Reagan ad from 1984, except in the minor key. And this was about eight, nine weeks into the COVID shutdown here in America. Trump saw it because we only buy media, really where we know he’s going to be. He is a cranky, old, lonely man. So he sits in the bridal suite of Mar a Lago, or at the time, in the residence at the White House and watches Fox News just like any other crazy old man. So he saw it and he attacked us. And we went from raising about $300,000 a month to $5 million to 10 million. And before you know it, we’re all over the place. And going into the fall of 2020, we didn’t expect it would be as close as it was. But we also weren’t surprised that we didn’t know what January 6 would be, but we weren’t surprised when it happened. And so what we saw in the aftermath of 2020 was that the race to defeat Trump was over for the moment, but the race for democracy had only just begun. And in that time, the stakes have gotten much higher. Trump has gotten much more dangerous. And the idea that he and really the people around him could return to power in, know, nine and a half months is something that we should all really take seriously.

Jim: Absolutely. So that strategy of aiming your ads largely at that audience of one, what’s the end game for that?

Reed Galen: It’s a great question. So, look, a lot of our supporters, mostly Democrats, say, your ads keep me sane. I love it when you make fun of them. And there is a point to that, right? Which is if you can get inside Trump’s head and make your friends happy, right? Remember, in America, unhappy Democrats stay home and happy Democrats vote, right? And they’re on the natural unhappy. So you have to find some way to sort of get them revved up. But look, there is a strategic purpose to this. So let’s go to just last December, early December 2023, we launched an ad aimed, I think we called it feeble, aimed at showing all of Trump’s verbal gaffes, cognitive decline. All of these videos stitched together, and then again, we put them in front of him so he can see it. Well, again, he attacks us. Okay, why did we do the ad in the first place? Because we know that the Republicans and Trump in particular, are going to say, joe Biden’s too old, he’s incapable of doing the job now, let alone another four years. Well, Donald Trump is worse off cognitively and certainly behaviorally. And so we wanted to show that. What does he do? He attacks us and says that we have utilized artificial intelligence to make all these videos up. Okay, so what has he now done for us? One, as he has revalidated us as someone who he hates. Right, that’s good. Secondly, he has made a bigger deal out of the issue than he otherwise would. And lastly, he lied about it. So now he invoked what’s here in America called the Streisand effect, which is, if he had just ignored us, nobody but people in Palm Beach, Florida, would have seen this ad. But now everybody’s seeing it, and it’s now getting covered because he made a big deal out of it. So, okay, what’s the strategy behind that? He has now highlighted for us and for everybody else that he is, in fact, worse off physically, mentally, psychologically, emotionally than Joe Biden. So it’s a strategy to cut off the strategic attacks that he will use against Joe Biden this year, in 2024. And now you’re starting to see it get picked up in the mainstream media, because now they’re seeing him in person for the first time in a long time. A lot of these national political reporters who’ve just sort of bounced in and out or haven’t gone to his rallies, haven’t seen him in person. You see Nikki Haley now attacking him for it. And so that’s the reason we do that kind of stuff. Which is, yes, it makes us happy, it makes us laugh, it makes our friends happy. But there is a strategic point to it, which is he can’t ignore us, he can’t quit us. And when we do that, he makes our case for us, and we find that to be a very effective thing.

Jim: Yeah, the great thing is he doesn’t ever seem to learn that. That’s the effect he’s having.

Reed Galen: He’s not a learning animal. No, he’s not a learning animal.

Jim: So was there a point for you where you ever thought he would be a viable candidate from when he came down the escalator? Or was there a point at which he was like, he went too far and you thought, no, we’ve got to do something about this?

Reed Galen: Uh, I always thought he was. Well, when he came down the escalator, look, I was the first among many to say what a joke this was. Then he attacked John McCain, right? A man I worked for. Then he attacked if you remember, this is going back to the summer of 2015. Remember, he attacked Megyn Kelly for having her, quote, blood coming out of everywhere. And what I started to see was that he wasn’t. And then he did these debates where he would just ridicule and demean the rest of the candidates. And these were all people who had very storied careers in republican politics, some of whom I knew personally. And what I started to see was that this was a guy who was not. He was not obeying the laws of political gravity, that something had changed significantly. And by November of 2015 I realized, yes, this guy is going to be the nominee. Now. It took much longer. In fact, it took me up until election day to realize that he was going to be the president. I was in full confirmation bias denial. Um, and what I forgot was know, frankly, the Democrats chose the one person who could energize Republicans of all stripes to vote not for Trump, but against her. Because I forgot that for a lot of Republicans of a certain age, my age and older, Hillary was mythological. She’d been in a constant political presence since the early ninety s. And as much as they hated Donald Trump, they wanted nothing to do with her. And so I recognized by the fall of 2015, and then certainly by the spring and summer of 2016, who and what? He was never having any idea that he could actually win. And I was in a very dark place after he got elected in 2016.

Jim: Same. Absolutely. I was convinced he couldn’t possibly win, but there you go. So what reaction have you had from fellow Republicans that you’ve kind of turned against the party as they see me?

Reed Galen: I can make this a pretty personal one. I mean, even if you go back to before the Lincoln project, everybody, I was really out of republican politics. I wasn’t a Republican anymore, so I was really out of politics, as it were. Um, I was more into political reform and that kind of stuff. Um, once we started the Lincoln project, I got a lot of. Really love what you guys are doing, but nobody would say that publicly. And got a lot of very angry stuff from people. I can’t believe you’re doing this. You’ve turned into some sort of quote unquote liberal, as if that’s some sort of epithet that I should go running from. But the truth is that most of the people I know were Republicans. Like I was. Right. Look, I worked for George W. Bush in 1998, when he was governor, 2000, 2004, and we considered ourselves the establishment. We considered ourselves normal. What we didn’t understand was, frankly, how outnumbered we were, how out of touch we were. So there were some people who, like, I have two best friends I’ll probably never speak to again. Right. That’s part of the deal. Some other dear friends I’ll probably never speak to. You know, at this point, you had to make a choice from my perspective, which was most of them largely live in Washington, DC. Right. For them, this is as much a business decision and you can rationalize it however you want, but for to. I just couldn’t sit by and do this. And if it meant that know I’d had some success in republican politics, I could never work there again. All right, for me, that was worth it. I’ll find something else to do.

Jim: Your Lincoln Project colleague, Rick Wilson was swatted recently.

Reed Galen: Yeah.

Jim: Is there a sense that the kind of apostasy of being a former Republican and then working against them is kind of worse? It’s seen as worse than being a Democrat, in a way.

Reed Galen: Oh, for sure, yeah. 100%. It’s the right question, and it’s a great question. 100%. Remember, for these people and for anybody in really authoritarian, tyrannical movements, betrayal is the ultimate sin. Right. If you’re uh, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, the Republicans conservative Republicans might hate you for who and what you are and what you believe, but you’re expected to be their opponent. Right? We are far worse than that, because we are of them, or we were of the same place for a time, and we have betrayed them. We have committed that Cardinal sin. I would also say that in the context of Trump and the people around him, they blame the Lincoln project, right? They blame us for 2020, for him losing. They see us as the people who understood how to decode him. That’s why you saw in the immediate aftermath of the election back then, Mark Meadows, who was chief of staff at the White House at the time, had a memo sent from his office at the White House to Bill Barr, the attorney general’s office, the Department of Justice. And the email said, here’s the Lincoln project information I mentioned, and it’s me, Rick Wilson, and Stuart Stevens, who are mentioned in those memos. They came after us. They sent these awful mailers to everybody in our neighborhoods. Uh, they spent probably about a million dollars trying to destroy us. It almost worked. Right? They almost killed us. In some cases, they’re really trying to kill us. But politically, they almost killed us. And so, yeah, I would say that the swatting of Rick a couple of weeks ago is not surprising. You have to understand the environment in which you’re operating, which is there are people out there for whom political violence is a perfectly acceptable method of communicating a belief system, and that means that you take it seriously. But at this point, we’ve crossed the line. We’re so far over the. If somebody said, okay, I was with the Lincoln project, and now I’m not going to go back to Donald Trump, he would welcome them back with open arms. Right? He absolutely would. But I can’t imagine anybody who’s part of the Lincoln project or the pro democracy movement who would willingly do that because they really believed it.

Jim: Yeah. It doesn’t seem to move in that direction. No, fortunately. And do you think that sense of, I guess, peer pressure and betrayal has an impact on the polling?

Reed Galen: This is one of those things where the polling is so screwy nowadays, right? Think about this. In this country, they still do about 50% to 75% of the polling is done on the phone, right? On home phones, on landlines. They want to call somebody at home. So just as an aside, think about this. So you are somebody who has a home phone that you still pick up and you are willing to talk to a stranger about politics for somewhere between 32 and 40 minutes at dinner time on a Tuesday night, right. Like, you have self selected. You are not representative of much of anything anymore. And so I think that polling overall has gotten very skewed. And I think also what you’ve seen, and this is, again, going back to that whole idea of the people that are being smart and well resourced, is that the republican side is now just pumping out BS polls as quickly as they can because they realize they have enough purchase with media outlets, some of whom they control behind the scenes, that it ramps up this idea that Trump is winning, Republicans are winning. Trump is winning, Republicans are winning. Uh, and that you saw this, like, with the failed red wave back in 2022, it didn’t happen because so much of that data was bs. Right? It was all push polling or whatever the case might be. I would say in personal settings, you might have some of that. I think with polling, I think actually it probably skews a little bit the other way, which is even if somebody’s a Trump voter, they might be afraid to tell a pollster they are. Maybe because there’s still some social stigma to it. So, yeah, I think it’s hard to say. I think we are in a place where there are more avenues for individuals to collect information than we’ve ever had. I think they’re all more inefficient than they’ve ever been. And the conservative movement, the MAGA movement in this country, has really done a lot of work, again, over decades to create an infrastructure that not only communicates efficiently and effectively to their audience, but also keeps them in that sort of hypersealed bubble so that very little of the outside world gets into it. Uh, and you could say, look, I could see this with family members, I could see it with friends. Right? And you see it, and you’re. Well, you know, what I’m hearing, Reed, is that Kamala Harris is going to get nominated to the Supreme Court and that Joe Biden’s going to make Michelle Obama the vice president, and then he’s going to decide not to run or he’s going to resign. So Michelle Obama is going to run for president. And I’m like, let me just ask you, because you’re a smart guy, if somebody came up with this theory in a board meeting at your office, would you say, that makes total sense, or, that’s crazy? And the guy sort of looks, he goes, well, I guess that sounds crazy. I’m like, yeah, because it is. That was an argument they were making four years ago. It’s happening again. Right? So this stuff is very concentrated, it’s very potent, and just like an addict, they always have to up the ante because they have to keep jabbing that adrenaline. Right. That adrenal gland to keep people hopped up and angry and motivated.

Jim: So we are less than ten months now away from the election. Trump’s obviously going to be the republican candidate if he loses, do you think we’re going to see another January 6 type event, or do you think that the real consequences that some people have had from that has had a chilling effect?

Reed Galen: I think that there will be an attempt on Trump’s part to recreate some sort of January 6. I think your second point is the better one, which is now you see people who are facing real federal prison time here in the US. Their lives are not going to be better when they get out of prison, even if it’s for just a few months. Right. They’ll be convicted federal felons. Right. Which has a whole other set of consequences. They might consider themselves to be hostages or victims of the deep state or whatever, but the truth is that first, I think that having a president and an executive in the Oval Office who will be like, oh, you know what? No, we’re going to protect the country from people like this is very important, because remember that in 2020, Trump had all the resources of the federal government at his disposal. And remember, he started all this, right, even well before election day, right? Remember that he used federal troops, unmarked federal troops to clear streets in Washington, DC. He sent federal officers, again, unnamed, unmarked federal officers, into cities like Portland and Seattle for the express purpose of generating violence, which they got. And then on January 6, regardless of whatever anybody says at the Pentagon, it was not Nancy Pelosi’s fault that the Capitol was not better protected. The FBI knew a lot about this. Know, the National Guard was told specifically to stand down. And it wasn’t until everything got out of control. And I think it was actually pence who called the Pentagon and said, you get those guys over here, right? So Trump had completely abdicated his responsibility, both as president and commander in chief and chief law enforcement officer, for lack of a better way to put it. So I think those things are possible. I think we should expect it, and I think we should be prepared for it. But I think also a resounding defeat, I think. And you see this in sort of other historical experiences, if he is defeated soundly again, I think you’ll see the 65, 70% of the republican party, that’s for Trump, but not MAGA or not ultramaga. Anyway, say, okay, it’s over. And some of them have this, like, Rip Van Winkle effect. It’s like, what was I thinking? But then the fight won’t be over, right? I mean, a lot of the poison has seeped through into the states and into the next generations of political activists and thinkers and everything else. So defeating Trump in November is the biggest fight in the know, as Churchill would say. It would be the beginning of the. The, in the battle against MAGA, but it won’t be the end,

Jim: obviously, he’s not going to last forever. He’s not the healthiest of guys, and he’s getting on. Can the Republican party come back from this? Is there a way back to normality?

Reed Galen: Only with significant, continuous defeat at the state and local and federal level. Look, Republicans in these states have done a masterful job, and I use that word intentionally, of what we call gerrymandering. Right. Legislative and congressional districts. That means drawing lines that are favorable to them such that it’s almost impossible for a Democrat to get elected in a lot of these places. But the flip side of that is now, let’s say, know, normal MAGA member of Congress from Texas, right? Well, now, there’s the crazy ultra maga guy to my right who says, you’re not pure enough. At some point, they will push themselves into oblivion. And an otherwise normal candidate, even in a very conservative district, might be able to start squeaking out some wins. But it’s going to be a process, and it’s going to be work, and it’s going to have to be a united piece of effort, for lack of a better way to put it, because the conservative movement, the MAGA movement in this country, is very well resourced. These people are very smart, whatever you think about Trump intellectually, and they are relentless. For them, this is an existential fight, right? They believe that the country is falling victim to godless heathens who don’t believe in men versus women and black versus white, right? Like, they are Christian nationalists. Vast majority of them are white. They have a dominionist version of what America should be. And they have taken the long game on this. They have been working on this for 50 or 60 years and understanding that a lot of the infrastructure that’s in place is not going to go away just because of Donald Trump might lose. In fact, I would say that they would get further energized, because they will realize, well, shit, if. Pardon my French, if we don’t do this now, it’s never going to happen. And so what I would say is, again, Trump is the first big victory, but it’s far from the last.

Jim: Yeah. Looking at the other side of that, then say Trump somehow wins. What’s next? What happens first? And what does a second Trump term look like?

Reed Galen: Um, I think there will be a great deal of unrest in the country should he win. Because I think there are. Remember that even if he were to win in our electoral college, right, which is an anachronism from another time, literally 275 years ago, or whatever it is, 250 years ago he will lose the popular vote, which means that probably somewhere between five and 10 million more Americans will say they didn’t want Donald Trump than did. That is not a sustainable and or healthy thing. And we’ve had it for really since 2000, right? Maybe 2004 was the last time a republican presidential candidate won the popular vote in the United States. That’s not sustainable. And so I think you will see many, many Americans probably take to the streets. Now, this is what will happen in a democracy, which is if the democracy doesn’t ultimately want to protect itself, it will fall to somebody like this, I think that you will probably see, and I wrote a piece of this on this from my substack called the home front, called January 21, 2025, in which we should believe that if Donald Trump is going to invoke what’s called the Insurrection act, which allows American military forces to be put in the streets against American citizens, maybe he won’t use the military right away, but he’ll have plenty of sympathetic governors with their own national guards. He’ll have plenty of sympathetic sheriffs in counties across the country. And remember, in the United States, a sheriff, he only answers to two people, God and the voters, right? There’s almost no positive control from any higher level authority. And so I think you will know some pretty ugly crackdowns on behalf of Trump and his people. And the one thing we know about authoritarian movements, too, is when they finally do take power, they move very quickly to consolidate that power, because they know if they don’t, largely speaking, the people, that even the people that elected them won’t probably like a lot of the things they’re doing. So they will move very quickly to ensure it’s difficult, if not functionally impossible, to remove them without significant trouble, destruction, bloodshed, whatever the case might be.

Jim: So what can we do? What can our listeners do to make a difference and sway the election, hopefully in the right direction?

Reed Galen: Well, listen, I think know if you spend a lot of time online, when you see flat out misinformation or disinformation, report it, right? I know it sounds like small ball, but that stuff does have an impact. Now, Twitter is a cesspool, so who knows how effective that thing is anyway. But I would say that learn what you can about why democracy matters. I mean, look, for me, it’s a very simple argument. You might think that Joe Biden is too old, okay? But let me ask you this question. When he gets up in the morning, do you think he wants the country to be better or worse? When Donald Trump gets up in the afternoon, do you think he wants the country to be better or worse? And for him, he doesn’t care, right? If the country’s better by accident, he doesn’t care if it’s worse by his actions, he cares probably even less, so long as he’s okay. And so I think that keeping the faith, and we need to get a little bit more optimism in this. I really do believe, since Iowa, I have felt a can’t. Uh, some of it’s based in data, but some of it’s also, again, when Trump is now back out there in the middle of things. I think there are millions of Americans, not to mention all the people over the world, who go, come on, this can’t happen again. Now, you can say that and you can believe it, but now you got to go make a reality. Right? And so, again, whatever it is you can do in your place, to be part of the conversation, to show why you care about small d, democratic, small l, liberal values. Right? Because here’s the thing, is that authoritarians make life arbitrary for all of us. On any given day, you wake up in Russia, you got to worry about what Vladimir Putin’s worried about you personally. You got to worry about whether or not you’ve done something that you didn’t even know about. That suddenly has three guys throw you off a like, that’s a real possibility in a place like Russia. Democracy doesn’t get rid of the arbitrary nature of life because you could always get hit by a bus. But it says you, as an individual with your family and your community, has more of an opportunity to decide how you want to live your life. And Donald Trump and his goons want to tell you how you live your life, where you live your life. I mean, look, in Escambia county, Florida, they just banned the dictionary. Is that normal? That’s not normal. They literally don’t want you to be able to look up, like, what do you say to people? Like, that’s. That’s crazy. And that’s the kind of stuff that’s just the tip of the.

Jim: Yeah, yeah. So if people want to come and join the Lincoln Project and help you do what you’re doing, what can they do? How do they go about.

Reed Galen: Yeah, sure, yeah. Please go to Lincolnproject.us or jointheunion.us. You can go there and sign up for our updates. Please share widely. Right. We see this stuff as mattering everywhere, all the time. Also, if you go to my substack, it’s called the home front, and sign up, I write once or twice a week about how I’m seeing the world. It’s a little bit more irreverent. It’s got some data. It’s got some fun. Sometimes it’s scary, but I hope you’ll enjoy it. And always, please give the Lincoln Project podcast a listen. We have great guests. You might not have always heard of these people, but I’ll tell you that they are the smartest people you can find in the pro democracy movement. And I am always educated and entertained by them. And keep listening to fallacious Trump because I’ll tell you, if we all do this together, regardless of where we started from we’ll all end up in the same place. And that doesn’t mean we agree on everything. It doesn’t mean we agree on anything except for one thing, and that’s in this moment. Making sure Donald Trump never returns to power is the most important thing we can all do together.

Jim: Reed Galen, thank you very much for joining us.

Reed Galen: Thanks for having me.

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

Jim: It’s the most wonderful time of the year, the Trump trial season. It seems like it starts earlier and lasts longer every year, doesn’t it? We start with the immunity hearing in the DC District Court of Appeals. Trump’s lawyer D. John Sauer was making the ambitious claim that former Presidents can only be prosecuted if they’ve already been successfully impeached and convicted by the Senate. One of the three judge panel, Judge Florence Pan decided to test the logic of his argument. She asked if a President could order Seal Team 6 to assassinate his political rival. Sauer floundered a bit and started talking about what the founders intended, and Judge Pan said “I asked you a yes or no question. Could a president who ordered SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival, who was not impeached, would he be subject to criminal prosecution?” Sauer’s answer was yes, but only if he had been impeached and convicted first. Obviously Trump is going to lose this, and then it will be appealed, probably first for an en banc hearing and then to the Supreme Court. If at any point this argument is accepted by a court then Trump’s 2024 court schedule will get a lot lighter, but his running-from-SEAL-team-six schedule will fill right up. In Trump’s NY civil fraud trial, Trump himself wanted to give the closing arguments and at first, Judge Arthur Engoron was open to the idea, obviously understanding the entertainment potential, but asked Trump if he would stick to relevant matters and not make a campaign speech of personally attack the Judge, the DA or their staff. Naturally Trump didn’t accept those terms, so as is traditional, his lawyers gave the summation of the case. They then asked again if Trump could speak and the Judge asked again if he could limit himself to the case, at which point Trump just started talking and of course immediately ranted about the fact he’s being persecuted and attacked the DA and the Judge. Engoron allowed him to continue for another minute, then adjourned for lunch. Finally, in his defamation case against E Jean Carroll, Judge Kaplan threatened to have Trump removed from the courtroom because he wouldn’t stop loudly mumbling about how unfair it all was and calling the case a con job and a witch hunt within earshot of the jury. Given that said jury gets to decide how much he owes Ms Carroll, I’m not sure it’s a great idea to continue to defame her in front of the jury while on trial for defamation. But you do you, Donald.

Mark: Well as Lewis Carroll would have pointed out we had a caucus race in balmy Iowa this week- the minus 45 degree 10 minute frostbite warning didn’t deter the self-heating and furious voting population and, of course, without lifting a tiny finger ol’ I-don-t-get-out-of-a-court-room-to-rally-to-any-fewer-than-500-people Trump trumped home to win 54% of the vote. Annoyingly he won across most demographics; the college-educated and those without a degree; men and women; urban, suburban and rural voters; and evangelical Christians. He won 98 of Iowa’s 99 counties, losing Johnson County, the home of the University of Iowa, by a single vote to Nikki Haley – which he, as yet, is not complaining about, perhaps cos of his utter faith in the unimpeachable (har-har) security of the “write your preferred candidates name on a piece of paper in a crowded public bar and put it into a hat” method. The only demographic he didn’t scoop up, the moderates – who all (all? I’m surprised there are moderates – this was a race between candidates all on the same side – the GOP – after all!) voted for Haley, with voters ages 17 to 29, backing DeSantis. Haley and DeSantis took just enough of the vote to insist they were his main rival in New Hampshire, the next state to vote, ensuring the field will remain divided against him, so we’ll have to go through the same sorry fiasco all over again. One good thing tho – Vivek “rhymes with cake” but “he’s just scum” Ramaswamy dropped out of the race handing his voters over to Trump – I bet they’re thrilled! The weather did cut the voters down from 187,000 in 2016 to 100,000: and, a little perspective,  at only 100,000 that’s less than half the number who voted in last year’s Philadelphia mayoral primary and less than one-fifth of the number who voted in last year’s Chicago mayoral election. Though whilst we can try to dismiss it as an unimportant beating of butterfly wings on the other side of the world … we might wanna start saving up for one-way SpaceX tickets to Mars again!

 

Jim: I think one of the reasons that we can largely dismiss it as an unimportant beating of bus wings halfway across the world is because of the winners of the previous Iowa Caucasus didn’t end up being the candidate, let’s put it that way.

Mark: Oh, wow.

Jim: Mike Huckabee won in 2016, right? Yeah. It’s not really a big indication of how it’s going to go. I mean, Trump is going to be the candidate. Let’s not mess around. But this isn’t a suggestion that because the 96% white iowan GOP voters who came out in the cold are prepared, like, half of them since last time, are prepared to come out and put their torn off bit of paper in a popcorn bucket for Trump, that it actually means.

Mark: I think we dismissed the whole bellwether thing at some point. Didn’t.

Jim: Absolutely. Minnesota’s Borat, Mike Lindell is claiming that he’s been cancelled by Fox News, with the network refusing to run ads for his lumpy pillows in retaliation for hiring former Fox host Lou Dobbs to anchor shows on conspiracy website FrankSpeech.com. But hiring Lou Dobbs is surely punishment enough in itself, and indeed, according to a person with knowledge of the situation who spoke to the Washington Post, his ads are just paused because he hasn’t paid them for months. The right wing is full of grifters like Dinesh D’Souza who have got very rich pretending that Trump won in 2020, but I think Lindell really believes it, and has spent millions of dollars trying to actually prove the baseless conspiracy theories instead of focusing on milking the rubes, and so Lindell’s been having money problems for a while, leading to him selling off all his factory equipment for twelve dollars and some magic beans a few months ago. He says “it should be almost illegal that you don’t accept money to buy ads when you’ve been doing it this long” because like all good Republicans he believes private businesses should be able to do what they like until it affects him personally. He added that he spends 1 to 2 million dollars a week on ads on Fox, and I think I’ve spotted another problem with his business model.

Mark: Yeah, In the absence of Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman we can always depend on Stan Laurel but gone to the Dark Side; Roger Stone to provide some light relief. In a recording published by Mediaite, Stone purportedly told a friend at a restaurant in Florida in the weeks before the 2020 election “Let’s go find Swalwell. It’s time to do it. Then we’ll see how brave the rest of them are. It’s time to do it. It’s either Swalwell or Nadler has to die before the election. They need to get the message. Let’s go find Swalwell and get this over with. I’m just not putting up with this shit anymore.” The US Capitol Police are investigating the remarks with the help of the FBI, remarks which in true Henry II “what do you mean you killed Thomas Becket all I said was…” fashion, Stone denies it all saying “I never spoke about assassinating anyone,” in an X post Thursday. “Fake Mediaite can’t produce the recording they claim to have.” Mediaite “has produced NO audio of me threatening 2 Dem Congressmen. Where is it? Post it !” And of course they went ahead and did so. The alleged remarks came after Reps. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) and Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) members of the House Judiciary Committee, had said in July 2020 that Trump had “infected our judicial system with partisanship and cronyism,” Swalwell commented “This is what Trump and his real-life thugs do: they try to intimidate opponents and will always choose violence over voting.” And there we were continuing to miss The Sopranos and wondering what to fill that hole in our lives with and it’s been staring us in the face all along! Ol’ Don Trump-e-lone inspiring dastardly deeds in the name of loyalty – that’s another fine mess he’s gotten you into Roger! Mmm-mmm!

Jim: The House Oversight committee held a hearing on Wednesday about whether to hold Hunter Biden in contempt for ignoring a subpoena to testify behind closed doors. Hunter, who had offered to testify in a public hearing, showed up and sat in the front row, only to be yelled at by Nancy Mace who told him “You’re the epitome of white privilege. Coming into the Oversight Committee, spitting in our face, ignoring a congressional subpoena to be deposed. What are you afraid of? You have no balls to come up here today.” Jared Moskowitz pointed out that they could hear from Hunter right now if they wanted, but since that is absolutely not what they want, he was quickly shouted down by Mace and Committee Chairman James Comer. Texas Democrat Jasmine Crockett, who is a Black woman, objected to Nancy Mace, who is not, trying to invoke white privilege and then explained for the hard of thinking like Marjorie Taylor Greene why Hunter asked for a public hearing:

Jasmine Crockett: “Let me tell you why nobody wants to talk to you behind closed doors — because y’all lie.”

Mark: Fair enough.

Jim: Moskowitz had another go, asking for a vote to see how many of the GOP committee members wanted to hear from Hunter right now, since he’s in the room, and only one hand went up, which I think was to ask a question. Finally, when the committee was getting ready to vote on recommending contempt charges, Moskowitz again took the floor and said he would vote to hold Hunter in contempt if his Republican colleagues would vote to do the same with people who had ignored subpoenas from the Jan 6 committee such as Scott Perry, Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, Mo Brooks, Andy Biggs and Kevin McCarthy. They didn’t seem to think this was a good idea.

Mark: According to a list obtained and published by the nonprofit PEN America, the Escambia County school district lists more than 1,600 books “banned pending investigation in December 2023.” Among titles on the list are: John T. Alexander’s “Catherine the Great: Life and Legend” and Anne Frank’s “Diary of a Young Girl.” Also on the list are “Merriam-Webster’s Elementary Dictionary,” “The Bible Book,” “The World Book Encyclopedia of People and Places,” “Guinness Book of World Records, 2000,” “Webster’s Dictionary and Thesaurus for Students,” and “The American Heritage Children’s Dictionary.” A spokesperson for the Escambia school district said oh they’re not banned, they’ve just been pulled for review under the HB 1069 bill  – the bill approved by Gov. Ron DeSantis last year which, along with requiring schools to teach that “reproductive roles are binary, stable and unchangeable” and limiting education regarding sexual health, also bans schools from having books that depict or describe “sexual conduct” or “is inappropriate for the grade level and age group for which the material is used.” Escambia Superintendent Keith Leonard told the Pensacola News Journal that the district was making “great strides” to adhere to HB 1069, but Stephana Ferrell, director of research and insight at the Florida Freedom to Read Project, told CBS News that within the last five months, fewer than 100 titles have been reviewed by the district. I’m guessing that with the red mist descending every 3 lines they’re finding it difficult to actually do any reading. Also, where do you go to look up the definitions of whether this is inappropriate or sexual conduct if the dictionaries and encyclopaedias have gone! Ah yes of course we just have to refer to our Florida lawgivers with their vast panoply of thought and experience. Meanwhile, Stephana Ferrell points out “Most of these books, though pulled temporarily as the district has stated, will never be accessible in the school library for most current secondary students.” Yep, keep ‘em ignorant and they won’t learn enough to not vote Republican – Margaret Attwood foresaw that long-game approach way back when and we were all blind to it – that’s if we could find a copy of course!

Jim: Oklahoma State Representative Justin Humphrey is the latest local GOP lawmaker to achieve national recognition for hearing that kids identify as animals and, rather than checking if that’s real, immediately trying to legislate against it. In House Bill 3084, students who “purport to be an imaginary animal or species” or who “engage in anthropomorphic behavior, commonly referred to as furries” will not be allowed to participate in class or school activities, and if their parents can’t come and pick them up – and I swear I’m not making this up – “animal control will be contacted to remove the student”. Sadly, as we’ve discussed before, this is a non-existent problem that Humphrey is trying to solve, because I would love to see the animal control guy turn up at a school and be pointed towards a 6th grader called Kevin wearing a unicorn costume. Honestly, if this bill passes, imagine the shenanigans. I for one would gladly have said I was a dolphin to get out of a 5 mile cross country run. Kids who didn’t study for the test or just don’t like math will be going for rides in the back of the animal control van instead. There’s probably puppies when you get to animal control, too. It’s win-win! In case you think Representative Humphrey was just having a bad day but is usually great, some of the other Bills he’s sponsored over the last few years were to get cockfighting reduced from a  felony to a misdemeanor, classify Hispanic gang members as terrorists, and require women to get written consent from the father of the fetus in order to get an abortion, on the grounds that women are just ‘hosts’. What a guy!

Mark: What a guy, what a guy. Jesus. Meanwhile, over here in good old sensible, Blighty, Tory MPs have been acting against their party’s wishes to add amendments to the Rwanda Bill in order to make it easier to ignore International Human Rights Laws. This has meant that some of them had to resign from key positions; Lee Anderson and Brendan Clarke-Smith for example – no great loss really. Ultimately though they knew that their tabled amendments would lose, so was it just a gesture? (some say flipping the bird or flicking the vees are just gestures) a pointless and very visible gesture of party disunity and a snub to the PM in an election year without a care for how the public might view their petty fractured in-fighting? Of course the amendments failed to be adopted and those 60 odd rebel MPs that voted for those i.e against the bill as it stood, went on to stand firm in their resolve until the prospect of their actions bringing down the PM and thus the government and ushering in a general election before they could get anyone to fly to Rwanda and before they could cut inheritance tax in March to keep the three remaining eye-wateringly rich and teetering old to vote them in again – put them off – oh if only I had their moral fibre. Rishi’s latest, and only, criticism of The Labour Party is that they haven’t got a plan, and cos he’s got a plan then that’s what counts – Hmm the politician’s fallacy again right there – something must be done here’s something let’s do that. Aaaand yeah Rish me old mate, aaand Keir doesn’t have to have a plan cos he’s not in charge yah tiny fool! Meanwhile Labour MP Jess Phillips pointed out that in all this the Tory Home Office is spending about £169,000 per person to be deported to Rwanda and in the year since the establishment of the fund to support the 100,000 victims of child sexual abuse in 2023 the Home Office spent just £45 per victim. Priorities Rishi, priorities! And finally former environment minister Therese Coffey’s only line of attack was to accuse Yvette Cooper of not even getting the country right when speaking about the Kigali Government  “show some respect it’s Rwanda NOT Kigali” of course Kigali is the capital of Rwanda. Yeah she wasn’t ever minister for geography though, hmmmm!

Jim: So, that’s all the arguments and faulty reasoning we have time for this week. You’ll find the show notes at fallacioustrump.com and if you hear Trump say something stupid and want to ask if it’s a fallacy, our contact details are on the contact page.

Mark: If you think we’ve used a fallacy ourselves, let us know. And if you’ve had a good time, please give us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Or simply tell one other person in person about how much they’d like our podcast and you can support the show at patreon.com/ftrump just like our newest patron, NJ Transplant living in Delaware. Our straw man level patrons, Laura Tomsick, Renee Z, Schmootz, Mark Reiche and Amber R. Buchanan, who told us when we met her at QED, we could just call her Amber, though another listener recognised her at QED this year because we keep using her full name all the time. And our true Scotsman level patrons, Melissa Sytek, Stephen Bickle, Janet Yuetter Andrew Hauck, and our newly crowned top patron, Kaz Toohey. Thank you so much and welcome. If you’ve just joined us and your continued support is truly appreciated. Thank you.

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

Mark: All music is by the outbursts and was used with permission. So until next time on fallacious Trump, we’ll leave the last word to the Donald.

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

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Jim Cliff
jim@fallacioustrump.com


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