[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi everybody. Welcome along to another episode of the Dispatchers podcast. My name is Brendan Malone. It is great to be back with you again and today's topic of conversation. The reaction is revealing. That's right, we're going to be talking about the reaction to the election of Donald Trump.
Hi, my name is Brendan Malone and you're listening to the Dispatchers, the podcast that strives to cut through all the noise in order to challenge the popular narratives of the day with some good old fashioned contrarian thinking. You might not always agree, but at least you'll be taking a deeper look at the world around you.
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And what I thought I'd do in today's episode is just respond to or examine a bit more deeply some of the reactions that I'm seeing online from people who are progressive supporters of Kamala Harris who are now quite upset and angry about the result of the election. And it's something I mentioned in my substack, which I published yesterday about how the laptop class has tried and failed to win this election. And at the very end I said the reaction so far was also largely lacking in reality. And therefore they are just laying a foundation for probably someone like Vance 2028, because so far there's no indication that they're really learning or willing to actually learn their lessons. There have been one or two, and they are very isolated examples of people on the Democratic side and very senior positions who have indicated that they actually need to take a long, hard look at themselves and Learn some hard lessons from this. But by and large, everyone else is just progressing 100 miles an hour with all sorts of blame shifting excuses and really ugly rhetoric levelled at people who didn't vote for their candidate. And it's quite revealing, actually. There's a whole lot of responses here and I think it's worthy of examination because it's quite an important insight into the current state of culture in the west and also the current state of a certain group of people within Western society who have been absolutely ideologically captured. So let's just start working our way through these. And in no particular order, I have seen a whole lot of people posting and claiming online in different forums that you shouldn't say that Kamala Harris wasn't the best candidate. This is absolutely false and there were so many examples, I really couldn't pick one to highlight. But basically, in a nutshell, the excuse goes something like this. She was the best candidate. Anyone saying she wasn't doesn't know what they're talking about. There was no one better. She was robbed, something didn't go the way it should. And then basically, usually what happens is there's often other excuses that are attached to this claim that Kamala Harris was absolutely the best candidate and that anyone who is saying otherwise should be hung, drawn and courted. The actual truth, though, is that she was the vice president in a very unpopular regime. That regime was unpopular because it was not governing well. And she was the two. I see she was also gerrymandered into the role. There was no voting, no open primary to ensure that she actually got the role through democratic means. There's a type of coup is how some have described it. And the powers that be in the party just anointed her as the chosen one. And so what that means is right from the very beginning, there was a type of alienation amongst her own voter base. They weren't really right there. All of them, a lot of them in fact, were openly saying that she wasn't a legitimate candidate because they hadn't had their say, the process hadn't been democratic. And so that's a problem because she desperately needed her own voter base behind her and strength, and they weren't there with her. She was inserted into the race very late in the election. She definitely chose the wrong person to be her vice presidential candidate. Tim Waltz, for all sorts of reasons, was simply not the right pick. And that raised all sorts of issues. One big thing that didn't really go away, but there was a big question, well, why didn't you choose another candidate, say, like Shapiro, and there are people, and this is within their own movement who are pointing out, well, was it because of some sort of anti Semitism, because of his Jewishness? And so right from the very beginning there were problems. But Tim Walsh himself was also a major issue. He was not a guy who was ever going to appeal to middle America. He had a very extreme pro abortion position. He was all over the map on other issues and he just didn't really present particularly strongly. And he didn't offer her anything that was of strategic value, like he wasn't going to bring a state with him or anything like that. It was just, the whole thing was basically just a mess and it was a bad choice. She was the least popular candidate that they could have put forward. There is absolutely no denying that. The polling data, as in surveys of people, what do you think about her as a candidate from several years ago? They consistently show the same thing. She also had a poor track record when it comes to campaigning. She hasn't campaigned particularly well. And I think we saw that again this time she was also not obviously qualified for the role. Now that can be a little bit unfair at times because you look at a candidate and you think, well, I don't understand how they could be a good president or a good leader in this case. But then as you get to know them, you discover, oh, they really are quite a good person and I'm going to vote for them. But in this case, she's been around for a number of years already and there was no obvious indication that she had appropriate qualifications to bring to the role. It just was not clear at all that this person would be suitable to be the president. While she was campaigning, she claimed she was the change candidate. The whole, let's turn over a new page, it's time for a change. In other words, I'm the change candidate. But she is currently the sitting vice president. And even worse than that, she was also claiming during the campaign that nothing she had done as part of the previous administration needed to be changed. There was nothing she could think of that should have been done differently. And so on one hand she's the change candidate. On the other hand, nothing needs to be changed and that is just confusing. She also hid from the media for several weeks and that did not help. That was really a big mistake that was made. And then when she does get into the media and she does a succession of media interviews, she really gaffed her major media appeal appearances and it was not good. There were word salads There was a lack of clarity. And there were also questions in some cases about how the media might have aided her by editing and very selectively editing footage. And in one case there was even two different versions, it seemed, of answers that she had given. And so the question was, well, did they actually doctor this to make her look better? The whole thing was a real mess in that regard. And basically she had, at the end of the day, I think, a hollow campaign that seemed to sort of vacillate between mimicking Barack Obama's 2008 campaign. But instead of talking about hope, she was focused on the issue of joy. And the problem, of course, is that joy is not as tangible as something like hope. Now, hope for sure, can have vagaries to it, but hope is a sense of moving forward to something better and brighter. Hope for change, hope for something new, all that kind of stuff. But joy? What exactly do you mean by joy? We're just going to be happy because people actually need to pay their gas bills, they need houses, they need to feed their families. And as someone rightly said, you can't feed your family on joy. So there was this clear mimicking and almost like a plagiarism of Obama's approach in 2008. But then she would also vacillate from that to, all of a sudden, this harsh demagoguery and this really intense rhetoric, which involved all sorts of demonisation and even lying at times. And it was a real mess. There was no real consistency. The one big message that she seemed to have, the through line, if you like, was, hey, look, I'm not Donald Trump and you should vote for me because I am not that guy. But the problem is you actually need to bring something proactive and positive. Okay, you're not that guy, but who are you? What are you going to be about? And that was the thing that you consistently saw from the data and survey responses, where the voters were saying, we just don't know this woman. We feel like we just don't know who she is. And speaking of as well, the underlying and big issue here of the economy, the cost of living and really, border security and the sense of a loss of safety, among other things. These are really big issues that are impacting voters. It was clear that there is a disconnect. She's part of a more elite group who are very insulated from some of those problems because they have their wealth and the means to insulate themselves. And so they're very disconnected from what's actually going on for your ordinary working class. Person. And nothing sums this up more than Joe Scarborough on msnbc. And this is something that's only a few hours old. And he was talking about the economy. And have a listen to this because it's actually quite a fascinating insight into how disconnected this particular class of people has been. And Joe Scarborough was someone who was absolutely shilling for Hillary and was just telling all all sorts of lies and nonsense about Donald Trump throughout the election. Look, I get it. People don't want to vote for the guy and there are reasons why they would put forward. They see flaws in his character and flaws in his policies. That's all part of the election cycle. And that's all part of it. You disagree on legitimate, honest grounds, but what you don't do is tell absurd lies, keep repeating misinformation and all that kind of stuff. And that was how Joe Scarborough had approached things. So have a listen to this. This is a couple of hours ago, and this is him talking about the current state of economic life in America, the working classes and the cost of living. Have a listen to this. It's a short little clip, about a minute or so, but holy moly, it's quite revealing. Have a listen.
[00:10:56] Speaker B: I want to talk about economy for a second.
A few weeks ago, three weeks ago, somebody who was going to be voting for Kamala Harris came up to me and said, oh, my God, Trump's going to win. I go, why is that? He goes, I just, I went to the grocery store, butters over $3. I kind of laughed and I said, I said, well, that's kind of reductive, isn't it? Said it to myself, to him, I smiled and I said, good point.
But it actually, everything we're hearing after the election is, it is the seven.
[00:11:29] Speaker C: What's on the seven dollars?
[00:11:33] Speaker B: Butter is seven dollars.
[00:11:35] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:11:36] Speaker B: What is it framed in gold.
[00:11:41] Speaker A: Anyway.
[00:11:41] Speaker B: Where you go, okay, well. Yeah, okay, well, anyway, my point is this, Willie. The rent is too damn high. And this guy was saying, the cost of butter is way damn too high.
[00:11:53] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:11:54] Speaker B: And so I thought it was a bit reductive. It ended up being just the point that if you look at the cost of groceries, if you look at the cost of grass, of gas, if you look at the cost of things compared to four years ago, it was a very simple answer for working class Americans, things just cost too much.
[00:12:16] Speaker A: Yeah. That's quite astounding really, isn't it? So here's a guy who railed against Trump and was shilling for Hillary and here he is, basically, finally and in a way, that's quite shocking to him, realizing that an actual fact. And he's admitting here, maybe he did know this before and he was just being a bit dishonest, or maybe this really is a big discovery for him. But you can clearly see he's quite surprised by the cost of butter. He has no awareness of what that would actually be and what it's like to actually be at the grassroots trying to survive in an economic environment like that. And here he is actually finally admitting that this is the real underlying issue. And this is exactly why you saw Kamala Harris lose. She was not the best candidate. And the current situation with the economy is a really difficult one for a lot of people, and they have to actually find a way out of it. And so they are looking to Trump and his promises to help them out of this very difficult situation. And that little clip, I think, is a very fascinating and revealing insight about the state of the progressive elite culture and how disconnected they are from people on the ground. And really, I think that was just such a big part of Kamala's campaign. You know, you are running around speaking as if there are no other issues, when in actual fact, you're not really addressing the things that people need you to address at all. And speaking of this failure of governance from the Democrats and the progressives, a couple of hours ago, Gavin Newsom, who is the governor of California, he made headlines in the New York Times, and he also tweeted this out himself. And he says this. California is ready to fight. I just called an emergency special session to help bolster our legal resources and protect our state against any unlawful actions by the incoming Trump administration, whether it be our fundamental civil rights, reproductive freedom. That's abortion, is what he's saying there, or climate action. We refuse to turn back the clock and allow our values and laws to be attacked. And this is just a symptom of the progressive problem. These people are immoral when it comes to governance. They don't govern well. Because what he's telling you here is he has called a special emergency session of governance not to address the big crisis issues in California. And there are a lot over there. So one of the first comments in response to him was a Californian who was saying, why did you call an emergency special session just for this purpose? Why don't you call one to examine why the cost of gas is basically twice what it is in other states that are neighbouring us? Like, that's a really important issue for people in California. But he's not really interested in that. He's playing activist and he's playing political ideologue and he's engaging in these absurd power games. And even more than that, he has taken taxpayer funds so that he can then set himself up against the current administration, the current president of his nation, to fight against him tooth and nail. What's he doing there? He's admitting that he's wasting local taxpayer money for this political activism. And it's not simply activism. He's also doing this, I guarantee you, to try and big note himself, because guess what, the Democrats are going to pretty quickly need a new presidential contender. In four years time, they are going to be looking to someone else. Now, Kamala Harris has laid some groundwork where she seems to be indicating or has laid certain groundwork that seems to indicate that maybe she might have an interest in doing that. Again, that is not going to happen. But Gavin Newsom is someone who potentially could have his name in the ring. So this is just an absolute failure of governance. This is a moral governance. He's not actually meeting the needs of the people that he has been empowered to serve. It is an abuse of power. He's not taking the power and the resources at his disposal to actually serve those who are lower down the hierarchy, the families, the businesses, the communities. No, no, this is all about him and his grandiose political grandstanding. And he's wasting taxpayer money and valuable government resources and time to do this kind of madness. And this is exactly why they lost. Because Kamala Harris is part of this culture. This is the culture of the current democratic regime. And people in America really are getting tired of it and they've had enough of it. Another excuse that I've heard is, and this usually backs onto the fact that, no, she was the best candidate they had. It was amazing. And don't you dare say that she wasn't the best candidate. And here's a litany of other reasons why she actually lost. And one that is coming back now time and time and time again over the past 24 hours is that everyone in America is racist. Here's just one example from a lady called Melinda who tweeted this keeping thinking about how Trump campaign very intentionally made derogatory comments on Hispanics in the grand finale knowing they would still get their vote. They knew they could throw a bone to their white supremacist base and this would cost them no votes. And this is just nonsense because she's actually lying here. They didn't actually make derogatory comments about Hispanics at all. A poorly considered and not particularly funny joke was made by a roast comedian about Puerto Rico being an island of garbage. I'm not going to relitigate that. But as to why someone might make a joke about that, go and Google Puerto Rico garbage problem and you'll see pretty quickly that in actual fact, there is a major problem with garbage on the island of Puerto Rico and it is getting out of control. And so it was an attempt at a joke. It failed. It wasn't particularly funny. And then they completely misrepresented it and they were claiming that he was calling Puerto Ricans garbage. So the people themselves. It is just not true. That is not what he did. I've covered this on a previous episode. I'm not going to re litigate it here, but here's the thing. Here is someone who has taken a poorly considered joke from a roast comic, and the first thing that she's doing is she's now applying this to the whole Trump campaign. She's claiming this was some secret conspiracy where they asked him to do exactly this because they were trying to throw a bone out into the public arena to actual white supremacists to let them know that, hey, we are with you. And they also thought they could do this without losing any votes. This is just utter madness. This is a conspiracy theory of stupidity. It's the only way to describe this, because to believe this, you have to believe that people basically, simply for telling a joke, were actually trying to send some coded message to white supremacists. That's the first madness in all of this. Secondly, the idea here is that this joke is the coded message. And thirdly, the idea here is that they thought that they would do this and take a risk on possibly losing a key voting demographic in order to secure a far less important voting demographic, and that is white supremacists, who are a very tiny minority in America. And this is not the only version. There are so many different versions of this claim. People are saying the only reason she didn't make it is because she's a woman of color. She didn't make it because she's got Indian heritage. The Americans hate people who are not white. If she'd been a white woman, she would have made it. All that kind of stuff. It's just utter madness. This is people who are accusing other Americans, like a ton of Americans. He won the popular vote and the Electoral College. Like, this is a massive mandate that has actually been won here. And what really is going on here is people are voting against the current regime and the current culture. And so what do they do? They double down with this kind of madness. Now, another version of this, after someone says, well, she's actually the right candidate, is they are now claiming that everyone is sexist. And there are different versions of this, but basically, in a nutshell, people are trying to claim that if she had been a white male, or in other versions of this particular claim, a male of any ethnicity, she would have absolutely won the race. She would have beaten Trump. And it's purely the fact that she's a female is why she lost it. No, this is absolute nonsense. I've already explained why she lost this race. And you don't need to go fishing for conspiracy theories. It's pretty clear why she lost this race. You just have to be honest and have some common sense. But what this claim is also doing is it is effectively suggesting that Kamala Harris was the best female candidate that could have been put forward. Like there is no one else out there anywhere in America who is better than Kamala Harris as a potential presidential candidate. This is absolutely not true. Now, what some have done is they've also included Hillary Clinton in this, and they've said Hillary Clinton and now Kamala Harris. See, they hate women. Again, you could have chosen anybody else better than Hillary Clinton, but they didn't do that. The regime within the Democratic Party, the elites, those who are in control, they are just so disconnected now. They don't understand how this actually works. They're not understanding reality anymore because they're so used to bending reality to their own will, taking ideology and imposing it upon reality and breaking it to make their sort of perfect new world and make reality fit the ideology. They now think that they can do it anywhere and everywhere. And guess what? That's not the case anymore. Too many people are upset with what's been going on. A lot of people have been woken up, and a lot of people are really frustrated because they've been broken and wounded by this mess. And so there is a pushback now. And so you can't just do this. You've actually got to choose reasonable candidates who have something to offer and who actually are serious contenders. And Kamala Harris was not that. You could have chosen Michelle Obama. She would have done far better. You could have had someone like Condoleezza Rice if she'd wanted to run for the Democrat Party. That is, because she obviously is a former Republican. But I'm just putting an example of someone out there who actually would have been far more popular and more widely received than Kamala Harris was. Tulsi Gabbard, if you hadn't actually alienated her from the Democrat Party and then put her on a no fly list the day after she started criticizing what was going on within the Democrat Party, all of a sudden she finds herself on a no fly list. I mean, come on. This is why you are losing. You aren't actually recognizing talent when you see it. You've lost sight of meritocracy, the idea that you should actually give the job to the best person, male or female, regardless of ethnicity, who can actually do the job. You are instead playing these bizarre ideological games and also this bizarre managerial, sort of bureaucratic game where you think that you can actually manage your way to the outcome you want. And that's not how human beings actually work. So, no, this was not widespread sexism at all. She just wasn't up to the job. Then, of course, we've seen a whole lot of extreme and irrational displays of emotion. Now, I don't want to play any of these because I don't want to be uncharitable. It's pretty easy to watch someone acting truly insane online. Like they've posted content of themselves crying or screaming or getting angry and blaming everybody and calling them names and breaking down truly like visual spectacles of insanity. It's very easy to laugh at that. But I think that would be to laugh at someone else's misfortune. And I don't want to do that. I don't want to encourage that kind of behavior and I don't want to participate in it. So I'm not going to play any of these extreme and irrational displays of emotion. I also think that maybe there's hope that in future some of these people might actually mature and move forward out of this dark ideology. And the last thing that you'd want if that was you is to know that a whole nation of people or a whole lot of people all around the globe were just laughing at you and ridiculing you. That's not a good thing either. Even if people don't conduct themselves with virtue, the Christian way is that we always conduct ourselves with virtue. And so I don't pretend to be perfect at this or a saint, but I think to me it's pretty clear that we shouldn't really be amplifying and laughing at these people in this moment of madness. But there's been a whole lot of those, regardless of the fact that I'm not going to play them to you today. And I think one thing before I get to the real heart of that, I Think it's important to note that in the online context, you have something called online disinhibition effect that happens. And what happens is people get online and because they're often alone when they're doing this, and they're engaging with a personal device, so it's not communal, there's not a group of people around you you're not facing for, like, forward facing, when you transmit onto social media into a crowd or into a group, generally speaking. And so what happens is you experience something called online disinhibition effect, and your brain doesn't really recognize or register that. It's not just you alone in your car or in your room and this device. There is a whole planet of people who can potentially see what you are doing online. It's actually very public, but your brain doesn't recognise that because it doesn't feel particularly public. And of course, what that means is people, they get online, their inhibitions go out the window, and they say and do things that they would never normally say or do if they were in a crowded room or with another group of people. And so I think you've got to take that into consideration. When you see people acting in these really mad and irrational ways, that is definitely a factor driving a lot of people. It's not the only factor, but it's definitely something that amplifies this particular problem. But another issue that underlies this really is fragility culture. You have a whole group of people, and it is predominantly younger people who are engaging in these truly manic and, at times even psychotic behaviors online. And it is driven by a fragility culture. A lot of them would have had not simply helicopter parents who swoop in and save them from problems, but they may have also experienced lawnmower parents and even lawnmower teachers and others who run ahead of them and they mow down all of the potential obstacles and problems. And they have schools or universities where they set up safe spaces and places with colouring books and crayons where you can go and escape people who you just disagree with. No major crisis, just a disagreement on campus. There's a safe space for you to go to, all that kind of stuff. And it breeds and it builds fragility into people. And when a moment like this happens, which is a bit bigger and beyond their control and not your typical kind of thing like an election only happens every four years, the whole country's involved, they just lose the plot because they have not been formed to actually have a basic sense of virtue guiding their life. Instead, their own personal feelings and passions are front and center. Another thing that I've seen a lot of is conspiracy theories. And there are some really crazy ones out there and they go all the way up the food chain. I'll show you one from a high profile mainstream media personality. This is just about 12 hours old, so it's very recent, this one. And this conspiracy theory problem is all over the place on the left. And it's kind of ironic because you will remember after the last election you had a, a lot of people on the left who are saying, look at those crazy conservative people, look at those crazy right wing people. They're all full of conspiracy theorists. They're a bunch of nut jobs. Look at their movement, it's all looney tunes. And what do we see now? We see the exact same behavior from the left wing side of the political spectrum. This is something, if you've been listening to me for a while, you will know I've talked about this regularly and often. And that is the fact that throughout the disinformation moral panic, there was a complete failure to recognize that these were very typical human behaviors. They have existed for a very long time. There's nothing new about this. There's no new science or magic. There's nothing new at all. This was just weaponized politicization. That's all. The disinformation project, like the cottage machine and the cottage industry that it formed, that's all it really was. But this was a problem on both sides of the aisle. There were conspiracy theorists on one side and there were conspiracy theorists on the other. And of course the greatest irony was the disinformation project itself, which was running around claiming there's a conspiracy theory here, there's a conspiracy theory there. They also had their own big giant conspiracy theory about a supposed Russian conglomeration of white supremacists and others who were actually working to undermine democracy in the world as we know it. And they were targeting New Zealand. They never explained why New Zealand would be targeted by these people. There's no real reason why Russia would have any interest in our country whatsoever. But that didn't stop them from promoting their own conspiracy theory. So these are problems across the board. So we shouldn't be particularly surprised by this. This is one way that people try and cope. When things don't go their way, they will look for other reasons. There must be some hidden truth that I have missed because they can't bring themselves to accept either A, that they got things wrong, or B, that they, in their mind like history is going against what they thought should happen, that maybe they've made a voting decision and most people haven't joined them in that voting decision. And they really can't understand that. And so they go looking for conspiracies and secret information to explain what's actually going on around them. Here's one example, by the way, of someone who has gone back to the old, tried and true classic. It's someone called Dana. And the tweet says Biden should declassify everything he safely can about Republicans ties to Russians. This is an absurd nonsense I have, literally, and if you're a patron of mine, you will know this, because I talked a lot about the insights I gleaned from this book yesterday. But I have just finished reading an almost 900 page and very masterful biography of the life of Vladimir Putin by Philip Short. This is a book that's not just almost 900 pages long, but the author and his research team spent a full eight years researching this book before they wrote it. So there's. Yeah, it's a really phenomenal one. And he actually at one point covers the allegations of a Russian collusion campaign between Trump and Putin. It is absolute nonsense. The Russians had zero interest in Trump at all. There was, in fact, Putin was criticising him prior to the election when Trump actually took power. He was a problem for Putin. There was an incident that happened where Putin tried to assassinate a former double agent. And in response, Trump imposed heavy sanctions on Russia and then he expelled 60 of the diplomats. And Putin really, really hated Trump. He found him really hard to deal with. And in actual fact, the relationship between Russia and America got worse under Trump's regime than what it had been under previous regimes. And then also, Putin is quite open about the fact that things were far better for him under Biden. He enjoyed dealing with Biden because he just saw Trump basically as a bit of a mad dog. So, yeah, this is just utter nonsense. But here we are, we're back to this stupidity, this completely unscholarly unhistorical and false nonsense. And remember earlier how I said that these conspiracy theories go all the way up the food chain? Well, have a listen to this video clip of Rachel Maddow from MSNBC and the grand conspiracy that she has concocted about Donald Trump and voting and the state of, or the future state of democracy in America. Have a listen to this.
[00:31:40] Speaker C: But let me also point out something more strange which has been happening at the same time and it hasn't had as much attention the day before. Trump made those remarks on Friday. On Friday he said, you're never going to have to vote again after you vote for me this one time. The day before that, on Thursday last week.
[00:32:00] Speaker A: I should interrupt here to say that this is yet another example of this classic selective quoting and complete misrepresentation of what Trump was actually saying or meaning. He did not mean there will be no future elections. He was pointing out the fact that this is his last run at the presidency. So look, he was talking to a group of people who are undecided and who were wavering and he says, look, this is it. You don't have to vote for me again just once. That's it, job done. You don't, you know, you only have to hold your nose once and I won't ever ask anything more of you. That's what he was saying. He was not saying there will be one election and then no more because I'm going to destroy the rest. But hey, don't let the truth get in the way of your fictional high profile conspiracy theory, but let's carry on with what else she has to say here.
[00:32:45] Speaker C: He didn't say that people wouldn't have to vote anymore once he was elected this November. Now the day before that, on Thursday, he told his supporters not that they're not going to have to vote again, but that they don't have to vote this time, that they don't need to vote for him this November.
[00:33:05] Speaker D: My instruction, we don't need the votes. I have so many votes.
[00:33:09] Speaker C: My instruction, we don't need the votes. I have so many votes.
[00:33:12] Speaker A: Now, just before we carry on, because there's a couple of clips like this from Trump that she's using. Just notice that these are very abruptly and narrowly clipped quotes from Donald Trump and I'll explain why in a second. You are being lied to here. This is propaganda and it is absolutely egregious how someone could sit there with a straight face and do this. It is sociopathic levels of lying and dishonesty and I'll explain why in just a second. But just keep that in mind and listen for the short nature of the clips as we go.
[00:33:42] Speaker C: He said that on Thursday last week and it turns out this is something when you. Look, he says this all the time.
[00:33:49] Speaker D: Now, but my instruction, we don't need the votes. I have so many votes. We don't need votes. I tell my people, I don't need any votes. We got all the votes we need. I don't need votes. We don't need votes. We got more Votes than anybody's ever had. You don't have to vote. Don't worry about voting. The voting. We got plenty of votes.
[00:34:07] Speaker C: Don't worry about voting.
Of all the weirdness around this campaign, this is a truly strange thing to tell people, right? Don't vote. I don't need your vote. I don't want your vote.
I mean, all the surface level weirdness is, you know, worth noting. Having a new position on literally anything you can think of as soon as any random riddle guy tells you to. That's a weird thing. Picking the eccentric billionaires intern for your running mate, even though you apparently had no idea who he was or what a disaster he is on television. All of this is weird.
[00:34:40] Speaker A: By the way, she's talking about J.D. vance there, which is hilarious because the media concocted this lie that he was a weirdo, that he was inept, he was hopeless. And then what happened? He got into the public eye and he's actually really, really good. And those of us who have been reading and following JD Vance for many years, we knew that this was an utter lie, but it didn't stop them from telling it anyway. And she just basically embarrassed herself here by pushing the same lie herself and using it as part of her grand conspiracy theory. But it was always nonsense and everyone can see now it's on the public record. Yet JD Vance is not who you claim that he actually is.
[00:35:14] Speaker C: Telling voters, do not bother to vote for me. It doesn't matter if you do. I don't need your votes. That is a thing that should prick up your ears, because what that means is that he doesn't think he needs to win the vote to win the election.
He doesn't think he needs to win the election in order to take power.
He thinks something other than votes is going to determine whether or not he gets back in the White House.
[00:35:40] Speaker A: This is an example of the utter conspiratorial nonsense that goes all the way up the food chain. And it's coming from the very same people who are claiming, hey, the other side. They're all a bunch of conspiracists. This is just absolute nonsense. And it's also completely dishonest because in those quotes that they clip out, what is Donald Trump doing? He is not saying, hey, guys, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, we are actually going to take power some other way. We don't need you to vote for us because we're just going to, what, storm the Capitol and control the army? Or whatever fantasy she's got in her head playing out about this. And he's definitely not saying, and I'll tell you why I'm saying this in just a second, that, hey, I'm going to rig the voting somehow. I'm going to actually produce a whole lot of votes that are not real and they're going to go in my direction. What he was actually saying in those poorly clipped and dishonestly misrepresented quotes is that he was, first of all bragging about the number of people who he thinks he's got supporting him. And in actual fact, it turned out to be the case. And then secondly, there's a whole lot of other context. So here's just one of those quotes. Let me read to you the full quote. Now, you got to vote and do it early if you want. Do it early, do it. Just do it. You got to vote and watch your vote, guard your vote and follow your vote. Follow your vote. I tell my people, I don't need any votes. We got all the votes we need. I don't need votes. All I want to do is make sure that we guard our vote. And so that's the full context of just one of those examples. And so what he's actually doing here is he's effectively saying, I know that my support base, my voter base has the right amount of votes necessary to win. And what he says is, we need everyone who is one of my supporters to actually get out and vote. Make sure that your vote is counted. And this is a classic example of this. Now, why I'm playing you this older clip, not, you know, it's more recent, but it's not in the last couple of days from Rachel Maddow is because this clip is now being recirculated and widely shared. Like this particular post that I shared, this one from today has been seen by 4.6 million people already. And he is just one of the many different progressive accounts who are boosting this particular clip. And what they're saying is, see, Rachel Maddow knew. She knew something was up. There's a secret deal that's gone on. Trump has somehow rigged the election. And that's what's going on here. And this is why the mainstream media absolutely should be held accountable for this madness. And this is why Donald Trump talks about them being an enemy to the American people. They propagandize to a very big audience in a high profile way. And then other people are propagandized by their lies. And then they start believing and acting upon dangerous ideas and maybe even doing dangerous things, things themselves under a Completely false and absurd set of premises about the world that are just not true. They have not been careful with what they've said here. And this is an issue. And so what's going on there is people are basically saying, hey, we think this election was rigged. It doesn't make sense. In my mind, they are struggling to understand how Trump could secure so many votes. And so what they're saying is he must have stolen all the votes somehow. And there's different versions of this conspiracy theory that is now flying around the Internet at a great rate of knots. But one particular interesting version that I want to focus on is the 15 to 18 million missing votes. So what you've got is in the last election, Joe Biden received 15 to 18 million more votes than what Barack Obama did at the peak of his fame. He received about 80 million votes. @ the peak of his fame, Obama in 2008 received about 66 million. And then the following election, he also won it. He received about 65 million. Hillary Clinton was about 65 million. And then all of a sudden, Joe Biden skyrockets to 80 million votes. When you look at the bar graph, it is definitely a glaring statistical anomaly. Now, previously, I have not bought into this idea at all. And basically, I've always thought that this was the right wing version of over egging the pudding, just like the left likes to overegg the pudding. About January 6th, they've got this whole absurd narrative about an insurrection and an attempted coup. It was nothing of the sort. It was a poorly considered protest and a movement, a gathering of people in protest that just got out of hand. That's exactly what January 6th was. But they had to overhype the thing because it suited their anti Trump narrative. And so they turn it into a supposed insurrection, a supposed coup. It's just utter nonsense. And the amount of lies that have been told about that particular thing, it is constantly being over egged. And that's what the left do. And by the way, it's the only time you will hear them talking about things being sacred is when they talk about democracy on January 6, and the buildings, the government buildings on January 6, and these sacred halls of power. And guess what? They're not actually sacred. The sacred things are things that are religious in nature that are set aside for the purpose of worship and veneration. Democracy is not a sacred thing. Now, there is one way that you can use the word sacred to mean something of a singular kind, but that's not what they're meaning. Here they are trying to claim Something that is just not true, that these buildings and that democracy itself is sacred. And guess what? The only time they use it, they get it wrong. They don't actually talk about the sacredness of human life, they don't talk about the sacredness of religious belief. They don't consider anything else to be sacred, not sexuality. That's a play thing for them. But when it comes to democracy in January 6, you hear this overegging of the pudding and you hear this absurd claims about what's gone on. And I always thought that the claims of election interference and people actually manipulating the election last time around between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, I always thought that was the right wing version of overeging the pudding. This was their version of a big exaggerated situation. What the actual situation that you've got on the ground is that American democracy and voting in particular right now is a bit of a mess because they don't consistently, across the board, require voter id. This is something that is done in almost every other place in the world. When they have an election, you have to prove that you are who you claim to be before you can vote in an election. But guess what? That's not the universal requirement in America, despite The fact that 80% of the American people want this to be a requirement. Why would you not have that? The only reason you wouldn't have that is because if you want to leave open the possibility of cheating, I can't think of any other legitimate reason why you would not have that. It does not hinder a person's ability to vote, it does not prevent people from voting. That is often the claim that people try and make, but it's utter nonsense. People from all walks of life in America use IDs for all sorts of things, sometimes very minor and inconsequential, far less important than casting a vote. And so this is something that is not universally required. And then you have different states where their behaviours around counting are not transparent at all. You have the issue of voting machines instead of paper ballots. The whole thing has got problems. And so at the very least, what it does is it actually gives the appearance of the possibility of cheating. And it also does open up avenues for possible cheating when you don't have good security around your elections consistently across the whole nation. And so I always thought that that was basically the right wing were over egging that problem and applying it to the 2020 election and then saying, look, they've manufactured all these votes out of whole cloth and it's all just fraud and they were over egging because there are other problems with election integrity in America. However, in the last 12 hours or so, I'm now a little bit less certain about what's actually gone on here. I'm not saying there's any issue, but now that you can see the bar graph, you can see that 2020 was a truly bizarre statistical anomaly. So you've got basically Democrat voter Turnout is around 65, 66 million for Barack Obama. Then it is the same again for Barack Obama, and then it is the same again for Hillary Clinton, and then all of a sudden, Joe Biden skyrockets to 80 million. And guess what it's back to now. This year, it's back down to 65 million again for Kamala Harris. They're back within their typical bandwidth all of a sudden. And what's happening is you've got Democrats who supported Harris who are now saying, hey, where are those extra 15 to 18 million votes? They don't appear to have gone to Trump. It's not like he skyrocketed up in the other direction. And it seems like far too many people to say they all just stayed home. That doesn't quite make sense either. I mean, that could be a possibility. But then there's also another question in this, and that is the 2020 election. Do we really believe that Joe Biden was a far superior candidate who was so much more popular than Barack Obama was, that he somehow managed to draw an extra 15 million voters out of the woodwork? Now, all of these 15 million don't have to be fraudulent votes, by the way. I should say that I'm not saying anything happened here, I'm really not. And as I said previously, I've thought that it was just overeaking the pudding. But looking at that graph, there's definitely an anomaly here and it would be interesting to know why. And if there was something untoward that went on, you don't need 15 million false votes. You might only have a million or two false votes in key swing states and key locations. And that could be enough, you know, 100,000 here or 100,000 there. It doesn't really need much at all. So there might be a sort of combination of factors at play here. But what's happened is, now is Democrats, now that they've lost, they've gone and looked and they've seen the data from last year and they've realised that something doesn't quite seem to make sense. Now, it might not make sense because we could be misunderstanding and failing to recognise something obvious. So that's really important to point out, but the point I'm making here is that basically there are conspiracy theories up the wazoo now. And one of my favorite response tweets to this latest version of the conspiracy theory was someone called Hunter who said, Republicans in 2020, where did they come from? Democrats in 2024, where did they go? Prime suspect is Cotton Eye Joe.
Yeah, it was hilarious. But anyway, so there's lots of conspiracy theories going on. A very typical reaction. Secret Knowledge. There have been some Catholic reactions. Here's one. There's lots of these. These are progressive liberal Catholics who tend to put their liberal politics ahead of Catholic tradition and doctrine in a lot of cases. And they are often very malleable with the doctrine, but not so much with their progressive ideology. Here's a guy called D.W. lafferty and he said, it's not that bishops on the left, this is Catholic bishops should have spoken out. All the bishops in North America fail to discern from 2016 through the pandemic and until now, a force working against truth itself, an empire of lies in formation. In other words, it was growing and developing, and now it's truly here. And this is his reaction to the American election, and rightly so. People were ridiculing him beneath that. And they were saying, are you truly saying, as a Catholic, that you think the bishops should come out in support of a very extreme, pro abortion presidential candidate? And especially if you look at both candidates, they've got moral problems on both sides of the aisle. Are you really saying that the bishops in that situation should be picking one over the other? It's just nonsense. But there is a lot of liberal Catholic reactions of that kind. We've also seen a lot of hypocrisy. Here's one from a lady called Andrea. She's had about 400,000 views so far on this one. If you voted for Trump, I don't judge you for your choice of political party. Now, whenever it starts like this, I know that we are about to hear the exact opposite thing happen to what they claim. So she said, if you voted for Trump, I don't judge you for your choice of political party. She is about to. Before I'd even read any further in this tweet earlier today, I knew she was about to start judging people for their choice of political party. In fact, she does even worse because here's what she goes on to say. I judge you for your lack of morals, your ethics, your compassion and your humanity. I judge you for support of racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, treason and fascism. So in actual fact, after saying, trust me, I don't judge you for your choice of political party, she proceeds to judge you in the worst possible way if you didn't vote the way that she wanted you to vote. And guess what, what she's done here is created this absurd moral fiction. So what she's saying is your choice of political party. Like, it's actually not okay to judge people for their choice of political party, but I can actually judge you and claim that you're a racist and that you have no compassion and you have no humanity and all the rest of it, but it's not okay, or somehow it wouldn't be okay to judge your choice of political party. The whole thing is just utter nonsense. But this is hypocrisy, basically. In a nutshell, this is a classic example of gaslighting and projection. They are projecting onto their opponents their own moral flaws and they are gaslighting them like they are the only ones who have problems and they don't really like they're imagining things. No, no, we're the good guys, you're the bad guy and all the rest of it. And here is a truly shocking example that I came across a few hours ago. A guy called Indirefugee. And he says this. I texted my 75 year old trumpet mom. So this is this man's mother. She voted for Trump and she's 75 years old. I just texted her the news about the House gop. That's the Republicans jumping up and down to reduce Social Security the minute Trump won. I told her not to look to me when she needs help with food, medication or healthcare. She wanted this and I'm not standing in her way. You taught me how to be callous, Maga. Thanks. Now that is truly sociopathic. And guess what? Classic gaslighting and projection. No one who voted for Trump taught him to act this way. This is a truly ugly form of inhumanity and barbarism. A man who would actually refuse to care for his own mother, who would deliberately cut her off just because she voted for someone that he didn't want her to vote for. This is truly psychotic madness. It is evil. It is truly hypocritical. Because these people are now trying to present themselves as the good, upstanding, moral, virtuous people that everyone should imitate. And last but not least, before I wrap up by sharing my closing thoughts, have a listen to this clip from a couple of hours ago of Jimmy Kimmel on his late night supposedly comedy show where he is discussing the election and he shares his thoughts because it sums up perfectly exactly what some of the problems are on the progressive side of the aisle. And this is an example of someone who is at the very top level. This is a celebrity, a well known celebrity who is saying these things after an election where the overwhelming majority of his fellow countrymen and women voted in a way that he didn't want them to vote. So have a listen to what he says here.
[00:50:51] Speaker E: Let's be honest, it was a terrible night last night. It was a terrible night for women, for children, for the hundreds of thousands of hard working immigrants who make this country go for healthcare, for our climate, for science, for journalism, for justice, for free speech. It was a terrible night for poor people, for the middle class, for seniors who rely on Social Security, for our allies in Ukraine, for NATO, for the truth and democracy and decency.
And it was a terrible night for everyone who voted against him. And guess what? It was a bad night for everyone who voted for him too. You just don't realize it yet.
[00:51:38] Speaker A: This is just madness. It's just a state of delusion and disconnection from reality that only someone living in a truly enclosed bubble could actually have. What he's effectively suggesting here. And you heard him break down in tears even a couple of times over this. I look at this and I see the tragedy of an adult male stuck in a perpetual state of adolescence, who has been groomed by a culture of lies and who just doesn't understand what reality is anymore. Either that or something that would be truly frightening as he knows what reality is. But he's just lying. He's choosing to tell lies. But it seems to me he does genuinely believe this madness to be real. But what you've got here is someone who has a form of gnosticism, political gnosticism going on. He believes he has secret knowledge. All of you who didn't vote for Donald Trump, it was a bad night for you and everyone who voted for Donald Trump. It's also a bad night for you, but you just don't know it yet because you're too dumb, you're too stupid. It sums up the whole problem with what's going on on the progressive side of politics right now. But he's the smart one. He's one of the minority, the elite who have secret knowledge, secret gnosis about what's really going on. And he's the one that you should listen to and follow. This is why ordinary people are not voting for you and your candidates. Because a, you can't run the bloomin economy and the country properly and give them a sense of stability and safety and an ability to actually feed their families. And then on top of that, you push all sorts of extreme ideologies. And if that wasn't bad enough, you are completely disconnected from reality. And you turn on those same people who are suffering and carrying the burden of this poor governance. And so what happens? People say, I'm out. I'm not interested at all. But meanwhile, here's Jimmy Kimmel with his secret gnostic knowledge he's got about what the world really is and how everyone else is basically too dumb or too stupid or too evil or too mad or somehow they have been all duped, but not him. He can't possibly be duped. They're the ones who are mad and who are insane, basically. I would suggest you just to wrap this all up. There is definitely a group of people now who have become ideologically programmed in a very, very deep way. They have been lied to with a constant bombardment, a veritable tsunami of propaganda and to a degree that we have not seen before in our history. And it has absolutely overwhelmed their capacity to understand and recognize reality as it is. This group also has no moral compass in a lot of cases, not always, but in a lot of cases, because they have been very much steeped in an ideology that's grounded in Marxism. And Marxism is all about a power struggle. It is fixated on power. The central focus of Marxism is taking control of power. The central focus of Marxism is not goodness and truth like it is with the Christian vision of reality. And that's why you see all this hypocrisy in their mind. They think they are the good guys. And to prove how good they are, they think it's okay to do very, very evil things in order to secure the good. That means that you're not the good guys, folks. And they don't recognize that because they've been so ideologically programmed and propagandized. My eldest daughter was recently at someone else's house and they were watching the mainstream media news. This is from New Zealand about the election coverage. And she was saying to me just how shocked she was by the nature, the propagandistic nature of the coverage of the election. And she said for her, as someone who is not constantly immersed in this, because we don't watch the news each night in our house and we don't immerse ourselves in this propagandistic world, it was really stark and obvious for her because she hasn't been like a frog boiling away in the pot. And the mainstream media lies really are at the heart of a lot of this. And this lack of restraint that they have shown in the light of not just Donald Trump running again, but now also his subsequent election again, their lack of restraint is really a manifestation of this power struggle. They don't really see goodness and truth. They're not the primary goals. It's about power. And that's why it's okay to lie. That's why it's okay to do things that are completely unvirtuous and lack all humanity. Now, social media has definitely made this worse, but the underlying problem is not social media. Social media didn't cause this. It is amplified. The technology has definitely amplified the problem and it contributes to it in particularly problematic ways. But the underlying problem is a crisis of a lack of virtue. It is a cultural crisis. It is about an underlying culture that is now operating solely at the level of the passions, the animalistic brain. A culture that is mired in hedonism and self gratification. And also at the same time there is a lack of a belief that I should really self regulate my behaviors. But at the same time, this exact same culture is also desperate to try and regulate those who have opposing philosophies. So there's not a lot of self regulation, but there's lots of almost puritanical attempts to regulate the thoughts and the beliefs and the actions of others in the world who don't agree with me. Again, go back to Marxism and it's about a power struggle. Ultimately though, this is a manifestation of the loss of a sacred, transcendent religious faith underpinning our culture. When you take God out of the equation and the religious vision of reality, you don't end up with a nice liberal vacuum of Kumbaya. And let's all agree to disagree. You end up with another ideology, with another set of religious beliefs that will say, guess what? I want to be in that vacuum. Nature abhors a vacuum. And it's absolutely true that so does culture. You can't have a cultural vacuum. You will have other religious ideologies like Wokeism, Marxism, Nietzschean thought, Freudian thought, Jean Jacques Rousseau. They will all rush up to the altar to become the new deities, the new religious messianic figures that people will pledge their allegiance to and will bow down and make the object of their daily worship and the way in which they shape and form their lives. As G.K. chesterton once said, when man stops believing in God, he doesn't believe nothing. He will believe anything. Thanks again for tuning in. Don't forget, live by goodness, truth and beauty, not by lies. And I'll see you next time on the Dispatches.
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