Denying the Antecedent – FT#144

05 Mar Denying the Antecedent – FT#144

Posted at 01:04h in Fallacies by
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Show Notes

Denying the Antecedent is a formal logical fallacy taking the form:

If P then Q
Not P
Therefore, not Q

eg: If I am a bird, I have two legs.
I am not a bird (I am a human)
Therefore I do not have two legs.

Trump

We started out by discussing this extract of the Appeals Court’s judgement against Trump in his immunity case:

And then we looked at this Trump tweet:

Finally, we talked about this clip of Debbie Lesko questioning Robert Mueller:

Mark’s British Politics Corner

Mark talked about Kier Starmer claiming George Galloway only won in Rochdale because there was no Labour candidate.

He followed that up by talking about Robert Jenrick on immigration:

Fallacy in the Wild

In the Fallacy in the Wild we looked at this clip from Little Miss Sunshine:

Then we discussed this clip from Animaniacs:

 

Fake News

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

  1. Nobody’s really been able to tell me how anybody could want it. You know you always – in business you always want to understand the other side. You want to figure it out so you can do something that’s good or bad depending on what you’re looking for. But nobody can explain to me.
  2. There’s nobody explains to me how allowing millions of people from places unknown, from countries unknown… who don’t speak languages. We have languages coming into our country, we have nobody that even speaks those languages. They’re truly foreign languages Nobody speaks them.
  3. And I ask people – you know, I’m a pretty smart guy, so if I don’t understand something… and I just don’t understand it. Can anybody tell me why they think it’s a good thing? And nobody can tell me. But I know. The reality is that it’s for votes. They’re letting them in for votes. That’s the only explanation.

Mark got it wrong again this week, and is on 52%!

 

Immunity is not a logical fallacy

We talked about the ramifications of the Supreme Court granting cert to Trump’s claim of immunity.

 

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

  • Trump legal advisor Ken Chesebro is back in the news as it turns out he might not have been totally truthful in his cooperation session with Michigan investigators looking into the fake electors scheme he helped devise. Here they are asking him about his social media: And while he seemed totally convincing to me, it turns out that wasn’t true. In fact, he had an account called @BadgerPundit where he also talked about election stuff. His lawyer Robert Langford dismissed this as unrelated to his work on Trump’s campaign, saying “When he was doing volunteer work for the campaign, he was very specific and hunkered-down into being the lawyer that he is, and gave specific kinds of legal advice based on things that he thought were legitimate legal challenges, versus BadgerPundit, who is this other guy over there, just being a goof.” Yeah, my client wasn’t withholding evidence, he was just being a goof, you honor. That usually works. That other guy, who also happens to be Chesebro, was just doing goofy stuff like tweeting more than 50 times that Pence had the power to count the fake electors. But hey, just ‘cos he lied about that, doesn’t mean he lied about other stuff. Like the fact that he only learned in May 2021 that the Trump team had been planning on using the fake electors since before the election, regardless of how their legal cases went. Chesebro may not have known, but that goof BadgerPundit sure did, tweeting about it in September 2020 when it was discussed in an Atlantic article. Honestly, if you can’t trust a Trump lawyer to tell the truth, who can you trust?
  • In the same way that British physician Andrew Wakefield lost his medical licence in Britain as a result of publishing a fraudulent and long-debunked report in 1998 linking MMR vaccines to autism, let’s hope Joseph Ladapo gets struck off for failing to point out the problems associated with not getting vaccinated against the latest measles outbreak in Florida. Sure, COVID anti-vaxxer Ron De Santis installed Florida Surgeon General Ladapo advised parents in a letter to be on the lookout for “a rash that often develops on the face and neck before spreading to the rest of the body as well as “high fever, which can reach 105°F, cough, runny nose, and red, watery eyes.” and added “Due to the high immunity rate in the community, as well as the burden on families and educational cost of healthy children missing school,” his agency would let parents or guardians make their own decisions about sending their kids to school. It left out a recommendation that parents of non immunised children get them vaccinated immediately and the information that actual epidemiologists like Katelyn Jetelina know that among the unimmunized, 9 out of 10 people exposed will get infected and “1 in 5 will be hospitalised, 1 in 20 will develop pneumonia (the most common way measles kills young kids), 1 in 1,000 will develop encephalitis (infection of the brain, sometimes causing permanent brain damage), and 1-3 in 1,000 will die.” Also, measles can “cause ‘immune amnesia,’ where the immune system loses its ability to fight other viruses that people were previously immune to.” Yeah something that’s sufficiently dangerous to life that hey a vaccine was invented in 1963 to prevent it spreading!! But if you’re more concerned about votes than the lives of the actual voters or their children then, sure, appoint a superquack to the Surgeon General post and ignore the fact that Florida has a third of all the cases currently in the US and that the number of cases so far this year is more than half of the entirety of cases last year already – and there were only 70 cases last year. The rate has dropped so low cos of the effectiveness of the life-saving vaccination programme based on a vaccine that’s worked successfully for 60 years, that the severity of the disease for the unimmunized can be deadly. I do hope DeSantis and Ladapo have fallen behind on their own shots, and no they can’t have a lollipop!!
  • Last time we reported on the, at the time, brand new ruling by the Alabama Supreme Court that embryos are people, my friend, and since then, the Republican party realised that while this is great for their campaign to force poor people to have babies, it also accidentally poses a problem for IVF, because there are all kinds of other rules about not storing people in liquid nitrogen and then throwing them away when you don’t need them any more. That led several Alabama IVF clinics to stop providing the treatment, which is a problem for Republicans, because that affects rich people too. In fact, more than 2% of the babies born in the US are conceived using IVF and similar technologies, and it’s cool with basically everyone except the most ultraconservative insane Christians like Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who, while he now claims to support IVF, has repeatedly claimed in hearings that life begins at fertilization and a fetus is a unique and separate human being. The Alabama legislature has clumsily tried to account for IVF proposing a new bill which says “No action, suit, or criminal prosecution shall be brought or maintained against any individual or entity providing goods or services related to in vitro fertilization except for an act or omission that is both intentional and not arising from or related to IVF services,” which seems to me like it also explicitly provides immunity to the fertility clinic the Supreme Court ruled are liable in this case. I’m no expert on Alabama law, but I don’t know if the state legislature can follow up a state Supreme Court ruling with “but not really, though”. Democrats in the Senate tried to pass a bill protecting IVF at the federal level but that was blocked by Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith on the made up grounds that it would somehow pave the way for human animal hybrids. The only sliver of light that comes from this is that the more Republicans fuck around with people’s ability to make their own reproductive health decisions, the more they’ll find out in November that people don’t like it when they do that. But that is cold comfort for all the millions of people affected by their callousness in the meantime.
  • Among the laugh-a-minute moments at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference CPAC were a) our own “didn’t-last-as-long-as-a-lettuce” ex-British Prime Minister Liz Truss who blamed the deep state (and bizarrely Joe Biden) for her downfall and the trashing of the economy rather than her own insanely low IQ and being the puppet of the far right ERG group. 2) A Jan 6-themed pinball machine with graphics on the high score targets including “stop the steal”, “fake news” and “political prisoners” and when certain scores are hit, clips from the insurrection are played as well as audio clips from Insurrectionist-in-Chief Mr Trump. Despite it appearing to be very popular, GOP members were accused of “destroying the conservative movement” but probably cos they didn’t respect the “hey my dime was on the table next” rule. Also given space were c) out and proud actual Nazis who openly identified as national socialists mingling with mainstream conservative personalities at a Young Republicans mixer, including some from Turning Point USA, and discussing “race science” and antisemitic conspiracy theories. Ryan Sánchez, who was previously part of the Nazi “Rise Above Movement,” took photos and videos of himself at the conference with an official badge and touted associations with previously-ejected-from-CPAC well-known Nazi and white supremacist Nick Fuentes. In another video, Sánchez can be seen in the lobby of the conference hotel giving a Nazi salute. After NBC News reported on those events in an article, CPAC issued multiple statements on X, calling the article “a hit piece,” “false” and “fake news.” and saying “CPAC stands firmly against all forms of antisemitism and hate,”. Well I guess when you’re so far over one side of the political spectrum there’s no-one else but themselves to cover up for themselves! Just who else are they lying to? Musk Truss Trump?  Cos we all see you, you losers!
  • The House Oversight Committee finally got to question Hunter Biden behind closed doors so that nobody could see their failure on video, but one of the conditions they agreed to in order to make it happen was releasing a full transcript. It hardly needs saying that nothing in the transcript offers any new or existing evidence of any corruption or other naughty things on the part of old Joe, but it does give us the opportunity to witness the fantastic trolling done by Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell when it was his turn to question Hunter, which we present to you now as a dramatic reading: 

SWALWELL: Any time your father was in government, prior to the Presidency or before, did he ever operate a hotel?
BIDEN: No, he has never operated a hotel.
SWALWELL: So he’s never operated a hotel where foreign nationals spent millions at that hotel while he was in office?
BIDEN: No, he has not.
SWALWELL: Did your father ever employ in the Oval Office any direct family member to also work in the Oval Office?
BIDEN: My father has never employed any direct family members, to my knowledge.
SWALWELL: While your father was President, did anyone in the family receive 41 trademarks from China?
BIDEN: No.
SWALWELL: As President and the leader of the party, has your father ever tried to install as the chairperson of the party a daughter-in-law or anyone else in the family?
BIDEN: No. And I don’t think that anyone in my family would be crazy enough to want to be the chairperson of the DNC.
SWALWELL: Has your father ever in his time as an adult been fined $355 million by any State that he worked in?
BIDEN: No, he has not, thank God.
SWALWELL: Anyone in your family ever strike a multi billion dollar deal with the Saudi Government while your father was in office?
BIDEN: No.
SWALWELL: That’s all I’ve got.

  • At Fallacious Towers we’re in awe of the progress that AI image generators have made just over the last year and we’ve even been in receipt of requests to buy the Funko pop versions of ourselves that we’ve generated, so we know the power of an image. BBC’s Panorama programme discovered dozens of AI-generated fake images of black voters that Donald Trump supporters have been creating and sharing to encourage African Americans to vote Republican. Mark Kaye and his team at a conservative radio show in Florida used AI to create an image of Mr Trump smiling with his arms around a group of black women at a party and shared it on Facebook, where Mr Kaye has more than one million followers. At first it looks real, but on closer inspection everyone’s skin is a little too shiny and there are missing fingers on people’s hands – some tell-tale signs of AI-created images. “I’m not a photojournalist,” Mr Kaye tells Panorama from his radio studio. “I’m not out there taking pictures of what’s really happening. I’m a storyteller.” “I’m not claiming it is accurate. I’m not saying, ‘Hey, look, Donald Trump was at this party with all of these African American voters. Look how much they love him!'” he said. “If anybody’s voting one way or another because of one photo they see on a Facebook page, that’s a problem with that person, not with the post itself.” Which of course is the clarion cry of deniability that every agit-prop exponent has used since reductio ad Goebbels. Cliff Albright, the co-founder of campaign group Black Voters Matter, said the fake images were consistent with a “very strategic narrative” pushed by conservatives – from the Trump campaign down to influencers online – designed to win over black voters. They are particularly targeting young black men, who are thought to be more open to voting for Mr Trump than black women. Men like Douglas in Atlanta who thought an AI-generated image of Trump sitting on a front porch with black voters was real. He said it bolstered his view, shared by some other black people he knows, that Trump is supportive of the community. When revealed to be fake he added. “Well, that’s the thing about social media. It’s so easy to fool people“. Again it’s the printing press’ fault not the people creating them huh? All of the major social media companies have policies in place to tackle potential influence operations, and several – like Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram – have introduced new measures to deal with AI-generated content during elections. Musk and eX/Twitter you think?
  • If I was New York Attorney General Letitia James I might be tempted to have a nice sit down after winning a multi billion dollar lawsuit against the corrupt former president. Maybe have a bit of cake and rewatch Ted Lasso. She’s fucking earned it in my opinion. But she is apparently not one to rest on her laurels, because there are always more villains in Gotham. Like, for example, former CEO of the National Rifle Association, Wayne LaPierre who, you’ll be shocked to learn, is not a great guy. Thanks to AG James holding him to account, a jury has now found him liable for corruption by diverting $5.4 million of the non-profit organisation’s funds into his own pockets by expensing African safaris, eight trips to the Bahamas, private jet flights, and more, as well as awarding multi million dollar contracts to vendors who showered him with gifts like international holidays and access to a 108 foot yacht. The downside is that he’ll be paying that money back to the NRA, who are also not the greatest, but to soften the blow, his 30+ years of financial mismanagement put them in so much debt that they had to declare bankruptcy in 2021 so I don’t think they’re in a position to start throwing money at Republicans again just yet, especially since the AG has requested an independent monitor be assigned to oversee their spending. My question is, can we get Letitia James to take a look at Clarence Thomas next please?
  • “The time has now come for us all to stand together to combat the forces of division and beat this poison we must face down the extremists who would tear us apart there must be leadership not pandering or appeasement when they tell their lies” No not pleas from the left to rid the country of the worst government who’ve ruined the economic, health and education systems of an entire nation over the last 14 years, but little Rishi getting all Neville Chamberlain and promising peace in our time, by all but instructing the police to start clamping down forcefully on people who disagree with his lame-assed policies over Gaza so determinedly that they elected George ‘let-me-be-your-cat-and-lick-milk-from-your-cupped-hands-Rula-Lenska’ Galloway rather than the Tory candidate in Rochdale when the goal was left open by Labour’s removal of their candidate. Similarly way over there on the right 30p Lee Anderson made not-so-veiled references to Sadiq Khan being in hock to Muslims so that it’s they who run London now – you know the kind of remark that if you’d said Zionists and not Muslims Starmer would’ve withdrawn your candidacy (almost) immediately and permanently – *cof cof* Member for Islington North! Lee Anderson eventually got the whip removed not because he was an out and out anti-Islamist and there’s no place for that riddling the rotten core of the Tory party, but because he didn’t apologise to Sadiq. Nick Ferrari on LBC ended up terminating his interview with immigration minister Michael Tomlinson, because the minister could not say why Anderson should’ve apologised other than cos “the words he chose were wrong” and then failing on 6 occasions to say why the words were wrong. By this time even Anderson had distanced himself from the extremism of his own words but not the Party, cos the Party found it useful to create the “Other” to blame rather than accept responsibility for the carnage they’re wrought on the country and will be wrought upon them come the GE. Quod est Demonstrandum reductio ad Andersium!

 

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:

Denying the Antecedent – FT#144 Transcript

Jim: Hello, and welcome to fallacious Trump, the podcast where we use the insane ramblings of America’s richest hemorrhoid to explain logical fallacies. I’m your host, Jim.

Mark: Hello. You are the host, mark. A logical fallacy is an error in reasoning that results in bad or invalid arguments. And the logical fallacy we’re looking at this week is denying the antecedent, also known as the inverse fallacy, which is hemorrhoid, is very. Some sort of diamond studded thing going on in my mind.

Jim: Yeah, I can’t take credit for that It’s a John Oliver original. Right. And I heard it, I was like, yeah, no, that’s, good. So, yes, denying the antecedent, this is a formal fallacy, which is we don’t do many of, because they are, ah, less common in general discourse, because they’re kind of automatically, by the form of the argument, invalid reasoning, whereas the informal fallacies that we usually talk about are invalid because of the context of the argument. And so they’re m much more common. Denying the antecedent is the argument that takes the form, if p, then q. not p, therefore not q. So you might say something like, if I’m a bird, then I have two legs.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: I’m not a bird.

Mark: Right.

Jim: Therefore I don’t have two legs.

Mark: Right. So it’s saying that the if statement, if p, then q is actually so rock solid that the negative of it would also obtain the antecedent.

Jim: There is p. If I’m a bird, the next bit. If I’m a bird, then I have two legs. That’s the consequent.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So if you deny the consequent. So if I’m a bird, I have two legs. I don’t have two legs, therefore I’m not a bird. That is valid logic.

Mark: Right?

Jim: Denying the consequent, denying the antecedent, saying, I’m not a bird, therefore I don’t have two legs. Two legs is where it falls down. Because obviously there are lots of other things that have two legs, including you, who’s clear. Including me. Yeah. It’s probably best if we use some real world examples to explain this. And the reason that I chose to do this one is because of the court case involving our former president where he claimed to be immune from stuff. And in his argument, essentially his lawyers made the case that the impeachment judgment clause says m, that if a president is impeached and convicted in that impeachment.

Jim: Then they can go on to be prosecuted in court.

Mark: Right.

Jim: And they said that that means if he isn’t impeached and convicted in that impeachment, then he can’t be prosecuted in court.

Mark: Yeah. Yes. They’re putting a lot of weight on the antecedent in the defense by saying, well, the logic is so strong, if convicted, then prosecuted, that if not convicted must mean not prosecuted. Yeah.

Jim: Essentially, this is the difference between if and if and only if. You said at the beginning of those statements, if and only if, then q, that would be valid logic. And you could then say, well, the antecedent isn’t fulfilled. Therefore, we know that the consequence q is not valid. So if the impeachment judgment clause said if and only if the person is impeached and convicted, then they can be prosecuted, that would be reasonable. But it doesn’t say that. And both Tanya Chukkan, when this was first argued, in front of her, and the appeals court both pointed out in their judgments that this is denying the antecedent. The appeals court ruling said the impeachment judgment clause merely states that the party convicted shall nevertheless be subject to criminal prosecution. The text says nothing about non convicted officials. Former President Trump’s reading rests on a logical fallacy, stating that if the president is convicted, he can be prosecuted does not necessarily mean that if the president is not convicted, he cannot be prosecuted.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And then they cite an example of a Scalia concurrence to a case in 2014 of NLRB versus Noel Canning, where the question there was whether Obama could make recess appointments while Senate wasn’t in session because that’s a rule, something you’re allowed to do. And it is always used generally to be when there is an appointment which needs to be made, but it’s that Senate has broken up and hasn’t resumed the next session yet. And there was a point at which Obama used the moment between two sessions in January where it was the end of one session of Senate and the beginning of the next session. And it was kind of the stroke of the gavel was the point at which there was kind of a break. And he claimed that he’d. Oh, yeah. During that millisecond, I made a couple of government appointments that would have otherwise needed Senate approval. But I did them in the recess. The question was basically whether, they were in recess between the two sessions of Senate, essentially while they were switching from one session to the next session of Senate. And the Judiciary Committee argued that it’s not a recess because the Senate is never absent. They’re there in the room the whole time. You’re just legislatively changing it from one session to the next. And Scalia made the point that arguing that it’s not a recess because the Senate is never absent at that point doesn’t mean that if the Senate is absent, it is a recess.

Mark: Yes, because, it’s wonderful stuff, isn’t it? Because it’s properly formal logic. And I actually took a course in formal logic, and it’s basically maths, and it’s all full of p’s and q’s and the little symbol for not p and not q. And it’s like balancing chemical formula, where you can work out from just how things react and how all the numbers come out, what the product of a chemical reaction would be, or an equation. How do you work out the equation where you have to give them a common denominator? And you could take that away from that. And it’s like that with logical. With formal logic, having sat in back to back committee meetings where they do do the gavel and you know, you’re not in session, even though you don’t leave the room. So you can’t make committee decisions because the committee isn’t called, even though they’re all in the room.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Excellent. Yeah.

Jim: Our second example is a tweet from Donald Trump on May 30 of 2019. The greatest presidential harassment in history. After spending $40 million over two dark years with unlimited access, people, resources, and cooperation, highly conflicted. Robert Mueller would have brought charges if he had anything, but there were no charges to bring. So his argument there is, if Mueller had charged Trump with a crime, that would be evidence that he committed a crime. But Mueller didn’t charge him with a crime. Therefore, there’s no evidence he committed any crimes, which is not true at all, because there are other reasons.

Mark: Mueller didn’t charge him bring charges, because he wasn’t authorized to do so.

Jim: Yeah, the OLC memo didn’t allow.

Mark: He made lots of recommendations that charges ought to be brought because he didn’t find evidence that he hadn’t committed. wow. So that’s a very convenient use of that.

Jim: And on a similar vein, we have Debbie Lesko questioning Mueller in Congress. This was a hearing where they were very focused on the obstruction of justice arguments against Trump. And she said this,

Rep. Debbie Lesko: there’s been a. Lot of talk today about firing the special counsel and curtailing the investigation. Were you ever fired, Mr. Mueller, from? Were you ever fired as special counsel, Mr. Mueller?

Robert Mueller: No.

Jim: So her argument essentially is that if Mueller had been fired, that would have been good evidence that Trump was obstructing justice. But Mueller wasn’t fired.

Mark: Right.

Jim: Therefore, Trump didn’t obstruct justice.

Mark: Right.

Jim: And again, that’s not the only way he obstructed justice. That’s not the only way he could have obstructed in many other ways.

Mark: Yes. That’s the other thing. It is stretching, the if to being an if and only if, isn’t it? it’s stretching it to say, this is the only way you can proceed. But actually, you could have done all of the things that you’re accused of by countless other means, which he has. Yeah. And it is good. The lovely footage in that bit, like, Mueller and his team are just laughing at her.

Jim: He kind of toys with doing a little joke. When she says, were you ever fired? He starts to say, not that I know of, but he’s like, no, this is a serious.

Mark: Because these people are idiots. Yes. And the fact that she’s kind of, she’s. I think she’s breaking Trump’s teeth in that day for him on his behalf, because she can’t get, special counselor.

Jim: Special counselor.

Mark: All get chewed up and then Mr. And Mueller get all squashed.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Because he’s so excited at the.

Jim: Got it. This is gotcha, gotcha question.

Mark: Yeah. The flawless logic.

Jim: Let’s prove it. And now we can all go home.

Mark: Yeah.

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

Mark: It was quite interesting looking for this stuff, because what I normally do is go and watch prime minister’s questions,

Jim: Just wait for it to happen.

Mark: Yeah. This is the kind of access drug for doing it, and it is a cauldron of countless logical fallacies. But it’s just getting boring now, because Rishi, whatever Starmer says, and Stalmer’s getting bolder and bolder and wittier and rapier, like, each and every time, whatever he says, rishi Sunak just says, same old story. He’s, sniping from the sidelines. He’s got no plan. Whilst we’re getting on with delivering. What are you delivering? Profits for previously nationalized companies. So I didn’t do that. So what I did was I thought, oh, hang on a minute, I’m sure Thatcher said some dodgy things and I think I found the one. and the quote is, look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end. It’s not a day when you lounge around doing nothing. It’s when you’ve had everything to do and you’ve done it right. And I think that the denying, the antecedent is that actually my counterexample would be some of the most satisfying days I’ve ever had. Includes those where I’ve just lounged around doing nothing.

Jim: Yeah. So if you had lots to do and you got it done, you are satisfied. Therefore, if you didn’t have anything to do, you can’t be satisfied. Her argument or you had lots to.

Mark: Do and you didn’t do it.

Jim: Yes.

Mark: You can’t be satisfied or you did something other than not doing lots of stuff. You can’t be satisfied if you lounged around all day doing nothing, then you can’t be satisfied.

Jim: Which again, would be fulfilled by the. By changing it to if and only.

Mark: Yes.

Jim: If and only if you have been busy and successful, you can be satisfied with your day. That would then follow logically.

Mark: Yes. it would still be deniable, not.

Jim: An if and only if. Oh, yeah. That would be incorrect. But it would be valid logic.

Mark: It would be logically valid. Yes.

Jim: And you can get to an incorrect conclusion using valid logic.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: The point of the formal fallacies is even if you get to the correct conclusion, you have not done it in a logically valid way.

Mark: Logically valid way. So, yes, you’ve done it in an invalid way. Yes. So, in fact, m my kind of bracket note is that those days where I’ve lounged around doing nothing and being supremely satisfying called being on holiday, but not only on holiday, because that in itself would be denying the antecedent. You say, yeah, you can have those lounging around days when you’re on holiday, but you could also have lounging around days when you’re not on holiday. So that’s another denial of the answer. So that would have to be if and only if you’re on holiday for it to be logically. So. Yes, it’s very satisfying to find that Margaret Thatcher was illogical. Captain was very useful. So example number two. This week, today, in fact, George Galloway was sworn in as a new MP for Rochdale in the election. I think we covered in the last episode where we talked about another by election in Rochdale where the Labour candidate was withdrawn too late to take his name off the ballot paper because he had said some anti semitic remarks. Labour had kind of stood by him when he claimed that Israel had only allowed the 7th October attacks by Hamas as a pretext to invade Gaza. And he said, well, he’s apologized for that. So they kind of. Yeah, all right. And everybody went, wait a minute. You’ve thrown people out of the party for less. Why haven’t you done it this time? And then it kind of umdenard a bit. But Stalmer finally changed his position after the same guy apparently also blamed jewish media figures for fueling criticism against a pro palestinian Labour MP. And then it all got a bit, oh, well, you can’t kind of have a go at other mps. So he got taken off the ballot.

Jim: He’s having a go at the mps now.

Mark: Yeah, but they threw him out the party. He was still on the ballot. George Galloway, who was running for the Workers’Party of Britain, won the election. And after he won, Starmer said this.

Keir Starmer: Galloway only won because Labour didn’t stand a candidate. I regret that we had to withdraw our candidate and apologise to voters in Rochdale, but I took that decision. It was the right decision. And when I say I’ve changed the Labour party, I mean it. Obviously we will put a first class candidate, a unifier, before the voters in Rochdale at the general election.

Mark: I think the denying, the antecedent is he only won because Labour didn’t stand. So the, logic there is, if Labour had stood, he wouldn’t have won, which actually isn’t borne out by what’s happened before because Galloway was elected as an mp in a by election in Bethel Green, where he stood for the respect party. And he gained the seat from the labor party, who stood with a majority of 823 votes. And at that time he said, blair, this is for Iraq. When he won the seat in Rochdale he said, starmer, this is for Gaza. So it’s about kind of doing that. He also won as a respect candidate in Bradford west by election in 2012, defeating the labor candidate Imran Hussein with a 36% swing, which was amongst the largest in modern british political history. So it isn’t true.

Jim: Well, it could be true, but it isn’t logically valid to argue that. Yes, if, there wasn’t a Labour candidate, he won. If not, no labor candidate, therefore, if there was a Labour candidate, he would have.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Jim: You can’t make that argument.

Mark: Yeah. So that’s an interesting one. And then only yesterday, former immigration minister Robert Jenrik said this.

Robert Jenrick: You cannot resolve this problem. Build a more united country, which is what the prime minister was calling for, a more cohesive country built around british values. Unless you end this era of mass migration. We’ve been living in a time where up to a million people have arrived in our country every year and is impossible to successfully integrate so many people.

Mark: So basically saying you can’t integrate into society at this level of immigration, especially.

Jim: If you really, really don’t try, if the government has no interest whatsoever in helping that happen, it makes it very difficult.

Mark: Yeah. And also, if you look at the government, it’s straight out of Nigel Farage, Oswald Mosley, the language of 1930s Germany playbook. What they’re doing is just conjuring an enemy out of thin air, this amorphous blob of them immigrants doing that stuff which is intended to scare everybody else into voting for a party that will do something about it. But if you look at the party, given that he’s saying at, this level of immigration, and we’ve been subject to this for 30 years, whether the numbers are correct, I doubt. But at, this level of integration, you can’t integrate. But if you look round the present cabinet table and even only the just previous cabinet tables, which show you how successfully children of immigrants can integrate into the country to the point where they hold some of the very highest offices in the land. Rishi Sunak is prime minister. Suella Bravaman, Priti Patel. James Cleverly, Kemi Badanok, Saji Javid Kwazi. Kwarteng Nadim Sahari, Alok Sharma. There are 66 mps who are from ethnic minorities and 55 ethnic minority members in the House of Lords. The man he is quoting, who stood outside number ten and made up this stuff about immigrants, is the prime minister. He is the son of immigrants that came over in the parents of Suella Bravaman, pretty Patel. James Cleverly, Kemmy Badenox, Haji Javid Kwazi Quarteng Deem Zahawi, Alok Sharma were all immigrants, many of them were refugees. But of course, what they’re saying is, well, you can’t have the level of integration because there’s only so much room at the top. We can’t let everyone have access to all this richness and income that we enjoy. So we’ve got to keep you out. James O’Brien was talking about it and he said, it’s not so much the pull up, the drawbridge afterwards, it’s more like, oh, I didn’t mean. I didn’t mean you, I meant them. I said, well, who’s them? Well, yeah, we’re not Sunak and not all of these people that have successfully integrated you, but them over there, just the shadow at the end of the street that caused you sufficient fear. And as the idols once sang, the best way to scare a Tory is to read and get rich.

Jim: So is your argument here that if you have immigration at a high level, then you cannot have integration of those immigrants into british society, and if you don’t have the immigration at that level, then you can have integration?

Mark: Can have integration, but then if you don’t have immigration at that level, there would be nobody to integrate because they just wouldn’t come in. There would be no need for integration.

Jim: That makes it purely the volume, arguably, that affects integration. Whereas actually there’s quite a lot of societal pressures, both financial and governmental and historical, et cetera, that either improve or reduce the likelihood of integration. Yeah. Not to mention, apart from the house, how important integration, whatever that means, is. How about what the people are allowed to be who they are and that is part of Britain. Yeah. So it’s a very, very shaky premise. I think.

Mark: Yazz and the plastic people there with the Antecedent denying the only way is up. You can go down sideways. Yeah.

Jim: There’s other options.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So in the fallacy of the wild, we like to talk about the fallacy of the week from a non political perspective. And our first example comes from the excellent film Little Miss Sunshine.

Mark: Oh, yeah.

Jim: And in this scene, the family who is going cross country to enter their little girl into a beauty pageant has stopped at a diner and they’re having some food and she wants to order ice cream.

Richard Hoover: When you eat ice cream, the fat. In the ice cream becomes fat in. Your body,

Sheryl Hoover: Richard, I swear to God.

Olive Hoover: What? What’s wrong?

Sheryl Hoover: Nothing’s wrong.

Richard Hoover: So if you eat a lot of. Ice cream, you might become fat. And if you don’t, you’re going to stay nice and skinny, sweetie.

Jim: Yeah. So if you eat ice cream, you’ll get fat. If you don’t eat ice m cream. Ice cream, you’ll stay skinny.

Mark: Fat.

Jim: I can attest to the fact that there, ah, are other things you can eat which will make you not skinny. I don’t eat a lot of ice cream. And yet somehow I have achieved a.

Mark: Level of fatness that if you had.

Jim: Eaten ice cream, some might attribute to ice cream. If they saw me. Yeah. that guy, they might say, you.

Mark: Just have to carry around an empty ice cream cone in order to put them off the set that you’ve eaten pizza and drunk lots of beer. Yeah. No, it’s not the pizza beer. It’s all ice cream, everything else. If I just could cut out the ice cream, I would be fine. I would be slim.

Jim: It’s that easy. I can live without ice cream. I do like ice cream, I’m not going to lie. But I could go without it. That’d be fine if it was that easy. Yeah, but no, there’s other stuff. Chocolate and things like that. You can’t eat that either.

Mark: No, not in the quantities that we. Those big bars, those jumbo bars.

Jim: I do like a big bar of chocolate.

Mark: Yeah, when it says family pack. Yeah. Really? there’s four in my family. I’ll have to get four of those. And also, if you want to lose weight, what you need to do like Alan Arkin does is die. Well, actually, he loses height because we.

Jim: Should say the character Arkin plays in the film. This is not just a weird, sick joke about Alan Arkin.

Mark: Yeah, no, this is the character that he plays, not Alan Arkin. He’s a fairly tall guy. He’s substantial. He dies in the film, and then they ship him home again. but they shove him sideways, well across the width of a VW camper van. What’s a doormobile, isn’t it? Which are notoriously narrow. And so he’s a lot less tall from the morgue.

Jim: Scrunch him up. That’s, famously with dead people, you can just scrunch. Very scrunchable.

Mark: You become after they are, but they turn into a kind of silver foil once they scrunch. They just stay. Yeah. And they conduct electrolytes, as Frankenstein will attest.

Jim: Yeah. So our, second example is from an episode of Animaniacs, the reboot of animaniacs, not the original series. and this is actually part of a pinky and the brain segment where brain has created a, robot likeness of himself.

Mark: Right.

Jim: And Pinky asks the brain robot to tell him a joke.

B.R.A.I.N.: Rene Descartes walks into a bar. The bartender asks him if he’d like a drink. Descartes replies, I think not. He then vanishes.

Brain: That is rich. Cartesian dualism, a ripe source of humor.

Mark: It’s, a philosopher’s gag. Yeah.

Jim: So, yeah, I think, therefore I am. I think not, therefore I am not.

Mark: Yes. Simple as that. Isn’t the essence of cartesian dualism, just to correct the record, because cartesian dualism maintains that there is a body and a mind. That’s the dualism whereas monism is the idea that consciousness is a brain function.

Jim: The materialism kind of argument.

Mark: Yeah. there is a philosophical publication called the Monist, but I have heard that gag in a philosophical journal. in fact, I’ve read it in the monist. Yeah, it was exactly that. So it’s good to hear that again.

Jim: There you go.

Mark: And then I found an example which is even more overt. isn’t it? So this is from american dad, and they’ve been to a fireworks display at which there was some sort of competitiveness going on. And the dad bought lots of fireworks.

Steve Smith: It was awesome, mom. We blew the other rockets away.

Francine Smith: That’s great, honey. I, just wish your father didn’t spend our entire savings on it.

Stan Smith: Well, you got to spend money to make money,

Francine Smith: but you didn’t make any money.

Stan Smith: Then, by that logic, I didn’t spend any. Good night, everybody.

Mark: There you go. Yeah. So you got to spend money to make money, and you didn’t make any money, therefore I didn’t spend any.

Jim: Yes. So if you made money, then you must have spent money. You didn’t make money, therefore you didn’t spend money. That’s the argument, essentially, yes.

Mark: In order to make money, you’ve got to have spent some money. I didn’t make any money. Therefore any.

Jim: Yeah, yeah. There you.

Mark: Hastily beats the everyone. Yeah.

Jim: So before we move on to fake news this week, we need to tell you again about our Oscars pool. Because the Oscars are coming up next Sunday. This coming Sunday. And we spent a while last night talking about the Oscars. Yeah, it was almost day office talking about the Oscars. I will edit down before I release Patreon bonuses later this week. And so that will give you an opportunity to hear what we think will win the Oscars. But if you have any thoughts on what might win the Oscars or if you want to listen to us and then have a go, fallacioustrump.com Oscars is our Oscars pool. It’s a competition to see who can predict the most correct Oscar wins. There’s no prizes or anything, just bragging rights.

Mark: Free to enter.

Jim: Yeah, free to enter. And the more people who enter, the better, because for every person who enters, we will donate $5 to when we all vote the get out the vote organization. And in fact, that money will be doubled because I will donate it through my work, who have a clever system of matching charitable funds. And cool. Also, every year we like to do one of our months of Patron money. We donate to charity. And so since it’s an election year. We’ll be doing that to when we all vote as well. And we’re going to do it with this month, March, so that it actually has some time to have some kind of impact. That money will also be doubled. So if you’ve been thinking about maybe becoming a patron or increasing your patron money, like one of our favorite patrons, Rene Z, did this month, now’s a great time to do it.

Mark: Do that. You’d only do it for the month.

Jim: Yeah. Even if you only do it for the month, that’s fine. And you get access to all of our extra, Patreon bonuses. lots and lots of episodes. Talking about weird Dinesh D’souza films or books by Mary Trump or by Bob Woodward. Also, we did a, book of did. We’ve done lots of films and books and extra stuff that you can access if you become a patron.

Mark: And that, too, will be doubled.

Jim: Absolutely.

Mark: Even if you want to do it for just one month, you get access to all that free stuff. You can listen to the oscars, get our considered, a bit long considered opinions.

Jim: You can listen to our previous two attempts at, predicting the Oscars and see how well we matched up as well.

Mark: Yeah. We just gloss over that bit. You say us. Yeah, do that.

Jim: So that’s patreon.com ftrump to join up or fallacioustrump.com oscars to join in the Oscar pool.

Donald Trump: So we’re gonna 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 met up, and Mark has to figure out which one is fake news.

Mark: Well, of course, if we were truthful about the game, then the only reason I’m losing is because the game is rigged. And you might say the game’s not rigged, therefore, I’m not losing.

Jim: Right? Yeah. Flawless. Absolutely. So I managed to break your impressive streak of victories. I know last time. I am currently on a streak of one and, hoping to increase that. So we’ll see how that goes.

Mark: Yeah. Is that a streak, or is that more of just the dot?

Jim: Let’s see if we can turn into a streak or a smudge that then later becomes a.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Trump visited the border this week, right? coincidentally on exactly the same day as Biden visited the border.

Mark: Right? Yeah, same bit of the border.

Jim: They’re slightly just up the road because.

Jim: He wouldn’t want Biden to have any good press for visiting the border. So he went to and he gave a speech. I’m not sure if it was after or before that. He went to the kind of fence and waved at some migrants trying to get in, just like over the river, and then turned to the cameras and went, they like Trump, what can I tell you? And just crazy fucking dude. Anyway, he also gave a speech, and, these are some of the things he said for a little while. He went on about how he couldn’t understand why the Democrats would be so keen on letting so many illegal immigrants into the country, because that’s kind of the Democrat thing.

Mark: Yeah, that’s so on that.

Jim: So here are some things he said about that. Okay, statement number one. Nobody’s really been able to tell me how anybody could want it. In business. You always want to understand the other side. You want to figure it out so you can do something that’s good or bad, depending on what you’re looking for. But nobody can explain to me. Okay, statement number two.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: There’s nobody explains to me how allowing millions of people from places unknown, from countries unknown, who don’t speak languages. We have languages coming into our country. We have nobody that even speaks those languages. They’re truly foreign languages. Nobody speaks them.

Mark: Right. He snagged on a word and then he’s kind of spiraling around it like a moth round a flame. Yeah.

Jim: Statement number three. And I ask people, I’m a pretty smart guy, so if I don’t understand something and I just don’t understand it, can anybody tell me why they think it’s a good thing and nobody can tell me. But I know the reality is that it’s for votes. They’re letting them in for votes. That’s the only explanation.

Mark: There you go. Yeah. Ah, okay. Well, the number one is a bit tricky because it doesn’t say anything. Not that the others do, but that one’s kind of empty of any hooks that you might think, oh, yeah, that’s definitely him. So I’m a bit suspicious of that. Okay. And also the languages. Speaks those languages. Truly fontly, nobody speaks them. I’m suddenly not convinced that that’s real either now. Okay, well, I’m a pretty smart guy, so if I don’t understand something, dot, dot, dot. Yeah. Then he’s not that smart because he can’t come up with. So if I don’t understand it, then he’s lost. a loss for what? So he just says. And I don’t. I just don’t okay. Let him for votes. That’s the only explanation. Which is suspiciously denying the antecedent shaped. Letting him in. That’s the only explanation. Okay. all right. So on that basis, man, all right. Okay. Letting him in for votes. The only explanation. Or is it languages? Okay. I’m now very special. I think number two is the one that you made up about the languages. The bouncing ball of languages.

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

Mark: I’m more convinced by the, unsurprising, fairly mundane one. Number one.

Jim: Okay. And number one.

Mark: Yeah?

Jim: Is real.

Donald Trump: Nobody’s really been able to tell me how anybody could want it. You’re always in business. You always want to understand the other side. you want to figure it out so you can do something that’s good or bad, depending on what you’re looking for. But nobody can explain to me.

Jim: Well, you want to know. You want to be able to understand. You can do something good or bad.

Mark: Or bad, depending on what you’re looking for. Yeah. Goodness or badness. But nobody can explain it to me. So I can’t understand that. So I don’t understand it.

Jim: No.

Mark: Because nobody’s been able to tell me.

Jim: Yeah. If nobody can explain it to him, maybe it’s him.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: You think?

Mark: Or maybe there isn’t a reason. Like business is not about business. It’s about providing a, service. but apart from the fact the reason that nobody can explain it to is because he’s made it up. Yes.

Jim: There’s also that.

Mark: Nobody can explain to me. why? Because it doesn’t.

Jim: Why this thing isn’t real. Happened.

Mark: M ah. Why can’t explain that to me? Because you made it up, you idiot.

Jim: You also think that number three is real.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And number three, I think, yeah, it’s fake news.

Mark: went for the wrong one.

Jim: and the dot becomes a smudge.

Mark: I was drawn in by the foreign languages bouncing ball. And then thought. But then the tell, I think, was the only explanation in an episode about denying the antecedent. It’s the only explanation. If not votes, then what? If it’s not? The reality is, yeah, they’re letting them in, but it’s for votes. They’re not letting them in for votes. Therefore, it can’t be something else. Yeah, man. Well done.

Jim: Which means that, language, bouncing ball, it was real.

Donald Trump: Nobody explained to me how allowing millions of people from places unknown, from countries unknown, who don’t speak languages. We have languages coming into our country. We have nobody that even speaks those languages. They’re truly foreign languages. Nobody speaks them.

Mark: We have people who don’t speak languages, and then we have languages coming in.

Jim: On their own, attached to people wandering.

Mark: In, asking for directions. Nobody can understand them. We have nobody that even speaks those languages, apart from the people that have come in. Yeah, languages don’t appear on their own. Exactly. Wander in, bit of Sanskrit, coming across the border, american sign language waving to you. Everybody speaks that.

Jim: yeah. So that was real.

Mark: Should have gone with it. Yeah, should have gone with my gut. Well, that was my gut. It was wrong because I’ve filled it up with too much ice cream. There you go.

Jim: We do have, some social answers on Facebook. Andrew says, the focus on languages in two seems too chatbot to me, so I’m going with that one.

Mark: I’m with you. I feel your pain.

Jim: Mary says, number one is so wonderfully vague that it’s either cleverly made up or just the usual Trump gubbins. I’m going for it being fake. Jason says, my guess is number two is real. These are always tough, so didn’t get. Which was well done. Ben says, I’m going for three as fake. It has so many trumpisms, it must have been composed by someone pretending to be Trump. Strangely, number one doesn’t sound like Trump at.

Mark: Heaps. It’s obviously just the warm up before he got rich.

Jim: Yeah, he’s revving up. And Richard said, new Trump, unauthorized biography, title, ideas, everything you wanted to know about business, language, and votes, but were afraid to ask. Okay, I’m going for two. It’s just too wacky, so it has to be made.

Mark: So many trumpisms, too good to be true.

Jim: On, Patreon, Stephen Bickle says, okay, I know it’s one or three. Since I heard Trump talk about languages no one speaks, I’m going to guess one as three is a classic case of projection. Nick says, tough. I remember him talking about, where did you come from? In the Congo? And they say prison, so I would expect the languages bit. Yeah, because he did bring Congo up again in this speech.

Mark: Oh, did he?

Jim: Oh, my God.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: He obviously would remind everyone that he’s a smart guy. So I’m going to say number one is fake. Amber says, I don’t want to guess because I’m sure I’ll be wrong. On a totally unrelated and hypothetical note, how would the monarchy feel about taking us back? Asking for a friend? Renee says, I think number one is fake news. I doubt his view of business is to understand the other person. I think. Absolutely, yeah.

Mark: Yeah. Unless you can figure out you could do something bad to. Yeah, depending on what you’re looking for.

Jim: And Will says, my guess is number one is fake, but I’d really like them all to be fake news. Christ, that man is just unhinged. So, yeah, I think that’s pretty good record against the social contestants. I think this time.

Mark: Yeah, pretty good. And it was a good selection. It reminds me of, the ones I did of Boris, where the first one was kind of inane and then the others were unhinged. So you think, oh, wow. Well, definitely that one. The inane one. man, I went for the unhinged.

Jim: You went for the unhinged one. And that was real.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Has. It often seems to be the case.

Mark: Exactly.

Jim: And m. It’s time for the part of the show that this week, at least, is called immunity is not a logical fallacy because the supreme Court has decided to take up the immunity case. They have granted cert and will be hearing oral arguments, the week of April 22. What’s that? That’s almost two months from when they took it up. It was, the 20 eigth. I think they took it up in February. So that’s quite a long time for briefings to be prepared, given that this case has already been through, two courts, essentially, but equally, it’s not as long as they could have given. So they’re calling it an expedited timeline. But realistically, it really was. Yeah, realistically, it means that we probably won’t get a ruling on it until June, just before the court’s term, finishes this year. This is specifically an appeal of the immunity question that was heard in Tanya Trixon’s court. So it definitely stops that one. The Georgia case we haven’t got a date for anyway. And, we’re still waiting on McCaffrey’s ruling on, whether funny Willis is going to be taken off the. Yeah, but when that comes through, I don’t know whether this will have an impact on whether they’re able to set a date for that case. But what it does mean is that the DC election interference case with Jack Smith’s, case in Tanya Shukkin’s court will not be able to go ahead probably until late summer, early fall.

Mark: Yeah. Which might actually be quite good because that’s getting very near the voting window. And actually, if that’s all back in the news again, that might.

Jim: I mean, I don’t think he’s going to be out of the news, his court, at any point. But yes, if he’s actually physically in court during the kind of month or two running up to the actual election. It could have an impact, Ted Liu said on, I think, twitter. Something to the effect of, if Trump does somehow manage to delay his court cases until after the election on the basis that he’s going to get in and then pardon people, what will happen, in his opinion, and I think there’s some merit to this, is that there will be a blue wave, the likes of which we’ve never seen, because people want him to see the inside of a courtroom.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: If that case or the Georgia case gets pushed beyond the election, Democrats will come out in force to make sure that he doesn’t get out of it by becoming president. I think that’s not a bad argument. I think it’s fair, and I think it’s certainly something that if those cases do get pushed beyond the election, it’s something the Democrats can campaign very heavily on, is if you want him to see even the argument of justice, if you want there to be a hearing in a court about the stuff that he’s accused of, then we have to stop him from getting in. It might not be the worst thing that has happened. And one thing I do think is that it doesn’t necessarily mean. Well, it certainly doesn’t mean that the Supreme Court is going to rule that he is immune. It can’t be taken to say that. What it means is that at least four of the justices decided that this was an, important or novel enough piece of legislation that it needs to be decided by the Supreme Court. And that might be that they are just going to rubber stamp the lower court’s argument that he is not immune. It could be that they want to explore his immunity or how narrow or wide that immunity should be. I think in taking up cert, they have narrowed the question of immunity specifically to official acts taken while he was president. So even if they rule on that, that he is immune, that doesn’t necessarily cover the obstruction of justice that he.

Mark: Committed all the stuff since. Yes, because otherwise, they’ve got to also consider, if they do rule that he is immune in all cases, then what’s the implications for future presidents or the current president. Yeah. To do, whatever the fuck they like.

Jim: Absolutely.

Mark: Like a king. And then have people put to death and they would be immune from prosecution.

Jim: Yeah, very much so. And, I really don’t think it’s going to go in that direction. I don’t think they’re going to rule that he has immunity because. Yeah, absolutely. That means that Biden can do all kinds of stuff. He can have every republican senator arrested, and then the Senate can’t vote to impeach him.

Mark: Yeah, fads.

Jim: There’s literally nothing to stop him doing.

Mark: except the Democrats don’t do that.

Jim: No, they don’t do that kind of thing. But, yeah, the danger that that could happen in the future means m that it would be insane if they say that he’s immune. M also, it only takes four justices to grant, sir. it takes five to have a ruling on a thing. And based on the fact that they just. Yesterday, yesterday, or today actually came back with today, a ruling on the Colorado 14th amendment case, and it was a unanimous ruling that kind of suggests that they are looking at these cases that could be really divisive and thinking, okay, we need to present a united front on them.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: I mean, there’s absolutely possibility that some of the hardline republican justices might dissent, but I think it might come back with a unanimous 90 he’s not immune argument. M the Colorado case, the judgment of the court is that Colorado can’t take him off the ballot for the primaries.

Mark: Because it’s got to be. Can’t be done at that level. Can only be. Yeah.

Jim: It can’t be done by the states, they say.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So this, ruling has come down just the day before Super Tuesday, when lots of states, including Colorado, have their primaries. So kind of timely, weirdly. Yeah. And it does essentially say that it can’t be done at the state level. It would have to be done at the federal level. The majority ruling is that it can only be decided by Congress. Congress are the only people who can make that decision to say whether someone should be on or off the ballot.

Mark: Whether someone is an insurrectionist.

Jim: Well, no, they didn’t look into whether he engaged in insurrection. They didn’t discuss it at all. They left that completely. And they didn’t talk about whether, if you are an insurrectionist, you can be removed by anyone. They said essentially that it’s not self executing. Congress has to decide only that removal.

Mark: Can be done at that level. Yeah.

Jim: The three liberal justices and Amy Coney Barrett, wrote a concurrence to that, but dissenting from the methodology of the judgment, they agreed with the judgment that it can’t be done at the state level, but they don’t think that it should be only Congress. There are other federal authorities that could make that ruling, like the supreme Court, like federal courts could make that ruling. But the majority ruling has been that it has to be Congress. So that means that Illinois, who recently also, decided to take him off the primary ballot, Maine and Colorado won’t be able to do that. it means that Arizona’s weird decision recently, last week to propose, a bill or pass a bill, in fact, that made it impossible to take a presidential candidate off the ballot due to the 14th amendment, which kind of repealed the 14th amendment in Arizona is moose anyway, because, this is dealt with by the supreme Court now. so that isn’t a thing that Democrats can do. They’re not going to be able to keep Trump off ballots in any jurisdictions at all because Congress aren’t going to rule that he’s not allowed to be on the ballot. They argued essentially that if it was allowed, it would be chaos and it would create some kind of patchwork system of weird rulings.

Mark: Okay.

Jim: Which is a great argument for not having the electoral college.

Mark: Yeah. Weirdly. Yeah. And also, of course, having Congress decide that wouldn’t create a patchwork of democracy.

Jim: If.

Mark: The controlling party, whose president was the one that was up for being judged as to whether he was an insurrectionist or not, there is that would then just go. Yeah, because. Aka the supreme court. Yeah. If we, the supporters of the insurrectioning party, and we’ve got the majority because we’ve just committed an insurrection and killed all the opposition, only we get to decide whether he has breached the 14th amendment. Yes, in breaching the 14th amendment and being the populist Congress, we can vote him in. We can give a free pass.

Jim: Yeah. They’re all about states rights when it comes to abortions.

Mark: Oh, yeah.

Jim: And the constitution puts the business of elections into the states. It says states have their own, ability to run elections how they see fit, essentially. And yet the supreme Court is saying, yeah, but not like this.

Mark: No, not if it means our guy. Yeah, no, not if it’s our guy.

Jim: Again, to be fair, it’s not just the know, Eleanor Kagan, some GBran Jackson agreed that it shouldn’t be left down to the states. M this argument. They didn’t go as far as the others in the majority, but they also agreed that this was a matter that should not be decided by states because it gives the states too much power in a federal election, which I can’t really understand because it does seem like states have a lot of power in federal elections already.

Mark: Yeah. The electoral college.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: There you. Yeah.

Jim: We also have, in Trump’s legal cases in Georgia, the hearing about Fonny Willis and Nathan Wade and whether they were a couple before she hired him to be special prosecutor in this case is now finished. But they had what MAGA people described as their star witness, Terrence Bradley, who was the one who arguably kicked the whole thing off when he talked to someone previously about the fact, about his interpretation that Willis and Wade had started their relationship much earlier than they claimed. And so they thought, well, this guy, he’s going to blow this case out the water. He’s going to come and say, yes. Here is how I know they definitely were at it before. And in fact, when he got into the courtroom and they said, tell us how you knew about this. He was like, yeah, I don’t have it. I don’t know. I was just kind of shooting the shit with people. I was speculating, I was guessing something I wondered about. I didn’t have any information. I don’t have any information. And I’m not prepared to say that they definitely were in a relationship and that completely fucked them.

Mark: Yeah. Because, yes, just opening your mouth like that will set massive things in motion. And then when you’re called to, okay, well, show us your evidence, then. Put your money in the mouth.

Jim: Well, I don’t know.

Mark: He hasn’t got anything.

Jim: Yeah, so that wasn’t great for them.

Mark: It reminds me of, there was a conversation I was listening to on James O’Brien on LBC Talk radio here in the UK. So it was a conservative councillor rang up the show to talk about the kind of rise of islamism. We can’t talk about all islam. He was complaining that we can’t talk about. We talk about exactly that. And then he said, and you should learn, you don’t go up against James O’Brien, who will listen to everything you say and then ask you, questions. He said, okay, tell me who in the Labour Party is doing things equally anti semitic as Lee Anderson and Priti Patel are anti islamist? Show me stuff that’s just as strong as that. Give me an example of that. So this guy just reeled off a name of a Labour MP. James O’Brien said, okay, you are aware of the libel laws. What’s your evidence? And, instead of coming up with the evidence, because he had no evidence, he just did the same thing in the funny Willis thing. It’s just shooting the shit to go. Oh, yeah, well, it’s obvious. Lots of people have said, oh, there are all sorts of things. And James O’Brien saying, okay, well, what’s your evidence then? Because you’ve now just libeled an MP live on the radio. Unless you provide the evidence, they’re going to take issue at that. And he just complained about the fact that you can’t say Islamism locked up these days and then accused James O’Brien of being. We didn’t quite call him anti semitic. He called him sort of unconcerned with the plight of. And again, he just said, m, where’s your evidence of that? And it just turned out that the evidence of that was that this guy was getting frustrated at the straight questions he was being asked.

Jim: Yeah. That happens a lot on James O’Brien.

Mark: Yeah. And consequently, the MP has now tweeted, I’ve heard that this. I will be consulting my lawyer. So the whole thing has kicked off. Yeah.

Jim: Wow. Yeah. It’s a special kind of confidence that comes from phoning up James O’Brien thinking you can win an argument with.

Mark: Of special kind of confidence that we also cause. So it’s a bit like the whole of the case that they’re thinking, right. Yeah, we got funny. Well, and that’s it. And now we’re going to be able to dismiss this entire case because she’s clearly unsuited, because she was biased from the beginning, blah, blah, blah. Her whole integrity has been compromised. Yeah. Let’s get the guy that set the ball rolling to tell us what he’s, he’s. It’s a bit like, Giuliani saying, oh, yeah, well, there’s so much evidence I can show you.

Jim: I think the thing is, the one piece of evidence that really takes the legs away from their case is they’re arguing that she somehow enriched herself by giving her boyfriend this job and then benefiting financially. And he was making more in private practice before he took this case. He’s making less now. And that’s it. That’s the end of the case, as far as I’m m concerned. she would be better off if she was in a relationship with him, not giving him this job and letting him continue in his very successful private practice as a lawyer and then benefiting from that. Yeah. Anyway, the judge, Scott McAfee, is, going to rule within two weeks on this whether he’s going to remove funny wellness from once he stopped laughing. I’d, be so surprised if she gets taken out. I don’t think she will, but we’ll see. You never know. The law is an ass in many ways, but I’d be surprised.

Mark: Yeah. Because there’s no grounds for doing so.

Jim: No, there’s not. No.

Mark: And we’re not lawyers, and we know.

Jim: That in the end, basically all they were able to argue is if you, in the course of this, have found them not to be credible, then you must remove them from the case, basically.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So we also have the ruling in New York where Trump, having been required to post his $454,000,000 bond because it’s the judgment plus interest, he went, well, I mean, I don’t have that amount of money. Would you take 100 million? That was basically what they did. If you need me to pay all of it, I’m going to have to sell a building, and that’s just not fair. So I’ll give you 100 and we’ll call it quits.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And then let me appeal. And weirdly, the New York court went, no, don’t want to do that. No, you have to pay the full amount if you want to appeal. Yeah, we’ll see. He has until March 25 to pay that. and we’ll see what happens with that.

Mark: Is he still able to do business in New York, be able to create that?

Jim: What they’ve done is they’ve lifted the restriction on getting loans from banks because basically, because most big banks have either headquarters or some connection to New York.

Mark: Right.

Jim: The rule previously would have prevented him from doing business with businesses in New York, essentially.

Mark: Oh, okay. Yeah.

Jim: So it would have prevented him from getting a loan from a bank that had headquarters in New York. So they’ve lifted that restriction. So theoretically, if there was a bank that was prepared to loan him hundreds of millions of dollars based on his credit history.

Mark: Yes, exactly. Knowing how good he is to repay those kind of loans, I think they.

Jim: Lifted that restriction as a joke because I don’t think. Go on, have a go. If you can convince one of them to do it, go for it.

Mark: Yeah. Your belief in that the free market will police itself. Well, yeah, here it is. Go test that. Yes.

Jim: So m, if he can get basically $350,000,000 loan, plus his 100 million he’s got on hand, then he can post his bond. and that’s not to mention the 83 million that he’s got to post in the E Jean Carroll case. So we’ll see what happens.

Mark: And is he complaining yet that he hasn’t got that much money?

Jim: Yeah, he’s complaining. He’s complaining that it will cause him to have to sell property under exigent circumstances.

Mark: Right.

Jim: Those being the property isn’t worth what he claimed.

Mark: Yeah. Ah, really? Is it okay. Yeah. And you’re complaining about, you know, take it up with a lawyer. Oh, no. That’s why you’re paying this.

Jim: Yeah. And finally, in Florida, Eileen Cannon has ruled against Trump in a couple of ways in as much as. First of all, she ruled that his co defendants, Walt Nowter and Carlos Oliveira, could not have access to classified discovery information, which seems fair, right, given that they don’t have any top secret clearance of any kind.

Mark: Yeah, like Trump doesn’t anymore.

Jim: And now she has ruled that Trump’s lawyers bid to see more of the classified documents that the prosecutors submitted. the government is right to withhold some information that isn’t hampering Trump’s case. It’s because it’s classified stuff and they haven’t got the rights to see if, there’s all kinds of rules under the classified Information Procedures act that mean that that information can then be used in open court, essentially under various methods. There’s ways of kind of describing it, of changing details, which takes away the secrets in there, and there’s a set of procedures that she will have to learn because she knows fuck all about it. but she is gradually picking up things about how they will actually use those classified documents in court. But one of the things they’re not doing is just giving them to Trump, who has not had a great history of handling classified.

Mark: Had a. He’s had a great time, Matt.

Jim: he’s got plenty of experience.

Mark: You wouldn’t want to ask him about whether that’s a thing that you’re allowed to do or.

Jim: No, no.

Mark: Yeah, because it will change depending on how it suits him. Yeah. And then the other stop press is Mitch McConnell was standing down prior to the election.

Jim: Well, in. Yep, yep. He said he’s standing down as leader of the Republicans in the Senate. He is not standing down as senator. He’ll still be a senator. So there’s not going to be an election or anything for his seat, but, yeah, there will be a leadership election.

Mark: Yeah. Wow. Oh, that’d be fun.

Donald Trump: How?

Jim: Well, the ones in the House have gone.

Mark: Yes, exactly. Is there time to have that many elections before the election? So do you think he’s standing down because his job is done? He’s manipulated the republican party into revoking Roe v. Wade, et cetera, et cetera, all that stuff. There’s those theories that he’s just been there playing the long game to get the right. I mean, as right as he wanted it to be.

Jim: If I had to speculate, I would say that it’s got to be a health thing, I would think. Right. He had all that health issues.

Mark: yeah.

Jim: And perhaps it’s got to a point where he has been advised that he won’t be able to keep going forever, which obviously everyone knew before. And, he’s like, all right, just six more months.

Mark: How old is he? Pretty old when he looks. Oh, he’s 82. Yeah, there you go. So he’s older than Biden.

Jim: Yeah, he’s older than Martin Scorsese.

Mark: But nobody says in the republican party. Yeah. That Scorsese ought not to be making films anymore. No, but they do say it about Biden, but they don’t weirdly say it about.

Jim: No, no. There’s not a lot on the republican side about how McConnell shouldn’t be leader because he clearly is too old for that kind of OD.

Mark: Yeah, he’s losing his marbles and has no chin. Never has had. Yeah. And finally, some things we really don’t have time to talk about.

Jim: Trump legal advisor Ken cheese bro is back in the news. As it turns out, he might not have been totally truthful in his cooperation session with Michigan investigators looking into his fake elector scheme that he helped devise. Here they are asking him about his social media.

Mark: Do you have any social media presence? Facebook? No. Before any, alternate ids that you’re using for that kind of stuff? No, I don’t do any tweeting.

Jim: And, while he seemed totally convincing to me, it turns out that wasn’t true. In fact, he had an account called Badger pundit where he also talked about election stuff. His lawyer, Robert Langford, dismissed this as unrelated to his work on Trump’s campaign, saying when he was doing volunteer work for the campaign, he was very specific and hunkered down into being the lawyer that he is and gave specific kinds of legal advice based on things that he thought were legitimate legal challenges versus badger pundit. Who is this other guy over there just being a goof? Yeah, my client wasn’t withholding evidence. He was just being a goof. Your honor, over there, that usually works. That other guy, who also happens to be Cheeseborough, was just doing goofy stuff like tweeting more than 50 times that Pence had the power to count the fake electors. But, hey, just because he lied about that doesn’t mean he lied about other stuff. Like the fact that he only learned in May 2021 that the Trump team had been planning on using the fake electors since before the election, regardless of how their legal cases went. Cheese bro may not have known, but that goof badger pundit sure did, tweeting about it in September 2020 when it was discussed in an Atlantic article. Honestly, if you can’t trust a Trump lawyer to tell the truth. Who can you trust?

Mark: It’s not like people in the Tory party have lots of different Michael Green ids. no. In the same way that british physician Andrew Wakefield lost his medical license in Britain as a result of publishing a fraudulent and long debunked report in 1998 linking MMR vaccines to autism. Let’s hope Joseph Ladapo gets struck off for failing to point out the problems associated with not getting vaccinated against the latest measles outbreak in Florida. Sure. Covid antivaxxer Ron DeSantis installed. Florida surgeon general Ladapo advised parents in a letter to be on the lookout for a rash that often develops on the face and neck before spreading to the rest of the body, as well as high fever, which can reach 105 degrees, a, cough, runny nose and red watery eyes. And added due to the high immunity rate in the community, as well as the burden on families and educational cost of healthy children. Missing school. His agency would let parents or guardians make their own decisions about sending their kids to school. It left out a recommendation that parents of non immunised children get them vaccinated immediately. And left out the information that actual epidemiologists like Caitlin Chatealina know. That among the unimunized, nine out of ten people exposed will get infected and one in five will be hospitalized. One in 20 will develop pneumonia, the most common way measles kill young kids. One in 1000 will develop encephalitis, an infection of the brain, sometimes causing permanent brain damage, and one to three in a thousand will die. Also, measles can cause immune amnesia, where the immune system loses its ability to fight other viruses that people were previously immune to. Yeah, you see, it’s something that’s sufficiently dangerous to life that, hey, a vaccine was invented in 1963 to prevent it spreading. But if you’re more concerned about votes than the lives of the actual voters or their children, yeah, sure. Appoint a super quack to search in general post and ignore the fact that Florida has a third of all the cases currently in the US, and that the number of cases so far this year is more than half of the entirety of cases last year already. And there were only 70 cases last year. The rate has dropped so low because of the effectiveness of a life saving vaccination program based on a vaccine that’s worked successfully for 60 years, that the severity of the disease for the unimunized can be deadly. I do hope DeSantis and Ladapo have fallen behind on their own shots. And no, they can’t have a lollipop.

Jim: Last time we reported on the at the time, brand new ruling by the Alabama Supreme Court that embryos are people, my friend. And since then, the republican party realised that while this is great for their campaign to force poor people to have babies, it also accidentally poses a problem for IVF because there are all kinds of other rules about not storing people in liquid nitrogen and then throwing them away when you don’t need them anymore. That led several Alabama IVF clinics to stop providing the treatment, which is a problem for Republicans because that affects rich people too. In fact, more than 2% of the babies born in the US are conceived using IVF and similar technologies. And it’s cool with basically everyone except the most ultra conservative, insane christians like speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who, while he now claims to support IVF, has repeatedly claimed in hearings that life begins at fertilization and a fetus is a unique and separate human being. The Alabama legislature has clumsily tried to account for IVF, proposing a new bill which says no action suit or criminal prosecution shall be brought or maintained against any individual or entity providing goods or services related to in vitro fertilization, except for an act or a mission that is both intentional and not arising from or related to IVF services, which seems to me like it also explicitly provides immunity to the fertility clinic. The Supreme Court ruled a liable in this case. I’m no expert on Alabama law, but I don’t know if the state legislature can follow up a state supreme court ruling with, but not really, though. Democrats in the Senate tried to pass a bill protecting IVF at the federal level, but that was blocked by republican senator Cindy Hyde Smith on the made up grounds that it would somehow pave the way for human animal hybrids. I don’t know. The only sliver of light that comes from this is that the more Republicans fuck around with people’s ability to make their own reproductive health decisions, the more they’ll find out in November that people don’t like it when they do that. But that is cold comfort for all the millions of people affected by their callousness. In the meantime, among the laugh a.

Mark: Minute moments at this year’s conservative political action conference, CPAC were a our own didn’t last as long as a lettuce. Ex prime minister, Liz Truss, who blamed the deep state and bizarrely, Joe Biden for, her downfall and the trashing of the economy, rather than her own insanely low iq and being the puppet of the far right Erg group two, a January 6 themed pinball machine with graphics on the high score targets including stop the steal, fake news, and political prisoners. And when certain scores are hit, clips from the insurrection are played, as well as audio clips from insurrectionists in chief. Mr. Trump, despite it appearing very popular, GOP members were accused of destroying the conservative movement, but probably because they just didn’t respect the hey, my dime was on the table. Next rule. Also given Spaceworth see out and proud actual Nazis who openly identifies as national socialists, mingling with mainstream conservative personalities at young Republicans mixer, including some from turning Point USA and discussing race science and anti semitic conspiracy theories. Ryan Sanchez, who’s previously part of the Nazi Rise above movement, took photos and videos of himself at the conference with an official badge and touted associations with previously ejected from CPAC, well known nazi and white supremacist Nick Fuentes. In another video, Sanchez can be seen in the lobby of the conference hotel giving a nazi salute after NBC News reported on these events. In an article, CPAC issued multiple statements on x, calling the article a hit piece false and fake news and saying CPAC stands firmly against all forms of anti semitism and hate. Well, I guess when you’re so far over one side of the political spectrum, there’s no one else but themselves to cover up for. So just who else are they lying to? Musk? Truss Trump? Because we all see you, you losers.

Jim: The House Oversight Committee finally got to question Hunter Biden behind closed doors so that nobody could see their failure on video. But one of the conditions they agreed to in order to make it happen was releasing a full transcript. Now, hardly needs saying that nothing in the transcript offers any new or existing evidence of any corruption or other naughty things on the part of old Joe. But it does give us the opportunity to witness the fantastic trolling done by democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell when it was his turn to question Hunter, which we present to you now as a dramatic reading. Any time your father was in government prior to the presidency or before, did he ever operate a hotel?

Mark: No, he has never operated a hotel.

Jim: So he’s never operated a hotel where foreign nationals spent millions at that hotel while he was in office?

Mark: No, he has not.

Jim: Did your father ever employ in the Oval Office any direct family member to also work in the Oval office?

Mark: My father has never employed any direct family members. To my knowledge.

Jim: While your father was president, did anyone in the family receive 41 trademarks from China?

Mark: No.

Jim: As president and leader of the party, has your father ever tried to install as the chairperson of the party a daughter in law or anyone else in the family?

Mark: No. And I don’t think that anyone in my family would be crazy enough to want to be chairperson of the DNC.

Jim: Has your father ever, in his time as an adult, been fined $355,000,000 by any state that he worked in?

Mark: No, he has not. Thank God.

Jim: Anyone in your family ever strike a multibillion dollar deal with the saudi government while your father was in office? No. That’s all I’ve got.

Mark: That’s just brilliant. Oh, yes. So good at, fallacious towers. We’re in awe of the progress that AI image generators have made just over the last year. And we’ve even been in receipt of requests to buy the funko pop versions of ourselves that we’ve generated. So we know the power of an image. BBC’s panorama program discovered dozens of AI generated fake images of black voters that Donald Trump supporters have been creating and sharing to encourage African Americans to vote Republican. Mark Kay and his team at a conservative radio show in Florida used AI to create an image of Mr. Trump smiling with his arms around a group of black women at a party and shared it on Facebook, where Mr. K has more than 1 million followers. At first it looks real, but on closer inspection, everyone’s skin’s a little bit shiny and there are missing fingers on people’s hands. Some of those telltale signs of AI created images. I’m, m not a photojournalist, M Mr. K tells Panorama from his radio studio. I’m not out there taking pictures of what’s really happening. I’m a storyteller. I’m not claiming it as accurate. I’m not saying, hey, look, Donald Trump was at this party with all of these african american voters. Look how much they love him. If anyone’s voting one way or another because of one photo they see on a Facebook page, well, that’s the problem with that person, not with the post itself. Which, of course, is the clarion cry of deniability that every agit prop exponent has used since reductio adgherbles. Cliff Albright, the co founder of campaign group Black Voters Matter, said that fake images were consistent with a very strategic narrative pushed by conservatives from the Trump campaign down to influencers online designed to win over black voters. They are particularly targeting young black men who are thought to be more open to voting for Mr. Trump than black women. Men like Douglas in Atlanta, who thought an AI generated image of Trump sitting on a front porch with black voters was real. He said it bolstered his view, shared by some other black people. He knew that Trump is supportive of the community. When revealed to be fake, he added, well, that’s the thing about social media. It’s easy to fool people. Again, it’s the printing press’s fault, not the people creating the images. Huh? All of the major social media companies have policies in place to tackle potential influence operations. And several, like meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, have introduced new measures to deal with AI generated content during elections. Musk and ex Twitter.

Jim: if I was New York Attorney general Letitia James, I might be tempted to have a nice sit down after winning a multi billion dollar lawsuit against the corrupt former president? Maybe have a bit of cake and rewatch Ted Lasso? She’s fucking earned it, in my opinion. But she is apparently not one to rest on her laurels, because there are always more villains in Gotham. Like, for example, former CEO of the National Rifle Association, Wayne LaPierre, who, you’ll be shocked to learn is not a great guy. Thanks to AG James holding him to account, a jury has now found him liable for corruption by diverting $5.4 million of the nonprofit organization’s funds into his own pockets, by expensing african safaris, eight trips to the Bahamas, private jet flights, and more, as well as awarding multimillion dollar contracts to vendors who showered him with gifts like international holidays and access to 108 foot yacht. The downside is that he’ll be paying that money back to the NRA, who also are, not the greatest. But to soften the blow, his 30 plus years of financial mismanagement put them so much in debt that they had to declare bankruptcy in 2021. So I don’t think they’re in a position to start throwing money at Republicans again just yet. Especially since the AG has requested an independent monitor be assigned to oversee their spending. My question is, can we get Letitia James to look at Clarence Thomas next, please?

Mark: Yeah. Oh, that’s excellent that they’re bankrupt. Oh, how marvellous. The time has now come for us all to stand together to combat the forces of division and, beat this poison. We must face down the extremists who would tear us apart. There must be leadership, not pandering or appeasement when they tell their lies. No, not pleased from the left to rid the country of the worst government ever who ruined the economic, health, and education systems of an entire nation over the last 14 years. But little Rishi getting all Neville Chamberlain and promising peace in our time by all but instructing the police to start clamping down forcefully on people who disagree with his lame ass policies over Gaza so determinedly that they elected George let me be your cat and lick milk from your cupped hands ruler Lenska Galloway rather than the Tory candidate in Rochdale when the goal was left open by Labor’s removal of their candidate. Similarly, way over there on the right, 30 p. Lee Anderson made not so veil references to Sadiq Khan being in hock to Muslims so that it’s they who run London now. You know the kind of remark that if you said Zionists are not Muslims, Starmer would have withdrawn your candidacy almost immediately and permanently. Cough cough. Member for Islington North Lee Anderson eventually got the whip removed, not because he was an out and out anti islamist and there’s no place for that riddling the rotten core of the Tory party, but because he didn’t apologize to Sadiq. Nick Ferrari on LBC ended up terminating his interview with Immigration Minister Michael Tomlinson because the minister could not say why Anderson should have apologized other than because the words he chose were wrong, and then failing on six occasions to say why the words were wrong. By this time, even Anderson had, ah, distanced himself from the extremism of his own words, but not the party, because the party found it useful to create the other to blame rather than accept responsibility for the carnage they’ve wrought on the country and will be wrought upon them come the general election. Quad est demonstrandum reduxio ad andersium.

Jim: that’s a deep british celebrity Big brother cut that you had on George Galloway there.

Mark: Well, he’s turned up because they just announced that the likes of Sharon Osborne were going to be on the news, big brother. And, of course Galloway’s won. So the next bullet item down is George Galloway. It’s there. Get on there. Get on BBC.com, people. Look it up. It’s appalling. He’s an elected mp

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

Mark: If you think we’ve used a fallacy ourselves, let us know, and if you’ve had a good time please give us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts or simply tell one other person, in person, about how much they’d like our podcast. And you can support the show at patreon.com/ftrump, just like our Straw Man level Patrons, Will M, Scott, Aussie En Banc, Laura Tomsick, Renee Z, Schmootz, Mark Reiche and Amber R. Buchanan (who told us when we met her at QED we can just call her Amber, though another listener recognised her at QED last year cos we keep using her full name all the time!); and our True Scotsman level Patrons, Melissa Sytek, Steven Bickel, Janet Yuetter, Andrew Hauck, and our top Patron… Kaz Toohey!

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

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

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

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Jim Cliff
jim@fallacioustrump.com


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