Appeal to Probability – FT#163

13 Dec Appeal to Probability – FT#163

Show Notes

The Appeal to Probability Fallacy occurs when someone assumes that because something is possible or probable then it will definitely happen.

Trump

We started out by discussing Trump lying about inflation:

Then we looked at Trump lying about 9/11:

And finally we talked about this Trump tweet:

At 10:00 P.M. on Election Evening, we were at 97% win with the so-called “bookies”.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 9, 2020

Mark’s British Politics Corner

Mark talked about a collection of people predicting Farage’s return

He followed that up by talking about Farage himself somehow making ChatGPT seem woke:

Fallacy in the Wild

In the Fallacy in the Wild we looked at this clip from Friends

Then we discussed this clip from Men in Black

And we finished up with this clip from Sherlock

 

Fake News

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

1. Look, the most beautiful word in the dictionary to me is tariff. I think it’s the most beautiful word. It’s going to make our country rich. And these stupid people – look, politicians, there’s only two reasons why they wouldn’t want to use tariffs. They’re stupid or they’re corrupt. There’s no third reason. They’re either stupid or they’re corrupt. I just stopped the largest plant in the entire world, which would destroy your state. I think this plant made more than all of Detroit put together. You know it’s a big – and I just stopped it, and I’m not even president yet, OK? Think of what I could do when I’m president.
2. Because tariffs work, right? They just work. Look at what happened last time, when Mexico wasn’t doing anything about what was an invasion – really an invasion on our Southern border, and I told them… I called them up and I said “I’m going to tariff the hell out of you” and they said “Sir, we’d like to give you 28,000 soldiers free of charge”. You can get them to do anything with tariffs. You can – just by threatening you can get people to do what you want. You can stop wars. Everyone is terrified of being tariffed, so terrified. It’s true. So of course I’m going to do that. You’d have to be stupid not to do that. We’re gonna be so rich.
3. In the 1890s and 1880s, our country was actually the richest it ever was. They had to form committees to determine, how are we going to spend this vast wealth? We had so much wealth, relatively speaking, so much wealth, more than anybody by far. And they formed up blue ribbon committees, “How are we going to spend the money? We don’t know how to spend it.” Wouldn’t that be a nice problem to have? And it was all a tariff – we were a tariff country. And McKinley was president. William McKinley. Was actually a great president. Was assassinated, by the way. He was assassinated. You know, being president is a very dangerous profession.

Mark got it wrong this week, and is on 51%!

 

A pardon is not a logical fallacy

We talked about Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter

 

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

• Well, the final 2024 election results are in, and Trump’s landslide victory turned out to be more of a muddy trickle, ending up with less than 50% of the popular vote and the sixth smallest winning margin in history. But of course, the popular vote is just a vanity metric – the electoral college is what counts, and his winning margin there was a robust 44th out of 60 elections. Yes, the GOP did win the Senate, which was not super surprising given almost all the flippable seats were held by Democrats in red or purple states, and they also held on to the House, but that’s where it gets a bit interesting. Last week Adam Gray defeated Republican incumbent John Duarte in California’s 13th. That means Democrats netted two extra seats, reducing the already slim GOP majority to 220-215. That means that Speaker Mike Johnson would have to get almost unanimous agreement and attendance from the notoriously fractured and lazy House Republicans in order to get any legislation through. But it’s actually better than that, because Matt Gaetz has already resigned his seat, and Trump has appointed Florida Congressman Mike Waltz as national security advisor. Their seats will be vacant until special elections in April. Trump has also nominated Elise Stefanik as US Ambassador to the UN, and when she resigns, her seat will be vacant for up to 80 days. That puts the balance at 217-215 and means Johnson can’t afford a single defector or heavy cold if he wants to get anything done. And let’s face it, there’s still time for Trump to appoint another Congressperson to some random position they’re not qualified for, because he neither understands nor cares about the consequences of his actions.
• Perhaps we’ve got it all wrong about nasty anti-trans shouty hateful MTG-wannabe Republican Senator Nancy Mace, perhaps we should be a bit more sympathetic towards her and create a safe space for her in recognition of her reported trauma as a child. You know a safe space to talk over curated and accessible care like say at an event honoring the 25th anniversary of the Foster Care Independence Act of 1999 that significantly expanded federal support for foster youth who leave the system after turning 18 without a permanent home. Whilst Mace told the crowd that while she was not an adoptee or former foster youth, she had been a victim of sexual abuse as a child. She called the dozens of advocates and foster youth in attendance “the cream of the crop.” Former foster youth and award-winning advocate for children James McIntyre was moved to shake her hand, and mindful of the next 25 years of advocacy for vulnerable young people made a comment to her about how many transgender youth are in foster care, adding: “They need your support.” But of course through the right-wing red mist that was triggered within her intolerant bigoted-for-money-and-votes stance she posted on X, describing the exchange as a violent confrontation. “I was physically accosted at the Capitol tonight by a pro-tr*ns man. One new brace for my wrist and some ice for my arm and it’ll heal just fine,” she posted at 8:43 p.m. “The Capitol police arrested the guy. Your tr*ns violence and threats on my life will only make me double down.” I’ve a feeling Mace has never shaken hands with a constituent, you know as you might expect as a legislator – blimey let’s hope she never experiences Trump’s handshake – jeezs! That scene in Papillon where Steve McQueen respectfully shakes hands and shares a cigar with the leader of an exiled leper colony this ain’t! Mace’s inhumanity to her fellow beings extends to people who are simply not sufficiently against the same things she’s against – ‘call the cops and have them arrest the friends of my enemies’ Oh I bet she’s going to go far in TrumpWorld, but don’t ask me to shake on that!
• If any of our Canadian listeners have spent the past month feeling all smug about the fact they don’t live in the US, watch out – you’re not safe from the sheer stupidity of Trump’s followers. So discovered Keri McKinley, a florist in British Columbia, recently, when her shop, Everbloom Designs, started getting lots of negative reviews on Facebook and Google, and she was on the receiving end of some very angry calls and emails. The reason, it turns out, is that a florist in Tennessee, Kristin Wolter, announced on her Instagram account that she would not be doing business with Trump supporters. As a private business owner, that is her right. Your political affiliation is not a protected characteristic under Tennessee law like your race or sexuality, and of course most conservatives think businesses should be allowed to discriminate no matter how protected your characteristics are. Kristin’s shop is called Everbloom Design, and Trump supporters are idiots, so Keri in BC took some of the heat. Don’t worry though, enough Trump supporters were able to direct abuse, hate and threats in the right direction to make Kristin close her business at least temporarily out of concern for her own safety. In the meantime I guess you Canadians will just have to feel smug about something else, like your clearly superior bacon, or for spawning heroes like Keanu, Kiefer, Celine, and the Ryans (Gosling and Reynolds). 
• Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister removed himself recently as Trump’s nominee for Drug Enforcement Agency Administrator, maintaining that his nomination was still the honour of his life but said he was removing himself from consideration in favor of continuing work with the Sheriff’s office. If anything is going to get up the Cheeto’d spray-tanned nose of the Trumpster-fire himself it’s people turning down the papal/royal/holy favours bestowed on them by his god-king-messiah-emporerness. Saying ‘nah, you’re good, keep it I don’t wannit’ Is a real insulting understroking of the chin to the Donald – who Truth’d in response “The Wall Street Journal is becoming more and more obnoxious and unreadable. Today’s main headline is: ‘Trump’s DEA Pick Pulls Out In Latest Setback.’ With all that’s happening in the World, this is their Number One story of the day. Besides, he didn’t pull out; I pulled him out because I did not like what he said to my pastors and other supporters.” Cos it IS number one in Trump’s world that someone would dare to beware of Grifts bearing gifts! “Pastors” possibly refers to the fact that Chronister, often seen as a moderating voice in conservative politics in Hillsborough County, during the early stages of the pandemic announced the arrest of Dr. Rodney Howard-Browne, pastor of The River at Tampa Bay Church, for having conducted a service during the height of social distancing policies. Chronister’s office provided a statement in response to Trump’s stamping his tiny lifted feet “Sheriff Chronister stands behind his decision to withdraw from consideration. Right now, his priority, as it has been for the last seven years, remains the mission to protect and serve everyone in Hillsborough County,” So yeah basically I’m going to stay here and make decisions based on keeping people safe and protected by applying the law without fear or favour, rather than be gathered up into your Ringling circus of neutered crazies and forced to toe the line and be party to neglect and damage through your particular brand of dereliction of moral duty. Nice one Chad!  

• I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to think pillow peddler Mike Lindell might not be the best at business. Lindell, who looks like he’s playing Mario in an Ingmar Bergman film, is suing a lender because he claims he was duped into taking out a merchant cash advance – essentially the corporate equivalent of a payday loan. Desperate for cash after spending millions trying to prove the 2020 election was stolen, Lindell borrowed $1.6 million from Cobalt Finance Solutions at a 409% annual interest rate. He’s now suing them for predatory lending practices and exorbitant interest rates. I don’t think he’s very likely to succeed, since the terms of the loan were clear when he took it out, and as all good Republicans know, if you choose to take out a loan you should have to pay it back because otherwise it’s unfair to everyone else who’s ever paid back a loan. The other reason I don’t think it’ll work is because he probably wrote the brief himself, since his lawyers quit last year because he didn’t pay them. He’s tried the same argument against two other lenders he borrowed a total of $2.6 million from earlier in the year and at a certain point you have to wonder how these lenders think they’re going to get any of their money back, let alone the ridiculous interest. He still owes $5 million to the guy who proved his packet data was not only not proof of election fraud, it wasn’t even data.
• Remember when Rishi Sunak said he’d banned, stopped and prevented: tax on meat, seven recycling bins – and several other things that people pointed out weren’t ever policies and didn’t in fact exist, and we all suspected it was a big distraction from the lack of actual anything he was actually doing? We-ell Florida Republican Sen. Ileana Garcia has introduced a bill that will ban “weather modification activities,” which includes the release of chemicals that influence the temperature or weather patterns. Garcia’s bill will prohibit the injection of chemicals into the atmosphere for the purpose of altering the weather or sunlight intensity within Florida’s borders. Anyone who violates the law, should it be passed, will be fined up to $10,000. Of course no-one is, ever has or will likely ever be able to actually do any such things, although this does feel something of an advance on the Tennessee law we reported on earlier in the year that banned chemtrails entirely! As we have witnessed many times tons, pages, hours of fact-checked and peer-reviewed actual scientific evidence showing things like chemtrails are simply the result of hot air meeting cold air up high where the air is cold and where the planes fly and are made up of water vapour, are insufficient to shift belief away from conspiracy theories about weather and “them putting stuff in the air”. Questions always occur to me like ‘to what end?’ And ‘how do they stop themselves getting affected?’ And ‘if this is such a secret only known to them – the elite cartel of overminds that are ruling us all and are not to be trusted – how come you know? And are you therefore to be trusted? Ileanna’s not the bad guy here though it’s probably a bit more the people who are going through with the drawing up of the legislation and drafting it and having lawyers check it etc etc all possibly for money? Incidentally It should be noted that Garcia only has her seat in the Florida State Senate because when she first ran for office back in 2020 someone with the same name as her Democratic opponent was paid to run in the election to divide the vote – yeah so possibly money, is all I’m saying! Now if there could be legislation drawn up to prevent that kind of corruption by elected officials that might be something to sky-write home about!

• Being a world class narcissist, awards are a big thing for Trump, whether it’s awards he gave himself, like club championships at his own golf clubs, or ones he just made up, like Michigan Man of the Year. But sometimes he gets awards that other people made up, like last week, when he won Fox Nation’s “Patriot of the Year” award. At a star studded event in New York, where former child star and God Awful Movies staple Kirk Cameron was also among the honorees, Trump accepted his award from Sean Hannity and then talked the kind of bollocks that may make it into a future Fake News game. Attendees were encouraged to dance the Trump dance to YMCA, and Hannity did impressions, including Joe Biden and Tim Walz. In a much more sedate ceremony, Trump rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange after having been announced as Time Magazine’s Person of the Year for 2024. I’m not sure how those two things are linked, but all the articles about it mention the bell ringing so I guess I should too. There’s been some consternation about Time magazine’s choice of Trump, but I do think it’s worth remembering that no matter what Trump believes, it’s not “best person”, it’s, in Time Magazine’s own words, the person who “for better or for worse … has done the most to influence the events of the year”, and their person of the year in 1938 was Hitler, so fair enough I guess. Meanwhile, I think it’s time that we at Fallacious Trump got in on the game, so I’d like to announce that we have decided to award Trump with the inaugural Underwhelming Privileged Fuck of the Year Award. Needless to say, there was stiff competition for this year’s award because there is sadly no shortage of Underwhelming Privileged Fucks (although thanks to Luigi Mangione the list did get slightly shorter recently). Other shortlisted Underwhelming Privileged Fucks included Elon Musk, Nigel Farage and Joe Rogan, as well as every single one of Trump’s children, but this year nobody embodied being an Underwhelming Privileged Fuck more than the man who was convicted of 34 felonies, and was still elected to do a job he clearly wasn’t qualified for the first time he fucked it up. I don’t want to jinx it, but I’m pretty sure he’s the front runner for next year’s award too.
• This week even the Brexiteers are celebrating Starmers ‘reset’ with the EU. Not cos the influx of people through the borders that Boris got Brexit done to get back control of had reduced to a trickle. As we heard in PMQs this week Badenoch interrogated the PM on why reducing the number of people coming to the U.K. wasn’t one of the six milestones in his latest collection of pledge promise stakes in the ground lines in the sand speech last week – a bit rich coming from the Tories who presided over the largest net migration in the year to June 2023 at 906,000 – higher that at any time before Brexit, with year to June 2024 fairly high also at 728,000. It’s as though the new Tory leader has done her own Ministry of Truth reset and lives in a world where the Labour government has always been in power and everything prior to her being switched on is their fault. Kemi also said this week that lunch is for wimps and she won’t touch bread if it’s moist – who does? Who even thinks about the moistness of bread? Let’s hope she’s not so squeamish about fish, cos it’s always about the fish – and fish I’d wager are amongst the moistest of foodstuffs. Arch Brexiteer Jacob Fleeced-Mob famously quipped the fish are much happier post-Brexit – well post-Brexit-reset – fishball’s coming home! Cos the new deal brokered by Starmer with the EU has meant a quota for the UK fishing in European waters is 150,000 tonnes for 2025 – 15,000 tonnes more than in 2024. Now if we could only see the 10s of thousands of people as equally a good thing to have landed from Europe then we could stop all this demonising of the other – or in Kemi’s case demonising her own birthplace! And just get on with realising there’s a plaice for everyone?

You can now buy Jim’s book, 2000 Mules and One Big Lie: A Stubborn Conspiracy Theory

Create your podcast today! #madeonzencastr

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:

Appeal to Probability – FT#163 Transcript

Jim: Hello and welcome to Fallacious Trump, the podcast where we use the insane ramblings of a racist voodoo doll made of discarded cat hair to explain logical fallacies. I’m your host, Jim.

Mark: And I’m your host, Mark. A logical fallacy is an error in reasoning that results in bad or invalid arguments. And the logical fallacy we’re looking at this week is the appeal to probability. I like that. The. I was hoovering today, so. And in the wheel of the hoover was some discarded cat and made you think of Trumpeah. It’s that kind of. Is that kind of particularly scabby ginger cats’it yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jim: So, we’re recording a few days later than usual because, you’ve been, you’ve been having a bit of power.

Mark: Yeah. In, in the countryside. Yes. Went to the countryside, big storm. I thought it was a bit blowy and a bit rainy. Turns out it was a named storm. And being in the countryside when the power goes out, that’s it. No. So I did think, oh, just, ah, I’ll get online and look up on, the computer’s down, I’ll just get on my phone and look up. But no, because there’s no phone signal and he couldn’t even get on. Had to drive out from the house, up a hill and over yon and far away to get a phone signal to text Jim to say it’s all gone horribly where it’s all gone horribly primitive and to look up what the electricity company was doing and they going, yeah, it’s all out. No guarantees. And this is now Thursday. We’re recording this. Some parts of the neighborhood still not going to get any power till tomorrow. And that was last Saturday. It’s all, all started. Yeah, yeah. Don’t move to the country, people. It’s not. No wonder. People will only do weaving and those kind of blankets made up of small squares of stuff because there’s not enough light or electricity.

Jim: You do get a lot of weaving in the country’t you?

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nothing but fences are woven, everything the cat hair gets woven into wigs.

Jim: Yeah. So, yeah, appeal to probability yeah. This is when someone assumes that because an event is probable, likely to happen, or even in some cases just could happen, that it is definitely going to happen.

Mark: It’s true that it will.

Jim: Yes. We delved into this a little bit in the Worst Case Scenario episode because that was times when they were saying, look, if everything goes wrong, it could be this, this is possible, this is a thing that could happen. And then they’re like, so we must assume that that will happen and therefore act accordingly.

Mark: Ye.

Jim: And this isn’t quite that. This is just like if anything is has a probability that is greater than zero, then in service to the argument we’re trying to make, we can assume that it is reasonably going to happen.

Mark: Right. Yeah, yeah. And then act on that basis. Yes, yes. Yeah. And then recruit everybody to your side of the argument as a result. Yeah. So it’s like the infinite improbability drive, isn’t it? Nothing’s impossible, it’s just highly improbable.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: And you could just calculate the probability. But Trump does do that.

Jim: It wasn’t super easy to narrow down the Trump examples because.

Mark: Right.

Jim: Trump says probably about a lot of stuff.

Mark: Right.

Jim: When what he means is, this is something I’m lying about or have no knowledge of. But if I say probably, that’s enough plausible deniability to get away with it.

Mark: Exactly. Yes. Yes.

Jim: Like when he was talking about the economy and what would happen to it if he didn’t get elected.

Donald Trump: And this is an election that’s, really a choice between whether or not we’ll, have four more years of total failure or whether we’ll begin the four greatest years in the history of our country. And we’re starting. We’re starting a little bit from behind because we’ve been set back. We’ve been set back badly in every single way with inflation. I mean, the costs are way too high and inflation is still higher than it’s supposed to be with all that they’ve done to try and get it down. But, they use the number mic 20%, but it’s probably 40 or 50% if you really look, look, interest rates with us were 2% and now they’re 10%.

Jim: So saying inflation, they say 20%, but it’s probably 40 or 50. Therefore vote for me, because we might.

Mark: As well, because interest was 2, now it’s 10. So, you know, we could just chuck in any old number because he does that a lot with numbers.

Jim: Y.

Mark: There’s no. Who is it? I think it was Tiger woods was talking about playing Golf with him. By the time they had got rounded back to the clubhouse, he had scored something like 10 under par. You he started off with two underpower. And every time Trump met somebody on the thing he sayes is Tiger Wood. He’s doing great on this course. He’s four under now and then next time they see somed he’s sixs under. He has’never played anym more holes. He’s just bumping up the numbers because for him they are servants to his boosterism. It’booster.

Jim: He has a term free. He calls it truthful hyperbole, which is. It’s a bit weir. Yeah, it’s nonsense, obviously, but, yeah, he’s. He’s basically saying when, when he says numbers about stuff, he’s kind of just giving the sense, while being hyperbolic of what it is. But yeah, the thing is, people do know what the numbers that he’s talking about actually are and were m Because this is the kind of shit that people keep track of. And inflation, cumulative inflation over the course of Biden’s Presidency is around 20%. Month on month inflation, which is the number that people really look at at the moment, is around 3%. The Fed would like it to be about 2%. So it’s a bit higher than it and it should be, but it’s come down enormously. But at its absolute peak in I think, July of 2022, it hit 9%.

Mark: Right.

Jim: Because of, you know, everything that led on from COVID and also the Russian invasion of Ukraine and all of that kind of stuff, it got high, it’s come down. But cumulatively, over the course of Biden’s presidency, it’s around 20%. Over the course of Trump’s presidency, it was around 6%, which is a lot lower. But there was a significant period during that where supply and demand was a bit fucked up because of everyone being inside for a little while. So the prices of everything came down dramatically.

Mark: Came down a bit, yes.

Jim: Of inflation.

Mark: And the thing is that nobody mentions cumulative interest, do they?

Jim: I mean, people. Yeah, it’s. It’s a figure they keep track of.

Mark: But they don’t kind of go, you know, month on month, which actually affects how you, how much your dollar buys you in the supermarket. You know, you’re going to go, all right, it’s gone down to three great ye. It’s less. It’s still going up.

Jim: Yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s a factor in, in terms of what you can buy with money compared to what you could an arbitrary number of years Ago.

Mark: Right.

Jim: So yeah, cumulative inflation, if you do it year by year, that m means something because you’re comparing what it was like last year to what it’s like this year. But when you’re talking about cumulative inflation over a period of time, like our presidency, you’re just saying, well, starting at January 2021. Ye and stopping here. How do you compare those two things? And there’s a lot that happens and a lot that affects that.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So it’s a bit of an arbitrary figure.

Mark: And does the Fed run independently of government be like the bank of England?

Jim: Yeah, the government doesn’t tell them how to set the interest rates.

Mark: So it’s a bit like when Sunak said, yeah, we called the general election on the basis that yes, he’d met one of his impossible to affect pledges’s a bit like saying England will win the World cup under my premiership. You know, it’s nothing to do with him. So he was, and he was saying, oh yeah, inflation. Well we will get inflation down. I don’t know how because there’s nothing to do with you unless you haveve fuel duty. Yeah, I guess you could do that because that’s the, you know, the cost of things is what drives people, drives inflation up. If they were to reduce the tax on things, the duty on the people pay when they buy things, that might be something that they could affect. But yeah. So to claim that the things what Trump did meant that inflation was cumulatively lower than the things what Biden did and the things that he will go ahead and do will keep inflation down.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: When it’s actually nothing to do with him. He’s gonna go up. Cause he’s gonna do talifent.

Jim: Yeah, that’s the thing is there are some things that a president can theoretically do which can have an impact on inflation, but it’s a minor impact in terms of reality of how much things will cost because it’s global supply and demand that determines prices of a lot of things. Tariffs do have a significant impact as well in terms of the just the cost of stuff. Because as we know, although Trump doesn’t, when you put tariffs on stuff, it’s, it tends to be the consumer who then pays those tariffs because the people who are paying to import those things end up passing that cost on sometimes like when Trump put tariffs on washing machines, the people who make washing machines put the cost up on washing machines, but they also put the cost up on dryers, which weren’t terrorf.

Mark: Right.

Jim: But they were like, hey, we’re Putting costs up already. Why not gouge the public, do that? So there’s some stuff that presidents do that can have an impact on inflation, but realistically there’s not a great deal. Like if it’s globally moving in one direction, there’s not a lot that a president can do about it. The interest

00:10:00

Jim: rates that he cited, he said it was, we had 2% and now it’s 10%.

Mark: Ye.

Jim: Neither of those figures are accurate, you’ll be shocked to learn. Right, yeah, no, the 2% one is close. It was 2.2% percent under Trump and it’s never been above 5.9% under Biden. So 10% is quite significantly out. And, and at the moment. And when he was saying this, it was I think 4.75 or 4.5%. So it had come down even further from the maximum that. So there’s that tooah. But basically the reason we played that is because he said they say 20%, it’s probably 40 or 50bably. And he does this with a lot of numbers. He does it with illegal immigrants as he classes them undocumented people. He says that there is like a official number that they say and he usually inflates the official number and then he says, but really the number is probably this moun. And it’s. Yeah, it’s just completely out of his head with no basis in reality.

Mark: It’s actually to make the real number sound worse.

Jim: But yeah, he’s kind of expecting you to, to then base the decision on, for example, who to vote for, on his probable number, on his number that he’s just made up and said, yeah, it could be true. Who knows?

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jim: And also it’s, it’s really good and easy to reduce that number dramatically if you claim it’s higher than it ever was.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: If you make up an enormous number and then when you get into office, it turns out that the real number is way lower. You can go see, see how successful I’ve been.

Mark: Yeaheah, yeah. Already only been here a day. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jim: So our second Trump example is about when he claimed that he saw on TV lots of American Muslims celebrating in New Jersey after 9 11. Everyone kind of university went, no you didn’t. That didn’t happen. And he went, oh no, I saw it. Absolutely. Everyone agrees with me. It happened. Yeah. And so when he was on Meet the Press talking to Chuck Todd once, Chuck confronted him about it and said, look, everyone’s looked, into this.

Chuck Todd: We’ve really searched all the media. It didn’t happen. This didn’t happen in New Jersey. There were plenty of reports and you’reating stereotype.

Donald Trump: It did happen in New Jersey. I have hundreds of people that agree with me and by the way, but.

Chuck Todd: They want to agree with you.

Donald Trump: That doesn’t make Chuck, you have a huge Muslim population over there and that’s fine. That’s fine. But you have a huge Muslim population between Patterson and different places and Jersey City, an unbelievable large population. If they’re going to be doing it at soccer games, if they’re going to be doing it all around the world, it was being done. It was when the Trade center came down, it was done all around the world. And you know that because that has been reported very strongly. Why wouldn’t it have taken place?

Jim: So his argum stands to reason. His argument is Muslims all around the world celebrated when the towers came down. that’s not the case. Although there were some isolated incidents in the Middle east that were reported on and he’s saying Muslims did it elsewhere. There’s Muslims in New Jersey. So therefore, you know, probably. Yeah, therefore I’m right when I say it definitely happened.

Mark: And hundreds of people agree with me. Yeah, yeah. Hundreds of anti Muslim racists. Yeahough you intent on stirring up trouble, I will agree with you. Of course it, you know, it’s. It’s just saying we’ve done appeal to the populace. Y you just because you say that doesn’t mean it’s true. And even if it was true, it doesn’t mean that you’re right.

Jim: Yeah. Help.

Mark: Yeah. How many times do we have to him. Wow, that’s just awful. Is is a bloody racist food dol God.

Jim: So our final Trump example comes from just after the 2020 election. Actually December 9th is a tweet that he sent in support of his claim that obviously he really won. He says yeah. At 10pm on election evening we were at 97% win with the so called bookies. So this is why this fallacy is often successful in convincing people of stuff because we are very bad at intuiting probability. Probability is something that humans struggle with in terms of it making sense to us on a emotional level. It feels like it’s telling us stuff that it isn’t really telling us when we think something is 97% likely to happen. Even if like this is basically this is according to bookies but assume the bookies were exactly right on how likely it was at that point that he was going to end up having won the election. Yeah, it feels like, oh, it’s Almost certainly gonna happen then.

Mark: Yeah. Because that’s, because that’s a lot.

Jim: Ninety sevens. Almost a hundred. But

00:15:00

Jim: yeah what that is is about 1 in 30 chance that he wasn’t gonna win. And things that have a 1 in 30 chance of happening happen all the fucking time. Hundreds, thousands of times a day. Things that have a 1 in 30 chance of happening happen. They are incredibly frequent events because if you think about all the things that happen.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: There are billions of them every day. Some of them are go going toa be slightly unusual events.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And slightly unusual still happens all the.

Mark: Time because it’s only slightly unusual. Yah.

Jim: He wasn’t right about this. When you actually go and look at the bookies or ask the bookies or even like bookies who, who commented on this Tweet, people like OddsCheckker.com whose job it is to keep an eye on what the odds are for things the odds are. They said actually at that time you were about 69% likely to win which means it’s lot less likely. Only a little better than 2 in 3 chance that he was going to win.

Mark: There’s all sorts of plausible deniability stuff going in there, isn’t it? We were at 97% win with the so so called bookies. Why is he put so. And then he’s put bookies comm comments as well. So he so called it twice. So why. Surely in order to add some authority to your statement you would want to say with the bookie.

Jim: Absolutely you would. The act first of all doesn’t understand how scare quotes work. So yeah he’s doing that badly. But yes he’s denigrating them while trying to use them as a source for his.

Mark: Yeah. To back him up.

Jim: That proves that he won, really won. And they also weren’t saying 97% at all.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So it’s another one of those. If he was telling the truth it still wouldn’t prove his point. He’s not telling truth.

Mark: Yeah. Therefore. Yeah O y like you get.

Jim: Dumb every time you m. Listen to a thing he says.

Mark: Yeah. It’s got, and it doesn’t help with, with the sort of vague grip. I got an entire book bought for me by my son which is about a ah human’s relationship with probability and it kind of counts in terms of how to beat the turn of the cards. If you don’t go along with your gut feel you’re more likely to understand what the probabilities are.

Jim: Yeah. That’s like the Monty hall problem. People are very Very bad at figuring it out without a degree in statistics and probability.

Mark: And the advantage is if you understand all how all this works, you can be a better. Better.

Jim: Yes.

Mark: Though I didn’t anticipate that happening before I said it. That’s quite cool because the entire betting industry by the run by the so called book is, is based on the gambler’fallacy and you know, it’s that whole belief in the numbers and the belief that we can understand them, but we don’t.

Jim: I mean there’s a huge amount of the bandwagon fallacy appeal to popularity in the whole betting thing because odds are almost exclusively based on how likely other people think it is that something’s going to happen.

Mark: Right.

Jim: Because if, if everyone reckons one film is going to win Best Picture at the Oscars or one horse is going to win a particular race, then the odds become very low on that point because when other people bet on that, the bookies don’t want to pay out on it as much so they don’t give you as much back. And that makes it look like that horse is M or that film is much more likely to win when actually it’s just an expression of how many people reckon it’s likely to win.

Mark: Yeah. And the reticence for the bookies to lose money. Yeah, so called bookies.

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

Mark: Well, my go to kind of for all things rhetorically fallacious nearly said go Toad is of course Nigel the faux farmers friend, the frog face Farage. He’s of the same ilke as Trump as he will use this appeal to probability in order to protect himself from accusations of actually holding the belief itself. But he will rather innocently report the possibility. You know, I’m just saying it might be probable whilst actually firmly holding the belief itself. And he causes some consternation in the political sphere, which he loves doing, of course. And being a politician he doesn’t have to do any work other than that, you know, turn up to constituency meetings, deal with people, complaints about bin collections and so on. He doesn’t do any of that even though he’s an elected MP because he’s also a lazy, attention grabbing wannabe superstar. And here’s John Curtis who’s political scientist professor of politics. He always turns up at election times because he’s a senior research fellow at the National Cent Centre for Social Research and he’s quite prescient with his appeal to probability. And then we’ve got Miriam

00:20:00

Mark: Cates who’s the then Tory MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge and also the editor of the Sun, Kelvin Mackenzie, and then James Cleverly, all of whom are commenting on this sort of mercurial power of Farage as not a politician but and what the probability is going to be. And some of the probabilities that they talk about were quite prescient.

John Curtis: The worst thing that could possibly happen for Tory MPs, and the next. Six months it probably is that Nigel Farage would return, as the leader. Of the Brexit party.

Miriam Cates MP: If he was to stand and loose in a constituency which is quite possible because of our first pass theosed system, that would actually be quite detrimental to his reputation. So I can understand why, he hasn’t done that. But obviously as a Conservative, I am pleased that that probably means that reform won’t get quite the same traction as they otherwise might have done.

Kelvin MacKenzie: If he gets 18 seats, he’be the leader of the Conservative Party, probably by Christmas

James Cleverly: Nigel Farage is very effective communicator. He’s very good at tapping into frustrations. Pointing at problems is easy. Coming up with solutions to problems is a lot harder. And we have to do both, we have to be good, at both. He only has to do one of those two things.

Mark: So that lines it up for the next.

Jim: Yes. I’m looking forward to seeing what Farage himself has to say, but I would say I don’t think, I think most of those were not fallacious in use because they’re simply expressing thing that they believe is likely to happen.

Mark: Right.

Jim: For this to be a fallacy, you have to use the fact that it’s likely to happen in part of an argument that it’s going to happen.

Mark: Well, it’s quite interesting because I think that Miriam Kate’s one is that is reflective of what the Tory Party’s belief was and what their actions were, as a result of that belief. They didn’t believe that he would have much impact.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: So they didn’t do anything in preparation for that.

Jim: But I think it’s reasonable to talk about things that people should do or be prepared to do based on what you think is the likely outcome of a thing, that’s completely logical to do that. And for example, if you’re saying you shouldn’t vote for Donald Trump because of Project 2025, because although he claims he hasn’t got anything to do with it, there’s a lot of evidence that suggests he does. And all of the things that they want to do are bad. And so because there’s an at least reasonable chance they can make some of those things happen. You should take action as if they’re going to happen. That’s not unreasonable because you’re saying this, this is a possibility. It would have a bad, it’s like climate change thing. If you’re saying, you know there. Yeah, yeah, we have reasons to believe if we don’t do anything about climate change, bad stuff will happen, therefore we should take action. That makes sense and Like it’s almost the only thing, the only reasonable way youave is to act on what you think is the most likely outcome or in the case of something devastating like climate change, a sufficiently possible outcome to make it worth acting on.

Mark: Because I think that the Miriam Kate’one I would still possibly class that in there where she was saying it’s probably not going to happen, therefore we shouldn’t do anything. So it’s kind of like the opposite of that. That’s reasonable, it’s probably going to happen, so therefore we should do something. It probably isn’t going to happen, so therefore we ought not to do anything about it. But as James cleverly says, actually he is very good at stirring up people in the election campaign. He didn’t say we’re probably going to win, so vote for us or they’re probably going to lose, so vote for us. But Miriam Kate said because we’ve got the first pass to post thing, they’re probably not going to achieve stuff. Actually it turned out that they did.

Jim: No, that’s reasonable. Yeah.

Mark: And they got caught out because they made the assumption that it was probably not going to happen, that there was no probability of it going to happen, that they didn’t therefore act on it and she lost their seat. So you know, they should probably have done something about that. But yeah, so okay, so here’s Farage himself as key badot was warned by James cleverly he is a good communicator who can identify and amplify people’s genuine concerns. And I think here’s Farage using the appeal in order to direct our opinions towards a seemingly random thing in the forever war on woke on his GB News slot in February 2023 and he’s still got a GB news stock. I can’t. How is that even possible?

Nigel Farage: You just tap into Chat GPT and they do it all for you. Well, that’s all well and good until you ask Chat GPT to write something about how great white people are and you will get. I’m sorry but it’s not Appropriate to write a poem about the superiority of one race over any other. But tap in to Chat GPT

00:25:00

Nigel Farage: write a poem about how great black people are. You’ll get black people. A community so bright with strength and beauty shining so bright their talents and abilities are source of pride. The resilience in the face of adversity. A guide. So please folks, do not be taken in by this idea that Chat GPT is somehow this marvelous thing that will revolutionize the world. It is probably the most extreme case of hard left liberal bias I’ve ever seen in my life.

Jim: It’s also a terrible poem.

Mark: Yeah, yeah. And he kind of glosses over the bit about his. But here’s a poem about the contribution that black people have made in society. You know, I think’chap with J is probably quite rightly saying, yeah, you they comes through with a lot of baggage saying that white thing. Yeah, it’s kind of.

Jim: Yeah. Basically Chat ept is intelligent enough to know what Farage was asking when he how great white people are.

Mark: He knew exactly what he was up to. Yeah. And what he was up to in directing us to this is probably the most liberally biased thing ever is actuallyiding distracting us from his complete over sneering racism. He’s saying, oh, look at this thing. I’ll probably biased them and left wing and abhorrent it is because it’s not racist. Not like me, not racist enough.

Jim: Not as racist as I would like. Therefore.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jim: Uh-huh.

Mark: O man. So not only is he kind of pointing to something that nobody’s even thought about. Well, it’s a kind of twisted version of Google search algorithms which will then make the similar processes will migrate into AI being somewhat biased in terms of, you know, if you would say, show me, a typical Israeli or a typical Scotsman or a typical Canadian. You will get biased images because that’s what exists on the Internet because of the way that the algorithms have worked and they provide the images that AI or the words that Chat GPTT draw on. So what he’s talking about is a twisted version of people’s awareness that there are cognitive biases at work at the underlying, what you think are completely neutral algorithms for searches. And he’s say, well it’s probably the most left wing biased thing I’ve ever seen in my life.

Jim: And we discussed all those issues with the kind of Google algorithm and stuff like that, in The Automation Fallacy episode 140.

Mark: There you go. Yes, yes. So there is, he’s probably Something to guard against the photo. That’s not enough. Let me take you down Let me hear you fail. There’s a fallacy and it’s in the Wild. It the Will Le behind Constant, life. I think I try to find it’s probably all in the mind Oasis there with probably all in the mind, which is probably mostly the Beatles. Tomorrow Never knows actually.

Jim: And in the fallacy in the wild we like to talk about the fallacy of the week from a non political perspective. And our first example this week comes from Friends.

Mark: Yay.

Jim: I. I don’t think we’ve had a friends one in a little while.

Mark: No, not for. No, we haven’t.

Jim: That’s true. So this is season two episode when M. Mr. Heckles dies. And this was their last interaction with Heckles.

Monica Geller: Hello, Mr. Heckles.

Mr. Heckles: You’re doing it again.

Monica Geller: We’re not doing anything.

00:30:00

Mr. Heckles: You’re stomping. It’s disturbing my birds.

Rachel Green: You don’t have birds.

Mr. Heckles: I could have birds.

Jim: So. Yeah, Hacles’s argument isus he. He could have birds. Therefore. Yeah, his argument is valid. That you’re disturbing my birds.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: He does this repeatedly. He says, I think he talks about oboe practice. You’re disturbing my OBO practice. You don’t play the obo. I could play the obo. And at which point Phoebe says, in that case, I’m gonna have to ask you to keep it down.

Mark: Perfect. Yeah. Yeah.

Jim: Our second example is from Men in Black. This is towards the beginning of the film where still during the recruitment process and Will Smith’s character, along with several other kind of military types.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: are being put through their paces on a shooting range with lots of alien cutouts to fire at and one little girl cut out who he shoots at.

Z: May I ask why you felt little Tiffany deserved to die?

J: Well, she was the only one that actually seemed dangerous at the time, sir.

Z: How’d you come with that conclusion?

J: Well, first I was gonna pop this guy hanging from the street light. And then I realized, you know, he’s just working out. How would I feel somebody come running in a gym, bust me in my ass while I’m on a treadmill. Then I saw this, snarling beast guy and I noticed he had a tissue in his hand. And I realized, you know, he’s not snarling, he’s sneezing. You know, ain’t no real threat there. And I saw a little Tiffany. I’m thinking, you know, eight year old white girl, middle to ghetto bunch of monsters this time of night with quantum physics books she about to start some shit. Z She’s about 8 years old. Those books are way too advanced for her, if you ask me. I say she’s up to something.

Jim: So he’s made certain assumptions there. yeah. Definitive enough in his mind that because those books, she’s probably not old enough to read those books, therefore she’s shooting in the head. Yeah, yeah. Ra.

Mark: Than the other monstrous things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know with that kind of attitude you’re going to get recruited on you.

Jim: Yes. To an American law enforcement agency. Sure. Yeah.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So. Yeah. But he’s making us kind of not necessarily similar assumptions. Obviously it’s for comedy purposes, but the kind of assumptions that Sherlock Holmes makes when everyone praises his deductive powers, which are in fact, as we’ve discussed a few times, not deductive, but inductive. In that deductive means that you are able to use clues to come to a conclusion that is the reasonable conclusion from those clues. Whereas inductive reasoning is about probability. It’s about narrowing things down to make a one thing seem more probable than other things. And then in cases like this, assuming that that means it’s correct.

Sherlock Holmes: Then when I met you for the first time yesterday, I said Afghanistan or Iraq. you look surprised.

John Watson: Yes. How did you know?

Sherlock Holmes: I didn’t know. I saw you. Haircut, the way you hold yourself says military. But your conversation as you enter the room, bit different from my day said trained at BART, so Army Dr. Obvious. The face is tanned, but no tan above the wrists. You’ve been abroad, but not sunbathing. Your lips really bad when you walk, but you don’t ask for a chairman. You stand like you’ve forgotten about it. So it’s at least partly psychosomatic. That says the original circumstances of the injury were traumatic. Wounded in action. Then we did an action sometime. Afghanistan, all Iraq.

Jim: So there’s a lot of assumptions that he’s making. The fact that he’s. His face is tanned, but he’s not turnanned above the wrists. So therefore he was abroad but not sunbathing. M Can’t lead youq Afghanistan.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: The fact that might just.

Mark: You might drive a dump trackuck.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: On a. Yeah. In a particular hot place, which means you need to wear a long sleeve shirt.

Jim: Yeah. The fact that you that you have a limp that is quite bad, but you don’t ask for a chair when you know you stand instead, doesn’t mean that your limp is at least partially psychosomatic. It could be that you’re just not comfortable asking someone for A chair. And you’re prepared to put up with the pain rather than doing that because you’re a bit awkward socially. Yeah.

Mark: Or, or actually they, the, the knee is mechanically injured. You can’t sit down because you’ve got a nerve injury, which means that you, you trap.

Jim: That makes it wor. And it’s better if you move about and you’ve been sitting down all morning.

Mark: Stood. Yeah, yeah.

Jim: And, yeah. And. And because it’s a psychosomatic injury, therefore it’s probably because of trauma. That means wounded in action. It’s insane.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: But obviously, because he’s written this way, he’s right. He’s not right about everything because he also, in this scene, borrows Watson’s phone. This is the first time they meet.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And, he borrows Watson’s phone and there’it’s engraved Harry with love Clara or

00:35:00

Jim: something like that. And so he says that, he has a recently divorced brother with alcohol problems. it turns out Harry is short for Harriet, so you got that wrong. But the thing at the point is that the, the guesses that he’s basing his statements on are entirely based on probability. But when he says it so confidently, my argument is he’s using this fallacy because he’s taking a statement which there’s at least some reason to believe might be true, not nothing.

Mark: Ye.

Jim: And then assuming it is true and saying it as if it’s true. Confidently.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So he does that almost all the.

Mark: Time and racking up the probability. Yeah, he almost gives you a gish gallop of things and says, so therefore that’s it’s highly probable that. Blahah. So he racks up the probability and then says it with confidence and doesn’t give you any space to put in any kind of opposing argument or, you know, to counter it. We haven’t done that for a long time. How do you counter this?

Jim: Yeah, the way to counter this is to point out the fact that something that has been mentioned is either possible or likely but not definite. That there’s either m equal or reasonable possibilities. That the opposite is true.

Mark: Yeah. And equally you could counter somebody saying, oh, you’re using fallacy there. Like I did with some 2 of M. My people were, were saying actually is it is highly probable that just because they’ve said it’s highly probable doesn’t mean they’re using a fallacy. It could be true that it’s highly probable. Particularly if it’s coming from somebody who knows about that stuff, like the head of research, John Curtis.

Jim: Yeah. And of course, it wouldn’t be nearly as interesting a, character or storyline, but it would be much more intellectually honest if when Sherlock did.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Jim: He, he would say something like, oh, I noticed some mud on her sleeve that looked dark brown. And that kind of mud’quite common in Devon. So I suspect that she’s probably come from there. But if you don’t couch it in. Yeah. I can tell something about you just from looking at you for the first time.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Jim: Then it’s, it’s not as interesting. It’s much more fun to do that and then explain how he could possibly know it when no one else in the room observed those things.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Jim: So, yeah. If when you are doing this and you think, oh, this thing really very likely, if you try not to express it, therefore, as a thing that will happen, but a thing that, based on the evidence, is likely to happen, or you think is probably the most likely outcome, then you’re going to avoid doing this fallacy. Ye.

Mark: You’re more John Curtis than Donald Trump. Yeah, yeah.

Jim: There’s also a lovely bit of accelerating truth in this scene because he says that the limp is psychosomatic and also mentions later on, outside of this bit, that John has a therapist. And John says, well, I had a therapist. And he says psychosomatic limp. Of course you ve got a therapist. Like that’s based on a guess that you made.

Mark: Yeah. A fallacious guess that you had. Yeah, yeah, yeaheah.

Jim: So, before we move on to fake news this week, I wanted to quickly talk about Patreon, because we haven’t talked about Patreon a lot recently. Occasionally we mentioned that there’s a thing we’re doing for our patrons. But yeah, we’ve had a few new listeners and I think it’s just worth mentioning some of the stuff that we talk about on our Patreon, because basically, if you like listening to us drone on about this kind of stuff or any kind of stuff, there’s at least as much, again, on our pa. Not only do we do an extra episode in between each two episodes of Flash Trump, but we also talk about stuff for usually about half an hour after the end of the episode. Usually that.

Mark: Oh, yeah. So you get a bumper episode of this.

Jim: Yeah, we do extra long episodes and we extra whole things.

Mark: Stuff for just you. Yeah. And we look at books and you mainly all in the Trump universe, except for maybe Blackbird. We’ve looked at Bob Woodward’s book, we looked at Mary Trump’s book. We’ve look?ed at Qing On. On Phenomena.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: We’ve reviewed various films, lots of films.

Jim: We go into quite a lot of detail about, about various films from. From Dinesh D. Souza documentaries like 2000 Mules and Police State to right wing vanity projects like Me, you, Madness.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And Blackbird. Things like Tucker Carlson’s End of Men documentary.

Mark: Oh, yeah.

Jim: And we’ve also done terrible films that have some vague connection to Trump, whether he did a cameo.

Mark: Oh, yeah. Wonder Woman 1984 had a Trump.

Jim: Well, he didn’t cameo in that. The bad guy was a very Trump like character. Yeah. But he did. He was in the Associate, the Whoopee Goldberg film. And so the Ghost can’t do It. Bo Derek film, which was terrible. We talked about that.

Mark: And we also looked at, ah, Home Alone.

Jim: We did Home Sweet Home Alone.

Mark: Homeeet Home Alone. On the basis that Trump was in the.

Jim: He was in Home.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Some of the links are a bit more tenuous than others. That’s true.

Mark: But it’s basically because we want to look at crap stuff and then

00:40:00

Mark: talk you through it. Yeah. And in doing so, we look at the fallacies that are employed. So we kind of bring our critical thinking chops to go look at other.

Jim: Media and every now and again we’ll even look at a right wing YouTuber and talk about their stuff. But we try not to do that too often because it fucks with our algorithm and ends up showing us lots of stuff we don’t want to watch on YouTube.

Mark: And then we give ourselves a holiday and ah, look at all of the Oscar nominations.

Jim: oh, that is a thing. And we do that. We’ve been doing that every year for the last few years. We’ll be doing it again this year. The nominations will be in January and we will be watching every single film that is nominated for an Oscar.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And the week before the Oscar ceremony, we will release a special episode where we talk about all of the categories, all of the films that have been nominated, what we think should win, what we think will win.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And why, and all of that kind of stuff.

Mark: And we also run a competition that you can join in with and see you our self professed expertisees. I remain to be unbeaten.

Jim: You remain to win.

Mark: Yes. I have been beaten by everybody, our listeners. And we also do extra Christmas stuff.

Jim: There’s extra little things all the time.

Mark: All over, all place, all the time. If you like this, you’ll love that.

Jim: It’s patreon.com frump so we’renn.

Donald Trump: We’re gon toa 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 real on one I made up and Mark has to figure out which one is fake news.

Mark: So given the way that this game has always gone in all probability the likelihood of my ultimate winning has surely got to mean that we should just rack the score up one notch, move on without having to go through with this whole distraction just to make it seem otherwise.

Jim: I mean on the balance of probabilities, you are going to win this one because you have won more than 50% so.

Mark: Welleah, well then we should just say that I have and move on. That seems reasonable and don’t put ourselves through this, this moment.

Jim: but just you know, because not like other people. Might as well yeah. Have a go.

Mark: Well you’re assuming they’re gonna we’re here, they’re listening. What’s the probability that they’ll. Yeah. Why not?

Jim: So Trump last week announced that he was going to put huge tariffs on Canadian and Mexican goods in order to stop drug dealers the border from o.

Mark: Okay.

Jim: Sending drugs into the US and also I don’t know how that’s supposed to help that. And also to stop illegal immigration over the borders.

Mark: Right.

Jim: So yeah, he’s again misunderstanding tariffs and so I thought we’d do a bit.

Mark: Where he talks about tariffs and drug traffickers. Okay. Yeah, yeah yeah.

Jim: His idea to give it its’s due is that he will be able to force the governments of Mexico and Canada to enforce stricter rules about what’s going over their borders into the US which is not typically how BR work. Usually there is while there is some outgoing checks, most of the checks that happen are on the incoming side of the border. It is the American job to stop things coming into their country coming in the Canadians M To stop people taking things into America.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Jim: Largely.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: These are three things that he said about tariffs. Ok One statement number one.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Look the most beautiful word in the dictionary to me is tariff. I think it’s the most beautiful word. It’s going to make our country rich. And these stupid people. Look, politicians, there’s only two reasons why they wouldn’t want to use tariffs. They’re stupid or they’re corrupt. There’s no third reason. They’re either stupid or they’re corrupt. I just stopped the largest plant in the entire world which would destroy your State, I think this plant made more than all of Detroit put together. You know, it’s a big. And I just stopped it. And I’m not even president yet. Okay. Think of what I could do when I’m president. So okay, I should add, he’s not talking about a literal plant. He’s talking about a car plant. It’s not a little shop of horror situation.

Mark: Yeah, yeah. Feed beer. Yeah.

Jim: Statement number two.

Mark: Okay.

Jim: Because tariffs work, right? They just work. Look at what happened last time when Mexico wasn’t doing anything about what was an invasion really an invasion on our southern border. And I told them, I called them up and I said I’m going to tariff the hell out of you. And they said sir, we’d like to give you 28,000 soldiers free of charge. You can get them to do anything with tariffs. You can just by threatening you can get people to do what you want. You can stop wars. Everyone is terrified of being tariffed. So terrified it’s true. So of course I’m going to do that. You’d have to be stupid not to do that. We’re gonna be so rich.

Mark: Could stop everything with you. Could stop wars. We bloody started with tariffs. Terrified of tariffs. Tariffs. Terrified. Okay,

00:45:00

Mark: statement number three. y.

Jim: In the 1890s and 1880s our country was actually the richest it ever was. They had to form committees to determine how are we going to spend this vast wealth. We had so much wealth, relatively speaking. So much wealth. More than anybody by far. And they formed up blue ribbon committees. How are we going to spend the money? We don’t know how to spend it. Wouldn’t that be a nice problem to have? And it was all a tariff. We were a tariff country. And McKinley was president. William McKinley was actually a great president. Was assassinated by the way. He was assassinated. You know, being president is a very dangerous professional.

Mark: okay, the telltale tells there’s onening their when he says sir, and you know they I’m going to tariff the hell out of you. And they said sir, we’d like to give you 28,000 soldiers free of Charles straight away. Youeah not kind of. Yeah, bring it on Orange dude, you know? Yeah, orange bad guy, bring it on. They d say actually we want to give you 28,000 soldiers. you can do anything with tariffs. I could go out here and I could tariff somebody in the street in New York.

Jim: Yeah, I don’t even ask. I’just tariff them just in your style. They let you do it.

Mark: They let you do that. Yeah. and then that bit the. I’m, not even president. Think of what I could do when I’m president. You know, it’s a big. And I just stopped it. That sounds like one of his non sequiturs. But I’m beginning to be suspicious because I spotted that last time and I suspect you might have incorporated that. And the McKinley. Blimey. That must have been written down for him because he’d have no idea. That was. Yeah, McKinley. He was a great president. He put tariffs on aireroplanes. Yeah, yeah. So, all right, on the basis of, let’s say, prob. Probability. I think number one is the one you made up, the most beautiful one. The dictionary.

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

Mark: More Convinced by the McKinley1. Number three.

Jim: Okay.

Mark: And.

Jim: Ah, number three. Yeah, is real.

Donald Trump: And the 1890s and 1880s, our country was actually the richest it ever was. They had affored committees to determine how are we going to spend this vast wealth? We had so much wealth, relatively speaking. So much wealth, more than anybody by far. And they formed up blue ribbon committees. How are we going to spend the money? We don’t know how to spend it. Wouldn’t that be a nice problem to have? And it was all. And it was all a tariff. We were a tariff country. And McKinley was president. William McKinley was actually a great president. Was assassinated, by the way. He was assassinated. You know, being president is a very dangerous profession.

Mark: So why are they. We had so much wealth, relatively speaking. Why did he put that in? How do you measure wealth, relatively speaking? So much wealth, more than anybody, by far. Oh, well, there you go.

Jim: Yeah, more were rich than other people, other countries.

Mark: Yeah, not rich, objectively speaking. Not. Not absolutely rich. They were relatively rich.

Jim: You might not be shocked to discover that his history isn’t great.

Mark: Yeah, no, I’m in the 1890s. 80s.

Jim: Yeah. The actually 80s and 1890s weren’t the best time financially for the U.S. yes, they had taken in quite a lot of money through tariffs, but yeah, they were in the midst of a very long depression that had last.

Mark: Yes, that’s right. It was the one prior to the Great Depression, wasn’t it? Yes, yes it was.

Jim: It was called the long depression. In fact, in the 1890s there were three panics which were extra depressions during the long depression. The panic of 1893 was a deep depression that lasted until 1897.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: And even within that there was a panic of 1896. So like during this period, things were shit.

Mark: It was no way try to suoot McKinley.

Jim: There were very rich people, they had money, and the government had quite a lot of money, but poor people had no money. Like, the inequality was incredibly strong.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So, yeah, the country as a whole was doing very badly during that period. The thing that was happening with the tariff was that basically Post Civil War, McKinley, when he was encouraging tariffs, wasn’t president.

Mark: Right.

Jim: He was a politician from Ohio. He, proposed a tariff act in the late, in the 1880s which was taken up, which raised tariffs, protectionist tariffs, essentially designed to stop American companies buying stuff from outside America and doing more manufacturing inside.

00:50:00

Jim: They had been in the kind of 30% range, 35% range, and they went up to 42%, something around that.

Mark: Right.

Jim: It was incredibly unpopular. And the Republicans, of which McKinley was one, had a terrible midterms and got voted out like as much as anyone could possibly do.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Jim: So it went very badly for the party that introduced them. And the debates they were having were not how we going to spend all this money.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: It was basically, the tariffs don’t seem to be working because we’re taking in a lot of money and we shouldn’t be. The tariffs are designed to stop people from importing stuff.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And clearly the fact that we’re taking in so much money means we’re not stopping them from importing it because they’re importing it and then paying us these tariffs.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jim: So the debate.

Mark: So they’re not working.

Jim: Yeah. The debate in 1888 was to, was not how are we going to spend this money, but how are we going to stop people from importing stuff if tariffs aren’t working? And one side wanted to just take tariffs away because it was essentially wasting America’s money. It was just bringing in stuff that they didn’t, they didn’t need. The government had already enough money essentially in the treasury and it was costing the consumers. So either take the tariffs away. And the other side said actually we would need to put the tariff up, not to raise more money for the country, but because, that might stop people from importing stuff.

Mark: Importing.

Jim: So we will ultimately end up making less money as a Treasury.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Because we are essentially taxing imports, which is what tariffs are, because you tax stuff you want to stop. And they wanted to stop people importing stuff. So, yeah, once McKinley was president, he increased tariffs even further in his first term. And it did not do what they were trying to make happen. So it was essentially very ineffective. McKinley wasn’t president when the Whole thing of look we what are we going to do about this tariff stuff was going on and that wasn’t the debate they were having was how are we going to spend all our money? Other than that it’s fully that. Yeah, yeah.

Mark: And also it’s telling that he was Trump was only interested in we had so much wealth relative when he said relatively speaking I say we the rich people had so much wealth.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: More than anybody actually the anybody were the poor people. Yes.

Jim: Ye Incidentally when McKinley I think he was starting his second term but when he basically he decided actually this is tariffs are a bad thing, we should stop them. They’re just ruining everything. We re ruining the economy. He decided that he was going to change the system and was assassinated pretty soon after. Probably not because of that, but meaning that he then didn’t get a chance to implement any of those changes. And so it was another 12 years or so before the tariffs were pretty much dropped and replaced with income tax as a way of raising money for the treasury.

Mark: Right. Wow. So were were the panic and then the mini panic within the panic were they tied up with the increase in tariffs?

Jim: Well it certainly didn’t help because as I say the American consumers were spending their money essentially m on the raised prices that importers were passing on to them because they had to pay to import stuff rather than making it ah in the US So yeah it made things more expensive and everyone had less money except for rich people and the government.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So you also think that number two is real.

Mark: Oh know I could be kicking myself but numbereah the 28,000 is going to be true, isn’t it?

Jim: Is fake news.

Mark: Ah ah no well done. God damn it. I got f into the you know it’s a big. I just stopped it non secretor.

Jim: Wow.

Mark: I should have go it was the other, the other tell was sir we’d like to give you. Yeah soon as he says well I mean yeah he ah.

Jim: He has talked about Mexico giving him 28,000 soldiers before.

Mark: Right.

Jim: So that is a, that is a topic that he’s addressedes use the.

Mark: Words so that’s true.

Jim: It wasn’t true when he said it.

Mark: He said it before. Yeah. should have been go. I should have gone with terrified or be tar.

Jim: Yeah no terrified. That’s purely my. I almost had him try out terrified but I that was too.

Mark: Too far. Yeah. So yes that would been along the lines of I’ve justeted a new word.

Jim: Yeah. By Brant Crime.

Mark: He tries once didn’t he that’s exactly y. Yeah, Terrified. That’s pretty good.

Jim: Terrified.

Mark: Good. yeah, let’s wait for the Washington Post to use that as a headline.

Jim: So that means that number one was indeed a real thing that he said.

Mark: Oh my God. Oh look.

Donald Trump: The most beautiful word in the dictionary to me is tariff. I think it’s the most beautiful word.

00:55:00

Donald Trump: It’s going to make our country rich. And these stupid people look, politicians, there’s only two reasons why they wouldn’t want to use tariffs. They’re stupid or they’re corrupt. There’s no third reason. They’re either stupid or they’re corrupt. I just stopped the largest plant in the entire world. Which would destroy your state. This, I think this plant more than all of Detroit put together. You know, it’s a big. And I just stopped it. And I’m not even president yet. Okay. Think of what I could do when I’m president.

Mark: They’re either stupid or they’re corrupt or they’re both like is.

Jim: He was claiming that the big plant, the largest plan in the entire world was, was a car plant that was going to be built by China in Mexico.

Mark: Oh.

Jim: Then sell cars into the US So you’d get Chinese cars that were built in Mexico. They would be cheaper than American cars presumably. And so he was putting a tariff on that specific factory that, that company importing cars into the US this is almost all a lie. But it’it’s a story he’s told many times.

Jim: There is a Chinese auto manufacturer who has planned to build a plant in Mexico. Not, not the largest plan plant in the world by any meanseah. And specifically for the Mexican market, for the domestic market.

Mark: Right.

Jim: Not too important into the US either. It also has not in any way been impacted by anything Trump has said. It was a thing. They were like, yeah, we’re going toa do that at some point. They’re still probably going toa do it. There’s no. They haven’t abandoned it. They haven’t decided not to. They haven’t been scared away by things Trump has said. It’s just hasn’t happened yet.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: He claims or has claimed in various tellings of this story that the way he heard about this, the way he knows about it, is a good friend of his is a guy who builds auto plants. That’s all he does. And he says like if you re ask him to build a house, he couldn’t do it, but he buildso autop plants.

Mark: Ye. Yeah.

Jim: And that guy told him because he Asked the guy, he asked his good friend, the auto plant builder.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: If he could see one of his big plants. And he said, I can show you the biggest. The biggest that there is in the world. World, but we have to go to Mexico. And then he claimed that he saw that guy in Detroit recently and he said, that they’they’ve abandoned it. They’re not doing it anymore. So he claimed that, like, work had started on this thing and his friend was working.

Mark: Right.

Jim: And then they were like, naturally. No, it’s to. The tariffs have made it impossible. We’re not gonna do it. All complete nonse. Not true at all. A guy almost certainly doesn’t exist.

Mark: Exist.

Jim: And yeah, the plant doesn’t exist. And none of the tariff claims that he’s. He’s made or things that he said he’s go goingna do have had any impact on any decisions by any automakers about building things. In, in Mexico, he made similar claims about John Deere the.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Tractor manufacturers.

Mark: Y.

Jim: saying that he’d stopped them from building a plant in Mexico and they were now going to build theirs in. In the US And John Deere came out, went, no, he didn’t.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Yeah. It’s just. It’s just bullshit. That’s just what he does.

Mark: Because, man. Because this, these things, they’re all checkable.

Jim: Oh, yeah.

Mark: The thing is that, the people that follow him will never check it. No. Because he’s the Messiah.

Jim: Yeah, he’s not the Messiah. He’s very naughty boy.

Mark: Uh,?ah. I, recognize him. I know, I know. I followed a few.

Jim: So.

Mark: Wow. Well, well done.

Jim: We do have a few social contestants. You can see they also were fooled.

Mark: Whether they were terrified of the tariffs.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Being terrified on Discord.

Jim: We’ve got Andrew who says the 28,000 soldiers seems a bit weird to me. And despite weird being par of the course for Trump, I’m going with two being fake. So there you go. Yeah.

Mark: you go. Yeah.

Jim: And Steve Pickickel says three has to be fake. Way too much American history without inserting planes in it for that to be Trump.

Mark: Right. Ye. Yep, yep, yep.

Jim: On Patron, Anders says I was leaning number two, but I’m no good at this. So in a different take, rumor has it that he likes to spend quite some time in front of the television. And so he should be aware that indeed, sellarore is the most beautiful word. Okay. Combination of words. In Dionary y, number one should have been the one you made up. Playing the odds. But sometimes you get hit by a jet engine. Also, it’s a big.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: Okay. Scott says two is definitely real. It uses some of his favorite words like invasion and, sir. It also includes a kind of silly word, tariff. Three is real because first he counts the years backwards. Yep, that’s our Donald. Then he rambles ye. 1890s to 1880.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Jim: Then he rambles from having too much money to tariffs, and in his stream of consciousness drivel, he ends up in assassination. That’s

01:00:00

Jim: exactly what happened. Yes.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And one is fake. A dictionary. Oh, please, not Donald. And frankly, I don’t want to think about what he could do as president because I remember what he did last time he was president.

Mark: Ah, yes, you say yes.

Jim: Richard says I have to go with number one, mainly because it involves Trump having to read something. The dictionary. He likes to break a mental sweat too. Hashag doable. America’s favorite Cheeto can’t fool me. So caazu. He says, holy crap. Trump is a dribbling fool and loves a good insult. Stupid, corrupt, and empty threats. But Jim can emulate Trump talk like no one else. So I’m clueless. I want to hear him say too, but I think it’s fake.

Mark: Ah, yes, there you go. Yeah, I often get hoodwinked and that. yes, Terrified of being tariffed. Yeah, I wanted to hear him say that so much.

Jim: Invisible unicorn just says, shit, I give up. And finally, Rene Z Says, this is difficult. I remember the 28,000 Mexican soldiers from his first. Oh, fuck, there’s gonna be a second administration. I also heard him referencing the dictionary when talking about tariffs. To be fair, he has done that in many rallies. Recently he’s talked about it being his most beautiful word in the dictionary.

Mark: Right.

Jim: That leaves number three as fake news. I’m not happy about this choice. McKinley’s assassination gave us Teddy Roosevelt speaks offft d and carry a big stick. This has been in the news a lot lately, which is why I’m not happy picking number three at fake. But I will.

Mark: Ah.

Jim: Oh, well, my winning streak ended last time.

Mark: Ah, wow. Well, there you go. You’ forward. Whole bunch of people. I don’t feel quite stupid now. I’m just corrupt.

Jim: Stupid or corrupt, it’s either one of the two. Yeah, there’s no.

Mark: Yeah, that was it. There’s no third reason. That was. Yeah, see, that also was, I thought was a bit of a. Bit of a thing. Yeah, don’t want to go for that one because that’s too much of a false dilemma. Yeah.

Jim: I shall use it in Our full dilemma episode when we do that in a few months time.

Mark: Yeah, there go. Yeah, yeah.

Jim: So it’s time for the part of the show that this week at least is called a pardon is not a logical fallacy because Biden pardoned Hunter having promised that he wouldn’t repeatedly. And this has split pretty much all communities. It’s not like a Republican versus Democrat thing, although Republicans are much more against it, as you might expect.

Mark: Oh yeah.

Jim: But a significant number of Democrats have openly criticized Biden about it. not just Democratic politicians but Democrat constituents, voters. Is it is not a popular result. I m think 22% of people as a whole not, not going to split up. Democrats and Republicans are fully in favor. A big chunk of people kind of either feel like they don’t have enough information or don’t really care. And other people are wrong because I have read a lot of people saying this is a bad thing and it’s an abuseive power and he’s wrong to do it and he shouldn’t have done it and all of that kind of “ people who I often agree with, who I respect and I disagree in this case I am strongly in favour of this being the right thing done and it not being a problem at all for reasons that I suspect we’ll talk about. What are your feelings on it?

Mark: Yeah, well it’s interesting because the thing that put me on alert were where Republicans and Democrats said things along the lines of no family should be above the law. And you kind of think in a way in the mouths of Republicans that’s a little bit hypocritical because that’s fundamentally what Trump has positioned himself to do, to be and he’s pardon people merely as a way to guarantee that they will continued to be loyal to him in his, well, what turns out to be his second term, in office. Yeah, I mean for Biden knowing, oddly through our patron imposed viewing of my son Hunter, we got an insight into the tortured past that he’s dealt with. It feels like a humane thing for Biden to have done because I think he was right that the prosecution of him was a politicized act, it was a political acteah. And for the Republicans to say, oh well, Biden’s always complained that it’s a politicized system that just department who it is because you know, the Supreme Court is completely filled with pro Trump people. Well, not completely, but deliberately made political and Mitch McConnell’s been playing that long, long, long game forever in order to make sure that they can put through Republican political decisions and make them legal. So, yeah, I think that having talked

01:05:00

Mark: about Oneter Biden’s laptop and all of that kind of stuff, it was definitely a way to distract from Trump’s myriad convictions by. Let’s make Hunter Biden guilty of something.

Jim: I don’t think I would necessarily go that far even.

Mark: Right, right.

Jim: But he’s definitely been treated differently to people who aren’t called Biden. There’s no question.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And I think the thing is, the arguments against the pardon, like, not that it can make any difference on both sides, the Republican arguments, I don’t feel the need to argue against. I think they can all fuck all the way off because all of them promoted, defended, and almost certainly voted for Trump after he was convicted of all of the things and assisted in the defense of him and, and distraction away from all of the stuff that he’s clearly done and been found guilty of and say, you know, minimized all of that and even in some cases called for Biden to pardon Trump.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Jim: Before he leaves and stuff like that, which the odd Democrat has also done. But basically anyone who was, who has made any claim that Trump was treated unfairly and suggested he still in any way fit to hold any office, y can fuck off. Their opinions on whether Biden was right to do this in this instance or whether or whether Hunter was treated fairly by the legal system has absolutely no weight at all because they don’t have any consistency. They don’t. They clearly aren’t, serious people. There are arguments that have been made by people who didn’t make those arguments. People have said things like, yes, no one should be above law. I think that’s reasonable. I think people should be treated fairly. I think people should be treated the same. There are, again, people who have said that Biden can’t say all the time that the Justice Department is, is doing the right thing when they are going after Trump and then say that they politicized the investigation against his son. I disagree with that. He can say that.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Because the Justice Department isn’t they. The Justice Department is a group of different, people and organizations. And you can have faith in the justice system of the United States and still feel one case was handled badly or unfairly. Yeah, that’that’s absolutely possible. And the reality is that the kinds of things, as Biden said in his statement, the kinds of things that Hunter, either pled guilty to or was found guilty of are, in almost all cases not in every case. Things that would almost never be either prosecuted or result in a custodial sentence. They are, you know, the gun charges things prominent prosecutors and defense attorneys. Some people have said, I’ve never seen this be charged outside of attack on charge. Like if someone has committed an offence with a firearm, then they will take on the charge that they also lied on the form when they bought the firearm.

Mark: Right.

Jim: But not doing that.

Mark: Ye.

Jim: Or just possession of a firearm by someone who has a drug addiction problem is not charged. This is not a thing that is.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: taken to court at all. The fact that that carries a 25 year potential sentence is something which means that he is not being treated fairly. The sentence obviously hasn’t been handed down yet. They didn’t get to that point. But y. The fact is that there is that danger of him being sentenced to serious jail time for a thing that people just don’t get charged for. It doesn’t ever get taken to court. The tax things, there’s slight differences because for the most part a lot of the felonies that he was pled guilty to in the tax thing, because the gun thing I think he took to court and was found guilty. The tax things he pled guilty to, most of those were paying his taxes late basically. And he paid them in 2019 in full with penalties and interest.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So yeah, for a few years he didn’t pay his taxes on time. Then he paid them for most people penalies. For example, Roger Stone, who didn’t even pay them back. That doesn’t go to court. That’s at best. If it does go to court, you get a fine that very rarely results in a custodial sentence. And again he has the potential of seeing 17 years in prison for that or did have Soeah. There’s those things. There was another aspect of the taxes where he did essentially commit tax fraud in that he was charging things like for example, I think it was his daughter’s school tuition

01:10:00

Jim: and various kind of entertainment stuff like nights out with people as business expenses and. And things he was charging to his business that he shouldn’t have charged to his business. Again.

Mark: Right.

Jim: Yes. That’s a crime. It’s tax fraud sometimes that results in people being prosecuted. It is nowhere near the amount of fraud that Trump committed in New York where that still hasn’t found any kind of resolution yet and may never do so. And most Republicans are in favor of that never getting resolved.

Mark: Ye.

Jim: But again it’s very unlikely to result in someone going to prison. Again, it mostly would be, fine, it could result in a, in a short prison sentence. But the biggest thing, the thing that most people seem to have a problem with, including the polls that they did, where as I said, it was like 22% of people were saying, yeah, this is the right thing, he should have done it. Absolutely, well done. A lot of the people who said he shouldn’t have done it was because they feel he lied because he said he would do it, he said he.

Mark: Wouldn’T, and then he said he did.

Jim: So they felt it’not about the part.

Mark: Yeah, it’s so much.

Jim: It’s because the, yeah, he claimed he wouldn’t do it and they feel like he claimed he wouldn’t do it so that he would get votes because, you know, people thought he was being. Not treating his son differently. And then when he lost the election, or presumably they believe even if he’d won the election, he would have done it then and, and m. So that he lied about it. So my take on that is the.

Mark: Other guy doesn’t lie.

Jim: No, it’s not that at all. It’s not. Because it doesn’t. That doesn’t make it okay. The fact that Trump lies with almost everything he says doesn’t make it okay for Biden to lie. But in my opinion, he wasn’t lying.

Jim: And I could be wrong about this, but I think that when he said those things, he was looking at the justice system as it stands. And as it stands, even though Hunter Biden was treated differently, even though he had a plea deal on both of these things, that was agreed with the prosecution, with the Department of Justice, they were on board with him having a plea deal where he wouldn’t have gone to prison. The judge ruled that that plea deal wasn’t allowed. And then they went back and they decided to prosecute harder, basically, even with that. And I think that Joe was confident that the outcome of it would be minimal in terms of the impact on Hunter. It would be, drug treatment programs, maybe home confinement, maybe a short prison sentence, finds that kind of thing. And y. That yeah, he did do these things and therefore that was reasonable as an outcome. And he was prepared to accept that. And I expect Hunter was prepared to accept that as a consequence of the things he did. But changing your mind based on new information and new events isn’t lying. And since he made those statements repeatedly that he wouldn’t pardon Hunter Trump got elected. Cash Patel is the potential head of the FBI. Pam Bondi is the potential new Attorney General.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: People like Cash Patel who have gone out of their way to promise that they will prosecute Trump’s enemies, specifically talking about Hunter, that they will find other things that the James Coma and his committee have, have been specifically looking for anything they can find about Hunter for years. And they will find every single thing they could possibly take to court, even if they don’t have a reasonable chance of getting a prosecution on it, and do that. And they will ruin Hunter’s life and, and anyone he knows by doing that the entire time they can. During Trump’s presidency. They promised to do it. It’s not like they could do it. They have. No, they have said, this is, this is our plan. We will do this. Cash Patell literally published a list of his enemies, of Trump’s enemies who he will go after in legal terms. So not only should Biden definitely have done this to avoid that possibility, he should do it for more people. He should absolutely give Fauci go down the list. Adam Schiff, Liz Cheaneney, people like that, preemptive pardons to avoid the. Absolutely. Now weaponized Department of Justice.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: From taking these people and, and making them spend all of their time and money in court fighting groundless charges. Because they are going to do it. They’ve said they’re going to do it, and they are the kind of unserious people who will do that.

Mark: And they will literally be trumped up charges.

Jim: Yes.

Mark: They’re going to come up with stuff in order to just, punish them.

01:15:00

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: And all who are like them.

Jim: So, aside from the fact to strike fear that Hunter hadn’t been sentenced yet, and at least one of the judges who is involved in that is a Trump appointee who could have pressure put on them to delay sentencing until after Trump is, or to just increase the sentence to the maximum allowable y. That stuff could result in Hunter spending.

Mark: Decades in prison for stuff that other people, if they were called, somebody said, you know, if he was called Joe Smith, he wouldn’t have been pardoned. But also if he was called Joe Smith, he wouldn’t have been jailed for possession of a firearm as a drug addict.

Jim: Yeah. Incidentally, I mean, I’ve talked a little bit about the tax thing. The gun charge was that he, he bought a gun 2017 or 2018. I think it was 2018. On the form that he filled in when he bought the gun, there is a box to tick that says you’re not currently a hard drug user or something like that.

Mark: Right.

Jim: And he ticked it or didn’t tick a box saying he is a hard drug user or basically he didn’t indicate that he was currently addicted to and using drugs.

Mark: Right.

Jim: And that’s a federal form. That is a crime. And he owned that gun for 11 days at, which point his partner at the time, I think it might been Haileley Bidedn, actually Boau’s widow found the gun, decided that he shouldn’t have it because first of all, might be a danger to him and it was a danger to her kids, so she got rid of it. So he owned a gun as a drug addict for 11 days. He ticked or didn’t tick the appropriate box on the federal for that’s the thing that he was then, found guilty for and risks 25 years in prison for. Seems harsh to me and again, is not a thing that other people would have to deal with.

Mark: Ye.

Jim: So there’s all of that. There’s also the fact that what does Biden get out of not doing this? What benefit would there be to Biden nor the Democrats or anyone for that matter, by not doing this? Because this is the end of Biden’s political career, obviously.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Jim: He’s not running for Senate again. He’s not doing anything else where it matters. No one’s, no one’s ever going to vote for him for anything again.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: It has no impact on any other Democrats. It doesn’t weigh on any of those people. Some people have said, which is the most insane argument I’ve heard, is that it sets a dangerous precedent for pardons.

Jim: And are these people who have been asleep for the entire first Trump turn y. Because Trump not only pardoned actual criminals who were friends of his or family members who had like, helped to try and overturn, he’s. He’s promising to pardon the January 6th insurrectionists, on day one, he pardoned people like Charles Kushner, Jared Kushner’s dad, and has made him ambassador to France. He pardoned people like Roger Stone and Steve Bannon, George Papadopoulos, and people who helped him get elected or helped try to overthrow the government on his behalf. Yeah, I think Joe should. There’s a lot more people that Joe should pardon. There’s a lot more people who just are regular people who shouldn’t be in prison who Joe should pardon.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Or commute their sentences or whatever. But saying that this is an abuse of power and risks his legacy or whatever is such bullshit. And, the defense that some people have used of, you know, or if you’as a father, you’d absolutely do this and you wouldn’t care about the consequences. There are no consequences to doing. Yes, yeah, I agree that also as a father, it’s the right thing to do for your son, but it’s the right thing to do for him as a person because he wouldn’t, he shouldn’t be in that situation. And he and various others, people like Sheiff and Cheney and Fauci and others who they’ve promised they will go after should be protected from. Yes, I risk insane, abusive situation.

Mark: Which is why the pardon, it’s a kind of catch all, it kind of insulates him from the Trump administration going after him based on stuff that, that they will say was heinous over the last 10 years.

Jim: And the thing is, because it’s a federal pardon, it doesn’t pardon any state crimes. So there’s nothing to stop Trump’s almost certainly corrupt Department of Justice because it’ll be corrupt from the top down from Pa, Bondiian, Cash, Bel and people like that.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Inducing state attorneys general to try and do. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see that happen.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Jim: But there’s nothing that Biden can do about that. But he can do something about the federal charges. So he’s done that. And it’s absolutely, in my opinion, the right thing to do.

01:20:00

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

Jim: Well, the final 2024 election results are in and Trump’s landslide victory turned out to be more of a muddy trickle, ending up with less than 50% of the popular vote and the sixth smallest winning margin in. But of course, the popular vote is just a vanity metric. The Electoral College is what counts. And his winning margin there was a robust 44 out of 60 elections. Yes, the GOP did win the Senate, which was not super surprising given that almost all the flippable seats were held by Democrats in red or purple states. And they also held onto the House. But that’s where it gets a bit interesting. Last week, Adam Gray defeated Republican incumbent John duarti in California’s 13th. That means Democrats netted 2 ext receipts, reducing the already slim GOP majority to 220 to 215. That means that Speaker Mike Johnson would have to get almost unanimous agreement and attendance from the notoriously fractured and lazy House Republicans in order to get any legislation through. But it actually gets better than that because Matt Gaet has already resigned his seat and Trump has appointed Florida Congressman Mike Waltz as national security adviseor. Their seats will be vacant until special elections in eight and Trump has also appointed Elise Stefanik as US Ambassador to the un and when she resigns, her seat will be vacant for up to 80 days. That puts the balance at 217 to 215 and means Johnson can’t afford a single defector or heavy cold if he wants to get anything done. And let’s face it, there’s still time for Trump to appoint another congressperson to some random position they’re not qualified for because he neither understands nor cares about the consequences of his actions.

Mark: Perhaps we’ve got it all wrong about nasty, anti trans shouty, hateful MTG wannabe Republican Senateator Nancy Mays. Perhaps we should be a bit more sympathetic towards her and create a safe space for her in recognition of her reported trauma as a child. You know, a safe space to talk over curated and accessible care. Like, say, an event honouring the 25th anniversary of the Foster Care Independence act of 1999 that significantly expanded federal support for foster youth who leave the system after turning 18 without a permanent home. Whilst Mace told the crowd that while she was not an adoptee or a former foster youth, she had been victim of a sexual abuse as a child, she called the dozens of advocates and foster youth in attendance the cream of the crop. Former foster youth and award winning advocate for children James McIntyre was moved to shake her hand and mind full of the next 25 years of advocacy for vulnerable use youth made a comment to her about how many transgender youth are in foster care, adding they need your support. But of course through the right wing red mist that was triggered within her intolerant, bigoted for money and vote stance she posted on X describing the exchange as a violent confrontation. I was physically accosted at the Capitol tonight by a pro trans man with the A in Trans * out. One new brace for my wrist and some ice for my arm and it’ll heal just fine. She Posted at 8:43pm the Capitol Police, the arrest of the guy your trans violence and threats on my life will only make me double down youe I have a feeling Masa has never shaken hands with a constituent. You know, you might expect as a legislator Blime list noe she never experiences Trump’s handshake. Geeez that scene in Papillon where Steve McQueen respectfully shakes hands and shares a cigar with the leader of an exiled leper colony? This ain’t Maces’s inhumanity to her fellow beings extends to people who are simply not sufficiently against the same things she’s against. Call the cops and have them arrest the friends of my enemies. Oh, I bet she’s going to go far in Trump world. But don’t ask me to shake on that.

Jim: If any of our Canadian listeners have spent the past month feeling all smug about the fact they don’t live in the U.S. watch out. You’re not safe from the sheer stupidity of Trump’s follow. So discovered Kerry McKinley, a florist in British Columbia, recently when her shop, Everblooo Designs, started getting a lot of negative reviews on Facebook and Google and she was on the receiving end of some very angry calls and emails. The reason, it turns out, is that a florist in Tennessee, Christine Walter, announced on her Instagram account that she would not be doing business with Trump supporters as a private business owner. That’s her right. Your political affiliation is not a protected characteristic under Tennessee law, like your race or sexual and of course most conservatives think businesses should be allowed to discriminate no matter how protected your characteristics are. Kristin’s shop is called everbloomm Design and Trump’s supporters are idiots, so Kerry and BC took some of the heat. Don’t worry though. Enough Trump supporters were able to direct abuse, hate and threats in the right direction to make Kristen close her business, at least temporarily, out of concern for her own safety. In the meantime, I guess you Canadians will just have to feel smug about something el_se

01:25:00

Jim: like your clearly superior bacon or for spawning heroes like Keanu, Kiefa, Selene and the Ryans, Gosling and Reynolds.

Mark: Yeah, and for the kids in the hall. Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister removed himself recently as Trump’s nominee for Drug Enforcement Agency administrator, maintaining that his nomination was still the honor of his life, but said he was removing himself from consideration in favor of continuing work with the Sheriff’s office. If anything is going to get up to Cheeto sprayed tann nose of the Trumpser fire himself, it’s people turning down the paal royal holy favour bestowed on them by his God king Messiah Emperoress saying nah, you’re good, keep it I don’t want it is a real insulting underst straking of the gin to the Donald who truthed in response. The Wall Street Journal is becoming more and more obnoxious and unreadable. Today’s main headline is Trump’s DEA pick pourss out in later his setback. With all this happening in the world, this is their number one story of the day. Besides, he didn’t pull out. I pulled him out because I did not like what he said to my pastors and other supporters, because it is number one in Trump’s world that someone would dare to beware of grifts bearing gifts. Pastors probably refers to the fact that Chronister, often seen as the moderating voice in conservative politics in Hillsborough county during the early stages of the pandemic, announced the arrest of Dr. Rodney Howard Brown, pastor of the river at Tampa Bay Church, for having conducted a service during the height of social distancing policies. Chron’s office provided a statement in response to Trump stamping his tidy, lifted feet. Sheriff Chron stands behind his decision to withdraw from consideration. Right now, his priority, as it has been for the last seven years, remains the mission to protect and serve everyone in Hillsborough County. So, yeah, basically, I’m going to stay here and make decisions based on keeping people safe and protected by applying the law or without fear or favor, rather than be gathered up into your Ringling circus of newuter crazies and forced to toe the line and be part to neglect and damage through your particular brand of dereliction of moral duty. Yeah, nice one, Chad.

Jim: I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to think pillow peddler Mike Lindell might not be the best at business.

Mark: Really?

Jim: Lindell, who looks like he’s playing Mario in an Ingmar Bergman film, is suing a lender because he claims he was duped into taking out a merchant cash advance, essentially the corporate equivalent of a payday loan. Desperate for cash after spending millions trying to prove the 2020 election was stolen, Lindale borrowed $1.6 million from Cobalt Finance Solutions at a, 409% annual interest rate. He’s now suing them for predatory lending practices and exorbitant interest rate. I don’t think he’s very likely to succeed since the terms of the loan were clear when he took it out. And as all good Republicans know, if you choose to take out a loan, you should have to pay it back because otherwise it’s unfair to everyone else who’s ever paid back a loan. The other reason I don’t think it’ll work is because he probably wrote the brief himself. Since his lawyers quit last year because he didn’t pay them, he’s tried the same argument against two other lenders he borrowed a total of 2.6 million from earlier in the year. And at a certain point, you have to wonder how these lenders think they’re going to get any of their money back, let alone the ridiculous. He still owes 5 million to the guy who proved his packet data was not only not proof of election fraud, it wasn’t even data.

Mark: Wow. Remember when Rishi Sunak said he’d banned, stopped and prevented tax on meats, seven recycling bins and several other things that people pointed out weren’t even policies and didn’t in fact exist. And we all suspected it was a big distraction from the lack of actual anything he was actually doing. Well, Florida Republican Senator Ileana Garcia, has introduced a bill that will ban weather modification activities, which includes the release of chemicals that influence the temperature or weather patterns. Garcia’s bill will prohibit the injection of chemicals into the atmosphere for the purpose of altering the weather or sunlight intensity within Florida’s borders. Anyone who violates the law, should it be passed, will we fin up to $10,000? Of course, no one is ever has or will likely ever be able to actually do any such things. Although this does feel something of an advance on the Tennessee law we’ve reported on earlier in the year that banned chemtrails entirely. As we have witnessed many times, tons, pages, hours of fact checked and peer reviewed actual scientific evidence showing things like chemrails are simply the result of hot air meeting cold air up high. Where the air is cold and where planes fly and are made up of water vapour are insufficient to shift belief away from conspiracy

01:30:00

Mark: theories about weather and then putting stuff in the air. Questions always occur to me. Like to what end are they doing this and how do they stop themselves getting affected? And if this is such a secret known only to them, the elite cartel of overmines that are ruling us all, and and not to be trusted, how come you know and are you therefore to be trusted? Ilana’s not the bad guy here, though it’s probably a bit more the people who are going through with the drawing up of the legislation and drafting it and having lawyers check it etter, etc. All possibly for money. Incidentally, it should be noted that Garcia only has her seat in the Florida State senate because when she ran for office back in 2020, someone with the same name as her Democratic opponent was paid to run in the election to divide the vote. Yeah, so possibly money is all I’SAYING now, if there could be legislation drawn up to prevent that kind of corruption by elected officials, that might be something.

Jim: To sky right home about being a world class narcissist. Awards are a big thing for Trump. Whether it’s awards he gave himself, like club championships at his own golf clubs or ones he just made up like Michigan man of the year. But sometimes he gets awards that other people made up. Like last week when he won Fox Nation’patriot of the Year award at a star studded event in New York, where former child star and God awful movie staple Kirk Cameron was also among the honorees. Trump accepted his award from Sean Hannity and then talked the kind of bollocks that may make it into a future fake news game. Attendees were encouraged to dance the Trump Dance to YMCA and Hannity did him impressions, including Joe Biden and Tim Wltz. In a much more sedate ceremony, Trump ran the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange after having been announced as Time magazine’s Person of the Year for 2024. I’m not sure how those two things are linked, but all the articles about it mentioned the bell ringing, so I guess I should too. There’s been some consternation about Time M magazine’s choice of Trump, but I do think it’s worth remembering that no matter what Trump believes, it’s not best person. It is in Time magazine’s own work, the person who, for better or worse, has done the most to influence the events of the year and their Person of the year in 1938 was Hitler. So fair enough, I guess. Meanwhile, I think it’s time that we at Fallacious Trump got in on the game. So I’d like to announce that we’ve decided to award Trump with the inaugural Underwhelming Privileged Fuck of the Year award. Y Needless to say, there were stiff competition for this year’s award because there’s sadly no shortage of underwhelming privileged fucks, although thanks to Luigi Mangioni, the list did get slightly shorter. Other shortlisted underwhelming privileged fucks included Elon Musk, Nigel Far Arge and Joe Rogan, as well as every single one of Trump’s children. But this year, nobody embodied being an underwhelming privileged fuck more than the man who was convicted of 34 felonies and was still elected to do a job he clearly wasn’t qualified for the first time he fucked it up. I don’t want to jinx it, but I’m pretty sure he’s frontrunner for next year’s award.

Mark: 2O yeah, fingers cross. This week even the Brexiteers in the UK are celebrating stmer’reset with the eu. Not because the influx of people through the borders that Boris got Brexit done to get back control of had reduced to a trickle, as we heard in PMQS this week. Badenock interrogated the PM on why reducing the number of people coming to the UK wasn’t one of the six milestones in his latest collection of pledge promised stakes in the ground lines in the sand speech last week. Bit rich coming from the Tories who presided over the largest net migration in the year to June 2023 at 906,000 higher than at any time before Brexit, with the year to June 2024 fairly high also at 728,000. It’s as though, the new Tory leader has done her own Ministry of Truth reset and lives in a world where the labor government has always been inower and everything prior to her being switched on is their fault. Keni also said this week that lunch is for wimps and she won’t touch bread if it’s moist. Who does? Who even thinks about the moistness of bread? Let’s hope she’s not so squeamish about fish, because it’s always about the fish. And fish, I’d wager, are amongst the moistest of foodstuffs. Arched Brexiteer Jacobs fleeced mob famously quipped the fish you’much happier post Brexit. Well, post Brexit reset fishbols coming home because the new deal brokered by stman with the EU has meant a quota for the UK fishing in European waters is 150,000 tons for 2025, 15,000 tons more than in 2024. Now if only we could see the tens of thousands of people as equally a good thing to have landed from Europe, then we can stop all this demonizing of the other, or in Chemi’s case, demonizing our own birthplace,

01:35:00

Mark: and just get on with realizising. There’s a place for everyone.

Jim: Yeah, that. That place for everyone works a lot better written down because it’s placed with an eye. Yeah, this was a fish. Yeah, I think it’s the audio medium doesn’t work.

Mark: There’s a place for us. Yeah. Yeah.

Jim: So that’s all about arguments for faulty reasoning. We have time for this week. You’ll find the show not felaciousru.com and if you hear Trump say something stupid and want to ask if it’s a fallacy, our contact details are on the contact page.

Mark: If you think we’ve used the fallacy ourselves, let us know. If you had a good time, please go to the review on Apple Podcasts orver you get your podcast or simply tell one other person in person about how much they like our podcasts and you can support the show at patreon.com f TRUMP just like our newest patron Elisha Finink, our strawman level patrons, Mike Smith, LT Colleen Lella, Richard Thunder H. Hopkins, Willem Scott Ozy, On Bank, Laura Thompson, Mark Racky and Amber I. Buchanan who told us where we met her at QED we can just call a Ramba this year at qed I met the listener who recognize a QED last year because we keep using our full name all the time. And our two Scotsmen level patrons, Schmootz, Sharon Robinson, Renee Zed, Melissa Sctech, Stephen Bigickel, Janet usa, Andrew Hauk and our top patron Caaz Toi. Thank you so much for joining Elisha and thank you everybody else for continuing with your patronage. It’s very much appreciated. Thank you.

Jim: You can connect with those awesome people as well as us and other listeners in the facebook group@facebook.com group falllaciousrump or in the discord@feaciousrump.com discord all music is.

Mark: 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.